Originally posted: June 10, 2000
Revised: February 10, 2001
Here we go, the Revised version.... Enjoy.
Title: It's the Pilot Part 1/18
Author: Truth
Archive: The usual places
Notes: AU - wherein the Gundam Pilots have known each other for a little while, but the war is still stalled back before the Pilots return to space. Meanwhile, the five mad scientists have had second thoughts about some of the pilots. Probably OC as well, but I did my best. First person stream of consciousness/POV.
Rated PG-13 at least.
First person stream of consciousness. No warnings this time. Strong language in later parts, perhaps other developments as well. Muahahahaha... *cough* Er, yeah.
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing belongs to someone else, sadly.
Feedback, comments and criticisms cheerfully accepted at dhaunea@yahoo.com
I don't believe I'm doing this. Maxwell is an idiot. Where he is and what he's doing are none of my concern. Why I should waste my valuable time on combing through all this non-data _again_ is beyond me. We have hit one dead end after another. As days turned into weeks we should have given up, not continued to waste what little time we have on this stupid project.
Truthfully, this was Quatre's all idea. It usually is. Rashid told him that people who are grieving are often encouraged to write. He overlooked the fact that Quatre is practically incapable of giving up hope, and was therefore not yet grieving.
Unfortunately, Quatre took this idea one step further, as is his usual habit. He asked _me_ to write something. He opened those impossibly innocent blue eyes and said, "Please, you really are the best at this sort of thing. There must be something that we've overlooked. If you write it all down, maybe you'll see something that we missed."
Someone will patent that look of his some day and we will _all_ be in serious trouble.
This is not a very good idea. Stream of consciousness writing is supposed to be an effective tool to combat grief, but I doubt it will do anything to help me find a line of reasoning that we have not already explored. However, we have tried everything else that we can think of, both individually and collectively. I might as well give it a try. After all, what have I got to lose?
Three months ago, Duo Maxwell disappeared. Literally.
We were all together for once, staying at a place that Quatre knew about. We still don't know each other very well, and were keeping mostly to ourselves while we waited for new orders to come in. Mostly.
Maxwell was not content simply to have us all together in one place. He had to socialize. Despite the less than warm response from everyone save Quatre, he persevered. There were strange games, practical jokes and various and sundry bizarre antics until I, personally, was ready to kill him just to gain some much needed peace and quiet.
And then he was gone.
I don't mean that he went out on a mission and never came back, I mean that he vanished. Disappeared. Wafted away on an evening breeze. We didn't even miss him for several days. That is, we noticed that he was gone right away. We just didn't miss him. It wasn't until the third day of his unexplained absence that Quatre decided to check his room. And that's when we knew that something had gone seriously wrong.
All of his belongings were still there, save whatever clothing he was wearing. Even the leather coat had been left behind. I think that the coat is what forces me to believe that he had believed that he would be coming back. He loved that coat to the point of obsessing over it. Some oversized bully tried to beat him up in an alley outside of a bar (and what he was doing there in the first place I do not want to know) when I came looking for him. I put the drunken idiot down and Maxwell took his jacket, claiming it as 'spoils of war'.
Maxwell practices lunacy as some sort of personal art form. He could have been killed. However, that didn't seem to faze him and he danced all the way back to our Gundams, almost enveloped in the long black coat. If he knew that he would be gone for more than a few days, he would have taken it with him. Ergo, he did not _know_ that he would not be coming back.
But I digress.
He was gone. Completely. Without a trace. And when I say without a trace, I am not exaggerating. We've searched. We've checked every contact, hacked every computer system we could think of. We begged, borrowed and stole anything we thought would provide a clue. We searched his computer files, traced his last messages, demanded information from his control.... And still, nothing.
The silence was more than oppressive. It was frightening.
And what were we to do when we came to the end of our own resources? It's not as though we could call the local police and report him missing. And even if we could, what would we say? "Hello. I would like to report a missing idiot. He has a long braid, a big mouth - oh, and by the way, he is apparently bouncing around somewhere in a gigantic machine of mass destruction. Answers to the name 'Shinigami'."
That's right. He took the Gundam with him. And we can't find _it_ anywhere either.
Despite our reputation as faceless terrorists and assassins, it is almost impossible to hide a Gundam from someone who knows how it's done. Maxwell took that massive black behemoth and just walked away. There are no transports of any type capable of transporting a Gundam either missing, sold or reported hijacked. None. There have been no reports of a psychotic death-dealing black Gundam either. It's as if he simply disappeared, and that's just not possible.
There is no physical way that he could have taken that Gundam from the area without leaving some sort of trail, some clue we would pick up on. We went so far as to hack into the nearest OZ base to see if he'd turned himself in. Nothing. I had suspected as much. There is no way that the OZ leadership would not be spouting such a coup from every news channel in the Federation.
