03-Dec-2004
Title: What's In A Name?
Author: RurouniTriv
Note: Well, this is the last of the POV fics. Trowa's POV, and you finally find out who they've been talking to. No warnings, no smut, just an ex-mercenary doing a bit of talking.
So, I hear that the others have been talking to you. Duo is entirely too sneaky for his own good - or maybe just sneaky enough, since I might have reacted badly if I'd realized he was watching me while I was talking to you. Reflexes, you know.
It's not that I'm ashamed or anything. Why bother? Shame does nothing but waste energy, and it's better to practice expressing myself with you than with someone else. You won't take offense if I'm blunt or take things the wrong way. I've never developed the ability to talk about non-mission matters that the others, even Heero, have. It took him some time to break the conditioning that repressed him so badly when we first met him, but the innate ability was there. If I ever had it, it was back in the times that I don't remember, before I met the mercenaries. For years, I thought that I had no feelings, that I had so thoroughly in my fight to survive that they had been destroyed completely. By the time that I had realized that wasn't true, I had seen in my own teammates the way that words could hurt.
Heero's coldness towards Duo in those early days, Wufei's constant aggression towards us all, even the way that Quatre coldly dressed down one of the Maguanacs who had made a mistake in battle that had led to casualties - words can be weapons. I knew that from as long as I could remember, and so I did not waste them. I never learned small talk, because I wanted people to listen when I spoke, not dismiss my words as those of the child I physically was.
Now, however, being able to speak in the banalities that constitute most peoples' conversation is a necessary skill, particularly when living so close to Quatre.
Give me a knife, and I can kill a man or cut a bullet out of his flesh with equal precision. I can aim a gun as easily as pointing my finger, and what I aim for I hit. With the proper supplies, I can maintain anything mechanical, and without them I can generally scavenge what I need to cobble together something almost as good.
But with words, I am clumsy as a child, a child with razor blades for fingernails and a gun for a mouth. I hurt where I do not intend to, I push people away in my attempt to draw them in.
I can communicate, but to me, words are weapons as deadly as any other, and it shows in my speech. People find me intimidating. I can pretend for a bit to be ordinary, try to fade into the background, but once I start talking, people notice me as they would notice a man walking down the street carrying a loaded weapon in his hand. It served me well during the war, allowing me to infiltrate many military installations - I knew how to act, after all, knew what not to say and how not to say it. I'd lived in that environment all my life.
Civilian life, however, is as alien to me as the culture of the mythical little green men from Mars. I've never known anything other than a militaristic society. From the mercenaries - the Captain's ex-military background saw to it that our company's discipline level was several steps above that of many other mercenaries - to space and the Gundam development project, from piloting a Gundam to infiltrating OZ, it was always a matter of keeping my head down, staying quiet unless I had something to say and then confining my comments to those which had a purpose. Small talk was not encouraged. Not needed. Not wanted. I was simply there to do my job, do it well, and my opinions were undesired in any capacity other than professional. I wasn't needed or wanted except for my skills.
I was a tool in the hands of others, much as they tried to make Heero. I didn't realize that Barton was behind that until much later. If I had, I think that the Mariemaia Uprising might have been over before it began - the idea of a soul with the passion and intensity that Heero possesses being crushed into the same emptiness that filled me for so long is... extremely annoying.
I don't know even now the details of what they did to try to break him. I don't really want to - the disadvantage of having recovered my emotions from their long hibernation is that I am reminded of why I shut them down in the first place. They hurt, and never more so than when someone I care for is in pain and I can do nothing to help.
At the same time, I know that I must wake those emotions, or dwell forever in this wasteland which is my soul.
It frightens me. I can face death without blinking - what is my life worth, to myself or anyone else? Not much. Nothing at all, before I met my teammates. I was a warm body to fill the pilot's seat left empty by the real Trowa Barton's death. I doubt that S would have cared if I died: so long as I had not taken Heavyarms with me, he'd merely have been inconvenienced by the necessity of finding a new pilot. He'd definitely have been annoyed if I'd managed to destroy my Gundam in the process of getting killed.
