Foreword: =^_^= *sniffle* You love me! You really love me! *bawls* I've only just noticed, at the eleventh hour, that my 20GB quota was just used up. How sweet! (I get sentimental over weird things.) But it means I haven't lost all my readers, which was something I was really, truly scared about. It's been two months, after all...my personal life never should have intruded on the story, but it did, and now I've shoved it back to where it ought to be, and things are looking up, sorta. Thanks, everybody, for the kind support. =) Love ya.
Warning: Violence, substance abuse, dangerous behaviour that should NOT be imitated.
Disclaimer: These characters are used and abused without permission. But they enjoy it. =^_~=
Note: Of course, the train tunnel is fictional, as are the villages, the specific tracks, and the signal boxes, although those things weren't at all uncommon at the time. =^_~=
~~~~~~~~~~Episode Ninety: The Tragic Downfall of Heero Yuy
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." ~Sir Winston ChurchillAugust 16th, 1903
Without any other place to go, Heero was cast out into the streets. The difficult part about that was that he had resolved not to abuse his powers of persuasion, not for anything. Once the roving agents chased him away from the office, he was without food, without lodging, and utterly alone, unwilling to risk even the smallest amount of human contact for fear that the temptation to wheedle meat or drink out of them would be too great. He took it as a personal challenge, and if it meant that he went hungry for a short while, so it would be. Unfortunately, the agents tailing him weren't likely to be satisfied with waiting a short while to catch him--if the chase continued more than a few days longer, he thought, there was no guarantee that he would be able to elude them on an empty stomach.
Sneaking back into the neighbourhood surrounding the newspaper office the next evening, he dug a copy of the late edition out of the trash bin on a street corner, scurrying away into an alley to read it in peace. He turned immediately to the agony column and found a message from Duo, obviously edited by someone else along with all the other articles and advertisements. The chef was asking for a sign, in their coded language, that Heero was alright, but as he slumped against the brick wall and hung his head, he realized there was no way to answer. There was no telegraph office or hotel with a telephone in it that didn't have a small, scattered swarm of agents milling around, trying to force him into daylight. Even showing his face anywhere near the manor was out of the question, so not only was there no way to reassure Duo that he wasn't lying in the gutter somewhere, it was also impossible to co-ordinate his team for the upcoming dual feat of Count Khushrenada and Milliardo Peacecraft. Heero soon began to see himself as a liability, dragging his friends down towards ultimate defeat.
The next day, he was slightly more upbeat, having gotten a full night's sleep under some dear old lady's front porch, behind the trellis, to which she was none the wiser. It was dark, damp and chilly, and Heero was sure there were more than a few dead rats to be found, but it was quiet and relatively safe, which was good enough. When he emerged and sought out another copy of his newspaper, there was a pleasant surprise. Another message from Duo, but this one had a much different tone to it:
I hid my cheese behind
a loose brick in our station.
If you find it, chow down!
That sounded fascinating. Heero paced in the alley for a moment or two, thinking about the verbal breadcrumb trail, and concluded that 'our station' must have meant Marlborough Road, where he led Duo on a merry chase of clues and puzzles, where they hid, where they kissed, and where an exciting new chapter in their friendship began. There was already a detailed map of London inside his head, so he hastened to the station, dodging agents along the way. It appeared just as it did the last time he was there, with double train tracks running between two broken-down platforms and disappearing down tunnels in either direction, canopied by hulking brick arches. When the very next train pulled up to exchange a load of passengers, he used the distraction to slip past the civillian guards and hop the fence that kept people from falling down into the railway ditch. From there, he ducked down below the level of the passenger car windows and jogged deeper into the tunnel, to the point where their game of follow-the-leader ended the first time.
There were no lights in the tunnel, so he picked his way over to a random wall and began feeling up and down the slightly curved brick surface. He was at it for less than five minutes before he found a brick that protruded about half an inch, and wiggled in its concrete socket. Some sharp chisel marks surrounded it, where someone with a history of chipping at stones had literally carved a niche into the wall and replaced the broken brick with one of similar size and shape, but definitely of a different lot. A bit of brick rubble at Heero's feet confirmed it. This was what he was looking for.
He pried the brick away. Behind it was a tiny leather pouch that jingled when picked up, and a very pleasant jingle it was indeed! He ran back out of the tunnel, back up on the platform and out of the station before any of the railway police could catch him amidst the mid-day crowd. As soon as he was safely away, he stopped to look inside the pouch, finding a few meagre coins and a note from Duo. Heero smiled faintly as he read the note, saving Duo's comforting words for himself alone. Duo of all people knew exactly what he was going through, scrounging for food and shelter, and the suggestion that he could tell Catherine to leave a few fresh-baked pies on the windowsill of the pub actually made Heero laugh briefly. For the next several days, this was how Duo looked after his friend at a distance, providing him with as much money as he was able so that he wouldn't go hungry. It wasn't enough for a hotel room, or even a few strong drinks, but at least upon sneaking into the train tunnel and finding the brick moved day after day, Duo had the comfort of knowing that Heero wouldn't starve.
**********Dawn on the day of reckoning came quietly, heralded by lavender-orange hues painted across the sky and the thankful chirping of sparrows rising from their roosts. Odd in more ways than could be easily counted, several independant groups were turning their attention to the region of Shropshire that morning, all with a slightly different goal in mind. Over breakfast, they all finalized their plans and made their travel arrangements, finely polishing every last detail to make sure that absolutely nothing could go wrong...all of them, except the batch at Bridlewood.
Duo was quite good at looking after Heero's needs, and at the one-way communication that went with it, but his leadership skills were somewhat lacking. As the specified day approached, the team sank into a continually deepening dither, paralyzed without their trusted general. They only had a vague idea of what needed to be done, and no clue whatsoever about how to do it. The trickled-down telegram told the world that Treize would be attempting to crash two trains together in a tunnel somewhere west of Birmingham, and that Milliardo would be doing something to hijack the feat for himself, but that was all the information they had. Several times Quatre went to his sisters, prying and jimmying with words in case they let something slip, but they weren't budging. After discovering that Hessa leaked the information in the first place, they had lectured her soundly about the importance of keeping their dealings a secret, even from other members of the family, so she wasn't about to divulge details like that ever again, and nor would the others.
Trying to help, Trowa dug out a book of maps from the attic, and they found a thorough diagram of the pertinent area with all the railroad tracks marked. Sally had dragged Wufei in at Duo's request, and the six of them all stood around a temporary table set up in the cold storage, studying the map by the light of a gas lantern hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Before they could really get started, though, Trowa had to teach those less familiar with cartography how to actually read the document. Duo wasn't doing so well. "Okay...waitaminute...so, the north side of the map always goes up?" he asked innocently.
Trowa tried not to sigh too loudly. "I really wouldn't recommend doing it any other way."
"I can't see the name of the tunnel anywhere," Quatre complained softly. "Are you sure it's in this county?"
"I double-checked with the station master at Euston," affirmed Trowa. "It's got to be there."
"Let's look at this again step-by-step," Sally suggested in a very adult voice, running over the details of the telegram in her head. "Train 'A' leaves Birmingham first, and heads for the tunnel..." She followed a cross-hatched line away from the dot representing the named town, but stopped after awhile. "...there is no tunnel."
"Give me that," Wufei snapped, and he grabbed the book away, turning it upright toward himself. "Now, train 'B' leaves Wales bound for Shrewsbury, but Treize plans to divert it..."
He began drawing another imaginary line away from the border, with all eyes following it, and Duo took over at what appeared to be the point where Sally's line ended. "...through the tunnel of mystery, and crash it into train 'A', demolishing the tunnel and everything in it," the chef finished.
Trowa shook his head in frustration and straightened up, slapping the map with the back of his hand. "...there isn't a railway on this map that fits that description."
"Aw, no, there has to be!" whined Hilde as she pushed her way closer. She saw a wiggly line with some writing over it that was unintelligible to her, and pointed to it. "What's this line right here?"
Again, Trowa almost sighed. "That's the Shropshire Union Canal."
Hilde blinked. "...shut up!" she blurted weakly before withdrawing a pace or two.
On the other side of the table, Sally was standing away slightly, with her arms folded across the front of her fern green dress, tapping a finger against her chin. "Something's not right here. When was this book printed?" Without waiting for an answer, she marked the current page with one hand, flipped to the front inside cover with the other, read the date, and glared squintily up at Trowa with laughing disapproval. "1850?"
The map retriever deflated. "Hey, all the people responsible for stocking the manor's library are long dead. Take it up with them."
Wufei was growing impatient, and swatted the map book back to its original open page. "Someone has to make a decision. We're running out of time."
"Who's second-in-command?" asked Sally.
"We don't have one," Hilde admitted, slowly looking up at Duo. "At least...not officially..."
Duo swallowed. What he feared most was happening. Without Heero's strength, his strategic savvy, just the way he commanded respect from people, the team had splintered, and no one could really take his place. Strangely, and at the same time predictably, most of them began looking towards Duo to fill the gap, as the one who knew Heero best. They were all staring at him now, and the tips of his ears were turning red, he could feel it. Swallowing a second time, he stood up as straight as he could, and then pointed down at the map. "Two different enemy teams are going to commandeer a signal box each, on either end of whatever track goes through the tunnel...so we'll send two teams to intercept them. Two to a team, and two of us stay here." He looked around at the five faces in front of him, and made a difficult decision in record time. "Tro and me will be one team, Sal and Wu will be the other."
Quatre was immediately offended, and it showed on his face. "Why am I staying behind!? My sisters could be involved in this! Nobody knows them better than I do!"
"And nobody knows you better than them," Duo pointed out regretfully. "Besides...if we all go and somebody gets hurt, we've got nobody in reserve for the next mission.....and we don't have enough money for six train tickets to Birmingham anyway."
"But I made sure we had enough!" the treasurer erupted, pointing wildly at the door to the hallway. "I've been setting it aside in the old Cadbury's tin in the pantry! What happened to it!?"
Duo blushed and looked away, unwilling to admit that he had been funnelling it to Heero on the sly. Quietly enraged, Quatre turned on his heel and stomped off in a huff. Hilde frowned and went after him, but did not in any way protest her backup position; she and others recognized it as a purely strategic move, nothing to be overly upset about. As the two second-stringers vanished from view, guilt trickled down Duo's face, and Sally took pity by slinging an arm around his shoulders and giving him a comforting shake. "You did the right thing. You're doing fine."
"No, I'm not, I'm crashing and burning," Duo moaned, leaning into her side for comfort. This stinks. I'm no good at any of this. I wish Heero was here right now... "I wish..."
"He'll be there. And he'll be proud of you for taking charge."
I hope you're right... He looked up at Sally with pitiful eyes, then pulled away from her, realizing that snuggling up to a warm, squishy mother figure wasn't the best way to start his career as a big, strapping leader figure. "We'd better go." Duo rounded up his meagre team and led them away from Bridlewood, stopping briefly at Sally's townhouse so she could change into something a litte more adventurous in tailored trousers. They could only hope that Heero would be somewhere to meet them at some time, and that he would have some sort of a plan in mind.
**********The last few days had been the most difficult Heero had faced in a long time. For some reason, in the absence of salicylic acid, with which he had been saturating himself for months trying to block out his eye-shredding headaches, those same headaches returned with a terrifying new ferocity never experienced before. During what could loosely be called the 'good' times, all he felt was the searing agony of a flaming-hot jagged sword impaling his skull and twisting at will, and during the 'bad' times, it was much worse. It got to be so that he no longer knew what date it was by the calendar, nor could he have even opened his eyes long enough to look at one. Ironically enough, he ended up spralwed in the corner of an alley behind the Covent Garden theatre, where Duo had once lived in a packing case during his less prideful moments. He became unable to travel to Malrborough Road to collect whatever money Duo had set aside for him, but food was out of the question anyway, as the headaches began bring with them the most terrible stomach upset. The early morning hours of the sixteenth were his lowest point yet, as he laid inert on a filthy carpet of brick, crippled by punishing pain along with the dregs of society in that forbidding alley and struggling to understand his predicament.
