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Title: System Shutdown
Author: NinthFeather
Beta: StormyMonday
Rating: K+
Characters: Tieria Erde
Summary: If that's what it meant to have a past, Tieria didn't want one.
WARNINGS: Spoilers for the end of Season 1, mentions of character death, angst.
Disclaimer: Unless having a plushie replica of Exia counts, I do not own.
AN – Takes place in the four-year interim between Season One and Season Two. I love Tieria, but he can be really hard to write.
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"If that man is being corrupted by the thing he calls a past, then he needs to purify himself with his own hands."
Tieria had said that, once, during the intervention involving the HRL's Super-Soldier Institute. But now…now, he needed to take his own advice.
He hadn't really understood, then, why Allelujah's past was able to affect his actions. In fact, he hadn't really understood the idea of "having a past" until the few tense moments on that island, with Neil's gun pointed at Setsuna's head, had opened his eyes to what a human's past was.
He had always thought of a person's past as nothing more than a single aspect of a human's multifaceted operating systems, a few lines of the code that operated their brains which could easily be isolated and excluded from certain actions.
But a past was not a simple piece of code. It was a virus, a very well-designed virus, one that easily wormed its way into every aspect of their individual programs and could not be dislodged while they were still operating. It could impede or alter any or every process that they engaged in.
As soon as he realized that, he made a decision—if that was what it meant to have a past, he didn't want one. Celestial Being's members already had enough trouble without another person whose past caused malfunctions.
Unfortunately for that plan, Fallen Angels had occurred. And Tieria had been left with this brand-new emotion that Sumeragi referred to as grief.
While he was not sure it constituted a past, per say, it seemed to possess similar destructive capabilities to one. His function was not just impeded, it was all but eliminated. He just wanted to lose himself in Veda and forget everything…but he didn't even have the ability to do that anymore, not with the link to Veda gone.
When he had spoken of Allelujah's past, he had said that his fellow Meister was being "corrupted" by it. "Corroded" might have been a better word, however, because this felt like slow, steady degradation, consuming him from within.
But even if that was true, even if that was how he felt, he had no excuse. Neil had lost people too, and he had gone on living and fighting and being more cheerful, most of the time, than he had any right to be.
Tieria wasn't sure he could achieve the former Lockon Stratos's levels of geniality. But perhaps he could settle for working to regain his ability to function at a normal level.
Yes, if he himself was being corrupted by this thing he called a past, then he, too, would purify himself with his own hands. That was what it meant to be a Gundam Meister.
Tieria suspected that was what it meant to be a human, as well.
Inconsequential A/N: I would love to see a list of all the things that Gundam characters from all the various time lines have proclaimed to be "the meaning of being a Gundam/Gundam pilot," just because I think it would be a long, diverse, and rather amusing list.