Begin to Shine
Darwin Delantri
Author’s Note: This is virtualy a continuation to my previous two works, Captives of Circumstance and Everyone Needs an Eden, the focus being on Noin again. I make a few passing references to those fics, so you might want to read them first.
Standing on the edge of time
Playing out a reckless pantomime
And every day’s another wrong to rectify
Slowly but surely, it happened again, sneaking up on her like a lightfooted cat so that once she realized it was there there was no way to fight it. The work she set for herself was no longer distracting, no longer coldly consoling, and her imagination began to probe its boundaries again. It wasn’t fatigue creeping up on her, it never was anymore. This was raw, untamed boredom.
Of course, Noin was never one to crave entertainment. It was an eerie thing for her, feeling her mind switch totally and blankly onto receive. There was enough difference between listening and vegetating to fit an entire colony, and while intelligent perception was a necessity in her line of work, allowing her mind those moments of apathy were straight out decadent. Pleasant, beguiling, oblivious, perhaps, but still seemed miserably loathsome. She could never force that sort of weakness upon herself.
That was probably why her apartment – clean, comfortable, and efficient, just right for a Preventer field agent – lacked a television. Its space was filled by a high-end stereo that was perpetually tuned into a soft rock station that wouldn’t interrupt a sacred old song for a nuclear attack. That was the way of things.
The apartment seemed like a distant yet attainable goal now, on the other side of an insurmountable mound of paperwork and the end product of malicious intentions. Sleep fit into the intelligent perception category, as long as dreams prevailed. As long as dreams – the purest form of inner communication, ruled the night, Noin could stay in control. Dreams were where everything was peaceful, where everything that mattered were together with her, and where all of this nasty business of policing every human being alive could be left for another time. It was ideal, and was always supposed to be there, ready for when she found a chance to lie down and rest her eyes.
That was the root of all this cruel work she was forcing upon herself. For too long, for a time that dragged like months but only days could have passed by, Noin’s dreams had not come.
No, it wasn’t exactly like that. Her dreams were still there, but she wasn’t allowed to take part. It was like her subconscious hired a bouncer and she was only one getting stopped at the door. Just past a living blockade she could hear everyone laughing and making merry. The old friends from Victoria now lost into the mists of revolution and chaos, every crony she fought beside, and everyone given a throne in her mind were celebrating without her. Even Zechs was laughing, and that was the most painful.
I dream about a stranger’s touch
And voices in my I cannot hush
And every night’s a hunger I can’t satisfy
Zechs’ grainy, lucid laugh was within the precious sanctuary of a single brazen memory, filed in a glade of refuge in the confines of a frightfully personal secret. Zechs had there for her all those days and years ago. He had helped her pull herself up, he had offered her his shoulder, and he had watched the sun come up with her. When serpent-tongued cadets began to whisper behind their backs, he saved face. The rock he provided was another museum piece, a rosy, glittering moment that lived forever in fond, almost addictive recall.
But now, that laugh was stolen from her, a flimsy scarlet rope of moonbeams and cloudtissue barring her from all held dear better than any tangible iron could. The worst wounds were those that never truly manifested, because they couldn’t be healed with any perceptions of ease.
Again, that wasn’t an accurate description of what she felt. It was less a wound as it was a sever, some lost limb she never before noticed still itching as she couldn’t scratch it, still twitching as she couldn’t satisfy it. She imagined that this was how Cain and Abel must have felt when their denied parents told them of their lost heritage. Her lost paradise felt like a myth or a misty vision crafted from the same stock as King Arthur or Achilles.
How would Adam and Eve themselves have reacted to being so rudely cast away from an ideal life that they held with candor, even with the knowledge that they deserved the exile? Could it be any different from the war she waged within her chest, camped over whether or not her accepting decadence had caused this to come about? She paid the price for her easy comfort. When Adam and Eve lost eternal life and bliss, what she was missing was a little contentment in her life, the radiant care she longed for was across a cold inky expanse, and she was being starved. There was no denying that simple fact: This was killing her. Everyone needs an Eden, and hers was always just out of her reach. In the past, it was still close enough that she could sample it in her dreams, so she remained comfortable. She always tried to believe that that satisfaction would replace partaking in a special, golden communion, and the debt for inaction was being extracted daily now. The divine account was relentless.
It’s the secret that I keep
It’s the ache that makes me weep
And once again, she was retreating to simple solace, despite knowing it would be her undoing. She wanted to feel useful, she wanted to be needed, just like she tried to be at Specials, and OZ, and at Zechs’ side.
All this laid out in front of her was her sinful apple, the mountain of denial, of ink and caffeine, of adrenaline and belief. It was a conflagration of false emotions and it had every appearance of a glossy bulb dangled by the snake, the easy way to happiness. In truth, in the light of all her heart indisputably needed, it showed its veridical guise and how it shielded her like a stripped umbrella. This was pathetic. Preventer Fire was one giant lie.
