30 Ways to Conquer Mars

#014 ラジカセ
A.C. 197, April 22:「Lilacs Out of the Dead Land」

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.

...

There was a brief moment of panic before he found the note and the nondescript box that went with it, when he woke up alone in what passed for their apartment.

"Good morning, your Illustriousness," it read, and he smiled at her good-natured sarcasm. It was a few minutes past noon. "Brunch is in the oven and the coffee's in the machine, just turn it on." He discovered both exactly as she'd said and wondered what the occasion was that warranted French toast and Denver omelette. The coffee machine made ominous sounds to the next lines, "Treize left something for you the year before last."

A chill slid down Zechs' stomach. The year before last, the revolution, the Eve War, O.Z. These were things he was not yet ready to think about.

"He was very specific that you only receive it on April twenty-second A.C. 197. I hope, whatever it is, it's something you've been looking for." He caught himself imagining that delivering their late commander's package was the only reason she had insisted on dogging his every step since Christmas. Noin may not have trusted the man, she certainly did not like him, but she would have done anything within her power to complete what has been entrusted to her. She was dependable like that.

A peek in the medicine cabinet calmed him. She wouldn't have taken off without her toothbrush. She was also fastidious like that. The package explained her offerings in comfort food, though not why he should be one to receive such a thing.

Treize Khushrenada was many things to many people: inspiration, pariah, military genius, dictator; if one were to combine all his facets, one would still not be able to tell who or what he truly was. Zechs, like Noin, had no deep love for him. They had shared some commonality in goals and social standing. The rest, as far as Zechs was concerned, had died with him, without remorse.

Some live in the belief that the world that has survived his war was his true intention all along, others celebrate his demise as the end of martial coercion and the business of war. The precious few who know both these to be wrong also knew enough of him to say nothing. There were no words on his headstone, because he did not want any.

Which made his current gesture all the odder. He had left Zechs a mini cassette player, the kind he used to hide under his desks for reviewing private conversations. The first voice on the tape was aged and venomous. "I'm watching you, boy," it snarled, "Do not think I have forgotten where your father's sympathies laid!"

The answering voice, silky smooth and velvet-rich, put a lump in Zechs' chest. "Then it may also please you to remember, Uncle, that Marquis Khushrenada is dead and I am hardly my father's favourite child." The Duke's response was cut off by a length of white noise.

Ah, Treize. It was a mistake to think he could listen to that voice and eat. Zechs put down his fork and rested his aristocratic nose against crossed fingers, waiting for the dead man to explain himself.

"Do excuse the guileful censorship, I do not wish to be remembered by my uncle's ungracious language." He was speaking directly to him now, against an oddly familiar hush in the background. It took several minutes for Zechs to realise what it was. It was the kind of silence that characterised the tapes they used to make as children, telling stories around torchlight campfires under heavy duvet tents.

"My friend, to borrow a phrase from Lucrezia, it's been five years, eleven months and twenty-nine days. I hold no delusions that the place we sat and became brothers again in is still standing; my faith goes instead towards the restoration of our proud Empire of Sanq. I have no doubt that you are a fine Duke, or whatever it is you are pretending to be instead of King, as I have no doubt that your little trachelium would have seen to that you are alive today, survivor of our shared lunacy."

The tall blond winced and almost turned off the player. Lunacy. The word struck him deeper and crueller than the mention of Sanq or the verbal liberties taken with Noin. Even beyond the grave, Treize had a way of getting under his skin.

The worst of it was that it wasn't untrue, and if Treize had been standing across from him today, Zechs would have charged him with the same. Lunacy. How else to describe the man's drunken recital of the entire final act to a classic tragedy at a military bar, and what transpired in the wake of that particular hangover? He smiled at the memory. It had been a flawless delivery until Treize fell back into his barstool in an emotional stupor, some twenty lines from the conclusion.

He laughed light-headedly at his audience, unsure if they had ever heard Shakespeare in their lifetimes. If he was honest with himself, he would admit that they were only waiting for him to buy them another round or do something slapstick, like fall flat on his face.

"See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love."
Misery loves company. Through the many years that followed, Zechs could think of no other reasons that he might have called the Lieutenant's attention to himself that night. He had been pleasantly inebriated in a cocktail of crude whiskey and teenaged familial angst, and the words of a fictional Italian Prince seemed all too apt.
"And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen; all are punish'd."

There were no scenes of sudden recognition, Lieutenant Khushrenada knew exactly who Zechs Merquise was when he was assigned to his command eight weeks ago —the boy had lived in his father's house and eaten at his table as one of his children for six years, after all— He was awake the night his father brought the renegade prince home and tucked him into the other side of his bed. He was there when the younger boy fell off his first pony and won his first fencing match. He had made the pens himself, that their fathers used to sign the contract that would have forever tied their Houses together in marriage, had history unfolded some other way.

