[gw fic] Question (Dorothy)
Question
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Characters: Dorothy, Treize, possible future Dorothy/Wufei
Rating: PG
Summary: Dorothy remembers her promise to Noin, and begins to look to the future.
A/N: Approx. 2,300 words. I think this was once part of a longer story, involving Quatre and Relena, and their daddy issues.
This is what I remember:
I am twelve years old and I am in Barcelona. It is a glorious November day. The sky is as bright as polished blue topaz, and seems just as shiny. The leaves that flutter down from the trees are cinnamon and caramel and the sun is so bright it renders the whitewashed walls painful to look at. I am on vacation from school and skipping happily between the two men I love best, my papa, and my cousin, Treize.
Papa is General Joseph Catalonia, the former commander of OZ. He retired almost a year ago and came home to his family’s ancestral manor because, he says, he is tired of war and will work for peace all the days that remain to him. I am too young to understand fully what he means. All I care is that he is home and I no longer have to live with my grandfather, the Duke.
I have had so much fun since vacation started! Almost every day Papa has taken me out into the city to show me around. I have not been here since I was very young, so some things are half-familiar, but everything is exciting and wonderful. We go to the theatre. We go to museums. We go for tea in Arabic teahouses, where we sit at low tables in shadowy, flower-and-oil-scented rooms and sip violet tea in small gilt-trimmed glasses and eat sesame seed cakes, and talk. He tells me what he wants to do now that he is retired. We’ll travel all over the world, Ruby, he promises, his blue eyes twinkling. He calls me Ruby because the people here always call me rubia--blonde. He listens while I chatter about school. I am in Heaven.
Two days ago, Cousin Treize flew down from Austria and joined us here. I like him a lot and am glad he is here, although since his arrival Papa has been acting a little distracted. I think he is worried about something. I ask Cousin Treize, but he won’t say what it is.
But you know, it’s hard to think about that on such a beautiful day, even though Papa and Cousin Treize are talking about battle and Earth’s unstable relationship with the Colonies. I pretend to be mesmerized by the sights around me, but I listen.
“What do you know, Treize? You’re only twenty-one, less than half my age. I’m not surprised by your opinions, but I think that in time you’ll see things the way I do now. Violence only begets more violence. I began to understand that after the slaughter of the Peacecrafts. I knew the king and his family. Our daughters played together when they were five.”
I have the vaguest recollection of a little girl with light brown hair and big, insipid tear-filled blue eyes and me standing over her, a decapitated doll in my hands, explaining that we were playing French Revolution and if she had not wanted this to happen she should not have whined about being the queen.
The memory does not interest me. I sweep it aside and listen to Cousin Treize’s response:
“Yes, that was a travesty. O’Neill was and still is a monumental idiot, and cruel besides. What he did was not war; it was murder plain and simple.”
“War is never plain and simple, Nephew,” my Papa admonishes gently. He is so smart! “You’ll find as you grow older, if you manage to grow older, that the line between murder and the kind of killing soldiers do is very hard to determine at times.”
“Nevertheless there is a line. O’Neill crossed it. I do not intend to.”
“No? Then how do you explain the Alliance’s decision regarding Colony A0206?”
Cousin Treize clenches his fist. He tries to hide it in his jacket pocket, but I see. “You were not supposed to have heard of that, Uncle. I hope Septem does not know that you know. Anyway, Colony A0206 is decrepit. The problems with its systems are too myriad to fix. Our spy reports show that Dekim Barton of L3-X18999 has taken a keen interest in that colony. It could be used as a weapon against the Earth. Long Zi-ling has been appraised of the situation, and refuses to move the people.”
“And why should they move?” Papa does not sound very impressed with Cousin Treize’s arguments. He sifts through a pile of charm bracelets, holding each one up for my inspection as he replies. “After China fell to the Alliance and was divided by its generals many of the Chinese people were forced off their land and became nomadic. Long Bao and several other clan leaders pooled what wealth remained to them and purchased land on L5-A0206. They were cheated of course; the ones who sold the colony knew of its potential instability and said nothing. Still, the colony belonged to them. They’ve been there for more than a century. Why should they leave their homes a second time? They refuse, so they must be slaughtered. There’s a word for that: genocide. Is that beautiful, Nephew?”
