Beyond Tomorrow (And Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)

by BlueWay

Universal Century, 0079. As the One Year War rages its path across time and space, a lone woman, out of place, wanders the ruins of the Pacific North West and finds herself holding the fate of all History in her hands. The path of the Universal Century will be rewritten as the survival of a single man sets the stages to change the course of Humanity forever. Who will survive?

5. 1-1: Human Embers - Reaper's Return

1-1
Human Embers - Reaper's Return

---

Garma Zabi hurts too much to have anything close to restful sleep nowadays. The bandages itch, the scars burn anew, and the hole he feels in his head where his right eye sits dead drills more profound and deeper every moment, reminding him of his condition. His fractured leg in the Academy seems much more of a non-issue now. On top of that, a dry, flaking gel applied to his scars must be reapplied daily and, especially at night, is prone to dry cracking. It's not a pleasurable experience, but if anything, there is a new understanding of it.

Many times, the field hospitals of the North American front would host him, and he would walk and award medals and commendations to those who had nearly given it all for Zeon. They were broken, just like he was now, and for some, even worse.

Once, and only once, as he leaned in to pin a medal on a soldier's chest, that soldier leaned up, both eyes gone and covered by two bandages separately, and whispered. "Let me die."

He thought about that soldier for many weeks after until the string of Federation victories near the equator and on the west coast had preoccupied him instead, but now as he was, he remembered him.

Clear skies over Seattle, and at night, it let the moon come in to give the room he occupied light. Distant battlegrounds of space warfare are beyond his ability to see, but the war continues without him. There is a dark comedy, only understated by his condition, that this is perhaps the first time in nearly a year that he hasn't had to concern himself about the war as a matter of responsibility.

It's not his problem anymore insofar that, as again and again proclaimed by his very own flesh and blood over the radio, he was dead.

Despite this, he shares that same question screamed: Why?

So many times now, he had replayed those final moments in the Gaw, over and over, burning and screaming toward the Trojan Horse, and then from there, so many years back to the years he had shared with the man who tried to kill him.

What had he done to Char Aznable? Or rather, what had his family done to him? He was just a young man from the Texas Colony, and for all the politicking and anything, his family might've done to secure a future for Zeon and all Spacenoids. He had done nothing to the man other than be guilty of companionship with him.

Even more than that, he thought that maybe something was still there in the realm of their particular relations to each other. Something. It had to have been something because it was once more. No words ever put to it—just action. Just shared nights. Feeling and pleasure, mutual need, were gone when the morning came, or both of them did. At the high peaks of those moments, he could say those words that he tells now Icelina every day. He says them true to her, but, in the throes of passions once were, they were true then.

In the whirlwind of Academy days, Char Aznable was once a true love of his.

Garma Zabi knows not what type of love or how, but it simply was.

Maybe he was just mouthy in bed.

But even now, he can't stop thinking about him, his mark left upon his body worse than any bite could.

The woman that has saved him, Mai Gul, sleeps like the dead a few feet away from him on the floor, wrapped up in her proper blanket as he is given thermals. Nary a peep out of her, but any building creak or wind blow would wake her. A handful of times now, she has woken up in a snap, her pistol in hand, and many times during that, she has woken up locking eyes with him, still awake in the night.

She was a different beast than anyone else he had ever known. Any knowledge, peripheral thoughts that had been of her that he had, they're all invalid now. This woman was a woman born again since the Academy, and it's turned into someone he can very much believe had resisted Zeon for nearly a year.

If maybe he told her more about Char, she could be the start of a chain that let the truth come out for all of Zeon and Spacenoids, however unlikely. It was what he had; if he were to die, his legacy would be more proactive than most. If he were to die, the act, the knowledge of what had been done to him, would carry on with her. The inkling of a feeling within him had confided that she would survive long enough to matter.

The war would be over soon, and she would, hopefully, talk. She would tell the story of meeting him: martyred prince, Garma Zabi. For her own skin, he imagined she wouldn't tell them how she killed him, but she would tell those who would listen she tried her best to keep him alive. She would tell them Garma's passing words: "Char Aznable did this to me!"

Whether he liked it or not, she would be his legacy.

Zeon would win this war, and it would have to contend with its very character.

Was there a coup happening within his family right now? Was Char in on it?

Those thoughts kept him awake almost as effectively as the pain, but, no matter the case, other questions didn't have to do with his own personal situation.

Even if the war was out of his control, it was continuing. According to his last status update from wider Zeon command elements, all the pieces were falling into place for the final push for victory. Because, as whispers implicated, it was final victory, or the long road to that unmentionable word: defeat.

Though Garma had no concerns about that.

Surely, reinforcements from Side 3 would arrive any day now, and, even without him, the path of the war would change on Earth and, therefore, the stars above. Forces would be drawn up. Gihren's strength would renew the populace.

Undoubtedly, the White Devil would be dealt with.

Indeed, the Newtype Platoons being deployed would finally strike a decisive blow for the future of all Humanity.

And, most definitely, he would be remembered as a hero.

As he does most nights now, he thinks, but his remaining eye has to fall somewhere. So, it falls on his right hand, and he feels its loss as heavy as his leg. His ring finger was gone entirely, with them, what had been on it. He carried his engagement ring into battle beneath his gloves, and as went his hand so went it.

Icelina…

Mai turned on the radio for him days after they began their routine of stripping his bandages and applying new ones with whatever else she needed to do to him. In it, he had heard repeats, again and again, of the speech made in his honor by Gihren. It was all that played on any Zeonic frequency. His death had been a good thing, and he knows how it could be. Everyone loved a martyr, but he knew one person who wouldn't.

He wonders where she is now, Icelina. Is she mourning in New York? Is her father lording over her that his death was a good thing?

If there were anyone that deserved to attend to him, it would've been her, and it is perhaps a fantasy of his, but a normal one by all accounts; the love of his life attending to his every need as he is stuck to the bed, but the last thing he wants to think of is that fantasy made reality. There was an idea Zeon Zum Deikun had proposed in some of his more supplementary writings, and he, as a good, avid learner of Spacenoid theory, knew it: A fantasy realized was a nightmare.

And yet he had his fantasy, his love, golden hair, and silken skin that looked up to him and told him that he was loved, and worthy of love, and well-received by his love. There was a woman out there in the world right now he would've given up Zeon for, and if there's any tragedy to him right now, it is that she must feel so alone. Here he was, an actor off the stage, having died as a soldier at war. Being not yet dead, he knows he has left behind a woman who has to assume the form of a widow.

Garma hopes only that she forgives him, and he would beg if he did not end up dead to the woman beside him.

He wants to know why this has happened to him. He wants to return himself to love. Those are reasons enough why he wants to live on for that chance. Eventually, exhaustion takes him, and he goes to a dreamless rest.

---

Mai Gul sleeps on the floor of her apartment, setting her mood when she wakes up. She hasn't been in a good mood, depending on her definition, in either three years or two weeks. It was all relative to her. However, the simple fact of her existence and routine sets her days off on the wrong foot as her watch rings: 7AM.

She sleeps with her blanket curled up on the floor, which is tolerable, and some of her better sleeping arrangements.

She could very much easily reuse the second bedroom in that apartment, devoid of furnishings as it is, but she would be damned if she wasn't going to be a constant presence as far as Garma was concerned. She didn't want it to get out of his head that she was there.

Drifting aimlessness as her life had recently been, his presence had been a honing focus that had brought back senses once dulled. It was like she was back in an active war, but that was a consequence of being so close to the enemy.

"You look so well-rested." She knew at least what his voice sounded like before this. His voice was a pleasingly young and charming example that was very much perfect for whenever he had to go to the radio for addresses. He was groomed to be a prince, and even now, his throat ragged and breathy, it was still there. She could be mad because he was Garma, and that was enough, especially when he was being a smartass.

They were both awake, and, given the nature of their co-habitation, on the same schedule.

"Shut up." Her hair had its own curve to it, natural as it was, sticking to her face as she brushed them out of the way with one hand, the other going to her gun in the holster she was sleeping with. Highest level of retention assured her that it going off would be the least of her worries.

Once, long ago, she had to wake up earlier. It got confusing, a little bit, with each and every Side having its own time zone, with some particular colonies declaring their own, but the general rule was that she had been awake at 3AM each day for prayer, Fajr, back to sleep, and up again for 6. As was what had happened when the dar-al Islam extended out into the stars.

The war also hadn't provided her with much of a solid sleeping schedule between Zeon raids and bombardments.

She was fine with waking up at seven nowadays, however. It'd been a long time since she had been an adherent to faith.

She rose, once again stretching, more than once catching Garma in the mirror staring at her back all the while. She had always been quick to turn around and catch his gaze, only for him to move off and pretend as if it hadn't happened, after the first week it was a routine.

"Morning." Day ten of living with Garma Zabi, and this is the first time she's said good morning to him. It shocks him, based on the way he tilts his head, eyebrow up, but he recognizes it. It hadn't helped that she had turned herself away from him while doing it, but the disguise of domesticity was something enforced after the first week. There was no getting around the fact that this was going to be normal, if that was a proper word for it, for at least a time.

Mai had a time, she decided, when she was going to kill him. A very pertinent time. So with that question in her head settled the rest came easy: just keeping him alive until then.

"Good morning." He finally responded when she turned, arms crossed on top of each other on his lap. He had been well enough to at least prop up his pillow and scoot up to sit in bed as opposed to languish laying down. He was cautious while saying it, not entirely sure why, but it was what it was, and so it happened.

They said good morning to each other, and that was it.

On the night table had amassed a large pile of both Zeonic and Federation military manuals ranging from MRE menus to procedures on how to assemble an ATGM turret. They all came with the supplies Mai had gathered in her residence here, gone unread, until now.

"I'm not giving you anything with a cellular reception or connectivity, dumbass." She said, first time he asked. "Not like we got cell service anymore. Or electricity."

So, the manuals would do to keep his mind off the dreadful inward thoughts.

"You good?" She asked, putting on her dull green jacket. It was hers before the war, canvas and big on her form, but with enough utility that she had carried it all the way through. Seattle's rain had beat down the rest of her clothing, and, somehow, even war hadn't yet destroyed this one. The temperature had been lowering, autumn had been here already and winter was on the horizon. It'd made sense why the Conclave wanted out of the wet and cold of this city before then.

Garma had, slowly, roused himself into movement, another Federation uniform being his sleepwear that day, shuffling beneath him as he pivoted out from his thermal blanket. He was still bandaged up where it mattered: around his head, his right hand covering his lost fingers, and his right leg stump, but the burns, though still relatively fresh, had started fading into the twisted flesh that always remained after them.

On that same bedside table had been pain pills, two at a time, every hour and more if the flares of his nerves coming back alive had been too much to handle.

As he swung himself out the pair of crutches on the floor besides him was scooped up by him, and a deep breath taken. Mai looks on expectantly. First few times she needed to help him take a morning piss were for free, the rest she would be annoyed more about, and Garma knew it.

It's a matter of weight, and balance, putting almost too much weight on the metal crutch. Too many times had he fallen while trying to balance himself already on this, and not enough times has Mai had to catch him on the way down.

Garma has it now, or, at least, the best he could.

He stands. The fact that he can is a point that he cannot believe, but he does.

"Stronger than you look…" Mai admits beneath her breath, looking out to Seattle through her windows and seeing it is, yet again, another overcast day.

He walks at barely a third her speed as they both walk out into the living room, and Mai, as she usually does, cedes the bathroom for him first as she prepares. For him, every other step is a thunk, but it's a step nonetheless.

The mirror in the bathroom reveals day by day himself, and it's a new sight every time. The funny shock that came with him being dressed like a Federation soldier is long gone, the tan top layer unbuttoned, revealing a white undershirt that he's been wearing for the last few days. He prefers Zeon fatigues, but it's no matter. Clothing is clothing. The uniform he came here with was all but destroyed, and she had promptly made a scene of burning it in the lobby in a trashcan.

