Darkfic Gift: The Hanged Man (for theoriginal_ist)
Title: The Hanged Man
Written by:
octavius_x for theoriginal_ist
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: vague sexuality, some adult themes
Gift #10: Anyone suffering from "Mnemophobia" (fear of memories), from the war, before the war, whatever. Angst, psychological.
The heat of China stifled Wufei. The cities were all perpetually stuck under a scudding cloud of pollution, and he was unused to the variability of Earth's climates. Across the street from the hotel was the Beijing High-speed Train station, a beige building with white Victorian moldings. He'd been standing in front of its vast old-style train board watching the mechanism flip names and numbers over and over. There were men observing him off to his right: one on his phone and another flipping through the magazine rack. He turned and walked back to his hotel observing where they came in after him. They came in separately but maintained eye contact with each other as they crossed the lobby dodging the ornamental flower vases.
The Harold Johnson was a nice enough hotel. The staff attentive but uninterested. The rooms clean and well kept, but without the pretense of being more stars than it was. Wufei smiled in spite of himself as he got off the elevator and broke into the room across the hall from his own. Four men followed his route exactly half an hour later on the dot. He watched as they closed the door then followed busting the wood off its hinges.
Whoever the group was hadn't been expecting it. He'd caught the rear guard still in the tiny entryway between door, closet, and bathroom and punched him in the throat. The other one drew his gun but Wufei grabbed and twisted the barrel until the fingers in the trigger well snapped. He beat the shit out of the other two and left them seeping in the bathroom. It was a hot day, he was irritable and his mouth tasted metallic and unpleasant like exhaust. He'd wanted to see the Forbidden city and thinks as he's packing his things, that now was as good a time as any.
The Imperial throne was all done in yellow silk, a true masterpiece of woodcarving in chestnut and dark ebony. But Wufei's gaze is drawn to what lurked above it, among a curtain of gold tassels and more silk set like waves was a dragon's head, gilded in gold and silver and set into the rafters of the ceiling. In its mouth it held a silver ball--the "imperial pearl".
"Here you can see it," a guide said and behind her a flock of orange-capped school children clung to the bars, jostling Wufei their small hands, their energy, "This is the throne of the last Manchurian Chinese Emperor Pǔyí Xiānsheng, which he used up until his expulsion from the Forbidden city during the second pre-colonial War. It was used mostly for ceremonial purposes," her English juts out into the heat caused by the press of bodies. Children's fingerprints imprinted all over the brass restraining bar, video recorders flash into the depths of the hall. Wufei looses focus for a second, separated from the crush--"And they say that if anyone besides the emperor sits in throne the pearl will fall and crush him"--inside it was resolute, untouched by the clamor and heat.
The replica on L5-A0206 is missing the pearl, he thought then corrected himself, was missing. As far as he knew it had never been there or else it had been taken out in reverence to the former emperor. A light breeze from outside touched the embroidery, ruffling the straight back of the portrait screen. Chang's eye is drawn to these things, the small slight movements. A scene on ivory depicting a wedding phoenix painted using a brush with a single hair.
In reality when he thinks back on it he remembers very little about his wedding. The ceremony had taken place in the 1/3 size replica of the Forbidden City that the colony had once boasted as a cultural heritage site and tourist attraction. It was a complete replica and he and Meilin had taken their vows in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, endured the reception in the courtyard of the Hundred Courtesans and exited past the Guilty Chinese Scholar Tree into the Coal Hill park. Now that he finally saw the real thing in person everything seemed off and rundown. The one he had known was like a home, wide and large enough for a family or court, but the real one was enormous. For the first time calling it "city" made sense. It was like something out of the wrong time. Courtyards that spanned whole playing fields. It's clutter of architecture, gardens and feng shui screens. Rows of dragon heads carved in marble, rain water basins plated in gold, and high high red walls that defined where this universe began and ended.
She continued pulling apart all her carefully assembled ceremonial ware. The phoenix headdress she left on the provided stand, the red silk veil following afterward. She shrugged out of the outer robe and then sat down in a chair across from him and crossed her legs the way a man would. Meilan ran her fingers through her hair tugging out the curls it had been gelled into. She pulled off the hairpins and picked out the artful ringlet of hair stuck to her cheek. Her hair was paintbrush black.
