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?

12. 1-8: Earthquake - War Born

1-8
Earthquake - War Born

---

It starts small, the barely there vibrations below him that he has usually written off as the wind battering itself against the building. Mai's weatherly forecast had been as correct as always recently, with a light pattering of rain in the last few days wetting the ground and greying the sky above. The storms that had collected were so far distant that not even their thunder made their way to his own place, amidst the Seattle skyline. The shaking and rumble that came then he had noticed only when it came not from the sides of the building, but below. Mai had been halfway through the doorway of the bathroom when she and him locked eyes and for the first time they both were taken off guard together as the Earth groaned and the world started shaking like a mobile suit coming apart.

He screams, because he really does think that this is it: He knows what this shaking brings before as his Gaw tears at the seams between flame and gunfire. Here he goes again, and he wasn't prepared once more.

Sitting on that stool it topples over and he's on the ground on his bad side, his scars sparing him from the pain, but not from the low ooze of hurt that spools after that as the building around them shakes still. Mai's gear in its corner topples over, guns and crates coming off of piles as something breaks in the kitchen.

Something in the building's integrity must've finally had it from damage in the war he thinks as his mind races that same old path of about to die.

Icelina… dear, Icelina.

"We're dead!" He says, arms again wrapping around his head as he's on the floor. He yelps when a weight is put upon him- perhaps the ceiling above has collapsed and is bringing him down through the floors, but it's a solid feeling, and then soft and warm, for when he opens his eyes he's got a face full of Mai's side as she tucks him in and curls herself around him.

She's silent, all the while, and the vibrations do not let him get a good look at her face, but the shaking doesn't stop until it feels as if the reality around him is about to tear.

She's dragged him to the clearest part of the floor, away from anything that might topple over, she herself on the floor as well until eventually the vibrato of the world settles down just as it had arrived at its very peak.

Battlefield explosions are less disastrous as, when the world is still, they stay like that tangled for another thirty seconds before they even begin breathing again.

She's sweating, a fact that he is very much aware of as the skin of her arm brushes against his cheek.

"Earthquake." The caution in her voice is unlike her. There's fear in it born of being a Spacenoid. The only time all reality shook like that if she was in the colonies was because there had been a breach in the colony walls. Old habits die hard, old warnings persist. "It's an earthquake."

"Ah. Right." Garma can hardly keep his own fears down.

Here they were two Spacenoids experiencing the wonders and horrors of the Earth together. Just the smallest moments of solidarity as they lock eyes and realize, together, the Earth was an insane beast.

Of all the places she settled on Earth, she had to settle in a place that had sat above or adjacent to a fault line that, if broken, could've ended the Human race far faster than even a hundred colony drops would. Mother Earth was a creature, a living being, and every once and a while rumblings from the Earth promising calamity would remind Mankind where they were and who would survive until the end of Time. The first time she had experienced the uniquely Earthly phenomenon she had thought the Federation had come for her with an army on their own, as was how much this sounded even worse than hellfire bombings of the war she saw from afar on Guardian Banchi. The second time hadn't been any better, half of her apartment broken down in drops and cracking. This was the fifth time in her life the world below had rumbled below, and the Spacenoid inside of her would never have such carnal fear erased.

"Madness. Truly." Garma's hands are curled into fists as he detaches from Mai, wriggling out from her grasp as he lays on the floor, belly down. "Madness." He says again, not too loud as if the Earth could listen.

"Stay down." Mai is up despite her instructions to Garma, carefully rising up, her apartment shifted and made a mess in every corner because of it. In the kitchen a bottle of vodka has fallen over, but it's the least of her concerns as she goes to the windows, all intact, thankfully, as she looks to the city below southward. Seattle had been on its last legs already with the war come and gone, buildings already half collapsed and tumbled over. Elysium Condos would survive, she had checked for damages when she moved in to the integral structure, but for the rest of the city? Sand castles had better chances, and many had been losing the draw as she looked outside to a city already bent one way or another. Giant dust clouds had been forming down below like the ground had been letting out its breath, she having missed the collapse of buildings amongst Seattle. Foreman's former Pavilion before he moved undoubtedly suffering collapses as unfinished buildings screamed their metal wails, thrown down to the ground as supports gave out below.

The defining feature of Seattle, the space needle, it remained stalwart, untouched, but damaged from stray explosive ordnance, groaned so loud that it rang throughout the city as it swayed so perceptibly that Mai had held her breath as she moved to the side of her apartment's windows that had a good view of it, but it stood still for now.

She never had the chance to visit it in her years living here.

She had scanned all the buildings she could see, all the way out to 6 Pavilion and Garma's Gaw's crash site, buildings having shaken down, most already destroyed, but not brought back to the Earth as fragile geometry crumpled beneath the weight of their designs and the damage done to them. Seattle rain rusted away what was never meant to be exposed, and the city returned to the Earth as a dusty haze settled over.

Mai hadn't remembered flipping on the radio, but she had done so on an impulse as the static buzz of a hundred radios going to the net composed themselves.

"The fuck was that?!"

"You know what it was."

"Shit that's about the worst one in five years!"

"We've got casualties! Conclave, Gearten! Open those gates we're gonna have people inbound! Conclave?! You read?!"

Once when the city was whole there had been a warning system in place for when fractures and tectonic activity had been imminent. No such warnings existed now as moments after a shrill roll aired out from the direction of the Conclave: The emergency sirens going off as if signaling an air raid. This had been a different disaster, however. She could see the Conclave and its white walls through the hazy smoke and dust clouds, tiny dots of people scrambling as the outer walls were thrown open.

"Fucking- Shit! Some of the streets are opening up and flooding!"

"We gotta leave Seattle, now! We're gonna sink!"

"Keep your ass off the net if you're not reporting." A.K Gully had never forgotten his training, same as Mai. "1 Pavilion, we're five by five. Evergreen Bridge is holding it seems. I'll send out people to check. All Pavilions we need one report from each. If we don't hear a squeak, we're going to assume disaster."

"This is Crow. I'm looking at collapses of Green Hill Bank, Three Tree Hotel… Seems like a lot of the construction Downtown got upturned." Her callsign on the radio is not Ghoul. The guerillas of Seattle wouldn't be so obviously to imply otherwise. "Start consolidating. Sound off. I'm oscar-mike to the Conclave."

"Win here. I'm all good, thanks for asking. I'm gonna make a run for 3 and 4 Pavilion and chat back. Give me a sec."

"Keep comms clear, only for urgent messages as necessary, otherwise we're doing this by word of mouth. Pav leaders in place it's your call but affirm your status."

"Copy. Anyone who's not keeping security for obvious reasons, all hands on deck."

At some point radio frequencies would have to be redone, but for now, the Conclave and the Reapers shared the same lines, a fact that most people forgot up until Murph himself answered. "Fuck you think we're gonna do? We're gonna get ours soon enough, but we have our own shit to deal with!" Murph, colorful as ever, had a point though. He and the Reapers were not exempt from this.

They still had to be considered, however.

It's about the fastest she's geared up in months, how fast she puts on her plate carrier and backpack, sniper rifle and pistol checked for ammo as boonie cap goes on. It's all load bearing gear too, so the events of the day would probably call for it. She wasn't planning on taking up a fight, but she could: Grenades on her battle belt just in case the Reapers got funny.

And there, Garma looks at her, arms crossed over each other in quiet steeling, hands holding onto himself. The furrowed brow on him hides nothing. The shakes in him are ones she notices before she realizes the same vibrate through her.

She really was a Spacenoid, after all this time.

"Lightning and thunder," She speaks once as she arranges herself. "That's still the worst. And the wind." Garma understands her. The winds and the drafts of a colony are nothing compared to the Earth-equivalent. On Earth, the wind howls, speaking a whistle language that has been spoken since beyond ancient Man, and would continue beyond. In those winds heard from those long gone peoples, they heard it too, and wondered if Human history could go on without hearing its song.

"Long day ahead?" The hint of concern, she doesn't know if its sarcasm, something too casual that has now festered between them.

She doesn't dignify him with an answer, and instead gives him a contingency.

"If the building starts actually going down, I give you permission to leave."

He let his arms slip from each other, an amused, incredulous eyebrow raised at her. "If the building starts going down, I'm not going to have too much time, aren't I?"

She's not sure when her hand darts to his shoulder like it does, shaking it once. "You'll be fine. Or else I'll kill you." How easy it was for him to touch him so casually it shocks her through the hand that does it. It's a confusion to him too. It almost makes him ignore her words. "Just uh, clean up a bit, alright?"

"Right." He says unsteadily, nodding. "Stay safe."

"Mm." She still doesn't quite believe when he does wish her well into the day, but they are words she hasn't heard since bloody knuckle beginnings of raids during the war.

If he says it because he cares, Mai does not heed them.

---

On the way down, that dog, golden furred and all, is still there. Mai barely sees it in the shadows as it whimpers, and without thinking she dumps her pockets of her jerky onto the floor. The pup was too scared to move, hiding in its corner of the lobby, but it looked from it to her and to the meat on the floor again, putting its head down in the dark.

---

Blowback is present on the streets. Cracks made from the earthquake had bubbled up with water from the storm drains they backed up to keep security. Streets flood like rivers coming to life, but for now she can run dry all the way to the Conclave as more and more, people making their way to it join her, covered with dust or limping. People who had housed and hid away in Seattle's buildings all forced out to the street, waiting out in case of secondary aftershocks. She hadn't known so many people lived in Seattle still as she made her journey to the Conclave, her radio buzzing off the hook as rescue efforts were organized and people reported their status, all of it had fallen to the wayside as she rounded the corner and found the Conclave alive, frantic, but most importantly operating.

At the heart of it, past being a beacon of civilization and organization in a Seattle going the way of the apocalypse, the Conclave remained a hospital.

It was like those first days after the colony drop as Seattle weathered its own losses during it: the debris that had hit Canada peppering some of Seattle as survivors from South East Asia and Oceania were deposited in any hospital able, including the Conclave, which had then been First Hill Hospital. It was the action, the way she rose to help First Hill in the chaos, that kept her alive. Better to be in chaos than to deal with what she had just lost.

It was still true today, but regardless of her own personal reasons, the Conclave needed any able hands.

"If you're not about to die, triage outside!" Gearten's shouting had been what he had to give that day as, in between each command, he had sucked in hard from his breathing machine on his belt. It might've damaged him further, but the Conclave was his to manage when the chips were down. She heard him first before she arrived, a solid mass of people trickling in hobbling, or carried, dust in the streets lousy from buildings collapsed. "Anyone who's critical get in and we'll handle it!"

It's like the first days after the bombings, when Zeon carpet bombed any rumor of a Federation defensive position, even if it meant the city itself got caught in the crossfire. All anyone can remember is the dust that kept bathing over them from debris and the Pacific wind. It was then that Seattle begged for rain, but the rain had been its own devil.

The rubble of buildings not yet excavated, survivors still in them, drowned in the downpour. Hell on Earth came to Seattle by way of the dust, and now Hell has returned. Not from above, but from below. Aftershocks hadn't been felt however as Mai Gul ran through the streets and found herself in front of the Conclave, dozens and dozens of people creating crowds of almost a hundred, coughing up and broken and injured as the city collapsed and spit them out. The sound of buildings collapsing in the distance had been constant until it all stopped at once, and whatever had not fallen yet was not going to fall unless war returned.

Hopefully it wouldn't. Each step of a mobiles suit had been its own aftershock, and Seattle was long a brittle skeleton.

The remnants of the Conclave's medical staff had been the loudest sound, the emerging out of the hospital with the tattered blue remnants of their scrubs, a defiant uniform against the world at large that tried to stop them from saving lives. Thirty-five people, those that had been staff of the First Hill hospital, had remained when the Conclave survived the active fighting in the war. This had been down for nearly three hundred staff to account for eighty beds.

Gearten catches Mai's eye as she makes her way through the injured crowd and the helping medical aid staff. A man hobbles past her with a piece of his shoulder exposed, his body all whited out by dust as if he had been floured. He is quickly taken off up his feet by a male medic, blood dripping down in his wake. Gearten jumps down from his post on the walls, directing people with his broad arms as people shamble by his direction. Before he can even begin to speak to Mai he clamps the plastic mask over his mouth and sucks in hard, in and out, re-inflating his lungs.

"I'm here to help." Is how Mai greets him. It's the same as she had in those first days after the Colony Drop and she had been discharged, only to turn around and corral the desperate crowds around the Conclave seeking medical aid. He had clamped his broad hand on her shoulder once, nodding before he spoke, the suction of air from the mask not cut off as he pulled it off of him.

"We're doing this all as it happens. Fuck this is bad." He would spit on the ground if the air hadn't been so dry. The debris and dust clouds had slowly been coagulating upward, the sun through an already cloudy day becoming milkier, yellower even, sickly. "Ghoul- Mai." Gearten takes both her arms. "Go out, grab people, organize search parties. Do what you can."

He commands inward, she'll command outward. She understands, dropping her pack of spare medical supplies at his feet to use as she drills her ear piece back into her head and coughs her voice clear.

"Crow to all Conclave scouts and anyone unoccupied, I need you on the ground, rally on the main street gate. We're going out to verify."

The injured hobble in and the ready rush out. She knows some of their names: Caine, Arkie, Combulo, Dawson and Yao. Last man out is Dentley, and he is half a suited man, and half a scav. He's a fresh looking man, albeit hurriedly putting on his utility vest and slinging his shotgun behind his back as he forms with the group around Mai.

"First day with classes and this is what happens," he bellyaches with a growl. Apparently he had just come from the classroom, or whatever counted inside of the Conclave.

A realization whips across Mai's face: "Are the kids okay?" She tips her head at the Conclave with worry that betrays her cool.

Dentley nods. "Enough of them remember what to do anyway. You know, under the desk, heads down."

By the time she makes the call that she has enough people, that group has ballooned to twenty, and they all surround her like a ballgame play. She spreads herself to all of them, taking a good look at familiar faces but unknown names, waiting for her orders. "Alright. All of us, just like we did during fighting, we go up and down the streets. Every alley that remains, make notes when you see the roads breaking down to the sewers below, and log any voices you hear. If you cannot within five seconds dig someone out, or help anyone stuck in place, call it, or remember where. You link up with the Pav's I'm sending you to and then you double back with search parties on their own. We got that?!"

