FIC: Europe Did The Trick [Gundam Wing, Trowa & Heero]

[omnicat]

Title: Europe Did The Trick
Author: Omnicat v''v
Rating: K+ / PG
Genre: General
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Episode Zero and the first 20 episodes of the anime.
Warnings: War talk.
Pairings: None.
Disclaimer: If you recognize it from the Gundam Wing canon, I didn’t come up with it. The rest is only my interpretation of the canon.
Summary: Trowa’s thoughts as he travels through Europe with Heero, and hw that leads to the exchange of lavender turtlenecks and trust that transcends an OZ uniform.
Author’s Note: This started as an attempt to explain where Heero got that odd lilac sweater he wore to the moon base. And then Trowa started rambling. Sigh. Ah, well, I should have known that not being talkative means you have all the more thoughts cooped up inside your head. This takes place during the anime; as you read you’ll recognize the canon parts. Enjoy your read!

 Europe Did The Trick

 

Europe was frustrating, confusing, and incredibly bad for his back.

Trucks had never been his favourite sleeping accommodation to begin with, and now that he was the one sleeping upright for a change he began to feel for and appreciate his deceased Captain more and more. He had always let No-Name sleep on the front seat and use his legs as a pillow, during the drive or while sagging against the car door himself, and every morning he’d had to wait a quarter of an hour for the feeling to come back to his leg.

Now, Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes was no ten-year-old boy, and ‘Trowa’ was no mercenary captain, but the principle was the same: Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes was wounded, which made him vulnerable and in need of great amounts of sleep (whether he would admit it or not), and the truck they were traveling in wasn’t wide enough to let them both lie down. So Trowa was the one who gave up the comfort of horizontality to make sure he wouldn’t accidentally kick the other in the face in the middle of the night, just like Captain used to do for No-Name. Trowa didn’t even know the kid’s name, even though he did address him with ‘Trowa’.

That’s how it had always been. That’s how it was supposed to be. And even though his behind lost all feeling and his back was stiff, he saw no reason to complain about something he had offered himself. Captain never did.

He thought he might even begin to understand why not.

Though the comparison was a little skewed, he thought as the tip of the circus tent finally disappeared from his mirror and he asked the one in the passenger’s seat where they’d be heading; Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes was the captain, the one with determination and with his eyes on a goal, however much he was trapped in guilt and however clear it was that the way he was trying to keep himself standing would eventually be his demise - just like it had been with the Captain.

He wasn’t much better off himself, now that the gundams were powerless and the name Trowa Barton was worthless. He was No-Name to the bone again, and No-Name had always done what the Captain needed without having to be asked.

He was back where he’d started. The traveling, the landscapes of Earth, the characteristic bump-and-sway rhythm of a vehicle heavy with MS, the fact that his life and everything he did with it was completely worthless...

In a way, he was even angrier at himself than at the one who’d shot down his short-lived life goal. Hadn’t he left for the colonies and entered the Bartons’ employment to escape this lifestyle? Now that he was trying to get through Europe unnoticed and the gundam was little more than a three story, eight ton stumbling block, he began to wonder why he’d ever offered to become its pilot. Why defend the colonies you want to start a new life in when you only get stuck in your old way of life and can’t even do anything for said colonies, in the end?

Admittedly, since S would most likely have shot him if he’d so much as breathed wrong, he hadn’t had a lot of options back then. But damnit No-Name, Trowa Barton, whoever you are, if you’re going to keep whining that your life has no purpose, then at least have the decency not to tie yourself in knots trying to extend that useless little life of yours. Do something about it. Hadn’t he decided to do that when his mercenary troupe had gone up in flames and he spared Middie Une and let her return home, her mission accomplished and her pockets full of money for food and medicine?

Find something else, do something to make it better, or stop whinging and just end it already had become an almost logical thought during the long, frustrating vigil over his comatose fellow pilot. (And someone who blows up himself that easily must think the same way, so do the poor sod a favour and put an end to his misery too, while you’re at it.)

The "do something about it" part kept tripping him up, though; with the missiles of Lady Une of OZ pointed at a defenseless colony, there was nothing he could do. Every now and then he called himself an idiot for not just moving in with the circus permanently, sinking Heavyarms to the bottom of a lake, and leaving fighting the good fight to someone else. Nobody would miss a useless freedom fighter without serviceable weapons, banners, voice or even any real patriotism. Without Heavyarms, he’d be as free as Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes, whom the whole world thought dead.

But every night he dutifully checked the cables fastening the gundam to the truck, straightened the tarp, and forced Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes to sit still long enough to be able to change his bandages. He made sure to avoid military bases, choose the routes where the oh-look,-that’s-an-MS size of their truck would draw the least attention, and in the first best city they came across he went onto the black market to replenish his ammunition and fuel.

His only consolation was that, even though the trip through Europe had no benefits for him that he could see, the fact that he could help Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes with it was unexpectedly rewarding and gratifying. He’d sucked in teamwork with whatever passed for his mother’s milk in the mercenary troupe, but this was different. The persistence and intensity the other pilot kept in the absence of security of any kind and without a gundam, was both comforting and inspiring. It kept at bay the vague feeling of helplessness and despair that always accompanied uselessness and crept up on him whenever he was stuck with the circus in between missions as a gundam pilot, where everyone called him a Name that had no meaning outside Heavyarms’ cockpit.

Now he just had to make sure not to dwell too long and often on the fact that Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes used all his resolution to undertake a search for someone to execute him. As long as he was nameless and the other the captain, he would be No-Name, he decided when they finally tracked down their first target, General Noventa’s granddaughter. Do what the Captain needs, don’t get any big ideas, and no whining.

It worked until they actually met Sylvia Noventa and he became no longer No-Name once more.