"Don't think I'm happy having you for a husband."
"Don't think I'm happy having you for a wife," he'd replied. She scowled and stuck out her tongue.
Wufei remembers her mostly in snatches like this. It was his own fault, really. For the most part he does not allow himself the convenience of imagining he sees her on the street. Watching someone die in your arms was a surefire way to be assured they were dead.
He remembers with perfect clarity what he'd been reading at the time of his wedding, what arguments he'd agreed or disagreed with, but his memories of Meilan were always tempered with...annoyance or anger, guilt and sometimes amusement--they were a spectrum of his feelings as the bored scholar, limited and clinical.
She was almost constantly tan from practice, and she or her mother always made some inept attempt to hide the bruises she received in practice. In this memory it was blue-green already (doesn't matter, you should have seen the other guy) at least she healed fast. Chang is much more familiar with her presence in the Gundam. There she was a force at his back massive and ungendered.
Half-way through the tour Wufei ditched and walked out to the vendors by the side of the road. Taking a side street he lounged on someone's doorstep and ate one of the soft white peaches that were in season now. The fuzz chafed the roof of his mouth, and the fruit was lukewarm his tongue reaching through to the rough pit. There was a red good luck tag on the door behind him, peeling away from the wood its prayer a tightly curled entreaty.
It had been stupid of him to come to Earth. There was nothing here, no connection. No ancestral longings. He could trace his earth relatives back to their burial sites. Could probably even still find their headstones, their great sun baked monuments to a forever that did not come. What would they think if they knew their progeny would reach the stars and find it the same hell hole. He'd walked in the rabbit on the moon and found it only dust. Through the plate glass of his helmet the surface was only another if more barren prison. Craters like headstones and dust indistinguishable from ashes. It all slid through his gloved hands into other days.
Nataku's face was the face of a god, but not like Duo's with the constant threat of idolatry. They bore the same expression as the giant Buddha's the same acquiescence, an otherworldly calmness. He remembers seeing "Deathscythe" destroyed and the quiet unease in him as he'd watched it being torn apart into its component features. The mask had disintegrated in the heat of the beam weapon and as the Gundanium that gave it its name was torn away it became nothing, a blind mass of mechanisms.
"I screamed y'know." Duo had told him on the moon base "When she was destroyed, screamed my head off in the middle of the street. Scared the bejeezes out of some old ladies and romantic couples. Oi, but doesn't this new one look great? Look at those coupling capacitors on the double scythe and tell me that's not something to jerk-off to at night." He laughed shallowly which eventually turned into harsh pants like he might actually have been masturbating.
The jail cell was built with an airlock door, and they lay in the dark sweating. There had been a stint of days when he was young where he dreamed of being buried alive, a sure-fire impossibility in the colonies, but it still terrified him. Every night he dreamed the taste of gravel in his mouth, the rough texture of the grains as the entered his lungs, and always that close suffocating darkness. Sitting there in the cell the apprehension of those nights all came back like a blow to the gut. And here he was going to die in this coffin of a room with some crude 15 year old who smelled like B.O.
Duo's head swiveled on the floor, rotating to squint at him, "Hey Wu-man, just want to say if this is how we go out it's been an honor. I'd shake your hand but." He shrugged in his cuffs and turned over. Wufei was left staring at the pale back of his neck beneath his hairline, where it was pulled up into the braid. It looked tender uncovered. Wufei was too tired at the time to think on it, the dull edges of oxygen deprivation pressing in on his eyes. It would end up as one of the clear images he remembered, although later he realized this probably also had to do with Meilan.
He's part way through dismantling the hydraulic life in Altron's right knee when there's a slight beep from the open cockpit. A transmission incoming from X18999 over a coded connection. He considers ignoring it.
"So it's you." He says when the face appears. Again an old face, and disgruntled. He thinks of Herodotus, it is only when a man is old he wishes for a graven image of himself.
"05, Chang Wufei, we haven't been introduced--my name is Dekim Barton."
"I'm aware of who you are."
"Ah," he steeples his fingers together "you-ah-disabled my messengers earlier today and this seemed the only way to reach you. I'm surprised you answered."
"What do you want?"
Dekim sits forward in his chair, "I have someone here who'd like to meet you."
