Scene III: Princess of Sand and Air
"I've seen what I was and I know what I'll be-
I've seen it all; there is no more to see."
--Bjork, I've Seen It All
It was always the men, Atsuki thought as she felt the familiar weight beside her rise and pad soundlessly to the door. Always the men. She couldn't seem to stay away from them. They would be her downfall...they already were.
Wing closed the door softly behind him as he always did, believing her to be asleep. He always left at dawn, before any sane human being would be awake, the amounts of alcohol and the needles and tablets he had taken the night before seemingly having no effect on his system. She didn't know why he didn't wake her up to say goodbye, but she never slept until dawn. She was always long awake before the sunrise, staring up at the cracked ceiling or out the tiny window, hearing Wing's steady breathing beside her, tangled in his sheets, tracing with her eyes the bare tanned skin scarred in too many places.
He always awoke at dawn, and she would close her eyes, pretending to sleep. Sometimes she actually fell back asleep before he left, but most of the time she would watch through almost closed lids as he climbed out of bed, dressed quickly, and departed.
He never said goodbye.
When his footsteps had faded down the hallway, she sighed, rolled over, threw the covers off and stood on the cold floor. She hadn't drunk much last night but the ground felt unsteady and she reached out with one hand, balancing herself against the wall. To think of it, she hadn't gotten drunk in a while. Her alcohol tolerance must be dropping.
The bathroom was a filthy little room across the hall, dark and dank, rodent-infested, smelling of human excrement. She took a cold shower and hurried back across to her room, to wait out the day. To wait until the night, when she would move soundlessly through the streets and take the men, one by one.
Or they would take her.
For a moment she wished Wing were still here, sleeping next to her and she could watch him, not touching him, just stroking him with her eyes. But that was ridiculous. Wing had his own life, his own obligations, and if it included destroying lives, it was none of her business.
Her family had raised her pacifist, but she was no longer tied to her family, so it didn't matter. Being a prostitute took care of severing ties by itself. She was not ashamed to call it that - shame was part of that old moral code. Obsolete.
Wrapping the towel around herself, Atsuki absentmindedly picked the strands of hair out of her hairbrush before running it through her hair. It was long and golden, and an anomaly, she had believed. No one in her family had had golden hair, except one.
She didn't like to think about her family.
Atsuki brushed her hair hurriedly, throwing on an old sweatshirt and a pair of dirty jeans, staring at the wall and concentrating on nothing. Not even a pair of blue eyes that was like and so unlike...
It was always the men.
They were her downfall.
It was a man at the beginning, who had convinced her to leave it all behind. Come with me, he'd said. She could still feel his arms around her and the feel of his lips when he had kissed her. She had been so young, so naive, and she had believed him.
He was a beautiful specimen, tall, dark-haired, with a square jaw and athletic physique. But his eyes were what intrigued her the most. Dark, dark blue, almost black, but when the light hit them they would shine with all the brilliance of sapphires. They'd met at a party, another one of those boring social functions in which her duty was to stand and look enchanting, with the older couples patting on her head, commenting on how enchanting she looked.
He was different. He'd asked to dance with her and she had accepted. She'd felt a curious burning in her heart whenever he looked at her, a hunger she had not known, and when the guests departed that night, she had asked her father who he was.
Her father had not known, but instead told her to stay away from him. Had threatened that he would punish her if she did not. And she, who had listened to her father for all of her thirteen years like a dutiful daughter, decided that she had had enough. Her father was always telling her what to do. He was always telling her siblings what to do, also, but they were not like her. They were submissive while she was wild, willful. They followed blindly while she thought for herself. Or so she had thought at the time.
She saw him again soon afterwards, and she had let him take her home, back to the small but well-furnished house where he lived. It was her first kiss, her first love encounter, and it was not so much for the emotion or the sensation, but for the sheer plunge headlong into the cliff of total independence. It was her own rebellion.
He had taken her virginity. She had let him, and in the hot days and forbidden nights that followed, she had confessed her unhappiness, her frustration with the system that had her bogged down in the mire of social status.
One night, he'd suggested it. That she run away with him. He was leaving for Earth, and he wanted her to come with him.
