1-6
Talk Talks - Foxtrot Moon
When Mai returns the next day from her usual outing, she comes home early, and she brings a map of the North American continent, courtesy of another momentary trip to the Seattle Public Library. It's a laminated example, and she has brought markers. It draws Garma's attention away from the pages of The Odyssey that day as he sits at the table they share meals at. He still tries to ask a question just by a raise of a non-existent eyebrow.
"I want some… perspective, one that's uniquely yours." She tells him, sliding across from him into her stool. His is always the one closest to the bedroom. "You take a walk already today?"
He nods, some self-satisfied look that washes over him that's complacent that he's becoming more and more of a known quantity to her. She doesn't like the look but she's already about broken his nose once, she might actually do it again on another swing. Tucked into her softshell jacket, she draws out a single, rather large laminate article. It's about as big as their table even, but Garma, not one to leave a paragraph unfinished, hurries through Ulysses' current predicament. The smirk on his face is one that he wants her to pick up on, and she does, after gearing down, getting ready to spend the a good chunk of the day with him in the apartment.
"Something funny?" She says finally.
He nods, closing The Odyssey and putting it aside.
"It's a rather ironic item, that you've given me: This book." It's still easy enough for him to turn the pages over with two and a half fingers with his right hand, and he seems self-amused by that dexterity he has left. The phantom pain reminds him of what was though. His hand naturally wants to turn over the page with more fingers, and he thing she can feel the pad of his middle and ring finger touch upon it, but no such thing happens. The brain is a curious thing. Its capabilities are no more understood by traditional science in the thousands of years of Human study. A more yet is to be discovered with the idea of Newtypes.
"How so?" Mai asks, arms crossing over themselves as he finally takes a glance down at what she has presented: A map of North America.
He continues still to explain, however, before becoming too enthralled over an image he has known very well for the last year. "A story about a war hero, missing in action, trying to find his way back home and to his love? I would think you chose this to torture me."
"Oh, you'd know if I was." This is the closest her tone comes to teasing. Something casual.
If Garma believes the good doctor, Mai does not torture. "Still, odder that there's a particular section where Ulysses is captured by a nymph, Calypso and she promises him eternal life."
"Ironic." She pauses, echoing his words, gratingly. "That's not what's happening here, you know."
"I know."
"Do you?" Mai presses. She knows what kind of words she can say to hurt him. She didn't expect these to. He winces, just slightly. The way his skin curls by his temples, even beneath scars, she catches it as he looks right at her with his uneven haze.
"I can't go home. I can't go anywhere. At least with you, I have more time… And I don't want to kill you to try my chances." He sniffs once, saying it out loud is easier than he thought. "What I said the other day is true. I think you deserved better, and I don't think me killing you, for any reason, would exactly help that." His right hand slowly rises for his forehead again, but there's nothing to grab, no hair long enough for him to twirl around. There's something else he wants to say, something about answering to the divine to the end of it, to a higher power. But he doesn't. It stings at his mind so.
He hears the flap of wings outside, but when he glances out, there are no birds.
She didn't know how to react when he had told her that to her face the other day. He told her to her face that he believed she deserved far more than what the world had given her, and she believed him. She couldn't trust what she would do next to him, processing those words, so she had fled, like so many engagements as she had during the war, and let the waves of whatever it had been wash over her beneath a cold shower.
If she didn't know any better, she wanted to cry, but she didn't. She wouldn't. She cried all of her tears long ago, and she wouldn't, of all things, summon more in front of him.
Enough about ancient tales and lost war heroes, however. She pressed her finger down on the surface again, right in the dead center of North America. "Walk me through this last year for you. A war game, almost."
Her own eyes cross over the map.
She had originally come down to Earth by way of a Pacific entry point that deposited her with other business-class travelers near Los Angeles.
That day would've been magical, had it not been for why she was there, but even there, the wonder of Earth had touched her, looking out the port windows. Earth engulfed her view, and she hadn't seen so much blue and green and sky in her life. It hadn't been that that brought her to her knees however, Luna-born Spacenoid that she was. It had been, as it always had been: Gravity. She didn't wander from the North American west coast and the Pacific Northwest in general, taking the long line of buses up from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Junction City, Hillsboro, Kelso, Tacoma and finally Seattle, Washington with nothing but a duffle bag with a hastily taped up Zeon emblem.
He had seen more of this world than her at this point.
A map of North America is by no means a foreign object to him at this point, and looking down on this example, his mind is already filling in unit emblems and battle lines that have long since been burned into his mind's eye whenever he looked upon a map. His charge was the North American theatre, and he had imprinted its impression into his memory for the last year. "Why?" Garma finally asks, confused.
She can't even be her usual biting cold with him here. "I'm just curious. Is all. Not like we've got anything better to do."
He narrows his eyes at her, milky white and dark brown colluding in suspicion. "You could very well be cataloging my reasonings for things. Even if I die, my plans live on, and could be used still by my command staff."
"Battle plans change." She said once. "You've been gone over a month now. I think that's time enough that anything you knew of to be outdated. The war isn't that stagnant, isn't it?" He had been, she had remembered, been out here in what was veritably an active frontline. Not that any of the sides had anything to show for it. "If you really think you were betrayed, then those plans are null and void anyway, are they not? Your command staff are no better an enemy than, say, me."
Her words pause him, stewing within him as his mouth tightens over and he has an internal conversation with himself, the only result of this being what he says next:
"You're better at this point." The grumble came out of Garma before he could stop it, and yet his hand still moved over his mouth as it held his chin. Embarrassed, if for a moment. He returns to something that she can identify as a spoiled prince. "Do you know that I still get flight hours? That I'm not just content to stay behind the frontline?"
"Being in combat doesn't impress me." Not her, that is. Almost everyone she had interacted with had their hours (months) in a gunfight, and the fact that Garma thinks it special, a privilege, or a positive, disgusts her to an extent.
"Of course," He amends, "but, what I mean is that my command staff seemed to have forgotten what it was like to fight a war, when we didn't control territory on this planet. They've gotten too comfortable and complacent."
She didn't know if the truth had been the same to him, royal that he is. Maybe he was living the life of a frontline commander despite himself, but in the end it didn't matter.
"What do you think is more of the truth, then, that your officers have failed you, or that the Earth Federation has bettered you?"
"Cadets overran Guardian Banchi; may I remind you." He doesn't need to remind her, of course. "Not that I don't respect the enemy, but from everything I've seen thus far, there is a course of history and battle plans that we might've taken that would've led us to victory months ago."
"But that's not the case, is it?"
"No…"
"Then help me understand."
"But why? Really?"
"Garma…" His name off of her lips is an odd sound. She is perhaps the first Arabic woman that he has talked to with as strong an accent as she, and it drips with a certain foreignness that he can't help but shake off. She is far from foreign to him. She was his neighbor, and yet all of her words, the sound of her voice, is something that surrounds him like an unfamiliar something. It doesn't scare him, it doesn't alienate him, it's just a sound that is uniquely hers, and her ownership of his name is a part of it. This one is stern, but it's almost begging him to consider the other options.
"Fine, fine. If you wish." He tries to come off of as aloof, but it's hard to do so wearing a hoodie with a hipster on it.
His acquiescence satisfies her however, and if he wants to ask her from a place of some upper echelon of care, she can match him still.
"Do you really think I'm the type of person to care about the path of this war and the world? The world hasn't done me anything." A bang of her hair hangs off in front of her eyes, and there's an urge to Garma to reach out. "Let's speak our language."
He leans his head toward her, well reading her words. A thoughtful clarification by her does illuminate his own thoughts. "If I must…" A thought experiment, or at least, an explanation. An interesting conversation to have with a woman on the other side. It was a shame no one there was documenting it. "Before we get to all this, we have to speak about the overall conditions of the war." His thumb almost brushes asides the laminated map. "I don't think I have to particularly describe the overall affairs that led to this war, now do I?" She scrunched her nose once, as if squashing an amused huff out of her breath before shaking her head. He would be preaching to the choir about the embargos, the Earthnoid predisposition to try and rule over Spacenoids from Earth without fully understanding the conditions for what they were doing. A colonial, imperial imposition that was by no means sustainable, but on a scale that, comparatively, could only be matched by the European empires of old and their atrocities across India and Africa. Positions of powers being maintained for the sake of the oldest vices: greed and power itself. It puts people like them, Spacenoids, at hazard.
Regardless of if he had been a prince, who had existed as and been treated like royalty, he had still been a Spacenoid, and thus lower in the eyes of Earthnoids. Together in unity, the Federation did not discriminate.
"This war," She can tell now when Garma is about to go into the higher language, the holier than though words of speeches and ideology. "It's not over something so simple as policy or even lines on a map. This is a war for the path of Humanity's future."
It had only been eight months of fighting, but it felt a lifetime for Mai. "It's hard to think of it like that when you're down here fighting. It all just feels like survival." she said lowly.
He's big picture, she's small picture. Not exactly a counterpoint, but complementary, regardless of their sides.
"Of course," He stammers slowly, thinking of a response. "But surely that this type of fighting is charged with some sort of far deadlier intrinsic will than say, if we were fighting over territory just for the sake of resources."
"But are you not?"
"All as means to an end, of course. I have not committed my forces to capture North America's vast resource centers for the sake of capturing them. I did so in the name of fueling an ultimate victory for the sake of our future. Any of the Federation's logistical capability that we deny to them means our forces will have a better time, not only Earth, but in space."
"Means to ends," Mai parrots quietly. "My baby dying a means to end?"
"A tragedy." Garma tells her. She's still not sure if he means it (he does). "Collateral damage I would wish on no one."
Silence hangs, but it falls, and Mai breaths as she rolls a remaining crick out of her neck, moving on forward. She's not sure where she should start as he waits patiently, working eye tracing over the map and trying on his own to remember what he could. The battle plans for their year on Earth were of course burned into his memory, but he had taken his part of a lot of burning recently.
He sees the edges of nightmares in dreams: flame, red hot licks at his skin. His mind pulls him out of it before he starts screaming, more fearful of disturbing a temperamental Mai.
Starting this war in some ways was easier than starting to talk about it, and it is the first immediate wall that both of them come across as that painful revisitation of Mai's meaning comes and goes. A familiar topic now, but no easier to traverse than a minefield in the dark. She has done that before however, so she starts:
"Very interesting tactic. Taking the cities first."
He responds immediately, with candor. "We had to make sure population centers were secure. We couldn't land on Earth and be ignored, after all." This was a war that could've been won entirely in the hearts and minds. There was no Federation without the backing of its populace after all.
"Sure, but those cities, at least here in Seattle, became battlefields. If it were me," She pauses, and suddenly the roles are fit in in a different world. If she had been his adjunct, she would be like this, almost. It's a tingle that goes down his spine as well, if not for her flight from Side 3, this conversation might've happened in another life.
But it wasn't.
"If it were me," she starts again, getting over the awkwardness of realization. "Start of course with the Fed bases, that's given, but don't worry about the cities."
"Don't worry?"
"Each city is a battlefield and a disaster waiting to happen." Mai can't help but look outside and see what has become of Seattle again. Flattened wasn't the right word, but decimated was another. "If you start there, you become entangled at the base of your entire invasion when resistance starts going hot. No." she says again, her eyes tracing North American cities. Chicago. New York City. Orlando. Houston and Dallas. Boston. "You stay outside and starve them out."
"This is from experience, isn't it?" Garma's trepidation comes with the realization that the only reason she would be telling him this is that she really did think it was information that would go to his grave. Grimness aides, there is curiosity on his part as well.
