The Wrong Side of You
by Chustang
Part 1
VERSE CHORUS VERSE
A cold course of action faced him. Die or kill. Kill or die. Kill that agent, or he would retaliate and kill him. Fingering the trigger on his faithful colt, the only gun, a practice gun, he'd had with him at the time he had been pulled into this encounter, he wondered. He snaked around him, putting one leg to the side at a time. The injured lump of nine-year-old kid lay where his attacker had kicked him.
At the moment Heero had encountered him in the dark alley, it was those eyes that been the first thing to intimidate him in his life besides the scolding of his harsh teachers, Dr. J and his blood lusting assistants. Heero had seen more loss in those violet tinted eyes than scars on his back, even if the kid hooded them to hide it. But training had kicked in and erased sympathy when he had seen that familiar tattoo under his chin of a peace sign filled in blood red; Dr. J's rival crime syndicate's autograph: The Deuces. He had wasted no more time staring at hurt-filled eyes and sent the boy to the ground. The metallic clatter of a weapon disrupted the alley's quiet and Heero saw the barrel of an experiment laser rifle poke out from the Deuce's trench coat.
Heero licked some blood on his lip. The Deuce had managed to get a fingernail across his face before he went down. Allowing himself a moment to pinch the blood to a stop, Heero kept the barrel of his colt leveled precisely. One wrong move and that kid would be ground beef. He would like to take him in for interrogation, though. That would get him merits and therefore better training, better rank, and best of all, better weapons to defend himself.
Heero's daydream of a jack rifle or gundanium knife was interrupted by a splitting bout of coughing from the Deuce. The eight-year-old got into a stance and aimed his gun, slowing to a halt directly in back of him. He heard internal bleeding in that coughing, and the crimson proof ran on the blacktop. The child shifted weakly and most vocally. A grunt or yelp of peaking pain accompanied him until he managed to move his head from his fetal position to the side so one violet eye found Heero through a pile of brown bangs. A braid came from nowhere and lay limply beside the Deuce's face.
"Alive, I see," Heero said. "I could always fix that, so don't try anything, Deuce-shit."
"Yeah," the Deuce said. "I didn't plan… on it."
That voice seemed way too deep for a kid barely past kindergarten. Heero was suspicious and moved the sights from the chest to the exposed neck. It was the typical gangster death, a bullet to the throat. But a slow death of bleeding would also give him time to get the Deuce to his headquarters and would render him powerless.
"Am I going to die?"
"What?" Heero was strained by this question. Who hired this dipshit of a kid? Of course he was going to die, he'd just been captured!
He closed one blue eye and focused his sights, which subconsciously went to those unnerving colored eyes. They were dull and lifeless already, like death was nothing new to them. "Well, what do you think Deuce?"
A smile pierced all that grimness. A smile missing a bucktooth.
"I think," he said, smart-assed, "you're going to take me home and bake me cookies and then let me fall asleep by the furnace."
Heero was somewhat amused by this, but then again, amusement came rare and in niggardly packages. This kid was in serious psychological shit… It was funny.
"Yes, in a way."
The ghostly purple lit up. "Really?" he rasped out, lifting his head laboriously from his coughed-up pool of blood. The Deuce's odd plait of hair was swinging in that crimson. Heero almost felt guilty seeing such innocence.
"If you replace cookies with cyanide and sleep with die, yes," Heero replied, dispatching a shell to the shoulder to shut him up. His mindset was once again set on bloodletting and completion of the mission and the harsh bastard tone in his voice reflected that conviction. The alleyway, with its stereotypical billows of steam and dingy attitude, echoed with the ricocheting bullet as it easily ripped a bloody hole through the kid and continued on its way. Heero smirked as the body collapsed silently again, and predicted the path of the glancing bullet. The eight-year-old Jisatsu agent took a metal plate from his makeshift bulletproof vest and didn't jolt an inch as he caught it in the metal. Heero popped it out like a freshly made plastic creep crawly and stored it back in his colt.
Easy.
The Deuce again made labored movements, raising his hole-pocked body up to speak.
"You know… I like cyanide," the Deuce squeaked with hints of pain at the back of his cracking bass voice. Who did this kid think he was scaring? Heero rolled his eyes and pulled out a metal cord.
"You're the usual Deuce whitehead, you know that? Smart-assed, ham-fisted, and you pop if you get squeezed by one measly bullet," he grumbled as he approached the body, eyes always considering the lethal shape of the gun under that thin cloth.
Heero pounced on his back, pressing one boot to his head, hooking his head back like a lethargic heifer. The cord was too dull to slice any kind of human flesh or bone. The Deuce numbly accepted it like an old cow for slaughter and closed his indigo eyes. The Adam's apple in his neck bobbed up and down trying to talk, but the first few times were just raspy gasps, muddled by the pain shooting through his shoulder. Meanwhile, Heero ripped the gun from its strap that the Deuce had hidden in his coat.
"That's the first time I've been compared to a zit," he said listlessly. "You're like a poet, you know? A gross poet, a gross homicidal poet…"
Heero coldly knocked him upside his head. "I've got more colorful language for you, Deuce. Now, if you want to live, you'll come with me for interrogation --"
"Do you honestly think I want to live?"
Heero looked at him. Stupid deranged hippie American… he looked so lost. More so than even himself. The guilt returned in a screaming ball in his stomach and he suppressed it again.
"No,'' Heero answered truthfully.
Heero kept on with his work, making quick use of his demolition skills on disengaging the owner lock on the gun. He hooked it into a spare holster and collected the jagged ends of the cord into one hand so he kept the head up. Ignoring the coppery scent of blood snaking through his senses and the feel of it as it pumped steadily from the bullet hole, Heero flipped the boy over like raw hamburger and stood there taking in the Deuce's new face for his computer database of a mind, pinning him down mercilessly with a boot. The Deuce was a limp as a dead body, just trying to stay conscious.
American. Definitely, with large, expressive doll eyes. A carved pug nose. Babyish, ruby-pink lips. A solid neck. A hard-set jaw but not overly masculine jaw. Heero snorted coldly at the blood that came at the corner of the boy's lips.
It didn't surprise him that this kid was American. The Deuces hailed from L-2, the space colony with a mostly American or Spanish population. The syndicate he was currently training under, Jisatsu, was from L-1, and like the name suggested, Japanese. The sleazy members of these crime-hungry gangs were calling this the underground World War II. All they needed now was a bomb to drop on New Nagasaki. It was the fiercest but smartest rivalry for a few centuries. Attacks were placed on each other with passion but not recklessness. It rarely leaked to the media and rarely got out of hand.
Heero leaned in and retched the boy's chin back to look at the tattoo. The Deuce finally passed out in pain and went lolling limp with eyes plunged into the back of his head, like spaghetti in Heero's hand. "932071," Heero confirmed to himself. The agent unceremoniously let the head smack against the tar frequented by puddles of rainbow oil discharge. The Deuce's face still found no peace, screwed up in pain. Heero slipped the cord into his pocket. A quick scan of the grungy, drug-scented made his hair stand on end like trees in a hurricane.
Heero was about to pick up the limp body of the Deuce when that six-sense froze him in place, hearing far off but approaching voices.
"Jesus, where could that little fuck be?"
"Always was the little smart-ass, if you ask me," a different voice intoned. "Maxy! Yo, Maxy! God… who let him out for the night anyway? Who's idea was that?"
"Don't look at me, bitch."
"Oh I don't want to, ugly as you's is."
