30 Ways to Conquer Mars
#Bonus Track: 逃げ水キスの30回
A.C. 197, December 24:「Turtles All The Way Down」
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.
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#22 揺り籠
Once upon a time, a prince sat in his tower window— much like the woman gazing far away into the Inter-Colony Shuttle window— and told himself tales of magic and adventure to see him through the hot, sticky afternoons, heavy with the fragrance of Lindenwood smoke.
#06: 夢と現の間
It was not so long ago that he had run through the gardens and palaces of Europe pretending to be a Lost Boy. Now that he was one, it really wasn't as much fun as he'd hoped. Perhaps it was as his Wendy Darling'd said, the disillusionment of growing up. Fortunately, he was a Lost Boy, and those grew up to become Captain Pans.
#14 ラジカセ
Fifteen years later, a woman on the shuttle in Launch Pad 6 at the L4-D768 Spaceport listened to the same fairy stories on headphones and fancied herself to be a little bit of the same. She wonders if that was her trouble. Like Peter, she had gone to fight a war only to find both the lives being offered at its end too strange and barren to bear.
#20 かえり道
To anyone who asked, she smiled and said she was thinking about going home. This vague answer was accepted readily by the Spaceport customs because nobody working at the Check-In desks actually cared. They were busy imagining vacations in much more exciting destinations, like Earth.
#25 フェンス
If she was being truthful, or sensible, that was where she would be going, too. She had been born on Earth, although all the moving around she had done in the last three years had muddled her instinctual certainty of what 'Home' was, and she had friends there. On the other hand, these were good reasons for her to go anywhere but. She tugged absently on hair that hung in loosely ragged ends, victim to her indecision between keeping it short and growing it out.
#15 perfect blue
Things were supposed to be ideal now. Cleansed in the fires of war and reborn by grace after centuries of conflict of one kind or another, it was a world she had tried her best to help deliver into the coming century, and she was proud of it. She also knew enough of human nature to not want to stare too closely at its perfect blue; lest she is forced, realist that she is, to admit the rose-tint glasses she wore for the subject.
#02 音沙汰
She promised herself to write eventually. She did not mean to disappear, she just hadn't known what to say, how to explain the new state of affairs in her life, how to be around her old friends without falling back into the patterns she was determined to break out of. She did not think they would be terribly concerned to not to hear from her for a while longer. It wasn't that she was anti-social, it was that she had been a career soldier for so long that enforced military habits— such as fuel efficiency and maintaining information blackouts until the completion of an objective— have become personal ones.
#28 ワダカルシウムCD3
For lunch she had half a portion of what was colloquially known as 'Colonist's Rations', a crude cocktail of vitamins and minerals of particular importance to a colonist's diet disguised in a chocolate bar. If this was what they were expected to live on, it's no wonder the people in Space resented the people on Earth these past forty years. Even the lowliest grunt's emergency rations were better than this, under the United Earth Sphere Alliance.
#08 二人の世界
She would have gotten herself some real food, except everything here was sold in pairs and she had nobody to share with. The stores offered His-and-Hers as the standard, hotels and restaurants sported double occupancy rooms and meals served for two. D768 is a Couple's World. She wished she had known this before, so she could have packed a sandwich.
#23 飴玉
Singlehood rested uneasily in the back of her throat the way new states of being and foreign candy did, although she had never thought of herself as romantically attached. And like sweet treats from a different land, the notion was familiar enough to be easily received, yet alien enough to cause varying degrees of apprehension. Perhaps the most fitting aspect of the metaphor was that she was not fond of candy.
#10 #10
Still, there was one advantage to being a lone traveller in a popular couples destination: the extra room. This was especially luxurious to someone who has spent most of the last twelve years in tight cubicles. Not expecting anyone to want to join her, and to allay the jitters from not having anyone watch her back, she slumped the duffel bag stuffed three-quarters full with her pieces of worldly precious in the empty seat between her and the shuttle's aisle and draped her bistre leather flight jacket over it, creating The Dozing Man In Aisle Seat Ten.
#18 「アーン？」
She did not see the beautiful young man until he appeared, reflected, in her tiny shuttle window. He smiled at her briefly, smiles that were glimpses of the stars through a crowded city skyline, glimmers of cold fire so beautiful it could break your heart without a thought yet remain completely untouched behind the self-assuring glass and stone. The preen of a man who knew exactly how lethal his every look and tilt of chin could be and strutted it without a care.
#21 強奪
"May I have this seat?" He inquired in affectations of genteel birth and settled in to the right of her with Dozing Man in his lap, jacket and all, before he could be refused.
#01 こっち向いて
The woman who turned from her revelry to regard him behind large aviator sunglasses could have been around twenty, with the wariness of several more lifetimes than she had business holding on to lurking in her almond face; or in her middling fifties, with the number of a really good plastic surgeon. He felt her gaze whip sharply across his posture in a manner reminiscent of a glorious raven-tressed Marchessa he had once admired, long ago, at a child's birthday party.
