Type K: Part 9

By Kira Maxwell

Disclaimer: Gundam Wing belongs to Sunrise, not me. I don’t own the G-boys, so please don’t sue me. You wouldn’t get anything anyway.
Warnings: Yaoi, Yuri, Het, Drug abuse, Gore, Strong language, NCS, Violence
Pairings: 13xR, implied 1x2, 3x4, 5+R, 9x11

Part 9

Zechs leaned back in the driver seat of his Monte Carlo, pulling the collar of his trench coat a little closer around him. The cold and the wet of the afternoon’s rainstorm had seeped into his bones, making his limbs leaden and stiff. The weather had produced a nostalgia inside of the platinum-haired man. Memories swirled inside of him like a misbegotten rain cloud. He wished they’d end.

But they wouldn’t.

Seeing Noin today had only proven to him further that he hadn’t improved one whit since the day she left him. Zechs sighed softly. He couldn’t hate Une for taking Noin away. He hadn’t even deserved Noin while he had her, but still, that didn’t stop him from missing her…

Zechs had met Noin in one of his father’s training compounds during his training as a young man to become his father’s private enforcer. He’d spent his young years hidden away from the spotlight and public life, very much unlike his baby sister Relena. At the age of six he’d been sent to a training camp to be trained in the arts of subterfuge and war, besides statecraft. He’d never been raised in the fancy mansion was Darlian lived with his wife and daughter in luxurious comfort. Most people had forgotten Darlian even had a son.

Darlian’s plan had been quite genius, actually. In the beginning of his life, he’d foreseen the political instability that would surely follow his own death. He was a unique man, able to be both a saint and a murderer at the same time and still remain sane. His people looked to him for guidance and they found fairness and justice in his heart, yet he had still been able to perform the ugly things that guarded his rule. He faced the realities of a political life head-on. Darlian had killed a man when he found it necessary, and had arranged for certain upstarts and rivals to be quietly disposed of to protect his own position. However, he’d doubted either of his children would be capable of the same thing. Neither had all of the traits in them to do what had to be done to keep the Darlian family’s grandeur the same as it was and even improve upon it. Therefore, he’d made a backup plan.

Zechs he sent to a private compound at the age of six to be trained as an enforcer. His son would learn the same things his father had taught him, how to silence a wagging tongue or make an offer a rival simply couldn’t refuse. He would learn to be the dark side of the Darlian family, the thing which ensured his family’s continued vast influence over the Earth sphere.

His other child he decided to make a saint out of. Little Relena had been perfect for that. She would be the face people saw, the voice that guided them to Darlian’s own ends. He groomed her to be perfect, sending her to the finest schools, teaching her manners of grace and ladyship like the kind her mother had. Relena had lived a public life, mingling with the other powerful families’ children and being a general favorite of the populace. She was everything Zechs could not and would never be. Innocent.

The platinum-haired man sighed, rubbing a hand against his temple. He had loved his father a great deal, but he couldn’t deny the corruptness that the man had harbored in his soul. By all rights, Zechs should have led a pampered life alongside his sister, safe at home with his parents and enjoying the socialite life he’d wished he could have had. However, that had not been. He’d had a hard life, endless training, endless conditioning. At all costs, he was to protect the Darlian family’s name, the Darlian family’s ends. At all costs, he was to obey his father.

However, that had not been so. In his mid-teens, he’d met the woman who’d changed his life: Lucrezia Noin.

Noin had been a young woman working alongside Zechs in the private taskforce. She’d had lustrous dark hair, a slim body, and an enticingly soft mouth that belied her firm demeanor. Darlian’s only son was taken with her at once. Noin was the first girl his age he’d ever met.

Of course, Noin loved Zechs, too. He’d been handsome then and still was, a look of mingled sadness and mystery in his blue eyes that was quite irresistible. They’d shared numerous encounters together at the training compound, hurried but exciting moments filled with all the vigor of youth. Their small, cramped bunks had been cradles for the feelings so very unfamiliar to both of them.

Then, one day, Noin simply disappeared. Zechs couldn’t find her anywhere. He searched the entire compound, and was shocked when the commander informed him that the young woman had defected. She was really a spy for the Khushrenada family, and she’d been working for them all along. Zechs had been dealt a great wound; he’d bedded with the enemy. For days and nights he couldn’t move, so obsessed was he with wondering if all those secret, pilfered moments with the beautiful young woman had really happened. Had she really loved him? Had she really been anything more than a ghost?

