Darkfic Gift: Vicarious, Part 1 (for nagi_schwarz)
Title: Vicarious, Part 1
Written by: cozzybob2 for nagi_schwarz
Rating: R
Warnings: graphic images of injury, curse words
Gift #1: Quiet, serious, ruthlessly death-dealing Duo gone off the rails, drained of all but the most morbid gallows humor, as a mission-based serial killer being hunted by the Preventers.
1 - Eye.
Eye on the TV
Cause tragedy thrills me
Whatever flavor
It happens to be
She was the hot and sour flavor you'd find in any American-Chinese buffet, and Wufei couldn't get enough of her. His hand was restless on her thigh, his tongue swiping his lips in search of more.
In the aftermath, she smirked against his jaw, and whispered, "We really need to get out of this closet."
He lifted a cool brow at the joke, but took note of their surroundings, unease settling in his gut. Fucking his partner had become a dangerous game, laced with the knowledge that both of them could be fired upon discovery. They had been reduced to this--and it would've stung, if the sex wasn't so very good.
She kissed his throat and peeled off of him, straightening her hair in the dark. She fastened her pants again, and smacked him on the rear.
"Zip up, Chang, it's cramped in here."
As he dressed, Sally toyed with his hair, which was let down sometime during the vicious frenzy, the hair tie broken and lost somewhere in the dark. Wufei had another in his pocket--he always kept a spare, these days--and Sally put her hand over his, shaking her head.
"It's nice when it's down."
"They'll know," he said.
Her eyes darkened. "Right."
Frustration made the air far too thick to breathe. He tied his hair back quickly, and burst from the closet with a sigh of relief. Thankfully, no one was in the hall to witness his carelessness, and Sally followed after with a small thundercloud hanging over her head.
Wufei's cell buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket, glancing at the number. Une.
"Chang."
"There's been another murder. You have a flight to Florida at 13 hundred hours."
"Acknowledged."
He snapped the cell shut and gave Sally a meaningful glance.
The thundercloud darkened and spread to a full-on storm, and she brushed passed him with hardly a glance. He let her go, making his own way to the parking garage.
**
Benjamin Moore was four years old. Clad in adorable blond hair and blue eyes, he was the son of a full-time nurse and a self-employed contractor. He'd gone missing from his backyard three days ago--his mother was in hysterics on the other side of the tape line, smashing her fists against an officer's chest, ripe with seething denials and a gaping wound that belched shrieks of agony into the sand. The ocean roared its indifference at her, and the father stood staring at the waves, wondering if there really was a God at all.
Chang passed the family with a grimace. The mother's wretched eyes raked him like Justice, but his failure was palpable and he was left broken under the stare. Sally stood between he and them like a brick wall... she took his hand briefly, and squeezed it. There were bags under her eyes.
The body was artfully left on Miami Beach, sprawled on a towel next to an intricate sand castle. He was rolled onto his stomach with his face laid into the fabric, as if he'd just gone to sleep while waiting for his mother to come back for him. It was mid-winter this side of the equator, but with the cool breeze and the sun shining a perpetual joy over the Florida landscape, the child corpse stank that much more of just how wrong things had become. If Wufei could bring himself to think it, he'd find a whole new mental breakdown to consider, one that had nothing to do with Treize at all--for all these years, and all this fighting... there is still such horrible evil in the world.
Po's soft cursing voiced what Chang couldn't say, who stared at the broken little body with the eyes of someone who had seen this all to often. Forensics were scurrying around the scene combing for evidence, but everyone was well aware that after the forth kill in two months, not a hair would lead back to their killer.
Desperately, Sally checked her emotions, one last drop of sympathy fading with the snap of her latex gloves. Wufei admired her that control--his rage was plain to see, as well as his continued helplessness. His partner nodded toward the lead forensic, and asked, voice crisp with business, "Is he ready to be moved?"
