A/N: Written for Gundam 00 Week Day 4 prompt, "Alternate Universe."
Hey, look, it's Ninth and her 80's TV again! So, yeah, A-Team fusion. The story's pretty self-explanatory, but it should be noted that the Meisters are aged up from canon to make sense in the setting—the ages range from 32 to 43, so enjoy your older!Meisters. I also changed Setsuna's name—he's Soran Grad in this AU, having been adopted by this AU's version of Klaus and Shirin. Finally, everyone from Gundam 00 mentioned lives in America, even if they aren't American by birth, for reasons of Plot. By the way, Tieria, despite being canonically genderless (yay finally finding this information out) still uses male pronouns frequently enough that I will continue using those for him until further notice.
The italicized bit is cribbed from the original A-Team show, in case anyone doesn't recognize it on sight.
The spoilers in this one are pretty light and vague; if you haven't watched either show you should be fine to read it. Also, you'll have a lot more fun if you don't take this too seriously. There are more detailed notes at the end.
I love it when a plan comes together
In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... the A-Team.
"You still look excellent in a dress, Tieria," Neil said approvingly over the sound of gunfire as he slowed to give Tieira a chance to climb into the Jeep.
Tieria, clutching the sodden, tattered remains of purple silk to himself, made a dismissive noise and slammed the passenger-side door behind him. "Hope you aren't too attached to this one. I'll never get all the mud out. Ugh, what a waste, this thing cost half my cut of the last job." He paused to brace himself as Neil swerved, hard, to avoid a thick grove of trees. "I got the documents. We can prove that land belongs to the Navarrones now."
"Good," Soran said, leaning out of the back window and taking a few potshots at their pursuers. "Does that mean we can finally get out of this place? I hate tropical countries."
"You are such a desert boy, Soran," Neil said, wincing at the report of machine-gun fire and then at the explosions that followed. "And yes, we can get out of here. Once our ride arrives."
Soran turned around. "Neil, tell me you didn't."
Neil didn't say a word.
Tieria snickered.
"They took away his pilot's license after his second Section Eight discharge!" Soran half-shouted.
"The psych discharges were because of that other dude in his head," Neil said breezily. "Who, incidentally, is just as good at piloting as he is. So there's really no problem!"
"Except the other dude hates everyone, which, unsurprisingly, includes us, and will probably someday crash the plane out of pure spite," Soran said. "No. Not doing it."
"So you'd rather be turned into Swiss cheese by the local guerillas?" Neil drawled.
"Well, no, but—"
"Kid, those are your options," Neil said. "Take 'em or leave 'em. Besides, all of us are living in glass houses when it comes to our sanity."
"Except me," Tieria said airily, as he checked one of the AK-47s leaning on the dashboard for ammunition. "I am completely mentally sound."
"You got into the Jeep under fire and you were more worried about your dress than whether you'd been hit," Soran pointed out.
"Shut up," Tieira said, hefting the AK-47 onto his shoulder and emptying a few clips into the jungle behind them. "I went to school for computer science; I don't deserve any of this."
"Yeah, well neither do the Navarrones, but they're about two days away from getting pushed off of a farm their family's owned since the 1800's," Neil said. "Let's see what we can do about keeping them on it."
A strand of purple-black hair flew into Neil's eyes, and he let go of the steering wheel to brush it away.
"Neil, there's a tree!" Soran shouted.
Neil cursed and swerved.
Soran hit the side of the Jeep, hard, and spat something angry in Kurdish.
"Tieira, take off your long, luxurious wig before it gets us all killed!" Neil roared.
Tieria made a huffing sound, then tore the offending wig off, stuffed a grenade into it, and tossed it out of the Jeep.
The resulting explosion rocked the forest.
"Remind me never to piss you off," Soran said lowly.
"Shut up, Grad," Tieria replied curtly as he reloaded his gun.
The sound of a helicopter engine suddenly filled the air. Neil whooped. Soran groaned.
