A/N: crossposting from AO3 for completeness' sake :) here's the latest fic I've been working on, hope someone out there likes it. Comments, as always, are more than welcome!
reaching for the far horizon
by Bryony
Zechs leaves the airlock behind; he's been through decontamination and now he hits the showers, takes his time in the locker room after. The Martian space station doesn't hold a lot worth hurrying for. But as he's heading out into the main hub at last, he spots her - Noin - on the sofa just outside the door. Head tilted back, eyes closed. She's back from her own mission then, piloting a team out to the asteroid belt to harness another specimen for the Project's burgeoning mining operation. She must have settled down to wait for him, then…decided to take a nap?
Whatever the reason, she'll end up with a crick in the neck if she stays like that.
He stops in front of her, bends down to gently press her shoulder. Her eyes open at once (she's not yet lost that soldier's reflex), and then she's greeting him with a sleep-edged smile and a quiet "Hey." There's no hidden nuance; she's simply and honestly glad to see him.
He can't understand it, isn't sure he ever will. He's glad to see her, too - he always will be - but where is the simplicity? The pleasure is tangled up with so much guilt and grief and God knows what, that it's hard to pick out. Still, he smiles back at her and offers a hand to help her up.
Noin is amused by it, he thinks, watching her eyes (and why wouldn't she be, it's not like she needs assistance; but the courtesy is ingrained, deep), but she accepts, her hand warm in his as she pulls herself to her feet.
Then she steps closer. The one step is all it takes to eat the distance between them; her hand slips from his to circle his waist, leaving his to fall against her back. "Is this okay?" she asks, half teasing, half serious. Her voice is slightly muffled against his collarbone. He can feel her tiredness in the heaviness of her limbs in all the places their bodies touch.
He lets his arms tighten around her. "Fine," he whispers back. "It's fine."
In the moment, it is.
He still can't give her what she wants. She deserves better; more. The kind thing - for both of them - would be to distance himself. But he tried that…and now they are on Mars together. He is too selfish, too weak. The comfort she gives him feels too good.
The ultimatum she gave him months ago still sits like an anchor in the back of his mind. Heavy. But she's still here. Still waiting.
He's known Noin since he was nine years old. Longer. He began attending the Lake Victoria Academy at the age of eight, but he no longer remembers their first meeting. At any rate, she has been part of his life for more than ten years. That's more than half his lifetime. Longer than he had his parents; longer than anyone.
He didn't intend to befriend any of his fellow cadets at Lake Victoria. He was two years orphaned and frothing with hate. The other students were mere cogs in the same machine he intended to dismantle from within. Enemies in waiting. What would he want with them? Especially when his own superiority was clear from the start.
He has both ability and drive. The others…do not.
Except, perhaps, for Lucrezia Noin. An unassuming dark-haired girl who nonetheless stands out by virtue of her excellence. The instructors like her because of her eagerness and her enthusiasm for learning. The students who lack her academic aptitude grumble that she's a teacher's pet, but that's the worst that can be said of her and it isn't even said with any malice. She smiles and makes everything look easy, and even in this pressure-cooker that is designed to pit them all against each other, to weed out the weakest links among them, she manages to be well-liked.
(He made the mistake of saying this to her face once and she looked at him in puzzlement. "That's not what they're doing," she replied. "They want us to be a unit. The pressure is to make us work together.")
The first that Zechs, some months into his stint at LVA and still growing used to his new name, really remembers taking notice of Lucrezia Noin is when she saves an injured bird that flew into their classroom window. The gesture earns her the favoritism of Instructor Treize, who has a fondness for birds and takes an interest in her project.
The other cadets view this with a kind of awe. Lake Victoria is an active military base as well as an academy and, young as he is, Treize is its ranking officer - Lake Victoria is his. All of it. The first year cadets like themselves, the grunts, are far beneath his notice, or ought to be. They will not begin receiving his personal tutelage until they graduate into the MS Corps and earn the right to begin piloting real mobile suits.
Yet here he is, dropping by their morning drills and interrupting other instructors' lessons to ask after Noin's pet (ha, ha) project. He even unearths a couple of texts on avian anatomy to lend, and speaks to her as if she is an equal.
Zechs is less impressed.
It isn't that he's jealous of Treize's attentions. That would be absurd.
He simply thinks it would have been better to let nature take its course.
His opinion is entirely rational and he makes no secret of it. Noin shrugs off the criticism and archly asks if Cadet Zechs would like to help her construct a splint? He turns his back on the question in disgust.
Later, in Treize's private study (a privilege to which he alone among the cadets has access), he again cannot contain his scorn. Treize laughs as if he's told a great joke, and when he looks at Zechs his eyes dance in a way that seems to say he knows something Zechs does not.
The bird, incidentally, lives. Its wing mends, and in due course it is released back into the wild.
Zechs wants to dismiss Noin. She's naive, he thinks resentfully; she'll break at the first real fight she faces, the first time she tastes loss, then run home crying to the family she still has.
