Title: A Peace to Replace Justice

Author: Something Like Human

Rating: T

Pairings: 2x5, past 5xM

Warnings: Nothing that I can think of yet.

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing. Right now, I've been taken prisoner by Long Meilan and she is demanding that I write her.

POV: Wu Fei

Coming home from work, I tossed my keys in the basket on the table by the door. It was a mundane action; one I completed every day. I quickly shuffled through the mail I picked up at the door. A bank statement, some bills, and mostly junk mail were all that we received. I tossed the statement and bills on the table beside the basket with the keys.

I walked through the house pulling at my uniform tie. The house was by no means large but it was large enough for myself and Duo. He had crashed on my couch shortly after I had moved in when we recruited him to the Preventers. That had been almost two years ago now and he had since moved off of the couch and into the master bedroom with me. He had attracted my attention back during the war but I had been too young and foolish to see him for who he was. It was only later, in the quiet moments after long shifts at work that I came to really appreciate him.

He had joked that he always seemed to be attracted to dangerous men. I had originally argued that I thought he was in love with Yuy but he claimed that he had gotten over that infatuation very quickly. He also claimed that he always thought I was straight. I stated that I had never claimed any sort of attraction to any one gender. It was the truth. I was not really attracted to one gender or another, it was more like I was attracted to strong individuals. People who challenged me both physically and intellectually. Duo had that in spades. As a Gundam pilot and a Preventer, he was a fierce warrior. His quick wit and sharp tongue kept me on my toes. What I had originally mistaken for stupidity, had actually been from his lack of a formal education. In the years since the war, he had worked to fill the gaps in his education.

He had also convinced me to move out of active duty at the Preventers. It was a something that I fought against for quite some time. When he finally did challenge me to join him in the training department, that was when I finally relaxed. We trained all of the new recruits before they went into active duty. I could take pride in actually flexing my intellectual skills instead of just physical. It was hard work getting the the fresh faces up to the standards that we needed them to be.

I changed my clothes. It was an adjustment to me after the wars to do the routine after work. During the war, we had always been 'on duty'. Duo had eventually taught me, especially when we started in the training department with a regular nine to five schedule, that the key was to change out of your work clothes at the end of the day. It was strangely the key to get me to relax and move on from active duty. He had finally taught me how to balance my life.

"You beat me home," my braided lover teased as he walked into the bedroom. "I stayed a little late with a small group of the kids. They are really struggling with learning breaking and entering skills. I don't know what it is with the new group but they just seem really young and inexperienced to me."

"You say that like they aren't all older than us by several years," I replied pulling a comfortable sweater on over my head. "We are only twenty."

"We're old men in Gundam years though!"

"You may have a point," I laughed along with him. Laughing came much easier with Duo in my life. It had been very freeing to allow myself to laugh again. Being with him definitely gave me a lot to laugh at.

"You know, I love it when you steal my sweater," he told me tugging at the hem. "Red suits you."

"I think at this point, it's my sweater," I teased. "I wear it more than you."

We settled in after eating dinner together. We were both curled up on the couch with our books. The few years of age and maturity had calmed Duo quite a bit. Don't get me wrong, he still had his moments but he rarely acted like a chipmunk on espresso any more. He had discovered a passion for reading. It was something we shared together that at times surprised our friends. The only consession we had though for these quiet moments at home was that he had to have the radio on while reading. I didn't mind though.

My cell phone rang startling us out of our books. I pulled it from my pants pocket and frowned at it. "Chang speaking."

"Still all business," Sally's voice chided.

"Well, when the office calls on your night off, a Friday night at that, excuse me for not being so cheerful."

"Point taken," she replied. "If it wasn't important, I would not have called."

Duo was looking at me oddly. He had turned the radio down so he could listen to my phone call. He was leaning close to me to hear Sally's voice. "What Preventers business couldn't wait until I clock in on Monday?"

"We found something that may interest you."

"Woman, don't play around," I warned her. "Just tell me what is going on. Also, weren't you in the L5 cluster investigating resistance factions? What are you doing calling from Headquarters?"

"I just got back a few minutes ago," she explained. "We didn't find the faction we were looking for. We did find a small group of refugees from your home colony."

"There were survivors?" I asked not able to hide the shock in my voice. "Are you sure? I figured there had to be a few people who weren't on colony when it was destroyed but not a group."

"It isn't by any means a large group. Just a handful of adults and a few young people and small children. It seems that the elders sent a small contingent off colony several months before it was destroyed."

"Who are they?" I asked wondering if anyone from my family was left alive.

"That's just it, we may need you to come in this weekend and help identify people. We were hoping that you could confirm that these people are who they say they are."

"I can come in this evening," I said looking at Duo who was already putting our books on the coffee table and turning off the radio. "Do you need us uniformed?"

"Nah," she said. "It's after hours and most of them are just pictures. They did not want to leave the colony. A few have come to Earth seeking asylum. If they are who they say they are, we are working on finding them a new place to live."

"How many came to Earth with you?"