"There's no reason why I should even be listening to this right now--"
"But I think you'll have a particular interest in this one. Besides," Dekim leaned closer to the screen so that Wufei could see his pores, the deep grooves around his mouth "if you weren't interested you would have closed the connection already. You too, must know the feeling of a soldier who has forgotten to fight." He smiles and turns off-screen.
Wufei feels sweat break out on his bare arms. It could have been simply the heat of the cockpit. It was body-warm and felt like blood welling up from a cut. He reached to turn the vidscreen off hand suspended midway, but instead he just stares at the border of the screen into the blankness of the other room. Miles away and waiting to see what lurked just out of view half convinced that what would appear would be a ghost.
"Ah here we are," he hears Dekim in the background and then blue eyes--
"Oh it's you 05" was the only greeting he'd ever received from Treize. As much a phrase of acknoledgement as ridicule.
Trieze was nobody's son, a bastard. But as they would come to see he would father so much. They were, both of them, men with a propensity for violence. Romefeller was covered with ornateness, the cravat in the uniform, the ranks and hierarchy, the Specials who ritualized their sacrifice screaming it into the beam sword or canon as they were ripped apart. But like the Gundams, theirs was also a culture shaped on war and Treize was its god. The beginning and the end. Wufei barely thinks about him. The time and his blaring failure is still too close, too near. He's turned corners, walked down streets convinced that somewhere he'd hear those tone's again it's you 05...
"You think I'm a joke because I'm a woman."
"I think you're a joke because you think being a woman has anything to do with it." He turns a page.
She sat back hard in the field and crossed her arms, "Buy me a Boba drink."
"Don't you have more important things to do?" He doesn't look up from his book, enjoying being pedantic. She was frowning and glaring at him.
"Jesus Christ," He hands her a few credits.
"Thanks honey," she kisses him on the cheek and he makes to wipe it off but leaves it as she turns away. Sighing he returns to the pages of Herodotus and picks up the threads of his sentence For those cities that were great in earlier times must now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before…Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place.
Outside the window there was nothing, just a black expanse. Powered down and drifting in Altron he listens to the hum of it around him. The bones of its frame belonged to Nataku. And cupped in its innards, under rows of insectoid switches was himself. There were ancient customs where Chinese wives kept the bones of their husbands for burial or vice versa, and he'd read once that funerary rites were ways of coping with grief, a way of ensuring the mind remembered scoffing at both the superstitious and the psychological. And now here he was in this consructured great shell and it seemed like he'd gone the farthest of all.
Barton's message had unnerved him. Wufei flies to the empty space where his colony used to exist. There was a memorial satellite orbiting in its place broadcasting in different languages the sacrifice of L5-A0206 and the need for remembrance. The voices in Mandarin and Cantonese and the colonial dialect play simultaneously in Altron's cockpit fusing together out of the nothingness in his vidscreen. Like the voices from the dead...
Seeing Shenlong's skeletal frame in the hanger he'd sneered to Master O, "Give me a place to stand and lever long enough and I will move the world."
Master O continued looking on at his work, but he'd smiled slightly.
"Archimedes?"
Chang ignored him, "Is this going to be our lever? A fine lot you did with it."
But it was an appropriate design for a god, he'd thought. A construct that depended on the strength of the human at its core. The weakness of one imparted to the other.
Quatre had talked about how the past moved on, but he was wrong. This place still existed. Chang knows the shape of every bulkhead, how much space it should have occupied and within it everyone...even the goddamn servant woman who always spilled and apologized when she poured tea.
He was steeped in their ghosts, all their ghosts. Their faces, their phantom wishes, their lives. The great Long lineage stretched behind him and he was its at its head, a kernel of self driven by their desires, an avenging dragon. Nataku had been a war god, taken part in the battle for the sake of the fight. But like Duo had realized, vengeance was the real Great Destroyer, inexhaustible, unforgiving, that Old Testament version of justice. In his hands the gundam was a totem that carried all his rage, and all his strength. It embodied their memory and his need for vengeance; it was a god forsaken. Not only by his own clan, and not only by the colonies, but by everyone on Earth who continued on as if the war had never happened. He saw the suit for what it really was, an extension of the pilot, the military leverage with which Barton and the others planned to move history.
She rolled up her sleeve and plunged it up to her elbow into the basin.
