When Hilde woke to the sound of an infant crying, she had believed herself to still be dreaming. She let her eyes remain closed, listening to the muffled sobs. No dream she could remember had involved a child, not even the thought of a child, and now she thought on the matter she recognized her own metacognition. If she was conscious enough to be thinking about her dreams, she could not have been asleep.

Tentatively, she opened her eyes and cast her gaze about a familiar room. The bed felt familiar, the air smelled familiar, and all about her she could sense the faintest echo of the past. This was Duo's room aboard the Peacemillion II, yet she was unmistakably alone.

For a while, Hilde simply stared at the ceiling, remembering what she could. She had dreamed of the night of Duo's trial over and over again. Quatre had received a messenger who claimed Duo was having some adverse reaction, and Quatre had rushed out into the rain. She and Sally had remained in their own quarters, waiting for him to return with good news or bad. But when Quatre had come huffing back into the room his face had taken on a look of panic, and he explained as much as he could in a tiny amount of time.

Hilde remembered the run toward the hangar. She remembered being fired upon. She remembered the impact of the bullet. Everything thereafter was gone.

She rolled these memories through her mind three times before settling with herself that it must have been true, and then she took stock of her body. She flexed her fingers, her hands, her arms, tensed every muscle from her head to her toes. Everything seemed in decent enough repair, though her body felt remarkably weak. She reasoned that she must have been out for a while. A few days, perhaps.

Hilde could not fathom how long she'd been laying there when the door opened with a hiss. She watched Quatre enter with a supply bag in one hand and a book in the other; he flipped on the lights without ever looking her direction. But when he finally turned her way and noticed her gray eyes staring back at him, he dropped his things with a wordless cry and rushed toward her.

"You're awake!" he cried happily as he lurched toward her, and at once he took her arm in his and began an excited but wholly clinical check. "You're awake!"

It seemed to be all Quatre could say.

"I'm awake," Hilde croaked in reply. Talking hurt. Her throat was dry and scratchy. Her voice sounded old and broken.

"Your throat will hurt for a while," Quatre explained in as stern a tone as the enormous smile on his face would allow. "We took you out of stasis three weeks ago and I removed your feeder on," He looked at a calendar on the wall opposite the bed, "on Thursday. It's Monday now."

Hilde thought on this for a while. "Feeder?"

"Ah, yes," Quatre rushed back to retrieve his dropped items and returned to the bed. "You were shot, struck your head, lost a lot of blood, and were in stasis for a while. I had a spare chamber aboard my medical dock and we..."

"How long?"

"One hundred and five days in stasis," Quatre replied automatically. "We were certain you were going to die. I took you off of stasis to..."

Hilde furrowed her brow at this. Not only was the date confusing, the idea that she had been wounded so grievously was beyond her comprehension. "That bad?"

Quatre nodded. "You had been stable in the stasis chamber. Sally and I decided after a really long talk that your being in there was not helping you to get better, and that you needed to get stronger on your own. So we took you out and hoped you would get better."

But you thought I was going to die, Hilde thought. And yet she could not fault Quatre for saying what he had. It was his job, after all, to inform a person of all aspects of their care.

"We had made preparations just in case things went the other way, of course," Quatre continued, apparently oblivious to Hilde's reaction. "But after a week of you laying in the med bay, unsupported except for your feeder, we decided to put you in here. We've got a lot to fill you in on, now you're awake, and..."

"Where's Duo?" Hilde interrupted. "I want to see him."

Quatre shut up at once and looked at Hilde with pity in his eyes. It took him a long and seemingly troublesome moment to reply, "He's gone."

Again, Hilde tried to push herself to her elbows, but Quatre eased her back down. "Gone?" she croaked incredulously. "Gone where?" She rubbed at her throat instinctively.

Quatre shrugged. "I don't know. We don't know. We haven't heard from him in weeks."

"Gone where?" Hilde demanded again, and this time her voice found some power. "What is he doing?"

Quatre sat on the bed at Hilde's feet and regarded her inquisitively. It seemed, if she was to judge by his expression, that he hadn't suspected the news would cause her to become so irate. But he began his explanation anyway, pausing frequently to reevaluate verbiage. "Duo left sometime in the middle of September. He didn't let us know that he was going. After you were injured he lost it completely, though. We stole a couple of mobile suits from the McCarthy base and escaped. The suits we stole ended up being so heavily damaged from the flight that all we could do was salvage them. Duo did that on his own. Then he built a mobile suit-"

"A gundam?"

Quatre shook his head. "Not really," he said. "It had components made of gundanium but the build was almost entirely titanium. I don't know what materials were used in the prefabs."

"And he did that all by himself?"

Quatre shrugged. "Close enough as makes no difference," he said. "He started out by himself; he made the blueprints for the new suit, salvaged the stolen suits, got about thirty percent of his new build finished before Howard gave the rest of us the go ahead to help him out. All told the process took about five weeks."

