Thought Patterns
Chapter 04: Version Two
I've been awake for thirty seconds, and already checked off "crappy day" on the list. In my exhaustion, I forgot to turn my alarm off last night, so while I really don't need to be awake at five thirty today, I am. But hey, it's me, and heaven forbid I'm allowed to fall back asleep after waking up. Nope, I'm wide-eyed, decidedly not bushy-tailed, and, uh, hungry as all hell.
Today registers itself even further as a Strange Day in the book of All Strange Days when, upon walking into the living room en route to the kitchen, I spot Duo already awake and staring, silently, into space. Can you say, "Twilight Zone?"
"Duo?" I ask, scrunching my eyebrows together in concern, as it's not normal for Duo to be up before me, let alone at five thirty in the morning, and for it to be quiet? Has someone died?
Duo blinks, shaking himself slightly and turning back to me. "Huh? Oh, hey," he pauses to look guilty for a moment before turning back to me. "Did I wake you up?"
"Uh, no," I reply, "my alarm did." He gives me an odd look. "I forgot to shut it off," I clarify. I decline to mention it's set to go off at five thirty every day, and that is has been doing such for the last four months, ever since he moved in.
Duo's mouth presses into a thin-lipped smile. "Well, I'm glad it wasn't me."
He trails off into silence, eyes losing their focus on the wall as he takes a sip of the beverage I hadn't noticed he had. "Duo?" I ask again, "why are you awake?"
"Oh!" he says, coming back to the present from wherever his mind had field-tripped. "Uhm, just a little thirsty," he replies, holding up his drink in evidence, as though I hadn't yet noticed it.
Too bad he's the worst liar I've ever met in my life. Actually, I'll take that back: when he puts in effort, he's fucking flawless, despite his proclamation that he "never lies." No one never lies; it's just not plausible. But Duo usually doesn't lie about anything important, not even in the form of sugarcoating. And right now, he's telling the truth, just a very small sliver of it. And, unfortunately for him, I've known him a little too long, and a little too well, to be caught up in whatever he says to try and fool me. Sorry, kiddo.
"Duo," I try again, "why are you awake?"
He has the courtesy to look at least a little chagrinned as he looks up at me, wincing slightly, which is strange, since I'm standing in a not-even-remotely imposing manner, being as I'm shirtless and in flannel pants.
"Just thinking, I suppose," he says after a short pause, his voice almost too soft to hear. "Woke up, wanted a drink, and couldn't fall back asleep." He chuckles. "Unfortunately, we didn't quite have the drink I was looking for, so I settled for hot chocolate." We're not even a little bit out of alcohol, so my imagination is left with executive decision on just what, exactly, he'd been looking for.
If I weren't concerned, I'd smile. Just like if I didn't already know what he'd been thinking about, I'd ask. "Wait until we've covered all our bases before you worry about it," I say quietly. He makes a small noise of protest, returning to looking at some nondescript point on the wall. "Right now, it's not your battle to fight, all right?"
Apparently that wasn't the right thing to say.
"What?" he asks me roughly, attention refocusing on me more quickly than I'd have given him credit for. " 'Not my battle,' you say? Then who the fuck's battle is it? Yours?"
I'd be afraid if I had the energy, or the reason. But it's Duo. I know him almost as well as I know myself. He'll continue, and he'll make sense, damn him. I remain silent, meeting Duo's eyes with my own.
"Well, let me tell you something, Mr. I-Fight-My-Own-Battles: you're full of shit," Duo says succinctly. His eyes are a confusing mix of anger and worry, and I'm tempted to sit down, just so I don't fall over. "It's everyone's battle -- everyone who is affected by something is called to fight for their freedom. Or whatever cause the people are fighting for." He scowls. "This stopped being between just you and him when he brought the Preventer Agency into it. Now it's just as much my business as it is yours, as well as Une's, and the rank two buffoon on the third floor who just passed his qualifying test. If there's a breach in the security system, it's everyone's business." He puts down his mug and stands up, walking up so he's standing directly before me. "Do you understand?" he asks, reaching out to grab my arms.
