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Subterfuge	By : Switchblade003 Category: Gundam Wing/AC > General Views: 597 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing/AC, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Subterfuge
- 1
Disclaimer: Shit. Ya’ll know Gundam ain’t mine! If it were, Trowa’s pants wouldn’t’a been so damned tight. His sperm are gaggin’!

Title: Subterfuge

Author: Switchblade003

Pairing(s): Dunno. Read and tell me. There might be a quiz!

Warning(s): This is my return to the fanfiction community, so go easy on me? Heh, no, I’m just kiddin’. Go crazy! Rip me a new one! God only knows that I deserve it after leavin’ ya’ll for three months…

Rating: R, for violence, language, and author designation. I said so, dammit! It’s my fic; I’ll do what I want!

Archive: None, right now. Hopefully Dians will put it up at Wuffie.Net.

Notes: Well, I try to write about points in the series that most ignore. This is another one. I took some liberty with the storyline from "Blind Target." I apologize. It’s a kinda prequel to my other fic "Blind Target." Parts of this are loosely based on lines from "Fight Club," my favorite movie—specifically where the narrator beats the shit out of that blonde guy: "I wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t fuck to save its species, I wanted to breathe fire. I wanted to destroy something beautiful."

Status: Complete, never revised (Oct. 2003).

+++

I don’t think that I can ever remember being quite as overwhelmed by my own feelings as I was the day that Quatre died.

At least, I honestly thought he was dead.

Either way, it shocked me that such an inevitable event, something that I’d been bracing myself for the entire duration of the war, could turn my heart inside out and shatter all of my logic, my self-control.

It was the first time in my life that I killed out of sheer hatred, anger, and every other selfish, reckless emotion unleashed from Pandora’s box.

Ralph Kurt showed up at the circus grounds unannounced and uninvited that day, but that’s always been his style. We were mercenaries, and surprise appearances were our specialty, so when I did find him—or rather, he found me—it was almost acceptable. I was cautious. When he demanded that I hand over my Gundam due to my lack of aggression, however, the circumstances changed; I was agitated.

When Catherine came barreling out of the tents, screaming to me that Quatre’s conference hall had been annihilated, I saw red.

Quatre Raberba Winner had always been the backbone of our group missions. In the final days of the war, when we truly believed that Zechs Merquise would drop Libra onto the Earth and that we were powerless to stop him, that idealistic and humanist compassion of Quatre’s was too stubborn to allow him to quit fighting, and I think that it was his immortal naivete that kept us going. That boy—however sheltered and truly innocent he might have been—had effectively kept four skilled Gundam terrorists from abandoning the cause. He was that pure, unadulterated spirit that we had all lost somewhere along the line, and we would die trying to preserve it. It disturbed me on some level, the influence that he had over me, but unlike most things I succumbed to it.

I’m not a leader. I generally don’t go beyond and above the of of duty for anyone, but for Quatre I would have flown to Hell and back. I did.

I had spent months mulling over the idea of losing him, or any of the other pilots, and I had thought that shutting down emotionally—which isn’t very difficult for me—would be the best solution. If I was numb I couldn’t feel the pain, the anger, the loss. I thought that I had prepared myself for the unavoidable outcome of years spent fighting losing battles; I thought that I could handle losing him.

God almighty, how wrong I was.

The words that fell from my lips after hearing Cathy’s screams were soft, low, almost growls and laced with venom.

I asked Ralph if he had been responsible. It was an easy mental process—If Quatre is dead, then who took him from me?

He pushed my question aside easily, as if the death of Quatre Winner couldn’t have meant less to him, and in all seriousness, it couldn’t have. What did Ralph care if he had destroyed my reason for fighting, for surviving? Pilot Zero-Four was nothing more to him than a face on the news, a statistic. He was more to me, so much more…

I wrestled with myself internally, ordered my heart to shut down, to block out, to not feel. For a moment a thought that I had succeeded, and I told Catherine that I had to leave, had to keep her out of harm’s way. For once, her protests about my departure fell on deaf ears.

I walked, off of the circus grounds, towards the industrial section of the colony, not thinking, not feeling, just staring ahead, just concentrating on keeping myself breathing. I walked for what could have been minutes, hours even, and I was fine. Nothing crossed my mind for what seemed like forever, no disparaging thoughts, no regrets, and then I found myself standing before the enormous vidlink monitor that loomed over the downtown business district’s park, and there were steady images pouring in from L4, of the carnage and destruction unleashed at what once was the conference center.

I watched the names of the colony and Earth representatives scroll down the bottom of the screen, saw the flaming ruins of the building that had almost cemented the peace that we had worked ard ard to achieve, but when they broadcast footage of the trademark Winner Enterprises limousine, the sleek black end of the vehicle crushed by a rafter beam displaced during the explosion, the driver lying deathly still beside the automobile, I lost control.

