A/N: A series of one-shots focussing on one or more of the women and girls of Gundam Wing. Every chapter is stand-alone.
Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just borrowing them.
Mike from Mars
Noin knew that back in the infancy of spaceflight when manned spacecrafts took an enormous amount of effort and resources and didn't make it further than the moon anyway, fiction had created the popular idea of alien Martians. They had been everything from threatening to friendly to naive and innocent.
Noin didn't know why so many fictional accounts had chosen Mars as the origin of these aliens, but she thought that if there really had been intelligent life on Mars, she could understand why they had left. Noin had lived many places, from her native Italy to Lake Victoria. She had been to Siberia and the Antarctic, and seen most of what the Earth had to offer – tundra, frozen ice wastes, desert, jungle, as well as the almost overly cultivated landscape of continental Europe. She had lived by the sea in the Sank Kingdom, and had kept a home in land-locked Brussels during her first year as a Preventer, although she hadn't spent much time there. Noin had even spent some time in the space colonies, with their artificial atmosphere and the hum of technology everywhere.
But even the space colonies tried to approximate Earth, simulating wind and gravity and even grass, although only the agricultural colonies took the trouble of creating the soil necessary to grow the real thing, and that was exclusively used for feeding livestock. Mars, on the other hand...
Mars was a desert, but nothing like the deserts on Earth. The stars were wrong. The air wasn't breathable. The gravity was wrong. What small traces of water existed on the surface wasn't nearly enough to provide the work crews with a daily ration. So far, water had to be brought in with the food – and the shipping line was unreliable. Noin had volunteered for spacial ice mining, needing to get off the planet where even time was wrong. The colonies kept to an Earth time cycle, but Mars had its own rotation.
She loved outer space, but she thought it would take some effort to come to love Mars.
Zechs was here, they were finally together again, but she wondered if that would prove to be enough. Through all their time together, he had remained remarkably dense about what she wanted from him, and she was tired of waiting.
A strong arm grabbed her around the waist, and she had wrenched loose and twisted it behind the person's back before she realised it was Zechs. She let go and was about to scold him for sneaking up on her when she realised that he was laughing excitedly. His eyes were sparkling and his long hair had been braided – she would have to take a picture and send to Duo.
"Isn't it wonderful, Noin? A whole new world, and we get to help shaping it!" She hadn't heard him sound so elated since...well, ever. He pulled her against him again, and Noin allowed herself to hope.
They were strangers in this strange, new land, but maybe it would be possible to call it home.