Mobile Suit Gundam SEED ETERNITY

Phase 30 - Unit Zero-Two

Now that he had a chance to look at it up close, Trojan Noiret had to admit that the towering ZAKU Ranger could certainly intimidate. A gigantic rail cannon hanging over its right shoulder, a ZAKU Phantom torso on its forward hull clutching a beam rifle, two larger hands with three claws, a massive hovercraft assembly on its back...

And it had friends. Four ZAKUs all on Guuls, hovering around the Ranger in a defensive pattern. And then they all opened fire, and Trojan slammed back the DOM's controls and sent his mobile suit backpedaling behind its beam shield.

Trojan gritted his teeth as a storm of missiles slammed down around his humming mobile suit. "Well," he snarled, "you might have a bunch of guns, but I've got speed!" The DOM darted to the right as the ZAKU Ranger's beam cannons opened fire, and an instant later he flung the mobile suit aside again to dodge a blast from a Gunner ZAKU Warrior hovering overhead. And then the Blaze ZAKU Warrior lunged in from behind, beam rifle blazing; Trojan whirled around and sliced at it with the beam sabers on his custom rifle, only to see the enemy back away and let the blades sear by harmlessly. And then the Slash ZAKU Warrior showered him with beam bolts and drove him back further.

Trojan jammed back the controls, then reared back and fired a bazooka shell straight into the sand in front of him. A column of dust burst up from the ground— and the DOM Trooper burst through, vaulted over the Gunner ZAKU's furious blast, leveled off its weapons at the ZAKU Ranger, and opened fire—

...and Trojan felt his jaw drop as the blasts smashed harmlessly against a translucent, shimmering barrier around the monstrous machine. Up above, a Blaze ZAKU Phantom on a Guul opened fire and forced the DOM back onto the ground, and the Ranger whipped around to face its diminutive foe.

"Beam shields don't work that way," he grunted, and then the Ranger's beam cannons let fly with another burst that drove the DOM back further. "Oh, wonderful, does this mean I have to get close?"

The ZAKUs above him backed away and opened fire, while the Ranger leveled off its beam cannons again.

"Fine," Trojan growled, "close combat it is!"

The CGUE shuddered to a halt in the dust on the city edges, and Rau Le Creuset cast a wary glance skyward. Two more BABIs circling like hawks, waiting for their opportunity— but the Desert Dawn's ground-based mobile suits, even with their obsolescence, were putting up a decent enough screen of firepower. Nearby, the guns of a transformed ZuOOT boomed and forced the two BABIs to veer off course.

Rau stretched his senses towards the sky, towards that spot where ZAFT's new arrival was fighting. So powerful and a little similar to Emily, but she was her own person— and she had to be a clone as well. Not if Emily's real mother had already died.

The BABIs swept down towards the city, spitting machinegun rounds; Rau lunged into the air, beam sword blazing to life, and slashed one of them in two before it could react. The other swerved away and banked back up into the air, traced by fire from the Desert Dawn, and Rau sailed back down to the ground with a satisfied smirk.

And the other presence, that churning vortex of suffering...well, Emily would have to learn one way or the other that this world was well and truly beyond salvation. And nothing could convince her more than this.

With a resounding crash, the Gunner ZAKU Warrior fired off a pulsing blast from its beam cannon— only for the Vent Savior Gundam to effortlessly somersault over the shot and drill a blast of its own through the ZAKU's Guul unit. The ZAKU staggered from the sky— and then the Vent Savior was there to blow it away with a plasma cannon volley.

In the cockpit, Lily Thevalley blew out a breath and waited for the next move from the remaining three ZAKUs. A Slash ZAKU Phantom and two Blaze ZAKU Warriors split their formation up and showered the Vent Savior with beam fire.

"Three more," she grumbled, "and then I can go help Emily!" The ZAKUs came screaming in; Lily darted to the left and whipped out a beam saber, and with an ear-splitting shriek, she whirled around and slashed one of the Blaze ZAKUs in two at the waist. The two survivors split up and the remaining Blaze ZAKU let loose a cloud of missiles that sent the Vent Savior spiraling towards the ground for distance, before pulling up and tearing the missiles apart with a CIWS burst.

The Slash ZAKU Phantom dropped in from above with its beam axe blazing and slammed the blade down onto the Vent Savior's shield. Lily grunted in pain as the blow threw her back in her seat, and the ZAKU pressed harder against her.

