1-2

Know Your Enemy - Know Yourself


There's a hole in Mai's hand that goes beyond physical with Murph's stab wounds. It's a sinkhole of a feeling, like gravity dragging through the wound down to the Earth that makes her left hand feel sore and heavy. Her eyes can't help but look at that clean line beset by black thread that keep it together. Tammy's bandana which had stemmed the bleeding had been sharing a pouch on her kit with Garma's tassel, and would, after a through cleaning, would be given back to her at some point.

For now however, she sat at her stool for breakfast, and stared at it.

Garma too did so. "Annoying. Isn't it?" He posed, spooning some oatmeal from the Federation MRE into his mouth.

"You? Yeah."

"Your hand. I meant your hand." There's just a little grit behind his teeth, and she find she likes the auditory experience of picking at his nerves.

"Did you? Hmph."

There's little he can do to address, very knowingly too on her part, that she was being a little obtuse. They catch each other's eyes, and she can't help but twist her mouth into something of a knot, blocking a self-amused smirk as he simply keeps his spork inside of his mouth and glares at her.

He's wearing what she had picked up for him, and here Garma Zabi is, down a leg, a few fingers, an eye, and wearing joggers with all too unaware hipster beer company's hoodie that's just a touch too big for him.

She's not any better, white-tee shirt and a bomber jacket on herself, sweatpants on otherwise. She's of the class to wear it however. The look on Garma's face was all that she had to see to know that it demeaned him to be brought as low as to wear merchandise.

To the outside observer, ignoring the fact that the living room they ate in had been filled with military crates, benches, and several weapons, they both in that instant looked like they had been in college. Both of them being twenty, sophomores more specifically.

His reaction to his new clothing had been perhaps telling to a particular expectation about his life, but he wouldn't complain given they were warmer, and far more comfortable than the Federation fatigues that he had otherwise existed in since his internment (if that was the right word) here with Mai. Odder still however, was the fact she had dressed in just the casual same. By the time he had been out of the bathroom in the morning usually, she had been dressed in her "work" clothes, ready to go out in Seattle and not return until near nightfall. Not today however as he hobbles over to his side of the table and stool and sits himself.

"I suppose today is a red letter day?" He posed before they even started breakfast, but she shook her head, giving him an answer at least for what he could expect. "You're usually all kitted up by this time."

The fact that he is aware of her schedule, her habits now at any degree, it reeks of him getting too comfortable. It bugs her in the same way a mosquito bite (something she'd never had to encounter before she came to Earth) does- in that she cannot scratch it or else risk worse. What would happen if she chained him to the bed? What would happen if she made him bleed, just a little? What would happen if she returned the favor of the many interned and interrogated in Seattle by the Zeon administrators and tore out his fingernails?

She knows she would like it.

She knows that, maybe, just maybe, if she indulged her cruelty, she would spend hours and hours, days and days, of doing nothing but, in a word, torture.

Her fingertips fizz.

She doesn't torture him, even as those who have come to this planet in his name have done so with glee and vindication.

She won't rape him as some of Zeon's troops had done to any woman who had been within their grasp here on Earth.

She'll kill him, she'll hurt him, but there's a line there that she sees that, if she crosses, she's afraid to see what will happen on the other end. She needed to be a person able to judge the damned, not worthy of damnation herself, even for all that she's done. She wanted to be judged on the rest of her life, not the now, not with who she is with.

Finally, she answers Garma as she decides that she could talk to him at least.

"Staying home today." Her fingers thread through her hair, pony-tail almost undone, but kept. All she can do is flash her stabbed hand at him, "Doctor's orders."

He opens his mouth in response, but it holds until he takes back the words that might've come out and his teeth clack together shut, looking at her with a cautious (only) eye.

He can do nothing. That was his station, and he had grown up knowing to stay within it.

All this effort, all this tribulation to comfort him, to heal him, and still she says she would kill him. It confuses him, but, perhaps that is her trick, her ploy, her cruel plan to truly kill him in a way that matters. Still with the way, day by day, his body eases out of the ache, there is a small inkling of belief that he might see the next decade: the 0080s. Icelina had always dreamed of it, speaking of the ceremonies of New York City when the new year came in its Times Square, where thousands of people would gather for the drop of a crystalline ball to bring in a new start with celebration, joy, and very pointedly, kissing.

Mai sits there, chewing on her breakfast between sips of coffee. Today she has the pancakes, looking anywhere but at him. He is obliged to do the same as they sit there and eat together, silently.

Finally, he breaks the quiet. "I think I'll stay out here with you."

She chews the last of her pancakes, sipping from her tin cup. "Do you not usually?" She asks, curious.

He shakes his head. "I'm in bed, most of the day. Reading. Reading. So much reading." At his bedside about every manual she has in this house between Federation and Zeon military booklets to first-aid guides and hand references. It's all he can do. "Plotting an escape. Maybe." He hasn't got used to the unease he feels, placing his right hand to prop up his cheek and feeling the missing digits despite his mind telling him that they are there, but he does. He's not quite sure this tease was the smartest idea for him, but it came naturally.

Maybe it's to test her.

"And how could you possibly do that?" She shakes her head as the words come out of her. Why she is entertaining him is perhaps a failure on her part, but she can't remember when she was this, literally, dressed down, having something close to a regular conversation. She had always learned Humans were social creatures, but maybe the Spacenoid in her has her inclined to the solitude, and that the part of her, as so espoused by so many Zeeks, that is held down by Gravity makes her want to talk to him.

"I'd leave you alive. Obviously. Obviously." He repeats, his right-hand drifts to his hair, trying to finds bangs that have burnt or cut away, his fingers float aimlessly otherwise, useless, the disdain on his face cannot be hidden. Mai wants to spit in his face for even trying it, that tic of his, known back even in the Academy days as a flourish that had made women swoon, men feel insecure, and those particularly envious pout. She never belonged to any of those categories, personally. "As thanks for healing me thus far."

"How gracious." She mulls, eyes still tracing his hair. The hair on his right side is short, cut or burned away, the uneven fuzz and strands that remain doing minimal to hide the wounds beneath. His left has sustained itself well, but it is uneven and uncared for, matted and losing its shape. Remarkably more of it survived than she would've thought, and, given that he was going to be kept alive for a relatively longer period, she suspects she might see it come back out again.

Maybe.

He nods to her that it was true, about not wanting to do her harm. "I would find the nearest remains of a Zeon vehicle. Maybe one of our mobile suits even, and activate the emergency transponder if its survival kit remained untouched. They would come here, get me out. And after I return to Zeon lines and heal fully, I would return to Seattle, and bring you back to Zeon as one of my wards, celebrated for sheltering me. We would, of course, never talk about this business about killing me." He seems so in love with that idea and its simplicity that he doesn't see the curve of her eyes sour.

There was a common misunderstanding about the tales of that came from the last Human era about the first colonizers that came to this coast of North America. Sacagawea, their guide, a Native American woman, had not done so out of charity. She had done so out of bondage and slavery. In another case: Pocahontas herself, so related to Jamestown, had been taken from this land in the end and paraded over England as an example of a "civilized savage".

The bile in her throat, the idea that Garma would do that with her, it sets a fire in her heart that she keeps kept down, just for now.

"You don't seem too concerned about my… relative freedom." He says, just on that topic of him, lashing out at her, genuinely curious.

She's not concerned of him on any measure, but the practical part of it is that she no more imagines him being a literal, physical threat to her than anyone else she has dead to rights. Also, he's been subservient. She expected at some point that he'd be chained to the bed and the idea that he is a prisoner would really be gotten across, but he's been too docile, and she, perhaps, unexpecting.

She wanted resistance, not a breakfast chat, and yet here they were.

The scoff out of her mouth takes a chunk of pancake out onto the table she flicks away toward him, bouncing off his hoodie as he tries to hide any menial disgust. "Got no reason to be. You try anything funny I kill you sooner rather than later, and if you do try to walk out here you've got forty flights of stairs and then the rest of a city you don't know, and I do." She takes a moment to look out the window before answering. "I don't even know where the nearest Zeon line is."

He does. The Las Vegas front is perhaps the closest, strongest Zeon stronghold ever since California Base reoccupied by the Federation. If he were to try anything, it'd be that. The thought of procuring a vehicle to simply drive all the way down is so easily dreamed by him, but he remembers two things at once: He was betrayed, and also operating a vehicle without a leg is perhaps not the best proposition.

"I know you're not even going to walk out of the city limits." She also tells him, less as a warning and more of a truth.

"Is that so?"

Nodding matter of factly: "Not gonna happen."

"With such certainty." He tsks.

Leaving Seattle wasn't exactly the hardest thing. If she really wanted to she could've packed up and been at least out of the city limits by nightfall. But the Conclave and its Pavilions had a cursory oversight of the bridges out of Seattle out into greater Washington, and toward the end, the amount of Zeeks trying to run away had been the same amount shot dead. "I've seen Zeeks try to limp out of this city. It won't happen."

"Because of you?"

"I don't waste ammo on dead men." She thumbs back to her sniper rifle, the rule of hers made simply because .300 magnum wasn't the most openly found round. She has her backups, nine-millimeter, seven-millimeter short for the storm rifle that was still half broken down on her workbench, various Zeonic machine pistols and a shotgun that she hasn't touched in weeks, but her sniper rifle was her preferred.

He muses aloud, perhaps far more dangerously than he should. "So if I run, would you come down chasing after me? Dragging me all the way back up here?"

"Would you like to find out?" She levels her voice. Garma knows what it sounds like when she's threatening him, and even then, he's gotten used to it.

Microaggression is the word he'd use.

He does, apparently, want to find out, pushing gently his tray toward the table, the crutch that leans against the table scooped up by him as he, taking a more than curious glance at her, starts his brisk walk to the door. She doesn't think too much of it as she hears the door open and close behind him. She gives him two sips of coffee before she's taking the leisurely pace of going out the front door, coffee cup still in hand, Garma still very much in sight as he hobbles along.

