1-5
What you Deserve
Garma Zabi counts the dead after the Dawn Rebellion. His responsibility, his deaths, his and his alone to account for. The Federation has been chased off to the space port and Guardian Banchi is the first colony taken of a war yet fought, years in the future. After he comes to, Dozle agonizing over him, he mans up again and becomes a Zabi man.
It is Lino's body that he forces himself to see.
They tore him from the wreckage of a Federation tank, half-melted, broken in with the metal. Blue on blue.
The fog of war was Lino's unmaker. How he had gotten into a Federation tank, no one knows, and those that had fired the shots that destroyed it could not be guilty. How could they know.
Unfortunate death. Useless death.
His body, or rather what remains, is in three parts: Right leg, some of his left arm, and then his torso up to his head. His flesh isn't clean as it sits in a body bag, laying across a stretcher in one of the hangers that was taken from the Federation. All dirt and grime, grey, not alive. His eyes had been palmed closed long ago.
Suddenly in that morning, cold and dry, it becomes warm. Too warm.
A hand is on his shoulder.
He jolts, flak jacket still on him.
"Lino was a good man." Char Aznable tells him, rifle still in hand. Behind his mask Garma cannot know anything. His mouth, however, is free, available.
The last time Garma Zabi kisses Char Aznable is also the first time he is the one that initiates it. It is a needy kiss. One that has Garma ball his fists at the collar of Char's flak jacket and drag him down, just so much, for him to take what he needs.
They did it.
The Federation was challenged, and they had won.
And so Garma takes one last thing that day, and it is Char Aznable's mouth as they stand before dozens and dozens sacrificed in the name of Spacenoids.
Outside of the hanger, a lone woman, Mai Gul, a wooden rifle in her hand, stands before the rolling scores of Federation dead by her hand, and no one finds her, their bodies lined up on the ground, waiting for their final dispensation. She waits for them to be processed, and when they do, she too disappears.
When Mai returns to the Conclave the next day, intent on getting out of the apartment as early as possible, she comes to reveal what her own independent recon has uncovered, and the scouting she had done in the hours before she showed up. Again, she had gone down to Smith Tower to look down upon south of Seattle, and again, the same thing: more movement by the airport, and more than that, the slow burn of life from trucks of Reapers rolling around the city southerly. Not close enough to matter, but close enough to care.
The radio reveals even worse:
"I'm going to be frank, Conclave, Seattle is just you, or us, and God knows if push comes to shove who's going to win that fight. We're going to give you until December to get lost. You've got no reason to stay and all the reason to leave. Consider this the Murphy Courtesy. Any poor bastard who is still caught in the middle. Get out of here. Or hell, join us, the Reaper Lords, and run this city right when the war ends. This message is on repeat."
It was the tail end of about a five-minute, meandering speech spoken by Elliot "Murph" Murphy's less than eloquent voice.
"I prefer Garma." To Mai, it seems almost unprompted the way Gearten says that as she sits on his table in his prefab office in the loading dock, more and more the clipboards and requests from him piling up with the arrival of more and more people to the Conclave searching for safety. "Least his radio firesides were something you could listen to." It stumbles her, but she hides it well enough. It's a bias of reality that the second that he has appeared in her life, every other detail, roaming those streets, becomes a detail of him. Leaflets left over from the bombings, posters put up by the occupation force, graffiti decrying all Zabis, Garma is everywhere now, and yet she knows where he is: In her apartment, in her bed.
She waits because she wants to kill him on an incredibly special day, because if not, the opportunity wasted might be the thing that kills her. She could wait, she could deal with him just a little longer.
"How're weapons looking?" Mai pushes off instead, cutting the radio off and wishing they had Minovsky particle generators just to drown out that noise. "We have enough?"
Gearten nods once, his own Colt Bullpup off to the side. "City is still lousy with them, and all the ammo we could ask for too. It's not an issue if we're talking small arms. We're down to only a dozen anti-armor launchers and maybe a few minutes of continuous fire from Bolton's mortars, not that it matters."
"It might." Mai shrugged. "I see more and more vehicle activity out there by the airport every day."
Gearten had taken another pause to take a breath. Week by week in the war, ever since the first day she had met him, Mai had noticed the seconds longer each time had taken. Soon enough the machine would have to breath for him outright, but until then, he would be a free man. "Well, as long as they're not throwing tanks or mobile suits at us, I think we can put up a fight." The ever-approaching topic of the ever-approaching Reapers had returned the miasma of the fog of war to the Conclave, down from the post-orgasmic veil that had been since Zeon had left. Reality had returned, and that meant a war in some measure as well. "Think we should respond?"
"Rather not." Mai answered instead, adjusting her rifle's sling. "Talking to these people is a lost cause."
Gearten had huffed once, arms crossed. "Tell me, were you always like this in some way?"
It's Mai's turn to give a momentary huff as well in some measure of self-amusement. Some days she tries to remember who she was before Seattle, before those final days at the Academy. She tries to remember a personality, some sort of broad statement that could be applied to her like a byline or summary. Yet that is so far away from her now. That Mai Gul was dead, and she had hardly remembered her. "Maybe." She answers.
Gearten stirs, leaning back in his chair, looking up at light fixture that hadn't been on in months before leaning back down and looking at her. "You know I remember when you first told us that you were a Spacenoid, and then how you told us that you were a shooter during that insurrection or whatever up there in Side 3. You had a lot of balls admitting that straight up and out, woman."
"I wanted to get it out of the way." She tells him the truth. "I had enough problems with Zeeks shooting me. If I got shot in the back, I got shot in the back." The shrug that follows is one that she's taken on quite well.
The person she is now is blunt, unbotherable, but most of all realistic. Life wasn't as rosy or majestic or a put-together story like she had, perhaps, once believed.
Gearten only strokes his beard, really considering her. He, perhaps, had the privilege of the person that had talked the most to her over the last year. "If the world was run by straight shooters like you, I swear it'd be a utopia or we'd all be dead." In a manner of speaking her family did run the world. Technically. The colonies above were controlled, after all. It's little consolation however as Gearten takes one deep breath that pains him, running his large hands over his face as if he had been confronted with an unending pile of paperwork, opposite of the unending pile of paperwork he deals with already. "Look, Ghoul, I do appreciate you going out there and doing this," he gestured to her notes, given over to him. "I'll appreciate it still if you keep going on about it, but just- Do me a favor, when you're out there, not to start shit."
Her rifle had gone unfired for several days. At least since just before the Dock Market fight. Her sidearm had last been fired killing the Reapers pissing on Garma. They ached for usage, but she had been their master in the end. "Can't promise anything, Gear." She had been as sincere as she ever had been with him, tipping her boonie hat straight.
"Well, you have to when it's the Conclave at risk."
It was perhaps a promise that was going to be broken immediately when the rattle of machinegun fire broke out close. Too close. Three blocks at least. Mai had slung her rifle forward and into the crook of her shoulder, racking it all the while, Gearten up with his rifle.
