Part: Fourteen
Title: Cold Facts
Genre: Gundam Wing
A/N: Sadly, Wufei won't be joining us for the end of this series. In addition, there's only two more parts, one chapter, 15, and the epilogue. 

***

    The drive up is proving to be uneventful, and long. But the roads have definitely improved since I was last up this way, so it was more of a scenic tour of my old homeland than anything else. The trip reminded me much of the last time I was here, except the trees glistened in the light of day rather than with the starlight and the moon.

    In five years, they’ve managed to remove the wreckage of the last two wars quite well, and as the debris falls from the sky periodically, our main reminder of the Eve Wars that haunt the recent past, they are taken away quickly. Sometimes, the reminders of the wars are small enough that they fall to the ground and lie hidden. We stumble upon them when we least expect them.

    Like now.

    I pull over to get some gas for the car, there’s a small town here, and I’m shocked to realize I recognize this place. Of course the store window’s long since been replaced, and there’s no trace of the soldiers that Wufei and I fought here, but it’s all achingly familiar. The people seem happier, though, which is to be expected, and there are children playing near the river.

    I smile.

    It’s things like this that make me realize why I bothered to fight in that war so long ago, rather than just surviving as a civilian after the Alliance was taken over, and why I continue to work to keep the peace now, when I could safely go back to being just another woman in the press of the crowd somewhere. It’s something we sometimes forget, when we put on the uniforms we wear to work, and fight through the daily swamp.

    We’re all just human beings, in the end.

    I head inside the gas station to pay for the gas I’ve just taken, and I see my name on the front of the newspaper that the cashier is reading. There’s an article about what happened on L2. The Commissioner of the Weapons Regulations has managed to start the case against the Exian corporation, and is asking for anyone with information regarding the case to step forward.

    I swear, sometimes the bureaucracy makes less sense than the President. Relena has never been much of a genius when it comes to things like this. Does the Commissioner honestly think that the terrorists that Exian had dealings with are going to step forward and admit to it? Does Relena?

    “Twenty-two,” the cashier says, not bothering to look up from the newspaper.

    I dig into my pocket, and drop the appropriate amount on the counter.

    Slowly, the man lowers his newspaper, and for a moment, I think I’m going to pass out. The first thought that comes to mind is that the man before me is Wufei, but after closer inspection, I realize that it is not, could not be him. The man before me is old, older than Wufei by probably twenty years, with gray streaks in his hair.

    He nods politely to me, respectfully, but detached, and I back out of the station and move quickly back to my rental car.

    I don’t know what it was about that man, but he blurred the edges between himself and Wufei. I couldn’t be sure about it, without seeing him move, but that man had the same bearing as Wufei, the same look about his dark eyes, the slant to his chin as he nodded to me.

    I get in the car. No time to think about that now. If I don’t start driving again, I’m not going to make it home before the sun goes down. And I need to be home…

*

    The house, with its high exterior wall around the main grounds, is back from the road. I pull up and have to get out into the brisk, early evening air to open the front gate and drive the rental car up towards the house. I pull the coat closer around me as I do so. The gate is a little entrenched in the dirt, I can tell it hasn’t been used in some time. As I approach the house, I can tell that no one is inside.

    The voice on the phone clearly said that my father still lived in the same house.

    Cautiously, half afraid of the house with its tall, wide windows and panels, I climb the steps to the front door of the house and take out my set of keys, trying a few before I find the proper one to open the front door.

    If I didn’t know that my father was dying, I would think the only thing of him left was his spirit haunting this house. I push open the door, and find that the light switch does not work. If he is very sick, which I am certain he is, and has been moved to a hospital, which I am also certain he has been, then of course he would not have paid the electric bills for the house, and it would’ve been shut off.

    No one is left to come back here, now. Mother is gone, Samuel died long ago, Lin… I swallow, hard, my mind thinking about my older brother. He was always kind to me, and I him. Like so much else, I find it hard to believe that he is gone and I will never see him again.

    Outside, the sun dips down out of sight, leaving only the brilliance of the sunset to light the sky before the stars come out. It is too late to go somewhere else for the evening. I move through the house, with a purposeful twist of the flashlight on my keychain, and head in to the kitchen. Mother used to keep candles, in case the power went out. Our home, which has been in my father’s family for generations, went through many changes, but its remoteness and its isolation has remained the same. Most likely because we own so much land around it.

    I find the candles, sitting still in their wrapped box in the back of a linen drawer, and seek out candleholders. When the power went out, as children we would play in the shadows of the house, unafraid of whatever spirits might be lurking in the shadows. Now, as I light the first white candle and jam it into the wooden candleholder I’ve found, I don’t find the darkness so inviting.

    In the morning, I will have to find out what hospital my father was taken to, and make my way there. For tonight, I will sleep here, and see what can be done about getting it ready for him.

    If my father is dying, which he seems to know even himself, I won’t have him do it in a hospital, some impersonal building filled with impersonal people.

