Disclaimer: I own nothing of Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny, which can be a blessing, because if you did, then you'd have legions of ASUCAGA fans waiting to kill you if you didn't get ASUCAGA sorted out.

Chapter 5

Athrun tried his utmost to listen to her words as he watched Cagalli confidently addressing the literati, ambassadors and delegates in a commanding voice that added an aura of authority to her presence. He knew he was failing so bad, it would look pathetic if it had been placed onto a scorecard. But then, he knew that the men in the room weren't quite paying attention to what she was saying either, and then he wanted to take some gasoline and set fire to the room just to see what would happen next.

Through the mumble-jumble of everything, he miraculously gathered that Cagalli had spoken of her wishes for the three powers to unite in the aim to bring back peace in all areas of life and a desire for cooperation, finally wishing all those present a wonderful evening.

Kira was applauding so heartily and obviously that it brought a slight flush into her face, secretly pleased that her brother was so delighted with her. Lacus was no exception, and as she joined Cagalli on stage for a photo to be taken, the photographers went crazy with their trusty cameras and the rest applauded politely once more. Not for nothing had they been crowned the Princesses of Peace by the media.

As she stepped down, dozens of men swarmed around her, intermingling with the photographers and journalists, but Kira easily blocked them by taking her hand first and leading her away, Lacus taking his other hand. To Athrun, his best friend looked like a downright Casanova, but the cameras loved it. Anyway, everyone, save maybe those who had been living under a rock for the past two years or so knew that Kira Yamato and Cagalli Yula Atha were twins.

The world had been stunned to find out they were twins, but the photo of Via Hibiki and them as babies had been concrete enough as evidence, although conspiracy theories were still flying everywhere. Athrun knew for a fact that Kira didn't bother answering mails that accused him of fathering Cagalli Yula Atha. It was too ludicrous to even bother with.

Athrun had been one of the first to see the photos during the end of the first war when Cagalli had produced it, and the more he looked at Cagalli, the more he had seen her mother in her and Kira. They had the same eyes and fine features, although Kira had inherited the brown hair while Cagalli had inherited the blond hair her biological father had.

But once, when he had managed to get her to loosen up with some drinks, her tongue had been untied and she had told him once that she had no other father except the man who had shoved her and Kira into safety and then died for the ideals of ORB.

Then he had had to hide the drinks away because she started shouting absolute gobbledy-gook and ranting nonsense, and he had tried to send her straight to bed. But she had subsequently regurgitated her dinner on him, and by the time he had gotten cleaned up and popped into her room to see if she was alright, she had been curled up and dozing on her bedcovers without even bothering with the blankets. Athrun knew that bodyguards just didn't tuck their employers into their beds like children, but he had covered her with blankets and sat there for a long time, watching her cry out silently in her sleep and he had stroked her head and gently wiped away her hot tears, one by one, all while she slept fitfully.

Now watching his best friend applauding so enthusiastically and in such a carefree manner that was rare to see especially after the war, Athrun had to allow himself a smile and applauded along with the rest.

He tried to catch her eye again, but she was smiling and greeting the rest of the world but him. He felt like jumping up at down and screeching, "Here! Here!", but he obviously didn't do it. Fully-fledged twenty-year-old coordinators weren't supposed to be behaving like they were three.

Dinner was announced in a matter of a few seconds and the officials were placed at their seats, discreetly arranged so that their various titles and positions were in accordance with where they sat.

Athrun quietly noted that nobody dared complain. How could anyone be ambassadors if they didn't know when to keep their mouths shut in any case? Heading the long dining table was Lacus, where Kira sat adjacent to her. Athrun was placed next to Kira on one side of the table, directly opposite Cagalli who was sitting next to PLANT's ZAFT's ambassador-cum-spokesperson.

Her eyes were like magnets that were turned on same poles to each other- they repelled his, and it was insistently effective. She refused to look at him no matter how hard he tried to catch her eye, and it was rather embarrassing since the discretion was fading to a full-out silent assault. In the end, he gave up and concentrated on his steak, scorning himself silently for doing what she had done to avoid him. So she concentrated on her steak.

His meal tasted like sawdust, and nothing was registering anything familiar to his taste buds. Compliments were doled out dutifully to the Chef, and Kira and Cagalli were praising the sauce that the chef had skillfully made, making the chef standing nearby blush as red as the lobster served as a second course.

Apparently, the twins shared the same taste buds, and Athrun personally knew Kira too was impartial towards chilli, and yoghurt sauce on kebabs was a second option only when they ran out of chilli sauce. He also knew for a fact that Kira was smart enough not to say anything of the sort to either Andrew Bartfeld or Cagalli, lest they start a war proving which sauce was better.

