[Gundam 00] A Piece of Sky (Tieria, G)
Title: A Piece of Sky
Characters: Tieria (Lockon, Allelujah)
Rating: G
Notes: Written for the first weekly writing challenge on the Mechaphiles forum! 1300 words, taking place mostly post s1 (during/after the timeskip), scheduled to become totally AU as soon as s2 arrives.
Sometimes the worst thing is not knowing all the answers.
Tieria doesn’t tell anyone that, because confiding has never come naturally to him, but he can’t siphon the thoughts off into Veda either, so they stay in his head, unsorted, full of shoddy human logic.
Once there was a jigsaw, he thinks. I solved it perfectly and it was simple; all of the answers, all of the information. The thought carries sensory memory along with it, until he almost feels that he’s back on the station, with all his brothers and sisters, sitting in long rows at cold steel tables while Mother paced the length of the room with slow, echoing steps. We are going to perform a different sort of test today. The clothing that they wore was very rough against the skin, and never fit quite right; it bunched up around the hips and thighs, and made him want to fidget in his seat to adjust it.
But when they carried out the test, he finished faster than everyone else.
Mother praised him.
He remembers pride. But that doesn’t matter; if he’s putting together a jigsaw now then some of the pieces are missing.
He doesn’t even know why he is thinking this. Thoughts and feelings were much simpler when he could take them out of his head and examine them critically.
Alone, he tries talking into the silence, to see if that will help.
“I miss you,” he says, because it’s true. His own reflection looks back at him from the dark window, softened and smudged, an impression only. His mouth is a crooked blur, a lopsided line. The red of his eyes is only a suggestion here; he can barely see his hair at all, just a pale patch of face and neck.
“I hate you,” he says, because he can’t say what he means, even to thin air. “I hate you for dying.”
No-one answers, because there’s no-one there. The silence chokes him, tightening his throat and stinging at his eyes. Or maybe that’s the tears.
He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see himself like this.
Eventually, after the fighting and the losses and the moment he thought was the end, they find him. The same steel tables are sitting in that room, although he only sees it briefly as he is escorted through.
He still doesn’t have any answers.
“Why did Lockon Stratos know what I am?” he asks them. He wouldn’t ask if Lockon was alive, but Lockon is dead. Or Neil is dead, anyway; gone to somewhere beyond their reach, if it turns out he wasn’t meant to know.
They don’t treat him badly, but they don’t answer his questions either.
He has grown better at reading people while he was gone - a little better, at least - and he thinks that the reason they don’t answer is that they don’t know themselves.
But he could be wrong.
He dreams. It’s been happening more and more, although it’s still rare.
In this dream, he is putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
In the end, two pieces are missing, empty spaces in the picture, lost bits of sky; he knows something terrible will happen if he can’t find them, and the fear of it twists at his chest, more and more dizzyingly painful, until he begins to drift away from himself. He wonders, with a reassuring touch of clinical detachment, if this is what cardiac arrest might feel like.
When he wakes up, though, his heart is still beating -- hard and fast and frantic.
Deep breaths calm him enough to let him wonder why this is happening. He’s read that dreaming is a way for the mind to sort through things that had happened to them while they were awake, and until recently he had his own way of doing that -- perhaps that’s all it is. But he dislikes the lack of control in this method.
He tries asking about Lockon again, as a different member of staff is overseeing his assessment today. They might know something, or they might choose to share different things; personal discretion comes into it, whatever the situation.
“You don’t have the clearance to access that information,” he is told, in tones so similar to his own that he has to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose.
He said things like that to other people before, didn’t he?
It could be that he learned to speak from people like this, and that’s why their way of talking echoes, as though teasing.
It could be.
He has the dream a few more times, each one a progression of the last.
He never finds the missing pieces.
Later, declared fit for duty and turned loose in the world again, he finds himself still wondering. He does bits of research, and comes up against wall after wall.
“Does it matter that much?” Allelujah says. He’s different now, more damaged but somehow more solid, too; a person, not a part of one. It is interesting to Tieria that he finds himself able to tell the difference. “Answers don’t always make anything better.”
