"There are precisely five things I know about him that you won't find in that book."
The woman looked up from her reading, startled despite herself by the sound. She'd been sitting in the room for hours now, determined to be unflustered by the blatant rudeness of the other occupant. She'd seen his eyes widen in the first seconds after she'd opened the door, seen he knew who she was, seen he knew that she knew who he was – and everything after that had been merely a quiet war of wills as to which of them couldn't take the tension first.
She wondered if he'd also known he was going to lose. She was younger, healthier, more patient than he had ever been, and not constitutionally habituated to respond to pale-skinned, blue-eyed redheads.
"That was what you came here to ask, wasn't it?"
His voice was harsh, but the weakness in it was unmistakeable. It made her look at him again, this man that once had been unrealistically beautiful, and, for a moment, regret. How would this conversation have gone if she'd found him sooner, when she'd been a girl still and he'd not been counting off his life in hours?
She'd never know and it wasn't in her nature to mourn the impossible. He wasn't the first former pilot to discover that flying reactor-powered suits wasn't a good idea, and he wouldn't be the last. She supposed he might even be grateful to have it all over.
"I came to ask you to speak," she replied softly, as she always did. "If you wish to speak about him, that will be your choice." She closed the book, set it neatly onto the side table and folded her hands in her lap without hurrying. "If you tell me to go, I will," she reminded, repeating the only words they'd exchanged before these. "If not, I will stay and hear whatever you choose to say, whenever you choose to say it."
He barked a rough laugh, more cough than anything else, and shook his head. He'd kept his hair, despite his health, because he'd refused all treatment. Yes, she decided, he would be grateful.
"You must have studied the recordings for hours," he accused her, pushing himself to sit more upright. "You have him so exactly right. Congratulations."
It wasn't a compliment.
"I haven't looked at a recording since my eighth birthday," she corrected, without inflection. "Not of him or you, or any of you. You're seeing only what you want to see."
"Am I?" He pinned her with a gaze that, once, would have been icy. "I don't think so. In this, if nothing else, I'm rather the expert. And you are not what I would ever want," he added, and he was being deliberately nasty, hatred born from pain, envy and loss.
Mariemeia blinked, and then smiled at what remained of Zechs Marquise. "What I am is irrelevant. I'm here to hear you, if you wish. If not, then tell me to go. I can't force you and I wouldn't want to."
Unaccountably, Zechs laughed again, something in his face twisting. "You probably could, actually. I'm not in any shape to fight back." He drew a wheezing breath, tilting his head to stare down his nose at her, a hawk studying a mouse. "The rumours are right, then? You're Treize Khushrenada's bastard daughter, self-determined curator of our murderous histories."
Mariemeia smiled back with a graceful shrug. "What I am is irrelevant," she repeated. "Will you speak?"
She thought for a moment he'd refuse her, this last, most important tale-bearer, and if he did, she wouldn't get another chance. Her rules were her rules, a decade in the making. If he told her to go, she would without murmur – and he would be dead before either of them could change their minds.
Then he slumped back into his pillows and chuckled drily. "God, he'd hate you," he sneered. "Look at you – second-hand dress, ugly shoes, short hair, traipsing around the sphere asking insipid questions of monsters without even the will to insist on the answers. Everything he was, everything he left you – and this is what you do with it? He'd hate it – hate you."
For a moment, Mariemeia stilled, swallowing against a wince of pain. They were the cheap shots of a wounded animal and far from the worst insults she'd had levelled at her, but they stung.
Then she let it go, as with so much else. "Would he?" she asked, breathing out the personal pain, reaching out to activate her tiny recorder.
Zechs met her eyes, then looked away. "No," he admitted. "I - apologise," he said, and even to her, who didn't know this man at all, he sounded rusty in saying those words. "He wouldn't hate it at all. He'd approve, I think. It's a far fitter memorial than any of the rest of us managed."
"That's not why I'm doing it," Mariemeia corrected gently, waving away the apology with an agile flick of her fingers.
"No?" The blond man shifted himself again, flinching from something she couldn't see. "Pity. I'd have respected you more if it had been, rather than some personal hair-shirt." He shook his head. "What are your rules for this nonsense, then?"
The woman smoothed her skirt, feeling the inexpensive cotton in a way she never had before. "There are no rules. Whatever you wish to say, on whatever subject, I will listen to. When you tell me you have nothing left to say, I'll leave."
"And then you do – what? What's the point of your little project?"
