Relena’s Decision
By Zapenstap
Heero knelt on one knee on the balcony above the auditorium
stage, crouching easily behind the lights that lit up the slender figure
standing straight and tall behind the podium.
He had a handgun tucked in the back of his waistband and his coat hung
over the railing because it was hot, baring his arms and shoulders. He passed a hand over his forehead, swiping
away the beads of sweat that clung to his hair and turned his attention back to
the girl behind the podium.
Down below, on the other side of the stage and standing in
the shadow of the curtain, Wufei Chang was acting a
personal bodyguard, arms crossed over his chest, his body a motionless form
that was both attentive and uncompromising.
He never blinked. Wufei cared very little for Relena
generally, but he did his duty as well as any of them. Quatre was in the
audience, as a delegate not a bodyguard, his blonde head sticking out among the
swarm of Maguanac bodyguards that accompanied him
anywhere there might be danger. Trowa was at home.
Duo was in the Colonies. Zechs and Noin were in Space.
Heero watched Relena, barely able to
make out her expressions from this height.
She had her hair twisted up behind her head in a French roll. She was dressed in gray business trousers
with a matching coat and a silk, white collared shirt. She was trim and poised. Her gestures were natural, her eyes hard as
iron, but her expression warm and welcoming.
When Relena entered into the conclusion of her
speech, Heero caught the feel of danger in the air.
Instantly he became alert, his eyes sweeping the figures
gathered in the audience, raising himself to the balls of his feet in
preparation to bolt in whatever direction necessary. From the audience, Quatre
was looking around, a puzzled expression on his face. Wufei had lowered
his arms, his brows narrowed in consternation.
The Chinese man whispered to the people standing on guard in the
darkness behind him and the whispers traveled until all the security in the
building was riled with agitation. Relena paused briefly in her speech, catching the currents
around her, but only for a hint of a second that barely registered before
continuing smoothly on.
Heero was just getting ready to head for the stairs and get on
the ground floor nearer her when he felt a sharp pain penetrate his
shoulder. Grunting, he ducked, glancing
quickly at his arm. It wasn’t a
bullet. Instead, his fingers gripped a
dart, a tiny dart no larger than one digit on his littlest finger. Heero glanced up,
sweeping the scaffolds, the crowd in the audience. Relena spoke
on. In the audience, Quatre
was staring straight at him, and a moment later he saw Wufei’s
head turn his way.
Heero plucked the dart out of his arm, but that was all he had
time for. Almost immediately his
worldview swirled, his vision blurring.
Sound and sensation became strangely distant. He tried to stumble to his feet, but all he
felt was the cold hard, metal floor panels rising to meet his right cheek. The sound of his boots thudding against the
floor as his body fell heavily assaulted his own ears. He became vaguely aware that his hands were
flat on the ground by his face and that he couldn’t seem to control his
movements. The pain came suddenly, as if
all the veins in his body were being squeezed shut. He gasped in sudden realization, but his
muscles were numb and no sounds escaped.
*****
“What has happened?”
Relena cried, keeping her anxiety as clouded
as she could, one fist clutched to her chest to manually slow the beating of her
heart. The delegates were filing out of
the auditorium, unaware of any disturbance.
They had stopped her to applaud her speech but she begged off on
occasion of an emergency. Security was
buzzing around the building like a hive of angry bees. Somehow, she knew it was Heero.
She spotted Quatre coming toward
her and moved in his direction, knowing she must look a little wild about the
eyes. Quatre
caught her by the shoulders, staring into her face for several seconds. “Relena…”
“What has happened?” she said again, barely managing to
keep her voice down. Most of the main
lobby was emptied, but some people remained, and they were watching her
beginning to panic with interest.
Stubbornly, she set her face while the Maguanacs
surrounded Relena and Quatre
without being asked, forming a shield between them and the rest of the
crowd. Relena
swallowed, knowing the fear in her face was visible now that she was protected. Quatre’s blue eyes
loomed in front of her, and she could see little beyond them. “Quatre, tell me,
please. Something has happened. I can feel it. Wufei disappeared
almost before I was finished.”
“I think it’s Heero,”
Quatre said, and for a moment he seemed to be looking
not at her but at something she couldn’t see.
“I felt something…strange, just a moment ago.” He blinked and his vision refocused. “And then I saw him vanish from his post on
the balcony. Wufei saw it too. He went to check on him.”
Relena swallowed and masked a slight shudder passing through her
body. A moment later they both caught
the sound of ambulance sirens wailing outside. Relena
heart hardened like a stone and she turned, but again Quatre
caught her shoulders, slowing her down.