It did not, and it had been three years since either had acknowledged the other in any capacity outside soldiers of the OZ. Had it not been an evening of such sorrow and loss, they might never have spoken of their shared history again. But his father and sisters were lost to him, and now, his beloved and child. That night, more than any other, he did not want to be alone in the world, without a friend.

"O brother Montague, give me thy hand;
This is my daughter's jointure, for no more
Can I demand.
But I can give thee more;
For I will raise her statue in pure gold;
That while Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful…"

Treize had promised him the world, or, at least, all the world that mattered. Milliardo Peacecraft's Sanq Kingdom was a Pacifist Nation, not the coveted seat of power on the European continent. The Marquis was vigilant in teaching his children the correct history of the world, laying plain the many inevitable villainies of the ages. Zechs could care less for the deeds of dead men. He preferred to remember his father as the firm, compassionate, man whose influence over his neighbours was won through wisdom and respect, not as the reformed heir of warlords and tyrants. For Treize, however, it became the world he saw when he looked in every ballroom and council hall, a game of musical chairs played to violence and strife. It fascinated him in its unchoreographed grace and vitality.

Zechs never learnt Treize's intentions in overthrowing the United Earth Sphere Alliance, nor did he care to. It was easier to regard the Aryan's goals as world domination because he had been taught all about overreaching ambitions and knew how to deal with them. Zechs preferred his world simple.

Treize was true to his word. The world remembers Sanq Kingdom as Zechs Merquise does, the lone voice on Earth speaking out against the prevailing corporation whose main business was war. Forgotten were the days when Sanq's armies marched across the Mediterranean in the shadow of her power-armoured Knights. Forgotten was the fear and awe once evoked by the mere whisper of their name. The world remembers, instead, Relena Peacecraft, who was, for two momentous weeks, the Queen of the World, a captive who refused to be hostage.

It was not enough.

Noin had tried to warn him, and, much as the last King had refused reason from his Knight-Commander over the demilitarisation of his kingdom, Zechs would not listen. Casting his lot in with Treize was the best chance he saw of claiming his vengeance, something he did not expect, and would not accept, that she'd understand. It was worth every future he had thrown at it except, he came to realise, Relena's. Without her to carry on, history would be nothing more than a story.

He listened to Treize reminisce for hours, reliving the stories of boys' games on palace lawns and dragon quests in secret gardens, carefully avoiding talk of their families and sacrifices. He remembered, as Treize spoke, of the lies they have told and servants they have tormented, and of places they had known and things they have seen, and he knew, as each word was formed, that he will miss the part of him that was forever buried with the man who reminded him of lilacs.

"This is the last time I will be able to speak to you freely, so I have saved my sins for the end. You do not need my explanations, and I will not burden you with them. I leave you, in its place, my apologies and a cowardly admission of guilt from far beyond your reach. I was never a brave man, brother, do not let them remember me that way.

"If you have met the ravenous Fenrir then you must know the poor fate I have written you and your sister in my opera. It was I who set them on you, although I confess I had expected you to slay the beast our King's ideals created, not become it…" The proud strategist chuckled, conjuring the content image of his chiselled features with its distinctive brows, enthralled in the transient bliss of fine wine and opera. That is how Zechs will always see him, immaculately groomed, never a hair out of place.

"I am not ashamed, only disappointed that I had not discovered your sister sooner. She is fast replacing you as the prima donna in my affectations with her astonishing propensity to blossom under adversity. Were the circumstances to arise, I would inflict upon her the same, without hesitation, if merely to watch her splendours unfold. I send her to you in anticipation of your duet.

"Milliardo, I am not my father's favourite child: that was you. Even as I pen speeches of peace for the world and seal my final instructions to Lady Une, I do not believe in the dream. All I can lay claim to is an incompetent father's wish for a world in which he could just once kiss his only child goodnight. One day, perhaps, you will understand."

His ending was abrupt, albeit lyrical and well-spoken, mirroring himself, the gentleman orator who had never learnt to properly say good-bye.

And curiously, even though nothing has changed and he neither trusted nor liked the man any more than he had when he went to bed the night before, Zechs replayed his tape from the beginning and mourned the death of his friend.

...

.

A/N:
Melodramatic verses quoted from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet without permission. 'Twas in another country, and besides, the wretch is dead.
One more Zechs-is-a-verbose-sensitive-soul-with-too-many-things-eating-him-up-inside shot and we can move on to more Zechs-and-Noin-trip-over-their-own-feet-to-uselessly-catch-each-other's-attention shots.