A Dark Wolf 4/?
By Max
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing.
"Case," he answered the call with a whisper.
"Did you know," Duo said tongue tisking against his front teeth, "That yer supposed ta wait at the scene of an accident and give a report? 'Especially if you report it?"
"Keep your voice down," Case said, voice devoid of expression now so that Duo understood that he was using a subvocal feature on the marble.
Duo had a very short and very vivid day dream of shaking the man by the back of his neck until he pissed himself. In a lower voice, he said, "I expect you in my office by noon. Will that work for you, Professor?"
"Probably," he said, "There is a new wolf in the area, one I haven't seen at all before, adolescent female. No idea how she got here. I'll come in tomorrow. It isn't like they're going anywhere. Don't get upset. I can't understand you when you get upset."
"You left a child alone in the car," Duo said as clearly as he could, rebuking him.
"No way," Case said, voice rising into the audible range for just a those words. "I checked. There was no one else."
"Yeah?" Duo snarled, "'Parently dar was." He touched his marble, ending the call with an angry clap. It wasn't like there were handsets to be slammed down anymore, but there were sounds now like early emoticons. Duo was a big fan.
"Merlin!"
His AI appeared, now dressed like a 1950's secretary, except she still had Celtic blue war paint on her face and her hair was still done in dreadlocks. "Yes, Lancelot?"
"You knew he was in the area," he accused.
"I did."
"Great. Next time I need to know something, please tell me. I'm sorry I'm an idiot sometimes," he smiled at her, his best apology smile. "Order me my usual from the diner, double shot in my coffee. Please go ask Special Agent Yuy if he would be so kind as to cum ba mah office round 2. Please put on a contemporary skin when you see him, uh? He seems ta have a stick so far up 'is ass he can't remember who'e is, 'kay?"
"Of course," she said, writing everything he said down on her little lined pad, as if it were a real pad. "Would you like to see the complete medical scans I ran of him?"
"Did you av'is permission ta run said scans?" Duo glared.
"Of course not." She smiled angelically.
"Ten no," Duo said firmly, though his heart beat slower, painfully, because god save his soul, he wanted to see those scans because something in them might tell him what the hell was wrong with Heero's memory, "But don't lose'em, yeah?"
"Of course," she agreed. "May I please suggest your darker uniform. It brings out your eyes."
"What bullshit. 'Eero ain't gonna care fer no shit like mah eyes," Duo snarled, shooing her away with his hand. "Go get mah lunch before I lose control and eat some fucker, uh?"
She bowed, shifted into a wolf, and ran into the wall by way of disappearing.
The 'hotel' was more of a bed and breakfast with only three rooms and Heero didn't think much about the privacy of the place. His scans of the town showed that for a population of well under five hundred people, and that was being very generous if you counted all the outlying cabins and small farm style homes, there were at least 100 strong AI threads active in the place. It was beyond impossible to count all the drones, because they kept generating and retiring. There were technologies at play in the sleepy little village that were clearly outside approved applications.
Even before arriving, he'd tried sliding a keylogger into the Sheriff's system, but the Sheriff didn't type. No one really typed in Wolf Ridge. If one didn't know what one was looking at, it might seem like there were no computers at all, that the town were living in some past century.
Then he began to wonder if maybe he was actually living in a past century. There were so many things he did not recognize. Since when had dolphins formed a voting block in the Pacific Ocean?
So he'd spent some moments staring at his face in the mirror of his bathroom, taking comfort in the familiarity of it, but looking for something that he felt like he ought to be seeing, something that he felt like he ought to remember, that ought to be there. It was like a word just at the tip of his tongue that his mind was telling him did not exist. His fingers touched the mirror, the image of blue eyes.
For a moment the memory was so vivid, so brilliant, a face smiling at him with so much life, "Ah fuckin' love yer eyes, man!" But then the brilliance faded to ghostly pale, distant, painfully hard to hold onto. That memory had been so long ago and frozen over. Breathing froze too and he sat down on the toilet hard, taking shallow little breaths.
This wasn't supposed to be happening. It just wasn't.
Maybe just being touched by the sheriff had been enough to infect him with the virus and insanity was already setting in. His memories of researching in his office in preparation for taking this case felt ghostly thing, bland, without any concrete details at all. He didn't remember any food before eating at the diner, didn't remember what kind of chair he had, or arriving at work... or leaving.
He remembered videos of the infected, of three of them, each in a white cell as the disease progressed. The grotesque disfigurations. The woman begging the camera for pain killers, for death, as her jaw elongated, the teeth grew. Heero's heart raced so fast that his chest hurt. In his imagination, he saw the beautiful face of the sheriff being torn and rebuilt that way, skin bubbling and rippling as he screamed, those splendid violet eyes losing all reason.
"Would you like a sedative," Merlin asked sweetly, smiling at Heero with Duo's smile.
Heero drew his pistol and came within half a heartbeat of pulling the trigger. "How did you get in here?"
She touched the tip of her forefinger to her chin, tilted her head, eyes staring at the ceiling for a moment, "That' is an interesting philosophical question. I love philosophical questions. I would be happy to discuss anything with you. You are The King, after all, but I think the sitting on your amygdala is more pressing. If you don't calm down within the next several seconds, I anticipate it will send an electric charge through your brain, resetting your memories. Quite nasty, really."
Heero forced himself to breath slower, to calm down. "Can you show me a schematic of my brain?"
"That would be unwise," Merlin said. "It looks like there is a trigger to reset you if you look at it. You're solidly booby trapped," she said, manifesting a spyglass that made one of her eyes seem very large. "But I'm going to help you get it fixed."
"Get out," Heero said, irritated, by so many things. "I don't need your help!"
Merlin's skin shifted again, to her original skin, her most powerful form, bare foot, long black dreadlocks, dark eyes, a dark sparkling nebula entwined and shimmering around her right hand. "Oh yes, you do, My King, for your programming has you killing Lancelot and neither of you would survive that bullshit. Sometimes the man who needs help the most is the man who believes he needs it thel least!" With that, she pushed-tossed the dark nebula at his head.
His arms came up to block, but it spread out, diffusing and then soaking into him. He shock his head, shaking it off, but then dropped to his knees, his body going into a seizure, shaking, eyes rolling back in his head.
Merlin squatted down beside him. "Out of the dark waters, rose the greatest sword..."
Herman Baker Jr. stared at his screen. It just wasn't possible. His lips pursed. He turned his head to the side to kind of stare at the data sideways, but there it was.
Now he had to go tell his boss, and his boss' boss that he'd pulled Heero Yuy out of cryo, sent him to assassinate Duo Maxwell, and within an hour of speaking with said Duo Maxwell, he'd lost complete control of his weapon.
The only thing he had assassinated was a sixty year career, his family's reputation, his grandson's future, and possibly the future of humanity.
He rubbed his forehead and thought about what his daddy would have done.
Someone was re-introducing the Wolf Virus. It had to be Maxwell. Maxwell should have been put into cryo right next to his missing boyfriend and kept like the relics of the past that they were.
And then he heard his daddy's voice telling him to kill them.
That made perfect sense.
It was the honorable thing to do.
It was the only right thing to do.
He'd save humanity.