Wasting Bullets [gen, one-shot, PG-13]

[Omnicat]

Title: Wasting Bullets

Author: Omnicat

Rating: PG-13 (T), for a heavy subject and character death

Genre: General

Spoilers and Desirable Foreknowledge: Episode 29.

Warnings: OC death.

Pairings: None.

Soundtrack: None.

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. I do not claim to. I do not make any money by writing this piece of fanfiction. Happy now?

Summary: Quatre is taking a walk with the saying ?Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer.? No romance. Reflections on friends, enemies, conviction, caring, war and pacifism. OC death.

Author?s Note: Set just before Heero and Quatre go to Sank, after Heero?s battle with the Leo squad.



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Wasting Bullets

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?Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer.? is what they say. Whoever they might have been that originally thought of it, probably didn?t mean it like this.

Quatre gently changed the blood-soaked bandages for fresh ones. His patient let out a high pitched groan that had to strain itself to be audible, and opened his eyes to bloodshot slits. Quatre might be gentle, the man?s wounds were all but. The eyes rolled around until they found him, and for the first time, Quatre saw that they were brown. Brown like a wounded dog?s, pleading for his master to make it all right again.

No Quatre, don?t think like that, he told himself.

?Shh...? Quatre lay a hand on the man?s blond curls, stroking them like a mother would. ?It?s okay. I?m with you now, I?ll take care of you.?

The brown eyes closed, relieving Quatre of an apprehensive knot in his stomach and a tight band around his chest. He hadn?t been recognized for who he was; a Gundam pilot. A friend and ally of the one that had done this to him.

It would have only ruined the mood. And for what? It didn?t matter who was treating his wounds, did it? What mattered, was how they were treated. Quatre was treating them as gently as he could. It didn?t matter if he was less efficient this way; the man had been beyond saving when Quatre had found him. What mattered, was that the soldier wouldn?t have to die alone. He?d have someone by his side. It didn?t matter that it was an enemy. What mattered was that he wouldn?t feel lonely. Not like Quatre.

Not for the first time, Quatre wondered why he was doing it. Making enemies, fighting them... and then worry about them and treat the wounds he?d inflicted on them. Looking at the damage as closely as medical attention required didn?t exactly help alleviate his guilt. The fact that there were wounds he had to stitch up only made it more clear to him that they shouldn?t be there in the first place.

Was he doing it because he didn?t know this? Quatre looked at the beads of sweat forming on the face of his patient, his enemy. He dabbed them away with a cool cloth. No. He?d been told even before he ever drew blood. He?d felt it every time he was forced to kill someone because they wouldn?t surrender when he asked them to. In the heat of battle, there was just no time... no time to explain... no time to settle arguments... no time to turn back... no time to think twice. They shouldn?t be fighting, if they wanted to solve things. But they were forced to fight, somehow. They couldn?t stop; the Gundam pilots nor the soldiers. If they weren?t forced into battle by the world around them, their own minds would do it for them.

Quatre believed they shouldn?t fight. But he was forced to fight. When he had fought, he tried to make up for it. All sides were fighting for the same thing, after all. To convince the other that they were right, and that they were the ones that should get their way. It was so childish, in a way... Quatre had always been taught that it took a toddler to hit someone, but it took a wise man to talk things over. But talking to someone who was hitting you hadn?t worked. So he had decided he would hit them, to force them to talk things over. So in a way, it did help ease his guilt to worry over, and help the enemies he?d defeated. He could talk to them, when they were done fighting. Or at least make sure they wouldn?t suffer unnecessarily. Quatre thought his enemies deserved it no more than his friends did.

They were fighting for the same reasons, after all. In essence, they already agreed. The rest was just a matter of sorting things out, of coming to understand each other?s standpoint, of accepting and negotiating. The fighting beforehand was useless... it shouldn?t be necessary, because it wasn?t. But unless everyone would realise that together, no-one would realise it.

Before him lay one of the men that had hurt Heero?s leg. Quatre had, in turn, sent the man towards Death?s gate. And now, he was making sure his victim wouldn?t suffer any more than he had, as he covered the last distance to and through it.

He shouldn?t care about the man with bloodshot eyes and hair soaked with even more blood. Blood so easily erased the brown eyes and golden glow of his curls. Blood so easily erased the difference between friend and enemy. Because blood came from the inside, and they were all the same deep down. Everyone who fought, fought for the same reasons. The uniform they wore was only a superficial difference. Beneath, they were all alike. Quatre?s enemies believed in their goals as much as his friends did. Their blood flowed just as red.

It was a waste of time for Quatre to sit beside a dying soldier to ease his passing. He had more important things to think of than his enemy?s well being. Heero had been hurt. Noin and Pagan must have finished with him by now. They?d want to leave soon. Maybe Heero was limping toward him now to tell him just that.

Whatever the reason was, Quatre wasn?t able to tell. He felt too numb to adequately read Heero?s face and gait for anything other than the obvious fatigue. Numb, but clearheaded. He could see the path that lay in front of them very clearly.

