1-7
Red - Gold


If there was any time for Garma to kill Mai, it would've been then: in broad daylight. Passed out on her bed, she was perhaps the most vulnerable she had been.

Out of the shower she had that morning she had barely put pants on before she collapsed into the sheets that had not yet been made by Garma.

He does make his bed (their bed) even now. He fills in the minutes of the day with these little tasks. Organization, but not overly so, as to mix up her own internal methodology she would hardly explain to him. Cleaning, some dusting. Then it's a few laps around the interior walkway of their apartment building, and then reading from The Odyssey. It's a schedule; one that he adheres to keep him grounded.

The thought arose in him that he could've very well moved into another room on that floor, but, he imagines, Mai had wanted to keep him close. Her watch over him was, in no small definition, definite. He was still a prisoner of sorts.

That however was flipped that day.

She's not exactly a quiet sleeper. She breathes, she groans, she mutters from time to time in her own sleep. In the night it's barely perceptible, but in the day, her noises while asleep are prevalent. Mai tells him that he also talks in his sleep, but it's a fact corroborated by Icelina as well from her own fond comments of their own bed-sharing. As he reads The Odyssey by a murky daylight by their shared dinner table, he has at least one ear dedicated to her stirrings on the bed.

Mai sleeps on her back, albeit one arm tucked around her pillow as if it were a partner, the pillow bent into an L to still provide some rest for her head. Half mouth open, she drools just slightly, a head out of the bundle of blankets she wraps herself up in.

It really would be easy for him to pick up her sniper rifle and put one round in her as she slept.

He'd be free to survive on his own. He'd be free of her.

Maybe, even, he could just up and leave.

It all seemed so easy to entertain those plans, looking at her as she slept and how open, how easy it would've been. But no plan survived contact with the enemy, and he, technically, after several weeks of living with her, is very much in contact with the enemy.

So, he does nothing that day as she sleeps, and once, only once, did he look over to her to see if she was getting along just fine: Some of her hair had drifted to over her face, but even in her sleep her hand had of its own accord brushed them off before flopping down on top of her.

She looked peaceful like that, and for Garma, that was enough for him to put the thought of violence out of his head.


When she wakes, Mai comes to the realization of that vulnerability and immediately chastises herself for it.

When she wakes, she realizes that he has done nothing to her except have another cup of coffee waiting.


Another deer, another day back to the Conclave to drop it off. More activity, more people moving. Seattle becomes active again and again, in the smallest of ways. The closer she gets to the Conclave; pedestrian traffic becomes a thing again. Sparse, and by no means matching what had once been, but she would pass people by, patrols, or just people being put to work by the Conclave, and some old normalcy would return. A fleeting idea, but normal, nonetheless.

If there was a normal that Mai could return to, it was a long-gone prospect, not as her shopping cart rattled along the road with meat in it to be delivered.

The foot traffic had made her go slow, not as cagey, or decisive with her movements toward the Conclave that day, but because of it, her body had moved along the darker predispositions of her inclinations. It brought her down Seattle's Broadway instead of her usual side approach, and because of it, she held her boonie hat a little lower than needed.

Off Broadway, the street which the Conclave had been on, had been a broken mess of a building. Old and stone, red brick crumbled down to dust with its skeleton still standing upright. It was a building designed and opposed to the modern city around it, with a sizable acreage around it in the middle of the city. But people didn't mind. She, especially. She had known the holy places of Seattle rather well. All of them: Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and their denominations. They had done their services and their soup kitchens all the same, which she was always thankful to attend. Her mosque and temple she used to visit had been destroyed by the war, but the Christian places of worship seemed to have been given, barely, more deference from Zeon and the Federation.

Saint Matthew's Church was a victim of circumstance, and now, served a solemn purpose beneath its ragged shadow.

The last remaining church in that section of Seattle after the orthodox cathedral had taken an artillery strike.

She passes it, from time to time, to remember, to know this place, on days where she forgets where the world is leading her.

A single man, a thick sherpa around his shoulders, a rake and shovel in his hands, tiredly, as he had done for every day since the invasion, tended to the grounds of Saint Matthew's Church, taking great care of where, it seemed, the only place the dead could lay in rest. The burial grounds around the church had been true and filled up completely by now, ashes now taken instead of full bodies if it could be helped. He was a thin man, one that had worn the war on his shoulders and longer hair cascading down his shoulders. His jeans had been dirty with grime and mud, and his belt had hooked a single canteen. The man was a veteran himself of an Earthnoid war, one that had brought him to the Middle East so long ago. He had been about sixty now, by Mai's guess, and she had always gotten the impression that someone like her had always sat in the mind of Father Davon Blinn just because of who she looked like. She was an Arab, she would never forget.

For that, Blinn had revered her well.

The father, as he had for every day of the last year it seemed, tended to his grounds, keeping the dead at peace, and neither Zeon, Federation, nor guerilla, had stopped him.

He stops for her and her alone, across the divide of the street.

Father Blinn looked to Mai Gul, and, once knowing it had been her, gave one solemn nod.

They had hardly talked: her, a once practicing Islamic woman, and him, a leader of a Christian denomination, though when they did talk, it was for a very Human thing.

She returned to Saint Matthew's after dropping off her catch for the day, and Gearten had left her with another bag of deer jerky. His presence in the Conclave during this portion of the last year had been becoming even more and more appreciated. He as an outdoorsman had been well acquainted with the idea of game meat, and she could tell with his prepared meats he often gave her.

It wouldn't be hers today, however.

When she returned to Saint Matthew's she had tried to be fast about it, right to the steps of the church where a long-standing charity ritual had been ongoing. Bits and baubles. Clothes, food, drinks. All had been assembled by the door of Saint Matthew's. Offerings to a holy man as if God would recognize it and give them grace and protection.

Mai Gul did not come here for God, only for a man for his service to her. She had let her bag of jerky down next to a plastic quart of water, left by another like her, and that was that.


"Honestly, you're a fluke of nature." Garma admits that the following morning as they have breakfast-turned-strategy meeting. The topic that morning had been Appalachia and the Zeon fighting there. "We Spacenoids aren't exactly imbued with the idea of a marksmanship culture. Hunting isn't a thing, at least on Side 3. The fact that you are a natural sniper is quite a peculiar fact."

Mai shrugged that morning before she had gone off into the world. There wasn't much for her to do today that required her leaving, but it was routine, and she didn't want to get too comfortable with the idea that she could stay the day here, with him. "I can't really explain it. The accuracy part at least. The rest is just me being stubborn." She grunts.

The only explanation she ever had after all this time, after all her time behind a rifle's scope, was that she was just a natural. NBK. Natural born killer.

Garma leans back, right hand holding up his head. The bandages are back on for the most part today, both on arm and head, tufts of lavender poking out from white. He had been a little too enthusiastic about bathing himself and opened certain parts of him anew, as if he could get rid of the scars so easily. Scars are scars for a reason, however. His hair grows fast, and by the time November rolls around, she is, vaguely, impressed. Her own silk black strands became a hinderance during the war, any growth a problem she would put out by a simple swipe of a knife or a cragged scissor treatment.

Her mother would've despaired at that idea, but she did what she needed to stay alive.

It was the truth for all guerillas like her the world over, and she was just part of the pattern.

These conversations they have are refreshing, neutral, and the closest thing to productive between the both of them just for the sake of talking and socialization. To talk about the war from the top down, as if they were both studying a test and this war had been ancient history, it had its charms. At least that day the running topic had been of people like her.

Howe Macdonwald, the clothing trader that had come from the American south, only to die there in Seattle, standing up for her, had told her shortly before his death that every place there had been a resistance, there had been something close to the Ghoul. Garma could confirm, though not with such specificity.

There was obvious discomfort to the topic however: guerillas like her were the common people that Zeon had fought for, even if they were on Earth. So naturally he changes the topic to her, someone who, even if there is that undercurrent of uncomfortableness, they had been familiar now.

His hair is uneven, naturally, but what hair was left relatively untouched by the destruction of the Gaw is now, almost, but not quite, shoulder length. He's a fast grower.

"How often do you get a haircut?" She tilts her head, getting a better look at his strands. This, more than anything, has him the most self-conscious. His free hand goes to run through his hair on the back of his head carefully before he answers in the most bashful of tones.

"I have- had appointments, twice a month, in the City," Perhaps if she had lived in New York City instead of Seattle, she might've been put in a position where Garma would've been shot by her, if her life path had been remotely the same that is. "Even during my time in the Academy, I had my grooming affairs sorted out."

