There was a lot to discuss after the Doha bombing. The others seemed most focused on the completely pointless question of what in the hell Trowa and Quatre had been thinking, which tested Wufei's patience mightily.

Still, it was important to lead by example, especially when trying to foster maturity, so he kept a tight rein on his temper—a feat for which he wanted someone to give him a medal—and tried to gently, subtly redirect the group to the more important, looming, and above all, solvable problems.

But that didn't work, so he fell back on bluntness.

"Listen," he tried, making a token effort, but the argument building between the other three was too much to talk over, so he just stuck his fingers in his mouth and produced a whistle so sharp it probably bled everyone's eardrums. Their collective wince made them shut up though, so that was perfect.

"As I was saying," he said calmly, letting their glares deflect off of his mature and wise aura, "Noin is a problem."

"I think it's more that you're Noin's problem," suggested Duo, rubbing at his ear.

Wufei ignored him. "We have to tell her," he said. "It's not like she doesn't know, or won't know, about the bombing. She has eyes and ears. It's all over the news, if she doesn't hear about it through whatever communication channels she has left with OZ. And she's not a fucking idiot—"

"High praise, from you," said Heero.

He was above this. "She's not an idiot, so when those two show up here, she's going to either find out or figure it out sooner or later."

"I'm sorry, what?" said Hilde. "You think they're going to come here? They're the two most wanted people on this continent right now, or they will be if they get ID'd off that surveillance footage, and whatever else the authorities have. Why would they come here?"

One of his favourite things about Hilde—and that was a list that got longer with every day she tolerated his company—was that she saved the sarcastic insults until he'd done something to really deserve them, and engaged with his actual points instead.

Still, this one was obvious and he wasn't going to pretend otherwise. "Where else are they going to go?" he asked, spreading his arms. "You think they're going to, what, run off together to some nowhere backwater in Siberia or Western China or, I don't know, fucking sub-Saharan Africa, and just lay low and do nothing? We're in a war! They're going to come here and they're going to be chomping at the bit to do something. And do you know why?" he asked, looking at Heero.

Heero's jaw was set in that certain way of his that said, 'I'm listening because you have a point, but I'm not happy about it.' He just raised his eyebrows for Wufei to continue.

Wufei suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. "Because, regardless of why they did it and what a terrible idea it was, they know it's put OZ and Romefeller off-balance, and now is the moment to keep applying pressure! Or Quatre knows it, at least, which is enough."

Heero's expression was slipping towards 'I've heard enough of this shit,' so Wufei played his trump card while he still had their collective attention.

"Look, we don't have a time machine, alright? We can't go back in time and undo this thing, unkill all those civilians and possibly-innocent Romefeller employees. We agree that it was wrong and idiotic and they shouldn't have done it. But they did, and this is a chance we've never had before and never will again to strike at OZ and do some real damage to them. If we make a big and loud enough mess, someone might notice and start looking into it separately. We could potentially undo that tactical error with the UN investigators, if we play our cards right and get a little lucky."

"We're never lucky," said Duo, his voice flat and his arms crossed.

Wufei stared in utter disbelief. "You survived a car bomb with no injuries worse than some cuts and minor burns! A car bomb targeting Relena, who wasn't in the car because you happened to need to go pay a bill! I don't think it gets luckier than that, Maxwell."

There was a silence that Wufei dared hope was the thoughtful kind.

"I guess that's one way of looking at it," said Duo finally.

"So it's clear then," said Wufei. "We tell Noin what we know about the bombing ASAP while we still have the chance to spin it in some kind of positive way, or at least give her the chance to get over it before those idiots show up, and then we find a target before our window of opportunity closes."

Heero chewed his lip as he stared Wufei down; Wufei raised an eyebrow back and waited.

"His idea has some merit," Heero said, at last.

"Wow," said Wufei before he could stop himself. "Thanks, Yuy."

"But," Heero continued, "protecting Relena has to remain our first priority, now more than ever. There's only five of us, including Noin. Hilde's got a critical position covering her at school, and Noin may be used to the 24-hours-a-day routine but the two of them can't adequately cover her security on their own. Especially now that we've got these new protocols Duo made so that nobody else finds a bomb the hard way. They're important but they're time-consuming, which probably just proves how much more time we need to be putting into security around here. So at most, there are two of us available to go run an operation. That's not enough."

Wufei was unhappy to admit that no, the math was not adding up. "I don't have a problem staying here and supporting Relena's security, though, which would free up you two for other work," he ventured. "All the evidence to date suggests that your combined efforts can cause enough chaos for three or four normal people."

