Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Barbarians in Rome ❯ Pax Romana ( Chapter 2 )

AC 195. The citizens of Earth have launched colonies to each of the LaGrange points in outer space. They are a source of relief for many over populated countries and they lack the natural dangers of a life on Earth. The Earth feeds these colonies with money and supplies for many years, but there is conflict on both sides. The colonies, who believe that there should be one ruling government for both the Earth and space, form the Alliance to gain control of the whole Earth Sphere. They fight back, but the odds are stacked against them. The Alliance uses Gundanium, which can only be mined in the weightlessness of outer space, to build five superior mobile suits and seize power from the major cities of Earth. These simultaneous coup d'états over Washington D.C., Tokyo, Bejing, London, and Rome give rise to the Colonies oppressive rule over the Earth Sphere, enforced by the loathed mobile suits called the Gundams.

The members of the Earth Sphere resist their conquest, but to little avail. The manufacturing conditions and resources of space create superior weapons at a more efficient rate than the neglected Earth Sphere militia can counter. Once united underneath a reign of pacifistic coexistence, the nations of the world fracture apart to withdraw from the areas of Alliance domination. Behind a slogan of betterment and glory, the Gundams continue to battle the remaining Earth resistance with superior technology and untiring resources on their side.

A year has passed in turmoil between the conquering Alliance force and the rebelling fractions of the Earth Sphere and the Colonies have all but demolished those who would resist them. Small pockets of the White Fang, a group of aggressive Earthlings committing guerrilla attacks against the Alliance, exist but dwindle steadily. Resources have been commandeered restrictively and all nations repressed by the mobile suits. The Gundams lead this autocracy. They remain a symbol of the Colonies’ tyrannical control and are untouchable in battle.

As of September, After Colony 195, the five mobile suits had gathered in Rome to guard the construction of the Alliance’s new large-scale factories. Traces of the White Fang Rebellion were diminishing and new strongholds were being uncovered and demolished with every passing day. The Earth’s resistance was weakening. The Alliance was most assured of their victory and ordered each of the five pilots to attend the military academy in Rome, a longstanding Alliance headquarters, feeling secure from the guerrillas. At the time, there was an outstanding warrant for the White Fang leader, Dorothy "The Queen" Catalonia and her second-in-command, Treize Khushrenada, had been killed in the Battle of Florence. The victorious soldiers had come to scornfully call it the White Fang’s last stand.

Currently, the Gundams sat neatly on a throne of power, backed by the undefeated Alliance.

Trowa was unimpressed with the academy. All of its sophisticated technology and esteemed training courses could not automatically insure its good intentions. Suspicion was vital to survival at times, and he had learned it could be trusted more often than not.

General Wufei Chang had not batted an eye after he ordered his chauffeur to the drive of the Holy Roman Military Academy, now more widely known as Central Administration of the Alliance, and left his comrade at the door, more concerned that he would be late for his meeting. Trowa glimpsed him vainly running a hand through his short black hair before the door was swung close and the driver stalked back to the front and slammed his own door. It wasn’t difficult to see how well this General had cultivated his relationship with his men, listening to the Chinese pilot bark at his insolent subordinate once or twice before the town car could leave the drive. The difficult part was accepting these impossible and tangible facts.

Once the General had departed, he turned to size up the Academy doors before entering. While the heritage of Rome had been withering about the fringe of the city, the builders of this structure shamelessly took from the classical world to construct it. A pair of standalone pillars stood guard at the beginning of the walk that led to the extravagant doorway, seemingly a rendition of the famed Coliseum, which had been noticeably neglected as the rest of the buildings forming the ancient heart of the city. It seemed foreign while flanked from a munitions storage base not five hundred meters from the far edge of the military school. It was a poor façade for a military base, Trowa admitted, but there apparently was no threat against it and it thrived still.

Students could be seen throughout the surrounding grounds, though he assumed most of them would be in class during this time of the day. The distant noise of drilling came from a far off corner, removed from the academic section of the school. He could even make out the metallic roof of a barrack at the edge of the grounds. Stationed at the doors was a pair of soldiers who gave vigilance to all who entered. Trowa walked towards the door as if he owned the place and brushed by the troops without meriting so much as a second place. They had been expecting him.

