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He is thinking of white fingers on white hands, and the delicate blue veins that run like spiderwebs across them. Hands that had cradled his face with such gentleness that he fears - even more than he fears his own death - that he might feel their touch again.
Lieutenant Noin's voice comes to him distant and dreamlike, fading in with quiet wonder. "Strange, isn't it?" she says. "How something like that can be so beautiful...."
Trowa doesn't follow her gaze; he watches her instead. She's so intent upon the battle now, even though she knows as well as he does that it's meaningless. He sees her eyes shift, jet black pupils narrowing to pinpricks, and her lips press together tight to her teeth. Which suit is she focusing on, he wonders. Does she keep her eyes on Zechs and hope for his triumph? Or does she fear for his defeat and keep a wary soldier's eye on his opponent?
Beauty isn't something Trowa is used to noticing. It isn't something easy to quantify. You can't pile it up like crates of ammo and say this is more beautiful than that. And yet, he's begun to notice beauty everywhere, even here, on the edges of a radar screen where harsh, arctic sunlight glitters on polished chrome.
He looks then, out at the ice and the figures locked in combat. He sees opportunity, weakness, vulnerability, but he does not see what Noin does. There is nothing to make him wish for time to slow, just long enough, that he might fix the scene in memory.
But beyond them, past the smoke and steam, it's white ground and blue sky for as far as the eye can see. Frozen land and frozen air coming together in crystalline perfection on the flat line of the horizon. The building he stands in is climate controlled, and yet his chest feels tight and stinging as if he's taken a great gulping breath of the air that frosts the edges of the window.
"It would be more beautiful without them," he says.
Noin turns sharply to look at him. She is shocked, perhaps, that such a sentiment would come from a boy like him. Her face melts into a rueful smile and she dips her head in a nod. Her eyes are shining as she looks back at the battle. "You're right, of course."
It's Zechs she watches, he decides, uncaring whether or not it is true. He's learned he would rather stand next to someone who believes in the future. There is more beauty in hope than in despair.
Trowa crosses his arms over his chest. The battle will continue regardless of his witness, so he embraces his fear and closes his eyes to relive the memory of fingers like snow, eyes like the sky, and a kiss like belonging.