Somewhere between the war and now he had grown several inches taller
than she, and managed to direct her movements with ease. Graciously, she allowed herself to be guided,
slipping easily into the role of the refined lady-like career woman that
appealed to both aristocratic representatives of Romafeller
and the general public.
Out of the doors leading to the catwalks, Wufei emerged into the lobby. He walked awkwardly under a heavy weight, his
face expressionless but his eyes determined.
Relena nearly cried out in alarm. He was carrying Heero
like a limp doll on his back, Heero’s arms hanging
limply around Wufei’s neck, the head of the Japanese
soldier slumped over Wufei’s right shoulder.
Relena’s throat closed up and her stomach cramped, but she managed
to shout raggedly through the blockage. “Heero! Wufei, what
happened?”
As soon as he was through the door, Wufei
passed Heero’s body off to two other Preventors and approached Relena
and Quatre with a somber expression. Medics burst into the room, scattering the
remaining people who were lingering in the hall. Relena’s eyes
followed the medics and latched onto Heero. The
medics bore with them a stretcher, onto which Heero
was lifted in one fluid motion. Once
lying prone on his back, Heero made blessed signs of
movement; eyes squeezed shut as his body shook with violent tremors. He was alive, but…
“Oh, God,” Relena said. She rushed toward the stretcher, but Wufei imperiously blocked her path with one arm flung out
before her.
“He’s been poisoned,” Wufei said
in a straight, even voice. “Shot with a dart from the shadows.” He turned to Quatre
and seemed to signify something with his eyes. Quatre
received that look grimly. Quatre never looked like that unless the news was very bad. Relena’s gaze swung
back and forth between them, but neither of them said anything to her.
Scrunching her eyebrows, she made to push past them.
“Let them take him to the hospital, Miss Relena,” Quatre implored. “You don’t want to delay his getting to a
hospital.”
Relena’s heart thudded violently in her chest, but she stopped,
swallowing, butterflies beating their wings against the tender insides of her
stomach. Quatre
was right. She stood still, watching the
stretcher bearing Heero’s body roll away, watched as
it was loaded into the back of an ambulance.
“I have to follow him,” she said. “Peygan! Peygan?”
The desperate call was answered when Peygan
appeared in an almost irrational way. “Your transportation is waiting for you,
Miss Relena,” the old man said with his usual respect
and deference.
“Thank you,” Relena replied.
“Relena, there will be reporters,”
Quatre protested.
“Not to mention that our assignment isn’t through,” Wufei added stoically.
“You could still be in danger.”
“I’m more concerned about Heero,”
she said without looking back.
Quatre and Wufei exchanged glances and
followed her silently out to the parking lot.
As Quatre predicted, outside the building, the
press swarmed them.
“Miss Darilan, could you please
comment on your speech today?”
“Vice Foreign Minister, who was the young man taken away in
an ambulance?”
“Miss Relena Peacecraft…”
Waving away the microphones, Relena
fought through the crowd with Wufei and Quatre flanking her on either side, assisting her in her
persistence. Peygan
opened to door to her limo and Quatre and Relena piled into the back.
Wufei sat in the front seat beside Peygan. The press
swarmed around the car, questions flying at their ears as hands beat on the
windows and doors.
Relena sat rigidly on her seat.
Heero. Poisoned.
He was supposed to be the one protecting her, not the other
way around, but she was responsible for him on this assignment, responsible for
all the people she paid to have protecting her.
And it wasn’t just that. It was Heero. It was Heero and she was terrified.
“Do you know what kind of poison it was, Wufei?” she asked, unable to sit in silence. She grasped the back of his chair with her
slender fingers. “Is there an
antidote? Will he be all right?”
“I can’t identify it from what I saw,” Wufei
said in a quiet, controlled voice. He
sat in the front seat like the blade of a knife, stiff, subtle and deadly. “We’ll wait for the test results. All I found was Heero
on the floor and the dart. Heero’s strong, but if the poison is lethal…”
“Who would have poisoned Heero,
though?” Quatre
cut him off in a voice barely suppressing emotion. His eyes were glowing like blue fire with
angry curiosity. “He was there to
protect Miss Relena.
It doesn’t make any sense.”
Relena took a deep breath. “We’ll find out soon enough,” she said
in low tones. “What I want to know now is
what is going to happen to Heero.”
“Well,” Wufei murmured, giving
her a sly, almost insulting glance.
