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?

13. 1-9: Take Care of You - Take Care of Me

1-9

Take Care of You - Take Care of Me

---

It's not that long after Seattle. Just over a day at the very least, but Amuro Ray can hardly tell time anymore. His life passes by not by time, but by sorties, as was the burden placed upon him by so many. It was a burden placed by Zeon, fighting him because they simply flew the flag and colors of the Earth Federation. It was a burden placed on him by the captain of the White Base, Bright Noa, and his reliance, need of him to fight for the crew, even as at times it felt like the adversarial opposition had been more from him and not Zeon. It was a burden placed on him by his father, who designed the weapon that he, somehow, had known best.

Amuro Ray, sixteen years old, Earth born, but having lived in space for most of his life, had been called upon for the responsibility to pilot a machine that could change the course of the war.

It was a machine so powerful that it took many in its wake and spit them out without regard, and for Captain Bright, that was what they needed to survive, even if the dead that fell before him were those that he did not understand.

Just after Seattle, another Gaw came at them. Ill-equipped, under staffed. It was on a one way trip and even he had been able to tell.

As the Gaw was grounded and the battle seemingly all but won, out, emerged from it, was a woman. Not a Zeon soldier, not a man even. But a woman, hardly older than himself, dressed in such beautiful, pretty clothing that it screamed socialite more than soldier. In that desert they found themselves, he thought her a mirage.

She cursed revenge on him, holding a pistol to aim.

And then she fell, her golden blonde hair like wings that never flew.

When he checked the body, she had been dead.

She carried no identification and had no hint from where she came save for that of class in her dress. She was not a soldier, far from it, and she had been young, almost their own age even. The White Base crew had not a man over the age of twenty-five, so she would've fit in in some alternate world, alternate life. Out of place in war but fit to wage it all the same, asked the same as all of them.

It was not that that had perplexed Amuro Ray however, at least not alone. It was in the aggregate that took him, that held him down, and made him think: She wanted him dead.

Her body is gathered up, fellow pilot Ryu Jose taking her into his large arms away from where she fell. The White Base, forced to ground, had begun its own movements, and after the battle that had happened those within it had stretched and recovered. Like pilgrim masses from old history, the refugees of Side 7 touch upon Earth for the first time and they walk out into the desert. Like a ghost army, pale and old and tired, but Home. Home in the Human sense. Where they would go no one knew, but they begged to be let go, and Captain Bright Noa let them in silent aggravation. It would not be his fault if they all got killed. Their fate was in their hands, and he had been responsible for far more, but now less as they left for an Earth-turned battlefield beneath the Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation. These western skies hid nothing, but at least they were blue.

The masses disappeared in distant mirage, and it left, finally, the crew of the White Base on their mission, but not before burying a singular dead.

Bright Noa looks down from the White Base's bridge, a twitch in his eye, seeing his pilots carry a single reported body from one part of sand to another. This had been useless, and his hands had moved from his uniform jacket to the nearest tele device to reach out and tell them to quit their nonsense. Whoever that body had been, it had been an enemy, and if the roles were reversed no grace would be given to their own remains. A hand on his wrist stops him, however.

Mirai Yashima stands ready at the conn station, exhausted after the day, but not forgetting herself. She might've flown the White Base, but she knew her influence was felt in more Human places, and especially so in the mannerism of Bright Noa (not that she had been immune to him as well). She reached out, holding him still, locking his eyes and taking what stress, what anxiety within him had bundled up and letting it dissipate.

"Let them." She says softly.

Bright Noa understands all that was left unsaid on Mirai's face. "Fine."

He glances over to Sayla's station to ask her to let the crew know to still be on combat stations, but she is gone as well and that aggravation rises in him one last time.

Shovels are collected from the open hangars of the White Base, Kai Shinden and Hayato Kobayashi, Amuro's compatriots, holding them in their arms. In a long whistle, Kai Shinden sees the dead in Ryu's arm as she gently puts her down, arms crossed, eyes palmed close, in the shade of the Gaw's wing at least for her.

She's beautiful.

"I wonder what her name was." Kai raises his eyebrow as Amuro asks aloud, leaning in, just a bit closer to her. Her gun remains in her hand, and no one has the heart to unhand it from her. Maybe she was the storied Sleeping Beauty herself. But she had gone into a sleep she would never return from. Amuro has no more information to give save one piece to give as Hayato hands him his shovel. "She said she wanted vengeance on me."

They all stood there over her in their pilot suits. They were all no longer unfamiliar with death, but not upon such beings as her, precious as she was. In a world gone so ugly they hadn't believed such beauty remained.

Kai had been a shrewd man, but at least a pragmatic man. They could not mourn who was unknown for so long. So he began to dig a shallow grave. The rest had followed save for Amuro, not yet ready to resign her to the thereafter. So many questions, but no answers. What did he have to pay for for his duty of piloting a weapon like none other ever seen?

A pair of footsteps of crunchy sand comes from the White Base, and they all stop.

Sayla Mass arrives, her blonde hair a harsher color than that of the dead, Amuro can't help but make the comparison. She walks to them a mission in her mind.

"Miss Sayla?" Amuro asks what she's doing as she moves up to the side of the body, sand having already gotten on her. Her hands brush away the errant grains, carefully taking her gun from her, unloading it and ejecting the round in the chamber. Amuro's eyes follow it. It was the round meant for him, its brass like gold. It drops to the ground in front of him, tempting, taunting.

Sayla's hands roam the body, a silent curiosity on her part. "She was not hurt, was she?" She asks Amuro without looking at him. The body is still warm.

"No…" He answers, honestly unsure. But there is no blood. Her body is perfect.

Sayla does not linger long after, coming out of the shallow grave made, and all the boys look to her for an answer. She has one. "It's very rare, but it happens…" Sayla Mass ponders the exact mechanism of the body releasing stress hormones and how, in the direst of cases, they could cause heart failure as the shock spreads through the body. Sayla Mass knows very much how the Human body operates, lives, heals, and dies, but such a technical understanding is a double-edged sword. It is true, she knows, probably, how this woman died. She knows how the flesh seized and the blood stopped flowing and the impact that probably caused internal hemorrhaging that bled her from the inside out. She knows all of this. But what she explains to Amuro is this: "She died of a broken heart."

She died of shock, of the situation she was in, of what had brought her here. What that was no one there could ever know, but she died, because in her, something broke.

"You seem so sure of that, Miss Sayla." Kai sneered. She shot him a sharp look and he had recoiled away from her gaze.

"I just know." She had bitten back at the weasel of a man. He spoke truer than he would ever know, however. "I know what it's like."

Her heart had hardened long ago to save itself from the grief long hidden away for her own good, but even then, she yearned, she wondered, she dreamed…

Casval. What have you done?

Amuro Ray and the pilots of the White Base bury Icelina Eschonbach in a distant desert, so far away from her home, and her love. Just as he had gone down in a Gaw, so too did she. In that moment she had followed him to where no one would ever keep them apart again. In her final moments, she accepted it.

Icelina Eschonbach died pure, and in that Universal Century she died better than most.

---

In a word: Mai looks like shit.

She's only looked this bad once before, and that had been one the worst day of her life. This might've been a close second however, the dull pain that puts her right side on fire makes her imagine that she might have some sympathy for Garma's own injuries. She wakes up in a sweat, in pain, and with the regret that she woke up at all. At least she had been extremely medicated when she had been shot in the stomach. This had been a piercing, and then dull pain that was bad enough to put her on her ass, and yet not bad enough that didn't literally keep her in the Conclave. In a civil society maybe she would've stayed, but she felt like she was going to die and she was sure as hell not going to let killing Garma Zabi not be fulfilled by her.

Nothing of the sort came to pass, and all she was left with was pain again.

When she opens her eyes that day she can tell it's much past morning based on how much of the sun filters in through in the room. When she opens her eyes she remembers where she is, who she is, and what has happened to her.

She woke up as women of action always do: Not wanting to wake up.

The smell of coffee drags her awake, despite this.

She's on the ground in her bedroom, a blanket wrapped around her and her pillow to her head. Not the first time she's woken up like this, but the first time in a while as she pulls her sheets up and sees herself dressed differently. A flash of fear, uniquely feminine, courses through her and out before she truly remembers where she is and what had happened to her, for that burst of movement has shear pain spreading out from her right side as she can feel a lukewarm compress press beneath her chest.

"Fuck!" She cries out, and Mai Gul is back in the world of the living. She expects to hear the half-metal footsteps of Garma Zabi come into the room for her, but instead she hears a pitter patter, and suddenly, a familiar, yet unfamiliar beast rolls up, at her eye-level, tongue out. The dog. It's happy to see her, and that tongue is on her face in a flurry of licks. She doesn't quite know what to do as the dog assaults her in obsession, forcing her up against the side of the bed in equal parts confusion and pain and-

"Good morning, dear Mai." His voice is what drives her up the wall the most. With her left hand she pushes up against the chest of the pup, pushing it off and away as she snarls back, still partially covered by sheets that she finally kicks off of her. Garma Zabi had dressed her in the complimentary sweater of the university she attended and, more than that, taken care of her.

He transitions to the ball of his amputated leg and knee as he returns to the room, a cup of coffee in one hand, no doubt for her. The pup easily returns to his side as he settles besides her, on his face one of domestic nicety she had not seen since she had lived with her parents as a child.

What the hell is this?

Garma smiles, and the horror on Mai's face takes her in between pain. "You son of a bitch- you absolute son of a bitch." She talks like a man because speaking like a man was far more closer to the real meaning of her words than the women she knew. When she tries to right herself into a sit, she is pained, and the cold pack beneath her top drops out of her.

"Are you okay?" Garma raises his eyebrow as casually as he can.

The gall of him to even ask. "Wallah, the fuck does it look like!"

She hates vulnerability, she hates the weakness, she hates the idea that in this life that has tested her so that it still puts upon her even now. As she goes through her own process of reminding herself of what's happened to her, feeling her own body for her pains, there is something that wasn't there yesterday. Something distinctly unique to her, and all those like her. It brews in her abdomen like electric fire that paralyzes, and now, as she wakes and moves, it deposits itself along her blood stream and she aches. She aches as she had, once a month, every year since her body had told her it was time to become a woman.

