Written for the Gundam 00 week happening over on Tumblr, for the prompt 'future.'

Technically requires knowledge of the movie to read, but really all you need to know is that much of the population slowly started to evolve into Innovators in the aftermath of the show. It's also revealed that these true Innovators have roughly twice the lifespan of regular humans...hence, the angst.

Basically, you'll be fine for this fic if you know that and have finished the show!

Title from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Saji finds his first grey hair at thirty-five.

They both laugh it off, saying he's getting too old (though Louise is five months his senior), saying the stresses of life have finally caught up to him (though, truthfully, Louise's life has been worse…even if neither of them bother to keep count, anymore).

Saji decides to leave it, says it makes him look sophisticated, says Kinue would laugh herself silly at his worrying. Louise smiles and agrees, saying that should they ever have children, he'll only look like a man to be respected—someone their sons and daughters can look up to.

(Louise tries to ignore the fact that her hair has stayed a beautiful, shining gold despite all of the medical treatments she's gone through. Saji tries to ignore the fact that while he is gaining lines along his cheeks and his forehead and his eyes, Louise's skin is just as smooth as it was when they first met, almost twenty years ago.)

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They never do have children.

Louise mentions it, every so often, and Saji knows that should their lives have been different, both of them would have been more than happy with a few kids following them around. But Louise's medical condition—while better than any doctor could have hoped for—is still too fragile for the stresses of pregnancy, and they're getting old, anyway.

She jokes that they've beaten so many odds already—maybe it's best they don't test any more.

Louise jokes and shoves it away but Saji knows it hurts her, that she is too weak and too old to bear even a single child. Maybe it would have brightened their lives, and maybe it wouldn't have, but that is neither here nor there, because Louise is ill and Saji is finding more and more grey hairs by the day, and they both realize, on some level, that it's probably best for the child that they never try to raise one.

Saji grew up an orphan, after all, and Louise wakes screaming from nightmares more often than not, and neither of them really know what they would do with a baby, a toddler, a child. They have friends who could help (precious few), but even fewer of those have ever raised a child of their own. Ian and Linda are grandparents, now, still out on Krung Thep—unwilling to retire even when Ian's pushing seventy. Allelujah and Marie are content with their little girl (almost a teenager, now), and they've settled down happily somewhere in Scandinavia. That pregnancy had been fraught with worry, too, but Marie is a super soldier—and of course she had ended up all right.

They have access to the best doctors the world has to offer, and everyone—Saji included—assures Louise that she is far stronger than she thinks, but still they worry about the barely halted GN particle poisoning; they worry about her frail bones and her mental state with the unpredictable hormones of pregnancy. Their doctor says she will support them and help any way she can if they do decide to have a child, but she recommends strongly against it.

They never do have children, and maybe it hurts them both more than either of them ever let on, but by the end, they realize it will have only made things more difficult for all of them, and so Saji does not have regrets.

.

.

When Saji looks his age at fifty-five and Louise appears barely half of that, they stop fooling themselves and realize that something is wrong.

Louise goes to her doctor asking if something is wrong with her (though their every instinct says the opposite), because she should be five months older than her husband, but she is not; she should be post-menopausal, but she is not—and everything but her health says she is yet able to bear children.

Her doctor can only shrug in bafflement, because she has seen Louise for almost thirty years, now, and it is true—she looks far younger than she should.

She promises to look into it, see if there is any mention of this in the literature, and Louise nods and hopes this isn't something else from her past, come back to haunt her.

Less than a week later, Saji answers a phone call from the doctor's office, and is told they need to schedule an appointment right away. Fearing the worst, Saji asks that they be squeezed in the next day—and carefully tells Louise the news when she comes home, that night.

She takes it with stoicism, as she always has—after all, she says rather nastily, what else could the world possibly throw at us?

Saji can think of a great number of things—because they, at least, have their lives when so many others do not—but he says nothing, because all else aside, he thinks Louise is probably right.

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He grips his too-young wife's hand in his own in the waiting room the next morning, tries to ignore the strange looks they've grown used to receiving over the years. It's strange—they both know it's strange, and the terse voice on the other end of that phone line tells Saji they might finally have answers.

(It may be too much to ask for a cure, but they've been through enough together—surely, whatever this is, they will survive it as well.)