Quatre believed. He believed just as Heero and the other pilots believed, and their opponents believed. They were all convinced that they were doing the right thing, however they went about it. They cared about the outcome of their actions, about achieving their goals. All sides wanted the others to revert to their way of thinking. For Quatre, this meant that he would rather help his enemies understand why the colonies should be given their freedom and Romefeller should give up its oppressing reign, than fight to force them to do and accept that.

Quatre liked to believe that he acted with a certain amount of selflessness. He didn?t just care about his ideals, he cared about the people he wanted to explain them to, too. In return for the selfish ambition to make them change their ideals into his, he saved them. He saved them from the harm he?d have to cause them if they fought.

Because that?s what warriors did; they saved. The Maganacs had taught him that if you must fight, you fight to protect, not to harm. Never to harm. It put Quatre at a disadvantage to feel remorse for the sake of his opponents, but he couldn?t stand the idea of having to fight without compassion for his victims. He would rather feel the weight of every single death weigh him down, than freeze his heart until nothing could penetrate it anymore. Quatre couldn?t fight like that, couldn?t live like that. Quatre looked up at Heero?s cold, dark eyes and squeezed his hands together around the used bandages he held to stop them from shaking, until the blood of his enemy spilled over his fingers. It would be the death of him.

Quatre didn?t wonder about Heero?s thoughts. He knew Heero thought the same things he did. He believed the same things, too. The difference between them lay somewhere else. Heero?s way of thinking was that of a Gundam pilot. You fight now, you talk later. Only, Heero had replaced the last part with ?you die before the time to talk comes?. No Gundam pilot could convince Heero to change this way of thinking, because, to some extend, they all thought like that. Even Quatre. They couldn?t help him, because they were part of the reason Heero thought like that.

To Heero, the objections - that he was wasting time, that he was wasting equipment, that it put him at a disadvantage to care for his opponent - had been made the rules. Sometimes, Quatre knew, Heero became angry with himself for caring about his enemies? thoughts. Sometimes, it scared Heero that he wanted so badly that his victims knew what he thought and why they were on opposite sides. For some reason, Heero wasn?t allowed to believe in himself, wasn?t allowed to trust the wisdom of his instincts.

Heero had to trust in someone else?s. Quatre smiled at his dark friend, a weak but sincere quirk of his lips. Heero looked at the wounded man, his face showing a blankness that was no longer a shield, but a void. The one on Earth Heero had been thinking about had been Relena Peacecraft. Quatre had never met her, but he knew she could help Heero. She could help the entire world. If Quatre, who fought to be able to talk, was the middle, and Heero, who fought without being allowed to speak, was one end, Relena Peacecraft, who refused to fight and set an example with her talking, was the other end.

They needed the Peacecraft?s ideals of total pacifism. They were sinking too deeply into the madness of their own fights. Someone needed to pull them out before they drowned in all the blood. Someone who had never been tainted by it, someone pure and strong to mend the cracks in the hearts and minds of even the most hardened fighters. They needed time to rest in peace, Quatre and Heero.

It wouldn?t be long now. Quatre wondered if his patient would die peacefully. If there weren?t any internal injuries that he hadn?t been able to identify, causing him pain that he was no longer able to express. If there really weren?t any more painkillers to be found.

He couldn?t tell if Heero wondered all those things when he asked: ?He?s not going to live.?

Quatre shook his head.

Heero bowed his. He took out his gun and aimed it. He wasted a bullet for an enemy.

[11krage]

Its wonderful, one of those stories i'm going to have to read over and over again. You showed perfectly what the gundam pilots were thinking, what quatre was thinking and even heero. And i loved the way it ended, you really feel what heero's going through and quatre.

That sad numb feeling of holding someone in your arms and knowing they were going to die, and theres nothing you can do but be there. And that horrible feeling of putting them out of their misery so they don't suffer.

This fits so well with the story as well. Espically that moment in EW when heero chooses to try and 'relieve marimaya of her pain'.

But anyway, great story, its left me in complete awe.

[Terra]

Very realistic, honest depictions of both Heero and Quatre; as fanfiction writers, that's really the highest benchmark. That Heero would shoot the dying soldier foreshadows his "shooting" Mariemaia a year later. It's great that you incorporated it this way. Finally, someone has updated in this forum!

[Omnicat]

*bows* Thank you. Your praise means a lot to me. It's good to know that readers think I'm on the right track when it comes to the characters' personalities.

But to be honest, I hadn't linked Heero shooting the dying soldier to Mariemeia at all before you mentioned it. ^_^;; It seemed to be the appropriate ending, and beyond that, I didn't really give it any thought. Strange how such things interconnect.

[11krage]

Just shows that you can really write from heero's wavelength

Or as other people would put it, that you are well and truely obsessed with gw

Either way, its clearly affecting your writing unconciously as well as conciously, my only advice is to write more...

[Omnicat]

^^ Hint taken. Heero is, though tricky, fun to write. Each time I'm really enjoying it, more than I had ever imagined before I tried.