She hates life more than she's ever had now, the two spectrums of pain: intense and constant now making a home in her body as her eyes tear and every word of hers is forced out like a shout. She looks, she sounds, and she feels messed up, and as she wakes up she sweats and nearly sobs in frustration.

But she doesn't. She closes her eyes and breath. She catches any sound at all to try and center herself, and she finds Garma's breathing. She finds it, she matches it. She brings herself in in slow and steady breaths so her lungs don't push against her fractured rib, and all at once. The pain inside her is beat down again, flat, down within, and she lives.

When she opens his eyes Garma is there still, a puppy nipping at his heels that he ignores, but keeps otherwise occupied.

"Where'd that dog come from?"

He turns to it as she asks her question, running his palm over its head and down the length of its back as if he had just noticed it. "I found it after I put you to rest last night, when I went outside to check if you had dropped anything out there. I think this guy followed you all the way up." In her manic pain she did not notice the dog at all, and here it had been now, second guest, invited in by him. "I always wanted a pet when I was young, but my father would never allow it."

It was perhaps one of the few things ever denied of him. Apparently his father had been a great deal allergic to animals and their fur, for even Gihren had kept hidden his pet cat as if on a secret tryst with a lover (and he had already that). There is genuine fondness as Garma rakes his hand through dirty fur. The dog does not smell at all clean, its stench is of the city, but a shower could help alleviate it, he believes.

Mai could hardly believe what was happening before her eyes, but then again, she could hardly believe that her period has started the day after she had just broken a rib, and that discontent paints itself on her face. For Garma's credit, there is concern, genuine, with him, after the dog settles from being patted down, continuing to go at his heels inoffensively.

He is calm.

He is calm because he must be with her.

"I didn't overstep any boundaries, did I?" He tugged on the bottom of his own hoodie to make a point.

"No. No." She repeated twice, harder on the second. She didn't care about that process. She's woken up enough times on the floor of someone's bedroom naked that being clothed was a legitimate courtesy. She could hardly be bothered either or. She had long not since respected herself enough to care. "I've seen enough of you and you me. Who gives a shit." She doesn't want to tell him he had done right, because she herself can hardly know what was the right thing to do in that moment, but getting her washed down, letting her process her pain, it was better than doing nothing. If he had done nothing, maybe, just maybe, he would be dead tomorrow.

But something had happened between them, and she had been warm and in bed and clean and as best as she probably could be given the circumstances.

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" She ground out from the very bottom of her throat, her accent turning less Arab and more Infernal.

Garma considers her words succinctly, his face going from that domestic sweetness to something far more realistic. The curve of one side of his mouth, the way he darted his eyes away from her. The coffee is still in his hand, but it's put aside on the nearby bed stand.

He tore the Earth asunder, and yet here he had been, nursing her.

He opens his mouth several times, but each time when the two of them think an answer is about to spill, none comes until he goes from his knees down to his ass, sitting across from her as the dog transfers from his heels, rounding around him to the pen made by his crossed legs.

"Do you so detest the idea of me being able to help you, even like this?" He does not look at her, only at the dog below, so enamored by attention as his hands slowly raked through its fur again.

It is her turn not to answer as she sits against the bed in pain, the cold sweat of her brow wiped off with her forearm as she confides in herself the truth. She does not give an answer but an explanation. The cold pack now warmed by her body heat sits between them.

"It's- it's that time for me. Of month." She looks away unable to find his gaze.

"Oh." He finally responds. "Wait here." He tells her with the weight of true clarity. If she wanted to give chase or to stop him, she couldn't, he crawling away until he came to his crutch again and standing, the dog following all the while. If she were to try to stand it feels like, to her, that she would break her rib again worse for. All she can do is sit there and listen. Water runs in the kitchen shortly, a wrapper being broken open. The coffee Garma has left for her still steams, and who was she to deny herself the one creature comfort she has allowed herself in that dark year.

When he returns the coffee is half-full, and she is remised to show him that she has drank it, putting it aside.

In his hand is her canteen, wrapped in a lukewarm towel. "Here. It's hot. Careful." He bends down as he lets himself into a controlled collapse, off of his crutch, onto his ass again in a sit. The dog was glued to him all the while, but it did not yap on. At least not in her presence at least. It knows who can bark louder there.

The hot, but manageable canteen is handed to her, wrapped in a towel, and she knows exactly what to do with it as she presses it beneath her shirt, on her abdomen, and the paradoxically cooling and numbing feeling of it soothes far more than she'd expected. Lost in her pain she had forgotten this trick, and yet Garma had done it for her all the same.

"How…?" A question dies on her lips. Not many men would particularly know this remedy, even partners or lovers.

He looked at her with a blank gaze, his mind obviously inward before he looked up to the ceiling as if the answer was there.

"I have a fiancé." He finally relents to her question of the present, and the question of the past in her. She had asked if he had a partner now, and he had kept that to himself until now. He nodded to himself, and the air of fondness in her words are so unfamiliar to Mai she doubts that this is Garma Zabi. "Her name is Icelina." How sweet it is for him to speak her name in the air again, he says it softly, as he always had. "Her name is Icelina, and she remains in New York City."

Mai cannot speak as she holds the warm bottle to her abdomen like a lifeline. She had suspected that there was someone there for him with how guarded he was, but he says it true to her, and it is in admittance. He goes on, but he is oddly comfortable.

"She has been my fiancé for several months, not that it particularly is an official thing, her father's detractions considering, but she is my fiancé to me, and me to her. With it has comes certain… well, intricacies. I am not unfamiliar with the banal pains of being a woman." He smiled to himself. "It was either be scarce or be helpful during this time of month for her."

He chose helpful after learning how to do so.

What he is missing on his right hand is an annoyance, but the index and thumb survive, so he still has considerable use of it, and even grip with the remains of his middle finger. Though his pinky and ring finger are gone entirely, down to the palm. They're still there in his mind, phantom appendages that he can still feel move even if there is no flesh for nerve to interface with. It is however his ring finger that he mourns the most on that hand. It is a ring finger that held a ring.

His hands are smoothened over and dull in puddles of skin. What was once the natural topography of them, especially on his right hand, were now taut and unnaturally smoothened skin the color of his scars. He could see where Mai had taken the knife to his palms to get his melted gloves off of him, but he had not felt or remembered it all. All he knew was that his hands, like the rest of his body, were no longer the same. It was a shame then, for he yearned and missed and mourned that Icelina, even if he had somehow been able to return to her, he would not be able to feel her fingers travel his palms in delicate, intimate touch. Even now as he rakes through the fur of the dog, it comes in passes, as if someone had put plastic over random places in his hand. The most he felt was that dull pressure beneath the burns and the nerve damage.

"You love her?" Mai asks, gripping the canteen beneath her shirt.

"I do." He nods without pause. "It is not such a strange thing to me, the idea of giving up Zeon. I told her, just before I went on this mission, that if Zeon did not accept her as my bride, I would not accept Zeon… It appears I have more cause to reject it now." If Zeon had wanted him dead, if whoever Char had been scheming with had been so readily able to let it slide by, he would do more than just leave and reject, if given the choice. But that rage of betrayal brewing in him was for nothing. His revenge could not ever be. "The mission I went on, it would've been an end to so many things, but yet the beginning of a great new part of my life for me: I would've been able to so easily with that victory come to my father and tell him I would also be taking on an Earthnoid wife, who I loved, dearest and true."

That is why he went after all.

He cried out the hail to Zeon in his supposed final moments, but when his life flashed before his eyes, he saw her.

"This, more than anything, is what Zeon, what Char Aznable, has taken from me." Not only his life, but a particular version of his life that involved Icelina Eschonbach. Even now, he hurts so much thinking about how much she must mourn him. He hurts so much, it shows on his face, and it is pain that Mai would never be able to inflict on him, truly.

She may be the one to kill him, but she was not the one to steal his life.

That angers her.

But her rage, it is beat down by the relief coming from the warm canteen against herself and her menstrual pain. He looks back at her, square in the eye, and the way his hair has parted she sees both his conflicting sides stare into her. It captures her, and suddenly the pain is lifted for a moment. "Do not mistake me then, Mai Gul. I can let go of Zeon."

"To a point." She grits through her teeth.

He waits before answering, letting her words sit in him first as he crosses his arms tightly.

"To a point." Garma agreed, not lying to himself. But she didn't lie to herself as well. She was of the same parable. In earthquake madness, she remained, and she retained, the same fears as a Spacenoid. She was a Spacenoid, and, more than that, she had been of Zeon.

She cannot bare to speak more to him, but the hot pressure against her midsection is cooling to the sharp pain that reverberates throughout her. There was a fentanyl lollipop somewhere, just ready for her to take, but she knew how it affected her. If she had taken it, she would be out for the day, if not two. Two days left in the care of Garma Zabi. That she could not abide by.

So instead of medicine, she remembers Win's words yesterday. Talking drew people's attention naturally, and she needed her attention off herself, so she did not hurt as she did, sat against her own bed.

"What was the mission then?"

They had talked of tactics and war lines, and she in their talks over a map had perhaps spoken about her techniques as a guerilla. Finally, perhaps, it was time for him to talk of why he was in Seattle at all: What that white ship was and why it had been so important that even a Zabi themselves would have to go out for it.

There was trepidation again, coming over Garma, the dog settling by his side and laying complacently as he ran his fingers through its fur again. He had slowly let the details of Zeon's war slide out of him in their talks, and he had, past the upfront security considerations, not totally been averse to speaking to her about it. It was not trust imbued in her to ward him, but it was an abstract other feeling. Perhaps it was only the fact of shared heritage and upbringing that made him speak at all about military matters.

In the end, however, she had no love for the Federation just the same, and what information he gave her had been therefore benign.

This too, it would be.

"That white ship was carrying the Federation's first new generation mobile suit." He answers her. He breathes, and she matches. "It was carried, all the way from Side 7 to Earth, and, most likely, to Jaburo to begin mass production."

"The Federation's first mobile suit?" The realization of it comes easier in her than she'd like to admit. "They'd have a far easier time pumping those out then Zeon."

His mouth forms into a straight line, nodding again softly. She speaks truer than she knows. "I do not think this war lost, but the emergence of the Federation standardizing mobile suits with their own forces would drastically increase losses and prolong the war at the very least."