    Setting up several candles in the large living room, I turn to the door, heading out to the car once again to gather what out of my luggage I will need for the evening. I’m not quite brave enough, or strong enough, to head upstairs to where our bedrooms were. And something tells me they will be buried in dust and sealed up like tombs.

    I went to bed with the candles still burning, and woke up with the warmth of the sun on my face. I had nightmares, last night, and I must’ve rolled off the couch where I went to bed, because as I wake up I find that I’m sprawled on the thick, old carpet that covers the wood floor of the main room. I sit up, and my back, stiff, complains almost as loudly as my shoulder. The candles, all melted down, have only coated their candlesticks in their wax as they dutifully burned all night, and not onto the expensive furniture they are set on.

    I head into the kitchen, the bottle of antibiotics in hand, along with the pain medication. The water still works, probably because it comes almost directly from the river that flows across our property a few hundred yards out the back door. As children we used to swim in the river, during the summer, and our mother would take us on small boating excursions when father was far enough away not to chide all of us for childish behavior. He hated the idea of us in such a small vessel on the water.

    I take a glass from the cabinet and fill it with water, taking my medication in a single swallow. Setting foot in this house has made me feel the sorrow that I managed to ignore while I was in London, and while I was on L2. Being in these rooms, where my family once lived, reminds me how empty a house can be with no one inside it.

    My lack of appetite is a good thing, I find, because there isn’t any food in the house that’s easy to fix, because without electricity there’s nowhere to keep it good. Unimpressed by the kitchen, I head outside to check the mail box, and find it nearly full. I tuck the stack of envelopes under my arm and head back inside.

    Bills, bills, I sit on the couch and pull the blanket from last night over my shoulders. The house is relatively chill, despite the morning sunlight. I find the envelope I’m looking for, with a header from a hospital, and leave the rest of the mail sitting on the low table in front of the couch as I grab my jacket and head out to the car.

*

    The hospital is clean, and sanitary. It reminds me of a hundred other hospitals that I’ve seen since becoming a doctor, and living through two wars. I wonder, momentarily, if Wufei is in one, somewhere, right now. I step up to the reception desk in the main lobby.

    “English?” I ask, feeling a little ashamed of myself. I shouldn’t be coming here expecting them to change their customs for me. It’s a bad habit I’ve picked up from being a Preventer.

    But the young woman behind the counter nods, her dark hair falling in a cropped cut around her face. “Some,” she says, the word heavily accented.

    I offer her the envelope, and she nods, typing something into her computer. I stand there for a minute, feeling a little silly. I haven’t showered, or changed my clothes, since yesterday morning, earlier than this. I must look atrocious.

    “Po Zhou Shui is in room 1214,” she says, her words slightly clearer. “But he has yet to receive any visitors. May I ask your relationship with the patient?”

    I nod, and take out my wallet, “I’m his daughter,” I say, showing her my identification. “May I go up and see him?”

    She blinks, “Let me make you a pass,” she says, typing more into the computer and glancing at the ID. I look almost exactly like my photo, whether that’s good or bad I can’t really be sure, but the neither I nor the photo look much like my father. I take the small tag badge she hands me and follow her directions to the elevator. I’ll have to check in with the nurse’s station on the twelfth floor, and they’ll show me to my father’s room.

    I’ve learned to hate elevators, but the ride up is relatively swift, and uninterrupted. The only other passenger in the elevator car is a doctor wearing a long white coat that seems to be standard in civilian hospitals. We don’t speak, but he seems like he wants to. We get off on the same floor, and he heads down the hall to the rooms while I drift over to the nurse’s station.

    I offer up my badge to the young woman and she smiles at me, “Do you speak English?” she asks, whatever accent she has barely noticeable in her voice. I nod and she smiles warmly. “My name is Emily Zheng, nice to meet you Miss Po. Not all the other nurses here do, it’s glad to meet someone I can talk to comfortably. Mr. Po is down this way.” She rises and leads me down the hall. I follow a little sullenly, my shoes making noise against the over-clean tile floor in the hallway as we walk. “Since he hasn’t had any visitors, I try to look in on him whenever I can.”

    “Has he… said anything?”

    “When he’s awake, he speaks pretty clearly, but he’s been awake less and less recently. And when he’s been awake he’s been fairly delirious. He’s asked about you, and someone named… Lin?”

    “My brother,” I respond as we continue our trek down the hallway.

    “Will he be coming?”

    “No. I got word that he died…”

    She stops talking for a while, and turns her eyes back to look down the hall, so that when I glance at her sidelong, I see the profile of her face, and I find the most traditional thing about Emily is that her hair is pulled back, and obviously kept long. Finally, it seems, we reach our destination, and she steps aside.

    “In there,” she says, politely reaching forward and opening the door for me. “Dr. Richards should be in shortly to check on him for the day, and then they’ll bring his lunch around, but visiting hours are until six this evening.”

    I nod, and give her my muted thanks before I step inside, quietly closing the door behind me. The room is so deafeningly silent that I don’t even hear Emily’s footsteps as she heads back down to the nurse’s station. As my ears adjust to the lack of background noise, I hear the persistent beeping and hum of the machinery monitoring my father’s vital signs.

