1-10
The Dreams We Had to Sell
"Lord Garma," The upper crust and management classes of New York City were so willing to call him that, as if they hadn't been subservient to a man like him for all of their lives. "Let my company oversee reconstruction for Manhattan, we are well acquainted with the area in our hundred-year history. Ricardo Marcenas himself was on the board before the Universal Century!"
"Lord Garma, if we could offer you and Zeon a personal tour of our facilities, they are modular, and thus we would be very easily able to host your superior technology for use here on Earth."
"Your honorable Lord Master Garma, we avail ourselves to-"
"We're glad Zeon is here finally!"
"I have information in regard to the Federation because, as I humbly admit, they often licensed our-"
Words, wishes, groveling. All at his feet.
It tires him so, but this was a necessity that had also been a proving fact of the conditions of the war: The Earth Elite had been spineless, and they would gladly accept any masters as long as they were kept alive, kept comfortable. So here Garma walks among the ideas of civility in Upper Manhattan splendor in the Eschonbach Manor, entertaining those after nearly a year at war about the future beneath warm lights and crystal chandeliers. He fits very easily in this type of world, his uniform pressed and fitted exactly for these type of events. If anything, this is his element. He floats upon the well dressed and the well-bred and he is among like kind, and yet not. All of them pivot to him after all:
The old men who have their blood and gold buried in the floorboards below.
The women born beautiful and at hazard to feel bad for their fortunes.
The sons who see in him what they were not, and their jealous glares across from the side of the ball in the shadow of a war that they were spared from.
And then the daughters, the tender and sweet daughters who always took their leave to stand by him because he had irradiated classical and gentlemanly warmth that he knew he had but did not acknowledge oh so much. He had his own warrior, battle poet charisma about him. He had seen the bone and the blood, and it had made hm that much more alluring to the young women his age. They crowd him. They love him.
Why they love him, he tries to guess, but any reason is a valid reason when it comes to matters of accounting for Zeon's control of the Earth.
In Asia, the Zeon theatre commander there he knows does so in the way of the old history: a military coup to rule over the largest population of Mankind concentrated. M'Quve, for all the man's culture and eccentricities, understands that he must appeal to Europe's culture to control them.
In those United States, Garma Zabi simply appeals with himself, and that is enough.
Garma spares an older man his attention as he wades through a late-night party and gathering in the Eschonbach Manor, a rather affluent affair which he has made his command post for the greater part of the year. Mayor Eschonbach had executive dreams in becoming the local administrator, that is, the President of the United States, and for that reason alone he had played nice with Zeon, the assumption that the US would be under control of Zeon for the foreseeable future. For his political game, the wiry older man had wanted to play, Garma had let him partake. Zeon had no use for the domestic and local politics, all those issues having gone the way of the backburner when came the advent of the Universal Century. What remained had been a culture war, but he had been on Earth only a year, and it was not his concern as he fought an actual war.
Said war had been going exceedingly well, by all accounts, save for a few hiccups.
Above them, Degwin Zabi himself looked down on the affair in that ball room painted red with salmon flooring that spoke to an older, classical design. All things were better in the old days, even design. Statesmen and those well to do had found further reprieve from the war that came to Earth there, and, more than that, colluded with the liberator.
A great victory, Garma thinks, looking up to his father's portrait great and grand as expected of a man such as him. That alone can keep him smiling in that room that is quickly becoming stuffy: black suits and dresses and military uniforms of those staff of his invited mixing together in a room perhaps too bright, too quiet, and too at ease despite the war.
Trouble in paradise was a phrase that implied that trouble had to come to paradise, as opposed to having been built in. As he takes a quiet moment, smiling and patting the hands away of those that kept appealing to him, he realizes that Zeon itself had its troublemakers born within it, as opposed to out.
There he is, fresh from their shared homeland: Space. Garma's eyes trace across the ball room to the bar, a barman at the far opposite end of it, staying far away from a figure clad in red it was as if he had taken a swatch from the walls and put it before him.
Char Aznable has always preferred the color red however, Garma Zabi knows, and it is a red that is eye-catching all the same. He knows better now than to be caught in his gravity.
When he walks over to him, there is a barrier around Char it seems that keeps others away from him. There, among everyone else, stood a soldier having a private moment, and those looking on would surmise he had come fresh from the battlefield. Those further in the know would also surmise that this man in particular was the fabled Red Comet ace, and thus any impression they could place upon him would be totally inadequate.
There is no introduction needed between them. They have been long ago engaged.
The bartender tonight, a Scottish gentleman by the name of Hackley longs know Garma's preferred drink in social situations. It's a drink that he can silently, swiftly, put back for the maximum effect of socially lubricating himself.
Hackley has the small glass passed to him, and from afar one would assume that he was simply handed a glass of ice. But that was the benefit of blanche absinthe. He hides nothing from Char however as he plants himself against the counter, the glass in his white gloved hands, and slams it back.
He can barely hear Char go "oh" in amusement. He's in rare form tonight, for that helmet is off, leaving only the mask that he had seen Lino Fernandez hand him before their great student putsch that was the Dawn Rebellion years ago. The burn is pleasant and uniformly expected, and a weight on his shoulders that was there is let go of, sliding off his form like that if meat from bone. Despite the conduct of those in this room, a war had still been on, and every hour, every minute, a Spacenoid patriot had been killed resisting the Federation.
"I can't stand these fools." His breath that follows after downing the glass is sharp, unturning to Char.
The Red Comet leans his back against that old wooden counter, white boots against a bronze foot rest below as he nurses his own glass of a spinning drink. Char's jaw barely moves as he tenses once, and then goes to sympathize. "They'd all be in a panic if they knew about the Trojan Horse and its mobile suits."
Those there are present specifically because they believe, not in Zeon, although any expressed thought to that was appreciated, but rather in Zeon victory. They were there because they had drawn their card and put it upon the side of the Principality and expected to be awarded in exchange for their complacency. It's rather bourgeois, how they attached any ideology that allowed them to maintain themselves and their standing, but those are ideas that swim in Garma's head that makes him see them not as people, but carpetbaggers and coattail riders and, eventually, they would be dealt with all the same, if not sell Zeon the rope.
How many there managed companies that had abided by the Federation charters and laws that put an immense tax and disincentive for sending their goods into space? How many there had been complicit in the poverty that plagued all Spacenoids because of the profit margin that they, those who had gone to space, did not fit into? Too many. In another world all of them would've been Zeon's target as opposed to just the Federation, but this was not that world.
"That's right," Garma agrees, clearing his throat. He wonders how it would look, the revelation that, in some fantastic future, the Federation would turn around the front. At the very least he would like to see them all scramble. "But I do have a task force assembled for it."
Char crosses his arms, head tilted Garma's way, messy blond strands hanging. "Do you?"
Garma nods once, unbothered. "I do." Dangerous as it might've been to take off some of his forces from the frontline, they are currently under good management for such an important task. But he thinks no longer on it for now. He doesn't doubt his people, even if the same task they are off on was failed by Char.
Char says nothing, but the curve of his mouth tightens. Garma craves the look so.
The dynamic has changed, and he lets it stew and marinate for later consumption. The years between them have grown them apart, side to side, and yet in position as well.