"Char cut your hair?" She blurted out, half surprised that she did. Her own chin is being held by her hand, mirroring him.

"Oh, heaven's no." He snorted lowly. "The man couldn't groom himself to save his life. His hair was always unruly, but, regrettably, he made it work." The curve of his mouth, it does something, a slight flick upward upon the memory of him passing by his mind. Odd, for him to do so, thinking of a man who, even in the long way about it, sentenced him to her. She knows that look on his face because it's the same one that's on Bo Tale's whenever she looks at her; a certain fondness.

Of all the injustices of the Federation, there had been one policy that Mai hadn't often thought of due to her upbringing. Nowadays, and on Earth in particular, it was no issue, but up in the colonies, the policy against same-sex relationships had been disbarred. An older law, kept still this far into the Universal Century, back when space colony immigration relied on internal populations to replenish themselves. Nowadays it was a law acted on as a matter of convenience: just another option to stomp down on the Spacenoid.

Her first kiss was with a woman, on Earth; a free woman who was more than happy to share and to teach and, perhaps, Mai had sought it out after her life thus far of adhering to rules both faith based and law. It felt wrong, and yet right, and that alienating feeling she had was one that remained after growing up in the colonies.

"Are you gay, Garma?" Mai says aloud, and it's a blunt question. Rumors about the academy had been common, and even in Seattle during the guerilla war there had been people calling him slurs that did tend to touch upon a certain sexuality, but those weren't often in good faith anyway. She had always assumed so much that she had sworn that he had told her.

Garma, brought from a memory reverie, straightens up, shoulders square.

"You do quite know that we're not supposed to be, right?" Garma steadily asks her back, teeth grinding in a quiet anxiety about the topic, Spacenoid to Spacenoid.

"We're on Earth." She reminds him, but she does nod once, understanding.

"What brings this sort of question on?" Garma tempts the waters in a voice unsure, but it is one that gives an answer that Mai already takes.

"Just now, how you speak about this man who betrayed you," Her Arabic accent does tend to drop into a natural skepticism, a low suspicion. "You speak awfully fond of him, and… I'm sure you're not ignorant of what was said among our class."

He does know. Loved as he was, it was not an absolute, especially back in the adolescence of the Academy. "Well… what do you believe?" Garma is still slow, trying to read her more and more. She doesn't think he's hiding anything from her. Not this, but there's caution there as if he's fearing himself. As odd as it is, her words have weight to them he heralds.

What did she believe? "I believe that he wore the pants in-"

"Oh my god." It's one of the first times she has seen his composure drop, head turning away in some embarrassment. "Surely I'm more dignified than-" Mai cuts him off just as a matter of clarification.

"Nothing wrong with a certain amount of submissiveness. Being in charge as you are could get… tiresome." She avoids his gaze, tracing errant lines on the plastic table's molding between them. She's not quite sure why she said that at all. Maybe it was to prove that she knew him better than he himself, but it was an odd calculation that had left her fearing how he would follow up on it.

"What would you know about that?" His annoyed words are exactly what she did fear about it, eyes narrowing, eyebrow raised. She was, to him, a strong woman, and all that entailed. Her answer is a long sip from her cup of coffee, and the slow, shit-eating smirk on his face. She is sure to put it away with her own question:

"You've never known want or need, have you?" He takes the question, lets it sit, his head tilted toward the side of his burns, considering. His brow is furrowed and his becomes mouth taut. Garma knows want. He really does.


How many nights was it before the first time? Before something happened.

Maybe before the war he would've remembered, because Garma Zabi was counting. Not that he was counting at that very moment as if it was an inevitability, but it was a vague notion of something that had him counting the days just for reference. However long it had been, however, it had been at least fast enough that he hadn't even been out of the cast and brace that had been necessitated by his ruck march fall.

Not that he had any mind to repeat the experience, but he could admit that in the immediate aftermath the pretense of going to school seemed to fall away from him, at least temporarily, as the entire apparatus of the school and even the students, his fellow classmates, seemed to acquiesce and serve him. So many people cared for him in those classical ways: filling him in on missed classes and assignments, carrying his books and bags, and giving him such an ample berth in his limped walking that it had been a private, luxurious way to go about it. This was obviously very special treatment.

It seemed only after he had moved into the dorm room of Char Aznable that the constant supervision and doting by all his admirers had fallen away to the background of his mind.

He moved in with Char for the same truth he had told him: It was tiresome living with yes men.

A woman, however, could be a nice retreat from time to time.

Liza Bluedover had hailed from New Galway Colony, an agricultural colony that had specialized in livestock, with a healthy population of Spacenoid residents that had hailed from Ireland. That fact was immediately apparent the second that anyone had listened to her; a classic lass, her hair, depending on the lighting, shimmering from auburn to a burnt butterscotch. A beautiful girl with a button nose, freckles like stars on her face, an adorable smile, and, as Garma had learned, legs that made him reconsider such an antiquated notion male proclivity toward certain female features. Those legs had been draped across his lap as he laid back in his lower bunk in his new room, Liza also sharing the mattress with him as she propped up on one arm beside him, looking down upon Zeon's prince.

It was a classic meeting: Simple. They sat next to each other during an intro to military logistics through the AD Era. He was charming, and she loved to be charmed. What happened next was natural after a few well-meaning study sessions together.

Liza Bluedover was the young woman that he had given his virginity to, and vice versa, the second half of their first year in Guardian Banchi. A natural conclusion of any higher educational academy situation with dorm rooms he had figured to himself in those moments just before the act, wondering about whether his older siblings, or even his father, would approve.

It was a rather exciting affair with the discovery that a freight elevator between the mess hall's pantry and a general population hallway had a certain feature that was missing on other elevators throughout the Academy: It could be stopped in between floors. If it had been called again, there had been enough time for them to make themselves decent.

"From what?" Garma had asked her then as she formulated a plan.

Liza had giggled, leaning into his side as they studied that night for some topic he had long since forgotten, he rather fine enough studying the way his hands roamed the curve of her shoulders, her thighs, and the very boundaries of what could be considered teasing and public decency as they sat next to each other in the library.

She leaned into his side, making sure that the pen she held grazed the lip of his uniform pants hem, it doing a poor job hiding his reaction to the last hour of proximity to his not-girlfriend (far be it from him to, officially give her a title. It would be too much trouble if it had been set in stone like that).

"For when you take me, my prince." She whispered, and the intent had been almost as hot and heavy as the kiss they shared before they parted ways that night with something to look forward to.

Being good military cadets that they were, Garma and Liza had verified the elevator's quirk separately first, riding that elevator innocently on off-hours, in between class transfer times and dining periods. When that had been assured, what happened next had been worth it.

The need for the elevator for their tryst had been something brought upon a watchful eye from dorm officers enforcing gender-separate housing for particularly that exact reason, and it had been one that they repeated for quite a while. Garma's fall, his broken leg and the recovery afterward, however, had offered him many privileges: including the excuse that Liza, the classmate that she was to Garma, could be allowed to visit him for academic reasons.

"It's such a bloody shame the one time we do get a bed together, I can't be too rough, now, my prince?" She whispers as if she could be caught, but then again, she wasn't doing too much to hide the fact of what she was really doing, one hand of hers slipped beneath Garma's pants in that darkened dorm.

Every slip, every stroke, one hand of Garma's grazes circles as it loops around Liza's back, while the other squeezes at her milky thighs in concert with her own. Every once and a while a labored breath from his more intense grasps would break a moan from her throat, and he, on that as a cue, would strain himself up to take her mouth with his, and the sounds would get only wetter.

"Oh-" They separate from a long lip lock, and he speaks. "I do like this change of pace, dear Liza."

"Pace?" She repeats, and her hand beneath his pants emphasizes that very idea of pace. "You're going to have to be more specific than that, boyo."

Slow. Seconds at a time. Down. Down. All the way down, her grip is barely there but her fingertips are tantalizing before they tighten again around him and drag him up. Several times, and each takes his breath away as he closes his eyes and keeps his head back, exposing a neck which Liza is more than willing to take upon her lips.

"That's good." He breathes. She gives him another option.

Fast. Rapid. The tent made in his pants pops each time she cycles, up and down, with the slickness and the repetition of a nearly vibrating pattern.

"Shit-!"

