SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
Dreams: Treize

I used to watch the stars.

When I was young I used to lean out the window of my room and stargaze every night. I had a star chart book that I had received for my fifth birthday, bound in leather with a golden leafed spine, and a small telescope that my uncle had ordered for me from Japan when I had been born. He had said he would keep for me until I was old enough to use it.

The stars were in my destiny, he had said.

My uncle announced his decision to move to the L2 colony when I was six years old. My family opposed him, of course, but that did not stop him. It was his dream, he told me. I watched him solemnly with all the innocence of a six year old, though I did not care to hear about his dream. It was not mine.

He boarded a shuttle to the colony, planning to start a business there, but something went wrong with the shuttle's fuel supply and the shuttle exploded ten seconds after takeoff.

The only thing my uncle left me was the telescope.

We had horses when I was a young boy and my second cousin twice removed had taught me to ride. It's easy, I remember her saying, holding the horse's bridle with a slender hand and looking for all the world like part of the horse. You must feel the horse. Feel its thoughts, its heart, and if you understand, it will obey you.

She would sneak away to the paddocks in the evenings after supper and race across the fields bareback, the horse wearing only a hackamore, she barefoot and bent low over the animal with its mane and tail streaming, as if they were flying.

When I was nine, she was thrown from the back of her favorite stallion and broke her neck.

I joined the military because I had the potential to be a great soldier, I suppose. At least that's what my father's nephew used to tell me. He was not my cousin because my father had married his first wife long before he ever met my mother, and the nephew was the nephew of his first wife's sister. He was a captain in the Federation forces and used to come to visit, even when my mother made it clear time and again that he was not welcome on the Khushrenada estate grounds.

Treize, you'll make a fine soldier. Soldiering is one of the noblest professions in the world.

When I was ten, word came that he had been involved in an engagement in South America and had disappeared, missing in action. I don't remember if they ever found his body. No one on my side of the family cared enough to ask.

I could have cared, but it would have meant devoting my energy to something I cared less about than my studies and my education, and I couldn't have that.

I had priorities.

When I announced my plans to go into the Lake Victoria Military Academy, my mother flew into a rage. You can't go, she said. You'll disgrace the family. You were meant for greater things.

Mother, I said. My life is mine.

She couldn't argue with that. Not that I cared what she thought. I took the exams, passed, went to the academy, studied and graduated. The studies were not especially difficult, and I mastered the military life with ease. I rather enjoyed it, even. The instructors were skeptical at first. The Khushrenada dynasty was well known across Europe as one of the wealthier and prouder dynasties in the world, and at least three of my professors I knew suspected that I had some trick up my sleeve. But as the semesters passed by and I excelled in my studies and in the school, they gradually relaxed their opinions of me.

Khushrenada is a bright student, they wrote on the grade reports at the end of my final year. He shows an high capacity for learning and a great interest in the military. Recommend him for further specialized training after commissioning.

If they had asked me at that point if I cared, I would have replied no. The Academy was simply a stepping stone, and success came naturally to me. But as long as they thought I cared, I saw no reason to inform them otherwise.

Some truths are best kept secret.

I wrote to my family inviting them to commissioning. I never heard from them. Two days before commissioning I heard from the commandant of cadets at the academy that my older half-brother had committed suicide the week before.

I was recruited right away by the Specials Headquarters after I was commissioned. It came as no surprise to me, and if I had really cared I would have been proud. But I didn't care about that.

As before, I had my priorities.

I pulled strings and maneuvered and got myself shifted to the space division of the OZ Specials forces. Space was all I had dreamed it would be, and more. For the first time I thought I understood my uncle's fascination with it so long ago, the glory and the grandeur and the mystery.

For the first time, I thought I had a vision, a dream, like his.

I wanted more.

I fought in some more engagements, pulled some more strings and found myself at the top of the OZ chain of command. But it was an empty victory, like taking something I already had and claiming it as mine. The Federation was the giant sun of the universe and I was but a moon, a satellite, circling their Earth in an ever-shrinking circle. If I did not break free, I would be pulled into their atmosphere and crushed as if I had never been.

I wanted to show them that it would not be that easy.

I wanted to show them that I meant something to the world.

I wanted to show them my vision and that vision did not include them.

I cared about this, and I would show them exactly how much, even if it meant destroying the image of myself I had so carefully built up through the years.

Zechs Merquise agreed with me. Zechs, the brilliant and beautiful boy who was like a shadow of me, who had graduated from the Academy with higher scores than mine, who had come up to me at his commissioning ceremony and announced that he wanted a position under me. Just like that. One sentence.

I was impressed.

I gave him the position of my second-in-command, and already I could see things changing. Zechs was fiery, a rebel, opposed to my careful strategic nature. He wanted change, and he wanted it now.

