02-Dec-2004
Title: And What Of The Dragon?
Author: RurouniTriv
Wufei POV, hopefully not OOC. It's the dragon's turn to talk.
Note: Okay, I finally got around to finishing this one. One more, and the series is done, yay!
This is ridiculous. I don't know why I'm going along with this, it's stupid.
Well, that's not true. I do know the reason: he's about five foot six, with long brown hair that he usually wears in a braid, and sleeps with a man who bends steel bars in his bare hands and is ridiculously overprotective of him.
I did not expect Winner to support him in this foolishness, however. There is nothing wrong with me. I am fine. It's just been a rough month, and... and this time of year reminds me of Meiran and of my family.
In some ways, Winner and I are the most alike of the Gundam pilots. We were both raised in large families, educated, well-bred sons of cultures which go back thousands of years and place great store in tradition, culture, and courtesy. We were both raised knowing the place we were to take in our societies and the responsibilities attendant on the privileges we enjoyed.
He rebelled. I did not.
Had Meiran lived, I would most likely still be married to her. Not because I loved her - I didn't, though I did grow to respect the strength of her will (and her right cross). No, I would have stayed with her because it was the will of my parents and my clan that we would wed and have children to continue our respective family lines. They would have been strong, intelligent, and stubborn, I have no doubt - how else, with two such parents?
But that was not fated to be. Neither of us were prepared to be parents when we were married, and less than a year later, she was dead by the command of the only man I have ever truly hated.
Once, someone insinuated that the reason behind the passionate hatred I felt for Khushrenada was an attempt to cover up my attraction to him. Fortunately, Yuy was present at the time. I don't think that anyone else would have been strong and skilled enough to pull me off the idiot without causing me serious injuries, and in retrospect I find that the idea of explaining to Une how I had come to kill one of my fellow Preventers is less than appealing. The dressing-down I received for putting him in the hospital was quite bad enough, thank you.
Lady Une has many admirable qualities, but an excess of amiability is not one of them. It is one reason that we find one another's company so congenial - neither of us minces words between ourselves. We argue frequently and vehemently, but we each know that it is simply a result of our own strong wills. It is one of the things I find most appealing about her.
Indeed, it is when we argue that I find myself most attracted to her - she combines the strong will I admired so in Meiran with respect for me and a beauty that is purely her own. We complement one another beautifully even if we do drive each other mad sometimes.
I have many regrets in my past, and for a time I thought that they would drag me down into the same grave as my ancestors. I had no purpose, no reason to continue fighting, yet I had so lost my old self that I could see no path other than further combat. I hungered for an ending, a way to free myself of my pain in the only honorable way I could see - by death in battle. I greatly wronged my friends and the world in so doing - I allowed myself to be used by a greedy man and harmed many in my mad quest to justify my own desire to validate the path that life had forced me to take. To take a new path, one that was determined purely by my own will, was terrifying to me. And so I hid my fear behind bravado, justifying it in a false quest to aid others just as frightened of the change that Relena had led us to.
Never are those regrets closer to my mind than at this time of year.
Six years ago, Meiran and I met for the first time, as our families were celebrating their forthcoming union through our marriage. Five years ago, I was celebrating my first - and only - festival married to Meiran. Four years ago, I was at war - I barely noticed the date. Three years ago, I was deep in training pilots for the Barton foundation. Two years ago, I was in training myself after joining the Preventers. Last year, I was in the field, fighting alongside Po against a group of racial supremacists.
This is the first year in which I have not had some all-consuming activity distracting my mind from the season since Meiran died. The first one I have faced without my family or my wife, and without a life-or-death situation to distract me from my aloneness.
My friends have been my salvation. As moody and unpredictable as I know I have been, I am grateful to them for their patience and for the effort they have put into trying to keep my spirits up. It is none too easy, I know. I have been a bit short-tempered lately, and for all that I know that Duo's antics are an attempt to distract me from the grief that I have deferred for so long, I still find myself becoming easily irritated with him. It is the reason that he suggested that I come here and speak to you.
Heero knows as I do the shame that comes in failing to protect those that I swore to serve. Duo knows the grief of losing all that you love. Trowa knows how it is to be so caught up in being a soldier that no other alternative seems obvious. Quatre knows what it is to have the blood of innocents on one's hands. Each of them shares some grief or guilt with me, yet none quite knows who I am.
I am a warrior, from a clan of warriors that stretches back to a time when the pyramids were simply rock waiting to be quarried. I am a scholar, studying that history. I am a Preventer, doing my best to stop those who would break the peace before they can strike and harm innocents. I am a widower and an orphan.
I am many things, not simply the caricature of Justice that I sometimes wanted to be in my younger days, the one that Meiran tried to be and died for. I have been on both sides of the fence.
There is good. There is evil. I have done both, and am neither. I am simply a man. I grew up the hard way, and far too fast. I lost my illusions, and for a time lost my faith. But I never lost my friends.
They are my lifeline. They are my family, by choice if not by blood. They are my connection to sanity, to reason, to laughter, life and love. For all the differences between us - and they are legion - we are still Gundam pilots, and will ever be, despite the fact that the Gundams have been destroyed. There are certain things that we share, certain qualities beyond the physical that we all possess, that we do not share with others, save for a select few of the pilots who once fought for our enemies.
There are few who can match me in a battle of wits. Winner can defeat me, more than half the time. There are few who can keep pace with my intuitive leaps - Maxwell can race ahead. There are few who can best me on the physical plane, but Heero can twist me into a pretzel should I be careless enough to let him within range to grapple with me. And Trowa's precision incites my own envy - such elegant union of thought, form and function!
Sometimes, I almost find myself overwhelmed by them. They are all such powerful personalities, fierce and strong and disciplined - although if you tell Maxwell that I called him disciplined I shall deny it categorically.
When I remember what I was like when Meiran lived, I can see why it was that she found me infuriating - I had been the best, by such a wide margin, for all my life, and had the arrogance that comes with it. When I remember what I was like as a young man in a time of war, I wonder how it is that such extraordinary people as my fellow pilots went to the effort, each in their own way, to not only work with me but forge a bond of friendship with me - I was hard and angry and consumed with the desire for revenge, to the exclusion of all else.
Now, I look around myself and find myself surrounded by persons just as extraordinary as I, people who are often even better at certain things than I could ever dream of being, and marvel that we found each other, that we had enough awareness of how lucky we were to do so to make the effort to maintain the bond that was forged in battle in this time of peace.
When I find myself drowning in the memories of all I have lost, I find that it helps to think of how fortunate I am to have found these young men who are closer to me than my own blood, who are my equals, I who knew no equals in my youth. And as I cling to my thoughts of them like a drowning man clutching a spar, I see the hands of my ancestors in this coming together. My children shall be theirs as well, and fortunate indeed I shall be, if they are half so extraordinary as my brothers!
The End
(:./rt/pov4)
