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Gundam Wing is property of Sotsu Agency, Bandai Studios, and TV Asahi. Sainan no Kekka and all original characters and plot copyright 2000-2002 by Quicksilver and Gerald Tarrant. Please ask permission before reposting.
SAINAN NO KEKKA
--Gundam Wing, Tooi Yoake And I wonder, will I always think of you?" -- Gundam X, Human Touch He'd seen the ocean all right, but not how he had imagined it. He hadn't ever imagined he would be submerged in Earth's oceans not only once, but twice, once to get rid of something he thought had become only a memory, and the second time to bring it back. And once again, someone had died because of him. The self-loathing and penance were things that were so ingrained into him that it was almost impossible to stop them, and Wufei had to concentrate, to dig his fingers into the flesh of his arm or his head and consciously wrestle with himself. He'd been standing there on the balcony since the doctors had deemed it safe for him to get out of bed earlier that morning and just watched the clouds. It wasn't his fault that Varis had died. It wasn't his fault that Treize had died. It wasn't... There it was again. He shook his head, a good hard shake, as if that could chase away the demons. He hadn't heard Sally's announcement last night, having been drugged and just out of surgery for injuries sustained during his flight in Shenlong and symptoms of near hypoxia that had set in because he hadn't had the proper life support gear for a flight that high into the atmosphere in a craft with a crippled life support system. But they'd given him Sally's news as soon as he woke up, and he couldn't say he was surprised. He could say that was his fault too, but that would be stretching it. Still, he felt some responsibility for Sally. If he'd have said something different - if he hadn't threatened her with Treize's memory, perhaps, maybe... No. Clamping down on that thought too. Sally had been planning this almost as long as she'd been in the Preventers, probably, and a few words from some ex-Gundam pilot wasn't going to deter her. The only reason she'd talked to him was because she thought he would join her. Wufei didn't kid himself. If it had been two years earlier, he couldn't say for certain that he wouldn't have. He let go of the railing and paced back and forth restlessly, fingering the soft bandage wrapped around his upper arm, feeling the wind in his hair. He wished it was sunny. It was almost time for lunch, but he wasn't hungry. There was too much to think about and too much to do, but at the same time he had no idea what Une would let him do. He'd gotten Shenlong back, true, but that was for the sole purpose of not letting Sally have it. With this threat hanging over L1, would Une even let the Gundam pilots off base? "Hey dude, what's up?" He hadn't heard the balcony door creak open, but he would recognize Duo Maxwell's voice anywhere. Turning, he saw both Duo and Heero standing there, Duo lounging against the doorframe and Heero looking a bit awkward. He let his eyes linger on the Wing Zero pilot, on the raised scar that was still strange to him after all this time, but Heero didn't meet his gaze. "Hello Duo, Heero. What are you two up to?" Wufei asked, with a lightness in his voice he didn't feel at all. Duo snorted. "Well, our recon mission didn't go so good." "Oh?" Wufei said, reading beneath Duo's words and knowing the other boy wasn't really here to talk about the recon mission, but it was the only excuse he'd had to come visit and to drag Heero along with him. Duo was not the world's best master of tact, and it was obvious that he was of the opinion that Wufei and Heero were long overdue for some peacemaking. Well, he wasn't opposed to that. The only opposition was Heero's feelings on the matter. "We got recalled," Heero said, still not looking at Wufei. "Sally had some forces at Lake Victoria...we engaged, then got the call halfway through." "About Kashmir," Wufei stated. Heero nodded, and Duo's fist clenched. "Damn Sally. Good men died there." Heero finally looked up, but his eyes were dark. "Trowa may have died there." No one spoke, and Wufei turned back to the railing. There were sheets of rain coming down from the distant clouds over the mountains, and that meant there would be rain here in Geneva by noon. "Wufei?" "I never thought it would be this hard," he said. "War is always hard," Heero answered from behind him. He almost said something he would most likely regret in the next five minutes, changed his mind. "When the war ended," he said instead, talking to the trees two floors below, planted in neat rows around the hospital building and swaying in the pre-storm wind, "all I wanted to do was forget. I wanted to get away from it all, because I really wasn't sure what I had accomplished." "I know." Heero said. There was no emotion in the Wing Zero pilot's voice. "I ran and I hid because I was scared. I came to the conclusion that I hadn't been a soldier, but only a murderer, murdering people weaker than myself or those who wanted to be killed. I beat myself up about Treize's death, because I didn't see what I had accomplished by killing him. I didn't understand what he wanted." "I know," Heero said again. "I don't