Dedicated to Karina. Thank you for your lovely reviews!
The Lightning Arc 7 - My Rose
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Rating: M/NC-15 for m/m relationship
Pairing: Zechs and Treize
Warnings: m/m love, some swearing - if you are hoping for explicit scenes though, you are likely to be disappointed.
Spoilers: everywhere, in all my stories.
Summary: see Chapter 1.
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Chapter 3 - Do Not Believe
After the death of Treize Khushrenada, the world he had shaped kept turning, while layer by layer, the old world was peeled away, like sunburnt skin will flake to reveal a fresh, raw newness beneath... trading war for peace, conflict for restitution, despair for hope. Just as he had foreseen, his vision turning out as precise as his plans had been.
Yet for the man who had conquered the Zero system, this bright new world held no lustre. The most brilliantpilot ever, the acefighter who once had flown the most advanced weapon ever developed, now wanted to remember nothing. Dazed and hurting, he was lingering on a white hospital bed in a farflung corner of the snowbound vastness of Siberia. Here, no one knew his name, and the majority of the sparse population had barely heard of the exploits of the Lightning Count.
Barely in his twenties, Zechs Marquise was too numb to care whether he lived or died. Cocooned into layers of white cotton bandages, collagen weave, and for some time placed into the protective shell of an oxygen tent that would help hisscorched body form a new skin, he lay dying inside even as humanity was renewing itself with all the vigour of life after death.
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He had spent weeks in the small hospital. Weeks turning into months while his life ticked over amid bandages and the reek of chloroform and sickness. Heavily sedated against the pain of his burns and fractures, spun into an intricate web of cables, syringes and blinking machines, a tube stuck down his throat to ventilate his lungs, the vague light of his small white room never fading or brightening. Steady, unwavering, timeless.
The medical staffdid not know who he was. They took care of him as they would of any human being that was hurt and suspended in the neverland between death and life, and they fought as doggedly for his life as he fought to leave it.
They won. Their warmth, their incessant work that he made so hard, their compassion with this young soldier whose eyes seemed so sad...
He refused to come round.
They shocked his heart into thudding again.
He denied his body the food they tried to force down his mouth soon after the tube had been removed.
They stuck another tube down his stomach to feed him.
He struggled to come off his bed when he was told to stay put.
They strapped him down.
The fight of wills lasteduntil they were content that he had given up. Yielding. Giving in to sheer superiority of force. Outnumbered, alone, with no backup, he let them make him live. His only visitor - a woman, with short dark hair and a firm, commanding voice - spent long hours by his bedside, to hold his hand, to talk in a quiet tone as if to herself. She told him about snow melting outside, and the first breath of spring, late and reluctantin the cold Siberian winter. He cast about in his fogged mind and remembered a name. "Lucy?"
She turned away so that he could not see her face, but he knew from the set of her shoulders, and wondered why on earth anyone would cry for him. In his head, in the black mud that was slopping against his skull beyond the pain of his burned skin, a strange, low wailing echoed... persistent, stinging and slicing into his brains...
Zero.
His memories crashed over him like a blinding wave, his eyes flew open, his body reared off the bed, and he began to scream...
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He drifted back to consciousness later, with a nurse and a doctor rushing in as soon as the monitors showed that their most troublesome patient had woken from his drug-induced stupor. He was back on the ventilator, and time had slipped, like sand slips from an open hand.
Combat Stress Reaction, selective amnesia, dissociative disorder...
Once they knew that they had succeeded in saving his life, they had labeled and boxed him and still failed to get through. They could not understand.
Time was a passing of grey: lighter grey, darker grey, mottled grey, blank grey. Punctuated with waves of agony that washed over him whenever he was preoccupied with some function of the living flesh. He bore with indifference the machines that held him captive with their soft hum and their wires and tubes, the white-clad men and women who tried to patch up his skin. And he watched this body hurt and heal against his will, from a safe distance, detached, impassive, almost bored
For in his head, Zero kept screaming, and not even the depths of his coma had silenced it.
Those last few moments.
The savagery of it all.
The raging pain of a loss too great to comprehend.
Irreversible.
Monstrous in its finality.