A rage surged through my body that set fire to the blood pounding in my veins. Time stood still as the charred remains of my former partner were seared into oblivion, and every bit of rational thought that I had ever possessed were smoking beside the corpse of my best friend, the only person in the world I believed who had ever truly understood me.

It didn’t hurt the way I had expected it to, but I shed no tears.

I wanted blood on my hands.

When I was younger I watched the mercenaries take pot-shots at civilians on missions. They cackled and cheered each other on, as if the act of taking an innocent human life were some kind of video game purely for their amusement, and it sickened me. I’ve killed hundreds if not thousands of people in my nineteen short years of life, and I regret every one of them.

As I stood in the park that day, and realized that the last time I had seen Quatre Winner I had never thanked him for shooting me down in the Veyate, for allowing me to pilot Zero and realize my purpose in life, that I had never told him to quit blaming himself for everything, to practice his major arpeggios, to cut his hair, to stop chewing his lower lip every time he got nervous…

I felt cheated.

I wanted to kill for every time I had pulled my punches, not pulled the trigger. I wanted to become evil itself that day, because it struck me then that we were supposed to be the good guys, and the heroes of history are always the ones who get fucked.

We had lived through that God-forsaken war, maintained our code of loyalty and ethics on the battlefield. We had fought with as much tact and consideration as a life of mass-murder and guerilla terrorism allots for, and the enemy had never shown us the same courtesy, the same mercy.

No one had shown Quatre that mercy. I would show my new enemy no mercy.

I remember standing so still, but inside I was dying. His lilting alto filled my head, his brilliant, sad blue eyes clouded my vision. He had been so awkward and scrawny-looking at out first encounter, but I had watched him mature into the beautiful mind with which he guided us pilots.

It probably sounds like idol-worship, the awe that I held for Sandrock’s pilot, but you have to understand that on a soldier’s level, on a strategic level, this child—he was fifteen by the skin of his neck—was a prodigy. He created the ZERO system, the most technologically advanced piloting system in the history of modern warfare, before most kids his age had mastered negative numbers. Quatre Winner was undeniably brilliant, and what endeared him to virtually anyone he met was how clueless and naïve he was about his own intelligence, his own abilities as a pilot.

It’s what caught my attention about him at first.

And that amazing guy, the closest friend that I would probably ever know, had been ripped violently out of my life over a renegade crusade and a crackpot cause.

When the facts feel into place in my mind I was furious. I started walking again, struggling to keep from dropping to my knees and screaming, letting out all of the grief and pain I had felt during the war, fearing for his safety, promising myself never to fail in protecting him, and then letting loose my agony at having faltered in my pursuit. It was the kind of enraged frenzy that I had seen others succumb to, the type that generally results in mass-murder/ suicides, and I had fought for so long to harness the dark side of me that thirsted for death, for the carnage and chaos of war.

Quatre’s mere existence had held that leash tightly contained within my mind for so long, but it had finally snapped. I wanted to relief of killing out of hatred, out of spite, desired the maniac glee that would accompany a return to my life as a killer. If Ralph and his crazy followers could take life so carelessly, so easily, then why couldn’t I? Maybe there was some release in senseless bloodshed, some glory in malice-inspired slaughter.

I was going to strangle Ralph Kurt to death with my bare hands if I ever saw him, again.

However, and much to his luck, it wasn’t Ralph that I ran into that night. It was a team of his lackeys.

I realized after walking for some time, or rather my soldier’s intuition realized, that I was being tailed. And in the back of my mind I was still planning a spectacular and torturous death for all who opposed me, but I now had a concern; if I were killed before I could unleash my wrath on any and every responsible party involved in Quatre’s murder I couldn’t very well avenge him. I needed a plan of action, and it was subsequently handed to me.

Duo Maxwell shows up in the strangest of places, but he often proves himself useful in dire situations. That night, as my two shadows were beginning to close in on me, that braided idiot jumped them from behind.

The first thing I noticed about the American was that he was smiling. I wouldn’t have expected a jovial mood in light of recent events, and I knew for a fact that not only did he handle anger worse than any of us pilots, but his temper was explosive and not so easily pacified. As I landed a powerful uppercut to one of my stalkers’ stomach, I decided that the Deathscythe pilot was simply in denial.

Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief list denial among things that happen to the families of the dead and dying, and we were the closest thing to brothers that Quatre had ever known. I assumed that he had come to L3 to confirm what he wanted to believe, that our former leader was alive on L4, that he had somehow escaped the blast, even though we both knew that the officials had found no survivors.

So we fought the two men, each outweighing the both of us by a hundred pounds easily, and as my adrenaline began to overtake my rationale, I knocked the taller of the two to the ground, throwing my elbow into his solar plexus with the weight of my entire body, and then I started punching.