"Have you ever been to Yunnan, on Earth?"
As Wufei watched her brown elbow move back and forth seeking something in the water, she continued "I don't know why you would. It's a scrap of a place probably not worth your time. But in a town called Lijiang the villagers believe that by telling a fish your troubles and letting it go all your misfortunes will follow it instead."
She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, and her hand was finally still. He saw now what she'd been up to, crouched over the plastic tub her thumb was slipped into the gills of the squirming, wriggling thing. She got up and dropped it over the edge of the bridge, releasing it into the water below. It made a small splash into the muddy water.
"You're a superstitious fool," and Chang walked away leaving her standing there.
"You've got a scholar's hands," Master O had told him when he was seven, and he'd pulled them back like he'd been burned.
He is a child running joyful down the temple walkway with high red walls and a ceiling of cool rustling bamboo. The sound of his sandals clacking on the pavement, the long walkway the scaled back of a dragon.
The uniform was laid out on his bed.
They had left it in different pieces folded neatly but spread in the shape of a body, like the vestments of some holy sect. They had even left him a sword belt for the machete. He picked it up, and felt the fabric between his fingers. Standard issue uniform material, fire-retardant, quick dry.
Mariemaia had looked like a dress up doll in hers, something you wound up and paraded around. Wufei was aware of Barton lurking in the background, but then she had looked up at him. There was there an intensity he'd seen before... It made his throat tighten.
He strips quietly and efficiently, the sweat on his arms and chest chilling and dryin in the quiet hum of the air conditioner. By the time he pulls on the undershirt he was completely dry. He smooths the creases, straightens the armband and slowly, methodically buttons the front of the shirt up to the neck. The tie was last, and he turns to the mirror to do it where Chang is caught by his reflection in the mirror. Maybe "driven" would have been the right word, or "vengeful", it slips from him into--
That black elbow crook of the out-stretched limb extending over the edge of the garden wall. It was just above Wufei's height. He could have reached and touched the outstretched arm with his fingertips, the black surface like carbon. His hand against it made a white star.
He'd come here to be alone but as always she was there too leaning against the solid trunk of the tree. She rapped the black branch appraisingly with her knuckles before opening her mouth and saying, "They say that the last emperor of the Ming dynasty--Chongzen--came out from the Forbidden City after it had been overrun by peasants and hanged himself here in shame. Pretty pitiful don't you think?"
Hands in pockets, she stepped down the garden wall by setting her boots between the chinks in the stones. "If he were a real man he would have stayed and fought it out." She stood next to Wufei now, directly under the branch and looking up at its blackness, and continued "The Elders would always talk about you, you know. 'Too smart. Too skilled. Too aloof. No motivation.' They think something must be wrong with you. Why do you think we were married off so quick, they thought maybe you'd take an interest in sex or a family or something. This though--" she looks up at green above them, a bower over bother their heads "I'm sure this wasn't what they were thinking--you coward."
He hates her suddenly, viciously. How she has invaded his life, her useless talk, herself so ingrained within the family plan she doesn't even know it. Her willingness to die for only a shadow and a cause and a banner to die under, and him--he has 6 feet of rope in his pack that he never planned on using and he opens his mouth and says,"They're going to do the same thing by allowing the colony to be dropped. Why shouldn't I speed them along in their own stupidity".
It's the wrong things and he expects her to hit him, but Meilan just looks at him hard for a second. "It's not the real tree anyway. Even the one on Earth was torn up during the cultural revolution, it's just a replica for tourists now,” she pauses, “Doing it here wouldn't have quite the same poetic justice."
She had been right. It would have been meaningless then. His cowardice as yellow as the silk on the throne. In his head he sees his hands tying the knots, the nine turns around the rope like the Long dragon its own serpentine body forming loops and tight nooses. What must the emperor have used? he wonders. What had gone through his head when they informed him the palace was overrun? As shouts and whooping echoed up from the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and above the Imperial Throne the pearl held in the dragon's mouth came crashing down to Earth along with the line of 10,000 years. The end of a dynasty pulling taunt at the end of a rope.
It didn't matter anymore. It was all gone, wiped clean in the face of the stark black M on a red background. He finishes knotting the new uniform tie and cinches it tight to the base of his throat, now complete.
