14-Nov-2004
Title: Me? Innocent?
Author: RurouniTriv
No warnings, as usual for this series. Mention of pairings. And here comes the angst...
Notes: New installment to the POV series. Hope that you like it - Quatre's a little harder for me to get into than Heero or Duo.
Ah, hello. I hope you don't mind me coming to speak with you, but I have been feeling a bit frustrated lately, and both Duo and Heero agreed that the best thing I could do is to come talk to you.
I can't talk to the others about this. They are part of the problem, after all, though they don't intend to be.
You see, I have the misfortune to have been born with an innocent face. It can be useful, I admit, but sometimes... between that and the manners that my father and the tutors he hired trained into me, I'm afraid that it leads to certain misunderstandings.
I am much stronger than I look. We all are. But the others, despite the fact that they know better, sometimes find themselves responding more to my appearance than they should.
I am a Gundam pilot. Trained and blooded in mortal combat. I have killed many people, and to my shame, some of them - many of them - were innocents. I did have enough sanity, despite the grief that Zero used to manipulate me into my mad attacks on the colonies of L4, to give them fair warning. I managed that much, at least. But I have no doubt that there were those who could not believe that a Winner, and a pilot who had laid his life at the colonies' altar, would carry out such a heinous crime. That they believed me to be bluffing.
I do not bluff. I simply do not make threats that I am not willing and able to carry out. But my name and this accursed face conspired to undermine the effectiveness of my warning.
I do not know how many died because of that. I have made a point of never trying to find out, and simply find myself grateful that my friends - both Gundam pilots and Maguanacs - did not turn their backs on me for the atrocity that I committed. And most thankful of all that my beloved Trowa found the greatness of heart to forgive me, not only for what I did to others, but most particularly for the crime I committed against him. Even to this day, I still wake with his plea to what little sanity I had, in the grip of the Zero System and of my grief, ringing in my ears.
That is what they do not truly understand, I think, all those who forgave me for my sins. It was not merely the mind-warping effects of that horrible system that led to my terrible actions in that time. It was the effect of seeing my father destroyed before my eyes, of knowing that my sister Iria hovered between life and death and I could do nothing to affect the outcome one way or another. Zero made me see all others who came against me as enemies, yes - but it was my own grief and wrath that made it easy to lash out at those I had sworn to protect, those who in their cowardice had betrayed me and hurt those I loved.
I have never enlightened them of the true reason that I so completely failed to control myself in those dark days. They have never asked what it was that I saw, nor have I asked them what they saw when they, in turn, faced Zero. I have been too ashamed, too cowardly in my gratitude for their unbelievable forbearance to risk tipping what seems to me a precarious balance indeed. If they knew, their perception of me might well be irretrievably altered, and not for the better.
No, sometimes silence is the best policy. Not all secrets are bad, particularly among those who live as closely as we have come to. Sometimes, they are the only reason that we can relate to one another as easily as we do. Some wounds heal best in the dark.
Heero has never spoken of his retraining after an incident with civilian casualties before he got his Gundam. We know that there was a little girl and a dog somehow involved, that he'd met them before the accident - and that is only because of nightmares. He wakes screaming sometimes, and if Duo is not there to help calm him, he cannot go back to sleep. I suspect that there are other things as well that haunt him, some that we know of and never speak about, others that would appall even us if we knew of them.
Duo - his whole life before meeting Professor G is effectively off-limits. He will talk about particular incidents, sometimes, but only in his time and in his way. And never, ever ask him about things from those days. He's usually pretty easy-going, but if you poke him in one of those sensitive spots, well, things can get very nasty very quickly. Growing up on the streets taught him that chivalry just got people killed, so he tends to strike hard and right at one's weak points when he's hurting - and he's an expert at finding one's weak points. We learned the hard way that you do not tease him about his dead - Wufei made that mistake once. Wufei ran for his room less than a minute later - we suspect that he did so in order to keep from being seen crying. Sometimes, even the strongest warrior can be laid low so swiftly that he has no time for anger, no chance to fight back.
To Wufei's credit, he did not realize at the time that he had done such a thing, nor would he have done so intentionally - Wufei has his own dead, after all. But we all were reminded that for all his happy-go-lucky ways, our friend is a deadly-dangerous man.
But then, so is Wufei - it was mostly the fact that he had not expected such a fierce attack from Duo that had left him unprepared to defend himself. Normally, an enemy could say much worse without breaking his composure, now that he has been through the crucible of the incident with Mariemaia. He has learned to bank his fire, to control his fierce passions and use them to fuel his inner drive. But it took years before we knew anything more than the barest of facts about his clan and his Nataku - the human one, not his Gundam.
Trowa, oddly enough, is the one who has the least secrets, and the most. The most, because so much of his memory is closed away, lost even to him - the amnesia he suffered was not due to physical trauma, but psychological. We suspect that is the reason that he remembers nothing at all from before his time with the mercenary group who raised him and taught him to fight. He still does not remember certain things even from the time that we were together, although most of his memory has returned, dragged forth by Zero. The least, because even when he does remember, it is not uncommon for those memories to be more like he watched them on a television screen, not like he had experienced them himself. He has little attachment to anything, and so little affects him the way that the rest of us can be hurt. His adopted sister, his friends, children and animals - you do not hurt them, if you want to stay healthy. Otherwise, it is very difficult to reach through the barriers he has placed between his heart and the world - and too fierce an attack on those walls can be hazardous indeed. A slow seduction, carefully picking one's way through the defenses, is well-advised.
And myself? I hide my secrets well, under this angelic facade. I pretend to be the sweet, caring, compassionate fool even when I want nothing more than to curse and shout at them for believing the illusion that habit and fear have made me erect. I act as if I have not a care in the world beyond making my friends and my employees happy.
We are family, you see. The family I chose to be a part of, rather than one dictated by the vagaries of chance and genetics. And like all families, we have learned that some truths are best hidden, some pains best not shared.
They say that pain shared is pain halved. I don't agree with that. You must face it, must be willing to acknowledge its cause and existence, must be able to take it into oneself and say, "Yes, this hurts, but in allowing this pain to become part of me, I can master it."
I have learned to master my pain. To harness my guilt. To fuel my drive with anger and shame.
I am anything but innocent.
The End
And you thought that the Quatre one would be all sweet and sappy, didn't you? ;)
(:./rt/pov3)
