Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Seed,Gundam Seed Destiny, yadah yadah. But no problem, there's always Fanfiction so I can play with the characters. R&R&R please, and the last R stands for recommend. I'm thick-skinned that's for sure,but please recommend Truth to every ASUCAGA supporter. Spread the gospel, people.

Chapter 12

He had arrived at Kira's residence, well aware that this was his second day here and he had only one more day left if he discounted this one. His mother had played a game with him when he had been three, she would hide her hands behind her back and ask him to guess how many fingers she was holding upwards. Most would think that it was a game of sheer luck, but Athrun had used probability equations when he had been three to guess the number correctly,but it also had todo with luck most of the time. It was like that now. Without any luck, he would be losing Cagalli very soon.

And then he saw a blonde head peeping out from a thorny bush and the sound of heavy panting and some queer hissing. Knowing who the blonde hair probably belonged to, his heart thumped insanely and for a minute, he was sure she'd hear his heart beating like some typical iron drum.

So he hurried over and curiously looked on from the corner of the garden he was now at, and spotted a hot and bothered Cagalli in a peculiar semi-squat, trying to hold a hissing, furious cat down by its hind legs, and he amusedly called out to her and she was startled, momentarily losing grip on the cat and letting go long enough for the cat to run off, but not before it took revenge by swiping at her left hand and leaving a long scratch and some blood.

Wincing in pain, she hissed herself, almost like the feline and tried to stand, but her centre of gravity had been misplaced a long time ago,and Athrun didn't need a crystal ball to predict what happened next.

She lost her balance and fell over into a pile of dead leaves behind her and started cursing and swearing, making such a comical scene that he had to laugh at her apparent clumsiness. Then he moved over to her very silently, the way he would stalk an animal in case it fled. He was afraid that she'd flee, but she didn't, and she lay there in a tumble oforange leaves, her blonde hair perfectly framed by the pointy leaves.

Cagalli looked up at him, and she saw he was gazing at her while she lay eagle-spread on the ground and stammered quite helplessly, "I-I like leaves."

He bent down and offered a hand, and she unwittingly tilted her face up to his, close, and he blushed a little, but she didn't notice because of the sun. And then she hesitantly put her hand in his and allowed herself to be pulled upright, but she didn't bother to dust leaves off herself immediately as another girl might have done, but allowed them to fall as and when they liked to.

He liked that about her. Heck, he liked everything about her.

"What is it?" she asked a little self-consciously when they both realised he was staring like an idiot at her. Finding his tongue suddenly tied into a terrible knot, he shrugged and looked away in case she fled, which was something he definitely did not want. But he had made her realise what she might have looked like after the tumble, and then she was self-conscious instantly. She immediately started to brush the leaves off her so she could save a bit of the dignity she had left after being caught in such an unflattering situation, and he let her tidy up herself first, then lookedat her said seriously, " We need to talk."

Not quite understanding or even detecting the unspoken meaning in his words, Cagalli stopped brushing her clothes and looked at him curiously, but blurted out before she could stop herself, "Kira speaks like that too!"

If she had realised what he had meant and that he was trying to settle a score, she would have fled. But she didn't know. So she had compared him to Kira, or rather, the serious tone that they often used.

And then she clapped her hand over her mouth because she realised how childish it sounded, thinking how Goebbels would have scolded her for making unnecessary comments the media would lambast her for, but he was grinning shyly and leading her to the extensive park that surrounded half the estate. She knew it was going to be a long walk then, it wasn't just their pace of strolling, the place itself was humongous.

As they walked at a leisurely pace, he watched her fidgeting and tying her scarf around her neck securely, and then made a stab at what he needed to tell her. He was glad the ZAFT ambassadors had left the day before, and that the embassy house only had a few servants, a few secretaries and of course, Kira and Lacus, who were stationed here almost permanently although they both held ORB citizenships.

"Can you be yourself when you're with me?" he asked quietly, albeit a little bluntly.

Nobody had ever asked her that before. Not even when she had changed so much during these two years that she had to second-guess every thought she made. She looked at the leaves she had trampled over and felt a strange pain in her chest, but she overcame it in mere seconds.

And her fingers were busy with her scarf, but they stopped as she stared at him. Unflinchingly, he gazed back seriously at her with such sincerity that she found herself nodding and biting her lip, a habit she had from young, all this before saying very honestly, "I tried to not be myself, but I don't think I can be anything else when I'm with you, Athrun."

He was smiling now as they continued to walk, not really seeing the orange leaves that crackled under them or the wide arch of trees that was extending out before them. But he didn't know that she was in misery and agony as she told him, or rather, admitted to him, that she could never be the kind of person she had tried so much to be when Athrun was with her.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it?" he said, not quite looking at her, his hands fingering something in his pocket. She wondered for a moment what it could have been, but she dismissed all the idle wonderings soon af.