Metal monsters in his name walked the Earth, and although Mai Gul had known of them better than most, the first time she had seen one turn the corner of a building in a firefight she had remembered once, long ago, ancient peoples had worshipped giants. The fear of god in her heart was reminded that day as she and her guerillas ran in an immediate retreat from the Zaku-I.

It was by barbarity alone that Murph was able to rack up the kills he had on mobile suits, often at great exchange of life.

With the Federation's production base, the idea of mobile suits becoming an advantage for the EFF as opposed to Zeon painted a certain picture in her mind that Garma did not allow himself to think: Zeon loss and surrender.

"Stopping that ship was something I was willing to die for, both for Icelina, and for Zeon." He admits, looking down at the dog again as it quietly acquiesced. As calming as it was to sit there with her, petting a dog, letting go of the burdens he once had, all he could do was sigh deeply, brushing his growing hair back behind his ear. "Does it help?" He tipped his chin at the hand of hers beneath her own shirt, holding the canteen to her.

She nodded. "Yeah. It does. A bit."

"A bit." He echoed. "I have breakfast out there. I can bring it in. You can have the room to yourself today. Just let me know if you need me."

Had her hands not been occupied with keeping herself together she would've reached out and grabbed him and dug her nails into his skin so deeply, even the scars, he would remember what it was to feel pain beneath them. She hates weakness, but she hates who he is more. Her protests, however, fall silent within her. He leaves and returns with a tray of food, Zeonic chow mein. Softer food.

She knows who he is: a fascist, a murderer of billions. All that he is is not as important, vile, as what he has done and the judgement promised to him (by her) for it. And yet…

He had treated her well.

He leaves the tray with her, he goes to exit the room himself and delve back into the pages of Greek epics with the dog following his heels. She can't help herself, however.

"Garma." Is willed out of her by a force not of her own choosing. He turns, half-way through the doorway, leaning on his crutch, head tilted. In Seattle gray light his hair is an exotic color that drapes and colors the rest of him so. The tilt of his head asks the question of what she needs for her. She stares up at him, face crooked and mouth shut tight down to her jaw by her own soul's warning. So they stand, they sit, they stare at each other. And then it's over.

---

In Mai like fashion, she does not settle for long, bringing her own tray out to the sink, a damp splotch beneath her shirt from the condensation of the canteen before she hobbles herself into the shower for another clear. When she emerges, underwear tightly bundled for her own sake into a much reduced stack of used clothing, now in a crate that Garma has organized for the purpose, she returns to her table with her storm rifle as Garma sits next to her at the cleared table they use otherwise. She looks around for the dog after remembering its existence, finding it in the kitchen after leaning her head to see it.

"It's your responsibility. If it shits inside, I'm putting your face in its first before you clean it up." She says with as much of her annoyed pain as she can toward the dog.

He's complacent. "Of course, of course." He has a few ideas on adding the dog to his schedule at home, but as far as it dispensing with itself went he would, hopefully, just have it shit outside. He's never had to clean up after a dog before, but it's hopefully far less offensive than any amount of flesh and gore he's seen in his life. That and feeding it would be easy enough. Water from a bucket, jerky from Mai's ample supply.

At the end of his life then, he was able to finally have a pet dog, and that is a victory today.

The dog is seemingly passed out on a bundled up towel in the kitchen, it's leg kicking in response to whatever dreamland it finds itself in. For Mai, it's inoffensive, and she can hardly spare anything to it.

After that, it's quiet.

Out of their peripherals they watch each other in that several foot distance between them in their own stools.

For him, he watches her take down and break apart and put back together that same Zeonic storm rifle. He knows her pace, the way her fingers expertly and familiarly take down the rifle. She must've done this at least a hundred times by now since their living arrangement together. He never asks, and she doesn't seem to notice that she's doing it. It is her idle obsession when she's not doing maintenance with her sniper rifle. Today however, there's a lag to her movement, her fingers are a little more shaky, and her eyes are distinctly not there. The pain of being a woman compounds with the pain of being shot with a 4.8mm round, and it drags her as, half-way through trying to thread the roller block into the upper receiver, she drops it, and swears in a language unknown to him and frustration boil in her to a simmer that has her wrapping her face in greasy black hands.

He does not say anything as she takes a moment, frozen still, biding within herself a calm that usually is her stoicness, lost.

"It's usually not this bad." she says quietly, brushing her face with her forearms.

She moves on still, she pushes past. She always does.

Past pain, past regret, past the searing hole in her heart and the cold in the pit of her. She moves on past them because forward movement, as according to the Academy they shared, was good movement. Forward toward the enemy. Forward toward some sort of objective not yet present in her mind. Forward, surviving, living, had meant seeing Garma Zabi dead. She would live, but for the right now she hurt, letting black greased fingers intermingle with a weapon again and again until they were numb.

She looks to him from her side as well, when of course, he's not looking at her. He cannot so easily glance at her without her noticing because he sits right of her and his left eye is the one he relies on now. Though when he is not occupied with her, he is occupied with that same, green leather book.

RECEPTION OF ULYSSES AT THE PALACE OF KING ALCINOUS.

Those are the words that she is able to see in her periphery, and it is those words that Garma's own eyes trace themselves upon. He moves his mouth to the ghost of words, not saying them, but his tongue, his teeth, his lips go along in a narration only he can hear, and one she can only see. Looking at him from this side, with his red muted scars cast like continents on his body, it still very much is Garma beneath it. His scars are well taken cared for, both by her part and his, and they become only that: scars and all that they entailed. His profile is drank in by her, whether she wanted to or not as his chin softly dabbed in his silent speech. In there she sees something she didn't think quite possible. She sees fuzz. As lopsided as his hair is right now it grows fast, and if it came up, she thinks she could make a ponytail of it. It didn't however leave her to think about the fact of his facial hair, and it sprouts now, and now that she's noticed it doesn't go away. It's, at least at the root, light enough, but the color of all his hair, curtains and drapes, is shared by his facial hair. It starts for him mostly along the upper part of his lip, his mouth mostly spared most of the burns, the beginnings of a moustache. Along the side of right side of his head it is entirely taken by the scar, however his scalp was saved from the worst of it, and even then that grows still out. The idea that Garma would have a full head of hair by the time she's putting him in the ground is a funny thought, but funnier still is the idea, she can't help but lean in and look now, that he would grow a moustache and a beard.

She leans in, squinting at his mouth and chin, and he stares back, eyebrow raised. Even the one he lost is slowly being replaced. "What?"

She hurts still, but concentrating on this detail of him consoles her.

"I thought you Zabis couldn't grow facial hair worth jack." Her way of speaking, he's starting to place it, more and more. Her accent clashes with the Earthnoid American urban, and it's interesting to listen to.

What was once a look of moderate annoyance and concern turned into something a little more innocent, and even his skepticism melts a bit as he breaths out of his nose a disarming huff, against his better judgement rolling his head around for her to look for the growth that he had accomplished.

"Grooming and shaving are a part of clean regiment, dear Mai." She doesn't mind that much this time, leaning back and readjusting a new cold pack to her broken rib and the hot canteen that sits tucked on her abdomen. He pats his jawline with his own hand. "That and I know I am quite handsome, I wouldn't quite risk looking disastrous growing in a beard."

Her eye twitches at him. "You could try it, before it happens."

He doesn't even mind the finality of that statement. "Perhaps," he looked away, scratching away at the erect strands that bristled against his palm. "Doubtful you'd trust me with a blade anyhow."

Her head had gestured back to her guns in a corner. Guns that he has touched by now. Organized. "Anything you might try, I'm sure I could fight over before I get to you. I would love to see you fuck up your face trying to shave with a knife too."

"Oh, there's always something, isn't it?" He growls, just a little at her. She can't ever give him something banal, something casual, without the reminder of malice. He is getting used to it, but today, of all days, it does affirm she is normal in the head despite her injuries and pain. Or at least as right in the head as someone like her could be now.

"Mm." She rumbles, but there's a smirk at the edge of her mouth that spreads to his.

They go on in silence, doing as they did idly until morning. Just before lunch which Garma prepares, Mai turns on the radio, listening to Conclave radio traffic. The Conclave is busy, but they have cause to with the earthquake and the matter of digging survivors, if possible, out. But that is their concern. Murph had not been an issue today, and no distant gunfire had been heard. The Reapers tended to their own, and the Conclave likewise. It was if no one had been shot or killed yesterday, and as far as the status quo had went, Mai had been fine with that as she shut it off.

"I won't ask how you ended up as you did, yesterday." Garma asks, the trays of their with their food placed down. This meal was particular: a Zeon mobile suit pilot MRE. It was smaller than the rest, but handheld. It had been a cheeseburger. It's not particular a good example of it, the buns appear more like thick crackers and the cheese is a dense spread, but it is, technically, a hamburger, and a good sized one as well. "But I can garner a guess it had to deal with those gangsters from Tacoma? These Reaper Lords?"

He's too smart for his own good, or too curious listening to the radio, but Mai gives away with a nod before she settles back in, forgetting to wipe her hands of the grease before her hands are on the buns.

"Yeah, if things go their way maybe you and me will end up dead together." She seems a little too frank at that admission, and Garma picks up on it.

"Is that so?"

"Earthnoids like them," She can't believe she is speaking from a place on his side now, but for the Reapers, it's okay. "You'd think that they ran the Federation government instead of what they actually are: low life scum." There was no greater aspiration to them in the war, no just cause such as a new life and an ended war. What they fought for had been simple. She had known them as scum, because she too had been one. All they wanted was Zeeks dead. "They're like me, though. A good day meant a dead Zeek, and they've had a lot of good days."

She did not accept the tranquil battle poet philosophers of the ancient past. She learned war by warring, and in that she learned the emotion of the dance that she danced for that year, UC 0079. That emotion she found herself cutting through was hate. She hated the enemy, completely. She hated them so much she had killed them. The mechanism was the same, what she did yesterday, but not the feeling. That boiled in her rotten.

Garma sees the twitch crumple her nose before she answers. She lets him talk, to speak. This is the longest she's spoken like this without him, and he wants to listen.

