Title: Nothing but Table Crumbs
By: Jillian
(Disclaimer: I do not own the Gundam Wing characters. Written as a response to the "Women at War" challenge. happyfangirl.org)
~*~
"I've been fingering the flame like tomorrow's martyr
. . . it's getting harder to believe."
~Over the Rhine, "All I Need is Everything"
~*~
Une hadn't set foot inside a church for years. As the truck rolled through the city and the cobbled street started out into the countryside of green hills dotted with sheep, she remembered being taken to a Christmas Eve service during her elementary school years. Her grandparents had taken her from her parents for the evening and braided her hair into small coils to sit on either side of her head. Her honey colored hair had been long and thin; however, even at that age it had been a source of pride. Identity.
At some point, life expanded past the superficial. Now she found herself in the passenger seat of a Preventers vehicle with Heero Yuy driving them to a Luxemburg church in order to settle the next minor incident. To keep the peace.
"We're on our way, Trowa," the dark haired man driving managed to steer with his wrist while his other hand gripped the mouth piece of the vehicle's communication system. Heero had taken the call for backup that morning. After disappearing for two years, the retired Gundam Pilot had walked into the Preventer's office and had offered his services. Given his reputation and his influence on a certain woman in politics, Heero was given an offer to co-command the peacekeeping unit with Une. "If he remains non-violent, watch. However, we do not negotiate with terrorists, so have Agent Noventa put the target in her scope. Delay for us if you can."
"Understood." Trowa Barton's voice scratched through the out-dated system. Two years of relatively harmonious life after Dekim Barton's coup de main failed, the government was not keen on reinforcing their military protection with finances.
"We're lucky that Sylvia's been keeping her rifle nearby, even when she and Trowa go to their Sunday services." Heero laughed, his sense of humor no less mysterious and sinister as he aged, "She's the best marksman in the unit with all the practice they put in on weekends. And when they noticed something was wrong going in, she was armed and ready."
Une nodded, since what Heero said had been the truth. The Preventers had more than their fair share of time to fine-tune their skills while practice, rather than fieldwork, was all that was available to them. Sylvia Noventa, who enlisted after her older cousin and his wife assumed the Noventa family property, was one of their members who had never seen a true combat situation. And no matter how much training and how many seminar briefings; one could never be taught the deep-rooted change that actual wartime conflict roused.
"I'm certain Trowa will stay advised to Preventer policy. We're here to prevent conflict and bring the perpetrator to justice." The words sounded hollow, and inappropriate as the sunshine warmed her body wherever it filtered in from the truck's windows. She had to squint as they drove past a field of wheat in high maturity. Harvest still a distant future. She wondered how many people had taken this path from the country village to go to church that morning.
The church, modest white and longer than it was wide, was ahead on their left. They drove past a small graveyard first. Even from the road, the tombstones were noticeable older than even the wars that the current living had fought. Graves from that Great War were still new cemeteries and stretched for miles. The iron fence around the smaller plot of land stood only to mark the edges of the sacred ground, and no gate existed to close it away from more souls seeking a resting place.
"Trowa, status." She took the radio, as Heero slowed, still several yards away from the modestly full parking area for the church's congregation.
"Sylvia and I are in the upper balcony." Trowa's voice was thin and hard to hear. She immediately had an image of her soldiers crouched behind thin rails. Sylvia's rifle balanced but strained from the wait of keeping her shot, "Une, he's taken a hostage. And we have an . . . unconfirmed ID."
"Unconfirmed?"
Heero had exited the truck, leaving his door partially open to limit sounds that might startle the aggressive activist. Une hesitated to hear Trowa's reply.
"Colonel," the mistake of her old title reverberated her spirit, sparking as her head began to ache " . . . Une, I think . . . "
His last words were cut short. The birds that had been resting on the power line that stretched parallel to the road suddenly took flight away from the church building. Balancing the movement of Une and Heero, as they pulled their handguns and broke into an even paced run across the church lawn toward the front doors. They had heard a gunshot.
Heero whispered harshly, his jaw stiffening but as prepared as his body for immediate confrontation, "I've been here before. For Sylvia to have a shot from the balcony, the suspect must be at the front of the church. If he's still living, he would have his back to the pipe organ. A rear door leads to the priest's office and a staircase up to where the organist sits. I could take him out there."
