A/N: Wow, thank you for all of the reviews. Hope you like this chapter just as much. Enjoy.
The familiar dull beeping of my computer woke me out of a sound sleep. It was followed by the last thing I wanted to hear: J's voice calling my name. He didn't contact me face-to-face very often, usually preferring instead to send me e-mails that were safer and harder to trace. It was only when he was angry or had something particularly complicated for me to look after that he bothered to call. I sat up and looked around blearily for my laptop. It was sitting on a small table across the room, the top up. I pushed the covers back, realizing that someone must have tucked them around me while I was asleep, and stood. My legs only just managed to hold my weight; they felt weak under me as I hobbled across the room.
"I'm here," I croaked, realizing that my voice sounded harsh from disuse. I cleared my throat and sat down, turning the laptop so that it faced me. J looked furious, but that didn't bother me as much as it might have before. "I'm here," I repeated.
"I've been calling you for the past ten minutes!" J said, glaring at me. "Where have you been?"
"I was preoccupied," I said simply, not bothering to admit that I had been having a very nice dream wherein Duo and I had wings and we were flying over the mountains and seas. "What is it?"
"I have a mission for you. Another opportunity for you to take down that factory near the school," he told me. There was an undercurrent in his voice that told me exactly how annoyed he was that Duo and I had missed out on our mission in the first place. At one time that would have alarmed me, but right then I wanted nothing more than to slam the top of the laptop down and break the connection. He must have read something of my intent in my face because he scowled and said, "This is an important mission. The principal of that school has top-secret information that could turn the war in our favour, Heero. And that factory has been producing weaponry for years. It needs to be destroyed."
I took a deep breath and frowned at the screen, torn. Part of me wanted to ignore the mission and stage a rescue mission for Duo and Quatre. It wasn't what I had been taught, yes, but I had a nagging feeling that all five of us would need to be alive in order for the war to be won. We had been bred to be individual soldiers, but somehow we were stronger when we were together, and the whole "gods" thing was only serving to make that even more evident. If something happened to those two, it wouldn't bode well for anyone. But I didn't think J would understand that when I barely understood it myself.
"Understood," I said instead. "Send me the coordinates and mission plans and I will follow through."
J looked at me for a moment longer, face scrunched up, like he was trying to see through me. "Is there something you need to tell me, 01?" he asked. "You've been acting very suspiciously as of late. I'm starting to wonder if I should have chosen someone else."
It was a threat that J had often used against me as a child, and the idea of not being able to complete the missions that I felt I had been born for had been terrifying enough to make me submit to all kinds of procedures I might have otherwise protested. Strangely, it wasn't anymore. I was starting to see that there was more to this war than just J and me. It was bigger than all of us and had, possibly, been in the works for thousands of years. Regardless of whether J believed he had brought me into this, I knew that I would have been a part of it anyway. All of us would have. I didn't usually believe in things like destiny or fate, but that was just how it was.
"There is nothing I need to report to you," I replied, and that was the truth. J didn't need to know about the gods. None of the scientists did.
He didn't seem to be very convinced by my words, but he must have realized that nothing else would be forthcoming because he nodded. "Very well. I'm sending you the details right now. Do not fail me, 01. This mission is of critical importance."
The screen flickered and went dark. I glared at it and pushed the top down without bothering to look at the information that was coming through. J had always feared the day that I would begin ignoring his instructions, even though he'd never said as much. He'd tried his best to keep me under his thumb to prevent that from ever happening. That was one of the reasons he had taught me to be the so-called Perfect Soldier. Nothing should ever stop me from completing a mission. I thought about that and wondered if he realized that by teaching me that, he had given me the capacity to ignore his instructions as long as it was about a mission, even if it wasn't the one he had assigned.
"Will you go?"
I was unsurprised to hear Trowa's voice behind me. "I don't know," I said honestly, spinning around to face him. He was hovering in the doorway carrying a covered tray. "I know that I should, and my mind is telling me that it's more important to think about the war. Duo and Quatre are both strong soldiers and they can get out of this without our help. But there is another part of me that says we should be helping them, and I justify it by thinking that without them we'll never win the war."
Trowa smiled and finally came into the room. He set the tray down in front of me and pulled the covering off to reveal that it was some kind of thick soup, along with a sandwich and a glass of water. "Someone wise once told me to follow my emotions," he said, sitting down across from me.
