II
They navigate their way through the space station corridors to the central hub, where most of the amenities (such as they are out here on Mars) are to be found. Noin is still only half-awake, yawning into her elbow. Their shoulders bump occasionally against each other as they walk.
It would be so very easy for him to reach out and wrap his arm around her. He's done it before; and he can remember how neatly she fits against him, like nesting puzzle pieces. The impulse worries at him as they walk, won't let him go.
"Noin…"
"Mmm?"
There are things he doesn't talk about. Feelings he does not acknowledge. But he's going to. Because they have been on Mars for more than six months now and this limbo has become just as unbearable. "I haven't forgotten what you told me."
Noin stops walking, which perforce draws him to a halt as well; she cocks her head curiously. "What's that?"
He doesn't look away. "About not waiting any longer."
Her expression smooths in understanding, then transitions into something he takes for reassurance. "I asked you to let me stand by your side," she says, leaning close; her hand comes to rest against his shoulder. "And here we are. Before anything else, Zechs, I'm your friend. I don't need more than that. I'm happy."
It should come as a relief. He is not being asked for more than he can give.
It doesn't.
The impulse is still there - she is close enough to kiss.
Noin smirks as if she's read his mind. It wouldn't surprise him if she had; as she has said to him before, he isn't very subtle. The hand on his shoulder serving as a brace, she rises on her tiptoes and sways forward to murmur into his ear, "I'm flattered you're worried about losing me, though."
The entire exchange leaves him unsatisfied. Noin's teasing strikes a raw nerve and he is no closer to unraveling the tangled mess in his head.
She is close enough to reach for, but he doesn't.
In AC186, he is ten years old. He is in his second year at the Lake Victoria Academy. His name is Zechs Marquise. He's known Treize by now four years. Not so very long a time, and yet for all he can remember of the time that came Before, it feels like Treize has been there his entire life.
In AC182, he is still only six. He is father's son: a prince. Milliardo Peacecraft.
He is held by the collar of his coat by a horrible man, an Alliance man, whose enormous hand keeps him pinned in place.
In front of him, stands Treize. Not an adult, but when one is young enough nearly everyone else appears grown up by comparison. And Treize is tall, taller even than the grown woman standing beside him; tall and lean and impeccably polished, clothes perfectly tailored and not a hair out of place. The look in his eyes is perfectly controlled.
In contrast, the woman at his side looks positively deranged.
"Sweet boy," she murmurs, bending down to cup Milliardo's face. Matted tangles of hair swing down with her. He can see the sheen of oil on her skin, smell the unwashed musk whiffing from beneath her clothes with each small movement. "Poor, sweet boy." When she kisses his cheek, her breath is awful. Like a corpse.
And yet it's Treize, whose name he doesn't even know, whose presence commands his attention, whose impression lingers. Looking past the corpse woman, he sees him watching them, his expression measured and unreadable. Sunlight glinting off his hair gives him a copper halo. His eyes are very blue.
"Treize - a word," says the horrible man who brought him here. That is it: the moment of their introduction.
"Of course, uncle. Shall we go in?"
Milliardo is frog-marched into the house. He squirms rebelliously and receives a violent shake for his troubles. Ahead of him, the odd woman drifts down the hall, ghostlike in her long, filmy nightdress, until she disappears.
Angeline, he later learns. Treize's mother.
Treize leads the rest of them to a comfortable sitting room at the back of the house, where windows overlook a wide lawn running down to a lake choked with cattails. A fire burns in the hearth and the first ice of winter clings to the lake's shore. Treize seats himself on a low sofa, at his ease, one arm draped over the sofa's back, an ankle hooked over his knee.
"Sit," the Alliance man tells Milliardo, like a dog; so Milliardo bares his teeth and snarls like one. The Alliance man gives him a single quick cuff upside the head and bears inexorably down on Milliardo's shoulder until he is kneeling on the floor.
Treize takes this in without comment, then listens to his uncle talk.
Impotent fury keeps sparking behind Milliardo's eyes to the beat of Father - Mother - Gertie, distracting him, but he sits up straight and pays attention when Treize, the minute after his uncle finishes speaking, calmly looks him in the eye and tells him, "No."
This is unprecedented.
Milliardo knows himself for a willful boy. He has, in his time, been known to argue back with the adults in his life and put on displays of defiance. But never with such aplomb. Always, with him, it has been a futile effort, doomed to overrule. When Treize says it, as an adult to an adult, there is little doubt but that he will have his way.
Somehow, despite being the child, there is no doubt that Treize is the one with authority here.
