Disclaimer: I don't own a thing (as sad as that realization is), except for the words I've written.

Warnings: Rated for adult language (Duo's got quite a surly mouth and mind), some violence, and mild adult themes.

A/N: Here we go with the next installment. Some questions answered, some new questions stirred up. Reviews are incredibly appreciated!

Maxwell

Chapter 19: You're In Control, Is There Anything You Wanna Know?

Square One - Coldplay

It had been an utterly pointless venture. A complete waste of time, though Quatre had disagreed with the notion of 'complete.' It had at least been a tremendous waste of time then.

Heero studied the fingers curling into fists in his lap as Wufei drove and he didn't even bother to look up when the brakes were slammed a few times more than normal. They all had other things on their minds, driving was not 'priority number one' right now. He chastised himself inwardly for having taken into account something Duo might have muttered sarcastically in his ear.

Their lives were priority number one if only for the soul purpose of finding Duo, therefore driving ended up inadvertently tied to 02's wellbeing. But- he trusted Chang.

In his mind the conversation with Menta Rolland played over again as if stuck on repeat, something usually an annoyance to him. Get the pertinent information, analyze it, move on. But no matter how many times he'd analyzed this new development nothing seemed to quite fit.

"My father wasn't one of the scientists chosen for Operation Meteor. He could have been, but- things got complicated."

Yes, it seemed that everything nowadays was 'getting complicated.' The woman had wanted their help, knew of their capabilities, and tried to work them over with sorrowful eyes. She'd just assumed perhaps their comrade's disappearance was related. Maybe it was, but they'd all kept faces of steel on that suspicion. And yet, even despite everything, she had given them one useful piece of information. Meister R.

Ideas that had seemed so far away and strung out from one another were finally being pulled closer together. And even though this had turned out to be a rather interesting piece of intel, they were no closer to finding Duo and that is what irritated him the most.

By the time they'd made it back to Vingt et Un the slew of Preventers had dissipated, leaving only a few to deal with the crowds of onlookers and a ballistics team trying desperately to figure out what the hell had happened there. It seemed the L2 establishment was too wary of sending its best customers to a rivaling hotel. Greed feeds greed. That shouldn't have settled well with the four pilots, but in this instance it did afford them their private rooms and less time wasted moving elsewhere, so it went quietly overlooked.

Heero had internally resolved not to go back into the room he had briefly shared with Duo earlier that day. It never occurred to him to voice the minor, concerning feeling of acid brewing in his gut. So instead he followed the others to the twenty-fourth floor and without question they all found themselves holed up in Quatre and Trowa's suite, silent and contemplating.

"I suppose I should call Iria," Quatre had murmured after a few moments of hesitation. "She can tell me more intricate details in regards to the renewal project."

He looked sheepish as if he should know more in regards to a project his own company was heading up, but Heero couldn't completely blame him for not knowing every last detail personally. Being a twenty-something CEO of a billion dollar, often scrutinized, corporation sounded to him more painstaking than even mastering the Zero System. It was no wonder the man hadn't already gone prematurely gray. But to each his own.

As Quatre went to fish around his luggage for a palm-top communicator, Heero's eyes flickered to the form of a restless Wufei wrenching open the room's sliding door and stepping out onto the patio without an utterance. He closed the door behind him, but it did not fully reach its locking point, leaving an inch or so of space perhaps in preparation of listening in on Quatre's imminent conversation with his sister.

Heero found himself staring at the man's back through the tinted glass. It was stiff as he leaned his forearms against the balcony's railing, surveying the colony below, his shirt cuffs rolled up roughly as Duo's had been. It seemed none of them were quite as accustomed to the starched dress shirts of Quatre's usual repertoire.

There was a movement accompanied by a shuffling sound that pulled Heero's eyes away and towards the disturbance only to find Trowa's piercing eyes staring back at him with a pointed look in their green depths. They shared no words, only that harsh gaze as Quatre typed in a long code of numbers sitting at the room's business desk a few feet away.

Heero swallowed once and resigned himself to heed Trowa's unspoken command instead of waiting to see what might happen if he chose to ignore it.

With the grace of a cat stalking its prey, Heero made his way to the door and carefully slid it open just enough for his body to squeeze through. The colony air was stale and chilled the skin beneath his thin clothing. A quiver ran through his muscles and he wondered vaguely if it was due to the cold or the imminence of the conversation about to take place.

"When we were stuck in that cell on the Lunar Base," Wufei began without turning, his voice so soft Heero had to move forward towards the railing to catch the words. "I thought that I might kill him- more than once."

Heero grunted in affirmation. Duo had a way about him, that was for certain. Always jawing about something, complaining, interjecting. Heero had felt the impending need to strangle the man more than once himself, not limited to their shared cell during the war.