Why is this happening to me!? Eyes clenched, teeth gritted behind his closed-lipped grimace, he let a hand drift up to his face, dancing numbly across the sweaty terrain as if checking to see if he was still there. There's someone out there...I don't know who it is, but I can hear them... As he dared to lift his head off the ground and squint at those with whom he shared the alley, he saw shadows of the poor and depressed, drunkards and thieves, the lot of them, but he was losing his ability to tell which were the homeless and which were the agents. Why don't they just come and take me!? ...take me home...where there's injections for the pain...open my veins right now, I don't care...
It was suffering unlike any other. It made him slip in thinking that 'home' was with Jeffrhyss, and if Duo had been there inside his head, he would have smacked him for it. Ordinary pain, he could handle, but this required extraodinary help if he was ever to move from that spot, and just when he thought his head would split completely open, spewing forth blinding white flames that would consume everyone and everything in a five-block radius, a voice spoke to him. From inside his head. And it sounded a bit like Duo.
Get up.
Heero looked down at the soothing cool brown of the bricks beneath him, through a hazy aura that threatened to completely choke off the rest of his vision. A ghost was whispering in his ear, and he didn't for a minute believe it was real.
I said...get...up.
He held his breath. That seemed more than a mere hallucination. Somewhat fearful, Heero struggled to his feet, crashing lightly into the nearest wall as his sense of equilibrium fought to keep up with his laboured movements. As his pulse began to pound with the effort, his head throbbed in perfect time, adding another bobbing wave of agony that made him wobble, but he tried to listen for the voice one more time.
Now walk.
Despite the pain, he was compelled to obey, and gradually the way became clearer. Barely able to keep his balance, he somehow struggled out of the alley to look for enemy threats before venturing further, and he escaped into the depths of the city unmolested.
**********When one looked at a recent and accurate map of Shropshire, one could pick out three points of interest which formed a sloppy triangle of concern. The westernmost point, well back from the border of Wales but not close enough to Birmingham to be heavily populated, was the site of a signal box targeted by Treize. It was here that he planned to misdirect a cargo train through the tunnel and crash it into an oncoming passenger train, and he felt more than confident that he could do it, with the aid of his foreign-born cronies. At the easternmost point, on the far side of that tunnel, was a second signalbox, where Milliardo planned to divert the passenger train northward and create a wreck with a fourth train, also loaded with cargo, which would be coming down from the Liverpool area later that day. At the north point of the triangle was a third signalbox, which would also have to be taken over, and a stretch of track where the passenger train would have to be stopped while Milliardo waited for the oncoming bullet from the north to smash into it. It was perhaps the most intricate and indelicate of plans, when glued together into one big glob, but it was the best that everyone could muster at the time.
Treize, happily confident that his men would take care of the details in a timely manner, set up a fancy wrought iron table and two chairs on the top of a hill which overlooked a wide stream, beyond which lay the hill with the tunnel cut through it. There was a bright blue sky overhead with only a few clouds, a splendid change from the on-again, off-again rain so typical of English summers, making it the perfect time to entertain his guest, a nondescript man in a gray suit sent by the Cinq Association to observe the feat. The two men sat at the table, draped in a white lace cloth and decorated with a silver tea set, a single red rose in a small vase, and a plate of assorted biscuits, just a small snack to nibble while they waited for the big show.
"Lovely day for it," Treize remarked offhandedly, picking up a plate of pastires and holding it out to his right. "Jam tart?"
The nondescript man, dark-haired and clean-shaven with an American accent, contemplated the plate of treats and eventually took one. "It won't count towards your final score of course."
Treize smirked. "Of course." Then he poured two cups of tea, making the milk and sugar available to his guest, and sat back in his chair, lounging like a panther dreaming of his next big pounce. "Should I indeed capture the vacant chair, I greatly look forward to working with you again."
The American smirked back, adding to his clipboard of notes. "Compliments don't count either, sporty."
Bested at the contest of wills, if only temporarily, Treize retreated, swinging one leg over the other and sipping his own tea as he ran an eye over the peaceful, green countryside. The two men were facing roughly north-east, and the occasional cloud passed in front of the sun to shield their eyes as they waited. In a little while, a passenger train from the right and a cargo train from the left would be colliding in front of them, sending fire, smoke and debris shooting out the sides of the tunnel before, if luck would have it, the tunnel collapsed completely. Then the American judge would take some shots of the aftermath with his Brownie camera, and then there would be wine spritzers for everyone! "How soon afterwards will you be making your final report?"
Tipping his straw hat up slightly, the judge flipped an arm over the back of the chair and scratched his neck with his pencil. "Well, that depends. Technically, the existing four members are supposed to be present and accounted for, but if the Chairman thinks we can make do with Lord Byron, then--" He trailed off suddenly, as if he didn't mean to run off at the mouth like that.
"Excuse me," Treize jutted in, leaning over to him. "...Lord Whom?"
The judge sighed at himself, then shrugged, thinking there wasn't much harm in elaborating. "Lord Byron. He's taken over from Lord Jeffrhyss while he's on extended leave. Most of us figured the old dog needed a holiday, but this is getting ridiculous." He skewed his hat to the side, almost hiding from the Count. "I shouldn't have said that much. Just forget about it, will 'ya? If you're that confident that you'll be joining up, you'll hear all the latest gossip soon enough anyway."
Treize was naturally intrigued. "...indeed," he purred through a slight smile. Something was the matter with Lord Jeffrhyss. Something juicy.
The Count looked at his pocket watch, and the time was just about right for phase one to be carried out. At that very moment, three of his goons were approaching the west signal box, which was miles away and too far to be seen from Treize's picnic area. The goons climbed up the wooden steps to the gray-painted apartment on stilts where the signalman lived and worked, broke down the door, tied the poor fellow up and tossed him in his own wardrobe, all without much difficulty. It was the middle of the country, with the signal box sitting on the outermost edge of a tiny village, and no one had any clue as to what had transpired. The instruments of evil had lodged themselves quite firmly into the Shropshire railway system, and were about to bring a little extra noise to the quiet countryside.
**********It probably wasn't a good sign that a few stiff drinks cured Heero of his headache. As he gulped down the last of his wicked whiskey shots, purchased with the money earned in desperation by pawning his gun holster of genuine hand-worked Italian leather, he realized he was no longer the picture of the average immigrant worker who could slip under society's radar. His programming had failed him in the end. Less than three years out of the nest, and he was already going to pieces. How any agent made it past the age of twenty-one was a mystery.
What did Giorgenson say to Duo? A sixty percent suicide rate?
He held up his empty glass and looked at his surroundings through it, a seedy, underground gin joint where about a dozen other lost souls had come to slowly expire. It was unclear to him whether it was more cowardly to kill oneself slowly or quickly, or whether it even mattered. If I didn't have Duo...I'd be gone already, he decided. Perhaps he would be mourned for a short while by a few friendly acquaintances, and certainly cursed by his enemies, but that would be all. Momentarily blinded to the impact he'd had on everyone around him, he concluded that no pleasant memory of him, however small, would remain. The alcohol brought with it a dull, aching depression in exchange for getting rid of the more immediate, piercing pain.
Once he was swimming in chemicals, however, his head began to clear of both the pain-induced haze and the booze-induced self-pity, and he recalled smattering of a plan to disrupt the feat of trains about to be carried out in the west, but the cost of medicating himself to that point was too high when compared to the price of a train ticket. He was short of cash once again, and since he had already sacrificed his holster, letting his six-shooter be content to rest in the waistband of his trousers at the back, it didn't seem like such a big deal to pawn his pocketwatch next. The wafer of poison had long since been removed and given to Sally for proper disposal; if someone set it to twelve noon and pulled out the knob, they would be flattened by knockout gas, but they would soon recover with no real harm done. It was the only thing he could reasonably part with, so he did.
The money he obtained in exchange for the watch was more than enough to get him to Shropshire, but he didn't want to drink away the remainder. The philosophical questions about the way he had always treated people were still gnawing at him, and he had been pondering, on and off between headaches, what to do about it. Those thoughts led him to a little gift shop not too far from the pawnbroker's, and he was mysteriously drawn inside to look at the trinkets for sale. On his arrival, a young saleslady with curly ash brown hair and a light Irish accent approached him with a genial smile. "Can I help you, sir?" she asked.
Heero froze for a moment or two. "...yes. No. I..." An obvious demonstration of his total cluelessness followed, as he still hadn't decided himself. "There's something I need to say to someone, but..."
"You don't know how?" the girl finished for him, still smiling. "I can help you."
She led him deeper into the cheery little shop, its shelves packed full with baubles of every description. There were music boxes, ceramic figurines, children's soft toys, picture frames, small paintings of flowers and cottages, decorative candles, and anything else that might have made a nice present for someone special. "Is it a friend you're wantin' to speak to?"
A friend? Heero couldn't think of this person as a friend, nor did he believe the feeling would be returned even if he did. There were too many scars that couldn't be covered up, too many words and actions that could never be taken back...and yet, there was perhaps a peculiar kinship, risen out of a mutual sense of being battered and used in the name of competition. In that sense, the person was a friend. Heero gradually nodded with his hands in his pockets. "...after a fashion."
"A lady friend?" the sales girl added with a mischievous grin.
Another uncomfortable question. Heero avoided it deftly, nodding again. "We'll go with that."
"I've got something new that's just come in." The girl's eyes danced knowingly, and she led her customer over to a copper and glass shelf near the back of the store, where the most special merchandise was kept close to the cash register. On the eye-high shelf, the second from the top, were some very strange creatures, animals made out of felt with tiny hand-sewn waistcoats and britches of satin, velvet, and other fine materials. Heero didn't know what they were at first, but thinking back to his zoology classes, a spark ignited behind his eyes as he identified the animals as bears. Odd bears they were, too, for they sat straight up on their bottoms with their limbs sticking out unnaturally, and some even had whimsical smiles stiched onto their faces underneath their button eyes and leather noses. The girl picked a handsome one up off the shelf and held it out to him. "Isn't that precious? And there's a little card on a string attached to each one with a little story on it. You see, the President of the United States was out bear huntin' last year, some sort of publicity stunt to curry votes, you know how they do...and his guides found him an easy target, this wee little baby bear, but he refused to shoot it on humanitarian grounds. These bears have been selling as fast as they can make 'em in America, so I wrote my pen friend and had a carton shipped out to me as soon as one was available. It makes a lovely gift for any occasion."
She let him hold the bear, this one having glass eyes and a black pinstriped suit, much like his own. The name 'Teddy' was on all of the little storycards, after Theodore Roosevelt, the president in question. Not having been on the market for a gift for very long, Heero may not have fully appreciated how special the bear was compared to the other treasures for sale, but rather than spend all day looking for something else, he agreed on a price and paid the girl. It was meant as a mere token anyway, not the crown jewels. "Can you package and post it for me as well?" he inquired.
"Of course!" she replied, and she quickly handed him an embossed floral card and a pen. "Will you be after fillin' out this notecard?"
"Notecard?"
"With the message you want to give to your lady friend!"
Only afterwards did it seem obvious. Heero picked up the pen, but couldn't think of what to write for what seemed like ages, while the sales girl found an appropriate-sized box and some stuffing to pack the bear in. What he wanted to say wasn't easy, in fact the girl had to wait awhile for him to finish, seal the notecard in the tiny envelope provided and write the recipient's name on the front before she could pack it into the box, squarely in the centre of the bear's chest. He knew where the package needed to go, but got stuck on the postcode, and had to make one up, hoping His Majesty's Postal Service could figure out the rest by themselves. After handing over a little extra money to cover the postage, Heero had just enough to get himself to the passenger train targeted by Treize, not one penny more. As he walked away from the gift shop, however, he had a strange sense that money wouldn't be a problem soon, and he didn't know why.