Then Athrun watched Cagalli flash the chef a slight smile, causing the chef to blush with pleasure, and couldn't help clenching his fork. How could she even care about a dinner sauce when he was sitting right before her?

At that point, Lacus drew herself up, making the most of her rather diminutive height. Kira was slight himself, and Lacus' profile complimented his own. The pink-haired coordinator beamed at the cameras and proposed a toast to everyone for their efforts at changing the world. There were a hundred or so clink of glasses as they all stood up, and as Athrun pushed back his chair to stand, so did Cagalli. In the crowded space filled with dishes and glasses and fancy cutlery, what happened next was inevitable.

Their hands brushed against each other's and their eyes met each other's for the briefest of moments before she immediately refocused on her darned steak. He was so startled at the amber eyes looking straight at him that he failed to notice Kira's raised eyebrows that were in danger of disappearing beyond his hairline, and he was far too ruffled to notice Lacus' slight giggle that made the PLANT chairman a tad puzzled at what she was laughing at. The toast was over and done with, and they were seated once more with sounds of pleasant conversation springing up everywhere amongst various segments of the table. Quietly wrenching his hand from his fork, Athrun breathed heavily and resumed shovelling food down his throat.

Kira glanced from his once-feisty sister to his best friend and snorted into his napkin. He understood everything that was going on, of course. He could summarise it as concisely as the Mathematical equations he used in the extensive laboratory that he had worked in for the past two years.

Simply put, it was Cagalli with ORB obligations, Athrun with ZAFT duties, both drifting away, ring passed to Meyrin, ring now in pocket, ring not on hand, Cagalli with more ORB obligations, Athrun with ETERNITY duties, oh, it was so simple.

One day, he would summarise all those complicated cooking recipes into simple equations for cooking-dummies like him, but first, he needed to learn how to cook an egg properly. He'd get Lacus to teach him exactly that one day.

He had discussed everything with Lacus, who had agreed it was a downright shame that Cagalli, now a professional at her duties, was woefully not adapt at handling both obligations and her own personal life. It wasn't that ORB couldn't handle her taking her eyes off it for a reasonable daily basis, it was more of Cagalli who refused to see that she could have a life even though a country was on her shoulders.

Kira had watched his sister swallow all sorts of medicine to keep her health stable as she fought through mountains of documents and made important decisions every morning after a Cabinet meeting that left her drained and exhausted from arguing and trying to negotiate and compromise with the other ministers.

His best friend wasn't any better. Life on the Minerva after retuning to ZAFT in the second war had proven that. Heck, he couldn't even shake off the other girls' attention! To cut him some slack, Athrun hadn't even noticed the Hawke girls were about to fight tooth and nail over him, but surely Lacus' look-alike had been an obvious indication?

He had heard from Shinn and Lunamaria just some time ago, how Athrun had woken up to see Mia Campbell next to him, much to Athrun's immense embarrassment. There he was, straddled between his obligations and his personal life and definitely clueless on how to win Cagalli back. Sad, though Kira morosely, how sad.

Swallowing a bite down, Kira observed Lacus. She was busy in earnest conversation with the PLANT ambassador adjacent on her other end, and everyone around them was busy in heartfelt conversation.

Athrun's right neighbour, a suave businessman who held the most important businesses in the Earth Alliance, was trying to chat him up, and Athrun had all but entertained him for about three minutes before resuming to the steak he had been cutting up. Kira was certain that if the businessman tried pushing his luck any longer, Athrun would demonstrate some knife-skills he had learnt in ZAFT, all with his steak-knife.

"What was so interesting about the steak anyway?" Kira wondered, noting how intently his sister and his best friend were shredding theirs. Wondering if he ought to see things from their point of view, Kira absently flipped up his knife and set to work with his own steak.

The meat was tasteless, thought Athrun as the awkwardness made him cringe inwardly. His exterior though, was another case altogether in the eyes of the others. Not for nothing had he been a Red Coat who could hide his emotions well enough, if not splendidly, when the time called for it.

He peeped through his lashes up at the girl sitting opposite him, a trick he had learnt to do when he was pretending to look at his chess pieces while intently watching Yzak's face. Yzak Joule's face was the kind that often betrayed the next step or course of action the hot-headed coordinator was about to execute. By simply reading Yzak Joule's expressions in secret so he would not realise Athrun was reading him, Yzak had lost three quarters of the time they had been pitted against each other.

