I own nothing of GS/GSD.

R&R please.

Chapter 34

Morning came in unannounced, like an assailant of the dark, passionate night, stabbing the first skirts of the twilight colours with a blade of gold indifference to the women that reluctantly got up to make breakfast and clean, oblivious to the lovers who woke up entwined in each others' bodies and the mussed sheets as a single being. And the rays were warm but uncaring of the pain it brought to those who did not want morning to come. Athrun Zala was one of those.

He stirred slightly, the half-smile like a sickle moon on his lips and he turned a little, like a dolphin learning how to control the currents under it as he began recalling the cramped space of his bed when she had been sharing it. And now he opened his eyes in an imitation of the crack of dawn, when they had still been very much awake and alive in each others' arms, lovers guilty of what defined them as lovers, lovers who fought to bring back simpler times and uncomplicated gifts to each other.

He had brushed away her tears at one point, asked helplessly, "Does it hurt?"

A question like that would never make sense; he had done nothing to hurt her physically, or at least not enough for her to weep as passionately as she had. But he thought of his cruel words, his deliberate attempts to wound, and had felt unworthy of being one with her then, felt that the hand that was sharing the liquid tears with her cheeks did not deserve to be even near her face.

She wasn't entirely faultless, she had spurned him in her own deliberate attempts to wound him, but then retaliating had been worse than even starting it. Why was the great hero who was placid, wise and who never lost his temper such a beast in these situations? He didn't know, only that being Athrun Zala with his troops, being that well-respected, enviable man was a façade of bestiality that Cagalli brought out in him, along with a gentle, open side to counter it all. And he knew then, that it wasn't the dual-nature of his character that Cagalli could unconsciously bring out, it was simply that with Cagalli, he wasn't Athrun Zala, he was simply Athrun.

His arms clutched an armful of the sheets in his half-conscious ephiphany, his body not quite released from dreams.

A single memory of the time before they'd separated flooded into the denseness of his sleep-muddled self, his eyes still closed in remembrance.

They'd been working on their own things in the drawing room, and she hadn't been speaking to him for quite some time after she'd lost their child. And in his weariness to recreate normalcy and the failure he'd found so far, he had threatened to tell Kira what had happened if Cagalli continued to ignore him. And her eyes had flashed and she had gathered her things and moved towards the door. She never liked threats, and he been a fool for using one, after he had known so well that if a person wanted Cagalli to do something, he would tell her not to and she would do it to prove she could. Hadn't she always been like that?

"If you step out of this room," Athrun had then said, pained and angered, "I won't forgive you."

She looked at him, her eyes liquid golden and mottled in agony and she lifted a handful of skirt and stepped cleanly over the door line.

And that had been his repeated mistake, that callousness that reared its ugly head in his need, his all-consuming need to possess her. Was Shinn or any other man, for that matter, capable of making her love him? He wasn't quite so sure, but he hadn't wanted to even allow a chance of that. And the mistake wasn't in the gravity of the threat and in the way Athrun had truly meant its essence; the mistake had been in making it in the first place.

His eyes now flew open, adjusting themselves to the ceiling, which didn't look as battered and sad in the light that was filtered through the drawn curtains. He vaguely remembered pulling them shut with only one careless, rough hand, the other holding Cagalli to him already, unwilling to let go for even one moment.

Athrun looked around, slowly sitting up, running a tired hand through his hair, recalling the way her fingers had felt in it, straining to hold him away but wanting him to come to her as well in that confusion of desire and aching need. And he strained to hear, perhaps, the sound of Cagalli moving in the kitchen near the bedroom in the small apartment, perhaps, hear the trickling of water as she rinsed in the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom, anything to tell him he was not alone.

But a strange incongruity stood out before him, perhaps the absence of the last item of clothing he had fed to the floor in order to hold her without any barrier of any kind, the very item, he thought wryly, that had allowed him to catch up to her as she had fled the previous evening. He looked around swiftly, the heels were indeed missing.

