Disclaimer: I know, from traipsing through every store, mall, and boutique in the Greater Toronto Area, that nobody has Gundam pilots for sale. I even offered to pay retail instead of the supposed sale price, but they still said no. Therefore, I cannot possibly own these magnificent examples of manhood, or the chicks they hang out with. Do not sue me. I have no money except that miniscule amount reserved for presents.
~~~~~~~~~~Episode Seventy-Eight: Siege
"It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the credit." ~Robert YatesApril 4th, 1903
Heero was only vaguely aware of the alarm clock going off at five in the morning; amazingly, he was beginning to sleep right through it. Duo, on the other hand, sat straight up in bed, or as straight as he could while still anchored firmly in dreamland, and then slouched over and rubbed his eyes as he realised reality was calling him. It never wanted to leave a message and go away. The sun wouldn't even be up for another half-hour, but Duo somehow mustered the strength to slap a hand sloppily over the ringing bells atop the fat little timepiece, silencing it. He hadn't opened his eyes once yet, and just sort of groaned as he leaned out of the twin bed and subsequently fell on the floor with a crash. That woke Heero up.
Looking quickly left and right, and finding a wall on one side and empty space on the other, Heero crawled over to the side of the bed and looked down, finding Duo flat out on his stomach on the mat, with his head facing the door, snoring. The boy scowled and flopped back down into a pillow. This wasn't working. Having Duo come to stay at the pub with him every night seemed like a fabulous idea when it was hatched, but situations at the manor hadn't always been conducive to Duo getting a good night's sleep. The previous evening, Otto was entertaining some friends of the family, investors as Duo put it after listening to bits of their conversation, and they insisted on being fed well past midnight. In the absence of a butler, the task fell to the food preparer himself, and when it was all finished, including a round of drinks for the investors and a night of scrubbing pots and pans after Hilde fell asleep right at the kitchen table, he didn't arrive at Catherine's until a quarter past two. Having to pop perkily out of bed three hours later to take the milk in and start making breakfast was a tall order after that.
Not unsympathetically, Heero reached over the side of the bed with one arm, while crushing the other underneath him, and grabbed a handful of braid, tugging on it firmly. "Duo," he rasped, also feeling the effects of sleep-deprivation, but to a lesser extent. It was alright for him, he didn't necessarily have anything to do on any particular day, so he could always take an afternoon nap. ...take a nap? he thought angrily. That's what old people do! "Duo, get up," he said, a little more firmly.
Duo moaned and groaned, but finally struggled up off the floor and into his coat and boots, his eyelids fluttering around half-mast the entire time. "...bumped into another family's chef in the vegetable market the other day," he muttered bitterly. "Why do all the other rich people in England eat breakfast off a big buffet table where everybody helps themselves, and I get the only batch who wants separate plates made for them like a short-order cook!?"
"You can't go on like this," said Heero, forcing himself to sit up in his green and black pajamas and slouch in Duo's general direction.
The chef was just buttoning his coat over the clothes he slept in, and shook his head. "I'm not going back there, I won't get any sleep at all." That seemed to settle the matter, as they were both too tired to argue further. He hadn't even the energy to lace up his boots properly, and shuffled to the door like a drunkard. "See ya later..."
"As soon as Trowa finds out anything, you call me," Heero reminding him seconds before hitting the pillow again.
"Yeah." Not too exhausted to be careful about how he entered and exited the room, Duo poked his head out into the hall and had a good look around before slipping out, quietly shutting the door behind him. Heero frowned and nestled back down into the bedcovers, in the warm spot that Duo had left behind. He tried to relax, breathing in the lingering scent of fresh-baked scones and hot cocoa transferred from Duo's hair to his pillow, staring at the wall, but sleep was now impossible. Still, there was very little for him to do, until Trowa came up with a theory on where Quatre was, so there was hardly any point in getting up. Beginning to feel very useless, Heero laid there in the dark, wide awake with his eyes closed, waiting for something to happen that would give him purpose again.
**********Sometime around mid-morning, Hilde went to see Wufei. She was getting tired of receiving less and less of his attention lately, and wanted to do something about it, which respectable young ladies wouldn't have even dreamed of doing, but she wasn't bothered about being respectable in their sense of the word. When she knocked on his door at the pub, she found out that he was just going somewhere, but was amiable enough to take her along, if she wanted. She agreed without even asking where they were going, and that was a mistake.
Wufei took her to a dangerous part of town, where all manner of thieves, rogues, and murderers walked the streets freely, at least until a policeman showed his face, in which case they all dove for cover. The dregs of society blended in with common beggars and pickpockets around one particular marketplace in the poor neighbourhood, and when one went underground into the various basement flats attached to seemingly respectable shops, a whole other world was revealed where one could buy daggers, guns, drugs, and anything else that could be dreamed up. How Wufei knew about such places, Hilde didn't want to contemplate. She just clung to his arm like a baby koala, shrinking into his side every time one of the unshaven thugs looked in her direction.
"Do we have to be here?" she squealed.
