(fic) Tough by Nature (oneshot)
Tough by Nature
Author: Masamune Reforged
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters.
Characters: Noin, with a bit of Zechs, Quatre, and Sally Po
Warning: All audiences, Gen fic, angst
Word Count: 1138
For gw500 's challenge #277 'Noin'
crossposted to gw_dark as well
Author's Note: The three scenes are based on, respectively, episode 41 (scene 1), episode 43 (scene 2) and episode 44 (scene 3)
-Tough by Nature-
It is amazing to her how everything in their lives has been marked by mocking paradox, insurmountable barriers, sweeping change and unfaltering steadiness. It has been brutal, beautiful, agonizing and the sole joy that has seeped into every slit and corner of her world. For all its complexities, honors and disgraces, Lucrezia Noin cannot deny that her life has essentially boiled down to one long struggle.
For so long, she could not lay eyes on him, not completely at least. The rigid regulations of the Academy, the divide in rank, the chasm of professional soldiery, the mask, war. Now, after all that they've shared and bled together, he raises the visor on his mask and looks at her with those chillingly blue eyes. He speaks pure hypocrisy, sagely insanity. He looks at her as if she is not there at all. Noin cannot help but feel that perhaps for all the sidelong glances and soul-searching stares she's fixed on him, she may have never seen him at all.
“Zechs...”
She has finally been able to lay hands on him, albeit through the unfeeling appendages of a mobile suit, and he breaks free from her with insulting ease, becomes a sole, shimmering point of light amidst a star-dotted battlefield of darkness.
------------------------------------------------------------------
For all the silly, stupid, trite, overused words that have been written and spoken about love as conflict, they all seem to perfectly describe this battle she has invested her life in.
They have been apart since the icy wastelands of Antartica. Now she sees him in broadcasts everywhere she turns. His voice, that pedantically calm and somber timbre, reaches out from a place she has never been able to penetrate, and the words from their past and their present blur together. Glory to the colonies. Death to the Earth. At Lake Victoria, it is almost the peak of the torridly hot summer.
Noin walks out to the lower decks criss-crossing the Peacemillion's cavernous hangar. On the highest deck, five young men are reuniting and meeting for the first time. Sally Po comes up to her. Before Noin knows it, she is spilling her secret to the blonde woman like the terrible mess it is, all over the metal struts and supports.
“I feel so powerless.”
Sally tells her that it's tough, that it's only going to get worse. Sally is a person she feels a strange affinity towards, even stronger than the ever-growing friendship she and Quatre Winner share. Both Sally and Quatre are intelligent, kind, and focused. They are like pillars that give both warmth and aid. But the moment she first saw Sally's face, raising her from the shuttle, Noin realized how awfully and completely isolated she has felt recently. How long has she felt like that? Sally tells her that she'll find her right way if she continues to stick with these five young warriors, her former enemies. It'll be tough, and it'll get worse.
Noin frowns and feels herself staring beyond the walls of the Peacemillion. “Battles are tough by nature,” she says.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Day in and day out she is falling to pieces and willing herself to keep it together. She is tired. Her mind is a whirling, dizzy mess. The food all tastes rotten, and she catches herself saying stupid, naïve things, rationalizing impossibly cruel actions, forcing the tears to stay locked deep behind her in a place that will surely cave at any moment. Her eyes are often shimmering and she speaks to defend him without even thinking how ridiculous and pathetic she will sound. She has gathered these strong, capable, determined young warriors, and now there is no place for her. Not here.
He is somewhere far away, and, now more than ever, Noin is unsure that she can reach him. Quatre Winner launches recklessly, and when he returns it is not only with the person he cares for, but with a rediscovered bond between them, a miraculous recovery of times past and struggles shared. Sometimes he gives her a sidelong glance, a searching probe that seems to already know, but for all the time they have spent since their first meeting in the Sanq Kingdom, Noin knows he's never been happier. Heero is their iron center. Duo lightens the gloom. Trowa calms the chaos. Wufei keeps the fire boiling in their veins. Sally keeps them all on a leash. Howard keeps them from falling out of the sky. Out on the black, four-pointed colossus that closes toward the cradle of mankind with every passing moment, a man is waiting for the curtain to rise on what promises to be the absolute worst battle of all time.
