Okay, you know the drill: They don't belong to me, I'm just borrowing them, and I'm not making any money at this.

Series time line, Ep. 19 & 20. After the pilots return to space and split up, disaster strikes Duo. Heero faces difficult decisions and discovers that he's more than just the weapon of the colonies. PG-13 for our boy Duo's potty mouth and some violence. Any reviews gladly accepted!!

Negative Factors

by Kamchatka

"Never, under any circumstances, sleep untethered in zero gravity," Professor G had told him, lectured him, harangued him. "And if you're alone in a ship, never sleep unless you're in a suit. Never."

But Duo Maxwell, at fifteen, had never learned to simply accept instructions. "Why not? I've never heard anyone say bad things happened to them when..."

G had whipped around so fast Duo would have sworn he'd seen the man's incredible nose actually cut the air. "Of course you haven't. No one has. If anything happens to a pilot in those situations he's dead. He isn't going to share anecdotes with anyone but the devil."

And so now, nearly a year later, Duo felt a little guilty as he tilted the seat in Deathscythe's cockpit to its maximum recline and tried to make his aching body as comfortable as possible. He was alone and he had no intention of exerting the effort to put on a vacuum suit. The HLV that surrounded him wasn't going to hit anything. Nothing was going to squash him to bug juice while he slept. So he compromised. No way was he going to fasten the safety harness. His shoulders and chest were still on fire from the beating his body had taken during the battle at the Singapore Space Port. He was just too bloody exhausted to get up and put on a suit. So he fastened the simple lap belt around his middle and considered himself secured.

G could probably have given a good reason why he shouldn't dry swallow a couple of heavy duty pain relievers before drifting off, too. Duo shrugged and decided he wasn't going to make the effort to try to remember any. One, two. Bitter, bitter, bitter.

Checking the HLV's supply levels before blasting off would have been standard operating procedure, but he'd hardly launched into space under the best of circumstances. It was way too late to do anything about it when he found the water tank was all but empty and that he was the only edible thing on the little ship. Deathscythe's reservoir was full, but it was small. No one expected to be confined to a gundam for days at a time.

God, he was thirsty. He'd made himself settle for a few sips. He didn't figure he'd be aboard the HLV for very long, but it made sense to conserve his very limited water supply. He'd have another drink when he woke up. No washing, though, and damn, he smelled like he hadn't changed clothes for a week instead of a day. Nothing like a nice, prolonged battle with the Ozzies to make a guy stink. Well, fuck it. He couldn't be more than ten or eleven hours from L2. And he planned to use the time sleeping, not sniffing his armpits.

It would have been nice to be able to wash his face, though, especially since he seemed to be getting a nice fat zit on the bridge of his nose. Front and center. Yep, there were definite drawbacks to being fifteen. In the end, he'd settled for a medicated band-aid, and hoped he didn't look like a rotting leper when he woke up...

Relena Peacecraft was following him across an outdoor basketball court, yanking his braid and lecturing him on personal hygiene when the claxon warning of hull contact ripped him from sleep. Shit! He'd never let G know he'd been right. He barely had time to secure the safety harness around him and start Deathscythe's engines before the sensors told him that there were half a dozen OZ Leos surrounding the HLV and more closing in. At least they were Leos, big old, slow-moving Leos.
God love 'em.

"Now the naked lady jumps out of the cake!" he cackled as his beam scythe cut through the HLV's skin like butter. Within seconds, he'd reduced the Leos to rubble. But before he had time to gloat, he saw more suits approaching, a single Leo preceded by a group of new models of some sort. They looked like black Tauruses, but there was something odd about the cockpit area.

"I'll be glad to fight a new model," he considered. "But get too close to me and you'll die."

Okay, great. It had sounded good for the flight recorder, but it was immediately apparent that he was in trouble. He was so exhausted it felt like he was swimming through molasses and he hurt. He'd been asleep long enough that the pain medication had worn off and his muscles had stiffened up.

He hadn't had any difficulty with the Leos, but these new suits were incredible. He'd never seen anything so fast. They flashed in and out of his field of vision like shooting stars, and he couldn't seem to land a single effective shot, even while they hit him again, and again, and again, plastering him back against the seat, helpless even to attempt controlling the gundam. Deathscythe reeled and careened through the darkness, and when the mad tumble ceased, it hung crookedly against the stars like a giant insect impaled on a collector's board.

