Disclaimers, Warnings, Ratings, Archive, Etc.: See Chapter One.

Part 9: Darkest Before the Dawn

Quatre clung to consciousness with everything he had, letting his training settle into place like a pair of old, well-fitting jeans. Large, bruising hands lifted him and carelessly slung his naked form over a shoulder, then took them to the living room and dropped them there. The Sandrock Thunder pilot quickly recognized it for what it was and let his body hit the ground limply. His hands landed across fingers and a quick code was tapped against a palm, identifying Hiiro to him while rough hands pulled him into a sitting position.

"All right, boys, quit pretending. I know you're awake already."

Quatre opened his eyes and leveled a glare on the man seated in his chair, turquoise blue eyes widened fractionally at him. Kronus sat in Trowa's favorite chair with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his elbows braced on his knees. His dark hair was now liberally peppered with grey, and his scars, which had been red and raw-looking at the time of his arrest, were now pale and silvered with age, as though he'd aged a decade overnight. That led all three pilots to the same conclusion.

"How many doubles of you are there?" an angry Hiiro questioned.

"Six in total and all of them blindly loyal to me. They truly believe we're all one and the same," Kronus answered in a curiously childish, sing-song voice. "I'm very angry with you, my pretty little gods."

"I'll just bet you are," Quatre snarled. It was then that the three pilots noticed the syringe kit perched on Kronus' knee.

"We belong to ourselves, not you or anyone else, you deluded son of a bitch!" Trowa growled through his teeth as his trypanophobia took hold, fury and fear pounding in his ears with his pulse as Kronus carefully opened the case and prepared the syringe he held in front of them. [1]

Two of his henchmen pulled Trowa up to his feet, easily restraining the struggling, terrified man between them while the scientist jabbed the emerald eyed acrobat in the neck, injecting him with its contents. The Heavyarms Bombardier pilot jerked away from the madman, landing in a heap on the floor, only to be kicked in the chest as he started to succumb to the effects of the drug.

"YES, YOU DO!" the scarred man screamed at Trowa as his foot connected with his rib cage. "YES, YOU DO! YOU'RE ALL MINE! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LOVE ME AND ONLY ME, BUT YOU BETRAYED ME INSTEAD!"

"What did you give him?" Quatre asked, his eyes locked on his husband's supine form as Kronus smiled darkly.

"I call it liquid pain," he replied, his smile growing broader and more sinister as Trowa's body started convulsing. "It's a drug cocktail designed to begin at the last known pain tolerances of Gundam Pilot 04."

As Trowa screamed, so did Quatre; their telepathic and empathic links were still wide open from the previous night, so everything Trowa felt, Quatre did too.

- = 0 = -

At the Maxwell home, Sally helped Duo to sit up and used a damp face cloth to wash the drying blood off of his face, not all of it his. The Deathscythe Beast pilot pushed the doctor's hands away in frustration and anger, then began gathering his weapons when the phone rang; a frantic, tearful Relena on the other end. Finishing their search and clearing the house, Lady Une and Wu Fei entered from the bedroom area.

"That was Relena. The fuckers broke into their place and grabbed Hiiro," he stated, his voice deathly cold as he checking his gun.

"Why not take you guys, too?" a bewildered Hilde asked.

"Maybe Kronus didn't recognize us," Wu Fei answered. "We're older now; Duo's hair is a lot shorter than it was during our training and I've let mine grow longer..."

"That isn't it, Fei," Duo retorted as he punched a pair of numbers on his cell phone. "Before I took him out, Kronus' goon here told me the bastard didn't want to waste his time on us yet. Dammit, I'm not getting an answer from Quatre or Trowa's cells, or their land line!"

"Let's go," Lady Une ordered, stuffing her own cell phone back into her jacket pocket. "I've contacted Zechs and Noin; they're already on their way."

- = 0 = -

Zechs and Noin were approaching the front door just as the screaming started. Guns drawn, they moved quickly toward the picture window and peered in through the gaps in the curtain. Though there wasn't much to be seen through the small space, they could see a dark haired man seated in Trowa's overstuffed chair. At least two men was standing beside Hiiro and Quatre, the tips of dark and pale hair the only things visible over the edge of the couch to identify them.

"We need to get in there," Noin hissed as they withdrew to a safer distance. Zechs was already dialing Lady Une, his quick mind working on a plan to get inside.

"The bastards beat us here," he said as soon as she answered. Hanging up the phone moments later, he turned to Noin. "The others are five minutes out, and there are three hostages. Our orders are to keep an eye on the situation unless it becomes necessary for us to take Kronus and his men out."

"Okay, I'll move around back to see if I can get a better shot from the kitchen window," replied Noin. "Oh, God... that's Trowa and Quatre screaming... that cannot be a good sign."

- = 0 = -

Pain, vast and all-encompassing, burned white-hot through Trowa's veins. Screams of agony were torn from his throat before his mind even registered he was reacting, and his vision blurred as his world was reduced to madness and fire. He couldn't think beyond the pain; it ripped its way through his brain, shattering the walls between Trowa and the Silencer. The pain was a madness far greater than anything the ZERO System had ever shown him.

Without any conscious effort, he was determined to survive as he always had; rather than try to hide the pain under a mask of indifference, he would hide himself from the pain. Everything that made up Trowa Bloom and the Silencer were shoved into a tiny stone cell in his mind, walled off and protected from the pain the only way he knew how. And then he, too, was gone, lost in the cold, dark, lonely silence of his self-made mental prison.

- = 0 = -

"You're risking one of your "little Gods" just to punish us?" Hiiro snarled, his mind running in circles on how to get the three of them out of enemy hands.