Patience, Zechs, I said. Rome was not built in a day.

He gazed at me impassively. My father used to tell me that.

When I met Midii Une she was already out of the Academy and working as a weapons specialist in the lower levels of the OZ facilities. She had potential. She was like Zechs and I, but without the amount of elegance that noble birth had ingrained in us. But that was all right, because elegance could be taught to anyone. I took her under my wing as my aide and attendant on a whim. Rumors flew at headquarters, but I ignored them. It was a test more than anything else, for her as well as for me, and it was someone to keep me company, because it sometimes became quite lonely in the large house I had built.

I never intended to touch her as a man touches a woman. I had better things to do.

She fell in love with me almost at once, I think, a young girl without a home being taken in by a powerful superior. I could see the signs. She was attractive in her own right, but I had no time for that. Love was a distraction, a plaything I could do without.

I still had priorities.

When word reached me that my mother had died of cancer, I was engrossed in the inner workings of the Romefeller Foundation, in conference with Duke Dermail regarding some operation plan or other. The servant came with the message on a silver platter. The Duke liked to keep some things the old-fashioned way.

Excuse me, I said, rising from my chair and exiting the room.

I did not weep. I had never wept for any member of my family, and there was no need to start now. I simply stared at the flowing cursive script on the note, the first actual correspondence I had received from any relative since I had entered the Academy. It was from my aunt, telling me the simple facts and asking me not to come home for the funeral.

You are not needed, she wrote. Just like that.

I crumpled the note in my hand and threw it into the fire, where it flared into a bright nothingness of ash.

Just like death.

I returned to the mansion that night and Midii Une was waiting for me, ready to draw my bath as always. I had given her the title of Lady. It suited her well, I thought, though she disagreed.

How would you like your water, Treize-sama?

Her soft voice was too much for me.

Get out, I snarled, raising my hand as if to strike her. Get out!

She froze and the jar of spices and herbs dropped from her hands. It broke on the floor with a splintering sound, like the breaking of fragile bone, but I did not even look down, only staring at the doorway with a fierce anger until her fleeing footsteps faded on the marble stairs down the hall.

I remember my knees feeling weak until I could no longer stand but instead fell to the cool marble floor of the bathroom, my hands falling into the gritty spice crystals and broken pottery shards on the floor. I don't remember when the tears started coming.

I do remember hands in my hair, a warm body against mine as I cried like a boy that night, as she simply held me and let me weep. She smelled like spices.

I returned to work the next day. I could sense the lower officers watching me warily, as if I might snap at any minute. Obviously they'd heard the news about my mother through the media sources.

I'm fine, I said with a smile on my face when Zechs asked me. Don't worry about me. The plan must go on.

And go on it did, but my heart was not in it.

When the war began, all I felt was a vast weariness. My side of the plan was done, and I did not care anymore. I wondered if I had ever truly cared, or if I had been fooling myself. When chaos broke out I simply sat back and let it happen, let the colonists and OZ and the remnants of the Federation fight over broken space like mad dogs. Space was no longer beautiful and mysterious. There was too much blood there, too much death, too much guilt. And I no longer cared. I couldn't.

My vision…

Space was my vision, and they had destroyed it.

It was only too late that I realized the stars were indeed my destiny, and soldiering was truly the finest profession in the world. That I hadn't listened and hadn't felt the heart of space, and that was why I had lost.

I thought I was meant for greater things, greater than I had ever dreamed, and it was all a lie, because the greatest things I could ever want were right before my eyes and I had thrown them away. I cared too much but I could never pinpoint exactly what it was that I had cared about.

Freedom.

Happiness.

Love.

The elegance was a sham, and I was too ashamed of myself to break it to OZ, whom I had served, to Zechs, whom I had trusted, to her, whom I had betrayed most of all. I had worked so hard to please myself because I thought that the things that I wanted were the things that they would want. I wanted to make them happy. I wanted to make them proud, if they would only open their eyes and see.

I was the one who had been blinded, by the light of the stars through my uncle's telescope.

I think…at the end…I did love her. And if such it was that love had to die for other dreams to live…then I did.

My love, my legacy, was not fit to live after my death. But it was fitting, because I loved her and I loved space and I loved freedom most of all.

And peace.

I realized then that all I had really wanted was peace. And it was too late now.

I was twenty-four years old, and in those Gundam pilots against whom I had ordered attacks, I saw myself as I had been so long ago. Young. Idealistic. Loyal.

Meant for greater things.

I was not needed, as they had told me for so long. Not needed. The world would go on without me, and I had made too many mistakes and I was tired. Those who came after me would set my mistakes right and go on living like I had never existed. Everything that I had built, that I had worked for, would be lost.

But that was all right, because in the end I had found my release among the stars and everything that I had loved.

In space, which was my dream.

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