There was little option for escape from his farcical reality, if any. The only constructive thing he could do was at least gain an orientation to his new location, straighten out his confusion. The ornate glass doors opened onto a stark foyer, leading to another, smaller set of glass doors. Trowa passed another sequence of Romanesque pillars and cautiously opened the next doorway. He felt a cool, perfectly conditioned breeze rush over his face from the changing air pressure and his eyes traced up into the high-ceilinged commons. It was an elaborate expanse of marble and stone pillars, intended to mimic that of the ancient architecture. A circle of hallways led off toward classrooms, and the second level was ringed with doorways to similar facilities.

There was a great fountain in the center of the polished dark marble floor gurgling water and glowing from the light of the open windows overhead. Here, the military students milled around in the style of a traditional forum, each in his or her neatly pressed uniforms. Trowa acknowledged his own bizarre garb and momentarily doubted his association with the academy. If he truly had been expected, why would he have found these rather alternative clothes near his hospital bed? What exactly was his role here? And how had the Gundams come to ally themselves to this place?

Each student wore an insignia of the Alliance on his or her breast and none paid any significant attention to the Gundam Pilot standing at the mouth of the commons in a dark purple trench coat.

"Trowa, you’re well! It’s good to see you on your feet again," Duo’s voice suddenly hailed him from the right, approaching from one of the hallways alone, a textbook tucked under one arm. The pilot instinctively tensed up and could not bring himself to dropping his defenses around his transmuted comrade. This was not the Duo Maxwell he knew was possible, that was sane.

The American stopped near him and gave his strange garb no second glance. His eyes were familiar to it and warmed as soon as he could visibly tell that his comrade was on the mend. "How are you feeling? Better?"

He seemed harmless enough, but the surface of something was never the final truth. He still could not afford to trust Duo, or Wufei, or anyone. It pained him, but he knew it was necessity to be wary of his comrades, even the unusually bright-faced Deathscythe pilot standing before him. He was wearing a dark grey uniform jacket over his white dress shirt. The polished insignia gleamed on his chest.

"Much better."

"That’s good. I’ve missed you. Spending time with the others is a little bland—what with their spending so much time with their mobile suits and Wufei charging around from meeting to meeting as he does." He wore a sincere, sunny smile constantly as he talked to him, his textbook under his arm and the shape of a small bible protruding from his pocket. "I’m glad you’re alright. That White Fang soldier gave you quite a jolt, you know. More of a fight than anyone expected from their group. His mobile suit was so demolished when it collided with yours they only finished prying it from the abdomen of your Gundam yesterday."

Trowa lifted his head to rub gingerly at a wound he felt and knew was not there, because he had not been attacked by this so-called White Fang. "It did shake me up a little. I’m not quiet myself yet," he admitted, awkwardly trying to portray a more talkative version of himself that apparently had been put out of commission by a low-level grunt. He tried to adapt to the Looking Glass he’d fallen into.

It seemed to satisfy the Mad Hatter and his smile didn’t fade. He shifted the weight of his textbook to his hip, revealing to Trowa’s keen eyes the title on the spine. Christian Theology. "Do you think you’re going to go back to class today?" he asked.

"No, I was told I should get a day of bed rest before I get back to work. I’m still feeling not quite myself. You know, just a bad headache." That was a mild lie; it was everyone else who was not the same, he knew. As he spoke, he was simultaneously scrutinizing the Alliance insignia sitting contently on Duo’s jacket and noticing it differed from those decorating the student body moving around them.

"That’s too bad. You’re going to have an unbelievable amount to make up by now." He chuckled shyly, almost plainly. "The professors took great joy in stockpiling you with work while you were absent. I believe they scheduled you for two examinations and a mobile suit audit."

Trowa couldn’t help but let his lip quirk at that. Homework from professors he had never seen didn’t trouble him. He had never spent a day of his life in a lecture, he’d hardly know what they would be able to judge from him. The abnormal Duo Maxwell was, indeed, starkly different, but he remained certainly charming as he had been. Even the dark twinkle in his eye had left in favor of something much more fanciful and innocent.