"I understand them. They're not who they are just because of you or this war." She went to work in the part of town where who would become the Reaper Lords had been the average goer. If nothing else she had been in the same tax bracket as all of them, and, if her life had gone a certain way the insurmountable fact that she might've ended up as a gang banger, a shooter, was not out of the question. "We became who we were in this war a long time before Sydney. That's what living on Earth has done to us." What living on Earth has done to them all is create them as killers, as animals. In the course of the war of course she's killed Earthnoids in service to Spacenoids and Spacenoids alike, all of those that had cast their lot in with Zeon. But now, yesterday, she had killed Earthnoid, pure and simple, and it had not felt any different. Not just any Earthnoid, not like her kills on Guardian Banchi. She had killed those born, lived, and now died on Earth and Earth alone. She became a killer of men kept to Gravity, and had she not been in pain otherwise, an existential threat arose in her that would've burned her down.

It had been easy. As easy as any mechanism in the middle of battle had called her to perform.

Her dalliance with the ability to kill could only be assuaged by a why:

Why they were the way they were, why the world had been the way it was. What had led men and women to cast themselves as killers of Spacenoids, and, past that, the cruelty of that act. The scalps of Spacenoids hung from Reaper trucks as readily as the Spacenoid bodies were hung from billboards and walls during the war. A warning and promise for Zeon that came, and Mai had been hard pressed to completely dissuade. She has her answers, but they are too simple, too obvious.

"Poverty. A failed government system. Not enough jobs, not enough benefits, not enough help. It's the same old story." She breathed out tiredly through the haze. "And after all this time, no one still seems to care. Not Zeon, not the Federation. No one." Those who bore the mark of the Reaper Lords: the scythe, it was the acknowledgement that their lives had ended long ago, and in a world that had seemed like it was ending those who were Reapers lived on best. "If you really wanted to help all of us, Zeon should've set up missions down here on Earth. Show the Earthnoid that Spacenoids care." She's not sure why she had said that last bit at all, but it had come up out of her like a solution too obvious that it had obviously been a farce. But here she had been: Spacenoid, and yet no different from her common Earthnoid. Living, but dead. A killer, and a savior.

The words are slow to Garma, into his mind, into his ears. It's an idea he's sure he's heard before, but the assumption that comes up in him on why any such charitable organization wouldn't work was because of the antagonism from the Federation. If that hadn't been the case, then he liked to imagine that what she was speaking hadn't felt as silly as she herself seemed to take it, looking away from him as she did.

If all the problems of the last year, if the billions dead could've been spared from the bottom up, then that way would've been readily apparent, he imagines. Not that he had any charge about the absolute beginnings of the war and its origins. This had been a conflict brewing since before he had been born, and he had only two years ago seriously made his way onto the stage with Guardian Banchi. If such a humane way was so apparent, he would've joined the peace corps instead of the military.

That's what Garma Zabi tells himself as Mai Gul wonders another life: one in which people cared.

---

It takes them both longer than a few seconds to remember that once, a long time ago, people knocked on doors to announce that they were here, and when Hale Candy arrives, he arrives with a few delicate taps. It's enough to shock the dog from its doze into a wake and immediately into a roaring burp of yaps.

"Hello, Mai?" His voice confirms as such, even over the barks.

Mai pivots to leave her stool, but her rib had settled, and when she moves, she unsettles it, a sharp wince through her form that Garma feels the electricity from.

"I'll get it."

She huffs, blowing some of her bangs out of her face as she lets Garma walk over with his crutch to the door, the dog going to his feet and anxiously waiting to see who had been on the other side. Perhaps, accidentally, she had taken this dog from someone in Seattle: a companion animal that had wandered into her traps and, with little other recourse, followed her home and not its actual owner. The dog had been a boy, she now more closely saw from its hindquarters.

Garma opens the door, stepping back, and there stands Hale Candy.

Even older as he is, the war has put upon him a certain amount of fitness that makes him able to lug around a hiker's backpack that towered above him. Mai had known this pack as the kit he had brought when he walked to Seattle's more northern districts, and across the Evergreen Bridge to those still living out there. He had taken some time out of every month to go visit the living there, the older and incapacitated, and rendered them continuing treatment there instead of the Conclave. He was a doctor of another time, true and true, keeping to a Socratic-oath that was his type of holy.

Even if it brought him face to face with Garma Zabi.

"Hello, good doctor." Garma greets cordially. The shock of him still being there almost beating out the more pleasant surprise that is a golden retriever going to his legs, it's yapping ceased after having seen what had been there.

"Mr. Zabi." He responds back in that same uncomfortable tone that comes with meeting the presumed dead princeling of Zeon. Though by now he should've gotten used to Mai's "prisoner."

When he sees Mai sitting, he immediately disapproves, and Mai can't even protest, miserable as she looks, the shudder of her breath revealing all left unsaid.

"I see you both have a new guest." Candy pivots to the dog, sniffing up his leg before being self-satisfied and backing off back to Mai's own feet. She ignores it.

"Got two dogs now." She grunted, her voice more gravel than words. Both Garma and the dog had hardly minded the insult, Garma settling back into the seat next to her. "At least one had the courtesy of walking instead of being carried all the way up there."

Candy enters himself, standing, unsure of where to put himself. "Does he have a name, at least?"

Mai grunted in a negative. "All I know he's a craft son of a bitch for following me up, just the other day."

Crafty.

The name that comes to Garma's head is too easy.

"Char…lie." His hands, whole and not, roam through the mattered fur quite comfortably. "I think Charlie is a good name for you." He looked down at the dog.

"Char…lie." Mai parroted Garma, the look that followed once again very apt at making him uncomfortable. It was her favorite look to give him. "You're being very transparent."

There is a smirk to him that he shares with her, cocking his head one way as if to show his scars. "Here I stand, I can be no other, dear Mai." In that moment all three of them know he's healing, the way his arms flatly offer himself to her. A gesture of speeches, of a man who had taken a place of grandeur and destiny. He spoke like he knew the world and himself. The great temptations of man were summed up in triplicate: The world, the devil, and the flesh. Mai believes she knows Garma's sin from this. He declares to the world he is who he is, and his enemies are his enemies, but he does it to a crowd of two and a dog, naming that dog, in an apartment he is squatting in while down a leg, an eye, a few fingers, and further dignity.

It amuses Candy at least. He muses that in another life he would've had to be invited to see Garma Zabi so close and personal, and that is partly why he's here today, turning to Mai as she brews some sort of insult in her mind. He approaches Garma all the while, touching his shoulder, bringing him down from his Zabi-ness.

"Do you mind if me and Mai can have some privacy?"

It's a gentle and simple request, and he's not quite sure on how to take it, glancing at Mai too who is confused in that minor way. She nods though, to him, to let him.

"I'll- Well. I'll just go take a walk around the balcony. I'll knock after I do a few rounds." He settles himself to a stand, now well practiced with his crutch. "Charlie!" He yells, and drawn by the louder sound the dog wags its tail and appears right to him, drawn to whatever it is that may be interesting. Even over dogs, he had his air of command, and it follows him out the door.

"He seems to be recovering quite well."

"Hm. He's just gotta last another two months."

"I suppose that is when you want him dead? January 1st?" Candy recalls the day that began that war, yet to be named. To Mai it had been her unholy day and thus, if Garma Zabi were to die, it would've been one year to the day her own child died. That felt right, that felt good in her, that he would die on the first day of a new year, UC 0080. His words turn to a hint of annoyance, and it's not of that fact, at least not entirely, looking at her. "You should be in bed."

"The bed smells like him. I'm not spending the day like that." Candy looks at her with an eyebrow raised concerned, and whatever question he has within him she doesn't dignify save for an explanation. "We switch on and off. One night the bed's him, the other time it's for me. Last night 'was him, is all." So, she presumes. It'd be the closest they've slept yet with him being in the bed over her, less than a few feet distance.

"I see."

"… Fine." She gets the point of his stare. She's off the stool and hobbling over to her bedroom, laying herself down flat. "Do your worst, but uh. I'm hurting a little more than usual."

"Ah? Is that so?"

"It's that time of month."

Candy understands more than most would assume, offering his arm to Mai for her to lean on as she is brought over and into the bed. Too proud, but not too stupid for the fact that it's true. The bed smells like Garma. She's always had something of heightened senses compared to her peers. The eyesight is one thing, the intuitive notions inside of her that make her natural born marksman, but she is acute otherwise as well. Smelling clean is perhaps what Garma smells like the most nowadays, but it is a rare smell, a good smell to her.

She lies upon the bed and her crewneck is lifted by Candy over the problem areas. The canteen is put aside, followed by the cold pack. "You never told me you attended locally."

Who she was before the war had been closely guarded by her. She doesn't make comment back to Candy as he notices the logo on her.

The swelling has been beat back, but barely, and the area of the gunshot swells out as it did in an ugly black and purple area as if a miscolored topographic map, all circling a single point where she had been shot. Candy prods, Mai swears, and he is not particularly happy that she, stubborn as she is, is not under the effects of any medicine right now based on the fact the staple that kept the brown baggie of meds that she brought him with her had been still clipped. He grabs her right hand again, and the coloring around her stitches is agitated. "For someone who's so intent on keeping this man for herself to kill, you're doing an awful good job trying to get yourself dead first."

"Doc…" She groaned, "You know why I went out yesterday and got myself in that whole thing."

"I know, I know." Candy breaths tiredly, setting down his pack on the bedroom floor. "Just remember still that you are one of my patients too. In fact, the longest of, since the war began. I'm old, and I worry." He too had been a parent of children. They had been safe, and so he had remained to care for those that had not been cared for in Seattle. Mai had been of those.

She feels bad, she does, and for the first time in a while she wonders if her own mother has worried herself to death, or if she had mourned for a daughter she thought dead. She wonders if her father is on Earth, trying to file through refugees trying to find her. The conscious thought that she would have to find a way to contact them when she could had never been a high priority one, but as the days countdown to an amorphous future where she survived the danger of this war, she would have to find them again and see what had become of her and their grandchild. Mai doesn't know if she could do it, all over again, to reveal that fact of lost life within her, but that was for a Mai of another day.

The Mai of today had to deal with more immediate matters.

Candy massages the area around her wound, applying some roll on spread to the most painful of it. The smell of menthol rises, and it covers up Garma's scent on her nose.

"I'm afraid I can't do much about your monthlies, though here," In his bag Candy digs into its supplies, and when she hears the bottle of pain pills in them, she protests.

"No." she says once, wincing even as she leans up onto her arms. "I'm fine. I can deal without them. Save them for someone else."

