Author's Note: A thousand apologies to those who have been reading this
story. I do intend to finish it, but, life has been crazy for these past
few months, lots of developments I'm sure you don't want to hear about, so,
I'll just let you get on with the story. And also, I promise that you won't
have to wait nearly as long for the next part. Oh, and I don't own GW or
any of its ideas. Ok, whew, on with the show!
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~ Part 15 By Zero's Wings
The Face of Ymir
Zero was lying dormant on a pile of shattered titanium plates, having rent and split the outer hull of the colony when it's engines exploded. The broken shards of metal resembled cracked bits of eggshell, and Zero would be the frightful, metallic newborn that hatched from them. The Gundam was bathed in ash and salted with silvery splinters of it own armor. Its majestic wings were gone, all that remained were the blackened skeletal tatters, gnarled supports that reached up from its back like arthritic fingers.
With a stubborn groan and much displacement of soot and debris, Zero began to move at last, and its emerald eyes flashed, life energy flowing back through the machine. A few of the ruined pieces of wing cracked and snapped like blackened sticks of dry wax, the nearly invulnerable Gundanium alloy disintegrating with a few simple movements.
Heero gripped the headrest of his seat and pulled himself off the floor with a painful groan. The salty, thick taste of blood invaded his mouth, and his head lolled backwards painfully.
"ZERO, you know your time is nearly over," Heero said weakly. "Do me this one last favor." There was a golden glow of acknowledgement, and then a rumble as the Gundam reached into the canyons of its power reserves, gathering its strength one final time.
Such a magnificent and uniquely beautiful piece of technology was ironically, as its final purpose, being used as nothing more than a battering ram. Perhaps it was fitting that, in the end, a weapon, even one as advanced as Zero, could create nothing more than stupid, blunt, ineffectual trauma.
Zero's head, really only existing for anthropomorphic likeness and as a sensory array, disintegrated into white-hot fragments as the suit cleared the first bulkhead. The armored plates continued to give way, rending unnaturally with horrible metallic wailing. As the layers of metal peeled back, Heero thought to himself that he had adopted the unusual perspective of every bullet he had ever fired into another human being. Every one of the golden-headed juggernauts that drilled through the soft tissue of some hapless, faceless victim, that was his legacy, literally manifested here.
At some point, Heero blacked out, awoke upside down, and slipped back into a filmy pocket of the subconscious.
*****
Emulat glared impotently at the static-coated screen. The groans of structural supports within the colony had put an abrupt end to his excitement. There was fear in his yellow eyes now. Not a personal fear; that had long since departed from his series of resurrections. It was fear for his creation, his drawn face whipped around and he gave an almost longing glance back at Ymir.
Relena saw this glance, and recognized it easily. It was love. That sent a horrible ripple through her body, a wave of disgust and terror that settled in her stomach and stretched out roots or legs like icicles. As this twisted man's love for his creation lingered in Relena's mind, she had inevitably juxtaposed it to her love for Heero, and was so disturbed by such implications that she found herself paralyzed in that spot.
Relena had found in Heero the exact kind of person that she could love, it was a feeling so automatic, so ingrained in her psyche that she couldn't hope to ignore it. But, had she created Heero, the Heero she loved, grooming him to be the perfect man for herself out of a vicious and unflinching soldier? And, was that process so different from what this man had done?
The link between Emulat and Ymir was broken, and his eyes returned to their familiar state: clouded yellow with malice and sadism. He whipped his attention back to the series of monitors and keyboards and began to work furiously. His spidery fingers lashed keys and fiercely grappled switches.
Relena was still rooted in her spot securely, unable to do anything but watch with escalating fear and uncertainty. Suddenly, the platform beneath her undulated wildly, and she was thrown to the cold, metal floor. Directly behind her, Ymir stirred violently.
Coiling red plumes of smoke reached up and down the long, steel channel that cradled Ymir and bisected the colony at its core. Glowing golden patches appeared on the suit's sapphire casing. Its pincers sprung to life with quivering movement, it moved unlike any machine, but its mannerisms were far from human as well. It was decidedly insect-like, with a startlingly efficient economy in every reflexive action. Its eyes were unseen beneath a beetle-shaped helm.
