End of Intro Section

Section 0-3
Seattle - Risen III


A soft bed.

It was the first feeling that Garma noticed as he opened his eyes. The haze that's over him now is a medicated one, that much he can tell, and then immediately forgets as, at the very least, his mind tells him he's alive.

The next feeling is of the immediate piercing pain that seeps through the haze of medicine and the lightheadedness. His body is pricked by a million piercing hot needles before being exposed to the numbest colds, and then back and forth until he wills his body to simply still, for no sensation is good for him. Half his vision is blocked, pressure on it that wraps around half of his head it feels, trapping hair beneath.

Memories come back to him like sludge:

Icelina, a promise made.

A Trojan Horse spotted.

A mission to win the war and secure a perfect future.

Fire, war, a White Devil spotted.

Betrayal.

A new voice:

"You're stronger than I thought." It's Arabic accented and its familiar vaguely.

He survived somehow being shot down by the Trojan Horse, fell out of the sky, and was dug out. He looks down and sees who saves him:

That same woman, Mai, she wears a thermal shirt that hugs her form tightly and jeans below, her silk black hair tied into a ponytail as she walks in with a canteen that steams from its top.

"I'm alive?" It comes out as a croak, his mouth and throat so dry it burns to even talk. He feels cold, and before he can look down to see if he is even clothed she walks closer to him on his side of the bed.

In his distant mind's eyes he can feel something more slip away like sand in a sieve, truths maybe, realizations that might've come with being so close to death, but taken away now that, for the time being, he was firmly breathing.

She was careful not to dislodge him from his place on the bed, her green eyes piercing through him with skepticism, but yet even that unkindness did not stop her from lowering her canteen to his face, the steam pleasant, even if a little painful, on his face. A hard cut however had been felt: where he had felt the steam touch and where it seemingly did not. Odd.

The smell of what was inside was immediately apparent, so at least his sense of smell was unmute.

"Coffee." She verified.

He wasn't usually a partaker, but he would take it as he tried to bend his head down, but she had only roughly put her hand beneath the pillow his head had been on and moved it up, giving him enough clearance to sip as a bulb of black liquid came tumbling out, burning his tongue, but wanted all the same as he yelped and swallowed and-

Mai had wondered what it'd be like if she dumped this canteen of hot coffee on his face. Burn him more. Give him pain. She wanted to see him in an agony that was so unnecessary that it made her smile so wide it cracked her skin.

She didn't do that.

"You awake?" She asks finally of him as he blinks himself into full consciousness, trying to concentrate on the here and now.

"I… I believe so. What's… what's happening?"

She was a believer of ripping the bandage off quick, so that's what she did to answer him:

She whips the blanket off of him, and the truth is there.

His right leg is gone, and for five seconds there is bliss in Garma's uncovered eye that it can't possibly be his body he's looking at. But that bliss ends, and he is granted movement from shock.

He comes forward to where the blanket is at the bottom of the bed and pukes green and vile vomit onto it and his hearing blanks. He doesn't cognate the way Mai curses in her own tongue and puts the coffee cup to the bedside table and quickly creating a basin with the blanket so none could splatter on the bed itself.

"God dammit." She mutters as Garma vomits his throat raw. Eventually he empties his gut, and Mai carries the blanket out of the apartment entirely somewhere as he remains with only himself, looking down at the stump, capped by bandage, of his missing leg.

When he goes to touch it, to prove that it is real, it's his right hand that draws his attention, and before the details of it even register, he realizes with what vision he sees the world now: He blinks with only one eye, his left, and the world goes dark. He blinks with his right, and he feels nothing but more piercing pain, but nothing about his vision changes.

There's a mirror attached to the sliding closet door of that room, and he is only barely off angle enough that he can't see himself fully, so before Mai he goes to it. It's frantic, the way his mind forgets that he's down a leg with how he steps off and immediately tumbles to the carpeted floor with a thump. He definitely feels something reopen, but that is no matter: what matters as he crawls along the carpet, burning him, is being able to see himself. He wishes he had not.

As he comes upon the mirror, hauling himself in all the burning strain to be in physical contact against it, he finally sees what has become of him:

His right hand touches upon the surface of the mirror, and a damaged man stares back, palm against his palm, missing almost all fingers but index, thumb, and a portion of his middle. That hand itself is rubbed red raw from the bandage as it becomes undone, and that red sinewy, burnt flesh peeks out from bandages that have been applied to most of his body, and he cannot stop himself from undoing them, unwrapping himself, and revealing what has been done to him as bandages come off with their insides caked with puss and blood.

He looks like a dead man, a dead white right eye looking right back at itself as the burns cover the right side of his face, up to his scalp, his hair singed down almost to their roots on that side as well.

Almost nothing on Earth can force him to look away from himself. He can't believe it's him, but he knows. He knows.

He does not turn away when he hears footsteps walk into the room or the groan from that woman upon seeing the bandages that have accrued at his feet (foot). He cannot do anything but look at himself and what has been done to him.

"…I just put those on you."

His eyes had spoken what he could not: Tell me I'm going to be fine, tell me if I'm going to be whole again, tell me if this is all just a nightmare.

Mai knows those eyes because she's seen them before in men before they die, and women who have lived too long. She sees it when she forgets who she is in the mirror, whenever she has the chance to see herself in the reflection.

For Garma, they are no different.

His breath is rising fast, up and down, looking down at what has been done to him and then again and again as if each time he looked would change the outcome. All he is doing is raising himself, higher and higher until-

"Look at me."

He wants to wake up from this nightmare, but the hard truth was there was no escape for him.

"Focus, Garma." She kneels in front of him as he tries to crawl away into a corner, trying to get away from her, as if she was the one who did this to him, but he cannot when all of his muscles burn and all the world spins in his head.

Yelling does no one any good but she wants to then and there to get him to stop squirming. He has nowhere to go however as he finds his plain corner of the room, drawing himself in as his one eye looks up at her with the fear she wanted.

Every step she takes toward him, every move of her hand, he watches on, wide eye'd, shivering, cowering. Scared.

She could very easily with the boots she has on- In fact she does. With the boots she has on she puts one tip of it against the nub of his quickly unbandaging right leg remains, and she lays it there, him looking up at her and all of the horror promised.

"I want to hurt you like you wouldn't believe." Her teeth grits against itself as she says it.

She wonders if she stepped down hard enough, she could shear another piece of bone from his right leg. Not like he needed it.

Garma is scared. The fear in his mind is like a coldness he has never known before in his life, and it permeates deep into his mind and to the very tips of his fingers: every move he makes will be wrong and so he fears life itself, for everything has gone wrong.

The bandages loosen with every shiver and shake of his, and Mai, before she does hurt him more, kill him more, brings herself back and to his level.

Her hands touch the remnants of his right leg and the unfurling bandage but they do not grab, instead she lays her fingers on those layers and looks into his eyes, silently, unmoving. It matters now about how he understands her at this moment.

"Please, don't." He whispers, huddled against himself.

"Please don't what, Garma?"

"I don't- please just- no no no no no!" Her hands are moving with the wraps before he can recognize what she is doing and he closes his eyes for what good it will do to him. He fears and anticipates the burning pain of the rest of his leg being ripped from him. With how close her hands are to his area he also fears something far far worse, but as the darkness moves on, the sound of bandages being handled fills that silent room on top of the patter of rain he had just noticed. No pain.

He opens his eyes, and instead of gouging, she is mending, white bandages crusted but not totally spent retightened and reapplied, a stern, stony look on her face as she glances back up as he looks down on her.

She seemed insulted.

"I saw your Gaw get blown up. I'm surprised you're not vaporized, but yet here we are…" She silently spoke as she went back to the rest of his bandages and slowly reapplied them to where they needed to be, even threading around his back. He was helpless to stop her even if he tried.

Here we are. Garma looks at her with his one good eye. "Where are we?"

She doesn't like how demanding he asks that, but she answers. "Seattle still. My apartment. Closer to the stars." She echoes his delirious words, and she wonders if he knows. He doesn't. "Not mine, but I don't think anyone cares or knows."

"Are… are we safe?" He asks again and his throat burns more.

"Matter of speaking. Yeah."

"What day is it?" He continues, questions rolling off his tongue as his fears momentarily subside and he remembers, yes, this woman did save him. "How long have I been out?"

"About a day. It's October 7th. I'm honestly surprised you're conscious."

And then the big question again: "Who are you…? Mai?" He recalls bits and pieces, fragments. "Yes, it's Mai isn't it?"

She nods, and as the details from the prior forty-eight hours come flooding back, small ones about her, for that's all he has, arise. She is a Spacenoid.

He is safe with her.

Is he?

She is at his side, left arm casting across his back as the other loops beneath his ass. He is up and off and deposited back on the bed as it wheezes in compression.

"Ow!" By the time the sudden impact is dealt with, reverberating through his body, she's disappeared and returned with an assortment of syringes and drugs, the canteen reappeared.

The idea that he is being drugged right now beyond what is necessary flairs within Garma's mind, but he still feels present. He still feels like Garma, despite what has happened to him. He knows what drugs his interrogators use after all, and although it is not a subject he tends to oversee himself, he knows what it's like for the chemical lubricants of the more injurious type to be applied. He feels nothing but the numbness forced upon him like a heavy blanket, keeping him unfeeling to what is far worse.

She is very sure to show him each syringe and each bottle she draws serums from, and although it has been a long time since his medical class on Guardian Banchi and the Academy, he, for what best he can do in his cloudy thoughts, see that they are not drugs meant to harm him.

Each syringe applied to his veins, each solution wiped across the scars that now coat his body, he feels more and more cared for as she does this silently. The piercing pain of the day mutes out slowly.

Even so there is a fear in his heart every time he wants to ask and press for more. The drugs must cloud his thoughts to body expression enough because that apprehension is on his face.

"No. I'm not a Fed. I'm not keeping you alive to handover." She plainly says as she wipes her hands on the plastic film that covers the bed below. "It's even doubtful I'm gonna keep you alive."

"What?" He wants to cry, why, he doesn't comprehend, but he's keeping something back within himself.

"You're fascist scum, your highness." She doesn't mind addressing him like this at that moment, saying that so casually Garma thought he misheard her. "You belong in the ground, and chances are I'm gonna do that myself. But not now."

"You… You want to kill me?" He asked her as she readjusted his pillow as he was laid down and gave him the medicine that kept away the pain.

"I do." She said with no more weight as one confirmed an order to a waiter.

"Then what is all this?" He asks afraid of an answer.

"I want you to be at the cusp of recovery before I kill you."

The words sink in like rain into the ground, and Garma's not sure how to take that as her hands move across his head to tighten the bandages on his face. She does it with care, with understanding, like a nurse.

He laughs as she finally pulls back, satisfied with her work today. He laughs, and it hurts, his ribs feeling unsettled and undone as he laughs into a rise, out to the ceiling.

Life was a sick fucking joke.

Mai, for her credit, has an inkling of an idea what Garma is laughing about. There is absurdity in life and when life is at its hardest, so too is it its most absurd. For example, the prince of space was dropped to her feet and that by itself is an absurd thought. As his laughing turns into coughing fits however, she is quick to put a hand to his back, recoiling her face with how easy it was for her to do that as if he was any other comrade of hers injured. Her fingers catch her own bandaged weave across his back, and then the slow rise and fall of his breath as he settles.

She is so close to him; she wants to bite into his flesh and rip and tear.

She doesn't.

She holds him steady, and eventually he leans back into the bed, looking at her with a twinkling eye.

"You're the one who's going to kill me?" He asks her. He seems almost glad.

She nods, concerned at his candidness.

"At least I get to see your face before it happens." In his clouded mind, he decides, it's not a bad face at all. No mask.

Her face is a young one, much like his own, but he sees the lines of stress on it, alleviated by how pleased she is at his understanding that yes! He is going to die because of her. He thinks he can see the dirt in her pores, the grease and sweat that can't be so easily taken away.

At least it's her and not The Red Comet.

Char. His name is in his head and that smile is off his face.

No one is sure if it's the meds talking or not, but Garma, forcing a breath through his nose, is relieved. "My life in the last forty-eight hours has gotten so complicated, and then so much simpler, thanks to you."

He's almost too comfortable, Mai figures, and she wonders if pinching him on the skin that hasn't been burnt might make him remember his position, but now that he's awake he is responding in ways that she couldn't quite anticipate.

She wanted begging, bargaining. She got fear, but that wasn't enough for her.

Instead, she got the man who she would bury talking to her frankly as the world of the living was, for now, firmly his.

"All that first aid work," He still cannot feel at ease glancing down to see what has become of himself, but his hand is manageable enough as he brings it up and gestures with it. He perhaps doesn't think too ill of it because he's seen the type of prosthetics and disability aids that have been born out of Zeon. It would do him well, even, if he was seen like this, but he pushes the thought away. That's thinking more aligned with Gihren's sensibilities. "It has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? There's technique there that is not common."

She narrows her eyes at him, but the curl in her mouth is a reluctant affirmative.

If she was a Spacenoid, and trained in any capacity of military conduct… True, it could've been she had once been of a colonial militia, but she had been young, his age, the only time she could've been trained formally was during the same time he did. More than that, she seemed familiar, like a ghost in his peripheral- a halfway image formed in his mind of someone he might've seen before, or maybe a relative? That had meant a reasonable guess:

"I take it you attended the Academy." Her face betrays her as she pauses her movements at once, and then continued as if nothing had been uttered.. More than that. "Were we…?"

