"Zechs," said the Commander, leaning back in his chair. "I have an assignment for you. Urgent."

"Sir," said Zechs, standing at ease.

"Remember what I told you about the high profile individuals we suspected White Fang might target for assassination?"

"I do, sir."

"Well, we've got a credible threat against one of them, and I'm sending you in to assess the situation for us. You'll leave immediately and I'll expect your preliminary recommendations within two days."

"Understood. Should I take any positive action if I do identify a threat during my assessment?"

The Commander crossed his arms. "Don't bite off more than you can chew, how's that sound?"

"Doable, sir."

The Commander's lips quirked into a little smirk. "Glad to hear it, Zechs!"

"Where am I being sent?"

"Liechtenstein," said the Commander.

Zechs blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Ever been there? They have a constitutional monarchy, I believe. Anyway, the royal family was thought to be all dead, but the Crown Princess has come out of the woodwork. Like Anastasia! She's the target. We want to keep her alive at all costs."

He stared.

"Zechs? Something wrong?"

Everything was wrong, apparently. "No, sir. Liechtenstein. Got it. I'm flying?"

"Please do. Time is of the essence."

"I'll go prepare, then," he said hurriedly.

The Commander nodded. "Dismissed."

Zechs almost walked into the door on his way out of the room. He had to… he had to talk to Lucy. Get her assessment, let her know about the threat on Relena's life.

He thought about calling her immediately, but he could be there in person in a matter of hours. He'd get a better sitrep that way, he decided.

Heero was heading from lunch to a meeting with Wufei when his comms beeped.

"Trowa here."

He stopped and leaned against a wall. "Go ahead."

"Yeah, there's an unmarked sedan coming up the driveway. Tan. Looks like a rental."

Heero frowned. "Can you see who's in it?" he asked, heading back the other way to get to the front entrance.

The response took a few seconds. "One person. Male? Long hair, but they're really big. I think male."

"Understood. Keep eyes on them."

"You bet. Should I fire a warning shot?"

"Might be overdoing it." He walked past the dining room and then doubled back when he spotted Pargan.

"Master Heero?" Pargan asked.

"We have a visitor out front."

Pargan raised an eyebrow. "Are they expected?"

Heero shook his head.

Pargan set down the empty tureen he was holding. "Well, then. I suppose I'd better go answer the door, hadn't I?"

Heero didn't like that idea, but he'd have gotten further arguing with a wall, so he let Pargan go do his job and set himself up by the window in the front room to surveil. After a moment's thought, he tried to raise Noin on the radio.

"Noin, where's Relena right now?"

"She said she was going to her room to get started on homework. Why?"

"Make sure she stays there," he said.

"Is something happening?"

"Not yet. I'll let you know."

He had a reasonable view through the sheer curtains as the car stopped and its driver got out. He had impressively long, almost white blond hair and was wearing polished jackboots.

Heero heard Pargan open the front door and then announce, "Oh my."

Shit. "Noin, get out here."

He made his way quietly back across the room and concealed himself behind the doorframe, which gave him a poor sightline but excellent eavesdropping on the front door.

"Pargan, you haven't aged a day," came a smooth, definitely male voice.

"I can't say the same for you, Master Milliard! You've grown up to be a fine young man."

"Thank you. I'm here to see Lucy. Noin," he added belatedly.

'Lucy?' Heero mouthed to himself, shaking his head. He'd never met anyone who seemed like less of a 'Lucy' than Noin.

She appeared barely a second after he'd had that thought, as though summoned by her awful nickname. She'd drawn even with the doorway Heero was lurking in and didn't seem to have noticed him yet, but she suddenly stopped dead and brought her hand up to her face.

"Shit," she whispered, staring at the front door, and then made eye contact with Heero. 'Hide,' she mouthed.

He raised his eyebrows at her. That wasn't an order he felt prepared to follow, in the circumstances.

She jerked her chin at him, urging him to go back into the front room.

Heero shook his head.

"Lucy? Is that you?" came from the vicinity of the front door, and she closed her eyes like she was in pain. Then Heero watched in fascination as she schooled her face into a pleasant mask.

"Zechs?" she asked brightly, walking toward the entryway and out of Heero's sight. "What are you doing here? This is so unexpected!"

Heero drifted back out of the doorway so he could use his radio undetected. "Who the fuck is Zechs?" he asked on the open channel, keeping his voice low.

Wufei responded. "There's a guy in OZ by that name."

"What's he look like?"

"Why are you whispering, Yuy? I can barely hear you. He's got long, blond hair. Probably his most distinctive feature."

"Okay, well, he's at the front door."

"What?!" That was Duo. Heero hoped Noin was enjoying being an unwilling audience to this while she made nice with the OZ guy at the door and hopefully chased him off.

