Content Warning: LOTS of violence, LOTS of blood. Several people die in POV, and many more die outside of the POV character's sight. This might be the most violent thing I've ever written, so if you don't like violence, do not read past the first line break. There's some damn fine angst there; content yourselves with that. But if you can't handle violence, beware past the first line break.
Everyone else, welcome to the Pain Train! Destination: EMOTIONAL AGONY and MASS DEATH! Written because a reddit comment of mine, predicting past and coping with the events of Episode 17, became a full-blown story in my head in minutes and I HAD to get it out of there. I do not own Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. Please review, comment, or criticize. Most of all, enjoy!
The Lady in Black (and Red)
It had been just over a year, and it still hurt. As much as she told herself, every day, it had been for the girl's own good, her own safety, it still hurt. The hole Miorine had had to tear in both their hearts, to keep Suletta safe. And while she should have been worried that the young Mercurian had left Earth House many months ago, Miorine decided to see that as positive. As her former groom finally breaking out, finding a path that was wholly her own, free from the scheming and machinations of the Benerit Group and Prospera and Miorine herself.
That was how she had to see it, frankly. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. Work served as a good distraction from that constant, piercing hurt. Managing Gund-Arm in concert with Jeturk, managing the entire Group, and continuing to stall Prospera Mercury's plans as much and as long as reasonably as she could. Things had been… far more orderly, more bloodless, when she won the election. So much so that…
Her personal computer pinged; a new message. The sender was unknown. Miorine didn't know why, but she opened it anyway. The attached audio file downloaded automatically, against her system's security preferences, shattering those systems, in fact, and opened itself.
The voice seemed distorted, and she couldn't tell why. File compression, intentional post-production alteration, distortion from speaker systems. Any number of reasons would've meant the voice, happily singing, was unrecognizable. Unrecognizable to anyone but her.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you," Even without whatever audio distortion was present, a year had dulled some of her old high-pitched charm, brought the voice lower, but it was, to Miorine's ears, unmistakable. This had come from Suletta. This was Suletta's voice on the file. "Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
It looped automatically, and all Miorine could do was hold herself up upon her desk desperately, trying with every bit of herself to not break down. She didn't even hear or see her door opening, the man she'd married for convenience walking through. She didn't see him stop dead in his tracks as the sound hit his ears, see his eyes widen in recognition, then further in horror as his mind went to all the same possibilities that were running through her own head.
Guel didn't say anything. He just approached her and put a comforting arm around her, and she kept trying to hold her tears at bay. How could that girl ever wish this for her, wish anything good upon her, after all she'd done to her?
The lights flickered. Everything flickered, save her computer. Miorine moved to close the file, and found the interface wouldn't respond. Then the alarms began to sound. She and Guel moved, heading for the security center.
"Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
"What's the situation?" Guel called as her entered ahead of his wife.
"Uknown." The reply came from one of the camera operators.
"Unknown?" Guel replied. Even the Dawn of Fold were a recognizable quantity after the last year of activity.
"It's a Mobile Suit, sir, but it has no ID in the system, and isn't responding to hails. We've got a squad scrambled, should have visual in a moment." It might've seemed like an overreaction, but between rival companies and anti-Spacian groups, they sadly did need to be so careful about who and what entered their airspace.
The main picture shifted, as did the small screens around it, showing the feed from the security Mobile Suits that had been dispatched. Guel's gaze narrowed as the squad neared, and the unidentified Mobile Suit came into sharper view. He could feel Miorine's eyes widen in tandem with his as the distance was closed, but his mind was running so fast he couldn't hear the communications over his own thoughts.
It was the Gundam Schwarzette on-screen. The most controversial joint project between Gund-ARM and Jeturk Heavy Machinery. The one thing Miorine had sworn they'd never build; a Gundam Mobile Suit meant for combat, rather than as a vector for medicinal enhancement and prosthesis. She'd argued that it was a purely in-house model, not for sale, not for mass production. It was made so that they could defend themselves, and ONLY for their own defense. And as much as the development board DID need that capability, she could never fully answer WHY she'd felt the need to have it built. Nor could Guel. He didn't even pilot any longer.
Further, Miorine's assertion of the need for self-defense had been proven ironically correct; the day after they'd run the final tests of the Schwarzette, the lab facility had been attacked by parties unknown, and the Schwarzette stolen. No attempt at finding it had proven successful. Until now. When whoever had taken it had apparently decided to simply… show up, boldfaced.