"Yes ma'am!" They all say in unison, and she's sorry for it. No time to be annoyed even for that.

"Radio my callsign if needed, and when you get to the Pavs, grab people that aren't on guard. Better safe than sorry. It'd be a really good time for the Reapers to do prodding." She knows so because it is what she'd do.

Her fingers move on her own as she assigns groups to Pavilions, and without question they run out to start assessments and search and rescue. For whatever rescues are being done now, it was best to get an organized effort started from the Conclave down. Let the spider web form, and let it bind together.

It wasn't any different from guerilla work.

"Dentley," She had been getting familiar with him lately, so he had been last to be picked on. "You're with me. We're gonna go see Tammy down at 6."

He doesn't complain, tightening his gear breathlessly, he nodded, and followed her in flight.

---

Garma listens.

It's all he can do as he carefully picks back up her guns and gear in the room and stacks and store them neatly. At least she doesn't leave them loaded, but he had found the ammo and the magazines for them, and once again those intrusive thoughts take hold in him that he beats down as soon as he hears her voice over comms.

It's a return to a comfortable tenor: not quite military, but organized and meaningful chatter of radio static nonetheless that his days before Seattle were filled with. She is the star of the show however, and even more he understands why she led the guerilla movement here in Seattle. People had trusted her, and he knew that because not one order of hers was paused upon.

"Crow, we've got a fire in the old server building. Found a few squatters inside and we're dragging them out now. I uh, smells really funny around here."

"Batteries and electronics cooking off. Just wave them off before the place burns down. After you get them out, I want you to push over to 2 Pav and help out Caine's group." Mai responds over the air.

Out from his perch, their apartment is a prime viewing angle as one building in Seattle begins its slow burns as the rest smoke among dust clouds. Seattle's ruins house a million shapes all fighting against each other, and the more that he looks out through those windows the more of a headache forms as the dull pain from his fall ebbs and echoes through his body.

Her training remains, in organization alone. Her words, the names of the groups she sends out and the directions and orders she gives, paint a picture in Garma's mind.

Their map of North America that they chat over has certainly helped in that regard: He sits there, before the table that has her radio set, and sprawled in front of him is that same map, but turned over. On the other side of the map of North America is a more specific map: one of Seattle.

He knows where he is now: the Elysium Condos, right on 5th Avenue. The long spanning highway that he sees cutting south to north is Interstate-5, and further down from that he can see west to east, the I-90 and the remains of the bridge: blown up by the Federation in order to halt the Zeonic advance. He traces the lines on the map of Seattle's grid, the streets, from the Elysium Condos all the way up to the Evergreen Bridge, or down below down toward Tacoma. He sees, and he traces with his eyes the flow of a path out from where he is now and he wonders, he plans, and there is a consideration there that he could, maybe, with enough planning, go, leave, live on.

Was it cowardice to stay? Was it cowardice to not fight?

He knows the answer, but he cannot admit.

None of what was happening to him was sane at all.

To remain here would really be to relegate himself to a death by Char, even if not direct, but yet hesitation.

He hears her voice and all of its purpose, and those thoughts fall away from his mind again.

Seattle burns. Seattle shakes. Seattle is alive. Seattle dances to the serenade of Mai Gul.

---

Mai and Tammy and Dentley meet at 6 Pavilion, and they return back inward with a group in tow, pulling people up and out from twisted remains of a city bothered once more. Sweat forms on her dusky brow and it drops below as she pulls debris and rubble asides to unbury the buried. Wailing. Wailing, screaming and crying. Those are what she is drawn towards as she digs, again, men and women out from dirt and dust.

How many people still live in Seattle surprises her, but it is a horrible thing when they become trapped below its carcass. Everything but child was born in her, with how she digs in and digs and digs and toils with shovel in hand and order on her tongue. Conflict was born in her, but it is not alone.

She still saves, and that born conflict in her again so.

She digs, and she hardly notices a man.

He clambers out of the pit by himself, further up. A man as old as her, hair that went down to his shoulders as the layered rags that he wore for clothing pelt with grey residue and himself. His flesh is of the same color, and only his eyes are a reprieve from the dryness of his form. He stood, up from the Earth like some unshackled soul, melting upward and then solidifying without sound as Mai stopped for him and him alone and saw what a ghost could've been. The man had looked to the grey sky above as he moved forward, feet taking him from this place, out to the road, only to disappear in the dust itself.

---

A day of digging and it would never be enough, but those that need help are helped, and those that don't do the helping. The old machine of a guerilla apparatus spins up again as those that remained in Seattle fought Seattle itself for a change instead of fascists from space. By the time the sun begins its downward curve into the western skies Mai appears as if she had been a part of the disasters as, back at the Conclave, a map of Seattle has been brought out, leftover from the areas covered by ambulances and emergency services. Buildings and streets are reddened out or crossed off as more and more the Conclave and its people call in, report in, and bring the weary to rest or the injured to roost.

War was worse, but natural disaster still was its own beast.

Bo Tale walks among stretchers brought out to the lobby of the Conclave holding the moderately wounded as Gearten talks with Pavilion leaders that have gathered back at the Conclave about current plans and search areas. No one has a complete estimate about how many of those in Seattle truly stayed, but until the screaming stopped, they would go out. Bo moves along the rows, a bag of pills and supplies in a tote, glancing at messy handwriting attached to the wounded by wrist or by leg noting observations, treatments, recommended medicines and remedies that she has been good to hand out and to whisper in the ears of the wounded to take when they can. Elsewhere she is tying bandages, adjusting liters, promising, hoping, that those that have crushed legs or dusted lungs that things will be okay. When Bo Tale tells people they will be okay, even the ruined believe her.

If only it had worked with herself, Mai ponders.

Bo catches her eyes, and she smiles.

Redness on her cheeks is covered by the dust and sweat over them.

On one of those beds, however, is someone else, voluntarily, and yet not. Gearten's words tone out, and Mai finds her floating to the side of a pregnant woman.

It's the first time she's seen Fleety Kino outside of a glance. She's a homely woman, run thin and ragged by the war, but the stress on her face is one that's so familiar it robs Mai of everything she had built up of the last year. It does so because it's a look seen in memory, and in the mirror. Fleety, red brown curls having seen better days, looks up through misguided bangs and sees the woman that she has heard of all year, but had seen very little of. Gearten moves his mouth as if to stop her but when she sees where she drifts he clamps his teeth and instead returns to the business of the day.

Her hands hold the sides of the liter, the dust on her palms imprinting on orange plastic.

"Miss Gul?" Fleety Kino asks up from her litter, she seems weak, her skin is pale, and her baby bump is visible beneath her own clothes and the blanket over her.

Mai goes cold. "What's wrong?" She asks.

Fleety goes quiet, her hands settling over her bump over the blanket. The mother to be knows the tragedy of the mother that wasn't, and because of that there is little to be said. She looked fine, otherwise.

A hand touches Mai's shoulder and she knows who it is without turning.

Doctor Candy is run ragged by the day but in the chaos, he seems to be even more alive, his white coat dusted even further. His hands are bloody and bloodied again, but a constantly changing rag in his pocket keeps the worst at bay as the oldest child of the Conclave, a stout young man about Win's age, does his part with a mop and is making sure the floor is clean at least in the lobby turned triage center. Candy has had decades of experience talking of what had happened to people. In a world at war, the hospital had been a battlefield for him for decades: he, a veteran, a survivor, and, at one point in his life, a victim.

"That earthquake shook us pretty badly. Miss Kino here, unfortunately, got caught walking up a stairwell during it." Doctor Candy pocketed his hands, taking again another wide look at the several dozen people set up in the lobby, the beds that remained in the Conclave in its wings occupied by those that needed emergency and life-saving care. Those in the lobby had been injured, but at no immediate risk of death. A routine of triage that had happened, time and time again, and only on the bleakest days were those that had been the lobby were those where nothing could be done for them but to die as peacefully as they could.

Mai's blood goes cold and her grip on the liter, raised up to their waist level, tightens.

"I… I didn't need an actual bed- I'm not injured, I don't think I am but-" Fleety replays her own struggle, her own moment where the world shook apart down the stairs and. "I fell down the stairs and, I just- we don't know what's wrong."

"She fell on her stomach."

"My baby, I can't feel it kicking anymore."

"Doctor-!" Mai snaps to face Candy, as if compelling him to do something, but his face is stone as a doctor needed to be, today of all days, and every day that necessitated someone to remain grounded to the practical reality. It's that look that stops Mai.

"I've done all the external tests I could, when I could," He takes a deep, long breath, looking back down on Fleety Kino. "But that earthquake took out our last ultrasound machine. So we can't get a good look inside of her."

"Broke?" Mai wishes for specifics, for something that could be a silver lining she could take out and pull.

A piece of grimness betrays Candy's nod. "Broke. Completely. It took us a month to replace machinery in peacetime. There's no chance now."

Of all the tragedies of her loss, it was not knowing what had happened that culminated in her baby shriveling up inside of her that had killed Mai, deep down. The helplessness. Her hands are tight, and the grooves of plastic imprint in her palms until it's all she can feel. A soft hand, however, passes over her knuckles. It's Fleety.

"Oh, Miss Gul," She starts, trying to assuage her. "It's- it's probably nothing."

Nothing. That word unwinds itself in Mai's ear. Nothing had undone her and left her as she was. It ruined her. Fleety Kino smiles up at her, and Mai nearly breaks. She has not said more than a few words to her this last year and yet she has known Fleety Kino all her life. She knows the path of a woman who would bear child, and she knows how painful it was to be denied those final steps, that ultimate purpose. Mai Gul knows what it was like to become less than a woman, and Fleety Kino smiles up at her.

Mai Gul is not assuaged, and she takes her hands off her liter before she breaks it. "Dentley!" She shouts out, and the lobby stills. Dentley freezes, hunched over a water cooler brought out and guzzling from his canteen, constantly being refilled, chokes momentarily. Nearly a hundred people stop as the world, for once, is dictated by her.

Dentley is at her side at a moment, and Candy is surprised at how sharply Mai barks.

"Ultrasound machines, I know you've been in some of the hospitals around town. You remember any recently?"

"I- I'd need to see what they'd look like again, just to make sure."

"I can show you what's left." Bo appears, popping up at Mai's side before Candy or Kino can protest or dissuade, and he is led off into the hospital to a broken machine. Bo does have her charms sometimes, even Mai can admit as she slides her sniper rifle from her back and is already checking the chamber.

"Mai, what are you doing?" Candy asks with urgency.

It's no issue to Mai. Just another objective. Just another day in her life. "Getting on. Making sure her baby's alright."

Her radio squeaks and Dentley is reporting from somewhere else in the building. "Yeah, hey, Captain. Lucky day. I remember seeing one of these things down by the PMC. Right by Little Saigon. Saw I think a few. We scavs didn't know what they were so we just left 'em."

Gearten, overhearing in the abundance of silence in the room that slowly was resuming its trauma care, had stomped on over. "The Pacific Medical Center's right below our line. It's within tagged Reaper territory."

She had pulled the bolt all the way back and caught the unspent, ejected round midair before thumbing it back into the chamber. "In and out. Like in the war."

"Ghoul, these aren't Zeeks. These were people who fought like us- Hell, fuck." Gearten runs his hand through his beard and dust comes out of it. "They were us."

They fought by numbers alone. Not individual combat ability. Mai holds them in literal scorn.

"In and out. I'm not starting shit. The only business I have about fighting is ending it." She knows the place: The location of a brutal firefight in the war. It was about on the same longitude with the Kingdome, and just below the current line of Pavilions standing against Reaper territory.

"Miss Gul," Fleety is her senior, and yet she respects her so as the voice comes from below. "You don't have to."

No, I must.

Mai leans down, to face level with Fleety, and she herself raises herself up still on her elbows. Sun dried freckles on her face, and Mai can hardly imagine without breaking down what they'd look like on a child. "Ma'am. Better safe than sorry. Especially when it's something like this."

She thinks from time to time that what had happened to her on the day of the colony drop had been preventable, that maybe there was a checkup she had declined to go to or a mistake of her own that she made and never noticed. That day had only been a day and that her tragedy could've been stopped because of her. She does not want to see that regret burrow into the innocent, and Fleety looks into Mai's eyes and sees the devils that have taken hold of her.

"Better safe than sorry?" Fleety echoes. Mai nods.

In Candy a conflict brews between the medical necessity, and the eventuality of what Mai might do that day in Fleety's name. Though he beats it down. He does not fight Mai on this. He has long since given up with her in this regard. He had not lost a child, he could not know what pain was born in her in place, especially in war. He looks up to the ceiling above and makes his peace.

He thanks her instead. "Thank you, Mai."

His words calm the storm in her for just a second as she raises up, her shoulder patted once as Candy goes off to tend to the rest of the victims today. Gearten is not so easily pacified. "Look, Ghoul, scouting missions is one thing, but you're gonna be scrounging around there, and stuff is pretty hot. God knows the Reapers might be looking for medical supplies to where you are."

"Gearten!" Her hands fly to his arms, and they are stuck to his side now. "Please. She- her baby needs help. Let me do this. Please just let me- "

Those hands at his sides have killed hundreds, and they beg him now to save, to help, to do something. Her green eyes burn but her face is desperate. In moments, she de-ages years, and Gearten looks down on a woman stolen of her innocence, taken from her homeland. He pities her now and knows he cannot stop her.

He remembers who he's talking to, and all of his protests, all of his warnings, they would fall on deaf ears of someone who just wanted to help.

"Horses are spooked." He admits instead to her, wriggling out of her grip. "You're gonna have to walk."

"I'll go alone. I'll go see what those things look like and-"

Bo and Dentley re-appear from a hallway, and already Dentley is ready to roll. "I'll tag along. Tagging along with you is fun, Captain."

"Aye. Me too."

