2023-05-27: Was It Worth It?
- Log: 2023-05-27: Was It Worth It?
- Cast: Sayla Mass, Char Aznable
- Where: A Ship in a Pacific
- OOC - IC Date: 27 March 0097
- Summary: Sayla confirms for herself that an experimental treatment has 'purified' Char Aznable. The Deikun siblings share a newtype bond for the first time.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Mithril's Helicopter division had taken the Zaku II's cockpit block- air gapped as it was by the maglev transportations- and taken it out to sea.
Not long after that, the cockpit was slicer open with a beam saber- its pilot dropped roughly onto the deck of a converted container ship. The small team on the boat moved quickly. There was still so much room for it to go wrong.
A medical team in hazmat suits moved him quickly, while the MS unit placed on the ship- a Nermo and two Dijehs- destroyed the last of the Conqueror King Zaku II with enough weapons fire to atomize to the point there was nothing else left.
They moved quickly- the process was an experiment, but the theory was that Triple Zero was much like DG Cells. A bloodborne disease of sorts. If they could purge the particles from the blood…
The work started now, no more than two minutes exposure at a time, constant checks to confirm they hadn't been subverted and the MS Squadron ready to destroy the medical room on a moment's notice. They'd be working all night.
—-
Sayla had arrived sometime in the night. She wasn't exactly sure. Her hands were still shaking, and nothing could take the edge off.
She knows she should be somewhere else right now.
But she can't face that right now.
She had to leave securing communications again to Diamond-2. As much as it was to lean on Teletha… there were so few others she could lean on right now. So many had been lost.
All because she focused on the wrong thing.
She watched from the other side of the glass, the coffee in her hand cold.
The sun wasn't up yet, and the sea was quiet.
"...Dr Mass?" The head of the medical team speaks up, and Sayla jolts alert.
"Sorry, what is it?"
"I said we're detecting no more Zero Particles in his body, and the blood has been…. Fading into light as we dispersed it. He'll be waking up any time.
Sayla nodded, and handed off her coffee.
"I'm going in. Mr Cuaran, if the distress signal goes off, tell your team to take the shot."
There was silence of a few moments, before she got a single 'Affirmative'.
She stepped into the hastily built medical facility. This time, she'd be talking to her brother with no more artifice between.
—
In his cockpit, Cuaran shook his head. This isn't where he expected to be today, nearly two decades after his unit was abandoned on Earth by Zeon. There was a crackle over the comms. "You sure about this, sir?"
"Hell no. I don't want regicide on my conscience either. But it's not my call. Now keep everything trained on them."
It was probably a good thing his plan to bomb the Trojan Horse and the White Devil failed that day, in some ways. Those kids had earned his respect.
But he's pretty sure that was the reason he was here today, with orders to fire.
"I swear, it's the devil's own luck at play here," He muttered to himself, before putting his eye to the targeting scope- and hoping he wouldn't be pulling the trigger.
<Pose Tracker> Char Aznable has posed.
… He hurts. All over. As though his whole body had been on fire for months and he's only now feeling the burn scars within. Once awake enough, and having pushed through the pain enough, to assemble something resembling a conscious thought, he considers that full-body agony is the least he could have expected, considering everything he's done. Outwardly, he expresses this complex feeling in an incredibly undignified groan.
Slowly - gingerly - he opens his eyes, to stare up at the ceiling for a long moment, those cold, crystal blues finally untainted by the amber spark of the Oath Over Omega. His proprioception comes to life and he takes note of the rocking sensation. The sounds of the medical devices next to his bed are the next to reach his consciousness, followed by a dry taste in his mouth.
Last to awaken - that battered, gnarled and frayed sense the people of space took to be the mark of his father's beliefs, and this is what tells him he's not alone in the room.
"... Artesia," he croaks. Memory is now deigning to return to him. "You… I'm not…" He attempts to sit up, then lets out a deeply-pained grunt and slumps back into the bed. "... No, if I… were dead, it surely wouldn't… hurt this much." It is a visible effort to manage that sentence.