"I hold nothing against you. That would be a wasteful use of emotions." Heero's voice was rough as he spoke, but the words were clean cut, truthful, and poignant.

They stood in silence watching over the limited traffic below them, a few Preventer vehicles and taxis pulling in and away from the hotel's expansive front entrance, the roof encased in a red tinted stained glass that resembled a large rose from this vantage point.

Heero thought about what Duo might have said in this instance. Something to rival the seriousness; he would brush everything off and hide away his feelings- like usual. There was some sort of pain that ran for a split second across his chest and he thought for a single moment that it was the sensation of loss.

"I have this feeling that when we find him-" Wufei turned with a look of absolute confidence in his dark eyes, because they were going to find him. "-that he's going to be smiling up at us- that Shinigami smile- no matter the circumstances."

Heero felt a pull at his lips. It was an astute and quite accurate prediction. Always smiling in the face of danger, laughing away the fates, mocking death.

"Baka," he agreed in reply beneath his breath. He managed to catch the way Wufei's mouth morphed into something akin to a smirk at that and Heero hastened to think of the last time he'd seen the man with such honest amusement written across his features.

"He's- my greatest friend," Wufei said.

Heero nodded once. "I understand."

The conversation ended there, somewhat abruptly for anyone that might have been listening in. But they knew, they understood, and that was all that needed to be said.

The idea of drowning, the sensation of lungs filling with water, the pull of weight downward into the dark abyss, would have been more appealing than this.

Duo's throat burned and his muscles, still weak from the sedative, were screaming at him to dilute their exertion. But he wasn't listening, only staring straight ahead into the marble-like eyes of his companions. They were lifeless and unknowing as their gaze seemed to travel through the glass without remorse. They were a scrap of war-time memory, something akin to confidantes, but most of all his family. And they were dead.

It hadn't taken Duo long to discern that these wax-like figures were not who they were masquerading to be, not by a long shot. But that initial shock, that painful shiver as his muscles tried desperately to defy his mind's commands, that's what stuck with him. His throat was raw from screaming their names.

But now, just as suddenly as the episode of panic had hit it was gone, replaced by stunned, hollow silence. Duo was pretty certain he could hear himself breathing, low and unsteady, and that meant he was still alive. But these- clones- they were far from whatever the definition of living was.

He could tell by the way their eyes glossed over and the electrodes against their foreheads doing nothing to rectify their blank stares that they were inhuman- had to be. They certainly weren't the ex-pilots he knew, no matter how closely their features had been sculpted to reflect otherwise. But shit, it was frighteningly uncanny.

Duo's hand clutched helplessly at the glass before him. His body was trembling with fatigue, but he ignored it.

"Heero." The name, the plea, was no more than a whisper of the screams that had echoed through the small room moments before. His throat was damn well torn apart, his vocal chords charred with overuse.

It's not him. It's not Heero. The internal mantra did nothing to stop the quiver of tendons within his legs. Fuck, this couldn't be happening.

A flicker of movement, something he had been too preoccupied to notice before, caught Duo's attention. His eyes turned and melted upwards at a pace slower than his mind approved of, reflexes still thick with drugs and muddled with confusion. There was a small black box hovering in the corner, a glassy sphere forming an eye through which someone on the 'outside' was presumably watching his every move.

He could just barely feel the bite of his nails into flesh as his hands came to form fists at his side. Duo's teeth clenched, gnashing together with untamed anger, his face contorting into a sneering mask he'd not felt since his time spent harbored in a killing machine during the war.

You don't fuck with Duo Maxwell's mind and you certainly don't fuck with Shinigami's.

"Hey!" His voice was rough at first, but it was loud and driven with power. His arms waved madly around his body, flapping raggedly like a bird caught in the throes of a storm. "Enjoying the show?!"

Duo could feel his resolve bubbling away. "Are you listening to me out there?!"

There was the faintest taste of dripping metallic in the back of his throat. "You like fucking with people's heads? Do you get off on that shit, you sick bastard?!"

He could feel his lungs taking on more air than they were used to, his heart palpitating wildly, trying desperately to free itself from its cage.

"Talk to me, goddammit! Somebody's there- you're not that fuckin' stupid! You hear me?!"

His body was spinning now, searching for other cameras to spit at. There was no door he noticed, though he couldn't even focus on the frustration or confusion in that. His mind was a blur of curses, of memories colliding violently together, of hot fury- of those photographs. Damn it all-

"I get it." Duo's breathing was ragged, harsh blasts of hot air streaming out his nose and mouth. "You're in command here, huh? You wanna feel powerful? Important? Did your mommy not tell you you were special when you were a kid? Is that it?!"

The words came like gunfire, rapid and without relent, careening against the walls with nowhere to escape, ricocheting back in on him.

