Chapter Eight
I
Out of the shadows, into the light. The sun hurt his eyes but only briefly, and once he recovered from the assault he stepped beyond the threshold and into the despicably civilized world beyond.
Heero departed the place that had been his desolate home for the past month. He had stayed there long enough, he knew, too long really, and would have to move on soon.
Were he more naïve, he might have fooled himself into believing he could leave without informing Odin Lowe of where he was going and never return to the counteroffensive base, but he knew better than that. Odin would find him regardless of where he went or what he did. He half-believed Odin could find him in the seventh ring of Hell, if Hell existed.
He had no intentions of trying to escape his former mentor's presence, though. Odin was essential to his mission, if not the primary factor for it as well, though if he were not the primary factor, Heero did not know what was.
His thoughts were far from Odin this morning, as well as from the counteroffensive and the damnable mission. Rather they were on his surroundings, trying to place any subtle difference.
There was none.
Whoever was following him was undeniably good, so good, in fact, that even Heero was almost unnerved by him. Still, he was not good enough to escape his awareness. Heero, trained from youth, had always been good at spotting a tail, and now was no exception, although he was not spotting it so much as he was sensing it.
He had yet to actually see a sign of his stalker. One thing was already clear, however: when at last he did see him, he could not be allowed to live. Better he should kill him immediately and without interrogation than to let him live in hopes of sucking some vital information out of him only to be killed in return. He had never been one for questioning anyway. If he wanted to hear someone's pathetic sob story, he would buy them a beer and invite them over. Perhaps that had been one of the biggest differences between himself and Quatre: Quatre believed in the goodness of all humanity and that people were forced to do bad things by their own subconscious pain, a very Freudian concept, and Heero just didn't care.
His hands were shoved into the pockets of his dark trench coat, his right gripping one of the guns he carried with him, his left poised to grip the other should something prevent his dominant hand from acting. He was prepared to kill his stalker if he became visible for even one moment.
He would be entering the city soon; however, this was no hindrance. If he caught sight of the one pursuing him he would empty the contents of one gun into him and then proceed to empty the second if he deemed it necessary, whether they were in public or not. He could escape the authorities without any problem, and none that knew him in the counteroffensive would have any objection to his actions.
He had finally informed Odin of the circumstances, to which Odin had responded simply for him to do as he wished, and Yuan-Chen would never have found himself in this position to begin with. And Heero knew that, if placed in this situation, Odin would do the same. He practically already had.
As much as he wanted to die, to be shot down by a pursuer of whom one was aware the entire time was simply disgraceful, and while Heero couldn't care less about dying with dignity or honor, he found the idea of being gunned down amid a crowded street repulsive.
He entered the city and passed throughout it without incident.
It was a gray morning over the Spanish countryside, but there was enough light to make him fully visible as he stepped out of the woods. He hesitated briefly on the threshold of the forest, scanning the field ahead of him and the woods that bordered it. He saw nothing but he knew he was not alone all the same.
He withdrew his gun, held it firmly at his side. He turned up the collar of his coat and lowered his head, then stepped out into the open, half-expecting to hear the gunshot before his foot even touched the ground.
He had not always been so unnerved by his pursuer. It was not the first time he had ever sensed he was being followed, and at first this new stalker hadn't made the slightest impression upon him. They were acting no differently than they had when first he became aware of them, but he could sense something new in their constant pursuit of him, something that caused him to carry four guns with him this morning, two in either of the outer pockets of his trench coat, one tucked into the waist of his pants, the fourth secured to his left ankle.
Desperation.
The word struck him as he walked parallel to the woods and he found it strangely accurate. There was desperation in the chase now, the kind of desperation that meant whoever had employed the one who followed him was running out of time to attain whatever it was they wanted from him. Desperation that could lead to desperate measures being taken, which in turn could result in lives other than Heero's own being taken, which simply could not be allowed.
It was this desperation that unnerved him, and it was this desperation that convinced him that the tail had been sent by Treize Kushrenada.
Running out of time…possibly. Odin had said he believed something was about to happen in Greece, and if it were something major, that would account for someone being sent to Spain to see what information could be found there.
