「The Secret Life of Gardenias」

「December, 181: Happy Families – Hanasuou (1)」

…

Milliard Peacecraft was having an inordinately good day. It was breezy and overcast but not too cold, his favourite kind of weather. He'd woken up all on his own, which was always better than having to be woken by the servants, and the Starlight Ball begins tonight.

It would be the first time he has been given permission to attend any formal festivities, and everything was coming along perfectly. He had drilled himself in dancing and etiquette so well he could do both in his sleep. His costume was undergoing its final touches, he had a respectable date (not that there were too many choices in his height category to begin with before he would have to be carried around on the dance-floor to give a decent waltz), and Aunt Lucy was here and he had her personal guarantee that his cousin Rex would arrive in time for the Opening Ball. It has been a little over a year since Rex'd gone off to school and Milliard sorely missed having some decent company under the age of majority. They have so much to catch up on! The only children in his vicinity were all horrifyingly boring and childish and there were things that no adult, however awesome or sympathetic, could truly understand.

She wasn't really his aunt, of course, and Rex wasn't really his cousin, they were Relena's, because they were actually Katrina's sister and nephew; but he has known them all his life and they have never corrected him for calling them family. Presumably somewhere out among the stars, there was an entire clan of cousins, uncles and aunts related to him through the mother he'd never known that Katrina and his father promise to take him to meet when he was old enough, but at age five-and-three-quarters, he could not imagine needing any family other than the one he's already got.

Knowing that Rex was coming put an extra spring in the Princeling's step. He'll have to call him by his proper name now. "Rex" was something the older boy let him use because he could not get his baby tongue around "Treize" but now that Milliard was almost six, the rolling "tr-r" and soft "zze" combination no longer made him stutter. Rex would be proud! He would also be proud, Milliard hoped, of his victories against the snivelling children the adults keep trying to send in to somehow gain his royal affections. Now that his step-cousin was back, he could prove to that annoying Neun kid once and for all how much better Rex was at everything compared to her, or anyone else in their age range, and put an end to her inane assertion that there could possibly be anyone more brilliant, more fantastic, and more worthy of his unflinching loyalty —

And if he could just get everyone else to see this too, then maybe they will see some sense and finally bring Rex home to Skagen Castle from that crummy far-away place called school for good!

.

There was just one very slight problem with Prince Millard's plan: it did not seem very much like Treize Khushrenada wanted to go to Sanq. In fact, he had done his very best to avoid having to do so by spending most of the week coercing his roommate Alessandro to go in his place instead.

Like most Lords and Ladies of the Dominion nations, Melusina Prinzessin Khushrenada had no qualms about using her son as a political chip and Treize was sick of it. He wanted her to call him and take him places because he was her son and she missed him, not because she was going to a party where his presence would further her position and strength her stock or some other such agenda. It was his birthday, damn it! Not to mention, Sanq was a terrible place for him. He always ends up in the middle of one or the other of the infamously epic fights between his mother and his Aunt Katya. Some offer would also most certainly be made for him to stay in Sanq, which he would then have to feel guilty about rejecting because, truth be told, Treize liked the freedom of being away at school. He just wished his mother would visit him more, that's all.

But while Alex was sorely tempted by the prospect of seeing his sister in Sanq, he wasn't quite as much of an idiot as Treize had hoped. At least, he was more aware of the ways things could go wrong and the consequences of being caught impersonating a Prince than Treize would have liked, even a dispossessed bastard one such as himself.

In the end, it was agreed that Alex was to come with him and switch places with him during the balls, which relieved Treize of the burden of being paraded around by like a fashion accessory while giving Alex the best opportunities of locating his sister and, hopefully, someone from Roma powerful enough to help them out of their muddled plight.

This worked out well enough for Treize since he did miss his Sanqere relatives, secretly. Aunt Katya was elegant and sensible, unlike his beautiful, licentious, mother, and her husband was the man who'd taught him to ride and shoot. He wanted to meet his baby cousin too, who was just a warm throbbing lump in Katya's belly when he'd left, and check in on the little aviary he had designed and built in the middle of their greenhouse. It was worth putting up with a few minutes of the lofty Imperial Princess Melusina for, he supposed.

To Alessandro's surprise, Melusina Romefeller Prinzessin Khushrenada seemed rather disinterested in her son and his guest.

He had expected some kind of interrogation regarding the circumstances of his and Treize's acquaintanceship such as one his grandmother, the Duchessa, levied towards every new face in her presence. Instead, the bewitching woman barely stirred as they entered her suite.

She was soaking in a claw-foot tub filled with deep red rose-petals under the stately window in the sitting room, thin cucumber slices covering her up-turned face and lily-white hands hanging over the sides, dipped in bowls of warm paraffin. It was a comfortably luxurious room with lavender and rose-gold accents and unusual patches on the walls where it seems the large collection of framed portraits now lying in a haphazard pile behind the rococo couch used to hang.

"Master Treize and guest, your Imperial Highness," the old man who'd brought them in from the shuttle hanger announced with an admirably deep bow.

"Thank you... Hello, baby," she acknowledged with a musical voice that made Alex blush, but that was the extent of it.

