Author: Sparkle Itamashii
Title: Inheritance
Warnings: Respect the rating. Please see my profile.
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing After Colony (A/C) and its plot, characters and settings are NOT MINE.
Chapter Twenty Three
"Is there anything else I can do for you before take-off?" the attendant asked, smiling sweetly for the millionth time in the past five minutes.
"Just the food, and a couple of blankets," Heero told her gruffly, trying his best to keep Mara's hands out of his hair and failing miserably.
I couldn't help laughing as the stewardess left, telling us that if we needed anything our call button would bring someone running. We'd made it to the spaceport without incident, although we'd had to skirt around a group of suspicious looking people. The compartment we were seated in was pretty small, kind of like if we'd been riding a train back on Earth. The door, at least, sealed much better than any train I'd ever been on and the walls looked to be pretty sound-proof; I couldn't hear the shuttle engines at all. It felt a little weird to take conventional transportation between the colonies, as I couldn't remember the last time I had.
I relaxed back into the soft red cushions and gave Heero a level, still somewhat amused look. He had gotten Mara out of his hair, literally, and had her seated next to him. He was trying his best to gently lecture her but she kept talking over him, asking questions like "where are we going?" and "what's this?" as she reached for the call button. I knew that he was stalling, waiting to make sure that the shuttle attendants weren't going to bust in on us in the middle of talking.
A short while later some real food was brought to us, some kind of light sandwich and fruit with milk for Mara and some kind of thin, disgusting juice for me and Heero. Thinking ahead, Heero moved Mara to the floor to eat so that she wouldn't get food everywhere on the seats. It was a very wise decision, we learned shortly after she'd spilled crumbly sandwich meat all over the place.
Once the food was out of the way there was no more reason for stalling but he remained silent, eyes trained a little tiredly on Mara. It had been a long while since we'd both been up this long doing this much. I was tempted to take a nap and ask him about it later but I knew that my best chance at getting information was when there was nowhere else for him to go and nothing else for him to do. So I settled back in my seat, propped my feet up on the bench on his side, and raised an eyebrow in question.
"So? What's up with all this?"
He sighed and finally turned his attention to me. "Before I say anything else, I want you to know that I don't want to tell you this. Any of it. And if I thought that there was any way we could get out of this without you knowing, I wouldn't tell you."
That hurt, but I forced myself to let it slide. "Okay."
After looking me up and down once to make sure that I was really okay, he laid back against his chair as well. "You know the good professors built, or helped build, a lot of weapons. The most well known of those were the gundams: billion dollar or more investments into rare metals, specialized controls that would need months of training to even begin to understand, and weaponry equipment that had previously been unfathomable."
"I know what a gundam is, Heero," I said drolly, eyes narrowed.
"And it never, in the last five or six years, occurred to you as to why they might have let a handful of adolescent boys with shady backgrounds run off with the most powerful weapons ever created?"
That gave me pause. I mean, I had wondered occasionally 'why us' but it just seemed too obvious every time I thought of it. I mean, we'd done it all right, hadn't we? We'd ended the war just like we were supposed to do. "We had training," I remarked after a moment. "You had special training and the rest of us all had experience with mobile suits." He gave me a very good you-know-better look and I felt my face flush a little. "Well then why do you think they did it?"
"I assume you remember the words Operation Meteor?"
They want Meteor. Milliardo's phone call and the message we'd heard just before leaving Earth fluttered uneasily through my mind. "Yeah… drop a colony… Why? Is that what this is about?"
"Sort of," he said. "Except not how you know it. Meteor was never about dropping a colony; something like that can be stopped. What they're after now, the real Meteor… can't." His eyes dropped to Mara for a second and his eyes nearly closed. I could practically feel the weight of whatever it was he had been hiding. "It's us. Our blood - or more accurately what's in our blood - that they want."
My thoughts moved uncomfortably back to the phone conversation I'd had with the doctor who had tested our blood. I couldn't help the way my stomach flopped, making me feel sick. I should have told him. I should have warned him about the testing and the markers the doctor had said they'd found but I couldn't find the words to tell him I'd screwed up. "So what is it?" I asked uncertainly, guiltily.