Seconds pass, but she eventually nods, feet on the floor, looking out to the rain of Seattle. "I was there. For all of it." All. That word is heavy for their time, those three years.

"You don't mean…?" She nodded again before Garma could say.

She turned to face Garma, arms crossed. "I was there when we raided the barracks at Banchi."

Recognition, all at once, it clears away the pain somewhat. He can see her face among his comrades that arose for the Dawn Rebellion. If he could just push past the fog, the pain and haze of medication and his current situation, maybe, just maybe, he could know and remember this woman. But he had been through so many soldiers since then and now. Still, he fought, she must've counted for something. She was one of the first.

Another revelation takes over him: "Then you fought this war at the very beginning. You KNOW what we're fighting for." He says it from his chest and he leans forward, trying to be nearer to her, but she scoots every distance he approaches as he sits himself up in the bed. "You're one of my people." The pain of movement does not match the pain of her response.

She snaps again, her lips curling up. "And what does that mean, huh?! What did that count for me in the end?" Her stomach hurts. She is not wounded there in a way that means she will bleed out, but she is wounded there in a way deeper than a bullet can impart.

Those who died in the Dawn Rebellion he would always owe everything to. They were the first casualties of the great war they fought for now, and more than that, did it by his word, in his name. They had given the greatest sacrifice in their cause against the corrupt Federation, and all those that lived from that attack he held in the greatest regard.

And yet here she was, a woman who had been on both sides of that line drawn.

"It means that our glorious cause is for you. I'm sorry that-"

She stops her hands before they're at his neck and he recoils as she shifts the bed and instead is on all fours inadvertently, growling at him, less than Human. She wants him to know where he has dragged her down to. "Don't you dare apologize. Not one word. You can't even try."

And he does, shutting his teeth, breathing in, and out.

"I gave up everything for you, your highness." The sharpness of how she ends it, it is as if she is saying the name of the infernal, "And then you, Zeon, you took something that I didn't even have yet."

She was here on Earth, he realized, and more and more he pieced together guesses of this woman's life. She had lost clearly because of the war, and she was outfitted like a fighter of it. His forces invaded, and she had done her best to fight them off to the point that Seattle became a wasteland.

This woman had lost because of him in some way, and that was enough for him to quiet, to sober what he could. This woman had a reason to kill him.

This woman was his enemy.

"So you'll take my life in turn now?" He asked.

"I hate you." She forced out. "I hate you in a way that if I even tried to say I feel like my teeth would crack. I'd bite off my fucking tongue."

Here, Garma Zabi had felt so small now. "…So you'll keep me here, just to hate?"

It makes her feel good to see his face as she spews her vile hatred, eyes cutting through him and back. It makes her feel complete, and to lose that- no, this was what she had earned.

"I'll keep you here until the time is right." It's the truth. "Then I'm gonna decide how I kill you."

The words hang in the air between them, and for her, Garma is far too lucid for a part of him that she had forgotten was exuded. It was a line practiced by all Zabis, and she had been in the presence of two in her life before the war. An aura, unbreakable. Composed. Even when he was missing entire pieces of himself he was put together. Squaring his shoulders, he showed:

"I don't see what you're trying to do here… And I suspect you don't either."

He looked at her in the eye, and she looked back. How many in the Earthsphere had lived to do that she wondered.

She squared her shoulders back, dead straight at him: "I know what I'm doing, Zabi. I've lasted almost a year now against you, and I'm gonna last longer than you."

There's a curve to his left eye. It hit a nerve. "People like you are responsible for why I'm having so much trouble in Chicago and Detroit, or out in the American Dustlands." So many forces and units that would've otherwise been used in forcing the Federation frontlines were instead used for partisan and guerilla pacification. No one had counted on the resistance from what were irregular military units. It would've been easy to pass off such resistance up in the sides as simply being organizations funded by the Earth Federation from the shadows. He had seen to such pacifications very early on in the war before he came to Earth, but now, now had been different.

This woman was just one of thousands, hundred thousands perhaps. Suddenly when Earth itself was attacked all of its splintered factions seemed to come together and try to resist them, the liberators Zeon. Even in the less dense countrysides of Earth there had been fierce resistance that came in the form of bullets. In the cities such as Seattle, the results were bare to see just looking out the window.

"Yeah well. Tends to happen when you open up your damn invasion with killing several billion people."

Half of the population of the Human race: gone. "And here I was hearing that the Federation leadership wanted such a population control."

She snapped. "Zeon Deikun didn't advocate for a genocide-!"

He matched her back, even as his throat strained in tis fight: "Zeon Zum Deikun knew that something like this was always supposed to happen! Which is why he appointed my father as his successor!"

She was only a girl when Zeon died, and during that day on Munzo it was decided that she would spend the rest of her childhood more closely following her parents as they traveled throughout the Earthsphere in their work. It was a bloody revolution and turmoil, but she knew, as history came around, there was always a question there: The Zabis had taken the throne of Zeon by assassination.

It was something that Mai had no problem thinking about.

"The opulence of the Earth elite had to-"

"I lived in a FUCKING shoebox when I came to Earth!" The windows of her apartment vibrate as she shrieks, and she stops that line she has had to hear for years. She did not come from poverty. She came from an upper-middleclass family that had the privilege of knowing the pull of gravity, and then the freedom thereof. She lived better when she was out beyond Earth. "The opulence, don't you dare tell me the opulence when you-" She had pulled from her pocket his golden tassel from his shoulder she had cut off when she originally was going to leave him. It bounced off his forehead as she flicked it at him. "Have you ever been to Shangri-La?"

One of the very first space colonies on Side 1. He nodded as her volume created his silence. Once, long ago, his family had been there when the relations between Side 3 and the Federation had been warmer.

"I've seen those mansions there, sitting on their pretty hills above the scrapyards where people live in huts at the very bottom. I've seen those ghettos that the limos of the Spacenoid just pass by on the way from social function to social function in walled off communities." More than that, the spit on her lip threatened to be hucked at him as well as she thought of her first home. "I lived in eyesight of your castle. Every single night, I thought to myself, do you know how many people they could house on your compound?"

"Those were simple left-behinds from the earlier culture of Munzo-!" He tried to get out. His family simply inherited it, as they would any form of inheritance they did from Zeon Deikun.

"The opulence of the Earth elite!" She snapped in echo of him. "You don't get to say a god damned word about privilege when you're wearing gold trim, and when you're royalty!" Every word was another inch closer to him, every breath, one more step toward actualizing all the anger. "You don't get to say a god damned word to me, because I know better, and you owe me your life."

There might've been lower class neighborhoods on the Sides, but they were self-contained systems, all living too close to each other for trickle down economics to not work just by the pure condensation of a society within their cylinders. Here on Earth, however, slums and ghettos remained. It took her all but her life lived so far to realize that, for all the rhetoric and division between Earth and the Spacenoids, it was all a veil of hostility created out of a lie. When she walked out on the street before the war, Seattle looked a lot like Zum, and vice versa. It was never a matter of gravity. It was a matter of class, of wealth, of disparity, but not of race and birthright. She had known a dire truth she was unable to vocalize before the war came: Humanity was the same, everywhere. "We're trying to alleviate that problem, woman. And hard decisions have to be made. Sacrifices must be made."

Her gun is out, and she is on him, straddling his chest as he is tackled against the bed, and the cold steel of its barrel against the bottom of his head. She knows the angle: up from his throat, angled so if she shot it would've blown out the center of his brain.

This feels good. It feels too good to her as she presses the steel into his flesh, flesh yet unmarred, and he strains against it.

"That's not your decision to make. What do you know about sacrifice!?" Some of her spittle dots his face, but he does not dare move to wipe it off.

He has an answer, and it does not require words as he struggles to breath with her weight on his chest. He can only get air in gasps, the cold of the gun against his neck burning hot. The answer he gives is himself, trying to find her eyes again as the barrel of the gun keeps him from fully looking down. His body is limp, and the pain she has melted away now comes back like the tide.

"What are you even sacrificing for?" She whispers down on him. It's a question she knows the answer to. It's the simplest explanation after all: Rule. He was just a man in a family who wanted to rule the Earth.

If he had a response to that he kept it in himself as he struggled to breath with her weight on him.

Minutes, an hour, seconds, no time at all. She's not sure how long she sat on his chest and felt his heart beat rapid, lungs fighting, before she stepped off of him.

He took a breath as if breaching water when he did.

He coughed, recovering, but coming back to it: "I don't think you can understand. Gravity has skewed your view."

He was a strong man, with strong opinions, and a gun being shoved in his face could not change that as much as she wanted him to beg for his life.

She wanted to spit in his face. "You don't even understand yourself."

The long silence came in between them with the rain, a gun holstered in between patters on the raindrop. It wasn't agree to disagree. It was a battle of ideals from two avatars of their respective thoughts.

Despite this all, he had survived because of her.

Despite this, she wanted to kill him still.

"What will you do to me?" He finally asks, regaining what breath he can, propping himself up against the headboard, trying his best to avoid looking at the stump of his leg with his remaining eye. He wants to gesture with his right hand, but as he moves, he only feels pain where fingers once were. "Right now, right here."

She doesn't answer, glancing back and forth at him and the window as if she couldn't bear to look at him for more than a few seconds; as if he was as grisly as he felt. Rain and thunder continue. Seattle was known for its rain, and she had seen it drown Spacenoids before. The first time she saw lightning was when she was an adult, and it was on that day she knew what the fear of God was.

"If I was a loyal Spacenoid, what would you ask me to do?" She poses instead back to him. He considers, taking in a breath.

If nothing else, she deserved something for her efforts of letting him see another day: "It is not something you might expect me to ask."

"Shoot." She responded.

"Hm?"

"I mean, try me." Clarification.

The breath he takes hurts, the cold biting his nostrils, looking out to a rain swept world. "I was set up; led to… this. Did you see how it happened?" He doesn't want to say how he was shot down, set on fire, destroyed.

She nodded once. He was shot from behind. "You didn't stand a chance."

"I think… I think…" He really does try to remember the last moments of his life, or rather, what he thought his last moments were supposed to be: Anger, hellfire, spurred on by betrayal.

You were a good friend. This is your father's fault.

"I think I was betrayed."

Somewhere in Mai's mind she thinks of betrayal. She thinks of it often on the day to day. The guerilla forces of Seattle were not always those she thought highly of, and although she owed her life to her own cell, there were others that she wondered, from time to time, what if she had given them bad info? Let them wander into a place she knew Zeon was set up?

"Oh." Is all Mai can say to that before she thinks truly about what that means. Was there a Zeon coup happening behind the scenes somewhere? Not exactly an issue she particularly cared about, but if Garma was redlined for death by those players it would make sense how he could've been in this scenario. Still it presented a question that was based on the very idea of Garma himself: "Who… though? I might hate you to your bones, but to the rest of Zeon, you're beloved."

She would know, Garma is quick to realize. She was there in the Academy, and, no doubt, would've been there and witness to the man that became the Red Comet.

"If you were loyal to your race, I'd ask you to do as you are now, actually." He is uncomfortable, just as a baseline, and the thought of elaborating to this woman who may very well be his final witness is not a particularly reassuring thought to him as of current. "I'll just say that I'm in no hurry to reconnect with my forces."

She grumbles once. "Yeah, well, me neither your highness," She let slip again, cringing. "God knows you'll have me shot."

"Why would I have the woman that saved my life shot?" Even if she was being difficult, Garma can hardly consider seeing her on the firing line (existing crimes against Zeon yet to be discovered withholding).

Because that's how she imagined her life ending up. She thought to herself.

Because that's an easy way to think about Garma.

Every moment more, a mistake is peeled back like a scab: She should've shot him and been done with it, because now, they're talking, they're understanding each other. It really is a mistake and he, whether he knows it or not, is making the case for his continued survival by etiquette alone. She recoiled again saying his title, and he noticed.

"Just call me Garma, like you did back at the Academy. That is your privilege, and I recommend it to. I've never seen someone bristle so at this formality. Isn't it beneath you as my enemy?" Even when he was down a leg, a few fingers, and an eye, he cannot forget who he is. She doesn't forget how Garma Zabi conducted himself in the Academy among those he called his peers. This man exerted a pressure that solidified himself, and crushed those around him. She wouldn't allow it. Not after all this time.

Her mouth screws into a taut curl. She really ought to zip his mouth up tight, but she doesn't do that, so she leaves him, last of the coffee in the canteen polished off and she stretching herself as she stood again.

Garma can't help but notice the definition that stretched across her back beneath the thermal shirt. He hasn't quite seen a woman quite like her this close; only from afar do the female members of the logistical and engineering corps, where most of the female service members mostly are assigned to, does he see the women that have built themselves into form. Fulsome might be a word to describe her, but he keeps it in check.

She's got one-half head height on him, and even perhaps when he was whole, if they were to fight for any reason he's positive that it wouldn't go his way.

This woman was a warfighter, and he had been the one who brought the war.

Seeing her like this, focusing on her, a piece of his mind is alight. A memory, an almost-detail: "I think I remember your last name now… It's funny, I thought it was rather unforgettable, now that I think about it."

Her face betrays her again with the smallest of smirks, but she does nothing else as she throws on her poncho and gets her necessary implements ready for her mental to-do list. Her rifle is always first.

"How did you come to Earth?" He asks, the questions pouring in. "Where did you go after Banchi?"

She looks back to Garma on her bed, and then the various weapons she has strewn about in the next room. A hazard, a risk, for any number of reasons, but the most treacherous of them give her an excuse. The rest: "If for whatever reason you want to blow your brains out, please do it over the balcony or in the tub or something. Do me that favor would you?"

