A/N: A little under halfway there from being done with section 1.

Hey, thanks for reading so far, by the way. I know this isn't one of my big stories, but this is a story that means a lot to me because it's the culmination of my technique and prose so far in my life. So honestly, again, thank you.


1-11

A Man and Woman of Distant Origins


She sleeps with Garma Zabi every night now that the temperature has gone down and the building seems to suck itself of warmth. She wouldn't lie to herself in saying that her body does not crave the warmth of another every night, but it's levied against the fact that the warm body is the half-dead and fully despicable prince.

Pragmatism might've helped her survive this long, but her dignity strains as most every morning now she either wakes up buried into his neck or blissfully unaware of her situation, sleeping on his chest. It always seemed to be their deep sleep natural position with each other. Garma, for his part, was overly sensitive to his own positioning in their communal bed sharing. A lot of hip shuffling and giving her a wide berth when she climbed into bed with him.

Though in the morning nothing could be avoided save for the more lurid parts of male anatomy that neither would comment on. Not as if she had been any better.

And yet, despite this new proximity, nothing else had changed.

Comforting, to say the least.

On one fine dark morning before dawn cracked, she returns to her outer routine.

She's fond of this sniper rifle in a way that does make her believe she is going the way of the dogs. There is emotional attachment to it she feels. It has served her as well as any loyal troop, and done more to bring her closer to some righteous reckoning than any on Earth or beyond could. As goes the old creed: This was her rifle, there were many like it, but that one was hers.

Because she sleeps with him, so too does he wake up with her. He groans as she is already off the bed, and Charlie too wakes up from his bundle in the pulled out drawer. "So soon?"

She growls a short affirmative at him, and one more time she dons the clothing and gear of Seattle's Ghoul. Ancient blue and dark fibers of the keffiyeh wrap around her neck, over her face, and her eyes remain green amidst her darker skin, the white of her eyes, and the fibers of another world. It may remain coldest at night, but in all hours the chills remain. She becomes now twice alien in the world she walks in, dressed in the image of her ancestors from a different land. Her hunting knife and its long, broad blade is attached to her belt, and she is ready. This was how she looked when she had first found him.

Garma stands in the doorway, wrapped around himself, arms tucked in, his leg attached with increasing speed. He has something to say.

She waits, her boonie hat covering her eyes in a shade, sniper rifle kept in her left hand.

"For my good behavior, I would like to request you something…"

Garma Zabi, aloof and royal, asks meekly. She pauses, but no anger arises in her of him daring.

"Yeah, alright. Go on."

"Would it be so much to ask you that I could come with you?" He's just gotten a leg and yet he would ask to walk on the Earth again. And yet still this request does not aggravate her as he had imagine it would. She stands there, and the question is mulled over in her mind as she looks at him up and down, and then the dark landscape outside. Yes, he was not used to these lands as she was, but there was no haste to her then. If he fell, he fell, if he tripped, he tripped. He had been her responsibility all the same, and if anything, he would see this world he had made from, not above, but in.

She nods before she answers. "Sure."

Garma is surprised, his eyes not hiding it. "Oh my."

"Mm." With a small hand gesture she moves him aside as they return to the bedroom, and the drawers are out again. The Federation hadn't quite given them cold weather gear when they supplied them, but the BDUs are a good second layer as she spreads them out behind her, followed by a sherpa's coat, cloth gloves. He wears her underwear and wears her clothes again, but as he was down here, he had been in her world anyway. By the time he is dressed, the clothes are still big on him, but it is enough for an outing. He's not too different in dress from Gearten, with his worn jeans and waxed jacket with its sherpa lining, the pants thick enough to disguise the fact he had a prosthetic at all. She has a spare pair of boots too, courtesy of the Federation in the case her own boot's waterproofing had started to fail, but for now they become his and he is able to barely, comfortably fit in them.

What is left uncovered is what is most identifiable about him.

The burns have set into the background, his hair has grown out, and he stands on his own. Garma Zabi survives and if those who knew his face, and many in Seattle did, would see him out there with her, many questions would arise and the only consequence she cared for was that his death would be taken from her.

She can think of a method to avoid this, her medical kit on her belt brought open and he brought to the edge of the bed.

She holds the beige roll up to him. "You let this happen, or you ain't going anywhere."

He knows not what she wants to do, but he nods once. The metal clip that holds it together is put asides and her hands move behind his head, and fibers are unlocked as they put upon his hair, his head, and she begins a processing of wrapping. In the end they are all just meat, but now he is being packaged up like one as she silently does the deed, tucking his hair beneath the roll, his upper face, a section of which is avoided for the sake of his eyes, and then again on the lower half to allow his mouth and nose some leeway. It's half a roll of bandages, but this alone is what she needs to trust herself, bringing him out into Seattle. For the just in case. Garma is a still a noted topic from time to time over the air, speaking how, by all accounts, it had been he who had died over Seattle that month and a half ago, and hardly anyone noticed. She wonders, from time to time, how Candy deals with his secret, but a doctor as he keeps many secrets, though none of the type that goes to harboring.

"The scars have set in well." She says quietly, and Garma looks up, avoiding staring straight ahead at her chest level.

"Despite my best efforts… You did promise me open casket, didn't you?" He moves his head in a tilt so gingerly.

She pulls just a little harder on this next turn that the bandages burn his feeling skin. "I promise you nothing."

"Of course." He coughs by the slight pain.

When all was done, he appeared mummified from the neck up, Mai twisting the bandage and tying it tight so as not to have it be undone. This was the appearance of burn victims that had suffered worse than he, and perhaps if he had been like this truly, Garma had believed he might ask for death sooner.

As it stands however, he still is himself, very much so, for better or worse.

"One last thing." Mai says, keeping him down on the edge of the bed with pressuring hands. There is paracord attached to her belt, and she goes for it, unhooking it from a carabiner, unfurling it and-

Panic rises, just momentarily, as that rope goes around his neck and tied. The fibers of it bite into his skin, but not enough to hurt, at least not yet. That red line that looped around his neck had been the circumference of his thumb, heavy duty, and it had drawn back to Mai's belt.

Charlie had awoken fully at this point, but it seemed no bother by the fact that Garma had been covered up, and a leash had been put on him, instead. "We can… we can leave Charlie out on the balcony with a dish of water and some jerky. I'm sure we won't be out all day, would we?"

Her fingers tighten the loop which the rope secures itself to his neck, and she stops, just short, of tightening it beyond his breathing. She doesn't, her fingers grazing the lower shape of his jaw even through bandages. He looks up at her into her eyes and his milky white circlet has its own type of color in the dark. He is half a corpse, and yet he lives. He is destined to die, and yet his eyes are young. She unlocks the carabiner for now, tucking it into his coat's pocket. The threat in her eyes is standard by this point, and he dares not adjust it at all around his neck.

"Come on." She turns away from them, and he is left to lead Charlie out to the balcony with scraps and water as she waits by the stairs.

Charlie seems to know that the Ghoul does not want to be followed, but Garma tempers their fears as the dish and a handful of jerky scraps are left asides, his hands ruffling their head fondly. "There there, I'll be back soon."

She heard that, and any unspoken concern that he was going to run already answered for by what she would do. With the stairs waiting for him, so too does she. It's the border of his world, the stairs, and the windows, and she would lead him out. Charlie seemed intent to eat up all his meals for the day in one go, so he leaves and goes and stands before her as she stands a few steps down, and they are eye to eye.

"Can I ask why?" He asks, and his voice echoes in that inside cavern where hundreds once lived, and now only them.

She doesn't answer, but she turns over and starts the walk down. With the deepest breath he's taken since he had fallen, he starts down.


On the ground level Garma thinks that he might as well turn himself over and go back up with the strain in his breath, but to go back would be to climb another forty immediately again. Down is better than up. The inner draft that comes in from bust open front gate chills him again, but at least it is fresh air. The first since he had come here. By there is the couch he can see in vague fever dreams, plopped down upon as a body, and risen back up to life floors up.

"From what I hear, the ground's not too shaken up, up north where we're going." She speaks, gesturing to the world outside in its continued darkness. "Try to keep up, but I'm not letting you out of my sight."

"I'll try."

"Sure." She scoffed, and the carabiner comes out of his jacket to her belt and they are chained together. They were out through the sheer of the front gate, Garma just behind her. Only now it had occurred to him that he had never seen Seattle from street level, not truly, not in his lucid memory. He can hardly remember anything but darkness and pain. Now it still is just darkness, but at least he is of mostly sound mind.

His exercises and walks around the balcony have done him well, so as he walks, he walks true, out into Seattle, out into a shadowed world with dying moonlight. He looks up to see the stars, the moon, the colonies, unfiltered by glass.

Step one out into the road in front of Elysium Condos and he has already paused, looking up, and she had the fire in her throat to yell at him to keep going, but she recognizes, the look of him doing as he did now, up at starry sky. She remembers it, for she had done quite the same, those first few lonely nights here in Seattle. How far she had fallen, and, perhaps, how far she would have to go, to return Home was in her mind looking up at heaven, and it is a feeling that remains in her still as Garma Zabi contends with that pulsing, cold that spreads from his heart to the rest of his bones.

Home was so far away. She lets him look up, and not be captured by Seattle and its destruction, but rather the Earthsphere above. The lights up there, placed by God, contended with those of the Colony Corporation, and Garma could not tell which from which. If he were to try, he would be left there for the rest of the night. So he doesn't, and he follows Mai Gul out into the street, through the world that is, and he is floating.

