category: Gundam SEED

disclaimer: I don't own it.

ONE.

Sundays are for friends, and good food, and sitting in the front corner of that café five blocks west of the Orb parliament building. Sunday evening dinner started as a ritual in the weeks directly following the Battle of Messiah, when Orb hosted the peace talks to end the war. Cagalli took Lacus to eat there once as an escape from the chain of endless meetings. The next week, they returned with Kira and Athrun and spent the better part of four hours there, losing all sense of trickling time in the safety of camaraderie.

When Kira and Lacus left for the PLANTs, Lacus promised they would return every Sunday to that nice café, a thin semblance of normalcy as everything was changing. Life moved in circles within squares except for that one day of the week when the minutes would stop ticking again and the world became black and white outside of their table. They would talk about anything – the wars, the reconstruction, the Second Treaty of Junius Seven, how Athrun was in severe need of a haircut – it didn't matter as long as they were there, together.

Sometimes other old friends made appearances. Yzak and Dearka came every three or four weeks, and Miriallia would often show up from whatever continent she was exploring at the time to catch up on recent happenings. Mu and Murrue had a habit of dropping by on the most unexpected of days, and Andrew Waltfeld's visits nearly always included a passing insult to the café's coffee and him frightening other diners by shooting his left arm at the ceiling. Over the course of six months everyone from Arnold Neumann to Martin DaCosta had sat in on a Sunday dinner, all bound by the persistent threads that connected them for years to come.

And sometimes no one else could make it, so it was just Cagalli and Kira and Athrun and Lacus tucked into a corner until the city outside the glass storefront was dim and silent and the shuttle for Aprilius One would be departing soon. The pavements would be slick because it always drizzled in Orb after nightfall, and at the spaceport there would be a perfunctory round of kisses-on-cheeks and handshakes.

"Goodbye," Cagalli would breathe out, and each time seemed like the last they would see each other.

Their weeks and months and years would continue to march by at the same plodding pace.

notes: A drabble series that I've already written 7,000 words for. Hooray! Updates should be regular; I'll try for daily. And when I say that the chapters will span all characters, they will span all characters. (Also, I listed this under Athrun/Cagalli, because about a quarter of the drabbles will concern them, which is certainly a lot more than those dealing with any other people.) Hope you stick around!

NEXT PHASE: Lacus steps into her position as the provisional chairwoman of the PLANTs.