After the first month, we stopped looking. I don't mean that we gave up, we had simply exhausted every logical lead. A few weeks later, Quatre pointed out that Maxwell is, by nature, illogical. This observation led to another round of more bizarre inquiries which proved equally fruitless.
Unsurprisingly....
After the second month, the other two gave him up for dead. I don't know what they thought he did with the Gundam. There weren't any strange explosions or gundanium debris reported. Quatre was the only one still pressing the search. I....
I'm not sure what I believe. After we left the safe-house, Quatre took all of Maxwell's belongings with him. It was a bit frightening to see just how much stuff he had accumulated in just the few weeks he had been with us. Quatre was sure that he'd simply reappear and demand to know what we'd done with his things.
Self-delusion can be contagious. Perhaps I just wanted to believe it too. I helped him pack it all up.
The second time all four of us met, Quatre quietly disposed of most of the baggage. Maxwell's shampoo and conditioner can still be found in the bathroom whenever the four of us meet up. I don't know who put them out the first time, but I took them away with me once. I caught Quatre quietly inhaling the scent from the bottles on another occasion, tears in his eyes. He told me that he _knew_ Maxwell was still alive, just not where.
I kept the coat.
I don't know why I did that. It's not something that I would ever wear, though Maxwell did try to get me to put it on once. He said it felt like a full body hug. Something to do with the weight. I remember telling him that I had no interest in 'hugs' and snarling at him to be serious. He ignored me, as usual.
I have all the reports that we ran, searching for him. Both the logical, precise ones and the illogical, random ones. I have sifted through them over and over, looking for some clue, some hint as to how he disappeared so completely.
He's still alive. He must be. If he were dead, surely we would have heard. One fifteen year old boy can disappear easily. We've all done it. But we know all the tricks, so we should have been able to find him equally easily. But he remained missing.
And the Gundam....
No one can explain that, and we've all tried. Professor G keeps sending messages to Maxwell's accounts, demanding a response. No one has accessed those accounts but us since the day we discovered that he wasn't coming back.
It's been three months now. The four of us are together again. We don't talk about Maxwell at all anymore. Even Professor G has stopped leaving messages. But I know there's a clue here somewhere. Something that we've overlooked. There must be.
I've gone over the reports again and again. So has Quatre. So have the others, even if they won't admit it. The pages are becoming dog-eared and torn. What are we missing. What am _I_ missing?
Maxwell isn't dead. I'm sure of it now. Perhaps Quatre was right. Just the act of writing it all down seems to have brought something to the surface that I was not even aware of. Maxwell is alive. The only question is, where?
Quatre peered cautiously into the room where the tap, tap, tap of the laptop had attracted his attention. The other two pilots looked in over his shoulders.
"I didn't think he'd actually sit down and do it," the blonde boy breathed. "He's been working at it for hours."
"That's abnormal," was the flat comment from behind him.
Quatre turned to observe the speaker with slack jawed amazement. Trowa also turned, though his face bore his usual impassive expression.
"Abnormal for Wufei," Heero clarified defensively.
"Ahhhh."
Of course, I could just be grasping at straws. Quatre is right, I do know a great deal about grieving. Maybe this is his way of trying to get me to see that I'm in denial.
Maybe I am.
It doesn't seem right that someone so full of life and compassion should just disappear as if they've never been. And that sparks a new idea.
It never occurred to any of us that Maxwell would just wander off. Looking back at the sort of person he normally appears to be - that should have been one of the _logical_ assumptions. But we know him better than that. We've all fought with him, seen his determination. None of us even considered that as a serious option.
I think that's the missing piece. Someone wants us to think that Maxwell just wandered away on his own, like the fool he so enjoys pretending to be.
This whole project is starting to irritate me. Maxwell _is_ a fool. No, that's unjust. Whatever else he may or may not be, he's not the type to just walk away from something that needs to be done. If he left under his own power, which is fairly obvious, he had to have a damn good reason. But whoever took him....
I'm beginning to sound like one of those damned crime shows that Heero is so fond of.
....was probably counting on our not seeing past Maxwell's frivolous exterior. They want us to believe that he just left - abandoning us and our mission.
That leads me to two conclusions.
Maxwell is still alive, and he's in trouble.
Typical.
End Part One
Heero: That's a bit cold.
Wufei: Am I wrong?
Trowa: No.
Quatre: Come on. Now is no time to be quarreling.
Wufei: Now is the _perfect_ time.
Heero: Why are you being so _difficult_?
Wufei: ....
Trowa: He's up to something....
Truth
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