14-Jul-2003
revised 06-Sep-2005
Title: The X Faction 5/?
Author: Kitty Chou
Archive: GW Addiction
Category: AU, Shounen-ai, Angst, Possible OOC
Pairing: 3+4, 1+2
Disclaimer: *clears throat* I do not in any way, shape, or form own Gundam Wing or its wonderful characters! I just pull them out to play and then clean them up and put them back when I'm done! I'm making no money and if you sue me you will receive no money because *shock* I have none.
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, shounen-ai, angst, violence
Spoilers: The entire series, Endless Waltz and Episode Zero... along with Blind Target and Ground Zero, probably.
Author's Notes: I love doing this revision... I'd forgotten really why I loved the story so much in the first place. Now I know. If you're wondering why Quatre calls Duo 'D' and Duo calls Quatre 'Q', it's out of habit. In the X Faction, they go by the codenames Instructor Q and Professor D among their people. Wouldn't want their good names to slip out, after all! Though in this chapter, Duo remembers to call him Quatre occasionally for the sake of Heero and Wufei, as Trowa isn't paying much attention.
Feedback: Please send feedback! ARNIE HUNGRY!!!
"You know," Duo began, giving Heero a wry look. "Funny you should mention Relena... " The room fell silent save for the sounds of Duo's raspy breath and the shuffle of feet as the technicians quietly backed out of the room, sensing that they probably would rather not be there anymore. When Heero spoke again, his voice was quiet and deadly, an unspoken threat.
"What about Relena?"
"D," Quatre warned, giving his friend an earnest look. "Perhaps it would be best to start from the beginning... "
"No, Q," Duo stated firmly, his eyes locked with Heero's. "I think it's about time they all learned the truth about Pretty, Pretty Princess. After all, we're going to need all the allies we can get when she tries to destroy the world."
Quatre sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose tiredly, the room dissolving into chaos around him. Heero hauled his ex-lover to his feet, pulling him close and glaring steadily into his smirking eyes while Wufei attempted to pull him away from Duo, who appeared to be enjoying himself. And Trowa... well Trowa was staring at Quatre and had been doing so since he'd gotten off the shuttle. It was starting to get unnerving.
"That's enough," Quatre spoke sternly, taking command. "You three sit down! And YOU!" He pointed at Duo, who pretended not to notice his accusing finger. "You, drink your water and stop making this difficult!"
"Yes, Instructor," Duo said sheepishly, trying unsuccessfully to keep from grinning like an ass as he pointedly drank his water.
"Alright then," Quatre snapped irritably, wheeling in front of the three Preventers, none of whom had sat. "Okay... Lets begin with March 9, AC 200, the day I was allegedly shot and killed before my meeting with Foreign Minister Darlian and the other delegates on the Mars project. I did die for a short period of time between the shooting and the ambulance, but I was resuscitated by the EMTs and transferred to my private facilities. When I arrived, I was rushed into surgery and they removed the bullets in my stomach and my arm. There... was some nerve damage from where the third bullet hit, but they were able to repair the damage so that there would be no chance of paralysis.
"But, as you can see," he gesturing at himself, "there were complications. For some reason, the nerves didn't heal, and I was left crippled. Someone suggested that a disease or sickness might be preventing my body from healing itself, so they ran some tests and did some blood work. They found a lethal toxin in my system, undetectable until it has finished killing you from the inside out. The poison was treated and they were finally able to mend some of the nerve damage, though I am obviously still healing. Not wanting to face another assassination attempt until the origin of the toxin had been discovered, my survival was kept secret from everyone."
"Except Duo," Wufei pointed out, glancing at his former partner, who was still innocently drinking his water.
"Well... no," Quatre contradicted him. "It was kept secret from him as well, but he figured out that I was alive anyway and came knocking. Perhaps you can better explain that, D."
"Oh sure, now I can talk," Duo said sulkily, sticking out his lower lip in a childish pout before grinning devilishly. "Okay, you remember how I started researching Quatre's death, right Wufei? Well when I studied the vid clips I discovered that the point of entry for the bullets was wrong. In accordance with the angle at which the shots were fired, and their exact point of entry, there was no way he could have possibly died by those wounds! Those shots wouldn't have killed a kitten! Well... maybe a kitten, but not Q here, even if he had supposedly died before the ambulance arrived. So I jumped the first ship to L4 and demanded that they let me see him."
"And they just let you in?" Heero questioned doubtfully.
"Ah... no. I had to blackmail Rasid with the threat to release my conspiracy theory to every seedy tabloid in the known universe. But that isn't important. What's important is that I found something else in my research," he paused dramatically for effect as he took another drink. "The gunman wasn't aiming for Relena. He was aiming for Heero.
"Alright, alright!" Duo calmed them, holding up his hands when his claim was met with protests. "Just hear me out, will you? Relena was on Quatre's right, right? She was as least a foot to his right. But Heero was just behind Q and to the left by only a few inches. All three bullets hit Quatre on his left side! Well... except for the one in his abdomen, but even that one hit to the left of his spinal column as if our shooter had decided to switch targets. So either the gunman was dyslexic, or aiming for Heero, right?"
"I don't know... " Wufei commented doubtfully. "It's a pretty wild theory."
"Oh tell them the rest, Duo," Quatre said irritably, wishing Trowa would stop staring at him like he was as it was quite distracting.
"Fine. I only wanted to make sure you guys knew that I figured all this out long before we captured the hit man."
"You captured the hit man?" Heero asked quickly, his eyes alight with an almost manic gleam reminiscent of his days as the inhuman Gundam pilot.
"Of course we captured the hit man," Duo replied sarcastically, as though the possibility of their not having found the gunman was an offensive slant against them. "But what I'm trying to convey here is that I'm a genius."