She nodded once. "The Federation did one thing constantly during the occupation: secure a supply line beneath Zeon's nose. Food, supplies, medicine. All delivered bits at a time by smugglers or by drop offs offshore."
Tammy had been an invaluable member of Seattle's guerilla cells just because she had, very early on, still had gone about her job as a fisher until she had been discovered as a guerilla outright. Until that moment however she had spent time going out and collecting supplies from the remnant at large naval forces of California Base, hiding in the Pacific, or the wider Federation military apparatus. Even after that had been shut down by upping Zeon patrols offshore, supplies, albeit meager, had been slowly trickled into Seattle by a network of smugglers and bribed Zeeks.
Maybe she alone could've continued her own without Federation support, but not when there had been a guerilla force of several hundred in Seattle that needed to be fed, kept alive, and given weapons.
The solution to the Ghoul, and indeed any, was to simply starve the city out, or, at the very worst: "You can't be nice. You gotta kill us all."
Even she knew what it was like to starve, and that had been before the war.
She sounded like a Zeek she hated so much, it felt sour coming out of her throat.
"Well. There were always alternatives to that of course. Maybe not as forthright as… much of a solution as what you may be putting down, but we are not conquerors. This is a liberation from the corrupt Federation."
"If only it was…"
"If it was would you have fought for us again?"
She doesn't dignify his question with words, only an expectant glare, but he doesn't back down, remaining eyebrow raised. He can wait, and what annoying he does to her does coax this out of her with a breath that's more tired than she realized.
He has nothing to lose, not even time. What time he's had is borrowed anyway.
"It's still true, you know. The Federation doing what it does." It hurts that he is right, but they've always been right when it came to the Earth Federation and how it propelled along its agenda. She lived on Earth for over two years before the invasion, she had had her fair share of a certain, unique viewpoint. How rare she must've been, and how miraculous it is to Garma that he realizes that. "Billions for space development and the resource collection pipeline into the colonies, but none for down here on Earth."
She was a Spacenoid, yes, but she had lived among Earthnoids and seen that perspective anew.
She wondered how many others like her had been on Earth. There were always the commerce families who often spent equal times on Earth as they did up on the Sides, maybe the errant rare family that had been split up between Earth and the Sides allowed a certain amount of free travel. But all the talk about Earthnoids on Earth living in such luxury and comfort while Spacenoids toiled away beneath taxes and embargos, it fell away when on Earth she saw the same homeless, the same hungry, the same poverty. The Federation was still to blame, but not all Earthnoids.
Her wallet was somewhere, buried in Fremont, north of there in the rubble of her original, small, basement apartment that hardly had sun and the cement walls were badly painted over: In it, her picture ID, a few singles in Earth Fed Dollars, and then an EBT card. On her picture ID had been a black stamp, one meant for her, and people like her: Spacenoid-Immigrant.
"Everywhere, it's always someone abusing someone." It was admission, and defeat.
Garma does her best to assuage her, pained as she seems right now. "Well, you must know that's what war is, too. If that is the case with the Federation, then the Federation has always been at war with its people." He dips his chin down, trying to catch her own low gaze as she blankly stares at the map between them. "I understand, I do." He said quietly but amends quickly. "Not in the way that you know, but I'm not ignorant of it."
It's a thoughtful assuage of his words to her. He lived a certain way as a Zabi, and she, by all accounts, was far more normal. He may be a Zabi, but he too is also a Spacenoid.
"Does it burn you?" He asks her.
"Huh?"
"For those two years you lived on Earth, seeing that the Earth Federation still treated its own underclass the same as it did us Spacenoids, did you think of going to war with them again?"
"Yes." The word flows so easy when it's to him, asking that question. It surprises him, and her, and they stare at each other with a distant connection between them. It was this feeling, long ago, that tied her to his cause during that distant Dawn on Guardian Banchi.
For her it's easy now: the idea of seeing a problem and going to deal with it, rifle in her hand. But this was a lawless land and she had been God forsaken to her role as a problem solver with a rifle. Back then, however, that feeling remained in her when she was on Earth. She had once charged into action and been vindicated for it by victory. Her helplessness on Earth had been familiar, but unable to be resolved.
Even with a blanked out, white eye, his vision is honest in their impression of her: "I really wish you remained with Zeon." His sincerity is true, if not embarrassing to himself as he once again darts a hand up to hair that isn't there. He settles for looking away. "True Spacenoid patriots are often missing nowadays."
"Am I only a patriot because I'm willing-" She stops. "Because I was willing to kill for you?"
"With or without me the cause remains, does it not?" His hands, they intertwine, clasping in front of his face before one unlocks and palms the wide burn that covers the right side of his face. "Without any of us, the problem persists."
"Yeah." She agrees with him. She still does, and she cannot deny him that because to deny him that would be to deny the plight of all Spacenoid kind. Even she, so far removed from being a Spacenoid, cannot forget that. "That doesn't mean that your solution was what was warranted."
"Are you speaking of-"
"Just the war." She cuts him off. She can only retread old ground with the colony drop so much before even to her, it becomes old hat. Her retribution for it will come eventually. "Your aim was to completely and utterly destroy the EFF, and just on that premise I think it was wrong base of this war, if I was in your shoes."
Pass the mile high rhetoric of freedom and Spacenoid rights, and the condemnation of the Earthborn elite, there was still a very practical, very simple statement that would've outlined the goals of this war: the elimination of the Federation and then the subsequent replacement of their power structure with that of Zeon's and their own ideology for a greater good.
"Does it not deserve to be destroyed? For stomping on the rights of the innocent?" He asks her.
"If you wanted to teach someone the wrongs of their ways, do you kill them for it?" Garma opens his mouth, but Mai, at the very least, believes in him enough that he would say no. "Of course not." His teeth clack back together, but the moment of extra consideration that he gives himself does make him agree with her. "Killing's need to be done, no doubt in this world, but not the way we went about it."
She's talking a little bit like Gearten now, his folksy roughness is an apt tone that goes well with explaining matters of the world. "Forgive me if I don't see your same nuance, but roughly, I think I do agree with you." Garma explains otherwise, confused, but he is not bothered. "It's the nature of war."
She scowls, snarls, before speaking. "War is not the literal violence or the tactics or the maneuvers, Garma. War is the mechanism of politics to use force to change or make people abide where they otherwise would not. Killing, violence, it's all… if it doesn't have a purpose, it's useless." Maybe spending time in civilian higher education has done her well, and even she surprises herself as she speaks. "This is a useless war."
Garma, he tilts his head gently from side to side, hearing her words and the way they seem to tickle his ears. "This war is useless, even though you know the Earth Federation deserves to be uprooted at its corrupted heart?"
"There has to have been a better way."
"If there was, we would've found it."
The silence between them is far more considerate than she'd like, as if nursing open wounds long open from before the war and their shared existence of having been born away from the Earth. His words sound like they are trying to convince himself to her ears however, and her words are those of someone who has given up to him. In between them a consensus could be made on that laminated map.
"You believe all this, and yet you still fought against Zeon?" he asks quietly. "You still killed my soldiers."
"Yes." She nodded, resolutely, bringing her leg up to the seat itself, resting her chin upon her knee. "They didn't need to die. I know that. But I was there with a gun, and a price that needed to be paid. The colony was dropped and they- you, used it to your advantage in a way that can't be forgiven." It was an eternal truth, and she an eternal hypocrite, in that in a perfect world, no one died with wasted time or lives. But this was not a perfect world. Far from it. She killed them because it felt right, and good to her, and that was something that could not be explained away by the education of war and military history. She enjoyed the killing because it was the only thing she could do. "I don't claim to be a good person, Garma." To say that she was would be to be further gone than him, and as she admits it, she hurts, and she looks at him.
She sees his sympathy before she can shut him out.
"You vex me so, dear Mai." His voice is a young voice, like hers. The voice that he uses, not to speak to crowds or to press or to soldiers. His voice was of a young man lost in the world and she knew the sound well. No matter how hard he could form it or put volume behind it, he couldn't hide it: They still were just starting their lives (or at least on his part, he would die young).
"Please stop saying that." Dear Mai. She groans, but this is the umpteenth time she's asked, and, at this point, he has felt out that she was too dignified to kill him over something so innocent.
Garma chuckles once. Any victory he can take against her is one he's sure to repeat. "Still, you do see how odd it is that you decry Zeon for its cruelty, and yet when you are put in this hypothetical situation of what you'd do in my place, you'd do far worse."
She strains her voice, rushing through her words annoyed, as if she was loathe to actually explain it: "I can separate objective mechanism from reality. I'm not saying it's good, what would be the way for Zeon to win this war, but it is how it could be done."
"Hmph." He crosses his arms, right over the left. His right arm dulls in pain when applied pressure, the burns return alight. It's a bit of agitation he has to stomach, and to ignore it he likes to keep his mind busy. "Well, how about I start telling you about how it was done, then."
For a moment Garma can swear he can see her eyes light up for a moment, the fact that he is doing what she's saying for once, this one odd thing, but it settles her as she nods, and he, very slowly, begins to outline the first day of the invasions.
Command has honed him. For as much as Garma tries to remember Mai of the Academy, Mai can remember Garma better than he could vice versa. Back then he had been more flair, even more princely. The expectations were always there given the circumstances of his birth, but the exact responsibility, or lack thereof, had been absent to the sixteen-year-old teenagers that they had once been. He was a brat that, as fair as he tried to be, he could never shed his name.
She didn't watch him from afar, but it was impossible to not notice the Zabi.
What had once been a teenager that had been coy and charming in his own bratty way, gallivanting all over the Academy with good grades, looks, and company, was still there. She hears it in the way dear Mai sounds, but she also recognizes an echo of that night that has rung out to the now: The Garma that had drawn them all to the APC hangar and roused them into the Dawn Rebellion.
Garma Zabi has changed into a military commander, and if there was any doubt, it is casted away in how easy the overhead abstractions and methods of the war for the Earth, at least in North America, are described, over and over again from him, a day at a time.
"You've got a good memory." She comments as he recounts the battle of St. Louis and the exact hour that the Federation tried to counterattack a vital logistical line (one that he had prepared for by allocation a mobile suit squadron for).
"Thank you." He holds the dry erase marker in his left hand as the curve of a frontline marking creates battlelines of the war as it happened, and each time he smudges one out or draws another, he explains. "Not to disparage my assistants, but having good recall is crucial when a battle is ongoing."
Texas was taken by perhaps the cleanest, at least for Zeon, mobile suit offensive yet. He had explained that the Dom mobile suits that had been recently deployed at that point in the war, late April, had been far more effective on Texan plains than the Zakus. The Doms in Seattle often didn't have the room to fully use their "skating" abilities, and for that, as Garma went on to describe the blitz against a Federation armored battalion, she is thankful for.
"The Federation, for its credit, were very wary about encirclements. My forces in North America could hardly ever find an opening to encircle units." He shades in with a red dry erase marker the territory which the Federation held onto at that point, shakily, but shading is not the same as handwriting and, for as long as he is alive, he might as well get used to writing with his left hand. Truth be told he would be writing his final will and statement at some point, but not now. Not today. That would be a finality he was not ready to accept: a conscious step toward simply surrendering his life, and not having it taken. "We could destroy unit cohesion, and of course eliminate enemy force compositions, however we could never outright destroy manpower itself, or at least in a way that would've made the months that followed this less of an issue."
"Retreat is a viable strategy." Mai gives the Federation credit in turn. The Federation abandoning Seattle early in the war had given her ample opportunity to kill as she did.
