Chapter 14

"Alright," she found herself saying as he calmly informed her they were going out for dinner without her brother and Lacus who were upstairs kissing themselves senseless.

Cagalli was about to turn into the corridor that would lead her into her room,but then she remembered something and abruptly paused while she was halfway up the stairs and asked hesitantly, "Do I have to wear a dress to get into the place where we're dining at?"

He had already thrown on his navy-coloured coat and was trying to tie a maroon scarf around his neck and called out cheerfully, "No."

So she hurried up to the room Lacus had lent her and threw on a clean white shirt with long sleeves and proper cuffs in case the paparazzi took photos of her, she knew she couldn't go wrong in her work clothes. And then she made very sure that she was wearing a knee-length workskirt which was a deep olivine colour she quite liked.

Of course she made sure she was wearing her shorts underneath, she needed them like she needed air when it came to the region of skirt-wearing. And then she grabbed her handbag Goebbels had made her carry, emptied its contents into a satchel she had used when she was schooling for what felt like about an eon ago, then swiftly dumped in some sweets she had been saving, and hurried down without bothering to look at her reflection in the mirror.

She hadn't looked much into a mirror for her own sake unless it was before some important event where they made her sit in front of dressing table to do the whole works of hair and make-up.

He was waiting for her at the foot of the staircase, and she had to admit the dark navy-blue coat looked very sharp on him. He always knew how to dress well, even as bodyguard.

It wasn't a wonder that Yuna had quickly deduced that she was nuts about him, it hadn't taken the incident when he had caught them laughing and wrestling on the carpet to tell him that she didn't fancy anyone else but 'Alex Dino'.While Yuna had been the type who cared more about spending time to look sharp than worrying about ORB's state of chaos, Athrun Zala was one of the few blessed people in the galaxy who could wake up looking like a million dollars or that sort of thing.

Not that she cared of course. She scarcely looked into a mirror her whole life, she couldn't care less if he did or he didn't.

Athrun was taking her hand in his and bringing her to his car- a black Lamborghini. She would have pulled away, not because she didn't like her hand being held in his,but because she was afraid that she'd get used to it and be hurt when he left, which was pretty soon. But she didn't pull away because she was staring in awe at his car. She wasn't shallow, ye Gods, she wasn't, but it was a thing of beauty.

Cagalli had been homeschooled for almost her whole life, and she had studied surprisingly well, but when she was twelve, she had demanded that she go to a normal school, incognito of course, because she wanted some friends of her own age.

Her friends hadn't known she was Uzumi Nara Atha's daughter, because she had just told them that she was Cagalli Yula, and Uzumi Nara Atha had never shown his adopted daughter to the public before, she never said she wanted to be a performing monkey anyway.

So her friends had known her as the fun-loving, trouble-creating girl who could rattle off the model names of guns and rifles and car models as well as any boy with war history nailed right down, and when she had gone back to home schooling after a classmate had blown her cover, she had missed all her friends very badly with no way to contact them after that. But they had managed to find a way to send a book of car names and the kind of things they knew she was interested in, so she could have opened a car manual shop by the time she was fifteen.

So of course she could tell Athrun's car was a Lamborghini, and nobody had to be a car expert to tell that it was a very nice one too. But other than the car, its familiarity struck her hard.

Biting her lip a little, she asked him, "Did you come here yesterday morning?" and bit her lip some more when he nodded. She knew whose car it had been now.

She got into the seat next to him and the seatbelts strapped her in tightly. As the engine roared and he manned the steering wheel along the roads, she looked at the setting sun with its vivid pinks, reds, yellows, and orange. The horizon met the sun almost flawlessly, almost as if the rays were kissing the earth. Then she rememebered something and swivelled around to look at Athrun.

"So how did you know they were kissing?" she asked curiously while the traffic light made the car pause at a turn point.

"Because I was talking to Lacus and he came in and they started doing you-know-what" Athrun said dryly as he frowned a little at some random driver who cut into his lane without signalling. She chewed her lip as she pondered what he had been saying, and gave up trying to understand what had happened because she never really understood what Kira and Lacus were up to most of the time.