They knew where to go, not who fired, but it hadn't mattered as the two broke out running to the defensive walls with other guards on duty that day, all those within the Conclave's perimeter wall going to the Conclave itself or getting into defensive positions. The lull of peace, of the loss of Zeon, had not dulled the innate mechanisms and physical actions of those hardened by, almost at that point, a one year war.
Mai had been fast to clamber up the step ladder onto the defensive battlements, made about half a story tall, facing south, several of the defenders already taking a knee on the low wall and levying their guns out.
Radios had been going, confirming positions, on what had been happening, but as the machine gun fire went on, the inverse had happened: They knew what it was, and their guards had dropped down. Mai stared through her sniper's scope, and down the street a mass, a dozen, of fighters in dirty Federation uniforms: all being led by a teenage boy, or, at least, walking in the same direction.
"Ease up." Gearten had yelled out from where he stood on his own defensive firing position, and they all did, marginally.
1 Pavilion had showed up, A.K Gully leading his squad with a rifle slung across his shoulders. 1 Pavilion had embodied the idea of guerilla fighters in the classical sense more than most. Even now they wore their uniforms given by the Federation, even if they were not Federation themselves. They weren't well maintained, the distinctive tan darkened after months of fighting and dirt, sleeves torn off and the wearers themselves anything but regulation, beards grown out, hair let down, bandanas on. A.K Gully led a mean bunch, but at least they were friendly (in terms of where their guns were pointed).
With them that day however had been the draw: At first it was hidden by the mass of them, but as they approached and got closer the truth had been revealed in between the group of 1 Pavilion: a man, being dragged, along, feet shuffling with rope around his neck, stumbling, trying to keep pace, naked save for a simple ragged wrap it seemed.
If that hadn't drawn the attention of the Conclave, it was the young boy that came out in front of the group from 1 Pavilion and Gully, gun pointed up and then-
A chatter of sub machine gun fire pointed toward the sky and was let loose from Win, and any who hadn't clocked it had habitually hit the floor or recoiled by habit and reaction alone. Mai hadn't even flinched. Everyone in the Conclave knew what a Zeon weapon sounded like at that point, even if it was fired from Win Nguyen.
"That boy ain't right." Gearten had repeated of Win, looking down on him for perhaps the hundredth time in regards to the young child. "But he knows how to live, I'll give him that."
It was 1 Pavilion confirmed by the time they were right in front of the walls, and so they gates were opened, and the mass of them had come in, dragging the near naked young man with them.
"Hi Ghoulie!" Win had shouted out to Mai as they passed the wall, she barely managing a raised hand as her eyebrow raised and what had been the odd thing about it.
"Gully!" Gearten called down, dropping down himself. "What the hell is this?"
Out from the Conclave those that had run for cover poked their heads out, knowing now that it had been Win who was doing celebratory gunfire up and out, more intent on terrorizing birds than accidentally terrorizing the people on the ground. Several had bellyached, calling Win out for the bastard that he was, but it was no more an issue than what had turned up with 1 Pavilion.
Gully's men had habitually spread out, providing ground security. His militia men had, if not been trained themselves, seemed like it so much, taking a knee and providing security. None would look at the man they dragged in, his leash held by Gully.
In short sleeves today despite the ever-decreasing temperature, Gully's tattoos had been fully burned into vision, black shapes of tribal affiliation. Normally gauche, but on Gully, they were threatening.
He yanked the rope once, the young man, tumbling to his side and onto the ground. He couldn't even stop himself from falling face first as his arms were kicked out by Win before a spitball from him landed on the back of his head.
Gully had started to answer, but Mai had appeared besides Gearten, and it was her, surprisingly, that he had wanted to answer to. Again, the rope was yanked, and the man had dragged on the concrete ground by the side of his face. He groaned in pain, sharply, and then the long draw out. This close Mai could see the marks of abuse, of pain.
"Turns out he was hiding out in the sewers for these last few months. Shame we flushed the rat out, eh?" Gully spoke in his brutish tongue. He spoke however as if this had been a known topic. A known understanding between them. "Would rather keep him eating shit for a little while longer."
"Gully, who the hell is this guy?" Gearten had asked the question aloud, but Mai knew better. There was only one type of person that was ever treated this way by Seattle's guerilla fighters.
"How do you know he's a Zeek?" Mai asked instead, and then Gearten remembered why the world was the way it was.
Win had the answer the second he tore the man's rags off and then putting him on his back. The words "Sieg Zeon" never seemed so loud until it was tattooed across a chest. Gully had let go of the rope, but there was no freedom to be found on it, the slack letting the red ring around the man's neck peak out from the rope burn.
"We were going to hang him." One of 1 Pavilion's guerillas had said all so casually. "But it's been a while since we saw you get a piece of meat, Ghoul."
It was funny, in some sick sense to Mai as a Spacenoid. This was what Garma cried out against in the Academy during that night. This was the reason she fought. And yet she had been okay with it.
Finally, the young man spoke, his hair had been half shaved off or ripped off, the follicles bleeding as his face was painted blue and purple, a split lip oozing. "They- they forced me to-" There was no sympathy to be taken from his words.
"To fucking what? Get ink?" Mai had poked him with the rifle as soon as he was verifiable, kneeling down. "To oppress the innocent?"
"You don't understand!" He cried out on the ground, trying to prop himself up by his elbows, but again Win had only kicked them out. Beneath him the concrete had been wet, grimy. His back hit the ground with a squelch even as he tried to answer for himself. "I thought- I thought Zeon was going to win this! I had to do what I did for my family!"
She should've prefaced to Garma this when she spoke about Earthnoid divisions being folded into Zeon's military: Using them for the occupation effort and policing was bad, but putting them in that position had been worse in the end.
As he screamed out begging, more and more the Conclave listening had tuned in, and for those, they approached him, circling him as Gully, Mai, and Gearten stood over him. Win, all the while, took up to the defensive walls to sit and look down. His favorite part was about to happen.
"You gutless swine." Gearten hadn't the ability to directly confront Zeon and its troops like those that had followed his plans. This was a rare opportunity. His insults were much like him, firm and sturdy. They did not betray with nuance. They were plain. "You chose to join Zeon?! Was that really what you thought was best?!"
"The- the mobile suits! They were-" Dead. Destroyed. Just like any other weapon of war.
"We dealt with them. They weren't impossible." Gully cut him off before looking at Mai directly. He had the height on her, but they had seen eye to eye. "Ghoul, if it's one thing I respect you for, it's what you do best." She had killed dozens like him during the Dawn Rebellion, and she would do it again, every time she worked with Gully. This modicum of offering that had happened from time to time was perhaps the only thing they agreed on. "All yours. Like usual."
Why he did this, offering her meat on a platter, was perhaps some sick enjoyment from him: seeing a Spacenoid eat away at Zeon, even with its withering scraps.
