SUMMARY: Nida is a flight-school failure with serious apathy issues. What will it take for him to kick the habit and finally make something of his life? A lot more than you'd expect. WIP, mild AU, possible char death.

Twist of Fate -- Now The Breakspark

Chapter I - Indifference

Disclaimer: Pfft, come on. You know I don't own this, dude.

A/N: It's been a long haul, guys, but I've decided to run these over with some mad editing skills. I realize now that the way I was writing was not only n00bish, but littered with chatspeak, immaturity, and a strange Mary-Sue-like deity in the form of me as "Trowa".

I will admit I got good reviews -- many good reviews, at that -- but ... I can't keep this the way it was with a clear conscience.

Trowa will now take the form of the pilot Nida, and hopefully with him I can grasp some semblance of a plot.

I'd like to thank anyone who reviewed The Breakspark in its past form, and anyone who plans to review this. I love y'all. D

Warnings: Pfft.

Rating: PG-13

Ships: Pfft. All right, maybe Nida/Seifer later on, because I can. But this isn't about the pairings. P

Other: Very slight AU. Begins before-game. Slightly difficult to catch on to, but once you've got it, it's hella good.

Trust me.

commence&chapterone

It could have been.

Rain lashed at the roof of building number 515, Samahain Parkway. A plump woman of obvious Italian descent was standing by the window wearing a somber expression, one hand holding back the curtains as her worried eyes scanned the dark street for any sign of Nida.

He should have been back by now, she thought, trying to mask her uncertainty with irritation. He was always late for things -- not that it was his fault, of course. He just had natural bad luck sometimes, just some inescapable thing that seemed to follow him everywhere like a dark cloud and express itself in everything he did, no matter how hard he tried. And now -- pilot training. The one last unachievable goal, perhaps? Or maybe the one thing he could finally excel in, showing some strange burst of natural talent and ability? It was highly unlikely, but he was her son, so she had to support him. What else could she do? What else had she ever done?

An abrupt knock on the door made her mind click out of its reverie. She quickly closed the curtains and bustled noisly across the smooth wooden floor, hastening to undo the chain-lock and open the door.

"I failed, you know. The calm voice. It was expected. Not resentment, fury, sadness, dissappointment. Just calm, the sort of eerie dead calm that you have when you know all along that something horrible's going to happen -- and sure enough, it happens -- and you just can't bring yourself to care anymore. Indifferent calm.

A slender man was standing in the doorway, completely drenched. His damp chesnut-brown hair was weighted down and obscured his eyes, which were looking toward the ground, though you could somehow still see the disdain in the way he was standing, and the way he was holding a rolled-up bunch of paper in his right hand with a sort of suppressed anger, as if everything bad that had happened in his life was the fault of that one piece of paper, and he couldn't bring himself to do anything about it yet. And that might have been the case.

The woman frowned and closed the door behind him as he walked in -- only a few steps. He was having self-pity. Self-pity wasn't allowed. "You'll be fine. It was just the test jitters - I know you've got a knack for flying, I saw you out on Brenson's land last week. You were brilliant, Nida --"

Nida looked up and glared at his mother. A sharp glare, not angry, but stony. The look you give when you want people to shut up.

"It doesn't matter, mom. Nothing matters." He reluctantly dropped the paper he was holding, and it landed on the linoleum with a soft wet splash. Neither of them heard it. It wasn't an important sound.

She felt a slight twinge of anger. He's giving up already? I didn't raise any quitters.

Nida hadn't planned on giving her a chance to respond. He'd spent two hours in the rain practicing what he was going to say, loitering outside of the hangar after he'd failed the written test, trying and failing to light a cigarette, and the irony had struck him. The irony that at eighteen, he was delaying going home like a scared little kid, thinking up excuses for his failure. But he'd pushed it away. There wasn't any guilt in not wanting to do this anymore. He wasn't getting anywhere with this, and he had to admit to himself that he never would.

