Amy spends a lot of time in the cemetery, as the years go on.
She's fifteen, now: a year older than her brothers were ever allowed to be. She's sure Aunt Kathryn means well when she tells her that she's growing up so nicely, winning shooting tournaments and excelling in her studies (and moving on with her life, though she never says this aloud)—but Amy often feels as if everything ground to a halt on her eleventh birthday, and never quite managed to get going again.
It's been four years, and she's mostly adjusted to living with her aunt. Teresa's a couple of years into college, now, but visits when she can—and always makes a point of coming home the weekend nearest Amy's birthday.
It's not that she celebrates it, anymore, but Amy appreciates the sentiment—and isn't too lost in her own grief to realize that her aunt and cousin lost her family, too.
She visits their grave nearly every day, at first, but as time goes on she slows down to a few times a month. She tends to it carefully, ensures that the stone is well-kept and that the flowers planted beside it are vibrant and alive. She doesn't look at the names and dates (doesn't think she can bear seeing the day she gained her life listed as the day they lost theirs), but visits often all the same—sometimes only briefly, sometimes for hours—curled up against the stone as if it will bring her closer to those whose bones are buried beneath the dirt at her feet.
She's not so naïve as to think that she can hear their voices, speaking to her from heaven or whatever afterlife such a God would create. She's not so naïve as to think they are still talking to her, but feeling close is a comfort in the years when she has little left. Aunt Kathryn does her best, as do her friends, and she truly does appreciate it. But while nearly everyone in the city knew someone affected by the bombing, none of her friends know loss on the scale that she was forced to learn—and even as they grow into teenagers alongside her, many of them seem tentative to talk about anything even narrowly related to her family or the mall.
They blink at her in concern when she tells them all that she won first place at a sharpshooting tournament, and shrink back when she says she'll be a little late to a party because she promised she'd visit their grave. She attended the unveiling of a memorial to the lives lost six months after the bombing with her aunt and cousin and Anna and Mrs. Holmes, and though Aunt Kathryn kept a steady arm around her shoulders, Amy could not stop crying. They spoke of the significance of the statue, of the resilience of humanity and strength in the face of adversity—and Amy lost what composure she might have had left when they began reading the names of those lost. Anna stood next to her, her hands shaking at her sides and tears rolling down her face, but she did not ask Amy if she wanted a hug.
Some days, she appreciates the distance. More often, she resents it more than she can say.
.
.
The day she beats Neil's old video games, she spends an hour sobbing at his grave.
She didn't touch a console for almost a year after their deaths; ghosts of Lyle's best races taunted her, and Neil was so good at his shooters that the save files were all but unplayable for her skill level. He had the difficulty cranked all the way up and was quite far into them, and Amy—frustrated as she became, when she finally did start playing them—could not clear a level, no matter how hard she tried.
It took her months to pick up the games at all, and a week after that to convince herself to save over Neil's data. Aunt Kathryn encouraged her, when she realizes what she was doing; after all, she said, Neil would have wanted you to enjoy his old games, even if it means deleting his old save data.
Amy swallows and holds back tears as she saves over them, starting over on normal difficulty and working her way up. It's really nothing like shooting in real life, but Neil's skill had always seemed to translate over, and he had thoroughly enjoyed these games. Amy finds herself liking them as well, playing late into the night on weekends (and occasional weeknights, to Aunt Kathryn's chagrin) and steadily building up her skill.
She leaves the house without a word to her aunt when she hundred-percents the last game on insane difficulty, pulls her bike off the front porch, and pedals to the cemetery with tears falling down her face.
They're dead. She knows this, knows they cannot be speaking to her, knows that they aren't coming back. But she wants to believe she can feel Neil's pride enveloping her as she curls up on the grass, the headstone the only thing holding her any sort of upright as she heaves great, hiccoughing sobs. Aunt Kathryn's right, she thinks—her brothers would be proud of her, in this and in everything else.
She thinks this would be the case but now, still reeling from completing the games Neil never had the opportunity to finish, she would give anything to hear it for sure—hear her brothers' voices one more time, wide grins on their faces as they tell her exactly how awesome she is. She cannot remember the way they sounded, anymore—and clings more and more to videos and photographs to remember them by.
