(no subject)
Personality: Duo is quick-thinking, sharp-tongued, gregarious, precocious and friendly. He’s resourceful, productive, hard-working and adventurous, if frequently impatient and brash. Duo is also duplicitous, however unintentionally: An extremely autonomous, independent person, Duo still trusts and makes friends easily, and is constantly seeking to belong to a “gang” or social network of some sort or another.
For all this social ease, however, most of his relationships are superficial, for along with his need to be a part of a group, he carries the deeply ingrained belief that anyone he gets too close to will die (and not in the Sylvia Plath sense, either, but rather more immediately. This is not a random neuroses so much as it is a product of his upbringing, see below).
Duo is highly intelligent and observant, but prefers by default to play the fool, which he excels at. Better an idiot than a coward, and it’s easier to cheer people up coming from a disarming position of harmlessness than overt competence- or so he’s found.
He’s a nice kid, and a funny guy, but he’s ruthless and focused when he has to be. He has so many layers of so many walls up that it’s entirely conceivable that, if he found someone strong enough, someone who didn’t seem to pose the threat of up and dying on him, he would break them down and stop hiding behind smiles. The trouble is, he has no idea that they’re there.
He’s very persuasive.
Even to himself.
Background: (This is a somewhat abbreviated version.)
Orphaned at an early age, Duo has no memories of his life before his 5th year or so, at which point the was living with a street gang on an impoverished satellite. When he was 7 (AC 187), a virus breaks out on the colony, and due to limited vaccine, staggering numbers under the poverty level die, including most of Duo’s gang and their leader, Solo. Though Duo steals antidote to give to the older boy, he’s too late, and though Solo dies, Duo miraculously survives (without aid of medicine), and names himself in Solo’s memory. The remaining urchins, Duo included, are taken in by the Maxwell Church. The other children are quickly adopted but due to his sensitivity and defensiveness, often leading to fights, Duo is not and stays at the Church under Father Maxwell and Sister Helen’s care. A year later, a rebel faction takes hold of the Church to use as a base. Duo strikes a bargain with the leader, goes to steal them a mobile suit to use in battle, but returns to the Church to find it razed to the ground. 245 people are killed in what comes to be called the Maxwell Church Massacre (AC 188), including Father Maxwell and Sister Helen.
Duo disappears (as far as canon is concerned), reemerging four years later (AC 192) as a stow away on the salvage group The Sweepers’ transport, at which point he’s calling himself Duo Maxwell. He becomes the chosen pilot for an experimental mobile suit, and spends three years in training for the guerilla war he’ll be fighting with four other pilots, with whom he has no contact. However, he discovers the true nature of this “Operation Meteor” he’s gotten involved with, and in AC 195, decides he can’t stomach its decidedly genocidal tone. Liberating the colonies? Yes. Killing a bunch of people to make a point? No. He plans to detonate the mobile suit, and the ship it’s on, and everyone else on it, but is stopped by Professor G (the man responsible for the suit’s construction and Duo’s training), and is encouraged to “steal” it instead. G tells him to go Earth and fight the colony’s battle.
April 7th, Duo makes the drop. Over the course of nine months, he fights a brutal and tasking war, a confusing war with a lot of switching of sides, convoluted politics, massive destruction and begins to lose himself. He pulls it together with the four other pilots, now the only people he could consider true friends, around November, and in December they, no longer fighting for any one side, but fighting for all sides, to stop a war that would end in apocalypse, win.
And that’s after 9 months of continual ass kicking and terrible fuckups and the worst possible odds.
So they part ways, for a year, at which point the daughter of the defeated and KIA General who started the last war shows up, and stars a new war on December 24th. The ex-gundam pilots, having just sent their mobile suits into the sun, have to go and infiltrated her ranks and shut her down to prevent her from going through with the original Operation Meteor (aka dropping a colony the size of Texas onto the Earth=eternal winter). Though the battle only lasts 24 hours, it is a wrenching one that causes great strain between the friends. At its end, the Gundams, as well as all the Earth’s (and colonies’) mobile suits are destroyed.
Two years after the Mariemeia Incident (as the 24 hour war comes to be called) has ended Duo, now 18, operates his own salvage business on the colony he grew up on. He makes regular donations to local charities and plays as much of the philanthropist as he can off the income that he makes. Hirde Schbeiker, an ex Alliance-soldier and friend from the war, works with him, and though they’ve made attempts at a romantic relationship, it’s become clear that such a thing isn’t possible. For Duo, at least.
Content as he truly is with the work he does and the life he leads, Duo still holds authority as an Auxiliary Preventer and goes on occasional missions for them (The Preventers is an organization independent of country, designed to stop the “fires of war“ before they start. It‘s like an international peace-keeping military police organization). Several of these missions have had him paired with the other ex-Gundam pilots, but not many. He misses them powerfully, though would never say as much. In an effort to keep the compiled guilt of his hypocrisy- his role in the war as a terrorist and bringer of death, so at odds with the role he wanted to fulfill as a child of lifting people up and protecting them when he lead the gang after Solo’s death, etc - at bay, he readily takes on any Preventer’s work that he can. It’s an error in one such mission that lands him on the island.