A/N: Wasn't originally supposed to turn out like this, but it kind of turned into a thought/character experiment of Setsuna after the second scene and so that's how it stayed.
Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, h29 – write a scene that explores memory, and for the Advent Calendar 2015, day 2 – write about time getting away from someone (be it in a mundane or serious way).
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First Words
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"Dialogue" was an interesting term. At what level did understanding matter? In the first contact, where both sides cringe and retreat because things are too confusing, too different, and their languages simply can't find a common point… Or was it later, when one's shouted so loudly they've cracked through, with emotions that transcend what words alone can explain. Or was it even later still? When they are finally able to communicate with words: when he could say something carelessly and the GN particles in space would translate into that metallic hum the ELS responded to.
Perhaps, one day, they'll receive a better name from the combined human and innovator than ELS: extra-terrestrial living-metal shapeshifters. But, Setsuna supposed, there had been crueller names in history. And kinder ones. And the ones people made for themselves weren't necessarily any better. And Celestial Being and the A-Laws both turned out to be a prime examples of that. And the new evolution that humanity had undergone might need a name as well, with how innovators were distinguished from the fold.
But, before that, their dialogue would have to evolve. They only understood the concept of co-existence and they were willing to try. Perhaps the rain of battle-fire had frightened them into a more ferocious assault. Perhaps there was something about the humans themselves, about the quantum brain waves, about the GN particles, about the innovators… It was definitely about the innovators, because only they heard that metallic shriek in their heads, and it was only with the massive release of GN particles from the 00-Raiser that Setsuna had been able to communicate the wish for peace to them.
There had to be a better way. An easier way.
But how did one talk to an entirely different lifeform when they could barely communicate with other humans?
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The Ptolomy 2 struck a course away from the earth. 'I'm sure it's a mess down there,' said their captain, Sumeragi. 'But it'll be a bigger mess if this tentative ceasefire isn't made more solid.'
Setsuna knew. The others eyes were boring into his own.
'I'm sorry, Setsuna,' said Sumeragi. 'We're putting all our expectations on you again.'
Feldt reached for his hand. He drifted away, letting the weightless from space propel him.
'It's okay,' he said, a little too late to be a good reply, but it was meant as a reply nonetheless. 'I'm the only one that can do this, for now.'
The door sensed his approach and opened to let him through, closing behind him. They weren't sentient, of course. Science could quite easily explain the mechanism but, sometimes, it felt those doors always knew when someone wanted to be alone, away from the crew.
Innovators hadn't lost the human language. They'd only added to it. And yet, his status made him feel further away from the crew of the Ptolomy – the only people he really knew.
Of course, there were more fleeting encounters: Marina Ismail, Sagi Crossroad, even Louise Halevy and he barely knew her at all. But they walked very different paths, and no matter how they intersected or how many times, there was still a level beyond which understanding still seemed impossible.
And then there were people like Ali Al-Sachez, and he still didn't understand how a man could be so hungry for war, for blood. Humanity had its mould and that man broke most of them. He spoke the national human tongue, and the languages of the smaller middle-eastern countries as well. He spoke and people believed him, and then he betrayed them. Scorpion claws laced with honey. Or snake fangs likewise laced. He ensnared people in his net and then tossed them into the flames of war and watched it all burn like it was the smoke from some drug he simply couldn't get enough of. Ali Al-Sachez who'd seen it fit to rip up Krugis – and not just Krugis. They'd reached all the way to Ireland, after all.
And to think Celestial Being had made the victim from Ireland his friend. His best friend – and yet, what did that even mean? He'd never done a thing against Ali Al-Sachez. Not a damn thing. Graham Aker wound up being his eternal opponent and it was fully, because Graham Aker was no Ali Al-Sachez, no man he could really hate because he hadn't done anything to deserve that hate. But he, Setsuna, had. Destroyed fellow Flags. Killed comrades. Destabilised the nation he'd tried to protect.
That still wasn't as personal as the grudge they carried against Ali Al-Sachez – and he said we, because the whole of the Ptolomious crew – and maybe the ones new to Ptolomy 2 as well – held that grudge. Maybe not as deep as him and Lyle Dylandy or Feldt Grace. But they shared the grudge, because that man had killed a Gundam Meister. That man had killed the original Lockon Stratos. That man had killed Neil Dylandy.
It was just like they shared a hatred for Ribbons Almark, for killing Tieria Erde. But even then…Tieria was different. Not a human, but not an innovator either. And now, a part of Veda. Able to create a new body. Return to them. Die for them all over again – and shouldn't they hate the ELS as well? For killing Tieria Erde that second time. But no-one did. Or, rather, no-one spoke that hatred. Not aloud. Not silently either, so that he could pick up the whispers amidst the quantum waves. But wasn't that hypocritical?
