Christmas '06 gift for Feria.
Happily Ever After
(not) a fairy tale in four parts
;
I. Cagalli grew up listening to stories about other princesses. By the time she hears the fifth story, she can dictate the end of the sixth and the seventh and the eighth.
"If everyone lived happily ever after, why do they still need Daddy?" she asked one day.
Cagalli is sixteen. She is fighting with Ahmed, with Desert Dawn, and her clothes are hot and sticky and her hair is plastered on her face and neck--she considers cutting it to a more convenient length; it's not like peopel don't already mistaken her for a boy anyway. Cagalli is sixteen, and she doesn't feel like a princess at all.
Today is another sticky summer day, and she strains to remember what Kisaka-san's answer had been to that question a decade at all, find that she can't recall, and figures that it is probably a sugarcoated version of "real life doesn't work that way".
II. Athrun and Cagalli are by no means cutouts from a storybook. In fact, they try to kill each other first and Athrun thinks she's a boy and Cagalli tries to shoot him again in his sleep and Athrun does get shot even though that was just an accident.
Somehow things work out between the two of them; personally, Cagalli thinks it couldn't have worked out any better, because it isn't like a fairy tale at all and Cagalli doesn't like fairy tales.
III. Cagalli is nineteen and working to maintain what millions of lives have laid down. Athrun is nineteen years old and doing the same thing, except differently. There are still loose ends to tie, creases to smooth--peace is a big thing, after all.
Sometimes they don't see each other for months, and sometimes Cagalli feels lonely although she'll never admit it. This distance, she knows, is a small price, and it will not endure forever.
IV. New Year's Eve, and Athrun makes a surprise entrance at the doorstep. They're all delighted--Kira, Lacus, the children--but Cagalli takes him in with a scowl and a plateful of dinner, because he seems thinner, and just because he's a Coordinator doesn't mean it's okay to starve himself like this, who does he think he is anyway?
Athrun's belated Christmas gift to Cagalli is his resolution to eat better. Cagalli's resolution is to make sure he keeps his, and she lets him press a soft kiss on her lips when it's midnight and takes him home when he falls asleep on the couch later on.
It isn't the ever-after kind of happiness, but it's the kind that matters.