Warnings: Yaoi. No lemon yet but no guarantees for later. Old guys. Original characters. AU? You decide... OOC? Same.

E.S.O. by Bonnejeanne & Vonceia

Prologue Two: Jacob

The man known as Doctor J was surprised to wake up. His artificial lenses adjusted to the light and he realized he was lying in a bed, not unlike a hospital bed. He looked down, noting dispassionately that he was now minus another limb, a leg, and that his left arm prosthesis was missing. Turning his head he looked around and came face to face with a ghost.

"Alfa." he said hoarsely. "Alfa Numera." So, it hadn't been a hallucination, those last few moments before the explosion. The small figure, moving inhumanly fast at first he'd thought it was Heero, and had been both shocked and angered that the youth was here, and not where he should be, fighting to save the Earth and the Colonies. Before he had time to do more than register the image, Quinze had gone down, his finger still tightening on the trigger of the gun aimed at J's chest.

"Jacob," the ghost said to him, looking perpetually, disgustingly beautiful. "Not much left of you to pick up, this time."

"Less and less," he answered, nodding at the missing leg. "The others?"

"All here. You are all supposedly dead, and that's the way it is going to stay for a while," she answered, coming closer to the side of the bed. She looked down at him with deep, indigo-blue eyes that had haunted his soul for a quarter of a century.

"Like you?" he said.

"Yeah, dead like me," she answered. Reaching out, she placed a hand against his forehead.

"What are you doing?" Doctor Jacob Jensen asked. "You haven't sprouted feelings since 'dying' have you?"

"No, of course not," she answered. "But you aren't allowed to die yet. I still have work for you to do."

Shaking his head, J stared at the little scientist. "There is the matter of my resignation, tendered, oh.. Was it twenty years ago?"

"I tore it up," she said, stepping back to perch on the foot of the bed.. "I told you, you don't get to quit, I have to fire you. All of you."

"I see. So I take it you are still certifiably insane," J said, leaning back. He smiled to himself when he was rewarded - her eyes flashed.

"Takes one to know one, eh, Jacob?" she said simply. "You've had your fun. Running around, stirring up trouble, starting revolutions. That's all over. It's back to work, my friend, with a vengeance."

"I find that word makes me uncomfortable on your lips," J said dryly.

Alfa got up and leaned over him again. "Any word makes you uncomfortable on my lips," she said with sweet menace. "Maybe it's not the words, maybe it's the lips."

Bending over, she kissed him. Then leaned back.

"Bitch," he said softly, but it lacked conviction. He was still in love with her after all these years.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. I mean it, Jacob. You've had your fun, you and your merry little band of oddballs. We are running out of time." She said, perching back on the foot of the bed.

"Not that ESO nonsense again," he said, just to watch her rise to the bait.

He was disappointed. She simply held up a small recorder and pressed the play button. A sound emerged from the speaker. It was not a pretty noise, in fact it might have sounded like static to an untrained ear, but as the series of changing tones droned on, J began to feel a chill steal into his artificial heart.

"I don't believe it," he said finally.

"Believe it. Oma has all the data. You will be reviewing it tomorrow. The doctors said you needed a week to recover but I know you - you'll be raring to go, won't you?" she said, getting up and moving to the door.

Trying to summon up a ghost of his old spirit, he said, "Oma. Still with that dyke?"

Walking back over to the bed, Alfa leaned over, gave him a breathtaking smile, and slapped his face hard enough to make him spit blood. Then she walked back to the door.

"She's really thrilled about seeing you again, too," she said, then left the room.

J lay back in the bed - there was nothing else he *could* do. His face ached and his mouth felt warm, but it was only because *she* has pressed her lips to his. He thought about the first time she had ever done that. It had been so very long ago. He had been a young man, strong, even handsome, cocky and sure of himself and smug in the knowledge of his own superior intellect and skills. Then he had gone to work for a woman.

It had been a little unnerving to find himself in a crack research team with the most brilliant technical minds of his generation, and discover that the head of the research team, the person they would all answer to, was a diminutive five-foot beauty with unruly auburn hair, and an indomitable spirit. It hadn't taken long for each of the men to realize this would be the most demanding assignment of their lives. Alfa, though she was called by another name then, ran the lab like an odd cross between a think-tank, a kindergarten, and a military unit. Together they had revolutionized technology and engineering and created the first mobile suit designs.