Outside, blue skies, but she feels it in the air that it won't last for long. Blue skies and the sun don't give any particular warmth to Seattle as the cold of winter approaches them day by day in that November time. She hates the cold, and this, more than anything, she knows is a consequence of her flesh and blood. People like her don't belong in that hemisphere just by temperature tolerance alone. Her eye catches the speck of birds, black amongst blue.
The idea of retreat, of hiding from Zeon, it pokes something in Garma, a good hour or so after they had descended into the procedural talk of military matters. It returns to her:
"If I can inquire, what were you doing here on Earth, other than hiding from the Federation?" He had understood that much: she had come to Earth so that the Federation, looking for one of the deadliest of the Dawn Rebellion in the colonies, would remain looking for her in the colonies and not underneath their noses. Mai considers his question thoughtfully, hands braced against the table, her calloused fingers tapping along the plastic surface several times before her head seemed to agree with a stray thought.
"Trying to move past it all, pick up a wage, keep to myself." It's not much of an answer and even she knows it as her voice strains.
"How so?"
A hand of hers gestures up before landing back on the table. "The local university here offered a reduced tuition for Spacenoid applicants. I was starting on a business management degree, but it's hard keeping up with my studies, living as I did." Her eyes glance down, and they land on his chest, just idly, the moustache of the beer company's emblem he wears on his hoodie curving along with the wrinkles. "I lived paycheck to paycheck, trying to find out how to live on my own, on Earth of all places." Earth was big. Too big. In her mind the world was finite, living on the colonies, for as long as a city went on, it would end, and then nothing. But on Earth, city limits did not mean an end to space on a colony, it meant something further beyond, endlessly. When she came to Earth, she had found the horizon for the first time, and it terrified her. Nowadays she looks to it by the grace of the sun and the moon and realizes that this was something that wayward Spacenoids longed for. Mornings weren't always what they were cracked up to be, but they were beautiful at times, not that Seattle's typical weather helped. Garma sees how her eyes drift downward, as if looking down into her past, a bitter look curving her eyes. "No one helped me. Everyone was too busy with their own shit."
Garma knows the word that she cannot say, admit, in her vulnerability.
She was lonely.
He knows what that's like.
He might've had his family, brothers and a sister, various servants constantly around him and teachers, but none he called call peers. He might've been an only child after all, and no friends to grow up with. He doesn't regret his upbringing, but it had been in his past. For Mai it had been her life.
She goes on, "During the day whenever I didn't have classes, I was a cashier at a vegan grocery… but at night…" She knew how to fight, and, perhaps more specifically, she had been trained to fight in a professional way. The Academy, for as much as it raised officers, had often reminded them that they were soldiers first. Theoretically, seventeen different physical fighting styles had been drilled into all of them, from Tae Kwon Do to any number of military-derived martial arts. Actual technique when it came to throwing and taking a punch had been a skill as any, and a skill recognized, very much so. "I did something else."
She was a fit woman who had killed before. Certain options were available to her.
Her words are slow, considering of herself, but low in such a way that vexes and enraptures him.
Garma knows more than he has ever in his life save for being in his father's presence during official meetings about the affairs of Zeon, when not to push a subject. But there's something there that he takes in, stores away for later. The possibility of something else had been as intriguing as anything.
They talk for a few more hours about the war, and its development, starting from March on. Battle lines are drawn, and territory is filled in. The way they talk, it almost is as if they were going over notes for an exam regarding an ancient military campaign.
The distinct possibility that this could've been them, in another life, either academic or in actual military confrontation, is a possibility that Mai tries not to think about, but one that Garma is very comfortable imagining.
This woman could've been one of his own, completely. (As for what completely means Garma doesn't dwell too much on.)
"How did you fight our mobile suits?" They end the day on that topic, Garma noticing the twitch and the mannerism of her movements speak to a certain need for her to move. It wraps around the underline of the entire military campaign and what had made the conventional warfare unique.
Mobile suits.
Despite her Spacenoid origins, despite her familiarity with mobile workers, she had been no more knowledgeable about the mobile suits made for war than anyone else on Earth when the first time Zakus made their appearance known on the battlefield.
She did have advice however as her fellow guerillas primed Molotov cocktails and RPGs: Go for the legs.
"I don't know if fight is the right way to say what we did at least." She looks over to her sniper rifle. The oculars of Zeonic mobile suits had protective glass meant for space warfare over them, so as large as a target as they were, she couldn't even damage them that way. Not that she didn't try. "We had to attack everything leading up to a mobile suit, earlier on. If we couldn't kill the pilots, we knocked out the mobile suit crews, if not them, then their gear or equipment; replacement parts, stuff like that. But we've never been able to take on mobile suits head on without doing some extremely stupid stuff."
Stuff like driving semi-trucks full of explosives into their legs. That hadn't been sustainable, to say the least. The collateral damage of a suicide truck going off with several tons of TNT in urban Seattle had been almost as bad as detonating a mobile suit core itself.
Garma nods, understanding. "I was surprised too, about our mobile suits. Me and Dozle knew very early on about them, but even then, I couldn't anticipate what exactly they could do until Loum. They are something that perhaps even I can't fully wrap my head around tactically. I don't know if our stratagem used them in the way that they should, but on every battlefield they touch, they are a force multiplier beyond any of the like I've ever heard outside of weapons of mass destruction."
By the mobile suit victories, streaming in during the first days of open warfare alone, it had been those numbers, those reports that had inspired Zeon everywhere that victory was assured.
When the war was mostly relegated to space and the colonies, news about the first confrontations had been lousy on the airwaves until the Federation censors kicked in. It was the Battle of Loum that had become the breaking point: the realization that this rebellion in Side 3 was not to be over and finished immediately.
"They lost their… well okay-" She stopped herself before going on. "We had found ways to deal with them directly as the war went on, but if it came down to facing down mobile suits, we weren't taking the right fights. Wallah, there was a point in the war where your pilots would just sleep in their cockpits, which made it a pain in the ass to get them." The implication left in the air at that fact was chilling, but to the guerillas, no doubt it meant they had been doing the right combative actions.
"But you have killed several units, have you not? Mobile suit losses are not unusual, especially since most of those combat loss reports are forwarded to me." Garma tilted his head. He still has enough hair that a bit of it droops over.
There had been the Zaku by the library that had technically been her kill: her squad at the time blasting it with RPGs at close range until its dynamo or servos gave up and collapse, the pilot, in its panic, trying to run, only to get sniped by her.
Before that had been a Zaku-I that Foreman's people had attached demolition charges too when it wandered too close to the downtown construction.
The rest had been Murph's kills; the majority even.
"Not usually who I was aiming for, but yeah, I've got a few to my name." It's a half-boast on her lip, a smirk too as she eyes him. "Get up and under their sensors, knock out their joints, weapons. We never needed to destroy your mobiles suits, just damage them enough to put them as non-combat effective, then we could take care of your logistics. I'm sure there's enough parts strewn around Seattle that we intercepted that could maintain the mobile suits you had here, but they never got to those mobile suits with how we fought."
In truth he's not surprised. There is credit to be given to her in that regard. Entire armored battalions of Federation tanks couldn't deal with a single troop of Doms. And yet this woman with nothing but infantry gear had been able to make do. Granted mobile suits shouldn't have gotten, presumably, close enough to have her be able to engage as she did, but the providence of active combat often tipped logical movements and maneuvers to the brave and the bold.
As he's spoken these last few hours, her comments are insightful, frank, but honest and constructive. She might've been a guerilla, but her training was classical, traditional, and more than that, this position between them was a forum he had not had in years as far as strategy meetings he had been involved with were concerned. His presence meant deference. Not to her, however.
He might've thought that he would've very much enjoyed a partition of history where she had remained with Zeon, but there's an amend to that that he thinks is cruel, messed up, and selfish of him. It's a true thought of his still though: He would enjoy having this version of her as an officer to him. If she had stayed with Zeon, no doubt that version of Mai Gul might've held a certain deference to him that, although pleasing, would've harmed the tactical stratagem as far as he was concerned.
Kiss-asses surrounded him so much, he had realized in his long internment, that he had become fond of this woman who would kill him. If nothing else, it was a change of pace.
She tempts a question on her tongue of her own fanciful what-if: "I heard stories about Fed remnant units stealing Zakus, mostly, early on during the war. The controls aren't too different from their combat planes or gun tanks according to some of the Feds, or even those of us who used mobile workers, but we didn't have much luck with that, nor did we try. That true?"
He huffs once, left finger with a marker still wedged between it and his middle finger gesturing to her sniper rifle. "Think of a career change?"
She shrugged. To that he had nodded at her in small bobs, barely perceptible. "As I said before. We're all replacements of replacements, this deep into this war. Replacement training was streamlined, and to be honest," Garma remembers his own, rudimentary training with a Zaku. This had been an endeavor even he, commander as he was, was able to slip in during the late hours of his less busy days, which already had gone on for perhaps longer than his personal physician would advise. "It's not hard to get behind a mobile suit once you understand the controls. The fact that they are bipedal means that the average individual has an intuitive understanding about movement. The rest comes faster than you expect, and as long as the Federation is not able to field weaponry properly able to fight them, we are given a long berth to build our experiences."
The more prideful, head strong, on their first sorties would often become scourges of the Federation, breaking line and form as they were given the power beyond most mortal men at the behest of what they called mobile suits. Annoying to any tactical plan, but they had their own results to bear. Garma could at least understand why those hot shot pilots had done as they did.
He starts, looking down on the map again and seeing months in his past that seem like years ago: "When I'm behind the controls of a Zaku, after all, I feel invincible."
A distant thought, bathed red, hiding behind a silver mask: I'm sure he feels just the same.
"Without your mobile suits, Zeon was just an army out of place."
Mai's voice, breathy and husky, but low and small at the same time, brings him out of his reverie, looking straight at him. Her green eyes again are perhaps the greenest he's ever seen. Blue skies from the windows behind her shade her a soft color, opposed to her usual harshness.
"I suppose…" He doesn't want to fight her on this. He can't, even if he wanted to. "I suppose so, dear Mai."
She lets this one slip, but those green eyes narrow, and all he can do is give a smirk back, knowingly.
Her fingers on her hands tingle, as if he's due a slap, but she doesn't this time.
Indeed, she does go to leave today again, some time past lunch, and there is a passiveness about her that Garma feels in the air. Or, at the very least, he convinces himself that he feels.
"Is this what you wanted out of me? For me to play back my strategy as it happened?"
She ties her boots before tucking them in, and even now she ties them as the Academy taught them how to. On the floor, she answers with a grunt. "Yeah." She explains no further, but Garma knows by now not to expect more from her. "Still gonna kill you though."
"Of course." He accepts as lightly as he can to at least entertain her. She leaves soon after, so again he is left to himself and the continuing odyssey of Odysseus. Before that, however, he figures he would do some menial cleaning, starting with the map still left on the table.
When Garma turns the map over, he discovers something that is far more dangerous than anything than he could ever say, and Mai doesn't know.
There's an extra pep in her step today, if only because it's padded by socks that are doing their jobs inside of her boots, but it's a pep that doesn't last long as she visits 6 Pavilion. It had been Tammy's now, after her relocation: A mixed use building that had been half of a wine and paint studio and the other apartments. It had all been living space now, with the sections of the building that had been facing south turned into battlements out of the windows. It had been very close to the Kingdome, close enough that bodies, fresh from the engagement of the night that the Gaw had come bombing, were still there. Not Human bodies that is, although they were undoubtedly there, but rather bodies from Zakus and the Zeon war machine that had come with the Gaw. Mai had the full picture of what happened that night, but not so the rest of the Conclave and its Pavilions.