#12 ゴキゲン
"Hello, mademoiselle, I'd hoped you would tell me where this shuttle is headed," he cut her off pleasantly, a sparkle in his piercing, dazzling, blue eyes. He was rewarded by a tiny, surprised, flinch as she was thrown off-balance by this idle chatter between amicable strangers.
"If there is some place you're going to?" She recomposed herself in a flash, flawlessly matching his distantness.
#13 余計な鎖
"Not particularly," he replied. "When in pursuit of a quest, one's destination is an excessive concern."
"I am not one for understanding literary devices, sir," she confessed with a polite smile.
"It's nothing terribly important," he explained, "I came to the spaceport this morning to send a dear friend off to a fresh start and realised that person had the right idea all along. Somehow or another, it brought me on this shuttle, next to a beautiful woman.
"You may have to protect me," he grinned, "my boss will kill me when I don't show up for work next week."
#17 kHz
She let her eyes sweep and linger over his aristocratic fingers and the web of calluses and old scars that mapped his career as a pilot and a man of war. A corner of her expressive mouth twitched, and she went back to watching grey-uniformed workers push ramps off the runway.
"That's odd, your voice is similar to someone I know, but you don't sound like him. That guy never did anything he was not fully confident in." He'd never admitted to needing her, either.
#16 無敵
"With you by my side, I can be confident of anything," he said in quiet gravity.
#11 くちなしの花
The man held out his left hand, palm up in invitation, and with a shrewd flick of the wrist conjured a white origami blossom out of thin air. It rested serenely on his fingertips, challenging what fortune that had caused it to become refined wood pulp instead of a flower with peaked, rose-like petals.
#05 「あのさ」
"Let's start over. I am Milliard Neunt-Zechs."
#08 スーパースター
Zechs, derived from Zechs Merquise, hero of the novel L's Sanctuary by Caerulea Surgere, once popular in the European courts around A.C. 170. The Lightning Count had once sworn her to secrecy regarding the origins of his name, though he had never told her why.
#26 ぼくのものになれば良いのに
"As I recall," the woman pointed out, studying his offering with a melancholic set in her firm jaw, "Zechs Merquise married the Empress and lived happily ever after."
#19 赤 (裸)
"I wouldn't know," Milliard mused truthfully, boldly pinning the paper trinket to her luggage, a liberty that might have made any lesser woman blush. She remained an unmoved statue when he searched out her stormy eyes. "I have not actually read it."
#04 キミとボクのキョリとアノコ
She arched a disbelieving eyebrow. Pretty words. What would-be hero picks a moniker from a book they have not bothered to read?
"Treize's sister suggested it, from her favourite novel," he fumbled verbally and was again the defensive little boy whom, once upon a time, she could not leave behind. "She was always reading out excerpts of his heroism. It seemed a good avenging name… All I could come up with was Char Aznable."
#27 零れる
She began to chuckle, a warm, deep-throated bubbling like the song of secret, unspoilt brooks. "Perhaps that would have been slightly more dignified," she shook her head helplessly at the choices. "Caerulea Surgere wrote soft-core erotic romance."
#03 ユル！
He groaned under the weight of over a decade's naive social embarrassment and buried his face in his hands. "Cher dieu…! If Relena finds out…" Then, dawning horror— "But Anatolie was twelve!"— and suspicion. "How do you?"
#24 おやすみ
She continued to look bemused. He did not need to know that she had a vintage Collector's Edition in her bag, a family heirloom of sorts, nor that it had been her bedtime story (naughty bits censored) for years before she ever found him.
#29 波音
Stripped of the sex and romance, L's Sanctuary was a fine fiction of political ideology and court intrigue rumoured to be penned by a prominent noblewoman of the Sanq Kingdom court. The young woman on the shuttle did not need to know that the authoress, her mother, had based the character of Zechs Merquise on her girlhood experiences, nor that a few of the dispossessed-Marquis-turned-gentleman-thief's exploits had even been true.
#09 ダッシュ
"I'm sorry," the blond man apologised, withdrawing once again into the persona of one half of a pair of strangers in a chance shuttle encounter. "Evidently, I'm not very good at making friends, or starting over with old ones."
"It is a tricky process," the woman replied kindly, revealing mysterious purple eyes under her Aviators. "Don't rush it."
#30 キス
She held out her hand after a certain consideration, presenting her left palm angled down and thumb separated from forefinger by exactly forty-five degrees. "Alessandra diLuculo," she said to him coolly. "Or 'Noin' is fine too."
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A/N:
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
~ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Turtles All The Way Down is a matter of Faith.
Glossary:
逃げ水 - Japanese. (nigemizu) Mirage
キス - Japanese. (kisu) kiss
30回 - Japanese (kai) 30 encounters/episodes/rounds
Together makes "30 Rounds of Mirage-Kisses", not quite "A Mirage of 30 Kisses" (ah, don't students of multiple languages just adore grammatical nuance) but we can go with the latter if it makes more sense to you...
Neunt – German for "ninth", a variation on Noin/Neun.
Char Aznable – the not-as-hot Gundam character that Zechs is an upgraded AU-version of.
赤 (裸) in #19 (aka-hadaka) means "stark-naked" and/or "frankness" in Japanese.