Their food stores are comprised of various forms of jerky with MREs taken and scavenged from both Zeon and the Federation alike; however, clearly, it was a store not meant for two mouths. Four meals a day for the foreseeable future, and suddenly the idea arises in Mai's mind that she has to shoot deer for herself and not the Conclave.

The coffee is hers, however, and always would be, her small camp burner heating the tin cup of water to a boil. She's not too sure of who she was nowadays. She's not sure if she really is Mai Gul and the young woman that had once been. She's not sure if, if she was but an idea and not a person, her parents would recognize her. What she was sure of was that she loved coffee. She couldn't tell anyone the difference between beans, or how to actually make it outside of the MRE granules or just finding it served in the Conclave. But she loved coffee. She didn't need it to wake up. She didn't need it to stay awake. She just loved it as a matter of state. If she was in the position to have coffee, things had been probably been going good, despite any factors to the contrary like distant gunfire or any wound she might have.

Even with Garma Zabi as her roommate now, she can drink coffee, so she, she figures, must not be that far gone.

She hears the toilet flush and her tin cup is in her hand and Garma's own drink is ready. For every other MRE that came with coffee, another came with tea. He was getting tea. It was probably better for him in the end anyway and she only drank tea after the sun went down. For what little time he had been in here already her living accommodations have had to change. On one hand she's had to go steal a stool from another room on the floor, and suddenly they have a table for the both of them. Mostly for meals in the morning. Dinner was often in bed.

He hobbles over steadily, metal crutch resting against the table as he does his best to hop up onto the stool. Today is the first day that he is able to do it without looking like he's about to fall over.

"You're not shitting or pissing blood, are you?" She greets him.

He tries to learn her, little by little, the same as he would find out any other person that would come into and establish themselves in his life, and one of the first details about her is her language. Her voice is of the Arab world, and sometimes it only adds to the harshness of her frank and upfront speech. He doesn't dwell too much on the fact that Side 3 was predominantly of that European stock originating from Bavaria. He himself, as far as he knows of his own heritage, is predominantly of that German and Middle Europe blood. It matters little however in space. Everyone up there is predominantly identified as a Spacenoid, something that the Earth-elite would never realize on Earth itself.

He shakes his head, thankful that there is a bidet installed. Wiping his own ass is a tribulation that he, for all of his dignity, would not ask her about. "All clean."

"Just checking." She says in her usual unimpressed way when it comes to speaking with him.

"Mm. Very important to you, is it?" It feels so unnatural, using his right hand now, where there was grip there was nothing now, and yet even as he tries to balance his face in said hand, it wobbles, wavers, before he gives up. Trying to straighten his back isn't any better, every muscle burns and it keeps him slow, keeps him broken down.

"Only one of us is allowed to be bleeding from down there." The eye-roll she does, non-committal, is almost audible.

She talks like a soldier at least, so there's that comfortable air about them. He was a military man after all this time, and knew how his own troops talked. He was raised of such a color that the brevity was beneath him, however.

Unfurled from their plastic packs, breakfast for the day. For him, it's freeze-dried pancakes that have been rehydrated, syrup over them with the usual assortment of mushy granola and oatmeal that the dieticians in Zeon's military had thrown into each MRE.

She fed him for the last ten days, as if he really was spoiled beyond repair for it, but now she makes her intentions clear as a plastic knife and a fork are slid onto the tray with the rest of his meal.

Her meal is a little more substantive: bacon and rehydrated scrambled eggs with clumps of deer jerky thrown into it. She needs the calories even more than he might.

"What're you doing today? If I may ask?" His body yearns for food, but it doesn't feel right for him to bite before she does. Subservience wasn't ever his style but his unconscious mannerisms betray him.

Usually, those breakfasts between them pass in silence. He tries to thank her, but she never lets him finish the words. She can answer this at least though, not like it's an exciting answer as she begins to take in spoonfuls of mediocre eggs and the salt of the meat. "Hunting. More or less. Grab some game, and deliver it over to the Conclave. Same old shit."

"Four days in a row."

He was correct. "…How you figure?" She said, a little more egg out of her mouth than she had wanted. It'd been a long time since she's had to live with anyone. Been a long time since she's had to be a domestic type of polite.

"Your knife." He gestures over to the coat rack that has housed most of her gear, seemingly able to take on the metal plates and the load-bearing vests. On it, hanging from a lanyard, a big knife, serrated by its edge, about as long as her forearm. "I don't think that's Federation or Zeon standard, and you only take it out on some days."

She's left the knife behind on days where she hadn't been hunting game, true, and all those days she's returned Garma hadn't been hiding it behind his back. There was a more than ample arsenal for him to take from in her apartment, ranging from explosives to firearms long and short. And yet he hadn't touched them. She had been sure to sprinkle some of her coffee powder on all of them one particular morning, checking them later to find none had been disturbed.

She was planning to kill him, and yet…

She wanted him to fight, to be dirty about it, to give her every excuse to make him hurt.

He hadn't.

He was a perfectly good prisoner of hers, and it infuriated her privately.

"Yeah." She answered, nodding. "It's getting cold soon. Pelts and meat for winter is going to be big for them, wherever they go."

She had seen the bandages that had been wrapped around his head over his right eye shift. He was raising his eyebrow. "And you're not going?"

Perceptive, even while drugged and amputated. Of course, the valedictorian of the Academy was astute in listening when his entire life was of that political scheme. "Not sure. Won't matter to you." She shrugged, trying to put another reminder of his fate at the end of it.

It bounces off of him as if nothing had ever been said, picking up his fork and beginning to stab into his pancakes. He still tries to use his right hand, but with two and a half fingers, it's not going well for him. "Just curious."

They eat the rest of the way in silence, and that was the most they could get to comfortable as the wind of Seattle beat against the building. She knows even he feels it's an unnerving, uncomfortable sound. She as a Spacenoid hadn't known of the phenomenon intuitively until she came to Seattle. He looks on, out those windows, each time wind streams in a constant beat.

He fears the wind more than her, at least over breakfast.

"I don't mind MREs you know-…" He tries to start a conversation but she's up off her feet and attending to her usual daily outfittings, her gear and kit sliding on her easily, all put on within half a minute, her rifle slung over her shoulder, boonie hat on her head as she chews through the last of her meal.

"Be back same as usual. No funny business." She says quickly.

"Wouldn't think of it." He responds quickly back.

And she leaves. It's true that they spend more time asleep together than awake and interacting, but perhaps that is better for the both of them. He's never been more alone in his life, with the rest of the Earth Sphere thinking him dead, and more than that realistically confined to that apartment. She doesn't lock him in, she doesn't put any restrictions on him, and anything that she doesn't want him to do is left unsaid because it was obvious. She didn't worry about him, and he wasn't quite sure on what to think of that.

The radio is there, receiver and all, sitting on a table right by the windows, but what he had told her had been true: He had no desire, at least right now, to go back to Zeon. Whatever awaited him there might've been worse than now.

So he sits there and bides his time, thinking about a future of what may come, and a distant death. His eyes wander to the various bottles of alcohol sitting in the corner of the kitchen table, but pushes off.

He was Garma Zabi. He wasn't a man who was going to drink himself to happy ignorance.

No, he was a man who was going to face his fate with dignity.

---

Another day, another deer. Winter was coming, with October already halfway over. Seattle would only get wetter, and it was an eventuality that all who would spend any amount of time into November and December would have to prepare for.

It's why Mai Gul had been asked earlier that week to do as she was helpful at and kill. More specifically, killing animals.

Despite Seattle looking on in its ruined glass and steel, anyone who remained had returned to the stone age, which was why Mai had that morning been wheeling three deer bodies on a shopping cart procured from off the streets onto the grounds of the Conclave.

It was an unusually good day for game, and so she had counted her blessings and bagged the three bodies, wheeling them back over to the Conclave, rubbing shoulders with the others allowed past the wire in the name of the settlement. Seattle was abandoned in the aggregate, but not in the micro. She'd see others like her out of the corner of her eye every once and a while; rats scurrying around in the shadows avoiding each other like the plague. Most had hiding spots like her up in Elysium, well away from the world, and no one was usually in a hurry to find out where. She was told once that a society was a nation of strangers, and so Seattle had still, despite its apocalypse, still maintained one that was analogous to the one that it was before Zeon. People, passing by, existing in that concrete jungle hardly saying a word to each other.

Here she was again to Seattle: a stranger, not its savior.

Why people had begun to think of her like that she didn't like thinking about; she wasn't a hero as much as she just was a middle manager that stepped up and would, occasionally, take out into the field herself.

That's what she tells herself.

It's not what reality is.

In front of her, a thirty-something man who looks more hobo than survivor turns to her. "Captain." The Federation in contact with her during the war when all of Seattle's resistance fighters went underground had given her and other leaders of "cells" the provisional rank. It stuck after it was pulled and they left. The man in line to enter the Conclave addresses her. She knows this man. Dentley. An art teacher turned general rifleman. He had been with her group since day one and he had been one of several dozens she knew by name and by order. When the war ended, he stayed, if only because, like her, he had nowhere else to go.

He was a reliable man, but no more sticking out in her memory than the rest of her group. Still, they had a relationship just based on the months they fought together. Same as she felt about Gearten.

The line to enter the Conclave was by security alone, hunters and traders and generally any foot traffic that wanted into the place on a regular day waved down at its front security gate and patted safe. At first it had been to check for Zeon spies, now it had been to catch thieves or those who wanted to do the Conclave harm. It was uneventful either way, but security theater still had its place as the line, at least a dozen long, moved every five minutes or so.

Dentley, mullet grown out, beanie on his head with a shotgun tucked on his back, leans on his own pushcart waiting in front of Mai. "How ya doing, Cap?"

She takes a sip from her canteen, the mental note to clean it at some point rising once she feels what was otherwise clean water underlined by the taste of coffee. "Fine, Dentley." She gestured to the bodies she had stacked today. "Maybe a little lucky."

"Yeah. Not bad. My beat today didn't bring up anything that good." He had taken the tarp that was cast over his cart and lifted it just for a second. What Mai could see in that brief moment had been just the usual knick-knacks of useful utility that the Conclave always appreciated. In return, the Conclave would feed him better than he could feed himself for the day. Not that they would turn him away as one of the Ghoul's cadre, but Dentley, and indeed anyone who had survived Zeon, knew nothing could be taken without a fair shake. Out from the tarp however he grabbed what had been up top.

Pristine as the day it probably was shipped to a store, plastic cover sheen still there displaying a stick figure family and a white house.

A coloring book.

"Makes me miss the old days a bit." He puffed up his chest.

A mother. A father. Two children. A dog. A regular life.

The tip of her boonie hat dipped down before she lingered too long on the book. "A bit?"

Dentley laughed, thumbs rifling through the pages once before sliding the book back into the pile he carried. "A bit. Nowadays I don't got a worry about rent, groceries, things like that. The city paid me shit back then, you know? Now it's not really my problem."

To be fair to him, she too was also glad to not be thinking about the jobs she once had as she dryly responded. "Glad to hear the war turned out your way Dentley."

"Never change, Captain Ghoul." The line was moving as Dentley left it at that.

Arm's length acquaintances were how she operated nowadays if she could help it, even with those who fought directly under her. She would make sure that her appreciation was clearly known, but past that? Solitude was her preference, and even that nowadays had been intruded upon.

The line had moved slowly along until it was her turn, the two guards on duty today for the Conclave long having recognized her back in line. There was no specific need for her to be patted down, no worry about the Ghoul. It didn't take more than a minute for her to be waved through to where she usually went for drop-offs like this.

Through the front had been not the best, which was why the Conclave's loading dock, once kept for medical supply deliveries and, ironically enough, foodstuffs, had been where most of the trade that happened for the Conclave in house happened. The currency of useful items, of medicine and food and even ammo was practiced for anyone who lived in that city still. Money had no meaning anymore. There, on the lip of a loading dock overseeing the tables put out attending to sorting and preparing game meat and inventory as needed, was Gearten, arms held at his hips. His sharp eyes had caught Mai's own immediately as she pushed her deer over, and he had been there to meet her as two of the Conclave's workers took the cart off her hand.

