A/N: Thanks for reading thus far, and feel free to follow me on Twitter flyawayn0w.


1-4
Normal


Garma talks in his sleep. Mai is a light sleeper, so she listens to him. A recent development, but interesting, if not slightly annoying. More than once she's caught herself talking to him back in the haze of her own sleepy drowsiness at 3AM, only to realize that she had been talking to a man far beyond reality. She pays his deep sleep thoughts and words no mind if they ever come out past murmurs, for they are, mostly, unintelligible anyway. The trend however was that in heavier dreams, or rather, nightmares, the one where he is reliving the horrors that brought him here, they catch him and his tongue and he screams out his protests, his body writhing in his thermal sheets until all at once he snaps and comes awake, usually bringing her with him. It's not as bad as that first night however, where his rumbling brought himself off of the bed and he had been screaming, half-awake and half-alive.

He never tells her his nightmares as they stare at each other in the dark of night, both awake now by his thrashing, however she is no stranger to nightmares. The Conclave and Pavilions are filled with those who had lived the worst moments of their life, again and again in their restless sleep. In those nightmares, they see comrades lost, family members dead, and the pain that had often put them in the Conclave relived again. Again, and again and again. The Conclave could put them back together again, but not so for the mind and memory that had now been forever imparted.

It's not hard for her to imagine what Garma's nightmares are like then with how he thrashes, and how quick he brings his hands to his face again as he scrambles back awake.

Napalm stuck to kids. That is a fact she knows now because of Zeon.

She knows what it looks like for people who had barely lived to claw at their own faces in an attempt to get the flames off of them before they were cooked alive and left in bodies that had hardly resembled the Human form at all. Garma does the same, and more than once, his finger nails have scraped open his scars and he is left with a bloody face that she, more and more, pats him down from with dressing.

More than that, however, his sleeping words are of horror, yelled out in defiance and then begging: Why?!

He does not scream for the pain to stop; he simply wants to know why.

"Why." She tells him after the sixth time he has awoken in the dead of night like this.

"What?" He is tired, for his nightmares allow him no sleep, moonlight making the pale skin on his face that remains almost glow.

"You always scream out why when you have your nightmares." This is the softest she usually handles him: when it comes to stemming the bleeding on his face with fresh bandages and anti-septic wipes. Her voice is beleaguered herself, but there's no hostility there. She's too tired for that, and he, as far she knew, never went back to sleep after visions like that. He spends the rest of the night reading The Odyssey by candlelight, and perhaps that is better for him. "Are you asking why you're being killed?"

He waits as her palm gently curves his burned cheek, drawing away red splotches of his own blood from where his fingers have caught. Eventually he shakes his head, and his one remaining eye is honest. He still looks with both, a machination of physical habit, but more and more she sees him leaning with his left side when looking. "I know why I'm being killed." Admittance is quiet, and at that early hour there is no pomp of power. "I want to know why I was betrayed."

In the smallest form of sympathy that she can give outside of making sure he doesn't bleed all over her bed and pillows, she lets the smallest of nods, of understanding go through her to him.

Char Aznable's reasons might've been his own for his betrayal, and for all his privilege, he might've thought his reasons had been sanctified, fulfilled when the Gaw went down. Reality hadn't been so clean however.

"Maybe I'll ask him one day." She offers, Garma letting a breath out of his noise in a minor amusement, only to wince as the sting of the anti-septic wipe glosses over his self-made wounds.

"Be sure to kill him after you find out, won't you?" He wants, he desires. Early that morning, a part of that Zabi steadfastness returns. Of course, Mai thinks, that it comes when ordering death.

Char Aznable was still a Zeek to be fair, so who was she to not do so? Being Garma Zabi's avenger however, even by technicality, doesn't quite sit well in her. It's much too early in the day for her to get worked up about hypotheticals and futures she wasn't quite sure she had, so again, faintly, she nods and keeps her kill alive.


Two weeks has officially passed since he's been dug up and brought to life again, all just to die. Two weeks means that Candy returns to the apartment, and on that day, it's earlier rather than later. No more than an hour after Mai had left that morning, she returned with the good doctor behind her, a small duffle bag tucked beneath his arms as he looked upon Garma, reaffirming that he had been alive.

The good doctor had caught him sitting at the table, hoodie and all, sitting there like any other young man, albeit missing what he had been. An all too casual scene that made the good doctor say out loud a fact that Mai herself had been contending with day by day, hour by hour:

"This is really still happening, isn't it?" Candy can barely get out from beneath his breath. Mai had patted his back once, nodding, and then locking eyes with Garma. The message was clear: behave.

He had no intentions of doing otherwise, and he had been sure to communicate that with a shrug. "Good morning, good doctor." Garma greeted himself, swinging himself to sitting at the edge of the bed, The Odyssey put by bedside table for the moment. Candy is surprised that Garma is, by himself, that nimble, scooping his crutch up and standing. His joggers have been, crudely, tied off around his stump, keeping it from dragging, and the hoodie is well crumpled from it being the only thing he has worn in days.

"Well," Candy starts, again glancing at Mai. "I suppose he is, as you said, "stronger than he looks"."

It is a flash of embarrassment that hits Mai in that Garma has to hear Candy quote her. Garma is wise to keep his mouth shut this time. Gihren often had theories about the superiority of Spacenoid genes, and, between the two of them, Mai and himself, they were certainly examples.

He approaches Candy on his own, and only now does he understand the height difference. Candy is shorter than Mai, but taller than Garma, and yet all the same Garma imposes such a grander figure that it pauses him as he offers a two and a half-fingered hand for a shake.

Nothing shocks Candy usually. The medical profession even before the colony drop had been a warzone at times when it came to mass shootings, car pileups, and any number of other mass casualty events. There was no time to be stunned when it came to seconds of action. Garma Zabi offering his hand for him to shake however is a challenge that he, just before his hand does meet his, he pulls away. Garma for his part is unsurprised. It's not the first time this has happened to him on Earth. Icelina's father still refused his handshakes to this day. Principled men had their place on Earth, even if they were cold to the idea of Zeon rule.

Mai touches Candy's shoulder, turning him slightly. "If you need anything, I'll be cleaning my gun." She tells him, and he nods before she looks to Garma again. "You hurt this man I'm dragging you through glass before I kill you."

"Understood." He acknowledges all too knowingly. "Well, I believe this is a checkup, then, Doctor Candy?"

He nods promptly, unslinging his statchel from his side and unbuttoning his puffy coat, revealing none other than his white doctor's jacket below. He had so many that he still did just wear them out and about. It gave people hope, he told the Conclave, to see a doctor like him on those streets again administering aid. "I'll be giving you a full physical examination, actually today."

In the end Mai will kill him, but again the contradiction is sharp and biting. She wants him taken care of oddly enough.

"Down to your underwear, then, and on the bed. I'll be back in a few minutes." Candy closes the door behind him before Garma can protest, not that he would. The last time he had actually gotten a medical checkup was in space. God knows that the Zabi's personal physician would be having a fit right now with how he was, but he doubt that would ever come to pass.

He's down to his underwear shortly, EFF standard issue with the Federation logo on its tag. He rips it and puts it away before Candy returns. The bandages remain however, and those have to go as well, Candy doing the honors of unwrapping where Garma needs to be. The head bandage that wrapped around and put pressure on his dead eye had been removed the first week, but the one that wrapped around his right arm, hand, and right leg stump still remained and were changed out every few nights. They're a lot less caked with his fluid, if at all, the thin film of mucus that comes off from the very bottom layer of each bandage wrap not as painful of an experience for him to feel anymore. Maybe he's used to it, but Candy looks at it approvingly as wipes down the wrapped are with gauze, drying it out until, at once, all that remains are his scars and scars alone. The colder, dry air of the apartment helps, but stings all the same.

"No infection." Candy remarks once as Garma sits on the edge of the bed. "Good."

He feels no more under the microscope beneath Candy's eye and light prodding with latex'd hands than he did with Mai watching over him at home, but it calms him, just a little, that his injuries don't seem to be taking a turn for the worse. The treatment with the ointment has done well to start fading the reddest and most raw of his burns, and the stitches required to close off the flesh where he has lost have remained clean, with little to no puss bubbling out from their crease. He is, in some definition of the word, healthy. A miracle, by any other word, but to Garma it feels wasted with his eventual fate.

Eventually, after Candy gets an eyeful of Garma and assured to himself that he wasn't about to be eaten alive by himself, the checkup begins proper, a stethoscope out, placed against his chest and back as he is instructed to breath.

It takes an hour. It was a full examination. A checklist that Candy goes down as he presses his fingers against muscles, articulation points, looks inside of his eyes, ears, mouth, everything just short of opening him up to get a good look at his internal organs. It is the very last thing however, as much as he feels like an object now, that demeans him. Candy had sat on the nightstand, looking across to Garma, flipping out all forms but a last handful and handing it over to him.

With his left hand it was easy enough to hold the clipboard with what looked like a sheet of medical history, but it was the pen afterwards that Candy offered that had given Garma pause.

He no longer has enough of a middle finger to curl for a grip. Realistically only his index and thumb are useful to him now on his right, and his grasp of holding things in his right is a careful balancing act. The situation with his hands overall isn't a kind one, regardless. Both of them have been numbed, smoothened over, his gloves had to have been torn off of his skin by Mai, patchy blotches exist where his palms are and they swing from cold, to on fire, to feeling nothing at all.

"Can you fill this out for me?" Candy asks of him.

He can try.

His name is first, with the way the way the ballpoint pen however is held, more pincer than grip, however, it is like a needle over a seismograph.

He had spent a good portion of his original tutoring, at the very beginning when handwriting was still a skill needed to develop, perfecting his signature: a flowing, flowering example that ended with a swooping line beneath his name ending to a stop as the dot above the I in Zabi. Now his characters are about as shaky as his first attempts when his young, and it takes about three times as long.

Garma Nolo Zabi.

That's his name, written down. His middle name is a little mentioned article. A trend on Side 3: to take on a middle name to tie themselves to Space itself as opposed to ancestral etymology of Earth. For him it was the echo of his late mother, and because of that, not one spoken often.