Wufei was very casually browsing the wares for sale by the smugglers and bootleggers, and seemed only slightly irritated by the panicky female clutching one of his limbs. "Just doing a bit of gift shopping," he placated her. "Won't take long." It was very dark in the basement warehouse, and gas lamps illuminated table after table of illegal goods, laying on filthy old bedsheets that could be gathered up, tied closed, and slung over the vendor's back very quickly in the event of a raid. Behind one table that caught the boy's eye, a scraggly old woman with straw-like gray hair, a bandage over one eye, and raggedy clothes that hung off her bony form like torn curtains on a dead tree. She had many bottles of liquids and powders, hand-labeled like the wares of an ancient apothecary, and they all looked at least a little bit menacing.
"...uh huh..." Hilde's eyes ballooned as a man walked past with a caged snake, and it hissed at her as it was carried by. She jumped and clung harder. "So you're, uh...buying someone a present?" she asked with a quiver in her voice.
"More like a present for myself," Wufei said with a grin much similar to the snake's. "But it'll be a surprise for Treize, make no mistake." He made single eye contact with the old woman behind the table. "What have you got there?"
"Poisons," the woman hissed, waving her hands over her collection like a gypsy mystic. She sounded crackly and raspy, as if she was miming to a phonograph recording of herself. "Many mixtures from the four corners of the globe. Choose your weapon, and I'll give you my price."
Hilde squeaked. "Is it his birthday or something?" she asked, sounding awfully nervous to be making such benign conversation. She pointed across Wufei's line of sight to a harmless-looking ebony rod with an engraved silver ball on top. "How about that nice walking stick?"
Wufei walked over, picked up the walking stick in both hands, and pulled it apart to reveal a long, thin sword hidden inside, which he admired. Hilde squeaked again. Nothing in this place was safe. "Hmm...nice," Wufei mused, "but I've got plenty of swords already. I need something...special for what I have planned." The serpentine smile scared Hilde even more than the deadly walking stick did, and she let go of his arm to stand alone with her arms wrapped around her, looking in all directions for potential threats. This was just the sort of place from which a young girl like herself could be carried off in a sack and never heard from again. It was the sort of place she made a point to avoid during her life on the streets, just on the strength of rumours alone. A lingering hope in the back of her mind told her that Wufei would protect her if anything went wrong, but he looked awfully preoccupied.
"Can I interest you in some cyanide?" the woman offered, holding up a vial of white powder with her bony fingers.
"No, too quick," the boy said as he set the walking stick back down. He walked back up to the woman with his hands suspended before him, squinting and looking up as he tried to describe his beautiful dream. "I want...I want something painful, but not messy. I have blades galore, but I don't much care for firearms...maybe thumbscrews, or a nice medieval nostalgia piece, like.....what are those tables that stretch a body out in four directions?"
Hilde inched away from him. "A rack?"
"Thank you," Wufei said, smiling that serpentine smile at her again. He turned back the old woman. "Thumbscrews, or a rack. Do you have anything like that?"
The old woman rubbed her chin, which had a mole with two coarse hairs sticking out of it. "Hmm...special order...wouldn't be able to get it to you for several weeks...plus danger money for transporting something so large..."
Wufei seemed disappointed and perched a hand on his hip, scowling. "Look, I'm trying to wreak horrible, unspeakable vengeance on the man who slaughetered my soul mate. Maybe you can suggest something."
Wagging a finger in the air and seeming to recall another special order that someone had asked for and then never picked up, the woman ducked under the table. "Perhaps you might find these to your liking..." She shuffled around and then popped up with a cubical metal cage made of a fine wire mesh, about ten inches on each side with a little handle on top. The inside was black, but the black was moving, crawling around with hundreds of tiny little legs. Hilde stared at the cage with a bubbling sensation of excess stomach acid gurgling up her throat, and she made a squeamish face of terror and miscellaneous ickyness. "...poisonous spiders," the woman crowed proudly. "Tie your subject down and let these little darlings crawl where they will, stinging and biting and wriggling an--"
"Excuse me, I need some air," Hilde blurted out, and she dashed clear out of the underground market with a hand over her mouth, in case her breakfast tried to make a return appearance.
The old woman lowered the cage of spiders, clasping it casually with both hands, and shot a heavy-lidded look at Wufei. The boy merely shrugged. "She wanted to come, it wasn't my idea!" The woman said nothing.
Outside, Hilde sat down on the curb while a light drizzle began to fall and took deep, cleansing breaths to overcome her revulsion. Lately she was seeing her sweet Wufei in a startling new light, one that was much less flattering. He didn't seemed bothered that Quatre was gone, or that Heero had lost his job and was potentially the number one man on Lord Jeffrhyss' hit list, or any other woe that was plaguing her friends. All he could think about was Treize, Treize, Treize, and it was starting to get on her nerves. About ten minutes after her emergence, Wufei turned up next to her, sitting on the curb as well with a curious frown, as if he really couldn't fathom what her problem was. "What's with you?" he barked unsympathetically.
"You don't find that place the least bit revolting?"
Again, Wufei shrugged. "Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs..."
Hilde nodded. So he did recognize that she was in distress--he just didn't care. "Can you get revenge out of your mind for five minutes so we can talk?" A third and final shrug turned into a full body readjustment as Wufei sulked in preparation for being chastised yet again. Hilde forced herself to smile while she did it, but her voice slowly went from calm at the start to hysterical at the finish. "You've been through a lot of heartbreak in your short life, and I understand that...and you also have a very firey, very powerful personality, and I understand that. But I also need you to understand that I can't take much more of hiking through the gutters of London looking for new ways to torture the object of your rage when all I want is a safe home, a decent job, and a nice friend I can turn to when I have a disagreement with somebody who won't immediately suggest putting poison spiders down their pants!!"