"Are you going to come with me at the end of the week?"

This question was unexpected; Trowa supposed that only the Trowa living through the Looking Glass would know the answer and his face remained neutral. He tried to decipher what it could mean. Duo started to look at him oddly and opened his mouth gently before Trowa could sidestep an answer.

"I’m sorry. I forgot about your injury. It slipped my mind. Do you remember the party planned for tomorrow at all?"

"No, I guess I don’t." He shook his head and tried to appear apologetic for it.

"Well, Wufei invited the four of us to a student party, but I—"

Trowa had noticed Heero coming for a few moments before Duo flinched at his presence and twisted his body away from the other pilot when he roughly jostled him in the shoulder as some graceless greeting. He continued on from the collision and the textbook fell stricken to the floor, its hard cover splaying open and the pages reaching for the ceiling. Duo clamped his mouth down over a half-strangled noise when the other pilot breezed on by, strutting in a juvenile way with tattered black pants hanging loosely on his hips. Heero simply continued on, hardly aware that he’d touched anyone or even where he was walking to, it seemed. Trowa watched him objectively as he disappeared. He too, had radically metamorphosed since the concussion he’d supposedly suffered. The glimpse of his long, shabby black hair moved indifferently through the mass.

Duo was flustered and picked up his book with a wounded sensibility. Trowa caught the momentary resentful look that followed Heero as he disappeared into the crowd and could feel the wire of tension that had suddenly suffocated the neck of the timid pilot’s humor and made him straighten up stiffly.

"I’m sorry to bother you, Trowa. You’re probably very tired from your injury. You were there for over three days after all, I shouldn’t be so selfish and assume you’re fit to be listening to me go on," he said politely, keeping his head bowed from eye contact. "I’ll let you be and get your rest. I need to be going anyway. Good luck to you with those exams," he bid in sincerity, but he seemed more anxious to leave.

Trowa knew there was a burning humiliation in his movements. His eloquent tongue stumbled on some mumbled word before he turned on his heel. He did not need to trace the path of Duo’s furtive apprehensive look to know who had invoked it.

He left back toward where he had come from and fretted with his book quietly while he walked. A second later he changed directions dramatically, shaking his head disdainfully at himself and burning red. It was a truly abnormal emotion to witness on such a drastically changed faced; his embarrassment did not seem appropriate to his shaven head and impeccable dress. He wove his way through the crowd around Trowa toward his original destination and disappeared.

He looked to the fountain in the center of the forum again, remaining where he stood. The light in the windows had muddled behind a Roman afternoon cloud but soon returned to paint the crackled face of the statue in the center. He felt a certain degree of sympathy for the wearied stone face. He began to walk through the student body, past the silent sculpture, and decided his next sensible move should be to at least find his room in this academy. There he may have the temporary haven to sort his over-saturated mind. There he might have the luck of awaking back in reality, where he’d last remembered a bullet cutting into him. As he walked the chains sang obnoxiously on his boots. He let the sigh out quietly and kept moving.

The large classrooms and forums occupied the first level of the academy. The library itself was magnificent but cold and untouched—this was a military academy first and foremost, before any kind of peaceful academics. It remained enthusiasctially neglected. No one would likely hear its silent cry not to be ignored, not to let the culture in the literature of Rome that had once been its life blood be reduced to fine, beautiful sculptures to be admired at a distance, not to be touched at any time.

On the opposing side of the academy, in a much more popular wing, lay the mobile suit mechanics classes, filled with passing students and future soldiers who were in turned filled with indiscriminate enthusiasm for the instruments of war they were being acquainted with extensively. There were large gyms teeming with movements of grey and black, the colors of the Alliance. There young men and women were drilled, exercised, exhibited proudly their fighting spirits, all determined to deserve a medal of honor more than the next. Few would get them. More would be bestowed with the red badge of courage, a crippling wound, or a fatal blow. Even more, before their final prizes of war, would be visited by the ghost of disillusionment and wander a wasteland of the mind swept bare by horrors they were never informed off in their textbooks and drills.

