The military rally looked as something from a pre-colonial war film. Everything from the grainy video to the angle of the shot harkened back to dictatorial days of old. As he watched the soldiers marching in straight ranks down the almost wholly abandoned L-237 streets, streets lined with towering mobile suits at even intervals the whole way down, Heero wondered at what point things had gotten so extreme.

He'd been abed most of the afternoon, watching the poor quality broadcast via live stream on his laptop while the rest of the Peacemillion crew fussed about outside. All his personal plans had been forgotten: No one would be interested in assisting him in the gathering of military intelligence with a baby on the way. But even if Quatre, Sally, and Zechs were distracted, and Wufei and Trowa and Howard were hiding, Heero could provide much needed support for Maxwell out in the field, even if that support came as simple observation and later guidance.

The march ran for twenty minutes or so, until the in-air camera panned to the front of the line, situated at the colonial square, and focused in on the mob of military uniforms crowded about a raised platform with a line of chairs and a podium atop it. It was here that the actual rally would take place. When he'd first heard of the event, he couldn't understand why: With all the recent attention being given to the ESUN service, with all the internal investigations and outward criticism, why anyone would want to bring more attention to themselves?

It was this question that prompted Heero to investigate the matter more fully, and through covert avenues he'd managed to get his hands on an internal memo suggesting that the move was made to bolster morale among the troops. This made sense, Heero supposed: too much bad press would make anyone unhappy about their job and their employer, particularly if that bad press suggested that they'd been infiltrated by a group of insurgents. But still, the motivation remained suspect.

Further digging revealed a second, related memo from the desk of Charles Benning to another man whose name Heero had forgotten as soon as he'd read it, which contained a carefully worded script that read like a hard political party line, like propaganda designed to advertise the strength and integrity of the service to the colonial citizens, who'd grown more restless still in the days since Duo's hasty exit from the Peacemillion. But outside of the script, and outside of Benning's name, there was little written information that connected the message to a colored operation, let alone the organization as a whole. And it wasn't until long later, until Relena got her eyes on the correspondence, that Heero was able to connect the dots.

"Your screen looks weird," she'd said, an offhanded remark while she situated herself in bed. "Did you do something to the color? It's awfully bright."

Heero hadn't had a clue what she was yapping about, and he'd been in such a foul mood with himself and his inability to piece the puzzle together that he'd completely blown her off. But when he slipped into bed beside her and replaced the computer on his lap, he noticed it: the screen had been off color.

Perhaps he'd missed it earlier in the rush of excitement for finding the memo, or maybe it'd been the brightness of the bedroom lights. But now it was quiet and dark, Heero couldn't miss the very slightly blue hue to the letter as a whole. The tiniest tint, just barely beyond white, colored the screen and made it glow brighter and more harshly than normal.

The letter had been very subtly color-coded.

Upon this realization, Heero had formulated his first message to Maxwell, and after a quick once-over by Relena in the morning he'd sent it on its way. He'd been uncertain about including a mission detail, nervous about whether Maxwell would appreciate the guidance (as it had seemed so much lately that he'd wanted to fly solo), but when Heero's computer beeped at him later on that day and he opened Maxwell's response, the doubt disappeared.

So now he sat and watched and waited, hoping that Duo would have enough sense to time the mission right and to execute it with flawless precision. Heero hoped also that Duo would be of sound enough mind to determine whether or not the Blue Operative leader would need to be killed, or if it would be enough to merely scare him. Heero had meant it when he said he never wanted to kill again, and even if Maxwell was the one doing the dirty work, Heero knew he'd feel just as culpable for giving the order.

At last, the parade stopped and the mob of uniforms formed ranks at the base of the platform. Five people, whose features were obscured by the poor-quality video, took to the stage and found seats in a neat row. Then one of them stood and approached the podium.

The camera angle switched suddenly, from a distant, wide shot to a low view from just beneath the stage. Heero recognized the angle at once as what Relena would've called a "power shot," an angle that looked up at the speaker as if placing him on a pedestal with the viewers down below. The image remained extremely grainy, but Heero could make out broad features of the man on the stage. On the young side of middle aged, the speaker was a tall, ginger-haired man with a sturdy build. He looked slightly alien.

The man began to speak, and Heero watched without sound. He didn't care terribly what the man had to say: He'd read the script twice over already and had therefore decided that he'd ingested enough "Blah blah military is great, blah blah," for a lifetime. All he cared about was seeing whether or not Duo would pull through with the mission.

