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Author: Ruth
Pairings: Non-romantic Quatre and Heero
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: “stretched time line” Alternate Universe
Story Summary: chance encounter as Heero and Quatre cross Europe
Word count: 444
*****
Quatre mashed some of the boiled potatoes with his fork and poured a small amount of whole milk over them. “I started eating these during the First Eve War,” he explained. “Heero was scouting for the Treize faction rebels and I was scavenging for the company cook.”
It was somewhere around Slovakia, I think, just before we met Miss Noin and went to Sank. I’d dug up some pretty sorry looking carrots and was trying to knock the dirt off them.
I didn’t even hear anyone; all I saw was Heero pulling his gun. He just stopped dead and went white as a sheet. A little girl with a handful of flowers had come up right behind us. She couldn’t have been five. She just stared at us with these huge eyes, and then she ran away.
Of course we chased after her; neither one of us were about to let a child run around a battlefield. She ran to what must have been a little stone chapel. A woman came out and demanded to know what we were doing there. She wore the drab olive everyone was wearing. She had this sort of black and white headdress on and a necklace of beads with a cross. She was a nun, she was trying to get to Rome. She was with her nieces - the five year old we met and a seven year old and her nieces’ seven year old friend. They’d caught a nanny goat in the burned out town that was over the last hill.
That’s where I first had potatoes and milk. That was all they had, but they shared it with us.” He sprinkled a little salt on the potatoes. “The nun gave me a sack of potatoes for the men. She didn’t have anything and she still shared a sack of potatoes.”
“The next morning we went our separate ways.”
“Did you learn their names?” asked his companion quietly.
“Sister Mary Incarnia,” he stirred the potatoes on his plate, suddenly losing appetite. “Little Gianna, Teresa and her friend Evana. . .”
“Did you ever find out what happened to them after the War?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know. She’d have had to cross the Romafeller line before she even got to the Peninsula; a nun, a five year old and two seven year olds. The odds were all against them and I don’t want to know what happened to them. I . . . I want to think they survived. Even if I’m pretty sure they didn’t.”
He took a bite. “Every so often I just feel like having potatoes and milk.” He pushed his plate over. “Try some.”
Tags: gundam wing
