"In & Out"
a Gundam Wing Fanfic

by the Princess

**Warning--foul language, shounen-ai, characters frequently OOC...**

~Epilogue~

Day 8 (the Day of Retraction)

>passive<

The day of Noin's newly called press conference finally dawned. Reporters from all over the world were gathering in the press conference room several hours before the meeting began at 11:00 in the morning; all of them were eager to hear the retraction for themselves...and all of them followed the signs which read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY!!!!!

Unbenownst to the world at large, the day was dawning on only *one* Gundam pilot who considered himself straight. Quatre and Trowa had fallen from grace two days ago, and Duo and Hiro had found each other just last night. Only Wufei remained, burdened with the knowledge that his friends were being manipulated by a madman; armed with two sister reporters, Kuruna and Kittana-i Butsoyo, he and Zechs prepared to crash Trieze's party.

The vectors were all converging at wildly different angles; since everyone was either on one fraction of reality or another, no one was able to foresee what was going to happen...except for, perhaps, a few of you precocious readers...

10:11 a.m.

"WE OVERSLEPT!!!"

Wufei woke up to the above being shrieked into his ear and a rough shaking of his shoulders. His almond eyes snapped open, to see Kittana-i standing over him, viciously shaking him awake. She was wearing nothing but a white T-shirt, and he did his best to ignore that fact. "WAKE UP, BAKA YAROU!" she was screaming. "IT'S ALMOST 10:15, AND WE'RE AN HOUR AWAY FROM--"

"URUSAI YO, STUPID WOMAN!!" he screamed back, his fist swinging up and connecting with her jaw. She flew across the room and crashed into the TV, knocking it off its table with a terrific cacophony. Zechs, who was carefully ironing his clothing on a towel on the ground, looked up with an eyebrow raised, then returned to getting the creases just right.

"I'm not paying for that!" cried Kuruna, who was showering and taking all the hot water.

"Who said we'll pay for it?" Wufei cried, hopping out of his bed and giving himself a once-over. His typical white clothing ("chef's outfit," the dumb American had always joked) was wrinkled, but it would do. He wasn't aiming to impress anyone at the press conference, anyhow; he was only aiming to bust out Trieze's hentai little ass. "We'll just sneak on out. I doubt anyone has heard a thing."

"Right," Zechs replied. "That makes perfect sense. I'm sure the people below us wouldn't be able to hear a TV crashing down on their ceiling, anymore than they heard the great screeching owl over there." He cocked his head towards a frantic Kittana-i, who was trying to get a stain out of her jeans by scrubbing it with soap and water.

"I heard that!" she snapped, digging in with her fingernails.

Kuruna emerged from the bathroom with a cloud of steam, her long black hair soaking wet and in a loose braid, wearing the same wrinkled clothes she'd worn the day before. "Shower's free," she said, then giggled as Wufei and her sister wrestled over who got it next. The Chinese boy clubbed Kittana-i across the face with a free bottle of lotion, which nearly rendered her unconscious, and made a mad dash for the bathroom, shrieking about justice against stupid onnas like her. Kittana-i, recovering from the blow, went up behind Wufei and got him in a full nelson. She seductively rubbed her near-naked body up against his and latched her teeth onto one of his earlobes. Wufei's eyes actually shrank down to little black dots, and he made a weirdly strangled noise as she gave him a sudden tongue-lashing kiss. The Chinaman promptly fainted dead away, and she, giggling, stepped over his prone form and hopped into the bathroom triumphantly.

Kuruna and Zechs looked at each other weirdly. "Your sister knows exactly how to push his buttons," Zechs commented, returning to his ironing.

"She always *did* have a way with prudish guys," she replied sourly.

"OH MY GOD, THIS WATER IS FREEZING!!" shrieked her sister from the bathroom.

The ragtag team finally got situated twenty minutes later, and, at 10:30, they piled into the rustbucket van and screeched out of the hotel parking lot without paying. They took a quick vote on the most agressive driver, and it was decided that Kuruna took the cake. She swung down the highway at her cruising speed, roughly 90 mph, and skipped through lanes like a runaway chess pawn advancing down the board. "So where is this press conference taking place?" she inquired casually, one elbow jutting out of the window.

"The same stadium the other one took place in," Kittana-i replied. "Zechs, maybe you should buckle up."