Trowa knew their kind, but never had been one of them. He had seen through the attractive veil of ascendancy and of the immortality in comprehensive training that War wore to hide her ugly head. He had had innocence at one time, he knew, but it had been like a past life he’d never visited. All he knew of it was that it had existed at one time. He had grown up, had spent his formative years scrapping for food until his fingernails bled, standing in the shadow of cruel, mercenary foster families, drawing into himself just to be objective enough to survive. How lamentable it is for a child to need to be objective—objective—when all he desires is to cry in his mother’s arms. And now even that was faded and Trowa had adjusted to the indifference he’d installed in himself.

And now, that was being bayoneted and challenged. His sanity, though, was more in danger here. And even then, what would that matter, if he was never to know how to restore the rational reality he’d known. If there was ever a time he would wish to have the terrorist lifestyle he’d lived, it was now and only now.

The second and third levels were the student dorm rooms, Trowa ascertained as he traveled through them. Hardly a one of them saw him go by in the hallways, which were lavish with the marble flooring and the traditional classical embellishment. He counted the number of insignia as they passed; it did not help to ease his rushed mind. The few that did take notice of him—which was a surprisingly low number considering the tawdry clothes he wore; he would never be ashamed to wear his clown costume again—gaped respectfully and let him pass in a little deference. They had noticed the Gundam pilot, he assumed.

That brought to mind the General Chang. Judging only by his title, he could be expected to be instantly recognizable to the body of the military academy. Trowa obviously did not receive the same reception as he went by them without a spark of recognition. Then he was not a highly regarded soldier as Wufei. It was not a big piece of this puzzling reality, but it was a start.

"What a surprise, with such the refined wardrobe I have," Trowa snorted to himself beneath his breath. The boots still sang an obnoxious song to announce every move he made. Eventually, when he was out of tolerance, he paused to fix the problem. He turned into an empty hall to momentarily kneel down and take the tiny metal chains in his fist and tear them from his boots. Standing up, he looked warily around and walked across to the garbage can to toss them away.

Before he turned to continue his careful probing of this academy, he caught sight of movement far away down the hallway. A cleaning maid emerged from a room pushing a cleaning cart. Her shoulders were stooped, humble, and even hunched. From this distance, he could make out the faint features of her face, and the disorderly dark violet hair clouding her sore face. She did not notice him, though, and resigned herself to pushing the cart towards another task, moving like a resigned steer toward a distant slaughterhouse. She moved down the hallway and Trowa left quickly, wishing not to recognize her though it was inevitable. He continued his impossible expedition through this strange school.

Trowa decided eventually that the Gundam pilots had been allocated a floor of their very own, sharing it only with the suites of the distinguished officers. He had faintly been following the traces of intoxicants that Heero had left in his wake as he traveled toward his room, Trowa assumed. Unless there was someone else in the school with a habit as obvious as his. There were hints of cigarette smoke leaving an indistinct but pursuable trail, which he followed to the highest floor, through a pristine marble room that was almost museum-like in its grandeur and uselessly quixotic at best. Three hallways sprung from it. He passed the bronze statue of a female wolf suckling two writing young toddlers when he went into the hallway furthest to the right.

He could still hear Heero’s laggard steps echoing on the marble ahead of him, and the sound of a door opening and halfway closing behind him. He followed silently, closing in on the ajar door when he turned the corner. There was very little chance that what he would find here would be promising at all, judging already from just the smell of intoxicants coming off the Gundam pilot’s trail. But it was necessary. Necessary to know as much as he could, even if it was disagreeable information as he suspected it would be from the others’ conditions. And that is how he came to find himself standing in the open doorway of the dormroom, watching Heero casually take a hit of cocaine while sitting on the edge of his ragged bed. He’d freshly lit a cigarette, and it sat on the ashtray sitting on his pillow, forgone for stronger stuff.

The dark-haired pilot shuddered violent for a moment as he snorted what seemed to be a rather liberal amount, considering that the door had been left unconcernedly open and officers and professors could be heard traveling the halls on the floor. Trowa did not move, only watched raptly as the mirror reflection of the fiercely proficient and strong-willed rubbed at his Asian nose, jeering stupidly as the effects began to take root. His juvenile grin that followed when he let his head come back down was starkly frightening to witness. Wiping the back of his hand over his reddened nostrils, he chuckled and turned the crooked expression up to Trowa.

