Bad Luck Woman

By MidiiUne

March, After Colony 205

Icy chunks of sleet chattered and rattled against the smoked glass windows of the upper story windows of the Preventer Headquarters skyscraper creating a din of white noise in the office of its chief executive.

Had it really been merely a matter of days since the sun had shone down warm and bright and the first brave crocuses had peeked from their beds of dirt, lured by the promise of a false spring?

Those brief, beautiful days seemed a lifetime ago now to Lady Une, the bad news brought by the informant who sat across from her promised the eternal chill of winter, the desolation of war.

There was sunshine in the young woman’s hair and the blue of clear skies in her wide, seemingly ingenuous eyes. She was even a distant cousin of Une’s. But seeing that coldly pretty face had always been precedent to some horrible incident, and it did now. Une shivered a little in her jacket, anticipating the coming storm.

The younger woman huffed impatiently and crossed one slim leg casually over the other. She rolled her shoulders to release some of the tension she felt. It had been a rough couple weeks and her welcome back to the other side had not been warm.

“Don’t blame the messenger,” she quipped finally in a bitingly bitter tone that echoed the splatter of the slushy rain on the windows. “Besides, you begged me to go, said I’d be doing you an enormous favor!”

Une sighed wearily, her voice straining to attain patience and a tone of good will she could not feel. “Midii, you can’t expect me to greet you with a smile when you’ve just sent my…our…world crashing into a crisis with your report. Don’t you realize just how serious this situation is bound to become? It’s the end of everything I’ve worked for, the end of everything Mr. Treize died for….”

Her voice trailed off and her fingers reached to caress a photograph enshrined in a gleaming silver frame.

Midii sprang to her feet, the released tension bolting her from the chair she had seemed to rest in so casually, so carelessly.

“I know better than most. I lived in the heart of it for the past six weeks. But of course that’s all I’m good for, all I’ve ever been good for! Isn’t it Lady Une? Well I’d best leave you to meet with your heroes. I’ll make myself scarce again until you summon me back to your honored presence to do more of your dirty work.”

With a flippant and obviously mocking curtsey Midii flounced from the elegantly appointed office without a backward glance at the bereft and white-faced woman behind her. She felt a trifle better for slamming the door insolently behind her but she sank back against the dark wood and closed her eyes for the space of a heartbeat, hiding ever so briefly from the too-familiar pain of dismissal in her cousin’s face and the deeply buried grief for what she had done and seen during her time of reconnaissance in the name of the Preventer Organization.

But the girl, a woman now really, was resilient. Her eyes flew open and she straightened a bit. “Best not to think about it, best just to take the money and run,” she comforted herself. The boys needed new shoes, the roof needed a repair and if all hell broke loose, as she personally knew it was about to, they’d need money to protect themselves from what might come.

“I need a smoke,” she muttered under her breath, slim fingers quickly retrieving a cigarette from the pack in her jacket pocket and popping the nicotine stick between her lush red lips. She commenced a futile search in her pocket for a lighter. Tobacco had been illegal for years, peacetime legislators had too much time to burn. But she didn’t give a good goddamn what they had decided was best for her health and being a relative, no matter how distant, of the great “Lady of the Preventers” had its dubious perks when it came to diplomatic immunity and such.

A whiff of brimstone filled the air and a blue flame flared and gratefully she leaned toward the outstretched match.

“Thanks,” she said begrudgingly, raising her eyes a trifle seductively to examine her knight in shining armor.

“Those things will kill you,” the young man said, but his voice was devoid of all concern. He was merely stating a fact. But she noticed that his vibrant green eyes seemed to appraise her face and figure with a strange intensity.

“Maybe I don’t deserve to live anyway,” she said shrugging. “Besides if ‘these things’ end up being what kills me off I’ll count myself lucky!”

He raised a brow at her words, struck by the familiarity of hidden anguish masked by a lovely, but obnoxious exterior. He turned away, both from the glare in her angry eyes at the judgment she saw in his expression and from the smoke she purposely exhaled into his face.

There was something about her, beyond the perfection of face and form and the well-concealed despair…something more, something that had lured him in before…

And then he knew, remembered it all with in a sudden, stark vision composed of graphic scenes of blood, and smoke and snow, and a battered silver cross. Disaster heralded by a beautiful child, her need touching something in his own shrouded soul. A little girl in tears, a little girl who destroyed everything she touched. He’d wanted to shield and protect her but she brought only pain and seeing her there again before him so lovely and yet so terrible…yes, he recognized her.

His very own bad luck woman. He knew in an instant that when he went through the door waiting behind her that something unstoppable was going to begin. His whole world would be destroyed, everything he had come to love and call his own in this fragile world of peace would soon be gone.

She recognized him too. He heard her breath turn shallow and those blue, blue eyes grew large with memory and realization.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked in a stunned voice. “Don’t tell me I’ve got the wrong guy or whatever your line of choice is these days. It is you and you’re looking at me the same way she did. So guess what Nanashi? I still hate you, too!”

She brushed past him and walked quickly down the hall without a backward glance, not bothering to wait for an answer she knew from experience would never come. But she couldn’t walk far enough away from that wretched look of awareness on his face. The look that told her he knew exactly what she had done. “Why,” she wondered desperately, why must I always be anathema to him? To him, the one I….”

She could not continue, even in thoughts.

“Take care now soldier boy,” she whispered softly, not bothering to dash away the exquisite diamond tears that fell from soft, blue eyes.

She knew that she would never see him again.

The End

AN: A bit of a Cowboy Bebop-inspired atmosphere and title in this story. Written in celebration of GW’s 10^th Anniversary around the same time as Change of Seasons, dark and light looks at possible Trowa and Midii reunions in AC 205.