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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 2000-2003 by Quicksilver and Gerald Tarrant. Please ask permission before reposting. Merry Christmas 2002 to all our Sainan no Kekka readers, and a very happy New Year!
SAINAN NO KEKKA
Adrianna Rosenbaum's mouth was set in a firm line, and the way she gazed out the window at the snow falling in the dim twilight, the way her knuckles gripped the sill, told Helena that this wasn't a spur of the moment decision. She couldn't lie to herself and say she hadn't seen it coming, but she'd hoped that her parents had somehow changed their minds. Not that the present state of world events had given them much in that direction.
"I'm sorry, mama," she offered softly.
Her mother tore her gaze from the window, looking at her tiredly. "What do you have to be sorry about?" she whispered, a small smile creasing her face.
Helena smiled back sadly. "That the world isn't a better place."
Her mother closed her eyes briefly, shaking her head, still smiling. "That's not your fault, child…that's none of our faults. I wish more than anything that we could send you back…but with the way things are right now, Cliffside is a prime target for terrorist activity. I know you understand."
Helena nodded, reaching out and squeezing her mother's hand. "I know. Don't worry…I can home-study until this blows over."
Her mothe's eyes were tired. "Do you honestly think it'll blow over? Do you think…" she trailed off.
"Mama?"
Her mother shook herself. "Sorry…rambling to myself. Why don't you go upstairs…dinner will be ready in about half an hour."
Helena recognized a dismissal summons when she saw one and didn't have the heart to argue with the weariness in her mother's face. "Yes, mama."
She took her time going up the stairs. Her mother had turned the radio on in the kitchen, and she dawdled, hanging over the railing and straining her ears to make out what she could. As far as she could tell, the word "war" kept cropping up…"war" this and "war" that, along with "Federation" and "Khushrenada." She would like to give Treize Khushrenada a piece of her mind, if she could. She'd like to give all the Federation leaders a piece of her mind, actually. It was all their fault that she wasn't allowed to return to Cliffside for the spring semester. Theirs, for starting the talk about war in the first place.
It was funny, because at first, she hadn't even wanted to go to Cliffside in the first place. When her mother had asked her to take the entrance exam, she'd scoffed. Cliffside, the school for politicians' and wealthy landowners' sons and daughters, when her family was proudly middle-class? Her, go to a school with a bunch of spoiled, rich heirs and heiresses? No thank you, she declared, handing the brochure firmly back to her mother. She wasn't going to identify herself with snobs. She was perfectly happy in her public school, with her friends and her soccer team, and she was going to stay.
It was only afterwards, when her father had asked her the same thing, did she suddenly wonder why they were badgering her to do this when they usually let her do what she thought was best for her life. It wasn't that she was a spoiled child - no, the Rosenbaums were strict and firm in their upbringing, one of those couples that believed children should be seen and not heard. But behind that, they'd always let her stand up on her own, and that included failures as well as successes. When she had worked hard for something, they congratulated her. When she made poor decisions, they let her take the fall she'd made for herself. But they hardly ever scolded her. When she was wrong, they would sit her down and make her think hard about the consequences of her actions. Where did you go wrong? What could you do next time to improve? What do you think you should have done?
Her father worked for the State Department, and he'd come home with a weary look on his face and tales of the corruption and injustice he'd seen at work that day. He never asked her to leave the room when he told his stories. He treated her like an adult, just like one of them, and as she grew older she began to understand that he wanted more for her than just a quiet life in the same small sleepy town.
So she'd seen the hope in her father's face when he'd asked her to take the entrance exam, and she'd taken the brochure upstairs to her room and flipped through it again, more carefully this time. Cliffside Heights, an elite boarding school for the future of America…she'd dismissed the title of the brochure as mere propaganda at first, but reading through it again, she realized that her parents wanted to send her here not because they wanted her to mix with the spoiled heirs of money-stuffed legacies, but because they believed she could do it. They believed she had the potential.
After half an hour of lying on her bed staring up at the white-washed ceiling and hugging her teddy bear, Helena had decided that they were right.
