Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Last Impression ❯ Last Impression ( Chapter 1 )

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB

This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

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Last Impression

 

 

“You're going to catch a cold sitting in the dark without a shirt on. If you're sulking about being phased out, don't worry,” Lucrezia Noin announced as she turned on the light and removed the top half of her uniform. ”This calm won't last forever. There'll be plenty of chances for you to see combat again. Even if it's only against Mars rats.”

 

Zechs Merquis found himself smiling in spite of himself. It was true, he had been brooding on the Preventer ship's cabin bunk, pretending to polish his boots, two hours and eighteen minutes away from starting a new life on Mars, where all sorts of unfortunate things could happen and a man could disappear in any number of ways.

 

His partner and long-time friend, Noin, made an uncharacteristic amount of noise moving about the small cabin and brandished an opened bottle of Wild Turkey at him.

 

“That's contraband, Preventer Fire,” he tutted at her, but relented to produce shotglasses and ice from their refrigeration compartment.

 

“It's a special occasion, Sally helped me get it on board.” She shrugged, as the bottle and glasses were passed around.

 

“Is that new?” He asked, meaning the Prussian silk slip she wore as an undershirt. “The colour suits you.”

 

“Yes it is, thank you.” She said, meaning `don't avoid the subject'. He sighed and sat back down on the bed.

 

“Okay, what's the special occasion?”

 

“If you don't want to commemorate your birthday, Zechs, we can drink to Relena's future. Neither of us have had a chance to celebrate her safe return yet.”

 

“To the future, then,” he grumbled and emptied the glass in one gulp. But Zechs did not feel like he belonged, that was why he jumped on the opportunity to join the Mars Terra Formation Project, to get away and leave the new world he had helped forge to the people he cared about. To go far away so he would not and could not muck it up for them.

 

Noin's presence made him angsty. Why couldn't she stay put? He had been all prepared to leave everyone and everything he'd ever known behind, and she had to show up at the last minute with Une's orders and ruin everything.

 

“I won't apologise for ruining your exit, Zechs, drama is for confused teenagers.” She said sternly, reading his mind. Damnit anyway. “Besides, you're not that important. Even if we hadn't caught up with you, Lady Une would have wanted to establish Preventer presence on Mars.”

 

Even so, he was not quite prepared to forgive her for pulling him off the project team's shuttle yet. To keep from agreeing with her logic, he used the first excuse for his mood that came to mind: “It's nothing, I'm tired and can't remember the last time I got laid, that's all.” There, that should shut her up. It was even partly true, too.

 

Instead, her mouth twitched wryly and before he knew it, she was pulling his pants to his knees and taking the empty glass from his hand, tossing it onto the pool of material that was her pants on the floor.

 

He did not resist as she silently straddled his lap, forcing him into her depths, nor when she pushed him down on the bunk to settle on top of him. He plundered into her with a sadistic edge and grabbed her hips under the slip, amazed at how tight she was. His hands raked trails up her thighs, across her hips and waist, up her sides to the underside of her breasts, which fit easily into his grip, pulling off the blue silk. She had a soldier's body, as expected, hard and lean under surprisingly soft skin, marred by ridges of old battle scars, some pale, others dark.

 

He placed her hands on the edge of the upper bunk, giving her silky nipples a firm pinch and twist, delighting in the feel of them between his fingertips, and punched through her cervix with a violent shove before sensing something was wrong.

 

“Noin, are you… is this…” he stammered softly, surprised that he would be embarrassed to ask her this question, and already certain of the answer. Not that she would allow herself to show any signs of weakness.

 

Now that he is looking for it, he sees them: the barest tremor in her limbs, the controlled strain in her breathing, the grim set of her jaw enduring his assault, betraying her maidenly affliction that gave him a reverential sense of shame and awe. The understanding that she had just given him her first experience and allowed him, no, set him up, to rip it from her struck him like a knife in the back. What kind of monster did she think he was?

 

“Oh Noin… Noin, not like this…” a quiver in his voice, he raised his hands to her face, capturing it in his palms, running his fingers everywhere along her neck and cheeks, her lips… his heart bursting, breaking.

 

Of course she wouldn't bleed, he remembered when she broke her hymen during a riding exam and how he'd tormented her by insisting the stains on her riding pants was prove she had sold her virginity for a favourable score. He remembered also the time he guilted her into jerking him off, reasoning that it was the least she could do for breaking both his arms in a mobile suit spar gone too far.

 

How she had blushed and carefully locked the infirmary door before rolling up her sleeves and servicing him in the same methodical manner, and how he throbbed for a long time afterwards, remembering the touch of her fingers on his flesh. He remembered too, the birthday he blindfolded her with the promises of a surprise, but in reality so that she couldn't see his face as he pushed her up against a wall and stole their first kiss, diving his hand under her skirt into her panties.