It is a battle. For the first time in her life, her bravery seems to blanch at the prospect of how it will all end. It is not loss she fears. It is not death. She is afraid that for all the righteousness she has championed and made manifest through her sacrifices, she has been going about it in a completely backwards, moronically prideful farce.
It is a war. Her entire life has been conflict and suffering and bold, passionate reflexes. Her head pounds and aches. Her breaths come in tattered patches. Blinding flashes sear her eyes. Deafening alarms thunder in her ears. The cockpit smells like the sweat of a cadaver, and the controls are impossibly rigid bones that must keep moving, unless it all end in one quick, sightless relief of violence.
It is tough, impossibly so. But everyone keeps fighting. It's all they can do. They fight, fight their battles. The enemy mobile dolls are surrounding each of them bit by bit. Wufei destroys one foe to find himself racing towards yet another. Duo reaches out to take a life and finds only a soulless program encased in whining, splitting metal. Trowa is always about to run out of bullets. Heero is in Peacemillion preparing to kill the man she loves. Treize is on Earth doing the same.
The back of her mobile suit presses against Quatre's. Strange. Out of all of the people who have come into her life in this past year, perhaps nobody has been as openly self-doubting and fragile as Quatre Winner. In the midst of death and sheer chaos, they are the only two on the same page, the only two who know the horrible, awful truth that will either kill them or save them. Quatre is begging the others to stop engaging the enemy on their own, begging them to come together. Noin is the only one listening.
It is a battle. Battles are tough by nature. Alone, they are all powerless.
Zechs is on Libra, yet she is not.
Her own words leave her mouth before she is aware of how desperate and fatally true they are, “Separated, we won't survive.”
-end 'Tough by Nature'
Author's Note: It was NOT my goal to make Noin come off as a weepy, weak-willed woman who defines her existence based on the man she loves. Noin is, hands down, my favorite Gundam Wing gal, and not only is she strong as fuck, but she is one of the most instrumental characters in the entire show. Did you know that NOBODY has as much total time interacting with the five pilots as she does? She's one of the biggest reasons they all come together. But I watched some episodes recently where she is just going through the ringer because of what Zechs is doing in White Fang and, well, and, yeah, this is what came out.
Author: Masamune Reforged
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters.
Characters: Noin, with a bit of Zechs, Quatre, and Sally Po
Warning: All audiences, Gen fic, angst
Word Count: 1138
For gw500 's challenge #277 'Noin'
crossposted to gw_dark as well
Author's Note: The three scenes are based on, respectively, episode 41 (scene 1), episode 43 (scene 2) and episode 44 (scene 3)
-Tough by Nature-
It is amazing to her how everything in their lives has been marked by mocking paradox, insurmountable barriers, sweeping change and unfaltering steadiness. It has been brutal, beautiful, agonizing and the sole joy that has seeped into every slit and corner of her world. For all its complexities, honors and disgraces, Lucrezia Noin cannot deny that her life has essentially boiled down to one long struggle.
For so long, she could not lay eyes on him, not completely at least. The rigid regulations of the Academy, the divide in rank, the chasm of professional soldiery, the mask, war. Now, after all that they've shared and bled together, he raises the visor on his mask and looks at her with those chillingly blue eyes. He speaks pure hypocrisy, sagely insanity. He looks at her as if she is not there at all. Noin cannot help but feel that perhaps for all the sidelong glances and soul-searching stares she's fixed on him, she may have never seen him at all.
“Zechs...”
She has finally been able to lay hands on him, albeit through the unfeeling appendages of a mobile suit, and he breaks free from her with insulting ease, becomes a sole, shimmering point of light amidst a star-dotted battlefield of darkness.
------------------------------------------------------------------
For all the silly, stupid, trite, overused words that have been written and spoken about love as conflict, they all seem to perfectly describe this battle she has invested her life in.
They have been apart since the icy wastelands of Antartica. Now she sees him in broadcasts everywhere she turns. His voice, that pedantically calm and somber timbre, reaches out from a place she has never been able to penetrate, and the words from their past and their present blur together. Glory to the colonies. Death to the Earth. At Lake Victoria, it is almost the peak of the torridly hot summer.