"There's no seat belt!" he cried. He and Wufei were stuck on the couch in the back, and were being shaken up viciously by the tabloid journalist's driving tactics.

Ignoring the two men as they flew around the back, Kuruna said to her sister: "Hai, so-dane. That would make sense. But isn't that all the way downtown?"

"Downtown?" Wufei cried, then swore as he banged his head on the ceiling. "There's no way that we'll ever make it, it's an hour away!"

"Not at the speeds I'm going, don't worry!" To prove her point, she jammed down on the gas pedal until it was eating mat. The speedometer bent past the last setting, 140 mph, then broke. "Kuso! I can never make one of those things last for more than a week--"

Suddenly, she switched all her power from gas to brake. The boys flew forward and smacked into the windshield as the van came to a screeching halt. Both the girls strained against their seat belts and their eyes threatened to slide right out of their heads. The paint on the van actually slipped right off and crumbled into thin air, leaving it with a metal chrome finish instead of its rusty old white.

When Wufei and Zechs were able to peel their faces off the inside of the windshield (the Chinese pilot was sourly reminded of Hiro's experience at The Bunghole), they saw that Kuruna had skidded to a halt because of a seemingly endless line of traffic. There was a wreck several miles ahead, from what they could see, and the traffic was immobile for a long stretch ahead.

"Oh, my God!" Wufei cried. "We're gonna be late to the press conference if we don't get past this traffic!"

Kuruna, with a determined set to her jaw, said: "Leave that to me. This van looks like a rustbucket, but it was designed to withstand street riots." She flipped open the cigarette lighter, and hit a little button which was inside of it.

Out of nowhere, the van was suddenly twenty feet in the air, then thirty. Wufei screamed and jumped into Zechs's lap, unaware of the basic homosexuality of the act in his fear, and threw his arms around the platinum-blonde's neck. Zechs looked out the window, and saw that the car had been raised up off its wheels, like the taxi in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Far below, the tires ran over the tops of the cars which were waiting in traffic, just as light and smooth as shit from a goose. He tried to say "Who knew?", but Wufei had sealed off his air supply, and he only remembered seeing black motes blur his eyesight before he fainted from lack of oxygen.

10:56 a.m.

The bus pulled up in front of the stadium, expertly swerving to avoid the many cars and news vans which clogged up the road. It finally came to a stop on the sidewalk directly in front of the place's big double doors, and opened its own. The only four passengers quickly got off, and waved goodbye as it pulled off.

"Here we are," Hiro mused, taking Duo's hand in his.

"'Born to be kings,'" Duo sang happily as they went inside the building. "'We are the princes of the universe!'"*

Quatre and Trowa both rolled their eyes in unison and smiled. This was it, the moment of truth, and they were ready for it. God, were they ever. "I'm still worried, though," the blonde Arab said softly. "We haven't seen Wufei in so long, I hope he's all right."

"I'm sure he is," Trowa replied, "and he's probably waiting for the opportunity to gut us all in his quest for justice against all fags." He smiled and squeezed the smaller boy's hand in comfort.

This was it.

Trieze was perfectly aware of their intentions, and he laughed. It was going perfectly according to his plans.

This was the moment of truth.

Noin stared at herself in the mirror, and took in a few deep breaths to calm herself. The moment was here at last, when people would stop calling her house and journalists would at last leave her alone.

And maybe when this was over, she could finally get the award she'd won that had started all of this, whatever the thing was.

For good or bad, this was where it ended.

She checked over her makeup one last time, then finally left the dressing room, and made her way to the microphone-laden podium on the stage. A dead silence dropped over the place like darkness as she did. She cast her eyes over the audience. The stadium was jam-packed to full capacity, overflowing with reporters like pus from an old wound. In the front row, right before her, sat four of the pilots. They looked at her expectantly, smiling. Wondering just where the other one was, she tapped one of the microphones to test it. It screeched as though it had a phobia about being touched. A good-natured laughter rippled through the crowd, then ceased.

"Kenichiwa," she said.

Everyone leaned forward, expecting.

"No flash photography, please...arigatou. Last week, I made several remarks in error with regards to the sexuality of the Gundam pilots and Zechs Marquise. I am officially retr--"

To everyone's shock, Hiro suddenly leaped up and cried: "MATTE!!"

Questioning whispers ripped through the crowd, as well as gasps of surprise. This was an unexpected move. Hadn't the pilots been pushing for her to take back what she'd said? Why were they suddenly running up on the stage, trying to stop here?

