Please see Part 1 for story notes.


2. Mother

After that, it seemed very natural to open up the other boxes of framed photos and photo albums that Athrun had. They sat on the floor of his bedroom, poring through them together.

There was a great piece of Athrun's life that he had missed sharing with his best friend. He was eager to catch up, and so was Kira, who told them both story after story about his own life on Heliopolis.

They did skip over most of the pictures with Nicol in them, mostly taken during training together. This was a part of his life that he could never truly share with Kira, for his sake. The last one was a copy of a photo that Lady Amarfi had taken of her son at his last concert. She had given it to Athrun the last time he visited her, exactly one week after Jachin Due.

Remembering her sad eyes, he said, "I wish I'd known him better. I wish I'd told him more about myself."

Cagalli gripped his arm tightly.

There were several albums of Athrun himself that had been collected by Athrun's mother from their life on the moon. Over half of them featured him and Kira in various locales and costumes.

"I can't believe you still have these..." marveled Kira. He paused to laugh at the two of them, 13 years old, at the aquarium, where Kira had insisted that they both spend part of their lunch money on ridiculously large puffer fish hats.

Athrun raised his eyebrows at the robot bird perched on Kira's shoulder. "You kept that," he said, pointedly.

"You guys are ridiculous," Cagalli commented, and it was hard not to agree.

Athrun discovered, as they paged through the photographs, that he had never truly shared his mother with anyone since her death -- not even with his own father. It was freeing to talk about his mother without the context of the tragedy that had ended her life.

His mother had been the main photographer of the family, so she didn't show up much in the albums. Occasionally, though, a family photo would come up and his mother's face would be there smiling at him. He found himself remembering more and more happy memories of her, and Kira threw in his comments now and then as well. Cagalli was delighted, drinking in the memories as if they were her own.

They came to one photo where both their mothers stood together in front of their children's grade school, young and happy. All three grew quiet.

Cagalli studied the photo with a longing look. "With Kira's mother, right?" Athrun confirmed with a slow nod. "They look sweet. I wish I could have met them." As Athrun remembered, she had grown up with just her father. He felt suddenly lucky that he had had his mother even for so short a time.

Athrun felt Kira fidget next to him, and he thought he knew why.

"You haven't spoken with your parents since Heliopolis, have you?" It was a given that they had not met.

Kira did not answer. He reached out and flipped the page, banishing the photograph from their sight.

Athrun saw Cagalli chewing her lip, looking thoughtful.

"Kira, do you think," she said, "that your mother knew the lady...?"

The three of them stared separately at nothing at all, each of them knowing perfectly well what Cagalli was thinking about. The picture of Cagalli and Kira as infants with the gentle-faced woman had ingrained itself into all of their minds.

"I wonder if there's some way we can find out more about her."

"If only we had a name, at least." Athrun was sure she must be in a database somewhere.

Kira was strangely quiet. "Hibiki," he said.

They both turned startled eyes on him.

"What?" Cagalli demanded, suddenly animated. "How do you know?"

Kira shook his head, looking irritated. "The abandoned--" He bit off the rest of the sentence, but it was enough to pique Athrun's suspicions. "It was just something I... found out. I don't know. Her last name should have been Hibiki."

Athrun and Cagalli shared a telling look. Something had happened to Kira inside the abandoned Mendel colony with Mwu La Fllaga that he would never talk about. He had brought back a photo identical to the one that Chief Representative Uzumi had given Cagalli. And he had also brought back an album containing a few precious pages of other photographs. These included the woman, often dressed in a labcoat, several other scientist types, and a pair of mysterious boys.

Athrun had guessed that there was some clue to Kira and Cagalli's origins there. Whatever had happened, though, it had affected both Kira and Mwu deeply -- especially Kira. They had thought it unwise to pry.

But looking at Kira's tortured look, Athrun wondered if it might be even more unwise to let it rest.

"Kira, you can't run away from it forever." He looked at Cagalli, seeing her pained expression. "Cagalli deserves to know, too."

"Kira, do you know who she was?" Cagalli asked.

Kira tensed but did not speak.

"Please? She's our... She might be my mother."

Still, Kira refused to meet her eyes.

"Do you know what happened to her?"

Kira gulped, then drew a shaky breath. "I think she was... I think she's dead."

Cagalli looked stricken, though Athrun was not surprised. The love the woman in the picture had for the children in her arms had been obvious. Such a mother would never have given up her children unless separated by death.

Kira put his head in his arms, shaking it back and forth. "Everyone involved is dead. Klueze... he told me... awful things. I don't even know if they're true, but..."

Athrun and Cagalli exchanged mystified looks. Cagalli threw her arms around her brother, as if to protect him. "What did he say?" she asked.

Kira leaned into the embrace, taking deep shuddering breaths. "He said all these things about people wanting to be superior, being crazy for it. He told me things about... me..."

Athrun was saddened even as he was concerned for Kira. The proud, collected Commander he had known had become sadly crazed by the end of the war. "What things?"

His voice sounding disbelieving yet frightened, Kira told them everything...

Athrun and Cagalli took in with wide eyes what Commander Klueze had told Kira about himself, about the Hibikis, and the lab, and the experiments to produce the Ultimate Coordinator.

"Klueze said that I had to die. He said that people would find out and want to learn how to make more people like me."

Mind racing, Athrun thought back about how quickly Kira had learned to pilot a mobile suit. He thought about how skilled in combat Kira had become with no training whatsoever. The improvements that Kira had made to Strike Gundam, even considering his work in the research lab with civilian mobile suits, were also remarkable.