He was sure he had supplied nothing. He had always made sure he no longer sensed that he was being watched before going to the base, and once he left he did not feel them again until he had reached the city, nor had he ever gone where he intended to go today when he even suspected he was being followed. Everywhere else he went was inconsequential. He wondered which of the two was more important to him: the counteroffensive or the one he was going to see, the closest thing to a friend he had ever known. Which would cost him more to lose, and which could he not afford to lose at all? Would he trade the lives of all those involved in the counteroffensive for the one he walked toward now? The answer was simple, shameful: yes. He would trade the lives of all those people for just one, and he could do it without regret. It would even get him the only thing he had never been able to get for himself: his death. He could lead his stalker to the base and let everyone there die, and then Odin Lowe would kill him for it. It would be swift, it would be brutal, and ultimately, it would be an end.
But he would not do it, not even for his death.
Something moved in the woods to his left. He swung around, gun raised, and for one moment he knew he was looking into his stalker's eyes, then the shadow pivoted and sprinted through the forest.
Heero ran into the woods after it.
He saw the shadow again in a patch of light where the sun penetrated the forest floor. He turned and fired blindly at it. Dust and pine needles flew up in the bullet's wake, but the shadow was unscathed.
He chased it further into the woods. There was no light here, nothing to make a shadow that would warn him of his enemy's approach. It was not a good place for this, whether it turned into a simple duel or a shoot-out.
He ran on. He was familiar with the forest but there was still a chance that his enemy was not, and if he could maneuver the chase to a certain place he had a better chance at getting a clear shot at him.
Running. Over the dry, dusty earth, over rocks and fallen pine needles, over a narrow stream and the stone slope beyond. The pine needles crunched under his shoes, betraying his position with every step. If he listened closely, he could hear their dry splitting somewhere else.
He fired another shot in that direction and ran on.
They passed out of the thickest part of the woods. From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of some vague form changing direction, and he was realized his enemy was trying to get behind him. That was fine, perhaps better.
He ran toward the hill, where he hoped to have a better chance at confronting his enemy. He kept his head lowered in anticipation of a gunshot. He highly doubted that his enemy was unarmed, and he was unnerved that there had been no other assault on him yet.
The figure darted in front of him again, and as he aimed his gun at it, it fell back behind.
What the hell were they doing?
At last he spotted the hill up ahead of him. It seemed, up until one stood at its crest, that one could simply run up one side and down the other, but an act of erosion had made that impossible. The hill ended at its crest in a nine-foot drop-off, which Heero intended to use to his advantage.
He sprinted up the hill. He could hear his pursuer breathing behind him now but he could not turn to see his face, for if he did he would stumble, literally, into his own trap.
Holding the gun at his side, he leapt over the drop-off. He struck the ground on his feet and turned in time to see his pursuer fall from the drop. It was a woman, he saw with no shock or disdain, around his size and age, and his eyes bulged at the initial thought that it was Relena.
The woman landed on her side. The still air rang out with the sound of her right shoulder cracking. She cried out and continued to roll, stopping finally only inches from his feet.
He cocked the gun again and aimed it at the spot between her eyes.
Her eyes — two pale orbs of green — opened and she looked up at him. She looked nothing like Relena this close; her face held none of Relena's innocence but rather a strange, wild beauty, a face not of soft curving angles but sharp feline points.
She laughed quietly, then winced as the pain in her shoulder flared again. "Heero Yuy," she said. "Takeru Hanasaki." She spat on his shoes. "Your mother was a whore."
Where others would have been offended, he was unfazed by this. He only remembered his mother when he chose to do so, and her good dignity was of little consequence to him.
His finger tightened on the trigger, and he wondered why he hadn't pulled it yet.
"What are you waiting for, Takeru? Has the perfect soldier actually forgotten how to perform a task as simple as firing a gun? If so, then–" She sprang to her feet and ran, clutching her injured shoulder. He followed after her. She was running even faster than she had before, and he could not gain on her.
Her laughter floated back to him as he followed, he the pursuer now. He brought the gun up again, leveled it at the back of her right knee, and fired.
The bullet hit its mark this time.
With a shrill, piercing scream that could have been in reality a laugh the girl dropped to the ground. She lowered her head and shielded her neck before he could get off a shot at those vital locations too, then, as though oblivious to him, bent to examine her wound.
