The POV is Zechs'.
My deepest thanks to Ravyn (who normally gives life to the far more elegant voice of Treize, and was kind enough to loan him to me for a day) and to all of the Ex-Fam group, for letting me play in their world. ~Nixers
Do you know, he liked bad wine? I mean, the truly terrible stuff. He'd turn down a well aged vintage, something costing hundreds of dollars a glass, in favor some bitter thing made in a winery a week ago. He had a simple, if twisted, reason for it: nothing should be perfect.
If something was absolutely perfect, he told me, it polluted your senses, made them lazy and shut them down in the face of it. We aren't built to experience perfection, he explained. If you see a gorgeous sunset painted across the silhouetted horizon, or listen to a symphony that just strikes you to the core, everything else shuts down, except those sole senses we use to greedily take in that wonderful thing.
So he drank bitter wine. It was something to give him that little discord to pull him back, so he could witness everything, experience it all. The better the times were, the worse the wine would be. On my less than charitable days, I suspected that he sought out the worst years, from the most incompetent vineyards, and /then/ left them to turn to vinegar for a while. As you might guess, I never had the same taste for it as he did back then.
It was just another quirk we teased each other about. I never really thought about it until I came to visit him, before I left for space. I don't think anyone ever knew I did, or even, really, what I expected to do by going there. Our time together had already been severed. Maybe I hoped that we'd heal it. That he'd persuade me to stop. It was an unfair hope to hold him to.
I told him about everything... who had asked for my help, what their goals were -- and conversely, what mine were -- the Libra, Epyon, everything. Tactically, it was probably the most idiotic thing I'd ever done, but.. in that room, with him listening so solemnly, hands folded over each other in his lap... strategy didn't matter. I needed to tell someone who would understand. Perhaps, in a way, I was there for his approval.
When I had finally stopped, he stood up and wordlessly crossed the room, taking out a few glasses, to play the proper host I suppose.
The circumstance didn't strike me until I tasted the drink he served. The liquid was a perfect red, sweet, seductive. It was honey with a touch of smoke and a potency that stole past your defenses without ever giving the tart fair warning that most wines will. The bouquet was something that could have caused the gods to disdain their ambrosia. I'd never had the like of it.
Just as my eyelids had begun to drop in pleasure, the meaning of it struck me. The shock woke me from my short haze.
The realization must have been plain on my face, or maybe he'd just become that adept at reading me. Whichever it was, he simply smiled, a sharp, sad curl to his lips, and raised his wine to me in a salute.
"It should be able to work in reverse, Millardo," he said, quietly sipping his own glass. His eyes were closed as he told this to me. "When everything is too bitter to palate, something ought to be perfect."
I left quietly soon after that glass, as undetected as I had entered. It was finished; we both had recognized it over that exquisite drink. But we had to go through the motions. Nothing could stop us from that. It was at the root of who we were, both of us. It was how we kept fighting, kept living, how we never quite gave up on each other, no matter how cruel fate was.
Things are better now. Peace is everything I could have hoped for, and imagined it would be, like that sunset and symphony combined. It was what both of us fought for in our own stubborn, arrogant ways. Funny how peace is somehow both, and yet neither, of our doings.
Despite the sour fact that he's not here to share it with me anymore, this perfection sometimes threatens to overwhelm me. I wonder if he was as scared then, as I am now, of simply shutting down completely in the face of it all.
Still, one terribly familiar irony exists, now that everything had been turned around.
Relena doesn't understand my taste in wine.
Owari
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