"It concerned Fllay," he continued, and her head which had been facing downwards while she was digging her worn, brown canvas schoolbag for a sweet snapped right back up where she oggled at him comically. But he didn't see, he was concentrating on the road because the road, in his opinion, was full of lunatics like the one he had just met.

"Fllay Alster?" she said in disbelief, "Kira's..?"

He nodded and continued as the light turned green, moving quickly ahead and ready to overtake the driver who had cut into his lane without signalling for the second time.

"Yes. A candidate I was looking at had her red hair and her features, you know, and it turns out his mother was Fllay's second cousin, assuming George Alster's brother's child had a cousin who was the boy's mother."

"Oh," she said, a little confused, not quite getting the system of first and second cousins, she never had anyway, since she had no relatives except her father who had been an only child, Kira nonwithstandin, of couse.

"So what happened after that?" she continued inquisitively, not aware that she was more interested than she realised.

He squinted at the road ahead as the sunset began to become stronger and replied, "So Lacus got flustered and revealed all her fears to me, and then Kira burst in quite suddenly.

Turns out that he knew what we were talking about because he had tinkered with the blue haro, but apparently he did it too often and too excessively, although he had just aimed to make it share a link with the pink one so it could be like a walk-talkie for him and Lacus.

And then he was in his lab working as you know, and the blue haro malfunctioned because of all the tinkering he did with it, and it became a sort of eavesdropping device according to where the pink haro was.

So he heard what she said to me and then when he got into the room, we all know what happened thereafter," he concluded, focusing on the route he was about to take.

"Oh," was all she said as she smiled and bent down and continued to scrabble around in her continued quest to locate the sweets in her bag.

He noticed she was fumbling everywhere in the bag she was carrying and took his eyes of the road for a few seconds to see her dumping out its contents onto her lap just in time. He knew he wasn't such a good driver that he could take his eyes off the road for more than a few seconds, since the only person who could drive blindfolded and not die was probably Meyrin Hawke, when she had driven the jeep like a mad person while avoiding the gun bullets, even doing some fancy drifting moves around the difficult bends of the roads. It had been like some kind of action movie, but he had been too focused on trying to stay alive that he hadn't enjoyed the experience very much.

At the next traffic light, Athrun looked back at Cagalli who had all her things spread out everywhere on her lap and was trying to hold something in one hand while using the other to open her bag and stuff everything in it at the same time.

"Don't you ever wish you had three hands?" he asked dryly, shifting some of the edge of her lap where the miscellaneous items looked ready to commit scuicide.

"Uh-no, why do you ask?" she said absentmindedly while she continued to sift around and flip some notepads over.

He snorted and hauled open her bag while she gathered everything up in her now-free hand and successfully swept everything back into it.

Cagalli breathed her thanks in relief and proudly opened her fist to reveal brightly coloured sweets that she had been clutching like treasures before that.

"Here," she said proudly, offering him a sweet.

He stared at her and then took one because it would have been rude to tell her he didn't really share her sweet tooth unlike Kira, and because it was Cagalli who was offering him the sweet. He'd do anything for her. He was pretty sure then that if she had asked him to eat his Infinite Justice Gundam for her, he would have gotten out his knife, fork, and some pepper, and sat down to eating metal for the rest of his life.

As they neared a little cliff, she glanced around and asked, "Is the place we're having dinner at near a beach?" and he nodded, although it wasn't the same one they had been on previously.

She helped herself to a sweet too and happily peeled of its wrapper before she popped it in, then sat quietly in bliss.

He did too, and thought the sweet was actually quite nice, since it was coffee-flavoured, which he really didn't mind at all. In fact, as long as she was the one who presented it to him, he didn't mind anything at all. As they pulled up near the coast, and the door automatically unlocked, she pulled off the safety-belts and shot out of the car like a streak of lightning, obviously eager to get onto the beach, but not before she dropped something that had previously been on her lap.

Athrun stared and picked up a little rag doll which had a long extension string behind it and a mop of purplish-blue hair tied in a ponytail, reminiscent of…

"Yuna Roma Seiran?" he said aloud when he flipped the little doll around. Then he knew that she had been carrying it around with her like some kind of secret pet while he had pined away unwittingly for the last two years.

