Author Note: I've had this story in my head for ages, and I feel silly that I've only just started to work on it. It's going to fill in the space between Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny from Yzak Joule's POV. If I've done my job well, it'll stick close to canon and fit almost seamlessly.

This first bit is a brief prologue — it glosses over the final few episodes of SEED at a swift pace. I felt such a prologue was necessary because SEED's last episodes are action-packed and fast-moving; it's difficult to follow the general course of events, never mind what characters like Yzak and Dearka were up to at each moment. This is meant to work as both a memory jog and a way of plumping up what was already present in the canon, and then I'll move into my main plot line. (That ought to be a better read, haha.) Enjoy yourselves, dear readers.


Yzak's hands shook over the Duel's controls. His ragged breathing echoed around the cockpit. It was loud, too loud in the sudden quiet, and lights blinked and blipped that meant nothing to him in his haze. The imprints of mushroom clouds bloomed behind his eyelids when he squinted them shut. So many nuclear missiles aimed at the PLANTs, but they hadn't hit; they hadn't hit…. The GENESIS had been fired in retaliation, but that had been awful too…. Yzak's heart pounded and his mobile suit drifted in space. The Duel was out of power, but he wasn't moving to retreat and recharge. He opened his eyes again and sweat dripped down from his brow, clouding his vision. Flashes of his previous actions battered him one by one as they sunk in, delayed in coming until now.

He was… alive. Yes, he was still fighting. He'd protected that rose-colored Strike, and managed to take out one of the three Earth Forces pilots, but his assault armor had been destroyed in the blast. On top of that, he'd flung himself head-on into twice the danger when a spike-backed, unidentified mobile suit tore the Buster to shreds….

"Yzak? Yzak!"

The Buster had been cornered by the time another of the psychotic Earth Alliance pilots reared his head. Yzak had shoved Dearka's mobile suit aside and seized its rifle to blast apart the black-and-red Raider….

"Yzak, come in, damn it!" Dearka's voice rang loud over the airwaves.

Yzak's hands were still shaking, but he released the Duel's controls, fingers stiff. He had to keep it together. There was the present to think about. Was it too late to help the rest of his forces? His Phase Shift was down. He couldn't fight anymore….

There was only one thing left he was able to see to, and that was Dearka. If they didn't get shot down in more crossfire, perhaps he could bring the blond back to a ZAFT ship and get him patched up while he recharged his own mobile suit. Yzak clamped down on the thought and used it to haul himself back to stable ground.

"Dearka, I'm here. Respond immediately — what is your condition?" Yzak heard a forced chuckle, and waited with bated breath.

"Alive, but with a head injury that won't stop bleeding."

There was a pause in which Yzak's stomach did a turn at the realization that he had just saved Dearka Elsman, when not hours before he had aimed a gun at him on the Mendel Colony. Dearka, alive? He'd given Dearka up for dead. The notion struggled to sink in; Yzak's mind fought to adjust, but the adrenaline of battle still coursed through him and his thoughts could not keep up. He was shaking again.

"Yzak… I need to get back to the Archangel."

The silver head's blood continued to pound. Dearka's statement barely registered. The flagship of the Three Ship Alliance? The Earth Forces runaway, the legged ship, the Archangel. Yzak located it on his navigation system with unsteady fingers. Dearka wanted to go there? Still? That ship was nothing but a target! Would the blond stand by it, even now? Yzak knew Dearka was waiting for a response from him, but he couldn't find it in himself to speak. That Dearka was alive… was going to be okay….

"Yzak, come with me."

Yzak faltered, his Coordinator pride kicking in to steer while his other emotions battled uselessly. "Wh—? Elsman, I'm not going with you to the legged ship."

"We can't do anything more here, and I'm not safe anywhere but there," Dearka pressed. "I need medical attention, and both our mobile suits are too damaged to go far. The Kusanagi and the Eternal won't be able to take us aboard right now because they're engaged in firing on the GENESIS, so… the Archangel is our only shot and we'll both be safe there. You come, too."

The Buster began to inch away from him. Yzak's head whirled. What was this Dearka was spouting? Names of unfamiliar ships, with a voice full of something desperate and commanding — something action-driven that had never been present in his tone before….

Dearka's yell echoed. "Yzak, damn it!" The colored lights of explosions in the distance illuminated the urgency of their situation.

The silver head braced himself and swallowed. "Okay, Dearka. Okay. But only for a moment." He held tight to the broken Buster and they drifted toward the legged ship.

— x —

"I can't stay here." Yzak paced the suspended bridge in the Archangel's hangar, staring up at their two mobile suits. The Buster and Duel had been docked and set to charging. The Duel, being tended to by a team of scurrying Naturals in the bowels of the very ship he'd spent his military career chasing with intent to kill!

It was ludicrous.

"Dearka, where are they? Someone is coming to help you, right?" Yzak paced, keeping his hands tight in fists. Nothing hit him without seeping through a wall of adrenaline first. His rush had not abated, and each progression of events felt like running through fire blind. "I don't like not knowing what's going on out there. If they ever caught me on this ship, Dearka, if Commander Le Creuset were to find out that I… that I—"

"That you helped me?" Dearka finished coolly, and Yzak halted his pacing to meet the blond's violet eyes. Dearka was looking at him with a sort of pity that Yzak had never seen, never known him to possess the capacity for, and Yzak never wanted to see such a look directed at him again.