Noin thought this, too. "Nanda aitsu Hiro?" she said, looking at him, then at the others with a weird look in her eyes as they all ran onstage.

"There's been another mistake, Noin!" Quatre said breathlessly. "You know how you said we were gay, and we said that it wasn't true, and that we thought it was slanderous for you to be saying that about us?"

"Hai..."

"Well..." Quatree paused, going pink in his cheeks.

"What the boy's trying to say," Duo said bluntly into the microphones, "is that we all are, indeed, as gay as Elton John, if not more so."

"I wouldn't have been so crude about it, Duo," Quatre said, turning a deeper crimson, as the sea of reporters broke into a riot of shouted questions and screams for "Can I quote you on that?!"

"You would have preferred it if I said that we were a pack of cum-guzzling, pantywaist, queerbait buttfuckers?" This got picked up and broadcasted over the loudspeakers, much to Duo's humiliation, and even he went a little red.

Somewhere in the crowd, a flash went off as some stupid reporter got a picture of them all on stage. Noin blinked hard. "Yes, well, um." A pale, glazed look got in her eyes. "A pack of cum-guzzling buttfuckers. Couldn't have, uh, said it better m'self. So-dane. Yep. Um, right."

"What baka just did that? You set her off! I'll have you know that bad things happen when she gets set off--"

"Relax, Duo, I'll shut you up," Hiro said, and drew the other boy into a kiss.

"BUKKOROSU, PUSSY-BOYS!! JUSTICE AGAINST ALL FAGS!!"

Everyone'e attention went from the stage to one of the stadium doors, where Wufei, Zechs, Kuruna, and Kittana-i Butsoyo all stood. Wufei was waving around his sword (one might wonder when he got it back; he'd left it at the jail, after all), Zechs was shaking his head, and the two women were looking around at the crowd and feeling rather humiliated. "Urusai yo, Wufei," Kittana-i growled, "or I'll 'attack' you again, and I know you don't want that happening."

He immediatedly stuck his sword in the back of his pants and calmed down. "PEOPLE," he said. "THIS IS ALL A SHAM!"

"What is?" a reporter hollered.

"The award, the photographs..." a sudden Russian voice boomed from behind Wufei and the others. "Everythink which you have taken for fact is a, how do you say? A *lie*!"

Kittana-i grinned, her blue eyes twinkling. "You tell 'em, Boss!"

Mr. Rasputin stepped out from behind Wufei and Zechs. He was, for his vocal power, an incredibly short man; he stood below Quatre in height. His head was completely bald except for a small ring of silver hair around the base of his skull, from ear to ear, like a backwards smile. His face was thickly defined with wrinkles and his spectacles sat on the end of his nose, free of earpieces, in no way hampering his fierce green eyes in glaring at everyone around him. He wore an old-looking gray suit and tie which he had probably not changed out of since AC 03. Despite this, he seemed to have a *very* intimidating presence, and his voice was very young and strong. "Moof it out of my way, you silly little bugs!" he commanded to the crowd, and they parted like he was Moses (he was certainly *old* enough...), and he led the two reporter sisters and the two guys up to the stage. He hopped up on the stage unassisted, gave Noin a scathing look, and said: "You, git out of my way!"

"I want my mother," she muttered incoherently, stumbling backstage.

"I eem not your mother," he hollered after her, "but were I she, I would raise up my skirts and, how do you say? peess upon you from the loins what gave you birth!" He looked at the podium, then at Trowa. "You, you little sssirkus munkey, git over here and help me!"

Trowa, not knowing what to make of the little old man, obediently went over to where he stood. Mr. Rasputin promptly kicked him in the shins. He cried out and fell to his hands and knees, and the little man hopped on his back, and used him as a footstool to get close to the mics. He started to rant at the audience, unaware that Hiro, Duo, Zechs, Wufei, Kuruna, and Kittana-i all had to pin back Quatre from ripping his throat out.

"You eegnorant donkeys, listen to me now!" he said. "This is all a sham! The last press konference was rrrrrigged! Somebody purposefully used No-een for hees own evil purposes! Then the kowardly fool konteenued to ssirculate more lies upon the, what do you so quaintly call it? the Interrnet!