“He’s not dead yet, and the matter of who is responsible is being looked
into. Just sit tight and be calm. We can’t do anything except wait.”
“We call Lady Une,” Relena said, “and the hospital. Tell them that he is coming, what has
happened. Tell them to please do
everything they can under my authority.”
Wufei looked almost insulted.
“That’s already been done.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” She mentally berated herself, knowing how
important Wufei’s pride was to him.
Sitting back, Relena told herself
to stay calm, relaxing her hands on her lap, but she couldn’t let her fears
go. Quatre
looked at her sympathetically and Relena refused to
meet his eyes for fear that she would cry.
She knew that Quatre knew how she felt about Heero, though he never said anything about it. He probably knew better than she did.
At the hospital, Heero was
wheeled into the emergency room. Peygan let them out of the car almost on the heels of the
ambulance and Relena strained to see the stretcher as
Heero was lifted and carried into the hospital. With Quatre and Wufei at her side, she followed. She caught only glimpses of his face as
doctors and nurses surrounded the stretcher, a slack, sweating face half
shrouded in his wild, dark hair.
She was slowed by the medical staff as Heero
was carried to an operating room and hooked up to all manners of devices that
beeped and blared and pumped foreign substances into his bloodstream. An oxygen mask was fitted over his face, an
IV inserted into his arm, and tubes connected to a variety of machines
crisscrossed his body. Relena saw it from a window in the hallway only briefly
before she was told very firmly by the reigning doctor to get out of the way. Doctors came and went carrying samples of his
blood, one with the dart sealed in a bag.
“Come on, Relena,” Quatre urged. “We
can’t be here.”
Wufei said nothing.
Lady Une met Relena
and her Gundam Pilot escorts in the hospital waiting
room. She held a clipboard in one hand
and sported a headset. People in the
room shrank back and walked small, confronted by her authoritarian
presence. Some recognized her Preventor’s jacket, but most just sense an ex-OZ officer on
deck.
“Well?” Relena demanded, ignoring
the looks of the other people in the room.
“The poison is unknown,” Lady Une
said. “It’s some kind of contained
virus, not a lethal agent, but it still should have killed him quickly. Whoever bought it isn’t well connected or
they would have used something more efficient.
So far, Heero Yuy
has managed to survive the effects, but this is a deadly poison. We have the best doctors available to help
him fight it, but as far as we know, there is no cure.”
Relena turned her face away, biting her lip, but she refused to
sit down, to bend her back. “What’s the
likelihood that he will survive?” she asked as logically and severely as she
could.
Lady Une lowered her clipboard in
a dropping, telltale manner. Her face
broke out in an expression of worry and sorrow.
“There’s less than a five per cent chance of recovery. It’s probable that he won’t survive the
night.”
Relena’s heart clenched. “I
won’t accept that!” she said. Then, more
calmly, because that wasn’t fair, “Lady Une, please
tell me what I can expect, what I need to know.”
Lady Une turned her face away,
her dark hair hiding her face. When she
looked back her emotions were cloaked by a firm and commanding face and voice
that had received practice hardening during all those years as a commanding
officer.
“Relena,” Lady Une said gently, “the medical staff here will fight the
virus with what safe measurements they have, but you should know that Heero is licensed under your authority for protecting you
during this assignment, not mine. As far
as the hospital staff is concerned, they will keep him alive until you tell
them to stop.” She paused. “They’ve told me that it might be best to
give him something that will ease the pain and let him die peacefully, within
minutes. He’s hurting tremendously and
there’s not much they can do for him. I
told them I wasn’t in a position to authorize such a thing. Relena,
I’m afraid you will have to make that decision.”
Relena fled from the thought.
Killing Heero?
Swallowing, she straightened her shoulders. “Tell them to do everything they can,” she
said deliberately, authoritatively, ignoring the tears in her eyes. “Tell them to spare no expense in trying to
cure him. I will pay anything.”
“Relena,” Lady Une began.
Relena’s face remained straight.
“Tell them.”
Lady Une made a stiff, jerky
movement that was something like a bow and strode away.
“You can’t stop death,” Wufei
said from behind her left shoulder. “Heero’s a soldier.
He knew the risks of protecting you.
He knows the risks of just being who he is. You can’t just hope he’ll get better. You’ll
only prolong his suffering.”
Relena raised her hands to her throat and massaged her neck and
shoulders. She closed her eyes briefly
to still the tears and tried to smile at Wufei. “I know who he is,” she said. “But I will believe that he can survive
this. I can’t kill him.”