"You, all of you, you don't need to do this for me." Fleety Kino is quiet in her warnings, but they are warnings that are unneeded as Tammy kneels beside her just the same. "I've given birth twice, Fleety." Tammy hauls her machine gun from her sling tight. "It's a miracle each time. We don't want to chance it."

Mai does not think of herself often as a woman, not anymore, but there is a simple fact of the matter that everyone else does. It must be a strange thing to think about who had been a part of the war effort. Easily half of the guerillas in Seattle had been women, and some ancillary part of her studies in the Academy reminded her that this was not typical. Women waged this war, same as any other, as was how deeply it went. Women suffered, women fought, women died.

It was along those lines that Gearten had backed off, trading a knowing look at Dentley as he breathed out tiredly, raggedly, before clamping his machine over his mouth and breathing true.

"I don't know how I could ever begin to repay you all."

Mai could think of how: give birth. But she doesn't say that.

"Don't worry about it." Mai had been prompt, sharing a gaze across the two going with her. They were ready. "I'm sure you'd do the same for us."

---

The Pacific Medical Center had served the more impoverished health needs of that section of Seattle, right above Little Saigon. City dwellers that they are, the long blocks that it takes to travel down to it, even amidst streets ruined anew or new rivers made of roads, are not such a long travel that they are winded when they make it to that building, shaped like sprouted winner's podium. It rises meekly above as it stands on Beacon Hill, and the angle up is a welcome burn.

From the altitude of Beacon Hill, they see the great mountain of Tacoma and the Olympic, distant beacons of a wider world that peek out from the faraway lands that Seattle borders on in their view.

Mountains, true mountains, did not exist in the Sides save for artificial manifestations. None could ever match the enormity of any seen on Earth. Of all the majesty that Mai remembered, that most Spacenoids have, is how real was real the actual dirt and natural monuments were in size alone. Birthed from the same movements of the Earth that created calamity beneath them, it rose them up and kept them above.

Tacoma looked on, and it would look on forever more for as long as the Pacific North West had been standing.

Behind them, the Seattle skyline survived in broken glory.

"You know, I'm from New York City." Dentley breaths out as they hop over a fence and are within the perimeter of the PMC, it too needing such a safety net after the world started ending at the beginning of 0079. According to Candy, the staff of the PMC had been some of the first to get relieved of their positions by the Federation and pressed into service. "I'll take dealing with parking than these god damn hills." He fell on his ass last, hauled up by Tammy.

"Seafood here's better. Probably." She said with her pride as a fisherman. Dentley didn't protest as he rose up and found Mai already taking a knee, her face shaded by her boonie cap and looking out the distance with her honed vision.

That giant building had remained empty since then, host to squatters, to the Federation and Zeon alike in back and forth battles, and it bore its scars in exposed superstructure and blown open windows, pot marked bullet holes trailing around windows from every angle.

More trees and lawns here. Beacon Hill had been residential compared to the more metropolitan areas around it. Remnants of green dulled in the winter months, and apple trees with their unclaimed harvest lay rotten on the ground wherever they walk.

Tammy had moved up behind kneeling Mai, fist tapping her shoulder. Mai paused, eyes scanning one last time across the entire street, the buildings around them and the cars left behind. Remnants of the war had remained in the form of decomposing bodies on the concrete and discarded shells. The road had suffered a heavier Federation tank most likely based on its bow inward.

In a nod she rose and walked swiftly across the street, over the empty parking lot of the PMC, and into the lobby with Dentley and Tammy following, but not before they each got an eyeful of, besides the main door, the white spray paint curve of the moon: a scythe. It had been the marking of the Reaper Lord that this had been their territory.

"Don't look any different when I stopped by in September, save for that thing of graffiti." Dentley commented, their eyes adjusting to a dark lobby not too unlike the Conclave. Even in daylight, the insides of buildings left mostly untouched by ambient light had been a creepy dark. From Mai's battle belt, a flashlight that hadn't been attached to a gun, the clip of it hung through a loop in her boonie hat, illuminating where she looked. The others did similarly with hand lights. Dust and grit from the world that seeped in floated in particulates down to the rough carpet below. A Federation soldier lay dead, face down, half blown apart by his stomach in the entry way.

His helmet had been taken, as his gun, and any equipment on him.

How soon did some in Seattle return to hunter gathering and scavenging. Across generations, there were still ancient principles that people knew deep down.

"Us scavs usually don't go into the hospitals, that much." In an empty building their voices reverberate as Dentley goes to the dead man and remembers him, his face emaciated, the maggots long having since died in the dark and cold. "Most people usually aren't prepared to see what they think is in here. Old horror movies, shit like that."

Dentley, however, had been intimately familiar with hospitals thank to the Conclave during the war. There was no superstition for him that kept him away, looking for medicine and the easier, understood medical implements. "Tammy," Mai twists around to her, taking another hard look at the machinegun that has been her signature as much as a sniper rifle had been hers. "Can you go up a floor? Take overwatch?"

Tammy agrees without question, nodding and finding a stairwell up as Dentley gets right to it.

Doors and locks have long since been kicked or blown open, and in those halls, remnants of firefights in the past. Every building in Seattle had its own scars and own battles to tell that had lasted either minutes or months. Urban warfare had been the closest visitation of hell on Earth that no Academy class could prepare a soldier for. Loud, brutish, and bloody. Blood splatter on the wall catches where victims had tried to cross the halls as the enemy waited.

Mai had felt herself inadequate with the rifle she wielded, but she often made do as she followed Dentley through sprawling halls.

He talks quietly, and peers still into rooms of offices and patient rooms themselves looking for glimmer where his eyes draw him naturally. They're there for one thing only, but it never hurts to check for more, for something else.

PMC doesn't have a maternity ward, it wasn't a hospital, but it did do checkups for the women in waiting, mothers who could not properly be accommodated or afford the hospitals deeper in the city. Mai sees machines like this, all the same as they peruse the bottom floors.

She remembers this building as well. She had fought here, but the memory is distant, like a mirage and not important. Just another fight, and another window she had peered out of to get a shot on a Zeek position. She does not remember it from a different life. She had always been to First Hill for her motions about her own pregnancy. Being married to a police officer did let her enjoy certain insurance benefits, if not one of the few benefits of being married on paper.

"On this floor." Dentley says, and the dilapidated row before them with doors on either side seems to sprawl forever in the dark. The mildew was thick in the air. "Don't remember where, but it was in a closet."

Fair enough, close enough.

The two of them split, going through mystery boxes of rooms looking for an ultrasound machine amidst dusty places. Windows on one side, facing west, give Mai a view out to the Kingdome, bits and pieces of Garma's Gaw still there.

She's not sure what she would've done in her life if he hadn't turned up like he did. Probably, mostly, the same. Even up to now as she turns over broken doors and finds remains of fighting positions. A comforting thought, perhaps, but the dirty thought of it is that hosting Garma Zabi hasn't made her life any worse.

She finds names, name tags, door labels, pieces of papers on patient reports. Medical records left to the floor like debris amongst the dead. How many are deceased, how many does it still matter? Sean Rothman, Hill Dempsey, Mila Oruma- names that she says in her head as she finds their records as her eyes scan more. This building that maintained even life was dead, and there is sorrow in her that she pushes asides like she had all other emotions save for the few that kept her killing, and kept her focused. Those feelings return to her now as she and Dentley go through and try to find the TV-like display on a pedestal.

They needed to see if Mrs. Kino's baby was okay. She needed to.

---

"I swear to God it's here. And I know I didn't see it pop up at the Dock Market." Dentley tries to explain to Mai, an hour later as they continue to look through. He feels the need to apologize, but Mai does not take it, hear it, or need it. They'll keep looking.

It was an entire damned hospital.

She's glad she's brought her gloves out today with how she turns over doors and entire rooms, looking and looking.

She never says anything as she goes through those halls like an active ghost until a handful of rooms because a dozen, and a dozen become fifty, and fifty becomes one hundred.

Dentley passes by the room that Tammy is in and looks in her room still, perched on counters, looking out with her machine gun deployed along its surface. She cannot concentrate on the out as much as she listens to the tables and chairs that Mai is turning over. When the building is quiet, Mai is the storm in it, heard through walls.

Mai is Mai, that was an inscrutable fact about the Conclave and all those that fought with her against Zeon. It was easy, and sometimes even righteous, to fight Zeon beneath her, for her reason had been as much of a reason to fight a war, let alone all the other injustices of Zeon. Mai had brought them all together, and what she did was in the name of a fight that, if one died in, it would've been worth it. Tammy felt it, Dentley felt it, Gearten felt it, them and over a hundred different people. Mai had been more than what she was in war, but now Zeon had left, and what that left behind was what she was:

A mother who had lost her child.

That bitterness has been slowly leaking, down from her, down into Seattle like the under currents beneath it.

"My mother, she's a purebred Finn. Silliest thing."

"Yeah?"

"I worked in Sweden first part of my life as a fisherman. Married my husband, he was a Swede, obviously, then we moved here to America. My Ma' hated that fact that I married across the sea, didn't keep the family purebred for some ancient traditional bullshit, but hell- I've seen her give the school master over there hell when she hears my son got bullied over there. She moved heaven and Earth and all that. I still worry after having not seen them for a year, but you know if my mother's with them like I know she is, I don't have to worry too much."

The love of a mother can move Heaven and Earth, all for the sake of her children.

"All that power…" Dentley reminisces, and understands better the context for what was happening behind him as he hears what sounds like furniture get thrown onto the floor.

"It's a thing you probably won't ever really know, Dentley, about Moms and kids. And even then, I don't think we'll ever know what she feels exactly." And she, Tammy, hair bundled behind that blue bandana of hers winces at the very thought of trying to truly understand. She is a mother. She knows all too well the possibility of her knowing that loss, but not so deeply, not so biting as how Mai lost hers. "Might kill us, even. It's a shame. Tammy pats the broad stock of her machine gun once, knowing her own pains of being a woman, a mother, so far away from her children. "It's a god damn shame."

Unspoken is the reason why she brought it up, an explanation of why they were there at all. Of course, the two of them, any of them in the Conclave, would've done this, but more reasons didn't hurt.

Tammy picks a good moment to look back out, for when she does a long line of trucks, as if mystic forgotten beasts from another era, are out below them on the streets moving up the slope to the road connecting PMC. It was only one group that it could be.

Mai, she's on her knees in a dark room, and torn asunder not by the war but by herself. She doesn't know what tears at her eyes, but they do, and they draw but the slight edges of tears as her nose feels alight and her body begins to shake.

Where is it, god dammit, where is it?!

The Conclave, the survivors of the war, they tell her as they leave Seattle after Zeon was forced out that she had saved their children, making sure to tell her that, and for that she would never trade anything for the momentary flash of feeling that she gets that she has spared someone her fate. But for every innocent saved, another is lost, and this one, a baby still in its womb, if she cannot make sure one is okay then what had been the last year for anyway? She's on her knees, and the ball of rage, of confusion, of something that tears at her very mind until she can't breathe: It puts her down.

It feels like Gravity.

A whistle in her mind that goes across sine waves and silences her worlds until it delivers to her an unthinkable, but very real idea: Another baby would die before they were born.

When she comes back into her mind, fully coherent, a table has been broken in two and the radio is yelling in her ear in Tammy's voice.

"Captain! We've got Reapers coming up out front."

The rage, the uncertainty, the anxiety, it flows out of her in exchange of the cold that came with the fight.

She wore her gear today, plate carrier and all, because it had been load bearing kit too. Who knew what she would have to carry? It still doubled as a fighting rig.

"Dentley." She called for him again over the radio. "Meet me downstairs."

They get out the front of the lobby the second the trucks of the Reaper Lords pull up, all of them surprised, and some even spooked, to see a woman, still dusty as she is from the earthquake today, come out the front. The fear remains when they realize she is corporeal, and more than that, the Ghoul.

She comes out, arms flat at her hip level as Dentley does the same. Up above, Tammy keeps watch, machine gun pointed down. No one noticed, and that had made for the best of firing positions.

"You need something here?" Mai opened, leveling her voice. She almost sounds naturalized.

Five trucks. Full house all around. Twenty-five Reapers. The trucks bare the armor plating from Zeonic and Federation APCs alike, the Reapers wielding firearms from either side appropriately along with their own pillaged collection. Her eyes dart among all of them as most stay along the back as the leader of the group, a fiery red head man, shorter than her, a beanie over his head walks up. He's already had his pistol drawn, two more Reapers behind him, a man and a woman, also seem primed to draw. Dentley is to her back, shotgun on his chest held by sling.

The red head licked his lips, glancing left and right and around. Slyly two of his fingers on his right hand had flicked toward the hospital, and all but five of the Reapers pushing to either side of Mai, past Dentley. Dentley had spun around, going back to back with Mai.

It left two behind the cars, and the three in front of them.

"Lady, what're you doing here? You see that tag, don't you?" He gestured to the white paint besides them. "Thought we were doing this unspoken cold war shit right."

"We don't want any of that trouble." Mai had spoken strongly. "We're just here trying to find some special equipment. We've got a pregnant lady up in the Conclave. She got injured today because of," she gestured around, to the ground, to the smoke from buildings burning, to everything. "We just need this one thing we've been looking for and we're out."

Mai knows the Reaper's answer before he even opens his mouth: the furrow of his brow and the way he looks up at the PMC behind her is telling. "Tough shit. Get out. This is our grub, and you got the top half, the good half of Seattle. Make do. You're the ones with Pill Hill anyway."

First Hill had been where the Conclave had been, but it had not been the only hospital there. A massive concentration of medical care facilities had also called First Hill home, hence the nickname. Not much of it had survived, however.

"You think if we had what we needed we'd be all the way out here after this shit today?" She barked back, it was the most polite she'd sound. She wasn't going to ask or beg.

The red haired man had been less than indignant, breathing in and out once as he pocketed one hand, the other still very flippant with the pistol he held, pointing around with it. "Tough shit, Ghoul. But I'm not letting you toss around stuff that's ours. On the principle of it. Get the fuck outta' here."

