Duo was not happy. It had been three hours since the Oz soldiers grabbed him out of his shell, stuck a hood over his head, shoved him into some transport, brought him to this cell, and left him alone. He had no idea what had happened to Diana. They'd taken her away, and she'd never returned. He might have thought she was dead, but he had the feeling that little less than a Gundam would be able to take her down. So where was she? For that matter, where was he?
He was assuming that it was another Oz base, one much more secure than the one where they'd been captured, but they'd traveled over an hour by plane. At least that's what it had sounded like. An hour by plane was enough time to go a good distance... or they could have been circling, to thrown him off. Add to that the fact that he hadn't been very certain of his location to begin with, and he could be anywhere on Earth. Great.
As Duo sat by himself in the dark, completely ignorant of his situation and that of Diana, he reflected on how much life could suck.
"How did the mission go?" Andrew asked as Heero marched past him, heading upstairs to his laptop, undoubtedly to make his report. What was surprising was that there was a hint of a frown on his face -- assuming that he was like Brian when it came to showing emotions, Heero was absolutely furious. Andrew's question was directed at Quatre, who came in right after Heero, holding onto his left arm with his right. His left sleeve was drenched with blood. Andrew immediately shot to his feet, but Quatre shook him off.
"No. Go help Trowa!"
"Devin!" Andrew shouted as he ran outside. Devin was their doctor -- they were all medic-trained, but Devin's interest in medicine had left him knowledgeable enough to earn his PhD if he'd wanted. Andrew climbed up the side of Trowa's Gundam -- it had to be Trowa's, it was the only one he didn't recognize -- in a few seconds, and was waiting when the hatch popped and Trowa stumbled out, his eyes more glazed than usual, probably due to the head wound that had blood streaming down the side of his face.
"All right, come on," Andrew said, picking up Trowa in his arms before jumping down, which was the fastest way he could think of to get him to the ground. He landed in a crouch to cushion the fall for Trowa, then carried him into the house at a run. Devin was inside, already wrapping a bandage around Quatre's arm, but he stopped as soon as he saw Trowa, handing the rest of the bandage to Quatre.
"What happened?"
"Head wound. I didn't get a good look at it yet."
"Get some water. I've got to get some of this cleaned out of his hair before I can take a look at the wound," Devin instructed as Andrew set Trowa down on the couch. "What happened?" he asked Quatre, who had finished wrapping up his arm and was now standing there, looking at Trowa, a pained expression on his face.
"It was a trap. We were betrayed, somewhere," Quatre said quietly, his face very pale and emotionless. Andrew heard this comment as he came back from the kitchen with a pot of water and several towels. He extended his senses towards Quatre and was shocked by the cold fury that gripped his double. He wouldn't have thought that nice, gentle Quatre could even understand those emotions, much less have them himself. "We were lucky to get out of there at all. That's what Heero's doing -- he's hacking into Oz's database, to find out how they knew we were coming." He turned as Wufei came in. "Wufei! Are you all right?"
Wufei growled something in Chinese that Andrew missed, but he didn't miss the fact that his arms were wrapped around his chest, or that he winced slightly with every breath. "Let me see your ribs," he said authoritatively. He might not be qualified to be a doctor, but he was medic-trained. He ought to be able to diagnose the problem at least.
Wufei grumbled but allowed them to strip off his shirt, barely holding back a gasp of pain as they did so. As carefully as he could, Andrew probed Wufei's ribs with his very sensitive fingers. "Not broken," he finally decided. "But at least two of them have minor fractures, and the rest are probably bruised. I think we've got some ointment that will do something for the pain, and then the only thing we can do is wrap it up."
"Do it," Wufei grunted through gritted teeth.
By the time Andrew finished treating Wufei, Devin had finished cleaning up Trowa's head and was in the process of stitching him up. "How is he?" Andrew asked as Wufei disappeared into his room, probably to sleep. They were tough, but they weren't like him or his brothers -- they were still human, and anyone but them probably would have collapsed by now.
"Mild concussion and a fairly deep laceration. I'm stitching that up now. He's going to need rest, but he should be fine in a few weeks. They heal faster than most humans. Not as fast as us, but still pretty fast. He'll be fine." This last comment was directed at Quatre, who was still hovering over Trowa. "You lost a lot of blood. You should rest, too."