"Yeah." The tech bounced on the balls of his feet, far too excited at the expense of a child's life. Wufei prayed to all the gods in the Eastern kingdom that he'd never become so jaded. "It's that Frankenstein guy, right? Sick shit, sounds like--saw a special on 60 Minutes about the three so far, hard to believe he's so friggin'--"
Sally cleared her throat, her eyes twin laser beams. Chang rested his hand on Colt strapped to his thigh.
"Uh, sorry, I always get a bit excited about this sort of thing. Hard to find any interesting cases these days, I've been stuck on gang warfare for months--"
He pulled the Colt from its holster.
"W-We, um, w-we... just relax, sir, no harm done--" He coughed, brushing his shirt. Chang put the gun away again. "We combed and took a thousand pictures, but there's not a trace of blood anywhere. No prints, nothing. Another fucking dead end, eh?"
Chang growled, losing his patience with the lab tech--he was local to the force here, and he wasn't supposed to know anything about the case... and no one was supposed to be that annoying and live beyond their childhood.
The man paled and held his hands in surrender. "Just saying. I'll leave you be, then, sirs."
Skittering away to join the other local officers, the tech gave Wufei a paranoid glance at his back. The local forces got along about as well with them as the FBI did. No one liked another sanction stepping in on a case, but this killer transcended all national borders and there was no other way to handle it without creating a big political clusterfuck. Still, the FBI stood at the other end, glaring impotently at the officers and giving the two Preventers a mean look of envy. They were useless in every way, but the US loved to provide "escorts" while Po and Chang poked through their country chasing after a child killer. Some nations found it hard to understand the idea of a borderless planet, even ten years after Relena's drastic proclamations. Not that much had changed. Not really.
But Chang never spoke politics anymore, and he didn't care to wonder about it. "What is he missing, Po?"
Sally carefully turned the body over, stiff with rigor mortis, his upper arm still slung over his face. Behind the arm peaked horrible emptiness where his eyes should've been.
The mother, still screaming behind the tape line, gave a horrible wail. Police finally came into action to force her away.
Wufei would have given them a very long, loud rant about protocol, but he was too busy staring at the empty sockets. They'd been so carefully removed that the eyelids were still there. Or at least, he thought they were. He wasn't an expert.
"Christ!" Sally shook her head at the heavens before breathing deeply, getting herself under control again. A few breaths and she raked her experienced eyes over the site, examining the cuts. "Definitely our guy. Such a steady hand... this is surgeon-worthy. Bastard knows what he's doing. Looks like he removed them after death... look, no blood again. Not a drop."
Sally brushed Benjamin's leathery jaw with a sad frown. "Drained, like the others." She moved to his neck, showing Wufei the slit throat. On the side of his neck, there was a tiny prick mark. "Looks like this is how the bastard killed him." She roved down the body to the boy's ankles, and nodded. "Bruising, see? The kid was alive. Our guy drugged him, hung him upset down and slit his throat. Like a fucking carcass."
"Nothing else missing?"
Sally pulled up Benjamin's shirt, examining any other wounds, but there weren't any. She shook her head. "No, he's clean. All the killer wanted was his eyes."
"He never takes more than two parts from a body," Wufei muttered, frowning. "For a killer this careful, it seems... wasteful."
"He's choosy," Sally growled back. She carefully laid the boy face down on the towel again, and motioned for a tech to put a sheet over him. Brushing the sand off her jeans, she stood up. "Miami. Last one was in fucking England! When it's this random, how are we supposed to trace him, Chang? With no knowledge of what he looks like or any possible suspects, how the hell are we going to sift him through the hundreds of thousands of air transports every fucking day?"
"Sally--"
"I know, swearing. But... Jesus! Two months, four children dead--four--and not one lead."
Wufei crossed the distance between them, and held her eyes. As he put his hand on her shoulder, static sparked between them, and the ill-timed lust of their earlier bout uncoiled to send vicious heat through their veins. Each took a careful breath, and Wufei pulled away sharply, resisting the urge to glance around to make sure none had seen the connection.
"We'll find him, Sally."
Her eyes were sparkling, heated with rage and frustration he echoed plainly.
"We'll find him," he said.