Duo snorted. "I'm taking that as a compliment."

Heero was unsuccessfully fighting back a grin himself. "Be that as it may," he said, "what kind of advantage are we seizing with an operation that size? I'm not sure it's worth the risk or the resources."

Another silence fell that was definitely thoughtful.

"Well," said Wufei, feeling the inevitability of it as he spoke, "I guess we better hope Trowa and Quatre do show up on our doorstep, then."

Things were not good.

For lack of a better option, after they drove away from the scene of the crime Trowa had let Quatre deliver them both directly into the next phase of his extraction plan. Instructor H had linked up with them just outside the city, and he and Trowa had spent a long, silent moment staring each other down. Trowa had hated the man on sight. He liked to think that this wasn't only because he knew H was responsible for what had just happened, and had taken advantage of Quatre's vulnerable state of mind. No, he was confident that he'd have hated H regardless, because there was an aura of untrustworthiness surrounding him.

The man was basically impossible to read, but there was still a clear instant when he evaluated the situation—his eyes did flick between Trowa and Quatre once—and apparently decided to leave it alone, at least for the time being. So Trowa had been extracted along with Quatre as if he'd been involved all along, and H had made himself scarce once his part was finished. Unsurprising, since H had gotten what he wanted from Quatre and now he didn't even have to worry about managing him in the aftermath.

With that responsibility having fallen neatly into Trowa's lap, he had no idea what to do about it. They had spent two days holed up in Riyadh and were now settling into a new safehouse in Budapest. In all that time, Quatre had spoken twice and eaten once.

Since he didn't know what else to do, Trowa started triaging all the problems he now had and then set himself to to addressing the more manageable ones. Plunking down a cup of instant ramen in front of Quatre to deal with the 'not eating' thing seemed achievable enough.

Except Quatre took one look at it steaming on the table in front of him and said, "Not hungry."

Well. Trowa turned his gaze up to the ceiling (more patches than ceiling, from what he could tell) and tried to look on the bright side: he'd just made unexpected headway on one of the other problems, since Quatre had now spoken a third time. The thought didn't actually improve his mood any.

"Liar. You haven't eaten in like 40 hours."

"And yet, I'm not hungry."

Trowa took the seat across the beat-up kitchen table from Quatre, which finally pulled his attention away from their view out the little window. They stared at each other for a moment.

"What are you doing?" Trowa asked, leaning back in his chair.

That got him a quizzical look, but he wasn't going to fall for these deflection tactics.

"What's your endgame, here?" he pressed.

"You tell me, you're the reason I'm still here at all," Quatre muttered, turning his head back toward the window.

"Yeah? Why'd you bother with this safehouse setup, then?" He tilted his head a little, trying to make eye contact. "Why was H meeting you afterward?"

Quatre sighed.

Trowa waited him out. He had nothing better to do.

"Virgo," said Quatre finally.

If that was an OZ thing, it wasn't one Trowa recognized. "What?"

"That was my next target," Quatre clarified. "And the one I wasn't going to come back from."

"Why not? And what is it?"

Quatre rubbed a hand over his face tiredly. "Kind of the same question. Look. Do you know where your old boss came from?"

"You mean S?" Trowa frowned. "I figured a sewer, maybe."

Quatre snorted. He also pulled the still-steaming noodles closer, and Trowa tried to pretend he didn't notice.

"In World War II," Quatre said, which was an unexpected start to the explanation, "the Allied powers had a lot of codebreakers. Do you know about that stuff?"

"Something something Alan Turing," said Trowa, waving it off.

"Yeah. The Enigma Machine. Signals intelligence took off in a big way during that war. Fascinating stuff," said Quatre through a mouthful of noodles. Trowa would agree to disagree on that one. "Anyway, that international cooperation carried on into the Cold War, and of course spying became a thing. Signals and human intelligence became a new machinery of warfare. And now we're starting to have satellites in orbit that have powerful capabilities. The view from above is probably the future."

"Makes sense, I guess."

Quatre nodded, stabbing his fork into his noodles. "All those eyes in the sky—and on the ground—need coordination. Always have. And what you know might be valuable to your neighbour. So there's a network, still. That Allied network, it's gotten bigger. Led by the United States, because of course it is, but Germany and Italy are allowed to play now, for starters. Japan. China, too, provisionally."

"Right."

"And around here, anyone with intelligence on al-Qaida is very popular indeed with the major powers."

