I was only seventeen when I was selected to serve in the Specials. Despite
the fact that one must be sixteen to legally join the military, I had been
serving for two years already. I suspect the recruiter respected my ability
to lie baldly when asked how old I was and successfully distract him long
enough to avoid showing him my identification; to be honest, I could not
possibly have been all that believable. After a year of serving as an
enlistee, my father found out where I was and what I was doing; as it was
by this time too late to extricate me without a lot of doing, he settled
for pulling me a place in the officers academy, declaring that no daughter
of his was going to serve in the infantry. Maman was not happy about the
fact that her only girl was learning how to field strip a rifle rather than
how to embroider a pillowcase, but there was nothing she could do about
that either, so she settled for proudly telling her friends that her
darling daughter was already a Lieutenant, junior grade.
At the academy, I was efficient, courteous, and consistently turned in top- grade work; I got sterling marks and my tactical suggestions were well- respected by students and faculty alike. The letter with the Specials stamp on the front was not completely unexpected, though I did not think the assignment would come so soon. I was fully prepared to have to explain to my father -- via mail, so that I would be safely in my new post before he got the letter -- that I had been selected for service in the ranks of the politically powerful, and just as fully prepared to say nothing at all to Maman other than a few idle remarks on how the weather went where I was stationed.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the letter with my new orders and read the words "executive aide" -- in layman's terms, "secretary." I wondered then, as I still do, if my father had pulled some other strings in order to keep me away from the combat zone, but he denied it until the moment of his death, so I suppose I'll never really know. If he were trying to prevent me from getting into trouble, he was pulling the wrong ones; I had been assigned to a man named Treize Khushrenada, recent promotion from major to lieutenant colonel who was transferring locations and apparently wanted a new clerk. Treize, even then, had a reputation as a man who was on his way up in the world. A ranking officer in his early twenties, he had a talent for walking into a situation, grabbing it by the throat, and throttling it into whatever shape he wanted it in before anyone even realized he was in command. He was also seen as something of a heartbreaker -- the younger enlistee women had been forever remarking on news reports that contained his name, and the one visit he'd made to my training base (which I just missed, coming in by train the day after his departure) was the topic of conversation for weeks. The main complaint about it was that the young officer was what the girls called a "workaholic" and spent little or no time at all in the club where they could stare at him, dreaming.
Treize would want someone who could keep an eye on several dozen things at once. Someone with a keen eye for detail, and someone who could adapt easily in a crisis. I knew I was capable of all of those things, but never having applied them to my typing rather than my sharpshooting, I had some understandable misgivings about working for him. Had I allowed my trepidation full run of my thoughts, I would have been a writhing morass of nerves when I reported to Room 18 in the now-defunct Borman Base early the next Monday morning. As it was, I was scarcely much more composed on the interior, but at least I managed to keep myself as starched and polished as my uniform. The blue wool jacket was crisply pressed, the leather boots gleamed; I had my hair pulled into double chignons in the back of my head, as my mother had done when I was a girl, so that my cap sat straight and stayed there. I knocked on his door and prepared myself to salute when whatever temporary girl he had swung it open; instead, a smooth tenor called out to me and told me merely to come in.
I was thrown off-stride. I hesitated briefly, then unlatched the door and opened it myself, then stood at attention and saluted sharply. "Lieutenant j.g. Marie-Claire Une, reporting for duty, sir."
"Ah, My Lady of Mercy." He didn't even look at me, merely waved me vaguely over to his desk while staring intently at a computer monitor. My first impression was that he must be the most arrogant officer on base, to wave me summarily into his office and hand me a stack of papers; then his hand strayed down to his desk and from inside the haphazard piles of documents he extracted a china teacup, white with a bloom of dark rouged roses on the side. He took a sip and set it down again, shifting idly a stack of bound books to reveal a teapot, his saucer -- and a second cup. Empty. My estimation of his arrogance went down a notch, while my estimation of his manners went up one; I had yet to meet anyone in the upper echelons of command who could manage his own instant coffee, much less something as complicated as English tea.
"Please, help yourself," he murmured. "I will be a moment."
At a loss as to what else to do, I seated myself in the chair opposite his and poured myself a cup of tea, though I don't recall that I remembered it long enough to drink any. Momentarily, he turned away from the terminal and caught my eye; purely by reflex, I put the cup back on the saucer and straightened up. He gave me a good, hard look, one long finger pressed to his lips, and then said, "How are you at telephone negotiations?"
"How do you mean, sir?"
"To put it in another light," he said, the beginnings of a rueful smile appearing, "how are you at strategically editing the truth?"
I paused, considering. Treize was obviously in something of a sticky situation, having just transferred into what looked like one of the most horrendous monstrosities on base. I supposed, all things considered, with the indirect admission he'd just made, I was going to be stuck with it no matter what.
"My seventeenth birthday was two months ago, sir," I said.
It took him a moment to realize the significance. Then the smile broadened. "Excellent. I want you to return General Rolstad's last call and tell him what a wonderful time we're having now that I have another aide. Reassure him that the paperwork will be straightened out in a reasonable time, and if you need to hang up to prevent him from demanding a definition of reasonable, I will point out that they are currently working on the base communications exchange and it would not necessarily be your fault."
"Of course, sir."
"After that," he continued, swiveling his chair so he could reach the other side of his cherrywood desk, "I shall need these sorted by priority -- anything not marked, decide for yourself where it goes -- these need to be boxed and stored in a cabinet, and this stack has been completely misrouted from the supplies office and needs to be returned." He pointed to several large towers of loose and paperclipped pages on the far end of his desk, just off his blotter. My very first mental note as Treize's secretary was to get the man two baskets, one marked IN and the other marked OUT, because otherwise I despaired of ever understanding which was which.
"Yes, sir."
"Tomorrow, you are to go into town and get yourself fitted for a new uniform; I don't want to see you wearing blues in here again. I would recommend Carter's Tailoring myself, as they already have the basic pattern for my uniform on file; moreover, they are swift and their account has already been cleared -- albeit shakily -- with the supply department. Something red, with a more flattering fit than the adapted men's uniforms they give the women now."
He stopped, leaving me shuffling around in the mounds of manila folders on my lap. "Red, sir?" I asked, bewildered.
"A red coat will make you far easier to find in the crowds when I need you," Treize said, picking up another stack of hopelessly disorganized papers. The he paused, looking up at me. "And a nice burgundy would be far more suited to your coloring, don't you think?"
"I suppose, sir." I propped one of the files up on my lap and started scanning the first page, trying to determine how urgent it was. Going through several of them this way proved that my job would be both easy and extremely frustrating; easy in that most of these demands were extremely low on the emergency scale, frustrating in that they all held the same low ranking, and whoever had filed them was going to want them taken care of the day before yesterday. "Do I have any instructions as to lunch, sir?"
"Oh, I'll take care of that," he answered off-handedly. "After all, General Rolstad doesn't work in the base commissary."
I soon learned that working for Treize Khushrenada was not a Monday through Friday proposition. Treize seemed to have the idea that there were up to a dozen days in each week, and was profoundly disappointed when there proved to be only seven. He had some definite ideas about how certain things were to be done, but others were left entirely to me; merely being assigned to his office carried a certain reputation, and after I passed the two-month mark without having a nervous breakdown, I earned the right to be officially feared. Apparently, Treize had a habit of switching secretaries whenever one of them succumbed to exhaustion. Though his working schedule tended to be long and during odd hours, it posed no problem for me; my work was my life, and anything else was secondary. The first dozen people who came into the office to speak to Treize -- and whom I was able to successfully stall until Treize finished whatever he was doing first -- were introduced to me, as "My Lady of Mercy," although I think few enough of them knew my given name to appreciate the faintly religious pun. It did serve to underscore that Treize was busy enough to be grateful for a secretary, which scared some of them off; Treize does not like to be interrupted while he is in the midst of something important.
No one in that office ever called me Marie or Marie-Claire, and for nearly a year it was only Treize who called me Lady of Mercy -- in effect, I was "Lady" Une long before I was Lady Une, ironically enough. The name eventually caught on in the vernacular of Borman Base, and from there, wherever Treize was transferred I was simply listed on the door plaque as "Lady Une" and no one questioned it. Shortly after I turned twenty, a dowager aunt passed away and left me some land and a minor title, making the appellation reality; Treize seemed much amused at his own prescience, though few aside from the two of us realized that truth had finally caught up to fiction.
I served as Treize's aide for six years, through his promotion to colonel and my own to lieutenant, and then major. My father, though he liked Treize little if at all, was quite proud when I began participating openly in conferences and dinners; I think he finally came to terms with the fact that my talent was in politics and not dancing or being a blushing bride. Maman never quite did, unfortunately, and when she died, her funeral was the first formal event in several years that I refrained from wearing my dress uniform to.