He smelled the flowers even through the daze of sedation and the hissing breath of the ventilator, and later the nurses and doctors would argue heatedly that under no circumstances could their bandaged, semi-conscious, machine-animated patient have swiped the vase with fresh red roses from the nightstand. But it had been shattered on the polished grey lino floor, the flowers broken, petals scattered, and he had hung barely alive in his wires and tubes, one of his drips torn out of his bleeding arm, the ventilator mask askew, his blankets rumpled and bloodstained...
His eyes, pale and red-rimmed between the bandages that covered most of his face, were leaking bitter tears when the nurses packed him back onto his bed and strapped him down for good measure. In the doctor's office, Noin yelled at the medic in charge, forbidding him to ever do something like that again... no news, no radio, no flowers... especially no flowers. He looked at her as though he considered admitting her to the psychiatric ward, but the hospital was small and had no such facility.
Roses were precious here, he told her crossly, inthe forcibly mild tone of patience stretched beyond endurance. The nurses had gone to considerable lengths to obtain them for this particular patient because he seemed so young and so lost. They had not expected to be slighted for their care, let alone threatened; the young soldier had been crying out for a rose in his coma...
They had only meant to help him back to life.
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When Zechs could not avoid life any longer, Noin brought him papers to sign – wads of documents to confirm that Treize's estate had been wound up, and Milliardo Peacecraft now owned the grounds, the house, the dacha. He laughed as he scrawled his old name on the letter of accpetance and a variety of other papers requiring his confirmation of the deed. Then he asked her to get him a mirror, and leave him alone.
He sat up in his bed and pulled up his knees to rest the small, round silver disk on them as he looked at himself. His face had barely scarred. The blast had scorched away his hair, but it was growing back, covering his scalp and falling in a soft silver wave over his ears and to the nape of his neck. Months, he thought vaguely, has it been months already? How long is a month? A day? An hour? I know how long a night is...
Lucky, they had said sympathetically, it would have been such a shame about your face... He had laughed at that, too, and they had decided that he was happy that his featuresremained handsome... almost beautiful had they not been marred by those flat, ashen eyes.
His head was bursting. They had scanned his brain, checked his vision, could find nothing and gave him painkillers. He tried to swallow too many of the small white tablets, not because he had planned it, but because he did not pay attention... it seemed so unimportant to count the right dosage out.
They called Noin. In spite of their protests, she had him discharged and was waiting impatiently in the clean white corridor outside his room while he stared at his face, wondering idly why he felt so numb.
Home, she told him, you need to find back to yourself...
But he had no home any longer.
For Treize was dead.
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There were those who refused to believe in the death of someone like him.
Larger than life. Arrogant, vain, flamboyant, brilliant and ruthless. A presence that kept making itself known, as though he really was still alive.
Some days, Zechs wanted to believe that he was caught in a particularly vivid nightmare, and tried to scramble out of it, only to find to his terror that he could not leave. He was trapped, reliving those moments when his life went out like a light, extinguished by this silent ball of fire that tore through Treize's gundam.
When Zero made him hear, feel, smell Treize's dying in all its murderous intensity.
On days like that, he stayed away from everyone. He stayed at home. Holed up in the tiny loghouse in the depths of the Russian forest. The groundkeeper took care to refill his stock of vodka bottles and food. Zechs was losing weight; his clothes – usually a sloppy, open shirt and carelessly buttoned jeans – began to flap around his now lanky frame like rags on a scarecrow. His hair was in a mess, and he had taken to drinking more than eating. He hardly bothered with shoes, welcoming as a merciful distraction the pain of walking barefoot in the forest . Sometimes, he left bloody prints. He found this a fitting allegory.
His sister was taking care of what he was supposed to own, though these things were delicate after all that happened. Some people would help, others would not. He did not care. He was dead, to all intents and purposes, even to himself, not to mention the rest of the world he had no strength to hate any longer. He simply did not give a fig.
Inside him, Zero kept howling, however hard he drank, however much he hurt, however loud he screamed at the woods. Inside, he was burning up alive. He knew that Treize was gone. Without redemption. However fervently he wanted to believe every new rumour that sprang up about some sighting of him.
There were many. At the beginning, when he was forced back into the world of the living, he latched on to each of those rumours like a thirsty child to its mother's breast – drinking them in greedily, madly hopeful, torn between laughter and tears, and every timeanother bubble burst, he slid a little deeper into desolation. The black tide inside him was washing up closer to the shore of his sanity, to retreat reluctantly and crash over him again, persistently eroding what was left of his self. He wanted to let go instead of clinging on.
