out of the island
into the highway
past the places where you might have turned
you never did notice
but you still hide away
the anger of angels who won't return
-Everything You Want, Vertical Horizon
Heero awoke at the crack of dawn, hours ahead of his other teammates. The sad part of this was that this had been one of the all-too-rare nights when those strange dreams hadn't haunted his sleep. And God knew he needed every scrap of that he could get. Still, he could not shirk his duty. So, still clad in the boxers and tanktop that were his standard sleepwear, he made his way downstairs.
The safehouse the Preventers had prepared for the five undercover boys looked exactly like a typical suburban dwelling - except for one thing. When you touched a hidden panel on the wall, and the touchscreen beneath the veneer of false wood confirmed your DNA print, the library turned into a fully equipped ready-room. Heero touched the hidden panel and watched, yawning, as bookshelves spun around to reveal consoles and wall screens, as the tables flipped their tops to reveal keyboards and holographic displays, and as a shielding system kicked online. There was enough technology in that single room to make Bill Gates, had he still been alive in AC 196, fall all over himself slobbering in pure techno-lust. The entire shebang had been installed in five hours, and could be uninstalled in two. It was a portable tactics-and-strategy system, which had been developed by a team of the best minds from the Eve Wars and before that. Heero had had a hand in its development, specifically in the part of the system intended for use by Intelligence – the so-called 'spy array'. It was the development of said spy array that caught the eye of Lucas Shaw, the head of the newly formed Preventers Intelligence.
Quicker than Lady Une liked, Shaw had had Heero transferred to Intelligence. Heero had thrived there, and soon had the reputation as the intelligence operative that could accomplish what no other could. He could have been Shaw's deputy director, except that he disliked administrative work. Still, he was more Shaw's right-hand man than the one who was deputy, and could be counted upon to help run the Intelligence directorate, if from an unofficial status.
Heero had worked on the mission briefing the whole day yesterday, but was now up to put on the finishing touches. He watched a map of the terrain slowly rotate above the main holographic display in the central table, sipping from a cup of coffee. Hopefully, the caffeine would keep him alert today – not that he had much confidence in the drink. He could easily refute Duo's claims of him being a druggie, but if Duo had accused him of being addicted to caffeine…
He examined every aspect of the mission he had planned. He found little to correct, but lots to double-check – for his peace of mind, if for nothing else. Heero and Wufei had been on this particular operation for nearly three months already – the other three had arrived yesterday for the final strike.
The entire thing was codenamed OPERATION: WIPEOUT. A faction of discontented OZ and White Fang people had begun making trouble. This country, in the European region, was where their forces were headquartered – in fact, outside of this country, there were no WhiteClaw forces to speak of. Heero and Wufei, along with Sally Po, had been in the region for months. Wufei and Sally took down the known rebel cells, leaving as little trace as possible. More than half of their sting operations were accredited to disgruntled police, drug and weapon runners, private crime lords – this new faction were not exactly above the law. Heero was there to gather the information to make these sting operations possible, but often he was right alongside Wufei and Sally in the takedowns.
Things had changed when they found out that WhiteClaw had somehow, impossibly, acquired a contingent of Mobile Suits – Aries and Virgos and even a Cancer. Upon learning that, Heero and Wufei's Gundams were immediately shipped to them, while Sally went back to Geneva to give a first-person report to Lady Une.
Night sorties were the modus operandi, taking out whatever Aries or Virgos WhiteClaw sent out for whatever objectives they had. They didn't know all of the missions WhiteClaw planned, but that was okay. Their objective was to whittle away at the WhiteClaw's forces until a strike at the base was more like a reasonable venture with good chances of victory and survival rather than a suicidal run much like the last battle against the Libra. One of that per lifetime was enough for most people, thank you very much.
That was why Trowa, Quatre and Duo were there. Wufei and Heero had finally decided that it was a go. Today they would strike down WhiteClaw – for good.
'I've been hanging around too long with Wufei,' Heero thought, shaking his head over the steam coming up from his coffee mug.