They became a man and woman of another time, who did not know that Humans could live in space, who followed the long shadows of the Earth for shelter as they stalked along unspoken hints of food walking. Despite themselves with their modern names and modern tongues they became of like hunter-gatherers in ancient ancient times. They were part of generations sent to the stars for no room on Earth, and here yet they were alone in their morning hunt. They did not speak, all they did was move through the city of Seattle like paradise lost. Here in that city of once millions they walked with their ghosts in a world not yet taken back by nature. Apples who were not fit for Eden had found themselves on wet and dirty concrete ground. Seattle and its apple trees, planted along apartment ways and sidewalks had let fruit down to a world that did not accept them, and were left to be splattered and rot. An effort of a Seattle to try and bring nature back, apple trees ruled from private yards and public thoroughfares, but they were left untended to in the year. Winter had come, and they were stripped bare with only its corpses below.

Mai warns Garma in these apple graveyards on streets not to slip, and he abides carefully with his new steps. His eye catches however one yet melted example, standing haphazardly with a slight bruise where it had landed from above its bare tree. He wanted to reach out, to touch it, but knew better for it. These apples had betrayed life beneath them, dead to their core because of the world around them, unaccommodating to them who yearned for loamy dirt and animals to pick at them and take them to yet undiscovered countries.

What had happened to the apples of Eden that went not picked? Were they too left to fall from that tree and to rot in a paradise that seemed so far removed from the concept? Zeon was a name hailed from Zion, and Zion: the name of Jerusalem, Holy Land. The woman who held him now came from there, her blood born there, and yet the Palestinian people had forced out, removed, discarded by a Zionist project. Like these apples, she had been left to Earth to die.

Mai Gul came from paradise, Garma knows, for he had been born there with her, and he had seen where she fell.

She sees hidden tells, hidden paths in the world that he cannot, tied to her even. Her feet take her on a path that he cannot feel but knows guides them true. He concentrates on her through it all. They did not speak. In peripheral vision Garma sees the world and the monsters undefined in a city meant to be alive, but now dead in its eerie hollowness. Who did this, he catches himself thinking.

He knows who.

Whether or not he accepts it is another matter.

Seattle was different than New York City. New York City in its designs had been built absolutely in the name of man in geometric shapes without the covenant of nature; a grid, easily understood by Man and Man alone. Seattle, however, nature remained in distant vistas and beneath their feet, the rolling hills of Seattle and territory never yielding to the footwork of the Human generations that lived there. The land may have been swallowed up in concrete and building but it did not settle. It was always there, from mountaintop peaks in the distance to the waters of the sound besides it and the rolling shape below.

Mai Gul follows that shape following morning mysteries, and Garma looks and sees a city ruined by war and calamity. The city had felt abandoned for a thousand years yet had stood for less than a fraction of that, named after a Native American Chief who spoke upon his last when the United States bought the land of his ancestors beneath him and named it for the Great American President George Washington.

When Mankind had first colonized the Earth, it was spoken that the coast they were on now: the great American western coast, had been the rim of the world touching upon unknown known waters. It was here that the frontier died and the Humanity understood its mortality. In California, the white man's manifest destiny had ended, and an eternal forsworn dream of a forever journey was ended in that century long ago, only to be rediscovered when man went to space. For the longest time until that point however, it was true, and Garma understood now what those frontiersmen cowboys felt coming to the ends of the Earth: death.

Here people came to die, or rather, realize that an end was existent, on that American west coast, as he did, unable to go further.

Mai Gul came here to live.

He tries to imagine her, that day on Guardian Banchi when they waged war for the first time. He tries to imagine her like this, stalking up to her firing position, rifle in hand and natural in her art. He hardly sees her face but her stride is confident and knowing. If only, if only, as he had dreamed, she remained with him.

Chief Seattle, of whom the White Man named Seattle for, spoke to the colonizers that had come and put his people to obsolescence by genocide words that remained true now: He had be resigned to history, but knew he would not be alone.


Excerpt of Chief Seattle's Speech - March 11, 1854 – At an outdoor public meeting called by Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens to discuss the surrender or sale of native land to white settlers.

"There was a time when our people covered the whole land, as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten. I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my pale-face brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame.

Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill all the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. The white man's God cannot love his red children or he would protect them. They seem to be orphans and can look nowhere for help. How then can we become brothers? How can your father become our father and bring us prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? Your God seems to us to be partial. He came to the white man. We never saw Him; never even heard His voice. He gave the white man laws, but He had no word for His red children whose teeming millions filled this vast continent as the stars fill the firmament. No, we are two distinct races and must ever remain so. There is little in common between us.

The ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their final resting place is hallowed ground, while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers seemingly without regret. Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people. Your dead cease to love you and the homes of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars, are soon forgotten, and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely hearted living and often return to visit and comfort them. Day and night cannot dwell together. The red man has ever fled the approach of the white man, as the changing mists on the mountain side flee before the blazing morning sun. However, your proposition seems a just one, and I think that my folks will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them, and we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the great white chief seem to be the voice of nature speaking to my people out of the thick darkness that is fast gathering around them like a dense fog floating inward from a midnight sea.

It matters but little where we pass the remainder of our days. They are not many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. No bright star hovers about the horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Some grim Nemesis of our race is on the red man's trail, and wherever he goes he will still hear the sure approaching footsteps of the fell destroyer and prepare to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of all the mighty hosts that once filled this broad land or that now roam in fragmentary bands through these vast solitudes will remain to weep over the tombs of a people once as powerful and as hopeful as your own. But why should we repine? Why should I murmur at the fate of my people? Tribes are made up of individuals and are no better than they. Men come and go like the waves of the sea. A tear, a tamanamus, a dirge, and they are gone from our longing eyes forever. Even the white man, whose God walked and talked with him, as friend to friend, is not exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers, after all. We shall see.

We will ponder your proposition, and when we have decided we will tell you. But should we accept it, I here and now make this the first condition: That we will not be denied the privilege, without molestation, of visiting at will the graves of our ancestors and friends. Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hill-side, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people, and the very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred. The noble braves, and fond mothers, and glad-hearted maidens, and the little children who lived and rejoiced here, and whose very names are now forgotten, still love these solitudes, and their deep fastnesses at eventide grow shadowy with the presence of dusky spirits. And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless."


She walks like a ghost because she walks in a ghost town. Is Garma himself not a dead man walking?

This is what they both think of themselves as they walk in the city's wild north on the edge of poisoned and salted lands. Federation cluster munitions and Zeonic artillery shells litter Seattle in the selfsame danger to those that remained, and by the time that the war has come and passed through like a storm, they remain in the ground like seeds of calamity waiting for errant strangers to move them and ignite the earth one more time. It is for that danger that Humans do not walk along north of Seattle, but animals, with their unusual intelligence are able to. Here, the Ghoul stalks among, not the inheritors of the Earth, but its original formation.

They come across such a design, sticking out from the concrete of the road by a bakery as if an outcropping of horrid growth in the dark, bubbling and infested with flies.

A deer torn apart.

She and Garma stop in the intersection, looking down to it a block over. Mai pauses, and Garma pauses a step after her, her form frozen as her head alone moves with a rifle tucked into her shoulder. She waits, she listens. Seattle wind blows. Garma thinks he can smell it, from this far away, but all he can smell is the urban rock wetness of the world around him.

"Does this not mean they are here?" He asks her quietly as if they were being watched.

She shook her head, slinging her rifle back, satisfied by the details she had picked from the air. "Animals tend to avoid where others have died."

"Who would…?"

"Ezekiel." She explains the torn apart mass by a beast of nature, caught in a world that it was not party to, but stuck in all the same. Africa was a long ways away, and it had not a chance of ever returning to it. That is why, Mai believes, it'd be better if Ezekiel was dead.

Mai Gul seemed to cast herself across the dark land not with conversation with Garma but rather with the bones that remained from life ended there. The bones spoke to her, and she listened, and she followed those words. Like silent symphony, Mai listens, and all Garma can do is hear the refractions as she speaks back in action and walk, through concrete jungles and of a domain left behind of war and light.

A car is in their way, among many of Seattle's burnt out wrecks, but this one had its owners still remains, black soot and burned down to the frame, on both accounts. Human fat burns like wax upon bones leaving a structure of grisly creation. Lino's body had still been of flesh and blood despite it being blown apart, these had been burned down, scorched, charred. Four skeletons in an SUV lay askew on the sidewalk, its roof torn apart by some sort of explosive measure, and the two of them linger on it.

He is no stranger to this view, this sight.

He is no stranger to the dead.

And yet…

He wants to ask her if she thinks he would be changed in these roads they walked, but change is not something she wants to do to him, surely.

Her enigmatic airs are not hidden, however. Char Aznable perhaps hid his intentions and destroyed him, she is the same save for this. She hid nothing from him, and for that he is thankful.

Bodies are counted as he walks along, for they have become part of the scenery of the Earth that are not reckoned with in normal passing, but remain all the same: the emaciated and withered forms of the dead hugging the ground as if trying to take in their shadows remained long after they had died by collateral or by resistance. Even he with his unacquainted eye can see those who died resisting Zeon. Their bodies are fresher.

"That was Allen Title." She catches him staring at one body, cast across an overturned newspaper kiosk, tangled, his face having withered down to his skull. She knew that man. She knows them in death because they too had given everything for the sake of her fight it felt. "A jeweler." There had not been many other snipers like her in Seattle, truly formed and understanding of the scope and draw, but Title had been. Attention to details and he had been another marksman for it. He died because he had gotten impatient, wanted to fight on the front as befit a soldier that he wasn't.

"How…?" Garma had asked the body, had asked the Ghoul.