"I… I'll consider it." He wasn't quite sure what to say about that as he sat on that bed before really thinking about it. "Should I consider blowing my brains out?"

"…No." Maybe if he was that petty, he'd do himself in before she could. "I'll be back. Nine hours about. If I'm not back I've got food in the fridge and the water works. The meds are in any box listed MEDS. If I'm not back in a day that means your troubles with me are over and it's up to you to crawl your way out of this city." No way in hell. "Also if you want to ambush me on the way back in. Don't. Your men have tried for a year, an amputee with barely a grip hand isn't going to do it. Also I'll be expecting it."

She hears him fall back onto the bed, a great pained exhale a prelude to his answer: "I'm not going to give you what you want."

A fight. An excuse.

"I see. Still warning you though." She's not sure if it's a chuckle or a cough that rises out of his throat, but she does hear his question as she gears up and goes to leave.

"Where are you going then?"

Her boonie hat is always the last thing, worn and dusty, but perhaps the closest thing to a keepsake of hers. A signature, maybe. "Going to go make a bad decision."


She has two things to do today. Both of them about meeting people.

Her weekly routines are not dissimilar enough from most civilized people's. In fact, they are bereft of the arbitrary nature of modern society and its deference for truth. Living in Seattle has shown her more truths than she cared to reiterate, and living as she has, it is the most truthful she has been to herself as she checks her live animal traps north bound of her apartment.

No dice today.

Seattle Animal Control had been surprisingly an active force in the first weeks of the invasion, given their firearms and, something that had hindered both Zeon and the Federation both: Loose animals.

Nowadays when she was facing northerly of her usual stomping grounds she held her rifle a little closer on those streets, because very early on an animal rights group had broken into the Seattle Zoo and broke almost every animal out.

Animal Control, even in a warzone, did its best to contain the wilder beasts, such as the rhinos and leopards, however examples still remained out there, and those who remained in the city were ever aware of deer carcasses that had the claw marks of Ezekiel: the African Lion that had never been accounted for. During the invasion there had been stories that propagated around the Zeek lines that her own notoriety bumped into, and Ezekiel tearing through Zeon patrols as if it too had a bone to pick with Spacenoids had been a thing.

Swinging back down from the north, she had found herself back downtown and not too far from her apartment, but she wouldn't return to her tower and Garma Zabi until the very end of today. Now was just her social call.

The Seattle Art Museum was one of the city's pride and joys when it came to the higher aspects of society that she had never really appreciated enough, nor cared for, but like all places in Seattle it had come to wreck and ruin: modern lines of bamboo flooring, stainless steel and glass depicting a modern building had been shattered, shot through, and made into a art piece of its own with every building in Seattle that it shared the block with. Fighting on those streets had been full of mobile suits, tanks, and door to door window to window engagements that she could only remember in flashes of color and emotion. The recoil of gunfire as she opened up into a building storefront was now imprinted into her bones, and she understood the feeling in her jaw of return fire landing near her.

All those were memories now, and like memories they were frozen in time, day by day, just like how the art museum was now as she came in through the destroyed ground floor, a clay art piece that had been almost as tall as the first floor crumbled down, like a skeleton, melting and twisting upon itself.

Modern art, yes: it made her feel its tragedy as she made her way up the stairs to the very top of the building, a mere twenty floor climb. She hadn't been part of the forces clearing out this section of town, but even then she could track where doors were blown open, angles of fire, the remains of blood splatter that had since either evaporated or sunk into the floor.

The displays had all either been destroyed or cracked open, squares on the wall where paintings once had been. Those that had been too damaged? Just left to rot on the floor with the patina of relics of a colonial past.

She needed two new cups since she had just anger-gripped one to a crack, so on the way up she had actually picked up two cups from the American colonial period when the Pacific North West was the frontier. One for her and one for her awful house guest.

Damn it all if she was going to be sharing her canteen with him again.

The door to the top floor had been opened from the stairway, and here had been room, expansive in its floor plan that was somewhat recovered (all the debris just kicked out into the stairway or out the window). It was actually well lit from the skylight, although Seattle's overcast did little to help it out: out in the furthest corner several of the flat long benches with their padded cushions had been formed together into something of a bed, sheets and a sleeping bag on it while a heater laid next to it. It had been, if not for the fact it was in the middle of an art museum, looked like someone had been camping with a small TV and a generator at the ready. Wrappers of MREs and several clothes line were held up against the blank grey wall where art displays hadn't been. Some of those clothes line had fish hung up on them, out from the nearby coast. The fish that this occupant always caught had always been bigger than her own, she dismayed.

She knew who had made the top floor of the Seattle Art Museum their home.

The youngest fighter she knew had been eight, and it broke her heart when that young boy disappeared in the middle of a Zeke offensive. It was by the virtue of Heaven alone she believed that Win Nguyen, the next youngest fighter, had survived still.

He was a bright young fourteen-year-old, a tunnel rat like his people were known to be over a century ago. Many nights she had seen that boy disappear into the sewers of Seattle, only to remerge with any amount of dogtags signifying Zeek kills or an objective far behind enemy lines accomplished.

He was, she envied him privately, happy to be alive, after all this time.

In the end, he was among the last of her guerilla cell that remained in Seattle, the rest having gone with the Federation forces as they pulled out to continue the fight elsewhere against Zeon, or disappears into the continent toward refugee camps and new beginnings.

He was there, center of the room where the main art on display had been: it remained untouched by some miraculous reason, and every week she would spend some time with him, sitting on one of those long seats and bask in the civility of it, if only to keep themselves just a little more sane.

"Ghoulie." He had given her a mock salute, the sound of the door opening had been her tell. He had a little more growing to do, but even then, unfolded, the Zeon machinepistole that he had called his own, with its stock unfolded, was over half his height.

That title of hers grates her ears from his voice. "You know it's bad enough to hear that from even the Conclave, boy."

His face was that of a school boy's at heart, cuts and scrapes on it covered up by flesh-colored bandages and a tooth that had been chipped out partly out front. He was, by any regard, a puppy turned into a Human, his hair having gone so long without a proper haircut that it required a pony tail that they shared in looks. He was dressed in a hoodie, but save for who he actually was, Mai could look upon him and see an almost mirror image of their day to day kit, now after the war had gone. All the military gear and pouches that had been useful for their scavenging lifestyle now kept.

He looked up at her, head tilted, uncut hair bobbing, and she sighed, softened for but a moment at the question he was wondering internally.

"Okay." She admitted, and his arms had been open and she putting her rifle off to her side with her sling, slowly welcomed him.

"Favorite part of my week."

It was very obvious why with the way he had been very much face, forehead, and cheeks all trying to rub deeper in the valley that was pressed by the pressure of his form against her chest and into her cleavage.

She pushed him off after the blinding flash of actual Human kindness and warmth wore off, a very sturdy slap leveled against the top of his head that resounded in its fleshy smack. He recoiled into it, obviously expecting it. The war might've aged him, she had seen the horror baked into his face all the same during those endless days of fighting, his soul wise and matured beyond the fourteen he had been. At the end of the day however he had still been that teenager who may have spent a little too much time with men and their degeneracy, strung at the end of their ropes.

She tried to only think of the more innocent part of that that made him liable to being a pervert: being a hormonal youngster.

"What'd I say about doing that?" The stern out of her mouth had made her wistful more than the situation had at all warranted.

"Won't happen again." He smiled at her.

It would.

She knew that there was something there: about how she could go on about respecting that line of respect and dignity and not being a creep. But she had seen Win kill before. She had seen the moment he had pulled the trigger, jumping into an enemy trench line and emerge a bloody mess, having done his job.

If he wanted to cop feels, she would punish him all the same, but in the end it was such a small, almost innocent misdemeanor when put against the brutality they shared together.

It wasn't right, but they were not saints. None of those existed anymore.

In the end however, she admitted, she liked him, and she had an inkling of a feeling that his infatuation with at least her softness would always be innocent enough in just a way to annoy her, and he knew that.

"Hello, boy." she breathed into his hair as that aggravation drained out of her.

"Hello Mai." He too had been tired, and then they sat together in the glow of the tapestry: La Dame à la licorne.

It was a tapestry that was on loan from Paris for a time before Zeon came down. Understandably no one had come back to get it back. Not a touch had been put upon it in the nearly one year that war raged across the Earth, and, when Win had found it like this, all alone, he chose this to be the place he remained.

She asked him, once, about what happened to his parents.

This was about three months into the invasion and she had yet to come to know all of her people in the cell. Win had been one of the last, for she had anticipated that he would be called away, find salvation somewhere else.

He shrugged, back then still wearing the school jacket of his private school. "Somewhere."

He was a problem child; at least, a problem enough that his parents decided that public education would only foster his disinterest in schooling and instead went for the hardnosed academies. Mai had never seen it though, not as he seemed perfectly content to get away from what life he used to live.

Today he had laid across the seats, head laid in her lap as she absentmindedly ran her fingers through his dirty hair.

This was their comfortable routine, for war had made their relationship progress far beyond that need for words: Every Wednesday they come to this hall, at the top of this building, and simply lean on each other.

A small comfort was what they allowed each other every week like this as their eyes traced against the wonderful color and composition of ancient fairytales woven.

"Maybe when it gets warmer we can go out by the shore and do this." Win quietly remarked, his cheeks against her thighs.

"Mm."

For the next thirty minutes not a word passed, but warmth was shared as their eyes traced every line, every color.

A unicorn gave regards to a lady amidst royal colors and patterns, chivalry on display. Is that regards love? Or is it possibility itself in its fantastical presentation to someone who was worthy to be in its presence?

She should've been an art student.

Eventually he peeped up, rolling his head over to look up at her. She looked down, expectantly.

"You smell a lot like medicine, and I know you don't spend time in the Conclave." He rose his eyebrow at her. "You take a hit recently?"

It was no wonder she smelled sterile, with what how much she was applying to Garma.

She shook her head as he sat up straight, concern on his face with the innocence baked in as if she had burned herself cooking and not the implication that she had been shot recently. She looked at this young boy she had called comrade and wondered, really, if he has seen right through her. She couldn't admit the exact details, but, she would never lie. Not to him at least. Stranger things have happened in war.

She hasn't taken a hit in a month, and the last time it had been a grazing pistol round that nearly took off a part of her ear.

Steeling herself, eyes to the sky before coming back to his dark pupils, she licked her lips and admitted: "I have a prisoner. A Zeek, from that business about two days ago." Win's mouth opened in an oh, understanding what all the city had come under with that bombing, and then he smiled, eyebrow raised again in a short laugh.

"Prisoner? Didn't think the Ghoul took prisoners." Not with the shots she took, with the rifle she held now by her side.

"No, I don't. But this one is different." Her gaze returned to the tapestry and the mane of one of its depicted lion, so regal, so formal.

Win cocked his hands at his hips. "Oh? General? Colonel? Something like that?" He was always eager to hear details of the Zeonic officer corps. They were always the prime targets for all Guerillas in Seattle, and Win could count his personal kills colonels and captains on two hands.

What Garma was could be more than defined just by military rank. "Mm. I knew him when I was in the Academy."

The realization that wipes over Win is like the wind through the remaining corridors of Seattle. It's cold, and its sobering, and it's a remembrance of the initial misgivings that other guerilla fighters had about Mai when her truth was revealed. She had become the leader of a good portion of Seattle's guerillas, nearly four hundred people, not just because she had officer training, but because she knew exactly how the Spacenoid fought. For she was one. "…Ah."

"Yeah."

"Not too easy to kill huh?" Win tries to lighten, but it only brings up the earliest memories: Of someone yelling at her in the sewers, trying to form a resistance at all, that she might've gotten cold feet if she saw someone she knew. That has come true in the worst way. There probably had been faces from Guardian Banchi that had come to Seattle, but she hadn't noticed or cared. Not that any of them had been Garma Zabi that is.

She must strike a somber impression right now, for Win gets on his feet in front of her, shaking her shoulders: "Ah ah ah. You and a man spending time alone together in an apartment? That you have history with? Tsk tsk what would your husband say about it?"

"Why would I give a shit?" There was no ring on her finger, but still, officially, in some official document somewhere, Mai had been married.

"Well I just want to be your ring bearer, Captain Ghoulie." The way her hand reaches up only to seize his cheek and pinch, it's a reminder that they both react like soldiers as he does the same and grabs both of her cheeks.

"You little runt!" She grunts as he pinches right back.

"Let go let go let go let go!"

"You first!"

"Fauaggh-!" Win is cursing through the pain and she is wincing trying to maintain perhaps all too knowingly an image of herself that is meant more for furrowing and frowning. It's hard to do that as a boy is trying to rip her cheeks.

"You mention me having any relation with a Zeek again and I'm pulling out the rest of your fucking baby teeth you little shit!"

"Mai you love me don't you?! Owowow-!"

He calls uncle first the second she digs her fingernails into his skin, and they both stop before their cheeks get too sore. But not before long he has that puppy dog smile on his face. "Sensitive topic. I see."

"Mm."

"Gonna kill him?" He asks with that same candor. "Can I watch?"

It freaks her out, just a little, but she shrugs. "I don't know. Really."