"After we get Trowa into bed," Quatre said firmly. "Thank you for your help."
Devin only nodded, then easily picked up Trowa and carried him upstairs to the room (and bed) that he and Quatre shared. Andrew was beginning to get used to the idea that his double and Devin's were sleeping together, but it still struck him as strange that the brotherly love he and Devin shared was something more physical here. Very strange.
As if meeting your human double from another world and then traveling to their world wasn't strange enough on its own.
"What's going on? Where is everyone?" Quatre asked, following Trowa with his eyes.
"Kane went off to pick up Brian, so he doesn't have to run the entire way. Wufei is in bed, Heero is upstairs, we still don't know where Shin is, and Duo and Diana are still being held by Oz. Now you have to rest. And eat something when you wake up."
Quatre turned and slowly started climbing the stairs. "What? I don't think we have any food here."
"I'll make something."
Andrew followed Quatre up the stairs, watching him very carefully. His senses told him that his double was dangerously close to collapse. Somehow Quatre made it up the stairs and collapsed on the bed beside Trowa, throwing one arm over his partner's chest. He was asleep almost before his head hit the bed.
Andrew shot a look at Devin, arranged Quatre so that his legs were not hanging off the bed and then walked out of the room, turning off the light and closing the door behind him.
"You realize what you just did?" Devin asked him as they walked back down the stairs.
"What?" Andrew asked as he picked up the bloody cloths that were left over from Devin's ministrations.
"You said that we'd cook," he said flatly. There was nothing in his tone to suggest that it was an accusation, but it was.
"Well, I was trying to get him upstairs," Andrew defended himself.
"You said that we'd cook."
"We'll get something that doesn't require actual cooking," Andrew assured him. It was patently ridiculous, that genetically designed weapons couldn't cook their own meals. But there'd never been a need or occasion to learn -- at the Alliance base, all they ever ate were nutrient bars, and now that they were with the Rebels, someone (he honestly didn't know who) cooked their meals for them. So they didn't know how to prepare their own food, other than the obvious -- don't eat stuff raw, and black isn't good either. "Sandwiches or something."
"You said we'd cook."
Diana was confused. It was not a condition that afflicted her very often, and she wasn't enjoying the experience. She hated Adam Velanz with an emotional intensity that had yet to be matched anywhere else. She hated him because he'd killed her father to get to her, she hated him for what he'd done to Andrew and the others, she hated him for what he'd done to her, and she hated him for what he'd done to the colonies, the thousands of lives he'd destroyed. There was no hesitation, no wavering about her thoughts on this matter.
So when she had met Velanz's double on this world, she had been completely prepared to hate him as well. What she hadn't been expecting was the possibility that he might be an actual person, instead of a monster like Velanz. He was cool, controlled, and like Velanz, his eyes didn't show much of what he was really thinking, but they didn't have the emptiness that she'd come to associate with that face. Even stranger, she didn't think he'd been lying when he apologized for the actions of his men. His face his been a perfect mask when he said that, but she could hear heartbeats when she wanted to, and his hadn't changed in the slightest, indicating that he probably wasn't lying. He actually had been sorry, at least a little. Strange.
Even stranger was the way that she'd been treated since her meeting with them Someone had gotten her a pair of pants, and she hadn't been touched. No drugs, no beatings, nothing. Very strange. Somehow she was having a hard time picturing Treize Khushrenada as the cold-blooded killer that she knew Velanz was. A killer, certainly, cold at times, definitely, but not the sort of man who'd slaughter innocent civilians to help his organization -- whatever it was -- gain power.
Another oddity. The political maneuverings of the factions on this world were mind-boggling. Oz was made up entirely of military personnel, but it was a political organization as well. It had taken the place of something called the Earth Sphere Alliance, if she remembered overheard conversations with the Gundam pilots correctly, but that Alliance hadn't been a world government, like hers. It was an organization that represented the multiple Earth-governments. There were still many Earth-governments, and Oz too, plus whatever the colonies here had for governments. Well, she could say one good thing about the Alliance from her world -- having one massive government in charge of everything did simplify the issue.