She tipped her boonie cap down and remembered this fight as told to her by his fireteam. "He tried to intercept a convoy moving between Freecastle and a coastal point up north when the Zeeks were still in control." And for that he had been killed.

"Supplies?"

"People." Freecastle had been a dirty word, and even in her quiet tones she hushed it even lighter. "They came from that prison, and where they went… prison labor. Maybe. I heard they were sent across the Pacific to Japan, Korea." And in that course, they were still there, if not dead in the course of the war, so far from home.

"I'd never-" Garma protests but cannot as he is cut off.

"It happened. It doesn't matter if you didn't want it to happen or not. They're still gone. Title is still dead for it."

Title, and dozens more, hundreds, that tried to stop entire groups of people from being shipped out of Seattle. Families split up, lovers separated, children and parents. She didn't know if Title had anyone in the convoy he took after, all she knew was that he hadn't been able to stop it.

In Islamic tradition, the burial of bodies took place very soon after death, twenty-four hours at max. No time could be wasted, or given, but the world and its battles did not wait. Around Seattle, the bodies of those not given their respect, not given any holy rites, remained and those that lived walked in a town that had become haunted for it.

As they walk the distance becomes indistinct, and the boundaries of the world become further away from them. Bodies become markers, and those markers become numerous in their distinction together, but not apart.

A marker that remains against an apartment building is a laser etched, laser painted, is a memory: It's him, and he turns away.

Along the brick face of a building, tilted and threatening to turn over like so many others in Seattle, made even more crooked by the earthquake, Garma Zabi's face adorns in art looking over the street. It's his face, or, at least, a version that had been easily applied over to a version that was more billboard than painting. A familiar feature to the more Zeon secured cities by their administrators to acclimate the populace to the face of Zabi hierarchy. Here remains an image of a man that he was no longer, and he stares.

"A dozen."

"Hm?"

"They'd send out squads of a dozen or more to try and secure the area enough to put up that type of thing, back when you had all thought that this city was controlled fully." They were easy targets, open targets, for someone like her. "A dozen at a time, and then another dozen after that, more and more for something… so…"

"Useless."

"Useless."

Men have died for less, killed for less. She, a killer of men, had been responsible for that.

"It is not my charge that puts such eccentric plans in place… No less is it my fault for a certain community in our people to form around my personality." Garma explains, but Mai had not listened.

"In those middles ages," She speaks of their education, "were dictators not depicted on walls like this in grandeur?" A month and a half of being with him and how she talked had changed and in that moment she seemed to realize it. "Bastard."

"I have no such inclination for such displays. This was all on my theatre and regional commanders."

"But for what?"

Because Zeon loved him, and so should the Earthnoid.

A Spacenoid challenges him, and he can offer no resistance, no answer, and it pains him so. She knows now how to do so.

They passed by Federation and Zeon vehicles alike, Federation soldiers and Zeon soldiers sharing the dirt of the ground together torn apart and left to the Earth. How alike now they were save for scraps of uniforms left that were not torn or burnt or rotted down to the flesh and rotting flesh. The same, the same. Down to the bone.

These were his forces, and there next to them, the enemy, left untaken for for months. Only Seattle itself, like a god in its permeance, masks their smell of rot with the wet smell of the city. Here, the crows make their kingdom picking from the dead and their own crops. Shriveled, blackened flesh; seeds onto an Earth that won't accept them. Only the crows can benefit from death and death itself.

What is death? For Garma, seeing upon them all as he walks around them, unable to find names or faces, it is a motivator, perhaps the greatest. But there was, as always, such things as useless death.

His promised death was to be a useless death.

"What will you do with my body, then?" He asks.

"Why do you care?" She asks back, and no answers are given.

Zeeks, from there down the I-5 to Federal Way and Tacoma had been strung up on walls and billboards as if for sale, crucified and maimed and brought to death from torture as applied to them by the Reaper Lords. They looked good, as they were, cruel as it was. But at least they were dead.

They continued north, into the ruins of northern Seattle, past her traps for game which have yielded none, past the Space Needle and its forever watch over the town as long as it stood, into a wild heart of complete animosity. South and Center Seattle had been pulverized and thrown upon in destruction, but only north was Seattle flattened utterly and completely, there were no buildings, only rubble, and piles of rubble in the place of buildings.

She passed her old apartment building, its debris coming up to her waist as she walked by, and thought of it no more. She would not come back here again.

On occasion as they walked, a device on her belt would tick, and she would stop, and Garma would freeze in his place as Mai pedaled back slowly, calmly, to some other avenue of progress that took them through alleyways and collapsed structures. Unexploded munitions and mines remained, and there would be no help coming for them if one were to go off.

"Do you usually come this far out in your hunt?" He asks her after a time.

"No." she says. "Just for you."

"Delightful." He had been fit all the same still, and he carried himself through uneven terrain with a stiff leg. Rucks in the Academy had been more straining, but this adventure had been a different type of danger: surreal.

Everywhere that there had been war on Earth, there had been places like this, and although he does feel the tragedy of it, this was an unavoidable condition of war. This was just another place.

Mai Gul finds her place, and so too does Garma, as they climb a small laundromat to its second floor, to a hallway that might've led into residential addresses but the building was destroyed so that it had left only the hallway at a raised level with a shell and a floor and a straight wide view from its mouth of a long place beyond toward an unending sprawl of destruction. A wooden chair is brought up, found from the rubble, its flat surface on the seating offered to her as she went to the lip of the exposed hallway and placed the chair down with her gun resting upon it out.

There is gunfire, out there with her, distant pops far beyond Seattle, beyond the river that divides Seattle from the rest of the world. Other hunters. Like her. She has never met another out in the wilds, but like the wolves of nature they keep to their own places. Mai finds her place, and she sits, cross legged, out into the world.

"Sit." She tells him without turning, and he does, up against a creaky wall exposed to the elements. "How's the leg?" She asks without care it sounds.

"Fine." He answers, even as a hint, distant throb is at the pressure point. The rest should settle him, however. As he looks back he cannot tell if Seattle is behind them or they are still with it, the darkness still shrouding the world. His eyes are not used to perhaps the world again and being out, and so everything becomes shapes and things with only one eye. Even Mai, frozen into place, she is solid and still in the world. "How's your rib?"

"Fine." She parrots. It was no bother to her. She knew pain and the tug of her rib is placed beneath her senses. She was fine enough to go out, to tug meat from there to the Conclave. She had been hurt worse and fought more before.

The bandages give him an unanticipated barrier of warmth that keeps his breath trapped between it and his skin, the Earth becoming still in that place, nestled in North Queen Anne.

Minutes pass, indeterminate. The wind speaks between them.

"When did you start hunting?" Mai has not moved, but Garma fidgets in the cold morning come.

She doesn't stir. "About a month after the final battle." At first it was for animal control, but after, meat became a concern with the Federation and their supplies moving out to fight in battles beyond them.

"And how did you learn how to hunt?"

"The same way anyone learns of anything, really." Her breath touched upon laminate stock, the grain breathing with her as she looked down her optic and felt the familiar feeling of this gun, this power it gave her. "I learned war, by warring. I learned to hunt, by hunting."

"One could argue they're much of the same thing." And yet both came naturally to her. "How long did it take for you to realize you were good at it?"

"Not for me to say."

"They call you Ghoul for a reason, don't they? And you would not be out here in these urban wilds if you were ineffectual."

The line of red between them is generous, but it could be taut all so soon. Does he have the strength to take that line and use it against her? No. Probably not. But he could try.

He doesn't.

"Weird thing…" She starts, lingers, and then continues. "About the hunt. About warring. It was never really about how good I thought I was at it."

"Hm?"

"It's not about your actions. It's about theirs."

"And here I had thought you were liable to the idea of direct action, and upfront action."

"Yeah, if Zeon never came I wouldn't have to do shit."

Hunting is a misnomer, in some ways. The word evokes the prowl, the chase, the ancient walks of hunter-gatherers of Mankind's past that took place over miles on the Serengeti for days and nights. Mai Gul is a hunter, and yet she waits in place. The modern hunter does go into the wilds for prey, but they do not chase. They let them come before them.

Mai Gul sits and waits to kill.

She's waited a long time.

The deer that come into Seattle come in from the north, their own unnatural awareness of the dangers of the world letting them filter through from beyond down south into their own undiscovered country, and, for some, their death. It leaves Garma a long time to look out along that landscape too, an alien landscape that hid the horrors beyond them and yet contained entirely their actions. This was where war was waged and it war that was waged battles were fought and people died. Before them, thousands dead beneath layers and layers of ruin.

"What were my commanders responsible for, Mai?"

He could not control an entire war. He had been responsible for the direct tactical navigations of his forces east of the Great Plains, while a council of officers had handled the American West. He could remember their names but not who they were but had been assured they had it all in hand. He had no time, no capacity, to wage an entire continental war on his own, but he could do well with half a continent. It was the plan for all of Zeon's fronts on Earth, after all, and at the end of the day, even he as a Zabi man, could only take on so much. In the end however, as Mai lets him know in the way she does not answer, he is responsible for them.

"I had not been aware of the conduct of fighting here." His words are inward, questioning, of himself, but they are light, and Mai cannot believe them true.

The words of the trader she traded his clothes from had been in her mind. Even in his section of North America commissars had still been in place, nasty businesses of war and conduct all the same.

He brought death upon the Earth.

"Same shit that they've done everywhere else." Mai answered. "When the Federation came for that final battle before they left here, chasing Zeon off elsewhere, they spoke to us about the other cities: Portland, Little Rock, Reno, even St. Louis and New Orleans. It was the same shit to them, everywhere."

But he would know that, as commander of all those battlefields, at least on North America.

