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Chapter 42 - The Laboratories
A few hours later
Relena POV
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Just like every storm ultimately loses its strength, winnowed by the wind, Relena gradually quietened down.
She had vomited up everything she still had in her stomach. No more tears were filling her eyes. Her heart was no longer beating so erratically. She wasn't breathing expeditiously like after a fast run. Her hands and feet stopped trembling and felt now as icy to the touch as if no blood was flowing to them. Although her body was silent now, the echo of her sorrowful cry kept returning inside her head. Petrified, she could only sit and look ahead with an absent gaze, but even then, she couldn't stop seeing Heero's last gaze...
Sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, with her fingers curled around the cowries pendant on her neck, Relena looked up at the flickering light of the broken fluorescent lamp on the ceiling. There were no windows in the room. She wasn't sure where exactly she was held. For the last several hours, almost non-stop, the Fireflies had been subjecting her to various examinations, done three CT scans, four ultrasound scans, took hectoliters of blood samples, and gave five different IV therapies.
It was already during the first tests when they managed to determine - without a single word on her part on this subject - that she was pregnant.
Three months pregnant...
The doctors showed it to her on an ultrasound, and Relena looked at her child in a speechless daze. They said that the embryo was already three centimeters long. Its clearly outlined arms and legs were already visible on the screen; it had a large, disproportionately large head compared to the rest of the body. Doctors said that its eyelids are already formed - they are stuck together, so the baby looks as if asleep. Soon he or she will be able to have small hiccups… Through the loudspeaker, Relena could hear the beating of the child's heart… such a tiny heart, but already beating so fast...
She had spasms again. She fell off the bed onto her knees and vomited.
The noise quickly summoned the doctors and the Fireflies. Supine and dazed with bloodless anguish, Relena was immediately lifted into a sitting position like a rag doll. She felt a few sharp pricks on her forearm again; she didn't even flinch. How could this pain compare to the suffering Heero endured before he…
After a while, the doctors left the room again; only one stayed with her. Probably just to make sure she didn't hurt herself or run away. It was unnecessary, though, as now Relena had her arms strapped with tight strips to the hospital bed. Even if she wanted to hurt herself, the best she could do was bite off her tongue.
The female doctor that stayed with her had short, platinum-black hair and gentle gaze. The name "L. Noin" was embroidered on the front pocket of the white coat she was wearing.
"You're still in a state of shock," dr. Noin said softly as she sat down by Relena's bed. "Try to rest. The laboratory testing will be over soon."
Relena tilted her head to the side and watched as dr. Noin tenderly brushed the unruly strand of hair from her face. The heartwarming gesture was so incongruent, so out of place in this sterile dungeon... Relena studied the woman's face.
"You remind me of someone…," she sighed, "someone… very important to my dear friend."
Dr. Noin smiled. "I'd like to meet her one day."
Relena continued to stare motionlessly, unemotionally.
"She's dead."
The atmosphere thickened as if the air had evaporated from the room, and the soft smile instantly faded from dr Noin's face. She studied Relena for a moment, her dark purple eyes reflecting the flickering light of the fluorescent light.
"...was she killed by the infected?"
Relena didn't answer, considering that it didn't matter. Although she never met Hilde Schbeiker personally, she saw Duo talking about her and gazing at the photo so often that the smiling girl from the worn-out picture seemed to her almost alive. A picture that Duo always held close to his heart… Suddenly, Relena remembered that when she was looking through his backpack after Duo's death, she didn't find this photo.
That moment she realized that Duo died looking at Hilde, too...
Heero… The memory of his Prussian-blue eyes staring at her a moment before his death returned… Relena closed her eyes shut.
"All these tests are for a reason," she heard dr Noin's gentle voice. "Only this way, we'll be able to find out what exactly eradicated the Cordyceps fungus in your body. Maybe it's a genetic mutation, maybe a protein mutation... maybe some counter infection, or..." the woman paused her medical jargon, clearly excited. "You're our best hope, Relena. The world never had such hope before..."
Relena didn't say anything, but turned her head, staring at the ceiling. Soon, she felt the touch of dr Noin's hand as she stroked her arm.