"Power level zero," Duo panted. "If Deathscythe's dead I don't have long to live. But I won't die for nothing." His hand hovered above the closed compartment that concealed the self-destruct switch as the OZ mobile suits came closer. He didn't want to copy Heero, but he knew he was no match for those intimidating new mobile suits. Besides, it was obvious that OZ was more interested in his capture than his death. If they'd wanted him dead, the strange black Tauruses could have eliminated him immediately. He knew he couldn't allow himself to be taken, but he'd wait until the last possible moment and take as many with him as he could.

Then that sneaky bastard hanging back in the Leo fired again. Duo rode the shock wave that blasted away his gundam's beam scythe and right arm, tossed around in his seat like a rag doll despite the harness. When everything finally stopped spinning, the cockpit was dark and absolutely silent. And the suits were closing in again. Sing songing words chased each other through his mind.

This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends...

Oh, shut up, shut up, shut UP!

...not with a bang, but a whimper.

Resignation came sneaking up out of his bones. With a whimper. Shit. Why did I have to pay attention in that class? Thank you, Sir, Mr. Eliot, Sir."

"No whimpers for us, buddy," he said aloud. That was going to sound weird on the flight recorder, he mused. Provided anyone ever found it. Oh well, let 'em wonder.

Duo straightened in his seat against the pull of exhaustion and pain. Whoever had designed those restraining harnesses had not been thinking of comfort. He'd worn that particular pattern of bruises a few times before, but this set wasn't ever going to have a chance to get good and colorful.

A glance at the main screen confirmed that the circle of black suits was creeping into optimum range. "Let 'em come," Duo managed to chuckle. Join me on my merry little trip to hell.

"It's time to end this," he breathed.

I don't want to die.

It's the only way. At least it will be clean and fast. Well... fast, anyway. Not even enough left to bury. Just little bits of Duo drifting around in...

Will you shut the fuck UP and just DO it?

Heero did it. You gonna let him upstage you?

Of course, Heero wasn't in space. And he lived. That ain't the way this is going down. You're not even wearing a space suit...

Thanks for the advice, G. Maybe I should have followed it.

The suits were close enough. Yes, if he did it now, he'd take them all out with him. And no one would ever know how fucking scared he'd been.

Now, dammit!

Adrenalin jolted through his body like an electrical shock. Ride the high, buddy, ride it right on out of here.

"Let's go to hell together!" he roared and pounded the switch.

Nothing happened.

It took him a moment to realize that he was still alive, that the mobile suits were still hovering around him like a flock of black vultures. He smacked the switch again. Nothing.

He couldn't have hit it again if he'd wanted to. He was shaking too hard and the tidal wave of adrenalin had moved on, leaving him weaker than he'd ever felt in his life.

"No more luck for me," he muttered. "Even the self-destruct is broken."

His heart was pounding so hard he could barely breathe. It was surely going to burst. Hearts just weren't made to beat that fast. Great example he was going to make. Died of fright. Couldn't even hold it together to self-detonate.

At least I didn't piss my pants.

"Or maybe it was good luck..." he thought, and he'd have laughed if he'd had the energy. But the roaring in his ears took over, and he sagged into the harness, and the world tilted off into the distance.

The heat woke him. He was flat on his back with his legs in the air. Nice, dignified pose, that. Shit. He was still strapped into his seat in Deathscythe.

Damn, it was hot. What was the story with that? The air was stale, and his mouth was dry as sandpaper. He tried to pull himself upright. Gravity was not his friend. Gravity? Bright artificial sunlight illuminated the cockpit. His eyes wouldn't focus well enough to see clearly, but there seemed to be someone standing directly over him. Outside. Where the hell was he?

The nasty whine of a high intensity beam torch set his teeth rattling. Whoever was out there wanted in, and that wasn't good. If they didn't know how to get in, they didn't belong in. He released the harness and rolled out of the seat. If he could just make it to the emergency hatch before they sawed into the cockpit...

But he was dizzy and disoriented, trying to walk on the back wall of the cockpit... and up wasn't where up belonged... And what the hell was an OZ soldier doing in the wrong-side-up cockpit of his gundam? The guy was wearing a gas mask and holding a big ass machine pistol, which he was very discourteously pointing at Duo's face.

"Well, fuck you!" Duo huffed and charged the Ozzie.