"Ugly or not, that street fuck is our salvation, ya hear? Lose him and those Japs will get the upper hand. Then we'll be screwed to hell."
"Well, Maxy sure won't. We can always cancel that whore for his thirteenth birthday, right? Maybe that's motivation for his soggy cereal ass."
"Ah, Maxy don't know what a whore is. He couldn't even spell it."
"That's because I was going to give him a lesson but fuck! – I couldn't, now could I?"
"Shut up. I think I smell something."
"Jer, this is a bitchin' alley. It don't smell like no bed of roses, you know, or no perfume. By the way… what is that shit you got on?"
"God, shut up!"
By now, the animal-instinct Heero was already ready to run. Flashing dangerous looks up both paths of the alley, he skillfully tucked the Deuce's hair into his torn trench coat as to hide his discernable feature so that his comrades might not come investigating. That was the best-light situation. But, biting his lip, he knew shit went wrong. He cussed as the clothing of the Deuce shifted and the raucous voices grew perilously close, eyes as wide as a cornered fox. The Deuce moaned in his sleep, and Heero wanted to smack him for giving away his position. Heero, cloaked into the black background by his black coat, paused indecisively once he spotted the gold chain against the back of the Deuce's neck.
A gold necklace
Something like that would see him a few good thousand dollars on the L-1 market, where gold was rarely imported. Heero snatched at it the last minute, as his newly acquired gun was stashed and the L-2 citizen made a guttural noise. Two shadows loomed only thirty feet away, in the mouth of the alley. Heero bolted. He grunted, nearly losing his grip on the wet, cobblestone alley, and used a nearby dumpster as a barricade, as an overly eager onslaught of bullets tailed him.
"Aw shit, I knew I smelled Jap! Come on, Lou, what are you doing? We gotta get that kid!"
"What the fuck are you doing?! This is Maxy!"
"No way he got smacked up by that little thing! You saw that little Jisatsu running; he wasn't even Maxy's age."
"I know… but God, look what he did to his ribs."
"Gnarly. Is that fucking bone stickin' out like that?"
"That's fucking bone."
"Come on Jer, we gotta get that bastard."
"Leave Maxy here and you're boiled in oil, Lou. Shit… he got a hole in his shoulder the size of his fucking ego."
"… Jesus, the things I do for this street fuck."
"Grab his feet, I'll get his head and stuff. Careful, dickhead! Kill this 'street fuck' and we will have our heads on Jap sticks!"
"I am careful!"
"Well, not enough!"
"…Jeremy… Lou?"
"Welcome back, dipshit."
"Don't call me that… I've heard it enough…"
"What did that Jisatsu do to you? Get his name or anything?"
"No, no…"
"Anything at all?"
"Jeeze, you worthless–"
"Lou, shut the anus on you face, okay? Now, Maxy… did you get anything? Whaddid he look like? And I smack you to hell if you say like a Japanese pug again; do you know how long it took us to find the other one?"
"He was…just like me..."
"Come on Lou, he's worse than we thought."
"Mad Max, you's are fucking insane! There ain't no way there's a Jap just like you, you're better than any of them Orientals."
"No… he was…"
The Deuce now lay in a pained daze, hammocked between his two grungy, typical Italian gangster-flavored street rats like himself, only a decade or so older. The nine-year-old assassin lolled his head back against Jeremy, or Jer for short, for support. His body ached like a sliced piece of bread. The rest of the cuss-spiced conversation between Jer and Lou was lost on him, for he numbly watched the figure of the Jisatsu slip away in to the alley, water occasionally flying from his feet and catching light. He could have sworn it stopped once or twice.
Maxy fell into light sleep until he was dumped, a lot gentler than usual but still dumped all the same, on to a hospital cot safely inside the L-2 abandoned warehouse, a.k.a. the Deuce Headquarters. He allowed himself to be swarmed by the smutty American nurses the second Lou and Jer backed off, who's clothes had been tailored by the horny older Deuces past puberty, allowed them to croon over him, and nearly rape him in their hurry to seal up his obvious wounds. A brilliant light stared down at him like a sun and in the background he could hear the drunken swoon of his comrades and the disapproving grunt of Dr. G.
The skin around his purplish-blue eyes tightened as he tried to talk. All that came out was a gargled mix of blood and a shriek of pain. One nurse put her finger to his lips and sat beside his head, cleaning up the blood with little success. It still left traces on his skin. She bit her lip, he thought, but it was getting harder to discern things with the light seemingly getting brighter. "Shush, it's okay," she crooned.
"I really don't think you should be telling the boy such lies," came Dr. G's voice as he strolled into the room. Maxy vaguely caught the sound of a door clicking shut. The flurry of hands tending to each wound, long-fingernailed and manicured, recoiled from helping him suddenly as another, more deadly click came to ear. Craning his head painfully, he was met by the barrel of his own gun in Dr. G's hand. All the nurses, except for the one that kept stroking his hair, had retreated at the professor's look and left his bloody torso naked and red in the light. "It is not okay."
The Deuce tried to gulp; it would make him feel better about what was coming. His throat was too dry.
"You better have a damned good reason for this, 93207," Dr. G said dangerously, finding the safety with one finger and clicking it off. "I didn't train you for your entire life to end up a soft-stomached nothing. Internal bleeding? That's nothing, right? You remember the exercise we have for internal bleeding, don't' you?"
He grimly nodded as much as he could without inducing pain.
The mushroom shaped man, body slumped with age but not his mind or cruelty, stepped slightly into the light, but only his dagger nose, bubbly lips, and scar were visible under his hair. "So. You know what that means, don't you?"
He shook his head, sweat-slicked bangs clouding his already blurry vision. He didn't need to see that expression to feel it.
"No?"
Dr. G chuckled.
The barrel finally left the spot between his brows and slid back into Dr. G gray slacks. As much as his heaving, violently bleeding chest would allow, he sighed a bit of relief.
"Now, I won't be a complete bastard to you. You have been one our best students ever, not to mention a constant, if prohibited, uplifting humor to the rest of our syndicate, and I suppose I'll never be able to stop you from doing that. I admit you show a genius for public infiltration and mechanics but you must understand that all of that is a pathetic waste if you die because of such minor injuries. This is nothing, boy."
The Deuce tore his eyes away from his professor. It was reversed by a raw slap from the decrepit man that left him about to fall off the metal table. Screwing up his face and breathing ragged, the nine-year-old body just curled on its side, about to fall to the floor that seemed could kill him. He watched the blood spill out on to the cement until Dr. G circled around the table. Maxy stared at his torso as long as he dared before craning his head.
"Never, never look away from me, you piece of shit," he glowered.
"Yes sir," he managed to reply submissively. God, how much his neck hurt… it was funny, that his neck ached so much he couldn't stand it while he rarely cared about the rib through his skin and the bullet hole in his shoulder. But he wasn't laughing.
"Good." A long, wrinkling hand pushed him over back onto his back. "Now, I know you do not want to repeat the internal bleeding training, correct?"
The Deuce stared up at the ceiling. His lips moved once, nothing came, and he tried again.
"Yes sir." It was barely audible.
"Good. But you still aren't looking at me." Maxy screamed as the raw slap was replaced with a sharp yank to his braid that sent more than a few strands ripping.
Tears came finally from the child as his cruel professor fingered it dangerously. A predator look came to those squinted eyes and an innocent sob came from Maxy, afraid for the only memory of his mother. Buried somewhere in training, lonely nights, pain, and drunken days granted by his comrades, he could remember his mother cradling him and running her fingers through his hair. She always smelled like strawberries. It was his sole speck of reassurance that he always had.
