Chapter Five

.:In Space:.

"I dunno what's wrong with him, but it must be something bad…" Quatre said with a worried tone in his voice.

"Yeah, something has to be up." Trowa stated. "To include all of us in this and how you describe how she was on the call is most puzzling…" Trowa looked at them. "Heero's never in trouble, and when he is, he doesn't need our help, I mean…"

Duo looked at Trowa. "Not necessarily true, I saved his butt from the Alliance one, y'know." He said, recalling the time when he first met the chocolate-haired reckless pilot or "Intense" as Zech's called him when he first met him.

"I was surfacing my Gundam when I found his and he was gonna shoot Relena, saying something about being in way over her head or somethin'," The other two pilots looked at each or and sweat dropped. Relena had fallen in love with Heero, yet he had threatened her so many times they didn't bother to count any more.

"So I shot his arm, hard. He got mad, lunged for it, shot him in the leg, then he saw my Gundam, carrying his which I didn't know at the time since I found it on the bottom of the ocean and his so he set torpedo's out after it." Duo said. The others looked at Duo, half shocked, he had tried to destroy his Gundam when Duo and him first met? Then again, they weren't surprised. Heero had and would do anything to keep the mission a secret in the beginning that he was willing to commit suicide when breaking away from the shuttle first.

"Um…" Quatre said to Duo, clearing his throat. "What does this have to do with the Alliance?" Quatre asked, noticing this had nothing to do with their enemy, which had fallen when OZ took over, now it was their mission to destroy and disband OZ forces.

"I was getting there." Duo said. "Relena took him to the Alliance med area in the sub-J P area where Major Sally Po was in charge and they restrained him to find out where and who he worked for. He tried to kill himself by not setting off his parachute when he jumped off of a who-knows how tall building on a cliff." Duo said angry. "He survived the fall, obvious, and broke his upper leg bone. So when I pulled up his Gundam with mine from where he sunk it and blew the crap out of it, he fixed his bone by cracking it into place, which was just sick. Then he took parts he need for his Gundam mine my Gundam and stole it's parts to repair his while I was sleeping and then disappeared to do a mission."

"Wow. Such a memorable experience, is it not?" Said Trowa, fighting to keep from laughing.

"Sally Po was a Alliance major? I never knew that…" Quatre muttered while looking at Trowa who was fighting back hysterical explosions of laughter. Quatre wanted to laugh at the sight but bit his lip instead.

"Yeah, and he still hates remembering that experience. He lost a disk or something I found out." Duo sighed heavily. Trowa burst out laughing (much like he did in Ground Zero when they found out Heero's motive for his custom job on Zero One). Duo started laughing because of the way Trowa was laughing and Quatre looked at the two of them like they had gone mad.

"We need to behave." He told them sternly. "Remember, Noin was serious!" Quatre shouted at them, making them give him their utmost attention.

With a jolt and bump, they landed onto the track and runway for the airport and shuttle lift off center. The shuttle was quickly maneuvered by Duo, the Gundam pilot for Deathscythe. He parked the shuttle as soon as he could and told everyone to 'pile out'.

"Well, we'd best hurry." Quatre said anxiously. "Relena sent us one of her own private cars for us." He said. They quickly filed out and got into the car waiting outside the shuttle for them.

"Wow." Duo said, looking at the black car with darkly tinted windows.

"Let's go." Trowa stated, walking leisurely to the car, he opened the door and got in. Quatre got in next to Trowa so he had to sit in the middle, then Duo who, like Trowa, got one of the window seats.

The driver was none other than Relena's trusted butler, Pagan. He hit the accelerator and sped off towards the Sanc Kingdom.

After a while, he broke the silence. "I'm so very happy you were able to make it as soon as possible, the Mistress hasn't slept barely a wink except when she cries herself to sleep from this whole ordeal or falls asleep from exhaustion. She's going to come down with something…she never really eats or leaves his side." With that he sighed. They were at the gates of the Sanc Kingdom.

The Gundam boys were speechless. "Whatever happened to him must be bad, right?" Duo half asked, half said.

"Yes, it is." He merely stated, parking the car to the entrance where Noin was waiting.

They all piled out of the car, Quatre nearly tripping from trying to get out in such a hurry to see what was up, not wanting to miss anything. "Noin!" He exclaimed. They all walked up the stone entrance staircase.

"We're here, so what's so wrong with him that you can't talk about on the phone? You could have given away our locations." Trowa grumbled neither of them had gotten any sleep that whole night. They had made it to the Sanc Kingdom six hours after Noin called.

"Come and see for yourself." She turned and walked down the hallway, with the boys following her. She headed towards the Hospital Wing, though they didn't know that until they reached a room. Noin pulled the handle and stepped back for them to enter and then closed the door.