She didn't want anything for them. She never did.

"Ghoul."

"Gearten." The two shook hands today at least, Mai doing her former XO the solid of at least taking off her blood-soaked glove to shake his rough and defined hands from a different outdoorsy life. He even had his year-old flannel on.

He took a cursory look at her catch today, fingers passing over one's antlers before it was taken away fully to be skinned and cut down to usable portions. He was impressed. "Christ, Ghoul, ease off for a bit. That's, what, twelve this week?"

Twelve rounds. Ten deer, a wolf, and a moose. "Something like that."

"Well, good on you, but try not to depopulate the would-be new neighbors. Not like Man's gonna move back in for a while." Gearten's more nature minded upbringings had spoken for him.

"You'd be surprised," Unconsciously she looks up, "Lotta the colonies, they did this thing where they copy and pasted layouts of cities here on Earth onto themselves, and not only that they can build all of that stuff fast. Tokyo's been built about six times, five years each time they do it, up there. I think they can bring that stuff back down."

She'd been to a Seattle before. She'd never been to wear the Conclave's location would be on that colony, but she'd been to wear her apartment was now. It was a city not yet completely filled in, not in stature at least, but in population. The irony of how the Seattle in Loum was probably the best example of it now sits uneasily in her.

Gearten grumbles, "I don't know if I want to get into a Ship of Theseus discussion with you, Ghoul, but I don't think locals around here would like that: Seattle being replaced by a copy of itself. I think people around here would rather build something new."

"You would think…" She drags on, looking up into the sky and the world beyond. Being with the prince of space has her thinking more about her origins, conscious of who she had been and what this war meant to her.

"Got your coffee today?" Gearten asks quietly, knowing the habits of the woman he had spent the last year serving.

"Yeah."

"Want more?"

"Yeah." Gearten motions over his shoulder and she follows. His "office" was just a side prefab built into the inner loading dock of the Conclave, and, surprisingly, its function was the same. It was an office meant for the loading dock manager on duty, and here Gearten was playing that same role with a computer desk, sans computer, and more filled with papers with his hand notes. Most of it is about the specific needs of the currently cared for in the Conclave, wishlists from the medical personnel about what they need and he looks out for, while the rest is notes about personnel and security shifts. It keeps him busy, and he is well suited in running it. It was about the same duties he had performed underneath her, the tactical, moment-to-moment decision-making often being in her better domain. A fresh pot of coffee is there for him.

They share from the same cup.

It was a mark of war comrades, the act of absolute sharing. To some it might've seemed they were close, but in reality, it was simply habits formed of rough times.

This coffee tasted fruity. Sour.

"Not a fan?" He read her face. "Mikita went out himself went up into Canada for this. Crazy Russian bastard. Walked the way too. We lost our chef for like two weeks."

"He been up there?" Mai didn't quite believe him. Mikita had been a meek, quiet man, but perhaps the language barrier had put up that assumption.

"Yep. One of his "adventures"." Mikita Trotsky had been somewhat of an airheaded sort. Shellshock had taken him early in the war and he never seem to have gotten over it, the language barrier hadn't helped any treatment the Conclave could've given him. So, he had been prone to walking the Earth, disappearing like a neighborhood cat and then reappearing as if nothing had happened.

They talked a bit there. About how the Conclave was doing, about people they knew, half-rumors from around town, the familiar talk of an officer and an advisor. There was a tense unease about Gearten, due in no small part, not that he would know, because of Garma. He had lost twenty people when the Gaw came down: Some scouts, just meandering in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Gaw came, but mostly good people from 3 Pavilion.

"I know we're about to be leaving soon, but we still gotta keep those posts manned." He breathed into his hands as he talked. Mai knew his rhythm; he would need the machine almost always on his hip to breathe for him soon. "You heard? Four of Murph's gang bangers turned up dead by the Kingdome."

He drew his face mask to start the task of reinflating his lungs as he waited for Mai's answer.

She shook her head. "Didn't see them when I stopped by." She had been good about lying. It was necessary for that first year she had been on Earth. No one wanted to hire a woman who had been, technically, discharged dishonorably from the military.

In, and out. In, and out. The machine purred on his belt until, in one breath like a gasp of a drowning man, he released the mask from his face. "Yeah well. Been hearing a lot more of them popping up down south."

"I thought those that stayed behind here in Seattle were cut off from Murph?"

"Well, leave it to the gang lord to have connections still. But chances are he's coming back up from Tacoma."

Elliot "Murph" Murphy had been the sole surviving guerilla cell leader that hadn't worked with Mai during the active war against Zeon. The leader of the South Bend Sin Jacks, a typical drug-running, pussy peddling outfit before the war, he and Torald Nguyen of the Saigon Lords, a Vietnam ethnic gang formed out of Seattle's Little Saigon, had the inspired idea of consolidating all of Seattle's underground and criminal elements into one unified bloc. Those that had used to be a part of the "Reaper Lords" as the bloc was named, had said that it was a bloc made for two eventualities: the continuation of their activities beneath a new Zeon government, or to be the strongest unified outfit in the Pacific North West when the Federation won the war.

Seattle had been their battlefield for far longer than Zeon had existed, and when Zeon came, they had formed a formidable chunk of its guerilla resistance efforts, enough that the Federation recognized them and shipped them the same support that Mai and her cells eventually got.

She knew both men and had met them personally during tactical meetings in the thick of the war where the Federation had been at its brink and they were truly alone in Seattle. They worked well then, pragmatic, and nasty in their own ways, all pointed toward Spacenoids, but in the end, they were who they were: Gang Lords and an exile from space. They had regarded her with as much regard as a used-up wrapper due to her origins, but she handled her part of the war well that she wasn't ignored outright.

Mai had heard that Torald had died during the final weeks of the war: a wayward Zaku-II cannon shell bouncing down the street and landing in the building the man was in, and when active fighting stopped, Murph, the sole leader then, decided Seattle was old news and moved his hundreds-strong foot soldier army down to Tacoma.

A token few stayed behind, stubborn or otherwise told to stay to keep tabs on Seattle, she imagined Murph had been diligent enough to do that.

Still, it didn't stop her from killing the four of them that had been pissing in Garma's face. She'd killed more of them in the weeks prior, most of them trying to ambush her for her own loot and game meat whenever she had wandered further South of the Kingdome, but those were idiots who thought she was someone to be abused.

She didn't want them, of all people, to know that he lived.

There were so many Reaper Lords that it wasn't an anomaly that some ended up dead in Seattle for one reason or another other than her, but four in one night was an escalation.

"You're not in with the other Scavs, right?" Gearten asked about the Scavengers like her. She shook her head. Apparently, there had been a loose association, she had heard their voices over the radio some nights.

"We're friendly, but we don't talk. Only those that fought with us during the war like Dentley out there." If there was any interaction, she did have with them, it was a purposeful, albeit subterfuge-based implication her portion of Downtown was off-limits to Scavs. The idea of a Scav stumbling upon her apartment even now not something she wanted to entertain.

Gearten wants to ask her something. She knows that look and the way his beard and mustache curve in contemplation. He knows she knows that he wants to ask her something stupid, and so there is silence between them as she is allowed to finish the coffee from that ceramic cup with the original name of the Conclave on it: Swedish Hill.

She knows the look because it's the look he's used to ask her to go on day long missions out to intercept officer transfers and assassinate colonels. She knows the looks because it's the look he uses to tell her that no help is coming, and she's going to have to take Seattle's hilly districts on her own with a meager fireteam. She knows the look because it's the look that he used on her when she was given command for the first time, and things have never been the same since.

She finishes her coffee, and he opens his mouth.

The door opens behind them. "Got good news for me Gear-? Oh! Mai!"

Bo Tale interrupts, and Geartens decides his request is for another time.

If she could give a handshake to Gearten, she could let Bo partly embrace her, holding her arms and being happy to see her. Bo is a working woman however, letting go shorter than she had usually held onto her and turning over to Gearten, a clipboard of her own in her hand. "Remember what I've been asking for Gear?"

"As much aloe vera or alternatives as you can. More bandages. MREs. Sun screen etcetera etcetera. I got it Bo don't you worry." Gearten listed off, gesturing to a list that she already wrote for him. Out in the loading dock Conclave workers had been sorting through and trading with those that did make the journey over. Not everyone had been a fan of the Conclave. Misgivings about not sharing its supplies or not more actively taking part in the war outside of people from its population using it as a safe haven where the Zeeks wouldn't touch. In the end, the Conclave had its own to take care of, and its capacity had been full during the war of those truly innocent.

Bo flicked away at Gearten's forehead, and the sturdy man had hardly flinched as Bo pouted. "Not gonna make you live down when we had a guy who literally had fish oil by the gallon and you didn't pick up any of that."

He shrugged, rubbing his hairy arms that had hauled lumber since he had been a child. "Yeah well he read like a Zeek deserter and he was lucky he even got back out of these walls."

Mai knows the man Gearten talks about. A frail young man that she had pegged for a Spacenoid immediately. He was guilty of a certain tic that Mai herself had beat down after years of floating along with the non-gravitational environments in space. It was unexplainable save for the way a Spacenoid angled their shoulders or moved, dipping their head just slightly forward every time they made to move. It was a common habit for those who spent more time on the colonies and their artificial gravity but still occasionally had to find themselves in the core. He was wearing clothes that didn't fit him, and not too knowledgeable about what he had been offering. The general consensus that day was that he had killed for his wares, whispered among the guards, but no action was taken. If he was Spacenoid he would've ended up dead on his own, alone on Earth.

"We were supposed to have another day like this when we were bombed, right?" Mai remembers, both Bo and Gearten looking at her. Bo nodded heavily.

"Yeah. We're a little behind on supplies. I was also coming down here to ask Gear if he could… well, maybe, a few of us have wanted to head down to the Dock Market for a while."

Gearten is immediately repulsed. "Aw- come on Bo we've been over this. You're the only damn person who knows everything we have by heart," He gestured over to the files and files he had and even that wasn't enough for Gearten. "Plus you're still one of the only nurses that aren't burnt out yet. We can't risk you going out there."

"I lived through this war, same as you, Gear. I was out there doing runs with the ambulances when half our god damned EMTs got wiped out in the first few days!"

"The danger's not Zekes anymore, Bo. It was easy then. Nowadays we don't got the luxury of knowing what or who's dangerous out there."

The silence that dragged on between the three of them was uncomfortable, and no one was wrong, the worst type of stalemate. Mai had been expert in breaking them however before Bo pouted her face off.

"I'll take her." Mai's interjection is simple, and it's all she needs to say, her sniper rifle is back out and she checking the chamber on it before checking her pistol's chamber. "Shouldn't be an issue. I can still lead an element."

It'd been several months since she had lead any type of force from the Conclave, even something as banal as a convoy, but if there was any leadership that could impart safety, it was a safety enforced by the woman known as Ghoul.

Gearten paused, nodding, remembering what this woman was capable of. Any fear he had had been minimized.

The long list that sprawled out from Gearten's desk on one of his clipboards had been more checked off with supplies to hunt down, but still, stragglers remained. He rubbed the beard that defined woodsman like him as he leaned back and winced momentarily from the strain on his chest, looking between Bo and Mai and then back from Mai to Bo. "Right. Fair enough." He threw up his arms. "Bo, go with Mai; take anyone else who wants to head over to the market. Get some fresh air. God knows I'd love some."

"You were spoiled for it, Gearten." The man bristled beneath Bo's comment, taking a quick huff from his ventilator.

He shrugged. "One day, I'm going back north, and that air will heal me more than this damned machine." Gearten had long known that he hadn't been going to the Midwest with the Conclave, but that hadn't been unanticipated. He had roots elsewhere. He was lucky to have a place to go and a future more set in stone than most.

"Got a home to go back up to, Gear?" Bo asked, tilting her head.

He nodded. "Rest of my family's doing okay last I checked. Zeon was no better fighting in a city than they were out in the woods. And if I go back up and find my home blown to high hell, we'll build a new one. For now, though…." For now, though, Gearten had a responsibility to the Conclave. He could've left months ago when the fighting had stopped, and the need for guerilla fighters washed away, but that's not the type of man he was. "Go on, git. Don't make me regret sending you out."