Mai must have one, he imagines. He swears she does by some hazy memory where her name was passed by on the class ranking list by him.

Coaxing the pen and clipboard out of his hand, Garma gives it back to Candy, the man empathetically nodding. "I'll handle that for you."

"I'm hard pressed to be filling out medical records for you, good doctor. I don't quite see the point." He can hardly keep his suspicions kept to himself. To this Candy is sympathetic as far as it makes sense, but he hasn't explained.

"You have to be very through in my profession, Mister Zabi. I've seen enough patterns just on paper alone that it matters." Garma's trepidation cannot be hidden, but Candy knows that look of mortality: "If, nothing else, it'll just go to show that you were taken care of in your final days. I'm sure your family would be well to hear that."

His family. What would his family think of him now? In these final days? His actions, how he is so captured by this woman. Shame paints his face, but it was best to just get it over with.

"Date of birth?"

"March 7th, 0059. I'm twenty years old."

"Do you identify as Male, Female or-"

"Male."

"Any known allergies or illnesses?"

He raises his stump for a moment. "I'm missing a leg." Candy stifles a chuckle, and Garma too for that matter.

"Right, but asides?"

He shakes his head. "No. I've been a perfectly healthy for all my life."

"Are you sexually active?"

"Yes." Rapid fire and his tongue had slipped. He's not quite sure he's ever admitted it to anyone that he and Icelina had been entangled like that. Not that it was a matter of great tactical importance, secrecy, or political intrigue. Any who had seen them together in any function might've speculated, and only confirmed by the scorn that her father spoke of him. Candy would have no idea who Icelina would be anyway.

It still didn't mean that he couldn't be embarrassed about it, eyes darting away.

Far be it for Candy to divine what this prince had done, so he moves on.

"Do you partake in drugs and alcohol?"

The princeling considers honestly, thinking back to his recent memory before answering. "I smoke, occasionally. As for drinking, only during formal events. Several times a week, admittedly, but I assure you I often have my champagne watered down."

Candy marks it down. "Do you have a more specific amount for how much you smoke?"

"No more than a pack a month, as I've discovered." Only after the days where losses had been reported more than victories. Only after those days when the models made up by his tacticians tacked on weeks and months to the overall war's projected length. Only after those long nights sitting over tactical maps with his officers and not spending his time with his dear Icelina.

He had been doing that more and more in the month leaving up to the Trojan Horse appearing.

"Still don't recommend it." Candy sighed, pen gesturing up to the top of his head. "Lung cancer got rid of most of mine, up top. Beard turned out okay though still."

"My sympathies." Garma says earnestly, before the rest of the procedural information is cut through.

Of the form Candy concedes, he doubts he needs to ask about health insurance provider contact information. There are more, however, one that he has to consider, regardless of who he is, and moreso what he is. It's an ironic series of questions. Two dozen in total.

He nods through Garma's sympathies for what they're worth. Cancer had run him thin, down to the bone, but in the preceding decades he had more than fattened back up. His late wife always preferred him that way, regardless. "I did, before the war, get issued a new variant of forms. It's mostly the same as our previous versions but there is a section here, I think I do need to go over with you." Candy flips over his clipboard for Garma to look, and, with the bureaucratic language befit of a Federation mandated line, they, in no obfuscating language, were testing for Newtypes. At least in survey form. "This is a form that the Federation Health Council gave to us in 78', mostly for use for patients that we know originated from space."

Garma knew where this was going. These exact forms were a matter, among hundreds, in the final days before the war of the Federation's injustice against Spacenoids. This type of particular health-based racial profiling had only been exacerbated by the existence of these forms when their discovery was turned up. Harmless on their own, but symptomatic of a larger discrimination.

"Very well." He humors, irony thick. "Do your worst."

Candy had tried his best to be disinterested. "I assure you, Mister Zabi, it is no different in texture to what you just answered."

Zeon had no equivalent, just the broad cultural expectation that if, simply put, if you knew, you knew. "If it were so easy to detect Newtypes by a simple questionnaire, I believe a lot of our issues in the Earth Sphere would've been over already."

"Just a formality." Candy insists.

If he insists, Garma must inquire. "Do you believe in the Newtype Theory, Doctor Candy?"

It feels like an offensive question to ask an Earthnoid that to Garma, but it's a question he must ask. It was the question at the very heart of the war after all.

Candy takes a full minute to respond, glancing at the papers before him and the outside world. If this were any other of his patients, he knew he would give an answer, simple, fast. Of course, many people had asked him on the merits of it. None of those people were, however, Garma Zabi. So he finds and bundles himself up before telling him something that might be too pleasing for him to hear. "I believe that Humans are infinitely adaptable to their environment, it's true. Throughout the world you'll find subsets of Humans that are uniquely tailored to surviving where they are. There is a sound logic to Zeon Deikun's theory, however to see it come true over the course of a single lifetime, I'm not sold."

Garma does enjoy that answer, because it's an answer that is the truth. "Humans wield boundless potential, as long, of course, they are not bound by Gravity." When he speaks like this, it really is almost like he's back among kind.

There was three months in between the colony drop and then the invasion of the North American continent by Garma's contingent. Time enough, for certain rumors to come through the medical networks for Candy: People, mostly children, who had inferred by the faintest of gut feelings that Sydney was to be obliterated soon. Miracle children. There had been as much explanation for them as the insanity of Zeon as a whole, but they existed, somewhere out there on Earth, held onto by the Federation. Soothsaying was by no means a part of Newtype theory, but how else save for the supernatural was one able to explain those instances?

Gravity had nothing to do with it.

Mankind was changing, and the man before Candy was proclaimed as an arbiter of that change.

It scared the doctor. It scared him far greater than he had ever felt in his life, but there was no time to be scared in war.

Garma curled his hands, the many times he's had to speak on this to cameras and crowds returning to him. "My generation are the vanguard for those Newtypes that will come after us. Even if some walk among our people now, a greater future awaits."

Candy could never quite forget that who sat before him on the bed was none other than a Zabi, and responsible for all that had been done to all of them.

"Let's just get on with this test then." He could bare the conversation no longer, being in his presence. "Have you, or are you, experiencing effects that are commonly associated with being a Newtype? As follows:

"Do you have an acute awareness to the physical goings on around you even when you have not directly observed them? Have you felt the emotions of other people as if you were experiencing their feelings yourself? Do you feel an inherent need to return to space so much that you feel like you would do anything to do so? Do you have a hard time perceiving bright colors-" On and on Candy went, reading off the gross stereotypes that apparently the Federation had been using as gospel, a great general definition on who or who may not be Newtypes. As if such a thing could be quantifiable. But these are details that are not unfounded. They are indications.

"Doctor, if I may," Garma raises his hand, stopping him. "I'd like to tell you that, my entire family once was tested for these same… tells in a far more concentrated setting. I can assure you that when I underwent those examinations, I was not discovered as a Newtype." He thinks to himself a second. "And if I was, I'm sure you would've heard about it. Besides," He takes in a breath, "I know several."

"Newtypes?" Candy couldn't hide some sort of curiosity and horror.

He nodded.

They were real. They walked among Zeon. A top secret, confidential item, of course, but one that could not be kept for much longer based on how the stories of specific names, again and again, filtered through down from space out to his troops. For the millions at war, dozens emerged proving that Zeon Deikun's path forward had been true. A new type of Human was here, and now it had emerged in the war in his name. If there was any aspect as to why he fought the war as he did, his life and convictions, it was because he had known that there had been a truth so powerful it could change Mankind.

Reports, signed off for Zabi eyes only had come by his desk before he came to Earth, and then mentions from Kycilia specifically in their correspondences. The reports of Zeon's ace pilots more often than not displaying nothing less than the capabilities of Newtypes had been true, and thus, the war must've surely been soon won. For all the scorn, all the confusion he feels for his attempted assassin, there is a lingering thought there that the Red Comet himself was a Newtype in his mind.

"Mankind has spent nearly three generations in space, Doctor Candy. People are beginning to change." Quantifiable, legitimate evidence that Humanity was walking further along an evolutionary path had been there. "If you so doubt me, I would love to show you first hand, if I survive, if you would like to come to Zeon as my honored guest."

"Hmph." Candy had closed off his medical tools into his satchel. "As I said, Mister Zabi, you can promise me nothing."

Outside, black birds circle Seattle, for what, Garma can't tell. A single week on Earth and he had seen more animals than his entire life on Zum. He had spent his life educating, training to deal with Humans and their intrigue, animals were another matter entirely. Their intentions, their hopes and dreams if they had any, they were all beyond him, just out of his reach. It was a feeling not exactly familiar to him.

"Can you at least tell me if you have any new insight as to my condition, good doctor?"

"You're healthy. Healthy as you can be, given the circumstances. You're not being starved or being kept from water, you're clean, you're obviously still of sound mind. I'm not worried about you as so far as your health is concerned. Trust me, we've had ample time to get experienced to amputations in this last year, Mister Zabi."

"Are you concerned about me as far as my overall life expectancy goes, perchance?"

"None outside of my initial general feelings for you as another Human being. Tragic as it is."

"Tragic?"

Candy gives a long nod, his shoulders heavy. "That's one of the miracles of youth: That you're so resilient and able to grow out of things." Candy breathed deeply. "It's a shame that most young people I've known like you were so willing to throw their lives away to fight you."

Half of the population of mankind was dead and more were to come. Every life had even more and more meaning now, and yet fighting still continued. A tragedy to Candy. Necessary to Garma.

"Can I ask you something about Miss Gul?" Garma can't help but ask.

There's not much more than Candy needs to go over as far as the checkup goes. No red flags rise out of his body that he can see. "I can't guarantee I'd keep it secret that you asked it, Mister Zabi." He answers cautiously, a glance out to Mai, out of earshot, with a slightly lowered breath.

"It's quite appropriate. I believe. I don't think she'll mind if I ask."

"Then go ahead." Candy won't stop Garma from making a mistake.

"Is she known to… torture?"

A question that even Candy had had to wonder, from time to time, but none of her guerilla cell had ever admitted as such, and none had ever spoken of surviving torture, if there had been such a thing, from the Ghoul.

