30 Ways to Conquer Mars

#022 揺り籠
A.C. 197, April 30 「Tigna←Tinia」or「Akuryou Ato no Kimi」

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.

...

She'd done it. She'd gotten them a job with the most questionable of corporations bidding for majority on the Mars Project, just as she'd said she would. It took all of his presence of mind to smile at her news and be pleased. A treacherous voice in his head grumbled that if she hadn't pulled him off the transport those months ago, he would already be on the red planet. It wasn't that he was unhappy about the arrangements, and it certainly couldn't be that he resented her for putting it together… could it?

Zechs had always been the one with the big ideas and dramatic plans, and Noin had always been the one to hold his hair back as he threw up or stitched himself back together the morning after. That was who they were, the touchstone of their tenuous relationship. It was easier to think that way, even when he knows it not to be true. They've lived too long in the lie, and any deception carried long enough starts to feel like the truth. It was disconcerting to be reminded of what she really was, though more so for him that he would need reminding.

She was the one who held back so that he would always come out on top. Whenever he was stuck for a strategy or at a loss for answers, she was there, having already anticipated his needs; granted, she hadn't always been nice about it. He'd sooner forget that there was ever a time when they were younger than twelve.

The Noin he prefers to remember was a solemn, silent creature who locked herself away in her dorm for six weeks following the class' return from Practical Field Assignment. Their instructors assumed it to be a harmless bout of depression triggered by the guilt from Sergeant Khushrenada's injury on X18999, not uncommon, especially considering the dashing young officer's popularity. Young Zechs had not been so sure. To be fair, he had a better idea of what was wrong.

It was his first time venturing within the perimeters of a lady's boudoir, and he has since learnt more charming ways of gaining access than attempting to kick their doors down in steel-toed boots at study-hour. The prefects arrived when he lost his temper armed with the assortment of profanities he had picked up from Hans Werden. The next day, he returned with a craftily stolen master key. She opened the door before he had had a chance to use it.

"What do you want." She stated more than asked, heading, mostly oozing, back towards the bed against the eastern wall. It was the most dishevelled he has seen her, save the time he walked in on her and Michelangelo the Mechanic at her fifteenth birthday party, which was also one of those things too uncomfortable for him to recall.

"The Principles of Astrophysics test is Monday," he followed her in, shutting the door behind him out of habit and finding himself trapped in the darkness, afraid to move in case he stepped on something. "It's forty-percent of the overall grade and even if you don't care about it, I do."

"So what?" There was an inflection in her tone this time, which was encouraging, although her climbing back under the covers wasn't.

"So… I need a study partner," he shuffled his weight around uncomfortably. "To come to the library and help me study."

"Instructor Petz can requisition you a new one," she mumbled without any of her usual vitality. "I'm sick."

"Oh, come on! You know I'll flunk without you, nobody else even knows what the hell they're answering half the time!"

The words slipped right out and he bit down on his tongue too late. Her silence reared its head and roared deafeningly in his ears. "Go away," it seemed to whisper. "Get out, while you can." He stayed put, petrified.

Several minutes passed. Then, a shuddering, long-suffering breath. "Pull," was her quiet advice, "not push."

It might have been romantic to imagine it was something in her voice, or the haunting familiarity of the situation that made his heart go out to her. The piles of things that were picked up and then strewn randomly across the floor for not providing enough distraction, the way she trotted through the halls between periods, eyes cast down, avoiding all presence of other life, the sordid atmosphere of a heart-sick room… it was, in fact, the lack of mouldering food. He couldn't recall the last time he had seen her eat around the Academy. He had hoped she was getting fed elsewhere.

When he had been laid up like this, there were always servants around to push open the curtains in the morning and leave fragrant tidbits lying within range of his featherbed fortress. There had been Treize, marching in every day during school holidays that year to see if he could please have his bed back, and his elder sister Anatolie, who moved all her lessons into Treize's room and made a point of asking his opinion on subjects from Classical Poetry to ladies fencing until he'd finally cracked.

The Astrophysics test was two days away. Zechs did not have that much time. He crossed the cave-like room in four purposeful strides and unceremoniously whipped the linen cocoon of her bedthings off the bed.

"Noin, Cadet, look at me!" He grabbed her upper arm angrily as she curled tighter in on herself, facing away. "Cadet, when was the last time you had a good meal?"

It was more awkward than he had imagined to actually wrestle her around enough to sit up. The first thing she noticed was his crude, face-obscuring helmet hanging off her bedpost.

"Idiot!" She hissed, quick as a flash. "What if someone'd walked in and recognised you?"

There was some sort of irony at play here that they will come to appreciate later, when they were done being disgusted at each other. He caught her other arm as she reached for his mask. Holding both wrists in a hand that had grown alarmingly large over the summer, he seized her chin with his free hand, inspected her pale, listless, face as though he knew what he was looking for, and let go roughly with a light push. She pushed back.

"What's the matter, Cadet, you push like a girl!" He taunted.

"What's wrong, Peacecraft," she replied in an equally harsh whisper. "Don't like what you see?"

If she saw him flinch, she was hurting too much to care. He lashed out at her. She parried and made a grab for his collar with only a shadow of her former fighting grace. He ducked out of the way and took a step back.

"That was laughable, Cadet, grown all soft and girly over the summer?"