A tragedy, but she knows the particulars of amputees like Garma, thanks to the Conclave, which is why she's not concerned as Garma throws a glance over his shoulder back at her as if asking permission.

"I'll- I'll have you know that this isn't a serious attempt!" He struggles to say himself as he shuffles forward, the difficulty coming from his chest.

What takes him two minutes she closes the distance in ten seconds at a brisk walking pace as if she was out to go get her mail, and by the time she's shoulder to shoulder with him, she answers:

"Of course." She doesn't give a hint of any emotion save for amused curiosity.

Later that night she wonders if she should, generally, be getting this much enjoyment watching a man missing a leg try to (not seriously) outrun her, but in the end it remains: he is Garma. She's allowed, she tells herself, to derive enjoyment from his suffering. He's not unused to crutches, she realizes, but back then in the Academy he also wasn't missing a leg entirely.

The stairs are on the other side of the balcony that makes up the immediate walking space of her floor, and Garma, traversing that L, does so in huffs, pauses, trying to gain any pace at all when also trying not to topple over.

Does she gloat as she walks ahead of him to the stairway, it zig zagging all the way downward, out from the balcony? The look on her face doesn't exactly hide some sick self-amusement she gets, the same way his face doesn't hide how annoyed and demeaned he might be at this moment. He has no bangs to hide his eyes from her.

"You could try to make this a serious attempt, you know." She chides, and it's perhaps the most enjoyment she's gotten in quite a while.

He growls at her suggestion, finally making it to the top of the stairs, looking down. It's something of a visual trick the way that he looks down, the break where the stairs double back inward a sheer cut visually. Looking down, Garma can only feel, not forty flights of stairs down to walk, but to fall.

"Which leg was it again, during the Academy?" She asks, taking a seat at the top by his side. He doesn't say anything, barely moving his right stump to indicate the one that got broke during his storied fall. Even though the rest of the cadet class had just finished a ruck, one that she by no means had fared any better in embarking on, as night fell on Guardian Banchi, they were being told to go back out as search parties for the missing Garma Zabi and, on a lesser note, Cadet Char Aznable. That night had been the beginning of her miscontent with Garma, just on the basis of his fall making her have to go out and look for him. Even if it had stayed that way, even without the miscarriage, Mai liked to think she'd still kill him for it now.

She thinks he's joining her as he sits down himself, but soon after he is on his ass, slowly sliding down the stairs, each step a thump. Hardly dignified, but it was a way to go about it. It's not smooth, and from each impact, it's jarring, stone surface as the stairs is, but it undoubtedly is a far better way for him to go down those stairs than not.

He makes it to floor 39, his joggers considerably dirtier along its back, and Mai is, patience being her virtue, following him down, coffee cup in hand.

This had been more stimulating than most of her usual off-day affairs.

"Thirty-eight more to go." She starts. "Then all of Seattle… Then me of course."

He keeps his silence as he crawls, dragging his crutch with him to the next set of stairs, and this time he angles himself to fully slide down. The balance of not having another leg however betrays him, and as he tries to steady, all he finds is no standing as instead he slips, and tumbles down the first half of stairs to the first break, the crutch coming down with him in its metal clang as he grunts in very obvious pain, the edges of the stairs catching him all the way down to the floor. The clangs of pain echo throughout him as it feels like a certain amount of his healing and rest had become completely undone, all of it concentrating on his missing appendages and the low thrum in his head from where he had smacked it against the cold floor.

It disguises the sound of Mai, once again, coming over him.

She didn't worry about Garma escaping, because he couldn't, and now he knew that: Garma Zabi had been bested by stairs.

Roughly, she turns him over, lifting his hoodie, seeing for any reopened wounds, but none have done so, thankfully, and instead her hands ball at the front of his hoodie, seizing him up. He, despite it all, thanks her for that at least, but he isn't allowed as the force of her hands push him, right against the railing, and then suddenly the top half of his body is over it.

If she let go-

"I can show you a far faster way down, if you're so inclined, your highness." Her voice opened up its evil eyes, dripping with malice, malcontent, and promise.

Earth Gravity was such a horrible thing: to know that, constantly, forever, an unseeable force would always be dragging him down, even if it killed him. The force that kept him alive, from toppling over and down to the lobby floor 39 stories below, however was one that was going to kill him eventually.

All Humans, Spacenoid or not, had several instinctual Fs: Fighting, fleeing, fucking, and, lesser known, but all too well recognized by Garma as the end was at his back: falling.

"Mai!" His voice echoed in that empty building, up and down and then back to him.

She held on with two hands, but as he screamed, she went for one instead. He honestly thought he might've as hell fallen out of his hoodie with how she held him, but her grip was true, even despite his flailing.

"Please!" He begged again, voice hoarse, pain disappeared, replaced with a primal fear.

She savored that feeling, irony soaked and dripping. She really could've shown him, truly, what gravity was like, but alas that would give the Earth her kill. Garma was hers.

So, she yanked him back, almost chest to chest, the height difference between them more apparent than ever as she looked down on him, being held by his collar. He had been paler than usual, given the experience. "Don't give me that. You've fallen from higher."

His breathing had been rough, hard, unmeasured and frantic as he tried staring up into her eyes to try and assert that Zabi dominance. There was no dominance however but hers. Not in that city, not in the building that was hers. "I didn't enjoy it." Through his teeth, it's the truth.

She lets go, and he drops to the floor, back where he started. The crutch, before he can claim it, is in her hands, and she is away to the top of the stairs, on her way to the apartment. "We're finishing breakfast. Crawl back."

He can make no protest as she disappears, and, expectantly, without choice, he drags himself up, each and every step, on hands and knees. It destroys him to no end that he feels his right leg, his mind telling him to simply stand, but he cannot. He knows the term, vaguely, spoken from those soldiers in Zeon who have lost as he has now: phantom pain. Here he was, the prince of space, on his hands and knees, grit and dirt in his palms as he crawls up stairs back to a place where he was simply allowed to exist.

Shouldn't he be grateful?

When he's back, pained, exhausted, and demeaned five minutes later, she's sitting on her stool, sipping coffee. The only greetings she gives him is finally tossing his crutch his way as he makes his way through the door on his elbows.

"If- If I was not the man I am- I would have words for you." He pants, drawing in his crutch, pushing himself off the ground to lean on the wall, slipping the support beneath him.

"If you weren't the man you were, Zabi, I would've put you down when I found you." Her thumb flicks across her cheek, the curve of her mouth a frown.

His hands are dirtied and greyed, the floor of her building not clean, especially with what she had tracked in from time to time, pebbled imprinted in his palm. It makes him want to go to the sink to want to wash them off, but he doesn't, returning to his stool, a little worse for wear.

"Remember when I said I didn't hate you? Just last night?" He huffs.

"Of course."

"I do find you very detestable, however." He amends, whipping what's left of his hair with a jerk of his neck, a small bit of perspiration from dragging himself made.

"Likewise." For her credit, at least, his cup has been tossed of its tea and instead replaced with water, and he, after a quick head tilt at it, making it known, takes it down. "Don't make this a habit. I've got enough to worry about." A drop of water he had tried to get into his system embarrassingly fast had dripped out from the corner of his mouth, across the total burn that covered the right side of his face. She stared until it fell off of the curve of his jaw, and then pretended as if she hadn't noticed. He had been too busy recovering to even tell, new clothes dirtied just a bit more. Here, royalty drank from her tap, wore clothes given to him by her, and was, by all means, beholden to her. The very thought of it gives her as much rush as a bad bowel movement, though it's not something she hasn't gotten used to, over a week he's been here.

"Interesting idea, all of that, by the way." Mai is almost too quick to mention as he pants again from drinking too fast. "But I'll let you know that your QRF for those emergency broadcasts hasn't been a thing since July abouts."

"Oh?" With items like cups, grip more crucial than fingered position, he is okay. The fingers he's lost on his right hand are not

"Federation supplied us with some interesting comm equipment," She thumbs toward the set on the table by the window. "Full spectrum, able to pick through known Zeonic frequencies. Your forces never seemed to respond to any of them by the time summer ended."

Patterns and habits were the lifeblood of how the guerillas like her acted. Finding the when and where to slit open a throat of an armored beast was their only shot, and they mastered the art as organically as any other guerilla group in history. She can't help but imagine what the Zeon forces in Afghanistan, South East Asia, or cities even larger than Seattle were faring. The final offensive with the Federation that rendered Zeon ineffective in the Pacific North West had happened in mid-August, and since then the warring parties, until now, had left the city and its survivors alone.

He tries to justify it, squaring his shoulders. "Well… obviously not in this AO. Seattle is- was hardly worth it, given its state." He didn't know, she realizes. Then again why would a theatre commander need to know about the particular operations summaries of QRF forces? "We have our concerns elsewhere."

If the aim of Zeon was to conquer the Earth, they hadn't done the job they needed to do in the near year they've been to war for it, and she knows better than most, in the long run Zeon could not sustain a war on this scale as the Federation could.

"Like….?" She shimmied her head, tilting it down toward him.

He looks away from her, out the window. "Far be it from me to discuss about the current battle plan with you."

She shuffles, leaning in on her side of the table. If, in some event, Garma did give her secrets, give her the plans that might've won the Earth over in a day, she's not quite sure if she would even give it to the Federation. "You seem to forget you're not going back. So why not?"

His eyes return to her own. "Because, you're very much a Federation asset, in the end. Even if I die, the war goes on, and we have our contingencies." How loyal to the mission he was. She almost admired it.

"They didn't come look for your body." He seems to freeze as she says those words, her hands on the edge of the table. "The funeral was barely two days later. What kind of power is Zeon if they cannot even look for you, in territory that is, technically, yours?"