Mai knew the type. If gravity, as some Spacenoids yelled at them as an insult, bound their souls to the Earth, then it was the opinion of Earthnoids that the bonds between people that reigned instead.

He had been one of her most steadfast fighters, and she would always appreciate Gearten despite how he kept people at arm's length. It's not like she could say anything to the contrary herself.

He knew he would leave one day, but he'd keep the Conclave running on his strong back for now. He had been an outdoorsman, used to set his domain in order. She wishes, in some small part, that Gearten had been her father, with how uncomplicated he had been and how simple his idea of taking people was, but if she had Gearten as a father instead of her own she imagines she would've been dead long ago.

Her parents, she imagines, are probably still alive out there, out on Side 3. The Colony Corporation as far as she had last heard from a family friend, a one Alloyin Yuiry, was trying its best to isolate itself from the oncoming conflict between Zeon and the Earth Federation, with most of its administrative assets being moved to the neutral Side 6. The assumption probably wasn't held both ways, however.

It was fine though for Mai.

Her father wanted her gone in the first place.

"Go over and get ready?" Mai touches upon Bo's arm, and she nods, ready, dashing out the door she came in from with a renewed spirit.

"She's a good girl." Gearten is quick to comment. He's only in his thirties, and yet he can't help but imprint some part of a fatherly skew. "Glad she never picked up a gun."

"It's what people like us are for. Right?" Mai's candidness was perhaps her at her most friendliness, and it gets a chuckle out of Gearten. "Want me to pick you up anything, Gear?" Mai hadn't usually been the one for niceties, but even the sun came out in Seattle from time to time. He looked up, a little surprised, but nodded in the end:

"New socks. I'm wearing through the last of the ones the Feds gave us."

She knows too well what Gearten speaks about as she takes a tired breath. Her wool socks are all being bitten into by her heel and her toes, making her very existence just that much more intolerable. "I'll see what I can do."

"Oh yeah," he rises up from his desk, finger up. "You still see that rascal Win?"

She shook her head. She hadn't seen him since the last time she met up with him since she took in Garma. To assuage his worries, she had nailed a message of "things are okay just need some time to myself" to the art museum's front door, but she was meaning to go up to see him soon again. "No, but I'll see him in the next few days, why?"

Gearten falls into form as the exasperated principal. "Can you tell him to stop hanging out with the Conclave's guards past midnight? It's not good form and he's gonna end up shot if one of our people mistakes him for something else."

Fair enough, Mai thinks. "I'm a little annoyed at him anyway so who knows, it might scare him right."

"Yeah?" It was on the topic of clothing anyway, and she's never really minded saying her mind aloud as Gearten asks an innocent question about the youngest soldier they both knew. Gearten had known Win's type just because he had nieces and nephews like him already, all of them rambunctious devils out in the woods.

"He recently found out my bra size and has been trying to deliver me underwear." 32F. Blessed, but in battle not exactly the best, as far as momentum, fitting into cover, squeezing into small spaces was concerned, or even just avoiding unwanted stares. Hence her binding most days. She'd gotten used to it in the same way her fingers and feet were mostly callouses now.

Gearten's not a man she knows to necessarily be tripped up on this, but the furrow of his brow and the way his mind goes through what Win is apparently guilty of sits oddly in him enough that he has to ask: "How does he know that at all, Captain?"

She shrugs. "I got busy last month trying to hunt down Ezekiel so I dropped off some of my clothes with him to wash since that boy still somehow has the sense to do chores all on his own." More rumors from around town that Ezekiel the "Friendly Lion" had been stalking the close side of the Evergreen bridge that connected Seattle to the rest of Washington to the East. It was a mini-vacation for her from one abandoned building to another acting as a hunter of a lion that had been missing for a year but had still been turning up animal corpses throughout the city. She hadn't found him.

"Sounds like a spanking." Gearten shrugs back.

"He spent too much time with us. He'd probably like it." The roll of her eyes only brings her out to Dentley out in the loading docks as he unloads his own stuffs for the day. Dentley was fine but operating with a then thirteen-year-old with a bunch of more developed, yet still young adults, and then putting them in a situation where tomorrow was never promised was not a way to raise a kid. Especially not when everyone talked about their partners or very readily showed off risqué pictures with the thirteen-year-old in presence.

His fixation on her breasts had been innocent enough as it could be. It's not as if she hadn't understood where he was coming from. She was only six years older than him, after all. She, especially after she came back to Earth, knew what it was like to indulge in that particular primal part of Human imposition.

She knew she was desirable, once, long ago. But dirt and war and stress had bitten into her skin and never let go, and her eyes had become a ghastly white that cut through even shadows. She can't even recognize her own eyes in the mirror anymore, the figure in the shape of her is a stranger.

It gives Gearten a sensible chuckle as he sits back down to continue his work for the day. "The war has made us all so very strange, hasn't it Captain?"

Strange wasn't the word she'd use, but she knows what he means. "Mm. Be back." And she leaves for her short trip.

The parking garage of the Conclave had spiraled under the hospital, and in there had sat the only remaining intact cars in all of Seattle, it seemed: ambulances, trucks, a flatbed turned into a battle wagon technical, anyone's personal vehicle that had been here when the invasion had started. However, those cars had been moved off to the side, and instead, the gentle whinnying of horses remained.

Seattle's police department had found their refuge in the Conclave, and with them, they had brought the horses used for mounted beats.

Five of them survived until now, which had been more than anyone could say for the Seattle police. The department had split down the middle between supporting Zeon and the Federation. When the occupation had begun, the Seattle PD that had sought to maintain order had been right alongside the Zeonic occupiers. They were treated the same in the end.

Bo had been quick to get people, a full dozen of the Conclave. Some she knew faces, the rest had been strangers. All recognized her.

They had all dressed in some ways like her, utilitarian garb that had been inherited from bits and pieces of soldiers' gear or hiking equipment. Coats with many pockets, load-bearing vests from Federation combat kit, and of the like. Her poncho today had fluttered around her hiding her own adornments. She hadn't worn any combat armor since Zeon left, the walk to get Garma that night the exception, but for the more unsure, they did, the tell-tale solid shape of a plate seen beneath their jackets.

"Geoffy. Take Keaton and the cart. And Mai," Her real name isn't often heard around the Conclave, so some of the party today are confused until they realize who Bo is talking to. "Brando's comfortable with you, right?"

The grey-coated Tennessee Walker, a sight leaner than the rest of the Conclave's horses, had been it.

The horses had all been lined up in the back, Bo leading the group as she herself had her own poncho on, a baseball cap of the local Seattle national team still on it in a flash of marine color. One by one the horses, almost in unison, tracked their heads over the makeshift pens they were in all until they found the familiar face of whoever they had been most familiar with in that group.

Brando had found hers, black eyes staring down at her in quiet waiting.

Animals were the same everywhere in the Earth Sphere. The horses she had known on the Texas Colony were, by all means, the same as those down on Earth. Fickle, angry, murderous beasts, and yet subservient and well-meaning and useful all the same. She wasn't the type of girl who had enjoyed horses while she was young, but she appreciated them now, reaching up and patting Brando's thick neck along the side. He dipped his head, his mane braided by the Conclave's attendants to him drooping off to the side as the reins were already set to him.

She was about as good at riding a horse as she had been driving a car, which was not at all because the only vehicle she had ever driven before she came to Earth had been an APC, but like all things the war that came to Seattle beat her into form quick enough.

When Zeon pumped Minovsky Particles into Seattle for the greater part of the war, the fastest way messages were ever sent between cells had been from these same horses, navigating the ruined streets. On days when she wasn't fit for the fight, she put herself on these horses to coordinate.

Brando had been her partner for all of that.

Keaton, the large European stock horse, had been usually the one assigned to cart duty. The former paddy wagon of Seattle PD had turned into something a little more humane with how it was cut in half horizontally and opened up for transport of the more domestic sort.

Those who could ride a horse had settled in the back there, while those that didn't mind doubling up, did. Four horses had been out today for twelve people. As Mai had mounted Brando, the weight behind her and touching her back followed soon after.

"Hi." It was Bo, wrapping her arms around her midsection.

"Hm."

Half had rifles, Federation Colt rifles, that they kept close to themselves as the rest carried bags full of goods hidden in their flaps. It had been a scene out of any post-apocalyptic movie that Mai had seen out of the corner of her eye, but this was their normal.

With the reins in her hand, scabbard for a riot shotgun on Brando's saddle instead fitting her sniper rifle, she had started Brando out of his pen in a slow trot and the rest had followed up out into the light.

Brando had been a silent horse, barely regarding the sunlight as he did the various flies that pricked at him.

They left the Conclave quietly, the gates to the streets swung open as the Conclave looked on in their slow trot. It would've been a rather short ride on a horse, but Bo settled herself in as she laid her head on Mai's back, content.

"Why do you like me again, Bo?" Mai asked finally as they turned the first corner down Seattle's ruined streets. The horses had been well used to the debris.

"Well, whenever you do take a shower, you smell very nice, which isn't today." She hadn't taken a shower since Garma had come. Something about the idea of being totally naked in the same apartment with that man, dressed down, had been something she didn't enjoy thinking about. Not that she worried particularly about it, the feeling didn't sit well in her. "Also, you're cool, you're badass, and your voice is pretty."

"My voice is unique. Not pretty." On the husky side, pairing with the accent is that "unique" way. She had been homeschooled early on, and the lingua franca she learned had been from her parents and their tongue.

"Pretty to me." Bo admitted.

Mai sighed, the breath let go tired. "You shouldn't like me Bo. I ain't the type to like back."

"Let a girl dream, Mai, besides," She leans in and Mai is all too aware she's pressing into her back. "You're clearly not opposed to liking women if that's the issue."

"I don't like anyone."

Her type is simple. No strings attached. At least that what it was when she had a choice, and when she cared.

"Also you're gorgeous. I think." Bo is very easy to admonish her with compliments, but she supposes that it was simply the adorations of a young woman to peer. Bo had been far more normal despite the world around them, so perhaps Mai thinks, she shouldn't be as annoyed at her.

To calm her thoughts today as Bo holds onto her, she thinks simple: Like pushing Garma over on that stool next time they have breakfast and breaking his other arm. She wonders if he would cry.

Probably.

It fills her with a certain satisfaction to make him even more useless than he is now, but then again if he became anymore impotent she would be becoming a nursemaid in order to keep him alive.

"Liar." Mai says nothing to Bo's accusation as they get underway through the concrete jungle. To Bo's credit however, she might be due a shower.

On the way down, craters, fresh. Eleven days old at this point. Garma's Gaw had opened up the earth anew, and where one of the fractures had been was right on the site of 3 Pavilion.

The Pavilions were the Conclave's patrol centers and bases, settlements, and communities in their own right. 2 Pavilion had been a community built into a hardware store. 6 Pavilion was a school. On the site of 3 Pavilion, a grocery store. Looted empty early during the March landings, but by then there hadn't been much on the shelves anyway, the war in space had been affecting imports already.

All the glass, all the steel of it, gone to the crater sets of a random bombardment. Distantly Mai thinks about asking what exactly Garma was trying to do, but it doesn't matter as much as what had happened.

The Conclave goes quiet as Geneburn, a balding man, the Conclave's IT man now out of his profession without any I or T to work with, trots along closer to the craters as they pass. "It's like the fighting never ended."

He was one of those sent out the day after while Mai had been at the Gaw crash site itself, coming to this place, digging out the bodies and any useful surviving resources before burying the dead by Saint James, across the street from the Conclave. An ugly job, but a necessary one.

Mai can feel Bo shrink, so close to the site of death. As far as the Ghoul knows Bo had spent months within the confines of the Conclave as the world around her fell apart in war. She doesn't know the battlefields as they've come alive and died. She only knows the dead and dying that they produce.

Brando makes a wide path of the craters as he trots along, leading, the sound of the cart creaking along the only sound anyone makes as Mai, at least for the block, takes off her boonie hat in the respect she can give.