The Hanged Man (XII) is the twelfth trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks. It may also be known as The Traitor.
Written by:
octavius_x for theoriginal_ist
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: vague sexuality, some adult themes
Gift #10: Anyone suffering from "Mnemophobia" (fear of memories), from the war, before the war, whatever. Angst, psychological.
The heat of China stifled Wufei. The cities were all perpetually stuck under a scudding cloud of pollution, and he was unused to the variability of Earth's climates. Across the street from the hotel was the Beijing High-speed Train station, a beige building with white Victorian moldings. He'd been standing in front of its vast old-style train board watching the mechanism flip names and numbers over and over. There were men observing him off to his right: one on his phone and another flipping through the magazine rack. He turned and walked back to his hotel observing where they came in after him. They came in separately but maintained eye contact with each other as they crossed the lobby dodging the ornamental flower vases.
The Harold Johnson was a nice enough hotel. The staff attentive but uninterested. The rooms clean and well kept, but without the pretense of being more stars than it was. Wufei smiled in spite of himself as he got off the elevator and broke into the room across the hall from his own. Four men followed his route exactly half an hour later on the dot. He watched as they closed the door then followed busting the wood off its hinges.
Whoever the group was hadn't been expecting it. He'd caught the rear guard still in the tiny entryway between door, closet, and bathroom and punched him in the throat. The other one drew his gun but Wufei grabbed and twisted the barrel until the fingers in the trigger well snapped. He beat the shit out of the other two and left them seeping in the bathroom. It was a hot day, he was irritable and his mouth tasted metallic and unpleasant like exhaust. He'd wanted to see the Forbidden city and thinks as he's packing his things, that now was as good a time as any.
The Imperial throne was all done in yellow silk, a true masterpiece of woodcarving in chestnut and dark ebony. But Wufei's gaze is drawn to what lurked above it, among a curtain of gold tassels and more silk set like waves was a dragon's head, gilded in gold and silver and set into the rafters of the ceiling. In its mouth it held a silver ball--the "imperial pearl".
"Here you can see it," a guide said and behind her a flock of orange-capped school children clung to the bars, jostling Wufei their small hands, their energy, "This is the throne of the last Manchurian Chinese Emperor Pǔyí Xiānsheng, which he used up until his expulsion from the Forbidden city during the second pre-colonial War. It was used mostly for ceremonial purposes," her English juts out into the heat caused by the press of bodies. Children's fingerprints imprinted all over the brass restraining bar, video recorders flash into the depths of the hall. Wufei looses focus for a second, separated from the crush--"And they say that if anyone besides the emperor sits in throne the pearl will fall and crush him"--inside it was resolute, untouched by the clamor and heat.
The replica on L5-A0206 is missing the pearl, he thought then corrected himself, was missing. As far as he knew it had never been there or else it had been taken out in reverence to the former emperor. A light breeze from outside touched the embroidery, ruffling the straight back of the portrait screen. Chang's eye is drawn to these things, the small slight movements. A scene on ivory depicting a wedding phoenix painted using a brush with a single hair.
In reality when he thinks back on it he remembers very little about his wedding. The ceremony had taken place in the 1/3 size replica of the Forbidden City that the colony had once boasted as a cultural heritage site and tourist attraction. It was a complete replica and he and Meilin had taken their vows in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, endured the reception in the courtyard of the Hundred Courtesans and exited past the Guilty Chinese Scholar Tree into the Coal Hill park. Now that he finally saw the real thing in person everything seemed off and rundown. The one he had known was like a home, wide and large enough for a family or court, but the real one was enormous. For the first time calling it "city" made sense. It was like something out of the wrong time. Courtyards that spanned whole playing fields. It's clutter of architecture, gardens and feng shui screens. Rows of dragon heads carved in marble, rain water basins plated in gold, and high high red walls that defined where this universe began and ended.
She continued pulling apart all her carefully assembled ceremonial ware. The phoenix headdress she left on the provided stand, the red silk veil following afterward. She shrugged out of the outer robe and then sat down in a chair across from him and crossed her legs the way a man would. Meilan ran her fingers through her hair tugging out the curls it had been gelled into. She pulled off the hairpins and picked out the artful ringlet of hair stuck to her cheek. Her hair was paintbrush black.
"Don't think I'm happy having you for a husband."