And I know I’m in too deep
I’m gonna drown
Nevertheless, night drew inexorably on, and if this deception wasn’t pulling its weight for her anymore than there was no need to continue and stagnant further. Although she couldn’t stand the thought of another dreamless sleep, she must try. There were still a few last barriers and final duties to polish off, the first to lock up the dreary offices. The janitors had the day and the night off, and none of the others were stupid or sadistic enough to subject themselves to the doctrine had Noin adhered to. First of all, it would probably be best to straighten the desk up a mite. This mess wasn’t like her at all, and it would be for the best if her camaraderie didn’t find out that she wasn’t being herself.
She dropped her warm pen into the shining cup with its fellows, and snapped the open drawers shut, the top and middle of the triple column, but once the third was open to the light Noin paused. Within the final drawer was the secret usually guarded by inanimate lock and key, mostly out of modestly. It didn’t make that much difference. Should Sally or Anne stumble upon the little shrine hidden in the bottom right drawer, they would surely chuckle sympathetically, say they understand, and leave it at that.
Trembling lightly, as though she expected something more volatile that immaculate pictures dwelled in the back of the drawer, or under its special satin lining, Noin reached in and lifted out the bulky pewter frame. The frame itself was some kind of souvenir, made of hundreds of threads of frigid metal entangled like vines over a trellis. True, the frame was a dear relic to her as well. She had found it on Libra, in Millardo’s room. The inspecting crews had been so polite when she asked to be the one to investigate his seized chamber, and she had found the freshly dusted frame, which was then devoid of whatever photograph it held safe for him, and replaced with one of his own. He was flashing a warm, rare smile underneath his denuded bangs, but his visage had not changed a day since she had her first fleeting glimpse at the face he concealed. He had put it there personally, knowing she would find it, predicting her next move again.
That Polaroid he left her was tucked in the edge of the frame, over the glass. It belonged in the corner, the offset crown jewel, so that there should be no layer over his eyes. That was the way Zechs had intended it.
It’s the emptiness I fear
Baby, please don’t leave me here
The softly soothing glint in his glacial eyes made everything else melt away before their icy focus, and whatever fantasies still suffered her presence began to worm their way free of mental barriers again. Old ideas about the perfect, glorious death meant nothing compared to holding that gaze, although she would have liked to die in those frigid capsules. They were surreal, as though the gods had chiseled perfection out of arctic ice and painted him alive, graciously leaving their divine pigments away from his eyes. The eyes had the feature to eternally reflect the crystal of his birth. But still, the look of his eyes did not stir hot emotions, but silenced them, the gospel of simplistic purity and calm resolution, such that it had to be shared.
The picture was such a gift and a plastic treasure, but it carried a subtle tone of guilt. After all, she failed again and again to be there for him and to do the same for him. All he did was give and give. He gave her the right to choose her own path, and he never did demand her loyalty. He merely accepted it when she meted it out to him, whenever it was convientant. He had always accepted her past all of his intent on what he thought must be the greatest justification of his life.
What a fool he could be, never able to see what life was really offering him, or what being alive truly meant. Whether it was his mask that shielded him from his first enemies or his flat fatalism made him so rash about destiny, she might never know. As long as the older Peacecraft was dead the secrets that brought about his demise might as well remain buried along with him. Even though it was flagrantly ignorant, she was sure that it was how he would have liked it.
‘Cause I’m lost inside a dream
That’s out of bounds
She put the picture away with unemotional resolve, but she didn’t peel her eyes away until it was concealed back in the closed drawer and the key from her pocket had snapped it back into it’s velvet crypt again. The time for those memories had past. The time for the present was gone as well, shed as the Sun moved on to warm another side of Earth. At sunset, she had always wondered if Zechs was watching the same Sun’s radiant sliver edge up over his own horizon.
Night was the time for the future and for fantasies, the time to embrace what could come about. But she was helpless, her dreams had been sealed and denied of her. A pain indescribable to lose your single sanctuary. What she would have done to get her personal world back!
Reason prevailed and she decided that her desk was not the right place to try and plead her reverie back to her. Checking once more that the bottom-left drawer was secure, she left her office, snapping the light switch off as she passed. She snatched her dark green coat off the racks, folded it over her arm, and fished the ring of keys out of one of its pockets. Returning to the cavernous office Anne kept, she reminded herself off where the unlit windows and empty chairs would be placed to avoid turning any lights on again. The room was on an uncomfortable scale on it’s own, and during the day the scope of the full-wall windows that looked over the inverse horizon made it take on a perverted size. Anne must not have liked it at all, but she was the only one to sit in headquarters that be the representative. It meant both taking calls and dealing with any visitors, which meant it must impress. She must envy Noin and Sally sometimes, able to leave and get into the world and not be eternally cooped up in an office, especially not one of such preposterous expanse.
She might be right, but Noin would never admit it. She hated paperwork and desks, so she tended to pull down these shifts to get it all over with, but never like this before. There were better things to do than to deal with the bureaucratic whims of the government all day. Shedding her thoughts, Noin cast the keys across the room with trained deftness, listening as the shards of glinting steel arc invisibly through the air. They landed in a splayed clump on the desk blotter before sliding further into the chair. It wasn’t worth concern; Anne would find them when she came back and sat down. Noin eagerly retreated downstairs to the parking garage.
