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PHASE 02: The Unreasonable Reason
On board the Hegira, C.E. 73 5.5
Yzak closed the inner lock door behind him and scanning the tiny vessel, roundly cursed his fellow crewmates.
The Hegira, designed specifically for small-scale rescue operations, had only six acceleration couches, which were arranged in two neat rows separated by a narrow aisle. Cagalli and Dearka, who were in charge of navigation and piloting the ship respectively, had already occupied the two seats at the head of the ship. Behind them, Lacus appeared to be dozing, strapped into the acceleration harness. The seat next to her was taken up by a bulky pink backpack.
As his luck would have it, there was only one unoccupied seat at the back of the vessel. Still holding on to his duffel bag, Yzak sat down warily in the acceleration couch. He didn't look at the occupant of the other seat.
The said occupant jerked around. He had been gazing out of the porthole, his shoulder-length hair ruffled and his face drawn and pallid.
"I'm sorry I made you jump, Zala," Yzak smirked.
"No, no, it's alright. I was just thinking..." Athrun made a quick apologetic grimace. His features seemed to weigh down his face, Yzak thought: always the same tortured expression.
He wanted suddenly to say something, but the words were slippery. "I'm sorry about that. All of it. That day. It was awful."
"Well, yes..." Athrun was embarrassed, flinching from the contact of emotion. He glanced at Yzak, and it seemed for a second that he would make an attempt at conversation.
But his eyes flicked away, and Yzak watched, fascinated and disturbed, as the bright echo of another time dropped away like a coat and left Athrun with his humourless, slightly guilty air.
After that, they didn't talk. There was a great deal to be said, but it was too late to say it.
Junius 4, C.E. 73 3.20
"Look! Swans!"
Lazy as the hot summer day, a pair of swans sailed slowly by without a sound; their small wake lapped at the riverbank.
Athrun smiled: "They like this bit of the river. It's always quiet. The big boats stay over in the main reach, even on a Saturday."
They had presently reached the gates of a house: white, two-storey, with two columns at the door and four windows on each floor. It would have been just another pleasurable tour around yet another city in the PLANT, but Kira knew better: this, after all, was the abode of the Amarfis. He took a deep breath, letting it out through his teeth in a silent hiss.
"Kira? Are you nervous?" Athrun leaned closer, trying to peer past the straight brown forelock that flopped over Kira's eyes. "Don't be. I did the same for Tolle and survived unscathed."
"I doubt Milly would have anything to you, at least not with Dearka present."
Athrun groaned comically. "Have you forgotten already? I am almost a son to the Amarfis." He put his right arm around Kira's shoulders and squeezed lightly. "Don't worry. It will be a little awkward, but you will feel the better for it."
Kira expected to be kicked out of the Amarfi household as soon as he was introduced; instead, they were led up a flight of stairs and settled in a diminutive room that served as some sort of lounge.
"Make yourselves at home, boys," Mrs Amarfi was saying. "It's not often that an old lady gets surprise visits from handsome young men like you."
"Sorry, mum, but working in the robotics research lab really took up all my time," said Athrun. "In fact, I have to rush back to Maius 9 in about an hour or so to monitor the progress of my pet project."
She gave them each a cup of tea and a plate piled high with homemade cookies.
"Well, since you are not staying for dinner, you'll probably do better with something inside you." She explained.
"Cookies taste ten times as good here as anywhere else, right, Kira?"
"Uh... yes," Kira affirmed, muffled, through a mouthful. Glancing up as he chewed, he saw Mrs Amarfi watching them with a funny, wry half-smile.
"Both of you are the very picture of health. Nicol would have been just like you." She turned to Kira. "I assume Athrun has brought you around. How do you find the PLANT? Very agreeable, no?"
"I—I suppose so," Kira stammered. "I am not here solely for pleasure."
"What is your other reason then?" Her pleasant, cosy face was unreadable.
Kira looked down into his plate so that nothing of him was visible except a thick slanting curtain of brown hair. "I am the pilot of the Strike Gundam, Mrs Amarfi."
I killed your son.
"Kira..."
Kira looked up suddenly, and for once her luminous brown eyes met his, though they seemed to be looking not at him but beyond, into the future or the past. Her voice came firmer.
"Kira, my boy. In a war, nothing is safe or sacred. Yes, it was Nicol who left us. But it could have been you, or Athrun, or any of your other friends," Mrs Amarfi shook her head, smiling sadly. "Not a moment goes by for me without thinking about him; but I have never held it against you."
He decided that Athrun was right: he was already starting to feel better.
On board the Hegira, C.E. 73 5.5
And it seemed to him that every decision he made after that fateful day led irreversibly to Kira's death. Traveling to Junius 7, sharing the escape pod, landing on that particular satellite: he had the impression of being drawn along by a conspiracy of coincidences.
Athrun buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking almost involuntarily.
"Athrun... Athrun, are you alright?"
The pain he felt did not wish to heal; on the contrary, it sought to aggravate the wound and parade it about the way one parades an injustice for all to see. He did not have the patience to embark on a prolonged soliloquy for the benefit of his friends. Deep down Athrun knew very well that this would be the only reasonable behaviour, but pain does not listen to reason; it has its own reason, which is not reasonable. His unreasonable reason wanted his friends to leave him alone with his misery.
There was only one way to circumnavigate that barrier.
Lacus was woken by loud voices coming from the back of the ship.
"Hey! Let go! Dearka, De—Help!"
Yzak was pinned to the wall of the vessel, twisting angrily against the iron grip that held him.
"What do you know? What the fuck do you know about anything at all?" Athrun's voice was thick and bitter; he stared furiously at the other man.
In an instant, Dearka was at her side with Cagalli close behind; they struggled to hold Athrun back and soon had him trapped and harmless. Cagalli slipped a needle deftly in and out of his arm before he knew what she was doing: he faltered and blinked, eyelids drooping as the drug began to spread its drowsiness over him. There was an immediate difference in the ship, a slackening of tension. Dearka drew back with an exasperated sigh.
"Of all times to run berserk," he said. "Friend or not, he's going to have to be out for a while. Yzak, how are you doing?"
Yzak rubbed his sore neck. "The jerk used his SEED capabilities," his brilliant blue eyes flashed with disgust. "You know what? I think that's probably how he got Kira."
Lacus stood silently, stunned by the farce that was being played out before her. When she learnt about Athrun's single attempt to destroy the Strike Gundam and its pilot, she had suffered, but it squared with what she could, just conceivably, expect from him. However this rage, this unremitting fury matched nothing she knew about him: it transformed her ex-fiancé into a strange simulacrum of himself.
She shivered. That air was like a current of chill water, cutting through the body to the mind.
Our only hope is what it was in the beginning: that coordinators, like naturals, are no more than humans.
... ... End of Phase 02 ... ...
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