Keeping the gun trained on her, he walked toward the place where she had fallen. She collapsed against the ground as he approached, her lips pulled back to reveal a demon's grin.
She looked up at him warily, but her grin remained.
"Aren't you going to interrogate me first?" she asked mockingly. Her auburn hair, dark red in the shadows, fanned out around her head like a fresh pool of spreading blood. "Why kill me when you don't even know who I am?"
"I don't care who you are." He knelt and pressed the gun to her temple.
"Very well then." Her eyes lit up and her hand rose, and too late he saw the blade strapped to her palm. Before he could move she cupped the back of his head, the very gesture of a lover, and the blade was buried into his scalp.
He felt the disorientation immediately. His mouth fell open — not from shock but reflex — and his vision blurred, and suddenly all he could feel or sense was the cold length of steel imbedded along his skull and something warm and pleasantly thick streaming down his neck.
The girl, still holding the blade to his head, pushed him back and sat up. She slid her other arm around him and, as he struggled futilely against the darkness that threatened to overtake him, she lowered him onto the ground, as a groom lowering his new bride onto the marriage bed.
"My name is Aphrodite Delankos," she said. "Remember that when I receive orders to kill you."
He fought to stand up and couldn't, and then she was gone. In another moment, so was he.
II
When he awoke, the sun had begun to go down in the far west, painting the forest in an overly bright shade of orange that hurt his eyes. He groaned as they opened, then quickly turned his head away from the light.
The disorientation was gone, but the memory of what had happened was not. His eyes darted rapidly around the cluttered woods, but he saw nothing.
After a few minutes he realized that he was alone. It was entirely possible that she could be elsewhere in the forest, waiting on him to regain consciousness, perhaps with something other than a blade in her hand, but he knew she was not, just as he had always known when she was following behind him and when she was not. She had had her wound to tend to, and with her quarry disabled, her work was done for the evening.
He pulled himself up into a sitting position. Instantly he realized that his gun was gone. Whether he had dropped it when the blade had been pressed into his head or the girl had taken it from him, he didn't know, but it was not lying on the ground beside him now.
He reached into his trench coat, feeling for the second gun. It seemed she had removed it as well.
He reached down, checked his ankle. The holster was still there to taunt him, but the gun was not.
There seemed to be one place she hadn't thought of to look for a gun. He could feel, as he bent, the cold press of the fourth gun against his abdomen.
He withdrew the revolver. It truly was untouched, fully loaded, and not disabled in any way.
With a low grunt he rose to his feet. The wound on the back of his head, dry now, throbbed fiercely but his face made no change.
The ground upon which he had lain was not as bloodied as he had expected. The wound had bled a good amount, enough to leave him unconscious for so long, and the dust beneath where his head had fallen was dyed in a sickeningly dark shade of crimson, but the length of this red area was surprisingly small.
He touched the back of his head, felt along the wound. Indeed it was dry now, dry and sore enough to make him wince at the slightest touch. He wondered briefly how severe the injury was, then decided it could not be too bad if it were dry and he were alive.
Aphrodite Delankos. The name was undeniably of Greek origin, and Heero had no reason to suspect that there might be yet another force rising in Greece that could involve himself or the counteroffensive altogether. Treize had sent the girl.
He would have to inform Odin of this.
Gun in hand, Heero proceeded through the woods. They were dark now, pitch black in certain areas, but he knew his way through them well enough not to need the light.
He went in the same direction as he had been going when he had at long last spotted the girl, away from the place he would soon be leaving, away from the counteroffensive's base. This might be his last chance to visit his friend after what had just happened, and he intended to take advantage of it. He needed it right now. Later, once he had said all that needed to be said at the moment, he would go to the base and allow Yuan-Chen to provide any necessary medical aid to the wound. It would not be the first time he had had to do this.
His eyes went briefly down to the scar that snaked down the length of his left hand and disappeared underneath the sleeve of his coat, where it continued up his wrist.
No, this definitely would not be the first time.
He continued onward. It had been too long since his last visit, but he knew his friend didn't care. His friend didn't care about anything, not even Heero himself.
The woods he trudged through needed no description. To his mind they were all the same, one of the few remaining areas that had yet to be touched by man.