I close my eyes and it’s so real
All at once I know just what I feel
And baby, its the kind of rush that terrifies
The car felt cold and supple from spending all day in the perpetual shade under the building. It moaned like an animal rudely awakened, but always aware of its chains. Even the steering acted the slightest bit dishonest as she guided the vehicle out of the concrete cave.
It was no coincidence that the Preventer home base was in the World Capital. It was a government-funded organization, but even the pachydermatous government was content to stay out of their business as long as results were produced. That was why Anne could stay stable these days. Less time dealing with the people checks came from meant less time in that Veldt she called an office. But Anne wasn’t here anyway. She had been summoned up to the colonies on business, and so Noin had to take care of her single most personal duty. There were no longer any excuses to avoid carrying it out for her anymore.
As she drove, Noin noted the usual splashes fly by on either side of the nigh-empty street. The little outdoor coffee shop where the two of them talked all afternoon and laughed off the skies’ threats of a storm. Not a memory. Not just yet.
And at the corner when she paused under a red light, the deli owned by that talkative Vietnamese fellow, from whom she bought the ham steaks she cooked for Zechs when she invited him to her abode for dinner. It just hadn’t happened yet, but when it had the chance, everything was planned.
The mailbox in front of the bookstore, beside which the flower girl pitched her blossoms. Zechs had nabbed one of the corsages as they passed and deftly handed the girl a ten, then politely asked her permission before pinning it on her. The girl was at home now, or perhaps finding her flowers, never knowing that someday Zechs’ chivalry would pay off a ten-spot in her favour.
I am weak – I am wrong
Everyday I swear that I will be strong
But there’s a bond between us that I can’t deny
What good were forced dreams? They were artificial and tainted by the unwelcome lightworld, another giant lie to one’s self. Perhaps that was why her sleep remained vacant and still: She was cheating on herself by gorging on fantasies. In all her past, she had not needed to daydream. During the days she could work her missions satisfied that Zechs was wearing the same uniform. That spelt comfort back then.
After the fertilizer hit the fan a year and a half ago with Operation Meteor and cleared up with the final clash between White Fang and World Nation, nothing was permitted to be the same again. She was the only soul that still held onto faith in his life anymore, and everyone else thought her beliefs were immature and her resolution pitiful. They all assumed that there was no way for any living being to pass through the vengeful inferno Zechs had plunged himself into. In fact, the only other person that might actually share her creed that the fire that Block A became could grant new life as well as take it was one of the star children himself.
Months ago, she received a package from L2. There had been the usual catching-up stuff that came from her separated comrades every so often. At the bottom of the parcel, dense and heavy and wrapped in blue tissue paper, were a pair of cold steel articles: The tip of an orange claw and a half-melted mobile suit control stick. Duo had added a second letter regarding how the parts had come to end up in his junkheap. He said that there were a few more, unspectacular pieces, and if she didn’t want them he would just melt them down.
She never responded to the second letter, sending a reply that didn’t mention the pieces of Epyon. Duo might have wondered whether or not she had really gotten them at all.
In truth, the pieces were separated now. The claw, which she had prudently dulled at Sally’s urgings, was a paperweight on her desk. It had been buried underneath the sheets now, since there was never any wind in Preventer headquarters anyway. The stick that Zechs’ hand had once been wrapped around was under her desk, sealed away on a velvet placard in the bottom-left drawer.
Noin’s reminiscing was cut short with a abrupt honk from the car behind. The light was green.
It’s the secret that I keep
It’s the ache that makes me weep
An all-night florist might not have been the best idea to begin with, but the little store named Blessings just off the main street seemed to hang on by its teeth. Anne’s usual order for two-dozen long-stemmed roses every Monday must have helped their ever-reeling financial crisis. Besides, the store’s 24-hour schedule couldn’t fit better with Noin’s 24-hour schedule, whenever she had to deal with Anne’s duty for her.
The night had promised her the mercy of finding a parking space right outside the store. The clerk seemed to be expecting her. Anne had probably told her that Noin would be the one coming in this week. She purchased the bouquet without a word, and couldn’t help but feel dismayed that she leave the natural perfume of the store so quickly. A little brass bell dutifully rung as Noin shoved the door back open with her unburdened arm, and the warm summer night flowed back at her with renewed zeal in it’s welcome. After only a few seconds exposure to something sweeter than city air, everything before it became grossly unbearable.
She juggled the bundle in her arms as she took her keys in her hand, but she was rapidly distracted as a sports car with vermilion paint and a spoiler roared past her and through an intersection. Noin thought on the topic of why anyone in their right minds would do around 100 kilometres in the city, but only until the stinking cascade of fumes trailing the car washed over her. There was the normal, tangy stench of exhaust without unburned gasoline nuances. It must have had an open-flame afterburner. Somebody’s daddy must have shelled out an awful lot for that car. Finally, so deep and faint she thought she might be placing it there, there was an unmistakable hint of bitter alcohol.
