Author: Sparkle Itamashii

Title: Inheritance

Warnings: Respect the rating. Please see my profile.

Disclaimer: Gundam Wing A/C and its plot, characters, and settings are NOT MINE


Chapter Twenty One

I wanted to nap in the car on the way to the airport but I couldn't force myself to relax. I wanted to sleep at least a little bit on the plane but I couldn't seem to close my eyes for more than a matter of seconds before the unsettling feeling of being on the run again crept through my body and sent adrenaline coursing through my veins. Heero didn't seem about to sleep either; as soon as he was able he had his laptop out, fingers flying over the keys. It wasn't the same laptop as he'd had during the war. This one was smaller and lighter, something he'd made himself half a year ago. Mara slept between us, blanket tucked to her chin and thumb in her mouth and I couldn't lean close enough to Heero to see what he was doing unless I wanted to disturb her.

So I relaxed. I took a few deep breaths and settled down into my little chair with Mara snuggled up to my side, my hand stroking absently over her hair… and I relaxed.

After a while everything in my head stopped running in circles and I calmed down enough to do something I hadn't done in years. I pushed innocence to the back of my mind and pulled the "god of death" in me forward. I put away things like compassion and fear and sanity, replacing them with the clear, collected determination to remain alive no matter what. I allowed myself to forget that a life outside of fight or flight existed. I allowed my past to become my present so that I could become a solider once more.

It was both easier and harder to do the second time. Easier because I knew the patterns already- I knew the way to simplify everything down to a single goal, a single task. I knew how to organize what I knew and use everything I learned to adapt my course of actions. I knew what things could be taken and what should be left behind; what things were important enough to worry over now and what things would be important later. I knew who and what mattered and how to survive like no other human would be able.

But it was harder because I desperately didn't want to have to do it.

I didn't want to be a soldier again. I didn't want to run. I didn't want to hide. I didn't want to fight and I didn't want to kill. I wanted a normal life. Like a man lost in the desert craves water, I craved the simple, easy life I'd been living the past three years. But by the time the aerospace shuttle landed against the side of the little L1 colony and we set foot in the landing dock it was too late. There was no going back now.

"It's not far from here," Heero told me quietly as he hefted the lone bag we'd brought onto his shoulder from the baggage claim circle. "But we are going to have to walk. I don't want anyone remembering us if they haven't got to."

I shifted the still dozing Mara in my arms so that her head lolled more comfortably against my shoulder. "You can stop treating me like I'm the child, Yuy," I said, forcing myself to use his last name. It certainly got his attention but he didn't comment. Instead he turned away and began walking briskly toward the exit.

It was nighttime on the colony still, even though we'd just been through an entire night of our own time. The streets were light with aging yellowed street lamps and I wondered whether they'd ever been replaced since the colonies had first been placed in space. Probably not. There were only a couple of cars on the streets and once we were away from the airport I didn't see anyone at all walking the metallic sidewalks. Above us on the curve of the colony ceiling, the pinpricks of machinery lights flickered in a cruel imitation of the beautiful earth starscape.

The worst part was that I know I would have thought it was a beautiful place, back before I'd ever been to Earth. I would have thought this was an amazing night. Everything was peaceful- I didn't hear sirens, none of the machines were giving off that coarse smelling fog like they did when they were cleaning themselves… It was nice; or it would have been if I hadn't seen so, so much better in my life.

"Wu Fei said he would meet us there," Heero said quietly after a while. "I don't know if he's already here or not."

I grunted an acknowledgement- that was practically the first bit of information Heero had volunteered. "If he's not?"

"We'll find what we need and leave," he said simply.

"Papers… parts…?" I questioned. "What are we looking for?"

"Papers. Documents."

"Do we need them or do we need them destroyed?" I asked, shifting Mara to my other hip to allow some circulation back into my now free arm. We'd been walking for nearly a mile now.

"Both. We need them and then we need them destroyed." He took a breath and I let him alone for a moment, recognizing that he was debating something. When he finally seemed to come to a decision, he stopped and turned, facing me with a very serious look. "It'll make more sense later- I promise I'll explain. When it is safe to do so." He held up a hand as I made to protest. "I know. You're not a kid, you can help… I know that. That's why I'm trusting you to cooperate and wait until it's time."

"How much further," I said quietly, instead of responding.

His eyes narrowed at the words but he didn't admonish me. "We're here."

'Here' appeared to be a blank wall. It was smooth silver like the rest of the buildings on the colony, probably rooted to the very metal ground beneath it, melded to the structure of the colony's hull. The metal was tarnished and ugly looking, dirty from years and years of never being cleaned. It really didn't look like we were anywhere of importance- at least the lab I'd been at had a visible front door. I gave him a skeptical look which he promptly ignored as he turned to face the wall. I watched silently as he placed his palm against one of the metal tiles and it sank, depressing in the shape of his hand.

Clever, I thought. Very clever indeed. Whatever the lab was hiding, it meant to do it very well.

With a grinding of metal and a groan of protest, a section of the wall sank into the building and slid to the left. The opening was barely large enough to fit one person and it was pitch black inside. Wonderful. I arranged Mara on my hip so that we would fit through and she stirred, blinking sleepily at me. I shushed her and cooed as I slipped inside the darkened passageway, until she put her head back on my shoulder and fell asleep. I breathed a sigh of relief just as Heero joined us and the door slid closed. We were trapped in a blanket of muffling, suffocating blackness.

"Do we get lights?" I asked, a little more scathingly than I'd intended.

