Title: Return to Innocence

Author: Ashika

Summary: Chaos has destroyed everything Usagi held dear, and she's left in the middle of the year A.C. 193 with nothing but some magic that is useless in this time (there aren't any Youma around to destroy or people to exorcise), the clothes on her back, and some retractable wings. Heero sits on the edge of Operation Meteor, its initiation nearly ready to commence. So why should he believe in an angel to save his emotionless soul when she can't even save herself?

Disclaimer: I don't own anything to do with Gundam Wing or Sailor Moon, for now. :P Besides, if I did . . . do you really believe I'd be writing the plots as fanfiction? I think not. This was also inspired by the song Return to Innocence by Enigma. I don't own the song or band either.


A.C. 193

He clenched his jaw as his breath began to come harder. He ran fast, as fast as he could. His gundam was a thousand meters away, and the distance was closing. He didn't have much time left before the whole place blew up.

One minute left.

He could hardly breathe, he was running so fast. He should have given himself more time to get out, but he just hadn't been able to reset the timer without wasting valuable seconds. His eyes started to blur as he tried to run faster; his legs burned with the lactic acid that was slowly building up.

Thirty seconds.

He frowned as he tried loping, and shook his head. That was even worse. He began to stumble, and quickly righted himself. This was no time for mistakes. Mistakes meant a failure of the mission. Time flew by as he counted the seconds in his head. He was so close, just another hundred meters.

Fifteen seconds.

His breath caught as he turned his head to look behind and saw a girl. She stood behind the chain-link fence with a look of innocent curiosity lighting her face. Her light brown hair swayed slightly in the breeze as she watched him run to the forest. The question in her eyes was left unanswered as the buildings behind her abruptly blew up, her along with them.

He fell to the ground as the explosion knocked him off his feet. His breath came is harsh gasps as he lay on the ground. Tears threatened to fall as he considered the girl standing against the fence. He should never have looked back. Never look back, an old adage by a very wise man many years ago. As he opened his eyes, they swiftly hardened. Emotions fell off his face as quickly as the sweat dripped off his body.

Emotions were a weakness. Dr. J had told him so.

Now Heero Yuy knew why.

Her crystal blue eyes shimmered with tears. They were gone, all gone. All of her senshi, Mamo-chan, her daughter; they were all dead. Chaos had killed them in His damned eternal pursuit of power.

The tears dripped down her face as she silently wept, letting the endless expanse of space take her sorrow. She slipped into a dream-like state, remembering those who had died for her. It was essentially her fault, that they were dead. She stifled a sigh as she slowly drifted back to earth. No one would notice her. The only ones who ever cared to see her were dead now.

She didn't even flinch when a vision of Sailor Pluto came to her; didn't even move as Pluto flickered in her sight. Pluto seemed to be shouting, but she could only hear the whisper of words emit from Pluto's mouth.

"Usagi, believe in yourself. We will meet again. I have seen it. We will be together again. We swear."

Pluto slowly faded from view as Usagi mutely hovered in the air. Her wings fluttered as she began her descent to earth once again. Her landing upon the rich soil of earth was firm. The view presented to her was one of great destruction. Building upon building; the rubble still smoked from what seemed to be a catastrophic explosion.

Catastrophic explosion…? No, a catastrophic explosion would be like when Chaos blew up half the world in his quest to kill her and the senshi…who stood in the way of his other quest. In either case, someone had blown this compound up.

It looked like it had been a rather nice compound, as far as military areas go. She would know; she had spent some time in quite a few of them. A closer look brought her to a chain-link fence, the body of a small girl lying on the ground, her light brown hair scattered across the ground. The girl was barely breathing, her strength nearly gone. Not for the first time did Usagi wish that her healing powers were a little bit more concentrated on healing the wounded instead of solely on the possessed.

The girl's eyelids slid open and she spoke one word before her breathing completely stopped:

"Angel."

But the child was wrong, wasn't she?

A.C. 202

The gundam beat its wings against the nothingness of space, the twin buster rifles aimed at mobile doll after mobile doll. When Zero showed signs of no more enemies, the rifles lowered. Heero headed back to Earth, its blue surface dotted by spots of cloud and land.

Then the Zero system went berserk. Signals showed one enemy in range; the rifles locked on and shot before he took a good look at what he was shooting at. As he drew closer the enemy appeared to be nothing more than a girl…with wings. An angel? Couldn't be…angels were figments of the imagination. They were a made up ideal by the creators of the Holy Bible. There was no evidence to the existence of such creatures, and the idea that they were only seen by "believers" was long since proved to be nonsense. They had clearly been delusional.

In this era, religion had been eradicated through careful elimination of people who believed in a god other than the government. Or maybe the people who believed in a god were just too afraid to come out and proclaim their affiliation. They were smart then.

But either way, there was an injured girl (who by all rights should have been killed by the blast) with wings floating – without an oxygen mask – in the middle of space. He grabbed her with the hands of his gundam and headed back down to Earth, the speed at a minimum. Damn if he was going to be the one to kill a real life angel, even if he didn't believe in them.

A/N: I hope you like this story so far. I realize I've skewed the whole little girl and blowing up thing from Heero's past (if you watched Endless Waltz) but she wasn't all that important to the story anyway. I've officially given up on really long chapters, so if anything, you'll be seeing chapters about this length. On the upside, this will mean faster chapters! I promise…I'm actually going to work on this one. I just think that since my other fic (The Chaos Theory) has basically been an original story, I'm having a lot more trouble with it. In case you're wondering, I have been working on that one. Anywho, you know the drill. Please review, or send me an email at ratty210hotmail.com! See ya next chapter.