So what was Khushrenada planning? Why hadn't he even tried to torture her for information? At this point, all she wanted was to be stuck back in a cell with Duo so that she could get them both the hell out of here, where-ever they were. The various injuries she'd sustained hadn't been as bad as she'd thought, and there was no internal bleeding, so she was almost as good as new. As soon as she saw Duo again, they were leaving. It wouldn't be hard, given what she'd seen of their bases. They weren't made to stop someone like her -- the walls were too thin, for one thing. All the walls of her cell in the Alliance base she'd been taken to had been at least three feet thick and reinforced with steel, and even then she'd been drugged most of the time and chained up. She probably could have escaped right now, but it was her fault that Duo had been captured in the first place, so she wasn't leaving him behind.
So where did that leave her? Being escorted through the halls by several Oz soldiers, about to see the irritating Khushrenada again. Irritating because he was one of the few people she'd ever met whose motives she couldn't discern within a few minutes of meeting them.
Was this all some sort of bizarre technique to soften her up for the interrogation she knew had to come eventually? She was more confused then she'd been in a long time, but being confused wasn't exactly a torture technique, and she couldn't see how this was possibly going to help them later, if it was a deliberate plot, which she doubted. Velanz played those sorts of mind games, and so did she, but to set all this up just to confuse her would have indicated a tremendous effort for little result, as well as a great deal of knowledge about her and the way her mind worked. Khushrenada didn't have that information. So this was all some sort of weird coincidence.
Great. So now what was she supposed to do? She didn't think it would be a good idea to start randomly killing off any officers she could find. That would be the equivalent of letting Duo 'have fun' by assassinating random members of the Alliance. Sure, she'd probably get rid of some assholes who deserved it, but there was an equal chance (maybe) that she'd kill someone who might actually do some good. She'd wait until she could talk with Duo before she killed anyone.
Her main goal right now was to be put back with Duo. And with that firmly in mind, she was escorted into the room where she'd do verbal gymnastics with Velanz's double, and try to resist the urge to beat him to death with her bare hands.
Treize nodded slightly as the girl was once again brought into his presence. She'd cleaned herself up slightly and was wearing the pants that he'd ordered she be given. She gazed coolly at him for several seconds before letting her eyes travel briefly around his elegantly furnished office before returning her gaze to him. He forced himself not to react in any way as she studied him, although the regard was more than a little disturbing, especially with those all-white eyes.
"I'm going to order the guards to leave," he said quietly. "If you misbehave, your companion will be punished."
She gave no indication that she'd even heard him, but her eyes did slide momentarily to the guards as they left. She watched him silently for another minute, then casually seated herself in one of his chairs, crossing her legs demurely and carefully placing her manacled hands in her lap. She tilted her head slightly as she looked at him, smiling. Her eyes were vacant, her smile frighteningly devoid of thought. She looked just like any air headed teenager. But what was even more frightening was that an instant before she had been calm and controlled, without a hint of emotion in her eyes. Now she was acting like a (stupid) schoolchild.
"So what are we going to do next, Mr. Khushrenada?" she asked, the brainless look fading from her face as suddenly as it had come. "I'm assuming that if you aren't going to torture information out of me, then you're planning on trying to trick it out of me. Am I right?"
"You're a very observant young woman."
She inclined her head towards him slightly, acknowledging the compliment, then her eyes traveled to Zechs, who was standing unobtrusively in the corner. "Is he an aide of yours? Second in command? He seems to follow you around a lot." It was clear that, unlike many, she didn't feel vulnerable because she was sitting while the other two were standing. That meant that he wouldn't be able to intimidate her using their comparative physical positions.
"An aide of sorts," he said quietly.
"Ah," she said, still studying him out of the corner of her eye. "Does he always wear that helmet thing?"
"Yes."
"Can he talk for himself, or do you always talk for him?"
"How do you know pilot 02?" he asked, thinking that this question session had gone on long enough.
"We got captured together," was the immediate response.
"At least give me the courtesy of a believable response," he scolded. "It's obvious that you knew each other before we captured you. You were working together to get out of the base."
"I said that we met when we got captured together," she responded easily, shifting in her seat just slightly, so that she could rest one of her elbows on the armrest. "I never said that it was when you captured us. We got captured together elsewhere, and decided that we had some things in common. So we stuck together."
"I was not aware that any of the Gundam pilots were captured with you before now."
"Well... " she trailed off and shrugged slightly. "There may be things in this world that you don't know," she finally said, a sarcastic edge to her voice.
"Rudeness is not necessary."
