12-Sep-2003
edited: 15-Sep-2003
Title: The Unforgiven
Author: CleverYoungThief
Rating: R
Warnings: Death, angst, gore
Genre: General/Angst
Pairings: None
Feedback: Please?
Note: I now officially have writer's block from trying too hard to work on "Endless Summer". That's where this little ficling came from. It was originally just a writing exercise I based on a challenge issued to me in one of my reviews to do a fic inspired by Metallica's "The Unforgiven" about Heero's past. And then it wanted to become a fic. Now it kind of wants to become a longer fic. (Mostly, I think, because I'm completely fascinated with Heero's upbringing as a soldier.)
But I'll let you guys decide on whether this works better as a one-shot or the first chapter to a longer fic. *shrug* I just had to write something, I was getting out of practice.
"New blood joins this earth, and quickly he's subdued
through constant pained disgrace, the young boy learns their rules."
- "The Unforgiven", Metallica
After the first battle...
The first members of the colony resistance were counting the dead left in Colony L1-C1013 after the attack. After the initial mobile suit attack, OZ had gone house to house, shooting anyone they could find. They shot men, women, and children, punishing the entire colony for "rebels" that had allegedly sabotaged an OZ spaceport and were thought to be from L1-C1013.
The "L1 incident" was named one of the most bloodthirsty in OZ's history.
The men of the organization which had tentatively been dubbed "Project Apocalypse" hadn't been searching for ten minutes before they heard an unearthly sound which they first mistook for a baying dog. But it wasn't a baying dog; it was a howling rather than a baying-a wounded, gutteral sound-and a sound no animal ever made, not even in its dying extremities. It was a sound none of them had ever heard anything make, but they knew right away, all of them, that it was a person, a child.
They had heard a similiar sound a few times from doomed soldiers, the ones that believed that hell was a real place and it was waiting for them in their deaths. The leader of the resistance, a much younger Dr. Hector Jaye, who had not yet become Gundam Engineer 01, paled at the sound. The other men reloaded their automatic weapons and snapped them closed. That howling had chilled them all, made the sweat under their arms and running down their backs feel like icewater, and the fact that most of the lights of the colony had been knocked out in the attack didn't help things.
They were stumbling along in the dark, guided only by starlight, moonlight, and their dying flashlights, with those howls drowning out the muffled cries of the other survivors and the sirens of the disabled oxygen generators and the silence of the dead; those howls with a hollow, metallic sound that reverberated off the walls of the colony like shrieks from hell.
They made their way through the rubble of destroyed colony tenements, and broke through. They all stopped where they were, thunderstruck. They would have all given a good deal to unsee what was before them, and none of them would ever forget it, not in a million lifetimes.
Sitting amidst the shattered brick and glass and steel of a bombed-out tenement, in a pair of faded, bloodstained pajamas, was a boy around five years old. His small feet were bare, and Dr. Jaye could see the pieces of glass stuck in them when they glittered in the flashlights' dim glow.
// Is this really a boy, really a boy that looks like some cruel person had dumped a bucket of red paint over his head? //
For one infinite moment, which he would never admit to later, Jaye felt an impulse to turn around and leave... leave the colonies forever, forget about fighting OZ. Because what was going on in this still, mangled space colony was inhuman.
But it was like a gruesome car wreck. Horrifying, but to the point that he was unable to look away. None of them could look away. And they refused to look away. They had to see what was being done. To look away would be cowardly.
Cradled in the boy's arms was the body of a younger girl, around three or four. The girl's dark hair, which had once been soft and fine, was now matted to her head and streaked with red. The boy's own tousled, dark brown hair was plastered to his skull with blood.
The boy holding her sat bawling up at the stars, his crimson cheeks slicked with tears, his face twisted in grief. He drew his breath in a child's unapologetic, hitching sobs, his chest rising until the pajama top-which had once been a light forest green color and was now a muddy maroon--strained, and then let that vast catch of air out in another of those anguished howls.
The boy was torn apart by whatever he had seen... but he would live, Jaye thought clinically. The girl would not. She had been torn apart in a more fundamental way, by the blast of an OZ mobile suit, he had no doubt. No one seemed to know how long the callow anarchist group stood there, watching the wailing boy who, in turn, kept gazing druggedly at the stars beyond the colony, as if searching for what he had done to deserve his punishment.
The boy rocked himself back and forth; the dead girl rocked with him like a rag doll, boneless and limp, her head rolled back on her broken neck so far her hair brushed between her shoulderblades. The bloodstained muscles in the boy's thin, strong-looking arms tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed as he rocked. In one tightly-gripped hand, he held a bloodied six-inch shard of glass.
The men formed a machine-gun toting circle around the rocking, caterwauling child. He still seemed not to realize that anyone but him was there. Dr. Jaye stepped forward, shifted uncertainly from foot to foot, and then crouched down, wary of any sudden movements.
"Boy," he said in a quiet voice, and the child hushed at once.
The rebel engineer looked into dark blue eyes that were red from crying. Those cobalt eyes wept, and yet were somehow untouched... distant and serene, but not in shock. "They were the eyes of a wild animal that had never seen a man before," Dr. Jaye said to his compatriots later, those that hadn't been there.
It was looking into those eyes that Dr. Jaye first realized the vast spectrum of violence this young boy would be able to perform. He looked into those eyes and saw the detachment of a sociopath. Whether it had been caused by the trauma of being so viciously orphaned or whether it had been there from the start, Jaye didn't know. And wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Boy, do you hear me?" Dr. Jaye asked. He was slightly worried that whatever the boy had seen had shredded his sanity in a single stroke.
