Note: This is the story of Quatre's past, covering everything that happens before, during, and after the Manga 'Episode Zero.' You don't need to read that to understand this. Also, there is some strong language (From Quatre of all people!) Please read my other fic, "The Awakening" first! Oh yeah, and please Read & Review!!!
Disconnect - Part I
By Zero's Wings
Through the Palladian windows with gold panels, into a beautiful Victorian-style mansion, the intricate crown molding, the massive, embroidered draperies, a queen-sized bed with gold and ruby colored weavings upon a coverlet, and below a huge, feathersoft mattress.
In the bed, nearly consumed by it, was the form of a thin, pale woman who seemed so fragile that she could break to pieces in your arms like a porcelain doll. Her face was like a porcelain doll as well, soft, delicate, and flawlessly beautiful. Two narrow tufts of golden hair fell down around her face, soaked with the sweat of her intense labor. She could be heard moaning softly under the sheets of her bed.
The woman's husband, and tall, dark, man of a mixed European and Arabian descent. He stood at the frail woman's bedside, holding their newborn son. He was trying to mask his anger, but his body shook with fury nonetheless.
"I've never seen a woman as rash as you! You knew that giving birth to this child would cost you your life." She tried to answer, but was nearly too weak to even speak.
"But...I wanted to have your child..." Her voice was as sweet as the sundrop dew of a morning in July.
A moment later, the gorgeous face fell and her eyes closed. She had died. One of the servants beside her mouthed this silently to the husband. Tears were streaming down the faces of everyone in the room, including those of the Winner families' first and only newborn son.
The other children of the Winner family were all test-tube babies, all female. The family had reproductive abnormalities since they moved to the artificial environment of the colonies. No one before Miss Quaterine had attempting a natural birth since the first generation of Winner colonists. The cause of her mixing waves of pain and joy, her son, Quatre, had a soft face and blond hair, like his mother. He was bawling loudly.
"That's right, Quatre. Go ahead and cry. Your mother was a proud woman. And you killed her." The furious husband whispered this close to the child's face, his voice wavering and rough with bitterness.
The man handed the sobbing child to a servant and left the room, angry and confused.
12 years later...
Huge oil derricks rose up on the horizon like dead, blackened trees, twisted into x-shaped grids that scarred the artificial clouds in the loop-the-loop sky. A barren colony. The infertile mother hiding in shame in the corner of the nursery. The desert place. The shit hole of the universe, Quatre thought bitterly. He had fought with his father for long enough. As he looked to the draining wastelands of his father's natural resource satellite, he thought of his birth, his soulless, empty birth in a tube.
Mothers of this colony were infertile, perhaps because god would not let children be born in such a miserable place. But people don't care about that, do they? No, their selfishness will be restrained by no one, not even the will of god himself.
Quatre watched as the oil pumps rocked back and forth, pivoting like lovers in mid-coitus. He was a rich son, but a neglected one. He and his forty-seven sisters were regarded as lower forms of humanity, having been conceived by artificial means. They were disposable tools, expendable servants, and he, the lowly, bastard son.
Even though he was careless and callous, Quatre's kind heart could not be buried by his cruelly chosen life condition.
"Father..." he sighed, looking to the stars. His face was warm and gentle now. He raised the detonation switch that had been in his hand and his expression hardened. "...fuck you."
He pressed the trigger.
Almost instantly, the oil fields around him erupted into a sea of flame. His father's fortune on this colony had vanished in an instant. Quatre had no reason to stay; his father had already disowned him after their big fight. It was all over now.
*****
A small, gracefully designed shuttle sailed through the vacuum of space. It was in the shape of a teardrop and had a swooping neck like a brilliant, white egret. On board were Quatre and his entourage of servants and advisors. The young boy was wearing a black, formal-wear shirt with the collar turned up. The outfit was completed by a pair of brown slacks and a charcoal vest with gold buttons.