"She isn't known to. No. I don't think I've known her to do anything that could be described as such, despite her intense hatred of you and your flock. I would say her rage against Zeon isn't wasted on something as… useless as torture." Candy had cleared his throat, remembering very well that the Zeon troops here hadn't granted them the same reprieve. He had been the one who had to put people back together after all when they were dumped back out onto the streets by Zeon troops after weeks long sessions in the Harborview Mall turned prison, or, worse, if they were lucky, out of Freecastle. "The person who wounded her however, he was quite a ghastly number, if I do say so myself."

That black line that rips across her palm. She wasn't invincible. "She hasn't told me about that wound on her hand. So it was a person?"

The realization that he can say too much is very real to Candy at that moment. "I won't betray Mai's trust. She's done so much for my people. If she hasn't explained to you, I won't… But I will tell you that she has a clear distinction between right and wrong, and there is a line there in the way she's killed you Zeons." Candy pauses just by the way of how absurd this was, but there was truth. "She has not treated you particularly cruelly, has she? I see nothing physically that would denote as such, save for those marks on your face?"

"Those were self-inflicted, I'm afraid. But… No. She is treating me oddly, but not cruelly."

"I say as far as Mai goes, that is about as well as it's going to get." He pauses again, realizing that there is in that room a blanket on the floor meant for someone else. "She is a good woman, deep down."

It doesn't take the years of political intrigue that Garma knows to see the battle inside Candy as he says that.

Good isn't the word he'd use to describe the woman.

"One last thing, about Mai." Candy had looked at Garma disapprovingly, but did not resist. "Did you run this same test on her? The Newtype one?"

Candy stood there, biting on the inside of his cheek. It was one of Mai's many popular rumors that had perpetrated throughout Seattle during the war, but one that was, perhaps, closer to true than most. She had medical records in the Conclave, courtesy of her tragedy, and he more than anyone could run down her list of data ranging from blood work to her neurology tests to discover the validity that she had been, Spacenoid born, a Newtype.

He answered however, for her sake, taking a step back toward Garma. "I've observed nothing that would lead me to believe that Miss Gul could be considered a Newtype." She was supremely effective on the battlefield, threading shots that were impossible in scope and idea, and, more than that, she was consistent as far as Candy had known. Zeeks with holes through their heads had been a common theme in Zeon casualty reports. "She is supremely effective at what she does, but, unless she knows otherwise, it is within the boundaries of what we consider Human."

"So you haven't run that test."

"What?"

"If you had run that test with her, I'm sure she would've tripped some flags, as basic as that test is."

"How do you know?"

"Intuition. Consider it a Spacenoid's sensibilities." He paused. When she was around him all he had felt was a cold nothingness. Not even her body heat sometimes. A feeling of perhaps their relationship, if it could be called that, but it was something he had known of her presence after this long. "I knew her in the Academy, I've seen her work. I would be very interested in knowing."

If, perhaps, the Flanagan Institute had observed Mai, than maybe… Kycilia had always been astute in reminding him that if there had been any Zeon troops that started exhibiting signs of Newtypism to pull them off the front and send them back into space ASAP, and safely.

Wartime efforts and the practical reality had left him little time for his own intelligence officers and commissars to find those special few however.

"Well, consider it my medical intuition that Mai isn't any different than any other Human." Candy answered back.

"I see." Garma pauses, crossing his arms over himself, being able to talk about Mai however is therapeutic almost. Being able to talk to anyone that isn't her is a privilege on top. "But, humor me this then, if she was, if this war never happened, what would you have done upon discovery?"

Candy goes back into a mental checklist that he has been on the verge of forgetting altogether. "If we did have a patient who checked off enough pre-requisites here, I was to immediately alert a committee that was recently established over on the east coast. They would send people out for further testing. I've never done it myself, but I heard from my colleagues in cities with a higher Spacenoid population that gradually, just before the war, there had been some activity. Not a lot, but some." A seed is planted, very much intentionally by Garma in Candy's head with this. He as a medical man had needed to know of all the cutting-edge developments, even in war, and especially when it came to the very ferment of what it meant to be Human. "What are they like, Mister Zabi?"

"Hm?"

"Newtypes." He stresses, privately, teeth grating. "What makes them worth all of this?"

Knowingly, he had only met one Newtype in his life, and she was Char's. To describe Newtypes, he would have to describe Lalah Sune, and Mai was by no means that young girl to be fair to his suspicions. If Char were here, even as the thought of him sours his own breath, he imagined that he would answer that the war would be worth it for her, and her alone, however.

Garma Zabi knows how Char Aznable loves.

If Garma had an answer, he couldn't say, for a woman was at the door, and as Candy himself noticed he had straightened as if caught.

"Anything I should know, Doctor Candy?" Mai stands in the door way, hands on her hips, ready to go back out for the day. Candy has nothing extraordinary for her, shaking his head.

"He is well taken care of." Candy offers, standing up, and leaving Garma behind, well reminded that he was a dangerous man.

Mai's not sure if he's she glad at that result, not that she would sway the natural course of his own healing. That was the point after all: she, and she alone would be the reason for his death.


Several days after his biweekly checkup, she's out again, south, almost as far down as where she had first been cursed with the personal knowledge of Garma Zabi again in her life. No one had told her to do this, but it was for her own knowledge alone.

Smith Tower's observation floor had been one of Mai's southernmost positions as far as her scouting posts go, just a block north of the Kingdome. Garma's Gaw still laid in pieces on the Kingdome's south, but that hadn't been what she was there for today at that early hour. The sky above had cleared, visibility as well as it had been in recent weeks, and from Smith Tower she could see all the way out to Seattle's Kings Airport, or, at least, its northern edge, poking out from behind Beacon Hill

Seattle's hills had been a point of contention during active combat, the locals being far more acquainted with the slopes and nuances of living in that place. No one had wanted to fight an uphill battle, in that war, both Zeon and guerilla, however more often than not it had been Zeon trying to climb up and clear out streets on inclines while people like her shot down on them.

First light was when people usually moved, which was what she was waiting for.

Her binoculars had been of higher magnification of her sniper rifle's own optic, sixteen times to her rifle's three. As much as she had confided her life to it, she didn't trust it to make it anything longer than eight hundred meters, or a kilometer if she really needed to. She had only made those type of shots with pre-ranged markers. A week's set up. If an officer's rounds were known, if they had come out of a certain door, at a certain time; a known quantity, then that shot was set up, written down, and if all went well, executed.

She hadn't exactly known what had made her a sniper of any particular merit by the way she was made, her skills apparent even back in the Academy, so much so that her instructors often wondered if the officer track was how she was to serve Spacenoids best, but it was no matter in the end.

She was patient, she was silent, she knew how to take her shots. She was a ghost, a ghoul, and most of all, a woman wronged.

She had been prone on the observation deck, several couch cushions still remaining from errant furniture lined up for padding as her binocular's tripod held it for her, letting her peer out as the sun's rays finally cast itself on the Earth in its dimness, just letting her, barely, look out to Kings Airport.

Vague shapes, first, boxy apparitions in the dark, spewing rays of light themselves at the end of the tarmac. Vehicles. In Seattle, very few people operated vehicles due to the state of the roads and debris, but the Reaper Lords were the exception. Whips was as much a mark of social strata as ice, as was the life lived by heaters. Cars, watches, and guns.

She could see them at the edge of the landing strip, stick figures at that distance, barely discernable, but white was a great color for spotting and so the speck of armbands had been seen all the same, even in low morning light.

Kings Airport had been a mess during the final battle, destroyed and battered over by the Federation and deemed too close to Zeon territory to justify retaking it. But in the dark, a great yellow box of a vehicle, an excavator, appeared out from behind the curve of Beacon Hill, only to let go of the contents of its buckets out on the far side of the air strip as Reapers looked on.

Murph had the manpower, far more than the Conclave could swing around for tasks like debris clearing. But did he have the resources to fully take advantage of the airport? A question she didn't want answered but was presented with anyway.

She sat there, for an hour, writing down notes on observation as she looked at the activity from the seen end of the airport roll, the same pattern of debris clearing by more and more construction vehicles present as the sun rose over Seattle before leaving back to the Conclave to meet up with Gearten for a mission.


Belltower Industrial and Infrastructure had been, unsurprising to anyone who looked at its logo, an Anaheim Electronics affiliate, so the Belltower Storm Drain and Discharge Channels had been an engineering feat that had been distinctly Anaheim: Expensive, but it worked, and of course it was on the Earth Federation's dime. The sign that had designated the area of the storm drain, nestled along the upper harbor, north of downtown and skirting the kill zone full of unexploded munitions and mines, had only given a minimal list of donators and contributors, which was why the Vist Foundation sat right next to a cannabis growth mom and pop store on the signage.

The storm drains, their reservoirs were giant concrete sink holes in the Earth, all of them fed into by discharge channels the size of buildings beneath Seattle.

It had been the needed solution to Earth's rising sea levels, any amount of rain threatening to flood Seattle from both the ocean and the ground beneath it. These construction projects had been built by mobile workers, and required mobile workers to maintain them still. Even before the invasion, Zeon had found its way to Seattle, laying derelict, yellow painted monsters from Zeonic lay rusted and unmoving in the parking lot of the Belltower Storm Drain facility. A tracked mobile worker, and then a model Mai knew the top of her head: MW-01, the Zaku's civilian ancestor. Foreman, for his knowledge of all things public works, had supplied this answer when someone had talked about hijacking these two workers to use in battle. He had said that Zeonic had sent out some choice updates over the air just a week before Iffish fell, bricking and immobilizing much equipment that had been leased from Zeonic to Earth. These mobile workers were not exempt.

Brando, currently being ridden, had held his head down in recognition of the metal monsters, behind them both, personnel from the Conclave and the rest of the horses bearing them.

"Zeon mobile workers, helping maintain an Anaheim Electronics project, paid for by the Earth Federation, all to help us who lived in Seattle." Tammy commented over her shoulder on her own horse, taking the moment to sit in awe of one of the great machine beasts and not worry about it falling over or attacking her. "That sounds like we had the recipe for peace already, didn't it, Ghoul?"