But to feel... ask Heero what it was like, to know that he had destroyed our best chance at peace. Ask Duo what it was like to kneel in the wreckage of the only home he'd ever known. Ask Quatre what it was like to see his father killed - and no matter what he says about his relationship with his father, I know that was what unbalanced him enough that the Zero effect tipped him over the edge. Ask Wufei...
On second thought, don't. It would be bad for your health to remind him.
To feel is a dangerous thing. It is dropping your armor, opening the cockpit of your mobile suit when you aren't sure that the area is secure. It is giving away your only coat when winter is on the way and you don't know when you'll be able to find another one.
The more I develop my awareness of my emotions, the more I realize why it is that I locked them away all those years ago. They frighten me. They cause wounds that cannot be seen, cannot be stitched up, pain that no medicine or doctor can ease. They drive men to kill or die with equal abandon.
My whole life has been about controlling myself and now, when I am an adult in body as well as mind, I am forced to learn how to let go of that control. To not only let go, but to enjoy the freedom that comes with it.
I have never been free. I have always been constrained by circumstance to my path. Chance and chaos have forged me in a fire that destroyed many others who shared my misfortune.
The thought of being free chills me to the bone.
It is part of the reason that I cling so tightly to my teammates. They understand me well enough that I don't have to pretend to be like everyone else.
At the same time, there is a part of me that wants to run from them. To flee like a frightened child before a raging mob.
They make me feel, you see. They make me care. And that terrifies me. They are closer to me already than the mercenaries that I grew up with - for all that they raised me, in their rough way, I was still professional enough, soldier enough, that when they betrayed the Captain, I killed them. To kill my teammates - the thought frightens me.
Bad enough to contemplate losing them, to think of inflicting that agony on myself...
No. They won't do anything that requires that. They are loyal to their ideals, loyal to death and beyond reason. They have proven themselves too many times for me to doubt them. They would not do that.
And Quatre in particular would not do that. Not again. He would never do that to me again. He loves me. I do not understand love well, but I know enough to know that he would rather die himself than hurt me so.
I am safe with them. We know each other, we work together - if not in earning our salaries, then in maintaining this estate that Quatre bought for us. We depend on each other for more than my old company ever did. We are alone in a world that does not understand us, that has betrayed us before, and we have only one another to rely upon.
We are beginning to reach out beyond our little world, to welcome others in. Wufei, in particular, has been spending considerable time with Commander Une - which surprised most of us, given how acrimonious some of their "conversations" get. Quatre simply looked smug when it was mentioned. Quatre himself never retreated as far as the rest of us did, and Duo... well, Duo's reaction to seeing a large dangerous thing seems to involve poking it with a stick. His courage sometimes borders on foolhardiness.
Heero, I think, would like to be a little less visible than he is, but the combination of the press, Relena, and Duo is overwhelming even for our "perfect soldier". And I...
I need to master new skills, to find a way to relate to those who are not in the military, who do not understand the military mind. And talking to you is a way to practice in perfect safety. You'll never tell my secrets, after all. You don't even know the meaning of betrayal.
You I can trust more even than Quatre. You won't hurt me without a reason, and you will give me warning first. All that I need is to watch you, and you will tell me all I need to know.
There's a reason I like animals better than people, after all.
I need to go. Quatre is calling, and it's almost time for dinner. Take care until tomorrow.
The old dog's tail thumped against the ground as Fur-Over-Face, as he thought of him, gave him a final scratch behind the ears and left. He had a good life here, and his new pack treated him well. It was much better than the life he'd had before Fur-Over-Face had found him and brought him here, half-dead after a gang of teenagers had decided it would be fun to throw rocks at him. They had smelled bad, of aggression and wrongness spurred on by their pack bond.
The humans that made up his new pack didn't smell like them, though they weren't much older. They smelled sad sometimes, occasionally annoyed when he marked an area that they'd declared off-limits, but they didn't have the anger-sickness that he'd known from some of the humans on the streets.
Yes, they were a good pack to belong to. And if it made the humans smell less sad and annoyed to sit next to him and pet him and make their strange noises, well, that was certainly a price he was more than willing to pay. It was good to be useful.
The End
Well, that's it for this series. Hope you enjoyed the little twist at the end, I had fun coming up with who the "interviewer" was. ;)
(:./rt/pov5)