I was evidently the first aide Treize had ever had whose tenure could be measured in years rather than weeks. He and I were evenly matched in our tolerance for sleep deprivation, stubborn endurance and our habits of working long hours to make sure everything was done correctly; almost everything, in fact, with the exception of drinking contests -- he massed far more than I did, giving him an unfair advantage. It was never a formal challenge, per se; it was more a matter of who could get further into the supply of cognac he kept in his lower right hand desk drawer. This commonly happened around midnight on very quiet nights, when nothing at all was taking place and nothing could be expected to take place for some time yet; Treize may have been a suitably patient commander, but nowhere was there a regulation that required him to like it. After the first such bout of time- killing resulted in a clearly inebriated colonel carrying his flatly unconscious secretary back to her quarters at three-thirty in the morning through the (fortunately deserted) hallways inside the base and laying her out, shoes and all, on her sitting room couch to sleep it off, I resolved never to try it again. Though we were mutually unsurprised to see each other at work the next morning at eight o'clock sharp, I was smart enough to hold off the next time, and thereafter I was the one trailing Treize home, which was a much more common -- and therefore much less remarkable -- occurrence. These nights also resulted in my cultivating a peculiar talent; whenever I pick up a tea tray, I automatically become completely invisible and silent. Not only did I make a point of being sensitive when my commanding officer was hung over, being his secretary and partaking in his guilty little pleasures, I frequently shared the feeling.
Treize, so far as I recall, never stopped working. I spent more than one weekend at his country estates to take dictation and retrieve papers during his "days off"; having been born into the aristocracy and well-used to being attended by servants, Treize would think nothing of conducting important business from the bath, with me standing in the near corner of the chamber with a clipboard in my hands -- he would have held it himself, I'm certain, but for the fact that it would have been swiftly lost in the bubbles or dropped into the hot water. The colonel was a fine figure of a man, pursuing several athletic interests in addition to his more scholarly hobbies on his increasingly rare free days; and in light of the comments he had made about my getting a new uniform the first day we had met, I decided he would think me ridiculous if I objected to the arrangement solely on the basis of human nudity. I am absolutely certain that the women I had been to boot camp with would be screaming outside the gates to the estate if they'd but known. It wasn't that I made it a point to stare to prove I wasn't bothered; I merely did not make a point of not looking, and thinking back, I'm sure he noticed and probably harbored a vague amusement at me for it. He was never so presumptuous as to demand the reverse, and my leave was my own, on those rare occasions when I both received a pass and bothered to take advantage of it. Treize did not want to run me into the ground simply for want of a weekend break -- I think that by the time the colonial problems began mounting up, he would have been lost if he'd had to request a new aide -- and I was more than once specifically left at one of his villas for a day or two with orders not to even think about returning to base until Monday.
On the very rare occasions when our leave tickets -- and opportunities -- coincided, he and I would inevitably find ourselves together somewhere in Europe. Because of the perpetual state of emergency we tended to live in, I didn't dare take leave anywhere more than a day away from the base I was assigned to, no matter how lengthy the ticket; and only rarely did I have anywhere to go on such short notice. By travelling together, we were automatically in a position to deal with almost anything that could come up unexpectedly, as contacting one would automatically reach the other; since most of the absolutely vital information could be carried with one or the other of us on microdisks or recalled from memory while we were working, the only concern would have to be new findings or communiqués. To be honest, though, I suspect Treize enjoyed my company more than he generally let on. Communication wasn't a tremendous problem, even during the war, and he managed himself quite well when I was temporarily stationed on the colonies or in the diplomatic circle. He had far fewer friends than he had contacts or allies; counting myself, I believe he openly recognized two, perhaps three companions within the Specials, none outside of it.
One night I remember most clearly was part of a pleasant three days we spent on his French properties. I was born in France, though a distance from the countryside of Lille, so it was almost a homecoming for me; Treize kept the estate largely for the spectacularly beautiful scenery outside, and the isolation from the township nearby. I had taken one of the horses out in the late afternoon, and coming back in early evening encountered Treize himself stretched out in a chaise lounge on the veranda, a drink in one hand. Though he was rarely out of uniform altogether, several of the outer layers frequently went missing, particularly when he was making an effort to relax; he had shed the coat, cravat and gloves somewhere inside, and looked more a nobleman than a soldier without them. He nodded and saluted me in passing, and I saluted back, continuing on to the stables to tend the horse. Coming through the house onto the veranda afterwards, I found him staring up into the sky, past the climbing vines that arched overhead and into the many-starred night.
"Lady Une, do you think they'll thank us when this is over?" he asked me suddenly. I remember glancing down at the pitcher and the glass on the table, and realizing they were probably martinis after I saw the bowl of olives beside them. My commanding officer was probably well on his way to getting drunk, for once without me. We were well into the war by this point, in the first real lull since Treize had put his plans into effect years ago; though later I would understand that if we'd known what was going on we could have been enacting damage control before the damage was done, at the time I was of the opinion that the colonel probably needed as must rest as he could manage before the next phase went into effect.
"If it works, sir. People are unpredictable."
"Indeed they are," Treize agreed. "People are irrational and selfish -- if I recall correctly, that is what put the whole of humanity in this predicament in the first place."
"It seems to me sometimes that you and I are the only ones with our heads on straight. Sir," I added. It was rare when I forgot it, and even less frequently did Treize notice when I did, but the two of us were more and more in the public eye then, and I dreaded appearing anything less than professional on the television cameras.
"Don't forget the Lightning Count," he admonished, picking up his drink again.
I vividly recall trying not to pull a face. Zechs had never struck me as having Treize's convictions or rock-solid stability, but Treize was right in that Zechs Merquise, né Milliard Peacecraft, was good enough at what he did to be trusted to complete missions as needed. "In that event, we ought to include Lieutenant Noin as well." Four people in the world who could reasonably be expected to know what was going on in the present, and only two of us who had a good idea of what would go on in the near future -- I did have to stop and wonder from time to time if it were truly a good idea for Providence to hand us the fate of the Earth and all the people on it. I had, after being well and truly mired in the mess for just shy of five years at that time, come to the conclusion that it was not so much a good idea as it was the least evil of the alternatives. War would result in death and destruction, certainly, but should the war go as planned, the ultimate outcome would be worth it.
"Forgive me. What would I do without you here to correct my oversights?" My earlier assumption had been correct; Treize resorted to sarcasm and the bitingly ironic only when he was deliberately suppressing the confident, charming persona he used on the general public.
"I'm sure I don't know, sir," I said, preparing to back out of the conversation gracefully in the event that he wanted to drown himself in martini glass alone.
Treize shook his head. "You needn't go, Lady Une. I apologize; I have been very out of sorts lately and I have been taking it out on you."
"Everyone has been out of sorts lately," I said.
"That does not excuse my behavior," Treize declared, rising from his chair. "It is not your fault, and you do not deserve the abuse."
"Your behavior is eminently understandable, sir. I'm sure I'd be accused of the same if I didn't already terrify the rest of the base personnel."
Treize laughed at me. I welcomed that sound; his sense of humor used to disappear almost entirely while under stress, and when he had hit the point of actually missing witticisms thrown in his direction, I knew he was suffering from complete exhaustion.
"Surely you don't. You're a formidable woman, Une, but not a dragon."
"It's a reputation similar to yours, sir," I told him dryly.
"I don't frighten the men," he scoffed.
"In a way, sir, you do. It's not that they think you cold enough to send them out into a situation where there's no chance at all; it's that they know you have the power to change the situations they're in, and they fear that."
Treize shook his head in disbelief. His feet took him off the stone tiles and out into the grass with soft, verdant sounds. Normally there were guards posted around the perimeter of the property, and those around the back would be faintly visible through the trees from where we stood, but the Specials needed all the men they could get, and Treize had dismissed them all earlier in the day.
"Amazing," he said, staring away from me, up into the sky again. "This is the longest I have worked closely with any female since my wife died, and instead of basking in her feminine glory, I have managed to drag her into my own personal quagmire of overwork and endless fretting."
"With all due respect, sir," I responded, following him out, "I believe I followed you of my own free will."
"Ah, but I requested you."
"I had the option of filing for a transfer."
"You did, but I would have fought it tooth and nail. I made it a point to procure your secretarial services, out of all the officers in your class. Had I left it up to the central command, I would have gotten another illiterate child."
That was the first I'd heard of Treize asking for me, rather than my meeting him being merely a coincidence with unobjectionable consequences. "You did, sir?"
"I prefer my secretaries to be both intelligent and aesthetically pleasing, Une," he informed me matter of factly. "The assigning office could not seem to find anyone who met both qualifications at once. I elected to give them some help."
"The assigning office," I said, "has thus far shown no evidence that they are capable of finding their own rumps with the aid of both hands and a map."
"You have a grievance against them, Lady?"
"Not personally -- but there are some pig-headed fools on the officers' board and some brilliant tacticians working in dining services."
"Always the way of the military, my dear Lady. Since the time of the ancient Etruscans, government has been slow to recognize the error of its ways, and the more time passes, the more errors are made."
"With human nature being what it is, there are days I am amazed we've managed to make it to this point," I muttered, I thought under my breath, but Treize did, on occasion, surprise me with how keenly he can hear -- or, more accurately, how keenly he can listen -- with several drinks in him.
"That's what we're for, Lady Une. When things collapse past the point of no return, we must pick up the pieces and reassemble them into a new whole." I have an image, with me still, of Treize scanning the sky, for what, I did not know then and am only beginning to understand now, in golden profile. "It is daunting work, but someone must be here to do it."
"I quite understand, sir." I paused. "But I'm not so certain there are enough of us to accomplish anything but making more of a mess."
"There are more than you realize, Une. But you're right; it's a heavy burden to bear. For every man who comes home to see the world his hands have wrought, there's another who will never see his family again."
