Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Death Throws ❯ Record 1.1 ( Chapter 1 )

Death Throws: Record 1.1

By: Kiamirei

~I don't claim to own Gundam Wing. Please review this or contact me with your questions or comments!

THE LIFE OF THE DRAGON

His students were weak. There was nothing else to be said. They were weak, and lax, and their bodies were unfit for anything but the most minimal exercise. He hated them. Of course, he was aware that it had been his own choice to become a student teacher and so he must take the consequences with no complaint. But what else had there been for him to do? With no war there was no one to fight, and to purposely make enemies simply for the sake of battle was a weakness more despicable than the weakness that his students possessed. Having piloted and maintained Shenlong, he had skills as a mechanic and an engineer, but there were no available openings. He could not teach his skills in the martial arts because they would earn him high-scale recognition, and that was something that he would not risk having. Before becoming a pilot he had been a scholar, and it was to that that he turned to, even though he had no love of knowledge anymore. So he had created files and passports and birth certificates, all giving him an age appropriately higher than his sixteen years and a history that he could allow others to know, and had settled in an obscure city on earth.

They would come into his first period class complaining about how tired they were, and they would complain during fifth hour how hungry they were, and complain about their work load, or if they had a headache, or if they received a minor injury, or if they failed a test, or if a friend was cruel to them, or if they got into a fight with their parents or siblings, or if they couldn't go to a movie or the mall, and complain and complain and complain. He hated it, could barely stand it. What did they know? They lived in their small world completely oblivious to everything around them, spoiled and soft. They had not had to pilot a mobile suit for three days straight, or had to live on almost starvation rations for weeks at a time, unable to leave their mobile suit for fear of being caught. Never had they experienced the pain of having to pilot with multiple broken limbs, and never had they felt the fires of betrayal burn their souls as the people they fought for branded them traitors and terrorists.

But these are the people that you fought for, he reminded himself. This is what you wanted to protect, and this is the result of the peace that you fought and killed and bled and put your life on the line for. This peace won in the name of justice and in the name of human kind -and in Nataku's name- used to be your ideal.

Keeping that in mind, he tolerated his weak pupils as best he could, pretending to care if they got an education and repressing the emotions he felt. So he taught. He taught fifth grade students, students who saw his lack of height and his youth -though they could not tell he really was not much older than them- and at first decided not to respect him. It had taken him only two days to teach them who was in control, and they had given him their grudging respect. He had no charisma, and so relationships with the students were almost unusually formal. But that was how he liked it. Respect, formality, and math, a subject that gave no room for argument; these were the things that he thrived upon in these times of peace. He had battled with his soul during the war, had fought with his heart and his conscience, and had ended up ravaged and alone. This was all that was left for him.

Alone. Ironic, that the pilot who had most obviously distanced himself from everyone hated being alone. It was weak. Nataku would scorn him. Or would she really? Had Nataku really been the way he remembered or had his mind warped his memories of her in desperation, made her more righteous, more stern than she had been, in order to give him a lifeline to cling to during the war? He couldn't say. But he knew with every fiber in his body that she had always been strong, had lived for justice, and that it was only right for him to do the same. It was both his privilege and his duty to do at least that for her.

He had spoiled his chance at friendship, had thrown away opportunity of camaraderie when he left so shortly after peace had been declared. He laughed at himself softly as he ate his lunch in the teacher's lounge. Camaraderie? There was none, and there never had been. The other Gundam pilots had been the only people in the entire universe who truly expected nothing from him, had wanted nothing but an alliance. That included not needing his friendship. But they had offered it anyway, hadn't they? It had been his decision to refuse. He had needed solitude, had not been able to stand the four other pilots.

Funny how he couldn't stop thinking about them.

There was Heero Yuy, the so-called perfect soldier whose first act had been to disobey the true orders of Operation Meteor, and who could never quite bring himself to kill Relena, despite everything that he said. Cold, piercing cobalt eyes and the emotions of a rock. A perfectionist through and through that never bothered to conform to rules and instead conformed the rules to fit him. One of only two people who had truly mastered the Zero System, that all-knowing program that haunted dreams, and a relentless assassin that was sometimes kinder than he seemed.

And Duo Maxwell, the boy who had taken on death as his persona and had lived up to it as best as he possibly could during the war. A thief and a terrorist with intense magnetism that could, along with his other skills, get him anything he wanted in life. Money, friends, anything. He couldn't tell whether to be amused or frightened at Duo's ability to go from being a forbidding killer to literally rolling on the floor with laughter and back again in ten seconds flat. In battle sometimes the lightning-quick flashes between the personality of a killer and a jovial teenager took even less time than that.

Quatre Winner had been someone he had initially thought was too weak to be a Gundam pilot, a boy with inner strength enough to get him through half of his battles and compassion enough to get him through the other half. Hell, that compassion was how he had won over Trowa in the first place. He had liked beauty, and had played the violin well. An elegance and nobility that was matched by no one else possessed Quatre, but he was far too kind for his own good, and everybody knew it except for the pilot himself. His sensitivity and consideration would, most likely, get him killed one day. Wufei was surprised to find that he would miss the Arabian if that prediction came true.