She treats him like a prince, like royalty- the type of person he wanted to avoid the privilege of during his days at the Academy. He had his vices, his private indulgences that Liza all so readily breathe onto him as her lips graze, and only graze, the skin of his neck, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. "Fast or slow." She says again in quiet whispers. "Tell me what you want."

He chuckles, even as he half groans through such a simple handjob. Any resistance to his own strength and pride predictably melted away under certain feminine care. "What I want is to put you on your back and show you what I want, rather."

He dreams, he wants, to really use his legs again in a way that matters right at that very moment. It's like breathing clearly after allergies. He now knows how to appreciate his body now. He wants her ruined because of him, but for now, he can let her take care of him with each stroke of him.

He doesn't quite care for the time of it, so he lets it last for as long as he can last. Liza for her part does drag it along for a luxurious amount of time.

There's something in his mind telling him that they should finish soon, but it's in the back of his mind naturally as the knot in his core unpeels.

"Liza, I'm about to cum." How gross, how demeaned does he breathe that into her ear. "Take me there. Please." It comes out more commanding than he anticipated, but the moan that comes from Liza sends a spark through his spine as much as it does hers.

"As you wish." She leads, she teases, and with her words she takes her mouth and drags herself down, down, to his place, slipping his pants all the way down as far as they could go, caught in his cast, and reveal at last him completely. "Today's a special day, enjoy yourself prince."

Her mouth is over him before he realizes, the barrier of warm breath that engulfs him before just the wetness. Pliant flesh seems to form around him completely down there- it is but one second of complete warmth, she hollows her cheeks with the delectable sound of suck. For this feeling, all encompassing, so wet and pulling at his core that it is, his first blowjob is something he'll fight his impending climax to just experience a little while longer as her tongue traces the vein of him down to the base and then back up, trailing all the way.

"Liza-!"

She pulls away just enough to let her speak before she's back down and feels what he cannot will himself to articulate with his pulsing, and sudden hardening: "In my mouth!"

He fights against letting go, just because surrender meant ending: finishing.

His pride unmakes him as before he can be defeated, the door to the room clacks open.

A burst of light from the hallway floods in for a second before the door is shut again, footsteps far too familiar to Garma following as no matter how far or fast Liza can pull herself off Garma's cock, their deed is caught by the only person that could: Char Aznable.

"Shite."

He's always stood proud and tall as a Zabi, even if it hadn't been warranted. Like now.

Char Aznable had come in and it had been apparent where he had been from: fresh from fencing. His fencing hood had been dropped to the floor along with his gym duffel bag, and his smell was the one that flooded the room in nothing but his PT uniform- shorts and a tee-shirt. Salt and sweat from him had more than somehow smothered the two of them in the bed.

"Hello Liza." He looked down on both of them, those sunglasses in the dark of the room their own type of shadow.

"Oh my god." She barely has time to wipe her mouth before she's out of the room out of embarrassment. Garma didn't particularly think the woman would've been shamed, outside of the immediate situation, of being outed as being entangled with Garma, but apparently Char had that effect. He knew so and reveled in it with a quiet laugh.

Garma couldn't have stopped her if he tried. Not while he was down a leg. Not while he was at full mast. She left so fast she didn't even pull his pants up, and he had been so captured, so petrified, that he had been frozen by Char's gaze alone. His gaze behind his sunglasses is damnable in that moment. He doesn't know where he is looking.

"You're-… you're back early." Garma finally stammers, hands slowly going up to try and attempt to make a play at covering his shame, but the harsh shrill whine of Char's chair being pulled out and turned around stops him cold.

"We had bouts today. I won, handily. It was quick."

"I- I see."

He sits himself down, legs crossed, as if Garma hadn't had his dick out, as if he hadn't been still fully up. Normally this would be a situation where he imagined he would be going flaccid but that's not the case. Liza had taken him there to those final moments. If she had just stayed there for a few more half-seconds than he would've finished, but as it stands now, he was left primed, and no one left to pull the trigger. The masculine aggravation within him was beaten back by the deep swirl of embarrassment, of fear, that filled him as Char Aznable sat there and looked at him: helpless.

Their monitors are on, even in the dark. Moody lighting, enough for what Liza and he were doing, but now it turns starkly, the silhouette of Char on that chair filling in Garma's vision for all that it was worth.

Living with Char Aznable is not what he expected. He's a cordial young man, despite his incessant poking, judging. Only sometimes. Garma knows when when it's his pride on the line, and Char rises to meet him. But that was not the 24/7. Char Aznable was still a stellar student in all regards, and that had required hm to still do the work required both in study and training. He wasn't that different, Garma had discovered. He showered and shit like anyone else. He ate, he slept, he studied and had his small moments as benign as scratching his eyes beneath the sunglasses or yawning even. Char Aznable was human.

So Garma assumed that is until now. Now he was a devil.

"It looks like we've been negligent with certain… arrangements, between us." A sock on the door handle perhaps was needed after all.

"Char…" Garma breaths his name in like water, and his throat is burning.

"I admit, I didn't think you had it into to actually bring a girl in here. Especially in the middle of the day, your highness." Garma has no excuse. "Isn't it against the rules, that type of fraternization? What would Dozle think?"

The type of fraternization that has his dick dripping, pre-ejaculate coating. It stands still as Char flicks his finger toward it.

"We simply got carried away!" Garma snaps as best he can, still out of breath from the whole affair and the whirlwind turn. His elbow slips as he tries to prop himself up, but the slight shock through his body goes all the way to his leg, and he winces. "I take offense in thinking that you don't think I could have an affair such as that, Char."

"I'm sure you're more than capable, your highness. But to have me be witness to it… Now that's quite rude, isn't it? As if there wasn't the chance I could walk in here." His accent, it's strange. It's artificial almost. It's not refined at all, but it's solid and true, beating against the curve of all the rest from the Texas colony. Char's voice is a level voice that presses down on Garma's chest, and he can't breathe because of it. The emphasis on the threat remains as he steps up from his chair, and he comes closer, right to the bunks, and leans on the divider between their beds. "All I wanted was to come to rest, and now I have to bear you, looking like this."

Even as Garma's hands finally make their way to the hem of his pants they can't themselves to pull up.

He's basically twitching, his body yearning for release.

Char growls amusedly. "I didn't take you for a man, but I could see a deprived pervert."

The shadow of Char Aznable casts itself over Garma, but the darkness hides nothing. Not the way his skin glistens in the blue-lit black from former physical activity, or the way his veins curve through his arms, strong and tight and holding the edge of the divider. It doesn't hide anything from where Garma's eyes wander. Char is hard, but it matters not to him, looking down on Zeon's prince. The impression of him is a bulge that burns into memory. His shorts were stirring but it is the only part of Char that is, he is silent, still, like stone, and all Garma can do is stare as his mouth wets.

He's an open-minded man, or, at least, never particularly thought of there being a barrier in his mind in terms of what he was attracted to. Being in proximity to so many people his age in relatively fit shape has certainly affirmed his decision not to stake for one side or another and being in proximity to Char Aznable certainly has him thankful for it.

It was an experience he had heard gossiped about from the Zabi manor's younger servants about how they would always reminisce on their college days as when they really had fun. Inbound for the Academy, he had doubted personally he would have the same experience, but life found a way.

He was unsatisfied, and his brain wanted it so badly, wires crossing between so many impulses.

"What do you take me for?" Garma grits through his teeth, the slow retreat of his hands upward to try and cover himself finally painful.

Char's sunglasses give nothing to Garma.

"Door unlocked, middle of the day. People saw Liza walk in, didn't they?" He offers instead. "Is that where you get off? Knowing that you are enjoying yourself in a way that they can't? You're such a privileged child." He laughs again. "It's quite pathetic you can't even finish. Even more pathetic that this whole situation hasn't turned you off, even."

"Char…!" Garma can't move with the cast as it is, but Char's shadow seems to have weight of its own, the bed's pliancy betraying him as it bounces against his resistance. "I won't- I shall not be demeaned by-"

"Go ahead, keep talking like that royal you tell people you're not. I'm sure you'd suck your own dick right now with that mouth of yours if you could, given how you are right now." Char's words are slow and smooth and just as icy as space itself. It hurts, it pains, it insults, but it makes Garma feel.

What are they doing? It's a pathetic question that Garma has as the part of his brain that's rational, and that's not insane, tries to tell him to stop all of this. But he's unsatisfied, Char's pressure is too much, and some part of him, deep inside, wants this. Badly.

He really didn't want to live with yes men, after all.