Sometimes she tries to imagine what they might look like now—nearly nineteen, maybe in college, maybe finding a full-time job. Mum always said they took after Dad and so she bases her guesses on old pictures of her father (curlier hair, a younger face), but—
But she will never know what her brothers will look like grown because they never turned fifteen, and now she has nothing left but old video games and CDs and recordings and guns—always her (Neil's) guns. She graduated to proper guns just before she turned thirteen (something Neil had looked forward to, before he quit, saying they feel more real) but keeps her brother's airsoft rifles locked in Aunt Kathryn's basement, despite the range's offer to buy them back from her.
They were Neil's, and with the precious few things she has to remember him by, anymore, she will hold onto them desperately for as long as she can.
.
.
She's fifteen, and she hates the government at least as much as she hates the KPSA.
At first, it's for the fact that they couldn't predict the bombing—couldn't realize that terrorists were planning larger and larger attacks. Perhaps an attack specifically in Waterford, Ireland might have been too much to ask, but an attack in western Europe, or even the AEU at large, might have raised the military's defenses, might have put them on their guard, and might have stopped the bombing before it even happened.
At first her anger is selfish and all-consuming, but as the years go on and she follows the news more and more, she realizes that the problems within their governments are so much broader than one attack, no matter how many people were killed. Government's failings are endless, running the spectrum from embezzlement and fraud to genocide. It's not restricted to Ireland, or the AEU, or any particular group; as she learns more about prime ministers and legislatures and kings from around the world, she realizes that there is not one that she thinks she would trust to run a country.
Once, this might have discouraged her. Now, it only makes her angry.
She's intelligent; her aunt and teachers tell her this regularly, tell her even in her first year of high school that she'll be able to get into any university she wants for her drive to learn (though her grades have steadily been slipping, since her eleventh birthday). But she's not sure she's interested in university at all—let alone the history degree that her advisor seems to be pushing toward, as a stepping-off point for a graduate degree.
Being a tactical forecaster or a politician would be good in theory, she thinks—and she would have been good at it, in another life. She could see herself working to prevent more terrorist attacks around the world; she could see herself getting elected on a platform of fixing the governments that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
But she's intelligent, and so she knows now exactly how hopeless this is; terrorist groups are everywhere, their motives extreme and inexplicable, and predicting their movements or legislating against them will do nothing to stop them from killing. And—even if she were to rise to elected office—the governments that started the Solar Energy Wars are still in place, making half-hearted attempts at peace and at relief to those whose lives have been destroyed. She would drive herself mad working with such people—and, after all, what could one person do to change the world?
Even if she could—if, and she realizes how far-fetched it is every time her aunt mentions how good of a politician she could be—it doesn't seem like doing enough, anymore.
She thinks often of the KPSA, when she's reading about the Middle East—of the way HRL officials nearer to Krugis talk of child soldiers and mercenary groups spreading chaos. She can't decide whether she hates those soldiers or the government doing nothing about them more. After all, it's the rest of the world's fault that that region was all but destroyed in the first place.
Krugis is all but wiped out, resorting to guerrilla warfare against the Azadistani armies and their HRL allies. Azadistan itself is burning, split by a decades-long civil war that has shown no sign of ending. The surrounding countries are doing no better, with millions displaced by the in-fighting and tens of thousands coming to Europe every month, begging for asylum. Most are turned away; after all, the power blocs' governments want nothing to do with citizens of non-member, non-paying countries.
Every time Amy sees the statistics, sees how many people are sent back to destroyed countries—and then sees the casualties in that part of the world, making the Waterford bombing seem like a minor accident—her rage boils a little higher. Those days, at the range, the targets she shoots at look less like paper silhouettes and more like terrorist cells and complacent legislators.
