Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Deadly Beautiful ❯ Rendezvous ( Chapter 22 )

Disclaimer: Gundams are big, the moon is too, I don't own the series, and neither do you. :P

Deadly Beautiful - Chapter 22

By danse

When Duo checked his computer on the morning of May 2nd, there was an urgent message from G. It said: 'Reaper: Mission aborted. Target's father killed. No point in remaining. Pickup arranged on reply. Grandpa.'

Duo's eyes went very wide. Leave? Already? But he was enjoying high school. It was a great experience so far. Besides, wasn't it a little soon to be leaving all of a sudden? He'd only been here for a week. He looked up quickly and checked the room. He could hear that Hikaru was still in the shower. Frantically, he started typing. 'Grandpa: Think it's too soon. At least another week necessary to make it look less weird that I'm leaving. Departure must not coincide with target incident. Request permission to remain another week. Reaper.' He encrypted his message and sent it, then ran his deleting program to remove all traces of the messages from his laptop. With that finished, he threw on his red jacket and left the room for breakfast.

Catherine pedalled as hard as she could, panting as she pushed the bike up the last steep hill. She stopped at the top, leaned against the thick trunk of an ancient tree, and gasped as quietly as she could for air as the bike leaned against her leg. She couldn't go any farther on it without being easily detected, so she concealed it in some bushes nearby. She would have to go the rest of the way on foot. She checked her watch. Two hours remained to her before she had to be at her meeting with Trowa. It was time to get going.

She hiked, fast and silently, for a kilometre and a half through thin woods, and then spotted a fence, three hundred metres away. It was ten feet high and made of chain link, with barbed wire coils crowning it. Guards strolled by every hour or so. She had no idea when the last one had come. Makes things more interesting, she thought gamely as she removed a pair of wire cutters from a pouch on her belt. The sun was barely setting, but she was dressed all in black, expecting to have a much worse time getting out than in, in full darkness. She put on a black ski mask that exposed only her eyes and mouth, feeling like she was about to rob a bank. If there were cameras around, she didn't want them to see who she was.

Looking around carefully, she went up to the fence and started looking through her pouch again. She removed something pink wrapped in plastic wrap and pinched it lightly in the wire cutters, holding it up against the metal fence. The raw hamburger didn't do anything when it was mooched against the wire; hopefully that meant that the fence wasn't electrified. She threw it on the ground and took the next step without hesitation, grabbing the fence and hoisting herself up. She didn't get electrocuted or shot, so she took that as a go-ahead and scrambled to the top with the wire cutters clenched in one hand. Reaching up to arm's-length to stay as far away as possible, she snipped the barbed wire coil and watched it spring away with a clatter. Quickly, she leaned over and snipped it again over to her left, cringing out of the way as the piece fell to the ground. Now the top was clear. She practically vaulted herself over the fence and rolled on the ground to absorb the thudding sound she made when she hit it.

Catherine slipped as quietly as she could through the trees, the easiest part of her mission complete.

Jeremiah leaned casually against the wall of the building with his AK-47 slung over one shoulder, trying not to fall asleep. Guard duty was pretty boring, especially at the unused side entrances like this one. Suddenly, he heard a branch snap from somewhere to the left. He whirled around and levelled his gun, ready to pump the intruder full of lead. He didn't expect the intruder to have quite so much cleavage, though.

"Hey, Jerry," Catherine crooned. "How you been?"

"Katie!" he breathed, lowering his gun as he spoke his best Italian. "You look good, baby."

"Thanks," Catherine replied. She had rolled up her black shorts to a level that would have made her mother blush, and her black button-down shirt had about two of the buttons done up, in strategic places. Her hair was artfully messed up, partly from the ski mask she'd abandoned before stomping on a branch. She hated being called Katie. Sacrifices must be made sometimes, she thought as she presented her vamped-up self to the guard, staying just in the shadows. There was a camera with a microphone on the right side of the door, right over the floodlight. "I haven't seen you for a while, Jerry," she whispered.

"I know," he said, shifting anxiously. "Where've you been lately?"

