[Gundam Wing] Keeping Distance
Title: Keeping Distance
Author: telepathicpixie
Rating: PG
Character: Iria Winner
Word Count: 600
Notes: 100_women prompt #41 - wealth.
Summary: There were days when she wished there was more distance between her and her family.


There were days when she wished there was more distance between her and her family. People always acted like the name and the fortune should have been some great asset to her, but Iria often found it to be the opposite. It was an expectation and, not infrequently, a ball and chain around her ankle she couldn’t escape from. (Perhaps if she got married, she could change the name, but she knew she would never be certain it was a marriage of love and not opportunity.)

She remembered sitting in her university classes, pursuing a medical degree with a single-minded tenacity only slightly derailed by the sidelong looks and whispers she could see and hear and feel in her peripheral vision. The other students generally resented her and some had even spread rumors that Iria was only in that school, in that program, and getting those grades because her father had donated some unnamed and exorbitant amount of money to the university. It stung, even though she tried to ignore it, and sometimes she stared at her high marks and wondered if she’d really earned them or if the instructors had given them to her out of preemptive fear.

She’d had very few friends at the university, separated from her classmates by the rumors and the name and the distance she imposed herself, because even when some girls would try and be friendly, she never knew their real motives. Somewhere amongst twenty-eight sisters, there should have been someone to be a friend with—someone who would understand, by virtue of similar situation—but they were as distant from each other as they were from the rest of the world.

Once she had gotten her degree (she’d earned it, she had), Iria banished herself to the furthest flung resource satellite her family owned. The satellites always needed medics and there were never enough properly trained doctors to go around. Something so remote was often lucky to have anyone with medical training at all, much less a professional, and while all satellites were equipped with the best medical equipment the Earthsphere boasted, it was never an adequate replacement for a real doctor.

She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping for, removing herself as much as possible from civilized space. It wasn’t as though the people on the satellite had never heard of her family—they were employed by her family—and all the preconceived looks and notions followed her there as surely as they would have followed her anywhere else. The only real advantage was that there were fewer people around to scrutinize her.

For months after she joined them, the men and women of the resource satellite regarded Iria with the same apprehension as her former classmates and Iria found herself keeping the same defensive distance. The situation didn’t change until a drill suffered a mechanical malfunction, shorts and explosions firing back upwards into the control booth. They’d nearly lost one man to vacuum exposure when the faceplate of his suit cracked, the other to blood loss as his legs were crushed under twisted metal. There had been no time for distance when they were trying to save lives and at some point when she was bloodied up to her elbows, her hair dirty with dust and mussed into disarray, and shouting orders at anyone who would listen, Iria discovered she wasn’t as detached from the others as she had thought—and looking into their eyes, it was plain they felt the same.

It was strangely liberating to realize she had finally earned respect based solely, unquestionably, on her own merits and nothing else.


Table here.