Author: Sparkle Itamashii

Title: Our World

Disclaimer: Gundam Wing A/C and its characters, settings, and plot are NOT MINE. Please do not take, alter, distribute or archive this story without my permission.

Note: This story is from my "Before Storm" one-shot series that all take place during the altered-plotline war and before the beginning of "Through the Storm" which may also be found amongst my fanfiction.

Our World

It was hard, never being able to stay in one place for very long, always on the run from an enemy that didn't have just one face. It was lonely not being able to make friends in a stable place because we'd know that we'd just be leaving again. I couldn't even have the comfort of getting letters from home because I couldn't give my sisters a useful address.

The closest to friends I ever got during the war was the other gundam pilots. Sure, the maguanacs were fantastic people and I got very close to some of them but they weren't my age. They were the sort of friends that kids make with adults, the sort of friends that protected you but didn't really live in your world. The other pilots- they lived in my world, although I'm sure most of them wished they didn't. I'd heard all their stories, listened to them late at night as we waited for the rising dawn to light our way. Their worlds had been torn apart by the war; my life, in its shambles, was more whole than any of theirs and all I had of it was my sisters.

Heero had grown up without any real concept of family or normality. Duo had been orphaned more than once by the war and forced into a position where he now held far more control than he wanted. Trowa, my dear, sweet Trowa, had been orphaned as well, picked up and shuffled between a variety of 'homes' that were nothing short of hurtful. Then there was Wu Fei, who'd had his wife stolen from him and his family destroyed by the war leaving him alone and outwardly bitter.

Yet none of them had given up. They had all survived and they all continued to fight. Better than that, we'd banded together. We'd found each other in all of that crazy mess and become… well, friends. We became the closest thing to family for one another since our families had been taken from us by the war. We split up a lot but I found myself in the company of one or more of the others more often than I was alone.

That particular day I'd been grounded for over a week. Duo had nearly been hospitalized (I think he should have been, but he insisted on staying away from proper medical attention) and I'd been instructed to stay where I was until I heard from someone. Two days after that, Wu Fei had shown up looking worse for wear, saying that he'd been told he could find rest and help here. Things had settled down and for the moment, no one was killing anyone else.

Wu Fei was back on his feet the next day and practicing with his sword shortly afterwards, though he shouldn't have been. I watched him sometimes, lunging and parrying against an invisible opponent. He never asked for me to join. He wanted to believe that he could stand alone but he spent the majority of his time chasing after people. I know that he liked to spend time with the rest of us, even if he would never admit it. He didn't have to; he was the sort of person that would leave if he was somewhere he didn't want to be.

Still, he kept to himself for the most part. His past, I think, haunted him more than he wanted to admit. There was one time, shortly after I'd first met him, that he had spoken to me quite truthfully. He'd been laying on the couch thinking to himself while I was playing my violin and out of nowhere he'd said: "I was married once."

It had surprised me, because I knew that Wu Fei had peculiar beliefs about women, always harping to them about being stronger. If there had been a woman who could strike Wu Fei's fancy, I had no doubts that she had been impressive.

That was the day he'd hesitantly told me about Meiran and about how she had died, how his clan had been destroyed. My heart broke for him, for everything he had been through, everything he had survived. It was the most he'd ever spoken to me and I think probably the most he had spoken to anyone in a long time. He spoke like he'd gotten tired of being angry, like he had gotten tired of everything.

He disappeared that night and the next time I saw him he was every bit as bitter and opinionated as ever. Since then it has only been on the rare occasions where the emotion would flicker through his eyes that I've known that afternoon was real; that there was more to him than met the eyes or ears.

Now he spent most of his time hunting down Treize Khushrenada. He spent so much of his time fighting or training to fight Treize it was a wonder the both of them were still alive. But Treize kept on beating him and letting him go and Wu Fei just kept training and going back for more. Of course, I don't think either of them really wanted the other dead; they didn't hate each other, not for real. I could see it at least in Wu Fei whenever he spoke of Treize- there was a light to his eyes that spoke volumes about his true feelings. He had found someone strong, someone who could fight him, beat him; someone who could give him the retribution he thought he deserved for losing Meiran.