He should know that.

He never had any illusions that it would've been impractical to know about the company to company maneuvers of each and every division, and the Academy had taken after the North American military tradition of bottom-up leadership. So, he had not imposed himself on the micro, trusting his officers to report as needed. No news was good news, but no news ever reached him about such items like his own face on the wall and, by Mai's account, the hundred and more men dead because of it.

Had he not walked through Chicago's battlefields after the fighting was done to observe the damage? Had he not seen the Appalachian frontline with his own eyes? This war was his to fight, and his to know about in its conduct, and so he had wanted to see, making his staff arrange for visits and observances of various battlefields not for the grandeur or romanticism of him, a great man, visiting them and feeling the loss there. He had wanted to see it so he could wage war with as much knowledge as he could.

Information eluded him still.

More than that, as was the case, people had kept the truth from him.

"You said that there was a prison here?" Garma dares ask now still. Such a ludicrous idea, and yet, true. "What for? For who?"

"Anyone. Everyone." Mai answered. "Anyone who your military police thought could be a problem. It wasn't called a prison, but that's what it turned into."

There was no great prison riot, no great mission led by her that freed all within. There was no possibility for that. Only those that went in there to disappear, to be raked over with the cruelty of an occupying force, and those that were transferred, so far away. When the guerillas of Seattle found their way into Freecastle, the survivors did not look any different than the lost. The truth of Freecastle was what turned Seattle into a true warzone, where its populace did not pretend to be citizenry anymore, and instead accepted that they, like the Earth at large, had been part of a war.

On that day it was when the slow loss of Seattle to Zeon began, and it had become the kingdom of those like Mai.

"Surely, my men-"

"Stop." She spoke, and he did, unturning. "It's what happened. You can't take it back. You can't excuse it."

Atrocities in war had been what had happened, but it was never supposed to be his own. Garma looks, and stares at her back, and then the landscape beyond.

This was what war looked like, and nothing more, nothing less.

History would vindicate him and what had happened, and he would answer to a power greater than all of them: Time, History, beyond God.

"I would never have let that type of… collateral, unnecessary, useless pain happen."

"You bombed us, when you came for that white ship." He tightens his lips, clenches his jaws. She speaks about how he arrived, and he cannot deny. "You were looking for that ship and the new mobile suit, and you decided to just bomb us all to flush them out. You didn't care about anyone left down here."

"It was necessary-, I… It was unlikely, from my point of view, that upon this landscape there would be anyone left."

She turns to him, and she is presented. She remained. Win Nguyen remained. Doctor Candy remained. Bo Tale, Gearten Possai, Bolton Dancer, Foreman Foreman, Teresia "Tammy" Hansen, and at least over a hundred more remained.

Mai Gul looks at him with that measure of incredulity that had never been there in his life. If Garma had never felt the truth before the day, it had been in her eyes.

Silence, forced upon him.

"You would've killed me." she says quietly. "You would've never known."

Billions of dead lay upon the Earth, and in a thousand lifetimes no one person would ever come to know and remember them all. That was a collective burden for the living. Within Garma then lay an inkling of the thought that, maybe, just maybe, there had been other Mais out there for him. In the eventuality of the world, there probably had been. The sickness in his stomach is bile, but he keeps it down.

In his mind's eye, the dream recedes from it but save one image: of her, dying in his arms.

He hates it. He detests it.

And yet he could've been the one killing her by an errant bomb drop.

They wait for what feels like another hour, and Garma is thankful for his layers and waxed jacket as Mai sits still, waiting. He takes in the world around him as he waits: He sees the wallpaper exposed to the elements, the barely ajar door of a room blown open in that hallway and the hooks holding a jacket untaken. Beyond that, a photo frame. A family. A father and two children. That was one room held open ajar in their broken laundromat. Around them a thousand lives had lived and now nothing had been left but a flattened place of ruin.

Maybe he lived, maybe he died, the father, but the life he lived would be gone.

This was a neighborhood like thousands of others on Earth, and where had the people gone?

The sun is making its distant rise and still the light is not yet there, and Mai Gul is frozen as if waiting for the sun to unthaw her. But Garma knows what she is doing. She is lying in wait, and she had been so familiar with it that he felt as if looking at a secret of the art of being a sniper.

So, he sits, and he stews in a world he helped create.

It's not a pleasant feeling. Far from it, but he had asked for it.

"So. Tell me about that book." She asks after a time.

"Hm?" He dips his head up from his inner thoughts.

"The Odyssey. You've read it back and forth for a while now. Tell me about it."

Not to be particularly dramatic, but it's a story he knows quite well, both by text, and by personal relation. The Odyssey, as he had alluded to her before, had been a story about him.

"Are you a particular reader of stories?"

"Not really." She answers. "I don't usually have too much time to read."

"Right… Well. It's, at least the version I have, a little of that classical performative. It's good. It's a classic for a reason, after all." He read the old classics because they tapped into a purer version of Humanity. Shakespeare was a little too crass for him, personally, but the olden authors whose prose wandered into greater ideas than him, Steinbeck and McCarthy, Milton and Voltaire and Austen, Nabokov and Tolstoy, Soseki and Basho. The oldest story, or at least, one of the oldest, would've been finely within his wheelhouse. Now it had been his definition. "It's a story of a man, trying to return home from winning his war."

The wind blows between them. Mai does not move.

The irony has never been lost on her.

What a coincidence that she had taken that book for him.

"Does he get there?" She asks.

He does, Garma dares not to answer. He's read the book once over now, on his second go around when he can, taking in every word as translated to the Universal Century English. What he reads, he reads to imbue himself within. Not to say he was a particularly bookish child, but they were his only company inside of the Zabi Compound some days.

His father would've perhaps been more sated if he had become a scholar as Sasro had been, but there was not a Zabi alive who had not been charged with the military apparatus of Zeon, and so too did he follow in the footsteps of Dozle and Gihren and Kycilia all.

Only now, thinking of his father happy, did Garma realize what terrible sorrow, what terrible angst he might've put upon his father.

No further radio transmission from Zeon came about him, or about the status of his family. So, at the very least, Degwin had not died of a broken heart as Garma often thought he might've. He kept himself safe for that worry, outside of, of course, wanting to stay alive.

It would appear that he had failed in that.

"It's… not necessarily a story about him getting home, but the journey that he takes to get there. We call it an odyssey for a reason, after all."

He tells her about the Odyssey then. He tells her about the gods in their halls of Olympus being so concerned about the great hero mortal, he tells her about his imprisonment on an island to a beauty, he tells her about the loyal wife at home and the suitors and traitors among his estate. He tells her the story of the Odysseus, and how he had traveled to Hades to confer with a great prophet who would tell him how it would all end and the other kingdoms that he finds himself in. Oh, beautiful Penelope, oh beautiful Nausicaa and the sirens and Calypso who trapped him for seven years.

"I better not be Calypso, in your head." Mai comments, and the obvious is put forward. How easily the name of Calypso drips off of her accent, he notices.

The Odyssey is his story, his dream as well.

Garma chuckles once after a pause, taking in those words. "You aren't offering me eternal life. Of course not." He rebuffs. "If anything, you're Athena." Goddess of War. "An odd thing, people often don't think about nowadays: In ancient times, the deity that was war's master was a woman. You would think the descendant cultures would prescribe that type of respect to woman warriors in the generations that followed."

"Yeah. Well. I'm barely a woman anyway."

The words are as cold as the world around them, but they are true.

In ancient, ancient paragraphs from the middle ages, there spoke of a figure who had born into modern historical times as the avatar of war. A man. A beast, whose skin was so white that the clouds above seemed dark in their color compared to him. He never aged. He never slept. He would never die. Because as goes the creed of all captains on ships, long live the captain, the position, always filled and maintained by the next. In the Universal Century he finds it fitting that war came in the form of the woman that took him. He would be killed by War, completely.

"Do you really think that, Mai?" He said perhaps too tenderly.

She doesn't answer, but whatever she is could not be prescribed to now as a woman. Not with what she had lost, and what she was incapable of bearing. Those were the tenants of being a woman and she had failed at them so completely she became something beyond what she could possibly know, even as she was. She feels the familiar feel of the stock beneath her fingers, the natural way her vision goes into that scope of hers. She knows what she can do with it.

"Does it matter to you?"

"Yes." Garma answers at once. "… Not, not about- I'm not speaking about whether I care about you as a woman but just… the nature of what you're presupposing that you are." It's a stumbling answer, one that puts a barrier between him and her, but it's a barrier nonetheless and like all glass between prisoners and freedom she can stare at him through it tolerably, yet intolerably.

"You made me like this, Garma."

"You know very well that, regardless of my actions, my intent, turning people away from themselves was not a goal of this war."

"Then what do you think I am?"

"Mai Gul." My Ghoul.

And yet what is she? What are any of them?

Garma Zabi says her name, and the loop her stomach does when perhaps one of the most important Spacenoids holds it within his mouth is like bile going from her gut to her bones to her lungs. She can't help but want to breathe fire at him for it.

Once, long ago, they could've been comrades. They were comrades.

Garma starts again, head leaned back, bringing down his voice as if not to wake the dark just yet. "I don't know how to quantify that any more than I can quantify myself, or even my family. But we are what we are. A true version that we cannot say but exist as all the same. We may not always show our true colors, but I know that your true colors are not as… distant as you might believe them to be."

He's not sure if she is considering his words or simply just waiting silently for her hunt that day. These are the pauses between her words that are so unlike them when they are in the apartment. "It's not about what I am. It's about what I wasn't."