Wufei's eyes lit up at the mention of pants. "Good idea..."
"Stop that!" Hilde snapped, whacking him in the shoulder. "It's all you can think about, isn't it!? Poor Quatre's out there somewhere, probably alone and scared, and you don't even care! The others have been working overtime trying to figure out where he is and how to reach him, and you can't be bothered!"
"Don't be naive!" Wufei shot back. "If that bleeding heart blond wanted to go, then let him stay gone!"
"But we don't know what he wanted! He could be in trouble!" She waited for any tiny sign that any of these things were making an impact on the boy, but nothing seemed to have any effect. The girl deflated considerably. "I can tell you're not interested. Sorry for taking up so much of your time." Disappointed, she pushed herself up off the curb, wiped what might have been light rainwater off her cheek, and walked away. It hurt even worse when Wufei didn't try to stop her.
He stayed on the curb for awhile with his arms sternly folded, and what the girl obviously couldn't have realised was that he was fiercely trying not to accept the hurt he had caused her. Wasteful emotions such as guilt and regret could only cloud his goals, and he couldn't afford to lose sight of Treize when he was so close to making his move. Distractions were unforgivable. Once again resolved that he was in the right, he stood up proudly and left the dingy neighbourhood, without having made any significant purchases, but still with a clear sense of purpose. Soon, he would decide on the proper punishment for his nemesis, and his retribution would be fierce.
The delicious thought of his vengeance kept his spirits high all the way back to the pub, where, if Hilde couldn't get through to him, fate certainly was more than able. When he went up to his room, unlocked the door and stepped inside, he finally saw something that made his blood boil. His entire collection of swords, knives and daggers, which had decorated the walls with both artistic and sadistic flair, was missing.
**********Quatre was continually amazed at the collective incompetence of his captors. If he had been in charge of minding a prisoner, he would have made damn sure that there was no weak point in the room, and that no assistance from external implements such as posh silverware would be allowed inside. Still, he said constant prayers of thanks that Lady Une was so overconfident as to leave him alone for hours with forks and knives, with which he had succesfully cut an eighteen-inch hole into the wall of the linen cupboard.
He wiped beads of sweat off his brow and looked at his progress. The other side of the wall was indeed a mirror image linen closet, and he was able to reach through the hole and dislodge the flimsy shelves without too much trouble. He then did a test-crawl through the hole to make sure he could fit, removed the rest of the empty shelves, and opened the door a crack to reveal another room, not much different from his own, only darker and dustier. He was almost ready to make his move, but first, he had to finish off a few vital tasks.
For the past three days, he had taken only a little food from his meal trays, the sort of thing that wouldn't rot or go stale, like biscuits and crackers, and squirreled it away in the closet, wrapped in old newspaper. He also made certain that he was tucked in bed with the covers over his head, to make it appear to his captors that he was depressed and not eating very much. In fact, he wasn't eating at all, to keep up the illusion. He had to save the small bits of food for later, and also had to make it look like he was more or less on a hunger strike. Lady Une never came up to check on him, though, so she either didn't know or didn't care. In the next phase of his plan, Quatre curled up in bed, drew the covers over his head yet again, and waited for the delivery of his lunch.
Footsteps were heard, and the armed butler arrived with a young assistant who dealt with the trays, exchanging the untouched breakfast for a destined-to-be-untouched lunch, and they left with the same lack of ceremony they always did. Quatre could feel the butler's eyes looking at the lump of his form under the blankets, but he held his breath and didn't move. Within a minute, they left him alone with a fresh tray of food, and the time was finally right to put his plan into action. As soon as their footsteps faded, he got up, crept over to the closet, cralwed through to the other room where there was another small bed, and took its pillows, ramming them back through the hole in the wall before crawling back in himself. With the added pillows, he was able to make a very convincing lump that he hoped would fool the butler for the short-term future, and having set a precedent for not eating, it wouldn't arouse suspicion when the lump stopped consuming food altogether.
Next, he took his paper bundle of food rations, added to it a bit from the lunch tray, tied it up tightly with a bit of string and secure the string to his belt, and then took the wooden shelves out from under the bed, the ones he had earlier removed from the closet. He had even saved the nails he was able to pry out with his fork, and took the lot back into the closet with him. He carefully replaced half of the nails, the ones he wouldn't be able to reach from the other side of the hole, crawled through, replaced the rest of the nails, and spent a good half hour trying to get the shelves back in place to disguise his tampering. Amazingly, he succeeded, and propped more shelves from the other closet up against the hole so that even if the light was on in one room, it wasn't likely to permeate into the other. That left him standing in a brand-new part of the attic, his hunger pangs being forced back by pure adrenalin.
He stopped in front of the door to the new room and stared at it. Now, if he was very careful and extremely fortunate, he could hide from room to room, inching his way downstairs and hopefully out an unguarded window. It could work. It had to work. Quatre rubbed his hands together and prepared to open the door.