I was silent then. There was very little one could say to that which had not been said before; and for a man who carried such a tremendous load of guilt as Treize did, there was nothing that could be said that would make things any better. I wondered, for a long time, why he kept such meticulous track of his kills in battle and yet never spoke of them openly; it did not come to me until long after he was gone that it was not his form of twisted pride in death, but his attempt at absolution, and that no matter how much effort he put into the endeavor, it would never be enough to assuage his conscience on the matter. Treize was forever a living paradox in ways most men could not even begin to comprehend.
"Should a solider learn to bury his feelings?" I asked uncertainly. I even forgot my 'sir'. I had a peculiar relationship with my own conscience, then; I never doubted that Treize was right about what needed to be done, I merely doubted whether we, against the rest of the world, could truly accomplish it. "Should those who are forced to fight refuse love to their enemy in order to get their jobs done?"
"No," he said sadly, shaking his head. "Compassion is always needed, even in war. A solider must only learn to train the target of his emotion. Instead of declaring love for an enemy, he should instead apply that love to all of humanity. If it cannot be done under condition of the battle he is fighting, then the war cannot be justified."
"What about justifying the disruption to billions of lives?"
Treize sighed. "Those who are intimately involved in a conflict like this one must put their personal lives on hold, Une. Were I not working for Oz, I would probably have avoided the military like the proverbial plague. I have no time for personal feelings right now."
"It's a shame, sir," I opined. I did not dare say why; I was tremendously curious as to whether he considered me a close friend or merely a very good secretary. It would have been an inappropriate question to put to him in the mood he was keeping at the time, and as luck would have it, I did not have the chance to put it to him later.
"May I ask a favor of you, Lady Une?" he asked, and suddenly Treize sounded very weary. That tone of voice on occasion made me nervous, but usually when I began to fear for his state of mind, the next request was either dinner or to note the time of his wake-up call in the morning, and my thoughts were set at ease.
"Certainly, sir. One moment while I get my clipboard."
He waved me still. "A personal favor," he amended.
I stopped, perfectly silent, then. This was a new one; previously he had not even begun to inquire into my life, beyond what past history I volunteered, and had not presumed to dictate my future beyond my service to him. "Yes?"
"When this war is over," he said, "find me, please. I have no way of knowing where I will be when it all ends, or in what state -- but if I am well, I would ask of you one more day of company, free of crises and papers. If I am not--" he shrugged, presuming to be light but failing, falling into a melancholy he seemed closer and closer to those days. "If I am not, Une, please be sure I am somewhere I would enjoy."
Sudden terror at the thought of an assassination or Treize's death at the hands of one of the Gundam pilots seized me, and for a moment I had a vision of all of Oz lost and trembling without its figurehead and leader.
"Of course, sir," I promised, as composed as always. I had built a reputation for being unshakeable, and I suspected that now would not be the time to betray it. "You deserve as much."
"Thank you, Lady Une." There was much relief in his voice -- yet a further indication that he was approaching a state of inebriation. Treize had far more control than I did. He turned and settled a hand on either of my shoulders, and leaned in to press the first and only kiss of our acquaintance to my forehead, the way a friend might, or a father to a daughter. It was then that I realized the enormity of my feelings for this man, that sense that I was duty-bound to follow his orders to the best of my ability joined by the genuine desire to make him proud and a clear willingness to do anything he asked. Above all, I wanted his trust, and I wanted to be an important person in his life.
He released me, and took himself towards the house, and I automatically fell into step one pace behind and half a pace to the right of him, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Shortly after this, it was necessary for an agent to be planted in the political councils, and it was agreed that I, with my insider's knowledge of Oz and the direction things were supposed to be taking, was the best choice. I procured for myself a number of fashionable civilian dresses, and a suitable supply of shoes and jewelry, well aware that it was important to present the correct image to the squabbling constituents. So long had I habitually worn the double chignons and my wire-rimmed glasses that when I took my hair down and had corrective contacts made I scarcely recognized myself in the mirror; walking the corridors of the Oz base proved that the change was so dramatic as to be unbelievable. Had I not clipped my military identification to my collar, I would have been detained and escorted off- base several times over. Only Treize knew me on sight, and even he paused momentarily before reassuring himself I was the only female likely to swing his office door open without knocking and hand him important, confidential file folders. To accompany this change of face, I schooled myself to affect a change of heart as well; by the time I first addressed the councilmen, my mask was perfect. When I was with Treize, I was Lady Une, his seneschal and most valued aide; when I was on diplomatic time, I was St. Une, savior of Earth. There was no slipping in and out of character, I had so sternly separated myself into, in effect, two different people. The strain of a double life was evident, even frightening on occasion, when I discovered that as St. Une I was frequently forgetting things that Lady Une knew but the Saint didn't. But I was willing to do anything for Treize, and I could not afford to slip up.
In a way, that only made it easier when I was informed of Colonel Khushrenada's death in each of my guises. St. Une was properly and politely saddened by the announcement when it was presented to her in conference. Lady Une responded by clearing off the last desk Treize had bothered to work from and declaring herself in charge of all of his former projects until they could be taken over by the appropriate agencies, or, in the case of the civilian ones, until a proper caretaker could be found. Somewhere behind it all, Marie-Claire was grieving.
Once, long ago, Treize had told me that in the event of his death, I was never to cry for him in public. In deference to my pride, he had couched in such terms that it was implied that I might shed tears in an attempt to help his image, rather than from lack of control, but the end result was quite clear; if he were to be lost, the responsibility for almost all of his work would fall upon me, and he was adamant that I remain strong enough to finish it. I scrupulously honored this request, both for his sake and for mine; Treize had only asked two things of me in his life, and I was determined to do my best to take care of both.
It was not for several days, as I hastily arranged the disappearance of Lady Une, St. Une or both at once, over and over again, that I got any scrap of time to myself to sort out my own affairs. It was late on one Wednesday night, in a city hotel room on the L3 colony cluster, when I finally realized that I was completely alone. There wasn't a soul on this entire floor of the hotel, aside from myself; I had managed to escape an entourage, for once, by registering as Marie Claire -- an ignominious move, I'll agree, but one that earned me some peace and quiet while I tried to discreetly sort out some of Treize's off-planet holdings that didn't seem to want to be found. When the utter silence struck me, though, there was no thought of finances, no thought of agents or of diplomatic condolences. For the first time, I curled up into a tiny package on the bed, knotted my arms tightly around a pillow, and let all three of me pour out tears in secret.
Treize was, if nothing else, very conscientious about his affairs; I found a strongbox of important papers exactly where he'd always kept it, in the top left drawer of his desk, in the French manse. The reading of the will was delayed some weeks by the obvious bureaucratic difficulties following a major war. Unfortunately, neither "Zechs Merquise" nor "Milliard Peacecraft" could be found to attend, and the attorneys-at-law had a surprising amount of frustration trying to identify whether "Mlle. Marie- Claire Une" meant the Lady Une that served as Treize's secretary or the emissary from Earth. So it was that the official reading of the last will and testament of a man whose very existence had affected billions of lives was attended by exactly two people: myself, and Lucrezia Noin, who had been extracted from her job as chairwoman of a new civic corps organization for the event. I had been no particular favorite of hers before, and she had never held as high a position in my esteem as the colonel had, but when we met by chance in the solicitor's office and each discovered that the other cared deeply enough to dress in black, any brewing feud was instantly called off.
His will was much as we had expected. Treize controlled a fortune equaled by few mere mortals; it was just as much a result of his shrewd business dealings as it was of inherited family money, and even after his death, much of it was tightly locked into charitable trusts or funds -- he had left a generous sum for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Sank, several scholarships, directed at various private universities, and a considerable lump sum for distribution by the government for purposes of rehabilitation of the people of both the colonies and Earth. Another substantial amount was to be rendered to either Zechs Merquise or Milliard Peacecraft, whichever could be found; if he could not be located the money was to be held in trust by his sister, Relena Dorlan, née Peacecraft, until he could be located or the time of her death, at which time it would be released to her heirs. Lucrezia Noin was given lifetime tenure in the Department of Extraterrestrial Research of Treize's alma mater, with whom he had apparently exercised considerable influence. I, in addition to being named executrix, was to inherit his entire private estate, including most of his Terran properties and all of his personal possessions. The last clause was something I had never expected: a savings account and a trust fund specifically in the name of his daughter, Mariemaia Khushrenada, whom I was to locate and care for as best I could.
To say that was a surprise would be an understatement. I had known that Treize was once married, but never had he mentioned a child; being Treize and being cautious, however, he may have sought to keep her out of the political conflict by refraining from publicly acknowledging her existence. The fact that I had been asked to care for her suggested that she was still a minor at the time the will was written, and I knew for certain that it had been revised less than a year before. I set myself to tracking the child down, and for the next seven months, I spent more time looking for her than I did tending my own life.
Of all the things Treize asked of me, of all of the dangerous missions I undertook and orders I shouted in the heat of the battle, Mariemaia was my one and only failure. I was too late, and there was no opportunity to make amends. I will forever carry the memory of what happened then, and it will always remind me that if Treize has found a way to watch me after his own passing, he is disappointed.