"I'll distract him from the front. See if we can disarm him first."
Heero pondered that, while they both stood with their backs toward the large wooden doors. Une could feel the designs of a carving as her shoulder blades weighed against them. It felt as if history were trying to push back into her skin. He nodded once, and his body, taut like a bowstring, snapped off the front steps and rounded the corner of the church. For all his practice at living peacefully, she knew Heero Yuy was still a weapon.
"Treize, give me strength to do what I must." On the doorstep of a church, her faith in a dead lover seemed sacrilegious and hollow. She balanced her gun for a moment, knowing its weight and knowing she could use it without hesitation. That sort of strength had confused nations into battle. How much stronger was the power over one weak individual. She set it back into her holster, but not without realizing the metal was still warmed by her own nervous body heat.
She turned, not focusing on the carvings that she still felt impressed upon her back, and reached out for the large brass rings that would grant her entrance into the church. Untouched by the sun, they chilled her fingers.
Any hope of walking in unnoticed failed as the opening creak of the door echoed loudly into the foyer. As her eyes adjusted to the darker shadows of the front hall, she saw tables at either side of her with modest piles, the paper work of church business, sitting there. Ahead, the entryway to the sanctuary had been framed with angled decorations of candles. She stepped forward, trying not to walk too quickly or too slowly. Trying to anticipate what the radical upstart would expect, and what might make him relax when she did as he estimated.
She fought back the urge to cover her eyes with one hand as the sanctuary became startling bright as either wall was adorned almost floor to high ceiling with stained glass letting in brilliant colored light. The aroma of incense immediately pierced her sense of smell, only increasing the throbbing anxiety in her own mind. The room itself stirred with rapid breathing and the occasional moan. The congregation had slumped into the far edges of the church pews, as if taking collective flight and then upon orders to stay had sat where they were. Several people sat in the outside aisles, holding each other. Lips moved with murmurs of comfort or perhaps prayers, only adding to the solemn buzz.
Une studied them only to acknowledge their presence and placement. As she had walked in, the ceiling had been low to hold the balcony before opening up to the full height of the church's peak. She knew that Trowa and Sylvia were just behind her. Without needing to look, she knew they deferred their role to her present authority. They would move immediately upon her command or her death.
She felt numb to their fate, even as it rested in her every action.
Ahead of her, she saw the priest crumpled to the ground. His robes spread out around him on the wooden floor, but from the slow rise of his chest he was still living. An unusually large book, most likely a Bible, was haphazardly dropped near the priest's head. The pulpit, from which the book and a littering of other papers must have fallen, had been cleared as if brushed off in a fury from the way they fell. The sacraments had also been spilled. The wine soaked the white cloth of the communion table like a pool of blood. Small, round wafers of bread fallen everywhere like gun shells. Above there, the pipes of the organ stretched and gleamed bronze, midway up, she saw the small platform where the organist should sit. She wondered where the organist went.
Gripped with panic, she wondered where the suspect went. And his gun.
As she asked, she received her answer.
He was standing on the level floor of the sanctuary, just to her right side. His right hand stretched out straight toward Une, holding the gun which Une suspect had fired the shot. It had been a warning. The other arm also had a gun and was wrapped around a young girl of ten, perhaps eleven. Une recognized the girl, and thereby knew the identity of the man facing away from where he sat in the front pew with his hands balanced obediently on his head.
The girl was Elizabeth Walker, sometimes playmate to her own adopted daughter, Mariemaia. The man had to be her father, a soldier who had served under Une when she'd been a colonel for OZ, commanding Barge. The Walker family had sent seven of their sons to serve with Lord Treize. Only three had returned home.
One of those three, the oldest, had retired with the highest honors given to soldiers. The same son, Une had recommended to the President herself for those honors. The man who had stepped up to be her lieutenant when her first officer had to be dismissed for insubordination. The first officer she'd consequently forgotten. The man with the gun.
She knew why Trowa had slipped and called her Colonel. His unconfirmed ID was correct.
"Nichol."
She hadn't said it loudly. Her involuntary speech was more of an acknowledgement than to get his attention, since his gaze was fixed on her already. He'd probably frozen still as soon as he had realized who had walked into the church.
Une had stopped moving when she recognized him. Halfway between the entryway and the pulpit. She wondered if this was what he wanted. To confront her. Or if he'd been targeting Giles Walker. Or if he'd only happened to bring two guns with him to the Sunday morning service on whim.
