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PHASE 09: Answers to Some Questions
Malchio’s Island, C.E.73, 6.02
When they were alone, Athrun began to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.
“I woke up in a daze a few hours later, maybe at about midnight. I remember thinking I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then I turned around and saw my father.” He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. “You can’t imagine what it felt like.”
He stopped and looked directly at Cagalli, who stood paralysed, a bird caught by the cobra’s gaze.
“I decided finally that I would kill him if he… tried anything.” He was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make Cagalli understand. “I – There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, When my father comes around, one of us is going to die, I don’t care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. The blueprint of the GENESIS had already been finalised and its construction had commenced. I wanted us to die.”
He stopped again and looked helplessly at Cagalli. “I wanted to die, but it was Kira who left instead. Why?”
Cagalli could not follow this. But it was a question she had had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and she was able to say, “Because, I suppose, fates are not interchangeable.”
Athrun was not listening. “I didn’t sleep after that. I needed answers to some questions, so I waited.” He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing Cagalli. “My father – he had taught me self-defence when I was younger – it would have been almost impossible to hurt him when he is alert, even if I had a gun. Instead, I thought about how I could bring him within point-blank range. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open.”
Somewhere on the Debris Belt, C.E. 73 4.23
It was long past midnight now, and darker than it would ever be again. Kira opened his eyes, for he sensed movement near him, but he did not move. Only his eyes searched the darkness, and in the pale light of the moon that crept through the translucent walls, he saw Athrun glide like a shadow to the far corner of the room. Not wanting to startle him, Kira cleared his throat softly; Athrun did not turn, but he stopped moving.
“Athrun? What’s wrong?” Kira’s own face and hands ached with cold. He was shuddering now and did not understand how Athrun could be so still. “You gave me a scare. Next time, just wake me up when you need something, ok?” He pushed himself closer to the other man, one hand outstretched. “Aren’t you freezing? Come on, it is warmer in this part of the satellite.”
“If you come near me,” Athrun said, “you’ll bleed for it.”
Kira let his arm drop, unnoticed. Closer now, he saw that what he had taken for stillness was a coiled tension, wound too tightly to be seen from a distance. He tried again. “Please, Athrun, stop now. That’s enough.” The man turned and looked through him as through one of them did not exist, the green eyes unfathomable.
“Why? Have I hit a raw nerve? Are you afraid that I will cease to remain your mindless instrument of destruction now that I know the truth, father?”
Father? Kira’s mind whirled in dizzy circles. Athrun thought he was the late Patrick Zala! He was so shocked he could only gape soundlessly at his friend. Then, as if to confirm his worst nightmare, Kira watched as Athrun shifted slightly, staring at him with feline, unsmiling eyes, a knife in his hand now apparent.
“You knew it, didn’t you? You knew that long-term usage of hormone suppressors would produce adverse side effects, yet you gave them to mother without her consent or knowledge. How could you do this? She trusted you!”
“Wait! Your father died two years ago! I’m Kira; we have been friends since we were five, remember?”
Athrun ignored him. He continued, balancing the knife in his hand. “Have you ever loved her? Or have you always seen her as yet another pawn to be manipulated to achieve your own ends?”
Kira saw then that there was nothing to do except to try to overpower Athrun. It would not do any good to tell Athrun he was not Patrick: he would not listen to reason in his current state of mind. Kira took a deep breath, and prayed that his plan would carry through.
He forced his trembling legs to work, and made a lunge towards Athrun, but Athrun eluded him and holding his knife poised an instant, high above his shoulder, brought it down, straight at Kira’s throat. It struck the amethyst pendant around his neck, cracking it in two, and he felt the cold steel slip away from him, pricking his skin, catching itself in the folds of his suit. Kira breathed quickly, with the pain of it. Before he could recover, Athrun was upon him, one hand doubling his wrist behind his back, and the other pressing his mouth in suffocation. Kira felt himself falling back against the table, displacing the manuscript and other miscellaneous items, which then floated away.
He bit through the palm of Athrun’s hand and punched his left fist repeatedly into his eyes. The bruises soon broke through to frank bleeding. Athrun released his wrist, his back bent with pain and his head low. Without thinking, Kira crouched and using all the power in his legs, drove his shoulder upward into the belly, knowing from the explosive grunt above him that he had emptied the lungs of air. He slammed Athrun against the wall, and took up a position with his forearm like an iron bar over his friend’s throat. The threat was plain: he could, if he shifted his position a fraction, crush the fragile windpipe, and make the present airlessness permanent.
Kira looked at the person he was choking, his breath coming in short gasps, the tears and perspiration rolling down his cheeks drying quickly in the frigid air. He said quietly, “I’m sorry about this, Athrun. Even so…”
And then Kira stood uncertainly. The duel was over far too soon: Athrun could not possibly be taken down so easily, could he? Something was wrong; some signal was trying to get through to his brain. The room was silent now. Then Kira’s mind cleared from its red concentration and he knew the sound – the metallic click of a revolver being cocked, the sound of death.
“Athr – ”
By that time, his life was irrevocably divided into before and after.
He heard his name, and it was so strange. His mind was already clear but his body was so primed. It was like – the nerves fired without his telling them to.
Athrun tried desperately to change the line of fire, to shoot anything else but the one dearest to him, but before he could make his right arm move, he had pulled the trigger. The shot rang out and reverberated around the satellite.
He found himself in a nightmarish situation, with Kira suspended in the zero gravity, his face so close to his that he could see blood bubbling in the corner of his mouth and seeping from the gunshot wound.
He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Kira’s corpse half-blinded by the sudden brilliant ray of dawn pouring through the walls. Recognised the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.
“Why, you killed him! You bastard!” Yzak yelled. Beside him, Dearka was coughing and holding an arm over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat. And then they fell silent, taking in the knife floating in the background, the revolver, the bloody evidence of the fight.
“Bastard,” Yzak repeated, balling his fists and making towards Athrun.
There was a sound that began as a laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.
“Why did it all happen like that? I’ve tried so hard to understand…” His voice trailed off, and Cagalli waited, not sure what to say or do. “You must have been thirteen when the war started, right?”
Cagalli, the sudden shift taking her by surprise, frowned at Athrun and nodded, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.
“I figured it out once. Thirty-one years. Coordinators had been living under constant threats to their lives for thirty-one years. I joined ZAFT after the Bloody Valentine because I thought it would make a difference.” The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. Cagalli went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Athrun wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. “And I – I thought I understood. But, the thing about this is: I didn’t. All that I have fought for are lies; all those I have killed died pointless deaths. What does that make me?” His shoulders shook. “A defector, with a lot of blood on his hands.”
And then suddenly, Athrun wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired; and for that reason, sadder than anything Cagalli had heard before. “So you see, my life has a certain symmetry, if seen with sufficient detachment.” His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. “Kira’s death is the punch-line to the protracted joke I have been living out.”
There was a momentary pause before the tears began again. “So many dead, because I believed. I’ve tried so hard to understand,” he whispered. “Who can forgive me? So many dead…”
Cagalli took him in her arms and held him, rocking while they both cried. It had to be enough, because she could not think of anything to say to comfort him.
… … End of Phase 09 … …
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