Green flickered into existence with a snap as Heero broke a military glow stick over his knee. The light was bright but it didn't extend far, turning the tunnel into a sort of night-vision illusion. I felt like I was looking though goggles. Heero brushed past me, obviously in more of a hurry, and I took a breath or two before following the eerie neon light. We walked for nearly a minute before emerging at the heart of the laboratory.

It was quiet in the lab as well, but not silent like the tunnel had been. The mechanical whir of the generator drifted about the enclosed space. The lab was larger than the one I'd been in but it was just as cluttered with everything under the sun. I felt as though I'd opened a door and stepped into my own dubious past, with just a few alterations. Most of the parts I saw along the walls couldn't have belonged to Deathscythe and the chicken scratch notes scrawled all over the scattered papers didn't match the Professors. He'd always had very neat, concise writing that fit perfectly with his to-the-point nature.

I startled, jerking my hand away from the papers I'd been touching when Mara knocked over a small instrument and sent it clattering across the metal floor. Heero looked sharply but slowly at us, raising one eyebrow in a silent "what the hell are you doing" glare. I gave him an apologetic shrug and grabbed Mara around the waist, carefully lifting her up to sit on my hip.

"Daddy, I wan' ice keem," she said, wrapping her arms around my neck and giving me a sleepy yawn. It was still early morning and she had been moving just as long as we had.

Smiling at her strange request, I adjusted her so I could still walk and use my right arm. "Okay, sweetie. We'll get you some ice cream if you can be really… really… quiiiieet." I exaggerated the whispered last word and she hid a giggle behind her hand before giving me the 'shh' finger. "That's right," I agreed, barely a breath.

Heero finally stopped watching us and returned to sorting through the papers scattered everywhere in the lab. It almost looked as though someone had been throwing things around, trying to find something. Probably the same something that Heero had found, I thought grimly. Whatever it was it was important or dangerous or both or we wouldn't be here looking for it. So what if it was important enough that someone had found it before us? Had Wu Fei already been here and gotten it? Had someone else?

I shuffled another stack of paper before I decided I had no idea what the hell I was looking for and stopped. I didn't know why Heero had brought both of us into the lab with him except that it must have seemed safer that way- if we were out of the lab that meant we were out of his sight, which meant we could be in danger. But being in here without being able to help was frustrating, maddening. I felt… useless. I hated feeling useless.

"What are we looking for?" I whispered, barely a breath, knowing he would hear me in the quiet.

"Anything…" he said distractedly, almost like he'd been expecting to say more but had forgotten mid-sentence.

I snorted. "There's a whole lot of anything in this lab, Heero Yuy. What are we looking for?"

"We are looking for evidence of something," he hissed. "If you want to help, keep watch."

Though I could have said a few choice words to him, I kept my mouth shut and settled for listening to the silence. It was still creepy, like walking into someone's home when all the lights were off and you weren't sure there was really no one home. It felt a little like when we'd first gotten Artemis and we would both wake up at night reaching for guns because we'd heard something wandering the house. I felt like this place, so much like the lab I had spent time at, should have been the safest place in the world but somehow it felt like the most dangerous. I began to think that it might have been a good idea to leave word with someone, maybe Quatre or someone, just to make sure that someone other than us knew where we were trying to be. Even in the war we'd known where all of us should be, even if we didn't know how things were going.

It was as I was so dutifully thinking of calling someone to let them know our where-abouts that I heard it- a cell phone ringing.

At first I thought it was my own and I'm sure that's what Heero thought as well. He turned to give me a sharp, angry look only to realize in the same instant as I did that it wasn't me. It wasn't him. It was our ring tone, the ring only our fives phones had, the one Quatre made especially for us. If it wasn't my phone and it wasn't Heero's phone, that meant it could only be one person. Wu Fei. Relief washed over me at the realization and I took two steps before Heero was able to grab a handful of my sleeve and give me a glare that meant death if I took a third.

I shifted Mara in my arms and gave him a 'what's up?' look. He just shook his head and silently motioned for me to get myself and my captive out of there. Inside, I smiled a little bit at his use of the word captive; there was no military hand signal for child, after all. Despite that, the motions chilled me. If Heero didn't think that ring was Wu Fei, then it was someone else and that meant Wu Fei didn't have his phone anymore. It meant Wu Fei probably wasn't a free man anymore, if he was alive at all.

I nodded, retracing the two steps I had just taken while Heero moved forward. The phone was still ringing, the noise emanating from a small, closed off room on the other side of the lab. I wanted to leave but I was frozen, watching him cross the room, watching him stop at the entrance and confusedly signal to me that there was no one there. The ringing stopped and silence stole over the lab once more. Not even the generator hummed in the background.

Spider webs crawled across my skin and the soldier's instinct in me got the better of me. I heard the clack of a gun settling against metal even as I was tightening my grip on Mara and ducking. The first shots rang deafeningly loud just as I rolled us behind an unused gundanium armor plating, wondering whether Heero had managed to take cover in time; I hadn't had the chance to even see his reaction.

I threw a glance to the doorway we'd first come through, trying to judge my chances for success if I just bolted for them. Mara was crying and squirming, terrified at all of the loud noises that were echoing through the lab. There was no way I could fool them into thinking we'd crawled in a different direction. Not with the kid making so much noise. We'd never make it in a straight run, either. I would have to fight back this time, whether I wanted to or not.

I reached around Mara and drew my gun.


/End Chapter Twenty One, Inhertiance/
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