30 Ways to Conquer Mars
#027 零れる
A.C. 197, April 「Februus」or「Kisaragi no Shinigami 」
Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.
...
Some days, Zechs can barely bring himself to look at Noin. On others, he can hardly bare to let her out of his sight. There was plenty of normality in between, too, though he could never tell what the day was going to be until he actually saw her. It got worse with each death, each loyal man shot down whom he was responsible for, and the worst of it was, he would never be able to tell anyone about it, not as long as he lived and Milliardo Peacecraft did not.
She was spread out on the couch in little more than a tank top and a pair of shorts when he came in. He held his breath and waited for the steady rise and fall of her chest before turning away, relieved. Sometimes, he would find himself out of bed, gripped in some unnamed terror in the middle of the night, and creep beside her just to watch her breathe. She always seemed too quiet in her sleep, too still. Sometimes, he fancied that she did not sleep, only fall into a little death now and again, to be resurrected when she wakened.
Last night, he saw her standing at the foot of his bed, with the moon in her eyes and a clouded expression on her cold, passive, face. When he tried to sit up in bed, she vanished, and he was too horrified to check in her room.
He said nothing to the cheerfully animated young woman, so different from his midnight visitor, at breakfast. It couldn't have been her. She was his light, his shadow. Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe the carefree persona pouring him coffee and orange juice was a lie. Maybe, he thought, studying her silhouette, she has finally found him out.
Once upon a time, a girl told a boy that he could talk to her about anything, so he did. He told her about the life he has lost and the people he has killed, about the men with whom he'd schemed, and the girls with whom he'd loved. He told her everything, every secret, every sin, save the worst one of all.
Some nights, he dreams of his own murder, always at her hands, those lovely, delicate, hands. In his favourite death, she holds him beneath a lazurite sea and wrings the life out of him before he drowns, wearing bone-white kid leather gloves and a matching summer dress strewn with seed pearls and crystal chips. Like a hrímthurs rising from the rime, she is beautiful, and so at peace, as he wakes and dies.
She should have killed him long ago, that summer in Italy. She could have killed him in any number of ways when he pulled her out of the twisted metal that had been the ejected safety pod of a self-destructing prototype MS. She had been furious, and screaming in German. He recognised her voice and words from shouting matches at the Academy before receiving a visual from his Leo's exterior monitors.
Shock, and the irrational panic that no one else must discover the enemy pilot's identity, made him abandon all caution. He powered down his suit and slipped from the safety of his cockpit into the salty sea breeze. She had paused, equally stunned to see him as he reached into the wreckage and hauled her up by the arms, and started again in English, kicking and gnashing for all she was worth.
"Let me go, Milliardo Peacecraft!" She screamed before he could form a coherent thought. "Let me go! Are you happy now? Look at that! Look!"
The faint thunder of combat pounded to be let inside his head from a distance, and the acrid taste of gunpowder smoke in the back of his throat made him sick. The bloody, soot-stained face was one he had last seen a scant three months ago in Africa, pouring over final preparations for their first internship assignments, debating extra socks. He refused to acknowledge memories of the fight they'd had later that evening, as she helped him with an overdue assignment on the History of Unified Earth. The words are still branded on his tongue:
"If one cannot do battle for the fallen, whose beliefs they've shared, then they have as good as turned their backs on them; and if they do not share the same visions as their allies and leaders, then the leaders must execute these worms themselves, as hypocrites and traitors to their service."
"There is more than one way to defend an ideal," she had said, thoughtfully, "and many concerns of greater consequence than vengeance. What worth is a life thrown too hastily away? A massacre does no one any good."
He had called her weak, and foolish, naïve. She had picked up her things and informed him that in that case, he can finish the essay by himself. He never did. What could she possibly know of the reality of history? She was an honour student, daughter of a common mechanic whose only brush with the ruling caste had been to service Baron Yurendei's yacht one autumn twenty years ago, whereas he was a Prince of the noble lineage of Sanq, an unfortunate survivor of history. He has stood in the ashes and watched a circle of old men, sworn to protect and serve his dead father, divvy up the salvage from his broken home and go their separate ways. He has seen the guilt in their eyes, the look that wished he and his sister had not survived. He committed all their faces to memory.
That was why he had begged to be allowed to fly on the mission, even though interns were strictly classified as non-combat personnel. One of them had been the target, the Marchese di Luculo of Venezia. And if he'd killed the man in defiance of the capture order, his commander chalked it up to over-enthusiasm and privately mused over what might have passed between the boy and the Marchese. Still, the mission had been ultimately successful and he thought no more of it.
Later, the cadet will be clapped on the back by the older pilots and told that the Marchese was wanted on suspicions of aiding and sheltering dissidents, in particular, the missing Peacecraft siblings. He was lucky that the charred body of the boy had been discovered in amongst the family, albeit recognisable only by the royal signet ring he'd carried on his person, or there would have been hell to pay for letting the prince of Sanq escape. He broke away from their well-meaning camaraderie and threw up.
"Is that the glorious stand you wanted? It is nothing but death and fire!"
Later, he will be sorry. She will tell him, years after, of how she had climbed into her grandfather's Mobile Suit, a relic from his old days of service to Sanq, to fight off the descending OZ Leos, and how her mother forced a remote override to send her to safety. With only head-sized debris and cadet Merquise's account of the Svala unit's explosion, the United Earth Sphere Alliance will presume the mystery pilot, identified in battle as Alessandra di Luculo, the Marchese's reclusive youngest daughter, deceased.