Soma Peries’ name is not mentioned, so carefully and pointedly that it might as well have been shouted.
“It matters,” Tieria says. He would not have chosen to let Allelujah know, but they all watch each other closely now, even more so than before; as friends, as comrades. We can be broken, and we know it. “I would rather know the answers. Regardless of what they might be.”
Allelujah just shrugs. “Go for it, then.”
Tieria nods. But you don’t have the clearance to access that information.
It has been four years. This is the day; he remembers it because he remembers everything, or as close to everything as possible. And because it is important, if he’s honest, which is getting easier at least.
Feldt writes another letter. Whatever Setsuna and Allelujah do is done privately.
And Tieria stands at a window, watching his smudged reflection, and says, “I still hate you, you know.”
He’ll never get his answers, he’s coming to realise. Sometimes there are none. Neil -- Lockon, always the one he thinks of as Lockon, even now, even though he knows better -- had them, and Neil is gone. However poor the image is, it’s not bad enough to let him imagine that Lockon’s reflection is there beside his, or that if he turned his head he’d see the man himself.
It matters, he remembers himself saying. He’s obsessed over this for years -- not as though it was the only thing in the world, but perhaps as if it was the only thing as important as duty.
But is it the answer that matters, or something else?
Ah. Another question.
He dreams of Lockon, still wearing his old green flight suit, a patch over one eye. Lockon holds up a hand, and between his fingers are puzzle-pieces.
And he turns, hand still raised; looks back over his shoulder. Smiles. Walks away.
Tieria wonders, distantly, if everyone has such obvious dreams, and if so how anyone ever made a living out of interpreting them. But mostly, he’s watching Lockon. All his detachment can’t cut him loose from that.
He keeps watching, right up until Lockon vanishes from sight, and wakes up feeling pleasantly ordered -- as though everything is in the right place, at least for a moment. He understands that grief and obsession can get tangled up in odd ways, and he understands that not everything has an answer you can get at from where you’re standing -- really understands, instead of just knowing.
There are things he can wait for. Right up to the end, and beyond.
He doesn’t need to know right now.
Characters: Tieria (Lockon, Allelujah)
Rating: G
Notes: Written for the first weekly writing challenge on the Mechaphiles forum! 1300 words, taking place mostly post s1 (during/after the timeskip), scheduled to become totally AU as soon as s2 arrives.
Sometimes the worst thing is not knowing all the answers.
Tieria doesn’t tell anyone that, because confiding has never come naturally to him, but he can’t siphon the thoughts off into Veda either, so they stay in his head, unsorted, full of shoddy human logic.
Once there was a jigsaw, he thinks. I solved it perfectly and it was simple; all of the answers, all of the information. The thought carries sensory memory along with it, until he almost feels that he’s back on the station, with all his brothers and sisters, sitting in long rows at cold steel tables while Mother paced the length of the room with slow, echoing steps. We are going to perform a different sort of test today. The clothing that they wore was very rough against the skin, and never fit quite right; it bunched up around the hips and thighs, and made him want to fidget in his seat to adjust it.
But when they carried out the test, he finished faster than everyone else.
Mother praised him.
He remembers pride. But that doesn’t matter; if he’s putting together a jigsaw now then some of the pieces are missing.
He doesn’t even know why he is thinking this. Thoughts and feelings were much simpler when he could take them out of his head and examine them critically.
Alone, he tries talking into the silence, to see if that will help.
“I miss you,” he says, because it’s true. His own reflection looks back at him from the dark window, softened and smudged, an impression only. His mouth is a crooked blur, a lopsided line. The red of his eyes is only a suggestion here; he can barely see his hair at all, just a pale patch of face and neck.
“I hate you,” he says, because he can’t say what he means, even to thin air. “I hate you for dying.”
No-one answers, because there’s no-one there. The silence chokes him, tightening his throat and stinging at his eyes. Or maybe that’s the tears.
He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see himself like this.
Eventually, after the fighting and the losses and the moment he thought was the end, they find him. The same steel tables are sitting in that room, although he only sees it briefly as he is escorted through.
