Disclaimer: I own nothing of GS/GSD, but if I did, I would try and give Athrun's respective Red Gundams a dye-job, because red's a little too flashy for my liking. Oh, Akatsuki too, I get the feeling it's a homage to Star War's golden android, can't remember it's name. Horrid gold, it is.

Chapter 21

Athrun Zala was in a bad mood. Even Yzak Joule, who didn't even notice when he was in a bad mood himself, could see that very clearly, his friend was in a bad mood. He didn't slam any doors or bash chairs or yell like what Yzak would have done of course, but the man was listless and uninterested in anything other than his work. Which was stupid, Yzak concluded.

His friend had arrived back in PLANT about a month and two weeks ago, looking weary and drawn, which he had said was due to the workload. Yzak wasn't the type who lacked an ounce of thinking power in his head of course, he knew his friend was lying through his face.

Yzak had walked into the office one random day, and caught Chairman Zala doodling on some official scripts. Yzak had cleared his throat, and Athrun had sprung up in shock and swiftly hidden the paper from sight, but Yzak wasn't blind either, he knew the chairman of ETERNITY had been writing her name all over the paper. He hadn't said anything, just watched his friend sweat buckets with slits for eyes and hear Athrun ask shakily, "How can I help you, Commander Joule?"

The guy was obviously guilty of something.

He looked up at Shiho arranging some test-tubes of fuel the GOUF could function on and asked rudely just to get a kick out of it, "Where's the idiot?"

She didn't even bother looking up at him, just continued arranging the test-apparatus and answered briefly, "Which idiot, Yzak?"

He couldn't stand her cool attitude and screeched, "The idiot's just an idiot, why's there a need to know other idiots other than him?"

"So it's a male idiot," she concluded very wisely and calmly, then went back to rearranging some wires plugged to the OS of a GOUF.

He was going to blow up, he could feel it coming so he quickly turned while seated on some broken computer he had been resting on while watching his fiancé do some work, and counted one to ten and breather deeply. He wondered if Shiho's German heritage had anything to do with her stoic nature. Then he thought of her parents and concluded that it wasn't the German heritage at all. His mother had suddenly just told him to go and marry his childhood playmate and friend; he had kept quiet about it, not quite sure if her parents were telling her to do the same.

Of course he didn't mind getting hitched to her at all, she was very intelligent and incredibly attractive, not in the coventional way, of course, but she had a razor-sharp wit he looked out for and found in people only very rarely. And Shiho was the kind he hadn't gone for at first but had found himself more and more drawn to her.

She had told him she despised him once when he had accidentally knocked over her carefully-arranged tests and he had spent nearly a month trying to apologise to her. With Dearka's help of course, without his best friend, he would have been lost already.

Dearka had suggested flowers and chocolates, the kind of stuff most females went for and Yzak had tried it at first and failed miserably when the flowers were sent back to him with a note written and attached, "Don't bother." and the chocolates had been opened and one had been eaten and the rest remaining intact with another note attached, "These chocolates are expired, aren't they?"

And then Dearka had figured out Shiho Hahenfuss wasn't the conventional kind of girl, so he had made Yzak get her a pictorial calculator which was the bst for solving quadratic equations in seconds and a GOUF specimen chart.

She had appeared in his office in the morning, saluted stiffly and then said very calmly, "Sorry I got mad too."

And then a week later, she had proposed to him in front of all his troops, and he had nearly gone into a state of shock-induced coma.

Yzak scowled at the insanity of life and heard Shiho typing something on her keyboard. Willing himself not to lose the mature side he had achieved and acquired through the two years after the first war, he breathed in and out slowly.

Then he turned back to Shiho who was polishing the screen very carefully and said calmly, "Where's Athrun Zala, Shiho?"

"I don't know, I don't keep a sensor of him on me, Commander" she said absently, not bothering to avert her eyes from the screen to at least look at him.