For all his big and meaningful words, they do not give anything back to her, smoothing over her form like the breeze. This is the barrier between them: what she's lost, and what he was responsible for that led to her loss.

The Odyssey is still in his mind, and he thinks of it instead of her. "In the end, the Odyssey is a story of a man of steadfast will after a simple thing, a pure thing, that even the gods and the devils and the beasts of the world could not stop him."

It's not long after that Mai posed him a question. "What did Odysseus do?"

"Hm?"

"I know he was a soldier, a tactician. He was the one who had the idea for the Trojan Horse." Those words sit oddly in Garma, but he ignores them as Mai is on the lip of an idea. "What did Ulysses return from?" She betrays her own knowledge of what she knows in the way that she speaks the Roman name, and Garma does not forget it as he moves on:

Garma answers by cultural osmosis alone. "The Trojan War."

He knows of this story too: The Iliad.

"A war over what?"

"Oh, over what many wars feel like they're over in the end: a woman."

In a farce between the gods and goddesses of Olympus, a position was offered the mortals of Troy: The Prince of the Trojans, gained the favor of Aphrodite, and in return Aphrodite had made Helen, the Queen of Sparta, fall in love with the prince. In anger, the Spartan king raised all of Greece to arms and invaded Troy. Among those numbers: Odysseus and Achilles.

He told her, at least as far as his own cultural memory could ascertain, of the ten year war between the Trojans and Greece, broken only by that famous implement that had been studied and spoken on in all academic military affairs from then to even now in Guardian Banchi.

Ten years, a war waged over Greece that the Gods dabbled in.

"And so, how many died, because of a squabble of two men, over a woman?" Mai asked at the end of it. "They called it the sacking of Troy, right?"

And in those ancient times the barbarity of what it meant to sack: to pillage and rape upon a populace, was not understated. Garma nods, but she doesn't need to turn to see it. "Yes."

"And Odysseus is still a hero?" Odysseus, hero, champion, who through great subterfuge pierced through the defenses of Troy and blew open the gates of the city, letting armies in to exact themselves upon a populace who had been no more responsible for the crimes and the injustices of the gods and their favors than anyone else. Odysseus, who would find himself trapped, yearning to return to his wife, was responsible for far more than what his story would tell of him.

"Every hero is someone's nightmare." Garma settles on that.

"And you?" If he is Odysseus, Mai sees, Mai wonders, then the answer would be the same.

The sun is nearly up when he answers. "I'm just a Spacenoid, doing his best, to free us from the Earth Federation."

Garma hears her tighten her form in the morning light, holding her rifle even tighter as she locks up and looks down her scope with the rested rifle.

It's not all true, about hunting and how she learned. Gearten had taught her details. He was by no means a sniper, he preferring his bow and arrows, but he had been a hunter all the same up in Vancouver Island. "Deer, you got, last, I remember, whitetails and mules down there. As for elk, Roosevelts and Rocky Mountains. Now I'm more familiar with my blacktails, but whitetails would be good to pick up… Really any meat, Ghoul, but just try not to kill too many youngins or mothers."

How comfortable Gearten had been talking to her about that it slipped his mind about the topic, but she hadn't minded. It was legitimate advice. The rest she had in hand as a shape in the dark arrived like the morning dawn. The war had been so terrible that the fighting in the countryside and the reserves had forced those herds into nature still where Zeon's restraint was more even handed. The Colony Drop too had seemed to corrupt the inner instincts of animals in some ways that, even now, the cities had become the shelter of all those, animal or man, wanting to hide from those that came to save the Earth.

For the animals at least, they would all come into the sights of Mai Gul,

A single deer, a whitetail, grey fur and healthy dips out of the shapes of the land to the center of the street, going after grass that has not yet died between cracks of concrete. About three years old, as far as she can recall from Gearten's own scoring of her takes. She's never taken a trophy animal, or at least, one that could be graded as such, but the man had always told her if she could take on Zakus she could take on a twelve-point buck. This one had eight points on its antlers, not yet shed for the winter to come. The Conclave had used the antlers for mostly trade, when the Dock Market was up, the white gold that had been the bone of them useful for some in some far off future where civilization returned and people wanted their wealth stored in material objects. Otherwise, they were just a waste.

It grazes, unaware of where it is, unknowing of the three-line scope that puts it heart right at the center.

Garma knows she is about to take a shot by the way she takes in a deep breath through her nose and holds it. He holds his own breath, clamping his hands around his ears.

It was an all too easy shot with its profile offered to her: aiming at its chest, high. Right through the heart.

She hoped, if it ever came down to it, she would go as fast, in the same way, as how she had killed those animals around her for their meat. She felt her lungs go tight in taken in breath and her body still. The deer tipped its head up to the sky above, and then the heavens echoed in shrill, sharp, gunshot.

Most deer, when hit in a vital area, scamper, dash off as their bodies do not yet know they're dead. This deer, however, makes it easy for her: Silently, the deer collapsed as the bullet rang true, and as it round echoed, all stood still save for the fluttering of unseen birds, flying away from where they had been by gunshot start. What had been a standing animal had now been a slump in the dark.

The power of her sniper rifle shook the building, and she had not yet moved from her position as, as her only movement, she moved her right hand to the crooked bolt of her rifle and moved open the action, gun smoke coming from the chamber as the gold cartridge flew out.

She let go of her breath and immediately regretted it.

"Gah-!" The breath she held inside of her was harsher coming out, and that same pain within her rises up, and she falters, rifle going askew as her sit goes to something of a prostration onto the wooden floor.

"Mai?!" Garma is on his feet, but Mai waves him off frantically, gathering herself.

"It's fine." She barked, spitting on the floor. "Recoil hit me a little different."

Besides her head the cartridge sat still smoking in the dark, and she breathed harshly. To her form, Garma had reached a hand out but receded it and let her lie there and settle herself. All he can dare is to sit beside her and wait, looking at her suffer for what she did best.

It's been so long, she thinks to herself distantly, since she last took this pose as the sun rose. She's in the wrong direction, but the urge in her to pray and give thanks to Allah and his prophet on Earth rises in her. She does not. Her words are not good enough for them, after all this time.

"It's just a story, you know." Garma tells her, reconciles her as she breaths to a dusty, cold floor. A story of how two men who would burn the world down over a woman. "Just a story."


Sometime in the future, Char Aznable asks Lalah Sune what she meant when she told him to "spare her". To spare this lone, grainy figure through his Zaku-II's monitor. Lalah Sune does not know what Char Aznable means.

He studies her face through his mask, and he sees, as far as he had known, the truth on her face.

Mothers never lie to their children. Why would Lalah?


Further still into the future. Amuro Ray meets Lalah Sune with lakeside rain.

The story plays out the same.

And then it doesn't.


He has a new opinion on meat and gore. He's seen it on himself, and consequently desensitized, just enough, that when she rips through the hide and the fat that lay below its skin seems to froth out like an ocean tide, he doesn't gag.

They walk out to the kill down those streets, and her device buzzes but she is cautious about it, keeping straight and narrow and he following her footsteps until they get to the deer freshly dead. Even the flies have not yet gotten there. Her gait is slower, but she is not so much pained that she couldn't do what she came out here to do, going to her knees at the dead beast and drawing that long black knife she only brought on these days out. How easy it is for her, it almost surprises Garma the way she drags the beast back to her, getting on her knees, and plunging the blade near its anus and then down a long line through its belly to separate the top layer of fur from the meat itself, but not the insides. Not yet.

She has gloves on when she does this, digging her hands between those layers as she cuts and pulling up.

"Sooner I do this," she speaks absentmindedly, "less bloat I've got to deal with."

She goes backward from the top of its belly back down to the anus, her hand reaching in and pulling up as meat and that gooey sound shifts as if someone was chewing. The hard pelvis bone remains, and the knife's serrations go at the bone until the deer's legs seem to open up further. The way she takes those two legs and wedges them upwards is the first to make Garma appreciate he hadn't had breakfast yet with the organic sound that it makes. Grey stew of guts are in the crux of cuts near the anus, but she ignores it as she comes back down with her knife and retraces her path deeper, upward, and Garma sees the ribcage of it finally with all that it holds between.

She reaches in, and she pulls out a heart. She doesn't offer it to him, but she holds it up as if an object of note, and he does note it, bulbous and jiggling and still red within it. She puts it asides, intent on saving it, and she goes back in with her knife like an electrician, cutting wires, cutting strains in the open rib cage of the beast, ripping it wider, wider, until five minutes later she is done and Garma does not know how until she reaches both of her arms in and seizes its disconnected wind pipe and pulls.

It's a sack of blood and guts. Like fishing net combined with trash but all organic, all meat, all red and bulbous like a creation of another horrifying world, birthed in this corpse that she drags out and puts asides as trash. Garma can't look away at the guts, fresh and red and emanating of warmth still, held in her bloody hands, the dark colored slabs that he thinks are the liver of the deer held up by her and cut free from the jumble as it collapses on the ground like the unusable meat that it is, leaving her with a heart, its liver, and a dear ready to be picked apart by a butcher.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" Garma finally asks, giving wide berth to the guts discarded as he leans into the open bowels of the deer. It smells alive, and yet not at the same time, its black beady eyes staring up to a sky quickly lightening.

"Someone I know." She wipes her hands on her pants. "You're going to meet him."

Garma doesn't quite get what she says before it's too late and she's hauling the deer over her shoulders, blinking several times as she walks and begins the journey down south again.

"What?" he says, standing amongst the ruins with discarded guts.

"You're coming with me to the Conclave." She doesn't give him a choice, and he, the sudden fear within him rising, follows her still.


