Chapter Text
Before Quatre’s eyes adjusted to the glow of the aurora, he thought that he could guess who the girl above him was. Though he hasn't regained his ability to comprehend her appearance, he could discern the intensity of the emotional force emanating from her. A short life of vast pain, cracks in an heirloom, a history of broken promises and familial outrage.
“Dorothy?”
“Nope,” responded a voice unrecognizable, as his vision slowly stabilized. Quatre pulled himself up to sit and look at her, trying to determine who she could be. She was near his age, though likely a couple years younger. Her hair was a bright teal. Despite the fact that he was looking directly at her, he found that the longer he stared, the less confident he became in precisely how she looked at all. Her hair seemed to be in multiple styles simultaneously, shifting with the ebb and flow of the gleaming sky. First it was a single long braid down her back, but when he looked again it was two high pigtails. As he tried to make sense of the apparition, he noticed she had a single low ponytail as well. He was seeing her at multiple points in time, all at once. She wore military attire, pajamas, and an outfit of yellow. A pair of constant red slippers appeared over her fluctuating shoes.
Her expression was nonchalant, irreverent, the perfect encapsulation of teenaged arrogance. But that was her face in life. Her true visage now had a more earnest look behind it, though not without its own mischievousness.
Feeling a second presence nearby, Quatre turned his head to see an even more difficult to parse figure standing on the opposite side of him as the girl. He was a child, a young boy, and a man. He had a small collared shirt, a school uniform, and a business suit. It was easy to read his past, information from his life came to Quatre against his will. He had a difficult relationship with his father from a young age, a conflict that reached its pinnacle when he ran away and commandeered a mobile suit. His father had never wanted him to get caught up in this war, but it was partially his own emotional negligence that led to his son’s desire to run in the first place. To do what he could, in spite of this paternal conflict. The son’s life was increasingly driven by a desperation to be a savior. And he knew the girl that stood on the other side of Quatre; but after she died he’d only see the same eyes she had once more, in a girl he met many years later. A girl who could’ve been a friend, maybe, in some other time. But not in the time he was given. His hands dripped blood. He was a failure. Quatre had to force himself to stop thinking about him.
“Excuse me, but who are you? You seem like ghosts. I haven’t died… have I?” Quatre asked. His heart clenched. They were just about to save the Earth, he and his friends and allies, together. Trowa had come to aid in his retreat from the Libra. He couldn’t die now—not unless there was someone to be saved in the process. He needed to make sure that everyone was okay. That they’d all made it out, his friends, his comrades, and all of those supporting their mission.
“Sure, we’re sorta like ghosts,” the girl said, and rolled her eyes, “But you’re not dead. You don’t need to be dead to see us. You are in rough shape out there though.” She sat down beside him and dangled her legs over a dropoff. He hadn’t noticed before, but they seemed to be at a cliff’s edge, with the ocean below. The green shades of the light show in Earth’s magnetic field arced and flickered over the sea. The girl swung her feet casually, and impaled Quatre with a look that forced him to recall exactly how rough the shape he was in truly was.
Dorothy had stabbed him—he remembered that much. That’s when Trowa helped him find his way out of the Libra and back to Sandrock. From that point on, his memories mostly gave way to the excruciating pain of the hole in his torso. He hung onto the confirmation that he was still alive. By this point he’d likely been rescued, and hope flared in his chest at the idea. He felt tears push at the corners of his eyes, and the sting at the front of his nose that warned him that he was near crying.
“Yeah, you’ll be fine. Ugh, you should stop being such a kid about it.”
Quatre didn’t respond. Her annoyance didn’t have any real bite to it. It almost sounded like it was hiding an aspect of affection, of camaraderie. The closer he looked at her attire, the more details he got lost in. It seemed like she was wearing some kind of headgear, not unlike the helmet Dorothy had been given, but less heavy. It was for piloting; for a machine that worked with something similar to the Zero System, the one that she died in. He shuddered. She laughed, but it sounded sardonic, like thinking about it still hurt.
“You’re not from the Alliance, or OZ, or Romefeller. And you’re certainly not from the colonies. You’re from Earth. Both of you,” Quatre mused.
“We’ve been around much longer than any of those stupid factions,” the girl huffed.
“But you’ve had similar experiences.”
“Guess so.”
Quatre’s mind suddenly caught a glint of red and a near-familiar mask, and was caught in a painful deluge of sympathy for the girl beside him. Manipulated so cruelly—so callously—led to her death emotionally blindfolded. The familiarity of the man behind that mask, an orchestrator of personal catastrophe, left Quatre reeling with recognition of the echoes of a swan song that carried into his own time. First he heard it from within the present leader of White Fang, the shattered-helmet conductor. But he heard it as well from a different uniformed commander, whose name was adopted by a Faction dedicated to the belief that he was fighting for their prayers. He heard the song from within the red metal chassis of the Epyon, the Mercurius, even the Heavyarms. It carried through the porcelain mask of a jester, through lies and deception. Quatre even heard it coming faintly from within himself: and from a pair of goggles, inherited in more ways than one, given like his name. It scared him. But he knew himself, and he knew all of his new companions; they wouldn’t need to be beholden to their current lives once this was over. Trowa would want to change things for himself just the way Quatre would, freeing themselves from the gravity threatening to bind them all in orbit. Heero, Duo, and Wufei would as well, he could only hope.
“Heero changed my life. Even saved it once,” said the boy on his other side suddenly. Quatre could feel the tug of being pulled to safety out of a churning tide, as if it were he himself drowning.
“Heero did that?” Quatre asked, confused.
“No,” he replied, “That’s not the name I said. Though it may be the one you heard.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s alright. I don’t think we really have anything to teach you. I think you already know some things about where you want to go from here. You’re not lost.”
“What’s the point, then? Of you being here?”
“Commiseration, I suppose. We just wanted to speak to you, to find out if we could. Because you reminded us of who we were.”
Quatre couldn’t disagree. He looked between the two of them and felt, in a much different way than ever before, part of something far larger than himself. He wanted to sit for just a moment longer, to soak in the aurora’s shining light and grapple with these revelations, but his new associates bid him adieu. The girl tapped her shoes together, and she and her friend were gone. In that moment Quatre was startled by a noise above his head, a loud rhythmic beating. It was the wings of a large and powerful bird. A stray white feather landed in his lap.
When he woke, he lay in a hospital bed surrounded by friends and chosen family.