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