"Stubborn." Candy says once, turning away from his bag.

"It is what it is, Doc." She pivots herself to a sit, and she desperately yearns for the cool of the cold pack and the heat of the canteen, even with the numbing agent Candy has applied, but she sits herself still for now. "Almost makes me consider going abouts like you."

It takes several moments for Candy to know what she's talking about, but it arises in him a chuckle. Maybe an off-color comment, but her pain has taken away most of her better judgement. "You know that's not exactly a good reason."

"It is where I'm sitting." She could admit this, "Being a woman sucks." It comes out in a groan and she's wiping her face down with her hands. Candy sits next to her, a lithe palm on her back again rubbing it down.

"Mai, you're a beautiful and well-meaning woman. These times will pass. I don't think you're fighting that kind of war inside of yourself, after all."

"Got more than one war, Doc." She grits.

More than war even, but her blood and bones reminded her of that within her. "So, what's up that you didn't want him around?"

Candy nods, stroking his beard down with consideration. "There is something here I would ask your permission for, if it is something you'd tolerate."

She raised an eyebrow before narrowing them, and then Candy had told her what it was.

---

Charlie had shat in a room that he had yet opened until that day, and revealing a building sheared apart in its skin. He hadn't even known that the opposite side of their apartment building had that giant gash of damage, frame and wall cracked apart upon opening that mirror of their apartment, except coated black and ruined with explosive fire having burnt it down like some hellfire parody. It left Seattle open before him, and most likely a room that Mai would mind if the dog shat it, which it did after he had sat there and left Charlie settle for a bit. He had privately reveled in it. This was his first real bit of fresh air in over a month, and here it had been, so openly available to him. The gash in the building faced north, and in the north of Seattle he had seen the curve of the bay and the city rolling out to a destroyed metropolis.

Seattle had looked so different from above, and it itself so much different from New York City.

It was true, he had never come to Seattle because of very particular resistance threats. Sure, there had been those in New York City that wanted to do him harm, the errant threat of car bombings existing still, however even in Los Angeles or Atlanta or St. Louis, of which he had visited, Seattle alone remained the one metropolitan city that had been under Zeon control that he could not visit.

It was the only city with Mai Gul in it, after all.

"You know, it might not exactly be the best idea for you to be up here with me. I'm rather shut in, all things considered." He spoke absent mindedly to a dog that, probably, had no understanding of the English language. Charlie had looked up at him all the same. He had been, even immediately after, regretting naming such a cute, innocent thing after Char Aznable, but that was the most dignity Char could ever have again in his mind: the name of an animal. In any sense, it fulfilled him that day and he would go on as usual, walking along the inner balcony several times over with his crutch to just give Mai and the good doctor time, the dog following him all the while, sniffing at corners and rug, occupied with its own machinations but not straying too far from Garma. It reminds him almost of his aides in the Eschonbach manor, it having become half his own command post in the Long Island estate, a stone's throw away from Manhattan. They too ghosted his movements, but constantly there, always knowingly keeping distance but not enough so that if an alert or an update was had by whatever department they came from he would know from them immediately. As was the tick of the war.

He goes to knock, deciding enough time has passed, but before he can even rap his knuckles once against the door Mai is there and his fist flies through to nothing.

He raises an eyebrow, and she, arms crossed, gestures with her head for him to follow in. Doctor Candy is not in the main room, so the bedroom it is then. Charlie lets himself in just the same, and then to the kitchen, a towel waiting for it to rest upon.

Doctor Candy is on the bed, a bucket at the foot of the bed and several canisters that had just been emptied besides him from his massive bag. Mai, she takes a seat by the windowsill, not giving much thought or care to what was transpiring. The good doctor looks up, kneeling, and then standing, to Garma.

"Have you used the restroom recently?" He asked him promptly.

"No?" Garma shook his head.

Candy nodded. "Well, I'd suggest doing so. I'm going to need you immobile for about half an hour."

"Am I in the position to ask for what?" Garma had asked with the weariness that had been born with being so close to Mai, her face is unseen, turned away at that moment toward south of Seattle.

"You can very much ask, but to speak it aloud would perhaps change Mai's mind on a few things, and I implore you, it's not anything bad." Candy is frank, but amiable with his words, hands behind his back.

Garma's not in much of a position to do anything, his life is not his own, but in the end, he had to at least acquiesce with a nod.

He had did his business in the bathroom, awkwardly with Charlie watching, but when he returned Candy had gestured for him to take a seat at the foot of the bed with the bucket, and closer now he could see into it and it's milky thick liquid.

"Roll up your pant leg, for your right foot." Garma does as instructed by Candy. His stump is not an unfamiliar sight to him now, or anyone in that room. Folded over as it is, the scar tissue there is still very much red, but it's smooth, and it hadn't reopened and leaked of puss for quite a while. For good measure Candy does pat it down sterile and dry, and the phantom pain of his foot, he swears he can still feel it there. "Now, please press your leg into this."

He trusts the good doctor as much as he can trust anyone nowadays, but, between him and Mai, at least he hadn't done him any harm. So, he does so, sinking his leg into the bucket and feeling the extreme viscosity of it as he immerses his stump into it.

"This'll take at least a half-hour, maybe more, but it's pretty imperative that you keep it there. The silicone will form around your leg, and then after that-" Candy goes to his backpack, and out from it is something he wouldn't quite believe was something you could pull out of a backpack: a leg. It's the color of a mildew sky, more grey than blue, and its formative lines that curve along it are ridged, as if a squished accordion, but it is a whole, a solid object.

It is a leg Candy pulled out.

"Our 3D printers still work, and one of the engineers we had on hand, he's able to take plastic bottles and things like that and break it down into material filament." Candy explains as he pulls the leg out, holding it as if an instrument. "We're well acquainted with these type of designs."

This all dancing around a singular statement however, one that Garma is sure to say outright: "You're fitting me with a new leg?"

Mai seems wounded by the accusation, but it is she alone that nods once, looking away from him. Doctor Candy continues, kneeling before Garma's exposed leg and rolling up its pant leg before putting the artificial leg aside it. He handles Garma's remaining leg expertly, locking it into place as a guide for the leg that he had brought out. He mirrors Garma's leg with the artificial one, a small wrench brought out, internal mechanisms being toyed with as the joints of it extend or shrink appropriately. All Mai does is watch, rivets and clutches ticking across in metal sound in quiet beat with the wind outside. Eventually her gaze is taken by him, and there is a conversation brewing between them, kept for later.

Candy goes through the motions as he had with every amputee that had come to the Conclave. Garma was far from the only person without a leg. He hadn't even been the youngest. "I was able to consolidate enough of your leg, flesh and bone, that you have a below the knee amputation. As far as Mai has told me you still have full usage of that knee, and that makes the idea of fitting you with a prosthetic much easier." He gestures to the stub in the bucket. "Now from what I saw inflammation of fluids is low, very little agitation. Good. I can see that both of you have been keeping to his regiment."

"Mostly him." Mai finally admits after her long silence. "He can take care of himself."

Candy sniffs, nodding along. "Of course," he looks to Garma. "What I'm doing now is creating a template of your remaining limb, and with any luck I can create a liner for you, and then the socket so we can get you attached to this." With one final crank the leg is, unknowably to Garma, fitted to him, or at least approximate. It was a mirror image in height of his remaining leg, experimented as Candy gets him to extend his leg fully out, matching heels side by side with artificial leg and real. "It's not exactly the most technical or complicated substitute or prosthetic, but it's the best I can do and, quite frankly the Conclave has had its fair share of creative thinking when it comes to treatment like this.

Garma is speechless. It is not appreciation of charity that comes from him, at least not completely, but there is confusion, as if this had been a trap. But there was none.

"Don't expect to be able to run well, and I doubt Mai would quite enjoy you having that capability, but this will allow you to walk."

"To walk?"

It's a concept which Garma holds differently now since his amputation. How odd it sits in him that he could walk again, but it would only lead him to the grave in the end. He had only gotten used to using a crutch, let alone his injuries, and here he had been, being provided with a leg.

The word is already in his mind: vexing.

---

They wait, the checkup that Candy does on Garma is simple, not much to look toward other than any preventative measures for infection or complications, but he has none. Who Candy concentrates on today is on Mai as she is brought to the bed again, even as Garma sits on it, and is treated. She's still very much in pain, but Candy does his best with some careful pressure and, surprisingly, a paper towel and a needle that lets out fluid from where it pricks in her. She groans, teeth gnashing through it, her entire body on fire, but she survives, and by the time that Candy returns to him the silicon inside has hardened.

When he slides it off his skin is balmy and chapped, but no worse for wear as Candy returns to his bag only to draw a wire saw and then a smaller knife, excavating the silicon block from the bucket until it comes out. Like meat to be carved, the wire saw hucks off entire cloudy chunks of the gelatin like material until it is in the vague size of his leg. That's when the smaller knife comes out, scraps kicked back into the bucket until, as if he had been carving wood, Candy presents to him several items. From his pocket: he mistakes it for a sock, but it is a sock that would expand out to the size of his thigh at least.

"This is the first layer to your liner," he offers it first to him, and Garma intuits enough to know what to do. The stump on his leg is no easier for him to interact with than it had been the first time he had seen it, touching it, cleaning it, reckoning, but he can at least pull the fabric material over it until it is tight. Then comes the next. "This is the next." And it is the silicon now. It'd edges are rough like cut meat, but it's rubbery, cool to the touch. "This goes over to help cushion yourself when in the prosthetic. It's not the most breathable, but, as you well know this is the best we can do in our circumstances."

"This is…" Regardless of what he thinks, he should at least have his grace. "I am thankful for the effort, Doctor Candy." Garma Zabi says Candy's name and it still stuns him so.

Candy trips momentarily, but he does the honor himself of sheathing Garma's stump with the silicon until it's tight. "Normally there's a socket and a sleeve after this, but this design should be good for minimal movement." He puts emphasis on the minimal part of it as Garma acclimates to the feeling of something surrounding his stump, thankful for the cloth liner. "Any discomfort so far?"

Garma shakes his head; no discomfort that he can tell. "I'm quite fine."

Then the leg is brought over. It has no foot, at least, in the traditional sense. A metal blade that curves out like a bill is what provides touch to the ground. "Do you have any socks to spare?"