The spacecraft's co-pilot came into the cabin area and announced, to no one in particular, that the shuttle would reach Earth soon. Quatre started, his blue eyes flashing open in anger.
"Don't wake me again," he replied tersely, then began to fall back asleep.
The co-pilot went back to his control station. The advisors and bodyguards dispersed to various seats in the shuttle. As the co-pilot rejoined the pilot in the cockpit, he muttered: "Man, that kid sure has an attitude!"
"You should expect that from the next head of the Winner family. It's just the way that he looks down on people that bothers me. But don't let any of that bother you, he's just another test tube baby. All the Winner kids are."
"Disrespectful little shit..." the co-pilot muttered.
As the shuttle continued to fly along the path of Minovsky particles that acted like wind currents in the dead void of space, four larger ships began to close in on it. These ships were not fancy or appealing to one's aesthetic sense like Quatre's shuttle. They were practical, stripped down ships, probably freighters at some point, which had been equipped with heavy assault weapons.
One of the ships flew in very close to the shuttle and its front opened and formed a telescopic gateway between the two ships. The passage's automatic systems pressurized it with oxygen. A group of large, burly men of Middle Eastern descent walked through.
The heavy, titanium door at the back of the shuttle began to rattle. A blinding light and a stream of sparks came through the sides of the door, and it fell of its hinges. The metal door hit the ground with a resounding thud and it sizzled with the heat of soldering. The men from the passage stepped on board the shuttle and leveled sub-machine guns at the crew and passengers. The man at the front of their group stepped forward and spoke in a deep, commanding voice.
"We claim this ship and all aboard in the name of the Maguanac corps! All hostages must quickly proceed through the passageway back to our ship."
Quatre was startled awake by the man's thunderous voice. "What the hell's going on here? Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?!" A large man wearing desert gear and a small fez strode up to Quatre and hit the boy in the stomach with the but of is rifle. Quatre slumped down in his seat, groaning thinly with the wind knocked out of his lungs, then quickly regained his composure and stared up at the man who had hit him.
"Get going, brat!" The man grabbed Quatre by the collar and hauled him out of the ship. Most of the Maguanacs left the ship immediately, but a few, including the leader, stayed behind and began to roughly search the ship.
As Quatre observed all of this with a passing interest, the Maguanacs were busily preparing their ship for de-insertion procedures. A glowing monitor on the new ship's bridge flashed to life above Quatre's head. The leader spoke to the man who had hit Quatre with his rifle.
"Audah, this is just a civilian shuttle. It's totally devoid of weapons and there isn't any fuel on board either."
"That's not surprising," Quatre muttered. "We were just about to land on Earth anyway."
"Keep quiet, boy!" Audah hissed.
"I say we scuttle the craft and leave before the Alliance military shows up." The leader turned off his comm signal and started back through the tubular walkway between the two ships.
When he returned with his men, the rest of the Maguanacs greeted him as though they hadn't laid eyes on each other for months and it was cause for celebration. They hugged and sang merrily and laughed together as their ship disengaged from the empty shuttle.
Quatre flinched as all four of the Maguanac ships trained their forward guns to the beautifully crafted, Winner family shuttle and fired. It exploded in a blinding flash of light and was gone, nothing but floating ash and debris. Quatre scowled and turned away. He had always been fond of that ship.
*****
The Maguanacs took their ships to the only safe haven they knew of in the Earth Sphere: The natural resource satellite called MO-III.
The workers at MO-III were mostly criminals and people that the Alliance had banished due to their anti-governmental sentiments. There was supposedly an elaborate labor union supporting the workers, but that was just an Alliance cover story. The truth of the matter was, all the people on MO-III were treated like slaves. Most had ironically become hostages when the Maguanacs made the resource satellite their headquarters, but this was actually a step up in their lives' conditions. This was because the Maguanacs promised that, after their demands were met; they would return all their hostages to their respective homes on Earth. That was the secret goal of the corps as well, to simply return home; they were not interested in a revolution.