"And..."

"And then he up and left in the middle of the night. Only said goodbye to Heero and didn't leave a single trace that he'd ever been here. We heard from him two or three times after that." Quatre paused and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Now I think on it; you've missed an awful lot."

"Summarize."

Flustered, Quatre pondered for an uncomfortable moment. "He left in order to lead a war for colonial independence using the mobile suit he built here. Heero should still have the videos he released; there were a few announcements of independence that he made in October that were broadcast all over the place."

"Why?" Hilde croaked. "Why would he do that?"

"Because someone wanted a war and was willing to achieve it at the expense of peace in the colonies. I guess Duo believed that if the colonists were going to be pushed into fighting, they may as well get something good out of it. I'd rather believe that than to think his only motivation was revenge. But like I said, we haven't heard from him in a long time. Heero was sending and receiving weekly messages, but those cut off. I sent him another message the day before I removed you from stasis so that he could come back, but it's been silent since then. We don't know his status or his location, and he hasn't appeared on television broadcasts since before then."

Hilde glanced at the calendar on the wall, opened to the month of December. "The date?"

"Monday, December 14, AC206. We've been floating in deep space since McCarthy, and Howard's colonial connections have been bringing in supplies biweekly."

Hilde nodded. "I want to watch those videos."

ф

As a matter of course, Heero had spent much of his life in isolation. Between the numbing soldier's training of his youth and the solitary missions of the One Year War, Heero had spent far more time by himself than in the company of others. Even now that he'd settled into a significantly more domestic life with occasional diplomatic and political forays into the public eye, Heero still found the most contentment when locked in a room by himself with his projects, which ranged anywhere between actual work commissioned by Howard or his crew to honing skills he might otherwise have lost. Indeed, if given a functioning computer, Heero could amuse himself in most any situation. In fact, he reckoned he'd be able to amuse himself even if the device was broken.

It followed that Heero never quite understood the meaning of cabin fever. Even as the rest of the crew grew irritable and short-sighted, Heero thought for a while that it was the result of nearly three months of uninterrupted stress from the newborn. Trowa and Wufei began searching for exit strategies. Relena boxed herself in the room with Heero and remained uncharacteristically quiet, brooding. Even Howard seemed occasionally too snappy when Heero had asked about any incoming transmissions. Hilde, recently conscious and newly able to maneuver about the ship on her own, acted with grim determination and kept largely to herself. But it wasn't until Quatre lashed out that Heero truly believed that things had gone too far.

Heero had always known Quatre as a man who could withstand inhuman levels of anxiety without showing even a hairline crack in his flawless personality. But without contact from Maxwell, without contact from the military or ESUN government personnel, and without much in the way of privacy, a crack seemed to have begun to grow.

Word had come in from Preventers Officer Une to the proxied inbox that Heero had been using for transmissions to and from Relena. At first when Heero read the thing, he balked, and then he read it again and his reaction was more tempered. The letter explained that Une had received orders to recall all Preventer's personnel to headquarters, which included Noin, Milliardo, Poe, and Wufei in the very least. Nearly half their crew had been ordered to rendezvous at a specific set of coordinates just inside the colonial boundary. She had not included instructions about how such an operation was to take place; she merely specified that a warship would be waiting on January 3, AC206.

Heero did not receive the reaction he'd been expecting when he broke this news over Christmas dinner. While Trowa and Wufei exchanged looks that might have contained relief, the rest appeared in some way skeptical. Noin in particular furrowed her brow at her seat even as she cradled her buoyant child. Sally Poe and Milliardo immediately began talking logistics and they concluded, long after dinner had gone cold, that setting out with the Peacemillion's last remaining, ill-equipped passenger shuttle would be suicide. Any ship that approached the boundary would be intercepted, and not necessarily by the good guys.

Hilde cried indignantly that if everything she'd heard about recent events was true, that there was no way such a move could be safe. She continued towing the line that finding Duo should be their primary concern, but Heero reasoned that she had been blinded be love, desperation, or both. There would be no way she'd be open to the idea that Maxwell was gone permanently, not after all she'd experienced.

Relena argued after this that things had been quiet for too long to worry about any trouble. The military had cracked down on the insurgents, had weeded out a huge number of people associated with the rogue operatives, and therefore must have restored some measure of peace to the organization as a whole. She reasoned that no one would invite them back into colonial space if there was any possibility that they might be hurt, much less someone as trustworthy as Une. When Relena at last claimed that all would be safe the mood lightened, and talk of leaving the ship broke out amongst the lot. Even Hilde opened up slightly and suggested that perhaps the Preventers could help them locate Duo.

All through this, Quatre remained quiet, nibbling away at his meal and radiating some intense emotion. When Howard began talking about outfitting the passenger shuttle with weapons systems salvaged from the Peacemillion itself, he grew visibly irate.

"There's no way," Quatre said at last and somewhat under his breath, and the quiet intensity of his voice drew the attention of everyone in the room. "It's not safe."