---

Port 46 had been the shipping repository for naval trade in Seattle before the war, underused, but used. It had been empty save for a handful of Conex containers when the war came, and when Zeon landed its wide and flat concrete lot provided itself a place for its main firebase in Seattle. That had been for about a month, and then Zeon learned the disadvantages of having its main firebase be directly out in the open, within range of Seattle's skyline.

For Mai, it had been her first true bout as the sniper she became on Earth, too familiar from Guardian Banchi. The script had flipped, and she had been batting for the other side. If she had any traitorous feelings once, they were gone now. Any injustice by the Federation was by far a minor thing for her when it came to Zeon.

Her bullets are still buried in the concrete below, and on that vast concrete lot, a flea market has been set up. Seattle was still an easy landmark for many survivors in Washington to rally to, and even though a vast majority of those that had come to the unimaginatively called "Dock Market" had been from out of town, they had been familiar, or even former locals to the city. It was here, between tents and umbrellas and fires made for collective warmth, that trade continued.

Several hundred people, most of them took the coastal route, by boats and rafts, as opposed to going through the city. Here, the idea that Human civilization would live on in the apocalypse was lived out.

There was a perception that the city had been filled with dangerous scavengers and a certain ghoulish sniper that kept most away from the land route, and for that Mai had, when that was recounted and she overheard, would scoff.

There was a proper parking lot and everything for horses and the like where the actual parking lot had once been, no longer fit for vehicles because of Zeon tanks and mobile suits overloading the surface, but fine enough for animals and the odd ATV or motorbike.

The frontier had returned to Seattle, and not a person there hadn't had a gun, like olden times of western fairytales.

This had been an organic event that coalesced every other Saturday, started up almost as soon as Zeon and the Federation had left.

The horses had been parked together in a clearing in the lot, several self-appointed guards leftover from those that had once worked those docks standing by, assuring security. They recognized her, as any who picked up a gun in that last year had tended to do.

It was funny how even in the complete breakdown of a society, order came about again.

Mai is the last to get off her horse as the Conclave congregate by her, looking down on them. "One hour," she says sternly. "Get what you need and we're out." The words come out like orders, and Bo grumbles in disapproval. Expediency however was a beneficial trait to have.

The members of the Conclave out today are young men and women well used to working fast. Most of them she recognizes as nurses and aides, knowing best what the Conclave needs along with Bo, their fingers on the literal pulses of the families and patients that remain.

"What're you gonna do, Mai?" Bo asks her as she slides off, slinging her own duffel bag over her shoulder, the jingling of syringes within.

"Small barters. Things like that." She said with as much weight as the wind itself, feeling her small pouch on her battle belt. Her full-on pack that she used for her scavenging escapades had been left at home. Nowadays she'd been more a hunter than a picker, but still, even she wandered into the city to pick from its bones when it rained. She kept smaller items in a zippered pouch along her back next to her IFAK, just in case of impromptu trading sessions like today.

Ignoring the rampant fact that everyone looked like they had fought a war, had weapons, and Seattle around them had been destroyed, this very much could've been a farmer's market as people shuffled amongst each other, moving from stall to stall with a trader, set up with curated pickings from the great city that once was in the foreground.

Those with something to sell yelled out their stock, and the crowds came to them to the chants of fuel for food, food for fuel, ammo for favors, and favors for information.

Several of the Conclave's congregation had gone to those scavengers who had perused the rest of Washington's hospitals and medical facilities, pulling out trinkets and baubles that were useless to the average person, but invaluable to those with training: Skin transilluminators, defibrillators, bloodsets and instruments. They traded for recreational drugs, synthesized and made up in spare time, sometimes grown from the Conclave's rooftop gardens. Washington had its fair share of, at least, marijuana cultivation, and it was no surprise that some of those that sought shelter in the Conclave still had some plants of their own.

For some of the Conclave, they offered quick medical advice, procedure, and second opinions to those that needed it in exchange for goods.

Mai was a little more material in her offerings. Her notoriety had followed her however as those who recognized her stepped out of her way, barkers selling goods holding back their voice as they saw the woman that had turned Seattle into her own foxtrot playground. The appearance of the rifle that did it, slung across her front, had only helped get that across as she did the equivalent of window shopping.

She wasn't a material person before the war, far too young herself to particularly have property that she could firmly say was her own. Any of the meager belongings that she did own after the Academy in her first apartment in Seattle were all blown away by the Zeon bombings. She was pragmatic, however, and everything she did own had its purpose, everything she held onto: an aim with its holding.

Each of the vendors and traders had been mostly of the same cloth: those that had made it a goal to clear out particular stores for any remaining goods and concentrating on that. For one trader it had been stocks of whatever he could pull out of a department store: nuts and bolts and tools hanging up on displays he too also pulled out of that place. Another had been in sporting goods, and ammunition. Some had peddled information and rumors (many times she's heard those survivors like her ask them if they knew if one of their loved ones survived). A good lot had been hunters or fishermen.

She looked, walking slowly until she had found the vendor she had half-remembered from the last time she came to the Dock Market on a whim. He was a rough-looking man of about forty whose clothing was patched together from what seemed like twenty different articles, a hat made out of a raccoon over his head like a hood. His face had been as tall and slender as the rest of him, a stick figure if not for the thick padding of his clothing. He sat in a lawn chair, his tent pulled out wide offering a shop like experience as he sat in the center, hands folded across his front leaning back, tied to his right wrist had been a dog's red collar, tag still bright on it. He had straightened his form however, seeing the Ghoul walk in.

"Jesus Christ, you're actually a woman." The raggedy man wasn't quite sure if he had regretted that outburst, but it was honest at least. "I didn't think you were real. Thought you might've been like one of them men who crossdressed to do hits on those zeeks."

She had heard the exact stories that the raggedy man had been referring to, but she shook her head. "Never had to hide who I am."

Up on the walls of his tent, held up by wooden posts, had been his wares: clothing. Seattle's malls had been quickly looted following the invasion, however, clothes had been some of the remaining stocks that remained almost a year later, especially clothing that had been meant for more domestic or novelty purposes. Field and sporting clothing had been fast to disappear due to their utility, but graphic tees and clothes meant to impress? They remained.

"I've got uh ladies goods in a box somewhere if-"

She shook her head, stopping him as she continued her browsing in that tent. She was the only customer at the moment. "Not needed."

"Ah. Right. Okay. Just well, let me know what you want and we'll see if we can work out a deal." Raggedy said, uncomfortably, but with nothing less to do he sat back down in his chair, eyes half-closed occasionally glancing her way. She doesn't take long to find the box she's looking for: socks.

A bundle of three caught her eye. Large. She hopes Gearten is a large. Wool socks in the absolute ugliest blue she's ever seen, but it's something as she presents the socks, plopping them down on a table by Raggedy.

"…Sure these your size?" He asks unsure, leaning over to grab a look at her feet but is cut off before he can.

"Ain't for me. What're you looking for trade?"

Down to business.

"Ah, ain't nothing in particular. What you got?" He spoke with an accent of a southerner. He wasn't local. Then again if someone had made the same judgment of her on the same basis she too would be judged as not a local. She never found out how long it would've taken her to become a part of Seattle, but in the end the simple answer was that she was now more local than most.

She unzipped the pouch at her back, feeling around, glancing at the man's gun as he shifted his form to sit straight. A nine-millimeter. Unfortunately, she had no spare rounds for nine on her. At some point everyone in Seattle had started to carry a gun. Where those guns had come from had been a topic as varied as the guns themselves: Some had been candid in their explanation, saying that they had taken them from fallen Zeon or Federation troops. Others had been taken off of Seattle PD armories.

"Rat poison?" She held up a small glass bottle first from her pouch.

He shook his head. "Nah. Where I sleep rats are welcome. They let me know if I got intruders."

"Screw driver?" He shook his head as the tool came out. Duct tape had been next, a small roll she had found half-used just on the ground. It piqued his interest but he had shook his head again. What came next: Plastic clamshell packaging that even with a military knife she hated breaking open: a twelve-pack of batteries.

He jolted up when he saw them. "Oh yeah I'll take that."

His enthusiasm was his give. She quickly glanced over at a pair of casual pants on one of the wooden posts, joggers. "Those medium?"

"Don't know. Probably." Raggedy had taken a peek at them himself, eager to get his hands on the batteries.

"Throw those in?"

"Sure." He agreed. "No one's wearing joggers nowadays anyway. Not like anyone's got a house to wear 'em in."

She could push her luck a little then now. "Yeah… And one last thing, how about that hoodie?" It catches her eye as it hangs off in the corner of his tent because it's absolutely stupid, grey, but on its front, a giant handlebar mustache underlining retro text: Seattle Beer Bros & Company.

Raggedy seemed self-amused that he owned it. "Got anything else?" She wasn't exactly happy that he was asking for more but that was bartering. She drew out an unbroken ziplock pack: Flossers, pack of ninety. She saw his teeth while talking.

"Oh, well, jeez if you needed to say I should brush my teeth just say so lady."

"You want it or not."

"Ah fine."

Joggers, socks, and a hoodie for a pack of batteries and flossers.

Raggedy had taken in a deep breath but before Mai had let it come out she had shaken her head sharply. "If you make me shake your hand with a fucking loogie in it I'm-"

"Alright, alright." He bit the mucus back down and instead just offered a dry shake, and that was enough for Mai.

"You from around here?" Mai had asked as she slid over the trade, Raggedy for his part folded up the clothes for her.

He shook his head. "Nah. Been here for about a month, month and a half, gaining my strength to make the trip up to Anchorage. I'm from South Carolina, actually. Out over on the east coast."

She had seen the overall tactical maps from the North American theater when the Federal forces had been in Seattle and the guerilla cell leaders had been asked to meet them. "Zeek territory, right?" She wanted to clarify.

He nodded. "Yessiree, under the proud control of one Garma Zabi… Or at least was, from what I hear." He spat on the ground at the mention of his name, and she wanted to do the same if she hadn't been buying clothes for him. "No good bastard."

She could agree with that.

The small talk continued as the market outside continued on its hour by hour. There was no particular high demand for clothes. Any that had lasted that long in people's usage had been meant for it, and those that hadn't already withered away. "How was the occupation over there?"

There was a long drawn-out sigh in him as he answered, his boots had been worn down to the barest of rubbers, their laces frayed; a testament to how far he'd come. "Ah, about the same. I was a factory worker. Worked in aerospace with the Anaheim-Boeing Terrestrial branch, putting together planes and such. They bombed about everything, including the cities, except for any lick of facilities. Then they came in, pig cops worked with their troops to maintain order. My district in particular had a nasty trend of Zeeks disappearing people."

"Yeah, was about the same up here." There was a period in time between Zeon landing and occupying Seattle and the full-blown guerilla war that destroyed the city where a semblance of a civilian life was had beneath the watchful eye of Spacenoids. Zeon had wanted life to go on, to continue for the benefit of itself, but people wouldn't ignore the mobile suits or the tanks that patrolled the streets enforcing martial law.

Raggedy continued in his drawl. "When they landed the Federation had mostly retreated down toward Mexico, so after, they sent some ugly mother of a commissar or whatever to take over the plant. They went and rounded up all the plant workers, brought us, and told us that we were to keep working as if half of Humanity hadn't just been wiped out." Raggedy had laughed, palming his face, shaking his head at the absurdity of it. "Ain't no way I was spending the end of days bolting on fuselage or repairing Zeek mobile suits. So, I hightailed it with my dog, god bless his soul."

"Going to Alaska though?" Mai asked. She hated the cold, and she wonders if hailing from the Middle East had something to do about that.

The man nodded, flipping out his leather wallet, a flash of a picture, two men, one of them him, standing arm to arm in front of a larger family. "My brother's a crab fisherman so, well, I been making my way the last few months up there to see if he's doing any better. It's not like I can get in a call or nothin', and I heard the war ain't so bad up there."

"Some journey."