Emotions were such confusing things. Often, in his childhood, he'd wished they, amongst a great number of other things, hadn't existed.
He could just hear his father's voice telling him what a dull world that would be.
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As a child, he used to stay out late on the streets of Krugis. At first, it was freedom. It was that little bit of rebellion that led them (the children) disobey curfew, that made his mother scold him a little (because even scolding was attention, and sometimes, when both parents worked themselves into the ground to survive, that and a brief kiss when he went to bed were all he could get) and made his father sometimes shake his head and warn him to keep his head and heart in the world.
He'd always thought that was an odd way to say things. Head and heart? Why heart? That meant being sympathetic to the people on the streets, begging for food that no-one could spare. That meant being sympathetic to the children with one arm, or one leg, regardless of whether they'd been born that way, became that way in some accident or other or because their guardians cut them off themselves to create a business of the beggars. But that happened more with orphans. People who didn't have parents who loved them enough to spare them that. But love was a fickle thing too. Some parents did cut off their kids when times got too hard.
Maybe that was an innate fear he held as well, that one day that light kiss before he went to bed would vanish too, and he'd be out on the streets with those other children, starving for scraps or sitting without a limb and begging for money that was seized for the greater good.
Even as a child, he'd known it was a cruel world outside. And there was no room for sympathy in it. Sympathy would mean giving coin they couldn't spare, or a bit of bread they couldn't spare, or even tears they couldn't spare because who would cry for them when they vanished from the world?
Children were the useless ones. The ones to be first cast aside. And even at that age, he'd had no illusions about the matter. No thoughts like "my parents won't do that" because that was just naïve. And he'd be less prepared when it happened.
It never happened. But simply because there hadn't been time. It might have, one year down that track. Or two.
But Ali Al-Sachez came and twisted everything.
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He still didn't understand what his father meant, about keeping one's head and one's heart in the streets, in the world. Keeping one's head was plain: keeping intelligence, keeping wits. Keeping one's heart seemed more liable to get one killed, especially in the warzones his life became after the intervention of Ali Al-Sachez.
Or maybe it wasn't fair to blame him. Ali Al-Sachez didn't put a Gundam in front of him. Ali Al-Sachez, while a part of Celestial Being (and he would also never understand why a man like that was part of Celestial Being, when he was the very sort of man Aeolia Schenberg feared would ruin the world), wasn't the force that recruited him. Ribbons Almark claimed credit for all of that, but ultimately, who knew what the deciding factor was. It might simply have been his destiny, and therefore a force that wouldn't sway, no matter how one pushed or pulled at it. In any case, the Gundam in all its incarnations became a decisive force in his life.
But saying he loved the Gundam might be…inaccurate. He was drawn to them first and foremost because it was a machine, and instead of making the machine an extension of himself as pilots tended to do, he'd wished to make himself an extension of the machine. And, at first, he'd succeeded quite well in that. On the whole, he'd succeeded quite well in that. Fighting and living largely without emotion. Schooling his heart – because it was more, far more, than not expressing emotion. It was about not feeling them to begin with. And for a Gundam Meister of Celestial Being, it was even more important. They didn't have the luxury of years on the battlefield, to hone their skills and their hearts and souls. They had to be perfect from the first intervention. Whenever they needed to kill, they had to kill. They couldn't afford to hesitate and so all of them had to make peace with that idea long before the time came to first draw their swords.
Though, in a sense, he had the least to school himself for because he did have experience. He'd held a gun in that shameful past of his. He'd killed. He shot two people at point blank range that might have cut him loose if it meant they'd live a little longer, but they hadn't yet. He'd shot two people at point blank range that had given birth to him in a wretched world, and all the love and sacrifice they could afford.
So many years later… He should mourn them more, shouldn't he? His own parents, but somehow, the fact that it was his own hands that killed them numbed the grief that should be there. He wasn't like Lockon – the first Lockon, Neil – who'd loved his family more than life itself and was willing to throw everything away in order to seek revenge for their deaths.
He also wasn't like the Lockon – that same Lockon – that could have walked away from a member of the KPSA, from the organisation that had killed his family, without a shot to the chest or a punch to the face. That man is amazing, he remembered thinking to himself, as he'd walked away from the truth without a scratch on him. Never mind that things between them were never the same because of that ugly truth – and he was sure it would have been the same if he'd caved to his mother opening her arms to him that day, regardless of the end result.