They had littered Little Saigon and southerly of the Kingdome, beam weapon damage lousy with them. Only in the very latest stages of the war had the concept of beam weaponry at all, at least on the ground, had been shown off by a Federation mobile artillery piece that had required a generator truck three times its size. It was the most effective anti-Zaku II measure the Federation counterattack forces had in retaking Seattle, and it worked, due in no small part to the guerilla forces Mai led in corralling Zakus toward its line of fire.
6 Pavilion's garrison had on patrol often took their time looking them up and down and all over. A dead Zaku was always a spectacle worth appreciating, and the realization that these hadn't yet been picked through had kept scavengers from the Conclave busy for precious metal, wiring, glass, ammunition, and whatever could be recovered from the cockpit, assuming that they had still been somewhat recoverable.
"Two Zakus at least, but we're getting bits and pieces of others. Plus at least an entire squadron of Dopps just based on the fuselages that are around." Dentley, scavenger that he has become, reports to her as they pass on the street. Seattle is busier with lines being drawn, carts and trolleys being used to scavenge through debris of a battle that they had only been a backdrop to.
"Any red Zaku parts?"
"Red?" Dentley tilted his head to Mai's odder question, his beard drooping with it.
"Never mind."
Dentley sniffed a few times, looking back over his shoulder at south of Seattle. "Most of the fighting that night was down that direction. Seems like the Zakus were fighting other mobile suits if I had to guess. Tons of footprints that don't match any Zeon suits we know."
Zaku I and IIs, Goufs, Doms, and Zaku Tanks had made up the repertoire of Zeon's mobile suits that had come to Seattle and the surrounding areas. Mostly Zakus and their derivatives. One Gouf. That unit had torn its way through Little Saigon until Murph had thrown enough people and four semi-trucks into its legs with high explosives that it had created a crater dead center of the once ethnic section of Seattle.
They all had been dealt with the same after the Federation had upped its supply of rocket launchers and thermite to them.
The fact that the Federation had now been fielding mobile suits of their own had sat inside Mai oddly. It spoke to an inevitability. The Federation could outpace Zeon's production capacity without doubt, and with a larger infrastructural and logistical base, it didn't come down to how, but when the Federation would achieve victory. Maybe that ship she saw had been delivering the very first mobile suits, perhaps.
"We'd go take larger chunks out of them but… uh, yeah, Murph's people are making themselves known. We're seeing fresh tags." Dentley refers to the spray-painted mark known as graffiti to some, but markers to others. The mark of the Reaper Lords is that of a half-moon crescent affixed like the Grim Reaper's scythe. "They're claiming territory."
"How close?"
"About a dozen blocks off, but you know what that means."
It meant that there was some plus or minus there, some give and take those gangsters like them always liked pushing.
"Like hell I do. See you around."
"Right, Captain."
The two split off, and soon enough Mai has arrived at Tammy's Pavilion, finding her second floor from the top, leaning against a window with a pair of binoculars around her neck, blue bandana around her head that seemed to stretch her face back like the crows' feet around her eyes.
Mai would've said hi, walking into that apartment turned Tammy's own personal post, but another man is in there, sitting on a stool on what had been a dresser, a radio set on top of it. She'd seen him before, skin almost as dark as hers and that same jet-black hair. He dresses in a rugged button down, jeans on his pants with a bracelet of a design she can't quite make heads or tails about around his wrist. An older man, but younger than Tammy. He knows who she is, an angular face looking her up and down as one hand of his is occupied with the receiver of a radio set. With a respectful nod that is his greetings before he continues what he was doing: having a conversation.
It's not a conversation she understands then before she remembers what this was.
During the war, the usage of radios had been a dangerous prospect until an ancient lesson of hers was brought back out: From the ancient Second World War, the United States spoke its secrets over unsecure lines the only way that they could: in a tongue unrecognizable save for a distinctly American people.
"Got the radio setup yesterday." Tammy starts with her, pushing off her windowsill and greeting her, gesturing toward the whole affair. It was curiosity enough that a radio had been set up, and because of that, a reminder that there had been an outside world.
The language that the man speaks into the radio might've been mistaken for a foreign tongue, but it was entirely native.
It's month one of the true guerilla war, and the only way messages between different insurgent groups are either through direct word of mouth, or physical letter. Both are risky, unreliable, even with modern technology freely available. Hunkering down in the sewers one day, the Ghoul hears a language spoken between two darker men who have come to Seattle to fight Zeon. Mai had already two languages floating around in her head: Universal Standard English and Universal Standard Arabic, and the latter had slowly been going out of use. The language spoken however wasn't even Spanish or Chinese or Vietnamese that she had heard from time to time. She's confused at first, but someone clarifies. She as a Spacenoid especially, kept to the city, wouldn't know.
"They're Snoqualmie." Mai tilts her head at the unknown word from Win Nguyen, fresh faced, a little crazy, but more than willing to let her have a bit of his own street smarts. "Natives." Win clarifies. It doesn't make too much more sense to her. "Apparently, they turned their reservation into a safe haven, Zeeks mostly avoided them. Word is because the local commander wanted to try and build an alliance with them. These dudes wanted none of that and just wanted to fight."
Over the radio, the Conclave and its guerilla groups spoke in the Lushootseed dialect, the language of the Native Americans there in Washington. Highly specific, Zeon never was able to crack it before it had been too late for them.
The Snoqualmie man goes on for a bit more before hanging up the radio. "I was just keeping in contact with my parents back over in Snoqualmie." He spoke in Universal Century English to Mai. The area in which they resided had been named Snoqualmie, a town out east of Seattle, more center of the state, far and away from the heaviest fighting in Seattle. "My little brother was able to get his telescope back from the resistance fighters there. Apparently, there's some real interesting stuff happening back where you come from, Ghoul."
As if she cared. "Yeah? Go on." Mai though let him speak. Tammy held her arms akimbo, interested as well.
"Federation space freight is going up. A lot." He starts. "He catches launches from the Federation territory up north- they're the only ones up there able to do that, and apparently for the last few weeks the Federation have been launching dozens a day: More in the last month than the entire war so far."
That was very intriguing. Mai can't help but think back to her discussion about Garma earlier. He had identified perhaps the only reason why the Federation would win the war in the end, and one that Gihren had identified in Garma's own funeral speech: The Federation had so many resources over Zeon that it could survive the long game. Perhaps that was being enacted now, if Federation supplies were being shipped off world to the EFSF.
"Not only that," the man went on, "a trader that my tribe is working with right now says Federation has been getting their shit together. Rumor is, is that a massive offensive is being prepped in South East Asia and the Ukraine."
"How does a single trader know that?" Tammy had been as skeptical as she needed to be, but the answer that he gave hadn't been a surprise to Mai.
"Well, the trader is a Fed Quartermaster selling off some… extra stock." Leave it to a Fed to be corrupt, but it is illuminating.
"Are the Feds actually that close?" Mai tilted her head. She had last heard the closest Federation forces had been at least past Montana.
"Unofficially." The man nodded. "From what I hear all sorts of units and teams from the Federation are just pushing out. Zeon's pretty much disappeared all around… Which is I suppose is the reason why Murph is moving back up."
"Yeah?"
He nodded again. "Feds sounds like they've finally, actually, pacified Los Angeles. They have California Base back." And what had meant was left unsaid of course: On the west coast, all that the Zeeks had left, to anyone's guess, was Oregon and technically Washington with Seattle. But the battle had been won here, and the forces all withdrawn, leaving behind them. Zeon's ownership of the Pacific Northwest had been on paper only. Whether or not the Federation knew that, no one knew, but the Federation had taken back the West Coast proper.
"So, the Feds have the West Coast, the Mid West, and the Zeeks are, presumably, everything east of the Mississippi?" Tammy asked, surprised. Mai didn't know her local states anymore as the next Spacenoid. She knew Texas and New York, but not anything else. She knew cities, at least. "And with the Feds up north…."
North north. Alaska north.
It had left Zeon with a supposedly U-shaped holding of territory mid-continent, as far as they had any knowledge of the general state of the war.
Tammy had only given a shrug. "Long as it means I don't have to see another Zeek for as long as I live, I'll be a happy woman." Looking over to Mai however, the look on her face is almost unreadable beneath her boonie hat. "You would know, you think this war will be done before year's end?"
"Not unless the Federation has some sort of secret weapon." She scoffed.
"Right… Alright James, get out of here. Ghoul seems like she wants to talk to me." James had taken that as his time to leave, the two women left alone, and drawn back to the window. The room had been a bedroom before the war, cutesy as hell, probably a teenage girl's if based on the wallpaper and the remaining polaroid photos taped on the wall. Memories of a different life, for all of them there. "What's up?"
Mai shrugged. "Just wanted to see how things were going down here. Feels like I'll be swinging by a lot."
"Yeah, it's a nice place, don't know about a forward fighting position but I'll make do." She knocked her knuckles against the building, her LMG laying on the sill of the window ready for whatever may come. "I hear you're out and about further south than this, scouting too, right?"
Mai nodded once, adjusting the sling of her rifle as it laid across her back. "Someone's gotta."
"Yeah… Been hearing stuff from patrols and the occasional scav that comes from down south. Not too encouraging." A part of Tammy's voice dips, concern in it. "Reapers are getting closer and closer. They've been tagging territory again, marking places for scavs not to go. When I get a group to go out to see what's up they never can seem to find any Reapers though, but the scavs swear up and down that the Reapers move at night." She spit out the window, obviously not too happy with it. "Inch by inch, like the tide. They come up at night and recede during the day. I don't got enough batteries to be running night vision all night."
They were lucky, the Conclave and Mai's forces had been the group that were given the most direct of the Federation's clandestine support. Murph hadn't been as receptive, but because of that, the lion's share, if not all of the specialized equipment like night vision remained with the Conclave.
"You've got enough to run for at least one night though, do you?" Mai poses. Tammy's eyes clear like the Seattle sky today, head tilted.
"You going goon?" As was the language by the more militia types that they fought with when they kitted up, fought, a certain way.
"Something like that." Again Mai shrugged. She could only do so much herself, looking from afar as a sniper. "If you can, get a fireteam for tonight, I'll take 'em out. Go see if I can watch some Reapers in their wild habitat."
"Scouting…?" Tammy makes sure.
"Scouting." Mai affirms. She's not starting a ground war again if she can help it.
Tammy considers in her mind a bit, the breeze from the window knocking a few light blonde hairs from her bangs to stick in front of her face as she does. It doesn't take long. "Well. Shit. Alright sure. Don't see why not. When?"
"Sundown." Which would be a few hours from now. Before Tammy can offer her anything else, she turns, walking out and away. "I got my own gear. I'll be back."
When she returns to their apartment, she has caught him stirring a cup of tea, about to return to the bedroom to continue reading. He is surprised, the way he raises an eyebrow up tells it all. She answers.
"Won't be back tonight. Maybe in the morning." She says as she moves into the gear corner of the room, digging out one of her many weapons and grabbing what she needed for the long night ahead. Garma stands by, more adept standing with a crutch and a cup of tea in one hand than he would ever think. It's not exactly natural, but he's getting used to it. Before he opens his mouth however, he goes to the sink to grab her tin cup, a rip of a small paper package a familiar sound to Mai as boiling water from their communal pot is dipped in, the smell of Zeonic coffee rising in the room.