There laying on the bed was a very pale Heero, his arms laying out on the sheet covering his lower body where he was wearing his trade-mark black plants. Connected to his right arm was an IV line, dangling to the liquid filled bag that held sedatives and other medicines required for his recovery. He had strings connected to his chest that led to the heart monitor, which was still too slow for Noin's liking. In a chair lay an exhausted Relena who was in a troubled sleep, her red rimmed eyes showed she had been crying for quite some time.

"My god…" Duo murmured. He looked at the almost to still form of Heero. If not for the slight rising and fall of his chest, he would have swore he was dead, what with the peaceful expression he had in his sleep. Quatre and Trowa were speechless and at loss for words. Now they understood why Noin couldn't bring herself to talk about it.

"H-How long has he been like this?" Quatre stuttered out, still looking at Heero. He had always been the strongest out of the five. Here he was, laying in a bed, showing no movement except for the rise and fall of his chest, which itself looked labored enough as it was.

"He was brought down here sometime during the lunch hour. They did surgery on him and…" Noin looked at the sleeping Relena, who even whimpered in her sleep.

"And?" Trowa asked, looking from Heero to Noin.

"Well, that part I will discuss in the study after we are all alone, without Miss Relena listening. It would break her heart. They put him into a barbiturate coma just yesterday, but he didn't even wake up from the surgery. They said it would be better for his condition if they did that to him." She said. "The study is down the hall, there is much more to discuss. Shall we go?" Noin had been quite good at keeping a strait face, though if Heero didn't get better quickly, she didn't know the affect it would have on Relena.

His bones had been repaired during surgery; the only wound was the bullet hole on his back which had been stitched up neatly.

They all followed her into the study. She shut and locked the door behind her. "What did this too him?" Duo asked. He had never seen his buddy like this before, even though he rarely even saw him before this.

"A bullet. He got shot in the back." She stated.

Trowa looked at her, doubting her words. "Impossible. Heero wouldn't be brought down with a single bullet, even if in the back or not. He's stronger than that, mostly all of us are trained to withstand bullets until we treat our wounds, we do have medical experience before." He said.

Noin reached into her pocket and with drew the sharp thick pin-like needle. It was about half-an inch wide on the bottom and slowly shrunk to produce a point at the end of the bullet. She put it on the table between them. "But this is no ordinary bullet." She stated.

"What the hell is that?" Duo said. "This isn't a bullet!" He said, knowing by the looks on everyone's faces that they also doubted that it was a bullet. They had never seen anything like this.

"It's one of a kind." Noin said. "It was made directly for him and only him, to weaken him, but not kill him."

"What makes you so sure?" Quatre said.

"Yeah, who would only want Heero, usually they try going for all of us." Duo said.

Trowa stared at the bullet. "If he was doing a mission in this and they had guns, then wouldn't there be other bullet wounds? Usually, militia takes as many shots as they can at us, yet it hit him in the back, and he got out alive. This is most odd." He said.

"Yes, there were no other bullet wounds. This one," She pointed to the bullet in Trowa's palm, which he was still examining. "Was hit in a certain spot on Heero's back where it would go deeper than normal. Of course, it was a one-in-one shot. He would have to be in a certain position, a very awkward one though. They would have to shoot him in the air when his legs would tense for the fall, leaving his back almost vulnerable. The only thing is that you only have seconds to fire the bullet and then you have to predict its path. They must have been expecting him." Noin said.

They looked at her. She continued on. "I need you here to help figure this out. Also for Heero's sake, his body and mind is under a lot of stress. So much that in the operating room he-he…" She took a deep gulp of air and then decided to let the bombshell fall.

"His heart stopped and they had to use defibrillation on him. The bullet was deep in his body and he lost a lot of blood. He's been stressing about something and I know that much because of this." She displayed a disk, the one that doctor found concealed on him.

Duo took the disk and then shoved it into the nearby computer. 'Thank goodness we're in the Study.' Duo huffed. He logged on and tried to upload the disk. The other pilots stood up and walked over to help decode the disk. It took fifteen minutes for them to decode it and even then they had to decipher the data.

"Well, seems like he has some secrets he doesn't want anyone to know." Duo huffed as the screen was refreshing to display the decrypted data. They looked at the screen. It was still gibberish.

"But we deciphered it!" Quatre exclaimed.

"Seems like he doesn't want anyone to open up this file." Duo said thoughtfully. Then a screen popped up. A weird ring tone came up with a girl singing a verse of something. 'I tried to kill my pain…but only brought more…so much more.'

"Ok, so we already knew that he is a suicidal maniac, but this really pushes the line!" Duo said exasperated.

They gazed at it. 'Salvation Password.' Said the box with a little place to type in the code. "So, that's why it wouldn't completely decipher it.

"Heero never struck me as a type of religious guy." Quatre spoke, still gazing at the screen until he heard a soft click, but brushed it off, thinking it was only the computer and the many odd, but sometimes funny sounds they make.

"He's not." Came a young woman's voice. They looked to the doorway.

There stood Relena.

TBC

Author's note: This chapter makes up for the really short one last time; sorry 'bout that! -Red Tail