"Mm. Well, from what I hear from both the Zeeks and the Feds, the war is gonna be over soon." She knows what he's referring to. Endsieg is here. Both the Federation and Zeon say that they are going to win imminently, but through what methods, no one knows; especially not them so far away in their abandoned land. "Could hold onto him. If the Feds win, we pick up a reward. If the Zeeks win, show of good faith as we all start living beneath a Newtype caste system… Heck that might be better. Can I be a servant in your house, I'm sure you, my wonderful Newtype master, won't beat us lowly Earthnoids right?"

She's surprised Win knew about the Newtype theory at all, but his private schooling must've done him some good.

Like all political philosophers, many people tended to not truly understand the literal meanings of Zeon Zum Deikun. For many on Earth, even before the war, Spacenoids were Newtypes.

As far as she knew, she wasn't one, and she understood the concept better than most. "Not a Newtype."

"Oh how could you say that?" He leans in to her, head tilted. "I've seen you take the head off a Zeek in the darkest night at nearly a mile out while the guy was walking. I think that's a Newtype shot."

"You gonna call every shot you can't make a Newtype shot?"

Win folded his arms, shrugging. "Why not, might be better for you in the end. One day we're gonna leave this place and having your bloodtype be, uh, New might be good."

Not how it works.

"What you think I'm gonna keep you around?" It almost hurts Mai to say this, but thankfully it always bounces off of Win.

"You think I sit on my ass all day looking at this stupid carpet? No I've been down at the DMV, trying to get that god damn ID machine to work. We could print ourselves new identities, and I'd love to be your younger brother. Having your last name would be so cool."

Her last name.

He talks like this, she knows, when she's uncomfortable. Because he knows her, her past, her trials, her pain and loss. He is a good kid, but a killer nonetheless like all of them, and if he's broken, he doesn't show it. No one around there does. So they are broken together and it works as he talks and talks about a future stemming from "fake" ID cards and how he's gonna be a gymnast and she's gonna teach kids how to shoot a gun because he swears the Earth Federation/Zeon is gonna want to make more kids his age able to get up to fighting speed.

He forgets he's a child soldier, and she forgets all that she's lost.


By the time Win has lost his breath in rambles it's about time she starts moving off for the day. A check of the watch only confirms. 3:00.

Eventually, however, before she leaves, Win has to really ask.

"What're you gonna do with the Zeek, Mai? I mean, I know you know him and all, but…" But he's still a Zeek, words left in the air.

"Well, what would've you done Winny?" It's about time she uses that pet name of his that anyone older than him (most people) use. The flash of anger in him that comes from it paints his answer:

"I woulda left him for dead. Hell, I don't know how you found him, but you stank like a morgue. Don't know if he's got much life left in 'em."

She nods, thoughtful consideration in each bob of her head. In Win is sane, and it's still a question if he is, then she must still be sane because it's the choice that floated in her mind at that moment when she found him.

Though that Mai was not the one that existed today, with the choice she made.

Raising from the softest surface she's sat on in a while she brushes her green rain jacket down over her kit, ready to move out, but he leaves Win like this: He's back on her lap before she leaves, and she draws her finger tips through his scalp one last time. "Don't tell anyone I got a live one alright?"

There's enough concern in her voice that Win immediately pushes off of her and her fingers, warm and gentle as they are. He's standing at attention because he wants to assure her: "You kept all of us fighting, Captain Ghoul. I'm alive because of you. I think that alone should be enough for me to trust you on any call you make. You won't hear a peep outta me."

Ghoul was a nickname that came because it was too easy. The way Win uses it however, it's okay to her. It's not biting away at her, painting her to be something she physically is not. It is a term that makes her feel ugly, and yet… it's perfect for her. Double edged swords manifested in a sniper rifle: Zeon soldiers whispering of the bloodshot-eye'd woman, staring at them in the dark, waiting to take a perfect shot and take them from life.

When Win uses it, it takes a little bit of that edge away. She smiles for the first time in a week.

"Thank you, Win."

"Anything for my Captain." He smiles back.

It was an actual hug this time she gave him, one where he had more rested his head over her heart, and she held him, arms over his shoulders. He smelled like the city, and she might've been sick of it, but there was an old saying, about how cities never leave those that leave them. She hoped this boy left one day, but for now, in her arms is okay.

"You would've been a good Mom, Mai."

He means well by it, she knows he does, but it does little to settle her heart. He's not her son. If anything, he is her brother, but the swell in her heart still pangs of loss.

They stay like that for a few more moments, and this time it is Mai that takes in his smell. He smells like a library, stale air, and the dirt that has been kicked up by a year's worth of bombardment. But to her, it is a smell that comforts her.

"I love you, boy."

This boy is her family, born of battle, and the fact that Garma, up above in her apartment, is to blame for so much of the pain that he had known, it hurts her even still.


The Conclave in daylight is a much more welcome sight, and, given that its location in the middle of Seattle's health center meant that even Zeon wouldn't bomb it, if one looked at it at just the right angle it seemed like the war hadn't happened at all.

An illusion that was always broken before too long.

That far out in daylight she is easily spotted by the Conclave's forwards scouts and positions, and by the time she gets to the same front gates that she arrived when the Gaw had been bombing Seattle back to life, they are open for her.

"Ghoul."

"Ghoul."

"How ya doin, Ghoul?"

The name bounces off her again and again as she enters and simply gives nods to all those who give her regards as she makes her way through the hospital.

In daytime there is more life here than anywhere else in Seattle. In daytime, it is a memory and a reminder that people survive even brutal war. Part housing complex, and still part hospital, the Conclave's halls teem with life and families who remain in Seattle, safe away from the wilds of its ruins. She walking through it even is a matter of displacement. Brightly lit and warm, powered by generators chugging along from fuel sipped from abandoned wrecks and facilities in Seattle, it is home for hundreds, and a haven for all the innocent (and perhaps not so innocent).

Patrols going out for more supplies organize themselves in the lobby as they all straighten up and out in her presence, habitually she gives them a salute down. Some of those young men and women, going out past the wire with gear and rigs not unlike her own were guerillas too, but not with her. They have heard of her though, and every time she comes to the Conclave they take a good long look at her face, and her rifle, and remember her name: Ghoul.

As she moves further and further up the building, guerillas are replaced by hospital staff still trudging along treating those injured from the war, and then finally, along the top floors, families whole: men and women and children who have made empty offices or wards home.

A trio of young children rush past her and give her a wide bearing as they look, wide eye'd at this woman that the rest of the hospital staff must whisper about no doubt. Five years old at most, she observes as she passes them, making sure her rifle is tight against her form by her sling.

As if she had a doctor appointment, she had knocked on the door, gold plated insert at eye level, of Hale Candy, MD. Last doctor in all of Seattle.

"Come in!"

She had heard three voices beyond the door as she approached and she recognized each one.

Entering the office of Hale Candy, each time she has to remember that there had been a war outside these doors, for his office is immaculate. A surge of emotion from another doctor's office for her; about meeting with her primary care physician at the time to prepare for a nine month journey in front of her that never played out the way she thought. It happens every time she comes into that green rugged office, medical textbooks in a book case off to the side with dozens of photos of colleagues and patients and rewards adorning that room. It was the office of model medical doctor. It was the office of the Conclave's leader:

He was a bald man, a white beard on his face, and for a man of sixty, he shared something with Win: He had youth defiantly plastered on his face cheeks well shined and reddened as he looks through his round spectacles down at an ultrasound (it embarrasses Mai so much that she immediately knows what he holds in his hand). He's sitting on his desk, a tee-shirt branded with his alma mater overlooking his notes for the day's care, Bo Tale, the pharmacy tech, and Gearten Possai, the Conclave's guerilla organizer, by his side in discussion with him.

Gearten's sign that he was in here had been apparent by the way his bullpup rifle was left at the door. (All the kids in the Conclave as far as she remembered had been given a VERY stern talking to to not touch any of the military hardware).

Bo is glad to see Mai there, and Gearten is always ambivalent to her presence. Candy however makes up the difference. He lights up, seeing her face. "Mai!"

"Doctor Candy." Mai responds in kind.

She owes this man much, for he was the one that took care of her in this hospital when that fateful day happened. Her blood has been on his hands.

He takes her hand warmly as his free hand touches her other shoulder. "How're you dear girl?"

She can't help but speak to him as the woman she was before this: the woman who had only been to war for one night before, and hoped she never would again. A younger, more innocent version of her. "Oh you know Doc, hanging in there. Am I interrupting something?"

Bo is by her side almost as soon as Candy is, touching upon her arm as Candy leaves. Mai is in a better mood in the aggregate so she appreciates Bo's presence today. Her mood swings, although understandable, were unfair in the end, at least to the bystanders like Bo. She pats Bo's hands in greeting and Bo is glad to see her better, or, at least, not the version of her that stalks out at night with a rifle. "No," Bo answers. "We're just talking about. Miss Kino. Mister Kino asked for another ultrasound just to see what was up with their kid."

Gearten was an uncle, so he had been through the process as the Kino family had been going through, nodding along as the ultrasound was on Candy's table, looking along impressed. "We just found out their sex right here. It took a while, because, uh, well, let's just say she has a pretty big kid on the way and his size stopped us from properly determining. Usually, it doesn't take this long to determine."

"Oh!" Mai is right at the table ecstatic like a child herself, the four of them looking down at that radar shape of a baby. "A boy?"

Candy nods along, sitting at his desk. "Mrs. Kino was waiting for me to get back to the city, but she didn't want to be told until Albert is back from his patrols." He gestures with his arms, it was no big deal. "But yes, as far as I can tell, she has a healthy baby boy on the way."

"That's, that's great!" The enthusiasm on Mai's face is palpable, but before long, and she is not the first to realize it, there is a reason why and it makes them all uncomfortable. The long silence that comes over the room is mercifully broken by Candy.

"Now, what pleasure do I have in having you here today, Mai?" Candy tilts his head, going to his desk and squaring away the ultrasounds into a manila folder.

"Oh yes. I just wanted to see if you were back from the suburbs." She nodded, leveling her voice. "I presume you saw the trouble the other day sweep by?"

Dr. Candy nodded once. "I'm sure everyone in the state saw, even." His face suddenly soured, "It's a shame we lost 3 Pavilion." Over a dozen men and women manning a safe haven inside of a bombed-out grocery store, radioing reports over to the Conclave itself.

Gearten had nodded in concert. "They were our southernmost outpost, and we don't have the manpower to rebuild it. It's a shame. They were our only finger on the pulse of what's happening below Little Saigon." Unsaid names, unsaid implications in Gearten's grumbling. Another storm oncoming which more and more made the Conclave want to take flight away from that city.

Now wasn't the time though.

"You really shouldn't be out there Dr. Candy." Bo spoke up, concern in her voice. "We can't risk losing you when so many here are still so injured."

"I understand Bo," Candy nodded with her, but his empathy was far greater than that. "But I can't just relegate myself to this building. There are people out there out in Seattle's outskirts that still need help, and they can't get themselves here or…" He shrugged himself. "Old folks, like me, who are too stubborn to leave. So I understand that."

Bo grimaced, but she couldn't stop a man who wanted to help.

Such type of house calls however was what Mai was here for today.

"It's a risk, Doc." Bo still protested quietly.

"Well, when we have Mr. Gearten here as our brute force I'm sure no one will take that risk." He touched upon Gearten's arm as he leaned on his desk, taking heavy breaths from his machine on his belt. He ended up in a command and organization position exactly because of his condition. Gearten only shook his head in some fondness of his position as Bo rolled her eyes. A strange family to have arisen out of the war, but a family nonetheless.

"Doc," Mai asked once, and all eyes were on her. "Can I talk to you in private for a moment." Her green eyes shifted over to Bo and Gearten. Gearten rose his eyebrows, but he had always deferred judgement to the woman that had once been his technical CO (and he her XO). Bo, mild-mannered as she was also looked on in concern.

"You dying, Ghoul?" Gearten rubbed his beard straight from the mask he had to breath through.

She shook her head. "Unfortunately not, but still, some privacy?"

Gearten had looked over to Bo, and he nodded, leaving the room with her as Candy folded his hands into each other patiently on the desk. This was a matter of doctor-patient confidentiality then. With the door closed behind her and several seconds waited after that, Candy tilted is head, his own eyebrow raised and waiting for what she needed to ask.

"I need to ask you a favor Doc. I need to bring you home with me." An odd way of putting it, one that made Candy straighten his face in a self-amused thought before glancing on the photo of his desk of him and his late wife. That look however was gone when she spoke next: "I have… a prisoner."

If that's what she could call Garma that is.

When it came to saving life Candy could only be serious. "What is his condition?" He asked urgently, notepad out.

Mai goes through everything: the image of Garma in her head makes her recoil, but it's back to business. "Third degree burns on forty percent of his body, mostly on his right side from here," she gestured to herself, right waist all the way up to the right side of her scalp. "to there. His right leg has been blown off right below the knee, and he's missing pinky, ring, and most of his middle finger on his right hand. Right eye also has some pretty bad lacerations, enough so I think the stuff inside drained out. It's all white."

Candy, behind his beard, gulped, taking in all this information as he pocketed his hands in his white jacket, leaned back. "Are you sure you haven't recovered a dead man?"

She shook her head. "He's…" She chose her words carefully, and yet even then she felt like she failed herself. "Important to me."

Candy had been given pause. "…I don't follow."

On her way over she rehearsed the exact explanation: less was more. "I knew him from the Academy. Is all. Can't really shoot a man that I knew, I guess. Spent too much time thinking about it."