"Show yourself, you coward!"

Duo's eyes were nothing more than violet saucers. His surroundings had fogged over, the artificial Heero, Quatre, and Wufei a distant memory. Irritation, towards himself, towards these people, towards Preventer, towards his comrades and their seamless post-war lives...

"What's your motivation here?" He'd reverted into a whisper now, undoubtably catching his breath. Duo's eyes darted to the camera. "That's what I'm trying to fuckin' figure. What, did one of us kill your family during the war? Did we cost you your cushy job with Oz? Well?!"

He grunted in frustration, his fist slamming into the glass next to his body. He didn't even notice the spidering cracks the impact had caused. "Yeah, well get in line. You're not the only one who wants revenge on us pilots-"

There was the faintest sound of static, but it brought Duo's inflamed tirade to a stop immediately. His eyes narrowed upwards at the watching entity he'd apparently been communicating with.

"Mr. Maxwell, take a seat," a voice commanded, coming over an intercom system with some sort of indifferent authority. They sounded fucking bored actually, completely unimpressed by Duo's sudden conniption. "You're going to overexert yourself if you keep this up."

Duo couldn't fight the bout of laughter that rose from his gut and into the room around him, bouncing off the walls. Overexert himself? The empathy was overwhelming.

"I'm glad to hear you care so much for my wellbeing," Duo snorted out, incensed and chuckling, the newfound smirk not leaving his lips.

"We do," the voice replied. "Now sit."

Duo, some sort of compulsion pulling him towards the bed or else the fact that his knees were seconds away from giving out, decided somewhat reluctantly to follow the order.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, trying not to relish in the relief his muscles felt upon impact. His eyes darted around the room again, connecting with the camera and then slowly migrating back towards the three bodies in the room opposite him, now completely ignoring his presence as if they could even recognize it anyways.

"Who are you?" Duo's voice was so soft and grating that it didn't even sound like himself.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked again, this time louder, his head tilting upwards towards where the voice had come from, somewhere within the ceiling, a hidden speaker.

There was a moment of hesitation that Duo noted as odd. The voice's other commands had seemed so sure and practiced. "A- a doctor- I guess you could say."

Duo's shoulders heaved up and down as he let out a slow breath. These were great answers, definitely going to be helpful towards their investigation. Everything was totally making sense. His eyes rolled almost painfully. The fuckers.

He swiped at the side of his head, some sort of phantom sensation attacking the layer of scarred skin. "Help me out here, will ya?"

There was another hesitation, this one decidedly shorter. "You are an interesting subject, just like that of your- fellow compatriots," the voice answered, stumbling a bit with the appropriate words. "Your genetic makeup is- different- than many things we've seen in my field since this era of peace. Conserving your blood is very valuable to our experimental duplication process, Mr. Maxwell."

Duo swallowed, not having to dig very far to understand just what was meant by the odd proclamation. During the war, during his time with the Sweepers and the mad-man of a 'mentor,' Professor G, Duo had been inundated with more boosters, antigens, and immunizations than he could keep straight. His body had been one wiry, malnourished war-zone of scientific exploration, a veritable cocktail sloshing through his veins by the time he'd made his 'escape' to Earth, Shinigami's initial materialization. The worst of it had been the introduction of nanoids, the little toxin destroying tech monsters that still roved his blood stream making him inadvertently immune to near everything harmful, but also the likes of antibiotics, anti-depressants, and even alcohol; the latter being the only one he actually gave a flying fuck about.

But this was not so unusual to him, this realization. Heero had shared on one occasion this similarity between them. Apparently his own genetic make-up had been so highly tampered with that he may well have been a cyborg, in Duo's imaginative mind at least. So, it went without assumption that all five of the pilots had underwent some sort of genetic defense, whether it be in the demonic form of nano-tech or not.

And even though he rarely thought about what might or might not be coursing through his body's pipes, Duo had never given so much thought to the idea that this tech was not widely available amongst the Earth Sphere. Sure, it certainly couldn't be legal, that would have been all too simple for Professor G. But still, he'd never thought it'd come to this, some fanatical scientifically greedy wack-job wanting to clone whatever techno-primordial soup was still residually flowing through his body.

"You dropped someone made to look and identify as Heero Yuy from a fucking helicopter."

It's probably not the first thing that should have come out of his mouth. In fact it seemed much more pressing to discuss his impending blood-harvesting situation, as absurd as that was. But shit, somehow all Duo could think of right now was Heero and the question he'd been most plagued by since Wufei had come knocking at his hotel room door.

The voice took a few moments before answering, albeit hesitantly. "An- experiment. A trial run you might say."

"Fucking hell." Duo's palms came up to rub at his eyes, causing dark spots to crash through his vision. "And you just decided 'why not give him sky-diving lessons- minus the damn parachute?'"