Garma never knew what he wanted, in the end: Char Aznable. The true desires and needs of the man had been beyond him, and what they were to each other in a dorm room, beneath the sheets, could be forgotten save for the initiation of any familiarity. He was a colonel, and his captain, and he, ace and decorated pilot as he was now, was still subordinate to him.
Garma doesn't dwell on it, especially since he has other concerns, and people looking at him.
Eschonbach is in there, somewhere, looking at him from afar. He hides nothing about his distaste for Zeon and Garma knows likewise about his backroom deals with an opposition party, waiting for the right time to strike against him so as to free his New York from Zeon. That won't happen and he'll end up dead for it. But for now in the meantime, Garma can feel some vindication by his hatred.
A jazz band goes on, offering an inoffensive tune that fills in the gaps of whatever speakings are happening between the patrons, and it fills in the silence between him and Char as well.
Things have changed between them, utterly, and totally, and the very fringes of what had happened between them, many nights when they were very much enjoying each other, it is behind them.
Char seems to be silent, not out of choice, but his mouth slowly moves, as if testing words without his lips without parting to see if they would be the right words to say.
Garma turns over, back against the counter, same as him, looking out on the crowd that belongs to him. He's been man of the hour for almost a year in New York. With he turned over the crowd that was unseen by him shuffles, a dozen heads moving as to not get caught looking.
"What bothers you, Char?" Garma asks softly. He lived with him for years in spite of that now divide. He knows his tells.
Char looks away from him as well, out to the crowd. "Just the Trojan Horse. Is all." He pauses. "You don't seem at all bothered by it."
They had both failed together, separately, to try and down that white ship. Char was right, he should've been worrying instead of attending this function. But he didn't. Literally, and beyond.
There is a staircase leading to a second floor of that room, attached to the more personal areas of the manor for the owners and the hosts. It is where people expect to see those of importance come out, so, naturally, they all turn when those great white doors at the end of the balcony open with an old, resounding echo. The jazz band and its singer in practiced movement stops, and the singer looks up above him where his band is situation with their instruments and mic sings for him as he riles up,
"Introducing-!" He stops, making eye contact with who has found himself above and it not being who he thinks it is.
Those there expected an Eschonbach. What they get, rather, is the emergence of the only woman of color there, dressed in an officer's uniform of the Principality of Zeon.
What comes first for people when they see her is in triplicate: her stature (tall), the fact she was ethnic (a novelty in those halls), and the pistol on her hip (scary). Her hair is tied for utility and utility alone, its dark color the color of the midnight black in its silky strands. As the door closes behind her, she immediately recognizes that this was not the way with how the room looks at her in turn. She is frozen for a moment as if she had done something truly wrong, manilla folder pressed against her chest and held as her vision darts across the wide room in a sweep before any disturbance on her face is put back, square and stone when she finds what she was looking for across a sea of people.
The officer finds Garma's eyes across it all, and then she makes her beeline from her level down the stairs, even before people find out that she's not meant to be looked at, and the jazz band returns to playing and the people go back to their aesthetic busy attending to each other.
She's a woman that doesn't quite fit into her officer uniform, but she goes through so many anyway, and she doesn't spend much time in them. It is not, of course, the physical fit of them, but rather the situation she finds herself through. Uniforms meant for officers were by no means the most efficient for field work, where a BDU would be more in place, but she spends as much time in these places of high honor as she does on ruined battlefields, and one required a certain cloth.
Even Char cannot mistake the look of fondness on Garma's face when she enters the room.
"Didn't know you preferred women in uniform, Garma." Garma can never quite tell if Char approves or disapproves in his comments, but he knows better to speak ill of the woman in question. Perhaps that why he likes her so: one of the few people to ward him off.
"I didn't know you preferred them young." He bites back as they were used to, even as far back in the Academy, even while they were far more entangled with each other, talking now of the women they were attached to.
She's a darker woman, amplified only by her time out in the sun, but she hides it well beneath the standard Zeonic female officer's uniform, her long legs kept within a dark olive skirt that went to below her knees that the entire affair had gotten a look at as she went down those long steps. She had made haste, eyes shooting evil at those who did look at her. Her eyes were barely contained behind a pair of glasses.
Char knows this woman too, but not like Garma.
Captain Mai Gul. Spacenoid patriot to the bone, even if she would rather not admit it. She cuts her way through the floor with the same aura as Char's repulsiveness to any bystander, and she's before him in less than thirty seconds after she entered the room, drawing everyone's attention.
Their height difference, for she even stands taller than Char, is one that Garma manages far better than Char as the man shifts away slightly.
"An odd way to enter the floor, Captain Gul." Garma welcomes Captain Gul back, almost coaxing her in between himself and Char, away from the bulk of the party.
She had always flaunted a certain lack of decorum in front of him, which, in all honesty, he hadn't minded quite at all. She was comfortable with him, and he had been all the more confident in his decision in appointing her to the place that she had been: by his side for the Earth Invasion. Her face scrunched once in minor annoyance, an errant bang of hers cast behind her ear, her glasses securing it. "If there's anything the Earth elite deserve execution over, it's making their houses the size of labyrinths."
Char can hardly hold his drink down as he's caught mid sip. Such an extreme woman, the Red Comet thinks as he chokes down the champagne.
Garma takes all the pleasure he can from whenever his dear right hand woman makes his dear comrade stumble. "Naturally. Your report?" He moves on to save the Red Comet's graces.
She glances at Char, and then back to him. "Ready. But not here."
"Oh?" Char can feel her eyes on him, even through her side glance. "Not here?"
"It's not your mission, Red Comet." Whereas Char spoke around people, like the twirls of a dancer's ribbons, Captain Gul did not dance with him. The scores of Zeon political figures and officers tried to dance his dance, but Captain Gul was not accord to the dance.
Around them, people danced. The rug below muting out the feelings of those steps which were impure and made for the appearance of. There is much dancing in that room and the dancing never stops even as the feet stay. The dance is more than action. The dance is word and song and action and intent and the dreams inward of people that only eeks out of themselves in the stray inflections of that intention, and of conspiracy. The dance continues, and Char Aznable is a master of the dance.
What is a dancer to a gunman, however?
The dance manifests destiny, and Captain Mai Gul denies it.
She looks down upon Char Aznable and denies his words, his position.
Garma likes to imagine she sees through his mask differently than how he knows what's behind it. Between them, not a dance brews, but a fight, and he intercedes physically, sliding between her and him.
"Now Char, you might have your way of doing things, but I would like to remind you that it falls outside of some particular decorum as expected in the military. Captain Gul here is a consummate professional, and I prefer her quite immensely."
"Do you now?" Another challenge from Char.
Captain Gul shifts behind Garma, but he straightens himself. "Well, I take my leisure time during quite seriously, and I wouldn't have brought her along if I didn't intend to be assured of my leisure."
In the reflection of a glass left on the counter, Garma sees her face twist in some embarrassment that he loves to see on her. He had brought her on the one week he had allowed himself to be free of the war because if there was anyone else he had trusted to stand-in for him, and be close by, it had been her. He turns, confronting her in jest.
"You enjoyed our trip to Florida, didn't you?" He asks delicately. "Did we not dance together, you and me, at a similar function at-"
"Colonel." Captain Gul is prompt, but she looks away from him saying it. He chuckles, but there would be time enough to poke at her later. He glances at Char, pushing off the counter, touching his arm, just for old time's sake. Char knows the maneuver well, and he is nursing another drink in silence. "Well, Captain, if you insist on giving me an update, join me out on the balcony, would you?"