If she were one of Garma's officers, she would've leveled this city to look for him. Not because of any particular personal opinion of him, but simply because he was Garma. He was more than a commander. He was a Zabi.

If they could not reclaim the dead son of their leader, what was happening to Zeon's forces on the ground?

She knew the answer to that however, because she had been the answer.

Win had asked her once, about how many people she had pulled the trigger on. She didn't give him an answer but the number of three hundred abouts had lingered in her mind automatically if she did have an answer. And she had only been a sniper. She had to wonder about those who were a little more indiscriminate in their choice of how to fight back. The damage one man with a pipebomb planted beneath trash going off as a Zeon supply convoy went by wasn't to be understated, nor had been the various times entire buildings were sacrificed to kill the Zeeks who had thought it a good idea to congregate in one identifiable location.

The Zeon military, come a traditional fight, especially with its mobile suits, might've had the upper hand at times, but if the guerilla and resistance forces were ever in a traditional fight it had been their mistake.

The rules of guerilla warfare never changed, and even she as a classically trained officer of an army could not help but feel her former curriculum had been intractable when it came to who she was now and all those like her.

Not to say the war they fought had been a clean war, or a good war, or that even the innocent had been spared, but it was the war that drove them all away, and that was good enough for her.

Garma stared at her for a long time at that, mouth opening, closing, several times as if an answer was there for him, but none ever came that sounded natural out of his mouth. His attempt hadn't been on his usual tenor, said with full confidence and knowledge that what he had been saying was the truth. She knew how he talked.

"Quite obviously, reports of my demise, and the battle, were self-explanatory. I presume my command staff thought it wise to not waste resources on something as trivial as a… body." His teeth grind against each other as he relents. "I do not blame them."

Mai wonders what Garma feels, talking about himself like that: already dead. A body. She doesn't wonder long, not by the way he averts his eyes, remaining fingers against the plastic top of that table meant for the outdoors scratching against it. He's bothered by it, obviously, that in the end he was reduced to dead, only as a state, not even something physical to the outside world.

"When I first saw your body I certainly didn't think it as only a body." She said, carefully, measured.

He was always a very physical person by the way he emoted. Even in speeches, she remembered his face, the motions of his hands and arms, sweeping in their statements. They were not the dramaticism of Gihren, or its threat, but rather they were passionate. Now he is still, but for this first moment, perking up. "Oh? What did you think then?"

"A gift from God." She admits, finishing up her pancakes, finishing her coffee, watching the way his fingers grip the table themselves as she looks at him with as much of a mean look as she can garner. It's a look that she wants him to see, and know, that what she means she means it in a way that is cruel. "Left you to me so I could tear you apart, break you down." Like clay, to her fingers. "Obviously, you being alive has changed that."

Garma can't help but force a breath through his nose. "I could say the same… My plans being changed, that is."

He's not quite in the mood to finish his own breakfast, but with Mai, he's sure there's not a choice with his oatmeal. She didn't seem to be the type of woman to waste. He chews through the rest mechanically, lingering on what plans he does have: None. Just to live, and for what? To die?

"It could happen any day you know." She reminds him, taking his tray with her own, depositing them into the sink.

"That's a reality of war, yes, I understand it." He says as she begins to wash them down on her own, speaking to the space she once was, empty. "How will it happen?"

"Not sure yet." Running water undercuts her words, soft as they already are, compared to what they carry in its meaning. "It won't be a surprise. You'll see it coming, and I'll watch your life drain from your eyes." In all eventualities, she wanted to be the last thing Garma Zabi would see in his life. "It'll be a death, far better than you deserve."

She could see a million ways he could die, because she has seen the million ways people die in war. He deserved to be sucked beneath the tracks of a tank feet first. He deserved to melt in napalm melting through his skull. He deserved to drown in Seattle downpour, trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

The death he was going to have was far better than whatever death would've come to him in the Gaw.

She returns to him, the dirty wet rag given to his hands to wash off as she takes her seat again.

"Will it happen with that?" He gestures over to her storied sniper rifle as he wipes down his hands from his crawl, making sure to keep the bandages on his right hand dry. "Or will you make me… fall?"

"If…" She brushes some stray strands of her hair back. She's due a haircut. Bo is usually good enough for her to trim, they both have wavy, curvy hair so she knows the peculiarities. "If you're a good house guest, I promise it'll be open casket."

"A funeral?" He cracks a smirk. "You really are serving me right, dear Mai."

She twitches the way he tries to say her name like that. "Right now, you're go out being strangled if you keep that up. Just Mai."

He chills at the thought, of choking, her hands around his neck and squeezing what's left of him out. It's not how he usually appreciates the act, that is. This agony would be permanent, and then forever. Unconsciously his hands raise to his burnt neck, a flare of itch around them the shape of someone's hands.

"Understood." He grates.

"Mm."

She thinks to herself what would be the "nicest" way for him to be killed, and she settles on reopening his wounds and simply letting him bleed out quietly, but he had to earn that, perhaps by what falls on her mind next. She has to ask, after all this time. Curiosity does take her. "The war's not going too well, is it?"

Garma's eyes narrow together, his jaw tightening. "How could you possibly infer that?"

It was easy enough. It went back to where they had both started. "The last time I saw you desperate enough to ride into war directly was that night… Was that ship important?"

"The Federation did not communicate with you about that white ship?"

She shook her head. The Federation had dropped all communication with them following Seattle being rid of active Zeon forces. There had been, technically, a frequency left to them in the case of more Zeon forces reappearing, but none had called upon it. The Federation had other things to worry about than a bunch of rebels, which was, historically, how things often turned bad post-war, but she herself at least had no intentions. Far be it from her to speak ill of the Taliban or the Mujahedeen of old when she, on that American continent, replicated them far closer than she would ever like to admit.

Garma had done a lot of looking at her in these weeks, and she vice versa, both when either hadn't been returning the gaze, so it is unique now, sharing a table and having a conversation that doesn't dip into the inevitability of fate.

"Was something important on it?" She remembers, in the night, the distant sounds of mobile suits fighting mobile suits: the hydraulic grinding and the sound of motors and engines blaring off in the distant. "Something important enough to start bombing this city again?"

She remembers a quote, from an American invasion of Iraq, on how one citizen there had commented that America was going to burn down a forest to kill a fox. They would've sacrificed Seattle again, she realizes.

He licks his lips, considering truly, but the fact that he is already gives up that answer. He nods to it. "It was something that the Federation thought of very highly, and because of that, so too does Zeon."

"What, though?"

He shook his head at her once. "I prefer not to say, but, I assure you, if the contents of that white ship got to the Federation command center at Jaburo, the only thing that it would cause is far more death before our inevitable victory."

True, perhaps it hadn't been quite important to know what had been in that white ship, but his words mean something else as he ends it to her: Victory.

"You're not winning this war." She breaths as easy as the truth. She isn't telling him as much as she is saying facts of the world.

It bounces off of him, used to such detractions. "Oh, we will. Spacenoid victory is assured."

Spacenoid.

She was a Spacenoid too, and nothing that felt like victory had been in her life since the Dawn Rebellion. Even that final battle for Seattle, when the Zeeks were pushed back and surrounded at the very base of the Space Needle as Federation and Guerilla forces beat the last of them into a bloody red paste. Even today, the base of the Needle had smelled of corpses rivaled only by the Zeon prison camp that the Harborview Mall turned into.

"How? Superior firepower? Overwhelming offensives?" She resettles herself in her stool. "Garma, remember, I know what I'm talking about." There's a little shrug in her shoulders, tilting her head down at him, the memories of what would become the Zeon standard officer uniform that all Munzo cadets had is suddenly again on her. "You can't sit here and tell me that everything has gone as intended."

"Consolidation. Obviously." His fingers so much want to grab onto his hair, but none exists for him, so his hands lay limply on the table. "It would be unrealistic for us to have expected the battle plans as we've drafted for the invasion to have gone completely well, but we control major territory on every continent. Save for our mobile suits, our holdings allow us to maintain the war effort on our own without particular assistance from the Colonies. It's only a matter of time, however, when those forces from the colonies are able to send us reinforcements so we can clean up resistance from the Federation."

She squints at him. She knows that tone. "Who do you take me for, Garma?"

"An interesting woman on the wrong side of history." He leans back, saying it like its true.

Always a flatterer, just like gossip in the Academy had said, and the inclination for him to reach out and flick him, pinch him, maybe to rip some of his scars off, persists. "Stop that. I'm serious though. I don't need the press conference talk." Her shoulders slump, "We've heard things around here, seen how you handle these cities… We've kicked you out. It's not sustainable."

"What're you trying to tell me?" He settles, the fist he tries to make with his right hand momentarily paining him beneath the bandages.

"You know. Don't you?" She leans in. "You have to, after all this time."

Of all that Mai Gul thinks of Garma Zabi, he's not stupid, at least in a way that makes him completely blind to the simple fact that she knows something about Zeon that not many people have the luxury of understanding, and yet was proclaimed to all of Humanity just days before, and yet it was a fact that had been true, even far before the war. Her realization of this only came when she remembered who she was supposed to be.

"War has taught me many things, as it does all of Zeon's forces. With these lessons we inch closer and closer to endsieg. All we wait for is the opportunity. I'm sorry if you're not impressed that we haven't taken the Earth in less than a year." He tips his forehead up at her, as if she was supposed to know better. "This war is not lost for us and our cause."

If he had not realized, then it's not for her to say, but it doesn't surprise her. This arrogance had killed and failed those beneath him, and it infected it down to the lowest grunt who had been forced to take Seattle from her, and all those like her.

He should've known Mankind could not be taken by war alone, and so the effort was failed from the start. A fool's errand in the shape of a military campaign.

"At the very least you shouldn't have made your Earthnoid collaborator divisions your main occupation forces." Mai mumbled.

