Gundam Wing fanfiction. My standard disclaimers apply. When I first thought about this story, my sempai said that, to him, it sounded like I was 'trying to decorate a rock.' Well, I hope that you guys like the way the rock's decorated.
Summer
by Lady Aria (bukiminatenshi@mailcity.com)
Thump... thump... thump....
The sound of feet running... or a heart pounding.
I could see a girl rushing through a corridor....
... And she had a gun in her hands.
Another sound.
Men, rounding a corner. They were screaming for her to stop.
One of them pulls out a gun and aims.
I try to scream... to warn her.
Shots were fired.
She falls to the ground.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
I wake up covered in cold sweat, totally disoriented. Moments pass and I realize that I was at home. Beside me, I felt her stir. My wife. She looks so peaceful in her sleep. So young. But then again, I was also pretty young myself.
I slowly get out of bed. I needed to think. The war had ended almost seven years ago. Less than a year after that, the mess with Mariemaia took place. It's been more or less peaceful after. Me and the guys became Preventers, primarily because most of us knew little else than being soldiers. Almost all of us had gotten married two, maybe three years, after joining the Preventers, with the exception of Quatre and Trowa. In Quatre's case, it was understandable. He was the sole heir to a colonial empire. Trowa..., well.... Trowa felt that his sister needed him, despite Catherine's objections to the contrary. Last I heard, he was now dating one of the circus performers. But then again, I digress.
The dream I had was of my last mission just before all hell broke loose with OZ. I had escaped from an OZ base along with Wufei in Deathscythe Hell....
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"This is where we part ways."
I looked up at Wufei with my usual grin, smiling even more because of the irritated expression he was giving me. We had landed back on Earth a few hours earlier and had almost immediately received new missions. Wufei had been ordered to go to China and lay low for a while. I, on the other hand, was to go to Paris to meet with a colony agent. I watched as Wufei gave me another irritated huff and go off in Nataku. Pushing his buttons was my second most favorite pastime. My most favorite one was pushing Heero's buttons. It sounds like a death wish, but I liked to live life dangerously.
Paris was beautiful, just as I had expected. The first thing that I did was look for the agent, but instead, the agent was the one who found me.
"Are you Duo Maxwell?"
Shock must have definitely been on my face then. "You're Summer?!" She was a thirteen-year-old kid with short brown hair and black eyes. A thirteen-year-old kid that gave me the creeps. She had a serious expression on her face and never smiled. There wasn't even a hint of emotion in her voice.
We arrived at an expensive-looking flat. Somehow, I had thought that I would be in for another crummy time, but here I was going into a mission with style. She gave me my own room and I was more than a little surprised by its opulence.
"Not that I'm complaining, but why in the world do we have such a... beautiful safehouse?" I was turning around in the room, drinking it all in. Who knows when I'll have accommodations like this again.
"We could not risk being conspicuous," she replied. "The first places OZ will search for us are in the slums and the countryside. Hiding in the heart of the city will be the last thing they would expect."
"It was certainly the last thing I expected," I breathed. I saw her turn to leave.
"Meet me in the study in twenty minutes. The mission will commence in ten days. We will walk through the entire mission until we live and breathe it."
After two days, I was ready to take back everything I had said. Summer was WORSE than Heero. In fact, she made Heero look like the guy next door. I don't think she even stopped to eat. I took the time we had doing reconnaissance to watch her closely. I fancied myself a good judge of character but Summer was a total blank.
"So, what made you become a colony agent?"
It was the fifth night and we were both sitting in front of the fireplace looking at the base's blue prints. I had decided to launch that question at her to get to know her better. What can I say? That's just the kind of guy I was.
"I don't understand."
I sighed. This was going to take a while. "You know, reasons. Were you a war orphan like me? Do you want to protect someone? Are you looking for revenge?"
She looked at me squarely and gave me a reply that I never expected.
"I was born for the mission."
"Come again?"
"There is nothing more to discuss."
She sifted through the blue prints until she came to the second floor plans and settled down to read. What she told me just didn't make sense. 'Born for the mission?' What kind of an answer was that?