“No!” How angry he sounds! “That’s not beautiful. If there were some other option I would take it, but there is none. However, war can be beautiful when it is done correctly. It is a test of skill and brings out best in men.”
“It brings out the worst. If all you wanted was a test of skill, why not challenge your so-called enemies to a soccer game?” Papa laughs, picks up a pretty leather wallet with a grinning cat sewed onto it and shows it to me. “This one, Ruby?” He’s trying to distract me and I pretend to be distracted.
I don’t hear the shots. What I hear is my Papa say, “Ruby,” again, softly, and then he falls, pulling the contents of the table down with him.
I don’t say anything. I just stare down at my father, watching the red roses blossom across his white shirt. People are beginning to shout, one of them is Cousin Treize, but I hardly hear. I stare into my father’s wide-open eyes that don’t see, at the mouth that does not draw breath. And then I scream.
I scream like a falcon: loud, piercing, inhuman. I scream and scream and then there are arms around me trying to pull me away. I struggle wildly, flailing, kicking, biting, but I’m only a little girl, I’m not strong. Cousin Treize tears me away from my Papa and clasps me against his chest while I writhe and scream like all the winds of the world are inside me trying to get out through the tiny hole of my mouth.
As I scream I look up over Cousin Treize’s shoulder and I see the gunman and he is aiming at my cousin and I don’t care, I don’t care. Kill me, I want to scream, but the words don’t come, only pure, shrill sound. Kill me, kill me. I press my heart to my cousin’s so I’ll be sure to die, too.
But the gunman does not fire. He lowers his weapon and between one heartbeat and the next he disappears in the crowd that’s gathering. I struggle again in my cousin’s arms. I’ll overtake that man, I’ll make him kill me, too.
“Dorothy, don’t,” pleads Cousin Treize. “Your father died as a soldier should, for the thing he believed in. You can’t die until you have something to believe in, too. Stop it. Dorothy, stop.”
I keep struggling. I don’t know when I stop or when my screams become sobs, but eventually they do. I cry for a long time, and then I vow never to cry again because no other man in this sick world can ever be worth my grief.
* * * *
I never did find out who ordered my father’s murder. I think it might have been Septem, because he and Cousin Treize hated each other passionately. But I never knew for sure. That was one secret that OZ managed to keep from me. Grandfather once told me that if I wanted the name of my Papa’s killer, I should look no further than Cousin Treize himself, but I never believed that and still don’t. Treize was a brilliant, charismatic leader, but he was blind when it came to the true nature of men and war. Back then he still believed it was possible to win a war with his honor intact. I think Papa’s death is what changed him. If he had arranged Papa’s murder he’d have had it done when I was not around. He was a bad man in many respects, but he always cared for me. Yes, I know that this is true. One must understand people if one wishes to manipulate them, you see.
I did get my tears back eventually. It was Quatre Winner who found them for me after I almost killed him. I regret hurting him. Of course I do. I was blinded by grief at the time--yes, I was still grieving for my father--but that is not an excuse. If I had killed him I would have destroyed the last shred of goodness inside my heart, my last chance. I attacked him because I thought that he was just like me and because of that he should have seen things my way and helped me in my plan to teach every human being a lesson they would not forget. But he helped me in a way that I never expected; we were so alike that he understood my soul and was able to show it to me. He showed me the thing I used to be, the thing I was, and he gave me a glimpse of the thing I could become. He saved me but I hated him for a long time after that, or thought I did.
But I’m less like Quatre Winner than I am like Chang Wufei of Colony A0206. People like Quatre and Relena Peacecraft follow their hearts, and that is good. Wufei and I try to think things through carefully, often coldly, and act according to our convictions. Sometimes I think we are more sensitive, Wufei and I. We understand the evil as well as the good.
It’s so strange. I thought that Quatre was like me and I hated him for it. I know that Wufei is like me and I think that I am falling in love with him.
I think at first that I should ask Wufei to take me with him when he destroys his Gundam. But on further contemplation I decide that my presence would be intrusive. He has his own ghosts to bury, and I have mine. And our ghosts clashed once. They should not be together in the end.