He's never wanted to be closer to her. Though he is mindful of the distance between them in the other aspects of his life, now, as that white blocked arrangement of the building known as the Conclave looms over him, barricades and defensive walls around it, he clings to her side as she lugs a deer carcass over her shoulders. The bandages around his head are still oppressive, but they are a safety net for him as much as she is too.

Here he had been, standing in that line for the Conclave's entrance, and he had gone from interacting with no people save two, to being exposed to dozens more.

His forces had set up refugee camps for processing of those that have come from Federation territory, so he understands this sight, not that his security forces would ever let him near, but he thinks he knows these tired masses, these unmistakable American huddled masses yearning for a better place, and so they have crossed into Zeon lines. The Conclave is no such facility, but he sees the similarities. All the more still, he is now among them. Mai can feel him tense, the side eye that she throws upon him as he feels himself jittering by her frozen solid. It does not melt him, but steels him rather.

"You're mine." She said lowly, the head of the deer by her own with black marbles for eyes. "Don't forget that." He couldn't. Not when the rope around his neck had been tucked beneath his collar and it tucked into his pocket. This threat of hers is the realest she's spoken of in a while, her green eyes burning into him and searing within him.

Any air he gulps stings.

They took turns, if not shared the burden of carrying that deer on their shoulders, and it took them a faster time coming south than they did going north. Soon enough, on those streets disheveled and ruined anew by the sewers coming up and the earthquake, did they found themselves before the Conclave and the line made for security to be let in. Even she needed to wait, despite herself.

Everyone knows who she is however, just by stature and form alone, even with a deer covering her form as she carries it. They almost mistake Garma for someone unaffiliated, but he stands much too close to her for them not to notice.

"Captain." The guard finally greets her as they get to the fence opening for them to be in. "Got another catch?"

"Mm." She nods, looking back to Garma. He, head down, appears next to her. "He's with me."

The guard, wearing the battered fatigues of the Federation, is surprised, but thinks nothing of it as, politely, he doesn't stare at Garma, covered in bandages all. "We're still a bit disorganized since the earthquake, so we've done got the butcher station up. Just go straight in and to Mikita."

"Mm." She nods again. "Gearten busy?"

"Always is, ma'am." The guard answered respectfully. He knows why she asks, however. "If you want to talk to him, though, I think he's good for it."

"Right." Her tone is measured, but the way she reaches out a hand to Garma's sleeve is brutish and sharp. He follows, and he follows tightly as they walk into the Conclave's front yard, its parking lot, and in it Garma sees Seattle that has not died. He's listened over the air from her radio set of these people and their organization, about how after the war came and gone the organizations they made to fight it remained to keep some semblance of order going that all concentrated in this well-worn hospital that had seen and survived the fighting around it. Men and women mounted from rooftops around and stations within with machines and contraptions made of utility that they valued in a world that seemed to have lost civilization. Post-apocalyptic settings brought to life in the wake of a war. But it was a relatively peaceful scene, with all those in there having purpose and task that kept them moving and alive. Traders moved in and bartered with those by the cargo dock, patrols and builders organized up front carting gear and material off and around to the Pavilions further south, and others, like them, with water or food or goods made their way to where they were needed. All of them gave wide berth of the woman they knew as Ghoul.

Up the steps they go, and they are in the Conclave proper, the medical lobby cleaned up much from her last visit there as a fractured rib patient fresh off of killing twenty five Reapers, nurses and staff and patients even, plain clothed, walk about as if unaware of a war that had happened around. The lights are on, even, and Garma thinks he hears someone talk about the generators and solar panels and whether or not someone collected eggs from the chickens today. He is not at liberty to wait and listen and hear other people. Other living, seemingly at peace people who had survived the war and were simply making their way through.

He wants to ask them all so much, but he cannot. He, there, looks so much like a patient in his bandages that he fits right in, and he hopes that he remains for, if any of their rage is as true as Mai's towards Zeon and him, he knows that he would be buried with those bandages.

It's odd, and it almost exhausts him, being around so many people again, but Mai centers him, the connecting line between them not a rope, but a deer, as they move to the cafeteria and into its kitchen, several other animals spread out on the stainless steel table as a single man sits on a stool in the corner and gazes up at the ceiling.

"Mikita." Mai calls out to him silently, finding a bare table and laying out their catch. Mikita does not respond, the older gentleman lost to his own mind as his unruly black hair forms in the shadow of the room.

She never sees him work, but he does.

Far be it for her to coax anything out of him. The man, even before the war, was there for psychological treatment, before the shell shock of being caught up in the invasion. A sort of craziness within him that left him inside of himself. But at least he was in the Conclave and not wandering up north in the wilds as he used to. Even he, in his blank mind, knew better.

"Mikita." She calls again, to see if he noticed, but he does not move as he looks up and up as if seeing something that none of them could see.


Garma is fearful of even opening his mouth to ask her what she is thinking, bringing him there, but he knows how their conversations, their arguments go. He doesn't dare want to do it with people present. All he can do is follow, walking those halls of the Conclave seeing life that existed still, despite themselves.

People. Actual people. Common men and women he had been so far removed from prior to the war.

He loved Icelina much, but being around Icelina meant being around that certain class of people where he had fit into.

Not these people.

Not people like Mai.

He looks, and stares as they walk past, and none looks to stare at him with his bandages. It was impolite to look at him it seemed, but he did not mind.

He did not mind the ability to look and see those with burns like him; a man without an arm, a woman without a foot, an older gentleman without an eye, going about their day, carrying supplies, doing their own work as required of them, never stopping. Despite what had happened to them, they persisted, and Garma had wanted, at least, to ask them their names, how were they and what had happened to them.

But it would make no sense.

He was a man out of place, on the way to the grave.

Mai brings them to the loading dock and its prefab office, and there, as always, is Gearten, three radios on his desk, a dry erase clipboard being poured over as a bowl of chili and coffee is by its side. His face in his hands as they walked in.

"What is it-" He stops when he turns his head and sees who it is. "Oh Christ."

"You mad at me Gear'?" Garma barely makes it past the door before it closes, melting behind her to the point that Gearten almost doesn't notice. He catches him, eyebrow raised, but stays seated, breathing deeply as his machine has moved from his belt to the desk for easier access. He takes in a breath from there, deep and true, before answering.

"If I'm mad at you, will you be mad at me for being mad at you?" He wagers.

"Maybe." She says, arms crossed. "You know why I did what I did for Mrs. Kino."

"Oh," Gearten shook his head, "Don't I know why. That doesn't mean it makes my job any easier."

It does ease Garma a little bit to discover that she is like that with most everyone, but it's little consolation to his immediate, hidden distress. He would say that he was among the enemy, but he didn't want to call them that.

"…Sorry." She says, apologizes, boonie hat tipped down.

"…Don't be." Gearten grits. "At least, not for making sure her baby was alright."

Garma doesn't know this. Doesn't know what exactly happened, but he does not prod, he does not move. He barely wants to be there at all as Gearten moves his gaze from her to him, and Mai does nothing to stop him. Gearten is a big man, bigger than Mai, arms and brawn meant for forest living not betraying anything. Only Dozle, Garma thinks, was a similar figure. He stands, arms held akimbo, craning his head around and finally looking at him in Mai's shadow. He waits, bides his time, bowl of chili and coffee in his hands, offering them to Mai.

"You can eat beef, right?"

"I'm not devout." She takes the bowl and cup from him, slurping from both. Deer chili and dark coffee. A strong, almost repugnant taste in her, but she'll take it.

"Just checking."

If Win is her younger brother and not a son to her, then Gearten is an older brother and not a father to her. But with less about the war on going, this is what they fall under. What they would be like in peace time, she naturally wonders. Gearten's not particularly her type if it was under certain pretenses, as was how she had any relationship with any men after she came to Earth, but there was something sturdy and stable about him that was valuable to the Conclave and her.

"Now, who's this?" He finally asks.

Mai is silent, and Garma's blood pressure pumps as she steps asides, nothing, and no one, between him and Gearten.

"M- Mai…" Garma glances at her, crossing his arms, wanting to move back to the wall and put his form against it to brace. She shakes her head, offering no solace. Nothing.

Gearten raises a bushy eyebrow of his, a large hand extended out. "I don't think we've met. I think I'd recognize one of our folks who'd be all wrapped up like you are. The name's Gearten Possai."

The hand between them lingers, and Garma holds his own arms tight looking at it. Even before the war he had met Federation ministers and been less anxious, if not more commanding than even then.

This was just a normal man.

He couldn't be anymore intimidated.

But he had a name, one that was his, and yet not. One that he used when he wanted to go amongst the normal people of Zum in morning getaways just for the sake of it, to escape his life's responsibilities if for only a short while. The breath he sucks in his shaky, and the hand he extends is missing fingers, but he offers it all the same.

"Garfield." He snapped once, cutting his breath off the second the name came out of his mouth and willing himself to some sort of presentable. "My name is Garfield."

He sees Mai out of the corner of his good eye purse her lips up, eyebrow raised. She's amused.

"Garfield…?" Gearten takes his hand and squeezes gently so as to not crush and wound him further. His palms are the most torn and calloused he's ever felt. It's apparent what he's asking for: a last name, something that Garma never needed to fake, for his confidence carried the first far. He was not confident now, and what last name he answers comes up choked in spit with a crack.

"Garfield Sune."

Perhaps another spit into Char's face, even if he would never know. Here Garma is, taking the name of the person Char really did hold most dear. A shame, Garma thinks, for Lalah. He would never wish her ill, but when Char is involved, then it would come. Granted, he's not the same type of shade as her, but it was enough for Gearten who thought nothing more of a man who was covered in bandages.

