Shatter Me

Series: Gundam Wing

Author: Cyn Finnegan

Summary: Post-war AU; after a massive betrayal by friends and family and a brutal attack leaves him disgraced and disowned, Quatre fakes his own death and leaves the Colonies behind to start a new life on Earth. He soon realizes that, no matter how hard you try, you can't always run away from your past. Eventual Bara (4x3x4), torture, NCS. LOOSELY based on Madame Vodka's abandoned fic, "New Life."

Gundam Wing © Sunrise/Sotsu. Used without permission and not for profit.

A/N: The first three chapters are told from varying first person perspectives: first, Quatre's thoughts on his escape. Second, the boys and Howard's reactions to Quatre's "death" and funeral, and the third features the girls' reactions. Chapter Four will reveal the incidents mentioned in the first three.

Chapter One: I Pirouette In the Dark

Boy, they're all really pissed off with me this time...

Well, no shit, Sherlock! They're always angry with me! Nothing I do has ever been good enough for them!

Look, I don't mean to bitch, but I have to get this off my chest. I'm not who or what people think I am...

To the public, I'm a spoiled, rich brat who's had an easy life, one who's "blessed" with a large, kind and loving family who are too good for him, and was born with the Earth Sphere groveling at my feet because I'm Zaid Winner's only son. The public doesn't know dick of what I've been through all my life, or what I've had to suffer in recent years. All they see is a faded, phony smile that hasn't reached my eyes since... well, since halfway through After Colony 195... And I hate it.

What I hate most of all, though, are the majority of my half-sisters, and those half-sisters hate me, too. Hell, even my own father hated me... while he was alive, at least. Betcha didn't know that, did you? He never let me forget it, either. You wanna know something else no one knows about my family? Not one of Zaid Winner's children had the same woman for a mother, if you could call them that.

Here's the thing: all my half-sisters came from eggs taken from my father's four wives and twenty-five of his concubines. Those eggs were then fertilized in Petri dishes with Father's sperm, and finally, when they'd grown into a big enough clutch of cells, were jammed into giant, womb-shaped test tubes filled with artificial amniotic fluid and left to grow for nine months. Then they were all "born" within hours of each other on the same day, month, and year.

Though a lot of people think that I was "born" the same way, I am, in fact, the only naturally born child of the lot. I was born six weeks premature and my mother, Quaterine, died when I was just ten days old. And contrary to what my father thought, I wasn't partly named for my mother; she named me Quatre because she was French and I was her fourth attempt at having a child. The other three, all boys, were test tube babies who failed to grow or thrive.

Here's another little tidbit: since dear old Dad was a devout Muslim, though Mama wasn't, no autopsy was ever performed on her, so I'll probably never know if I really was the cause of her death or if someone killed her because she was carrying me.

Why would any man force twenty-nine different women to go through in vitro fertilization at the same time in the hope of having one child turn out to be the son and heir he craved? And why have his only naturally born child spend most of his life believing he, too, came from a test tube? Hubris, mainly. It seems that, since my father's family settled in the L4 cluster nearly two hundred years ago, all the men in it have had fertility issues. In other words, they tend to shoot blanks, so the cloning of sperm cells, IVF, and mechanical wombs have been how my family's reproduced ever since.

Father called it the "Winner Curse."

Me? I couldn't make a baby if I wanted to, and I don't. Spacers' disease hit me big time when I was ten, rendering me completely sterile, and even if I weren't, I wouldn't wish my "childhood," especially the bogus "created for the sake of convenience" part, on another living being, offspring or not.

By the way, Mama's death was the reason why my father hated me. "She sacrificed herself to bring an ungrateful brat into the Sphere," my father's words, not mine, and I just happen to look like a masculine version of her. That and the fact of his knowing about my being as straight as a corkscrew four years before I finally figured it out for myself didn't exactly help matters between us much, either.

You see, in spite of the fact that it's widely accepted on Earth, many colonies frown on anything other than heterosexuality, especially my native cluster, L4. Imprisonment for being gay isn't uncommon here, and while they're supposed to be rare, so-called "honor" killings aren't unheard of, either. I've avoided jail so far because of my status as Zaid Winner's only son, and the fact that the colonies will lose a lot of financial support if I'm imprisoned, and though they'll deny it, some of my brothers-in-law have made several attempts on my life since it happened, and labeled me an abomination.