**********Unbeknownst to him, Treize's plan was under attack on two different fronts. He failed to consider the security of the eastern signal box, or even the existence of the northern one, and those were two inexcusable omissions. For example, a pair of intruders who had spent the night in another tiny village much like the first were creeping out of the town toward the railroad tracks. They were both girls, dressed very oddly in colourful silks and diaphanous shawls with jingling gold tokens sewn onto their hems and other edges. They both had dark hair and were about the same height, in fact they might have even been related in some way.
The younger and cuter of the two had tiny cymbals on her fingers, and the older one with strips of bright fabric braided into her hair carried a strange, bulbous musical instrument in one hand, and a small cage with a bird in the other. As soon as the maidens were a discreet distance away from the village, where few or none could see them, the older one set the cage down, put the instrument to her lips, and began to play an exotic, warbling tune in the direction of the signal box. The other girl smiled as she adjusted her crimson dress to accentuate her bare midrift, and started dancing, setting the trap.
Obviously, the sudden ruckus down below drew the attention of the lonely signalman, enough for him to leave his post and peek out the window. The balding, bespectacled man nearly fell over at the sight of a scantily-clad, well-endowed woman flaunting herself out in the open, regardless of the fact that there really wasn't anyone around to see it but him. Rather than being excited, however, he was shocked in a most mortified way, but the girls got the result they wanted in any case. The signalman came tearing down the wooden steps of his perch armed with a blanket to cover the poor, ignorant girl up, but as he fearfully approached her, she backed away teasingly, drawing him away from the musical girl and exposing his back to her. A moment later, it was all over. The older girl whacked the signalman hard at the back of the head with a kind of pocket-sized club, and they immediately tied him, gagged him, and threw him in the bushes. Then they sped up the stairs, took control of the railway signals, and released the caged bird they carried with them. It knew exactly which way to fly, and disappeared within seconds.
At the eastern signal box, a similar scene was taking place. A brunette was helping a blonde down the road of a third tiny village, and the blonde was crying, squealing, and just generally complaining bitterly over a twisted ankle. As before, the signalman poked his head outside, saw the damsels in distress, and rushed down to help, and also as before, he went down in a cloud of his own dust when the girls turned on the Samaritan, clubbing him in the head and lashing his hands and feet together. The eastern railway signals were theirs, and upon taking control, they released a bird from a cage, who flew off in a flurry of feathers.
All this action came together outside Wolverhampton, where Camp Peacecraft was holed up in a guest house on the outermost edge of the borough. Lucrezia, torn between wanting to support her man and wanting as little to do with his cruel games, contributed by waiting at the window of their second-floor suite for the carrier pigeons, each trained for days in advance to fly from a different signal box to that exact window when Quatre's sisters had done the first of their duties. First one arrived, and then the other, each being ushered into new cages once a small metal vial containing a short message had been removed from each of their left legs. "Everyone's in position," Lucrezia reported blandly as she closed the cage doors and turned away. "Only a matter of time now..."
The sad lilt in her voice did all it could to extend the argument that had been going on for days and days, but Milliardo was unmoved. "Your objections have already been noted," said he.
Lucrezia scowled. "Don't go on at me about it. I'm here, aren't I? I'm still supporting you, even while you're about to make a tragic mistake that's going to cost a lot of people their lives..."
"They were already forfeit when Uncle Treize drew up his plan. We're just using their deaths in our favour." Even as the words came out, Milliardo heard them through Lucrezia's ears, and was not without compassion, however slight. His voice softened, and he crept up behind her, placing both hands on her shoulders in a somewhat comforting way. "It sounds a lot worse than it actually is." Lucrezia chose not to respond, taking it all as a near-worthless token of false sensitivity, and they moved apart again as the temperature dropped another six degrees.
If either one had been praying for a distraction, it must have worked, for there was an unexpected knock at the door. Not very trusting of anyone at the moment, Milliardo went first to the empty corner of the room between the bureau and the dressing table, and grabbed his quarterstaff, the tall wooden pole he had been practicing with as his new favoured weapon. He had hoped that Lucrezia might have given him a few points for carrying a non-lethal instrument, but at this point she wasn't about to be swayed. His staff at the ready, he went to the door, opened it an inch and a half, prepared to fling it completely open and deliver a sharp blow to the solar plexus of any potential enemy, and peered out at none other than his own sister. He knit his brows and stood back, letting the door swing clear.
Relena did not look pleased, standing there with her arms folded across a plain white blouse. She seemed to have gone to a lot of trouble to make herself ready for the mission, finding herself fawn trousers and riding boots to make herself more mobile, and tying her hair back with a black velvet ribbon to clear her vision, and was understandably peeved that her brother had taken off that morning without inviting her to join him on what would be their mose important outing to date. "You left without telling me! I've been scrambling all morning to get here on time! Why didn't you wake me?"
Milliardo glared at her for awhile, then tilted his head towards Lucrezia. "Wait for me downstairs," he instructed, and after she grudgingly left them alone, he led his sister into the rented room.
Just the way in which her brother folded his arms and turned to the wall spoke immensely about how much involvement he wanted her to have. Once Relena understood that, her glare went cold. "You didn't want me here. You don't think I'm capable."
As he lectured, Milliardo slowly paced around the room, inching towards the door while Relena stood in the middle and watched. "I don't think you should waste your energy where it is most definitely not needed. There's nothing for you to do, because it's all been done...and apart from that...I also didn't want you getting hurt."
"With what's lying ahead of us, you can't possibly protect me forever, it can't be done. Someday I'm going to have to really face what I've committed myself to, and until I do, I don't know if I can trust myself to make decisions in the world's best interest, and isn't that what this is all about?"
No one had ever given the man credit for how good an actor he was, and he made a great play of lookind sorrowed and remorseful as he looked between his sister and the door. Gradually, he moved to the doorway and turned around, as if considering whether to recind his previous order and find a place for Relena in the mission. He glanced over at the window briefly. "Is Lucrezia waiting downstairs like I asked her to?"
Foolishly, Relena turned to the window to glance down and check. Milliardo grabbed the door handle, pulled it shut with a slam, and slipped the key into the lock a twinkling before Relena was beating angrily on the other side. All the shouting in the world couldn't keep him from turning the key and taking it with him, trapping her inside with her white-hot rage. The poor girl beat on the door and hollered until her voice gave out and her hands were red with fresh welts, but Milliardo was long gone. He picked up Lucrezia and headed away from the boarding house, not even looking up to the window to give her the satisfaction of yelling at him through the glass.
Relena flopped on the double bed and sank her head into her hands with a deep sigh. He's never going to let me grow up... Then after she spent a few minutes feeling sorry for herself, she got up and surveyed her prison for weak points, as she imagined a certain someone with dark hair and sharp wits she used to know might have done in that situation. Her attention was drawn to the window, and she unlatched it to look outside. To the immediate right, bolted against the brown brick wall, was a drainpipe, and that was more than good enough. She sat up on the windowsill, angled herself out, and actually shimmied down the drainpipe in a most unladylike fashion, drawing curious stares from passers-by which she firmly ignored. Then she was off like a shot, following her turncoat sibling to the train station, to claim her fair share of the action.
**********With the last of their savings plundered from the Cadbury's cookie tin, Duo, Trowa, Sally and Wufei all hopped a westbound train and ended up at Dudley, still unsure of what their final destination was. They needed an up-to-date map, so Sally and Trowa provided some distraction for the station master while Duo snuck into his office and 'borrowed' some maps, while Wufei kept lookout. Afterwards, Sally was the first to notice that Wufei was carrying a sword at his side, an oddly outlandish thing to have in a railway station. She approached him, asking if he really needed such a thing for a mission that was meant to be non-lethal, and he scowled back at her, insisting that of course he needed it, don't be stupid. Everyone spoke to him a bit less for the rest of their time together, but other than that, it was a swift and painless operation which netted them exactly what they needed, a clear picture of Shropshire, railway tunnels included. As they were holed up under a stairwell studying the new charts, they happily found the tunnel that was named in Treize's declaration of intent, giving them a real direction at last.
"These are the two signal boxes we want," Duo began, pointing to a pair of marks on either side of the underground passage. "If this one is Treize's, and it must be if he's re-routing the cargo train, he'll have it jam packed with hired goons."
"So this one must have been taken by the Peacecrafts," Wufei continued, tapping the easternmost of the two dots.
Trowa looked down at the floor briefly. "And Quat's sisters."
It was an uncomfortable topic, but the girls knew what they were getting into as much as anyone else. "You two take that one, gently," Duo said to the other team. "We'll take the goons. If anyone sees Heero along the way, make sure he knows who's doing what. The best thing we can do for him is take care of as much of the background work as possible. He's had plenty of time to come up with a plan of his own, and he can't be in two places at once, so I think he'll be expecting us to set the pace. Everyone ready?"
"Ready," chimed the others.
"Okay, then...uh..." There was a momentary lapse in leadership while Duo tried to think of something pointed and energizing to say, to spur his troops on to victory. All he could manage was to raise one fist weakly into the air and shout, "Mush, huskies!"
Three boys moved, but Sally stayed put. "Hold up," she ordered, and they ground to a halt, turning around with a collective sigh.
"Whatsa matter?" asked Duo impatiently.
"I just thought of something." She folded her arms sternly. "Take a look at the time listed on the telegram, and then look at the clock, and tell me if you think anything's wrong." The boys all looked at the telegram again, then at the clock above the schedule board out in the foyer of the gothic revival building, then back at Sally with questioning glances. "The only train left that's headed in the direction of the signal boxes is the one that's supposed to crash. We got here too late, and now we have to outrun a train that's already left this station to stop at another one. I'll bet there's not enough money for a private coach to take us the rest of the way, either."
They all looked at Duo with slight accusation, since he was in charge and technically responsible for everything that went wrong. He went red and smirked. "Heh...ideas, anyone?"
Trowa tossed glances all around the station, his eyes eventually landing on a freight car from which several blanketed horses were being unloaded by their handlers. The blankets as well as the handlers' carts were emblazoned with the name of a local stable and stud farm. "I've got one..." He raised an eyebrow and walked toward them; intrigued, the others followed, not yet clued in to what he had in mind.
**********Inside a particular railway station, the crux of the operation, some travellers were waiting on Platform 1 to board a train heading north, unaware that it was marked for destruction in the very near future. Both passenger and freight trains were routed past on any of half a dozen different tracks, some inside the station and some strictly outdoors. From there, cars travelled north to Manchester or Liverpool, west to Wales, or South to Bristol, the seaport to the known world. Having abandoned Relena in the boarding house, Milliardo led Lucrezia to the station, stopping at Platform 2 where they could look across the space of two tracks in a ditch to the other side, and was finally ready to tell her why. "This is what I didn't want her to see," he explained.
"I thought you wanted to shield her from the crash."
"Don't be silly, nobody's going to see that first-hand," he asserted, quite correctly. "This is the real danger to the spirit...seeing the victims beforehand. It's all too likely that none of these people will survive...I wanted to see their faces...to remember each one of them." He could feel Lucrezia giving him another one of her strange looks of disbelief, as it was heating up the back of his neck like the thick fur collar on a heavy overcoat. As he surveyed the platform across the way, he gave the impression of a Roman emperor counting the lands he was about to conquer, standing monolithic in his red army jacket and pure white slacks tucked into tall black boots, his hands clasped behind him in contemplation. "I learned a great deal from the war...the greatest fact of which was that the guilt over extinguishing the enemy is the least of one's worries. The soldiers who went to pieces afterwards were the ones who lost friends and brothers on the battlefield. They couldn't get the thought of the dead mens' faces out of their heads, they were haunted by dreams of their comrades crying out to them for help. The strongest soldiers weren't the ones who could forget the fallen, but who could remember without it killing them. In remembering these people...I will ultimately strengthen myself for future missions."