She pulled away, and crossed the tapeline to speak with the family.
**
Back at the hotel, Sally was curled under the covers in the bed across from his own, her back to him. Wufei stared at it, wondering when she'd stop letting the case affect her so strongly. Every time they found a new body, she shut down. She wouldn't speak to him for days afterward unless she wanted a quick fuck, and he was sure he knew why. The damning thing was, he'd done nothing wrong in the first place--neither of them had.
"You're letting this get to you, Sally."
No answer, but he didn't expect one.
"We'll find a way to fix this."
She turned around and gave him a sour look. It was so miserable, he flinched.
"We'll find a way," he said again.
Her voice was a mere whisper. "No, we won't."
"Sally--"
Again, she turned and gave him the cold shoulder.
He growled in frustration, hands balling into useless fists. "We're not talking about the killer, are we?"
There was a slight shrug under the sheets. He wanted to slap sense into her, or at least interrogate until the proper answer came forth, but instead, because he loved her, Wufei did nothing.
They sat like that for another hour, fury and passive-aggressive body language stifling the room before Sally's cell phone rang. She lifted a pale hand to answer it, her voice hoarse.
"Yes?"
Wufei could hear an indistinct voice on the other end--it may have been Quatre, but he wasn't sure. Whatever it was that was said, Sally bolted upright in her bed, wide-eyed.
"We'll be there."
Snapping the cell phone shut, she gave Wufei a horrified glance. He feared the worst. "What happened?"
"Trowa, he..."
"What happened, Sally?"
"He's in the hospital."
**
Considering the late hour, Wufei was surprised to find Duo sitting in the farthest corner of the waiting room, curled tiredly in his chair with an arm wrapped around one knee, face turned downward and staring at nothing. Oddly, Wufei was struck by how covered Duo was, from the black leather gloves on his hands to his long-sleeved shirt, high-collar, black denim, and heavy boots. His coat was tossed carelessly in the chair beside him, the only hint to how hot he must be in the humid, sweat-sucking heat of a spectacular summer day in Auckland. Even the hospital's air conditioning and full-length blinds barely kept back the sun's UV radiation from piercing through the windows, and Wufei could hear the vents puttering along, trying to keep the temperature at a decent, livable level.
Sally took one glance at Duo, and headed for the nurses station.
He stood there, awkward and silent, fiddling with his hands. Duo didn't even acknowledge his presence, drenched as he was with clear misery. He'd lost his son last year to a bad fire, and six months ago, his wife left him. Now his best friend was in a hospital bed facing certain death, and Chang didn't envy whatever was going on in Duo's mind.
Sally returned and said for both their benefit, "The nurse said he's still in ICU, but visitations are open." She gave Wufei a look, took his hand, and dragged him down the hall toward Trowa's room.
Duo stayed right where he was.
Wufei gave one last glance back at the shell of his former comrade, frowning. Sally's hand tightened around his and pulled him forward.
"Trowa's in a coma," she said.
He faltered in his step, and stared at her business-like expression.
"There's no telling when he'll wake. Might be days, might be weeks. Might be years." Might be never. "Whoever attacked him beat the shit out of him pretty good--and we both know Trowa isn't that easy to jump."
That said, she tugged him along, and stopped at room 303. She shoved him inside, closing the door behind her.
Wufei halted.
Machines kept Trowa breathing, a heart monitor beeping rhythmically to ensure he was still alive. If it weren't for the monitor, Wufei wouldn't have known... Trowa was hardly recognizable. His face was smashed in and covered in bandages, one arm raised carefully in a cast, his body clearly taped under the hospital garb, indicating bruised or broken ribs. His breaths, pumped in and out of him with disturbing rhythmic clarity, wheezed slightly. His good arm appeared was tucked carefully by his side, the knuckles bandaged where they must have been bloodied, fighting back.
Trowa's lip was split open. His left eye was bruised and swollen.
"He took a nasty hit on the back of the head," Sally said, pointing to the worst of the bandages, so thick Wufei wondered at the damage. "Looks like the same hit he took back in the war. You remember..."
