Argh. I don't think I did a very good job on the last part, since everyone seems to think that Heero was afraid to be on his own and make his own decisions, which wasn't what was going on at all.
This is the third time I've written this part- trying another person's viewpoint this time. Maybe I'll be happy with it for once (probably not).
Hilde: Song of Disbelief
By: M.E. (Magnificent Entity)
"He meant it as a kindness, for how could he know that God had judged me before I was born and had cast me out before I took my first breath?"
— Louise, from Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson
When I was nine, I stopped believing in the tooth fairy. I lost my last baby tooth then, and she was no longer a part of my life as I knew it.
When I was twelve, I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I was almost a teenager, and too grown up to still accept his existence.
I'm eighteen now, and I don't want to believe in you anymore. I want to put you behind me, like I did with my childhood fantasies, since you are no longer real for me. But you're not like the others, are you? You won't let me stop believing. You won't let me turn my back on you.
Who gave you the right to decide who may disbelieve? Certainly not me.
This time I have a better reason to stop believing. I thought about a long time, and put a lot of time and effort into creating my reason.
It's a very good reason. It'll hold water, at least.
I don't want to believe in you because you have never done anything for me. You have never helped me in any way, you have never given me anything at all. You have never, as far as I can see, shown any care for the human race.
You could have, you know. It's part of your job description– I checked.
The only ones who actually tried to help out our poor species during those awful wars were the Gundam pilots, and maybe Relena Peacecraft. And where are they now, I ask? I never hear anything about them, and I never find them when I look.
I've looked very hard, you know. You see, I want to thank Duo. He helped me when you wouldn't. Strange, isn't it? In the end, Shinigami turned out to be the more forgiving god.
Serves you right.
They show up in the news every now and then, you know. Last June one of them committed suicide. He would have graduated at the top of his class if he had waited a couple of days, but he didn't. Life sucks like that, I guess. We can never wait for the good things.
That is, if it was a good thing. I starting to think that it might not have been. Either way, I wish him luck wherever he is, and I hope that he is happy.
Then, in August, there was this scandal because the government was keeping one of the pilots– Quatre, I think– in a mental institution for no decent reason– he tested as being more sane than all of the other patients and even a few of the nurses. The media got wind of it, even though his family tried to hush it up. Though, of course, the only papers interested in printing it were the supermarket tabloids. And even then it didn't make the front page.
I think that they released him in the end, but I'm not sure. I hope they did, he deserved more than four sterile, white walls for the rest of his life.
In the end, we all deserve more than that. And we never get it.
Most of the time I try to just do my schoolwork, make it through my courses, and hope that I get enough credits this semester that my scholarship won't be revoked. But sometimes I remember that I could have ended up like them, forgotten, ignored, neglected. Hated. I could have been like that too, if I had been a better pilot and become well known. But I didn't, did I? I was never good enough to be a household name, and somehow that worked out to my advantage. Because, unlike them, I can walk down the street without being cursed and spat at. Mobbed.
And this society, it's so strange. It makes no effort to differentiate between those it once revered and those it once hated. You know what I'm talking about, who I'm talking about. Peacecraft. I saw her once, sometime last fall when I was visiting a college, trying to decide whether I should go there (in the end, I didn't). And she's just another of the walking dead now, you know. Earth's most outspoken pacifist, now silent, made mute by the peace that she once fought to preserve. And all around her the world laughs and laughs, a never-ending guffaw. They think it's funny that she will, in all likelihood, never again be anything more than a ghost, a name in history books.
I wonder if they know the damage that they cause each time they let out a chuckle.
And that's it. That's why. That's the main reason why I no longer wish to believe in you. That all-loving, all-forgiving stuff is crap. If you really were that way, you'd make them stop laughing. That girl and those five pilots would have been your magnum opus, if you had let them. Instead you abandoned them at their peak, letting them rise like multicolored balloons in the sky, only to fall like stones when they were pricked by needles of jealousy and spite.
And that's not the way it's supposed to be. You're supposed to help them, supposed to do something, anything at all. But you don't, and so now I choose to disbelieve.
I wouldn't do this, you know, if you did something. If you acted.
But all you do is watch and listen. Once you were omnipotent, now you are nothing more than someone for people to talk to.
And I hate you for that.
