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PHASE 10: The Third Option
Malchio’s Island, C.E.73 6.02
Yzak sank onto the cool stone of the garden bench, surrounded by summer blossoms in dazzling sunlight. There were sunflowers and brilliant yellow daylilies, delphinium and liatris and gladioli, and the scent of roses from somewhere nearby. The swallows were out now, as the evening approached, and the insect noise was changing. Dearka Elthman joined him after some time. He sat heavily on the ground across the garden walkway from the bench and put his head in his hands.
“It was hard,” Yzak said.
“Yes. It was hard.”
“Kira?”
“The closest legal term might be involuntary manslaughter.” Dearka lay back, flattening some ground cover, unable to stay upright any longer. “No,” he amended after a time. “It wasn’t an accident. He meant to kill, but in self-defence. That Kira was the one who died – that was an accident.”
“Where is he now?”
Dearka, drained, looked up at him. “In his room, sleeping like the dead. That’s an awful phrase. Anyway, asleep. Cagalli’s with him.” There was a pause. “I think it did him good. It sure as hell didn’t do us any good to hear it, but I really think he’s better now.” Dearka put his hands over his eyes. “To dream of all that. And his father… Now we know.”
“Now we know,” Yzak agreed. “I’m sitting here trying to understand why it seemed less awful when I thought it was murder. It’s the same physical act.” He was no longer a member of the influential Supreme Council, just plain Yzak Jule, with no answers. Unknowing, he trod the path of reason that countless philosophers had travelled before. “I suppose a murderer has at least an illusion of control. There is some element of satisfaction.”
Dearka sat up suddenly. “What a wilderness, to believe you have been seduced and raped by fate.” And then to come home to our tender mercies, he thought bleakly.
They sat there for a long while, in the late June afternoon, the light golden and the air soft, the small near sounds of the garden punctuated by sounds of the orphans playing in the distance.
Yzak came back to the present with a start, wondering if he had dozed off. “Come on,” he said, resting on the edge of the bench before standing. “Let’s walk. I’ll blow off an early dinner today.”
“Right.” Dearka slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself up, shaking off the heavy mood. “Go for broke, I say. Live for the moment.”
They moved slowly, not saying much, walking through the garden towards the beach, Yzak setting the pace. They got as far as their usual place on the ledge, which had a comfortable flat spot and a good view of the ocean and the sky. Out of habit, Yzak scuffed his hand around in the dirt, feeling for pebbles, but he had long since scoured the spot of rocks, so he gave up and let his hands go loose in his lap. “Damn it,” he started. “I hate people who refuse to make rescue teams appear omnipotent. It’s bad form.”
Dearka knew his friend well enough to recognise bluster when he heard it. “People are mortal,” he told him. He thought of their lost comrades, of Miguel Ayman and Nicol Amarfi. “We both know there are worse ways to go.”
Yzak had turned away, blinking rapidly, but snuffled in a breath vigorously and got a hold of himself. When he spoke again, his voice was firm and irate. “It’s not the fact, it’s the timing and method that piss me off.”
“So, what do you intend to do after this?” Dearka said after a while, changing the subject.
“I’m returning to the PLANTs early next morning to settle some administrative duties,” he paused, blue eyes narrow. “I’ve been working it through in my mind. The self-destruction of the Acis – if Athrun’s hunch is right, there will be a record of the signal in the PLANTs’ network. It will be like finding a needle in a haystack, but it’s a lead nevertheless.”
Dearka started to protest but hearing it, he remembered that the only other person who would investigate would be Morton Rice. He nodded. “It’s a good plan. I’ll go with you; the humidity here is starting to get to me. Anyway Athrun is more than capable of looking out for himself. And even if he isn’t, there is always Lacus, Cagalli, Malchio and the Rice guy.”
Yzak frowned at the mention of the investigator. “I don’t trust him. Did you see him the past few weeks? He was always around Athrun, ignoring the rest of us. Intellectual vulture.” He spat viciously.