think any of us did," Duo said slowly. "That's why we're in trouble with Sally now. We can say all we like that Treize died to bring us a better world, but there are people, people like Sally, who believe he was totally wrong." Sally. Isn't Nataku worth that much to you? Doesn't she stand for your heritage? "Sally doesn't understand a lot of things," Wufei said thoughtfully. "About loyalty, about love, about patriotism." Absently, he noticed that Heero had migrated to the far end of the balcony, leaning against the rail, watching him with those bright eyes. "Heero? I don't know how much this applies to you, but tell me about your heritage." "My heritage?" the pilot repeated, looking blank. "You know, being Japanese. Or even...being from L1. Doesn't it mean anything to you at all?" The Japanese boy was very still for a moment. "I can't say...that it does," he replied slowly, a look on his face that made it clear it was a less than comfortable topic for him. "Or rather...it does, but I'm not like you, Wufei. Most colonists aren't. I'm Japanese, that's true, but that's really the only thing I know about myself, and that doesn't matter much in the Breaks. You were raised Chinese, but I was just raised to steal and kill and fend for myself. I did go home, at the end of the war, but just because L1 was the only place I'd ever known." Duo nodded. "Same here, really. That isn't to say there aren't people who I love on L2, but I don't think fighting for the colonies meant the same thing to us as it did to you." "I did the same thing we all did after the war," Wufei said. "I went home. But my home wasn't L5...it was China. I asked you about your heritage, Heero, because I've come to realize there are three kinds of people in the world. There are those who were born in one country, have lived there all their lives, and have never thought of doing anything different. Then there are those, like you, colonists, born on the colonies and have never thought of doing anything different." Heero looked thoughtful. "And the third? I think I can guess." "The third are people like me and Sally. Feeling...pulled...I suppose...to a country that says we don't really belong, one perhaps that our parents called home but we never did. That's what the World Nation doesn't understand about Sally, because they have never known that feeling. Sally is fighting to get that back. She thought I would do the same." Duo nodded. "I was never really patriotic, and that's where I don't understand Sally, I suppose. When she says she's fighting for China." Wufei gave a short laugh. "She's not fighting for China. That's why I'm still here. She's fighting for her idea of what she thinks the world should be like. She feels cheated by the war." "But she helped us! She helped Une!" Duo looked frustrated. "I don't get it." "No," Heero said. "I do. Sally feels that we all betrayed her in the end. She helped us to get what she wanted, and when we all decided to support the World Nation, she thought that we'd lied to her. "I personally, like Duo said, didn't fight because of patriotism. If Sally thought that I did, she's dead wrong. At the end, I fought to save the Earth because I believed it needed saving and I couldn't bear to see it destroyed, but it wasn't for any high ideal of equality or liberty or justice or anything like that." Looking at Wufei as he said the word justice. "Sorry." "What are you apologizing for?" Wufei returned. The curtain of rain and mass of clouds were moving nearer. Below, a dump truck carrying a load of broken concrete from the north end of base rumbled through the three-way intersection. "I always sort of envied you, you know," Heero said. Wufei looked at him in surprise, and was even more shocked to see the trace of a grin around the Wing Zero pilot's lips. "You had something to fight for. You were always talking about justice and honor and things like that. I wished I could be like that sometimes, instead of just some homeless boy who happened to get picked up wandering around the Breaks and trained into a killing machine to follow orders." "No," Wufei said. Heero looked confused, and the scar across his forehead puckered into a deep canyon shape as he frowned. "No what?" He didn't answer back for a moment, instead resumed his pacing, feeling something closing in, knowing he'd backed himself into a corner that he couldn't slip out of without the two of them knowing. Heero and Duo watched him curiously, and he wondered if they could feel the tension building inside him like the approaching thunderstorm. "No," he said at last, still pacing. Back and forth along the railing. "You don't wish you could be like that." "Wufei-" He cut Duo off with a curt hand gesture, realizing that he should have told all of them a long time ago, and realizing that if he'd done so, it would probably have helped. "I wasn't always like that." Wondering how to say it. "There was...there was a girl." A soft gasp from Duo, and he didn't have to be a genius to figure out Duo was thinking about his dead friend, Ilene Keets. "Her name was Chang Meilan. She was my wife." "Your wife?" Duo sounded incredulous. Heero said nothing. "We married young in my clan. Tradition. She was always muttering about justice and truth and honor and all that. I