Heero Yuy, L6, and the Second Suit Wars | ELLE


Hey everyone! We're back! :D Unfortunately my time away did not prove as fruitful as I had hoped so this part isn't completely finished. Which means I will only be posting on Mondays until I have it completed. That said, I am over half way done and have a pretty solid outline so hopefully I'll get it all tied up soon enough and my three day a week postings will return. =P As always, thank you so much for you patience and sticking with me through this whole thing. I hope you will not be disappointed... ;-)


PART THREE | Restitution of a Former Life

3.1 The Ramifications


When I awoke, the first thing I could ascertain with any sort of certainty was that I must have a migraine. My head ached fiercely and my stomach roiled with nausea. The lights seemed painfully bright despite the fact that there were only a few lamps lit and I swallowed hard, lifting a shaky hand to my mouth and begging my body not to rebel.

And suddenly I was being lifted with a strong arm across my back and under my armpit and drug through the room, my unsteady feet just barely keeping me up, and I was set unceremoniously before a toilet. I bit down into my lower lip, a feat that caused an unexpected amount of pain, and laid my sweaty head across folded arms, still trying to fight the inevitable.

I fucking hate throwing up.

I have no concept of how much time I spent over that toilet because the shittiest thing about migraines is it doesn't matter how empty your stomach is, you still feel sick. Thinking back to the events that lead me here was a misery in and of itself so I didn't try. But eventually compassionate, cool hands rubbed my back for a while and I felt steady enough to lean back into the touch with closed eyes.

As I eased back and rested between Duo's legs, my head laying on his inner thigh, I felt him press aspirin and a glass of water into my hands, both of which I accepted and took rather tentatively as the slightest movement redoubled the nausea.

When I awoke next I was huddled up against Duo in the dark bathroom, the gentle sound of his breathing and the rise and fall of his chest soothing me despite how badly my muscles ached from sleeping in that position. My migraine had downgraded to a sharp headache and my mouth tasted horrible and I was suddenly starving but I pressed my face into Duo's chest for a moment, taking comfort in him before he woke up and I wouldn't be able to any longer.

I would have to face Duo, face his anger, face – no, not Duo. I would have to face myself, what I'd done, accept that I was a catalyst to this situation and I... I just wanted one more moment of peace.

His hands slid through my hair as he came to and I sighed, voluntarily standing and limping over to the sink. Every muscle in my body was uncomfortably tight and I tried not to lean too heavily on the sink as I dug around for a toothbrush. Duo yawned and stood, hitting a pale light over the vanity and handing me the item I quested for before leaving me alone to wash up.

I stared into the broken mirror and noted blood had dried on my chin and thought back to how I bit and re-busted my lip before retching horribly for god only knows how long. But then I noticed the hastily but not very well cleaned lacerations starting in my hairline and sweeping down my temples. As if Duo didn't do enough work on my face, I had to finish the job myself in Zeus' cockpit. I noted the dried blood under my fingernails as I brought the toothbrush to my mouth.

What a goddamned train wreck.

"Do you think you feel up to talking to Quat?" Duo asked carefully once I'd emerged from the bathroom. I threw off the shirt I was wearing slid on the new one he proffered.

"Yeah, fine," I agreed, faintly surprised he wasn't chewing into me. I wasn't sure how I got here specifically – I vaguely remember falling from the cockpit but then every time I'd ever fallen from a cockpit kind of merged together in that instant I hit the access panel – but I was sure Duo had to have been informed of how I ended up in this predicament.

Duo scanned my face, surely noting the new injuries, and shook his head wearily. He looked pretty rough but then he slept in a bathroom last night for my sake. "Wish you would've waited for me."

"Wouldn't have made a difference."

"Still."

We both had the maturity to acknowledge that conversation had no direction and no end so I let him have the last word and we wandered in silence to some predetermined sitting room Duo had obviously been informed of last night. Quatre was there, pouring tea, and he just briefly glanced at us as we entered. My eyes searched out the room and I stared at what had to be a complete set of family portraits placed around the circular room as well as ornate wallpaper and plush chairs. But really, it was the fruit and pastry platter that my eyes locked on.

Quatre offered us to help ourselves and we stacked our little plates. At a certain point after they exchanged some pleasantries it became obvious to me that they were both looking at me for some sort of explanation and I paused, taking a deep breath and recalling the events of last night fully for the first time.