He could not. For letting go would have meant letting go of Treize once more. Of admitting -no, of repeating - the one, the most terrible mistake of his life. Thedecisionthat cost Treize his life and left his own in limbo.
Zechs was unable to let go.
And it was tearing him to shreds.
The world was incredulous. It was also gleeful. Treize had scared them. People like the Lighting Count scared them. And the two of them together...
They had been too much of everything.
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He had seen the two gravestones when Relena tried to shake him from his catatonic state. The vast wilderness of the forests around the manor was beginning to blush golden, and the intense brightness of summer began to soften into the watery blue light of autumn. On the fields around the airstrip, the harvest of wheat and barley was nearly finished, and tractors with wide ploughs were beginning to turn over the stubble to reveal the glossy black soil beneath, ready for the new seed. The clouds of dust and spelt had settled, and the aroma of ripening fruit in the orchards, of dewy mornings and falling leaves wove headily through the cooling days, along with the sweet smoke of the first log fires.
On one of those mornings, with whisps of mist curling among the trees in the park, Relena arrived at the estate in near anonymity; her new role would hardly allow for such a visit to be official. Condoning the former enemy of Earth, her own brother no less, former Second to the greatest and maddest military leader ever, his partner not only in what was rapidly rewritten as a crime – no, it was better to let the dead rest, was it not? History is always written by the victors...
But beyond some basic precautions, she braved the opinion of the world at large and, accompanied by just a couple of her most trusted security men, dared to visit him. Told him she loved him. That she did not believe in the facade of insanity behind which he was desperately trying to bury himself... losing the shreds of his soul that he was utterly unable and completely unwilling to patch together again. Her words hurt him, and he raved and screamed his agony at her. He even made her cry, but still she insisted he travel with her.
Hollowed out beneath this violent attempt of refusal, he simply collapsed and allowed her to lead him. So they got into the jet piloted by Noin – an unmarked private plane – and flew to Europe to visit a graveyard.
Here, Relena said, pain raw and all too obvious in her voice as she clasped his arm and pressed him close, it's over, you can start anew.
And he could only say, I don't want it to be over. It cannot be over. Impossible. It is not over, it cannot be over... He only realised that he was yelling at the top of his lungs when her security guards began to close in on him.
Maybe one of those rumours, one day, would prove to be true.
Had to be true. It could not be over, could it? Not really. There just had to be another chance...
They had to restrain him back then because he wanted to kick the stones over that pronounced dead him and Treize. Side by side even in death, embraced by the fat, grassy soil, with the heady smell of autumn and ripe earth filling the damp air. Lucy and Relena held on to him, but he still managed to drag them down as he kept howling and trampling the small mounds of soil that covered a couple of empty coffins.
He still hated Treize. Hated too much. Did not resist when the doctors declared he needed to undergo a series of checkups and tests and laughed when they certified him sane. They had no way of knowing. Heero Yuy might know, and his colleagues, but he did not want to see any of them – he would want to murder them all, and that would not sit well with the new powers. It would trouble his sister. He could not do that.
Noin flew him back. Relena was crying when she was hugging his bony form before he climbed into the jet. She had no one else, she told him. She needed him. He could see the flicker of fear in her wide eyes and plunged back into that night of fire and slaughter when Cinq was wiped out along with his family and his soul. The blind, hopeless despair of a small boy who felt his little sister's hand slide from his grip and could but hide and hear her scream as he watched her being bundled off by armed men... spattered with the blood and brains of his parents...
Did she feel the same helplessness now? Was his hand sliding from hers like that? He felt sorry and bitterly ashamed yet again, but he was sinking and desperate to leave... to join the one who had promised to wait, to never abandon him... the only constant in his erratic life.
But Treize was gone.
And as always when the realisation bypassed all of his wretched defences, all those flimsy walls and stockades, it hit home with breathtaking brutality. Crushing him into his place and having him grope blindly for that flat silver bottle he carried in the chest pocket of his sloppy suit jacket. Shaking, quaking on the edge of sanity, latching on to his drink as if to soak up pure oblivion.
Quench fire with fire. He smiled around the first mouthful of the burning liquid and drowned the rising sobs with another gulp.
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Next chapter: Without Tears