Candy too knew the story of Ghoul, and what she had done on the battlefield. He understood better than most because he knew how the story started: As Zeon came, and she bedridden, she turned her sorrow into anger and picked up a rifle and went out into the night in nothing but her hospital gown. When she returned, she was down several dozen cartridges and had a smorgasbord of kit and gear that she had taken off the dead. She was ready to wage a war, and then she did.

If she could not bear a life, she could take it, and that had been how she survived.

For Candy, Zeek or not, there was no question when it came to helping people: "Mai, you've done so much for us here. Anything I can do for you, it's for all of our honor." She kept her lips tight as she accepted his grace. "I'll be ready in half an hour. Go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat."

"Okay, I'll meet you out by the entrance." She would say that he would be the first to know where she lived now, but that was a lie. Garma had that privilege.

Bo had been waiting for her down the hall, waiting expectantly. "Complications?" She leveled her hand at her own midsection. Mai shook her head. She hadn't had any complications for months, at least physically. "Oh. Well I'm glad."

Mai's furrowed eyebrows had foretold the second time today she had to pinch someone's cheek: reaching out to Bo and, only more softly than she had with Win, held her right cheek with her thumb and index. "You like me too much."

"Euh sorry sorry!" She squirmed quietly as Mai let go of her cheek. "I can't help it."

In another life maybe Mai could fully appreciate her obvious affections, but that was not this life. Still, what she could do was a moment after she was done cringing to simply kiss her cheek and arise in Bo a blushing fit. It was very easy for someone detached as her to freely return simulacrums of affections, and far be it from her for her own strife to drag other people down (that she didn't want dead). "What's on the menu today?"

Once, long ago, Mai used to love very freely in a very loose definition.

After she's done stammering from the dozenth skin-deep pecks that Mai occasionally gives her as matters of forgiveness for her bad mood or as moments of strength, she settles back into herself. "You would know." Bo teases as they both head down to the cafeteria.

Mai should know, it was her deer that she brought in hours before Garma came into her life.

In the cafeteria it's clean and sane, kept that way so when even when people eat they remember that life used to be something else. Metal trays stacked high and MRE wrappers filling the trash can high as the serving trays behind the L-shaped counter steamed with fresh slabs of meat and grown vegetables.

It was just prior to the dinner rush, and Mai had caught the food fresh.

An older man, a Russian immigrant who had found himself sheltering, and then volunteering with the Conclave, had been the main "Chef" of the Conclave. "Micky." Mai greeted as she and Bo had taken their metal trays to in front of him in the serving line.

"Ghoul." Mikita Trotsky responded in his deeper accent, swept back hair in a net as he had worn the same clothes he had come to the conclave in almost a year ago: jeans and an ill-fitting plaid shirt. "Deer you bring. Eh not best work." Broken lingua franca had been bolstered by his hand movements, flat hand moving back and forth like a boat.

"Blame Zeon for that." Not her fault the deer had already been half-tenderized on the way in.

"Ah." He broke into a line of his own language in some affirmative, and Bo and Mai nodded along as two deer steaks were dropped onto their trays. "Bon appetite." As said the Russian in French.

Mai's rifle was Russian, she remembered as she and Bo sat down. She was not the only one there with a gun, but guns had been as normal an appendage of people as their phones had been pre-war. As people came wandering in for their dinner fixings, it was her sniper rifle that gave away her first as people, after getting their meals, gave their respects and hellos to her as she chewed through her steak.

She saved this Conclave once. A midnight gun battle that exploded into a week that was made and saved by her shots finding the heads of Zeonic commanders behind enemy lines. She saved Seattle, some more would say, with the guerilla war she led, but those days had been past.

"You think people are gonna be like this to you when this is all over?" Bo chewed through some seared fat asking Mai across her, her boonie hat taken off indoors for once as she herself ate her first true hot meal in weeks.

"If the Federation wins, no, hopefully. If Zeon does, well I'm probably getting shot."

It wouldn't be hard to find the "Ghoul of Seattle" if it came down to it. Maybe she was due a name change anyway, a thought she had even before the war. Turn her ethnic name into something more palatable. Mai to May, so on and so forth.

"It's funny. In college I had a roommate, she was a big health freak, and she loved ordering these steaks from around here." Bo's alma mater was back out east. John Hopkin's. A smart woman whose skills were greatly appreciated here in Seattle where she had found her first job out of school. Still, it wasn't in the way she thought. "And I eat these pretty much every week. Strange, isn't it?"

Stranger things have happened to all of them, so all Mai can do is just nod and her be called Ghoul for the next half hour as she chews through her meat. All she can think about is that wounded animal she found, and how easy it was for her to kill it.


He dreams that day, after Mai leaves. He dreams because his body has exerted so much in just talking to her it puts him back to the void.

This time however it's something he can handle, and he's back in a distant memory that wasn't too far away:

Marksmanship for cadets had been less about actual application and more for the ritual, and the principal of it. The Gaurdian Banchi Colony trained officers, not regular infantry, but at the end of the day they were all still soldiers, and all soldiers knew at the very least how to use a rifle, and with Academy standards, everything was held to a high bar.

Target rifles were one thing, but full powered cartridges were another.

The Academy had brought in an instructor on loan from Earth: a soldier who had been with the remaining national governments and rooting out insurgencies in Africa still. He was a white man, but his skin had been browned over down to its core. He spent a lot of time out on the field, and it showed. For all the instructors in the Academy he was the one that many feared most, for it was over direct application of personal skill:

Garma feared none, it was simply a matter of his person, but whether or not he could attain to his standards was another: as a dozen cadets laid prone on their stomach, aiming out with bolt action rifles out to five hundred yards, he was one of them.

His foot hadn't been flat on the ground and for the mistake in his form the sniper had stepped on it hard. He got the correction as he stayed there, white knuckle grip against the wooden stock as he reloaded another five rounds into his rifle.

They'd been there beneath the scorching artificial heat for two hours now: the only requisite for them leaving? All twelve them, hit their targets in a row. No failures, no misses.

Two hours that hadn't happened.

They were left alone with only one actual officer from the Academy, but even then, the instructor did not care as his words left his mouth.

"I hear things on the wind. It's what a sniper does!" He yelled out as the distant sound of dirt being punched instead of a metal plate was followed by one cadet groaning. "Why the fuck you groaning cadet?! This is your fault, ain't it?!"

"Sir, yes sir!"

He continued as the line started again. The first shooter in the line when the order wasn't being alternated had always rung true. Garma on one end, the other shooter on the other. He hadn't been as reliable, and twice now he had failed to finish off the set (not that anyone would disdain him for it), but that other first shooter had been steadfast in their results.

"I hear that you fucking Spacenoids got a bone to pick with us Earthborn. Don't think I don't know. Don't think we all don't know!" His voice was hoarse as he paced back and forth behind each recruit as they still laid prone on hot concrete with barely their shooter's mat for safety from burns below. "I bet you hate me real bad don't you?"

Over Garma's head the solution to all his problems were listed in on a sign: BASIC MARKSMANSHIP FUNDAMENTALS.

Sight alignment. Sight picture. Trigger. Breath control. Positions.

So simple to understand and yet still the cadets were failing.

Another sniper shot rang out, and the momentary delay from fire to metal hit was heard.

"Hit." The cadet's spotter reported.

The instructor went on. "I don't believe that for one second seeing the sorry shit right here. But let's say you do invade the Earth, wouldn't that be something huh? Oh I wouldn't worry. Each miss here is someone you'll be missing on Earth, and god knows, they won't miss you when it happens!"

Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Miss.

The silent defeat in each of their shooting forms was but a knee jerk reaction before the whole thing started again: this time it was Garma's end.

For two hours he was sure he had his sniper's scope ranged out perfectly, but this was a freehand shoot: no bipods, only the reliance on their own body was the rule here. Sucking in his breath, hot and dry, he braced the rifle again against his shoulders as his elbows burned in their use, propping it up. The man-sized silhouette had its shattered spalling strikes dented in it already, and here came another as he depressed the trigger and the metal target was sent recoiling back from a hit. The concussion of a gunshot had long since faded.

"Hit."

He let go of his breath and racked back the bolt, hot round spilling out into the pile besides him.

"Oh it's a shame you've got that royal blood in you, Cadet Zabi." The instructor was right behind him, his shadow casting over him. "It's a shame that if there is a war, you're gonna be held all the way back in that castle of yours pretending to be a military man. It's gonna be so fun thinking about how many people would want to kill you if that war starts."

His foot had raised up again and the instructor had pressed down on it.

The officer from the Academy had said nothing, for he could say nothing against a man who had killed before, and, more likely than not, would kill again. Academia was always different from application.

Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Miss.

"Real good fuck up Cadet Mittel. You got some place to be with how fast you tried to get that shot off? I think its all of your lunch time now, right?" The instructor hadn't finished his thought when the new start had gone off, the cadet on the other end had started.

"Hit."

"Jesus Christ, we get it, Cadet G**!" The instructor seemed infuriated that the shot had hit. "Go fuck off. You're dismissed. My lesson here obviously isn't meant for a muzzie like you."

On the other end was a young woman, another cadet like himself, roused up from her prone position. The line had turned their head to look at her and see her talent off. Her black curvy hair had been slick with sweat when it peaked out over her forehead, a hijab keeping the rest in line, her skin nearly as dark as the instructor's. "R*********** I* n** g****, s**."

It's so hot his body is trying to conserve all his other senses to keep steady and focused, and so her words are distantly lost to him.

He can hear the instructor scoff, loud and clear however.

"Oh ever since all you cadets thought you got a one up on the Fed officers because of that little incident with Cadet Aznable and-" He turned over to Garma, and the power of his voice is beat into the back of his neck. "Cadet Zabi, you think this unity bullshit is gonna fly? You think you're real bad ass for this shtick?"

"Sir! We are comrades in arms! Sir! Teamwork is crucial to our survival!"

"Yeah no shit. Teamwork is doing real good for all of you now, isn't it cadets?!"

A resounding chorus of Sir, yes sir roars out, and still, the lone cadet still kneels, unsure to go or not. He can't stop staring at her as she is frozen in the heat, reluctant.

"God dammit, Cadet G**, I told you to get out of here!"

"S**…." She says, timid almost.

"What is keeping you here dammit?!"

"It's not fair." Garma hears her words as loudly as the instructors. He hears her so loud, those words stayed with him.

The Instructor spat at his feet as he turned his back on her and waited for the rest to keep shooting down range. "War isn't fair. Now get the fuck outta here and don't waste my time."

Her green eyes burned in the heat, but orders were orders. Before she had packed up her rifle and unloaded it, she had instead eyes furrowed up and down the line of her fellow cadets and then finally at the prince himself before she turned to the instructor and made to leave. Her eyes were green, and the heat mirage distorted her body as Garma followed the path of the walking shadow.

Her name was…

Her name was…


"You know you can get them to stop calling you Ghoul." Candy knows the way Mai is harmed each time they call her that. "They've listened to orders from you before."

"Yeah, well, I'm not their boss anymore. War's over for us." She stated with as much weight as the weather above. There had been a brief let-up in the rain that had come as it did in Seattle from its overcast, and so they traveled back to her apartment.

Candy looks more like a hiker than a doctor as he moves through Seattle behind Mai. Even he has a revolver strapped to his thigh, but Mai can't remember ever hearing about him using it outside of warding off wild animals.

"So this is where you live?" He looked up at the standing tower of Elysium Gardens. Mai nodded, taking a scan around her. She wouldn't risk taking Candy into the underground, so the bus-made entrance would do for him as she, satisfied that no one is looking at them, she crawls into the bus's cargo compartment and motions for Candy to follow. She hears his old bones creak as he goes through and pops up inside the bus.

"Don't groan too much, you've got about several dozen floors to climb." She means it in half-jest, but it is a warning.

"Bah. You Spacenoids really are the more fit race." He had been one of the first to know just by the grace of her medical records. It was hard to imagine how someone who was born on Granada had returned to Earth, and it left an impression.

"Stairs still exist in the colonies, Dr. Candy." They were through the bus and out into the lobby, and suddenly gravity itself seemed to lodge itself in her throat. She wasn't quite ready to reveal who she was bringing Candy to, but Garma needed the help.

He huffed once, looking up at the inside balconies with some dismay, his rain jacket feeling oh so much heavier. "You know it was me and Leo's plan to retire to the colonies when we got old?"

Leo, his late wife. Candy didn't talk much about her, but there wasn't much to say when that love still persisted in every step he took and every help he gave.

"It's just like Earth." It would be nice, she knows, to just jump up and propel herself up though. Without this however they started the long journey up to her apartment.

Candy talks between breaths. "So, this Zeek prisoner of yours. Does he know that he's your prisoner?"

"Mm. Well, he doesn't really have a choice?" Down one leg, a few fingers, and an eye, he really didn't.

He had nodded to himself, backpack on him brimming with medical supplies. The one that Mai carries however from him is telling: it's a crutch. "Is he actively hostile? I know we've had our fair share of Zeeks in the Conclave, but the worst were those that fought back on the table."

"No, he's fairly docile." Assuming he hasn't been waiting at the door to blow her brains out. She has an alternative however.

"I see." If she was correct with her dosages he would've been coming down from the pain meds for now.

"By choice or for his own good?"

"One and the same."

When they get to her floor she turns to him, a little out of breath, but it's good. "Wait here for a second." He nods, keeling over as he sips from a water bottle and watches her disappear a floor above.