I nod weakly, trying to step backwards, but Duo holds me where I am.
"Do you understand?" he repeats, this time with more emphasis.
"Yes," I say, or try to say, as my voice comes out as something of a croak. I repeat, more solidly, "Yes."
"Good," Duo replies, and I'm met briefly with the anger in his eyes being replaced by relief before Duo does something I'm thoroughly not expecting.
He takes a short, deep sigh, and pulls me into a hug.
I can feel his hands, one on the small of my back, the other curled around my shoulder, shaking slightly. His breath is shaking, too, into the side of my neck, and his whole body joins along, ceasing only as his arms around me tighten slowly.
This isn't a situation I find myself in very frequently, and I suppose I should do, well, something back, and I lift my arms to do that something just as Duo exhales, "Fuck," and lets go of me, spinning around to pick up his mug and head into the kitchen.
As I struggle with my emotional whiplash, Duo calls from the kitchen, "Maybe we should just go out for breakfast, huh?" I hear him rattling around with something on the counter, and I can assume he's putting his mug into the strainer. "Then we can head over to HQ and wait for the others to show up."
I nod, but realize he can't see that, and reply audibly, "Yeah, sure." When I unfreeze and start heading towards the kitchen myself, I recall my wardrobe. "I'm just gonna throw some clothes on," I call, heading back into my room to do so.
Breakfast passes awkwardly and almost silently, and we arrive at HQ around seven, heading automatically towards Une's office. When we get there, her assistant tells us that she's in a meeting, and should be back shortly, and would we like her to page us when she arrives?
Rather than waiting around in the office, Duo and I take up on the assistant's offer, and wander aimlessly through the building, eventually finding our way to the training facility reserved for those of us with more muscle mass than brain mass (otherwise known as the Level 5 Training Facility). We change silently into the light, airy pants and tanks that comprise the training gear, and head out onto the sparing mat.
Sparring with Duo is something I don't do nearly as often as you'd think. Generally speaking, we're too busy to waste time sparring, or we need to save our energy for something more important, like a mission. But on days like today, when nervous energy abounds, we throw each other around a little bit.
While Duo wasn't the strongest of us during the war, and isn't the strongest of us today, his muscle mass has filled out some, making him less the scrawny teenager and more the lean soldier. His specialties are still speed and special operations, but I wouldn't want him to take a swing at me unannounced. The headache and large, stained mark it'd leave wouldn't be nominal.
Not that I haven't gotten a little older, too. Not much taller, unfortunately, but more endurance from a more compact form. Sparring between us is different now than during the war, as during the war the only real hits Duo could manage were from getting in multiple shots in a short period of time. Now he can still manage that, but with a lot more power involved, as well as his slower landing punches carrying a lot more oomph. That, and I don't know how he does it, but the kid's a contortionist. I remember once bending out of the way for a punch and getting a foot to the side of the head. Didn't make that mistake again, but wow, I couldn't have done that. Trowa, maybe. But not me.
We bow to one another briefly as the fight begins, moving to a crouched circle. Duo usually attacks first, feinting and reappearing somewhere completely unwarranted, but he seems to be waiting today. There's no snap of movement, no surge of muscle to trace. I suppose it works with his uncharacteristic silence: he's being patient.
I could outwait him, but I'm wound about as tightly as silk, and I want some outward pouring of this energy. So I attack, using a feint one of my teachers taught me once upon a time, tensing the thigh of my leg, pushing off the other direction, and spinning once I reach my opponent. Never having had me attack first before, Duo doesn't have a catalogue of my moves, though he reacts nicely, blocking my leg's movement with his hip, and throwing a straight arm at my chest, forcing me back.
But he doesn't move again. We're circling one another once more and Duo's eyes are nearly unblinking. It's disconcerting is what it is. This time I just rush him, throwing a kick and a punch in succession, though Duo blocks both, and spins into a roundhouse aimed at my shoulder. I catch his leg and throw it, trying to push him off balance, but he catches himself like the cat he must have been in his past life, slowly rotating and bringing the leg back down, poised defensively all the while.
