The Gundam Pilots' Wives, Part Two

A Halloween Horror Fic by Midii Une

"No, you can't see Mrs. Barton," the nurse/guard told Sally, Hilde and Dorothy. "She can't have any visitors except for her husband. She gets too upset. You do realize this is a psychiatric hospital, don't you?"

"Yes I realize that," Dorothy said, stepping forward. "Perhaps what you don't realize is that I am Dorothy Catalonia Winner and my husband is a major contributor to this hospital and Mrs. Barton is a close friend of mine. I insist that you let us in to see her immediately."

"I'm a doctor," Sally said, sensing that the guard was starting to waver. "We won't stay if we upset her too much, please this is very important."

"Alright," the nurse said. "I'll give you five minutes but that's it and do not upset her."

Midii sat huddled in a rocking chair in a white room with padding on the walls, her hair was a tangled mess and her eyes were large and staring.

"It's true," Dorothy gasped, aghast at the sight the other woman presented. "She is insane. We shouldn't have come here."

The place itself was a nightmare, Hilde thought, her eyes wide with sympathy and riveted on her best friend. How had she ended up like this? Midii had always been emotional but never crazy, never. This was a bad dream she had to wake up from soon, first Duo had started acting so strangely and now her best friend had lost her mind. She shuddered at the hellish sounds of shrieks and screams from the insane clientele beyond the walls of Midii's silent little room.

Sally noted that her wrists were bound to the armrests of the chair to keep her from hurting herself. Her tender heart ached at the sight of the other woman. There was something very wrong about this.

Midii didn't look up when she heard them enter, she was afraid to look, afraid to see Trowa with those horrible black eyes of his, eyes she saw before her all the time, even in her sleep and she couldn't escape.

Sally knelt down beside the chair as she heard a small sob of terror from the sad little figure in the rocking chair.

"Midii," she said softly and slowly. "It's me Sally. Hilde and Dorothy are here too. We came to see how you're doing. Can you talk to us."

Midii's head shot up so fast that Hilde and Dorothy stepped back a bit, startled by the sudden movement when she had been so still and quiet.

She looked at all of them, her eyes trying to catch theirs. "Help me," she pleaded. "Please find Trowa. You have to find Trowa. Where is he? Where's Trowa?"

Hilde joined Sally beside the chair and grasped Midii's hand comfortingly. "Midii, they told us he came to see you just a little while ago. Don't you remember?"

"NO! No, no," she screamed. "Not him. I need Trowa, when will he come back? That man isn't Trowa. He's not Trowa! Don't you see their eyes? They're not who they pretend to be. They're only pretending."

She started sobbing and pulling at her restraints as they watched her horrified.

"Help me, please help me," she screamed again. Tears of pity ran down Hilde's face and Dorothy turned pale as Sally ushered them out of the little room, leaving Midii alone again.

*****

Hilde was haunted by the visit to Midii. She wished they had never gone to see her. Her words had been frantic and her voice terrified but her eyes hadn't looked like an insane person's. She'd only looked horribly frightened and terribly desperate, desperate for someone to believe her.

Hilde curled up on the couch and fell asleep. In her dreams she could hear Midii's screams. "They're pretending," she'd said.

She came awake with a start, running a nervous hand through her midnight-black hair in the darkness that had fallen while she slept. Her heart was pounding from her unhappy dreams.

"I shouldn't have gone," she thought again. "I'll end up as crazy as she is. Oh Midii, forgive me. What happened to make you this way?"

Her friend's voice seemed to answer from far away. "Their eyes. Haven't you seen their eyes?"

She shook her head, she hated to believe it but Midii really was crazy, she had to be. She'd totally lost it somehow. Was it true as Trowa said that she'd always been prone to it?

She heard the door slam. Duo was home. She was going to make him talk to her she decided. She had to have some answers about everything, especially about what was going wrong in their relationship.

*****

"Who'd have thought Earth could ever look so good," Wufei said, looking at the distant blue planet out the observation window of the long-range space shuttle they were testing, so far with fairly disastrous results. They were more than a month off their scheduled return time.

Heero nodded tersely. "Strange though that we still haven't been able to establish contact with headquarters yet. That should've happened long before we even got Earth in our sights," he said thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Duo said. "Well, anyway, maybe we'll make it back in time for mine and Hilde's anniversary. Seven years of wedded bliss tomorrow guys. Lucky 7."

"Trowa," Quatre said, nudging his friend. "Is something wrong? Cheer up, we're finally going to get back."

Trowa was staring silently through his bangs at the floor. "I don't know what's wrong," he said flatly. "It's just a bad feeling that's all. I dreamed about Midii last night."