They were two of a good dozen of people from the Conclave, Foreman included, who had been tasked out from the Conclave with their horses and a cart full of supplies, aimed right at the Belltower Storm Drain.

The sky above, she felt no rain in her bones, but it was going to be dreadfully cloudy all the same.

Belltower's facilities had been a part of the war all the same, the office and facility buildings peppered with gunfire, broken windows, bits and pieces of their geometry knocked off as half of the dozen group split off to the facility building listed as "backup generator". It had left the rest to keep trotting inward, toward the coast, and the first of many of the massive manmade sinkholes.

Brando had made his discontent known with a rough shake of his head, his braided mane bouncing as Mai whispered harshly to calm him. The air of the place stank like accumulated grey water, dredged through Seattle itself.

"These places," Foreman, he had taken the trouble of bringing back out his sticker bombed construction hard hat, spinning his finger in the air at the whole of the acres wide facility that took of so much of Seattle's harbor front property. "Based off of a Japanese design that they use over in Tokyo."

When Tokyo was copied in the colonies the Colony Corporation never bothered replicating the developments on Earth that were required for their survival against a worsening, changing planet. Global warming, rising sea levels, wet bulb effects, desertification; they didn't need to be accounted for in a man-made system.

On any other day, the sinkholes that they approached, giant reservoirs for water caught from Seattle during tidal waves or flooding, would be stored here before being emptied back out. The automation process however had fallen silent with the power. Today that was to change, momentarily.

It was an inspired plan, to flood out the subways and underground service tunnels that connected Seattle below, at least in the connective tissue above and below the I-90. Those passageways had been the lifeblood of the resistance and guerilla force during the war, being shelter, information and logistical highways, and a barrier no Spacenoid Zeek would go. It was enough of an adjustment fighting on Earth, but to go below it? Phobias had kept a lot of Zeeks out, and thus people hiding from them safe.

Now they were to be sacrificed for safety.

The horses were left in the parking lot as the unloading of the paddy wagon turned storage cart began, all the while, the three leaders, Tammy, Foreman, and Mai had wandered over chain link fences right to the edge of one of many reservoirs, the dirty muck of them stagnant, smelling, and where they needed to go.

"About three hundred meters deep. The end point of about dozens of miles of canals and drains beneath Seattle that just sucks up water here instead of overflowing elsewhere." Foreman had always been impressed with any engineering project. His passioned had put him in his career, his dark skin made darker by the life he lived outdoors, building up Seattle from construction project to project. "Shame we gotta mess it up."

"You don't sound that sad." Tammy had began to tie her dirty blonde hair into a pony tail, her blue headband covering her forehead otherwise, her prominent laugh lines slick with oil and sweat already that day. She had been busy moving her Pavilion to where Gearten had pointed out.

"Any day I get to mess up an Anaheim project, I'm happy." The union man in him remained still against a decidedly anti-union conglomerate.

"You know it turns out Anaheim owned my boat even. They owned the company that handled leasing to us fishermen."

"What was your boat called again Tammy?"

"Fiscal Responsibility."

Mai had be silent all the while, unslinging her sniper rifle, peering down into the depths. She couldn't see much past fifty meters except for an honest to good fish, swimming around in there. "How did Gearten say we're supposed to be solving this stuff again?" She asks aloud. For some reason she hadn't thought this much water was going to be in the way, and she wasn't the best swimmer. Swimming in the colonies was for the upper class and people who had time, something which she hadn't neither the luxury of.

"Did… Did Gearten not tell you?"

Mai shook her head, jaw tightening. "I'm uh, guess he usually just sends me places to shoot people so I might've just tuned out if he did."

Tammy had been quick to reach to the top of Mai's head, ruffling her hair over her boonie cap, a Finnish exasperation coming out of her lips as Mai had been, for once, treated like a child. "Life's not all about killing Zeeks."

The solution to their obvious problems had come with a metal crate, dragged unkindly across the concrete to them, the markings of Zeonic on it drawing Mai's vision very pointedly.

"Tammy's here because she knows how to work underwater. I'm here because this kinda stuff is my domain. And you're here because another hand is useful, especially since you're the only one who has experience with-" The Conclave member who had dragged it over had popped the seals with a hiss, and as the cover came off, instant recognition:

The light green and steel trim had been the telltale signature of Zeon normal suits. It'd been a lifetime since she had worn one last during the Academy during space trash collection duty. The form fitting utility, EVA-capable suits had been as common in space as any number of vehicles. Two-for-one deals advertising colony-approved cars coming with an emergency normal suit in the survival kit in case of sudden decompression had been a common deal. Most first-generation immigrants to the colonies, still unsure about their existence in space, often had normal suits in their homes just in case of a breach. Such fears were unfounded, according to the Colony Corporation, so Mai's own experience with them had been minimal until the Academy, and then it became mandatory.

One of the hardest tests given during the Academy in the course of survival training was the emergency suit up of a normal suit, done in a zero-g environment and a time limit: fifteen seconds. That was the amount of time for the average human to lose consciousness in space, fifteen seconds after that, eyes would start popping and skin would be "boiling", followed quickly by death.

"I'm not too familiar with these things," Tammy had awkwardly held up on of the four suits brought out. "But from what I hear, these should totally be capable of going underwater."

Mai had picked one up, running the feel of the synthetic Teflon, Kevlar, and Nomex disgusting nostalgic, the stylized helmets of a Zeon mobile suit pilot laid out besides each suit. These were fresh suits, not worn once, the creases fresh. She looked up at Tammy, more confusion on her face than not. "Where'd you get these?"

Tammy had been quick to answer as she put on one of the helmet's independently, red armored hump of a cross on its forehead. "Found these at the bottom of one of the disposal ditches Zeon tried to destroy their gear in before they got overrun. Apparently, the fire blazed out before it got to these things."

Foreman had thrown his over his shoulder as he looked at the man who brought them over. "Radio to me when you make any progress on the generator and get the charges would you?"

"Right Boss."

"They should work underwater, right?" Tammy had poked at Mai making sure, even as she dazed out, looking at what they were.

When the Zeon command sub had been sunk, rumors from various cells had been that a handful of survivors had made it shore wearing full body suits that Mai could only presume as normal suits based on the description. As far as her own firsthand knowledge goes, she couldn't find a point where they wouldn't work. If they were secure for space, it was secure for diving.

Space.

She really did wonder if she would return to space one day, and not be left on Earth forever. Why she cared, she couldn't articulate, but it drew her up there, and these suits were meant for somewhere else.

"Yeah," she finally said. "They should."

Normal suits had been a refined science, efficient because if not, any margin of error meant absolute death. The internal oxygen recycler's battery for most military-grade normal suits had been around sixteen hours, assuming that the occupant of the said normal suit hadn't been under duress or the normal suit itself was damaged. Even the real figure: four hours approximately, would be more than enough for them.

They were designed to go over clothes, but even then, base layers only had been the preferred way to go about it, Mai indicating as she took off her soft-shell jacket, laying her rifle on top of it, down to her thermals.

"Plan is simple. We put these on, head down, and we place explosives at certain structural walls before we get the pumps here back online and reverse them. That should do what it needs to."

Flushing out the city beneath them on their side was a move for internal security. To anyone who had spent any time in the sewers or Seattle's underground however, one would often argue that it needed to be washed out. Bodies remained down there, after so long, wedged or trapped beneath collapsed sections of the weights of other bodies, courtesy of bombardments that had destroyed sections entirely or the sparse times Zeon did send squads down to flush out guerilla fighters. When men had gone in and bodies had come out for them however, they settled with fire: Zeon flamethrowers flooding down with flames from above. The stench of burnt flesh was permeant now.

"Sure this won't collapse the city?" Tammy had asked. Foreman has considered her question, shaking his head as an answer.

"Before the Universal Century started, the local government spent billions digging Seattle up from below in anticipation for sea level rises. It'll hold for now."

Billions to mitigate as opposed to less to address. Much about Earth's environmental issues had been brought up in Academy courses, and how, perhaps, all of this, the war included, might've been able to be prevented if it hadn't been for the short-sighted inclinations of their ancestors of the last Human era. Hindsight was always 20/20, and yet wasn't something like the condition of the Earth so obvious to take care of? Perhaps not.

A problem for the descendants of man to take care of, to suffer through, and to the pay the price.

Mai knows not who sold her generation, but she knows the answer lies in a distant past.

Satisfied with Foreman's answer there had been little else to do but to start gearing up, however they all wait for Mai. They have no idea how to put on a normal suit.

It's the same as any other jumpsuit however, one that she easily steps into, thankful that she fits in a man's size. The gauntlets that her hands fit into however give tell to what type of normal suits there were: they were for mobile suit pilots, cuffs that of the golden arrow design of Zeon's piloting corps. It's not a zipper that keeps the suit sealed, but rather an electro-magnetic lock that ensures complete enclosure, the minor zap she feels as it kicks in as the locks layer on top of each other an old feeling. It doesn't take long at all for her to be dressed as if, once again, she had been a soldier of Spacenoid kind, helmet in her arms.

Tammy had looked her up and down once before chuckling to herself. "Shit"

"What?" Mai had looked herself over as well, as if she missed something.

Tammy however had stopped her, shaking her head. "Nothing. But if I had a body like yours, I'd probably still be married."

Foreman, married man as he is, makes no comment as he dips down to grab his own normal suit to put on, emulating Mai. Two opinions form between the three of them, inversely related: How wrong it feels to wear the skin of the enemy, or how right it feels. It's not an uncomfortable thing to wear, and as Seattle proceeded into late Fall, cold and wet, the insulating and padding beneath were very accommodating.

The helmets go on much the same, with Mai going first, balling up her hair to accommodate before sliding on the fresh helmet, the world going wash with the polarized visors, sealing as it overlapped her collar.

Tammy and Foreman are less graceful in putting on their suits, getting on the floor and rolling around momentarily for their own, but eventually the three of stand in Zeon normal suits, a sight that gives pause to the Conclave personnel that has brought over the requested explosive charges.

