Author's Note: Well, well, well. It's been quite a while, hasn't it? I think I've been receiving emails for upwards of two years asking for this fic, so I've finally decided to post it. I do, however, have a few things to say about it first. Most prominently, this is the companion piece or sequel, if you prefer, to my previous fic "A Ballad of War," which I started posting a few years ago. If you have not finished reading Ballad or have never read it before, this story will make absolutely no sense. Secondly - and perhaps more importantly - I wrote these two stories when I was fifteen and sixteen. I'm twenty now, so they do not any longer reflect my writing style. Thirdly, the only excuse I can offer for my neglecting the requests for this fic is that I've been very busy with college and with my original novel. However, it's summer now, and I do promise to respond to my readers much more thoroughly now. That being said, thanks for your persistence in asking me to post this, and as always, comments are most gratefully welcome.
The Remnants of War
awaken, my darling
The Unnamed Soldier
It had ceased to matter now, and if it had ever truly mattered, he could not remember it doing so. The memories of what had happened had not yet begun to fade, but already they had been made obsolete, and because of this he could endure them.
The thought of such endurance no longer disturbed him. His mind had often been plagued by much worse.
If history and his own past were ever to have taught him anything, it should have been that true peace did not exist, not for any country, for any colony, for any person. Yet strangely he found that the state in which he existed these days was something very close to peace, a life that was temporarily beyond hiatus, beyond the interruptions around which he had once centered his miserable excuse of a life. He tried to think nothing of it, and very often he succeeded.
What will you do, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?
Phantom words from a long-ago voice, a question that had never needed an answer. Ironic that Odin's voice should plague him now, so many months since they had last spoken. Had he been a believer in such things, he might have taken this to mean they never would again.
This, too, did not disturb him.
The war had ended much as predicted. No words needed be said about it now. He had accomplished his final mission and at its completion no new one had been given to him. He had become, as Odin had once said he would, a soldier devoid of purpose.
Perhaps the others had become the same. He didn't know. He didn't care. What use were any of them to each other now? What use were any of them to each other but reminders of all that could now not be changed, of all the past transgressions of which they all believed themselves guilty that could not be absolved?
He no longer counted himself among their numbers. He had no use for the romance of such guilt. He was not the profound contemplation of Odin Lowe, nor was he the grim poetic dignitary of Zechs Marquise. What he himself was he had yet to learn.
The graves of the Earth's last conflict were many and unmarked. The final battle outside the Sanq Kingdom had claimed the most lives, though their numbers were never fully counted; it was in this battle that he himself had almost lost his life, when Zechs's mind had again been unable to overcome the new system he had installed in the Epyon.
It didn't matter. None of it did.
It was over these unmarked graves that he now stood, thinking of those who lay beneath them, of the past and of the present, of everything, and then of nothing at all. The grass had long grown over the scattered mounds that protested, against all that now seemed truthful, that those who had found their cold beds in them had never once existed. Only a few actual graves were dug here; many of the bodies from that last battle were never recovered, lost completely to the fires that had consumed their suits, but nonetheless this forsaken piece of land was a graveyard, yet another place left by war that bade the living keep out while the dead kept vigil over the dead.
This place suited him.
The ground was still charred in places, the trees surrounding it dead and blackened. He found it strange that Relena had not commissioned it to be landscaped and restored yet. Perhaps she had finally realized the significance of this decadent blemish upon her beautiful pacifist nation.
Relena. He had not thought of her for so long, did not truly think about her now; he had not even considered the dramatic change he had beheld in her the last time he had seen her. No longer was she the naïve child she had been when they had parted after the Eve Wars, nor was she the rising dignitary she had been after the Mariemaia incident. She was something else entirely now, something colder and yet wiser, something more like Zechs himself than was perhaps best for her. He did not need to have seen her that night in Thessalonikí, among the ruins of the base, to know this. All around him people spoke of it and though he had learned nothing new of her, he knew it was true. Perhaps there was hope for her yet. And perhaps he should have felt something, some greater pang of regret, for not having thought of her in the years it had been since they had last truly spoken, for not grieving the loss of the innocent girl who had once been Relena Darlian. Maybe he should have, but he did not. He could not. He had never possessed any sentimental notions toward her, no sense of camaraderie. He had, even in all the time they had been forced to spend together during the wars of AC 195, never really thought of her as anything more than a hindrance and a child.
Believe in me, Relena.
Of course she would; of course she did. She had believed in everything then. He was nothing of importance for having gained her agreement.
Perhaps she had finally grown enough to see beyond her ideals while still advocating them. Maybe now it was she and others like her who could benefit the world, not embittered soldiers lost to all the wars they could not stop fighting.
She left his thoughts as quickly as she had almost come into them. She was ultimately of little consequence to him.
He walked slowly over the ruined field as one lost in thought might do. His footsteps were too silent to disturb the rest of those who had died beneath them. Did any of them care that he had come, a living being into their mass grave to taunt them with the breath that he drew that they would never take again? Did they care that he walked so carelessly over the spot where the remains of their lifeless bodies had either been buried or burned? Did any care that he would without hesitation have taken each of their places?