"Yeah, but it's fun."
He blinked. She was switching personalities every several seconds, it seemed, and he was having a hard time keeping up. First she was cool and collected, then when she seated herself, her actions had reflected manners he expected of the children of diplomats and kings. Then there was that short episode while she was acting like a brainless idiot. Since then she'd gone back to cold and calculating, then back to the dinner-party persona, then a rude and sarcastic teenager, and now this childish tone...
"I don't suppose you'd be interested in telling me your name?" he asked.
She hesitated for a fraction of an instant, then replied, "Diana."
"Diana what?"
"Diana Dorlian."
There was a sputtering noise from Zechs, and Treize smiled humorlessly. "I don't suppose that would be Dorlian, as in Ambassador Dorlian?"
"It would."
"I happen to know the ambassador's daughter. Her name is Relena, and while you resemble her slightly, you most certainly aren't her."
"Well, since you obviously know who I am, much better than I do, why are you bothering to ask me at all? Why don't you just divine the answers from wherever you produced that last one?" she asked sarcastically, switching gears again.
He frowned slightly. She was acting as though an obvious lie was the just as obvious truth. He had to get her to stop switching personas like this -- they weren't going to get anywhere this way. A glimmer of an idea occurred to him -- something he'd planned for as a last resort, but she was proving more resourceful than he'd anticipated. This could work out both ways -- it would show him what she really knew of high society, and he could use her against his many political enemies.
"I have a proposition for you," he said walking around his desk to sit in his own chair, which was, incidentally, several inches higher than hers and much more comfortable as well.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. Good, he'd caught her off-guard with that comment. "Yes?" she asked sharply.
"I will take those off," he gestured smoothly to her wrists, "if you agree to accompany us," he nodded slightly towards Zechs, "to an official function."
He expected her to accept at once, lured by an illusion of freedom, and was impressed when her eyes narrowed again and she didn't speak for several seconds. Finally she said, "You're a very shrewd player, aren't you, Mr. Khushrenada? You gain an advantage over me, and at the same time, I'm sure that you're planning to use me against some of your own enemies. Very good." She fell silent for several seconds, a thoughtful expression on her face. He was surprised how easily she'd seen what he was planning, and expected her to refuse his offer. "I have a proposition for you."
Despite his attempts at self-control, he felt his eyebrows raising. "Yes?"
"I'll go to this 'official function' of yours. I'll even behave myself. And I'll give you any information I pick up, too."
He crossed his arms. "And how would you know what is important? From what I've seen, you aren't exactly in touch with the current political situation."
"I'm not a complete idiot. I can tell a lie from the truth. And I can tell when people are trying to hide something. You have nothing to lose. If you don't believe me, you don't have to listen to anything I tell you. If I'm right, you might gain a few valuable insights."
"And what do you want in return?"
"I want to see my friend again. Pilot 02. I want a couple of hours to talk with him, alone. After that, you can separate us again, do whatever the hell you want, and we can keep playing this game for as long as you want."
"Interesting proposal. What guarantee do you have that I won't accept your advice, and then not allow you your time with the pilot?"
"The same guarantee that you have that I won't do my best to make you look like an idiot if you take me to this party, or whatever the hell it is. I'm pretty good at it, when I try, and chances were you wouldn't hear about it for weeks. So do we have an agreement? I behave myself at the party, give you whatever tidbits of information I pick up, and you let me see the pilot again?" She hadn't switched speech patterns in almost a minute now. So that was something of an advantage for him already.
He nodded agreement, then reached into his desk and withdrew a remote. He pressed a sequence of buttons, careful to keep his hand out of her sight, and there was a barely audible click as the manacles came undone. She raised her arms and rubbed one wrist, then the other. Then she examined her right wrist very carefully, then rubbed it again.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
"Just had a slight injury," she responded calmly. "It's fine now." She stood up, catching the manacles as they slid off her lap before they could hit the floor. "I'm assuming that you have some clothing for me to wear? I have a feeling that showing up in this... " her gesture took in her current ensemble, "... is going to attract a little attention."
"The box over there," Treize said, pointing.
She raised an eyebrow. "You planned for this in advance." There was a hint of surprise in her voice. She walked over and opened the large box, pulling out the dress that was inside, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
"Is there a problem?" he asked as she held the dress up to her body experimentally. It was light blue, a little longer than knee-length, and looked to be about her size.