I must not be one of the strong ones, then, the saddened lady thought, for she couldn't bear to meet the eyes of any of the poor, artless citizens about to meet their doom. She drew a sharp breath and turned aside, only to whirl back around and grab her lover by the arm. "It's not too late to change your mind. You can take the feat away from Treize without harming anyone! Just keep him from diverting it and send it on its way! That's all you need to do!"
Unexpectedly, he wheeled on her with a sudden fierceness and leaned forward menacingly, scaring her back a step. "When I approach the Cinq representative right in front of my uncle and invite him to view what I have accomplished, Treize will finally know that I've beaten him!"
She drew away, squinting at him and lowering her voice. "Is this about Cinq, or about you and your uncle?"
Milliardo shrugged slightly. "If Uncle Treize gets slapped in the face with a few harsh realities, it's just a delightful bonus."
Slowly, Lucrezia shook her head with contempt. "No...I used to think so, but not anymore. You've already let the game consume you, and now it's not enough. You have to turn it into a personal vendetta."
A lot of harsh words had passed between them over the previous weeks, but these were by far the worst. However, Milliardo was not one to make a scene unless he was completely out of control, and he hadn't reached that boiling point yet. He simply turned away, resuming his study of the passengers on the opposite platform. Defiantly, Lucrezia also turned her back in a huff, her cobalt blue dress swirling around her ankles in anger, and stared in the opposite direction at another track in a ditch and Platform 3, which was empty. It was while she was staring at the blank patch of the station that she saw something unexpected.
A slight figure in black was darting from column to column, peeking out at the platinum-haired warrior behind her. Lucrezia squinted as the figure slowly emerged from a pillar of bricks holding up the station canopy to look more closely with curiosity of his own, and realized that it was Heero. Her heart leapt with a mixture of joy and terror. He can stop it, she told herself. Milliardo won't listen to me, and I couldn't bear to fight him more than I already have, but Heero could do more...and do better. She looked carefully over her shoulder to make sure Milliardo wasn't paying attention, and then waved to the boy.
Heero saw her, took a moment out to wonder why she was there at all, since the work was being done at the signal boxes and switch-track's, but waved back in the end. Yes, I'd prefer it if your gentleman friend didn't see me quite yet...
Lucrezia gnawed on a fingernail while she thought about how to communicate with him, looked behind her again, and raised her arms to send some mime-like signals. First she pointed over her shoulder at Milliardo, then at the sign across the way that read 'Platform 1', and then held her bent arms level with the ground with her fists clenched, making the motion of two objects crashing into one another in slow motion. Heero didn't understand until he looked carefully into her eyes and saw that she didn't approve of her brother's plan. How she even guessed that he knew about the plan in the first place was a mystery, but his very presence at the station was evidence enough for her. After processing the information she acted out to him across the railway ditch, he glanced across to the affected platform, made a swift survey of all points in between, nodded to her, and resumed column-hopping toward the north end of the station. What happened next, while Lucrezia kept her eyes firmly glued to his sprightly form, was both fearful and phenominal.
While Heero was focused solely on getting across to Platform 1, someone was tailing him at a distance. It was a plain-looking person with plain-looking clothes, but Lucrezia saw something about him she recognized. Unfortunately, it was buried so far in her memory that she simply couldn't will it to the surface to inspect it more closely, and in the meantime, he was gaining on Heero, and she couldn't shout to warn him without Milliardo twigging to the whole issue. No...this is okay. He's a big kid, he can look after himself. He'll just give the guy a short shock to the neck and...
The plain-looking person drew a gun and aimed to shoot Heero in the leg. Lucrezia started to yell, but caught the sound before it left her throat, torn and suddenly terrified. Then, just as the man levelled his weapon with both hands and prepared to shoot, shielded from common view by one of the great brick pillars, three additional men wearing some kind of dull blue jumpsuits and matching caps leapt out of a shadowed archway, grabbed the plain-looking man in six different places, particularly his hands and mouth, and dragged him out of sight. There were some light groans and thumping noises, as the trio in blue pummelled the sauce out of the gunman. Many yards away, almost at the exit, Heero paused and looked behind him at the noise, but saw nothing, and disappeared from sight immediately after. Lucrezia was stunned, and spent several seconds shifting her gaze from one end of the scene to the other and pointing delicately with a single finger, trying to work out exactly what it was she had just witnessed. The blue capped men seemed to be watching over Heero, and he didn't even know about it. Unbelievable...a whole flock of guardian angels...but why? And who sent them?
"The train's coming."
Milliardo's subdued statement didn't register at first, but then she turned, looked down the length of the track, and saw a great steam engine rumbling toward the station. Lucrezia nearly began panicking, but kept a level head as she tried once more to dissuade him from his chosen course. "If we head back right now, we can send a pigeon back to Kamal and tell her to abort. Think about this!"
"I asked you to accompany me here as a courtesy, in light of our...history, but somehow I knew you'd try to talk me out of it. We've both come too far, and now you have to choose. If you're not with us, you're against us. It's as simple as that."
A terrible chill paralyzed Lucrezia, and even if she had wanted to answer, it was impossible. Then, taking her silence as the ultimate rejection, he decided to cut her out of the immediate loop. As the train pulled into the station with great, billowing puffs of steam, Milliardo waited until it was just a few yards away from the platform and then leapt into the ditch, loping over the nearer set of tracks and using his quarterstaff to pole-vault over the second set and up onto the platform a mere second and a half before the train would have flattened him. Lucrezia held her breath in shock, then realized that the whole point of the display was to cut her off from speaking to him further. The train finally came to a rest, extending many more yards in either direction, and to even reach him she would have to take the longest possible route through the station, which she wasn't sure if she was even prepared to do. At first, she deflated with a sigh, but then her gaze hardened. Lucrezia squared her shoulders and walked away.
She hadn't decided whether she would ever speak to Milliardo again, but in a moment she would have a new facet of the situation to think about. From her left, running at full speed, came a very determined Relena, who came to a skidding halt in front of Lucrezia, eyes blazing. "Where is he!?"
Lucrezia nodded her head towards the train. "I'm through fighting with him."
"Oh, no you're not!" Relena grabbed her hand and dragged her towards the platform at a full clip, desperately clinging to the last person she considered a partner in her struggle.
Back amongst the crowd, another twist was taking place. While Milliardo gazed stoically from face to face, he saw the shadow of something threatening, then blinked, and moved in for a closer look. Someone familiar had boarded the train, but he wasn't ready to believe it until he saw the face again through the windows of one of the passenger cars. It was Heero Yuy, the very most uninvited. He knows, the soldier thought to himself. He's trying to stop it...and if he makes it to the engine, he just might do it. Adapting to the new risk for the good of the mission, Milliardo ran towards the front of the train and hopped on at a point closer to the engine, lying in wait for his prey.
Both of the women following him saw the man suddenly dash further down the platform and onto the train, but they had no idea why. They only had seconds to think before the whistle blew and the train began pulling away. No matter how angry they were with Milliardo, they knew what he had just done was tantamount to suicide, and so they began wordlessly running alongside the train, their vigorous panting covered up by the chugging and clattering of the iron beast. At the last possible moment, Lucrezia jumped up onto the caboose, then helped Relena do the same, before the railway police even had time to react. No doubt they would telegraph the next station and warn them that there were stowaways aboard, not knowing that the train would probably never make it that far.
**********In a peculiar twist, Duo's team headed out of Dudley towards the first of the two signal boxes on horseback, having just enough money left to rent some sturdy steeds for the day from the leisure department of the stables Trowa spotted. As the only one with any serious experience with horses, Trowa had to give the others a crash course about three minutes in length before he was confident enough to turn them loose. A conversation with a clerk at the ticketing office had confirmed that the affected train was probably loading up in another part of the Birmingham area that very minute, so there was no time to lose. The quartet rode off into the west with Trowa in the lead, constantly checking the stolen map against the position of the sun. After riding tirelessly for a while, he brought them to a halt by a gully for a quick conference.
"The east signal box should be another twenty minutes' ride in that direction," he told Wufei and Sally with a long point. "We've got another few miles ahead of us, but I think we'll make it."
"Which one of us should take the map?" Sally asked, concerned about getting lost.
"Let me," Wufei said sternly, and he reached out and snatched the map out of Trowa's hands. Very carefully, he tore it in half right down the middle of the tunnel marking, and gave Trowa's half back to him with a snort. Then he turned his mount in the direction the boy indicated, snapped the reins, dug in his heels, and the horse took off like a shot. Sally and the others frowned and wished each other luck before splitting off in their own directions, and soon everyone was on their way.
Duo and Trowa were long out of sight riding farther west by the time Sally finally caught up to Wufei. "I know we're in an emergency situation," she shouted over the wind, "but a little courtesy wouldn't go amiss!"
"The signal box is straight ahead!" Wufei hollered back without looking at her. "That brown peak to the left of the clock tower! That's the village!"
"What do we do when we get there!?"
Wufei paused, letting the thundering hoofbeats speak for themselves a bit. "You do whatever you want!" he yelled, and then without warning, he gave a sharp command to his horse and veered off to the left, riding in entirely the wrong direction.
Sally wondered if this was part of the plan she didn't know about, but knew that didn't make sense. "What are you doing!?" she yelled back. "Get back here! Wufei!" She could yell all she wanted, but he wasn't turning back. Next she wondered if she should go after him, but the top of the signal box was becoming clearer through the trees, and she knew she couldn't bail out now. Making a mental note to chew both of his ears off the next time she saw him, if he dared to show his face after abandoning his post, she spurred her horse on faster, closing the distance between her and the village in mere minutes. Wufei was a dot on the horizon, and had no intention of following Duo's plan. In fact, he never did.
Pulling her white and roan-spotted hunter up to the signal box, a silly-looking thing akin to a boathouse on matchsticks, it seemed abandoned. Sally dismounted, walked the horse up to the wooden spiral staircase, and tied the reins to the handrail, looking up constantly for signs of life. Now that she was alone, she had little chance against two warrior women such as Quatre had described, so her only real weapon was logic and her grasp of the English language. Carefully, she put a single foot on the bottom step, and hand on the rail, and called politely upwards. "Hello!?" No reply. "I couldn't have a quick word, could I!? It's...rather important...won't take a minute, I promise!"
Once the last word was out, Sally felt something cold and flat slip under her chin, and she froze. Raising her hands slowly, she was allowed to turn her head and see who had caught her off-guard, a beautiful, statuesque brunette who had a shining sword pressed neatly against the woman's jugular. "And what if I don't have a minute?"
Sally took her foot off the step and stood up straight, smiling cordially at her captor. "Now there's that fine desert hospitality I was looking forward to..."
**********There was only so much Heero could put into his plan when he didn't know what the rest of his team was doing, but he had every confidence in them nonetheless. He calculated that the most useful place for him to be was on the doomed train itself, for no matter which way it was bound, he could simply pull the plug by forcing his way into the engine at the front and either overpowering the engineer or convincing him that he was personally in mortal danger if he didn't pull the brake. If that didn't work, he could even set one of the cars on fire, which would necessitate an emergency stop as well as an evacuation while they sent a porter to the nearest town on foot to call for the fire brigade. He was easy either way.
It was a fairly short train, as the traffic to and from Wales was relatively light as compared to other routes, so it didn't take him very long to scoot through the corridor cars, politely dodging the occasional passenger coming in or out of their glass-doored cubicle. Between the cars, each of which had a locking door on either end that mostly relied on the honour system to keep people from drifting back and forth, there was a space of about six feet where one car was joined to the next with a locking hitch, and if one was careful, one could hop from metal landing to metal landing without seriously endangering oneself. Heero knew, even without his pocket watch, that he had enough time to be careful, so he was absolutely meticulous in the way he picked his way to the front of the train. All was going well until he got to the last car between the engine and the rest of the train, used by the engineer and the other staff; when he opened the door and stepped out onto the narrow landing, he saw none other than Milliardo Peacecraft coming through the next door in front of him.