I did what I could for Mariemaia, and then did the next best thing and departed. I am evidently not cut out for children, although I haven't yet managed to damage any of Noin's. She and Merquise were married not long after their reunion and Lucrezia was with child within a year; I am not normally one to find humor in everyday life, but I must comment that watching a woman seven months pregnant walk into a zero-gravity chamber -- in maternity clothes and her husband's borrowed Preventers jacket -- and utterly humiliate a dozen recruits two months into maneuverability training was most amusing. Noin had a sharp tongue under normal circumstances, but the irritability and lower back pain that appeared to settle in for a permanent stay perhaps a month before she was due with her first made her swing from even and calm to perfectly vicious if someone happened to catch her in a temper and say the wrong thing. The birth of the baby alleviated these somewhat; not so much from a lessening of the symptoms, but because it would have been twice as difficult for Noin to keep up such a rapid stream of scathing personal attacks on two hours' sleep a night. Merquise, while almost as good with his first son as with his mobile suit, was no help at all with insults; he simply did not have the same sort of hair- trigger temper Noin did, and preferred to glare erring recruits (or officers) into submission rather than browbeat them there. Relena Peacecraft, then quite a successful political leader, was very quietly thrilled to be an aunt, though she did not often get a chance to see her new nephew.
In remembrance of the man who, deliberately or accidentally, had ensured we would all meet, the child's middle name was Treize.
Noin went on to endure two more pregnancies and two more year-long spates of being sleepless and cross to produce a pair of daughters; one of them was dark like her mother, and the other a sunny blonde in the manner of her father, and both of them were tiny angels until they were left alone with their sometime babysitter Tante Une, and then they both became half-size demons from the nether depths of Hell. Maximillion Treize was not enough older than Gretchen and Fiona to take on child-care duties by himself, but I found myself on occasion nearly begging him for any help he could render with his two sisters. Somewhere, I was certain, Colonel Treize was sitting comfortably in a wicker chair, with a brandy snifter in his hand, laughing with a great deal of humor and dignity at his former secretary trying her level best to change the diaper on one toddler while attempting to keep her sister out of the knife drawer in the kitchen and yelling for her brother to put down his game and come help before Gretchen managed to slit her own wrists by mistake. I could only be thankful that the Sank Kingdom was to pass to Maximillion -- at seven, already a solemn and thoughtful boy -- and not his squabbling sisters, then one and a half and three.
I was later to eat those words, unfortunately; at the ages of twelve and fourteen, Gretchen and Fiona magically transformed into perfectly poised young ladies, closely in the manner of their aunt Relena, whereas Max turned seventeen and immediately took off for parts unknown with his erstwhile fiancée, a girl by name of Mariona. I was not quite so apoplectic as his parents were, though I was faintly annoyed that he had not even thought to collaborate with his Tante Une in the matter; I found myself quite liking Mariona, for the most part, and thought she showed great potential for a girl so young. Once his parents recovered from his abrupt -- but ultimately successful -- marriage, Merquise suddenly found himself father to two girls with eyes for no one but the new Preventer boys, and that sparked a brand-new conflict in the household. Noin and I refused to help him in his quest to wall the sisters into their room until they reached a reasonable dating age, such as their mid-forties, but at the very least I pointed out that if they insisted on pursuing military men, they would do better to stand outside the officers academy and look charming than they would sitting across the street from the barracks and giggling. The two of them took it to heart after several years of repetition and at age twenty, Gretchen wed a lieutenant colonel with ginger hair who reminded me painfully of Treize, the very first time I walked into his office to begin my tour of duty. Fiona had a more difficult time finding a mate; she married once at sixteen, mostly to spite her father, and once more, at twenty-two, to someone immeasurably more acceptable. Between the three of them, they gave the family six grandchildren, and both Noin and I were pressed into day-care service again. "Once more into the fray," as Noin put it, the first time we were asked to watch the first two squealing toddlers, one from Max, one from Gretchen.
We were not the only ones aiding with the brood; for one thing, Noin and I wouldn't ever have allowed the rest of the family to bow out. Merquise was popular with the young boys for the tales he told of mobile suits and fighting for glory and justice; and he was just as popular with the young girls for the long tassel of hair that had gone grey and been tied back bit by bit over the years, but had never entirely gone away. The six of them, clustered together in Noin's villa in Sank, had some impressive quarrels over whether their grandfather was allowed to tell stories with explosions in them while the girls were braiding his hair -- or, if you asked the boys, whether the girls were allowed to braid his hair while he was telling stories with explosions in them. Their grandparents, less the effects of gravity, were in startling shape for a couple of their age, which was fortunate for those times when one of them was chasing a pair of six-year olds up and down the spiral stairs and the other was chasing spoonfuls of dinner around the kitchen after attempting to feed three toddlers and an infant at once -- not the most intelligent idea Merquise ever had, but they had only had three to deal with, once upon a time, and Maximillion had enough of a head start over his sisters that there were never more than two with bibs in any given year. Noin and I witnessed our revenge some twenty years later when the eldest pair married not a month apart and each managed a child within a year of the wedding. All of the six grandchildren wed, some more than once, and not one of them had any less than two children of their own, and we received a heartfelt apology from one of the girls for the portion of the incessant mess she had personally been responsible for from the ages of one to ten inclusive. For a third time, Noin and I were given slurred and babbled nicknames by a small army of children and drafted into the officer corps to help, although fortunately no one in that generation was ever cruel enough to ask me to watch the entire clan at once. I taught many of that round to read and write in Russian, his language, as their great-aunt was helping her own grandchildren -- by the blue-eyed pilot, I am fairly certain, though the two of them were never officially married, and he never stayed in one place long enough to question about it -- negotiate important treaties with the New Ukraine people.
I feel fortunate, having survived this long. Though I have never married and have no biological family to speak of, Noin and Merquise's great- grandchildren are now in their teens or beyond. A startling position to be in, when there was a time not long after Treize's death when I would go to sleep each night doubting I would rise to see the next day. They have ever spoken to me with proper respect, some calling me Lady and some calling me Tante, although Rietta's children one day decided to call me Belle-Mère whenever their parents were gone; whether they meant to call me their stepmother or merely, looking with the eyes of a child, to call me pretty, I still cannot guess, and of course now that they are older they cannot fathom what they thought at that age. My ego councils me to conclude the former, for though I have tried to keep myself neat and retain much of what I had when I was younger, what I had when I was younger was long and spare, and has become more so as I age. The more I think on the comment he made about my figure the day we met, the more I think it was an ironic turn of phrase and not a literal one; Treize was notoriously charming and words such as those were likely just a part of making my acquaintance. Still, he was a large part of the reason I was once convinced I was pretty, and I try not to argue with things like that. The chocolate brown hair he knew has turned white, and two chignons at the base of my neck have merged into one fat knot pinned to the crown of my head; my glasses have gotten thicker over time, frames as well as lenses, and are so strong I now have to remove them to read. I have settled, for the most part, into his French estate; for years I moved from home to home in Europe whenever one generation of children was grown and gone, and came back to Lille, close to Sank, when the new ones arrived and I could watch them, and care for them, and keep Noin from being completely inundated with her progeny. The house is much bigger than I truly need, large enough to echo even when filled with small grubby children, and when the small grubby children are gone again it echoes even louder with words no longer spoken in its halls.
I never go into his study. There must be an inch of dust on his mahogany desk now, spread across his blotter. There is one window that sits directly behind his chair that was left leaning open the last time he left this house, and it would not have been closed even for the first summer squall if the groundskeeper hadn't done it himself.
I find that many of the reminders bother me less as time goes on; one that has oddly never bothered me at all is the scent of tea roses. They were omnipresent, around Treize; vases of them in his office, enormous walls of them around the houses on all of his estates where they could possibly be grown. I find I've taken up his habit of soaking in a tub of fragrant rosewater, although I don't recall ever seeing Treize with the bubbles clear up to his chin as I tend to do. It's pleasant, a reminder of the past that brings up only the good memories, and I see why Treize indulged himself so. I sink into a misty stupor of memories, and then into the bathtub up to my chin. Breathing, somehow, is difficult, slow and sleepy, and it takes too much energy to battle against it and so I don't. Hot water touches my lips, skims up over my cheekbones, and I close my eyes to the softly colored bubbles.
It's so peaceful. So very silent. There is nothing in this house now but his footsteps, just as on that one short weekend so very long ago. I honored my promise. Though there were no remains found in the depths of space, I decided a memorial would be in order. Mine was not the only one; there were several stones and plaques funded by historians and foundations. But mine was the only one sealed in a sphere and sent into orbit on a satellite, where he would have been able to see the Earth and all of the colonies, to watch over the world he had wrought, though he had been one of the many who never came home to it.
The quiet footfalls come to the door, and though my eyes do not open beneath the water I can hear the ornate lever click as it turns and engages the latch. Only sound in my mind. Only sound in the house. One and the same, for all intents and purposes now. There is only one person it could possibly be, and as my face breaks the surface of the water once more, the door opens properly, and he slips in, ginger hair striking against the shoulders of his white uniform shirt. The coat is gone, the cravat is gone, the gloves are gone; he is a solider in the trenches no longer, but a noble coming home from a war that is long over and gone. He smiles at me, a touch ruefully, and closes the door behind him.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," he says softly.
There are no words. I pull myself out of the water, elbows on the edge of the tub, and dark hair threads in front of my eyes, wet and clinging. He holds out his hand, patient as ever, and trembling I draw myself from the tub to stand, bare-breasted and streaming water, before him. I feel new, and as I feel, I am; his gaze flows down my body as the remaining bubbles do, and I know that when he said that I was beautiful, he meant it as truth and not as friendly jest. His eyes say but one thing when they return to meet mine, and it is that he understands -- has always understood -- my heart, and regrets only that we had no time to compose the words that said so while we both lived; that he watched me and he missed me as I missed him, deeply, completely.