Mai groans as she lies behind Garma, head on the pillow, her arm gesturing to one of the drawers in a dress off to the side. Candy retrieves a sock from there, Garma's stitching still fresh. The sock goes over the blade, and over the blade: something more from his bag. It is a foot. Or, at least, a shell that seemed to be like a foot, placing it over.

Garma's mind goes to Zeon's own prosthetic industry. The perils of living in space introduced a new mechanism of Human health development and technologies, and Zeon had been at the forefront of medical technologies as concerned artificial limb replacement. He had only been educated on that fact at all because it rubbed up alongside the Newtype research. There had been mechanical hands and feet that had been entirely responsive with person's existing, or more likely, remaining nerve endings, granting them dexterous capability that would've been miraculous even in the AD period. It had been compared that Earthnoid medicine was more concerned with trying to replicate life, where cloned body parts and organs had still been the field most prevalent on Earth in regard to medical developments. However, it was in Space, with the Spacenoid people already dehumanized by their treatment by Earthnoids, that the more mechanical and artificial skew was accepted.

Here he was, being constructed a leg however by a man with surely choice resources to expend.

Here he was, being allowed, supposedly, to be given a range of movement by someone who was keeping him prisoner.

In the prosthetic leg is a cup, roughly the size of his stump, and when Candy offers silently, he accepts.

There's a suction sound if only by the silicon liner, Candy watching it as it is brought into the leg. It won't go fully in, but Candy gestures for him to pull his leg out, his knife at the ready. "Gave you a little more padding, just in case. Easier to take away than to put back on."

As more and more material is cut off to accommodate, Mai rises from herself. Garma doesn't turn, but she's there, peering over his shoulder. In fact, her own shoulder touches his back before she stands up. She's shaky, as if she was the one with a prosthetic on. Candy scoffs.

"Mai." He sterns. "Not so fast."

"Mm." Mai grumbles, off into the kitchen with her canteen in tow. Another MRE heater is on, and the tin is brought out for more water to heat. In Candy, Garma finds some connection. Mai is difficult, the two of them know, but none could do anything about it.

The leg finally goes on. Garma, in the back of his mind, had thought maybe his phantom limb would acquiesce to it, to connect to it. But no. This is a dumb leg. This is a tool. Not a limb.

Candy stands before him. "Alright, up."

"Huh?"

"Up." Candy repeats, pocketing his hands in white coat. "Just to see where we're at."

The bed is behind him, and it's not like he is not unfamiliar with falling at this point. Mai's water boils in the background, and behind Candy, he sees her, the shade of her black hair covering her gaze.

Who is he to disappoint her?

So, he does it, he tries, at least, recalling the exact way he would tell his body to get up from the bed. He flexes the muscles in his thighs, putting power, steady, into his feet below. With his left leg, it still is natural, and he tries to mirror it all the way down to his right, but there is no movement. He still has his knee, but it stopped past it. All he can do is trust as he straightens his spine and moves himself up off the bed to a stand.

He's the same height as Doctor Candy, he realized.

It's a lot of second guessing, but it is the same parable that he had given Mai about piloting a mobile suit: it was intuitive. Every Human had, deep down, this instinct to walk, to stand. The pressure he feels now is unique, feeling all of his weight being put upon his stump, but it's assuaged by the cup and the padding and the liner.

Garma Zabi stands.

His spine is thankful, his shoulders are thankful. He stands, and he has never been so glad to be vertical as it must show on his face. Even as Mai's own face comes into focus behind Candy's, he keeps it. He lets her see.

His arms however are not as convinced as the both of them naturally go out to his sides as if balancing. An instinct.

Candy looks down at his foot, craning his head several times before looking at his face. "Alright, good," he backs off. "Come."

His prosthetic foot is up, brought forward, slow, heel first, and then pivoted down, followed by his left foot. His arm is still out as if balancing. Candy takes another step back, and Garma repeats the motion.

Mai watches as water boils.

They do this several times until Candy's back is to the table, and Garma is before him. The good doctor raised his finger, gesturing behind him. "Go ahead and walk back toward the bed, and then back to me."

Each step is like he is using the prosthetic to jump from or take a step from rather than with. He's more hopping than walking, but it is movement, walking back and to, back and forth as Candy calls again, his hands out for balancing, even if he tries to fight against the impulse.

To turn, to rotate, is to drag, put pressure on his new heel and then pivot.

Much like his pain, the annoyance is there in unwieldy manner. But it is a manner that he can, eventually, wield.

Garma Zabi walks.

"Be careful," Candy warns as he goes again. "You might tend to drift toward, in your case, your left side. Be mindful of this."

Walking with a prosthetic certainly has him weighed a certain way, and even after several minutes of back and forth walking, he is tired, despite himself.

He sees them in his memory: those that now are as he, at the resorts on Earth that have been converted to hospitals or therapy sites for those that had been injured and wounded in the course of fighting. It hadn't been the most practical move to send the wounded back into space and toward Side 3, however on Earth they made do, and troops that had never been to Earth before had hardly seemed to want to leave at all. He sees them walking, hobbled, crutches and bandages and shaky. Mai notes to herself, even without a leg, he walks, or at least tries to, with a sense of decorum. He walked the walk as befit of royalty like him, even if he was now closer than ever to the common veteran that fought for Zeon.

Eventually, Mai refills her bottle, putting it up against her abdomen as she sits with a shrewd look about her on her face, but she is silent all the while, and eventually she fades into the background as more and more Garma concentrates on walking again.

The sun begins its downward turn, around two past noon, when Candy settles himself back up with his ruck and ready to go again. The dog, Charlie, seems sad to see him go.

He and Mai mutter to each other, but Mai seems not to listen as Candy hands over another paper bag to her before he leaves. "I'll be back in due time, Mister Zabi." Candy tells Garma, and that he would, the door closing behind him, leaving the two of them alone again. He stands, now, in the hallway with Mai as she crutches over in her pain. They are eye to eye, and it is a rare thing.

It was the question that now belonged to him: "Why?" He asks her, arms crossed. It is an honest question.

She doesn't take it honestly, pushing past him to sit upon her stool and lean on the table. "Why what?"

"Why?" He says again instead, pulling up and out his stool and settling back in as if he had been walking with a prosthetic leg all his life.

"Shut up."

"Explain to me why." He goes on despite her. "You hate me so, and yet you still treat me this way. Why?" His right index finger puts upon the plastic surface of their table. "You'd still let me… walk?"

More than walk. She'd let him live, and breath, and walk, and touch among her stuffs, and eat her foods, and sleep in her bed, and talk with her of shared memories. In his fears as a tactical man, he felt a trap, some fraudulent destiny somehow worse than the one promised to him by her. His words, implication, it weighs her scale, and she locks up. Her eyes, wild and darting, betray her silence, looking anywhere but him as she grips herself tighter.

"You need a leg to take care of me when I'm out stupid."

"What?"

"Gonna need to be put under. Drugs. Help me heal up. I need you up." She explains in fast bursts, but it is words of convenience rather than true words. He can see it. He's been in politics for so long he sees the waves behind her words like air current. Just as she can tell the weather by the prick of her skin, he knows better the lies spoken to him. Though, then again, if he had been so good, he would never have been led to this.

Maybe he was just happy to see Char again from space that he had forgotten himself.

It ended up killing him, after all.

"I've been handling myself, and even you, well enough without a leg. I carried you, even. I have not starved, I've made myself healthier, I simply do not underst-" She snaps as his period, her hands gripping the table once, the leftovers of a lunch shared between them and Candy disheveled in wrapper shrapnel as he shuts his jaw.

"God dammit-" Her finger nails almost cut into her palm as she breathed out once before locking his gaze with hers. "You think if I kept you in here, just beat the ever-living fuck out of you for days, weeks, months, that I'd be any better off killing you?"

He blinks several times as her sharp venom comes off her lips as it flares with pain itself, and she herself is keeping it in with her hand. A splotch forms at her stomach from condensation. She is hurting. She always has been. He does not dare speak up as she pants, several times, regaining her breath until she realizes she can just take his. She reaches over the table, the canteen tumbles to the plastic below out of her shirt that Garma peers down for a moment in stimulative reaction before they're face to face again. Her hands are around his throat, and he is frozen. She does not squeeze, not entirely. She squeezes tight enough for him to feel the ridges of her palms, the callouses of her index finger, even through his scar. He feels her. It's soothing. He does not fear her.

"Killing you is a choice. A choice I have to make completely, and utterly, on its own." She couldn't put him out of his misery as a mercy. She couldn't give him what he wanted. "When I kill you," her thumb, her hand, larger than his own, passed over his jugular. "It will be entirely, solely, an isolated decision. It will mean something if, I had not been here, at that moment, you could've lived on."

She wants to take his life from him in the most complete way possible. From her hands around his neck, Garma feels not heat, but cold. She is a distant woman to him, even as she touches him, but yet there was something to seek out in those far horizons. Something desperate, something too, that stood alone without the circumstances.

She was lonely, that much he knew down in his bones. A single woman out on the frontier of this new world with nothing to lose or gain save being judgement's messenger.

Spacenoid as she was, she was still Human. Human nature survived in her.

"You are my burden." She whispers to him, and some spit comes with it without her regard. At the end of the day, he showed up on her doorstep, and if that was not a divine prerogative, she didn't know what was. She knew him, as he had once known her. If she could not bear execution, then who else could? The Federation was still damnable, and she had her own loss that made this personal.

Hands rise up, and they are not hers. They're his, on her shoulders, pushing back, but not of resistance. Pressure on her that rises, slowly, like boiling water, until they match each other's grip. The musculature of her body beneath his fingertips, and his breath, beneath her pads as they bear each other, both of them standing.

Garma thinks of Char as Mai's hands are on his throat.

He wants to not think of him, to give him a place in his mind, not even scorn. To give him a piece of his mind at all would be to surrender or cede that he had indeed held him still after his great betrayal and admittance. But he thinks of Char now because, maybe, what would it have been if he was this upfront about his disdain for him. That mask had been the difference, literal, and metaphorical.

Mai hid nothing.

Maybe, just maybe, through her, he could understand him.

What had he said to him before he thought him dead?

This is your father's fault.

Maybe she hates him so more than Char. There is no veil of his father for her. It's just him for her. They stand like that, and slowly, slowly, his thumbs shift where they lie on her shoulders until they run minute circles beneath the fabric of her crew neck. In her wild eyes, that rage tempered down as seconds become minutes, and how hard she was breathing was realized until she settled down herself.