At last, however, he came to a place that had been touched. In the midst of a small clearing in the woods stood a large, gray building, bearing no evidence of ownership or use. It was nonetheless secluded, though, for the twisting path that led through the forest to it had years ago grown over, and to his knowledge, he was the only human who ever came here. It was here that his companion waited for him.
He disengaged the locks on the entrance and slipped quickly into the building, though he knew there was no one there to see him do it. After so many years of practicing it, discretion had become a habit with him.
There were no windows anywhere on the structure, nor was there any natural light. Heero flicked a switch on the wall to his right and, one by one, a series of incandescent bulbs overhead came on, providing just enough light to allow him to see where he was going.
Whatever the building had once been, it maintained nothing of its former glory. Any interior walls that may have once existed had been torn down; anything that may once have stood or been kept within those walls had been taken out. It was merely one great empty room now, cold and lifeless.
Or perhaps not entirely empty. Not really, though at first it seemed that way. At the back of the room, hidden in the shadows, was a staircase, and at the foot of the staircase lay the one he had come here to find.
This lower level was already lighted, just as it always was when he came and always would be when he left. The lights were powered by a generator, which strangely had been left when the building was abandoned.
He crossed the room to the staircase, silently, quickly, unaware still that he was taking unnecessary precautions; likewise he descended the stairs. He paused only after coming away from the foot of them, long enough for his passive blue eyes to register that what he had come here to find was indeed still here, intact and untouched since his last visit. The last remaining Gundam, the only one that had not been destroyed after the battle with Mariemaia, stood at the far edge of the room, unrestrained, a passive war machine.
God, but he needed this now.
He tucked his gun into one of the pockets of his coat and started toward the Gundam. Its eyes, dull, lifeless in the shadows, stared down at him like the eyes of a malevolent beast, a modern version of an angry Roman god.
Will you pass your judgement upon me now? Or haven't I sinned for you enough?
The Gundam gave no answer. He had never really expected one, not after so many years of silence between them. He climbed up into the cockpit. It was pleasantly cold inside its metal confines, and the chill penetrated his flesh to the very marrow of his bones.
The only sanctuary he had ever known.
He settled into the pilot's seat. The Wing Zero gave no protest to his intrusion. Heero wondered briefly when he had come to think of the Gundam as a living being, then decided that it did not matter.
The helmet he had worn when he had first used the Zero system — the helmet that had originally been used as a direct link between the system and his brain — lay beside the seat like a child's discarded toy. He picked it up, ran his fingers across the smooth surface of the convexity where it curved to fit his head.
Something so monstrous as the system should never have been created, he thought, and he slipped the helmet over his head.
There was a small black disk concealed in a split in the control panel. He retrieved it and inserted it into a slot in the system's central components.
The silence was broken by a low hum as the disk activated the program he had installed into the system. The viewing portal in front of him cleared, at first to reveal the empty room around him, then promptly faded to black, broken only by three words printed across the screen in white.
Zero System activated
He sighed and fell back against the seat. The pain in the back of his head was down to a dull throb now, and the slight pressure the helmet put on it kept him carelessly aware of the wound there and how it had been inflicted.
The program on the disk was a battle simulation, designed in a bunker in the lowest floor of the base against the knowledge of Odin Lowe using the data he had taken from the salvaged systems of mobile dolls. It required no commands and no responses, only a brain strong enough to accept what it was shown.
Often, Heero had only been able to come so far in challenging the program. Tonight, however…
He had only one more conscious thought before his mind was surrendered completely to the system: that he would find the girl, Aphrodite, and he would kill her. Then there was nothing but the system. His drug, his addiction. The only thing that had ever not cared about him as he didn't care about it.
Would he trade them all, every one of their lives, for this? Yes, their lives and then some. His own if the system demanded it. Perhaps it would in the upcoming battle. Then what? Hell, if it existed, and he did not believe it did. Then emptiness. That was real; it had to be. An emptiness where the souls of the blessed and the damned were cast equally, thrown atop one another like the corpses after a massacre. Better he should go into that emptiness than into Hell — if he were in the latter, perhaps one of the demons assigned to torment him would be one of those he had killed.