The Captain turned out to have a name. Heero Yuy. Sounded just as fake as Trowa Barton, but it did ensure that Suicidal Messy-Hair-Dark-Eyes almost immediately lost his title of Captain, and he his own of No-Name. The name wouldn’t leave his mind from the moment he heard it, and and when he woke up the next day he felt - inexplicably, indefinably - different.

‘Heero’ hardly seemed to notice that he’d given away his name just like that, acting the exact same way after he’d met Sylvia Noventa as he had before. Which, unfortunately, included his tendency to neglect himself whenever he was working on something else. Blowing up Wing while he was still on the hatch had been the first and most extreme example, but - as to be expected from a gundam pilot - Trowa found him to be much less trouble when he was occupying the only real bed in the trailer for weeks on end than when he couldn’t be left alone for even a minute, lest he’d managed to reopen his wounds again.

He’d seen the stunt Heero pulled in Antarctica coming miles away. Literally. But what Heero Yuy decided to do with his life was Heero Yuy’s business, not his, even if the possibility that Heero would die by Zechs’s hand sent shivers down his spine for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that he’d be left in the middle of an uninhabited continent surrounded by OZ soldiers. Even though Trowa was the one who’d done most of the work from Siberia onward, he felt he owed Heero as big a chance at surviving his duel as he could give him, and he stayed up all night to adjust Heavyarms to accommodate his wounded arm. The knowledge and skills he’d acquired in his youth came in handy there, but otherwise it was nothing like his time with the mercenaries.

No-Name had never had much sympathy for soldiers who endangered the entire unit by recklessly putting their own lives on the line, but Trowa the terrorist realised very well that it was different for gundam pilots. Even now, tied hands and feet because of OZ’s threats, they had nothing to live for as gundam pilots but what they could attain through the efforts and sacrifices of today.

Zechs’s blood lust was an obstacle. To quench it would open up the way to tomorrow for Heero. And in the weeks Trowa had spent with him he’d become convinced that once Heero finally realised that there was still that tomorrow for him, that the mistakes he’d made in the past could only be undone by fighting for a new day, with new opportunities to strive for improvement, that overwhelming energy and gravity of his could open a similar path forwards for the other gundam pilots.

Trowa trusted and counted on Heero like he’d never done with any of his brothers in arms. And astonishingly enough he felt safe knowing another had so much influence on his morale, on his life. He couldn’t remember ever feeling like that before.

He’d never seen himself as a nice guy, but it only occurred to him how generous he was being when, after their escape from the OZ troops that had disrupted the duel, he automatically pulled a sweater and pants from Heavyarms’s ‘luggage compartment’ for Heero, who was freezing his limbs off in the Antarctic cold, only to be stared at like he’d grown a second head.

It wasn’t that hard to understand, Trowa thought. A safe distance away from the battlefield they had penetrated an abandoned military base to repair the damage done to Wing and Heavyarms. They had an ocean to cross, and watertight armour and cockpits would come in handy should they happen to crash into it. Heero had lost all his possessions with his self-destruction in Siberia, and the clothes they’d picked up for him in Europe as a replacement were nowhere near sufficient for the temperatures they were currently stuck in. Trowa had extra clothes which Heero, exhausted, bruised and shivering in his spandex shorts, green undershirt and thin shirt, needed rather urgently.

That Heero seemed to not understand this reminded Trowa that he actually didn’t understand a lot of things himself, and they stared at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.

Eventually Trowa simply threw the garments - a lilac turtleneck and a pair of pants with breeches - at him, forcing Heero to accept them. "Put those on before you catch pneumonia."

"But these are your clothes." Heero immediately protested.

"I don’t need them at the moment, you do."

"But -" A confused frown formed between Heero’s eyebrows.

"You know what, keep them. That sweater’s getting too small for me anyway."

The frown deepened, the confusion disappeared and was replaced with a look so sharp and intense Trowa had the feeling it could suck in his soul, tear it to shreds with pure willpower, and expose his deepest thoughts and feelings. Or would have, had he believed in souls.

"Your clothes, your gundam, your bed. I did nothing to earn such generosity. What the hell is this?"

Trowa had been wondering the same thing. The mercenaries had raised him according to very simple principles; if you wanted to eat, you had to work for it. It had been the rule even when he’d been barely five years old and the Captain had taken him under his wing for no other reason than charity.

With Heero, he had thrown that rule out the window. And he’d be damned if he knew why.

"Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth." Trowa said, and managed not to make it sound too evasive.

The frown deepened the longer Heero stared at him, almost as if he was angry, but eventually he sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

"You sound like Relena..." he mumbled as he stuck his arms through the sleeves of the sweater.

It took Trowa a moment to realise what he was talking about. "What, that girl from earlier? The one that flew all the way here to bring you a letter?"

Heero’s messy, dark brown hair poked through the neck of the sweater, followed by a mouth the corners of which curled down so far he almost seemed to be pouting. "I threatened to kill her at least three times, and then out of nowhere she said she was on my side and would help me out."

Trowa couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing. "I’d consider myself lucky to be so gifted."

Maybe it was a gift of Heero’s, maybe the fact that he saw so much of himself in him, or maybe he’d just lost his mind when Catherine slapped him. But whatever it was, it felt good.

And whatever it was stayed with him when he and Heero went their separate ways in the colonies, when he infiltrated OZ, and when officer Trowa Barton came eye to eye with one of the gundam pilots, who had come to sabotage the Mercurius and Vayaete.

Whatever it was, Trowa recognized it in Heero’s eyes when the latter dropped his weapon without hesitation and surrendered himself to a young man in an OZ uniform.

Whatever it was, Europe did the trick. 

 
PSAN: Ouch. My head. I’m pretty happy with this piece, but damn, those two have some twisted minds. o_o