"You watch your mouth, lady," he snarled, "being a good friend and the future wife doesn't mean you get to be smart with the commander."

"It's true," she was saying calmly, still not looking at him while she climbed onto a chair in her male uniform to get something on a shelf she couldn't reach, "I don't keep a sensor of him on me."

Her long, dark hair was swishing tantalisingly above his head, neatly tied with a pink ribbon at the end, and he resisted the urge to fetch the pair of scissors a distance away to snip the end of for fun. He was a grown-up, not some kitten itching for yarn to be dangled! He wished he hadn't given her the pink ribbon now, it was too distracting.

"Why don't you wear a skirt or something that ZAFT allows for female redcoats, like maybe Officer Hawke's miniskirt?" he snapped, trying to pick a fight with her.

"I'm already wearing a skirt," she said, her voice muffled by the pilot helmet she had put on her head to try for size.

"That's part of the coat, not a skirt!" he yelled, while she slipped the helmet off and turned it upside down, looking at its inner structure.

"I knew that already, Commander, but since all of you don't wear skirts, I thought I should do likewise," she said emotionlessly, now fetching a long tree branch she had randomly picked up and prodding it into the helmet.

"We're males, Officer; of course we don't wear sodding skirts!"

"Why not, Commander?" she enunciated clearly, now standing up to fetch a joystick from the corner. Then she fetched a rag and polished it very meticulously.

"I-I don't know!" he spluttered angrily.

"Well, then why shouldn't females wear male clothes, if males can't explain the reason why males can't wear female clothes?"

She had trapped him, so he picked on another issue she had brought up first- the sensor thing.

"So you keep a sensor of someone at all?" Yzak growled, irritated but still pushing on for a fight.

"No," she was saying while she located the file and pulled it out, still not giving him any attention, "I don't keep sensors of anyone except one of you, Commander."

And then she produced a little screen from her pocket where there were two flashing lights, one red and one red, and one blue, and they were right next to each other in the same office.

He promptly fell of his broken computer-seat in shock, and looked up just in time to see a pair of shoes near his nose.

Yzak quickly got up with as much dignity as he possessed, and looked at Athrun.

"What are you staring at?" he said emotionlessly. He had matured from the time when he was seventeen, and was able to be calm and controlled for most of the time but in private, Shiho still brought out his worst side, and he loved her for it. With her, he lost his sanity, and that was how they both liked it.

"Nothing," Athrun said tonelessly, "Just checking if you have file DQI 192774 HAVT. I need it for the new blueprint of the ZAKU the new troops are to be trained with."

Shiho was instantly crossing over with the file in her hands and saluting to him, and he responded likewise.

Then he took the file and turned to leave. No attempt to make conversation, no smile, no nothing.

Yzak watched him leave with Shiho, who had finally stopped doing God-knows-what and stood in silence by his side.

"Will he be alright?" Yzak wondered to himself, then grew red with embarrassment when he realised he had said the words aloud in front of his fiancé.

She was looking up at him in surprise and wonder although she didn't say anything. She knew better than that. She would store it in her extensive memory and use it against him some other time when they were arguing, that is if he could rile her up enough to fight with him.

"What do you think of Chairman Atha?" she said without malice, slipping a hand into the crook of his arm and catching him off guard.

He knew the way she expressed affection was quite a deviant from the usual person's since she had presented him a small, model-scale GOUF's head after he had shyly slipped her a box of sweets in herYFX-200 CGUE DEEP Arms during Valentine's Day, but she was adorable in her quirkiness and her intelligence. (Later, the GOUF head had been proven to be a mini neutron-jammer.)

"She's intelligent and pretty enough if you can stuff her into a dress, but she's too prickly and likes her freedom too much," he said, not unkindly.

"About the prickly part, were you effectively describing yourself, Commander?" Shiho said calmly, and then when he gaped at her, she took her hand away from his and marched back to her test-tubes where she refused to say anything for another hour even when he was goading her to the best of his abilities.