Carefully, he turns his head to look at Sayla, taking in the expression on her face, the way her arms are trembling even as she hides her hands behind her back. He opens his mouth to say something - then winces and apparently thinks better of it.
Another interminable pause; then, he gathers enough strength to say: "I didn't expect to wake up, let alone for you to be here when I did."
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
"No. You're not." Sayla is trying to keep her voice level, dispassionate, but it's simply not happening. Her emotions are all over the place, and the place is dark. Her walls aren't hiding- or can't hide- that.
"...I couldn't let it end with you dying again." Sayla says, but there is doubt in her voice. "...Even if that's what you wanted."
She's silent for a good few minutes more. She had thought she'd be angry. She thought the words would just come out.
They don't.
"I'm not letting you walk away again. Not again."
What else can she say.
...something she's still too scared to tell another parent.
"...Vist took Mineva. They have her now. They have Mineva, they have the Unicorn, they have Banagher." They finally start to rush out, and tears start to flow. "They have everything they want, and they have Akane and Rikka and-"
She cuts herself off. Just the thought of saying it- admitting it- feels like it could tear her apart.
"You knew." She says, accusatory and despairing. "Why couldn't you just tell me? Why couldn't you just...."
She turns away, and tries unsuccessfully to stifle a sob.
"Why....?"
<Pose Tracker> Char Aznable has posed.
With no small effort, Char forces himself to sit up in the bed, eyes screwed shut as he does so. "Whatever you… However you got It out of me, it feels awful. I suppose it will heal in time."
He sucks in a sharp breath when she says the Vist have everything they wanted, including Mineva. He winces. "... I see."
And then: 'Why didn't he just tell her?'
"I only put it together in the wake of Seattle," he answers. "What I felt from the Banshee… The shape of the pilot's hate for me, it was unmistakable."
A memory crosses the gap between them, unbidden - a girl's voice, distorted by the comms scrambling, declaring: 'Disappear'.
"I could not reveal myself, even to you. You would have done then what you've done now, and the Oath prohibited that risk." He grits his teeth for a moment, the effort of speaking too much for him.
"In the battle… You were already coming apart with panic. If I had added one more reason for you to be distracted… You would have been killed." He could see it plain as day - her Hi-Nu shot in the back by an unaccounted-for Anksha squad, or cleaved in twain by the Mu Gundam's terrible claw.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
"It was similar to dialysis, with a full DG Cell purge. We... effectively replaced the blood you had with uncontaminated blood, and..." She stops. "It means we can purge the Aura of Dawn- under certain circumstances, without purifiers."
She doesn't mention that Char was the guinea pig for this trial, But it had to be someone who could survive the experience, and most people would accept the death of if it failed.
That's how she could justify saving him at all, maybe.
The shape of the pilot's hate... for him.
How could she have been so stupid. How could she not have realized?
"...So you claim you were protecting me." It's not a question. There's venom in those words.
"What if I had been part of the team facing her and not you?" She starts to stand. " I deserved to know it was Leina! I had a right-"
The words die in her throat. Sayla's face pales.
Did you ever stop to think what would happen if you were found out anyway? If they came for me to get to you?
She staggers back, as it all slots into place. As if she's realizing what she'd done. Because she finally had. It finally made sense.
"...I did to her exactly what you did to me." There was one other chair in the room, and she fell into it, as the weight of it all crashed down on her. "I... I..."
"I was so scared of her finding out about you... so I did exactly... what you did to me... And now... and now..."
She can't tell if she wants to scream, or sob, or just curl into a ball and close herself off from the world. She stares at the one way mirror, at her own face in the glass.
She failed them all. Banagher, Mineva, Alouette, Rikka, Akane, Leina.... She failed her friends. Her family. The people she had told herself she cared about most.
Judau, Roux, Knight, Chris, Guy- more people she'd let down.
"...th it?" She mumbles, barely audible, as the last of her walls fall away. What point is there having them?
There's no secrets left to protect anymore- and no one left worth protecting behind them.
<Pose Tracker> Char Aznable has posed.
