13: frail cogs of stone.

"Dermail is dead," Treize began by way of explanation, as he closed the door to his personal suite.

Zechs waited impassively in the entrance hall. "What does that mean, for the Specials?"

"Let me worry about that," Treize hummed as he grazed his knuckles across his lover's cheek, a gesture at that moment no more soothing than the punch those knuckles were capable of inflicting. When Zechs remained still, glowering, Treize urged the blonde into his living quarters with a guiding grasp. "Come now, Milliard, don't ask me to discuss agonising strategy when I finally have you returned safely to my side." He swept a graceful arm towards the numerous decanters spread atop the coffee table, and collected two empty wineglasses. "Let us instead celebrate our victories."

"Our victories?" Zechs repeated, with skepticism wracking his tone, as he removed his mask of a helmet and shook long platinum locks loose. "I just made it out alive. It's your victory- you're the one who worries about that, remember?"

Treize did not bother to study the adonis revealed from beneath gleaming steel, instead removing the cork of a dusty wine bottle with practiced ease. "You're cross with me."

Zechs turned his profile to the sight of that controlled man with a heavy sigh. He watched the paintings on the wall.

The General poured both crystal glasses full of aged red wine, surely thick with tannins and just bitter enough for the taste of the evening. He offered one to Zechs between two slim fingertips that fully supported the bowl, the rest of his form still, his eyebrows raised enticingly. When it was not accepted, he twirled it teasingly in the air, its flared stem rotating in even circlets where it dangled from his grasp, and the sanguine liquid was stirred. "Would you deny a doomed man his final luxuries?"

Zechs assented to the proffered wine because he simply wanted to remove the distraction of it from Treize's person; he knew his superior officer would not cease pestering him with it otherwise, and he had important things to discuss. "Why do you say that?" he demanded.

Treize took a long, savouring sip from his own glass, an infuriating pause before he answered, "We always knew you would outlive me."

Zechs narrowed his eyes. "What is this 'we?' Treize, I don't know what your intentions are from one moment to the next, how could I predict your life expectancy?"

"Then why argue with me," Treize tilted his head downward to intensify the stare with which he fixed his blonde pilot, "when I tell you it's coming to a close?"

Stiffly, miserably, Zechs worked out his explanation for the fault of logic Treize had pinpointed, and only the tense flexing of his jaw indicated his effort. He threw his gaze away, to the side. Finally: "There's no reason."

"No reason?" An embittered chuckle coloured Treize's throat. "Ah, how you forget me in my old age. I am nothing if not reasonable."

"Spoken like a true madman," Zechs groused.

Treize enjoyed more of his precious fine wine, and chastised Zechs with his tone. "I doubt a madman knows what he's doing."

With a lowered voice, with shame in his mouth, Zechs muttered, "I doubt that you do, as well."

Treize snapped his gaze onto the younger man, now that he sensed a threat to the state of his chessboard. "You've never doubted me."

Maturely, Zechs rolled his eyes. "I am a paragon of doubt, Treize. Just because I've always followed your orders doesn't mean I never doubted them. I..." He tossed his head, searching the room for something meaningful, and settled on the sight of his own darkened eyelids. "I had nothing better to do."

"You're allowing your mood to colour your perception of the past, you're warping memory." Treize uttered with scorn, tipping the rim of fine crystal that Zechs still clutched towards his lover. "Have a drink."

Automatically Zechs obeyed, and was momentarily transported out of his wits by the intensity of Treize's quality wine filling him, like rose-tainted silk enveloping the soft palette of his tongue before it poured down his throat in one smooth thick line; an inside-out cord of strangulation, suffusing his own soft tissue instead of constricting around his throat. Instantly his nerves were set alight, buzzing timidly within the solid frame of his muscled body. Zechs observed from somewhere outside of himself, somewhere he could be lost in addiction to this absenteeism, as Treize refilled his glass with more elegant poison.

"You have a plan, then?" Zechs finally spoke, raising his eyes to the General, "To orchestrate your demise?"

Treize's smirk was too rehearsed. "I always have a plan."

"Of course. Were you ever intending to share it with me?"

"I'd rather share with you my bed."

"I'm too injured to withstand your affections these days," Zechs murmured, lifting the hem of his dress shirt to reveal the still-fresh stitches he bore.

True to his earlier claim over rationale, Treize did not press the matter, and neither man could find a suitable response to the silence that lapsed between them.

They drank, and said nothing.

Zechs cradled his wineglass between both hands as though it were a delicate artifact of the raging tides he nursed regularly from behind the steel mask of a massive machine, as though it symbolised the last vestige of his own weeping humanity, to be handled with care lest it shatter in the wake of the robotics he performed; a totem beneath his throat into which he gazed listlessly, eyes dimming, until not even his thoughts were focused. He let himself be moved by the sensation of impending intoxication. He let himself be drowned.

"I can't do this anymore, Treize," he murmured into the gently sloshing wine at the bottom, transfixed by the way his long fingers curled so evenly around the bulk of the glass; both hands perfectly poised, each a mirror to the other, like ornate carvings on a grecian pillar. Not hands. He forgot the weight of the wineglass against his skin; he could not remember how it was to grasp such a thing, to hold it. Not his hands. He felt like waxwork.