"Jesus Christ, man, we're here for just one thing, we'll be out of your hair soon!" Dentley screams over his shoulder. For the sake of the Reaper, and those that had gone in behind him, Dentley screamed. Tammy had seen Reapers come into the building, but she couldn't move, not when the two of them were still out front. Not when she could do something proper, even as she heard Reapers scrounging below her.

"You think you're the only ones hurting today?!" The Reaper screamed back. "We need supplies, same as you." It's the racking of the gun that makes his position and stance known.

To take a life was easy, to live with it was harder. But those were for the considerations of a later date, a distant person, one that Mai didn't think too much about being. These people got in her way, and for that that was enough for her to see red.

"You leave, or you die. Take one, lady." The Reaper warned, one last time.

She squared her feet. She knew she had kept one round in the chamber on her pistol always for Garma in case he really did try to go at her one day. She knew Dentley could fight. She knew that, violence of action, speed, ruled the day in a fight. She took her chances, and she took his life. The red haired man stepped forward to make good on his threat, closing the distance even with a gun, and when he had been in arm's reach Mai had initiated. "Yeah, you die."

"Wh-?"

Her left hand from where it had been raised swiped across right to the gun in her face, throwing the man's arm's down, his right hand all the smoothly finding the release on her holster for her handgun.

Accuracy with her sniper had been one thing in the end. Becoming a gunfighter had been another, and she had, after all this time, become a practical master at both. She didn't need to say, she could prove:

The man threatening her had grunted in surprise, but his lungs were blacked out by two gunshots, center mass, loud and echoing through the halls as she raised the gun up to both of her hands and snapped right to the other Reaper, struggling to pull his gun from his holster only for three more gunshots to land: two body, one in the head as he fell.

Violence of action ruled the day, and when she had been the perpetrator, time was beyond her, slowed down, and acted upon as she swept left to shoot the woman, too shocked to do anything but die: a flurry of gunfire sent down their way as shell casings rained upon the cars below.

Dentley had pushed off from Mai back toward the lobby. "Ghoul! Fuck!"

Three seconds and that many people were dead, dropped to the ground as the sound of Tammy racking her MG's bolt above had been just as loud as the gunshots.

Anyone behind them in the lobby had immediately regretted it: a hail of buckshot sweeping from left to right causing them to be cut apart as a loud cacophony of fire, gunfire, returned to Seattle at the footsteps of Pacific Medical.

Dentley, for all of his own raggedness, had been sharp back on the draw, his shotgun brought up and firing, peppering the lobby with dozens and dozens of holes as naturally, he fought for his life.

"In! In!" Mai yelled, Dentley hearing it as he held down the trigger and walked back into the lobby, chasing off Reapers deeper into the building. Suppressive fire kept them alive, but it hadn't been hard cover, and it couldn't last forever.

Mai had let loose a flurry of gunfire from her pistol, and to the uninitiated it looked like she had spewed fire from her hand.

She ducked into the lobby just as return gunfire started out front from the remaining two, only for Tammy to return it back as she tried to chop through the cars with gunfire alone. The rapid thumps went into their bones, the concussive pressure of its chattering stirring the adrenaline in them to a full bore. Dentley in combat-honed fashion had fisted a handful of shotgun shells in his hands as he slammed them into his shotgun, forcing those that had gone in behind them further into the building and more than likely up the stairs.

"Tammy! You've got incoming!"

Tammy hadn't answered Dentley's shout over the radio, her gun going silent, but she had most likely been repositioning. That five second grace that the suppressed Reapers out front had been trying to recover with had given Mai time to swing her storied sniper rifle from her back to her front as she holstered her pistol.

Like an old friend, Mai rose her sniper rifle to a brace against her shoulder as the two outside from the Reaper party had ducked down to avoid the fire, but she could see them through a three times magnification that peered between cracks and a lack of body awareness. A tuft of hair, a patch of skin- natural things amidst an unnatural world and she looks for it as she snaps her feet to a lock, and before her clothes have even settled from her momentum, she finds the tip of a Reaper's head, ducked around the front of his truck, and that's target enough for her to let her trigger finger pull.

In the dark, taking out the Reapers that had found Garma, she didn't see the blood, the puff of red mist. But when she had executed Beltweiler, she had seen it, and been reminded that of all the weapons she had been known for in Seattle, the crack of her Mosin Nagant had been her signature.

She would answer Gearten and the Conclave about this, but she did it in the same name as how she started her fight against Zeon long ago: for a baby.

When she had racked the bolt back the other person had gone, with little time for her to scan for him as Dentley posted up on a hallway leading into the building further, one shell sent down range and catching a Reaper in the dark as they tried to peer back into the lobby. As she turned she saw that Dentley had already caught two in the lobby when she wasn't looking, they dead and dying on the rug besides the dead Fed, their guns kicked far away just in case.

Footsteps upstairs had been loud and moving, dust shaking from the ceiling tiles above them as gunfire came in response. Dentley ducked back, the corner of the hallway entrance chipping as Reapers shot from doorways of their own for cover.

Upstairs light machine gun fire started again with a roar of return fire. Tammy was still kicking and dealing with people on her floor.

"Conclave, this is Crow! We need fast response by PacMed! Now!" It'd been months since she'd gone by her callsign, but her names have always come from a piece of her. She picked from the dead, yes, but there was always something more. Dentley had gone through another tube of shells, winging Mai as he had slipped back behind the corner. She had taken the wide angle, peering into the dark, seeing the forms of darkness of confused Reapers yards and yards away.

She snapped on an abstract shape, pulling the trigger on it through her scope as, like a picture in time, the fireball flash of her muzzle revealed that hallway at a millisecond's pace.

She gets in two shots before she throws herself behind the angle of cover, bolt being racked, slick like glass. Below her scope had been a clear view of the iron sights and so she had relied on those as Dentley peeked out again and let loose another hail of buckshot.

It was known what weapons the two of them had: a shotgun and a bolt action rifle. Each time a Reaper tried to peak out from their cover and doors, thinking them out of ammo, they had learned that that hadn't been the case.

"Didn't have to be like this you pieces of shit!" Dentley had yelled as he reloaded and Mai had ran down the hall opposite, giving her a long sightline for her to properly use her sniper rifle best.

Masters of rhythm, and for every gunshot, it had been Mai's that were loudest.

How sad this had been. Earthnoids fighting amongst each other. She was the cause.

The more things change the more they stayed the same/

"Upstairs! Upstairs!" A call to move from the Reapers that remained, at least six on the floor in that hallway they were forced into, falling back to the nearest stairway. Above, Tammy's LMG still chugged in a constant firefight. Better to try and take one than two. The Reapers had all tried to, in one go, fallback, but Mai had her gun up. Only times like these she had wished for a gun with a bit more modern capabilities, but one dead target was better than none: The bullet she shot at one of the Reapers running down the hall landing square in his back.

The feeling wasn't the same, she realized.

These weren't Zeeks. These weren't bastard Feds.

Questions for another time, or maybe she'd be dead before it mattered to her.

"Dentley! Fall back to me!" Mai yelled out, rifle up.

He had topped off his shotgun with another tube. Scavenger as he was, he knew how to fit as many shells as she could in his gear. "Moving!"

He didn't have a plate carrier however, like Mai, all he had had been a vest and his clothes beneath it, hiking boots carrying him over and down, cutting too far into the firing angle from the Reaper filled, but quickly draining hallway. Not all had gone, however. A single Reaper, a woman, had peeked up, holding her pistol offside, but it shot rain true before Mai could take her out.

Dentley had seem to freeze in place before his entire body recoiled, jerking right. Mai had returned the favor, putting one shot through the chin of the Reaper that did it, she collapsing onto the ground to make for number seven.

"FUCK!"

Mai knew the feeling that Dentley had just gone through: the hottest burn, the piercing pain, how wet everything got the second a bullet punched through skin and flesh. The spurt of blood and where it came from biting through his suit jacket, and the fact that he had still been screaming and running, had beaten down any fear within Mai about having lost a man.

Dying was for the other side, and if she died it wouldn't be her problem anymore.

Dentley had made his way back behind Mai, blood leaking all the while as from one of his pockets he had torn open a fabric loop: a tourniquet, threading his right arm through it and up above his elbow before cinching it down.

"Fucking- went RIGHT through! SHIT!"

Mai had continued to peer down as she had stood in front of Dentley, he crouched down in the dark as he had ripped out a bandage as well and wrapped it around the long of his arm on the wound itself, it running deep red immediately before it again was covered.

"Missing chunks and shit, nothing to pack."

"You good? Your hand still up?" She didn't want to sound like a bitch, but it was in the middle of combat. She had no choice but to ask if he could still fight. He growled once, the meek and otherwise polite man, growling as adrenaline surged through him. He had killed, he had been shot. Dentley was no initiated, a grit to his voice. He had reaffirmed by using his right hand to hold up his shotgun, fingers still going.

"I'm up. Fuck-! You never told me how much this shit hurts, Ghoul!" To be fair when she had been shot in the stomach, she had already been nulled to most of the pain by the adrenaline and the rush itself. If there was pain it had all been in recovery or she had forgotten about it already.

"Right."

A Reaper tried crawling down the middle of the hall, away from them, a hole in his heart that quickly spelled his doom, collapsing in a wet slam and a horrid groan. She had slammed back her bolt, catching the unfired round before thumbing in more. The clicks had echoed as gunfire continued steadily upstairs. They needed to get up to Tammy.

In battle there was only time to think about the battle itself, not its effects. Dentley had been of the mind to wonder still, however. "Thought Gearten told you to not start shit."

She slammed the bolt forward home, topping off her sniper rifle. "Not my fault. If there's a chance Mrs. Kino's baby is at all-"

The same old story with Mai. "I know, I know. Just, let's get on with it."

The worst of the bleeding was stymied, but clothing had covered the worst of it from being revealed. A piece of Dentley's arm had been lost and she wondered if he could see bone.

Dentley had still his sensibilities taking point as Mai covered behind, walking backward to their side's stairwell, Dentley kicking in the door to a crack that echoes upward through the building's spine.

She drew her pistol, ready as Dentley circled the stairway up to the second floor as Tammy's LMG kept pumping. He popped the door, but before going in he yelled out, "Tammy!"

"Yep!" She screamed out in return, halfway crouched behind an overturned desk as her machine gun kept going, the line of bullets fed into it rattling like a snake.

Before her on her floor lay another three bodies and several hundred bullet holes down the other end.

Tammy never learned how to shoot, but because of that she had been the best machine gunner on that side of Seattle.

Mai had tapped on Tammy's shoulder, relieving her of her firing position as she ducked back behind into an office to let the red barrel of her gun cool. With the fire stopped a Reaper had peered a look out of the corner of his cover, but Mai had been there, white hot lightning in her hand that turned red when it went through his head.

"See any go up?"

"No! Got at least another handful of cocksuckers down there!"

"Ten." Mai had said once, still peering down her scope at a locked down ground of Reapers. She was good at keeping count.

"What?!"

A Reaper had tried to cross the hall. They didn't. Trigger pull, gun shot. Mai's breathing had been on a one-two-three intake, outtake. Slow was smooth, smooth was fast, and all she needed to steady herself in a fight.

Bolt pulled back and another round chambered before the dead man had stopped wriggling on the floor.

"Nine."

A pack was dangerous more to those within it. Five man fireteams was what she had often allocated out in the war and the Reapers clump of twenty-five and dwindling had proven her right. Safety in numbers was an illusion when it came to a gunfight where no one knew what was happening and the impetus for each person to do something came as such a tight tactical debt with coordination that it frayed group think. Mai for the last year thrived on tugging on those frayed lines.

The Reapers were being thinned out to nine, but at nine that was the Reaper's cue to fight back, finally, properly. Three of them at once popping out of cover down their hallway and letting loose a flurry that had sent Mai barreling back into the stairway for cover with Dentley as Tammy found cover in a close room.

On their side had been the elevator bank to the rest of the hospital, and just down the way: a locker room for the staff with showers.

Firefights were never ideal, building fighting less so. What the Reapers were thinking moving up here no one would know but the providence of God but there was no God here. Only them. Only soldiers now bringing their fights against each other because of such a simple thing of territory and want.

Dentley bled through his bandages, the grip on his shotgun tight making blown open veins pump. Smoke in the air makes them all ghosts, puff cloud manifestations come from each shot sent down range and bullet holes that land back.

A Reaper lays dead in the middle of the floor. Bigger than her. She makes a note as she, firing off one shot to get the crack of her bullet to down heads, her left hand had gone to her front-left of the battle belt and ripped by memory alone a Federation hand grenade, tossed all the way down behind cover and doorways, metal shell clanging against ceramic floors.

"It's a nade! It's a FUCKIN-" The Reaper screamed as one noticed it fall behind their line.

The great concussive boom went off and it shook down the building to its core, and then it never stopped.

Dentley had peered out with his shotgun into the hallway leading down into the locker room, eight rounds of buckshot tearing it all the way down as tiles and glass from the lights and ceiling above continue to rain:

A single Lord had, caught in the blast, stumbled out of room dazed but had caught four of the shotgun shells, the first peppering his back, making him rigid in the pain of being blasted, but the rest had kicked his body down several feet from where he had stood in a bloody mess.

The second the slide of his shotgun locked back Dentley threw himself back into his room as Mai took a knee and peered down from the stairway door and opened up in a mad minute firing spree. The body of the Lord that had fallen had been torn up more as all the rest ducked back behind the distant lockers and the corners of the locker room. It was a cacophony without end as her rifle dumped round after round down, echoing back and forth. She shook her hip violently, "Dentley!". What had shook the most was the small, apple sized pouch that Dentley had immediately gone to and unhooked, taking its contents.

The vision behind her eyes had gone white with the pure stimuli with a battle as she went through the cycle of trigger pull and bolt rack until by instinct alone she had snapped back into the stairway as her magazine ran out, barrel smoking as Tammy had swung back out into the hallway, machinegun at her hip, spraying downward as she strafed forward to a room further down, falling onto the floor as Mai reloaded and racked the bolt back.