It was wrong.
"Tell them to break off." Miorine's voice cut through the bustle of room, and the sounds of the security flight starting to issue final warnings and move into a threatening attack formation. "Break off and return, now. Set the station on high-"
She couldn't finish, for on the screens, the Schwarzette sprang to life from a seemingly static and uninterested flight path towards the station. An integrated arm cannon fired out two explosive beams, which left behind nothing of their targets but floating shrapnel and charnel. A swift reach and a course correction saw a sword nearly as big as any of the Mobile Suits themselves carve through the remaining two Suits, cutting out their video feeds, but not their pilot comms. The whole room fell silent in disgust and terror as they heard the pilots cry and beg, choking on vacuum and freezing in cold space as their Mobile Suits and EVA suits broke apart around them, rent asunder by the sheer force of the blow.
"Set…" Miorine had to compose herself. "Set the station on high alert."
They had just gathered up the rest of the Gund-ARM founding team and her father when it happened. An undercurrent of static cut beneath the alarms and automated emergency instructions, static that resolved itself in the most impossible, horrifying way.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you."
It couldn't be.
"Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
Mioine could see the same disbelief and horror begin to build across everyone else's faces. From Nika to Chuchu to Martin, to Guel again, and all the others. Her own included, she was sure.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you."
"SHUT UP!" Miorine hadn't meant to say it out loud, let alone scream it as she did, but the sheer implication, of this sound and the message she'd received, took her past an emotional limit she'd hadn't realized she'd nearly hit already yet today. She wasn't sure if this was the final push or not. It felt like it could've been, but…
"Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
Breathing heavily, she turned to the others.
"What are you all staring at? Let's keep moving." She'd stopped them, and they had every right to stare, but of course no one was going to point that out. Not even her father.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
The sound hunted them down the corridors, a twisted undercurrent to the shudderings of the halls around them, and the gentle reports of beam fire and screaming metal and people that meant the Schwarzette was drawing closer. Or at least, making it through the station's defenses. Of course it was. It was a Gundam.
They were almost to the bunker they'd had built into the station center when it happened, one hangar away. The Schwarzette and four Dilanzas crashed through the far wall, and derbis landed all along the path to the elevator. One Gundam against 4 Mobile Suits handled by some of the best pilots money could buy. It wasn't even close to a fair fight, and most of what once was Earth House smartly hid behind whatever they could find as great mechanical limbs and bodies went flying. As the pilots within were crushed beneath the sheer vastness of the Schwarzette's blade or smashed against the walls with what was left of their Mobile Suits.
The most terrible part wasn't the violence before them, though. It was the sounds that were coming from the Schwarzette. The occasional giggle or shriek of glee from its pilot cut across the sounds of death and the incessant song. In that same voice, and Miorine saw that Guel and Earth House had reached the same conclusion, and just like her, couldn't believe it. Even her father looked perhaps the most shocked she'd ever seen him, even if he'd only properly met the girl barely once.
In short order, the last pilot ended up tumbling out of his ruined cockpit, his Mobile Suit hacked to pieces above him, and he scrambled to outrun the debris, nearing the board. As he saw his charges trapped, he turned to face the great black and grey Gundam, and drew his sidearm. As if it would do anything
"Ma'am, you can still make it, just ru-" He was cut off abruptly, half looking at his President, when Schwarzette lifted a hand from its sword and brought it down hard. In less than a second, what was once a man, desperately pointing the way to a vague promise of safety, was reduced to a slurry of blood and bones that slowly, but surely, drifted towards her and the rest. His arm softly hit and rolled off her face, just like the time at Plant Quetta. The Schwarzette lifted its hand, and blood and pulped organs fell away from the metal like grotesque bubbles in the lessened gravity of the hangar. Miorine could see that the whole of the Gundam, from head to toe, was drenched. In shrapnel. In oil. In people. What used to be people.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
The song was still ringing in her ears, ringing from the automated systems, what had started the events of the day as a heart wrenching reminder of her own cruelty and twisted love had itself twisted and warped, poisoned itself with the lives and viscera of the pilots and workers in her wider employ that had died fruitlessly trying to protect her from this.