They half-swerved into a small clearing, where reeds and thin-trunked trees whipped in the dust-filled wind created by the blades of the small helicopter hovering a few feet above the swampy ground.
A tan-skinned man with a baseball cap jammed over shoulder-length, unkempt hair leaned out of the cockpit. "I can't touch down, it's too swampy!"
"That's all right, Allelujah, we aren't exactly planning to sit and stay awhile!" Neil shouted back.
Allelujah quickly ducked back into the cockpit as a bullet bounced off the steel of the helicopter's carriage.
"See, he's still mostly there, he's dodging the bullets," Neil said cheerily, gathering his supplies. "Time to make a run for it, boys!"
"I hate you so much!" Tieria shouted, throwing himself out of the Jeep with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder.
Soran followed, glowering, gun clutched tight to his chest.
"Could you guys not have a band of guerillas with guns chasing after you when I show up?" Allelujah shouted over the engine as he pulled Neil into the helicopter. "Just once? For variety?"
"'Fraid you'll have to wait 'til our next South American vacation for that one," Neil said.
"What if there wasn't a next South American vacation!" Tieria said, scrambing in after him. "Just a thought."
"Ah, you enjoyed it," Neil said. "You even got to buy yourself a nice dress. So, Allelujah, have any trouble getting out of the VA?"
Allelujah, in the middle of pulling Soran into the helicopter, winced. "There was a bit of a complication, actually."
"What kind of complication?" Neil asked slowly.
"Allelujah, why is there a reporter in the helicopter?" Soran asked, eyes narrowed.
Neil followed his gaze to a young, pretty Asian woman wearing a skirt and jacket set and heels, her hair perfectly styled, sitting in one of the 'copter's seats.
"How'd you know I was a reporter?" she asked. "My name is Kinue Crossroad, by the way."
"I can recognize your kind on sight," Soran said, scowling. "Allelujah, explanation, now."
"She wouldn't stop following me!" Allelujah whined, as he scrambled back into the pilot's seat.
"You're trained in evasive maneuvers, Haptism, try again," Neil said.
"She's got a kid brother mixed up in something bad, and she needed help," Allelujah said. "And she wanted to know our side of the story, about the court martial. No one's asked our side of the story since the last appeal."
"True," Neil said. "Still no excuse for bringing a civilian into a gunfight. Speaking of—Soran, why aren't you returning fire?"
"Right," Soran said, saluting and getting on his belly to shoot out the wheels on the oncoming Jeeps.
"Am I in trouble, sir?" Allelujah asked.
"Can we discuss that when there's less chance of someone getting winged by a stray bullet?" Tieria suggested.
"Agreed," Neil said. "Take us up, Haptism."
"Sir," Allelujah said. "Everybody, get in your seats now, and no bitching about it."
Yep, that last part was Hallelujah.
Soran whimpered. "Why does the other guy always do the takeoffs under fire?"
"You're alive to ask, so don't look a gift horse in the mouth," Neil said cheerily, strapping himself in next to the pretty lady journalist.
"What other guy is he talking about?" Kinue asked. "Allelujah's still piloting."
"You mean he didn't even tell you?" Neil asked.
"Didn't tell me what?" Kinue asked.
"Never mind, it'll just make this scarier," Neil said, as Hallelujah let out a whoop and launched the helicopter into a high-speed, near-vertical climb that turned Soran green, took leaves off of a lot of local vegetation and involved at least one unnecessary swerve.
"Sorry about that," Allelujah said, after they levelled out. "Movie night got cancelled and he was a little worked up over it."
"We could tell," Soran said weakly.
"Do we need to start buying you airsickness pills again?" Tieria asked in mock concern.
"Oh, go eat—" Soran started nastily.
"Now, now, men, there's a lady present, let's try to have a nice calm trip," Neil said.
"Uh, good plan, sir, but it seems like the guerrillas got a plane from somewhere," Allelujah said.