didn't understand it." Duo made a noise. "Arranged." "You have no idea," Wufei said darkly. "We hated each other. She was pretty good with a sword, a great martial artist...all that. I learned about combat because we were required to know self-defense, but I never saw the point. We weren't ever going to be attacked, right?" He saw her eyes again, saw her gently smiling at him. Take me to that field of flowers. "She called herself Nataku." Duo made a noise of realization. "She said...I was weak." "You're not weak," Duo said. "You're one of the strongest people I know." "She was stronger. She...our colony was attacked by OZ. I didn't know it at the time, but Master O would have sent her to earth in Operation Meteor as the fifth Gundam pilot. You'd have had my wife Meilan instead of me. But...she died." There. He had said it. He realized that it was the first time he'd said it out loud, had acknowledged her death to anyone but himself, had shared his private grief. He knew his voice was choked and trembling, but he didn't care. It felt good. "I'm sorry, Wufei. Shit, I...I know it sounds trite, but...I really am." "You'd think I wouldn't care," he plowed on, "because we hated each other. But having someone die in your arms...your wife...knowing that things could have been all right and that you could have loved each other if we'd have given each other the chance, knowing that..." He ground his fists into his eyes to stop the tears, feeling them leak from beneath his fingers. The other two were very still. "The reason she died," he said, "was because she believed in justice. She was going to protect the colony. And I think part of that was she wanted to prove to me how capable she really was. I've never stopped believing she died because of me. Whenever someone else died in the war because of an attack we made...whenever I killed someone...I saw her face." "It's not-" Duo began, but Wufei shook his head. "Knowing that doesn't make a difference. When she died, something...broke. I wish I were a Gundam sometimes, a machine, that someone could turn a wrench and fix. But I'm human and that's not possible." The wind picked up, and he tucked stray wisps of long black hair behind his ear. "I wanted to prove to her that I was worthy. That I was a worthy husband to such a strong woman. I'm still trying to do that. I've spent the past two years doing penance, telling her I was sorry, that I'd failed her because she died for nothing." Wufei stopped his pacing, gripping the railing, eyes fixed on the rain. "I'd like to say that I've stopped doing that, but I haven't. Two days ago, again, someone died because of me. I know that it isn't my fault - he could have saved himself and come home, but he didn't. He made a choice. But I still can't help myself." Turning around, feeling the hard balcony railing dig into his spine, he faced the two pilots, one standing at the doorway, one at the edge of the balcony. "When does it stop?" he demanded. "When does the hurting go away? When do I stop hating myself?" Heero pushed himself off the railing, and Wufei watched silently as the Wing pilot made his way over, stopping and facing him. "I'm leaving in an hour," he said. "Une's decided to send me to defend Sparta. I doubt Sally will strike there once she has L1 in ruins, but better safe than sorry." Wufei nodded, wondering where this was leading, not trusting himself to speak lest he burst into tears at the first word. "That's the level of trust the world has in our abilities right now," Heero continued. "We're not criminals, we're not murderers. We're tried and proven warriors who have pledged our skills to their safety, and they trust us." The blue eyes met his squarely, confidently, and in them there was no fear, no guilt, just a steely resolve. "I know that your wife must have been a wonderful woman and a great pilot and warrior, and I would have been proud to have known and worked with her. But the fact remains that the one who came to us wasn't Chang Meilan. It was you, Chang Wufei, who came to us from L5 piloting Shenlong Gundam. And it was you who helped us win the war." Heero held out his hand, and Wufei stared at him. He felt the beginnings of drizzle on his face - clean, cool water. "Before anything else happens, I want you to know...that I am glad it was you." The rain broke over them like the tide, and Wufei finally let the tears come, glad for the rain to mask them. As he reached out and grasped Heero's outstretched hand, he felt himself jerked into a rough embrace, and everything disappeared - the images of Meilan's dying body in his arms, Treize's face on his comm screen, Varis' shuttle exploding into leaping flames - and all he could see and feel was a darkened room, a frightened boy with a scar across his face, and his own voice, saying, welcome home. Heero released him and he stumbled back, a little bewildered, into the metal railing. The two pilots were smiling at him, Heero a little uncertainly, Duo grinning like a maniac. The hurting was still there, but it had lessened somewhat. It would be all right. "You gonna fight with us, Wufei?" Duo said, and he knew the answer before the question was out of the Deathscythe pilot's mouth. "Yes," he heard himself saying, "I'm with you. We've got a war to win."