And that was when fear struck its way in, not unlike the wretched rays that had awoken him and illuminated what he was trying to hold- an armful of naked, empty air.

Clearing his throat from the last signs of slumber, Athrun called her name loudly, and heard nothing but the neighbours grumbling about inconsiderate bastards from the other side of the thin walls. He grimaced then and flung himself out, throwing the sheets that had served their purpose so well for both he and Cagalli aside with impatience and pulling on pants, absently searching for his shirt until he realized that she might have worn it again. Smirking slightly and running a hand through his hair, he strode out and stopped dead in his tracks.

The first thing he saw was the absence of the absolute warpath they had left in their trail the night before, and he immediately recognized how she had put everything back in its place, straightened the things they'd left crooked, and how she'd put his papers as best as she could onto the table, they being already hopelessly mixed up. And as an afterthought, she'd found the mug and put it there to weigh everything down, a parallel to the weight of what they'd done. But she had effectively removed her presence from this place, he thought slowly, and he began to stiffen, looking around for her, anything that might signal Cagalli's presence, and he found none.

No coat, no purse he had wrestled and threw aside as she gasped, no jet chiffon that had clung to her only a bit better than a second skin, no heels the thought she might have brought and arranged next to his own badly tossed shoes, and the Haumea he had taken and put around her neck last night, allowing it to dangle from her neck and then nestling in the valley he had touched with the tip of his tongue as she gasped, holding him tightly, now lay innocently on the little mantel he had snatched it off from.

For a minute, he thought he was dreaming.

For a minute, he thought nothing had happened, that he had just gotten drunk and got lost with dreams that led to an unwrapping of the first layer of the onion skin around the core, and then another wrapping and another until reality was not distinguishable, merely collapsible. But her recalled the vividness of her eyes, liquid gold and molten as her mouth opened, but the intensity of their passion made no sound emit from her parted lips.

His chest still stung a little, she had clawed him in a desperate attempt to escape and then later, an equally desperate bid for control as he had held her tightly to him.

But the world around him revealed nothing of the time she'd spent here, nearly, what was it? He had had her then, for half a day. All to himself. Was that all they amounted to?

And then the rage plunged like a knife slipping into soap, so quickly and gently it poured in and he was filled with doubt and the damned knowledge of what Cagalli had done, for he was seeing the world through her eyes, seeing what they'd left in their path to get to their final destination, seen what they'd done while they'd became animals, unthinking but innocent, blameless with nature's need.

He moved quickly, harshly yanking open the drawer he kept the most important things in and saw, with despair that left a terrible gash of pain in his chest even where she had placed her cheek against the night before for him to kiss her forehead, that Cagalli had taken the papers he had hoped she would retract and maybe one day with their children, burn it in a bonfire and laugh at the ridiculous nature of the past.

"She took them," He said quietly to the walls, and his face was mottled with grief and fury as he strode back to the bedroom they had spent half a day in, from the time he had brought her back here to the time he had carelessly fallen asleep in her arms, basking in her glorious warmth and entwining Cagalli in the sheets that permeated with sweetness after they had slept in them.

His eyes swept over the room critically and he saw that she had taken nothing with her except the papers, and that she would take everything away from him. The sheets would soon be made, soon lose the scent of their bodies, show him how transient her presence her was, how he had failed to make her understand their need for each other, failed to make her stay, failed to keep awake so she would not escape him-

He jerked suddenly, thinking of one point in the night, or was it the wee hours of morning? He had awoken suddenly as the clock struck, to see her curled in the shirt he had been wearing and ball-like in a chair, staring at him with hesitant eyes, and the way he had yanked her off her perch and took her back into the nest, to where he wanted her, to where she belonged, to him. But had she been planning what she would do already? Or had she done that from the single instant when they'd been wrestling like animals capable of anything but rationality, when she'd given up and then put her arms around him?