They leave Char behind and for Garma, it feels exquisite. He feels exquisite. They walk, and he has alcohol in his gut spreading throughout him as they cut through the dance again, she on his side. They are a great subject to those there, polar opposites in physicality, but together in unison. The dance floor stops, spreads, and dissipates for them as they walk to a tall glass door to a balcony outside. Only just by the short distance does he not offer his arm to her, not that he would be assured she would take it.
The air is fresh, and cool, the line of trees that creates a border around the manor supplying much in the way of air that couldn't be replicated in the colonies. He does take in a fresh breath of it, clearing his head, leading the two of them to the stone balcony with only the light inside illuminating them out here. The stars were so distant that their eternal lights had been dimmed, then and there.
"You're back so soon from the Seattle Front." He opens, and his voice is low, relaxed. Just as they are usually when not having to maintain the decorum expected of the military life. She had still stuck to it for as much as she had been a good soldier. Even she, however relaxes, her broad shoulders drooping.
"Wanted to stay away from me a little while longer, Colonel?" She seems hardly bothered as she absent-mindedly flicks away at the edge of her paper folder and teases back. The papers within are thick and probably holding secrets to the war that someone like her seemed to dig up.
"Perhaps." A finger of his curves up into his bangs, twirling a stray lock as she looks on disapprovingly, hurt in just a minuscule way, but the smirk, the narrowing of his eyes reminds her he doesn't mean it. "And did you want me all on your own? Away from the good foreboding Red Comet?"
The slightest curve of her mouth sways upward. This game they play. This conversation they have. How unique. How loathsome. How… comfortable. "You know how I feel about Commander Aznable." And by that, there is, among hundreds, of the little threads between them that tie them together. He chose her, in the end, to do the jobs she did, because his belief in her had been of a different color, a different competency, then the red and gold of Char Aznable.
"No need to reiterate, dear Mai." He looked up at her, leaning on the stone. "It's always fun seeing old flames."
"I wouldn't know anything about that." She says fast as if wanting to move past the topic of Char.
"Well, by all accounts you're married to me according to the gossip."
Her face burns up and his teasing always reaches this apex to the point where she either breaks out laughing (in private only) or trying to push him along to a more amenable, serviceable path. She does let it linger for a second as if savoring the thought, and he, for his credit, does hold her gaze to dangerous thoughts between them. They've always been like this, and no question could be made, or condition brought up to something between them that had been as natural as breathing.
Still there was business to be done. "I'm back so soon from the Seattle Front because we captured the Federation Trojan Horse, and Project V."
She expects the revelation on a successful mission, perhaps the most important mission in the war, to do something to Garma. Indeed, she looks at him, reading his face as he looks up at her with a compliant smile, his features soft.
"Sir?" She asks, as if he had not heard that the infernal white devil had been captured. That the Federation's last chance in this war had been taken from them.
No. He does not react, save for a dreamy breath, the balcony's stone railing inviting him to lean on it. Captain Gul is not often confused, nor does little take her off guard, but this moment had taken her off balance. The Federation's new mobile suit had just been captured!
"Are you not… pleased with this report, Colonel?"
He waits to respond, a wash of relief coming off of his shoulders that relaxes him so, it threatens the reality he holds onto. He turns over, elbows on, head hung back, a smile on his face. "I'm very pleased with this, Captain. I'm very pleased with you."
She sucks in a breath, tightening her jaw as she holds the folder closely to her chest, Garma's eyes naturally drawn to it as it rises and falls, and she is too busy taking his compliment to notice. He feels bad whenever his gaze does linger upon her, because she's so much more than what people assume of them both. She wasn't an idle doll at her side. Far from it.
She was beautiful still, regardless, her hair tucked into a bun, much like Kycilia's, her face, when at all she let her guard down, speaking to him frankly about any matter but the war, had been the fresh like best of Earth spring rain.
"If there is something wrong, Master Garma, I could-"
"There's nothing wrong, Captain Gul… Dear Mai." He chuckles, letting the vibrations in his chest untighten his body as the uniform he wears is much too tight. "You've made me like this, however."
"Sir?" She was concerned, a one-step distance closed. There had always been a certain understanding between them further. Something unconventional. Something perhaps not best elaborated on.
"You told me once, you owed me your life." And she did, after the Dawn Rebellion, when the Federation had wanted the sniper responsible for cutting down so many "non-combatants" running for their vehicles at the motor pools. He had taken the responsibility of her personally when he had found out her troubles, insisting to her that his protection would keep her safe, and that she was needed for the coming war. "But I really think nowadays I owe you my own."
More than that, he begged her to stay.
If he could not keep her safe, then what was the worth of all Zeon then?
So, she stayed, they graduated together, Federation diplomatic officers coming for her all strong armed by the personal interceptions of those that stood for the Zabi interest, and in the end, she had pledged herself by blood and by duty to him. She became what Char Aznable could not be to him, whatever that meant.
How that manifested in this war so far had been a woman who was by far comfortable, leading divisions into battles as he would want, without exception, and making sure that his objectives were secured without problem.
She was dependable, effective, deadly, and more than anything, loyal. Perhaps not to Zeon, not completely, but to him.
There had been no fear, no impulsion, however, of her being any different with him than anyone else. He might have been a Zabi, but that mattered little when it came to her opinion, and of herself.
He appreciated that. More than, even.
The business with Project V, with the Trojan Horse that Char Aznable, the famed Red Comet, had been ineffectual at stopping, was stopped by her. He was sure the details of it were in said manilla folder she had, held against herself.
But despite this, this very crucial victory, he had felt not the celebration of it, but rather, the low hum of peace, like a cigarette light in the dark.
"It was just any other mission, sir." She availed her own opinion to him. "I didn't want you to worry about it."
"Oh please, whenever you're around me, I don't worry about the war at all." He had come off the balcony, facing toward her completely. He really did wish he had been the same height as her some days, but it was no matter. He was close now, close enough to feel her heart in the New England chill. "When you're here, the war, this conflict between Earthnoid and Spacenoid, it does not mean a thing to me."
He's heard those words before, he's not sure where, but they were sweet, and he wanted to be sweet now, to her, to this woman that has treated him so well, and served him beyond any reasonable doubt.
"I'm just doing my job." No. She was serving him, completely, beyond the call of duty. Her devotion was to him, not Zeon. It made her the perfect Spacenoid.
He catches her eyes finally, slowly he moving closer to catch the lower and lower of her gaze until he's nearly chest to chest with her. Together they are warm, in the air they breathe, the way their bodies radiate together. Even with her darker skin he can tell a slight rosiness to her cheeks that he can only feel on his own. Still, he pushes on, looking at her hands crushing the folder beneath them, only to soften at once as he threads one hand beneath one, his thumb smoothing along her knuckles gently.
How easy had it been to speak to his father about her, and for what, it had hardly seemed like the momentous decision that he had asked for his permission for.
"If Zeon did not have people like you…" If Zeon didn't have you, he thinks truly. "I would cast aside Zeon."
I understand all of this.
If I could not be with you.
I want to be with you.