He didn't believe this. He himself found it not worth giving a damn.
A slight breeze blew through the dead woods, shaking the cracked limbs and rustling leaves that had sprouted as nothing short of a miracle. The restless dead could use the wind as their voiceless whisper for all he cared; he had no desire to romanticize their souls' loss any longer. Was not one, either life or death, inherently better than the other?
A useless soldier's thoughts were not needed here. He had spoken their unwritten epitaph just by being here, by walking among their graves and over their tattered corpses. He was not needed anymore. Perhaps he had never been needed in the first place.
He looked out at the ocean, at the peninsula farther away on which the green of the trees was rich and untainted, and he wondered if he was the last to leave Greece. Yuan-Chen had taken his leave three days following the war's official close, disclosing the knowledge of his departure only to Odin and to Heero. He never expected to see the man again.
"This war is over, Takeru. When will you cease in fighting your own battle?"
The old man's voice, his ancient withered hands lighting upon his shoulders. Flinching, almost in a moment of cowardice pulling away. Even Odin, despite their many encounters in which Heero had heard similar, never actually touched him.
"This once, Takeru, I request an answer." An endearing smile, such a sincere expression.
How dare you care about me. How dare you. How dare you.
"I'm not fighting anything."
A quiet laugh, ironic and yet at the same time conveying no bitterness. "True. You do not fight anything—you fight against everything. You rage quietly against everything that can claim even one moment in your life. You will realize someday, Takeru, that you are only fighting against yourself."
How dare you.
It was believed that Yuan-Chen had returned to his native China with his nephews—who had left soon afterward—and perhaps he had, but Heero thought it more likely that he had, after all these years away, at long last gone back to Japan. Let him go back, let him go back to those candlelit rooms scented of incense and solitude, to those shrines, to that order that was both monastic and secular. Let him go back to her grave. He didn't care.
He did care.
He did, and perhaps this was why he could think about these things.
Odin had remained longer and then abruptly disappeared, without notice or farewell even to Heero. There had been no torturous parting words between them. The scar on his hand and the infrequent pain of it were now the only indications that Odin Lowe had ever existed.
He sometimes thought that he saw Odin, a mere glimpse of a face in a crowd, and saw nothing, saw sometimes a man who merely resembled him and sometimes no one at all. He would then be unable to even think for several minutes, and if indeed Odin Lowe were watching him, he was undoubtedly pleased with this reaction.
Did he really believe that Odin was again following him, seeking him out to fulfill some purpose that only he knew, or perhaps only to monitor the course of his life? No. He did not. He had a feeling that the end of the war had in turn marked the end of their dealings with each other. There was no longer any reason for their contact or for one to be a presence in the other's life. Odin had finally been able to see what Heero had become—if he had failed Sakura, so be it. There was nothing they could do for each other now; the contract was ended. Odin was now free to find his next purpose, leaving Heero to continue a life that was without one.
He was beginning to hear his voice more often, though. He could almost hear it now, a low timbre beneath the slight wind, speaking of something Heero did not want to know, asking questions he did not want to answer.
How dare you care about me. How dare you.
How dare you.
"How dare you," he whispered, the first words he had spoken in days, the first words that had perhaps ever been spoken over this unconsecrated ground. Would the dead now take note of him, would they hear his voice and find it more suitable than the wind? Let them have it then. It no longer served him efficiently.
The voice beneath the breeze, the words that only he could hear, ceased. He looked into the woods, caught a brief glance of Odin's face that immediately faded into shadow.
"I have nothing to say to you," he said, and then louder he repeated it, shuddering as the words left his lips. His voice was hoarse and choked from days of disuse.
The words did not echo back to him.
"And you have nothing to say to me," he mumbled, shrugging his bare shoulders and letting his hands fall, defeated, from his pockets. No answer was received, either from the air or from those over those whose remains he now walked, from the voice that spoke to him even when the man to whom it belonged was not present. Perhaps one did truly need to be alone to be defeated.
Or perhaps they were all already defeated, every one of them, both those with a purpose and those without. Perhaps they had been defeated from the beginning, really.
It sounded like something Zechs would say. He had realized in the past two years that they truly were more alike than he cared to admit.
He wondered if Odin would think the same.
He passed through the empty graveyard, giving not thought or word to the raised mounds or to the dead patches where grass would perhaps never grow again. It didn't matter now. He walked to the edge of the field, the abrupt cliff that overlooked the sea. This place would suffice.
He sat on the edge of the drop-off, watched the water below his feet. The ocean was calm today, chilled by the wind but nonetheless lighted by the sun, and too deep at this point for him to see the bottom. The cold darkness of those depths invited him, beseeched him to plunge into its embrace, to find solace there as he had not found it in life.
He almost smiled at the thought of it.
Later he could give himself to it, if it so desired him. Right now he had something else to surrender.