A muscle in his jaw jumped and I could tell that this was the part he'd tried so hard to keep from me. "Viral code," he said at last. My eyes closed and I swallowed thickly. "In your blood, in my blood and in the Peacecraft line are three different segments of the same viral code. They're harmless while separated between us but if they are cultivated together correctly, they can become the most deadly virus anyone's ever seen."
"Ffff…" I breathed out slowly, forcing myself to remain calm and not curse in front of the kid. Panicking now would change nothing. It would solve nothing. Panicking would make it worse, I told myself as I took a few deep, soothing breaths. I was getting information from him, finally, and I didn't want to lose that by flipping out or acting like an ass. "Worse than the L2 plague?"
"It is the L2 plague," he said, refusing to meet my shocked gaze. "What happened on that colony wasn't a mistake. That was a prototype for what's in our blood. The only reason anyone survived that was because the code was imperfect and the virus malfunctioned."
"How do you know it wouldn't this time?" I said, stomach tight with nausea at having to remember the days the plague ran rampant around my home colony. It was still the worst experience of my life, especially after I'd lost Solo to it.
"It wouldn't," he assured me gravely. "But even if it would malfunction the same way, can we really risk it? Do you know how many people survived from that colony?"
I nodded. I knew. I was one of only a few dozen survivors, out of the thousands of people that had lived there. They'd moved us to a new colony as soon as they were sure it was 'safe' to do so. "There's no way," I whispered. "Someone would have stopped them…"
But one look from him and I knew I was only lying to myself. "No one stopped them. No one wanted to; they wanted freedom and that is what our dear friends offered them."
"At what cost?" I closed my eyes, resting my elbows on my knees and putting my head in my hands. I felt sick. How could anyone have been so heartless? "They went along with it…"
"The colony leaders helped," he said, voice even again. "They supplied a 'cure' after a while, but it wasn't anything the afflicted body wasn't already doing for itself. Didn't you ever think it was kind of strange that they never attempted to distribute a vaccination?"
"No," I said, searching my memories of the event. "No, it wasn't. They couldn't. They said that… they said there wasn't a clear cause of death. The people that died simply… stopped. It was like their bodies just suddenly failed."
He nodded, glancing over to me in the same moment as I looked to him. "Like they fell apart," he agreed. "That's exactly what happened. It disassembles the human body on a very base level so that the infected body ceases to function properly. Once active, the virus was supposed to operate for sixteen hours. The first eight would be spent replicating like hell, the second eight destroying everything it touches."
"And after that?"
"After that the virus degrades and produces an enzyme that disintegrates its leftovers. There's no trace of what killed the person." He took a deep breath and finally leaned back in his chair a little. "The only reason anyone survived the L2 test was because in some cases the virus shut itself down early and deleted itself. If the body was adaptable enough to salvage functioning, they lived. But most of the L2 survivors were kids and almost all of the ones left are in the care of one hospital or another."
I let out the breath I'd been holding, stunned. Shocked. "Why would anyone create something like that?"
"It was a war," he said simply, eyes to the shuttle ceiling. "People do desperate, horrible things during wars." I knew he wasn't just talking about the virus; his own past and the things he had done still bothered him immensely. "We should know that better than anyone."
"I've never been that desperate," I said seriously. "They would have wiped out all of human kind with something like that, including themselves."
"Not necessarily," he contradicted. "If the colonies released it in the Earth Sphere, all they would have to do would be to restrict or even sever travel between the two for a couple of months and let the virus run its course. The colony leaders knew that so they let the professors do what they needed to do."
Things were beginning to really come together for me. "But it's not just the colony leaders that know now, is it? If they got all the parts, anyone could make the virus…"
"Anyone that knew," Heero clarified. "No one that doesn't already know what it is would be able to tell, though. It expresses itself in our blood as something that resembles an antibody, but it isn't. It's just loose genetic code."
So that was it. Genetics. Heero's bizarre behavior the last couple weeks came into sharp perspective. "Let me guess; it's transmissible via reproduction."