She had been nervous her first day. Her parents hadn't come with her, saying goodbye to her at the airport. Her mother had been sniffling back tears, and she'd almost turned back at the gate at the last minute, running back to her parents and wanting to say, I can't do this, Mama, Papa, let me go home with you. But she'd marched resolutely through the terminal with tears in her eyes, sat shivering on her seat on the plane, and walked nervously up to the women she'd seen at the gate with the sign reading "Helena Rosenbaum - Cliffside."
Half a year later now, she could hardly remember that she had been nervous about going to Cliffside in the first place. True, there were some students there who were too spoiled rich for their own good, but by and large, all of the people she had met had been wonderful to her. She'd worried about being too outspoken at first, but she'd soon realized that most of the other students there were as or even more so than she was, and she'd wasted no time plunging headfirst into all of the political opportunities offered there. Even more to her delight, Cliffside had a soccer team, and that was how she met Chris Johnsen.
Chris wasn't on the soccer team. He wasn't an athletic sort of guy to begin with, and she could see that when she first met him - he was muscular but not athletically so, and when she'd shyly asked him if he played sports, he'd shaken his head in what seemed like amusement.
"I don't play sports," he said, "but I ride horses."
She'd never met anyone who rode horses before, and that just made him the more fascinating.
Chris was a reporter-in-training for the school newspaper, which was why he'd been at her soccer game that day. The Cliffside rules stated explicitly that freshmen were not allowed to do full journalism activities, but that they could tag along with an older journalist and see the day-to-day workings of the system. She'd no doubt that Chris could have pulled some strings and gotten that rule waived for him if he chose: his family was one of the ten richest in the world, or so she'd been told by her roommate Ilene that night when she had asked about him. She remembered the look of shock in Ilene's brown eyes as she causally mentioned Chris' name.
"You met CHRIS JOHNSEN?" Ilene had practically squealed. "Oh my GOD!" And fell off the bed.
It had taken the better part of an hour to calm Ilene down. Her roommate had always amused Helena - even the day they'd met, Ilene had wasted no time in trying to tell her her entire life story, the words tripping over each other as they tumbled from her mouth. Usually, people like her annoyed Helena, but somehow Ilene was different - familiar, even. It wasn't so, because the Keets family was up on the echelons of the ranked and wealthy also, but Ilene had none of that in her character. She was exuberant and excited about anything and everything, from meeting new people to taking the next biology test. She didn't look it, but Ilene was incredibly smart. Helena envied her sometimes. The girl hardly had to study to breeze through her classes, while Helena spent night after night slaving over her books.
Helena had been relieved to learn (after a whole hour of trying to sort through Ilene's gushing of how CUTE and POPULAR Chris was) that Ilene didn't have a crush on Chris after all. Which was a good thing, because she did. It was a strange feeling, to discover that as she sat on her comfortable bed with her familiar quilt, that she had overcome whatever qualms that she'd had about attending a school as selective as Cliffside, and that she'd grown so comfortable here that she felt no uneasiness whatever about having a crush on a boy from school.
He'd asked her out shortly before the winter holidays, and they'd only had a week or two together before they went their separate ways. She wished they had been longer. With finals and packing, they'd managed to only sneak a few moments of intimacy together, but that only made them the more special. Chris had no layers to him, nothing to hide. He was dependable and dedicated, warm and loving, and he made her feel like a queen.
Ilene had told her a few days after they started dating that Helena's popularity was rising steeply even among the girls who hadn't even considered her to be friend material before. Chris had thought that was rather nice, but Helena had rolled her eyes. She appreciated the sentiment, she had told Ilene later that night, but she didn't like being labeled. Being who she was had nothing to do with what she looked like or who she dated. She caught the puzzled look on Ilene's face after she'd made the statement, and decided it would be wise to keep her mouth shut. Ilene wasn't scatterbrained by any means, but she never seemed to quite grasp the fact that Helena's upbringing had been drastically different from hers.
Helena dawdled her way up the last few stairs, flipping the light switch on and letting herself fall backwards onto her bed. It was funny how her old room, the room she'd grown up in, now looked almost foreign to her. Her life was at Cliffside now, not here. She'd never had many friends here in this town, and with her going away to boarding school, she'd cut her ties entirely.
The light was rapidly fading now, and the snowfall was getting thicker. Her father still wasn't home from work, and Helena wondered briefly if war hadn't been imminent, if her father would have had to work at all.