She lunged for his throat with a frustrated growl and knocked the wind out of him with a well-placed shove of her shoulders when he tried to side-step her. He was flat out on his back in under thirty seconds, dazedly wondering if it was a new school record. She threw her weight across his chest and would have taken his eye out on the follow through had she not caught herself.

"Mio Dio…" she gasped, horrified.

"Well," he coughed, struggling for breath, "it got you out of bed. Now, about that test… but some real food for you first, I think. You've definitely lost weight since the last time we've been in this position."

Regular, ten, eleven year-old Noin would have slugged him one and put him in his place. Twelve year-old Noin turned bright red in chagrin and pulled him to his feet amidst the jumble of her discarded books and clothes, then dropped to a knee and a fist, mumbling apologies to 'your Majesty'.

"I told you," he said into the darkness, "I'm not King yet."

"Highness, then."

He sighed. "What should I call you?"

"Anything that pleases your Highness."

There was a time when the boy would have milked it for all it was worth, but that boy was dead, killed by his own hand on a lazurite blue coast near Venezia. Prince Milliardo Peacecraft, heir to the throne of Sanq, rubbed the right of his neck wearily and extended his left hand to his last loyal subject.

"So, Noin. You didn't answer my question. When was the last time you've had anything besides," he made a face at the thought, "cafeteria soup?"

Loss is a terrifying thing, more frightful than death, at some ages. More tangible. The only defence two children alone in the dark had against it was the hand each gripped clumsily in their own, and the unspoken promise to not let go.

She was never quite the same afterwards, and neither was he. It was the last time she ever beat him at physical combat, which was fine, because that was something he'd always thought he could do without.

The hallway war between the girls and the boys quickly fell into obscurity without their respective ringleaders. Zechs stopped wearing the beat-up metal helm that was his 'cousin' Treize's symbol of office as past Class President. Noin took up every extra credit assignment she could and withdrew into her studies. Other than that early October weekend where he'd publicly bribed her with all manners of choice morsels from the cafeteria for her help in a Principles of Astrophysics exam, they were hardly seen in the same room outside weekday study periods again. For a whole term, the Chief Instructor's disciplinary lecture featured the phrase "time to grow up, like Cadets Merquise and Noin".

It was no surprise when they graduated first and second of the class. Noin's instructors were only a little disappointed, in that they were convinced she could have beaten Cadet Merquise for the higher ranking if she hadn't been spread so thin over her electives. Nonetheless, they told her encouragingly, there was plenty of time to make up for it in service.

No, he did not remember the girl who used to stroll, bold and natural as she pleased, into the boys' shower whenever the girls took too long in theirs; the same girl who had declared the trophy helm once awarded to Treize Khushrenada, Honour Student and President of the Academy Class of A.C. 184, to be tawdry and out of style, and proceeded to tease and plague the boy who had, receiving it as a going-away present from his 'cousin', refused to take it off in a true hero-worship fanaticism. The other boys had made him their leader by virtue of that very shiny and symbolic headpiece, and he wasn't about to let her get away with tarnishing its significance.

The lines were quickly drawn, with the female students protesting his arbitrary supremacy and somehow pushing the little purple-eyed firecracker forward as their champion. No one will admit, in the years to come, that it had began with the boys' efforts to fend off her brazen invasion into their territories. All that will be remembered is that she had called him developmentally arrested, and he had called her a penis-envying suffragette. Not that either, in point of fact, understood what the words had meant. It was simply something cool and sophisticated they'd heard to insult someone with. They also hadn't been very clear on the definition of 'sophisticated'.

More and more, that girl was starting to come back on the edges of Noin's laughter and in the sparkle in her eyes. He was glad for her, and worried at the same time. Ten year-old Noin had not been overtly fond of him. Did twenty year-old Noin like her? He wondered. He had. He was not so confident that he would, still. He had grown so used to her second fiddle.

There were other things too. Her rock steady calm, her shy "I told you so" smile, the way she spoke to him with only her eyes. Little things. He liked how he could read her every move and thought, how he had never had to question if she will be at the right place at the right time, or invent new and interesting things to say to her. Lucrezia Noin, the one he was accustomed to, did not need any impressing.

He had to laugh at himself, then. It wasn't to do with her after all. Performance anxieties! He had forgotten that gnawing, nagging, urge to outdo her at every turn.

With renewed humour, he dared turn his attention from the washing-up to pick her up and spin her around a little before stealing a peck on her cheek.

"That's great news, Noin. I've never doubted you, not even for a second."

"Not even a second, huh? Funny, I don't like that tone." She regarded him suspiciously, homing right in on the bravado.

Zechs Merquise, afraid of a little competition? Ludicrous. Even if it is from a woman who was once a little girl who could hand him his ass on a platter.

…

.

Glossary:
Akuryou Ato no Kimi – Japanese "you who are descended from evil spirits" or "you (who stands) behind evil spirits" deliberately ambiguous.
Mio Dio – Italian "My God", as in "oh my god"

A/N:
Tinia, the Bright Sky God is the Etruscan High God (who upholds the sacred inviolability of boundaries) who was reinvented after the fall of Etruria as Tigna (apparently Italian for ringworm), an evil spirit who brings lightning, hail and rain, and mildew.

This Fanon's Background-check: The remembered scene references the one in Februus, in which Zechs pretty much kills Noin's family out of spite in the Spring of 188. Also references Zechs' early relationship with Treize in the Khushrenada home.