1.1 Chapter Ten: United We Stand
Both Duo and Anna were awake and dressed well before dawn that morning. They had gotten breakfast at the airport and decided to mill around before their flight.
"I think I'm going to develop airsickness if I have to get on any more planes." Anna sighed.
"It'll end soon. Maybe you'll traveling by laptop again soon." Duo said coyly.
"Maybe." Anna said vaguely.
"You don't want to go back, do you?" Duo asked flatly.
"I don't want to hurt the way I did again." Anna responded.
Duo was about to reply when the call went up for them to board. The look Anna gave him told him to drop the discussion until later. As they were boarding, a young man stepped off the plane and tipped his hat to them, and vanished into the crowd.
Duo leaned close to her. "Know him?"
Anna shook her head. "No, I don't think so. He's not one of us, if that's what you mean."
The rest of the flight went smoothly, although the image of the young man remained on Anna's mind. He had been familiar, but she couldn't place it.
As soon as they got back in the townhouse Anna immediately headed for the office.
"Come on, boyo, we've got serious work to do."
"What do you have in mind?" Duo joined her in the master bedroom turned workplace.
"We have to locate Wufei, right? The last known coordinates we have for him are here, in Chicago and that was months ago. There's no guarantee he's still here. We need to find out where he went. That's going to take phone calls, hacking, and lunch. Take Chase's computer." Anna said.
Duo grinned. "I like the lunch part. Let's get to it."
*~*~*~*~*
Chase crossed her legs and sighed heavily as she glanced at the clock. She had forgotten what the waiting periods were like. "Could we speed this up?"
"Always the impatient one, ne, Chase?" Heero asked with a small smirk.
"Maybe." She stood and crossed over to where he was seated at the laptop. They had found a small hotel room in a small town outside of Tokyo to work. It was safer that way.
Heero sighed, half annoyed at Chase's unnerving restlessness.
The loud ringing of the phone made Chase jump. "I'll get it," she muttered as she stepped toward it. "Moshi moshi?" Her eyes widened as she heard the voice.
"It's good to hear your voice again, Chase Yuy. My sister and I would like to see you and your husband again."
"Where?"
"The mansion. Ours, not Quatre's." Pause. "It is good to hear you are alive and well. I'll see you as soon as possible."
Chase hung up the phone in a daze.
"Who was it?"
The blond girl glanced at her husband. Her now green eyes were slightly darkened with emotion. "We're leaving."
"Hn." He had been around her for good many years. He knew she made decisions at the moment and off of strong emotions, without thinking threw the outcome.
"Fine," Chase responded as she grabbed her jacket. "I'm going."
Heero reached out and caught her wrist on her way towards the door. "No."
"I'm a grown woman, Heero Yuy. I can take care of myself."
"Who was on the phone?"
"Someone I need to see."
"Trowa?"
Chase's eyes widened only slightly. "You know where he is?"
"What do you know of Trowa?"
"I know he's working undercover."
"Wrong. Don't go near him." He leaned back in his chair as he gazed at the screen.
"I wasn't planning on it," she growled. "I'm not a little girl you can tell what to do, Yuy. I can take care of myself." She glared and kicked the chair from under him, sending him to the ground.
He grunted slightly and picked himself up, watching the door close. "Blasted girl will get herself killed one of these days."
"The nerve…" she muttered under her breath as she stormed down the street, heading towards the airport. She clung to her jacket as the wind blew steadily.
"Chase!"
She whirled around, glaring. "What?"
His eyes softened as he looked at her. "Gomen ne."
Her green eyes fell to the ground. "Me too. It was Zechs, not Trowa. He said for us to come to the Peacecraft mansion."
Heero eyed her for a moment. "That wasn't Zechs."
She cocked an eyebrow. "And just how do you figure that?"
"Zechs would have found some little, obscure place for us to meet."
Chase clenched her teeth in frustration. "I really have been away from this business too long," she said dejectedly.
Heero took her in his arms. "It's okay, Chase."
Chase placed her chin on his shoulder and hugged back. Her eyes opened slightly and she saw a dark figure. "He-" Everything went black for the two pilots.
Duo and Anna typed and hacked and prodded for all the information they could well into the evening. They had ordered pizza once, and Chinese twice (the first order was wrong) and gone through several cups of coffee and tea each. They were both determined to find him, and somewhere along the way it had turned into a competition to see who could locate him first.
"This is impossible." Duo grumbled from Chase's desk. "We'll never find him."