When Garma is ready with her cup of coffee he stands there, benign, waiting to make a move.
If he was going to ask why, she wasn't going to answer. Her why is that it really is a good idea to go look at what the Reapers might be doing south of 6 Pavilion and the Kingdome. They're not at war yet, but it was an obvious war-like thing to proceed as they were feeling about it. She can't blame herself, however. It felt like the right thing to do for the Conclave.
From deep in a weapon case, she pulls out a black rifle.
Police issue AR-15s. Over a hundred years old, and mostly phased out for the Federation's bullpup Colt rifle, but it had been good enough for the police departments still, and especially good enough for her. An IR laser and a holographic sight have made their home on it. It was easier to use Federation and Zeon standard weapons in the majority of fighting for ammo and part's sake, but there had been a certain refinement that these old weapons had when it came to fighting of a more tactical skew.
Military technology had, seemingly, stagnated long ago in the AD period of Human history. Neutron bombs, lasers, railguns, drones had been on that upper end, because after that, the destructive and outright decimating power of what laid beyond hadn't been as feasible as the proliferation of what had been made already. Only when the mobile suit had been made had the gears of military research and development began to turn again, and that barrier of devastation was breached.
The weapon that changed warfare was a weapon that had been a part of the divine parable. It seemed only fit its results had been so terrible.
If God had made man in his image, as went the Christian and Judaic doctrine, then what Zeonic had done was nothing less than a divine farce. Mobile weapons systems, that walked and operated like those that designed them.
In Islam, as Mai knew, her Creator had no form that she could understand, fathom, outside of worship.
If she had defiled faith, it had not been in the desecration of her image.
Her transgressions bit far deeper.
She wasn't the best sniper at night, and so her rifle was kept on her back by its sling just in case, and instead she had kept the AR-15 up front, screwing on a suppressor onto its barrel.
There had been a time during the deepest of the guerilla war where she had been charged with going out into the deepest of Zeon's territory and told to either put down bodies or bring up some sort of objective that would loosen Zeon's grip on Seattle. Military training or not, she had followed, or fallen, into a long line of fighters that were more wolves than men. The Federation had a term for their Special Operation Forces: Manhunters. If that was a definition then she had abided by it when the plate carrier was put on, the helmet and night vision set up, and her battle belt tightened.
"That first night, when you found me," Garma came to her, keeping his distance, but standing still. The height difference between them seems even greater when she's kitted up, but this was a familiar look to him. "I mistook you for Zeon's own special forces group."
She pauses, carefully considering the danger in his words. "Should I be expecting them at some point?"
Innocently, he shakes his head once. "…Unlikely. That cadre has long been depleted due to the war." Also, he lingers on, "Zeon thinks me dead still, anyway."
"You've got no transmitting chip in you? Nothing like that?" It's a half-serious question. If that had been the case their arrangement together would've never gotten as far along as it did.
"Of course not." He chuckles, only a little indignant, holding her cup of coffee, waiting still.
They listen to the radio together for some days, and, on the Zeonic channels taken from space above, Gihren's speech still plays on. On the Federation channels, however, the propaganda is of the same caliber, but there's a hope to it, something that Mai had not heard yet in its genuine form from the Federation.
Something about the war had changed.
She chambered a round in the AR-15 before she slung it over her head, letting it fall limp over her front plate carrier. She could admit she never felt more ready to wage war than when her organs had been behind ceramic plates and she had been outfitted to stack bodies like operators of old, but she had always remembered that all of this had paled when it came to Zeon's mobile suit.
"I really would like to know what's going on." Garma says, and honesty is on his breath as he says it quietly.
Mai has no answer for him save for this: "The world moves on, with or without us."
Time moves forward, never stopping. The world didn't stop for her, nor did it stop when Iffish fell. Time kept going.
Between her, a cup of coffee, and her first instinct is to grab it.
She doesn't, however.
No, a part of her reminds herself, stop it. Don't let him entertain you like this.
What he thinks is her about to grab the cup from him is instead her pushing past him, and she wings him, slightly, a drop of coffee getting onto the floor.
"Hey-!"
She cuts him off, back to him. "If you hear gunfire, it's probably me." As the words leave her mouth Garma slightly straightens his back, and the rise of annoyance is cut off momentarily.
"And…?" He expects more from that, the concern in his face palpable even behind scars. She wants to laugh. The single drop of spilt coffee steams itself below him.
As if you do care.
"It takes more than one to be in a firefight." She gives him instead.
She flashes her hand, its scar still through it, and that was enough for him as she gloved up, helmet on, and one last thing: Garma wouldn't have found it if he had been perusing her laundry. This one is deep in her gear trunk. A piece of the old her. Practical though. A final gift from her mother, ancient threads, kept and maintained over a century at least, back in the old history, before the UC. Its colors were faded, but still distinct, dark blue, almost black even, with white threads, tracing lines across them like streaks. Patchwork from generations of Guls in the past have made their place known through it if she unfolded it out. Unfolded it could've very well been a cape or shawl, but it was neither. She goes to it before she leaves and draws it out.
"Our blood hails from Tabariya, in ancient Palestine. Never forget that name, and never forget what you come from." So said her mother, the last time Mai saw her, before she departed to Earth from Side 3, entrusting her with a Keffiyeh that had seen peoples disappear and history turn over.
"Is that…?" She knows what Garma asks before he finishes. She shakes her head. It's not the light lilac fabric of a distant past that she called her own.
"This is a keffiyeh." she answers, threading it around her neck, acting as a gaiter. Green eyes seem to get darker with dark blue so near to them. "My hijab, or at least the one you saw me with in the Academy, I lost it, during the initial bombings, when my actual apartment was destroyed by Zeon's attacks." She, among hundreds, combing through the ruins of hundreds of buildings in Seattle's north, could hardly find anything that remained or survived. She was lucky that this, alone, survived in the rubble of her tenement. She herself had been at the Conclave, as she had stayed since the colony drop. The Conclave, in so many words, was why she was alive now. "I stopped wearing it shortly after I came to Earth anyway."
"Why?" If it's concern on Garma's lips she doesn't want to hear it, although she doesn't care if it's an impolite topic with him.
A crisis of faith, on one part for her. A million reasons and half of it she can't even verbalize them or else damn herself in the eyes of something greater than her, both god or mortal. "It's hard being someone who looks like me in this part of the world, let alone a Muslim."
Her fingers thread over the rough feeling surface. Handwash only. Delicate, and yet it came out with her in the war.
"My people, that of Palestine, we were destroyed by a…" History is circular, but as far as she could tell, it always curves downward, ever downward. "Zion." She lets the word sit on her tongue and it turns rancid. In blood and name, she was prescribed her place in history long ago, and she had only now realized it had been right in front of her the entire time. "I won't let it happen to me. I haven't. I didn't."
It's folded over into a triangle before it's tucked into her collar, and then around her head, covering the lower half of her face. A look of ancient insurgents, and she had drawn from them, for as long as she fought. This was the Ghoul, and with her eyes and eyes alone, Garma saw the form and figure of a woman that had fought him. She was the only type of person he could imagine fighting him. For his own good, as said Kycilia, direct interaction with certain types of prisoners, namely the guerilla ones, were left to her liaisons on Earth to disseminate. But he'd at least get the reports on them and any tactical advantages that were taken from them, even across theaters. The Middle Eastern front, she would fit right in, and, perhaps more than that, it had been there where Zeon's forces had been having the hardest fight.
"In the Middle East. We're faltering because our mobile suits aren't exactly well suited to desert conditions, that and…" Military history came back to him. He wasn't a valedictorian for nothing. "I suppose the people there have been fighting this fight for centuries by now."
Not just her people. She's not even sure what she could define as "her people". She was a Spacenoid. She was a Palestinian. She was a Muslim. She was a woman who had lost everything. At the very least, she knew she hadn't been innocent.
She fights history, and yet is a part of it all the same.
She wants to disappear but cannot. Not completely. Not in a way that's easy. What she can do is disappear from Garma, at least for tonight.
"Stay safe." His words stopped her. If they were physical, they would have bounced off the back plate of her armor, but it stuns her all the same.
Without responding, she disappears into the dark and he is left holding a cup of coffee.
When she arrives, those who dare whistle. Her kit is impressive, if only because it was a kit that worked. It had to have worked for her to have survived that long. Mag pouches in the right place: a row of triple right across her midsection, right below a zippered pocket above her upper torso that held administrative items. Three more magazines for her rifle were along pockets in the plate carrier's cummerbund, a tourniquet and her radio filling out the rest. The wire that led from the radio, over her shoulder, into her earpiece had split and gone to a bone conduction microphone that wrapped around her neck, the boonie that had been her trademark traded in for the armored helmet and the night vision that came attached with it.
At some point the idea that soldiers needed to wear what Mai had been wearing was antiquated, a doctrinal change that read of stagnation and complacency.
What was old was new again, however.
"You look mean as always, Captain!" One of Tammy's men on night watch had cheered out quietly for her, and she had only let it bounce off her as she made her way up the building again to where Tammy presumably was: the kitchen.
It was an industrial type, not domestic, but Tammy had been at home enough with it as she stands before a metal island and a butane camping stove so common nowadays for heated meals. A pot boils with the smell of some sort of fatty oil and the bubbling of frying.
Tammy doesn't show her age. The crow's feet and the laugh lines are there on her pale face, dirty blonde hair thinning out due to stress and the war, but for a woman who is half-way through her forties, she doesn't look much more than thirty. Sea salt somehow had kept her face just smooth, but her body hadn't been as lucky. The cricks in her arm, the slugging creak of her back and shoulders, she would complain about it from time to time, even as she lugged around a light machine gun as her own personal weapon. Responsibility alone however kept her going.
It was the responsibility of motherhood. The two women lock eyes, acknowledging each other as Tammy dips a fork into the pot, the smell of fish filling the air in a way that makes Mai even water her mouth in avarice. A stool across the island is offered, and she takes it, helmet off, rifle on the table. Tammy is in her "going out" kit as well. Not too much different than what she wore out fishing. Warm, comfortable, spray painted a green from its yellow high viz that it once was. A police Kevlar vest is over it, the long line of a hundred bullets linked up, in a pile on the table.
"You going out with me tonight?" Mai asks quietly. A wind-up lamp provides the white light that keeps the internal dark at bay. That building is breathing, those asleep in the shadows of bunks and beds in the relative peace that remains as those on night watch stand out, look on, and guard a new front of an undefinable something off in the distance.
Tammy nods, still considering her cooking. "I'm the farthest Pavilion leader down now. I figure I should know what's going on beyond the wire myself." Breading, salt, some pepper, three sets of buns given out by the Conclave's own kitchen most likely. Flour had been delivered by the Federation before they had left, and enough was kept that bread was on the menu most days. "You're good with eating fish, right? I'm not to uh- I don't know if-."
Mai knows what Tammy means. "It's not something I worry about."
Tammy is calmed by this, nodding to herself as she fishes a cutlet of a fish out of the pot, a bass most likely, putting it down on a bun already opened. It's thick for a cutlet, juices running down as Tammy cuts it in half with her combat knife on the table, sliding it over to Mai. She takes it silently, the bite that comes one that is hot, crunchy, but good. A smile must slip from her because Tammy seems pleased. "You know, I think I'm old enough to be your mother, Ghoul." Tammy lets slip herself.
She really might be, Mai remembers her own parent's age. "Thank you, Teresia." She thanks with her real name. Tammy had been the easier one to say, a nickname. It stuck. Easier to yell out in combat. Tammy could only scoff at that, shaking her head as she makes two more sandwiches before turning off the stove. Mai takes the time to savor. Hot food, made food, is a rarity for her, so even now on that night of a patrol, she can take her time.
