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"Tenebris"Written By: Clara Barton Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. The following
is an intellectual exercise with no intention of profit. That said,
these characterizations, words, and situations are mine. Please ask
before reprinting. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: angst, language, violence, smut, death,
gore, vampires, drug use, character death Pairings: past 1x3x5, past 1x5, past 3x5, past
1x3, 3x?, 1x3x5, 1x3, 1x5, 3x5 Summary: Nine years after the last war, humanity is yet again on the brink of destruction. A new threat emerges from the colonies, one more horrific and defiant than any before. A/N: For Tina - wishing you a very happy birthday! A/N: As always, thank you Ro for the support and the beta! A/N: Set post-canon
"Tenebris"
Part 3 Six Weeks Later "It was some of the scariest shit I've ever seen. I'm tellin' ya, Ro - we need to do something about it." Heero sighed and finally gave Duo his full attention. His former comrade had spent the years since the war travelling the colonies, picking up odd jobs here and there to make ends meet, but seemingly unable to settle in one place. Heero could sympathize with that - he had tried to, and that had failed rather spectacularly. Maybe Duo had had the right idea all along. Of course, Duo's surprise visits every few months - breaking into whatever apartment Heero happened to be living in and making himself at home - did a very thorough job of reminding Heero that, whatever disappointments he had faced over his failed relationship with Wufei and Trowa, at least living alone had its merits. Merits that Duo forcefully reminded Heero of. Merits such as working alone, with no distractions. Duo, munching away on an apple that Heero was fairly certain was the last one, straightened up under Heero's glare and continued. "I mean, I know you're busy here, with all your... writing or whatever," Duo gave a dismissive wave to Heero's computer and the open document that he had been working on. Heero flushed. "No, I mean, it's great, Ro. Really. Love your books and I've got 'em all. I even paid for two of them. I'm just saying, maybe you could take a break and help me track down some of these fuckers. You know, for old time's sake and all that." Heero sighed again and rubbed his eyes. "Duo, this plague has affected millions. What exactly do you think we can accomplish?" "I dunno. Ya got a point there. Might as well give up and pack it in. 'S'not like we have a reputation for managing the impossible or anything to uphold." Heero arched an eyebrow. "That's what this is about? Upholding your reputation? You want to go off and... and do what, exactly?" Duo growled in frustration and ran a hand through his bangs. "I don't fucking know - but something! Heero, people are dying and - and fuck you for thinking this is just me being bored or caring about my fucking reputation." "You just said- " "You know what they're calling them? Vampires, Heero. They suck the blood from their victims until they die. And the poor bastards who refuse to feed off other humans waste away and die. This isn't a fucking plague - this is the end of humanity. We have to do something. You can't just hide away in your ivory fucking tower while it all burns down. I know you miss them but-" "This has nothing to do with them," Heero interrupted him, voice low and fierce. Duo, of all people, knew that discussing Wufei and Trowa was completely off-limits. And if he ever forgot, he had the scars to remind himself. Duo held up his hands in supplication. "Okay, yeah. Sure. I'm just... I'm just saying, Ro, that we need to figure out where this shit all started. I have some buddies who were on Mars before the colony was evacuated, and they've been saying all this shit about-" "You really think this started on Mars?" "I don't know, is what I'm saying. But what if it did? I mean, think about the timing - the first cases of this started showing up, what, a year ago? The same time that the last of the evacuees got back from Mars." "The living ones," Heero murmured. The dead ones had been shipped back on a cargo freighter, travelling at a slower speed and passing by the Belt customs station before coming back to the colonies. Heero frowned. "What?" Duo asked. "I know that look. You thought of something." Heero hesitated. "It's strange... The first reported cases of the plague-" "Vampirism." "Whatever. They were reported in the L2 colonies, right?" Duo nodded. "But wasn't there..." Heero trailed off as he turned back to his computer and started searching. "Wasn't there what? You know how it drives me crazy when you trail off and go all