Scene IV: The Hush of a Stormy Night
"It's not that those who are pure have no direction.
It's that their souls...are free."
-- Treize Khushrenada, Gundam Wing
The interrogator's chair was as hard and cold as ever, Etille thought distractedly, staring at the tips of his boots and shifting uncomfortably against the awkward position of his handcuffed hands digging into the small of his back. Across the table from him, Sally Po shifted her notes, glaring tiredly at him.
"This is getting us nowhere, General. I don't know why you won't tell me what you know. I can't believe you're holding back from loyalty to Une."
"This isn't about Une," Etille said in the same tired tone, matching her blow by blow. She might wear him down in the end, but damned if he was going to make it easy for her.
"What is it about, then?"
He simply stared at her with his best dead stare, but this was Sally Po and he had a feeling she would not be intimidated by it in the least. She wasn't.
"All you're getting out of this, Etille, is another long, hot night in a detention cell. If you'd tell me what I want to know, you'd be a free man in a heartbeat." Staring at him with a calculating look. "You know you want it."
"No," he said, not being able to come up with a better response.
"Where are Une's forces massing?"
Etille remained silent. She sighed again.
If she had asked him under pain of death to tell him why he was not volunteering information, he would have to honestly say he didn't know. It definitely was not loyalty to Une, whom he had served under for less than a week and hardly knew at all. It wasn't quite pride, because he had nothing to lose by confessing, and he knew it. What then?
The best answer he could come up with was that Sally's words to him the other day had stung, and he was not going to be humiliated by her again. But that wasn't quite it, either, because he was not easily humiliated, and her words had dug deep under his skin in a way that none ever had before.
He didn't want to admit to himself that her accusations were true.
You've been a soldier all your life, but you don't know what soldiering is.
No one had ever said that to him before. He'd known that inside his heart for years, but every commander who he had worked for had seemed to believe that he had the passion and the fire for commitment. Every battle, every engagement, every project he took had been like that. Even Une had said nothing.
Sally had found out the truth. And the truth hurt.
It was like Mohammed Ali Banks and the unveiling of the Gundam pilots in a way, he thought to himself a little bemusedly. Banks had only showed the world something that many people had already known but had carefully kept from the light of day because it was something that wasn't proper to say. And yet the truth hurt.
Sally rapped on the table sharply and he looked up at her, noticing that it wasn't just her voice that was tired, but the rest of her expression and posture was as well. He was tempted to say something, to tell her to drop the facade and just be Sally Po, but figured that would not gain a very polite response.
"Etille, tell me about the defenses of L3, and I'll let you go. I won't even ask you about Une anymore."
He raised an eyebrow. "And what is so important about the defenses of L3?"
"None of your business!" she snapped, and he raised the other eyebrow. It had been the first time she had lost her composure in all of the interrogation sessions over the past two days. The strain of waiting was getting to her too.
"The truth hurts, Sally," he said softly.
She stared at him. "What?"
"The truth hurts," he repeated. "But sometimes you must learn to accept it."
"I'm not asking about the truth," she replied, and he could tell she was trying to keep calm. He had no doubt he was about to get strangled in a matter of seconds. "I don't care about what the truth is. Everyone has their own version of the truth sometimes!"
"Then why do you push your version of it on others?" he demanded, playing one of the few cards he had, and had the return pleasure of having her stare at him with her mouth half open. "Why do you insist on destroying a colony that obviously does not believe in the same truth as you do? Isn't that negating your own beliefs?"
"I will not bandy words with you over this!" she hissed at last, and stood up from the chair so quickly that it almost toppled over. "Escort the prisoner back to his quarters," she said to the guard, who inclined his head quickly and snapped to attention nervously as she exited, slamming the door behind her.
"Don't worry," Etille said to the young guard, who was making his way over with a wary look to undo the leg irons which strapped him to the interrogation chair. "I'm not dangerous. If you don't believe me you can ask your boss."
Trowa had spent the better part of that night and the rest of the next day prowling the confines of his cell, pacing from one wall to the next. If anyone had been able to see him, they might have remarked that he looked remarkably like one of the lions he had been so fond of in his circus, but it was a solitary cell in Kashmir's high-security detention facility, tiny, with four concrete walls and a bare lightbulb hanging high over his head from the bleak grey ceiling. A blanket and pillow on the floor made up his bed, and an empty tin in the corner was all that was left of tonight's dinner.
When he had gotten tired of pacing he had sat down restlessly on the cold concrete floor, and when he couldn't stand sitting anymore he had jumped up and started again. Every so often he felt a burning, unquenchable desire to pound the walls till his hands bled and scream until his voice was gone. He kept this uncharacteristic surge of emotion in check till the late evening, when he had finally given in, screaming like a madman and falling to his knees when his hands were so numb he couldn't feel the pain anymore.