She'd balked at the idea. It was too rebellious, even for her. She did not particularly care for her father, but there were sisters and particularly a little brother whom she was attached to. They didn't know what she was doing, though she knew some of her sisters suspected. She was provided for, cared for. She didn't want to leave.
But at the same time she didn't want to leave him.
She promised him she'd think it over, and when she returned home that night, had climbed into her own bed, determined not to think about it until morning. But she couldn't sleep.
Her brother's room was in the far wing of the house, but it was not that far a walk, and she knew back corridors. The light was shining from the crack under his door. He was always so studious; it amazed her. She could never keep her concentration on the books for more than a few minutes at a time.
She pushed open the door. He was seated at his desk, bent over some paper or other, but he turned around when he heard the door open. He smiled at her.
"I thought you were Reeshya."
"Why would you think that?" she wondered absently as she wandered over and seated herself on his bed.
"Reeshya always has problems sleeping, so she comes over sometimes." Angelic face smiling. She suddenly wondered if she should be here after all.
"I...want to ask you something," she said softly.
He must have sensed her hesitation, because he suddenly got up from his chair, climbing up on the bed next to her. "What?"
"If I," she began, then stopped. "If I were to-"
"Run away?"
She darted a startled glance at him, the careful, planned words lost. "W-what?"
"If you were to run away," he stated solemnly. He was not smiling now. "Neechan...what are you going to do?"
"How did you know?" she managed, through the thin veil of shock that her little brother, her ten year old brother, knew about her plans before she had even made a decision for herself. Because it wasn't a guess. He wasn't the type to guess. He knew.
"Neechan-" he whispered, and when she looked at him, he was crying, one hand pressed over his heart. "It hurts inside, neechan-"
"Shh," she murmured, wrapping her arms around him tightly and rocking him. "Shh. Neechan's not going anywhere. She's staying right here with you. She's not going anywhere."
He didn't speak for a while, sniffling and wiping the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. "If you did go away..." he said at last, looking up at her. "You'd come back, right?"
"I'm not going anywhere," she said stonily.
"I love you, neechan."
Two weeks later she found herself crowding into a third class cabin aboard an old dilapidated passenger freighter, bound for Earth. It was frightening, but it was all right, because he was there. He had promised to take good care of her. She left a note in her room, warning them not to search for her. She didn't think they would. Her father had better things to spend his money on than a wayward daughter.
They never made it to Earth. There were engine problems and they had to stop on L1, and he had told her they were getting off here.
"L1 is just as well," he had reassured her when she wondered at the sudden change of plans. "It's all the same. We can start a new life."
Money was scarce, and the part of town where they lived was dirty and dark, filled with criminals that wandered the streets at night. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. There was never enough to eat, and though she tried to tell herself differently, his kisses were not the same as they used to be. He was colder, more aloof, disappearing for days at a time and leaving her alone in the run-down apartment. When he would return, smelling like alcohol and other things, she would not question him, just wait in silence until he motioned her into his bed and he touched her with a touch that was almost violent. It was not the same. She wanted to go home.
But she dared not suggest it to him for fear of his anger, so she cried in her bed at night when she thought he was asleep and dreamed of a better life. Dreamed of running away, back to the family who now when she thought back had not been that suffocating after all. Wondered how she had been so naively stupid to think that a man could solve all her problems.
If you did go away...you'd come back, right?
It hurts, neechan.
She couldn't go back. Her family had probably cut her off from the inheritance, from the family circle. Had probably declared her dead. They had done it to one of her older sisters who had run away years ago. Her name was erased from all the annals. Gone. Forgotten.
If she went back, she would have no place to go.
So she stayed.
She tried to get a job, but there was simply no employer willing to hire a girl as young as she was for honest work, even for minimal wages. She needed a job, or she would starve. So again, he was the one to suggest it to her. The occupation, if it could be called that, was not foreign to her. There were whores on all the street corners as soon as afternoon began to fade into evening, and sometimes even during the daytime. They frightened her, but if that was what he wanted, she would do it. Anything for him.
She still thought she loved him, even if he didn't love her.