Sahib Ashman bit back a curse as he ducked into the waterfront warehouse and activated a clanking cargo lift. The whole point of a secret weapon was to keep it secret, and this was not the way he wanted it to be revealed. The Desert Dawn, after all, survived by trickery and cunning and keeping a whole deck of aces up its sleeves. And this little surprise was supposed to be reserved for the Alliance— the same Alliance that was surely watching this battle and eagerly counting just how many mobile suits Sahib Ashman had collected over the years.

On the other hand...there was ZAFT.

The cargo lift rattled as it reached the bottom of the shaft, and Sahib stepped into the harsh artificial light with his retinue of bodyguards. A gift from Andrew Bartfeldt, so to speak, completed at great cost to the Desert Dawn, it had started its life as a ZAFT project during the Valentine War. Abandoned in a secret underground hangar and never uncovered by disinterested Alliance occupiers and Junk Guild technicians not clever enough to find their way inside, Andrew Bartfeldt's embryonic trump card had become that of the Desert Dawn. And Sahib Ashman hated it.

After all, the massive Compton-class land battleship once called Dyson and now named Omar Mukhtar was the very antithesis of guerrilla armament. What kind of self-respecting desert warrior tooled around the Sahara in a two hundred and thirty-meter-long tank?

"Zahid," he called out as he ascended the walkway to the boarding catwalk, "you've followed the situation outside, right?"

The lanky young captain of the Mukhtar smirked back. "Shitty as can be, as I saw it."

Sahib ground his teeth and pushed past the younger man. "Activate the elevator and get the ship topside. This day came sooner than I expected."

"Ooh, you mean Omar finally gets to see some action?" Zahid shot back with a grin entirely too excited for Sahib's tastes. "Give me fifteen minutes and everything will be on the move."

Sahib seethed to himself as he marched down the boarding catwalk. If ever the situation for Banadiya became truly dire, we would deploy Bartfeldt's last surprise— and bring upon ourselves the full wrath of the Earth Alliance.

He shook his head. Those were not the thoughts of a successful man. Those were the thoughts of a man who was already dead.

The ZAKU Ranger fired its enormous rail cannon and Trojan Noiret thanked his lucky stars he had already gotten out of the line of fire— but the shell plowed straight through Banadiya and tore a massive smoking gash in the city, before detonating somewhere in the water. Trojan cringed; he had forgotten that railguns could do that.

Undeterred, the ZAKU Ranger pushed forward and its four Guul-mounted escorts focused their fire on the twisting DOM. The Ranger sent a burst of steam billowing out of the cooling systems on its back and chest, and angled its cannon for another shot.

"Oh no you don't!" Trojan shouted, and the DOM lurched forward, ducking beneath fire from the determined ZAKUs. The Ranger turned enough to fire back at him with its left-hand beam cannon and Trojan sent the DOM into a furious drive to the right— but the Gunner ZAKU to cut him off with a pulsing red beam blast. He darted backwards again, then moved away as the ZAKUs honed in their fire— and the Ranger edged closer to Banadiya, warming up its rail cannon for another shot. The ZAKU Phantom up ahead leveled off its beam rifle—

...and then went reeling as something slammed into its shield and exploded. The ZAKUs backed away and Trojan blinked in surprise as a flurry of rocket-propelled grenades came roaring out of the city. He slammed down the magnification dial and gasped at the sight of bearded, dusky men, weapons in hand, firing up at the Guul-mounted mobile suits.

"What the— they're gonna get killed!" Trojan hissed. The ZAKUs turned their fire towards the city; Trojan flung himself into their line of fire to deflect their blasts with his beam shield. The ZAKUs split their formation and showered the DOM with rifle fire. "And I thought I was stupid for taking this thing on," he grumbled.

Up ahead, the ZAKU Ranger's three monoeyes lit up with a flash. Trojan ground his teeth as he activated the beam sabers on his custom rifle. There was more than one way through a beam shield.

Flames scattered around the roaring Vent Savior Gundam as it finished off the crippled body of the last Blaze ZAKU Warrior and rocketed up towards the Slash ZAKU Phantom floating overhead. Lily threw the silver Gundam to the left as the ZAKU let loose its beam Gatlings; it whirled around with its beam axe in hand and the blade crashed against the Vent Savior's shield. Lily flung the blade skyward and swung up her beam rifle, but the ZAKU jetted backwards with a burst from its Guul's forward thrusters and slammed it head-on with a missile salvo.