Neil cursed. "Tell me someone has a rocket launcher."
"Nope, but this thing's got guns," either Hallelujah or Allelujah replied—Neil couldn't tell anymore, exactly, but whoever was in control was having fun.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Ten hours, a gunfire-filled trip to the Land Office, and yet another emergency takeoff later, the five of them sat around a table at a café somewhere in Mexico.
"You have to understand, everything we did, we did in order to end the war as quickly as possible," Neil said.
"Not for America?" Kinue prodded.
Neil shrugged. "I was born in Ireland. Soran's Kurdish. Tieria's kind of a misanthrope in general; liking a whole country would be kind of a stretch."
"Hey!" Tieria said.
"He's a little right," Allelujah said.
"It's still rude," Tieria pouted.
Neil waved a hand. "Anyway, by the time our team was formed, I'd been in Vietnam four years, and I was sick of it. The people wanted us out, kids were dying left and right, it wasn't good for Vietnam or America or me but part of me was still stuck on having a military career." He laughed, and tried not to let it get bitter. It didn't quite work. "Besides, I was too good at sniping and command to send home unless I found medical reasons."
"I was drafted when I graduated from Purdue," Tieria said. "About half my class was, never mind that most of us had never seen a gun before. I was lucky to end up in supply." He grinned, small and sharp. "I'm very good at barter."
"I got called up in the first draft," Soran said quietly. "I didn't want to go…but even in Arizona, for a foreign-born kid to pull a 'conscientious objector'—well, my parents got enough trouble for adopting me in the first place. Small towns are racist."
"You're a pacifist?" Kinue asked.
Soran nodded. "War is pointless. Some people say that there are conflicts that you can't solve without large-scale violence, but there has to be a better way."
"We're all pacifists, by now," Allelujah said. "But Soran was ahead of the rest of us. It took Vietnam to get the rest of us thinking that way, but he was already convinced when he got off the plane."
"So you went anyway," Kinue said with a nod. "What about you, Allelujah?"
"I joined up because I was tired of stuffing ballot boxes for the local elections back home," Allelujah said.
Kinue stared.
Neil sighed. "Don't bother. He comes up with a different lie every time you ask. And no one knows the truth anymore—his personnel records got firebombed in transit about a year before I met him, and no one's been able to find copies that aren't damaged past readability."
Allelujah grinned.
"We all suspect he was a POW at some point, but none of us can prove it and he won't confirm, so consider him a mystery," Neil shrugged. "He refuses to explain where the other guy—we call him Hallelujah, usually—came from, either."
Kinue looked the four of them over, then turned to Soran. "You couldn't have been any older than my brother when you were called up."
"No, I was eighteen," Soran said.
"How did you end up on an elite team, then?" Kinue asked. "Allelujah is obviously some sort of ridiculous genius with helicopters, and I'm guessing Tieria's bizarre barter skills are what ended him up on your squad—" She broke off to look at him. "How did you get a purple silk dress and a wig in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle?"
"Trade secret," Tieria said, smirking.
"But how did you end up with them?" Kinue asked Soran.
Soran shrugged uncomfortably. "I showed up to the first day of training with experience and terrified my CO; he handed me off to the first people who would take me, which happened to be the Special Forces division that was putting this team together."
"What do you mean, 'experience'?" Kinue asked. "Were you in ROTC or something?"
Soran grimaced. "I fought in the war between the Kurdish people and the Iraqi government starting in '61, until I deserted with the help of a U.S. spy who eventually adopted me."
Kinue gripped her pen a little more tightly. "If the dates you're giving me are correct, you would've been ten," she said softly.
"We fought kids that young, over there," Soran said, not meeting her eyes. "We did our best not to hurt them, but they were doing their best to hurt us. It's more common than you'd think."
"So, that's enough about our backgrounds," Neil said. "I'm guessing what you really want to know about is the incident that landed us in the stockade."
Kinue leaned forward. "That is a big part of why I wanted to talk to you."