Quatre sighed, looking down at his feet. “I know how you feel, Miss Relena,” he said imploringly. “But…You might have to face facts. Heero is… dying. I never thought that anything could kill him,
but a lethal poison is a lethal poison.
I too am hoping that he can fight it, that he can miraculously pull out
of this, but you should still consider your other options, in case he doesn’t.”
Tears burned hot in her eyes and her head began to ache
with the pulse of them but Relena took a deep breath
and managed with only a little waver in her voice to respond. “You’ve fought losing battles before and
won.”
Quatre smiled at her. “Not
always, but I know what you mean. I’m
not saying you should give up now, just that you should be prepared. A soldier can’t fight expecting to
survive. What losing battles we won, we
won because we were not afraid to die and the enemy was. A sickness, a poison
isn’t the same kind of enemy.”
Relena nodded curtly, her head bobbing like it was on a spring,
but her heart was not in it. She
wouldn’t see Heero die today; she couldn’t conceive
of it. “I can’t wait in this room,” she
said after a moment. “I need to see
him. Quatre,
if he’s going to die…” She choked on the word.
“I think my presence will help. I
need to see him.”
“They won’t let you in,” Wufei
told her. He was sitting on a bench with
one ankle crossed over his knee and both arms crossed over his chest.
“I need to see him,” she repeated.
Relena left the waiting room, striding out through the swinging
doors, but as she left she heard Wufei mutter to Quatre, “I can’t believe she’s still in love with him. He’s
never indicated that he cares about her that way.”
“Wufei…”
The door closed behind her and Relena’s
momentum slowed to a stop.
A choking sob escaped her throat and she quickly covered
her eyes. Just outside the waiting room
she slumped against the wall in a wave of dizziness, sinking to a crouch,
huddling in the corner by the door. She
stayed there for a moment, tears obscuring her vision, ignoring the people
passing by her with concern on their faces.
The man she loved was dying, and she never told him. Wiping the tears away from her eyes, she
stumbled again to her feet and walked down the hall with more purpose to her
stride. She remembered that her hair was
done, that she wore the finest of designer business suits, that she was the
Vice Foreign Minister liaison between the Colonies and Planet Earth. She was Relena Peacecraft and if Heero’s life
could be saved, she would save it. It
didn’t matter how he felt about her.
The doctors started when they saw her coming. A dark-haired nurse stopped her outside the
operating room with a clipboard.
“I’m afraid we can’t have you in here, Miss.”
“Vice Foreign Minister Relena Peacecraft,” she corrected his address. “I won’t interfere.”
Surprise dawned in the eyes of the dark-haired nurse and
she let her in reluctantly, but with a sureness that spoke of a twinge of awe
and respect. Relena
hardly gave her another glance. Her eyes were reaching for Heero’s
body to cling to. In two steps she was
through the door.
Heero was laid out on a table, still dressed in his jeans and
boots and green tank top. It was hard on
her heart to see him like that, normally outfitted and staying alive—it
seemed—only because he was connected to machines by plastic tubes and an oxygen
mask. His body was no longer the limp
form Wufei had carried out of the auditorium. His muscles were tense now, clenched as if
entering post mortem early and sweat beaded beneath his hairline and dripped
down his face. His skin looked hot and
flushed, as if the blood in his veins was boiling, but his face was pale, his
lips discolored. The pain he was
undergoing was obvious, and heart-wrenching.
Relena lost some of her balance staring at him. She wanted to speak to him, but with eyes
clenched shut like that and his hands balled up into fists, his back arching on
the table, she wasn’t sure he would be able to hear her.
“What is she doing in here?” one of the doctors demanded.
The dark-haired nurse opened and closed her mouth
soundlessly. Someone else identified the
strange woman in the operating room. Relena ignored all of it.
The doctors were lifting plastic pouches filled with strange
fluids and hovering over Heero’s still form. The underside of his arm was exposed, dabbed
with iodine, blood drawn from the artery.
The area under his eyes was beginning to look shaded, bruised, and every
so often he jerked in pain, muscles cramping even tighter.
Relena came to herself when she felt tears on her cheeks, and
dashed them away violently. “What is
it?” she asked. “What has he been
poisoned with?”
“We don’t know,” one of the doctors muttered. “We can’t identify it. You really need to leave, Vice Foreign
Minister. I see that this young man is
important to you, but you can’t help by standing here.”
“Is he going to live?” she asked, barely able to form the
question.
“It’s too early to say.