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Soran… Soran… Please, don't do this…
Her voice still echoed in his ears. It echoed more strongly now, in fact. Maybe because of his dreams. It was Ali Al-Sachez, again. Meeting him on the battlefield had dug up all those things he'd buried deep, and he'd detached from his Gundam that day. Detached and walked right out of the cockpit because he'd been a fool, dragged by emotions –
And he'd done it again, on another battlefield. And that foolishness had earned him a bullet wound in the shoulder in a place he couldn't regenerate. Not that it would have mattered. Whatever Ali Al-Sachez had hit him with had proved resistant to the treatment. Worse, it had proved to be some sort of poison, eating away at his human form. If he hadn't evolved, he would have died before the world war they'd ignited ever came to a close. And what would have happened then? Who would have mediated the dialogues that had followed the worldwide war? Would another purebred type emerged from the chaos of the war? Was it one of those things that the world would have compensated for?
It probably would have compensated. Right now, he was the only one who could do it but that was already changing. Innovators were emerging everywhere, and moreso those with potential. Scientists had decided themselves to monitoring the quantum brainwave emissions of the world and utilising it in its evolution. He was only special because he was the only Innovator amongst the members of Celestial Being, the only Innovator amongst the crew of the Ptolomy 2 and they were the only ones who could fly away and leave the Earth in chaos because the voices of another species and another planet called them.
But they were no longer the enemy of the world. They weren't leaving the earth entirely in shambles, to that extent. The world had been almost unified but had never reached that pinnacle. When the ELS had descended upon the earth and changed its very structure and the structure of its inhabitants, they had, for a brief moment, been unified in full. Unified against the threat of an invasion – and yet, it hadn't been that at all. The conveyance of a single world, a single idea, had changed the entire tide of the ordeal.
But who was he to preach about peace when he had the blood of both innocent and enemy of the world upon his hands?
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He'd been afraid of the gun, first of all. Afraid because that man had given it to him and told him to point and shoot. But won't he die? was his thought. Don't people die when you shoot them?
Of course they do, and he was naïve to think otherwise. Naïve to think what he was doing was instead releasing their souls so that they may find their way back to god and repent for the sin of bringing such children they could ill afford into this wretched world…
And, of course, the messenger of God was immune to such things for how else would he pass on the message to the children that would carry out the words of God? Because, back then, they were too ignorant of the world to know about things like bullet proof vests, things like trickery – and they lapped up every drop of honey spilled from that lying, warmongering, mouth.
So he did pick up the gun, in that old reasoning that was now oh so terribly flawed when he looked back on it. But it wasn't to the old him, the one who'd picked up that gun, who'd shot at Ali al-Sachez's chest like he'd been ordered to like a good little guerrilla soldier, and who'd watched in amazement when the man barely flinched.
'See?' Ali al-Sachez had said. 'This is the blessing that I, the Messenger of God, have received.'
And they got used to the gun. To aiming, to firing, to not flinching at its lukewarm steel or when they pointed it at flesh and blood. 'Not at each other,' Ali al-Sachez would caution. 'You are all needed to pave the path to God.' But it was fine to aim at him, because he was preserved and protected by God. And, later, it was fine to aim at those he told them to because they deserved the judgement of God.
And when they shot their parents, they did it in the same, unfeeling way. Like they were the vessels escorting their parents to God to be judged. Like there was nothing in bending and then pulling one's finger towards the palm, nothing in that little kick the gun gave as it released its bullet, nothing in all the blood that spilt out when the bullet made a nice little hole in the victim they'd shot at.
And nothing at all in the other parent, reaching out or cowering away, afraid or horrified or both of those, and not understanding at all why their children would suddenly come home with a gun and shoot them.
They'd had too much freedom. It was unavoidable in a place like that, but freedom didn't have to amount to anything until someone came with a new set of chains. And that someone was Ali al-Sachez, and he'd of course had his own agenda in ripping families apart, in ripping the country apart, in forming his own army of child guerrilla soldiers that festered hatred all over the world, and it had neither begun nor ended when Soran Ibrahim shot both parents at point blank range. They were that insignificant.
In fact, nothing had begun nor ended with their deaths. Not a tide to some war or conflict that could assign blame or success. Not the name of Soran Ibrahim, which died that day when the Gundam O descended in Krugis and the rest of the world around him went aflame. Not when Setsuna F. Seyei had been born, in front of Exia, in front of his fellow Gundam Meisters and the Tactical Forecaster of Celestial Being. Not even when he'd realised Ali al-Sachez for the monster he was – and when was that anyway? Maybe not until they met on the battlefield, with him in a Gundam. Not until he saw the man away from his Messenger of God role. Not until he was dragged out of Schrödinger's box so he could see the contents, the truth, and that was about the latest self-defining event of all of them.