"Do you understand me, Relena Peacecraft?" dr Noin's voice was trembling as if she was nervous… as if she was excusing herself. "We can put an end to this suffering... so that such horrors never repeat themselves. Your life means so much for the world…"
"I don't care about my life," Relena sighed ever so indifferently and discouragedly. "Neither you do. Stop pretending that I'm anything more to you than a lab rat."
Dr. Noin flinched at those harsh words and bit her lip. "It's much more complicated than you are trying to portray…"
Suddenly, the door to Relena's room opened, and Dorothy Catalonia appeared in the doorway. Her slim figure cast a stretched shadow on the floor, her lengthy hair was tied back in a long ponytail.
"Lucrezia, you're needed in lab number 3," she announced in a cold voice. "They've just finished the genetic tests. They want your opinion."
Dr. Noin smiled a stressed smile at Relena, then got up from her chair and left the room briskly. Upon walking through the door, she whispered something to Dorothy, but Relena couldn't hear the words. Dorothy let dr Noin pass through the door, then turned to Relena, walked over the threshold, and over to Relena's bed.
"How is our only hope for humanity feeling?" she asked in a squeaky voice, gazing at the straps that were still holding Relena in bed. "I've heard you're still puking. Being pregnant is a nasty thing, isn't it?"
Relena said nothing in reply. The blonde jumped on her bed like a child on a swing, seating herself comfortably and crossing her long legs. A silver chain with a firefly pendant dangled happily on her chest. Dorothy clicked her tongue, then gently stroked Relena's thigh; her touch was cold as ice.
"Noin doesn't know it yet, but I do. And I think you should also know by now," she began, the timbre of her voice causing the air in the room to vibrate. Feeling dizzy from the touch of Dorothy's hand on her thigh, Relena nailed her eye on the ceiling again. "The fact that you're carrying this smuggler's baby leaves us with one more option that we could to check before we start dissecting your brain."
Relena didn't even flinch at the words, letting Dorothy continue.
x
Meanwhile
Dr. Lucrezia Noin's heels echoed in the corridor as she briskly followed the route from the medical block to the administration wing of the St Anthony's Hospital, where the Fireflies' units stationed.
Every time she walked through this corridor, she had a feeling of shifting back in time. The hospital halls looked almost like they did during the time of her medical school. When the pandemic broke out, she was just completing her studies - there was only one last exam left for her to pass: medical ethics. The outbreak day came, and she never took this exam.
It was all the more surprising how many colliding emotions she felt in her heart when she kept repeating in her mind over and over again that "this is what you have to do," "it is required by the situation," "sacrifice one life to save millions"…
Passing the skywalk between the hospital buildings, she sneaked a glance down at the makeshift hospital cemetery spreading out below, in the green belt between the wards. Since they started working here on the cure almost a year ago, they took so many lives... in the name of science. They severed limbs, injected experimental drugs and saliva of the infected, transfused blood without giving a rip about serological conflicts... Looking at the carelessly dug, shallow graves, Noin realized that she had just found a name for her state of mind: hypocrisy. In its advanced, incurable, terminal stage.
Because what else to call the conflicting feelings she was experiencing? What differed this unfortunate girl from those other unfortunate ones who had lost their lives before her...
She reached the last door and pushed it open with a bang entering the spacious open space that served as the Fireflies' command center. Apparently, a gathering was just underway. A few Fireflies rose at the sight of her out of respect. The rest looked at their leader, standing with his back to them all, in front of a big window.
"Everyone out, except dr. Noin," Zechs Merquise growled.
Noin bowed her head and stuffed her hands into the pockets of her white overall, waiting for everyone to leave the room. Realizing how much depended only on her, she weighed again in her mind the words she was about to say.
"Well?" Zechs Merquise said expectantly when the last Firefly left the room. He still stood with his back to her.
Noin took a deep breath before beginning, adopting a professional attitude.
"She's almost a textbook definition of health. Apart from the bite mark on her neck, there are no significant injuries, old nor new. The samples don't show that she has taken any intoxicants or psychotropic substances in the last few months. All indicators standard, morphology without allegations... the only abnormality is an almost eightfold elevated leukocyte count. However, we have ruled out all clinically known possible causes, including leukemia and other autoimmune diseases..."
