Part: Thirteen
Title: Loyalty
Genre: Gundam Wing
A/N: No, I still have no idea when we get Wufei back, and for that I apologize. The end of this story is coming fast, and I'm not sure if we find out what's happened to him in it. Don't worry though, I've been itching to write out what has happened to Wufei, and I think part of the reason that I can't bring him into the ending of this story, because it is winding down, I'm almost sad to say, is because he needs to be able to tell how his mission went in the same narrative style that Sally has gotten to tell hers. The title comes from a song written by Me'Shell N'DegeOcello.

***

    In the morning, I wake with a terrible headache. The light coming through the blinds hurts my eyes, but I make an effort to get out of bed. Slowly but surely the chill of the morning wears off as I drift through my apartment, making coffee by boiling water to put in the instant coffee mix - no where near the same, but still better than nothing, taking my morning shower, and making my breakfast.

    As I pass by the front door, possibly for the third time, and, for the first time, I notice the large white envelope that’s lying on the hallway rug. Slowly, with my bath robe wrapped around me and the collar of the fluffy white terrycloth thing turned up to ward off the lingering chill in the air, I bend down to lift the envelope. There’s no address label on the front, just my name in neat, laser printed scrip, Po Sai Lei. In the upper left hand corner there’s a printed logo, Winner Corp.

    St. Quatre strikes again. Anytime there’s something horribly wrong with the world, you can be nearly assured he’ll be there to step in. I’ve seen it happen before… at disaster areas, places that governments had turned their backs on and where the Preventers had no jurisdiction… suddenly there’d be a flurry of political activity, and somehow Winner Corp’s relief department was on the scene.

    Do-gooder Quatre, always dependable and reliable in event of a tragedy, but not quite so entirely good, are you, Quatre? Just as human and selfish and greedy as the rest of us. I saw his eyes when I said Jean was his new boyfriend. I saw the way that he looked at Jean when he got into the elevator. Even the best of them can get jealous, can be human.

    Quatre’s just like all the rest of us.

    I am both gladdened and saddened to know that.

    I open the envelope, heading into the kitchen where my coffee and the morning paper are waiting. I nod to myself. Plane tickets, a flight to Beijing and arrangements for a car to take me to my father’s home. Thinks of everything.

    I check the date on the plane tickets.

    Sure enough. Tomorrow morning at eleven am. I head back into my bedroom and take out my remaining luggage. I didn’t spend enough time at headquarters yesterday to find out about my luggage, or the clothes that were in them. So instead of taking one large bag I get to take three or four smaller ones.

    I dress first, pulling on a pair of jeans and a tee shirt before sticking my nearly numb toes into my slippers, and then I glance out the window. The snowing has stopped, and the city no longer looks romantic to my eyes, as it did two nights ago when I took my cab ride through the city to get back here.

    Instead the snow is covered in the grime and oil of the streets, and sits piled on the sidewalk, like dirty igloo walls between the cars and the people. Separation.

    My throat catches at that thought. I need to focus on other things or I’m not going to be able to function. I hadn’t realized, after so much time, how much I rely on him, rely on him just to be able to function from day to day, to be able to work out things, and think things through…

    How much I need him.

    I remember how shocked I was, during the Mariemaia Incident, when Lady Une called me into her office.

**

    “Preventer Water,” she addressed me in the most formal manner she has with me, and that alone was enough to set me on edge. But the atmosphere of her office, the dim lighting, the silence that made the near noiseless footfalls of my boots on carpet seem to echo in her office, and the melancholy seeming to radiate from her as I entered her office with a crisp salute, that almost made me turn tail and flee. “I have some difficult news for you… something that I need you to know before you and Preventer Fire head out.”

    “Ma’am?” my voice was timid, child-like. Everyone has different manners of coping with fear, one of mine has always been regression into a childlike state, when I’m on my own. No Peacemillion, this office with it’s high ceiling and its red carpet, no jovial, smiling Gundam pilot to keep my wits about me…

    “We’ve just gotten word from our agents already inside the group… it seems Wufei Chang is with them,” Une said, words gentle, voice soft and yet shouting in my ears.

    I was shocked, unable to form a decent response. Something in me shattered, some part of me that had been signed away to him the moment I saw his despondent visage that day in China. Something he took from me in that instant that I hadn’t quite recognized yet, a part of me that I drew strength from when all things were hopeless and the world seemed to be getting dimmer… The very idea that he could be working against this peace we had all fought so hard… fought so hard together to attain… the strength I had drawn from the memory of the wounded warrior was snatched from me, ripped out like the cornerstone to a foundation.