The speaker droned on until Heero felt vaguely sleepy, and he was caught so off guard by the sudden change in action that he jolted upright, the laptop nearly falling from the bed.

In an instant, a great red fireball erupted from beyond the camera's frame, filling the sky with smoke. The camera jerked about, left and right and left again, up and down, until finally it came to rest on a plume of smoke climbing in great peaks above the stage. It cleared like fog, and just barely beyond its obscuring form Heero could see the faint silhouette of Duo Maxwell's gundam, dual-headed scythe glowing eerily.

He didn't know when he'd assumed the position, but Heero noticed that he'd sat forward, hands cupped against his mouth, and he watched the scene unfolding without breath.

And he'd been expecting it.

ф

Duo stared at the chaos unfolding below him in the wake of the explosions. As the smoke cleared he saw hundreds of uniformed men and women scurrying around like ants, some running with purpose and others trying to flee. He knew going into this mission that he'd be forced to fight against armed mobile suits, yet still he hoped to avoid casualties.

He opened the communication line to the outside, and his voice projected loudly, "This colony does not recognize your authority. Stand down at once."

Unsurprisingly, no one listened.

As the mobile suits he'd slashed through fell into unmoving heaps at his side, Duo wondered how many others he'd be able to safely dispatch. Already the suits lining the streets began to power on, and Duo knew that his victory here would depend on the lack of dead in his wake.

"I repeat," he said again, more confidently this time, "stand down or I will retaliate. This colony does not recognize your authority or the authority of Charles Benning of the United Earth Sphere Military. You are being led by an insurgent who is acting out of the line of duty and beyond the scope of his jurisdiction. Stand down!"

When they didn't stand down, Duo's chest tightened. He'd understood the very real possibility that he would have to fight: He'd counted on that fact, and he'd tried to train himself to fight without killing as much as possible. But no matter how much he prepped himself, no matter how many times he reassured himself that he would be able to fight with a clear mind and a sound heart he still dreaded this moment. Now it was real, and he would be put to the test again.

Every time he'd entered a mobile suit cockpit since the detonation of M-204 he'd experienced panic. The trauma ran deeper than he'd expected. Duo knew that it ran deeper than anyone had expected. Last time he'd piloted a suit in full combat, on the evening that the Peacemillion crew had escaped the military compound on Earth, he'd had to be right and properly medicated to calm back down. He'd barely been able to walk without help; his knees had been shaking so badly. And now, with those experiences playing back in his mind, and the very real sight of soldiers rushing to their own cockpits, he felt the slightest tremble in his hands, the tiniest rumble of nausea in his gut.

When the first mobile suit came to life, Duo steeled himself, and with the rest of the confidence he could muster, he said coldly through the audio feed: "You were warned."

Even through the shakes, Duo fired his engines and shot off toward the grate through which he'd entered the colony. Duo knew he would have to get clear of civilian zones, and he knew as well that the suits would be trailing. And though he'd closed his audio output, he could hear the calls behind him, ordering the mobile suits to follow and shoot to kill.

Before he knew it, he was outside the colonial chassis, floating in wide open space with mobile suits coming at him in droves. The first round had been right on his tail as he'd broken out, and he'd about-faced deftly to take a precise swing at the mobile suits' heads, severing them cleanly. With cameras offline, the first two machines fell motionless.

On came more, at first in waves. Three dove in from the left, and Duo dispatched them with the vulcan guns equipped to his gundam's head armor. Four came right, and he cut them down with the scythe, each in turn. And each enemy he faced wound up the same way: Floating motionless and powerless in the void of space.

At first the panic faded away against a front of instinct and calculation. As the enemies pressed in tight formations, Duo could predict their movements easily enough. These were rookie fighters, apparently, taught with the same three and four men teams in the same drills that Duo had experienced during his own air force training. He knew these movements, had fought against these movements in the One Year War. He could best them.

But then the suits came on in full, abandoning the rudimentary formations for spontaneous assaults that lacked the discipline Maxwell had come to expect. They charged apparently at random and from all sides, at least fifty of them. While once upon a time such a paltry number would have posed no threat to the God of Death, Duo knew that now was not that time. His once solid mind had been compromised by post-traumatic stress, and no matter how much he'd wanted to deny what Quatre and Sally had agreed upon and explained to him, he could not deny the very real panic overtaking his mind and body at that very moment.