"Well, Mister Sune, you from around here?" He turns back to sit on his folding chair. "Earthquake brought you in from out deeper?"

"Not quite…" Mai rolls around his name, his fake name in her head: Garfield Sune. A particular orange cat naturally comes to mind, but beyond that, it fits him. It's old-style enough that it suits him as a spoiled brat. It's close enough to his real name anyway. "I'm a… just, getting familiar with… people. Isn't that right, Mai?"

He says her name, and it's not something anyone does in Seattle lightly.

Her eyes brighten, placing aside her borrowed breakfast, nodding once at Gearten. "Showing him around, getting him to meet new people."

Doctor Candy is in the building, somewhere, but they are already acquainted. The morbid curiosity of how Gearten would take the knowledge of Garma Zabi burns within her like any an ember, but that was not for today. The reveal of today would be softer. Somewhat like her own.

She, alone, would bring harm to him, no one else. She would fight the world for that right.

"Didn't know you were a tour guide, Ghoul."

"I am when it comes to other Spacenoids."

Part 1. Garma braces for something, a reaction from that, but Gearten nods along at her, realizing what "Garfield" is. "Oh. Well. Yeah, that makes you a rare sort down here. That is, if you're just a Spacenoid like Ghoul here… I mean, I guess it's not impossible that there are others and-" Before Gearten goes on too long, part two comes up.

Garma feels it coming before she even says it and suddenly, he's looking at the door handle and really wondering how fast he can run with his prosthetic.

"He's a Zeek." she says, rubbing her fingers together absent mindedly as if explaining any other detail. She's unbothered, and the tone almost tricks Gearten as he nods, and then stops at once, his eyes go stark and focused. It takes Gearten several seconds to parse, to process, to double check what she had just said, but he does so, looking to him to her, to him, to her, and back and again several times until words catch up to the flaps of his mouth. Garma cannot move, and if he were, Mai is already there, her hand on the sling of her rifle.

He cannot run from this.

Gearten keeps looking back and forth from him to her, and her to him until finally words get in his mouth, and the accusation that comes is not at him, but rather at her:

"You got some balls on you, woman." Gearten wagged his finger at her before glancing at Garma. "For bringing a Zeek in here."

"Why?" She asks unbothered.

"Well- You know."

"No. Tell me." Her teeth grit, and her eyes burn at Gearten.

"One God damned year we been doing this shit, and you bring the enemy, in here, on his feet. What the hell do you think I'm supposed to do with-" Gearten glances back at his bullpup rifle in the corner, but he knows, this close, he can take Garma with those rough hands of his. The realization that this is the closest he's ever been to a Zeek rises in him. "This guy is the enemy."

The only Zeeks that were not in the Conclave for mercy treatment during the war came in as those to quickly be executed, especially during the latter half of the fighting during the summer.

Not all in New York saw the Zeon occupation as friendly. Patrols would be harassed, graffiti would be put on mobile suits and tanks, and jeers and protests would occasionally fill the street only to be dispersed by water cannons or tear gas. When it came to death and fighting and the guerilla war, those were expected, everything below that had been of a different color of discontent that was brought all the way back to now, with Gearten Possai, sitting before Garma Zabi, even if he didn't know it.

"I'm not your enemy." Garma speaks out, even if it might kill him. "I- I don't want to be."

"That's real easy to say when you're here. In this place." Gearten's finger almost slams down on his table. "Do you even know how much suffering that you god damned Zeeks caused us all, do you-?!" His voice rises and rises, but before it can go to screaming, Mai's hand is on his shoulder, and he is kept down. "Why him? Out of the hundreds of Zeeks you pulled the trigger on, and the thousands more dead because of what we did together? Why. Him?"

All Garma can do is just stand there as a man knows that a soldier of Zeon is before him; a man that has spent the last year organizing a war against him.

"I knew him from the Academy, is all." She admits, but it barely assuages Gearten. "Remember, I'm from Zeon too." Her face is calm, serious, but calm in her stoic visage, the shadow of her boonie keeper her features vague. She is the calming force in that room, and it comes with the cold of her voice.

"It's different with you, Ghoul. With what you lost-" Gearten snaps to Garma again. "Do you know what you've done to her?!"

What screaming, ruckus inside Gearten's prefab is expected when it's him and Mai in there, especially since the events of the Pacific Medical Center. Gearten's anger, frustration is true, but where he is is frustrated, his protests muffled behind metal sheet wall that leaves all those outside none the wiser.

"I do." He knows.

"He does." She admits.

The two Spacenoids say together. Garma knows what became of her, what happened to her, and what she shall do to him. Trust, like a rope between them.

Gearten sits there, fuming, breathing hard, mask put across his face, looking straight at Garma there. Only under inspection in the aforementioned Academy did he ever feel under such a microscope. "You're crazy." The mask comes off him and Gearten speaks to Mai again.

"Sure."

"You knew him from before all this?"

"I did."

"And you're keeping him alive-"

"I'm going to kill him." She cuts Gearten off. "Not now. But I will."

"Wha-?"

"I'm bringing him back up to health. When he's fully healthy, when he thinks he can live again on his own, I'm going to kill him. I'm going to open up his body and I'm going to watch him bleed out and die." She walks over, back to Garfield, and she lets his collar loose, the rope around his neck brought out with the carabiner in her hand. She tugs on it, and he is brought down, hunched. "I'm not saving his life, I am keeping it." She holds it tight, and he can breathe, but not speak, studying her in a way that is trying to find answers to impossible questions. With nothing made in the silence, he falls back on simpler questions that can be spoken.

"What was he? He a regular troop?"

"Flight officer. He survived that crash last month." She lets go, and he's back up, uncomfortable, unused to just being a prop in a room, but it's all he can bear as they speak of him.

"No shit?" Gearten asks, and she nods, going down to Garma's pants, pulling the right leg up and revealing a prosthetic. "Oh, shit."

"That's how I know he's mine." Because even something catastrophic like that refused to kill him.

"But you knew him?" Gearten asks again, leaning in. "Went to that military academy together? What're the chances of that?" He's more perplexed now than anything, but knowing "Garfield" is a dead man walking further calms him. If Ghoul says she's going to kill someone, he knows better than to doubt her.

Deep down, he gets it, if someone in his past, even if any enemy, appeared before him. There would be certain privileges afforded, but not so much as to let him off, Scott free. Not a Zeek.

"Same colony, even." She breathes, remised to mentioned.

"Neighbors? Childhood friends?" She scoffs at Gearten's prodding, but Garma answers instead.

"No. We didn't meet until the Academy… and we weren't friends there. We just know each other." That's all they were to each other in every other life: they just were people passing by each other. Not this life though. If there is regret in his voice it is self-muffled, and Gearten was annoyed he spoke up at all.

"Garfield Sune." Gearten tries the name before looking to Mai again. "Same colony… why the hell does he sound like some Hollywood actor and you an Arab."

Her eye twitches. If only Earthnoids understood more about the colonies maybe all of that, this year, could've been avoided. "Colonies ain't like Earth, you dumb lug. No roots to plant and come up from. We just, you know, mix and match."

Chinese families immigrated along the Irish to Side 1 so much so that they two had been the largest ethnic groups for the first twenties years of the UC. Brazilians and the Czechoslovaks shared in cultural harmony a colony in Side 2 so much that Portuguese was spoken with Slavic accents from time to time. In Side 3, although predominantly white, the Arab population of which Mai hailed was nestled in a colony near Zum, and some of Zeon Deikun's first supporters had been clerics of the Muslim population. The only binds between them had been of their class: of being at hazard of being sent to space at all.

"Why you bring him here, to me?" Gearten gets to the root of it all, this odd encounter, and Mai explains, to him, and to Garma both in one go. "Why you gotta put that evil on me to know?"

She shrugs. "Candy already knows, for one. He's known since that day, remember when I talked to him privately after that whole thing that night?"

"Yeah."

"Well, Gearten, I trusted you in the war, and I trust you now. Feel like you're entitled to know that I got who I got, and what I'm going to do to him."

"Which is kill him?"

"Mhm." He runs his hand through his beard as Mai looks at him, expectantly. The rage in him boils but subsides. It's a rage he's long since had to deal with in his condition. So much he wanted to go out and fight as she did, but his own body kept him back. Here, the enemy had been delivered to him, and yet Garma was not his to take.

The bristles of his beard make the sound of a prickly wave as that large hand of his runs up his face and then down in tiredness and weariness. "Look, I don't want to understand your mind, Ghoul, because that's a whole lot in there, but how do you know he ain't gonna turn around on you and kill you with your guard down."

"Because," she leveled her gaze back at Garma. "I think he knows that he deserves what's coming to him. I wanted him to start to see why he deserved it."

Garma's eyes are distant, but he is there, always listening, beholden to her and what had happened. If there was judgement on this Earth, he thinks, it would be made manifest in her. He does not want to be judged now, but judgement always comes.

Gearten is quiet, leaning back, taking her in for those rare times he can. "But… Mai." It is his turn to say her name. "You're all the reason he could ever need to be put down six feet."

Her core is cold, her stomach, the pit of it, a burning ice that has not even gone away. All she can do is be distracted from it. Her hand unconsciously holds her midsection. She does not want to speak on it, but this selfish thing, it is hers and hers alone, and Gearten knows better when game belonged to the providence of someone else.

Gearten takes a long look at Garfield, a broken man that he is. This was a Zeek, and he was there, before him. That Zeek was a young man, younger than himself. He didn't need to see his face to see that Garfield was younger than him.

He was just a damned kid.

"He's your problem." Gearten stopped himself from spitting on the ground.