    But I did not break.

    “Preventer Water, are you still willing to accept this next assignment?” Une’s voice told me everything I needed to know about it. She thought I would turn down the assignment, because of this news. But she was wrong.

    My father mentioned that he and I have a very similar spirit. In the past, I had always taken that for granted, and scorned it. But I began to understand, a little, what he meant by that compliment. And another phrase that my mother used to say to us when my father was absent from home, “Not all strength can come from others. It must also come from within, because some day you will be alone, and then what good will the strength of others do you?”

    “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, maintaining a rigid stance. Une both loathed and was comforted by our military background, back then. She wasn’t sure how to handle us if not with the strictest formality, and yet she tempered it with kindness, and grace. It was the personality she had inherited from her family, the one she had come back to towards the end of the first Eve War, shortly before Treize’s death. “I will accept the assignment.”

    “You do recognize that you must consider him your enemy?”

    I nodded, once, and Une let out a relieved sigh, motioning me to go on about my preparations. I still had some faith in Wufei, even then, but for the sake of my duty, to ESUN and the Preventers, I had to treat him as I would any opponent.

**

    It is only now that I can relate that confidence, that trust I had in him, though he had gone astray, to the faith and trust that Lucrezia had in Milliardo when he was working with the White Fang. I did not, at that time, understand why Wufei had chosen to do what he did, but I was certain that not only was there a reason, but that in his mind that reason was worthy of the betrayal of all he had previously known.

    And now, now… I think to myself, now, when he needs my faith and support… perhaps even for me to rescue him physically, I cannot. Somehow there seems more danger in his current situation, that I know so little of, than there was in either war. The light shining brightly in the darkness, the light that shined despite itself, seems at the point of extinguishing… and I must walk away from it.

    Wearily, I pack. There is nothing left for me to do here. London is but a large, empty city with him absent from it, where I have no friends, and no family. There is nothing for me here, nothing holding me to what I once found so important. Nothing…

    Nothing here matters to me.

    Perhaps… perhaps I do understand why he chose to betray his principles afterall.

*

    By the time my hunger catches up to me, and I’ve looked through the wide array of frozen food in my freezer, I realize that there is nothing here that I want to eat. Or at least nothing I want to eat after it’s nuked to perfection. I cross to the small cork board next to the phone, looking at the menus for various types of take out, and as I pull off one for Thai, a card falls to the floor.

    I lean down to pick it up, and read the name and the tight, exacting script of numbers on it. Heero. My mind tastes the word, bittersweet, and I glance up at my clock. Not too late to give him a call.

    I suppose I can’t say I have no friends whatsoever in this city, quite the contrary, just not ones that anyone can claim to see on a regular basis. I dial the phone number, and it rings several times.

    Finally, he answers, “Yes?”

    I am tempted to retort something trite, like Wufei’s query of ‘don’t you ever answer the phone with a greeting?’, but I don’t. That’s not the relationship that Heero and I have with one another. “Hi, Heero.”

    “Sally,” he says, not sounding too surprised, and though he is not angry to hear my voice, there is something slightly… sad in his voice.

    “I’m sorry I couldn’t be him for you, Heero,” I say quietly, and then I continue in a firmer voice, “But I’m leaving town tomorrow morning, and I-”

    “You don’t want to be alone right now?”

    I pause for a moment, narrowing my eyes, “Actually, I was going to say I don’t want to buy groceries that will only go to waste. What did you mean by that?”

    He lets out a long suffering sigh, and I can almost see him rake a hand through his wild, flyaway hair as he says, “I heard about Wufei and Trowa.”

    And Trowa? What does he mean ‘and’ Trowa? “W-what did you hear?”

    “That the situation on L1 has escalated, and they’ve been considered MIA by the Preventers.” His voice is empty, sounding much like the one time I heard him repeating a mission’s parameters to himself just before he muttered, ‘ninmu kanryo.’ It startles me, and unnerves me to hear him use such a voice. “No, Sally,” his voice is kind, and I can hear the sad smile in his words as he speaks them, “There’s nothing I can say to comfort you. The truth will… out, they say. And… I won’t lie to you. Wufei may not be coming back.”