"Last night HERA... connected me? I don't know what exactly she did – maybe you could fill me in on that Quatre," I said sharply with a pointed glare in his direction, "but she connected me with a pilot of a suit I can only guess is on L6." Duo looked horrified and I think in that moment we both considered what Trowa had said so dismissively about training. But, he didn't know, and I turned my eyes to the side, staring at one of many of Quatre's sisters.

I couldn't look at him. I knew... I knew how he felt about our own conscription, how despite willingly agreeing he and I, at least, didn't truly have a choice. That it wasn't right. We were only children but she... she was even younger.

A new future. A better tomorrow. Suddenly I wondered how Nexxus could bandy about such bold statements in light of what they were actually doing.

"Heero?" he warned me tersely. I had delivered so much bad news in my life but to him it was always so much more difficult.

I swallowed and met his eyes head on, the only honest thing to do. "The other pilot was Lizzy, Duo, from the orphanage. She – she recognized me."

Duo blinked rapidly as if he couldn't even comprehend what I just said and I noted Quatre looking back and forth between us curiously at the edge of my vision.

"What did you just say?" he asked softly, but his voice was hard and his eyes cruel. I saw his anger, his mask, his self-preservation forming before I even had a chance to counteract it.

Two sets of blue eyes stared at me expectantly. I couldn't believe they were going to make me repeat it.

"It was her, Lizzy, the little girl from the orphanage. I don't remember ever being there with you, but I knew as soon as we connected who she was and how I knew her. It must've happened with Jack. She called me Jack." I rarely rushed through a speech but fuck if I wanted to hold on to those words any longer than necessary. The anguish I saw in Duo's eyes as he processed what I was saying hurt me. I thought of how HERA had presented him to me – a mashed amalgamation of every time I ever saw him – and my heart squeezed.

Her and I – we wanted the same thing. In my selfish fucking quest for it I subjected her to share my past – a past which defined us as a tool, an instrument of some larger scheme, a child pawn in a game we didn't start. In a brief foolish moment, I hoped that maybe she would get to share my future, a future in which despite my own astronomical failings, I did find love.

But it wasn't love reflecting in Duo's eyes then. I looked away once again to the pictures on the wall and one caught my eye for a moment. But then Duo's angry voice cut through my thoughts and I turned back to look at him.

"How could you?" The scathing accusation was warranted and I braced myself for his wrath but instead his head shot around and the focus of his attention was solely placed on Quatre. "She's just a baby!"

Quatre's eyes went wide and he took a step back. "Duo, I didn't know –"

"Fuck that!" Duo stood, his hands clenched into fists. "You work with those bastards! You fund this whole fucking operation! You created that system!"

I listened to my partner's angry words but my eyes darted back to that picture. Something about it, it seemed so familiar. But damn if my head didn't hurt so bad still...

"I didn't even know they had mobile suits on L6!" Quatre replied hotly in his defense.

"Well you fuckin' shoulda!"

Those eyes, those pale blue eyes in that well rendered painting suddenly seemed like they were boring into my soul, like I had seen those eyes before, the blond hair falling in a beautiful wave around them.

"How could I have known that?"

"What, you never fucking used your own damned system before? HERA never showed you that?!"

I remembered a hand on my shoulder but it was from a woman I'd never seen before. From this woman. I remembered soft, comforting words. Dinner. Something about going to dinner but I refused because she was too close and I couldn't – I didn't want anyone to be close any more.

"N-no, I knew it was possible, but HERA never showed me another pilot. I honestly haven't even touched HERA recently, I just –"

"You're telling me you don't go down there every night and sit in that cockpit and boot up that system and feel that power? Because I don't fuckin' believe that."

Their argument made it so hard to think, to remember just what it was about her. Who she was. Where I met her. I wanted to tell them to shut up, let me think, but it seemed too important to waste even one second focused on anything else.

"I do it's just –"

"Then are you telling me HERA isn't installed on each one of those three Gundams down there? Because if not, then what the fuck system is?"

In the pause that followed everything rushed in all at once and my teeth clamped together so hard they ached. The touch, the way we worked together so seamlessly, how she offered me texts on memory allocation and the human brain, how we accelerated the development of my primitive AI together.

Aisha. A woman I had once thought of as my surrogate mother. Once, when I was Jack.

Aisha was Quatre's fucking sister.

And then it all fell into place. The whole fucking thing. And if my rage didn't overshadow Duo's then I'd be damned.

"ZERO," I said in answer to Duo's question and both sets of eyes turned towards me as if they had forgotten I was even there. Duo's eyes held pure confusion but Quatre... Oh poor little Quatre Raberba Winner never could do very well with guilt.