They're called in soon after, and the doctor's lips are tightly set as she offers them seats in the exam room. "Nobody knows why, yet," she starts with—no pleasantries, no small talk. After all, each of them knows what they're here for. "But there have been medical reports all over the world of this happening."

"Of people not aging?" Louise asks, her grip on Saji's hand tightening, and she runs her fingers over his ring for a moment before the doctor nods.

"We only have correlations to go on, right now," she continues, leaning forward and looking between the two of them. "Louise, were you ever exposed to the Gundams, thirty years ago?"

Louise stiffens, and Saji glances to her in concern. Of course she was exposed to the Gundams, or at the very least, the ones that Setsuna swore up and down were not their allies. "You know about my particle poisoning," Louise says—almost accuses—because it's true, and Saji thinks the doctor should know better than to bring it up without good cause. But she shakes her head.

"The red particles caused cellular abnormalities," she says, looking only more closely at them. "But we think the green particles may have done the exact opposite."

Saji only stares at the doctor for a moment, because—because Louise fought against the Gundams more than once, certainly, but if she's proposing that exposure to green GN particles caused this delay in aging, surely he would be near the head of the line? After all, he piloted the 0 Raiser; behind Ian and the Gundam Meisters themselves, he likely got more exposure to them than anyone in the world.

Louise seems to be thinking along the same lines. "Saji was exposed more than I ever was," she says nastily, reaching for her purse. "Whatever's going on, it's got nothing to do with those damned things."

Saji allows her to pull him out of the office by the arm, feels the tremors as he holds her hand on the drive home.

They don't quite make it there before she breaks.

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.

Saji waits until a few days later, when he's gone out to the store, to call Celestial Being.

Ian gave him a direct number, before he left, to call in case they ever had any problems. Though Louise had scorned the offer of trust, Saji had recognized the potential of having a direct line to the most powerful organization in the world—and so he has kept it in his phone all these years. He has never called—has not so much as seen any of these people in almost thirty years.

But this afternoon, sitting in a parking lot, he dials the number with a shaking hand—holding the phone before him and waiting for it to connect. He's more surprised than he should be when he recognizes the face that greets him; Feldt Grace looks a little older than she once did—she looks of an age with Louise, though she should be closer to Saji's—and this is more of an answer than he thinks he wants to handle, right now.

"Saji?" She sounds surprised to see him—more surprised, maybe, by his apparent age—but she rallies quickly, smiling genuinely at him. "What can we do for you?"

"I'm fifty-five," he opens with, because he's not sure what else to say to this woman he hardly knows at all. "And I look it."

The smile slips off her face, but she nods slowly, encouraging him to continue—though she surely knows where this is going. "Louise is five months older than me, but she looks half my age."

Feldt's face falls in horrible sympathy, then—such pity that Saji doesn't quite manage to keep the scowl off his face. "Most of us have experienced decelerated aging as well," she says slowly. "Our doctors can tell you about as much as anyone else—it's caused by the GN particles."

"So why do I look older?" he challenges, more angry than he should be. "I piloted the 0 Raiser, that was as close to the particles as anyone could get—"

"The best they can guess is that some of us have a genetic predisposition," Feldt says carefully. "Miss Sumeragi—she's been around longer than most of us, but she's aging normally, too. And with the medicine Ribbons Almark was giving Louise…I think that probably helped her along, a bit."

She sounds apologetic, and Saji isn't quite sure what to say—he's quiet for a moment, trying to bite down on the sick pleasure he gets from hearing that not all of Celestial Being gets to stay young. Setsuna, he is sure, looks like he's yet in his twenties—and last he heard from Allelujah and Marie, they looked surprisingly young as well. He had chalked it up to the two of them being super soldiers, or—or something, but now he realizes that it may be something more.

"As far as we can tell, about a third of Earth's population is starting to exhibit signs of Innovation," Feldt says carefully, when Saji doesn't reply. "So it can't just be spread by the GN particles—but it must have been what started it, at least."

Saji doesn't want to sound like a child—he is well into his middle age, after all—but he still has to keep himself from asking whether there's any way for him to start Innovating. "I'm sorry," Feldt says after a moment, studying his face. "If there's anything we can do—"

"There's not," Saji says, not really sure where his anger has gone, suddenly. "But thank you for the offer."

