Fan Fiction / Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Pax Eterna ❯ Prologue ( Prologue )

Pax Eterna

By Chyna Rose

Disclaimer: Gundam Wing belongs to Bandai. Highlander belongs to Gaumont Television Corp and David Panzer Productions. No money is being made off this fic; this is a product of enjoyment and an over active imagination. The original idea for this belongs to Hexadecimal; freely given on the GundamBunniesAnon mailing list. Beta reading credit goes to my best friend Rae.

 

It all started on the weirdest day of our careers as terrorists/freedom fighters-cum-peace keepers. An apocalyptic cult had decided that it was time for the Apocalypse, and since no actual disaster was looming, they were going to do it themselves. They even managed to find four guys willing to do the horseman bit. Laugh all you want, but this was a serious threat. It was so serious, that Lady Une had put all five of us on the case. This alone marked the mission as special.

 

It was also the culmination of months of hard prep work. We're talking info gathering and massive amounts of manpower. You just don't go bursting in when the other guy's got nukes. We were ready.

 

Getting into the cult's base was easy. It was as well guarded as an OZ base. I could've snuck in in my sleep. So for teams of ex-OZies headed by ex-gundam pilots it was a piece of cake. Too easy really, when you think about it. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when all hell broke loose. Almost literally.

 

Like any other apocalyptic cult, this group claimed to have some mystical abilities and weren't afraid to use them. Or to paraphrase my good friend Wufei, they believed their own mumbo-jumbo bull shit. We never banked on them actually telling the truth about the mystical thing (either that or they found a scientific way to fake it).

 

Anyway. We had taken care of the nukes before we made a move on the people. Crazy as they were, they at least hand enough sense not to store the nukes near their main compound. I'd hate to think what would've happened if they were present - even if they had been deactivated.

Everything had been going according to the plan. Too smoothly really - which should've tipped us off. With the nuke site neutralized, our job was seek and remand with deadly force allowances; meaning we were to find and take the cultists into custody, but we could shoot to kill if it came down to it. We were all inside when it happened.

 

I don't know who took that first shot; one of us, or one of them. That one shot had been the signal for an all out fire fight. I'm still a bit fuzzy on the details. It's hard to keep track of what's going on once the shit hits the fan. I do remember some guy coming at me with an honest to god sword. He missed of course. Actually, he never really got a chance since one of my men took him out before he could finish taking a swing at my head.

 

I died that day. I know I did; we all did.  Out of fifty Preventer agents and roughly three hundred cultists, only five survived; me, Heero, Trowa, Quatre, and Wufei. During the debriefing, Noin told us that an electrical short had set off the cashed weaponry and brought the entire building down on us. There was no way in hell that we should've survived that. I mean, Sally's good, but she's not that good. She's not god, after all.

We sure as hell shouldn't have been walking around barely a week later. Even if you factor in the advanced healing capabilities of a gundam pilot, it still would be impossible. Father Maxwell would call it an actual miracle. We (and by we, I include Noin, Sally and Une) just figured that it was an after effect of our training; like our lack of growth.

 

It's been three years since the war, and we still look like we're fifteen. Now, I realized early on that I'd never be a tall person. Not enough of the right foods when I needed them. And I've gotten used to it. But I always thought that I'd grow at least a couple of more inches; not stay the same size as when I started piloting `scythe. I sure as hell never expected the other not to have grown either. Can't say much about Heero's or Trowa's pasts, but Wufei and Quatre certainly had enough food to ensure that they got what they needed nutritionally. Yeah, it's hard to eat right when you're on the run fighting a war (OZ sure as hell didn't care about giving us balanced meals when we were `guests' in their prisons), but I thought that most of that was set in early childhood.

 

But this was ridiculous. All of us - me, Heero, Trowa, Quatre, Wufei - had just stopped growing (physically speaking) when we entered into the war; half way into adolescence. At least I was past the point of my voice breaking. Thank god for small favors, I guess.

Look at me; running off at the mouth again. Sally had just come back with the news that nothing short of an honest to god and Pope certified miracle's gonna cure us. I really don't mind it all that much, since the worst parts of adolescence are behind me, but it means that I can never just walk into a bar and order a drink.

 

But that was a month ago. Life's pretty much returned to normal. Normal for us at any rate. Whether or not it counts as normal for the rest of the world is open for debate.

 

Quatre is still struggling to run WEI his way. His `advisors' on the Board of Directors keep expecting him to act like a good little puppet CEO and do everything they say, and Quatre keeps messing it up with such radical ideas as his sisters could do just as good a job running the company as him. Or that what's good for WEI and what's good for the Board of Directors aren't necessarily the same thing (which may be the greater evil in their eyes. God forbid they should do any real work or get paid a paltry four digits a year). The Board of Weasels (my own name for them) isn't giving up their power easily by any means.

 

Trowa divides his time between helping Cathy at the circus and keeping in touch with the rest of us. Cathy still blames us about Trowa still having to fight (even if being a Preventer was a condition of our war time pardon), and makes it her job to keep him away from our `bad influence'.

 

Wufei has gone back to his long lost scholar days. He's busy taking random classes on-line in whatever catches his interest at the moment. He's the only one of our group to formally finish high school; the rest of us just tested out.

 

Heero's still working on finding his place in the world. This, for some reason only he understands, involves hanging around in Relena's shadow and avoiding her advances. Of course by now, Relena does it more to tease Heero than out of a desire to actually catch him. She's grown up a lot in these three years. She's finally realized that she doesn't need a prince. And thanks to Dorothy, she's got a wicked sense of humor.

 

As for me, I became a Roads Scholar. I'm wandering the world on foot; seeing everything I didn't get a chance to see or enjoy during the war. It may not be the most exciting or glamorous thing to do, but I'm not complaining. I'm exactly where I want to be, doing what I want to do.