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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 by Quicksilver and Gerald Tarrant. Please ask permission before reposting.
SAINAN NO KEKKA
He already liked his host mother. She was a little pudgy, but with the sort of pudge that made him think of happy American women who loved to cook, and she was turning out to be exactly the sort of person he'd hoped she would be. He had yet to meet his host father, who his host mom said was waiting back at the house for them, "keeping the chicken warm," she'd put it. That had amused him far more than she knew. Japanese men would have never let their wives keep them at home, cooking and watching the house.
He rather liked it.
Shinobu had arrived directly at Cliffside without prior exposure to American culture through a host family, and so the exchange program at the school had told him that the option of spending the Christmas holidays with an American host family was an option. The other options were to spend the holidays at a friend's home or to return home. He didn't really care to return home, as the very reason he'd come to Cliffside was to escape from his family and the Breaks, and he didn't have many friends at school.
Most of that was due to the language barrier, he realized, but there was a part of him that had declined to make friends with any of the students. Friends meant opening your heart and mind to someone, and that wasn't something he was prepared to do. It wasn't so hard to get by on your own. Go to school, go back to your dorm room, do your homework, go to bed. His roommate Rick was on the rugby team and was at practice almost all the time, which made it easy for Shinobu to avoid pretty much everyone. He wondered sometimes how Rick managed to pass classes.
But with the other two options not being viable solutions, he'd applied for the third.
The icy wind hit him as they exited the airport doors, and he noticed the ground was icy, with slushy snow piled up along the sides of the road, blackened and partially melted by the tread of thousands of booted feet. The sky was gray and cloudy, and it looked like it would snow any minute. He'd never seen snow till he came to Cliffside, and he was still fascinated by it.
His host family's car was a big blue sedan, and he deposited his bags neatly in the back as his host mom started up the engine. So far, her English had been easy to understand - no idioms or American slang, and she didn't talk too fast. Even having studied for half a year at Cliffside, he still had trouble following English if the person talked too quickly.
"What kind of music do you like?" she inquired as he got into the car and fastened his seatbelt, and he smiled.
"I listen to all kinds. So it is all right whichever you choose."
She beamed. "Your English is really good!"
He gave a little bow, hampered by the restriction of the seatbelt. "Thank you. I hope to improve it much during the holidays."
She backed out of the space, and he noticed the radio dial was set on what seemed to be a news station. She saw his glance. "I like to listen to the news a little first," she said apologetically. "You can change it if you want."
"Oh…no," he said hastily. "The news is fine."
Some man seemed to be talking, but the volume was turned too far down for him to hear anything, so he reached over and turned it up a notch. Before he could turn it up more to a comfortable level, his host mother was opening her mouth again.
"So where are you from, Shinobu?"
"Oh…the north of Japan," he said evasively. "I have many relatives. They are all around Japan."
"That sounds nice," she said approvingly. "Is this your first time in the States?"
He nodded. "I wanted to learn English. So I come here."
"I thought Cliffside was hard to get into though, isn't it?" She stopped at a stop sign, then made a large skidding left turn. He hoped she wouldn't get them killed.
"I was the recipient of a…" he grasped at the word. "I won money. To go to school. I have forgotten the word…"
"Scholarship?"
"Yes. Scholarship."
"Oh? Which one?"
He gaped at her, not knowing what to say, because no one had ever asked him what scholarship before. He hadn't really received a scholarship, but saying that he was from the Breaks and that his grandfather was the head of the Black Diamond Cartel would have been to commit virtual suicide, so he had made up the scholarship story. "Ah…" he began haltingly, but she cut him off before he could stutter out something.
"Hold on. Lots of traffic. Going to take a shortcut."
She made another huge, wheeling left turn, skidding across the icy road, then a right, then a left, leaving him dizzy and disoriented as he hung on for dear life. Looking over at her, he noticed she seemed fine, the same cheerful expression on her face as she narrowly missed an eighteen-wheeler and cut smoothly in between two cars that looked like they had been heading on a collision course with her. He heard loud, ferocious honking from behind them.