I say "slowly" when what I mean is that he moved at a lesser pace than our fight. It shows incredible muscle control to do that like he did. And flexibility, to boot.
He throws a quick uppercut at my chin and then a, no, a feint, and brings his knee up to my stomach, leaving me barely enough time to move out of the way and duck his left fist. I throw my leg up and around, bracing one hand lightly on the floor and he ducks it, using his own leg to try and knock me off balance. Sliding my leg back, I grab his ankle and pull myself upright again, forcibly pulling him off balance, letting go when the other leg comes around for my calf.
Flipping back to his feet, Duo backs off, reinstating the circling once more. I'm ready to try a different feint attack when a knock on the glass interrupts. The door opens to reveal an apparently-amused Wu Fei, smirking at us and crossing his arms.
"You guys having fun there?" he asks patronizingly, and takes a couple more steps towards us.
Shocking me with his mood one-eighty, Duo grins and turns to him, coming to a mockingly similar standing position. "Well, we were, I suppose," he answers.
Wu Fei chuckles and drops his arms, coming to stand so the three of us form something of a triangle. "That's good. Une sent me to retrieve you from wherever you'd disappeared to in order to save her secretary an all-building page, and this is only the third place I've had to look." He pivots and gestures for us to come along. "Let's go, huh? Quatre and Trowa went though the backlog files for this security breech a few times and hopefully found something."
Duo and I both nod, though we turn the opposite direction as Wu Fei, heading to change back into our uniforms. Detour included, it takes us about four minutes to reach Une's office, and, as promised, Quatre and Trowa are there, heads bent over what looks like an extremely long IP address written out in big, felt-tip letters on a sheet of paper.
It's actually sort of amusing how intent they are, and how they're standing just nicely inside each other's personal space. Wu Fei and Duo also seem to notice this, or just the big, block letters, and roll their eyes and smirk, respectively.
"Find anything?" Wu Fei asks, coming up to look at the numbers they're studying.
Trowa looks up and nods, though Quatre answers verbally, "We found his on Liming's incoming IP log. It doesn't match up to any of the emails he received, and doesn't look like an IP at all, except for in bits and pieces." He gestures to a piece in the middle. "That's the IP for the security server here at Preventer," gestures to the piece before it, "and that's the access code for the first-class file lockdown. With these, and knowing specifically what he was looking for, anyone could've hacked the system. At least we know how he got the numbers -- must have been an encoded attachment. But the last numbers don't signify anything we recognize." He stood up, crossing his arms, and Trowa followed suit, though placing his hands in his pockets.
Duo and I moved forward to join Wu Fei in looking more closely at the code, and Quatre turned it around so we could peruse right side up. The remaining numbers read, "34502.14168.5878879."
"We tried looking them up," Quatre says helpfully, "and the first two are both colonies, one in the L1 area and the other in the L3 area. The last could be a phone number, but it'd be impossible to tell where." He pauses. "At least with this information. We tried cross-referencing it with the two colonies and it was a negative return."
I know the second one. It's the colony where Kai, Anna, and Karin were. Obviously, their locations have been found, but . . . oh, shit.
"What?" Duo asks, looking at me. Apparently that last bit was out loud.
Ah, well. I'm a dumbass. They're allowed to notice. "Fuck, shit, other obscene terms of idiocy," I groan, reaching up to pinch the bridge of my nose. "I forgot to make any calls. At all. Fuck!"
Duo stares at me for a moment before it kicks in. "Oh, hell. Which one?" He pauses. "Forget that, L3, it's the second one," he amends.
It's probably no shock that the other three were staring at us in fathomable interest now.
"What about the second one?" Trowa asks mildly, unimposing. Best tactic, right there.
Duo and I exchange a glance. "How much did Une brief you on?" I ask.
"All of it, I hope," Wu Fei answers. "Who we believe the culprit is, what we believe he did."