"You miss your parents?" Tammy asks between pops of the oil.
Her father was that bog-standard patriarch of Islamic expectation, and her mother taught her kindness in its absolute form. She is the child of her mother and father, and yet her inheritance has gone to waste. "Sometimes."
Tammy reflects on Mai's answer, forthright and fast as she assembles her own sandwich for herself, biting into it and chewing as she explains back: "I just wonder if my kids miss me."
Friend is a word that Mai doesn't like thinking about. Around her, she knows some people might call her that, and she might be friendly (comparatively) to them. But friend is such a word that doesn't feel like belongs to her. She hasn't had friends in a year, or, rather, she doesn't like the idea that she had them at all. In war, all friends did were die.
She chews through her fish sandwich, a common delicacy in Seattle. Common enough that she had her fair share of it before the war. Her meals had mostly been finger foods and fried affairs from work. Not exactly healthy, but it kept starvation at bay.
"Chances are my parents think I'm dead. Given everything." Mai says aloud to Tammy on the topic. It's true. The last call she had gotten from her family had been from her father advising her to return to Side 3 as soon as she could, or, at the very least, go to Gibraltar. Since Sydney, communications out to the colonies and vice versa have been nil.
Tammy winces, either for her, or because of her. "It's not a good feeling for a mother to have, you know?"
Mai had never been able to give birth, and despite this, she was known as a mother still.
She never had the chance to know, to feel, to see right and wrong on her path of motherhood. Tammy fills in the gaps, lets her know. A gift, or a curse. Mai doesn't know. But she needed it in the way that one extracted venom from a snake for anti-venom. It might've killed her, but she needed the traces to survive on still. Garma has been a very good source of venom in her mind, in her gut, recently.
It doesn't take long for Mai and Tammy to finish up eating, silent all the while. When Tammy eats, she eats only for the utility of it. To her fish is the same as air, it is a flavor that has long since melted away into the background of her mind.
"Who you got for me?" Mai finally asks as they finish.
"One more." She said, wiping her hands clean and turning off the stove. Said one more comes in through the door to the kitchen at that moment, and it's a familiar face, one that is also offered a fish sandwich for his troubles.
"What's up?" Dentley, shotgun in his arms, beard cut was a good enough choice in Mai's mind. "Tammy said you needed shooters. I figured you'd need a scavenger's touch." She had been as neutral about her feelings toward him as she had been any stranger, but again, he had been there for almost all of it. The detraction was the fact that he stayed in Seattle. No one smart did. To be fair to Dentley however, she really didn't like too much of anyone.
She nodded at the man, his night vision set up revealed as, not a helmet, but instead just a Lunaball mask with a night vision monocle attached to it. A distant memory rises in her, tucked away for the sake of her sanity at the visage of that mask, but she squashes it before it returns.
Garma tells her that Char became an ace pilot, among other things.
"Arts and crafts." He was rather impressed with his educational niche after all this time, proudly showing it off.
"Your call, but…" Mai looked at the two weapons of the two people going with her that night. "If we have to shoot, it'll be loud."
Dentley shrugged, his dark poncho seeming to be the same color as the beard he had lost. "If we have to go hot, it's going to be loud anyway."
"And we're not planning on kicking stuff off tonight, are we?" Tammy had wanted to make sure, tilting her head toward Mai. She was shorter than her, but age had made up the difference.
Mai shook her head. "Not if I can help it." She licked her teeth, considering. This would be the first time they were "behind" enemy lines since Zeon had fully occupied. Though this war, and the time in history that they were in, had not yet ended. The conditions of the world at large had not changed.
It kept going, and going, and going.
Full moon meant the night vision had the most to work with. Green light tubes paint the world its unnatural color and Mai sees the world in ways that many cannot. The same goes for Dentley and Tammy by her side. The Kingdome is behind them now, and only naturally, of course, as Mai leads, she leads them back to where this had all started: Back to where she had dug Garma out of the ground.
In the dark, guerillas move by shadows in the dark, and even now they do so. Hiding from who though? None want to admit it's each other.
In the shadow of the buildings Mai returns to where Garma had been buried, and maybe should've been left.
"Radiation hopefully should've died down." Dentley mutters as he walks in typical tri-form formation, right of Mai, Tammy taking the left. Tammy on the left made sense as they walked on the sidewalks of Seattle, letting her the most open field of fire if it came down to it.
"Any indication that the Reapers are running NODs?" Mai asks quietly to Tammy as they approach that rubble that she had pulled Garma from. Blood stains remain on crumpled rock and brick, both from Garma, and from the Reapers she killed. She can feel her own ghost stand where she had, weeks ago, as they stand on ground once tread. Dentley pushes past, taking an upper vantage post on the rubble, rock tumbling down, filling in the divot made from Garma's place, only noticed by Mai.
Tammy is busy looking outward down the street, scanning the area around.
"No. Don't think so."
With that answer Mai raises her rifle, canted against her shoulder as her left thumb depressed a thumb switch on her laser designator. Light, visible only to them, shone on the street. IR illumination had its benefits. It hadn't been daylight bright, but even with the night vision, it had revealed far more about the street like a selective flashlight.
"You're too tactical for us, Ghoul." Dentley teases.
"Mm." Tools of the trade she never entered fully. She was an officer, not a door kicker, but the need had arisen, and she knew how to walk walks, and talk talks. She swept the beam of IR light around, back to the building that had partially collapsed because of the Gaw impact, and, unmistakable, the flash of the Zeon cross beamed back at her as she passed it over. It hadn't been part of the debris of the Gaw, at least.
It shone out at her, and Tammy and Dentley hadn't noticed as they were otherwise looking down the street still, mapping the area in their mind's eye. What they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Mai had been a believer in that statement, and she lived it now still. "Go down the corner. Just gotta check something in here about this wreckage." She spoke out to Tammy and Dentley, the two affirming without a second thought as they moved down the street, leaving her alone.
Bits and pieces of the first aid that she administered here had still been strewn. Caps of solutions and syringes, along with bandage clips, mending into the concrete and rubble below her feet. There would've been a time where she would've thought that what happened, that Garma himself, had simply been an illusion of grief. Though there was no hiding the bloody stains left behind.
The Zeon gold cross that got caught in her IR beam was there when she flashed it again, approaching it in the dark of that partially collapsed building. The blocky object that it had been attached to had been revealed as she found herself in an arm's distance of it: half collapsed into the floor due to its weight.
It had been a safe, black, but with gold ornate markings. Key code combination along with a dialer. It had been about the size of a microwave, not much larger than those found in hotel rooms. It had done its job, and kept itself intact, thrown from the Gaw same as Garma. If she had to guess this safe had been his own, assuming the Gaw had been his personal command vehicle as far as the air was concerned. Running her gloves over it, dust and particles from laying stagnant amidst a debris field had been wiped off. She wasn't even going to try, but, at the very least, it was something to tempt Garma about, later.
"Anything interesting?" Tammy asks Mai as she reconnects with her and Dentley.
"No. Was trying to find some squadron insignias, is all. Maybe something I recognize."
Dentley had been first to peer down the intersection, pointing with his own gun at the imprint of truck treads. "Haven't you heard, Captain? That Gaw was apparently carrying Zeon royalty. The pretty-boy one."
"Who?" Mai lied.
"Garma Zabi. Me and the few other scavs were trying to find the guy's corpse, but no dice." Dentley's voice had been rough, callous, as if he had been talking about any hobby project. "But, really, given how that Gaw went up, I'm not surprised we haven't."
"Yeah? What good would that be?" Tammy had traced the tracks either east to south or south to east, indicating with her finger.
"I'unno." Dentley answered. "Maybe take a few pictures. Dig him out. Take a piece of him for a souvenir."
"Christ, now you're sounding like that little shit, Win." Tammy had stifled a genuine disapproval, but Dentley had been unbothered. "Ghoul, got a plan?"
Mai had nodded, getting her thoughts off of Garma, tracing the tire tracks herself before deciding the next move: "We're going to cut over to Jefferson Park. Take up post at the fire station that was there last I checked and keep looking down."
"Jefferson Park?"
"Makes sense for a rally if the Reapers are out here doing stuff."
"Rules of engagement?"
"Huh?" Mai hadn't understood the question from Dentley, even though she heard it clearly.
"What happens if we come across any tonight?" He clarified, holding his shotgun at ease, but ready.
"To engage, we must be engaged. Rather keep quiet and low." To affirm, Mai had clicked on her radio, the three of them on the same frequency for their own headsets. Their voices came into her ear quietly in a hush, at a volume more used to shadows. With her bone conduction headset, she could sub-vocalize even to speak.
"Right." Dentley.
"Roger." Tammy.
In the dark of the war, she had often gone out with squads of five, including herself, wading through those dark streets by sewer or alley way foxtrot, bringing the war within the safe zone when she couldn't do the damage she needed to by sniper rifle's bullet. 1 Pavilion and Gully's group had been supremely acquainted with that type of fighting that she had usually left it to them, but even she needed to go out. Like now, tonight. "Well, let's move then. Dentley, on you."
Distant winds through concrete corridors, following the streets of Seattle carry them through, and beneath them, even framed by rubble and battlefield, they see the freshly kicked up dust of new activity that was bothering. These tire tracks had been recent, and serious. Deeply set in the dust, tires that had been chosen just for traversing those ruined streets. The Reapers had been running trucks, that was for sure, but no headlights were ever seen, and no one had ever reported otherwise. In the dark meant a particular reason: clandestine. Same as them tonight as they traced the tire treads all the way over to one of Seattle's parks. All of the parks had been sites of Zaku mobile suit maintenance and parking: the only open areas that would allow Zakus to remain in Seattle and also be maintained and served. Those areas had been the most patrolled and guarded, for the idea of taking pot shots at Zaku drivers coming in and out of those areas had been too enticing. Every window or building facing inward to that park, trees toppled over, and the grass below torn up by war machine steps, destroyed by war or pre-emptively by planning.
Zeon had been removed so completely from Seattle months ago what had once been a no-go zone had been freely stepped into as the great green space nestled in the heart of Seattle greeted them again.
They had stacked up on an office building, just on the corner of the park, the fire station that inhabited the northern corner still standing, the remains of a Zeon command post flowing in the wind with its camo netting.
"Tammy," Mai had called out for the woman on her back, gazing up and down the park and seeing the tracks go off into it from the street. "Go set up in this building for overwatch. Dentley, with me. We'll set up in that fire station for observation."
Tammy had slung her LMG around her back before affirming with a fist against Mai's shoulder, her pistol up and out as she rounded the corner and into the building. Dentley had similarly been quiet, looking back to Mai for her to take point. She did, swapping out, the brisk travel pace two blocks over to the fire station quick, rifle up, just in case.
"Funny," Dentley had said, catching his breath as the two of them came to the street side of the fire station, doors to the garage open. "When Zeon and the Federation left us scavs went for these places first. I remember this place in particular."
"Yeah?"
"It's got an annex. You're the eagle eyed one, I'd suggest setting up there."
"Got it. You set up down here for rear security."
The world was still as they swung out, into the garage of the fire station. No fire trucks remained, lockers turned over, tables, burnt ash from probably Zeonic officers burning documents remained in a trash can. No sign of immediate disturbance, save for them.