"Hey buddy, don't tell us about it, we've all been having little dreams like that ourselves. Tomorrow we can show'em just how much we missed those girls of ours. I can't wait to see the look on Hilde's face when we walk down that tunnel," Duo said, grinning wickedly.

"That's not what I meant. It was a nightmare. She was screaming my name and I couldn't get back in time," Trowa answered.

"In time for what," Quatre asked.

"I don't know," Trowa said.

******

"You can't go on another mission now," Hilde cried, looking at Duo in disbelief.

"Hilde, it's my job," he said shortly. He didn't want to talk to her anymore. It was bad enough that things had gotten so messed up with Midii Barton's AlphaEarth counterpart. She'd totally flipped out, but they'd had no choice. Poor Trowa felt like crap. They had to get the hell off this place before something else happened.

"Duo, you can't leave tomorrow," Hilde insisted. "It's our anniversary and I feel just sick about Midii. She's my best friend and seeing her like that today was very upsetting."

Duo sprang to alert and questioned her sharply.

"Trowa said she wasn't allowed to have visitors Hilde. How the hell did you get in to see her," Duo said. "Did she say anything?"

Hilde grew a little frightened of Duo's intense reaction.

"She didn't say anything really," she lied. "Just a lot of rambling."

She couldn't help studying Duo's eyes, but they were still the same reassuring shade of violet they always had been and she breathed an unconscious sigh of relief.

"But Duo," she continued. "I need you now, I need you to be with me. What's happened to us? What's wrong? How can you go off like this with these problems between us?"

She grabbed his arm and stared into his eyes, forcing him to look at her. "Duo, I love you. Stay with me. If you love me you'll stay," she said.

He shut his eyes and his face twisted almost as if in pain. Why was she pushing him so hard, tomorrow he'd be gone, it was so close he could touch it . . . angrily he shoved her away from him so hard that she landed on the floor and knicked her temple on the edge of the coffee table. She reached up with her fingers and felt blood.

"You're acting crazy Hilde," he said coldly. "Just get yourself under control, you never should have gone to visit that crazy chick in that hospital. If you don't watch it you'll end up as nuts as she is."

Hilde's blue eyes blazed furiously.

"You bastard," she shouted. "How dare you hit me and how dare you say those things about Midii. Aren't you Trowa's friend? She's my best friend, you know that! Can't you see how I'm hurting? I need you and you're acting like a first-class jerk. What's come over you?"

Duo gained control of himself, it was difficult. He sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. The tension of the last few weeks, the fear that he'd never get home to his own wife was tearing him up inside. He was blowing it here, blowing it big time.

"I'm sorry Hilde," he muttered. "Sorry about Midii, sorry about everything. I can't stay okay! I have to go on that mission and I don't want to talk anymore about it. I have to go tomorrow. Please just leave it at that."

He walked to the kitchen to get a cold rag for her cut. He bent close and pressed it to her head.

"Duo, please, please don't go," Hilde begged, forgetting her anger, seeing that he was distancing himself from her. She loved him, she didn't want to lose him. She wrapped her arms around his neck. "Make love to me, please," she whispered. "Please."

He pulled her close, returning her kiss. His hands roaming over her body and his breath coming in short gasps. "Hilde," he groaned softly, tumbling her to the floor beneath him.

*****

"Heero you can't go," Relena protested, her hand sliding protectively over her stomach in a gesture that was quickly becoming a habit. "How long will you be gone?"

"I don't know Relena," he muttered, despising himself for losing control, betraying Relena with this other. He just needed her in his life so damn much that this substitute had gotten to him.

Soon you'll be back with her, Heero thought. Soon, he promised himself. He'd confess his betrayal of course. On OmegaEarth there was no such thing as lies or tears. It was a perfect Utopia. How he longed to return, to get away from the subterfuges and horrors they'd been forced to commit on this strange planet so like their own.

*****

She'd gotten so upset when he'd visited her that afternoon that she'd gotten loose and almost jumped out the window in her frenzy to get away from him. And now she was like this. She would never get better they said, the effects of the emergency electroshock therapy were irreversible.

Trowa entered the room. Midii was sitting curled up in the corner, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. When she looked at him there was no fear in her eyes, or recognition either, the eyes of an innocent child.

"I'm going away tomorrow," he said. "Midii, I'm so sorry. Sorry I hurt you."

She looked puzzled. "Okay," she said finally. "Goodbye."

He pulled her unresisting form into his arms and felt her slight figure pressed against his and ran a hand through her tangled hair. As he walked away from her forever he felt a strange burning in his eyes and the wetness he'd felt on her face the first night was now present on his own.

"I don't like this place," Midii thought sadly. "I want to go home."

She went back to idly twirling her hair.