The various people that the Maguanacs had captured on their ships and on the resource satellite were rounded up into large groups, each watched over by a man toting a threat-ening automatic rifle.
After being huddled together with a colorful variety of people from the satellite and elsewhere, Quatre found the courage to approach the Maguanac leader. He needed to know this man's intentions.
Rasid, the leader of the corps, was a giant of a man, of mixed middle-eastern descent with a sharp, blocky, ex-military style haircut. His face was tightly drawn with a square jaw and an abruptly pointed chin.
"I'm Quatre Raberba Winner," the boy said meekly, as opposed to his usually intense and haughty tone.
"I don't care," Rasid growled, brushing past him
"Wait!" Quatre cried.
"Listen, kid!" the Maguanac leader turned around fiercely, "You aren't being pampered in one of your father's mansions anymore. I have my own problems, and I don't have the time, patience, or interest to deal with any of yours. So stay out of my way, unless you want to be shoved out the nearest airlock!" Quatre stumbled backwards, unsettled. No one had ever spoken to him that way, not even his father during their big fight that had led to Quatre's estrangement from the Winner family. Rasid turned around and kept walking. A group of Maguanacs joined him, all chattering at once about something or other. Amazingly, he seemed to be able to take in everything they had to say simultaneously, and respond to each man in turn.
"But I just want to know what you're going to do with me!" Quatre called out, but the man was already too far away to hear him. The Maguanac named Audah walked up to Quatre, shouldered his rifle, and spit.
"You're our hostage, at least until we find safe passage to Earth."
"How convenient," Quatre said, "I was headed for Earth, as well."
"I hate to tell ya this, kid, but we're probably gonna leave you here. You aren't of any use to us; you're just a kid. You're extra baggage."
"That's not true," Quatre protested, "I learned how to pilot a mobile suit out in the desert of my colony. No one in the whole town could beat me one-on-one!"
"Is that so?" Audah mused, rubbing the remnants of a shaved-off goatee on his chin. "Well, I'll think about it. Until then, you just stay quiet and out of Rasid's way. He's got enough to worry about. C'mon, I'll show you to your cell."
Audah led Quatre to a cramped, little room with metal walls and a ceiling that stretched up nearly fifteen feet. Inside was a boy, about Quatre's age, sitting cross-legged in the corner. He was dressed in a clown costume.
"Hey clown!" Audah yelled, "I got a cell mate for you!" He shoved Quatre in and closed the thick steel door. It locked automatically.
Quatre sat down and tried to strike up a conversation with his new cellmate. The boy clown remained silent the entire time. The boy didn't begin to talk until Quatre had nearly fallen asleep and even then, the boy spoke in hushed tones, quickly and succinctly, and his expression did not change.
These Maguanacs are fools," he said, not in anger, but with perfect emotional detachment and cold, scalpel-sharp observation. "They let emotions play as a factor in each of their missions. Very unprofessional. They are careless, too. I'll escape soon."
"They seem nice to me," Quatre replied diplomatically.
"They kidnapped you, how can you feel that way?"
"I don't know. They just don't seem to mean any harm, and they said that they might even bring me to Earth with them," Quatre said hopefully.
"Well, unlike you, I don't want to go to the Earth. I was just fine where I was."
"Working as a clown?"
"Yes, with a traveling circus. My sister is there as well."
"Oh, that must be nice," Quatre said. "Is she here as well?"
"No, she had the good sense to escape when the Maguancs came to loot our vessels. We travel to different colonies with the circus, and they caught us off guard when we were in transit."
Quatre yawned and found himself struggling not to fall asleep. He closed his eyes for a few minutes, but opened them again before he really started to drift off. That was when he noticed that the boy who had been in the cell was gone.
"Hmm...and I didn't even get to know his name," Quatre muttered in disappointment. Then he heard a voice echoing above him.
"That's okay," the boy yelled down to Quatre, his voice reverberating off the metal walls somewhere above. "I don't have one."
Quatre looked up and saw a metal grate swing shut about twelve feet over his head.