Luckily, Dr. G lost interest in torturing his victim/student.
"Now," he spat coldly. "You see that rib? I want you to set it back in place. Until you do that, I will not allow any nurse to touch you, for physical or emotion support or healing." He eyed up the nurse that remained stubbornly by the bloodstained cot and she obediently bowed her head and swiftly exited. Maxy watched her go with a bit of wretchedness. A raw slap brought him back to Dr. G's face, contorted by anger and dissatisfaction. "Set it, or we will find a replacement for you."
The mushroom shaped man recoiled into the shadow, still retaining the gun at the ready.
For what seemed like over an hour, the boy struggled against his mounting nausea, dizziness, and rapid loss of blood. His body arched from pain the second any one of his muscles moved and bouts of coughing were as frequent as stripes on a zebra. Bloodied hands gingerly wrapped around the exposed bone, and with a scream, he put it back into the jagged flesh and blacked out. Dr. G waved in the nurses, watched them go to quick work. One again seated herself by his head, this time unbraiding his hair and gently grooming it as the rest sewed up his bullet hole and ripped chest. Then they disappeared, taking him.
Dr. G spat and smashed the gun under his foot quite easily. This boy would never break… to them or against them.
6 Years Later
He'd just been scanning for a file when he found the piece of paper. Accidentally grabbing it, he'd noticed it was blank on the side he'd pulled it out, but on the other side was only a number and an envelope attached to the right hand corner. He'd stashed it quickly into his pocket as another Jisatsu member had passed by in this more bustling section of the office. Secretly, he finished his task, drawing out an information file on the Deuce's new recruits, and dropping it off distantly on the main desk on his way back to the outside. He unlocked one of the large metal doors with his fingerprints, regular procedure, and continued out to the grassy metal enclosure that was protected from the outside.
The grass ditch was what people called it because basically that was all it was: a metal dome with grass strewn across the bottom. A few weeks ago, the artificial grass had taken root and grown a good three inches and just yesterday had been cut. It smelled wonderful, crisper and wetter than normal grass, but that didn't compensate enough for the horribly polluted air of L-1.
Today, shielding his eyes from the bright, imitated sun lamps, he saw that he was the only one there. The Japanese boy randomly picked a spot in the football field sized dome and sat down. He fished out the paper and unfolded it, holding it up to the light. First of all, the fact of one side being empty had startled him. Four years ago the last large tree had been harvested and all the paper on L-1 was either spilling with as much information as possible or was recycled with a grayish hue to it. This sheet had been completely white. The other thing that had caught his attention was it was distinctly his handwriting. The number was odd too. Why had he written this down? 93207 was all it said.
Thrown for a loop because he couldn't remember, Heero moved on to opening the envelope, which had made an enticing jingle on the way out.
He carelessly ripped open the envelope, and cupped his hand as a cold metal object poured in. Heero held up a gold chain with a crucifix and Latin written on the back. Of course he could read it, but he was too busy trying to remember what this was from. There was no gold on L-1, and very little Christianity at all, or if there was, it was mostly in secret and under scrutiny from the mostly Shinto-Buddhist colony.
The artificial sunlight was intense that day, imitating a muggy afternoon for anybody who wanted to escape the cramped, almost too cool offices that dotted L-1 like freckles. Of all the colonies, this had to be the most industrialized. Heero didn't like it. He'd been raised in the bowels of the city, had killed in the city, and had wasted his childhood in the city.
He sat there for a good fifteen minutes, turning the gold over in his hand.
The wind kicked in around 1:00. He finally became so consumed by his curiosity that he was tempted to smell it. But he doubted he'd be able to find anything except the dull scent of paper. The Japanese boy, now fourteen, brought his arms around his knees and just stared at it. The light glinted off it like it was brand new, but he recognized the scratchiness of his younger handwriting. That must have been in there for years. He wished he'd left more written down. This was going to eat at the back of his mind forever and he'd never relax, even on his vacation.
He sighed and ran his fingers back through his scruffy bangs. A quick surveying confirmed that he was still alone in the grass ditch. He stretched his lanky figure out and tried to loosen his joints. Although there hadn't been a raid on L-1 for months, the constant threat was burned into his mind by a lifetime of teaching that all Deuces were nothing but bastard scum bags that kidnapped children and butchered dogs. He was beginning to question all that.
Heero put on the gold chain and hid it under his thin white shirt and green tie. He'd be burned at the stake if any of his superiors saw a Christian cross on him. Or something drastic at least.
He'd only been back wandering the office for a few minutes, doing random favors for the clearly overworked, wrinkled, and loudly cussing Japanese people hunched over papers, when he was called to the fifth floor by a discreet secretary. As he stood alone in the elevator, he scrutinized his reflection. A sort of warped, war-hardened Asian Enrique Iglesias throwback stared back at him with fierce blue eyes. He'd never thought about it much, but it was odd that he had blue eyes…not brown.
Along the curve of his neck was a scar from one of his first truly brutal missions into a Deuce base. He shook his head solemnly. The blood, the knives, and all the children in the other room screeching and cringing in the doorway… they were way to vivid, like the taste of wine from last night. But that was four years ago… and the carnage hadn't added up to more than one painless death, achieved by the element of surprise, which obviously was lost after the first few seconds, a few raised tempers and adrenaline levels, and his own scar where he'd been slit. He folded his arms tightly, almost consoling the look he gave himself. In the week he'd been working with the oblivious people, or gaijins as they were sometimes called since they were foreign to the crime scene, Heero knew he'd grown soft. It even stung when he gingerly touched his scar, even when it had stopped hurting two years ago.
A flurry of plants rushed up past him in the glass window and was plunged into black again. His reflection proved much more worried this time.
They would change that…
An advertisement. It passed so quickly he blinked once and it was already below him, a floor down. Heero briefly caught a freeze frame in his near photographic memory. A smiling family eating ice cream through wind-swept hair in the back of a pickup, which strolled through gorgeous a L-5 forest.
Oh, they would change that.
No more 'innocent' civilian life for him.
The bell toll at floor five woke him up and he fully expected to be swept out by a current of people into the undertow of frantic workers hurrying to their jobs. But the glass doors opened to emptiness. Heero strolled out, a bit confused at this deathly quiet floor. A bank desk to his left, facing a hall of businesses, coffee shops, beanie baby dispensers, ATMs, and escalators to the convenience stores downstairs; a skywalk to his left and three more elevators. He felt like he was walking in a carpeted desert.
Taking advantage of the abandoned popcorn stand, Heero filled his stomach a bit and navigated his way through the echoing halls to a Jisatsu office that few knew of or noticed. It was wedged between a renovating clothes store and a Vietnamese restaurant. It was disguised as a newly rented space: tarped and masked by a Coming Soon sign. Clever, but the unlashed tarp kept waving out in the air conditioning and gave secretive windows to the outside. If it had been anywhere as busy as usual, the secrecy would have lasted ten seconds at the most.
A coy woman ushered him in, clearly dressed to please the men inside. Heero surveyed for any trailers, then stepped under the tarp.
"Boss-san wants to see you. Go quickly; his temper can be quick," she warned in Japanese, lit by the dim light of candle hooked on the wall.
Heero bowed a thank you and continued down the shady hall. He passed four more smutty women on his way, which sensually blew smoke at him after lifting their cigarettes. They apparently didn't care that he was only a fourteen-year-old boy. Indifferent, he shot them no accusing looks but wanted to. But then again… insulting a man's whores wasn't a way to get on his good side. Heero ducked through a bead curtain and stepped into a lavish, Indian-style room. Apparently, the crime had been good lately.
