Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Smile ❯ Prologue

Title: Smile

Author: Indie (IndieVampire@placebo.nu)

Notes: Rated PG, contains angst, some religious references, and introspection, 2+1, Duo's POV. I don't own Gundam Wing; I simply borrow the characters for my own sadistic amusement.

Comments: Sorry it's been so long since I've written anything, but RL does it's best to keep me from writing. Thanks to my manager at work Dan, for sparking this idea with an awesome line. The title sucks, but I couldn't think of a better one.

Feedback: Any and all welcome.

**************************************************************** ********

Sometimes it hurts to smile, most days now it seems. With each day it gets harder to do so, as the death toll only climbs. Innocent casualties of war who will only be remembered as a statistic when these battles end. Their fates were in my hand and I failed them. I allowed the enemy to survive, this path of destruction to continue on to a new area where it will all play out again, and a new batch of souls will be delivered to the afterlife.

Wouldn't Father Maxwell be proud now? He had such plans for me. I was to become a priest, a saver of men. Instead I serve the underworld as a destroyer of men. I wonder whether he looks down on me from Heaven and regrets that he saved that child from the streets so many years ago - if there is a Heaven at all. Lately I've begun to doubt that there is a God at all. Even if he is, he obviously does not have either the power or the will to sort out the problems here on earth and the colonies. This is all Lucifer's territory, as one can see from the people who inhabit it; so many soulless killing machines, with no human emotions or desires.

Even some of those I fight along side of are like that. I made the mistake of loving one. I thought that perhaps I could change him, but even as we made love, as I was on an emotional high, he was stoic, mechanical. Sometimes I think it would be better to be that way, to not be able to feel this thing gnawing on my insides, the sadness that hits you at night when you sit and think about the consequences of your actions, the pain that washes over you when your memories hit, with familiar faces that now exist only in your mind as their bodies are buried deep in the cold ground. It's not happiness exists anymore for me anyway. It hasn't for a long time, almost as longer than I can remember.

The only reason I smile is because if I don't, I'll cry, and I feel like if I cry now I'll never stop. There are so many people that I've lost, I've let down. So many I killed that didn't deserve to die, and nobody deserves to die. So many left behind, lives destroyed by a lost brother, friend or son who went off to war and never came back. One of the few things I have left is my dignity and reputation, and I won't let a bunch of guys in mobile suits take that away from me by making me look like a sissy. Boys don't cry, and so I crack jokes instead, try to keep the grin on my face, though it hurts more each day.