"We cannot sit here and let the bastions of justice and truth rot away into nothing," he said, and she could almost imagine him grasping a microphone or the sides of a podium with white-knuckled hands, or shaking one fist in the air. "It is our duty, as soldiers of the Federation, to defend what is right. Some people believe that sitting and doing nothing is the right thing. Some others believe that letting the colonies have their every wish is the right thing. Still others believe that all-out war is the only option, that we should tear down all the barriers and laws we have built against the crimes of warfare and rid the earth forever of what they think is wrong."
He paused, and she could feel the silence like a solid wall against her back. "But that is not the case," he said finally, his rich voice soft and sad. "The case is, however much we might want to think otherwise, that this world and the colonies are made up of billions of people, each of which has their own conscience, their own sense of what is right and what is wrong. For me or for anyone to say that I know what is best for every single one of those people would be to lie. But at the same time, for me to stand here and tell you that I cannot take a course of action because not all of those people have agreed is just the same as if I had seen a child who has climbed too high into the branches of a tree and is about to fall, and standing and doing nothing because the people around me disagreed on the best method of how to bring that child down to safety."
He paused again. There was dead silence. She was afraid to move for fear that she would miss his next words. "And so I choose," he intoned gravely. "I choose to fight for what seems to me to be the best course of action, and if it is not so, I will surely fall and another leader will surely rise up. That is the way of things. But I do not believe I am mistaken. The fate of the world now lies not with the politicians and the heads of state making their slow-moving way across the vast mires of the bog we have sunk ourselves into. The fate of the world ultimately lies with the soldier, the one who is willing to risk his very life for the causes that he believes is right. And that, friends…that is truth."
When the thunderous applause began, Helena fought the urge to join in. She wondered who this man was - he sounded young - who could be so sure of the course he would take to save the world. She thought of the protests at Cliffside, anti-war and pro-war, and wondered if all her fellow students had missed the point.
The applause faded away and the voice of the DJ came back on the radio. She sat bolt upright, hoping he'd say the name of whoever had just spoken.
"Thanks for listening to WTUS, Boston's news station. That was an excerpt from one of the speeches that was given last night at the Federation Geneva summit, from Treize Khushrenada, leader of the OZ Specials Force."
Helena's mouth dropped open. That was Treize?
She sat, stunned, as the DJ shifted to other topics, staring at the snow falling outside her window. For a moment, as he had spoken, it was as if her world had turned upside-down, as if she had been called to re-evaluate everything she'd ever believed. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself hastily. She walked in politically active circles at Cliffside, and she'd heard time and again about the cunning webs that Treize Khushrenada wove, of how he basically had the leaders of the Federation in his palm, and how he was the real power behind this call to war. She hadn't done much research on him. She knew he was young and had powerful connections to the European nobility, but that was about all.
She understood now why her friends had called Treize dangerous. Yet, at the same time, she couldn't shake the feeling that what he had said was more correct than anything she had heard about politics, war, and the future of the Federation at school. She wondered what her mother thought of Treize. Her parents hardly ever mentioned him, and she had been home for a week. She had thought that odd.
For a split second she wished she wasn't living in such turbulent times, but quickly pushed the thought from her mind. It was times like these, she remembered her philosophy professor saying, that separated the wheat from the chaff. He'd pulled her aside at the end of class when she had gone up to ask him his opinion on a particularly hard question that they'd discussed that day.
I see great potential in you, Helena, he'd said. Don't let anybody take that away. You're one of those who will shape the future of our nation and our world, and you must stay strong.
In puzzlement, she had replied that she'd try, and he had smiled a little.
What was it that Thomas Paine said? 'These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.' That's you, Helena. Don't you forget that.
Moving to the window, she rested her chin on the ledge and stared out at the white-covered rooftops. The sun was mostly gone and the radio was now playing some soothing Christmas music: Silent Night, The Wexford Carol, White Christmas. She thought of Ilene and Chris, of the school she might not see again in the spring, and sighed, a little melancholy sigh that left a small spot of moist breath on the windowpane.
Reaching out with the tip of her finger, she drew a face in the moisture and then added a cute little tongue sticking out of its mouth, as she used to do when she was a child. The memory made her smile. |