Lastly, there was Trowa Barton, the boy who had never been anything but a soldier, one who was perpetually wearing a mask. Someone who had, by his own admittance, no name of his own and so had taken the name of a corpse instead. A lethal killer so skilled at taking on new identities and playing both sides that he had, at one point, convinced even Lady Une of a loyalty that did not exist. He was an enigma, one that preferred to stay that way. Perhaps it was all he had, now that there was no war. But in a way Wufei envied him. Someone who had hit rock bottom could only go up, even if it took a lifetime to start the journey.

They had parted, each going in their separate ways, and now he was alone in a place where everyone referred to him as Mr. Chang and no one called him Wufei. But maybe this was how it was supposed to be. He wouldn't know what to do if they were constantly around, and he knew that eventually he would lash out at them. He tried to put those four out of his mind, to just forget that he had ever known them, but the more he attempted to disregard them the more their words and images found their way into his head.

He had left without telling them that he was going. The hangar had been absolutely silent, with only the five Gundams inside when he walked in feeling like an intruder in a sacred place. He had thought that no one knew he was departing, but when he looked around again he saw Heero standing in the shadows, watching his every move.

"Where are you going?" Heero had asked, voice completely monotone. If he didn't know the boy, he would have thought that the assassin didn't care. But Heero never asked anyone about anything he didn't care about.

"Why should you care?" was his hostile reply.

"Why shouldn't I?"

"I don't answer to you anymore."

"Have you ever?"

He had turned away without answering, only to face Trowa. Emerald eyes calmly stared into him, analyzing, and he had felt then that the pilot of Heavyarms could see into his soul and read everything that was written upon it.

"Are you coming back?" Trowa had asked in an equally dead voice.

It had occurred to him then how similar those two really were. He hadn't answered, but they knew him well enough to take it as an answer. They had stepped out of his way, and he had left. They didn't know where he was now and he didn't know where they were. Quatre and Trowa were the only ones he could be sure about, because it was obvious that Trowa would go back to the circus where Catherine would be waiting to welcome back her "little brother" and Quatre would go back to his multitude of sisters.

Now not only was he completely alone, he was alone and without a purpose. His entire life had been lived for principle, initially pursuing knowledge, and then one of strength and justice when the first part of his existence fell apart into nothingness. War had left earth and the colonies, and it had dragged any reason for living his life along with it. He had first lived for knowledge, after that he had fought for strength, then he had fought for justice, since the beginning he had also been fighting for Nataku. Now there was nothing to fight, and he, who could be nothing but a warrior, had been cruelly tossed aside by the hard-won peace to be as forgotten as the mutilated scraps of mobile suits floating around through space. His life was mundane now, and he found he couldn't endure it. He couldn't endure peace for much longer, either.

In fact, he completely loathed it. No matter how hard he had fought, and even though peace had brought the colonies and the earth together, and even though all wars had come to an end, the world had remained the same. There was still poverty, murder, rape, and all the evils of humanity that he had so idealistically thought would end with the wars. People still conned one another, they still secretly hated each other. The only difference was that no full-scale battles were fought. Now, the battles were one on one. What, then, had he fought for anyway? He knew that to assume that once wars had ended people would become the embodiment of virtue was naïve. Still, couldn't they understand that the peace he had fought for did not end with peace between nations? He had fought passionately so that citizens of the world and of the colonies could stop fighting not only with other nations, but so that they could also stop fighting with their neighbors and with their own hearts.

He hated peace, and he hated war. He did not allow himself to think about the war, nor of his fellow pilots, the only ones who had offered friendship without expecting anything in return. The memories were painful, and he did not want to bear them.

Looking back, he realized that he had blinded himself with his arrogance and his ideals. He had always been too high-flown, too dependent upon his them. They were what had sustained him, and now that he could not depend on them anymore, he had nothing. Humans would never change, and he would always hate peace from now on. He had deluded himself, and had told himself that he was right, and everyone else was wrong. He had not understood that others believed in their cause just as passionately as he did, and that the world was almost always made up of shades of gray, instead of black and white.

Wufei was done with ideals. All save two: he would continue to advocate the need for strength and the need for justice. But he would not fight for these ideals, because it would only start a war, because there was no point to it, and because there was no one to fight. He would endure the peace that he hated, and he would hate that peace until people had the intelligence to realize for themselves what he had already made his last ideal, and that they could take the time to be kind for one another. He would not hold his breath, though. The former pilot was done with ideals, and he was also done with fighting.

What would Nataku say? Maybe she wouldn't say anything at all, or maybe she would scold him for being weak. Maybe she would say his name softly, with compassion. She had always been capable of that, too, his Nataku, had even been that way a couple times. He preferred to think that she would take the last option. Wufei still missed her, though the pain was only bittersweet now, not piercing like it had been before.

Nataku…