Hereafter

CHAPTER 5

March Madness Prompt #19

"Fortune Cookie"

When Heero said he would kill whoever did this, Sally's face turned to an expression of pained sympathy.

"Oh, Heero," she said. "You don't have to."

"Then you should have prevented this!" he shouted at her. He could not seem to control the volume of his voice. He shouted even though it hurt his throat. He desperately needed water. He did not care. "Aren't you the Preventers?"

Ash and dust blew in little eddies around them, carried by an indifferent wind. Trowa, standing just beside Heero, looked at him with the same pained expression Sally wore. Heero felt only rage.

"Let's go down," Sally said in a heavy voice. "I think it would be best to brief you on what we know. We can take it from there."

It was the perfect response. Heero's hands clenched into fists, his palms dry and hot. His neck under his collar felt hot too. He was a boiler about to steam, but Sally had disarmed him. He had expected her to tell him to take it easy, or that she understood that he was upset…. Upset didn't begin to cover it. Heero wanted to smash something. He couldn't remember feeling like this—not ever. During the war, he had felt calm most of the time. When he was agitated, it was usually because someone else was doing something stupid and he had to stop them. He couldn't remember ever feeling like this—furious and ineffectual. One seemed to feed the other.

Still, he nodded, if a bit jerkily. Trowa ended the conversation with Dorothy, who agreed that she needed to preserve the battery of her phone. Heero did not say anything as the three of them trudged down the hill together. He did not want to talk and both Trowa and Sally seemed to sense that. He could not sort through his feelings. He only knew that the pain was deep, and the grief was deeper. Rage was the only thing that kept him walking.

The rubble from the collapsed building yawned before him. It seemed to grow larger as they approached. His head could not make sense of the magnitude of the disaster. His only shred of hope was that somehow Relena was trapped in a void, alive even if all her bones were broken. But it was a small hope. She had been on the sixth floor of a seven-story building that now looked like a giant game of pick-up-sticks strewn over boulder-sized gravel.

Firemen and other emergency responders were clambering over the rubble. Close up, he could see the body of a woman being lifted out of the top of the pile. His heart leapt when he saw flaxen hair spilling over the fireman's arm. But it wasn't Relena. The body was limp as a boneless fish, dead eyes wide and staring.

Heero could see more bodies laid out in rows not far from the wreckage. There were also tents being set up and ambulances being loaded with a few people who had been injured but not killed in the blast, though he had no way of knowing if the survivors had been found in the wreckage or merely nearby. He supposed he was one of the latter. He did not want to go to a hospital, though. Just the thought of sitting in a waiting room while Relena… His body started to shake.

"Oh, thank God. You found them."

Heero turned his head at the sound of Lucrezia Noin's voice. Behind her stood Wufei Chang, arms crossed in a Preventer's jacket, looking stony-faced.

"I did," Sally said, "and I have a lead on Quatre and Dorothy, so you'll have to excuse me." With that, she ran off, heading toward an area where the first responders seemed to be checking in with whoever was running the rescue efforts.

"Come on," Noin said, waving Trowa and Heero to follow her into one of the white tarp tents that had been erected on the edge of the disaster zone.

Heero did so. Inside, he saw hastily erected tables with computers sitting on them. Behind one was Director Une, but she closed the lid when Heero and Trowa came in with Noin.

"You're alive," she said, sounding relieved. "Are you hurt?"

Heero knew his face must look like a rock. He could not seem to unclench his jaw.

Noin handed Trowa a bottle of water, followed by Heero. "Take a drink," she said. "Wash your face and hands."

Heero crushed the bottle in his hand. "Is this all?" he demanded. "Where is the person responsible?"

"We think we found him," Une said. "Duo is on it. Please, Heero, try to stay calm."

And what was he supposed to say to that? Calm? When they sent Duo after him?

"I want to help," Heero said. "Where is he?"

"There is a lot to do," Noin said. "But you can be of more help if you take care of yourself, Heero. You're a victim. Drink some water first. Sit down. Eat something."

She gestured to a table on the side of the room where there was an odd assortment of edibles, including some fruit that had seen better days, a few muffins, and a bag of fortune cookies.

Heero unscrewed the cap of the bottle and drank half of it. He splashed his face and hands with the other half and grabbed a fortune cookie from the table. Ripping open the plastic, he broke the cookie in half and stuffed it in his mouth. The piece of paper inside fluttered to the ground.

"Can I go now?" he demanded after swallowing.

As he turned toward the tent flap, Wufei knelt and picked up the piece of paper. Crouching, he unfolded the fortune and read it aloud. "You can work both alone or with others."

There was a moment of awkward silence.

"I never liked Fortune Cookies," Wufei sighed, rolling his eyes. "But let me go with you, Heero."