 

His jaw clenched with the memory of the smack she had given him. She had split his lip and knocked out a tooth or two with that single blow, and he didn't think she ever wore skirts again. But he had licked the scent of her from his fingers like a balm for his wounds and pined for days afterwards for another clumsy, crushing kiss. That was when he decided to lose his virginity. He chose a trainee instructor and took her behind the girls' dorm, doggy-style, under Noin's window.

 

“I don't mean to hurt you… I never mean to hurt you…” he could have wept with the weight of it all.

 

“You haven't.” She says curtly, meaning `if you turn emo on me now I will rip your throat out'. He froze, the too-taut sensitivity of her that, moments ago, incited his masculine ferocity, now caused him to be terrified to move a muscle `lest he cause her any more distress.

 

He wanted to stop, so he could lay her down sweetly and start over, but they had come too far and judging from the painful grip around the base of his tip, pulling out now might hurt him, not to mention the injury he would certainly do to her. The only thing left to him was to move forward.

 

He takes her hands and guides them to his shoulders, drawing himself up towards her with gentle caresses and flipped her onto the mattress, under him. Moving carefully, he fluidly massaged her inner sanctum to encourage her pleasure over his own, and was comforted by the growth of her passion as she wrapped her limbs around him and tried to rock against him of her own accord.

 

“Zechs,” she gasps, softly, heatedly, impaled on his promiscuity, entwined in his hair.

 

“Yes.” I'm here, he murmured gently against her neck, her hair, gathering her to his chest, suddenly the most fragile, most precious thing in the world.

 

“Do you know the reason I count the days?”

 

“Because you are an obsessive compulsive nerd?”

 

She laughs. “That too.” It is breathless and rugged and sends ripples down her body that stirs his desire. She pushes away from him, to make him look at her.

 

“I am counting the hours until this moment,” she said with all the intensity in the world crammed into her deep violet eyes and sex-raked voice, “when you finally make me a woman.” A woman.

 

He looked into her face, the dangerous, wanton face of a stranger, this madwoman Lucrezia that lurks under the mask of plain, measured little Noin. Sensible, dependable little Noin. This woman, his woman,

 

He found no words for her, so she kissed him.

 

It was the kiss to end all kisses, a kiss that crumbled cities and brought down kings, the kiss that poets and playwrights across the centuries have envied and admired. All his colourful life, he had never felt anything it's like, the intoxicating sensations of becoming incorporeal, of her melting into his lips as he melted into her heat. And all his life, Zechs thought fleetingly, he will never be able to kiss like that again.

 

Spent, he started to withdraw only to be prevented by her vice-like grip on his arm. She wanted him to stay, so she can go on feeling a part of him in her for as long as she can. “I didn't think I can be so greedy” she giggled in a faraway haze.

 

`I'm right here!' His heart cried out, but he said nothing, and showered her with kisses instead.

 

“You moron,” he growled when she was back in her own head, “you could have really hurt yourself!”

 

“It wasn't ideal,” she admitted, untangling from him, “but it had to be done.”

 

“What exactly?” He retorted crossly, tenderly cleaning her up with all the romance of tending to a fallen comrade on the battlefield. Does it hurt? He didn't want to know. “To see what kind off abuse your body can take?”

 

Now that she was no longer wrapped around him, he was frightened and confused, afraid of the distance between them, of never again seeing the emotion behind that beautiful display. Had she meant what he thought she did? Did she mean for this to happen? Had he misunderstood? Was it, after all, merely an exercise in sexuality? Maybe now he could be rid of her for good. The thought chilled him. All the time he had spent distancing from her, he had never once imagined a world where she would not be there when he looked.

 

“If I didn't feel like such a limp noodle right now I would slap you.” She finally said into the silence. “I didn't think you were going to make a move, and at least this way I can look back one day and say `ah well, I tried'.”

 

“Noin, what are you talking about?”

 

Zechs stood over her. He had put his pants back on while she wasn't paying attention, she noted, which probably, she found herself drawing an absurd analogy to cheap motel pornos, means the end.

 

Oh well, time to start explaining. Noin pulled herself into a sitting position and fashioned a sari out of the sheet. “I've had a crush on you until the day I met you,” she started with a big sigh.

 

“You're making a mistake, I'm not the boy you knew from the Academy…” He interrupted, and was cut off by the pillow she threw in his face.

 

“I said until I met you, idiot. Just shut up and listen.” So he leaned against the lonely side table and faced her, expressionless. “You're just going to say that boy died and became a man, and that man died and etcetera.” She chuckled, avoiding his perfect profile, so void of emotion. “You were such a brat. I hated you, and I hated how I was supposed to magically be in love with you and marry you just because a couple of dead old men thought it'd be nice, although until I actually met you, the idea hadn't sounded so bad.