"The amnesia."
She was solemn, guilt stricken. "Yes."
"You don't think--"
"It's possible. We won't know until he wakes."
Wufei curled his fists. He tried to tell himself that at least this time, Trowa would not be alone to suffer his losses, but there's no telling he'd even wake up. Maybe never filtered through Sally's earlier diagnoses. Some coma patients spent the rest of their lives in bed. And they died there, withered and helpless.
"We need to find who did this," he said.
From the shadows, Heero's voice was vigil-soft. Wufei jumped at it, having missed his presence in the low lighting and the emotional torrent rushing through him. Sally seized his hand for strength, and Heero said, "A homeless man named found him in a back alley on one of the L3 colonies. Someone beat the living hell out of him..." Wufei searched the shadows and found Heero's eyes. Heero bit his lip, looking troubled. "There's not many who can do that," he added.
Wufei dredged his Preventers persona desperately. "Did you question the man?"
"Of course," Heero said, glaring at him. Sally's hand tightened in Wufei's. "It's a dead end."
"Any witnesses?"
"No."
"Why is he in New Zealand? Why not just--"
Heero stood, walking from the shadows into the slashed sunlight of the blinds. His glare could slice gundanium. "It was directly over orbit, and it's the best hospital we could get him to at the fastest possible time."
"Yuy..."
"Go back to your case, Chang. We're handling this."
That stung. Wufei gripped his fists, pulling out of Sally's grasp. He walked up into Heero's space and held his glare with a matching one of his own. "If you have a problem..."
Surprisingly, or maybe not-so, Heero broke the contact first. He stared at the ground, defeated.
"Trowa was in that alley for over a day, Chang. Over a day."
He stepped back, Trowa's wheezing breaths pulling his own from him with a sharp gasp. He wondered-how many had walked by his helpless, broken body, without stopping? Without checking? With hardly a glance at all.
"Fucking colony," Sally spat.
Wufei said nothing. He took one look at Heero's lost expression, so mirrored to his own thoughts that it frightened him. He fled back to the waiting room.
Written by: cozzybob2 for nagi_schwarz
Rating: R
Warnings: graphic images of injury, curse words
Gift #1: Quiet, serious, ruthlessly death-dealing Duo gone off the rails, drained of all but the most morbid gallows humor, as a mission-based serial killer being hunted by the Preventers.
1 - Eye.
Eye on the TV
Cause tragedy thrills me
Whatever flavor
It happens to be
She was the hot and sour flavor you'd find in any American-Chinese buffet, and Wufei couldn't get enough of her. His hand was restless on her thigh, his tongue swiping his lips in search of more.
In the aftermath, she smirked against his jaw, and whispered, "We really need to get out of this closet."
He lifted a cool brow at the joke, but took note of their surroundings, unease settling in his gut. Fucking his partner had become a dangerous game, laced with the knowledge that both of them could be fired upon discovery. They had been reduced to this--and it would've stung, if the sex wasn't so very good.
She kissed his throat and peeled off of him, straightening her hair in the dark. She fastened her pants again, and smacked him on the rear.
"Zip up, Chang, it's cramped in here."
As he dressed, Sally toyed with his hair, which was let down sometime during the vicious frenzy, the hair tie broken and lost somewhere in the dark. Wufei had another in his pocket--he always kept a spare, these days--and Sally put her hand over his, shaking her head.
"It's nice when it's down."
"They'll know," he said.
Her eyes darkened. "Right."
Frustration made the air far too thick to breathe. He tied his hair back quickly, and burst from the closet with a sigh of relief. Thankfully, no one was in the hall to witness his carelessness, and Sally followed after with a small thundercloud hanging over her head.
Wufei's cell buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket, glancing at the number. Une.
"Chang."
"There's been another murder. You have a flight to Florida at 13 hundred hours."
"Acknowledged."
He snapped the cell shut and gave Sally a meaningful glance.
The thundercloud darkened and spread to a full-on storm, and she brushed passed him with hardly a glance. He let her go, making his own way to the parking garage.