"No, this ought to fit. I just hate dresses in general. Pants are more comfortable. I don't suppose you'd know about that, though."
"No," he replied, a hint of amusement in his voice. "I'm afraid I wouldn't."
She stared at him expectantly. "Well? Are you going to turn around so I can have some semblance of privacy, or are you interested in a strip show?"
"You aren't going to ask us to vacate the room?"
"I don't really think you're going to do that, are you?" she asked rhetorically. "I don't think that you trust me that much. So are you going to turn around or not?"
He chuckled to himself as he turned around, nodding at Zechs to do the same. "I'm surprised that you aren't more... hesitant."
"You mean afraid," she observed from behind his back. "Of what? You? Should I be worried about protecting my virtue, such as it is?" She snorted. "I'm not ashamed of my body, and it doesn't mean that much. If I thought it had a chance in hell of succeeding, I'd offer to sleep with you in return for my freedom."
"And why don't you think it would work?" he asked.
"Because you like boys. You're probably more interested in your aide over there than you are in me," she said. "That's a thought. Are you sleeping together?"
Treize stiffened. "I thought we agreed no more rudeness."
"I never agreed to anything like that. I'll take that as a yes and leave it at that. You can turn around now."
He turned and stared. It had been obvious before that she was pretty. What hadn't been obvious was just how beautiful she was. Now, in a dress, she was breathtaking as she ran a hand through her hair, pulling it out of the braid and letting it fall in waves around her face. The unusual coloring didn't detract from her beauty at all, rather it added to it. He didn't think that anyone could have created a more beautiful person if they'd tried. "How did you know?" he asked, realizing that trying to hide it from her was impossible.
"It's the way you look at me," she said as she finished with her hair and looked down at the dress, smoothing out invisible wrinkles. "Do you have any shoes, or am I going barefoot?"
"In the bottom of the box," he told her. "And what do you mean, the way I look at you?"
"The way you look at me. You look at me as if I were... as if I were a piece of art. Beautiful, worthy of admiration, and completely useless, in terms of physical pleasure. I know lust when I see it, and you don't have the slightest bit of interest in me. Am I right?" she asked as she stepped into the high-heeled shoes. She walked experimentally across the room, showing that despite her declared dislike of fancy clothes, she was no stranger to them.
He chose not to acknowledge her response.
She walked back across the room and once again seated herself, arranging the skirts so that they fell in a graceful arc around her. "How long until we have to leave?" she asked alertly.
"A few hours."
"Great. I guess that means you're going to keep up this subtle interrogation until then?"
Duo wasn't sure what he was expecting when the guards finally returned with Diana, but he was absolutely certain that he wasn't expecting her to be shoved in, her hands still manacled in front of her, wearing what appeared to be a party dress, complete with high-heeled shoes. "Diana, are you... "
"I don't want to talk about it," she growled. "If I have to spend another evening listening to disgusting, corrupt old men tell me how adorable I am, I'm seriously going to go on a killing spree." The way she said it told him that she wasn't joking in the least. "We're getting out of here now."
"How?"
"I'm going to punch through the wall."
"You're joking." He stared in shock as she suddenly ripped her arms apart. There was a screeching sound as the chain between the two handcuffs ripped in half. Then she took her bare hands and ripped the manacles off her wrists, crunching the metal with her fingers. "You're not joking." It was one thing to hear her talk about how strong she was, it was another thing entirely to see a girl his own age tear metal apart with her bare hands.
"Give me your hands."
He held out his wrists, and watched as she tore the cuffs off, being careful not to hurt him in the process. "Ah, thanks."
"Not a problem. Sorry it took me so long to get here. I had to convince Khushrenada to let me see you."
"What? What does he have to do with this? Where have you been?"
"I'll tell you after we're out of here," she said, walking over to the wall opposite the door. "There's a hallway on the other side of this wall. The hall leads directly to one of their hangars. Feel up to stealing something?"
"Sure. How do you know this?"
"I heard it last time they were taking me around," she said, kicking off the high heels. She raised a fist and punched the wall. Her hand came out unscathed, although it was covered in dust. There was a fist-sized hole in the wall. Diana examined the wall critically. "Pretty thin," she observed. "They make the walls a lot thicker on our world." She then proceeded to widen the hole, using her hands to tear away the concrete and occasionally kicking it with her bare feet to quicken the procedure. In less than a minute they had a hole in the wall large enough to climb through. "Let's go." She slid through the hole, tearing her dress in the process, and he followed her.