"Nothing is impossible. Just think about it this way. We used to be able to locate people whether they were on earth or one of five colonies. Now its just earth." Anna said.
"At least in our time the population was spread out. You've got billions of people on this planet." Duo exclaimed.
"Is it really billions?" Anna wondered absently.
"I don't know. Whatcha looking at?" Duo asked.
"Seating charts from all flights in the last two weeks." She replied.
"All flights?" Duo repeated incredulously.
"All flights in and out of Chicago. Remember, he's probably using an alias." She replied.
"We don't have a clue what he'd use, though." He said.
"No. But Quatre used something in reference to his real name. Wufei might have done the same, or even something in reference to his gundam number." Anna mused.
"Like Justin Quint?" Duo asked, leaning closer to his screen.
"Justin Quint? Justin sounds like justice, and quint means five! That's it! Duo, you're brilliant!" she cried.
He grinned. "One of the reason's ya married me, isn't it? I'm sending you the link."
Anna grinned back and opened the link. "The description fits him too. It's got to be him."
"Now the question is, where is he?" Duo said.
"It says here that Justin Quint has made six airline trips in the last week." Anna said.
"Six? Good grief, that guy's racking up the frequent flyer miles." Duo muttered.
"He went from Chicago to LA, back to Chicago, then to New York, back to Chicago, then to New York again, then he just left for LA about the same time we came home. He might have even been in the same airport!" Anna exclaimed.
Duo shook his head. "No. He flew to La Guardia when he went to New York. We were at JFK. He was following you. That's part of the pattern you took."
"It looks like he started out going after Chase, because she was in LA, where she met you. Then he might have followed me, but why did he go back to LA?"
"Because he's following me." Duo said, looking at the chart again.
"Nani?"
"When I first came to this world, I was in Chicago, looking for you. I didn't know, or remember your real name, and I didn't know what you did or what happened to you so I was at a loss. I actually found Chase by her artwork. I picked up a copy of Emerald Dawn, and knew it was she. I read the name and got the flight information and followed her to LA. He's following the name Maxwell. That's why he followed you for a time. It's the only thing he's got to go on." Duo said.
"I get it. Maybe he has post-trauma amnesia that the doctors didn't pick up on. But still, why did he go back to LA? Neither one of us were on any flights to LA recently." Anna posed the problem.
"Maybe because a Davis Maxwell was on a flight to LA from New York. Like I said, he's just following Maxwell's. And now he's got the wrong one! What if he tracks this guy down and confronts him with being me?" Duo laughed. "He'd be in for the surprise of his life!"
"Or the trouble. What if this Davis Maxwell belongs to OWN and is using our name for bait?" Anna questioned.
"Always the optimistic one, ne?" Duo groaned.
"There are always alternatives." Anna retorted.
"So he's in LA now?" Duo changed the topic.
"Apparently. There haven't been anymore flights with Justin Quint on them." Anna affirmed.
"Great. So now we go to LA and get him." Duo smiled.
"No." Anna said.
Duo swiveled in the computer chair to face her. "No?"
"No." she repeated.
"And why no?" Duo asked.
"I can't go anywhere. It's Sunday." Anna said firmly.
"So we'll leave tomorrow." Duo suggested.
Anna slumped in her chair. "It's because of tomorrow I can't go. I can't afford to not teach my classes tomorrow, without Heero as a substitute. Besides, I need to make sure all my students survived."
"You can't find another sub?" Duo asked.
"I could, but it could take two weeks to locate him and make sure he hasn't joined OWN. It isn't like it was before. We have bills to pay, groceries to keep stocked, and that homeowner's group thing. And while Chase does make a lot off royalties from Emerald Dawn –they're considering making it an anime in Japan- I have to do my share of the work. I can't just fly off the handle at the drop of a hat." Anna sighed.
"If they try a full take over, you'll have too." Duo reminded her.
"If they try a full take over, I'll have a justifiable reason." Anna replied.
Duo sighed. "Life sure has changed."
"A lot of things have changed." Anna agreed.
"So what are we going to do?" he wondered.
"We can't do anything together at this point. You go to LA and find Wufei, and bring him back here. I'll stay here and keep in contact with you and Dorothy, and find out what I can to what extent OWN has its roots in this world." Anna said.
Duo shook his head. "I don't like leaving you alone."
"Hey, we play the big leagues now, remember? I'll be fine for a few days or however long it takes for you to find him. I lasted ten years, after all."