Slowly, the boy nodded his head. Still he curled his arms protectively closer around his unspeakable burden, and her chin dropped down on her chest so that her face could not be clearly seen. Many years later, Dr. Jaye would not remember much of that day, but he remembered being thankful for it.
"Do you have a name?" Dr. Jaye asked.
"Akira," he said in a thick and tear-clotted voice. "They call me Akira."
"Did soldiers do this?" Jaye asked, even though he already knew the answer. Dimly, about six yards behind the boy, two figures lay sprawled in the debris, half concealed.
// Parents, // Dr. Jaye thought, and made sure the other men's flashlights didn't illuminate the grisly corpses. // This must be his sister, // he thought with horror, // they were sleeping, they didn't have time to get away, and they were bombed. //
Closer, he saw the body of an OZ soldier. He kneeled away from the boy a minute, checking the soldier for a pulse. None; his eyes were already glazing over. Dr. Jaye spat on him, then turned him over, and the pieces of the puzzle came together. The soldier was stabbed twice, once in the side and once in the chest. The chest wound was deep; the boy was pretty strong, Dr. Jaye decided, to drive the shard of glass in that far.
// Must have nicked the heart. //
"Yessir, I mean, I-I-I don't kn-know, sir," the boy said, trying to sound brave even though he was bathed in blood and surrounded by his dead, maimed family. "I... I was sl-sl-sleeping. Soldiers. The lion soldiers. The Earth soldiers were here. I-I hid, and then one f-found me." His voice was totally controlled when he said what he did next. "He tried to take me away, so I stopped him," the boy said, pointing at the dead OZ soldier with the piece of glass in his hand. Jaye could hear the icy hatred in the boy's quiet, almost monotone voice.
"Wh-what happened to us?" The boy's strange eyes gazed at him, welling tears and agonized on top, detached and strangely tranquil underneath, as if the true Akira was somewhere else, as if looking out on some other unfathomable landscape where mutilated colonies and dead civilians and colonial children murdering OZ soldiers and OZ soldiers murdering children were nothing to get all worked up about.
"It was the Earth soldiers. OZ and the Alliance. They did this to your colony, boy," Dr. Jaye answered. He didn't know how else to say it. Besides, he had seen the face--or, what was left of the face-- of what he assumed was the father of the boy, and the rations he had had for dinner were threatening to erupt violently from his stomach. He forced himself to be calm, not to look at the girl in the boy's lap. But he couldn't help it. Blood had run down the girl's cheeks out of it like it was a bad dye job, and you didn't have to be a doctor to see that her fragile young skull had been dashed against something hard, probably a wall or a flying brick.
Looking at that made it hard for a soldier to think, even a soldier as determined as Dr. Jaye.
He tried to take the girl away from the boy, but the shock of his situation had worn off and the boy was more angry than hysterical, now. He would not let Jaye near the girl, and brought the shard of glass up defensively. When Jaye reached for the girl to take her out of the boy's arms, "Akira" bared his teeth and growled soundlessly at him. The boy's glare was intimidating for a child.
Another resistance soldier tried to take the girl from the gore-caked boy, and the boy slashed his hand. Other soldiers from the group came to help him. The boy fought them.
And now watching on the side was Dr. Jaye, admiring the way the boy was fighting.
// He's an orphan now. Yes...he will be our symbol, our example of the horrific oppression of the colonies by Earth and the colony's retaliation. I'll train him to be the best of the best...the perfect soldier, the perfect pilot and assassin... the Perfect Soldier.. //
The field surgeon of the group brought a syringe. There was a struggle. The syringe was broken. The girl lay on the gravel now, still just as dead as before.
Two more men advanced on the boy, who crouched over her protectively with his body, like a wild animal over its kill. There was another struggle, short and furious, and the boy's wrist was wrenched, causing him to drop the fatal shard of glass. The boy was finally pulled away from his sister by four sweating, straining soldiers. He nearly broke free again and Dr. Jaye, still feeling sick, joined them. The boy screamed soundlessly, panting with violent panic, whipping his head from side to side. Another syringe was produced, and he was injected successfully this time.
One of the soldiers took off his jacket and threw it over the face and body of the girl. At the sight of this, the boy redoubled his struggles. He freed one hand and began to flail about wildly with it. Then, suddenly, he was free.
"Boy," Dr. Jaye said. He wiped the sweat from his brow. "Boy, it's over. Boy, please. Let go... just let go."
The boy didn't go to where his sister lay in the smashed ruins. He went for the piece of glass. The soldiers brought up their guns in case he went for one of them, but he didn't. He went over to the dead OZ soldier and threw himself to his knees, began stabbing the soldier again. The sound of the glass making contact was heavy and terrible, a slicing butcher-shop sound. The soldier's corpse jumped a little each time he stabbed it. Fresh blood flecked the young boy's face. The boy's eyes blazed coldly.
One of the soldiers began to move forward, hand raised to knock the boy out from behind.
"No," the field surgeon said quietly, and a few moments later the boy simply collapsed. The shard of glass fell out of his relaxing hand.
The boy fully relaxed, for perhaps the last time in his life.
Because the boy would no longer relax. He would no longer be Akira Niigata. It wouldn't be long before he could no longer remember his own name, much less the name of his family. His bitterness would be a fulcrum and his impassive rage would be a long, brutal lever with which he would move the world, the whole damned world, to avenge his family and his colonies and their leader, no matter what damage he caused or whom he destroyed in the process.
From that day, the boy would be known only as Soldier 2457, the boy codenamed "Heero Yuy".
Owari
(:./cyt/unforgiven)
