07-Jan-2003
Title: Peace
Author: RurouniTriv
Disclaimer: Not mine. No money. Don't sue.
Notes: Okay, I seem to be on a bit of a creative roll here... since Mediaminer isn't all that reliable at the moment, how about a fic instead? ;)
Come to think of it, I seem to be kind of Trowa-centric lately too. Weird... Ah, well, on with the fic!
It feels so good. It feels so right. I'm here, warm, safe, wrapped in the arms of the boy - no, definitely man - that I love. After all the heartache, all the pain and death, we made it here.
None of us thought this day would ever come. None of us truly believed that we would see an end to war, to bloodshed. Oh, there are still pockets of rebellion, soldiers who don't know how to lay down their arms and greedy men who count others' lives as being of less worth than their own desires, but for the first time in human history there are no wars being fought anywhere on the planet, or in the colonies. There is peace in the Earth Sphere.
Peace. Such a simple word for a concept so profound, and so all-encompassing. No more wars. No more killing. I've kept up my skills with guns and blades out of sheer habit, but I haven't used them for almost three years. I haven't had need to. And the last time I did use them, it was nothing more than a mugger. If he hadn't had a gun, I wouldn't have even bothered with a weapon. As it was, I didn't really need it anyway. He made the mistake of laying a hand on Quatre.
Very large mistake. He might look sweet and innocent even now, but he was a Gundam pilot, same as the rest of us, and while his actual combat skills might not have been the best (he was primarily a strategist, and knew it), he is still quite competent in a fight. Hell, he's actually better than he was during the war. I have to spar against someone, after all, and he'd rather go to the mats with me himself.
I silently snicker as I realize that there's more than one interpretation for that phrase. I've been hanging around Duo too long, obviously. The warm chest beneath me moves slightly as Quatre mumbles something, and I reach up to brush the bangs from his eyes. He smiles sleepily and relaxes again. I feel my cheek move as I smile. It used to be that I didn't let anything I felt show on my face. It used to be I barely felt anything. I'd wrapped myself in uncaring, less like Heero's icy wall of hostility than a thick fog of indifference. It was the only way to survive the constant death that surrounded me when I was young.
Sunlight burns away fog. I snuggle a bit closer to Quatre, so warm and bright and full of life, and ponder the way that the sunlight, when it strikes his hair, almost seems to set it aglow. The first time I saw it, I felt a shiver of superstitious awe thread through my usual apathy, and sometimes I still do. He wondered why I got him that bust of Apollo on his birthday a couple years ago. Apollo as a young man must have looked like Quatre.
I don't have to fight any more. I don't need that cottony shield against the world. I haven't lost it completely, but slowly, so very slowly, Quatre is teaching me to live without it. Weaning me away from it, melting it away.
We could have become Preventers, we work with them frequently even now, but neither of us wanted to be soldiers any longer. He'd never been happy in combat, and I... I have seen far too much death. It's all right for Wufei, who needed a purpose to strive for, and Duo, who has his own team, his own 'gang' of Preventers who specialize in dealing with crimes against children. Heero has left his combat days behind, mostly, although he too is working with the Preventers. He's their top hacker, and he loves it. The adrenaline rush of matching wits with someone who's an expert in his field without the pain of knowing that his actions are hurting someone else. He'll go out on field missions sometimes, but mainly you can find him behind his laptop, fingers moving at a machine-gun pace.
We chose a different path, Quatre and I. A more peaceful one, and one that in the long term might just have a bigger effect.
I'm not the only person out there who grew up knowing nothing but war. I'm not the only one who found himself looking around at the end of the war and saying 'now what?' Wufei could definitely testify to that. In fact, Wufei was the reason that Quatre and I started Plowshares. We realized that for many of the soldiers, there had been so much focus on staying alive, on improving their martial skills, that when the wars were over, they were left at loose ends. So we created Plowshares, which helps soldiers either learn new peace-time occupations or helps them find ways to apply their military skills to civilian problems. It's more than just help finding a way to make ends meet financially, though. It also involves teaching them the personal skills to deal with civilian life. A drill sergeant who tries to treat the employees in a store he's managing the way he treated the recruits in boot camp will not get good results, after all!
It feels good, helping others to get their lives together, the way that Catherine and Quatre helped me. It feels even better to see that I'm not alone in struggling to adjust sometimes, but that it can be done, even by those who've been soldiers even longer than I have, who have sometimes come from families who'd been in the military for more generations than anyone could remember and grown up knowing nothing else. It even helped when Quatre, too, had trouble adjusting to certain things after the war.
He murmurs and wraps his arms a little tighter around me and I feel like purring. Lying here like this, I feel like a cat curling up in a sunny spot, and he is the sun.
I wonder... I know what it means for the world, for our society, to have peace.
Is this what it feels like to be at peace?
The End
(:./rt/peace)
