"You're doing it again."
Only the voice's familiarity, the feisty edge it carried even in such a simple statement, pierced the haze of frantic thought in Athrun Zala's head. "Eh?" He blinked, eyes refocusing across the desk towards the lioness in a burgundy pantsuit. She looked hungry and that made him prey. "Doing what?"
An upwards sigh puffed Cagalli's bangs. "Thinking." A disdainful gesture accompanied the word, along with a twist of mouth.
"Is thinking such a bad thing?" Half-teasing, half-serious, he watched her for reaction.
Frown. Metaphorical tail-twitch. Ready to pounce. "Yes," she replied without hesitation. "Well...not exactly," Cagalli amended; taking up the mantle of politics was slowly conditioning her to choose her words less impulsively. "Thinking is good when you don't get lost in it like usual." A pause, then an irritated drag of pen across paper in something resembling a signature. Athrun winced and hoped it wasn't an important document. "I called your name five different times, even told you the building was on fire and so were my pants."
Her pants? A quick glance under the desk showed them still intact. "I'm sorry I missed that." Athrun knew he was pressing his luck, but his mind was still running in circles and thus left his mouth to its own devices.
A paperclip bounced off his forehead. "I'm serious. You're turning something over in that head of yours and..."
"I can't go back to PLANT." He'd meant to tease her, but somehow he volunteered the last thing he would have said and the first thing weighing heavily on his mind. Athrun froze, not sure how to continue the conversation.
"Oh." Cagalli stood, abandoning the desk and her work for the chair next to Athrun's. She crossed her legs and folded her hands neatly atop her knee, waiting.
He blinked, for a moment uncertain if he was seeing Cagalli or Lacus; the patient posture definitely belonged to the latter, and part of his mind wondered just what reciprocal habits Lacus was adopting from Cagalli. "Even though the circumstances from the war could be extenuating, in the eyes of ZAFT I'm still a deserter. A traitor." Athrun looked down, away from Cagalli; even now, those words echoed inside his head. In his father's voice, thick with shame and disgust.
"It may be a little early to say that." Cagalli's posture remained still, but she rotated the ankle of her crossed leg, first one direction and then the other. "The cease-fire and treaty signings were only three weeks ago. Aren't you being fatalistic too soon, even for you?"
She had a point, Athrun admitted, but he shook his head anyways. "My father is...gone." He still couldn't bring himself to say 'dead', despite seeing it happen right in front of him. "So is Mother. ZAFT aside, there's nothing left to go back to. Lacus and Kira, they're here, and you..."
If Cagalli noticed he was blushing, she didn't mention it, possibly because of the color on her own face. "ORB has always opened its doors to Coordinators willing to abide by our ideals. That includes ZAFT traitors and deserters. Waldfeld-san is going to stay," she added.
Which brought him back to the second layer of his problem. "I'm not so sure that invitation should extend to someone by the name of Zala."
Cagalli pursed her lips, jaw jerking up in a familiar stubborn tilt. "Then change your name."
"Eh?"
"You've already said that Athrun Zala can't go back to PLANT, nor should he be accepted in ORB. But I...we, I mean...everyone, we want you to stay. If the only thing keeping you from staying here in ORB is your name, can't you change it?" The hands on her knee tightened together; it wasn't in Cagalli's nature to be serene and still for very long. "You'd still smell like a rose!" she burst out in exasperation.
Sometimes Athrun wondered if he was completely lost when it came to speaking Natural female. Or if it was just Cagalli; he honestly didn't know that many Natural females. "What does a rose have to do with anything?"
"You know, from that one play? About how you can change roses' names but they'd still smell and...aaargh, I don't remember it exactly, I sort of skipped reading it-"
Athrun clapped a hand over his mouth but not in time. Deep, hearty, tension-breaking laughter spilled forth before he could restrain it. "You truly are the strangest girl I've ever known," he managed to gasp out, "never to have read 'Romeo and Juliet'." Catching his breath, he cast a wry look in her direction. "I thought every girl knew the balcony scene by heart."
"Sorry to disappoint you," Cagalli shot back, but she was smiling for the first time that afternoon. "You'll always be Athrun to me, you know," a nervous hand darted through her hair, "a-and to Kira and Lacus. That won't ever change, even if we call you something else."
"A rose by any other name, huh?" He turned that over in his mind and stood up, offering Cagalli his hand. She blinked but took it without hesitation, letting out a small noise of surprise when Athrun pulled her up and into his arms, hugging her tightly.
"Thank you, Cagalli. That was just what I needed to hear." Her voice was muffled against his chest, but it sounded warm and faintly like 'You're welcome.'
Omake: The Choosing of the Name
Athrun held her close for a long moment, then stepped back with an expectant look on his face. "So?"
Cagalli frowned, the heat fading too slowly from her cheeks for her liking. "So what?"
"So what is my new name going to be?" It felt a little like launching, exciting and frightening both; that must be why he kept hold of her hands. "Since it was your idea, you should pick it."
"Me? But you're the one who has to answer to it."
"Then make it something close to my current name."
"Athrun is hardly a common name, and it doesn't really rhyme with anything." Cagalli chewed on her bottom lip, running through all of the male names she knew. "It should start with A, then. Andy is Waldfeld-san's name, so that's no good. Athha, that's my last name, and everyone would look at you funny if you went by that. Arnold?"
"Isn't he the helmsman of the Archangel?"
"Oh, right. Actually, I could never remember his name." Pause. "Allen?"
Athrun debated that with himself for a minute. "Allen isn't bad."
"Good," Cagalli beamed, happy to have made short work of it. "I had a tutor once named Allen. In retrospect, I think he might have been my first crush..."
He frowned. "On second thought, I don't think I like Allen as much."
"I'm just teasing you, Ath...Mister A. But there are still a lot of names to choose from." Back to chewing her lip. "Alex?"
"Was he your second crush?" Athrun couldn't help but ask.
"Third. If that's what you decide to call yourself, that is." Face flaming, Cagalli looked anywhere but at him. "I did sort of like Kira before I learned he was my brother," she mumbled, hands tight on his.
That made Athrun chuckle, and he rubbed the backs of her hands with his thumbs, soothing away the tension. "Kira's very likable that way. He always has been. People are naturally drawn to him." And to Cagalli as well; they were, after all, twins. And any place where the two of them were would be home to Athrun.
The boy once called Athrun Zala lifted Cagalli's hands to his lips, kissing the back of each one in greeting. "I think Alex will suit me just fine."