Lily shook her head angrily as she stashed the Vent Savior's beam rifle and drew a beam saber instead. "Oh, you wanna do this the hard way? We'll do this the hard way!"

The ZAKU charged and brought down its axe; Lily swung up the saber to deflect the blow, then stormed forward and rammed the ZAKU as hard as she could with the Vent Savior's shoulder. The green mobile suit staggered back but managed to remain attached to its Guul; Lily drove the saber down towards the green subflight system, but the ZAKU wedged its axe blade into the way and parried the blow safely aside from its target. The ZAKU surged forward; Lily slammed her shield forward to deflect its blow and left the two mobile suits struggling against each other.

"And now," Lily grumbled, "you're just being annoying!"

"Quite a bit of pressure your mother's giving off, little Emily," chuckled Rau Le Creuset as the CGUE Assault twisted its way through the low buildings of Banadiya. "And I see the skill runs in the family!"

Up above, a BABI spiraled down with a spray of machinegun bullets. The CGUE darted to the left as the bullets tore up the dusty road— just in time for two men down below to spring out of hiding and fire RPGs up towards the charging mobile suit. It jerked to the right but the second grenade struck home and blew off the BABI's left arm at the shoulder— and with a crash, Rau stormed forward and sliced the rest in half with his sword, and landed with a satisfying thud as his defeated foe exploded in midair.

Rau turned the CGUE's monoeye towards the sky. The Providence ZAKU was charging towards the city and the Desert Dawn's meager handful of remaining aerial combat mobile suits was rising to meet it. This would get gory.

And he could hardly wait.

The Gundam Eclipse shook from a furious overhead sword blow from the charging CaZEL. The black Gundam reeled back and drew back its beam sword; the CaZEL ducked beneath its horizontal swipe and slammed its knee into the Eclipse's torso, sending it staggering and making Emily's ears ring.

"Not so tough now that we've got an angel of death, are ya?!" Varder cackled. Up above, the Providence ZAKU lunged up, the CaZEL darted aside, and the gray mobile suit pounded the Eclipse with a wall of beam fire.

"Emily!" a voice rang out— and the CaZEL ducked away as the silver and gray CGUE Assault dropped into the battle with a sword slash. Emily snapped her eyes up ahead and found the Desert Dawn's remaining aerial mobile suits charging into the fight, guns blazing. The Providence ZAKU whirled around and its monoeye flashed threateningly at the newcomers. "Emily, you deal with that Providence ZAKU!" Rau barked.

"But that— "

"It doesn't matter! Go!"

Emily swallowed the fear and slammed on the booster, darting away just as the CaVAL down below opened fire with its beam cannons. The Providence ZAKU somersaulted up above the Desert Dawn mobile suits, angled its DRAGOONs, and slammed their ranks with a barrage of beam fire. At the center of the storm, a stricken DINN belched fire and spiraled out of the sky with a trail of smoke. The Desert Dawn mobile suits split up— but the Providence ZAKU dropped into their formation with another burst of fire, and two more mobile suits vanished in fiery explosions.

Coniel's Murasame burst out of the heavens with a volley of beam fire. "That thing is massacring us!" she screamed. "Emily, move your ass!"

Emily squeezed her fists around the Eclipse's controls and moved the Gundam in. "Stop this," she murmured, "my mother...she would never do this..."

The Providence ZAKU whipped around and pummeled the Eclipse and the Murasame with beam fire. Coniel banked away with a curse while Emily kept going behind her beam shield and pulled back its beam sword.

"You're not her," Emily moaned, and the images of her mother danced before her eyes. She charged down with a scream— but the Providence ZAKU, faster than she could see, tossed its beam rifle over to its left hand, drew a beam saber from its shoulder with its right, and swung the blade up to parry her own. The two mobile suits crashed together and stared into each other's eyes.

All at once, the world around Emily came to a stop and the feelings flooded back. Her mother, letting her shed her tears after another upbraiding by her father; her mother, comforting her after the teasing at school; her mother, soothing the pain from one of the scrapes and bruises Viveka had haphazardly supplied; her mother, the parent who loved her...

