Waking Up In Vegas
Chapter Thirty Four
Jezzy sat on the Maxwell's back porch, watching the sun rise through the trees in the distance. Her head was resting against her brother's shoulder. She missed this. She'd missed *him*. She'd gone eight years of her life without knowing him... but since the day she'd been dropped off at that military school... Heero had been her life. Once... for all of about five minutes... she'd fancied herself *in* love with him. She'd been nine at the time. It didn't take her long to decide that no, she wasn't in love with him. Since that day forward... Heero'd been her brother in heart, if not blood. And she knew he regarded her in the exact same light.
Relena sat on Heero's other side, and Jezzy pondered briefly if these two would ever catch a clue. They'd been dancing around each other for almost three years now. She could remember the first day they'd met... about four years before. Allelujah had gotten charged with doing the security work on some kind of 'peace' conference at a US military base in Asia. Being short handed, Allelujah and Marie had asked Heero to come in for that one week.
Of course Heero had agreed. And some mix up during a terorist attack had Heero pointing his gun at Relena, who'd been at the meeting as her father's assistant. Surprisingly... Relena had not paniced. According to how Heero told it, she'd brashly looked him straight in the eye and told him that if he was going to shoot her to avoid getting blood on her dress, as red would not look good on the green fabric. Her calmness had thrown Heero for a loop. He'd breifly wondered if she was crazy, or if she was really that *blond*.
He'd quickly realized she was neither. She was quick, intelligent, kind, and level-headed. After that fiasco, they'd become fast friends. Jezzy had been quick to take to the other blond girl. Despite fundamental personality differences... Jezzy's laid-back boyish lifestyle against the girly, glitzy life of Relena... they'd found many things in common.
They'd all been pleasantly surprised when Allelujah was assigned to the ZERO project initiated by Relena's best friend, one Quatre Winner. And thus... the 'Three Blonds' were born. Relena's butler-slash-driver, Pargan, had coined the phrase. And had unfortunately uttered the phrase a little too loudly so that Relena's brother and then Heero had heard. The name had stuck.
And then, Jezzy thought, her own 'death' had ruined it, broken it. And for all of three minutes they'd all been together again. Until, as she had predicted... the shit had hit the fan. Jezzy had met Iria Winner on several occasions. While they were not close friends by any length of the imagination, Jezzy would miss the older woman. She'd been sweet and kind and smart... and a pacifist to the bone.
To beleive she was actually dead... not just a fake dead... was a blow to all of those who knew her. And to know that she'd died... according to what she'd gleaned from Heero's chat with Zechs... in a horrible robbery in her own home. It was... it *hurt*.
Jezzy knew, better perhaps than anyone else, that life was precious and fleeting. She knew that death was a part of life, an assurement from day one. And she knew that this tangled web that surrounded ZERO... she knew it would cause destruction. Death. But to have that reality thrown in her face so soon. It hurt.
Iria Winner did not have to die. And if she ever found Iria Winner's killer... she would torture them to within an inch of their lives... bandage them up, heal them... and do it all over again.
That was, of course, if Quatre did not beat her to it.
For the second time in about a week, Quatre was on a plane, with Trowa at his side. After he'd calmed down enough to stand on his own... to speak.... to *think*, it had taken him five minutes talking with Zechs to glean the nessesary information from his just as greif stricken XO. It had taken him another ten minutes to get tickets on the next flight out of Huntsville International. One way to NYC.
He'd held onto his fragile composure while he'd talked with Trowa, while they'd grabbed Trowa a small bag of clothes, all the way to the airport in Alabama. He'd held onto the brittle mask he'd pulled around himself... held onto it until they were in the air. With Trowa murmuring soft words in his ear, he'd finally broken down. The tears he'd kept at bay for hours had fallen down in torrents.
His sister. Iria. She was gone. Shot down. And to make matters worse... Quatre knew why she was dead. Zechs had mentioned a small detail... it was a robbery. But nothing other than her laptop seemed missing.
Quatre knew why.
ZERO.
Iria's entire life was on that computer. Pictures of her friends. Pictures of her family, of Quatre. Her favorite songs. E-copies of her favorite books. Research data. Ideas for new experiments, notes on old ones. And more than likely the location of Wing Zero. With Heero's knowledge... and now this... that was the only reason Quatre saw.
And it just made the tears flow harder.
"Shhh," Trowa tried to sooth him, a hand rubbing up and down Quatre's back as the small blond clung to him for dear life.
"She's gone," Quatre sobbed.