They were in an empty hall. She immediately started running down it, and he followed her. She turned a corner and there was a slight sound. By the time he rounded the same corner, less than ten seconds later, she was standing over the unconscious bodies of two Oz soldiers. She tossed him a gun, presumably from one of the bodies. "They're still alive," Diana said to him, then looked at the door. "I don't suppose we should bother trying to hide my abilities anymore, should we?" she asked, and then kicked in the door.
She walked into the room beyond it, presumably the hangar she had spoken of, the gun held in front of her. Duo hurried after her, wondering if she was suicidal. There were a dozen people inside, some of whom were technicians, some of whom were mobile-suit pilots. Only one of them got off a shot, and only a single shot before a bullet from Diana's gun hit him right between the eyes. "The next person who goes for a gun dies," she said in a calm voice. He got a good look at her -- standing there in the torn remaints of a party dress, barefoot, and holding a gun on a bunch of trained soldiers. If not for the completely controlled expression on her face and the coldness in her voice, it would have been almost funny.
One of the soldiers obviously was looking at the dress and not her face, because he started to reach for his gun. A second later he was also dead on the floor.
"Anyone else?" Diana asked, and the survivors all raised their hands in the air. "Cover them," she murmured to Duo, who already had his gun up and aimed at them.
"What are you going to do?" he asked. He was as ready to kill as anyone, but it was one thing to commit acts of terrorism, another thing to kill people who had surrendered.
"Just knock them out. They can't follow us."
She walked around and knocked out all of their prisoners will a careful blow to the back of their heads. Then she looked at him. "Now what?"
"Hey, I thought you had this all planned out!" he protested.
"Nope. This was about as far as I'd gotten. I assumed that we'd steal a shuttle or something, but I forgot that you people don't use shuttles here," she gestured with disgust at the mobile suits in the hangar. "They are bigger than I'd thought. This is your world, not mine. What do you think we should do?"
"How long you think we got until they figure out we escaped?"
"Ten minutes, tops. Probably closer to five. And there are at least three other hangars, so disabling this one and running that way isn't an option."
"Damn it. We'll be better off on foot than in one of these things," Duo gestured with disgust to the mobile suits.
"So we go on foot."
"Yeah, but I think I can set up a distraction before then," Duo said as an idea occurred to him. He grabbed onto one of the waiting lines and gave it a sharp tug. The line automatically began to retract, pulling him up to the cockpit. He climbed inside and began to program some simple movements into the mobile suit. You really needed a pilot to do any fighting, but they did have some programmable components, for long trips and that sort of stuff. It took him less than a minute to finish.
"What did you just do?" Diana's voice asked from very nearby. He looked up and jumped to see her face right in front of him.
"How the hell did you get up here?" he asked.
"I climbed. What did you just do?"
"I programmed the suit's automatic pilot to walk out that door and keep on going. It won't fool them for long, but it might buy us enough time to get away on foot. If nothing else it will cause some confusion."
"Good idea. They're all programmed the same way?"
"Yeah."
"I'll take some of them, then. You get the rest. We have four and a half minutes left." With that, she jumped off the suit, treating the thirty-foot-drop like it was nothing. He watched her use the line to get up into another suit, then shook his head and climbed down himself.
It took them about three minutes more to program the five other mobile suits. "Go open the door," Diana called. "I'll activate them one at a time."
Duo nodded and quickly activated the door controls. The huge doors opened, and the first mobile suit started lumbering out the door. That was when the alarms finally went off. Guess someone finally noticed we were missing, he thought, climbing up to activate another suit as she sent the second suit after the first. It took the two of them less than a minute to send all six suits outside. "Ready?" Diana asked, holding up her gun. She'd paled slightly when she got to the huge door and saw the sky, and he was afraid for a moment that they were going to a repeat of yesterday's performance, where she froze when she saw the sky.
"You going to be OK?" he asked. If she wasn't going to be able to handle seeing the sky, they were going to have a very hard time getting anywhere.
She nodded, still unusually pale, even for her. "I'll live. Just don't remind me of it. Are you ready?"