That surprises him, even he being unsure of what she said. "Oh? Why? I would imagine people who are from the area we've assigned them to would operate best with the conditions we've given them. They at least understand they're fighting for-"

She's an audience of one, and not the grand crowds or legions of troopers he might be accustomed to. More than that she's an audience that knows better, and is very pointedly able to reach out to him, the broad of her palm wrapping around the muscle of his neck on one side. She feels him tense, pausing his words, her fingers only letting go when he relaxes. She wasn't born physical, or touchy, the inherent distance built into her being a woman born of a Muslim family, but military academy life, the trauma thereafter, and then the war didn't leave her any choice. Language of action, of physical touches, the movement of hands to speak silently so as to not give themselves away during missions behind enemy lines, all of that is part of a language she prefers nowadays.

Her eyebrows furrow, but she isn't particularly mad this time. She just wants him to listen.

He does, this time. His breaths are beneath her fingertips, and she draws away. "People tend to have a hard time doing their job right when they're dealing with people of like kind." Maybe, just maybe the occupation of Seattle would've worked if Zeon had been ruthless outright. Not only do you need force. You needed fear. You needed compliance. You needed brutality. "Earthnoid Zeeks were often the ones assigned to MP duties around here. They were soft. Softer than we were taught they should be."

To the average civilian out on those Seattle streets their oppression had been far harder than anything they might've felt in peace time, however, tactically, it had been unsound on two ends. If they had been too soft, than naturally guerillas like herself could've very easily operated in Seattle to resist. Collaborators who thought they were striking a compromise, by offering some sort of empathetic, benevolent authoritarian rule over Seattle, actually stymied Zeon in the end. Zeon needed to be the monsters that she knew she was, and not be held back by those Earthnoids that tried to find the middle way, if their occupation at least there in Seattle to have worked.

"If I were you, I'd be using any recruits you have from Seattle-2 or just any of the colonies that were cloned from Earth's population centers as opposed to doing homegrown. You get the advantages of inherent knowledge that come with city living while none of the connection." For her, war was personal, but she was only a single person, not an aggregate. "It's hard to oppress your neighbor."

"Are you… giving me advice?" Garma can't help but be confused in his own way: this woman who has decried him for being a fascist, thought he needed to have been even more of one. (Not that he had particularly thought himself as one. Of course not.)

The solution to her and her guerilla movement was simply competence, removed from the squishy feeling of belonging. How many times she'd killed a Zeek because they had their guard down, or had assumed nothing of her as she blended back into the then civilian population, she couldn't count. She died, ironically, because the fascists hadn't been authoritarian enough. Even she could understand that. "Just talking from a mutual understanding."

Inside of her was a fascist as well, and that was a thought that no one, early on in the war, ever let her forget.

In Afghanistan, during old history, when the Soviet Union invaded, the trouble born of having Kazakh Soviets fight against their neighbors, people who look and were them, in Afghanistan, had been a major stumbling block, solved only when the Soviets sent more of their European stock to the field. Here, on Earth, the divide between Earthnoid and Spacenoid had been the same.

People just knew by some unconscious sense when one had come from space.

"It was the little things that failed you here." She says softly, tiredly. A failure of micro-military strategy that she exploited, and, more often than not those failures resulted in people dying.

Garma takes a beat to respond, mulling it over in his mind. "I see your point, but recruiting from Earthnoid populations for our occupations forces was paramount. Our nativeborn Spacenoid forces were needed for more active frontline work, they're the only population that can be relied on for those strategic maneuvers save for more niche positions like our submarine corps."

She's quick on the back and forth. "Sure, but it's an inverse agreement there. Spacenoid forces sustaining the most active casualties no doubt, only to be replaced by Earthnoid forces by necessity then."

"Ah. So you'd be willing to sacrifice Earthnoid populations for frontline duty instead?" Garma pokes at her.

She shook her head once violently. As if she could be that person to direct operations in such a way anymore, so far removed from the ground and grit of pulling the trigger. Everything she had ordered her cells to do in Seattle were orders she would do herself, and her people knew that. "I'm saying that if I still believed in Zeon, and I was a different person, I would still know you're waging this war wrong."

"But your opinion is obviously curated from how your life has turned out, no? Any of your own victories obviously carry a justification bias."

"There's a pattern though. When your forces were the most brutal, that's when you won the most. Any give was where we won." Just as Garma should, at least in Mai's mind, be willing to say his piece, so too does she admit this. She has no problems telling him how he should've killed her, and all those like her. "Besides. You're trying to free the Earth from us anyway. Causing more death is what you want, right?" Her eyebrows furrow at him, daring him.

He meets her. "Trying to free the Earth from the corrupt Federation government, may I remind you. Not you, not the common people, not sojourned Spacenoids especially… And our plans, our war, it's not meant for the sake of death. I despise death, especially useless death."

"Half of Mankind, Garma." She can feel her own throat tightening, her voice grind as if she was the only one who really knew the madness: "This war has killed half of Mankind, and we are no more free than when we started."

She did not remember that day when Iffish fell on Earth. She could not, not with what had happened to her and her unborn child, but the survivors, all those that lived on from that day, had told her about the starfall debris from the main pieces of the colony that fell on Earth. Sydney had been destroyed, and the tremors from that impact had drowned most of South East Asia. Gearten himself had a first hand look as another section pulverized Alberta and British Colombia, the entire population of Canada seemingly fleeing from the woods where he had lived to avoid the chaos. Mai Gul did not remember that day, but all the rest of Humanity did as the world shook itself apart, and Humanity itself cut down in half.

Even in Seattle, car-sized chunks of the colony itself had been the first shots sent from the coming war, right into several buildings that now no longer stood.

The Conclave had been her home for the next two months, between her treatment, and then volunteering. She was very useful at corralling and crowd control, as the Conclave, then First Hill Hospital, had found out, and those desperately trying to get into the already overflowing hospital had been kept from destroying it by her and the security guards at the time. It had all changed when Zeon landed however, but by that time, billions had already died.

"You say you tried to stop that white ship to prevent more death, but then what was Iffish?" She asks, almost pleads.

His answer is one that he has believed in since he dropped it. Not he in the particular sense, but it had been a decision made between every Zabi, and every Zeon military commander. It was something that was necessary. "Island Iffish is what it always was. An example to be made, and a monument to what Zeon is willing to do to win this war."

"And what if you don't win? What will it be then?" Her midsection ducks down to that cold, colder than space itself. In the course of Human events, in the way she knows Zeon will fail, she knows that her baby would have died for nothing.

Garma pauses, holding his tongue. Iffish, and all the death that came, had been necessary because… Suddenly her point about Earthnoid MPs make sense: It was, if they really believed in what they were doing, only right to take it to its logical extreme. There were no half-measures.

She wants to tear his answer out from his lungs, but talking like this with him, it wounds her up, wounds her down, and snaps her back and forth as her breath becomes short. The absurdity can never be lost on her: right across from her is Garma Zabi, and she wants to know why this life has happened to her.

Looking at her with only one eye for Garma is a strain, and suddenly the surface of his pupil feels very, very dry.

She did have her points, she did understand more than what most guerillas would.

"I do not think this war lost." He said, blinking through it, the urge to rub both of his eyes raising within him. "If Zeon thinks that this war was untenable, we would cease immediately, for at that time, if it does happen, the Federation would be no better off."

"The same Zeon that sends officers to destroy a metropolitan city? The same Zeon that takes people off the streets and tortures them, disfigures them all because they were walking the streets at the wrong time? I thought we were taught to wage war better than that." She can't help but twitch at her own irony. Waging war better was an oxymoron. "I've seen- I know what Zeon forces do, first hand. Don't tell me you don't know that."

He can feel his throat constricting himself. He knows, he does. Sometimes intelligence from his ISR services are so decisive, that he puts away that thought in his mind on how his people had gotten them. Lesser evils of course. "I am not blind to certain… aberrations in the way we conduct war. I do take responsibility, of course, as any good commander should, but I do not dictate the particular eccentricities of how my district commanders operate… Besides. I know that people of your persuasion haven't given my forces that kind of respectable treatment."

Garma Zabi, even after all that, would take responsibility. Mai's not sure if she is okay with that, how easy he says it to her, as if not realizing what, exactly, he had answer for because of it. But it's something.

She pulls back from his imposition on her, or, at least, guerillas in general. "I can only speak for myself and my people." She definitely couldn't speak to Murph and what he had done to the many Zeeks he had taken and captured during the war, but the Federation, and even she, had looked away if only because that the people he had put upon, torn apart, raped and then quartered had been Zeeks. "And the difference between me and you is what's it's always been, even since the Academy: I'm a nobody, you're Garma Zabi."

This is the closest she can get to fighting, to something close to a collision that is fair, that outlines and forces him to see what she sees and knows and understands. Talking. Nothing but talking.

There would be a lot of time for talking still.

He sees the poison off of her lips, how every word of hers are a stop-gap, holding her back from yelling at him, and he hates it. He hates the idea she is hiding even more from him, even in this position as they are. "Are you trying by word alone show me the error of my ways by word alone? That I will turn the other cheek and bring myself to my own justice?" He leans in his face, through scars and burns, is that of seriousness, drawn as if what had happened to him never did. "Mai Gul, I've gone to war for my beliefs, and if I was not willing to die for them, then they're not really my beliefs at all, are they?"

"And what are those beliefs?" She says through her teeth.

He pulls back, back straight, shoulders square. "I don't need to tell you. Because I know they were once yours."

Freedom. He fought for Freedom, at least to all appearances.

He did not budge, but neither did she as a silence settled between them, the last of breakfast still there attended to slowly between two people who had looked at each other like animals: quiet, wondering who would lash out fatally first on contested ground. The gnashing of teeth from their chewing, sipping at their drinks, for what good sharing a meal does, it settles them by the time their finished and the trays are stacked on top of each other, put to the side for the sink later.

It's the first time Garma Zabi in years uses his sleeve to wipe his mouth, but he does before he speaks again to her.