**********Heero had been in command of his little cabal of spies long enough to have a pretty optimistic view of the force he was trying to create. He envisioned an elite group with the skills, strength, and ingenuity to outwit any enemy they came across, all in the name of the greater good. In a relatively short space of time, his dream team had been reduced to three boys who weren't getting enough sleep, and that was distressing. Trowa had finally made the grand announcement that he thought he might know where Quatre was, but Hilde had gone into her room and shut the door, Sally was unreachable, Lucrezia had defected to the other side, and Wufei was incommunicado for some reason. They had all been getting along so well together that Heero couldn't understand how things had fallen apart so quickly. Nevertheless, he and Duo walked quickly alongside Trowa as they got out of a carriage a block from Lady Une's and crept up on the mansion.
"...and I'm sure he knew it was wrong to hide it from you, but Dorothy just wasn't co-operating, and the whole plan to bring back details about Treize's dealings was already ruined," Trowa explained as the trio marched hastily across the dampened pavement. "Dorothy is the key, and she always has been, but neither one of us could get her to surface. I even tried calling the house and pretending that she'd won prize money by being the 1000th customer at some dress shop I made up, and even that couldn't get her to the phone. She's hiding something big, and it has to be Quatre."
"How do you propose we get inside to check?" asked Heero.
"I haven't figured that out yet, but we can at least scope the place out and--"
"Guys..." Duo had stopped walking only a moment before and was frozen solid where he stood. He was looking all the way down the road, far past the front gate of Lady Une's, where another carriage had stopped and was letting off several passengers. Six figures exited from the vehicle, dressed in dark clothes with their heads partially covered. The last of the six was the tallest, an imposing woman with flowing dark brown hair who glanced all around and gathered the other girls into a tight knot like a mother hen guarding her chicks. Duo found something very familiar about the bunch, and as soon as Heero and Trowa stopped long enough to have a look as well, they saw it too.
Trowa blinked. "That looks like..."
"...Yasmeen," Heero finished for him.
Down at the other end of the street, the girls sent their carriage away, and it turned down a sidestreet and stopped after passing the boys' position, where it was apparently waiting for them to finish whatever they came to do. On her second visual sweep of the neighbourhood, Yasmeen spotted the trio, and hushed her sisters, who all looked in the same direction, then looked at each other. Then, the tall woman began walking bravely forward, and with a suspicious glare, Heero did the same. The two miniature tribes met in the middle, just a hundred feet or so away from Lady Une's front gate. They all stared at each other, Yasmeen more mistrustfully than anyone. "Hello..." she ventured.
"Out for a stroll?" Heero asked. The question was made infinitely more sarcastic after the clear observation that the girls were all armed with swords and daggers, hanging at their hips, strapped to their arms and thighs over tight-fitting clothes, and in a few cases, already in their hands. Something was definitely up.
Yasmeen squinted. "Maybe...if you are..."
"...no particular reason why you picked this neighbourhood, and those...'accessories' to stroll with?"
"What exactly are you saying!?" the girl snapped suddenly.
Duo and Trowa flinched and leaned back a little, uncertain of where this abrupt anger was coming from, but Heero just switched tactics. He searched the half-dozen girls for the face he thought, after past observations, would be the most pliable by subversion, found it, and smiled. "Adeela," he purred, picking the bubbly young brunette out of the crowd and walking her away from the others with an overly-friendly arm around her waist. "You know, I've missed you...and your lovely dancing too. We should spend some time getting to know each other better. Would you like to start by telling me what's going on?"
"Don't tell him anything!" Yasmeen shouted to her sister. "We know all about your ways of extracting information, Heero, and it's not going to work!"
Heero frowned. Adeela giggled from flattery and kissed his cheek briefly. "Maybe later," she said before skipping back to her siblings. Shrugging with his eyebrows, the butler followed.
"I'll save you the trouble of propositioning the rest of us," the eldest sister growled. "Come on, girls..." With that, she spun around, satisfied that the unhelpful boys weren't going to follow.
Trowa, however, wasn't about to give up as easily as that. "You're going after him, aren't you? He's in there, isn't he!?" Duo and Heero stood off to the side while Trowa marched right up to the woman, challenging her. He seemed to know what he was doing.
All the girls were looking at Yasmeen, waiting for an indication of whether or not they could be nice to the boys. Yasmeen glared at Trowa for quite some time before perching a hand on the hilt of her sword and leaning towards him. "If you mean, is our brother hidden away in one of these houses, perhape he is...not that I would have any reason to tell you if he were."
"What's that supposed to mean!?"
"I am really very upset at every one of you!" Yasmeen yelled in her delicate accent, pointing an enraged finger at each of the boys in turn. "Quatre has been missing for weeks and all his friends have done is sit on their backsides waiting for him to come home!"
"That's not true," Heero stepped in. "We've been pestering the police on a daily basis, and we've been all over this city on foot, asking--"
"While you've been wasting valuable time, we've actually been doing something useful!" said Kamal, the auburn-haired spiritualist with many beaded braids. "Not only is Quatre in that house," she continued, pointing at Une's mansion, "but we have also determined that he is being held in that room!" She finished by moving her arm to indicate a tiny window near the upper-left-most corner of the house, in the attic.
"Oh yeah?" Duo scoffed, not liking their overconfident attitude one bit. "How do you figure?"