"Is he alone?" Wufei asked urgently.

"Yes."

"Oh." He sounded disappointed.

Noin's voice suddenly cut in over their chatter; she'd hot miked them all by turning her radio on. Then Heero realized she was actually trying to transmit the whole conversation to them. He edged back over to his doorway hiding spot to listen better.

"No," she said, "nothing has happened here. No threats."

"My intel says otherwise. Look, can I come in?"

"You do know that Relena is home, yes?"

"It's fine, Lucy. We don't have to tell her anything. I can handle this in an official capacity."

"Can you?" Just from her tone, Heero knew she'd crossed her arms.

"Look, I can already tell we need to bolster security. I'll contact the Commander, make my initial report, and we'll get some people out here. You and Pargan alone do not a security team make."

"Zechs, I've told you I don't know how many times that I have it handled."

So she was in regular contact with this man. Heero would have liked to know that a bit earlier.

"That was fine when people didn't know she was here, Lucy, but clearly things have changed now. If the Commander already knew about her—"

"I thought you weren't going to say anything to him!"

"I didn't!"

"Shit," she said. Then, louder, "Shit."

"Ms. Noin," said Pargan very calmly, "may I ask what is going on?"

"Oh, Pargan, it's a long—wait!"

Zechs, who wore some kind of fancy-looking officer's uniform, was standing in the foyer and staring directly at Heero.

Oh.

Heero knew this man. Now that he was looking him in the face, their first meeting was coming back to him crystal clear. 'Excuse me for not introducing myself. I am Lieutenant Zechs Merquise of OZ.' The UN team's van smoldering in the background.

As he had that thought, Zechs' eyes widened. He remembered Heero, too.

"How did you get in here?" Zechs asked very calmly.

"I work here," said Heero. He reached up and activated his comms. "Lock it down," he said, still staring at Zechs.

He was glad he'd moved fast to do that, because in the next instant there was a gun pointed at him. He raised his hands slowly.

"What did you do to my sister?" Zechs barked at him.

"Sent her to the panic room under guard," said Heero, debating whether he could dive behind the tub chair to his left before the trigger got pulled.

"You abducted her."

Heero opened his mouth but Noin answered first, which was probably for the best as he was losing patience. "No," she said, and Heero couldn't see her from his vantage point but he saw Zechs' head turn minutely to the side. "He's my head of security." There was a pause. "He followed protocol." Had he just heard a gun cocking?

"Lucy, he is White Fang. This kid is a terrorist. He's the threat."

"Put the gun down, Zechs."

"What's gotten into you?" Zechs demanded.

"Either you can put the gun down and we can have a calm discussion about all of this, or I can kill you. There's no third option. So you'd better make up your mind right now." Apparently she had indeed pulled a gun on him. Heero bit his lip to keep from smiling.

"Did they turn you?"

"I have exactly one loyalty, Zechs. I protect Relena's life. That's my job now. Understand?"

"How can you possibly be protecting her when you're letting White Fang into the house? Letting them infiltrate your security like this?"

"They're not the ones I need to protect her from," said Noin. She was audibly on the edge of losing her temper.

Heero shifted his weight to his other foot. His hands were still up, and he was starting to feel it a little. "Hey, I think she's about to shoot you," he volunteered.

"Heero, stop helping!" she snapped.

"Oh-kay."

His earpiece chose that moment to crackle to life. "Heero, what the fuck is going on?" asked Duo. "She's getting agitated and we can't get her to go in the panic room."

Heero breathed out slowly through his nose. It would not, he told himself, be worth getting shot (probably several times) to tell Duo to fucking throw Relena over his shoulder and carry her in there if he had to.

Noin answered Duo instead. "Let her out." No, that was not the right answer. What was she doing? "Okay, Zechs," she said. "You want your sister's first impression of you to be watching you kill a man? She's quite friendly with him, so I have no idea how she'll react but I'm sure it won't be pretty."

Heero winced at the very thought.

So did Zechs. He looked at Heero appraisingly, and then over at Noin. Finally, he raised both hands and then slowly knelt to put his gun down on the floor. He kicked it gently in Noin's direction, and she appeared in the doorway a moment later, shoving him between the shoulderblades into the room. "Lucy—"

"Sit down," she said, pointing at a couch.

Heero let his arms drop, shook them out, and then activated his comms. "Duo, keep her away from—"

"Noin, what is going on?" Relena called out. Heero rubbed a hand over his face and went to intercept her at the door. Duo shrugged helplessly from behind Relena's back.

Pargan drifted past. "I shall fetch the tea service," he said.

"Relena," said Noin, who was sitting on the couch opposite Zechs now, "we have a… visitor."