"Mm. More and more I remember you, vaguely." Garma says, right to her face, but quietly, far more civil than how they had conducted themselves so far. Talk of the past and a heat rises to her cheeks, as if it was an embarrassing childhood for her. "More than once we've shared the library during midnight hours, have we not?"

It's true. She nods once, not particularly pleased he remembered. "Always tried my best to ignore you. You tend to be a distraction."

Those midnight hours, in the Academy's library, tables apart, papers and books strewn studying for exams and essays and field exercises. They were both busy people, and years later here they had been sharing a table. He had never noticed her more than a cursory glance of recognition that there had been a Muslim girl with him in his class, and in his mind, she had been "that Muslim girl" initially until she had become "that Muslim girl that knew how to shoot".

"I appreciated that." He says, hanging out in the air. "Any who treated me as an equal back then I always preferred."

And now, she almost spits at him, he was lesser.

"That could never be the case, your highness."

He takes a tired breath as those words of hers hit him again, the huff barely doing anything to settle his own misgivings. "…Must you keep up the bitterness of our conversations? I actually quite preferred your insight on our current operations here on Earth. It was intriguing, to say the least, especially from someone with an actual education in the art of war as I understand it."

She had only herself to blame for bringing Garma into her life in this way, so she couldn't quite snap back at him. She didn't hide it from herself. She could be a bitch.

His hand raises up to her, as if offering. "Right now, in this apartment, we are simply one man, and one woman, with very interesting thoughts. I find that quite engrossing if you think about it."

Mai almost laughs at his proposal. "It's not that easy to cast off who you are. I've tried." Her baggage coming to Earth had been more than just some meager belongings. She carried that baggage still, if not added to it. "It's easier to fight your enemies."

"You were just one woman. It seems like a fruitless endeavor." He had commanded armies, legions, and yet even he recognized that he was just a small drop in the war effort. "I am just one man, after all, and it seems to me my removal hasn't seemed to change the course of the war that much."

She shook her head immediately. She would never forget those who gave their lives to fight against Zeon. "You're only one man. And I'm only one woman, true. But I guarantee you that there are more people wanting to fight you than there are people willing to fight for you. I know it because that's what happened here in Seattle."

"Hm. I won't disagree." His candidness surprises both of them. "Every place on this continent at least had a different, so varied way to fight. Las Vegas, the entire city itself, seemed to fight back by just draining the coffers of my occupation troops there." The shrewd taut of his mouth thinking about how Zeon seemed to be conquered by way of slots and cards doesn't sit any better in him. "I'd almost preferred if someone like you was out there instead. Less complicated."

He told her that she had made his life so simple now, and it sits weirdly inside of her enough that she has to talk about killing Zeeks. "Well, if they're still there after I deal with you, I'll see what I can do."

"You're incorrigible." Garma glares at her.

She likes annoying him more than she would admit, but that was as much of any for that conversation. She looks at him, shit eating smirk and all, and says nothing more as she draws the storm rifle she's been working on for the last month to spend her day on. He, on the other hand, takes a walk back into the bedroom, returning with his current reading of choice: A Federation sniper manual. She's never needed to read it herself, but Garma finds it, at least the fact that it's long and time occupying enough, a well enough read.

Sniper marksmanship is an extension of basic rifle marksmanship and focuses on the techniques needed to engage targets at extended ranges. To successfully engage targets at increased distances, the sniper team must be proficient in marksmanship fundamentals and advanced marksmanship skills. Examples of these skills are determining the effects of weather conditions on ballistics, holding off for elevation and windage, engaging moving targets, using adjusting scopes, and zeroing procedures. Marksmanship skills should be practiced often.

He reads the lines, the driest language that there could be, and thinks only of that idea: Sniper.

Long range artists of an increasingly archaic art. Mobile suits, drones, and advanced sensor suites that had come with the advancement of warfare had put a damper on the need for individuals with the skills needed to shoot out, miles away, for one shot, one kill on the battlefield. For espionage and clandestine services, of course, Kycilia, Garma knew, had maintained a cadre of marksmen for the less savory parts of domestic security, but as far as war went, snipers had been replaced by drone strikes and other, far less subtle methods.

And yet here he had been sitting right across from a woman who had become one to great effectiveness.

The primary mission of a sniper in combat is to support combat operations by delivering precise long-range fire on selected targets. By this, the sniper creates casualties among enemy troops, slows enemy movement, frightens enemy soldiers, lowers morale, and adds confusion to their operations. The secondary mission of the sniper is collecting and reporting battlefield information.

She's not alone. Far from it. Snipers and marksmen like her had made up a disgusting portion of resistance against his own forces in rural or more wild terrains such as the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, but she's different, by background, and by current circumstance. Garma looks, between page turns, the way her fingers dealt with the fire control group, the innards of the storm rifle that had been taken from his forces. Her fingers move with intention, hardly a movement wasted as she looks down into the mess of a machine, gun oil on her prints as she, as he watches from time to time for the next hour, works over the rifle.

The sun isn't able to completely break through the clouds, and so the Earth is still its middling gray out those windows as the morning goes on and, eventually, noon approaches.

Still, she works on the rifle, taking it apart, breaking it down, laying out all the screws and pieces out on her table, and then repeating the process of putting it back together.

She does this, all the way, back and forth, but never completely finishing the rifle to a point where it could be fired. Back and forth, and again and again.


Today is a rare day that she has lunch.

In the short two years between the Dawn Rebellion and 0079, she had been on one meal a day out of necessity. Sleep for breakfast, and then taking the leftovers from the kitchen at her job had been the expedient thing for her. The small box of a fridge that she had at home had only ever hosted leftovers, and those leftovers contributed to a certain amount of weight gain that has since been negated by the weight-loss regiment known as waging a guerilla war.

Nowadays she had been far healthier, physically, even if the MREs and preserved foods that had made up most of her food were high in calories. She had used them all in the course of her day to day.

Another Zeonic MRE had been pulled out at twelve noon on the dot, Garma looking up from his reading for the day around the time the manual had been explaining what a rifle sling was.

Spirited conversation withholding, they had existed in a comfortable silence for a few hours, the sound of her fiddling with the storm rifle, and then him turning the page of the manual, existing above the constant battering of the wind outside. It had been as if neither existed to each other at all. For Mai this was tolerable, for Garma it was a nice change of pace.

"I noticed," she started, ripping the bag open with her bare hands. "You're mostly taking from my Federation stock of MREs."

That he was, and he had freely admitted it with a nod, closing the manual, head resting on propped up right arm, making sure his right hand still was feeling. "A private indulgence." He had eaten lunch when she was gone most days, and he had always cleaned up before she arrived home, the utensils all stored away in one of the kitchen's drawers. "Federation MREs tend to source from Earth, as opposed to the colonies." Even then it hadn't been 100%. Side 1's agricultural colonies had been benefitting from the war almost as much as any weapon development firm in neutral Side 6, and Garma had been one to fully realize that there had been some companies double dipping. A sidenote for after the war, Kycilia had often confided in him for reasons he could very easily guess.

She on the other hand preferred her Zeonic MREs, if only out of private nostalgia.

Spacenoid crackers tasted different from Ritz.

Lunch had been "tex-mex chili".

"You eat around now?" She asked, and he nodded, watching her place out the MRE between them with well-normalized and practiced routine, the self-heating bag with the entrée already ignited and well on its way to being cooked. "Been keeping a schedule?"

That, he sighed, he shook his head to. "I don't have much of a schedule to keep." That had been a fair answer.

"What do you do all day then?"

"Adhere to the good doctor's treatment schedule. Try to further get comfortable with what I've lost." He stands now, trying to prove that point with his crutch, walking over the window and looking down on that ruined metropolis. Still out in the distance, he sees where he was dug up in between ruined skyscrapers and the shape of the Kingdome. "Not like I quite have a choice."

"What was your schedule like before this?"

He could go on, so he does, sitting on the lip of the window, the cool surface against his back through his hoodie is soothing.

"7:30AM, I would be awakened by my intelligence officer working out of Richmond," He drags, lingers on that idea of waking up. "A phone call to my bedroom." A shared bedroom but he won't give her that just yet. "He would report the weather conditions of the day, our progress on various frontlines as pertinent, and then any other developments I should know about. By 8AM, I would be dressed and ready for the day. The nature of the war gives me no set schedule, as you must understand."

Mai doesn't disagree. There could be no particular idea of a schedule committed when they were fighting their guerilla war. Schedule meant form and function that could be picked apart by any Zeon intelligence agent, and in reality, that type of organization had been reserved for a war effort that hadn't been run out of basements, beneath the cover of night, as a space empire put themselves up as the enemy.

"Some days would bring me out to the southern front, in the Mexican territories, and I'd be out just miles behind a battlefield observing lines as they fell and moved. Others would bring me to Fort Lauderdale trying to retrofit the nascent space programs there for own usage. If not that organizing and smoothing over relations with the major North American cities beneath our control."

"Shame you never came to Seattle." She says with as much heavy sarcasm as she's summoned in the last three years. If Garma had come to Seattle she would've otherwise been put in a far better situation where shooting him was a far simpler proposition.

"…There were, security considerations." In plain language: Even before Seattle had been completely destroyed, she had been a threat extraordinary compared to the rest of North America.

"Like?" She asked as if she knew the answer. Garma's mouth twisted once into a tight line before letting her have this:

"An unusually high instance of partisan marksmen inhabiting the area for one." Just over her shoulder in the corner of the room is her sniper rifle. As much a faithful companion to her as any. "It was decided I would not be allowed to visit by my regional commanders after…"

It's not hard to guess why any substantially important Zeon officer had avoided Seattle like the plague. It was because of a disaster: "After you lost the originals, right?"

