You all right there?
I see your friends look kinda busy. Have a drink on me. A cute thing like you shouldn't be sitting by herself.
You new around here? Lots of new kids showing up lately.
Me, I've been here since the war. Got my leg eaten by some shithead that came down from the moon. SeeD retired me out while I was still in hospital. What do they want with a grunt that's half made out of metal? Good thing Esthar has free healthcare.
Yeah, I'm from Balamb originally. Ever been there? Beautiful place. Very much stuck in the past. Couldn't wait to get the fuck out and start shooting people.
Of course I know her. Knew her. Been reading too many war magazines? I need another drink to listen to this.
Oh, the fan club. Yeah. We meet every other Thursday in here. Guess you got here too late for the meeting, though.
You want to talk about – before the war?
Well, there's a fan club in every Garden now - most of the female instructors are members, or used to be in their cadet days - and at least one in every major city, now that she's so famous. All started at Balamb, though.
Who started it?
Sometimes we talk about who might have founded it. We older members, who were in it from the start - we who watched her star rise, fall, and rise again, even we don't have an answer, no matter how many drinks the cute new pledges buy us.
We tell them about how admired she was at Garden, of course. Even in the early days, she was exceptional. As Trepie Number One, I take pride in having hunted the Grat Queen with her. Such a beautiful sight. All young and fresh, gleaming with sweat, tearing its limbs from its body and devouring them in pursuit of her art. How they giggle when I tell them it was the first time I'd seen her in a dirty uniform!
They prefer those kinds of stories. None of us have too much to tell about her in the war, we who fought and died on the ground as the heroes flew. The rest, what came after, everybody knows, and we don't tell it any better.
The story I tell least of all, the one I hold closest to my chest, the one I keep for the girls who look knowing enough, the ones with smiles for me and sad eyes? The ones who come here with their friends but sleep alone?
I'm happy to tell it to you, if that bitch at the bar will give me another drink. Get one for yourself.
See, the club wasn't always a club. At our first meeting, there were already enough of us that we weren't embarrassed to be there. Sure, we didn't take ourselves too seriously. Trepe laughed when she found out, blushed, yeah, but she wasn't ashamed. She thought it was a joke, and by the time it wasn't, she wasn't around enough to care. She's pale like you, you know. Blushes like a traffic light. We used to joke that Hyne didn't give her legs, just two bottles of milk. You pale under those jeans, honey?
All right, no need to kick me. It started with a post to the Garden network. Cryptic enough.
"She who chases.
She who hunts.
She who devours.
She who is gold.
She who is blue.
She who awaits her time.
She whose time has come.
Watch her."
Like I said, cryptic enough. Kind of poetic, though, that's why I remember it.
Whoever posted it did it in the middle of the night, though, so it was there on the front page of the network when half of Garden logged in for their morning classes and did everything they could to avoid listening to their Instructors. By lunchtime the cafeteria talk was all over it. Most people, though, thought it was Wimbly Donner trying to drum up interest for his festival. Hah! He'd been in Galbadia for three weeks by then on an exchange trip. Not that anyone had noticed he was gone.
Of course, by the time afternoon classes were over, it was all but forgotten about. The thing was, there was more to come that day. And when it came, we remembered.
When we heard that four SeeDs were taken down at long range on a contract out in Timber, we all shook a little, knowing it could so easily have been us. Her included, the sole survivor of team Gold. Sent to get one last message to Blue team about where the bombs were, so that the rest of them could clear a path out while Gold cut the remote connection to twenty-six detonators across the city.
They did cut it - temporarily- no thanks to the sniper that took them out approximately thirty seconds later.
She took out seven terrorists on her way to us, including the guy that had killed most of her team and was busy maiming the others. They show the body cam video to first year cadets now.
They showed it in her debriefing. She cried, and shook, and gripped my hand with hers. It was cold and sweaty, and afterwards she threw up for nearly ten minutes in a wastebasket while I held her hair.
Yeah, and? She may not have known my name, but I was a soldier back then. That's what we do.
The part where she tears out the guy's throat with her teeth? The cyborg militant guy with the eye mods who's trying to break her neck? They don't show the cadets that part. Or what he was doing right before that. Just the part afterwards where she shoots lasers from her eyes.
Get me a fuckin' shot.
Hyne knows what happened to the poor kids she had to leave behind. They looked like they should have been dead, but they got fucked up so badly, no one could tell.
I'm not crying, kid, this shit you bought me just has a kick to it.
Anyway, they announced the deaths right after classes finished, so that night the post on Garden-net was on fire.
Wasn't long, of course, before the fan club started. We'd been talking about it online for a while, and finally that same anonymous account - the one we were all wondering about by now - gave us a time, and a place. We took our numbers from the order we showed up. Of course, I was number one. I told Trepe about it afterwards. Reconnaissance. Naturally. She took it pretty well.
No one stepped up though. We were all silent when the question came up: who? Who knew, before the rest of B-Garden, what she'd done?
Hah! You were looking for an answer, weren't you?
Well, you can stop peeping at me from under your hair, honey. None of us know. Now if you're not gonna let me see your tits, fuck off, unless you're going to get me another drink.
The young woman walks away, hair still swept over her face. Before she leaves the bar, she pauses for a moment. She has an itch. She lifts her eyepatch and rubs the cold metal underneath. Remembers how it burned going in, and how much blood came from the throat of the man who put it there.
"Number one." She murmurs to herself. "Obnoxious." Then smiles. "Still. Anonymous."
The sixth member of Gold team has business to attend to.