Chaos.
To some, it was a simple five-letter word that never entered their lives, only existed in their dictionary, if the person owned one at all.
To some, it was a simple five-letter word that they came to know all to well.
To a select few, it was a dangerous five-letter word that was a metaphor for their life.
Heero Yuy knew exactly what chaos was like.
He was staring at it, right into its bleeding pupils, as the horrid scene before him played out on a stage of grief. The pursuit of Nicholas had gone horribly awry, his plan shattered when his former mentor had driven the Camry onto the sidewalk and started attacking pedestrians and others.
Heero had never thought Nicholas capable of such destruction, thought he was simply a man who was doing a job, just like Heero had been ordered to do...but this, this was more than the former Gundam pilot had ever seen. He had destroyed mobile suit plants, he had killed other pilots in Leos, Aries, Taurus suits. He had heard their screams on the radio, stepped over their ruined cockpits. He had even tried to kill those who had asked, begged to become his comrades.
What made this situation different from the others before it was that Heero had never known, whether it was through the influence of the Zero system or not, who he had killed. He had never met them in real life. He had connection to their lives.
He knew the people before him this time.
Noin was on the ground, struggling to stand, as Zechs slipped his arms around her waist and rolled her over, cradling her head in his right hand. There was blood somewhere on her, a wound that Heero could not see. Her chest was heaving up and down, and she bit her teeth in frustration. Zechs looked up at Heero, who was staring down at them both with the Beretta clutched in his frozen fingers, and appeared to be lost for the first time in his life.
There were sounds, too. The sounds of tears, the sounds of people on the verge of life and death, the sounds of police cars, ambulances, the proper authorities to clean up the legal mess. The cleaning of the real mess, or the creator of the mess, was left to Heero.
He looked over to his right, by the sidewalk (or what was left of it) and saw Trowa being lifted onto a stretcher. Heero felt his eyes widen through his numbed senses, felt that humanity that Sylvia had touched awaken at the sight of Trowa's body. Whether the clown was going to make it was unclear, but Heero knew that he would never be using that left arm of his again, for it had gone missing, along with the tattered remnants of Heero's grip on reality.
Nicholas was too far away to begin another pursuit. Heero could have simply started walking and just hoped that he would catch up to the man, but he knew what part of his mind that was coming from...it was his guilt, the guilt that this was all his fault.
If I had only killed Relena...that was the job, the only job I had to do that day. Nicholas had trained me so well...he probably thought I was his son or something ridiculous like that. He's lashing out in anger and hurt at me, because I did not finish the job. If I had, then this would not have happened.
He turned completely around, stared at the face of that girl he hadn't been able to kill, standing at the edge of the police barrier with Quetra's hand on her arm, and the blonde pilot's eyes on Heero, his blood-stained shirt, the ruined tie, the gun in the frozen hand.
Heero's vision was getting fuzzy. It was becoming difficult to remember what had transpired to cause such a horrid event, let alone how he had arrived in Minneapolis in the first place, or when the last time was that he had eaten, or slept, or done anything resembling that of normality.
Someone came to pick up Noin, and Heero stared at the stained concrete below his shoes. Funny, he didn't remember where he had picked up that stain on his shoe...looked like soda. When had he been drinking that? When...
Heero awoke to find himself sitting on a bench. He blinked hard to wash away the fuzziness in his eyes, and stared across from him at the light blue wall. The light was a dim orange color, and he had the feeling that it was nighttime. He realized that his right hand was numb, and looked down to see the Beretta still in his icy grip. He pulled it out, gently as he could, and put it back into his holster.
"You awake now?" a voice said to him in a slightly mocking tone. Heero looked to his left, despite the stiffness in his body, and saw Wufei Chang staring back at him. "It's about time, Mr. Yuy."
The hallway was mostly darkened, say for the orange lights and the red exit signs against the blue walls and the ivory tile floor. Heero stood up from the plastic bench and ran a hand through his limp brown hair. He needed to clean himself up, but first he needed to know why Wufei was playing his babysitter.
"You're in the hospital," the chinese pilot said simply. "Noin's in the second room from the left corner, and Trowa's in intensive care. I haven't heard anything about him yet. Relena and Quetra are somewhere around here, but I haven't been keeping tabs on them particularly or anything." He shrugged. "Don't ask me where Maxwell is...probably playing arcade games in a colony or something."