"Shh," Trowa tried again. He had the feeling there was something more... something he didn't know. Something big. Something big enough to have a couple fly across a country to speak in person rather than over a phone. Something big enough to have a barely-more-than-teenaged girl land a helicopter in his adopted mother's yard. Something big enough to maybe cause the death of his lover's sister.
Emily pushed a lock of her light golden brown hair from her face, hazel eyes taking in what was happening. Three men were walking away down the street. She'd known they weren't just 'friends' as they'd said. They weren't friends of Trowa's. No way, no how. She knew Trowa *that* much at least. And they weren't working with her and Sei. So... who were they with? She blinked to her cousin.
"Sei... what are you doing?"
The other girl ignored her, unlocking the trunk of the car witht he faint glow of the false dawn on the horizon.
"Sei... what are you doing?" she repeated. The blond still ignored her. She lifted the trunk open, moved aside a few odds and ends and lifted the floor of the trunk. In the compartment where any other car would have a spare tire, the Ford had a duffle bag. Sei snatched the duffle bag open.
Emily's mouth fell open as her cousin withdrew a gun from the bag.
"Marseille Antoinette Lovecraft!" Emily gasped.
"Shut up, Emmy," Sei snapped, turning her annoyed blue eyes to her younger cousin. "Don't you get it? This isn't some game. This is not a movie or a book! This is *real*. Real people. Real bad guys. Real good guys. Real guns. Real death," she stated with finality. The blonde handled the gun expertly, checking the magazine, then clicking the safety back on before tucking it in the back of her belt.
Emily's hazel eyes stared in horror at her cousin. Her voice was low, slightly tinted with fear when she spoke. "Sei... who are you? The 'good guy'? Or.... the 'bad guy'?"
Seil laughed, slamming the trunk down. "I'm the guy trying to stop a global war. By any means nessesary."
Emily stared as her cousin walked away into the morning. Just who was that girl and what had happened to the cousin she remembered from when she was a little child? How had things gotten so out of hand? All she'd had to do was keep an eye on Trowa when he got back. The simplest job ever; an easy way to make some extra money to help her through school. And then that blond had come back with him, and all of a sudden Louisa Lovecraft, her self-righteous and conceited aunt, had turned her beady eyes to the niece she'd almost forgotten had existed. Then she'd had to keep an eye on both of them, and to let Aunt Louisa or Sei know if the two seemed to be having problems, or getting on good.
Emily knew her aunt wanted Quatre back in his own home up north. And Emily knew it had something to do with something called ZERO. But she hadn't known things were going to turn dangerous like this. Keeping tabs on someone was one thing... in Emily's mind at least. Guns and shady men were something else entirely.
The hazel eyed girl was pulling out her phone and dialing up her aunt, a rough idea already forming in her mind when she paused.
Emily blinked as something occured to her... as she realized Sei hadn't really answered her question.
Delana stood looking over the three new arrivals. Maia had stayed over again, and she and Vanny had managed to fall back asleep again. Hilde'd crashed on the couch. Dad was upstairs in bed asleep, too. He'd never been much on big crowds, and he trusted his wife to alert him should something important arise. Jasper was sitting across the porch on a chair, looking half-asleep. Momma was somewhere inside making coffee. Quatre and Trowa had left a few hours back, with Trowa's promise to leave Cathy a note.
Delana had never liked the thought of Cathy staying all alone in that house, and now she had even more reason to dislike the idea. As soon as it was a more decent hour, she was going to go and kidnap her new girlfriend. Cathy was going to stay here with her until Trowa came back, however long that took.
She sighed softly, looking out across the yard and pastures. Her jeep was sitting there in the drive, blocked in by a monstrously huge black SUV. The truck was tucked in by the barn, where it usually always stayed, still hooked to a horse trailer from where Momma had carried one of the mares off yesterday morning. A helicopter of all things sat in the distance in a paddock, the horses giving it a wide berth, despite the fences that seperated them from it. Diana stood nibbling lazily at the dew-kissed grass in the closest corner of the pasture, not far from the edge of the porch.
All in all, a quiet morning, she thought as her gaze sweeped across the land. One would never have expected all the drama that had already unfolded. One would never have thought that....
Even her thoughts trailed off when she caught sight of the thin whisp of smoke in the distance, towards town. Then, a darker cloud rose up, and a glint of reddish-gold flashed through the trees.
Her feet were running forward immidiately, before her mind had ever given them permission to move.
"Oh, God, no..." she cried, rousing the attention of the others as she scrambled down the dew-slicked steps. She knew exactly where that orange flash was....
"No! Cathy!"