2011-08-15 - Soldier of Sorrow

The legal name for the small colony we make our way to is High Baltimore, but the natives haven't called it that in years. No, High Baltimore is a rough and tumble kind of place, the air inside constantly stinking of tobacco and cheap whiskey, where the men wear stained coats as a matter of course, and where the dames are - nearly to a one - hysterical. In High Baltimore, usually the only friends you can count on are the revolver in your pocket and the flask at your hip. Everything's got a price in High Baltimore, and life is cheap.

Locals just call it the grey city. Nobody says it with enough respect to deserve capital letters.

Kai Shiden, his mood as grey as the city around him, never finds himself in this bar unless he's feeling as low as he can possibly go. Opening the door to Marl's, more often than not you're greeted with a blast of stale cigar smoke, the tinny speakers of the decades-old jukebox struggling their way through another old song. Marl Cassle, the bartender, isn't one for pleasantries, serving drinks with a grim nod, but he keeps the bar bone-dry with the threadbare, discolored rag looped around his shoulders. Kai Shiden's slotted himself into a booth at the corner, a bottle of expensive scotch on the table next to an empty shotglass. Without lifting his forehead from the table, he picks up the bottle and fills his glass, not spilling a drop.

Over the last several months, Kai has been pursuing 'personal interests', which usually means he's about to blow the lid off some conspiracy or another. Usually popping on the grid every now and then to check in, he's been completely dark for the entirety of Space August, which is never a good sign.

A worse sign is that it's not particularly hard to track him down.

To say Bright Noa keeps tabs on his colleagues is an understatement.

He keeps files on them; even the deceased. Amuro Ray, Hayato Kobayashi, Sayla Mass, even that blond kid Job who only showed up every so often on White Base and will somehow even survive to a ripe old age to appear on a ship in the future that no one will care about. But no file is as thick or as filled with inconsistent accounts as the one with Kai Shiden's name on it.

Full of half-truths, near-truths, and of course, the sort-of-truths. Every time the grey-haired freelance journalist pops on the grid, a communique is dispatched from Karaba with the highest security encryptions. Often, they come too late. Well after Kai has disappeared again -- mostly due to the nature they're dispatched. Hayato only transmits them during a solar flare so he can mask the transmission as meaningless background radiation to avoid the snooping ears of the Earth Federation, Mithril, and any other entities who might pay a hefty price to know just what Karaba's semi-retired spymaster is up to.

Which leads us to right now. Only a full space-hour ago, when an relatively unimportant junk-freighter bearing Jupiter Energy Fleet idents and markings landed in High Baltimore's less-than-spectacular spaceport. A few 'have you seen this man?'s later (and thankfully, all without some ridiculous Gundam Fight needing to happen beforehand) and the captain of the freighter makes his way into Marl's. And all but a few clacks of hard leather soles against the floor heralds hanging-over shadow of a tall man in a mid-length brown space-duster and tan pants suspended over an unmarked red tunic. Kai's reflection, bent over on the table, appears in the convex shape of the brown-tinted Aviator frames sitting on the man's face. Above his brow, a heaping order of dark hair with just a bit of curl and sideburns that clearly are not regulation.

"Kai," the man lets out a sigh. The voice can only be entirely too familiar to Kai Shiden and perhaps painfully so.

It belongs to the man he once had to deal with as Captain.

The man the history textbooks call Bright Noa.

His family calls him that too.

In fact, most people do.

Okay, all of them do.

Due to the public nature of his muckraking, Kai Shiden has to take great pains to become actually anonymous - his preferred method is to simply not even be seen except by those he wants to see him. The grey city is something of a stomping ground for him - in a colony where everybody has something to hide, nobody pries too deeply. So, while Bright is in something approaching casual dress, Kai is wearing one of his ubiquitous white suits, the jacket tossed carelessly next to him in the booth.

After Bright speaks, Kai carefully sets the scotch bottle down on the table, his other hand emerging from beneath to take the glass, and pull it down, obscured by his head. His face finally appears as he leans back, the alcohol smoothly burning down his throat. The glass knocks on the wood of the table, another blow against Kai Shiden's conscious mind, another nick in the shield. His deep-socketed eyes are even more shadowed than normal from lack of sleep, and though bleary, his gaze is focused. His hair is a mess, and stubble covers his chin. Kai hates beards!

"What."

Just like that - a statement, not a question. Never a question, because that would imply that Kai actually wants to know 'what'.

'What.'

It's always 'what.'

Bright Noa suppresses the urge to let out a suffering groan over such treatment. Instead, he merely slides into the seat opposite of Kai's in his booth. His outfit less casual and more 'I'm trying to remain inconspicuous.' These days, not everyone is friendly to a man who seems content to wear his Earth Federation tans.

"You know what," serves as the veteran Captain's reply. "You've been gone for over a month." His hands reach up, fingers pinching the hinges on either side of his sunglasses. They slide off easily and collapse inward so that they might better disappear inside a pocket of his coat. "When your name didn't come up on the police blotters, we began thinking the worst." His voice is stern as always, though not without its sense of concern. It might be hard to notice, especially for someone who has a less than stellar rapport with their former 'war-buddies' so to speak.

