J. stepped off the shuttle, bag in hand, as D.'s chief aide and two of the guards came sailing towards him.
"You're not supposed to be here," the aide, Evelyn Rose, said to him, a note of distress underlying her voice.
"I want to see D.," he told her. She just shook her head reluctantly. J. frowned. Evelyn Roe had spent her entire life attending to D.--twenty years of trying to anticipate and cope with the woman's wildly changing moods. It was not a life that J. would wish on anyone, but someone had to deal with D. on a day-to-day basis. He felt a twinge of guilt. If he had been a better man, he might have embraced her right then, but instead he turned to the guards, handing his bag to the nearest one. "Begin unloading," he barked. Then, to D.'s aide, "Walk with me."
She glided across the hangar beside him. It had been G.'s idea to use her as a sort of living doll when she was just an infant. The child had the power to soothe D. when she was upset and cheer her when she was depressed. When D. was lucid, she ignored Evelyn Rose, as if the idea of occasionally needing a child to comfort her offended her rational sensibilities. And then, there were times when not even God Himself could do anything to touch D.'s irradiated brain.
Evelyn Rose was a pretty young woman with big, brown, almond-shaped eyes, smooth, transparent, white skin, and long, brown hair. She was also extremely smart—there had been talk of using her in Operation Meteor, but J. had squashed that idea. She was too compassionate, too loving. How she had escaped being infected with D.'s madness was one of the greater mysteries of the universe.
"How bad is she? And how long has she been like this?" he asked.
"Two days, roughly," she answered, "Forty-seven hours, if you want to be specific."
He glanced over at her and saw for the first time the dark circles around her eyes. "How many hours of sleep have you had since it started?"
She held up three fingers.
"Tell me where she is, and go get some sleep. You're no good to us exhausted."
"She's in the mobile suit hanger. I gave her a tranq. six hours ago to keep her from getting violent again. She punched out one of the guards yesterday."
Dr. J. nodded and turned down the appropriate side corridor. The bay was almost empty right now—the Taurus mobiles dolls and suits were out on a strike. At the end of the hangar, closest to the doors, were five sets of brackets designed for much larger suits. Three were empty, one held a partially completed mobile suit, and the Dragonbreak rested in the fifth. D. was there, in an astrosuit with the helmet off, sitting on the gundam's foot, slumped against the leg. She had butchered her hair again, he noticed as he descended. It stuck out in stiff, uneven bristles. She had nicked her scalp in several places, and her head was dotted with fresh scabs. Silently, he cursed whoever had been stupid enough to let her have scissors. The guard yesterday should be thankfully she hadn't gutted him with them.
She was awake, babbling. "So pretty…such prettiness in a death-machine," she whispered as she stroked the cold metal of the gundam's foot. "I will make many deaths in you, my beloved dragon. Such a pretty, pretty war we will make." Dr. J. settled within her line of vision but just out of easy reach. He had no illusions about being able to escape her should she decide to hurt him—she was too great a warrior for that—but he didn't want to startle her. "You come, little ugly broken herald…" she hissed when she noticed him. "Herald of Doom! Yes, that's you, Johansen, Herald of Doom and gloom and doomy death." She stared defiantly at him, challenging him with her eyes.
She had taken off her mask. It lay at his feet, looking grim and cold. He reached down and picked it up with his left hand, the mechanical pincer that replaced the limb he had lost years ago. To think, they had both forfeited so much to this war, and it still had not been won. Most people doubted that there was still a war raging, but he knew the truth—until her soul was still, there would be no peace.
He knelt down on the edge of the gundam's foot and seized her by the chin. She had shut-up when he had picked up the mask, watching him with wary eyes. She fought—she had to, it was in her nature—but she didn't put too much effort into it. He had used his good hand, his flesh and blood hand, after all. He had learned long ago that when D. was like this, she hated the touch of prosthetics to her skin. When she was her normal self, she didn't want to be touched at all.
He studied her face for a moment. The right side of her face, the part that was normally covered by the half-mask. It was a twisted mess of corded, red scar tissue. The cartilage surrounding her right nostril was melted into the skin of her cheek, and her eyelid was so puckered and pinched that it would not close all the way. Somehow, the eyeball itself had escaped being damaged in the blast, but that was little consolation when he saw what was behind the eyes, lurking in her mind. The corner of her mouth was twisted downwards, so it always seemed as if she were about to cry. She was missing part of her lower lip on this side.
