Author's Note: Repost part II, because the original sucked. Please Read and Review if you like it!
Italics: Characters' thoughts or foreign words.
Definitions: Terraformation is cultivating a livable atmosphere on other planets. Talent is another word for psionic powers (telepathy, empathy, etc). Samsara is the Hindu death and reincarnation cycle.
Warnings: OC main character. Confusing New-Age gibberish. :)
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. (Sigh...) Except for Wing; she's mine. The story's mine, too, so if you want to post it anywhere else, get my permission or I will sic my fluffy bunny slippers on you.
Last Waltz
Part 1: Wing Gundam Zero
Chapter 2: Pain Carried into the Present (Machine's Thoughts)
In the apartment's gloomy front room, Heero lounged haphazardly across the decrepit couch, glowering as he slept. Rid of her stuffy formal clothes, Wing lay stretched out on the ancient, knotted carpet beside the sofa, drifting in the lucid white haze that the Gundams called sleep. With the ritual of long practice, she turned the day's unpleasant events over in her mind, prodding gently for any person or place that made her unsettled. In the past, the images and feelings that had sifted to the surface had brought her trouble at a later time. The hostility between the colonies and Earth was beginning to thicken with Relena's introduction of the Terraformation Project and the added strain of the Colony reconstruction, and Wing didn't want anything to surprise her—especially with so many high-powered officials under her de facto protection. But for today, there were no red flags. Wing gave a mental sigh of relief and mentally prepared herself to fall into dreamless sleep.
Gundams didn't dream. It was to be expected; they were machines...or used to be. It had never been programmed into them, to dream, and so they didn't possess the ability. Not that Wing cared. The fog they saw in its place was far more relaxing for her…you slid in and out so easily. There was no confused, opaque film to break when you awoke. Nothing to slow your reaction time.
Wing ran her injured hand over the carpet's texture and agitated the worn pile, breathing in the heady, calming smell of her pilot as she stirred the twists of fabric. The scent of cloves, mild deodorant, and the faint tang of sweat enveloped her head all-inclusively, on a level only slightly less intimate than sex. She felt the always-present aching pain leech out of her body, slightly, but even the small retreat was welcome respite from the burning in her core. It was at the times when her mind was the most quiet that the pain of the punishment the Gods had meted out surfaced in all its searing power.
The pain was fantastic in the way it held her by the throat. She was long past the point of whimpering and wishing for an end to the ache that had been her constant companion since she had been cast down to Earth. The best medical technology in the world couldn't spot its source, the highest-educated minds in the World Nation couldn't decode the parts of her mind that were making it, and Wing had signed her name in blood to the contract that said she would bear it for the term of her punishment. And she'd long known euphoria was the only thing that would bring temporary relief. Perhaps euphoria didn't work as well as morphine, but she could not afford to become addicted to painkillers. So she tried to raise her endorphin count in whatever way she could, whenever she could. If it meant hanging on to every bit of scent she could find, so be it. Without some relief, she would go insane.
A rapid shift in her pilot's body position alerted Wing to his regain of consciousness, and she scrambled out of the way as he swung his legs around and sat upright. Her chest tightened with a swirl of emotions not her own: horror, pain, sorrow. She realized Heero had been dreaming. Wing caught impressions of the dream as, in his waking, it sunk itself into the shadows of his inner mind—and realized she had seen fragments of this one before. It was a memory, but the afterimages that now flooded her sight were new ones, and they burned with desperate, heart-wrenching grief.
The young, chubby Yellow Labrador puppy, dead, fur smoldering even under a stifling coating of fine concrete dust;
A tiny, severed foot's heat-blistered skin melted into its patent-leather shoe—
The tattered white rag pulled mercilessly by the wind—
Pummeled stone that wept blood, diluted in the Colony's artificial rain…the smell of seared, tortured flesh mingled with the sweetness of rot and burning asbestos—
Dekim's voice, screaming through the hidden complex. "I don't CARE! Who ever heard of a weapon mourning dead civilians? Re-train him NOW!"
