Recollection

- - - -

All I remembered about Shinn Asuka was how quiet he was back in our academy days. I often found him dazing off with his eyes everywhere but the teacher's direction. I remembered how he always brought a pink, girly looking cell-phone everywhere he went. He flipped it open back and forth so many times; the flipping sound would make you pull your hair out. The cell-phone was out-to-date, and obviously not one that any normal boy should caught dead using. One day, a classmate made fun of his cell phone, hanging it over Shinn's furious face. Shinn, whenever he's not talking was like any other boy, gentle, and could be harsh at times. I've even seen him blushing in front of other girls.

Later, the classmate (thankfully a boy) had to leave the school early for several broken ribs and fractured jaw. Rumors of how Shinn's family was killed in frontline of Orb must have reached everyone by the next month, because by the time the boy got out of the hospital, the first thing he did was bowing his head so low to Shinn that Asuka himself flushed a not so healthy red.

He wasn't someone that could live for himself.

That's what I concluded from a pink, worn-out, out-to-date cell phone that he didn't let anybody to lay a finger on, and brought it everywhere with him like a good-luck charm.

But he let me touched the pink cell phone as he showed me the old, digital photos of his family that his late sister Mayu had taken, after the officials informed me how Meyrin had committed treason and needed to be shot down along with the traitor Athrun Zala. He told me with a very soft, raspy voice that the contraption was Mayu's treasure, and his lifesaver.

I'm sorry, Lunamaria, he whispered to my hair repeatedly as his arm circled around my shoulders, pulling me to a warm embrace. We were friends, casualties of war and so much more than that.

Shinn Asuka has taken my happiness away, and he was there to share a fate with me.