Back in his office, some distance away, in the headquarters of the leaders of ZAFT and the council of ETERNITY, Athrun flipped through the file Shiho had passed him and admired her handiwork. She was basically almost a male version of Kira, scientific and precise in her judgements, and still child-like at times.

No wonder she appealed to his hot-headed friend so much, he hadn't even complained when Ezalia Joule had arranged for him to marry the daughter of the military family of Hahenfuss. Ezalia was shrewd herself. She knew Shiho Hahenfuss, then already a friend to Yzak, would rein her son in very nicely, and Ezalia would be bouncing a grandchild on her lap soon.

Her work on the DQI 192774 HAVT Zaku was astonishing. She had programmed the Zakus to have better abilities in speed and superior manoeuvre abilities with smooth controls that would enable the new troops ZAFT had trained as an elite class to learn at twice the speed recruits had before. And she had probably done it without breaking a sweat.

Athrun took down some notes on his QUINd and prepared to include the references of the type of controls the new Zaku into his report due to PLANT in a few days time. The new class of soldiers had yet to be named, although they were issued the same red uniform the elite in ZAFT wore with an additional badge of beaten silver into the outline of an up-turned triangle. The three vertices represented EA, PLANT and ORB.

He finished off the report and drank the dregs of his tea. He had refused to drink coffee ever since he came back to PLANT a month ago. He couldn't bring himself to drink coffee any more. When he was tired, he would just go and wash his face instead, no more coffee, no more. He threw away the packet of coffee-sweets his secretary had given to him in a bid to tempt to get him to drink coffee so she could test her brewing skills and had snapped at her for the first time in her working history and then she had suddenly became a star-worker.

Athrun never had to re-edit her work anymore, it was all prefectly done the way it should have been ages ago, but he hadn't complained then because extra work meant less opportunities to think of Cagalli.

He wasn't trying to forget Cagalli, he was sure of that. He knew he couldn't anyway. He was just trying to prepare himself for the worst when this month was over, and then he crossed over to check the calendar and saw that the date to leave for ORB was exactly three weeks from then.

They had made the arrangements already. The new troops would leave with some Redcoats to go to ORB to train to broaden their range of skills and they would be released after two years each to go back to PLANT and a new batch would come. He would be training them too. PLANT had informed him of him tasks in the long run, and he knew it wouldn't be without the existing paperwork he had on his hands now. At least his pay would match the amount of work he had to do. Not that he cared anymore.

He had to be prepared to be worked to death, although admittedly, it would be easy to work if he was working while knowing he had someone waiting for him in a warm home in ORB. He didn't say anything of course, he wasn't an idiot, and besides, nobody would listen anyway.

Athrun flipped open some papers he had randomly gotten on his hands and saw a model of the new Zaku being published there. Then he remembered that Shiho had told him to see some function she had put in, written on page sixteen.

So he groped for the file he had put under the pile of paperwork on his desk and pulled it out, flipping to page sixteen to try and see the function she had mentioned, and as he pulled it towards him while flipping, a picture fell out.

It was a newspaper cutting, a picture of him, Kira, Lacus and Cagalli in the gardens when they had all been in EA Berlin a month ago. He saw a picture of himself smiling stiffly and looked at Cagalli and saw that she was blushing very slightly, almost unnoticeable if one didn't look carefully enough, and smiling shyly at the camera, also a little stiff and unsure of herself. Then he looked carefully at her eyes and saw they weren't dull like he thought they would be at that time, but were wide and surprised at the invasion of cameras and the sudden appearance of Lacus and Kira.

He stared hard at her face and thought fondly to himself that she looked like a child with her eyes so wide and innocent. He wanted to keep her that way for as long as possible, and then he realised that he had been sitting there with a newspaper clipping in his hands for along time and quickly stuffed it back between pages sixteen and seventeen, quite forgetting that Shiho had told him to look at page sixteen specifically.

