"It's a pretty standard case, as far as I see it," Quatre said between sips of tea. He reclined in his chair and rested his chin on his empty hand, watching and waiting for Sally to weigh in. The conversation had been tense but necessary to compare notes and transfer files, and Sally had been quieter than usual. All she did now was nod. "I'm really hesitant to put the label on him but I think it'll help the court martial."
"Post-traumatic stress is a serious diagnosis," Sally agreed quietly. "And I agree that it's not a label to be placed arbitrarily. I don't want to admit it as much as anyone else, but Duo's been deteriorating since he got out of stasis."
"And I'll bet it's worse than what I've seen. He's always trying to play it down when I'm around."
Sally nodded and leaned forward in her chair, her elbows resting on her legs, and spoke in a hushed, scandalous tone. "Howard had me move him from his bunk to the med bay again."
Now Quatre leaned forward, his interest piqued. "Oh? When was this?"
Again, Poe nodded. "A few days ago. The shade in his room was up—you know, before all this happened he used to like sitting in his room just staring out into space to decompress," she paused and waited for Quatre to nod. "But the shade in his room was open, and when he entered with Howard he just blanked out. Went completely dead faced and stared like he'd been frozen to the spot. Howard thought he was stroking or seizing or something, but then all of a sudden, the way Howard told it, Duo tried to bolt out into the hallway and nearly took Howard out."
"Standard," Quatre quipped.
"Howard called me immediately after it happened… it took an hour to get Duo back under control. All clammy and sweaty, but we managed to do it without tranquilizers… Since then he's barely said a thing to anyone. Maybe Heero once in a while, maybe something here or there to Howard but it's always noncommittal. He didn't say a word to me on Thursday check-up. He's gone from upswing to rock bottom in nothing flat."
Quatre leaned back again and sipped. "I wouldn't call it nothing flat," he said. "Regression wouldn't be uncommon after all he's been through."
"But he won't tell us what he's been through," Sally rebutted. "All we know is the capture, the explosion…And yes, that's bad enough to cause him problems but if there was something else. Something more that happened in between…"
It took Quatre a while to ruminate on the possibility. Duo had been away for more than two weeks. There was no telling what his captors might have put him through, and no way to know now they were gone. "Has he done anything to suggest something happened outside of what we know?"
"No," Sally said. "Not that I know of. But think about it, Quatre, they completely repurposed that mobile suit, and we don't know what kind of engineering expertise they had access to. Heero's been decoding the thing for two weeks full-time and has barely put a dent in the operating system alone." Sally spoke passionately, her arms gesticulating wildly. "Those people put that system into his mobile suit, they debugged and tested it, and they linked it to mobile dolls. And Duo had to learn that system from head to foot. Certainly they wouldn't have sent him out in a real exercise without knowing he'd have things under control."
"Or without knowing that he was under their control," Quatre added.
Sally stopped short, looking interested by this. "What do you mean?"
"Do you remember his tox-screen? All those chemicals? Turns out it's a street drug they call Quell and it's ancient. They used it in pre-colonial days as a means of control, and they shot him up with it what—" he grabbed the legal pad from his table and flipped through its pages. "He said twice a day. He was gone for eighteen days, if you count when we got him back… That's almost forty shots if they were consistent in their dosing. That's a huge amount of that kind of chemical."
"What does it do?"
"Powerful sedative, but it's obscure," Quatre explained, still engrossed in his notes. "I had to look it up in the databases to be sure I was clear on its purpose. In theory it's supposed to be an emotional suppressor, make a patient sort of deadpan and nonreactive. It was used in psych wards primarily to help patients with negative thought stopping, but then word got out that it produced some interesting effects when doses were raised. The Global Drug Administration pulled it from the market not long after that but unused stockpiles were still available for years in underground markets."
"What's it do when doses are raised?"
The corner of Quatre's mouth twitched in a slight frown. He thought for a long moment before he said hesitantly, "It's not so much what it did under abuse, but what it did after abuse."
Sally picked up her cup and held it to her lips, waiting expectantly.