Finally pushing his feelings aside, Zechs had returned to his duties with a firmer, more cynical outlook on life. His final innocence and naiveté had been crushed by Noin’s betrayal. He’d never trust a woman again—never!

The next time he saw Noin was on a covert raid to one of the Khushrenada family’s military compounds. She was a leader there, and they’d met in the midst of a heated battle of gunfire. Their men were dying around them, the air heavy with the scent of blood and death. And in the middle of it all, they froze.

I know you. Their gazes seemed to say. Then slowly Noin lifted her gun and aimed at him, mouthing the words. I’m sorry.

Zechs had snapped. Filled with rage and grief, he’d flung himself at her, hoping to destroy with her the pain that was tearing him apart inside.

Unfortunately for Zechs, fate intervened in the shape of an agile young woman taking him down to the ground hard from behind. She slammed him down, rapping him across the head with the butt of her automatic rifle, and shouting for Noin to get out of the way. He could still remember the face of the woman, brown eyes flashing behind a pair of circular glasses and hair in a cascade around her face. He could still see Noin’s bewildered expression as she fled. Then, blackness.

He’d woken up in a cell. The same brown-haired woman was sitting in a chair opposite his cot. The look on her face was that of calm and something else he couldn’t distinguish. She was busy polishing her glasses with a handkerchief, the motions of her fingers deft and slow.

“I know about you and Noin,” she said simply, looking up at him when she realized he was awake. “Stay away from her.” Then she got up to leave.

Zechs had sputtered, mostly in pain from the bruise across his head at being hit with the woman’s rifle earlier. “Who are you?”

The woman had paused with the cell door in her hand, looking back over her shoulder. “My name is Une.” And then, she’d walked out.

Zechs had learned later Une and Noin were lovers and always had been.

Zechs breathed deeply and then got out of the car, shutting his door behind him and looking up at the warehouse in the rapidly fading sunlight. It was time for him to meet his destiny.

*~*~*

Quatre didn’t think he’d ever felt more uncomfortable in his life. He twisted in his seat under the mortician’s scrutinizing green gaze. He couldn’t stand the look of indifferent calm plastered on Trowa’s face, and he’d never felt guiltier for anything he’d done in his life. He’d done the unspeakable and hurt someone he…loved.

“Are you sorry for what you did, Quatre? You certainly look like it,” remarked the mortician soberly, at the blonde over the table. For a brief moment, a look of intense pain flashed through his eyes. Quatre saw this and winced.

“Yes, I am sorry.”

“It doesn’t help her now, though, does it?” Barton turned away from the blonde, propping his feet up on the table and closing his eyes. “And…I think you’re only sorry about it because it hurt me. You never cared a damn thing for her, did you? For a common human life…you felt nothing.”

Quatre was stunned into silence. He’d never been read so easily by anyone. Hearing the truth spoken so frankly in another’s voice, so very calmly, rattled him to his bones. Is this true? Am I such a hopeless monster?

Quatre’s wallowing in guilt was interrupted by the mortician speaking again, almost talking to himself. His gaze was fixed on the wall, never going to the blonde’s face, and his voice was rather deadpan. “You know, when I first started out, I never knew I’d end up like this. I was going to help people. I wanted to help people with no money, especially. My mother died of tuberculosis, you know, a perfectly curable disease. The doctors diagnosed it in plenty of time. However, she never got that medicine which could have saved her, all because we couldn’t pay for it. Those heartless bastards turned their back on my mother, a helpless woman, because she had no money. They were like you, I think. They had no respect for life.

“And now, thinking of Cathy only reminds me of my mother. She died for no reason other than that another person didn’t have any respect for human life. Because another person just didn’t stop and think that the person they just killed might have had hopes, dreams, talents, a life of their own. Just because another person didn’t stop and think.”

The mortician finally turned to face Quatre, his green eye burning into the blonde. For a moment, all of the emotions he felt for the blonde were a tumult in his facial expression: hope, attraction, admiration, love… and at last, something dark and twisted. The mortician’s faced hardened and he said the only thing he could think of to say to the blonde.

“You disgust me.”

With that, he turned his back on Quatre forever.

~TBC~


Kira Maxwell

KiraxMaxwell@msn.com

On to Part 10!