Duo said that I would have killed the man, had I been given the opportunity to continue my senseless brutality, and I believe him, because my rage, my torment had manifested itself into a homicidal tendency in my mind. I wanted blood for blood. I would have taken the existence of that spineless, pathetic waste of atoms and air for the life of my partner.

Shinigami himself decided not to let me play the God of Death, that night.

I punched and kicked and clawed; I felt flesh rip under my hands and blood soak my shirt and jeans, and it wasn’t enough. I would have burned that man alive, just to ensure that he knew first-hand the hellish death that had wiped Quatre Winner’s laugh from the face of my world, but Duo dragged me off of him.

I fought him, struggled like my life depended on it, and maybe it did at the time, but Duo was surprisingly stronger than me. He pulled me away and pinned me down, slapped me hard at one point to get my attention.

He’s a lot smarter than we all give him credit for, and he’s very perceptive. If the situation truly called for it, he could diffuse an explosive situation like a one-man bomb squad, and then was one of those rare instances.

"Knock it off, Nanashi!"

It was the name, I think, that stung more than anything, and I stopped struggling. "I know it hurts…" he began, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t need any reassurances or commiseration. I needed retribution.

"No," I snarled, resuming my struggle. "You have no fucking clue how this feels!"

Amaryllis eyes sparked with something deadly, and he wrestled me savagely to the cold concrete of the alley. "He was my friend, too, Trowa. I cared about him a lot—"

"It can’t hurt you half as much as it’s killing me," I protested, and Duo grit his teeth as he fought to contain me.

"There’s no reason in Hell to think that, Tro—" was his quiet reply.

I cut him off, knocked his lithe form to the ground with a swift kick to his stomach, and stood over him, my psychotic fury reaching climactic proportions. "You weren’t in love with him!" I screamed, and as Duo lay stunned on the ground at my outburst, I snatched my Glok from the waistband of my jeans and took aim at the barely-conscious man only feet away from us.

"You lost you friend," I growled, helpless with desperate agony, punctuating my last word with a bullet to the man’s heart.

I wanted to set fire to every orphanage on L2.

I wanted to breathe lightening and bleed fire.

I wanted to destroy every beautiful thing in the world that reminded me of his smile.

"But I," I fired again, "lost the only [shot] person in this fucking world [shot] who ever made me feel [shot] anything!"

I emptied the entire chamber and clip into the man’s motionless form, and when the bullets ran out I fell to my knees, still pulling the trigger, and the pain didn’t subside the way I thought it would.

There were no tears as Duo stood silently, dropped into a crouch in front of me and gently pulled the gun from my trembling hands. There was nothing. Without asking questions I followed him to the spaceport.

+++

It was quiet when we arrived at wherever it was that Duo was taking us. I asked no questions, didn’t particularly care where we were going.

It would hurt just the same no matter where I went.

I was covered in blood, my hands shaking uncontrollably, though Duo had stolen the second man’s trench-coat to conceal my disarray. He led me to a shuttle, nudged me inside, and what I found there caused me to stop dead in my tracks.

"Trowa!"

I figured at first that it was a side-effect of the adrenaline, or bereavement, that I saw him rushing towards me, felt his agile frame as it impacted my torso and his slender arms were thrown around my shoulders, but Quatre was standing before me, his bright head pressed to my chest.

My throat closed up, my eyes watered; I thought that I might pass out, but some part of me wouldn’t allow for that, because he was standing there and losing consciousness would mean losing a moment with Quatre. He gasped softly and pulled back from me suddenly, staring down at the dark crimson stains on my clothes and now his own, and then warm hands were under my shirt, searching for wounds that I hadn’t received in the fight.

"It isn’t his," Duo reassured him darkly, frowning as he walked past us to the shuttle’s pilot seat. He threw himself down and stared hard at the controls, prepping the ship for takeoff, and in the dim glow of the computer monitor’s I could see that I’d split his lip, blackened his eye.

I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel anything.

Quatre was still there, hands resting cautiously at my hips, gazing up at me. His azure eyes darkened as he looked at me, and without turning away he addressed Duo. "Whose is it?"

The Deathscythe pilot chewed his split lip, winced, then released it from between even white teeth. "One of Kurt’s goons. He attacked me while I was lookin’ for Tro." The braided youth finished giving the ship autopilot instructions and swiveled the seat around to face Quatre’s back. Over the blonde’s shoulder he glared harshly at me.

"The guy pulled a gun on me, so Trowa took him out."

I knew that Quatre didn’t believe his story, because he had that look in his eyes, that ‘human lie-detector’ expression. He was waiting for me to blink, to cave in and confess, but I couldn’t have if I had wanted to. I was too numb.

