12: out of the blue.
The body of Duke Dermail in death was worth study; almost comical against the context of how he'd lived within it. Treize's aim had been perfect and only the smallest round bullethole adorned Dermail's forehead, with a trail of blood dripping between his eyes like leaking ink from a bindi. It was the back of his head - one large exit wound - that did him justice. He was not crumpled, but rather stiff and sat against the main control panel, braced along his back and somehow maintaining the regal posture of rigor mortis like a professional. There was no terror in his brow, and his still-open eyes looked only to judge angrily that which would suppose to supplant his authority over anything, especially his own life.
Treize was still musing on the magnificence of his fallen enemy - perhaps the single most powerful architect of the sins of the world lay here, now, felled by Treize's own weapon - when a nervous Lieutenant suggested they barricade the General inside his office and finish securing the estate.
Treize smirked. "No, you can easily see what a death-trap that idea is. No..." He turned with the utmost sense of finality, dismissing Dermail's corpse from his thoughts. "I will continue this battle with my loyal troops."
The lieutenant saluted, and followed her General out into the hall.
...
Zechs stood beside Une with his hands clasped behind his back, posture rigid despite the steady throb of pain emanating from his sutures.
"You nearly gave your nurse a coronary," Une mentioned over her shoulder, tone mild and expression carefully guarded.
"I'm not satisfied until my captors are injured worse than I am," came Zechs' humored reply. Neither soldier moved.
"Captor- hardly." Une's glasses gleamed in the light of the flight monitors. "Welcome back, Colonel. I'm sure Treize will be pleased to learn that I allowed you onto this vessel in your condition."
Zechs' smirk could not reach his eyes, hidden as they were by his helmet. "Allowed, hardly."
Une's cheek twitched as she bit into it to restrain a smile. "At least get some rest during the flight."
"The one-hour flight?"
"Rest," Une demanded.
"Sure." Zechs was already a vanishing breeze of long blonde locks, so Une took the luxury of rolling her eyes.
...
As only troops organised and commanded by the most brilliant General to ever grace the warface of the post-colonial Earthsphere could, the Treize Faction mowed down OZ opposition in record time. Bases across the globe were locked down and secured before uprisings could even occur, and even the riots on the colonies that ensued from a sense of internal instability in the oppressive military were quickly subdued.
Around Treize's manor and the nearby bases, where Dermail's OZ soldiers were most clustered, the General's superior planning and guidance overwhelmed the lackadaisical intentions of Romefeller's erstwhile leader in short, violent eruptions of battle.
By the time Une's craft, still cradling the desiccated husk of Tallgeese in its bowels, arrived on the premises, Treize was lounging calmly in his favorite parlour chair, sipping at last a fine brandy with thick, unmelted icecubes, smiling and nodding at his Faction soldiers as they marched through the halls in one last exercise of security. Lieutenant Anmodere broke Treize's silent reverie.
"Sir, Colonel Une has just touched down on the south wing landing pad-" His eyes widened in surprise as the General bounded from his seat, a disappearing blur through the door before even his abandoned glass of brandy could topple to the floor, spilling its contents atop a very expensive persian rug. Anmodere blinked.
...
"All troops fall into flanking formation! Prepare for possible hostility! Your regulation caps and insignia must be removed! Do not, I repeat, do not fire upon OZ soldiers and Specials who are not wearing caps or insignia!"
Une was too absorbed with barking orders and inspecting each ready soldier as he or she marched past for proper uniform alterations to notice Zechs, slithering as he was, slip out of an unmanned crew exit from the spacecraft. The conspicuous waterfall of platinum blond and impossibly tell-tale silver helmet, salvaged from the wreckage of Tallgeese, were no match for Une's pre-battle energetic chaos. Zechs, after all, bore those two visible assets like insignia of his own self-importance, and lesser soldiers did abide, and know him through all propaganda media as the interminable figure beside their beloved Treize.
It was that man for whom Zechs now searched, his lips stretching and then helplessly curling upward in amusement at the reality he now encountered of the state of Treize's manor; the battle was, of course, already won. Treize's inevitably triumphant struggle against the corporate tyranny of his own army was already made fiction, at least for the Lightning Baron who was supposed to have fought it for him. Instead, Zechs had been getting himself half-killed somewhere nameless off world, and he wondered if he'd be written into the annals of this event anyway, just for the hell of it. Just to maintain a better sense of congruency for the next generation; just to help him understand how he could be so much a part of the General's life and yet so little involved with the man responsible for it.
Zechs wandered mansion corridors with the flippant flair of a very tired artist, inspecting the remaining soldiers as they tended their dead as though he were studying the exhibits in a museum built specifically to display the style that he had invented, but was full of paintings by anyone else. He had not been needed here, not even in Treize's personal living space, not even for the first battle that heralded a new era in Treize's legacy.
Zechs wondered if he had ever actually been needed, or if he were just some weird caricature of a companion wearing all the wrong outfits at all the wrong times; a soldier's uniform when he should be in a butler's bowtie; a lover's handcuffs when he should bear a crown; and always the garish maquillage of a clown.
Zechs couldn't even die when he was supposed to. He felt so always one step behind the complex tune of Treize's personal waltz.
He stood, then, and questioned, with fear beginning to boil behind his eyes, if Treize even missed him at all.
...
Treize was running.
It was not an activity he particularly relished, and not one he had performed since his days of academy training, but Treize did running the way he did everything else: perfectly. He was quick, he was deft, he was maintaining the trail of his cape with practiced grace as the soles of his boots barely skimmed the floor; he was sprinting.
In this fashion he sprinted around the corner of the main south wing hall-
...and skidded to a pronounced stop just before a tall man with flowing blonde hair, whose visage was shielded by glinting silver steel.
Treize's own expression went slack, wordless, chest heaving for laboured breath above a racing heart, the sound of his panting audible in a silence split only by distant report.
Zechs' lips were already quirked in a wry smile, and Treize could not decipher it. He inclined his head backwards to indicate the clear glass behind him, filled with spilling flares of deliriously-coloured light that punctuated the gunfire. "Don't they know there's a war on?"
Treize laughed.