Defiance, stubbornness, the shade of lust that hazed him over so well it didn't discriminate.

"What do you want, Char? Can't you see you have me at a disadvantage here." Garma's senses are so concentrated on his body he can't even hear his own words. His dick was out, and in every other situation that would've been fixed already. But in this situation, there was something else here, and past the shock of his return was the mystery of a proposition.

"Would you like some help with that?"

In the dark his eyes finally adjust, and Garma sees Char totally, just in time to see him take one his palms, rough and taking, place against his mid-thigh. He nearly shocks from the contact, but if that were the case Char would've held him there. "What?"

He leans in further, and the contrast of his eyes is finally seen. "You wanted to room with me for a reason. Is this not it?" This close, and the salt of his sweat takes over Garma's senses entirely. "I can't imagine what you'd do to me if I don't give you what you want, your highness."

Char Aznable has a death wish, so bold, so uncaring it seemed, and most of all forward. The squeeze of his hand on his thigh lets Garma breathe again, however. He couldn't quite say if he was attracted to him, but there was a case to be made, and his mind tells him to fully appreciate him now.

"You're terrible. And bold." Garma's glare can't be hidden, but it's the only non-compliant part about him from Char's point of view.

"And you're wanting." Char's tongue flicks his teeth on the T in wanting, and Garma can't help but feel it.

Wants. Needs. Garma has had his wandering thoughts before today of what it would've been like to kiss a man. Now that seems so far behind him as a man's hand is slowly reaching up his thigh and his head hovers over his own, like a hawk.

"I could have you thrown out for what you're doing." The reminder is barely a threat from Garma.

"Tell me to stop then." Garma seizes on the idea, and his mouth is still. "This is nothing. Just me helping you out as Liza did, your highness." This time he says it, Garma's spine electrifies.

Maybe it is just boys letting off steam, and Char is pent up himself.

Maybe it is some sort of pitiful action.

Maybe this happens far more often than Garma's upbringing would have him believe.

Maybe, just maybe, Garma did want this beyond his physical yearning at that very moment.

Maybe, as Char makes that final drag of his hand up, his fingernails raking every bit of skin until he gets to the still wet saliva left behind by Liza, this was all foreplay to torture.

Garma was at a disadvantage, a fact drilled so deep by the way, quickly, once, Char ripped his finger nails up his dick, and the scratching burn that yanked the breath out of his mouth was smothered as that same hand clamped him, hard, around the base.

"Char!"

Pleasure and pain are right beside each other in the brain, and for Garma, it couldn't have been a better descriptor of him and Char Aznable. When Garma thinks of the word used like an object, he often thinks back to this night. Because Char had used him. No pain nor cry from him even as his leg screamed at him in pain mattered as much as that feeling that he had gotten drunk off and left ruined.

In the burning haze Garma swears he sees Char twitch through his shorts as well, but his vision goes white as he picks up almost where Liza left off.


"I know them both very well, Mai Gul." Garma hopes that's all he needs to say to Mai. The strategic part of their day is over and done then, mostly likely, and confirmed by the way Mai puts asides that laminated map of theirs, already adorned with delicate markered notes. His eyes carefully dart one last time at the map. She usually lets him put it away for the day as she readies herself for an outing. "I am not above such things, and neither are you. As if you've never been inclined to certain people for certain reasons."

She's inclined to him for very certain reasons, but that's not what he means.

She blushes, trying to avoid his gaze. "I don't nurse crushes. I'm not really that type of person." Not the type of person to fall in love, she means. "Even in the Academy I never had any type of… relationship like that, or boys that I felt particularly drawn to. Nor women, even. And I can understand the whole same sex thing. Women have certain… pains that only they can understand of each other. It's not hard to realize that sympathizing offers easier love."

Garma nods along and he doesn't even realize it. "Companionship has its merits."

She realizes too quickly how open she's being, the rubber band of herself going the other direction as fast as she can manage. "I'm sure you can say that very easily, given your entourage."

But Garma is above, or perhaps recognizes very easily her whiplash. "Well I'm sure even if I didn't look as dashing as I did my personality would've remained the same."

"Oh so you admit it was because you were a pretty boy." He lets her continue to lash at him like this. Personal attacks as they may be, it does do more to belittle her than him.

"Do you think I am a pretty boy? Is that pleasing to you?" She glares at him, but her mind answers. Yes, he is, and she's not disinterested in men who look like him.

"You look medium rare." She spat back.

"Maybe that's just the way I like it, dear Mai."

It's cathartic, for the both of them, to snap at each other like this. It's as grating as five miles per hour on an interstate, but at least there was progress to some sort of fulfillment of hostile confliction. Mai alone, however, has the right to tip it over, and Garma holds her there, waiting, wondering, preparing. She holds for now today, the silence of moments passing as their shoulders drop from their unconscious tension.

"Medium rare? Really?" She says softer.

He taut one corner of his mouth, shaking his head, realizing the same absurdity of their quips. "Isn't it the common perception that women like scars? It's what I hear from my troops, at least." It's not exactly anything he believes either, but it is the concept that he knows.

"Eh, not really doing anything to me."

"Well, I'm not exactly showing for you."

"As if." It was perhaps the first time she knew she was being overly bratty, just by reaction alone, and for Garma, it had made him raise his remaining eyebrow.

Once upon a time, she could admit, he was handsome (and to be fair to him, even with the scars, he still carried his face well). Though it was a handsome that didn't quite matter to her. It was no more or less a distinguishing a fact about him than the fact his hair had been a part of that color palette that had been endemic of newborn, new generation Spacenoids, or his vaguely strong neutral accent that had obviously been trained into him. It was not something that factored into her, because it had been immutable. She had an opinion, but it wasn't a personal opinion.

There had also been the fact that she had seen his body in its absolute worst state. She had touched him in his unmentionable place and washed him down, and when she thought of his body she thought of his flesh, his gore.

Far be it from her to think of him having a nice ass and a cute face after seeing him destroyed like that.

"Are you entangled now?" This question is the one that catches him off guard, and it comes out in a tone that's the most innocent Mai has sounded. It doesn't offend him, but if he were in a different place, at least with two full legs, he would've left. How improper a question, but all of this was improper.

"…. Mai, I- this. It's personal. I'm not comfortable speaking on it." It surprises him, his candor changing, how guarded he had become in that one moment. "Would you let me have this, at least?"

He was entangled. That was the only reason why he had been reacting like that, but the question hadn't been if he had been, it was the detail after that: Who. She knew that was what had been at hazard.

She leaned in, head tilted. "Someone loves you?" Zeon's prince was always well loved by the public, but this love was something else. It was true love. That love. The love that people spend their lives looking for.

He is silent on Mai's question.

Even he had someone to leave behind.

Icelina, poor Icelina. The wave of darkness, of sorrow, that passes over him now comes from the realization that she must've believed him dead. She has been, for as far as the world knew, left alone now. Garma Zabi might not be truly dead, but to the world, and to Icelina Eschonbach, he is. For leaving her like this, Garma can't help but believe he might as well be dead after all.

Mai had stayed on Guardian Banchi for one week after the Dawn Rebellion, her father, after discovering what she had done, arranging for her extraction by way of Dozle. In that one week, however, she had seen the beginning of the long aftermath, repeated now on Earth for millions: She had seen what it was like for loved ones to mourn.

Mio Vorelli was a female cadet, one of the many of Garma's troops to have lost her life that night. It had been her parents that had arrived in Banchi first, and those that had survived were there to greet her. Even Mai. Garma was a constant.

Mrs. Vorelli had come out of the terminal, screaming, arms reached out toward Garma, like a wraith. No one stopped her as she slipped, falling, before Garma as he stood there, his face unreadable, but his words their best to try and calm her as Mr. Vorelli emerged, hat in hand, a grim look of acceptance deep in his brow. Mrs. Vorelli, pulling herself up, had brought herself to Garma and held him by her shoulders as she screamed, she begged, and at last, she bargained.

"Show me where she died! Show me!" She begged, and begged, and begged until her legs and breath gave out and she had fallen before Garma in tears and in hoarse screaming. She wanted to see where her daughter was blown apart by a Federation grenade.

Garma took her there.

More and more the parents of the killed cadets arrived in Guardian Banchi, and for each one, Garma had been there personally to console, to explain, to take the blame. Some parents understood, Spacenoid patriots themselves, some had been furious and righteously so at the fact that Garma had sacrificed their child in a confrontation that didn't need to happen, being warded off by the other cadets as Garma stood there, just barely out of their reach. Most, however, could do nothing but be led to the bodies of their flesh and blood, and begin the long process of mourning.