"I know." Mechanically, I dipped a spoon into the soup and brought it to my lips, barely noticing that it was almost too hot to eat. Was Trowa right? Should I be following my emotions and ignoring the mission J had sent to me until Duo and Quatre were safe? Or was I allowing myself to be foolishly sentimental and putting all of our efforts in danger? What was the right thing to do? Human attachments sure were a pain.
I ate the food and felt better by the time I was done, though I was no closer to a decision. I finally opened the laptop up and looked at what J had sent. It was pretty much the same as before, only this time Duo's part in the matter was noticeably absent. That told me J knew he'd been kidnapped and it started a low boil of anger in my stomach, though I tried to ignore it. The mission would take up to two weeks, as I wouldn't have the advantage of Duo's stealth when it came to getting the information from the principal or infiltrating the factory.
"What will you do?" Trowa asked again.
I didn't answer for a minute and I avoided meeting his gaze. Instead I scanned the details again, knowing that it was the kind of mission that had been designed for both of us. For me and my partner. It felt wrong to contemplate going without Duo, though I knew that if he had been around he would have been yelling at me for even thinking about not going. That didn't matter, though. Somehow the baka had weaseled his way into me and I didn't think I could extract him if I tried. I shook my head and looked up at Trowa. There was only one decision I could make.
"I will go once we have rescued Duo and Quatre," I said, and as soon as the words were out, a feeling of relief swept over me. "J says that this is an important mission, so the sooner we have the two of them back where they belong the sooner Duo and I can get back to work."
Trowa grinned and I knew he approved of my decision. "If that's the case, then Wufei and I think we know where they are."
"You do?" My head snapped up and I stared at him intently, all thoughts of J forgotten.
"Yes, but whether or not you're coming with us remains to be seen," he replied, nudging the plate that held the sandwich closer to me. I'd eaten the soup while I was thinking and I wasn't really hungry anymore, but I picked the sandwich up reluctantly. "Tell me the honest truth, Heero, because I don't want you to be a liability if you come along with us. These people may be amateurs but they mean business." He frowned. "The media finally caught on to what happened at the cabin and it was reported that there was over fifty fatalities, not including the people that we took care of."
Fifty? The number turned my stomach. That was nearly all of the servants, which meant there must have been more bodies we hadn't seen. It was one thing to kill for war, but I would never understand people who found joy in killing for fun or profit. There was no happiness to be found in watching someone's life draining away. "I can come," I told him firmly. I would have said that regardless, as there was no way they were going without me after that piece of information, but it was the truth. I was still tired, more so than I was used to, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been. I was confident that I could do the mission with no problems.
"Alright. Wufei checked into the father's cell phone records. We found one suspicious call that was re-routed to one of his daughter's phones. Iria Winner. She's important. Makes a lot of decisions for the Winner family, so I decided to look into her. I was able to trace the steps you used to hack into Zayeed's records and do the same for hers. She's been getting regular phone calls from a similar source. They've made an effort to hide their tracks by bouncing the signal off of multiple towers and it seems to be working because there's been no mention of a rescue effort yet." He looked up at me. "But I'm getting worried, Heero. The calls have been getting shorter every time."
"Do you think she's refusing to give them what they want?" I asked.
"Wufei did a little extra research into the Winner family. It seems that Zayeed is infamous for refusing to bow to anyone," he replied grimly, tossing some folders down on the table. I picked them up and flipped through them. Most of the papers were documentation about lawsuits that had been brought against the Winner family over the years. Zayeed Winner had fought every single one, no matter how small or insignificant, and in most cases the plaintiff just gave up rather than try to win against someone who had the ability to drag things out for years. The rest of the documents were computer print-outs of articles that had been written detailing Zayeed's infamous 'my way or the highway' attitude. No wonder Quatre never talked about his family.
"This doesn't bode well," I muttered, my stomach tightening. If Zayeed was refusing to give the kidnappers what they wanted there was no telling what might have happened. "You think that he might have told Iria Winner not to give in to their demands?"
"You know that Quatre doesn't speak to his father. They had a falling out," Trowa told me. "From what he told me, Zayeed doesn't want anything to do with him right now. I think that's exactly what would have happened. He probably didn't even alert the police to the fact that Quatre was gone. And there's something else, Heero. I think we know who those people are."