"That doesn't matter," she whispered, pushing desperately. She had fifteen minutes. "I'm here now." She beckoned with one finger as she stepped backwards, teasing him with a smile. Just as she'd hoped, he followed quickly, hormones raging out of control. It was easy to disappear in the darkening trees as he approached, and hit him with the wire cutters in the back of the head as soon as he was close. He dropped immediately, and she had to catch him and lower him to the ground. She bound his slack hands and feet with plastic ties and put duct tape over his mouth.

With a little more than five minutes left, Catherine fixed her clothes, stuffed the mask back on, and slid quickly along the wall to the door. She squished herself in the recess of the door as she put cotton balls on a piece of duct tape and leaned over and up a little to cover the microphone on the camera with it, silencing the sound. She couldn't cover the camera, because that would alert the security department. She slipped quickly back into the shadows, hearing Trowa's approach through the door.

Trowa walked down the empty hallway of the base, doing his best to look nonchalant and slightly bored as he wove his way steadily along a roundabout route to the East Entrance. He glanced at his watch. '21:50' glowed up at him in green digital numbers.

He got to the entrance in question at 21:58 and looked around. Where the hell was the guard? There was usually one posted at every entrance, at all times. He raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and softly opened the door. It swung open to reveal a dirt path fading into trees, illuminated in the darkness by a halogen floodlight over his head. He stood on the threshold for a moment and peered around him, seeing no one.

Suddenly, he was hit in the arm. He jumped and whipped his head around to see Catherine several feet away, standing in the shadows as close to the wall of the building as she could. She dropped the stone in her hand into a bush, since she didn't need to throw another one, and beckoned to him to follow her. "Stay close to the wall," she whispered. Her voice was so quiet that he barely heard it. He followed.

When they were both concealed in the trees, Trowa's eyes adjusted to the darkness and he noticed a body for the first time. "What the--!" he yelped. Catherine clapped a hand over his mouth.

"Shut up!" she hissed. "Do you want to give us away? He's just unconscious. I don't have very long." When Trowa calmed down and just stared at her expectantly, she removed her hand from his mouth and took a deep breath. "You've got questions, I'm sure," she whispered.

He sure as hell did have questions. Where to start? "Where did you go to?" he whispered. "Why all this trouble to talk to me? I hardly know who you are!"

She sat down on a fallen log, and Trowa planted himself next to her to hear her story, urgently whispered and unbelievable.

"They let me go two days after you left," she said. "It started two weeks before that, though, when I was putting away some files for S. They were personal history files, marked as confidential, with pictures and names. I actually dropped a stack while I was trying to open a door, and they spilled on the floor. Your picture fell out of yours, and when I opened your file to put it back, I accidentally noticed more photos on the first page.

"It was your medical history, and the photos were of your back." Trowa squirmed a little in his green T-shirt as he realized what she was referring to. She didn't seem to notice, and continued. "It's covered in scars, isn't that right? A bunch of long, thin diagonals, little puffy lines that have been there for years. I'll tell you in a minute why that caught my eye." She stared at her hand, fingers spread, as she talked. "I put the files away, but first I sneaked into an empty office and photocopied the contents of yours. I kept them hidden in my quarters, under the carpet in a place where it had lifted. I went through the papers the first chance I got, and found some other things."

"Like what?" Trowa asked. He was surprised that the immense nervousness he felt didn't show in his voice.

She looked up at him, her eyes shining in the starlight. "You were brought here at the age of four to begin your training, yes?"

He blinked. "I guess so. I never really thought about it before. I don't have a lot of memories before being here."

"They have programs that would generate that kind of response after a while," she answered. "Before they discovered what I was doing and forced me into hiding, I did some more research about how you got here and found that two other children, a girl and a boy, were also brought, same time, same age. Only you were successful at the training, though."

Vaguely, Trowa wondered what had happened to the other two, but her story was beginning to draw him in.

"Did you ever stop and wonder how you got here, Trowa? How could a four- year-old child possibly find himself here?"

Trowa shook his head. He'd honestly never thought about that with more than passing curiosity. Now, he wondered if that was a natural reaction, or something programmed into him.

