Athrun's first person POV. ZAFT boys angst, all day, err'day. The aftermath of Nicol's death. Almost everything is canon, except for a minor detail or two. Trust me, I would un-canonized Nicol's death if I could.
Nicol died in a deafening silence.
Not in the vacuum of space. Not with the bright pink and gold explosions of flesh and circuitry we were so used to, all the brighter and more crisp against the black background of the universe.
Nicol died in the deep drone of a plasma beam, the sickening wail and screech of metal collapsing on itself, the dull reverberation of an explosion capped by a gold and black fireball under a calm blue sky.
Our cockpits are not soundproof. Vibrations are dampened and the steel walls are reinforced a hundredfold, but I heard the explosion. It seemed almost comical - the quiet poof of sound that filtered through my helmet into my ears didn't seem to match the fireball that engulfed Blitz as though from the inside out. I felt it more than I heard it – felt the sizzle of air and electricity at my fingertips when Strike plunged the plasma blade into Blitz's cockpit; felt the stillness of the moment when it backed away and time seemed to stop as sparks erupted and Blitz just stood there – again: how comical, I had time to think – like an animal impaled on a trap.
The crackle of static that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. His voice, in my head. Like a ghost.
Go, Athrun.
Then the low reverberation in my bones when the machine giant blew, ripping his voice out of my head, ripping my world open.
I don't remember screaming. I know I did – I've played the black box recordings recovered from Blitz and Aegis a thousand times over again – but I can't fathom how I could've made a sound. I don't remember much of anything that happened after. Echoes of other voices on my comm.
Nicol! A deep, warm voice, cold with fear and disbelief.
Impossible. A hard-edged voice blunted with shock, muted with numbness.
Around me, the world seemed to burn.
There are flashes I remember between the island and the Vesalius. Pieces of debris – iron and steel, a giant alloy hand, fingers curled in like death. Black smoke and burning earth.
Things are clearer on the ship. I'm snapped into the present by the rhythmic pounding of metal crunching, bloody knuckles and sore bones. Yzak's voice, in perfect metric time with every ringing punch.
"Fuck!"
His voice is hoarse and shrill at once, and he repeats the word so many times it loses meaning and becomes only a sound; a guttural cry of rage and devastation. When he stops for a moment I don't know if it's because he's screamed himself hoarse or if he's caught a glimpse of Nicol's uniform, hanging in the shadows of the locker he's kicked open in his fury.
"Enough."
Dearka's voice is flat, reaching our ears dully like the sound of fists on the metal wall. His face a mask of impassivity that falls away every little while, revealing tremors of disbelief beneath a deceptively calm façade. When I think back to it now, I realize he was the only one of us holding it together.
But Yzak is not interested in holding it together – he never has been. "Why did he have to die?!" He is asking both of us and yet no one at once. What a stupid question, some detached part of my mind thinks – the same sickeningly rational part that found impaled Blitz so comical just standing there, waiting to die.
Dearka tries again. "Yzak - ,"
He whirls on me instead. "Why?!" I'm looking away, though I feel his face close to mine, feel his limbs shake in the fury of energy that fills the space between us. I sense the potential for violence in him before it happens. The need to lash out is written in every fibre of his muscles, every gesture. He's done this with me before, drawn me in – he needs to fight, to focus his fury on something, to rage, it's who he is – and he knows if he extends a hand, I'll dance.
Fucking stupid question.
So I do. I take him by the collar of his suit, and because he's not expecting it he buckles right into my force as I slam him back against the wall. His head connects with the lockers with the same satisfying ring of bone on metal that his fists made a moment earlier. The symphony of our mourning.
"Say it," I snarl, and I let the other part of me – the savagely emotional part of me that was never going to hold it together anyway – take over. "Say it was my fault, that he died because of me."
His mouth is agape but he says nothing, so I press him back harder.
"Say he only died saving me!"
Steely eyes recoil from me and that's when I realize our faces are only inches apart, and the gentle splashes of water on my cheek are the tears flung from his eyes in my fervour to hurt him. His eyes are bright and swollen, pale features rimmed with red. It is the first time I have truly looked at him since waking into this nightmare, and with a jolt I realize of those of us who value life perhaps the least, he is the only one mourning. I have nothing to give. My eyes are dry and my throat is clear.
Dearka sees me loosen my grip in hesitation, and puts his hand on mine. "Enough," he says again, "this isn't helping." Though he is visibly more shaken, he recognizes the need to redirect our rage. "Strike is the one to blame." He is moving between us now, the only thing quelling the violent space that separates us.