Trying to turn over and finding that he couldn't, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at a white ceiling. In the background there was the soft chatter of...the radio? Or maybe a vidscreen, turned to some news channel. Listening for another second told him that the window of the room was open and that it was raining outside. He could smell it.
No one had to tell him that it was a hospital. He had spent an exorbitant amount of time being ill or injured lately, it seemed, and he really had no one to blame but himself.
The last thing he remembered was seeing the white towers of the base command center in the distance and feeling the dull throbbing in his right arm, which meant that he'd somehow broken it as Epyon had tipped over onto the ground during his struggle with the Zero system. He hadn't even bothered to radio headquarters that he was coming. Perhaps Etille had. He didn't know. He had thought they would sooner throw him out than accept him, the prodigal son, back into their care, so what did it matter?
He'd fought the Zero system once again, and this time, the Zero system had won.
Why?
There were a dozen different excuses. He hadn't used it in a long time. He hadn't flown a real mobile suit battle in a long time. Epyon was harder to handle and he was out of practice. But excuses were quite useless now in this scenario, where no one would believe him anyway, when he no longer had any pretenses to keep up. He had tried, and he had failed.
It was more than just him not being in control and being aware of the system's workings. He hadn't wanted to be in control. He hadn't wanted to be aware, because then he could just throw conscience to the wind and run on pure emotion.
He understood now, just a little, how Dorothy Catalonia felt.
Soon discovering the reason he couldn't turn over was that his arm was suspended to the side of the bed in a plaster cast hung on a large metal stand, he also discovered that he could at least sit up. There was a small mirror to the side of the bed and for a second he wondered if he could somehow turn it over or push it onto the floor so he wouldn't have to see his reflection, the reflection of a broken man, staring back at him.
But that was a lost cause after all. No matter if he didn't want to believe it - others who looked at him would see what he was afraid to see. And it was far too late to hide from the truth for vanity's sake.
Scooting to the edge of the bed, he lowered his face and peered into it.
Haunted blue eyes stared back at him out of a gaunt, hollow face. There were red patches on his cheeks and forehead from where A007's unforgiving sun had burned him, from too many hours standing out in the field. A mass of small scars over his right eyebrow and around his right eye were just scabbing over. He raised his good arm to touch them, and winced as they stung. There was another long, thin scar, jagged and messy, stretching across his chin. He needed a haircut.
"Well," he said to himself, a little ruefully, with a sigh. The tabloids wouldn't have anything to report on for a while, at least. Or maybe they'd take pictures of his scarred and disfigured face and blow it up to 500 times its normal size and stick it on the front cover so the world could see what Milliard Peacecraft had become.
Milliard, Zechs. Did names matter anymore? Did it matter what he called himself?
"I'm a failure," he said to the wall, and if he was any more delirious, he probably could have sworn to himself that the wall smiled back at him. But no, he was just drugged and bound up and broken, and so deadly tired.