He had broken down and cried then.
He knew there were guards outside, but no one responded to his outburst. He never heard footsteps, never heard voices. For all intents and purposes, he was alone.
It was what Sally intended, he knew. She had been wrong with Wufei because Wufei had changed so much since the war she didn't know him at all anymore. But he, Trowa Barton, was predictable.
After his tears had subsided and he had wiped most of the condemning traces off his cheeks, he had remained sitting there with his head against the wall, staring out the tiny barred window at the starry sky, trying to think. It was something he had not done in a long while, because thinking required him to let go of the mask of quiet acceptance and obedience he had been used to wearing for so long. Lately, his thoughts had been frightening him.
He thought back to Antarctica, the second time Heero had faced Zechs Merquise, in Trowa's Gundam. He remembered the pilots turning the plane around, against Noin's orders. No discipline, he'd said about them, because that was all war was at the time - an endless nightmare of following orders, shooting to kill, and knowing that whatever happened, he could never leave anyone alive.
When he had tried to self-destruct that first time, Catherine had demanded to know why. Have you ever thought about the people who care about you? Don't be such a spoiled child! The people who will live... who will live without you won't be able to do anything but cry!
He hadn't had the heart to tell her that there was no one who cared about him. That he was all he had. It amazed him that she had the capacity to love so deeply, to love someone she had known for so short a time. That had fascinated him about her, held him in awe even, because the someone she had chosen to love had been him, who had thought himself not capable of human affection.
Because in the end, he had still been Nanashi, child of L3, raised and trained to kill, to follow orders to the letter, to leave no man alive if he wanted to survive. There was no love in this world, Doktor S had drummed into his skull, only dominance. Even his oyabun, who had been almost a father to him, was one of the most ruthless men Trowa had ever known, and if their up and coming prodigy had ever made a mistake that warranted it, Trowa had no doubt that the yakuza boss would have had no regrets about putting a bullet through his skull.
It was the world that he had grown up in, and most people, he knew, would call it bizarre, even nightmarish. But to Trowa, it was the world he lived in now that was bizarre and nightmarish, a world in which there were too many choices and no clear road, a world in which the enemy was sometimes not the enemy and a man could not live just by doing what he thought was best for himself. He would give almost anything to go back to L3, back to the yakuza, because even if was not the happy world that other people dreamed of, it was familiar to him. It was comfortable.
Even the world of the One Year War was still comfortable. Though not as comfortable as life back on the colony, it had still been familiar territory to him: kill or be killed, shoot first or die fast. He knew that Heero and Duo understood. Later in the war, when he had begun to cautiously open up to human companionship, he had envied Quatre the luxury of being able to forget that at times. Quatre had fascinated him because the blond Arabian was so unlike himself, yet was still able to fight.
Doktor S had made him believe that all people who fought, who killed, were nameless, faceless nobodies in the world like himself who had to kill to stay alive. He had been taught to think of himself as part of the Gundam, solitary, alone in a world of people out to get him, with only the orders hanging over his head as a motive for staying alive. He wondered if that was why Doktor S had tried so hard to keep the existence of the other Gundams a secret from him. If he had met Quatre before the war, perhaps things would have changed.
He had thought that maybe Catherine loved him because she didn't know all of that. But he had seen for himself time and again that wasn't true. Even when Catherine found out the truth, she still loved him.
She had done so much for him and he had done so little for her in return.
She probably thought he was dead now. He wondered what Sally had told the world - probably that he'd been killed in the attack. One less ex-Gundam pilot. One less criminal for the world to worry about. He wondered how Quatre's trial was going. He wished he could have stayed for it, to let Quatre know he still cared. He wondered if the World Nation would actually do something about Sally or if would just sit there like it had done in the past, staring helplessly and doing nothing.
He wondered for a brief moment what it would be like to have the same ethnic loyalty that Sally had to her homeland and to her heritage. What would it be like to be French, not just knowing you were descended from French people, but having France alive in your heart and your soul, feeling it in your very bones? It was too late for most of the European nations, Trowa supposed, except for maybe Cinq, because Europe had been united and divided and split up and pieced back together so many times that being Spanish or French or German or Italian or anything else had very little to do with who you were anymore.
Treize had been part French and part German, hadn't he? And something else...Russian? Most of the European nobility were like that, his oyabun had told him a long time ago. The old families take pride in the fact that they are old, not in where they come from. Because of that, we in the colonies have a different reason to fight. We're fighting for the chance to be our own people.