"The leetle blonde faggot-man rrreferred to No-een's statements as a meestake. I am aware of yet another meestake, komrades. For you see, there is a man among us who has used--what do you kall them? Lincolns? Washingtons? Hamiltons? Nyet, dollars is the word! He has used dollars and dirty bribery to manipulate the public!"

In this time, Quatre had been knocked unconsious to avoid his killing of Rasputin. Kittana-i, letting the Arab go, grinned at her boss with something like acolytical love. "So-dane, boss. And the filthy perpertrator is--HEY! KURN SUGIMAS!"

"BOTZE MOI!!"

Suddenly, all the lights had shorted out.

Trieze let go of the power switch with a grin on his face. So things had not gone exactly the way he had expected. It did not matter. His game had been played out, and they were in too deep a disarray in the stadium to even care about the little Rooshan, who was slamming his shoe on the podium in an attempt to restore order.

"We will bury you," Trieze snickered, then laughed. How true it was. A wind seemed to come from nowhere and swept his cape into a dramatic wave. He slid out of the power supply room and easily made his way out of the stadium, through the back door, and got into a waiting black limo.

So, it was done.

12:05 p.m.

"Are they all gone yet?"

Hiro opened the dressing room door a crack, then peered out at the stage. He shut it back, looked at Trowa, and shook his head. "Iie. They're still stumbling around and trying to get out. It probably won't be cleared out there for another couple of hours." He sat back down on the bed, next to Duo, and took the other boy's hand.

"Oh, darn," Duo said, not meaning it at all.

The Gundam pilots, the reporter sisters, the dazed soldier woman, the man in the silver mask, and the dwarf Russian were all hiding out in the dressing room. After the lights had been cut, they had all beat a hasty retreat, not wanting to be caught alone in a room with a bunch of rabid reporters. The lights were still out, and the room was lit with a huge mass of tea candles on the bureau drawers. The two couples were curled up on opposite ends of the bed; Wufei, Zechs, and the reporters all sat in a semicircle around the candles; Mr. Rasputin paced the room nervously; and Noin was propped up in a corner, talking to the flashing lights she saw hanging in front of her eyes.

"So the guy distributing Internet pics, and the guy who hired Kuruna, *and* the guy who gave Noin this award...they're all Trieze?" Quatre asked.

Wufei nodded. "So-dane. We figured it was Kuruna's boss from his email address. She only ever communicated with him through the Internet, and--Zechs, you have that paper?"

"Hai." Zechs dug the paper containing the email address out of his pocket. "Here it is." He handed it to Quatre, who saw this:

drop_dead20|18|9|5|26|5

"What do the dashes mean?"

"They're where the numbers separate. The numbers stand for letters. 20 is T, 18 is R, 9 is I--"

"Sokka! I get it! Wow!"

"Hot damn! Let me see..." Duo snatched away the paper, and glanced at it. "Wow. Sugoi."

"That's what I said," Kittana-i added.

"But doshite?"

"E?" Wufei asked.

"Why would he do that??"

He shrugged. "He's an online pornographer and sex addict. He got a buzz off it, most likely."

Hiro suddenly laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"That he turned out to be right. Except with you and Zechs."

"Hai. That's pretty funny," Wufei grinned.

A sudden wind started to blow (perhaps, some remainder of Trieze's own private wind) (wait, that came out wrong), extinguishing all of the candles at once.

"Kurn sugimas!" Kittana-i cried.

"Someone hit a light!" Duo shrieked, hopping into Hiro's lap.

"But there's lots of lights," Noin said. "They're everywhere--"

For a solid five minutes, pure chaos ensued.

Finally, a strong Russian voice cut through the chaos: "Ach, do you pig capitalists not carry a, what do you say? Zippo!" Mr. Rasputin clicked on his own, lighting the small flame and illuminating a small circle around him. Noin had somehow gotten stuck in the ceiling fan by her belt, and she slowly rotated and giggled, trying to catch the silly lights. Duo had wrapped himself around Hiro's waist, and clung for dear life. Hiro had gotten both his hands tangled up in Trowa's unibang, like it was a tar baby, and he had both his feet braced on Trowa's shoulders as he tried to get free. Quatre had wrapped his arms around Trowa's chest and yanked him in the other direction. Kuruna and Kittana-i were both strangling each other--

And Wufei and Zechs were tangled up together on the rug, making out like blasted rabbits.