Anyway, the only times most of the twenty-eight strangers or the other members of WinnerCorp's board of directors ever contacted me were either to complain about my ideas (which, I might add, have made them money, too) or to boast about how fucking great they all think they are. They're always bitching and whining at me about how Father did a far better job than I've ever done, or bragging on and on about how they could do a much better job than I ever could, not that they've ever gotten off their asses and proven it.

Speaking of sisters, I thank Allah for Iria. She's the only person from my old life that I'm really gonna miss, even if it's only for keeping me halfway sane through the shit storm my life has been these past few months. Since the war, she's been the only one of the whole damned gaggle who's ever been solidly in my corner, loved and accepted me for who and what I am, and treated me like her brother, and not like the bastard at a family reunion. She also broke the promise our father forced her to make and told me all about my mother Quaterine, whom she says I look exactly like, my birth and her death shortly after.

Okay, I'll miss Amina, a.k.a. Sister number two, as well; at least she was halfway decent towards me, and even drew up a will for me to make this whole scam look good. In exchange, I left her the company, mainly to keep it out of the clutches of half-sister number three, Yasmin, and her husband Tariq. Those two do not know the meaning of living within your means. They'd most likely run the company into the ground within a year.

Oh, yeah... while we're on the subject of bastards, when I was three or four, I overheard the aforementioned Yasmin refer to my mother as "Father's French whore" and to me as "the little bastard" to one of the others, and she agreed with her. Being too smart for my own good, I looked the words up in the dictionary and didn't like what they meant. I'm guessing it was because Father replaced her mother with mine as one of his four wives.

Of course, I didn't know they were my sisters, too, until Father's Janazah, his burial ceremony.

When I was six, half-sister number 14, I think her name's Naila, gave Father the brilliant idea to send me to a public school. According to her, it was supposed to "socialize" me and "toughen" me up. Within three months of registration, I was in the ICU for getting the shit kicked out of me by a bunch of bigger, older boys, declared a "disruptive influence" and accused of cheating by my so-called teacher and principal, and sent back to isolation and home schooling. Not my fault I was far smarter than the other kids. Now, the majority of the board and my sisters employ the very assholes who tormented me during that brief, painful time.

Why would they do such a thing, you ask? According to what they tell the gossip mongers, I did it because I'm the nice guy, the forgiving guy, the happy guy who gives everyone the shirt off his back. In reality, it's just a bunch of public relations bullshit one of the half-sisters cooked up to keep "dearest little Quatre" in line and show the Sphere what a "nice" guy I am.

Well, screw that. So long, Mister Nice Guy, and don't let the door hit your skinny blond ass on the way out.

If that's all I am to them, then I certainly don't want to be a Winner anymore. I'm so fucking fed up with the arguments and petty bickering. I hate being a figurehead, working long hours, missing meals, wearing suits (which my father never wore a day in his life!), and dealing with hostile competitors and shallow assholes who think they can corrupt me into giving them power that I've never had. I hate this quasi-life I was forced into, and I'm tired of seeing everyone I've ever loved or cared about hating me, of coming home to my father's huge, empty mansion, and of constantly being haunted by the echoes of my past. I've so many memories of growing up in that mausoleum, and not one of them a happy one.

My only truly happy memories are of things that happened while I was on Earth. I want to go back there, find some town in the middle of nowhere where no one knows who Quatre Raberba Winner is, move into a flat and finally LIVE my life. I'm seventeen now, for piss sake! I don't care if it is "selfish," I deserve a chance to live my own life and to have a little fun without fretting myself into an early grave over my father's stupid company! I'd fought for a life I could be proud of, and then I threw it all away when I ran back to the L-4 cluster and started working there!

Watching the news and peoples' reactions to my "retirement" almost made me smile. Alone in my cheap hotel room, armed only with preparation, I'm listening to the media's lies. I may not be anyone special anymore, but damn it, I'm going to finally be happy, and no one will ever take that away from me again. People are going to judge me anyway, right? So I might as well live my life the way I fucking well want to.

I'm only packing a few things to go with me; mostly my violin and some thrift shop jeans and t-shirts I'd bought months ago for this occasion. I've got my old shuttle set up for a "business" trip, but this will the last time Quatre Raberba Winner will ever be making an appearance. Let's face it, anyone that would have cared if I were alive or dead stopped caring about it a long time ago. I've shed my tears, gotten over the loss of my so-called "friends," and I'm moving on.