"We've seen him!" said Hessa enthusiastically, flipping the dark cowl back from her platinum blonde head and brushing a few loose strands back under a green headband. "From inside the house on the other side of the street!"
The boys looked across the street at an equally opulent mansion that directly faced Lady Une's. It was not totally inconceivable to imagine that a person standing at an upper floor window of that house could peer into the upper floor window of another house, but still, Heero glanced back at the girls in disbelief. "How did you get in there?"
"We have our ways," Yasmeen muttered through tight lips. "Now, if you'll excuse us..." She and her team turned on their collective heel and began marching on the estate, but Heero ran a head and stopped in front of them.
"What are you doing? Are you just going to walk up and knock on the door?" he asked incredulously.
"Not...exactly," said Yasmeen, "but if you're curious about our methods, I suggest you keep well back. This is my operation, and I'm not having it fouled up by anyone who isn't in the program!"
The girls all brushed past Heero and jogged up to the mansion, bold and carefree as they made their move in broad daylight. The boys gathered in a clump and watched helplessly as Quatre's sisters took up scattered positions around the house, in preparation for the biggest heist that neighbourhood had ever seen. None of them knew what to do, and they stood looking at each other for several seconds until finally, they silently agreed and followed the girls into the fray.
**********Inside Lady Une's mansion, it was anything but a normal day. They were entertaining a visitor, someone who once publicly vowed never to set foot in that particular house after the owner's behaviour at her father's funeral. In the finest parlour, with tea and fancy finger cakes and itty bitty sandwiches with the crusts removed, Lady Une, Treize, and Dorothy were entertaining Relena Peacecraft.
The two resident ladies sat opposite Relena on a lovely pink French revolution sofa, while Treize milled about with a piece of paper in his hand, and the other hand in his pocket. Relena, strangely enough, looked just as calm and confident as all of them put together. Faced with her traitorous former friend, her scheming uncle, and the catty cow who always delighted in making her life a misery, she was oddly serene, sitting up comfortably straight in the matching pink chair and daintily picking away at some petit-fours with a miniscule fork and an embroidered napkin tucked underneath her plate, which was raised to chest level. As a matter of fact, she was quite enjoying the position, for this time it was their turn to squirm and crawl as they tried to persuade her over to their way of thinking.
"See this?" Treize asked, on one of his many broad circuits around Relena's chair, holding up the piece of paper. "It's the short list of candidates to join Cinq, after the undesirables were eliminated. I'm on it. And your brother's on it. That likely means that you have an identical list sitting on a shelf somewhere at home."
Relena's expression didn't change, except for slight and very ladylike approval of the treats they were feeding her. "We do," she said in a sing-song voice.
"And, as I'm sure you've already had a quick glance at it," Treize continued, "there are some pretty impressive names included."
Still looking down at her plate, interested more in the meal than this speech, Relena shrugged. "I wouldn't know."
The Count saw that he wasn't getting through to his niece, and so he pulled up a pink Ottoman, right up to her chair, and sat down on it, leaning into her sphere of personal space but not blocking the other girls' view of her. "Let me try and explain something to you," he declared with purpose. "Alright, your brother put on a clever little show for the assembly, and maybe he impressed one or two people with his charm and wit, but it's going to take a lot more than that to best me for the top position."
"He knows what he's talking about, dear," said Dorothy as she sipped her tea and ran a hand through her hair. She had only found out about Treize's secret motivations recently, and was taking it rather well. "I'd just hate to see you get hurt in all this, so I highly suggest you take his advice."
Relena looked up from her plate, slowly, and with a confident gaze that hadn't gotten much practice travelling around her face. "And what advice would that be?" she asked sweetly, directly at her uncle.
"Tell your brother to back off," said the Count. "It's for your own good, believe me. You may have money, and a bit of influence, and a few friends around Europe...but it's not enough. This isn't some rich man's party game you're trying to nose into, this is a war...and you have no army. Nothing gets done without troops taking orders. You can't keep pulling favours from friendly acquaintances and expect to get ahead of those candidates who have been amassing loyal followers for years."
Though she didn't let it show, Relena knew that he had an unfortunate point. It was just her, Milliardo, and Otto against the likes of the Count, who had so vast a network of spies and assassins that he managed to wipe out most of their extended family before the reading of her father's will. Having no battallion to command did leave her at a significant disadvantage, but it wasn't so large that it could scare her and her brother off into a dark corner. "Suggestion noted," she said.
"Oh, don't be so stubborn!" Lady Une piped up while smoothing out the skirt of her dress. "We're only thinking of what's best for you! One would think you'd be a little more appreci--"
Somewhere in the house, there was the sound of glass breaking. The parlour froze, along with everyone inside it. Scuffling noises followed, and then little screeches of fright emanating from the female staff members going about their business several rooms away. Lady Une rose and quickly went to the parlour door, throwing it open to demand an immediate explanation for all the noise and shouting. Something outside the door made her squeak with fright, however, and she slammed the parlour door shut again, locking it and rushing to stand behind Treize. No sooner did she arrive there than someone tried the door handle, and Treize and Dorothy were both yelling at once for Une to tell them what she saw. Soon enough, however, what she saw kicked the door clean open, and stalked into the room without an invitation.