    I hang up the phone. How easily he saw through me, straight to what I wanted. Noin was right, I’m not very good at keeping friends, and the ones I have can see right through me. I didn’t call Heero because I felt any great desire to see him, to talk with him, but rather because I had a great desire to see someone, and to hear someone’s voice other than my own. Heero, of all the people I know in this city, is one of the few that I can trust with everything. I have had to, and… I choose to.

    One would think that Quatre, with his kindness and his gentleness, would be the person I would choose to confide in, after so much time, but instead I chose the silent and morose Heero Yuy. I blink. When I think of him that way, I feel that I am no better than Relena, who took so many years to settle whatever score she felt she had with him, to understand whatever it was she felt for him. For a long time, she saw him as surly and misguided, and she wanted to change him, to make him a better person.

    I think he has done a good enough job of that himself.

    I leave the kitchen and put on my coat. This may be my last night in London, for a while. I think I would like to spend it remembering things that make me feel happy. I lock the apartment after me as I head out the door.

*

    The same restaurant that he took me to, so many weeks ago now, it seems, but in my mind I know that it was only three. Strange to think that, now, as I look back on it. It seems so far away, and the person I was then, the understanding I had, seems someone entirely alien to me. The restaurant’s proprietor gives me a warm greeting and offers to show me to the same table I had last time.

    Will my friend be joining me?

    I shake my head, stubbornly refusing to give in to the sting that thought brings to my eyes. No. Wufei will not be joining me this time. I have to face the idea that Wufei may not be joining me ever again.

    He hands me a menu and heads off to stand near the door again, waiting for his next customer to arrive. The waiter comes out and takes my order for a drink. I should’ve brought a book.

    It’s going to be a long, lonely night, preceding a long, lonely journey to a house of sorrow. I have nothing to bring to my father anymore but myself. Not the glad tidings or news of his remaining son, no hopes of grand children, or a husband for myself, and no word from the woman he spent so much of his life with. At last, it will be just the two of us facing off, and getting out what we have felt prudent to silently feel towards one another, but never say.

    A long trip indeed.

    The waiter brings my drink, and an appetizer, which, he nods towards the proprietor, he mentions is courtesy of the house.

    Either he’s hitting on me, or he wasn’t nearly as angry about Wufei and I spending the entire evening in the restaurant, as the waiter mentioned might be the case. Whichever the truth, I nod my thanks to the man and order my food, taking an occasional bite of the appetizer as I do so.

    It tastes good, tangy and sweet on my tongue.

    Something Wufei would like.

*

    I step off the plane in China. The Beijing airport is packed, filled to the brim like airports on television. The last time I flew in or out of this particular civilian airport was during the Eve Wars. I had come ‘home’ to China in order to help out the rebel groups attempting to free the country from the oppressive leadership, and I wanted to come in unnoticed. At the time, with my face on record as being an Alliance officer, that was easier said than done.

    I still remember the outfit I wore. A yellow sun dress with big white flowers in print all over it. I had a white umbrella, my hair pulled high on my head, hanging down my neck in banana curls. I wore makeup, and looked like a real foreigner, someone rich enough to be wearing such a hideously ridiculous get up like what I had on. Bao, who came to pick me up, took a picture of what he then called “the new Sally”. I still have it, creased and scuffed, bent up, tucked away in my favorite book, which is in the bottom of my carryon.

    Today I look much different. My long sandy hair is pulled back in a traditional bun on the back of my head and my clothes, a dark gray pants suit with a knee length coat, look reserved and conservative. All these things were planned just as carefully as the yellow sun dress with its ridiculous accessories of parasol and purse. Personally, I think it makes me look lonelier, wearing this, than I did playing the offensive American.

    I’m easily a head taller than most of the crowd, but not quite tall enough to stand out amidst them. In the years that have passed since the Colonies went up into the sky, there’s been enough of a mixture among the population on Earth that the historically shorter nationalities have just about evened out height wise. So the average of human height is just over five-foot-seven. Wufei is six feet, I’m five-nine. Last time I saw Duo he was five-six, but then that was years ago now and I can’t say if he’s grown more or not. Trowa, Mr. Neanderthal himself, is almost six-three tall, while Quatre is the smallest man standing at five-three.

    It’s odd that, of all of them, he’s the one that didn’t grow more. When I saw Heero, he was about my height, I think, but then I don’t really remember too well. When you’re around Heero you’re not focusing on how tall he is.