**
Benjamin Moore was four years old. Clad in adorable blond hair and blue eyes, he was the son of a full-time nurse and a self-employed contractor. He'd gone missing from his backyard three days ago--his mother was in hysterics on the other side of the tape line, smashing her fists against an officer's chest, ripe with seething denials and a gaping wound that belched shrieks of agony into the sand. The ocean roared its indifference at her, and the father stood staring at the waves, wondering if there really was a God at all.
Chang passed the family with a grimace. The mother's wretched eyes raked him like Justice, but his failure was palpable and he was left broken under the stare. Sally stood between he and them like a brick wall... she took his hand briefly, and squeezed it. There were bags under her eyes.
The body was artfully left on Miami Beach, sprawled on a towel next to an intricate sand castle. He was rolled onto his stomach with his face laid into the fabric, as if he'd just gone to sleep while waiting for his mother to come back for him. It was mid-winter this side of the equator, but with the cool breeze and the sun shining a perpetual joy over the Florida landscape, the child corpse stank that much more of just how wrong things had become. If Wufei could bring himself to think it, he'd find a whole new mental breakdown to consider, one that had nothing to do with Treize at all--for all these years, and all this fighting... there is still such horrible evil in the world.
Po's soft cursing voiced what Chang couldn't say, who stared at the broken little body with the eyes of someone who had seen this all to often. Forensics were scurrying around the scene combing for evidence, but everyone was well aware that after the forth kill in two months, not a hair would lead back to their killer.
Desperately, Sally checked her emotions, one last drop of sympathy fading with the snap of her latex gloves. Wufei admired her that control--his rage was plain to see, as well as his continued helplessness. His partner nodded toward the lead forensic, and asked, voice crisp with business, "Is he ready to be moved?"
"Yeah." The tech bounced on the balls of his feet, far too excited at the expense of a child's life. Wufei prayed to all the gods in the Eastern kingdom that he'd never become so jaded. "It's that Frankenstein guy, right? Sick shit, sounds like--saw a special on 60 Minutes about the three so far, hard to believe he's so friggin'--"
Sally cleared her throat, her eyes twin laser beams. Chang rested his hand on Colt strapped to his thigh.
"Uh, sorry, I always get a bit excited about this sort of thing. Hard to find any interesting cases these days, I've been stuck on gang warfare for months--"
He pulled the Colt from its holster.
"W-We, um, w-we... just relax, sir, no harm done--" He coughed, brushing his shirt. Chang put the gun away again. "We combed and took a thousand pictures, but there's not a trace of blood anywhere. No prints, nothing. Another fucking dead end, eh?"
Chang growled, losing his patience with the lab tech--he was local to the force here, and he wasn't supposed to know anything about the case... and no one was supposed to be that annoying and live beyond their childhood.
The man paled and held his hands in surrender. "Just saying. I'll leave you be, then, sirs."
Skittering away to join the other local officers, the tech gave Wufei a paranoid glance at his back. The local forces got along about as well with them as the FBI did. No one liked another sanction stepping in on a case, but this killer transcended all national borders and there was no other way to handle it without creating a big political clusterfuck. Still, the FBI stood at the other end, glaring impotently at the officers and giving the two Preventers a mean look of envy. They were useless in every way, but the US loved to provide "escorts" while Po and Chang poked through their country chasing after a child killer. Some nations found it hard to understand the idea of a borderless planet, even ten years after Relena's drastic proclamations. Not that much had changed. Not really.
But Chang never spoke politics anymore, and he didn't care to wonder about it. "What is he missing, Po?"
Sally carefully turned the body over, stiff with rigor mortis, his upper arm still slung over his face. Behind the arm peaked horrible emptiness where his eyes should've been.
The mother, still screaming behind the tape line, gave a horrible wail. Police finally came into action to force her away.
Wufei would have given them a very long, loud rant about protocol, but he was too busy staring at the empty sockets. They'd been so carefully removed that the eyelids were still there. Or at least, he thought they were. He wasn't an expert.
