A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, L18 - a series containing two to five fics (totalling over 100,000 words). This is the first fic in said series, and a rewrite of most of the first season.

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Before Pride Falls

Part 1: independence and oppression
Chapter 1

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They demanded independence from the Earth Spheres but in truth they desired a different sort of freedom. It was a freedom, however, that they couldn't put into words. They knew too few of them: too few words to translate the far too complex world… and, in truth, "independence" was one of those things too complex for them to know. So it was easy for them to flock behind the Independence movement, behind Kudelia Aina Bernstein who promised them their lives – and for them: space rats and human debris, their lives and the lives of their comrades were all they'd ever had.

And so, though they feared pain and punishment, they fought to stay alive. The cowardly rungs who stood just a step or few above them on the ladder were put to use, where they'd rather have sheltered beneath the debris of their dead. They were the Third Group left to die, and so they did their best to survive. Outside was a larger battle, yes, but their fight in words was simple: don't die, survive.

And survive they did, though they paid bitterly for their survival. They survived against the odds no-one thought they'd survived against, except maybe themselves because they best understood their own desperation: best understood the feeling of rats scrambling in the garbage heap of Mars, bound to the whims of the maze-makers but scrambling in futility anyway because they had to to have any chance of escaping the maze.

But they won this battle: the massacre that had spelt their deaths in the sky with the first, wasteful, shots, and now what did that mean for the future? They'd blown open a hole in the wall with their desperation, but was that going to let them out…or the blade of an even more overwhelming executioner in?

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Lieutenant Crank Zent was a soldier, and he'd fought many battles: long hard battles in space and earth and mars, before he settled in the lattermost of them. He knew more horrors than most of the men he shared the battlefield with, because he outlived most of them. His rank told a different tale: a tale of stagnancy but he was stagnant by his own volition. Gjallarhorn was a place of politics in the higher rungs and only where he was could he fight with the weapons he could wield. A Graze he could pilot well enough and well enough to train the greenhorns that found their way to him, but a team of soldiers looking for orders on a battlefield was another matter. And when wisdom and knowledge grew and with them the horrible truth: the truth of the enemies he fought against – he couldn't' force his thoughts on others, and it was better for all of them if he did not.

Many desperate people forced to fight…and those he avoided were only shot down by his comrades. A kindness that gave nothing, in the end, and it was no kindness at all. All he could do was send away the children they captured, the children they freed: pirate children with the Alaya-Vijnana System they sent off to colonies of Mars because that was the only place they'd be able to live and work… But it didn't matter to most how many were shot down before they captured the rest. Human debris, they were called, and the way the pirates tossed them into the front while they escaped was a stark sign of exactly that.

And now, the CGS attack. Meant to be a retrieval of Kudelia Aina Bernstein, daughter of the Mars' Chryse Autonomous Region Representative and a figurehead in the Independence movement. Turned into a massacre that backfired on them. And he thought he could have dealt with a massacre, too. He'd done it before: kept his head down and salvaged whatever they'd managed to save, if they'd saved someone, and took comfort in his comrades' ongoing lives if they did not.

But this massacre had backfired on them. Killed Captain Orlis Stenja. Lost them a third of their mobile workers and a Graze – his Graze. And that wasn't counting the injured, like Ein. And all Chief Coral Conrad had to say was: 'Don't mess with me.'

He could forgive a necessary massacre that saved the lives of his men and the innocents, but to talk of their defeat so lightly… 'We had no other choice,' he repeated again, though they did and only he knew it. He'd seen the thrusters failing, the machine lagging. That Gundam suit couldn't have held on for much longer and pushing forward would have won them the massacre after all. And that would have been the right thing, if they'd been dealing with ordinary enemies: guilty men who broke the law of Gjallarhorn and staked their lives to defend it… But children fighting their hardest to live was another matter. Always another matter.

He never wanted to fight children. Somehow, he always wound up doing it.

'They were children.'

The chief's lips curled in distaste. 'So you were beaten by a bunch of brats, is that it?'

No, that wasn't it at all. 'Child soldiers, fighting only because they were ordered.' And he'd seen it so many times before. With the pirates. With other places on Mars and now, in the cool aftermath as opposed to the heat of a battlefield, he wondered why he was even surprised anymore. Of course the CGS would have child soldiers as well. They were cheap labour and cheap goods, altogether too easy to replace when they were gone.

He wondered how many of them he'd met before. He wondered how many of them he'd rescued, just to send them straight back to the battlefield.

Children shouldn't even be on the battlefield.

The chief mumbled to himself, then straightened and glared through the monitor: at him, at the situation, at the enemy that had driven them back here. 'Capture Kudelia in two days. And erase everything else: the battle, your dishonourable defeat – and the entire enemy force as well!'

Massacre them all. And this time, a true massacre where they wouldn't even have the chance to fight back.

They didn't have to do that. They could have taken over the facility instead, or even negotiated with them for the handover of Kudelia Aina Bernstein. Or they could have simply asked to come. She was part of the Mars administration, after all. Why should she refuse Gjallarhorn? And why should Gjallarhorn go after her with mobile workers and Grazes?

