Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing. I just like to pretend I do. ;)
The Lost Girl
Part 5
We sat there in the darkness for I don't know how long - maybe ten minutes. He'd grabbed my hand in his, squeezing it tightly, and we just sat there, waiting for something. We didn't have to wait long.
The door suddenly whooshed open and that woman was back, silhouetted in the doorway and looking even harsher in the bright light from the hallway as it assaulted my eyes. She had four guards with her, I saw, and I didn't like the look of them at all.
Duo was up in a flash, and I struggled into a standing position as he stared at her with fierce eyes. When he spoke, his voice cut the air like a razor blade, as if he was trying to hurt her with his tones.
"Whatever you did to us, you're going to pay for it, lady. Let us go. Now."
She smiled and lifted her hand, pointing at us. Instantly two of the guards had locked their strong grips around my upper arms, and seeing as I couldn't struggle much because my body was still so unresponsive, I was trapped. Duo, on the other hand, was struggling with all his might, but he didn't seem to be gaining any ground for all his efforts. He looked so small, so thin in contrast with the huge guards holding him in place. His face was contorted in pain - one of them had grabbed his lower left arm, I realized, squeezing the broken bones.
"Stop it!" I screamed, but received a backhanded slap across my face as a response.
"You will bring them with me," the woman said, turning on her heel and walking crisply down the hall, her boots clicking and echoing down the corridor above the noise of struggling coming from us. The guards managed to propel us down the hall with what looked like very little effort, and I could tell they were enjoying their job far too much for my comfort.
We were veritably dragged through countless halls again, until we finally stopped in a large room. It could see a blank viewscreen on the wall opposite the door, and a metal chair with restraints on it in front of the screen. There was another chair closer to the door, out of the line of sight of the main viewscreen. The woman motioned to the guards, and I was strapped into the chair near the door as Duo was dragged over to the chair by the screen and strapped in there, still struggling violently, but less so with his left side, I noticed. I winced - it must be hurting him a lot.
The guards then retreated to posts by the door, pulling guns out and eyeing both Duo and me menacingly, as if daring us to try and escape. Duo was still struggling against his restraints as the woman walked over and stood in front of him.
"What do you want?" he spat, and she fixed him with her cold gaze.
"I want you to do something for me, Duo Maxwell."
"Well, I ain't gonna do it, lady! So forget about it!" he said, glaring up at her from the metal chair.
"Oh, I think you will, Mr. Maxwell," she said, smiling, and snapped her fingers.
From a side door that I hadn't seen before, two men wearing lab coats stepped out, one coming over to my chair and one approaching Duo's. The one who stopped next to Duo's chair pulled a syringe out of his pocket, holding it up as it glinted in the overhead lights.
"Do it," the woman commanded, and he flicked the cap off and plunged the
needle into Duo's arm.
"Stop it!" I screamed again, but immediately found myself gagged by the man
who'd just come over to my chair, tying a piece of cloth tightly across my mouth and preventing any further sound from escaping me. I glared at him as best I could, but I knew there was nothing I could do. Instead I turned back to Duo's chair, only to see that he was no longer struggling. He'd become slumped in his chair, looking up at the woman and man weakly, but even from here I could see the cold, deadly spark in his eyes. He was angry, and ready to kill.
But there was something else in his gaze - it looked a little off, a little fuzzy. Not quite focused. What had they given him?
"Now then, Mr. Maxwell. Let me explain to you what you are going to do for me,"
the woman began, each word she spoke deliberate and carefully enunciated. "You are going to contact your friends - the other four Gundam pilots - and you are going to say to them what I tell you to say. You are going to say that you managed to escape from OZ but cannot meet with them. You have managed to track down the party that is after you, and have contacted friends across the globe that will help you dispose of this OZ party. The only catch is that each of your friends must take his Gundam and go to a separate base. I will give you the names and locations of each base, as well as the officer they are to contact upon arrival."
"And...why am I gonna do this... for you?" he asked slowly, each word sounding like it caused him a great amount of effort to produce.
Suddenly I felt cold metal against my temple - I looked up to see the man who'd
gagged me, grinning and holding a gun to my head.
"Because, Duo Maxwell, if you don't do this for me, I'm going to kill her. And
then I'm going to kill you."
A tense silence filled the room, and I could see the internal struggle going on
behind Duo's fuzzy gaze. I wanted to scream at him - tell him I would rather die than hand over the other four Gundams, because even if I couldn't remember everything, I knew this was important. Bigger than me. And he knew that too. Didn't he?
"Fu..." he began.
The gun was shoved further into my temple, and the woman glared angrily down at
him.
"I *will* kill her, Maxwell. I know what she means to you. I know what your own
life means to you. Do you want her blood to be the last thing you see?"