She found Dentley's white eyes as he had thumbed shells back into his shotgun and they knew what they were doing- the grenade Dentley had taken out had been tossed back to her had been her as Dentley peaked down the hallway again and unloaded more thunderous booms, Mai biting down on her own teeth as he pulled the pin on the grenade and had ran out down the hallway in a dead sprint, sliding to a stop by the dead man as she had thrown the grenade into the locker room proper. Her head had felt the dead man's ribcage as she hunkered down.

Two seconds passed and another explosion had gone off inside the building, followed by screams.

Through her body, eyes closed, she felt two pairs of footsteps run up behind her followed by fellow gunfire, when she looked up Dentley had taken in front of her as Tammy unloaded and unloaded from her hip unending.

There had been a row of lockers that had been partly visible from the doorway, the tip of a Lord's gun barrel poking up from the side as more dust and debris filled the air, each time multiplied as seconds of Tammy's machinegun kept spewing fire. Mai had yanked Tammy's shoulder, sending the fire askew before she paused, stopping her, but not before she threw herself into the doorway and into the locker. Blood and shrapnel had already painted the walls, the color of mint green and red forming into each other with specks of dirt as her right arm collided into the locker, throwing all of her body weight into it.

The Lord on the other side, dazed, had seen the locker fall toward him, his body throwing him out, but into the line of fire as a shotgun slug took off the right side of his face. As he fell his rifle dropped to the ground besides Mai, scooped up as she fought through the impact pain of falling on the locker as it collapsed on the floor.

She yelled, but her sound could not fight the warfare as she collapsed onto the floor right of the locker, coughing, clouds of dust forming in front of her mouth as she threw herself onto her feet into the inner wall of the U-shaped locker room.

She had killed men in this room before, and she could do it again.

This rifle was familiar to her. Federation standard. Bullpup. Good for close quarters.

She had racked the bolt back once, clearing and then loading the chamber as she quickly glanced back at the body she took this from, still very much dying. No openly visible spare magazines on them and she wasn't going to risk a pat-down as gunfire still erupted.

"What's fucking going on in there?!" There was a radio on his body, and it screamed of other Lords.

She shifted down the locker rows to the far side of her corner of the room, the small inner hall to the other half of the locker room occupied as two men tried to transfer over to her side: lined up for her as she hadn't even had the time to fully shoulder her rifle, a long burst of gunfire erupting into them. She could see the shock in their eyes as they died, the man in front almost collapsing onto her as the bullets ripped through them.

"ONE INSIDE! ONE INSIDE!"

A woman on the other end peeked into that inner hall with her shotgun, seeing Mai and popping off a shot that had blown into the falling back of one of her compatriots, Mai again throwing herself back into cover as she let the rest of the magazine go into the inner hallway.

One mag in her pistol, two spare. She drew her sidearm as she hugged the wall, her teeth sick of the recoil enough that she felt like if she untightened her jaw they would all fall out.

A hand had reached out from the corner of the inner hallway in her direction, holding a submachine gun and depressing the trigger wildly. Mai had ducked the second it came out, pistol up and out and aimed at the submachine gun as a flurry of trigger pulls resulted in a metal spark and shrapnel of a gun being shot. Mai crawled forward, pulling herself along until she peered back around the corner, finding a woman whose hand had been torn up from taking one in the hand, winging in pain as she looked down at remained of it instead of down the corridor line. Her mistake, Mai pulling her gun down the corridor and letting loose a burst into her side. The lockers behind her were painted red as she pushed up and forward, split-second glances to the left and right of her clearing the way as on the left, Reapers still continued to look down the way toward Tammy and Dentley. Her hands tightened around the polymer grip of the 10mm pistol and let loose the rest in the magazine against the two Reapers peering down: right into their backs and sides and eventually, one's head. The body of the one that had been headshot hit the floor as his gun was still firing, rigor mortis sending the gunfire from his carbine all the way up to the ceiling before it locked empty and open. The one remaining standing screamed out in pain as rounds punched through him, falling back, swinging so that with one arm he let loose another flurry of rounds in Mai's direction. She had seen the shift before it happened, ducking back behind the corridor wall as she dumped her pistol mag and held another one in to reload before the gunshots stopped.

Shuffling from the right of the lockers against the windows. Mai had back pedaled, getting an angle, a single Reaper slunk along the sides of the inner corner and not anticipating her getting the angle. He shocked himself forward, offering his head and neck for targets which had been blown through with two pistol shots, his body slumping over to the window in a smear before onto the floor entirely.

The last Lord, injured, body on autopilot, ran right out into the side of the room visible from the entry doorway, the left side of his body torn up by Tammy and Dentley before he knew what mistake he made. The wet slam of a skull exploding lets her know how that remaining Reaper was dealt with, the silence that follows the sound of his body collapsing ushering in four seconds of pause, as if all engaged needed a breath to take.

"Vernon?! Emily?!"

Reapers call out for the dead inside from deeper, and she alone keeps quiet as gunfire rains from Tammy still on that side of the hall.

"Ghoul?! Still with us?!" Dentley had called out over the radio in between shotgun blasts. She only taps on her radio several times, moving during bursts of fire to conceal her movement deeper into the locker room. She had stepped over the man who had tried to push her on the right side, an older hunting shotgun in his arms that kept him propped up. Scooping it up, the shells for it had been drenched in his own matter, kept in a pocket along its sling. She weighed it in her hands as she pushed on, she hadn't heard a shotgun fire yet, so the tube had probably been full as she shook off the pieces of grey matter on it.

"Vernon?! Emily?! God fucking dammit!" Again, the voice called from deeper down. She pushed right still as the voice died down, and then all at once she exploded along the back wall toward the showers and where the voice had come from:

A man, a young man, as usual. Wasted youth. Him or her.

She chose herself. She rose the shotgun to her shoulder as her momentum brought her against the back line of lockers, bracing her as the young man, the white arm band of his flowing tried to get his assault rifle around to get her. She had him dead to rights and exercised it: 12 gauge buck. Mai Gul did not believe much in life, but she believed in a shotgun and what it did to people. Perhaps knowing she was to shoot first the Reaper raised his arm, the arm with the armband, up to his face, recoiling, as if it would protect him. It wouldn't, it didn't. A shotgun, as evidenced by Dentley's fire, was an explosion in such a small place, and this one she picked up had been just the same as the man's arm blew into ribbons before his body behind it, flesh chewed up as he keeled back, onto the floor, and locked up. Tammy's line of fire was uninterruptable, and even as he lay dead machine gun fire peppered his body still.

The showers led inward into the building, the entrance to it obscured by the man she just shot, he falling leaving it wide open for one last Reaper to poke out, she caught without another shell chambered. She swore. She didn't know if she swore but just as fast as she had thrown herself against the locker wall, she had thrown herself off from how she pushed off, the whizz of the bullets breaking glass behind her like fire on her heels. The shockwave of them cracks against her back and she nearly trips over the dead body of the man she took the shotgun from as she pumps it once, shell out, shell in.

She hears the rushing of boots behind her as the Reaper gives chase and she cuts across and down, praying that Tammy recognizes it's her as she crosses into the once open line of fire. She doesn't die immediately when she does step out, pointing her shotgun back where she came and firing once pre-emptively at empty space, only for the Reaper to pop out and pepper the wall behind her as she moves herself, steel and ceramic sparking and flaying by gunfire. Her hand slams back the pump once to go again but as she jerks herself to avoid the gunshots the momentum locks two shells, jamming the action as she swears in a smear of tongues and dashes left, sending herself back down the next corridor of lockers over. She doesn't know what the hell she is doing as she runs, as she screams and yells, but the Reaper that survives almost shifts over fast enough to catch a full spray as in the last ten feet, the last bullet before the gun runs dry finds home and she feels a sledgehammer wind up, shock through her side faster than light. Momentum alone keeps her going into the man, her head ducked down and colliding with his chest as she brought her arms around. She can feel her face scratch against the hard surface of his gun as she sandwiches it between her head and his stomach, but it's no matter, the pressure let's go as her feet take her, and she hears glass shatter.

There was one place to go as she pushed and rushed: out the window.

To her, falling was weightlessness faux. Falling was freedom from Gravity, if only by trick alone. Falling was a false home, because in Space, there was not falling, there was only floating. She flies out the window with a man she intends to kill, and in that Mai Gul feels at home before Gravity takes her, just like Zeon told her it would.

She doesn't have a soul, she thinks, but she does have a body, and it is dragged down all the same.

Glass breaks, a man screams, and two bodies hit the pavement below as Mai shuts her eyes and angles her head up so she doesn't break her neck in the precious half a second she has to consider her actions.

Her hands hit the pavement first, only to be crushed by the weight of the man taking the worst of it. Stitching reopens, an unintelligible warble comes out of her mouth as she feels fire in her chest and the sound of a bone going through flesh rips clothing. She crumpled into the man as a pad, and whatever snapped she didn't know if it was him or her. Maybe both, maybe it was with the shockwave of searing blue fire pain that went from her midsection to the rest of her body.

Both him and her tangle together for seconds after the impact, and, as she slides her hands out from beneath him, she kicks her legs, sending herself backwards and immediately seeing where his gun landed: not too far away, just behind her. As she leaves him, she drags a magazine out of his pocket for his gun as she feels her sniper rifle drag against concrete on the back, wood whining as she shuffled toward the rifle. She doesn't care to look and see why her stomach feels wet again, or why her plate carrier feels soaked. The ceramic plate beneath it is shattered, but that means it had done its job.

She had been shot and adrenaline alone kept the pain away from taking her in the dark, but there is a hollowness that seems to drag her left arm, and as she tries to move it, she can feel that her shoulder is not where it should be.

Her senses bow and ebb from there to not, and as her hearing returns to her momentarily from the sheath of pain she hears Tammy scream her name.

Another Colt Federation Bullpup, its front sight sheared off from impact but otherwise usable. She gathered it up into her arms, hand finding the paddle for the magazine release and dropping it before slamming in a new one. The hand that Murph had stabbed had its stitching open all over, and the inside of her glove is becoming increasingly warm and damp as she rolls partly over to shuffle back toward the lobby, back toward the PMC, up the concrete steps that had grown a hundred times more difficult to traverse as she held a rifle weakly, out toward the line of cars left by Reapers dead.

"Nnh." Was all she could form in language and no doubt Tammy couldn't hear that, crawling on her arms back to the hospital lobby with her rifle in one hand and her sniper rifle in the other. She dragged herself like a carcass as the spit from her mouth turned from bone white to red, and by the time she was tasting it again the steps had become too much, and so she settled, watching the man, pancaked, blood pooling on the ground with him, turn himself over himself and started to crawl away in the opposite direction. A bone from his elbow stuck out like broken plastic, and each time he used that arm to move it would come further out. She watched him through the rear sight pip of her rifle as he got to the bumper of one of the trucks, taking his un-broken arm to haul himself up, onto his feet shakily.

Rushing footsteps behind her: the jingle of ammunition. It was Tammy.

"Son of a bitc-!"

"Don't!" Mai had slapped Tammy's MG down with her words, only at the cost of a spurt of blood coming out of her mouth she had ignored.

"What-?! Why?"

Mai had known what a dead man walking looked like. She lived with one. The red dripping line he left getting only more and more pronounced as his arms and legs gave out any control as he walked, shambled, away from them, and then even his head began to gag and loll before, eventually, he fell to his knees, collapsed.

She'd spent too many moments watching people die after being shot: that brief five or ten seconds when the brain had been doing its best to continue even as it flickered gone.

A rule: don't waste ammo on the dead.

A glob of spit and blood had followed to the ground shortly after from Mai's mouth, leaning on Tammy's leg. The fight was done, and for about the dozenth time in her life Mai was dragged into a hospital.

---

"Left arm is dislocated. Help me unfuck it." Mai wasn't even sure those were the words that came out for her, but Tammy got the idea as Mai had been dropped to the floor, her left arm offered as Tammy's boot came against her side.

Mai wasn't a loud person, but she had been prone to exceptions, screams echoing through hallowed halls along with the crack of her bones being set.

It had been an explosion compared to the slow drip of Dentley's arm, he set on one of the lobby's waiting chairs. He was as well settled as he could be, a tourniquet at his elbow as he had already been bandaging it up with mouth and remaining hand.

"Ghoul, you good?"

She grunted an affirmative to Tammy, leaving her to get set with Dentley for what treatment he needed. The pain surging through her numbed her and yet set her on fire at the same time, a wave going through bone and blood until it left her airheaded, nauseous, but alive, very much alive. No gunshot wounds, not bleeding, but something had felt broken in her.

Her hand ripped open her IFAK on the back of her battle belt, the IFAK dumping itself onto the ground with its innards: "Hemostatic. Take the hemostatic. And your gun. Give-!" She had half ripped Tammy's LMG off of her as the woman understood Mai would cover them from more if it came down to it. Adrenaline had made the weight of the massive weapon feel negligible.

"Fuck me, guess I'm only gonna be good as a teacher now." Dentley's words are half groans and half him dealing with the pain. "It's my god damn picking arm." Tammy rips open the hemostatic as she applies it to his wounds as used bandages go back to the ground. Dentley's teeth grinding and Tammy holding her breath fill the room as Mai can barely stand, and at last falls to the ground on her stomach with the LMG. A burst of spit comes out of her mouth, onto the ground, but it's no matter as she settles Tammy's machinegun with its bipod and stares out. The sound of rushing boots fast approaching that makes Tammy pick up Dentley and throw him behind the counter facing the door.

Mai can feel the warm sweat of Tammy's palm beneath her own now as she rests her cheek into the stock, staring out into light that blinds.

She would kill them all.

Kill them all.

Kill any who stood in her way.

How many Zeeks had tried to back her into a corner? How many now lay dead as scenery in Seattle? And before that? How many Federation grunts on Guardian Banchi bled out on concrete on that wide tarmac that became a killing field cultivated by her.

Her vision goes red, and she likes it.

"Caramel!"

And like so many of life's great joys, they are ripped away from her as those words are yelled out from those beyond her gaze, about to come into view.

"Caramel god dammit!" Those that came running up yelled out.

"Candy!" Mai responded. Call and repose. A technique taught to her from the Academy spread now through those that fought with her. She eased off of Tammy's LMG as backed by the light outside, the figures, like an illusion, appear from the streets. At first blush, they are not guerillas. They are the Federation.