"I do nothing," Mariemeia replied. "I'll add your name as you give it, the date, and that's all. I'm not a journalist, or a biographer," she promised, answering the most asked question to spare him needing to find the air. "There won't be a book or an article. I'm hear to listen, and nothing more."
"Why record then?" Zechs challenged. His eyes were narrow as they looked at the recorder, the most expensive thing she owned.
Without comment, Mariemeia reached out again and turned it off. "If you don't wish me to, I won't. Most speakers prefer to know they'll be heard by more than me. I wouldn't presume to impose my transcription, so I record."
Zechs blinked, slow and considering. "You don't need the recordings," he said, and it was statement, not a question.
Mariemeia answered him with a single, patient head-shake. "I don't." She gave him the beat she saw he needed from the way his eyes flashed in the gloom, then folded her hands together again. "The choice is and remains yours. I stay or I go, I listen or I don't, as you choose."
He replied by flicking a dismissive hand at her recorder, giving her permission without saying it, and she turned the little device back on.
"That will be in your book, I suppose," he asked, when the minutes had stretched in brimming silence. "His memory. I know people speculated how he did it, how he could be who he was so young. Photographic and Eidetic," he bit off. "Always. Naturally so, I think. It did him no favours."
The woman nodded, but did not speak. She didn't speak; that wasn't her role and she had no part in this story.
"Most people envied him. They went on and on about how useful it must be. I think -" He stopped, swallowing against something. "I remember saying to him that I was sorry he couldn't ever forget anything. I think I was... nine, maybe ten. Young, definitely. Before my own memories started to fade. I can't remember my mother's face, or her voice, but I also can't remember what she sounded like screaming. He told me later it was a worthy trade."
There was a thread of bitterness in his voice, but also something very much like fondness, the recall of a memory that was both treasured and painful.
"You look surprised by that," Zechs accused, although Mariemeia was sure she looked nothing of the sort. "I'd have thought you'd understand."
The blond man drew a rattling breath, congestion making the sound harsh to hear. Blood, they'd told her. A man who'd owned the skies would drown in a sea of his own body.
"A curious fact for you," he continued, when he'd gained the air. "If you take a photograph, the mind plays a trick. The act of taking the picture blanks the live image from your memory; you can only ever remember the photograph. Ironic, no?"
He gestured towards the now-closed book. "Is it in there?"
Mariemeia turned to follow his hand. "Is what in there?" she asked patiently.
"That he took photographs?"
The red-haired woman reached for the book, a newly published biography of Treize Khushrenada written by no-one she'd ever heard of, and turned it over in her hands slowly. "It mentions it, yes. A hobby, it says. There's two pictures he took. He was quite good."
Zechs smiled, a chilly little thing. "Lying author," he said. "It was anything but a childish pastime." He tipped his head to her, offering her the smile. "Five things that won't be in the book, I said. This is the first – his photographs were his way of controlling his own memory. He recalled what he shot and only that. The play on 'photographic' never stopped amusing him."
He shook his head slowly. "He took pictures of the most horrible things – wounded animals, a car accident when we were children. Dead pilots, downed suits when we were older. You've heard of his list?"
Mariemeia nodded quietly. General Khushrenada's List of Heroes was infamous now.
"He started that by putting the names to the photographs. His palm camera was in his pocket every minute I knew him. A coping mechanism for the world's most composed man. He wasn't, but he was a damned good actor. Focusing on using the camera pulled his mind from the scents and the smells; taking the picture blanked the image." Zechs shrugged carelessly, as though imparting nothing of import. "It gave him a terribly good eye, after a while. Perfect training for his future career – how to arrange an image and how to capture a moving target both."
The woman blinked slowly, but said nothing.
"It sounds trivial, doesn't it?" Zechs asked. "The reason he took pictures. Who cares, really? Why does it matter? It's not any more or less significant than the fact that, well-earned reputation as a fencer though he had, he actually preferred boxing. Or that he had an incorrigible sweet tooth and indulged it."
He shrugged again, his eyes on hers and not friendly. "All that made it into your book, I imagine, and why not? It's all true – but it's also irrelevant, if only because he knew it would come out one day. But the photographs... well. You'll see."
There was nothing Mariemeia could do to that but nod. It was his story to tell, how he chose to tell it.
Zechs reached for the glass of water on his bedside table, sipping and swallowing in what looked like discomfort, before placing it down again and looking at her. "Do you believe in God?" he asked.
"God?" Mariemeia asked, a little confused. "In what sense? I'm not religious, no. I've never been able to believe in a greater power shaping the world. It seems... naïve."