They locked eyes, and from comparing facial expressions, it was clear that Milliardo had the advantage. In the twinkling of an eye, Heero backed up a bit and reached behind him, grabbing the gun out of his waistband, and started to point it outward, but Milliardo jumped across the gap between the cars, clutched the out-swinging door and slammed it shut, right on Heero's hand. The boy scowled with a grunt of pain, and had to relinquish the weapon to avoid having some key bones in his hand crushed beyond repair. Milliardo pounced on the revolver, snatching it for himself and levelling it casually at Heero as he let go of the door, leaving Heero to rub the back of his badly bruised paw and wonder what went wrong.
"I'm sorry, but traipsing from car to car while the train is moving is strictly against regulations," Milliardo snarked in his raspy baritone.
Heero wasn't letting the pain show anymore. "How are people supposed to get to the drinks car, then?"
"There's no drinks car open to the people who've gotten a head start," Milliardo countered, waving a white-gloved hand across his nose at the aroma of alcohol clinging to his foe. "It's a bit early to be at the Kentucky bourbon, isn't it?"
"A bit odd to be riding the Valhalla Express, isn't it?" the boy hissed back with a raised eyebrow. "I can't imagine wanting to see two steam engines collide at close range..."
"I'll be making my exit once I deal with you. Turn around, please." Heero was an exceptionally good sport as he faced the opposite direction and allowed Milliardo to jam his own gun into the middle of his back. He'd gotten out of much worse scrapes. "Now, we're going to walk very calmly to the back, and then you're taking the fast way off. But let's not disturb the nice passengers along the way, agreed?"
"I'm always a model prisoner."
"Excellent." Milliardo marched his captive back through the train, car by car, pressing a little harder with the gun every time they passed a civillian, just to remind Heero not to make any funny moves. He hadn't decided how to dispose of the lad, as a gunshot might alert the passengers, who might alert the engineer, who might stop the train and ruin everything. Probably best to just toss him over the side and deal with him later, he concluded. Unless, of course, he stirred the soldier's ire.
All was going well, again, until they got to the very end of the train. One door remained between them and the caboose, and like any other, Milliardo expected Heero to open it himself and proceed slowly through, but this time, Heero got about halfway through and froze. Being a good foot taller, Milliardo saw why without much difficulty. Relena and Lucrezia were standing on the deck of the caboose, and the elder was giving the younger what-for over her foolhardy actions. They both froze and looked up as the gentlemen emerged, and everything was quiet for a few seconds as the four of them exchanged both curious and fearful glances.
Never one to miss an opportunity, Heero used the confusion to hurl a backfist blow at Milliardo's head, catching him in the chin and making him drop the gun, which clattered around the locking latch and finally fell down between the rails, perhaps lost forever. While the girls squealed in surprise, he gave Milliardo another sound punch to the stomach, then reached down to the latch that hooked the cars together, pulled the pin out, pried the coupling apart and gave a last look to the women, especially Relena, that said no dispute was worth their personal safety. The caboose began to drift backwards, losing speed, and it was just as Milliardo was recovering from the blow to his gut that Heero vanished back through the swinging door and into the train.
As touching as it was to have Heero push her out of harm's way, to which she somehow paid more attention than her own brother getting beat up on, Relena was having none of it. Even with Lucrezia trying to hold her back, she climbed up onto the railing and called to Milliardo, "I'm coming over! Catch me!"
"Sit down before you kill yourself!" Lucrezia shouted, becoming hoarse from competing with the clattering wheels.
Horrified, Milliardo leaned forward over the rail, holding his hand out, but palm-first in a warning gesture. "No! Don't!"
There was no arguing with her. She slapped poor Miss Noin hard enough to make her let go, and then made her best flying leap across the widening gap, forcing Milliardo to reach out and grab her arms just to keep her from falling under the wheels of the caboose. Unable to focus on grabbing hold of her brother, she dangled in his grasp, her boots dragging along the the wooden railway ties until he could haul her up onto the landing. Lucrezia leaned back against the nearest wall, steadying herself with one hand on a vertical bar and letting the other plaster over her mouth as she shut her eyes, lest she grow dizzy and faint dead away. She was then helpless to watch as her unpropelled vehicle slowed and slowed, but Relena appeared safe as the rest of the train chugged away, and the sight of the siblings embracing was the last one she could see.
Already exhausted for having done so little, Lucrezia sat down on the deck and caught her breath. Then, realizing that another train would eventually be along to bump the stray caboose out of the way and that it probably wasn't the best place to be, she got up and hopped off while it was travelling at a little more than brisk walking pace. Now stranded, there was very little she could do until someone came to rescue her from the middle of nowhere along the border of the Welsh countryside. Unsure if she was closer to the next station or the last, she decided it was best to backtrack, so she began walking alongside the tracks in an easterly direction, making note of the length of her shadow to monitor the passage of time. After a short portion of the walk, she saw something black and angular lying on the wood and gravel between the rails. It turned out to be Heero's revolver, and she picked it up and hid it in her skirts for safe keeping. If she was unlucky getting back to a populated area, she reasoned, it might even come in handy.
Less than fifteen minutes passed before there was any sign of life on the horizon, and perhaps it was paranoia directing her, but she chose to hide behind a tree before they arrived. The first batch was made up of a number of men on horseback, and one small cart being pulled by a two-horse team. As they got closer, Lucrezia found she liked the look of them less and less. They wore ominously dark clothes and numbered about ten in total. Nothing was obviously evil about them except the bad vibe they put out, which she could feel all the way from behind the broad, sturdy oak she chose for her shelter. The group passed without noticing the woman, and lumbered on, following the departing train which was quite a long way ahead.
Some clouds passed in front of the sun, blotting out Lucrezia's shadow as she emerged from the massive trunk, gazing quizzically after the horsemen, but she wasn't out more than a few breaths when a second cloud of dust and horses appeared, and she had to duck out of sight again. This batch looked strangely familiar, but it wasn't their faces she knew. They wore dull, dark blue suits, double-buttoned down the front like porters' uniforms, and matching caps. Their dress was in every way identical to the three men who jumped the lone gunman who was closing on an unsuspecting Heero in the station.
Totally bizarre, she thought, struggling to work it out as they passed her, equally oblivious as the first batch. If they really are guardian angels...then that first lot were tools of the devil, as sure as I'm standing here. Heero's in some sort of trouble, and he never told me...not that we're really speaking at the moment, but...
Now she was torn over whether to head back and try to help, but she quashed the idea quickly; there was no way she could catch up now. Sighing dejectedly, she thought out a silent prayer as she resumed her course. Perhaps it was odd, or perhaps predictable, that she was thinking of him the entire way back, instead of the platinum-haired Adonis she once called her beloved.
**********Things were pretty calm in the west signalbox, a somewhat more sturdy structure than the eastern outpost. It was less of a treehouse and more of a two-storey brick apartment complex, all the inhabitants of which had been knocked out, tied up, and slung into the bushes. The two chunky Romanian he-men with thick shaving stubble whom had done the deed for Treize were smoking celebratory cigars after manipulating the switchtrack so that the freight train would take a detour through the tunnel. All was serene in their humble oasis.
A clunk sounded on the roof. One thug glanced at the other and muttered, "Ce este aceasta?" The other one shrugged. Then some scraping noises were added, and they seemed to be moving across the eave of the wooden roof towards the half-open window. The thugs squinted suspiciously and rose to investigate the noise, extinguishing their cigars right on the workstation table and plodding over to the pertinent wall. They each had forearms as large around as watermelons, muscles like steel, and a menacing countenance each to ward off intruders, so they naturally felt superior. It was indeed a surprise, then, when one of them opened the window the rest of the way and a slim, braided ball of fury came flying in from above with a primal battle cry forged on the auditory anvil of Satan himself. The first thug went down with an unintelligible exclamation, but the second thug wasn't able to help much, for a second teenage bullet came screaming in after the first, swinging on the eavestrough like a monkey and kicking the man soundly in the jaw.
The element of surprise, the superior skill and speed of the attackers, and their youth added up to a big defeat for the goons, though they put up a good fight in the meantime. The boys made it through with some scrapes and bruises, but nothing they couldn't recover from with the help of some home cooking and brandy.
"Only two?" Trowa wondered, huffing and puffing and brushing himself off as he looked down at the snoozing carcasses. "He must be awfully confident!"
"He still doesn't know he's got a leak somewhere in his house, that's why," said Duo, rearranging himself in a similar fashion. He looked around at the inside of the signal box, part of which was a makeshift apartment, and the other part of which had switches and levers leading to the signalling system, made up of wooden posts, steel towers, crossbars and painted boards, all moved by very modern electric motors. "Alright, now what?"
Trowa ignored the signalling system and went to the window, focusing instead on the track system below. "We figure out which track the freight train is coming in on, and throw whatever lever we have to, to...get it to...whatever." He was then revealed to be something other than an expert on land travel.
"What do all these levers and buttons do in here?" Duo asked in nervous confusion.
"Uh..." Just as jittery, Trowa eventually shook his head and pointed out the window to the ground. "Never mind all that, the stuff we want is outside."
Duo looked outside and frowned miserably. "Oh, yeah, outside with a half dozen different tracks, none of which are labelled! Who knew we were going to be fiddling around with the major transport hub for all of Wales!?"
"So we'll switch them all! Who's going to complain about a few misdirected trains when we're about to save the lives of dozens of happy commuters?"
That seemed good enough. They scrambled downstairs, unsure of how much time they had, and started throwing switchtrack levers willy-nilly. With each one, a different section of curved track shifted to one side or the other, creating entirely new paths through the hilly region. Hopefully, one alteration would be the right one, but when it got to the very last one, the final lever remaining untouched, Duo found that he couldn't budge it, and he instinctively knew that it was going to be the only one that mattered.
"Geez...this thing's..." The chef struggled and strained, and even climbed up on top of the metal bar as best he could in an effort to shift it, but it stubbornly refused. "It's rusted solid!"
"Here, lemmie at it..." Trowa joined him, but even their combined strength wasn't enough. Then they heard a low rumbling and a whistle from afar, and knew that the freight train was fast approaching. Desperate, they pulled and pulled until every muscle they had between them was screaming in pain. The train got close enough for them to see its plume of smoke rising above the treetops. When it cleared the bend, the engineer caught sight of the intruders and blew his whistle angrily, but the boys stood fast, tugging and struggling with the lever while they both growled in pain. At the limit of their combined strength, the lever creaked just half an inch out of alignment, and as the train grew and grew in their peripheral vision, they somehow managed to shove it a good sixty degrees in the opposite direction, which was just enough to change the path of the cargo train at the very last moment. They jumped aside and the train whooshed past them, blowing dust and clods of dirt in their faces as they rolled defensively away from the track.
As they sat up and studied their work, they realized they had been too busy to take note of which track they were working on in comparison to which track the train was on, but the net effect was the same. Instead of travelling northeast, the locomotive swerved south. On the surface, their part of the mission appeared to be a success.
Once they caught their breath, they walked back up to the signalbox, where Trowa looked at the clock, then at the day's schedule. He let out a low whistle and shook his head, and when Duo gave him a questioning look, he had to tell him what really saved their bacon. "That train was ten minutes late."
**********It was fair to say that Milliardo was furious with his baby sister. "What made you do such a stupid thing!?" he raged at her, shaking her by the shoulders. "Do you realize what nearly happened to you!!?"
"I..." The poor girl had a whole speech prepared about how she could look after herself, and that she wanted to prove her worth as an ally, but it didn't seem appropriate just then.
"Stay...here," he ordered, and then sat her down on the landing of the last car, and actually wrapped her hands around the railing for her. She clung to the bars of semi-polished metal like a wet cat that had just escaped a plunge over Niagara Falls. Once she seemed reasonably settled, Milliardo left her there to chase after Heero and, if he had his way, to bash his head in for endangering her.