Duo pulled his gun out of the back of his pants, where he'd stuck it. "Here goes nothing."
Duo ran out first, keeping his head down and heading for the fence, assuming that Diana could rip it apart with little trouble. Beyond that he could see fields. Not good -- it was a lot harder to lose pursuers in fields rather than woods. On the bright side, there was a lot of shouting and running around going on, but no one was paying any attention to them. The guards that should have been guarding the door were running in the opposite direction, although whether it was because they were going to get help or just because they were scared was debatable. They reached the fence without incident. "Can you tear us a hole?" he asked.
She stared at it. "No."
"Why not?"
"I hear humming. How much do you weigh?"
"Forty-three kilograms. What humming? And what does that have to do with anything?"
"The fence is electrified. I don't know what the voltage is, but enough of that will kill me just as fast as a normal human. Come here."
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to toss you over the fence."
"You're what?!"
They both turned and looked as one of the mobile suits they'd hijacked crashed into another building. Suddenly several other mobile suits -- obviously with pilots in them -- appeared and started shooting at their suits. "You want to wait for them? I'm going to toss you as gently as I can over the thing, then jump over myself. Unless you want to try this with me jumping and you on my back. I'll warn you, if we do it this way, it's going to be close. I know I can jump that high on my own, I'm not sure if I can do it with the extra weight."
"So you're just going to throw me over?"
"Unless you can come up with a better way."
He looked at the fence. It was fifteen feet high. He was not relishing the thought of getting thrown over an electrified fence and then dropping the fifteen-plus feet to the ground. But he didn't have a better idea.
"If you miss and throw me into the fence I'll never forgive you," he promised.
"I won't," she said, grabbing him under the arms. "Ready?"
"What the hell... Go for it."
There was sudden pressure under his arms and he was flying upwards. He automatically tucked his body into a ball as he soared over the fence and then rolled when he hit the ground to reduce the impact. Luckily he was mostly successful and didn't twist, sprain, or break anything. He got himself together as Diana backed up about twenty feet, her eyes fixed on the top of the fence. She got a running start and then dove over the fence, rolling when she landed, although she did it with much more control than he had.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Yup. You?"
"I think I killed the dress," Diana remarked, looking down at what had been a dress half an hour ago. Now it was torn in a dozen places, stained with blood, dust, oil from scrambling around the suits, and now dirt from when she rolled in the mud. She'd also torn off about six inches around the bottom in preparation for the jump -- no doubt she didn't want it to accidentally brush against the fence.
"Where'd you get it?" he asked as they started wading into the cornfield.
"Khushrenada gave it to me. He wanted me to go to some party with him."
"And you did it?"
"I said I'd go if he let me see you. That man is very fucked up."
"You sound surprised," Duo said, grateful that it was late in the season, so that the corn was tall enough to completely hide them while they ran. They were making good time. They might even get far enough away that Oz wouldn't find them when they figured out where they'd gone.
"Well, he's fucked up, but he's not a sociopath. He's not as bad as Velanz."
"How do you know that?"
"He kept his word. And he really was sorry about what happened to me. Weird."
They suddenly left the field and were standing on a dirt road. Diana looked down the road in either direction. "Why is their base in the middle of nowhere?" she asked.
"People don't like having mobile suits too close to their homes. There have been some accidents in the past, and besides that, battles tend to range all around, not just at the bases, and that's not good for the neighbors." He frowned as he looked around. He was a child of the colonies, and the land down here tended to look the same to him, unless there were some pretty obvious differences, like mountains versus plains, or something like that, but this place looked familiar.
"Oh." Diana was silent for a few seconds, then said, "Duo, I really hate to do this to you, but you've got to make the decisions here. I'm kind of concentrating on not panicking again. Pick a direction and lets go because if we stand here much longer, I'm going to lose it and go running back to that damned base just to get out from under the sky."
He looked at her and for the first time noticed how tightly her fists were clenched, and how she steadfastly refused to look at anything except the ground or the air right in front of her. She was hanging onto herself, but just barely. "Oh. Sorry."
"It's better when we're doing something. Just pick a direction and lets go. And then talk. It helps."
That had to be the first time in his entire life that someone told Duo Maxwell to talk more. An opportunity not to be missed. "Sure! No problem! But there's one thing first... you see that forest over there?" he asked, pointing.