***
The sun was well above the horizon before everyone was up. Heero was on his third cup of java, and everyone else was on his first. The five pilots were in the ready room, watching the central holo-display. Heero and Wufei stood next to the table, arms crossed, two dragons surveying future conquests – and the minions who would carry it out for them.
At least that was one thought that crossed Duo's mind as he looked at them. Heero glared at him, as if he knew what Duo was thinking, and the American boy hurriedly concentrated on the map.
Heero turned his attention back to the display. "Alright," he began. "This is the blueprint of WhiteClaw's base. It's not underground or hidden by any physical land characteristics – it's in plain sight in the middle of this region…" And he jabbed a finger at one area on the map. The computer zoomed in on the area he pointed at, showing the squat complex in full three-dimensional detail.
Wufei took over. "The base is protected by a stealth technology that was also applied onboard the Libra. Aside from that, there is a detection network that allows WhiteClaw to see and – they hope – destroy any vehicle heading towards their base before the people inside said vehicles see the base. That hasn't happened so far, because their complex is in a rather deserted area."
"Duo, you take Deathscythe, in cloaked mode, and take out these towers." The map spun around about forty degrees. On the side of the complex now facing the five boys, two towers were ringed by red circles that suddenly appeared on the holograph.
"Radio us when you have. Breaking radio silence means they'll pick you up on their scanning frequencies, but that's okay – taking out those towers means disabling their detection system. That's when we'll attack."
Heero started again. "We need to aim especially at these areas – here, here, here and here." As he pointed at the map, certain parts of the 3D base model began to glow slightly.
"Trowa, you and Quatre will attack this area. It's the ground based one, and so your ammo will be needed, Trowa, to take it out, while Quatre's heavy armor will be of good use in withstanding and taking out their own guns. Wufei will be raking the fuel tanks and power generator. With any luck, his flamethrower will cause the tanks to explode. Duo, you're in charge of taking out the missile silos, anti-aircraft defense systems, and any ground-based weapon that they could use to defend themselves. Got it? I'll provide air support – that is, I'll be keeping as many of the Mobile Suits as possible from reaching you guys. Feel free to join in whenever you want, of course," he told them, grinning ferally.
A strange notion crossed Duo's mind – why was it that Heero was always at his most just before a battle?
***
Heero stared at his viewscreen, drumming his fingers on the dash. His sensors showed nothing around him but a few high-flying eagles. All was quiet. All was peaceful, in spite of the firestorm they were about to send down on WhiteClaw's head. All was serene.
Heero was getting bored.
He'd drunk three cups of coffee before he'd left (Starbucks was beginning to love him) and he had been able to catch three hours of sleep last night – practically luxurious, compared to the hours he'd been keeping lately. Still, he could feel the gray void of slumber beckoning to him. This non-action wasn't helping any, either.
His head slumped to one side, and his eyes began to drift closed. The lack of sleep was telling even upon his enhanced body…
"You're not my brother!"
"I'm not that badly off that I need a woman to worry about me."
"Don't cry, mother. I'll be the king instead of my big brother. And someday, I'll be as strong as father. So…please don't cry anymore, mother…"
"The towers are out!" Duo's voice, excited and loud, came over Wing's speakers, startling Heero out of his sleep. The voices slipped away…from both mind and memory. He was snapped out of sleep into the battle now beginning.
"I repeat, the towers are out! Go, go, go!" Duo yelled.
Heero shook his head as if physically flinging away the last remnants of sleepiness, cursing himself for giving into his lethargy. Wing Zero, in fighter mode, had been waiting in the sky, well out of the range of WhiteClaw's radar. Now Heero jerked the stick and Wing dived, like a falcon on the hunt. The sleek mecha sliced through the purple evening clouds like a beam saber through metal, making a path in the haze through which the stars glimmered for a brief moment before being covered again.
