First drabble of the new season. Blatant speculation (see: Soma) and (potential) future spoilers ahoy.

Yeah, I'm pretty confident I'll be right on with some of these, though I also will end up being wrong with some of these as well.

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All Is Not Well

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"It's an easy job, boy. All you have to do is walk the streets at night, shouting the hour and that all is well."

"But what if all is not well, sir?"

-Terry Pratchet, "Nightwatch"

--

After the young man has left, Soma turns to Sergei. The revelation still affects her.

"You never told me you had a son," she says. "Why didn't you tell me?" The lesser half is accusing, but the greater half pleading for him to tell her that the visit was just a hallucination, that her life of peace has not just ended, that the man she has come to trust more than anyone else has not spent the entire five years that she has known him lying to her.

Sergei, damn him, averts his eyes.

"We had…" he trails off, seeking the best words to explain it to her (and now she realizes that he has done this far too often: trying to explain to her things any other girl would have understood), and he finally ends with "we had drifted apart."

Soma hears and does not understand. She knows she does not understand, hates that she does not understand, does not want to understand why Sergei would separate from his own flesh and blood.

(Because if he would do so to his own flesh and blood, why wouldn't he do it to her? And then she would be alone once again, but this time having known camaraderie and friendship and family and would know their absence and…)

But she must know. "Why?" is the meaning of what she says.

Sergei still does not look her in the eyes, or look at her at all. He now looks into the past, a past long before she came to know him, and suddenly that scares her.

"I was a soldier once," he says, as if he isn't one now, "and I was much like you. I thought duty was everything, the mission more important than anything else. Country dominated everything: my honor, my life," and here he, the strongest man she has ever known, visibly chokes with remembered shame and weakness, and she wants to rush and put him at ease, as any daughter would (Is that what she is? Or what she wants to be? A few minutes ago she had told him she was not sure, but now she was confused and even a bit frightened), but she must know why

"And my family."

--

Billy has the woman of his dreams and the love of his life by his side, and still feels as if he has lost everything that matters.

He doesn't know when it started. Maybe with the death of Professor Eifman. True, the man who was the closest thing to a father he can remember would surely have died by now, old as he was, but the man should never have been hunted down…

He doesn't know when it started, but he suspects when it accelerated, when he lost his best friend to the worst of the world government. Graham had been slipping since the loss of his own friends all those years ago, but over time the man had become restless, obsessed with finding a purpose in a time of peace. Even as Billy had been content to retire to a quieter life, the other had strived even harder, looked even harder into every lead of Celestial Being's continued existence…

Billy didn't know where Graham was today, to be honest. Likely with the new anti-Rebel force. Maybe with the rebels. (Billy doubted it, Graham always thought in terms of states and power and authority, but he wouldn't be surprised if, one day, Graham was found in the cockpit of an old flag, fighting against a superior force for the sheer joy of it.)

But while Billy doesn't know how it started, and is unsure when exactly it got worse, he does know where it has come, and that is now in his bed. Sumeragi is miserable, Billy knows, every day and all the time between her smiles to him and their brief moments of happiness. She had never truly recovered from the incident all those years ago, but now it was something more. Murmurs in her sleep have left him suspicious (not that he will ever tell anyone!), looks of pain at every mention of the anti-government rebels only fuel them, but deep down he knows that it's because she has failed again, in some way she will never tell him.

But he wishes she would. He wishes someone, anyone, would come and change things. At this point he doesn't care who, and he doesn't care how, only that soon she might find a focus other than on her failures.

Billy feels as if he's lost everything that matters. He has a feeling he would have to give up everything else for even a chance to get it all back.

--

Louise sits alone. In her room.

It's strange how wrong that feels, though she has done it all her life. A few years ago, she had an opportunity to change that. She wouldn't be alone on a ship full of people, and it wouldn't be 'her' room.

But Celestial Being showed up, and changed that. They separated her from everything she had known.

Her family, to almost the last cousin, was dead. A lineage that traced itself back a millennia, wiped out at a single wedding. All that remained of anyone within three relations was herself.

Her home was taken. True, the property still stand there, and the lawyers rush to reassured her that they are in her name. But home was where the heart is, and her heart refused to stay in those large, empty rooms where no life remained.

And then there was him. He was still alive, she knew. He occasionally sent her letters, though she never replied. She couldn't. Not yet. Not since she had met them, and learned that Celestial Being still lived. She couldn't return, even if he would take her, a cripple, until Celetial Being was resolved. Until the world was safer for him.

Louise sat alone, in her room. Tomorrow would be her first combat mission, and an important step to one day reuniting with Saji, if she only she could make it.

But she was still alone, and it was still her room. But maybe it wouldn't have to be that way for that much longer.