This path was for days when she had forgotten if she armed the claymore on the way out. It took her a floor above and into the unfurnished apartment above her own and into the bathroom of it: Its flooring hadn't yet been installed, however what that meant was simply the rising a ceiling tile on her bathroom after pulling her pistol out and peering through. Viewing her bathroom and then living room from upside down, gun out, had given her the initial impression that: No, Garma was not waiting for her to ambush. Still a through sweeping was needed as she had popped back out and then sent herself through that hole in the floor with a thump. Barely any clearance, and in that momentary second she found herself stuck in that hole she damned the fact she was built the way she was, but this was the price she paid for being through, gun out as she was on the floor and stood up, clearing out her own apartment.

Nothing had been disrupted as she did her sweep, clearing corners of her domicile. Unsurprisingly Garma had been right where she left him: out cold on her bed.

Up, and down, he breathed, the gentle puff of his chest beneath the sheets revealing that. He seemed peaceful in his sleep this time around.

This had been the safest place in the city for him somehow. Satisfied that no hijinks had been set up for, she had gone to her front door, throwing it open, poking her head out and gesturing for Candy to come in.


Garma came back from his dreams and into his nightmares again: the living world and its reality going on without him. He woke up, and Mai had been pointing that same pistol down on him.

It had was a trend at this point.

He grunted once, acknowledging she was there and he had been awake. She brought company too: an old man.

"This wasn't your actual place before Zeon came, was it?" His voice was light, domestic, normal. He appeared behind her, taking a good once over the place, not catching their routine of her pointing a gun at him as she holstered.

She had spun on her heels to get out of the way of the doorway, leaving nothing between the old man and himself. "A doctor." She said once to him, and it was then and there that Garma had been introduce to Doctor Hale Candy. Before he had even entered the room his bag was slung off his back, and only then did he notice Mai had come in with a crutch on her pack.

"Ah, hello. My name is Doctor Hale Candy. Chief of medicine and attending physician at the former First Hill Hospital. Rest assured that you're going to get the best in-home care in all of Seattle! All the other competitors I ran out of town!" A joke, keeping it light, it was what Candy was best at for all the darkness of the last year, swept up into his bag as he had pulled out his medical supplies and his stethoscope. He hadn't even paused to look at truly who was in the bed. All he knew it was a body, living, in need of help. "Off with the sheets if you-" He gestured to Garma to remove the coverings of another, unpuked on thermal blanket, kneeling besides him on the bed.

Garma, for his credit, couldn't help but not look at the man Mai had brought home, but Mai herself. An eyebrow would be raised at her but it was trapped beneath bandages and bereft of actual brow.

Candy had paused however, taking in, this close, the fact of his patient. First it had been a fluke, the second time, an itch, the third time before he had taken a look back down on his body, he had fully stopped, shoulders drooping, mouth held open asking a question. A preposterous question. Garma looked back at the man who had come to his bedside, stuck within himself as he looked up and down his form as he slowly took off his blanket to reveal his broken form.

Even the burns, even the missing leg, even the injuries and the whited eye could hold no candle for Candy what was in his mind right now, looking at him.

He had a suspicion, clearly written on his face, but he couldn't say outright. It had been too outlandish until silently a pair of dog tags was handed from her own hands to his.

He hadn't even noticed his dog tags were gone.

Garma did notice when, after a half minute of the man reading his tags, then dropping to the carpeted floor as he turned around and Mai, obviously anticipating this, quickly followed, the door closing behind her.


"You should've told me- Do you even understand that that is-" It's out of Candy's mouth as Mai folds her arms over and waits and listens to the protests she has counted on coming. He has his hands up on his head where hair is no longer, trying to rake through in the pure insanity of everything. "When you said you knew him."

"I do. I did." Mai answered quietly.

"Are you a deep cover spy? Has that always been the case, Mai?" He is fearful of her in this second, but she recoils almost immediately, shaking her head.

"No, Doc. All I am is what I've been, and I've shown and told you everything about that. But what I said in the hospital is also true. I knew that man."

"That's not a man in there, Mai." His hand wipes down his face, dragging his cheeks down. "That is a monster."

And she agreed, taking a step forward. "Doc. I want you to keep him alive. If he dies like this, there's no atonement there. I want him dead too, inshallah. But he needs to be live long enough to suffer."

Candy's face turned into stone, back straight as Mai approached him. "I'm no torturer."

"I'm not asking you to torture him."

"But you're going to?"

Fingernails, torn out of fingers. Another hospital in the section that Zeon controlled firmly for the duration of the invasion had become a factory of fingernails. He remembers too much for those that survived the Zeon torture, only to be dumped back out onto the streets. Many found their way to the Conclave, and many remained there still, forever tarnished. When Zeon was forced out finally, all he can remember is seeing the fingernails that littered the ground when the Conclave had gone there to recover any medical supplies it could.

She licked her lip. "No. Not gonna keep him up here to waterboard him, if that's what you're asking."

"Then what are you doing, Mai?" He stressed so hard his throat was raw.

She wishes she knew, but she gives an answer that she thinks would appease Candy for now:

"Waiting for judgement day."

The silence fills in like a spreading fire between Candy and Mai. This was the first tension there had been between them ever since those first weeks after Zeon came. He had argued with her to stay put in the hospital, that she was in no condition to go out and wage a war on behalf of them all. She didn't listen, and, as far as anyone could tell, the Conclave turned out better for it.

Candy reminds her of one thing, perhaps unfairly, but was the truth that underlined everything with who lain across her bed in the next room: "This man killed your baby."

Garma can't hear much through the door as he lays in bed to await a fate of his, but what he can hear is what he was responsible for.

He shoots up, eyes wide, and rain thunders beyond.

Mai's hands instinctively move slowly downward, down to her waist, her midsection. There's cold there, an empty well of a womb that did not bring life: it had been a grave. Her baby never got a name, never had a gender, never had a chance.

All because of the Zabis.

The colony fell and its shockwaves drowned her child.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have-" Candy is quick to try and take back what's already been said, and what's already transpired, but Mai shakes her head.

"Doc. Please. Stabilize him. This is on me." She says, eyes winced together near shut in the memory of pain. "What happens to him, it's on me."

Candy takes a long draw of breath through his nose, looking to the pained face of the Ghoul, and then to the close door and what laid beyond. If he went in there and did it he knows the Federation would hold him to trial for it. For Mai at least, she is not unfamiliar with the concept.

"Okay. Do no harm. Do no harm." He repeated, an ancient oath still adhered to, to himself. "I want you to gather up all the medical supply you have. I'll take a closer look at him, but chances are he's going to need a lot of treatment."

She was good at following orders, and, without further delay she had gone back to her supplies in her crates and started digging and categorizing, leaving Candy to do the unthinkable: confront the man who ordered his armies upon Earth.

He returned, entering into her bedroom, Garma Zabi looking right back at him.

It's perhaps a useless question to ask, but he has to: "Do you know who I am?"

Candy nods once, hands clasping together almost at bed level as he returns to his side. "Very early on when your bombers came, they would drop leaflets with your face on it. That and I did keep in touch with the news before this war."

Garma was never blind to the fact that he was of a certain attraction- at least enough to soothe certain opinions of Zeon. It was one of his more transient qualities that he did, at least in his own small part, to foster. When one of his officers mentioned that propaganda leaflets were sent out with his face and a message from Zeon promising peace on it, he had thought little of it.

He tried to reach out, but couldn't the pain was quickly catching up to him. "I will not forget those who help me. I assure you, Doctor Hale Candy."

Candy is hardly convinced. "Frankly, Mister Zabi," It's perhaps the first time anyone has called him that in his life and it gives him pause. "You terrify me so. But seeing you like this, you can promise me nothing."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not in the position to promise me anything. Not like this at least."

And like "this" are details he alone can see with his medical training; threats unsaid but festering in his very body.

"Now, Mister Zabi, together, we'll get through this as fast as possible, for both of our wellbeing."

Before he can start however, latex gloves going on from his pack, Garma stops him with a single question about the woman rummaging about in the room over: "She's a mother?"

It froze Candy, but not too long, glancing back at Mai and seeing her consumed in her organizing work. "Was. Thanks to you and Zeon." He sighs. "I'm sure she's not the only one."

Pain. If it was a matter of comparing pain, then he knew even the pain of Spacenoid mothers for years against the Earth Federation's embargos had been as damaging, if not crueler. Tragedy, but not unique. That's what he told himself as the good doctor's hands roamed his body, fingers tracing a path all too articulate in the Human body, cold metal of the stethoscope going over his skin, the cold of it cutting in and out as they came over burns.

"Breath. In, out." Candy presses the cold disk over his chest, and the cold is pleasurable to him. He breaths, in and out, chest rising, falling. It hurts to breath, but at least he's breathing. The disk goes to his back, but where it lands he cannot feel. Burns no doubt. Candy's gaze starts from the top down, starting from his head, the man peering into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope after the dressing was unwrapped. The good doctor keeps his face blank, and for that Garma is thankful.

Before he brings his observation down his arm, to his legs, Candy draws out a tin of strong smelling ointment. He knows the type, Kycilia often used a similar smelling ointment to ease the callouses on her hands. Candy dabs it below his nose several times before moving closer to his arms and seeing the molted flesh run red and yellow and raw. His gloves run over his arm but Garma feels nothing, his nerves are long gone.

He is ginger with his right hand, looking close to where his fingers have either been shredded out torn off, maybe even vaporized. "Cauterized." He notes. "From what I can gather, you were blown up?"

Garma has so many other ways to describe what happened to him, but he nods weakly instead. The exhaustion that constantly is beating at his door present now as a doctor is looking at him.

"Partly lucky then. Whatever took your leg and fingers it seems like also closed it off on the way out."

"I don't know if lucky is the word I'd use." That gets a laugh out of Candy quietly as he continues to look Garma up and down before focusing on his leg. He stays far more silent than Garma would like as he carefully puts his fingers upon the exposed flesh and tendon, blackened by burns. The curve of his mouth finally goes down.

"Mai?" He calls out for her.

"Yes doctor?" It's the first time Garma hears Mai speak normally to someone. Her voice is nicer like this.

"Just want you to hear this." She nods at him as she takes a seat at the foot of his bed. His notepad is out from his bag as he writes down what he says, just to verify that it is what he thinks: "Alright. In order of severity here's what I'm focused on: The leg comes up first. We need to, in simple English, sanitize, tie off any problem areas, and fold over the site so we don't have that bone just sticking out. It might require a little more removal but… I don't think we have a choice here, Mister Zabi."

Candy gestures to Garma's leg all the while, dead serious in his voice. "What's done has been done…" Garma cannot fight, relegation is in his voice.

Garma's leg is not the first leg Candy's seen lost in this war. It's not the second, or the tenth, or the dozenth. "Right. With your eye, as you've described- Mai do you have a mirror?" She nodded as Candy asked, running into the next room to get the mirror that she had often used to look at enemy positions out of cover: it had been a repurposed car door mirror. "Right, see here." He used it to let Garma see closely.

Looking into his own eye, the milky whiteness of it, the fact that even now it contributed nothing to his vision, the pain slowly started coming up, breaking through. He wanted to cry, but if he did he knew his tears would run red.

"I'm not optometrist, but as far as I can observe there's no shrapnel in your eye. I can only guess if there was any it simply sliced across the surface of your eye and caused what was inside of it to drop out, hence its current coloration, and of course the burn damage frying your optical nerves. There's nothing I can do for it. I'm simply not equipped." Garma's already seen enough of what has become of him by the time Candy lets the mirror down, and the way he can't even feel half his face is an emptiness filled with cold. "The burns are… Well, they're fresh, and Mai here has done her best to deal with them as best she can, however we can minimize any chance of infection and start on a path of recovery. I can tell you burn wounds are something we're very familiar with, Mister Zabi."

Implication: Candy doesn't give it enough darkness there. All the injuries, all the injustices and killing that had come to that city, it had been because of him. He grabs Garma's eyes, and Garma stares back and sees a man who might seem perfectly happy continuing to heal and to help, but the meaning of the look changes, changes, shifts and shifts until Garma sees tiredness incarnate.

What did he do to deserve this?

Mai, unbeknownst, snaps the two of them out of it. "What do you need to do, Doc?"

Candy is quick to respond, gesturing to his leg again. "For his leg, I need to operate."

"Can you do it here?" Mai is a little more urgent as she asks.

"Might have to." An obvious imposition: there was no way Garma was being brought to the Conclave, and Mai understood that. Her restraint was not the restraint of fathers who have lost entire families, or sons who had lost parents, or mothers, like her, who had seen their children starve for months before they had gone to sleep, and then never woke up again. Her restraint was born of the same patience that made her a good sniper, a privilege not given to anyone.

For Garma's sake, his agency was taken from him. He felt useless, there, being attended to, but it wasn't up to him anyway.

"Before we get started," Candy started, hands at the edges of the bed, curling at the sheets, staring straight back into Garma's face and seeing the last year imprinted on it. "I want it to be clear, I don't think you deserve this."

In the months since Garma landed it had only now personally occurred to him that the world wanted him dead on a measure he could never fully grasp, but would be made to understand. "I… I don't know how to respond to that."

All Candy could do was gesture with his head back to Mai. "You should thank her."

"Doc…" Mai had almost been totally offended, stepping back, but it's more out of embarrassment. She hadn't wanted to be put in the position to be thanked by someone she would bury. Garma wants to catch her face whole in his vision, but she doesn't allow it as she shuffles uncomfortably, Candy going on explaining further his plan, looking at Garma and his wounds.

"I don't have the proper anesthesia here, nor would I be able to bring it. I'm sure the battlefield medicine that Mai has here might suffice, but… This will be painful. I take no joy in it, despite it being you."