"Right," said Trowa more slowly, starting to see where Quatre might be taking this.

"Someone has to coordinate it. Someone has to make the technology for the spy satellites. And the ground surveillance. Someone has to design newer and newer encryption protocols, to stay ahead of the codebreakers." Quatre paused to drink some soup out of the cup. "Those people are in great demand for their talents and resources. Some of them went independent. Either for the money, or because they disagreed with how the US-led coalition manages its affairs."

"And some of those people go by one-letter codenames?" Trowa guessed.

Quatre's smile was like the sun coming out. "That's right." He put his fork down. "And some of them went to work for Romefeller."

Trowa thought that through. "So that's where OZ came from? And also where we came from?"

"Initially, they came from there as one entity. Or so I'm told," said Quatre. "But then there was a faction split, and our masters left with the dissenters. Their work, however, lives on."

"Okay," said Trowa slowly. It was a lot to digest and he tried not to wonder how long Quatre had been sitting on that information. "What does this have to do with Virgo? It's some kind of OZ base? One that wasn't on the list?"

"It's not a base, per se." Quatre contemplated his food and then pushed the rest away. He'd managed half of it, so Trowa decided to leave him alone about it. "Virgo is a program. And it was the particular brainchild of J and G, for all that really matters at this point. Much in the spirit of the esteemed Mr. Turing," Quatre gestured in acknowledgment of Trowa's early contribution to the subject, "Virgo oversees the development of some very terrifying artificial intelligence-powered spyware. The idea being that you can reduce the need for human brainpower and oversight in the assessment of new information, and therefore lower not only your overhead costs but also your security risks by having fewer people with eyes on the material."

"That sounds valuable."

"It really does," Quatre agreed. "I don't know how far along it is, because sadly H's information is a little out of date on that point, but the potential there is staggering. And the fact that OZ has it is deeply alarming."

"So where is it?"

"That's part of the problem. It's housed in servers. The servers, naturally, are all over the place. Taking it out would be trying to lop off the heads of a hydra. The best I can likely manage is to set them back by several years, by taking out key personnel and some of their development facilities. Virgo itself is probably not something I can kill."

Another advantage over human intelligence officers, Trowa realized. "I see."

"They had a small office in that Romefeller building. On paper, they were a human resources department."

Trowa looked up at him. Quatre was back to looking out the window. Refusing to look at Trowa. This was the most either of them had said about the bombing. He chewed over his next words carefully. "You didn't have to take out the entire building to take out the Virgo presence."

Quatre stared outside. "Well. I did."

Trowa took a deep, calming breath. "Okay."

After the awkward silence had stretched to its limit, Quatre went on, "I anticipated that it would distract them enough to make my next step easier. There's a lab in Zurich. Heavily fortified."

"Wouldn't it be harder, after an attack like that on one of their offices?"

"I'm wagering not. Virgo is top, top secret. Off-books. I think they pretend it's defunct, even within OZ. And from everything we've seen so far, OZ is actually not terribly organized to deal with targeted, surgical strikes. They somehow didn't anticipate this being a problem they'd face. Maybe not before they were too big to be ignored, anyway. We've left them scrambling before. I believe I've done it again. Still," he shrugged, "I didn't expect to come back from that trip."

"Is it just not a one-person job?"

"Not really."

Trowa frowned. "It sounds important, and you were just going to take yourself out in that building instead of going through with it? What's with this past-tense talk about the plan? You're here now."

"Yeah," said Quatre, finally meeting his eyes again. "And so are you. I never planned for this."

"So?"

"So, you're supposed to be back home with your sister. I think if we give it a week, you can probably go home without worrying about the authorities catching up with you."

Trowa stared. "Were you just going to stall me here? And then what?"

Quatre shrugged. "Think my window is going to close on Zurich by then. It is what it is."

Trowa shook his head to clear out the angry buzzing of his thoughts. "But we—Zurich is right there! We could practically wave at them from there!"

"Wave at who from where?"

"Fucking—the others, Quatre! All of them are holed up in Liechtenstein right now!"

Quatre stared at him. "Why?"

"Oh, my…" He cut himself off and wiped a hand down over his face. "Right. You've missed some things."

Heero wished a communication from Trowa could have been more welcome than it was at this point, but he didn't have to admit Wufei had been right just yet. He opened the message with no small sense of dread, but that gave way to intrigue when he saw it was strongly encrypted.