There had been one night Treize hadn't let him go. He hadn't held him prisoner or hurt him… at least not physically. I'd been the first to see him after that.

It was the same afternoon I heard about Meiran.

So we were here again, such a long time later, still alive and fighting. Wu Fei was fencing the ghosts of his past in my courtyard while I stood by silently and watched the sun set behind him. He lunged and parried, dipped and rolled, each swing more determined than the last. It was so strange to see, like watching a movie you've already seen with the sound off and the lights dimmed. He was alone again, wrapped up in a world he hated and obsessed over at the same time.

He was startled when his foil met mine on a turnaround, the clash of the thin blades deafeningly loud in the quiet of dusk. I smiled, sliding my steel blade along the length of his. "Do you mind if I join you?"

"I didn't know you could fence," he said guardedly, watching the edges of our foils pull apart with a metallic hiss.

"You never asked," I said simply, separating us. "Would you like to?"

His eyes ran over me for a second and I knew that he was considering my looks- I didn't seem like anyone particularly challenging. I was small even for our age and I've been told more than once that I'm deceptively innocent looking. Despite that I was good with a sword, maybe even as good as he was. For a split second I thought he might turn down the offer but with liquid grace he dropped into a guard stance and waited, giving a silent invitation for me to join. I nodded and slipped into my own beginning stance.

"Ready?" he asked, a pleasant note to his normally sour tone.

"When you are," I murmured, muscles tensing in anticipation.

The first hit, when it came, was clearly a test that I met as easily as if I'd been fencing a grade school child. It was light and slid just the right amount as he pushed before separation. I found my grip tightening reflexively as the blades met a second time and the first dizzying feeling of adrenaline-powered excitement surfaced. Neither of us was wearing proper fencing gear, but then Wu Fei had been practicing with a beginner's button-tipped foil and I'd chosen mine to match so neither of us would be hurt.

I can't recall how long we fenced, but the sun had long set and the stars were bright in the full moon sky by the time we stopped. The summer air had done nothing to cool either of us and I could see the shine on his skin reflected with moonlight. I smiled as our hands fell to our sides at the same time and the glimmer of a smile crossed his features as well. Wiping across my brow with the back of my wrist, I motioned none-too-subtly toward the house.

"You missed dinner earlier," I said quietly, tucking my sword so that I could remove my gloves.

"I wasn't hungry." He turned eyes to the sky and sighed tiredly. Silence surrounded us; the desert had little to say most nights. "I needed to think alone." I traced my vision up along his gaze to where he watched the stars and I knew then why he had wanted to be so alone.

When he looked to the stars he didn't see what normal people saw.

He didn't see burning stars and empty space. He didn't see the large dots of light that were the colonies, revolving around Earth ever so slowly as they had done for all our lives. When he looked to the sky he saw the fights he'd had there. He saw the people he'd lost, all the people he'd tried so hard to save, the people he killed; he saw everything he'd done and everything he still had to do. Amongst the stars in the sky he saw a world that only a handful of people had ever touched; a world only a few people understood.

When he looked to the skies, he saw all the same things as I did and thought all of the same frightening thoughts.

"And now?" I asked, not sure if I was still talking about being hungry.

He huffed, nearly laughter, and turned to look at me. I knew he saw the same things in me as he did when he looked to the sky; he knew that we were inexorably part of the same, closed-off little world. "Yeah," he said slowly. "I'm a little hungry."

I smiled again and turned for the house, his soft footfalls following mine. True that our world was small. It was wrought with things no one else wanted, things that scared most other people. But it was our world and as long as we few pilots, friends, family could keep it together, we'd make it.

/End Our World/

Notes:

Thanks for reading! This one was just chillin' in my 'unfinished' folder with a couple others and it took just a couple paragraphs and a little fixing till I could post so I went ahead.