My makeover went well; so well that I don't even recognize myself anymore. The young man looking back at me from the mirror has shaggy, shoulder length black hair (do you know what kind of Hell I went through to hide the fact I was growing it out?) and bottle green eyes (thank you, cosmetic contacts). A little light hacking into my life records and a couple hundred credits spent here and there equaled a new name, birth certificate, a driver's license, and a triple-A credit rating.

Now that I'm finished, no one will be able to prove Quatre Raberba Winner ever existed, or that Christopher Alexander Thomas never did, at least not past his tenth birthday.

I was feeling a little sentimental when I chose my new name; I wanted to keep the nickname Cat because that's what they used to call me. We were all friends and equals once, my brothers-in-arms and I, fighting together in the wars, but where are they now? I don't know and, quite frankly, I couldn't care less. They ditched my skinny ass during my all-too-brief and horrible stint with Preventer and never once looked back to see how I was faring after IT happened.

One "friend" promised to call me at least once a week, but never did. Another "friend," supposedly my best friend, swore he'd kidnap me if he found out I'd been working too hard, just so I could take a break, but he never bothered, either. All the three of them did was beat me down, break my spirit, and belittle me for things that I couldn't have done.

The only thing the fourth one broke was my heart.

And then there were the forty men who, at one time, were more loyal to me than my family had ever been, called me "master" out of respect instead of fear, and who treated me as their equal. They ditched me after what happened to make me leave Preventer. Now, the other Gundam pilots and the Maguanacs are all just a bunch of bad memories of a different life... or maybe just a part of a long, drawn-out nightmare I've finally woken up from.

Hey, maybe Chris could stand trial for all the soldiers' lives I took, and for the colony and resource satellite I destroyed. I once made a promise to myself that if any survivors or their families found me and demanded my blood as payment for my crimes, I wouldn't run away or beg for forgiveness, but accept my fate. I killed to protect my father, Iria and my other sisters, and I killed to bring about peace, so I should be killed in retribution for my crimes.

As part of its numerous charities, WinnerCorp built new colonies to replace the ones I'd damaged or destroyed, and funded the construction of several orphanages, but that doesn't come anywhere close to repaying the lives the corporation's junior grade CEO wannabe ruined when the people who lived and worked there were displaced.

I know I could blame the ZERO System, or the members of the colony council who allowed OZ to murder my father and hurt my eldest sister, but I've chosen not to assign any more blame to anyone or anything. The blame's squarely on my shoulders, and the blood's on my hands. I can't erase or ignore it, so until they come for me, there's nothing I can do. I considered suicide an option for a while, and even made a half-assed attempt at it after the incident, but how would killing myself change the past? How would it change anything? Only justice will do that.

Allah, I'm beginning to sound like Wu Fei.

Arrgh! I've gotta stop saying/thinking that name! Chris is an Atheist, not a Muslim, not that I was ever a very good one of those to begin with. After all, I fell in love with another boy, didn't I, even if he didn't love me back?

For months now, I've been planning my escape. I recreated Chris and his life's history; an L-4 orphan whose father abandoned him at birth, much the way my own father did, but whose mother died during an Alliance crackdown, and who emigrated to Earth just before the end of the war. I opened his bank account with the funds I'd pilfered from OZ and the Alliance, then applied for and got him a drivers' license and a credit card.

I don't know where he'd want to live or work. Certainly not in Cinq; too many people there would recognize me, especially Relena and Hiiro, though I know neither of them could be bothered to acknowledge me. Same with the Arabian Desert, only it would be Rashid, Auda, Abdul, and Ahmed. I once thought of them as my real family, but like my former friends, the Maguanac Corps turned their backs on me when I needed them most, so their further censure is the last thing I need.

Getting off the commercial shuttle, I put in a pair of wireless earbuds, turn on my audio player, choose a song called "Once in a Lifetime" by a pre-colony alternative band called the Talking Heads, and put it on replay. Contrary to what my former friends thought, classical music isn't the only type of music I like. I enjoy most kinds: classical, rock, blues, soul, rap, dubstep... okay, maybe not country. Country's too maudlin for my tastes.