Or…not really. When he met Marina Ismail. When he established goals for himself instead of being the blind follower. When he became separated from the other members of Celestial Being, stranded with just a broken Exia. When he became an Innovator. When he made contact with that alien race, the EPS, for the first time. They were all life-defining, life-changing, movements, and not one of those had anything to do with his parents' deaths.
In that sense, they really did seem woefully insignificant. And yet, the infrastructure of human society put parents on the level just below that non-existent God.
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No-one knocked on his door. They seemed to understand he needed the time alone and he appreciated it. The flower Feldt had given him floated freely – they were long past Earth's gravitational field – and it was the only thing that did. The only personal item in his room…and was that even personal? It was a gift, after all. As much a part of the person who gave it to him, and Linda who gave it to her, and the Lagrange base where it had gone.
Following that logic though, there was nothing that wholly belonged to anyone because it all belonged to space first: to a planet, to a colony, to some form of mass they could land on but hadn't yet been given a name. No physical thing, anyway. Most emotions too, though they might come from a specific place, did tie multiple people or things or both together and rarely came in independence. How could one feel lonely unless they knew of companionship? And if loneliness, whose very definition denied contact, could not be an emotion one entirely owned, then what could?
And yet loneliness was a hole humans sought to fill. Through stone walls. Through destruction. Or through opening one's arms to as many hearts as would fit in them, and those arms could hold an infinite number of hearts, it would sometimes seem. Setsuna F. Seyei. Ali al-Sachez. Marina Ismail. Each of them an epitome of one of those three paths. And the same applied to war. The one who fought to eradicate them. The one who incited them. And the one who would take any non-violent method she could to see the wars and destruction end.
And, by meeting her, he had changed a little bit, he thought.
By meeting her, he'd thought of his parents for the first time in six years.
By meeting her, he'd finally shared tears for their deaths.
By meeting her…
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It had been a dream. Or magic but there was no such thing in this world as magic, except in childish hopes and dreams. And his dream was a magical one. Or, at the very least, a supernatural one. The he of the past and the present – then, present – had both existed. He'd touched his childhood self. Talked to him. Taken the gun from him.
Of course, it was a dream and the past would not change. The gun vanished from his hands. The words were forgotten. The gunshots rang out, mixing with the symphony flowing into the streets: the children that walked with smoking barrels and blank faces, and the parents who lay dead inside. It still happened, like it had happened in truth, all those years ago. But he saw it this time. His eyes weren't elsewhere, staring at a God he would later come to know did not exist.
If not the slow realisation that had crept up on him before, that scene showed him the wrongness of it all. And the things before and after: parents he'd traded for a path to a God that didn't exist, parents he'd erased from his heart and memories…
Even now, he barely remembered them. Just a few whispers of their existence. Most prominent, the faces of them dying that day. His father already on the floor. His mother opening her arms to him, wanting to embrace him, despite her fear and shock and horror. Why couldn't have put the gun down and gone to her? Had his concept of their love become such a diluted thing? Had he been so willing to trade a peace he knew would one day end for a war that never seemed to reach a stopping place?
Even after he joined Celestial Being and their mission to eradicate war. Even after the world united in hatred for that same Celestial Being. Even when the world came even closer together when faced with invasion and destruction by a new species, the ELS. The fight never seemed to end. Now, after another round with the guns, it was a battle with words again. Words he couldn't speak in the National tongue because that only applied to earth and to the ships that took off from earth. It only applied to the humans. Those new and poorly named creatures from deeper in space could not comprehend it. And, likewise, humans could not make sense of those shrill cries that came from metal resonance. Innovators couldn't do that either.
Setsuna could only understand – and he still used that term lightly – because of another sort of language altogether.
A baby didn't know how to speak, after all. They expressed things through the body and their cries. Take out the cries and all that's left is the body: the way it moves, the way the face scrunches, the eyes turn away because they've been captivated by someone or some thing… And those body movements became a language. But that was also restricted. Yes, it translated over to animals in a sense – some animals. But did it, for example, translate over to an ant whose subtleties were too small for the human eye to see? Did it translate to the bird that flew too high to make out? Did it apply to the tree that stood silently, no matter the storm?