Words, heard in memory, and yet… and yet…
He looked up to the stars of New York, and how they illuminated the black of space and of his deep dark desires. They seemed different now, looking at them from Earth below.
"Garma." Captain Gul spoke once, chiding, warning, and yet reaching. He reached back, the folder in her hands fluttering down to the floor in a quiet crash of paper as she finally let go of them, and held onto the intruding hand, rolling against gentle wind that caressed them both. Her hands were so warm, and yet so calloused. He wanted to profusely apologize for them, for her.
She seemed so vulnerable here, and perhaps she always was, but she had been strong for the sake of the mission. His mission.
Like she always had.
Ten fingers to ten fingers, threading together. She couldn't bear to look him in the eye, but she had stayed regardless and held on tight.
Beneath the cold of night, they are warm together.
"You're beautiful." It's true.
"Garma…" She breathes again, as if a warning that she barely believed. He only holds on, steadfast. This connection was the closest thing to God he had ever known.
In his eyes werespoken an order with the weight of true desire. She squeezes his hands even tighter as silence leaves his mouth. There is nothing in herself that can stop her. She's a good soldier after all, and he is her commander. Even beyond that, there is need, unspoken as she nods once, her face all too happy, and leans in as Garma waits for the contact against his lips, eyes closed.
The warmth he feels on his face, on his lips, however, are not of Captain Gul's own. What he feels on his face is yet, burning, and before he can realize what it is, two sounds: one, loud, shrill and explosive, the other unmistakably of a body, dropping to the floor. He can't stop opening his eyes, looking down, and seeing his most loyal soldier, beautiful Gul, sucking on her own lungs as a pool of red splotches at her chest, her body seizing, up and down, until all at once the gurgling stops in one final spit into the ground beside her. His hand scrambles at his hip, but he knows he does not carry a sidearm. All he can do is twist toward where the gunshot came from, and reveal, who has killed his most loyal soldier.
Golden light bathes the Red Comet, standing in the glass door, pistol smoking, doing nothing to hide his shame.
"Char-?!" The same old story, the same fire and fervor of rage rising to his throat. Mai's blood spreads out from her on the tiles beneath him, like rivers, forever webbing out. "Char!" He yells his name again, and there is accusation. The barrel to his gun smokes, and then the world becomes him. The stars die out in the darkness. It becomes much too hot. He goes to her body as she fades away, choking, and then silence, forever, eyes open and blood out of her mouth. He holds her as she dies, and it is a feeling so terrible that he has opened up a part of his heart that goes beyond God. Her blood finds itself on his palms, and when he retracts his right hand, it is blood red, covering his fingers so much that they burn.
The Red Comet approaches, gun toward him. No one stops him.
"Isn't this what you want?" He asked him.
"She- she didn't deserve that!" He screamed at him, as if this was a continuing conversation of a different page. Char laughs at him, just as Garma always knew he did behind his back.
Char cocks his head. "Am I not saving you, dear Garma? From her?"
Garma cannot answer Char, for the screams take his mouth instead.
Garma does not wake from his nightmares with a lurch, or with any speed. He hurts too much to do that. So instead, he opens his eyes, and his memory is bombarded by fires that numb and dull his brain and make him realize again the horror of his condition. He opens his mouth in a gasp and his cotton mouth hurts him to be fully awake.
Compelled to hold his face in his hands, wiping off sweat from nighttime exertions, he is no longer able to cup it all in one go. His right hand is to blame for that, stiff and neutered as it is.
He checks every morning for the slight hope that his waking life hadn't been as bad as it was: that he was only missing one finger and not two and a half, that he was only missing a foot and not a leg. Neither comes true as the thermal blanket is off, and his right leg is still gone. The visual: right hand of his going over his right leg, massaging any feeling into it, he tries not to look, but he has to, he does, and it brings a disgusting taste to his morning breath-soaked mouth that almost makes him want to hurl. He doesn't. Her footsteps, her machinations are present in the apartment, and she is not asleep on the floor besides him as she usually is. Far be it from him to divine how she should continue the process of "taking it easy".
This Mai is not the one he had just encountered: the one that stayed with him, who became a steadfast ally that he could rely on and depend on and, perhaps, more than that. That last thought, however, is at once ejected merely as an inclination of dream and fantasy.
Unfortunately, he rationalizes quickly, that this has happened simply because he had spent the better part of the last month and a half in very close and intense proximity with a woman who is more "casual" with him than any he's ever met. He sees it in the co-ed barracks out on the frontline, women taking on the supposed masculine casualness of men at war out of pure sanity-keeping necessity. There is little dignity or privacy when it comes to forward operating bases after all. It's a routine of theirs, while he soaks for the day, she is often in the shower, and more than once he has seen her bare, touched her while bare, and about that many times she has fully been cognitive of that fact. If she cared, she cared little.
He knows her smell, he knows the pace of her walk, he knows far more than he should about her, but it comes with the simple fact that he has been imprisoned in her place, and sleeps in her bed.
It would've been different if she had been her namesake, totally unappealing and a monster, literally. But she's not. Dressed down as they are together at the end of days, when she lets her hair down, when she's freshly washed, unattractive is hardly the word Garma would use with her. Crudely, he thinks, her body alone would draw any red-blooded male, but he had been beyond such considerations, subjectively, despite her objective draw. It didn't matter to him what she looked like, save for his body's own inclinations. It didn't matter because he was a taken man, and also, he was eminently about to take a cold shower.
Mai was a captivating woman, and he had been captured by her.
Icelina, he hopes, can forgive him for dreaming of another woman. He hopes Icelina can forgive him for so much.
He's, not that he has given it much of a stark definition to himself, bisexual. He had lain with a man as easily as he had with women, but his captivation with Mai was with a cause far deeper than flesh. He had owed her. Not for what she thought, but for, at least, that long time ago night that ended at Dawn. He was drawn to her in a color that was not that of simple Human bond. He was drawn to her by right and duty and a shared, precious history. She had chosen him, and he had been with her, on that night of all nights, when the war for the Universal Century began.
There is an idea in him as a red-blooded man that conquering Mai in such a way was enticing, regardless of her other draws, but it's a thought that rises in him and gets killed down for being inappropriate.
A theory he had heard comes to him, back from during field exercises in the Academy, during long campfire nights alone in the dark of Guardian Banchi's natural reserves of. Male cadets spoke together about their experiences and wonderings of female kind.
"Even if you are strictly a friend with a girl, and you swear to God above that you don't want to fuck her- a part of you is always going to want to. You're a guy, right? It's literally in our DNA. So don't feel bad and accept it." Milt Howell, cadet from an urban colony, tells them all, and they all nod along, even Garma.
It seemed justification at the time hearing that theory said out by that male cadet but now having come from that dream with Mai, Mai, his executioner no less, the theory arrives again in the most morbid way. It proves in some way that even Humans were instinctual animals, deep down.
A week has gone by since she'd fractured a rib, and by far is it not completely healed, but the hard part was done, and, more importantly, her womanly affairs had been gotten over and tossed aside and she almost seemed happy to it. She had been bedridden, however, for those several days, the first half, out of her mind, blankly staring up at the ceiling and muttering in a language that had still been Human, but not of the repertoire of his own knowledge. She spoke to him in coy glances as if he would understand the most likely Arabic coming out of her mouth and Charlie spoke back in his yapping. Charlie, their, or perhaps his alone, had been their new dog, and at least how she was Mai had been helpless to stop it as her body became stone and she melted into a bed idle and unwilling to move save for in the morning and at nights when she had to do her business and she had held onto his arm as if his bones hadn't been already half-way to broken. The memory of his crash might've been receding away from the immediate memory of his but his body still remembered.