There was the sound of coughing through the static. Good, Duo thought, let's get this bastard as flustered as possible. Maybe that'll get some answers out of him.

A throat cleared and then the voice was back, calm and as collected as he could try to sound. "A: our brainwashing techniques- the memories and the intel- it had become a slight bit intensive for our subject's brain function to handle, leaving him essentially- well, um- uncooperative. B: there was the issue of attracting attention of other pilots as Doctor J was the only one willing enough to share his personal research in regards to his- er- patient with me during the war. We were comrades. And C: I was becoming increasingly curious in regards to our 'Heero Yuy's' endurance and in this line of work trial and error are really the only way to test our hypotheses."

Duo had gleaned one essential understanding from this man's over-thought monologue: he'd had contact with Doctor J during the war, perhaps some of the other scientists as well, though he could only imagine how G had felt about the bumbling man, probably holding the same mirthful depreciation for him that he felt in this current moment. Regardless, the new information was fantastic, a minor question finally coming to a close, though it had also opened a whole new can of fucking worms.

"So your clone got wise- or maybe insane- you couldn't locate any of the rocks I like to call home nowadays so you figured let Preventer do all the work, and then you wanted to know if your little science experiment had managed to actually create a version of the Perfect Solider. Did I get all the correct?"

"My- er- employer has a rather innocuous taste for the over-dramatic."

The second realization Duo logged into his mind was that this man, this 'scientist' or whatever he wanted to damn well call himself was not working on his own, he probably wasn't M.R. or M.P.- or at least he was not the 'head honcho.' And by the way he seemed to frequently stumble over his words, he was not used to being remotely in charge of anything. Perhaps he wasn't even here at his own will, but that was speculation at its finest and Duo had to hold his mind back from picturing the disapproving face of Mr. Preventer Man in his mind.

Duo grunted in reply. "Yeah, I kinda got that. Your new 'Heero and Friends' nearly gave me a fuckin' heart attack."

The 'good doctor' nearly sounded sympathetic when he next spoke. "It's all a part of the process. We have to understand what each of your- er- body's hold within their blood and DNA, but the testing does not stop at that. Brainwaves tell us a lot-"

"But you said they're brainwashed. That's not actually us, doc, you realize that, don't you?"

Of course he did, the man might have fumbled for words occasionally, but he clearly wasn't stupid. Still, this conversation was beginning to infuriate Duo. It was all so impossible, something straight out of a poorly written sci-fi flick.

"Let me take a stab at this." Duo turned his body to face the near inanimate bodies on the other side of the glass. His eyes studied the spidering design where his fist had earlier connected before boring into the unseeing eyes of 'Wufei.' "Preventer probably keeps blood on file for all their operatives, or at the very least samples in a lab somewhere. Gotta keep their best agents healthy and accounted for just in case there's a trip to the ER."

His eyes then flicked to 'Quatre.' "Winner Corp does all sorts of humanitarian work- blood drives and all that shit. Not hard to get a hold of that rich blood."

Finally his vision rested on 'Heero.' "And here, you've told me your best secret. There's intel and samples on file from Doctor J's greatest experiment- closely followed by Wing."

His presumptive explanation was followed by cold silence, though he'd rather expected that reaction. If he was correct, which this new lack of response was quickly informing him that he was, then many of the puzzle pieces that had been floating around their investigation were being slowly popped into place. Duo felt almost happy to have been drugged, kidnapped, and made to nearly lose his mind moments before.

Duo ran fingers over his chin, pondering in mock inquisitiveness. "Me an' Tro are the last ones then. You've just shown me all your cards right here-" he pointed vaguely towards the room opposite him. "-were we really that hard to track down?"

The continuing quiet afforded him a moment of understanding, remembering when Wufei had explained to him how hard it had been to get ahold of Trowa Barton. Perhaps a traveling circus was even better protection from the outside world than hitching it across the Earth Sphere sans cellular device.

His eyes gradually made their way back towards the camera. It was still watching him, studying him, mocking him, but there were no more words to follow. He'd probably crossed a line, but hell he'd gotten more than what he'd bargained for from whatever kind of 'doctor' he'd been speaking with. Duo was rather pleased with himself in the end, despite the cold eyes still staring out into nothingness past his head.

"Clones, shit," he muttered under his breath. His muscles had begun to ache again in the absence of stimulating conversation to take his mind off the residual effects of the sedative.

He couldn't quite tell if somehow his body had been inadvertently given another dose- though how that could have happened he had no fucking earthly idea- or else maybe he really had 'overexerted himself,' but the way his head was suddenly spinning with new answers and the new questions bred from those thoughts, Duo found his eyes falling shut to darkness before his head even hit the pillow.