"I'll be honest," the man, from Foreman's Pavilion, is brash but true: "Just looking at you three makes me want to put a bullet in all of you, looking like that."

Tammy had finally set down her LMG besides Mai's rifle, there was no use bringing weapons down with them. "Don't blame you."

The man turned to Foreman. "Got what you ordered, Boss." It had been a duffel bag, its contents shown off immediately with pride. "Plastic explosive. Military grade."

The Federation and Zeon both had left so many weapons and utility behind in Seattle there had been an honest question extant about what any post-war was going to look like. For the Federation's case, if the war had been lost outside of Seattle, then at the very least any Federation guerilla movements would be well equipped for the resistance ahead. For Zeon, they didn't have a choice. Though the matter of post-war was a question that kept rolling forward. Whoever was the victor would have to deal, eventually, with all the weapons brought to Earth.

For now, however it had been useful for the Conclave.

At least twenty blocks the size of water bottles, wrapped in paper, a synthetic, almost rubber gum like substance shaped beneath it. A half block of what had been presented had been enough to completely blow the top off of a Zeon tank. What was being offered would be enough to blow through walls in the infrastructure below.

"If I've done my homework right," Foreman palms one of the blocks, tossing it up and down in his hand, inert until a mini shockwave from a remote detonator hit it. "Where we blow these should be enough to create a pressure difference that lets the water collected here to flow back out toward the city when we reverse the pumps."

"And if we mess up?"

"We get more sewage than grey water and we all have to deal with smelling like shit for the next few months. Now check our suits I don't want to drown."

As she checked the man who had delivered the charges had waited patiently, eyeing the guns left behind: Tammy's light machine gun, his boss's revolver, and of course Mai's storied sniper rifle. Out of the corner of her eye Mai saw the avarice.

"Don't touch my gun, and especially don't mess with my scope." She barked.

Tammy's LMG had been one torn off of a Federation emplacement overrun, a lifetime of fishing making her able to swing it around as if it had been nothing. Not that her accuracy had been any good, but LMGs were meant for suppressive fire and she had been a loud and brash woman. It fit. As for Foreman's revolver, it had been his before the war, bought for the need of protection against union busters that would occasionally toss stones through his house's window.

Everyone and everything had a story.

The man had gotten the warning from the Ghoul quite well, straightening out. "I'll head back to the pumps, try and get them online with our generators."

Foreman had taken in one last breath of fresh, unfiltered air before he had put on the helmet of the normal suit. "Try not to accidentally jump start them when we're down there. I could do without being chewed up today."

"I'll be on watch, Boss. They won't do anything until they hear from me."

"Good man."

Tammy followed shortly after, sliding her own on. "How come your crew is so polite to you, Foreman?"

"Solidarity forever, Tammy." The union had made the construction workers of Seattle strong. Not that Tammy had been a bad captain on her fishing boat by all accounts, but there was a certain charm that Foreman had had. Even during the war he had found his strength in his comrade family.

He would've been a good officer, Mai thinks from time to time, but the thought that one would fit in well in the military was becoming a less of a good thought and more of a curse.

There had been the beginning of a ladder, near their end of the hole, that would've led all the way down. With nothing left to prepare for, Mai had slid on her helmet, and the airy fit of the helmet, pressurizing with the suit, had sounded off with a pop. The crank to open up the visor was found by her fingers all too naturally again.

"These should have short range radios in them that automatically connect." She spoke from experience. "Let's get down there, after that, Foreman, it's on you."

"Aye cap'n." Foreman slung the duffel bag around his back as the three of them began to move off toward the very edge of the hole turned pool, the froth of it debris from the city, a dead bird floating dead center.

They didn't feel the water as they dipped their toes in, hooking themselves to the rungs as they began their long climb down, full submerging themselves an experience that had been surreal, but not uncomfortable.

"We good on the suits?" She called out, all of them now fully submerged, she on point going down, Tammy and then Foreman above her.

"Seals all tight." Foreman had answered, hanging off with one hand.

"Ain't drowning yet." Tammy remarked, looking the long way down. "Shit."

A long way down, all filled with water. Not a particular safe descent if anyone just decided to dive in. Debris had floated in the empty space between them and the other side, stagnant water as this was keeping it all floating without end. All they could was just keep climbing down.

How does one describe Gravity when they were born in a place that did not have it as law? How does one describe what it means to be born without being pulled down to the Earth? She was trapped on Earth, and Zeon had fought to free her.

"What am I doing?" A quiet question, muting the radio, with no answer descending down, down, further down into the Earth, hollow creaking of water around them against the bounds of the concrete.

Unlike Space, the water pushes in on them, the pressure apparent, unlike Space and its constant nothingness, but it's familiar, and her memories bring her back to the Academy again on her first space walks. The particulates in the water are almost stars, and those she goes down with are almost classmates. But it's never the same.

She presses, naturally onto the side of her helmet, LEDs on its side lighting up her immediate field of view. She had forgotten at all that this was a feature built into normal suits, brought on by muscle memory. Tammy and Foreman follow, and suddenly as they descend it's not so murky, not so unknown.

Fifteen minutes to climb feels like days, but they make it down eventually.

Mai feels at home here, even if, compared to space, all her movements feel slowed as if she had just experienced a concussion. This isn't space, but on Earth, this was the closest approximation. So, she hangs off a rung, twenty meters off the ground, and jumps.

Her old physical memories kick in, of drifting through space attached only to a line from the Academy's shuttles, and she feels no fear as she falls. Her eyes close, and she is weightless again. She is again, a Spacenoid. She can pretend Gravity doesn't have her now. She can pretend that she is aimlessly adrift, both in her mind, and physically. In her dreams that don't do with the violence of her life, this is what she feels. It bathes her warm, like a homecoming, and yet she cannot be any further from it. Garma is right, in the end. She hailed from Space, and that could never be taken away from her, even if it meant that she fell under him in the bonds that have been made in the stars.

Lightly, her back touches concrete floors, and she looks up to see the opening of sky above her, hundreds of meters up.

Earth, when looking up at it from the lunar surface, looked similar.

Tammy and Foreman had made it down shortly after, standing over Gul as they both offered hands to haul her back to her feet. "Something wrong?" Tammy had asked, brushing the accumulated dirt off of her normal suit's pack. She shook her head. She didn't have time to be nostalgic.

"You know, back in the day when it was really expensive to get people up into space," Foreman recounts in his city accent, moving around, imitating astronauts of old. "They used to train for zero-g down in the water like this. You ever have to practice, being up there, Ghoul?

She shook her head as she was raised up. "Was born in it, Foreman. As natural to me as breathing."

It'd been a long time since she had floated truly, expertly harnessing momentum for the most casual of movements. The weather control systems of a colony and especially its more maintenance-minded modules had often been outside of its Gravity, and her parents had done her well to accompany them to the innards of the colony to show her how it all worked out from the inside. That had meant a lot of hours in normal suits, and a lot of hours in zero-g, even moreso than some other Spacenoids she had joined the Academy with.

"What's space like, Captain?" Foreman asks again, "What is spring like on Jupiter and Mars, eh?"

They all look up to the sky above through murky water, like underwater walkways in aquariums, they looked up and saw the separation between the surface and them through glass and water. Just on the far side of the hole: the tunnel opening of the storm drains.

He meant it only as a clever way to get the lyrical reference in, but Mai could be sincere in her answer: "The furthest I've been from Earth is Side 3, actually: Zeon." If she had to get specific, if she really needed to say, she could say that she was from Zeon, a truth forced out of her out of the necessity of it. Guerillas didn't like operating underneath a Spacenoid when Spacenoids were the enemy. She went on further to explain, "Most of Mankind is still within the Earth Sphere, but there are colonies out there in the rest of the solar system. Not many though. Mostly around Jupiter."

Past the immediate Earth Sphere laid Zeon's asteroid belt bases and installations, sprawling with mining operations that had originally built most of the colonies that no doubt pumped on still with the war. Beyond that hard barrier between easily accessible space and the rest of the solar system had been the true frontier wilds that remained:

Jupiter and the Jupiter Energy Fleet maintained a choice number of colonies in the Jupiter Sphere, completely removed from the current ongoings of the Earth Sphere, and were generally considered the furthest reaches of any concentrated Humanity. Rumors and half-verifiable rumors from the nascent Federation's Office of Astro-Exploration had been seldom understood decades-long missions to outposts and stations as far out as Pluto, but the number of people that had particularly mattered to in the Earth Sphere was a quickly shrinking handful.

"That's reassuring." Foreman spoke quietly.

"Yeah?" Tammy posed. "What's so reassuring about Humans being so far out there in the dark of space?"

"Well, look at it this way, if we all blow up, if every Human in the Earth Sphere just one day dropped dead, we'd still have people out there to rebuild."

"Or they could just keep finding themselves doing this shit, over and over again."

"Have some faith, Tammy." Foreman had primed his charge like clockwork. This wasn't his first time blowing apart infrastructure, both in his civilian life and in the war. "How about you, Ghoul? How say you?"

"I don't care."

This feeling of being underwater is hard on her feet however. Any movement she's had that day has been unkind and annoying. All of her socks are destroyed, the ones she wears now the most recoverable of the bunch.

Gravity, for all of its faults, is hardest on Earth for her soles.

Each colony, each ship, each solar body had its own type of gravitational pull that varied, and she had never been as comfortable just existing as she had been on Side 3.

The pace they walk is slow, the pressure of the water staying any jerky or fast movement, but it's peaceful down here, save for the drab grey and greens, an eternal fog always a dozen feet out from them they had to wade through.

Laminated, a map comes out of Foreman's duffel bag, red Xs marked out.

"About four hundred feet down this tunnel we get to the storm drain proper." He calls out, but Mai doesn't move, not as she takes a knee, a shape in the dark approaching them, drifting.

They have no weapons save for themselves, and suddenly rumors about crocodiles in sewers are suddenly far more real as Mai cuts her LEDs, the rest following. The man-sized dark shape approaches them slowly, Tammy already trying to find a rock or debris herself to hold, but Mai is first to see that it's nothing that could hurt them.

It was a man-sized object, because it was a man.