Yet it is not. Even heady with pain, Mai knows what the Federation smells of.

This is a different stench. Potent, and vile, distilled.

A.K Gully of 1 Pavilion and his militia men have arrived in the skin of the Federation.

In a darkening day even his tattoos, black ink and all, burned brightly.

His militia men are those of Seattle hailing from a right-wing belief of an ancient, Americana folk tale. With gun and will alone an invader to the great American way could not only be fought off, but killed, and made piece meal, regardless the government, in the name of an abstract individual freedom that didn't seem, to Mai, all that far off from the jackboot. A battle fantasy of a heroic war had been delivered to them by Zeon, and A.K Gully joined them, and more than that now, led them.

One of the Reapers that had been shot in the opening seconds of the engagement in the lobby had moaned, groaned, turned over on his side as Gully walked in with his group, only for the man to put his boot on the dying man's neck, and another gunshot had rattled through the man's guts by him.

Mai didn't waste bullets on the dead, but Gully wanted to savor each kill. His sharp look, dark hair and beard framing his face had matched the beast of his ink, looking to Mai, and she had only looked to him as the Ghoul.

She and him, especially, held no pretense to the idea that in another, very possible life, they could've ended up on opposite sides.

For now, though, they were not.

"Ghoul, you green?" They were soldiers, once. Proper, tried and true. He more so, but she more so than others. He had pat his knuckles in one tap onto her shoulder as she had weakly risen up.

"Fuck no." The pain was in her mouth and no amount of spitting would get it out.

"No pen?"

"What?"

"You've been fucking shot."

She felt the pain, but heeded not for the reason at all. Only when Gully pointed it out had she realized that her plates along her right side had been crumpled, and the sound within the plate bag had been crinkly, like glass almost. Glass too had been embedded, but none had cut through. She winced, now cognating why she had been hurting, stumbling once against the near wall as A.K Gully looked on and around. Half the dozen strong group who had not gone over to Tammy and Dentley taking a knee and heading back outside to secure a perimeter, while others went to the bodies of each Reaper and raked them over.

"Some upstairs too." Tammy said, backing off, letting a more medically inclined militiamen take a look at Dentley's grisly wound, before calm had fully settled in however a yell from outside:

"Technicals! Incoming up the hill!"

Gully stole a glance from Mai, tearing her over and out the door, she following with Tammy's LMG, up to the trucks that had originally come up. Brain and blood from those cut down near them, especially from the headshot Mai had landed in the first seconds of the fight with her rifle, remained on the hood of these trucks, all outfitted for guerilla war with welded metal and cages.

More like their kind had made their meandering way up the streets, roaring.

Guns were posted up, cover taken, at the very front of the convoy a sleek white mega cab, lifted nearly several feet off the ground with massive tires roared up to them like a band of horses and cowboys, all of them bearing the scythe moon mark. Eighty people, easily, between over a dozen trucks, that white monstrosity hanging off of its side the same unremarkable man with a wild face: Murph.

On his hip still had been the long, sword-appearing object that had been Zeon's prototype flash rifles, also dressed down in white like ivory. The cars had rolled up, but none had fired as Murph raised his hand up once despite the blood thirsty Reapers that came with them, all of them as rag-tag group of guerillas as one would expect to define the term.

Many of them were gang members, but that generalization had lasted this long in the war.

Murph too, like Mai, had been an excuse. He had been his own type of leader, and one that promised the death of Zeeks in his own way. Even those unaffiliated with the criminal before the war had joined him, for in their minds the lawless of a society were the ones most likely to survive in a genocidal war.

Just as he had appeared to Mai in the dark in Jefferson Park, throwing her around in the Dock Market, his enforcer Kell had been right at his back, disembarking from the truck as others looked on in gunner positions and firing positions as well.

Gun to gun, the Conclave group had been outgunned and manned, but that didn't mean much after the war with Zeon.

Murph's hand rose high and out as he looked over for one Reaper, a man, out of breath and dirty still.

Mai recognized him. He was the initial one who got away, unaccounted for by the trucks. He ran to get help no doubt, the radios in their trucks peppered by Tammy.

"I told you, Murph!" The man screamed accusations at Mai, going to Murph's side as he approached the truck line and the dead that bled below them. By the time he stopped only the hood of the cars separated Reaper from Conclave. "They came up here and started looting our shit! This is our turf!"

Murph had been quiet, unusually so as he looked up and down the line at the A.K Gully's militia men before ending on Mai.

"How's the hand?" he asked innocently, asides the situation, scratching his nose.

Mai had panted once, eye twitching as an answer. Murph had taken it, looking down at his boots and the Federation fatigue pants he wore and seeing the blood that pooled from one of his dead men. Gully's men had swept around, trying to cover as many angles as they could, but they would always be out matched. The goal then, if shooting started, to take down as many before they got got in a hellfire blaze of gun shots.

That tension, however, boiled differently with Murph there, looking down, disappointedly at the dead Reaper, a u-shaped cavity in his head, sighing. The man that got away had been on Murph's side, spewing nonsense, spewing violence, spewing how they should all be lit the fuck up right now. None of this was taken by Murph as instead he had reached out his right arm, only to throw the man onto the ground in the pool of brain and blood.

"You dumb motherfuckers-!" Murph had surprised them all, his foot pushing the surviving Reaper back into the gore as he stumbled down into it. "We ain't here in Seattle to grab hospital shit! You know that. You think we're like them? Scrounging around?! My god you fucker."

Slowly, A.K Gully had turned back to his men taking a firing position inside, some of them reporting to him by his ear that several of the Reapers inside had survived, albeit quickly bleeding out or wounded grievously.

He wanted them brought out.

"But, but Murph!"

"But the fuck what?!" Murph screamed down on the man, glancing at Mai in a look that she had long since imprinted in her memory. He was making an offering. "You think I'm mad at them for killing you?! That's all that she," The finger comes out and lands directly on her, the shadow of her boonie cap hiding her eyes from nearly all. "Does. I don't get mad at dogs because they shit. I get mad about where!"

A stark hand motion from him sends Kell to the surviving Reaper, holding him down and still in the dead man's viscera as another matter is brought up, Murph bringing his attention to those holding guns on him.

Casual. All too casual. "Ghoul, you're lucky the roads are all fucked up even more or we'd woulda been here five minutes after this started."

Reapers foamed at the mouth, and militia men waited for them to bite. Murph and Mai, however, spoke from somewhere else: They spoke on a plane of a certain type of killer. They neither respected each other, but they respected pragmatic, literal, objectional tactical capability. He looked down at the dead man and his new partner again before back to her.

"How many of them you clock?" He asked her directly.

That she could answer. "About five out here, another dozen and a half in there."

"Anyone I like?" He looked up to the PMC.

She shook her head. "No one I recognize."

Once, long ago, they had been comrades, unwillingly, but comrades all the same. In war communication had been paramount above all grudges or misgivings, and so they talked as they did. He hated Spacenoids almost as much as A.K Gully did, and he had no reservations about what it meant to work with Mai.

"Right." Murph tilted his head and the way that blood dripped out of the bottom of Mai's shirt, the plate carrier she had sporting a shattered dent. "Someone got a shot on you Ghoul. You're slipping."

"No shit." She spat out. Odd comrades, bad blood. They all spoke the same language: they hated Zeon. That had been the greatest unifier, but now nothing was shared between them but bones, but blood, and but the final constant: death. "Lotta men I just took out."

"I got more." Murph leaned on the lightbar of his truck. "Smarter no doubt than to pick a fight, to die, over some shit like this. We're all soldiers anyhow, ain't that right?" He cast his gaze between the Spacenoid cadet and the Federation deserter, and then back to his Reapers, who gave out one huff of a cry in rousing. "I don't care that you're here. You're cramping our privacy, yeah, but lucky you we got bigger shit to deal with than simple turf war shit… We're going legit, babe."

He chopped his hand at her. "Only thing legit about you are the Zeeks you kill, and even then, you're of the same type anyway." She spat back, tasting more and more iron and copper between her teeth.

Behind them, shot and bleeding out Reapers were dragged to the steps of the PMC, overlooking them all. Murph had hardly cared. None of the Reapers did. It was hard to care, it seemed, when everyone was a bastard.

"You know, according to the Feddies, that may be enough." Murph propped his elbows on the hood that Mai had set her LMG on, peering right down that well-worn barrel. "This war's gonna end, that is, if it hasn't already been decided already, and you know this all will be built right back up!" His hands and arms went wide, to the world, to Seattle, a proclamation that seemed to billow out like the exhaust of the many trucks around them. "When the Feds return, they're gonna want to talk to someone structural, someone who knows this city inside and out and knows that they can run this place. That's going to be me and my people."

The Reaper Lords, gang as they were, were still a gang in the end, an organization, a company, quickly able to be repurposed with the right amount of backing, the right amount of legitimacy. Through all of conflict history the same was done to remnant groups in war torn nations after the battle was done: The Taliban, the Nazi war machine into West German, NATO positions, puppet rulers and glorified juntas put in place because there was no other practical option.

"We don't care." A.K Gully spoke up. "We shooting out or what?"

"We're better than just this spat." Murph kept his eye down on the ground at the Reaper that ran away. "But you are intruding. Gonna say it again, this time right to your face: We want you gone, not only from here, but from all Seattle. I'm being nice here. Back before the war we used to kill people as a warning, and don't tell me you're better than even that because that's how you started your day Ghoul, right after coffee. I remember."

A.K Gully and her were much far alike than Mai would like to admit, because she wanted to speak again his words. But all of this was a distraction for why they were here in the first place again. "Just get on with it, or we will."

"Touchy." Murph hissed. "But go on, do whatever the fuck you're doing here, and get out of my sight. Next time we see you all we're shooting, especially if for some reason we see you poking around down here past the Kingdome at night."

"Murph, you can all of Seattle for all I fucking care." Mai finally spoke up for the sake of the Conclave, because she couldn't trust Gully to not open fire the next time he had to choose between speaking or shooting. "But the Conclave can't leave that fast. They still have people that need to be in that hospital."

"Again, I don't give a shit, lady." Murph had been exasperated as if he explained a very simple point. "The Federation isn't going to like it if two groups like us are around. There can only be one. And with from what I hear? Zeon's going to be gone sooner than we all think."

Garma's tactical reasonings, plans, are still fresh in his mind. He still believed victory was soon, but why? What had been new since he had fallen to the Earth? Before she can even continue to think between pain and anger and aggravation Murph keeps going on, "The Feds are going to deal with us, and us alone, if you're not there when we move, good. But if you are? You know how it'll be. Clocks ticking."

"Fuck you." Mai spits.

"Bitch whore." Murph comes back.

More spit, more blood on the ground. "We got more business or we doing this, here and now?"

"It ain't business. Have this hospital. We'll be back by sundown, if you're not back up north, you're not going back at all." Murph had let the words sink into the Ghoul, and for once, she looked like what they called her. "Ay, yo! Let's get the fuck outta here!" Kell finally gets his boot off of the Reaper beneath him, but Murph, he does not let him stand still. "Kill this guy too. He gave me a headache coming up, being a part of all this."

Human life, after a year of war, came back down to resources and assets. Numbers. Pieces.

Easily discardable. Liabilities dealt with.

"Murph!" The man screamed out desperately.

"And those back there?" Gully motioned back to the dying, forced on their knees like hostages.

The gang leader barely gave them half a glance. "Look, I remember how triage went. They all look dead already." Murph, all at once, had been dismissive, hand going back around and twirling in the air as all his Reapers turned away and readied to drive out. "They're all yours, Ghoul. Consider it tribute to you, Mother War." In a billow of black smoke, the Reapers had left the dead, dying, and the killers. The lone Reaper that had called for them almost getting away but Gully had hopped the hood and collapsed on him, knee on the back of the man's neck as he scrambled.

"Give the word." Gully had asked the Ghoul.

A folk tale, made in real time, on the Ghoul and her meaning.

Mai Gul had given birth that day. Mai Gul had given birth to herself.

The war for Mankind had created another breed, a new type, of Human being. One not different in blood or mind or bone, but in conviction and capability. It was a type of Human being that had been so much like those born out of war past and might've been the logical continuation. But for all that Mai had denied that she was a Newtype, she could not deride or decry the simple fact that she had been a new person altogether.

Was it not the same?

Gully looked to

"Grease 'em." Words so straight they could cut. Orders so loaded, she could drown in it. The Reaper screamed.

She chooses to cut, and she chooses to drown.

She was a shooter, and her triggers hadn't always been guns. They were sometimes other men and women to her left and right, and right now, aiming at those who kneeled before them.

Gunfire rang out one more time that day in lower Seattle, and when it happened, it cut through men and women who had chosen the wrong side of the guerilla war. This was how they treated Zeon, but in the end, this was how they treated any enemy.

---

Mai is laid out in the Conclave's lobby like so many others, a courtesy blanket put over her and lifted to one side as Candy and Bo look her down, bare from waist up revealing what had been done to her. Just as Garma's great scar seemed to be an infection that had spread over his right side, Mai too had developed something similar in a wide bruise that cupped along her lower right torso all the way up to her right breast. A blackish, purple spread that revealed all the veins and the wounds beneath as if an otherworldly being propagating beneath her skin.

She's stubborn. If the events of the day didn't already reveal that, it's her insistence that she walk home, only after a partial clean up and dress down by the Conclave. Bo is very careful with the injury and the huge purple and black welt that forms right beneath her breast from where the plate in her armor caught a bullet. Bo tells her, in no uncertain terms: "You've fractured a rib."

"No shit." Through her teeth she spits out rude, and Bo only swears in her own mother tongue, Spanish, ignoring it, knowing Mai doesn't mean it.

She had walked all the way back as well with Tammy and Dentley, A.K Gully's group taking rear security until they returned to the highway bridge. It didn't help her wounds, not when she felt very structure shifting, each movement feeling like white lightning until they had gotten to the gates of the Conclave and, as they had all day, stretchers and a liter was brought out for two of the three of them to collapse on.