She was small and thin and considered good looking enough that she got a good deal from most of the rings she inquired into. She didn't care which one she joined. A job was a job, no matter what she did, and if it required stripping off one's clothes and climbing into bed with a stranger, then so be it.
And the days blurred into nights and then back into days and sometimes they were gentle and sometimes they beat her until she screamed, but they always paid. That was the most important part, because if they paid, she could stay alive. Though she really did not know what she was living for, because he didn't even come home anymore, and she didn't care.
Then they came, knocking on the door of the dilapidated apartment, and when she opened it she found an eviction notice waved in her face, because the rent had not been paid in three months. She told them he had been paying. They shoved a different notice in her face.
He had been killed three weeks ago by a bullet to the head, and if she would not pay the three month's previous rent, she would have to leave.
She left.
It was only when she was walking down the stairs, with all her wordly belongings in one backpack over her shoulder, that she realized he had never told her who he was.
She dreamed of her family sometimes still, but they were drug-enhanced dreams where the colors were twice as vivid and the people moved in terrible slow motion across the viewscreen of her mind. Their mouths would open and they would speak, but she couldn't hear them.
And there were the gang members and the drug dealers and the drunkards and the gamblers and the theives and the occasional assassin, and she would give them what they wanted if they had the money. Days became months which became years, and it was her life. He was gone, but she remained, and she could not escape.
She didn't know if she really wanted to. It was all she knew, now.
The war came and went, but nothing really changed, except there were suddenly more customers. She'd noticed the boy with the long black hair and the scar down his face before, but he had always been sitting alone, slumped over a drink or maybe shooting a needle into his arm with the lethargy of one who had no desire for any physical enjoyment. Like the drinking and shooting was simply part of an everyday routine. He intrigued her.
He had a partner, a dark-skinned, tall boy who would come around once in a while to check on him and then disappear into the crowd with various different women. She heard their names whispered over the lips of the crowd. Wing. Darkflight. Who they were no one knew; only that they were assassins of the highest caliber and that the leaders of the Black Diamond and Shionji cartels, among other high names, had asked them for their services at one time or another. There was even a rumor that they had refused the Tanaka cartel a job. She couldn't believe that. No one in his right mind could refuse the Tanaka cartel a job and still live to tell the story.
She resolved to ask him about that, if just to approach him and start up a conversation. He didn't look like the conversing type, but she had to try anyway. There was something different about him, something that reminded her of herself.
"Hello," she ventured, sliding onto the barstool next to him and making sure the neck of her dress fell further down than was proper.
He didn't answer, simply took another drink out of his half-full mug.
"Your name is Wing? I've heard of you."
Silence. She sighed inwardly. He was wearing a black tank top and his dark, greasy hair was bound back by a ragged strip of black cloth. Flipping her hair back from her shoulder and letting one of the straps of her dress fall down her arm, she reached out to caress one of his bare biceps. They were strong, muscular, just as she had expected, and still touching him, she conjured up her most seductive voice, like they had taught her.
"What are you doing tonight, Wing?"
"Take your hands off me."
She blinked, then renewed his stroking of his arm. "I don't think you know what you're saying."
"Take your hands off me," he said again, removing his arm from her touch. Just like that. There was no emotion in his words.
So that wouldn't work. "I hear you're an assassin. One of the best. They say you refused Tanaka a job. Is that true?"
"I don't want your services," he said again, and his gaze swung from the mug to look her square in the face.
Her mouth dropped open and it was all she could do to keep her balance on the stool.
His eyes were his eyes, dark, dark blue, almost black. But she knew that in the light, they would blaze like sapphires.
He watched her shock without comment, though she thought she could see something flicker in the depths of those eyes, and she swallowed. Those eyes held her, drew her into their spell, and when she finally looked away, she was shaking.
"I-I'm sorry," she murmured, catching her breath. "I should go..."
She slid off the stool, intending to make her way into the crowd, but there was a grip on her upper arm and she couldn't step forward.
"What-" she said, turning, and felt his lips fall on hers. They tasted of alcohol.
Afterwards, they lay in each other's arms on the dirty bed and he made no move to leave, and she made no sign that he had to go. She had to, she knew. He was only one customer, one conquest in a night of conquests, and she had a schedule to keep. But she didn't want him to go.