The intruder was a tall, slender woman with flowing dark brown hair and a steely gaze that passed over each of the faces of the people in the parlour. A split second later, two other girls, seemingly identical, rushed in and went straight to the two persons who were still seated, and grabbed them up out of their chairs. Dorothy and Relena were quickly hauled upright, and each had a dagger placed at their throats, all while the taller girl supervised. She focused her attention on Treize and Lady Une, whom she had previously identified as the primary residents, and closed in on them. "Your treachery against my family ends here," she growled.
Behind her, in the open hallway, three more girls were shouting commands to each other and taking hostages of their own as they fought to secure the house. Dorothy couldn't help whimpering like the fragile flower she told herself to be, but Relena stayed perfectly calm, reasoning that if these women were angry at Treize, then the enemy of their enemy might not get her throat slit right away. Treize was much less sympathetic. "I beg your pardon!" he bellowed. "You have exactly until the end of this sentence to get out of this house before we call the police!"
"Go on!" Yasmeen challenged, unsheathing her long, oriental sword and pointing it squarely in the middle of the man's chest. "Call them! Let them see that you've been holding our brother prisoner!"
More shouting was emitted from beyond the parlour door, and Relena was very much intrigued by the whole affair. The girls were impressive in the speed and efficiency with which they forced their way into the house and secured its owner; it was the sort of thing a small personal army would do, if they were ordered to do it, and Treize did mention that if the Peacecrafts wanted to remain competitive, they would need an army...
"This is pathetic!" Treize laughed. "You have no idea what you're up against in this house! None of you will make it out with your arms and legs attached!"
"Just because you managed to capture one of us, don't imagine we can be toppled as a unit so easily!" the girl shot back, still levelling her sword at the man's heart.
Indeed, the girls had underestimated the state of the mansion's defenses somewhat. While Yasmeen, Nashida, and Asalah were relatively secure in the parlour, Hassa, Kamal and Adeela were running through the rest of the house, looking for a way upstairs. They all had swords in their hands, and waved them wildly about whenever various members of the staff came near, one of whom must certainly have called the authorities by then. Time was short. Hessa led the other two through the maze that was the ground floor and came upon a grand staircase with sweeping banisters, which they ran towards across the slippery marble floor. Hurling themselves up the red velveteen steps, they were halfway to the second floor when the odds against them changed. A balding Englishman in a dark suit was walking briskly down the stairs, having been alerted by the shouting, and he held a small revolver in one hand, pointed at the girls. Hessa stopped suddenly, causing Adeela and Kamal to crash into her from behind, and they were forced to scatter in three directions looking for another way up to Quatre's cell. The butler chose one of the girls at random and followed her, jogging and shouting for her to halt and place her weapons on the floor.
Back at the side of the house, where two of the sisters had made their forced entry, the boys were helping each other through the broken window, avoiding broken glass still sticking out of the frame and especially avoiding the panicky housemaids who were still clinging to each other from fright. The boys looked around quickly, decided they were in some sort of laundry room, and quickly ran out into the hall, listening to the screeches and shouts, trying to figure out where the bulk of the action was taking place. When they got to the front hall, with its massive stone columns and opulent tapestries, Trowa went one way, and Heero and Duo went another. There seemed to be ruckus in all directions, a chaotic morass which couldn't be discerned except by seeing it first hand.
Duo and Heero found themselves crashing through random doors and surprising more than a few jittery servants as they searched for the sisters, knowing that a horde of police constables were likely already on their way. As they ran through a hall which they thought might take them to the back of the house, a more immediate concern than the police surfaced right in front of them, in the form of two burly brutes who stopped, looked the intruders over, and then walked menacingly towards them.
Duo swallowed, half-smiling. "...heh..."
Heero elbowed him. "Nothing you can't handle."
The reminder sank into Duo's brain only moments before the larger of the two thugs took a swing at him, which he expertly deflected without consciously thinking about it. The other thug went after Heero, and since the hallways were so much more spacious and luxuriant than at Bridlewood, there was ample room for all four of them to fight without scuffing the wallpaper. Duo and Heero worked in a perfect tandem, timing their blows so that the thugs couldn't possibly both have eyes to attack with at the same time, and occasionally hitting each other's targets for good measure. In a matter of seconds, it was all over. First one thug and then the other went down from a final blow to the head, out for the count. Duo and Heero grinned and shook hands, sharing the victory for only a moment before moving on in their hasty search.
All the while, the object of the fuss was slowly making his way from one empty room to the next, tip-toeing all the way out of the attic and down one level, until he was hiding in an unidentifiable room with dust covers on all the furnishings. Quatre was so hungry and light-headed that he had already broken into his emergency rations and eaten three cookies, but it was either that or collapse from hunger and start all over when they found him and took him back to his room. As he got closer to the next staircase, however, sounds of the meleé came trickling up from the lower floors, and it became clear to him that something was amiss. At first, he feared for his safety, if perhaps burglars had invaded the house, but then quickly thought that he might turn it into an opportunity to escape unnoticed, if he could just make it down two more flights and out a window or something.