Yzak pulls away, and this time I let go. "I know." Of course he knows – how many times has he tried to bring down that machine and failed? "He killed Miguel, now Nicol…" He falters, brings a hand to his face unconsciously. The scar, I realize – like a red slash of paint on a pristine white canvas – is not unlike his words. Miguel, and now Nicol. Bonds with whom, in war, were the strongest I've ever forged, and who with such sudden brutality no longer exist. I feel the bile rise in my throat.
When he looks at me, his eyes are savage. "Next time, I will kill him."
Then he is gone, with Dearka on his tail, because if not him to contain such a fury, then who?
I don't know what compels me to reach into the locker and retrieve Nicol's uniform. It seems almost obscene that the door is even open – if it is, he should be here, and I almost expect him to walk into the room through the hangar door, his voice like a ghost in my head, smile playing over gentle eyes. But he doesn't, of course, and when I pull his uniform out it seems to crumple, to fold and deflate in my arms as if it knows he is dead and with no body to animate it, it dies too. Whatever was holding me together seems to dissolve, collapse onto itself like the fabric of his uniform and I choke out a sob. It is second time I have known what it is like to have so much sorrow you cannot even begin to cry, because if you do it will rip right through you, tear you apart like the plasma blade that ripped through his cockpit. The first time was my mother: the blinding flash of sorrow like the nuclear explosion that annihilated Junius Seven. Some coherent part of my mind registers with mild interest that there is a typology of sorrow and files that knowledge away consciously. For the next time someone you love dies, it explains calmly, reasonably.
When I look down it is to the soft, distinct whoosh of papers floating to the ground, a quiet flap like wings. My breath makes a similar sound as it leaves my lungs all at once, and I go to inhale but can't because his sheet music lies at my feet, and the sound of the pages swishing to the floor might as well be the same deep echo of explosion, the same bell that tolls for death.
His ghost voice in my head –
Everyone else was fighting, so I felt that I should too.
I'm gasping into his uniform then, my breath not coming fast enough, and all I can do is exhale as though through my whole body, shaking now, and I can't inhale because the grief will tear right through me, out out out it will demand and never let me breath it, never give back what it is taking. My throat burns and the salt of tears is on my tongue, and underneath that is his smell – the sterile scent of metallic hallways and steel monsters but also something soft and organic, something from an island on a colony where he played piano in the sun shafts of a window rather than burned through the earth. Bergamot, I remember abstractly. Hiscolony farmed bergamot.
It should have been you.
I almost expect the voice to be Yzak's, the echo of the words I read in his eyes, the ones he couldn't bring himself to say – but it's not. The voice is mine.
Why didn't you kill Kira when you had the chance?
Now the voice is Nicol's.
"I'm sorry," I sob to the empty room. The rational part of me, that part that all soldiers awaken when they take human life, has begun to list the chances I had to kill Kira. At gunpoint in Morgenroete, it says nonchalantly. When he brought back Lacus. Countless battles where you didn't even try, and now Nicol is dead because of you. Sentiment, it spits.
Breathless, with the scent of bergamot and the taste of black smoke in my mouth, I vow to kill Kira.
We are given leave several days later, though not to grieve – the assumption is that we won't – but to visit his colony and inform his family. Red coats are elite, Le Creuset explained to us once. And for that reason they must be accountable. I leave it to you to explain to a mother that, for all your advanced weaponry and military prowess, you couldn't save her son.
It was supposed to be a warning, a way to bolster our desire to keep each other alive. I laugh out loud when I think about it, and Dearka, sitting next to me on the transport shuttle, looks over with concern. The journey is long and quiet, and below us fields of bergamot trees stretch out in seemingly endless rows over the horizon, like so many grave markers. I laugh again. We have not been well, these past few days.
I had never met Nicol's mother, and she is everything I hoped she would not be. Her hair falls around her face in curls like his did, and her eyes have a kindly shape to them, like his. The colony is so isolated she never would have received the news ahead of our arrival, but the moment the three of us disembark from the shuttle I see her expression disintegrate first into alarm, then distort her pleasant features into horror. I look away, but force myself to look back.
Death does not look away, embarrassed, when it arrives on one's doorstep.
They are my unit, I know – I have inherited them from Miguel – and so as we sit across from her I am charged with choking out the reality I can barely wrap my own head around. When I falter, Dearka interjects, his voice passive with soft, neutral statements, as though he reads from a script. Yzak sits beside him in absolute silence and stillness, his face a mask.