"Well," he sighed, and he sounded tired, wary, "You should both get cleaned up while you have time. We have work to do."

Without further prompting I left the cockpit.

+++

I lay awake that night in the storage hold of the shuttle, where Duo had rigged a ock ock for one of us to rest in while we switched off piloting, arms crossed over my chest, staring up at the ceiling of the hold.

My thoughts had slowly been coming back to me, and I felt very guilty.

I felt no remorse for the man that I had shot, or for the fact that I felt no guilt, but because I had lied to Quatre. Technically, Duo had lied, but hadn’t done a thing to dissuade him. But after all that had happened, I couldn’t let Quatre know that I was capable of cold-blooded murder.

The air-locked door to the cargo hold hissed open, and I heard footsteps. I lay still, and when Quatre’s handsome face appeared beside my resting place, I said nothing, simply locked eyes with him and waited.

Some times he used to seek me out to talk with—or at—while other times he merely wanted my company. There were nights that we would spend together in the hangar of Peacemillion, working in silence to repair one of our suits, or perch on the observation deck of the ship and try to count the stars. Tonight, I wasn’t certain what he wanted from me, but I knew that he whatever it was, he wouldn’t have to ask twice.

After coming so close to losing him, I would have granted him anything he would have asked me, no matter how impossible it seemed.

"I want you to know something," he murmured quietly, leaning into the hammock idly, blonde locks spilling over his forehead and casting shadows on his elegant features. His forearms rested across my ribcage, his hands clasped loosely on my left hipbone. "When I woke up in the medical ward on Peacemillion, after we destroyed Libra, you asked me what Zero had shown me, what had scared me badly enough to blow up that colony."

A self-deprecating smile took his lips. "When the conference building exploded in front of me, I thought that I was going to die, and the first thought I had was that I never answered your question. I’d like to answer it now, in case I don’t get the chance to in the future."

I gazed at him silently. I had honestly forgotten that half-drugged conversation that he had started after he woke on Peacemillion. He had barely recognized me, he had been so sedated.

"I asked Zero to show me my future, how I was going to die, and it showed me. I saw Dorothy Catalonia spear me with that damned lance, and that was the end."

I remembered how desperate I had been to find him that day, combing Libra’s labyrinth-like corridors in search of my partner, and I had been terrified inside when I did find him. "So I asked Zero if there was any way to change my fate, to trick destiny," he chuckled bitterly. It was a side of Quatre Winner that not many saw. There were times when I honestly believed that he hated himself.

"It showed me you."

My eyebrows shot up. It wasn’t often that I showed surprise as an expression, or any other emotion for that matter, but Quatre has a way of coaxing it out of me. "Why did that terrify you enough to attack me?" I asked softly, and the blonde looked up at me, a melancholy smile on his full lips.

The former Sandrock pilot leaned down over me and pressed a gently, chaste kiss to my hair, before turning and walking back towards the doors of the cargo hold. For a moment I thought that he wasn’t going to answer, but he stopped, back to me, and sighed.

It was a depressing sound, the kind of gesture you’d expect from someone twice his age and with twice the life experience. "Because I wanted nothing more than to die at Dorothy’s hands, Trowa. I thought that humanity was inherently evil, and I wanted no part of it. But I knew that you would never let me die. I hated you for that, for a very long time. Now I loathe myself for being so selfish. You killed that man because you thought that he had taken my life."

He paused. "You’re the kind of person worth living for, Trowa Barton."

+++

Continues in "Blind Target".

Hey, everyone. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long, but I’m here to stay, hopefully.egreegretfully announce here that, due to changes in my writin’ style, tone, and interests in Gundam Wing, my previous arcs have been put on an ‘Indefinite Suspension’ status. I may finish them, I may not. I apologize to readers who were keeping up on them. I’ve decided to take a more ‘Realism, Existentialism, Psychological Theologism’ route with my work.

On a lighter note, my other site got torn tot sot so I’m in the process of buildin’ a new one. It’s called ‘RemixX’ and it’ll feature fiction from several different fandoms. I’m also interested in puttin’ together a group of writers (including myself) under one circle name (to be decided), kinda like CLAMP but for fiction. I’d like a few visual artists as well, because we’ll need illustrations, and I’d like to try my hand at group writin’ (multi-author fiction). If you’re interested, e-mail me at Swtchblde003@aol.com (it’s also my screen name).

Thanks to Cob, Usako, and ShenLong for your support, to ReddAlice and AJ McKay for always keepin’ it professional, and to Takaro—you always make me laugh when I need it the most. A special thanks goes out to Fabi-chan, the most faithful reader I’ve ever had the fortune to ensnare. Thanks, guys.

-Jack S.

PS. Jack is BACK!
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Subterfuge