"They were good people." Garma tells her, if she was going to keep going along that thought. "Husbands, wives, of some of the best, ideal images of Spacenoid families I've ever seen. They were the future of our society." He sees them in his memory at the balls and officer galas back on Zeon before the war, all of them young, and believing in Spacenoid supremacy.

She remembers the operation passed down the wire from Federation intelligence through their encoded radios and messages. Five Zeon commanders would've been meeting offshore in one of Zeon's Pacific submarines come to Seattle to consolidate battle plans over the West Coast. Those five Zeon commanders remained there at the bottom of that watery grave.

It was an inspired attack: One that combined driftwood, magnets, several pounds of high-explosive, and her marksmanship skills.

Even now the wreckage of the Zeon sub bubbled up into the sound on occasions, leaving a smear of black oil along the surface.

"Good people don't do that, Garma." She pointed outside, to Seattle, to all of that. "You're not making this argument with me."

"I just find it a curious answer from someone who could've very easily been one of them." The steam from the bag their entrée is cooking in steams, and then its pressure valve releases on its own, letting a steady puff of steam into the room as he sits himself back on the stool. Her eyes are always, to him, at least partially honed at all times, focused, like that of a predator, but his have softened those piercing whites of hers.

She doesn't dignify a response as once again the trays are back, and their meal is split into two, and once again they eat silently until it's all very much done, cleaned, and settled.

Garma misses Icelina.

He does, in ways beyond a vocabulary he has. He misses her now, more than ever, because Mai is a cold woman to him. She is very much alive, perhaps even more alive than him, but she is as cold as the rifle that has been her calling card.

Mai speaks, depositing the trays into the sink, refilling both of their cups with water. "Are you ever going to tell me what was up? You know, with your betrayal? How'd you even know?"

Because his betrayer had spoke to him in what was to be his final moments. To think, the last Char Aznable had wanted to get across to him was to laugh at his death. He wanted warmth in that moment, and there was certainly a flash of fire in his heart, thinking about it.

Water is offered to him and he drinks it far faster than intended, looking at her, considering her as she steps by his side to give him his cup.

Mai Gul would know who Char Aznable is, and it's a coincidence that sits in him like a break in the enemy line. He's, officially, a colonel in Zeon's Army. He'll take it.

"I propose a trade if you wish to know." She raises her eyebrow as he speaks, pivoting his head up at her, staring down on him at his side. "Perhaps something more… stimulating than these manuals for, perhaps, some more particular, specific thoughts from myself about what has befallen me."

A few thoughts go through her head. The way he talks doesn't particularly help his case, and a cringe wracks its way through her face as she considers quickly that he doesn't mean physical stimulation, hopefully. The thought makes her almost slap him right then and there, but she really doubts Garma would be so forward. "Something else to occupy your time, right? That's what you mean?" She clarifies, perplexed. "Something else to read?" She stresses.

Garma is quite alarmed himself by the strain in her voice and the scrunch of her face, but replaying his words, he understands. "Ah. Yes. To read. I don't mean otherwise." He amends, fast, mirroring the curve of her mouth too as they both look away from each other. "Reading. Yes."

Mai had held in a breath as he answered, more than able to give him that benefit of the doubt as she realigns her thinking back to her usual annoyance with him. "Are you seriously bartering with me?"

"It's within my interest to at least try." He affirmed, nodding. "This isn't particularly information I would think would endanger my men if it got out. It's personal, if anything. I would trust you with it, in parts, but I need something else for my time here." It's this weird dance, of being dignified, begging, not wanting to step on her toes, and trying to appear as if he had something to trade. His final word helps, however: "Please?"

The long list of people that would hate Garma Zabi in a way comparable to how she does runs out of names in her memory, and across the Earthsphere it's probably in the millions. But those within Zeon, and within the Zeon military on Earth, who would hate him so much to actually set him up for death, that must've been a vitriolic hate that would rival her own. Of course, she's curious to know, especially if Garma, for all the revelations he might be able to provide, can speak on the circumstances of his own "death".

She'll beat him within an inch of his life for being himself, but somehow beating the information of his betrayal doesn't seem particularly the right course of action here.

"You're making odd requests to your executor." She relents, an eye twitching at him.

He tips his head once, juggling his thoughts in his blasted brain. "Stranger for my executor to nurse me back to health before killing me."

Fair. "Mm." She'll think about it, and Garma knows that she will as she returns to her side of the table to continue her mechanical fiddling.

The rest of the day goes peacefully, hardly a word passed between them as Garma read what he did have on hand, and eventually she had moved on from her forever limbo'd storm rifle to her bread and butter sniper rifle. With this she had been more direct in its field stripping and maintaining, an oily rag run down with water once as she had rubbed down its internals of carbon and grit, an oily shoe lace threaded through its barrel as Garma looked on. He knew from his current manual that there had been a ten-point guide to cleaning a sniper rifle, but for Mai, she had seemed to make it twenty. Though he was no different as the day went on. His machine that he needed to take care of was himself, disappearing into the bathroom every other hour to check his scars and to reapply gel on the burns, washing away crust as it continued more and more to form into the sink.

If Icelina was to see him again, dead or alive, he wanted to look healed, better than this, skin beat red and shriveling up still as if like Mai's jerky.

When night falls over Seattle, when the candles come out for dinner, a far lighter meal this time because they had had lunch (crackers and jam from an MRE kit that hadn't been completely used), Garma feels like enough silence has been banked to talk again to her, looking at her left hand, and then seeing his own right.

Soldiers often talked of scars and battle marks. The seemingly ancient opinions of women loving battle born injuries and their remains persisting even now. He's not quite sure if Icelina would approve of his own, as massive and dire as they are, but it's a conversation worth having with Mai.

She catches him looking far before he initiates the words.

"Is that your worst wound?" He chews the crumbly, sweet jam sandwich he has made, offering his own hand up to compare.

She hasn't done much all day to take care of her stitches, save for a momentary smear of antibiotic cream and a thin wrap of bandage across her palm. Mai shakes her head. "You know my worst."

He can hardly imagine an injury greater than the death of one's child. "… Yes. But, perhaps after that?" She's quiet, considering answering, but he is more than comfortable to go on. "I still have my cast you know, from my fall. It's in my own room at the Zabi estate in Zum still, actually. You remember how every one in our class tried to sign it?"

That she did. Even back then the thought of getting on her knees and doing everything short of kissing his feet had been a bit much, so she hadn't personally. Her roommate on the other hand, an honest, albeit timid girl from Dresden colony, had tried in spite of herself. She had been, as a good portion of the female cohort of their cadet class, been smitten with Garma.

"I'm sure your "security detail" was happy." Mai scoffed.

An embarrassed smile broke momentarily across his face., remembering those few who had been so quick to subserve him. At first he had thought them plants by Zeon security to keep him safe in the Academy, but upon further review they had just been cadets like any other, quick to claim the importance of keeping him "safe" and "popular" for their own. The yes men that had compressed him so much that he was of course, drawn to Char Aznable.

She stood up suddenly, rolling her shirt up, just enough to show off the broad of her abs, lean and muscled by wear and tear, and then the thin, messy line going up from her navel to about her mid, the line going horizontal as if making a T.

It's not the crackers that make Garma's mouth go dry. "Is that… cesarean?" He says gingerly, not quite understanding he was seeing in the low light.

He wouldn't have known the exact circumstances of her miscarriage, nor would she elaborate to him, but the scar on her stomach was not that of childbirth. She shook her head. One of Murph's liaisons to her own cell had noted the scar for what it was: "A California Zipper." As she repeated to Garma. Her shirt fell. "I was shot in the stomach, during the summer. Some of the local regiment tried to storm downtown to flush shooters like me out. One of them landed a hit on me, through my plate, into my stomach."

It was a miracle she hadn't been shitting in a bag, but the operation to save her life had come about five hours after recommended, and she had nearly bled herself out by the time she stumbled into the Conclave. That was what had taken her out of the fight the month before the final battle, backed by the Federation. From then on in she had been mostly relegated to far off commanding or sniper duties. Still, she had some residual pain some days when she reached down at had pulled herself a certain way, but as Doctor Candy liked to remind her, she was young.

She was also tough. Stubborn. Lucky (and yet unlucky).

"Hmph. We can't seem to have killed you if we tried." Garma is quiet to say, but it's the truth to his thoughts. She can't help but let out another one of her absurd laughs again, but this time it's to cover up a squeak out of her: one of self-satisfaction that he can admit that. "Do you not worry about that? About me taking one of those guns of yours and…. Resisting?"

Her short laugh settles into a content look on her face, assured and dreamy, and Garma can't see it true through the low light haze of candlelight. "For all you've done, I don't simply think you're the man able to do it personally. Killing is for other people."

He stares at her with his one working eye long after that. How pathetic he must be to her that she thinks he cannot do a man's job and kill on his own. Was it a dare for him to try otherwise? A cruel dare at that, because he doesn't want to prove it otherwise with her.

Killing was a man's duty, after all, and wasn't he a man?


Inaction all day throws her off balance, laying on the floor after showering, tending to Garma's own cleaning. Today, bandages need to be reapplied, and they do that together, grisly as it is, his bandages are now far less sticky and red than when they first started this routine. The immediate damage of the burns has been stymied, but now the longer road of residual care remains for the tender and still raw skin, bandages and healing gel smeared across him all the same.

He makes a point today however, dried and laying on the floor as she pats him down, to do what he can on his own.

She thinks nothing of it, backing off. The less she has to touch of him in places that are decidedly private and personal, the better.

He still gets the bed, and Mai still remains on the floor.

She can't sleep, staring up at the ceiling that is her own, her head resting on a curled and awkwardly curled bundle of her blanket's edge as she sleeps beneath the rest. It's getting colder in the room, gradually, and by the time winter properly sets in wet and heavy she suspects the situation in that unheated box of her apartment might become particularly concerning. But that was a problem another day.

Her problem tonight was that she could not sleep.

It was Garma's as well.