Blood and kinetic energy returned to the momentarily stunned regions of Relena's body. She scampered over to Emulat, assuming his creation wouldn't allow him to be harmed in its awakening. When she stumbled forward to his feet, she spun her head back quickly, almost accidentally, in an unconscious whim of a motion. That sudden turn of the head allowed her to witness one of the most frightening sights of her life. The spot on the walkway where she had just stood was hit by a wave of heat from Ymir's engines. Instantaneously, it fragmented into rectangular pieces of shrapnel. The pieces were lifted back and up in an impossible blur, like two piles of cards being shuffled together in reverse. In that moment, Relena was reacquainted with the idea of her own mortality.
*****
The armored behemoth that drew its name from an ancient frost giant. Ymir. The death of humanity inside a human's technology. It was Deus ex Machina on steroids. Heero's feverish, sporadic worries echoed in his skull like hurried footsteps in the halls of a catacomb. He was still being spun fully upside down and right side up many, many times over, and the bulkheads in front of him continued to be smashed away, peeling back now as easily as sagging flaps of skin. Then, a particularly hard bulkhead gave way, and he saw that he was inside a large, cylindrical chamber. Heero became aware of a sudden profusion of white light. It washed through his cockpit, blinding him. At the same time, the steady roar of something like a vernier engine grew in his ears, pounding at them in a growing wave.
Heero looked down seconds too late. Ymir was rising up the chamber with incredible speed, scarlet clouds on his heels like freakish hounds chasing it out of the gates of hell. Heero felt his guts implode as Ymir crashed fully into Zero and lifted it up into the air with hardly an interruption in its speed. The wind drew straight out of his lungs with a long, high- pitched wheeze.
Zero rocketed up further into the colony, the massive mobile suit beneath pinning him like a fly in a man's fist. Heero could feel Ymir's power beneath him, and there was definitely a character to it unlike any mobile suit he had encountered. Ymir moved extremely quickly, as though unhindered by the relative clumsiness and redundancy of robotic joints. The suit had a fluidity of motion that Heero had never encountered in a mobile suit, or any artificial creation, for that matter.
A half buried memory struggled back to the surface of Heero's mind. Ymir.A living mobile suit.That was it. Emulat, being a scientist prone to questionable experimentation with living tissue, had created an ultimate abomination. Even as white lightning ravaged Heero's brain, he gripped the controls to Zero, or what was left of it. He would have a single chance to redirect Ymir's path. However, they were rocketing up with metal walls on all sides. That would get him nowhere, Ymir would simply grind against the wall, right itself, and Zero would probably be completely destroyed in the process.
Suddenly, the metal wall on the right side was swept away, and a multi- tiered parking garage began to sweep past him. That was the window.
Heero pushed Zero's left vernier bar so hard he felt tendons snap in his arm. Ymir lurched only slightly, and for a terrifying instant, Heero believed he had failed. Then, Ymir's head rammed straight into a cinderblock column and pulverized it. Countless tons of deadly shrapnel whistled through the air. Zero and Ymir blew straight through, there armor riddled with the blade-like chips of concrete.
The two suits landed in a pile of cars. Zero stood headless and blind, groping and punching frantically at the insect-like beast beneath him. As Heero fought, he also worked at a fervent pace to bypass Zero's sensors into the chest array, giving him at least a small range of vision. One of Zero's fingers became caught between the seams of two armor plates, and Heero had no choice but to rip the plate off to free himself. He pulled both of Zero's control bars back, once again, with every ounce of strength that he could scrape from his battered body. His arms were on fire. Then, there was a sudden release of the metal, and his shoulder popped back with an awful crunching noise. In almost the same instant, the bypass worked and a view of Ymir lying beneath him came onto the main viewer. Heero forgot instantly about his shoulder. His breath drew in again, and he felt every part of his body instantly freeze, a terror and disgust never previously known to him sweeping the length of his body like a horrific, paralyzing fire.
The piece of metal that had given way had covered Ymir's face. Without the armor, Heero could see that Ymir did in fact have a human face, one so large that it must've been created from stitching the flesh of maybe a dozen bodies together. A tapestry of human skin. But that was not what had disturbed Heero so much. It was this feeling as though he were staring into a mirror that threatened to shatter his mind.