Though this had always been the routine, even early on: The idea that she had to be offered death on a platter. It was an idea that she, out of everyone, deserved to kill perpetuated throughout Seattle. Even Murph and the Reapers had sent over offerings from time to time.
Mankind needed rituals, even in death. Especially with death.
She hadn't even slung her rifle all the way around before the Zeek had been on his knees. "No no no no! Please! I beg you." He screamed, knees on concrete. If he had been praying, God hadn't been listening, and neither had she. "You don't understand I had no choice! I had a family! The Zeon force ensured that they were fed and-" He pawed at the edges of her green-gray shelled coat. With the realization of who he was spreading out through the onlookers, the yelling started, the swearing, the cursing. Same as always, in the face of Zeon. Seattle had sounded like this as insults were thrown and disparaged toward Zeon, and even now it continued in a long chorus that those of the Conclave continued.
Mai's rounds had over-penetration, she glanced over to a part of the Conclave that faced out toward the open street, and just by her gaze alone people cleared out from her field of view. "Go stand over there."
"No!" His begging turned to a hoarse cry. "I never killed anyone! All I did was just-"
Mai glared down at him. "What'd you fucking do-"
"All I did was just watch. And stand! I never raised my gun at anyone!"
"Yeah you fucking watched us get herded around like Human cattle!" Garma was not the only one in Seattle missing an eye, a middle-aged man, his left eye caved in and covered with an eyepatch, pushed asides people in the group surrounding the Zeek, even Gully, only to get in the Zeeks face and yell, one more time. "You're worse than the Zeeks! You saw it and did nothing!" The one-eye'd man looked to Gul as he held the Zeek's neck in place, forcing him to look at her. She raised her eyebrow at the man, beckoning him to explain. "Cocksucker was one of the guards at Freecastle. I saw him there." Anger dripped from his tongue like blood boiled over.
On his neck was the reason: there in faded black, a three-digit number. For him, 302.
His prisoner number. As was how Zeon had handled who they had imprisoned in Seattle.
With a shift of her head indicating for the man to move the Zeek in the direction she wanted, Gully did with a rageful shove, the Zeek being thrown like a ragdoll as the Conclave around went silent. There was no threat of collateral behind him.
"Stand up." Mai said once, and only once, and he didn't. It was his last chance at a dignified death. "Your name?"
"D- David. David Beltweiler." He said.
"Your family, they alive?" She asked, almost disinterested. All that he did, apparently, was for them. What a shame if they were gone.
"I- Yes. I think so." She could hear Win laughing into the sky at the thought of that, but it was only background noise now.
She pulled back the safety on her rifle back so the hammer was primed. It was time. Gully and Gearten had moved out, pushing back the crowd that had formed for safety.
He knew it had been, but even still, he begged, raising to his feet for one last try for his life. "Please. I'm an Earthnoid like you!"
Wrong woman. Wrong pleading: Sounds fallen on deaf ears and they were awful last words. Mai had grunted once in dismissal, and it had been almost as powerful as the gunshot of her rifle, cracking through the Conclave and through Seattle streets as it struck through the Zeek. His entire body seized, the wound going and blowing his back painting the street behind him red as all at once. He was dead before his body crumpled to the floor, and more than just Gully in the Conclave find their joy in a dead Zeek.
Gully finds her eyes before she leaves that day, and on his lips he ghosts those same words: "I'm an Earthnoid like you." He smiles his devil's smile, and she gives her annoyed glare back as she goes back to be among Spacenoid kind.
Mai doesn't talk to Garma for three days after punching him, even as they inhabit the same space. It's up to him to clean himself, to bandage and refreshen his dressing. It's not a clean job, but a necessary one, given that his caretaker (and executioner) refuses to even look at him. But he allows it. Not that any protest of his seemed particularly wise at that moment, but he lets it settle.
For the first time he truly feels alone in that apartment, even as another soul inhabits it with him.
At night he notices that she sleeps with her back towards him, and even though he makes the same dinner, she waits until he is done to eat.
How offensive it must've been to her: the idea of her saving him (or him saving her?). It was offensive to the point where she has changed completely, most ghost than person inhabiting that space with him.
His company instead now is his mind, and then the pages of The Odyssey.
So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him.
Ulysses, returning home from the Trojan War, had his trials, his tribulations, and his delays, but Garma knew how the story ended. Ulysses returned home. A comforting ending, but far be it from him to declare himself analogous to the ancient greats. With how their cohabitation had been going, he could count on no such epilogue. The underlying current that, maybe, just maybe, he was going to survive her had remained. The alternative hadn't been much better mentally: that he really was going to die, and the current state of affairs hadn't been as helpful to that.
At the end of the day, by his day by day, she is, asides from Candy, his only Human interaction ever since he had been betrayed by Char (He doesn't count that vague recollection of people pissing on his face).
Her interaction however was ultimately a unique that he had yet felt in his life, if not the last thing in his life he might encounter. He is not unused to the extremes. Early in his life Zabi protestors who had rebelled against the rise of Degwin, despite Zeon's appointment of him, had been more than vocal in sending hate towards teenage him. Now on Earth, and even during the Academy admittedly, he was not unused to the company of those who would be more than willing to give themselves up in service to him. Most of the time it was undignified, women and men who fancied his grace throwing themselves to him. All he would cast asides if not useful, for he had his beauty that had earned his favor. Those type of people he had been annoyed with, dismissive of most of his life, and had been a vast majority of his social interactions.
It was no wonder why, so long ago, Char Aznable was so to him.
He treated him so unlike his name merited, and it had been a certain type of intoxicating that remained on his tongue, years later, even now.
Mai on the other hand, treated him so intensely because such.
Both hated him (apparently).
On the fourth day that dangerous thought arises in him as he sits in the apartment, lunch brewing for him to the tune of Federation MRE pizza and cherry cobbler.
He wanders over, crutch and all, to the corner of the apartment that is known for three things: It faces out directly toward the Puget Sound, it hosted the pile of clothing that was worn and used between them, and where the crates of weapons were. Open. Free to take. Not locked down at all. A peppering of coffee powder however had been on all the guns, no doubt to check to see if he had even considered it and hadn't noticed it, but he was smarter than that. For her bad mood maybe twelve gauge would finally be called for. Maybe his senses would finally come to him and he would free himself of her.
Garma finds himself staring at her stack of guns for far longer than he intended. They're up against the window, leaned or laying across a Federation weapon crate. A chrome shotgun, a Zeonic MP-40, a Zeonic STG-44, and various Federation rifles and carbines. On her work bench, a singular STG-44 which has remained broken down and constantly field stripped by her, meant like that just to keep her hands busy and her focus singular.
He's never killed anyone before directly (that is he's never pulled the trigger), but his life has been surrounded by death. War and conflict has surrounded Side 3 ever since he was born.