"That's enough, Duo. I'll take it from here," Quatre chastised him, wanting to get this done as quickly and painlessly as possible. "Yes, we captured the hit man about a year or so after the shooting and have held him ever since. It took him another year to figure out that I wasn't planning to release him, nor was I turning him over to the Preventers, and that was when he cut a deal and began talking."
"What deal?" Wufei questioned.
"That as long as I held him captive, aka until the day of his death, he wanted to stay on one of my private islands. So I shipped him off to the Mediterranean and he told us everything we wanted to know... along with things we didn't." He stopped and turned his chair to one of the consoles, opening a video recording.
One of the screens flickered to life, displaying the words 'The Confession of C.R. Marsh: November 5, AC 202'. Then it showed a man in his thirties with shaggy brown hair and a scraggly brown beard sitting handcuffed behind a metallic table. His eyes were deep-set and bushy eyebrows hung down into them. He was wearing what looked to be gray scrubs, which covered his arms to the wrist. Duo's voice came over the speakers, sounding distant as the microphone sat next to the gunman.
"What is your full name?"
"Charles Ricardo Marsh," the man replied. His voice was deep and scratchy.
"What is your date of birth?"
"June 4, AC 170. I'm thirty-two years old," he added.
"What's your favorite color, Chuck?"
"Blue. No," Marsh thought a moment. "Yellow."
"Who were you hired to kill on March 9, AC 200?"
"Heero Yuy, Foreign Minister Darlian's bodyguard."
"Who hired you?"
"Foreign Minister Darlian."
"Say WHAT?"
"I was hired by Foreign Minister Relena Darlian to kill Heero Yuy on March 9, AC 200 before the meeting scheduled for that morning."
"Are you sure you weren't set up? What I mean is, did you actually speak to Relena when she hired you for the hit?"
"I was not set up. I spoke to the Foreign Minister in person on a colony in the L2 cluster six months prior. I was in the Cinq kingdom as part of the Treize faction during her reign, so I recognized her easily. She paid me five million in advance and promised ten more after the hit."
"Well, shit. Did she give any indication why she wanted Heero killed?"
"No."
"So... did you still get paid when you 'killed' Quatre instead?"
"Yes."
"Really? Any idea why?"
"She said that it was just as well because it had gotten both Yuy and Winner out of her hair."
"Did she mention any other attempts made on Quatre's life? Say... by poison?"
"No, but I can give you the names of assassins who specialize in toxins."
"Good. And their possible locations if you know them... "
Quatre turned off the clip, turning back to the stunned Preventers. "Well?" he asked after a moment.
"I... " Heero began, still staring at the screen with a rather lost expression on his face. "I don't... I don't know what to believe... "
"Did you find the other assassin?" Wufei asked quietly.
"Yes," Duo answered. "She had no qualms about telling us everything. Apparently Relena didn't pay her what she'd promised because Chuck did the dirty work. She was eager to rat her out to us, so we set her loose without the extended stay at Quatre's beach house."
"Heero," Quatre began quietly. "Do you have any idea why Relena would want you dead?"
"No," he replied firmly, his expression hardening in a way that very clearly said the discussion was closed. "What about the Gundams?"
"Gundams?" Wufei exclaimed, looking up sharply.
"In a minute," Duo waved aside the request, an expression of suspicious curiosity lighting upon his face. "How did you guys find us anyway?"
"Heero was able to get part of 'Project Tulip Gonads M-0024' before ARNIE killed his laptop. I deciphered the anagram," the Chinese man answered.
Duo and Quatre both flinched at that, but it appeared to be out of embarrassment. "That stupid anagram... " Duo muttered while Quatre apologized to Heero for the destruction of his computer. "Took me forever to come up with the damn thing and you go and figure it out in like, two seconds. And that was it? One clue and you guys bust in?"
"No, 'x' is also the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. Oh," Heero turned to Quatre. "And your WE security system needs updating. I was able to find the shipping records of gundamium to this satellite with little effort, even if it was labeled for incineration in the sun."
"Until ARNIE then destroyed Sally's laptop," Wufei muttered.
"'X' is the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet?" Duo laughed, looking amazed. "That's clever, I wish I'd thought of it!"
Heero frowned. "You wish you'd... Then why 'The X Faction'?"
"Well, 'The Ex-terrorist Gundam Pilots' Faction' is too big to fit comfortably on a t-shirt... "
Quatre giggled and then looked promptly embarrassed, which brought forth raucous laughter from Duo as they both looked at the shocked and mildly irritated Preventers. Heero actually looked rather embarrassed as he glared at them, crossing his arms in annoyance. Wufei cleared his throat, bringing their attention back to the matter at hand.
"The Gundams?" he asked irritably.
"Right," Quatre sobered, his ears flushing slightly pink. "After discovering Relena's hand in the assassinations, we began searching through her database. Unfortunately, it has a rather good security system and we were only able to get a few useful bits of information out of months of intensive hacking. One file we found held details for a new mobile doll, but their firewall shut us out before we could get any other information on it. Hence, the Gundams, but they're only a last resort since we don't know for sure if she's even building the suits. Whatever she's planning though, it has something to do with Mars."
"Were you able to find out anything on your visit, Q?" Duo said suddenly, as though having only just remembered.
Quatre shook his head tiredly. "Everything is very 'hush, hush' there. And I couldn't get any information on the whereabouts of Zechs or Noin. All I got was a name; 'Tembin'."
"Tembin?" Heero demanded, eyes wide with shock. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I think so," Quatre replied, startled at the outburst. "Why? What is it?"
"Tembin... is Japanese for Libra."
End Part 5
Next Chapter: The Gundams and all that technical junk that you probably didn't care about...
(:./kitty/faction5)