"Ah, good to see you again, Heero," a man exclaimed from his seat behind a desk in Japanese. "Enjoy your vacation, did you?"
"Hai."
"Still not very talkative I see." The man lit his own cigarette and puffed once. He dropped it in the ashtray, finding the smoke too acid for his liking right now. He offered the boy a seat and it was silently accepted. "Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing."
The man, oddly tall for his ethnic background, leaned across the desk and shook hands, weaving among the statues of Buddha and Mid-East trinkets. Heero reminded himself to wash his hands afterward, no telling where they'd been. The man known only as Boss, or Boss-san depending on what language, folded his hands in his lap and seemed to sum up Heero's face like a bank report. He saw that his potential hadn't dulled on the inside since his vacation, just a bit physically. But that was easily fixed.
"So," Heero said, breaking the look, "you wanted to see me." It was a statement, with no question in his voice. He was never the indecisive type, Boss noticed.
"Yes I did. As you know, this is the end of your vacation and Dr. J will be coming later today or tomorrow to give you some physical retraining, depending on how uh… busy he is."
Heero raised an eyebrow and settled back in his chair. "Another student, huh?"
"How did you know?" Boss only looked mildly surprised and a smirk curled his lips. It only proved that this boy was perfect for what he'd been raised for.
"It's just like Dr. J to take something on while I'm gone; he's no more than an obsessive mother," Heero stated harshly. He took a Turkish delight from the ceramic belly of a red elephant.
"So I take it you don't like Dr. J."
"Yeah." He looked up from causally chewing in the back of his mouth. "Is that a problem?"
Boss shook his head. "Of course not. You are entitled to your opinion but–"
"-You do not have freedom of speech; this is not America," Heero finished offhandedly. He met the wrinkled, a bit shocked face of boss with smug Prussian eyes. "Dr. J has a habit to quote you. I just happen to have heard this one a few thousand times."
"Good man," Boss said.
Heero wanted to snort and roll his eyes.
"Now, if we could get down to business," the Boss said abruptly. He waved a Portuguese girl dressed as an Arabic princess in from her shady position in the smoky corner. She appeared with a tray of coffee that almost materialized. "Do you drink coffee?" he asked, taking one.
"No," Heero said. The girl, clearly much older than her bronze tan and large brown eyes suggested, kept giving him weird looks like, 'What is such a young boy doing here? Doesn't he know what he's getting into?'
The Boss drank deeply from his mug and put it down besides a glass tiger.
"A mission?"
"Yes, but not the ones you're accustomed to," Boss informed the lanky teenager. "Much less physical. Political, almost. You're going to need a polish on your etiquette, that's all. And maybe a small weapon, but that would be pushing it a bit."
"Why not send someone in politics?"
"You're fourteen, Heero," Boss said, lifting his jagged eyebrows that reminded him of a bush. "Think about it. I'm sure you're resume includes tactical analyzing."
Heero frowned in his soft features. This man must have gotten a kick at pulling people's legs. He better damn well have fun, because he was on the edge of giving him a rude hit. He darted his eyes about for a second, thinking, and then spilled out fluent Japanese like a fax machine spills paper. "Assuming I'm meeting with a neutral party, this is to make a warm impression, probably on a prominent or rich corporation or family. A young child would be best, taking innocence into account, and any guards wouldn't interfere. A childhood friend. No threat. They wouldn't think of attacking someone so young. I am to meet with the party and get on good terms. Get word for supplies, recruits, or just support. No answering questions that could have an affect later, low profile," he concluded.
Boss nodded satisfactorily.
"Close," he said with a hearty laugh. "So very close. If this were a report, I'd have to give you an A-. Very close."
Heero was getting more and more annoyed by this man's insolence.
"You just about hit the nail on the head. A political figure would be much too old and instantly a suspect in the guard's and public's eye. Not to mention the family themselves," Boss informed. "Lately, we've been getting rumors of the Deuces branching out into other parts of L-2 for support, especially the Italian Mafias. Those rumors were confirmed earlier yesterday. Now it has progressed into an inter-colony thing. A well-known Deuce agent went to L-3 and disappeared from our sources. If it degrades into a race for the colonies for recruits, then the American's do have the upper hand. They have better relations with the Europeans on L-3 and more so than us in L-4 too. As you know, the only colony that truly can't stand most of the Americans is L-5, which we are already considering for recruiting.
"If we can set up alliance with L-4, we will have the upper hand population wise. So, this morning, a conference was set up the most prominent family on L-4, the Winners. We were going to mask it as a discussion of natural resources, but we had a much better idea when we considered you. You, Heero, are to leave all the political issues with Mr. Winner to a stand-in political figure and simply focus on the Winner children. We understand that Mr. Winner has a son and a few daughters around your age. If we can get them on our side, then it will be easy for them to sway their father's opinion to our benefit." Boss sipped on his coffee to hydrate his scratchy throat. "Get all that?"
Heero was suspicious. It sounded okay in words, but code that morally and it rang up red. He wasn't some bastard that was totally insensitive, just mostly. The Japanese boy contemplated all that had been said. "That's fine if it'll go off without a hitch, but," Heero intoned, "isn't it blackmailing? If the Winners suspect anything, you know they won't just sit around."
"Blackmailing? No… Not at all." The insistence in the syndicate leader's voice was masking something, he knew.
He wasn't dumb. He saw it in those constricted black eyes that he completely agreed, but that wouldn't help pressure him into it at all, he knew. So Boss was putting on an act to make sure Heero was confident. Jisatsu would put him in this mission anyway, confident or not.
"If it's not," Heero said with a dangerous tone, "then what am I supposed to 'sway' the children with?"
"Heero… It's nothing like that. Not at all!" Boss was laughing almost. He waved his hand at the sour-faced boy. "Sometimes you are so serious it frightens me, Heero. No, all you have to do is be friends with them. Friends. Don't offer them money or anything, that would be insane. I know this… might be a little out of your range, but you haven't been completely socially deprived, have you?"
The Japanese boy narrowed his Prussian blue eyes. His hand fished through the ceramic red elephant again and picked up a roll of smarties. "You'd be surprised," he snapped coldly, staring at the pale candies before he popped them into his mouth. His lips formed a rare and ironic smile. "You'd be surprised."
The Boss shook his head, rubbing his thinly haired head. The smoke in the room wafted through their visions and Heero couldn't discern the actual expression, but he knew that he'd be laughing at this. Pudgy fingers wiped his face and the Boss looked across the desk and did just what Heero expected: he laughed. "Well, not as much as you think," he replied lightheartedly.
The conversation ended with another professional handshake, less stiff than the first, and a well wishing on the mission. Heero bowed by instinct and was confronted by the same sluts shadily hanging around the walls, puckering their ruby lips and pouting them as they shoved their breasts out onto him as he passed. Coldly, he shoved past and they gave disappointed puppy looks. He was glad to step back into the cold, industrial air of the hall, brushing the rose petals and thick perfume off his white shirt. That man sure had some entertainment lined up for between meetings… disgusting, Heero thought. He was more disgusted to find a plant of red lipstick on the sleeve of his shirt. He was only fourteen! Indifferent, he proceeded down the marble floors and rolled up his sleeves to hide it. Heero didn't go back down his usual route; the people of the office probably would never see their free-working assistant again, that was for sure. Even if he did earn another short vacation, Dr. J would never allow it in the same place.