A stray dog passed in front of the tent, sniffing meekly, its ribs imprinted out through its skin. Mai had some jerky left in her pocket from breakfast she would chew on throughout the day, but when she looked for the dog it had already gone.

"Been dodging frontlines and battles all way across these once proud United States, I tell you. I hear the war's winding down so, uh, I figure I keep up tight here in quiet Seattle till we get the all-clear." Raggedy sounded proud of the fact of his own little road trip across North America, and lighter still with that amazing thought: The war had almost been over.

"You know that this is technically Zeon territory, right?" Mai had tilted her head at him.

He nodded still, but didn't agree. "Heard it all over. Apparently, Zeon owns everything past the Mississippi River to the east, and everything west of the Rockies, but that ain't true one bit. I see more and more people, like, I dunno, us, roaming America. I mean I guess them Zekes own it on paper, but they don't got manpower to enforce it."

A failure of the Academy in some ways. Her teachings and curriculum, the very same she shared with Garma, had been coursework that had been trimmed and combed by the Federation to make sure none could be easily applied to a global, planetary effort. They were lessons that hailed from history, dealing with modern, conventional warfare on at most a national scale. Whispers and rumors that the Federation, in conflict with the Sides, would send Spacenoids to fight fellow Spacenoids, had made sense on why many hypotheticals had dealt with what it was going to be like to invade a colony cylinder.

But fighting on Earth, the whole Earth, had been a breadth of fighting her generation of officers, no doubt a sizable majority were wholly unprepared for to fight.

For example: She never learned how to fight against someone like herself outside of just carpet bombing the estimated area of operations. So that's what Zeon naturally did to Seattle, to Detroit, to New York City, to Tokyo, to London, to Mumbai, to Dakar, to Mecca and Jerusalem and every single city where people like her had not fought rank and file but in the shadows and corners of the world.

She was taught to fight an equal enemy, not one who had been so far backed up against the wall they could melt into it and reappear, disappear, when most advantageous.

In another life, she was one of those Zeon officers that would've had to fight against guerillas such as herself.

She's not sure if she preferred that one over the one she lived.

"Been here for not that long, but even I know of you." Raggedy went on, settling back into his chair. "But if it's any consolation, every city, region, got someone like you, and for the Zekes, that ain't a good thing."

"How you know about me anyway?" The Ghoul had her reputation, even to the uninitiated.

He shrugged. "I asked about who drove the Zeeks out when I first came in town, and a good amount of them said you: this wraith of a woman wielding a giant sniper rifle, who ate Spacenoids alive, even though she was one. They tell me that they killed your kid. Awfully sorry if that's true."

Mai stayed silent as she heard her tale told, again and again, dipping her boonie hat down. "Is what it is." The clothes, folded and ready for her to pick up had been on the table, and she was ready to move on. "When you get out of here, take the Evergreen bridge. Everything north of Lake Union got peppered with Federation cluster bombs. That entire area is just lousy with unexploded bad news."

"Duly noted." Raggedy nodded thankfully. "Suppose Zeon's got a small point about the Federation littering the Earth."

The Spacenoid in her had always agreed with that point, but the Human being inside of her repulsed at it. She had almost gotten her hand on the bundle when piercing through the air: a scream.

A very familiar scream.

Bo Tale.

On instinct alone, she had pulled the safety lock on her sniper rifle to a ready. "I'll be back for this." She didn't stay long enough for Raggedy to respond about keeping her clothes as she dashed out into the crowd. A scream was not an unfamiliar sound in Seattle nowadays, but here, in the relatively safe Dock Market, it meant something else, and those crowds had known it. Their faces had pointed the direction Mai had to go as she slid through the crowd to the very end where the vendors and traders specializing in mechanics and vehicles had often set up. In the middle of the throughway made by the market had been a running jeep, Federation military standard, its headlight shining out to a crowd walled off by danger alone. She had made and pushed her way out to the front of the crowd and found her fears realized.

A gruff man, nearly Dozle's size as she remembered the other Zabi, had held Bo Tale by her hair, dragging her back against the concrete, shreds of her jacket left behind until it got through to her skin until she was brought before the vehicle's hood and brought up, slammed against it, leaned over. The large man had taken his hand had taken advantage of Bo's position, grabbing her rear end once roughly. The guttural protest from Bo had only started to come out of her mouth before a boot from a man standing on a hood had pushed the breath out in a pathetic wheeze of pain.

"If ain't none of you are gonna fess up-!" His voice was hoarse, furious like a drunk's without the insobriety. His lower half had been Federation standard: beige combat pants with black boots, but his top had been a black and white tracksuit that had seen its fair share of the war. Wearing it: a Caucasian man, face wild and taut as dots from freckles mixed in with that of dirt, the sweat from his curly hair sliding down his young features. Off his belt, an unusual implement: ivory and long, like a sword in is sheath, a white cone that might've otherwise been mistaken as an umbrella. She's seen this, once or twice, off the hip of those mobile suit pilots that had been high value targets, and hadn't been smart enough to sleep inside of their suits when in Seattle. "We're gonna keep blasting bitches left and right 'till we get to the right one!"

Around the running car, his entourage could've been mistaken for Federation troops with the gear they wore, but all of them had shared the telltale sign of the white armband with the black crescent moon on them, a scythe by an other measure.

Gearten had been right to worry: Elliot Murphy and his gang had returned to Seattle, and here he had been standing on a hood of a jeep, corralling the crowds like he used to do.

He took in another breath, the air around him audibly being sucked in as he had brought his boot back to where Bo's head had been and dipped the toe of it beneath it, only to rip up and send her flying back to the ground. Before she had scrambled away however, she had frozen.

Murph had drawn the long object on his hip like a fencing sword with all the pomp and power of what it brought. Federation intelligence from the Manhunters had called them Flash Rifles, issued only to Zeon elites or aces. Zeon's first try at beam weaponry. Lightweight, and a dead ringer to kill for any who had them. It had pointed right down on Bo as she laid, eyes wide with the very real fear of death. "Four of my brothers ended up dead! And someone had to do the shooting!"

The thought that she was going to shoot Garma the second she got back to her apartment for this trouble he had caused rose hot in her, but first things first.

"Mai!" She heard to her back Geneburn, "We gotta do something!"

"Yeah no shit." She whispered harshly back. "Go ride out to 6 Pavilion. Get the entire patrol out."

Geneburn had been gone before she had even looked to the man. A horse at full speed? Five minutes at least. When she glanced back she had seen a few from the Conclave's group look on scared, but raring to go, as those true bystanders, she damned them all for keeping their heads down.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

"God dammit Murph!" Mai screamed out from the front, stepping forward, arms out from the crowd as she approached Bo on the ground. The two retaining laces of her boonie hat had been tied together, the hat snapped off of her head by an accustomed jerk, sending it to rest on her back. "The fuck are you doing?!"

The heat that came from her heart seeped out from her skin in that rage that came only from the fight, but with it, her senses heightened. She could feel it in the air: a risk of rain, and a chance of war again.

Murph's enforcer type, the large bastard, she knew. Silent grunt named Kell. He had looked down on her as she approached and had been ready to thrash, to fight. So had she been. The knife attached to the back of her battle belt burned ready but before either had squared up, Bo had been between them. Mai knelt down, taking her arms, hauling her up. "You can walk, girl. Go."

"Mai…"

"Go!"

Bo had been pushed along by Mai's words back into the crowd, the Conclave group waiting for her as Mai stood now alone in that empty space in front of the jeep before a man who had been her insurgent equal.

"Well. How you doing Ghoul?" Murph had said it like some Zeons did: with scorn. "Been busy? Don't got kids to go back to? Fucking Spacenoid bitch." The white weapon at his hip was levied down at her now, but it was no matter. Not the first gun ever. "Surprised you didn't have any to spare seeing as how much you liked taking it downtown!"

She had heard worst from people who hadn't known her, and it was once true strictly speaking. She was a wild woman in one direction or another, and it had been because of pain. Her mouth had been kept shut, even as she grinded her molars together.

Wordlessly, Murph, two hands, two fingers each, had spread across the entire Dock Market before him, and his Reaper Lords affirmed as they walked off into the crowd, guns pointed at all as they came to stall to stall, tent to tent, and started breaking them down by boot and by smash. Nary a protest, nary a word said as goods were taken and livelihoods taken.

"I leave for a few months and suddenly we suddenly go all Mad Max and shit! By God, have some respect for yourselves people!" Murph chastised. Mai could hear Bo, wracked with tears, with a cry, trying to keep herself together from what she had just been through. The crowd had been that silent as the purr of the Federation jeep went on, Murph looking right down on her again as she stood her ground before Kell and Murph, fists curled. "As I said, a few of my people ended up dead, and someone's gotta pay. Just because Zeon ain't around anymore doesn't mean that rule's changed. We're cleaning up!"

"Your people end up dead up here all the time because of their own shit, Murph." He jumped down off the hood as Mai spoke back. Equal height with her, hands run rough by knife cuts down his palm. Each and every one of his trusted enforcers was blood brothers with him. Kell's hands were similarly cut up.

He smelled like the rust, the cancer of Tacoma's putrid, industrial air as he approached her, barely feet away. "You know it looks like they were shot, right in the back. Sounds like something the Ghoul would do."

It was what she did, but she was in no hurry to let them know that.

The pistol he held had been a pistol that had come off one of his guerilla cell's kills: A Zeon mobile suit captain. It was a well-planned ambush, she had to give Murph and Torald that: blowing up a part of Seattle's sewer system to suck in an entire company of Zakus into the storm drains before driving a semi-truck full of high explosive right on top of them. They dragged the captain out from his cockpit and then flayed him alive.

Excessive, to Mai personally, but the sentiment was something she shared.

That pistol had now been held at Murph's hit, aimed right into her stomach.

"I only kill Spacenoids. You know this. You know why." Mai grit through her teeth.

Murph recoiled. "Why you lying? I've seen you shoot those collaborator cops."

"You really want to argue semantics right now, Murph?"

"Not really, Ghoul." The hand not moving his pistol had shifted to his pocket. "Rather do this."

She might've been a sniper, but she knew how to move, especially in the case of return fire. That's why she had been fast enough to jerk back before the silver combat knife that ripped out of Murph's pocket to not find purchase in her neck, but reflexively she had raised her left hand, and instead, the blade found her palm: All the way through. If there was a sound she could make it was trapped in her throat as all the adrenaline that had been left over from the war surged through her at once. Murph had pushed forward, trying to overtake her as he pressed the blade all the way through, but she bit her heels into the ground as instead she twisted him away, the knife leaving. No pain save for the initial sharp tug, but she knew why as the fight surged through her.

She didn't have time to see the damage as she whipped her rifle up, but there hadn't been enough room to use it as intended. It was still a solid chunk of metal and wood however, it brought up in time to bar across her chest with Murph as he pressed again, knife coming up and then down, only for the arm that had been swinging to be caught with her rifle.

Murph had always been one for the knife and blade; shanking had been his calling card as a gangbanger before the war amongst his gang and it remained now.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw several of the armed Conclave members try to push through, but already they had been held back by gunpoint as the crowds of the Dock Market looked on in morbid fascination.

Angling her rifle Murph's arm slipped away, his momentum forcing him to expose his back to Mai as she brought her elbow down on it, her leg beneath sweeping causing Murph to fall face first onto the floor. With the way she was holding her rifle all she could do was raise it up above, stock first, and slam it into the back of his skull.

She could've had it not been for the hand seizing her rifle, taking her with it as the sling around her dragged.

Kell was there behind her, and then in front of her as he seized her, throwing her into a rough collision with the front of the jeep.

"God damn!" Murph had yelled out almost in triumph from the ground, raising to his feet and readjusting the arm he landed on, pistol in hand. "Ghoul I always wondered what it was going to be like when we put you down."

She went to grip her rifle even as she had been crumpled against the jeep, but her left hand had been too wet, she couldn't see any of her skin beneath the blood from her, and the rifle slid out of her palms as Murph came up right in front of her, knife at the ready, Kell over his shoulder.

"Was it you? Come on, tell me. Even we used to share information back when we were fighting Zekes."