Zechs Merquise listened to her in silence with his arms folded over his chest, invariably staring at the horizon outside the window that started to glisten with the distant light of the rising golden globe.
"…an immune reaction to Cordyceps?" he muttered under his breath.
"Exactly," Noin nodded, taking out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lighting one up. She took a puff and let the smoke out of her lungs, buying herself a few more seconds to control the nervous trembling in her chest… "There is no other answer; with this amount of leukocytes, the body of an average human kills itself. We've already established the gene responsible for this mutation of leukocytes and... as I feared... it doesn't affect the bone marrow or the thymus, usually responsible for the production of leukocytes… but the brain."
Zechs eventually turned around, eyeing Noin with intent, but emotionless stare. He seemed as tired as she was; his face was gray with the shadow circles under his eyes.
"Then it means… just like you predicted... that nothing can be done? And this bastard inside her… doesn't change a fucking thing?"
Noin bowed her head, biting her lip. "Actually, there's one thing we could still try… But I doubt if she'll ever agree to it."
Zechs was silent, waiting for Noin to continue. Noin took another long drag and cleared her throat before speaking.
"The embryo... is now about 11 weeks old. It must have inherited the mutation from Relena. Otherwise, the fungus would have already developed in him, even in utero. At this stage, it has a rather well-developed brain. We could in vitro enter Cordyceps particles into its system and try to find which specific part of the brain structure is physically responsible for increased immune response…"
The Fireflies' leader stared at Noin with an absent gaze for an uncomfortably long moment, then approached her. The woman couldn't tear her eyes from his unmoving pale blue look as he tore the cigarette from her hand and drew, then smothered it to the floor with his shoe.
"So this is the choice we're left with," he muttered grimly after a moment. "Kill her with the baby in her womb at one blow, or kill her baby first and then her?"
Noin flinched at the dryness with which he uttered the words, but couldn't argue. He was telling the truth. Such a young embryo had no chance to survive outside the mother's body. And any operation they would perform on Relena's brain would result in her death; it was impossible to keep her alive after cutting out portions of the brain tissue.
Noin lowered her head and held out another cigarette with trembling hands. "Apparently..." she sighed as the lighter refused to cooperate.
Milliardo yanked the cigarette out of her mouth and crushed it in his hand, then threw it on the ground. "You should stop smoking."
Noin chuckled, gazing at the falling pieces of the cigarette. "Maybe you're right… Our supplies are about to run out anyway…"
"Noin," Milliardo addressed her with a low voice, and the woman jerked her head up. "Tell me… What should I do? What decision should I make…?"
For the first time, the determination in his eyes faded. In front of anyone else, he wouldn't allow himself any doubts; she was the exception, his lover, and the only confidant of all his secrets. And now he stood before her, eyes filled with uncertainty and fear, facing a beastly choice that would leave its mark on his life forever.
Noin looked into the man's eyes, then reached out her hand to touch his cheek. "We should try with the embryo scenario first. It's a hope… I don't know to expect of this test on her baby, but there's always a possibility that…"
"She said no."
Noin turned on her heel, surprised by the sudden interruption. Dorothy Catalonia stood in the doorway, her hands triumphantly placed on her hips, her silhouette outlined in a dark contour against the light shining in the hallway until she closed the door behind her.
"Dorothy," Zechs shook Noin's hand from his cheek and walked the few steps across the room towards the blonde. "What are you talking about?"
"Your sis. She said she won't agree to submit her baby to this test," Dorothy announced as she stepped closer.
"What…?" Noin gasped. "How? Nobody has talked to her about it yet!"
Dorothy gave her an ominous smile. "I talked to her. Just a moment ago. I was curious about what she would say about that, given she had any right to decide. And she said no."
Noin felt a hot wave of fury rising in her chest. "You did what?"
"Are you fucking deaf, Noin?" Dorothy snapped.
"How dare you do this behind my back?!" Noin growled as she walked over to the blonde. "I am the commander-in-chief here. I decide about her, about her tests, her treatment... I decide whether or not we're feeding her, and whether or not we're telling her anything!"
Dorothy raised one of her long, spiky eyebrows and looked at the doctor dismissively. "What's gotten into you, Lucrezia? Are you suffering some vocation crisis?"