Mai understands now what it was like to mourn for a child: paralyzing, cold. Death was better.

Out there, somewhere, in the truest sense, not twisted and abused as Gihren and the rest of his family did, someone mourned for Garma Zabi.

Would they mourn for her as well if they knew her and what she would do to him, because of what he did to her?

It was true, what she had told him: She didn't hate him, not completely, until the Colony Drop. The Federation's corruption and vile authority had been still true, and he had risen to challenge it with her. For what he had lost that day, he stood by, and for those that lost with him, he had supported and atoned.

He would've done the same for her if she fell that night.

This was not a lie to appease her. She knew that he would've mourned her.

She leaves him alone on that question, on whether or not he had someone. His response was enough anyway.

She asks him another. "Ever think of me? Before this?" A weak question, spoken with a weak voice. Why did she care?

Garma is broken out of his reverie of somewhere else again, considering her face as she looked away out the window, unable to hold his gaze as she usually was able.

"Perhaps." He said earnestly, preferring this line of questioning. "In regard to those hunters in Appalachia that were giving me so much trouble. I'm sure I thought back to you, or at least who I thought you were, back during the Academy." It would've been easier if she had still worn a hijab, but he never completely forgot her as best as he could recall his memory before Seattle. She existed in his mind as a cypher, distinctive visible features that elevated in his mind's inclination to remember her: a tall girl, the only Muslim, and with him on that night. "If you're asking for me to say that I never forgot you, I'm sure I could say so with as much gravitas as you'd like to hear, dear Mai."

She winced; her face painted her annoyed.

"How about you?"

"Hm?" She was caught off guard.

"Did you think of me? Down here on Earth?"

The seconds that it takes her to remember such a fact are seconds that send her back into the last two years. Of course, she thought of the Zabis and their opulence as she tried to kick her radiator alive in the Seattle cold. Of course, she wondered what the Dawn Rebellion did in the ticky takka of politics on some internal level.

Did she think of him as a person?

It wasn't as if she had been totally removed from him, just as another person during the Academy. They were in each other's peripheral, and he certainly had said his piece on her.

"A man came into work with a purple wig once."

"At the grocery store?" Garma remembers what she said the other day. It takes a long time for her to respond, and he second guesses as if he had spoken at all, but eventually she shakes her head.

"I also worked at a strip club." She spoke to him, leveling her gaze at him for a moment, catching his eyes before looking off and away, he's quite surprised, his mouth slightly open. "At nights. Weekends and Fridays mostly. VIP sections most of the time."

"VIP sections? Important customers?" Garma's not sure if he's quite understanding; if what she had just revealed to him was exactly what it meant.

She rolled her eyes. "Eh, high paying ones at least. Get the girls of their choice into the private rooms."

"Were you…?" Garma doesn't have the courage to finish, but she does for him.

"I was a bouncer. Not the product." She sighs. Her father had asked her the same question. "I was there to be on standby just in case anyone got a little too hands on. And being a woman myself it made the other girls comfortable."

With all that combat training, with all her rather remarkable size and build, and with all the chips off her shoulder, Mai Gul worked as a bouncer at a strip club. She had her fair share of manhandling those who manhandled unjustly, and for that she threw enough men out the backdoors or broken enough noses to keep her relatively freshly acquainted with the art of hurting other people.

It was a dirty job, but it paid well.

"Sometimes customers would come in and try to hide their identity. I think that's what this one guy was doing when he came in one day with that stupid wig. So yeah, thought of you because of it. Wondered if you went to clubs on Side 3 like that. Felt like you did, royal as you are."

The image of Mai in a dark seedy club is not an image that leaves his mind easy. It's a double-edged though, the flash of her as product and not guard impossible to beat down, but in the end, he chooses to feel sorry for her, just a little bit. How a promising cadet such as her, even without the tragedy that had befallen her because of the Dawn Rebellion, had fallen to such a seedy place.

"I resent that'd you'd even think I would entertain myself like that." So, he gives her something. He heightens his voice, takes that nugget of true offense, blows it up a little. Something for her to chew on.

He is offended, but he can be playful about it.

She catches that at least, those sniper eyes of her slowly narrowing at him, the tilt of her head trying to sound out something different about him. "I have no reason to believe why you wouldn't, your highness." She says with as much skepticism as a mother, doting and all.

"Am I really someone that you think would be lacking in such class?" He leaned back on his stool, head tilted oppositely of her own. "I may even resent being called a prince; that's how far I am from your oil princes and monarchs in Europe."

Mai straightens her face, surprised at his candor. "… Yeah, alright. Fair enough." She can hardly imagine Garma doing a line of blow and cashing out singles.

"I'm not Gihren." He slides in at the end, looking away with a roll of his eyes.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Ridiculous. An absolutely ridiculous conversation. It almost makes her break a smirk on her face that Garma has no intention of hiding on his own.

"You mentioned that my brother Dozle would have known more about you? Correct?"

Mai nodded once. "My father offered some certain offerings to him to let me go from the Academy and some scrubbing of my records. It wouldn't have been a complete scrub, but it would've been enough for if the Federation started auditing, I didn't stand out no more or less than any other student. In exchange he offered favors to the Zabi family."

"Oh? And here I thought your name was clean."

She snorts. "If I remember correctly from the gossip pieces, Dozle and Zenna's ceremony had an absolutely perfect day on Zum."

Of course. The daughter of Colony Corp weather techs as she is, it's unsurprising. Even his family had acquiesced to them from time to time, the methods, and techniques of maintaining the colonies apolitical, and thus out of the hands of the Zabis even. Usually. "I see. I see." Garma had understood. "I suppose the only way that the Colony Corp would ever change their weather schedule would be if one of their children was at hazard."

The shrug that comes over Mai's shoulders is involuntary. Her father had always played loose with his position, not that she would complain. Her mother had been HR for Zum's Colony Corp station after she had been given birth, and so any particular complaints had been sidelined.

The Colony Corporation had been perhaps several of the few entities that hadn't directly bowed to either Zeon or the Federation in the years prior to 0079, if only because of their unchallenged understanding of the infrastructure that was irreplaceable for the current system.

Now, it only made sense why a daughter that hailed from the group had talked to Garma the way she did.

She's gazing again, outside, to the clouds beyond. "A risk of rain."

She knew, she just knew in her bones, blood, and skin.

Garma realizes this too. "Shame. I was going to go on a walk outside."

She wants to tug on his ear for even implying, pinch his skin, but even that is a betrayal of comfortability. It was too good natured that she mistakes who he is. He's too charming for his own good, and even she is not immune.

Mai runs a hand through her hair once, and, surprisingly, she lets it roll out the back, the industrial rubber band that had been her hair tie, kept up almost constantly, is let free. Her hair is in that middle state between curvy and straight, silk black as always, like pencil lines all formed together as it falls to her shoulders. Errant strands frame either side of her face, but they are brushed back behind her ear as soon as they settle. Her hair is just past shoulder length now and it captivates him so.

She thinks nothing of it.

"He might've killed you because it you were a Zabi," she explained, returning to the topic of Char, and his eyes are off her. It was the reason she believed, but she did offer an alternative: "Or, maybe there's just some residual bad blood between you and him on account of… whatever you did in the Academy."

Garma grimaces as he does, the curve of his mouth dipping into his burns on his face's right side. "I'd hardly believe the latter, given how we were. Besides, I'm a perfect gentleman when it comes to matters of the heart."

Even now, and this had surprised Mai, Garma had kept a certain level of decorum. Who was but a man in that nature vs. nurture debate, Mai couldn't really figure out after all this time alive. Garma, however, he was a creature of his environment, his upbringing.

She wonders if Garma was truly her neighbor, lived as she did in an apartment building, instead of becoming royalty, that the question he asked her would've been true: If they could've been friends.

The mystery of a middle class Garma however was for another life, one that, maybe, she would send him to.

"How quaint of you, your highness." The scorn on her lips is palpable, but tired now. "I'm glad that it panned out alright for you, clearly." He smiles at her toxicity, and that smile is but a farce, hardly hidden. It softens after, and he darts his remaining eye to a corner, looking into himself it seemed.

"My sister says that History protects all fools, and if I am fool now for entangling myself with Char Aznable, I'm sure I'll be fine in the end of it." He nods his head once. "Not fine as in what you'll do to me, but in the long span of things. The History of it."