There are stories of young children going missing, of bought-out officials smuggling people to safe countries or to space for exorbitant amounts of money—of entire families accepting help from those they should be able to trust and then disappearing without a trace. There are so many that eventually, the media stops reporting on them—but aid groups tally every toddler that was lost in the chaos, every child with a friend whose entire family has disappeared. Amy reads their websites, donates what she can of her meager savings, and feels her fury rising steadily as she cannot do more.
The Solar Energy Wars themselves may be past their peak, with the Middle East's armies depleted and the attacks abroad petering into nothing as their resources are destroyed, but the violence has not died down. Much of the rest of the world has started to move on; with their friends and family out of the line of fire, after all, what does it matter, if strangers halfway around the world are dying? It's not as if entire countries have been thrown into chaos by the governments that are supposed to protect this world, after all—
She reads the news every day and feels her fists clenching tighter, feels her rage burning brighter at the injustice of it all. The bombing in her hometown was awful—it is something she will never recover from—but those lives lost in Ireland are nothing when compared to the sheer number of those lost elsewhere. The fact that there is nothing she can truly do about it curls her lips into a snarl every time she thinks on it.
She is fifteen and lost, unsure of what to do with her life. Her interests are history and shooting, which leave open to her politics or the military, in various capacities. But joining the military is even more unpalatable than running for office; piloting a mobile suit, propagating war, killing people is so far outside of anything she thinks she'd ever be able to do. She thinks enlisting might give her aunt a heart attack, anyway, and tosses the idea aside every time it occurs to her.
.
.
.
.
Aunt Kathryn's lines grow deeper as months pass, as Amy glides through high school with decent grades across the board (they're nothing to write home about, especially compared with how she excelled in grade school), as she expresses no interest at all in college or a degree though they both know she's intelligent enough to pursue one.
Instead, she spends all her free time at the range; she's long since passed both of her brothers on the high score tables, knocking down record after record as her anger refuses to abate. She's nearly always the youngest there, and has long gotten used to the stares and the questions from newcomers. Shooting is calming to her in a way only visiting her family is; her instructor tells her she adopts the same look of concentration as her brothers once did when she's shooting. This is maybe more comforting than it should be, as the months go on and she has fewer and fewer things to remember them by.
Her aunt supports her hobby, if reluctantly, but she had nearly put her foot down at Amy's decision to switch to real guns. ("Why do you need to?" she asked, not harshly, but obviously worried when she told her over dinner one day. Amy hadn't been able to tell her that on bad days, using a real gun to shoot at pretend terrorists feels far better than anything else.) She's very clearly worried about her, but Amy can't muster the energy to care; she loves her family, of course, but they have been fooled well enough by her charade of normalcy. They think she's well-adjusted; they think she has managed to move past the single awful event that has defined her life.
Maybe another person would be able to build a new life from the rubble, but Amy is not that person—and though she is not consumed by her anger, she cannot simply leave it behind, either. And her aunt and extended family expect her to make decisions on her future like nothing ever happened; they expect her to go to college and get a job—live a normal life.
That doesn't seem like nearly enough to her, anymore.
Sure, she's plenty good at functioning in the real world when she needs to. She goes to school, and the range, and family gatherings (even if she's grown rather distant from her friends over the years). She laughs, when the situation warrants it—and sometimes she even finds the things she's laughing about funny. She can pretend all she wants, but that's all it is—and though nobody calls her out on it, Aunt Kathryn and Teresa stare at her every so often as if trying to figure something out. She's fooling them well enough, she realizes, but it may not be sustainable. She isn't sure what's going to happen when everything comes crashing down, but she doesn't have anything else in her life figured out; she'll tackle that problem when she gets there.
In the meantime, she has her shooting and her political activism—even if, for now, it's nothing more than from the armchair. She's seventeen but often feels so much older, and shoots paper targets full of holes pretending they're living people, and hates her government more than she thinks is probably rational. And every thought and every action is haunted by what would Neil or Lyle have done in my place and would my parents be proud of me—and she thinks the worst part is that she doesn't know the answer to either of them.
.
.
The opportunity comes out of the blue, but she doesn't give herself a moment to regret it.