Solutions began to clump together and draw themselves out for her. Inebriated youths driving home. With nothing to gain from it, they put themselves in so vast a peril that her soldier’s spine shivered. Such an outlook, to demand oneself to die to accomplish an end that might be worthwhile living to. It was a real loss. Theirs was a chemical philosophy.
The velocity they thought they desired was what prevented them from being helped now. Only leniency handed down from above would carry those kids home. Maybe they’d be lucky and reach their destination only to take the trip again next week. Perhaps their humming engine yanks them screaming over the median. There was nothing any other person could do to alter the sports car’s path, and that realization was a poison all its own.
And I know I’m in too deep
I’m gonna drown
Throughout life she failed to keep safe what mattered most. Dishonesty, or blazing courage, or plain old misfortune claimed pieces from her board selectively, in a critical fashion. She had been spread too thin, her wings were far too weak to cover them all, but she had never seen it before. She never even believed that they were in check before the ax fell.
At least a few had managed to outlive her failures. The pawns of the world and of Preventer Fire’s game, those insidious Gundam pilots, had their own team of guardian angels conspiring out their futures. They could never find death, but that was no province of Noin’s. They hadn’t needed her in the first place, and once she came to know her own role their waltz of deviation actually started looking like the blood-soaked dance floor it was. Noin sighed as she threw open the passenger door. That was one curse of such a viewpoint as hers.
Her trusted bishops and only confidants still stayed with her and fought with her in Preventer. They worked in an unearthly tandem, and could stand without Noin trying to cover front and back herself. It was a stern, respectful consanguinity, but it worked.
And Zechs, the keystone king, had the devil’s own luck. What possible reasons might drive him to require her presence? The genius of the battlefield could only operate alone. Nevertheless, there she remained, at his side on some plays and at his disposal on others, bowing to what the situation needed. She would have made any play he constituted. The queen’s sacrifice, if the time came.
There, standing beside her colony-make car, Noin placed the roses on the empty seat. "What piece was I on Zechs’ board? On Treize’s? Or Anne’s?"
Treize’s game, in all it’s obscure complexity and sublime cause, had folded on submission, pulling half of Anne’s with it. Whatever she had left was shrouded now, by the same complications that Treize had been devoted to. Zechs had chosen to castle.
And now, a carload of strangers go roaring off to an uncertain fate, not knowing if they should even greet another sunbreak, and she was already in mourning. No better way to seal their futures than to start planning against them. Still, try as she might, nothing could help the pawns in their good-for-nothing charge.
Was a queen supposed to feel this regret when a piece was taken? It seemed unnatural. Whatever deities that kept running from humanity could at least have made the game’s rules a little bit less perplexing.
It’s the emptiness I fear
Baby, please don’t leave me here
Who was she to judge to begin with? She was no angel, her hands were no less stained. Incredulously, she had made mistakes in her own youth, and in lessons of fortitude had struggled against her military demeanor. Burning flushes had persuaded her not to try and forge those shed moments from the hazy past, and Noin shut the door on the roses, then returned to her own side of the machine.
Machines like this were inevitable, right? All in the effort of making life easier on the public’s backs. Yet, humans had a nasty habit of creating machines for the sole purpose of war and obliteration. This car could kill if she so ordered it to, albeit less effectively than machines she had used before. No one ever saw any problem with marketing these unwieldy machines to the public, regardless of whether or not they had the sense and skill to handle them. It was just another blindness in natural civilization, and it had actually made her a slight bit guilty in buying one at all. Everyone else on the planet had a much simpler view. If the driver lacked the reason or reflexes to keep the vehicle from killing, than they would find out, usually after the fact.
Factor in alcohol and you’ve got a madman piloting a device for the singular purpose of destroying the lives of themselves and others.
Mobile suits were built and revolutionized the armed forces of the planet. After it was seen versatile the machines were, a shedding of the entire arsenal of every industrialized nation was sparked that was rivaled only by the beginning of the nuclear age centuries ago. Mobile suits proved to be no less destructive, and whole countries would be swept from the maps before the End of War could come about.
Factor in the Zero system and you’ve got a madman piloting a device for the singular purpose of destroying the lives of themselves and others.
Certainly, Zero and alcohol didn’t pose anything like the ancient nuclear weapon threats, abolished since the sickening events of After Colony 79. After all, Zero and alcohol were still legal, and in use. Or will the world catch on to how dangerous Zero actually is before another jihad could needlessly occur because of it, and the world might yet tear every specimen to shreds. Or will the crusade against atrocious weaponry go so far as to target mobile suits in their entirety?
Her own suit was right where it belonged; in stasis, where it couldn’t harm a soul. Frozen in a moment next to the reconstructed and modernized Tallgeese. She had put them at the floor of Lake Victoria in the shade of the base she had decommissioned personally. If Zechs wanted his weapon he would know exactly where to find it. And exactly who to blame as well, which might be the more important fact. He would know with that inherent intuition he had always displayed; he would know that she was still doing her job.