Duo looked pained at the last statement. "What if it's not him?"
"There's only one way to find out, babe." Anna replied gently.
Duo consented. "Alright. You're sure you'll be okay? They know what you look like now."
"I'll be fine." A thought occurred to her. "Duo, which laptop did Trowa save?" she asked urgently.
Duo put his arms behind his head and looked thoughtful. "I don't know. Is it important?"
Anna nodded. "It could be."
"Well, when Heero found it he said it was a blue covered one. That was Chase's, right?"
"Right."
"So he destroyed yours and saved Chase's. I'm not surprised." Duo said.
Anna groaned. "That's what I was afraid of."
"What?" Duo asked.
"Before Chase and I left, we downloaded all the blueprints of all seven gundams onto her laptop. Originally, four of them had been on mine. The Star, the Sandrock, the Deathscythe Hell, and the Altron. Chase already had Heavyarms, the Galaxy, and Zero on hers. So the files wouldn't be scattered, we put them all on hers. So OWN now has all the blueprints for the most powerful weapons on earth and the colonies." Anna murmured.
Duo whistled and leaned back. "And he'd use them too. Does he know they're on there?"
"Only if he found them by searching for them. We didn't tell anybody what we did, and we made them hidden files." Anna answered.
He whistled again. "That could change a lot. We should let Heero and Chase know right away."
"We'll tell them when they get back. Trowa can't build a gundam in four days." Anna said.
"You don't remember Trowa." Duo said wryly.
Anna laughed.
"And he could have had one already built."
She stopped laughing.
"Always the optimistic one, ne?" she sighed.
"It is just a possibility." Duo said.
"He wouldn't bring it here, though. That would be to risky, even for him." Anna countered.
He nodded.
"So you should go. Find Wufei. Bring him here. Okay?" Anna asked.
"Alright. But if you need anything, you call me. I've got a cell phone now." Duo said.
"I will." Anna promised.
"I'll go in the morning." He said, watching her.
"Okay." She whispered.
"I'll come back, Tenshi, I'm not going forever." He said softly.
"Hai, I know. It just seems so surreal." She said.
He moved over and pulled her into a kiss. "It's real. Honest." He said.
"I believe it."
Both Duo and Anna were awake and dressed well before dawn that morning. They had gotten breakfast at the airport and decided to mill around before their flight.
"I think I'm going to develop airsickness if I have to get on any more planes." Anna sighed.
"It'll end soon. Maybe you'll traveling by laptop again soon." Duo said coyly.
"Maybe." Anna said vaguely.
"You don't want to go back, do you?" Duo asked flatly.
"I don't want to hurt the way I did again." Anna responded.
Duo was about to reply when the call went up for them to board. The look Anna gave him told him to drop the discussion until later. As they were boarding, a young man stepped off the plane and tipped his hat to them, and vanished into the crowd.
Duo leaned close to her. "Know him?"
Anna shook her head. "No, I don't think so. He's not one of us, if that's what you mean."
The rest of the flight went smoothly, although the image of the young man remained on Anna's mind. He had been familiar, but she couldn't place it.
As soon as they got back in the townhouse Anna immediately headed for the office.
"Come on, boyo, we've got serious work to do."
"What do you have in mind?" Duo joined her in the master bedroom turned workplace.
"We have to locate Wufei, right? The last known coordinates we have for him are here, in Chicago and that was months ago. There's no guarantee he's still here. We need to find out where he went. That's going to take phone calls, hacking, and lunch. Take Chase's computer." Anna said.
Duo grinned. "I like the lunch part. Let's get to it."
*~*~*~*~*
Chase crossed her legs and sighed heavily as she glanced at the clock. She had forgotten what the waiting periods were like. "Could we speed this up?"
"Always the impatient one, ne, Chase?" Heero asked with a small smirk.
"Maybe." She stood and crossed over to where he was seated at the laptop. They had found a small hotel room in a small town outside of Tokyo to work. It was safer that way.
Heero sighed, half annoyed at Chase's unnerving restlessness.
The loud ringing of the phone made Chase jump. "I'll get it," she muttered as she stepped toward it. "Moshi moshi?" Her eyes widened as she heard the voice.
"It's good to hear your voice again, Chase Yuy. My sister and I would like to see you and your husband again."
"Where?"
"The mansion. Ours, not Quatre's." Pause. "It is good to hear you are alive and well. I'll see you as soon as possible."
