By Liz

The noise…. Why won’t it stop? I can hear nothing but the explosions. Surrounded by thick metal, destruction at its finest, and still I can only hear death….

"Trowa?"

I see Catherine looking at me. What can she see through my mask of calm indifference that gives away what I’m feeling? I knew from the beginning she had that power, to see my innermost thoughts at the most casual glance.

She rises, her hand is on mine, and now I can feel her presence. Her eyes say, "Tell me."

After the battle, inside the cockpit, the air is so thick I can hardly breath.

One wrong shot, one in a million, and I still don’t understand how it could have happened….

I wish I could get out, but out there I can smell it, the burning and the bloody smoke in the air and in the ground, everywhere. I can still smell it, I can still hear the thousands, and that one last ghost, inside my shell of metal.

Why?

There’s blood in my mouth and in my eyes, and my hands are so sweaty I can’t even work the controls anymore. But it doesn’t matter. I am finished with the fighting.

In the end, I finally learned what it was like to be loved. I had her, a light from the past to guide me into the future.

"I’m sorry," she says, and she’s gone. The flames rise to consume the wreckage, and I curse myself, damn myself in my carelessness and foolishness. We couldn’t be defeated. Not by our enemies, no, but by those closest to us. They were our greatest weakness, and no mobile suit could ever change that.

Crackling voices come over the radio. It’s over, they shout, we’ve won. But I switch them off, for I have found defeat in this meaningless field of death. I feel my Gundam humming around me, pulsing with power. It is a power too great for humans to control. I know that now.

I remember a face long ago, crying for a lost brother. She couldn’t let go of me, and now I have destroyed her in my desperation to end the fighting. Too much power in the hands of one person corrupts the meaning and purpose of their lives, and they become nothing more than killing spirits, shadows of what they once were.

But for me, that’s all there ever was. There has never been anything for me but the killing, and so I have never been anything but a ghost. Doomed to fail, always, doomed to eternal cursed sight, to see the truth. And yet throughout history human beings could not help but fight each other, and destroy what they loved.

As the hatch opens and I stand upon the threshold, the hot, stinking air of the battlefield whips around me, sucks into the cockpit, destroying my small haven. I clutch the hard metal object in my hand and look out over the endless expanse of dead land, charred, mangled, strewn with the bodies of men and their weapons. The sky is black and red, like a raw wound, and the stinging iron smell seeps into my nostrils and makes me sick.

I have faced the truth, known its cruelty, and have deemed myself unworthy. There is no way to pass on this knowledge of lonely death, and so those who learn of it must perish. Humankind will never learn, so long as there are soldiers in this world.

Catherine smiles at me as I press the button.

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End Trans.

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