"What can't you do?" The General's tone was defiantly teasing. Treize was such a dramatic paradox of omnipotence; he took himself far too seriously, as the purveyor of all matters grave, to be capable of regarding anyone else with seriousness, but he seemed to produce an infinite amount of being serious- surely he could spare enough for the lowly fallen prince. Surely he could not exhaust his own supply of seriousness on himself, for he did, after all, produce infinite seriousness- That is to say, by being serious-

Zechs was making himself dizzy.

Treize could not be a god when even he struggled to keep up with his own significance, and now there was no significance to be allowed for his other, the man who had done nothing to earn his dormant royal title, or any others titles he bore... save one, shared with the equally-accidental nature of the skies.

"Milliard?"

Inexplicably, the Lightning Baron giggled.

"I believe the wine is going to your head, my love."

"It can't find my head, that's the problem. No-" Suddenly awash with determination, Zechs slapped the stem of his glass down onto the table, a demonstration of his reconstituted resolve that drenched his hands with a wave of spilled wine. When he removed them from the object he had been mindlessly clutching, startled to remember there was something there, they were coated with oily dripping red. Zechs stared down at those fleshy extensions of his will and waited for his eyes to burn through them, but the blood never came. The blood was already there. The blood was slicking off, splattering into the carpet below. The blood was just wine.

All the blood he'd spilled- everything that Zechs did- accomplishment or assassination, Treize had bottled for his own pleasured consumption. Treize ordered Zechs in little bottles, one for every meal. A slice of war, a spoon in bed-

Treize covered Zechs' wine-sticky hands with his own, and at last those steaming cerulean eyes looked for another target in the older man's face. "You were saying something, Milliard?"

"I am not to be drunk," the blonde growled between grinding molars.

Treize issued a soft chuckle. "Sometimes you can't help it."

Zechs frowned. "I never can, with you. You always know the right bottles..."

"Bordeaux is not your strong suit, hmm?"

"Au contraire-" Zechs purred with bitter humor, "I have a suit of armour, but you seem to drink that down with no trouble."

It was Treize's turn to frown. "Pardon?"

Zechs glared at him. "We are not discussing the same topic."

"Bottled wine."

"Bottled me," Zechs failed to clarify.

"You are drunk-"

"I have been, by you, for a very long time. It ends tonight."

"Ends?" With one quick strike, with the violence of the title for which he was famed, Zechs set Treize's heart still. "Nothing ends tonight, Milliard- we have not yet written the final chapter."

"I will not be featured in it."

Treize set down his own glass at last; he needed both hands free to juggle the severity of that moment; he did not feel equipped to grasp the full weight of it. "What are you saying?"

Zechs stood of his own accord, if a little unsteady on his feet, and it felt good. Staring down at the paralyzed man who had so daunted and governed the whole of his adult life, he declared, "General Treize Kushrenada, consider me AWOL."

Treize's mouth fell open at just the slightest angle, but it was the most extreme reaction Zechs had ever elicited, so counter as it was to the entirety of the ginger-haired man's countenance. "You're not thinking clearly," he managed.

"I'm thinking clearly enough to know that I am terrified."

Treize stood, but still could not achieve level ground with his own subordinate warrior, now that Zechs had found a new mission to execute with the very talents Treize relied upon. At last Zechs knew why he was wanted, why he was so coveted by the man who had it all; Zechs had been it all. Here was the essence Treize would seek to devour in each sip of the Lightning Baron that he took; Zechs was powerful. Zechs was a weapon. It was time for him to begin controlling that weapon himself.

"I'm terrified to become what you have always been for me, and I'm confident that I will not excel in that, your specialty..." Here, his words slurred. "But... I am also sickened by what I have been willing to accept as the alternative."

"If you're making an arbitrary stand just to-"

"There is no other kind of stand to make," Zechs interrupted. "Not when the enemy is your own reluctance."

"This is treason."

"So hold a trial."

At that, Treize clenched his jaw until the muscles spanning it were flexed taut, and he turned away from his final intimate gaze with his disappearing lover to cross the room in stiff, definitive strides. "Go, then. Abandon me."

"I prefer to think of it as rejoining myself, not abandoning you."

Treize leaned heavily upon his desk, covered with stacks of paper whose issues contained therein could crush the shoulders of any man, but themselves would only flutter harmlessly to the floor were they dropped. It was not until Treize's palms were flat upon the varnished mahogany that his desk began to creak. "I loved you," he whispered. "You were mine."

There was nothing covering Zechs' face to hide the sickness in his eyes. "I have learned something that not even you can claim as yours."

With an expression of immense impatience, Treize whirled to face the man with two faces, knowing that now neither belonged to him. "And what's that?"

"There are things that only the dead know."

Treize was silent for a moment. "Happy new year, Milliard."

The tall blonde rebel left his silver helmet to gleam on the chair as he closed the door behind him.