"There's no alternative?" He has to ask.

Candy folds his hands in his lap almost, reconciling what he has to say with the insanity of the world. "From what Mai tells me, she will kill you. Not today. But she will. You can either spend the time between now and then in continually escalating pain when the meds wear off, or you can have some semblance of dignity and be relatively more comfortable prior."

There was no real choice at all.

"Garma." Mai can't bring herself to look at him as she says his name out loud. "The more meds you take from my stash, the more I'm inclined to-"

"Okay. Okay." He has decided, or at least accepted. "Do what you must. I'm already dead it seems." And he sounded like he looked to Candy for the first time.


The next few hours it's a mess of needles and drugs, a scalpel, transferring him over to the tub and suddenly more blood than Mai though Garma had left in him being poured out as his dressing was removed from him.

The nub on his leg is folded over with flesh. Candy wasn't a surgeon, but in the course of the last year he had gotten a lot of practice filling in when the head surgeon hadn't been able to cover. The head surgeon had a fatal heart attack nearly four months ago as well, so when it came to cutting bodies open for the sake of health, he had been on the line. For his luck however, his injuries had done half the work for him. The rest was cleaning up the wound, and tying off open vessels, and stitches, folding the skin that could be left like a flap over the front of his nub, raw flesh touching raw flesh but at least the skin made whole again. Mai is hands on to help, washing away blood as it comes back out.

As his back is against the porcelain tub, quickly going red with himself, he reaches for a grip, a Human connection, anyone, someone to keep him there as a pain so great it cuts through the medicine and digs into his brain like a diamond bullet. He reaches with his left hand, and Mai sees it, on the rim of the tub.

If its her he wants, she does not give. Instead, a wet towel is offered to Garma's face. "Bite." Mai tells him. He doesn't know why until he hears the handsaw rev.

With the whole bathroom lit by candle and flashlight, it's a medieval scene.

There's a lot of screaming. A lot of blood. Grunting pain that is all washed down the drain as the white bathroom becomes increasingly bloody with rags and instruments. Candy is silent all the while, for Garma's pain is what fills the room instead, hacking away at dead flesh that could only do harm and giving him enough room so that he could close the wound in a more medically sound way.

For another time, Mai is thankful this building is empty save for them.

"God!" The towel falls out of his mouth as Candy goes to the splintered bone, "God!" he screams again to a higher power. God won't help him here, Mai reckons, stuffing the towel back into his mouth as Candy goes all in and saws through bone.

What he would ask God for, what he would beg for, Mai can only guess, but he screams into the towel until, but a quite well after, a hunk of solid material hits the bottom of the tub, and the recoil sends Garma's leg up, just high enough, to see his missing leg anew.

It's the last thing he sees before he passes out.

It saves him however.

They save him.


For Candy and Mai, it's not the first time they've played this role of surgeon and assistant, and this wasn't even the worst case. For Garma it's a matter of reopening wounds and cleaning them tight. The unideal and grisly part of it was their lack of proper supplies and setup, but, in theory, it would be no more a life threatening procedure than the series of events that had made Garma like this.

Candy grunts as Mai holds a pair of scissor grips, holding his flesh over the nub tight. He's in the tub himself now, laying backwards in between Garma's legs, the awkward position the only way he can properly stitch his flesh together.

The blood of Garma Zabi is on his form as his maleness is pressing into his back, but it was what was needed, and thankfully the standing shower is still available to him after the hour operation is done. At the end, Candy is bloodied down to his clothing, Mai drips with sweat, and Garma is limp, but breathing, alive, and much cleaner for it. All Mai has to do is turn on the bath to wash him down before once again going through the routine of redressing his burns and freshly amputated leg, depositing him back on the bed. For Candy in the meanwhile, a shower is needed, and he does take it, emerging only to see Mai with some of her own jerky and tea out, her singular stool in the living room offered to him on the clearest table.

"I'll take your clothes. I'm due a laundry day soon anyway. Just take some of the spare Fed uniforms I've got for now." She's quick to motion to it, folded out already.

"Right. Sure." It was a sick joke that Garma had been dressed in Federation fatigues as well, but the uniform held no power here, only utility. A harrowing experience, one that took the daylights out of him, he walks as he does in most post-op hours, tired down to his bones, but knowing that maybe tomorrow it'll be the same. It hadn't been as intense as it had been during the bulk of the fighting, but there was never truly a free day for Candy. Fatigue wasn't what was on his mind however as he sat down, a clear view of Garma in her bedroom before him. "Nothing about him surviving- about him even being lucid and stable, makes sense to me! It's a miracle he's not in a coma right now." He takes one last look at the exhausted regent of space, laying limply in his bed. "The fact he is only missing what he is unprecedented. He has no right to be alive, and here we are keeping him alive."

His chest rises and falls at a constant rhythm, and Mai tracks it, up and down. "For now. For now… Anything else I need to know?"

He's taken out his notepad, scribbling his doctor's scratch onto it, transcribing directions repeated vocally as he shoved jerky down his throat and washed it down with tea:

"Get him as much water as he can. He's lost a lot of fluid for obvious reasons. Change out the bandages every three to five days. Keep him clean. Next time you swing by the Conclave I'll give you some IV bags, that'll help him out. You know how to set him up?" Mai nods once. She's seen enough, and put enough needles into people. If nothing else she has about four different Federation and Zeon first aid manuals lying about and, technically, Garma to help her out there. "Good. I'll also set you up with a hydrogel application with the IVs."

"Right. I'll just say that you're trading stuff with the Dock Market. I'll bring home some deer."

Candy nodded. It wouldn't be a good idea for that much stuff to disappear from the Conclave's stock. "Keep an eye on those stitches, you see anything that remotely looks like infection you come running immediately or else I'm gonna have to keep hacking away at his leg, and if that's the case I will have to bring him to the Conclave."

"Noted…. And how long until he's as good as he's gonna be, all things considered?"

Candy takes a few moments to look between his notes and Garma again in bed, deciding a realistic answer. "No complications? To get it so if he's going to die it won't be from his wounds? Well, four weeks? He's young… Young as you, right?"

"Same grade, Doc, even."

Candy nods, satisfied with that. "Well, I've seen you bounce back, I'm sure he will, especially with whatever power above seems to want him alive."

"Hmh. Won't keep me from killing him."

"If… that's what you want Mai. But, just, remember, you can take his life, but it won't give you anything back. Even if he deserves it."

They stay there a long time like that in silence. Perfect lessons for a perfect world. Death was useless. Killing was a sin. Despite it all, it still went on and on and on, and Mai practiced it wholly. Right and wrong was still understood, but the concepts never seemed so far away now.

"Someone's gotta do it." She looked out to Seattle after a time of hearing Candy's words, to this place on Earth that had become her battleground, her kingdom, and, maybe, her resting place. Some day, some time. Not now. She had taken out her hand and held it out for Candy, which he had taken warmly. "Thank you, Doctor Candy. I mean it. This means a lot to me."

"I'm sure it does, Mai." He takes one more long look at the recovering man and then no longer today. He was not a man accustomed with hate in his heart. "I'll swing by every two weeks from here, at least until all of us leave for the Mid West."

Soon there was going to be a day where the Conclave and its inhabitants moved on from the war, or, at least, Seattle. She wouldn't go with them. If she could mourn anymore, she would mourn their departure, but she's spent too long sad and her body can't feel too bad for them. They're still alive, after all.

Her face, as usual, betrays her however, and Candy puts a hand on her shoulder, shaking it softly once.

"How're you holding up?"

"I'm fine." The most common lie in all history and she still uses it. Candy glowers, his thin line of a mouth curving downward.

"We're getting details you know, about what it's like out there in the Breadbasket. As soon as everyone is ready and treated, we'll be going. You should come with us."

"Mm. I don't quite know yet." She does know her answer, but she cannot say it.

"Would be better than staying here." An obvious answer.

"Mm. I say having a downtown apartment in Seattle is good for someone my age, don't you think?" A glimpse, trying to remember what type of person she was before the war. She was pretty sure she had a certain amount of wit to her, maybe even smarminess, much to her ire, but that had been her true self, long ago. Not now.

If there is a conversation about Mai and about leaving her tragedies behind, it's not today. Today has been too complicated already.

As the sun goes down there's nothing more to be said between the former patient and her doctor. "I'll walk you back to the Conclave actually. Maybe I can grab the supplies now."

"And leave the Mr. Zabi here?" Candy is almost surprised, as if he hadn't just cut off a few more pounds of flesh from Garma.

"He didn't shoot me on the way back in so I doubt he'd do it now. Not like he's going anywhere."

"Fair enough." Candy spends a few more minutes finishing up his meal and recuperating, but when Seattle gets dark, the Conclave gets worried about where he would be, and he can hear the radio of the Conclave and its Pavilion patrol stations start asking where he is. He is much loved. Perhaps too much, but it's for a good reason.

As they walk out, packs a little lighter than before, Mai stops him one last time:

"Keep this secret Doc?" One of the holiest bonds: between a patient and doctor. He doesn't think twice with a nod. "Thank you."

He saved a life today, Candy rationalizes as he straightens out his beard. The showers at the Conclave are communal and so there isn't often time for him to attend to grooming himself like he did today. "I think it's a good idea to keep him away from the Conclave, from us. Just in case someone comes looking."

She would normally agree with his assessment, but holding her rifle as she is prepared for a quick walk over to the Conclave, she's not entirely sure she needs it for the danger Candy thinks about. "I doubt it. They didn't even come for his body… And if they wanted revenge whoever did it is long gone."


She's back in an hour, but Garma takes two days to wake up.

The night table for her is sturdy, and for her those two days, it's a seating, watching, waiting, this man sleep his way through immediate recovery. When he comes to she sees him over him again.

A trend.

Before he can even fully feel his body however she has taken up into his arms again, and, knowing his body better than he does currently, deposits him right on the toilet.

As familiar as she is with his body at this point, she leaves him to relieve himself in private and he is glad that she had thought of it, even if too that hurts.

Sitting there naked however leaves him alone with himself, and the tub where pain had come for him. It makes him almost pass out again, but his body fights to finish his business first. He tries his best to ignore his right leg, but the imbalance of his entire self even sitting is too much to handle.

This is what he is now, and what movement he can will out of what remains of it, it's all in service to nothing.

He knows he still has a little bit of his dignity left when he is able to use the bidet and toilet paper on his own.

She doesn't talk to him almost two hours as she assists him back into bed, a plastic tray delivered to his bedside. He recognizes the smell almost immediately. Zeon Military MRE Menu 20. Sausage goulash.

There were certain privileges afforded to him due to his station, and then his residence in New York, but he had never been so far removed to not recognize the smell of MREs. It'd been years since he's had them, the last time had been in the Academy.

It's softer food, freshly hot, but it's what he needs as she sits next to him on the edge of the bed and holds the spork that came with the MRE kit herself.

It's going to be like that then.

She feeds him, a spoonful at a time, but not entirely dependent. His free hand, his left, not covered up by bandages, takes the tin can that has the sweetened juice in it to wash it down, and then the hashbrown patties that came with it on the tray. He eats in silence, and his body, he can almost feel it take in all the sustenance.

She doesn't go as so far as to wipe his mouth, but he, even now, is capable of doing that himself.

"Afraid of what would I do with a spork?" he says, swallowing a spicy meat-sauce filled bite. She shakes her head, neutral about it.

Still raining outside the window. He doesn't know how long it's been, and the weather and constant view doesn't help.

"No, but I know you're a righty, and I don't want you spilling shit on my bed. You leak enough."

His memory isn't quite as clear as it usually is, but he tells himself that his bandages feel less disgusting where he can still feel skin beneath.

He doesn't quite feel as bad, but the pain and weight of everything still presses down upon him. It's a fighting process, and it wouldn't be easy, but it's a start. Where he's going to end up is another question, but knowing that there is finality now, it eases him. Maybe if he hadn't already gone through an experience that should've killed him he might've responded different, but now it's not so scary.

He's not afraid to step on landmines, so to speak.

"I overhear-" When the words leave his mouth her neutral look goes sour immediately and the tray is put asides.

"Don't." Is all she wants to say to that. He must've heard she realized.

"No. I must." Garma chose his words, licking his dry lips. "I won't assuage you. I know the innocent die in war. I know that I have waged a war and that, despite my best efforts, the innocent have been put at hazard. I… If there's anything I can do, now, and, perhaps, when things are set back into order…" She shot him a glare for him to stop anything more. Nothing on Earth would assuage her of her loss, however, it happened. She was his age, and although he has lost men and women before, the thought of losing his own child was a force far greater than Gravity.

"It's something no one can make up to me. Only atonement. Besides…" She says instead, her hand drifting unconsciously to her midsection, and with that touch upon herself she cannot help but falter. "Just the misfortune of birth. Is all."

And Garma stared at her as if he had finally realized she had been a guerilla soldier against him. Garma stared at her with an abject horror, and she noticed, his one uncovered eye wide at her.

"What?" She asked him, and still he stared at her until his eyes were drawn down, an answer on his lips.

"You just sound like someone I know."

A compliment or not, she didn't know. "Charmed."

His internal clock had been non-existent now, and he shivered at that thought that time itself was lost to him. "How long have I been out? Where's the good doctor?" He backed up more, propping himself straight with the headboard.

"Two days now." Mai answered, cooling down. "Doctor Candy is back at the hospital, and he left me with enough supplies and procedures to get you healthy again."