"Elsman," he said decisively, "I'm going back out there. Chairman Zala wants to fire the GENESIS again. I… I don't necessarily want him to do that, but I'm a member of ZAFT. I can't—" He cut himself off. Was any of this really happening? Too much too quickly, it felt so unreal…. Yzak watched through narrowed eyes as Dearka held a hand to his bleeding forehead and scrutinized him. Dearka Elsman, examining him in such a way — what the hell had the Earth Forces done to him in all the time he'd been away from ZAFT?

"Yzak, I may want to go back when this is over, too."

Yzak twitched at the blond's serious tone. "You? Go back where? To ZAFT? You don't have any place to go back to."

For the first time, Dearka looked away from him, choosing to focus instead on the metal mesh floor of the hangar bridge they waited upon. In that instant, Yzak regretted his words. It was true — Dearka of the Le Creuset Team had been considered MIA, but now that he was confirmed alive, and with the enemy, no less… so he was a traitor.

But that didn't mean that even Yzak needed to cast him aside, did it?

"The Archangel is a renegade ship," Dearka said after a moment. "If GENESIS fires on Earth, the Three Ship Alliance loses, and it'll likely be destroyed. If Lacus Clyne comes through and the fighting stops, well, there'll be a lot more responsibility ahead to take care of. Either way, I don't think I want to be part of it."

Yzak's mouth fell open, and he gripped the railing in front of him, hard. Hadn't Dearka given his new allegiance to Clyne and her followers? "You coward," he cried. "Do the people on this ship know you're planning to leave?" What… what in bloody hell was going on in his former teammate's head?

"I don't see it as a cowardly decision, or a traitorous one," Dearka said slowly, running a hand through his matted hair. At last, a gesture Yzak was familiar with. The silver head clung to it like a lifeline while the Buster pilot continued. "It's just that I'm still not sure what I'm fighting for. I know I don't like what ZAFT is doing now. But I don't like what the Earth Forces have done, either. I stayed here because there's someone — an old friend of Athrun's — that asked if I wanted to find the answers like he did. But he and Athrun, they've already made their decisions. I don't understand them or know whether I agree. I still need some time to figure it out, mull over what I've done and what I can do… and I think the people on this ship would understand why I can't do it here no matter what the outcome of this war is." Yzak stared at him incredulously. "I'm not sure ZAFT is the place to do it either, but…."

But what? Yzak wanted to ask, but the question was disencouraged by his failure to comprehend Dearka's outpouring in full. He didn't understand where the blond's thoughts had sprung from….

There was a tremor underfoot; the legged ship had taken a hit. At last, Yzak could see a medical team making its way up to where they stood in the hangar. Dearka would be tended to. Dearka would be safe.

Yzak looked the blond in the eye. "When this is over, Elsman, you're coming back with me." His voice cracked, and Dearka was looking at him with that dim display of pity again, but Yzak ignored both things. "Get taken care of. See to what you need to see to and don't let the captain of this ship get you killed. I'm going out in the Duel again, but I'll come back for you."

"Yzak—"

"You don't have the luxury of time to decide," Yzak barked, propelling himself over the bridge and toward his mobile suit in the anti-gravity. "If you want to come back even a little, then I'm going to be your only chance! Anyone else might just let you die." He left Dearka to the medics and floated past the Naturals that meandered around, mending wires and hauling bits of scrap metal. For him to have even set foot on this vessel….

He nodded to the worker that stepped aside for him when it became clear that Yzak intended to depart. His cockpit hatch sealed itself shut and he closed his eyes.

— x —

The GENESIS had been destroyed? It was supposed to have fired, but instead, it had self-destructed. How—?

He didn't have time to get the details. He didn't have time. It had been Patrick Zala himself that entered the codes that would aim GENESIS for North America, and that had been unbelievable. Yzak Joule didn't like to think that any Coordinator — even an angry and vengeful one like the Chairman — would do such a thing under the circumstances. Hadn't ZAFT already won? But the Chairman had acted, and had lost, and so those that had supported him were going to be—

"Yzak, I can't go yet! Yzak, are you listening?" Muffled voices coming through behind Dearka from the Archangel's bridge. The blond had talked the CIC into allowing him to make a connection.

Yzak's response was shrill. "Dearka, you don't understand what this means for ZAFT! The commander was the one in that mobile suit the Freedom was fighting. He's dead! I have to go, and I have to take you with m—"

"No one here knows what happened yet either! We don't know if the Orb Princess or Athrun and Kira are alive!" Dearka's shouts were desperate. "Athrun tried to blow up the Jus—"

Yzak's fist hit the arm of his chair inside the Duel's stifling cockpit. There was no time…. "Then Dearka, I can't wait for you, I have to go, I have to go…."

A groan. "But Yzak—"

"Dearka, Eileen Canaver took action as soon as she learned what the Chairman did…. The Chairman was assassinated by another official inside ZAFT, never mind that it was too late to stop him by then!" Yzak was already turning the Duel around. "The Chairman and all his supporters… my mother — Canaver and her men won't like it. They're going to go after her, after my—" His voice caught in his throat.

A moment of radio silence, then a near-inaudible curse. When Next Dearka spoke, it was in a whisper. "Okay, Yzak. I understand the situation. I'm launching in the Buster, but I may need help since my machine's a wreck. Wait for me."

Yzak forced the control back into his voice, relief and astonishment mingling as one. "Will you tell them that you're leaving?"

"…No."