He had a leg now, however, ferrying her back and forth as freely as he had been able to walk abouts the apartment, and even walk his route outside on the inner balcony. It had been straining work, covered by the elation and confusion of the fact Mai had allowed him the leg at all, but it was a freedom of his own that he had not missed until it was taken from him: mobility, a leg.
The first day he walked entirely with the prosthetic he had gone to sleep with a sore stub, a backache, and a reddened skin around his entire thigh from the chaffing from improper form, but he would get used to it, if not tolerate it, if it meant two legs. He had still kept the crutch at hand, to lean and to guide when he felt his muscles give out, but more and more just in that week he had returned to standing on his own, at least on flat flooring.
He hadn't dared try stairs.
It would make him think rebellious thoughts, and he had settled into a comfortable motion with his captor.
He had an inkling of feeling that his fate was not so absolute at all.
So, he had cared for her. Handed her flatbread from MREs because she seemed to intuit that they could be eaten and she needed to eat and she had eaten like an animal for it, watering down as well to take care of her own cotton mouth, but as she ate, she was complacent. He didn't dare try to clean her mouth from crumbs and spillage or else risk him being bit.
He could've gotten used to the feeling, but on the third day as he arrived with another peanut butter and flatbread breakfast for her, she had propped herself up on her elbows, looked at him straight in the eye, and said his name.
Mai Gul returned.
Her emotions were wordless, and her face bent into a question she did not ask of him. She found an answer anyway as she gingerly took the flatbread and ate it as civilized as she could, standing on her own, but not before eyeing up his leg again and the dog near it. If she dreamed in her medicinal haze, she had come back to another dreamlike place again where he was existent in her home, and the tragedies of the world still remained.
"Good." she finally said, unable to meet his eye. "You behaved." She reminds him, but he doesn't quite know how to respond save for a slight smile and a tilt of his head.
She's up and at it at a slower pace from there, back to the routine of the day, settling into a normal. Outside Seattle is a little bit more crooked, a bit more destroyed, but it has settled, and the destroyed city had been the same as it started: destroyed. With the days she's been out and how she had been left like this: a healing woman.
Garma wakes up from his nightmare and she's there, silently through the doorway, sitting at the stool before her radio set.
She's alive, and Garma does not want to see her any other way.
Distracted as she is, headphones on, she is hunched over the table and listening, headphones on as her hand writes in a notepad. In the time she is out and the trouble she's caused, the least she could do was listen to the situation over the radio. Nothing heavy, nothing dire, but she lived with an abundance of caution to the wider tactical problem of a Seattle divided. In this distraction she does not notice him stir and wake. Her profile instead is offered instead.
He lets himself look at her, the movement of her lips as she speaks, the curve of her chest as she is otherwise busy with her own bothers, just to get it out of the way. At first, he looks just to affirm she is alive and not bleeding out on the Eschonbach Manor balcony. He lingers, much too long as a man, he knows, but she does not see, and he has seen all of her by now already.
Of all the desires in his dreams, pressed for despite their illogical nature, he can find three, all of them about her:
Her, physically.
Her, taking care of his bothers, from the war, to himself.
And then, at least, her, in the face of Char, challenging him for the attention.
Needs and wants linger in his mind that morning.
He really can't shoot her.
Not when the dream he just had persists. Not when he has an image in his mind, the lucid memory, of what it looked like for a version of her to die.
"We were talking about Texas… Yes, Texas." She walks around the apartment sore, and Charlie skittering about doesn't help her nerves. Mai does not take well to cabin fever, but Garma can help assuage. His case of it has been beat down by a childhood kept within a compound. They sit, soup between them. Throughout the day she had glanced at her boonie hat and the sniper rifle and the poncho again with great envy, but they remained where they had been, leaning against the wall.
Inaction was her unmaker, and she had seemed miserable just sitting there across from Garma, and oddly enough it revealed her age more than anything. She and him, both twenty years old, and when she frowned she frowned the displeasure of youth in her. Better worlds existed in her head and none of them came for her.
The map of America is between them again, but as Garma reads her face, it is obviously the last thing she wants to do: talk about the war with him. So, his words falter and they are just left together.
Charlie is busy. An empty drawer from the bedroom had been taken out and filled and padded, now his own bed, and he had taken to breaking it in immediately.
"We could also just… talk." He offers, and she raises and eyebrow. She doesn't respond for a moment, and Garma more than remembers that this Mai is not the pliant and responsive one in his dreams. Her hair in its frizzy and unkempt state is explosive, and their natural straightness gives way to a coarse roughness. She looks like a wreck, but he doesn't look much better.
She mulls it around in her head a bit, forging spoons and a fork and instead taking her small bowl of chicken soup mix from their MRE today and slurping once. "You really think that's going to help me out?" Her deadpan had been frank and true, but he believed otherwise.
"Maybe."
Mai's not much in the mood to snap back, so she shrugs. "Sure."
Her face is the same, in his dream, which is good. He worries about the images of those he knows kept in memory alone. It's how, even after so much time so close to Char's face, he still worries about forgetting it now. Her face is the face of classics, that of verdant eyes, her lips always curved up it seemed in consideration or stoicism. It's a face not changed much since the Academy days, and the true is the same for his, but he can imagine her younger, and older, and in either direction she is distinctly a woman of classical looks. She belonged to the book he reads and so much more.
Icelina had honed him so for this, dinner conversations, taken on her bedroom balcony between cheese and bread and escargot. What he talks to her about over dinner is anything but the war, because war was such an impolite topic and he had hardly wanted to consider her in his mind's eye with it besides. Speaking to another child of a particular high society life had been so refreshing that it only affirmed his love for her. What Icelina did not have, however, was a shared upbringing. Icelina Eschonbach was not a Spacenoid.
Mai Gul is.
"Cigarettes." He says the word aloud as if key.
"Hm?" Mai raises an eyebrow of hers, like ink markers above her eyes.
"Cigarettes." Garma repeats, his hands wrapping around each other as if he had let go of a secret far beyond Zeon battle plans. "Kycilia had a weakness for them. Only a certain brand, however. I believe it was Ukrainian." How the smell of her had become them, and she had been smoking them for as long as Garma could remember in her areas of the house where she dreamed up plans of Zeon.
"Mm." Mai grunts. "My father was a smoker… was." She says and its unstated understanding. In Zum at least, cigarettes were a luxury item even before their time in the Academy. In the years leading up to 0079, everyone had to go cold turkey at some point for a vice denied by the Federation. For her father, it was cigarettes, for her mother, it had been strings for her guitar, hobbyist musician as she was. These items and more cordoned off by the Federation in tax and embargo.
"Gihren had his chocolates, and father even, these ointments that came out of the Caribbean he used to soothe himself." Garma's recounting is fond, his hand brought up to his hair and finding just a strand that has enough length. Just a single one, but it's enough for him. An uneven layer of lavender has started to flow over his burns on his head like flowers over lava glass fields. An odd sight, but he is healing true.