"No long time no see. ‘Bout shitting time you came and cleaned up this room. Didn’t miss your mouth for a minute, though. Fuck, you wan’ some?" His casual slur would have been a sacrilege to enrage the Heero through the Looking Glass, the one on the original side. His lifeless eyes, too, were shocking to see. Hazed and his pupils opening wide onto a fresh high, the bedraggled teenager offered the other half of his generous supply of the white powder with no more enthusiasm than if his arms were tied to a marionette’s string and moved on force. The plastic bag was semi-transparent, tinted green, and the academy’s emblem was printed in the corner.

Trowa shook his head casually, shrugging it off. "No thanks, man. I’m not feeling too well right now."

As the narcotic high began to work its incapacitating bliss, Heero’s movements were jerky, more energized at least, but his eyes remained as gravestone still as before. He chuckled, in a voice brother to the General Chang’s blunt domineering bark, and exaggeratedly jabbed a finger at him. "Then why the fuck not dig in? They always bring ya the best shit here. Make you feel better. Pure mountain snow. Hell, you get too bashed around to take a line with your old friend?"

He shook his head nonchalantly. "Not right now. Maybe later." At the same time, his eyes were dissecting the room, trying to coax answers or vague figures like them out of the woodwork. There was no insignia on Heero’s shabby black rock concert shirt, but neither was he wearing the typical uniform.

The other pilot scoffed and reached for his cigarette, his eyes swirling dimly as the drug worked its narcotic value on his mind and body. Relishing it with all the gusto of a recently deceased corpse. That was a particularly extraordinary accomplishment in laziness, seeing how the drug should enhance his body. He reclined lethargically onto the bed and with his foot he kicked the power button of the battered stereo at the end of the bed, jarring the overworked machine into life, spitting out the first bars of an old Led Zeppelin album. He sucked shamelessly on the cigarette, cherishing the fleeting, doping qualities until it left him and he took another drag to occupy the rift left by the first one.

"Hey, you’re the one missing out, man." He chuckled with an asinine expression. "Fuck, now why don’t you clean up your shit and keep it on your own side this own time, huh? Goddamn stuff, I stepped on your fucking gun. Lucky I didn’t mess up my foot, I would’ve had them pull your plug and be rid of you. But then who’d clean up this shit?"

"No body but you," Trowa added as he walked by, confronted by a slowly thinning curtain of fumes. Heero seemed only to leave the room to restock, then returned to empty that stock very promptly. The air didn’t remain clear for long, and the intoxicated corpse remained reclined out on the black covers of his unmade bed, gazing torpidly while he quietly rode the high on the sexual crooning of Robert Plant.

With little more to offer from the dozing snowbird, he went to what was obviously designated as his side of the large, richly-furnished room by the line of crumpled black rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts on the floor. Pressed up against the far wall was his bed. There was walk-in closet, littered with like punk clothing. There was a high-polish rifle case filled with knives and other assorted guns, as there was on Heero’s side, though the glass was plastered with garish rock stickers, his own couch, and a variety of other fanciful amenity no hunted terrorist would see, none that any rational terrorist would need. He would execute his mission and move on quickly, preserving himself in the process. It was clear that there was a distinction between the average mobile suit cadet and the Gundam pilot at this academy. Here they were not fugitive pirates to be sought and exterminated like rats gnawing obnoxiously at the heels of military control, trying to revolutionize and undermine. Here they were the very pillars of the military control yet to be undermined.

Of course, here was a difficult thing to determine. For a moment, Trowa remained cautiously motionless in the world, knowing it was not his own, staring at the glossy posers of women and street racers tacked to the wall near his bed in a dark violet trench coat and chained boots. This was not what he could have expected in all his life. And at the same time, Heero Yuy was contentedly getting high, Duo Maxwell was praying fearfully, and Wufei Chang was vainly commanding weaker men than him. It was a certain terrible apprehension with which Trowa realized there was still another pilot.