For a time, Duo lost track of his movements. He continued to swing the scythe and fire the guns, but more often than not he missed, and those shots that did connect were glancing blows at best, just enough to keep his head above water. He recognized the clumsiness in his piloting, the flailing about of his hands and fingers at the controls, the fat-fingering of keys and the jerkiness of his feet at the pedals. He was embarrassing himself. He who had brought the colonies to war, who had reassured civilians that the decision to fight back was in their best interest. He had promised them that he would lead them, would clear a path and leave peace in his wake.

And now he was failing.

"Dammit, Maxwell," he grumbled to himself as the gundam lurched hard to the left, accepting a hard hit from a beam sword. Duo swung the scythe toward the attacker and watched, minutely satisfied, as a nonlethal explosion rendered it inoperable. "This is ridiculous," he whispered to himself, the slightest edge of anger sounding through the nerves. "Ace pilot my ass. This is kid's stuff and you can barely land a shot..."

He accepted two more blows before his anger took hold. Filled with indignation he gave in to it, thinking to himself of all the times past, while under the effects of Quell and the mind-altering operating system, when he'd flown with ability he'd not known he'd had. The raw statistics had verified it: His mind was what held him back. So he stopped fighting against the panic and stopped berating himself, and for a heartbeat there came absolutely nothing in his brain. For that tiny moment Duo Maxwell was alone with himself, and in that time of clarity he knew what he had to do.

Clear-minded, he watched the monitor, saw blips and streaks of enemy suits tracked by the cameras. The zero system marked their proximity, their lethality, their projected motion, but the numbers did not matter. Piloting was as much intuition as calculation, and Maxwell new it was well past time to let instinct take hold.

A swing to the left dispatched two suits, and as the upper half of the mobile suit chassis turned he let loose the vulcan guns, mowing down three more distant. A half turn brought him to face a group of awkwardly spaced suits which remained motionless as if waiting for him to make the first move. Duo obliged, throttling forward at full, his breath held tight in his chest as his body reacted to the sudden acceleration. Full measures, he thought to himself in an instant, were the only way to take care of this situation efficiently. Full throttles, full swings, open fire. Death was inevitable, and any feelings of guilt in Duo's heart were tempered by the knowledge that these insurgent soldiers had been responsible, at least in part, for the detonation of M-204 and his subsequent breakdown.

A he flew on, dream-like images darted unbidden through Duo's consciousness. And while somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that these visions came as a result of operating the zero system, Duo could not help but feel he was reliving the Quell. Helen and Hilde, bloodied and dead, said things to him that he could not truly understand. He couldn't hear their voices over his own frantic breathing, but he knew. He'd heard their voices too many times not to know what they were saying.

This isn't who you are.

It's long past time for you to move on.

You're going to have to stop blaming yourself.

None of this is your fault.

And then all at once the world went quiet, and Duo swung the scythe into nothingness. The voices fell silent and the dreams faded into the blackness of space beyond the suit. The remnants of a mobile suit floated out there, shining in the light of the colony, but no more came on and no more appeared on the radar.

A flip of a switch fired the hyper-jammers, and another engaged the rudimentary cloaking system. His own radar swept the area immediately around and found it empty of live mobile suits.

It was over.

He had won.

ф

Over and over again Heero watched the footage of Duo's battle, and with each replay he felt more disappointed. Four different outlets had been recording the events separate from the low-quality stream he'd caught live, and each one captured a different angle of Duo's magnificent entrance and subsequent exit. There was no video and no news of what happened after. Heero couldn't even be certain that Maxwell was still alive.

"Our inside sources report that the unidentified mobile suit was plated with gundanium alloy, though not fully," reported Heero's latest video. "The gundam appeared in the midst of a military rally on colony L-237, destroying a full armament of mobile suits and leaving two soldiers dead. We have not yet identified the pilot of the mysterious suit, and its whereabouts are unknown. If you or anyone you know has any information regarding the identity of the pilot or the location of the gundam, please contact your local authorities."

With a sigh, Heero closed the video and opened his inbound communications, hoping for a message from Maxwell. It had become customary in the years of war to send a message declaring the success or failure of a mission, but two days had gone by and the only new messages Heero had received were from Relena, and contained pictures of an alien-looking newborn.