He was different.
"What's your name?" she said.
"Wing." The eyes flicked to hers, briefly. "You?"
"Atsuki."
"Ah." She knew he was going over the golden hair, the dark skin. She was not Japanese, but neither was "Wing" the name of a regular boy. It was all right.
"Why did you pick me, Atsuki?"
She blinked. "What?"
"You heard me," the monotone voice said. "Why did you pick me? There are plenty more lively men out there tonight."
She considered making a sexually slanted joke, wondering if he was up for another round, then realized he was serious. This was new. A man in her bed, serious. She'd thought they were all liars.
"Why do you think?" she said, turning onto her back. She suddenly felt like crying. Ridiculous. She hadn't cried since he had died, all those years ago.
"I don't know," he said. Emotionless.
"I-" she choked, then turned away from him. "I think you should leave now."
He didn't question her, simply sat up, dressed, and disappeared out the door. It slammed behind him.
There was no love, no emotion, no sharing of joys and fears. It was sex, plain and simple, and the next time she tapped him on the shoulder, just intending to say hello, he had stood and looked expectantly at her.
He never paid.
They talked sometimes, after all was done, about various topics that had nothing to do with who they were or where they wanted to go, but as time wore on that became harder and harder to do. She had never been with a man this long before, if it could be called that. Wing was the constant in her life, the one who would be there every night even if there was no one for her, and his was the first head she looked for when she entered that particular bar to look for customers. It should have been hard to see, being black on black, but it shone out to her like a beacon.
"What do you think of this?" he had asked her one night, rubbing the thick scar on his face. It twisted his upper lip and made a horrible line across his nose and the corner of his eye. She had often wondered what he would look like without it.
"The scar?" she said, touching it with gentle fingers. "I think it's beautiful."
Wing was beautiful, to her. Everything about him, soaked in blood but incredibly beautiful. He was lonely, she knew, lonely and haunted, just like her. She wanted to help him, but he would never tell her why he sometimes cried out in his sleep or would suddenly sometimes stop talking in the middle of a sentence and stare off into the air at nothing, trembling with his fists clenched.
She never said she loved him. She would not make that mistake again.
Then the news over the Gundam pilots broke, and the man she had thought she knew had disappeared, giving way to a confused, bewildered boy. It frightened her, but there was no explanation for it if he wouldn't give one. And he would never give one, because even if he had had memories of the war, he would tell no one. And he didn't have memories. He had erased them.
The day afterwards, she couldn't find him in the bar. She saw Darkflight there, asked him where his partner was, and the other boy had shrugged. Wing was home asleep, he said. Did she want him to take a message? Like he was an answering machine service. She had shook her head and left.
If Wing wanted his privacy, she would give it to him. He had no obligation to her, after all. He didn't love her, just like she didn't love him. He said she reminded him of someone. She had never asked him who, because he wouldn't tell her even if he could remember.
Or maybe he would lie.
But it didn't matter who Wing was: assassin, liar, cheat, betrayer, because those things had never mattered to her. As long as he was there, as long as he was able to whisper secret words in the dark and to touch her with the callused hands that were so gentle and to look at her with those deep blue eyes, it didn't matter.
Because she told herself she didn't love him, but she did.
Go to Heero story Rain
Scene IV: At the Gate of Heavenly Peace
"Excitate vos e somno, liberi fatali Somnus est non.
Ardente veritate Incedite tenebras mundi.
Valete liberi Diebus fatalibus."
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[Wake from your sleep, fated children The peace is gone]
[Fiery truth Light the dark world.]
[Goodbye, children The day has died.]
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--Final Fantasy VIII, Liberi Fatali
He didn't know what had awakened him, but he couldn't seem to fall back asleep. So he lay there quietly, listening to the gurgle of the brook in its bed and the twitter of the birds in the pre-dawn chill. It was still cool in the morning, in the early summer. That was good.
He could run some errands today, he supposed.
He really disliked running errands - disliked the city in general. But there were books to return and groceries to buy. He could grow vegetables, but he had yet to find the resources to start his own backyard rice paddy. So that required a trip to the capital.
