+++
"Are you certain this is the end?"
"More than certain. I'm sorry…"
"Don't be. We saw it coming."
+++
It's raining today. How fitting; the weather matches my mindset. Torrential waves of water are pounding the thatch houses and the palace of Cinq, uncertain in their purpose as thunder crashes overhead in time with the waves along the coast.
What year is it? What day? It's difficult to remember now. I pick up the calendar and toy with the paper. It's too old to be correct. Ah, here's the new one…It's A.C. 204, sometime in late May. That makes it seven years since it all started, a little more. I used to be able to remember dates so accurately, tell you what hour they happened, even…everything's changed. I feel so alone.
I'm sure this would have happened even if I hadn't been sent to prison. It wasn't a huge surprise, and the war criminals were housed separately. I was fortunate as well…I served only two of a seven-year term. I probably wouldn't have been much saner if I had been out in public anyway.
Preventers dissolved after the end of the trials. I remember hearing the department would be absorbed into something else. It hurt then…I was in prison at that time as well. It hurt like hell knowing I wouldn't have something solid to return to. But what did I expect? Lady Une was dead; she wasn't there to keep up the bureaucratic fight like she always did. God I miss her.
The therapist they assigned to all the prisoners would bug me about that. Ask me why I was still unable to sleep even after they pumped me so full of drugs it would have been toxic if I weren't used to it from my days in OZ. I told her a few weeks after I got out, I know she helped a good deal for my parole. No one trusted me…I supposed I owed enough to her to satisfy her curiosity.
I'd been silent on the phone for a few moments before responding. When I did I know I shocked her, although she could have thought…
"What keeps me up so much at night," I'd said, "is several things, always the same. It was watching one of my best friends be executed by firing squad. That in itself wasn't so bad, but I had to watch her try to smile at her daughter, because she was there, watching her mother be killed… And then five months later having to ID that girl's body when they pulled her out of a river, drowned, on one of her paternal relative's estates. Then the last thing…it was remembering that day here in Cinq, when I left to attend a meeting knowing that when I came back my husband would be dead…and I left anyway."
I hadn't waited for her falsely sympathetic answer, hanging up and disconnecting the comm unit on my desk. I'd finally been able to sleep that night - but my sleep was plagued with nightmares.
A flash of thunder hit a tree ten yards from my window; I barely flinched at the sound and sight of it. It was so irrelevant now…
Zechs had killed himself in the next room, here in the palace. I don't know how he did it; when I came home that evening it was almost as if he were asleep, after having finished the book in his hands. I don't think he wanted me to know how he killed himself…I don't think I want to know. We'd been married…had been after the appeals failed. Almost like a final proof to put on paper before he died. I'd known for a long while.
He'd done it a week before his trial. Most thought the act cowardly. I wasn't really sure what to think…when asked, I would answer flatly, "Let the dead bury the dead."
I suppose it applies.
Lady Une had been found guilty of nearly all of the charges against her, and I know they weren't all. She didn't hide or distort a thing, told of every crime she had ever committed and then expected no clemency for it. That had been why the public had such divided opinions about her punishment - she was admitting guilt, and expecting nothing. That was also why her trial was the most horrible of all.
In the end they'd decided to execute her. It had been painful when she asked me to help fulfill her last request. She wanted to die by a firing squad - a soldier's death.
I'd spoken to the head judge, Christina Novellum. She'd sighed, taken her glasses off, and spoke frankly as a human being.
"I respect her work, but we all consider her guilty. However, seeing as the crimes she is guilty of are crimes of an overzealous soldier, I'm sure I can convince them to let her die in that manner."
Zechs and I had to take care of Mariemaia while Une was in prison…we'd had her for possibly six months. The Mars Project had been entirely halted, the base practically abandoned. In the end, four years after the original charges in A.C. 197, she'd insisted on attending the execution; I felt later that had been the poor child's breaking point.