"You vex me so, dear Mai." He says again as if what had happened, hadn't. "I meant not to arise in you this. Just a simple question on why you'd allow me an even easier way to go abouts escaping. Hypothetically, of course."

She slides her hands down from his neck, putting upon his chest before he is forced off, and he breaks contact as well, back on the table as she gathers up her canteen and presses it back to where it needed to. Indignant, but sane, still, mouth curling. She knows her mood swings during her menstruation had often manifested in some intensity. All of this is too much, and if Garma would try anything now to save himself from her she would be sure that she would beat him to death with her bare hands and leave the dog to pick at his remains like he had seen many mutts before to do so. Though she knows, deepest down, that there was a modicum of unfairness for a man that had been his own type of fair, in a life that had been unfair to him from his standards.

"I told you, I need you up so you can deal with me." She says again, and this time, third time, Garma takes it as an answer. "I can take the leg away easy, anyway." She gulped, the spit in her mouth thick. "Besides, new leg or not you're still not getting far if you go for it, nor are you getting any better advantage of me, for it."

Garma huffs from his nose quickly. Again, "If I were to try to escape. I wouldn't try to harm you. That is my vow." Even then he glances at her weapons and ammo, all of which he has accounted for and placed and organized in the earthquake's aftermath yesterday. "I would just leave."

"Just leave," Mai says mockingly quiet, looking him over. Wounds and all, he still looks very much like Garma Zabi. "It won't even be me that gets you, if you walk out there. Any scav, or anyone walking from the Conclave would see you, what then?"

A forgone conclusion, one that Garma doesn't particularly want to consider himself. He brings his right hand up, and for the first time in a month and a few days, he finds purchase on one of his bangs. It's not enough to twirl, but he smooths it over between index and thumb. He hardly knew that he had done it.

"Would it surprise you to hear that sometimes I went undercover in public when I wanted to shed my responsibilities?" He said instead. "I believe I have some transferable skills in that regard."

That gets a huff out of her in some amusement. "Any good at it?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Enough." He shrugged. It worked most of the time. It was really all in the hair. "I have a fake name as well."

"Oh? Really?"

"Yes, I do." He shimmed with his eyebrows, recognizing that it did some rather farfetched that he would hide from Zeon's public eye. "Even on Zum, before the war, I would do this. In the early morning hour on days where I could spare time, I would've left our compound in disguise, to walk among the common people." In darker light his hair could pass as a color not his own, and with a hat, a simple camel leather coat and jeans, he became just another man in early morning commute, sneaking away from the Zabi compound from the lesser traveled side gates or exits, out into the street without even his guard. He would go to the markets, the bakeries of downtown Zum and walk close to them, window shopping. If he had been daring he would go into those bodegas and order a bacon egg and cheese sandwich on a rye roll, something that Icelina, being a homegrown New York City girl, had been surprised he had been so natural in ordering. It drew her to him further still. Visiting those locales had never been the same as a Zabi, where they were all orchestrated for public relations, to prove that the Zabis could well step among the citizenry just the same. It annoyed him, put upon him an ugly, artificial feeling. His first undercover walks out into Zum had been in response to that, and, every time, they were ended by a plain clothed bodyguard finding him and, with as much grace and decorum as expected of them, led him back home. But until then, he walked as others did.

He was not so far spoiled, so far royal, that he did not know how anyone else lived. He was spoiled of course, he had recognized that if it was brought to him, but he had been not unfamiliar in the ways of the world beyond gates and gardens and golden trim.

"Won't work with me." Mai had breathed.

"Perhaps. Probably not… You may hunt me down, and yes, a game would be afoot which my chances would not particularly in my favor… But I wouldn't put your life at hazard for it."

Repetition is their language, day by day this cabin fever of his does lead him to believe that this is more and more purgatory, but like all things: it ends. Every time they speak this same circle, each time he hopes it is truer.

Mai, if nothing else, can prove it true. She mulls those words, and he thinks she has finally been brought over to his way of thinking, but when she works herself up, standing, going to her gear in the corner. He fears something else, despite her own promise of how he'd die.

Icelina once during her time of month spoke a fierceness unlike her about how she would kill her father if it meant being together with him. It was nonsense, Garma patting her back and kissing upon her neck in soothing motions. He wouldn't believe, or have a world, where she would ever be at hazard of hurting, of killing in his name. It'd kill him to see.

Mai, however, he can totally believe that so in the pain of her time, for when she turns after kneeling down before her gear, her pistol is out, and the rack of its slide is as loud as a gunshot.

Garma knows the model from intelligence briefings: a Colt UCCQBP. Universal Century Close Quarters Battle Pistol. Tan. 10mm. Issued to Federation Marine Raiders and officers. It's heavy, especially with the flashlight she has attached to it, its sandstone, marble grip worn down with both sweat and grit and blood. She holds it in her one hand, carbon scoring along its front face blacker than soot. Her thumb flicks the safety, and she returns to him. He knows this gun well because it had been given to him once before, the night after she found him. She asked him to fight so that he may be killed.

Today she does the same, for a different purpose. She holds the gun limply but rotates it about her hand until the grip is facing him, and the barrel: to her.

It hits the table with a thump, plastic rumbling as she pushes it forward and offers it to him.

She says nothing, but as his hand had moved to balance himself while walking anew, it reached out now, slowly, as if unbelieving. His right hand does not have a proper grasp of the pistol's grip, and he hadn't been as in tune with his firearms skills as he once was outside of an academic setting, but there was no accuracy needed when who he would, might, target, was sitting only, barely, two feet away. As if on fire his hand darts as he touches the metal of its grip, but she does not react, hunched over, looking right at him. She doesn't react when he touches, gropes the pistol's grip again, grasping it, full contact with his palm. It takes another minute, his eyes darting between it and her, before he thinks of moving it. She does not react at all as the front sight of it lines up with her torso.

All it would take is one pull of his index finger, one shit, and that would be it.

The weight of the pistol is like gravity itself has singled it out to drag down, but he keeps it up, trained on her as his elbow dully leans on the table supporting it.

She would let him walk.

She would let him kill her.

This could be freedom. This could be his way back.

Icelina, he hears her voice at times in his head, from memories that keep him from the dark places in his mind to peaceful scenes to wet dream fantasies. He yearns to hear her voice not as an apparition, but as a real sound. All he needs to do is leave, to go, to force through any that would get in his way as he had promised her before that fateful mission.

All he would have to do is kill Mai Gul.

He doesn't.

Icelina's voice is silent.

His thumb depresses the magazine of her gun. The metal magazine collapses onto the table on its side, and it is empty. Bringing his left hand upon seeing it empty, he racks the slide, locking it back, but no bullet comes out.

The gun was empty anyway.

He hadn't pulled the trigger on her, and the gun hadn't been loaded anyway. She leans over, taking the gun from his hands as she comes back from her supposed stasis, their fingers brushing once together as she slowly rides the slide back home and decocked the hammer. The empty magazine stays between them, and he leans back, staring at her.

"I told you." He says softly, and she nods along, silently. He really did mean it.

She's stuck inside of her own head now.

"You're too damned proud for your own good." He was, in the end, either a saint, or a spoiled brat.

"Principled. Not proud." He shakes his head once. "I know what it means to be humbled."

He knows what it means to be demeaned, to be brought down to his place, on his knees before someone. More than that he had begged for it. And she, holding her gun that had taken life only just yesterday, standing over the man she had despised deep down, she feels herself so close to Mankind, vindicated. Her pistol unloaded, the cold metal of its barrel tips to his chin, and she holds his head, his face, looking up at her like that. She'd never killed anyone like this. With a knife, with a hail of gunfire, sure, that close up. He holds his breath, but he knows that the danger is not a gun, but her.

"You," She pointedly says. "vex me so." It's a half-mock back, but it's also half-true. He reaches up slowly, daring to take the barrel of her pistol away from him, and she does not shift to account. She lets him take the barrel, running his thumb along the underside of its bore before tilting it off. The slight tilt of the slide off of the frame tings, and she relents, putting the gun aside.

"See? We agree, more and more on common ground." With a shaky breath he crosses his arms again, his words far more comfortable than his nerves would allow.

She snickers at his shakes. "Sure." It is beaten back however as it is her turn to proving from him:

"Do you wish to die, Mai?"

She doesn't answer, and long enough passes that Garma believes he hadn't said anything at all, but when she looks at him that is answer enough: that he wasn't getting one.

---

It's not long after that that they return to their routine of the day as if Candy hadn't shown up, as if Garma did not look for a crutch to walk about their apartment, but this would be the last of this routine for several days. Mai clutches the paper bag that Candy had given her. To the uneducated, inside seemed as if a child's Halloween grab bag: Yellow candied bulbs upon cut sticks. To the Reaper Lord, however, this would be a score with a street value of at least a thousand dollars, if not more. It's fentanyl in lollipop form. It would take her through the day and soothe her body to a point of desperately needed healing, and she was always about ripping the bandages off fast.

What she had told Garma was true: she needed his help.

Despite the supply shortages, Bo Tale had been brilliant in maintaining supplies with the Conclave as a pharmacist. First year as she was, she had been a smart woman, and it proved in the way she was able to make supplies out of chemicals and compositions so far out of reach for the average person that she did, undoubtedly, save lives. Bo's way of synthesizing medicine was brilliant, but it did have its quirks. These lollipops were very potent, perhaps beyond a standard, regulated degree, but it was all she had and they had affected people differently than usual. She had given Garma the same dose and he had lost language for at least a day. She knows her tolerance. It's not much better than him.

But it was needed.

Sucking in her breath, clutching the bag in her hands, she rips the bandage.

"I do need your help, taking care of me for the next few days." Garma peeks his head out from The Odyssey, his mouth moving already to agree, but she stops him, teeth clutching tight with a slight click. She wasn't entirely being dramatic and impulse by giving him her gun. If he had not pulled a trigger so obviously then, her chances of not waking up or coming to dead had been enough that, she is remised to put it like this, trust him. "I need to go under. Same as you went under for your stuff."

She didn't want to shit her own bed or injure herself by rolling off. She would still be a functioning person, but more doll than Human. She could be told to do things, if not forced while in a hazy state for her own good.