Dead bodies are not a strange sight nowadays in any condition. The number of ways the dead can appear however is numerous, and the dead body that drifts before them is grey and bloated, but still, frozen in time at some point well after death. His face, the remains of a long, unkept beard ghosting its lower portion like a haze, floats almost free of him. He didn't die peacefully, however that happened, sucked into the storm drains of Seattle.

Around his form he was cast in the fatigues of, not the Federation, but an Earth national military, worn down, not by the waters around him, but by wear and tear.

"Poor guy." Foreman finally breaks the silence as the body stills. The dead hold no more mystery, no more eeriness or horror to them.

"Veteran?" Tammy asks aloud.

"Probably," Foreman answers. Several of his construction crew had been those of a similar background. "We still have our wars apart from the Zeeks. Mostly over resources. Africa is still hot as ever, literally and metaphorically. This guy must've done time there."

Mai is caught, staring on at the body. Confused, taken, perplexed. The idea of war beyond the one that was being fought now seemed a foreign concept to her.

The body stares off into nothingness forever. It however, grisly at this sight is, she thinks is a privilege. It was always a privilege, as Zeon would say, to be on Earth in the first place. The chance of this man's body being recovered and put to rest had been far greater than those lost in space.

"Let's go." She finally says, and the body is left in the dark for now.


Three people means the task can be done three times faster, approximate locations where charges are to be placed are pointed out, and the three of them take their share of plastic explosive to place.

The storm drain itself is a city of concrete towers extending to a ceiling beyond the fog of low visibility, holding up the chamber, but, without knowledge of what it was, appearing only as an alien city of uniform monoliths, lurking beneath the feet of average Earthnoids.

All of this had been necessary in the end for the survival of this metropolis with the oncoming tides of climate change, now left to be sacrificed. A short-term solution given up for yet another short-term solution.

The wheel, kept turning on and on.

Mai Gul had placed two blocks of her plastic explosives against a wall that was up against another storm drain chamber, intending to connect the two. The plastic gum had stuck against the concrete wall, blasting caps to be blown from the surface placed within each.

Memories flood back despite how hard she wants to think otherwise.


She's not the only forward soldiers that night in the Federation barracks, mere minutes before the main force is in their positions for the attack. It's her and four other cadets, with whispers that Char Aznable was off completing his own objective with Garma's clearance.

It was an easy enough infiltration for a base that hadn't been anticipating it, wire cutters right by the sewer pipes had been seldom watched over, and close enough to the barracks that it made it easy in and easy out back to her sniping position.

Training munitions that had been packed with real explosives had been planted in the bushes by the doors of the barracks, motion activated, set off whenever someone would step next to them. It wasn't the most strategic of placement, but they would, if set off, be deadly.

This close to the barracks, she can hear them, men and women, simply going about their night, chatting. Normal, living their lives. Friends, family to some. Soon to be her enemy.

There was no thought to her about the idea that she was placing down munitions to kill people. She knew that was the case because what placement she did was in consideration of that. But she had felt nothing but the necessity of it.

The necessity of their deaths.

The necessity of her, being able to kill.


Plastic explosive after plastic explosive, planted where they needed to be.

She counted kills because she needed to count ammunition, meager as it was that night, and on that night she had killed twenty eight men and women running to their vehicles to try and defend their base from them: the cadet attackers.

Memories from where she began, dragged out all the way to now. Each brick is another second of what had been, and dressed in the skin of Zeon, it doesn't make her feel any better, just short of biting through her own teeth.

Twenty-eight men the night of the Dawn Rebellion.

Eight Zeeks the night they landed in Seattle.

At least two a week until Freecastle's secret was blown open.

And from there, she lost count until she had probably measured around three hundred and more dead because of her directly pulling the trigger, or pulling the plug.

She would only be reconciled by all of that if the last person she ever killed was Garma Zabi.

His life was worth all of those she had taken.

Right?

Standing alone amongst water logged pillars, this was her space, her void, her loneliness. All she could think of was him.

She knew where his body was going to end up, but it felt right that, maybe, after the dead was done, she would bring him down here, so far removed from his precious space.

And then she'd blow her own brains out right next to him.

This felt right, the pressure around her.


The body of the dead veteran was pulled up with them, the duffel bag after its emptying being used to sling and drag him up from the deep dark. It was Mai that had to do it, but she did not pay any mind, one rung at a time.

Foreman speaks idly on the way up, the sun right above them all now, shining down on them, rays of light gossamer, like flowing shades in the wind. "You would think with over half the GDP going toward defense that we would've fared better against Zeon. But none of that mattered, did it?"

It didn't matter because at times the only resistance had been them. Mai grunted in agreement but it was hardly different in the grunts of exertions.

"Wish it got put into anything but. Maybe this fellar might've had a better life in the end." On and on, Foreman tries to fill in the silence again, but there's nothing more to be said. If the right resources were always put in the right place, maybe something better would've happened. This wasn't the course in history that they had lived through however.

Mai sometimes imagines what she'd really be like if she hadn't joined the Academy in the first place and instead followed her father into the Colony Corporation. She was raised for it, she had the know-how, the environment and language of what it meant to work among those that maintained the great Sides of Human ambition. The Colony Corporation, as far as she could remember, was a neutral party to both the Federation and Zeon just out of the very necessity that someone had to have the documentation and ability to maintain the structures of space so that millions didn't die.

Maybe she would've gone the way of her family again, and found a husband in the workplace, just as her parents had found each other.

Maybe she would've had to live a life without ever seeing a dead body, or killing anyone at all.

Her life would've been better, but this war was still going to happen anyway. The Conclave would've still gotten caught up in this war, Seattle would've still been destroyed, and Garma Zabi would've been shot down over the Kingdome. She doesn't think too hard on his survival being reliant on her presence.

"Jesus Christ, Ghoul, everything you do ends up with a body, huh." The man from Foreman's Pavilion waiting for them had been shocked, repulsed, when Mai had emerged from the deep with a dead man in tow. The sweat she had been working up beneath her helmet let off and out as she had unclasped it and sent it down to the ground, fresh air bombarding her, only to be overrun by the smell of the dead.

"She can't help herself." Tammy chided, letting her drip dry as pieces of not noticed debris hung off of her.

Mai had groaned in the lingua franca. "Just help me!" The body had, waterlogged, and all, needed more than her to just drag it up to solid ground again.

Freshly on her skin, she felt the air around her. It was going to be clear skies for a while.

The handling of the dead was a familiar form now to any remaining in Seattle, so despite the smell of pestilence with the stagnant water, the man was brought laid, flat on solid ground.

"This is recent, you know." Tammy had leaned in as the four of them carried, the waxy skin of the dead keeping the body well preserved, but identifiable. "Another of the fishing fleet lost a guy during a storm. We found his body about two weeks later, looking like this."

"Might've been underground when that Gaw came- maybe a bomb drop dumped him into the sewers only to end up down there." Foreman had been shaking his head all the while, about done with observing the dead. "Mai, you coming back with us to the Conclave?"

She wasn't about to leave this body down there. An innocent bystander didn't deserve to be left behind. She looked up at Foreman, gathering up her clothes and gear, rifle triple checked and thrown back over her shoulder, as her jacket went as well. She'd wear the normal suit back, helmet and the clothes she had worn out there into her kit's assault pack. She shook her head once, hair becoming unruly after a good two hours down there. "I'll just be heading home."

"We'll take this guy back then. Get him cremated… Alright how're the pumps?"

"Doing pretty good. Online. We can start the generators again for at least an hour based on how much fuel is left in the tanks, plenty time for us to get the water here back out toward the city. All that leaves then is-" The man had brought out the clacker to the explosives.

"Cap'n, do the honors?"

"Call it in to the Conclave." She had said in response, Foreman going for the nearest radio himself.. Tammy, long wanting to air her skin out, has the normal suit rolled down to just her waist, tying the arms around herself.

"Conclave, 5 Pavilion Actual. Interrogative: Are we go for detonation? Over."

"Conclave," It was Gearten she could hear. "Roger. Been ready for a bit. Punch it off on your go. We'll start ringing the flood sirens."

It didn't take long after that, but time enough for the drone of the buildings behind them to come alive again, the sound of a building actually being alive with its intended purpose a miracle. The generator and control buildings of the facility had been brought back online in short order, the radio in the immediate area going off and busy as Foreman coordinated the effort, normal suit still on.

For the first time in a year, the whooping tones of distant flooding sirens had reverberated through the city, the birds of Seattle all taking flight, all at once, abandoning the Earth. One cycle, two cycle, three cycles was enough of the alarm as, all at once, the clacker for the explosives was clicked once, twice, and that was that. The crack of the device's trigger had crunched, and below them, barely perceptible, the slow pops of explosives. It wasn't an immediate affect about what had happened, it taking longer than the flood sirens went on for, but eventually it did, the surface of the water bubbling, and then inch by inch, and then foot by foot, receding down as it roared.

"Helluva flush." Tammy followed the level all the way down, the several minutes that it took leaving the two women sitting by each other after a job well done.

Several hundred meters of water, roaring down into a cyclone below as it was joined in cacophony and storm by the other reservoirs.

It was a roar, elongated, a giant breath by the Earth that seemed to want to suck those near the reservoir back into the hole.

Foreman had been self-satisfied, leaning over the two. "Now, when the war is over and we have to rebuild, they're gonna have to keep me employed because I know exactly what we did here."

"Not gonna come east with us?" Tammy was curious. She had been intent on going personally. The sooner she had gotten a proper job again, she had always loudly proclaimed, the sooner she could get her own life back in order.

He shrugged. "Sure I will, but I'm going to come back eventually." Foreman follows the water down, all the way down until only a residual level of it remains at the very bottom, the opening of the passage way into the canals seen. "Shit, we went all the way down there, eh?"

Mai had been silent still, never one to be overly talkative, but always openly disturbed. She had looked over when Foreman poked her shoulder.

"Serious about what I said, Ghoul, the other day. When this war is over, whoever's in charge has gotta hire someone to build. I know you'd be right at home in Local 204." Foreman had hope for a future because he had been instrumental in building it.

She appreciated it, she really did, but not in any way she could vocalize. He got a nod from her, and that was that.