Quatre clears his throat "His, uh, connection to you," he says quietly.
I'm half-tempted to roll my eyes. Duo does roll his eyes.
"Good, then you aren't behind," Duo replies snarkily.
I turn back to the numbers. If the second is the colony, then the first . . . Aw, hell. "The first is to show he knows what happened, the second is a follow up. The first number isn't a colony code at all, it's just dates of birth. For the five of us that survived," I say. Then what's the third?
"Uhm, what?" Quatre asks, perplexed.
I clear my throat. "Karin was born in 173, Kai in 174, and Anna in 175. I was born in 180 and Ethan in 182. It's the five of us that are still alive. As far as Ethan would have known, Carr could have still been alive, too, but this proves Ethan knows he's not," I answer. Looking up, I have a few half-blank looks. So maybe the names were a bit much. "Uhm, Ethan is the so-called culprit. Karin, Kai, and Anna are a few of the failed experiments."
Right. Silence.
"The culprit is fifteen?" Trowa asks, a look of either annoyance or irony on his face.
"Yes," I say. We were fifteen during the war, why's he so surprised? Maybe Ethan's going for dramatic irony. Wouldn't be the first time.
Another silence, then, "That's sort of amusing, actually." Trowa smirks, and the look was irony.
Duo growls. "So what's the third number mean?" he asks, bringing us back to the present.
"Going with the phone number thing, could it be the letters on a dial?" Wu Fei asks. I think I'll give him my place of intelligence in this group. I didn't even think of that.
"'Just try'," I say. He's fucking taunting us.
Duo snorts. "Or 'lust try,' but yours is probably more likely." I scowl at him.
Actually, I think I'm scowling in general. At the irony, taunting, and bizarre humor being put out at its expense. "Little prick."
"Who, me?" Duo asks, raising an eyebrow.
"No, Ethan. He knew we'd catch it. He's fucking toying with us, the little shit." I scowl more. Duo claims I'll one day have scowl lines, like some people have laugh lines. He's probably right.
Wu Fei looks at me strangely. "Une only said he was stronger than you were. What exactly are we up against?"
Uh, good question. That all depends on what skills he's lost, refined, or gained. And how completely nuts he's gone. "Saying he's better than me is an understatement." I cough. "I explained this to Une last night, but she apparently didn't relay it." Again avoiding cockroach versus howitzer. Too much time in a Motel 6. "They created eight of us, total, minus the genetic combinations that didn't make it to birth or through infancy. The first five surviving past infancy didn't have more than just a few of the qualities they needed, so they were deemed 'failures' by the labs. They each had a specialty and an orientation towards whatever that was, but they weren't on a wide enough spectrum. The five failures were Emiko, Carr, Karin, Kai, and Anna, in that order. Two years after Anna was born, Jae was born. He had a good majority of the traits they were looking for, but his personality still chose fields he preferred and centered in, so he was deemed a partial success. I was born three years after Jae, with the ability to focus on all the traits they'd been cultivating, but I had opinions and more personality than they wanted, so I was also deemed a partial success.
"Ethan was born two years after I was with all the traits they wanted, in spades. His mind was easily cultivated and stuck to whatever he was told like glue. Because of that, he was deemed a complete success. And he probably would have been, if they hadn't left him with the rest of us. He listened to us talk about what we thought and eventually developed a sense of self equal to what the rest of us possessed, but he was smart enough not to show it when our superiors were around. Not until he went off his head, anyway." What was with all the long speeches lately? I should just write a bloody report on the whole event.
Quatre was the first to process this information. "So he has exceptional skill in, uh, everything? Or just the skills and tactical things that they wanted him to have?"
"What they focused us in were foresight, strategy, strength, piloting, flexibility of mind as well as body, logical processing, greater capacity for knowledge and understanding, and superior memory capabilities. Also, a lack of opinions and personality were sought after, since they were trying to create a human machine with enough adaptability to keep in society without attracting attention. The five before Jae and I have completely normal psyches, and we drop a notch past that point." Yeah, my lack of personality? Not so much. I just don't express it. Maybe that's why I was a partial success: because I'm naturally quiet. Or maybe that's what they were going for. At this point, I'll never know. And honestly don't care.