Carefully, he laid the cool metal of the mask over the scars. The mask used suction to adhere itself to her face. "You are still a bastard," she informed him quietly as he stepped back.
"And you're a crazy bitch," he replied without malice. "Come on, it's time you got some sleep." He offered his good hand to her, and she took it.
They had taken Relena straight from the shuttle to this little, windowless room and locked her in. Never bothered to say who they were or why she was being abducted this time. It intrigued her—an enemy who didn't gloat and lord over her. Actually, now that she had time to think about it, this was exactly what Zechs had done when she had been held captive on Libra. Ignored her. Now, that was not so intriguing as it was frustrating.
The room was tiny—a cot, a chair, and a little adjoining bathroom with sink and toilet. Someone had done their best to make the bed comfortable—covering the hard plastic mattress with sheets of foam from packing crates. The blanket used to shield her skin from contact with the foam was a little girl's pink one with a cartoon princess on it. The princess blanket was well-worn with a small hole in one corner. The top blanket was scratchy wool in standard army green. They hadn't given her a light, so she simply sat in the dark and waited.
Eventually, her patience was rewarded. The door opened with a creak, and a young woman entered, carrying a tray. "They didn't turn on the light for you?"
"No," Relena answered quietly.
The woman shifted the tray to her other hand and then reached outside and flicked on the lights. Relena blinked furiously as her eyes tried to adjust. "Sorry about that," the woman apologized, "Things have been kind of crazy these past few days."
"I imagine so if you're launching a revolution."
The woman ignored the bite in Relena's voice and set the tray down on the bed next to her. "Is the bed comfortable?" She sat down on the far side of the tray. "Those cot mattresses are horrible without the extra padding."
"Where am I?" Relena asked, cutting straight to the chase.
The girl opened her mouth to answer then paused, frowning. "Damn, I forgot the serial number. It's a small space station orbiting an abandoned mining colony. L3 cluster. We move around so much that sometimes I forget where I am." She laughed, and it was a pleasant sound. She was a few years older than Relena but slightly shorter with an Asian cast to her features that hinted at mixed parentage. "At least here is pretty nice—I spent a couple of months living on a shuttle with four other people. Talk about close quarters."
Relena eyed her suspiciously, "Why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?"
"Being nice to me—it won't get me to trust you."
The woman scooted back on the bed so her back was against the bulkhead and pulled her knees up against her chest. She wore a brown jumpsuit, stained and torn here and there. No insignia. Nothing that denoted rank or even suggest she was paramilitary. Maybe she wasn't—maybe she was just a mechanic or something mundane like that. But that didn't absolve her—she was an admitted one of them and apparently had been for quite a while. "Do I have to have a reason to be nice to you? Maybe I just heard they were bringing a girl my age aboard as a prisoner, and maybe I felt a little sorry for her and wanted to make things a little more comfortable for her. Everyone doesn't have some deep desire to manipulate you."
Relena sighed, still frustrated and on guard. The woman's attempt to set her at ease followed a familiar interrogation technique. Since Mariemaia's Uprising, Lady Une had been rigorous in her drilling Relena in interrogation techniques, ways to bear torture, etc. The basic tenant of all Une's teaching was to trust no one. It was a lesson she ahd already half-learned from her term as Queen of the World and before that, the assassination of her foster father…finding out that Darlian wasn't her biological father…the confrontation with Dr. J….the attack on St. Gabriel's…Heero... It all boiled down to her not being able to trust anyone—not even this woman even though Relena suspected it was her princess blanket they were sitting on.
"Are they going to try to ransom me?" she asked after a few moments.
The other woman shook her head. "Maybe later—I got the feeling that your capture was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Completely unprepared for."
"Great," Relena muttered sarcastically. "Do you people generally just make stuff up as you go along or was this a one-time thing?"
The woman sighed and a small frown wrinkled the skin in between her delicate eyebrows. "Happens just enough to keep us all hopping." It sounded like there was more she wanted to say, so Relena stayed quiet. Instead of continuing, she yawned mightily. "Oh—sorry, I haven't slept really in two days." She looked at the watch on her wrist—a bulky thing that looked like it could take a direct blow from a spanner-wielding maniac and survive—"Oh, lordy, I've got to be on the bridge in four hours for my watch." She turned to Relena and smiled, "Sorry that I have to cut this short. It was nice getting to meet you." She was up, on her feet, and half out the door before Relena could even think of responding. "By the way," the young woman called over her shoulder, "My name's Evelyn Rose." Then, the lock clicked shut, and she was gone. At least the lights were on this time.