He reached into his pocket, withdrew a crumpled photograph. It had been in perfect condition when it had been given to him and in the year since it had become creased and bent, its edges torn and ragged. Funny that he should feel regret that it was now so battered.
The photograph had been taken in the final months of her life, when her career as an opponent of the Alliance and the Cosmos Arm had been nearing a second apex. It was one of the few that had been taken of her then in which she was not holding her child.
He had requested it as such.
"What are you looking for, Takeru?"
Odin's inquisitive words, a raised eyebrow as he looked up from the document he was reading.
Heero had stopped rummaging through the stack of papers that lay on the desk. "Nothing."
Odin set the document aside and waited. They were the last two in the Vólos base then; all others had already departed for the evening, having no desire to spend another night there.
He at last, under Odin's scrutiny, returned to his search, moving aside reports and data that would never again be used. After several minutes he had found what he was looking for.
He picked up the newspaper clipping, studying it in silence. Odin said not a word as he watched, not bothering to conceal the vague smile that crossed his face.
Her face had been radiant in the picture above the words that now had no meaning to him, her eyes dark and serene and yet strangely warm, filled with the light of some strange faith that knew only her devotion. She was smiling, not at the camera but at something far beyond it, and the afternoon sunlight shone brightly upon the gloss of her black hair, granting her appearance the illumination of an Eastern goddess. Her husband stood several feet away from her, looking back at her over his shoulder, and at her side she held the hand of her young son, a grinning boy of his mother's face and strange blue eyes.
Beneath the photograph the caption read simply 'Hanasaki Sakura.'
He had expected Odin to laugh or to taunt him with his sudden interest in the photograph of his mother, but no sound came from him. At the moment they understood each other too much to speak.
He tried to look at her, to study her enigmatic face, to remember it that way and not as it had been the last time he had seen her, contorted by pain and the peace of oncoming death, but his eyes were inevitably drawn back to the boy, the child that would grow into this damned shell of a human.
He looked up at Odin, forced himself to sound calm. Please understand this. "Do you have one that…" His voice trailed into silence; his gaze fell to the floor.
Odin waited, and when Heero did not continue he merely nodded and went to the desk, opened the drawer beneath it. Everything associated with the war had already been discarded; there remained only the photographs of her, the newspaper articles, a single report on her that had once been part of the Cosmos Arm's files.
He withdrew a smaller picture of her, handed it without hesitation to him. All this was done entirely in silence.
She was alone in this photograph, dressed completely in white with her hands folded in front of her. Her hair was tied at the nape of her neck, revealing her face as she turned to look at something in the distance. Her expression was calm and solemn, and without the light of the sun her eyes seemed as two dark pools of oil, glistening as though from some light within them rather than without. The kimono she wore drew tight about her small figure, and as he studied her he realized for the first time how frail a woman she should have been.
"She was very…" he began, foolishly believing that he would be able to say this and failing horribly.
Odin nodded contemplatively. "She was."
He looked up at the man, fought the urge to plead, fought the quiver that tried to invade upon his voice. "May I have it," he said finally, too calmly to sound uncaring.
No hesitation, no interrogation. "Of course, Takeru."
For the first time in his life he had been grateful for Odin's strange understanding of him.
He looked at the photograph now, studied the serenity of her face. He tried not to think of the fact that she meant nothing and everything to him at once. Part of him strangely believed that she would want him to think of her that way.
Odin would soon be the only one whose memory of her persisted. The world had already buried her, he would bury her now, and then when Odin did the same she would at last be truly dead, forgotten by a world that forgot even its most vital leaders. She would attain the same insignificance that he had in the past so longed for.
The world and space were already forgetting Heero Yuy. Sakura was nothing to them.
He ran one finger over the line of her face, not entirely aware that he was doing so. On some level he wondered what it was she stared at so intently.
Enough of this. He had not come here to ponder Sakura's photograph or to force himself to remember her; he had come to bury her before he buried himself, the last victim of war.
He folded the picture, concealing her calm face. He would never see it again. Please, God, he would never have to see it again.
"Goodbye, Sakura."
The wind whispered its own farewell.
Without a further thought he extended his arm and dropped the photograph, watched until it lighted upon the water's surface. It floated for several minutes, swaying over the smooth waves, then at last was swallowed and carried down into the cobalt darkness, where it passed out of sight.
Tenshi-san.
He shuddered, swallowed. He felt his eyes close although he did not know why they did.
What will you, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?
Indeed, what would he do? There was nothing else but this.
He cast another fleeting glance at the sun and the sky and the unmarked graves, then rose and leapt over the edge.
The expression that graced his face in the moment before the chill and the dark consumed him was strangely almost that of a smile.
A/N: Forgive typos. As I said, I wrote this a few years ago, and I don't really have time to read over it thoroughly again at the moment. Any seeming-anomalies/anachronisms/crap like that are explained in the Author's Notes to Ballad. Yay. :) Oh wow... since this website is apparently no longer allowing author's notes... grumbles... please leave your email address in your comments and I promise to respond.