"I can't say I… recommend the procedure," he manages to half-joke, "but… needs must, in extremis. It is an ingenious solution."
He could interject as Sayla turns that venom on him - but then only moments later into her anger his sister makes a terrible realization and collapses into the one chair in the room.
As her walls collapse, Char closes his eyes again. The connection between them has oh so rarely been a mutual conduit, but now… With them both in the deepest despair and fatigue… There is a spark of something.
He remains silent for a while, gathering strength again… And then begins humming. It is an old, sweet, and deeply familiar tune to both of them - a lullaby sung to a young Sayla by her older brother. He doesn't have the strength for the lyrics, but they both know them by heart, at this point.
Inchworm, Inchworm…
She needs something to focus on now, instead of losing herself to her own self-recrimination.
He comes to the end of the first chorus, blue eyes on her. That frosty look to them has thawed, noticeably.
"I must have been unconscious when you learned. Tell me everything."
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
The attempted joke doesn't land. It earns him a glare, in the moments before she totally collapses.
But there is a spark of something.
The humming causes her to look up, wondering what the hell he was doing. But she recognized the tune.
They'd both learned it from their mother, after all.
Two and two are four... Four and four are eight...
She stares at him, for a moment. A simple lullaby.
And a moment of mutual understanding, here, now, more than four years after all hope of it was lost.
He asks her to tell him what happened, and for a second she seems stunned.
And so the part of her that got her through her life without him takes over, just for a bit.
"...Martha Vist Carbine... put Leina on camera. Broadcast it to everyone. And they she demanded Banagher and Mineva surrender, or she'd inject a neurotoxin into Leina. She said she'd die fighting us." Sayla feels a shiver through her body, recounting it.
"And then... Leina claimed she was doing it of her own free will but... She can't have been. Not her. She'd never put any of them through this unless they did something to her." Something Sayla never noticed. Because she was paying attention to the wrong person. That self loathing starts to build again.
"I... ordered everyone to stand down. Banagher begged someone to take Audrey... Mineva away from the battlefield but... in the end they both went. And then they activated whatever horrible thing they did to Rikka and they took Alouette as well." She pauses. "...She's 3G. One of Guy Shishioh's people." Why is she lingering on details?
"Everything after that... One of my allies took over. Shelby... one of Nanai's people got me back to the ship." That's a revelation Char may not be ready for but...
They've both hit rock bottom.
"...Diamond-2 is in charge for now. I came here to oversee your treatment."
With it all said, Sayla sounds more and more hopeless.
"Damnit... damnit!" She seems like nothing so much as a shaky house of cards, held together by hope and careful balance, and she's suddenly lost both.
"She... she said she'd return Leina once Laplace's Box was sealed away for good." But would she still be Leina? Would Leina still come back? After everything she said... Every cruelty that had been inflicted on her...
"Casval..." Sayla's voice is weak, frail, pathetic.
He's only heard her like this three times in his entire life. The first was on the shuttle out of Side 3, with the Ral's. The second was the day that both their mother and Lucifer passed away.
And the last was the day he sent her away, to keep her safe from his revenge.
"...tell me. Is there anything that makes this worth it?"
And, for a moment, it feels like everything she is hinges on that question.
<Pose Tracker> Char Aznable has posed.
It is an agony to even think, right now, to hold all this information in his brain in the aftermath of Triple Zero's energy being forcibly extracted from his body… But right now he's the only one Sayla can tell everything. He has to try.
"What use could she have for a 3G member…?" He frowns. "... This Alouette… She sounded young?" A grim suspicion settles in his stomach. "The girl with the lilac hair - she claimed Murasame Labs were involved."
One of Nanai's people… So they were drawn together in his wake.
"Mineva, at least, will be unharmed. Martha will want her as a friend and figurehead to smooth things over after this." He sounds detached, but she can feel his revulsion - that's the very thing he tried to spare the young Zabi heir from, after all.
And then, finally, a damning question - for both of them. He pauses, thinking carefully.