He shifted his laptop a little to move the warm spot it was baking through the bedcovers into his thighs, and absently reached down to stroke his fingers through Duo's hair as he waited for his computer to finish decrypting the message. Duo mumbled something incoherent in his sleep and threw an arm out across Heero's lap, the better to use him as a human teddy bear. Heero smiled a little at it, watching Duo settle back down without waking as he kept gently carding fingers through his hair.

He startled a little when his computer beeped that it was finished, and his hand stilled as he scanned the message. Then he moved his hand to Duo's shoulder. "Hey," he said softly. "Wake up."

"Mmm?" came from next to him, and Duo breathed in long and deep as he rolled over and then blinked his eyes open. "Time's it? Fuckin' go to sleep, Yuy, I swear to God," he grumbled.

"Can't right now. Turn your brain on, I need you to read this."

Duo dragged himself upright like it was the world's greatest imposition, and Heero obligingly moved his arm to allow Duo to slump into his side. He let his head sag onto Heero's shoulder and held him around the waist in a loose embrace, and Heero slung his arm over Duo's shoulders as he shifted the laptop with his free hand, pulling it closer for Duo to squint at.

After a few seconds, Duo let go of him and sat up a little to drag the laptop into his own lap, peering closer at the screen like that would help him read it faster.

"What the fuck is this? Am I still asleep?" he demanded.

"Nope." Heero pressed an impulsive kiss to his temple, because he could never find the words for how attractive it was that Duo could wake up this fast for a technical issue.

"Where did Quatre even get all—no, never mind. We don't ask those questions." He glared at the screen, then switched his gaze to Heero. The glare softened so fast when it landed on him that his heart fluttered a little. Then Duo reached out without looking, decisively slapped the laptop shut, and picked it up to drop on the nightstand on his side.

Heero watched it go out of his reach in some confusion. "Aren't we—" He was cut off by the arm across his chest knocking him flat on his back, into the pillows.

Duo leaned over him and his braid fell down around his shoulder to land on Heero's ribcage, which tickled a bit. "In the morning," he said forcefully. "When people are awake. And when I've had a chance to think about it some."

Heero reached up and wrapped Duo's braid around his wrist, giving it a gentle tug that Duo followed easily. "You just expect me to fall asleep on command, or what?" he asked.

"I mean, we both know you could, 'Ro. But no. Like I said, I need to think."

"What's that got to do with me?" he asked playfully, letting his grin break free.

Duo eased himself down onto his elbows, bracketing either side of Heero's head, and that brought them almost nose-to-nose. Heero drew his braid-wrapped arm back over his head, his knuckles skimming the headboard as he settled his arm back into the pillows comfortably.

"You woke me up, now you gotta help me do my thinking," he said against Heero's lips before kissing him, the opening volley.

Heero trailed his other hand down the bumps of Duo's spine and then watched through his eyelashes for Duo's shudder when he let his fingertips keep wandering down into the cleft of his ass. "If you insist," he managed when Duo let him up for air again, feeling the words rumbling in his own chest.

"Fair's fair." Duo settled his weight against him and grinned smugly when Heero's breath caught at the slow grind of his hips. Then he pressed his face into Heero's neck and groaned when Heero's wandering fingers focused more attentively on where he was touching.

"Yeah. Fair's fair." Heero agreed, and then laughed when he felt teeth on his neck. "How's that thinking going?"

"A mile a minute. Thanks, babe."

As seeking inspiration went, Heero had no complaints about his methods. He started focusing his own attention so that they could still get some sleep before dawn.

"Take him with you."

"Noin," said Heero, sounding aggrieved.

Duo winced and hunkered down a little more behind the convenient cover of Heero's laptop, trying to pretend he was invisible and refocusing his attention on fixing a bug in their code.

"You leave him here, I'm going to shoot him," she insisted, and a glance up confirmed that her arms were crossed and she had her Don't Fuck With Me look on.

"Don't be stupid," snapped Wufei, whose arms were also crossed. They actually looked like mirrors of each other, a little. "You need the coverage here."

"We don't need him," she said, still talking to Heero as if Wufei didn't exist or didn't understand human language. "Leave me Duo instead. I'll take him over five of Chang."

Duo was torn between feeling flattered, laughing in Wufei's face, and wanting desperately to be left out of this. He settled for hiding some more behind the laptop screen. Hilde was hovering nearby, shooting him some concerned looks in between spectating the argument.

Heero started to shake his head but Wufei cut in again, apparently choosing to ignore that he was being ignored. "We can't leave Maxwell here. He needs Maxwell for this. I have no head for that technical bullshit."