He lay there until the sky lightened and pinked at the edges, then flung aside the covers and sat up. The sleeping mat had shifted during the night and he was somehow lying at a slight angle to the doorway, staring directly at the window. The sun was coming up through the tops of the trees.
It took him less than ten minutes to get dressed and head out the front door. There were books in the sack slung over his shoulder, and he had enough money in his pocket to buy two weeks worth of rice and other necessities. If the prices hadn't gone up. Prices had a nasty inclination to do that nowadays.
The nearest bus station was a ways off, in the village down the road, and by the time he reached it, the sun was high in the sky and there was a thin trail of sweat trickling down his back. There were a few other people at the makeshift stop, waiting in silence. He stood off to the side, one hand resting idly on his straw hat to make sure it didn't blow away in the wind, which was picking up a little. Clouds drifted idly across the sky. He could feel their shadows on his skin.
There was a Chinese poem about clouds which he had read once. He couldn't remember the words, only that they had something to do with death.
A rumble and the blunt head of the bus appeared over the brow of the hill. As it hissed to a stop, he grasped his sack and patiently waited to crowd onto the bus with the others. If he was lucky, if the bus wasn't too crowded, he could get a seat.
The bus was empty.
Frowning, he surveyed the interior. The only people aboard were the short old woman and the two teenage girls that had been at the bus stop with him. He could feel the driver's eyes on him and he glanced over his shoulder. The eyes looked away.
The atmosphere was one of...fear?
His muscles tensed and he grasped onto one of the handrails, not heeding the rows of empty seats. There was something wrong, and he didn't like it.
It felt like war. But that didn't make sense. The war was over.
The rumbling of the bus' engine was the only conversation all the way to Beijing, and as the vehicle rattled through the outer limits of the city, he noticed that the usually bustling streets were deserted.
He smelled smoke.
hurtling through the depths of space and he saw the remnants of his colony burning and he screamed
The highways were deserted. The vehicle crossed lane after lane, exit after exit without a single car in sight. The bus finally screeched to a halt just short of downtown, and he got off, slinging his sack over his shoulder. Still no cars, but there was the noise of crowds in the background, and the thudding of drums. A crack.
Gunshots?
He began to hurry towards the sound. The bus had disappeared behind him and he ran through the twisting maze of streets. The roof of the Imperial Palace rose in the far distance. He had seen pictures of the Imperial Palace once, a long time before the...war...and he hadn't been too impressed with it. Another vainglorious ornament to man's ephemeral life. A waste of money that could have gone towards teaching the people to read or buying more books.
Meilan had laughed, when he told her that.
Always the scholar.
He passed an old man huddled in the corner of a building, tapping his staff against the stones.
"A ye!" he called out. "What's going on?" His voice was hoarse from disuse, and the words came out in a half-croak.
The man looked up at him from under his hat. "It's a riot up there," he rasped. "I wouldn't go up there if I were you."
"Up where?" he demanded.
"The square-"
The square. Tiananmen Square.
He started running again, running over in his mind the history he had been taught when he had been the student, when he was a child. About the riots at Tiananmen in the mid 1900's AD. About how the government had sent out soldiers. About the bright young minds that had died there.
They had been students and scholars, just like him.
There were more gunshots, and he could hear wild screaming. The sack was slowing him down, and in a fit of abandonment he shrugged the sack from his shoulder and threw it with a thump into the dark ways of a passing sidestreet.
The shouting was clearer now as he approached the Forbidden City, and he began to see people in the broad streets, some clutching bags of what he assumed were personal belongings, holding crying children.
"Down with the military! Give us justice!"
He stopped running, listening, unable to move. The chanting continued, interspersed with screams and the occasional gunshot. Blanks. They were firing blanks. They had to be.
"Down with the military! Give us justice! Down with the pilots!"
Pilots? What pilots?
Sprinting across the street, he stopped before a middle-aged woman pushing a cart filled with what looked like everything she owned. "What's going on?"
She tried to go around him, but he stepped in front of her agilely. "A yi! Give me an answer!"
