Life in Three Steps Part 2
Questions of War
Heero's boots struck solidly on the maintenance bay floor as he walked among five Gundams cradled securely in a latticework of steel beams and cables. Cold currents blowing through the open receiving doors brushed bitterly over his face. An eerie quiet as chilled as the steady gusts accompany his solitary crossing.
He raised his head craning his neck to gaze up at Wing Zero's full height. Pushing heavy hair from his brooding eyes Heero stared at the towering titan aligned shoulder to shoulder with its fellow "mock human" warriors. The Mecha's vacant "eyes" stared back with a cold fixed gaze that sent a phantom shiver through Yuy's soul.
Alone in the building's otherwise vast emptiness Heero could clearly hear the weary sigh that escaped over his lips. The rush of air, despite its whispered tone, almost seemed to echo above the hollowing wind. The sigh's hissing, drifting back into Yuy's ears, was as harsh as if he had given into his mind's pressing urge to scream out loud.
Earlier Heero Yuy had engaged yet another OZ enemy. Their destruction had been dispatched with his usual cold detachment, the same distance the Perfect Soldier always maintained in the heat of battle.
With the Zero System as his "eyes" and "ears" it was easy not to be blinded by the raw energy explosions. Easier still not to witness the resulting disintegration of both the machines and the men inside. It was simple to shut out the high-pitched hum of discharging beam weapons. To become deaf to the whine of severed metal and the screams of human travails.
So why, this time, did he not feel the same numbness that always set in after the fight? Something uncomfortable gnawed at his gut, a nagging sadness that wouldn't go away. An emotional response so foreign, so disturbing that it's very nature threatened to negate all his stoic training.
"Heero." Duo called as he traversed the labyrinth of Mobile Suits, "There you are."
"Heero." he repeated sensing that although his comrade's body was there his mind was focused elsewhere.
Duo paused as the locked upwards gaze of Heero's narrowed eyes directed his sight to level a lingering look at their mechanized Soldiers of Death.
"What are you thinking about?" Duo finally wondered aloud after the silence between them demanded the question.
"That they should have never been built." Heero answered letting another uncharacteristic sigh mingle with the chilling breeze.
"It's not the machines that maim and kill." Duo declared reading Heero's mind with a sudden empathetic connection that took him by surprise.
Duo laid a hand on Yuy's arm keeping the intruding touch light, "It is the men who can't find any other means to sort out their differences that destroy lives. It is their pride that ruins peace."
Heero turned slowly to face his friend. The brooding cast in his cobalt centers of sight now centered on Duo.
"Are we those men?"
Duo shook his head, "I don't know. Maybe." he confessed his own confusion, "But we didn't start this conflict. Most of it began before we were born."
Now Duo's liquid violet eyes locked with the puzzling, almost painful, aspect of his partner's steely stare. "I guess, somehow, we got stuck in the middle of all this madness and now we have to fight our way out."
Heero shook his head returning his sight once more to the indifferent death machines. "Has all these technological nightmares allowed men to become so detached from the killing that they no longer recognize death as the final outcome? Have we become so jaded by the impersonal contact that we have forgotten about the human factor involved?"
Duo stepped around studying the normally impassive pilot. There was a strange faraway look in Heero's eyes that Duo knew emanated from his troubled soul.
"This isn't like you, Heero." Maxwell said still studying his friend's face as he searched for the source of Yuy's unusual philosophical examination of mankind's warring habits.
Heero didn't reply, his attention held fast by his Gundam's features fixed in its unemotional, quite apathetic, form so much like his own harden heart.
"Will there ever be a time we won't need to fight?"
Duo shrugged his shoulders perplexed by both the spark of Heero's humanity that had suddenly surfaced and his own heartache over the lives Shinigami had claimed.
"Yeah. Someday." he answered his voice barely audible above the moaning wind as it sounded so much like the cries of forlorn souls that were as lost as he and Heero.
Heero heard the crying, too and his heart answered back with the same desperation.
"Soon?"
This time Duo could offer no sure answer. He shrugged again as his eyes met the merciless malice in his Mecha's gaze that bore straight into his soul.
TBC...
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