She noted he was wearing a suit, dark blue and suited for such a service. Not his OZ uniform.
From what she could remember of Henry Nichol, he had a quick sense of judgment. His slow temper, however, was often followed by determined, if misguided, calmness. Once he voiced a complaint, he often went weeks or months without displaying any obvious dissention. After his punishment and pardon for disobedience on Barge, Nichol had been politely dismissed from military service upon arrival to Earth. Une had left specific instruction to that effect and they had been followed during her brief time in the hospital.
At the time, she thought all he needed was to be released from the military environment. She had hoped that if Nichol had time to himself, he would be healed from whatever the war did to soldiers and move on with his life.
She tasted a sourness rising from the back of her tongue. No one could escape from the taint of war when it overcame one's ability to think with compassion. She knew she never would. Soldiers who had become Preventers still sought out counseling to reconcile their demons and in order to cope with the penetrating falseness of imperfect peace. She had been naïve.
Enough time passed with those thoughts, that Une watched the whiteness of Nichol's features start to blossom into an angry purple. The color crept up his neck and from underneath the dark curls of his hair around his ears to cross his cheeks. Was he angry, hurt, or humiliated? She hadn't thought about Henry Nichol in years, and she barely had taken the time to get to know him when he had served under her. She'd been preoccupied with other matters. With the war. With Treize.
"I expected Barton,"
She could scarcely hear him speak. Indeed, she doubted she even would have recognized his voice except for the other connections she made to surmise his identity.
He continued, "But, I never thought . . ."
His voice was so ordinary. Vague hints of emotion registered, but not one overwhelmed another to betray his motivation. Une's gaze dropped to specifically analyze Elizabeth's reactions. The girl trembled, but not consistently. Une wanted to believe that Nichol would not harm the girl, but she had underestimated him before. She pushed back assumptions.
She knew she should ask him what he wanted. She should ask him to let the girl go, and tell him that it was possible for him to be forgiven of this. It wasn't too late. He hadn't killed anyone here. He could get help. He wasn't alone.
Une was tired of lying. Offering false condolences in a church would only pile blasphemy to her list of transgressions. Humanity, for all its years and even in peacetime, had never learned how to forgive. No one could truly forgive another, let alone forgive herself.
"What are you doing?" She asked instead, barely lifting her voice. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and Nichol's eyes widened briefly to analyze her adjustment. His hold on Elizabeth reflexively tightened, and the girl lifted her arms to try and pull his grip away from her neck.
"Rather obvious, I'm sure you've guessed," His tone dropped into deeper registers to reflect the scowl that furrowed his dark brow and pulled downward on his lips, "I'm going to kill everyone here."
She fought the urge to look up to the organist's seat. She didn't want to betray Heero's location, even if Nichol suspected she did not come alone. He would expect it. He had been a good soldier once, "Why?"
"Because life is shit." His humor, a soldier's humor, was as awful as Heero's.
"This isn't like you."
"How do you know what I'm like?" Nichol's words took a dangerous turn, and Une regretted provoking him. She didn't know him. She didn't know what to expect. She didn't know where he had been since she'd demoted him and made him serve under the soldiers he used to command until his dismissal. She hadn't thought about anything but the glorious bigger picture. Treize had always been the one capable of respecting the individual.
Her muscles of her cheeks ached, and she knew her control was slipping. While her personality hadn't been in jeopardy with the medications that had been provided for her, the feeling of her mind drifting away from her surroundings was jarringly similar. Part of her focused on Nichol, another wondered if Sylvia still had her shot with Elizabeth in the way, part of her wondered if law enforcement had finally arrived and circled the building. Part of her wondered what Mariemaia was doing, "You were always very good at taking orders."
"When I was a soldier, but you took that away from me, didn't you?" Bitterness.
She decided to accept the burden of additional sins, "You don't want to do this. Let Elizabeth go, and we can talk about your options. With no consequences." She wetted her lips, "We might find a place for you with the Preventers." She added watching his mouth drop open to refuse.
He didn't speak at first. Instead, he looked stricken with absolute betrayal. As if she had been disloyal to him.
