Chapter 2: Darkness & Light

It was well past mid morning when a serious looking man seated at a gleaming polished, stately oak desk lifts his deep-in-thought focus from the documents, plans and papers of importance demanding his attention, to gaze about the room he was in.

Behind the "real" wooden oak desk (this oak was over 100 years old--only recently since the one world Alliance had fallen--had the cutting down of trees for human use been allowed again).

"And rightly so." A dark man's weather worn hands gently tap the solid wood as his wizened eyes smile. He knew well the fine balance between man and the ground he was born to was not as fine a line as other men, greedy to proceed with only their own silly power phases and wealth, would have the general public believe.

We were all put on this earth to coexist within it and each other along the way--give and take what we need, not just what we're allowed.

Dark eyes nod at the latest plan on the desk--the one that was being prepared for the development of tree planting and farmlands in the North American region. That was one of the foundation's main focuses these days. For from the farmlands, seeds of crops and young saplings of trees were cultivated and gathered to send off to grow anew in the developing colonies....

The Colonies.

The distinguished man stands up, moving his gaze from the computer screen to the blue sky outside the sixty plus story building. From where he was now standing at the full-walled glass window he could see nothing but the blue sky and the sun just starting on its peak towards the heavens. But he knew beyond the great blueness there were places beyond. Colonies that so many wanderers with pioneering spirits had decided one day to call home. Cities they had built through their own hard work and sweat and tears and hoped and prayed that their descendants one day would have the same love of these colonies of outer space to protect and maintain their acheivements.

"So it shall be." The man says out loud knowing, with a smile, he was unheard. His weathered eyes, from where he stood tall and foreboding, in command from behind the large desk and skyscape beyond, move to a small figure in a corner of the room. As yet, so still and quiet, remained heretofore, unnoticed.

There, in the far corner of the spacious office, a young boy sits indian-style, silently amusing himself amongst the cleverly sculpted and built to 1/100th scale size of the main city of the X-19444 Colony--at least at what he hoped it to be someday. X-19444 was still in its first terraforming stages and would be a good many years before such technological acheivements such as two-hundred-story high skyscrapers and in-sky transports would be in place.

But lifeless, engineered floating masses of weightless steel and titanium alloys needed dreams like this design to transform them into Colonies.

"Beautiful, isn't it, Rasid?" The blonde boy squatting on the floor could be no more different in stature than the monstrously tall man striding methodically where he sat. He could be no more different in the soft tenor of his sweet voice, in the starkly paled look, in the casual slacks and vest as compared to the garb of an Arabian soldier. The meek attitude versus the no-nonsense stoicism--that look of utter awe on his wide-eyed features. But no, one thing was alike in the two. Something Rasid could feel so acutely, so plainly in the boy's crystal clear, aqua eyes. The love of kindness in humanity--the love of peace between the Earth and Outer Space--the love of freedom for all. And each of those things were promised to be officially declared today, in the boy's joyous eyes.

"What's beautiful now?" Rasid's low-timbred voice resounds off the walls. His well placed crossed arms gave him that strong, commanding air as he looks down with a smile at the boy he called...

"Master Quatre?"

"The city." Master Quatre excitedly spreads his hands over the scale model of the city. His eyes were gleaming. "This city is beautiful." He smiles brightly up at the tall man. "The sky today is beautiful." Quatre jumps up, touching the clear window as if reaching for the sky. Rasid continues to smile, admiring the boy's enthusiasm as Quatre stands, leaning against the window, soaking up the sun's rays on his pale brow, as often he was want to do.

Rasid often found his vibrant "master" full of fits of emotional outbursts, of awestruck wonder that kept this sixteen-year-old the most innocent of young men.

"The Earth, the people, Outer Space--they're all beautiful!" Quatre exclaims beaming smiles. "Today--" Quatre was about to put a topper on his exuberant tirade, Rasid was certain this time when...

"...is beautiful?" A high-pitched female voice unexpectedly intrudes on the office. Quatre freezes and turns white as a sheet at the window he was leaning against. He spins to see someone he certainly didn't expect to see standing before him.