For answer, she reached into the cart with shaking hands, throwing a bundle of papers his way. Her eyes were frightened.
With a sigh he stepped out of her way and she hurried down the street as he bent to pick up the paper. His hands never made it. The bold Chinese characters on the page front leapt out at him with frightening clarity.
CHILD MURDERERS: THE GUNDAM PILOTS OF THE WAR REVEALED!
"No," he whispered under his breath, as he knelt shakily down, grasping the incriminating article in one hand. The characters did not lie. "No.""
"Down with the military! Give us justice!"
He was reaching for a sword that wasn't there. His mouth was dry, and he backed away from the paper. It wasn't true. The war was over.
"The war is over!" he shouted raggedly. His throat hurt. He could see the beginning of the masses of protesters packed into Tiananmen, some waving banners and posters, pushing and shoving.
Helicopters whirred overhead, and loudspeakers blared over the noise of the crowd. A man leaned out of the door, firing a gun into the air. The hysteria doubled in force, and he could feel the tension snapping back.
There was a name printed in bright colors on the side of the helicopter. It was in English.
PREVENTERS PEACE FORCE
Leaving the paper, he staggered towards the crowds on unsteady legs, seeing in his mind horrible scenarios of what could come to pass. He saw people dying, falling in their own blood. He saw people running but not able to run fast enough. He saw the sky black with mobile suits and combat aircraft. Explosions.
"NO!" He shouted, but the roar of the crowd swallowed him up. He shoved, trying to move forward, trying to move towards the tomb, the central focus of the square, but it was useless. The masses were packed tight. He smelled sweat and fear.
Those were the two smells he most hated. Sweat and fear.
"Down with the military!" The crowd chanted around him, chanting it like a mantra of protection. Wild chanting. "Down with the pilots! Give us justice!"
"This is not justice!" he screamed, fighting for a voice. "The war is over!"
An arm came whipping across his face, and he staggered. When he looked, the offender was gone, swallowed up in a sea of anonymous arms and legs and faces streaked with sweat, wild eyes and angry voices. He was suffocating, drowning.
"DISPERSE," came the voice from the loudspeaker. "OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO SHOOT. DISPERSE."
"Military bastards!"
"You destroyed our country!"
"Give us back our children!"
"Give us back our people!"
He fought to breathe, fought to keep his head free and upright. He was not afraid. There was no fear, just a terrible anger, and for a minute he wished for the controls of his metal machine once more. The crowd was out for his blood, and he was caught along in the terrible tide.
They had no idea who he was.
"Stop!" he shouted. "Stop! You're fighting the wrong people!"
I'm the Gundam pilot. I'm the one you want!
when he had swooped down low and pulled the terrible trigger and a hundred of the brightest minds in the Federation had died in their beds that night
There were gunshots, and he felt something warm splatter onto his face.
Screaming. A heavy weight.
He stumbled, fought to keep his balance, and he felt the crowds move apart, felt the fear increase to near panic as the screaming continued and rang in his ears. The cries for peace and justice faded in the face of raw chaos.
It was a young girl, head thrown back, bullet hole in the middle of her forehead gushing blood over his face and clothes, and he gave a wordless shout, throwing her from him and trying in vain to wipe the thick crimson from his skin. He could feel it crawling, like a live thing.
The crowd roiled around him and he fought to keep his balance as it buckled this way and that in panic. There was more firing, flashing in the sunlight like bright sparkling diamonds. Spatters of blood. He could hear sobbing over the screams, now.
"I'm the Gundam pilot!" He screamed. "I'm the one you want! Not them!"
It was the same. The war was over, but it was the same. People were dying, and it was because of him. Because he was a coward.
"I'm the one," he whispered, as the crowd surged around him and bodies fell. "I'm the one you want. Not them. Never them."
The clouds rolled across the sky, above the whirring blades of the helicopter, from the door of which they were taking lives in the name of justice.
They're innocent...
A yE: Chinese, literally "grandpa." Form of address towards elderly men
A yE: Chinese, literally "aunt" or "auntie." Form of address towards middle-aged woman
Link to information on the massacre at Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989
Act II Part III | Act III Part II | Back to Sainan no Kekka