"I expected . . . but, I was wrong." Nichol took the hand that held his gun and turned it in toward Elizabeth. The girl turned to look up at him. Elizabeth shook her head saying 'no' without words. Only Nichol didn't see.
Reacting, as if she'd taken a bullet into her own soul, Une cried out, "Heero, don't!" She ran forward, intuiting that her command would be followed, doubting her chance all the same. Her instincts were outpacing her thoughts. The irony of her title bit into her. How could she have prevented this?
But her movement, her understanding, always came too late. She had grasped Treize's truth too late to change. She hadn't seen the truth of the Gundam Pilots in her prison until it was too late to do much to help. It didn't matter if she couldn't forgive. Sometimes it only had to be offered in order to be true.
His hand dropped, and Elizabeth rushed forward to her father. Nichol raised his gun toward the organ pipes, but his chin dropped toward his chest. The congregation surged in a flurry of peripheral movement as if they'd suddenly been released from an enchantment to hold them still. The absence of sound in Une's reality did nothing to muffle the sound of rifle fire.
The man's knees buckled, and he fell to half his height without toppling. The damage of the rifle shot obvious from the tear of fabric and blood over the place of Nichol's heart. The gun rolled harmlessly from his finger while his arm dropped. Finally, it clattered against the ground.
Une stopped just short of him. Her heart hammered at such a rate she wondered how her body kept her blood inside as Nichol's drained out in rivulets.
"You wanted to die?" She hissed, but choked on the words. Nichol bent forward coughing up blood with the expulsion of the oxygen from his final breath. He couldn't speak. His arms couldn't catch him, and he fell dead.
She stared, eyes wide. She felt that way. She knew she felt the way that he did, when she was alone. When her soldiers filed out and the office door closed.
As if his ghost spoke, his words re-echoed through the situational pressure of her already fragmenting memory, 'Because life is shit.'
"Damn you." She cursed, unfocused, knowing the fate of the unsaved. Knowing the fate that she felt crouching at her front door, waiting for her every morning. The demons she would never admit to anyone else. The ones that hid deepest inside her. Unforgiven.
Heero reached her first. Putting his hand on her shoulder, not so much to comfort her as to warn her of her duty as commander. Her full hearing returned as a foremost sense, and she could hear Trowa and Sylvia sprinting down the sanctuary.
"Good shot, Sylvia." Heero spoke first, matter-of-fact, letting his comment ground reality back into Une. He would cover for Une's emotion, but both of them knew the significance of Sylvia's first kill.
"Oh God," Sylvia burst into tears. Une checked her own, blinking until her eyes were completely dry. It had been so long since she'd seen death up close, and those ties of memory took her back to a dark time in her past.
She saw Sylvia's blonde hair spin out as she fell into Trowa's arms, while he said something intended to console her. Une realized they both were wearing Sunday clothes. The yellow of Sylvia's dress a startling difference from the uniform she wore as a Preventer. The rifle had been for afternoon practice. A strange coincidence it also served as a weapon.
"I can't . . . , I thought . . ." Sylvia sobbed harder against Trowa's shoulder, while the young man looked uncomfortably unhappy. His eyebrows trembled as he turned to Une for guidance.
"He wanted to die," Une said, hearing the remnants of the Colonel in her voice, "He came here to provoke you." She understood that Nichol had seen Trowa as a rival. The pieces started to fall together.
"He only did this in order to . . ." Sylvia looked at Une then, her innocence only enhanced by the unashamed tears and red eyes. Her innocence an uncommon strength brought into their unit. What would he have brought into the unit, if he'd only been asked some other day?
"He must have watched you. Known that you'd have the rifle and were trained in such situations. Although, my guess is he counted on Trowa to kill him." Une felt wrong offering comfort to another person who, regardless, would have nightmares of death in her sleep.
"I'm so sorry. You told Heero not to shoot, but I . . . He wasn't going to hurt anybody?"
"Not another word. We did what we had to," Then Une looked down at the body. She would dream about this. Could she have prevented his choice? How was she to know? Should she have forgiven him? Forgiveness was the business of heaven. Une glanced around her, at the dark wood planks of the ceiling down to the portraits of Bible scenes fixed in the stained glass. She was in a church, after all. A rush of sincerity brought her next words, even though she couldn't comprehend their source, "I forgive you."
~*~
"Cause we can't run the truth out of town,
. . . only force it underground."