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Saji celebrates his sixtieth birthday with his wife and his friends, and tries not to think about the fact that Louise does not look a day over thirty.

This medical phenomenon has been well-publicized, by now, and so the two of them no longer get strange looks when they go out hand in hand. Someone (and Saji has a sneaking suspicion as to who) has coined the phrase Innovation for what is happening to almost forty percent of humanity, and though nobody is quite sure how or why or what the full effects are, most of the world has come to consider it a positive effect of humanity's advancement.

With the number of Innovators ever growing, Saji has tried to stay hopeful that he will suddenly stop aging (and perhaps his aching joints will even ease their grumbling), but he is turning sixty today, and his body has shown no signs of stopping. He has tried to stay hopeful for himself and for Louise—though they, of course, have plenty of friends they've made over the decades, Saji can no longer imagine a world without his wife in it—and he knows Louise feels the same.

His birthday party is a strange one, for though they are all about the same age, roughly half of them have slowed—and the rest have not. Some of them look their age, with laugh lines and bags under their eyes, but others look anywhere between thirty and forty—whatever age their switches flipped, and they became Innovators for humanity.

Saji wants to celebrate his birthday, but all he can think is how terrible a person Aeolia Schenberg must have been, to leave half of humanity behind as the rest reach for the stars.

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Saji is seventy-four, and Louise does not yet look thirty-five, and both of them know their time is running out.

He has a bad heart, his doctors say. Though they could try to build him a new one or fit him for a prosthetic, the surgery is risky, even for a young and healthy person—and they tell him he may be better off just waiting for the weak muscles to simply take their course.

Saji wonders, as Louise argues and screams at the doctors, whether an Innovator would get a similar prognosis. But he does not ask; he only talks Louise down, and thanks the doctors, and says they will discuss it at home and let them know what he decides.

He does not cry, in the car, but Louise does—her hands shake on the steering wheel (for his eyesight is too poor, anymore, for him to keep his license) as she swears at the road, at the other drivers, at the doctors and God and Celestial Being for ever doing this to them.

"You don't deserve this," she chokes to him at a red light, turning to him with a face streaked with tears—a face just now starting to earn its first lines.

Saji can't find anything to say to that, but they both have learned long ago that this world has never been fair—and so he grips her calloused hands with his wrinkled own, squeezes, and hopes she will be all right, after he's gone.

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.

They've discussed it—her leaving him, moving around the world (perhaps to the home country she hasn't seen since her twenties), not staying to watch him wither and fade away.

They have discussed it mainly because Saji does not want her to hurt, but she argues that not knowing whether he's alive or dead will be worse than watching him pass. "You're my husband," she says, passionately, and Saji finds he doesn't have anything to say to that. "I love you—you've been through worse than this for me. I'm not going to pretend you don't exist just because you're going to die."

It's brave of her, but then, Saji has always admired her courage—but her nightmares are only increasing in frequency, and Saji is finding it harder and harder to wake up well enough to talk her through them. He is old, just as she should be—and he thinks about this a lot, that she left him behind for her revenge, half a century ago, and now he must leave her on her own…in a much more finite way.

Louise cries into his chest tonight, just as she has on so many others, but Saji cannot find the words to comfort her—so he only holds her with shaking arms, cards bony fingers through her beautiful hair, and hopes she can understand the words he's unable to say.

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Louise wakes the next morning beside a corpse.

Saji's lips are blue, and his narrow chest does not rise and fall with the trembling breaths he has taken, of late. She was in the military for close to five years; she knows what a dead man looks like.

She's just never been prepared for it to be her husband.

She makes the necessary calls, to the hospital and to the coroner and to their closest friends, and when that is finished all she can do is sit in their (her) bed, stare at Saji's too-peaceful face, and pretend—just for these precious few moments—that her husband is simply asleep.

They have anticipated this day for too long, now; Saji is (was) old, with a genetically weak heart, and far too stressful a life for any one person…

Louise has known this day was coming for years and she is still not prepared for the grief and confusion and helplessness she feels, her fingers in her husband's thin white hair, her lips pressing gently against his wrinkled forehead.