Hn. He would miss it.
by Chustang
Part 1
VERSE CHORUS VERSE
A cold course of action faced him. Die or kill. Kill or die. Kill that agent, or he would retaliate and kill him. Fingering the trigger on his faithful colt, the only gun, a practice gun, he'd had with him at the time he had been pulled into this encounter, he wondered. He snaked around him, putting one leg to the side at a time. The injured lump of nine-year-old kid lay where his attacker had kicked him.
At the moment Heero had encountered him in the dark alley, it was those eyes that been the first thing to intimidate him in his life besides the scolding of his harsh teachers, Dr. J and his blood lusting assistants. Heero had seen more loss in those violet tinted eyes than scars on his back, even if the kid hooded them to hide it. But training had kicked in and erased sympathy when he had seen that familiar tattoo under his chin of a peace sign filled in blood red; Dr. J's rival crime syndicate's autograph: The Deuces. He had wasted no more time staring at hurt-filled eyes and sent the boy to the ground. The metallic clatter of a weapon disrupted the alley's quiet and Heero saw the barrel of an experiment laser rifle poke out from the Deuce's trench coat.
Heero licked some blood on his lip. The Deuce had managed to get a fingernail across his face before he went down. Allowing himself a moment to pinch the blood to a stop, Heero kept the barrel of his colt leveled precisely. One wrong move and that kid would be ground beef. He would like to take him in for interrogation, though. That would get him merits and therefore better training, better rank, and best of all, better weapons to defend himself.
Heero's daydream of a jack rifle or gundanium knife was interrupted by a splitting bout of coughing from the Deuce. The eight-year-old got into a stance and aimed his gun, slowing to a halt directly in back of him. He heard internal bleeding in that coughing, and the crimson proof ran on the blacktop. The child shifted weakly and most vocally. A grunt or yelp of peaking pain accompanied him until he managed to move his head from his fetal position to the side so one violet eye found Heero through a pile of brown bangs. A braid came from nowhere and lay limply beside the Deuce's face.
"Alive, I see," Heero said. "I could always fix that, so don't try anything, Deuce-shit."
"Yeah," the Deuce said. "I didn't plan… on it."
That voice seemed way too deep for a kid barely past kindergarten. Heero was suspicious and moved the sights from the chest to the exposed neck. It was the typical gangster death, a bullet to the throat. But a slow death of bleeding would also give him time to get the Deuce to his headquarters and would render him powerless.
"Am I going to die?"
"What?" Heero was strained by this question. Who hired this dipshit of a kid? Of course he was going to die, he'd just been captured!
He closed one blue eye and focused his sights, which subconsciously went to those unnerving colored eyes. They were dull and lifeless already, like death was nothing new to them. "Well, what do you think Deuce?"
A smile pierced all that grimness. A smile missing a bucktooth.
"I think," he said, smart-assed, "you're going to take me home and bake me cookies and then let me fall asleep by the furnace."
Heero was somewhat amused by this, but then again, amusement came rare and in niggardly packages. This kid was in serious psychological shit… It was funny.
"Yes, in a way."
The ghostly purple lit up. "Really?" he rasped out, lifting his head laboriously from his coughed-up pool of blood. The Deuce's odd plait of hair was swinging in that crimson. Heero almost felt guilty seeing such innocence.
"If you replace cookies with cyanide and sleep with die, yes," Heero replied, dispatching a shell to the shoulder to shut him up. His mindset was once again set on bloodletting and completion of the mission and the harsh bastard tone in his voice reflected that conviction. The alleyway, with its stereotypical billows of steam and dingy attitude, echoed with the ricocheting bullet as it easily ripped a bloody hole through the kid and continued on its way. Heero smirked as the body collapsed silently again, and predicted the path of the glancing bullet. The eight-year-old Jisatsu agent took a metal plate from his makeshift bulletproof vest and didn't jolt an inch as he caught it in the metal. Heero popped it out like a freshly made plastic creep crawly and stored it back in his colt.
Easy.
The Deuce again made labored movements, raising his hole-pocked body up to speak.
"You know… I like cyanide," the Deuce squeaked with hints of pain at the back of his cracking bass voice. Who did this kid think he was scaring? Heero rolled his eyes and pulled out a metal cord.
"You're the usual Deuce whitehead, you know that? Smart-assed, ham-fisted, and you pop if you get squeezed by one measly bullet," he grumbled as he approached the body, eyes always considering the lethal shape of the gun under that thin cloth.
Heero pounced on his back, pressing one boot to his head, hooking his head back like a lethargic heifer. The cord was too dull to slice any kind of human flesh or bone. The Deuce numbly accepted it like an old cow for slaughter and closed his indigo eyes. The Adam's apple in his neck bobbed up and down trying to talk, but the first few times were just raspy gasps, muddled by the pain shooting through his shoulder. Meanwhile, Heero ripped the gun from its strap that the Deuce had hidden in his coat.
"That's the first time I've been compared to a zit," he said listlessly. "You're like a poet, you know? A gross poet, a gross homicidal poet…"
Heero coldly knocked him upside his head. "I've got more colorful language for you, Deuce. Now, if you want to live, you'll come with me for interrogation --"
"Do you honestly think I want to live?"
Heero looked at him. Stupid deranged hippie American… he looked so lost. More so than even himself. The guilt returned in a screaming ball in his stomach and he suppressed it again.
"No,'' Heero answered truthfully.
Heero kept on with his work, making quick use of his demolition skills on disengaging the owner lock on the gun. He hooked it into a spare holster and collected the jagged ends of the cord into one hand so he kept the head up. Ignoring the coppery scent of blood snaking through his senses and the feel of it as it pumped steadily from the bullet hole, Heero flipped the boy over like raw hamburger and stood there taking in the Deuce's new face for his computer database of a mind, pinning him down mercilessly with a boot. The Deuce was a limp as a dead body, just trying to stay conscious.
American. Definitely, with large, expressive doll eyes. A carved pug nose. Babyish, ruby-pink lips. A solid neck. A hard-set jaw but not overly masculine jaw. Heero snorted coldly at the blood that came at the corner of the boy's lips.
It didn't surprise him that this kid was American. The Deuces hailed from L-2, the space colony with a mostly American or Spanish population. The syndicate he was currently training under, Jisatsu, was from L-1, and like the name suggested, Japanese. The sleazy members of these crime-hungry gangs were calling this the underground World War II. All they needed now was a bomb to drop on New Nagasaki. It was the fiercest but smartest rivalry for a few centuries. Attacks were placed on each other with passion but not recklessness. It rarely leaked to the media and rarely got out of hand.
Heero leaned in and retched the boy's chin back to look at the tattoo. The Deuce finally passed out in pain and went lolling limp with eyes plunged into the back of his head, like spaghetti in Heero's hand. "932071," Heero confirmed to himself. The agent unceremoniously let the head smack against the tar frequented by puddles of rainbow oil discharge. The Deuce's face still found no peace, screwed up in pain. Heero slipped the cord into his pocket. A quick scan of the grungy, drug-scented made his hair stand on end like trees in a hurricane.
Heero was about to pick up the limp body of the Deuce when that six-sense froze him in place, hearing far off but approaching voices.
"Jesus, where could that little fuck be?"
"Always was the little smart-ass, if you ask me," a different voice intoned. "Maxy! Yo, Maxy! God… who let him out for the night anyway? Who's idea was that?"
"Don't look at me, bitch."
"Oh I don't want to, ugly as you's is."