All things considered he should've killed someone long ago, and that shotgun, silver and chrome, stares at him. Twelve-gauge shells sit nearby, ready for usage, and the memory of the Dawn Rebellion, the want he had to go grab a rifle and go into the Federation barracks himself had rose in him. That same calling echoes out, and ever closer, he reaches his hand out for it.
Yes. Today was the day that he'd kill-
But then he stops, just short.
His face and nose still sting from the memory of the punch, and it reminds him of so much more pain he has taken from her. It changes nothing, however. His hand curls away. He doesn't want to kill her. He really doesn't. She's suffered so much as a Spacenoid, and if he wanted her dead, then what he fought for, and in reality, what he would die for, wouldn't matter to him. He wants to live, but killing her for it seemed so wrong. Once, a lifetime ago after all, she had killed in his name.
She lost her child because of the… events of the war. Mai joins legions of so many mothers with lost children now, and he cannot ever forget that.
Not at the cost of endsieg, however.
It was still in early in the day, and the Odyssey, for all its current trials and tribulations, cannot captivate him so away from his meandering thoughts. The steam from the cobbler's self-cooking pouch hisses out from its pressure valve, but it does not draw Garma away as instead of looking toward weapons, he looks toward their clothes.
On himself his hoodie still sports that ragged red splotchy line from where he bled from his nose, all the way down to his pants. It was no reason not to wear what was a comfortable for there, but eventually he would have to put on new clothes for the hygiene of it. His scars and burns had been healing well but still leakage would come through. The dull ache of his pain recedes, night by night, wash by wash, but he can never heal completely. He knows this, staring at himself in the mirrors of this apartment, down to his underwear some days as he patches himself up. This is what he has become: A broken man. His spirit is not gone yet however, even as he damns his curiosity to lean into the clothing pile. Where his additions to is concerned is on the upper layers, the pile going up to his waist, socks and underwear otherwise banished to their own individual pile to the side.
Garma doesn't know if he waits too long, or goes too quickly, to pick through it, carefully going onto his side, not wanting to put any pressure on his stump to do something close to a kneel before that secondary pile.
Here he is, heir of Zeon, stirring through a woman's dirty laundry. He's not the only person beneath that roof who thinks of murder, from time to time, but he wonders if being with her is better than actually being alone, so far removed from Zeon, assuming that Zeon in any measure would've believed that it was him. Sometimes her moping, her rage, it's more aggravating past the points she's made and he truly does understand, because for all her sorrow and anger, for as intense as it is, she still hasn't killed him.
He isn't sure to be thankful, or sorry for that fact, but in the end, she did save his life just for him to be able to mull that problem along.
He's not unfamiliar with women's underwear. Not with how his life has been since late Spring and his entanglement, his romance, with Icelina Eschonbach, but even in their casual life away from the war she had spoiled him with the visuals and the texture of what a high-class woman wore. White lace lingerie sporting names that go back centuries, all the more delicate for him to shed off, piece by tantalizing piece, or, perhaps, far more exciting in the moment to rip off of her.
Mai, predictably, was not wearing lingerie out in battle, or at all. Just the Federation standard as he had been wearing now as well.
She does go through a considerable amount of clothing however, even at her elongated pace: Sometimes she would wear the same set, days at a time, the grease of guns the only thing keeping her smell at bay. Garma knew her smell by now. Not unpleasant, but the smell of salt and the city kept to her.
She smelled like Icelina in her most vulnerable moments in bed, totally giving herself up to him. Those moments, nights, that he had craved and looked forward to, a factor of sensory seemed to perpetually exist with Mai. Exertion born of trying to exist rather than sex, to be fair, but his nose does not know the difference, or, at least, it's close enough that it could be mistaken. Any of those more lurid thoughts also drain out of him as he passes by underwear, stained red.
She was a woman, after all, and he thinks no further on it.
There is purpose to his rummaging however. His aim wasn't of perversion, shifting through her underwear. Instead, he picks out her socks.
Before their current silent treatment, she had made a small comment, returning one day:
"All my fucking socks got holes in them."
She wasn't lying. Pairs come out, drawn out, stretched out as Garma does his best to ignore the smell of them. Holes on wear points drawn thin.
He knows how crucial socks are, of all things. His visits to the front and away from the officers to the general infantry have always come with the need for supplies, socks chief among them. Garma Zabi has always been one to take problems, or at least situations presented to him, in wider berdths. Big picture solutions for big picture problems. He wants to fix up Mai's, and to a lesser extent, his own clothing situation, the long smear of blood still stuck in its crust on his own clothing, and he can stitch together socks. He's done it before, despite everything about him. This clothing pile however has become an eyesore, and sooner rather than later, he has a plan. This is busy work, yes.
She had remarked to him that, the last time, she had her laundry done by a friend of hers, which had meant to say that the washer and dryer that had been a part of that apartment did not work. It had been a shame, but nothing had been easy, so he had figured the next best thing.
There was a bucket in the kitchen for god knows what, one that he had in his damnably slow pace acquired for his own, putting it asides before heading to the fridge and their stash of MREs. It had been quickly been being depleted, but by no means on a pace that would concern them on their next meal, at least for a while. All the MREs that they had gone through however had resulted in a build up of accessories. Heating pads, forks, sporks, spoons, chewing gum and, surprisingly for the Federation MREs, cigarettes and chocolate.
If only. He thought. If only Zeon supply lines had been as robust to provide chocolate bars and cigarettes as standard. He could only imagine the morale boost, that very extra bit of energy that would win the day.
Far be it from him to speak on luxuries that he had that the regular troops didn't- that certain standard of his life that everyone seemed to want to maintain around him (not that he complained), but just a portion of that he always wish he could've shared with the troops below.
The Federation had chocolate with their MREs, and he couldn't stop thinking about it until he remembered that, in the end, Zeon victory probably wouldn't have been realistically decided over treats.
Every MRE, both Federation or Zeonic, had come with genial wipes. Scouring through the drawers of her (their?) kitchen, he had found the vast repository of them filling up one, scooping them up in his arms, ripping the packages, and depositing the wipes into the bucket. Each little towelette surely had had enough soap in it to extract out to a soup of cleanliness. Maybe sixty towelettes go into the bucket like discarded tissues before the bath faucet goes on over it, filling up the container until it was just below 3/4ths full.
He's winging it, and more than that, he's winging it at about a third of the speed if he, at least, had his right leg still. It's annoying, but it's part of a test in his mind, mania that is like a veil over it in his "imprisonment" that he isn't totally an invalid. He has been redressing his scars and wounds for the last few days after all.
It's not like he doesn't know how to do laundry. Granted the first time in his life had been in the Academy, but there was a rather considerable assumption that such labors were beyond him. Nowadays yes, the Eschonbach manor had its fair share of wards, maids, and servants that did attend to such things, but he was not unfamiliar.