We’ve done all we can for him for the time being. We’re waiting to see if he stabilizes. We’re researching the poison in his
blood. After a few tests there may be
something new to try. We’re hoping to
bring him to consciousness at least long enough to say goodbye. Now please, we can’t have you in here. He needs to rest.”
Relena stared at Heero’s form as the
doctors began to file out one by one, having other patients to attend to. She remained a moment longer, tears sparkling
on her cheeks with a bitter saltiness, staring at Heero
lying there, nearer to death than she had ever seen him and beyond the reach of
her voice.
“I won’t let you die, Heero,” she
told him anyway. “I’ve believed in you
this far. I want you to fight this time.
Please, Heero.
You have to fight.”
The doctor gently took her elbow and led her firmly out of
the room. But she kept saying it,
‘please fight’ over and over.
Sally Po had joined Quatre in the
hallway just outside the operating room.
The former officer and medical examiner for the Alliance was in deep
conversation with one of the doctors who had exited the room. By her expression, whatever they were
discussing did not seem good. Relena could read the subtle lines around Sally’s eyes and
mouth, the way her shoulders seemed to slump a little. Her eyes were focused on the doctor’s face,
drinking the words in realistically, and with each word her forehead creased a
little.
Quatre saw Relena coming and touched
Sally’s sleeve. The doctor murmured ‘try
to talk some sense into her’ as Sally turned and left them both in the hallway. Sally opened her mouth to speak, but Relena turned her eyes away, not wanting to hear what she
was going to say. Distracted, she began
taking her hair down, letting the mass of blonde locks fall haphazardly around
her head, some of it caught up in tangles and hairspray. Hairpins showered on the floor like pebbles,
clicking metallically. Some of them
remained stuck in her hair, but for a brief moment, she felt less tight inside. Relena stared at
them with glazed eyes.
“Relena,”
Sally said gently. The Chinese woman’s
eyes drifted to the window that looked into Heero’s
room and then back at Relena’s face. “Relena.”
“Don’t tell me,
Sally. I’m not giving up hope yet.”
Sally took a deep breath.
“Relena, you’re not someone given to these
kinds of illusions. From what the
doctors are telling me, it’s only a matter of time...”
Relena shook her head.
“No. They say he’s resting, but I
know he’s fighting in there. He’s
stronger than they think…”
Sally interrupted sharply. “I know how strong Heero is, Relena.”
The words cut her. Relena said nothing more.
Inside, she felt numb, the beginnings of grief stirring a pile of
ashes. She couldn’t handle this. Not this…
Her father died the same way, on a table, a victim. Not Heero too.
Relena realized after a moment that she was sitting on a white
bench in a hallway away from Heero’s room next to Quatre, who was holding her gently by the arms. Sally sat on the other side of her, stroking
her hair.
“Maybe you should
sleep, Relena,” Quatre
said. “He’s not gone yet, and it will do
you good.”
“If he dies while I rest I would never forgive myself,” Relena cried bitterly.
“Can’t they do anything?”
“Not without further endangering his life,” Sally said
gravely. “The body can only take so much
human intervention. They could give him
other poisons in the hope that something from one kills the lethal agent of the
other, but the effects would be too much.
He’s hanging by a thread now.
They don’t think he’ll last the night.”
Those words were like the deep rings of gongs or the
mournful cries of Church bells.
Pondering them, Relena sank within herself,
her eyes glossing over. Time ticked
slowly by with no improvement, and little word.
Three hours later, Quatre was
asleep on Sally’s shoulder and Relena sat alone on
the end of the bench. Her hair was
tousled and tangled around her head, her mascara smeared by her tears and her
face streaked. With her feet propped up
on the bench, she hardly thought about it, and was only thankful that Lady Une had prevented the press from entering the hospital.
Near
“We caught the man
who shot him,” Wufei was telling Sally. “Just a rogue member of the Mariemaia uprising who once idolized Heero
Yuy as a model soldier and now despises him. They were never after Relena. He was good, I’ll give him that, but he
worked alone.”
“Do we know what poison he used?”
Relena began listening.
“Yeah,” Wufei said. “The
staff has been informed, but there’s no cure for it.” Wufei
glanced at Relena as if to see how she was taking the
news. “They say there’s really nothing anybody can do. Anything that would help
would only kill him faster.”
Relena remembered that when her father had died, she had demanded
that they take him to a real hospital and had been denied. If they had, would
her father still be alive today? It had
been too dangerous, they said, because of OZ.