Chase hung up the phone in a daze.
"Who was it?"
The blond girl glanced at her husband. Her now green eyes were slightly darkened with emotion. "We're leaving."
"Hn." He had been around her for good many years. He knew she made decisions at the moment and off of strong emotions, without thinking threw the outcome.
"Fine," Chase responded as she grabbed her jacket. "I'm going."
Heero reached out and caught her wrist on her way towards the door. "No."
"I'm a grown woman, Heero Yuy. I can take care of myself."
"Who was on the phone?"
"Someone I need to see."
"Trowa?"
Chase's eyes widened only slightly. "You know where he is?"
"What do you know of Trowa?"
"I know he's working undercover."
"Wrong. Don't go near him." He leaned back in his chair as he gazed at the screen.
"I wasn't planning on it," she growled. "I'm not a little girl you can tell what to do, Yuy. I can take care of myself." She glared and kicked the chair from under him, sending him to the ground.
He grunted slightly and picked himself up, watching the door close. "Blasted girl will get herself killed one of these days."
"The nerve…" she muttered under her breath as she stormed down the street, heading towards the airport. She clung to her jacket as the wind blew steadily.
"Chase!"
She whirled around, glaring. "What?"
His eyes softened as he looked at her. "Gomen ne."
Her green eyes fell to the ground. "Me too. It was Zechs, not Trowa. He said for us to come to the Peacecraft mansion."
Heero eyed her for a moment. "That wasn't Zechs."
She cocked an eyebrow. "And just how do you figure that?"
"Zechs would have found some little, obscure place for us to meet."
Chase clenched her teeth in frustration. "I really have been away from this business too long," she said dejectedly.
Heero took her in his arms. "It's okay, Chase."
Chase placed her chin on his shoulder and hugged back. Her eyes opened slightly and she saw a dark figure. "He-" Everything went black for the two pilots.
Duo and Anna typed and hacked and prodded for all the information they could well into the evening. They had ordered pizza once, and Chinese twice (the first order was wrong) and gone through several cups of coffee and tea each. They were both determined to find him, and somewhere along the way it had turned into a competition to see who could locate him first.
"This is impossible." Duo grumbled from Chase's desk. "We'll never find him."
"Nothing is impossible. Just think about it this way. We used to be able to locate people whether they were on earth or one of five colonies. Now its just earth." Anna said.
"At least in our time the population was spread out. You've got billions of people on this planet." Duo exclaimed.
"Is it really billions?" Anna wondered absently.
"I don't know. Whatcha looking at?" Duo asked.
"Seating charts from all flights in the last two weeks." She replied.
"All flights?" Duo repeated incredulously.
"All flights in and out of Chicago. Remember, he's probably using an alias." She replied.
"We don't have a clue what he'd use, though." He said.
"No. But Quatre used something in reference to his real name. Wufei might have done the same, or even something in reference to his gundam number." Anna mused.
"Like Justin Quint?" Duo asked, leaning closer to his screen.
"Justin Quint? Justin sounds like justice, and quint means five! That's it! Duo, you're brilliant!" she cried.
He grinned. "One of the reason's ya married me, isn't it? I'm sending you the link."
Anna grinned back and opened the link. "The description fits him too. It's got to be him."
"Now the question is, where is he?" Duo said.
"It says here that Justin Quint has made six airline trips in the last week." Anna said.
"Six? Good grief, that guy's racking up the frequent flyer miles." Duo muttered.
"He went from Chicago to LA, back to Chicago, then to New York, back to Chicago, then to New York again, then he just left for LA about the same time we came home. He might have even been in the same airport!" Anna exclaimed.
Duo shook his head. "No. He flew to La Guardia when he went to New York. We were at JFK. He was following you. That's part of the pattern you took."
"It looks like he started out going after Chase, because she was in LA, where she met you. Then he might have followed me, but why did he go back to LA?"
"Because he's following me." Duo said, looking at the chart again.
"Nani?"
"When I first came to this world, I was in Chicago, looking for you. I didn't know, or remember your real name, and I didn't know what you did or what happened to you so I was at a loss. I actually found Chase by her artwork. I picked up a copy of Emerald Dawn, and knew it was she. I read the name and got the flight information and followed her to LA. He's following the name Maxwell. That's why he followed you for a time. It's the only thing he's got to go on." Duo said.