For the face that Ymir possessed was his own.
End Part 15
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~ Part 15 By Zero's Wings
The Face of Ymir
Zero was lying dormant on a pile of shattered titanium plates, having rent and split the outer hull of the colony when it's engines exploded. The broken shards of metal resembled cracked bits of eggshell, and Zero would be the frightful, metallic newborn that hatched from them. The Gundam was bathed in ash and salted with silvery splinters of it own armor. Its majestic wings were gone, all that remained were the blackened skeletal tatters, gnarled supports that reached up from its back like arthritic fingers.
With a stubborn groan and much displacement of soot and debris, Zero began to move at last, and its emerald eyes flashed, life energy flowing back through the machine. A few of the ruined pieces of wing cracked and snapped like blackened sticks of dry wax, the nearly invulnerable Gundanium alloy disintegrating with a few simple movements.
Heero gripped the headrest of his seat and pulled himself off the floor with a painful groan. The salty, thick taste of blood invaded his mouth, and his head lolled backwards painfully.
"ZERO, you know your time is nearly over," Heero said weakly. "Do me this one last favor." There was a golden glow of acknowledgement, and then a rumble as the Gundam reached into the canyons of its power reserves, gathering its strength one final time.
Such a magnificent and uniquely beautiful piece of technology was ironically, as its final purpose, being used as nothing more than a battering ram. Perhaps it was fitting that, in the end, a weapon, even one as advanced as Zero, could create nothing more than stupid, blunt, ineffectual trauma.
Zero's head, really only existing for anthropomorphic likeness and as a sensory array, disintegrated into white-hot fragments as the suit cleared the first bulkhead. The armored plates continued to give way, rending unnaturally with horrible metallic wailing. As the layers of metal peeled back, Heero thought to himself that he had adopted the unusual perspective of every bullet he had ever fired into another human being. Every one of the golden-headed juggernauts that drilled through the soft tissue of some hapless, faceless victim, that was his legacy, literally manifested here.
At some point, Heero blacked out, awoke upside down, and slipped back into a filmy pocket of the subconscious.
*****
Emulat glared impotently at the static-coated screen. The groans of structural supports within the colony had put an abrupt end to his excitement. There was fear in his yellow eyes now. Not a personal fear; that had long since departed from his series of resurrections. It was fear for his creation, his drawn face whipped around and he gave an almost longing glance back at Ymir.
Relena saw this glance, and recognized it easily. It was love. That sent a horrible ripple through her body, a wave of disgust and terror that settled in her stomach and stretched out roots or legs like icicles. As this twisted man's love for his creation lingered in Relena's mind, she had inevitably juxtaposed it to her love for Heero, and was so disturbed by such implications that she found herself paralyzed in that spot.
Relena had found in Heero the exact kind of person that she could love, it was a feeling so automatic, so ingrained in her psyche that she couldn't hope to ignore it. But, had she created Heero, the Heero she loved, grooming him to be the perfect man for herself out of a vicious and unflinching soldier? And, was that process so different from what this man had done?
The link between Emulat and Ymir was broken, and his eyes returned to their familiar state: clouded yellow with malice and sadism. He whipped his attention back to the series of monitors and keyboards and began to work furiously. His spidery fingers lashed keys and fiercely grappled switches.
Relena was still rooted in her spot securely, unable to do anything but watch with escalating fear and uncertainty. Suddenly, the platform beneath her undulated wildly, and she was thrown to the cold, metal floor. Directly behind her, Ymir stirred violently.
Coiling red plumes of smoke reached up and down the long, steel channel that cradled Ymir and bisected the colony at its core. Glowing golden patches appeared on the suit's sapphire casing. Its pincers sprung to life with quivering movement, it moved unlike any machine, but its mannerisms were far from human as well. It was decidedly insect-like, with a startlingly efficient economy in every reflexive action. Its eyes were unseen beneath a beetle-shaped helm.