"Christ!" Sally shook her head at the heavens before breathing deeply, getting herself under control again. A few breaths and she raked her experienced eyes over the site, examining the cuts. "Definitely our guy. Such a steady hand... this is surgeon-worthy. Bastard knows what he's doing. Looks like he removed them after death... look, no blood again. Not a drop."
Sally brushed Benjamin's leathery jaw with a sad frown. "Drained, like the others." She moved to his neck, showing Wufei the slit throat. On the side of his neck, there was a tiny prick mark. "Looks like this is how the bastard killed him." She roved down the body to the boy's ankles, and nodded. "Bruising, see? The kid was alive. Our guy drugged him, hung him upset down and slit his throat. Like a fucking carcass."
"Nothing else missing?"
Sally pulled up Benjamin's shirt, examining any other wounds, but there weren't any. She shook her head. "No, he's clean. All the killer wanted was his eyes."
"He never takes more than two parts from a body," Wufei muttered, frowning. "For a killer this careful, it seems... wasteful."
"He's choosy," Sally growled back. She carefully laid the boy face down on the towel again, and motioned for a tech to put a sheet over him. Brushing the sand off her jeans, she stood up. "Miami. Last one was in fucking England! When it's this random, how are we supposed to trace him, Chang? With no knowledge of what he looks like or any possible suspects, how the hell are we going to sift him through the hundreds of thousands of air transports every fucking day?"
"Sally--"
"I know, swearing. But... Jesus! Two months, four children dead--four--and not one lead."
Wufei crossed the distance between them, and held her eyes. As he put his hand on her shoulder, static sparked between them, and the ill-timed lust of their earlier bout uncoiled to send vicious heat through their veins. Each took a careful breath, and Wufei pulled away sharply, resisting the urge to glance around to make sure none had seen the connection.
"We'll find him, Sally."
Her eyes were sparkling, heated with rage and frustration he echoed plainly.
"We'll find him," he said.
She pulled away, and crossed the tapeline to speak with the family.
**
Back at the hotel, Sally was curled under the covers in the bed across from his own, her back to him. Wufei stared at it, wondering when she'd stop letting the case affect her so strongly. Every time they found a new body, she shut down. She wouldn't speak to him for days afterward unless she wanted a quick fuck, and he was sure he knew why. The damning thing was, he'd done nothing wrong in the first place--neither of them had.
"You're letting this get to you, Sally."
No answer, but he didn't expect one.
"We'll find a way to fix this."
She turned around and gave him a sour look. It was so miserable, he flinched.
"We'll find a way," he said again.
Her voice was a mere whisper. "No, we won't."
"Sally--"
Again, she turned and gave him the cold shoulder.
He growled in frustration, hands balling into useless fists. "We're not talking about the killer, are we?"
There was a slight shrug under the sheets. He wanted to slap sense into her, or at least interrogate until the proper answer came forth, but instead, because he loved her, Wufei did nothing.
They sat like that for another hour, fury and passive-aggressive body language stifling the room before Sally's cell phone rang. She lifted a pale hand to answer it, her voice hoarse.
"Yes?"
Wufei could hear an indistinct voice on the other end--it may have been Quatre, but he wasn't sure. Whatever it was that was said, Sally bolted upright in her bed, wide-eyed.
"We'll be there."
Snapping the cell phone shut, she gave Wufei a horrified glance. He feared the worst. "What happened?"
"Trowa, he..."
"What happened, Sally?"
"He's in the hospital."
**
Considering the late hour, Wufei was surprised to find Duo sitting in the farthest corner of the waiting room, curled tiredly in his chair with an arm wrapped around one knee, face turned downward and staring at nothing. Oddly, Wufei was struck by how covered Duo was, from the black leather gloves on his hands to his long-sleeved shirt, high-collar, black denim, and heavy boots. His coat was tossed carelessly in the chair beside him, the only hint to how hot he must be in the humid, sweat-sucking heat of a spectacular summer day in Auckland. Even the hospital's air conditioning and full-length blinds barely kept back the sun's UV radiation from piercing through the windows, and Wufei could hear the vents puttering along, trying to keep the temperature at a decent, livable level.