She could not help sighing then as she repeated Meyrin's words that suddenly flashed through her head.

'Too long if you ask me." She muttered, then she regretted her confession and thought silently, "Maybe an eternity of not seeing each other would have been better after all."

He was concentrating on the trees in front of them now, saying to her, "I'll be returning to PLANT the day after tomorrow, but..."

And she couldn't help cutting in by saying desperately, "So soon?"

Then she wanted to slap herself for being such a fool, because he would suspect that she had never forgotten him even when they had been apart for two years. She bit her lip very hard and ignored the way his head snapped up to look at her when she had shown him traces of being a desperate fool around him.

Athrun paused and nodded, and then they continued walking even though she wanted to curse and yell at something. She knew jolly well that he wouldn't be staying that long anyway. Her stay here had been extended because she had work here to do with Lacus, but ETERNITY had been recalled by PLANT's Supreme Council to oversee some new reshuffling of positions in ZAFT, and the chairman had to be there to see it, that she knew very clearly.

And then she cursed the own desperateness in her voice because she had heard it and she knew he had heard it too.

Athrun was explaining why PLANT had recalled him, and she wasn't quite listening, and therefore said, "No" in a daze when he asked her about something that she didn't quite catch.

His head snapped up sharply and he was asking, "Are you listening to me, Cagalli?" and she was getting that queer sense of deja vu and answered that she was listening, asking him thereafter, "Why are you asking me that?"

He was sighing and replying, "Because I asked you if you thought the answer was a yes or no, and you said no, but there wasn't a yes or no to answer me with in the first place."

And then she knew why her twin brother and Athrun Zala were best friends and cursed both loudly and very, very desperately.

"Fine, I wasn't quite listening, but I got the gist of why you have to go back the day after tomorrow," she shot furiously back at him, quite mad that she had swore in front of him like some common idiot on the street.

He surprised her by laughing a genuine, warm sound she recognised and quite liked, even though she didn't want to admit it to anyone including herself, and he was choking between gasps of laughter, silently thinking that he had been mistaken all along and she hadn't really changed at all. But it was the truth that she didn't know it herself, but that wasn't the problem. He'd show her how to find herself again, he promised himself that.

She was annoyed that he was poking fun at her slips and punched him, not very hard and quite playfully, but forgetting that it was the exact spot she had punched him at the day before, and his eyes widened in shock and pain and he said, "Oof" in a funny sort of voice before doubling over and clutching his shirt.

Cagalli stared in horror at him and then screeched insanely, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I forgot!" and she placed her hands over his abdomen in a wild attempt to see if it was in a bad shape because of her reckless actions, and then she realised they were too close and coloured crazily although he was gazing at her and wasn't blushing like she was. And then she quickly stepped away and they continued walking and trying to pretend nothing had happened. But her heart was pounding, and she could feel her palms beginning to become a little sweaty, a sure sign of nervousness.

He was asking in an attempt to restart the conversation, "So why were you terrorising the cat?" and she stopped abruptly and remembered what had happened, instantly becoming so furious that he thought steam would stream and then start whistling out of her ears.

"It got into the house and dragged out and tore my documents that I left on the table" she said sulkily, "and if you hadn't called out to me, I might have been able to whup it pretty good."

Athrun was laughing again, and standing clear of her in case she decided to render him more pain, which was highly probable since she was glaring with poisonous eyes at him, and then he asked between his chortles, "Don't you have spares?"

Annoyed at his jovial manner, Cagalli glared at him before answering curtly, "Yes, I do, but that's not the point!"

He just laughed again, although it wasn't a mean laugh and she joined him after a while.

Then he remembered she got scratched and pulled her to him before he took her hand in his and pulled up the sleeve-cuff of her white shirt to see if her fingers were still bleeding. They hadn't quite stopped bleeding but were beginning to clot up pretty nicely.

He noticed, not for the first time, that her fingers weren't the kind most would be attracted to, they just weren't the kind that was used in watch or bracelet or nail-varnish advertisements all over town. His own fingers were long and slim, "although a bit pale", he thought, because his parents hadn't arranged for him to have a gene that made him tan and he couldn't seem to become as brown as Kira just by being in the sun.

But her fingers were small and cuddly, and a bit misshapened like a child's, and her hands were pretty small for an average person, although he knew they were capable of pulling a trigger quite efficiently.

"You have such small hands," he said absent-mindedly, and she was putting out her arms in an instant and staring at her own hands and saying in genuine wonder, "I do, don't I?"

He put it down slowly and continued to walk forward, but he didn't let go of her hand and she didn't protest either.

And when he bent over to kiss her on her cheek, she coloured such an intense red that he wondered if his lips would be burnt, but she let him although she didn't bend forward to encourage him or anything of that sort, but didn't say anything either. Well, seeing that he had caught her by surprise, he wouldn't expect her to move away in any case.