I've already traveled over ten thousand miles, and soon, all my old clothes, credit cards, the wisdom tooth Wu Fei knocked out of my mouth, and a cheap violin will burn up with the meat puppet* sitting in the pilot's seat when I detonate my old shuttle as it hits the wave course. The only things that might survive are the tooth, which they'll use the DNA out of to verify my "death," and my old Preventer-issued Gundanium dog tags. I've made it impossible for any of them to track me or Sandrock, not that any of them would care enough to. After all, who'd want to look for an unloved dead man and his quasi-legal Gundanium mobile suit?

Okay, enough with the reminiscing and wool gathering. You know what I want to do now?

Call me a romantic fool, but I want to find real love.

Arguably, I don't deserve to, but it's what I crave.

They say you can't find true love, that it finds you, but I don't care. I'm gonna search the world for a feeling, and maybe have it returned this time.

Once upon a time, I thought I'd found the love I've always wanted, but I hadn't, not really. As time wore on, I realized his gentle smiles weren't for me and that, even if he did return my feelings at one time, being with him would be impossible now, especially in the aftermath of the incident, when I heard him say he'd rather fuck a maggot-ridden corpse than spend another minute in my unwanted company.

Kind-of ironic, him saying that, considering the fact that before it happened, before I was violated in the worst way possible, Trowa had been using me as a substitute for a teddy bear.

There's also the little fact that, except for Iria, none of my family would have approved of our being together because he was another male.

Trowa's probably engaged to that girl, Lady Une's sister Middie, by now, his own sister helping her to plan out the perfect wedding with the rest of my former friends and their loved ones in attendance. After all, he wasn't exactly fighting her off when I found them kissing just before that botched mission, and he made it perfectly clear after it happened that he didn't share my feelings...

As I exit Andrews Space Port, I realize that I can still "feel" Trowa in my heart and in the back of my mind. I don't want to hurt him, even though he's hurt me, but I don't want him to figure out I'm alive and end up using this damned "bond" we share to find me. Reaching into the pocket of my hoodie, my fingers find the pen-shaped detonation switch for my old shuttle and press the button on top. There's a ten second delay until the blast, and in that time, I completely shut down my Space Heart. That should keep anyone from thinking I'm still around to bother them.

I want to see more of the world I helped bring about. From my previous visits here, I know the Earth's a beautiful place full of kind people. There's no artificial sunlight or regularly scheduled rain, and NO funky-smelling recycled air here, either. It's all real, wild, and natural. I want to see the sights of beauty poets and historians raved about through time, but I want to see the land we destroyed, too. Maybe the truth about humanity lives there, because it certainly doesn't live in outer space. I know; I've looked.

Maybe here on Earth, I'll finally find a purpose to my life besides making money or dealing death, and maybe, just maybe, I can give my body, mind, heart, and soul a chance to finally heal.

Author's Notes: This is my first attempt at writing a first person narrative, so please be kind. The next couple of chapters will be in segments told from some of the others' points of view, then shift back to Quatre's perspective. Chapter Six will be from Trowa perspective.

What I was thinking about the GW version of test tube babies is Louise Brown, the World's first test tube baby, taken to the logical (or, in Zaid Winner's case, illogical) extreme, rather than cloning. The "Winner Curse," which only affects the men in Cat's family, is the reason why his 29 sisters are all test tube babies.

In my head canon, cloning sperm cells and organs for transplantation is legal, but cloning an entire human being for whatever purposes isn't.

Andrews Space Port is what we currently call Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

I think I need to explain what a meat puppet is, because unless you've watched forensics heavy TV shows such as CSI (any of them) or Bones, you probably don't know what one is. Simply put, they are processed luncheon meat, such as Spam or Treet, that's been layered onto a skeleton made of artificial bone, and they're sometimes used to stand in for a frozen pig in determining the length of time it takes for a human body to burn. Gross, I know, but a pig takes almost two weeks to thaw in a refrigerator, and using a frozen one skews the results.

You can see Cat's ear buds here: .

In this, "life records" are just that; record of your life, such as birth, medical, dental, school, employment, and social security records.

I've got a pretty good idea where I'm going with this fic, so please bear with me, but I've been a bit stuck on my other stories and wanted to start writing again. Hope you enjoy it.