Author’s Note: I really debated with myself about posting this, it is very, very weird! Sometimes I think, hey this is soooo good and other times, I think, the people are gonna think you’re warped!! Inspired by some of those “spirit of the Gundam” things that keep popping up and by Nikhya’s humor fic “What You’ll Never see on Gundam Wing”. This is part of my fic “Love is a Battlefield” so if you’re not reading that you may not get it, if you are reading it, this is just a possibility thing, none of this really happens later in the fic. We don’t know if this is real or nightmares or just plain EVIL. Basically it’s about a girl who creates Epyon for Treize. Sooo, read the warning and take heed please WARNING: dark, bizarre, kinky behavior, really satanic stuff, nothing really graphic but wild subject matter, SO WATCH OUT, OKAY Rated: NC-17 Written in an anonymous character style, but there is a character key at the end.

the zero manifestation

(a “love is a battlefield” possibility)

by midii une


It needed her presence, the creator, the genius that it had tempted into making it real. She (1) had tempted it as well. Her slender hands had touched every part of it, her mind had embraced its mechanisms and it had entered her mind with its systems. They were as close as lovers. She was a series of visions, an ethereal cloud of pale, curling hair; sparkling amethyst eyes deep with feeling and aliveness. Pale, porcelain skin, tinged with pink. The curve of her neck and a glimpse of the swell of her breasts. The magnificent darkness in her mind, the horrific things she could imagine. She was alive. But, it could not be alive. Humans could not create life. It needed a pilot, to manifest itself, to become the Devil. Epyon. Already once it had succeeded . . .

He (2) looked at her. His head was filled with her, with visions of her hair, her eyes, her body. He had to have her, it was an overwhelming desire like nothing else he had ever felt before. Something tugged at his consciousness, she wasn't well, she had been ill. But that didn't matter. Nothing mattered but what he wanted. What it wanted. His hand was shaking her awake and he watched her sit up, that hair spilling over her arm, her silk nightgown crumpled from sleep and half falling off her shoulder, violet eyes clouded with trouble and confusion.

He half-carried, half-dragged her to the library, ignoring her questions and protests.

His eyes, she thought, what's happened to his eyes? What has happened to him?

He placed the password card in the secret compartment and the doors slid apart to reveal the Gundam Epyon. He looked at it. He hadn't been worthy of it, hadn't been able to pilot her creation successfully. But there was still something it wanted of him. He fisted his hand in the front of her nightgown and pulled her to him. He kissed her with what could only be described as ferocity. He circled her neck with his hand and squeezed it lightly, feeling the heavy beating of her frightened pulse beneath his fingers.

She knew. She knew that it had affected him somehow. She tried to speak, to reason with him, but her voice was frozen in her throat.

It didn't need them to initiate its power supplies anymore. It's computers had adapted themselves to produce a constant supply of low power so that it was always aware, always. The eyes of the Gundam Epyon glowed green in the darkness. It collected the data.

She woke up alone in her own bed. It was daylight. And she knew that it was gone. They never discussed it. It might never have happened.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

She was real. She existed. She was not a figment of his tormented imagination. She was more than a vision dredged up by the hallucination-inducing Zero System. She was real.

He (3) saw her face on the communications screen, heard her voice for the first time. He touched the screen, traced the lines of her face. The visions of the Epyon flooded his mind. A girl with fair, wavy hair and incredibly violet eyes. In the visions he could almost feel the softness of her skin, feel the curve of her waist under his hand. But he had not thought that she was real. And the other vision, the man he knew and the girl, together, in the most intimate way. He had thought perhaps she was a symbol. A symbol of peace perhaps and the man had been war. In the vision war had overwhelmed peace in a frighteningly quick, brutal victory. Until finally peace had embraced war like a lover, welcoming her defeat.

Now he knew that she wasn't a symbol. It was he, himself, that was a symbol as the man had been in the visions. The man he had once called his friend. The pilot was the human symbol of the machine. And the machine wanted her, desired her, craved her very being with the same intensity as a child loves its mother. Because she was its creator. But the machine was no child. And now he was the pilot.

She could not look away as he spoke to her through the communications screen. His voice was cold and detached as he told her exactly how to enter the Libra without being detected, without being seen by anyone. And she thought that if she went she could stop it. Disable it somehow. Before it destroyed everything. But even as her eyes appreciated the beauty of his hair, longer and even fairer than her own, and his face like that of an angel barred from heaven, she feared him. Feared what she saw in those ice blue eyes. She had seen it before and had been unable to do anything to resist what it meant. But she had to go, she had to try. To stop it.