Dentley would be okay, but not unscathed. It was a grisly injury, but mostly flesh, no bone. It would leave an ugly mark, and, chances were, his scavenging days were over.

His injuries were worse, but yet external, easily workable. Mai had been hidden by her own body.

"Lower center on her left. Doesn't seem to be at risk of puncturing her lungs. Intercostal muscles have kept them in place, which makes sense. She's strong." Bo had pointed out the area to Candy as he kneeled, latex gloves ghosting the bruise. "Very little depression."

With the pad of his fingers Candy had found the line of the rib before barely pushing down on it.

"FUCK!" Mai had affirmed, screaming out again in the lobby.

Less people had been in there now, but damage control from the earthquake earlier had still been going on, Gearten working through the night as it came just outside.

"Yep. Really tender here." Candy affirmed. "Mai it's going to hurt, but breath in and out for me."

She immediately regrets it, ripping the bandage on herself as the breathing she does is labored, but steady, several times. "Okay that's good," Bo nods pleased, tired. She had been working all day and it showed on her eyes and scrubs. "You can breathe."

"Wish I wasn't right now." The pain is familiar, but not something she enjoyed at all. She's a mess, dirty and hurt. But she's alive, and she's not quite sure if, in her lurid clarity that is made only in pain, that alive was good.

"Mai." Candy calls for her softly, seeing and prodding enough. The bullet itself that did it is in her now ruined plate carrier, donated to the Conclave for material now. "I'm not in the position to risk you for a procedure. Nor do I think we could. The best I can do is get you narcotics."

Bo is already there with a fentanyl lollipop, taken from Federation supplies, placed in Mai's hand and closed for her as her top is already slid beneath the sheets for her to put on.

"Sorry, Doc." Mai winces still, the glacial surface of the candied bulb in her palm. She won't take it. Not yet. Candy is halfway up to a full stand when he comes back down, tilting his head with an eyebrow raised. "I'm sure Gearten's gonna bitch to you about me in the morning."

Candy smiles at that, even in agreement. "If I wanted a simple life, I would've left Seattle long ago. But that's not something I could've done."

"I'm not helping though." She groans, eyes closed, the pain absolute and unmoving.

She joins dozens of others still in similar pain from broken arms or dust inhalation.

"Sure, you have." He reassures her, but it's not enough.

Mai begs, eyes shut. "Tell me. Is Mrs. Kino okay?"

"Mai…"

"Please just tell me."

Mrs. Kino is not that far away, but far enough that she could not hear or see her. Over twenty dead, and what does she have to show for it?

It was not all for lost, thankfully.

An ultrasound machine stands ready and waiting for the right moment, and Candy decides that now it is.

They found it in the locker room, even through grenade shrapnel and gunfire. It had been stuffed into one of those lockers with other people's possibles, as if the hospital had been running out of space to hide or store its own implements. Only in battle did it turn up so Mai must think some sort of thankful that hell had broken out.

The machine had turned on, nary a scratch on it, and as Mrs. Kino slides her shirt up, the probe smoothing over her belly, Mai keeps her eyes shut and awaits the answer, just as she had that January, so long, and yet not that long ago. She had known the answer to her plight that day, but did not want to hear the answer from anyone else as if it would keep it from becoming anymore real. Here, today, she does not want to hear an answer because of the fear of it going wrong again.

Minutes pass, and she does not open her eyes. She concentrates on the pain instead to blur her mind and let Time pass her by. An eternity could've passed, but it wasn't long enough as Candy's footsteps return to her, and he reports this:

A baby kicks, and Mai Gul is okay.

---

She had to fight to go back home alone. The next step from her dismissals, her protests, had been the way she had naturally let her hand rest against the top of her pistol.

A drastic change from any disagreements she used to air. It stuns Gearten so thoroughly, seeing Mai bent over still in pain, and yet asking to let her find her own way home, that it does justify her staying at the Conclave.

It is Candy however that lets her go. He moves to him and grabs his shoulder, heavy with the day and the night to come after Seattle's quake.

"Gearten, I believe we'll be quite busy tonight. Mai, as always, will be able to take care of herself, isn't that right?"

That's always been true.

So, he lets her leave despite protests from Bo, looking on with concern meant only for Mai. Mai does not see it, already hobbling out toward her home, slowly, a step at a time as her sniper rifle drags across the ground and she fights with each breath. She has not taken the fentanyl yet, nor any of the meds that have been given to her in a paper bag with another thing of jerky. She's out of form, and because of that Win Nguyen appears to her like a ghost in that dusty city ahead of her, expectantly.

He's been busy the entire day, smaller person that he is, wriggling into ruins and debris to try and find survivors, his clothing tattered from sharp angles and stone. Only a pistol, wedged in the tension between his jean's waistband and hip is on him.

"Mai." He's heard what's happened to her, obviously. Seattle rises over them like Dali intended, crooked and battle worn.

"Leave me alone, boy." She can barely get her grit out as Win ignores and approaches her, the strength in his stride stopping her as he stands in front of her. He's stood before worse: Zeon tanks, rolling down the streets, Zakus, all to just spit in their face or the tag them with a spray of paint. He could stand in front of Mai when she was being unreasonable.

He knows why, arms crossed. She looks miserable, even to him, and it pains him so.

"I'll walk you to downtown. University Avenue. Then I stop and go home. Is that good enough?" Win has fought his whole life to remain a child, to remain the youth that he is, even if it skews him, even if it drives him mad. But he can't fight the reality that makes him put his feet down and stand before Mai. War has aged him, and he draws from that age now. "Won't see where you live, won't get tangled up with that Zeek of yours, aight?"

Mai cannot fight him, of all people. He waits for his answer, and she gives it before she topples over on the street.

"Okay."

"Okay?" Win reaffirmed.

She nodded, and he was satisfied as he gently took her arm and walked with her, taking her sniper rifle onto his back. It's a slow pace, they move like shadows in moonlight, barely perceptible as rescuers and Conclave members move around them sparsely in the streets to duties and needs elsewhere until it thins out, closer to downtown. A step at a time is all Mai can take as she can feel that piercing pain in her side seem to shock with every move.

"I was shot too, you know." Win speaks.

"No shit?" Young as he is, he seems indestructible, and she had seen him get tossed around by Zeon explosives and from his own nimble movements.

"Before the war." He surprises her. The story he tells is this:

---

I never really was a part of the Reapers, you know this, but I still like hung out with Torald and his guys back then. Much more fun that way. It's how I spent most of my days when I wasn't in my boarding school. Not like they could catch me anyway, even the cops, down in Little Saigon.

We had a lot of fun, because those Reapers, or at least, who they would become, they were just like any other gang, you know? Bunch of young guys and kids with maybe a little too much money and not enough care. It was better that way, I think, anyway. Drifted from apartment to apartment to block to block, you feel what I'm saying? Jumping around roof tops and running through the streets booling out.

We was free and nobody ever told us what to do except when the managers came around and started telling us to get off of our lazy asses and sell product.

I was able to stick around because I told the other kids at my boarding school where they could buy drugs, you know? So I let them have their opportunities and I was clean, I never sold anything to anyone but uh-

Yeah.

Anyway I was hanging out with a bunch of guys around, year, year and a half ago. It was the summer. I was hanging in one of the apartments down by Beacon and the A/C was out and it fucking shitty and so the older boys figured we go out downtown, around here actually. This was after dark, so we did what we usually did, just messed around, car surfed, picked pockets, shit like that. But then we got to the shops over at Pine and 6th, and a whole bunch of us, twelve ghetto ass teens got up in marble stores with those real golden lights above 'em. Real bougie stuff. I forget what I was doing specifically before then because I might've been a little drunk, a little high, but…

We were looking up some jewelry store, you know, doin' some window shopping obviously, and a security guard came out and just started blasting-

…

Yeah, just started blasting. We weren't doing nothing just looking and looking, but apparently he didn't like us looking so when he wanted us gone he just started blasting.

I didn't know it was a gun at first, but the older ones, the ones who knew, they were off like five seconds before the rest of us did.

We coulda taken the pot belly bastard but you know the crowd just went and I ran and we ran all the way back to Beacon Hill and maybe the cops were called but there was no reason for it but when we finally got back to where we started the night or at least where the cops won't follow, and I was fine, we were all out of breath, but then someone went ahead and pointed out there was a huge tear in my jacket across side of my chest.

Son of a bitch threaded a shot between my arm and my torso, about a few inches away from my heart.

And oh man, when I got told that, I- I don't know. That got me going, felt angry, thought I'd go run all the way back and beat the shit outta the guy, but then a second after that I felt scared as shit, then the next second I felt like just laughing it off, but the thing is I could never just settle on one thing and it became a million things all happening at once and I couldn't stop thinking about it and-

It wasn't good.

Now, Torald didn't show up, but he and Murph were always on at least talking basis, because by the time we got back to the apartment he was there with his guys asking us what the hell we were doing and the other boys told him the truth but apparently I looked real rough and shaky and. Yeah I was fucked up.

Panic attack, maybe. I don't know I never had one before or since. But Murph saw. He was there checking on us on Torald's behalf. I ain't never met him or Torald so I thought I was in trouble when he came swinging by but, that's not what he did.

No, he, he sat me down, and he just… He kept talking to me. He wasn't talking gospel or great things or anything, just talking, telling me to focus, and-

You know this probably wasn't the first time he tried to calm someone down after almost dying. So, he knew what to do. Concentrated on his words and not anything else, and that helped me. A lot. He kept talking till I got annoyed and till I could breath straight, and after that he left and told us to not cause any more shit that week.

…

He doesn't remember me. Saw him about a year after that and didn't seem to, nor in the thick of the war. But I know where Murph is coming from, a bit. He took care of people in his own way and dealt with them otherwise, if you know what I mean.

People get what they want from him, as long as they work it out.

When the world went to shit, he and Torald always used on that assumption that the world was shit, so they felt safe with him.

Guy made me feel safe at that moment, so it's uh, just weird, knowing what he really is, and what he's done.

He did teach me one thing though: If someone's in a bad way, just keep them distracted, keep talking.

---

Win had finished his story and he had been smart about it in a way that made sense in the end for Mai.

She wasn't hurting that bad and the blocks began to smooth a little faster by. Her left hand, weakly, moved to ruffle his hair and he smiled back, but she still had an image to keep up, pinching as she finished a few rakes.

"You weren't just window shopping, boy." She knows better than that and it annoys her still that he would try to lie.

"Alright alright," Win relents. "Fine maybe it was like 3AM, and I mighta' been holding a brick, but I don't ain't throw it yet."

"So, you were planning on throwing it."

"Shut up. Jeez let me just do my thang."

They were quiet for the next few minutes, the sound of a city alive and gurgling quietly tempering them both before Win spoke up again.

"Being shot at. I think it did me good." Win is quiet, considering his words, believing in them. "It let me like, know how close I can get to death. I was RIGHT there, you know. That bullet coulda killed me. And if it was like that, that means everything is gonna be fine for me until it isn't, you know?"

He grumbled a little bit before remembering the last year. "Also it got me used to it when Zeon came."

Silver linings were always pulled by Win, and Mai wished that she could see the world as he did. Either way, however, the picture wasn't pretty. Seattle had not been spared, nor any one in them.

University Avenue. Close enough that she could go the rest of the way. Win knew it, stopping on the corner, carefully placing her sniper across her back again, but he held, hugging onto her back, hands very respectfully around her waist as she felt his forehead dig into her back. "Mai, please."

Please what? Unspoken.

But it was everything. Win had sounded so small and Mai could not help but feel like she already failed.

A baby was okay today, and for that, if she did just bleed out in the Conclave it would've been fine to her.

Not to Win, however. Perhaps not to a whole lotta people.

"Go home, boy." She tells him, but lets him hold onto her for a few more minutes. Someone at home waits for her, but Garma can wait as long as she demands.

---

Forty flights of stairs and she's delirious at around floor twenty-three. All the wounds, all the care that Win has given her seems to be unwound as she ascends what would otherwise be a harmless walking commute. It brings her to her knees several times, white knuckled gripped against the railing as her breathing becomes more and more labored and the darkness reaches around her eyes. Each step seems to bump her broken rib just a little more, but all she could was fight through it. What takes her maybe five minutes on any other day takes her nearly an hour, catching her breath as her lungs bump against the fracture and put her down. Snot runs from her nose and her eyes tear. Her brain seems to shut down every few moments before she mentally tears herself upright.

She's not sure if she's babbling by the time she makes it to her floor, but by the time she opens the door, stumbling in against the foyer's wall in a loud crash, she is insane.

"Mai!" The concern in Garma's voice almost makes her laugh, but if she were to breath that hard blood would be blown out on the floor from her mouth. Sweat drips from her forehead, and her hand are the devil's play thing. The metallic and then soft thud exchange between Garma's socked foot and then his crutches echo closer and closer rapidly as she keeps her head down, the boonie cap dropping off to the floor until all at once, he is close enough.

She draws her pistol.

"Mai-?" Garma hears the click of the retention lose. A familiar sight: that pistol, aimed at him, and he is motionless as Mai tips her head up and he sees a woman in pain, in more ways than just one. He knows what it looks like when someone goes mad. He's seen it before in those hospitals: from his troops that have taken week long bombardments and fought for their lives on an unfamiliar world. Here, pain has made Mai Gul manic, her teeth bared, and the whites of her eyes overpowering her lush green irises.

"If I die- it's not before seeing you dead first." Her voice rumbles with its Arabic tone, and it sounds demonic, panting, breathy. Garma hears her pain, even as his hands slowly rise up flat.

"What- what happened?" he asks instead, a cold sweat of his own forming at his brow. This might be it. She's not wearing her armor, her gloves are run ragged, and the carbon scoring of the gun she holds on to him is a fresh dark soot. She had been busy today in her unique trade. "Mai Gul." He says her name, but she does not answer as she breaths, pants, her back falling, and rising, as her throat runs itself dry.

Behind him, a cup of coffee lays lukewarm with dinner: biscuits and sliced mincemeat, beans too, canned spinach.

