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"Baby Series 3"Written By: Karina Rating: PG Spoilers: None Disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing or the Characters from the series but the baby is mine. Pairing: Milliardo + Wu Fei Notes: Challenge 117. Baby Series 3 #121. Takes
place immediately after His Fate. Many thanks to ShenLong for her work betaing
this fic.
Snow and Stones More than twenty years had come and gone since that terrible day. Would that he could forget the terror that had shaped him in blood and fire. He could see it and hear it as though it was happening all around him now. He could see the fires raging, fierce, terrible flames in the night… hear the screams and the shouts, the wailing of women, the high pitched terror of the children. The sounds of the guns, the roaring thunder of the flames dominating the night and perhaps, despite the blood and screams, it was the flames that had been the most terrible thing of all. He had been caught in the flames, alone, desperate, wailing like every other child there. He had been the prince of Sanc, but he had also been just another terror filled child, traumatised, witnessing the destruction of all they had known and who had looked into the face of Hell. He had been alone when she had run, but they had come. They had shown him the way out. They had died to show him the way out of the burning palace, setting his feet on a path that kept him safe from flames and the killers terrorizing the night. He had survived to grow up. He had learned a great deal, witnessed so many other horrors; tragedies abounded on this world. But wonders could be found too. He had watched some wonderful things and he knew the world could be a beautiful place, but on that night… Even after so long the horror was fresh in his memory. He would take it, the memories, fresh as the new fall of snow, to his grave. Nor would he be alone in that journey. He was not the only one who remembered; not the only one who had survived. Pagan remembered. The few others who had survived the palace's destruction remembered and, blessedly, there were few who endured the nightmares of what had happened there. The survivors of the massacre that had taken place in the city had their own memories haunting their sleep. For all of them it would be the same. The memories isolated them, even from the others who had survived. They remembered and it was not something one spoke of. Words only freshened the blood, raised the level of the roar of the flames; brightening the colours of fire and blood. They were not alone in remembering, but they were, regardless, solitary in their pain. It was a very private, intensely personal thing, that pain. You knew you were not the only one to feel it; you knew those who remembered felt it as keenly as you yourself did, but you never talked about it. They never talked about it. You recognized that haunted look in their eyes, understood they recognized it in your own eyes; but you did not speak of it. That might bring the horror back. Psychologists would say it was unhealthy to hold it in. You had to talk about it to get past it and that was true. There had been psychiatrists and long sessions… but some things you did not say. Some things you kept to yourself, despite all their words to the contrary. Some things you did not talk about and you hoped and prayed a day would come when you forgot. You hoped, but you knew it was a day that would not come. He would always remember, just as Pagan would remember. Blessedly, Relena had been too young and need not live warped and twisted by the agony of the past. Why could they not forget? It seemed so unfair that it should always be there, lurking, lingering close, a threat to his sanity and sense of self. It was a slow poison for which there was no antidote. Not even time, which could softened a harsh, jagged mountain into a rounded grain of beach sand, would give relief. One simply could not live long enough for time to work at softening the jagged edges of memory. One would have to live the length of several life times to distance oneself from the memory, and that in itself was an isolation from the rest of humanity. All you could do to cope was to try not to think about it. Some days that was simply impossible. Some days no matter how hard you tried to forget, something would distract you and remind you of the terror… and you would bleed all over the progress you had made. Something always happened to remind you of the horrors man could perpetrate on his fellow man. He was reminded again why he stood alone amidst a crowd. He was reminded why he was alive; why he stood within the snow shrouded ruins. The memory recalled him to the cause for all that he had done; all that he and Treize had determined to do. They had decided the new generations to be born would not witness such atrocities. Even at the cost of their lives. It should have been he who died. Treize had not lived with the memories, the horror, of their screams. Treize had not witnessed the butchery of that night and would not have had to live with it until his grave released him. Unlike he, who could never forget. It would have brought him relief to have been the one to die; if one of them had had to die to end the bloody cycle. It had been a long time ago. "Milliardo?" He so clearly remembered the snow falling and the stones rising from the ground; the uneven outlines softened by the snow. The stones were ancient, somehow otherworldly, surrounding him, embracing him with a sense of the past; a solid feeling of security, of safety. Once he had dismissed it as a dream, the stressed hallucinations of the mind of a child pushed too far. But now… now he knew otherwise. It had been no hazed dream, no hallucination born of exhaustion and blood loss. It had been real, as real as the snow softening the outlines of the ruins surrounding him was real. There had been the voice of the old woman who had touched him, embraced him when he had needed it most; who had given him a name, there in the snow, surrounded by ancient stones. Moonlight on Snow. "Milliardo?" She had said he had given his blood to Sanc, that one day Sanc would rise gain, as the Phoenix of legend was said to rebirth from the ashes. He would be the Phoenix, she promised, reborn, strong and beautiful. She said it would happen because he had sacrificed his blood to the land, within the circle. Because it was a magical place. A special place… and because he had come there, because he had given his blood to the stones, he would never be alone, yet he would forever be alone. Both marked with a curse and a blessing. Or had that part been a dream? "Milliardo, might I approach and touch you?" Dream or reality, the whole thing had been a nightmare. "Hold me. Just… remind me… Hold me." Solidity came from the arms that circled his waist, from the body that pressed close to his back; from the solid, earthy presence of the man who was the Dragon to his Phoenix. ~ * ~ |