This was why he never advanced the rank, why he stayed as a Lieutenant who trained other men like Ein to fight but never dealt with the bureaucracy.

This was why…

'Lieutenant Crank?'

But he was the man in charge now. The man with the highest rank. And with orders he very much did not want to give.

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The takeover was both drawn out and quick, and not particularly messy. They'd planned it well, for a wish they'd entertained many times but never really pushed for – but they'd been pushed to act today, abandoned and then punished for trying to survive as their pride and the lives of their comrades were trodden into the dust. Because that was all they had. And they could and would have run in with guns and fists blazing and been all wiped out if that was all they knew, but their camaraderie gave them other resources too.

Even a bunch of uneducated kids like them could sage a takeover without too much unnecessary violence, and they did it. And even a bunch of uneducated kids like them could think, even just a little, about the future and the wider world. And so they gave out severance pay to everyone who refused to stay. So they gave a roof to everyone who returned. And so they pooled their resources together and thought: how could they run a company with what they had left, and what lurked just outside their new-crusted turf. Two different enemies they'd made just by trying to survive, and who knew how many enemies they'd saved themselves (or hadn't saved themselves) with the severance pay. What if it wasn't enough? What if they came back, baying for blood? What if Gjallarhorn came back with reinforcements the likes of which even Mikazuki and the antique Gundam Frame couldn't handle – and so many of them thought it was a miracle he'd handled three enemy Grazes and all those mobile workers at all. The thought that no-one could beat him in a melee was naïve. They saw that when shots had rained down on them: wasteful shots that destroyed people and things without care while they – the space rats, the human debris – scrambled for the scraps.

And now they were scrambling for scraps again. The scraps of a company that was now theirs to run if the world would let them run it. Too complicated for uneducated kids like them but they'd do it because they had to: because they had to survive.

And then they saw the Graze on the horizon, and there was another battle they had to fight to survive.

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He'd wanted to go alone, but there was no way to slip away from men who looked to him for command – or from his student, either, injured as he was.

'You're injured,' he repeated again. 'You'll be more a liability than a help.'

'You cannot go alone,' Ein protested. Too young. Too bright yet with undertones too dark. And too honest.

Crank sighed. 'I do not wish to fight innocent children who only try to survive.'

'Innocent?' Ein repeated. There was a touch of incredulousness in his voice. A touch of disbelief. 'He put us in a position where we'd have fired on our own mobile workers to catch him!'

'An act of desperation,' Crank sighed. 'Any child would hide behind their mother's skirt – but what would be the mother for an orphan?'

Ein's expression relaxed a fraction, and beneath that, there was pity as well. 'I suppose we can't expect anything but their best efforts to protect their lives.'

'No, Crank agreed. 'You have not seen the battlefield before this, but there are children at war in space as well. Children cast out to fight losing battles and then abandoned as pirates attempt to run with their treasure. And now here: children left to hold down the front lines and even their leader, the one who yelled orders on the battlefield, was a child. Where were the adults who ran the facility? And where was Kudelia Aina Bernstein who we'd gone in to capture?'

'I – don't know.' Ein looked down, and Crank, instantly guilty, put a firm hand on his shoulders.

'It is not yours to know. That is for those who lead us: who make the decisions, who plan the battles so the least amount of casualties – ' And then he stopped, because wasn't the mission only to retrieve the young lady? Why had their orders been to attack the base at all. 'Ein, if I gave you an order, what would you do?'

'Follow you, sir,' he said without hesitation.

'Even if my orders contradict that of our superiors?'

He hesitated, but eventually he nodded. 'I would, yes. You've always been…kind.'

And perhaps he was saying more with those words: perhaps he was saying he was too kind but it didn't matter. He had Ein's approval, at least. He had Ein looking at him.

And he was a coward who could walk forward with someone's eyes boring into his back.

'Then come. And bear witness on my battlefield. A battlefield where the bare minimum of lives are lost. Or none at all.'

If he won, at least. But he couldn't underestimate them: that child who fought with the blood of other children on his shoulders, and that antique machine that kept up with their Grazes, and the Alaya-Vijnana System, and the desperation of people fighting for their livelihoods and their lives.

What would he say to them? What could he offer them? 'I'll take care of everything' would seem so naïve and useless to them…or perhaps those words would be their Eden…and how would he hold them up?

Somehow, he'd have to. Until someone arrived (and no doubt someone would soon arrive, if he didn't report favourably and how could he give a favourable report with those orders? Nuke the place, and leave no survivors – and for what? To hide a defeat they should learn from and get stronger for? To wipe the floor of all the dead, enemy and ally: child and comrade alike. To pretend that battle hadn't happened at all when there'd been so much blood, so much lost.

'Come, Ein,' he said again, and Ein cast off his sling and reached for his uniform instead. His movements were stiff, but determined. Without even knowing what his orders were, what they meant, he followed them. Followed him, because he believed in him, in his kindness. Or maybe it was because of that kindness that he followed.

He hid a small smile. He's my student. I should know. He did know. And he didn't want to be the one to destroy that innocence.

Hopefully, he would not become that person.

'Let's see those children's' response.'