She had once made him smile and laugh like a fool, she still had that kind of power over him, and the realisation of that truth goaded him more than the doll he held now.

He clenched the doll very tightly in his fist, suddenly enraged that she had shown any trace of attachment to Yuna Roma Seiran, and leapt swiftly out of his car, slamming the door shut angrily and locking it with a 'click'. Far below him, he saw her moving towards the coastline and wanted to scream for her to turn back immediately.

Cagalli had already run onto the beach and deposited her shoes somewhere on a rock and was playing and splashing, shouting for him to some and join her, and he got to where she was in no time at all, sliding down the weathered rock that was the gentle-sloping cliff.

Marching to her, but first throwing off his own shoes the way he had watched her do, he moved into the warm seawater where she was bending down, looking for a seashell to "take back to Lacus", she excitedly suggested. He really couldn't care what she did as long as she could explain to him what a ragdoll in the image of Yuna Roma Seiran was doing in her bag.

He stood behind her, tall and stoic in the water with her back turned towards him while she continued to splash around and then he called her name fiercely, still clenching the doll in his fist.

Not detecting the dangerous note in his voice, she continued to play and mess around, and hummed a little "What?" to him, but when she didn't show any sign of turning around, he grabbed her by the back of her arms and forced her to turn around to look at him in an akward locking of arms. Her arms were covered by the sleeves of her shirt, but he knew that they were delicately sprinkled with freckles, and he held them tightly, suddenly afraid that she' take off.

Puzzled at his sudden aggressiveness, she put her head on one side and repeated innocently, "What?"

Thoroughly irritated, he held up the doll by it's long string and dangled it in front of their faces although his grip on her arm didn't slacken.

"Why do you keep this with you?" he shot furiously at her and saw that her eyes had widened and she had gone just a little red with something he didn't identify as embarrassment, but saw it as nervousness which made him want to track down and find Yuna Roma Seiran and kill him. Of course that wasn't possible.

"I-It's a Yuna doll," she stammered, and his grip on her arm didn't loosen when he retorted, "Anyone could see that."

She was suddenly frightened of the way he was holding her and rashly started thrashing violently against his grip and he let her break free easily, but he didn't expect her to turn back, face him, and lunge at himto grab the doll then charge out from the water and leave him standing like a fool in the sea.

He thought she had shown him what he meant to her, and how much more worthy a doll made like her former fiance was when it was compared to him, and he wanted to hit something in his anguish.

But he stood there instead, frozen, and he was hurt although he couldn't explain why, and then he heard her call out to him from the coast and he looked up and turned over to where she was. Cagalli was reaching out for him, the expression on her face hesitant, but he jumped at it and proceeded to wade his way out of the water as quickly as he could.

And he cursed himself for liking to be made a fool by her.

When he got to her, she was gripping a long wooden stick she had obtained from somewhere, and she started brandishing it like a sword. He waded out of the last of the water; his pants wet to his knees, and strode over to her, similarly barefooted. She had hung the doll on a tree nearby by its long cord and cheerfully handed him the stick.

Bewildered, he looked from the stick, to the doll, then at her, and asked, "What am I supposed to do with this?"

She growled and yanked it out of his hands, frustrated, then proceeded to swing the long wooden stick like a bat at the doll which made the cloth doll swing into the air with a loud thump that actually sounded like it hurt.

"That's what you do with it, you idiot!" she cried.

"Oh" he said.

She turned to him and put it in his hands again, and told him to try it too, and when he whacked the doll, she shouted that even his grandmother could do better, then when he thumped it so hard the thing actually flew upwards and whistled around the tree branch as an axis and got stuck, she let out a whooping cheer and pumped her fist in the air violently.

Then they were both laughing at the ridiculous state the doll was in, and she was saying without any malice, "Lacus made that for me to use it if I ever felt like I wanted to throw in the towel and give up."

And he was sorry that he had been so rough with her and took her hand in his, wanting to apologise but she laughed and pulled away from him, running to get her shoes and shouting over her shoulder that she was so hungry, she would cook and eat him if they didn't get going.