"Treize," says the horrible man impatiently, "be reasonable. The boy needs papers. He needs an identity; there is one here waiting for him. No one else outside these walls knows Vingt is dead-"
"Uncle Chilias, I understand your reasoning perfectly. The answer remains unchanged. This boy-" he glances at Milliardo "-will not assume my brother's name."
"Damn it, Treize, how else do you think these things are done? You can't just conjure up a false identity from the aether and expect it to stand up to scrutiny. God's sake, with that blond hair he even looks the part!"
It's him. They're talking about him.
They're talking about him as if he isn't even here.
They're talking about turning him into someone else.
"You're a colonel in the Alliance army, uncle. I have no doubt you can find another way to get him papers."
"If this is about your mother-"
"It's of no matter what it is 'about,'" Treize smoothly interrupts, waving a hand in casual dismissal. He wields his authority from the sofa as easily as Milliardo's father did from a throne. "Now I'll thank you to stop asking; the boy may stay here as agreed, but that is as far as it goes."
The exchange as good as cements Treize's idol status to the six-year-old boy watching: what he wouldn't give in that moment for Treize's power of command. Then he would tell them.
He is Milliardo Peacecraft of the Cinq Kingdom. He always will be.
They can't change that.
No one can.
But in AC186, he is ten years old and Zechs Marquise. He is two years away from graduating into the MS Corps, where he'll be a cadet still, but one fighting in real battles. Four years…two years…ten years - none of them so very long a time when you consider it, and yet he feels the weight of each one like a lifetime.
Treize has made him promises; and in exchange he has made compromises. It's a strange friendship that exists between them, for lack of a better term…he is still not really sure how to describe what they are.
Noin has honored his request (command, more like) and kept her distance in the months since she found him in the cafeteria. It's not as helpful as he'd hoped.
For one, their instructors have by now noticed their complementary aptitudes (which, without being conceited, have begun to far exceed the rest of their class) and begun squaring them off together more often than not, either in partnership or competition. For another…it's hard to dislike her.
She doesn't speak to him unnecessarily, but her attitude remains one of cautious friendliness. She is the same with everyone: it's nothing personal. Even when he bests her (which is not so common as he might have liked or once expected), she manages to find a smile, and her congratulations always sound sincere. He is not nearly so gracious in defeat.
But despite himself, he likes her work ethic. Respects her skill.
He wants to resent their forced camaraderie…but there's no denying it's effective. As uncomfortable as it makes him - and it does: she has seen him at his lowest and he is instinctively aware it's only luck that she is not the sort of person to exploit the weakness he displayed (he doesn't think about the friendly warmth of a familiar touch, that isn't why he's here) - he has to work harder, think quicker, and just be better when she's at his back.
As for Elv, he takes her warning about subtlety to heart. He can't entirely give up his constant awareness of Onegell's proximity, but the sense of urgency has left him. When he lies awake at night imagining the boy's demise, it feels more like a burden. Something has changed.
It's a peripheral awareness now. Like Noin.
Morning reveille sounds at 5AM. The overhead fluorescent lights in the cadet dormitory come on automatically and never fail to set off a ripple of hushed grumbling. The cadets (Zechs is one in a room of eight, in a corridor of eighty, in a dorm of many more) race to dress and line up outside, in formation by their year, for their drill sergeants' inspection.
There's still a bite in the air this early in the morning - the only good thing about dawn drills is that it saves them from doing the same in the midday heat and the risk of sunstroke. The year groups split; and for his cohort it's calisthenics to start, each repetition of every set signalled by a sharp whistle blast blown by their sergeant, Instructor Voegel, as he strides up and down the line. Next, they run: they're up to five miles now, in laps around the perimeter of the base, still in formation. While they do all this, it's the officers' mess hour. Only after do the cadet groups go in order of seniority to break their fasts.
No longer the youngest, they are, by now, used to all this - but Zechs can recall the bitter grumbling in their first weeks about the 'antiquated bullshit' of their training regime. ("We're going to be mobile suit pilots!" one particularly annoyed cadet, Brandeis, the maternal grandson of Commander Lafayette had complained. "How is this even relevant? By the time we graduate we'll all be deployed to outer space - and if we're caught outside our suits in vacuum we're dead anyway."
"Don't be so shortsighted," Noin had scolded him. For a second Zechs's ears pricked up, wondering just what she knew - but the brief argument that followed had nothing to do with what Treize had, even then, begun to refer to as Operation Daybreak. Zechs stopped listening, and after a minute, Brandeis, shame-faced, fell silent.)