"Ugly or not, that street fuck is our salvation, ya hear? Lose him and those Japs will get the upper hand. Then we'll be screwed to hell."
"Well, Maxy sure won't. We can always cancel that whore for his thirteenth birthday, right? Maybe that's motivation for his soggy cereal ass."
"Ah, Maxy don't know what a whore is. He couldn't even spell it."
"That's because I was going to give him a lesson but fuck! – I couldn't, now could I?"
"Shut up. I think I smell something."
"Jer, this is a bitchin' alley. It don't smell like no bed of roses, you know, or no perfume. By the way… what is that shit you got on?"
"God, shut up!"
By now, the animal-instinct Heero was already ready to run. Flashing dangerous looks up both paths of the alley, he skillfully tucked the Deuce's hair into his torn trench coat as to hide his discernable feature so that his comrades might not come investigating. That was the best-light situation. But, biting his lip, he knew shit went wrong. He cussed as the clothing of the Deuce shifted and the raucous voices grew perilously close, eyes as wide as a cornered fox. The Deuce moaned in his sleep, and Heero wanted to smack him for giving away his position. Heero, cloaked into the black background by his black coat, paused indecisively once he spotted the gold chain against the back of the Deuce's neck.
A gold necklace
Something like that would see him a few good thousand dollars on the L-1 market, where gold was rarely imported. Heero snatched at it the last minute, as his newly acquired gun was stashed and the L-2 citizen made a guttural noise. Two shadows loomed only thirty feet away, in the mouth of the alley. Heero bolted. He grunted, nearly losing his grip on the wet, cobblestone alley, and used a nearby dumpster as a barricade, as an overly eager onslaught of bullets tailed him.
"Aw shit, I knew I smelled Jap! Come on, Lou, what are you doing? We gotta get that kid!"
"What the fuck are you doing?! This is Maxy!"
"No way he got smacked up by that little thing! You saw that little Jisatsu running; he wasn't even Maxy's age."
"I know… but God, look what he did to his ribs."
"Gnarly. Is that fucking bone stickin' out like that?"
"That's fucking bone."
"Come on Jer, we gotta get that bastard."
"Leave Maxy here and you're boiled in oil, Lou. Shit… he got a hole in his shoulder the size of his fucking ego."
"… Jesus, the things I do for this street fuck."
"Grab his feet, I'll get his head and stuff. Careful, dickhead! Kill this 'street fuck' and we will have our heads on Jap sticks!"
"I am careful!"
"Well, not enough!"
"…Jeremy… Lou?"
"Welcome back, dipshit."
"Don't call me that… I've heard it enough…"
"What did that Jisatsu do to you? Get his name or anything?"
"No, no…"
"Anything at all?"
"Jeeze, you worthless–"
"Lou, shut the anus on you face, okay? Now, Maxy… did you get anything? Whaddid he look like? And I smack you to hell if you say like a Japanese pug again; do you know how long it took us to find the other one?"
"He was…just like me..."
"Come on Lou, he's worse than we thought."
"Mad Max, you's are fucking insane! There ain't no way there's a Jap just like you, you're better than any of them Orientals."
"No… he was…"
The Deuce now lay in a pained daze, hammocked between his two grungy, typical Italian gangster-flavored street rats like himself, only a decade or so older. The nine-year-old assassin lolled his head back against Jeremy, or Jer for short, for support. His body ached like a sliced piece of bread. The rest of the cuss-spiced conversation between Jer and Lou was lost on him, for he numbly watched the figure of the Jisatsu slip away in to the alley, water occasionally flying from his feet and catching light. He could have sworn it stopped once or twice.
Maxy fell into light sleep until he was dumped, a lot gentler than usual but still dumped all the same, on to a hospital cot safely inside the L-2 abandoned warehouse, a.k.a. the Deuce Headquarters. He allowed himself to be swarmed by the smutty American nurses the second Lou and Jer backed off, who's clothes had been tailored by the horny older Deuces past puberty, allowed them to croon over him, and nearly rape him in their hurry to seal up his obvious wounds. A brilliant light stared down at him like a sun and in the background he could hear the drunken swoon of his comrades and the disapproving grunt of Dr. G.
The skin around his purplish-blue eyes tightened as he tried to talk. All that came out was a gargled mix of blood and a shriek of pain. One nurse put her finger to his lips and sat beside his head, cleaning up the blood with little success. It still left traces on his skin. She bit her lip, he thought, but it was getting harder to discern things with the light seemingly getting brighter. "Shush, it's okay," she crooned.
"I really don't think you should be telling the boy such lies," came Dr. G's voice as he strolled into the room. Maxy vaguely caught the sound of a door clicking shut. The flurry of hands tending to each wound, long-fingernailed and manicured, recoiled from helping him suddenly as another, more deadly click came to ear. Craning his head painfully, he was met by the barrel of his own gun in Dr. G's hand. All the nurses, except for the one that kept stroking his hair, had retreated at the professor's look and left his bloody torso naked and red in the light. "It is not okay."
The Deuce tried to gulp; it would make him feel better about what was coming. His throat was too dry.
"You better have a damned good reason for this, 93207," Dr. G said dangerously, finding the safety with one finger and clicking it off. "I didn't train you for your entire life to end up a soft-stomached nothing. Internal bleeding? That's nothing, right? You remember the exercise we have for internal bleeding, don't' you?"
He grimly nodded as much as he could without inducing pain.
The mushroom shaped man, body slumped with age but not his mind or cruelty, stepped slightly into the light, but only his dagger nose, bubbly lips, and scar were visible under his hair. "So. You know what that means, don't you?"
He shook his head, sweat-slicked bangs clouding his already blurry vision. He didn't need to see that expression to feel it.
"No?"
Dr. G chuckled.
The barrel finally left the spot between his brows and slid back into Dr. G gray slacks. As much as his heaving, violently bleeding chest would allow, he sighed a bit of relief.
"Now, I won't be a complete bastard to you. You have been one our best students ever, not to mention a constant, if prohibited, uplifting humor to the rest of our syndicate, and I suppose I'll never be able to stop you from doing that. I admit you show a genius for public infiltration and mechanics but you must understand that all of that is a pathetic waste if you die because of such minor injuries. This is nothing, boy."
The Deuce tore his eyes away from his professor. It was reversed by a raw slap from the decrepit man that left him about to fall off the metal table. Screwing up his face and breathing ragged, the nine-year-old body just curled on its side, about to fall to the floor that seemed could kill him. He watched the blood spill out on to the cement until Dr. G circled around the table. Maxy stared at his torso as long as he dared before craning his head.
"Never, never look away from me, you piece of shit," he glowered.
"Yes sir," he managed to reply submissively. God, how much his neck hurt… it was funny, that his neck ached so much he couldn't stand it while he rarely cared about the rib through his skin and the bullet hole in his shoulder. But he wasn't laughing.
"Good." A long, wrinkling hand pushed him over back onto his back. "Now, I know you do not want to repeat the internal bleeding training, correct?"
The Deuce stared up at the ceiling. His lips moved once, nothing came, and he tried again.
"Yes sir." It was barely audible.
"Good. But you still aren't looking at me." Maxy screamed as the raw slap was replaced with a sharp yank to his braid that sent more than a few strands ripping.
Tears came finally from the child as his cruel professor fingered it dangerously. A predator look came to those squinted eyes and an innocent sob came from Maxy, afraid for the only memory of his mother. Buried somewhere in training, lonely nights, pain, and drunken days granted by his comrades, he could remember his mother cradling him and running her fingers through his hair. She always smelled like strawberries. It was his sole speck of reassurance that he always had.