He was a very practical man, he liked to think, as he filled a bucket of hand wipes with lukewarm water and held an e-tool he had found in the room. Whatever he was doing however, it had enough of a basis in reality that the water turned into a middling, frothy concoction spun up by the shovel he was mixing it with. Bubbles were good for cleanliness, right?
Mai had walked back with Win to his home at the art museum today, spending an hour with him. There was a part within her that found comfort in being that elder doting on him, a young boy, and she wasn't in a particular place or mind to find out where, but his presence was comforting, and he had always gravitated toward her during the war for a shoulder to sleep on or some sort of normal conversation that hadn't been about war.
He remained that still.
"I miss processed foods." He told her while very much leaning on her shoulder that day, the two of them still sitting on the bench before that ancient tapestry of unicorns and lions. "My Ma always gave me shit for popping in pizza rolls into the air fryer every day after school, saying how they were gonna give you cancer, but I really don't think it's cancer that's gonna get me."
"You're due a haircut." She answered instead, lazily rubbing her cheek into the top of his head.
"Shut up I like it."
No one had done her any favors when she came to Earth and found a place in Seattle.
She came to Seattle because there had been a Spacenoid education program at the local university, and she needed it on her resume at the end. If she had told the truth of herself: a drop out from a military academy, the questions and the path leading to herself would've stank loud enough for anyone who was looking for her to find. It had left her with nothing.
For all the years of Zeon propaganda that she had grown up in saying that the opulence of those who lived on Earth had been true, when she came to Earth the first time, she had none of this. Just an apartment she could barely afford off two jobs, and a community college to keep her going.
The first time anyone had ever done anything nice, genuinely banal, and nice, for her other than the occasional midnight carnal exploration, had been in war. Those on Earth had been too busy, too poor, too worried, to care about each other. But in war, Win Nguyen shared some chocolate he had taken off an abandoned store front one day, and from then and there she loved the boy like family.
Entering Elysium Condos that day, a large shadow had cast itself across its lobby across from where the inner skylight casted the sun down. Any detail that had been off from standard had been a detail she far and away had quickly picked up, shouldering he rifle again cautiously as she looked up and saw an odd thing: Her clothes.
A drying line, cast across the inner balcony of the condo building on their floor.
Her past reminds her what they are. In her neighborhood in Zum she had seen these clothes lines in alleyways like overgrowth. Her family was professionals, but Federation embargos had their chunk of inflationary effects that made just one bad month liable to destroy their future (which she on her own brought anyway). She lived amongst the working class all of her life, and yet had been destined for something far whiter collar had it not been for Garma Zabi (or perhaps the Federation, she doesn't know anymore).
"Why are you keeping the Zeek alive, Mai?" Win asks her that day before she leaves, saying that she needs to check on him and make sure that he isn't dead or planning to kill her.
She pauses, considering the question truly as she tightens her load bearing vest and bag. It really was insanity that she had been keeping Garma alive, and the boy that she knew as close to insane had recognized it.
"To make him suffer."
Win wasn't convinced, narrowing his eyes at his self-appointed oneesan. She might've been the sniper, but he was always far more attentive than people had given him credit for. Even she had underestimated him. He says nothing however with a shrug, going to lay down fully on the bench and snooze the rest of the day away.
When she makes it to the top of the steps on her floor, Garma is there, sitting against the balcony wall. A Zeon machine pistol, mag out, is used as a post for one end of the laundry line that reaches all the way across to the other balcony. A considerable amount of rappelling rope and paracord but she had no shortage of it. On the other end was no doubt another rifle.
He finally had touched her guns, but not for the reason she thought he would.
He doesn't notice her at first, not as in his hands was the unmistakable line of a needle and stitching. He does notice her when the last step creaks and she's there, looking at him. His company are folded clothes. Almost all of her own. He is down to a Federation issue tank top, his beer company hoodie out there on the line currently.
She doesn't need to open her mouth to ask the question, and he has more than prepared to give an answer. In fact he is prepared enough to provide results: "I've been doing some… busy work. Here." She approaches him slowly, and he, not exactly in the position to move, offers up, like a beggar.
Folded into his hands, her thermal shirts, dry, clean as they could be without proper detergent, but even then she can see the sheen and the lack of odor on them. It's pleasant even. At the side in neat piles, squared off and towered in individual groups had been her clothing, and his for that matter, stacked and categorized.
Even her underwear.
It's not that odd fact about his labor however that piques her interest. It's what he currently has in his hand: it's work with the smallest of needles, his left hand taking over threading duty as his right hand simply holds one of her socks. At the stack nearest to his feet, or at least, in a collection, at pairs and pairs of her socks.
"I've done my best to mend." He hands over the one sock he is working with now. The stitching job she can tell where the fabric is pulled tight against each other, but it's whole, a complete surface, also not terribly smelling given that they have also been washed. She is still silent as she runs it over her hand, as if trying to find a trickery in it. But there is no trick, even as Garma comes to understand that it is what she's looking for. She has been expecting a trick from himself for a while. Instead, she gets this: "I'm not expecting this to… when you finally make your decision, factor in. But… I don't quite have too much to do here that wouldn't get on your bad side…Or at least, further onto your bad side." He's sheepish, of all things, half-wanting to reach back out and grab that sock from her to continue the work, or just to sit there. The last thing he wants however is to have a broken hand, so he settles, stays, and talks. "Plus… Mai, you must remember that even I as a cadet was not beyond stitching my own clothes back together on field exercises." He keeps trying to speak, to make excuses. "I wanted something to do, of course. Something more… occupying. Please, allow me this at least."
She stares at him silently, eyes only very gradually switching back between the sock in her hand and then himself. Her gaze has always been, by default, a hard one, cold, like stone. If she still thanks Allah for anything, it was 20/20 vision. The only way her gaze melts is by confusion, by self-amusement, or by being taken off guard. Garma's not sure which one it is today.
She's not quite bothered by his want to break cabin fever, for it's been far and away established that any exertion of his freedom to try and escape is already a false prospect. And the guns, just openly grabbable: he had, and for what usage, it hadn't been what she wanted.
"This, I assure you, was to get back some of my faculties as well." He reassures his enemy. His captor. His savior. His comrade. His fellow Spacenoid. His subject. His executioner. There's nothing more for him to say as he, without that sock in her hand, simply starts on another pair whose whole comes from her heel. Out from one pile, to another, one that is mended, whole, and left for her as he avoids her gaze.
He has been reduced to this: doing house chores, but he's not sure if reduced is the word.
He's not feeling like nothing, because she says something. He can't quite catch it however, with the way she barely gets it past her teeth, the brim of her boonie hat the lowest he's ever seen.
"Hm?"
Again, that sound. And he really can't hear it. He has an inkling, but-
She mumbled it, one last time:
"Thank you."
She avoids his gaze, and, to her credit, goes to each stack of clothing that had been dried and folded and brings them into her arms, into the apartment.