She glared at him, presumably for making her look above knee level, then looked at the forest. "Yes. Why?"
"Your eyesight's supposed to be better than ours, right?"
"Yes," she growled.
"Can you see a little beyond the forest. Are there a bunch of cliffs?"
Diana stared at the forest, her eyes narrowing slightly. She stood absolutely still, her eyes widening and narrowing several times, for almost a minute, then closed her eyes and rubbed them. "Yeah, there are some cliffs there, at the edge of my range. You'd better have a damn good reason for asking me that. I'm going to have a headache for hours." She stopped to stare at Duo who was grinning madly. "What? Good news?"
"I hid Deathscythe under one of those cliffs."
"Deathscythe? That's your Gundam, right?"
"Yup," he replied, grinning broadly. He couldn't wait to get back in Deathscythe -- it had been way too long.
"We have to walk all the way there?" she asked, a hint of panic in her voice. The two of them ducked back into the cornfield as a mobile suit flew overhead. They waited until it was gone, then he seized her arm and pulled her out into the road. She shivered, and he grinned at her, trying to make her think of something other than the sky.
"It won't take too long, let's get going," he said encouragingly. She wanted talk, huh? He could do that. "Did you ever hear about how Heero and I met? I don't think you were there for that one, were you?"
She shook her head.
"Great! It was just after we first came to Earth... "
"They're both gone, sir," reported a very nervous soldier. "I've never seen anything like it. It was as if they tore through the wall with their bare hands. There isn't even any sign of explosives."
"Yes, I understand," Treize said quietly. "You mentioned that already. I have your report. You're dismissed."
The man saluted and left. "She could have escaped at any time," Zechs said.
"Yes. That was her intent all along, to be put back with the boy," Treize said. It was obvious he was angry with himself. "I thought she was just worried about him."
Zechs saw that Treize was a little preoccupied right now, and decided to point something out to him. Zechs had overseen the initial search for them, and had seen a few things that Treize hadn't. Very disturbing things. "Sir. What is important here is not that she knew she could escape, but that she did, and with apparent ease."
Treize looked at him. "Ease?"
Zechs smiled slightly. "Didn't you listen to the report? They broke out of their cell by... somehow... tearing a hole in the wall. We know neither of them had any explosives with them, and it stretching believability to say that they coincidentally were rescued less than five minutes after we put her in there with him. Especially since the reports from the survivors indicate that the two of them were alone when they reached the hangar."
Treize looked at him, drawn out of his self-recriminations by curiosity. "You know something."
"She is not what she seems. There was a camera outside the hangar through which they escaped, directed towards the electrified fence. Here are some stills from the recording, although I can show you the entire thing if you want." The pictures showed the pilot flying through the air over the fence, and then the girl following him. "Apparently she threw him over the fence and then jumped over herself, with little effort. The fence was fifteen feet high."
Treize stared at the pictures. "How is that possible?"
"She isn't a normal human, that's for sure. Possibly... changed, like pilot 01."
Treize raised an eyebrow. "You're saying she's the one who... "
"Punched through the wall."
"Punched?"
"There are indentations in the metal of the cuffs in the shape of fingers. Whoever got them off did so with brute force, using nothing but their hands."
"We have to get her back. Is there any chance that this information can be suppressed?"
"Not a very good one. There were too many witnesses, and too much evidence to hide what happened here for very long. Unlike the Gundam pilots, she seems to have no problems leaving people alive."
"When Romafeller hears about her, they'll be looking for her too. They'd love her," Treize said, a faintly worried look on his face.
"For people who designed mobile dolls, she would be a prize," Zechs agreed. "An assassin that looked like a little girl. They'd have a field day."
"Which is why we must find her first. She may think we're the enemy, but she doesn't know about them yet."
"She's friends with a Gundam pilot. I imagine she believes everyone's the enemy," Zechs remarked. He'd never admit it, but he was somewhat glad that she was gone. She bore a slight resemblance to his sister, just enough to make him very uncomfortable when she stripped in front of them. That together with the thoughtful looks she kept giving him... he repressed a shudder.
The phone rang, and Treize picked it up. He listened for a few seconds, then thanked whoever was on the other end and sat down in his chair, a slightly stunned look on his face. Finally he turned to Zechs and said, "It appears that they've caught the man who was pretending to be me."
End Part 7
(:./marika/others7)
