Disclaimer: Gundam Wing and all its characters © Sotsu Agency, Sunrise, and TV Asahi. All fanfics not for profit.

A/N: Hello and welcome to a new 4xD fic! I was originally planning to write an installment for my ficlet series Love and Other Explosive Items that would also meet the requirements of the ongoing Endless Reflection Challenge, which some fans cooked up to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary (20th, you guys!). But my plot bunnies went a little crazy: the story became longer, it swerved away from my usual rom-com-ish approach, and it insisted to be set a couple of years after the war instead of 10 years, as the Challenge required. Guess I just have to write a separate fic for the Challenge, no? ;)

Inspired by Arthur Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, this fic is set before my ficlet Blind Spot and will run for two chapters. Enjoy!

The Moon Can Keep a Secret
by kokopelle

Chapter 01

Lowering his copy of The Lunar Times, Quatre smiled up at the blue-green earthrise as it cast its soft glow across the domed spaceport. The planet was as beautiful as the first time he saw it. From where he was sitting it was just a crescent nestled in a bed of darkness on the horizon, but it could still wrap him in warmth that separated him from the happy but chilly Christmastime hustle-and-bustle of the place.

Still smiling, he checked the series of delta-dotted numbers on the nearest wallscreen and compared it to the timestamp on his ticket. He was yet to be accustomed to reading Lunar Standard Time, but with little difficulty he noted that he will be soon boarding the spacecruiser Artemis. Folding the broadsheet under his arm, he threw one last fond glance at the Earth and started to propel himself towards the reception area. He has almost reached the front row when a figure he would recognize anywhere floated gracefully along the turnstiles.

Dorothy Catalonia.

He stopped in his tracks. Of course she would be here. It was also around this time last year, during the First Eve War Armistice Anniversary Ball in Brussels, that he saw her in person for the first time since their Libra encounter.

The memory was so easy to dredge up: he had just disentangled himself from a rather suffocating group of businessmen when he looked up and caught her staring from the punch table. For some reason she had looked scared. His mild surprise had been immediately eclipsed by confusion, but he had managed to give her a reassuring smile. He had thought it was a figment of imagination when her expression had softened, but it was real all right. He remembered, quite childishly, that he had considered that a little victory for himself.

Never mind that she had not bothered to acknowledge his presence for the rest of that night.

Chuckling wryly at himself, he watched now as Dorothy discussed something with the receptionist. Should he approach her? He did not know what her reaction would be. Now that he thought about it, the woman had been a seldom visitor in his head; only when he would see her on the news or on a magazine cover would he ponder about her, with his hand reaching to his side, to the exact spot where their small but indelible history was recklessly etched. He would think about Libra, about Sanc Kingdom where he first met her, and about her reaction at the Ball. Was she afraid of him? That was light-years away from the most commonsensical of reasons, but why had she looked at him then as if she had seen a ghost?

Shrugging off the questions, he made his way towards her. It was very likely that she was also headed to Hotel de Luna in Clavius, where this year's armistice anniversary celebration would be held. Perhaps she would not be averse to some company on her way there…

As he approached her, she spun around as fast as the low gravity would allow. Unaware that he had somehow held his breath, Quatre halted, watching as her hair fluttered to her sides. She swatted away the lengthy blond strands that swished in front of her. And before she was able to clear her line of sight, Quatre had quickly raised The Lunar Times back up to shield his face. As soon as he was certain she was gone—marched off towards the embarkation station where passengers would be boarding Artemis—he let go of the pretense of reading the newspaper and heaved a small sigh of relief.

And then he laughed. She? Afraid of him? Was it not the other way around? He could not even bring himself to say hi this time.

No, "afraid" was not the right term. Gently, he touched the scar on his side.

He could not understand why, but his heart was thudding hard with a strange kind of happy nervousness.

