category: Gundam SEED
disclaimer: I don't own it.
FORTY-ONE.
The first war went badly.
That was all Kira let himself think whenever he remembered his days on the front line. And the reminders were always there – in the daffodils that Reverend Malchio planted behind the house, in the metal wreckage that hid in the treetops and under the sand, in one of the orphans who tied her light brown hair in two pigtails and spoke with a slight lisp.
But he blocked them out and forced his thoughts to not wander to darker places. It was ten times harder to put himself back together than to fall apart, and so he took to watching the ocean for hours a day as a distraction. The war went badly: he had let people die, and that was all that mattered.
For the first few months after the end of the war, Kira wasn't sure if he was allowed to think about Flay. He lived with Lacus, after all, and it was blue eyes (not gray, never gray) that greeted him every morning. Lacus brought him his tea in the back garden and while they drank in meaningful silence Kira tried not to stare at the blooming daffodils. He hated yellow flowers and he hated the lipsticks arranged neatly on Lacus's dressing table and he hated the cloudless skies that mocked his confusion and his uncertainty. Everything reminded him of times he tried desperately to overlook. Kira despised himself for often dreaming about red hair instead of pink.
It was unfair, for Flay to have died while he still loved her. She had bound him to her for the rest of time by doing that, by forever being his first kiss and first love and first everything. It was impossible to truly forget her because she was with him always, in the warm summer shower and the evening breeze. Theirs had not been a love of forever, or even of accepted reciprocity, but it had been something nonetheless.
But Kira learned. When painful memories surfaced he managed to dwell on them only momentarily. And his relationship with Lacus flourished. Eventually he realized that his feelings for her were the truest he'd ever known. He was happy with that knowledge even as he suffered constantly from the burden of faceless beings he did not save. Mothers and fathers who were blown to bits, children killed in cockpits – entire families crushed to dust and blown to the wind.
If he had, long ago, had the chance to end the war before it ever started and spare millions of people the anguish that they endured everyday he would have taken it unthinkingly and done his best. It would have been all right even if that twisted the future and meant that he never met Cagalli and Lacus at all. The prospect of living in a different reality where he did not have blood caked permanently into the creases of his hands was enthralling, more so than the monotonous bleakness of what his actual life had become.
The war went badly, and Kira did not forgive himself for many years afterward.
notes: A reviewer recently mentioned how the majority of SPTW is always so dismal. I think the reason is that SEED itself is not a happy show. The subject matter is harsh and moments of levity are few and far in-between, in a similar way they are for this story. I don't expect there to be much cheerfulness in a war, anyway. It's the small happinesses that count, like Cagalli hating her new nickname (PHASE SIX) or Shinn feeling inferior to Athrun (PHASE TWENTY-ONE) or Vino pining fruitlessly over Lunamaria (PHASE THIRTY-FOUR).
NEXT PHASE: Athrun apologizes to Shinn. "It sounded like you were troubled and all I could think was that I had failed you after all."