    His bed is on the center of the south wall, a large bank of windows on the east wall, there are three chairs on this side of the room, and on the other side, the curtain is drawn, the bed empty. There’s a small stand on the far side of the bed with a clock on it. A television sits high on a pedestal near the curtain, and the remote sits near the clock. There are two doors in the room, one for the closet, and the other obviously for the bathroom.

    I shrug out of my jacket, trying to keep quiet since he appears to be dozing, and lay it carefully across the back of a chair that is set to the right of the door. I move over towards the bed and take a quiet seat in the chair facing the window, and glance over my father’s body.

    While I was younger, I remember resenting him. He had many rules that I didn’t agree with, and we quarreled quite a bit. In all truth I was closer to my mother, though she was stricter with me. It is as though I knew how far I could push her, and with my father, there was nothing but an endless sea of gray to wade through. At times, he or I would blow up at one another. My friends, I remember, could not understand that about the two of us, and my brothers never commented on it. Apparently it was very unusual that I was allowed to blow up at my father.

    In other households, daughters who did so were beaten for such disrespect, but my father never raised a hand to me. My brothers often were struck for breaking the rules they were limited by, staying out late, going out with girls that neither mother or father had met, skipping martial arts practice or getting bad grades, but never me. Whenever I broke the rules, it was something in principle, rather than in practice. I always got good grades, I spent most of my time studying at home, I never went on dates unless father arranged them for me, and the few friends I did have were either cousins or came from families so close with our own that they might as well have been cousins. I did not get into trouble.

    I just asked too many questions. I never understood why I had to go on dates, or why we had to do things in the certain ways that they were done. And so my father, rather than patiently explain to me that the way things were done was tradition, responded in the only way he knew. He would get angry, and we would shout.

    The door opens, and I turn slightly to look at the person who has entered. The doctor from the elevator, with a sad little smile on his face.

    “I thought I’d see you again,” he says in unaccented English.

    “Well, here I am,” I respond, turning back to glance at my father. The clock next to the bed says that fifteen minutes have passed.

    “I’m Doctor Shin Richards, Miss Po.” He offers a handshake, which I do not bother to grant him. “If you wouldn’t mind stepping outside, I would like to inform you of your father’s condition. Emily and I spoke briefly, I’m glad that you’ve come.”

*

    “We’ve been running tests since he came in, but unfortunately your father’s condition is inoperable.”

    “What… what is his condition?”

    “Your father has cancer, Miss Po, the growth is in his lower back. Perhaps if we had known about it sooner, that is, if he had gotten the back pains he said he’d been having for a several years checked out, we could’ve done something, but…”

    I throw a glare at Dr. Richards. “So it’s his fault that he’s dying, you mean?” my words are cold, I cannot believe this man is telling me that my father let this happen to himself. And then, the cold fury that I feel dispels. “Several years?”

    “He claims he’s been having some pain in his lower back for four years, but that he went to a doctor only seven months ago because the pain got unbearable.”

    “Yes,” I respond, feeling only an empty sadness rather than any anger, “That’s something my father would do.” Hesitantly, I continue. “Three years ago, my mother died, and his relationship with Lin and I… was tenuous at best.”

    Thankfully, Richards doesn’t dwell on that. In a businesslike tone he says, “For now, all we can do is make your father comfortable, Miss Po, and we’ve been doing that since his final prognosis came in.”

    “Thank you,” I respond, turning slightly to see a nurse wheel a cart with his lunch in. Before I can say more Richards does.

    “I’ve got other rounds to make, and they’ll wake your father to have lunch now, so why don’t you go and see him while he’s awake, and I’ll stop by later?”

    I nod, and he smiles politely before turning and heading off down the hall. I follow the nurse, Emily again, as she wheels the cart into my father’s room, but I stop at the chair with my coat on it next to the door.

    “Mr. Po, it’s lunch time,” Emily says in clear English. My father stirs a little, and she helps him to sit up very carefully, propping pillows up behind his back. “I brought… well, I could never say your favorite, but it at least looks edible today.”

    He snorts, and I smile a little. Undoubtedly, that’s my father.

    “Any… news?”

    Emily purses her lips, and I see him narrow dark eyes at her a minute. “Actually, Mr. Po, your daughter is here.”

    I smile a little nervously, and step forward to stand at the foot of his bed. My father blinks, and for the first time that I can recall, there are tears in his eyes. He opens his eyes and I hesitantly step forward, leaning down to embrace my father for the first time in almost fifteen years. He smells of medicine and the papery hospital sheets.

    He is warm and alive. For now.

    I don’t bother to fight my tears, and he murmurs soothingly to me, his voice quietly whispering, “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” in broken English.

    “What else was there for me to do?” I reply, face buried in his shoulder, “Things are… hard.” He nods, and pats my hair patiently. In the background, I hear the door click shut quietly.

***