He had always wondered why a yakuza boss would sponsor a pilot for the colony rebellion, but had finally realized that the yakuza's ties with L3 ran deep. He respected that, but had never understood it. L3 was the place where he was from, nothing more. He had defined himself with the yakuza, not with L3, and until he had met Quatre and Catherine, he had thought he was fated to be the no-name pilot for the rest of his life.
And if he died here at Kashmir, maybe he would be.
Trowa was not an optimist, but he usually did try to look on the bright side of things for Catherine's sake. There was very little to be optimistic about in this situation, however.
Carefully, he got to his feet, wincing as his torn hands smarted, and started pacing again. It was impossible to sit still in this cell. He reminded himself of Duo, constantly moving, and the comparison brought a brief smile to his face which faded as he thought of his friends.
He wondered if Wufei had made it. At least Heero and Duo were safely back in Geneva.
That led to the thought of Ilene Keets, something that he still did not want to think about but had no choice. If he hadn't killed Ilene, would he have pushed the button and sent the missiles flying to Sally's death? Thinking on it now, he probably would have.
What kind of man had he become that he would kill little girls and yet leave world criminals alive?
Sometimes, the things we fight for - the ideals and the causes for which soldiers fight - become more than just a matter of life and death. Sometimes it's necessary to put the cause ahead of your love for that person...But I don't think Sally has stopped mattering. To any of us.
And that was it, Trowa realized, stopping his pacing with a sudden jerk, frowning. That was what war was, what Treize Khushrenada had fought for and died for. War was not the emotionless destruction that many people pictured it as. War wasn't even about fighting for your loved ones or for the ideals that you believed in, though that was a main cause. War was something that warped the people around you into people who you no longer knew, and sometimes you had to break all the rules.
Trowa Barton didn't know how to break the rules.
There had been times during the last war where he felt those rules lifting: when he had met Quatre and Catherine, when he had piloted Vayeate to the brink of death to save Quatre from himself, and during the last battle of the Eve Wars when all he wanted was to go home, back to Catherine, and to end the damn war that brought her so much pain. But in the end, he couldn't truly step outside the boundaries. The events two days ago had showed him that.
And yet...
He hugged himself, staring out at the night sky. What Etille had said was true after all.
He did still believe Sally could be saved.
It was the same, he realized, the same as when Quatre had taken Wing Zero out into space after his father's death. If Heero hadn't been there, Trowa didn't know what he would have done. Perhaps Quatre would have killed him there, and all this would have never happened. It had been Heero, in the end, who had shown Trowa what needed to be done, because all Trowa had felt after Quatre's betrayal was the same harsh, cold numbness that he felt now whenever he thought of Sally and her own path of twisted justice that was only hurting the people who loved her.
Quatre had come back to them. But his actions had been influenced by the Zero System. Sally did not have that excuse.
Out of all of them, Heero might be able to kill her. But Heero's conscience would never forgive him for that - he would be doing penance for the rest of his life if that came to pass. And unlike General Noventa, Sally had no living relatives that anyone knew of to whom Heero could give that gun.
Trowa wasn't going to let that happen.
"She might be a fanatic," he said to the moon, "and it's not my place to judge that. But...she is still my friend."
It was halfway to his cell before Etille decided that he had had enough of sitting there and doing nothing.
The guard had pulled him to his feet and pulled out a gun at the same time, like always, keeping Etille a few steps in front of him while he followed cautiously with a weapon. Etille hadn't even been thinking about anything like escape, just another long night in his cell and another interrogation session tomorrow morning. Why escape? There was nowhere he could run. Sally had the place locked down, and before he had even gone two steps he would be caught.
So when the idea of escape entered his mind, he wasn't quite sure why he grabbed at it and decided he wanted it. Maybe it had to do with the endless interrogation sessions. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was sick of Sally reading his every move. Maybe it was the fact that he just wanted to prove her wrong.
Whatever it was, he decided that if he was going to do it, he was going to do it now. Along that train of thought, he came to a stop in the middle of the corridor, where he knew there were no video cameras.
"Keep moving!" the guard barked, and he turned his head a little so he could see his captor's face. The guard was young, probably about the same age as the Gundam pilots, and looked it. The pilots didn't look it. They seemed much older, for some reason.
"I'm sorry," Etille apologized, and the boy blanched, and then Etille spun around, dealing a swift high kick to the side of the boy's head. The young guard didn't even have time to scream before he fell to the ground unconscious.
Moving quickly, Etille's eyes searched the boy's unconscious form and found the slight hump in the clothing that signified the presence of an electronic lock opener. His handcuffs were electronic, and he knelt, waving his bound hands in front of the thing, and heard a satisfying click as they came free. He stretched his slightly numb hands for a brief second, then handcuffed the boy, pocketing the key, and threw the body over his shoulder.