Heero had not yet gone to visit the medical bay. He'd scarcely left the room at all, and news of the baby had come firsthand from Relena, who'd entered the room more jubilant than he'd ever seen her before. On that evening he'd tried his best to humor her, but he had been too distracted by the mission, worried about Maxwell's status, and eventually Relena had calmed and noted his attitude.

Tentatively, Heero opened a new message and typed simply: Status? Then, with the message sent, he stood from his desk and left the room, uncertain of exactly where he might go. He just needed to walk.

Eventually Heero's stomach led him to the galley, and even before he entered he knew he'd found company. At a far table, Quatre, Trowa, and Zechs were casually seated, hovering close around the tabletop and apparently occupied.

"You grab and lift," Heero heard Quatre saying gently as he approached. "No, like this. Grab... And lift."

Heero slid into a chair beside Trowa and joined him in watching the embarrassment. The tiny baby lay atop the table between two trays laden with food, its lower half naked and sitting atop a bleach white towel. Quatre had apparently chosen this as prime time to teach Zechs to change its linens. And while Zechs appeared quite thoroughly flustered, Quatre and the baby wore the same serene and entirely forgiving expressions, and outside of Quatre's encouraging direction, neither made a single peep.

"There. Now slide this under," Quatre pointed, "just like that. Now gently...Gently..."

It was at this point that Trowa seemed to notice Heero had sat beside him, as he turned quite suddenly to engage. "What's new?" he said, and Heero noted a bit of relief in his voice. "It's been a while."

Heero shrugged. He kept his eyes on the squirming blob on the table and watched as Quatre expertly swaddled it. "Nothing really," Heero said after Quatre had comfortably settled in the seat opposite him. "Just waiting."

"No new leads, then," Trowa prompted.

And Heero shook his head, his eyes drawn to Milliardo and the baby now hidden amongst the cloth in his arms. He looked oddly natural holding the thing, serene and altogether entranced by its occasional movement. Now that Heero had seen the source of the ship's distraction, he could not be upset that his missions had been all but forgotten.

"Any word on Maxwell?" Zechs asked, using the same gentle tone that Quatre had previously employed. The tone suited him well, though it did not come naturally to him.

"Last I knew he was laying some pain on a group of insurgents in the L-2 cluster," Heero replied, and without thinking his voice had softened. "Haven't heard from him since, though."

"He had the gundam with him, then?" Trowa asked. "It's been revealed, I mean, people know it's out there."

"No doubt about that. You saw the news, didn't you? I got a random L-5 channel on the computer yesterday and it was all over."

"I listened a little bit," Quatre said. "Sounded like he made a stir."

"Seems like," Heero agreed. "But, like I said, I haven't heard from him since. Was hoping he'd get back to me by now but the com's been dead."

Suddenly Zechs looked up as if with purpose, and his forehead wrinkled severely. He looked tired even beyond the stern expression. "You don't think he's dead, do you?"

"Don't know. Like I said, I haven't heard back from him."

Quatre reclined in his chair with a sigh, his food apparently forgotten. "Well, now that we've finished with the hard work, we ought to refocus on your objectives, I think. Not to diminish anything, that is," he glanced meaningfully at Zechs, who offered a lethargic shrug in response. Then, satisfied, Quatre turned his gaze intently back to Heero. "So what can we do to help?"

On the spot, Heero wasn't certain what to say. He'd been distracted watching the child wriggle around. "Well, we'll have to sit a little. I threw out a line last week to O'Keefe to see if he'd bite. I'm hoping he'll respond now that Duo's out in the world screwing up his plans. Plus, with the internal investigations the military is running we ought to find something out. Last I checked this morning I saw they had arrested a couple guys and were going to begin questioning. It's all hush hush, though. I don't know that I'll be able to find any details for a while yet."

"What's Relena been up to?"

This question caught Heero off guard, and while he didn't immediately have a response, Zechs did. "She's been with Noin," he replied in Heero's place. "Recovery be damned, they've been working on a presser to send out. Last I checked they were hoping to elicit some cooperation from the military and government operations responsible for the investigation. Relena's been playing the 'I want to come home' card."

"Makes sense," Heero agreed. He wished now that he'd had a chance to speak with Relena before engaging this conversation, but there was no avoiding it. Until he could break through on his own, he'd have to rely on the intelligence gathered by others. And until he heard from Maxwell, he'd have to assume he was gone.

He just hoped he wasn't dead.