She tells herself she will not cry, because it is not what Saji would have wanted—but when the officials knock on her door (and then let themselves into the unlocked house when it's clear she isn't going to answer), they find Louise Crossroad hysterical, hugging the body of her beloved husband and refusing to let him go.

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She calls Marie, that afternoon, because she's the closest thing to a friend she's ever had within Celestial Being—and the only one of hers and Saji's current friends who knows of their past. She is not Soma Peries but she remembers the Louise of the A-Laws' days, and when she picks up the phone and sees Louise's face streaked with tears, she realizes immediately that something has happened.

Louise hates her for the fact that Allelujah is in the background, still, yet middle-aged and smiling and alive as he asks who's on the phone. She realizes, somewhere, that it is not Marie's fault that she and her husband (and her daughter, they told her last they talked) have evolved, but it is near unbearable, hours after finding her husband cold and dead beside her, and she cannot bring herself to look either of them in the eyes as their worry only increases.

"Louise, what happened?" Marie asks, urgently, answering her husband and ascertaining the problem all in one, and she finds she does not have the breath to answer. But her friend's face is growing only more concerned, and eventually Louise finds it in her to say:

"Saji's dead."

Marie inhales sharply, her eyes wide as she stares down at her phone, and Allelujah appears beside her, then, looking down at Louise in unconcealed worry. "What do you need?" Marie asks, ever practical, ever worried, ever eager to help. "We can—we can fly out today, if you want us to—"

"No," Louise says quickly, because—because having two other Innovators in Saji's house seems like sacrilege, seems like a mockery of the life he led. "I just—I don't—"

She doesn't know what to do, because she has expected this but she has never truly been prepared. In the aftermath of her family's deaths, she had of course considered a life without Saji; she had never meant to reunite with him at all. She had told him this, after everything, when she was still half convinced it would be best for the two of them to part ways. She had expected him to be upset, hurt and confused and unwilling to consider the possibility—

But Saji had only pulled her into his arms—gently, allowing her to pull away if she so chose—and she had collapsed into him. "I'm not going anywhere," he had said quietly, over fifty years ago, now. "I'll wait as long as you need me to."

From that moment on she had thought Saji would be with her for the rest of her life, and perhaps that had been a naïve and hopeful sentiment, but it had been comforting—and believable, right up until that doctor's appointment twenty years ago. Louise knows Saji contacted Celestial Being to confirm it, even though he never told her as such. She had been angry at the thought of him getting in touch with those terrorists—but, she supposed, if it's their Gundams causing all of this trouble, then maybe they would have known how to fix it.

But either they didn't, or they didn't care, because Saji is dead and though they have both worked to break her of her anger for so long, she feels rage flare in her heart because if—if Celestial Being had only—

If they had never existed the two of them would have grown old, together—and maybe Saji would have died this morning and maybe he wouldn't have, but at least Louise would be old and wrinkled and ready to follow close behind, but now she is—she is—

"Louise," Marie says, a little louder than she normally would, and she forces herself back to the phone call, forces herself back to the friends that she finds, in this moment, that she hates. "Do you have anyone locally who can help you?"

She bites back the I don't need help that is a clear, blatant lie, and nods—because it's true, they do have friends, even if none of them would understand. "I'm fine," she says defiantly, and Marie raises her eyebrows in skepticism, but eventually she lets it go.

"Let us know if you need anything," she presses, and Louise nods, even though she knows she never will.

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The morning Louise finds a grey hair is the morning she decides she's leaving Earth.

She is seventy-five, and she has lived without her husband for almost six months, now. He is buried in Japan, beside his sister and parents, and this has been the only thing tethering her to this country for these long months while she tries to get a handle on her grief.

What is she to do, now?

She is seventy-five and has never felt so lost and confused and terrified of what the future might hold. She does not know how long she will live (the government estimates that Innovators' lifespans are twice that of normal humans) and she does not know where to go (she hates space for all its awful memories, but she thinks she hates Earth more, for all the wonderful ones) and she is left adrift in a world unfamiliar to her slowly aging bones.

She finds a grey hair that morning and decides all at once that she cannot stay in Japan anymore. She cannot stay in Japan, and—she realizes—she cannot stay on Earth, and so she goes to the nearest recruitment center, full of people excited about traveling to space.