It was a quiet thanks, one that she was loathe to give. But she gave it anyway. Eventually all the piles of clothes return inside, and he is left alone outside, stitching socks that remain to be stitched.
It's another half hour before she emerges, and she emerges, almost reluctantly, in clothes that are freshly washed because of him, out into the balcony with him. She squats in front of him, seeing his progress, wearing his progress. Socks too.
Her bomber jacket is one also stolen off the rack, early in the war, worn only now when her green soft shell hadn't been prudent for her time in that apartment. It kept her warm enough, even as it began to smell until now.
"Suppose this is the only wash we can manage, huh?" She holds up a wrapper of one of the towelettes before throwing it over the railing. He nods. He had used all of them that he could find.
"Unless we go through enough MREs between you and me to collect more again."
"Right."
Speaking terms again, at least. A minefield self-made on both of their parts. Garma starts small and easy. She, predictably, goes blunt.
"What'd you do today?" He asks simply.
"Killed a Zeek." She says about as simply back. Several emotions run through his face, and suddenly the several foot distance between them isn't quite comfortable enough, but she clarifies. It's the least she could do given his deeds today. "He wasn't looking for you."
The rifle that did it is back in the apartment, but the cartridge shell that had the bullet had been in her hand, taken out of her pocket, shown to him, and flicked into his lap. .300 Magnum. It was a round meant for hunting bucks, Gearten recognized it and pointed her in the right direction when she needed to find ammo for her rifle in its mystery chambering. Powerful, and she had seen it blown heads clean off at 500 meters. At less than five: explosive.
It nestled, in the dip made by his thighs as he sat, legs out. (Intrusive thoughts, her tracking it down to it. She's already seen enough of his dick to certainly last his lifetime.) The casing stays there, the impression that it was still dangerous shocking through him as he gingerly took it up, staring at it before letting it fall back.
One of these had his name on it.
If there's any weapon that deserves to put Garma down, it is her Mosin-Nagant rifle.
She continued to explain, picking away at the callous of her trigger finger, making sure her left hand with its black line of stitching still felt well enough. Anything to not lock eyes with him. "He was hiding in the sewers. We flushed him out. Apparently, he was an Earthnoid prison guard here in Seattle."
"Prisons?" The eyebrow he raises with is one that no longer exists, but the scarred surface of his skin still moves up. As his skin settles from its treatment, it's warped and uneven, reddish in color. It's not as bad as it could be however. It's just a lot. The right side of his body is completely taken by scars, and this close she sees the knots of his skin where it has tried to reform. Though it's settled. This is what he is now.
His stitching job isn't bad for someone without any depth perception anymore. At least that's what she thinks what happens when one is down an eye.
"Prisons." She said, raising her own eyebrow. "You know? Those things that-"
"Stop." Domestic to duty, quick. It surprises her, the way his voice leans back into a tone fit for command. She ignores the way her spine wants to straighten at the sound of him like that. "What do you mean? The only military prison that is on this continent is the facility in Ontario." He holds her gaze in a way that's too familiar to her. It is an expectant gaze; commander to officer. She remembers it too well. Garma almost forgets where he is. "You blame me because of my responsibility. I do not contest you on this. I will not allow this blame for something I had no knowledge of however, especially if it's something I would've protested." If he could stand, he would've. He wanted to, so much. His body yearned to because this, more than anything, was a war he stood for. It would've meant nothing if it was waged in such a way that wasn't right.
Would he lie to her now if that was not what he didn't believe? He started the war with insanity, and yet he wanted to wage a sane, humane war.
What was done to Seattle, and from what she heard from Federation troops during their short time during the final battle, elsewhere, had been anything but humane.
Zabi fire burns bright, but like him, it destroys him young- destroys him now as he cannot form a fist with his right hand, and that determination drains from him like blood. She looks into his eyes, and, just for a moment, maybe she does believe that he didn't know.
Holding her socks, wearing clothes that are fresh, she supposes she will do something to justify keeping him alive: Knowledge.
"Why did you drop the Colony?" His grip on her socks tightens, and the needle falls, tinging against the shell in his lap, any strength that was mustered in him in that moment falls off him like tender meat from the bone. "If you want me to believe you that that is something you're not responsible for, explain to me for what you are."
"Would it satisfy you any if I said that, initially, the plan was Dozle's idea? I am a ground force commander, after all." That sound of him being too comfortable with her, it remains as if washed laundry could forgive him for what he had done to the world.
She shook her head, her eyelids habitually, slowly, narrowing, like staring through her scope.
"Do you think I'm stupid? Something like that, the Zabis alone can make that call. All of them. Together." Her words cut his composure, bit by bit, and the princeling shrinks ever so.
Dozle was not a renegade man from her memory. He had order and command befit of someone who had overseen a military academy, after all. She had respected him as far as she did any instructor with the addition that he had been a Zabi, of royal Spacenoid blood, brute as he was. The dropping of a colony on Earth itself was a move so momentous, only those that were so called at pleasure of commanding an entire portion of Humanity could make that call.
"It was not my plan." Garma grits. "It was Dozle's order. His plan. His execution." So easily her hands go for his neck for the technicality of it, and even as he tenses, he stares right back at her, jaw clenched. Her thumb as it curls around his neck traces the bump of his jugular, beneath her fingers she can feel his breath be still.
"Yet you allowed it to happen." She reminds him, so clearly, reminding him that things were the way they were for a reason. "You're a Zabi. Zeon answers to you. Nothing happens like that without all of you giving the go ahead.
In another life, and even in this one, she had answered to him: this man whose neck she held, not choking, but holding with her grip. He is frozen, unmoving, but yet unbreathing by his own accord. Not now, she tells herself after a long, pregnant pause to remind him that if things were as they said, he would not be here. When she lets go, a ragged breath is blown through his nose, but he makes no comment on it. The memory that she alone holds of wrapping her hands around his neck, her blood on her palms, raises high in her mind, twists herself taut, until all at once she eases off. The thought that calms her is that she could kill him at any time. That was her privilege.
His mouth curves into a shrewd line as he recovers with one single cough, offended by the thought that this was how and when they were going to talk about this. "I'd rather talk about these illegal prisons my commander here seems to have set up."
"I don't want to talk about either, but here we are." Acid on her tongue, on her teeth, promising more.
A small part of him had intended for him doing her laundry would've put her in a better mood. She had been, but not in his favor it seemed. But she wasn't biting at him, not in a way that had been base, or outright malicious. There was intrigue in her, curiosity, the want, the need, to know. But what? Garma does not know, but Mai cannot tell. She still wants to know if there was a reason, justified, so grand and beyond them, that her child had died. If not, she would fulfill perhaps an offering to those billions dead before her.