‘Cause it’s the emptiness I fear
Baby, please don’t leave me here
Noin twisted the keys in their socket again, and the car roared out of its warm, peaceful rest. She could just picture its headlights flare up with an unholy glare not unlike the one that shone when Wing was summoned by his master. The growl and whine of the engine could not be segregated from the empty rage that Heavyarms announced its assault through. An instrument of murder or a device for tranquility? It all depended on the notions of the wielder. A knife could either plunge into wood or flesh on the command of the hand behind it.
She would have used her power for the good of the world, but the future was eternally hazed, and it was impossible to know how you were doing now would be reflected upon by upcoming history. She had no honest way to answer should the Taurus, or the car, asked her, "Why did you chose for me to fight?"
The price of peace was blood by the ocean. That was the old doctrine, the old philosophy. It was proven wrong further with each and every passing sunrise, but still mercilessly adhered to. Even when all those purveyors of its cause had perished in it’s path, it still governed the human race.
One hundred and thirty-one people had died by her hand alone. That was a soldier’s hand in a uniform glove, but no fabric and no habit could hold back the stain. That number reached two hundred even when she added the dead from Wufei Chang’s attack on the Lake Victoria academy, as she invariably did. Wufei might have claimed their deaths at his hand, but he was ‘only following orders’. She was not.
Add the dead from Alex and Mueller’s double massacres and the number skyrocketed up to seven hundred eighty-five. Their sanguine fluid feel on her hands due to her own failures and not because of the murders themselves. The cadets that survived Wufei’s attack on Victoria, but later died because she had not succeeded as an instructor raised the number to eight hundred nineteen. Nine hundred fifty-eight after the addition of the dead White Fang soldiers and crew when Libra was rammed by the Peacemillion, although she didn’t have a choice in that matter. Guilt made no such allowances. Since she had become Preventer Fire she had shot and killed forty-two, arranged seven deaths and had seen one man she had apprehended beaten to death by his cellmate.
The grand total: one thousand and eight. She had the blood of a legion of human beings painting her hands. She knew her number was a poor shadow next to the accounting of those that Khushrenada had taken, but Treize would have counted those slaughtered in Russia by Libra’s cannon unto himself. The citizens of Volvograd that fell under the blade of light should have been part of Zechs’ total, right?
Or was it just horribly futile to consider the dead as such statistics? Numbers tended to hide faces and horrify the living, and she never once had the responsibility to look into the eyes of a soldier she was destroying. "Now that I think of it, perhaps that’s why mobile suits were started to the first place. The ultimate uniform and the final equalizer—"
It might be gratifying for lost souls, or to alleviate the culpability of the murderer, to consider what they had been laid low to accomplish. Their murders had prevented the holocaust that might have been, and saved an estimated eighteen point two billion Earth dwellers. That was it. That was she had to show for AC 195. Every building still standing in Brussels was her providence, but still, in her ancient choice to fight she had consented to kill a thousand to save billions. It would have so much easier if she had taken her own life when she had the change, before responsibility held her hand on a different course.
Might it not be satisfying for the thirsty spirits that she had slain to she their butcher brought down in the most humiliating of failures? If there was any substance that might still be able to wash her hands clean, it would only be her own lifeblood.
But obligations still had their voice, as the twenty-four frozen kisses on the seat next her did. Noin pulled her car off the curb and flung it around a blind U-turn. At this late at night nobody that cared would notice and no one that noticed would care.
I wanna surrender
I wanna give in
In ancient days before mobile suits desecrated Earthen soil or danced their unholy flamenco in the fabric of space, or before the bloody birth of the United Earth Sphere Alliance, there had been entire organized for the purpose of settling the spiritual side and guaranteeing acquittal and afterlife. They had been in steady decline and were persecuted by the Alliance at times, but they still persisted to find believers. Even if even church on Earth was toppled, the colonies, as smug as always, welcomed them with open arms. Their were still those that embraced the possibility of a Supreme Being, like Duo.
Could Duo be happy up at L2? Why wouldn’t he be, for he had everything had need allowed. He had success (Or at least sustenance), he had his desires fulfilled and his soul soothed, and he had his perfect match by his side. With an ingrained belief in a merciful omnipotance on one side and a flawless faith in his soulmate on the other, why should one make any more demands of life?
Noin may have once felt that sort of spiritual assurance in whatever mist she called a past. All part of a memory that may never that happened at all, in a sanctuary that may not have been built, with a family she might never had met from a hometown she might never have visited. Those fantasies about past, present and future may have been the only things keeping her sane, which was why she retained that pathetic air about her. She was weak and eternally at her dreams’ mercy. She was in withdrawal and crippled by her losses. She was in vice, always deeply envying those that didn’t need to imagine their dreams, because theirs had come about for them, and that envy was one of the brutal negative emotions had started to fill the span where illusions once had been. She was envious of Duo’s stability, and jealous of his sure righteousness in the face of all the suffering he’d reaped, and covetous that he could have had all she ever desired and to know that his love was reciprocal. That was unassailable truth. Noin would not lie to herself.