How the hell did he get all the way up there? Quatre wondered, and then he slid down against the wall and fell asleep in the darkness of the cell.
Disconnect - Part I
By Zero's Wings
Through the Palladian windows with gold panels, into a beautiful Victorian-style mansion, the intricate crown molding, the massive, embroidered draperies, a queen-sized bed with gold and ruby colored weavings upon a coverlet, and below a huge, feathersoft mattress.
In the bed, nearly consumed by it, was the form of a thin, pale woman who seemed so fragile that she could break to pieces in your arms like a porcelain doll. Her face was like a porcelain doll as well, soft, delicate, and flawlessly beautiful. Two narrow tufts of golden hair fell down around her face, soaked with the sweat of her intense labor. She could be heard moaning softly under the sheets of her bed.
The woman's husband, and tall, dark, man of a mixed European and Arabian descent. He stood at the frail woman's bedside, holding their newborn son. He was trying to mask his anger, but his body shook with fury nonetheless.
"I've never seen a woman as rash as you! You knew that giving birth to this child would cost you your life." She tried to answer, but was nearly too weak to even speak.
"But...I wanted to have your child..." Her voice was as sweet as the sundrop dew of a morning in July.
A moment later, the gorgeous face fell and her eyes closed. She had died. One of the servants beside her mouthed this silently to the husband. Tears were streaming down the faces of everyone in the room, including those of the Winner families' first and only newborn son.
The other children of the Winner family were all test-tube babies, all female. The family had reproductive abnormalities since they moved to the artificial environment of the colonies. No one before Miss Quaterine had attempting a natural birth since the first generation of Winner colonists. The cause of her mixing waves of pain and joy, her son, Quatre, had a soft face and blond hair, like his mother. He was bawling loudly.
"That's right, Quatre. Go ahead and cry. Your mother was a proud woman. And you killed her." The furious husband whispered this close to the child's face, his voice wavering and rough with bitterness.
The man handed the sobbing child to a servant and left the room, angry and confused.
12 years later...
Huge oil derricks rose up on the horizon like dead, blackened trees, twisted into x-shaped grids that scarred the artificial clouds in the loop-the-loop sky. A barren colony. The infertile mother hiding in shame in the corner of the nursery. The desert place. The shit hole of the universe, Quatre thought bitterly. He had fought with his father for long enough. As he looked to the draining wastelands of his father's natural resource satellite, he thought of his birth, his soulless, empty birth in a tube.
Mothers of this colony were infertile, perhaps because god would not let children be born in such a miserable place. But people don't care about that, do they? No, their selfishness will be restrained by no one, not even the will of god himself.
Quatre watched as the oil pumps rocked back and forth, pivoting like lovers in mid-coitus. He was a rich son, but a neglected one. He and his forty-seven sisters were regarded as lower forms of humanity, having been conceived by artificial means. They were disposable tools, expendable servants, and he, the lowly, bastard son.
Even though he was careless and callous, Quatre's kind heart could not be buried by his cruelly chosen life condition.
"Father..." he sighed, looking to the stars. His face was warm and gentle now. He raised the detonation switch that had been in his hand and his expression hardened. "...fuck you."
He pressed the trigger.
Almost instantly, the oil fields around him erupted into a sea of flame. His father's fortune on this colony had vanished in an instant. Quatre had no reason to stay; his father had already disowned him after their big fight. It was all over now.
*****
A small, gracefully designed shuttle sailed through the vacuum of space. It was in the shape of a teardrop and had a swooping neck like a brilliant, white egret. On board were Quatre and his entourage of servants and advisors. The young boy was wearing a black, formal-wear shirt with the collar turned up. The outfit was completed by a pair of brown slacks and a charcoal vest with gold buttons.
The spacecraft's co-pilot came into the cabin area and announced, to no one in particular, that the shuttle would reach Earth soon. Quatre started, his blue eyes flashing open in anger.
"Don't wake me again," he replied tersely, then began to fall back asleep.