Wing Zero broke through the cloud cover, executing a tight barrel roll as the metal began to shift and change from a next-generation fighter aircraft to a Gundam. The beam saber shot out of its containment into Wing Zero's hand, activating and shining on a Mobile Suit already gleaming from dim starlight.
Below him, the radar controllers in the WhiteClaw control center had collective apoplexy as their radars suddenly showed one…two…three, four, five…FIVE Gundams!
"Gundams!" one controller managed to shriek half-hysterically into the comm, alerting his superiors. His colleagues were less composed, as they began to scream and break down. Their voices overlapped one another in a rising cacophony of panic as they began to call upon their God(s) and to voice aloud their convictions of impending doom.
"Oh my god, we're going to die!"
"No enemy who sees a Gundam lives!"
"I…In the name of the Father, and of the S…Son, and of th…the H..H…Holy S..s…Spirit-t-t-t…"
"Allah preserve and protect us!"
Meanwhile, Heero watched as Mobile Suits boiled out of the base like a horde of angry bees. There were a lot of them…more than Wufei and he had anticipated. Still, instead of tensing or reevaluating his chances of success…or even considering that the increased number of opponents could mean defeat… Heero merely smirked.
He dove into their midst…and let the darkness take him.
***
"This is Trowa: mission complete."
"Duo here: I'm all done!"
"This is Quatre: the objectives have been reached."
"Wufei: mission accomplished."
Heero shook his head groggily. "Ninmu…ninmu kanryo." As awareness returned slowly to the cobalt-eyed pilot, he noticed that the others were heading back to the hidden hangar, and that it was now late twilight. It had been afternoon when he'd started, but he was becoming used to losing awareness and recollection of entire portions of the day.
He didn't know if he should be concerned about that fact.
Below them, the field around the complex (which was now a collection of half-ruined concrete things unrecognizable as buildings any longer) had been transformed into a virtual graveyard of scattered Mobile Suit parts, illuminated by fires dotting the field. He closed his eyes slowly and turned his head away.
He punched a code in, and let Wing Zero fly autopilot back.
As the five Gundams moved over the landscape, Duo keyed a private link to Heero.
"Heero," he said, hesitantly. "You didn't have to kill all of the MS."
Heero remained silent.
***
As the five boys disembarked and let the mechanics scurry over to overhaul the Gundams, Heero suddenly noticed a thin, but deep shoulder gash. He stroked a finger over it hesitantly, sucking the finger as it came away covered in blood. Shaking his head over how he had been so deep in battle-trance he hadn't noticed being banged around enough to get injured, he left to get a bandage.
When he returned, the others had finished making their reports. Heero sighed – usually he was the first one done – and set to work. By the time he had finished typing it up and sending it to Lady Une, the others had left for the safehouse.
***
The other boys had ridden the Jeep Cherokee back 'home', so Heero checked out the black motorbike he'd been keeping stored at the hangar. As two young technicians in obvious awe of the pilot - who was in fact younger than they – wheeled the motorcycle out, Heero ran his eyes over the machine in a swift but thorough check.
The cycle, though legally owned by Preventers and only allotted to him because of his position, was as much his as Wing Zero was. Heero had spent a lot of his free time and quite a chunk of his salary tinkering with it. It was the closest thing he had to a hobby. And it had served him well in this city, wheeling him from contact to place back to safehouse…and outrunning quite a few pursuers too. This city had a lot of gangs.
Heero was gratified – and relieved – to notice the black cycle was still in pristine condition. Of course, no hint of that showed on his face as he pulled the helmet over his head and straddled the cycle. He tied his Preventers jacket around his waist, to prevent it from flapping in the wind when he started to ride. Belatedly, almost as he was about to leave, he realized the two technicians were standing in salute, eyes on him. He raised his hand to his head and threw off his own salute before speeding off.
***
Heero roared up to the house on his cycle. He pushed the door open wearily, not even glancing at the dining room where the other pilots were munching on pizza.
"Hey! Aren't you going to eat dinner with us, Heero?" Duo called out before taking a bite of pizza.