Bright glances over the table and reaches out, his coat shifting with the movement, to grasp the neck of the bottle Kai had been pouring from. Just to inspect it.

Kai narrows an eye at Bright's hand, and reaches over shortly after, attempting to free the bottle with a tug so that he can pour himself another shot.

About half the bottle is already gone.

"Whatever, it ain't like you need me. I was trying to take care of something." If the simple tug didn't work, Kai snatches at the bottle, tugging at it with the desperation of a drowning man, pouring himself another shot come hell or high water. "Yer here. You see me. I ain't dead yet." Kai tilts the shot back, and the glass knocks on wood once more. "Enough for ya?"

Kai takes his eyes off Bright's face, and attempts to obstinately resume staring into the middle distance. Meanwhile, seeing that a man walked up to another man in his bar and neither have pulled a gun yet, assumes they're friends, and taps a second shotglass twice on the bar before resuming his work. Marl's view of the world is very black and white.

The bottle comes out of the older man's hand easily enough. It comes with a lift of thick black eyebrows and a set of worry-lines creased across his brow. "Are you drunk?" he questions softly, sounding more like an accusation than an inquiry. The frown comes soon enough and it weighty with paternal disappointment. Not exactly something conducive to a calm conversation on whether a man needs another man. Or a freelance journalist, for that matter.

"I thought we went over this," Bright makes an uncomfortable groan at Kai's remark of not needing him. "Of course we need you," it had always been 'we'. Not 'I.' Neither man could stay in the company of the other for very long. Their personalities too different, their outlooks on life too. The moment Kai's glass hits the table again, the Captain-turned-Admiral lets out an exasperated sound. "Sayla's been asking about you," he drops to a low murmur after chancing to give a glance back at Marl. "She's worried. Frankly, we all are." There's that 'we' again.

Then comes the authoritarian tone, "What the hell've you been up to?"

Drunk? "Not yet. Trying to get there." At least this is the longest they've spoken without Kai shooting a vaguely veiled insult Bright's way. "C'mon," his voice is only slightly edging toward a slur. "We're hooked up now. It's not a game of a bunch of jackasses playing silly bitches in a boat in the desert." He leans forward, props his elbows on the table, and rubs his face. "AEUG, Mithril, Orb, hell, Celestial Being..." Absolutely nobody in the bar appears to show the slightest interest when Kai starts dropping huge conspiracy wordbombs. Here in High Baltimore, people mind their own business, and snitches get stitches. "What's one guy? Thinking about going to the Alps again..." Kai hasn't sounded like this in a long time. He sounds... /defeated./ Worn out. It can't be anything related to the war - he hasn't really fought in the damn thing for closing in on half a year now.

He starts to pour himself another shot, but Bright continues. He stops, the liquor inches away from the neck of the bottle, oblivion hovering expectantly to do its grim work. Kai slowly turns the bottle upright, and sets it gently on the table, rubbing at one eye with a knuckle. "Sayla," he murmurs, possibly not even aware he's speaking. There had been a few girls in school, but Sayla was Kai's first legit crush - but back then, he was basically a shitty little garbage man, and she made her opinions of him pretty clear. Some years after the war, they were briefly involved, but something had happened to Kai in between, and he broke it off.

Someone had.

Bright drills him on his activities, and it combines with the brief moment of reminiscing into a kind of crowbar directly under Kai's hard emotional shell. He suddenly slumps, his hand covering his eyes, and his shoulders sag. "God... damn it..."

It happens. Once in a while, whenever the planets are in alignment and someone spectacularly fucks up for a heartfelt reason, Bright Noa's expression softens. "/Kai/," his whisper heavy with urging. "You're not 'one' guy," he has to remind him. Is it Kai's illustrious (if checkered) military career? His skill at handling mobile suits with specialization on long-range warfare? "You're the best intel man we have," he confesses softly. No. It isn't. It has nothing to do with how Kai's survived enough battle and heartache to fill several lifetimes. The AEUG and by extension, Katharon, has more than its fair share of ace pilots who think they're immortal.

What Bright Noa needs is a man who knows when to stay the hell out of a gunfight and keep his nose in other areas of interest.

Like information.

The echo of Sayla on Kai's lips is nothing new. She's a sore spot for everyone, the Captain included. She was the 'That Girl' on the ship, before he even started paying attention to Mirai. What wasn't to want? The lips, the hips, the tits, the eyes, the skin, the waist -- she had it all. And an aloof streak more than a mile wide. She was everything a man could want in a girl while he was also risking life and limb for his government. Well, so far as he could stand listening to her and her insane feminist lectures.

Though, could it have been that other girl Kai had found for a short during the early period of the War when he was still an immature asshole? Bright frowns. This reminiscing is getting him nowhere.

"/Shiden/," the Admiral calls him by his family name now. His voice gruff, trying to appeal to the boy on the inside. He reaches out, one arm stretched over the length of the table to clasp the scruffy-chinned man by the shoulder. "/Get it together/," he comes close to demanding. "What's /wrong/?"

