Wind Chimes And Prism Light

Hi Peeps! This is yet another strange psychedelic fic from moi, but this is what I do best. I think. Unlike My Sweet Quatrina, I don't bastardize Irea in this one, but I'm mean to his Dad. This is sort of meant as an explanation as to where his space heart came from, and exactly why Quatre is so small and pale. Warnings for child abuse, I don't own Gundam Wing, on with the show.

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Duo's shrill voice echoes through the room, all the other pilots are silent, waiting for my response. But I am not here. I'm three years old again, back in there with only the faint tinkling of the windchimes and the soft colors of the prism light occasionally permeating the darkness.

I cannot for the life of me remember why he is so angry. He yells something about me not knowing what it was like to grow up on the streets, having to go without food for days, weeks on end. He calls me a spoiled little rich kid, born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Abstractly I think that my father would have had me punished if I'd ever put silver in my mouth. As Duo's memories flood his mind, both his and my own drown out everything else.

Just over the screaming voices, there is silence as they wait for me to respond to Duo's barbs. They haven't realized that I'm gone, I can no longer feel my mortal body, a bright prism shines a hazy rainbow into my eyes, red, yellow, pink, green, blue…

…then impenetrable black.

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When I was three years old, I did something very bad. I can't remember what it was, because I was still little more than a toddler, barely able to speak and unable to judge what is right and wrong. Whatever it was that I did, it must have been awful to warrant the punishment my Father gave me.

Because my growing legs were still adapting to the act of walking, I was hauled along by my Father to a room in the upstairs of the house. It had a bed, a window with drapes to heavy for me to pull aside to let the sunlight in, an adjoining bathroom and a single fluorescent light. Without a word, Father deposited me here and locked the door behind him as he left.

The room wasn't very entertaining to my three year old self, nor was the bathroom. No toys or picture books to amuse myself with. The closets were bare, and the only door besides the one I had come in lead to an attic, dark and dusty and absolutely terrifying. My childish mind registered that all things scary resided in the dark, and the attic was as dark as I had ever seen. Tired and bored, I lay on the bed and slept.

When I woke up, I couldn't tell whether it was day or night, because the drapes lay across the window and the light was still on. I had been woken up by the turn of the key in the lock. Evidently, someone had come in while I was sleeping. On the floor was a large basket with two sandwiches, a covered bowl of soup and some fruit, as well as a bottle of milk. Beside the basket were three sets of clothes and one set of pajamas. Even seeing this, I didn't think that I'd be here for so long.

A fairly long time passed, and the basket of food was left seven times while I was sleeping. I still expected someone to come in to help me get dressed, so I still wore the clothes I had been wearing the day I was locked in. Eventually I realized that the clothes were getting rumpled, dirty and uncomfortable, so I made an attempt to get changed into the other garments.

I believe it was about three weeks before I realized that no one was going to help me get dressed, or run my bath for me. As much as I hated bathing, I didn't like feeling dirty either. So I taught myself how to run a bath so that I wouldn't freeze or scald myself, but nevertheless I just ended up clean but in soaking wet clothes. Within a few days, I was able to wash myself properly, and I must have been the cleanest three-year-old on the colony at the time. When I wasn't eating or sleeping, I was in the bath. It ate up time which I had far too much of.

About a month had passed in the little room with only the bed, the florescent light and the doorway to the dark attic, when the light bulb finally lost power and I was plunged into darkness. In my terror, I had to seek out the one source of light I could find, amazingly enough it came from the attic. I toddled up the long stairwell to find that the ceiling of the dark room, which was so high I couldn't see it through the black, was covered with hundreds of suspended prisms that caught the tiny bit of light from cracks in the ceiling and reflected it around the room. Sparse as this source of light was, I was grateful for it. As well as the prisms, long windchimes hung from the invisible rafters, giving soft tones to any draught that circled the room. The attic was completely bare, save for a hammock-style futon in the center. For the duration of my incarceration, I only went downstairs to get food or bathe. I slept and ate on the futon, or lied across it, staring at the prisms and listening to the chimes for hours.

I'm not sure how long had passed before I realized I had to do something about my hair, but I believe it was almost a year. My hair, normally yellowish-blonde, was getting so long that it fell past my shoulderblades. This wouldn't have bothered me, but it was continually matted with dust, soot and the occasional dead insect. I found an old pair of rusty hedge-cutters in a storage closet and hacked away at the thin bundle from the back, ignoring the front, which I could fix. When I held the long, thin strands in my hands, it struck me that they weren't golden-blonde, like they should have been. They were pale yellow in color, almost white. I didn't dwell on it for too long, the prisms caught my attention again.