(His theory is tested just a few short years later. And… She doesn't.
It does shake her. She does cry. She makes no secret of it, supporting herself against the foot of her newly-issued Leo and looking around at the aftermath of battle with wide, wet eyes.
But while she approaches the remainder of their training with a somberness she didn't have before, it becomes apparent that her resolve, far from crumbling, has gained a new steel core. He underestimated her.)
Victoria is strange. Almost alien at times. The climate shocks him; the wildlife shocks him. Even the foliage is unsettling in its foreignness compared to Cinq, compared to Luxembourg.
It is his first time on a military base, and that is shocking too, at first; but he soon realizes that for all its overwhelming noise and bustle, it is a place that operates on rules, and that makes it predictable. In that one way, at least, it is not so very different from Cinq's palace or the Luxembourgian Khushrenada estate where he spent two years.
Cinq's maritime climate kept it cool year round; the ocean currents made its weather changeable, prone to coastal squalls and high winds. Once upon a time, wolves and bears had roamed its inland forests, but that was long ago.
The most dangerous thing about Lake Victoria should be that he is walking into the jaws of an enemy, but the induction the first year cadets are subjected to their first day informs him of the many thousand other ways there are for a man to die down here.
Ironic that the seeming safety of his homeland proved so deceptive, whereas here, in this place where he should be afraid, Zechs (because that is his name now, Zechs) begins to thrive.
He was always an active child, tall and strong for his age, and he is growing all the more so. He's begun to feel alive again, and it isn't just that he is working towards a goal, towards revenge; it's the pleasure of finding something he is good at, of indulging in an unexpected talent. Perhaps it shouldn't feel so good, to excel at these games of war, to be so good at something that he was taught to find abhorrent - but it does, oh, it does.
Dimly, he is aware of how densely knotted the tangle of love and hate inside him is becoming: embracing that which his family would despise out of love for them; loving, simultaneously, the thing which he has set out to destroy… He daren't examine it too closely. Fortunately, the military routine suits him; the endless drills and physical activity exhaust him in body and mind. It's a blessing, those moments when the only thing his mind can hold is the will to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The kind of reprieve that can only be found in oblivion of one kind or another.
At eight and nine years old, the cadets are old enough to say, unironically, things like, "When I was a kid…"
It's hilarious, but he doesn't laugh. He does retreat, to Treize's study once again, as he has done enough times now to become habitual, where he shares some of his more acerbic observations about his classmates. Treize listens, indulgent, amused, and reminds him that he should maintain at least a semblance of distance between them. Zechs doesn't see the point: everyone knows by now that he's been a ward of the Khushrenada family, that Treize views him with a familiarity bordering on brotherly.
"It will help you maintain an equal footing with the others."
Zechs snorts. "Haven't I just finished telling you they're all idiots? Why would I want to do that?"
"It isn't a question of want, my friend. You need them."
No. No, Zechs absolutely does not. He cannot even conceive of a world in which that would be the case. He is through with needing anyone at all.
Treize merely looks at him. It is enough to give Zechs the uncomfortable impression that Treize sometimes views him from across the same wide chasm that exists between him and the other students in his year.
"Well," says Treize, re-settling himself, "we can argue that point later. For now, it's as well you're here." He holds Zechs's eye for the space of a dramatic pause, sipping from a tiny glass of brandy. It should be as ridiculous as the cadets, this teenager, however polished, putting on the airs of middle age; and yet Treize somehow manages to succeed where the others do not. Zechs sits up straighter, anticipation quickening his breath. (In his mind's eye, Gertie stirs, smiling benignly.)
The music Treize has put on swells, and he closes his eyes to listen, one finger rising as if he is the conductor of this recorded symphony. "Ah," he says pleasurably, "are you listening to this, Zechs?"
"Yes, of course," Zechs lies.
"Wagner composed this while in exile, you know." Treize says this with a look in his direction, as if it is significant. "This recording is from the AC89 festival revival in Munich. It was Janislav Paczek's first professional appearance; a young prodigy. The world hasn't seen his like since. Just think - every person involved in the production of this work of art is dead, yet their voices live on. Magnificent."
The music rolls and subsides, builds to a crescendo even greater than the first. The thundering percussion makes Zechs think of fire and thick, oily smoke. His head hurts. He closes his hands over the fabric of his trousers and endures. Like stone, he thinks: immutable.
"You were going to tell me something," he reminds Treize.
"Mmm…" Treize sighs with a hint of resignation. "I have a name for you."
Brigadier General Daigo Onegell.
This is the name Treize has given him. The General's title is still relatively fresh, earned through the success of his mission to conquer (no, exterminate) the Cinq Kingdom. Zechs's hands tremble with rage whenever the name runs through his head. Which is often: he recites it to himself at regular intervals throughout his day, wants it always to be in the forefront of his mind, feeding his outrage.