"Someone in the brass set us up," Neil said. "We aren't sure who, we don't have proof yet. But here's what we do know. Word was starting to get around that we were finishing missions quick and clean because we wanted the war over, not for the love of Lady Liberty. And there was some grumbling up above about how that just wasn't patriotic. Some talk of a disciplinary hearing."
"We get orders—signed, sealed, official orders—to go steal some documents from a small-time enemy arms dealer none of us has ever heard of. We carry them out, and in the process one of the guy's footsoldiers shoots up the bag Tieria always keeps the orders in. The orders end up unreadable. We figure it's not a problem, until we come back with the documents and find out we ripped off a spy. And that a bunch of people around camp are saying they heard us plotting to do it. So we get charged with treason and locked up. Because that's what happens when you don't toe the line."
"So that's what you think happened?" Kinue asked. "They made an example of you?"
"To be fair, our attitude toward missions might not have been the reason," Tieria said. "Someone may have gotten jealous of our success rate."
"Racism's always a possibility too, because of me and Allelujah," Soran added.
"But it wasn't that we knew that guy was a spy," Allelujah said. "We had a network, sure! Neil's a friendly guy, Tieria knew where to get fancy French wine in the middle of the jungle, and both of them used those skills to get information. But that only got us so far. This guy was a double agent; he was deep cover. Only a few people even knew about him. How the heck would we have even figured out that there was a secret there to learn, much less what it was?"
"But they insisted that you had," Kinue said.
"We had built up somewhat of a reputation by that point," Tieria admitted. "There were people who probably would've believed it if we told them we'd assassinated the enemy leadership, all by ourselves, overnight."
"Our reputations kicked us in—ah, excuse me, I nearly forgot I was speaking to a lady," Neil said. "But, yeah, that's how it happened."
"And you're really just looking for a pardon?" Kinue pressed.
"We just want to go home," Tieria said.
"We know better than to expect an admission of wrongdoing," Soran said. "Reform would be nice, but just as unlikely."
"And trying to get revenge would just be giving them 'proof' that we're just what they say we are," Neil said. "We're holding out for a pardon. My idea of revenge is going so utterly, boringly civilian that I get whoever they send to spy on me after I go home fired for sleeping on watch."
"If they have someone spy on me I'm making them help me fix cars," Soran said.
Kinue stared.
"I'm opening a garage," Soran said. "Tieria's got plans for a computer store."
"I'm going to convince the VA I'm ready to move to outpatient services, and then I'm getting a dog," Allelujah declared. "And a job, but the dog's the important part."
"But, enough about us," Neil said. "I hear you've got a little brother in some kind of trouble?"
Kinue nodded. "It all started when some of the local gang kids were harassing his girlfriend. She can take care of herself, but he just had to get involved, and now they're out for his blood…he's an undersized geek; I'm working two jobs so he can go to a private school with a good engineering program—I don't want him to get himself shot over a girl and stupid male pride."
Neil glanced at the others. "Well, what do you think?"
"Gang members again," Soran sighed.
"America again!" Allelujah said, with much more enthusiasm. "I miss the States, sometimes!"
"You're the only one of us who gets to spend any time there!" Tieria snapped.
"We'll help you," Neil said, grinning. "We can discuss payment on the plane."
"One more thing," Kinue said. "If you're pacifists, why are you running around doing mercenary work? How do you reconcile that?"
"We've been making a habit of putting small warlords like the one you just saw out of business," Neil said, grinning. "I mean, new ones keep popping up in their places, but…we're just four guys, you know. Only so much we can do on our own."
"You're still using weapons to do that, though," Kinue pressed.
"We've already been court-martialed; the time for maintaining spotless reputations is long past," Tieira said. "I'm sure our brand of pacifism is far too active for the taste of most who share our beliefs, but we aren't trying to convince them to take our side."
"We just want to make a difference," Soran said. "This is how we can do it. So, where do you and your brother live?"