Athrun knew for a fact that the only people Yzak would listen to was Dearka Elseman or Shiho Haehenfuss, and neither could really control the eccentric temper he possessed.

Nicole had once been able to calm him down by pure logic and reasoning but Nicole wasn't here anymore, Athrun thought sadly.

Dearka and Shiho weren't as adapt with their words as the talented pianist, and they had to rely on their own individual ways to handle Yzak in a bad mood. Dearka would joke casually and then laugh off Yzak's threats to calm him down and Shiho, well, she'd punch him to get him to calm down, and oh boy, she threw a mean punch when she felt like it. Athrun could see her getting married to his friend any day now and shuddered to think of what their kids would be like in the future. He could imagine the ZAFT instructors handling their kids in their training to be Redcoats like their parents and prayed for the instructors' sake.

Now, Athrun was sitting across the girl he had known could punch as well as any man could, and couldn't help feeling puzzled as he silently assessed her. She was looking as polished as Lacus, a feat Mana must have had accomplished after twenty or more rounds of begging, but something was different about Cagalli.

Gone was the crackling fire in her eyes and in its place was a dull quietness that made his heart ache. Her cheeks were paler than before, perhaps due to the fact that was probably cooped indoors most of the time. The most disconcerting change was her eyes, those eyes that could have flashed fire in her fury and the same eyes that were reduced to ice-cold shards of amber now.

But how beautiful she was!

He only had to stand to have reached out and stroked her cheek with the soft of his hand's back, feel her eyes staring at him, golden and liquid.

And Athrun was struck by how emotionless they looked to him, and had to fight the urge to stare indiscreetly at her.

She had started talking to a ZAFT ambassador seated next to her, and he was even more surprised how subdued her voice was. It was a totally different voice from what he had ever heard, and her warm alto tone was replaced with a meeker, slightly more impersonal and a generic sounding key that transformed her into another person altogether. The warm huskiness in her voice was muted as she made her polite inquiries, and he wondered if she was hiding pain in her.

He knew he was.

He couldn't believe the shell he was witnessing. And Athrun was tempted to reach out and touch her face in an attempt to see if it was the same Cagalli he had known a little more than a year ago. But he held himself back just in the nick of time; it would not do to make a slip at this juncture with so many eyes around.

The ZAFT ambassador, a recently-promoted Red Coat was now inviting him into the conversation after being stumped by Cagalli's question. The poor boy who was signalling Athrun into the conversation with pleading eyes, and he gladly took the cue.

Clearing his throat slightly, he addressed the girl he had not known he was pining away for for two years until a few days ago.

"I'm sorry, but could you repeat your question, Chairman Atha?"

Her eyes were finally channelled straight at him, for she could not avoid him a longer in front of the ZAFT ambassador, and her lips were slightly parted in a gesture of not knowing what to do, but her training kicked in and she was smoothly throwing forth the question that had stumped the eager young ZAFT ambassador through and through.

" How is it that ZAFT's decision to introduce another elite faction of soldiers apart from the Red Coats can benefit the peace between PLANT's newly integrated naturals that originate from ORB and the existing Coordinators?" she asked, steadily levelling her amber gaze at him.

Athrun glanced at the young ambassador who was bobbing his head enthusiastically as if he had asked the question himself, genuinely eager to hear his answer, and had to smile at the impressionable young man's enthusiasm. At the back of his mind, he wondered if the young ambassador had ever killed before even as an elite soldier who was trained to kill if necessary,

Drawing in a deep breath, he replied, "ZAFT's decision to introduce the new faction complies alongside ETERNITY's decision to train potential soldiers with outstanding qualities above the average soldier's abilities.

By introducing the new faction in ZAFT that answer both to the diplomatic decisions ETERNITY carry out while keeping in mind ZAFT's military training, PLANT will see a new generation of suitably trained peace protectors that are better equipped than the existing Red Coats.

This is necessary so that we have the superior manpower and suitably trained soldier who can both compromise peacefully and carry out military action if necessary to prevent any glitches in the introduction of ORB's naturals as PLANT'S newcomers. In short, the new faction of elite ZAFT soldiers will be the future leaders of the protectors of peace in PLANT."

The young ZAFT ambassador was beaming away gratefully, mouthing his thanks to Athrun, and he nodded in response. Cagalli on the other hand, was nodding politely as she received the information, and subsequently returned back to what remained of her steak. Athrun felt somewhat crushed as she dabbed her lips with the napkin to avoid the smudging of her lips and likewise, returned to his shredded meat. He knew very well that she wasn't going to suddenly be Miss Universe-friendly and start talking to him.