All 58 crimes, ranging from battery of a subordinate to orders causing civilian massacres, had been read before Une was killed, taking up nearly twenty painful minutes. There were five in the firing squad, two women and three men. The one with the bullet had been one of my cadets, I recognized him nearly automatically. I frequently wondered how he felt to be shooting the woman he had been taught to obey right along with Treize Khushrenada and their instructors.
Mariemaia hadn't cried when Une was shot. But I could see the anguish in her face, held her hand tightly and watched Zechs flinch when the guns were fired. Mariemaia had been shuffled around the homes of some of her father's relatives for a few months. Zechs and I could have possibly taken care of her; we were too busy dealing with the very lawsuits that had killed her mother.
Five months later they pulled her from a river at her great-aunt's home. They didn't have her dental records; I had to I.D. her. It was one of the most traumatizing things from the trials that I had to see. The government never had officially deemed it a suicide, just an accident. But they all knew.
Appeals for the amnesty and the beginning trials had taken three years. Sentences were summarily carried out in the next two…the justice system was so hopelessly inept they'd had to deal with everything quickly. I don't think many people could have been saved through appeals, certainly not Lady Une. There was nothing that could have convinced the Tribunal after their final sentence.
My own sentencing had also been accurate. Most of us were guilty, few were merely caught a long. I must commend the Tribunal in how efficiently they split the units up. The top officials were charged individually. OZ as a whole was charged in their units; the Alliance was charged as branches. The Federation was charged through ranks.
I remember one of my most serious charges was something I had talked vehemently about with Zechs the night of the amnesty trial, the violations of the Convention on the Rights of a Child.
I hadn't denied any of it.
If there was one thing General Treize Khushrenada had left his officers permanently ingrained with, it was to be honorable. Even the most despised and immoral of officers had told the complete truth on the stand. But along with Zechs, many had also committed suicide before they ever came to trial.
Sally had been acquitted. I haven't been able to find her or her partner Wufei. She hasn't been avoiding me, I know that…it's almost as if she dropped off the edge of the colonies. I don't know what happened.
Relena had picked me up when I got out. I've been here at Cinq for the past two weeks or so. She was tired, and even worse off than when I'd last seen her outside. Heero Yuy was still in prison.
I toy with the archaic, pretty gun in my hands, examining something I could see with my eyes closed.
Zechs had given it to me long ago, when I "lost" the decorative issue I'd received - the equivalent of the gold watch of old, something officers considered a possession to be proud of. He'd laughed when I told him, much to my annoyance.
A week later, after he'd left the base, he'd sent me a birthday present, well, two. The first was this gun. I knew it had been his, never asked where he'd gotten it from. Zechs had included the note: "I won't be offended if you 'lose' this one as well." Of course he'd known that would only make me take better care of it.I don't remember the second.
"How, ah, thoughtful…" Relena had stammered when I'd explained the weapon's origin, several years ago, when I was merely her guardian and not even officially resigned from OZ. When OZ still existed.
It's loaded, I know it is. My hand tightens around the trigger, a familiar position even as I haven't seen it in two years.
"Oneesan," Relena had started to tell me.
"I'm not your sister anymore, Relena-sama…"
"Maybe not legally. And my brother is dead. But I won't stop calling you that, oneesan. I wanted to let you know I'm fine by myself. Normally I would try to dissuade someone I consider a sister from this…but I understand. I won't, trust in that, but I won't stop you. I understand."
Does she really? No, she doesn't lie…even if she doesn't, she believes she does. It's quite possible Relena already understands.
I hesitate as I look over the familiar instrument of death again, and realize I don't care. I really don't.
The shot fires.
Yes well...I'm fully aware I killed most of the characters. Oh yeah, and if anyone wants to know what happened to the Gundam pilots I oh-so-conveniently forgot...I'll write a second epilogue, but you have to ask for it. (I don't like them that much, so I suppose it was arbitrary amnesia.)