She still sleeps with her pistol on her belt, awkward as it is, and her right hand rests on it as she lays, head turned over to Garma as he slowly slides out of bed himself, sometime past midnight. They lock eyes, but he is on his own as he quietly picks up his crutch, pivoting to the side of the bed facing the window. Moonlight breaks through clouds, and he is silhouetted against the dark.

He stands on his own, looking out at Seattle beneath starlight, and pretends it's a different view.

When he first came to New York City, Zeon forces securing it, a victory parade was held, and he had conducted it from Rockefeller Center. Masses flooded the streets to see him, elevated above them, standing as a savior, standing on two feet. It was perhaps the greatest he had ever been as those that came out celebrated his arrival, and if there would ever be a replacement for gravity, it would be the pride he felt at that moment, assured of what Zeon was doing was right. It had been merely a week since he had come to the Earth the first time, and that had been what Earth offered him. The reclamation of Earth was his responsibility, and at that moment, it seemed the Earth trusted him to do it.

Now the pendulum had swung the other way, and it had taken.

He looks down from that window and pretends to go back there, and stand, but as hard as he wants to, he can never again plant two feet on solid ground. He can never stand as he once did, even as he tries. The crutch cannot help him stand fully straight, for if he tries to, it wobbles, it threatens to send him back down, but he tries to anyway, micro struggles never ending as that image of crowds that loved him disappear into a destroyed city where millions once lived.

Mai listens to his breathing, becoming more ragged and ragged, pained and pained. It fills the room, and she imagines it might be her lullaby.

Something gives, she hears him lightly lean abruptly against the window's lip, crutch falling onto the rug with a muted thump.

He's down an eye, frustrated with himself, but he's not blind, not as he sees her stand in the glass reflection, arms at her side, head tilted. He doesn't care, not even as she approaches, and he tracks her ghostly image right up next to him, lean down, and simply place the crutch leaning on the wall beneath the window with him.

She's back on the floor again as fast as she had righted his crutch, and he decides that, maybe not tonight, he'll eventually have to learn how to stand on his own again for what little time he has left.


Mai leaves the next day before Garma wakes up, at least fully, the shine of his eyes in the dark morning was but a flash as she passed by the bedroom on her way out. Standard kit: load bearing harness, a good handful of ammunition, the works. Gloves this time. Doctor Candy might've wanted her to stay put for a few days, but she was never the best listener to authority. The gloves she wears have been well formed and well sweated to her. They're about the only remaining piece of clothing that had remained from her wardrobe before the war, but they fit her new life. Hard knuckled, leathered up, they had survived Zeon, and would most likely survive a regular trip a few blocks over to the south.

The drip of the sky above in its early mist is beat away from her eyes by the brim of her boonie hat, and once again she had gone into the dead city.

The airwaves above had been alive at least:

"Ghoul's out and about." The staticky background chatter from 5 Pavilion's scouts, situated at the lower cusp of downtown Seattle amongst its incomplete construction, looking down upon her from above more than likely. She had raised her hand as she heard the chatter in her radio, wired up to her ear, giving a deft wave hello and goodbye to wherever they would be. 5 Pavilion had been the construction workers, led by Foreman Foreman, and here they kept their lonely watch, not too far removed from where they had been before Zeon came.

They were the only others who dared called the upper threshold of Seattle's remaining skyline their home, but they had been wise to stay out of the northerly end where she lived.

Only Win had a general idea where she lived, but he had to Mai's recollection always been particularly observant. Maybe she had made the mistake of using some words that tipped him off about it, but he knew.

She usually doesn't run into her favorite child soldier on those streets, for he's as elusive as herself when she's trying to be calndestine, but she had seen his markings, always so fresh and green and black: Across remaining walls and glass storefronts, Win had painted his way across them in the designs known only to a delinquent like himself. During Zeon's occupation, they had been crying death to Spacenoids, adorned with skulls and slurs for all of the Zeeks. Nowadays they were more and more absurd: The glass door of an electronics shop had a green prairie with simple flowers painted over it, Win's signature, all straight lines spelling out his name, had been on its corner.

It had been his calling cards sometime. All of the guerilla cells that served beneath her had some sort of signature that they left among completed raids or ambushed patrols. Win has his graffiti, a former bouncer operating in Little Saigon took teeth, while Tammy had made sure to riddle every single vehicle, body, and inch of Zeon owned space with bullets from her machine gun.

Mai hadn't been as theatrical with her direct cell. Her personal signature didn't need to be anything more than a hole through the heed.

Her sniper rifle had been out and front of her instead of its usual place while traveling on her back.

The Conclave had been doing its best with its new influx of sympathizers from the Dock Market, now destroyed, in preparing and sending out more and more guards to the Pavilions to keep watch over the city. Fear of the Reaper Lords returning had been all but implied, and everyone knew if they came back to Seattle, they would be coming to take and command.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: control and power over territory was what drove the ambition of some men.

She would know, having the poster boy, literal, of that imperial ambition in her apartment.

She didn't want a fight. She didn't want to be dragged back into a war. She would kill for the privilege of not having to deal with it.

If any Reaper Lords would cross her path and assail her, she was ready, but for now, no major movement had been reported from the south from Tacoma.

Voices from scouts she recognized chattered over the air, and they provided her soundtrack as she walked those lonely roads.


She didn't want to spend the day out like she usually did, which is why she out early in the morning, sky still dark, toward the Seattle Public Library. It stood, alone in its plaza, its still remaining glass of its boxy design reflecting dead Seattle, while its east side was partially collapsed: That end had been host to the carcass of the definitive feature of that war. It lay dead, abandoned, but every once and a while scrap of metal further would be ripped from its green hull, the head of the beast having long since closed its one evil eye. She was more familiar to the concepts of mobile suits than most. Many times, she would see their origin machines: the mobile workers, on colonies not yet finished, and yet her family had traveled to in order to start tuning the weather systems.

Their military application was just a rumor when she was in the Academy, but in only two years from that time, Zeon's Zaku mobile suit had ravaged modern warfare. The Zaku-II that laid slump against the Seattle Public Library, broken glass draped over it like confection, had learned however that being at the spearhead of military innovation did not exempt it from the lessons of the last wars.

She wondered how much her curriculum would've changed if she had known that mobile suits were going to be crucial elements in Spacenoid doctrine in very short order, however based on her observations no curriculum could've been implemented. This was all very fresh, exploratory in their usage, and in the end a mobile suit was still considered enemy armor and liable to counter-action derived to take down tanks.

This Zaku was her kill, or at least, her kill by the way of her cell laying ambush.

Murph, for as much credit as Mai would give him, had done more damage to mobile suits deployed in Washington than most, but she from time to time had to deal with them.

High Explosive Anti-Tank, HEAT rounds still were moderately effective at certain angles and, especially within close proximity, and before Zeon could find out, the city had become a death trap for mobile suits to travel through with every other building filled with guerillas like here with shaped charges, anti-tank weapons stolen from either the Zeeks themselves or given by the Federation, and in the case of the former construction workers union, insurgents crazy enough to hop onto the mobile suits themselves and throwing grenades, concrete mix, or any other amount of damaging implements into their crevices.

After the first Zaku had gone down, and the discovery that there had been an emergency open hatch for the Zaku's cockpit, that's when the game was up for infantry trying to take down Zakus.

As the war progressed however, and more and more of Seattle was cleared for free engagement, casualties against mobile suits had become untenable, and they became persona non grata until those final weeks when the Federation came with support needed desperately to finish Zeon's main military force in the area.

The Zaku against the public library's wound had been open, its pilot trying to make desperate escape, but even in the buildup of debris and general nature accumulation, Mai could still see the smear of blood and the gunshot that screamed from her rifle down through the heart of the pilot against the frame of his once impenetrable suit of armor, piercing his normal suit, killing him.

She gave the mobile suit one glance, cursory to remind herself that she did that, and went into the library.

She was hard pressed to turn this place into a fighting position during the war. It had been one of her safe havens when she first came to Seattle. Her father had paid for a year of rent, but none was promised past that. That had meant saving money for the future, and subsequently it meant her apartment had no reliable access to any of the modern "amenities" necessary for her to be at all productive in life. The library with its public internet had at least helped provide her with opportunities. The anti-theft scanners had long since quieted as she passed by, the remains of a firefight months before in blood splotches and shell casings. The shell casings usually got collected before the bodies, but here in the library the bodies had gone first. Zeon had chased her group out of the place and tried to recover the Zaku, but it had been too deep in guerilla territory at that point that any operation would've costed manpower that was day by day becoming a luxury to spend.

In here she was far more relaxed than out in the street, her rifle back on her back, but her hand laying on her pistol's holster ready while the other has her handheld flashlight.

She remembers the layout of the building by tactics alone, not about the purpose of the rooms as they were designed, and no librarian had ever come her way during the occupation. She has all the time in the world however as she steps past the threshold of the lobby and front desk, the backing of slanted, diamond patterned glass walls behind her. High concrete supporting walls as tall as buildings were a staple of modern architecture, and Seattle had, once, been a modern city. It's by no means comforting, at least to her own preferences. On Zum, the public library had been all wood and rug, evoking the older classical ideas of a library.

The Colonies had always emulated a certain look about them. Her father had been signed onto the conspiracy that the Colony Corporation's older administrators, those responsible for the first swath of colonies on Side 1 had wanted to recreate the cities of a golden era untouched by current, politically corrected man. They yearned for a mankind before the Universal Century and its supposed poison.

LA, 1992. Tokyo, 2000. New York City 1997. Beijing 2008. Cairo 2020.

Those were the colony templates that she remembered off the top of her head, and also the historical weather patterns that were requested to be emulated.

She was a young girl when she had traveled the Earth by way of visiting the Sides and their copied locales, but it didn't prepare her for what those cities had progressed from into the Universal Century.