Her mother, the person sitting in the cockpit of this mobile suit with its monoeye blazing furiously at her.

The Providence ZAKU flung its quarry back, then jetted upward, backflipped over the heads of a charging pair of Desert Dawn mobile suits, and effortlessly shot them out of the sky. Emily blinked away the tears as she felt them die— as she felt her mother, inside that thing that was killing them.

The Murasame came barreling out of nowhere and rammed the Eclipse aside just as the ZAKU opened fire. "Emily, what in God's name do you think you're doing!?" Coniel snapped. "If you're not going to fight, then get the hell out of here!"

She shook her head and struggled to clear the image. "But that thing's pilot— "

"I don't care if it's Lacus fucking Clyne, do something before it kills us all!"

Emily guided the Eclipse back into the air and cringed as another of Coniel's comrades went down in flames— and the old memories of peace washed over her.

With a resounding crash, the Providence ZAKU slammed its foot up into the Gundam Eclipse's chest. Emily cringed as the blow slammed her back into her cockpit seat; and then the ZAKU charged forward with its saber held back for a final stab at the Eclipse's chest. She yanked the controls to the side and ducked away as the ZAKU shot past— but it fired back with a storm of beam fire from its DRAGOONs.

"Emily, stay close to it!" Rau's voice ordered; up above, his flailing CGUE Assault parried a pair of sword blows from the two beam swords in the charging CaZEL's hands and went staggering back. "It can't use the DRAGOONs that way!"

Emily snapped her gaze back towards the ZAKU, back on the attack. Close to this thing meant more of that pressure— and those memories—

The ZAKU gave her no choice as it roared forward with a bone-jarring downward hack. Up above, the CGUE ducked beneath a horizontal slash from the CaZEL, then dropped down towards the ZAKU with its sword upraised.

Emily's eyes went wide as the ZAKU whirled around, jetting backwards at the same time, then whipped up its saber and slashed off the CGUE's right arm as it passed. And then it swung around again and sent a blazing volley of beam fire down into the falling mobile suit. Rau slammed the controls to the side, but the blasts still ripped through the mobile suit's left side and robbed it of its remaining arm, its backpack, and its left leg. Rau grunted in pain as shrapnel filled the cockpit and the CGUE fell with a billowing trail of smoke.

"Rau!" Emily cried— but the CaZEL was there to slam her back with a sword blow.

"Going somewhere?!" Varder cried. Emily steeled herself for the next attack, only to find the Murasame barreling out of nowhere, and with a crash, it shouldered the CaZEL aside, then darted upward and showered the green mobile suit with beam rifle fire.

"Emily, you deal with the gray one!" Coniel shouted.

Emily turned her eyes towards the Providence ZAKU, just in time to watch it shoot down a Jet Dagger L. It turned slowly towards her, monoeye flashing to life, daring her to come closer. It snapped up its beam rifle—

...and an instant later, the ZAKU went surging skyward as the air filled up with beams, missiles, and machinegun rounds. Emily looked around frantically and found a new force of mobile suits sailing in over the city— ZAFT mobile suits, their fire aimed at...the other ZAFT mobile suits...

With an abrupt crash, the green and white body of the Proto Abyss dropped into the fight and slammed its lance down against the Providence ZAKU's shields, driving it back.

Inside the CaZEL, Varder broke into a wild grin. "So the Aristotle's really betrayed us, huh?!" he cackled. "A whole nest of traitors waiting to die! Zero-Two, engage!"

The Providence ZAKU surged forward; the Proto Abyss stabbed forward with its lance, but the ZAKU deflected the blow skywards with its saber, then lopped off the lance's blade and left the Proto Abyss with a useless red staff. The green mobile suit backed away with a volley of beam fire and hurled the lance's remains away. Up above, the Murasame soared down into the battle with a beam volley that drove the Providence ZAKU back.

Emily flung herself back into the way as the CaZEL gave chase and smacked it aside with her beam sword. She whipped around to face the Providence ZAKU again— only to find it once more on the attack.

The pressure intensified. The memories became vivid and the world around her began to fade. Her mother's voice echoed in her head, drowning out the lingering presence of her father.

Keep being my little angel...

"Move!"