It's early summer, and though she's technically too young to work at the range, she helps out other customers when they look like they need a little leg-up—and the manager has promised her more than once that the moment she turns eighteen, he'll hire her on as an instructor, if she wants.
Her aunt pressures her to get a part-time job until then, at least—and she had looked upset when Amy told her of the job offer, come September. But Amy has no time for a job as a clerk or a lifeguard; she plans to drown herself in political reading and shooting for the whole summer. She's only ever pressured more to look at and apply to colleges, and her resistance to it grows stronger over time; wasting four years on a degree seems like the last thing she wants to do. She dodges questions when she can and answers bluntly when she can't, and stares at her terminal alone in her room many nights, wondering what she's going to do with herself when she's finally out of high school.
The man at the range is simply an oddity, at first; she wasn't even sure she could label him that until she heard him speak sharply to an attendant. His brown hair is sharply cut and streaked through with purple, and his eyes are bright and sharp as he stares down the range, only shooting a few targets down himself. He seems more interested in the people there—and more than once, Amy feels a prickling down her neck that means he's staring at her again.
His shooting's decent, when she has a chance to glance over, and she supposes that if he knows what he's doing, he might know the reigning champion of their local range, as well. But when he speaks it's with a distinct American accent—unobtrusive, like international news announcers put on—and she wonders exactly what an American man with purple hair could want with a small, run-down shooting range in Ireland.
And then, when she's paying attention, she sees him outside of the range, too. She sees him on sidewalks, in stores—even, once, in the graveyard, standing in an open patch of grass and staring up at the sky. Perhaps the most worrying is when she goes out to dinner with her aunt and cousin and sees him sitting alone a few tables over. The purple in his hair is invisible in the low light, and it's tied back primly with a rubber band, but it's undeniably the man from the range. Amy watches as he requests his check minutes after they do, though his food is only half-eaten, and her eyes narrow.
He's not someone she recognizes from school, though he looks like he might be about her age. He's either eighteen or bending the rules like her, because he never comes in with an adult—and had all but thrown his ID with a snarl at the first attendant to ask after his age. His clothes are always unobtrusive and normal, as if designed not to attract attention, though the pink sweater he's worn a couple of times has raised many eyebrows.
All in all, she's not at all sure what to make of him—and decides to confront him at the first opportunity. Talking to him at the range would be a safe bet, with plenty of other people around—but even if he did approach her alone, she takes comfort in the handgun she keeps tucked in her bag. (Semi-legally obtained, definitely illegally owned—with her aunt none the wiser. If the government isn't going to protect its constituents, after all, she needs to protect herself.)
(She doesn't tell her aunt about the man—doesn't want to worry her, especially if it ends up being nothing. Aunt Kathryn worries about her enough, these days.)
After weeks of this, he finally talks to her late one afternoon as she's walking home from the cemetery. It's a couple of miles, and Aunt Kathryn has given her free use of Teresa's old car, but it's a nice day—and walking allows her to clear her thoughts, especially after spending nearly half an hour talking with her family.
"Amelia Dylandy," the man says from close behind her, and she spins on her heel, her hand going for her bag. She hadn't even noticed he was following her, let alone that he was so close—and she berates herself for being so lost in thought when she's known he's been following her around.
"What do you want?" she asks sharply, her hand wrapping around the gun in her bag and not letting go. "I'm armed—you've seen how good I am with a gun."
The man smiles a bit, as if she's made a joke. "I am quite aware," he agrees, and pulls his own hands from his sweater pockets. They're too small to hold anything of a threat, she knows, but it's a gesture of good will all the same.
Her brows furrow, and she does not let go of her gun.
"Your shooting scores are quite impressive," he says, his face and voice carefully neutral as he takes a small step forward. "My superiors and I have taken note."
His superiors? Amy considers this, wonders whether this man is with the government, ready to arrest her for her gun—whether she's incriminated herself by admitting she's carrying one. Or whether he's part of the military, and is offering her a position in his unit—but he doesn't seem like the military type, especially with the purple streaks still visible in his hair.