He waited for her and he knew that she would come. Bravery was just one of her virtues, a trait that often seduced her into disaster, the machine had told him that. He watched her slip into the hangar where he kept the Gundam and he caught his breath. The visions hadn't captured her real beauty. He studied her as she went to enter the cockpit.

She was inside it, a wrench gripped in her sweat-slicked hand. Just pull some screws and nuts here and cut some wires there and it would be disabled. But her mind felt so strange, it buzzed and hummed with memories of the last time she had sat here. She had faced herself as the enemy then and it had nearly driven her over the edge. She swallowed and wiped the moisture from her forehead with the back of her hand. It was hot in the cockpit, stiflingly hot and it seemed like there was no air. She didn’t notice when the wrench slipped out of her damp hand.

"You can't destroy it," a voice said. "It is your greatest achievement. Can you destroy your own masterwork? I don't think that you can."

He pulled her out of the cockpit and laid her back on the hatch door, giving her a few minutes to catch her breath. He studied her, committed her to his memory, scrutinizing her features minutely so he could never forget them. When it seemed she had caught her breath again he covered her mouth with his and pushed up her skirt with his hand as he ground her back against the open hatch door with the weight of his own body. He had never felt this way before. He knew he was insane, insane with desire. Knew he must be hurting her but he didn't care. He was the pilot now, Epyon's pilot. He was Epyon.

She didn’t dare to move. They were so high up. Of course in space there was no gravity but as her eyes glanced over the edge of the narrow door where they lay her mind could not accept that if she fell she would not plummet relentlessly to the floor so far below. She looked up at him. She knew his name of course. Knew who he was. It seemed as if her mind separated itself from her body and she looked at the two of them together, as if from a distance. Their long, blonde hair, so similar in color and texture floated around them as if they were underwater.

As his mouth pressed down on the pulse beat of her neck she felt like she was back in her body. Her eyes looked into his, but although she did not know him at all, she knew that what she was seeing in the crystal blue orbs was not who he was. She looked past him and saw the face of the mobile suit, looming over them. She wondered idly why it seemed that the eyes were glowing. No one had powered it up.

When he came back to some semblance of himself he was alone. Perhaps she had never been there. There was no evidence of her presence anywhere. He didn't notice that the eyes of the Epyon were glowing softly in the dim light. Once again, it had gotten what it wanted. The data was collected.

She woke up on the supply satellite, clutching at her throat and gasping to breathe. She was sitting in a personal shuttle, but she had no idea why she was there. Alone in the dark launch bay. It was cold there and she rubbed her hands over her arms, touching a painful spot. She rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and looked in surprise at the ugly black and blue mark on her upper arm. She wondered how it had happened.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

She (1) was trapped in the nightmare again and all he (4) could do was watch her.

A slight sound, a soft whimper, escaped her. And he wished so hard that he could wake her up, help her get away from whatever it was that held her in its awful grip. But he had talked to doctors after the first time. To wake her up now would be dangerous they said. And they had given him strange looks after examining the bruises on her neck and arms. The bruises that looked as if they might have been caused by huge, metallic fingers.

All he could do was stroke her hair and when she finally stopped thrashing around he could hold her until her breathing grew even and soft again. He knew she would sleep through the whole next day and wake up not remembering a thing.

It didn't happen often. Only when certain constellations were in the sky.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

It didn't happen often. Only when certain constellations were in the sky.

Then his (3) eyes would get a far away look and although they would seem to be focussed on her, he wasn't really seeing her. It was as if he was seeing someone else. His hands, hands that were unfailingly gentle and adoring whenever he touched her, were rough and brutal, leaving bruises where his fingers passed.

She (5) always expected him to apologize in the morning, although she never held it against him. He seemed to be fighting some private demon and using her to do it. And all the other nights when they were together he loved her so gently, as if she were a precious thing, too precious to handle roughly, although he knew that she was just as strong as he. But he never mentioned those nights and he never apologized. He never seemed to see the marks on her arms and neck. Marks he had left.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It wanted her, it missed her. But even with the power it had once had, it couldn't hope to affect her anymore. Not often anyway. Only when certain constellations were in the sky. The green eyes of the Epyon glowed in space as the wreckage of the mobile suit completed another orbit around the Earth and its colonies. It would be back again, when the stars were lined up just so.

the end

Character key:
1-Linnea Lang
2-Treize Khushrenada
3-Milliardo Peacecraft
4-wouldn’t you like to know!
5-Lucrezia Noin