The blond man, unaccountably, laughed harshly. "That's kinder than I was, but Treize Khushrenada, naïve. I don't think anyone ever called him that. Treize was religious," he said bluntly.
"I know," Mariemeia answered calmly. "His service record lists him as Roman Catholic."
Zechs gave her raised eyebrows, perhaps at the casual mention of sight of Treize's records, but didn't pursue it. "So does mine," he said instead. "And I assure you, I never once went to Church for myself. He did." He coughed a little. "All those pictures of him, in full regalia, with his sword on his hip, or in his hands, or saluting his troops – so very much the natural Commander, the natural soldier. Born to it, raised to it, educated from birth... His first, best and only lie," he said darkly.
"...A lie?" Mariemeia asked. He had clearly decided that his was to be a conversation, not a recitation, and she could play her part if needed.
"The second thing you'll never find in any book," Zechs agreed. "He wasn't born to it. Anything but, in fact. When I first met him, he was a quiet boy, deeply intellectual, patient and kind to everyone. He welcomed me into his home, his life without pause, shared his toys and books willingly. Easy done, you might think, for a spoiled only child of Romefeller, but he wasn't. His mother had been married before his father; Treize was her third child. And on the night we first met, his own life had also been ripped apart, no less than mine."
He coughed again, then reached into the drawer of the nightstand, lifting free a small bound folio, loose sheets of paper and a loop of beads tied into the cord holding it closed. "Do you know what this is?" he asked her, untying the beads and holding them out to her.
Mariemeia took them, feeling them slip cool and heavy into her palm. They were simple, fine silver chain linking a single bead to a group of ten, loose clasp suspending an unadorned cross. Smooth, worn polished and slick, dark and semi-precious, there was nothing about the beads themselves, either, that made it a remarkable object. "It's a rosary," she said, realising.
Zechs nodded once, then held his hand out for the bracelet, fingers starting to work the beads between them automatically. "It is. 'Arto gave these to Treize when he was six, and his mother told him he'd be joining the Church. I don't know when he started wearing them all the time, exactly, but he was when I met him. I next to never saw him without them."
He sighed tiredly. "It's an old formula. Eldest son, Antonio, for the titles – killed in a car crash three weeks before. Second son, Bartolome, for the Military – killed in Sanc, the only Alliance Casualty. Arto's death saved my life, by putting Treize's father, Tollin, in Sanc, but it destroyed Treize's. The day we met, Treize had just gone from being the third son, with a wanted role in a Church he was utterly devoted to, to being told he was going to Victoria to replace his brothers.
Zechs closed his eyes, playing with the beads still. "He lost his future, but never his faith. He was well known for being found sitting, eyes closed and smiling, serene. It got him a reputation for arrogance, smugness, especially when he did it whilst under fire, but he was usually just praying."
Mariemeia looked across to the book, looking at the photograph on the dust jacket, a still shot of Treize in his dress uniform. He was, as Zechs had just described, sitting with his hands folded and legs crossed, eye closed and a small smile playing around his mouth. Where and when it had been taken, she didn't know, but the sense of peace radiating from the man was palpable even twenty years and a lifetime later.
"He was going to be a priest?" she asked without thinking, still caught looking.
"Yes," Zechs confirmed. "He was the 3rd son, the half-brother. It wasn't a fate he was unhappy with – he loved his faith, liked the intellectual challenge of the languages and the catechism. Devotion suited him, and he never strayed from it, even when it started to break him, even when it killed him. Poor Une never stood a chance, although I forgave her for falling for the front. As I said, he was a damned good actor and rose-water spas would have anyone thinking he was a blatant libertine."
"He was an engineer?" the woman questioned. "Forgive me, but it doesn't seem..."
"Science will tell us how the universe works, but it will never explain why we care about knowing," Zechs replied softly. "His answer to me, when I asked him how he could reconcile his engineering with his faith. 'God demands our service in many ways; mine is to control this blaze, as much as I can.' A simple reason for so much of what he built."
Mariemeia sat back in her chair, stilled by what she was hearing. "Forgive me," she repeated softly, "but is that why?"
"Why?" Zechs checked, then seemed to understand. He shook his head with a bitter little laugh. "Oh, no. It might be why he could – no one does single focus like the pious – but, no. He fought for his to be a Bella Justa, a Just war, between combatants only, but it wasn't why."
She wanted to ask, suddenly, to break her own most stringent rule, but she breathed through the impulse and pushed it away. His story, his to tell.
To distract herself, she looked at the picture again, caught again by the youth and surety of the man in it. Strange to think he'd been younger than she was now when it was taken, and the man in the room with her, even younger.
