Disclaimer: Characters within do not belong to me. Obviously.

Author's Notes: Such a delay! My extreme apologies. It's been a crazy couple of months. But the chapter's here now. I know many people were upset by the last chapter, and I just wanted to say how touched I was by the emotions displayed in your reviews. I love Relena, too. But we always hurt the ones we love, don't we? Anyways, I hope you'll keep reading, no matter what happens next. Take care! And thanks again:)

Be My Downfall

by Kristen Elizabeth

"Is she sleeping yet?"

Hilde glanced up at her husband as he entered the nursery, acknowledging him before returning her attention to the baby in her arms. "Wide awake. She'll drop off soon though."

Duo stopped at the side of the crib in which his seven month-old son slept peacefully. He swallowed a massive lump in his throat. "Did she take enough of the bottle?"

"More than usual," Hilde replied. "We're getting better. Aren't we, Gisele?" The little girl waved a tiny fist at her. "Poor sweetheart."

"I caught the news downstairs." She waited patiently for Duo to go on. "Karen Wynstock's dead."

"Wynstock…" Hilde frowned as she thought. "Isn't she the woman who…"

"Poisoned Relena the first time? Yeah." He folded his arms tightly across his chest. "They found her hanging in her cell. Suicide. Supposedly."

"Supposedly?" Hilde bit her lip hard enough to cause tears to spring to her eyes as she caught Duo's unspoken implication. "Why would he…now? It's been a month since she died."

"Got me. Maybe he held out as long as he could. Maybe he's been in a drunken stupor all this time. Whatever." Her husband rubbed his hands down his face. "It was a stupid move. The woman hadn't given up any information about her organization. So now…they might never know who gave…" He stopped.

"Who gave Relena the other half of the poison," Hilde whispered. "Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe she felt guilty and…and…"

"It was Heero," he told her flatly. "Don't ask me how; I just know."

Hilde didn't speak for a long moment. "I suppose I thought it was just a matter of time before he came to terms with her death and came back for his daughter. Will he be able to do that now?"

"He won't be charged with murder if that's what you're asking."

"It's not." Hilde's gaze dropped down; Gisele had finally fallen asleep. "I don't know if I can hand her over to him if he ever comes back…knowing that he…"

"She's his daughter. Relena knew what he was capable of, but she still wanted him to be the father of her children. Who are we…who am I to judge him? I've killed hundreds. Thousands maybe. Does that mean I don't deserve to be Jeremiah's father?"

Hilde's eyes burned with anger and grief. "You didn't abandon Jeremiah on his first day in this world, and disappear without a trace, Duo."

"You're forgetting something, babe." Duo unfolded his arms. "You didn't die on the day he was born, either."

Silence cloaked the little room of the apartment they'd leased immediately after arriving on Earth for Relena's funeral. They hadn't known then that they'd become Gisele's caretakers, but when it became clear that there was no one else, the Maxwell's hadn't hesitated in the least. It wouldn't last much longer, however. Just until Relena's family was able to permanently relocate from Mars. Then, the Peacecrafts would take little Gisele until her father returned for her.

If he returned for her.

Hilde stood up and carried Heero and Relena's baby to her own crib. She laid the child down with a kiss to her forehead. Duo watched her and when she was done, she looked back at him. An apology passed between them without a word being said and Hilde ran for the comfort of her husband's strong arms.

"She needs her father," Hilde cried into Duo's chest. His response was to stroke her back. "She needs him, Duo."

Duo closed his eyes and rested his cheek on the top of his wife's head. "Babe, I think he probably needs her, too."

Lying in bed with Trowa, Quatre watched the news with a heavy heart. The suicide of the only known participant in Relena's prolonged assassination seemed too unlikely. It hadn't mattered that she was locked up in a maximum security facility; to Heero, it would have been a minor challenge.

"I know what you're thinking," Trowa murmured.

"Do you think…"

He didn't have to finish his question. "If he did, I can't quite bring myself to blame him."