"Right. So, we're screwed," Duo says sarcastically, clapping his hands together.
I shake my head. "But Ethan fell from the success scale, I think, when he went berserk at the base. His reactions were slower, his processing slower, even, when he was doing something because he wanted to, rather than because he was told to. In the five years he's had since then, he's been sitting around and getting more acquainted with this ability to reason on his own, so it's possible that he's lost some of the abilities he had." And let's hope so. Or else we really are screwed. Standing, even.
"Possible, but not probable," Wu Fei says pessimistically. "Do we have any leeway against him at all?"
I bite my lower lip. Another rule broken from the Stoic Bastard Handbook. "We, uh, know what he wants?" I ask, crossing my arms and shrugging.
As I'm pretty sure my apartment isn't bugged, Duo's the only one I told about why Ethan went crazy. And what his goal in going crazy, in fact, was. For us all to die: I'm sure that when he'd finished with the rest of us, he'd have shot himself. He doesn't do things half-assed, unlike me.
"We know what he wants," Wu Fei repeats. "Really. And what's that?"
Quatre has a somewhat panicked look on his face, but Trowa just looks curious. They even out well. And I'm avoiding. "He thinks we, the attempts at human weaponry, are something of an abomination. Himself included. When he went berserker at base, he was trying to kill us. Chances are, he still wants us dead, thus his proving that he knows who's still alive, as well as where they are."
I'm receiving a few blank looks. And by blank, I mean that sort of 'good grief, you've grown another head, what shall I think' kind of blank. Eyes, eyebrows, and mouths all in funny directions. You know, except for Duo, who's got this 'great, now you broke them' thing going. And I did not. Don't look at me like that. It's not that hard to comprehend, is it? It's just the world's most perfect human weapon after my skin, after all. Nothing that extraordinary.
Oh, who am I kidding? I should be sitting and hyperventilating in a corner somewhere.
Wu Fei clears his throat. "The best course of action now would probably be to call the other, uh, failed experiments and get them on base for surveillance and protection."
Quatre and Trowa look at him briefly and then nod. Duo raises his hand in an effort to be, I believe, as annoying as possible.
"I've got a question," Duo says, smiling. "Why are we going on about extra protection here when we just got hacked? I mean, it was an inside job, and we're expecting them to be safer here?"
He's got a point. For the most part, anyway. "They should be informed of the situation," I tell him. This much is obvious. "From there, we can work together to come up with the best offensive and defensive strategies possible."
Trowa straightens from his somewhat hunched position over the table the code is resting on. "That's probably our only plan of action, right now. And you're," he looks at me, "the only one who can contact any of these people without some strange questions involved, so the rest of us should try and work out more from the file." He nods. "Quatre and I will go and get started on that."
"I'll go let Une know what we've worked out," Wu Fei says authoritatively, immediately turning and walking out the door.
Duo coughs. "I'll go make coffee," he says cheerily, bouncing out the door after Wu Fei.
Ordinarily, this is where I'd sigh in a much put-upon manner and go after him, making him choose a more productive course of action, but we're all stuck. More than two people working on the file would be overkill, and Duo hates Une. Or at least he wants to see her in several pieces on the floor. The two might be the same thing, but I wouldn't just write it off as such.
The only thing left to do is make a phone call, and such a fun call it will be. All I really have to do is get a hold of Kai and Anna, as they'll definitely pass the message on to Karin. Plus, they're a lot less frightening than Karin and her 'bite me, asshole' point-of-view. No matter that she thinks I'm her cute, sociopath little brother. In fact, that may make the whole thing worse.
And the quicker I make the calls, the quicker I can make sure Duo doesn't feel useless. That's a problem I've noticed he has: if he doesn't have a direct input in whatever situation we're in, he gets depressive, snippy, and quiet. All of which point to what I've decided is his expression of feeling useless.