"Iie," Heero replied, before remembering that Japanese wasn't the native language of anyone else in the room. He repeated his answer, in English this time. "No…I'm going to bed."
"Suit yourself," Duo said, and shrugged before turning back to his pizza. Heero didn't know it, but Duo had searched his room – quite thoroughly – before Heero had arrived back at the safehouse. He hadn't found any hidden stashes of anything, drugs or otherwise, and so while his suspicion was far from allayed, he at least remained fairly sure that Heero wouldn't go on a drug binge this night.
Quatre waved and called, "Goodnight!" while Trowa and Wufei nodded at him. Heero ignored them all, but they were used to that.
He climbed up the stairs to his room, and collapsed wearily onto his bedroll. He barely remembered to kick off his shoes before he fell asleep…
***
The head mechanic called down to his assistant. "Hey, we'll start with Wing Zero first. It's the least damaged out of all five of them. Practically the only damage is that slash to the right shoulder section. Pass me up the welder, will you?"
The young woman who was the assistant mechanic nodded, and passed him the requested tool. The head mechanic pulled down his faceplate, and set to work.
***
Quatre, Duo, Wufei and Trowa lounged in the living room, quiet and relaxed. It was a scene out of a postcard promoting total ease. Wufei and Quatre were engaged in a chess game, which Duo watched avidly while munching on a bag of Cadbury's Milk that served as a dessert. Trowa sat a little distance away, engrossed in a book. Occasionally he would glance up and look at the chess game.
Suddenly the comfortable silence surrounding them was split abruptly by a pained scream. With a startled look at each other, all four boys bolted for the source of the scream – Heero's room.
The door was locked, and nothing but Heero's code would open it. Wufei cursed, hauled out his katana and sliced the lock off the wall. Hissing and sparking, the door slid open, and the four boys rushed in.
Heero was thrashing in his bed, screaming. It took all four pilots to hold him down. Heero's head whipped from side to side, and he screamed something in English, then in Japanese. Finally, he stilled. The other pilots breathed sighs of relief. Then his eyes flew open, glazed and flat, and he began to convulse.
As the tremors wracking his slender frame began to subside, Heero turned his head and looked at his teammates with glassy cobalt eyes. "Avuge-n kuaru e jia-bo?" he asked them, in a tone that was perfectly normal, if a little angry. The quiet, deliberate voice was a marked contrast to the violent screams of earlier… yet the unfamiliar words were more frightening to the pilots than the screaming had been.
***
Heero alternated between fits of screaming and thrashing and – more alarming to the others – lying eerily still, save for slight convulsions, and speaking in gibberish. The pilots took turns to stand watch all through the long, long night.
***
Preventers Headquarters was, on this day, a maelstrom of human activity. There had been a decisive strike against WhiteClaw just completed, after all, and all that was left was the mopping up. If a person wasn't finishing off his duties and records, he or she was partying hard – the celebration that the Gundam pilots were saving for tomorrow, when they had the energy.
The exception to this general bedlam was a large room, quiet in the muffled way an air-conditioned, wall-to-wall carpeted corner office is. This room was the office of Lady Une, head of Preventers, and where she was currently poring over the mission reports she had just received from the Gundam pilots. Lady Une was just about to start on Heero's report, the last in the stack, when she was called away by the flashing light on her table's inset console. Lady Une turned away from the report as the vidcomm pinged, indicating a call. She turned it on, a bit irritated to have to set aside the reports, only to face the writer of one of the reports.
"Hello, Duo…" she started uncertainly. "What…"
"We have a problem," Duo interrupted her.
***
"And so, that's what happened," finished Duo. Lady Une looked at the screen, a troubled, shocked look in her brown eyes. "What could have happened to make him like that?" she asked faintly.
"I think I know." He took a deep breath, and looked at Lady Une squarely. "I think Heero's been taking drugs."