"Tammy here. Still got me?" Tammy over the radio, she had come in clear enough. Minovsky jamming had long since been a thing in the past. Mai had waited as she climbed the inside stairs up to what was presumably a crew cabin of the station, it itself in disarray, probably due to scavengers sweeping in the area and taking anything not nailed down.
"Still got you." Mai answered, pushing through the room, green colored, night vision getting hazy indoors.
The climb up to the annex, a clock-tower attached to the fire station. Seattle's fire department and volunteers had been hardworking all the way through the war, and only until those final days of active combat did firemen and women of the local stations go out and try to put out flames where the war hadn't been being actively waged. They had saved the city from being burned down a dozen times over, and when they left, they left as one of the few heroes born out of the last year. Cots and beds made out of sofas had been here.
The thought arose in her, from time to time, about becoming a firefighter if her degree in business administration didn't work out, but she had enough of fire, enough of danger, in the life she lived up to this point.
It had been a tight, spiral staircase climb up to the annex, the clocktower opaque and partly broken on its face, allowing her ample viewing out to the park dead on as Tammy covered a perpendicular angle.
"Yeah, think I'm tracking some more treads, flowering out." She reports down as Mai sets up, right on the inner curve of the clock, looking out. "You got my laser?"
Mai looks out from the punctured face, seeing the white line of a laser only those with IR can see. It comes from several stories up along the side of the park, in the office building overlooking it. Mai flashes her own back, intersecting.
"Affirmative." She radios out.
Mai tracks what Tammy laser paints, seeing the tracks from trucks run circles, and then out toward the various side streets. Maybe if Seattle had still been straight and standing with its blocks, maybe they could've heard them running, but the jagged bits and ends of buildings collapse hide mask sound rather well. Tammy's laser paints a picture, lines and lines of truck treads, sprawling out to parts unknown, not north, but east, west, and back south. One pair of tracks, thicker than the rest, stuck out in her head.
There's something more, however, to the ground beneath.
Limbs.
Limbs not of trees or debris, but limbs of bodies. Humans.
Seattle was a concrete jungle as a whole, so the bodies of man had often remained surface level, if not buried by debris on the surface. In these parks however, especially as far as mobile suits were concerned, Mai has discovered how easily the human body melts into the Earth: an impression of a boot, a human hand, a side profile. Maybe it was during the final battle when mobile suits were backed into this corner, that they just stepped on Zeon defenders that rallied beneath them.
Good riddance, she thought, but in the dark, the limbs stick from the ground, and her vision keeps on it, sitting just below the lip of the clock face, head out.
So many days and nights spent like this: perched in buildings, looking down on Zeeks to try and find an opening, or a shot.
It's old poetry to her, levying her rifle on the lip, pointing out, but still within.
An idea to her was forming.
"Settle in." She orders, and the affirmatives over the radio go at ease.
The stars at night are always constant company, and they call to Mai beneath night vision glow.
Side 3, it's near Gemini and Venus in terms of looking up from Seattle, right by the moon. Home. Or what used to be her home. It peeks out, sometimes, on what schedule she can't remember, but with a telescope the crescent of the moon gives way to glimmering dots of the Side furthest away from Earth and all the secrets of what, at some point, became another Mankind.
"So, Mai," It's Dentley over the radio, his voice quiet over the waves. "How were the last few months for you, since we drove the Zeeks out?"
It's hour two of their lookout, nothing, but patience had been a guerilla's secret weapon, and they all had been good guerillas.
Maybe it's Garma that has brought out her words more nowadays, for in those last two months, she had hardly spoken at all, but she relents now. "Boring." She admits. "Boring is okay though."
It was a different experience, walking Seattle streets before and after the war. Before the war those streets had been as they were designed: commuter avenues for her to get to her jobs and back, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people who couldn't care less for her save for if she had been in their immediate way. Now however, Seattle was a ghost town, filled with ghosts. She had thought she was going to spend the weeks after the Federation left after killing the Zeeks in town, digging up survivors, but it wasn't true: almost, save for a few holdouts like Beltweiler just a few days ago, Zeon had left Seattle either in a body bag or retreating north or east before the Federation closed up the gap. She had been the only Spacenoid left in all Seattle, if not Washington it felt.
There had been a small number of Spacenoids like her before the war, at that same college doing the same thing: getting an education, but she had been mostly divorced from her identity. There was no need for her to be among like kind again, ever again.
"You spent your time looking, didn't you?" Dentley asks.
"What?"
"We all saw you, during those months. During the day at least, we saw you, just roaming, wandering. I figured you were looking for some missing folks of yours- friends, maybe. Turning up bodies."
"I don't have friends, Dentley." She grits.
"Sure you do, Ghoul." Tammy, responding now again. "You got Bo, you got Gear', you got me, at least. I like you. Young Win too, he loves you like family."
Mai breathed through her nose once. "You like me because I'm good at what I do."
She could hear Tammy's disapproval of her apathy. "Nothing wrong with admiring someone who's dedicated."
"You're telling me that you never had a friend, coming down to Earth, Ghoul? No boyfriend or girlfriend or nothing?"
"I'm not good at making or keeping. Never have been." Mai's not sure if it's true, but she doesn't have any friends to prove any way at all.
Tammy scoffs. "Leave the poor girl alone, Dentley. How many friends did you have here when you moved?"
The Pavilion leaders had been more talkative amongst each other and their people, and naturally they all had been close just by the proximity of war. Dentley had moved to Seattle before the war, brought there by the need for teachers in cities.
"More than one, I can tell you that." He bellyached, but his breath turned reflective, even heard over the radio. A quiet thing: memory. Hard to believe for some that there had been a before the war, and that past present had been slowly, slowly, coming back into reach. "You know I should probably put some time in at the Conclave, start teaching kids again."
There had been several dozen children still in the Conclave, ranging from five all the way up to almost eighteen. Win, technically, might've counted among the older of them, but he had wanted to live alone after the active fighting ceased, and people had thought him capable of doing that. The rest though, sheltered away from the war as best they could by the adults that lived, often not their parents, sheltered them still.
"Yeah…" Tammy draws. "Yeah, that might be good. Bring them back to normal, slowly. Because God knows it's going to be a long time till real normal comes back… Christ, can't even begin to think about how long it's going to be until I fly back over to Sweden."
"Your family's over there, right?" Dentley remembers.
"Yeah… My folks. Ex-husband too… You know my story, Dentley?"
"Bits and pieces. How about you, me?"
"Public school teacher. Arts? You're not married yourself, are you?" Dentley was hardly any older than Mai, but he had been further along in a teaching career than his age would suspect.
"No." The word hangs in the air. "I was sweet on a man. He ran a boxing gym." Even in his words alone in the dark, Dentley is reflective. "Never went anywhere. I didn't know him too long even… But I wonder. Wonder a whole lot too." Wondering about what, Mai could guess. She wonders about those same questions too about her own life, about her own child. She knows what it's like to wonder, looking up at the stars above and wondering if they're battleships or distant suns. The possibility of Time and History is an undercurrent in every person's life, all too easily subsumed into larger tides of change. She knows this best. Her midsection gets cold, and she tries her best not to think of different lives. Even after all this time, it torments her. Maybe in a different life she would've truly loved the man who gave her the child, and that there would've been a family there she fled Seattle with to safety. The war would've passed them by, and they would've lived a quiet, good life.
She was to be a mother.
That didn't happen.
For what small little anguish she has elicited out of Dentley, Tammy figures fair is fair. She has her own to bring up: "I've got two kids. Janie and Ollie. Thirteen and eighteen. I'd see 'em a few months of the year, but in the end, they liked staying with my ex-husband more, back in the Old Country. Court thought so too, with what my own schedule of fishing seasons. Sometimes I wonder if it was worth it staying in a shitty marriage for the sake of my kids. God, I hope they're safe. Hopefully the war ain't too bad over there."
Mai waits, wonders.
The man that had given her a child was a police officer. The result of a one-night stand gone too far. It had been a night not unlike the usual way she spent her nights off in those last two years. Murph was quick to call her a whore, but, in a far-off way of saying, she had been. She wouldn't deny that at the end of the day.
Eventually that type of life she lived ended up in her bearing a child for it.
He was a nice enough man, albeit rough and brash and the type to leave her like that, but he had been of the traditional sort that mandated that if she was to have his kid, they least they could do was get married. And so, she did. Little fanfare about it. The fairytale of her life had been long since dead. No church or chapel, just a DMV and a town hall later, and she had been a married woman, though it had been only in official documentation only. He hadn't lived with her, but would, or at least promised to, support her raising the child.
All things considered; she would be okay with that.
That's not how it all turned out, however.
She doesn't know, or care to what happened to him, dead or alive, but it was a fact of her life that yes, she had a baby daddy, and, more than that, had technically been married, but those details fall off the bone to her, less important than what could've been: She could've been a mother.
"Can you really have done that, Tammy?" Mai asks quietly, knowing better of the woman that has survived this long with her. It's the first she's spoken after a long silence.
A beat, a pause. Dismissal in a cough. "No. I couldn't." She's distant before answering. "I loved that man like calm seas but loving someone is different than marrying them." The three of them are quiet for a long time after, but Tammy returns with a good thought: "The Kinos. They're a good pair. Love basically drips off the two of them, and God knows a kid isn't going to help."
There was an old concept: the American Dream. Mai knew it well enough. Dozens of colonies across the Sides had often tried to emulate it in slogans begging for immigration from well-to-do Spacenoids, trying to recreate the oldest desires of traveling peoples trying to find a home.
Come to Columbia! A New American Dream awaits!
An American World is here for you!
1776 Colony promises every man a parcel of land!
Find your slice of heaven (and apple pie!).
Amber waves of grain, blue skies, common brotherhood: all promises made because of a distant dream in a long gone past. Here, Mai lived that dream, but it had been what it was always: a nightmare.
Still, there were those that survived the rat race: the Kino family had been that, even in war, even against Zeon.
Meyer and Fleety Kino had been, in a small part representing the whole, what the guerillas in Seattle fought for. Meyer especially: his child had been on the way. Mai killed for herself, but she could fight for those yet unborn, yet soon to be, any day.
"Fleety Bird is gonna be in a whole lotta hurt. She's such a small girl and her kid is so big in there." Tammy is far fonder than she would admit, even as it slips out into words. They can hear her grin over the radio. "Ah my first kid took half a night to come out. The second only an hour."
Mai's own baby bump had been in full when the colony fell. It was a calming thing: to see life, truly, in her. Life that she would love with no complication. The world had, despite the circumstances of her pregnancy, been looking up. People smiled at her more, were more considerate. Her second job, not at the grocery, had been very understanding. Its other workers were always at hazard, and eventually did succumb to at some point, becoming pregnant, but it was a common enough occurrence and they had been nice about it- gave her time off and support.
The second job she worked at was at a strip club, and they had treated her with respect. An odd, even funny fact of her life, but one she was thankful for in the end.
"Any regrets, Ghoul?" Dentley asks from below. An odd question, but a meaningful one.
A million. Some meaningless, the others that would change her irreparably. She answers with this: "Moving to Seattle." She's not without some sort of humor, and it lands, just a bit, hearing Tammy chuckle over the radio.
Any conversation they had and were going on to had had been stopped in the same way the birds of Seattle knew when to get out of dodge at a singular moment. It just happened with an otherworldly candor. The guerillas had understood now, after so long, how to take on the aspects of those birds when danger was near. All of their bodies had tensed up, and Mai had held her rifle tight again as out in the distance, sound preceded visuals of a singular truck running with the dimmest lights in the dark.