His tone is low, but it's conversational, measured. "In the Second World War of the late last Human era, do you remember how it ended?" Nagasaki and Hiroshima: the advent of a weapon, so destructive, it harnessed the very powers of the sun within itself in ways wrought havoc and horror on the human body. The war ended with a weapon so powerful, it blasted shadows into form on the ground where their victims were. Mai nodded. She knew. "We learned the same lessons, you, and I. Same Academy. Same lectures. Same curriculum." Garma reaffirmed.
"If you think that what we learned in the Academy justified-"
He cuts her off. "One extreme for sake of not committing another- one far worse. Had it not been for the United States dropping two nuclear weapons on Japan, a ground war of that nation would've been the next alternative, and the casualties there numbered in the projected millions, military and civilian." He does not waver from her gaze. "I understood the reasoning behind the plan for Iffish from Dozle. So should you, dear Mai."
Someone else might've struck him for that, to imply that, in any measure, that he and what he had done was something that could've been done by anyone, and yet… She had killed in his name before, for something far less grand than the liberation of all Humanity. She does not affirm, but her silence was an answer unto itself.
"This is a war for Mankind itself, the scale of it- the scale of it had to be accounted for, for all those yet unborn." He pauses. He's back in his mind. A dream of a dream. Distant voices from distant times. Wings flap. Trees burn. Stars fall and he feels many eyes on him. Only Mai is there, and he realizes his choice of words is perhaps not the best.
"Unborn?" Mai ghosts those words on her lips.
As insane as it was for her to ignore her tragedy, her personal loss, she didn't matter in the end as much as what she could do to him. A billion souls look down on her from some ethereal beyond to simply go back inside and grab her gun and be done with this all already.
That didn't mean however it still didn't hurt.
It hurt her every day, and all she could was numb herself to that very idea that she was a woman, a mother to be, stolen by the circumstances of her life.
Every day with her, Garma has to choose his words so carefully one would think he was being recorded. He's gotten better with it, however.
"I'm sorry." He says again.
There is fear in it, regret in saying it, shame. This time she takes it, for what little it's worth. This time it is for a poor choice of words, and not for the outright insult to her that, if she was complicit in some prolonged survival of himself, that meant that she would be rewarded as if that had meant bygones were bygones. She wasn't that weak. She never had been. Only put upon, subjected to.
She squats before him, feet flat on the ground, arms wrapped around her knees. "I don't think you really understand what you did to us." Then again, perhaps, neither did she, not at the scale of destruction and death that had come to the Earth after Iffish.
Why does she bother, why does she even care to have this "dialog" with him, answers that she cannot bring herself to find, but they are inclinations acted upon in any case.
"Half of mankind. Yes. I know." His voice drops low. "We were aiming for Jaburo, but, the Federation, in their resistance, they were the ones that caused Iffish to fall upon Sydney."
Gearten is a survivor of the colony drop perhaps more directly than most. Southwestern Canada, just above Seattle, had hosted the 3rd largest debris cluster. Had it not been for Sydney, the enormity of what had been done to the North American continent would've been fully appreciated, but Sydney alone had been so monstrous and large in scale, what had happened to his world had fallen to the wayside.
Gearten had been in Seattle when Iffish fell, but back up before they invaded. Only by the coincidence of an appointment of his being on the day had saved him, he always exclaimed.
"Some areas, it's not so bad. But the wildfires, and the impact craters, several thousand years of pristine nature, a definition of Earth, and it's like a whole different world when you look at it now."
He settles with stitching for a time, the two of them sitting before each other, waiting for next words, next sentences in their self-made verbal minefield. She looks tired, Garma notices, perhaps for the first time. Rings beneath her eye are well hidden by her darker skin, but they're there, and they drag her face down. Both of them, they were each only twenty. Children still, to some. Gearten, and indeed most of the Conclave had treated Mai like a child until she had come back bloodied and with notches on her proverbial stock. Another pair of socks is tied closed, whole, worthy to be used. Her socks are black, and the thread he uses is likewise, much like the stitching that keeps her hand together, and stump of his leg closed for now.
"You think me unable to fully appreciate the horror of what's been done." His guess is perhaps closer than she'd admit, and said in a way that's far more delicate than how she would put it:
"I think you don't understand that none of this would've happened if you just stopped."
Garma leans in, just a bit from his position. "How can you say that, as a Spacenoid? You should understand that this war was going to happen." He really doesn't understand how she, of all people, doesn't understand. "Better brutal now, then a hundred generations of suffering, drawn out for centuries."
She looks away from him as she grits her teeth. "And how many bloodlines have you ended that'll never see this future you fight for?"
Tick for tack. Blow by blow. She speaks back to him as if she had her entire life. There is no barrier between them of rank or command and suddenly, Garma misses it. Yet, in spite of it all, just as she sees him, he sees her clearly. "You hate me, don't you?"
She's on her ass in a slight pivot, sitting on the floor across from him as she lets out one huff of amusement. "What makes you think that?" Her sarcasm drips like the laundry yet to be brought in on the line. It's impressive she had that much.
"Truly, do you?" He questions her, looking for an answer she's not sure is useful to him.
She gives him an answer anyway. "Down to your bone. Yes, I do."
"Because I am a Zabi? Or because of what I've done?"
"Because of everything."
"Sounds more of an excuse than an answer." What makes him so bold in the face of death, she can't imagine it being anything else than being a Zabi. In the end however the upperhand is hers squarely as the two of them lock eyes, and he is the one that falters first from it, going back to stitching her socks back together.
She could not mistake what she felt for him as anything but hate, no matter the reason, and the reason had been as bare simple as it was tragic.
"Do you think that I took joy, in any of this? That I am as evil as you seem to think of me? I'm waging this war for your sake, in spite of it all. I would continue to wage this war still." He explains further, a few more moments of silence between them that he needs to fill in. His life was always so full of sound and fury that the tension of the quiet feels like sludge to him, even with her.
"I think if there's anyone to blame, you and your family are. For all of this." She tells him back quietly. He turns over the sock, holding the thread he was stitching with in his teeth with the needle. Neither of them forgets the lessons on battlefield medicine from their instructors, and how that closing up a wound with a suture was not unlike how to mend clothing. He would know best firsthand now. If there was any doubt in Mai that Garma was doing their laundry and sewing for the sake of his physical faculties, he makes a convincing case for himself as he holds the needle in between his teeth and his left hand goes for a pair of medical shears, now scissors. She barely budges as he draws the blade. A poor stabbing weapon, but it's the closest he's held anything close to the sort ever since she had thrown a gun onto his chest and told him to fight. Still now, he doesn't, even as that first uneasy moment comes and goes and she eyes what he does with it carefully: trimming the line of thread once before putting the shears back, placing the scissors back on the ground. "Someone has to answer for this."