At Alfa's instruction, the designs were created to utilize a pilot with more than human abilities. That part of the project was under her direct control. Alfa was a geneticist, specializing in gene enhancement. You design the suit, she'd told them, I'll design the pilot.

It had been a feverish and exhilarating time, and like all good, young scientists, none of them had asked what the urgency was, or why they were creating the most advanced weapon the world had ever seen, to be used by the most advanced warrior. They were too caught up in the excitement of doing it, of breaking barriers previously thought to be unbreakable, and solving problems thought to be impassable. They all congratulated each other on the awards and prizes they would get, once they were free to publish. It was to be the start of a glorious time, glorious careers for all.

Then the dream had broken apart.

J remembered the horror he had felt when he realized that Alfa was using herself as a test subject. The fights they had had over it, behind closed doors of course. Though she accepted him as her lover, she insisted that it be keep completely out of the workplace.

After the worst of those fights, she had cut off the relationship. She couldn't explain her actions, or refused to, and he nursed his righteous anger, while still working on the prototype warsuit.

Things had gone from bad to worse. When the reasons behind the project had become clear, they had all been shocked and dismayed. A final showdown between Alfa and the mysterious project backers had ended in a confrontation where they had been asked to choose sides. The look that Alfa had bestowed upon him when he, like the others, had sided with the project backers, had withered his heart in an instant - it was the only time he ever saw her in a moment of weakness. The look was one of pure terror, pleading, and hurt, and he never forgot it, not even when they took his eyes.

Alfa walked back down the corridor, the slight frown that was a perpetual expression on her face. Jacob. He looked. old. He looked like shit, she thought. No one but she would remember the handsome young genius, his ready laugh, his beautiful gray eyes. The years had not been kind to him, or any of the others, but when Alfa looked at them, she saw the ghosts of their former selves superimposed over the bizarre looking group. Her bright young studs. they were going to conquer the world together, set it on its ear. then ESO had come into her life. ESO and. Heero Yuy.

Pushing open the door to the lab, she walked in. Oma looked up from the table where she was working. "So how is the old goat?" she said, with no affection at all.

"He's alive. It's a miracle. Quinze, that psychotic, put a bullet in him. Good thing it only hit flesh," Alfa said, coming over to sit near the table.

"Good thing for who?" Oma asked, then waved. "I know, I know, you need him. He's on his tenth life. Did he thank you?"

"No, of course not. He called me crazy and called you a dyke. The usual," Alfa said, idly picking up a stylus and twirling it through her fingers.

Oma simply snorted. "Professor Gordon has been pacing his room and demanding to see someone," she said, and sighed. "It's like having a house full of unruly children."

Alfa laughed. "Tell me about it. They were always like that - big kids with more brains than hair - and G has a lot of hair, you know. Geek freaks, each and every one."

Oma stopped working and looked at her friend. "You sound so."

"No I don't," Alfa snapped. "It was like riding herd on a bunch of jungle cats, all flash and independence and no discipline. And the hormones. they say women are bad. And look what we created. the mobile suit. How many lives are on our hands for that? It's beyond millions now."

"Yet, you believe it to be our only hope, now," Oma said quietly.

Alfa nodded. "Yes. ESO is real." She smiled vindictively. "I played him the signal. I saw it - he was afraid."

Oma shivered. "Well he might as well join the rest of us."

After a moment, Oma said, "Have you watched any of the broadcasts?"

"No."

"He's alive."

"Good."

"He saved the Earth you know." Oma said, watching her friend closely.

Alfa didn't twitch a muscle. "That's his job."

"He almost got killed doing it."

"As long as he succeeded," Alfa said, and got up, walking out of the door.

The assembly was a very strange one. The five scientists found themselves in a room together for the first time since their rescue from the ruins of the Libra. And none of them had a single word to say to the others. They simply exchanged looks.

Professor G adjusted the new prosthetic arm on Doctor J's left arm, and tweaked the prosthetic leg he now wore in place of a brace.

The door opened and Alfa walked in, followed by Oma.

She looked around, and came to the point.

"You've all heard the signal, you've read the briefing," she said. "I was right all along. ESO exists, and it's coming."