Relena stopped next to Heero in the doorway. And then she stared at Zechs. She stared for so long that Heero put a tentative hand on her shoulder. She didn't even seem to notice.

"Why do you look exactly like my brother?" she asked finally, her voice going scratchy. She looked at Noin. "My mom and Pargan both said my brother died."

"Yikes," said Duo quietly from the hallway. Heero thought about how all the family paintings hanging around the house made it a bold move for Zechs to think he could just walk in here and bluff about it.

"Your brother is dead," said Zechs very seriously. Relena frowned in confusion—understandably—and Heero lost the last shred of his patience.

"He's your fucking brother, Relena. He seems to be living under an assumed name."

She gaped at Heero and then at Zechs and Noin. "But… why? Noin, did you know about this?"

Noin sighed. "He swore me to secrecy. I'm sorry. I didn't think he'd come here."

"Am I imposing?" asked Zechs sarcastically.

"Yeah, actually," said Noin, and Heero coughed into his fist to cover the laugh that bubbled up. Maybe not successfully, because Relena shot him a look before drifting further into the room. She sat next to Noin on the couch.

"What are you doing here, then, if you were pretending to be dead?" she asked.

"There's been a threat to your life, Relena," Zechs said gently. "I came to investigate."

She blinked. "By who?"

He looked over at Heero (and Duo, now) in the doorway. "I have reason to believe that there are some terrorists—"

"Zechs, for the love of God, if they wanted to kill her they'd have done it already," Noin snapped.

Relena's eyes widened and she looked over at Heero and Duo. "What?"

"It's complicated," said Duo. "You're fine, though. Don't worry about it."

She relaxed a little. "Okay."

"Zechs," said Noin testily, "if you didn't tell Treize, and I didn't tell Treize, and Pargan certainly didn't, and I guarantee you none of them did," she waved vaguely at the doorway, "then how the hell does he know about Relena?"

"I don't know," said Zechs, like an idiot, "but I'm sure—"

Noin stood up. "Get out."

He blinked.

"You need to go," she said. "Now."

"I'm not—"

"You are. You're a liability, Zechs. This is a trap." Then she turned, ushered Relena to her feet, and hustled her out of the room with an arm around her shoulders. "I can't believe that little asshole was right. I'm never going to live this down," she muttered as she handed Relena off to Duo and shooed them off down the hallway.

Relena craned her neck to look back at them. "What little asshole?" he heard her ask Duo.

"She means Wufei."

"Oh. Wait, what did he say?"

"I'll tell you all about it when we get you to the panic room—" They disappeared around the corner, and Heero turned his full attention back to Zechs and Noin.

Zechs was trying to calm Noin down, but he was doing a terrible job at it because she'd reached the point of digging her hands back through her hair. "Zechs, he probably knows who you are," she said.

"He can't possibly."

Heero tilted his head at that one. "This is Treize Kushrenada we're talking about?" he asked.

"Yes," said Noin.

Heero shook his head. "I've met him. He's very smart. If your seventeen-year-old sister made you immediately just from looking at some old paintings—some of which are on public display—then he absolutely knows who you are."

Noin gestured at Heero like, 'You see?' "Thank you, Heero," she said, still looking at Zechs. "So, whatever you're going to do about this now?" she told Zechs, "You go and do it somewhere else. We have our own damage control to handle."

Zechs gave the two of them a sweeping look. "I'm going to go talk to the Commander," he said. "We'll clear this up. I'll come back," he tried to promise Noin.

She was already aiming him at the front door. "I am begging you not to," she said. "Go back to OZ and handle your own problems, Zechs."

They stood together on the front steps and watched him drive away, and then Heero turned on the open comms channel. "Team meeting, foyer, five minutes," he said.

"I'm going to get Relena. And Pargan," said Noin.

Quatre's second day in Vaduz was going more excitingly than he preferred. He was still trying to get up to speed on things when some kind of crisis happened. All he heard was Heero saying, "Who the fuck is Zechs?" (apparently he'd forgotten the man's name from that fiasco in Georgia) and then calling for a lockdown, which sent Hilde and Duo scrambling.

He and Hilde covered the hallway while Duo took point on princess-herding, with mixed success. Wufei and Trowa were both out on grounds patrol and couldn't assist.

"God, what is going on?" said Hilde after a few minutes.

"Sounds like OZ found the princess," said Quatre, shrugging.

She set her jaw. "If that little cow Dorothy had anything to do with this…"

"Who's Dorothy?"

Hilde startled a little, like she'd forgotten Quatre was there and could hear her, and then shook her head. "Nobody. Just… one of Relena's schoolmates. Dorothy Catalonia. Possibly well-connected, but an absolute weirdo." She paused. "She did know about the, uh… Romefeller bombing… before it hit the news, though."