Whoever they are, though, this man has taken note of her shooting scores but has not looked into her life deeply enough to realize she hates being called Amelia—and this rankles more than it should. "What do you want?" she asks, a little harshly, and he stares at her for a moment behind those sharp glasses before replying.
"We know exactly how much you hate the government," he says, "and we know what happened to your family. You may be interested in working with us."
Amy blinks, her face twisting. It's never been any secret who died in the bombing, but her anti-government sentiments she has kept to herself—in part so she would not get in trouble with the law. But she hasn't been encrypting her laptop and phone as she should, and—she supposes—a sufficiently competent hacker could—
"We are a private armed organization," he continues, when she does not reply. Her face twists—mobile suits, then, or a ground unit that wants her behind a rifle's scope. "Our goal is to eradicate war from this world, whether it be propagated by the government or by terrorists."
She turns this over in head, can't quite land on anything, and then considers the man before her again. He's barely of age (if he is at all), with purple in his hair and a pink sweater over his shoulders. He certainly doesn't seem like someone ready to wage war against—likely—the combined militaries of the world, and she nearly laughs at the absurdity of it. "That's ridiculous," she snaps after another moment, as he stares at her behind those thin glasses. "You're saying your so-called organization can fight the entire world? That's suicide!"
His face contorts momentarily. "I have full confidence in the Plan," he says sharply, and she can hear the capitalization of the last word in his voice. "But in order for us to properly execute it, we require your abilities."
"I'm not interested in killing anyone," she snaps, and frowns as he shakes his head.
"You're quite interested in changing the world," he says levelly, "and you've realized that peaceful means are not the answer. There is no other way."
Amy frowns deeply, but she can hear the truth in his words. Hasn't she been thinking exactly that, for all these years? She knows she's been fooling herself, wishing the world would change without a great upheaval of power, but—
"What would I be doing?" she hedges, though she thinks she knows the answer.
"We are building four custom mobile suits," he says. "You would pilot our sniping unit, to—I expect—great effect."
"I haven't set foot in a mobile suit in my life," she says, and her stomach turns at the thought of that much power beneath her fingertips.
"You will be given extensive training," he says, and the words are reassuring, but his voice doesn't seem to quite get the memo. "It will be several years before we enter the world's stage—you need not worry about being underprepared."
Amy knows this is wrong—knows that she is seventeen years old, that she should not be joining some random militia that approaches her off the street. So why is she having trouble coming up with reasons to refuse them? "What is this Plan, then?" she asks, and she feels like it's a reasonable question to ask.
However, his face twists, and an imperious look grows on his features. "That is not for you to know," he says. "Our commander has everything well in hand. You will be given information on a need-to-know basis."
Amy frowns deeply at him. "You're expecting me to risk my life for you," she says slowly, just to confirm, "but you're not telling me what it's for?"
"Our goal is to eradicate war from this Earth, by any means necessary," he says sharply. "If you are to become a Gundam Meister, that is all you need to know, and it should be enough."
Amy stares at him, weighing her options. "How long will I be gone?" she asks eventually, fairly certain they aren't anywhere near Ireland if they sent an American to recruit her. "And where are you based?"
"For as long as the Plan requires," he says, and her frown deepens. "You will leave within the week, and be stationed in space, with the rest of your team."
Amy's first instinct, if she's honest with herself, is to jump on this offer. She's been dreading her senior year of high school for months, after all, and a 'job offer' is something even her aunt wouldn't be able to argue. But—piloting a mobile suit, for years (as this man seems to be suggesting), fighting and killing people to try and stop war?
How far has her heart been twisted, that she thinks this might be justified?
"All ties to Earth must be cut off," he says over her increasingly clearer thoughts, and she blinks at him, surprised. "We are an organization built on secrecy. You will not be allowed to speak to anyone of what you are doing, what organization you are affiliated with, or where you work. Your free time on Earth will be minimal, and you may be stationed such that you will not be able to travel to Ireland."
"My aunt's not going to like that," Amy mutters without much thought, though it's the truth—and the man frowns impatiently at her.