Noin flinched at the sound of her own name in the mouth of this impudent blonde. "You're a sadist! What kind of decision would any mother make if faced with such a choice? She saw her baby for the first time on fucking ultrasound only a few hours ago!"
"Noin, that's enough," Zechs Merquise cut in, turning around to face the window again. "I think that ends the discussion about our options."
Noin felt as if she rooted to the spot, unable to move even an inch. She clenched her hands into fists, looking at the silhouette of a man she had always loved and admired, and whose attitude now filled her with uncontrollable anger.
"For God's sake, how can you be this calm, Milliardo?" Noin hissed. "She's your fucking sister…!"
"Shut up, Noin," Zechs growled. "Don't come between her and me. You have no right. I will respect her wish. And it's not your business."
The words hurt her on the raw, and hearing Dorothy's undisguised chuckle behind her back Noin realized that he had never humiliated her like this before. But the worst part was that Zechs was right, one more time: she shouldn't interfere. She was only a doctor, not a judge.
Noin pressed her trembling hands into the pockets of her overall and directed her steps towards the exit. She was about to grab the handle when she heard Zechs' silent voice behind her once again.
"And what about the vaccine?"
She sighed.
"It's… too early to talk about it. The material is scarce, and it will take months to multiply it. Now it's enough only for one person, and that leaves us with no possibilities to test its effectiveness..."
There was no other way out. What it was like…, Noin thought in her mind as she looked down at her hands, lightened by bright pink sunlight filling the room. 'Save the world by sacrificing...'
"The sun is rising. Finish all the remaining tests before the night falls," Zechs ordered. "How many hours before you could prep her?"
"I need at least eight hours."
"Good, start from now. Take all the time you need, but keep me informed about every detail. I count on you, Noin. No… the whole world counts on you."
x
Relena POV
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She imagined her hands were free, so she could stroke her belly.
In her mind, she could see the black-and-white ultrasound image again, with a tiny tadpole-like dot moving in the bubble, like an eye of broth in a spoon. She knew that the entire set of genes was already distributed. It was a boy or a girl, the doctors couldn't determine yet. He or she was to have ocean-blue eyes like hers or Prussian-blue ones... He or she was to have honey blonde or chocolate brown hair... After another few months, maybe they'd have found out...
She felt hunger again, but they told her that she wasn't allowed to eat anymore. That she would be operated at dusk. With no window or clock in her tiny prison, she couldn't guess how much time she still had. For a moment, she even hoped that she might starve to death before the time comes. That would have ruined Fireflies' perfect plan for the cure. The idea of Milliardo and Dr. Noin discovering her starved corpse brought a grim smile on her face…
…the fuck am I thinking about?
Relena jerked futilely with her hands at the belts that kept her tied down to the bed, then stared absentmindedly at the ceiling. After a short moment, vivid and painful memories of the nightmarish events of the night started coming back to her mind; they returned stubbornly and uninterruptedly, chasing her like hell hounds.
She was there again, in this horrible hotel lobby, ringed by the horde of armed Fireflies, held by Dorothy when her long-lost brother killed the love of her life just before her eyes. All she could do was to look…
And then, all of a sudden, that horror vision vanished.
Relena suddenly remembered that warm August night and the dances at the Evergreen party. She could almost smell the dense, moist air, saturated with the flowery scent of meadows surrounding Evergreen. She had never been as happy as then, in his strong arms, enveloped by his scent and warmth, swayed gently to the beat of a song that conveyed tender words that they both felt and yet couldn't always express.
She remembered the moment when she had lied to him the one and only time ever - when he had asked if she was pregnant.
Since that time, Relena had successfully made herself believe that it was meant to save him. That by lying about the baby and forcing them to continue their journey to Houston, she was sacrificing herself for the sake of the world... and for his sake. How hopelessly stupid she was... How naive of her it was to think that only the two of them would be able to save the world - just like that.
What's more… How naive it was of her to believe that the world was actually eagerly waiting for this... She might as well expect a welcoming committee somewhere in Houston, with people falling on their knees before them as if they were some modern-day messiahs and thanking for the rescue.