All she does is look at him, through the iron sight of her pistol, one handed, and knows how easy it would be to just do it, right now. To give herself what she needed, what she yearned for, after a day that has tested her and a pain that seems to grow within her, reminding herself of pain long gone.

"I don't want you to die." He whispers, and that is loud enough for the both of them as he leans on the wall carefully, unsure of what to do, hands unmoving. "Mai, are you dying?"

Why do you care?

She huffs, she breaths, she aims still at him as all at once her breath rises to a fever pitch that is like an eternal feedback within her head that makes her crumple, hands to her face, the cold steel in one of them pushing against her nose and forehead. She groans, she cries. She wants to give up.

Her thumb depresses the magazine release of the pistol accidentally with the pressure and it clatters to the floor in a steel thump, and only then does the rest of the pistol tumble out of her hand down to the floor as Garma winces and tries to angle himself away from the muzzle as it lands. No misfire happens. It's his cue to approach her hearing her pained babbling.

"I'm not dying before you."

Words come back to him, ghosts of hers:

She'll be there when you die.

An almost memory. Garma feels them but does not know from where. A random, errant thought he brushes away as he can feel her burning as she approaches all at once within arm's reach.

"Well, I'd rather you not die at all." Carefully he loops his left arm beneath her right, and she cedes from the wall to him. A dangerous proposition given he's down a foot, but he wills himself straight. The sweat from her face gets on his neck as she leans in on him, defeated.

"Was shot." She spurts out quietly, more teeth than lip. "My plate caught it but- Fuck."

"Shower?" He asks, she groans, and takes it as a yes.

It's hard and slow, maneuvering the several yards from hallway to bathroom, but Garma manages as Mai slogs along with him. The city is on her, and as she is on him, the city goes to him now in her sweat and soot and smell. She smelled like the war, with all of its sulfur and dust and gunpowder, but it is a smell that is distinctly her. He maneuvers her into the standing shower, up against the wall facing the shower head, but before he can thread his arm out, her own arm keeps him there in a desperate squeeze.

"I don't give a shit just, water on- Please."

With her hand on his back, she can feel him breath, and it's that rhythm that she attaches to, that she closes her eyes and listens to, feels beneath her palm.

Garma doesn't hesitate despite the consequences, reaching across, letting the crutch fall out of the shower as he flipped the lever for water to go. The both of them are sprayed immediately, and she winces, holding him there tighter.

"Still gonna kill you, still gonna kill you, still gonna kill you…" It's what she holds onto as she breathes the pain out, her forehead against his shoulder. A promise. A reminder. Something to keep her mind on as the water flows over her and numbs her. "I'm going to kill you." Whispers, but he hears them. Whispers, but she doesn't even realize she's saying it.

Garma's left hand holds the broad curve of her back still, the slump of her giving them equal height for once. She's a tall woman, and he can't quite but help see a little bit of Kycilia in her, but there were other times he could think of his sister as he holds a woman in a shower as she lets the pain wrack through her. The grip she has holding herself up on his own back is tight, her fingers nails digging through his sleeve, but she holds solid and still until all at once she cannot hold anymore, and she slowly slides from her back down the shower wall and onto the floor below.

The breathy grunt that comes from her is weak, and she is finally gone.

This is what she looks like when she loses, Garma puts it to memory, but it's a pathetic sight, and he can only imagine that he had looked worse.

He slides down with her, unable to stand on his own, scooting over to the opposite end of the shower beneath the head to try and avoid what has already wettened both of them.

Mai is like a corpse, sitting there, slumped.

Her body crumples, her arms, rising from her sides, only to fall midway give her another groan of aggravation as the dark of her skin is lightened just marginally from the water that flows over her and her soft-shell rain jacket she'd worn the entire day. It's what she wants off.

Garma sees this, reaching over. "Do you mind?"

She doesn't answer, only gives him a long look, her head slightly tilted forward as her hair shifts and covers her eyes in wet, messy strands. Of course, she minds, but she doesn't care. Her misgivings over simple things like this were gone long ago. She is a creature, not a woman; a beast, a Ghoul. Winging as she moves her arms, she lets him raise her arms for her and drag her jacket off over her head. The wetness gives her shirt grip enough that its hefts her breast up, and the sound of them slapping back down against her torso is unkind, disgusting even. She winces, and her shirt below is already soaked. A compression shirt, stinking of her remains. Surface bleeding from below her right breast has stained the tan color. The jacket was heavy, but her shirt wasn't, and she tears that off herself as well to a corner of that stall meant for only one person. Garma thinks little as her right hand goes to unbuckle her bra and rip her bindings in the same movement just after ridding herself of her shirt. Where else can he look but at her eyes. In them he finds her weakness, her failure, flickering motes of strength that manifests as scorn as she backs herself up against the glass wall and lets him do as he's told as she unhides herself.

He focuses on her face for the life of him, but it captures him all the same. Those wild eyes of hers still remain, but they are at least alive, scanning, considering him as he soaks as well.

"You've uh-" Garma sniffs once, looking up at the unlit, unused lights above in that bathroom. "You've probably seen more of me than you wanted. This uh, situation is not lost on me." Whatever air is cleared, Mai is not interested or caring in it. The ability of proper speech returns to her because she wants to drill him, to understand that important question of his life.

"You've been telling me, not only today, to stay safe when I go out." She says as water drips off her teeth. "Why?"

The water clears her whole, even as it pelts her form from above. He too is not exempt as he sits below the shower head, kept from the majority rain, but the pooling below that wets the fibers of his pants, his hair is drenched from the initial blast, stringing and clumping together in a way that has him try to bunch them behind his ears. It's a cold feeling, one that clears his nose and numbs the itch of his scars. She looks at him through black bangs and crystal vision, and he looks back with one eye.

"I do not speak in mysteries, Mai." He is quiet, his voice barely above the dripping water as it intermingles with the patter. "Have you ever known me as a man to not speak the truth? Even now. Even here. Even to you, with you."

Why? Gihren screamed that question over the radio, across all of Space and the Earth to any who would listen. He wanted to know why his brother was dead. A single word that is never answered in a way that is ever satisfactory. Why is a protest, a question that never needed to be asked amongst the wronged and the wronging. Here he is, a man guilty of the darkest wrong, and Mai gets an answer. This was not right, this could be made corrected.

An injured woman whose baby died because of the actions of a prince from space, sit across from each other in a shower running, blood thinning down the drain that had hosted much blood between them.

"Why?" Mai says again, and she speaks, the movement of her head banks her hair to cover her eyes completely.

"I've said before: I do not wish you dead."

"But why- Garma, tell me why." She knows who he is. She knows where he came from, and what he had been fighting for. She knows what he did in the name of that fight that she all so remembers she had fought with him. She wants to know why, after all this pain caused of him to her, about why he cares at all as scarlet colored pain cuts across her heart, her lungs, and the air and words that come out of her drip with malice that's cold; broken concrete rained on and dried and cracked over and over again. "Don't look away from me."

He doesn't.

She wants him to look and see her; to see the angry splotch that spreads from the bottom of her right breast like a putrid infection, black and purple flesh and skin spooling out from there that turns her skin into wilting ivory. The Human mind recognizes wounds, recognizes flesh as it pains, and Garma's mind sees it still even as it casts itself across her form like a curse.

He doesn't look away from her, and she wants to be seen: like this.

Her hand, weakly, comes to touch upon the spot of impact, and she gags again as the rip of pain flows through her like a bullet that did go through her armor. She racks her head back, and the flow of water is down her face numbing her as her hand tracks up, holding her own breast, as if reaching for the heart beneath it.

Pain, and nothing but pain, it captures her, it takes her, and Garma wants nothing more than to do something, to help, but he cannot. All he can do is as he was told:

"Don't look away." Breathlessly she says, and her hand grips herself harder. Her body snaps as if an invisible gunman has come and put a bullet in her. Her entire form twitches, and her fingers sink into her blackness, the injured flesh that was not lethal, but she wishes had killed her as she touches, she feels the only truth about her. Her eyes flinch shut and she can feel the fire spread in her, only to be overtaken by the cold from her stomach. Flashpoint Mai, and whatever wins, she has always lost.

She writhes, she bucks, she imparts the image of her suffering to him, and what is only seconds of self-infliction becomes forever.

She screams. Their glass chamber reverberates, and he knows now what she wants, what she means, and what she tells him as she shrieks, she wracks, and at last, she cries as her hand collapses to her side and her body goes just short of lifeless limp. One eye stares up from between her bangs, and Garma did not look away from her as that eye goes blank, and the pain is too much.

Mai Gul slumps to the side, her body making a wet slam.

Shower rain draws itself over her, and Garma stares at her in horror, in understanding. It bores into his head and beneath the sheen of water Mai Gul [flickers].

He has to do something for her.

The water in the shower goes off as he picks himself up, out, letting the shower mat do its best to dry his pants before he forgoes his crutch and instead opts to crawl for the expediency, rushing back into the bedroom and gathering a towel for her. She is not a woman dead by the way she groans; maybe the sound of her voice is regret, but Garma cares not as long as she's gathered up into his lap, he pulling her out onto the towel laid out. He knows what to do; it's what she had done for him, earlier on: wound still fresh, bleeding, pus filled. Her wound goes deeper than that even, but all he can do is dry her body down carefully, respectfully.

How easy it must've been, he thinks, to have fixed him, or, at least, to stabilize him.

His wounds, his loss, they had been of a physical affair. They stitched his leg closed and closed off the wounds of his finger. That's what was needed to be done, simply, to make sure he did not bleed out, or eat away to an undignified death.

The literal wound of Mai, no doubt a broken rib in his mind. Enough men of his had bragged about being shot and surviving for him to know the after effects. She hurts, but this pain was more.

He knew what she needed, crawling back out to the medical supplies she had. Spilling the contents of the plastic crate onto the ground below he finds the cold compress, ripping the package with his teeth before getting the plastic sheath and the instant-freeze material beneath it to activate with a firm slap against the ground. He readies medical tape with it too, shuffling back to Mai on the floor of the bathroom, laying across her towel as if saved from drowning.

She needs not saving, but he can do this:

The cold burn of the compress is almost unbearable to his bare flesh as he takes a hand towel to wrap it with, the stretch of tape long enough to get it across and around her torso as he pressed it upon the impact zone of her wound. She groans deeply, but her eyes do not open.

"There there." He says hurriedly. "I know, I know."

The knuckles of his right hand pass beneath the underside of her breasts as he wraps, once, twice, three times to her flesh before he is sure the cold compress would stay in place as he got ready for the next part: Dragging her over to the bedroom.

If he had two feet, it wouldn't be an issue. He's convinced that if he had been whole he could've done a roll to get her onto his back. He's not unfit, far from it, or, at least, before he had come to Seattle. A daily trailing regiment had been an hourly retreat from the war along with breakfast and dinner with Icelina. It was the only time he had been truly alone then, save for the guards that remained in the Eschonbach Manor's gym, overseeing him. All that muscle meant nothing without two feet to haul her up, for he's pretty sure that Mai's weight is what he could bench. The best he can do is to drag her over using the towel, hoping she forgives him for any fabric burn. He tries to kick himself along with his stump, but each time an unsatisfactory feeble attempt at mimicking the versatility of his foot comes up instead.

Now, he could kill her, and it seems like they might be agreed to the idea. It's what she wanted after all, for him to try and live, but killing her when she was half-naked hardly seemed like the way to go about it. If he was going to kill her, it would be, he imagines, in a gunfight, maybe even a fair one. The day would come up and he would make his last stand and she would be outside of this room trying to fight her way in as he barricaded it in a gunfight that would've been a good show of his own brilliance, even when down a foot.

It was dark outside, and the candles that usually gave light were left unlit now as, thankfully, the moon began to rise as she was brought to her room and besides the bed. Rummaging through her drawers she does find everything he needs. Her clothes are packed next to his own, sparse articles.

There's a sweater in there bearing the logo of a tiger she has never worn in his presence, and that is as much an option as anything as he realizes that her pants and underwear probably must go and be replaced as well.

Eroticism is lost. Even as he, a man, and her a woman. War had done that. Too many field hospitals. Too many bodies. The sanctity of the Human body and whatever abstract image it presented was lost to him on Guardian Banchi, watching the dead cadets that went with him that day all be brought into a hangar to be set into order and ready for final dispensation. Those bodies were not the older form of soldiers as he had known them their entire life: perpetually older and grizzled and ready to die. These were bodies that looked like him. They had hardly been considered adults, young, and so full of life not more than a day prior, laughing and crying and studying in school, the bothers of an academic tutelage and a social life their main concern. They had no concern anymore, and then forever.

When Garma slips her clothes off and makes her completely bare, he tries not to remember Lino's body, blown apart and melted. He tries not to remember Wilson Nottatilde, who had a piece of shrapnel the size of a license plate sliced through his chest. He tries not to remember Misha Mu Horsky, her body peppered with twenty-three rounds from a Federation assault rifle. He tries not to remember on Earth every field hospital he had visited to commend those that had lost pieces of themselves in the name of Spacenoid kind.

Sliding on her new clothes immediately warms her, and sliding both the thick blanket and then a pillow over and under her is satisfactory enough for Garma as she is bundled up and left to rest.

She murmurs as he leaves the room in a crawl, exhausted himself, but still left to organize her gear. He had left his crutch back on the floor near the bathroom anyhow.

Before he leaves, however, she murmurs. Pained, lurid murmuring, but they form into words just before he gets too far away.

"Thank you."

The spit in his mouth is sucked in through his teeth. Mai Gul truly must be losing herself if those are the words she says so softly, so beleaguered, as she seems to remain asleep.

He did not want to kill her. He, given the opportunity, would want to save her. But from what? From who?

The answer was always on her lips, in her mind, and hers to act on alone: Him.

In the end, he is beginning, and end, to her.

To her as she speaks in midnight delirium he feels compelled to apologize for. But for what?

Everything. But everything had been too much, and to apologize would admit a fault. Circumstances he wanted to change, but in the end, if he was asked if this was the life he wanted to live, for the sake of the causes he lived out, he would not change it one bit, even now, even with a hobbled march, day by day, to the grave.