With the body wrapped up in a rug that one of Foreman's people had pulled from the facility, placed in the back of the paddy wagon, the convoy had gone off shortly after what they needed to do was finished up, Belltower's buildings going numb and cold again. Mai's horse, Brando, was taken by a new rider. She would walk the hour home. It gave her time to check her traps anyway.

She was going to wear the normal suit back to her apartment, her boonie hat had been enough of a visual signature. No one else had been known to wear one around Seattle.

Tammy had been the last in trail position, adjusting her bandana tight again, looking down on Mai seeing them off. "Try not to get shot, Captain."

"If I do, you know where to dump me."

That Tammy did.

The effects of their little infrastructural operation had been immediate. The sewers below the streets they walked had been roaring, drains and grates rumbling with the rush of water beneath them. The animals as they were had been freaked out by it, birds skittish, the crows above scattering from building to building as she hid in the shadows of the streets she walked down.

The traps had come up empty again today. They had been empty for a while. Distantly Gearten's words had gotten to her: Maybe she should've been killed less of them. It was hard to imagine that she alone had had that much of an impact on the wild animal population moving back into ruined Seattle, but then again she had that much of an effect on the Zeon occupation. Local wildlife had been perhaps weaker. Though that had tracked in her mind. The Christian saying of the meek inheriting the Earth never specified that the kind would be Human after all.


The look on Garma's face when he sees a Zeon normal suit walk in through the door, with only the realization that Mai is the one wearing it is a mix of hope, fascination, disappointment, and confusion all in one. It stays on his face longer than he'd like, but on her part, she keeps her gaze on it longer than she usually does. It's wiped away by stench however, Garma immediately going to cover his nose with the smell she's tracked in.

"Were you in the sewer, perchance?" His voice is muffled and disgusted, sitting right at their table. He already has dinner out.

"Kinda." She answers him, straight into the bathroom, the wet sticky sounds of her getting the normal suit off and throwing it into the tub to soak.

Far be it from Garma to comment on the way she walks out of the bathroom in only her underwear, just to grab several bottles of alcohol from the kitchen and back into the bathroom, the glug of her dumping the contents over the suit presumably what she's doing. He says nothing, and avoids looking at her, until she has washed up for the day, smelling and looking a little more presentable in the clothes she uses to lounge around the apartment, sitting across from him all the same.

"Better?" Her eyebrow is raised as she settles in for dinner, annoyed, but willing to talk all the same.

He makes a show of sniffing in once before answering, "Undoubtedly." He smells better most days because his medicine and solutions double as cleaners. She only has water, but it's tolerable with the food between them. He can't quite help but take a glance at the pile, or rather mountain, of laundry that has been amassing in the furthest corner of the room. It stinks something fierce but it's localized and near a window, open most days. The chill however is eking in, degree by degree. It needs to be closed, and the reckoning of their combined clothing, or at least, his underwear with her clothes, will need to be dealt with.

Dinner tonight is helping along with the smell situation at least. White rice, aromatic as it is, with butter chicken. Again, a Federation MRE.

"How's your hand, if I may ask?" He says, picking up a fork with his left hand.

An answer comes out of her before she can stop it. "Better." She says again as an answer. She hasn't told him still it had been Murph's wound on her, but that's not his concern it seemed. It is better however, or maybe she's just used to the pain. It reminds her to take another pair of painkillers after dinner.

"Good." How he makes words sound so important, so much his, it makes her sick to her stomach but she can't fight the way it zaps the bottom of her spine and warms a piece of her gut that she doesn't want to define.

"Can I ask another question?" The touching of their forks against food and the platter below is far quieter than she likes. The city lives and breaths, even in battle. Quiet is good, but not silence. The world had its tendency to go completely silent in the moments before a battle. Long-lived Zeeks, or maybe just any Zeek with a propensity for the supernatural had been aware of silence. Maybe Garma knows that. He's not a loud eater, nor is he trying to be obnoxious, but his moves as he eats, the stroke of his fork from the plate to his mouth, and how he keeps his shoulders still, dignified, they scream who he is. He is loud in presence (or maybe she's too fixated on him).

"You don't need to know everything, you know."

"I'd like you know where you got that that normal suit." His fork gestures to the bathroom.

"At the getting place." She chews through her chicken. He's not convinced, obviously.

"…What are you doing with a Zeonic normal suit?" He asks flat out, but it's not an accusation, not that he could try. Though he does attempt something. A button that can be pressed on her. "It's a bit late for you to defect, dear Mai."

She can't hide the twitch of her eye, and then the rough sigh that comes with her realizing that if she is going to be a brat, so too would he. "Did some work earlier today underwater. The normal suits helped."

"So I heard."

"What?" He had said that with far too much confidence.

It's a bashful admittance, glancing at the reason he had spoken as he did candidly: The radio. "I… was on the set today. I wasn't broadcasting, but I was simply listening, after I heard those sirens. You seem to have a robust communication network. It's almost military. Was that your doing?"

Day by day she really does wonder if leaving him alone in her sanctum was what was right, and if she really did trust, or at least expect him to not be a rat. "I got you that damn book to keep you from being nosy." The grit in her mouth doesn't mix well with the cream of the butter.

"You got me that "damn book" as an exchange for information. And I still thank you for that."

One quieter days out since he had come into her life, Mai wonders if it would've been easy if it had been Dozle, or Gihren, or even Char Aznable that she had dug up. They were more liable to be nasty, to be gnashing and fighting against her for the state of themselves. But instead she had Garma, polite, earnest by appearances. Whether this is an act or not, she doesn't know, but putting it up now, after all that's been done to him, it would be a commitment.

He reached for her hand when Candy had been consolidating his stump of a leg, and she never forgot it.

The best she can do is ignore his thanks.

Far be it from her to admit such a large organization of a radio network, but she has to, for it's true. "The EMTs and emergency service people had the base of it, but I corralled people, told them about how radios were to be used whenever Minovsky Particles were in play, discipline, things like that. The habit stuck for them." Her radio set hadn't been used much by her recently, but at times during the meat of the active combat, it had been her weapon as much as her rifle, pinballing between it and a map in her forward command post in the sewer tracking unit movements. "It also maybe helped that I was perhaps the only person in Seattle who knew our-" She pauses, eyes wide at herself and wishing she hadn't tripped up. Even as she pushes on the mistake is made and marked by a attentive Garma. "Who knew Zeon military's radio frequencies and protocols, as well as the peculiarities of Minovsky Particles."

Like a hangnail, Garma could pull apart. He knows. Even with what she wanted to tell him, her removal from all other Spacenoids, from Zeon, is far more tenuous than even she can harbor, strong as she is. He doesn't however. It's nice to know. "I also found your, I presume, personal music collection." There's a rather uncomfortable pace to his voice. "It's very intense, if I do say so myself."

"It beats the country shit that was so popular in the Academy." She took a sip of her evening tea harshly, not too fond of the memory of her dorm neighbors blasting ancient country rock. "When I first came to Earth I heard so much more music than I ever thought existed, here in Seattle. I guess I found what I liked."

"I wouldn't think of you being a- well, listening to that music."

"Oh? What do you think my music tastes would be?"

"Dance. Ballad."

"Wallah." It was a thought that disgusted her so that she had brought out the Arabic curses. As disenchanted and disassociated from her roots that she is, her language is not one of them. She's fluent in Universal Century Arabic, just by grace of growing up in a household where it had been the lingua franca, and her accent betrays her perfect fluency of Universal Century Standard English. Arabic is a rather monotone in its delivery and inflection compared to English, and the accent she has perhaps creates her more of a cold-blooded stoic than she perhaps intends. What an irony that Garma seems to know otherwise.

Stoics don't listen to mumble rap.

It's such an indication however of who Garma is however that she can't help but stifle something close to a laugh.

"I'm quite serious, Mai Gul. I think those type of graceful tones suit you better than this… hip-hop."

She stops just short of throwing her spork at him, but it's not out of malice this time. It's just that he's being ridiculous. "You're too cultured for your own good, you know that?"

Icelina would like to think otherwise.

The benefits of being a woman of New York City was that Broadway had been right there, and she had been far and away Broadway's number one fan. Their first dates were very much including Broadway: private performances put on by the remaining actors that still remained in New York. A shame, she had told him, that so many of the actors had left New York City for the upstate before Zeon landed. This was a problem he had immediately rectified for her sake. Affected by the war, but, by his own effort and funds, maintained and sustained, Broadway, even while the rest of the city nursed its wounds, had gone on as if nothing had happened. It had helped that public notices that Broadway was getting direct monetary support from Garma Zabi himself that had returned many of Broadway's production staff and actors to New York into, as well as any on Earth under occupation, open arms.

Every show that they watched together had been the best version of it, Icelina had all so giddily exclaimed to him after a performance.

It was the ego that made him see the truth that, if he was an actor, he too would put on his best if he was performing for royalty like himself.

It was one of the few times he had considered himself one at all, but it was okay. It was for Icelina's sake that his privilege could be used.

As the saying went: the show went on.

He was supposed to go see a performance of Miss Saigon last week with Icelina, he remembered then and there, and it's a thought that sobers him enough to sit back with Mai as she recovers from very nearly losing her composure.


When the moon and the stars are out in full force, the need for the candles that Mai lights past dark aren't needed outright, and so as they wind down today, they find themselves awfully serene. It was about eleven when she, after squaring away her gear for what she might do tomorrow, came into the bedroom expecting Garma to be in her bed and reading by moonlight The Odyssey.

That wasn't what he was doing however. Instead, he was propped up along the window sill of their bedroom, looking out at the city in the vague direction of south, toward the Gaw and its crash site.

She joined him, facing him as she sat on it, one cheek on and the other hung off.

With a tip of her head, the question was asked of him.

"You must understand," he started, adjusting himself so instead his back was against the window instead, head turned over to her. "That you walking through those doors with a normal suit has put me into some particular thoughts."

"Serious thoughts or nothing thoughts?" Her hands wrap in front of her one leg that is brought up to the window. She hated her own nothing thoughts, the idle thoughts that led her down roads less traveled for her.