At that moment, however, on those shores, all he knew was her screaming his name. How does… how long has she… why? Snippets of history came to mind, a knighthood in Mobile Suits disbanded for his father's dreams of a pacifist future, a little girl at his fourth birthday party, a circle of old men poking about a ruined palace, whispering regrets and tears unshed.
"You bastard, Peacecraft! Let me go —Kill me here or let me go to my family!"
He pushed her from him and struck her for silence so that he can think, a rousing blow that barks worse than it bites. She reeled, stumbled two steps and spat on him. The spittle clung to his helm like a see-through slug. She was horrified. He removed the mask, and they stared at each other through the things unsaid.
"Assurer maintenant, Svala," he said softly, steady now, steady.
"Capisco, maestà." She replied in Italian and dropped her gaze.
"Non," he held out a hand to her, entranced in the gesture. "Je ne suis pas le Roi pourtant."
She kissed his fingers, in the fashion of royalty, then sank to her knees and cried.
"You're lucky I'm not kitted out with surveillance devices, idiot." Masking his awkwardness with dry sarcasm, he kneels on one knee beside her and comforted her against his shoulder.
Once she had cried her heart out and there were no more tears to be shed, she held her head high and looked him squarely in the eye.
"You are Luciano's sister." He pulled himself a little straighter to meet that look. Luciano was a young noble at the Sanq court, the prince's chess tutor.
"Yes."
"You used a false identity to get into Lake Victoria, I presume so you can get to me. Why?"
"I was sent to watch over you, sir. I was the only one of the appropriate age."
Her expression was bland, unreadable. He pursed his lips and frowned. It was not inconceivable that someone watching over his interests would distrust his guardian enough to introduce their own agents into the mix. To think it would be Noin though, who had always appeared to wear her heart on her sleeves, boggled his mind.
"You should be on X-18999. What happened?"
"Terrorists tried to nix the command centre. We were given a month of recovery so the parents don't sue for endangerment. Reassignments will be handed out next week." Has she always sounded so… dead?
He wanted desperately to apologise, but the words taste like ash, meaningless and hollow, so he swallowed them instead.
"I should get back. Will you be alright?"
She nodded numbly.
"What will you do, Noin?" Surely he couldn't just leave her here.
"I don't know, Zechs." Her calmness chilled him. "Go back to school, I guess."
He cleaned his mask off and put it back on, unsure of what else to say.
"Well, take care of yourself then. I'll see you back at the school."
.
One day, he will take her back to that April coastline, where a patch of burnt grass still remains on the spot he had found her, like a crudely wrapped present from above, and he will tell her the truth of what he had done that summer. She will study him, her head cocked to one side, just so, and ask, "Is this why you would not let me stay by your side?"
She will utter the words he had feared for a lifetime, that she had always known, had recognised him from his movements when he struck her father down. Only then will she look out over the sparkling sea and say to him, slowly, proudly, "my parents lost their lives because they failed to serve you the way you wished to be served. We are knights of the Order of the Thorn, Highness, our lives are yours whether you like it or not, your shield and your sword, to be wielded as you deem fit. That is our choice. You owe us nothing for it."
And as he starts to cry, a grown man crushed under the shame and love of those deaths, and many others, she will tell him that they forgive him and were sorry they could not do better by him. "I am ready. Strike me now for the wrongs I've done, I will not fight back." He replied, choking back his tears. He will offer her a rapier, which he has brought under his coat in preparation for this moment. "Do it, but please tell no-one why."
Here, things will come full circle to a fitting end.
She will take the weapon, and she will laugh. "Zechs. Zechs, you melodramatic, puffed-up, self-important…" She chants bitterly, stabbing angrily at the tall grass at the edge of the cliff with each syllable.
"Fool!" She cries, whirling around to face him. The tip of his foil kisses his bare chest, under the hollow of his throat, between the dip of his collarbones, before sailing through the air behind her. "Do you think I would have let you walk away back then if this was what I'd wanted? What does it take for you to get it? I forgive you, Zechs Merquise, I forgave you nine years ago to the day, for everything you might ever do, right here on this spot!"
She is every bit as dramatic and tearful as he is, and for an instant he thinks she might kiss him and make love to him right there.
She doesn't.
Instead, he asks her politely to return his ancestral ceremonial sword, at which point she will blush, clapping her hands to her mouth and confess in a horrified whisper that she must have thrown it over the cliffs, and they will skid down its slopes and spend the rest of the afternoon running hysterically along the rocks and the edge of the sea, until they find it amongst the shore debris again.
...
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Glossary:
Kisaragi no Shinigami - Japanese "February's Death God"
hrímthurs - Nordic "Frost Maiden", or "Frost Giant"
Assurer maintenant - French "Steady now"
Capisco, maestà - Italian "Understood, majesty"
Non. Je ne suis pas le Roi pourtant - French "No. I am not King yet"
A/N:
Februus is the Italian God of Death and Rebirth, after whom February is thought to be named. It's also my idea of when Zechs was born, if you check back to the one about his birthday. He's always struck me as one of those mysterious Aquarius boys.