introspective genius on me." Heero had to smirk, a little, at that. "This," he said, and tapped his computer screen triumphantly. "'Belt mining colony condemned after series of internal structural failures'?" Duo skeptically read the article title. "When is the last time a colonial structure was condemned due to structural failures?" Heero asked him. Duo arched an eyebrow. "I'm guessing you mean a time that pre-dates the Martian evacuation?" Heero nodded. Duo sighed and frowned. He took another bite of the apple and chewed thoughtfully. "I dunno... I'm guessing it would have to be a few hundred years though. Last one I can think of was back in AC 75, when they tried to do that outlier colonial system around L5? And the gravitational fields were wonky as shit because they didn't account for the-" "Yes, exactly," Heero jumped in. Duo was likely to go on for hours once he got started talking about anything to do with aerospace engineering. Duo scowled, irritated at being interrupted, but then his face cleared as he realized where Heero was going with this. "You think it wasn't structural failure - at either of those locations." Heero shook his head. "It just doesn't make sense. Aside from incidents related to the war, no colonies or outposts have been condemned because of structure failures since AC 75. So why now? It's been ten years since the last of the mines were cleared out of the Belt, eight years since the last kamikaze ship was disabled - and there is no indication this was terrorism. Internal structural failure?" Duo swore. "I'm a fucking idiot. Wait, no, I'm not. A fucking genius. I said it had something to do with Mars - and it does. This shit started there, didn't it? Then it came back on those corpse freighters and spread from there. Fuck. This has been right there the whole fucking time..." Duo trailed off, his eyes distant. Despite himself, Heero felt the familiar, if long abandoned, tingle of excitement that he had once felt during the war. He turned back to his computer terminal and started to pull up the earliest news articles that had, only recently, been linked to the outbreak of the plague. Vampirism. Heero started to map them, trying to piece together where the epicenter might be. "Ro." Duo sounded troubled, Heero's name - or rather, Duo's nickname for him, soft enough that Heero barely heard it. He looked over at him. "Did you... did you go to the funeral? For Zechs and Noin?" Heero shook his head in the negative. The funeral had been only a week after Trowa had left, only two days after Wufei had told Heero to do the same, and he had... he had not been in the right mental place to be in public. He knew that Une would have liked it, Heero being one of the last living figures from the war who actually knew Zechs and who the general populace still admired. "Me neither. My invitation must have been lost in the mail," Duo said with a sneer. "Why?" "Why didn't I get invited? Probably because the last time I was invited to the palace I told Une she could-" "No, why do you ask?" "Because I want to know what state their bodies were in. Were they victims? Were they the first victims?" It was hard to think of Zechs or Noin, in particular, as a victim. Heero frowned again, and he started to hack into the ESUN's database. "Uh, Ro, you know I'm all for a little deep-diving to find out state secrets on a Sunday afternoon, but what-" "How much do body-sized preservation coolers weigh?" Heero interrupted him. "The fuck if I know. A lot?" Heero glared at him. "What? You want me to just... figure it out in my head right now? Jesus fucking... alright, fine. You gotta have the aluminum frame, the siding, the housing for the ultra-cell battery to operate the temp control and the suspension system. Lead lining because of the radiation... Give or take a few kilos, probably about fifteen hundred?" Heero scowled as he looked at the cargo manifests. "Then why do these only weigh a thousand kilos?" "Uh... I've got no fucking clue. Even if they used Gundanium or some other alloy, there's no way to take off five hundred kilos, not to mention body weight and- fuck. Find some vid feed of them being unloaded." Duo moved so that he was behind Heero, leaning over him, one hand on his shoulder. It felt entirely too much like old times. Heero managed to find a recording of the coffins being unloaded, a pale-faced Une standing by to receive them. "There - see that?" Duo tapped at the screen. "That's not a preservation cooler. That's a Yuki-Haas cargo hold." "What?" Heero stared at the metal box, wondering how the hell Duo even knew that just by looking at grainy footage. "Those pressure locks - pieces of shit, mind you, that I could have broken