Even as she was thinking about it, four doctors—three men
and one woman, the best in the business—came around the corner in an entourage
of medical authority. Their long white
hospital coats flapped behind their heels, pristine white collars starched
crisp. Here, they were the important people, the authorities, but they stopped
before Relena respectfully, somberly.
Relena’s knees were weak, as if filled with water. As she stood, she could hardly hold up her
own weight.
“He’s dying,” the
oldest doctor said.
Behind her, Quatre raised his
head, eyes shimmering now. Wufei looked away. Sally said nothing.
Relena stood silently, mouth slightly parted. They wanted her to make a decision. She knew that they were waiting for her to
tell them to shut off the machines, to use their talents to save the life of
somebody else in this hospital, to ease Heero’s death
now so that he might die more peacefully.
The decision, Lady Une had said, lay with
her. The doctors were saying that their
only choices now were to keep him breathing a little longer in pain or let him
rest at last.
“Can I speak to him?” Relena
asked in a voice that sounded too quiet to be her own.
The doctors shared a glance between them. “You may say goodbye,” the oldest doctor
said. She knew they were trying to be
kind, but she also knew they were only letting her do it because they believed
it was psychologically important for her, not because they thought it would do Heero any good.
Instinctively, Relena knew that they were
probably right. But there were things
she had to say.
Sally, Quatre and Wufei remained behind as Relena
was led to Heero’s room. She could see in their eyes that they did not
want to say goodbye to Heero, that as soldiers they
would remember him as he was before, and wish him well wherever he was going,
wherever all the others had gone before him.
The woman doctor pushed open the door to the emergency ward
softly, giving Relena a significant look. “When you’re through,” she said in a soft
voice, “tell us what you decide.” No
further pressure was put on her, but it was enough.
Relena entered the room alone, once again confronting a comatose Heero lying on the bed, his breathing controlled by a
machine, shallow, but steady. His heart
rate was monitored by another machine, as was the dripping liquid being
measured into his bloodstream. His hair
was slick with sweat now, his face obscured by the tubes in his nose. The bubble mask had been removed from his
mouth. His eyes were closed, his skin
stretched and pale, his clean, strong limbs lying stiff and weak beside his
body. In the time since she had seen him
last, the doctors had removed his clothes, covering only part of his body with
a thin sheet. Relena
stared at that body with a strange consternation. She had dreamed of seeing him like this, but
not like this, not on that bed with those tubes and needles and machines, his
eyes shut, his skin pale.
Ignoring the tears now, Relena
circled the bed and knelt by his side, clasping his right hand in both of her
own. Even like this, he looked so strong
to her.
“Heero,” she whispered, and the
tears came on top of the word, bursting from the dam she had built to contain
them and flooding over her cheeks. She
wanted to tell him that she didn’t want him to die, but she couldn’t say it,
couldn’t let him think that she even though for a moment that he would.
“Heero,”
she said instead, rubbing her cheek against his hand. “I love you.”
He couldn’t hear her and she knew it, but now that it was
out there she said it again, and then one more time to confirm it to herself in
his presence. Tears trickled out of her
eyes as she breathed those words, the words she refused to admit even to
herself because it seemed to foolish and impossible. “I love you.
I love you.” It was hard to even
distinguish her own words, and on the last she let her head fall on the
mattress beneath his body, soaking the sheets in her tears, squeezing his hand
for her own comfort. When she lifted her
head, she reached up with one hand to swipe the sweat away from his brow, and
then gently caressed his face as she had always wanted to do. She understood now, on a level that was so
clear the sharpness of it was physically painful. Even in his present condition, he looked
suddenly beautiful to her. He was alive,
and fighting, at least for a bit longer.
She stood slowly and deliberately leaned over him. She touched his face again, with both of her
hands, and repeated what she said before, and then told him how much she had
always believed in him, how much he meant to her. When there seemed to be nothing more to say,
she kissed him softly on the lips, knowing that it couldn’t be a real kiss, not
when he couldn’t return it. She half
hoped that such a kiss would revive him, like in a fairytale, but he remained
unaware of her when she lifted her face.
Even so, she savored the taste of him as she rose, touching his skin
again lightly, her brows knit in consternation.
For several moments, she stared at him in silence, not
knowing what else to do.
When she finally pulled away, Heero
stiffened. He groaned, his body
tightening with a shuddering spasm. The
heart monitor went crazy, the lines rising and falling jaggedly up and
down. Heero
shook his head, tossing it from side to side wildly, his fingers splaying and
flailing. Relena
caught her breath in alarm, jumping backward, feeling her own heart race in
response to his sudden movements.
