The only thing I have to show for my experience, the life I led in those years before silence, is the knowledge that history will not look kindly on me and those I cheered with.
He ran his hand along the bindings of the books as he passed the bookshelf, books of wars long past. Books that had not been read in the years since he watched a war for himself, but books he could not sell. How could anyone sell all that was left of a time without guilt, a time when life could be taken for granted, a time when teenage boys did not make him avert his eyes and make him wonder if they had learned? Would they make the same mistakes as their fathers, he would ask each time, and do they know enough? Can I let them walk away without teaching them?
Humans never learn. Mistakes will always occur, and we will always know what we might have done to stop them. And it will always be too late. We, the witless lambs flocking together into a den of wolves... This generation of space-dwellers will go down in history as fools who abandoned their shepards for a short calm.
The streets were quiet, as they well should have been. Just as many people were there, going about their business, but voices stayed hushed and few people had anything to smile about. Perhaps the quiet wasn't from a lack of noise in itself, but from the lack of laughter. Humor was difficult to uncover on this day, even when the colonies had little left to weep over.
After the 190's, colonies in L2 had begun cleaning themselves up. No one could guarentee that new young orphans and runaways weren't hiding in the crevices of the colonies, but if they were, they were doing a wonderful job of keeping themselves unnoticed. Most children, abandoned or otherwise parentless, were accounted for. Foundation after foundation, in the name of Death, saved lives
The man nodded his head to another in passing and crossed the road. Out of habit, his hand rested briefly on the statue, but before he could pull it away he caught himself and held it there, rubbing his fingers into the groove around the knee. While he didn't doubt the colony's citizens wouldn't have minded a life-size replica, the orphanage settled for a scale model.
I remember every curse my older brother and I threw at the image on the screen, refusing to acknowledge the beauty hidden beneath the bloodstains, and every exalted shout of those around us. But in the back of my mind, when I search and when I dream, there is also a cry of anguish. Enemy of the peace, we accused, while the peace cried behind us.
Wails met his ears as soon as he opened the door. The man watched as a boy, thirteen years old in the face, twenty-seven in the eyes, picked a sobbing toddler up from the floor and dusted the child's knees, crooning comforts until the tears stopped and his face's pink tinge might have been a result of playing too hard.
"He's clumsy," Gabriel said affectionately as the man approached him. "I'm sure he'll grow out of it, though, aren't you?"
"Yes," he said. "I'm sure he will. You fell down all the time when you were his age." They shared quiet smiles that might have been laughs on another day, until another boy called for Gabriel to come into the back room. The man followed them, as did anyone old enough to care, and watched a few minutes of the carefully monitored boxing match before heading for his office. Gabriel would win, and then he would go to his bunk and study; the boy dreamed of the Preventers. No amount of subtle nudging had changed his determination, and eventually the man told the instructors to let him be.
It's always the little ones, he thought as he sat down at his desk to sift through records. He didn't doubt that Gabriel would make it if the boy kept trying as hard as he did, and he felt much better knowing the peace of the infants currently in his care would be handled by the men boys like Gabriel grew into.
And if peace, as he feared, could never be permanent, then the war that would scar those infants would also be handled by those men. The thought wasn't so comforting as the first, but better than nothing. A world without gundams was wonderful, but a world without gundam pilots...
He turned on the television, to a rerun of a documentary most L2 citizens knew by heart. He saw the explosion, heard the cheers and the vague, distant cry; watched the battle footage and the way he hung between his captors like a broken doll. The black gundam, the black preacher's clothing, the river of black umbrellas as the colony's artificial tears fell real and soft on a casket.
We called them demons. Demons don't die.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-John Stuart Mill