Weapons training follows, where Noin excels. Zechs is no bad shot, but her marksmanship is better even than some of the instructors'. Sometimes, if they're on a lunch break, a few of the base's soldiers will cluster by and watch, elbowing each other in the ribs and placing bets. It's the cadets who are disciplined for this behavior: they dis- and reassemble their rifles so many times they can do so with their eyes closed.
First aid. Fieldcraft.
And then - because they are, after all, training to be officers - an hour's worth of fencing. Zechs is undefeated (not that he's smug).
Afternoons are reserved for the more academic subjects, when heads begin to nod in stuffy classrooms. More drills await anyone caught out - or possibly the lot of them, depending on the instructor's mood.
The best is that from their second year, the cadets gain access to the base's flight simulator booths, where they will be expected to log two hundred hours of independent practice before graduation. There is, however, a pecking order: qualified pilots have first priority, then the older cadets, with the youngest, like Zechs, left to fit their hours in around everybody else.
It's worth it.
The enclosed booth is exactly like an MS cockpit. The controls are perfectly weighted to Leo specs (which is to say, heavy enough to work up a sweat, especially in a boy who has only just reached puberty), and the entire booth bucks and vibrates in realistic simulation of movement and impact, wildly enough that the seat harness isn't just for decoration.
It's exhilarating, the sense of speed, of power…of freedom. This is what awaits him; this is what he's working toward.
Zechs's first time inside the sim, he badly overbalances with the very first step he tries to take. His simulated suit stumbles and then, despite his frantic efforts at recovery, collapses fully to the ground. The sense of the earth rushing up at him and the shock of impact feel very real. It's no wonder, he sees at once, that the cadets are made to train in simulators before being allowed into the mechs they will be piloting; the cost in damage for every rookie blunder would be astronomical without an enemy bullet ever even being fired.
There are dozens of simulations - hundreds. He storms enemy bases, fights land battles against an array of heavy defenses, practices air drops with the Leo's limited thruster capabilities.
He persists and is rewarded by seeing his name climb slowly up the rankings.
It isn't just determination - he's good. Very good.
Even in the simulator, however, he can't escape Onegell or Noin. His fists clench on the controls each time he sees their names hovering just above or behind his in the rankings. It's not that he's competitive (although he is, he knows that well enough), he just… There's a clarity, when it's just him, alone in his suit. That meditative calm shatters each time the simulation ends and he sees their names appear in a return to unsettling reality. If he can just become good enough, maybe he can leave them both behind.
On top of all this, there are, naturally, assignments to complete, as individuals and groups. The cadets aren't allowed devices of their own so these are completed in the dorm's communal computer lab, where their activity and browsing history can be closely monitored.
One day Zechs, rebellious, looks up the Cinq Kingdom. It was not a thing he planned; he could not have said what he expected to find. But the lack of public record shocks him.
The attack was only - he counts it out in his head - four years ago.
It disturbs him, the idea that the most formative, the most cataclysmic event of his life could mean so little. It was not just him; it was a monarch, an entire nation.
Surely four years is not long enough to be forgotten?
Marticus Rex: The Peacecraft Tyrant, reads the headline of one article. There are only a very small number. Compulsion takes him and he clicks it open. By the time he has reached the end his hands are shaking and his stomach is awash with queasiness.
It's lies.
In this alternate reality version of events, the Alliance's invasion of a pacifist nation is presented as a mission of liberation. His father's pacifism, as a form of brainwashing, its intent solely to keep his subjects down and himself in power. Vicious lies, all of it.
…Isn't it?
To his horror, he experiences a sudden a seed of doubt. He was only six years old, would he have known, if…?
And then he sees the accompanying photo. A line of tanks move down the street, frozen in time. On either side, Cinqian citizens fill the sidewalks, watching the convoy. The caption presents it as a victory parade, the masses greeting their liberators with cheers.
But that's not what's happening. The faces of the people in the photo are watchful, wary. Their body language is subdued: they huddle together, not in celebration, but for the sense of safety.
The starkness of the contrast is a relief. But only for a minute. Because he has known, since he was six years old, that the Alliance is a brutal regime, feeding itself by eating the world, and that it needs to be dismantled. But he hadn't realized just how sinister it is, that its threads are not just military or sewed so tight. There are things here he doesn't know how to fight.
Reading the other results of his search one after the other returns much of the same. There are no mentions, in any of the articles, of the Peacecraft children. Zechs sees himself erased, in increments, and begins to wonder likewise: what else?
What are the other lies he's being told?