The co-pilot went back to his control station. The advisors and bodyguards dispersed to various seats in the shuttle. As the co-pilot rejoined the pilot in the cockpit, he muttered: "Man, that kid sure has an attitude!"
"You should expect that from the next head of the Winner family. It's just the way that he looks down on people that bothers me. But don't let any of that bother you, he's just another test tube baby. All the Winner kids are."
"Disrespectful little shit..." the co-pilot muttered.
As the shuttle continued to fly along the path of Minovsky particles that acted like wind currents in the dead void of space, four larger ships began to close in on it. These ships were not fancy or appealing to one's aesthetic sense like Quatre's shuttle. They were practical, stripped down ships, probably freighters at some point, which had been equipped with heavy assault weapons.
One of the ships flew in very close to the shuttle and its front opened and formed a telescopic gateway between the two ships. The passage's automatic systems pressurized it with oxygen. A group of large, burly men of Middle Eastern descent walked through.
The heavy, titanium door at the back of the shuttle began to rattle. A blinding light and a stream of sparks came through the sides of the door, and it fell of its hinges. The metal door hit the ground with a resounding thud and it sizzled with the heat of soldering. The men from the passage stepped on board the shuttle and leveled sub-machine guns at the crew and passengers. The man at the front of their group stepped forward and spoke in a deep, commanding voice.
"We claim this ship and all aboard in the name of the Maguanac corps! All hostages must quickly proceed through the passageway back to our ship."
Quatre was startled awake by the man's thunderous voice. "What the hell's going on here? Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?!" A large man wearing desert gear and a small fez strode up to Quatre and hit the boy in the stomach with the but of is rifle. Quatre slumped down in his seat, groaning thinly with the wind knocked out of his lungs, then quickly regained his composure and stared up at the man who had hit him.
"Get going, brat!" The man grabbed Quatre by the collar and hauled him out of the ship. Most of the Maguanacs left the ship immediately, but a few, including the leader, stayed behind and began to roughly search the ship.
As Quatre observed all of this with a passing interest, the Maguanacs were busily preparing their ship for de-insertion procedures. A glowing monitor on the new ship's bridge flashed to life above Quatre's head. The leader spoke to the man who had hit Quatre with his rifle.
"Audah, this is just a civilian shuttle. It's totally devoid of weapons and there isn't any fuel on board either."
"That's not surprising," Quatre muttered. "We were just about to land on Earth anyway."
"Keep quiet, boy!" Audah hissed.
"I say we scuttle the craft and leave before the Alliance military shows up." The leader turned off his comm signal and started back through the tubular walkway between the two ships.
When he returned with his men, the rest of the Maguanacs greeted him as though they hadn't laid eyes on each other for months and it was cause for celebration. They hugged and sang merrily and laughed together as their ship disengaged from the empty shuttle.
Quatre flinched as all four of the Maguanac ships trained their forward guns to the beautifully crafted, Winner family shuttle and fired. It exploded in a blinding flash of light and was gone, nothing but floating ash and debris. Quatre scowled and turned away. He had always been fond of that ship.
*****
The Maguanacs took their ships to the only safe haven they knew of in the Earth Sphere: The natural resource satellite called MO-III.
The workers at MO-III were mostly criminals and people that the Alliance had banished due to their anti-governmental sentiments. There was supposedly an elaborate labor union supporting the workers, but that was just an Alliance cover story. The truth of the matter was, all the people on MO-III were treated like slaves. Most had ironically become hostages when the Maguanacs made the resource satellite their headquarters, but this was actually a step up in their lives' conditions. This was because the Maguanacs promised that, after their demands were met; they would return all their hostages to their respective homes on Earth. That was the secret goal of the corps as well, to simply return home; they were not interested in a revolution.
The various people that the Maguanacs had captured on their ships and on the resource satellite were rounded up into large groups, each watched over by a man toting a threat-ening automatic rifle.