At that moment, Heero was trying to work his way through a clog of people in one of the passenger cars. One schoolgirl out of a class trip of forty was travel-sick, and it seemed like most if not all of her classmates had flooded the corridor trying to make her feel better. Heero pushed through the girly glut as politely as he could, escaped from that car into the next, and was more than a little surprised to be greeted by a stormy-faced Milliardo, who came barreling through the far door of the next car from the opposite direction. Somehow, he got past the thickly-packed car behind Heero.
How does he keep doing that? He glanced up at the roof of the car. ...oh.
"I'm going to take great satisfaction in making sure you never harm my sister again," the soldier growled.
Heero didn't answer, but started backing up through the corridor with a shifty gaze. Sensing that he'd figured out Milliardo was travelling over the cars rather than through them, the soldier backed up as well, and soon they were both dashing for the closest exit trying to get up on the roof and up to the front of the train first. Heero raced to the door, flung himself onto the landing and quickly climbed overtop of the racing passenger car, the scenery packed with trees and row houses whipping past him on either side. After taking a moment to balance himself and get used to the rocking motion, which felt much more exaggerated up there than it did inside the car, he looked up ahead of him and saw Milliardo climbing atop as well, only now he had some sort of long pole in one hand. Drawing on his own unique experience, Heero identified it as a bo staff, with which the man had obviousy been practicing, for the soldier gave his staff a threatening twirl, ending in an attack posture. "This would be an awful time for you to get travel-sick," he sneered at the boy.
It would have only been an awful time to waste precious energy on ego-feeding blather, so Heero remained silent, advancing slowly and carefully. Determined not to let him pass, Milliardo met him in the middle of the car's roof and waited for him to make the first move.
Heero made several tiny jumps to one side or the other, but saw no easy way past his opponent. Impatient to fling the boy off into the grassy hills zipping by as they left the city limits, Milliardo started the first volley by taking a fast swing with his staff. Heero dodged one blow, then a second and third before realizing he was being backed up perilously close to the rear edge of the car. Finding Milliardo's pesky twig to be rather annoying, he launched himself at it, grabbing hold tightly. With all four hands wrapped around the staff, they struggled back and forth, glaring with the ferocious fire of a thousand hells.
"How did you find out about this!?" Milliardo snarled, grunting with the effort of maintaining the staff's possession.
"You're not the only one with eyes and ears in strange places!" Heero shot back in a voice that was calmer, but firm enough to rise above the wind.
This made Milliardo think, very hard and very fast. Either his security net had some serious holes, or a member of his team, to whom he had entrusted the success of his entire adventure, was a low-down, dirty, rotten squealer. Since the Winner sisters were the last to be added, he would have immediately suspected them, if not for something Heero added to his argument while the tugging match was still going on.
"Now, before you make the worst mistake of your young life," the boy suggested with a sageness that belied his own years, "think what will happen to you and your family if you fully immerse yourself in this game! Once you get a taste of their power...it will absorb you! And you can't help but turn it into a personal war after that!"
Milliardo's eyes became slits, staring across the tiny space over the horizontally-raised staff. What was it Lucrezia said? A personal vendetta? Strange that they should both tell me the same thing on the same day.....very strange indeed. From that brief moment, something inside the soldier snapped. An horrendous fury bubbled up inside him as he imagined not one but two unforgivable betrayals, perpetrated by Heero with the tender assistance of someone very close to him, someone who once swore herself to him until the end of time. The very idea pierced his heart with a red-hot blade, angering him so fiercely that with a savage growl, he shoved the staff forward, toppling Heero over backwards onto the car's roof.
As Heero tumbled, he fought to keep at least one eye on the horizon, for it was the only way to maintain one's balance when hurtling through the air over a moving object. When he got up, Milliardo was advancing on him quickly, and began slicing through the air with his staff; once at head level, making Heero duck, once at knee level, making him jump, and a jab to the stomach area which was just barely avoided. They were both too busy to notice a third person moving about below them, crossing the short but frightening distance between that car and the one before, and then slipping inside.
The scattered travellers seated in that particular car were beginning to get very worried about the noises coming from the roof. It sounded like a herd of elephants was tramping around up there, but none of the dozen or so hapless civillians were brave enough to poke their heads outside to see what was going on. Compared to the cryptic crosswords and mystery novels most had brought with them, the majority silently decided that it wasn't worth the effort, but it worried them all the same.
Relena saw this as soon as she stepped into the car. More than half of the passengers gave her a good long look, as if they were anticipating a conductor to explain the ruckus. Still, they seemed to expect something of her, if only a vague reassurance. "Ev-...everything's going to be...alright," she sputtered quietly as she padded up through the centre aisle of the converted dining car, gently touching the backs of the benches as she walked. "There's nothing to be concerned about."
They looked about as convinced by this as she felt herself. It was oddly serene in the car, with hilly landscapes zooming past and great, thunderous thumps drifting down from above, but it was far from calm. To cover up the fact that she was sweating slightly from anxiety, a thirty-five-ish woman with a thick-brimmed flowered hat in three shades of beige took a mirrored compact out of her handbag and began applying a fresh coat of pressed powder to her nose and forehead.
Relena's eyes sparkled when she spotted the compact. "Excuse me...may I borrow that for a moment, please?" she inquired, ducking her head humbly as she approached her.
The woman was dubious at first, but Relena was such a pretty little thing with such impeccable manners that she couldn't reasonably refuse. Receiving the compact with a kind word of thanks, Relena looked up at the ceiling, targeting the thumping noises. Then she darted to an unoccupied bench seat to her left, facing the front of the train, slid down the window sash with both hands, the compact clinging on by three fingers, and angled her head and arm partway outside. Extending the compact as far out as she could reach, she pointed the circular mirror up at the roof and caught sight of two dark figures, bobbing back and forth in carefully measured attack stances, coming so horribly close to falling off the train that she could barely contain a squeak of abject terror. Relena pulled herself back inside, straightened up with a deep breath and a heavy-lidded gaze of false indifference, and returned the compact to its owner. "Yup, everything's under control," she lied.
The banging noises suddenly shifted forward, leaving that car and joining the next as the combatants moved closer to the coveted engine. Up on top, Heero had managed to back Milliardo up another twenty feet, bringing out the soldier's desperation. Right when the train took a broad turn to the south, under a multitude of tree branches trained to grow at just the right height, he used the distraction of bullet-speed limbs and leaves to deliver a strong blow to Heero's left side, sending him flat on his back to the panelled steel below. Milliardo was on him in a flash, pressing a length of staff against the boy's throat and pinning him in place.
"Look carefully down there," snarled the soldier, nearly out of breath. "Your death is just a few feet away."
Heero's head was hanging very uncomfortably off the edge of the car, and he could actually see the ends of the railroad ties blurring past in a line of mucky brown. The wooden bar thrust to his neck didn't help the faint feeling of dizziness that was overcoming him, but he wasn't ready to let go yet. He struggled and fought to free himself, while Milliardo leaned in harder, savouring what already felt like his moment of victory.
The soldier grinned slightly. "I should have done away with you the day I met you...but I can't deny that I've appreciated you as an adversary. Replacing you won't be easy."
Below them, Relena had crossed into another sparsely seated car, with about ten passengers in it, who shrank away from the disruptive noises and kept entirely to themselves. She went to a random window, opened it, and shoved her head outside just in time to see the deadly struggle way up at the other end of the car. No more than six windows separated her from the scene, which would have made her screech out loud with fright if she hadn't taught herself such rigid control. Still, she gasped at realizing Heero was inches away from falling off the train to certain injury, if not much worse.
"I wouldn't be much of a gentleman if I didn't give you one last chance to apologize, though, for all the annoyance you've caused," said Milliardo, releasing a tiny amount of pressure on the staff, allowing his victim to speak. "Any last words?"
Heero was grateful for the oxygen, but didn't use it to apologize. "Tree," he said matter-of-factly in a gravelly tone.
Milliardo squinted in confusion and took too many seconds to wonder about the cryptic remark before the limb of a mighty oak came sweeping across the top of the train and smacked him in the side of the head. The soldier went sprawling backwards, still clinging to his staff but in no condition to use it, and the same force also slid Heero right up to the edge of the roof. Before the boy could gain a foothold, he slipped.
As he fell, he managed to catch the decorative moulding just above the railroad company name emblazoned in six-inch gold letters over fading red paint, but only with one hand. He dangled there, swaying in the breeze and clutching his throat with the other hand, choking down his first unimpeded gulps of air, still unaware that Relena was watching. As he clasped a second handful of the moulding and scanned the upcoming horizon for more trees, he thought to himself, If all this work could have been spread out over the last two weeks, it wouldn't be so bad...
While Heero was pitying himself, Milliardo was getting a second wind. The moment he was back on his feet, he bounded to the side of the car where Heero was holding on, and drove his boot down on the boy's left hand. Heero let out a strangled growl of pain, gritting his teeth behind tightened lips. When he looked up, Milliardo was standing over him, staff raised to strike the final blow that would dislodge him from the train. With his free hand, he reached up and grabbed hold of Milliardo's shin, trying to pry the boot off his other hand, but it was a terrible angle to work from, and soon it wouldn't matter anyway.
No matter how angry she was at Heero, Relena couldn't bear to watch him perish, not now while they were both still children in the eyes of the world. Without giving a thought to angering her brother, she left that window and ran up to the closed window where Heero's feet were vainly sliding up and down glass, looking for something to step up on. Grabbing the clasps on either side, she unlocked the sash and slammed the pane down as fast as she could. Heero automatically stepped up on the window sash, hurled him self up and over the moulding, and tackled Milliardo before he could strike. In the back of his mind, he had a hazy sense of who might have opened the window, but there were more pressing matters at hand. "I am sorry about one thing!" Heero snapped while pinning Milliardo down in the same way. "I'm sorry I ever set foot in your country and brought this plague with me! But then how could I have known that you wouldn't be able to walk away from it!?"
After another brief but terse struggle, they scrambled to their feet and faced each other, Milliardo holding the staff at waist level as if it were a shield. "Trying to tempt me with the rest of your sob story?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. "I'm not curious enough to let you live."
Heero's back was now to the engine, three more cars ahead, but he made no move towards it. Instead, he stared the other down in a relaxed Kamae stance. "You might have been a good soldier, once...but you're a lousy strategist now." With that, he stepped swiftly forward with his right leg, bringing the corresponding arm down with a vertical knife hand strike that hit the centre point of the staff and broke it in two. Splinters flew in slow motion as Heero did away with the weapon, stunning his opponent into total immobility, at least for the moment.
**********Once the misunderstanding had been cleared up, and Yasmeen learned that the elegant Dr. Po was little or no threat, she and Hessa invited the woman up into the signalbox and showed her some genuine desert hospitality, with piping hot tea and travel treats they had brought with them from London. They listened politely to everything Sally had to say, but swaying their minds was difficult. "You must believe us," Yasmeen explained, "the last thing we want is for innocent people to get hurt, but they're going to be sacrificed whether our family is involved or not. If we can salvage some good out of this, something to save our other sisters, scattered like grains of sand across the earth, we must do as we are told."
Sally sipped the delicate concoction before her, looking out the window at the sleepy village below, and arched her eyebrows. "Don't let it get back to Heero's ears, but in a way, I admire you. I don't know if I'd have the guts to make that kind of a decision."
"Your profession makes it for you," Hessa pointed out in a soft voice. "Didn't Hippocrates begin his oath with 'First, do no harm'?"
"That he did," Sally said with a cordial nod, "but if he could have seen what life would be like for us now...I sometimes wonder if he would have taken a different position. Suppose I was the only physician on the scene of a major disaster, like what's about to happen in the next half hour or so. I would have to separate the dead from the dying, the dying from the wounded, and the wounded from the slightly scratched, and from there, I'd treat them in order depending on the severity of their injuries. Since there's only one of me...no matter what I did, someone would die, and that's a sound definition of 'harm' if ever I heard one."