"Nicholas." It was not a question, but a demand.
"Don't know. No one does."
Heero stared at the plain blue wall. "Figures."
"TWelve people died today, Heero," Wufei said, suddenly concerned. "Eighteen were injured, Trowa's going to lose his left arm, and Relena's practically on the verge of a breakdown. Isn't it about time you told one of us what the heck is going on here?"
Heero remained silent.
He felt strong hands fly to his shirt collar and shake him, harder than he expected. He was staring into the eyes of Wufei, the eyes of a rising orange sun.
"What is the matter with you? You tell me right now, or I swear to the spirit of my dead wife's cousin that I never liked that I will kick your sorry tail all the way around this hospital!" he blasted. "Twice!" he added after a moment.
"Make it three times. Then you know how I felt after Wing Zero fell into the ocean," Heero said in his deadpan voice.
Wufei blinked, then released Heero. "A sense of humor. Since when did we acquire one of those?"
"From a bum off the street."
Wufei smiled. "Are you going to say at least one smidgen of information here, or am I going to have to keep guessing?"
Heero shook his head. "Have a seat."
Wufei smiled. "Don't mind if I do."
Heero checked to make sure no one was coming down the hallway before speaking. "Nicholas is getting back at me, and everyone, because I never finished a job. I was his trainee three years before I joined Operation Meteor. He was an underworld assassin, a good one. I learned most of my skills from him. He was practicing a job when he saw me trying to steal some food to survive and he took me in. I suppose he thought I was something like a son, since he treated me better than most people had. His job was assassinating, at the time, Assistant Vice Foreign Minister Darlan and his daughter, Relena."
"You couldn't pull the trigger," Wufei said.
Heero lowered his head. "No."
"And because you bombed the job, and slipped out on him, he's coming back at all of us? That doesn't make sense, unless he's a maniac."
"I think he's being paid to do it. I heard through a few lines I had back in Sicily that there was a Roger Doberman that was complaining to Sylvia Noventa about the lack of spine in the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. The problem was, Doberman was the most prominent business owner in Sicily. A few up-scale restaurants, luxury car dealers, private jets, golf courses, and I believe an ice cream shop." Wufie snorted at this one. "His influence with the people was pretty deep."
"Of course. He was delivering a worthy product at moderate prices. He would turn down a deal like that?"
"Good point. The issue is that he made a strong point of saying, with myself present on some occasions, that Relena Darlan was the reason the world was going to you-know-where in a basket."
"You think he's paying Nickie to bump us off?"
Heero glanced at Wufei. "Wouldn't you come to that conclusion?"
Wufei remained silent.
Heero let his head drop again, stared at the floor before closing his eyes.
"What's this I hear about you and Noventa, anyway?" Wufei asked pointedly. "I thought you were the king of unrequited love."
Heero kept his head down. "I was her bodyguard, that's all."
"Heero, this is me you're talking to here. I threw myself at a space station that had more beam cannons than I had fingers to flick them off with and survived. If that doesn't qualify me as a converted idiot, then I don't know what does." He paused. "It wasn't wrong if you fell for her. That kind of stuff happens."
"You're one to talk."
"I was married, you know."
"Sorry," Heero said quietly.
"Don't mention it." Silence passed before Wufei spoke again. "Are you going to fill me in on your tortured love life or what?"
Heero felt his lips curl into the smallest smile he had ever made. He sat up, put his hands on his knees, and stared at the dim orange light on the ceiling.
"I honestly don't know where to start," he admitted, making Wufei's eyes widen. "I don't remember when Sylvia fell for me. She simply started...coming over to my place unexpectedly. She made dinner. She stayed longer at the office and asked me to stay with her. I was there for every engagement, every speech, every campaign stop. I guess I let her get to me.
"No, I take that back. I didn't let her...she made herself a home there."
Heero fastened the last button on his right cuff and stared at himself in the mirror. Sylvia had to be at the ballroom of the hotel in ten minutes to join the other members of the Sicilian Branch of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation, and she was racing against time, as usual. Slipping on his dark blue sportcoat and the black tie she had bought him that day, he froze in the mirror and stared at the reflection.
He blinked, shook his head, then blinked again.
