"Where are the funny remarks now, Gundam-pilot?" The name was a curse on the man's lips. "That bleeding-heart Stark is gone off to dinner... he won't be showing up to save your ass this time!"
He stepped away from Duo and moved over near Winner. We all froze, watching the man to see what in the hell he was going to do now. I had no doubt that Winner would not hold up to half what Duo had endured. He didn't know the tricks; the movements of the body that would help minimize the damage. I would fare better, with my training in the martial arts. Duo probably knew more than I did, from a life steeped in street fighting. But Winner... his forte was tactics and the grand scale, troop movements and the tediousness of equipment and supplies. He didn't know hand-to-hand combat. Particularly not at this... level.
But, as Duo had feared, the enemy finding the two of them together had offered Bellows a wedge to attack Duo's control with.
"You're so resolved not to cry out," Bellows said, his voice suddenly a sickening purr. "Think you can hold to that?" He drew his sidearm and pointed it directly at Winner's head. "One sound, my little piece of shit, and your... playmate here gets a bullet between the eyes. One cry. One moan. The slightest little sound."
The General really was a sick son of a bitch. I wondered that we had ever thought that he could possibly have anything to do with the Treize faction. Treize would spit on this man.
The Romefeller goons left us sit for a good long time in our stone walled cell, letting us stew in our own frustration. It had been an infiltration mission, what Maxwell termed a 'snatch and grab'. Our assignment had been to liberate a high-ranking official, a man who claimed to be loyal to Treize Khushrenada's 'true ideals' and was promising to defect with all the specs on the new mobile dolls in his hand. It could have ended the war, had it been the truth. It had been an outright lie. A trap. A bold trap that had succeeded quite admirably in snaring three of us. Maxwell, Winner and myself. I suppose, when you got right down to it... this might very well end the war after all. Just not necessarily in our favor.
My notes: For people who liked whump, angst and hurt/recovery in their fics, Gundam Wing was a garden of possibilities. Five boys at war, bodies modified to heal faster and react better, fighting for colonies who would later betray them, gave lots of room for us-vs-them scenarios, not to mention wartime torture and interrogation. CW for torture here and unrealisticaly easy triad negotiations. FYI, there's a chunk of text unfortunately repeated in the story, but it can't be corrected since the author has passed on. Just skip forward to where the new text begins.