The sisters hummed thoughtfully, never having looked at the medical profession from that angle before, and then stared down at their tea as it hit home that the triage scenario was a close relative of their role in young Master Peacecraft's plans. They were the surgeons, snipping and slicing where Milliardo told them to, and since there were so many casualties, somebody had to suffer, no matter how good their intentions were. Whether they allowed the passenger train to carry on through the tunnel or sent it north toward the other signalbox, something terrible would happen to it. If they had never interfered, though, at least none of the blood would be directly on their hands.
"Really makes you think, doesn't it?" asked Sally, when she saw Yasmeen's blank stare grow thick with worry.
The elder sister nodded at her tea. "It does."
Sally took another sip, looked out the window a little longer, counted off thirty seconds in her head, and sipped again. "By the way...two more of us went to take out Treize's men on the other side of the tunnel. In a matter of minutes, it should be perfectly safe for those people to get to Wales on time. I hear there's some nice vacation spots there this time of year..." Yasmeen and Hessa looked across the wobbly wooden table at each other. Suddenly they looked very guilty, which wasn't a factor when the train was doomed no matter what they did, but now that there was a chance for it to escape unharmed...
"I think I'll...take a bit of water to your horse," said Yasmeen, and she slowly got up from the table to fetch a bowl from the signalman's dish cupboard. Without saying another word, she carried the bowl down the steps, and the noises that wafted up to the remaining two women suggested that she poured out some water from the hand pump sunk into the ground, offered a drink to the horse, which he accepted, and after that, they stopped listening. Running alongside the signalbox were the railroad tracks, and they split into two heading west and north, connected by a switchtrack device. At the moment, the switchtrack was directing the rail path north to doom at the hands of their other sisters, but with the throwing of a heavy lever right at the pivot point, which Yasmeen would vehemently deny later if questioned about it, the iron rails shifted to the left, aftering the path in a westward fashion. The train would now continue through the tunnel as originally planned.
Up above in the box, Sally and Hessa heard the clanking of metal, but refused to discuss it. Instead, Sally finished off her tea gratefully. "...that's nice. Do you make it yourself?"
"Oh, no," Hessa admitted quietly. "It's just some Earl Grey from the corner shop...but I added a pinch of chamomile and some honey."
"Mmm. S'very good." My, this is civilized, Sally thought. I wonder how the boys made out...and where Wufei is...and--
And then there was a far-off steam whistle, heralding the arrival of the train. That got them out of their seats in a hurry, and the pair of them flew to the open window to see what was heading towards them. Without a lot of introduction time, the locomotive swept through the sparse forest in the distance and rolled past the signalbox, giving Yasmeen just enough time down below to get out of the way. They all watched nervously, not sure why they were watching at all since the matter was out of their hands. There was an even deeper moment of silence that followed as the two in the signalbox saw some fast-moving blurs on top of the train, unable to fathom what they were.
Heero and Milliardo zipped right past the window, making Sally and Hessa leap back with a yelp apiece. Just as quickly, they leaned further out the window to stare as they retreated at a wicked pace. They seemed to be fighting, of all things, and of all times, and of all the places in the whole wide world. Helpless to change what was, the girls gaped, spiralling down into worry and fear.
**********On the picturesque hilltop, Treize and the Cinq rep, whose name he found out was Reynolds, were making small talk and watching birds with their binoculars while they waited for the collision. Reynolds, trooper though he was, was getting rather bored, continually looking at his watch and shifting in his lawn chair. "Look, is this going to take much longer? I have to get a full night's sleep, I'm on the 7:25 to Glasgow in the morning...assuming they can find a way around this spot..."
Treize arched an eyebrow at the young man's impatience. "Should be any time, now. In fact..." He reached behind him into the wicker picnic basket and lifted out a bottle of red wine with a gold embossed seal on the label and a crown printed on the cork. "...I've brought along a fine vintage to enjoy during my big moment, if you'd care to join me..."
Reynolds eyed the bottle lovingly, biting his lip and smiling. "Well, I'm not really supposed to drink on the job..."
The Count grinned. "Oh, go on. Be a devil."
The other nodded wickedly. "Just this once."
Taking a glove off and snapping his fingers, Treize brought forth his only other companion other than the carriage driver and horses, which were resting under a tall, shady tree far out of ear's reach. Lady Une's snooty butler, borrowed for the day, stepped forward to uncork the bottle and fill two cut crystal goblets for the gentlemen, passing one to his master and the other to his guest. Treize savoured the glint of undulating sunlight hitting the facets as the clouds blew past. "What shall we drink to?"
Rolling his glass between his fingers, Reynolds tipped his hat in a new direction and pondered the liquid in deep thought. "Mmmm...it's something of a tradition, in Cinq circles, y'know...to, ah...drink to the long life of all the participants."
"Marvelous thought." Treize raised his glass over the table, waiting for the other glass to meet it before proposing the toast. "Long life to them all...and to their successors."
"Well put," said Reynolds, noting the subtle self-serving nature of the wish.
They each took a long pull of their glass, enjoying the lukewarm liquid immensely. Treize then proceeded to look at his watch, and smiled to himself as a pleasant, far-off rumbling touched his ears delicately, and then grew. The train from the east needed no introduction; both men turned their heads and raised their binoculars in unison, aiming for the point at which the locomotive would emerge from the trees. A puffy plume of steam preceeded it, and then it came, rumbling with a distant roar towards the tunnel. There was only one problem, though...the other train was missing. Treize looked anxiously down the other end of the landscape and wondered. His men had all the instructions they needed to do their job, and the calculations were perfect...
...as long as both trains are on time, the Count thought morosely.
Reynolds squinted, equally baffled, and was raising his binoculars up and down as if he saw something he couldn't believe. Treize peered through his instrument as well, and as the train completely cleared the trees blocking their view, he could see two figures on top of the train, where they really shouldn't have been. One was somewhat taller than the other, with long flaxen hair blowing wildly about a red army jacket, topping white trousers and tall black boots. The other was smaller, dark-haired, darkly dressed and wretchedly familiar. In fact, they both were. Having discarded the broken pieces of the quarterstaff, Milliardo and Heero were fully engaged in hand-to-hand combat, pitting karate against Marquis of Queensbury boxing, with no clear winner in sight. They were only visible for a few seconds before being swallowed up by the tunnel, but there was no immediate noise coming from the other end of the track, a clear sign that the colliding train was off-schedule at best, and completely absent at worst.
Atop the train, while they were still in the open air, Milliardo could no longer fathom why Heero was choosing to stand and fight instead of running up to the engine and stopping the vehicle, since he now had a clear path to do so. It also should have occurred to him that he had only seconds to get himself and his sister off the train before disaster struck, but he was so blinded by rage that he could not think of anything but pummelling Heero for all he was worth. Then, as the train cleared another grove of trees, Milliardo paused between blows, his eyes widening at something up ahead. Trustingly, Heero turned around to look behind him. Within two seconds they realized that the tunnel was approaching, that there would not be enough room to stand up all the way through, and that there was no safe place to jump off before they reached it. Both at once, they flattened themselves against the car roof just as the top edge of the tunnel passed over their heads.
Inside the tunnel, it was terribly claustrophobic. They could tell without raising their heads that the stone ceiling was only an inch or two away, and even attempting to look down the tunnel could have meant instant death. The shearing force of wind was amplified tenfold, and pushed hard against them both; Milliardo, being the heavier of the two, was able to hold on, but Heero was scooted back a little bit at a time, almost bumping into his foe. The boy was calmly concentrating on not sliding back any further, but Milliardo was panicking on the inside. As far as he knew, everything was happening on schedule now, but not his own. The train and everyone on it could have been smashed to bits at any moment, ending all fearful anticipation in an explosive fireball of twisted steel and smashed rock. It was all possible at once. In his mind, it was all happening at once. He could already feel the shrapnel cutting into his flesh from all directions. A few inches away, Heero was practically daydreaming, blissfully indifferent, and in a moment or two, the tunnel peeled away from them, the sky returned, and nothing at all painful had occurred.
As the train sped away in pristine condition, Treize lowered his binoculars, sat back in his chair, and tugged at his collar, glancing over at Reynolds in a wormlike way. "...well, that's the British railways, for you, isn't it? They couldn't stick to a timetable if it was made of molasses..." When he saw that Reynolds was unsympathetic, he cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. "Obviously there's been a small hitch, but I'm sure that if we toddle on down a few miles--"
"If there's one thing people can't stand in Cinq...it's sloppiness," said Reynolds, and he pointed at the scene of the strangeness. "And who were those two dancing around on the roof!? Tell me you didn't plan that..."
Convinced that it was nothing more than a minor glitch, Treize got up and took off in a light jog down the hill towards the point where the tracks emerged from the west end of the tunnel in front of the stream, leaving Reynolds to scratch his head and beckon another drink from the butler. The Count was certain that the crash would now be taking place a short distance down the line, and was endeavouring to get across a sparse wooded area when he got turned around and found himself lost. Angry and frustrated, he listened carefully for the sound of a distant collision, and when none came, he kicked a rock, swearing under his breath at whichever of his cronies had botched the maths.
It took a few minutes to calm down, and then he had to figure out in which direction laid his picnic grounds. Just as he looked through the sparse canopy of leaves to locate the sun, another rumbling sound approached from the east, and for a moment, he thought it was another train. When the rumbling resolved itself into hoofbeats, he squinted, pulling his forked eyebrows together in a curious scowl.
From the edge of the miniscule forest, atop a charging steed of such a dark brown that it was almost black, was a thin youth wearing flowing white trousers that billowed in the wind, a sleeveless shirt of royal blue, and black leather bracers on his wrists. In his hand, raised at the ready, was a gleaming sword. Treize bristled.
The swordsman galloped toward his prey with a murderous gleam in both eyes. As he neared the Count, he took a playful swing at him with his sword, and laughed as the man ducked. "Low bridge! Watch your head!" he cackled as he brought the horse around for another pass.
"Chang," Treize spat.
"Where's your army?" crowed Wufei. "It's terribly unsafe to leave oneself defenseless in the middle of the woods!" With that, he spurred his horse forward and took another swing at Treize.
The Count ducked with his arms raised in feeble self-protection and was certain he felt a slight breeze from the sword cutting the air just above the hairs on the back of his neck. "Are you mad!?" he hollered upon straightening up again.
Wufei brought his horse about and slowly walked it over to where the Count stood, so he could look down at him. "What an odd thing to say. There's a percentage of madness in everyone...the only difference among them is in how well they hide it." As Treize stood motionless, eyeing the boy with a calculating stare, Wufei reached out to lay the flat edge of the sword snugly against the side of his throat. "Any sane person would naturally reject the notion of slicing apart an unarmed man, miles from civilisation..." Then Wufei began walking his steed in a slow circle around him, letting the tip of the blade drag across his Adam's apple and around the back of his neck. "...but right now, you don't know if I'm rational! You can't tell if I even see you standing there, or if I think you're a construct of my own imagination! You have no certainties, no armaments, and no defense!"
Treize was remarkably calm for feeling a cold metal blade scrape a light circular trail just above his collar. Maintaining his smug airs, he folded his arms as the boy stopped his horse. "I would tend to disagree. It's not realy about sanity at all, it's about honour...and few things are as dishonourable as attacking the defenseless." He wasn't entirely defenseless--there was a loaded Derringer in his pocket, but he remained content to play the integrity card.
Wufei pointed the sword at the centre of the Count's chest and leaned forward with a furious snarl. "You mean like the way you murder innocent people for profit!? I should cut you down right now...but that wouldn't be much fun," he finished with a smirk.
Treize yawned, on purpose. "Yes, yes, I know, toy with me like a rat, and then kill me. For all the effort you seem to have put into this, you might have expended some original thought, you know."
With a carefully measured flick of his wrist, Wufei snapped the sword upwards, nicking a short vertical slash into Treize's jaw, just enough to draw blood. Then he slipped the blade back into its silver-accented scabbard hanging at his side, sat up proudly, and gripped the reins with both hands. "Today, I was that close. Nobody stopped me now, and no one ever will. Remember that." Having made his point, he rode back the way he came and disappeared.