It took less than a minute, running, to deposit the boy in his cell and lock the door. He didn't delude himself. The cameras in the hallways would have spotted him, and he didn't have much time before he was found.
Yet there was something he had to do.
This wasn't what Treize wanted.
I don't believe in Treize. And the last time I checked...neither did you.
Etille had startled himself in his outburst to Sally about Treize, because before he had met Dorothy Catalonia, he hadn't believed in Treize. Treize was a name, a figure, someone who had sacrificed his life in vain for some stupidly noble outdated ideal. But when he met Dorothy, and then the pilots, something had changed all that.
Talking to Chang Wufei, he had received an inkling of the world Treize had been trying to create. It was the world that the Gundam pilots and the Preventers and even the World Nation was trying to build now, and for Sally to take all of that future and that hope away and to plunge the world back into war would be...unforgivable.
He wanted to be able to forgive Sally when it was all over.
He wanted to be able to believe in Treize.
Slipping quietly down the hall, he could hear the sound of footsteps. Searching for him? It was probably not necessary for him to find out. They would come for him sooner or later. As long as he finished this, it didn't matter.
There was a computer lab in the guard station, and that computer lab had access to the prisoner directory and also the base intranet, both of which Etille would find useful right now. The guard station was right by the main detention compound entrance, and he crouched in the corner for what seemed like hours, waiting for voices or footsteps or something, but he could not hear a sound.
Finally, deciding that it was useless to wait any longer, he sprinted across the hall and rolled into the doorway of the guard station, ending up in another combat crouch, gun in hand.
The guard station was empty, unmanned.
Could it be that Sally did not have enough personnel to man it? Again, it wasn't important for him to find out. He headed for the computer on the far side of the room, knowing that he had five minutes. Maybe.
ENTER PASSWORD.
Being the former base commander, he had the hardware codes for the machines, and it was an easy override to get him into the system. It was the prisoner's database that was the hard part. He had never bothered to familiarize himself with it, never thinking that he would have to deal with it, for obvious reasons. The lines and lines of code and what seemed like gibberish bewildered him until he realized that most of it was encrypted transmissions meant for the guard station and the real database was in another part of the intranet.
Not a problem.
His heart was beating a little faster now, and he wondered if his escape perhaps had gone undiscovered. The database was organized according to cell, and he had to scroll through several pages worth of data before he found it. But the name was in there, and as soon as he saw it, he wondered why he had ever been worried, because Sally would not have killed him.
TROWA BARTON. C-BLOCK 251 HIGH SECURITY.
The sirens began to scream.
They had discovered him missing. There was not much time. Hurriedly, he exited the prisoner database to the regular intranet. What he was looking for was not on the intranet, however, and he needed more time that he did not have.
No time, no time, the sirens chanted behind him as he typed in the codes that would gain him access to the central Kashmir secure database, the one which Sally had undoubtedly thought that no one would be able to enter. She had been wrong. He would prove her wrong.
He had to.
Gritting his teeth and forcing his mind to work faster, his fingers to work harder, he dug deeper into the system. Every missed keystroke was a millisecond lost, every misfired brain synapse was his captors getting a step closer.
There were echoing footsteps in the hallways now, echoing above the noise of the sirens.
And then he found it.
Just in time, because as they burst in through the door with their guns at the ready, he had had just enough time to extract himself from the system, making it look like he had never been there, and entering enough erroneous data into the computer that if anyone less skilled than Aidoru himself checked the station, it would look like he had been trying to find an escape route out of the base.
"Freeze!" demanded a harsh voice behind him.
Etille obligingly turned, raising his hands in the air as he came to face the contingent of guards fully. The head guard gestured rudely with his rifle.
"Drop your weapon!"
As he reached to his belt to drop the stolen pistol to the ground, another Liberation Forces soldier moved to the computer, as Etille had predicted, to run a scan of the system. "Looks like he was trying to find a way out of the base, sir," he reported.
The commander grunted. "You're not going anywhere," he said, and Etille felt the familiar handcuffs snap on again. But it wasn't like last time, because he wasn't going to take this lying down anymore. He was going to take matters into his own hands.
He - no, not he. They - Une and Trowa and the rest of the pilots, Dorothy Catalonia and Relena Peacecraft and all of the ones on whose side he had allied himself. They were going to make this last battle count for something. Because Treize Khushrenada and Sally Po could not both be right, and he, like the people he now realized he admired most in the world, had finally chosen Treize.
Treize had not been perfect, nor had he been God. They all knew that. But he had at least been on the right road, had seen a vision of what could have been, and somehow, muddling through the dark tunnel into which he had pointed them, they would all someday emerge into the light.
Act XI Part IV | Act XII Part II | Back to Sainan no Kekka