"Jumping to conclusions again," Professor G said.

"Shut up, Gordon," Alfa returned in the same tone. "It doesn't matter if you believe me any more. You are going to do what I tell you. You've worked for everybody from megalomaniacs to Oz to White Fang. Now you are back working for me. The project is simple - it's the same damn project, in fact. You will design and build a new set of Gundams. They will be better than the last ones you made. They will be unstoppable."

The scientists exchanged looks.

"You just didn't get it, did you?" G said. "The war? That was all about ending violence! All weapons are being destroyed. Peace finally exists."

"You can't create weapons without using them," Instructor H said.

"The existence of such weapons will *incite* war," Master O added.

Alfa crossed her arms over her chest and glared at them. It was a formidable glare.

"Very nice. Hymie. Okun," she said. "You've learned the lessons you were too full of yourselves to learn twenty years ago. I'm impressed. But I don't care about any of that. In a year, possibly less, we are going to need those weapons. If we don't have them, all life in this solar system is going to be wiped out."

Eventually, they had given in to the inevitable and gone to work. Alfa left them to it - unlike twenty years ago, she didn't actively supervise, but she would drop in on each of them at unexpected moments, asking pointed questions, making suggestions. These exchanges were revealing - from them, each of the scientists began to realize that she knew a great deal about the five Gundam pilots who had fought for the Colonies with the current generation of mobile suit Gundams. She also seemed to be guiding the designs of the new suits to be even better suited to each of the five pilots. For the first time in their long careers, each of the five scientists began to have secret struggles with long-buried conscience.

Oma walked into the small room Alfa used as a study, one night, to find her friend watching recordings of events from the end of the war. In particular, the battle between Zechs, or Milliardo Peacecraft, and the Gundam pilot known as Heero Yuy.

Oma stopped, trying to make no sound, as she watched her friend's face. It was difficult to read. She watched the end of the battle, with Wing Zero falling ahead of the ship fragment, the impossible shot. and then Alfa ran it back and watched it again.

Turning it off finally, after multiple repetitions, Alfa got up, turned around and saw Oma watching. They exchanged a long look but Alfa said nothing and Oma knew better than to do so.

After that, Alfa gave Doctor J new specifications for the cockpit of the Gundam he was working on. He received them, examined them, but didn't question her. Instead, he went to Oma.

"What do you want? Did you get lost on the way to the bingo lounge?" Oma asked, seeing the scientist in her doorway.

"Nice to see you, Oma," he said with what had once been a suave smile.

"Oh please!"

Giving it up, he walked over to her, and dropped the printout of the cockpit specifications in front of her. Oma looked it over.

"Yes?" she asked, wondering if the old goat was growing a heart.

"I'm not dense, Oma," he said. "I know what this means. Do you?"

Oma looked at the list again, with a slight, sad smile. "It means she is the person I've always known she was, not the inhuman bitch you thought."

Doctor J grimaced. "It means she is having the cockpit adjusted for herself."

Oma looked at him impassively.

J snarled. "I would have expected you at least to care about this!" he said. "She can't do this."

Oma raised her eyebrows. "Why? I thought you didn't believe in ESO? No ESO, no real battle, so what does it matter?"

He stared at Oma through those blank lenses. "She would die. if there were such a battle. She's good, but my god, she can't possibly stand these stresses, no matter what unholy concoctions she's been dosing herself with."

Oma stared him down, a suspicious shimmer in her wide brown eyes.

"It's her right to do this," she said. "It's the first sign of hope I've seen her show in fifteen years. So shut up and make the modifications. If she has decided to let her son have a life, it's certainly not going to be up to you to stop her. I won't let you."

"I thought you were suppose to love her," J said.

Oma stood up, but controlled her impulse to go kick the old man's fake leg out from under him. "I do love her, you stupid asshole," she said. "I love the woman I knew before ESO took over her life. If there is a spark of that woman left, she gets a chance to find it."

"Even if it kills her?"

"Get out of my lab before I remove your spare parts."

End part 2

Here ends the Prologue. Next installment - Gundam Pilots....

Please, please, PLEASE let me know what your reactions are to this....

bonne & von

Comments? Email bonnejeanne@yahoo.com or vonceia@yahoo.com

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