Kinue looked a bit unconvinced, but she rattled off a Los Angeles address anyway.
"Not quite the desert, but at least there's sand in California," Neil said, standing. "Let's get moving, everyone. The West Coast awaits!"
Soran groaned, a faint smile on his face, as Tieria rolled his eyes and Allelujah grinned. Kinue just stared at them all in utter confusion.
Neil was beginning to think she'd be doing that a lot.
A/N: It's kind of amazing that I didn't already write something like this, honestly.
The fic is set in 1983, the same year the A-Team TV series started. The characters aren't complete one-to-one matches for the A-Team, but the equivalencies were meant to go like this: Neil is Hannibal Smith, Tieria is Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Soran is B.A. Barracus, Allelujah is Murdock, and Kinue is Amy Allen (the reporter from Seasons 1 and 2; she's not a very popular character and didn't make it into later seasons or the 2010 movie). I switched some skills between Tieria and Neil, though (specifically, Tieria's got Hannibal's disguises), and Soran obviously relies on skill more than physical intimidation (he's 32 in the fic, but he's still only kind of tall and more wiry than muscular).
Here's extra information about the AU, if you're curious! (for those avoiding spoilers, now would be a great time to stop reading)
Neil Dylandy: Irish, born in Ireland in 1940, emigrated to the U.S. along with his twin brother to live with his aunt and uncle after a house fire killed his parents and younger sister. (Neil's childhood falls between WWII and The Troubles [ wiki/The_Troubles], so there wasn't anything going on in Ireland that could've resulted in his family's death at the right time.) Neil and his brother were never very close but Neil joining the army in 1965, when they were 25, strained the relationship past the point of return. They haven't spoken since, though now, part of that is on Neil being devilishly hard to contact because he's evading MPs.
Soran Grad: Kurdish, born in Iraq in 1951, fought in the Iraqi-Kurdish starting in 1961 when he was 10 until he was 12. His adoptive father, Klaus Grad, was a CIA agent working in in Iraq who helped Soran desert from the Kurdish forces in exchange for information, and then got attached to him. Soran was adopted by and lived with him and his wife Shirin in Arizona until he was drafted at age 18 in 1969.
Tieria Erde: European-American, born in Iowa in 1948. His parents are college professors and were already something like hippies before the term officially existed; his straight-laced attitude is arguably rebellion. They never cared about the gender of Tieria's clothing and now he doesn't either. He attended Purdue University for computer science and was drafted in 1969, at age 21, right after graduating.
Allelujah Haptism: No one actually knows and he will lie forever to keep it that way. He's still ethnically Kazakh, and Neil managed to get him to admit that he doesn't have any living relatives at one point. I would need to poke him a lot more to be certain, but it's possible there is actually a hint of sci-fi-ish stuff to explain Hallelujah's existence (because DID does not work like that). Neil is right about the POW thing, but that was a different incident. He lives in the secure ward at a VA Hospital in Virginia right now, technically, but the others break him out almost constantly.
Kinue Crossroad: Japanese-American, born in California in 1961. After her parents died she moved out to California with her younger brother, Saji. Works for the Las Angeles Courier-Express; will insist on tagging along on with the A-Team on situations at least twice this dangerous in the future.
*Soran isn't a lot like B.A. but he does share the character's tendency to gather and mentor children whenever he sees ones he think need it.
*Allelujah lies to the doctors at the VA about what exactly is wrong with him, and they tend toward the sort of outrageous things Murdock was always telling B.A. in the TV show. He doesn't trust the doctors (and this is the 80's U.S. mental healthcare system, so he might not be completely wrong) and he doesn't want to talk about his actual problems.
*Soran's cut off "Oh go eat—" could have ended up as "Go eat shorts" or "Go eat s*** and die," since both were colloquialisms in use at the time. No prizes for guessing which one Neil thought it would be.
*Are Tieria and Neil flirting, or just joking around? You can alter the amount of shipping according to your perception!