Once they realized that everyone in the room was looking at them, they broke their kiss and looked around, blushing furiously. Zechs had lost his mask somewhere along the line, and his eyes glittered like he was drunk. Wufei, who was pinned down to the ground, looked blissfull and giddy, with his eyes wide shut. "Rasputin, you baka," the platinum blonde said, "you'd better put out that light before Wufei gets the king of all nosebleeds."

"You Amerikans!" Rasputin said, shaking his head, as he clicked the Zippo off obediently.

"Who's American!" Wufei started. "What an inj--" His rant was cut short by Zechs' hungry mouth...not that he necessarily minded.

>What's justice against fags when he's such a good kisser!!<

6:04 p.m.

Relena Peacecraft drained the shot glass in one gulp, and slammed it back down. "Gimme another one," she said to the bartender.

"Will do," he replied, whisking away her glass.

She glanced up at the TV casually, not really thinking. Thought had never exactly been one of Relena's strong suits, and she didn't let it plague her too much now. Lord knows she'd been doing enough thinking since her phone conversation with Hiro last night. That had been very depressing. After she'd yanked the phone out of the wall, she had sat and cried for several hours straight, then gone to sleep on the floor, with her thumb corked in her mouth and fantasies involving Duo's neck and her hands in her mind. She had awoken with some nasty muscle cramps and revenge boiling in her mind. It was a mistake, that was all, just one big, freakin mistake. There was no way that Hiro could have *really* told her that he was in love with Duo. He had been drugged. He had been under some sort of psychic influence. There had to be some rational reason why he'd do that--

She blinked, and really *looked* at the TV, which was turned onto the NBC channel and showing the news. It was all about the press conference which had occured earlier in the day, and she found herself looking at Hiro kissing Duo on national TV, and fainted dead away.

She woke up to some huge black guy she'd never seen before gently slapping her face. "Ne, girl, are you all right?" he asked, a worried look crossing his face. He was huge, at least 7' tall, and looked like a Barret Wallace wannabe. "Lady?"

She grinned. Perhaps she could use this as an opportunity to make Hiro jealous. "Genkidayo," she said, and allowed him to help her up. "Buy me a drink?"

"OK." He plopped her down into her bar stool, and sat on the one next to her. It sagged and cracked beneath the weight of his muscle. "I want a Black Russian."

"Atari maedano cracker," said the 'tender, delivering Relena's shot of whiskey to her. "There you go, doll."

She grinned at this black guy, totally unaware that he was the bouncer for a certain disco bar. "Kawaiine...Tsuki atte kureru?"

"Iie," he said. "I'm gay."

Relena blanched to the color of toilet paper. "NANI?!" she shrieked, shattering all of the glass in the bar with her screeching-weasel voice. "IS EVERYBODY GAY?!? IS THIS THE FREAKIN' TWILIGHT ZONE OR SOMETHING?!? I NEED A HETEROSEXUAL!! CODE RED!!" She slammed her head on the bar, and wept.

"Cheer up," the Queer Wonder said, grinning. "Have a peanut."

She dug her fist into the peanut bowl, and swallowed the fistful whole, shells and all. "'Tender, make it a double shot," she said, "and keep it coming."

And so, as always, everyone lived happily ever after...

Except for Relena.

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Disclaimer

The Gundam boys and anything pertaining to Gundam Wing belong to the creators of the show, not to me, no matter how hard I wish. They are being used without permission for fun, not profit. If you don't know this, then you are a sad sack of shit. Go crawl under a rock and wither up and die. Also, "In & Out" belongs to its writer, and not me; any semblances between the plot of this fanfic and that movie were done very much intentionally. Don't worry, similarities are rarer than you'd think.

In contrast, The Bunghole, Kuruna Butsoyo, Kittana-i Butsoyo, Mr. Rasputin, the Queer Wonder, and any characters not belonging to the Gundam franchise are mine, and may not be used without my permission (God only knows why anyone would want to use them, but...). Kittana-i, Kuruna, the QW, and Rasputin are 100% mine, but there is a bar in Portland, ME called The Bunghole. Whether it houses gays or not is beyond my knowledge.

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Now, cuz you're special--Japanese!!!

baka yarou--you idiot/jerk!

Kenichiwa--hello

arigatou--thank you

Kurn sugimas--It's too dark!

Sokka--Oh!

Tsuki atte kureru?--Will you go out with me?

*These lyrics are from "I am Immortal", by Queen. Moment of silence for Freddy Mercury, you heathen.

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