"According to the research the GDA did, when doses were slightly increased, say one and a half times the recommendations, the effects increased. It no longer stopped only negative thoughts, but impacted positive thoughts as well. When doses were increased beyond double, virtually all emotion ceased; more with higher doses. Patients reported feeling nothing—no excitement, no anxiety, no happiness, no anger. Nothing. Nothing at all. Fine and good, I suppose, but when the doses are stopped, and particularly when they're stopped suddenly, the patients experienced an overload."
"Overload," Sally parroted.
"Extreme mood swings," Quatre elaborated. "Sudden rage, confusion, blackouts. A few studies reported that people were acting without memory of what happened. The potential here is really alarming."
"So it could be that he acted and doesn't even remember what he did."
"During his stay on the ship, anyway. We know he remembers the detonation, at least in passing. He knows it happened, and he knows he did it. Beyond that?" Quatre shrugged, at a loss.
The two fell into silence as Quatre poked at his notepad, filling court ordered forms and testimony. Sally placed her teacup on the table with a quiet clink, and curled up comfortably in the plush chair on which she sat. "You know," she said sullenly after a while, peering out the window into the void of space, "they could just discharge him and be done with it. We've already submitted evidence that he wasn't in his right mind when he fired on that colony."
Quatre looked up. "They won't. Not with the uprisings in the colonies, not with the unrest in the Earth Sphere. The colonists want answers from the military, and the military needs someone to point the finger at. Much as I don't want to say it, Duo fits the bill to a T. He's a colony-born military man, and basically a free agent. Implicating him not only gives everyone a scapegoat, but it brings the colonies and the Earth closer together. It builds colonial trust because now the colonists think the Earth will peg its own man for a crime without hesitation and in a fair trial. It makes the military seem accountable."
"That's unfair."
"No," Quatre corrected pointedly, "that's politics."
ф
The crew of the Peacemillion learned to leave Duo Maxwell alone. He wandered the great ship's corridors on occasion, haunting the halls like a ghost, touching the walls, peering absently out the windows as if lost in thoughts too deep for his mind to grasp. And when he did speak it was only a few words here or there, monosyllabic answers that conveyed his message with as little real communication as possible. Several times he lashed out entirely in fits of anger that the crew saw as unusual and grotesque coming from one they knew as persistently cheerful. Many days he spent locked in his room staring at the still blank pages of the journal that Quatre had given him.
Howard and Sally agreed that twenty-four hour surveillance would not be necessary now that Duo was able to walk and talk and care for himself, but they still scheduled rotations each day to check in, and Quatre stopped in each third day.
It had been difficult for Duo to avoid the world outside Peacemillion's heavily armored hull. On Quatre's recommendation he had yet to turn on a television, and he figured that radios and newspapers would be littered with the same biased reporting that had characterized the article he had read. Aside from that, Duo could scarcely cope with the coalescing memories floating in his disorganized mind, prompted by Quatre's debriefing. He did not want to think what terrible thoughts would come if he was to see surveillance video of the colony's destruction.
Heero had explained one day that the event had been captured on no fewer than twelve cameras docked on military vessels, in high-definition and each from a different angle. Heero had been helpful in that way. He could talk about what happened with cold objectivity, but Duo did not know whether it was due to Heero's training as a soldier or the fact that Heero had analyzed the data so thoroughly that he'd been desensitized.
Duo suspected the latter.
Over time, Maxwell spent more time in Heero's quarters than he spent in the medical bay, an arrangement that seemed favorable to everyone as it gave Howard and Sally a much needed break from babysitting. Duo found the company comfortable: The quiet hum of Heero's computer and the gentle clicks of the mechanical keyboard soothed away his ever-present and perpetually rising anxiety. And Heero never said a word. He did not judge. All Heero did was to allow Duo into the room and offer a muted "hello" or "goodbye" when he came and went. Often those pleasantries came as simple grunts between keystrokes.
This was the only relationship that had remained normal through the disaster, if one could ever have called their oft brotherly and sometimes strained relationship normal.
