AN: Just like referring to PLANT as a singular collective rather than the PLANT(s) is a stylistic quirk of mine, I always believed the authors of SEED meant Nicol's last name to be Amalfi, like the Italian coast, so this is how I spell it here. Mostly because I speak Italian and spelling it Amarfi just seems so wrong.


I don't ever think about death

It's alright if you do,

it's fine;


His first kill is a single Earth Alliance assault unit. And eight civilian casualties.

The irony of it, he thinks later, is that it's a peacekeeping zone. The irony is that as the Earth Alliance's unit blows into the non-militarized perimeter with the intention of destroying the medical center - for the sake of a blue and pure world, no doubt - he shoots to both save and to kill.

A rogue machine, the Federation would later inform them. A third party defector acting on its own accord. And so there is nowhere to lay the blame, no accusation of guilt. There is no reprimand, no sanctions for him.Civilian casualties is the official military term. Collateral damage is the word they all hear in their heads, the dehumanizing implication that lives lost in action are as inconsequential as buildings bombed out, fields and forests left scorched on the surface of the Earth. Accidental only because they are not legitimate military targets. Are those lives, he thinks, somehow different?

The GINN he was piloting had been the closest to the medi center. He had been the quickest to react, the quickest to reposition himself in defense of the non-combatant facilities. He waited for backup.

No one is coming.

They're too far out.

You need to take this shot, Amalfi.

But he'd never been a good marksman: not like Athrun with moving targets, and he doesn't have the same judgement for blast radius like Dearka. So when he swung the scope over one eye and lifted the GINN's assault rifle, he was glad the steel giant's alloy hand did not shake the way his own did.

He fired two shots and missed.

It's going to be too close -

The third shot, almost errant when he fired it - blindly, forcing the panic down - hit the other unit square in the chest. It ripped open in a brilliant cloud of fire and debris, sweeping dust and churning the earth beneath it, and killing every non-combatant medical personnel riding in the convoy not far below.

Later, he'd said, If I hadn't hesitated, I could have taken it down without the convoy.

Yes, the Commander had answered, even though it hadn't been framed as a question. But to hesitate before a kill is only human.

But to hesitate in giving your life in place of another is not worthy of a Redcoat, he'd said to himself. Outwardly, he'd said nothing.

To save is almost always also to kill, Nicol.

Appeasing them with philosophy had always been the Commander's strong suit.

And so the reason he enlisted, the consequence of his finger on the trigger is just as open to possibilities, just as unforeseen as his fingers when they hover over the keys of a piano, moments before he presses them into song. He cannot only pull the trigger to kill, but he cannot only pull it to save, either.

But now as he sits next to the glossy black expanse, fingers perched above the keys, nothing comes. Too many things are playing in his head, too many notes he thinks to begin only to lose the will to carry them through the moment his fingers brush ivory.

He is so lost in his reverie that he only notices Athrun is there when the other pilot slides onto the piano seat next to him.

"Well?"

The tone in his voice is neutral but inviting. Nicol could say anything, really, but instead he looks over the expanse of octaves and imagines the eight civilians who lives he didn't mean to take.

Athrun smoothes his own hands over the instrument, but without pressing them down into sound. He has too much respect for the piano's beauty to sully it, Nicol knows. Rare, to find someone like that. "I'd like to see you play."

This time, Nicol looks up. He knows his eyes are a little red-rimmed, his lips a little swollen from biting them, but it's just Athrun, so he lets it go.

"Me too," he answers quietly, then glances at his hands again. "But I don't seem to…" He trails off. "It's not there."

He can picture Athrun's brow furrow, see the creases in his friend's handsome face, even as he looks away.

"I think I left them on the battlefield," he laughs softly, a little helplessly. "The notes, I mean."

"You saved a hundred lives," Athrun answers, without missing a beat. "Maybe more."

"Maybe. But I also took nine." He feels petulant, answering Athrun like this. "They're still human lives. They had value."

"And they should be mourned," Athrun acknowledges. "But not if it interferes with what you know you need to do." He looks at the other pilot pointedly, green eyes pensive. "You were the one who came to sit with me every fourteenth of every February. You were the one who gave me space enough to mourn, but time enough to make me realize I had to keep going."

He recalls Athrun's ritualistic seclusion on the anniversary of Junius Seven. Hours in his room, spent alone, until Nicol would come find him, pull him out of his sorrow as though pulling someone out of the depths of a well.

"After all, death is only a door - isn't that what you said?"

Nicol smiles weakly. "I did, didn't I?"

"We could mourn today, but if we die tomorrow, what good will it have done us?"

Briefly, Nicol wonders if they'll have to go through this every time they take a civilian life, or if it gets easier, somehow. He can't imagine how it could.

"I shouldn't have hesitated," he says finally. He won't say if I wouldn't have. It's too late for ifs, and so he will acknowledge what he didn't do instead.

"You won't, next time."

There's a little bit of a shudder in his voice when he sighs. "I know the others think it's foolish. For me to have enlisted, to have made it so far up only to be so reluctant to kill, so hesitant."

Athrun fiddles with a B flat key, running his fingers along its contours. "Someone else might've been too eager to kill," he offers quietly. "And cost more lives. Our duty is to protect our people, each other, as much as it is to eliminate the enemy."

Nicol nods. He presses his fingers into a small progression in low A minor, the sound almost mournful. "And if my hesitation were to cost one of you your lives?" he asks, as the sound echoes in the hollow room.

When Athrun puts a hand on his shoulder, he feels as though the touch lifts him.

"It won't. I know you, Nicol."

It's true, he realizes at once, a sense of warmth and wonder in his chest.

"Don't become who you aren't, just for this war. Don't hesitate, but don't lose yourself to the killing, either."

They're strange words, coming from Athrun. Athrun, whom he's mourned with every Valentine over the photograph of his mother; whose listened with pensive eyes and brooding silence to his symphonies; whose made him feel as if he's worth something, miles from home in this red uniform - a peacekeeper amid killers. And yet they are perfectly suited to him, too: Athrun the reluctant leader. They will need him.

Nicol does not want to die in this war. But he realizes that if he must, he will die for Athrun. Without hesitation.

His fingers hover over the piano's keys. "Next time, I won't hesitate."


end.