It WAS beautiful, Rasid thinks silently rolling his eyes as suddenly, without warning, the bright sunlit sky behind his "Master" Quatre suddenly turns dark and foreboding, downcast.

"Hmph." A man snorts in disgust it seems from inside the cockpit of a spacecraft. Wearing the uniform, a brown and black leather jacket, that made him a member of the Preventers group, Chang Wufei wonders, for the hundredth or so time in the past half hour why he was going where he was going and---once he got there, what was the quickest way back out.

And without her knowing. Wufei's thoughts plot evilly, smirking to himself of the silly, false command over him he magnanimously allowed that certain "her" to think she had over him these past few months.

"What's the "hmph" and that dog-eatin' 'I-told-you-so' smirk doing on your face, Mister?"

That her, again. Wufei can't help but give himself an extra moment of gloat before he lowered himself down to speaking civilly, one on one with a---

"Woman," he begins and ends nearly every address to his commanding officer in this simple, belittling way as he spoke the same to all of the female variety.

"Yes, Wufei?" Sally Po had long ago let that little (okay not so little, in Wufei's case) bit of male chauvinism go. She considered herself a knowledgeable, experienced, well-traveled "woman" who had quite a bit more between her swirled pigtails than Chang Wufei would ever be able to fit in front of his tiny ponytail.

"Woman," Wufei continues, as stated above, not having any inkling that this example of the lower spectrum of the species (i.e. female) did not revere him at all times as the quintessential perfection of a man in all ways that considered he was. "What is the purpose of...this Preventers unit...."

You never can say "us", can you, Wufei?

"...travelling hundreds of thousands of miles, wasting valuable fuel and resources, plus above all, time, on a silly, below my---" Wufei pauses, rephrasing, "--below this unit's worthiness to attend a party and a parade." The final two words seemed like blows against Mr. Chang's egocentric ways. Chang Wufei, member of the Dragon Clan, did not---DID NOT--go to party at parades.

"Wufei." Sally has heard herself argue this certain point so many times that she felt even the walls of this space shuttle were moaning at the thought of hearing it again. Sorry walls. Sally too moans herself inside. But it looks like you're the only audience I've got in this 2-man craft. Sally manages a slight smile. (Mostly at her own inside joke) and looks up from the controls to the man sitting in the pilot seat beside her in the cockpit. His black as coal eyebrows were raised, mirroring the question put in the air with his equally black as coal eyes, gazing at her intently for what the answer might be.

"Wufei, try to listen this time. Let it sink into that thick head of yours." Sally Po was not a woman to mince words. She wished sometimes she could mince something else instead on this spaceship. "We have orders. You hear that? Orders. O-R-D-E-R-S. Here, they're on the screen." Sally easily taps in codes and inputs from their last orders from Central, the one that recalled their ship back to Earth for the ceremonies of the Peace Signing Accords.

"Peace. Hmph. We'll see how long that lasts." Wufei scoffs, reading the type on the screen.

"A very, very long time if we do OUR job right. You wouldn't want to be accused of being half-hearted in any battle, would you, soldier?" Sally knew how to push this warrior's buttons (and rile him up along the way too). She ignores Wufei's snort and continues. "Our battle is against threats to peace, no matter how small they may seem. For peace in the Colonies, for peace on Earth, for---" Sally stops her dutiful commander's tirade. Wufei has, as usual, already tuned her out. He was reading the orders on the screen. That seemed a better pastime to him than listening to Sally's droning voice in his ear.

"Hmm. So this whole Peace Accords thing was set up by Relena Peacecraft and Une, huh? Sounds like something women would dream up." Wufei chuckles to himself as Sally feels her feminist hairs on the back of her neck stand up on end.

"Vice Foreign Minister Darlian and Colonel Une," she reminds him of the authority THAT particular woman held over him in the Preventers group, much to Wufei's chagrin.

"LADY Une." Wufei retorts with a smirk. The title, a certain important someone in both their pasts so named that most unladylike of creatures. "I do hope the weather man's right for once and it rains buckets on your silly parade." Wufei smirks, giving a silent salute to that certain vector of space as a ship zaps by, almost to their destination--Earth.