I lay my hand in his, and the aristocrat that I had known for once and for so long pulls me gently into forever. I will never miss him again.
At the academy, I was efficient, courteous, and consistently turned in top- grade work; I got sterling marks and my tactical suggestions were well- respected by students and faculty alike. The letter with the Specials stamp on the front was not completely unexpected, though I did not think the assignment would come so soon. I was fully prepared to have to explain to my father -- via mail, so that I would be safely in my new post before he got the letter -- that I had been selected for service in the ranks of the politically powerful, and just as fully prepared to say nothing at all to Maman other than a few idle remarks on how the weather went where I was stationed.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the letter with my new orders and read the words "executive aide" -- in layman's terms, "secretary." I wondered then, as I still do, if my father had pulled some other strings in order to keep me away from the combat zone, but he denied it until the moment of his death, so I suppose I'll never really know. If he were trying to prevent me from getting into trouble, he was pulling the wrong ones; I had been assigned to a man named Treize Khushrenada, recent promotion from major to lieutenant colonel who was transferring locations and apparently wanted a new clerk. Treize, even then, had a reputation as a man who was on his way up in the world. A ranking officer in his early twenties, he had a talent for walking into a situation, grabbing it by the throat, and throttling it into whatever shape he wanted it in before anyone even realized he was in command. He was also seen as something of a heartbreaker -- the younger enlistee women had been forever remarking on news reports that contained his name, and the one visit he'd made to my training base (which I just missed, coming in by train the day after his departure) was the topic of conversation for weeks. The main complaint about it was that the young officer was what the girls called a "workaholic" and spent little or no time at all in the club where they could stare at him, dreaming.
Treize would want someone who could keep an eye on several dozen things at once. Someone with a keen eye for detail, and someone who could adapt easily in a crisis. I knew I was capable of all of those things, but never having applied them to my typing rather than my sharpshooting, I had some understandable misgivings about working for him. Had I allowed my trepidation full run of my thoughts, I would have been a writhing morass of nerves when I reported to Room 18 in the now-defunct Borman Base early the next Monday morning. As it was, I was scarcely much more composed on the interior, but at least I managed to keep myself as starched and polished as my uniform. The blue wool jacket was crisply pressed, the leather boots gleamed; I had my hair pulled into double chignons in the back of my head, as my mother had done when I was a girl, so that my cap sat straight and stayed there. I knocked on his door and prepared myself to salute when whatever temporary girl he had swung it open; instead, a smooth tenor called out to me and told me merely to come in.
I was thrown off-stride. I hesitated briefly, then unlatched the door and opened it myself, then stood at attention and saluted sharply. "Lieutenant j.g. Marie-Claire Une, reporting for duty, sir."
"Ah, My Lady of Mercy." He didn't even look at me, merely waved me vaguely over to his desk while staring intently at a computer monitor. My first impression was that he must be the most arrogant officer on base, to wave me summarily into his office and hand me a stack of papers; then his hand strayed down to his desk and from inside the haphazard piles of documents he extracted a china teacup, white with a bloom of dark rouged roses on the side. He took a sip and set it down again, shifting idly a stack of bound books to reveal a teapot, his saucer -- and a second cup. Empty. My estimation of his arrogance went down a notch, while my estimation of his manners went up one; I had yet to meet anyone in the upper echelons of command who could manage his own instant coffee, much less something as complicated as English tea.
"Please, help yourself," he murmured. "I will be a moment."
At a loss as to what else to do, I seated myself in the chair opposite his and poured myself a cup of tea, though I don't recall that I remembered it long enough to drink any. Momentarily, he turned away from the terminal and caught my eye; purely by reflex, I put the cup back on the saucer and straightened up. He gave me a good, hard look, one long finger pressed to his lips, and then said, "How are you at telephone negotiations?"
"How do you mean, sir?"
"To put it in another light," he said, the beginnings of a rueful smile appearing, "how are you at strategically editing the truth?"
I paused, considering. Treize was obviously in something of a sticky situation, having just transferred into what looked like one of the most horrendous monstrosities on base. I supposed, all things considered, with the indirect admission he'd just made, I was going to be stuck with it no matter what.
"My seventeenth birthday was two months ago, sir," I said.
It took him a moment to realize the significance. Then the smile broadened. "Excellent. I want you to return General Rolstad's last call and tell him what a wonderful time we're having now that I have another aide. Reassure him that the paperwork will be straightened out in a reasonable time, and if you need to hang up to prevent him from demanding a definition of reasonable, I will point out that they are currently working on the base communications exchange and it would not necessarily be your fault."
"Of course, sir."
"After that," he continued, swiveling his chair so he could reach the other side of his cherrywood desk, "I shall need these sorted by priority -- anything not marked, decide for yourself where it goes -- these need to be boxed and stored in a cabinet, and this stack has been completely misrouted from the supplies office and needs to be returned." He pointed to several large towers of loose and paperclipped pages on the far end of his desk, just off his blotter. My very first mental note as Treize's secretary was to get the man two baskets, one marked IN and the other marked OUT, because otherwise I despaired of ever understanding which was which.
"Yes, sir."
"Tomorrow, you are to go into town and get yourself fitted for a new uniform; I don't want to see you wearing blues in here again. I would recommend Carter's Tailoring myself, as they already have the basic pattern for my uniform on file; moreover, they are swift and their account has already been cleared -- albeit shakily -- with the supply department. Something red, with a more flattering fit than the adapted men's uniforms they give the women now."
He stopped, leaving me shuffling around in the mounds of manila folders on my lap. "Red, sir?" I asked, bewildered.
"A red coat will make you far easier to find in the crowds when I need you," Treize said, picking up another stack of hopelessly disorganized papers. The he paused, looking up at me. "And a nice burgundy would be far more suited to your coloring, don't you think?"
"I suppose, sir." I propped one of the files up on my lap and started scanning the first page, trying to determine how urgent it was. Going through several of them this way proved that my job would be both easy and extremely frustrating; easy in that most of these demands were extremely low on the emergency scale, frustrating in that they all held the same low ranking, and whoever had filed them was going to want them taken care of the day before yesterday. "Do I have any instructions as to lunch, sir?"
"Oh, I'll take care of that," he answered off-handedly. "After all, General Rolstad doesn't work in the base commissary."
I soon learned that working for Treize Khushrenada was not a Monday through Friday proposition. Treize seemed to have the idea that there were up to a dozen days in each week, and was profoundly disappointed when there proved to be only seven. He had some definite ideas about how certain things were to be done, but others were left entirely to me; merely being assigned to his office carried a certain reputation, and after I passed the two-month mark without having a nervous breakdown, I earned the right to be officially feared. Apparently, Treize had a habit of switching secretaries whenever one of them succumbed to exhaustion. Though his working schedule tended to be long and during odd hours, it posed no problem for me; my work was my life, and anything else was secondary. The first dozen people who came into the office to speak to Treize -- and whom I was able to successfully stall until Treize finished whatever he was doing first -- were introduced to me, as "My Lady of Mercy," although I think few enough of them knew my given name to appreciate the faintly religious pun. It did serve to underscore that Treize was busy enough to be grateful for a secretary, which scared some of them off; Treize does not like to be interrupted while he is in the midst of something important.
No one in that office ever called me Marie or Marie-Claire, and for nearly a year it was only Treize who called me Lady of Mercy -- in effect, I was "Lady" Une long before I was Lady Une, ironically enough. The name eventually caught on in the vernacular of Borman Base, and from there, wherever Treize was transferred I was simply listed on the door plaque as "Lady Une" and no one questioned it. Shortly after I turned twenty, a dowager aunt passed away and left me some land and a minor title, making the appellation reality; Treize seemed much amused at his own prescience, though few aside from the two of us realized that truth had finally caught up to fiction.
I served as Treize's aide for six years, through his promotion to colonel and my own to lieutenant, and then major. My father, though he liked Treize little if at all, was quite proud when I began participating openly in conferences and dinners; I think he finally came to terms with the fact that my talent was in politics and not dancing or being a blushing bride. Maman never quite did, unfortunately, and when she died, her funeral was the first formal event in several years that I refrained from wearing my dress uniform to.
I was evidently the first aide Treize had ever had whose tenure could be measured in years rather than weeks. He and I were evenly matched in our tolerance for sleep deprivation, stubborn endurance and our habits of working long hours to make sure everything was done correctly; almost everything, in fact, with the exception of drinking contests -- he massed far more than I did, giving him an unfair advantage. It was never a formal challenge, per se; it was more a matter of who could get further into the supply of cognac he kept in his lower right hand desk drawer. This commonly happened around midnight on very quiet nights, when nothing at all was taking place and nothing could be expected to take place for some time yet; Treize may have been a suitably patient commander, but nowhere was there a regulation that required him to like it. After the first such bout of time- killing resulted in a clearly inebriated colonel carrying his flatly unconscious secretary back to her quarters at three-thirty in the morning through the (fortunately deserted) hallways inside the base and laying her out, shoes and all, on her sitting room couch to sleep it off, I resolved never to try it again. Though we were mutually unsurprised to see each other at work the next morning at eight o'clock sharp, I was smart enough to hold off the next time, and thereafter I was the one trailing Treize home, which was a much more common -- and therefore much less remarkable -- occurrence. These nights also resulted in my cultivating a peculiar talent; whenever I pick up a tea tray, I automatically become completely invisible and silent. Not only did I make a point of being sensitive when my commanding officer was hung over, being his secretary and partaking in his guilty little pleasures, I frequently shared the feeling.
