Allelujah Before the Institute

[ninthfeather]

sapphireswimming said: Do you have any headcanons for Allelujah's time between his escape and recruitment?

There’s a manga panel I remember seeing–Google tells me it was from the Gundam 00P manga, which I didn’t read in full–that involved Hallelujah getting into a fight with some previous-generation Celestial Being people, and I remember him looking kind of feral.  I think that my previous headcanon was that CB actually found him on the shuttle, and talked him down somehow, but the manga wiki page is telling me that’s not true, that he at least made it to Earth before CB picked him up, so…

 

Well, that couldn’t have been pretty.  Canon tells us he doesn’t remember anything from before the institute, and all the Institute taught him was how to be a soldier.  Even if he’d wanted to use those skills, he was at that point a tiny child–unless he happened across Ali Al Saachez (now there’s a horrid AU for you) nobody was gonna give him money or a place to stay in exchange for doing that.  So probably he spent however long that particular gap was on the streets.

 

On one hand, super-soldier skills were probably useful for stealing food.  On the other hand, he probably had little more than his instincts to go on when it came to almost any other aspect of survival.  Soma is pretty good evidence for the argument that the “fitting in with normal humans training came last,” and I doubt that the kids were allowed access to books or TV.  Those are generally not allowed in situations where brainwashing is being attempted, and that’s what was happening at the Institute.  So who knows if he even knew what half of the things on Earth were initially.  

 

Y’know, if this is what happened, it would explain why he comes off more well-adjusted than you’d expect someone who spent his entire life in either a super-soldier-making facility or an armed organization to be.  In the flashbacks with Marie, he showed pretty good people skills, so he’d probably end up developing those skills to beg (well, once he figured out what begging was) and negotiate with other homeless people.

 

The more I examine Allelujah’s life, the more convinced I am that the actual ideal ending of Gundam 00 should have involved him, in a corner, wrapped in a bunch of soft blankets and holding a mug of the warm beverage of his choice.