"Once upon a time," He begins, "I thought that, as long as you were safe, everything I did would be worth it. In the end…
I was surrounded by people hanging on my every word like some kind of avatar of liberation, loyal soldiers ready to fight and die at my command, even people who loved me… And all I felt was hollow."
I will finally be reunited with my father, Zeon.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
"...That's Akane," She says, quietly. The colour of her hair said so much. "She's 3G too. She's been living with me since we..."
She shudders again. "Since Rikka... the girl who was in the other Gundam... saved her." It hadn't just been Rikka- but Rikka had been the one at the heart of it. And it was too much to explain everything.
When Char tries to be dispassionate, however, he gets a despairing look from Sayla. "...She told me that you raised her. That she saw you as her father. That you were the one who told her to come to me if she was in trouble." Even as she feels his disgust... "Are you really going to tell me that that's enough? That she won't be harmed? How can you be sure, with the threats she just made? Do you think she won't kill Mineva the same way she was prepared to with Leina if she won't agree with her plan?"
She sickens herself with her own thoughts... and the fact that even for a second she could hope that the rest of them were in the same danger as Leina. What was wrong with her?
Char's reasoning feels like a poison settling in her stomach. "I really... did just turn into you..."
And then the memory sinks in, and she looks repulsed.
But it's hard to get away from your own body.
"...You just wanted to die? That was really it?" She shakes with rage and despair as she stands. Despair that she was so much like him, so prepared to inflict on Leina what had been done to her.
"You idiot!!" She yells, at herself as much as she was at Char, closing the distance from the chair to the bed. She looks like she could tear him from the bed and throw him against the wall, enraged and despairing and devoid of hope.
But she doesn't. She stops herself.
"Do you really think that would solve anything?" The question seems to echo- and in that moment she grabs his arm.
—
A memory of a brown haired girl in a faded Magical Girl Wonderful Persimmon coming down the stairs as Sayla stayed up all night, watching the news, terrified of what had happened. All her resources to help people were exhausted as she felt the miracle from afar.
The girl who she had saved those years ago was saving her now, keeping her from her worst. Keeping her alive, as she lost a man she had once loved, and a brother she had long ago had to walk away from.
The memory jumps.
A family dinner, with faces Char will recognize- and those he won't. A young cyborg woman that fought the Sazabi with the King of Braves and the King of Heart. The young man who launched at him with a pipe. A woman with purple hair and a star on her shirt. A girl with blue-black hair sitting next to the lilac haired girl. Leina.
These were Sayla's family. The family she had found after he had gone Beyond the Time.
The memories keep jumping.
Three AM on a rainy night, emerging from the hospital to talk to another Doctor- Kamille.
A quiet birthday dinner with heroes- Guy, Koji and Sayaka. People Quattro had fought alongside, once.
They jump further back.
Her time with Amuro, in that palatial prison of a home. The time she walked away from him, when all they could do was keep hurting each other with their presence.
The night she met a redheaded woman, waiting for a taxi at a hospital. Their first kiss a few years later. When they said goodbye, because the ghosts of their pasts were too much.
Walking into the destroyed remnants of that mansion with a woman Char once claimed to love- the cracks it made on her soul when Nanai told Sayla of Char's lost moments... and who he was thinking of.
These are the moments he had missed when he had walked away. Moments of joy and sadness, that could have been shared.
So many memories fly by, but for a moment, Char might feel a presence he hadn't felt since he left beyond the Asteroid belt- fleeting, brief, there but for a moment- but one that saved Sayla's life.
But they keep coming back to one person,.
A talk on a verandah in a Spanish villa with Leina, after Judau had left for Jupiter.
A quiet birthday, just Sayla and Leina.
An energetic discussion in the library about one of her father's papers, smiling brightly as Leina formed her own conclusions.
Waiting in the school foyer with a bouquet of flowers, to congratulate Leina after her first lead role.
Crying next to Leina in the movie theater, watching a happier retelling of Sayla's own life.
That's the person closest to Sayla's heart now. The daughter she pushed away to 'protect' her.