Sally took one glance at Duo, and headed for the nurses station.
He stood there, awkward and silent, fiddling with his hands. Duo didn't even acknowledge his presence, drenched as he was with clear misery. He'd lost his son last year to a bad fire, and six months ago, his wife left him. Now his best friend was in a hospital bed facing certain death, and Chang didn't envy whatever was going on in Duo's mind.
Sally returned and said for both their benefit, "The nurse said he's still in ICU, but visitations are open." She gave Wufei a look, took his hand, and dragged him down the hall toward Trowa's room.
Duo stayed right where he was.
Wufei gave one last glance back at the shell of his former comrade, frowning. Sally's hand tightened around his and pulled him forward.
"Trowa's in a coma," she said.
He faltered in his step, and stared at her business-like expression.
"There's no telling when he'll wake. Might be days, might be weeks. Might be years." Might be never. "Whoever attacked him beat the shit out of him pretty good--and we both know Trowa isn't that easy to jump."
That said, she tugged him along, and stopped at room 303. She shoved him inside, closing the door behind her.
Wufei halted.
Machines kept Trowa breathing, a heart monitor beeping rhythmically to ensure he was still alive. If it weren't for the monitor, Wufei wouldn't have known... Trowa was hardly recognizable. His face was smashed in and covered in bandages, one arm raised carefully in a cast, his body clearly taped under the hospital garb, indicating bruised or broken ribs. His breaths, pumped in and out of him with disturbing rhythmic clarity, wheezed slightly. His good arm appeared was tucked carefully by his side, the knuckles bandaged where they must have been bloodied, fighting back.
Trowa's lip was split open. His left eye was bruised and swollen.
"He took a nasty hit on the back of the head," Sally said, pointing to the worst of the bandages, so thick Wufei wondered at the damage. "Looks like the same hit he took back in the war. You remember..."
"The amnesia."
She was solemn, guilt stricken. "Yes."
"You don't think--"
"It's possible. We won't know until he wakes."
Wufei curled his fists. He tried to tell himself that at least this time, Trowa would not be alone to suffer his losses, but there's no telling he'd even wake up. Maybe never filtered through Sally's earlier diagnoses. Some coma patients spent the rest of their lives in bed. And they died there, withered and helpless.
"We need to find who did this," he said.
From the shadows, Heero's voice was vigil-soft. Wufei jumped at it, having missed his presence in the low lighting and the emotional torrent rushing through him. Sally seized his hand for strength, and Heero said, "A homeless man named found him in a back alley on one of the L3 colonies. Someone beat the living hell out of him..." Wufei searched the shadows and found Heero's eyes. Heero bit his lip, looking troubled. "There's not many who can do that," he added.
Wufei dredged his Preventers persona desperately. "Did you question the man?"
"Of course," Heero said, glaring at him. Sally's hand tightened in Wufei's. "It's a dead end."
"Any witnesses?"
"No."
"Why is he in New Zealand? Why not just--"
Heero stood, walking from the shadows into the slashed sunlight of the blinds. His glare could slice gundanium. "It was directly over orbit, and it's the best hospital we could get him to at the fastest possible time."
"Yuy..."
"Go back to your case, Chang. We're handling this."
That stung. Wufei gripped his fists, pulling out of Sally's grasp. He walked up into Heero's space and held his glare with a matching one of his own. "If you have a problem..."
Surprisingly, or maybe not-so, Heero broke the contact first. He stared at the ground, defeated.
"Trowa was in that alley for over a day, Chang. Over a day."
He stepped back, Trowa's wheezing breaths pulling his own from him with a sharp gasp. He wondered-how many had walked by his helpless, broken body, without stopping? Without checking? With hardly a glance at all.
"Fucking colony," Sally spat.
Wufei said nothing. He took one look at Heero's lost expression, so mirrored to his own thoughts that it frightened him. He fled back to the waiting room.