Covering his face in his hands had been the last thing Athrun Zala would have done in a normal situation. Today however, was not one. He sank into the chair she had sat in, a hand pressed to his forehead, wondering what the hell had gone on and why she was so stubborn, who had taught her to be so devious and cunning in reaching her goal, wondering who had even planted that goal in her in the first place. Athrun wanted to track her down now, carry her kicking and scratching form if he was obliged to do so, tussle her down to the bed and scream at her to wake from her nightmare and see him properly, see him for what he really was, see him for what she made him become without her to be with him.

A thought struck him and he reached over for the cell and dialed for his secretary.

She yawned as she answered, but snapped to attention when his voice, taut and commanding said, "Is there any information on this morning's shuttle back to ORB?"

"Hold on," he heard his secretary stutter and there were sounds of crashes here and there, like she was hurrying and scurrying from her quilts like a crab unearthed by a flipped stone, and some clicking here and there as he impatiently waited for her reply.

"Hold on," She repeated, "Er- there was one this morning, the earliest at about six-thirty. If I'm not wrong, all the ORB politicians and important personnel returned on that flight."

A hard click was the only thanks she received for that day.

He was already dialing for Cagalli, and it rang feebly, once and died like those hopes that were allowed to grow when they had been doomed to fizzle out with the harsh splashes of water reality kept throwing onto them, gleefully watching the, go up in nothing but insubstantial smoke. So she must have already been on a shuttle, must have gotten out from here fast, hailed a taxi doing its shift, ignored the yawned greeting the driver doled out and requested for him to step on it.

"Why?" He asked brokenly, staring at the cell. So Athrun put it away and filled with loathing for everything around him, slipped under the covers once more, but not before he drew the curtains, locking out the light, forcing darkness to be ushered into the room, blocking out sounds of the two college boys next door arguing with their one-time girlfriends on who would make the beds.

And sheer exhaustion came to claim his mind and subsequently his body, still half-dressed, and his grappled onto the little warmth left in the bed, tried to recall the way she had been, soft and giving, but somehow demanding as well, the night before, and how he had ached when she had uttered his name each time. Her scent, mingled with his stronger one had filled the sphere around them the night before, and in the morning and the passing hours of her absence, its power had been reduced to a wisp of fragrant desire, nothing more material than the smoke of hopes eroded by daylight after the night had passed its courses. And the way his weight on her body had been like the heaviest, most luxurious of quilts would melt into a wrinkle or two on the sheets, pressed by their conjoined forms, and then, with time, vanish to nothingness.

Athrun was not enough of a fool to call Cagalli and demand an explanation, even then. He would wait for her to offer one, and punish her when he had decided on one suitable enough for having fooled him, having bewitched him so effortlessly the first time he had calmed down enough to take a good look at her then boyish figure with giveaway curves she could not hide once he lost the armor of a soldier and became a seeing, feeling man. He would not forgive her for allowing him to kiss her, allowing himself to become reliant on her the way he had never been on anyone or anything before, and he would punish her for keeping herself intact for him and then taking herself away by the time he had woken from the spell Dullindal had cast with his persuasive, kind words and knowing, wise smiles.

And Athrun would not forgive her for bewitching him the second time he had seen her, pale and distant in the black of swans' downs, for putting her arms around him, embracing him as they sat alone under the foliage before the reporters had came and Kira and Lacus had had to deflect attention away.

He would not forget the time she had defied him with every fiber in her body, gone to find a dangerous killer who would have murdered the both of them if given a chance, to plead for Athrun to be left alone, the foolhardiness he would never forget.

And the way she had sat, soaked to the bone, miserable and bedraggled as he watched, numb with fear, from afar as Shinn, the boy who had become a man, offered Cagalli the shelter, his shelter, threatening to take her away.

Her words floated from the air, haunting him in ways he had been naïve of imagining before.

"I want us to stop delaying, to stop pretending we were as we once were!"

Had another claimed her for his own?