The Schwarzette titled its head, looking down at all of them. Martin and others had started desperately working to clear the way, but stopped when they felt the Gundam's gaze settle on them. Her father gazed right back in cold defiance, and Miorine couldn't tell who it was trying to focus on.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
Then a salvo of beam fire burst out of the same wall the Schwazrette had come through. Several shots went wide, passed just by the desperate board. The Schwarzette spun with impossible speed, and brought its sword around, to block the beams with its massive weapon. It's thrusters lit up and it launched back into the fray, but this time was different. Where before, there had been a sadistic glee that Miorine could never have imagined hearing in… that voice… now, what came from the Schwarzette's speaker was an equally alien, equally impossible, blood-hungry FURY.
"YOU!" The sword carved through the whole of one of the three Darilbalde; one of the last lines of security left. "COULD'VE!" The sword swept an opening into the cockpit for a hand to thrust in and squeeze, a cloud of blood and guts erupting out. "HURT!" The sword moved systemically, dismembering the last Darilbalde. "THEM!" It smashed the blade down upon the helpless torso, and Miorine could've sworn she saw the flare of the emergency eject system. Which made it all the messier, as the hapless pilot blasted himself right into the weapon.
The Schwarzette turned back, the fresh coat of oil and blood dripped and seeped down its front, down the massive sword. And then the twisted glee returned, a sick giggle spat out of its speakers.
"Well, Ms. Miorine," and even if the voice had not been so similar if changed with time, this confirmed the terrible truth. Her name could only sound like that in- "You said I was a 'good shield.'" Suletta's voice; she couldn't have put into words how deeply she had wished to hear it again over the last year, but this… "See?!" The Schwarzette expertly, artistically spun its massive sword around in its hands, casting a rain of viscera down upon the assembled group. "Now I'm a good sword, too!" The giggle that followed the frankly terrible pun would've been adorable, had it not been coming from the blood-soaked Gundam. Had it not carried such an undertone of sadism. Of madness.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!" The song carried on and on and on.
The Schwarzette titled its head to the emergency speakers, and that twisted giggle sounded again.
"I do hope you've had a good birthday so far, Ms. Miorine. But, I'm not actually here to speak to you." The Schwarzette lowered its head and focused its gaze. "Mr. Delling. Rembran." And the sadistic, poisonous sweetness was gone in an instant, replaced again by that terrible hatred that was just as alien in Suletta's voice. "You sent teams of murderers to what should've been my home." The Schwarzette stepped forward. "You sent them to kill everyone. My mother. My father. My sister. Our grandmother. Everyone there, everyone they knew. You. Sent. Them." The Gundam towered right above them, and began to kneel and reach. "YOU are why Eri and I had to grow up in hiding, grow up without a father. Grow up without anyone besides Mother to love us. Anyone else who would've all died, saving us from you."
Miorine sprinted, desperately trying to throw herself between the Mobile Suit and her father, but she couldn't move fast enough. And the Gundam moved faster than even she, who'd helped design it, thought it could. It swiftly but carefully seized Delling and lifted him off the ground.
"SULETTA!" Miorine screamed, begged. She didn't know why. She had given up the right to ask anything of her, even this. And if what Suletta said was true-
"AND FOR WHAT!?" Suletta's roar shook the room. Miorine might as well have not even spoken. "They died for your FEAR! For your small-mindedness! For problems with Gundams they were already FIXING!" She seemed to take a moment, collect herself. "You killed all of them. For fears and problems you barely understood, and hadn't even experienced. But, maybe," Miorine could see a shift in her father's posture. He was… afraid? "Maybe, you can. Maybe you should." The cockpit opened. "The 'Gundam's curse.' That was what you called it, Mr. Delling."
Miorine was all but paralyzed as the Schwarzette pressed her father into the cockpit. The cockpit that looked completely empty.
The cockpit slammed shut, and the Permet lines across the Schwarzette lit and burned. The blood boiled off in an evil-looking red mist, the oil caught and flared a terrible orange. Over the speakers, Miorine heard her father scream in agony. That at last shocked her into action.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
She sprinted against the Mobile Suit, crouched down in a perverted version of that same pose the Aerial had taken after their fist duel. She hammered her fists against the sword, against its leg and dangling off-hand. She smeared what was left of her employees, her people, over herself as she begged and screamed and grabbed at the unfeeling war machine she'd helped create.
"SULETTA! PLEASE!" Miorine wasn't sure she'd sounded so desperate in all her life.
