They
Know Not What They Do
By Lauren Ashley "AngelSakura Wolfwood" --------
Trigun/Trigun
Maximum © Yasuhiro Nightow/Shounen Gaho-sha
She stared up at them, wide-eyed. Her limbs were cleanly fashioned; her mid-length fair hair fell about her face; her liquid, crystal-blue eyes held a curiously blank expression, mingled with the inherent gentleness of a child. Her smile shone through with innocence. A new creation, unheard of and undocumented.
And so they took her, exactly fifty-seven days after her birth, and put her under for analysis. It was their duty as scientists, as pioneers, as humans, to research this breakthrough in the form of a girl-child. She watched. Never once did she close her eyes while conscious. And they dismissed it. It was not, after all, as if she were human.
Gradually, she learned to speak. Asked quietly for food when the need possessed her; conversed in hushed tones with the gentle woman with dark hair and worried eyes. More often, though, she sat in silence for days at a time, the heavy equipment encasing her small head bowing it as if in prayer.
She didn't know why the woman and her crewmate raised their voices to the others, after a time, panicked and upset. She didn't ask. The reasons for the constant injections, samplings, and long blank periods of sleep-like emptiness in her memory escaped her. She had been born into this rhythm of regular experimentations and remained ignorant of a life that lacked it.
The pain was nothing strange to her. She was accustomed. It slowly increased as the days went by. She didn't question it. She watched the world through her single exposed eye, now, more blankly than ever. Even as she cried, it was without knowledge of why the tears came.
Her skin became tinted with darkness. Her hair barely held itself in place. She felt the drain of her life leaving her and accepted it, as everything else. It was the only thing she knew how to do.
As she closed her eyes at last, Tessla heard Rem whisper, "'Forgive them, O Lord, they know not what they do.'"