Duo wouldn't have said he was much better at it, and he certainly didn't think of himself as an expert, but it turned out that he was closer to being one than Quatre, Wufei and Trowa, which by default apparently made him the one most qualified (or the least unqualified) to assist Heero with mission prep. And so the two of them had been trading off long hours on creating the software equivalent of a bunker-buster, designed by Heero. It wasn't pretty, but it would be potent, and speed was their top priority so that they could make the time window outlined by Trowa and Quatre for this op.

They finally appeased Noin when Hilde stepped into the fray and promised to make sure Noin never had to interact with Wufei personally outside of an emergency; the arrangement was only going to be for a weekend, after all.

Heero came to lean over the back of Duo's chair when the dust had settled. "How's it looking?" he asked, giving Duo's braid a gentle tug apparently just because it was there and he could.

"Getting there," said Duo, scrolling up a little through the code before going back to where he'd been frowning at it. "This part is kind of an asshole, though."

Heero stepped away to drag over another dining table chair. "Which part?" he asked, sitting down close enough that Duo felt his body heat all down his side. Duo bit back a smile and pushed the laptop over a little for him, and they bent their heads together to go over their work.

Zurich was not where the reunion happened. It was too risky for all four of them to be in the same place before their infiltration of the Virgo lab. Instead, Duo and Trowa met inside a McDonald's.

"You ordered food?" Trowa asked in surprise as he sat down at the table.

Duo swallowed his mouthful of burger. "What if I told you that one of my hobbies is trying McDonald's in as many countries as possible?"

"How many are you up to?"

"Ten!"

"Impressive. Favourite one?"

"Austria. They have potato wedges."

"And you're currently eating…?"

"Paprika chicken," said Duo. "Solid B-plus." He pushed a napkin across the table. Trowa picked it up and felt the oblong of a USB stick underneath it; he stashed the stick up his sleeve and started folding the napkin into an accordion shape.

"I recommend you not plug that into any computer besides a target machine," Duo added, taking a sip of his drink.

"Understood. We all set?"

Duo nodded. "On schedule."

"Is it the three of you?"

"We left Chang at home. I'm currently taking bets on whether he'll still be alive when we get back there."

Trowa leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "What are the odds on that?"

"Four to one against."

"Yikes."

Duo grinned around a french fry and then swallowed it to say, "It would have been worse, but Hilde promised to run interference between him and… our host."

"Good to hear he keeps making friends wherever he goes."

"He's a charmer, all right. You said two days to make it there yourselves, right?"

Trowa nodded slowly. "I'm not running the itinerary. I just work here. But I think that's what he said."

"Then we'll see you when we see you, I guess."

Trowa stole some french fries as he stood up, and waved goodbye over his shoulder when Duo said, "Rude!"

Quatre was waiting around the corner, next to a newspaper box. He fell in step next to Trowa as he passed. "How's Duo?"

Trowa slipped the USB stick out of his sleeve and into his pocket. "He looks pretty good. They must have gotten their shit together."

Quatre gave him a quizzical look.

"Him and Yuy," Trowa clarified.

"Oh!" said Quatre, and then he blinked. "Really?"

"Really. Thought you were supposed to be the observant one," he teased.

Quatre flushed pink but scoffed a little. "I only really know one of them," he said. "Not enough data."

"Maybe I had the advantage there," Trowa allowed, "since the one I know is Heero. Once he finally figured himself out, it was kind of inevitable."

"Is that so? What, he's like seventeen or eighteen years old and still couldn't positively identify a feeling?"

That was exactly right, Trowa didn't say. Instead he looked up at the sky and said, "Personally, I think it's okay to be a little slow on the uptake, as long as you get there in the end." He could tell Quatre was giving him a funny look, but if he didn't see it, he could pretend otherwise. "We're on schedule for 0100 tonight," he told the sky instead.

"Good," said Quatre, a little late.

Quatre's plan was a pretty good one, if he did say so himself.

Heero and Duo were key to its success, not just for cooking up the computer virus Duo had colourfully named 'bunker buster', but to increase their odds of actually delivering the payload to the Virgo servers in this lab Quatre had identified. He'd chosen a two-pronged approach, although his original plan had been to run it without comms between the teams.

"Red Fish, are you there?" came Heero's voice over his earpiece.

"Go ahead, Blue Fish."

"I don't need to ask who picked the names," whispered Trowa.