He looked...happy. At least, what he thought was the definition of the word. He had never really known what happiness was, ever, but now he was starting to guess at it. It was his job to guard Sylvia, she paid him fine money for it, but he realized that it wasn't about the money, or having a mission to fufill as part of his psyche.
He enjoyed it because she was a great person to have around.
He opened the door to his room and walked across the hall to hers, knocked on the door twice. It was a rapid knock, the kind they had worked on as their code. He waited for the slow two-knock response, but received none. Suspicious, he did not knock again, but tried the door handle.
It was unlocked. What is she doing? he wondered, and opened the door quickly, stepping into the room and freezing when he saw Sylvia. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her hands in her lap, her hair falling down across her face. She was making small noises that he couldn't decipher, but he closed the door behind him loud enough to snap her from her trance.
"Heero!" she gasped, and started to buzz around the room, to try and get ready. He caught her somewhere in the midst of her flurry and made her look at him with a small squeeze of her shoulders. Her eyes were swollen and teary, and she trembled with a kind of vulnerability. She was wearing a long pink silk robe, and she hadn't even attempted to try and prepare herself for the night.
"What's going on?" he asked. "You were crying."
"No I wasn't," she said.
"Then why are your eyes swollen?"
She muttered something under her breath. "Like you care."
He had been startled by her statement, but kept his grip on her shoulders. "Sylvia, you have to be downstairs. You're one of Earth's representatives. Now's not the time for this."
"Then when is the time, Heero? When is the time for me to be a normal person?" She swallowed hard before continuing. "Everyone acts like I'm perfect, like Relena. Well, I'm not! I've got feelings just like everyone else, I have the same problems like everyone else, and I've got feelings for my bodyguard and he doesn't even notice me!" She wrenched free from his grasp and put her hands to her face, hiding it from view. "I'm sorry, but sometimes I get emotional too. Of course, you wouldn't know what that's like."
"You're wrong."
She looked up at him. "What?"
"I said, you're wrong." He pulled her hands away, held them. "Sylvia, this is hard for me to say, and I will most likely never say it again in my entire life. I just saw a smile on my face in the mirror. A smile. I was...happy, I guess. You made me that way." He paused. "That's all I can say about it...there aren't any more words left."
Sylvia's bright eyes were staring into his, and without thinking about it, he had pullded her closer to him. She kissed him then, and while it never happened again until before her death, Heero knew that she understood...someone understood him, and he wasn't just another bodyguard. His life had another meaning. He was going to learn whatever he could about being human from this girl. She was his teacher, just as he was her paid protector.
The next year, Heero learned every facet of the human condition from Sylvia Noventa. Ranging from something as simple as holding a hand, as simple as catching a child's ball and giving it back to the owner, as simple as letting Sylvia beat him at a game of cards in the office, to something as complex as the streets riots, where Heero lost Sylvia in the crowd as she rushed to save a little girl, to that night in the hotel room when neither of them had ever made it downstairs, to the reflection in the mirror every morning whether she was present or not. The reflection changed daily, he had noted, and with each passing day of that year, he had learned more about himself and others than he had ever imagined.
Heero saw his profile in the glass behind him. It was as he always saw it, just as he had seen it the night that Sylvia had died. It was the old Heero, the boy who had killed adolesence, and not just a single person's, but his own. Wufei was looking at him with an arm propped on the bench, his eyes solid and firm.
"You loved her," he said simply. "Son of a gun."
"Now she's dead," Heero said back.
"You still have Relena."
"Quetra's her man."
Wufei blinked. "Since when did this happen?"
"I noticed it a long time ago. Why do you think I let Quetra stay with Relena in her office today?"
"You're crafty."
Heero smiled. "I have to be. He'll find someway to tell her. He's better at it then I ever was."
"You want to check on the others?" Wufei asked.
"Go on ahead. I'll join you."
Wufei nodded, and started walking down the hall. Heero removed his Beretta, ejected the clip, and put it back in, cocked the pistol when he was done.
"Next time," he said to no one, pointing the weapon at the wall, "I won't hesitate."
Sylvia was my humanity. She's gone. I'm back to the way I was before, and it's better that way. Next time, I won't have any regrets about killing you, Nicholas.
Do you hear me, out there in the great void? I'll kill you.
I'll kill you for Sylvia.