***
AN: Revised version of End of Innocence up. Yay! ^_^ That particular sword over my head is now gone, and this chapter no longer inspires me to lose all confidence in myself when I look at it. Phew. Oh yeah, the chapter notes (warning: extremely long-winded!):
(1) The entire WhiteClaw situation is currently the most important thing in the world to the UES (United Earth Sphere) government – at least to the ones cleared for the highest level of security; the media and most of the world do not know they exist. For the past three months, the majority of the Preventers have been gathering information about WhiteClaw and preventing leakage of said information. Aside from the main Po-Chang team, (with its unofficial member Heero Yuy, who was supposed to keep to Intelligence) there were fourteen other undercover strike teams, who were pulled out once they caught wind of WhiteClaw's Mobile Suits and OPERATION: WIPEOUT started. Mechanics, technicians and other support personnel have been brought in to keep OPERATION: WIPEOUT running smoothly, along a small troop of Preventers to keep the support personnel safe. Add the five Gundam pilots now taking out WhiteClaw's Mobile Suit forces, and you have around seventy-five people now in the region and working on the operation, and two hundred in bases all over the world who have been assigned to the situation. This is the most complicated endeavor the Preventers have ever undertaken.
(2) Lucas Shaw is the head of Preventers Intelligence, an organization that supports and augments Preventers but has a certain degree of autonomy. Lucas Shaw is a Colonist from the L-1 cluster. During the Eve Wars he held no official position in the rebellion against Earth, Oz or White Fang, but he still gained a reputation of the man on Earth and Colonies who could get the information you needed, provided you could meet his requirements. He worked on a freelance basis and somehow managed to evade the Colonies', Oz's and White Fang's attempts to enlist him, although he accepted Lady Une's offer easily enough. He has no family. He looks on the game of intelligence and counter-intelligence as the greatest challenge he could have and as the best way to live his life meaningfully. He is stern and detail-conscious with all but the few he trusts, with whom he is gruffly good-natured. He looks upon Heero as his especial protégé, and the assassin-turned-pilot-turned-intelligence-operative has managed to learn quite a few things from the sixty-one-year-old man.
(3) The black motorcycle: I was thinking something sleek, slim and efficient, like one of the Japanese street racers. (hey, that descrip could fit Heero too…freaky. o.0;;) Not a Harley-Davidson, that'd be something more for Duo, and not a dirt bike – that's what Wufei rides! (grins) Seriously though, the black bike is something like a next-next-next (hey, AC 196's got to be seriously into the future) generation advanced Kawasaki or Suzuki that was pretty cool to begin with and became even cooler with Heero's advanced tinkering. Heero really loves his black cycle, though he as usual denies attachment to anything. It is his hobby and his mode of stress relief to drive/repair/tinker the cycle. It is difficult to say which machine is more precious to him: Wing or the cycle.
(4) The part about Heero outrunning street gangs on his cycle is less because he wanted to than because many youths passed out on the streets could call attention to him. Don't worry, I haven't made Heero into a wuss – he could still kick their asses three ways from Sunday. ^_^
(5) The part about Japanese – see, here's my theory. I highly doubt that Japanese suddenly becomes an in-thing, such that everyone can speak it. I also don't take to the theory that Japanese becomes the new international standard language because Japanese is an insanely complicated language. An international language should be simpler for everyone to learn, like maybe one of the Latin or Romantic languages. (well…I think they're easier to learn) So when Heero speaks in Japanese, no one is going to understand him unless they're Japanese themselves. Duo is not going to say 'baka' or 'sugoi'…at least not in this fic. Same situation if Quatre speaks Arabic, Wufei speaks Chinese, or Trowa speaks…whatever the hell his native tongue is. For all we know it could be Tagalog. (coughs) Okay, I think I've ranted long enough…
(6) The first line of gibberish Heero speaks, "Avuge-n kuaru e jia-bo?" is what Van says in the first episode to Hitomi, Amano and Yukari. It translates to "What are you, devils?" I found the exact spelling of the words from the Episode 1 Story Notes from the Escaflowne Compendium, which can be found at http://www.anime.net/escaflowne
(7) I really like to make chapter notes, did anyone notice?