Besides, I don’t really know how he feels about me. He did not object when I kissed him that evening. Actually, I think he liked it. I caught him checking me out more than once as we walked back to the hotel. That was the first time I’d felt remotely attractive since before my father’s death. But we hadn’t really seen each other much after that night. I guess we avoided each other. I was shy, oddly enough, and maybe so was he.
So instead of begging to go along I go with Lady Une and Marie Maia, who is doing well but needs to be in a wheelchair until she is stronger, to the graveyard where Cousin Treize is buried.
I promised Lucrezia Noin that I would not visit that grave again, and I do not. My father is also buried here--this is a cemetery for fallen heroes of the Earth--and I leave Une and Marie Maia to go stand by my father’s grave.
I have not been here in two years. After the Eve War I was too ashamed to come. Now I am not afraid.
“I think I’m falling in love, Papa,” I whisper. “Can you believe it?” My voice gets picked up by the wind, which is rather fierce, and carried all around over the graves. I pull my headscarf closer around my face. “You’d like this boy--this young man, I should say. In some ways he is like you, but I think he is more like me. I didn’t know there was anyone else like me. Now I feel less lonely.”
I’m terrified, I want to say. But I’m delighted, too. These are such new feelings I can’t even find the words to express them. So instead I talk about Wufei, how handsome he is, and how smart, how strong he seemed when he caught me, how he’s the first young man I’ve ever caught staring at my ass. I hear my words and want to laugh at how girlish I sound, how normal. How can any of this be normal? But it certainly sounds that way.
This last thing I have to say to my father before I say goodbye, this question, is not normal. “When do you think history ended, Papa? I mean, when did things stop being new and start repeating themselves? How far back would I have to look to find the answer?” All I hear in reply is the wind moving through the graves and the bare branches high above.
But then I think, I promised I would look to the future, didn’t I? Maybe the answer is not to be found in the past but in the future? That being the case I should ask Wufei. Yes, I shall ask him. I shall see him again and ask him. And maybe he’ll know the answer. I have hope, now, Papa. I have so much hope. And maybe if we both know the answer, we two who used to have no hope, who walked the dark path and the light, we’ll be able to tell it to others, to everyone, and we can all begin again.
9/24/02
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Characters: Dorothy, Treize, possible future Dorothy/Wufei
Rating: PG
Summary: Dorothy remembers her promise to Noin, and begins to look to the future.
A/N: Approx. 2,300 words. I think this was once part of a longer story, involving Quatre and Relena, and their daddy issues.
This is what I remember:
I am twelve years old and I am in Barcelona. It is a glorious November day. The sky is as bright as polished blue topaz, and seems just as shiny. The leaves that flutter down from the trees are cinnamon and caramel and the sun is so bright it renders the whitewashed walls painful to look at. I am on vacation from school and skipping happily between the two men I love best, my papa, and my cousin, Treize.
Papa is General Joseph Catalonia, the former commander of OZ. He retired almost a year ago and came home to his family’s ancestral manor because, he says, he is tired of war and will work for peace all the days that remain to him. I am too young to understand fully what he means. All I care is that he is home and I no longer have to live with my grandfather, the Duke.
I have had so much fun since vacation started! Almost every day Papa has taken me out into the city to show me around. I have not been here since I was very young, so some things are half-familiar, but everything is exciting and wonderful. We go to the theatre. We go to museums. We go for tea in Arabic teahouses, where we sit at low tables in shadowy, flower-and-oil-scented rooms and sip violet tea in small gilt-trimmed glasses and eat sesame seed cakes, and talk. He tells me what he wants to do now that he is retired. We’ll travel all over the world, Ruby, he promises, his blue eyes twinkling. He calls me Ruby because the people here always call me rubia--blonde. He listens while I chatter about school. I am in Heaven.
Two days ago, Cousin Treize flew down from Austria and joined us here. I like him a lot and am glad he is here, although since his arrival Papa has been acting a little distracted. I think he is worried about something. I ask Cousin Treize, but he won’t say what it is.
But you know, it’s hard to think about that on such a beautiful day, even though Papa and Cousin Treize are talking about battle and Earth’s unstable relationship with the Colonies. I pretend to be mesmerized by the sights around me, but I listen.
