Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Tale ❯ My Tale ( Prologue )

Title: My Tale (working title)

Author: Pied Piper

Rating: PG-13

Pairings: None

Warnings: first person POV (for this chapter only), references to prostitution, minor original character death, one semi-bad word.

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing.

A/N/summary: Basically, the story of Duo's past, probably going to end right before Operation Meteor. The first person POV is most likely going to be this chapter only, and it's of Duo (just in case you couldn't figure that out). So, read, enjoy, and, if it so suits you, review. ^_~

 

 

 

What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd!

How sweet their memory still!

But they have left an aching void

The world can never fill.

~William Cowper~

 

 

 

My Tale: Prologue

Reminiscence

 

There's not much that I remember about my mother. I remember that she was pretty and had long hair, but it wasn't until lately that I realized she had dyed it: hiding hair that was, most likely, the same colour as mine. But it may have been some other colour; guess I'll never know. My mother was a prostitute named Foxfire, but I didn't know what that was until after she died, and when I did learn, boy was I shocked. Some guy, most likely trying to make me feel guilty, tried to tell me that she sold her body to keep me alive, but it was the other way around: I was alive because she sold her body. And because the condoms sold on L2 aren't exactly top of the line. As you could probably guess, one broke, and here I am today. Foxfire didn't even know who my father was, but I guess that was to be expected. It was just another job to her, after all.

 

I remember the way she used to talk. Her words were always slurred together, but it was what she said that stuck with me. “Boys don't cry,” she would tell me, and she kept telling me that right up to the day she got killed. “You a big boy?” she'd ask, “Then stop crying: big boys don't cry.” Then: BAM! Even before I was old enough to read, she was gone.

 

We had a fairly good relationship, I suppose. I was too young to be of much help to her, but, seeing as how I didn't starve and how I was somehow toilet trained, she probably didn't hate me. But she would have been a lot better off if I had never come. Once a girl's had a kid, she's never the same, both mentally and, more importantly for her, physically. She didn't have the same youthful body that she'd once had, and many of her frequent costumers left her for more supple women. My father may have been one of them . . . but not all of them left.

 

I remember being kept awake at night by strange sounds coming from my mother's room. I was scared, but I knew better than to leave the safety of my makeshift crib: Mommy would be mad. And so I would lie in my crib and just listen in silence; sometimes singing gentle lullabies to sooth myself to sleep.

 

My mother was a completely different person during the day. She was always tired, yet tried her best to be gentle with me and, unwanted though I may have been, I never felt unloved. But at night. . . she was no longer my mother. She would put on clothes that looked painfully tight, and the makeup she wore covered any sort of blemish she thought she had. She was so beautiful at night, and that scared me. She used to put me to bed at seven and leave for a few hours, sometimes returning with some man and sometimes not returning until morning. I had no idea when she slept, but she managed somehow. She always did. And then she died.

 

It was a normal day; the day that she died, until a bomb threat that happened about mid-afternoon. We were in a grocery store when the sirens started going off around us. Duck and cover, they told us, and duck and cover I did, `till my mother told me that we had to get out of there. Just as we got to the door, Foxfire realized that her purse, the one that held food money for the entire month, was back in the store. She shoved me out the door and, only a few seconds after she had run back in; a bomb went off from the inside. I was thrown through the air and nearly broke my arm as I rammed into a wall, but I fared far better than my mother. Far better than my mother. . . She died that day, along with about fifty others who were unlucky enough to be shopping in a grocery store at that particular time. It was a cruel thing that those terrorists did that day, cruel even for my standards. To place one bomb in all of the major grocery stores in L2 (even though there were only three) and to detonate them (even though the time was early, when not many people would be shopping) deprived L2 not only of people, but also of food. The shopping centers didn't return, and many people went hungry until street vendors became more common, street vendors I would steal from later.

 

I can't say that I cried when my mother died. I never really saw her dead, so it didn't occur to me for years that she was really gone. I just turned around and left the store, and with it, all the pieces of my old life. I left behind my family, my home, my name; and I became one of the many war orphans who spent their entire lives searching for a family, a home, a name. This is my tale, this is what made me what I am today, this is who I am.

 

I am the bastard son of a prostitute.

 

I am Duo Maxwell.