~Over the Rhine, "All I Need is Everything"
By: Jillian
(Disclaimer: I do not own the Gundam Wing characters. Written as a response to the "Women at War" challenge. happyfangirl.org)
~*~
"I've been fingering the flame like tomorrow's martyr
. . . it's getting harder to believe."
~Over the Rhine, "All I Need is Everything"
~*~
Une hadn't set foot inside a church for years. As the truck rolled through the city and the cobbled street started out into the countryside of green hills dotted with sheep, she remembered being taken to a Christmas Eve service during her elementary school years. Her grandparents had taken her from her parents for the evening and braided her hair into small coils to sit on either side of her head. Her honey colored hair had been long and thin; however, even at that age it had been a source of pride. Identity.
At some point, life expanded past the superficial. Now she found herself in the passenger seat of a Preventers vehicle with Heero Yuy driving them to a Luxemburg church in order to settle the next minor incident. To keep the peace.
"We're on our way, Trowa," the dark haired man driving managed to steer with his wrist while his other hand gripped the mouth piece of the vehicle's communication system. Heero had taken the call for backup that morning. After disappearing for two years, the retired Gundam Pilot had walked into the Preventer's office and had offered his services. Given his reputation and his influence on a certain woman in politics, Heero was given an offer to co-command the peacekeeping unit with Une. "If he remains non-violent, watch. However, we do not negotiate with terrorists, so have Agent Noventa put the target in her scope. Delay for us if you can."
"Understood." Trowa Barton's voice scratched through the out-dated system. Two years of relatively harmonious life after Dekim Barton's coup de main failed, the government was not keen on reinforcing their military protection with finances.
"We're lucky that Sylvia's been keeping her rifle nearby, even when she and Trowa go to their Sunday services." Heero laughed, his sense of humor no less mysterious and sinister as he aged, "She's the best marksman in the unit with all the practice they put in on weekends. And when they noticed something was wrong going in, she was armed and ready."
Une nodded, since what Heero said had been the truth. The Preventers had more than their fair share of time to fine-tune their skills while practice, rather than fieldwork, was all that was available to them. Sylvia Noventa, who enlisted after her older cousin and his wife assumed the Noventa family property, was one of their members who had never seen a true combat situation. And no matter how much training and how many seminar briefings; one could never be taught the deep-rooted change that actual wartime conflict roused.
"I'm certain Trowa will stay advised to Preventer policy. We're here to prevent conflict and bring the perpetrator to justice." The words sounded hollow, and inappropriate as the sunshine warmed her body wherever it filtered in from the truck's windows. She had to squint as they drove past a field of wheat in high maturity. Harvest still a distant future. She wondered how many people had taken this path from the country village to go to church that morning.
The church, modest white and longer than it was wide, was ahead on their left. They drove past a small graveyard first. Even from the road, the tombstones were noticeable older than even the wars that the current living had fought. Graves from that Great War were still new cemeteries and stretched for miles. The iron fence around the smaller plot of land stood only to mark the edges of the sacred ground, and no gate existed to close it away from more souls seeking a resting place.
"Trowa, status." She took the radio, as Heero slowed, still several yards away from the modestly full parking area for the church's congregation.
"Sylvia and I are in the upper balcony." Trowa's voice was thin and hard to hear. She immediately had an image of her soldiers crouched behind thin rails. Sylvia's rifle balanced but strained from the wait of keeping her shot, "Une, he's taken a hostage. And we have an . . . unconfirmed ID."
"Unconfirmed?"
Heero had exited the truck, leaving his door partially open to limit sounds that might startle the aggressive activist. Une hesitated to hear Trowa's reply.
"Colonel," the mistake of her old title reverberated her spirit, sparking as her head began to ache " . . . Une, I think . . . "
His last words were cut short. The birds that had been resting on the power line that stretched parallel to the road suddenly took flight away from the church building. Balancing the movement of Une and Heero, as they pulled their handguns and broke into an even paced run across the church lawn toward the front doors. They had heard a gunshot.
Heero whispered harshly, his jaw stiffening but as prepared as his body for immediate confrontation, "I've been here before. For Sylvia to have a shot from the balcony, the suspect must be at the front of the church. If he's still living, he would have his back to the pipe organ. A rear door leads to the priest's office and a staircase up to where the organist sits. I could take him out there."