 

“But still, you were the only one I felt natural around at school. Strange, considering the things you used to do to me. I crept around for eight whole months in year four convinced you were going to gang-rape me. Or maybe that makes perfect sense, I don't know. I was a pretty mixed up kid. I cried even harder than I did at my dad's funeral when you sent me those flowers for graduation.”

 

She was probably completely alienating him right now, but she knew it would come to this. She had known for all the weeks coming up to this morning, from the moment Lady Une issued her orders to have Preventer Wind dragged back to earth to accept his new mission. She had just left it to the last possible minute. “That boy from the academy was my nemesis, and the man who died was my best friend. I've changed a lot too, you know. The difference, I guess, is I'm still carrying around the memories of those who are important to the me I've left behind, and it's time to let that go.

 

“Mars is a new beginning for me, so before we get there, I needed to do this, so I can let go of these thoughts and curiosities belonging to the dead without regret. I'm a 20 year old survivor of two wars and still a virgin, for crying out loud!” There was a slight note of hysteria in her laugh. She paused, looking for clues of some kind of reaction, not surprised when she found none. She might as well have been speaking to the walls, but it needed to be said and it would all have been pointless if she did not come out and say it.

 

Noin took a deep breath. “And, because I wanted to see if the man I'm going to Mars with is a man I could love. There, I'm done.”

 

He regarded her, cold and calculative, a different person from the man who, minutes ago, was ready to burst into tears over the woman who wasn't quite the same woman holding his gaze across the cabin bunk.

 

“Why did you come to Mars?” He asked finally, evenly. She blinked.

 

“Heh, are you kidding? Centuries after the first plans to terraform Mars, we're finally doing it. How can I not be here?”

 

This seemed to satisfy him. Zechs stood up and restored the errant pillow to its rightful place on the bed. He used picking up the forgotten glasses as an excuse to pace.

 

A part of him wanted desperately to ask what kind of man would she love? He crushed it and dropped to his haunches in front of Noin. “Lucrezia,” he said, using her given name for the first time, “I don't know if the man you've come to Mars with is a man you can fall in love with.”

 

Normally, he would have stopped there. But because her honesty deserved more, he forced himself to go on. “But I do remember some things of a boy from the academy who did terrible things to a certain girl because he was in love with her and hated her for it, and of a man who took as much advantage as he could of his best friend because he did not believe he had any friends. I've put you through a lot, and done many things to you that are unforgivable,”

 

“But you never actually harmed or took advantage of me or my position,” She pointed out before he could plunge deeper into the soliloquy of his villainy, “and you nulled the betrothal when I asked you to.”

 

He paused to consider this point of view.

 

“True,” he arched a platinum eyebrow. “But that's only because I've always thought you a good enough fighter to kill me if you put your mind to it.” She blushed at the compliment, and he noted absently how pretty it was against her pale skin and dark hair.

 

“I am someone far worse than either of those, Noin.” He spoke her name as though it was a charm. “But I think, I would very much like to have you for a friend.”

 

There, she will have his honesty. It was only fair. But not the whole truth. Frankly, because he had yet to figure out what that truth might be.

 

She leaned forward and kissed him, chastely, on the brow. “Thank you, Zechs Merquise,”

 

He was startled to see her smile, a calm, genuinely content expression, and realised he was jealous that she could be happy with his answer when he himself wasn't.

 

He did not catch the sly look in the corner of Noin's eyes until it was too late. “You do care for me, really,” it said. It also said, `you will regret not having an excuse to be with me'. What Lucrezia Noin said later, after she had found the legs to use the on-board shower and check on the ship's progress as he monitored the autopilot for orbital approach resolutely shirtless, dressed once again in her uniform pants and Prussian blue undershirt and carrying a piercing ache quietly in the pit of her belly like a secret medal, was a mildly relieved “well, now I won't feel so bad about picking up Martian pioneers at the bar.”

 

He almost dropped them into the sun.

 

“Hmph.” He recovered himself with a cocky smirk. “You won't be needing any Martian pioneers with me around. And you won't be wanting any either, after you've had a go with me.” That's alright, isn't it? It's just sex, pure physical gratification, a convenience between two friends whose jobs enforced unpredictable periods of celibacy. It doesn't mean anything, it doesn't have to.

 

“I have had a go with you.” She replied pointedly.

 

“No you haven't,” he growled at her before he realised what he was saying, before realising, even, that he had abandoned his diagnostics and was reaching out to press her to him, against the agitated column in his pants that had sprung for her.

 

“That was whatever it was. Now this,” his voice lowered into a purr, grew husky with his warm lips on her ear, tugging off her clothes to savour her nakedness on his bare skin, the electric shudders in her flesh under his fingertips… ”…this is sex.”

 

…