Wincing, Treize reached up with the back of his hand and wiped away a growing trail of blood, glowering at the retreating horseman. Such impudence...he may be a skilled warrior, but he is no gentleman. Using Wufei's path to guide him, he navigated his way back out of the wooded grove, seething inwardly at persons not present. The feat of colliding trains was supposed to have been a tightly-kept secret, and somehow word of it had broken loose. There was no other explanation. On his way back to the top of the adjacent hill, where Reynolds was probably tapping his feet impatiently, or polishing off the wine, Treize was already devising disciplinary measures with which he would plug the holes in his security force. Wufei was still just a secondary concern.
**********When the train emerged from the tunnel unharmed, Milliardo scarcely knew what to do with himself. As the men picked themselves up and regained their balance, Heero straightened his spine with a smug look that wasn't quite a smile. "Surprised?"
Surprised didn't say it. Milliardo was flabbergasted. "...you knew."
"Yes, I knew," the boy confirmed, "but that's not the big difference between us. You thought this train would be destroyed one way or another, but you were more interesting in fighting me than getting Relena off safely. If I'd thought we were really doomed...you'd be no competition for her."
"...then why go through with this ridiculous farce!?" the other hollered. It was really just a way of deflecting blame from himself; now that he had remembered his sister, who must have been terrified, he felt awful.
"It makes you sick, doesn't it?" Heero continued with slight snark. "All the planning you put into this, all the faith you put in your team, and you still failed. I haven't even seen my team for days, but my faith in them is justified. They knew what they had to do without any help from me...and now I've got to do my part to help them." Then he turned and hopped lightly over to the next car down the line, and in case Milliardo had forgotten, he glanced over his shoulder with an impish smile. "I'm going to stop this train."
Once the reality of it all sunk in, Milliardo couldn't let Heero win, not even at this late stage and for such a small prize. He took off running after the boy, and they loped from car to car until Heero reached the engine, where he forced his way in, threw himself against the door, and ordered the startled engineer with the long white handlebar moustache to stop the train or there was going to be trouble. The middle-aged man complied fearfully, pulling the large lever in the floor to activate the braking system.
The train was only a short distance from the western signal box, where Duo and Trowa were perched anxiously at the windows, tapping their fingers on anything and everything as they waited for confirmation that the mission was a success. "Come on, come on, come on...where is it?" whined the former.
"We don't know that anything's gone wrong yet," said Trowa, shaking a hand at the window.
"Well, we don't know that anything's gone right yet." Duo stepped away from the window and paced a bit, thinking. What if Heero's not even around? What if he got drunk somewhere and forgot the date? What if he remembered the date, but went to the wrong railroad? What if something happened to him already and he never even made it this far? I just wish he'd talk to me! A telegram would do! A balloon-o-gram! A freakin' psychic message! Anything!! He went back to the window, leaning heavily on the sill, and tried to push down the doubts that had been haunting him all week. It was an uncomfortable place to be, feeling so helpless and uninformed, but even a small amount of faith could see him through the worst of anything, so he kept his fears to himself. Then, just as he looked up tiredly, thinking that perhaps all their effort was for nothing, he saw a far-off dot puffing out tiny plumes of steam. "What's that?"
Trowa focused on the blob in the distance and pounded a fist down on the window sill. "That's gotta be it," he crowed, "and...I think...it's slowing...down." Sure enough, the dot got bigger but at a disproportionate speed to what one expected from a fast-approaching train.
Duo's face lit up at last. "Then it's over! We actually did it!" The pair of them laughed, clasped hands, and even endulged in a side-long hug. "Should we go down or stay here?"
As good as it felt to claim victory, Trowa still saw fit to play it cautious, and hummed while he thought. "Let's hold off and see who disembarks first...just in case." Duo hesitantly agreed, and they went to the south window over the track to watch.
There was a high-pitched squeal coming from the braking system that grew louder and louder, accompanied by puffs of steam and a low chugging noise that gradually slowed as the train pulled up next to the signal box. What couldn't be easily seen from the box window was the commotion inside the engine compartment, where Heero and Milliardo were slugging it out yet again, with the engineer himself squeezed into a corner to avoid them. Just as the engine passed the signal box, the pair rambled out onto the narrow landing, where Milliardo finally succeeded in tossing Heero overboard. The boy took a low-speed tumble and ended up seated on the grass, catching his breath as the Peacecrafts rolled by quietly. As he looked up, his suspicions about who opened the window for him were confirmed as Relena appeared inside one of the cars, staring almost apologetically at him.
Once the train cleared their field of vision, Duo and Trowa saw clearly that Heero was unharmed, and shared a deep sigh, but the relief was short-lived as another train whistle sounded from the opposite direction. Suddenly they weren't sure if Heero's train had been stopped too soon, for the tail end of it hadn't quite made it past the switch-tracks, and would have been sheared off by an oncoming obstacle. They both fled to the signalman's desk and started thumbing quickly through schedules, expecting that Heero would be up the stairs to join them at any second.
Picking himself up off the turf, Heero brushed bits of grass off his suit and looked to either side, listening. There was definitely another train coming on one of the intersecting tracks, but he judged it to be immaterial to the mission. Everything had gone as well as possible, and there was nothing more to do, but instead of heading straight up to the signal box to see who was waiting for him, he paused and listened to something else, some far-off sound coming from the same direction he'd just left. It wasn't a train, but more like hoofbeats. A closer inspection of the horizon revealed dark splotches thundering forward on horseback, a gaggle of about ten riders in dark clothes. They gave off an unpleasant vibe, even at a distance.
Up in the signalbox, the boys were avidly watching the departing train, not Heero. "I think it'll just miss," Trowa judged.
Again, Duo let out a long-held breath. "Man...there's definitely a few angels working overtime on this--..." He was just wandering over to the east windows and froze; suddenly there were almost a dozen men on horseback, one pulling a small cart on rickety wheels, speeding towards the signal box at a full clip on the north side of the track. Duo didn't know what to make of them, but when he saw them angling towards Heero's spot on the south side of the track, he panicked. "C'mon!" he shouted to Trowa, slapping him in the shoulder, and they both bolted out the door and down the stairs.
What happened next was a miracle of orchestration that could not have been brought about by human planning alone. While Duo and Trowa flew down the stairs, the horsemen drew closer, seeing the oncoming train barreling forward. Heero felt many pairs of eyes on him, very threatening eyes, and decided to run. The engine of the oncoming train passed him and was just about to provide shielding from the horsemen, when they suddenly veered to the left, crossed the tracks like a flock of geese, and gave pursuit. Duo and Trowa couldn't make it to the tracks in time to follow them; the long cargo train cut them off at the last second, and they skidded to a halt, helplessly watching car after car fly by. The gaps between the cars made the action on the other side look like a grainy motion picture, but it was just blurry enough to obscure whatever the horsemen were doing. Duo was desperate to jump straight through the train and find out where Heero was, but Trowa kept holding him back by both arms, agonizing over the boy's terrified screams.
While they stood there struggling against each other, they failed to notice another group of horsemen approaching, these dressed in plain blue uniforms and matching caps. This group slowed, then stopped, then looked at the train speeding by and the two boys grappling with their helplessness, and discussed quickly amongst themselves. Heero was nowhere to be seen, nor were the horsemen in black. There was no way to get across the tracks, and by the time the train left, it would probably be too late. The lead rider in blue took off his cap, wiped a handful of sweat off his brow and rubbed his eyes dejectedly. "Fall back," he told the others, and they trotted off in defeat. Duo and Trowa never knew they were there.
Then the caboose of the train swooshed by silently. Duo vaulted across the tracks, right to the spot where he last saw Heero, but there was no one, and nothing in sight. The ground was scuffed by horseshoes, and great clumps of grass and divots of earth had been tossed up in what must have been a brief but terrible battle. "What happened!? Where is he!? Who were those guys!?" Duo exclaimed, eyes flashing in all directions.
"Okay...okay, don't panic," Trowa said unconvincingly. He swallowed and ran a hand through his bangs, twisting around in a full circle but finding nothing. "Maybe he's just..."
Duo shook his head fiercely, brought his hands up around his mouth and hollered at the hilly countryside. "Heeerooooo!!............." There was no reply.
They began running down the bend in the track where the first train had come to a complete stop, and saw miscellaneous scattered civillians standing in the grass, complaining to the engineer about the delay. Among them, but standing a little bit apart, the boys were surprised to see Relena, wringing her hands in front of her heart and shaking her head faintly. She looked like she was in shock over something. Before Trowa could grab an arm to stop him, Duo bolted over and grabbed her by the shoulders, jolting her out of her dream state. "What did you see!?" he yelled wildly, right in her startled face. "Who took him!?"
The poor girl couldn't answer right away. She had watched the whole thing unfold from the landing of the caboose, where she ran to get a better view. It was undeniable that she still cherished some sort of warm feeling for Heero, for now that he was gone, there was a gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach that wouldn't be quieted. "...I..." She shook her head some more, then struggled to look behind her. Milliardo was somewhere behind the crowd, probably wondering where she was. There were a few choice words she wanted to put before him, too. "I have to go..." She pulled away stiffly, then jogged into the crowd, her eyes tearing up as she fled. Duo was left to sway slightly from anguish, hyperventilating and looking all around with fearsome eyes. Without warning, he picked a direction and ran, hoping to find even a tiny clue about Heero's abductors before he totally lost his mind.
**********Once word spread through the network of railway police that there were saboteurs running all over the countryside, all traffic west of London was halted. Patrols were dispatched to all points around and between the reported disturbances. Many refunds had to be paid to the passengers who found themselves in a part of the country where they never expected to be. Some threatened to tell the newspapers, but rather than encourage any negative publicity, they were paid extra for their silence. No mention of the disruption in service ever made it past a small circle of railroad employees, who were also given a little something extra in their pay packets. No one could ever know how easy it was for amateur crooks to hijack His Majesty's rolling stock; there could have been widespread panic. Thankfully, the worst damage incurred was from a cargo train slamming into a stationary caboose, abandoned on the tracks. The caboose was demolished, but no one was hurt.
Lucrezia ended her hike at the first town she happened across, and stayed there until she could hitch a ride back to civilisation, but as soon as she was able to regroup with Relena and Milliardo, they all got into a terrible fight, and she was off again just as quickly. Quatre's sisters all retreated from their positions before they could be discovered by the authorities, and since both of the signalmen they overcame were too embarassed to give an accurate description of their attackers, the police spent hours looking for entirely the wrong individuals.
Duo was beside himself with grief, and wandered for hours through the countryside, calling Heero's name until his voice gave out. Trowa eventually convinced him to give up the search, but it took some doing. When they finally got back to Birmingham, Sally was waiting for them at the rendez-vous point, but Wufei was gone too. She recounted the way he had bolted, but it paled in comparison to what happened to Heero. They took their long faces with them back to London, where the gravity of the situation set in like a sack of doorknobs to the stomach.
As for Heero, he hardly felt a thing. Faced with so many pursuers, and after such a tiring battle beforehand, he was no match for the men who seemingly came out of nowhere to pounce on him, as if they knew precisely when and where he'd be. He went down quickly, but not quietly. Several attackers were injured, but their goal was attained. It was mere seconds before the lights went out in his world, and he was dragged off in darkness even while the sun beat down on him, unnoticed.
~~~~~~~~~~
Next, in Episode Ninety-One: Tension bubbles over at the mansion as Duo loses his grip, and subsequently confronts Wufei, demanding information about Heero. Lucrezia flees to the north, to regroup with some old acquaintances, and stumbles upon a curious clue.
I'VE GOT MY GROOVE BACK! YEE-HAW!!! =^_^= *cough* I'm...delighted. Anyway...I'm not going to mince words, after a two month absence, there's absolutely no reason for you guys to believe anything I say... =9_9= ...but I'm going to set a date of October 30th for Episode 91. (I wouldn't publish on Halloween, no way. =^_~= ) Ja ne!