Luckily, Dr. G lost interest in torturing his victim/student.
"Now," he spat coldly. "You see that rib? I want you to set it back in place. Until you do that, I will not allow any nurse to touch you, for physical or emotion support or healing." He eyed up the nurse that remained stubbornly by the bloodstained cot and she obediently bowed her head and swiftly exited. Maxy watched her go with a bit of wretchedness. A raw slap brought him back to Dr. G's face, contorted by anger and dissatisfaction. "Set it, or we will find a replacement for you."
The mushroom shaped man recoiled into the shadow, still retaining the gun at the ready.
For what seemed like over an hour, the boy struggled against his mounting nausea, dizziness, and rapid loss of blood. His body arched from pain the second any one of his muscles moved and bouts of coughing were as frequent as stripes on a zebra. Bloodied hands gingerly wrapped around the exposed bone, and with a scream, he put it back into the jagged flesh and blacked out. Dr. G waved in the nurses, watched them go to quick work. One again seated herself by his head, this time unbraiding his hair and gently grooming it as the rest sewed up his bullet hole and ripped chest. Then they disappeared, taking him.
Dr. G spat and smashed the gun under his foot quite easily. This boy would never break… to them or against them.
6 Years Later
He'd just been scanning for a file when he found the piece of paper. Accidentally grabbing it, he'd noticed it was blank on the side he'd pulled it out, but on the other side was only a number and an envelope attached to the right hand corner. He'd stashed it quickly into his pocket as another Jisatsu member had passed by in this more bustling section of the office. Secretly, he finished his task, drawing out an information file on the Deuce's new recruits, and dropping it off distantly on the main desk on his way back to the outside. He unlocked one of the large metal doors with his fingerprints, regular procedure, and continued out to the grassy metal enclosure that was protected from the outside.
The grass ditch was what people called it because basically that was all it was: a metal dome with grass strewn across the bottom. A few weeks ago, the artificial grass had taken root and grown a good three inches and just yesterday had been cut. It smelled wonderful, crisper and wetter than normal grass, but that didn't compensate enough for the horribly polluted air of L-1.
Today, shielding his eyes from the bright, imitated sun lamps, he saw that he was the only one there. The Japanese boy randomly picked a spot in the football field sized dome and sat down. He fished out the paper and unfolded it, holding it up to the light. First of all, the fact of one side being empty had startled him. Four years ago the last large tree had been harvested and all the paper on L-1 was either spilling with as much information as possible or was recycled with a grayish hue to it. This sheet had been completely white. The other thing that had caught his attention was it was distinctly his handwriting. The number was odd too. Why had he written this down? 93207 was all it said.
Thrown for a loop because he couldn't remember, Heero moved on to opening the envelope, which had made an enticing jingle on the way out.
He carelessly ripped open the envelope, and cupped his hand as a cold metal object poured in. Heero held up a gold chain with a crucifix and Latin written on the back. Of course he could read it, but he was too busy trying to remember what this was from. There was no gold on L-1, and very little Christianity at all, or if there was, it was mostly in secret and under scrutiny from the mostly Shinto-Buddhist colony.
The artificial sunlight was intense that day, imitating a muggy afternoon for anybody who wanted to escape the cramped, almost too cool offices that dotted L-1 like freckles. Of all the colonies, this had to be the most industrialized. Heero didn't like it. He'd been raised in the bowels of the city, had killed in the city, and had wasted his childhood in the city.
He sat there for a good fifteen minutes, turning the gold over in his hand.
The wind kicked in around 1:00. He finally became so consumed by his curiosity that he was tempted to smell it. But he doubted he'd be able to find anything except the dull scent of paper. The Japanese boy, now fourteen, brought his arms around his knees and just stared at it. The light glinted off it like it was brand new, but he recognized the scratchiness of his younger handwriting. That must have been in there for years. He wished he'd left more written down. This was going to eat at the back of his mind forever and he'd never relax, even on his vacation.
He sighed and ran his fingers back through his scruffy bangs. A quick surveying confirmed that he was still alone in the grass ditch. He stretched his lanky figure out and tried to loosen his joints. Although there hadn't been a raid on L-1 for months, the constant threat was burned into his mind by a lifetime of teaching that all Deuces were nothing but bastard scum bags that kidnapped children and butchered dogs. He was beginning to question all that.
Heero put on the gold chain and hid it under his thin white shirt and green tie. He'd be burned at the stake if any of his superiors saw a Christian cross on him. Or something drastic at least.
He'd only been back wandering the office for a few minutes, doing random favors for the clearly overworked, wrinkled, and loudly cussing Japanese people hunched over papers, when he was called to the fifth floor by a discreet secretary. As he stood alone in the elevator, he scrutinized his reflection. A sort of warped, war-hardened Asian Enrique Iglesias throwback stared back at him with fierce blue eyes. He'd never thought about it much, but it was odd that he had blue eyes…not brown.
Along the curve of his neck was a scar from one of his first truly brutal missions into a Deuce base. He shook his head solemnly. The blood, the knives, and all the children in the other room screeching and cringing in the doorway… they were way to vivid, like the taste of wine from last night. But that was four years ago… and the carnage hadn't added up to more than one painless death, achieved by the element of surprise, which obviously was lost after the first few seconds, a few raised tempers and adrenaline levels, and his own scar where he'd been slit. He folded his arms tightly, almost consoling the look he gave himself. In the week he'd been working with the oblivious people, or gaijins as they were sometimes called since they were foreign to the crime scene, Heero knew he'd grown soft. It even stung when he gingerly touched his scar, even when it had stopped hurting two years ago.
A flurry of plants rushed up past him in the glass window and was plunged into black again. His reflection proved much more worried this time.
They would change that…
An advertisement. It passed so quickly he blinked once and it was already below him, a floor down. Heero briefly caught a freeze frame in his near photographic memory. A smiling family eating ice cream through wind-swept hair in the back of a pickup, which strolled through gorgeous a L-5 forest.
Oh, they would change that.
No more 'innocent' civilian life for him.
The bell toll at floor five woke him up and he fully expected to be swept out by a current of people into the undertow of frantic workers hurrying to their jobs. But the glass doors opened to emptiness. Heero strolled out, a bit confused at this deathly quiet floor. A bank desk to his left, facing a hall of businesses, coffee shops, beanie baby dispensers, ATMs, and escalators to the convenience stores downstairs; a skywalk to his left and three more elevators. He felt like he was walking in a carpeted desert.
Taking advantage of the abandoned popcorn stand, Heero filled his stomach a bit and navigated his way through the echoing halls to a Jisatsu office that few knew of or noticed. It was wedged between a renovating clothes store and a Vietnamese restaurant. It was disguised as a newly rented space: tarped and masked by a Coming Soon sign. Clever, but the unlashed tarp kept waving out in the air conditioning and gave secretive windows to the outside. If it had been anywhere as busy as usual, the secrecy would have lasted ten seconds at the most.
A coy woman ushered him in, clearly dressed to please the men inside. Heero surveyed for any trailers, then stepped under the tarp.
"Boss-san wants to see you. Go quickly; his temper can be quick," she warned in Japanese, lit by the dim light of candle hooked on the wall.
Heero bowed a thank you and continued down the shady hall. He passed four more smutty women on his way, which sensually blew smoke at him after lifting their cigarettes. They apparently didn't care that he was only a fourteen-year-old boy. Indifferent, he shot them no accusing looks but wanted to. But then again… insulting a man's whores wasn't a way to get on his good side. Heero ducked through a bead curtain and stepped into a lavish, Indian-style room. Apparently, the crime had been good lately.