No, and therein was the final sort of language, the language that could be expressed even when frozen or bound. And that was the soul. What used the GN particles or quantum brainwaves or a combination of both those things to illustrate to the world. What allowed their Gundams to evolve in a way that was impossible for any predecessor or successor or forged and inadequate copy. What allowed his evolution into an Innovator instead of his death like Ali al-Sachez's plan.
After all, Aeolia Schoenberg claimed to have solved the puzzle of both war and humanity in his discovery of the GN particles. It was why he laid down his edicts: very specific edits that were, eventually, followed in full despite all the attempts from different people to deviate from it. It was why he created the five GN drives and gave them to four Gundam meisters, and the fifth of them was to spurn an evolution that created the 00-Riser, and, eventually, the Quantum. Setsuna could not pretend to understand the sciences involved, but that the GN particles were a language of the soul was more obvious. He heard all their voices on the battlefield: the fear despite the ferocity, the anger despite the cold machine in the way, the tears despite the screams. He heard them all, and though he couldn't match voice with name or face, he recognised those feelings, as they played again and again in new songs, in old loops.
Maybe he recognised them all as echoes from himself as well. The parents crying for their child. The children crying for their parents. Louise Halevy who despised the Gundams for the family they'd stolen from her and that one came closest because he had Saji so close, Saji trying to reach out and pull her back from the abyss of anger and revenge she sunk towards. He could recognise that because hadn't he wanted to kill Ali al-Sachez just as badly? Particularly when the truth came out about the connection between the two of them and Lockon. Especially when Lockon – the original one, that was – died.
Those were things they tried to put into words and failed, or simply didn't try. Things like love and hate, hope and despair, grudges and forgiveness – and he would never know what that Lockon had thought of him when he died, because they'd never had another chance to talk. And the new Lockon was a different man, despite how similar they might look. A different life. A different soul. And a very different thing caused him to raise a gun to Setsuna, to face him with that quivering anger that almost exploded out of his restraining arms. He'd tried to explain it before but it had been impossible. Why he'd killed Anew. Why he'd known they'd have to kill her, and why he'd chosen the role himself instead of imposing it on another. The one who heard the words and understood them became responsible, was it? Was that why a dialogue always had a response? Why, with a second being present to, even, only listen, it is no longer a monologue? But where was the understanding, for him? He'd known Lockon would die again if not Anew and he'd chosen Lockon, but had ignored or missed the fact that Lockon would rather it be Anew. He didn't know, at this point in time. He might never and it didn't even matter because Lockon was still alive, still living. Was that a deeper whisper that Setsuna heard that day and Lockon didn't? Or was that Setsuna's words, imposing themselves like his feelings for his parents had throttled their memory for all those years?
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People die. Of course, people die, but most of them had lived and had a chance. He remembered his father telling him to keep his heart open when he walked in the world and he wondered if he'd known about the GN particles, about the quantum brainwaves, about the language of the soul. He probably hadn't. He was a poor man in a poor country like Krugis, after all. A country that didn't even exist anymore. How could he have known about such things – but then, didn't Setsuna share those origins?
Or maybe he didn't know those things at all and it was just as much wisdom a man like him could pass on to his child, and this was what it had amounted to. He still didn't quite understand the words, but he understood the driving force behind them at least. Like how his mother would have embraced him even when they were both covered in his father's – her husband's – blood. Like how he'd reached out to Marina Ismail, and vice versa, even though he was from Krugis and she from Azadistan. Like how that priest who raised his hand at no-one, despite how he found the world, and yet was perfectly content to take the role of the devil to save a woman some trouble. Like how a man like Aeolia Schoenberg was able to trust to humans not yet even born to carry out the conquest of an ideal world.
Like how a person like him who knew no such thing as peace for himself was able to convey it from the depths of his soul. Was it because of the wider world he'd come to see? All those hearts that had sung to him on the battlefield? The quieter times with Marina Ismail and the children? Or in Japan: the swaying crowd, and that single day with Saji and Louise? Or maybe it was all of those, and more: those inconsequential things he'd discarded the concrete memories of but that remained as dots in the canvas that painted the portrait of who he was today. And maybe it wasn't necessary to understand that, to understand himself, in order to communicate with others. It was about understanding them, or as much of them as could be grasped by portrayed words.
Communication was understanding, and understanding lead to knowledge, and that: responsibility. Sumeragi was right in that it was his responsibility now, because the tool for communication was within him the strongest and, this far in space, his alone. They flew even deeper, away from the earth that might soon decide to act as they had, to be the envoy, or they might leave them as the envoy and prepare, instead, for the final answer that would break the truce.