"I'm not doing it anymore."

He was staring at the ground again -- a bad habit. He ran his fingers through his hair without a hint of nervousness and looked back up at his mother. His emerald-green eyes showed no hint of rebellion. No defiance. Just indifference. She would see this.

Nida's mother hadn't expected this. "Not doing what anymore?" she asked cautiously after a few seconds.

"You know what. I'm done. I'm tired of failing."

The lead instructor had approached him in the back of the hangar after the exam, before it had started raining and before Nida had started trying to light cigarettes. The words had been swirling around in Nida's head ever since: You're not a failure, Nida. There's something there, though. Something I don't get about you. Quiet, unassuming determination. You're good when you're on form, and there's nobody watching you. Not good. Genius. Best I've seen in my days. But when you've got to prove it, when it comes time to prove yourself to yourself and us, there's a wall. A barrier. You've got to break this, kid. You're brilliant. I know you can break this.

He hadn't cared. He hadn't been listening when the instructor had told him that he could come back any time, that he could still try again sometime, anytime.

His mother seemed to be in shock, and was certainly talking less than normal. Taking advantage of her silence, Nida slipped off his sneakers and padded his way up the carpeted staircase in his socks, still trailing behind the watery remains of the storm still raging outside. After a few seconds, Nida's mother recovered from her shock and ran after Nida, yelling, "But you passed the practical!"

Nida ignored the hufffing woman next to her, slid open the wooden doors to the linen closet and browsed through the range of towel colors carefully. After selecting a navy one with a fading white monogram, he quietly turned to his mother. "That wasn't the practical, it was the free-form. It didn't count towards my grade."

"But you passed it, didn't you? You did it, I've seen you do it!" She closed the linen closet doors and pulled the towel out of Nida's hands, forcing him to sweep his hair back yet again and look at her, this time slightly annoyed. He began walking into his room, muttering under his breath. "Yeah. I did the free-form, and he said I was off the charts. But that's all, you know? I'm not on the charts now. Maybe I'll just... I dunno. Don't wake me up tomorrow."

It was a mark of how desperate he was that he had forgotten the speech he had planned.

Nida shut the door behind him with one hand, submerging himself in total darkness. He stood and leaned against the door for a moment, still soaking wet and staring directly at the dark-curtained window across the room, listening to the rainstorm still raging outside.

The same rainstorm he had been seeing for ten years.

cease&chapterone

A/N: It's sad to say that I really don't know where I'm going with this. sob I started it literally in the middle of the night on a whim, and finished a couple more paragraphs in the morning. I like where it's going, but at the same time I want to know what the hell I'm doing. It's like being in a car racing down the countryside, and you love the feel of going so fast, and the view of the countryside around you, but at the same time, you can't help but wondering what's going to happen when the car stops.

Looking back, I see that my writing style has changed soooo much. I kind of miss it, being able to write randomly like that. But at the same time, I love the way I write now. I just wish that when I start things like this, I'd think of an ending before I get too far in.

On the plus side, this means you guys can't weasel any details out of me before I'm ready to surrender them. I know as much as you do! Well, maybe more than that. Did anyone catch the hint in the last sentence of that chapter? There's going to be backstory, believe you me. And no, it's not about a rainstorm that's been going on constantly for ten years. It's like a metaphor, capiche? Because that'd be one hell of a lot of flooding if it wasn't.

These author's notes are getting quite long. I haven't typed this fast since National Novel Writing Month, and it feels good to get back in the writing thingy again, even if (as aforementioned) I don't have a clue what I'm doing. Any comments or constructive critiscism on this chapter would be more welcome than cold glass of lemonade in the summertime -- even though it's probably like ten degrees where you are unless you live in Florida or something. 8) Mmm, Florida ..

Anyway! Read! Review! Kick me for writing so much when I'm supposed to be doing my ess ay tees YES MOM I'M COMING I KNOW I KNOW --

tbc