In a world ravaged by twenty years of the bloody and merciless pandemic, the only thing that mattered was power. Only power gave a sense of security and control over life and the world around. In this world, the vaccine and the cure for a deadly, terrifying disease is only the most effective instrument of power over people. Jives about salvation and selflessly given rescue were just fantasies that could be told only by such idealists as her father... and herself.
She was sure Heero understood that... While she kept naively believing in people's goodwill.
"We could stay here, Relena. Just say that you want it."
He wanted to stay... He asked her to…
If they had stayed in Evergreen then…
The death that awaited her had one great advantage. It freed from suffering and a tormenting feeling of guilt. Relena realized it was all her fault; Heero had died because of her naivety and her lies...
I killed Heero.
And she was unable to save their unborn child she was carrying in her womb - the only evidence that the man she loved so much ever existed.
"Heero..." Relena whispered, closing her eyes, but the tears didn't run down her cheeks. If she could turn back time… she'd have never hidden the truth from him… But now it was too late.
"I'm sorry..."
x
There was blood everywhere.
It went dry on his cracked lips and curdled on his tongue and throat like a thick slime. It soaked into the fabric of his clothes that felt tight and rigid as if they were made of cardboard. A trickle running from the wound on the top of his head dried and clumped the eyelids of his right eye - he felt a dry clot break and fall down on his nose as he opened his eyes.
The space around him was lit by the warm morning light. As he noticed the blurred contours of the dirty floor covered with blood close to his face, he realized that he was still alive after all. The downside to this situation was that this was his blood on the floor. On the plus side, though, it seemed to stop oozing from his wounds some time before. Hard to believe that having lost so much blood, he was still...
Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, his consciousness reached the subsequent parts of his body that started yielding to the power of his brain. He kept regaining control in his limbs, one by one, but that was followed by a feeling of throbbing pain. It felt like struggling through a thick swamp, with a lead load strapped to the side and during a massive hangover.
After a few more feeble attempts, it dawned on him that he couldn't move his left arm.
This time it wasn't only a projectile in the tissues, but a huge, jagged wound left by a gunshot and a nail on which he had been hung for far too long. With rising anger in his chest, he briefly glanced sideways, at his left arm, covered in blood, resting on the floor and stubbornly inert. He cursed in his mind because he didn't want to waste the air he breathed with such effort...
As he tried to lift up his mutilated body at least a few centimeters above the ground, his thoughts traveled through time and space, remembering the train of events that brought him here. He remembered the noise that woke him up in the middle of the night and dragged him downstairs. He remembered the blinding squadron of Fireflies' flashlights. He remembered his three well-aimed shots at the Fireflies, and then two equally well-aimed Dorothy's bullets in his leg and his upper body. He remembered the nails… tearing his body apart, crushing through his bones and only miraculously (or maybe it was on purpose...?) leaving his crucial arteries undamaged, which prevented him from bleeding out. He remembered the tall bastard from the smelly Philadelphia's sewers that he almost forgot about…
He remembered... Relena's wide eyes, almost black with terror...
Relena... It was the last thing he remembered. Then there was only darkness and deafening pain in the back of his head that he kept feeling even now.
Suddenly, a strange, monotonous sound broke through his pain-swollen mind...
Smacking… Slurping…
He carefully tilted his head to the side, toward the staircase. Out of the corner of his eye, through his blood-clotted bangs, he noticed a Runner preying on the Firefly's corpse. The other two bodies' guts were already gone - the monster, lured by the scent of blood, was ravenous.
And apparently… Heero was next on the menu list.
To be continued - Heero POV
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TBC
Yes! Heero is still alive! Guy's way too hard to break. Will he be able to save Relena before it's too late…?
I was posting the updates rather quickly because of two reasons. First, I was sitting at home on sick leave and finally had time to write and secondly... I just want to tell you this story to the end so much!
I appreciate all your reviews. Next chapter: "The Thin Thread of Life."
By the way… Do you know that feeling… when after having written almost the whole story you realize, that its title is (probably) totally wrong from the very beginning? This morning I realized that the correct title should sound: "As long as we're still breathing air"!
Jesus Christ, English is difficult! And my English really sucks!
Those of you who are natives, please tell me: is there truly a mistake? If there is, I will correct the title, it just can't stay like that…
Stay safe,
~enelle