"Ah, good to see you again, Heero," a man exclaimed from his seat behind a desk in Japanese. "Enjoy your vacation, did you?"
"Hai."
"Still not very talkative I see." The man lit his own cigarette and puffed once. He dropped it in the ashtray, finding the smoke too acid for his liking right now. He offered the boy a seat and it was silently accepted. "Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing."
The man, oddly tall for his ethnic background, leaned across the desk and shook hands, weaving among the statues of Buddha and Mid-East trinkets. Heero reminded himself to wash his hands afterward, no telling where they'd been. The man known only as Boss, or Boss-san depending on what language, folded his hands in his lap and seemed to sum up Heero's face like a bank report. He saw that his potential hadn't dulled on the inside since his vacation, just a bit physically. But that was easily fixed.
"So," Heero said, breaking the look, "you wanted to see me." It was a statement, with no question in his voice. He was never the indecisive type, Boss noticed.
"Yes I did. As you know, this is the end of your vacation and Dr. J will be coming later today or tomorrow to give you some physical retraining, depending on how uh… busy he is."
Heero raised an eyebrow and settled back in his chair. "Another student, huh?"
"How did you know?" Boss only looked mildly surprised and a smirk curled his lips. It only proved that this boy was perfect for what he'd been raised for.
"It's just like Dr. J to take something on while I'm gone; he's no more than an obsessive mother," Heero stated harshly. He took a Turkish delight from the ceramic belly of a red elephant.
"So I take it you don't like Dr. J."
"Yeah." He looked up from causally chewing in the back of his mouth. "Is that a problem?"
Boss shook his head. "Of course not. You are entitled to your opinion but–"
"-You do not have freedom of speech; this is not America," Heero finished offhandedly. He met the wrinkled, a bit shocked face of boss with smug Prussian eyes. "Dr. J has a habit to quote you. I just happen to have heard this one a few thousand times."
"Good man," Boss said.
Heero wanted to snort and roll his eyes.
"Now, if we could get down to business," the Boss said abruptly. He waved a Portuguese girl dressed as an Arabic princess in from her shady position in the smoky corner. She appeared with a tray of coffee that almost materialized. "Do you drink coffee?" he asked, taking one.
"No," Heero said. The girl, clearly much older than her bronze tan and large brown eyes suggested, kept giving him weird looks like, 'What is such a young boy doing here? Doesn't he know what he's getting into?'
The Boss drank deeply from his mug and put it down besides a glass tiger.
"A mission?"
"Yes, but not the ones you're accustomed to," Boss informed the lanky teenager. "Much less physical. Political, almost. You're going to need a polish on your etiquette, that's all. And maybe a small weapon, but that would be pushing it a bit."
"Why not send someone in politics?"
"You're fourteen, Heero," Boss said, lifting his jagged eyebrows that reminded him of a bush. "Think about it. I'm sure you're resume includes tactical analyzing."
Heero frowned in his soft features. This man must have gotten a kick at pulling people's legs. He better damn well have fun, because he was on the edge of giving him a rude hit. He darted his eyes about for a second, thinking, and then spilled out fluent Japanese like a fax machine spills paper. "Assuming I'm meeting with a neutral party, this is to make a warm impression, probably on a prominent or rich corporation or family. A young child would be best, taking innocence into account, and any guards wouldn't interfere. A childhood friend. No threat. They wouldn't think of attacking someone so young. I am to meet with the party and get on good terms. Get word for supplies, recruits, or just support. No answering questions that could have an affect later, low profile," he concluded.
Boss nodded satisfactorily.
"Close," he said with a hearty laugh. "So very close. If this were a report, I'd have to give you an A-. Very close."
Heero was getting more and more annoyed by this man's insolence.
"You just about hit the nail on the head. A political figure would be much too old and instantly a suspect in the guard's and public's eye. Not to mention the family themselves," Boss informed. "Lately, we've been getting rumors of the Deuces branching out into other parts of L-2 for support, especially the Italian Mafias. Those rumors were confirmed earlier yesterday. Now it has progressed into an inter-colony thing. A well-known Deuce agent went to L-3 and disappeared from our sources. If it degrades into a race for the colonies for recruits, then the American's do have the upper hand. They have better relations with the Europeans on L-3 and more so than us in L-4 too. As you know, the only colony that truly can't stand most of the Americans is L-5, which we are already considering for recruiting.
"If we can set up alliance with L-4, we will have the upper hand population wise. So, this morning, a conference was set up the most prominent family on L-4, the Winners. We were going to mask it as a discussion of natural resources, but we had a much better idea when we considered you. You, Heero, are to leave all the political issues with Mr. Winner to a stand-in political figure and simply focus on the Winner children. We understand that Mr. Winner has a son and a few daughters around your age. If we can get them on our side, then it will be easy for them to sway their father's opinion to our benefit." Boss sipped on his coffee to hydrate his scratchy throat. "Get all that?"
Heero was suspicious. It sounded okay in words, but code that morally and it rang up red. He wasn't some bastard that was totally insensitive, just mostly. The Japanese boy contemplated all that had been said. "That's fine if it'll go off without a hitch, but," Heero intoned, "isn't it blackmailing? If the Winners suspect anything, you know they won't just sit around."
"Blackmailing? No… Not at all." The insistence in the syndicate leader's voice was masking something, he knew.
He wasn't dumb. He saw it in those constricted black eyes that he completely agreed, but that wouldn't help pressure him into it at all, he knew. So Boss was putting on an act to make sure Heero was confident. Jisatsu would put him in this mission anyway, confident or not.
"If it's not," Heero said with a dangerous tone, "then what am I supposed to 'sway' the children with?"
"Heero… It's nothing like that. Not at all!" Boss was laughing almost. He waved his hand at the sour-faced boy. "Sometimes you are so serious it frightens me, Heero. No, all you have to do is be friends with them. Friends. Don't offer them money or anything, that would be insane. I know this… might be a little out of your range, but you haven't been completely socially deprived, have you?"
The Japanese boy narrowed his Prussian blue eyes. His hand fished through the ceramic red elephant again and picked up a roll of smarties. "You'd be surprised," he snapped coldly, staring at the pale candies before he popped them into his mouth. His lips formed a rare and ironic smile. "You'd be surprised."
The Boss shook his head, rubbing his thinly haired head. The smoke in the room wafted through their visions and Heero couldn't discern the actual expression, but he knew that he'd be laughing at this. Pudgy fingers wiped his face and the Boss looked across the desk and did just what Heero expected: he laughed. "Well, not as much as you think," he replied lightheartedly.
The conversation ended with another professional handshake, less stiff than the first, and a well wishing on the mission. Heero bowed by instinct and was confronted by the same sluts shadily hanging around the walls, puckering their ruby lips and pouting them as they shoved their breasts out onto him as he passed. Coldly, he shoved past and they gave disappointed puppy looks. He was glad to step back into the cold, industrial air of the hall, brushing the rose petals and thick perfume off his white shirt. That man sure had some entertainment lined up for between meetings… disgusting, Heero thought. He was more disgusted to find a plant of red lipstick on the sleeve of his shirt. He was only fourteen! Indifferent, he proceeded down the marble floors and rolled up his sleeves to hide it. Heero didn't go back down his usual route; the people of the office probably would never see their free-working assistant again, that was for sure. Even if he did earn another short vacation, Dr. J would never allow it in the same place.
Hn. He would miss it.