"You should not be—"
"Fine," she cuts him off, and he stops, drawing himself up a little more in outrage. But Amy pulls her hand out of her bag (her grip has long loosened on her gun, anyway) and stares at him. "I accept. What now?"
His jaw clicks shut, and he stares at her a moment longer before pulling a data stick from his pocket and holding it out to her. "Any further information you want to know can be found here," he says, and stares at her as she accepts it, flipping it around her finger for a few moments before tucking it into her bag. "If anyone but you attempts to read the files, they will self-delete. Do not lose it, or share it with anyone else."
Amy nods, and he continues, pulling slips of paper out of his pocket—"Your flight leaves Thursday morning. You will travel to the Union's elevator and take a linear train to the high orbital station. A woman will be there to pick you up. She is Japanese, with long red hair and a full figure."
Amy blinks, nodding—and looks down to the plane tickets as she takes them from his hand. "If you have any further questions after reading the information on the data drive, she will be able to answer them," he says. "Do you have any questions for me right now?"
Amy shakes her head vaguely, still trying to wrap her head around the fact that in five days, she will be traveling to space. "Wait," she says, as the man nods sharply and turns to leave. "My name's Amy. Don't call me Amelia."
The man snorts, looking at her in something like amusement as he shakes his head. "Your name is no longer Amy Dylandy," he says, and she frowns sharply at him. "From now on, you will be referred to as Lockon Stratos."
.
.
Aunt Kathryn nearly throws a fit, when she gives her the news.
You still have a year of school left and what kind of company offers a job to someone who doesn't even have a high school diploma and space travel is still dangerous, you shouldn't go until it's safer are thrown at her for hours that night, when the plane tickets are burning a hole in her purse and all she wants to do is go upstairs, lock the door, and plug the data stick into her computer. She's thought on this in the hours since she met with that strange man, and the reasoning becomes clearer every moment. She's not entirely comfortable with killing others—and isn't sure it's something she'll be able to talk herself around to—but everything else is falling into place far too easily in her mind.
If it's a scam, if it's ultimately not something she'd be comfortable doing, she can always come home—but she doubts more with every second that that's going to happen. That man had seemed deadly serious about their mission, had seemed personally offended when she questioned it—and, after all, hasn't she been raging at the combined world governments for six years now? Hasn't she wished for a way to push them down in recompense for all the lives they've ruined?
Aunt Kathryn realizes eventually that she's not really listening to her worries, and cuts herself off, reaching to rub at her eyes, to tuck flyaway hair from her face. "You're going," she says, in a defeated tone that says she knows she's lost. "I just—why? What did you sign up for?"
"I can't tell you," she says, and feels a twinge of regret at the hurt crossing her aunt's face. "I—I want to, but he said it's all secret. But I think…I'll be able to do good for the world, with this job."
Her aunt drops her hands so she can stare at Amy, as if trying to divine the truth just from her face. "Your parents only ever wanted two things for you," she says after a moment, very quietly, and Amy forces herself to hold her gaze even as her stomach flips, "and so do I. I want you to be safe, and I want you to be happy. But this—this doesn't sound safe at all!"
"It's going to make me happy," she says, "happier than I've been since they were alive. Isn't that good enough?"
Aunt Kathryn does not bother to hide the hurt on her face, and Amy almost regrets it. "Not if you're putting yourself in harm's way," she says, her voice cracking, and Amy's face twists. "You—Amy, you have a tendency to go into things headfirst, and uprooting your entire life in less than a week, I think…you should just think about this a little more."
"I've made my decision," she says firmly, crossing her arms over her chest. "I have the plane tickets, someone's meeting me to pick me up. I promise I'll come home when I can, but I'd much rather do this than finish high school, or go to university."
"And what happens when this is over?" Aunt Kathryn demands. "Without a high school diploma, without any sort of degree—when you come home, what are you going to do?"
"I'll figure it out," she says, and ignores the growing realization that this seems like more of a long-term job—one she'll hold for several years, if she leaves it at all. "I'll be fine, I promise."
