Blue as the Sky I Become
Between the fall of Celestial Being and the rise of A-laws, Setsuna repairs what remains of Exia and keeps moving forward. On a day meant for lovers, he realizes he already knows where his heart belongs.
—
A bell improvised from scrap metal tapped once as Setsuna stepped inside.
The shop was narrow, more a shelter than a store, it had corrugated metal walls bowing and creaking when the wind pressed against them. By instinct, he pulled his brown cape closer, lifting it just enough to shadow his face. He breathed in without thinking. Old sand, rain, oil, rust. The smells layered over one another like memories clinging to the fabric.
He angled his shoulders as he moved, weight balanced, eyes already mapping exits. Out of habit. Or perhaps a tiny bit of fear that he had long since learned how to wear without complaint.
Shelves crowded the walls, sagging under filters, cracked lenses, wire coils, scavenged metal stamped with ghosts of old corporate logos. Dust drifted lazily through a slanted beam of light pouring from a broken roof panel. Somewhere behind the counter, a radio hummed beneath static, a faint voice struggling to exist.
Setsuna had come for materials, anything that could help stabilize Exia's control panels. The Gundam waited, wounded but patient, and he was determined he would not fail her.
Yet, his steps slowed.
A calendar hung crookedly by the counter, sun-bleached and curling at the edges, held up by strips of yellowed tapes. Dates rarely mattered to him anymore. Days blurred into repairs, travel, and vigilance. Rather than numbers, time had been measured in maintenance cycles, resources management, and enemy encounters.
But followed by many lazily drawn dashes, one square was circled thickly with a heart drawn in bright pink marker. That should be today.
February 14th - "Valentine's Day."
"Oh, hey there. Looking for parts?" The shopkeeper looked up from a crate, a middle-aged man with an easy, practiced voice. When his gaze followed Setsuna's, he chuckled softly. "Ah. Today's the day."
"... What is this?" Setsuna asked, voice low, guarded.
"You're about that age to care about those things, yeah?"
Setsuna's hand tightened at the edge of his cape. He drew it a fraction closer to his face, instinctively covering anything that could be mistaken for softness, youth included.
"I'm not," he replied flatly.
The shopkeeper raised his hands in surrender. "Apologies. Didn't mean anything by it. Just..." His eyes lingered on Setsuna's posture, the way he stood like the world might strike at any second. "Just that people your age usually have someone special."
"I already have a G--" Setsuna stopped himself.
The word “Gundam” did not belong here. He couldn't blow his cover so easily.
"... A girlfriend?" The shopkeeper supplied, gentle tease in his tone.
"... Sure."
The embarrassing lie sat heavily on his tongue, but maintaining his secret mattered more than pride.
"I knew it!" The man's face brightened. "Then you should get something. Doesn't have to be anything big. It's about showing care. Let her know that you thought about her."
Setsuna looked back at the calendar. The pink heart seemed to burn against the grime, stubbornly bright.
—
When Setsuna stepped back outside, the wind met him immediately, tugging at his cape and the red turban wrapped around his neck. He paused there, half-sheltered by the doorway, looking down at his hands
He acquired what he came for. The bolts, wires, cabling.
And a bright blue ribbon.
It had cost him everything extra he'd earned that week. He lived from one small repair job to the next now, careful with every coin, measuring survival in modest margins. Yet when he stood at the counter, this had felt important enough to empty his pockets without hesitation.
"Showing care..." Setsuna echoed the words from the shopkeeper, murmuring to himself, as if they had lodged somewhere between his ribs.
Blue was Exia's color. It also became his pilot suit color back then.
The color had never meant anything to him before. It had never even been part of his wardrobe prior to joining Celestial Being, never something he sought out. Once war carved purpose into his life, blue had been just another shade in a broken world.
He held the ribbon between his fingers, rubbing the fabric carefully with his calloused thumb. It was soft. Clean. Incongruously gentle in a way that felt out of place against his skin.
Why did looking at this color now made his heart at peace?
He didn't understand what today was supposed to mean. He didn't understand love the way others spoke of it. His late comrade Neil Dylandy had talked about it with laughter, with stories so warm and reckless they felt unreal. His old neighbor Saji Crossroad spoke of it like an awkward promise, something fragile yet heavy, that could shatter if mishandled.
Those interpretations seemed to belong to another world, one Setsuna had never had room to inhabit.
But he understood what intention meant. He understood choosing something, even when it cost.
The wind pulled again, sharper this time, carrying grains of sand that stung faintly against his knuckles. Setsuna closed his fingers around the ribbon, shielding it instinctively as if it were something alive that needed protection.
He started walking, turning towards the place he had left Exia.
Exia did not need adornment. She did not need gifts or rituals. She existed to fight and to intervene, to end conflict by becoming it. That was the role assigned to her, just as it had been given to him. Gundam had been that answer to ending war. Exia had been that answer.