The person she wants to come home safe, more than anything.
—-
"Do you still think that, Casval?" She says, pulling her hand away.
Normally, she hated these bonds.
But for once, it might mean he understood.
<Pose Tracker> Char Aznable has posed.
He wants to refute her when she says she just turned into him - after all, where he chose to destroy, again and again, she chose to build - in the wake of his misdeeds.
Then she shouts, and lunges, and before he can answer her -
—
Time cascades. Memories, all at once, overwhelm him - and in turn - -
The travel on that ship out beyond the asteroid belt; new acquaintances, the sparks of something that could be romance, but deadened by a pervasive sense of solitude - an ache he did not, then, know to describe.
Returning - almost as if called back, inexorably drawn - and meeting a scrappy young outcast with a chip on his shoulder the size of Mars, and taking him under his wing for reasons he doesn't understand. Meeting Amuro again and fighting alongside him despite their acrimonious relationship.
The maelstrom and morass of emotions upon seeing Mineva Lao Zabi in Haman Karn's grip.
The pain and fury when he learned of Kamille's fate after fighting Scirocco.
The Sweetwater Mansion. Happier times. Playing with the young girl he rescued from Neo Zeon's leader, enjoying films with her. Singing their lullaby.
And all the while - every day - the guilt and emptiness deepens. What might her life have been, if he hadn't…
A meeting. Men wearing fine suits and empty smiles. An offer - an ultimatum. Either he becomes Neo Zeon's new leader, or they wait and approach Mineva. A weight, and a realization that the political rot was never confined solely to the Federation.
Talking with a heavyset man with his own ghosts of the past, entrusting a freighter captain with Mineva's protection and the utmost secrecy.
The speech. That speech, where he proclaimed his emptiness to Sweetwater, and nobody noticed.
An attempt to destroy the Red Comet once and for all, in a final clash with the White Devil - and Amuro refusing, at the very end, to finish the fight, slamming the Sazabi's cockpit block into Axis as he pushes, desperately. Feeling the hands of everyone on Earth join together to help Amuro - the same hands that clawed cruelly at their own, now open in warmth. Unable to process this feeling, as the psycoframe's resonance builds to incredible, unanticipated heights, and sends himself and the Nu Gundam tumbling far, far Beyond the Time.
Orange flame, in every direction. Himself, adrift in his own cockpit chair, the block itself gone. The panicked gasping for air, and finding the need to breathe irrelevant. His injuries healed… And something changing, moving into him -
It passes over and through, and everything feels normal again.
—
His other hand is gripping Sayla's, his blue eyes locked with her own. Blue into blue.
He lets go.
He could answer her… But she knows his answer already, now.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
<poem> Perhaps that was the difference.
For all they had both been through... Sayla's life was never truly empty. She still had those who she was able to let into her life, even at when she tried to push them away.
Char had been so much better at pushing- and the few who might have stayed close were taken from them.
But those last memories...
Sayla's face is pale when they let go, but she looks into her brother's eyes. Blue into blue.
That was how it felt. That was what he had stopped happening to her, when he exposed her to The Power. Coming back now...
She understood Char's answer. The question is whether he'd stick to it.
And then the intercom of the secure medical chamber startled her with a buzz.
"Dr Mass, your rendezvous with Anzus is here!"
She looked down to her hand. It would never make up for all those years apart. Those three extra years she had that Char didn't.
But at last she knew, rather than piecing it together from other people- other people's memories.
"...I... I have to talk. To my people. The world knows who I was now, or will in short order." There were plenty of civilians still evacuating when Martha broadcast her message to everyone in Dakar. As many friends as Sayla had, she couldn't cover this up. "And then I need..."
Her heart sinks again. "I need to tell Rikka's mother what happened."
She made for the door, but turned back to face her brother one last time. "When I get back we'll..."
We'll do what, exactly?
Sayla doesn't have an answer. In the end, she shakes her head and walks out. She had to board that transport before she put the TDD-1 at risk.
But at least this time she felt there would be a next time. [[Category:Phase 1, Turn 3]