strike deep the muscle cords.
all standard disclaimers apply. this is a work of fanfiction and therefore the author claims no legal rights to characters or implied storyline. no profit is made from this posting. the author does, however, claim all rights to the permutations of the words herein; this is his story of a story. warnings: harsh language, explicit male homosexual relationships, implied female homosexual and heterosexual relationships, emotional and sexual abuse, non-consensual sex, explicit and implied war-related violence, eventual character death and some serious angst. semi-canon. possible verbosity. weird sense of humour.
cord
1 a : a long slender flexible material usually consisting of several strands (as of thread or yarn) woven or twisted together
b : the hangman's rope
2 : a moral, spiritual, or emotional bond
3 a : an anatomical structure (as a nerve or tendon) resembling a cord;
chord
1 : three or more musical tones sounded simultaneously
2 : a resonant feeling or emotion (as striking a chord)
01: in the dim, in the cold.
"How long has it been?"
The enquiry was almost too quiet for the regal voice issuing it, too soft a question for the ginger-haired man whose eyes were gleaming a spectral sapphire in the subdued streetlamp slashing his face through the blinds. Those slashes, that brutality even in light as it crossed Treize Khushrenada were all that comforted Zechs into answering; familiar ground. "I can't remember anymore."
"Neither can I." Treize released the window from his gaze, a slow blink that began to etch ages of violence into his handsome features, exhaustion in his brow. "Isn't that strange?" he mused, finally facing the Lightning Baron, "I've lost track of the time. I've lost count."
"That isn't something you'd do," Zechs agreed, pushing the edge of the sheets down to his nude abdomen. "Come back to bed. You rarely get the chance for a full night's rest."
"Forgive me for disturbing you," Treize hummed, though he remained standing, his palm flat against the windowframe and supporting his weight as though the sheer force of his being were too much for his slim form. Zechs understood this; Zechs had seen him topple worlds.
"What is disturbing you? Does the street know a secret?" The blonde frowned, nodding towards Treize's vantage point at the window, and was rewarded with a low chuckle.
"It is the secret of the night that perturbs me, my love." Finally, Treize pushed himself away from the wall and stumbled, weary with sleep deprivation and stillness, down to his lover's thighs, hidden beneath the bedsheets. There he knelt at the edge of the bed, curling his elegant fingers around the thick sinew of Zechs' muscle, resting his forehead atop the backs of his pale hands. "It's so silent."
"No reports? No howling engines?" Zechs guessed, entwining his own fingers with the mussed auburn locks that poured into his lap.
"No screaming."
"The war hasn't yet reached this city."
A sharp exhalation tickled Zechs' knee. "We're going to change that."
"Do you want to cancel the attack?"
Treize raised his head to cast a glare of contempt over his pilot's concerned countenance. "Of course not. The attack will commence at dawn, as planned."
"And there will be screaming in every street," Zechs confirmed, removing his hands from Treize's shoulders where they had fallen and dropping them, useless, to the bed.
"If a man wishes for silence, he goes into space," Treize snapped, his authority slipping into his voice, as he propelled himself back to his feet and turned from the adonis sharing his bed, facing down the window as though it were a challenge to his military accomplishment.
"We're in space, sir," Zechs replied just as coldly, reminded of his position as inferior officer and all things from which he escaped into Treize's embrace in these clandestine moments they shared as lovers, not soldiers.
"No," Treize stalked to the window, his footsteps controlled but his posture tense, and gave the cord of the blinds a vicious yank. "We're no more in space than Earth is, caught up in the gravity of her situation and swirling," he gestured into the sudden wash of amaranthine glow that smeared across Zechs' honeyed skin like a viscous halo, and the pilot barely refrained from flinching at the shadow of his general's palm as it swept his cheek.
"This is as far into space at it gets, sir. No matter how deep we go, we'll always build stations. We need solid ground, oxygen, a place to be. A man can only drift inside a machine inside a vacuum for so long."
"And a man cannot live in silence forever," Treize restrained his triumphant smirk but Zechs, who had memorised the contours of that charismatic face, caught the faintest twitch of those cruel lips from the general's profile. "No matter where we go, the noise of our humanity will follow. Space is no escape. We must change that noise itself before we get any farther."
"I am aware that you believe mankind is aching to scream. What I don't understand is your mercurial approach to the task of making us scream," Zechs lowered his gaze and his voice for his next admission, "though you do it often enough."