He felt like jumping into the air in jubilation and then getting down on his knees and thanking Haumea. Of course he stopped himself, because he was twenty years old, and coordinators were supposedly adults after reaching the big one-three- that is, thirteen.

Cagalli was telling him all about her plans for ORB and in return, he was telling her about what ETERNITY would witness in ZAFT although they both knew what was going on from news papers. It wasn't what they were talking about that mattered, it was the fact that they were talking to each other properly again.

She was saying that she missed everyone and Kira had allowed her to stay at the PLANT embassy he and Lacus were situated at, and how she liked that nobody could boss her around. As far as he had gathered, she had finished her work and wanted a bit of a break like him, and apparently, ORB's council and Amagi had given her the green light. Of course, her work with the pending event of re-location of Naturals in PLANT would continue, and Lacus also would have to work out the next few weeks of arrangements with her.

Athrun on the other hand, would return to PLANT to give his breakdown of the regrouping of ZAFT units now that the new class of soldiers who were both diplomats and wielders of deterrence were to arise. But in the meantime, he had at least one and a half days left. "With her," he hoped silently.

Then he felt a need to be recklessand gave in eventually because of the lack of better options. Her hand was warm and her small fingers were pressed in between his, the only thing that felt real at that point.

Still holding her hand in his, he turned and said to her, "If it doesn't bother you, will you spend your time with me before I go home the day after tomorrow?" and she was nodding eagerly and smiling like the desperate fool she knew she was.

And he was laughing again and she looked at him and told him almost wistfully, "I like your laugh."\

He was taken aback for a minute or two, not quite comprehending what she had said, but then it hit him soon after, and he wanted to shout that he liked everything about her just to see how she would respond.

Then Athrun was smiling but looking ahead so she wouldn't see, and he thought of the times he had laughed genially but in a secretly forced way when it would be rude not to laugh, and then thought to himself, "I don't think I can laugh in any other way when I'm with you.'

They arrived back at Kira's house and caught the same ginger cat busily shredding more paper in the garden that had a tattered ORB symbol printed on them. Cagalli wrestled her hand from his, and he felt a little sorry that that had happened when he felt her pull away, but she continued to move quickly ahead of him, then bellowed like an enraged bull, and the cat turned and fled for its life.

Kira who had been tinkering in the garage that also served as a mini laboratory when he needed a place to test out some programmes his co-workers and subordinates had created, headed out to see what the commotion was all about. He stopped and stared and spotted Athrun squatting very clumsily and holding a furious cat by its hind legs, while Cagalli was getting ready to thrash it.

Feeling sorry for the doomed cat, (he always kind of liked animals even when he was a child), he called out to Athrun, knowing that the cat would be able to wriggle free if he did, and watched in horror as his startled friend unconsciously slackened his grip, allowing the cat to indeed, wriggle free and run away, but not before scratching Athrun and pausing to hiss very poisonously at Cagalli. She gaped for a few minutes, eyes widened at seeing an enemy in the form of a cat and Athrun in a pile of leaves with his work clothes obviously ruined.

"All in a day's work," Kira called out jovially, not quite suspecting that he was digging his grave there and then, but he watched their faces loom with murderous intent and suddenly felt nervous.

"Kiraaaaaa!" they both yelled in great annoyance.

High above on the second storey where Lacus was typing out a proposal to handle the readjustments of housing in PLANT the naturals would live in, she thought she heard Kira's name being called.

But Lacus continued typing because she had no time to loose if she wanted to finish her tasks for the day fast. She briefly wondered if it was the mischief the cat an ambassador had left was getting up to, but shrugged and continued what she was doing, even though some yelling and curses that she wanted to blush at were being fired very loudly from downstairs.

Her blue haro that had recently been strangely loyal to Kira instead of her, suddenly bopped over from where it had been placed at the window ledge, and proceeded to screech, "Help! Help! He's getting killed! He's getting killed!"

She paused and giggled, thinking how random Kira could be when he programmed speech, and wondered if the blue haro would ever say anything of relevance. Maybe she would ask him to explain to her what he had been doing with the haros, especially the blue one which he seemed to be particularly fond of, almost similiar to the way she favoured the pink haro.

And then she continued typing her proposal very precisely and calmly, all this while hearing the howls of pain doming from the garden below that sounded strangely familiar get louder and louder.

Author's notes:

Writing Truth has had a real kick, not literally of course. Thanks to those who have been consistently R-ing and R-ing, the encouragement goes far. Just a randompiece of information, the NANA live action movie song, ENDLESS STORY, performed by Yuna Ito, inspired Truth to a very large extent. Putting it on repeat mode helped, except I had to reset the count list about five times each time it hit the 120times mark.