Aunt Kathryn sobs, then, and does not try to hide it—she closes the distance between them in a few quick steps, pulling Amy into a tight hug. "I know I'm not your mum," she says into her hair, and Amy stiffens. Though Aunt Kathryn has dealt with intense grief before (for her husband died before Amy was born), they don't often talk about Amy's mother for the pain it still causes the both of them. "But you're my daughter, now. And sometimes I worry that Lyndsay wouldn't approve of how I've raised you."
"You've raised me fine," Amy says immediately, trying to keep the sudden tears out of her voice. "This is just—something I have to do."
"Will you promise me you'll come home?" she asks, even more quietly, and Amy hesitates here, because she's not sure she can promise this—but she knows exactly what her aunt needs to hear, to put her heart at ease, to assuage the worries of her sister's judgment.
"I promise," she says, and only hugs her aunt tighter.
.
.
Her bags are packed by Wednesday night, sitting in the front hall—containing a good portion of her wardrobe, personal items, and electronics (though she suspects they will be encrypted and re-encrypted once she arrives at her new home). Nestled in among her sweaters is a worn, brown teddy bear and a stack of printed photographs of her family that she will fight tooth and nail to keep, no matter what security measures these people demand of her.
Aunt Kathryn cries all night though she does not threaten to stop her, and Teresa came home Monday night when she heard what was happening—and went through nearly the same conversation with Amy as her mother did. But by that point, Amy had gone through the data stick, staring with wide eyes at mobile suit schematics she can't hope to understand—truly vast archives of military and governmental histories that she would have no hope of reading on her own.
Tucked in amongst them all is data on the KPSA, detailed information on Krugis' last months, and Amy had to steel herself before reading that particular file. But she comes out all the more determined (even if she's wiping angry tears from her eyes by the end), and she thinks that if she is to have a shot at changing the world, this organization—with its vast resources and bottomless bank accounts—is probably it.
Her brothers, she thinks, would understand, even if they wouldn't have done the same. Neil was always so cheerful and carefree and kind, and she's sure he would never even consider joining such a group—even should he have survived them all. His heart was far too big, and he was always so gentle in everything he did. The idea of Neil behind the throttles of a mobile suit is too strange for her to even consider. But he loved her—this she has never doubted—and even if he would have been upset, he would have tried to understand.
Lyle, she thinks, might have understood better, with his more cynical view of the world (even if it was only ever limited to their family and classmates, young as he was). She's not sure whether he would have followed in her footsteps, but with his quicker temper, his tendency to lash out against any perceived injustice…he may or may not have done the same, but he would have understood.
Her mother would have cried, just as Aunt Kathryn did—and her father would have been upset, probably beyond words. But they wouldn't have been able to stop her, just as her aunt couldn't, and she hopes that, in time, they would have come to understand what she was trying to achieve.
A place without terrorism and without warfare, without governments so corrupt as to create those awful conflicts in the first place; who wouldn't wish for such a world?
Her aunt helps her load her things into the car and drives her up to Dublin and its international airport, and Amy's hands are clasped tightly in her lap as she stares out the window in silence. The few times she's mustered the courage to look at her aunt, there were tears on her face—and eventually Amy's courage fails her. Looking at the countryside she won't see for months or years is easier than looking at the family she's leaving behind.
They put her bags on a cart and then Aunt Kathryn is pulling her into a crushing hug, even tighter than on the night she announced her departure, and does not let go for several seconds. "Promise you'll write," she says, and Amy hesitates, "and call, and—and visit, whenever you can. Teresa and I, you don't need to call ahead—just show up at the door. We'll be happy to have you."
"I will," she says, remembers the expression on that man's face as he explained their secrecy rules, and wonders how much external communication she's going to be allowed. "You don't need to worry, okay?"
"I'm always going to worry," she says quietly, and hugs her tighter for several moments before finally letting go. "I love you, and—and I want you to know how proud of you I am. Your parents—they would have been proud, too, more than they could say. They would have been glad to see their daughter changing the world."
Amy blinks a couple of times, feels a lump rising in her throat, and struggles to swallow it away. "I love you too," she says, very quietly, and reaches for the handle of the cart; she walks into the airport, and does not look back.