“What do you know, Treize? You’re only twenty-one, less than half my age. I’m not surprised by your opinions, but I think that in time you’ll see things the way I do now. Violence only begets more violence. I began to understand that after the slaughter of the Peacecrafts. I knew the king and his family. Our daughters played together when they were five.”
I have the vaguest recollection of a little girl with light brown hair and big, insipid tear-filled blue eyes and me standing over her, a decapitated doll in my hands, explaining that we were playing French Revolution and if she had not wanted this to happen she should not have whined about being the queen.
The memory does not interest me. I sweep it aside and listen to Cousin Treize’s response:
“Yes, that was a travesty. O’Neill was and still is a monumental idiot, and cruel besides. What he did was not war; it was murder plain and simple.”
“War is never plain and simple, Nephew,” my Papa admonishes gently. He is so smart! “You’ll find as you grow older, if you manage to grow older, that the line between murder and the kind of killing soldiers do is very hard to determine at times.”
“Nevertheless there is a line. O’Neill crossed it. I do not intend to.”
“No? Then how do you explain the Alliance’s decision regarding Colony A0206?”
Cousin Treize clenches his fist. He tries to hide it in his jacket pocket, but I see. “You were not supposed to have heard of that, Uncle. I hope Septem does not know that you know. Anyway, Colony A0206 is decrepit. The problems with its systems are too myriad to fix. Our spy reports show that Dekim Barton of L3-X18999 has taken a keen interest in that colony. It could be used as a weapon against the Earth. Long Zi-ling has been appraised of the situation, and refuses to move the people.”
“And why should they move?” Papa does not sound very impressed with Cousin Treize’s arguments. He sifts through a pile of charm bracelets, holding each one up for my inspection as he replies. “After China fell to the Alliance and was divided by its generals many of the Chinese people were forced off their land and became nomadic. Long Bao and several other clan leaders pooled what wealth remained to them and purchased land on L5-A0206. They were cheated of course; the ones who sold the colony knew of its potential instability and said nothing. Still, the colony belonged to them. They’ve been there for more than a century. Why should they leave their homes a second time? They refuse, so they must be slaughtered. There’s a word for that: genocide. Is that beautiful, Nephew?”
“No!” How angry he sounds! “That’s not beautiful. If there were some other option I would take it, but there is none. However, war can be beautiful when it is done correctly. It is a test of skill and brings out best in men.”
“It brings out the worst. If all you wanted was a test of skill, why not challenge your so-called enemies to a soccer game?” Papa laughs, picks up a pretty leather wallet with a grinning cat sewed onto it and shows it to me. “This one, Ruby?” He’s trying to distract me and I pretend to be distracted.
I don’t hear the shots. What I hear is my Papa say, “Ruby,” again, softly, and then he falls, pulling the contents of the table down with him.
I don’t say anything. I just stare down at my father, watching the red roses blossom across his white shirt. People are beginning to shout, one of them is Cousin Treize, but I hardly hear. I stare into my father’s wide-open eyes that don’t see, at the mouth that does not draw breath. And then I scream.
I scream like a falcon: loud, piercing, inhuman. I scream and scream and then there are arms around me trying to pull me away. I struggle wildly, flailing, kicking, biting, but I’m only a little girl, I’m not strong. Cousin Treize tears me away from my Papa and clasps me against his chest while I writhe and scream like all the winds of the world are inside me trying to get out through the tiny hole of my mouth.
As I scream I look up over Cousin Treize’s shoulder and I see the gunman and he is aiming at my cousin and I don’t care, I don’t care. Kill me, I want to scream, but the words don’t come, only pure, shrill sound. Kill me, kill me. I press my heart to my cousin’s so I’ll be sure to die, too.
But the gunman does not fire. He lowers his weapon and between one heartbeat and the next he disappears in the crowd that’s gathering. I struggle again in my cousin’s arms. I’ll overtake that man, I’ll make him kill me, too.
“Dorothy, don’t,” pleads Cousin Treize. “Your father died as a soldier should, for the thing he believed in. You can’t die until you have something to believe in, too. Stop it. Dorothy, stop.”
I keep struggling. I don’t know when I stop or when my screams become sobs, but eventually they do. I cry for a long time, and then I vow never to cry again because no other man in this sick world can ever be worth my grief.