It was not the first time Heero had subjected himself to this torment. The same memories had been in his eyes throughout the last battle with Dekim, and in five years he had never grown immune to them. Though his body was still, she felt his mind reel with anguish. Bound to inaction by the new human emotions rippling under her skin, she carefully sat next to the ex-soldier; knowing full well that were she to touch him to bring him comfort, her punishment would be severe.
Silently, Wing despaired. She needed only to touch him to alleviate his pain, but she could not; the ability was as good as bound. This seal on her spiritual Talent was a small part of the punishment the Gods had handed down to her—karmic reparations for the atrocities she had committed during the Wars. As far as the Gods were concerned, Wing, of all the Gundams, was the worst of the war criminals. Unlike the other four machines, she had not been just an instrument of the pilots' mayhem. With her actions in the two Wars—forcing Heero and Zechs into the maddened killing sprees of the A.C. 195 war, repeatedly torturing Quatre, killing the OZ officer Trant—Wing was notorious for her past cruelty and had earned her place in the samsara cycle. But that did not make the inability to relieve her pilot's suffering bearable.
Emotions too complex and numerous to name welled within her as she reviewed the sentence the Shining Lords had allotted her. Even your master's approach shall bring you pain. You will know all his suffering. For your lifetime you shall not know a day that he does not suffer—but to lay a hand on him in aid shall mean hurt for both souls. Know the agony you have been party to, and live your life in its shadow! The first pain of her mortal life had been the indescribable, all-encompassing agony of the Holy Scribe's stylus engraving the words of the Sentence onto every bone of her body.
Wing had writhed and screamed like a person dying in the fires of war, but the stylus's razor-sharp point calmly found its mark between her spasms. The scribe was mute, but Wing realized on her own that the record was long, horribly long, and fighting the demigod would only lengthen the time he took copying the words. Eventually she'd subsided in favor of ending the torment sooner. Keeping her body still had been more than she could bear. Assaulted as she had been, the Gundam nonetheless heard the Shining Ones' final pronouncement before she was flung naked to Earth. You shall forget this not, Wing Gundam Zero. Carry out your sentence, and return to Us to be judged again.
Wing glanced up at her pilot, wondering if he sensed any of what she was feeling. Wing knew from speaking with Sandrock that the connection between Gundam and Pilot could work both ways, if the pilot was receptive. But no. Heero had fixed his attention on the ill-used, dejected television set in the opposite corner…there was no sign that he had heard her. As usual.
Abruptly and inexplicably weary, she joined the ex-soldier in staring into the lifeless gray of the screen. She didn't forget the memory of her Judgment or of her uncomfortable situation with Heero, but this focus was mindless like forgetting, and she fell into it. A beautifully fragile, shroud-like calm descended in the darkened room.
The world was full dark, and the blue neon nightclub sign across the street flickered into life. Ultramarine light streamed through the grubby windows and bathed the carpet and walls in an intermittent, ethereal blue. The sweet, longing voice of a baritone sax, entwined with the phosphorescent glow, echoed off the silent buildings and mourned its way through the glass. Wing recognized the timbre: Nikolai, the gifted, flirty saxophonist in the apartment one block down, warming up for his nightly session at the club. As her pilot sank deeper into his thoughts, Wing's focus turned even deeper into herself until she lost all sense of her human body. Heero's pain was a beacon she was aware of even from far away, and searing in its intensity. Not even Nikolai's gut-stirring, plaintive strains of jazz could more than graze the ex-Gundam pilot's wounded heart. Wing focused on that wound, watched it grow like a disease, as she did practically every hour she was awake and many she wasn't.
The sudden knock on the door what seemed like hours later shocked Wing terribly and sent both she and her pilot careening away from their meditation. Wing sat and mentally gasped for breath, but Heero, long used to rude awakenings, pulled himself together instantly.
"Who is it?" He snarled, applying the deadly tone that usually had unwanted solicitors fleeing the door in terror.
No such luck.
"It's Relena!" A familiarly perky voice sang from behind the door.