But later, he realised that she had planned this. She was smart alright.

Then he picked up the phone, and scarcely before he knew it, he had dialled the ORB government office and was requesting to be put through to the chairman's personal line. He gave his name and designation in a rush, not caring that the desk-secretary could be taping the conversation and selling it to the fan club he knew existed to spread news around of him and ORB's Chairman. ASUCAGA something something ridiculous. It was ridiculous, no not the name, but the fact that the general populace was rooting for them and they weren't rooting for themselves.

He knew very well that he could have requested to see her through a direct connection from the QUINd, but he hadn't though of that until he had been put through to the ORB office.

He heard the line being out through and wondered if he should put it down in case he made a fool of himself, but then he heard her voice loud and clear through the system linking earth and space together and croaked, "Hello, Cagalli."

She was at the other end feeling awkward but readily answered, "Hello, Athrun, is this about business or you just calling to chat?"

He was tempted to say it was business and bluff his way through it all, but he knew he was quite incapable of that at that time, so he said a little jerkily, "I'm calling to chat. Do you have time on your hands now?"

"Yes," she answered very shyly, "I finished my tasks for the day, so I'm- I'm free to talk for as long from now to whenever we're done, that is, it depends on how long you want to talk for."

Athrun wanted to shout 'forever!' into the phone but quickly clamped his mouth shut and then said, "Uh, so what's going on in ORB now?"

She replied instantly with a chuckle, "Oh about the same as ever, lots of improvements to be made here and there, and then the army's getting all hyped up to receive ZAFT! Amagi's been talking about the stuff he'll drill into the soldiers when they get there. He's been polishing those bazookas all week! Oh, and Rainie's dating Vino, you know Vino from the Minerva? He came to ORB just a few weeks ago, because you guys sent him over here to try and program certain Mobile Suits to something more comfortable for the ZAFTies to train in the forests.

I saw him at a garage and I ran over and invited him for tea, so he came over and had to pass this security test, then he promptly fell head over heels for Rainie. She hated him at first, because she thought I was interested in recruiting him as a bodyguard, apparently Vino can fight quite well when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, but he's not a good shot at guns. But then she realised that she liked him very, very much and they've been going out since. They squabble a lot, like puppies, you know?"

Then she paused for breath, realising that she was rambling in an effort to keep him on the line and to break the awkward silence.

And he had to come in and added on instantly, "I knew he would go for somebody like Rainie. Vino always liked that sort, he had a crush on Lunamaria, then on Meyrin, then on Lacus, but it was more of Mia Campbell he had a crush on. He goes for the cute stuff; he's like a kid himself, always looking up to Shinn and the others. I know Lunamaria once got him to do a thousand odd jobs for her by just pouting at him. Does he still have that patch of orange?"

"Ah, yes, he does, he said he didn't dye it himself, his mother thought it was cute and arranged for his hair to be modified that way when he was still a zygote, so he's been stuck with the orange squirt name for his whole life, but it's okay, since ZAFT knows it's natural, they never hound on him or anything for inappropriate attire." She said, thinking that she would be stuck on what to say at some juncture, so she had better say as much as she could for now.

Her hands were in her lap, twisting at the table cloth and releasing it and retwisting it.

"Oh, I was wondering how much he had bribed Arthur Trine to not get on his case for the orange hair, but looks like he didn't have to bribe Arthur at all." He replied smoothly.

She didn't see any room to reply, so she was silent after she made a sound in assent.

He was quiet for a bit, knowing that he couldn't delay what he had called up to find out, then thought to himself, 'what the heck' and bravely plunged into it asking a little hesitantly, "Have you forgotten that ETERNITY and PLANT will post me to be in ORB three weeks from now?"

She was silent after that, and his heart was beating painfully with suspense and tension. Three weeks of silence and not knowing how she would respond when he came to ORB to live for the next ten years. He couldn't wait that long to be sure, he had called because he needed to be certain there and then.