"About ten - mostly the young people," Sally explained. "I'll see you in a few then."

I hung up from the call just as Duo was handing me my coat and shoes. "Do you think it's anyone from your family?"

"Possibly, I was only on colony briefly before it self destructed so I couldn't tell you who was there and who wasn't. It wasn't like it was a social visit."

"Still, it's someone from home," he said with a smile. "Good thing I've been brushing up on my Madarin."

"Try not to offend anyone with your pronunciations," I warned him. We took his car. I was nervous but was trying not to show it. He knew me well enough to know anyways. I was allowing myself to remember my friends and family whom I thought were mostly dead from the war. I had mourned them for a long time and was not sure how I felt to learn that some of them might still be alive even after all this time.

Sally met us at the door and led us to a conference room. We really didn't speak much on the way there. Duo walked beside me the whole time. Sally did not say anything at his presence. She knew me well enough too to know that he would not have let me come alone tonight.

I walked in the conference room and my eyes immediately scanned the room. I recognized a few faces although they were older. Most had been young adults when I had left for the war. I could see a few of them had small children with them.

"Chang!" One of the young men exclaimed. I recognized him as my distant cousing Long Sheng. He would be about 26 years old now. We bowed to each other. "We followed your progress through the war. You brought honor to the Long Clan."

"Long Sheng," I addressed him. "I am surprised to see everyone. I was not told that there were anyone off colony when it was destroyed."

"There were a small group of us that the Elders had leave the colony," he explained to me. "They were afraid that either the colony would come under attack because of its involvement in Operation Meteor. We later learned though that they had already had plans to destroy their own colony in case they were threatened."

"Who all is left?"

"There were not a lot of us," he said glancing around the room. "It was basically a few Elders to maintain our history and the few of us around my age who were just starting families. Others were given the choice to leave but many chose to stay."

"Fools," I argued. "If they knew that they were going to be attacked or forced to self destruct, why would they stay?"

"They claimed that it was their honor to stay," he replied with a sad shrug of his shoulders. "Ours was a proud clan."

"There is no pride in mass suicide, but I do not wish to argue the point tonight," I stated. "Who else survives?"

We went through a list of names and recent photographs of the colonist who chose to stay in space. Most were very distant relatives or aquaintances. They were people I vaguely remembered from the training hall or from seeing around the colony. The several gathered in the room with us were all around Sheng's age or were their young children. I could understand their desire to get off colony to protect their young ones. Sally used my confirmation of most of them to verify their identities since most of their finger prints or records had been lost when the colony was destroyed. They were then divided up by families and shown out of the room to go to their safe house. Sally had told us that they had set up a makeshift safe house near headquarters until they could find somewhere more appropriate for them to go. Sheng and his wife paused as they were leaving the room. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. I told him that he could call me any time and gave him one of my cards. We weren't close growing up but having lost the rest of our family, it was nice to not be so alone any more.

The last couple of people in the room had stayed silent the entire time. They hung back from the rest of the group. It was a woman who had spent the entire time staring out the windows over the city of Sanq with a small child on her lap. You could barely make out the stars over the lights of the city at night. But to someone who had spent their entire life on a colony, seeing any night sky for the first time was amazing.

"Ma'am," Duo said walking over to her. He switched to Mandarin and asked her to join me at the table. He still sounded like an American trying to pronounce the words but he did it well enough. He must have startled her when he walked up because she jerked her her head around from gazing out the window to look at him. At the angle I was sitting, I still could not see her face though.

Duo apologized for scaring her before looking at the child in her lap. "Well, aren't you a beautiful little girl."

The child smiled up at him. "You speak Madarin!" She exclaimed looking at the blue eyed American man. She looked to be around five years old. Her voice was accented much like the rest of my clansmen when she spoke English. "And I wanted to practice my English."

"Well, why don't we come over here and keep practicing," he explained extending his hand to the child. She took it easily and followed him around the table towards me. I had been so busy watching their exchange that I had not noticed that the child's mother had stood up and turned around to face us. When I did lift my eyes to meet hers, I was speechless.

"Wu Fei," was all that she said to me. I was glad that I was already sitting down because I knew that my legs would not have been able to hold me up. There, standing before me, was someone I had mourned for the last five years. There was no way that she could be alive but yet there was no way to mistake who she was. The face was the same, except older, more elegant instead of childish. The hair was longer and not up in pigtails. Her voice was unmistakeable though. It had not changed at all.

"Nataku," I breathed causing her eyes to widen. Never, since the day she had died, had I ever even thought of her name being anything but the God of Justice.

tbc.

Author's note: So, Meilan has wrangled all of my muses up and beat the snot out of them. She is demanding that I write her a fic in which she lives. I'm nervous becuase it's been ages since I started a brand new multipart fic. I'm still working on my Xover as a priority though, so don't dispair. And as always, 2x5 is my main OTP. I can't help it - it's what got me into the fandom in the first place. I just want to know if there is enough interest in my doing a Meilan fic.