All at once, Coniel's Murasame slammed into the Eclipse from the side— and a moment later, the Providence ZAKU's beam saber plunged into the Murasame's cockpit. The world returned in a rush as Emily felt a familiar presence disappear on the edges of that enormous pressure in front of her— and the Eclipse reeled as the dying Murasame exploded.

"C-Coniel," she whispered. Up above, the ZAKU turned its monoeye towards her. "My...my mother...you just...you killed her..."

The ZAKU snapped up its beam saber and charged.

Emily's eyes lit up in rage. "You killed her!"

The ZAKU charged, but the Eclipse was ready, and the two mobile suits' blades slammed together in a shower of sparks.

Varder slammed a furious fist down onto the CaZEL's console as the report came through. "I almost had you!" he snapped, and fixed his glowering eyes on the Eclipse as it traded blows with the Providence ZAKU. "Damn it, hold still!" He leveled off the beam cannons and opened fire— but the Eclipse danced around his shots and kept its focus on the ZAKU.

"Varder! What the hell are you doing up there?!" Lilith snapped. The CaZEL landed hard next to the dusty CaVAL, both mobile suits' monoeyes looking towards the swordfight up above. "You got the report! We have to get back to the ship!"

"And leave an opportunity like this?" Varder growled.

"It's not worth it! Let's go, we can get them some other time!"

Varder pounded his fist down on the console again. "It's always 'some other time!' How many more times will we be delayed?!"

The CaVAL turned back towards the retreating ZAFT ships. "It doesn't matter. There won't be a next time if we don't protect the ship. Now let's go!"

With a burst from its engines, the CaVAL darted off towards the ships. Varder glowered up at the sky and the Eclipse up above. "I won't be denied again," he growled, and threw a switch. "Zero-Two, return to the Arrhenius."

The Providence ZAKU parried a blow from the Eclipse, backed away, fired a combat flare into the black Gundam's face, and then leapt around and rocketed off back for home. Varder spared his reeling opponent one more hateful glare, and then vaulted into the air after his retreating allies.

The first thing Stella Loussier sensed as her consciousness clawed its way back to life was the familiar antiseptic smell of the Minerva's infirmary. She cracked open an eye, winced at the light flooding through— and then felt relief wash over her at the sight of Shinn Asuka's smiling face.

"Welcome back," he said.

Stella groaned and closed her eyes again. "What...happened?"

"You got wiped out by that thing with the giant railgun."

"...the Gaia...?"

"Yeah. Totaled." He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Sorry."

Stella fought down the urge to cry. The Gaia was gone? Now how would she fight? How would she protect her home and her friends?

"The good news is you're going to be okay," Shinn continued, "and we're going straight to Gigafloat. Where they're going to build us new Gundams. Okay?"

"O-Okay..."

"Now," he went on, "you just get some rest. We'll be alright."

She looked back up at him again. "Is...Shinn okay?"

"Yeah."

"And...and Emily?"

Shinn's smile faded away. "Just get some rest," he said.

Stella slumped back again and decided to do just that, and as she drifted back to sleep, Shinn straightened up, checked his own bandages, threw on his coat, grabbed his crutch, and made for the door.

Athrun Zala hated the way his memories came back in one massive emotional flood. It was hardly fair, after all; didn't give him a sporting chance to avoid brooding and becoming miserable.

And those memories came flooding back indeed at the sight of the muscular Alec Ladd, hesitantly shaking Athrun's hand. A man in that green uniform of ZAFT's ground forces, but a man of the old ZAFT— the ZAFT that Athrun Zala had willingly served. The ZAFT that had standards and morals, the ZAFT that stood on the moral high ground and defended it from the savages of Blue Cosmos.

But that ZAFT was as dead as those whose faces now swept back into the pit of his consciousness.

Alec arched an eyebrow. "I'm surprised I didn't see you out there, Zala."

"No mobile suit," Athrun answered with a shrug. Alec cracked a smirk.

"Really now. Big bad Gundam finally got totaled?"

"That was a while ago."

The brawny ZAFT pilot crossed his arms. "You know," he said, "I think I'm starting to understand you bunch of traitors." Athrun frowned, but Alec went on before he could speak. "Ran off from ZAFT because of some moral conflicts with your orders or whatever. I guess I couldn't appreciate that until it happened to me."