These things were far from his mind now, however. There was no Grecian girl acting as a shadow to his every move; there was no man standing behind her who had died two years ago yet lived still. There was only the system. There was no Grecian-German army rising in the east, nor was there any counteroffensive. There was only the system. There was no Odin Lowe, no Xing Yuan-Chen, and there had never been a Hanasaki Sakura to connect them all. There was only the system. There was no Heero Yuy, nor was there anymore a boy who had once been called Takeru. There was only this. There was no war, no peace, no life, no death. There was no Heaven or Hell. There was, ultimately, only this. Only this.
So far gone was he that he did not even feel it when, in the simulation that played out on the viewing screen, he died.
III
The first thing Rhyn Tolkien had noticed when he stepped off the plane was how much colder Germany was than Greece. He had dressed warmly enough, in the designated uniform of Alsirae Trecais's legion of soldiers underneath a large coat, but his usually warm clothes were not sufficient to keep the chill from immediately sinking into his blood. That chill would stay with him for the next week. Later, once he found himself sleeping not in the tight, cramped, but comfortable-enough soldier's quarters but rather in a cell so cold he could see his own breath, he would come to believe that the chill had been a premonition of some sort.
He then noticed how different the base was than the former palace of Thessaloníki. It was graceful, yes, as everything Treize Kushrenada touched seemed to be, but in an Old World way, lacking the grandeur of the Italian-Greek influences. While the Greek base all but shone in its deep, rich colors of ivory and gold and occasionally crimson, this one was dull, gray stone upon white mortar, with all the depressing harshness of a Medieval servant's quarter.
He noticed many other things after his arrival, most with some degree of amusement. However, he failed to notice the officers watching him wherever he went.
The first few days in Germany were uneventful. They unloaded the shipment of titanium — Rhyn was even one of the lucky ones chosen to help with the unloading manually, and the next morning he awoke with an almost disabling ache in his arms — and then saw it all properly into the designated section of the base, where it would be used to construct the next unit of mobile suits. These suits were most likely only for backup, they were told, to be used only as a last resort. This was the only thing they were informed of that Rhyn didn't already know.
He had spent much of his time with the soldiers who were to pilot the Gemini suits. Only a few of them had had any real mobile suit training, he realized, and next came the realization that most of these men were going to die, assisted to their deaths by Rhyn himself.
After this, he was no longer able to stay in their company for very long.
He kept to himself all that final day. His cold had begun to taper off and he could again breathe normally without periodically having to leave his assigned chamber for fresher air, meaning he could avoid the camaraderie that was beginning to form amongst the ranks.
Perhaps it was his antisocial behavior that first alarmed the higher-ups of the organization to him. He would, later that evening, consider this possibility, surprisingly with no regret over what he had done.
He rubbed his eyes and sat back in the chair lazily, hardly in the manner of the proper soldier he was supposed to be acting as now. He had been sitting in front of the computer for hours, sorting through the base's files, searching for anything that would provide a lead to the identity of Treize's benefactor. He was finding nothing instead, and getting quite sick of it.
Not that he would be able to use the information were he to find it anyway. This mission had restricted him to use only the base's computers, and any messages sent to Odin Lowe could be traced immediately back to him.
"Bloody hell," he whispered, and shut the computer off. Too many precautions had been taken to conceal the name of the benefactor; if he hadn't found it yet, he probably never would.
He found himself thinking of the night the former Lightning Count, Zechs Marquise, had learned of the Council's involvement with Treize, the night that Marquise had come within an inch of killing him. Marquise had been shocked but not shocked enough, alarmed only because it meant that Treize was being backed by someone of enormous power and influence. But he didn't know just how powerful a high member of the Council was, or what their involvement with Kushrenada could mean for the Earth. He hadn't lived on Earth since the Council had come into power; he wasn't fully aware of what could happen if Treize found favor with more than one member, that under proper influence the Council could award him control over whatever nation he wanted, over the entire Earthsphere if he so desired and so pulled strings, and the power to crush any who opposed him. Perhaps the full extent of what Treize's connection to the Council could mean would have struck Marquise a little harder if he had been informed that the Council could also pull the strings that would give Treize control of the colonies as well.
Marquise's quarrel was with Treize and Treize alone, not the powers behind the throne or even those who would see another war come into place. Treize symbolized all of that for him.