"It says in your file that you were 'found' on the street in Pordenone, Italy, and brought here in July of that year. Nothing else. You could have been homeless, lost, stolen, or anything. And now I have a story to tell you, about me and something that happened when I was young, but that I remember quite clearly." She took a deep, wavering breath. Trowa was transfixed.

"I grew up in northern Italy. When I was young, I had a mother, a father, and a brother. My brother's name was Triton. When he was two and I was eight, our parents were driving us somewhere and we got in a terrible car accident. I remember that I broke my arm and my collarbone, and that both of my parents died. A piece of metal scraped along Triton's back and cut him very deeply in a few places. They had to give him stitches, but there were scars that they said would never go away.

"Since we had no parents left, the two of us became foster children. We were kept together, but bumped around a lot. Two years after the accident, when he was four and I was ten, we were living in Pordenone with a nice lady who had two cats. One day, she took us shopping with her. She went into a store and left me to watch him outside. Triton was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the shop window, talking to the ants, and I was leaning on the glass wishing I could have some gelato. A dog barked loudly from my other side, and I turned to look. When I looked back, my brother was gone." She blinked and looked up at Trowa, searching his eyes. Trowa didn't know what to say. His mind was reeling with possibilities.

She gathered her courage and dropped the bomb. "Trowa, I think your name isn't really Trowa Barton. I think your name is Triton Bloom. In fact, I'm sure of it. You're my brother."

The words echoed through his brain, bouncing off of thoughts and emotions and redoubling in volume as they careened around. Brother... this girl is my sister... my family.... Not that long ago, he'd been having thoughts about her that now disgusted him to realize. She has no proof, though... just her memory... it could be a coincidence. But the more he tried to convince himself that she was wrong, the more he knew that she wasn't--that she couldn't be. It was too much to be a coincidence. She could be lying, his brain whispered. He met her eyes. She looked like she was about to cry. Trowa had met many deceivers in his line of work, and had deceived too many people himself. Catherine was still an unknown quantity (every time he saw her, she threw him another curveball), but he didn't think she was lying.

"So..." he squeaked, and cleared his throat before trying again. "So what do you think we should do?"

She grasped his hand urgently, nervous excitement washing over her. "I've gotten an apartment in Verona, under a false name. There's room for you. We can... start over. Make up for the last twelve years."

It was a very appealing idea. "Hasn't S got a line out on you, if you know things you shouldn't?"

"I have an inside source who keeps me up-to-date," she answered. "The man who gave you my message. He's trustworthy, if anyone is."

"How do you know I won't turn you in?" he asked bluntly.

She raised her head high. "I ran away from foster care when I was sixteen, and I've spent every year since then looking for you, hoping you were alive. It was my fault that you disappeared when I should have been watching you. If I can't get you to safety now that I've found you, they can do what they want to me." The gravity of her words shook him.

"So you think I'm in danger here? I'm the best agent he has."

"Trowa--Triton--I don't think you have an accurate idea of what you're caught in. I handled S' private papers for a year and a half, and I've dug around quite a bit. I still don't know for sure how much neither of us know, but the tip of the iceberg that I've found wasn't pleasant. It's a fickle profession, and the sooner you're far away from it, the better." She laid a hand on his arm and started whispering very fast, realizing that their time was nearly up. The guard could wake up any minute. "Look, if you can get out without getting killed, I know some people who can take you into hiding. We'll get some false papers drawn up, we'll wait for things to blow over, and then what's left of the Bloom family can be together again. Happily ever after."

"...I'd like that," Trowa murmured.

She smiled. "I have to go. If they find me, they'll kill me." She picked up a ski mask off of the ground and put it on. "We can keep in contact through my friend inside," she said.

"Will we meet like this again?"

"I don't know." She stepped close and hugged him fiercely, just as Jeremiah groaned. "When you go back inside, pull the tape off of the microphone on the camera," she whispered. "Now go!"

Trowa saw her snip the plastic restraints on the guard's ankles and wrists before she melted into the dark woods, black into shadows. She's nuts, he thought. I'm glad she's my sister. He slid along the wall to go back inside, stopping to pull the tape from the camera mike as he opened the door. He walked down the perpetually lit hallway towards the Playroom, ready to burn some nervous energy, whistling a tune as he went.