It wasn't a physical tiredness, because his body felt well-rested, even with the injuries and broken bones. He'd had worse injuries before in his Academy and OZ days, and it hadn't stopped him from getting up the next day and getting done what needed to be done. The Academy had needed him. Treize had needed him. He couldn't afford to be ill.
But for some reason his mind seemed to have shut down on him now, and as he eyed the door and wondered if he was strong enough to get up and walk to it, his brain rang a warning bell at him. It's not possible, it said to him. Even if you do get to that door and walk out of the hospital, what would you do? Where would you go?
I could go back to work. I could go back to the Preventers.
And his brain said reasonably, do you really believe they'll accept you back? After your failure on A007, after Noin's death, after your little stunt in Epyon? They'd sooner stick you in the crazy ward.
But Une went through that during the war too. Une will understand.
And some far corner of his mind, which always seemed to save every scrap of conversation that he'd ever heard, whispered Dorothy's words to him.
Une sent you out here to die.
He had never told Noin that he loved her. So many things left unsaid, undone. Did he wish he had? Did she, in that split second before she died, think of him?
It hurt to even think of her, to even think of the sound of her name. It was like a messy wound dealt by some knife or even an axe, the executioner's axe, the weapon still buried deep in his chest and unable to be removed. He didn't know if he wanted to remove it. He didn't know if he wanted to try. Because if he did, and if the pain went away, wouldn't that be untrue to her memory? Wouldn't that be like saying that she had never mattered?
He would never love anyone the way he had loved her. He wished he could have told Dorothy that. Maybe that would have made things better.
For once in my life, I wanted to do something right.
As he lay down again with a sigh, the door clicked open.
"Oniisama?"
He froze.
Her footsteps didn't come any nearer, but he didn't want to turn, didn't want to look, didn't want to do anything but lay there with every muscle in his body tense so that he didn't have to see her.
"Oniisama, I..."
There was an awkward silence.
"I - I brought you some flowers," she said at last, and something inside snapped, and he moved his head so he could see her.
She was the same as he remembered her, and yet different. She didn't look any older, and she was wearing plain slacks and a white shirt, with her hair down. But it wasn't the clothes or her hair that made her different. There was something in her face, in the way she carried herself, in the softness of her voice when she spoke, that he didn't remember from when he had forcefully parted ways with her a year ago.
Their eyes met. She flinched but didn't look away.
"Hello, Relena," he said.
"Hi," she ventured, looking shy, and it was as if they were meeting for the first time, which in a sense, they were. He wasn't sure what to say, so he watched in silence as she moved to the little table by the wall and plunked the vase of flowers down on it with unsteady hands. From this angle, she looked ten years old.
"How are you?" he said quietly, sensing that she wasn't comfortable saying anything until he acknowledged her presence.
She twisted her hands. "I'm...fine. How are you?" Twitching her shoulders as she realized it was a stupid question and nervously biting at a fingernail.
A flash of memory and he somehow remembered her standing there at two years old, when she had stolen a cookie from the kitchen without asking, and stuffing her fist in her mouth when confronted by their mother. He'd watched from a doorway, curious as to what her punishment would be, and then had been outraged when all she got was a slight scolding and no dessert.
He smiled. "I've been better," he said. "But I'm all right. Have you been busy with the trial?"
Her head snapped up. "I didn't know you followed-" she began, then stopped. "A little," she said instead, and he didn't press the issue, instead looking over her shoulder at the flowers on the table. She dropped to her knees beside the bed so he could get a better look. They were white lilies.
"Thank you," he said simply, and she just stared back at him, face stricken. Another awkward silence.
"When I returned to the Cinq Kingdom after the war," he began conversationally, and he sensed her stiffen, though outwardly, her body language didn't change. "I was searching for something. I knew I wouldn't find it in Cinq, but I didn't want to face the world quite yet. That was why I went back. It wasn't that I wanted to be the king, or even the queen's advisor. I didn't even want to be your elder brother."
"I gathered that the moment you walked in the door," Relena said, and he was surprised by the venom in her voice, though he'd expected something like that.