"Of course it's safe," Poe argued, though her voice gave no hint of anger. "We wouldn't have been instructed to come back if it wasn't safe. There was already one attempt on Relena's life. No one would've approved a motion like this if there was any risk of it happening again."

Quatre shook his head, his eyes still locked on his plate. "I don't like it," he said. "And I like it even less with all of you thinking so rashly. We can't afford to make a hasty decision right now, not after we've come so far."

"Nobody is making a hasty decision, Quatre." Howard reasoned gently.

"But we are. Heero just now read this letter, not ten minutes ago, and you're all jumping aboard like you've struck the lottery. We haven't even verified the message yet. More than that, we've been without real news from the outside for a week now, haven't we? Every one of our couriers went off for their holidays and we've had nothing. We won't get anything till next week. This is the longest blackout we've had, and you want to abandon ship?"

Quatre looked around the table accusingly, eventually falling to rest for a meaningful moment on Hilde. "And what about Duo?" he continued. "We haven't heard anything from him since what, October? It's been weeks! We don't know how the battles are going, how the mission is going. All we know is what we've been told by others. We have no primary sources. None of us has seen anything first hand. We can't just go diving into things without verification!"

"He's not wrong," Heero said at last and after a pregnant silence. He didn't much like to see Quatre in this state. "We'll need to verify the message and double check that it truly came from Une. We'll need to make sure it's all safe and then we can start making arrangements to rendezvous at the specified coordinates."

"And you're not taking the shuttle," Quatre snapped. "Even if you think it's all clear, if you go in there in an underpowered vessel without weapons and some unfriendly person meets you, you're not going to be able to put up a fight. Fancy piloting can't hold up against an arsenal, I don't care how clutch you think you are." Quatre cast an unkind look at Milliardo when he said this.

"Well what do you suggest?" Milliardo shot back irately. "What would you have us do?"

Quatre deflated. "I don't know," he said after a while. "If Duo was here we could send him in the mobile suit for backup."

"Oh, so he could take on a warship in that glass cannon but I can't in a well-armored shuttle?" Milliardo asked.

"Watch yourself, fly boy," Hilde warned.

Ignoring this biting exchange, Quatre continued. "But how do we contact him? When was the last time we had eyes on him?" He looked at Heero.

But Heero had no answer. He'd been sending Maxwell weekly messages, just as he'd promised, yet since the latest colony had declared its independence Duo had sent nothing back.

"I sent my last letter weeks ago," Quatre continued, at a ramble now. "I never got anything back. I invited him back to the ship and hoped he might come home but..."

"He's not coming home, Quatre," Heero said flatly, and at once he recognized that he'd offended. Irate eyes turned on him as though asking him to reason, and Heero returned their gazes with an expression of stupor. Of course the others would read too far into such a statement: Heero was the first point of contact for Duo when it came to the Peacemillion. "I don't know why I said that," he backtracked immediately, dropping his chin onto his hand. "That didn't come out right. I haven't heard from him, not since the last in the L-2 cluster declared. I've been sending my messages but there's been no response. There are lots of possibilities, though. He could be dead, yeah, but his radio could be broken, he could be too far out to receive our transmissions, especially if he backed into the deep."

As he said it, it seemed to Heero that Duo retreating into deep space was the most likely scenario. Maxwell had never been able to stomach a ding in the paint of his mobile suits, let alone a blown radio. If something that important had malfunctioned in any build Duo would have fixed it within the day. Considering the importance of this suit in particular, knowing that it acted not only as a weapon but also as his home base, Maxwell would certainly keep it in good repair.

But then Heero remembered how things had been in the days leading up to Duo's departure, and the idea of suicide or otherwise didn't seem so far-fetched. Even in the wake of the announcements of colonial independence, moments of utmost triumph, Duo's written transmissions had seemed distant and short. And in the videos of joint statements with colonial councils, Duo's appearance belied his posture and strong rhetoric. Behind the commanding front he had looked somehow frail, slightly malnourished, and generally exhausted. Heero wondered if Duo had simply given up and disappeared.

"I'll work to contact him," Heero said at last, and much to the relief of those around him. "I'll boost the signal if I can and send to all his known addresses. Past that, I'm not sure what I can do besides just waiting. I keep saying it: He'll come home when he wants to come home, and not a minute before."

"And we ought to get in touch with Une if we can," Quatre added, his voice much softer now, more characteristic of himself. "We'll need to verify her message and start making preparations to rendezvous if everything is legitimate. We ought to see if they'll have the firepower to protect us, that way we can bring Peacemillion as a whole back into boundary. One shuttle isn't enough to bring all of us back to civilization safely, and we can't crew this ship effectively without all hands."

Howard's face brightened at this, and he agreed heartily. One by one, so did the others, until a consensus had been met and all parties seemed appeased. And then the meeting broke, and everyone went back to his own devices.