Just to be sure she had heard him, he repeated his question again.

Holding his breath, he heard silence, then a tentative "No, I haven't forgotten."

Cagalli had said she hadn't forgotten that ZAFT and ETERNITY would arrive in ORB exactly three weeks from then, although it had been understood that the chairman of ORB couldn't possibly forget something so important and instrumental in ORB and PLANT relations.

They both knew she hadn't forgotten and wouldn't forget, but that was just a question masking other meanings hidden into it. It was a question that held so much in it, it was a two-way time-bomb in itself, the kind that would either explode or just fizzle out.

They both knew that three weeks would be agony for him to wait while hanging in suspense. They both knew why he had asked if she had forgotten that he would arrive in ORB in three weeks time. They both knew what that question masked. They both knew what he meant when he asked.

There was a prolonged silence, and Athrun was sure he was going into hypertension.

She was still silent although they could hear each other breathing heavily down the line on the other side.

As he was wondering how to continue, she whispered into the phone, "Have you done a pro-and-con-chart to make an important decision before?"

He was wondering if she had lost her mind, but decided to humour her, just in case she was changing the subject, and answered, "I think so, in school, that is."

"Do you know how it works?" she said, sounding breathless but terribly determined at the same time.

"Yes," he said, wondering what the world was going on, "you list the pros and the cons, and then you count the number of pros and cons, and take the decision with more pros then cons, unless the decision with more cons than pros have one very important pro that you must have at the end of making the decision. Am I correct?"

Athrun heard more silence, and opened his mouth to ask if she was alright at the other side, then he heard her answer, "Yes you are. Spot-on, actually."

Still wondering why she had suddenly brought up something so random, he paused, ready to ask her why she had started talking about it, but then he heard her enunciate very softly but clearly, so clear that he couldn't miss it even if she was on Earth and he was in deep space, "I want to be happy."

He paused and repeated what she had said in his mind, trying to figure out if she was being very, very random or there was some meaning to it.

Then he wanted to ask her something but he heard her suddenly draw herself in, breathe a deep breath and yell very loudly in a terrible rush of words and emotions, "I will wait for you in ORB even if you take forever to come here to where I am!"

And then he felt the numbness somewhere dissipate into a mist and metamorphose into an incredible rush of joy and wild emotions as he imagined her sitting in her office, holding the phone in her hands and her face all red with the effort to shout out what she truly wanted and what she truly felt.

He took in a deep breath too, then promptly yelled down the phone without thinking how ridiculous he would actually sound like on the other side, "I will always be with you forever!"

And then he beamed like he had never done for what seemed like eternity.

What they had shouted to each other was so random, it seemed like they had been born with clouds for brains and could only formulate sentences that had no link to what the other said. But whizzing through some sophisticated system of communication that linked PLANT in deep space and ORB on Earth was a promise of hope and truth.

And that was enough for them.

Then he put down the phone, calmly pushed his chair back and suddenly leapt into the air, pumping his fist wildly and whooping like a hooligan in a manner he knew his parents would never approve of if they had still been around to see him receive the confirmation he had been waiting to get for so long.

And in an office a distance away, Shiho slipped a little piece of metal out of her ear and looked at Yzak.

"What?" he said warily, although he was sensing that she was in a pleasant mood.

"I'll treat you to dinner for tonight," she said mildly, and then she looped her arm through his and silently led him out but not before tossing the earpiece she had used to eavesdrop into a bin where she knew someone would clear it in the next twenty minutes.

Author's notes:

I'm glad some of the reviews so far have been requesting for an Yzak/Shiho cameo, because I had already put it in a long time ago, so it made me quite glad there were people out there interested in them too.

Next up (I'm trying to make this kinda like a spoiler): Cagalli meets Athrun in ORB.

Ah, I stink at this, just R3. okay?

Thanks!