Finding Triton: The Lost Son

Disclaimer: Again, I don't own Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, or the characters from them. I'm just borrowing them. If I did, the Remastered version of the Gundam Wing series would have also been uncut and included the "Odds & Evens" episodes, and the HP movies would have been closer to the books.

Rated "M" for language.

Summary: How Triton becomes Nanashi.

Warning: This is NOT a slash or yaoi fic. There are NO M/M pairings. It is a family/brotherly love story. Don't like it? Don't read it.

Potterverse: slightly AU between Books Six and Seven and the end of DH.

GWverse: partly AU from "The Gundam They Call ZERO" on.

Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling. Used without permission and not for profit.

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The Lost Son

 

Somewhere in the Black Forest, Germany, August 4th, AC 182

A pitched battle between the Order of the Zodiac's Special Mobile Suit Corps, or Specials for short, and a band of local freedom fighters was getting closer to the forest road being traveled by a small, single-ring circus troupe run by a man named Blackthorn.

A shell from one of the Alliance's Leos hit a tree, sending flaming shards of wooden shrapnel everywhere, including the back of the wagon.  One of these shards struck little Triton Bloom's back, burning him, while his big sister Cathy screamed at the top of her lungs.

"Milo! Help me get the kids out! Those blasts are getting closer!" Sharon exclaimed, grabbing Cathy while Milo picked up Triton.  Carrying them to the front of the wagon, the couple tossed the children out just as an OZ mortar shell struck the wagon, killing Milo and Sharon instantly, but blowing both Cathy and Triton clear of the blast area.

Cathy landed on her bottom and started wailing, but as Triton landed, a stone struck him hard on the back of his head, setting off another explosion of pain and terror within him.  Pushed past his limits, the toddler wished to be anywhere but where he was and, with a loud CRACK like an M80 exploding, he disappeared.

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Some time later, a lost little boy with cinnamon colored hair awoke.  His emerald green eyes were dull and sore from crying, but when had he been crying?  He couldn't remember how he got there or how long he'd been lying there, but he was sick to his stomach, and the pains in his head and back were almost unbearable.  The clothes he wore were dirty and smelled like they'd been scorched.

As a wave of dizziness struck him, the boy reached to feel where the pain in the back of his head was.  His touched it, winced, pulled his hand away, and looked at his fingers; they were covered with sticky, drying blood, and that frightened him.

In spite of the pain and fear he felt, he managed to get up on his feet and started walking towards the setting moon, and as he walked, he looked at the moon and stars, and thought that living in space had to be a lot better than living on Earth.  He kept walking until he found several large, flatbed trucks, each with a mobile suit, covered with a tarp, tied down in the back.  They turned out to be the band of freedom fighters who had been battling OZ and the Alliance earlier.

A man in one of the trucks saw the boy, jumped out of the cab, and knelt down until he was near the child's eye level.  He sported a beard called a Van Dyke, and his right eye was covered with a bandage.

"Hey, kid.  Ya got a name?" the leader of the mercenaries asked the boy gently.  The confused child shook his head in response. "No, huh?  Well, come here.  The least we can do is give you something to eat, poor chibi."

Noticing the youngster was shivering, the mercenary captain took a spare blanket and wrapped it around the little one, then sat the toddler on his lap, handed him two ration bars, and had one of his men heat up a cup of dried whole milk that had been reconstituted with some bottled water.  When the liquid was hot but not scalding, the captain doled out a large dollop of honey from a jar and stirred it into the milk, then gave it to the boy and encouraged him to drink it.

When the boy finished his meager meal, he fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.  The man, the captain of the mercenaries, stood up and carried the boy to his tent, where he laid the boy down on a spare cot and stripped filthy, scorched clothes off the toddler's body.  He grabbed a basin, a jug of water, a bar of soap, a rag and a medikit, then proceeded to clean the boy up.  He found a badly blistered burn on the boy's back, washed it gently, slathered it with burn gel, then dressed it with gauze pads and tape.  The man knew it would most likely turn into a scar, but probably not a bad one.

The boy was so exhausted, he hadn't stirred once during all of this.  The captain then grabbed a bottle of liniment from the medikit and massaged some into the toddler's legs so they wouldn't be quite as sore in the morning. 

When the captain finished, he rummaged through his duffel bag until he found a t-shirt and put it on the boy. Then he wrapped the boy back up in the blanket and left, letting him sleep.  Being a father himself, he needed to inform his people that the kid was not to be harmed, or there would be Hell to pay, and he would be the one collecting the charge.

"All right, you maggots, listen up," the captain bellowed at his troops. "The kid is off limits, ya hear me?  Anything happens to little Nanashi, and I mean anything at all, I will personally slit the guilty party's fucking throat for 'em, rip their guts out through their neck and use 'em for garters.  Am I clear on that?"

Most of the corps, men and women alike, agreed; like their captain, they were parents themselves.  Many others weren't, but couldn't even think of harming a child.  These men and women were human beings, not indiscriminate killers like the Alliance's mobile suit troops or OZ's so-called "Specials" were.

Meanwhile, at Number 12 Grimmauld Place in London, a young, newly wed couple, Harry and Ginny Potter, were watching a BBC2 news report about a circus troupe being caught in the crossfire of a bloody, brutal attack by OZ and Alliance forces on a band of mercenaries, or rather freedom fighters, in Germany.

The reporter, a young woman named Susan Bones, was on the air, verbally ripping the United Earth Sphere Alliance and OZ a new orifice for their lack of concern for the lives of civilians, focusing on the deaths of Milo and Sharon Bloom.  She informed the viewing audience that the Blooms' four-year-old daughter, Cathy, was listed as physically unharmed but suffering from shock, and their two-year-old son, Triton, was missing and presumed dead.

Ginny burst into tears.  She and Harry had gotten to a place where they could reclaim their son and raise him, and OZ destroyed that dream with a single shell blast.  Harry knew that Ginny was inconsolable right now, so he went out to the back yard and looked up at the sky, feeling fairly miserable himself.

After staring at the star-dappled sky for a while, Harry finally said, "If you're out there, Triton Remus Potter, this is your home, and it should have been all along.  I made a mistake, and you're the one who paid for it.  If you are alive out there, you and anyone who's with you, Magical or Muggle, will always find a home here.  The wards will let you in."

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Due to his head injury, the boy people wound up calling Nanashi wouldn't remember anything of his foster parents or his adopted sister, but in the back of his young mind, he would hear a woman's voice singing about Mexico, saguaro cacti, and riding off into the sun and sky, and another about trees, roses, the bright blessed day, and the dark sacred night.

He would hum these songs to himself when he needed comfort, which was often, or when doing something mindless like working on a mobile suit called Gundam Heavyarms after he migrated to the L3 colony cluster, or play them on the flute when he thought no one was paying attention to him.

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Author's Notes: Again, I apologize for the shortness of the chapter. The third WILL be longer still, I promise, but will also skip ahead twelve years to when Trowa had infiltrated OZ. In the next chapter, Duo will be 15, while Hiiro, Trowa, Quatre and Wu Fei will all still be 14.

I figured that the mercenary captain would be one of the only people in the group actually looking out for Nanashi's wellbeing, or who even cared about him in the first place (making sure he ate, got plenty of sleep, telling his men what would happen to them if they tried anything funny with the kid, etc.).  I also figured that not all of them would listen to their chief.

I couldn't remember if Susan Bones survived the final battle with Voldemort or not (I never got to finish reading DH), but given the accident she'd had while Apparating, I thought her working as a reporter for a Muggle news agency would suit her.