Treize, so far as I recall, never stopped working. I spent more than one weekend at his country estates to take dictation and retrieve papers during his "days off"; having been born into the aristocracy and well-used to being attended by servants, Treize would think nothing of conducting important business from the bath, with me standing in the near corner of the chamber with a clipboard in my hands -- he would have held it himself, I'm certain, but for the fact that it would have been swiftly lost in the bubbles or dropped into the hot water. The colonel was a fine figure of a man, pursuing several athletic interests in addition to his more scholarly hobbies on his increasingly rare free days; and in light of the comments he had made about my getting a new uniform the first day we had met, I decided he would think me ridiculous if I objected to the arrangement solely on the basis of human nudity. I am absolutely certain that the women I had been to boot camp with would be screaming outside the gates to the estate if they'd but known. It wasn't that I made it a point to stare to prove I wasn't bothered; I merely did not make a point of not looking, and thinking back, I'm sure he noticed and probably harbored a vague amusement at me for it. He was never so presumptuous as to demand the reverse, and my leave was my own, on those rare occasions when I both received a pass and bothered to take advantage of it. Treize did not want to run me into the ground simply for want of a weekend break -- I think that by the time the colonial problems began mounting up, he would have been lost if he'd had to request a new aide -- and I was more than once specifically left at one of his villas for a day or two with orders not to even think about returning to base until Monday.
On the very rare occasions when our leave tickets -- and opportunities -- coincided, he and I would inevitably find ourselves together somewhere in Europe. Because of the perpetual state of emergency we tended to live in, I didn't dare take leave anywhere more than a day away from the base I was assigned to, no matter how lengthy the ticket; and only rarely did I have anywhere to go on such short notice. By travelling together, we were automatically in a position to deal with almost anything that could come up unexpectedly, as contacting one would automatically reach the other; since most of the absolutely vital information could be carried with one or the other of us on microdisks or recalled from memory while we were working, the only concern would have to be new findings or communiqués. To be honest, though, I suspect Treize enjoyed my company more than he generally let on. Communication wasn't a tremendous problem, even during the war, and he managed himself quite well when I was temporarily stationed on the colonies or in the diplomatic circle. He had far fewer friends than he had contacts or allies; counting myself, I believe he openly recognized two, perhaps three companions within the Specials, none outside of it.
One night I remember most clearly was part of a pleasant three days we spent on his French properties. I was born in France, though a distance from the countryside of Lille, so it was almost a homecoming for me; Treize kept the estate largely for the spectacularly beautiful scenery outside, and the isolation from the township nearby. I had taken one of the horses out in the late afternoon, and coming back in early evening encountered Treize himself stretched out in a chaise lounge on the veranda, a drink in one hand. Though he was rarely out of uniform altogether, several of the outer layers frequently went missing, particularly when he was making an effort to relax; he had shed the coat, cravat and gloves somewhere inside, and looked more a nobleman than a soldier without them. He nodded and saluted me in passing, and I saluted back, continuing on to the stables to tend the horse. Coming through the house onto the veranda afterwards, I found him staring up into the sky, past the climbing vines that arched overhead and into the many-starred night.
"Lady Une, do you think they'll thank us when this is over?" he asked me suddenly. I remember glancing down at the pitcher and the glass on the table, and realizing they were probably martinis after I saw the bowl of olives beside them. My commanding officer was probably well on his way to getting drunk, for once without me. We were well into the war by this point, in the first real lull since Treize had put his plans into effect years ago; though later I would understand that if we'd known what was going on we could have been enacting damage control before the damage was done, at the time I was of the opinion that the colonel probably needed as must rest as he could manage before the next phase went into effect.
"If it works, sir. People are unpredictable."
"Indeed they are," Treize agreed. "People are irrational and selfish -- if I recall correctly, that is what put the whole of humanity in this predicament in the first place."
"It seems to me sometimes that you and I are the only ones with our heads on straight. Sir," I added. It was rare when I forgot it, and even less frequently did Treize notice when I did, but the two of us were more and more in the public eye then, and I dreaded appearing anything less than professional on the television cameras.
"Don't forget the Lightning Count," he admonished, picking up his drink again.
I vividly recall trying not to pull a face. Zechs had never struck me as having Treize's convictions or rock-solid stability, but Treize was right in that Zechs Merquise, né Milliard Peacecraft, was good enough at what he did to be trusted to complete missions as needed. "In that event, we ought to include Lieutenant Noin as well." Four people in the world who could reasonably be expected to know what was going on in the present, and only two of us who had a good idea of what would go on in the near future -- I did have to stop and wonder from time to time if it were truly a good idea for Providence to hand us the fate of the Earth and all the people on it. I had, after being well and truly mired in the mess for just shy of five years at that time, come to the conclusion that it was not so much a good idea as it was the least evil of the alternatives. War would result in death and destruction, certainly, but should the war go as planned, the ultimate outcome would be worth it.
"Forgive me. What would I do without you here to correct my oversights?" My earlier assumption had been correct; Treize resorted to sarcasm and the bitingly ironic only when he was deliberately suppressing the confident, charming persona he used on the general public.
"I'm sure I don't know, sir," I said, preparing to back out of the conversation gracefully in the event that he wanted to drown himself in martini glass alone.
Treize shook his head. "You needn't go, Lady Une. I apologize; I have been very out of sorts lately and I have been taking it out on you."
"Everyone has been out of sorts lately," I said.
"That does not excuse my behavior," Treize declared, rising from his chair. "It is not your fault, and you do not deserve the abuse."
"Your behavior is eminently understandable, sir. I'm sure I'd be accused of the same if I didn't already terrify the rest of the base personnel."
Treize laughed at me. I welcomed that sound; his sense of humor used to disappear almost entirely while under stress, and when he had hit the point of actually missing witticisms thrown in his direction, I knew he was suffering from complete exhaustion.
"Surely you don't. You're a formidable woman, Une, but not a dragon."
"It's a reputation similar to yours, sir," I told him dryly.
"I don't frighten the men," he scoffed.
"In a way, sir, you do. It's not that they think you cold enough to send them out into a situation where there's no chance at all; it's that they know you have the power to change the situations they're in, and they fear that."
Treize shook his head in disbelief. His feet took him off the stone tiles and out into the grass with soft, verdant sounds. Normally there were guards posted around the perimeter of the property, and those around the back would be faintly visible through the trees from where we stood, but the Specials needed all the men they could get, and Treize had dismissed them all earlier in the day.
"Amazing," he said, staring away from me, up into the sky again. "This is the longest I have worked closely with any female since my wife died, and instead of basking in her feminine glory, I have managed to drag her into my own personal quagmire of overwork and endless fretting."
"With all due respect, sir," I responded, following him out, "I believe I followed you of my own free will."
"Ah, but I requested you."
"I had the option of filing for a transfer."
"You did, but I would have fought it tooth and nail. I made it a point to procure your secretarial services, out of all the officers in your class. Had I left it up to the central command, I would have gotten another illiterate child."
That was the first I'd heard of Treize asking for me, rather than my meeting him being merely a coincidence with unobjectionable consequences. "You did, sir?"
"I prefer my secretaries to be both intelligent and aesthetically pleasing, Une," he informed me matter of factly. "The assigning office could not seem to find anyone who met both qualifications at once. I elected to give them some help."
"The assigning office," I said, "has thus far shown no evidence that they are capable of finding their own rumps with the aid of both hands and a map."
"You have a grievance against them, Lady?"
"Not personally -- but there are some pig-headed fools on the officers' board and some brilliant tacticians working in dining services."
"Always the way of the military, my dear Lady. Since the time of the ancient Etruscans, government has been slow to recognize the error of its ways, and the more time passes, the more errors are made."
"With human nature being what it is, there are days I am amazed we've managed to make it to this point," I muttered, I thought under my breath, but Treize did, on occasion, surprise me with how keenly he can hear -- or, more accurately, how keenly he can listen -- with several drinks in him.
"That's what we're for, Lady Une. When things collapse past the point of no return, we must pick up the pieces and reassemble them into a new whole." I have an image, with me still, of Treize scanning the sky, for what, I did not know then and am only beginning to understand now, in golden profile. "It is daunting work, but someone must be here to do it."
"I quite understand, sir." I paused. "But I'm not so certain there are enough of us to accomplish anything but making more of a mess."
"There are more than you realize, Une. But you're right; it's a heavy burden to bear. For every man who comes home to see the world his hands have wrought, there's another who will never see his family again."
I was silent then. There was very little one could say to that which had not been said before; and for a man who carried such a tremendous load of guilt as Treize did, there was nothing that could be said that would make things any better. I wondered, for a long time, why he kept such meticulous track of his kills in battle and yet never spoke of them openly; it did not come to me until long after he was gone that it was not his form of twisted pride in death, but his attempt at absolution, and that no matter how much effort he put into the endeavor, it would never be enough to assuage his conscience on the matter. Treize was forever a living paradox in ways most men could not even begin to comprehend.
