30 Ways to Conquer Mars

#020 かえり道 & #023 飴玉 (reprisal)
A.C. 197, June 3, 23:45pm 「Life From the Linden Trees」

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.

...

A timid knock.

"Zechs? Are you decent?"

He went towards the voice, pulling on a shirt, and smirked at Noin as the door slid open. "I can't remember the last time that's stopped you."

"Must have been around Christmas 192, when I finally admitted I could never achieve the kind of figure those naked girls you kept hiding in interesting places had."

Zechs winced. He wasn't in the mood to talk about them. Donn's first month anniversary gift to Noin had put him in a temper he hadn't quite gotten over yet.

"Are you alright?" She was at his side in an instant, reaching to gauge the temperature under his ears and pulling his brow towards hers.

"Yes." He struggled to get away a little harder than he had intended and regretted staying in for the night. He should have done what any other man would have done and gone to the bar, possibly find another one of those girls she had so casually jabbed him with. He could tell from the way she surreptitiously scanned his room that she did not believe him

"I'm fine, Noin. How can I help you?" He asked with a pathetic pang of gladness that they were spending free-time alone together, and promised the stronger, growling part of him a good ass-kicking for his weaker, puppy-eyed self later.

She was still eyeing him up in case he suddenly collapsed on her. "Are you sure?"

"Noin, I promise, if I decide to put 'meeting an unfortunate accident alone in my room' on my schedule, you'll be the first to know."

"What about the unscheduled ones?"

"I will call you." He assured her, realising how little sense he was making. "Unless it is wearing some very sexy lingerie. Then I may wait until afterwards to call you."

The silence hung between them like the recycled atmosphere in the cramped crew quarters. She sighed, shaking her head in disgust. "The best retort I can think of is getting you to call me first, but I'm afraid you'll just take it as an invitation."

Zechs fought to keep a second wince from surfacing. Time was, he enjoyed the mildly suggestive banter they threw at each other like a pair of teenaged boys and thought nothing of it. Noin still didn't, so it has to be him that had changed. The Zechs who would have grinned and told her she might like it seemed a whole different lifetime ago.

"I came by to give you something," she found them seats on the edge of his bed and sat with a bowl of spherical treats wrapped in twists of pink and lilac paper in her lap, Donn's candies. She held one out to him. There was a joy in her eyes that he had not seen in many years and he regretted that. He should be the one who found that back for her, not Donn. "Come on, try it."

He unwrapped the offering, rolling the blackish ball gingerly in his fingers. "When did you start liking sweets?"

"I didn't," Noin admitted, snatching it impatiently from him and popping it into his mouth to staunch further delays. "Just these ones. Crunch."

He obeyed out of habit to her tone of voice and bit in. The aroma that flooded his senses from inside the hard candy shell was warm Summers and cool Autumns, children's laughter ringing in his ears, as real as Noin staring intently into his face, and making yourself sick on wildberries before dinner.

"Grand dieu…" he identified hoarsely around the pulpy, gritty, mellow texture, the flavour of the Sanq Kingdom of his childhood. "Linden flowers…"

She nodded vigorously and handed him a second. "I don't know where or how he got them all the way out here… they spoil quickly so I couldn't save you any the last time he made them, well, the first time, really. Doesn't it just remind you…"

He cut her off by pushing the sweet between her lips, letting his fingertip linger on them seconds longer than was strictly necessary. "Tell me about Venezia. What do you remember?"

Noin closed her eyes and smiled up at him.

"There were lindens everywhere, father brought them in from the Sanq Royal Gardens to cover the fish smell. On very clear days, you can see all the way to Marche from our rooftop. The summer I turned five, you came to Luciano's birthday on the most beautiful chestnut bay and I hated you for it…"

"Her name was Polaris," he chuckled softly, "I pleaded to get her, just to spite you."

She laughed. "I've always suspected that."

"What else?"

"Sitting under the trees, counting ants in the grass instead of learning my sums," she grinned, "chess games, spying on my sisters, playfights in the courtyard… Nonno's stories about the days of old, climbing trees… falling out of trees… the sun and the wind, sailing. Mamma loved the sea, she was going to teach me when I was old enough…" she opened her eyes to blink away the brimming tears. "Remember Lichtenberg Base? You came back one day with a pocketful of linden nuts and we made ourselves sick trying to eat them…"

"Alessandra, I…"

"Don't apologise, Peacecraft," she cut him off firmly. "You'll ruin it."

He flopped into the clinical indifference of his standard issue cot, covering his melancholy with an arm across his face. She stared up at the ceiling beside him and fed him another candy, carefully not asking his memories. She knew they would be more painful than hers.

Noin's family had known what was coming to them for a long time and chose it with the pride of knights; his people were slaughtered in the span of a single morning by treachery in the dead of the night. The linden tree was the Peacecraft's family emblem, and the United Earth Sphere Alliance burnt down every last one they could find within the kingdom's borders in the aftermath. The oldest trees blazed for days. It had taken years to get the smell of it out of his nose.

"Should you be giving them all to me?" The fallen prince asked as she supplied him with an eighth consecutive.

"I've never liked candy, you know that." Noin said simply, laying her cheek against the top of his head.

"But Donn made them especially for you." It took a world of effort not to reach out and touch her.

"So don't tell him," she shrugged dismissively. "He doesn't understand. To him, it's only a variation on his grandmother's cough drops."

Zechs couldn't help it. He choked and they had to sit up so Noin could pound on his back.

"Cough drops? You'd jump in bed with someone for cough drops?"

"I was homesick and vulnerable!" She protested in a hot blush, attacking him with his pillow when he continued laughing until they were both out of breath and fell back on his sheets, spent.

"I've missed you, mon meilleure amie," the words tumbled out before he realised.

"I'm sorry," she replied quietly for the distance between them these past weeks, but does not explain herself.

"It's not because of me, is it?" However painful, he had to know.

She seemed genuinely surprised. "No Zechs, why would it be?"

"Because two is company but three can be a crowd?" He ventured, feeling silly.

"That's true," Noin seemed innocently thoughtful, though in reality hiding her own insecurities. "But you and I make two, Peacecraft. Always have."

Zechs rose on his elbow to look at her, struggling to think in the coy, slightly sweet nostalgia that filled the air.

"Noin, I'm about to do something that may be incredibly stupid in the light of what'd happened the last time I tried it," he declared finally. Then, without pause for a response or reconsiderations, Prince Milliardo Peacecraft pressed his lips on hers gently, stealing a taste of home.

...

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Glossary:
Grand dieu – French "great god", as in an expression of astonishment
Nonno – Italian "Grandfather"
Mon meilleure amie – French "my best friend" (female)

A/N:
Linden Trees – the Linden Tree is sacred to ancient North Europeans, who believed it to be a seeker of truth and restorer of peace and justice. It is a symbol also of devotion and sometimes comparable to an Achilles' heel, in that Siegfried of the Norse traditions (a hero parallel to Achilles) receives his single point of vulnerability from a linden leaf that stuck to him unnoticed while he was bathing in dragon's blood.

And you can make chocolate by pounding linden flowers and unripe nuts together, or roast the nuts to make coffee, but linden nuts themselves are inedible, which is probably why they made themselves sick in Lichtenberg. You'd think he'd have known better.