For the briefest moment, her father's screams died down, and she let herself hope. Then they resumed, worse than before, as the Permet burned even brighter.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
After what seemed like an eternity, her father's screams stopped. The cockpit opened, and his corpse slid and tumbled out, landing in the pool of oil and blood that had dripped and run down from the frame of the Schwarzette. Miorine ran to him. His face had twisted into a snarl of anguish, of profound horror. Foam and blood caked his mouth, with more blood and a viscera she didn't want to think too hard about pouring out of his ears. One of his eyes looked like it had been boiled, the other had exploded in its socket. Miorine threw herself on top of him, sobbing and pleading. Eventually, Miorine turned to glare into the cockpit, at Suletta, and found… she couldn't. It was as she thought she'd seen. It was completely empty, save the blood that had spattered around from her father in his death throes.
"What's… how… what did you…" Miorine had her suspicions about Prospera, suspicions that had developed over the last year as they worked closer together. As Quiet Zero carried on even as Miorine worked to slow it. As Gund-ARM developed the sort of technology it was meant to, and Miorine looked ahead to see a potential, terrible endpoint of that technology. Suspicions that had been confirmed one sad night, when Belmeria Winston entered her office after the latest successful test, and told her of Prospera's first daughter.
"I needed to be a better pilot, a better fighter, Ms. Miorine. For this, and for what's to come. For what had been. I wasn't good enough before, but I am now." The still-open cockpit, bereft of the girl whose voice came from the Gundam. Who was speaking as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "What better way to improve, than to become the weapon itself?"
Miorine felt bile surge up her throat as the cockpit sealed itself, and the Schwarzette, SULETTA, rose back up to stand. She desperately tried and failed to not vomit on her father's body as the Schwarzette, as Suletta, turned towards the open hangar doors.
"I-I did mean it, y-you know," The Gundam, Suletta, turned her head to look back at her. That brief return of her stutter, utterly absent before, almost made Miorine vomit again. "Happy birthday, Ms. Miorine."
As Suletta flew out into the depths of space, the song continued in its now sadistic message, and Miorine could only weep.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you!"
So yeah, a reddit thread comment said "I suspect Suletta will have a crazy/evil arc before getting her shit sorted out." And my mind went RIGHT to one of the worst things I could possibly think of, and the idea captivated my creativity like few things have in YEARS. So here we are. The original idea was a slightly different; Sullettzette was supposed to just pick Delling up and pop him like a zit, but that felt both redundant with the redux of the Episode 12 SMACK, and just... not CRUEL and darkly poetic enough for what Suletta has let herself become. And then I thought "Could she kill him with Permet overload? Kill him with the 'Gundam's curse?' OH, THAT'S SO TERRIBLE! I LOVE IT! Oh, that's SO MUCH WORSE! LET'S GO!" And here we are. It was also interesting how this developed out of a very simple comment, in terms of characterization.
Suletta getting SO ANGRY that the last squad almost hit everyone was a in-the-moment addition, but I think it perfectly fits this new, twisted version of her. She still CARES about most of those people, and doesn't want them harmed (at least not physically). Some things about her haven't changed, even with everything that HAS. But the things that have changed are, to put it lightly, BIG CHANGES in how she perceives and acts upon her emotions and the things (and people) she perceives as problems. At the same time, also trying to get across that, yes, she's let herself become this actual monster, but she isn't as... inhuman as that implies. Some of her old self is still there, and there's a chance for her to come back from this in terms of personality, if not in her relationships with the people around her. She's supposed to get out of this state eventually; she's just in the absolute depths of her crazy/villain arc right now.
I might, MIGHT, do a companion piece, showing Suletta's journey to become...THIS, but I'm not sure. This is already up there as quite probably the darkest, most violent thing I've ever written, and what I've pictured Suletta going through in the year-long time skip to get here might honestly be WORSE (for sure at least 1 attempted suicide, SO MUCH GASLIGHTING, and transhumanist cyber-soul-agony, just to give you an rough idea), and I don't know that I want to put that out there. I also DO have another totally unrelated idea, also couched in online discussion theories, that I'm probably going to make that will be FAR less tragic and horrible in its subject matter than THIS was. Much more hopeful, if dusted in some major angst and light tragedy yet. Cause it's ME, and it's Gundam. It wouldn't be either without those, would it?