The Conclave was out of the question. Any chance she could babble about Garma too high, and the chance from that that someone would come killing him even greater.

This would have to do.

"It would be… good, of you, to make sure nothing happens while I'm down."

Of all that Garma could say, he says this: "I take care of you, you take care of me. It's simple enough, is it not?"

"Well, you are you, and I am me. Not the regular pair." Mai said unsteadily, but it was the truth. "Excuse me if I don't particularly still trust you, or this arrangement."

He pursed his lips. "Well, think of this as… making yourself well, so that you can see me well, and then… you know." And when he is well, so too does what she wants comes to fruition. It brings her solace, and she does it. She does it quick and fast, one lollipop out of the bundle taken out with such startling speed, kept between her fingers. She doesn't look at it.

Her finger on her free hand flicks, just by impulse, muscle memory, she catches it before she speaks, but she knows what it's from. She lets it flow out of her as that finger points up into the sky, and the words she speaks to Garma are that of a language, not of Universal Century Standard English. Garma can only guess what the long line of words that comes out of her mouth as if she had been speaking it her entire life mean.

She, however, means this to the bone, and her smile is one that is nice to see on her face, but one that Garma can't help but know the unease behind it for his sake:

"With Allah as my witness, you will be in perfect health when I kill you."

All he can do is smile back at her as she speaks Arabic to him, and for the first time between them, they are pleased with each other as she pops the fentanyl lollipop into her mouth.

No one would stop her. Not even herself.

It is done with such speed that he didn't anticipate that now he was going to be on the clock, but he went to his feet immediately. "Mai?"

She sucks hard, letting the lollipop settle between her jaw and line of her mouth. "Get me on the shitter before dark. Let me do my stuff. Yell at me to remind me to clean up after myself. But just let me back here after and do my thing. Spoon feed me if it comes down to it too. If you hear me groaning, pop another in my mouth, but give it at least a day. I didn't come along this far only to get addicted to Fet." She speaks fast, knowing her time is on a limit. Garma rounds the table to her, and she takes his arm to raise up.

"To bed?" He asks.

"To bed." She affirms. In their slow walk he considers her directions, and only one.

"I don't know if I want to risk yelling at you at all. I feel like you'd kill me in such a state."

"Sounds good to me." The squeeze of her hand along the scar of his arm is felt in pressure alone, but it's as friendly as she's ever been as she plops on the bed. There's little more to say. It was better to just get it down and over with as she continues to suck on her lollipop like an adult child, promised a relief to pain that she already feels spreading out from her lungs and brain. She does manage this before she goes, Garma sitting at the foot of the bed, looking her over. Charlie has returned, propping up on his legs to get even with him and see what was going on. He had been down onto the floor after enough, aware that Mai had been speaking: "If I come back alright, I think I know how I'm killing you."

Garma's eyes brightened as if he had been told of a birthday gift, inching up to sit by her closer. "Do tell?"

She nods. "Mm. I'll just, open up your leg, maybe, let you bleed out. I'll be there. Don't you worry." Her hand taps the stump of his leg as he sits by her side, barely missing his new silicon sheath. "Unless you've got a better idea, that is?"

"Don't want to take me in my sleep?" He posed back to her. "I feel that'd be amenable."

She tightens her grip and he can't help but squeak as she growls. "It won't be that easy for you. You fascist fuck."

It doesn't take several more minutes than that for that familiar haze to come over her eyes, but even before that she forgets where her hands had been, and her palm remains on his leg and he doesn't quite know what to do with it until she is blank faced and staring up at the ceiling. It slips off, and he tucks her in proper this time, unlike last night.

If she was insane, so was he for going along with this, but the world had not been sane for nearly a year, and he had been a part of the world all the same.

Looking down upon her in lucid drifting, she is at peace, and that is enough for him. "Right. Sweet dreams, dear Mai." And he pauses, stops, not content to leave it there. The trail is obvious, looking at his new leg. "And thank you."

She's not entirely gone with the way she groans at him, her eyes tracking him as she turns over away, but her face does not hide some sort of amiable complacence.

---

Riah. Side 6. Ribo Colony.

A man and his son walk into the UN Medical Center on the affluent colony. The Riah Republic had sprung into life shortly before the war as a matter of politicking between Riah's own self-actualization and the urging by a quickly mobilizing Principality of Zeon. The declaration of its own state and the ability to mark its own treatises and arrangements had spared it the war to come. This grace afforded to it spared it the fate that Side 1, 2, and 4 sustained in the opening weeks of the fighting. Whereas those colonies had more or less been completely wiped off the map, with barely any colonies safely able to maintain themselves at their respective points, Side 6 and Side 5 originally remained sustainable. As the war went on, Side 5 had fallen too, leaving Riah alone, save for Zeon, Side 3, itself.

It had a certain amount of fortune that came with maintaining neutrality in the current conflict between the Federation and Zeon, even as a power nominally within the Federation's sphere. As Earth's farmland quickly became battlefields, Side 6 rose in its necessity to feed what remained of the Earth Federation and its allies. Ribo, and most other of Side 6's colonies, had suffered great prosperity and wealth for it, but Ribo had been alone in what made it special.

A metropolitan colony first, middle class splendor of an infinite suburbs that wrapped around itself. Ribo had another distinction, hidden so far in this war. The UN Medical Center outwardly was a highly technological research facility meant to forward medicine and health technology in many forms ranging from technological aids to outright body replacement in the form of prosthetics and as such. However such technology was always a front, at least for as long as the Earth Federation's Project V was in play.

Tem Ray's project had yielded its first fruit, said fruit getting transported to Jaburo for full evaluation and data compilation for the full harvest. On Ribo, the next step of Project V was underway already before a certain rumor, one that Zeon fought for, but the Earth Federation denied. Professor Lumumba would deny the accusations that the UN Medical Center was a hub of Federation mobile suit research, with what the medical center's grasp of mechanical bipedal design meant for more Human based application.

War had been a Human-based application however. The money had to come from somewhere.

It was easy for Professor Lumumba to lie because of it. It was easy to pass a lie on why a man like him developing mechanical prosthetics would, bound to the wheel chair as he was, and it had been easy for people to take on that lie as well. A lie was a lie, however.

A necessary evil.

Professor Lumumba had not the luxury of turning to meet those who had been at the door to the observation deck, deep beneath the UN Medical Center in the very catacombs of the colony, built as part of the facility.

It had been the man and his son.

"Franklin." Lumumba had greeted. It was hardly their first time meeting, but it had been the first time they met on Ribo. Other times it had been on Luna, in Granada, or in Jaburo, conferring with a conference between Tem Ray's engineers and the Federation brass.

The blonde haired, older man had nodded. "Professor," As he walked, a boy had been in his shadow. "Forgive me. I had to bring the kid along today. We couldn't find a babysitter available for the week." He spoke with a harder British accent, enough stone in his voice to show a man rounding out his age into the latter half of his fifties. "And Hilda seems to found herself in some important business all of the sudden." The skepticism in his voice about his wife's whereabouts had hidden no emotion. Lumumba had no mind for it. He had always wished he had children of his own, but life had never gone that way for him. Work had been his progeny.

The child had kept to Franklin's shadow, avoiding the gaze of Lumumba even as Franklin approached the railing of the observation deck and the glass walls before it. Below them both: a machine. Its serial had been open on the very first bits of its frame:

RX-78NT-1

Engineers had clambered over it as the machine biped lay rigid on the ground, various technicians poking into its frame and various electronics as if ants touching upon fresh fruit, swarming it, not taking it apart however, but rather making it whole. A supervisor on the floor had in a barely audible warning called out, and the people below had all finished up their activities as warning sirens in the chamber below blared, evacuating in a calm fashion as Lumumba and Franklin looked down below.

Procedural tests for a new type of mobile suit. These were necessary, but all paled from data that was currently being awaited from that ship known as the White Base.

"Could it kill that ship to arrive at Jaburo any faster?" Franklin had breathed out annoyed, more of the nature of late mail than the enormity of what that data could reveal. "I worked on this design, and I know it's a perfect iteration of Tem Ray's pet project. All we need is that data from that Newtype."

"So confident of your team's work, aren't you?" Lumumba had found his own amusement in Franklin's arrogance. In a field of geniuses and savants it was a character trait he dealt with often. His own humbling came from his own ailments.

Franklin sniffed once. "All technological advancement is iterative. The work here on this new variant will make it the best mobile suit of its class as it stands. If we're not able to field it before that is made not true, it'd be an insult to me."

Even when war was being waged, those so far removed could make their own arbitrary conflicts.

Lumumba was not blind to this. The mobile suit below them was hardly the only one being worked on as far as he knew. Tem Ray's design was still Federation piecemeal, and thus the very standard of his design for the next generation mobile suit had been shared to any and all who could promise the Federation a way to win the war. Anaheim Electronics, the Moore Brotherhood, and even the firms made out of Federated Zeonic firms on Earth among others had all vied for a chance to put upon Tem Ray's initial blueprint. At least a dozen models of the same sort were being developed and the Federation had allowed it for the sake of combatting Zeonic mobile suits who had been at least generations ahead of their own tech.

What made the version in the UN Medical Center different was that it was being developed toward a true future, one that the Federation denied, but still accounted for secretly in labs in Augusta, Kilimanjaro, Pyongyang, and so many more.

Only in a place that had data of the Human body could properly work on what had been named the Alex.

Franklin spoke in harsh tones, and each time, the child he brought seemed to shrink away further.

Out below them, concussive pops were dulled by the observation floor's windows. The thrusters attached to the prototype mobile suit below, locked in place, were being evaluated for function, the gyros they were attached to clearing through all angles as the jets flared. It was this that lit curiosity in the young child, stepping out of his father's shadow to the railing of the deck. It was a railing that didn't account for children and thus the glass was easily reachable by him. He reached out a small palm on the cool glass and looked down at mechanics at work.

Franklin looked down upon his son annoyed, about to say something, but Lumumba had cut him off. It was good to let a child wonder.

"What's his name?" Lumumba asked, and Franklin answered.

The nine-year-old child tilts his head overhearing his name said but thinks nothing of it as he looks at the almost blinding light of the thrusters below. The reflections of firelight in his eyes bounce off against the glass he places his palms on, and in that they twinkle in his irises.