I wanna lie down and let it be now
And let it begin
Let it begin
She would not lie to Zechs, either. That was an unwavering and unspoken vow. She could do or say or admit to anything he would ask of her. When he placed his scared cerulean eyes so gently on hers, even when concealed behind a sheet of glass and steel, anything she might resist with would melt like—like—
Nothing. There was still nothing to coax forth. Her hopes denied her. She had become a cancer in her own life.
How could she become so sorrowful and pathetic and frail? She was placing herself at the leniency of the selfish consciousness she possessed and was being rent for her trust. If her consciousness was worth the while, it would have told her what she was doing wrong with Alex and Mueller, it would have helped her to do the right thing and persevere rather than allow herself to grow fat on fantasy. It would not have taken advantage of her.
There was no arguing with nightmares, they simply didn’t play fair. There were no other options, there were no other possibilities. If she wanted the right thing to happen there would be nobody to count on but herself. All her life, she had had the hope that she wouldn’t need to guide any hand to accomplish what had to be done, but it seemed that that plan had crashed and burnt. If she is to finish what she started and force an answer out of life she must be the instigator, she must be the one taking the lead.
No more lives can be taken in the name of peace. That was an irrepressible fact. She would not permit this unwitting hypocrisy to progress unmasked. Even if she stood alone, even if Zechs deserted her.
Somehow she managed to keep driving all the while, regardless of her preoccupation. The war memorial and the cemetery beyond were just a block or so away from this place. The ossuary had been placed on ground that gave it a commanding view over the river and the city. It would seem almost as if the land had been saved from development so many years, in waiting of some holier purpose.
The community that enveloped the cemetery was special in its own right, dominated by ethnic restaurants and painfully squeezed apartments. It was a distant extension of the main street, and it looked as though it had been designed to keep a mutual, rustic look. It was a perfect final resting place for the dead of After Colony 195.
She brought the car to a gliding stop in front of a dark French bakery. It was another fair mercy that the streets were deserted, lane and curb. There wasn’t a need to parallel park. Noin gathered the bundle of roses up in her arms, pushed the door open into the road, and flinched at the abrupt blast of a chill wind. Stepping out of the seat and not bothering to lock the door, she took another deep, tolerant breath of the frozen air, and renewed her promise in it. If she ever must take up that pearl weapon buried in the placid waters at the source of the Nile, she would not claim another life with it. Noin had to make a stand if
others are to follow.
It’s the secret that I keep
It’s the ache that makes me weep
Noin passed the sealed stores and dimmed apartments unnoticed, every unit and every building in midnight stasis. She went unheeded by the multi-lingual signs and ignored her image reflected in the dusty windows. Nothing stirred but distant suggestions of noise and revelry that flowed uphill from the city centre and the trees spurting out of two foot allowances in the pavement, which clapped their multitude of foliage while she passed. It was no less than a storybook scene with the nouns rearranged. Her forest was brick and her castle nothing more than a hilly plain enclosed in iron fencing, but it was still idealic of the night’s fictitious conventions. Every trees and link of sidewalk faced the brazen war memorial which raised out of the entrance to the cemetery. Each tree and chunk of concrete looked envious of the consecrated elms, willows, and headstones that littered the grounds and green hills, but it was an admirable sort of envy. If only her feelings were so mature as nature’s.
Noin kept her eyes focused and direct. The last of the stores soon fell behind her heels, and the wrought-iron enclosure, a powerful phalanx of sentry spears broken by meticulous cement towers twice her height stood testament to he hallowed land they guarded, where it could be seen through the gaps of shrubbery. It was an unassailable cathedral with thousands of altars. It was a pipe organ when the wind ran through the clouds of leaves. It was the foundation of the new, fragile, invisible peace that the world believed in. Any society building itself anew on such a fleeting premise was one that could never in a million years stand on its own. That brutal understanding the Une insisted upon, as well as a colourless belief in humankind. That was what the once-proud OZ had become.
"Pieces of the Next Devil. Secret sin. It was no different…"
What sort of twisted game had a thousand pieces? Treize’s did. That and beyond, but the weight of taken pawns came around to crush him. Noin did not feel the bearing of a thousand and eight. Their cursing was a different plague and a quiet sacrificial scream. There was only one death that she bore on her neck, a royal one.
There were many more that avoided forfeiture, that killed and did not die. They dodged their places in this graveyard, as Noin had done so aptly. There was no headstone with Lieu-Col. Lucrezia Noin inside these slated walls, but in some possible future, they might have been. What need was there for a droning sabre alone? There were so many creative ways she could have perished and spared a thousand and eight lives.
And I know I’m in too deep
I’m gonna drown
Passing under the ghostly shadow of the hooves of some half-forgotten hero, Noin paused and looked up at the face of the warrior whose name would preside over these grounds, and whose death in battle would be forever heralded by his rearing steed. This man had attained something that she herself once expected; to perish on the field of war amid flashing thunder and churning fire. However, the only public war had passed. She was trapped fighting personal and private skirmishes. Should she die here and now, it would be without honour or glory. She would be disavowed.