"Don't think I'm happy having you for a wife," he'd replied. She scowled and stuck out her tongue.
Wufei remembers her mostly in snatches like this. It was his own fault, really. For the most part he does not allow himself the convenience of imagining he sees her on the street. Watching someone die in your arms was a surefire way to be assured they were dead.
He remembers with perfect clarity what he'd been reading at the time of his wedding, what arguments he'd agreed or disagreed with, but his memories of Meilan were always tempered with...annoyance or anger, guilt and sometimes amusement--they were a spectrum of his feelings as the bored scholar, limited and clinical.
She was almost constantly tan from practice, and she or her mother always made some inept attempt to hide the bruises she received in practice. In this memory it was blue-green already (doesn't matter, you should have seen the other guy) at least she healed fast. Chang is much more familiar with her presence in the Gundam. There she was a force at his back massive and ungendered.
Half-way through the tour Wufei ditched and walked out to the vendors by the side of the road. Taking a side street he lounged on someone's doorstep and ate one of the soft white peaches that were in season now. The fuzz chafed the roof of his mouth, and the fruit was lukewarm his tongue reaching through to the rough pit. There was a red good luck tag on the door behind him, peeling away from the wood its prayer a tightly curled entreaty.
It had been stupid of him to come to Earth. There was nothing here, no connection. No ancestral longings. He could trace his earth relatives back to their burial sites. Could probably even still find their headstones, their great sun baked monuments to a forever that did not come. What would they think if they knew their progeny would reach the stars and find it the same hell hole. He'd walked in the rabbit on the moon and found it only dust. Through the plate glass of his helmet the surface was only another if more barren prison. Craters like headstones and dust indistinguishable from ashes. It all slid through his gloved hands into other days.
Nataku's face was the face of a god, but not like Duo's with the constant threat of idolatry. They bore the same expression as the giant Buddha's the same acquiescence, an otherworldly calmness. He remembers seeing "Deathscythe" destroyed and the quiet unease in him as he'd watched it being torn apart into its component features. The mask had disintegrated in the heat of the beam weapon and as the Gundanium that gave it its name was torn away it became nothing, a blind mass of mechanisms.
"I screamed y'know." Duo had told him on the moon base "When she was destroyed, screamed my head off in the middle of the street. Scared the bejeezes out of some old ladies and romantic couples. Oi, but doesn't this new one look great? Look at those coupling capacitors on the double scythe and tell me that's not something to jerk-off to at night." He laughed shallowly which eventually turned into harsh pants like he might actually have been masturbating.
The jail cell was built with an airlock door, and they lay in the dark sweating. There had been a stint of days when he was young where he dreamed of being buried alive, a sure-fire impossibility in the colonies, but it still terrified him. Every night he dreamed the taste of gravel in his mouth, the rough texture of the grains as the entered his lungs, and always that close suffocating darkness. Sitting there in the cell the apprehension of those nights all came back like a blow to the gut. And here he was going to die in this coffin of a room with some crude 15 year old who smelled like B.O.
Duo's head swiveled on the floor, rotating to squint at him, "Hey Wu-man, just want to say if this is how we go out it's been an honor. I'd shake your hand but." He shrugged in his cuffs and turned over. Wufei was left staring at the pale back of his neck beneath his hairline, where it was pulled up into the braid. It looked tender uncovered. Wufei was too tired at the time to think on it, the dull edges of oxygen deprivation pressing in on his eyes. It would end up as one of the clear images he remembered, although later he realized this probably also had to do with Meilan.
He's part way through dismantling the hydraulic life in Altron's right knee when there's a slight beep from the open cockpit. A transmission incoming from X18999 over a coded connection. He considers ignoring it.
"So it's you." He says when the face appears. Again an old face, and disgruntled. He thinks of Herodotus, it is only when a man is old he wishes for a graven image of himself.
"05, Chang Wufei, we haven't been introduced--my name is Dekim Barton."
"I'm aware of who you are."
"Ah," he steeples his fingers together "you-ah-disabled my messengers earlier today and this seemed the only way to reach you. I'm surprised you answered."
"What do you want?"
Dekim sits forward in his chair, "I have someone here who'd like to meet you."