There were a good three hundred men and women, a company of undoubtedly the best the revolutionary body could offer, the result of a year’s worth of terrorist activities that culled and cut out the weakest with bullets, with mobile suits, with detonations. They were the lean, starving, desperate remains of a once frightful resistance and together they were planning to make one last lunge at the throat of their enemy, death or glory. They would put all of their eggs in a single basket before inevitably stepping into the fire. Dorothy received messages through the subterranean tunnels via runner, now that their secrecy was so high priority even electricity was a threat, should it prove to be a lead for the vicious Alliance to follow to their dying stronghold. Word came that four more men and six women had died in the night, unable to reach the surface for medical attention. She nodded her head in acknowledgement and sent the messenger to sit among those gathered, in the largest of the underground caverns.

It was an unfortunate loss, yes, and yes, it would effect them drastically, to loose even a single person more to the Alliance, but she couldn’t do anything else for them. She observed silence for them with a gritty expression, staring darkly into the lantern swinging from the ceiling that illuminated the gathering. Her pale blonde hair was harsh and jagged from the dried blood collected there. And when she turned to look at them, her eyes were fire and violence. Her men waited in grave silence, equally battered and worn as she and resigned and dedicated to following her command against the oppressing Alliance.

She straightened up stiffly, a remnant from her days of heading a well-oiled Sicilian battalion, days that were old, whimsical dreams of a past dream now. "Angaron, how many mobile suits left?" she ordered quickly, to an officer in an uncleaned old Italian military uniform standing against the wall, while the rest of the men perched on rice and bean crates.

"Ninety, ma’am."

"And those functional?"

"Less than half of that. Too many need new parts. And we lost our best mechanic just last night. Crimly bled to death."

Her face could not sour any further than it had gone since the beginning of this grappling resistance. She wore an expression much deeper and more sincerely furrowed with burden than most military officers thrice her age. With a nod, she thanked him. "Nothing we can do about that, then. Sheng, Kleinfelter, you will designate whatever’s left to the most able pilots. Destroy those in repair immediately. Dump them in the ocean, tear them apart with pick-axes—do not leave anything to fall into enemy hands. If we defeat the Alliance here, we will have all the weapons we desire and even more."

From across the cramped, desolate little dirt and concrete chamber, her sole opposition made itself heard when Milliardo lifted his head at the back of the group, his glasses gleaming dully under the sick illumination of lanterns. "How can you be so sure the Gundams are, in fact, stationed in Rome?"

"They haven’t killed anybody there yet. They’ll be there," the leader growled back venomously, itching for the knife hanging faithfully on her hip. Yes, Treize had been the fool for allowing this spineless lizard to climb so high in rank that she ever had to lay eyes on him, let alone hear his idealist babble. "We win Rome, and we win back our chances, Gundams or not."

"And if they are there, won’t we be guaranteed our demise?" he asked again, horribly grim while he raised his voice. His shell-shocked blue eyes were for once clear and forward. The calm before the storm, the moment of strength before imminent death.

Dorothy turned her head from him, toward another fighter. "Cameron, I want a full platoon of skilled hand-to-hand—" she started to bark.

"They’ll be slaughtered before they can reach the outskirts," Milliardo interrupted, standing up, dragging his wounded, rotting leg, even as one could smell the gangrene seeping slowly into it. "This is foolishness, Dorothy, and you’re simply leading these men off to their deaths."

That fire and violence in her pale blue eyes turned on him, unadulterated. "The Gundams are in Rome. We are attacking Rome. And yes, we are all going to die." And for a deathly still moment, she scanned the faces of her followers, and was given a lukewarm reaction, one more faint from the acknowledgement that they were indeed embarking a last suicide mission. But none of it was mutiny or refractoriness. "But I’d kill every many who’d run in surrender to the Alliance bastards before he would die fighting them." And that was when she unflinchingly lifted her revolver from her shoulder holster and punctually fired at the back of the room, hurling hot lead through the top of the insubordinate’s head.

