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It has been four years since the attack on Fólkvangr, and Ericht Samaya is dying.
Elnora knows this, deep down in that darkest space full of truths she dare not ever acknowledge about what is happening to her beloved daughter, but is true. Since their desperate escape from the doom that came for her and those she loved and the future they dreamed of, Eri has been dying by inches as the after effects of the GUND format ravage her still developing brain and nervous system. From the bold and outgoing 4 year waddling her way around the research station and getting underfoot and into the hearts of the Vanadis Institute, she has become weaker and weaker, increasingly bound to Elnora's (Prospera's now, now she's 'safe' here on distant Mercury with the desperate enough to not ask questions Shin-Sei corporation) crude laboratory and spending more time plugged into the prototype GUND cradle of the Lfrith than she can now comfortably spend outside of it.
It was during one of her now daily sessions of being connected to the machine to provide at least some relief from the neurological decay caused by GUND that Elnora was forced to see the truth. She'd left the room for but a moment, to ready a birthday gift for the last, most precious, thing in her life (never mind that celebrating Ericht's birthday cut like a saber as she could only ever hear her beloved Nadim choke out his last words to her and his precious sabeyya) and came back to find her asleep. Not unexpected, Eri had been saying she was tired the last few days and the sessions always took a lot out of her, so Elnora went to wake her and....
She didn't respond.
Her gorgeous blue eyes wouldn't open.
Her chest, once so full of laughter even now as she and her mother were in hiding, was completely still.
Her darling daughter. The last light of her life. The last thing she had connecting her to her beloved Nadim.
Gone.
She thinks she screamed, then. That would explain the rawness in her throat as she stumbled back into the lab, backing away from the horror contained with the adjoining hangar, the sensation of bile creeping up her ragged throat as even her stomach simply rejected the reality it was presented with. As she staggered over to the sink to wash out her mouth, she saw it.
The last cruel trick the universe played upon her, ultimately spawned from her own hand (as was what had just happened to Eri, screamed her cruelest and most wounded self), for there upon the table was the nitrogen freezer containing the last living cells of her dead daughter.
As she stumbled over to the freezer, Prospera admitted what she could never had before; the cell culture had been her grasping at straws, trying to find something, anything to combat her daughters slow decline, but now? Now the worst had happened and somehow was still yet to come. Not only was her daughter dead, plugged into the very machine that had always been going to kill them both in the end, but now she had to face actively participating in the killing. These last few cells, what little was left of Eri's life and love for it, would have to be destroyed, and she would have to be the one to do it, lest the secret of her now lone survival get out.
Or did she? As she gripped the freezer, the cold burning her hands as a new idea burned it's way through her grief wracked mind; the plan had been to develop these cells for cloning, a desperate last ditch gamble to see if perhaps transplants of new tissue could help......could have helped Eri survive the cascade failure of her organs. And now, all it would take is taking that genetic material, and introducing it to a human egg, and in some small way Eri would live again.
Nadim had always wanted another child. He'd even named her, the second girl of his dreams, he'd told her once, in that dream time between the move to Fólkvangr and waking to this ever unfolding waking nightmare. She'd laughed him off then, told him that they had enough on their hands with Eri and Lfrith, but now?
Yes, now she was ready to have another of her brilliant Nadim's daughters.
A Suletta, to never forgetta.
She'd made a burbling laugh at that memory as it occurred to her, playing it off as remembering a silly joke her husband had made when the nurse performing the procedure raised an eyebrow. It never even occurred to Prospera, or rather Harriet Merquise, sitting in the doctors office under a false name (and even more ridiculous blonde wig) belonging to a fake receptionist at one of the shell companies she'd leveraged to begin taking control of Shin Sei that this single sentence was the closest she had come to telling the truth to another living being in months.
And as she returned home, her new daughter clinging to life inside her, torn between joyous laughter at the possibility now of seeing those gorgeous blue eyes filled with life again or given in to the creeping, crushing despair that was the realisation that Ericht was truly gone and this was a new life and a new person within her no matter who they looked like, when a new feeling entered the fray. Confusion.
An alert had been triggered from the lab, or more accurately the hangar. The remains of Lfrith, still strung up and powered on while Prospera tried to find some means of disposing of the loathed war machine without drawing attention to herself, had just registered a callback from layer 33.
Certain there was a glitch, or that she had at last lost her mind completely, she made her way to the hangar. Even here, from outside the door, she could hear the protesting of analytical computers and the grinding of metal, but nothing could have prepared for what was inside. There, nestled at the heart of the swathes of cables connecting the upper chest of the partially disassembled mobile suit to the rest of the facility, was a twitching and flashing Gundam. Awestruck, Prospera had made her way to the monitoring station still flashing it's verification of the callback from the layer only Eri had ever managed to dive to, and watched in rapture as the affirmative she sent back was responded to in kind.
Her voice shaking, breaking with barely restrained joy, she asked the only question she could think of in the face of this miracle; “Eri? Is that you?”
A moment passed. And then another affirmative was sent to the monitoring station, and then another and another and Prospera was crying now as tears of love poured down her cheeks she realised what had happened.
She had moved forward, and been rewarded with not one, but two darling daughters. And with their power and love and fate itself behind them, they would all put right what had been put wrong. Oh yes, together, the new Mercury family would change the world.