"You ain't worth my ammo!" She spat through her teeth.

"Same. Why do you think I'll be using this for you?" The silver blade had been dulled by not only her fresh blood, but the blood of dozens that had come before.

So this was it: she was going to die in this whirlwind appearance of a man who had gotten too used to waging war in the daylight.

She didn't want her last thoughts to be of Garma, but she had to imagine what he would do without her.

A gunshot, rang out: to the sky above. Nine millimeter. Murph had jerked, looking down at his chest to make sure that he hadn't gone out the way he had very audibly bellyached about going out: shot in the back.

Not this time, as he turned around, and even Mai herself had been surprised.

"Don't do it!" A southern voice. Raggedy. His pistol had been out as he burst through the crowd, ignoring even the Reaper Lords that had been keeping them back. "What in sam hill are you doing?!"

Even as he turned Murph pressed the blade to Mai's neck, making sure she didn't move as he addressed the interloper. "Who the hell are you country boy?"

Throughout the Dock Market the sound of chaos rang through still as stalls kept being broken down by the terrorizing gang members. Even Zeon hadn't been as overtly zealous.

Raggedy didn't answer, but he held his gun onto Murph. "There ain't no need for us to be fighting!" He cried out. "Please. The war's almost done! And we can go back to normal. Ain't none of this shit."

"Normal?! The fuck is normal? This year has been the most normal it's been to people like us!" Those that took up the gang lifestyle, those that had been forced into any metropolitan city's underbelly. "This year hasn't lied to us one bit, because all the fighting, all the having to crawl through the shit and the scum of this city, that was our every day, and everyone had to know it!"

"Well. I'm real sorry to hear that." Raggedy went on, his gun drooping down ever so slightly. "But what does killing her have to do with any of that?"

Mai felt the knife press just a little harder into her throat. If he had moved it laterally at all, that would've been it for her. She didn't even trust herself to go for her pistol.

"I keep hearing this story about how it was this bitch who drove Zeon out of Seattle! It even got down to Tacoma where we had been. I was insulted! How could this Spacenoid trash be responsible for repelling Spacenoids themselves? Does that make sense to you, sir?" Raggedy had been quiet as Murph went on, the knife unmoving as Mai breathed beneath it. "One woman with an old ass musket didn't do shit! We did! And when this war's over, the Federation is gonna recognize me, and my people, for what they are finally!"

"You don't sound any better than any Spacenoid. I tell you that. Let her go. She seems like a fine woman, besides."

"Don't…" She finally eeked out in a whisper. Why and for what, she didn't know. But it fell on deaf ears for Murph.

"I disagree. She's a god damned monster." The Flash Rifle on his hip had been drawn again and before Raggedy could raise his gun proper, Murph had fired true into Raggedy's head in one shot. There was no splatter from the energy weapon, going through his head and into the crowd behind him as a bystander caught and absorbing the beam. Before his body had fallen Mai jerked herself as the recoil bucked the knife off of her, onto the concrete. The crowd finally screamed in terror as Murph stood over Mai again, unable to back pedal. "Will you stay-"

A burst of heavy gunfire erupted from the crowd up into the sky again, Reaper Lords pushing through and away back to the jeep as the crowd opened up to a group of heavily armed locals.

6 Pavilion's captain had been a Swedish woman, her forties filled with fishing and, as Zeon had decreed on all those opposed to it, fighting. Stocky, and the elder of most, Tammy had come with great knowledge with a light machine gun and was uniquely situated to fight along the coast. She and her fishermen had been the closest Seattle's guerillas had to Marines, and they reemerged now on the Dock Market, half on horses, the other on the ground. Tammy herself, ammo belt draped around her shoulders had broken through the crowd just in time to see Raggedy's body twitch, hole in his head.

"Back off! Leave the Captain alone!" Her machine gun had been smoking from the prior warning shot, the loudness and shock of it forcing bystanders to get down as the rest of 6 Pavillion's patrol team forced Reaper Lords back toward the jeep. She arrived with her squad of a dozen volunteers from 6 Pavilion, not too far away, but too far away to make it count for Raggedy or Mai's hand.

Federation gun pointed at Federation gun, and the old conflict of what happened when arming guerilla groups had reared its head on Seattle's Market Port as 6 Pavillion's members went gun to gun with the Reaper Lords.

"Murph. Get the fuck outta here. You're not wanted!" Tammy said in her cigarette-made voice. Mai had backpedaled finally to Tammy's feet, with one hand the strong woman getting her to her feet. The bandana which she had worn on her head, blazing blue, was immediately taken off as soon as she had seen Mai's bleeding left hand, offered as Mai wrapped it immediately. With one hand it had been difficult, but Bo, appearing out of safety, returned to Mai's side even as tears and worry ran down her face, treating and wrapping Mai's hand as fast as she could.

Mai had seen through her hand, and she didn't want to again as finally, her pistol was in her non-dominant hand, joining the Conclave-allied force there.

Murph and his goons had seen that this wasn't a fight they could take. They were guerillas too. The playbook was the same as he shook his head disappointedly. "You fucking people. You fucking rats. We'll be back, and we'll remind you who Seattle belongs to."

The Federation jeep had roared to life as the Reaper Lords piled back in, waving their guns back at those that came to meet them, but sooner rather than later, they sped off, tires burning.

"I'm sorry, Mai, they just appeared so fast and they just grabbed-"

"Don't worry." Mai grit through her teeth again as Bo tied the bandana tight, Tammy going to kneel besides Raggedy's body.

"Why the fuck didn't anyone do anything?!" Geneburn yelled out around him to those bystanders, more concerned with the destroyed shops and items. "We outnumbered him thirty to one! Why?!"

It was a feeling Mai knew deeply, those first days after the invasion, as more and more she saw regular people just come to accept Zeon as their rulers. Every person who didn't resist with them just meant a greater load on those who did fight. Soon enough, every fighter was doing the work of a hundred men, and still, they fought on.

Raggedy's body drained itself of life on the ground below, her own blood joining his as the bystander that took his continuing bullet sat down, a Conclave member attending to him.

"Howe Macdonwald." Tammy said, pulling that same wallet out and reading his name. "Poor bastard."

He had a brother in Anchorage.

Rising in her, the old role, blood seeping through Tammy's bandana as her fist rolled in itself, Mai screamed. "Alright! Everyone who needs their shit fixed, we're going to the Conclave! Everyone who's thinking this shit's gonna get dicey real fast, go over with Tammy here to the Conclave's patrol station! Best not to stick around here!" Unconsciously those there in the Dock Market who had fought with her during the war, either directly or from down the wire, affirmed aloud, the crowds silently going as they were told to pick up back the pieces.

The voice of the Ghoul rang out again, and it felt, in the direst interpretation, that war was coming again.

Before they returned to their horses, Mai returned to Ragedy's, Howe's, tent. It had been broken down by the Reaper Lords, as did many others in that row, however in its mess remained her stack of clothes. "What's that?" Bo had asked, still shaken. It felt wrong to have taken anymore of Howe's bounty, even if he were dead, so she didn't entertain it as she took what was hers and left it behind.

"Nothing." She answered. It wasn't nothing.

---

Triage had been set up the same as it always had been during the war in the lobby of the Conclave. In their breakdown of the market, the Reaper Lords had roughed up those that resisted, and a dozen had come with group that had gone out originally seeking aid, Mai included. Broken bones needed to be set, cuts put back together, and in one case, a pair of dentures from broken teeth.

"You can keep this." Tammy had shaken Mai's shoulder as she bit down on her knife's scabbard, sitting on a chair as Dr. Candy worked over her hand with a needle and medical thread, looking into the very body of her hand with a table mounted magnifier. Mai had always liked Tammy if just because she was a reliable squad leader, and now even more for saving her ass. For now she had done the service of accompanying Mai and the wider group back to the Conclave. More likely than not there was something to discuss with the "command" element of the Conclave and her Pavilions. For now however was aid being applied.

"Stitches for you too, hm?" The older man teased as Mai grunted, the barest of painkillers through her system. The last thing she wanted was to think about Garma.

She had full use of her fingers still, thankfully, but the blade still nicked a nerve and she felt the fingertips of her middle and index finger go numb. Dr. Candy was doing his best as he put back together her hand, realigning nerve and tendon as nurses around him dealt with the rest.

Howe's body had been brought back for final services as well, but she couldn't bare to look at his body. Every death felt like her fault, and she didn't need more of the shame today as her skin was tied back together.

The church across the street still had lots open, hopefully.

She knew at least one still open.

Gearten's heavy footsteps were familiar to her, pulling up a chair to their table in the lobby as he patiently waited for Dr. Candy to finish up his procedure. The good doctor never liked talking about the state of affairs in the city, and Gearten knew it. He wouldn't bother the man in that way as instead Gearten and Mai talked in the language of eyes.

She was disappointed, and he was questioning.

"I recommend resting for a few days. No scavenging. No hunting. No fighting." Dr. Candy held onto Mai's shoulder as he stood up. "You know what meds you should take."

It wasn't her first time being operated on. It wasn't the first time someone's needed to put her back together or to pick a bullet out of her. She nodded, but Candy stayed there, bearing into her eyes to make sure that this point was made: Take care of yourself.

She would try.

Candy had left to attend to the other casualties today, leaving Mai and Gearten alone. Gearten, eyes drawn the blood stain across the front of her rifle, had a thousand questions to ask, but in the end, none would matter. "You did what you had to?" Gearten had a canteen, metal, no more the size of a large belt buckle, offering it to her. She knew what it was as it burned down her throat in its burning taste. It was moonshine. Gearten had brought an increasingly dwindling supply down from his home when he first came down to Seattle for treatment.

She nodded. "Didn't have much choice or else she was gonna get her brains blown out." Very rarely did one of the Conclave's own nurses end up being treated, but so was Bo, long bleeding avulsions along her back from being dragged on the concrete open and being patted down with wipes and pads. "Maybe she should carry a gun."

Gearten didn't sound too pleased with that suggestion, but he had relented as Mai stared long and hard at the deep and long line now dead center laterally of her palm, tied up straight with biogel and stitches. It had been deeply sore, deeply painful, but at least she could still use it. At least she still had all of her fingers…

"Heard the story from the rest. But, basically…?" Gearten waited for her to fill in the blanks, and she did.

Passing back his canteen to him, his socks too had come as well, and he had given a quiet thanks for them as she said the story straight: "Yeah. Looks like Murph is out of his hole again. All that shit about the war coming to a close soon means that the rule of law is coming back, I imagine he wants to angle so that the Feds talk to him and not anyone else about reorganizing Seattle."

"Hm."

"Hm." They both grunted in unison, and in agreement. Men and women groaned in pain around them, and more would follow, no doubt.

"It's not our problem, what he wants to do to Seattle, but we're here for a little while longer." Gearten looked around the room, seeing once again the pain shake through those that remained.

"You were gonna ask me something unfortunate earlier, Gearten." Mai spoke up.

"Aye. I was." Gearten had taken a second to respond to that.

She rolled her head, trying to feel something, anything out of her numb fingers. Maybe bad news would help. "Bad shit keeps coming today, so just lay it on."

Gearten steeled himself with a breath from his breathing machine, but when it came out, it came out strongly, as he had often during the war.

"I'm not saying this'll happen, but if push comes to shove, I'm gonna ask that we mobilize like we did. Zone out the city. Territory control. I want you out there with us."

She doesn't like the request immediately, spitting out some more painful spit in her mouth to the ground. "You know why I went to war against Zeon, Gearten. Going to war against some gangsters ain't for me."

"Captain-"

"I'm not your damned captain, and we're not soldiers." She snapped.

Gearten could only snap back. "…Jesus Christ, woman. I'm not asking you to wage a war again, I'm just asking you if you'd help us make sure we're all safe until we leave. Then you can have this entire damned city to yourself."

One day she's going to be alone again. The Conclave will go to safer pastures, the innocent will remove themselves from this graveyard. Someday soon, Garma Zabi will be dead and she would've taken the closest thing to revenge against the world.