"How terrible to you." He droned.

The sound out of her mouth had been her teeth gnashing in disbelief. "You've got a mouth on you, you know that?" It would've been threatening but her voice cracked, and, if there was any consideration of time it was that of something reiterated: they were both just twenty.

They stared at each other, a long time after that snap, unsure of what to do, of where to go. Garma had his fair share of awkward silences however between Federation diplomats and the society of New York and Zeon, so he broke it first.

"Can- can we actually have a dialog?" He gestured with a hand.

"What could we possibly have to talk about." Mai looked away.

So much.

The novelty of it alone is such a wide ocean to Garma it keeps him there, present.

"I'd like to know who you are, at the very least. Your path in life must be… fascinating." It should very much be with the prime coincidence that, seemingly, they've crossed paths before. Again he reminds her, "You're a Spacenoid?" It's a question this time, because he wants her to answer it.

She wants to rest her head on something and let her body switch off, then and there, but no such privilege is had by her as she mulls the question around until she decides, yes, it would make her killing him mean so much more if he knew. It's an open secret in Seattle that she is, but not the meat of it, not the full details and the complexities that made her different from all the rest of those who fought against Zeon.

"I am." She finally admits out loud to him. "Was born on Granada. Second generation." Her family had been born on Earth, and she had been born in Space. A momentous step in the family line, by all accounts.

"I grew up following my parents all across the sides; they were travelling weather techs for the Colony Corporation, but we spent most of our time in Zum." Side 3's colony named after Zeon himself, the heart of the Principality. "We had an apartment not too far away from the National Diet."

Garma perks up, and closer still, he feels she is more Spacenoid than most he has ever known. "Oh my. We were practically neighbors then."

"Don't do that." She snaps at him coldly.

"Do what?"

"Try to be friendly. We're not friends."

He pauses before responding, letting the air settle. "I'm just being courteous to the woman who, by all accounts, has kept me alive."

"Yeah well, don't count on it." The message has been clearly received by now, and, distantly, Garma thinks maybe she's more telling herself.

It's the first time in years she's spoken about her upbringings and her past beyond her teenage years. Weightlessness was her birthright, and she hasn't flown in a long time. She remembers the many colonies on every Side that existed, from closed to open, rich to poor. All of them had a weather system of some kind and her parents were often in charge of managing and adjusting to popular whim. So far away from Earth and people wanted the randomness of Earth weather and its seasons. Her parents were uniquely situated with areas as concerned with the skies and the clouds above, down to dew points and temperatures. She inherited more than her fair share with that itch in her that could tell the weather just by the way the moisture in the air laid across her skin or the way what remaining vegetation angled itself in anticipation for rainfall no one else could see.

She remembers her favorite colony in Side 6, an alpine based affair whose vegetation gave an awfully rich smell in the air that reinvigorated even her as a young girl. She remembers Texas and its dreadful heat. She remembers the great agricultural colonies where livestock roamed in all of its absurdity in space. She remembers her home colony, and the distant sound of jazz in the quarter her family lived.

Yes, she is a Spacenoid, and because of that she'll forever miss the freedom from Gravity, but what she was meant nothing with who she had become.

"Well. While I'm waiting for you to kill me, I'd like to at least ask about our shared past… Or, at least, how you were in the Academy. I'm sure it'd help me remember if I do truly remember you."

She scoffs at that fact. She was just another face in the crowd until it mattered. "Well you gave me a fireteam personally that night. Set us out on ATVs ahead of the rest of the main force to take forward positions."

Garma tries his best, furrowing his eyes, looking into himself. "I… I sent many of those teams out that night, both for spotting for our mortars and for overwatch." She's not offended he doesn't remember. "Those teams were for spotting, defensive purposes to make sure that if there was a counter-attack we wouldn't be flanked."

Mai doesn't know why she's as good with the sniper rifle as she is. A fluke of details about herself perhaps she doesn't care too much to break down, but she is. "Not all of them." She remarks, looking down on her index finger and thumb, calloused to hell and back, a patch in particular along the lower side of her index, scratched up from how she used the contact to rack back the bolt of her rifle.

The plan of the Dawn Rebellion as it was called was a visceral plan, relying on shock and awe as opposed to more intricate battle plans. More than that it was a plan devised in an exceedingly short time. His confidence that night was half-given, and half-fool hardy, but it was confidence all the same that spread all the way down to those who volunteered with him.

She was one of them, among those faces in the APC hanger waiting on his word: Attack.

In a manner of speaking, this war that waged across the Earth was her own as well.

He remembered the speech he gave, proud, sure of its necessity. He still believed, and so did she.

"Do you regret it?"

"Hm?" She looked up from her fingers.

"Joining me that night?"

She did. She really did. But it wasn't yes or nor for her, not as she leaned back and closed her eyes and remember that feeling of victory assured. She was scared as hell, yes, but she knew her reasons because it was the reasons he laid out to all of them:

"Why did we want to become soldiers?" Garma asked them all in formation before they were off. He answered with a shared belief. "It was to protect the lives, the rights and property of Spacenoids!"

So many years alter and she has her own answer now.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, not mad, at least not at first, but honest and true. "All of us believed that we were fighting for something bigger. Something that mattered: That we could show the god damned Federation that we wouldn't let them use those of us who were born in space like we were second-class citizens!" Her voice is raising, and suddenly, she's back in the Academy, in those days when the Federation officers looked down upon all of them because they were simply Spacenoids. She's there in unity and comradery with a cause that she knows became the war they fought now. "I believed in the words of Zeon Zum Deikun," she begs him to understand. "And his followers have ruined it."

Across the world and across all of the solar system wherever Humanity had gone, the war for his words had followed and corrupted. If the Principality had really fought for all Spacenoids, she would spend the rest of her short life trying to hunt all of them down.

And woe, he looked at her, and saw a woman that Zeon had failed.

The dam is broken open, and more and more words, explanations about herself come through. It's not something she does often, not to Win, or to Candy, or to those she knows from the battlefield or in the Conclave, but it's something Garma, she tells herself, deserves to hear. She isn't just some woman. She is a direct result of everything that they have done.

"I was up there in the class rankings. I was an alright company leader with squad tactics." Hence why when Zeon came, and she told the collective group of the first guerilla fighters who she was, for her sins of being a Spacenoid, she became a leader to prove her innocence. "My main thing was individual skills, especially with marksmanship."

Garma thinks to his memory, looking at the class rankings when they're posted. He thinks to himself that he did see a name that he thinks is hers trade blows for the upper positions many times. She tries to remember if she had traded blows with Char Aznable for marksmanship.

She did. "I was never any good with follow up shots, but my alphas? Spot on."

He and Char had been always top three at least in the class standing overall, but he was always interested in those within spitting distance. There was always someone else better than him in land navigation, or ballistics calculations, or even just historical theory, but all in all a top student of his own volition. That was something being a Zabi couldn't gift him, much in the same way he could never shoot as good as Mai.

She just had that eye for perfection up front, everything after that and it got shaky, she'd admit to herself. At least here during the war it gave her the practice that she never could properly get at a sterile academy save for that one day, at the very end.

"I presume it's part of the reason you've lived this long?"

"Something like that."

"And if you were… Oh." He remembers now about a fireteam with separate orders from the rest, and she knows he realizes it:

It's not easy for her to admit her history as warfighter, going back all the way, but she does, creaky in tone, and hazy in memory. "I was our class's best shot, and that I had come with you that night with the rest of us rebels. You sent me with a fireteam to cover the vehicle hangers, and made sure that no Federation pilot or driver got to their vehicles."

There were multiple Federation mechanical and armored platoons on Banchi, and only a handful ever were deployed. He wasn't privy to the post action reports, but word down from the wire had been that dozens and dozens of vehicle crews rushing to respond just were shot dead in the open run from their barracks to the vehicle staging area.

They called it a killing field.

Everyone else, Garma had ordered to attack. A sterile order. But for her it was a different order in nature. One imbued with necessity and violence.


"I need you to set up on this ridge: D4, keypad 6. It's a straight shot to where they're holding the majority of their vehicles. You're going to have ten minutes to set up and infiltrate to pre-place explosives, and then get out to make sure no Federation vehicle crews make it to their armor." Cadet Garma Zabi spoke to her specifically, each section leader that night crowded around a single left-behind plastic table and a weather map turned strategic layer of the incoming battlefield. "I need you to understand: Kill them all, or else they will kill us."

He looked to her, her hijab covered itself by a mesh net that cascaded over her shoulders, meant to break up her form, her team of other cadets also dressed to infiltrate. Her eyes were green and on fire, her wooden ceremonial rifle turned makeshift procured sniper rifle firm in her hands.

"Inshallah." The cadet answered him, and that was the last time they spoke until years later, in Seattle.


"They wanted me." Mai nodded to herself knowingly. "The Federation wanted me bad for what I did. They didn't know who I was, but they wanted me. So I disappeared. Your brother, Dozle, would know something about it."

It only occurred now to Garma that, perhaps she, out of every other cadet that rebelled with him that night had dealt the most death directly. The effectiveness of the infantry that night was admirable, but not exactly meant to deal death itself. Death was never the goal. The mortars even, they were aimed at infrastructure targets and defenses as opposed to manpower outright.

She, however, on his orders, targeted people expressly.

If there was anyone that the Federation could punish, it'd be her.

The mention of Dozle cleared his mind, but perturbed him, but she didn't dwell on that point.

"My father has always played a little fast and loose with his money. My sponsorship to the Academy came with that type of spending, but it was what I wanted: I got the idea in my head after travelling to all the sides that maybe it was all worth fighting for… Hell, most of my father's most corrupt partners were Feds." She meandered a bit, but returned, looking back at his face, her head tilted as she leaned back. "My father pulled me out of the Academy after, used some of his money to get back to the Earthsphere. He made me disappear here."

Garma hurts for her, feels for her. The pride and justice he felt in the days after the Dawn Rebellion and forcing the Federation to recognize Zeon's youth as the future, it was a burning torch that kept his heart fired up even today, and yet she had missed it. No, she was denied that.

He spoke up. "But why did you need to leave at all? Zeon would've harbored you. I would've done so myself." She doesn't know if it's funny or disgusting: the thought that she could've been under the harbor of Garma himself in these intervening years. She chooses to feel that ugly pit in her stomach rise into an aborted laugh. "We had a shared glory, Mai."

She grinds out the next words through her throat and teeth, and she means it in a way that comes from the bile in her stomach. "The only thing we share is the Gravity we feel right here, right now." Every time she bites at him like this, his body begins to hurt, his mind begins to swell and dull and bump against his skull. She hurts him, but not in a way she can see. "I don't know what I'm going to do with you between now and when I put you in the grave, but know this: It's not that I don't understand you, or don't know where you're coming from. I'm doing this because you've taken from me, in spite of it all."

Time and History had taken from her, and he was the reason why. That's why she was going to kill him.

It went both ways however to a certain degree.

"Irritable as you might think, if… If I was in your place, I don't know what I'd do myself." He surprises her, saying this, she blinking at him as if it would've clarified what he said into a different meaning.

"Are you saying that just to save your own ass, Zabi?" She says, actually perplexed.

"I'm already at your mercy, am I not? What does it matter? I wish to live, but can I fight you for it?" A strange rapport. A natural one, yes, but strange. They talked like old enemies.

Enough of that. She got up, went into the next room, and returned with a list, written on paper. Real paper, not the synthetic pulp as the Sides knew. "Can you read that?" It was her handwriting. He nodded. "I copied Doctor Candy's list. This'll be what I- we need to do to get you living comfortably for as long as I keep you around."

"I see."

A long list of cleaning, of medication to take and dosages, application and schedules. It's a lot, but it's necessary. Her handwriting however, it's so rigid and structured, and somehow it fills in the last piece of a puzzle:

"I know your name. I remember it now." He drops the list, it floating down to his lap as once again he locks eyes with her urgently.

"Do you?" She's almost afraid to know if he does, but she's not afraid of him if he does.

He answers: "Mai Gul." The irony of her title, of the name given to her by all those that came to Seattle for war, it is no different than her name. It is who she is. "Your name is Mai Gul."

She has always been a Gul.

Gul. Not like the bird.

Gul. Not like gulf.

Gul. Like ghoul.

He wants to thank her, for everything, with her name. "Than-" She's left, shutting the door behind her before he can finish, and what lies between them is more than walls and wood.


Correspondence from Zenna Zabi née Mia to her step-brother, Circa 0077 UC, Post-Dawn Rebellion

(In regards to Cadet Mai Gul)

"…She was gone before the victory parade. I knew her because she was in my dorm building, but we weren't really close, not that she was off-putting or anything, but she was just in a different circle of people. We shared a table when it was our block for eating, but she always spent more time with (…) Back to Mai, I don't know why I want to keep mentioning her, but she just disappeared. All of us thought she died during the attack, but her fireteam said she was fine, they had barely received return fire and they all got out by the time the sun came up. I wonder if she did anything wrong during the attack, I really do. Maybe she shot someone she shouldn't have? I know I could talk to Dozle about her but it doesn't seem right.

We made a big deal about remembering all the cadets that died, but I never saw her face, or heard her name mentioned.

All I can do is wonder, especially as now Char is gone, and he was Garma's roommate!

I wonder if they're off doing more important things, and I wonder if I'll ever think of her again after this.

If I disappear as well, remember this. I don't think anything will happen but just in case.

If she fought with us, that means something, doesn't it? For all of us Spacenoids? Don't we owe her something?"


End of Intro Section