The skull was severed jaggedly, and only partially, so blood began to spring forth from the deep, damaging cleave in his head. He slumped bonelessly on the rice crate while the sweet metallic reminder of blood filled the air. Those directly beside him did not flinch, even while his intellect had quite literally splattered on their faces. His eyes were still open and openly defiant, but they were softened by death.

"We will be moving in before dawn on the center of the city. The Holy Roman Academy, the Roman Munitions Base, and fuck, why not hit the Coliseum while we’re at it? Understood? I will designate specific tactical orders to each superior before midnight." She clasped her hands impassively behind her back, once she’d holstered the warm weapon and turned to walk out of the cramped chamber. "And clean up that mess."

With the harsh thud of her boots on the cement, echoing eerily off the walls, she left, and the White Fang resistance core had already begun its demise, starting with the bleeding corpse of Milliardo Peacecraft.

The Led Zeppelin CD had long been finished and twirled idly in the system. Heero had wandered off, dazed and contentedly so, and Trowa had not bothered to worry about where he’d gone to. It wasn’t like he was going to go to class, as he had griped of rather often while he went easily through half a pack of cigarettes. The room was still thick with fume and smell and the general feeling of malaise. It did, however, leave Trowa the opportunity to access the computer in their shared dormroom, allow the seasoned wolf something to investigate with.

The system was open. Unlocked, accessible, waiting—he was not even required identification or a password to instantly gain entry into the academy’s extensive network of information, maps, and student files. He wasn’t worried about the latter, for he had neither time nor interest for meddling with some buck cadet’s grade point average. As he sorted through the database, he found it foolishly easy to get around and access important files. There the seasoned wolf began to get a bearing of his surroundings. Scanning through floor maps and memorizing where the munitions and mobile suit parts were stored, where they were constructed, where the graduated soldiers were barracked and drilled—all of this came instinctively. Once he was sure where to find a mobile suit for escape should something arise, he moved onto the files labeled simply as 01 through 05. Though the system was an open book to any relatively experienced hacker, there was very little information on the Gundam pilots. Within each file, there was a picture, rather unremarkable, and a few lines of personal and academic information. All that was listed was a general brief history, scanning from birth to elementary to secondary school and to the academy, a military rank, and a few scraps of grade point information.

The Heero from through the Looking Glass was represented in the low end of the academic spectrum. He was not surprised, as he kept one ear peeled to the room filled with music and fumes. Other than that, he found no real decisive information to assuage his looming fear. Nothing he opened came out and told him yes, he was dreaming wildly, or yes, he had woken up in a twisted corridor of Hell.

And yet, nothing could confirm that he wasn’t, either. Perhaps that was the true meaning of Hell, a place of perpetual confusion and fear—not separation from God. For if there was no such thing, how could there be separation from it?

With that, he logged off with little elucidated in his mind and, using that same wary, disconcerted mind, began to make an inconspicuous path for the South August Hangar. As the largest of the mobile suit hangars, there was surprisingly little documented to be stored there. Trowa knew they kept arms there too precious to be risked being discovered. Perhaps there, reality would come back to claim him and take him back into the arms of the devils he knew, back to where he had once been satisfied with his role in life as a terrorist fighting impossible odds daily.

This place felt wrong at an impossible level, one that instilled him with general dread and unknown fears. Not a student or professor or soldier passed without an insignia gleaming on their chest.

A straight, no-nonsense path led to the South August Hangar, which was lit up and gleaming in the Roman sunlight. Apparently, whatever military force controlled this base either had the bold confidence or the self-assured foolishness to keep their mobile suit store-houses at a polished gleam, which, with the sun high in the sky as it was now, could probably catch the eye of enemy aircraft leagues away. The wide, paved path leading to this hangar was lined with primly kept trees. There were strategically placed flower patches between each of these trees to help distract the mind from the fact of this base’s violent purpose. Trowa noted it was a nice, if not misguided, touch, but he was not fooled by any of this, and nor could he afford to be.

From where he was walking, unaccompanied, he could see one of the hills of Rome from between the tree cover. A large surveillance station had been erected there, and armed soldiers kept watch there. Trowa had to squint to focus in on the individual guards, who looked haggard in their stuffy uniforms beneath a baking Italian sun as they marched back and forth.