I continued to live my pseudo-existence, eating, sleeping, bathing and staring at the ceiling. One time, I don't know if it was day or night, The soft sound of the chimes sounded like a human voice. Every time I listened to the windchimes, they sounded more and more like voices and the prisms distorted my vision so that I could make out faces in the misty color. This was when I discovered my empathic abilities, my Uuchuu no kokoro.

The first clear vision was a young woman, maybe eighteen or twenty. She was sad because her Father had sent her three-year-old brother to boarding school, to make him a man. She hadn't seen him in two years. I briefly saw through her thoughts a picture of her brother, and he looked a lot like her. They both had big blue eyes, golden blonde hair and radiant complexions. Unlike me. I had white hair, white skin and I looked like an old man. I hadn't seen the sun for almost two years. She was my first vision, and the clearest.

I had other visions of other people, far away from me. I saw a boy my age training to become a soldier, already a man at five years old. Another boy, starving and cold on the streets. Another crying in pain because he hated those who took care of him, who used his body to satisfy their needs. One more boy, being rigorously taught about justice though he was too young to understand it fully. A man now, who wanted to be rid of those who ruled him, another man who was unsure of what he was fighting for, so many people I met in one room while staring at the ceiling.

That year passed, then another, and I barely knew it. Thanks to my visions, I knew more than I could have ever known had I been taught at the pace of all schoolchildren. I could read and write, though I never tried it. I could add and count numbers, though there was no need for it where I was. I learned to play the violin from my visions of a struggling composer, though I had no instruments. I felt as though I had aged one hundred years within four, though I had never grown any more than an inch or two. I was seven years old, but the size of a three-year-old, and I felt over a hundred.

Approaching the end of my fourth year of imprisonment, I lay on the futon and waited for the basket of food sent to me daily. I waited for hours, but it didn't come. I wasn't too alarmed, I still had some food stored away. After a while, I had used up my store of food, and then I started to worry. No food came, and slowly I realized that I was starving to death.

To ignore the raw pain in my stomach, I tried to lose myself in my visions. Desperately, I reached out for help the only way I could. I sent a telepathic message to one of my visions. The one who answered lived on Earth, the Captain of a band of soldiers. He believed that I was a desert spirit of some kind, and I was too weak to argue. I asked him what to do if I was starving to death, and he said that I was to keep warm and move around as little as possible. Thanking him, I braved the darkness of downstairs, tugged all of the blankets from the bed I never used and lay huddled on the futon.

I must have been lying there for three days before I heard someone unlock the door and a woman's voice call my name. I was too weak to answer her, but I heard her running up the stairs. I briefly opened my eyes to see the woman of my first vision staring at me with tears running down her face. Muttering swears and sobbing softly, she picked me up, bundled me into her car and drove me to the hospital. The days that followed were a whirlwind of strange activity. I saw the sun again after four years, and I had never been in a hospital before. The woman was constantly near me, saying things that confused me. What was she doing with me? Shouldn't she have been looking for her brother?

Later I found out that my father's plan was to make me stronger by having me fend for myself, but it failed miserably. I was more of a child than I should have been, I was too small and weak for my age and could barely speak, because I hadn't used my voice in so long. As my Family tried to ease me back into a normal life, the four years I spent locked away seemed like a dream, and eventually I forgot everything that happened before I was eight years old. Until now…

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My head hurts, and I open my eyes to find a waterfall of auburn strands shadowing two bright green orbs. Trowa puts his hand to my forehead.

" How are you feeling?"

" Confused. What happened?"

" Duo was yelling at you, and you fainted. You've been out cold for three days."

Three days. I relived four years in three days. Suddenly, I hear a familiar voice from outside.

" Who are you talking to, Tro? Is he awake?"

Without waiting for an answer, Duo bounds into the room and hugs me so hard I can barely breathe. Trowa grabs him by his braid and pulls him off of me.

" Jeezus, Q, you scared the life outta me! I kinda forgot about that whole empathy thing. Sorry."

" Don't worry about it."

As Duo chatters away his apologies and tells me what's been happening while I was unconscious, I tune him out and seek out the only true peace I have ever known, in the flashing prism lights and soft musical wind.

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O.O? That was pretty strange……….where do I get this stuff?