Proofread version. There shouldn't be any more errors; if you detect one please contact me (in email or review).
There is no greater tyranny than that of creator to created.
-Kira Hibiki
---
"I hear they will be ready soon."
"Well, as the original subject was so…effective…"
A bleak chuckle. "A good word."
"…We could not simply ignore the results of the procedure. Though we've exercised much more caution this time."
He smiled in the darkness where there was no one to see. "They are near-perfect. Recently the eldest has even come to terms with the accelerated aging program. And, best of all, they see reason. Throughout history military technologies have been adopted into civilian life. This, this new thrust will soon legitimate our entry into a greater world – two of our most pressing dilemmas crushed in one swoop!"
"But will you have the tools on hand? I've heard you've been having supply problems lately – raiders from the Junk Guild, was it?"
"Yes, it's somewhat abnormal behavior for them. Regardless, they will desist once the first model finishes production: they are not suicidal."
"And the models? How are the designs coming along?"
The mask came off, a slender plastic slip of blue and red, and a pale white finger spun it to the side. It drifted, rotating slowly, caught the light.
"Finished."
"Oh? So soon? I would not have thought the small cabal of scientists you cobbled together would be so efficient…"
"You forget that my team is composed only of those in the top of their fields. But, more importantly, you forget that the subjects are scientists as well. They, as a whole, have vastly surpassed my own team."
"You have me slavering, old friend. When will they be out?"
"They will be ready in months. Possibly even before the close of this war."
"And, their first mission?"
He sighed, leaning back in the wheelchair. The leather creaked, absorbing his statuesque form, and he looked down at his shattered leg, loose and flaccid against the shining wheels. His hands came together, folded across his chest.
"Kill the original."
The other shrieked, utterly shriven from self-control, his laughter bounding tinny into the speakers and off the slate-steel walls.
---
"I was ten when I first escaped the PLANTs. I remember knocking two men unconscious and stealing their craft – by then I had realized what killing people meant. It was naïve. They regained consciousness and alerted Control. When the soldiers boarded I ended up massacring them all."
She was looking at him and her eyes were trembling, but her gaze was very intense. He felt a lightness in his fingertips. If she kept looking at him that way, he thought he might-
She snapped out of her trance. "Kira…what you've been through is-"
"No."
A question on her face. He sighed. An innocent misinterpretation – though I suppose I should be glad for that.
"It's not that. I don't mind what's been done to me – it's long over and the only remnants are chemicals in my brain. People…get used to things. After this long, even the skeleton has been assimilated seamlessly."
His breath was loud in his ears.
"Sorry. That was irrelevant. Where were we with the crew?"
She leaned forward, arm bridging the gap between them, and laid her hand on his. He stared at it for a moment, then looked at her. She was terrified.
Her tongue came out to wet her lips. He forgot what he was going to say.
"I should be the one apologizing, Kira. I thought you were a horrible creature, a mass murderer. But for the life you've lived you're…you have every right to hate everyone." Her voice fluttered like hummingbird wings.
"But you don't. You always try to help people – Norman, the crew, your pack. People that were overlooked. You're a good person, Kira. Please don't hate yourself. You, most of all-"
What is she talking about? I was made to be an assassin, and I rebelled, and now I kill people for a living. The past is no excuse. Morality dictates we act correctly regardless of our past conditions. I kill people. Cause them to be killed for my own survival. The crew would be still alive if I hadn't involved them. The pack as well: that killer wanted me.
Results matter. What I intended – does it change the condition of the victim if I kill out of altruism or sadism? She is being irrational. Stockholm Syndrome. Yes, it's a common enough-
Her fingers tightened around his. They were so soft. Had she been speaking?
She had moved, was sitting beside him. He drew in a breath, smelled cherries and lotus. She was shaking. He smelled fear like an undercurrent of blood.
He turned to regard her. Her lip quivered, and then she slumped. "I'm sorry for interrupting you, Kira."
This was bewildering. Most people had enough survival instinct not to get this close to him.
