Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ ZERO ❯ ZERO ( One-Shot )

Title: ZERO

Author: mao

Disclaimer: GundamW characters, likenesses, and plot lines are property of T.V. Asahi, Sunrise, the Sotsu Agency, Bandai, and the Cartoon Network. The story is mine and you may have it if you ask nicely. The bit at the beginning is from the T.S. Eliot poem, "The Hollow Men".

Author's Notes: Felt a little down, so I popped this out after watching Ep. 45 (what that has to do with anything, I don't really know. Maybe nothing. But good to know, just the same. Right?)

Warnings: Language.

It sounds weird, I guess. No, I know it sounds weird, but it didn't happen to you, so you can't possibly understand.

At the end of the Mariemaia "incident," as they called it - as if a nine year old trying to take over the world was a normal thing - it hit me. I had killed people. That little girl had killed people, and I had killed people. I'd killed a whole colony.

A whole fucking colony.

Whoa.

It bowled me over as we were celebrating, just this sudden need to get outside. I was going to beat myself, to scream and cry and rant.

Me, of all people. Because of the stupid fucking ZERO system. I'd killed people.

Not in battle, not honorably. I'd killed people who'd had nothing to do with the entire war, people just going about their day, about their life as if they were going to continue forever.

I took the blaster, and I aimed, and I fired. I watched as their lives exploded, listened as they all cried out for a single moment, then were silenced. I laughed as their lives ended, right in front of me, as their things and their colony flew at me with the energy of the blast.

I was grieving.

I explained it away that way for so long. I was a Pacifist after all; even if I was a soldier, I wasn't going to kill people for no reason, wasn't even going to try to kill other soldiers in battle; just disarm them.

And then, just like that, I turned on the people because I had the power.

When the trials for war crimes came around, I was mentioned. I did go to court. Even had I had to defend myself, I could have gotten off by means of temporary insanity.

But I didn't need to get off. I already was.

Because I'm a Gundam pilot.

I'm a stupid fucking pilot and so anything I do must be ok.

I was glad at the time. I was fairly dancing with joy, glad because, as I put it at the time "I couldn't help it." For some reason, I thought it was someone else's fault I killed all those people, that I destroyed a whole colony in a single moment.

Stupid Pacifist.

Stupid fucking Quatre Rebarba Winner.

I still hear their voices sometimes, in my sleep. I'll be lying there, thinking, wondering to myself, and I'll hear a million voices in my mind cry out as one, just for a moment.

Their last moment was one of unity, of peace.

In a way, it's kind of beautiful. Or it would be if it didn't make me vomit every time I think about it.

I haven't spoken to the other pilots. I don't even know if they're still alive.

Imagine that. Nearly fifty years gone by, and I don't know anything about them anymore.

Sure, I knew stuff for a while. Even thought I didn't talk to them after the Mariemaia incident, even though I dropped out of the limelight, allowing my sisters to take over the corporation, I was careful to keep track of them.

Relena and Heero never got married, but he stayed with her forever, until her death in a bombing last year. They had three children together, and she remained in politics until the end - she was killed because she proposed a new, controversial policy that would convert trash into energy. Heero's still around, somewhere. I think.

Wufei...God only knows what happened to him. I pray for him sometimes, but after he went to join the Terraforming project, all news about him ceases.

Trowa stayed with the circus until his death twenty-some odd years ago. A lion mauled him, believe it or not. A rabid lion. Imagine, living through all he did, to get killed by a lion.

Duo was a Preventer forever. He may still be; I don't know. He never got married either, but that may have been because Hilde was killed in a scrap accident not long after the Mariemaia incident. I remember one interview I saw of Heero and Relena, when someone mentioned Duo and the fact that he was single.

"Hilde was the love of Duo's life." Heero said, looking clearly at the camera. "When she died, all the fight went out of him."

I never had a love of my life. I've been living in this little town forever.

South Africa, Earth. Just outside of Johannesburg.

I don't stand out too much here. I do a little, I know I do. But no one knows me. I'm just the old man with the whitish hair who looks like someone who was famous for a while.

I thought about trying to call Heero the other day. I thought about asking him if he ever felt guilty for all the people he killed, all the lives he destroyed.

But fuck that.

I never get to live without thinking about it. If he does, I'm certainly not going to ruin it for him.

I wonder sometimes what life would be like for me if I'd never come into contact with the ZERO system. I might be dead.

If I were dead, would it be worse than this?

I wish it had killed me, sometimes. ZERO makes the best decisions for the suit to win, not for the pilot to live.

So why did I?