"He does look peaceful," she allowed herself.
Zechs tilted his head, looking at the book himself, eyes flashing weary sadness. "He does; he always did. I was always jealous."
Then he laughed softly, the first genuinely warm sound she'd had out of him. "Zechs?" she prompted, wanting to capture his thoughts, if she could. "Will you tell me?"
The blond waved a hand at the picture, then looked up at her, eyes sparkling. "That picture was taken on his jet – I recognise the interior. The 3rd thing that will never be in any book?" he asked, and he was asking her, she recognised – he really had forgotten about the recorder and really was speaking to her as though this was a conversation.
"Tell me?" she prompted.
"Treize was never a pilot. He knew how; he went to Victoria, he passed the simulators, but he never served in a front line role. He went straight from Training into Games and Theory, then into teaching for a year to get his field time for his Majority, before going back to Brussels as a Political Officer to General Catalonia."
Maremeia frowned. "His career path is -"
"Record, yes," Zechs interrupted. "That's not what I was referring to. You aren't curious why he wasn't a pilot? He had the training, the times and reflexes. He could, when he needed to, so why not go for the surety of the front-line role? It would have been a faster rank-climber – I proved that, and so did Noin. It took him ten years to make Colonel, it took me five to finish out only one grade under him, and if he helped me, then Catalonia helped him no less."
He laughed again, his fingers coming to rest on the photo gently. "He, very literally, didn't have the stomach for it. Travel made him ill, and that was enough to see front-line roles barred to him. He was fine when he was driving or flying himself, like most people, but not when he wasn't in control and a military pilot spends a lot of time on transports between one mission and another. Even the drugs only worked for him about 90% of the time, poor bastard. There's a reason he got out the horse and carriage later, when he was mostly based in Brussels full time."
He coughed again, suddenly, wet and painful, air coming harshly at the end of the spasm. "Although, oddly, I think it saved him some moments he wouldn't have been able to explain, otherwise," he said, when he'd breathed again.
He opened his folio, spilling papers onto the faded cotton sheets covering him. "A story for you," he offered, fingers sorting through the sheets and pictures. "One I can guarantee you've never heard, and one which will make sense of the things I've told you so far."
Mariemeia smiled gently. "If you want to tell me," she agreed.
"It's why you're here," Zechs replied, then found the pages he was looking for and grasped them. "I told you Treize was a Political Officer before he was anything else, and whilst he was, a good part of his job was media relations. He was tasked with controlling the way the Alliance was presented to the Sphere – a fatal mistake, eventually, but there was a time he did his job as he was supposed to. He was extremely good at white-wash, making a cock-up look like a success, and even better at justifying a horrible abuse of power. So good that, not only did the reporters buy his spin, very often, they didn't even bother publishing whatever incident he'd been spinning about."
Mariemeia nodded, but said nothing.
"I remember, absolutely, the incident when he realised what he'd done. I was seventeen, newly a Major, and in a role that saw me providing a lot of fast response support to the Alliance's core troops. Fun, for me – swoop in, show off, and swoop home again in time for tea. It was great PR for me, the Specials and everyone associated, and Treize had taken to following me into whatever theatre I was in, because he was nearly guaranteed the kind of shiny nonsense stories he was peddling on Catalonia's behalf back then."
Zechs swallowed and closed his eyes. "Normally, I found it entertaining to watch his entourage arrive – sparkly Staff officers in polished boots and silk gloves – and some of the pictures he made me take were just funny. That awful image of me standing on the shoulder of my Leo, cape blowing about, was one of them. It took an hour to get that shot, because I kept laughing so much. This day was – different."
He handed Mariemeia one of the pictures, and she looked down to a see a grayscale desert, shadow and highlight spreading in front of her, burned out vehicles abandoned on a highway. "Arabia," she said quietly, identifying the image as one which was really quite famous. "This is the end of the Alliance's Arabia campaign in 193. They hailed it as a bloodless victory, towns freed from rebel control."
"They lied," Zechs replied, matching her pitch. "Which, I think everyone knew, really, but not how much. Understand, breaking transport links was normal, a tactically sound action that even Treize continued when he took command. A no-fly screen without friendly ident. was always step one of a campaign. Cutting major highways was step two. It was just – normally, they were empty when we did it."
He looked down, at the papers he was holding. "It was end-ex, for the Alliance units in the region. We were replacing them, to push into the strongholds they'd been aiming for for three years without success, and I think, rather than all the hassle of transporting their ammo loads home and safing it, they just spent it. They were pissed off at us taking over, at not succeeding and a mile stretch of highway, with the justification of a rebel convoy in the middle of the traffic, was a pretty target. They strafed everything on it, with everything they had. By the time we got there, there wasn't a huge amount left that wasn't on fire."