Things were going less and less smoothly downstairs. After rounding the wrong corner at the wrong time, Trowa and Kamal slammed directly into one another and fell, nearly tripping the butler as he chased the auburn-haired girl. Duo and Heero had gotten themselves lost in the cavernous castle and were trying to retrace their steps. Adeela and Hessa had each found a different stairwell pointing upwards, but Adeela fell afoul of the footman and the valet, who picked her up by an arm each and carried her tiny form back down the stairs, her little feet pinwheeling madly a foot or so off the ground. The line of attack was cut down to Hessa alone, and armed with a peculiar jewelled saber with which she was still unfamiliar, she bounded around the upper floors energetically, searching for the magic combination of steps and passages that would take her to the attic.
Only a few rooms away, on the third floor, Quatre was huddled behind the door of a guest bedroom, listening to something coming closer and closer, something that was fearlessly flinging open every door along the way. It was becoming less and less safe to be where he was, but there was nowhere to go. It was a very long drop out the window to the ground below, and the guest room had only one exit. The bed didn't even have a long, draping bedspread on it, the kind that could h ide a person underneath the bed completely. The unknown force was coming closer. If there was any hope of freeing himself, he would have to get past this person and do it right, else he might be locked away under more draconian methods than before. Looking around the sun-lit room, he saw a fireplace, with the usual accessories, a steel poker among them. He rushed over, grabbed the poker, tipping over all the other implements in the process, raised it over his head, and prepared to charge the door just as it was flung open from the other side.
As the two combatants saw a momentarily-threatening flash of colour and movement, they rushed towards each other with their weapons held high, each hollering a makeshift battle cry. A moment before it was too late, there was a second flash, one of mutual recognition, and they froze just in time, dropping their metal implements and staring in disbelief.
"...Hessa!!" Quatre shouted gleefully after a good long gaze. "What are you doing here?"
Her eyes already tearing up, Hessa just rushed forward and gave her brother a giant bear hug. "We've come to get you out of here," she said, and then she stepped back and clasped his hand tightly. "Now, come on, we haven't got much time!" Quatre didn't argue, and the two of them raced hand-in-hand down the stairs, while Hessa shouted a signal to her siblings. Upon hearing the signal in the parlour, Yasmeen started to back up towards the door slowly, but before she could reach the door to give the all-clear to the twins, who still held Dorothy and Relena with razor-sharp blades, three servants entered, Une's snooty butler included, bearing Kamal, Adeela, and Trowa. The butler kept them in check with a pearl-handled revolver, something none of them had anticipated. Yasmeen's face fell as she saw her plans coming apart at the seams. The butler was framed in the doorway, and since he was the only one who could inflict damage at a distance, the sisters' swords were beaten. "Everybody to the centre of the room, please," he ordered.
"Well done, Eldrick," Une praised her faithful one, and she watched very proudly as the twins released their hostages and joined the others in forming a clump inside the circle of the three-piece suite. Dorothy and Relena rubbed their throats as a reflex action and moved away from the rogues, but by now, Relena was desperate to know why Trowa was among them. He was popping up in the most extraordinary places lately. Yasmeen just stared at the floor. According to the plan, Hessa and Quatre were out the back door and probably over the fence by now, but at what cost?
"The authorities will be along shortly, m'lady," Eldrick the butler continued, his Derringer expertly trained on the bunch.
Before Une could praise him again however, something happened that any con artist would have been proud of. Heero crept up behind the butler unnanounced and dropped a book of matches on the floor at the man's feet. Eldrick instinctively looked down at the noise, during which distraction Heero tapped him pleasantly on the shoulder and said, "Oh, excuse me," to make him look up, a second before socking him in the jaw, hard. Eldrick went down like a giant sack of potatoes, and the clump of Quatre's friends all dashed out of the room at once, leaping over the butler's prone form like a flock of gazelles. Duo was waiting for them down the hall and showed them the quickest way out the back door and into the next neighbourhood, and Heero stayed behind for a moment longer, soaking up the stares of shock and confusion.
Relena was the first to recover the power of speech, and her eyes met Heero's in a mutual blaze of surprise and bewilderment. She folded her hands in front of her and huffed out a sigh. "Do you have a hand in everything surreal that happend on God's earth??"
Heero backed up slowly through the parlour doorway, shrugging. "It only looks that way sometimes...really." Without knowing why, he had a rather guilty look as he left out the back garden with the others.
Once he was gone, Relena turned around, cordially picked up her near-empty plate, plucked the last of the little frosted cakes off of it, and handed it to Lady Une, who received it as prim and properly as a good hostess could. "Thank you for the tea, and the advice, but I think I shall have to make up my own mind about things. And now, if you'll excuse me, it's a long train ride back to Southhampton." She showed herself out, stepping daintily over Eldrick and leaving by the front door, just as the police were arriving. A pity for them, there was no longer anyone to arrest.
**********Once he was back where he belonged, Quatre was overwhelmed by the well-wishing that went on just for him. Otto made a small note of the boy's reappearance and vanished into the study without comment, but everyone else was over the moon for the boy's safe return. As nice as this reception was, however, he was disturbed by two things. One was Heero's inability to share in the celebration, since he wasn't to set foot in the manor ever again, it seemed, and the other was the state of his own hair. After most of the party had broken up, he excused himself to the garden shed where a secret bottle lay hidden among the potting soils. It was a mixture several of his family used to disguise themselves from Hassan when the tontine was made official, and with a few drops onto an old towel, vigorously rubbed into the scalp, Quatre quickly transformed completely into his old self, erasing the slightly dark roots that had emerged during his captivity. The process took just long enough for his clothes to soak up the smell of the horses, which would cover up the chemical smell of the secret mixture, at which point he rejoined the household, hoping nobody would notice the change. The first thing he did when he got back inside was seek out Duo.