From then on, I tried my best to get more out of her. Family background, hobbies, favorite foods... but all my efforts were in vain.
"Nothing is more important than the mission."
"That is not of the mission, therefore, irrelevant."
If I heard one more word about the mission, I swore I was going to lose it.
At last, the mission day had finally arrived. Summer was to execute a colony traitor while I was to download the OZ plan of attack from their main database. I had hidden my beloved Gundam a hundred meters from the base in a thick stand of trees. We were to rendezvous at the first floor corridor and escape using Deathscythe Hell. I watched as she silently assembled her rifle and pulled out the explosive bullets from their casing. She had demonstrated the bullets during a drive out to the country. It would lodge itself into the target like a knife and explode after ten seconds of being lodged in. Kind of like stabbing a person and giving the knife a twist before pulling it out -- just to make sure.
"Synchronize time."
I pushed the buttons on my watch and turned on the timer. We should complete the mission within twenty minutes, at least that was what Summer said.
"Let's go."
I remember nodding and watching her make her way stealthily through the defenses. My part of the mission went smoothly. I encountered no guards and managed to download all the information I needed in ten minutes. Summer's target was at the top floor, so I knew that she would take a lot longer than me. Five minutes before the rendezvous time, the alarm sounded.
"Plan B, Duo! I've been found!"
A soldier managed to gather enough wits to raise his gun and shoot.
Summer went down five paces from me. Shot in the back.
"Damn you!" I screamed as I shot the guy almost point blank. He was dead even before he hit the ground. The other soldiers were so surprised that I managed to grab Summer off the floor and made a run for it.
I don't remember much of what happened after that, except bringing her to the colonies' Earth base and handing her over to the doctors. Zechs declared war on the Earth days after that and soon everyone was up to their eyeballs with the war. I was the one who saved the scientists that had created the Gundams and, although I had wanted to leave them to die, I was glad I didn't. Professor G gave me the answers to all of the questions that I had been dying to ask.
"Summer?"
"Yeah, you know," I said as we walked down the corridors of the Preventer Headquarters. "Small, wiry girl, short brown hair, black eyes...."
"Duo, I am well aware of what she looks like," he cut in as he pushed open the doors to his office. "What I want to know is why you're asking."
I flipped a chair backwards and straddled it. We were going to be in for a long talk. "When I asked her about the reason why she became an agent, she gave some crap about her being 'born for the mission.' Do you have any idea what that meant?"
Professor G sighed and crossed his arms over the table. That meant that he was either going to give me a long-winded explanation, or that he wanted to brace me for something very, very serious. It was the latter.
"What Summer told you was about as accurate as it could get," he started, "she was, in effect born for the mission because she was raised almost from birth to be nothing but a soldier."
If that part hadn't horrified me, the rest of his story did. Even before Heero'd come into the picture, Dekim Barton had already been planning a way of taking over the world using a perfect soldier. Summer had been the fruit of an unwanted pregnancy. Dekim Barton needed to create a perfect soldier. The Barton Foundation provided the mother with everything she needed as well as a surprising amount of money as long as she signed a contract relinquishing her claim to the child. When she was born, Summer had been taken from her hysterical mother and placed in the care of Dr. J. In the laboratory, she'd been bombarded with tests and plans and tactics almost as soon as she could speak. Tests showed that Summer had the IQ of a genius and this made Dekim even happier. She had killed her first target when she was four and had blown up a number of OZ facilities in the process. Through all of this, she was kept in isolation, never to be exposed to human interactions other than mission briefings. Dekim had labeled Heero's ability to feel guilt and remorse a defect, blaming it all on the way he'd been brought up by Odin Lowe. Having little contact with other people, Summer had never learned how to feel. She had never even developed a conscience.
I hadn't realized that I'd been wandering aimlessly around the place until I found myself outside the medical wards. Two corridors and a door later, I found myself standing outside Summer's room in the ICU. She'd already been half-dead when we had gotten there after the mission. I could still vaguely recall the conversation I had with the doctor -- she had taken four bullets in the back and one of them managed to severely damage part of her spinal cord. Even if she could survive the other three wounds, there was almost no chance of her being able to walk again.