Quatre bit his lip to keep from snickering as Heero said, "We are in position. Say when ready."

At Trowa's nod, Quatre said, "We're ready." And they were off.

Getting inside the building went fairly smoothly. Quatre hung back and watched while Trowa sneaked up on a security guard taking a mid-shift smoke break and then pulled a building access card off of the guard's body. They had decided not to leave any potential witnesses, as Heero and Duo were adamant that Relena Darlian's safety not be compromised in any way.

After they'd slipped in the door and confirmed they were in an empty corridor, Quatre made radio contact again. "Breached south entrance."

"Acknowledged. Coming in the west entrance in a second."

Quatre led the way from there, as he had the building map in his head. Trowa had certainly spent some time examining the layout, but he didn't quite have Quatre's memory for spaces.

They needed to find a computer, but specifically they needed a computer that was networked to the servers that Virgo's spyware lived on. Quatre was fairly certain, from his research and from what H had told him, that the Virgo program's staff had a general policy of keeping their system's network contained to specific, more secure parts of the facility as a further safeguard against, well, people like Quatre. There were three more locked doors between them and their target room. On the third one, the dead guard's access card didn't work.

"Well, that was fun while it lasted," said Trowa.

"Red Fish, we have enemy contact," sounded briefly in Quatre's ear before Heero went back to silence. Quatre barely had time to start getting worried before Trowa whispered, "Incoming."

They dove for the next closest door; also locked, and by a regular key. No time to pick it. They kept going. The next door after that opened on a space so dark that Quatre couldn't tell how big it was, but only Trowa managed to slip through the doorway before there was a shout from behind Quatre.

His German was not the best, never mind his Swiss German, but he didn't really need to understand the words to tell that the two guards approaching were not pleased to see him. One spoke into a radio clipped to his shoulder, and Quatre thought he heard the words 'one intruder' in the wall of near-gibberish. They hadn't seen Trowa. Trowa was also the one carrying the USB stick.

Quatre let the door swing shut behind his back and took a step forward, hands in the air. "Don't shoot," he said in English, and the instant he saw one of the guards' guns waver in its aim, he took off back down the corridor the way they'd come in.

"What the fuck are you doing?" came Trowa's voice in his ear.

"Finish the job," he hissed back over the comms, not slowing down.

"Red Fish, what's happening?"

"Quebec is playing tag with two guards."

"Okay. Is he winning?"

"I don't know, I don't have eyes on him anymore."

Quatre muted his comms. He needed to keep his attention and hearing on the task at hand.

He was in better shape for sprinting than either of his pursuers, and after turning one more corner, he opened the first unlocked door he came to and shut it as softly as possible behind him. Crouching against the wall behind the door, he carefully caught his breath as the pounding footsteps of the two guards got louder. They came to a stop somewhere nearby and started talking (and they were breathing a lot harder than he was, thankfully). He caught the word 'where' several times, and then one set of footsteps echoed past him, further down the corridor. He stayed flat against the wall, waiting, and then a flashlight beam shone through the narrow window set into the door, illuminating a circle of tiled floor less than a metre from where he was hiding.

He shifted his weight, slow and careful, up onto the balls of his feet, but the door didn't open. He heard a shoe squeak as the guard took a few steps away, and then heard him call out to his partner. He was directly on the other side of the wall.

Quatre closed his eyes for a second, then slipped past the door to the side where the knob was. The guard's radio beeped with an incoming transmission and he turned the doorknob as quickly as possible while he had the noise for cover. Through the smallest possible crack he could make with the open door, he saw the back of the guard one long step away. He was facing the direction his partner had gone in and was answering someone on his radio.

This would have been easier if he had been allowed to leave witnesses. Quatre was wearing a balaclava to hide his features, but they'd still iseen/i him. They knew how tall he was and what he sounded like. They probably could tell he was young. It was too much information to leave in OZ's hands. Heero and Duo had been very clear about that.

The guard froze when his switchblade clicked open. He started to turn around when the door clicked shut. Quatre already had the blade across his throat by then. He eased the body to the floor and then searched it quickly, grabbing the access card clipped to the man's belt. With a little luck, it might even have better access than the one they'd taken off the guard outside, but mostly he just needed to get the hell out of this hallway. After taking care of the other half of his mess.

This one would be simpler. He was carrying a gun (because Quatre always, always carried a gun), and he had a suppressor on it. All he needed was a clear shot and no more chance encounters. He slipped up the corridor to the next turning, crouched down and peeked around the corner. The second guard was coming back. Quatre ducked back immediately, turned to press his side against the wall, checked back over his shoulder once, and braced one knee on the tiled floor. And waited.