Much, much later, I will regret not looking at her more directly as I relayed the very last news she would ever receive of her son. Instead, my gaze rests on the empty piano bench, glossy and black, as I speak of him as a hero; a courageous fighter who gave his life for a cause, who lived fully and bravely until his last moment. When I notice his portrait framed above the black and white keys I waver, and my voice breaks. He is barely a young man in the photo, and unlike the rest of us, whose families mount portraits of their sons in uniform, Nicol only smiles from the other side of the picture frame, fingers creating music lost in the deafening silence of his absence. None of us are fit for war, I want to tell her desperately. Especially not him. But they are my unit, my responsibility, and I have failed to bring one home. My most gentle companion. My child soldier.
Go, Athrun, his ghost voice whispers at the back of my mind.
She asks how he died. I have always thought it irrational that one would want so desperately to know how a love one died in war. Blown to bits, shot in cold blood, liquefied at an atomic level by some new horror of war – does it make the nightmares any less vivid? Can what they imagine be truly any less horrifying? I could say it was quick – but that might even be a lie, I think, recalling the sequence of events burned into the back of my eyes.
Protecting me, I want to scream suddenly. He died because I was too weak to do what needed to be done. He's dead because of me.
Dearka is looking at me cautiously, and even Yzak has turned his attention back to the present as the room settles into a heavy silence. She has long since stopped weeping – perhaps she too wants to keep the grief at bay until it can be controlled – and watches me with eyes like pools of amber. His eyes, I think.
I can't.
I leave it to Dearka to salvage the situation. Hastily I excuse myself and retreat to be sick, as those same eyes, reflective in their picture frames, follow me down the empty hall.
There is no body in the casket that we bury.
They thought first to bury him in one of the colony's ZAFT military graves, but it is not the way he should be remembered.He's a kid who wanted to play the piano, I remember screaming at the staffer who gave us the news. Not a solider. Several severe reprimands later, a military funeral was arranged in a sparse patch of land being prepared for bergamot planting, not far from his home.
The same trumpet fanfare that played at Miguel and Rusty's funeral plays, and without thinking our hands are over the hourglass patch sewn over our heart. What good is protecting the colonies when its sons are the ones dying? I glance over to where a few commanding officers have bothered to show their faces. Le Creuset is there, of course, and a few of the Vesalius' high ranking officers, arriving between missions. Whether they are commemorating a fallen soldier or contemplating their own mortality as there is one less machine to protect them, I do not know. But it is on Yzak's mother and Dearka's father that my gaze rests. That they have come is already beyond expectation as Council members, though part of me rages to ask them whether this is an exercise in preparation for the deaths of their own sons. Will you hold me responsible, I wonder bitterly, for not protecting my soldiers – or will you ask yourselves how you sent your children to war?
It takes three of us to fold the flags. There are two – a large one that covers the entire casket, with ZAFT's military insignia, and another, a smaller one with a PLANT hourglass and stylized bergamot orange, Nicol's colony flag. We fold the large one first – clumsily and unevenly, Yzak and Dearka each holding a corner of one side while I hold the remaining two. The act of folding the heavy fabric becomes a sort of procession – like a carefully contrived dance, with severe and ritualized movements we fold the image of ZAFT in and onto itself. I am reminded of the blast in Blitz's cockpit, crushing inward on itself before exploding into a brilliant cloud of death.
But at each fold point we meet; the three of us joining together before rotating the flag to fold again. Briefly our hands touch, Yzak to my left and Dearka to my right, and almost cautiously we exchange glances, but this time instead of a vast chasm of fury between us there is only quiet grief, and a latticework that seems to extend through the flag and keep us, somehow, from breaking down then and there. We are weeping for more than just Nicol, I realize – we are weeping for Rusty, and for Miguel. For the countless, faceless comrades we have lost. For family met and those never known. For the lives we have taken, those we inevitably will, and for ourselves and the lives we resign to give.
When I would mourn, once a year, on the anniversary of Junius Seven - lock myself away in our quarters for hours on end - Nicol would be the only one to find me, the only one to pull me out of my stupor of sorrow. We would sit in companionable silence, staring at the picture of my mother.
You'll see her again, he'd said, his voice quiet. After all, death is only a door.
How could children know so much about death?
We place his medals on the smaller flag. For singularly exception valor in combat protecting civilian life. For courage and devotion to duty. And finally a memorial cross, for giving his life in an act of self-sacrifice. Dearka places the first on the small folded flag, then Yzak.
I trace my fingers over the outline of the memorial cross.
Oh, Athrun. I felt that I, too, should be fighting.
I bring my hands to my face, as though that might capture his voice, his essence in my mind. As I drop to my knees, hands reach out to catch me.
Long after the last salutes are made, the three of us remain, watching the light bleed out from the sky.
