The lobby doors to the hospital slid open automatically, and a woman emerged, immediately raising her hand to shield her eyes with her discharge papers. Well, shield her eye. The colony’s strictly controlled temperature was a welcome change from her cold recovery room and though the light was harsh after being kept indoors for many weeks, she relished the feeling of the sun on her skin.

She stopped several paces out of the hospital, unsure of where to go. 'What now' seemed like an impossible question that could have been asked of a number of different issues Seulgi's brain had been cycling through since she had regained consciousness. But after a few moments, she sighed to herself.

Actually, she did know what to do now, though it required a taxi.

The drive into the suburban neighborhoods from downtown Libot was quiet. The driver let Seulgi alone with her thoughts and she attentively watched the buildings pass through the window. How long would it take for her to get used to craning her neck like this to look to the right? One thing that was already becoming a habit, however, was brushing her bangs away from her scars. Throughout her stay in the hospital, her hair had added to the itchiness of her injury as it healed, and though she partly wanted to conceal how gruesome the extent of the damage was, she couldn’t stand the extra irritation.

And as with her wound, the weeks after the battle seemed to have given the city time to heal as well. Seulgi had only had the news to keep her company in her room and had watched the whole political fallout between the Federation and the Republic play out, with Sector 3’s neutral colonies caught in the middle.

Between the sanctions and embargoes, the red-faced politicians screaming at each other, and the thinly veiled threats of declarations of war, it renewed Seulgi’s faith in the decisions she had made during that fight. Both sides were determined to continue fighting, despite the treaties, despite the sacrifices, despite the cyclical repetition of their zero-sum game. She wouldn’t be a part of it anymore. The Republic probably thought she was dead anyway. Even to the hospital she was just some random citizen of Libot, wracked with acute amnesia after getting caught up in the skirmish, and the irony of becoming one of the collateral damage statistics that had driven her to join up with the Zeon army in the first place came back to her in waves like nausea.

She was startled out of her reverie as she saw the taxi pass the deli in that little cluster of shops Irene had walked her to all those weeks ago. She sat up in her seat, anticipating those two familiar houses coming into view as they drove closer and closer. “S-stop here,” she stammered. “I’ll… I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

The taxi pulled over to the curb, idling as she exited, almost as if waiting for her to change her mind. And indeed Seulgi hesitated as she stepped out, her hand on the door, before she inhaled and shut it. What was she so afraid of all of a sudden? Would Yeri be angry with her? What if her parents had returned? What in the world could she possibly say after having been away all this time?

She walked slowly, her hands in her pockets, and she ducked her head as she passed Irene’s house. Seulgi would think about that later, something she hadn’t let herself unpack even as she had laid in her hospital bed alone for hours at a time.

But as she in a breath and finally gathered up the courage to knock on Yeri’s door, to her surprise it was Irene herself who answered it.

“Uh,” was all Seulgi could manage, her hand still raised as if to continue knocking.

Irene stared at her wordlessly, her dark eyes opened wide in shock.

“I uh, I thought I’d… I was just…” Seulgi tried again, her brain misfiring like a dead car starter.

“You’re alive.”

Ah, that’s right. Seulgi should probably start with that first. “I’m glad you seem okay,” she finally said. Truly, Irene was a vision, just like the first time she had seen her, and all of the anxieties she had been trying to avoid came over her in a rush.

“I was in the hospital,” she continued, her thoughts tumbling out faster and faster as Irene watched. “I was just released today. I didn’t know where else to go, so I… And I saw it all on the news, the base clearing out, the summits, the Federation’s Newtype suits…” Why wasn’t Irene saying anything? Seulgi wasn’t sure why she kept talking. Perhaps it was because this was the first time in weeks she was face to face with someone who wasn’t hospital staff? All she wanted to do was just run her hands through Irene’s dark hair. She wanted to feel her, prove to herself that she was real, and Seulgi realized the thought that she had been so afraid of facing during those long, quiet hours in the hospital was the fact that Irene might not have made it out of the fight.

But here she was, right in front of her. Alive.

“Did I do this?”

Irene’s question startled Seulgi, and she realized Irene was looking at her eyepatch.

“Well, I mean I guess, but-”

Irene carefully reached up, placing her hands on the sides of Seulgi’s head, and delicately guided her into a slight bow so she could place her lips against the medical patch. “I’m sorry.”

“Irene,” was all Seulgi could say.

“And your… your squadmate…” Seulgi felt tears against her forehead as Irene held her face in her hands.

“Hey, now,” Seulgi took Irene’s hands and held them in her own as she straightened. “Please, please don't cry.” They would all have to live with the consequences of the decisions made on that day, but it was over. This time, their war had finally ended.

“Seulgi?”

They both turned to see Yeri at the top of the stairs, her hands gripping the railing in white-knuckled shock.

“Hey, squirt.”

“Seulgi!” Yeri repeated. In a rush, she ran down the stairs and wrapped her arms around Seulgi, burying her face into her chest. “I watched you- I saw-” she cried, the horrible memories of that fight coming back to her. Every night she had cried herself to sleep, every day of school missed from grief, all of those difficult conversations with Irene, her long path towards acceptance... all of the pain stuck in , preventing her from speaking anymore.