It had come from one of the far side streets, following the treads of tracks before it, in what had been most likely a retread until it had come to a stop to the flat area of the park, over a hundred meters away from the firehouse.
A pickup, paint chipped down to hell, but not that the occupants, two males, had much minded. In the truck bed: spindly pieces of dark shapes. Behind night vision, the definition couldn't quite make it out.
"Tammy?" Mai's spotting scope was out, it having thermals, courtesy of a Zeon scout now dead. "I got two."
"Yeah. I'm tracking." Tammy responded from her perch. "They got NODs?"
"No. I don't think so." With Mai confirmed Tammy's laser went on again, tracking the truck until it stopped and the two had gotten out, idly stretching their legs before leaning against the truck. The dimly powered headlights seemed like a mod of sorts, giving them enough light to drive in the dark but not enough to give them away from any curious, especially from elsewhere in the city.
Downstairs Dentley had his window to look out of, and a corner of that window to conceal his form to look out of. "About 3AM now…"
3AM seemed to be the key, more and more trucks, coming out of the Seattle dark to within 150 to 100 meters of the firehouse, each of them with weighted down beds, and, as a neat line of them was made, revealed, were the Reapers that drove them. Some of the trucks had the crescent moon spraypainted on, while most of the people that had shown up with them had the white armbands. In, one truck by one, until over a dozen trucks and then thirty people.
What they were waiting for had been soon answered as a louder, larger vehicle had come in the direct of Kings Airport, on the opposite side of the park, crossing beneath Tammy's building until turning into the park itself. Large as the driver was in the window, his identity wasn't hidden at all.
"Looks like Kell's here." Kell, Murph's right hand strong man. Mai had seen him tear teeth with his bare hands out of captured Zeeks. Made sense to her. The man used to be a cop. He was driving a flatbed semi-truck, several men on it, empty, riding along with bundles of rope, coming to a stop in front of the assortment of trucks. He swung out of the cabin, his leather coat blacker than the night and barked out. What they had been, the three from the Conclave couldn't tell at that distance. The combined lights of the dim truck torches had given the Reapers enough light to work, and they had gone like clockwork. As the semi-truck stopped, the several dozen men and women at the back of it had hopped down, and bit by bit, the cargo of the pickup trucks were unloaded. The sound of them dropping onto the flat bed had revealed what it was.
"Metal?" Mai had made the mental note above. Dentley confirmed to his ear.
"Tons of scrap, it looks like." He said, but keeping the line open. He had a thought to continue. "Back when the Dock Market was open, there was always some left behind Reapers that were always looking at those that cut plates out of the APCs around town. Hm."
For a half hour the Reapers had done the job of dumping from pickup trucks to flatbed, depositing what would, to anyone else, appear as trash onto the semi as those with the rope had tied the larger pieces down. Where those pieces of metal had come from anyone could guess: maybe some armor from an APC there, building sidings or engine blocks. It had all been metal.
"Reapers love their technicals, don't they?" Tammy had breathed from afar, her laser darting from person to person, subject to subject as she was looking. Mai's laser was the same. The Reapers below would not see the solid laser that painted all of them, tracing across their forms in a way that assured Mai that she had them all dead to rights. If this was a fight, it wasn't ideal, but she could do it: elevated position, suppressed gun, enough ammo if she hit her shots.
Technicals had been the term for any vehicle turned into a fighting example: pickup trucks with machine guns had been the common version of a technical, and the Reapers had been known for them. Before the war many of them prided themselves on their cars and wheels already. This was a natural extension out into the war. That had meant that the technical that the Reapers had brought out had come from only the most deprived and desperate post-apocalyptic movies. But it worked. As long as Zeon didn't have armor themselves, they mowed them all down: a common sight toward the end of active fighting in Seattle.
Even now some of those trucks had welded on armor.
"Guess the Reapers are gearing up more of their vehicles… Why?" Tammy had asked aloud.
"You know why, Ghoul." Prep work meant in anticipation of something, Mai had reminded.
Kell had put his hand, large man as he was, into the effort, steel being hauled by him onto the flatbed until, finally, all was collected, and with nary more than another shout the Reapers had all gotten back in their cars and driven off as the semi roared up, its riders got back on, and it continued from where it came, dragging along what seemed at least to be a ton of scrap metal.
Before any hypothesizing at all could happen though, two trucks had in their circling around to dissipate had gone to the fire house, fast approaching. "Shit. Tammy keep overwatch." Mai had ground through her teeth as she got down from the clock tower, barreling down metal stairs now so she wouldn't have to do it when the trucks hadn't been there. Sound alone clued them both in to how close, deadly close, they were approaching.
By the time she had gotten to the crew room where Dentley had been, the man had already gone low, peering into the inner window down at the garage below as the trucks pulled in.
Without realizing it Mai had put the safety off on her rifle as the two of them looked down, their trucks parked where firetrucks from the department would've been, shut off as four Reapers disembarked below. Three men, one woman. Small arms held.
"Where's that fucker DeMarco hiding his truck?" The driver of one truck asked the other. "In the Kingdome itself? Who the hell does he think he is?"
The other driver scoffed. "He just likes the fact he can finally park so close to the Kingdome without fighting a billion other people… Macy? How's your hand."
"Still stings like shit." The woman answered, a wrap around her hand. "You know I don't get why Murph doesn't just go down to the Conclave and start recruiting people like we used to. We're gonna need like, fucking a bunch of doctors with how much tetanus all of us are about to get."
"Not gon' be tetanus that gets us."
From an elevated position, with the drop on them, to kill these four would've been easy. What Gearten had told Mai however was correct: to kill was to ask for reprisal.
Only one way, in or out, the stairs that led right to the feet of the Reapers below who had pulled out sleeping bags and supplies from their trucks. They were staying here for the night. The chances of her and Dentley staying quiet nil. Something had to be done.
Mai backed up from the window, far as she could, sub-vocalizing as much as she could without speaking so that her bone conduction microphone could pick it up. "Tammy. We're trapped in here. We need something to draw them out."
A pause, the sound of a machine gun being racked in the background. Mai had prayed that loud and proud Tammy knew what she was doing.
"Yeah. Give me a second."
A second was all she needed. A block over, a burst of machinegun fire went off.
The effect had been immediate as the four Reapers below snapped, twitched, immediately getting behind cover.
"The fuck was that?!" One of them cried out, racking back a shotgun. One of them immediately went to peek outside in the direction of that machine gun fire: out to where Tammy was. Mai couldn't hear the report at all of the impacts. Whatever Tammy had been doing it hadn't been shooting at them.
"Gunfire. That's close."
"Is it at us?!"
"Fuck do you think I know? Might be a fight breaking out."
"Carmina, go upstairs to the clock tower and see what's going on, we'll go check it out."
As the burst of machine gun fire went on that was their cue to move as the words had come out of the man's mouth. It was the instinct of guerilla's alone that gave them the same idea: going to the wall of the door as said Carmina had started rushing up those metal steps as the the other three had gone out.
Flat against the wall as they could, all they could do was just hope she was moving fast enough not to notice the two guerillas, in the shadows, mere feet away from the door but at a steep angle.
Mai's grip never left the trigger as the sound of metal stairs ended, and as soon as it did, a woman, a Reaper, had been flying through the door to her left: sprinting forward toward the door to the clocktower.
Mai didn't need night vision to see how white Dentley's eyes were with how wide they had been. There was no time for any of that as Carmina scrambled up the stairs, and the burst of machine gun fire ended. It was time to move, and Mai had gone first, back down the stairs, regardless of how loud it was as her rifle was held at low ready all the way down until she hit the ground floor, Dentley behind her. There was a backdoor access to the station, and with only one pause to clear the immediate left and right of it as she opened it, the two were off into Seattle again.
The two of them didn't stop running until they had made it back to Garma's crash site to catch their breath, machine gun fire long having since stopped. "Think Tammy's back already?" Dentley panted. They were mere feet away from where she had dug up Garma, the stones, and the blood still stained there.
Mai was worried, but not overly so. She had to have been, and it was too risky to go for comms. "She's fine. If Tammy was caught half the city would hear her fighting back."
Dentley had been too out of breath to reiterate, but fear had been a good motivator to keep them moving as they finished their run all the way back to Tammy's Pavilion, and right to Tammy herself, on the ground floor of that studio.
The night watch had been alert, but nothing out of the ordinary as Dentley and Mai had made their way to safety.
"Oh, come on, I'm twice your age and I still beat you back?" Her broad hand had clasped the two younger guerillas on their backs. Mai had wanted to swear at her, but she couldn't.
She gave her thanks instead as her hand covered hers with a pat.
Dentley had still been breathing hard, bent over his knees, but he had been in a good mood. The adrenaline in him wouldn't let him be otherwise. "Ain't the same as running from Zeeks, I'll tell you that." It wasn't. The three of them could agree, but for Mai it had been a sour vindication.
This wasn't the danger of Zeon anymore. This was a petty squabble that was below the war that she had all so docilely spent the day talking to Garma about.
It took them several minutes to pant down, to regain their breath, but by the time they did the return of Seattle calm night had returned. No Reapers had come chasing after them, and for now, they were in the clear.
Dentley was still having trouble, but it hadn't been anything "Yeah. Hey, go get a drink and a bed if you need it Dent."
Probably for the best, he had agreed with a nod as he trudged upstairs to the apartments. "Won't say no to that. Thanks for the walk tonight, Ghoul."
Mai recovers better than most. She hasn't lost any physical fitness for her downtime from the war. "Right. Alright, thanks Dentley." She breathes.
"Anytime, Captain." Dentley smiles back with a mocking salute before he disappears upstairs.
Her courtesy is a nod, her nose brushing up against her keffiyeh. Anyone willing to run with her is someone who does deserve her courtesy.
Several of her people check in with Tammy, being back, some there with a glass of water, another to take her LMG and ammo for her. She runs a well-oiled machine, and Mai expects nothing less from her.
"I'll go run a report to Gear at noon about what we saw tonight, I'm sure it'll get some things moving. You're free to stay yourself here, for the rest of the night." Her business-like tone, however, falls to something close to motherly, looking up at Mai. Mai doesn't remember the last time a woman was taller than her, and for her credit Tammy is one that feels like she should. Mai's not sure where she gets her height from, but it's certainly not her father or her mother.
Mai shakes her head, but thankful, nonetheless. She has someone to go home to (not that she'd admit it).
By the time that she returns to Elysian Condos, the light has broken out again into dawn. Garma is there that morning as she enters the front door, the sweat and dust of a night out evident on her. Once again: a cup of coffee has been set out of her. She's not sure to be annoyed or to be thankful for this extravagant display of thoughtfulness, so she decides to be both: annoyed on her face, but her words say something different:
"Thank you."
He's pleased to see her back, even if it means, once again, his death was assured at some date in the future.
"I suppose you want to spend the day in? The bed is yours."
"Mm." She grumbles in her throat, a slurp of coffee down her gullet. She's tired enough that the caffeine that would hit wouldn't be enough to fight her exhaustion. Though before she turns in, washes up, and goes to spend the day sleeping like the dead, she has something on her mind.
"How are Zeon forces doing in the Nordic countries?"
It's an odd question, out of place to Garma, and he raises non-existent eyebrows again before rolling in his mind a bit for the answer. "Fighting there is minimal. The northern sea oil reserves ran dry quite a long time ago, and our forces aren't exactly at leisure to take territory for the sake of territory. Why?"
A soft haze of reassurance washes over her like the warmth of the coffee from Garma. "Just curious. Is all."
He's glad she's back. He really is.