"History will remember you as a mass murderer."

"Well, may I remind you that History is written by the victor."

If he were to take everything they had discussed about the war up to that point, then yes, it did very much seem like Zeon was to be writing history. But something had happened in late Summer. Not a particular, singular event, but it had been an indicative phenomenon that Garma had been clearly trying to explain away, resolutions and solutions queued up with explanations, but not the cause. Just as Zeon had lost in Seattle, so too had offensives the world over started halting, slowing down, and more than that, the Federation had been able to counter-attack. For the Federation, even the smallest victories were momentous in what they meant now: Zeon could be fought, with or without mobile suits. The question lied in how many lives more could be taken or saved, but for the Federation, they had bodies to spare.

She's not here, nor does she want to tell him that Zeon was going to lose. It didn't matter to them anymore. It's not as if her life would've been improved by his rule, by a Zeon victory, anyway.

The radio picks up activity, it's on in the background, most days, chatter from the Conclave and the Pavilions heavy nowadays but it's a nicer ambience that reminds them that people are still extant out there. Garma listens when she's gone. He never speaks out, he never cries for help because God knows he wouldn't know where to start and it would very much end up with hastening his death, but he listens and puts together a picture of what the resistance war effort here was like.

The voice of Tammy from 6 Pavilion is a common one, and the way that it starts is telling that it drags two of them away from another catty back and forth.

"Tammy, baby. Now I like being polite as much as anyone, with what this new border that may or may not have formed between us and you alls up in the Conclave, but my people tell me something, someone got busy last night." Murph takes any excuse to broadcast on the radio: someone in love with his own voice. So openly on the comms too. But it's unsurprising, and Murph doesn't walk on polite pretenses. There's a line formed in Seattle, and he's one side of it.

There's a beat, several seconds that go on as Mai and Garma look at the radio, expecting a response, but Tammy is, all things considered, prompt.

"Must've been me, Murph. Sorry, Ezekiel jumped me and a few guys when I was on patrol, so you know what I had to do to scare the guy off. About above the Kingdome if I remember. Why, you worried about us?" Tammy answered smoothly.

"You sounded pretty close beyond where you should be…" Murph had responded, and he hadn't believed it.

"Yeah?" Tammy snapped back. "Well, my gun's loud… Besides, any of your people dead or hurt? If not keep the line clear."

Murph had followed with some choice expletives, ones that caused Mai to walk over, tuning the radio's volume down, but it had been enough.

"You have a colorful group of troops." Garma is sure to comment. For all the talk of his stratagem, and her hypotheticals, little is said about her actual history here in Seattle and her guerilla war.

Mai pauses, choosing her words carefully: "Not mine to command."

He raises a non-existent eyebrow and the muscles beneath his bandages chafe. "But from what I hear some days, it sounds like they consider you the commander."

How easy it was, when the resistance truly started and when people looked to her, for her to compartmentalize them all as assets, as elements, as options. Not as people. That was what the Academy had done to her, and she resented it. And yet in war that was what she needed to do, and on that first night when the guerilla war truly began, she had given out orders, and those that came to her to fight trusted her.

As she said earlier, submissiveness was nice, even when not talking about the lurid idea of sex. To be commanded, to believe in actions dictated by someone other than you, it was easy to fight that absurd concept of war that way.

"I just seemed like I knew what I was doing. I'd killed enough Zeeks at that point to make it look like I did, anyway."

He raised an eyebrow again. "Well, I know at this point you can't keep going for a year without some sort of idea of knowing what you're doing… And if I do remember correctly, you were not an unremarkable cadet at all." How tense she was to take a compliment.

"Don't give me too much praise. Apparently, I worked with the wrong people in the end." Her stabbed hand begins to ache again, but she's dealt with worse.

Garma knows little of Murph, but enough to know that he's a dangerous man, and who she is referring to at that very moment.

"He seems like the type of fellow who'd stab you." Garma awkwardly put.

"Many people would, Garma." Her hand drifts on the table the radio set sits on, going to the small music player that had been another one of Win's gifts to her: a music player. A small device, about the size of a pistol magazine. A music store in Seattle had kept enough power that Win had downloaded enough music from the internal hard drives to gift Mai an entire library of music. The look on his face when she had revealed what exactly the type of music she listened to had been a nice memory in her mind. It's quite similar to Garma's every time she lets music play from the speakers of the radio set, picking up where she had last been listening to:

Yuh, yuh, aye

Death By Dishonor

You crossed the wrong one

Your wig get pushed back

Underground Underdog

Need ten flat to be in the same room

Pop by the cut with a stick and the stained booth

Fuck whatcha heard

Baby having a round

Po-po 'round

We need a moment of silence

Running from the piece to get away from the sirens

Ain't a damn thing change

Yo we love the violence

Baby Bone, I'm an animal

Made a hundred thousand racks off the seminal

Eat a rapper up sick like I'm Hannibal

Got a bitch right off of the banana boat

Shakewell, made bells, hit cells

Send a rapper to hell

Broke ass rappers

Man, they want me to fail

All that in less than fifty seconds, rapid fire as if each word was a gunshot, and it makes Garma's head spin being reminded of Mai's preference of rap music. It's a metallic sound, a dark and dirty and aggressive.

It's entirely her.

It's the vibe of a chainsaw going through metal, and Mai enjoys it. "There's more than rap in here if you're curious." An offering.

Garma lets the lyrics wash over him and he supposes that he's not exactly the audience. "I try not to peruse too deeply in your articles, dear Mai." It's true. He doesn't try to gleam more of her life from her belongings here. There's a distinct impression on him from her that she doesn't hide much at all from him.

There's a distinct impression that she wants him to know her completely.

He's not unfamiliar with the politics between people when it comes to mind games and decorum: How even in the tug of war match in his own family there had been such colored conversation for the battle of his preference. Gihren and Kycilia often played that game, and he often found himself more in line with Kycilia and her own opinions on the conduct of the day to day of Zeon. Though time away from her has made her presence, either directly or by the influence of her many arms in the Zeonic war machine, more difficult than soothing.

He loved his family, no doubt, but they all seemed to forget that they were when it came to the operations or board rooms. What they gave, what they held back, all of them had been directly so tactical that it made him sick when he saw it in motion.

Mai, as always, is a fresh of breath air that would be as sickly sweet to him as much as it was deadly.

Only Icelina soothed him so more.

Not that Mai had intended any soothing of him and his airs.

A name sticks out from the radio from before:

"Who's Ezekiel?" He asks innocently.

Probably the most elusive target she'd ever hunted, and probably the only one that had eluded her.

"The Seattle Zoo's lion." She said as if bothered and shamed and annoyed, a shrug on her shoulders. "When the full-blown war came around, some animal rights people went into the pens and let them all free and out while your Gaws started bombing."

"Oh my."

"Yeah. Animal control got the biggest, and the police dealt with the most dangerous, but Ezekiel was more snake than lion… He's still out there."

When Zeon troops came and got into gun fights with any defenders, they did so amidst the backdrop of dead elephants and giraffes in the streets shot dead by the police, as crowds watched on.

It's been a nice day today, all things considered, Mai thinks. She had gotten a full 24 hours of bed rest after her outing, and it had done her body and mood well. Garma had been tolerable as well. It's one of those days too where she hangs out with Win for both of their sanity.

It was with that realization that they realized the worst had happened: they really were just two people.

"You know," She knows when he starts speaking like a Zabi again. Not this dressed down personal version of him that he is to her. She knows that must be a version. Everyone wears masks, and he, of course, must wear one for her (the same way she does to him). She entertains him, staying put, hands on the table, head tilted beckoning to go on. "I really think that one day, after we have one of these talks, like we do, and I do enjoy them, that you'll just pull out a gun and shoot me there as I'm thinking about what we just talked about."

A pang, a cold echo, it slowly rolls through her thinking about that. "Do you now? Do you fear for your life like that?"

His mouth curls. "It's a very Human thing to do, is it not? I told you. I'm not scared of you, but of course I must fear the moment."

Mai knows what he's feeling. She does, in both directions. She was a gifted sniper and the way that the Zeon troops spoke of her as the Ghoul made her understand her effect. A captured Zeek in Federation hands had said to them that after the first two months no Zeon personnel who had known of her wouldn't dare even stand near a window, or even be in a room with windows to the outside for the fear of her. Her existence had made them fear their own in Seattle. Likewise, she knows what it's like to be hunted, for Zeon had taken their time to do that early on. She knows not the fear of the fact that she was being hunted down, but she knows the fear of that moment, and the idea that she would not be able to kill more before the final blackout. Of course, she feared death, scared of a pain far beyond her own reckoning that would rip her into the forever dark. She had her courage however, her ability to fight, and so it was enough.