The guard startled at the sight of Quatre, a dark, huddled shape in his peripheral vision, and Quatre put a bullet through his knee immediately. The man went down hard, with the start of a scream of agony that was cut off by a second shot through his temple.

He made sure to check for a pulse, but the second shot had been clean. He breathed out his great relief and started back the way he'd come, jumping over the blood pooling on the floor to avoid leaving a trail of red shoeprints in his wake. Then he unmuted his comms.

"Red Fish, Blue Fish, what's your status?" he asked, keeping his voice low and walking quickly.

"You motherf—on my way out." Well, Trowa didn't sound pleased. He winced.

"Is the objective completed?"

"Blue Fish succeeded," Trowa answered in clipped tones. Blue Fish themselves were silent, apparently choosing to stay out of this.

"See you at the rendezvous," he said, changing direction at the next intersection.

"Yeah, you fucking will."

This would not be good. He started moving faster, the better to get it over with.

Trowa waited, maintaining an icy silence, until they were on the highway in the car they'd picked up for the run to Vaduz. Quatre darted a look out the window on his side, seeing nothing but darkness, stars, and snow-topped mountains reflecting moonlight, and wondered if Trowa had also turned on the child locks, to make good and sure he was trapped.

"Don't you ever do that again," Trowa started, staring fixedly out the windshield.

Quatre waited a second to see if more was coming, and then asked, "Which part?"

"Any of it, frankly. Everything you did there was fucking bullshit. Start to finish."

He licked his lips nervously. "I had to draw off—"

"I thought you were dead."

When the gasping silence started to press on his ears, Quatre opened his eyes again and said, "Because I muted my radio."

"Because you muted your fucking radio. And because you have a death wish. Did you forget," said Trowa, finally looking away from the empty road ahead to glare at him, "that you told me you originally planned this as a suicide mission?"

He hadn't forgotten. Not until he'd decided to mute his comms because all of his concentration had been on evading and taking out the guards. It was hitting him—now, at least—how that must have appeared to, well, everyone on the other end of his comms, but Trowa in particular.

"I am," he swallowed, his throat practically clicking with how dry it was, "so sorry—"

"No, you're not," said Trowa flatly, back to watching the road.

"I am," he said, horrified to hear his voice breaking just on those two words. "I—" He blinked and felt his eyelashes go wet, and turned to face the side window again as he tried to draw a breath without shuddering. "Fuck," he said to himself.

They came to a lookout point, just a spot where the road swung out into a wide shoulder with a guardrail along the cliff edge. Trowa pulled the car over, stopped, and after a second his fingers fumbled at the ignition to shut the car off. They sat and listened to the engine pinging in the cool night air.

"All I can tell you," Quatre eventually managed, "is that no, I wasn't trying to die. I wasn't thinking of that. And I also wasn't thinking of how the silence would seem, to you. Or that it might upset you."

"I wasn't upset, I was terrified," said Trowa, sharp and quick. Quatre didn't dare look at him, kept his eyes on the moon instead. Was that waxing? Waning? He couldn't even pretend to be properly distracted by it, though.

"It doesn't matter," Trowa went on, "if you weren't actively trying to die. Because leading two armed men on a fucking chase through a secured building isn't exactly trying to live, is it?"

Maybe the question was rhetorical. Quatre kept staring unseeingly at the moon.

"Is it?"

"It was reckless," he gave in.

"And completely unnecessary," Trowa snapped.

"True," he admitted. "I didn't think it through. I just reacted."

"Reacted like you didn't give a fuck if it killed you. They could have shot you at any time."

"Yeah," he breathed out. What else could he even say, really?

"Why?"

"Because I didn't," Quatre told the moon. As soon as he said it, it somehow felt easier to breathe. "I didn't give a fuck. I didn't care." He finally turned around again, and felt a sharp pain in his chest at the sight of Trowa's face. His eyes were wet, too, and he was staring at Quatre like his heart was broken.

"That's not good," Trowa said, his voice cracked, harsh, defeated. In pain.

Quatre blinked away more tears and shook his head.

"You've been feeling like this ever since your sister got murdered. Haven't you?"

Quatre nodded.

Trowa nodded back, not looking at all pleased to be correct. "She wouldn't be okay with this. You know that."

"It should have been me," Quatre said, his voice practically a croak from the tears he was holding back.