"And Dozle?" Mai asks. The only other Zabi she has ever spoken to, if only in affirmatives and negatives of a military skew.
Garma's lips purse, searching his mind, but nothing comes forth that would be expected. "Dozle didn't really try to get anything in before it happened. Mostly, well… supplies for taking care of a child. Baby formula from good brands here on Earth for Mineva, clothes, books for Zenna. We lived well," Garma is reflective in a way different from his usual aloofness. His brow furrows, and he is in his head about a memory. "Yes. We lived well, but Earthen luxuries and goods were always sought after, even for us. Not that'd we say about it, obviously."
"Must've been nice." She says, and it's half of scorn. "You know, you would imagine being a part of this mass, populist movement, I would imagine you Zabis wouldn't be so… royal, about it." He was a prince in all but name, and even then, she had heard him referred to as such as the prince to Degwin's sovereign position.
If it's well-rehearsed or not, if it's a question that Garma had to contend with at some point, he answers, unoffended, and smooth. "We hold ourselves as such not as a matter of our preferences, dear Mai. We are royals because the people we champion hold us with such regard and respect. They wanted that particular type of head because it was the strength they desired."
"And the benefits to you personally are obviously just circumstantial?"
She wears her suspicion on her face, and it is the suspicion of all those detractors in the early days of the regime that he remembers from his teenage memories. "I'm interested to imagine what life of luxury you think I lived. Do I, still stand to you as someone overly pampered?"
"What did you try to save for yourself then?"
"Huh?"
"You Zabis had the connection, you're no different. So, what did you save?" He opens his mouth to answer her suspicions but closes.
"I'm afraid my answer would feel impossible to you."
"No more impossible than you showing up on my streets."
Of all the lives and of all the chances, he had been captured by her and her alone.
He answers, "In truth, nothing."
He remembers Kycilia raising her eyebrow at him when she had asked him a similar question on why he had not seemed to come into a supply of anything. Under her breath as she turned away, he had heard her curse his supposed naivety, but it was anything but. His believed in the purity of his position, his path. "For Gihren, for Kycilia, for Dozle, for my entire family living or dead, they came into where they were by the providence of the world and history around us. But my life? I was born into it. From a young age I realized I had to be pure in my place in life. I do not think of my luxuries save as mechanism in the life I lead. The duty comes first, and, if nothing else, my father deserves a treatment of some luxury for his part in Zeon's place."
Mai straightens her back, and Garma is assured that she listens to him. He knows the type of people who would partake in listening to him, but not understanding. Simply being in his presence was enough for some and those people, as in the dream he had, had been those he had not respected.
"That is a privilege unto itself you know." She says lowly. "Knowing your purpose in life."
"…I suppose." He says, his volume matching hers. It's a new thought, a new perspective. The loudest of the Zabi's critics had often screamed of their opulence. Mai's critique was personal, for him, and for her.
Here she had been, adrift, finding a man who had all but a month ago been assured of his destiny. She knows what it's like to lose that purpose harshly. Her words are biting, but in them there is sympathy, bare as it is, and he sees it as she slurps her soup and yet keeps her eyes on him, waiting to see if he does get it.
He does. With a selfsame inkling of understanding between them, she backs down from what poison and ire there is within her, and the pain of her soreness goes with it.
"But what did you want, if you could choose?" she asked with a younger tone.
Private indulgences. They were not unique to him after all. He could admit this. "Maraschino cherries." He covers his hand with his mouth as if to hide a bit of shame. "Our palace chef, he had reserve of them, or made them, I'm not quite sure, but he had made cream puffs often accompanied by those candied cherries." Said chef had decided to accept service in the armed services and the labs that dealt with provisioning. The soup mix they ate from stood a good chance of being from the same hands that he had been eating from most of his life.
"Palace chef… god, you're such an asshole." She had air quotes around the fact he had a chef, scoffing, but it was in jest, even if he himself proclaimed no luxury forgone by the duty he had. "But cherries?"
"Yes." He remembers, tasting in his memory. Even in New York City, for all of Icelina's and the Eschonbach's own relatively privilege, maraschino cherries had been left behind by thinning civilian supply lines. "Now how say you if you had the opportunity? I recognize that the embargos we lived under was felt by the common people more so than us."
If she had lived Garma she's not quite sure who she'd be, or vice versa, but she can smart small. It's the same desire she's nursed for years on Earth, even before the war.
"Hazelnuts."
"Oh?"
She nodded. "There's a colony in Side 4. It's got plots of lands that some companies who specialize in one thing or another own, and my family always stopped by at least once a year because the weather patterns for that many lots was so finicky but… I forget the boutique group that handled them but… yeah, hazelnuts. From them."
In her childhood home, souvenirs from every side had remained like trophies: A pilot's helmet from Side 4 and a colony that had hosted a great number of aerospace firms, and thus bred competition racing. Sand in a bottle from Side 2 and it's leisure colonies there. From Side 7 even, despite its newness before the war, a commemorative plaque from the first batch of metal paneling for the first colonies. In her home, in her blood and family lay the history of those who came to space to live by force or by choice. For Mai, her favorite fruits of Mankind in space had been those little nuggets of flavor.
Garma knows the item. Icelina had a fan of them in breakfast, or, at least, something that proclaimed to be of their flavor. "Are you, perchance, a fan of those chocolate spre-"
"Yes!" She answers with a seriousness that takes his breath away. It's so kneejerk it shocks herself as her mouth turns into a shrewd line. "I mean… yeah."
She is Human, not a ghoul, and it is proved by that hint of innocence that remains at the mention of something so simple as chocolate hazelnut spread. In another life, a more civilian life, they'd both be in college now. They were still young, exceedingly so, and yet she had become a mother and lost it at all the same time, and he at the charge of not only thousands, but hopes and dreams of Humanity's future.
"The mess hall back on Guardian only had the chocolate spreads out on Sundays, did they not?"
"Don't remind me," she grumbled, and this aggravation is not her usual. It is childish, petulant, her nose scrunching at the memory. "Sundays was when I was always scheduled for my marksmanship drills. I had no god damn time to get any before they put breakfast away."
Garma remembers vaguely what she speaks of: If Zeon itself did not have the most dedicated officer corps back then, which explained why so many officers now had been young of his generation, but even lesser so were more specialized roles. Snipers were one of them.
"Did they ever offer you an alternative track with your… skills?"
She nodded. "They did." Her sniper rifle still remains in the corner, soot still on its barrel from where she dragged it in. "Going from officer training to full-fledged sniper school in another colony wasn't what I wanted to do though."
"Fair enough. Guardian was comfortable enough, wasn't it?"
"I'd rather take living with you in this apartment then living small again."
"Minimal living does have its merits. Even though I may live with my fiancé, back in New York, and am afforded a rather expansive suite, I do mind myself as a guest always. I keep my own belongings on Earth slim, and the Academy helped me with that." It helps him now, living amongst Mai.
She rolled her eyes. "I lived in an apartment all my life, and if not that, a hotel room or a friend of my dad's while on travel. I could do for some space."
"Hm. And how about here? This seems like a rather big apartment."
"Could use two beds."