"Hello Mother. The veruccas look well," Treize said pleasantly while making a rude face at her as their usher retreated. He could have said anything; the woman who was his mother was no longer listening.

"I told you," he muttered lowly at Alex, "You could have done this on your own and she wouldn't have noticed. Come on."

Treize wanted to go off exploring his old haunts, but then Alex would realise that they had free run of the castle, contrary to the lies Treize'd told, and have no reason to go through with The Plan. Besides, he had to get Alex ready.

The sitting room split off into three additional rooms: a small drawing room for private entertaining, a lavish bedroom, and a large bathroom with two side chambers of its own, complete with locking doors, closets and vanity sets. The larger of these became their base of operations, in which Treize transformed Alex into a passable body double and himself into the classic cartoon villain, Zero.

"Are you sure this is going to work?" Alex inspected himself worriedly in the full-length mirrors. He was a tragic mess of eyeliner and powder, dressed up as a colourless clown with a comical white ruff and white pompoms glued in two neat little rows as mock buttons. His jet black hair was shoved out of the way under a terrible red mop only technically considered a wig, complete with a frilly white cone hat, and his feet crammed into a pair of ornate pointy-toed boots with dainty feminine heels and a porcelain finish.

The awkward shoes were because Treize was several centimetres taller than Alex. The wig was to disguise that he was brunette, not dirty blonde. The caked-on make-up was because he was Pierrot the Pantomime Clown, naïve, lovestruck metaphor of the masses, so that Melusina and he can be a matching pair, but also so he would not be readily recognisable should he lose his mask.

In contrast, Treize wore black with blue and gold trims under an evil black-and-red cloak with a five-horned, featureless, black helm that covered the whole of his head, sold off the shelf at most good toy collector's stores. One-way visibility in the visor hid his face while allowing him to get a violet-tinted view of what's in front of him. It was annoying, but he didn't intend to keep it on after slipping out from the ball anyway.

"No-one will know, just hold your tongue," Treize said reassuringly, because Alex said everything with a heavy Neo-Lombard accent and Treize had none. "Trust me, Alessandro."

Alex wavered on his feet. The porcelain boots made it impossible to do any sort of walk that cannot be described as a prance, but if this is what it takes to find and rescue Lucrezia... He had promised himself that he will find her and that they will go home together somehow. He hasn't quite worked out how they were going to do that yet, but one step at a time. Not having to think too far ahead is one of the few privileges of being a ten year-old boy.

Alessandro Larucca of Roma took a deep breath. "Good luck, Khushrenada," he grimaced, and pranced out ahead into the big bad world of royal costumed parties and inattentive parents.

A different servant was waiting to lead them to the Grand Hall when the boys emerged, where groups of costumed men and women mingled politely outside its five sets of doors, waiting for them to open.

Melusina Romefeller, Alliance Ambassador to the Dominions and Imperial Princess of the now defunct empire of Deutscheland, was resplendent in a raw silk dress built out of artistically ripped layers to intimate a ragged, country look. The haltered neckline lent her an air of purity sharply juxtaposed by the seductive scarlet bolero jacket worn over it. Gold embroidering crawled richly across the red brocade, draping her arms and shoulders in an abundance of golden, blood-quenched, thorns and roses. Her face was powdered white as marble to match the elegantly ruffled collar at her throat and her hands were delicately covered in tattered raw silk gloves. A tentative black briar tendril wandered up the top of her breast, along her swan-like neck, and blossomed into a tiny black rosebud under her eye. Finally, a tiny silk top hat adorned with fresh white roses almost as large as the hat itself nestled atop the elaborate coif of hair piled on the top of her head. Everything was perfect.

"There's my escort. Hello, baby, we're going to have fun tonight," she cooed, leaning down to pin a corsage of miniature black and white roses to the Pierrot costume. Alex's heart stopped.

She's going to notice!

Amazingly, she didn't. There was hardly any intimacy in her interaction with the boy she thought was her son. Her attention rested on him only long enough to secure the flowers, as if she were reluctant to touch or acknowledge him. She hadn't even noticed his guest.

"I can't do this," he hissed at the cartoon villain trailing behind him the moment she turned away. "She knows. She must know! I told you, we're going to be found out!"

"Steady on, my friend, you'll be fine. Just stay close to her and don't say a word," Treize replied, thinking how odd it was that it was more painful to watch his mother's interaction with 'him' than it was to experience it.

Inside the hall, like a distant dream, an orchestral violin piece started to sound.

…

Another world away, Ken Tsubarov found himself explaining his methodology to a five year-old kid who, against all common odds and probabilities, actually seemed quite fascinated by it. Having never spent any time around anyone under the age of twenty since he himself was a teen, Tsubarov had taken her grasp of the conversation for granted and simply assumed that all children of a certain background had a certain degree of metallurgy and speculative engineering studies. He's had to explain a few things several times, she was only a child, after all, and can't be expected to know everything yet. It was surprisingly invigorating to be sharing conversation with someone while he worked again.