"Should a solider learn to bury his feelings?" I asked uncertainly. I even forgot my 'sir'. I had a peculiar relationship with my own conscience, then; I never doubted that Treize was right about what needed to be done, I merely doubted whether we, against the rest of the world, could truly accomplish it. "Should those who are forced to fight refuse love to their enemy in order to get their jobs done?"
"No," he said sadly, shaking his head. "Compassion is always needed, even in war. A solider must only learn to train the target of his emotion. Instead of declaring love for an enemy, he should instead apply that love to all of humanity. If it cannot be done under condition of the battle he is fighting, then the war cannot be justified."
"What about justifying the disruption to billions of lives?"
Treize sighed. "Those who are intimately involved in a conflict like this one must put their personal lives on hold, Une. Were I not working for Oz, I would probably have avoided the military like the proverbial plague. I have no time for personal feelings right now."
"It's a shame, sir," I opined. I did not dare say why; I was tremendously curious as to whether he considered me a close friend or merely a very good secretary. It would have been an inappropriate question to put to him in the mood he was keeping at the time, and as luck would have it, I did not have the chance to put it to him later.
"May I ask a favor of you, Lady Une?" he asked, and suddenly Treize sounded very weary. That tone of voice on occasion made me nervous, but usually when I began to fear for his state of mind, the next request was either dinner or to note the time of his wake-up call in the morning, and my thoughts were set at ease.
"Certainly, sir. One moment while I get my clipboard."
He waved me still. "A personal favor," he amended.
I stopped, perfectly silent, then. This was a new one; previously he had not even begun to inquire into my life, beyond what past history I volunteered, and had not presumed to dictate my future beyond my service to him. "Yes?"
"When this war is over," he said, "find me, please. I have no way of knowing where I will be when it all ends, or in what state -- but if I am well, I would ask of you one more day of company, free of crises and papers. If I am not--" he shrugged, presuming to be light but failing, falling into a melancholy he seemed closer and closer to those days. "If I am not, Une, please be sure I am somewhere I would enjoy."
Sudden terror at the thought of an assassination or Treize's death at the hands of one of the Gundam pilots seized me, and for a moment I had a vision of all of Oz lost and trembling without its figurehead and leader.
"Of course, sir," I promised, as composed as always. I had built a reputation for being unshakeable, and I suspected that now would not be the time to betray it. "You deserve as much."
"Thank you, Lady Une." There was much relief in his voice -- yet a further indication that he was approaching a state of inebriation. Treize had far more control than I did. He turned and settled a hand on either of my shoulders, and leaned in to press the first and only kiss of our acquaintance to my forehead, the way a friend might, or a father to a daughter. It was then that I realized the enormity of my feelings for this man, that sense that I was duty-bound to follow his orders to the best of my ability joined by the genuine desire to make him proud and a clear willingness to do anything he asked. Above all, I wanted his trust, and I wanted to be an important person in his life.
He released me, and took himself towards the house, and I automatically fell into step one pace behind and half a pace to the right of him, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Shortly after this, it was necessary for an agent to be planted in the political councils, and it was agreed that I, with my insider's knowledge of Oz and the direction things were supposed to be taking, was the best choice. I procured for myself a number of fashionable civilian dresses, and a suitable supply of shoes and jewelry, well aware that it was important to present the correct image to the squabbling constituents. So long had I habitually worn the double chignons and my wire-rimmed glasses that when I took my hair down and had corrective contacts made I scarcely recognized myself in the mirror; walking the corridors of the Oz base proved that the change was so dramatic as to be unbelievable. Had I not clipped my military identification to my collar, I would have been detained and escorted off- base several times over. Only Treize knew me on sight, and even he paused momentarily before reassuring himself I was the only female likely to swing his office door open without knocking and hand him important, confidential file folders. To accompany this change of face, I schooled myself to affect a change of heart as well; by the time I first addressed the councilmen, my mask was perfect. When I was with Treize, I was Lady Une, his seneschal and most valued aide; when I was on diplomatic time, I was St. Une, savior of Earth. There was no slipping in and out of character, I had so sternly separated myself into, in effect, two different people. The strain of a double life was evident, even frightening on occasion, when I discovered that as St. Une I was frequently forgetting things that Lady Une knew but the Saint didn't. But I was willing to do anything for Treize, and I could not afford to slip up.
In a way, that only made it easier when I was informed of Colonel Khushrenada's death in each of my guises. St. Une was properly and politely saddened by the announcement when it was presented to her in conference. Lady Une responded by clearing off the last desk Treize had bothered to work from and declaring herself in charge of all of his former projects until they could be taken over by the appropriate agencies, or, in the case of the civilian ones, until a proper caretaker could be found. Somewhere behind it all, Marie-Claire was grieving.
Once, long ago, Treize had told me that in the event of his death, I was never to cry for him in public. In deference to my pride, he had couched in such terms that it was implied that I might shed tears in an attempt to help his image, rather than from lack of control, but the end result was quite clear; if he were to be lost, the responsibility for almost all of his work would fall upon me, and he was adamant that I remain strong enough to finish it. I scrupulously honored this request, both for his sake and for mine; Treize had only asked two things of me in his life, and I was determined to do my best to take care of both.
It was not for several days, as I hastily arranged the disappearance of Lady Une, St. Une or both at once, over and over again, that I got any scrap of time to myself to sort out my own affairs. It was late on one Wednesday night, in a city hotel room on the L3 colony cluster, when I finally realized that I was completely alone. There wasn't a soul on this entire floor of the hotel, aside from myself; I had managed to escape an entourage, for once, by registering as Marie Claire -- an ignominious move, I'll agree, but one that earned me some peace and quiet while I tried to discreetly sort out some of Treize's off-planet holdings that didn't seem to want to be found. When the utter silence struck me, though, there was no thought of finances, no thought of agents or of diplomatic condolences. For the first time, I curled up into a tiny package on the bed, knotted my arms tightly around a pillow, and let all three of me pour out tears in secret.
Treize was, if nothing else, very conscientious about his affairs; I found a strongbox of important papers exactly where he'd always kept it, in the top left drawer of his desk, in the French manse. The reading of the will was delayed some weeks by the obvious bureaucratic difficulties following a major war. Unfortunately, neither "Zechs Merquise" nor "Milliard Peacecraft" could be found to attend, and the attorneys-at-law had a surprising amount of frustration trying to identify whether "Mlle. Marie- Claire Une" meant the Lady Une that served as Treize's secretary or the emissary from Earth. So it was that the official reading of the last will and testament of a man whose very existence had affected billions of lives was attended by exactly two people: myself, and Lucrezia Noin, who had been extracted from her job as chairwoman of a new civic corps organization for the event. I had been no particular favorite of hers before, and she had never held as high a position in my esteem as the colonel had, but when we met by chance in the solicitor's office and each discovered that the other cared deeply enough to dress in black, any brewing feud was instantly called off.
His will was much as we had expected. Treize controlled a fortune equaled by few mere mortals; it was just as much a result of his shrewd business dealings as it was of inherited family money, and even after his death, much of it was tightly locked into charitable trusts or funds -- he had left a generous sum for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Sank, several scholarships, directed at various private universities, and a considerable lump sum for distribution by the government for purposes of rehabilitation of the people of both the colonies and Earth. Another substantial amount was to be rendered to either Zechs Merquise or Milliard Peacecraft, whichever could be found; if he could not be located the money was to be held in trust by his sister, Relena Dorlan, née Peacecraft, until he could be located or the time of her death, at which time it would be released to her heirs. Lucrezia Noin was given lifetime tenure in the Department of Extraterrestrial Research of Treize's alma mater, with whom he had apparently exercised considerable influence. I, in addition to being named executrix, was to inherit his entire private estate, including most of his Terran properties and all of his personal possessions. The last clause was something I had never expected: a savings account and a trust fund specifically in the name of his daughter, Mariemaia Khushrenada, whom I was to locate and care for as best I could.
To say that was a surprise would be an understatement. I had known that Treize was once married, but never had he mentioned a child; being Treize and being cautious, however, he may have sought to keep her out of the political conflict by refraining from publicly acknowledging her existence. The fact that I had been asked to care for her suggested that she was still a minor at the time the will was written, and I knew for certain that it had been revised less than a year before. I set myself to tracking the child down, and for the next seven months, I spent more time looking for her than I did tending my own life.
Of all the things Treize asked of me, of all of the dangerous missions I undertook and orders I shouted in the heat of the battle, Mariemaia was my one and only failure. I was too late, and there was no opportunity to make amends. I will forever carry the memory of what happened then, and it will always remind me that if Treize has found a way to watch me after his own passing, he is disappointed.
I did what I could for Mariemaia, and then did the next best thing and departed. I am evidently not cut out for children, although I haven't yet managed to damage any of Noin's. She and Merquise were married not long after their reunion and Lucrezia was with child within a year; I am not normally one to find humor in everyday life, but I must comment that watching a woman seven months pregnant walk into a zero-gravity chamber -- in maternity clothes and her husband's borrowed Preventers jacket -- and utterly humiliate a dozen recruits two months into maneuverability training was most amusing. Noin had a sharp tongue under normal circumstances, but the irritability and lower back pain that appeared to settle in for a permanent stay perhaps a month before she was due with her first made her swing from even and calm to perfectly vicious if someone happened to catch her in a temper and say the wrong thing. The birth of the baby alleviated these somewhat; not so much from a lessening of the symptoms, but because it would have been twice as difficult for Noin to keep up such a rapid stream of scathing personal attacks on two hours' sleep a night. Merquise, while almost as good with his first son as with his mobile suit, was no help at all with insults; he simply did not have the same sort of hair- trigger temper Noin did, and preferred to glare erring recruits (or officers) into submission rather than browbeat them there. Relena Peacecraft, then quite a successful political leader, was very quietly thrilled to be an aunt, though she did not often get a chance to see her new nephew.