More silence. It seemed to go on forever, and it shouldn't have. He should have told them to pull the trigger, end this now and keep the other pilots safe. Why wasn't he telling her to shove it and kill us?!
"...Fine..." he said. "I'll... do it. If... you let her... go."
*Duo!* I screamed mentally, wishing I could speak. Why was he agreeing?! He
couldn't! He just couldn't...
But he was drugged, and biased, and...
Part of me felt something... something for the fact that he wasn't willing to sacrifice me. But the rest of me wanted to make the man pull the trigger so that Duo would no longer have a reason to give in. So that he wouldn't have a weakness.
This was all my fault
"Good." The woman was smiling smugly as she motioned to the man beside her. He nodded and went over to a drawer, producing a black shirt that looked much like the one Duo had been wearing when we were captured. He undid the hand restraints - Duo's legs were still firmly locked into place, and he looked too drugged to even try to get out, although I could tell he desperately wanted to - I desperately wanted him to as well, but it was no use. The drugs running through his veins were too much for him, and he sat relatively still as the man pulled the black shirt over his head, only wincing as it slid over the broken arm.
"All right," the woman said once this was done. "I'm going to turn the controls over to you. One false move and she dies, and you'll only live long enough to see her life run out of her and onto the floor. You got that?"
"..Yes," Duo said angrily, the malice quite evident in his voice.
"Good. Now - send your message."
She and the man stepped back as a control panel flipped up on the right arm of Duo's chair. He angrily, but slowly - druggedly - typed in the correct information, and the screen before him hissed with static momentarily, before a slightly distorted image of Wufei appeared, glaring angrily at the screen.
"Maxwell! You baka - where are you?! Why aren't you here - we agreed to meet -"
"Listen, Wufei. I had... some trouble getting away. I'm... fine now."
Wufei's image scrutinized the boy in the chair. "You don't look fine. Where are you? Where's Alison? Why aren't you here?"
"I've got a plan," Duo continued, ignoring Wufei's questions, although each word looked like it was killing him. Slowly.
I knew they were.
"Plan?"
"The OZ party... the one after us. We can get rid of them. I've... got allies."
"Allies? What are you talking about?" Wufei was definitely suspicious now.
"Never mind the details. We can get rid of the OZ party."
Wufei's eyes narrowed. "And how do you propose we do this, Maxwell?"
"Bases - five different ones... all over the world. My allies need only one Gundam to help them... at each location. The Oz party has... spread out. We can strike at them from five different... points, get rid of them that way."
The image of Wufei seemed to be considering this as a valid plan. I wanted to scream out at him, tell him it was a trap and to get off the link now and come save us. But I couldn't, and it was killing me just as much as this lie was killing Duo.
"You want us to split up," Wufei said finally.
"Yes."
A beat.
"I do not mind working on my own. I am sure the others will not either, as long as you promise your allies will assist us in getting rid of this OZ party. I am going to trust you, Maxwell, just this once. We will see."
I knew this was it - the point of no return. Wufei was just about to hand himself and the four other pilots over, right into OZ's hands. It was all over now. We were all dead.
"Where are the bases?"
The bottom of the screen flashed green, base locations and officers' names flashing across it for Duo to read off the Wufei.
"Heero is to go to.. San Francisco and look up Commander Thomas. Trowa needs
to take Heavyarms to Chile... to meet Commander Espinosa. Quatre goes to Hong Kong... meet with Commander Chen... You go to Sydney and find Officer Pierson. I will work from... Paris with my allies here."
"Very well," Wufei agreed. "We shall do so and meet these allies tomorrow. This had better work, Maxwell."
And with that, Wufei ended the transmission.
Duo closed his eyes for a second, knowing that with this, their fate was sealed. He knew what he had done, and I could tell that he wished very much that he hadn't.
"Very good, Mr. Maxwell. You are an excellent actor," the woman congratulated him, coming over to his chair.
"F**k you," he said. "Let... her go."
"Oh, by all means, Mr. Maxwell. There's no need for such language. Doctor?"
The butt of the gun suddenly cracked into my head, and I was gone.
* * *
"Duo!?"
I woke with a start, blinking and sitting up. Where was I? What was going on? Where was Duo?
I was alone, and it was silent here. Sunlight filtered in through the open door to..
My room? I was in my room, back at the military complex. What?
Maybe it was all a dream - maybe I'd just had a fever and I'd fallen asleep and nothing had blown up and we hadn't been captured by OZ and the pilots weren't about to hand themselves unknowingly over to the enemy -
"Duo?" I called again, my stomach twisting, hoping, praying, that he would come in and laugh at me for being so scared by a silly dream.
Silence. He didn't come.
I got out of the bed, aware that I was wearing pajamas - red flannel pants and a light blue shirt with 02 printed on it. I crept out of my room and stood in the hall, facing the closed door that led to Duo's room.
"Duo?" I asked softly, knocking on the door.
No answer.