"I get it. Maybe he has post-trauma amnesia that the doctors didn't pick up on. But still, why did he go back to LA? Neither one of us were on any flights to LA recently." Anna posed the problem.
"Maybe because a Davis Maxwell was on a flight to LA from New York. Like I said, he's just following Maxwell's. And now he's got the wrong one! What if he tracks this guy down and confronts him with being me?" Duo laughed. "He'd be in for the surprise of his life!"
"Or the trouble. What if this Davis Maxwell belongs to OWN and is using our name for bait?" Anna questioned.
"Always the optimistic one, ne?" Duo groaned.
"There are always alternatives." Anna retorted.
"So he's in LA now?" Duo changed the topic.
"Apparently. There haven't been anymore flights with Justin Quint on them." Anna affirmed.
"Great. So now we go to LA and get him." Duo smiled.
"No." Anna said.
Duo swiveled in the computer chair to face her. "No?"
"No." she repeated.
"And why no?" Duo asked.
"I can't go anywhere. It's Sunday." Anna said firmly.
"So we'll leave tomorrow." Duo suggested.
Anna slumped in her chair. "It's because of tomorrow I can't go. I can't afford to not teach my classes tomorrow, without Heero as a substitute. Besides, I need to make sure all my students survived."
"You can't find another sub?" Duo asked.
"I could, but it could take two weeks to locate him and make sure he hasn't joined OWN. It isn't like it was before. We have bills to pay, groceries to keep stocked, and that homeowner's group thing. And while Chase does make a lot off royalties from Emerald Dawn –they're considering making it an anime in Japan- I have to do my share of the work. I can't just fly off the handle at the drop of a hat." Anna sighed.
"If they try a full take over, you'll have too." Duo reminded her.
"If they try a full take over, I'll have a justifiable reason." Anna replied.
Duo sighed. "Life sure has changed."
"A lot of things have changed." Anna agreed.
"So what are we going to do?" he wondered.
"We can't do anything together at this point. You go to LA and find Wufei, and bring him back here. I'll stay here and keep in contact with you and Dorothy, and find out what I can to what extent OWN has its roots in this world." Anna said.
Duo shook his head. "I don't like leaving you alone."
"Hey, we play the big leagues now, remember? I'll be fine for a few days or however long it takes for you to find him. I lasted ten years, after all."
Duo looked pained at the last statement. "What if it's not him?"
"There's only one way to find out, babe." Anna replied gently.
Duo consented. "Alright. You're sure you'll be okay? They know what you look like now."
"I'll be fine." A thought occurred to her. "Duo, which laptop did Trowa save?" she asked urgently.
Duo put his arms behind his head and looked thoughtful. "I don't know. Is it important?"
Anna nodded. "It could be."
"Well, when Heero found it he said it was a blue covered one. That was Chase's, right?"
"Right."
"So he destroyed yours and saved Chase's. I'm not surprised." Duo said.
Anna groaned. "That's what I was afraid of."
"What?" Duo asked.
"Before Chase and I left, we downloaded all the blueprints of all seven gundams onto her laptop. Originally, four of them had been on mine. The Star, the Sandrock, the Deathscythe Hell, and the Altron. Chase already had Heavyarms, the Galaxy, and Zero on hers. So the files wouldn't be scattered, we put them all on hers. So OWN now has all the blueprints for the most powerful weapons on earth and the colonies." Anna murmured.
Duo whistled and leaned back. "And he'd use them too. Does he know they're on there?"
"Only if he found them by searching for them. We didn't tell anybody what we did, and we made them hidden files." Anna answered.
He whistled again. "That could change a lot. We should let Heero and Chase know right away."
"We'll tell them when they get back. Trowa can't build a gundam in four days." Anna said.
"You don't remember Trowa." Duo said wryly.
Anna laughed.
"And he could have had one already built."
She stopped laughing.
"Always the optimistic one, ne?" she sighed.
"It is just a possibility." Duo said.
"He wouldn't bring it here, though. That would be to risky, even for him." Anna countered.
He nodded.
"So you should go. Find Wufei. Bring him here. Okay?" Anna asked.
"Alright. But if you need anything, you call me. I've got a cell phone now." Duo said.
"I will." Anna promised.
"I'll go in the morning." He said, watching her.
"Okay." She whispered.
"I'll come back, Tenshi, I'm not going forever." He said softly.
"Hai, I know. It just seems so surreal." She said.
He moved over and pulled her into a kiss. "It's real. Honest." He said.
"I believe it."