"Yes. Very much so." Dressed down, comfortable. These are the moments Mai falls in, again and again with him: sharing a place with an agreeable young man, almost forgetting who they were, what they were. In another life, Garma posits, they could be friends. With their guard down it might appear that way already. "So. You, hazelnuts, and me maraschino cherries." His index finger taps on the table, a punctuation he was fine to leave on to attend to his meal for the day. She was fine as well, but there's always one bit of bitterness she is always well enough to leave with him.
"You find me a good handful of them, maybe you won't die." An impossible task for an impossible result. She knows this, Garma knows this, but the two of them smirk at each other as if a fair play, and that was that.
In the nights, Seattle becomes wet and cold now. That first year Mai Gul understood the meaning of that type of bodily darkness: of being cold, when she had been in an underground apartment in Seattle. She was not spoiled for much of her life, save a regular life until the age of sixteen when she had come to the Academy, but she was spoiled by a family who understood temperature and ambient conditions like her own. Here, on Earth, the weather had run her ragged, even if she herself had been bestowed upon such peculiar knowledge of the weather and her ability to predict like the old soothsayers of old, she could not prepare herself. Perhaps that's why she had, back then, been so liable to find a body to lie in bed with.
The cold creeps at her from the Pacific North West atmosphere, and in a place that has become dead, it becomes intolerable, and realized, before even midnight as November went on and she had been healing.
She and Garma traded on and off the bed in an unspoken scheduled tangle, every other day. He, day by day, went through his quickly redundant care schedule on his own, and she had resisted the urge to both a.) put him back on it and b.) not put herself in such a way that she required one herself. Four weeks top, but she did not intend to stay for more than week, week and a half in that apartment before she was back to it in the general air of her life.
The cold did not help.
Not, for the first time that year, the icy temperature had seeped into that building that had been half blown open on one side and doubtless more cracks had appeared day by day. Her windows had not draft but she could not be sure for the rest of the building, and because of that even with closed doors and closed windows and bundled up in thick clothing and blanket, she had felt that same familiar poverty cold seep into her.
It's a different cold than the wet cold of ruck marches and field exercises. It's a dry cold- goes to the bones, inescapable and unkind. The cold of ruck marches was formative. The cold of a building without heat in a place without care had been brittle and miserable.
She had set herself up from the floor, hands and arms tucked around herself and she had her thermals, her jacket, her poncho, and a thermal blanket around her. Even as she had squeezed herself and threatened to turn her rib fracture strained anew, the warmth she could keep to herself was not enough as she felt that same familiar cold wash over her, hold her, take her, and make her remember not that long ago she had felt forgotten by the world.
For Garma, it is the first time for as she rises, he does too, bundled up in blanket with only his face shown like a Russian doll.
Spacenoids together, they suffer together.
"Cold." Garma says simply, and his teeth chatter on the D. "Tell me," he asks her, putting his mind off of what he feels right now, cold at that hour and unable to do anything about it. "Were there any forbidden climates in the system for the colonies?"
"Too fucking cold and too fucking hot." She answers in her frustration.
There were safety measures built into the weather technology: a specified band that the weather existed in that could not be broken out of down from zero degrees Celsius up to forty for 95% of all standardized colonies. There were no Antarctic, desert, or true ocean costal colonies save for the novelty colonies that came at great expense. Texas Colony came to mind, Madagascar Colony. Earth had been more extreme. The band could not be broken for fear of mass disaster: a sudden scorching or deep freeze of an entire colony had been a horror story that the Colony Corporation long accounted for.
If only on Earth, then, Mai wondered, she wished she could turn the thermometer up worldwide. The world deserved to burn in some way anyway.
Charlie is not better off, curled up in a tower in the kitchen for the night, but when he hears his new owners awake he meekly walks in shivering all the same.
"Up, up." Garma raises his voice, just a bit, and Charlie is almost making the hop when Mai's voice cuts louder.
"Not on the bed!"
She is acclimated to the dog's presence as much as he is acclimated to hers and he is near her, by the side of her form cloaked by thermal blanket that she sighs out. The dog is drawn by sound alone, not language, and it's a proof given the longer it stays with them. Garma is their main interaction point, just a bit of his MRE at each meal given to them and gone out to walk along the balcony. He makes a passable dog owner as opposed to her, but even she had to forfeit her mistrust, her apathy toward it. She was not as cruel as she would allow herself to be toward a literal puppy.
So she opened her blanket like a wing, wrapping the dog within her tent of relative warmth, and the dogs shivering had gone away in time as the two of them remained cold.
It implants a terrible idea in her.
Perhaps even more terrible than lighting a fire indoors as last resort.
It's something he thinks about too.
Both shivering mad cold, and there's only one option: It was something expected between cadets out on field exercises, and here they were, two former cadets.
Again, proof that they had been made of the same emergent culture, the same crucible.
She rises up, but not before wrapping up Charlie like a burrito in foil, and the dog remains sated and calm through it, tucked into a corner as some more clothes of her is out of a drawer and around him. She's at Garma's bedside standing, and he looking up at her like in great fear draws down for the chill between them.
The many equalizers of the world came in the form of nature: death, hunger, want, need, chills.
He knows what she would ask and spares her the indignity of asking even if this is her own bed. He spares her the indignity of asking something as terrible as sharing a bed, his warmth, with him. He wears some of her clothes even, the much too large sweater she does not wear here, but he has long since known what it meant to be taken in by her stench.
It's not a bad one, in any case.
She is reluctant, at first, holding the edge of the blanket and freezing as if it had been too late for her, but it is when Garma unfurls it around his form, lets it back down the covers evenly, and scoots over does she attend.
The technicality of it is that it's not been that long since she's curled up with another body for warmth. Bo, Gearten, and even Candy are among those she has curled up with in the war beneath endless nights. Those had been nights where exhaustion and the pure practicality of it had overridden any misgivings. It had felt right then and no one spoke of it or felt of it oddly. Even in the Academy, on field exercises, the same parable, even among more particularly lust-forward teenagers. Garma knows best with Char, after all, attached to his side after that first night where he had wrung his soul out of his body and begged him for it.
For Mai, the last time she had laid with a man for the pleasure of it, the domestic comfort of it, had been her husband days before she realized she had been pregnant. The sex had been good, but that was the only intended purpose, months before the colony drop. For Garma, it had been only a night before this disastrous mission with Icelina. He thinks of her momentarily, but pushes herself out of her mind so as not to be associated with Mai.
So, they both think. They had been upon each other, touching one another in such close, imminent proximity that the staticky feeling between their distance now had been something different, something else.
As always, she settles first, slipping her legs beneath the cover and sharing a bed and a blanket with Garma Zabi, her back toward him, turned over. He looks down from her as he sits in the bed against the backboard, and, even if they have not touched, what remains of her body heat is very soothing. It must be the same for her.
She feels him looking.
"You pop a stiffy I'm killing you." She says like a bite, and what tension is there is cracked through. This was just another thing between them. No more weight than anything else. He sighs, he half chuckles, and he raggedly says:
"It's going to happen in the morning whether you like it or not." His answer is true, and she knows too, but she is silent.
He puts his back down, laying across the bed. Partners laying, as if in a frigid marriage, his arms tucked into themselves for fear of their own wandering, and she, curled up to herself.