I opened the door, slowly, peering around it into the room.
It was empty. My stomach fell as if I'd just fallen off a cliff - where was he? Was I still dreaming? Had I ever been?
I remembered being captured by OZ. I remember being tortured, maybe I remembered getting my memories back.
And losing them.
And I remembered Duo making the call, I remembered the gun in my temple, the crack of the butt against my skull -
I rushed into the bathroom, fumbling for the light switch - I didn't know where it was. The light clicked on and I stared into the mirror.
A second later, I watched a single, hot tear trace its way down my cheek, totally of its own volition.
There was a huge, blotchy bruise on my right temple, and a reddish needle mark on the side of my neck, just barely visible.
It hadn't been a dream.
They were going to be captured, and I didn't know what was going to happen to Duo.
It was all over.
I turned and marched out of the bathroom, unable to stare at my reflection any longer. It was just too painful; all I could see was Duo, over and over again, with his broken arm, face contorted by pain and drugs, closing his eyes, wishing that he hadn't just betrayed his friends.
And it was all my fault.
If I hadn't been there, he wouldn't have given in. He would have been dead for refusing to help -
But what was to say he wasn't dead now? Now that his job was done, what possible reason did they have for keeping him alive?
Why was *I* alive?
I ended up in the kitchen, leaning on the table with both hands. I realized how hard it was to breathe, to balance. It was all crashing down. My friends were gone, and I couldn't even remember them well enough to keep them alive in my mind. I was a failure, a weakness
NO.
I had to do something. They had let me live, and they were going to regret it. I was not going to sit there and cry my life away, mourning for friends that I couldn't remember knowing for more than a few days. No. I wouldn't do it.
I knew where they were. I remembered each base, as if it had been burned into my mind. Heero was in San Francisco. Trowa was in Chile. Quatre was in Hong Kong, and Wufei was in Sydney.
But where was Duo? Where had they been keeping us? It could be anywhere, I knew, and that wasn't even limited to the Earth. He had been told to say he was in Paris, but something deep in the pit of my stomach told me we had not been in Paris.
Maybe I could look there. But I had to get to the others first, muster some type of force and maybe get the information from the OZ guards at the bases. They would know, they had to be in on the plan.
That's what I would do.
I ran into my room and over to my dresser, frantically pulling clothes out and shoving them into the backpack that had been sitting beside my bed. I changed and brought the pack out into the kitchen, stuffing it with some food: a few apples, oranges, bread, cheese, and a bottle of water. I went over to the wall panel that Duo had opened the night we'd left, but it was empty.
Damn. I would have to go in there.
I would have to search his room.
I walked slowly down the hall and into his room, flipping on the light and looking over the place where Duo had lived, before this entire mess. The bed was unmade, and a few black shirts took refuge the floor, strewn here and there. There was a pack of flimsies containing blueprints that I recognized as Deathscythe's sitting on the desk next to a picture frame.
Oh God. I did not want to look at that picture. But somehow my eyes were glued to it, and I suddenly found myself in front of the desk, holding up the picture and looking into it like my life depended on it.
Half of the frame was filled with a picture of me, and him, sitting on top of Deathscythe as it lay on the floor of the warehouse. I was grease-stained and holding a wrench, smiling but looking a little surprised. He had his arm around me and was grinning like the devil.
Stuck into the frame beside it, filling the other half was the two of us sitting together on a park bench, sandwiched between a sweetly smiling Quatre and a slyly-smiling Trowa. Heero and Wufei were standing off to the side beneath a tree, arms crossed and looking uninterested. I was giving Duo bunny ears, and he didn't seem to notice.
I put the frame down, and opened the top desk drawer.
There it was. I pulled out the gun and checked the clip. It was full; I searched the drawer and found two extra clips, and grabbed those as well, shoving the gun into my belt and the clips into my pocket.
I left his room, shutting the door behind me and walking back to the kitchen to grab my bag.
Then I walked out the door, down the hall, and took the elevator to the warehouse, walking through it as quickly as possible, across the bare concrete floor, trying my hardest to stare at my feet and pretend that it wasn't empty. I also ignored the massive cave-in at the far side, where sunlight was streaming through to paint the floor gold. I opened the door out into the sun, and made my way up the docks, and to the street.
I hailed the first cab I saw, and told the driver to take me to the airport.
"Where're ya goin', honey?" the cabbie asked me, flipping his green-eyed gaze up to the rear-view mirror for a split second.
Green eyes.
Trowa had green eyes.
Quatre had green eyes.
"Honey?"
"Oh." I snapped back into reality, blinking. "What?"
"Where're you flyin' to?"
"San Francisco. I have a friend I need to see."
AN: Thanks for the continued feedback, and an extra-special thanks (and some of Quatre's just-cooked makies) to someone out there who knows who she is! :) coughDuofanaticcough