Independent of Treize, he has learned that the man's son also attends the Lake Victoria Academy, in the year ahead of his own. Treize is surely also aware of this fact, so why did he not choose to share it with him? The omission feels like a betrayal.
No matter.
Weeks have gone by. He knows by now every minute of the boy's routine.
At night, every night, he dwells on the lessons his father taught him.
Fairness. Pacifism.
Forgiveness.
These are the parts of himself that he has chosen to sacrifice. It is only right that he understand that which he has cut away. Mourn their loss. There is no one else left alive who can.
And then he plots young Onegell's murder.
It will be cruel, he has determined. It will be slow. The spray of red dances behind his eyelids in brutal detail before he sleeps.
This wasn't his original plan, inasmuch as he ever had one. In the years since the attack on the Cinq Kingdom he nursed visions of tracking down the man responsible and taking his revenge more bluntly. But this, he thinks…this is better.
For one, it means it will all be at an end much sooner. There is no knowing, otherwise, how many years it might take him to get close enough to the Alliance General to deal with him directly. Physically and logistically, he will be at a greatly reduced disadvantage grappling only with a half-grown boy close to his own age. And is it not more poetic this way? Why should Onegell be granted the release of a speedy death? It was family that was taken from Milliardo Peacecraft; fitting, then, that he should take family in turn.
It will, he recognizes, be the first life he ever takes. Nonetheless, he is sure that he can. He is training to be a soldier, he is here learning to kill; is it not better that his first time be more than a nameless enemy on a battlefield?
And after…once he has become a murderer in deed as well as in heart, well, he will take the consequences, and let it end there. His heart beats faster at the thought, in fear or anticipation, he isn't sure.
And then, one afternoon as he sits in the mess with his hands wrapped around a mug (they serve coffee even to the youngest cadets; at first it was awful, now he has grown to like it), Noin bangs her tray down next to his and leans in close to demand, "Why are you obsessed with Elv Onegell?"
This, in all his painstaking preparations, was not something he'd planned for.
His heart thumps in his chest. He sips his coffee. Tears his eyes from his target to glare at her. Says as flatly as he can, "I'm not."
The bald-faced lie wouldn't fool a child, as evidenced by Noin's open scoff.
"You're not being very subtle. People are starting to talk." She crosses her arms and meets his glare head on, unruffled. "I just thought you'd want to know."
He should be grateful for the warning (distantly, he is), but finds himself occupied with other problems. Why confront him like this only to let him off the hook so easily? What's her advantage - why give it up?
(She couldn't possibly know the truth, nothing has suggested she suspects who he is. Could she? No, no, he's paranoid, he must be.)
"Hey…are you okay?"
He is not. Go away, he wills her, dreading what's to come. There is tension rising in his shoulders. He tries to swallow and cannot.
Right beside him, with a yawning vertigo, Gertie smiles up at him from the floor.
He would surely have screamed, only (small mercies) his jaw has locked. He doesn't think he could answer Noin if he tried. The taste of ash fills his mouth until even his nose is clogged with it.
A scraping sound catches his attention: it's Noin, dragging out a chair and sitting beside him. Her eyes are round with alarm but she's not turning her back or calling out. Later it will occur to him to be grateful for this, but then, in that moment, he hates her for being there, for seeing him like this. "Breathe," she encourages him, "Breathe, like they taught us."
What the fuck is she talking about? (He is just sensate enough to take a distant, vicious pleasure in the curse word, which is all the rage amongst the cadets just now, as they hastily try to make themselves seem older and more worldly wise, to match the soldiers all around them. Ordinarily Zechs would consider himself above such things, but- His thoughts keep spinning, all disjointed.)
His hand has clamped down tight around his coffee mug; when he tries to move it, hot liquid sloshes out and scalds him, but that's nothing, nothing, because his chest has filled with cement and no matter what instructions Noin is muttering into his ear, he absolutely cannot breathe.
He's going to die like this. He can feel it, feel his soul striving to leave his body. It's in the ferocious racing of his heart, his loss of air, the creeping grey tunneling his vision, the rapidly thinning tether of his awareness.
After everything, he's going to die like this?
It's an affront, and somehow, somehow that loosens his chest enough to draw in one thready breath.
"That's it," Noin says. "There you go. Just like that."
One of her hands lands on his back; the other comes to rest on his forearm. It's too much, the first time he's been touched in comfort since- He shies away from the thought, eyes burning. The hand on his back runs in a careful circle, up and down.
Too much, he thinks again. It's dangerous. The wonder of it turns it to a curse. If he lets himself accept this, if he turns into the touch as he longs to do, the black pit inside him will never, never be filled. It will never be enough.
If he gives in now he will want more and more and he cannot-
He sucks in another great, sputtering gasp of air and, with great effort, shakes Noin off and staggers to his feet.
"Don't talk to me," he tells her in a rasping voice; and then he walks away, not thinking at all about the surprised expression on her face.
Elv Onegell lives.