At least they had a grasp on reality, or thought they did, he thought bitterly to himself. Right now, clarity was a distant dream that had left him at chaos’ door without a road map or a lantern to light his way. He naturally felt a little wronged by that.

There were no guards at the door of the hangar, just a few soldiers soliciting near the archway and laughing at the jokes they exchanged. One kept a cold beer clenched in his hand and they paid no notice to Trowa as he passed, even though he felt like a large, violet eyesore traveling through a stocked ammunition room full of unsuspecting enemies. They did not turn and attack him, as he feared; they couldn’t have known that the Gundam pilot they looked at was not the quite the man who belonged there. As soon as he stepped inside the shadow of the hangar, his eyes cleared from the sun and he saw that where there normally would have been the hangar floor was a catwalk that over looked a lower level filled with Alliance Leo suits. The underground story was immense, and the voices of the multitude of mechanics and students milling around it carried up to the overlooking catwalk, where Trowa stood, gazing down.

He looked up at the open doorway, where the soldiers were laughing because of some hilarious punchline, and went toward the staircase on the other end of the catwalk.

A mechanic passed Trowa to get on the staircase, carrying a frayed mess of wiring in one hand and wearing a pleasant expression, as soon as he stepped off. He stepped to the side, but he was far too absorbed by the sight of the mobile suits to pay much attention to her. The wall was lined thick with injured, bashed, and nearly repaired Leos and Aries in all varying degrees of damage. Mechanics crawled anxiously over their bent or seared skin like ants, some working faster than others. Sparks flew from welders into the air and down to the concrete floor, trainees were fetching tools, and even some pilots were nearby, supervising the reconstruction of their machines. There was a red suit, among the dented dull green and black, against the furthest wall in much worse shape. Lodged in the Heavyarms’s abdomen, just below the cockpit, was part of a Taurus arm, horribly mangled and horribly mangling the Gundam as well. There were so many mechanics teeming around it, the Heavyarms looked like a disturbing religious figure.

The mechanic he’d passed on the stairs came back down and breezed by Trowa, who had stopped a good distance from his mobile suit to stare at it, at its impossibility. As she walked, jauntily chewing a piece of gum, she lifted the cap from her head to scratch at her short, boyish blonde hair. She hesitated, after passing him, and turned to look back while she rubbed the grease off one hand onto her grubby work overalls.

A sweet-sounding, young voice came out of her mouth, and Trowa finally tore his eyes from the Gundam to find they settled on the smudged, grinning face of the heir to the Peacecraft legacy. "Oh, hey, Trowa! How’re you doing?" As shocking as it was to see the soft, fair Relena in a military academy, it was even more so to see her with hair cropped, oil-smeared clothes, and an awfully Duo-like grin. She walked briskly back over to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and nodded curtly at him. The motions were quick, desicive, and almost tomboyish. "You look like a million bucks. Well, compared with before, you do."

She laughed and Trowa just smiled politely in return. "I wish I felt that way."

"Now, you don’t have to worry about Heavyarms, alright? We’ll get ‘im working like a song in just a matter of hours. You get back to your classes soon and get that nose to the grindstone, before that Prime Minister dismisses you," she advised with a toothy smirk. "I hear he’s a real monster, that one. You watch your back, okay?"

"Alright," Trowa answered quietly, still stunned at the odd transformation the princess had taken but hiding as well as he could.

Before she started to walk toward the mobile suit, she lifted a wrench from her pocket, and pointed it at him. "You promise me you’ll get to work?"

He nodded in reassurance. "Stick in a needle in my eye."

A seriously impish smirk came across her face, and even her innocent cornflower blue eyes were twinkling with a playfulness as she started trotting away backwards so she could grin at him. "I’d rather you crossed your heart and died," she replied with a wink, before turning and jogging toward the gundanium mobile suit. A few other mechanics, swamped with work trying to dislodge the two suits, called out to her, and she answered with her own boisterous reply. Trowa could have sworn he saw a long tail of braided hair swing behind her, but he shook his head and the illusion was gone.

And so was his last piece of grip on reality.