Artemis was a sweet little cruiser. Quatre began affectionately referring to it as a moon-cab in his mind, though it was perhaps more correct to bill it as a tiny spaceboat grounded on the moon's rocky "lakes" and "seas," given its official designation (Mare-Cruiser Mark I; he saw it on the brochures back at the spaceport). The interior's pastels and lights provided a tender, homey ambiance, not unlike the glow that basked it from outside its observation windows.

Quatre looked around and saw that Dorothy was settled two rows from him. He was not positive that she saw him when they boarded the cruiser, but it seemed impossible for her to miss him. He was baffled to learn that there were only eight other people aboard, including the two-man crew. When he asked the FA about it, the man politely responded that many attendees to the Ball had booked earlier flights to catch the Lunar Festival the other day.

Not knowing what to do next, he just went back to the datapad on his lap and scrolled through the documents. These could in fact wait at home, but he was informed that their travel time to Clavius would take at most an hour. He felt like doing something productive and work-related. He knew he was supposed to be taking it easy right now, but he figured a few electronic signatures sent to his secretary would not hurt…

"Really? You're going to a party on the moon and you still won't let go of office work?"

Quatre's stylus stopped in mid-scribble. He snapped his head to the voice and found himself face to face with none other than the lady he has avoided moments ago.

Peering curiously down at his datapad, Dorothy seemed to pay his surprise no heed as she slumped on the empty seat next to him (cross-legged, he offhandedly noted, and it was an innocent thought he would not have pushed away had his eyes not lingered a little too long on her legs before focusing on her face again. He could have slapped himself hard for that. Twice.) When he did not say anything, she leaned closer towards him and propped her elbow on the armrest to support her weight.

"Miss Dorothy," he managed, and thanked the heavens it did not come out as a stammered acknowledgement.

Not bothering to respond right away, she flicked a finger to swipe his datapad close. Only when she saw the LOCKED notification onscreen did she lift her eyes and reply, "It's nice to see you too, Mr. Winner."

He could feel warmth spreading to his cheeks. Obviously pleased with herself, Dorothy let out a small laugh and tossed her hair over her shoulder.

"Try to relax a bit. After all, it's not every day that you get to cruise on this little satellite. Although I have to admit, sightseeing is not exactly an exciting activity—on this region at least. It's like a gray, lonely desert out there."

He could see what she meant. As Artemis stirred forward, the plain grayness of the moon outside stretched unbroken into the jagged horizon, with mountain peaks clawing at the stars and the lidded lamp of the earthrise above them.

"Not when you look up," he said, soothed at the sight of the Earth. "Your home is so beautiful. They say I sound like a broken record for repeating that all the time, but it's true. No matter where I look at it from, it never ceases to take my breath away. I wish everybody realizes how beautiful it is."

This was met by a long silence. When he turned back to Dorothy, she was staring straight at him.

"Yes," she muttered semi-inaudibly, looking away. "It is…it is my home."

The pause that followed became a tad uncomfortable. Quatre felt a small spark of panic blooming within him. This conversation was becoming an improvement on their little "connection" in the Ball last year and now it was on the verge of falling apart again. Damn him for saying the wrong thing! He needed to do something to salvage this…but what?

"Well," Dorothy started with a renewed expression that somewhat quelled Quatre's dread, "aside from the news about Winner Enterprises helping with colony reconstructions on L3, I haven't heard anything else about its head. I presume you're very busy. It's good to see you well."

"Likewise," he returned too-happily. He realized a beat too late that her last statement must have meant something more than just a piece of small talk but he brushed it aside. "I almost didn't expect you to attend this year's festivity, given that you yourself have a big project on your plate."

Dorothy lifted an eyebrow when he pointed on an article about Mars on the lower fold of the broadsheet he pulled out. It was no secret that Dorothy, last heiress of the Romafeller Foundation, has gotten herself involved in what was perhaps one of the largest colonization endeavors of the era: The Ares Program, known to many as the Mars Terraformation Project. Recently he also learned she had a hand in the further development of some of the domed facilities on the moon. Her latest venture on the Lunnik Bases of Shackleton City in the south, in particular, involved pressurized greenhouses full of flora six times the size of their terrestrial counterparts. He remembered grinning to himself when he read that—he had never pegged Dorothy to be a tree-hugger type.