*****

"Duo," Hilde panted, opening her eyes and looking up into his. They were dark, dark with desire. Black, black eyes. Horrible eyes. She screamed in terror and shoved him off her. She scrambled away from him her hand feeling around on the floor for a weapon anything. Her hand hit the coffee table, in the drawer there was a gun.

"Hilde, wait, don't," Duo said, his black eyes staring at her. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger over and over even after the bullets ran out.

******

"Duo, quit goofing around," Heero said, rolling in his eyes in irritation as his best friend, the classic American showoff, played dead on the floor. "I know you're bored but no one's in the mood for one of your performances right now."

They were all just a little too anxious to get home. Trowa's mood giving them all a strange sense of foreboding. They had been gone for so long, with no communication with anyone on Earth or the colonies.

*****

"I'm leaving Dorothy. I've got to stop and pick up Duo on the way," Quatre said.

Dorothy was glad, glad to see him go. He'd been so painfully perfect, absolutely polite, holding the door for her, pulling out her chair, bringing her flowers, but never looking at her while he did any of those things. Whenever she touched him he flinched as if her touch burned him. He stayed late at the office and left the house before dawn. What difference did it make really if he left for space or not? He wasn't really here with her anyway. It was as if he'd never actually come home from that last mission.

Quatre didn't love her anymore.

Quatre saw the tension in her posture, the dejection and hurt on her face, although she tried so hard to hide it in her aristocratic way. He sighed. He hoped everything would work out for her at least. He'd made it through somehow and hopefully the damage done, at least on his part, had been minimal.

"You're going to be alright," he whispered to her, keeping his eyes on the floor as he'd been doing these past weeks. He tenderly reached out and brushed back the curtain of her long, pale hair and glanced at her finally, before grabbing his flight bag and rushing out the door.

*****

Hilde edged closer to Duo's body on the floor. What had she done? Midii's crazy words had pushed her over the edge herself, she'd thought she'd seen something wrong with his eyes. She'd killed him. Killed Duo.

"Duo," she whispered hopefully, her hands and voice shaking in the aftermath of what she'd done. There was no answer, no movement, he was dead. She dared to look at his face and covered her mouth to stifle a scream. It hadn't been a hallucination, his eyes were a deep black, lifeless now, but the same horrible eyes she'd thought she'd seen when she looked up at him as they made love. No white at all, no hint of their usual violet shade, nothing, just complete blackness. She felt something rising in her throat. Hilde dashed to the bathroom and was promptly, violently ill. She had made love to that thing, begged for him to touch her and hold her. Hilde could feel his hands on her still and all that mattered was washing off his touch. The touch of whatever that thing that wasn't Duo was.

She stepped into the shower, regardless of there being a dead body on her living room floor. Her tears mixed with the water that streamed over her. She would never be clean again, would never escape from the vision of those awful eyes in the face she loved.

Quatre pushed the door open, no one had answered when he rang the doorbell. His eyes widened at the sight of Duo dead on the floor, he bent and closed the lids over the deep black eyes of his friend.

"Hilde," he called, cautiously. "Hilde are you here?"

There was no answer and he didn't want to push it. They were leaving. Quatre's black eyes gleamed sadly as he bent and placed Duo carefully over his shoulder. How were they ever going to tell Hilde the bad news?

Hilde stood shaking in terror, her bathrobe wrapped around her, her gun pointed at the bedroom door until she finally heard Quatre leave. She peeked out. Duo was gone. He was gone. "Oh God, thank you. Thank you," she whispered.

*****

Relena, Sally and Cathrine watched as the four pilots came down the ramp of the exit tunnel. Hilde was nowhere to be found and Dorothy had refused to come. Unfortunately, everybody knew where Midii was.

Relena rushed up to Heero and embraced him. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. "Oh Heero," she whispered, her hand stroking his back. "I'm so sorry about Duo, are you alright? Is that why you came back so soon?"

He stared at her. They were five weeks late and she called that soon?

There was a silent pause and the little group parted to let a casket with an L2 colony cluster flag draping it pass through.

"I don't know," Heero said, disbelief still in his voice. "I don't know what happened. He just keeled over. We'll have to wait for the autopsy I guess."

Wufei looked at the ground, then approached his wife, who seemed to be watching him warily. He pulled her close in his arms in an uncharacteristic display of affection. "Oh Sally," he said. "It is so good to be back. It almost seemed like something was keeping us from getting back here."

Sally gasped. There was something different about him. But it was a 'good' different. She clutched her arms around him tightly and started sobbing desperately.

"You're really home," she said. "Really home."

For once, he only held her tight and made no mention of her display of weakness.

Quatre looked around, his eyes drooping with sadness over Duo's unexplained and sudden death. They had been so close to making it home.

"Where's Dorothy," he asked. She'd never missed meeting him before and he'd been gone for so long. His heart twisted in pain. How could she not be here?

