[ Gil laughs. If Patrick Zala is somewhere out there in this afterlife, he can come take his complaints about the callousness up with them personally. Hopefully he won't. ]

And thank god you were.

[ But thinking of Patrick Zala also makes Gil think about his son. Athrun had been so easy to move with just a little bit of compassion towards his family situation... Love is a destructive force, indeed. Even love that one seeks to bury. ]

Zala was a skilled war time propagandist, I'll give him that. I don't know that he'd have been able to maintain that momentum after a victory, however.