He still doesn’t have any answers.
“Why did Lockon Stratos know what I am?” he asks them. He wouldn’t ask if Lockon was alive, but Lockon is dead. Or Neil is dead, anyway; gone to somewhere beyond their reach, if it turns out he wasn’t meant to know.
They don’t treat him badly, but they don’t answer his questions either.
He has grown better at reading people while he was gone - a little better, at least - and he thinks that the reason they don’t answer is that they don’t know themselves.
But he could be wrong.
He dreams. It’s been happening more and more, although it’s still rare.
In this dream, he is putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
In the end, two pieces are missing, empty spaces in the picture, lost bits of sky; he knows something terrible will happen if he can’t find them, and the fear of it twists at his chest, more and more dizzyingly painful, until he begins to drift away from himself. He wonders, with a reassuring touch of clinical detachment, if this is what cardiac arrest might feel like.
When he wakes up, though, his heart is still beating -- hard and fast and frantic.
Deep breaths calm him enough to let him wonder why this is happening. He’s read that dreaming is a way for the mind to sort through things that had happened to them while they were awake, and until recently he had his own way of doing that -- perhaps that’s all it is. But he dislikes the lack of control in this method.
He tries asking about Lockon again, as a different member of staff is overseeing his assessment today. They might know something, or they might choose to share different things; personal discretion comes into it, whatever the situation.
“You don’t have the clearance to access that information,” he is told, in tones so similar to his own that he has to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose.
He said things like that to other people before, didn’t he?
It could be that he learned to speak from people like this, and that’s why their way of talking echoes, as though teasing.
It could be.
He has the dream a few more times, each one a progression of the last.
He never finds the missing pieces.
Later, declared fit for duty and turned loose in the world again, he finds himself still wondering. He does bits of research, and comes up against wall after wall.
“Does it matter that much?” Allelujah says. He’s different now, more damaged but somehow more solid, too; a person, not a part of one. It is interesting to Tieria that he finds himself able to tell the difference. “Answers don’t always make anything better.”
Soma Peries’ name is not mentioned, so carefully and pointedly that it might as well have been shouted.
“It matters,” Tieria says. He would not have chosen to let Allelujah know, but they all watch each other closely now, even more so than before; as friends, as comrades. We can be broken, and we know it. “I would rather know the answers. Regardless of what they might be.”
Allelujah just shrugs. “Go for it, then.”
Tieria nods. But you don’t have the clearance to access that information.
It has been four years. This is the day; he remembers it because he remembers everything, or as close to everything as possible. And because it is important, if he’s honest, which is getting easier at least.
Feldt writes another letter. Whatever Setsuna and Allelujah do is done privately.
And Tieria stands at a window, watching his smudged reflection, and says, “I still hate you, you know.”
He’ll never get his answers, he’s coming to realise. Sometimes there are none. Neil -- Lockon, always the one he thinks of as Lockon, even now, even though he knows better -- had them, and Neil is gone. However poor the image is, it’s not bad enough to let him imagine that Lockon’s reflection is there beside his, or that if he turned his head he’d see the man himself.
It matters, he remembers himself saying. He’s obsessed over this for years -- not as though it was the only thing in the world, but perhaps as if it was the only thing as important as duty.
But is it the answer that matters, or something else?
Ah. Another question.
He dreams of Lockon, still wearing his old green flight suit, a patch over one eye. Lockon holds up a hand, and between his fingers are puzzle-pieces.
And he turns, hand still raised; looks back over his shoulder. Smiles. Walks away.
Tieria wonders, distantly, if everyone has such obvious dreams, and if so how anyone ever made a living out of interpreting them. But mostly, he’s watching Lockon. All his detachment can’t cut him loose from that.
He keeps watching, right up until Lockon vanishes from sight, and wakes up feeling pleasantly ordered -- as though everything is in the right place, at least for a moment. He understands that grief and obsession can get tangled up in odd ways, and he understands that not everything has an answer you can get at from where you’re standing -- really understands, instead of just knowing.
There are things he can wait for. Right up to the end, and beyond.
He doesn’t need to know right now.