into blindfolded and drunk at the age of two - are Yuki-Haas patents. No one else uses pressure locks like those. And Yuki-Haas doesn't make preservation coolers. They mostly make shitty fucking cargo holds for the transport of non-perishable goods. Lots of government contracts. I'll bet most of the equipment on Mars was shipped out in those pieces of shit." "How much do they weigh?" "Empty, probably right at a thousand kilos. And there's no way you'd ship a body back in one - it's lead-lined but it's not airtight. The decomposition over nine months of interstellar flight? Even in a cargo freighter, there is hold life support - they wouldn't have been frozen. Plus, even if they were..." Duo gestured at the screen, at the sun shining down on the funereal procession. Even if they were, as soon as that freighter started to enter atmo, they would have started to thaw, and by the time they were wheeled out for Une to see, they would have been very ripe. "So their bodies were left behind on Mars," Heero concluded. "It makes sense to give a state funeral, though, give the people-" "Ro, their bodies weren't left behind on Mars." Heero turned to scowl at Duo. "How do you-" Duo sighed, and he bit the inside corner of his mouth. One of his many tells. Heero sighed. "What did you do?" "It wasn't- I mean- Look, someone was going to go out there and scavenge." "You looted the Martian colony?" "I didn't loot- Look, it was a Sweeper expedition, and Howie asked me to tag along because I'm pretty familiar with government surveillance systems, yanno, and anyway, there wasn't that much left to loot. The place was a fucking disaster site - but we found the graveyard they made and, you know, it's Mars, so things don't decompose. Well, they sort of flash-freeze and boil, but after that, they don't decompose. We were able to ID all of the bodies there - Zechs and Noin weren't there." Heero pushed aside the questions he had about that little interstellar pirating mission. "So if they aren't on Mars, and they weren't shipped back to Earth- "They started this," Duo concluded. "It's them, Zechs and Noin. They hitched a ride on that cargo freighter, feasted on that belt customs depot and sent those cargo holds back to Earth empty. But- Ro, I mean, you and I are smarter than the average bureaucrat, no question there. But... surely someone, you know, looked inside the fucking boxes and realized they were empty?" Heero nodded; he had been thinking the same thing. "So, they know. They know that Noin and Zechs are unaccounted for. And they have all the initial data on this shit, Ro. The ESUN gets notifications for every crisis point, including medical. Preventers has a whole fucking wing dedicated to just analyzing this shit to make sure the colonial unrest threshold isn't surpassed again and- Fucking Une has known about this shit the whole fucking time!" "Probably," Heero agreed with a sigh. He wasn't entirely surprised. He wondered, though, if Une were in on it? He watched the video feed again, but her face was set in the rigid, unfathomable lines of diplomatic restraint. There was absolutely no telling if she knew that Zechs was not, in fact, dead and decaying in the box that passed her by, or if it was off in the L2 colonies marauding around and sucking the blood from innocents. Heero was still staring at her face, ignoring Duo as he started to rant about government conspiracies, when he heard the insistent ping of a video call. He looked up, at the left corner of his screen, and saw the incoming data feed location. The moon. Heero swallowed hard, his already rushing adrenaline spiking even more. There were, of course, a lot of people on the moon. Millions. But only one, he was fairly certain, would be calling him. Or, at least, there was only one person Heero wanted to be calling him from the moon. He swallowed hard, trying to soothe his anxiety and excitement, and reached out to answer the call. The screen flickered for a moment, and then the image resolved into the familiar, much-longed-for face. He was beautiful and perfect, his full lips drawn into a frown and his dark eyes as alive and intelligent as ever, the strength of his will as always at odds with the smooth lines of his cheeks and jaw. He- "Fei, you look like shit," Duo said, unceremonious and unwelcome. Duo's assessment, however, made Heero revise his own. Wufei was pale - even more-so than usual, and there were violet smudges under his eyes, and his hair, always immaculately pulled back, looked as if he had been mussing it with his hands. He did not look like shit, but he did look unsettled. "Maxwell," Wufei growled, his fondness for the man who had almost died with him clearly at odds