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SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
A Daughter's Sacrifice: Duke Dermail

"Even if you take away all the weapons, you can't stop war.
You must change the hearts of the people."
--Dorothy Catalonia, Gundam Wing


Her soft footfalls made almost no noise on the plush carpet outside the study, but he knew she was there. He waited until he knew she was just at the door, ready to put her soft hand to the brass handle and pull it open soundlessly, before he straightened in his chair and addressed her.

"What is it, Dorothy?"

She laughed, the lilting, soft laugh which he had come to know so well, and one corner of his lips twitched despite himself. Whenever she laughed, it made him want to smile as well, though he had learned to repress the impulse.

"You're up late," she said. Snow was falling outside the window.

"As are you," he said. "Did you get those reports done?"

A soft sigh. "Yes, Grandfather."

She was behind his chair now. He could see her small shadow thrown out of proportion by the flickering fire in the fireplace, which gleamed crimson and golden on the marble mantle and the dirty bronze of the grate. When she laid her hand on the chair back, just below his head, the winking lamplight on the diamonds and platinum of her wedding ring cast a small, shimmering spotlight on the dark mahogany wood of his desk. "What do you want, Dorothy?" he said tiredly.

She didn't answer him, simply placed one soft hand gently on his hair.

"Goodnight, Grandfather" she said, then bent and kissed him on the head before retreating, the scent of her perfume lingering long after her presence had faded away.

He gazed at the fire, then down at the piece of paper in his lap, smoothing it with his fingers. The paper itself had seen better days. It was crumpled from folding and refolding, its corners ragged from fingers rubbing over the edges. He'd read it so many times that he could almost see each black, flowing character etched into his mind, as if engraved. The letter was dated the second of September, AC 177.

Dear Father, it said.

Alicia had always been an old-fashioned one, and her handwriting, like the rest of her, curiously beautiful even though it should have been ungainly and awkward because no one hand wrote things anymore. There were computers to do that kind of work, but Alicia had retained the notion that personal letters were not personal unless they were handwritten. Her writing had been beautiful, flawless, elegant, poetic.

He closed his eyes.


Dear Father,


I hope this letter finds you well. It is nighttime here in Saudi now, and I will be gone on mission tomorrow before this is mailed. I hope it will reach you before too long. One never knows now what emergency circumstances might befall the post with the unrest all over the world. At any rate, I do hope that you receive this before too long.

We have suffered many losses on the front and I am not optimistic about my hopes for survival. The commander has requested that we pull out, but we are being kept here under command of the Federation government. Already we have lost over half of our mobile suits. With those statistics in mind, I feel that tomorrow might be my last patrol.


He'd received this letter about three weeks after the date it had been written. Apparently there had been a data and information blackout of the Saudi region after that devastating final battle in which Alicia had lost her life. Almost three-fourths of the unit had been killed or captured by Saudi rebels who had acquired Federation technology from parts unknown, and the Federation had tried its best to shift the blame onto someone, anyone else's shoulders. Unfortunately, there was nobody else.

León had refused to read the letter. He'd said that he knew Alicia well enough to know what she had to say, especially in a letter addressed to León Catalonia the elder, Duke of Dermail. Perhaps León was right.


I know you and I have never been close, especially with the circumstances of my leaving home, but tonight for some reason I felt compelled to write you this letter. Perhaps it is because the conflict in this part of the world is so desperate and so heart-wrenching that I just need to explain it to someone who is not here with me. Perhaps it is because I feel so very alone tonight and I wonder when, if ever, I will be able to come home. Or perhaps it is just because the stars are so bright here and yet so strange.

A man I knew once said to me that a soldier's mission is not to die, but to live. Nowhere have I found it truer than where I am today. Here among our underground compounds and our futile reconnaissance patrols and the desert sandstorms that howl on lonely nights, I have seen a determination to survive like I have never seen before. We are brought together here as a team, as not individuals but as one single unified body for one single unified goal.

I know you wonder why I tell you this, Father. I know you've never liked the military, never even respected it as an organization, and are still very much against my chosen career. I do not want to argue with you, either in letter or in spoken word, and so I will refrain. I just want you to understand my feelings, and whether you read this or not is entirely up to you. Even ten thousand miles away, I sit here at my tiny desk and wonder if you have even read this far, or if you have torn this letter up, thrown it away, burned it.


A log popped in the fireplace and he opened his eyes and rose from his chair, shuffled to the fire in his slippered feet and slipped another few logs into the grate. Dorothy had often remarked upon his curious practice of using real wood in the fireplace in an age when all fires could be produced by electric or even digital means. He'd told her that in a world of imitations, the way to distinguish oneself from competitors was to search for something real.


The fundamental difference in our beliefs, I think, is this: the Federation you and I know are two separate entities. You and León see the Federation as a tool to shape the world, a quivering mass of politics and politicians to be manipulated, a faceless, voiceless apparition that exists to do your bidding. You pull the strings from above, believing that it dances because you wish it to.