Quatre looked away from the screen. "She was being brought to justice."

"Apparently not fast enough."

"She might have given up the names of her associates!"

"Or she could have strung us along for years." Trowa sat up. "There were no guarantees that she'd give us any real information."

Quatre sighed. "And now there's no way she ever can." He touched his ribs and the scars that had been cut into his flesh by a terrorist's bomb and a surgeon's scalpel.

"I'd do it," his lover said all of a sudden. "If they ever found the person who did that…I'd kill them."

The simplicity and calm with which he spoke might have frightened anyone else. But Quatre merely nodded. "I know."

Trowa lowered himself back down and slid his arm underneath Quatre's back to pull him closer. "Sometimes I have to remind myself that I didn't lose you. But Heero…he lost everything."

"Not everything," Quatre reminded him. "He still has someone who needs him. Far more than Relena ever did."

Millardo's blood ran cold with hateful satisfaction as he read the daily news headlines as they flashed across the screen. Presidential assassinator dead. Suicide. No witnesses. He snorted softly. Heero. It had taken him awhile, but he'd finally gotten around to taking care of the problem. Relena could rest in peace.

"What kind of peace?" Noin said later, when he told her the news. She was in the middle of packing the final boxes of their things in preparation for their move to Earth. Little Elissa lay in her motorized swing nearby, watching her parents with her father's clear blue eyes. "To Relena, no death could bring any sort of peace."

"It brings peace to me," he snapped back. "My sister is dead. Now so is her killer."

"Find your peace where you will," was all she'd said before handing him the packing tape and picking up Elissa in order to change her diaper.

They hadn't spoken that night, or through most of the next day. It was only in the last hours of their final night on Mars that Noin had finally broken her silent treatment.

"I'm afraid," she said out loud as she stared at the ceiling.

He turned his head on his pillow to look at her. "Of what?"

"Now that he's done this…what if he can't ever come back for his daughter?" She continued quickly. "I'll take care of her as long as necessary, and I'll love her as if she were my own, but I'm not her mother. And you're not her father. She has parents, and if she can't have both of them…she deserves at least one."

It was only later, after they'd made love and she'd fallen asleep in his arms, that Millardo let her words penetrate his grief-fueled hatred. Holding his wife's slender body, he cried for his sister, for her daughter, and for Heero Yuy.

Wufei had received the news from the prison before anyone else, but held off from processing it until the chaos had been sorted out. The woman had hung herself in her cell with her sheets. That was the official report. What wasn't on the official report was the still surveillance photo of a shadowed figure entering her cell block, or the off-the-record autopsy finding of an unidentified drug in Karen Wynstock's system.

Back in his house after two days of bureaucratic nonsense, endless meetings, press conferences and interviews, the exhausted Preventer took a moment to brew himself a cup of tea before sitting down on his couch.

If Heero had killed their only captured suspect in Relena's assassination, he would have to bring him in for questioning. It was not going to be an easy task, even if they could locate him. As far as he knew, the man hadn't even been so much as spotted in the month since the President's death.

He sipped his tea. Somehow, instead of breaking down the fragile understructure of the government, the sudden death of the most powerful woman in the world had strengthened the resolve of the rest of the world's leaders to carry on in her name. It was as though her last act in the world had been to leave it a better place than it was before she began to take care of it. There would never be another leader like her, though, Wufei thought. For a woman…hell, for a human being…she'd been one of a kind. It was easy to see how she'd crippled the most formidable of all soldiers with grief.

A knock on his door jarred him out of his thoughts. He scowled, silently cursing whoever had dared to even consider intruding on his privacy. But still, he stood up and went to answer it.

On his way home, the sky had shown signs of an impending storm. Somewhere in the few minutes he'd been home, the bottom had dropped out, drenching everything in sight. Including the woman standing on his front stoop.

"Commander Chang." Sally's teeth chattered slightly. "I'm sorry to bother you."