She's easily the oldest person there, even if the rest are also evolved—they're just a bunch of kids (just as she and Saji were, before their world came crashing down), eager to see everything beyond what their planet has to offer. They're hopeful, still, for a bright future they might be able to see; they are happy and bright and unfettered by the horrors of the world.

These children were born decades after Celestial Being's rise, and they do not know the horrors of their families being torn apart.

She goes to the counter when her name is called and tells the clerk she wants to be recruited to the longest flight they have available; the woman looks up at her through narrowed eyes before asking exactly how long she has in mind.

"The government says I've got at least another eighty years in me," Louise says—chokes on a laugh—and the woman's frown deepens further. "I don't want to come home."

There are tests and interviews, and then somehow she is accepted into the program. She tells them she has spent ample time in space, both during scant engineering training as a teenager and as a soldier after—and this gains her favor, she thinks, even though they should probably strike her from the list the moment they see her health history.

She is as healthy as she ever will be, in this shiny new Innovator body, but she hates it—she would give everything to be unstable and unhealthy if only Saji were still with her. Months on, she still expects him to be by her side—righting her wrongs and apologizing for her bullheadedness and holding her hand and—

She expects Saji to be here but he is not—he is gone—he is crumbling to dust six feet under the ground in a lonely cemetery in Japan, and Louise is sure she will never visit his grave again. "Do you have any family?" the interviewer asks, and she laughs in his face.

She is signed onto a deep space voyage that will not return in her lifetime, and she thinks this is the most excited she's been in months.

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.

Months later, when she learns the name of the ship she will be working on for the rest of her life, she laughs hysterically in a way that turns heads in concern.

The Sumeragi is docked at the high orbital station of the Union's pillar, and Louise has returned to space for the first time in fifty years to board it. There is media all around, documenting the hubbub of new and exciting things happening in humanity's quest for the stars. There is the media and there is the crew, already in their normal suits as they flit between the station and the ship, prepping for take-off.

Louise finds one of her superior officers and asks whether the ship was named for anyone in particular. She looks at her askance but says a General Kati Mannequin and an important man named Billy Katagiri—both Innovators themselves—had requested it be named after an old friend.

Louise asks whether that old friend is still alive. She isn't.

She thinks she might feel something in her chest, at that—that Sumeragi Lee Noriega, the mastermind behind Celestial Being, so many years ago, is dead without mention or fanfare. The members of Celestial Being, surely, mourned her passing, but she is not an Innovator and so she is dead and gone—just like Saji.

She wipes away fleeting memories of that woman, desperate and exhausted and defeated so soon after the battle (just like her), and turns to help some younger crewmembers with their loads. That was a lifetime ago, after all—Celestial Being is long dead, and everyone on Earth is gladder for it. This is a new era for humanity, and those who brought war upon it have no place in this new world.

The children learn of their armed interventions in history class, and learn how they facilitated this peaceful world and humanity's evolution…but they also learn of the death tolls, of those whose lives were torn apart by their appearance. Some hail them as heroes, and some mock them as villains, but either way, they have not shown their faces in more than half a century. If they are yet watching over humanity, then they must not dislike what they see.

(Louise hopes she never sees any of them again.)

The Sumeragi takes off into space soon enough, and Louise does not look back, for Earth has nothing left to offer her. She looks only onward to the emptiness of space, and wonders whether it will provide more safety and peace to humanity than Earth.

After all, though the Gundams may have facilitated their exploration into deep space, it doesn't mean their existence hasn't left an awful blight on the planet she is no longer able to call home.

The stars are years and centuries and millennia away and yet she feels drawn to them—comforted by them, in some strange way. They are huge and burning and uncaring of the universe around them, and Louise stares at them for long, long moments, when she has no work left to do, wondering whether they are happy.

She wonders, suddenly, whether Saji is waiting for her, out there among the bright, uncaring stars.

"Wait for me in space," she told him, a lifetime ago, and he has ever kept his promises. Perhaps that is why she felt so drawn to space, after all—it has ever, always, been a symbol of hope for her and for Saji, and now it is a symbol of hope for all of humanity as well.

"Wait for me," she whispers to her husband, clenches the old ring she wears around her neck, and looks forward to the stars.

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