"There's no reason why I should even be listening to this right now--"
"But I think you'll have a particular interest in this one. Besides," Dekim leaned closer to the screen so that Wufei could see his pores, the deep grooves around his mouth "if you weren't interested you would have closed the connection already. You too, must know the feeling of a soldier who has forgotten to fight." He smiles and turns off-screen.
Wufei feels sweat break out on his bare arms. It could have been simply the heat of the cockpit. It was body-warm and felt like blood welling up from a cut. He reached to turn the vidscreen off hand suspended midway, but instead he just stares at the border of the screen into the blankness of the other room. Miles away and waiting to see what lurked just out of view half convinced that what would appear would be a ghost.
"Ah here we are," he hears Dekim in the background and then blue eyes--
"Oh it's you 05" was the only greeting he'd ever received from Treize. As much a phrase of acknoledgement as ridicule.
Trieze was nobody's son, a bastard. But as they would come to see he would father so much. They were, both of them, men with a propensity for violence. Romefeller was covered with ornateness, the cravat in the uniform, the ranks and hierarchy, the Specials who ritualized their sacrifice screaming it into the beam sword or canon as they were ripped apart. But like the Gundams, theirs was also a culture shaped on war and Treize was its god. The beginning and the end. Wufei barely thinks about him. The time and his blaring failure is still too close, too near. He's turned corners, walked down streets convinced that somewhere he'd hear those tone's again it's you 05...
"You think I'm a joke because I'm a woman."
"I think you're a joke because you think being a woman has anything to do with it." He turns a page.
She sat back hard in the field and crossed her arms, "Buy me a Boba drink."
"Don't you have more important things to do?" He doesn't look up from his book, enjoying being pedantic. She was frowning and glaring at him.
"Jesus Christ," He hands her a few credits.
"Thanks honey," she kisses him on the cheek and he makes to wipe it off but leaves it as she turns away. Sighing he returns to the pages of Herodotus and picks up the threads of his sentence For those cities that were great in earlier times must now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before…Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place.
Outside the window there was nothing, just a black expanse. Powered down and drifting in Altron he listens to the hum of it around him. The bones of its frame belonged to Nataku. And cupped in its innards, under rows of insectoid switches was himself. There were ancient customs where Chinese wives kept the bones of their husbands for burial or vice versa, and he'd read once that funerary rites were ways of coping with grief, a way of ensuring the mind remembered scoffing at both the superstitious and the psychological. And now here he was in this consructured great shell and it seemed like he'd gone the farthest of all.
Barton's message had unnerved him. Wufei flies to the empty space where his colony used to exist. There was a memorial satellite orbiting in its place broadcasting in different languages the sacrifice of L5-A0206 and the need for remembrance. The voices in Mandarin and Cantonese and the colonial dialect play simultaneously in Altron's cockpit fusing together out of the nothingness in his vidscreen. Like the voices from the dead...
Seeing Shenlong's skeletal frame in the hanger he'd sneered to Master O, "Give me a place to stand and lever long enough and I will move the world."
Master O continued looking on at his work, but he'd smiled slightly.
"Archimedes?"
Chang ignored him, "Is this going to be our lever? A fine lot you did with it."
But it was an appropriate design for a god, he'd thought. A construct that depended on the strength of the human at its core. The weakness of one imparted to the other.
Quatre had talked about how the past moved on, but he was wrong. This place still existed. Chang knows the shape of every bulkhead, how much space it should have occupied and within it everyone...even the goddamn servant woman who always spilled and apologized when she poured tea.
He was steeped in their ghosts, all their ghosts. Their faces, their phantom wishes, their lives. The great Long lineage stretched behind him and he was its at its head, a kernel of self driven by their desires, an avenging dragon. Nataku had been a war god, taken part in the battle for the sake of the fight. But like Duo had realized, vengeance was the real Great Destroyer, inexhaustible, unforgiving, that Old Testament version of justice. In his hands the gundam was a totem that carried all his rage, and all his strength. It embodied their memory and his need for vengeance; it was a god forsaken. Not only by his own clan, and not only by the colonies, but by everyone on Earth who continued on as if the war had never happened. He saw the suit for what it really was, an extension of the pilot, the military leverage with which Barton and the others planned to move history.
She rolled up her sleeve and plunged it up to her elbow into the basin.
"Have you ever been to Yunnan, on Earth?"
