Turn the Blade
by étienneofthewestwind
Summary: Major AU & Witchblade Crossover: A civil war turned into an ethnic conflict that scorched a world. One soldier's mastery of an ancient artifact allowed her to change a key event. But without her memory, will she counteract her change? Kira/Flay, Katherine/Lucas
Disclaimer: Gundam Seed belongs to Bandai and various related entities, not me. All I can claim is my skewering of the original universe. Witchblade isn't mine either. I've never read the manga or original comics, nor seen the anime. Therefore, anything about the blade herein is either from the TNT series or created by me to fit the Seed frame.
Alarms blared through the cockpit of the trashed mobile suit. Unable to move her legs, the pilot stared dully at the monitor. Debris filled the surrounding space: pieces of mobile armors, mobile suits, warships... and colonies. Half the PLANTs no longer existed. Of the remaining half, half showed enough structural damage to be uninhabitable. None of the colonies that made Junius City survived. Without their agricultural colonies, the PLANTs' survivors would be at the mercy of those on Earth.
And mercy ran out on both sides long ago.
If the earth can even produce food, anyway, she thought as her green eyes drifted to the display of Earth. Once a beautiful orb of white marbled over blue seas and recognizable continents of green and brown, the earth now resembled a ball of muddy cotton. The GENESIS strike on Washington had thrown so much crap into the atmosphere, that the surface might not see sunlight for years.
She felt the stone in that damned bracelet heat up. Visions swarmed her:
Huge arrays of ultraviolet lamps damaged by thieves after the food they nurtured...
People and animals suffering from radiation poisoning...
Arctic temperatures in the tropics...
Malnutrition causing disease in Natural and Coordinator alike...
Riots...
PLANT warring against PLANT for scant resources...
Rampant piracy...
Refugees fleeing to the Mars colony. The colony refusing admittance...
"DAMN BRACLET!" she snarled. She slammed the top of her wrist into the cockpit wall. Even without the padding of her pressure suit, she could not have cracked the red gem. "DON'T SHOW ME THIS!" The pilot swung her arm again, pushing with her legs for more force.
Emerald green eyes widened as she realized what she had done. "No!" she breathed. "Don't make me live through that!"
Abruptly, she found herself standing in the void of space. The earth and wreckage vanished. While she still wore her red and white flight suit, her helmet had disappeared. Short, dark blue hair lay plastered to her skin from the sweat of her recent battle. A silver clip shaped like a cat in mid-leap held her bangs to the left.
"Katherine," a familiar voice called. The young woman turned.
Someone who looked exactly like her mother stood there. The blue haired woman wore an AD 1920's flapper dress and stood over the planet Jupiter. A colony sat in orbit around the gas giant. "Behold," the woman instructed, rotating a finger in a clockwise circle as the colony exploded. "Time turns--" her finger reversed course-- "both ways." The colony reformed.
"This is a one-time power." A teenage boy had appeared on Katherine's left. The same age as the pilot, the young man wore a high quality green kimono with yellow embroidered dragons. The bangs of his brown hair hung around his eyes. "And you may only remember very little."
Katherine turned around and looked up, somehow knowing she would see the ruined Earth Sphere. "So all this could just happen again?"
"History is a complex beast," the amethyst-eyed boy replied. "Sometimes a change the size of a pebble affects the final outcome more than boulder-sized differences. The key is to find critical pebbles and fight to hold onto one or two."
"Then there is hope." Katherine turns to the young man. "The choice is obvious. This damn war wasn't worth it."
The boy shook his head. "Even if you could turn past the moment you bonded with the Witchblade, you could not prevent the war. Too many factors spawned it. At best, you'd have delayed it."
"The war was inevitable..." Katherine murmured as the faces of her lost comrades flashed through her mind. "...But not the outcome?" She met her companion's eyes with her own. He nodded. "I need to stop the N-Jammer Canceller's development," she said. Then she thought, And save you, if I can…
"Perhaps. When you tap into the power, it shall reveal when you need to go--and what to change."
Katherine opened her mouth to ask how to use the power, but the knowledge abruptly filled her awareness. She raised her right arm straight up--
"And Katherine." She looked at the boy. "I was nothing to this war. No individual is worth risking that." He gestured at the sullied Earth.
Emerald eyes locked with amethyst. "I know," she admitted. "I'm sorry."
"I know," the teen smiled. "Good luck."
A thin sword blade shot through the back of her white glove. Once fully extended, blue and purple lightning struck the sword and arced around Katherine in a sphere. The crackling energy grew stronger until the bottom of her mind unhinged.
Knowledge of everything assaulted her awareness: Infinite possibilities within infinite worlds. The soul's ability to exist in multiple dimensions and centuries at once. Interstellar societies. Post apocalyptic ninja cultures.
Dearka Elthman as a five-foot-two prima ballerina.
As the onslaught of images threatened to overwhelm her, the worlds she saw narrowed themselves to the ones most like her own. Some of those worlds had minor changes, such as Ezalia Jule having only one son. Others had larger differences, like the Bloody Valentine hitting a different colony, though still one of the food producers.
The wars had varying events and outcomes, but their paths paralleled her world's--until the day she bonded with the Witchblade. Some followed her world's violent march to extinction. Others split off in different directions, but patterns repeated. In one of those patterns, a certain brunette became something to the war.
The moment she decided her target, Katherine felt herself falling. The muck drained out of the earth's atmosphere. Shattered hourglasses healed into functional colonies. OMNI machines walked backwards from Victoria. Panama's mass driver grew into place; a hole in Alaska became a military base. The archipelago nation of Aube rose like a phoenix from its ashes. Resistance fighters prowled Africa. Chunks of shattered asteroid formed the Artemis base. Aube's resource satellite, Heliopolis, reassembled.
Katherine exited the cockpit of her suit. She swung the Witchblade as she ran backwards. Two people crouched for cover. Katherine leapt back--
Two enemies remained, though just the woman was armed. Katherine pushed forward, deflecting bullets with her gauntlet. One of the blocked bullets ricocheted off the mobile suit and hit the woman in the arm. She fell back, dropping her weapon. Katherine charged in for the kill.
The strangest combination of déjà vu and wrongness caused Katherine to slow her advance. With every step, the feeling grew, yet she could remember maintaining her sprint. And before she even realized--
"Kath… erine?"
Katherine turned her attention from the woman to the man. A boy her age, the unarmed soldier had messy brown hair and vibrant purple eyes. "Kira?" Katherine breathed incredulously as she stopped and took a step back. The brunette teen pulled away from the woman and stood staring back at the frozen Katherine.
The woman produced a handgun, and Katherine leapt backwards as she dodged the bullets. She raced towards the cockpit of the second suit. As she powered on the G-weapon--identified in its OS as X-303 Aegis--she saw the other suit activate through the flames engulfing the factory.
Shaking off the surreal feelings, Katherine Lenore Zala stood the humanoid robot up and piloted it away.