"I'll distract him from the front. See if we can disarm him first."
Heero pondered that, while they both stood with their backs toward the large wooden doors. Une could feel the designs of a carving as her shoulder blades weighed against them. It felt as if history were trying to push back into her skin. He nodded once, and his body, taut like a bowstring, snapped off the front steps and rounded the corner of the church. For all his practice at living peacefully, she knew Heero Yuy was still a weapon.
"Treize, give me strength to do what I must." On the doorstep of a church, her faith in a dead lover seemed sacrilegious and hollow. She balanced her gun for a moment, knowing its weight and knowing she could use it without hesitation. That sort of strength had confused nations into battle. How much stronger was the power over one weak individual. She set it back into her holster, but not without realizing the metal was still warmed by her own nervous body heat.
She turned, not focusing on the carvings that she still felt impressed upon her back, and reached out for the large brass rings that would grant her entrance into the church. Untouched by the sun, they chilled her fingers.
Any hope of walking in unnoticed failed as the opening creak of the door echoed loudly into the foyer. As her eyes adjusted to the darker shadows of the front hall, she saw tables at either side of her with modest piles, the paper work of church business, sitting there. Ahead, the entryway to the sanctuary had been framed with angled decorations of candles. She stepped forward, trying not to walk too quickly or too slowly. Trying to anticipate what the radical upstart would expect, and what might make him relax when she did as he estimated.
She fought back the urge to cover her eyes with one hand as the sanctuary became startling bright as either wall was adorned almost floor to high ceiling with stained glass letting in brilliant colored light. The aroma of incense immediately pierced her sense of smell, only increasing the throbbing anxiety in her own mind. The room itself stirred with rapid breathing and the occasional moan. The congregation had slumped into the far edges of the church pews, as if taking collective flight and then upon orders to stay had sat where they were. Several people sat in the outside aisles, holding each other. Lips moved with murmurs of comfort or perhaps prayers, only adding to the solemn buzz.
Une studied them only to acknowledge their presence and placement. As she had walked in, the ceiling had been low to hold the balcony before opening up to the full height of the church's peak. She knew that Trowa and Sylvia were just behind her. Without needing to look, she knew they deferred their role to her present authority. They would move immediately upon her command or her death.
She felt numb to their fate, even as it rested in her every action.
Ahead of her, she saw the priest crumpled to the ground. His robes spread out around him on the wooden floor, but from the slow rise of his chest he was still living. An unusually large book, most likely a Bible, was haphazardly dropped near the priest's head. The pulpit, from which the book and a littering of other papers must have fallen, had been cleared as if brushed off in a fury from the way they fell. The sacraments had also been spilled. The wine soaked the white cloth of the communion table like a pool of blood. Small, round wafers of bread fallen everywhere like gun shells. Above there, the pipes of the organ stretched and gleamed bronze, midway up, she saw the small platform where the organist should sit. She wondered where the organist went.
Gripped with panic, she wondered where the suspect went. And his gun.
As she asked, she received her answer.
He was standing on the level floor of the sanctuary, just to her right side. His right hand stretched out straight toward Une, holding the gun which Une suspect had fired the shot. It had been a warning. The other arm also had a gun and was wrapped around a young girl of ten, perhaps eleven. Une recognized the girl, and thereby knew the identity of the man facing away from where he sat in the front pew with his hands balanced obediently on his head.
The girl was Elizabeth Walker, sometimes playmate to her own adopted daughter, Mariemaia. The man had to be her father, a soldier who had served under Une when she'd been a colonel for OZ, commanding Barge. The Walker family had sent seven of their sons to serve with Lord Treize. Only three had returned home.
One of those three, the oldest, had retired with the highest honors given to soldiers. The same son, Une had recommended to the President herself for those honors. The man who had stepped up to be her lieutenant when her first officer had to be dismissed for insubordination. The first officer she'd consequently forgotten. The man with the gun.
She knew why Trowa had slipped and called her Colonel. His unconfirmed ID was correct.
"Nichol."
She hadn't said it loudly. Her involuntary speech was more of an acknowledgement than to get his attention, since his gaze was fixed on her already. He'd probably frozen still as soon as he had realized who had walked into the church.
Une had stopped moving when she recognized him. Halfway between the entryway and the pulpit. She wondered if this was what he wanted. To confront her. Or if he'd been targeting Giles Walker. Or if he'd only happened to bring two guns with him to the Sunday morning service on whim.