* * * *
I never did find out who ordered my father’s murder. I think it might have been Septem, because he and Cousin Treize hated each other passionately. But I never knew for sure. That was one secret that OZ managed to keep from me. Grandfather once told me that if I wanted the name of my Papa’s killer, I should look no further than Cousin Treize himself, but I never believed that and still don’t. Treize was a brilliant, charismatic leader, but he was blind when it came to the true nature of men and war. Back then he still believed it was possible to win a war with his honor intact. I think Papa’s death is what changed him. If he had arranged Papa’s murder he’d have had it done when I was not around. He was a bad man in many respects, but he always cared for me. Yes, I know that this is true. One must understand people if one wishes to manipulate them, you see.
I did get my tears back eventually. It was Quatre Winner who found them for me after I almost killed him. I regret hurting him. Of course I do. I was blinded by grief at the time--yes, I was still grieving for my father--but that is not an excuse. If I had killed him I would have destroyed the last shred of goodness inside my heart, my last chance. I attacked him because I thought that he was just like me and because of that he should have seen things my way and helped me in my plan to teach every human being a lesson they would not forget. But he helped me in a way that I never expected; we were so alike that he understood my soul and was able to show it to me. He showed me the thing I used to be, the thing I was, and he gave me a glimpse of the thing I could become. He saved me but I hated him for a long time after that, or thought I did.
But I’m less like Quatre Winner than I am like Chang Wufei of Colony A0206. People like Quatre and Relena Peacecraft follow their hearts, and that is good. Wufei and I try to think things through carefully, often coldly, and act according to our convictions. Sometimes I think we are more sensitive, Wufei and I. We understand the evil as well as the good.
It’s so strange. I thought that Quatre was like me and I hated him for it. I know that Wufei is like me and I think that I am falling in love with him.
I think at first that I should ask Wufei to take me with him when he destroys his Gundam. But on further contemplation I decide that my presence would be intrusive. He has his own ghosts to bury, and I have mine. And our ghosts clashed once. They should not be together in the end.
Besides, I don’t really know how he feels about me. He did not object when I kissed him that evening. Actually, I think he liked it. I caught him checking me out more than once as we walked back to the hotel. That was the first time I’d felt remotely attractive since before my father’s death. But we hadn’t really seen each other much after that night. I guess we avoided each other. I was shy, oddly enough, and maybe so was he.
So instead of begging to go along I go with Lady Une and Marie Maia, who is doing well but needs to be in a wheelchair until she is stronger, to the graveyard where Cousin Treize is buried.
I promised Lucrezia Noin that I would not visit that grave again, and I do not. My father is also buried here--this is a cemetery for fallen heroes of the Earth--and I leave Une and Marie Maia to go stand by my father’s grave.
I have not been here in two years. After the Eve War I was too ashamed to come. Now I am not afraid.
“I think I’m falling in love, Papa,” I whisper. “Can you believe it?” My voice gets picked up by the wind, which is rather fierce, and carried all around over the graves. I pull my headscarf closer around my face. “You’d like this boy--this young man, I should say. In some ways he is like you, but I think he is more like me. I didn’t know there was anyone else like me. Now I feel less lonely.”
I’m terrified, I want to say. But I’m delighted, too. These are such new feelings I can’t even find the words to express them. So instead I talk about Wufei, how handsome he is, and how smart, how strong he seemed when he caught me, how he’s the first young man I’ve ever caught staring at my ass. I hear my words and want to laugh at how girlish I sound, how normal. How can any of this be normal? But it certainly sounds that way.
This last thing I have to say to my father before I say goodbye, this question, is not normal. “When do you think history ended, Papa? I mean, when did things stop being new and start repeating themselves? How far back would I have to look to find the answer?” All I hear in reply is the wind moving through the graves and the bare branches high above.
But then I think, I promised I would look to the future, didn’t I? Maybe the answer is not to be found in the past but in the future? That being the case I should ask Wufei. Yes, I shall ask him. I shall see him again and ask him. And maybe he’ll know the answer. I have hope, now, Papa. I have so much hope. And maybe if we both know the answer, we two who used to have no hope, who walked the dark path and the light, we’ll be able to tell it to others, to everyone, and we can all begin again.
9/24/02