"I'd seen a lot, by then. Unlike Treize, I was a front-line officer, one of the Specials Aces, which says nothing nice about my own kill-count at that point." Zechs shook his head, lips pressing together white for a moment. "I'd never seen anything like this. The road was covered with ammo-cases, deep enough to walk on, cars, trucks and suits wrecked, glass melted in the heat, metal still burning. Men, women and children still in the vehicles, fused to their seats. I remember, as clear as anything, wondering who had thought to shoot someone's pet dog, because it was lying in the midle of the road."
Mariemeia shuddered, but she forced herself to keep still, listening, only listening.
"I lost it, rounded on the Alliance Colonel in charge and screamed at him. I shouldn't have done – I should have been paying attention, because I let myself forget Treize was half an hour behind me with his usual cadre of brass."
Zechs closed his eyes. "I – tried to keep him in the car. I knew, by then, that he'd never seen anything even close to that. He hadn't been in Sanc; he wasn't a combat pilot. He wasn't innocent, but it was – different. I was angry, furious, at what they'd done. He was..."
He tightened his hands, creasing his papers uncaringly. "It made him sick. The smell, I think, probably. Suits burned when they crashed, so we were used to it, as much as anyone could be, but he wasn't. Less than two minutes after he got out of the car, and it was pure, shocked reflex. He blamed the car-ride, when I tried to ask him if he was all right, but neither of us believed it. Then he started taking pictures, to cope, and to record."
"They were never published." Zechs's voice had dropped, forcing Mariemeia to lean forward if she wanted to hear him. "A lot of his were, but not these, although I know he pushed for them to be, later. Here."
Mariemeia took the papers he handed her, and looked down. They were awful images, blasted vehicles, sand melted smooth and the people. One in particular made her shiver, a young man, burned and blackened, the pattern of muscle and bone clearly exposed on his face and arms as he reached through his missing windscreen. He'd been trying to climb free but he'd burnt before he could.
"Was this your fourth?" she asked softly. "That no-one would ever believe he could be horrified?"
Zechs shook his head slowly. "No. I'm not done yet." He tipped his head back, tired now, limited strength fading. "Three days later, he took those pictures to an Alliance command meeting and demanded the removal of the officers who'd been in charge. He told me after what the response was."
"They said no," Mariemeia guessed, although it wasn't much of one.
"They said no," Zechs agreed. "Specifically, Noventa was irritated about making the road useable again, and Septem... Treize told me that Septem had complained about what a waste of tech it was. He didn't care about the people, just that the Alliance could have re-deployed the suits and the vehicles."
"That's your fourth thing," he added, a moment later. "The reason he did what he did. The utter lack of respect the Alliance had for life. He was devoutly religious and people, the planet, they were God's creations. Too, he wasn't a pilot, and he deeply respected those of us who were. His soldiers were everything to him. He had Une assassinate Septem the way he did purely because of his response to my first encounter with Heero Yuy. The man cared nothing for the pilots I lost that day, only about the three mobile suits. Treize hated him for that."
Mariemeia looked at the pictures again, then at the photo of Treize, and then at the man in the bed, seeing the pallor to his face that told her he'd exceeded his failing strength. "A worthy tale," she said quietly, knowing they were done. "Thank you for sharing it with me."
Zechs opened his eyes, faded blue. "You're leaving," he said, and it wasn't a question.
Mariemeia nodded slowly. "We have nothing left to say to one another, and I will not impose. You should rest."
"My lord, you're like him," Zechs said quietly. "And I'll rest plenty soon enough, I think."
The woman brushed back red hair and raised an eyebrow. "You know that I'm not," she corrected. "You said it yourself – he was devotedly Catholic all his life. He couldn't have been my father."
The man paused, and then handed her another picture with shaking fingers. "I said five things," he reminded carefully. "This is the 5th. In 189, Treize met your mother on L3. Exactly how is your tale to tell, but he was your father – and he knew it."
The woman held his gaze, and then looked at the picture of the baby with sudden tears in her eyes. "You think...?"
The man only smiled. "I know. So. One more story for you to record, perhaps," he suggested, then closed his eyes one last time. "Will you speak?" he asked.
The woman sat back down slowly, and didn't move again until the next morning, when she turned off the recorder, laid a gentle kiss on cold skin and left, smooth beads around her wrist and pictures in her bag.