Athrun thought back to his old comrades— to Yzak and Dearka, pushed away by his father's racist megalomania; to Andrew Bartfeldt, who joined a singer and a handful of rebels to stop a war gone out of control; to himself, lying on the floor before his father and realizing just how far gone he really was.

He cracked a smile of his own. "Welcome to the right side, Mr. Ladd."

All told, it wasn't too bad a set of injuries. Some cuts and bruises from shrapnel hits, but only one had required stitches, and the Coordinator advanced healing would take care of that.

Standing outside the infirmary, Rau Le Creuset flexed his uninjured arm with satisfaction and threw on his long coat. All well and good, because he had more important things to worry about than damage to his treacherous body.

Unit Zero-Two. That was the name he had heard from his contacts about this mysterious little newcomer in ZAFT's forces. Even distracted by Emily and her vastly superior machine, Zero-Two had taken down fifteen mobile suits. Rau could only imagine her in a contemporaneous machine; the destruction she could wreak, the things she could accomplish...

But there was a catch. She was a clone. Still young, perhaps. If she had been cloned as a backup of Lorelei von Oldendorf's genetic material, then she couldn't be any older than Emily. But she was a clone— and in addition to that inconvenient little fact, Rau idly wondered if other changes hadn't been made to her DNA, as long as it was there. As far as he knew, Lorelei had been a Natural— but she was also in no condition to be a mobile suit pilot, so something in the clone of that frail and sickly woman had to have changed.

And there it was. Unit Zero-One had run off and joined the Resistance, so here was Unit Zero-Two. Zero-One had become a perversion of what she had originally been intended to be; Zero-Two would realize what her predecessor had failed to achieve. At least as the smaller minds imagined it.

But a clone could only last so long, as Rau painfully knew. He glanced in the direction where Emily's presence— pulsing, twisting, churning with emotions— was strongest. The world, after all, had room for only one Angel of Death.

Shinn came to a stop outside Emily's door to find Viveka leaning against it tiredly. She glanced up at him and shrugged.

"If you're here to talk to her, it's not happening. She's not talking to anyone. Just sitting in there crying."

Shinn blinked. "What happened?"

"All I can get out of her is something about our mother." Viveka shook her head. "Has she snapped or something? She knows our mother's gone."

That pressure— that enormous, blinding pressure that had shot through the battlefield. Shinn suddenly swallowed anxiously.

"That...during the battle," he stammered, "there was this new enemy, with an enormous pressure."

"A Newtype thing?"

"Yeah. And it felt funny, distorted, like it was a clone." The pieces of the puzzle edged closer together. "You...you said your mother had Newtype abilities, right?"

Viveka shrugged. "I guess. I never paid attention to that sort of thing."

Shinn looked past her, towards Emily's agonizing presence, and tried to keep the knot of fear from climbing up his throat.

At least she could get by now without bursting into tears. That was an improvement.

Curled up on her bed and her face streaked with tears, Emily stared desolately at the wall in front of her. It was her mother in that mobile suit. She had felt it. Not really her mother...but that girl with the Newtype signature of her mother, the one that gave her those memories and that feeling of peace.

What was she doing there? Had ZAFT done to her mother what the Alliance had intended to do to Emily herself? That was impossible. Nobody could turn Lorelei von Oldendorf into a soldier. That was why she, Emily, had been born.

The memories drifted back. Emily saw herself again, a little girl, sobbing in her mother's arms. She had come home with a less than satisfactory report card and Gerhardt's wrath had avalanched down onto her. It wasn't her fault, she protested; multiplication was hard, history was boring, the other kids talked to her in class and distracted her, the teacher was mean—

Gerhardt had disagreed with a slap, buried her in a furious fusillade of angry words about her irresponsibility and laziness, and then sent her to her room, but Emily had taken a detour and wound up in her mother's room. And Lorelei listened patiently as her daughter cried and buried her stinging face in the sheets and railed against the injustice of the world as only an eight-year-old could.

And then, once the tears had ended, she had said mostly the same things to her that her father had said— but she said them in a way that made Emily know, in the most unshakable depths of her heart, that her mother still loved her no matter what the grade was on her history test.

There was no way that could have been turned into a killing machine.

When the comforted eight-year-old Emily had decided at last to do as her father had said and go to her room, her mother had let her go with the reminder that she would always be there to help her.

Emily blinked away the tears.

To be continued...