His heart was heavy then, filled with more than singular despair, but with pure vengeance if there was such a person, and peppered with stabs that almost threatened to make him cry out with agony. His lips were drawn tight, however, his eyes were nothing but numb, unfeeling orbs. He was a tolerating person, he had been when Yuuna had touched her, eyed him disdainfully with the superiority of a wolf taking the beta away from any one's grasp, and he had kept silent even though something raged in him.

He had sworn later, after Lunamaria had revealed to him that the ORB Princess had married someone, not him, that he would never make the same error of keeping silent when another man laid his hands on her. But had he already lost her to someone in all the time they'd spent apart from each other?

Doubt was startlingly poisonous, insidious in the rapier edge.

Two days later, his cell rang, and he brusquely took it and heard a wry voice he had never heard before, introducing its owner, "My name is Nells. I've been instructed, on behalf of my client, Ms. Atha to request of your presence in the emirates of ORB. Mr. Zala, did you hear me?"

"I did," Athrun answered, surprised he was even capable of doing that in his numbness. He was staring at a porcelain mug Cagalli had placed on his badly-mixed documents in hope that they would not fly off or get even more lost than they already were. The color was becoming blurred, mocking. He had an urge to ask her lawyer to find somebody else to mess around with, but his fingers were like ice upon the inanimate object.

"You are expected to arrive in ORB a day from now," Nells was saying simply, somewhat sympathetically, and the papers have been collated, all that is needed is your signature and a witness, who will be present on Ms. Atha's request. Is this understood?"

He didn't need anybody's sympathy, much less from a stranger he hadn't met before. That was shrewd of Cagalli, he thought hatefully, getting an unknown, young lawyer to deal with this, because an older, jaded one would want to make a stir of it to entertain his dinner guests with gossip on the various clients he had. But there was a stunning pointlessness in all of this. Once they'd signed everything, once everything was formalized, the word would be brought out and even this young gun would be talking, never mind that he wouldn't earn much profit from a domestic case like this.

"Understood," He answered numbly, "And is Ms. Atha there?"

A pause. He understood this; he wasn't an idiot to know that the lawyer was looking at Cagalli for approval. He didn't get it.

"No," Nells said, sounding slightly embarrassed. He would never make a good lawyer then, Athrun thought critically.

He cut the line promptly.

And a violent trembling seized him as Athrun turned calmly and swung his fist straight into the wall behind him, feeling the sickening, dull thud of the impact travel and shred the knuckles, feeling the bruises split into teeming blood lines and feeling the bones ache for what Cagalli had given him and then taken away.

An indignant 'Hey!' sounded from the other side of the wall, but he closed his eyes, hearing nothing and feeling numbness.

An hour later, his fist had became encrusted with blood and he got up from where he had sat, methodically put his fist under cold, gushing water, letting the sting pierce through his arm and then disappear after a while, and Athrun waited for the rusty-coloured water to become a running clear stream after a while. Like Cagalli's tears.

A tentative knock sounded, and he answered it slowly, opening it up to reveal Meyrin, shivering in the cold with her ridiculous pajamas and some heated food.

It was either that irony was forcing her on him each time Cagalli left, or she had a nose for sniffing out the times when she wasn't wanted and appearing right in the middle of the disastrous moment. He stared at her, dazed, not knowing what to say.

Her eyes were rolled pieces of the sky, put as beads into her face, fitted into the sockets, worried, solemn. "Are you okay, Athrun?"

'Yes,' He started to say, but he looked at her and swallowed.

"No," Athrun replied slowly, "I'm not."

He stood, looking at her quietly until she could bear it no longer and charged in, setting the food on the table, running to where he was still frozen, and then shutting the door with a resolute click. "Come here."

Inside, he was asking why she was being so kind to him, why she couldn't go and get a boyfriend to have her own troubles with, why she had to be the one comforting him in a state the one he loved had put him in. But he followed her dumbly and sat down on the couch woodenly, feeling misplaced suddenly, like she owned this apartment and not him, that all the things in here had her name written on them somewhere and he was a guest in his own place.