"He's in need of retraining," answered Kronus, his hungry dark eyes watching as Trowa writhed on the floor. "You all are. He'll learn to submit to me or I'll force him to. In time, he'll forget all about you and you'll forget all about him."

Quatre ground his teeth painfully; the thought of forgetting Trowa or being forgotten by him ignited a deadly rage he was all too familiar with. It was the same rage he'd felt when his father was killed and his sister Iria injured right in front to him; the same killing rage that caused him to build Wing Zero, then to complete and become overwhelmed by the ZERO System. [2]

"You're wrong," the tow-headed man finally said defiantly, gritting his teeth. "I'll never forget Trowa, and he'll never forget me."

Quatre was right; even when he'd been suffering from total amnesia and was terrified by Duo's sudden appearance at the Circus, Trowa instinctively knew that Quatre was not only important to him, but that he loved him, and would stick with him for better or worse. There had been hope in his eyes when Quatre approached him, not fear, and hope would always be stronger than fear.

"How do you know his mind can take that kind of pain?" Hiiro demanded. Quatre glanced at the Wing Zero pilot and was surprised to see the slightest hint of movement in his arms. Not for the first time, he wondered what tricks Hiiro had learned from his own grueling training. "Quatre's level of pain tolerance has always been greater than any of ours! What if Trowa's mind can't take it? What'll you do with a mindless doll, asshole?"

"I can always create another," Kronus replied, his eyes flicking from Trowa's screaming form to Quatre and back.

Quatre fought the urge to scream at Hiiro, to tell him that Trowa was stronger than that. His thoughts raced over Sally's concerns about the nanites in the children Kronus used as test subjects and it finally came to him.

"No, you can't," Quatre voice ground out. "Your experiment on the children failed. Their nanites aren't working properly."

"SHUT UP!" Kronus screamed, suddenly rising to his feet.

"That's why you took me in the first place... to attempt to reverse engineer how the Mads programmed them!" continued Quatre. Thanks to his father's abuse wehn he was younger, he saw the blow coming even before Kronus moved. Muscles relaxed in preparation for it and he forced his still-healing body to take the blow limply and leveled a deadly glare on the madman.

"Katoru's right," Hiiro said with a smugness he didn't feel. "You don't know how to program them properly, do you?! They're killing the kids by sapping their fragile little bodies of the very nutrients they need to survive in a vain attempt to reproduce!"

Kronus turned away from Quatre and landed another kick to Trowa's supine form. Hiiro and Quatre watched in horror as Trowa stopped screaming and his eyes went blank, all personality leaving them.

In the sudden silence of their shattered link, Quatre went berserk. His vision went white with rage and grief and he launched himself at the madman without a single thought for his own safety. He never heard the shots that stopped the first bodyguard, nor did he see Hiiro launch himself at the second one.

By the time Zechs, Noin and Hiiro were finally able to pull him off of Kronus, the older man was nearly dead, bones shattered under fists backed by raw fury as Quatre literally broke Gaintz's face. Once he was torn off of Kronus, Quatre let his full attention fall on Trowa. Despite the drugs in his system, the acrobat laid there, silent and still. Emerald green eyes were half-opened and glazed, the vibrant life missing from their jeweled depths. Quatre reached out with bloodied, bruised hands and gently straightened out Trowa's limbs.

"C'mon, Trowa... please stay with me. Please. You're stronger than this," he said as he gathered his husband's inert form into his arms, tears of pain and sorrow burning their way down his cheeks as he started rocking back and forth.

"Katoru," stated Hiiro.

"HE'S STRONGER THAN THIS!" Quatre screamed, not taking his eyes off his husband. Hiiro nodded, unwilling to argue with his friend.

"Mein Gott! What the Hell happened in here?" Lady Une asked as she rushed in the still-open door, her eyes going round as she saw Trowa lying motionless in his husband's arms.

Zechs glanced up from monitoring Kronus. "Something happened to Trowa, which set Quatre off on Kronus. I can honestly say that he beat the living shit out of the bastard."

"Kronus shot Trowa up with drugs to induce pain at Katoru's last known tolerance levels," Hiiro elaborated unsteadily, and then glanced towards his shell-shocked friend. "Trowa's mind couldn't handle it. I think losing their link drove Katoru mad and he attacked Kronus blindly."

"I... I can't feel him anymore," Quatre murmured as he turned terrifyingly empty eyes on his husband. "No! No, don't do this, Trowa! You're stronger than this!"

"Katoru..."

"NO! He's stronger than this, Hiiro! He hides! He'll even hide from himself, if he has to! It's his survival mechanism!"

To Be Continued

Author's Notes: I'm not dead, I finally got a new laptop, a 17 inch Toshiba Satellite that doesn't crash constantly, my shoulders don't hurt from typing, and RoughDraft works wonderfully on Windows 10. Life is good.

Annotations:

[1] Trypanophobia is the fear of injections. In this timeline, Trowa spent nearly three years in an Alliance "orphanage." While he was there, the UESA doctors took blood samples from the children at least once a week and gave them daily shots of experimental drugs to dampen any Newtype abilities they might have had. They weren't gentle about it, either.

[2] In my rewrite of Gundam Wing, Quatre is something of a coding genius and he did, indeed, create the programming for the ZERO System on the insistence of Instructor H. He'd started working on it just before the series starts and was attempting to remove the "takes over the mind of emotionally compromised pilots" component while he and Trowa traveled together to New Edwards. You can also see Episode 21, Grief-Stricken Quatre, for details.

Next Chapter: Though beaten, Kronus managed to take out two Gundam pilots... or has he? Quatre attempts a desperate plan to rescue Trowa from himself, but what will it cost him?

Next, in the penultimate chapter of Gundam Wing - Let Slip the Gods of War: Eclipse.