Noin walks out to the lower decks criss-crossing the Peacemillion's cavernous hangar. On the highest deck, five young men are reuniting and meeting for the first time. Sally Po comes up to her. Before Noin knows it, she is spilling her secret to the blonde woman like the terrible mess it is, all over the metal struts and supports.
“I feel so powerless.”
Sally tells her that it's tough, that it's only going to get worse. Sally is a person she feels a strange affinity towards, even stronger than the ever-growing friendship she and Quatre Winner share. Both Sally and Quatre are intelligent, kind, and focused. They are like pillars that give both warmth and aid. But the moment she first saw Sally's face, raising her from the shuttle, Noin realized how awfully and completely isolated she has felt recently. How long has she felt like that? Sally tells her that she'll find her right way if she continues to stick with these five young warriors, her former enemies. It'll be tough, and it'll get worse.
Noin frowns and feels herself staring beyond the walls of the Peacemillion. “Battles are tough by nature,” she says.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Day in and day out she is falling to pieces and willing herself to keep it together. She is tired. Her mind is a whirling, dizzy mess. The food all tastes rotten, and she catches herself saying stupid, naïve things, rationalizing impossibly cruel actions, forcing the tears to stay locked deep behind her in a place that will surely cave at any moment. Her eyes are often shimmering and she speaks to defend him without even thinking how ridiculous and pathetic she will sound. She has gathered these strong, capable, determined young warriors, and now there is no place for her. Not here.
He is somewhere far away, and, now more than ever, Noin is unsure that she can reach him. Quatre Winner launches recklessly, and when he returns it is not only with the person he cares for, but with a rediscovered bond between them, a miraculous recovery of times past and struggles shared. Sometimes he gives her a sidelong glance, a searching probe that seems to already know, but for all the time they have spent since their first meeting in the Sanq Kingdom, Noin knows he's never been happier. Heero is their iron center. Duo lightens the gloom. Trowa calms the chaos. Wufei keeps the fire boiling in their veins. Sally keeps them all on a leash. Howard keeps them from falling out of the sky. Out on the black, four-pointed colossus that closes toward the cradle of mankind with every passing moment, a man is waiting for the curtain to rise on what promises to be the absolute worst battle of all time.
It is a battle. For the first time in her life, her bravery seems to blanch at the prospect of how it will all end. It is not loss she fears. It is not death. She is afraid that for all the righteousness she has championed and made manifest through her sacrifices, she has been going about it in a completely backwards, moronically prideful farce.
It is a war. Her entire life has been conflict and suffering and bold, passionate reflexes. Her head pounds and aches. Her breaths come in tattered patches. Blinding flashes sear her eyes. Deafening alarms thunder in her ears. The cockpit smells like the sweat of a cadaver, and the controls are impossibly rigid bones that must keep moving, unless it all end in one quick, sightless relief of violence.
It is tough, impossibly so. But everyone keeps fighting. It's all they can do. They fight, fight their battles. The enemy mobile dolls are surrounding each of them bit by bit. Wufei destroys one foe to find himself racing towards yet another. Duo reaches out to take a life and finds only a soulless program encased in whining, splitting metal. Trowa is always about to run out of bullets. Heero is in Peacemillion preparing to kill the man she loves. Treize is on Earth doing the same.
The back of her mobile suit presses against Quatre's. Strange. Out of all of the people who have come into her life in this past year, perhaps nobody has been as openly self-doubting and fragile as Quatre Winner. In the midst of death and sheer chaos, they are the only two on the same page, the only two who know the horrible, awful truth that will either kill them or save them. Quatre is begging the others to stop engaging the enemy on their own, begging them to come together. Noin is the only one listening.
It is a battle. Battles are tough by nature. Alone, they are all powerless.
Zechs is on Libra, yet she is not.
Her own words leave her mouth before she is aware of how desperate and fatally true they are, “Separated, we won't survive.”
-end 'Tough by Nature'
Author's Note: It was NOT my goal to make Noin come off as a weepy, weak-willed woman who defines her existence based on the man she loves. Noin is, hands down, my favorite Gundam Wing gal, and not only is she strong as fuck, but she is one of the most instrumental characters in the entire show. Did you know that NOBODY has as much total time interacting with the five pilots as she does? She's one of the biggest reasons they all come together. But I watched some episodes recently where she is just going through the ringer because of what Zechs is doing in White Fang and, well, and, yeah, this is what came out.