"Sorry," she said, not sounding sorry in the least. "Got to get us home faster, you know. Pop's waiting."
To his relief, she seemed to have forgotten all about the scholarship incident, and her maneuvering seemed to have gotten them onto the entrance ramp to the highway, which was nowhere near as crowded as the frontage road. Shinobu loved cars. They'd had a limousine on L1, but that was only for his grandfather's official business, and he'd grown used to walking everywhere he went. Not that he had ever wanted to go anywhere - he had been a prime target in the breaks as Seki Hikaru's grandson, and when he had actually gone to the cleaner sections of L1, there had always been the hulking bodyguards. He had hated the bodyguards.
But he was on his own now, without the bodyguards, without his grandfather, without the shadowy presence of the drug empire on his shoulders. It was rather a strange feeling and had taken him a few months to get used to. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling that someone was watching him, but there was only Rick snoring on the top bunk and the moon shining in through the window.
For a while, he had worried about what would happen if someone found out who he really was. But it had been one semester, and nothing had happened, and he had been beginning to relax. It took effort to keep up his guard now, because he wanted to believe that everything would be fine. That his new life was really and truly what it appeared to be, and that the days of illusions were at an end.
But they weren't, really, because he was still living in an illusion - the one he'd had to build for this new life to happen in the first place.
"Oh!" his host mom exclaimed, turning up the radio. "We're missing the speech!"
"What speech?" he said, as the man's voice on the radio came in strong for the first time, and she lapsed into silence, listening intently. He strained his ears trying to catch as much as he could, though the man was using a lot of hard words that he couldn't understand. The voice was rich, full of hidden meaning, and he was instantly reminded of the way his grandfather spoke. But there was something in this man's voice that had never been in his grandfather's voice...something that was...almost holy. Pure, even.
"We cannot sit here and let the bastions of justice and truth rot away into nothing, 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."
The man paused. "But that is not the case. 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. The car's engine purred in the silence"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."
The radio station's jingle cut in, and his host mother sighed. "Wasn't that beautiful?"
"It was a little too fast," he admitted. "But when I understood, it sounded good."
"What a wonderful speaker," she said, then looked over at him. "Your host father doesn't like him…so don't go around the house saying I told you that." She laughed.
"Who was that?" Shinobu wondered.
"The leader of OZ of course," she said, sounding shocked that he didn't know. "Treize Khushrenada. There's a Federation summit in Geneva and he was scheduled to speak earlier today. Too bad I was running errands and missed it…but I'm glad they replayed it."
Shinobu frowned in concentration. Treize Khushrenada. His grandfather had mentioned the name before…leader of OZ…a dangerous man. He chewed his lip and watched the scenery pass by, the stripes of the highway flashing by at an alarming rate. Was he? He wondered. He hadn't understood most of the speech, but he had caught the important parts.
Justice. Truth.
What was justice and what was truth? He'd never known either, growing up in the Breaks, and now, hiding under a false identity, he feared he'd never know. It kept him awake at night after he had woken up in those flashes of night anxiety, lying in bed staring up at the bottom of Rick's bunkbed. His grandfather hadn't cared for either, but Shinobu cared.
And that was why he had left home.
"Shinobu?"
He looked over at his host mother, realized he'd been brooding. "I am sorry," he said. "I was trying to understand the speech."
"Oh, yes," she gushed. "Don't worry, dear…his speeches are hard to understand even for me. You caught the important parts, though, didn't you?"
He nodded slowly. "Yes. I think I did."
They were off the highway now, driving through a residential neighborhood. There were strands of light on the houses, Christmas trees through the window. Treize Khushrenada began to fade, seemed very far away now. Shinobu placed both hands on the window glass, watching the houses pass by with untrestrained awe. He'd never imagined a place so...home-like. So safe.
The car slowed, then pulled into a driveway, bumping softly up the curb. There were lights here too - a lighted snowman in the front yard, a big green and red wreath on the front door, and, as he had hoped, a Christmas tree through the window, with the star on top shining brightly.
"Welcome home for Christmas, Shinobu," his host mother said, and he smiled back at her.
It began to snow. |