"I needed the break," she explained with a shrug. "A trip to the moon is the best de-stressor I could think of right now. The longer I stay in my office, the more I think I'm becoming allergic to paperwork. I'm not always onsite to oversee the operations—in fact, people preferred me deskbound all the time, signing away permits and mobilization agreements. Projects like this necessitate tons and tons of written formalities. I won't blame the last of Earth's forests if they suddenly decide to revolt against me for all the paper I wasted just because their stewards are busy tenting homes on a neighboring Red Planet."

"I know what you mean," he said. He could not help but smile at the forest-mutiny bit.

"No you don't, ," she smirked. "At least about de-stressing. You're on a tourist cruiser and still glued to paperwork. Minus the physical paper, of course."

…did she just tease him? He chuckled and raised his hands in mock surrender. "At least I won't be the target of some Earth-trees insurgency."

"Touché," she returned good-naturedly.

As she stared past him into the mildly illuminated scenery outside, he wondered why he had been so nervous about approaching her. She was not as caustic, or as terrified, as he thought she would be; she was even surprisingly conversational.

With his worries buoyed away by the situation, he let his mind wander back to the very few moments he had with her. Dorothy, the lithe femme fatale of Sanc Kingdom, bringing with her a bagful of philosophies on the beauty of the struggling human spirit, challenging Heero Yuy to a fencing match that had almost disfigured her face permanently. Dorothy, the fearless spacewar tactician who sent out a fleet of ZERO-controlled Dolls to engage him and his comrades in a dance of death. Dorothy, a lonely girl on the floor of the wrecked Libra, clutching a helmet close to her as she wept about the conflicts, about not having a home to go back to—a scene branded in his then-damaged mind as a delicate beauty, like a precious work of art in a crumbling museum…

With all these memories flooding back, Quatre has unconsciously let his hand flutter to his side, right at the top of his scar. He snapped back to the present when he felt Dorothy shift beside him.

"Just tell me if I'm making you uncomfortable," she muttered with a feigned nonchalance. Quatre immediately peeled his hand away from his side.

"No! Not at all. I…I'm sorry. I was just—"

Quatre was not able to finish the sentence. For there was sudden violent jerk, and Artemis' meager passengers broke out in shrieks and gasps when they were jarred forward and crushed against their safety belts.

Quatre barely had the time to catch his breath when he realized that Dorothy, who transferred next to him less than five minutes ago, did not secure any belt. He saw her take advantage of the microgravity to cushion her collision with the backrest of the seat in front of her, and though he knew she was not hurt, she did release a small cry.

"Dorothy," Quatre called—or tried to, as he was too out of breath to even speak at a normal volume. He fumbled to release himself from his own safety gears. As he clicked the last constricting buckles open, another tremor hit, sending the cruiser tipping forward. Before he made contact with the seat in front of him, he noticed that the cold world outside became curtained with a fall of what looked like sheets of pallid sand.

It was a gigantic, eddying sea of dusts—and bit by bit, it was greedily swallowing Artemis.

Chunks of rock followed straight away and hit the cruiser with shaking force. Amidst the cacophony of freaked screams, Dorothy propelled herself to stand up with an unnerving calm. Quatre joined her near the observation windows and watched, rather unsteadily, as large gray boulders drop from above them, toppling to beat the cruiser's hull and roof and knocking out a few lights inside.

When Artemis finally settled, a deafening, grave-like silence wrapped it and its fragile cargo. The fear and confusion of its occupants were almost palpable. Everyone was too stricken by astonishment to utter a word. They could no longer see a single shaft of planetshine or an uneven stretch of a mare through their windows. Instead, there were rough curtains of gray rocks and dusts.

Then it dawned on Quatre what just happened to them.

There had just been a moonquake, and they were trapped.

To be continued...