Blood and kinetic energy returned to the momentarily stunned regions of Relena's body. She scampered over to Emulat, assuming his creation wouldn't allow him to be harmed in its awakening. When she stumbled forward to his feet, she spun her head back quickly, almost accidentally, in an unconscious whim of a motion. That sudden turn of the head allowed her to witness one of the most frightening sights of her life. The spot on the walkway where she had just stood was hit by a wave of heat from Ymir's engines. Instantaneously, it fragmented into rectangular pieces of shrapnel. The pieces were lifted back and up in an impossible blur, like two piles of cards being shuffled together in reverse. In that moment, Relena was reacquainted with the idea of her own mortality.
*****
The armored behemoth that drew its name from an ancient frost giant. Ymir. The death of humanity inside a human's technology. It was Deus ex Machina on steroids. Heero's feverish, sporadic worries echoed in his skull like hurried footsteps in the halls of a catacomb. He was still being spun fully upside down and right side up many, many times over, and the bulkheads in front of him continued to be smashed away, peeling back now as easily as sagging flaps of skin. Then, a particularly hard bulkhead gave way, and he saw that he was inside a large, cylindrical chamber. Heero became aware of a sudden profusion of white light. It washed through his cockpit, blinding him. At the same time, the steady roar of something like a vernier engine grew in his ears, pounding at them in a growing wave.
Heero looked down seconds too late. Ymir was rising up the chamber with incredible speed, scarlet clouds on his heels like freakish hounds chasing it out of the gates of hell. Heero felt his guts implode as Ymir crashed fully into Zero and lifted it up into the air with hardly an interruption in its speed. The wind drew straight out of his lungs with a long, high- pitched wheeze.
Zero rocketed up further into the colony, the massive mobile suit beneath pinning him like a fly in a man's fist. Heero could feel Ymir's power beneath him, and there was definitely a character to it unlike any mobile suit he had encountered. Ymir moved extremely quickly, as though unhindered by the relative clumsiness and redundancy of robotic joints. The suit had a fluidity of motion that Heero had never encountered in a mobile suit, or any artificial creation, for that matter.
A half buried memory struggled back to the surface of Heero's mind. Ymir.A living mobile suit.That was it. Emulat, being a scientist prone to questionable experimentation with living tissue, had created an ultimate abomination. Even as white lightning ravaged Heero's brain, he gripped the controls to Zero, or what was left of it. He would have a single chance to redirect Ymir's path. However, they were rocketing up with metal walls on all sides. That would get him nowhere, Ymir would simply grind against the wall, right itself, and Zero would probably be completely destroyed in the process.
Suddenly, the metal wall on the right side was swept away, and a multi- tiered parking garage began to sweep past him. That was the window.
Heero pushed Zero's left vernier bar so hard he felt tendons snap in his arm. Ymir lurched only slightly, and for a terrifying instant, Heero believed he had failed. Then, Ymir's head rammed straight into a cinderblock column and pulverized it. Countless tons of deadly shrapnel whistled through the air. Zero and Ymir blew straight through, there armor riddled with the blade-like chips of concrete.
The two suits landed in a pile of cars. Zero stood headless and blind, groping and punching frantically at the insect-like beast beneath him. As Heero fought, he also worked at a fervent pace to bypass Zero's sensors into the chest array, giving him at least a small range of vision. One of Zero's fingers became caught between the seams of two armor plates, and Heero had no choice but to rip the plate off to free himself. He pulled both of Zero's control bars back, once again, with every ounce of strength that he could scrape from his battered body. His arms were on fire. Then, there was a sudden release of the metal, and his shoulder popped back with an awful crunching noise. In almost the same instant, the bypass worked and a view of Ymir lying beneath him came onto the main viewer. Heero forgot instantly about his shoulder. His breath drew in again, and he felt every part of his body instantly freeze, a terror and disgust never previously known to him sweeping the length of his body like a horrific, paralyzing fire.
The piece of metal that had given way had covered Ymir's face. Without the armor, Heero could see that Ymir did in fact have a human face, one so large that it must've been created from stitching the flesh of maybe a dozen bodies together. A tapestry of human skin. But that was not what had disturbed Heero so much. It was this feeling as though he were staring into a mirror that threatened to shatter his mind.
For the face that Ymir possessed was his own.
End Part 15