It didn't surprise her that 1992 Los Angeles hadn't looked like UC 0077 LA, after all.

Zum was unique in that it had been natural in its design, made by the need of the people and not the memory of another world, but even then, Mankind yearned for a distant past all the same.

Those distant pasts were all well preserved in libraries like these.

There was no reason to loot a library, and save for the shakings of the world turned battlefield, the Seattle Public Library's insides had been relatively untouched when compared to anywhere else in Seattle. The only other building that she had seen that remained untouched in any relative manner was the Conclave by way of the rules of war.

The helpful signage of the library remained on the maple flooring, pointing her to the general vague sense of where she was to find what she was out here for today, the vault like sections that she descended into, the book shelves looking more like server racks, uniform, reflective of her flashlight as she had made the slow walk down and through.

On her way, the banned book section, controversial texts, had drawn her attention momentarily, enough that she imagined what would be in there: Huckleberry Finn, Fahrenheit 451, To Kill a Mockingbird, Zeon Deikun's Newtype Theory.

She knew Zeon Deikun's thesis by heart. Most Spacenoids did.


Zeon Zum Deikun's "On Humankind and its Expansion into Outer Space; Inevitability and Progress - A Call to Action!"

(First Mention of the Newtype Theory)

"The universe is a new environment, which will compel mankind to change. If the first stage in mankind's evolution was his evolution from an ape to a human, and the second stage was was his breakthrough from feudalism to the rational science of the Renaissance, then the third will be his transformation into a new type of human, a man with profound sensitivity and insight and a far greater awareness of the vastness of time and space.

The transition to Newtypes will be a natural one. The act of walking increased man's range of movement and helped the concept of tribe and nation-state to develop. Powered vehicles expanded man's awareness to a global level. And now civilization is advancing into outer space. By living and working in space, man's consciousness will will transcend the boundaries of Earth and become truly universal. The vastness of space will be "home". And as man's consciousness expands, he will begin to tap the unutilized portions of his cerebrum- the over half of his brain cells unused since time immemorial, the enormous untapped mental reserves given by God precisely for the new environment of space- that will act as the trigger.

O people of space! Now is the time to awaken! To realize your latent potential! We are at the dawn of a transformation of mankind. A true enlightenment of the human race. And we may finally be poised, ready to transcend what has always been thought the impossible- infinite space, and time itself. This is no idle dream. To live in a new universe, man must transcend the psychological limitations of his old environment!

It is the height of arrogance for those who remain on Earth to look up at the heavens and believe they can continue to rule over all its inhabitants. It is true that we- the space colonists- were largely shipped from Earth against our will as a population-control measure. But now we are developing a new identity and awareness. We are a new people. We live, eat, and sleep among the stars. We live in infinite space, and we will have access to infinite energy until the sun burns out fifty billion years from now. Our consciousness will expand, and infinite space will be our true home. God has given us the stars to live among.

We are the people of the universe. We have struggled to survive in a harsh environment, and new generations of colonists testify to our success. Now, when we gaze back at Earth, we see a sacred blue and green orb- the cradle of civilization and a sacred home that we must eternally preserve and protect. Our new consciousness as a people of the universe tells us that Earth was not created to be abused and polluted by a few members of an elite, privileged class. Men and women who have never been into outer space still believe Earth belongs to them and still continue rape and plunder it, but their time has passed. Earth must be preserved as the sacred homeland of all mankind. It does not belong solely to an Earthbound elite! By continuing to dream of controlling all of mankind, they forever deny mankind its true destiny.

Autonomy for the Sides, sovereignty for the colonists, does not simply mean a revolt against sovereignty on Earth. It means that every human should move into space, that the government of the Earth and the area around it should be placed in the hands of an alliance of all Sides, and that the Earth itself should be preserved and protected as the sacred birthplace of all mankind. It is easy to expand the numbers of colonies required to accomplish this.

In ancient times the Christians fought bloody battles for control over the birthplace of their religion, but there is no need for humanity to repeat this mistake over Earth."


She admired the man: one who spoke the truth about those born outside of Earth's gravity. She had known faith once, and even so, even as she had fallen wayward of the grace of Islam, she felt that once pull of Zeon Deikun's word as so close to religion it might as well have been.

Garma had been right. She did know why this war was being fought. She believes differently now, the words of Zeon Deikun occupy a different truth in her head than they once did, having grown into a woman faced with a hard reality that sometimes theory and philosophy are incompatible with.

She's Palestinian, ethnically. It's a land she's never been to, but she knows the story, the conflict, the Nakba and the slow recession of her people into ancient history. When Mankind moved to the stars, it left too many behind. An Israeli state, a Zion, won out in the end and her people dissolved into the world forever. This is something her mother made sure to pass down and remind her, that even though she was a Spacenoid, she hailed from, not only Earth, but a part of Earth with a history.

She was born to fight against those who proclaim, and would take, their holy lands from those who lived there for generations, and she wonders if Zeon Zum Deikun could really make this theory when on Earth, the Newtype ideals have failed, and that all those that came from and would be born from the colonies all originated from Earth in the end.

By intuition alone she takes a glance at her Casio. It's 9AM. Three hours until Dhuhr. Mid-day prayer. It'd been a long time since she had proclaimed the greatness of Allah, since she had sent well-wishes for Muhammed. But what she's done, and what she had wished for in her life, she knows, in some way, faith was not for her, and, even if she begged, would not take her back.

The classics section of the library archive is large, and far more expansive than she cares to put any effort into. In the dark, she only briskly walks through, her eyes wandering with the ray of her flashlight across the shelves, old names that she knows from cultural osmosis speaking out at her.

Byron and Poe.

Austen and Shelley.

Wilde and Tennyson.

Dickens and Twain.

Faulkner and Woolf.

She's by no means well-read, but even the Academy had prerequisite classes that almost every Cadet bemoaned having to take. Literature class had mostly been, appropriately, tales written about the ancient wars. She finds an old memory, glancing over All Quiet on the Western Front. She understands now, truly, and more than just words in a useless essay, on why Paul was very content to die as World War I ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Academy never taught her what happens after the war is fought.

It's not like her to be so caught off guard, between Murph getting the upper hand on her and then, this morning, the sudden dip and then jerk down she does. Her feet get incredibly wet as murky water goes ankle deep at least, a hole in the concrete floor where water had come up from a hole in the floor. A busted pipe below the building, reaching up and sinking the wood down enough for her to almost trip into it. She doesn't yelp, the only noise she makes is a big breath in as if a trap had been made and set: but no, only a hole from dilapidation and wonderful city water that drowned both of her feet.

She keeps any cussing within her as she backs out, the dirty water line halfway up to her knees less telling than the immediate wetness of her socks beginning to soak through her boots. She allows herself a groan through her throat as she sidesteps the puddle, watches her footwork, and continues onward, even less inclined on why she was here in the first place.

A flash of gold and green catches her flashlight, and it shines back at her. Any book that's able to grab her attention was probably one good enough for Garma Zabi. She barely looks at the title of it before she deposits it into her bag and leaves back to her apartment, leaving wet footprints all the way.


Unceremoniously there has been a pile of her own dirty clothes slowly and slowly accumulating in the corner: a depressive color of muted greens and browns and greys along with Federation standard underwear, thermals, and basic clothing. Mai throws her socks into it, disparaging. Gearten had the right idea on trying to get more, and now that the Dock Market had been dissolved in light of Murph, she would be left alone with socks quickly deteriorating. Her boots had been out to dry, and Garma, for his credit, has breakfast waiting for her on the table.

He himself is in bed today, her lack of company not drawing him out.

"Didn't know you'd be back so soon." He's surprised to see her, further surprised by what she does next:

"Here." She plops a volume down in his lap, coming a little too close to his nub that he winces at the impact. It's a simple leather book, rather large, as tall as his fist closed. Its leather is dyed green, with a simple golden inlaid text in it.

It is a book he knows but has never found the time to read, even if it is not only a part of his favored genre of reading but also perhaps the progenitor.

"A very interesting choice."

Mai shrugged, going over the stitches on her hand again. "I just found the book that looked pompous and overbearing. Figured you might like it."

He smiled in return earnestly. "Well, I'll very much enjoy it then."

"I'm going to go eat," she unslings her rifle, poking his chest with it as he tenses up, but this is perhaps the most benign she's been yet. "And when I'm done, let's talk about who else wants you dead."

She leaves as she usually does through those doors to start unpacking her kit and settle in again for another light day, a frank and true discovery of a conversation in both of their immediate future. But today, she's done him a favor, and for now, Garma Zabi sees it fit for him to start The Odyssey.

Before he starts however, he wonders, is it luck that he has ended up with Mai Gul? He wonders as his fingers touch upon real paper, not the artificial missives more common on the colonies. Real paper, real leather. Luxuries he has as a Zabi, but not a common one. All his life, his section of the estate had its own library dedicated for him, and, yet he can't remember ever effectively using it for recreational reading. He'd never been as voracious for text as he had been now. Mai had provided, not more than one night after his request.

A kindness.

An equivalent of a last meal perhaps?

It'd been so long since he had simply sat down and read a book, or even had been at liberty to not have the burden of command in the war. Yet she had given him the opportunity. Perhaps not intentionally, nor as an act of outright empathic fulfillment, but she had, in spite of it all. He does not think of her ulterior aims, her goals, her storm of a mind that she must surely harbor. For almost a year guerillas like her had been his enemy, destroying and killing future lives, and yet with a book, with her care, a part of that is not forgotten, but subsumed by a veil.

What did peace feel like again? He can't quite remember, for his family had always been at war for the sake of Spacenoids, but there's something here, in this cage he has found himself in, that feels like it.

If he can't remember it, maybe he'll discover it.


Homer's The Odyssey, 8th Century BCE

(First Passage)

"Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them."


A/N: Attributions to, of course, Homer, and Tomino's own writing of Zeon Deikun's thesis.