Still, he didn't think he could kill her. Not now.
---
Get a hold of yourself, Lacus!
Kira was staring at their hands again. Was that his way of telling her to let go? Maybe she was gripping too hard.
He had stopped listening halfway through, brow furrowing up as if he were in intense thought. She held back a sigh. She didn't think she was getting through at all.
Lacus was about to cry. Kira's perfect memory catalogued every single wrong done to him, and they weighed on her chest like stones, his eyes so angry and miserable and wounded it was hard to breathe, and he probably hated her now – she saw what his reaction had been to pity, in his chambers – touching him had been a mistake, he hated being touched, and- and she wasn't up to this, couldn't do this, his wounds were so deep and terrible and he was so casual about them there was just no way-
"Are you alright?" He looked at her quizzically.
She inhaled.
"Maybe this is too much." He looked wary, his voice unusually kind. "I'll leave you alone. I can see that I'm bothering you." He dislodged his hand.
She heard the defeat in his tone – he probably unsettled others a lot. She wasn't especially horrid for being too weak for him.
No! This is your chance to prove that you're different!
And so she gulped, pushing down the jitteriness and the tears, and grabbed his forearm.
His head snapped back, eyes wide as if he had just been shot.
She remembered what he had said and felt sorrow and strength. He deserves to be heard. "No, Kira, I'm fine. I insist, actually. Are you trying to get out of what you said you owed me?"
The amethyst orbs were befuddled, for a moment, and then with a quickening of her heart she thought they flashed amused.
"You caught my tactic very rapidly, Miss Clyne."
She gave a smile and felt the terror burn away.
There was a huge, sudden lurch, and she felt her stomach fly into her throat as she splayed forward ungracefully, landing on Kira's chest. A spill of hair trailed off her back and onto his arm. He was warm.
Oh no. He really dislikes contact. What should I do? I hope he doesn't think I planned that.
He blinked, completely distracted from the situation by her position across his chest. If it weren't for his shirt he could feel her cheek against his skin, limning with heat…
But no. How to extricate them both from this situation, with a minimum of embarrassment? If she would just get up, the issue would be resolved. Survival instinct nagged in the back of his mind – that lurch could not have been normal – but didn't seem to matter compared to the enormity of Lacus Clyne this close to him, breathing, her bosom pushing slightly against his abdomen.
Shouldn't she spring back and offer an apology, or something? This is highly irregular.
Enough. He had to fix this before the urge to embrace her overpowered his reason.
Gently, he reached out, gripped her yielding shoulders, and levered her back upright. Then he searched her face in the awkward silence, looking for an explanation.
He found none. And he couldn't detect fear or anger without first taking a whiff of her scent, which was heady and distracted him to other thoughts. This is stupid. Why am I assigning significance to a simple fall? There are security issues to be addressed. I should go check if I am needed.
She spoke, snapping him from his train of thought: "I'm sorry. I don't know what overcame me there. Thank you for…setting me upright again." A wavering smile, irresolute blue eyes.
Is she still this terrified?
Kira supposed it was about the norm for their depth of contact, but somehow he felt a little disappointed. He had, after all, tried to make her comfortable – something he had never attempted with a hostage. They were generally quickly gotten rid of, or rapidly outlived their usefulness.
Perhaps it is that kind of thinking that leads her to fear you?
He shrugged, sighed, and was about to speak when the walls turned the color of blood. A wailing drone flooded the ship and he stood, startled. There was an insistent rapping on the door, and quickly he tapped the release button.
Mwu la Flaga, one hand upraised (no doubt to knock again), opened his mouth, closed it for a second, then motioned for Kira to step out into the corridor. With a backwards glance at Lacus, Kira did so.
"Zaft forces and some local insurgents are playing cat-and-mouse in our backyard. Obviously we can't let them continue."
"Do we kill both?"
Mwu shot him a puzzled look. "No, just the Zaft forces…haven't you heard the phrase 'my enemy's enemy is my friend?''