Irene, who had been unceremoniously pushed out of the way looked up at Seulgi. “That’s right," she said with a note of wonder in her voice. "How…?” She had been so taken aback by Seulgi’s mere presence on Yeri’s doorstep that she hadn’t given a thought to how such a thing had come to be.

She recalled those final moments of the fight, how she had finally flicked the switch that had popped the hatch of her cockpit open, revealing herself to the massive head of the Zaku, whose damaged camera swiveled around to meet her.

Irene stared back fearfully as that great glowing eye watched her, its cracked aperture struggling to focus on such a small target. Like an animal, she froze, half risen from her seat, wondering if she had just condemned herself to death. But it was Seulgi behind that camera. It was Seulgi inside that hulking armored suit. Seulgi who had been so careful not to do any damage to the core of Gundam Alex, almost as if she knew Irene was inside.

Or perhaps not knowing it was Irene inside, but still taking such pains to spare the pilot’s life.

Irene removed her helmet, her hair, the majority of which had been pulled back into a hasty ponytail, sticking to her face from perspiration. There was no mistaking now that Irene was the pilot of Gundam Alex, and she hoped that would buy her some sympathy.

“Go.” Seulgi’s voice radioed laboriously through its external speakers. Irene could hear her gasping through the microphone. Was she injured? Had her saber done that much damage to the tanky Zaku?

And her answer came on the wind; she could smell it in the air all around them, that noxious, dangerous smell of an electrical fire, and the ionic fuel from their suits. Seulgi wasn’t bluffing, the Zaku seemed like it could blow any second.

“Please,” Seulgi urged, and with that heartfelt plea, Irene sprung into action. Like waking from a dream she suddenly pulled herself out of her cockpit and scrambled down the side of her Gundam, seeing the massive scrapes and gashes their fight had left on her suit’s armor plating. She dropped the rest of the way to the ground, falling heavily, and ran, first on all fours before regaining her feet. She could hear the Zaku’s rockets firing behind her and as she reached the safety of a massive shipping container, she paused and looked back, watching as the Zaku lifted Gundam Alex, her prototype suit, her breakthrough into the next generation of military technology, straight up into the air.

There was no way even a suit like a Zaku could carry another mobile suit very far, so Irene wasn’t sure what Seulgi was trying to do, but she watched in horror as the flare of the Zaku’s rockets caught the whole back of the suit up in a bright flash of flame, and without further warning, it exploded.

Parts rained down on the spaceport in fiery bits of metal as the two entwined suits themselves fell back to the ground in another series of violent explosions. Irene sprung away from the shipping container as a massive chunk of armor plating slammed into it, and tumbled across the tarmac. With a dull thud, she smacked into the side of a nearby building, and stared dully across the spaceport, trying desperately to remain conscious. With every ounce of her will, she pushed herself upright, hissing in pain as she realized her leg had been scrapped up pretty badly. The ground was littered with shrapnel from the blast, and as she began to drag herself away from the scene, she could hear the first sirens of emergency vehicles arriving.

Did that mean it was safe? Did that mean it was over?

And there, like a mirage amongst the smoldering wreckage, she saw Yeri.

How and why, Irene wasn’t sure, and as she stood, though the pain in her leg barely permitted it, her vision began to blur.

“Irene!”

She was just... so tired.

From over the top of Yeri’s head, Seulgi looked at Irene’s concerned expression. “I bailed,” she explained. “Right before I set the controls to take the suits away from the spaceport.” It hadn’t quite worked out the way her oxygen-deprived brain had envisioned, however. Her movements had been slow, and as she half-climbed, half-fell out of her suit, she realized the damage was far greater than she had realized. Her poor Zaku had barely managed to fly a hundred yards into the air before combusting, and all Seulgi could do was crawl as fast and as far away from the blast as she could before succumbing to her own injuries.

“I guess an ambulance picked me up or something. All I remember is waking up in the hospital, and…” she pointed at her eyepatch with one hand while the other held Yeri.

Irene just couldn’t believe it. It was the strangest miracle she could have ever wished for. “They didn’t know you were the pilot?”

Seulgi smiled. “I’m afraid I may have ruined another one of your shirts.”

“You won’t leave again, right?” Yeri asked, her teary voice muffled against Seulgi’s chest.

Seulgi blinked down at her. “Uh,” she hesitated, catching Irene’s critical gaze. “I mean I have like six months of PT here I’ve got to work through before I’ll be ‘recovered’... but I don’t really have anywhere to stay.”

“Too bad you don’t know anyone here in Libot you could crash with,” Irene mused, smiling for the first time since she had opened the front door.

Seulgi gave her a sheepish smile. “You must really think I’m a mooch after all this.”

“I’ll tell you what I think later.”

“And after that?” Yeri pressed, wanting a straight answer.

Seulgi pulled away from her tight grip and looked down at her. “After?” and she glanced back up at Irene, holding her gaze, though her answer was directed at Yeri.

“Well, I did promise I’d take you to Earth, right?”

fin