Perhaps being shot in the stomach like she had been in those final weeks had let her desensitize herself to that moment.

"I'm going to kill you Garma Zabi." She tells him for what feels like the umpteenth time, and his face is blank at that, even as he stares right into her own eyes. "But it won't be like that." It won't be over the table; it won't be something so crass and sudden. As she said, he'll see it coming. "Don't worry about it."

If it's relief that washes over his face, she can't tell, but it's the slump of his shoulders that's a hint. "It's a rather odd thing to tell someone not to worry about, is it not?"

She taps her fingers on the table a few times, as if they would let her walk away, but only the words on her tongue now let's her walk away: "Wish you were trying to at least be, truly, difficult. Or at least that's what I imagined you being."

"I'm not giving you the excuse to do as you will earlier." His finger again darts up to non-existent bangs, but this time he lets it twirl through ghostly strands. "I have no problem being difficult, however, dear Mai."

The scowl on her face almost does make him laugh. "You keep pushing your luck and I'll cuff you to the bed." She growls.

"Scandalous." He quips.

She should've seen it coming, and she bares her teeth at him momentarily as she bites. "Shut up."

"I'm serious. You think I like having you as a guest?" There's grit in her throat, and the rumble in her voice compounds with her accent that comes out as bile. "Do you think I enjoy it when you are being nice to me?"

"Am I not supposed to be?" Garma poses, seriously, honestly. His voice though does trend a bit into the seriousness of it. What does she expect of him? "What do you want me to do?"

"Fuck." she answers, hand digging into her cheek. "I don't know. You're a prisoner, don't you remember? I'm not about to kill you because you're annoying."

She wants to see him on his knees and begging and pathetic. But that hasn't happened, and to get him there… she can't. What is his groveling worth if it comes from her beating him to a pulp, evoking such great pain from him that his suffering is the same as any. She's not a good person, but she's not unprincipled.

He sometimes closes his working eye, just to try and look out of the milky circlet that has become his right. There's simply barely any visual information going from his eye to his brain anymore, though there is some in the form of splotches, barely there against darkness so complete there's only one word for it: nothing. Even then he can tell it recedes, day by day, until he is sure that eye will be useless for good. He looks at her with that one dead eye today, and the shape of her is there, an amorphous blob that he strains to focus on until it becomes too much, and he shuts both of his eyes. It's a calming process for him to not think too much about what he's lost. Meditation perhaps, but not quite. Just acceptance, little by little, of what has been taken until he can force himself to know where he's going. Along the way in his mind now, however, is her.

"In a life where I knew what happened to you, either after the Academy, or even here on Earth, I would've helped you."

"Shut up."

"I know you would've detested it. You might've still even wanted to kill me, as you do now, Mai Gul. But I would've still tried to help you."

"Shut up!"

"I never wanted any of this."

"Garma!"

"I would do anything in my power, even now, to make it right."

This is what sends Mai across the table, grabbing his collar and making him meet her halfway. She grabs and pulls harder than she even anticipated, and their foreheads collide as she snarls.

"I would've loved to see you try to make it up to me. You wouldn't. Never. But I'd like to see you try and fail- try so hard to try and keep your life."

"Is this what you want of me? To try and live?"

She doesn't know what she wants.

She knows that seeing him dead in the ground by her hand is what she's living toward, but is it a want? A need? Garma is a mirror, and he hadn't even tried. Wants and needs.

Mai's hands fall from his collar, but he remains there, forehead pushing back.

He is a Zabi man, after all, and he really does believe they see eye to eye more than they do apart.

She cannot answer him, so they stay there, foreheads touching until the smell of breakfast beats through the warmth of their breaths, and it becomes intolerable, tearing away from each other.

Garma starts, straightening his hoodie, coming back to his composure first. "I say we're both fairly… off-measure when it comes to how we are, given our situation then. I'm perfectly fine with it." Politely saying that both of them are nuts is something that feels right to say, and Mai doesn't disagree as she glares at him.

"You Zabis are always planning. So, I have to think to myself, what are you planning. An escape plan? To kill me eventually?"

He chuckles once, and his finger darts up to his forehead again, looking for strands that aren't there.

"I'm not going to kill you. I don't want to kill you, Mai Gul." The strength of it as it comes out of his throat hurts his chest even, but he means it with all that breath. "Even if it kills me."


Later, she's out and at the art museum hideaway of her favorite iron blooded orphan (presumed). She doesn't know if Win's parents are dead, but Win doesn't seem to care that much. He doesn't seem to care much about much of anything when he's feeling her body heat as they sit on that bench before his "room's" main attraction: that giant French tapestry that had been a part of a line of 1500s creations called La Dame à la licorne.

They had been sitting in comfortable silence after Win's initial rant about cars trying to run him over before the war when she dropped this question: "Win, if you had to kill me to survive, would you?"

Win Nguyen, for as long as Mai had known the boy, was observant. Street smarts often came with a certain amount of wise eyed gut feelings, but Win had an abundance of it. It had kept him alive, and deadly, during the war in that urban sprawl, and more than that it had kept him mostly above water when it came to his social interactions. It's no surprise he finds meaning from her question and springs up from her lap, looking at her dead serious in the eye like the accusation.

"Alright what the fuck is happening up there with that Zeek of yours."

"I've got no idea-"

"Don't even try I got you six ways from Sunday." How and why, she doesn't know, but Win is assured, and even if he were wrong about the assumption, it would take too long to convince him otherwise. "Now what's up is he like, you think he's breaking out of his chains or cuffs or something?"

"I don't have him chained up like an animal."

"Well, you should, even if you knew him." Win isn't impressed. "At least Gully and all of them have fun with their catches. They fucked up that one Zeek the other day good before we even started dragging him to the Conclave."

If Garma had ended up with any other person, she knows that he would've been beaten and tortured like none she had ever seen, and people would want him to suffer more.

She feeds him, heals him, talks with him as if old friends. Bile brews in her gut but Win's words keep it down.

"What does he look like even? Your age? Right? Old Academy classmates?" He pauses for a second. "Are you fucking?"

Mai's face twists into a shrewd tangle. "No!" She barked. "I just- it's something that came to mind. Alright? Nothing more."

Another version, or at least another, more deranged person might've taken Garma and chained him to the bed for personal use for as long as he would last, but that wasn't who she was or what she wanted from him.

Win isn't as convinced with the furrow of his brow and the sour look on his face, but the one she gives back settles him for the moment as he sighs and instead takes her stabbed hand, the black line of stitching still on it as he absent-mindedly massages it, still leaning against her. He takes the time to think otherwise, and she waits in silence, looking over the French tapestry again. Art had always been so much more engrossing and expressive in real life, seeing it with her very own eyes instead of behind a screen.

Eventually Win answers.

"If I had to kill you to survive, I'd simply die."

"Just like that?" She tilted her head down on him.

"Just like that." He nodded, confident as always. "If I had to kill you to make it, then that's not really making it, is it? If you dying was because of me I'd probably, I don't know, kill mys-"

"Win." She stops him.

He's offended, expressive as if he had just been stopped from hanging out with his friends after school. "I'm serious though! I've killed for you, why not die?"

"You haven't killed for me." She spoke too soon, and she knew she was wrong before she recovered her breath.

"Sure I have," He backed off her again, looking at her straight in the eye. "You were my captain." She did point him where to go, and because of that, people died. She didn't know why she had protested but it had been a fraught and ill-advised maneuver anyway.

She was on the other side of that paradigm once, she realized. The only difference now was that Win very much enjoyed it.

"Wallah, you love me." She remembers, she groans, and Win is satisfied with that as he leans his head against her shoulder again.

His affection for her is something that she allows, and she doesn't wrangle where her heart allows the feeling she has for Win Nguyen is.

As a son?

As a brother?

As a comrade in arms?

She cannot admit.

So, all she does is feel.

She doesn't hide it on her face and Win can tell, his elbow nudging her side.

"So, what does the lion mean to you?"'

"Huh?"

"That there lion."