    All around me, the chatter of native language creates a low hum around me. The air in the terminal is slightly better than that on the plane, but still it is stuffy and crowded. Most of the population in China thinned after the colonies went up, the poorer people and the upper classes alike moving up to seek out what fortune the stars held for them amidst the stars themselves. The air here now still reeks of people, and I must imagine that something never change, but endure, and stay the same. I am lost in a bubble of foreign language, not to the area, but to me. Some phrases, ones that I understand and syllables that I can’t, jump out at me. It’s all right though.

    After three years, I’ve come home. And I am, again, a stranger.

    If I was ever not a stranger, that is.

    I go to the luggage carousel and get a cart, piling my bags on it so I can better maneuver with a slightly sore shoulder. My leg, still feeling slightly sensitive, is almost completely healed, now, but I still feel it twitch from time to time, like the skin is trying to flick off heat. Coupling the two injuries together makes navigating the sea of activity that my country calls a major international airport enough to keep my mind off my destination.

    I head out to the street and hail a cab. The driver hops out and helps put my suitcase, and my hang up bag into the trunk. The carryon comes with me into the cab. Fumbling, I spit out a garbled destination in Mandarin. I’d try for Cantonese, but I don’t think that calling my cab driver an idiot, telling him goodbye, or telling him he’s bullshit will do me any good.

    I called ahead on my cell phone to a neighbor’s home, and was assured that my father still lives in the same house from my childhood, but no longer leaves. After a night at a hotel, because it’s much later here and jet lag has it’s evil claws into me, I’ve a long, bumpy ride out into the country and my father’s house. Not one I relish taking, but something that must be done.

    As I sit in the back of the cab, I think that there are always such unpleasant things that must be done.

    The same thing I thought to myself during the Incident, when I had to infiltrate the base on X-18999, and I passed him in the hallways.

**

    I had been pretty lucky, making it as far into the group as I had, and into the base. I had passed him in the hallways once, when he was escorting Mariemaia to some large meeting that all the combat soldiers had to attend, but neither of us showed any recognition, and so I thought that either he did not remember me, or that he was choosing to ignore my presence. Unfortunately, neither was the case.

    I had just finished my reconnaissance on the storage cells, and was about to move to the control room to unlock the cells. Trowa had the more difficult task, but he was better prepared to be in the ranks of Mariemaia’s soldiers than I was, and so it couldn’t be helped. I stepped around a corner, and found him heading down it towards me. Rather than turn away and blow my cover, or perhaps provoke him into action, I calmly continued down the hallway.

    He stopped a few feet away from me, one hand on the hilt of his sword. His eyes, darker than recently, nearly obsidian at the time, gazed at me coldly, heartlessly. He calculated me with those eyes, and whether or not I would be a threat to his goals. I stared back, pausing just out of his range of attack, without a jump or lunge involved, anyway, and stared back evenly.

    His eyes asked a question. Will you stop me?

    I am not sure how mine answered, but I know that he was not my objective. He seemed unsatisfied with the look I was giving him, and so, after a long, tense moment in which I was concentrating much more on simply breathing than planning how to defend myself in case he attacked, I slowly shook my head.

    I knew that if he decided to attack me, I’d be dead in seconds.

    I am not that sort of a fighter. I can shoot, I can react, I can plan.

    But there is something deadly about Wufei, as with the other pilots, a lack of hesitation in killing, in simply acting out what the situation requires, that I have never been able to grasp. Thankfully, in a way. I never want to be able to kill with such surety of action, I never want to be able to act with that sort of conviction.

    And apparently, to him, that makes me weak. It is a weakness I can accept, one I am wholly comfortable with, then, if that is what weakness is. He made no response, I wonder that they must have thought there was a glitch in the cameras, we were so still, and then we were moving again, walking past one another.

**

    There are always things that must be done. Unpleasant and pleasant things. Situations must be face, eventually. The truth will out, as I am fond of quoting when I find myself in a situation such as this one. At the hotel so soon…

    New buildings in Beijing. Nothing new in that concept. There are always new things here… as everywhere in the world known to man, colonies and earth and especially the project Noin and her… and her husband are working on. I wipe my eyes, feeling a strange tickle there.

    Tears.

    What would you think of me now, Wufei?

    I sigh. Probably very little.

***