"You told me about a girl once," Duo said quietly one evening as he thumbed the pages of the still blank journal, "and her dog. On a colony." From the corner of his eye, Duo saw Heero twitch a bit and cock his headphones behind one ear as if to listen. Not surprising, considering how little he'd been speaking of late. Duo cleared his throat and started again, perhaps less confidently now that the ruse of casual conversation had been spent. "What I'm trying to say is…You've… You've killed civilians before..."
Heero removed the headphones entirely and swiveled in his chair, his posture defensive. His eyes had narrowed just slightly; just enough that Duo knew he had struck a nerve. It was a long and uncomfortable moment before Heero spoke, and in that moment it seemed as if he was contemplating something very seriously. He said in a tone of finality, "There isn't a soldier alive who can say he hasn't at least taken part in the injury or death of a civilian." He paused then added, "But I've moved on."
Duo drew in a quick breath. Of late he'd dreamed these lines over and over. Helen sat at a white table in a white room judging him softly and saying, it's long past time for you to move on; it seems you've done a terrible thing; it's long past time for you to move on. The words came again, ringing in his head the same way as Quatre's had more than a week ago. But this time Duo maintained his calm. "How?" he asked.
Heero folded his hands on his lap, fidgeted, and stared at his fingers. They moved mechanically as he thought. Years of coding had taken all of the spontaneity away, and the fidgeting looked more as the twitch of a pilot at his mobile suit controls. Duo could practically hear the gears whirring in Heero's calculating brain.
"You change," Heero said bluntly, suddenly, his eyes on the floor. But then he looked up and met Duo's gaze full on. "I'm not the same person I was during the war. You know that. I made changes based on my emotions, based on the people around me, based on all kinds of circumstances. A time came when I didn't need to be a soldier anymore, so I stopped being a soldier."
Dumbstruck, Duo gazed at Heero. They had talked before and at significant length about the war in years prior, late at night after too many drinks and with little reservation, but Heero had never once sounded so genuine about it. "But how?" he asked again. "How did you stop?"
Heero shrugged and turned back to the monitor, but he did not begin typing again. It seemed as though the blinking cursor offered a focal point, somewhere he could look and concentrate. "I suppose it was Relena."
"What about her?"
"She required me to change, and it was clear at the end of the war that if I wanted to be with her and she was going to serve as Secretary General, that something would have to give. It doesn't fit the narrative for a high-ranking official to have an assassin for a husband, does it?"
"No."
Heero began poking at the keyboard again, his actions starting slow and building speed as he combed through more files. Duo was content to let the conversation die, but Heero continued on. "So you're faced with a bigger problem than I was, I guess. I've been a civilian for nine years, officially speaking. You're military to your very core. How are you going to handle things? How are you going to change?"
The question was difficult, to be sure, and Duo felt a tightening in his gut when he thought of it. Heero had had it easy: Relena gave him an ultimatum to change or be dumped, and Heero chose to change. All truth told, Duo had been given much the same ultimatum by Hilde and at nearly the same time, but Duo had chosen the opposite path, and now it seemed that the decision had led him to ruin.
Duo realized at once that his breathing had quickened, his heart had started racing, and his skin had grown clammy. The panic attacks came frequently now, and even Duo could not say for certain what would trigger them. Once they had started it was difficult to stop: The thoughts bombarded his brain like a hail of machine gunfire.
"Maxwell, if you're going to have another anxiety attack I'd just as soon you leave," Heero said, deadpan. "I've got entirely too much work to do to deal with your drama."
Duo forced himself to breathe, and breathe deeply and slowly. He felt his chest shuddering with each inhalation and felt his hands shaking. He clutched Quatre's journal tightly. How could he change? He'd been stuck in his role for too long. Military service was all he knew. How could he adjust to civilian life? For whom did he need to change?
Duo stood and made his way toward the door, his knuckles white from clutching the journal too tightly.
"Where are you going, and do I need to send Sally or Howard to make sure you're okay?"
"I'm going back to med bay," Duo replied unevenly. "And no. I'll be fine."
It wasn't the first time Duo had uttered those words untruthfully, and he knew it wouldn't be the last.