"I'm not quite sure." Garma breaths before taking another glance out toward the Kingdome and what was left of his Gaw. "I'm not a particular fan of normal suits. They're rather tight on me, all things considered. It's particularly hard to keep on the presence of a military commander when you're of a… particular aesthetic."

"You don't say." Mai knows what he talks of. He's a pretty boy in more than face alone. His figure is flattering to say the least, appealing to the eye, even across something as base as sexual attraction. She can admit that much. "I'm sure if you were getting out of here, how you are now might help."

"I think so too." He admits. "Gihren would immediately order all official media that depicted me to be scrubbed and replaced. I do look very useful, don't it?" Useful in the fact that a Zabi had suffered as well.

"How often were you in a normal suit anyway?"

"In space? Often enough. I'm a mobile suit pilot as well."

"Are you now?"

He nodded, gesturing back to the Kingdome. "My personal Zaku, it's probably resting in pieces with the debris you found me on. Not that I've particularly used it recently. My direct battlefield deployments are often in my Dopp- a fighter aircraft." He explained, looking out toward the darkening sky and the stars above. With no artificial light, the stars above were always distinctly visible. Location, location, location, and the apartment they shared had been good for what it was. "I leave fighting for other people however, people far more acquainted with combat than me." It is, momentarily, thinking about nothing but the conversation and not who they were, it was nice, sitting, leaning on that windowsill and looking out at Seattle in the dark beneath starlight. "I suppose in the same way you're a natural with your sniper rifle, I must have a certain predilection with the controls of combat aircraft."

It sits awkwardly in her gut, thinking of Garma as any accomplished combatant, especially an ace at that. "A jet is one thing, a mobile suit is another. I can't imagine you've had that much time to train on a mobile suit."

He shakes his head, taking a sip of water from his tin cup left to the side. "It's no average piece of machinery, I will admit that. The simulators that we have don't quite prepare you for the actual violence of movement when maneuvers are actually needed. Replacement training however is something that Zeon as a whole is getting used to. However, they are bipedal in mechanism, and for most, it comes intuitively after the initial micro-systems management."

"Maybe we could've stolen a few Zakus ourselves if it's that easy." A twinge of regret through Mai's voice is odd, but soothing to Garma to hear her admit, she bringing her leg up on the ledge to rest. "But we didn't. Foreman, one of my people, he had a few of his crew trained for mobile workers, but they died or left before we got close enough to even consider hijacking Zakus, and it's not like we could've trained ourselves in any meaningful manner."

Garma can't help but understand. "It's an older saying, but relevant: The further you get into the war, the more and more the people fighting are just replacements of replacements." He can't will the fork beneath the rice to move as he thinks about replacements. "I'm sure, even now, I have my own replacements in the command structure."

"Hard to believe." She says after a time.

"Hm?"

"Your rather irreplaceable, all things considered."

Garma blinks at her several times realizing it is a compliment. "Even from you, that's flattering."

"Just a matter of fact." She breaths, head leaned against the cool, cold glass, closing her eyes. "I never forgot how beloved you were. Made me feel insane for hating you after Sydney." Moonlight hits her skin and makes her an abstract image to Garma, the green of her eyes cutting through.

Again, admittance, one that Garma barely catches by that same moonlight.

"You started hating me only after Sydney?"

She nods, taking her time to respond. "I blamed myself more for joining you that night, not you. Not entirely." His eyes, or rather, his remaining working one, is a deep dark brown, almost black. It's an almost scary contrast to his milky white saucer that is his right eye, sitting amidst a sea of burned flesh. He's looking at her in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable, yet seen. "What… we fought for that night, it was true to us in that moment, and maybe it's still true now. I don't know. I don't care. But it mattered enough that people like us believed in it. How much fault can I really place upon you for that?"

After Sydney however, there was no nuance, there was no precondition. Hatred was the only thing that mattered.

They stayed like that, her words floating in the air until the stars and the moon lit up the Earth. No candles tonight, just them, on the edge of the city and this space they called their own.

"Do you miss, space? Honestly?" Garma asks. She can hear his hair rub against the glass. He too is leaning his head against it.

"Do you enjoy being here on Earth?" She counters back.

"You first."

"Nope."

"… Fine." It's a self-amused dismissal more than anything, he taking himself back before looking up, finding the stars above and the moon. Side 3 was in that direction. His voice as he explains, it's soft, it's personal. Far personal that he wants, but it's only natural. The only other time that he talks like this is by the company of his beloved and a pillow. "My time on Earth has only steeled my resolve. This is a vastly beautiful planet, and I'm sure you must understand that too. None of the colonies, as wonderful as they are themselves, they cannot match the pure awe and wonder that confronted me when I first saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, from a beach, or the Appalachian Mountains, or even the cold northern Arctic. Everywhere I've gone then, I've seen the war Humans scar the Earth and its splendor. It is insulting to me." The words out of his mouth are his true belief, and they are words heard in speeches made by him and his family across the Earth Sphere.

She doesn't like how it sounds against her ear, feet away from her. "I hope you know that what you're doing also affects the people. In fact, I'd argue that you're affecting people most of all."

Garma Zabi met Icelina Eschonbach on a special day, early on in the invasion. It was the first day he had ever experienced rain. True rain that is. Not the type that the Colony Corporation had used recycle water into with its artificial weather system. It had been so much more than he could handle, he was glad it was raining, for his tears of joy were hidden by it. He was simply overwhelmed that he had finally come to Earth. Others would've taken the opportunity to poke fun at him, to demean him in some sort of way. Icelina didn't do that however. All she did was ask, "Are you okay?" He was quite sure he had good reason to feel a fire in his heart then and there.

The first time he kissed her then, it was only right that it took place beneath the rain.

He affected people, but people still affected him. He was not so far removed from the common individual he believed.

"The people are quite nice if I do say so myself. Those who realize and believe that Zeon is here for their best interest…" She's ready to launch back into a tirade, but this time, at least metaphorically, it is Garma that reaches across. "I know your opinion already. I know."

They could do without it tonight, and she supposes, she can concede that. Her head tips back against the glass for support.

"Now. How say you?"

She's not as gifted with eloquence as Garma. She's blunt, unkind, and, quite frankly, talks like a man. Even she however can speak from the heart. It'd been so long since she spoke of space in a way that hadn't been in scorn, for any who she talked to had great scorn for the Spacenoid. Garma had saw it differently, if not represented it. In the course of human events it was impossible to ignore the simple fact that Garma Zabi was her homeland. Whether she wanted it or not he had been a part of the very ferment of what it meant to be a Spacenoid and to fight for it. In another life, she worshipped this man; fought and bled and maybe died for him.

"There's always going to be a part of me that wants to go back out there." Her head is leaning back on the window, and the cold of it beats back a headache forming, the pressure feels good. "Not because it is space. Not because I'm a Spacenoid, but because it feels like, sometimes, if I could just go back up there, my life could just go on. Like it should've."

It was a life where she probably, hopefully, would not have experienced the loss of a baby, where the pain she felt was not as cutting or severe as having her child die within her. Those first days after, she begged for death, or to wake up in a different version of her. Her requests never were answered, and instead she had to take her consolation from Zeon as they came.

"A life that would've led you to service under me, surely." Garma says cautiously.

"With Zeon, sure. Under you, who knows?" She sounded annoyed at the very thought that she was going to be under Garma in any eventuality.

He shuffles, leaning on the glass with her. "I had my pick of my officers when I came to Earth. Most of them served with me during the rebellion. It's not unreasonable to think our paths would've always crossed." The inevitability of her life was that she was always going to either die, or be miserable, in war, in the proximity of Garma Zabi. She doesn't know whether to spit or to groan, so she stays silent. Their eyes however, in that low light, when the world is not so bright, she can stand to stare right back at him, watching him. Garma Zabi lives, and will die, but her decision alone, and right now he is beholden to her. By that alone she holds his gaze in the dark, tracing his ruined features, his jagged hair. His right hand rests upon his left knee, the folds of his flesh over his lost fingers clean and well kept.

Bold as she is to look at him for so long, bold as he is to speak to her. "If you ensure my safety, if you lead me back to space, I can assure you that you will have your chance at a better life." He's dead serious, and he squares himself so, looking right at her. This is the very first time he would seriously ask, that, maybe, just maybe, he would like to tell her that he would like to live. And so he had offered her something.

She's impossible to read, her mouth always in a slight downward curve with an apex that seemed to almost bow to her nose. Her nose is a button one, meant for faces far more innocent than her own. She leans back, taking in the statement, mulling it around in her head.

It gives him hope, but it doesn't last long as she snaps forward.

He saw stars, he saw the black of space: a hole formed in his face that concentrated on his nose as a snapping shock of pain had gone through his head and then back again as he felt a warm drip start flooding over his lips.

Tonight, Garma Zabi had been punched in the face for the first time, and the result had been predictable. He lost control of his body momentarily, flailing, a guttural growl from his throat yelled out, only to be held in place by the person who had just walloped him. One hand of hers grabbed the collar of his hoodie, the other wrapped around his two hands, keeping them locked. Five fingers of hers kept all eight and a half of his still, captured. Red spilled out from his nose in an uninterrupted stream, all the way down to his new hoodie, handlebar moustache of hipsters ruined, pooling into a red splotch as she kept him there, looking right into him, her forehead touching his own, once again. He could smell all of her, the putrid smell of this city, dripping off of her.

There is no fire in her voice, just the dead and the disappointed. "You've already directed the course of my life in a way that can never be forgiven, don't insult me." Before he could respond, she let go, and he fell onto the floor. "Let it bleed."

He really believed that he could offer that to her, and Mai can feel nothing but insulted, so much so that she can't even imagine spending the night in the same room as him.

"I'm sorry!" The taste of his own blood touches his tongue, and his spittle from it is coated red, droplets onto the carpet below. The pain, it clouds him, momentarily makes him forget he had not two legs. He tries to climb up to go after her, but all he can do is collapse. "I didn't mean-"

Mai turns, and he freezes at her feet, fearing a strike. All she does however is look down on him and her own blood red rage drips from her mouth.

"I don't believe you."