After being huddled together with a colorful variety of people from the satellite and elsewhere, Quatre found the courage to approach the Maguanac leader. He needed to know this man's intentions.
Rasid, the leader of the corps, was a giant of a man, of mixed middle-eastern descent with a sharp, blocky, ex-military style haircut. His face was tightly drawn with a square jaw and an abruptly pointed chin.
"I'm Quatre Raberba Winner," the boy said meekly, as opposed to his usually intense and haughty tone.
"I don't care," Rasid growled, brushing past him
"Wait!" Quatre cried.
"Listen, kid!" the Maguanac leader turned around fiercely, "You aren't being pampered in one of your father's mansions anymore. I have my own problems, and I don't have the time, patience, or interest to deal with any of yours. So stay out of my way, unless you want to be shoved out the nearest airlock!" Quatre stumbled backwards, unsettled. No one had ever spoken to him that way, not even his father during their big fight that had led to Quatre's estrangement from the Winner family. Rasid turned around and kept walking. A group of Maguanacs joined him, all chattering at once about something or other. Amazingly, he seemed to be able to take in everything they had to say simultaneously, and respond to each man in turn.
"But I just want to know what you're going to do with me!" Quatre called out, but the man was already too far away to hear him. The Maguanac named Audah walked up to Quatre, shouldered his rifle, and spit.
"You're our hostage, at least until we find safe passage to Earth."
"How convenient," Quatre said, "I was headed for Earth, as well."
"I hate to tell ya this, kid, but we're probably gonna leave you here. You aren't of any use to us; you're just a kid. You're extra baggage."
"That's not true," Quatre protested, "I learned how to pilot a mobile suit out in the desert of my colony. No one in the whole town could beat me one-on-one!"
"Is that so?" Audah mused, rubbing the remnants of a shaved-off goatee on his chin. "Well, I'll think about it. Until then, you just stay quiet and out of Rasid's way. He's got enough to worry about. C'mon, I'll show you to your cell."
Audah led Quatre to a cramped, little room with metal walls and a ceiling that stretched up nearly fifteen feet. Inside was a boy, about Quatre's age, sitting cross-legged in the corner. He was dressed in a clown costume.
"Hey clown!" Audah yelled, "I got a cell mate for you!" He shoved Quatre in and closed the thick steel door. It locked automatically.
Quatre sat down and tried to strike up a conversation with his new cellmate. The boy clown remained silent the entire time. The boy didn't begin to talk until Quatre had nearly fallen asleep and even then, the boy spoke in hushed tones, quickly and succinctly, and his expression did not change.
These Maguanacs are fools," he said, not in anger, but with perfect emotional detachment and cold, scalpel-sharp observation. "They let emotions play as a factor in each of their missions. Very unprofessional. They are careless, too. I'll escape soon."
"They seem nice to me," Quatre replied diplomatically.
"They kidnapped you, how can you feel that way?"
"I don't know. They just don't seem to mean any harm, and they said that they might even bring me to Earth with them," Quatre said hopefully.
"Well, unlike you, I don't want to go to the Earth. I was just fine where I was."
"Working as a clown?"
"Yes, with a traveling circus. My sister is there as well."
"Oh, that must be nice," Quatre said. "Is she here as well?"
"No, she had the good sense to escape when the Maguancs came to loot our vessels. We travel to different colonies with the circus, and they caught us off guard when we were in transit."
Quatre yawned and found himself struggling not to fall asleep. He closed his eyes for a few minutes, but opened them again before he really started to drift off. That was when he noticed that the boy who had been in the cell was gone.
"Hmm...and I didn't even get to know his name," Quatre muttered in disappointment. Then he heard a voice echoing above him.
"That's okay," the boy yelled down to Quatre, his voice reverberating off the metal walls somewhere above. "I don't have one."
Quatre looked up and saw a metal grate swing shut about twelve feet over his head.
How the hell did he get all the way up there? Quatre wondered, and then he slid down against the wall and fell asleep in the darkness of the cell.