category: Gundam SEED
disclaimer: I don't own it.
TWENTY-FOUR.
The first morning Lacus did not sing, the silence rang out loudly in her place. Kira popped in his head from the bathroom, rubbing at his wet hair with a towel.
"Lacus?" There was no need to clarify what he meant by his concerned tone, because she always sang the same tune every day while she opened the bay windows of their bedroom, so brightly that the birds stopped to listen.
"It's okay," she passed him a smile that felt lackluster even to her and tied the curtains off to the side neatly. "I just don't feel like it today."
Kira let it pass. She had been the provisional chairwoman for six months then, and the work seemed to finally be catching up to her. She was probably only tired, he wanted to believe.
x
She wasn't. Even a week later, a month, she still did not sing. The absence was no longer gaping, but as routine as the fact she drank green tea and not coffee and did not like windy days. Lacus wondered where her voice had gone, once when she passed the year mark. In the middle of brushing her hair she stopped suddenly and realized she didn't even remember what it felt like to position her mouth just so and breathe from her diaphragm.
There was no reason as to why she no longer did what used to make her happiest. Worried friends always asked about it when they met after a period of time. She tried her best to explain that there was no perfect explanation that connected the dots. She just didn't want to sing. It was impossible, even. Lacus never told anyone, but one day she stood in front of her mirror and tried to force out the simplest melody she knew. Her voice failed her.
It was because she remembered too many faces, she thought one day. Too many names of the dead she had written in a small black book she kept buried in a drawer of scarves. Of people she didn't even know; names she had drawn painstakingly from all her acquaintances in an effort to make their sacrifices worth something. Her father was dead and a young, beautiful girl had given up her life to imitate someone she was not and Lacus could not sing.
x
"Sing for us, Lacus." Cagalli held her hand gently and ran her fingers through long pink hair in a soothing motion. "Please. Sing for your friends who love you. Sing for yourself."
Lacus raised her eyes and looked at the three people she held most dear in the world. She opened her mouth and strained with every mite of willpower left in her to produce the four-note progression she had sung to her pet bird when she was a child.
Her breath escaped with a swish and there was no pure voice that broke the tense hush.
x
Lacus thought she was dreaming sometimes, that she had gone to sleep after her fourteenth birthday and everything that had happened since hadn't happened at all. She would wake up anytime soon, pad quietly downstairs and meet her father before he left for work. "I had the most beautiful dream last night," she would tell him rapturously as he gathered his briefcase and tied his shoes. "It was a very sad dream. But it wasn't blurred at all." He would stroke her cheek tenderly and she wouldn't have the burden of a hundred names burning through her book and into her flesh. They would all be safe.
x
She loved Kira, but he was broken too, and shattered two halves don't make a whole. They add up to something more like three-fourths, which isn't a person at all but a shadow of one that dies with the fireflies and the moonflowers. No one ever asked her if she was all right, because people always assumed she must be. She was Lacus Clyne, as if that made a difference. As if those ten letters stamped her for life and she wasn't allowed to feel this sad and so weary all the time.
She did nevertheless.
x
A year into her marriage, Lacus sang again. It wasn't because she forgave herself or because it was suddenly acceptable to forget about everyone who had died. She sang because she felt it was what her child deserved. So she hummed while she cooked, composed spontaneous ditties while taking long baths, sang the four notes she had to her pet bird to her swollen stomach.
She gave birth to a beautiful baby with very large, very familiar blue eyes. She forgot about the names and the burning and the blood. She sang.
notes: I really thought there was so much more simmering under Lacus's veneer of impenetrability. At the beginning of GS, she was carefree and entirely guileless. In less than forty episodes after her first appearance she morphed into this dedicated, resilient leader. There's no way anyone can go through that transition that quickly and come out entirely unscathed. Surely she's haunted by something? And I'll admit, I kind of really miss the "ara, ara" days of yore.
NEXT PHASE: "Don't be irreverent, Dearka. She would have died if no one had stopped the bleeding," Yzak snaps, and throws his briefcase into the corner.