Athrun hurried after her and fetched his shoes while she gazed at something far beyond the ocean with an expression that seemed a little like wistfulness. So they moved on and the last he saw of the doll was a tiny purple peck hanging high up in some branches where nobody would notice it ever again. With time, it would be forgotten and be reduced to nothing.

While they strolled along the beach, they joked and talked of merry things although they argued about some things that were quite insignificant, and then ended up having to agree to disagree. Cagalli wondered aloud what Kira and Lacus would be eating for dinner since Athrun had left them where they were, and Athrun chuckled and said they probably wouldn't be hungry at all.

By the time they reached the restaurant, their clothes had already dried and they had worked up an appetite each. He didn't care even if they arrived as wet as dogs that had been turned out during a rainy day, as long as she was there, he wouldn't be bothered by such things.

And as they walked into the cosy looking restaurant his secretary had kept rattling off about when he had asked her to confirm his arrangements for his lodging in EA's territory, Athrun thought to himself that it was a lucky thing his brain could pick up random bits of information like where a nice restaurant was, especially since he didn't really care what he ate for dinner half the time.

The menu was mostly seafood, probably because of the proximity of the restaurant to the sea, but half the dishes were crab and lobster dishes, something quite messy that he wasn't prepared to deal with, but Cagalli turned to him with sparkling eyes that rendered him quite breathless before she proclaimed that she liked chilli crabs very much.

"O-kay," he thought watching her wield the little, well, not so little spiked end hammer with such finesse that he was surprised she was using it to crack open the crab and not split some unlucky idiot's head who got in her way.

She cracked open everything with little difficulty and they dug in, although he had to keep stopping to breathe and drink coldwater, and then he saw her ring not to laugh and he glared at her, saying that it wasn't fair because she had lived with the Desert Dawn resistance and gotten used to their spicy food while he had lived on bland tv dinners on a ship for almost all of his life.

"Where are your bodyguards?" he asked her suddenly.

"Back at the ORB embassy." she answered cheerfully, "Why do you ask anyway?"

He grinned and said, "I thought they would have wanted to come and protect you."

She waved away his wisecracking attempt and wiped her flushed lips, presumably red from the chilli's sting, and retorted, "I told them I didn't need any bodyguards when I was a Desert Dawn Resistance fighter and if I couldn't handle the situation, Kira Yamato, my twin, who happens to be the pilot of the legendary Freedom which only ended the first and second war, would lend me a hand."

Cagalli chortled with glee, then continued, "They begged me to bring them along so they could learn a thing or two from Kira, but I told them no and got them to take a break after we did some hand-to-hand-combat and I knocked them senseless."

Athrun raised an eyebrow quizzically and said, "Shouldn't you replace them with better bodyguards?"

And she looked at him and laughed again before tucking in once more. Other girls would have pouted and been coy with him, but not her. She wasn't 'other girls' anyway.

The waiters had given them a table stuffed in a little corner so nobody would notice them, and the people there were too busy stuffing themselves in a place with cheerful conversation that nobody bothered them for the whole evening. But in return, both of them had to give autographs to all the waiters who had qeued up already.

Athrun simply scribbled his signature, amused that the waiters thought so highly of them, but Cagalli emptied out all her bag's contents again and took out all her precious sweets and placed them between the napkins they signed on after footing the bill. She refused to let him pay for her of course.

Then she grinned at him, told him that she was going to get the shell for Lacus of it was the last thing she did, and proceeded to dart out of the restaurant with the waiters nearly prostrating themselves at her feet. One was almost weeping and even said he would frame the sweet wrapper to show it to his grandchildren next time.

Athrun shuddered when he thought of the party the ants would be having and hurried after her into the cool night breeze. Her hair was moving almost rhythmically in the wind like his own, and she looked at him with very wise eyes and he felt a pang of sorrow assault him. She probably realised that he was trying to settle the score they had left behind two years ago, and he knew she wasn't quite too keen on that, although he hoped the true reasons were not those he had been afraid of.

He could have ended it all with dinner and maybe a goodbye hug or that kind of thing, and then they'd have settled the score because they could talk to each other again without any walls in between. That might have been good enough for her. But he wasn't looking for that. He never had been when it concerned her.

So he chose to follow her when she stepped a little way to the side and walked, away from him.