Those words kept playing over and over in my mind as I tried to make out her face amidst the many tubes and wires that were keeping her alive. At that moment, I wanted to bring back to life the OZ bastard that shot her and kill him again, but in my life, I learned the hard way that hatred only bred more hatred and it is something that consumes you until you wake up one day and discover that you have nothing left but a feeling of emptiness.
I had become almost a permanent fixture in the medical wing after that. Although the doctors had managed to save her, Summer was still in a coma. The nurses who passed by used to whisper as they looked through the window at me while I read to her or just told her stories about my life as an orphan in L2 and how my life took a sudden turn when I had been taken in by Father Maxwell and Sister Helen. It was a bit strange, I wanted to be the first person Summer saw when she opened her eyes.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"Duo?"
I look up to see my wife padding over to me. She looked like a little girl with her hair all tousled up and it made me smile. One look at my expression and she immediately started to run her fingers through her hair in a vain attempt to tame it and it made me smile even more. She'd wanted to keep her hair short, but I wanted her to let it grow longer. She'd resisted at first but no woman could resist me for very long.
"Duo, it's four in the morning," she said sleepily as she took a seat beside me in the kitchen. "Is something wrong?"
"Nothing," I replied, "it was just a nightmare. I thought that a glass of water would cure it."
"You could have taken a glass of water from the decanter in our room," she replied as she squeezed my hand. "You can't fool me, Duo. You wouldn't be down here if that nightmare hadn't been very disturbing." She cupped my face in her hands. "It was about Summer, wasn't it?"
I looked into her eyes and saw the pain in them. I took her into my arms and held her tight. "Hilde, why do you put up with me? I know how much it hurts you whenever I think of Summer, but why do you still put up with it?"
"I love you, you big dummy, that's why," she replied as she snuggled closer. "Nothing in this world could ever change that."
That perfect moment was shattered by the ringing of the phone. I was willing to pretend that I hadn't heard that infernal machine, but Hilde wiggled out of my arms and snatched the handset before I could get to her. Her eyebrows arched up a bit and she waved the phone in my direction.
"It's Sally. She wants to talk to you."
"This early?!" I replied incredulously as I took the handset. We were talking for less than three minutes before the handset slipped from my fingers and I had to grab the wall for support.
"What's wrong?" Hilde asked as she rushed over to me and returned the handset to its cradle.
"It's over, Hilde," I whispered as tears started to stream from my eyes. "The alarm sounded in Summer's room about thirty minutes ago." I took in a deep breath to calm myself before forcing the words out of my mouth. "She's brain-dead. Sally just asked me if I would give them permission to take her off life-support."
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
8:00 AM
I'm standing alone in the ICU room once again. This time, it wasn't to read or to talk to her. Just to say good-bye. I stroked her hand absently as I looked at her. She looked so peaceful that it was hard to imagine that she had known nothing in her life but war and death.
"I wish I could have known you better," I whispered. "The world you've always known in no longer here. There's no more war. I wish you could see the world now. You could've finally started to live and to know that there is more to the world than orders and missions." Wiping a stray tear, I looked at her hand in mine. They were so small, just like a child's.
"Daddy?"
The voice shocked me out of my contemplation and I turned to see Hilde and our daughter at the door. I motioned for them to come in and my little girl shrieked happily as I picked her up.
"Daddy, who is she?" She asked, pointing at Summer.
"Her name is Summer," I replied as I leaned closer to give her a better view. "She's your namesake."
"You mean we have the same name?"
I laughed at the wide-eyed expression on her face. "Yes, you do," I said. "Summer was very brave when she was your age... and smart, but she never had the chance to be happy. I know for one that she'd want you and the other children to be happy." I placed an arm around Hilde's shoulders and we all walked out of her room together.
I thought I had seen her smile.
*************** The End ***************
original © July 2000 by Lady Aria