I am picking a bergamot orange from the tree when I hear the footsteps approaching.
They stop just short of the tree and examine it appreciatively. It's been a while since they've come, I realize, so the tree must seem exceptionally impressive with its far-reaching branches and plump, ripe fruit. The colony is out of the way, in any case, and now strictly peaceable, so there's no reason for military operations to exist nearby. For that I'm grateful.
They're dressed in civilian garb for once, though Yzak still stands like a soldier at attention, his back straight and rigid as though waiting for action. Dearka, in contrast, relaxes into his legs, shoulders back and hips slightly askew.
They are the most perfect sight I've seen in years.
I embrace Dearka easily and he smells like the sharp, spicy cologne he's worn since the academy. He's at least learned how much to put, I tease, and he shrugs me away, laughing easily in the way he always has, just as nonchalant as the day they handed us our diplomas.
I stumble with Yzak, of course – it's as if the two of us still can't be comfortable in the same room, awkwardly manoeuvring to be teammates, rivals, and friends all at once, with a history of bumping into each other and occasionally even hurting one another in our mad scramble. We settle on shaking hands – it's formal enough that neither of us feel strange, but his grip is strong and firm. When I glance at his face he is watching me intently, and somewhere behind the steely blue gaze is relief and familiarity.
They turn back toward the tree and Dearka asks, "Has it really been that long?"
I shrug. "They grow quicker now that the colony has the resources to devote to them." He's right, though – the lower parts of the trunk look gnarled and ancient, layered and old. Not unlike us, I think. Planted during the war and marked beyond our years. Tired and layered with experience that carves itself on our surface.
I notice for the first time that they're carrying flowers. "Isn't it redundant to bring flowers to a grave already marked by a tree?"
They hold up the plants to examine them, as if only having remembered their presence. I catch a glimpse of red and white arrangements, bright bursts of ruby that contrast boldly against the green of the tree. Like Nicol's hair did against the burgundy of his uniform. Dearka sees my expression darken, and puts a hand on my shoulder.
"Here." It's Yzak that speaks, and when I look up he is holding something up to me. Without the scar his countenance seems subtler, as though the hard edges had been smoothed over.
I take what he is offering me and inhale sharply.
The photograph is old, over a decade at least, and obviously well handled - the edges have begun to crumple and fray, and the ghosts of previous folds line the paper. Behind them, the ghosts of our own past stare back up at us. We are fifteen, perhaps sixteen, though no more, dressed in the sea green uniforms of academy cadets. Dearka stands at the center, and on either side of him Yzak and I face away from each other. I almost laugh aloud at the expression on our faces – Yzak's arms are folded and his chin up, while my hands are on my hips, looking away in exasperation. We have obviously just fought. Below us, bending forward in the center of the frame is Nicol.
With a sudden jolt, I realized no one in the picture is looking back at the camera, and with that the artificiality of the photograph dissolves. I feel as though I've broken through the paper's surface, and by extension through the surface of time that separates us then from here and now. It's the realest thing I've seen since the war: an instantaneous moment where instead of posing, we were really being - Yzak and I arguing, Dearka glancing between us helplessly, and Nicol looking over his shoulder, a gentle smile on his face. In an instant I'm there: the cool breeze and afternoon sun heavy on my eyelids; the surface of my skin, itchy underneath the collar we were forced to keep closed; Dearka's hand on my shoulder; and a future that had not seen war quite yet.
"Strange, isn't it?" Dearka's voice snaps me back to the present. "It's like the past in the present."
All photographs are, I think, reflecting on to the portrait of Nicol framed on the piano. I look at Yzak. "Is this -?"
"It's for here," he replies tersely, lips pressed together in a thin line. Then something passes over his face and he seems to soften, a quiet regret settling in place. "It's for him."
Standing close to one another, Yzak and Dearka place the flowers at the base of the tree, and when they step away it seems as though the roots of the tree float suddenly on pool of red and white. Nicol's colours, I think – the green of bergamot, the red of ZAFT, the white of piano keys.
I place the photograph between the two bundles of flowers, and as I step back I feel as though my knees will give in. Even now, I still wonder if they buckled under years of war or the memory of a young boy who smelled like bergamot.
Hands, just as they did years ago, reach out to catch me – Yzak under my shoulder, Dearka with his hand on my back. I may have led them into war, but there has never been a doubt in my mind that they carried me out. Instead of straightening up, they lower me gently to the ground and we sit, the three of us, and with heads close together in hushed voices we recall the sky, bleeding the last lights of evening.
From out of the shadow of war, we move under the shadow of a bergamot tree.
end.