How refreshingly unexpected, he'd said when he saw us tumble out of his shuttle closet yesterday.

Very little was unexpected when you piloted ZERO.

"How long?" I asked quietly, so much more calmly than the raging inferno within me suggested I could. "How long have you been fucking with my life?"

"Heero," Quatre pleaded as I stood and saw the cool, collected businessman disappear and nothing but a frightened fifteen year old was standing before me, shaking with dread.

"How long?" I asked again through gritted teeth. "It's not me you have to answer to, but all the innocent people you condemned by condemning me."

"You don't understand," Quatre begged, his words tumbling out of him in a tumultuous stream. "When Sergio approached me after the war I thought I could do something good with ZERO. I thought I could make up for everything. I thought I could redeem my father, Iria, myself. HERA was supposed to be my savior, was supposed to bring light to this world."

"And why me?" I blew his explanation off. It didn't explain anything.

"Sergio needed you – we needed you. Your research was instrumental in HERA's creation."

He may as well have admitted it then. It seemed like the room narrowed and I remembered the accident at the lake house. Waking up on the beach. The whole damned thing was a rouse to get me there. The whole damned thing intentional. How he knew what would happen, I wasn't sure, but I had a terrible suspicion he –

Then I heard Duo's low moan and I turned my eyes to him as he fell back into the chair.

"I knew," Duo's voice was practically a sob as he buried his head in his hands and hunched his shoulders together. "I knew, I knew, I knew!"

Unfortunately he didn't seem inclined to elaborate and I was too damned angry to comfort him so I returned my glare to Quatre.

"I refuse to believe that you did all of this for personal salvation," I accused, getting back to the matter at hand after Duo's strange outburst. "There's a whole damned colony of slaves up there because of you – how is HERA supposed to help that?"

And then, because I never said it even though it was the whole crux of the matter, I wasn't sure my voice would hold.

"You set me up to kill the first person I trusted with my love since Odin."

A moment of dead silence at the confession. My face felt hot with emotion I fought desperately to contain.

"No!" Quatre's pained gasp meant nothing as I stepped forward to, to – to I don't know what. I'd never had any sort of physical altercation with Quatre but my ire was nearly more than I could bear. What if I had done it? What if his actions had caused me to kill Duo? The night with the gun flooded back to me and my fists shook with fury, with the need to exact some kind of retribution.

"You wouldn't kill him! The statistical likelihood of that future –"

"Fucking hell, Quat, listen to yourself!" Duo interjected, surprisingly brisk for how weary and dejected he looked in that chair. But then he was up like a shot and folding Quatre into an embrace as the blond broke down into ugly sobbing in his arms. I felt confused as I stared at the scene before me, unable to figure out how Duo could be sympathetic to him in light of the confessions being made.

"How long has it been?" Duo asked softly as Quatre began to settle after a good five minutes or so – although clearly refusing to leave the shelter of Duo's chest. I couldn't divine what Duo could possibly be talking about so I waited impatiently for some sort of explanation.

"Come on," Duo urged gently and my frustration grew as Quatre peeked out to cast a furtive glance in my direction.

"Seven and a half years," he sighed so quietly into Duo that I almost didn't hear his reply. My mind raced trying to catch up with what Duo was asking. "I suffered a concussion during one of the assassination attempts on my life back when I first took over control of WEI publicly. Ever... ever since."

And I realized then what they were talking about. Quatre pulled slowly away from Duo to stand on his own, staring at the floor and looking up at me carefully. But rage was quickly replacing my confusion. It certainly didn't absolve his guilt in my eyes – he knew what I was going through and still fucked me over.

"They said they could help me!" Quatre's voice became desperate as I stalked towards him. He backed up quickly. "Sergio promised we'd undo this! He said you'd never be safe – we had to get your help!" Quatre's back hit the wall, pictures of sisters tilting around him. "Heero!"

He begged but I could hardly think. His panic and fear meant nothing to me – I hardly saw them in a rush of blind rage. And then I felt fingers slip across my abs and arms wrap around my waist and Duo's nose was nuzzling my ear and I stopped, electricity shooting down my body and effectively shutting me down completely.

"Come on," he whispered, drawing me away. Shaking, I closed my eyes as he led me out of that room, trying to calm my temper. I didn't really want to hurt Quatre, I just... I just wanted him to take the fall for all the shit I did, all the terrible decisions I'd made.

I really wanted to hurt myself.