There's a phone not too far down the hall, and it's a secure line, so hopefully I can make this quick. Or at least less than an hour.
Dialing a number I long ago memorized, I find myself staring blankly at the wall. If Kai answers I'll get a lot of surgical silence and precise questions, certain ones I definitely won't be able to answer, and the eminent feeling of stupidity. If Anna answers, I'll have to deal with an emotional pregnant woman.
Maybe I should just cut my losses and move to the Bahamas. I hear they're the latest I'm-running-from-my-crazed-not-quite-brother location.
"Hello?" a female voice answers from the other end of the phone. Anna.
I clear my throat lightly. "Anna," I say, feeling as awkward as I always do over the phone. Phones are development's way of pointing and laughing at social retardation, in my opinion. "It's me. We have a problem."
Of course she recognizes my voice; she's Anna. "What kind of problem?" she asks immediately, voice hushed.
"An Ethan-shaped problem. He hacked Preventer Headquarters and stole all the organization files we had on the hard drive, and left a cryptic IP return address, proving he knows which of us are still alive, as well as where, and taunting with the words, 'just try.'" There. Whole thing summed into a neat little paragraph. God, if only it were that easy. We'd have been done with this conversation yesterday.
Silence on the line. Then, "You want us there?"
I nod, then pause. Not a vidphone. "Yes, that would be preferable. I'll send someone to pick you up at the airport when I get your confirmation call. You still have my cell?"
Anna snorts. "Of course. Dumbass." With a click, she's off the line. Apparently an over-compensation of seriousness is also a side effect of pregnancy. If not, she took that a lot better than I'd expected.
That wasn't nearly an hour. In fact, I'm not sure it was five minutes. Something of a letdown after all that psyching out. Though, I probably shouldn't rest on my laurels quite yet. Moody pregnant woman is going to be flying here presently, with easily-frightened child and terribly-frightening husband. Joy.
Time to find Duo. The main break room, which is where he'd head if he said he was making coffee, is only a couple halls over, so it's not all that long of a walk to get there.
Lo-and-behold, as I approach the corner before the break room, I can hear Duo's voice in conversation with someone else.
"It's just frustrating," Duo says, and I can hear that same emotion that was in his voice this morning.
Whoever Duo's speaking with sighs. "I understand," they say, and I hear the cool, quiet tone of Quatre's voice. "But you can't expect him to change overnight, can you?"
"Of course not!" Duo exclaims, and my mind's eye shows me a wide movement of his arms, and the way he sets his jaw forward when he really means something. "But every time something comes up in any way related to him, he makes it his business, and his alone. Like we can't help him because, dammit, it's his problem. Even when it's not!" He makes an incoherent noise, and I've stopped moving. "Hell, even it was some guy coming back around 'cuz he shot his brother, we'd fucking help him out. That's what friends do." There is a grinding silence, then Duo chuckles. "Let alone partners."
I think they're talking about me, and I'd move to find out if this wall didn't need so much help standing up. I might be the only thing holding it up, and I'm not gonna let it down.
Duo lets out a frustrated sound, and I hear footsteps, and I realize a few seconds too late that they're headed my way, and Duo rounds the corner to be confronted with my best impression of a headlight begrudged deer.
I rush to compose myself, but Duo has that 'oh hell' look on his face, and I know he knows I was listening. He opens his mouth, then stops, the skin around his eyes tightening. Oh hell on my own, he's reversed whatever sort of apology he'd been forming.
"Why?" he asks. Why what? Why in relation to what he was saying? Why am I a one-man army? Good fucking question.
I swallow. "Because it's how I live," I find myself replying. "And stay alive."
Duo's cheek twitches and he uncrosses his arms, moving toward me. He moves past me and continues down the hall, not saying a thing.
And I'm left standing here in the middle of the hall, not knowing what the hell I just said that was so wrong, but that it had to have been. And I that I should turn around right now.