"I'm going to tell you something now," Meyrin said in a very low voice, "And you might be angry, but I know you'd never become insane enough to kill me for doing what I did."

"You brought Cagalli to where I was, didn't you?"

"I didn't," Meyrin answered in surprise, "I didn't know she wa- Oh, God, she was there? Tell me that-,"

He voice faltered, her shock was genuine, and Athrun shrugged cynically, eyeing her distastefully. "And I thought you were supposed to surprise me."

"Stop it," She said unpleasantly, "I'm not sure what happened and if you don't want to tell me, I have no right to ask, but stop egging me on then."

There was a silence. He was grimly triumphant and Meyrin looked perturbed.

"I suppose you don't believe me," She said finally, looking surprisingly unaffected by his dark mood. He shook his head a bit non-commitally, not quite caring to speak yet.

"Fine," Meyrin concluded, slightly coldly now, "I wanted to tell you that Lacus spoke to me. She has arranged for you to leave PLANT in a month's time, a month early before the new system of the Council has been stabilized. You've been here for a year and a half, it's time you went back to ORB."

"I don't belong there."

"Granted," She said impatiently, "You should be in PLANT, you're the head of the council you lead, and it's not common for a leader to be situated in ORB. But it's not impossible, nor is it unjust or a shirking of your duties. And I know-,"

Her eyes were hesitant, her voice paused. "I know you can win her back."

"I shouldn't have even told you," Athrun said, not feeling merely a little bitter. He had been half-drunk then, snapped when she'd persistently asked while trying to prevent him from drinking, but he'd revealed it in a rare show of anger, and had he caused her to try and mend him and Cagalli?

"But you did," Meyrin said sharply, hiding her hurt expression, "And when Lacus hinted to me she would arrange for the return to ORB because she said you'd never agree to without someone pushing the step forward, I told her you expressed great desire to return to ORB. She was delighted with my answer."

He wanted to put his face in his hands and weep like a child, lost from where it belonged. But he fought for control, looked at a slightly confused Meyrin with blank eyes and told her simply, "I've already arranged to go back tomorrow."

Her eyes brightened, and she forgot all the questions heavy on the tip of her tongue, possibly how he had met Cagalli, what had happened, where was she now, things like that. Meyrin was like that, always listening so intently she lost herself in all the words the others spoke, losing her own voice. But now, she found it, and her eyes were luminous and her face sparkling with the beam that stretched widely.

"Athrun!" She cried, in a bliss that made a searing pain erupt in his head, "I knew you'd both come to your senses, I knew this wouldn't last!"

"Last?" Athrun said softly, in his pain, watching her eyes suddenly widen as she slipped out of her reverie and immense delight, "Nothing lasts. I'm going back tomorrow to finish it all, and I'll be back in PLANT before-,"

He found that he could not complete his words. He would not say that he would be back here in PLANT before the news broke out and the memories sacred to him were splashed as photographs in newspapers announcing the latest disappointment, the one enormous, unforgiving failure, so sparklingly terrible, his life would be wounded by forever. And the days loomed dark and wasted before him, perhaps a life bounded to his job because there was nothing he could find a reason to live or look forward to, perhaps he would be driven to the edge of loneliness then the way he had been for some days that he could now never forget.

Through a thick haze, he heard Meyrin's voice repeating a pained refusal to believe him, and he smiled blindly, watching her eyes grow wide and her words becoming inconsistent even while the truth of his words gleamed in the still air. He would, together with Cagalli, soon end all they had ever started.

When he arrived, he was clothed in a coal-colored suit and the dull throb at the side of his temples, like the hangovers he never really had coming in one devastating, sweeping blow that was Cagalli's betrayal to what they had shared. And the irony gnawed at him, for what they'd gained back in a single night had been lost in those hours as well.