But would that be enough? When the time came to go to war, not the physical battle itself but the political one as well, would that personal quarrel be enough to ensure that what needed to be done was?
Rhyn got up from the chair, started for the small sofa on the other side of the room. He was a craving a drink at the moment and — glancing up at the clock — he estimated that in another hour or so the lounge would have cleared out enough to allow him to raid the bar without drawing much attention to himself.
His thoughts of going through the liquor cabinets — did they have anything good in Germany? — were interrupted by a sudden fierce pounding at the door of his quarters.
"Oh, piss off," he mumbled thickly, sniffling and rising from the sofa at the same time, knowing fully well that whoever it was wasn't going to piss off, then, as a mouse into a wolf's teeth, he went to the door and opened it.
A uniformed officer stood outside, his hard face expressionless as he stared down at the clipboard he held in his gloved hands. He looked up at Rhyn expectantly.
Rhyn brought his feet together and saluted, absentmindedly in the manner of a soldier in England, which had been instilled in him during his time spent in the Imperial Guard there. "Yes?"
"You are Rhyn Tolkien, I presume," the officer stated as though reading it from a cue card.
"No, but I am wearing his underwear."
The officer glared at him, identifying him, as so many did, by his complete refusal to be an obedient little soldier. "Identity code 0831172901?"
"Let me check." He pulled the waist of his pants as though to examine the aforementioned undergarments. "The name's there, but I think this number has got another three or so in it."
The officer gave no sign of amusement. "Would you please step out into the hallway, sir?"
"Oh, I get a 'sir' now, do I?" He stepped out of the doorway.
The club came down hard and fast from his right, connecting with his back across his shoulder blades. He soundlessly went down on his knees, blinded and choked by the shock and the pain of the blow. He could not feel anything below the neck but nonetheless he drew his knees up to his chest and shielded his face with his hands.
Somebody barked out an order in German. A phalanx of footsteps responded, and in an instant he realized that they had been waiting alongside the walls for him to step out, lining the hall as predators biding their time before the kill, starved for his blood.
He futilely tried to push one of those surrounding him away as, deafened by the sound of the others filing in to search his rooms, he felt the shackles being clamped on his wrists.
Someone approached him from the front. He looked up, his eyes tearing not from fear but from pain, and beheld the face of Treize Kushrenada himself, smiling like an angel of death presiding over his latest conquest.
Treize knelt down in front of him, placed one hand against his face. His smile became almost sympathetic.
"You've served Odin well, Rhyn," he whispered, then so quietly that only Rhyn could hear, he added, "Thank you."
Rhyn too disoriented to be confused by this, spat in his face. "I'll see you in hell for this, you bastard," he growled, then again something came down upon him, connecting with the back of his head this time, and as he collapsed even Treize's bright face faded into the consuming darkness.
Author's Notes: This was one of my favorite chapters to write, despite how short it is. It officially ends the first part of Ballad, simply entitled "Prelude," and I feel that it makes a suitable transition. At the beginning of the chapter, another side of Aphrodite's character is introduced, and there are more allusions to the past that I decided to create for Heero in this story. (For any who are interested, more of Aphrodite's connection to Heero is explained in Ballad's sequel.) I suppose it was rather obvious whom Heero was on his way to see when he was waylaid, but I never really intended it to be otherwise. The threat (and perhaps hope) of his own destruction has always been a rather potent drug for Heero, I think. If anyone prefers a little mood music with their fan fiction reading, I've found that Garbage's "Medication" off their Version 2.0 CD works well with this chapter.
In regard to the two Japanese names used in this chapter, usually I do not invert Japanese surnames and given names, but as Aphrodite is European, I found it more plausible for her to do so. For anyone who is curious, names take me forever to choose, and I usually find them in the oddest places. The surname 'Hanasaki' I got out of a friend's magazine, as well as 'Takeru,' although I am very fond of this name. 'Sakura' is simply my favorite Japanese name; it's phonetically very pretty, and I'd been dying to use it in a story, but never got the chance until Ballad.
I've gotten so many great responses about Rhyn. I'm very glad that so many people seem to like him so much. He is rather careless, though, as exemplified in this chapter. This is by far not his final appearance in Ballad, however.