"I suppose most of me wanted Treize back most of all. I didn't let myself care about you or the kingdom, because I was angry at Treize. He and his family were the ones who took care of me when our parents died, you know...while you were with Darlian."
He took a breath to start the next sentence, and then realized that he had no idea what to say. So instead he watched the rain for a while, his mind blank, struggling for words. "I guess I'd putting off thinking about you for a while. Because I knew eventually we'd have to see each other again, and nothing I say now will make things right. I've been a failure my whole life, and I'll just chalk this up to another milestone in my career of failures. I know that's no excuse, but..." He let the words trail off, knowing that it was probably wise not to say any more.
"I hate you," she said.
"I thought so. I don't mind."
If his quiet equanimity bothered her, she didn't let it show, just sat there with her hands twisted in her lap, biting her lip, no longer the queen of a kingdom but just a seventeen-year old girl who had never made peace with her past. "I've always hated you. I hated you when you were Zechs Merquise, I hated you when you were the leader of White Fang, I hated you when I thought you died and I hated you when you came back and I hated you when you left again."
"I thought-"
"No you didn't!" she cried, and he flinched despite his resolve not to let anything she said bother him. Because it did. Because this was Relena, his sister, and...
"I can't live like this, Milliard. I can't live knowing that I have a brother only to lose him time and again, and then realizing I never had him in the first place!" She raised her eyes to him, and tears leaked from the corners, running down to the corners of her mouth, but she made no move to wipe them away. "I was pushed and shoved into this kingdom by you, and you have no right - absolutely none! - to treat me the way you did!"
"Relena-"
"I know you never loved me. I thought I loved you, but maybe I was wrong." She made a move to push herself to her feet, then stopped, pushed her hands against the edge of his bed instead and stared at him with hard, angry blue eyes. There was another flash of memory, and he suddenly saw his mother's face, those same hard blue eyes, the resolve that he now realized was a little bit foolish and a little bit desperate and mostly just very brave.
"Then why did you bring me flowers?" he asked softly.
She made a half sob, half hiccup, and turned away from him in a curtain of blond hair. "Because you're in the hospital. And everyone in the hospital needs flowers."
"Relena, I don't hate you. I can't say right now that I love you either. I-" he stopped. "Relena, please look at me."
Maybe it was the pleading note in his voice that convinced her, because he never pleaded. But she turned around slowly, dragging her gaze with her to finally fix it on his face unwillingly.
"I have lost too much in the past two years. I lost my best friend, my kingdom, my reason for fighting. On A007, I lost two people very dear to me - one because I was too selfish to see how much I hurt her, and the other because of her unselfishness, to die saving my life and the lives of my soldiers. I'm not the same man who came back to Cinq after the war, Relena." He gestured to the cast on his arm. "I rebuilt Epyon, thinking I could avenge Noin. I don't know what I was thinking. Noin would have told me that there was nothing to avenge, to go pick up the pieces of my life and try to rebuild that instead of a machine which served its purpose long ago."
"We're all trying to rebuild, Oniisama," Relena said harshly. He nodded.
"I know. I know I'm not the only one, and I am not trying to make excuses. I'm not even asking for a second chance, because you and everyone else have given me chance after chance and I've let you all down."
"Why are you telling me this?" she whispered.
"Because I want to love you," he said after a long moment, trying to pretend that he was not about to cry. "Because...I want you to be able to love me."
Outside the window, the rain pattered, and he turned his eyes toward it, hearing her take another deep, gulping breath, sigh once, and then heard the soft taps of her shoes as she left the room without another word.
The door clicked closed, and he wondered where Epyon was, anyway. If they had dismantled her again or if she was still standing in some hangar waiting for him. He wasn't sure what he would do if he saw her again. He wondered if Sally would try to come after her, if she made it as far as Geneva. Though she wouldn't, he was quite certain of that. Heero Yuy would never let that happen.
Noin had believed in the Gundam pilots too.
But that didn't matter now, anyway. He stared out at the rain, listening to its soothing patter until his eyelids felt heavy and he laid his head back down on the pillow and drifted into sleep. |