The French tapestry before them is a large sort, kept, isolated from the war in its thick glass display case. There its red and gold veins still ring true, depicting a scene of a French maiden before an ornate tent, placing jewelry and another tapestry into a chest held by a servant. On their right: a unicorn, a white beast of impossibility, kicking up its hooves. On their left, however, that is what Win refers to: a lion. A black lion, probably a fantastical creature to the French who had created these in the last Human era, 1500s AD, claws up and out toward the back of the French maiden, teeth bared. So many other details exist: trees, birds, designs of flowers, all making for such a busy scene that it has lasted months beneath their eyes.

Today she focuses on the lion then for Win's question.

She's acquainted with the beasts, or, at least, one beast. She's never seen Ezekiel, but she knows he's real based on the occasional deer carcass that gets turned up. Claw marks, lion fur. Every once and a while a scav would say that they had seen it firsthand, but Ezekiel had been more elusive than even her in the war, even though Zeeks had been chewed up dead some nights. It was good though that even the Earthnoid lion that he was had a preference in targets.

Targets.

"Just another target." She spoke as the whim came up in her.

Win is reflective, considering her words and looking at the lion himself, but any thoughts inside of him he keeps to himself as he speaks otherwise:

"Those were my best assignments you know, back at my school. When they showed us stuff like this and we had to write like, a five-page essay on the themes and stuff. I could bullshit my way through a lot of that, so I always appreciated them. Made it so I wasn't completely failing everything. Some bullshit busy work, I think though."

"Yeah…" She had thought the same of her own assignments sometimes, but the Mai that had been going to school and done tests and of the like was so far away now. The sky above had been getting dark. She was due back home, but not before checking on her traps north of there today. "Alright, I'm gone." She said, getting up, picking her rifle up from the floor below.

"À Mon Seul Désir." The words out of Win's mouth don't sound like English, and it isn't. "À Mon Seul Désir." Win rattles off the exact name of the tapestry in his exaggerated accent before she leaves, both staring at a golden plaque below it. "Wish I fucking knew what it means."

If meaning were so easy to derive, she thinks, perhaps her life would not be as it was now.

She knows what Win feels as he lays himself across the bench they've shared for the last hour and ends his day early.


Water echoes beneath northern Seattle streets, and the job that the Conclave has done in flooding the sewers and tunnels below them to keep the security integrity of the territory is still working. Any fighting that came to them would be above ground only. Better for her that way.

Slowly she's returning to her schedule despite Garma, and that includes checking on her traps toward the zoo. It's not as successful as actually going out in the morning and pulling the trigger, but the traps were set, and she had made any excuse to spend a little more time away from the apartment.

Good thing she did check today as she knows, immediately, before she had rounded the alley to one her traps, she heard the metal clanging.

Something inside of it had heard her coming.

She had made sure to check the chamber on her rifle as she approached, but she had felt almost bad for doing so.

It scattered around in her cage, just the right size for it, but obviously not intended, living off a handful of deer jerky she had left for bait.

It's about the brightest shade of yellow she's seen other than the sun above, and it's shivering cold.

She's not an expert, or even remotely familiar with dogs. Dogs were haram, and she was once devout. Nowadays of course that hadn't quite stood, but it led to a deficit in terms of how familiar she had been with the animals, especially with the golden retriever that had found itself in one of her traps.

The cages were made for pest control: possums and raccoons. The golden retriever that found itself inside of it, obviously drawn by the meat, hadn't been fully grown. Half a year maybe. Shit had been in the cage, so it had been in there long enough it seemed.

It was an odd sight that gave her pause as the dog, finding her, looked up through the bars of its cages with the classic age-old visage of puppy eyes.

Dogs, pets more specifically, had been missing in Seattle a few months into the occupation. Pets were a signifier of some sort of stability, and anyone with enough connections or wealth had left Seattle, taking their pets with them. And yet here one was, born during the war, scrapping until now.

She had to have given it credit then.

It yapped at her, several times, its barks cute and hardly menacing. It had been big enough that it had been able to move the cage with each bark, but of course it could never escape.

She wasn't about to eat a dog, so, carefully moving up to her trap as if it had been something far more dangerous, the dog staring up at her all the while, she had put her hand on the latch.

She was attacked by its tongue in a furious procession of licks.

This was the first time in her life she had even interacted with a dog, and something inside of her had rebelled at the thought. Benefits of being raised a certain way. It had quickly become a silly prospect, however, as the dog's shaking from being cold had turned into a vibration of excitement it seemed.

"Okay okay okay." She spoke down to it, unsure of how to talk to it as she released the latch.

Out it burst, a furball that had immediately gone to its legs, shaking back and forth, and assailing her with its big floppy ears and sloppy tongue. It had clearly been socialized, based on how well it had taken to her. Or maybe it had…

She groaned once, standing up to get away from it, its licking concentrated around her pocket where she kept her out-and-about sustenance. More jerky sat inside of a plastic bag there.

Ghoul was something that only Man called her. Animals had no opinion of her.

Digging into her pocket she had taken the last bulky shards of jerky and thrown them to the floor. In the same flick of her hand she had dared, wondered, what it would be like to pet a dog. She had pulled back at the last second however, the dog fully engrossed and quickly making work of her offerings.

The dog had shit in her cage, so it was probably a loss, but she still had others to check on as she turned away to go check on them across the blocks. She hadn't anticipated the patter of paws on wet concrete behind her as she walked off and away.

An animal was an animal, she didn't think too much of them, but that was her mistake as she saw the dog following her, pausing when she turned round.

Oh no.


"Wallah." She thought it was something that only happened in tv movies, but here she was: that creature having followed her all the way back home. The dog had been company, wanted or not, as constant as her shadow as she checked the rest of her empty traps. She had half considered luring the dog back into a trap just to have it leave her alone, but she didn't have the heart.

She shouldn't have been surprised that the dog followed her all the way back to Elysium Condos.

It followed her onto the bus, her underground entrance now flooded out, despite her trying to shoo it away the entire time. In both languages she had gone through her dictionary of synonyms regarding the words "stop" and "go away". Nothing had worked as the dog had taken her words, loud enough to not draw attention to Seattle streets, as an invitation to keep following her. It followed her all the way into Elysium Condos itself, happily prancing and tongue lolled out all the way. At the stairs for the walk up, that was when she had stopped. Now inside she could bark back.

It's been some time since she's raised her voice truly to the sound needed to cut above gunfire, and she does now to the dog, teeth gnashing, yelling downward as the shout she does is less shout and more growl. She sounds like an animal, and the dog gets the point as it skitters, whimpers, surprised by the sudden snap, before it disappears into the corner of the lobby in the shadow.

That was good enough for now.

Mai had rubbed her sleeve against the corner of her mouth, spittle formed, and turned away, back up the stairs.

She already had one animal to take care of.


"Hey, do you remember Liza? Liza Bluedover?" She asks Garma that night over dinner. Bright and charming and full of life, she remembers her. She doesn't know the exact relation with Garma, even a hint of it, but she asks. It surprises him. Surely, he hadn't said anything about her in his sleep, had he? He hadn't dreamt of her since he had come to Earth. "She was always one of the more strategic ones. I just-" Mai drags off, distant. "I just was wondering what happened to her."

Garma knows. Of course, he would check in on her. They hadn't spoken since before their graduation when she had given him a chaste peck on the cheek with her official boyfriend on her arm, as if to prove to the new boy that she could count Garma Zabi as a friend, acquaintance, or however she referred to him as, but he hadn't minded. She had not followed up on an officer's contract and instead returned to New Galway. More than troops and officers, Zeon needed a supply of food separate from the quickly disintegrating Federation and Earth-based lines. She served Spacenoid-kind better in making sure cows were kept among Side 3's resources. Unless anything had changed, she was still there to this day.

"She's alright." Garma answered. "I think she went back to work with her family, after the Academy."

Mai had felt a pang of satisfaction with that. In a battle between former peers and her, of course she would pick herself, but the providence of battle was sometimes merciful in choosing combatants. Fortune turned up Garma for her, but it very much could've been someone else she recognized, someone else she was less inclined to immediately kill. Someone else, who was pretty much, just like her in the end. It satisfied her to some degree that some remained innocent (or at least more innocent than others).

"She wasn't with us that night, was she?" Mai recounted.

Garma shook his head softly. "No." He made sure she didn't hear of it. Far be it from him for someone to have gotten as close as she had been to him, even if it had been mostly a physical connection, to die that night. Of all the death that he could handle, the death of a loved one is one he doesn't know if he could take.