As Wufei watched her brown elbow move back and forth seeking something in the water, she continued "I don't know why you would. It's a scrap of a place probably not worth your time. But in a town called Lijiang the villagers believe that by telling a fish your troubles and letting it go all your misfortunes will follow it instead."
She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, and her hand was finally still. He saw now what she'd been up to, crouched over the plastic tub her thumb was slipped into the gills of the squirming, wriggling thing. She got up and dropped it over the edge of the bridge, releasing it into the water below. It made a small splash into the muddy water.
"You're a superstitious fool," and Chang walked away leaving her standing there.
"You've got a scholar's hands," Master O had told him when he was seven, and he'd pulled them back like he'd been burned.
He is a child running joyful down the temple walkway with high red walls and a ceiling of cool rustling bamboo. The sound of his sandals clacking on the pavement, the long walkway the scaled back of a dragon.
The uniform was laid out on his bed.
They had left it in different pieces folded neatly but spread in the shape of a body, like the vestments of some holy sect. They had even left him a sword belt for the machete. He picked it up, and felt the fabric between his fingers. Standard issue uniform material, fire-retardant, quick dry.
Mariemaia had looked like a dress up doll in hers, something you wound up and paraded around. Wufei was aware of Barton lurking in the background, but then she had looked up at him. There was there an intensity he'd seen before... It made his throat tighten.
He strips quietly and efficiently, the sweat on his arms and chest chilling and dryin in the quiet hum of the air conditioner. By the time he pulls on the undershirt he was completely dry. He smooths the creases, straightens the armband and slowly, methodically buttons the front of the shirt up to the neck. The tie was last, and he turns to the mirror to do it where Chang is caught by his reflection in the mirror. Maybe "driven" would have been the right word, or "vengeful", it slips from him into--
That black elbow crook of the out-stretched limb extending over the edge of the garden wall. It was just above Wufei's height. He could have reached and touched the outstretched arm with his fingertips, the black surface like carbon. His hand against it made a white star.
He'd come here to be alone but as always she was there too leaning against the solid trunk of the tree. She rapped the black branch appraisingly with her knuckles before opening her mouth and saying, "They say that the last emperor of the Ming dynasty--Chongzen--came out from the Forbidden City after it had been overrun by peasants and hanged himself here in shame. Pretty pitiful don't you think?"
Hands in pockets, she stepped down the garden wall by setting her boots between the chinks in the stones. "If he were a real man he would have stayed and fought it out." She stood next to Wufei now, directly under the branch and looking up at its blackness, and continued "The Elders would always talk about you, you know. 'Too smart. Too skilled. Too aloof. No motivation.' They think something must be wrong with you. Why do you think we were married off so quick, they thought maybe you'd take an interest in sex or a family or something. This though--" she looks up at green above them, a bower over bother their heads "I'm sure this wasn't what they were thinking--you coward."
He hates her suddenly, viciously. How she has invaded his life, her useless talk, herself so ingrained within the family plan she doesn't even know it. Her willingness to die for only a shadow and a cause and a banner to die under, and him--he has 6 feet of rope in his pack that he never planned on using and he opens his mouth and says,"They're going to do the same thing by allowing the colony to be dropped. Why shouldn't I speed them along in their own stupidity".
It's the wrong things and he expects her to hit him, but Meilan just looks at him hard for a second. "It's not the real tree anyway. Even the one on Earth was torn up during the cultural revolution, it's just a replica for tourists now,” she pauses, “Doing it here wouldn't have quite the same poetic justice."
She had been right. It would have been meaningless then. His cowardice as yellow as the silk on the throne. In his head he sees his hands tying the knots, the nine turns around the rope like the Long dragon its own serpentine body forming loops and tight nooses. What must the emperor have used? he wonders. What had gone through his head when they informed him the palace was overrun? As shouts and whooping echoed up from the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and above the Imperial Throne the pearl held in the dragon's mouth came crashing down to Earth along with the line of 10,000 years. The end of a dynasty pulling taunt at the end of a rope.
It didn't matter anymore. It was all gone, wiped clean in the face of the stark black M on a red background. He finishes knotting the new uniform tie and cinches it tight to the base of his throat, now complete.
The Hanged Man (XII) is the twelfth trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks. It may also be known as The Traitor.