Quatre stopped and stared. "Catalonia? As in General Catalonia of OZ?"

Hilde stared back. "Wait, he's real?"

"And she lives around here?" he checked. "And has contact with the princess?"

"Please, just call her Relena. For security and her preference. And yes. Every day at school. For better or for worse."

"Does everyone know about this?" He twirled his finger in the air to encompass everyone on the property.

"Well… I mean… yes? Not that we knew what to do about it. Just checking her facts is a monumental task. We don't have the time or resources for it."

"Hm," said Quatre, and went back to watching his sector while he considered the new information.

Duo was on edge. This day had been too much. First a lockdown, two separate attempts to get Relena to follow protocols and go to her goddamn safe room (at least the second one had succeeded… eventually), an OZ officer on the property who was apparently Relena's long-lost brother and had something to do with Noin… and apparently had pulled a gun on Heero. He waited impatiently in the foyer for their little team meeting to start, shifting from foot to foot and hugging his elbows.

"Are you okay?" Heero asked him at one point.

"Not really," he said, and Heero didn't press the matter. His self-preservation instinct was only reliable in non-life-or-death situations, it seemed.

After what felt like an eternity but was probably only five or ten minutes, most of their little cabal was standing in a loose circle in the foyer. Everyone except Wufei, actually.

"Where's Chang?" Duo asked. "Is he still outside watching the perimeter, or what?"

Trowa shrugged. "I didn't see him when I came in."

Heero sighed the Wufei Sigh and tried to raise him on comms. "Yeah, he's not answering," he said after a moment.

"Well, where the hell did he go?" Hilde asked, looking a bit alarmed. Duo didn't know what she saw in him. "Did he just wander off somewhere?"

"More than likely," said Heero tiredly. "Well, whatever. As briefly as possible: Noin and I suspect that we're compromised and that OZ knows who Relena is and where she is. They sent… that idiot… the asshole lieutenant from that fiasco in Georgia, who is apparently also Relena's brother, not as dead as we previously thought. And, it seems, Noin knew who he was all along." He frowned a little. "I suspect he set her up here in the first place."

"I always wondered where she came from," said Duo, shaking his head at the floor. "That makes sense, I guess."

"So what's happened with Noin, then?" asked Hilde warily.

"She told Zechs to fuck off," said Heero. He smiled, just a little. "Noin is fine. We can rely on her. She's all-in on protecting Relena."

"Okay, good," said Hilde, looking relieved.

Quatre had a thinking face on. Just as that started making Duo nervous, he spoke up. "So you expect OZ to make another move," he said.

"They apparently assassinated her father and tried to take her out at the same time once before," said Heero. "And I still don't know where all my assassination orders for her were coming from. Although I guess White Fang was probably trying to take her off the playing field before OZ could get their hands on her."

"What kind of value does she even have, though?" asked Duo. "At least in the short term. Maybe later, if she actually became the monarch, I guess, but now?"

"Legitimacy," said Quatre, like he'd just had a revelation. "That's her value. If OZ can control a country, they can get their hooks into organizations like the UN. Use the power to push their agenda and interests. And it seems they've decided they need that power right now."

"This country has like twelve people living in it, though," Duo pointed out. "How much leverage can that possibly give them?"

"More than you might expect, if they can produce a missing heir to the tragically lost House of Friedenskraft as their figurehead," said Quatre. He started heading for the front door.

"Where are you going?" Trowa asked.

"There's something I need to look into," Quatre said over his shoulder. "I'll be back as soon as I can." And then he was gone.

They all stared at the closed front door for a moment.

"Well," said Duo, "anyone else need to run off and do their own thing, or are we good now?"

"We've done more with less," said Heero.

"Yeah, and I'm getting fucking sick of having to," said Duo.

Trowa was still glaring at the door.

"Let's focus on the task at hand," said Heero. "We need a plan."

Zechs expected a fight, probably with Lady Une, to get some face time with the Commander when he returned to headquarters. However, not only was she not on the premises, the Commander's regular assistant let him in without a fuss. It made him unaccountably nervous.

But he'd certainly faced worse than this, so he took a deep, calming breath and strode into the office with his chin up. He heard the door shut behind him just as the Commander said, "Ah, Zechs. What fortunate timing."

There was someone already seated in one of the chairs in front of the desk, and when he turned around Zechs recognized Dekim Barton. "Am I intruding on something?" he asked.

"Not at all," said the Commander smoothly. "Have a seat, Zechs. Do you have a report for us already? How is your sister faring? And Lieutenant Noin?"

Zechs froze with his hand on the back of the other chair. "What?" he said.

The Commander and Dekim both chuckled a little, like he'd said something amusing.

"Have a seat, Zechs," repeated the Commander, and this time it sounded like an order.