with his irritation over the greeting. "Yuy." Heero swallowed hard, and Duo, his hand still on Heero's shoulder, gave him a subtle squeeze. "Hello," Heero managed. The three men stared at each other in silence, and Heero wondered - he wondered so many things, each of them impossible to give hope to. Wufei's eyes flicked towards Duo. Subtlety had never been his strong suit. Then again, it hadn't been Heero's either. He turned and gave Duo a look. Duo snorted a laugh and stepped back, putting the apple in his mouth while he reached for his jacket and shrugged it on. "Yeah, sure, I'll give you two some time to reminiscence or fight or- or whatever the hell you want to do," Duo grumbled after he had pulled on the coat and removed his jacket. "Oh- but Fei, is there any chance you want to help me track down these fucking vampires and figure out how to save humanity again?" "What?" Wufei looked startled by Duo's question - which, Heero had to admit, probably seemed too apropos of nothing, since that was doubtless not the reason Wufei had called Heero in the first place. "Ro and I think we've figured out where this shit started - and we're thinking Zechs and Noin have something to do with it." Wufei's eyes shuttered, and, though it was minute, Heero saw the shift in his body language, saw his guard go up. "Hm," Wufei said noncommittally. "I..." "Yeah, yeah, it sounds crazy. I know. But-" Duo sighed when Heero glared at him again. "Look, Ro can fill you in on everything. I'll probably be heading out your way soon enough anyway." Duo offered a jaunty wave at the screen and then, mercifully, left. Wufei did not relax. "You know something," Heero accused. Wufei glared at him. "Yes," he sighed, and he ran a hand over his hair. "I... I called because of Trowa." Trowa. The man who had brought them together, and driven them apart. Heero frowned, and he fought against the part of himself that started to go down very dark paths at the mention of his former lover. "You called about Trowa, but you aren't at all surprised that Zechs and Noin have something to do with the plague." Wufei took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Trowa needs our help." Four words that would have, at any point in their relationship, had Heero reaching for his gun and jacket and mentally calculating the quickest way to get to Trowa. And even now, even after all of this time and all of the silence from Trowa and Wufei both, Heero had to fight against the urge to do just that. He fought it by reminding himself of what he and Duo had just uncovered - what Wufei seemed hell-bent on glossing over. "Wufei, there is a plague decimating the human population. Trowa-" "Trowa has it," Wufei interrupted him, his voice and words cutting. "I'm not at all surprised about Zechs and Noin because Zechs is the one who infected him. Trowa is... Trowa is a vampire." Heero felt as if he had been jettisoned into space without an EVA suit. He felt hot and cold at once; he felt anger and fear and desperation. He felt everything and nothing. It was as if Wufei's words had flashed through Heero, burning him and then leaving him completely numb. Trowa. Trowa. "I need your help, Heero. I've been trying to deal with this, but he's... he's getting worse." "You've been dealing with this? How?" Wufei sighed again. "He came to me six weeks ago and asked me to kill him. He... he was infected nine months ago, and he killed several people before he realized he could subsist on a very small amount of blood, but he can't... he can't live like this and it's getting worse. I've been breaking into a local blood bank just to keep him alive, but the synthetics aren't the same as biological blood and his body is starting to break down. I..." Wufei's throat worked, and his eyes, those always passionate eyes, grew wet. "I can't save him, Heero. And I can't kill him. I... I need you." Just three words, and Heero was reaching for his jacket and gun and- "We have to save him, Heero." Those words, however, gave him pause. Heero had seen the newsreels, had seen the footage of those infected, had seen them waste away to nothing but red eyes and translucent skin. And he had seen the pale, lifeless bodies of their victims. Save. Hadn't Heero spent his life trying to save people? Hadn't he saved humanity from itself multiple times? But he hadn't been able to save Relena, or Quatre. And Trowa... "Please," Wufei added, the word so rough and unfamiliar that Heero had to take a moment to make sure he had even heard it. "Please," Wufei repeated. "I can't." Heero drew in a deep breath, and forced himself to meet Wufei's gaze. "I'm on my way," he said, offering the only assurance he could. -o-
~ * ~ Chapter 4 |