"Maybe people already have." He offers his suggestion, and the sock he had just finished to her. This particular pair had been unused by her for at least three months because of a tear, but now, it had been made whole again. She takes it, running through its freshly washed surface with a modicum of satisfaction, her fingers pressing into its malleable shape as she talks. Garma, all the while, leans back. Talking to her about the nature of their relationship, of the grander concepts that go beyond them, always exhausted him more than sleepless battlefields and distant war reports. "Perhaps all those solely responsible for carrying out those plans have already been torn up in the stars above. Dozle's forces are the most frontline of our space battlefields after all."
More medals to give, more graves to mark. Death, death, and more death.
Useless death.
Tucking her legs into her chest, there's a feeling brewing within her. If Garma has gotten so comfortable with her, the reverse is true, whether she liked it or not. It annoys her, but her mannerisms when dealing with someone so casually are not beaten down when she doesn't catch them. His tongue is silver, and she was born to listen to him. A vestigial habit that she never thought she would ever have to account for again, and yet had come back in the strongest way. A small part of her, deep down, grating against her very being, wants to believe in what he says. "Sure. But the way it's turned out, I have you, and you mean something." Garma Zabi means something to the storm in her heart that bleeds violence. "You're mine to judge." Because who else?
"Well, what I've done, if you think me to blame for this war. It is no more dismissible from your blame in all of this, in the end."
The sock drops from her hands. "Explain to me why you're not going over the railing right now."
Silver tongues gift precious words, and Mai is not so far gone from her days of faith to remember that al-Shayṭān, the accursed, did not always manifest as an ugly being, who could be identified as evil. The father of sin instead spoke perfect words for imperfect people.
She could not be tempted, but she would have to listen.
He is serious in his tone. He believes what he says because he remembers who she was. "Your support during the rebellion was important. Far more important than perhaps people remember." His hand had gestured to her. "You stopped the Federation armored units from mobilizing that night, and although we did face armor that night, we couldn't possibly have been able to take on the entire garrison, at least not without far more losses. The potency of the Dawn Rebellion would not have been the same without you."
Without the idea that cadets had overwhelmed an entire Federation military garrison had brewed contempt and fear than, if perhaps, the battle between them that had resulted in more cadet deaths.
"You were crucial to how effectively we were able to take on the Federation that day, and because of that, the history that followed is yours as much as it is mine." He takes a breath, ragged and dry as it is sometimes still is for him, and she watches his chest, rise and fall. "It is as much yours and mine, as it was Lino's, or Zenna's, or Marissa's, or Langley's, or Lada's, or Hiroyuki's, or Fulman's, or-"
"Stop." She can't bear to hear him list off all those names. She can't bear to see him prove that he cared so much that he remembered. "What we were doing back then was different."
"Is it? So much so? The reasons were the same because this is just a continuation of what we started years ago. Our domino fell, and History turned its page for us." He considers his next words carefully, but he wants to her to hear them, even in the end: "This is what you wanted, in some small part, long ago. Is it not?"
She's not the woman he barely knew, nor is she someone she could even consider Mai Gul. She has become the "Ghoul". What the Ghoul wants is him dead in a way that matters. What Mai Gul wanted… it didn't matter anymore.
In that space, where they are the only sound, when she slaps him again across the face, it echoes hard, and loud, and it recoils him to the floor, tipping over some remaining laundry. But he does not grunt, he does not scream. His entire face is red, but he stays quiet as he rights himself.
"Don't you dare try to presume anything about what I want or who I am." All that she was was all that she did in this world, and soon, it would be nothing. Her calloused hands sing in their own sting from smacking him that hard, but this is the third strike for him, and now he has come used to it. "You know nothing about me. You never did, and you never will."
With his left hand he touches upon the skin she's slapped, his cheek stinging in that now familiar pain. Even his own father never hit him like that. But these strikes are a part of their communication, and he lets it happen. He can't fight it. He could man up and take it. The echo in his mind as the pain numbs his physical senses however gives him a certain type of clarity he could only find in pain. He finds words he believes, and words he was sure she needed to hear. Long after the echo of his slap subsides, he adds one more before the silence takes hold for the rest of the day:
"I know that you deserved better."
He doesn't know how she responds to it, and he doesn't know if the next moments are his last as she stares at him. The look on her face, it is that of someone reckoning with the unknowable, and suddenly he wants to know what he looks like as if his face had opened up, or that he had been dying in a way that he could not tell. It wasn't that however. Nothing of the sort. Her green eyes, deep and natural like dew kissed grass grow darker still, as if [shimmering]. He can hardly hold the detail in place before she turns away, only to retreat into the barrier that is her (or their) apartment door.
Garma Zabi waits for Mai Gul to return, either with a gun, or bandages assuming that she had reopened some sort of wound he hadn't felt, but a cursory pat down reveals that no such thing has happened. Eventually he discovers today, at least for now, is not his time to die as he sorts through and dries the rest of the laundry and doing patchwork mending where he can. It's not until the sky above grows dark that he finally ventures back into that place where she has retreated, an arm of bath towels in one arm and his crutch supported in another. The rest could wait outside.
She is there, freshly washed and in clean clothes, at her work station working on that same old storm rifle. She only gives him a glance before returning to what she was doing in her eternal field stripping of that rifle.
A tray of food has been left out for him. Rice and beef. A Federation MRE offering. Still warm. Just for him.
She returns to her room again, that night, sleeping on the floor not too close, but not too far away from him. Same as always. Back to square one. It takes only one hour before they're both attempting to sleep for him to offer one last thing: He shuffles, and Mai knows the sound of it when he intends to speak to her, rolling to his side to look down upon her from his perch on her bed. She half turns to catch him in the side of her eye, groggy as it is.
"Would you like the bed?" He poses. "I'm sure I can handle a few nights on the floor myself."
That wakes her completely, and she answers faster than she perhaps should. "… I- yeah. I'd like that." On her feet, the least, for his sake, that she could do is to leave the blanket on the floor. It's not cold enough yet that she'd mind, but that was a problem that had been fast approaching, and she wasn't of the mind to go ask the Conclave for another one. Any blankets left in the city had been collected long ago, and not for her to take to simply give Garma Zabi and her their own set. The easiest solution would to be to, as always, kill him sooner, but nothing was ever easy.
He lets himself slowly, down onto the floor, the switch between them simple, passing each other by.
She's almost had forgotten the feel of her own bed after so long that it had been a bit more luxurious than she remembered it, and all too easily, she falls back onto it, laying her head upon the pillow. It is a trap, but not one that was made on purpose. When she gets in the bed, the smell that takes her is not her own, but rather his. The smell of a man, caked in medicine, yes, but a man's smell. Before she can escape, it takes her in and warms her.
When she sleeps that night, she sleeps deeper than she has in years.
Garma on the other hand, he could hardly remember sleeping so rough, but the tension between them has cleared, only marginally, but it is miles and away better than how they were. In that he can find some solace, some victory today.
Before he goes to sleep he thinks about the war, the tactical strategic war, for the first time in a long time, and he wonders how the situation is. Sleep takes him before he starts remembering that victory over the Federation was seemingly more and more like a dream itself.