Relena looked at him over Heero's shoulder. "She didn't know you were coming back," Relena said. "She left for Europe only a few hours ago."

"Cathy! Thanks for coming," Trowa said, wrapping an arm around his sister's shoulder. "Where's Midii? Isn't she feeling well or something?" He hoped that she would have good news for him. They were trying so hard to have a baby.

Cathrine looked at him and opened her mouth to speak, instead she broke into tears.

*****

In the end, despite all the strings Heero and Sally pulled they never found out exactly what happened.

Sally clenched her fists in frustration and guilt. Like Hilde she kept hearing Midii's screams, her desperate insistence that their husbands weren't who they claimed to be. It had been too difficult to believe. It still was, but there was no other explanation. Unfortunately all the mission data had been deleted the night Midii supposedly lost her mind.

"His eyes were black, solid black," Hilde said, her voice steady but her face as white as paper. "I knew then, I knew it wasn't Duo. That must be what Midii saw that night when we heard her screaming."

Hilde's words reverberated in Relena's consciousness. Ever since Heero had come back from his second mission life had been a nightmare. Everyone was insisting that Midii had been right all along, that the Heero who had made love to her so passionately, who had fulfilled her every secret desire had never been Heero at all. And she had told him about Midii, betrayed her to them, those others. It wasn't possible. It was too horrible to reconcile. They were all wrong, it had been Heero all along, her Heero, the man she had always loved. When he questioned her about that time she was silent and he left her alone after that, thinking that the subject was too painful.

She let herself believe that the others were all crazy and only she was sane. The horrible, bizarre episode had never happened.

Still, she waited a month to tell Heero their good news and he didn't suspect a thing when their lovely daughter Vanessa came into the world several weeks too soon.

Vanessa had her hair and eyes. Her eyes were true blue. Still, sometimes Relena studied her baby intensely as she fed her and imagined those pretty blue eyes turning an eerie black, heard Hilde's voice describing Duo's eyes, her words falling as harshly as fingernails on a chalkboard.

~*~*~ONE YEAR LATER~*~*~

Cathrine was brushing Midii's hair and tying a ribbon in it when Trowa came home. "Trowa," she cried happily, jumping up out of the chair.

"Hi Midii, did you have a good day," he asked.

She nodded, smiling her habitual sunny smile. She looked at her husband expectantly and he smiled back, handing her a daisy.

Midii plopped down on the floor and started pulling the petals off one by one. "He loves me, he loves me not," she said, concentrating on each white petal as she removed it from the bright yellow center of the daisy.

Cathrine smiled sadly at the two of them. Trowa was always so sweet, he always counted the daisy petals to make sure her rhyme came out just right. A tear streaked her cheek and she turned away.

"He loves me," Midii announced triumphantly, pulling off the last petal. She jumped up and gave Trowa an exuberant hug and he held her close, pressing his face against her hair. "You love me Trowa," she repeated.

"Of course I do," he said, brushing his lips against her hair so softly she couldn't feel it.

She sighed, "But Trowa, the poor flower. Look, it's all broken. I shouldn't have done it."

"Give it to me Midii. I'll fix it, it'll be just like new." He took the daisy stem she handed him and produced another flower from behind his back.

"Oh Trowa," she whispered her eyes lit with childish wonder. "You're magic! You can fix everything."

No, he thought, he couldn't. He couldn't fix her, he couldn't bring back the woman he loved.

******

"Happy Anniversary Duo," Hilde whispered, tears streaking her pale cheeks as she sat down on the mounded grave and rested her cheek against the cold marble of his tombstone.

Nobody blamed her for what she'd done. They said it was only a coincidence. Hilde knew better. She had killed him.

The rest of them were getting on with their lives, but she couldn't do that. Dorothy and Sally tried to act as if nothing had happened, they didn't want to talk about it. Relena was all wrapped up in that horrible baby of hers. Hilde didn't dare look at it, afraid she'd see those eyes looking back at her. Was she the only one who realized Relena was lying? Her baby had been a healthy 9-pounder, there was no way the child was premature. She was the child of that other Heero, but no one else seemed to realize it but her.

She was the only one who had seen those terrible eyes. Midii didn't count, the whole episode permanently erased along with most everything else in her memory. Everyone felt so sorry for poor Midii. But Hilde didn't. She envied her, she was happy in her childish way, she had Trowa and she didn't see those eyes, those awful black eyes every time she shut her own. Hilde's life was haunted by those horrible eyes looking at her as she shot that thing that was pretending to be Duo. Haunted by the fact that somehow by shooting him she had killed her own husband.

She swallowed the handful of pills and chased it with a gulp of champagne straight from the bottle.

"Happy Anniversary Duo," she whispered. "See you soon."

THE END