She noted he was wearing a suit, dark blue and suited for such a service. Not his OZ uniform.
From what she could remember of Henry Nichol, he had a quick sense of judgment. His slow temper, however, was often followed by determined, if misguided, calmness. Once he voiced a complaint, he often went weeks or months without displaying any obvious dissention. After his punishment and pardon for disobedience on Barge, Nichol had been politely dismissed from military service upon arrival to Earth. Une had left specific instruction to that effect and they had been followed during her brief time in the hospital.
At the time, she thought all he needed was to be released from the military environment. She had hoped that if Nichol had time to himself, he would be healed from whatever the war did to soldiers and move on with his life.
She tasted a sourness rising from the back of her tongue. No one could escape from the taint of war when it overcame one's ability to think with compassion. She knew she never would. Soldiers who had become Preventers still sought out counseling to reconcile their demons and in order to cope with the penetrating falseness of imperfect peace. She had been naïve.
Enough time passed with those thoughts, that Une watched the whiteness of Nichol's features start to blossom into an angry purple. The color crept up his neck and from underneath the dark curls of his hair around his ears to cross his cheeks. Was he angry, hurt, or humiliated? She hadn't thought about Henry Nichol in years, and she barely had taken the time to get to know him when he had served under her. She'd been preoccupied with other matters. With the war. With Treize.
"I expected Barton,"
She could scarcely hear him speak. Indeed, she doubted she even would have recognized his voice except for the other connections she made to surmise his identity.
He continued, "But, I never thought . . ."
His voice was so ordinary. Vague hints of emotion registered, but not one overwhelmed another to betray his motivation. Une's gaze dropped to specifically analyze Elizabeth's reactions. The girl trembled, but not consistently. Une wanted to believe that Nichol would not harm the girl, but she had underestimated him before. She pushed back assumptions.
She knew she should ask him what he wanted. She should ask him to let the girl go, and tell him that it was possible for him to be forgiven of this. It wasn't too late. He hadn't killed anyone here. He could get help. He wasn't alone.
Une was tired of lying. Offering false condolences in a church would only pile blasphemy to her list of transgressions. Humanity, for all its years and even in peacetime, had never learned how to forgive. No one could truly forgive another, let alone forgive herself.
"What are you doing?" She asked instead, barely lifting her voice. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and Nichol's eyes widened briefly to analyze her adjustment. His hold on Elizabeth reflexively tightened, and the girl lifted her arms to try and pull his grip away from her neck.
"Rather obvious, I'm sure you've guessed," His tone dropped into deeper registers to reflect the scowl that furrowed his dark brow and pulled downward on his lips, "I'm going to kill everyone here."
She fought the urge to look up to the organist's seat. She didn't want to betray Heero's location, even if Nichol suspected she did not come alone. He would expect it. He had been a good soldier once, "Why?"
"Because life is shit." His humor, a soldier's humor, was as awful as Heero's.
"This isn't like you."
"How do you know what I'm like?" Nichol's words took a dangerous turn, and Une regretted provoking him. She didn't know him. She didn't know what to expect. She didn't know where he had been since she'd demoted him and made him serve under the soldiers he used to command until his dismissal. She hadn't thought about anything but the glorious bigger picture. Treize had always been the one capable of respecting the individual.
Her muscles of her cheeks ached, and she knew her control was slipping. While her personality hadn't been in jeopardy with the medications that had been provided for her, the feeling of her mind drifting away from her surroundings was jarringly similar. Part of her focused on Nichol, another wondered if Sylvia still had her shot with Elizabeth in the way, part of her wondered if law enforcement had finally arrived and circled the building. Part of her wondered what Mariemaia was doing, "You were always very good at taking orders."
"When I was a soldier, but you took that away from me, didn't you?" Bitterness.
She decided to accept the burden of additional sins, "You don't want to do this. Let Elizabeth go, and we can talk about your options. With no consequences." She wetted her lips, "We might find a place for you with the Preventers." She added watching his mouth drop open to refuse.
He didn't speak at first. Instead, he looked stricken with absolute betrayal. As if she had been disloyal to him.
"I expected . . . but, I was wrong." Nichol took the hand that held his gun and turned it in toward Elizabeth. The girl turned to look up at him. Elizabeth shook her head saying 'no' without words. Only Nichol didn't see.