In a way, an soldier’s death was the one thing that this statue, as awe-inspiring as it may be, could never represent. The body that it sought to portray was surely lost forever. Death in a mobile suit meant instantaneous cremation, and there would never be anything for a family to put in the ground or shed tears over. There would exist no corporal memory. As a soldier, it was your responsibility to die with honour, or simply die.
That statue, another glorious misapprehension. That soldier was dust and ashes suspended among the artificial stars. There was never any corpse for a metalworker to emulate in steel; that face must be from a portrait, and that soldier did nothing greater than make sure to have representation of his striking features left behind as he went off to war. That statue was another empty grave, and you could give a dead man a thousand but never raise his distinction a mite.
And here were thousands and thousands of bare coffins in the ground. A forest had been leveled to put in the earth unsanctified, but it did not matter. A thousand trees were another thousand dead for the war effort, right?
"Disgusting---another thousand dead? Wasn’t I enough of a murderer?" She turned her eyes down from the immovable face and admired the quivering roses in her arms. "Once you’re taken a thousand and eight, no distinctions could save you. It’s all the same after your first, you’re just not the same any longer." She chuckled dryly once or twice. "It’s the sort of bitter irony you might liked, Wufei."
She broke away from the rising monument, pressing on along the shifting rows and columns of headstones. Erect as they would have been in life, they cast short shadows under the moon moody light. Counting the proper place along the sepulchers she broke away from the paved path to make her way between the rows on rows. The ground was still moist and yielding from the weekend rains, but not unpleasantly so. Most of the water had drained itself away, and what little was left gave the air a deep, languishing aroma.
Presently, the crest of a short hillock came between a split in the trees, and Noin quickly passed under the fimbria of the last willows between her and the greatest pilots paid homage to here. The last resting place of Treize Khushrenada was bare now as the desiccated carcasses of last week’s flowers had since been carted away from a cemetery attendant. Still lingering at the foot of the headstone, a few brittle petals that had not been washed away by breeze or wet weather. She circled around to the side of the hallowed ground, not stepping on the budge that covered his empty casket, and set the tissue-wrapped bundle of red roses in the corner or the grass and marble. With that, she took another few backward steps to come to stand before the grave with the moon at her back, her hanging shadow over the memorial unearthing—recalling glimpses of the military, and she could she herself standing there for an instant. Her nonchalant uniform had melted into the ceremonial OZ uniform, with a sabre at her side and a cape hanging from her shoulder, all the colour chosen to declare her position. It may have been the only thing about her that demanded respect and attention and nothing short of perfection, but it too had came at a voracious tariff. She had shed it like useless skin in the glass kingdom and had never missed it a day since, and she didn’t now, either. It was only duty—
Snapping to attention and a brusque salute, Noin’s own vital statistics rolled off her tongue. "Lieutenant-Colonel Lucrezia Noin, sir. Absent without leave as of April twenty-third, After Colony 195. One hundred and thirty-one confirmed kills, the most of all your regular students. Served in Operation Daybreak under Colonel Zechs Merquise." She broke her salute and stood rigid, her voice now slow and calculated. "I never had the chance to thank you for all you did for me. You gave me an opportunity when the rest of the world refused. You looked at me when everyone else wanted to forget. I had—" She swallowed forcibly. "—no right to serve under you. I disclaimed you, but I helped your friend stay alive and kept the both of us true to our, and your, high ideals. I still cannot find any excuses for turning my back on you and ignoring my debt, but I have to say how penitent I am.
"I should have resigned when I had the chance…" Mused Noin as she took a one step back from the grave, trying to pull her shadow off Treize’s soil.
It’s the emptiness I fear
Baby, please don’t leave me here
For the first time she had locked her eyes onto it and did turn away in self-loathing. Granite impressed with his name, the second one of his that she had never totally succeeded in denying. The time had come when he was no longer willing to put aside his birthright, but she had always insisted on the name she knew his as and persisted with Zechs.
"It was no different…"
That was there the two have them were so different. She didn’t ask for a second side to him when she would have needed it. She did not accept his alternate reality when he would have needed it most. Even now, even with Millardo Peacecraft in the dirt, that name came carrying a flurry of emotions. Zechs had given it to her in steed, and she keep its integrity. She had raised arms against that name, since it was raising arms against everything she stood for, everything he stood for.
"How could I have—?"
It was something she could never understand, and so she decided to hate that name. Let Millardo Peacecraft bleed in the dust, Zechs Merquise would outlast the fires. It didn’t help for a moment. All her feelings was torn by Millardo, and so she loved two men.
No, not true. She loved one man with two sets of principles, but that could be just as staggering.
Maybe that was the reason she did not come to mourn Millardo Peacecraft, dead heir to the kingdom of Sanc. For all his renown and all his grandeur, Millardo had embraced death with a sacrificial passion. It was pitiful and sarcastic: How could a transitory bout of sarcasm be representitive of the man she loved?
The answers always eluded her.
"Zechs, we need to talk." Noin took the same place at Millardo’s plot that she had at Treize’s, opposite the headstone across from the grave earth. "It seems alien to me to be speaking like this, but it shouldn’t, really. I’ve done it before, that that was to a photograph, not a tombstone. That’s why this is so difficult, so tempting. But please, hear me out."
