This drabble brought to you courtesy of SxStrngSamurai13, and my rambling tendancies. Seriously, this wasn't supposed to be so long... it just kept going. Well, anyway, there might be some branching off of this one later, but we shall see.

His eyes had been brown, once. A deep, rich brown; one of his girlfriends had said they were the kindest eyes she'd ever seen. Most girls seemed to like them.

His hair, also, had once been brown – mahogany colored. It had usually been just long enough to flop into his eyes, most girls had liked that, too.

He'd entered the army at eighteen out of a sense of wanting to do something right, helplessness being one of his greatest fears. He liked to think he'd beaten that fear, and for the most part, he had. He rose in the ranks, until someone mentioned the Rangers. As soon as he had heard the word, he'd known that he was meant to join.

And so he had. It required a minimum sixty percent cyberization – including a special eye implant that allowed them to switch between Normal light, Night Vision, UV, Infa-red, code, and even auditory sight. The first time he saw sound, he instantly discarded any feelings of grief for his natural eyes – they had been donated to a girl in Fukuoka and were serving their purpose on a body that deserved them. His heart and lungs were also off serving higher purposes. When in training, he sometimes smirked as he thought about how – piecemeal – he could serve several higher purposes, rather than just one.

With hard work, training had gone by quickly. They weren't deployed until his twenty-second birthday. A hell of a present, his commander said, and he had just smirked.

Then came the war. He hadn't expected anything less than what he had gotten, it wasn't as if human desperation and hatred was new to him. However, even knowing how bad it would be, he would never be the same. Death; of his comrades, his enemies, people innocent and guilty; hung around them all like a cloud. And even though he was in one of the sections most deeply entrenched in the war – he was still helpless on occasion.

He had come out of the fourth world war largely unharmed in body but scarred in spirit. The rangers were his life now, he knew it, they knew it, and nothing could change it. He didn't really want to – knowing that he could do more from there than anywhere else. Tired of having to worry about his abdomen when doing close range fighting, and knowing that his brain was almost fully cyberized in any case, he had signed the papers with the government to go full cyborg. It was bigger than his old body, and almost white blonde. He didn't mind – except for the first week when he bumped into things constantly – unused to his slightly larger size.

But all in all, he had never really regretted the choice.

Hard on the heels of the last great war they had been called to the Mexican desert. There, a strange coincidence segwayed what would have been the fairly straight line of the rest of his life. The American Empire, mistrustful of the nations helping them to curb the drug cartels, spilt them all into groups led by an American commander.

In that group, with it's confused English troops and American gonzos, the Major had made her first impression by deftly whipping a unit falling apart back into shape and ordering him to cover as she dashed into an abandoned hospital.

It wasn't until she came out of the rain with a wounded sniper and kept the remaining men off of the now one-eyed man, despite the fact that he had killed two of their men, that Batou finally understood what Ishikawa had meant by 'Female Guerilla'.

From there, his life had been intrinsically tied to Motoko Kusinagi, even before he grudgingly admitted to himself that he loved her, before she had called him out of the blue and said that she wanted him as a second in command for field duties or she wasn't going to take this Aramaki man's offer of building a combat unit. Somehow, they would end up on the same battlefield, tracking the same group of guerillas, she would be picking from the same group of trainees for the the army as the Rangers, always something. Maybe unconsciously, he had always involved himself in situations she might be in, hoping to study her again, but that didn't occur to him until section nine had been up and running for a year.

Now they had been present for a year, taken apart, reinstated, and narrowly diverted at least one international disaster. As he flexed his hand idly, he wondered how the girl from Fukuoka was doing – she'd be about eighteen now. If he could remember his given name, he could check up on her and those eyes that most girls had melted for in his teens… but why bother? They were gone, and he didn't really miss them. After all, Motoko Kusinagi was decidedly not 'most girls'.

Note: I'm pretty sure that Batou was given a choice about his full cyberization. Motoko and Kuze both suffered from it partially because they were pretty much not given a choice (ok, Kuze was, but it wasn't, really.) (How many times can i use the word pretty? I feel pretty, oh so pretty...)

Batou's age is up in the air as far as I know, so the times are guessed. I suppose he could have been recruited, but meh.

Yes, I have a fairy pointful view of what Batou looked like fully human. I was creating an original character who I wanted to be Batou but totally not, so I just said 'ok. what'd he look like before switching over?'

The timing might be a titch messed up because I didn't feel like going to Wikipedia and looking at their timeline again (yes, they have one, yes, I know this...)

Oy vey. anyway, back to your regularly scheduled lives, thanks for stopping by!