I have seen the puppet whose strings you pull, because I am the puppet. Do you know, Father, that every time you dismiss another country to the whims of revolution, every time you pass over the cries of a smaller nation in favor of a larger, fatter one who can line your pockets with more gold, every time you close your ears to the voice of justice - it is the puppet who must bear the consequences? You see the military as just a part of the Federation's many conveniences, but I am one of those conveniences that you have forgotten.

There are classmates of mine from the OZ Academy and fellow pilots who have fought alongside me who are no longer living. They died for you, Father. They gave their lives as a sacrifice for your goals, for your dreams and your visions, not their own. And even as they fall, you shake your fist and curse their names, demeaning their service as pointless, unethical, foolish.


His daughter, so idealistic and yet so true. He had never thought of the military as foolish, exactly, but after she had died he had even ceased to think of the military at all. It made no difference to him now whether soldiers lived or died, because in his eyes, the military, its ideals and traditions and nobility that she had championed, had died with her.

He wondered what Alicia would have thought if she had known about the Romefeller Foundation, what she would have said if she'd been alive when it had first grown from a seedling of an ideal to an actuality. She wondered what she would have thought of Dorothy. He could see her in Dorothy sometimes, and it frightened him.

But Dorothy was no Alicia. Dorothy was bold but not rebellious, bright but not blazing, passionate but not dangerous.


We are not simply a convenience. We believe in a far greater purpose than our own, a purpose which people like you have told us you will build. Yet as I sit here under less-than-adequate lighting upon my stool, hearing the whine of missiles above my head and feeling the ground shake with the impact, watching our mobile suits return and knowing that there are some who will not make it back, I wonder if I can truly believe what you tell us. How many years have we been fighting these battles, Father? And for what purpose?

Yet I have no choice but to believe. I have given my life to the service of the Federation and its cause, whatever that might be. The blood of those who have died for us, the ones who never came home, urges me on. I am not in the military because I am some noble-born girl with dreams of adventure and stars in her eyes. I joined the military because I believed in something higher than myself.

The future of this world is something I cannot imagine. At some point this will come to a head, and even politicians like you will be powerless to stop it. Perhaps what we need now is a war to end all wars: a war that is so terrible, so unimaginable in its carnage that it will quench our desire for conflict once and for all. But I cannot believe that should ever come to pass. There is nothing now that I can do but watch this conflict escalate, watch the bloody rivers rise until their banks overflow and flood the lands with war, and pray that another Heero Yuy will rise out of darkness and free us. I know what you are thinking. Why Heero Yuy, that foolish man who did nothing but give the colonies false hope?

But you forget one thing, the most important one of all. Heero Yuy did something that you could never do: he gave them that hope in the first place. In this dying age, sometimes that has to be enough. Even if you take away all the weapons in the world, you can't stop war. You must change the hearts of the people.


He reached for his pipe, already filled with tobacco, lit it and watched the smoke mingle with the light of the fire.


If you are still reading, this I hope you will forgive me for my attack upon your actions and your beliefs. It was something that I have left unsaid for almost fifteen years, and now I feel at peace. I do not expect my words to change your heart, or even your mind, nor do I expect them to change the way you view my choice in life. But at least I will know that I have said them before I go into combat tomorrow.


 He had received the official death notice before he had received her letter, and when the letter had finally come in the mail he had let it sit on his desk for a week, buried under paperwork and piles of junk, letting it sit because to read it would be like reading the words of a ghost.

It was this letter that convinced him that the Federation was no longer of use to him. It was this letter that had restructured the Romefeller Foundation from the piecemeal operations that had been in place before the tragedy in Saudi into the organization that it was now. The world needed a change of leadership, a change of perspective, she had said, and he would give it to them. The Catalonia legacy would live on.

"You were quite a daughter, Alicia," he said into the air, holding the pipe aloft in one hand, folding the letter carefully with the other and placing it back into the open envelope on his desk, tucking the envelope back into the top drawer and locking it. "Quite a daughter. You and I will change the world."


And with all that said, Father, I can do no more than give you a fond farewell. Give all my love to León. I hope to see both of you soon, whether that meeting be upon this earth or in heaven. And lastly, I want you to know that through all these years, through everything that has passed between us, I have never stopped remaining


Your loving daughter,
Alicia Catalonia


 His eyes were drifting closed again, a faint smile flitting across his lips as he let his mind drift free of the confines of waking life, and just before his eyelids fell shut he thought he could see the ghosts of all the soldiers Alicia had known, past, present, and future, their dead eyes imploring him to free them.

But wait - there was only one, a woman, who smiled at him with midnight black eyes, gliding over to him and bending down, her dark hair brushing his face as she kissed him. Her lips were cold.

"Sleep," she whispered.

"Good night, Alicia," he said softly, the heat of the fire burning his cheek where she had touched him.

The words came back to him like an echo.

Good night, Father.


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