Now that he thought about it, he also remembered how easily Kira had kept up in school. He had used to read all the supplementary texts that Athrun's Coordinator tutor gave him cover to cover, and still have time to incite Athrun to goof around with him. Kira's un-assuming personality had always put off any resentment, or even awareness, of his abilities.

It was only when they fought against each other that Athrun recognized what a force Kira was.

If someone discovered how to reproduce the experiment, there was potential for disaster. Already, Coordinators and Naturals were distrustful of each other. How much worse would it be with another 'superior' group of human beings?

When it really came down to it, though, trying to imagine Kira as some sort of superior being was just... well... Truth be told, it made Athrun want to laugh.

"Kira, think about this. You might be able to modify and pilot a mobile suit on the first try, but we all know that you're a crybaby, and an oblivious mess."

"Athrun!" Cagalli scolded, obviously shocked.

Athrun ignored her. "And I'm good with mechanics, but sometimes I don't think things through." He looked at Cagalli. "Cagalli is bright and she has the determination of a rock, but she's more oblivious than you are."

"Hey!" Cagalli protested, but there was no force to it.

"We all have areas where we excel at and other areas where we lack. I don't see any difference between you and me and Cagalli."

Kira showed some animation for the first time. "But..."

"And it isn't as if you could teach anyone how to create another 'Ultimate Coordinator.' Everyone involved in the project disappeared years ago."

"I guess so..." Kira still looked troubled, however. "But... all those babies who died because of me..."

Athrun sighed. "Do you know how many failed embryos and babies perished to create the first Coordinator?"

Both Kira and Cagalli shook their heads.

"There's not much information about George Glenn's creator. Some of our scientists and historians have tried to reconstruct the process, though. As far as they can estimate, the number of failed embryos would have numbered in the hundreds. This is without counting the embryos that were destroyed purposely." He shook his head. "Sacrifices are made for every step forward. It's so-called man-made evolution."

Cagalli's eyes were round. "I had no idea."

Athrun shrugged. "On P.L.A.N.T. the high schools teach it, as part of the theories of genetic manipulation." Despite being a Coordinator himself, Kira had been educated in the Earth Alliance school system growing up, which was written by Naturals. To Kira and Cagalli, gene manipulation was still only a cure for genetic diseases, not taken for granted as a method to improve the human race.

It didn't necessarily justify the sacrifices made, but Athrun saw it as somewhat inevitable.

Kira, however, still looked unconvinced.

Athrun took hold of Kira's shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "Kira, even if some terrible things may have happened in connection to the experiments, all this happened before you were even born.

"If you can forgive Yzak -- and especially me -- for what we did consciously, by choice, then you have to be able to forgive yourself for simply existing."

Tears filled Kira's violet eyes, and Athrun responded to that with gentle comfort, as he always had. Smiling, he squeezed Kira's shoulders. "You know I'm right," he said.

Eyes wet, Cagalli hugged Kira tightly. "Listen to him, Kira."

Closing his eyes within the circle of Cagalli's arms, Kira nodded.

They stayed that way for a long time, all of them connected. Athrun watched as the pain bled slowly out of his friend. To think that Kira, who felt things so strongly, had been carrying this horrible guilt with him for all this time... It made Athrun feel humbled.

"You know what we can do?" Cagalli announced all of a sudden. "We can go back and blow it up, the lab and everything. No evidence left at all."

"Cagalli!" Kira cried, pure shock shaking him out of his stupor as nothing else had.

"Well, why not?" Cagalli asked. "Look," she pressed, "this way we can get rid of any chance that people will re-use that lab."

Even as Athrun was equal parts amused and shocked by Cagalli's plan, he had to admit that Cagalli did have a point. Whatever assurances he had given Kira, the lab was a potential danger. As Kira had described it, there seemed to be plenty of equipment left that could be used to reproduce the experiments.

"Athrun, you think it's a good idea, don't you?"

Put suddenly on the spot, Athrun found himself hesitating to give a negative answer. "The colony is technically private property," he hedged. It was several cubic kilometers of private property, in fact. "However," Athrun continued, "the bio-contamination case was widely publicized and no one cares to go near it now. It shouldn't be a problem to get inside."

"Athrun!" Kira cried, looking doubly shocked now.

Cagalli looked almost as surprised as Kira did. She recovered quickly, however. "Exactly!" she said. "We sneaked three space ships in before. It should be easy to get us and a ship full of explosives inside."

"No." Athrun vetoed that instantly. "That's much too dangerous. It'll be better to make it look like an accident. Most of the L4 space colonies were built over thirty years ago. They should be running on nuclear power, so maybe we can set off a chain reaction somehow."

If they were lucky, Mendel, being a research colony with secrets to keep, may even have a self-destruct sequence built in. As he said to Cagalli, however, this was not something to rush into. It would take some careful planning.

Cagalli was nodding thoughtfully.

Meanwhile, Kira looked frantic. "You two aren't serious! We could go to jail for something like this!"

Athrun turned to his friend with a sly smile. "'We'?"

Cagalli grinned. "So you're agreeing to join us, right?"

"I..." Kira looked uncomfortable. "I do feel responsible."

"We're all responsible now," Cagalli replied matter-of-factedly, "now that we know about it."

Athrun nodded in agreement. "Cagalli's right. Whether destroying the lab or something else, we're obligated to do something."

Kira looked upset. "I didn't mean to drag you guys into this."

"Are you kidding?" Cagalli scoffed. "I'd have to hurt you if you didn't let us know what was going on." She hugged Kira again for good measure, making him blush.

"Besides..." Cagalli added in a serious voice. "I think it might be what she would have wanted."

Looking at the two siblings together, Athrun silently agreed. Aloud, he said, "Well, we need to get cleaned up here and back to work, or we'll be here all day."

His words were received with enthusiastic response.

(to be continued...)