Yes, why do you think I chose to land on the Archangel? Moron. "If the insurgents are being crushed by Zaft, they can't possibly be of much help to us, can they?"
Mwu sighed and started running towards the hangars, patting Kira on the back as he passed. "Not unless we save them first!"
If he's trying to act paternal he's failing miserably.
Kira turned the other way for a moment before making up his mind.
No need to antagonize the command of this ship by refusing to assist.
Kira took off after Mwu, easily overtaking the larger man. After he had talked to Lacus he felt...lighter.
--
Lacus exhaled loudly and flopped back on her bed, utterly exhausted. Weariness had seeped deep into the marrow of her bones and she stared unseeingly at the walls.
That didn't go nearly as well as I'd hoped.
She had completely frozen up after the fall, and now Kira was gone again – that was a good thing, she suddenly decided. She could use the time to regroup, maybe plan a different approach…
The walls grew blurry and she fell back, head nestled in the drowsy softness of the pillows, and she made a halfhearted attempt at fighting the weight of her eyelids before the world became dim.
---
Let's see, now…from where emerge the roots of war?
The end of the Anno Domini (A.D.) timeline was marked by massive stagnation of the world economy as petroleum reserves emptied. In the bloody fury of the Reconstruction War – a conflict that makes the current look like a salad-fork fight – the first outlines of today's terrestrial power structure emerged. Ethno-religious strife was the cause – no surprise there.
The deployment of nuclear weapons in the Kashmir region, along with the rampaging new strain of influenza dubbed "S," devastated humanity to the point where even politicians began to see the semblance of reason.
Type S Influenza wiped out hundreds of millions; combined with war casualties humankind lost nearly a billion of its number. Baptism of fire, indeed, for the Cosmic Era. Nine years into the new timeline, the Reconstruction War is over, the birth throes of our new age ended.
The first major space station humans orbited was named after the Norse world-tree, Yggdrasil, positioned at Langrange Point 1. Sad to say it was destroyed in one of the opening acts of our present war: 2/22, Cosmic Era 70.
From CE 10 on, a massive space colony mobilization occurred on Earth, resulting not only in the construction of the Copernicus Lunar Base but also the deployment of the exploration ship Tchaikovsky, manned by 'first' Coordinator George Glenn.
The man was an idiot. With his overbloated, Messianic ego, he announced the existence of Coordinators – a nonsensical term for genetically modified humans, and perverted from its original intended meaning anyway – and proceeded to rocket off into space, most assuredly patting himself on the back the whole way. One would be hard-pressed to create a more chaotic means of announcing our existence.
Obviously the world was hurled into tumult. Existing "Coordinators" kept their mouths shut and pretended to be highly talented natural-born prodigies. Environmental groups and the fanatically religious foamed at the mouth. CE 15: Lobbying organization Blue Cosmos begins its degeneration from savagely militant pressure organization with a veneer of credibility to savagely militant terrorist organization comprised mainly of inferiority-complex sufferers, weak-minded political buffoons, and the insane.
Partly due to their efforts, partly due to paranoia, a conference was convened during CE 16, banning the partial or total modification of genomes in fetuses. Obviously, a few people flouted these rules: mainly the very rich, who wanted only the best for their children.
In an incident bizarrely reminiscent of the abortion controversies centuries past, a hospital secretly creating Coordinators was set ablaze in CE 17, bringing the tetchy issue again to the fore. Strangely enough, nothing much resulted from this, and in five years the news was overshadowed by the paradigm-destroying introduction of Evidence 01, courtesy of pompous spacefaring fool George Glenn: the very first 'credible' indication of extraterrestrial life. It is interesting to note that several formulas proposing the near-impossibility of our solitude in the universe had been developed by the early 2000s AD: more evidence, I suppose, on the idiocy of mankind. I wonder sometimes if seeing is believing for the blind.