Reacting, as if she'd taken a bullet into her own soul, Une cried out, "Heero, don't!" She ran forward, intuiting that her command would be followed, doubting her chance all the same. Her instincts were outpacing her thoughts. The irony of her title bit into her. How could she have prevented this?
But her movement, her understanding, always came too late. She had grasped Treize's truth too late to change. She hadn't seen the truth of the Gundam Pilots in her prison until it was too late to do much to help. It didn't matter if she couldn't forgive. Sometimes it only had to be offered in order to be true.
His hand dropped, and Elizabeth rushed forward to her father. Nichol raised his gun toward the organ pipes, but his chin dropped toward his chest. The congregation surged in a flurry of peripheral movement as if they'd suddenly been released from an enchantment to hold them still. The absence of sound in Une's reality did nothing to muffle the sound of rifle fire.
The man's knees buckled, and he fell to half his height without toppling. The damage of the rifle shot obvious from the tear of fabric and blood over the place of Nichol's heart. The gun rolled harmlessly from his finger while his arm dropped. Finally, it clattered against the ground.
Une stopped just short of him. Her heart hammered at such a rate she wondered how her body kept her blood inside as Nichol's drained out in rivulets.
"You wanted to die?" She hissed, but choked on the words. Nichol bent forward coughing up blood with the expulsion of the oxygen from his final breath. He couldn't speak. His arms couldn't catch him, and he fell dead.
She stared, eyes wide. She felt that way. She knew she felt the way that he did, when she was alone. When her soldiers filed out and the office door closed.
As if his ghost spoke, his words re-echoed through the situational pressure of her already fragmenting memory, 'Because life is shit.'
"Damn you." She cursed, unfocused, knowing the fate of the unsaved. Knowing the fate that she felt crouching at her front door, waiting for her every morning. The demons she would never admit to anyone else. The ones that hid deepest inside her. Unforgiven.
Heero reached her first. Putting his hand on her shoulder, not so much to comfort her as to warn her of her duty as commander. Her full hearing returned as a foremost sense, and she could hear Trowa and Sylvia sprinting down the sanctuary.
"Good shot, Sylvia." Heero spoke first, matter-of-fact, letting his comment ground reality back into Une. He would cover for Une's emotion, but both of them knew the significance of Sylvia's first kill.
"Oh God," Sylvia burst into tears. Une checked her own, blinking until her eyes were completely dry. It had been so long since she'd seen death up close, and those ties of memory took her back to a dark time in her past.
She saw Sylvia's blonde hair spin out as she fell into Trowa's arms, while he said something intended to console her. Une realized they both were wearing Sunday clothes. The yellow of Sylvia's dress a startling difference from the uniform she wore as a Preventer. The rifle had been for afternoon practice. A strange coincidence it also served as a weapon.
"I can't . . . , I thought . . ." Sylvia sobbed harder against Trowa's shoulder, while the young man looked uncomfortably unhappy. His eyebrows trembled as he turned to Une for guidance.
"He wanted to die," Une said, hearing the remnants of the Colonel in her voice, "He came here to provoke you." She understood that Nichol had seen Trowa as a rival. The pieces started to fall together.
"He only did this in order to . . ." Sylvia looked at Une then, her innocence only enhanced by the unashamed tears and red eyes. Her innocence an uncommon strength brought into their unit. What would he have brought into the unit, if he'd only been asked some other day?
"He must have watched you. Known that you'd have the rifle and were trained in such situations. Although, my guess is he counted on Trowa to kill him." Une felt wrong offering comfort to another person who, regardless, would have nightmares of death in her sleep.
"I'm so sorry. You told Heero not to shoot, but I . . . He wasn't going to hurt anybody?"
"Not another word. We did what we had to," Then Une looked down at the body. She would dream about this. Could she have prevented his choice? How was she to know? Should she have forgiven him? Forgiveness was the business of heaven. Une glanced around her, at the dark wood planks of the ceiling down to the portraits of Bible scenes fixed in the stained glass. She was in a church, after all. A rush of sincerity brought her next words, even though she couldn't comprehend their source, "I forgive you."
~*~
"Cause we can't run the truth out of town,
. . . only force it underground."
~Over the Rhine, "All I Need is Everything"