"Mercurial?" Treize turned a purposefully wounded expression to the brazen colonel, ignoring his personal implications for the moment. "I have never faltered in my grim duties."
"Duties which you yourself choose to undertake," Zechs reminded him, voice creeping into higher decibles, "And decide to make them grim. This is just what I mean! You declare your distaste for the battles you enjoy, battles you create yourself! You relish in your toy soldiers but blame us for your sorrow!"
"Lower your voice, Colonel," Treize interrupted what could have become an incensed tirade from the blonde, though no hint of rank or superiority permeated his order. Instead, the General seemed saddened, now entirely focused on the intimate issues Zechs had been concealing, obviously for some time. "You aren't a toy to me, Milliard," Treize employed the use of his lover's private identity, softening his voice to his most soothing tone.
Instead of calming, however, Zechs leapt from the bed with a flurry of motion, growling out his words even as he struggled blindly with the sheet that had clung to his calves and now prevented him from pacing or even approaching the object of his sudden torrent of pent-up anger. "You can't fucking do that, Treize. You can't pull rank and then use... that name in the same goddamn sentence. I'm not a toy, but you're certainly treating me like a yo-yo! I'm not-"
Before Zechs could finish unravelling his legs, Treize slipped behind the slim mess of tightly-wound muscle that was his shouting subordinate and cupped a hand over those cherubic lips, silencing the blonde's outburst. Zechs grunted furiously but lowered his arms to his sides, unable to strike his superior officer no matter how intimate their relationship.
"If you cannot handle being both my lover and my subordinate," Treize hissed into Zechs' ear, his lips brushing the sensitive lobe and whispering through stray strands of platinum, "We will stop this foolishness now, because I am not interested in also being your emotional disciplinarian. I do not need this juvenile behaviour, Milliard, and I will not tolerate it in my lovers or my officers. You-" Treize bit off his reproach at the abrupt and unexpected splash of wetness on the top of his hand. Blinking, lips just slightly parted in shock, he considered the trembling body in his arms; the pilot's thick muscle was barely noticeable beneath this... fragility. "Milliard?" Splash. "Mill-" Splash splash.
Treize's Lighting Baron was crying.
Gently, Treize released Zech's chin and turned the taller man to face him, enveloping the broad shoulders in his arms. "I did not realise this upset you so much, my love."
Shaking his head and dislodging more unruly white-blonde locks, Zechs pulled out of Treize's grip and scraped a palm roughly across his moist cheeks. "Can you handle it, Treize? You can't separate yourself from the war; it affects you, despite your ideals, and it affects us. There hasn't been a night I've been in your bed that you haven't used your rank against me, despite your promises that our intimate relationship would remain separate from our professional one."
"Milliard-" Treize reached again for his lover, but Zechs held a firm hand between them, his fingertips a whisper away from pushing the general back.
"I thought the mask was enough. It appears I was wrong. You are always Treize; yourself, a general, with... lovers," here Zechs' voice faltered almost inaudibly but Treize, who had spent years memorising the minute inflections of his famed pilot to atone for the expressions he concealed, noticed, and it pained him to be the cause, "yet I am required to be two different men for you, though you will not even allow me to separate them. Milliard is dead," Zechs declared with such resigned bitterness, leaning towards the coffee table on which the silver helmet, bane of his duplicitous existence, lay discarded. He collected the cool metal and positioned it over his head, his near-angelic visage hardening under the familiar weight, the restriction, his rank. "I have only one face, sir," Zechs ended his confession with the abrupt, nonsenseless snap of a soldier's edge, the total finality in his tone causing Treize's lower lip to drop just slightly enough for his expression to be uncharacteristically stricken. Zechs walked away.
"Milliard, wait," Treize called after him, brow furrowing as he found himself tentatively stepping forward but unable to follow, trapped as he was by this unforseen loss. "Colonel, stop."
Zechs did stop, then; the delirious sculpture of his lean silhouette, the carved globes of his impossibly firm buttocks and the pale waterfall of a mane licking at that swell giving Treize a fleeting moment of hope that his lover truly was his subordinate, but; "The world is not your plaything, Treize. If you use rank to force me to comply with your personal wishes, I'll prosecute you for sexual coercion."
Treize's jaw clamped shut. He lashed his raging thoughts back into his customary control of a diplomat and forced his voice to be still. "Milliard-"
"My name is Zechs, sir," the Lighting Baron interrupted, closing the bedroom door to collect his shed clothing in privacy.