He blinked. What the hell was the woman doing there? Years of carefully cultivated cold shoulders should have pushed him out of her mind where he belonged. But she was stubborn.

"Can I come in?" she continued, penetrating his hard layers with a single, tortured look.

Wufei stepped aside to allow her in, but still said nothing. He waited until she'd hung up her wet coat and stepped out of her muddy shoes before speaking. "What do you want?"

He'd never seen any cracks in her professional veneer. He'd certainly never seen her cry. So when she broke down into tears right in front of him, he had absolutely no idea what to do or say. He simply watched her.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I know I shouldn't have come here. I know we're not friends. But I didn't have anywhere else to…" Tears mixed with the rain water running down her cheeks. "I can't keep going like I have been, pretending I'm all right."

"Woman, I have no idea what you mean."

Sally wiped her eyes. "Of course you don't." She drew in a breath. "This was stupid of me. I should go."

He caught her arm before she could grab her coat. "You're here. You might as well stay until the storm's over."

She followed him into the living room. "Sit," he instructed, pointing to the couch. "I'll get you a towel."

When he returned with the towel and a hot cup of tea, Sally had her head cradled in her hands, but she'd stopped crying. She turned her face up towards him and he had to clear his throat and look away. "Thank you," she whispered.

He sat across from her on the wooden coffee table that had come with the house and waited until she had taken her hair down and dried it off. It hung like wet gold around her shoulders. She took her tea, warming her hands around the cup.

"Patients die," Sally began a moment later. "You get used to it. You have to. But when it's a friend…someone you respect…someone you care about…" Her chin trembled. "I didn't fight hard enough for Relena's life."

"According to all reports, you did everything possible," he stated.

She shook her head. "There must have been something I didn't do, something I overlooked. I can't stop thinking about it. She was fine! She was happy. And then…she was gone. And I couldn't stop it."

Wufei combed his fingers through his hair. "Well, that makes two of us, woman." Sally shot him a puzzled look. "I couldn't stop it either."

His words had some impact, as her shoulders began to relax. "It wasn't your fault," she told him quietly.

"Any more than it was yours," he replied.

They stared at each other for a long minute. Something snapped between them and before Wufei could make himself stop, he was on top of her on the couch. Her tea cup lay on the floor, the dark liquid soaking into the carpet, and he couldn't care less. She was kissing him back, hot and hard, as eager to rid him of his clothes as he was to get hers off.

He marveled at the beauty of her body. She might have been a few years older than he, but one would never know it from looking at her perfect figure. She opened up to him and he took the invitation with a muffled groan of pleasure.

"Wufei," she moaned into his ear, enticing him to thrust harder, faster.

Her release came first, but he followed soon after, collapsing on top of her, sweaty and satisfied in a way he never had been after sex before.

She sighed and turned her face into his neck. "I thought you didn't find me attractive."

"Woman." Wufei lifted himself up onto his elbow to look down at her. "Don't be all feminine. I've wanted you for years."

He might have been content to stay entwined with her on the couch for the rest of the night, if not for the sudden buzzing sound from his communicator.

"Shit." He pulled out of her warmth with great reluctance.

"It's all right," Sally told him, her blue eyes clouding over. "I'll just clean up and get going."

"Stay," he commanded as he pulled on his pants. Softening his tone, he added, "I'll be right back."

When he returned to the living room twenty minutes later, she was dressed in his abandoned shirt and nothing else as she scrubbed the tea stain out of his carpet.

"Sally." She looked up and smiled, her smile fading when she caught sight of his expression. "I have to go."

"I understand," she said, standing up. "Duty calls."

"Heero's been spotted," Wufei said, letting the secret spill from his lips with ease that amazed him. How was it that he trusted this woman so much, when he made it a personal habit not to trust anyone? Had one fantastic bout of sex managed to break down all of his walls…or had she been chipping away at them for years? He couldn't think about it right then. He had his assignment, straight from Lady Une herself.

"I'm being sent to bring him in."

To Be Continued