Garma had gotten mail from a fan his age, asking for all the love, and all she'd give, to just spend a night in bed with him. It was a fanciful, cute display of someone in love with the idea of him sending out a love letter to which he had so humbly declined and given his signature and cologne to in a spritz, but, if his ego as a prince could ever be spoken of it would've been the belief that there might've been a retinue of people out there that would've enjoyed being in Mai's immediate position. Mai, clearly, was not one of those people.
Mai, for her part, tries to clear her mind, even if her face and back are warming up to a more tolerable degree against the cold. She focuses too hard to find any restful sleep.
By midnight they are frozen but not in temperature. Garma has not moved out of fear of disturbing her, and Mai has not moved out of stubbornness. They broke at nearly the same time, she turning over in the bed, on the pillow that they shared together because there were not two. He turns too, and both of them are messy in their hair and bangs draped across faces and foreheads both.
She grumbles, "This is nothing." She smells like the city, like the Earth itself.
"Of course." He reeks of a place far in her past that spoke of the future.
They find something in between that is tolerable.
The oldest anecdotal story of bonds between soldiers comes from a Vietnamese war a century and a half ago in the dying decades before the Universal Century began: the racist paradigm of the United States fell apart when it sent its soldiers overseas. In the story, a black man, and a white man, huddled together in a foxhole, agreeing they'd rather fight together than die alone.
Tonight, they'd rather lay together than die cold.
Her permission is she turning over his arms, putting one across him as she scooted herself down. He goes limp, and allows her to move his body in a way that is more comfortable. Her touch is not electrifying, but warming. Her legs cross over his own, and, in a morbid benefit, the fact he is missing a lot of his right lets her move and press comfortably more into him as he settles,
Eventually, eventually, Mai finds a place she is comfortable with. Her arms wrapped around Garma's midsection, her head dipped down, forehead touching upon his chest as Garma himself drapes his arms over her. This is a good way to be, they decided. God knows the idea of them taking on the spoon dichotomy was too much of a give for both of them.
This man was just a body, yet to put to rest. She could benefit it from it as long as it was warm.
Beneath her ear, a heartbeat.
His right arm lays long behind her shoulder, not curling in as natural to hold her, as he dare not try, but the pressure is comfortable and anchoring.
The cold now becomes less of an issue than what they are doing. She is plush against him and he is hard against her, but it is comfortable and the issue lies in who they are.
He dares to ask.
"May I pose to you a question?" He speaks to the ceiling as he asks the woman on his chest.
He feels her breath against the layer of clothing on him in the dark several times, but eventually she nods. "Sure."
He starts, and Mai's head feels the gentle rumbling of his chest as she simply keeps her eyes closed and listened to heartbeat and word alike. "Imagine, if you will, that the Federation had laid siege to Zum, and that I had been ambivalent to them in all ways until they came, and they set upon the colony, our home. Imagine, to you, that I do have the capacity to love people, family, friends, even my own child if it came down to it, and the Federation took them away from me in every way and even in the most absolute. Do you think I would know what you feel?"
She is silent, unmoving. She listens. He does not continue from there. She believes that this man can be capable of all that.
"I am not blind to exactly what you think of me," He stops, pauses, tries to find patterns in the ceiling with one good eye as they lay together beneath that blanket. "If you believe me, I understand what type of person this war has made of you." This was perhaps the coldest pillow talk the both of them have done in their life, but they do it anyway. "I understand, right now, it might be, demeaning of you to lay with me."
It does, and it doesn't. This is for the utility only. And yet…
She turns her head, her cheek resting on his chest over his burns, and he does not mind. It cools them. "If you understand, then you know why you'll die. Everything else in between is… nothing."
"Nothing." He repeats.
He wants to argue. He wants to say the context is different; the reason he had come to Earth different than those hypothetical, openly warlike Federation soldiers who would strike first against them. He wants to go into it, but as he readies, she turns over to him, facing him, head on her pillow, green eyes in the dark. They are not their fierce color as they usually do, they are not hating of him, they simply are of her, tired. Just like him. Those eyes wanted him to understand her, and she was willing to cede that he was capable of it.
He wants to argue, but in the end, he decides, he would be right, and she would be right, no matter how they go.
"Yes." Her eyes slightly open, and he can barely make out her face in the dark, and in his periphery, staring straight up. "Yes. I know why you'll kill me." These are the type words that balm her, and he knows them well at this point.
Her eyes are considerate now, looking at him as he cranes his head down to look at her.
"If it means anything to you then," she says so quietly even the wind stills to listen. "I still understand why you waged this war. Now shut up and sleep. We're both not dying of frostbite tonight."
The Newtypes were out there, the future of Humanity was at stake in the hearts of the downtrodden.
Across the Earth, war raged still.
In the morning, they still are.
Up and down, his chest rises, and with it, so does her head and the slight lick of drool that comes from the corner of her mouth down onto his chest. It's a rather relaxing feeling, the way she wakes up and her entire body is warm, and the gentle rhythm of heartbeat and breath threaten to take her right back into sleep, but doing so would be a defeat, a concession, that Mai Gul viewed Garma Zabi as a man in bed with her as opposed to a personal heater.
She wakes up, her cheek over his chest and her arm half draped over him, as he has his own arm looped around her upper back, the other arm up above the pillow it seemed. Together, they were sprawled out limbs and bodies together, and, for that entire reason, totally comfortable. She might've woke first, but Garma isn't that far behind: seconds even.
His eyes flutter open in the mild confusion of where he is and what the new sensation of weight is until they find Mai's, and that wakes the both of them up faster and harder than any coffee could. There's a splotch on his chest about the size of a quarter where she has drooled on him, and he on his inner forearm imprinted lines from her hair pressing up his skin. She, as cool as she can, pushes off of him to sit on the side of the bed.
It surprises her how much it feels like ripping flesh with the loss of their shared body heat.
She still can't believe this is transpiring, still can't believe this is her life.
It feels too nice that she tries to remember what had set her down this path anyway. She had ripped one way, so she ripped another: She remembered that this man killed her child, and her brain is centered that morning.
Sunlight dawn sprinkles through the glass window, and it is warm.
"Not frozen to death, have we?" Garma remarks looking at that sunrise. She grunts, out of bed, bundled in herself still trying to keep that residual warmth.
"You're warm." She comments.
"I thought that was you." She grunts again to him to his response, and he is at the edge of the bed, sitting, his stump hanging off the side as if he had been comfortable with it all his life. She stares, wonders, and then puts it away in her mind like she intends to for the rest of last night.
"We keep doing it. Don't bring it up." Her words are sharp and simple and short and this new thing between them is now established for as long as the cold shall remain or he. "Don't want to talk about it, don't want to think about it."
He reaches over to the side of the bed where his leg sits and, like Christmas morning, he takes his joy in putting it on again. "Wouldn't dare…. Rather comfortable, it." The prosthetic leg takes to his stub easily, and he goes through the motions of putting it on as she watches from the doorway. She watches his hands and how they move like music across himself to give himself the ability to walk.
A mirror in that room looks on. The same mirror that he had first seen himself in anew, putting the image of him and Mai on the same side, looking back at him. He looked better, and if, perhaps, he had grown bangs again, he could fool himself that the scars on his face were just smears of vision. Though there was no hiding from reality, and as any take in a breath before diving into waters, he had done the same as he, from his sit, pivoted himself off of the bed and stood.