category: Gundam SEED

disclaimer: I don't own it.

SEVENTEEN.

Dearka and Miriallia started a relationship after the first war, but it wasn't so much out of genuine feelings as convenience. They were close by in Orb as he waited for his trial to take place and she finally moved into a place of her own. So they fell together, because it made sense. He dropped by her apartment most evenings to take her out to eat; she came over some afternoons to simply sit in his living room and do nothing. It wasn't what they did that mattered but simply the fact that they weren't alone during those strange gray days.

He told her this a time that she was especially quiet. "We're in this together…I'm here for you." She only looked at him blankly because he didn't understand and went back to stabbing her gnocchi. The truth was that she didn't understand either. She didn't comprehend why she was so sad, why rainbows were colorless and summer nights cheerless. It took her a year and a half after the day Tolle died to realize that what was standing in the way between her and her happiness wasn't the shots – it wasn't the blood and the tears and the unfairness of a life ended too soon; it was her, her disease, the cancer of never letting go.

By the time she did understand, Dearka was long gone.

Once her parents asked her if that blond boy who was first on her speed dial (they didn't know his name, or even how they met – she always steered clear of specifics) treated her well. Of course, she responded. Was she happy, they ventured to ask next. She didn't meet their eyes, her reply unspoken. No.

Day in and day out, the two of them wandered in place without ever moving. Dearka turned and turned in circles around Miriallia as she spun always out of reach. Everything between them had been a rule to govern their lives together, everything a measurement of the distance that separated them, a symbiotic relationship of millimeters. He wasn't allowed to see her on Tuesdays, because that's the day a boy with brown hair and dancing blue eyes died. She didn't say the words 'desert' or 'defect' around him, even in innocuous context, because his case was still running in military tribunal and his best friend Yzak Joule had just been sentenced to death by firing squad. With time there were more and more restrictions: no sweet-scented teas because they nauseated her, no shirts that were red because he was so very sick of the color red, no public displays of affection, no airplanes, no wine, no dinners in restaurants where she might run into people she once knew, no sharp knives, no watching the news.

She had a fit the day she realized he still loaded his gun and secured his ankle holster under his pants every day, but he refused to toss it out. The distance widened.

Sometimes she felt completely alienated from him, because their entire situation was so bizarre. They had absolutely nothing in common except for the fact that they had been on the same ship for five months. Were it not for the war, she realized one day with a jolt, they would have passed each other by instantly, two faces in a shifting crowd. He was an elite pilot with a very important father in the PLANTs. She was simple and hardly a soldier, a natural at that. He liked video games and sports and she preferred quiet things like painting and photography. He took his coffee always black and she took hers with lots of cream and two sugars, and that made all the difference, it seemed.

One day he leaned in to kiss her, as he had done every night for the past months, but she turned her head away at the last minute and stared at her feet. He shifted and did not say anything.

Dearka's charges were cleared by the military the next week, and he flew back to the PLANTs without saying goodbye face-to-face. Miriallia received only a short email the morning after she went to his rented flat and found it empty, the clean counters and the open curtains a mockery of the fact that the place had been lived in once – today, or perhaps yesterday, she did not know.

ZAFT's let me back in with only a warning and a demotion. Sorry I couldn't meet you before I moved out, but I've already been reassigned. Good luck with your new photography job, Miriallia. There was an awkward gap that she could feel even through text. I'll see you around, maybe.

She deleted his message without rereading it. They did not keep in touch. Three days after he left, she received an untraceable call from Murrue. "The Terminal needs your help," she said clearly. Miriallia answered without hesitation and found herself automatically pulling out her suitcase.

"I'm in."

notes: I read a beautifully heartbreaking story for my French class the other day, and it sort of inspired me to write this. I feel like all the pairings in GS have potential to be tragic, and I like spinning things around to make them touching. Hope you all felt it! The story also got me thinking about a sad Athrun/Cagalli to write. There's a lot of them; about how they couldn't make it work or something. Hmmm. We'll see.

NEXT PHASE: After years of not knowing, Murrue decides to find out about the last moments of an old comrade – of her friend, Natarle Badgiruel.