Lucrezia adored the crotchety old man. He didn't talk slow to her, for a start. Most people do because she was small, even when they know she is smart. There were no awful, awkward moments of him trying to check if she could understand him. He simply talked, like he would with anyone else, and answered questions when she thought to ask them. Plus, he was a tombraider. How cool is that!

Although, tombraiding was turning out to be more boring than she'd originally thought. It was a lot more science stuff than adventuring, largely dusting and scribbling and swearing at things until something happens, from what she'd gathered, but reality was never quite the same as the ideal, after all. Most of it was boiling lumps of oddly shaped stuff he'd picked up off the floor. She didn't ask why he would do that; it seemed quite self-explanatory when bits of rust and grime fell off the bits he was cooking to reveal other bits underneath. A bath is a bath.

It was dim down in the big underground island cave. Luckily, Tsubarov was able to produce a lamp from his luggage to work by and a tiny LED flashlight for her from a forgotten breast pocket.

Lucrezia got the feeling the gigantic broken old things in the back of the cavern were supposed to scare her, but they didn't. To her they just looked sad and lonely, like her brother's discarded toy soldiers, only bigger— much bigger.

"What are their names?" She asked, instead of asking him what they were. Her tiny five year-old voice carried fearlessly across the strange mechanical graveyard like a ray of niggling sunshine.

"Don't know. It's not official," Tsubarov answered "but we sometimes called them Talgeists."

"Tall geeses? They don't look very goose-like," she complained, cocking herself around in strange angles trying to imagine what the hunks of black, twisted metal would look like new and whole.

"Tal-giest, it's Deutsche. Wait..."

Among the things that'd come out of Tsubarov's silver suitcase of tricks was a leather-bound book, thick with pictures and extra note pages, shoved haphazardly into a resealable plastic bag. He lifted the book out carefully from the plastic and thumbed through the jumbled mess of precious findings until he found a Polaroid of the cavern ceiling.

"Here," he stabbed a peeling nail-bitten finger at the photographed inscription. "Lag hier Talgeister, nicht mehr unser Himmel verdunkeln..."

"'Lay here, Tal-geists, no more'... no, 'don't darken our sky any more'? So... oh!" Her little face lit up delightedly, "like the Weltgeist, right? But for a valley?"

It should impress Tsubarov that what had taken the Vestmanna project's anthropologists three months to suggest appeared obvious to her in mere moments, but that would be unfair to the anthropologists. Children did not have to worry about things like professional credibility or being disproved on the same level they do. And anyway, etymology debates hold no interest for men like him. He showed her a second picture. This one was of a dark blue piece of paper with a clunky humanoid shape sketched on it in neat white lines.

"This is what we think they'd look like."

"This doesn't look very much like them," Lucrezia peered doubtfully into the dark.

"It's a projection, use your imagination."

She bit her lip and decided it wasn't worth arguing that she was using her imagination because she wasn't sure what being 'a projection' meant and asking him would only weaken her case.

"Why are they called ghosts?" She moved on instead. "Do they go invisible and pass through walls?"

"No," a corner of his face twitched at the childish thought. "It's just a name."

"Names should mean things," she mused solemnly, trying to compare the blueprint snapshot to another piece of derelict. "Otherwise, how would anyone know what things are? I'd love to see them fly. I bet they fly all the way into outer space... oh, but then they'd be Space-ghosts, hm..."

Tsubarov put down his pen and notepad. "That's absurd," he said, fixing her with a scornful look. "These things are obviously not designed for aerodynamics and Mankind did not develop the kind of propulsion technology that would be necessary for something of this mass to break atmosphere until after the Harmony War. The power requirement for the necessary lift… the power necessary to remotely mobilise something of this size and complexity alone is beyond anything we currently have, even today..." It was a sore point, the math just didn't work. The best Tsubarov had been able to come up with was chaining each recreated unit up to their own power plant by way of some kind of umbilical cord.

That was when the Romefeller Foundation lost interest and murdered the project; his project, his baby.

"Can't you make bigger batteries?" she quipped, not really understanding his angst.

…

A/N:

Part 1 of 3 planned parts for this chapter.

Hanasuou, Cercis Chinensis, another predominantly Asian blossom carrying meanings of "awakening", "frugality", "the Good Life", "suspicion", "betrayal", "taking advantage of kindness", "atheism" and "nobility" (the class and lifestyle, not the virtue). Its cousins in the West includes the Judas Tree, on which Judas Iscariot supposedly hanged himself (the story of the Last Supper always tastes to me like a bittersweet yaoi love-triangle). At home in Asia, it has long been used to symbolize homesickness, familial harmony and prosperity.

Treize – I realised I'd mistakenly set Treize's birthday to February in one of the earlier chapters, but it isn't. It's in the midst of December, and I've a good reason for it, honest.

Classic Cartoon Villian Zero – Is Lelouch vi Britannia, a "dispossessed-Prince-turned-masked-avenger" type character from the series Code Geass. Now, where have we heard that setup before, hmm...

Giant Mecha on Umbilical Cords – Is a comical thought at first, but is actually humanity's worst nightmare waiting to happen at the hands of a group of schizophrenic, hormonal teens *coughNGEcough* With that in mind, I can't really look upon the Foundation as the bad guy here for terminating Tsubarov's research...