During the year of Glenn's discovery, Lacus' father was born in the Kingdom of Scandinavia. The Clyne family has an interesting pedigree – as far as Aristotle can tell, the records show that their name was changed from "Kline" in the declining stages of the AD era. Furthermore, a connection can be made to prominent 2000s AD pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, previously GlaxoWellcome and SmithKline Beckman: the legacy of funds and technical expertise may have contributed to the family's decision to attempt the Coordinator process.
I wonder if Lacus knows that.
Patrick Zala, one of the men who commissioned my creation, was born the next year. He is one of the few men responsible for my design who have not yet died. I shall have to kill him, if I ever get the chance. Besides the obvious security concerns over his existence, he was and probably continues to be a genocidal lunatic. I remember several times during Conditioning that he attempted to integrate his beliefs with my core mindset – while I was supposed to be safely under hypnosis, of course. No doubt the death of his wife has brought this inner beast out in an unpleasant manner.
He was a very poor persuader. Not much given to logic either. Only the weak would follow such a man. I kind of enjoyed his visits, though. He was amusing and he had the most ridiculous eyebrows. And they generally stopped beating me on the days before his visits, to give my bones and organs time to recover. I was a pretty slow healer until eight, requiring nearly a whole week to regenerate an amputated limb.
But I digress.
Evidence 01 was relocated to Zodiac research station, Lagrange Point 5 – the future birthplace of the PLANTs. Intensive study began, running parallel to the Palestine Conference, in which major religious figures worldwide convened. The conclusions of both study and Conference led to a worldwide wane in the power of religious authorities, and thus the first Coordinator boom began. Rioting was kept to a minimum, the main bodies of dissent comprised of parents too poor to afford the modifications and the more zealous chapters of Blue Cosmos.
Cosmic Era 35: the Atlantic Federation finished construction of Ptolemaeus Lunar Base, attracting international ire. It quickly quelled its critics with the introduction of prototype mobile armors. The Eurasian Federation and Republic of East Asia rapidly followed suit. A chilling of international relations lead to a space arms race, with the Eurasian Federation establishing a preliminary base on the asteroid Artemis.
George Glenn, working alongside major Earth powers, began construction of the PLANTs in CE 38. They would serve as resource and production colonies for previously exotic technologies now entering the world market.
In the years to follow, the First Coordinator Generation would establish complete dominance in nearly every field of achievement, drawing intense fire from Natural critics and the newly revitalized Blue Cosmos. The Second Coordinator Generation, progeny of the first, would soon prove just as astounding as their parents.
CE 41: The man who I was programmed to kill, Murata Azrael, was born.
Patrick Zala and Siegel Clyne, cooperating on the construction of the PLANTs, met. The PLANTs were soon finished, and would be completely autonomous if they were allowed to produce food. With no military to speak of and minimal political representation, the manufacturing colonies were easy targets for Blue Cosmos terrorism. In the midst of this chaos, Al Da Flaga approached my father, and, promising him the funds necessary to create me, requested a clone of himself.
Thus, Rau La Flaga (now Le Creusete) was made.
If he is a clone, then he is a Natural, seeing as how Al Da Flaga was most definitely a Natural. This…simply does not explain his piloting capabilities. What martial talent could he possibly have inherited from the genes of a businessman turned politician?
No more time to muse. The thunder outside was by no means natural. The launch doors hissed open, revealing a maw of blazing yellow light, and as the Strike was disengaged from its locks it gripped the sword over its back, ready to draw.
Hunched down, the sun was less glaring. Flames sparked on the rails as he launched.
Thanks for reading! Please review!
Kira's little history review is mostly canon; there were one or two aspects that I made up.
Meh. I need to work on my dialogue skills. It's easier to write ten battle scenes instead of a single Kira/Lacus emotional scene...guess it's cause I'm a guy. --
Anyone else find it strange that Mwu was unable to fly an MS without Kira's OS, but Rau was better than Kira in a CGUE, despite being a clone (assuming cloning involves no genetic modification, as that would kind of defeat the purpose) of a Natural? Al Da Flaga must have been an insanely gifted pilot as well as a businessman and politician.