He saw a young, rather raw cheek-boned man with brown, inquisitive eyes, lounging against the pillar of the building, a bit tired looking but with that unmistakable excitement in his hands and the way he shuffled through documents. The lawyer was to have his success at their failure. And the morose thoughts seemed to reach from Athrun to the young man, for he looked up, or more plausibly, aware of the approaching footsteps, and bowed low to Athrun, who merely nodded.

"Ms. Atha's waiting inside." Nells said apologetically, his eyes bright and whimsical in his thin, not unattractive face. Athrun took a long, hard look at him, like a hawk sizing its prey up, and he knew then, that she had chosen him because he wasn't callous like most of them, he wouldn't rejoice at the opportunity of having clients like them, he would be fair and do his job and no more than that.

"Thank you," Athrun said in spite of his reservations, and he watched Nells relax and followed the lead the lawyer took as he showed Athrun the way into the firm's office. Cagalli would be waiting there. Perhaps, he thought dully, she would look triumphantly at him, and hold out her hand where no ring was sitting around her finger, and he'd know for sure. Or perhaps she'd have a dulled pain in her eyes like his, maybe wearing black today.

He was entirely wrong, because she was wearing a simple white blouse and olive skirt, and she looked simple and unassumingly care-free until he looked at her eyes and saw that they were as filled as the ornamental glass bowls he'd seen somewhere before; clear and gleaming but empty inside.

"Athrun." She stood up to acknowledge his presence, and he bit back everything at the tip of his tongue and said a bit stiffly, "Cagalli."

It was ridiculous. When they'd called each other by the name barely days ago, those words had been gifts for their mouths, a sort of release, no matter how their names were articulated with the urgent cries of tremulous pleasure or the soft sighs they shook their centres after. And now those names were reduced to wood shavings in their mouths.

They simultaneously sat down while Nells unlocked a briefcase and revealed the papers Athrun had lost because of Cagalli. He looked hard at her but her eyes were somewhere else, and the papers, no matter what they did, no matter how well he'd locked them away and ignored their existence, had reappeared between them, unsigned. 'They'll soon be,' Athrun thought numbly.

"You've looked through these already," Nells said guiltily, but these were the emotions Athrun did not want to find from this person, "And you'll sign them today, as you've agreed."

Lies. "Yes."

He reached for the finely-polished shaft of the gleaming pen, not noticing how cold his giners were, but then Cagalli jerked up and said softly, "Wait."

His heart skipped a beat, but she was shaking her head slowly and saying, "The witness isn't here yet."

As if to echo her thoughts, the doors were pulled open as a man was guided in by a colleague of Nells' who ogled at his friend's clients. But instead of a tanned, weathered and burly guardian, Athrun found himself staring into his own eyes, transfigured into a rather empty, cold face. Goebbels.

He was rendered speechless then, but sheer dislike for the assistant coursed through him then and prevented any other emotion save numbness from appearing in his features. Goebbels looked at him and swiftly pulled a chair to Cagalli's side, and sat down confidently as if he owned the world, as if he owned her.

Anger whipped through him, and he punished the paper with a strike of the pen, like a lash of wind against the delicate mesh of fibres that were no longer snow-white but pitch darkness that formed his signature. He looked up at Cagalli, she wasn't even signing the papers, she must have already had done so and those must have been in the possession of Nells long before she had taken these from him and forced a response from him.

Goebbels said nothing, not registering triumph or eager disdain on his face that Athrun had half-suspected. And he loathed the man even more for not showing any sign of weakness. He watched as Goebbels placed a hand on Cagalli's small shoulders and steered her from where she sat. The fates were mocking him.

She gazed woodenly at him, but not enough for the sorrow to be filtered from the gold-flecked amber he had lost himself in so many countless of times, but Athrun was too dazed to see anything, or anyone. A dreadful energy was coursing through his vessels, poisoning his heart, and he saw her stand up alongside Goebbels and said softly, "Goodbye, Athrun."

He had scarcely a chance to say anything before she was whisked away.