And yet.
He remembered the way her systems responded beneath his hand. How alerts quieted under his repairs. How her output steadied when he piloted her, as if violence itself could be guided into restraint. She also didn’t need a cape to hide her missing left arm, yet every time Setsuna saw it exposed, something in his chest tightened, an ache adjacent to pain but not quite the same thing.
Marina Ismail’s ideals surfaced again in his thoughts, as they often did. Questions without clear resolutions, hopes that resisted being translated into his own actions. He had once written to her, searching for an answer. Not that he ever expected to receive a reply. He knew he’d probably never understand her fully, as much as something in him yearned for that, but that was akin to demanding a simple response to the world’s suffering.
However, when he thought of Exia, a fragment of that answer seemed to flicker quietly within him.
Setsuna tucked the ribbon carefully into his pocket, separate from the tools and wires, where it would not be crushed or dirtied. He adjusted his footing and continued on.
Perhaps the answer was actually simple, or maybe parts of it lived in smaller places than he had imagined. Like in the way he looked at a broken mobile suit and decided she was worth preserving. In this way he wanted to offer gentleness to something built for war, even when the world would have insisted there was no point.
The wind followed him onward, but his steps remained steady.
—
Exia stood where he had left her.
Hidden among rocks and shadow, her repaired armor still mismatched, seams visible where battles have taken their toll. Exia Repair. Incomplete. Scarred.
--Still breathtaking.
Setsuna approached her slowly, his palm resting against her ankle armor through his fingerless gloves. The surface was cool to his touch as night crept closer. It felt like a greeting.
"I'm back," he murmured softly.
Exia's systems seemed to hum in response, low and familiar, like a gentle vibration that traveled up his arm and settled behind his ribs. Warm. Setsuna didn't need words to know she recognized him. She always did.
They crossed the world like this now. Quiet armed interventions, dismantling small but cruel machines of violence, secretly helping villages that would never make the news. Setsuna scavenged parts whenever he could, even armor fragments that almost fit could be enough if he was careful.
He was set on fixing her with his own hands. She held his soul steady in return.
Since being separated from Celestial Being, isolation pressed in from all sides, the world became something he had to walk through alone.
Except he wasn't, not really.
With practiced ease, Setsuna climbed to a cord that took him to the cockpit, then to her right hand, and finally settled onto the remains of her left shoulder. Setsuna watched the sun sink beyond the ruins across the desert scenery. Stars spread thinly above them, the cold metal beneath him was steady, comforting. Exia's presence was a constant, anchoring him to the moment like gravity.
"It seems," Setsuna said quietly, testing the words, "that today..."
Her right red eye optic seemed to glow a bit brighter. Most people would blame this behavior on Setsuna's makeshift repair making it unstable but, to him, it felt like a listening gesture.
"It's a day for love," he continued, uncertain. "For expressing care. People give something to the ones they cherish. I don't know how to do that for a Gundam, but..."
The wind moved through the ruins. Exia remained still, but he felt it, he felt *her* the way he always did. A resonance, subtle like a shared breath between them.
He pulled the ribbon from his pocket, fingers fumbling slightly, hesitant, almost embarrassed.
Carefully, he ties the blue fabric around her remaining clavicle antennae. It sat unevenly, one end much shorter than the other, but he let the long one trail freely, fluttering with the wind.
"For you."
Silence followed.
Then--
Her GN particles shimmered, faintly pink-tinted under the night sky, dispersing in a slow, careful pattern. The air around him warmed up, the hum deepened.
Setsuna's eyes widened.
The color reminded him of the TRANS-AM mode, yet Exia had been unable to activate it since she got damaged, no matter how much Setsuna attempted to repair the system.
The particles drifted outward, then curved gently back towards her frame, as though unwilling to stray too far. Their faint hue pulsed once, subtle and steady.
Setsuna did not move. He could barely breathe for a while.
The ribbon stirred softly in the wind, blue against Exia’s damaged white. Human against machine. A fragile thing tied to a mobile suit built to shatter battlefields. Setsuna thought of how easily it could tear, how quickly it could be lost. Yet he had tied it anyway.
As the particles faded out, the brightness of the stars regained, continuing their slow procession overhead, indifferent and eternal. Orion’s shape cut cleanly through the sky, the hunter frozen between violence and myth.
Setsuna brought himself a bit closer to Exia’s head.
"Happy Valentine's Day," he whispered, resting his forehead against her cheek armor, eyes closed. "I don't need anything back."
He already felt everything he needed in return.
The steadiness. The protection. The quiet promise that, as long as she stands, he was not alone.
Between seasons. Between wars. Between the cracks of a broken world.
A boy and his Gundam chose love in their own way.