I took the second folder he was holding out and flipped through it. My stomach tightened and everything I had just eaten threatened to reappear at what I was seeing. The Winner family was extremely well known throughout all of the colonies and on Earth. They were very influential and had a great deal of money. But according to what I was seeing, Zayeed Winner hadn't always made intelligent decisions with that money. These were stories of everything from illegal firings to people who had been stepped on in the name of progress. Most concerning of all were the threatening letters that had been written to the man; some of them were enough to make me cringe. If I had been Zayeed Winner, I would have been locking my door every night.
"You think one group wrote all of these, and these people are the ones who kidnapped Duo and Quatre?" I said weakly, lingering over a particularly graphic letter that expressed, in great detail, what the writer wanted to do to Zayeed. The writer had been surprisingly creative. I hadn't known that you could do those kinds of things with a regular kitchen knife.
Trowa nodded and didn't say anything else. He didn't have to. I could see the look of misery mingled with fear in his eyes. This was beyond anything we had dealt with before. It was one thing to fight against Oz, to deal with soldiers, even those who had been trained in the sophisticated art of torture and interrogation. We had been prepared against that kind of thing as much as possible: I might have undergone the most training but I knew the others had experienced some as well. But this? This wasn't interrogation or even torture. This was murder, plain and simple, from people who enjoyed it. I remembered the impressions I had been left with after the god had taken over and I'd seen into that man's mind before I killed him. My stomach twisted violently.
I lurched to my feet and ran in the direction of the bathroom. It took me a mere moment to lose everything I had just consumed. The images of Duo and Quatre having suffered everything that had been written in that letter haunted me as I bent over the toilet. And that was just one letter. There had been more. Not even soldiers could be this depraved. I stood up and drew the back of my hand over my mouth as I moved back to the doorway. Trowa hadn't moved and I was grateful for that. It gave me a moment to regain my bearings as I walked slowly back to the table and sat down, my mind racing a mile a minute.
"If they try to escape..." I said, closing the folders. I had no interest in reading any more. These people were a danger to everyone around them, that much was obvious. I had no idea how they hadn't come to the attention of the police or Zayeed's bodyguards before now. Why hadn't someone dealt with them? I'd never really paid much attention to the judicial or police systems but this was making me doubt them. Had they really just ignored these warnings and dismissed them as not being a threat? It was infuriating. I bet that if Zayeed was the one who had been kidnapped, they would have been doing everything to get him back. Yet because it was his estranged son, they were ignoring the matter.
"If they try to escape, there's a good chance it could set them off," Trowa concluded, having come to the same place as me. "Wufei has been getting the supplies ready. We know their location and it's unlikely that the group will try to move Quatre or Duo at this point. Once they get fed up with waiting for an answer, they're going to just follow through on their threat." His eyes dropped to the folders and I noticed his hands were shaking before he laced his fingers together. "We have to get there first, Heero."
"And we will." I stood up and grabbed the folders, taking them into the bathroom. I threw them into the sink and watched in the mirror as Trowa came in holding a pack of matches. Where he'd gotten them, I didn't know, but he didn't hesitate to strike one and throw it in on top of the folders. It felt good to watch the flames curl over the papers. I had a vague idea that the same thing would happen to the people that had dared to kidnap my brother and my lover. Any wounds on either one of them would be paid back in full.
"Heero..." Trowa's voice was hushed.
I looked up, into the mirror. My eyes were normally a medium blue color. Now, I saw, they had darkened to nearly black. It seemed to fit, considering the rage that was humming through my body. I wanted to find and bring destruction and vengeance down on those who had taken what did not belong to them. I wanted to cause war and be the winner; I wanted to cause them pain like they had never known. I took a deep breath, clenching my fingers into the marble countertop even as my mind was racing, following every line of thought, coming up with the best and safest way for us to approach them without causing trouble for anyone. It was probably dangerous to let the god out so soon, especially after it had exhausted me last time, but I was unable to press it back entirely. The presence burned in the back of my mind.
"Let's go," I said, and my voice was gravelly, harsher than usual. Trowa shivered but he was smirking.
"I'll get Wufei," he said.
I turned the water on to take care of the last vestiges of the small fire. In the curling flames, I imagined I could Duo's face. He was waiting for me and I would be coming for him, and the people who taken them had best hope that the other gods would be watching out for them by the time that we got there, because War and Death and our brothers would not be inclined to mercy.
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