In remembrance of the man who, deliberately or accidentally, had ensured we would all meet, the child's middle name was Treize.
Noin went on to endure two more pregnancies and two more year-long spates of being sleepless and cross to produce a pair of daughters; one of them was dark like her mother, and the other a sunny blonde in the manner of her father, and both of them were tiny angels until they were left alone with their sometime babysitter Tante Une, and then they both became half-size demons from the nether depths of Hell. Maximillion Treize was not enough older than Gretchen and Fiona to take on child-care duties by himself, but I found myself on occasion nearly begging him for any help he could render with his two sisters. Somewhere, I was certain, Colonel Treize was sitting comfortably in a wicker chair, with a brandy snifter in his hand, laughing with a great deal of humor and dignity at his former secretary trying her level best to change the diaper on one toddler while attempting to keep her sister out of the knife drawer in the kitchen and yelling for her brother to put down his game and come help before Gretchen managed to slit her own wrists by mistake. I could only be thankful that the Sank Kingdom was to pass to Maximillion -- at seven, already a solemn and thoughtful boy -- and not his squabbling sisters, then one and a half and three.
I was later to eat those words, unfortunately; at the ages of twelve and fourteen, Gretchen and Fiona magically transformed into perfectly poised young ladies, closely in the manner of their aunt Relena, whereas Max turned seventeen and immediately took off for parts unknown with his erstwhile fiancée, a girl by name of Mariona. I was not quite so apoplectic as his parents were, though I was faintly annoyed that he had not even thought to collaborate with his Tante Une in the matter; I found myself quite liking Mariona, for the most part, and thought she showed great potential for a girl so young. Once his parents recovered from his abrupt -- but ultimately successful -- marriage, Merquise suddenly found himself father to two girls with eyes for no one but the new Preventer boys, and that sparked a brand-new conflict in the household. Noin and I refused to help him in his quest to wall the sisters into their room until they reached a reasonable dating age, such as their mid-forties, but at the very least I pointed out that if they insisted on pursuing military men, they would do better to stand outside the officers academy and look charming than they would sitting across the street from the barracks and giggling. The two of them took it to heart after several years of repetition and at age twenty, Gretchen wed a lieutenant colonel with ginger hair who reminded me painfully of Treize, the very first time I walked into his office to begin my tour of duty. Fiona had a more difficult time finding a mate; she married once at sixteen, mostly to spite her father, and once more, at twenty-two, to someone immeasurably more acceptable. Between the three of them, they gave the family six grandchildren, and both Noin and I were pressed into day-care service again. "Once more into the fray," as Noin put it, the first time we were asked to watch the first two squealing toddlers, one from Max, one from Gretchen.
We were not the only ones aiding with the brood; for one thing, Noin and I wouldn't ever have allowed the rest of the family to bow out. Merquise was popular with the young boys for the tales he told of mobile suits and fighting for glory and justice; and he was just as popular with the young girls for the long tassel of hair that had gone grey and been tied back bit by bit over the years, but had never entirely gone away. The six of them, clustered together in Noin's villa in Sank, had some impressive quarrels over whether their grandfather was allowed to tell stories with explosions in them while the girls were braiding his hair -- or, if you asked the boys, whether the girls were allowed to braid his hair while he was telling stories with explosions in them. Their grandparents, less the effects of gravity, were in startling shape for a couple of their age, which was fortunate for those times when one of them was chasing a pair of six-year olds up and down the spiral stairs and the other was chasing spoonfuls of dinner around the kitchen after attempting to feed three toddlers and an infant at once -- not the most intelligent idea Merquise ever had, but they had only had three to deal with, once upon a time, and Maximillion had enough of a head start over his sisters that there were never more than two with bibs in any given year. Noin and I witnessed our revenge some twenty years later when the eldest pair married not a month apart and each managed a child within a year of the wedding. All of the six grandchildren wed, some more than once, and not one of them had any less than two children of their own, and we received a heartfelt apology from one of the girls for the portion of the incessant mess she had personally been responsible for from the ages of one to ten inclusive. For a third time, Noin and I were given slurred and babbled nicknames by a small army of children and drafted into the officer corps to help, although fortunately no one in that generation was ever cruel enough to ask me to watch the entire clan at once. I taught many of that round to read and write in Russian, his language, as their great-aunt was helping her own grandchildren -- by the blue-eyed pilot, I am fairly certain, though the two of them were never officially married, and he never stayed in one place long enough to question about it -- negotiate important treaties with the New Ukraine people.
I feel fortunate, having survived this long. Though I have never married and have no biological family to speak of, Noin and Merquise's great- grandchildren are now in their teens or beyond. A startling position to be in, when there was a time not long after Treize's death when I would go to sleep each night doubting I would rise to see the next day. They have ever spoken to me with proper respect, some calling me Lady and some calling me Tante, although Rietta's children one day decided to call me Belle-Mère whenever their parents were gone; whether they meant to call me their stepmother or merely, looking with the eyes of a child, to call me pretty, I still cannot guess, and of course now that they are older they cannot fathom what they thought at that age. My ego councils me to conclude the former, for though I have tried to keep myself neat and retain much of what I had when I was younger, what I had when I was younger was long and spare, and has become more so as I age. The more I think on the comment he made about my figure the day we met, the more I think it was an ironic turn of phrase and not a literal one; Treize was notoriously charming and words such as those were likely just a part of making my acquaintance. Still, he was a large part of the reason I was once convinced I was pretty, and I try not to argue with things like that. The chocolate brown hair he knew has turned white, and two chignons at the base of my neck have merged into one fat knot pinned to the crown of my head; my glasses have gotten thicker over time, frames as well as lenses, and are so strong I now have to remove them to read. I have settled, for the most part, into his French estate; for years I moved from home to home in Europe whenever one generation of children was grown and gone, and came back to Lille, close to Sank, when the new ones arrived and I could watch them, and care for them, and keep Noin from being completely inundated with her progeny. The house is much bigger than I truly need, large enough to echo even when filled with small grubby children, and when the small grubby children are gone again it echoes even louder with words no longer spoken in its halls.
I never go into his study. There must be an inch of dust on his mahogany desk now, spread across his blotter. There is one window that sits directly behind his chair that was left leaning open the last time he left this house, and it would not have been closed even for the first summer squall if the groundskeeper hadn't done it himself.
I find that many of the reminders bother me less as time goes on; one that has oddly never bothered me at all is the scent of tea roses. They were omnipresent, around Treize; vases of them in his office, enormous walls of them around the houses on all of his estates where they could possibly be grown. I find I've taken up his habit of soaking in a tub of fragrant rosewater, although I don't recall ever seeing Treize with the bubbles clear up to his chin as I tend to do. It's pleasant, a reminder of the past that brings up only the good memories, and I see why Treize indulged himself so. I sink into a misty stupor of memories, and then into the bathtub up to my chin. Breathing, somehow, is difficult, slow and sleepy, and it takes too much energy to battle against it and so I don't. Hot water touches my lips, skims up over my cheekbones, and I close my eyes to the softly colored bubbles.
It's so peaceful. So very silent. There is nothing in this house now but his footsteps, just as on that one short weekend so very long ago. I honored my promise. Though there were no remains found in the depths of space, I decided a memorial would be in order. Mine was not the only one; there were several stones and plaques funded by historians and foundations. But mine was the only one sealed in a sphere and sent into orbit on a satellite, where he would have been able to see the Earth and all of the colonies, to watch over the world he had wrought, though he had been one of the many who never came home to it.
The quiet footfalls come to the door, and though my eyes do not open beneath the water I can hear the ornate lever click as it turns and engages the latch. Only sound in my mind. Only sound in the house. One and the same, for all intents and purposes now. There is only one person it could possibly be, and as my face breaks the surface of the water once more, the door opens properly, and he slips in, ginger hair striking against the shoulders of his white uniform shirt. The coat is gone, the cravat is gone, the gloves are gone; he is a solider in the trenches no longer, but a noble coming home from a war that is long over and gone. He smiles at me, a touch ruefully, and closes the door behind him.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," he says softly.
There are no words. I pull myself out of the water, elbows on the edge of the tub, and dark hair threads in front of my eyes, wet and clinging. He holds out his hand, patient as ever, and trembling I draw myself from the tub to stand, bare-breasted and streaming water, before him. I feel new, and as I feel, I am; his gaze flows down my body as the remaining bubbles do, and I know that when he said that I was beautiful, he meant it as truth and not as friendly jest. His eyes say but one thing when they return to meet mine, and it is that he understands -- has always understood -- my heart, and regrets only that we had no time to compose the words that said so while we both lived; that he watched me and he missed me as I missed him, deeply, completely.
I lay my hand in his, and the aristocrat that I had known for once and for so long pulls me gently into forever. I will never miss him again.