Someday soon she'll get what she want, but it's not today.

She doesn't say anything as Gearten looks at her and expects a response, but she gives him nothing as she tightens her gloves over her stitched-up hand, puts her boonie hat on square on her head, and walks away and out into Seattle like the ghost she wishes she was.

Someone had asked her once to go to war for the greater good. She wouldn't make that mistake again. Especially not as she returns to the person that she had sworn to the first time.

---

She returns home to someone now, and as is the recommended routine, he is in the bath by the time she enters her apartment. The slosh of water gives it away, and she steps in before depositing her gear and load for the day. He seems so relaxed that it makes her sick, but it was what the doctor ordered.

There is something new however, her keen eyes catch as she makes her way to the bathroom to check on Garma: The trays that they used for breakfast are by the sink, gleaming. Clean.

She thinks nothing of it as she's in the doorway to the bathroom.

Garma knows she's there, even as his eyes are closed, head resting against the lip of the tub as his body is floating in a bath that's 90% water and 10% a special chemical solution to help him heal out, as recommended by Dr. Candy. It tinges the water a slight caramel color, but he's not adding any red to it at least. She stands there, looking at him, her gaze very much felt as finally, he opened up one eye, tilting her head toward her. "Hello." He says, expecting more from her as she stares at him with that undefinable look on her face. He calls it compromise.

"Hm." Annoyed as she is to see him, she makes that noise to acknowledge as she moves her eyes over to her standing shower beside the bath. "I'm taking a shower."

The glass is frosted if decency was what she was worried about, but even that worry is not a concern for her. Her misgiving is about letting her guard down, just for one second.

Stubborn as she is from both directions, she finally makes the decision, leaning on that door frame, that she was going to shower with a gun.

With his right hand he offers clearly the unoccupied shower, but she disappears into the apartment only to return with a fresh set of clothes for herself and a towel.

The cubicle of the shower is closed, and soon after her worn clothes are tossed up to the top, hanging on the lip of the glass box out of water's way. Even through the distorted glass Garma can see the dark shape of her battle belt, and thus her pistol, on her hip.

He can make out a lot more but he doesn't dwell on it.

This was not anything uncommon for either of them. Even in the Academy, an amount of communal bathing was the norm. The base of their experience together, of the Academy, is perhaps a base sturdier than most, and far more than what she thinks he deserves. The stream of the shower starts, the hiss of it filling in the air as she cleans herself down with water alone. The black mass of her hair curtains down to her shoulders, curly, perhaps one of the few times that she had let her hair down literally as Garma observed. Even when sleeping she had kept it in a ponytail.

As the water careens down her skin, she revels in it. It is enjoyable, being momentarily clean from the world, and a far cry from the weeks she had gone without any sort of cleanliness, trudging about in the underground sewers or the dusty surface. Back then cleanliness was from sweat and rain alone. Her left hand runs down with water, and her fingertips remain numb. At least it is clean, she confides in herself.

The shower she takes now is her lethargy, and some nights in more ways than one given a detachable shower head. Complete satisfaction however was blocked off, given that she shared the bathroom currently.

She's not sure what vague profile of herself she would surrender to Garma as a consequence of this arrangement, so she settles for her back, turned away from the man.

She needn't worry however, not as Garma is head back, looking up at the ceiling instead, trying hard not to think about the last time he shared a bathroom with a woman. Icelina had been quite a tease all day, trying to distract him for the goings-on of the war and his duties, and by the time he had retired and decided to follow up with her, the door to her bathroom had been left open, steaming, and for the sake of those who had still remained in the house at late, closed shortly after.

It was perhaps a peculiarity that they had never made love in an actual bed; but then again getting away with carnality in every place but the bedroom had a certain thrill that reminded them of how people their age were supposed to act.

"You did the dishes?" Garma startles a moment as Mai's voice cuts through the water.

"Yes," he nods to her through the glass, but her head is turned away from him. "Yes, I did."

"Hm." Is all the sound that she follows with as they bathe and shower together.

---

By the time she's done, he is done soaking, so he drains the tub and waits. As loathe as he is to rely on her like this, naked in an empty tub, it is for the best as she gets ready for this particular routine of theirs. This time however he is tossed underwear from her, more Federation briefs, before she picks him up and deposits him on the floor of their bedroom, the rug and towel working together to dry him off.

On the bed however is another set of clothes. For him?

She pats down his body dry, but more and more she cedes that duty to him especially as it concerns his lower half and stump. It's a comfortable, unsaid responsibility handed off after the first few days after the surgery where any movement had felt like it was going to destroy him.

After that however, he lays back, onto the ground, and she starts with his stump, a special medical cream as prescribe by Candy spread into her right hand.

He notices every detail he can about her, for his own sake, and this time instead of using both of her palms, it's only one, and when he noticed, he notices the stretch of stitching that mirrors itself on both sides of her left hand.

"What happened?" He asks it before he wonders if its smart to ask at all.

She pauses, white cream already in her right hand being spread, flexing her fingers through it. "You Zekes aren't the only bastards around." The wound and stitching were terribly fresh, but before Garma can ask any further her right hand is on him, running over the fold on his stump before tracing the line of burn tissue and scars that make up the right side of his body. The slow slick of the cream being spread on flesh was an uncomfortable sound at first, and its still uncomfortable now. Painting his body white, filling in where fire has turned him raw, Mai wonders why she even bothers doing this at all, but it was on principle alone that she try to heal, before she try to take rip it all down. A recursive logic, yes, but she only hopes that tearing this all away from him as he dies will feel so much sweeter to him.

It takes several minutes to fully coat all of his scars evenly with the cream. The last is always his face, her palm rubbing, perhaps a little roughly, over the skin of his features, near his faded eye, her fingers threading beneath the ruined hair that has become bangs for him. She has no nail clipper, so she bites her nails to keep them short, and Garma feels every edge of them against his face when she nears skin that still has feeling.

Her treatment is unkind, but he knows to not expect anything else.

Still he worries, about her stitched hand.

"Earthnoids will always find a war to fight, you see. It's in their nature. Is that what is happening?" Her hand pauses, almost cupping his cheek, her face twisting in an internal battle of whether or not to elaborate more or not, but she does not give. "I have observed such things for almost a year now. I am not unfamiliar." He sounds comfortable. Speaking to her. Too comfortable. Too used to her. Too used to the idea that even if he will die, he's going to wake up and be taken care of like this. That's what she infers, that's what she feels.

The fingertips on her left hand prickle to life slowly.

The dressing and bandages come out as she finishes with the cream, and the process starts again from the leg up. Before that however.

"Garma, can I ask you something." She touches him, the skin on his thigh is warm beneath her freshly washed fingers.

"You may." He maneuvers his nub to help the process.

She doesn't know she needed his permission, but it's ingrained in her still. "Do you really understand that I am going to kill you? That I'm not just saying this." She says to the man she is bandaging. He is silent as she rolls over the beige strips over his leg, pressuring down on stitches and their healing ointment. His face is contemplative, looking down upon the nub and the wound, and only when she gets to wrapping around his head again does he answer.

"I very much understand that you have taken this duty upon yourself, Mai Gul."

He says it as if congratulating her. He says it as if it were those same orders from the Academy, all those years ago. Surely, they must've spoken more. Surely, they might've bumped into each other in the halls, or she had passed him a new magazine full of paintballs during their force-on-force training, or he had ordered her around during those same exercises. He says it as if this was normal. "No. Say it."

"…Hm?" He looks up at her. Both of his eyes still move in unison, despite the fact he is now, as he has accepted, blind in one.

"Say that I'm going to kill you." She stops wrapping the bandage as it rounds the back of his head, and it falls upon him like a wreath over his shoulders as instead that stitched-up hand of hers grabs the roots of his hair at the very base of his skull. A flair of panic shoots through him as she stares, green eyes burning, right back. His jaw clenches, and he feels the pinching pain, the pressure, of her fingers digging deep and then pulling.

"I- I already understand-!" She tugs harder with each word that isn't what she wanted, and with more she tugs, the further she leans into him, face contorting, further and further, nostrils flaring.

This felt good to her, to see his face so close and twist in what was pain of his own choosing.

"No you don't. Not until I hear it from you. Say it." She grits through her teeth.

He's leaning back now as she moves further, closer and closer. They're almost chest to chest as she drags his head back further and further, and she angles her nails, deeper and deeper.

"Why-? Mai-" He gasps, his hands don't know what to do so they scatter along the floor besides him until his right, what fingers remain reach up to the side of his head and grab her wrist. He cannot, even if his life depended on it, take her off of him. "Mai." He says her name. He doesn't beg her to stop. He says her name. "Mai!"

The pain is there, and she is glad that the muting burns have not creeped up his spine.

She sees the tears of strain and pain pool as he winces further, and further, something less than a scream trying to squeeze out of his neck. His neck is so pale, half of it burnt raw and the other so nice and pliant. With how she pulls back, his neck is offered to her and the ricochet thought of wanting to sink her teeth into his flesh is there and gone as he is at the precipice of screaming and she reminds him of how to get out of this:

"Say it."

He does. "You are going to kill me!" The pressure is let go, and her hand lets go of the back of his head, his right hand releasing its hold from her wrist. "Mai Gul, you are going to kill me, Garma Zabi. This I understand." She releases, and his back hits the floor, and in her grasp, she has straddled him once again, a mania, very clear, in her eyes even in the candlelit dark of her apartment. "Please. Mai."

She too was holding a breath, and so they stay there, breathing heavily together until she nods to herself. Minutes pass, heavy silence. Garma knows now, and her fears are settled that he doesn't understand. Raising herself off of him he is frozen, like a doll, unsure if he was to move of his own accord, and Mai is quite fine with that as the bandage roll which has rolled away is back in her hand. Garma is dragged by those very same hands back to a sit, and the bandaging continues as if what had transpired was a false memory, she sitting behind him.

Even as her hands roam his back to heal him, even as she handles his body without him being able to see, he dares this: "I'm not scared of you."

She stops, palms open against his back and the ruinous designs that make up his scars. "I don't care."

What he says next does however make her reconsider.

"I don't hate you. We're kindred Spacenoids, after all." He says softly, and her palms do not move. "You've never been my enemy."

Mobile suits bearing the emblem of the Principality of Zeon walk the Earth, giants in his name crushing the innocent and the world they came here to save. She sees in her memories of a war men and women who would've lived their best lives cut down by gunfire from Zeon soldiers who knew not what they did, but paid for it in the end. She sees a metropolitan city of over a million degrade and rot beneath a conflict from the stars as several billion deaths wash over the world in false righteousness that she has dedicated the rest of her life to ripping out at the very root, and, if not that, just killing any who claim themselves saviors of Mankind. The greatest war in all history wages in his name, and every tragedy is his to answer for.

He killed her child.

He does not hate her, and so something inside of her shatters. But before it cracks down and litters the void inside of her with bleeding sharp edges, she turns her sorrow into anger, and those cracks melt into stronger bonds that keep her alive.

She leans in, her forehead laying upon the bump of his vertebrae at the base of his neck as her hands dig into his back. If he is pained by it, he keeps it in.

And they stay like that until the moon is full over Seattle, Time moving forward, never stopping.

They skip dinner. She doesn't care to give him his new clothes tonight, so he goes to sleep in only his underwear, but he doesn't mind. Interacting with her exhausts him anyway, and vice versa.

She finishes his dressing and she puts him to bed, but neither gets any sleep that night until the sun nearly rises.

---

Garma dreams of a desert oasis. He dreams of Icelina, tending to it.

She leads him to that water and lets him drink from it.

"You're going to be okay, my love, my Lord Garma." She tells him as the clearest water he has ever tasted slides past his throat. "Remember, I would give up everything for you, even you."

He wipes the water from the cup of his hands and turns to her, to tell her the same is still true. He would let go of the war, of Zeon itself, if it meant being with her.

She's not there, however. Just a desert, going on and on for all eternity.

The oasis disappears, and the sun is so very hot that it burns him down, but it's okay. Icelina's words settle him as he becomes one with the mirage.