In those moments of watching him thrash, Relena quite suddenly made her decision, and the force of
it was enough to make her feel suddenly displaced in time and space.
The doctors burst into the room, reading the machines,
adjusting the dosage of whatever it was they were giving him to keep him
stabilized. Heero
quieted a little under their ministration, his teeth clenched and his lips
pulled back. He thrashed more quietly and then became still again.
“Well, Vice Minister?” one of the doctors demanded. “He’s fading fast.”
Relena’s face was frozen stiff.
The air in the room seemed to have vanished, sucked out until her lungs
were sure to collapse. “I’ve made my
decision,” she said. Her voice echoed in
the small space of a hollow room. Her
heart beat in her chest as cold chill settled over, numbness that she tried to
wrap around her like a blanket.
They looked up, pausing in their tasks, waiting for her to voice
it, waiting for her to tell them they could let him die now. The woman stopped fiddling with the IV as she
looked over her shoulder at Relena.
“I’ve decided that’s he’s going to live,” she said calmly.
The older doctor raised his head slowly, amazement creasing
his faith, his mouth slightly parted.
The woman’s eyes were wide, like teacups. The other two doctors exchanged glances.
Relena did not smile at them.
She clasped her hands in front of her and met them each in the eye with
a level look. It was Heero
who taught her that sometimes sacrifices had to be made to get the job
done. “He is stronger than you think,”
she told them crisply. “And I believe
that he has the will to survive.
Therefore you will stop at nothing to save him.”
The woman doctor’s jaw hung slack as she stared at Relena as if seeing a wraith or a spirit. Relena knew well
the voice she spoke with, that commanding authority which motivated entire
nations, and she could feel the wheels turning in their heads, the energy
pumping through their hearts as their souls rang with her conviction. “There are other poisons that could possibly
counteract…” the woman began hesitantly.
“But it is unlikely that such measures will…”
Relena’s eyes turned on her like disks of ice. “You will hack off,
remove, dose, replace or poison anything if it that has a chance of saving
him. I want to make it perfectly clear
that there are no boundaries you may not cross.
Heery Yuy will leave
this room alive. If he doesn’t…” She bit
her tongue, leaving something of an empty threat in the air. She remembered how the gun felt in her hands,
the one she had held against the doctors in whose presence her father died
before they injected her with a sedative.
She had been about to say “if he doesn’t, you won’t either,” but of
course she could not really follow through on that. Even so, they seemed to understand. Their eyes widened as they grasped how
serious she was, and if not a gun perhaps they thought of other things that she
could do, things her power allowed her to do if she chose to do it. She wouldn’t, of course, but they didn’t know
that.
She looked at Heero then, for
resolve, for strength, for love. He was
breathing still, but the shadows under his eyes were deeper, like death was
preparing him for the grave. But death
would have to fight her too. She
wouldn’t just let him go. He had fought
too hard and too long for life to give in now, and she believed in him,
believed with all the power and love that was in her heart. If he died, it would be fighting in a messy,
bloody struggle until all energy was exhausted. God would have to rip his life
away.
“He will leave this room alive,” she said curtly.
Relena walked out of the Operating Room.
When she stepped out into the hall, Wufei,
Sally and Quatre were staring at her as if they had
never quite seen her before. The door
was open and they had heard everything. Quatre and
Sally were speechless, shocked beyond the ability to form words, but after a
moment, Wufei smirked at her. Relena almost
smiled back, if she felt she could smile again.
A glimmer of respect flashed through Wufei’s eyes,
as if he were telling her ‘that’s right, make them work to prove their
integrity.’ In that moment, she realized
she had finally earned Wufei’s respect, simply by accepting
no compromises on something that was truly important to her, Heero’s life.
“Relena,” Sally said at
last. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“He’ll recover, Sally,” she said. “He can take it. If he doesn’t, it’s no worse than before, but
I’m confident that he will.”
Quatre stared at her a moment, then shook his head with a
smile. “You’re really something, Relena, you know that?”
“No,” she said. “I’m
nobody special. And I’m tired. I wish to sleep now.”
Relena slept in the waiting room and woke up four hours after she
had dosed off on a line of chairs drawn together to make a couch. She wasn’t sure what had awoken her. It was four in the morning and though the
hospital never slept, things seemed quieter.
She was cold and still exhausted, but she knew she couldn’t go back to
sleep. She almost felt as if a voice had
awoken her.
Heero.
Was he still alive and calling or her or had that been his
ghost brushing her cheek?