“So you haven’t lost your tendency to sniff out conspiracy theories after all!” Dearka crowed, trying to lighten the moment a little. But it was not a light moment, so he told Yzak, lifting his arm and putting it on his shoulder. “I agree with you, we will have to keep a close eye on Rice.”
For a moment Yzak wrestled with the idea of throttling his friend, but he only looked at the sky, talked out.
He meant to tell him about his mother, who had devoted a large portion of her life to her ideals, and did not recommend it. He meant to tell Athrun to watch that Rice character, there was something about him, and Athrun should not let himself get blinded by sentiment. He meant to tell Cagalli to be strong, that Orb needed her leadership, especially during these times of uneasy peace. He thought he would see them again in the coming weeks, one way or another. But fate has its own agenda and its own logic, and it caught all of them unaware, with less warning than they expected.
Malchio’s Island, C.E.73 6.03
The sun was already fairly high when the investigator made his way to the beach, down the long line of stairs that zigzagged to the Pacific. The wind was carrying the sound of his footsteps away from Athrun: he made as much noise as he could, scuffling through the gravelly sand.
“I’ve been suffering from horizon deprivation,” he declared conversationally, stopping as he drew even with Athrun. “Feels good to be able to focus on something that’s far away.”
Blinking, Athrun turned slightly, rubbing his neck. “What time is it?”
“A little after ten,” Rice looked at him, sizing things up. “How do you feel?”
“Okay,” Athrun said simply. “I feel okay.”
No anger, Rice noticed. He watched as Athrun whipped off a dozen fist-sized stones in sequence, each sinking into the water a good distance beyond the shoreline, even as new ones took their place on the rocky shelf.
“The way I see it,” Rice said, breaking the silence as gulls wheeled and dipped and settled on the grey water, “you’ve got three choices. One: you can go on with your life, go back to the PLANTs and pretend that all these never happened.” Athrun turned to him, and Rice could almost taste the bile rising in the other man’s throat. He waited, to give Athrun a chance to say something, but he turned back to the sea. “Two: you can leave, like you said you wanted to, in the beginning. Leave the PLANTs, leave your friends and the memories.”
“And go where? And do what?” Athrun demanded. He had not spoken of leaving since the day a reporter burst into his room on Aprilius 1, when the reality of life on the outside had shouted in his face. “You know I’m trapped. And I’ve tried the third option.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean,” Rice said quietly. “It’s not over, you know. You don’t get over something like that all at once.”
Athrun stared at the bald stone outcropping they sat on for a while and then looked up. “Yes. I know.” He was still for a few moments, and then asked, “What were you, before? A therapist?”
Rice laughed and reached for a stone. “Not even close. I was a financial consultant, specialising in undervalued companies.” He turned back toward the Pacific, and with the grace of an old ballplayer, cocked and threw. “It involved recognising the worth of things that other people discounted. I was very good at it.”
Athrun did not see the connection. “Why did you stop then?”
It was some time before Rice answered, flat-voiced and unexpansive, “My wife was murdered.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Athrun said then, mortified. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It helps actually, to talk about her. Keeps her alive to me in some ways.” Rice leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head close to Athrun’s now. “It’s unthinkable, really. They never found out who did it.”
“I’m sorry.” There was a long silence. “It must have been terrible.”
“Well, I can only speak to the grief. In the natural way of things, it takes about a year, when you lose someone you really care for. Before the worst of it lets go of you, I mean. I found anniversaries the hardest. Not just formal things like wedding anniversaries, you understand. I’d be going along, functioning fairly well really, and then I’d realise, today would have been ten years since we met, or two years since that trip to France. Used to lay me away properly, little anniversaries like that.”
Athrun put his head in what was left of his hands. “Kira – he would have turned eighteen two weeks ago. We were planning to – ” A pause. “There’s no bottom to this.”
He really loved him, the investigator thought, hardly knowing whether to envy or pity him. He waited until he thought the time was right and then spoke again. “As I’ve said, there’s still the third option.” He stood, his feet displacing the neat line of stones placed along the edge of the natural shelf. “Come on. I can explain in the privacy of my room.”
After all, coordinators are but humans.
… … End of Phase 10 … …
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