The young soldier was caught off guard. Nobody was stupid enough to actually charge a machine gun. His split second of hesitation cost him his next promotion and a week in the hospital when Duo's head butt caught him in the belly and slammed him into the gundanium cockpit wall. Duo had almost gotten to the gun when rough hands from above grabbed his braid and pulled. He was yanked off his feet and hauled into the air, swinging from his own hair, kicking madly, and that lent a whole new dimension to feeling like a jackass.

Then he was face down on a pair of highly polished boots, outside, in the daylight, on the chest of his supine gundam, surrounded by a freaking forest of boots. He scrabbled off on hands and knees, scrambling hopelessly for a break.

"Little son of a bitch!" someone cursed, followed immediately with a shout of, "No! Don't kill him." Then a steel-toed boot caught him in the ribs, and there was no air, no air anywhere, even though they were outside, there was just no air, no air, no air...

The toes of his boots were dragging over rough tarmac and the vibration rattled up his spine to his head, where very bad things were happening. His head was stuffed with something squishy and obnoxious, and it weighed a ton, and he couldn't even lift it to see where he was. Not that it mattered. One place was a whole lot like another when you hung suspended between two of OZ's finest and you were too beat up to lift your head, let alone get your feet under you to put one in front of the other, and your arms felt like they were being wrenched out of their sockets, because these guys weren't the least bit interested in how you were going to review their conduct.

Someone was talking. Huh? No, Not to him... Going on about how the enemy of the people had been captured... Great. Made the news. He opened his eyes just long enough to see the macadam swirling beneath him, but it was still too long. His stomach lurched and he spewed a quite satisfactory amount of bile onto the legs and boots of the soldier on his right. Not half bad for somebody who hadn't eaten in God only knew how long.

"Dirty little bastard!" the guy roared.

Duo stifled the urge to laugh when he heard the disgusted newscaster's voice yelling, "Cut! Don't transmit that!" But he didn't have long to celebrate his little victory, because before he even realized he was falling, the pavement came up and smacked him in the face.

~~~

The boy who had called himself Heero Yuy for most of the past year sat in a public library in the largest city in the L2 colony cluster and listened to a computerized history text tell him pretty lies. He knew that his namesake, the legendary colonial leader, had been assassinated in this very city 20 years earlier. But the computer before him confidently stated that there had been no significant political events in AC 175. The revisionists had interesting interpretations of what constituted "significant".

He typed notes on his laptop, looking for all the world like what he would have claimed to be, a high school student doing his lessons. The name printed neatly on the covers of the notebooks by his side was "Duo Maxwell". The ruse both satisfied and amused Heero, though he would never have admitted the extent of that amusement to himself.

He'd attended classes with Maxwell for two weeks back on Earth, and while the other boy had proven surprisingly intelligent, he was a haphazard and lacksidasical student, more prone to flirting with the girls and playing games than actually cracking a book. Since that time, Heero had registered as Duo Maxwell whenever a mission, or lack of a mission, sent him under cover as a student. If anyone ever put those transcripts together Duo Maxwell was going to have a hard time explaining his academic career.

He was still writing when the normal quiet of the library was interrupted by several people exclaiming in surprise. Heero looked up to see them gathered around the news feed vid screen in the center of the room. When he saw what they were watching, he could only stare. Two OZ officers walked across the screen, faces grim. Suspended between them was a battered and semi-conscious Duo Maxwell.

Heero swallowed hard against the nearly physical shock of dismay and... concern? No, that was stupid. Maxwell was a soldier fighting for the same side. Nothing more.

I am the weapon of the colonies. A weapon does not feel. A weapon has no friends. Friends can only compromise a weapon's effectiveness.

The broadcast was coming from C-1102, only a few hours away. How the hell had Maxwell managed to get in so much trouble so fast? It had only been two days since they'd all made it back into space. 04 had been the one to worry about: he'd destroyed his gundam and barely made it off planet in a shuttle. 05 had made contact briefly before striking out on his own again. Trowa had headed for one of the L3 colonies. But good old 02 had flown straight into disaster.

He wanted to hit something, anything that would break into a thousand satisfying pieces, but he couldn't call attention to himself, and he willed the impulse away. This was no time for stirring up more trouble. All negative factors had to be eliminated.

He stared at image on the screen, his expression dead neutral. Duo Maxwell had just become a negative factor.

~TBC~