He nodded, eyes flickering over to where Mara leaned against the side of the bench and pushed empty, overturned cups around on the floor in a game. "Yeah."
"So she's…"
"Yeah," he agreed. "Two out of three." He looked slowly, sharply to me, eyes narrowed not in anger, as I thought they might, but in frustration. "That's why I tried so hard to keep the two of you apart. You have got the third part and that puts everyone at risk- and by everyone I mean literally everyone. It's not just you and me right now, Duo," he told me seriously, staring me straight in the eyes. "If we die now the entire Earth Sphere and the colonies could go down with us."
Guilt welled up within me because I knew he was blaming me for pushing to have her there with us and he had every right. It suddenly felt like it was my fault we were in so much trouble. I tamped down the urge to apologize, however, because I knew it wasn't. "If you'd told me this from the start, you know I would have worked with you."
"Is it any better knowing?" he asked dully, almost as though he were ignoring what I said. "Does it make you feel better to know what you're carrying?"
My throat closed and I couldn't hold his gaze any longer. My eyes dropped guiltily to the floor again. "No," I said after a while. "It doesn't."
I heard him put his head back against the seat again and I looked up, suddenly feeling very… worn. I was still tired, for sure, but it was different than just fatigue. It was the sort of feeling that makes people want to give up everything and just say 'fuck it' until things get better. I wanted to turn over and go to sleep so that I could wake up to someone saying 'surprise! It was all a really god-awful bad dream.' But I wasn't asleep and I couldn't wake up from my life, so I had to make the best of it.
"What about a cure?"
He made a noise that very nearly sounded like a laugh. "I don't know. You'll have to ask Trowa; he's the only one that would know about it besides the creators."
"So Trowa knew? Do you think he told Quatre?" It was a cruel thing to ask but the words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. It was almost blatantly asking if he thought Trowa trusted Quatre more than Heero trusted me.
Silence.
I sighed. Obviously I'd gotten everything I was going to get from him. I had the gist of what I assumed was everything he knew and it would have to be enough for now. I shook my head, slumping back in my seat. Mara had tired of her game and was crawling up onto my lap to snuggle against my side and play with the coins on the edge of my pocket. They clinked together, filling the silence for a few long minutes, accompanied so gently with Mara's childish murmurs. I couldn't think properly. Everything was just such a blank inside, so hollow and surreal.
"It might have been easier if we'd just managed to die in the war, don't you think?" I asked, smiling a little.
"We were supposed to," he replied, eyes still closed. "I should have killed you when I got here; I thought about it, too, until I saw you. I could never do it."
"And now? If you did it now, this would all end, right?"
"No."
My nose wrinkled a little. "No it wouldn't or-?"
"No," he interrupted a little forcefully, looking sharply at me. "I won't do that. I don't want to hear you even suggest it, Duo. Ever."
We stared at one another for a few minutes, silently. I don't know what was running through his head but I know it can't have been good. All I could think about what how easy it would have been if one of us died, or if one of us died now. It would have to me because I don't think either of us could have killed Mara. I didn't want to die but what was my life in comparison to the entire rest of the human race? I was already living on borrowed time; there was no way I should have survived the war's end.
"I'm sorry," he said at last and for once he sounded like he really meant it.
"I know," I whispered, tucking Mara in closer to me. "So am I."
God I felt tired. That under-the-skin weightless feeling that occurred when I knew I needed to do something but didn't know what had begun to seep into my bones and I just felt like if I could get some sleep this day would end and tomorrow would be better. I kept trying to wrap my mind around all of it but it just seemed so… ridiculous. It was so… out there, I suppose, that it didn't feel real. I couldn't understand why I had never been told; I should have been told. I should have known all of this from the beginning, regardless of what anyone thought it might do to me.
"Besides," he said quietly. "It's not so easy as just dying. If you die, they can still use your blood. So… don't die."
"I'll get right on it," I said, closing my eyes. The hard part would be just trying to keep that promise.
/End Chapter Twenty Three, Inheritance/
