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"Friends "Written By: Karina
Series: Friends Pairings: 2+6 Ratings: M 15+ [In Australia] Rated in the event of bad language and violence. Disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing or the characters. That’s the way it is. Warnings: Not a death fic despite how it starts.
Aussie spelling and unbetaed. Summary: When Milliardo Peacecraft is abducted
and left to die a solitary death Duo Maxwell decides to take a hand
in the proceedings.
Chapter 16 The fire crackled, new flame rising from the most recent piece added to the make shift hearth. He had salvaged more of the debris, stacking it neatly at the rear of the tent, well away from the flames. The last thing he needed was for the old wood to catch a stray spark and burst into flame. A firestorm in the pantry cave would be a death sentence. Likely he would be able to escape, but Marquise was another matter. If he delayed escaping to rescue the weakened Prince of Sanc there would be two bodies crisping beneath devouring flame. He witnessed enough of that during the war. It was because of such horrors he did not sleep soundly at night; nightmares haunting him frequently, despite his therapists best efforts. In raging firestorms he had witnessed men and women, soldiers of the Alliance and Oz, die in blazing agony, their hair and clothes wreathed with flame. He had watched buildings explode into flame, sending bodies and debris into the air, flames spreading to engulf everything in their path. //I never thought about it then. There was too much to do, too many places I had to be to deal out more death. To spread more destruction; more fire. More misery.// He never allowed himself, during those terrible days, to think about the lives he took. From the safety of Deathscythe they had been nameless, faceless; non entities. They had not been real; they were not people but things. Of course he had known they were real people, but they were safely nameless, faceless and unknown. As such they were safe; safe to kill. //God. That is sick.// No one deserved to be dismissed so easily. Safe to kill. He was not cold, heartless evil. He liked to laugh, liked to eat and drink, to party. He liked to be a part of life. How many people, just like him, had he killed? What was he to do? The dead left him alone during the war, and now came to him at night. Peace was a fact, not a dream, an ideal. Peace was real and now the dead walked through his dreams and pointed accusing fingers at him. They moaned their pain and horror, and their despair into his ears whenever he let his guard down. It was the price attached to being Shinigami, a price paid when the world calmed so that he would not forget. He did not sleep well at night. He tossed and turned, and on those nights they came he could hear himself screaming along with them. Something in him had died with them and he mourned it, though he did not recognize it. With the dead he screamed his head off until, mercifully, he would wake. He had killed so many people in his short life, and for what? “Peace.” He snorted softly. “There is no such thing.” Blue eyes tinged with violet sought out the quiet figure within the warmth of the tent. He would need to check on Marquise, but for now the man could sleep. It would do him good, and there was no need for them both to wait out the day. The wind would ease soon, and then he could venture out to see how much effort it would take to free the helicopter. He was expecting the task to take a few hours. Given the size of the snow drift creeping under the verandah it was a certainty much of the helicopter would need to be excavated. Then he would have to de-ice the mechanics of the rotors. Oh yes, there were a few hours of heavy work ahead, and Marquise was in no fit condition to assist. With luck by the time he finished he would be so exhausted he would welcome sleep, and no amount of dead wandering through his dreams would stir him. He had been invincible in Deathscythe. He felt so vulnerable in the broad light of peace, stripped of his armour; naked. War had hidden him within the great suit, given him the powers of a God and he had been Shinigami. The God of Death. He had dealt death wherever he had gone, dispassionately, all the while ignoring what it meant to kill. Not just one or two, but hundreds at a time. His kill tally numbered in the thousands. Did he honestly think there was no price to pay? To kill one person was unforgivable, what then the price to slaughter thousands? He had been a naïve teenager, fed propaganda by the best, and convinced all he had been told was right. He had entered into the war with his eyes open, determined to find peace and bring it to everyone. Had he understood what peace was? All who opposed him were wrong and would find death at his hands; or he would, in turn, die. Such arrogance. He had begun to entertain doubts as to the integrity of his superiors on receiving the briefing for Operation Meteor, and his Professor had told him to steal Deathscythe, and he had. Redemption, of a sort. He had determined to make better use of the wonderful machine he was trained to pilot, and crimp the plans of those who had designed his Scythe for rebellion and slaughter. Over bearing innocence. Perhaps ignorance was a better judgement there? Were his intentions any more pure than those of a common Oz soldier, let alone the Alliance and the Specials? Once he would have said, with unshakable certainty, yes. Now he was not so certain. He had crimped their design, inserting elements of his own, but what had he done with Deathscythe? He had gone to Earth, just as they had instructed him to do, and he had killed. He might have cut himself loose from the organization, but he still had gone about slaughtering soldiers. Just as had been intended in their original design. He had killed and he had thought nothing of those deaths. Not then. Not even the possibility of his own death had been real to a fifteen year old who had witnessed death from plague, and from betrayal. He had survived the destruction of Maxwell Church; he had seen the result of rebellion and deceit. Death should have been real to him. That was why they recruited teenagers to pilot their machines. The only Gundam not intended for a teenager to pilot had been Heavy Arms. That Gundam had not been built for the one who piloted it to Earth, but for the one who died, shot in the back and his death hidden. The cockpit of Deathscythe was smaller than Heavy Arms, everything crammed into a small space an adult body would have found more than uncomfortable to squeeze into. The Oz and Alliance Leo’s and Aeries had been designed for full grown pilots. Kushrenada had designed the latter Tallgeese series and Epyon for an adult… for a large adult. His eyes flicked to the sleeping man and he rubbed at his face, trying to regain control of his thoughts. He should not be doing this now. His therapist claimed those who had trained him had wanted young pilots. Teenagers had no true concept of death, she explained. In hindsight he had to agree with her. He had had no idea what death really was, despite the plague and the massacre. When you were fifteen and survived a version of hell you did not recognize death as others, older and wiser, did. What he had known of death had been anger, rage and revenge. He had grasped the idea of peace and dealt bloody ruin in its name. “Wake up, Marquise, so I don’t have to listen to my own thoughts.” He whispered, feeding another piece of wood to the flames. What was he trying to say to himself? He had survived and others had not. Some, a great many, had died because of his actions. He had witnessed so much death from afar it had become unreal. He had not been present when the Church had been destroyed, arriving in the aftermath. The concept of violent death was different to the bloody reality. Had it changed life so much there would be no return to the wars; to the deaths and the destruction? Had they come so far there would be no repeated explosions spewing bodies and storms of flame into the air? Had they come far enough, as a race? Would mothers again weep for their children lying on shattered concrete runways, or red hot burning decks? Had they come far enough not to repeat the mistakes of the past? In the contest of war who won? Did anyone truly win when man fought man? So much lost; lives, homes, ideals. Little personal things were the first to go; a lover’s touch, a mother’s kiss; a father’s pride. Those left behind died a little each day, worrying for those fighting. Those who fought, battling for the ideals they believed in, struggling in a contest for supremacy, died a little each day, longing for the security of home; the love that nurtured them. //Give it a rest, Maxwell. It’s just another morbid, psychotic monologue. My therapist would shake her finger at me and tell me it was time to move on.// He had tried. It was not as though he had not tried to get past it, but they were there, at night; waiting for him. Waiting to whisper in his ear, to accuse him, to call him names; killer, murderer… It was nothing others had not experienced. Every soldier who had seen action and brought death to another knew the dreams. The accusations. The horror to be relived again and again; the moment when bright eyes dimmed, when that which made a person real, an individual and alive, departed and death left a shattered husk. He had witnessed firestorms aplenty during the war, he had given birth to many in his Deathscythe. Through it all he had not once thought he would regret what he had done. But he did. ~ * ~
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