Notes: I highly, highly, highly recommend that you go back and read chapter one again. There are a lot of references to it here in this closing chapter, and I think you will appreciate you were in the darkness too a hundredfold more if you remember what was established previously. See you when you get back!

And thank you all for reading—feedback is as always greatly appreciated. Pleeeeease review!

The day he arrives, there is no storm or rain, neither does the sun shine brightly. There is a cool breeze off the water. The sky is a calm color that makes her daydream about leaping to hold the edges of the clouds, to dangle and to travel with them to distant places where the lines of the sky and the sea merge.

She finds him standing in front of her father's memorial. There are no words as she steps past him, kneels to place the arrangement of lilies and white gladioli at the base of the monument. The flowers blend into the stark colorlessness of the setting, the pure white of the marble and stone that drains the pavilion of both soul and spirit. Only in the distance is there relief, in the blueness of the ocean. It calls of redemption.

After a long silence, Athrun says to her back, "I told you I was coming to Orb."

"I know." She is standing in front of him and doesn't twist to meet his eyes. I ended my engagement. "I haven't been waiting." When he doesn't respond, she continues, voice forgiving. "And? Is this reunion all that you had hoped it would be?"

Here, alone with the two of them, Athrun feels the surroundings pressing inward. Strangely, the blank whiteness seems blinding. Painful to the senses. "No."

"Had enough of building castles in the air, then? I told you, we have been doomed from the start."

"My dreams are too lowly to be castles in the air. I'd only hoped to see your face. Maybe hear you say my name. If I was lucky."

She finally turns, expression unreadable. "Athrun."

A breath, a skipped heartbeat as his name falls from her lips, heavy. I believe that thoughts can overcome time and distance. That you can hear me. "Cagalli."

"Is this meeting enough to tide you until we see each other next? For another four, five years?" Even as she speaks, she comes closer, one hand rubbing the other arm.

"I need to hear you say it to me. I'll never believe it until you do."

She catches his meaning—it's painted all over his face. The emotion is too raw, to open to meet directly. She turns away and presses her palms to the white railing. A faraway ocean wind whips her hair around her shoulders. "The truth is this. The man that I knew before the second war never came back. But when I think about it, I wonder if maybe he's still out there, somewhere. On the other side of this road or just beyond this water, or maybe somewhere I can't reach at all. I used to think that perhaps someday, when his country no longer needed him, I'd see him again."

Athrun's mouth has gone dry. He opens it, but no sound forms.

Cagalli raises her head to stare at the sky. Sometimes I wake up and I want to believe you're next to me. "I meant it when I said that you had me. I was yours. I knew who you were and we understood each other. It's different now, because I'm not the only one with obligations. Now I'm sure, even if one day your country doesn't need you, the day won't come when you no longer need your people."

"It doesn't have to be one or the other: country or self. Not for me and not for you either."

"Do you think so?" The question lacks any sharp edges. "In these years I've come to learn that public duty and personal desire are usually mutually exclusive."

"Sometimes," he comes to stand beside her at the railing, "they are. And then one day they aren't."

Cagalli allows Athrun to take her hand and rub his thumb over the pressure point at her wrist. It's an easy, familiar touch that makes her shiver from the top of her head straight to her toes. "Is today that that day?" she asks, words nearly carried away in the breeze toward the distant tide.

"…No." Unexpectedly, Athrun leans down to press a firm, warm kiss to her mouth. He tastes like longing and impossibility. For a second she can't think clearly. He pulls away, but only enough so he can speak, thumb still lingering at her wrist. "Things are going to change very soon. But I want you to know that it won't make any difference to me. I will still choose you. I will always choose you."

He steps back. Cagalli grips the railing to stabilize herself from the sudden lack of support, from the aftershock of his kiss, so intimate and distant at once. In a moment, he has turned away.

Stop, she wants to call out to his retreating figure, what do you mean?

But he is already out of her reach, his dark form a shadow on the blank white palette of the pavilion. Something in her chest prickles. Behind her, the sea is a hum and the wind picks up to a dull roar.

Cagalli receives the news days later, on a crisp morning when the early-spring sunlight bathes her office in a cool glow. From the outside, she appears ever the same—crisp, slightly detached—but her left temple begins to pound with a sudden headache.

Athrun has been named the Chair of the PLANT Supreme Council after the mid-term retirement of Chairwoman Brevard.

Cagalli thinks back to his enigmatic comments at the memorial, "It won't make any difference to me. I will always choose you." She remembers the words, his and hers both, shared between them in a place that she secrets at the far bottom of her soul. Sometimes I wish this were real.

That night is different. She finds that her dreams have stopped—it takes another year for them to return to her, twelve months spent fruitlessly grasping at something undefinable that slips like sand through her fingers. The first dream is like a drop of water on the tongue after eons trapped in the desert.

From the depths of her dream she hears footsteps. They are distant and faint but she would recognize them anywhere, their rhythm imprinted permanently onto the shadow of her heart. When we are drowning in noise, I will stop to find your voice. I know that somehow I will find my way back.

She shoots into the darkness of the dreamscape, letting her ears guide her. She follows the press of his feet on the street of this abandoned city, coming faster and louder, the press becoming a pound as his walk becomes a run, then a sprint. She chases the sounds until all she senses is his heartbeat shooting through her nerves to the tips of her being. Until all she hears is his breath and his voice as it brushes her ear, telling her in ardent tones exactly the words she wants to hear.