Getting up, Relena slung a
hospital blanket around her shoulders and padded quietly through the
halls. The floors glistened under her
feet, mopped since she last passed through.
She saw only one nurse passing through the halls from one room to
another, but he did not turn to look her way.
At length, she found herself at Heero’s
ward, and entered without knocking.
Heero was still lying on the hospital table, still connected to
the IV and the heart monitor. He was laying
quietly, as if asleep, his face more peaceful than she remembered seeing it in
a long time. The room was very quiet. It took her a moment to realize that no sound
came from any of the machines in the room.
Wrapping the blanket tighter around her shoulders, Relena approached Heero’s
bedside. Reaching out a hand, she touched his forehead, swiping the bangs away
from his face. Sweat still covered his
skin, but he was cooler than before, as if the heat had gone out of him.
Then he opened his eyes.
Relena gasped in amazement and alarm as he reached out a hand and
grasped her wrist in a light, but firm grip.
His eyes were dark and alive, like the ocean or a storm, and they caught
and held her motionless as she paused, half leaning over him. In their darkness she saw turmoil, the waves
of a thrashing sea or the roiling of dark clouds, but it was a fighting spirit
that she saw, revived and energized with victory.
“The fever broke,” she said in sudden understanding.
Heero turned his head away from her to look at the
machines. “I couldn’t sleep with them
on,” he said. “I’m very tired.”
“You turned them off?” she whispered, and he smiled at her.
“I don’t know what you did,” he told her. “I think I was dying. I don’t know how they saved me. I thought for sure…” He trailed off.
Relena swallowed. Her
heart was so full she wondered if she must be dreaming. “Did I do the right thing, Heero? I told them
to do anything to save you. They gave you other poisons, or drugs, something
that should have killed you, but I…”
His eyes swung back to her and with the same hand that had
held her wrist he gently touched her face, brushing her cheek with the back of
his index finger. “You did the right
thing,” he said, and then dropped his hand, turning away from her as he settled
back against the pillows propped under her shoulders. “I want to be alive. I needed help this time. I’m not better yet, but I will be.”
He was still weak.
She could tell by the way his arms seemed to sink lethargically into the
mattress. He couldn’t seem to move much,
but he was alert and certain that he would recover.
“Heero,” she said, and the joy in
her voice was almost a choke of relief.
A dark shape blotted out the light of the corridor.
“Come in, Wufei,” Heero said, and the Chinese warrior ducked inside at his
behest.
“So I see it worked,” Wufei
murmured. “I’ll be glad to tell the
others.”
Heero glanced at him, but gave no indication as to what he
thought of this.
“They’ll want to know right away,” Wufei
said. “Sally’s waiting for a report
every hour.”
“Who was it?” Heero asked him as Wufei turned to leave.
Wufei smirked. “Oh, don’t
worry about that. We got him. You just take your time recovering. If you
don’t, your little princess’s mighty efforts on your behalf will be spoiled.”
When Wufei left, Heero turned his attention back to Relena. For a long while he said nothing, and then
looked at her and asked a single question. “Why?”
Relena understood immediately, and for answer all she could do
was look at him, plainly, unable to mask anything she felt or thought or
desired. Heero
waited for a response with patience, and then puzzlement, and at last a slow
flicker of realization flamed in his eyes.
Relena smiled a wavering smile, shaking all throughout her
body. She couldn’t speak or explain or
do anything except smile at him the same way she had smiled at him in the past
a hundred times. She had never seen him
thrown so off balance, his eyes wide and tense at the corners, his mouth
slightly parted. Neither of them spoke,
not having the right words, but at length Relena
leaned forward, drawing herself close to Heero’s face
the same way he had drawn her close on his last mission in the Wing Zero, when
he left her after Libra. She had no
words to speak to him, no explanations or encouragement to give about war or
his purpose in life, save one. For this,
she kissed him softly, the same way she had when he could not feel it, and this
time he responded, almost as if he remembered.
Briefly, and then she pulled away, overcome with emotions too long
buried.
“Get better,” she implored, and vanished from the room.
When the doctors came they found their patient sitting up
with the IV manually removed and the machines turned off when they had expected
to find a corpse. The woman doctor
exclaimed that it was impossible. The
older doctor merely shook his head in amazement at the uncanny strength of this
young man who didn’t look to be anything very special.
The patient spoke few words to the medical staff, but he
seemed adamant at getting rest and nourishment so that he could leave the
hospital in good health. If he hadn’t
felt so suddenly weak, he said, he would have left on his own already. He had places he’d rather be.
End