"Keep it a secret for now?" Mai asks quietly.

"Yup." He nodded at that. As long as he didn't look at the man, he could pretend he wasn't there. For the first time in his life, Garma is invisible, and he does, and yet does not want to be.

Mai and Gearten talk more, catch up on the situation of Seattle, and all Garma can do is just stand there and be inside his own head as the reality of where he is sets in: In a place where all those that lived on wanted him dead, even if he were just another Spacenoid.

"Reapers are starting to come face to face with our border patrols. Lots of mean words, but uh, nothing too serious. More and more we're getting it, but we're putting up right back. Tammy and Bolton like throwing their words, you know." Gearten speaks, gesturing to a map of Seattle hung up in his prefab. "Bolton, actually, he's who we have on call a lot trying to defuse situations given that he, you know, was a public defender. He knows a good amount of them, and them back."

"Should we be ready?" She knows that she shouldn't ask what it always the default position.

"Always," Gearten nods. "But, God damn. I don't want to do it."

The story of her life is her answer to Gearten: "It was never our choice."


Garma and Mai leave the Conclave soon after, the customary bag of jerky from the last deer already pocketed, and even an extra bag for Garma, those not knowing who he is at the supplies giving them out to him as an ally of Ghoul. He takes it, but not for his sake.

Gearten stares at him the entire time as he leaves, but does nothing more.

She did not visit Candy or see Bo today, but she is glad for that. Gearten is enough of an introduction today for Garma, and at a little past noon, they walk their way home. Far enough away from the Conclave, it is Mai that speaks up first:

"Sune?" She stops them both on a corner, waiting for traffic long gone, she leaning on a stop sign. Garma is rattled, going, seeing so many people again who, despite their normalcy in this ruined world, would all turn to him and beat him dead if they knew has shaken him down to a place he didn't know he had. Hearing that name off of her tongue seems far more natural than himself. "Where'd that come from, Garfield?" His go to fake name as well is said by her, and she is feeling it out on her teeth.

He settles, taking a breath, his leg aching from all this walking today he had asked for. He can't quite give her a straight answer without asking her a question herself.

"What do you know of Newtypes?"

A question put upon her for as long as she had been on Earth: a woman from space, who had looked as she did. She looked like the future, and yet she was not. Or, at least, she had hoped that she wasn't. She knows the Newtype theory by heart in the same way she knew Zeon Deikun's ideology.

"I know what they are. Don't know if they're real, and I don't care." She blows out cold air between her teeth, knowing them only as aggravation. "It was bad enough for people to be calling me out as a Spacenoid this year. But they also had a habit of calling me a Newtype just because I could shoot shit good." Even through bandages she can see him form that self-confident smile of his, that one that is all but a little goading of her that is flavored in the same way as (she can feel his casual address to her coming) those all too comfortable moments between them.

"Oh, I assure you, they're very much real, dear Mai." He looks up to the blue sky above, and his gaze draws Mai up as well.

(She stops, she breathes in the air, the feel on her skin, the pace of the clouds and the layering of them. She cannot explain how, but she knows the weathers from details as small as the temperature of the wind or the haze of the air around her.)

(Cloudy, for the next few days at least. And then rain again.)

"In fact," Garma tries to see the stars beyond in daylight but cannot. "I have… borrowed the name from a Newtype."

If anyone would've known they're real, it would've been him. But to what ends? She didn't care.

Their future was not worth what had been done the world, and what they had taken from her.

"I know a Sune." Garma goes on. "She is… Char Aznable's beloved."

Mai sniffs once, looking at his profile, covered by bandages and her clothing. "Sorry to hear."

It catches him in between a breath. "Oh-. I… It is not- That's not something that mattered to me."

She barely hides one chuckle, digging into his pocket for the bag of jerky given to him. Oddly, he is pliant as she does so, keeping still. "She is a Newtype. Unquestionably so. Like so many others undoubtedly out there, but she is one that we know without doubt. Lalah Sune is a Newtype."

She finds what she's looking for, a plastic bag crimpling in her hands as she draws it out of his jacket and mixes the content of her own. Two pieces come out about the size of a thumb. One for her, and one for him, offered. He takes it, feeling its freshly dried out plumpness. Nothing but salt and drying to them, and still the taste is savory. He talks to the piece of meat more than he can look at Mai when he says this:

"I might have my suspicions about you, dear Mai."

Halfway through biting her own she grinds it against her teeth once before swallowing a taste that has become so common to her it has become nothing. Her green eyes, their fire bubbles beneath their surface, but she keeps it down, held, like a boiling kettle.

Dozens of people claimed she to be a Newtype with claims as little as the fact that she had been born in Space, to the shots she had made as a sniper. To hear it from a man who had known Newtypes, who had said they were real, it sits in her oddly. All she knew of Human experience was the life she lived, the person she was, the feelings she felt and the consciousness she had. If they were anything beyond Human she hoped she would know.

This wasn't the doubt she needed, appreciated, or even thought valid at all.

As said Zeon Deikun, even, Newtypes were meant to be something. She was not that something. "I assure you, I am not the future, especially yours."

Garma nods, but still studies her, studies her closely in natural light. The texture of her skin, her lips, the slight movement of their curve that gives her feelings away. If, only at a glance, she does in some ways remind him of Lalah, as brash and callous of a statement that may be, given their approximate races. Still, he cannot help but think about it, with her sharp eyes, her tenacity, and the story of her fight here.

"You may not be my future, but you are my end. Is that not something close?"

The silence between them is different, out in the world, where it surrounds them outside of the bubble of their apartment together. The silence between them is wild and cold, swirling between them and yet bringing them closer still. The silence is her answer.

Saint Matthew's church in the background, just down the street. Father Blinn is nowhere to be found in eyesight, but Mai won't go looking. The Christian God cared for him.

"Are you a religious man, Garma?" She asks him instead. If it was one aspect she hated of him deeply it was having to answer any of his high-minded, grandiose questions.

He tilted his head at her, the wind of Seattle blowing through the street, dead leaves following it with a plastic bag as well. "How do you mean?"

"Have you ever prayed to God?" God is a word that's still foreign to her lips as she says it. Her god was of a different color. A more modern religion, technically. Islam remained in her, despite how far away any faith at all had been from her. It was endemic of many second generation Spacenoids: that crisis of faith of believing in a God, a religion, now that Mankind had been in what had been once considered those unreachable heavens. The stars were lonely, and the religions of Earth had been so far away. Save for those who made it a specific aspect of their life, as her family did, the idea of God and religion became boiled down to a single form, an amorphous form that represented everything and nothing: light against the dark of space itself.

The Zabi family celebrated, or at least hosted, the idea of Christmas. Many times in his childhood Christmas was the closest thing per year to what felt like a family event, even if it was, a realization that occurred when Garma was older, spectacle for people beyond him. Those many parties on Zabi grounds for the most basic of religious ceremonies like Christmas or baptisms or Sunday prayer had been motions, but not imbued with direct religious fulfillment.

He struggled to remember if he was even baptized or not, but God, religion, had been so far away from him as a matter of his life.

"I've never quite had the time or the duty to spare to commit."

"But you've prayed, haven't you? You know what that's like, right?" Some people never prayed to God unless they were in trouble. She's heard it before before she's killed Zeeks, but some invoke the Word for far lesser. She steps forward, and her fingers touch upon the rope around his neck. "You still have time to pray."

For what, Garma wonders, hearing the ridges of her gloves pads rub against those red fibers around his neck. "Maybe. Maybe."

"Maybe." Mai repeats, nodding, backing away. "These Newtypes, if they were to appear, to come onto Earth from the sky. Would they be gods? Seems like that's what Zeon worshipped." Zeon the man. Not the nation.

"Newtypes aren't gods." He speaks. He knows.

Lalah Sune was not a God.

(And yet Char worshipped her.)

"Then don't think of me like that." She returns to what he asked originally, turning away from Saint Matthews. There would be time for that place later. "Not as a force. Not as something big like ends or future or some shit." Not as a Ghoul. She wants to say too, but she knows Garma already does not think of her like that. "Even if I was a Newtype, that doesn't mean anything. I'm…"

"Nothing." Garma says for her. The slightest of nods follow it from her. "Well. I don't quite think that either."

She looks at him in the eyes and sees one that sees her, and one that is dead. "It doesn't matter if I'm a Newtype or not. I'm not. But even if I was, that doesn't mean anything." It hurts her, because being something put her at hazard to the world. Being something meant the world could happen to her, and it did. She lost everything for it.

She is not nothing, Garma knows. She is cold, she is his captor. She is a woman out of place and a woman that knew him. She is his killer, his savior. "Sorry I brought it up." He said, and his honesty never faltered despite his quiet.

"Hm." She grunted. It's time for the walk home. The walk up. The cool down for the day. The wash up, and then tomorrow would come. It would be cold tonight, and so they would share a bed and think nothing more about it. This would keep going on, and on, and on, until a day came, and he was healthy enough, and on that morning she would give him a good meal, she would listen to what he had to say for final words, and then she would open his leg, or maybe a vein, and let him bleed out as she watched. "I'm going to be bringing you back to the Conclave, from time to time. If you keep coming out with me like this."

"I'd… It's not my choice, is it?" She answers him by taking the carabiner again and locking it to her belt.

"You're gonna see it wasn't just me that suffered." Her thumb runs over that red rope between him and her, back and forth. "It was never just me."

Garma wonders what a child, born of a Spacenoid on Earth would be. He wonders if Zeon would believe them a Newtype. He thinks no more of it, holding that rope on his end as well, once he realizes that child would've been the one he had with Icelina.