Then he glared up at Kira who had similarly shredded his meat and was proudly showing it off to him, watching sourly as Kira grinned up at him in a rather child-like manner that Athrun had not seen after the first war.

Right at that point. Cagalli caused a small diversion at the table by dripping blood onto the pristine-white table cloth. Lacus was the first to notice, gasping, "Cagalli! You're bleeding!"

Stunned, Cagalli sat frozen in her seat while her bodyguards seemed to materialise out of nowhere and rushed to the table to attend to her.

Her nostrils were dripping blood everywhere, and the intense red was staining the table cloth and dripping down her lips and chin. She was having a nosebleed and it was without warning, making all the diners go into frenzy while the cameras resumed their clicking that was becoming rather tiresome, thought Athrun.

He wondered that it would look like on the newspapers for someone in beautiful clothes at a sophisticated dinner to be dripping blood everywhere and felt a little sorry for Cagalli.

The delegates and important people were all flustered trying to make her sit still and fussing over her and avoiding touching or cleaning up the blood while she tried to mop it up as cleanly as possible. Her body had probably overheated in the room, Athrun realised, and that was causing her nosebleed.

She then flustered everyone even further by pushing her chair back and standing tall with her head proud, although the sudden shock had been a blow to her pride in her efforts to be part of a perfect evening.

Cagalli held up a hand, the other still covering the lower part of her face exposing her mouth, and said mildly, "I will go for a walk to get some fresh air, and perhaps that will clear my head a little. I apologise for the ruckus I have unintentionally caused, but please go ahead without me and enjoy your dinner."

She ended her words with a little smile that set the flustered air still and placid once more. The cameras that had suddenly reactivated their frantic clicking were now still, and Lacus clapped her hands together and called for dinner to resume.

Barely any eyes were on Cagalli as she gathered herself together and with her bodyguards, discreetly made her way to the nearest exit, for Lacus was doing far too good a job of diverting the attention back to dinner.

The butler, one of the hundreds for that night, asked politely, "Dessert?"

"Please." He answered dully.

He was still looking at Cagalli's retreating back.

There was a general bustle as the crowd near her table dispersed back to their original seats and resumed the last course-desert. Athrun cringed as the crème brule's high sugar levels finally punched through his taste buds and made him want to check if he had diabetes.

Kira, who actually had a sweet tooth, was blissfully savouring the desert and Athrun could tell he was trying to abstain from calling for seconds. He sighed and tried to finish it all for fear of wasting, as his mother had taught him, but gave up after a few mouthfuls of sweet desert. Athrun looked around at the rest of those at the table to check if the coast was clear and discreetly slid the desert to Kira who wolfed it down within seconds and muttered his thanks to which he responded with an almost invisible nod.

It wouldn't be good for the reporters to write that the head of Science and Engineering at ORB was a pig when it came to desert, would it? They'd be saying that he was having a yo-yo relationship with his weight after that, trust the tabloids to do that kind of thing.

As soon as desert had ended and the dance floor was open, Athrun stood up along with the others and headed to a side exit where an extensive stretch of rose gardens were beckoning. He noted how glorious the gardens were even in the night, and how the Earth Alliance's diplomats really knew how to turn up the glamour factor.

Ignoring the call to find a partner for the upcoming dance segment, he peered through the slightly foggy glass. The bustle and noise was enough distraction for him to pull open a heavy, gilded-door handle and lead him out of the stifling room, but a hand tugged at his elbow, and he whirled around to face Kira.

"What is it?" Athrun asked, a tad embarrassed that his friend had noticed his attempt to follow Cagalli without trying very hard to. With some luck, the others wouldn't.

"Bring this to her, it'll help her stem the bleeding," murmured Kira, as he placed a little pill and a wad of soft cotton into Athrun's outstretched palm.

Grinning at his friend, Athrun slipped like a shadow, silent and cat-like, out of the brightly-lit area and into the looming darkness of the extensive gardens where he could spot Cagalli pacing up at down in the distance.

She was an entity amongst the gloomy loneliness of the shrubs, and even from the distance, Athrun understood, from her posture and the slight tilt of her head, that she was waiting for something they did not know how to identify, waiting for something to present itself.

Grasping the pill in his hands, he strode purposefully to where she was pacing with her bodyguards standing alert nearby, hoping that a wind would blow, tousling her hair, freezing the composure he would have to muster upon setting eyes on her face, and that the same wind would make her tongue loosen by the time he arrived.