"That's not how it works," said Trowa gently.

"It's my fault," said Quatre. "I didn't do enough to protect them, either of them, from Romefeller. I practically put a target on them."

Trowa watched him thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, "Rashid told me that it happened because Romefeller was trying to take over your family's company."

Quatre shrugged listlessly.

"So what the fuck does that have to do with you? You weren't involved. You weren't in the country. For years, you weren't in the country. Nothing to do with Winner Enterprises has anything to do with you. Or Iria."

"You don't know that that's why it happened, Trowa," said Quatre, starting to feel irritated. "It's impossible to know."

"Whose car was it?"

"What?"

"Whose car were you driving when it happened?"

Quatre leaned his head back against the seat. "My father's."

"And how easy is it to track a vehicle when you know the registration on it?"

He looked up at the felt-paneled roof. "Very," he said grudgingly.

"And how long were you and Iria in the country before it happened?"

"I know what you're doing, here."

"How long, Quatre?"

He rolled his eyes. "Two days. Two and a half, maybe."

"Did you fly in on commercial flights? Use your passport at any point?"

"No."

"Do you see how dumb this is, yet?"

That incited Quatre to glaring. "My father drove every day. To work, from work. Predictable routes. Why did they pick the one time that we were—that I was—in the car with him?"

"Quatre, your dad has 30 kids. Twenty-eight of them are shareholders. I don't think they realized they were targeting the only two who aren't."

That had not actually occurred to him before. He tried not to let it show on his face.

"You are the smartest person I know. Stop being an idiot."

This was starting to feel like one of his fights with Farzana growing up, so Quatre said, "Make me."

He was not expecting Trowa to lean over the console, hook a hand around the back of his neck, and kiss him.

He felt paralyzed, shocked stiff, and couldn't move when Trowa leaned away again, licking his lips. The sight of Trowa's tongue made his stomach flip, though, and he wished his hormones knew how to read a room.

"I care about you," said Trowa.

"You said you didn't."

Trowa arched an eyebrow. "I can't change my mind? You want me to take it back?"

"No," he said quickly, and then pinched the bridge of his nose. His thoughts were in overdrive and his head felt full of bees. "I don't know how to react to this right now."

"Honestly, neither do I. I didn't mean to do that. Not… like this." He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat awkwardly, and then apparently regrouped. "But if it'll make you stop and think for a second before you go throw yourself headfirst into danger, then don't fucking forget it: if you die, I will be very upset."

Quatre broke eye contact first, losing his nerve, and nodded his understanding.

"And we can talk about the rest of this…" Trowa trailed off. "Later."

Quatre nodded quickly. "Afterwards."

"There better be an afterwards." Trowa restarted the car, and Quatre leaned back in his seat to look out at the moon again as they pulled back onto the road.

That was a waxing moon, he realized, gently touching his fingers to his lips.

Treize stared at the report from Zurich, willing it to make sense.

"I can't fucking believe this," he muttered. Virgo had just been set back by years. They'd really managed to catch his weak side, finally.

He'd nearly managed to forget Une was still there until she spoke up. "What I can't believe is that nobody got an ID on whoever did this."

He tossed the report on his desk. "Well, apparently they killed everyone who could have," he said, waving vaguely at it. Six deaths in total. In two different parts of the facility, oddly enough. "Did we get the camera feeds yet?" he asked.

She put both hands down on the end of his desk and sagged, hanging her head; the picture of defeat. "First thing I asked for, sir," she said, her voice muffled. "They're wiped."

He sighed. "Of course they are."

Une stepped back, stretching her shoulders, and then pushed herself upright before perching on the clear edge of his desk. "What are your orders, sir?" she asked, readjusting her glasses.

He rubbed at his temple, contemplating her face. It was a nice face, he often found himself thinking. "This has White Fang all over it," he said finally.

"I tend to agree."

He weighed his options. There weren't many. "Get me Zechs," he said. "I'm going to pull the trigger on the sister thing."

She clearly hadn't anticipated that. "Are you sure, sir?"

Treize nodded. "It's past time. I'm done playing games with these kids." He closed his eyes against the building headache. "Literal kids," he added, shaking his head.

She stood up and smoothed out her skirt. "Well, sir, I've often heard that they can be a handful at that age."

That dragged a laugh out of him. "That'll be all, Une."

A smirk tugged at her mouth, which made her face even nicer as she nodded. "Sir," she said, and left his office to go track down the little prince for him.