She gasped and indulged in a breath of night’s wind. The breezes had taken a curve to them that worked over the crest of the little hill the graves were on. It was a tiny, slight bend, and it felt like she was standing on the fringe of an ancestral whirlwind. "Life was a bit deranged when you were around. Of course, it isn’t like it’s any less unpredictable now. I just relished your special breed of entropy. I never thought for a second that I might be addicted before—" As she trailed off, the wind flowed swifter and quieter. All the world seemed to darken except the moon, a ghostly spotlight behind her. Herself an ethereal orator in khaki blue, all existence anticipated her words.
"Zechs, I never wondered about what I would do without you. In days gone by, I was always able to accept that would be profoundly bonded and that I could always live with that. But now, everything had changed while nothing is any different at all. A part of you is dead and buried, and I fight a spiteful, useless war, feeling like a part of me is in your coffin. We’re linked that way; I’m sure you wouldn’t deny that. We could have finished one another’s sentences, but we held back because we had to. It was a serious, tenacious world, and so it persists. I’m standing on my own, but I’m starting to stumble, to feel the ground cracking behind my feet. No one had even noticed because all of us have our eyes set on some invisible price of peace. We all have the same selective blindness." She cleared her throat to gut out an assiduous clog.
"Everything made sense once. While you were here, we could all focus on a goal we knew wasn’t to be found. Unilateral peace isn’t out there, and without you I can’t help but see the truth. It’s so bright and fragile, and it hurts me to think right at it, because when I try I end up denying it.
"The truth, Zechs, is that I can’t make a peace for everyone. None of us can, right? All I can do is try to make one person happy and hope that that person does the same for another—even if it’s not going to be me. That’s the nature of peace. It could never be achieved with policing and force, only through understanding.
"Maybe I was wrong to understand you, but it doesn’t really matter right now. I’m failing you. I’m trying to fill your niche and coming up direly short. I’d just give up—" She raised her eyes off the granite’s surface and up to the dome of stars. Some were farther out of reach than others, she knew. "—But I won’t. I won’t allow myself to surrender. Even if it costs me my dreams, my life, and even what I feel for you."
On her knees now, with her eyes still enthralled by the millennial dance of the luminaries above, Noin rubbed her quaking hands in the soft grass at the end of the grave. This casket had more substance in it than all the truly dead soldiers in this cemetery combined. Two souls in two places each, and the only place two of their halves could ever join was six feet under the surface, under Millardo’s tombstone. "Zechs, I’ve gone through so much to make it here, and I still don’t have a thing to show for it. I’m scared of it all, actually." Her voice wavered, her eyes clouding with a blackness that slowly spread across the stars, the harbinger of the insomniac’s sleep. "It hurts to say it, but—I don’t know—what I’m going to do—do without—"
Consciousness gave out at last under the night willows, and she fell prostrate on the grass. The world began to pick up again now that speech had been cut short by earthly confines and her commitment to name-dead stars went unfinished and unbound. It was a shame that entertainment was so fleeting. Nevertheless, among all those disappointed glimmers, sapphires in the night’s inkpot, something began to move.
‘Cause I’m lost inside a dream
That’s out of bounds
Some time later, when the sun’s glorious return was nearly upon the World Capital and the turmolt of wind that settled and passed, two other spirits stirred out in that open-air cathedral-field. "I’m glad that you could come here with me." The shorter of the two told the taller. "I hate coming here all by myself, and we wouldn’t have beaten daybreak if you hadn’t known about that shortcut. We would have stopped by that mangled wreak of a sports car..." The taller remained silent, but the shorter did not loathe for it. The taller’s eyes were closed under his chestnut curtain, not out of weariness, but in comfort that his reflexive instinct outclassed even the sight of his fair-haired comrade.
Quatre found his way to the familiar site, and laid his wreath of daffodils at the foot of it. His memories had brought him to know what she would have loved most of al, and spring daffodils were it. "I’m sorry, honoured dead, that I could not renew these sooner." He bowed his head low and offered a restful prayer before leaving the grave, and returning to where Trowa kept his distance. "Our flight isn’t until noon. Do you think we should pay Noin a visit before we go? It’s a little while to walk, but—"
Trowa cocked his head at where the hill rose between a split in the willows. "Noin may be closer than you think." Quatre gasped when he saw the collapsed form, and rushed to her to help her.
Noin, however, slept like the dead, and could not be happier so. A faint, relaxed smile was curving the edges of her mouth, the only action her inert body insisted on. In every other respect, she was utterly peaceful, the dew-dusted grass trembling lightly in her sleeping breaths.
As she slept, Lucrezia Noin laughed along with Zechs Merquise.
Disclaimer:
All characters are property of Sunrise Studios, Sutso Agency, and Bandai.
Out of Bounds is property of Amanda Marshall.
Now then, either I get your feedback at serpentarius84@hotmail.com or I won’t write the next one about Zechs or Anne or whomever. Simple, right?