"Tell me again how Heero lost his job," he said quietly when he finally found him cleaning up after dinner. "I don't think I understood you the first time."
"That's because Otto might've been listening," said Duo. "There's a long story behind it, but I can't tell you right now, 'cause I'm about to go out." Indeed, he was cleaning up in an awful hurry, and made for his coat almost immediately afterwards.
"Oh..." Quatre couldn't imagine where Duo could be going at such a late hour, but it wasn't for him to question. "Well, come find me when you get back, and we'll talk about it over cocoa."
Duo cringed when he was halfway into his coat, and sucked in some air through his clenched teeth. "I, uh...won't be back until the morning. I'm...going to go see Heero tonight."
"Why?" Quatre asked immediately, and when he didn't get an immediate answer, he probed a few inches into Duo's psyche, just far enough to possibly see what he was in such a hurry over. What he felt was warm and pleasant, and he couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it in the past few hours. He blushed and smiled. "Oh. Sure...don't keep him waiting," he added, backing up a few paces.
Duo was naturally confused at the knowing glance Quatre seemed to be giving him, but grinned anyway. "Thanks. Anyway...Trowa knows more about what happened than I did. He'll be glad to give you the blow-by-blow account, I'm sure."
Quatre nodded, and the pair said their goodbyes with promises to carry greetings to those who couldn't be there to receive them first-hand. It was dark out when Duo left, and having been placed on a strict budget by the curmudgeon Otto, he had to walk most of the way to the pub, but hitched unknown lifts on the backs of carriages once in awhile, just enough so as not to get caught. When he got there, the pub was insanely busy, and the customers were talking amongst themselves about the restaurant being mysteriously understaffed. As Duo inched past the door to the kitchen on his way to the stairs, he found out the reason why.
"...not an unreasonable employer, am I? I'm approchable, aren't I? If you needed some time off for personal matters, you could have come and asked me!" Catherine had her six most valuable workers lined up in their cornflower blue dresses, and was apparently admonishing them for taking off for the day and not informing her. All six of Quatre's sisters stood with their hands folded and their eyes lowered, happy to be taking their punishment for a worthy cause. Duo suppressed a snicker as Catherine continued pacing back and forth, slapping the palm of one hand with the knuckles of the other as she lectured. "From now on, no more than two of you can take the same day off, and then only with a week's notice so I can find temporary help, got that?"
"Yes, Miss," the six answered solemnly. Duo's snicker surfaced a bit as he passed the kitchen and padded up the stairs.
Just as he reached the top, the doors to the front of the pub burst open, and another familiar voice cut through the din. "Everybody out of the way! Policemen coming through! Back up, give us some room, one side!" It was a snide, self-important voice that could only have belonged to Wufei, and he was apparently being followed closely by two uniformed constables. Duo panicked. They couldn't see him going into Heero's door! He only had moments to think--they were coming up the stairs, all three of them. Duo dashed around in a dither until he spotted a free-standing coat rack at the end of the hall with lots of coats on it. He zipped down past a half-dozen doors and swung the coat rack in front of him, just as Wufei and the policemen rounded the corner at the top of the stairs and headed down to the old wing. "It took you people long enough, I called hours ago!" the Chinese boy whined.
"Cawn't be ev'rywhere at once, sir," one of the policemen said tiredly.
"Fine, fine...just so long as you know, I've been in a great amount of distress...not that either of you care..." Wufei jammed his key angrily into the lock, swung open his door, and led the men inside, where he was met with his second terrible shock of the day.
The constables looked around the room, looked at each other, and sighed. "And which collection of swords was it that you had nicked, sir?" the second one said in an arrogant voice.
Wufei stared in disbelief. His entire collection of deadly weaponry, down to the very last dagger, had been returned. They were in exactly the same racks on the walls as they had been when he left to go shopping early that morning. He shook his head slowly. "This...this has to be a mistake!"
"I'd call it wasting police time, sir," the first one corrected.
"But they were gone a few hours ago! Every last one of them was gone, I swear it!!"
Again, the constables looked at each other and rolled their eyes. "Well, sir...maybe someone's taken 'em out for a spring clean wi'out tellin' ya." With that, the policemen turned and left, and it was a miracle they didn't charge Wufei for filing a false claim of theft. Wufei, for his part, could only stand paralysed in the middle of his room with both hands clamped over his ears and his eyes bulging, shaking his head and telling himself over and over that he wasn't going mad. At the other end of the hall, behind the coat rack, Duo took the approximate number of swords and knives in Wufei's arsenal, added to it six desperate sisters, came up with a hilarious number and slipped into Heero's room to tell him all about it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Next, in Episode Seventy-Nine: Relena has a brainstorm about her brother's requirements to join Cinq, and looks for the appropriate staff members to fill some key positions.
*yeek* Sorry for the delay, weather and all that. =^_^;= I'll keep this short, because it's my night to do dishes. Next episode will be on April 17th, so mark those calendars!