The cowardly boy and the hardened spy fight for dominion over Kai's emotion and reactions. The cowardly boy would go limp in Bright's grasp - the hardened spy would try to crack Bright's jaw. Right now, he settles for brushing Bright's arm roughly off, and looks sublimely miserable with himself. "Whatever." For so long he's kept himself moving with the idea that he was making a difference, but when it mattered most... "I ain't that good." He's trying to slide away down the booth, but they're not exactly wide. He just ends up pinning his coat against the wall and going nowhere. "I... I couldn't even..."

Something cracks, and a tear slips from Kai's eye, the first where anyone could see it for a long time. He knows Bright, and Bright's not going to stop. Kai would have to punch the Admiral out to get him to stop, and right now, he doesn't think he could beat up Camille.

(camille is kind of a bitch)

Kai Shiden's apparent turmoil ceases, and his shoulders droop. His head bows, eyes closed, and he reaches up to shamefully thumb the tear again. Like an afterthought, he flaps his hand toward the empty seat across from him.

Bright Noa makes a face when Kai shoves him off. Kai, why are you always so difficult, he wonders to himself. "You're the best," he corrects without hesitation. "You're better than anyone in the game, Kai. You're the reason we've managed to get by this long." It wasn't a candy-coated lie, either. It was the truth. Yes, the battles were important. But the ones they managed to avoid or otherwise turn suicide into a sure victory had all to do with the man sitting in front of him now. Having him cash in his chips again is tanamount to a deathknell for a bunch of idealists and war veterans trying to weed the corruption out of the Federation.

I can't do this, the Admiral thinks. His inclination rests on his tried-and-true method of slapping Kai until some manner of sense enters his lanky body. But that tear leaking out of those devil eyes is what keeps him from causing a ruckus. Tense muscles relax under the inocuous costume Bright Noa wears. The droop of his shoulders and the motion of his hand are what seal the deal.

"..I've been sitting here the entire time," the curly-haired family-man flatly reports. He had been sitting in the seat across from Kai since he went 'what' at him. Maybe he was drunker than he let on. Or just in so much of a downspiral that he didn't notice. "So what couldn't you do, Kai?" he implores again. God almighty, loosen those lips..

Kai opens simply: "You remember Miharu?" Of course it comes back to Miharu. The girl nobody else but Kai seems to really remember clearly. The girl that changed everything. Just saying it, knowing what he knows now, causes a fresh wave of sorrow, and he clamps his hand on the empty shotglass, knuckles whitening, until it passes. Once he's composed himself, he slips his wallet out of his pocket, and slips a picture out of it without even looking, placing it on the table - Kai's room in the White Base, a red-headed girl about the same age as he was, wearing nothing but Kai's uniform jacket in a manner that is completely against regulation.

The picture sits there for two seconds before he snatches it back, putting the one he meant to down - Miharu again, at her small house, with two little kids clinging to her legs - a boy and a girl.

"When she was..." He almost says 'spying.' "...stowed on the ship, we talked a lot about the... the future. You know. Just a couple of dumb teenagers. Those two kids, their names are Gill and Milly Ratokie... her kid brother and sister." He stops again, and pours himself a shot, bringing it close... but doesn't drink yet.

"One day, we kinda talked about what would happen if one of us... died. Not like it was ever gonna happen. Even in a war, we were young." He picks the picture back up, and stares at it. "Invincible."

He's losing track again, the alcohol and his own mental state making his focus slip.

"The girl?" Bright gives a look that'd imply a fuzzy memory. The picture he puts down elicits a sense of consternation. Dark eyes imply I can't believe you did that to your uniform. It was completely against regulation. Didn't anyone have respect for it?

The next picture is a lot more forgivable. This one he squints at, picking apart the faces of Gill and Milly. He cannot help but smile, albeit softly. How couldn't he? They remind him of Hathaway and Cheimin. Back on Earth.. with an absentee father who sends them video-mail instead of hugs.

The Admiral begins to frown.

It's the mention of their names that catch Bright's attention. Kai wasn't the type of person who said anything useless. If he didn't like you, he'd let you know it. And when he brings something up, it usually means it means something to him. Either something he's passionate about or something he hates. In the veteran's case, in his experience it was always more of the latter than the former.

Invincible, Kai says. More like stupid, Bright corrects in his head.

"What about them, Kai?" he pushes on, eyes lifted back at the haggard-looking freelance journalist. He draws in a breath, letting the silence permeate for a moment before he finds the courage to ask the next question. His tongue runs the inside of his mouth before he puts the words together, "What happened to Gill and Milly Ratokie?" He had to brace himself for the ineveitable. When the topic of children and a dark mood are combined, the reasons why are never pretty.

And the way Kai says 'invincible', the bitter twist to his mouth, he agrees.

To be a journalist like him, to tear the veil off of the big lies, you have to have a bit of the storyteller inside. Kai opens his tale with all the appropriate foreshadowing, and when he opens his mouth to try and deliver what he's learned, it sticks in his throat. He tries to lubricate it with the poured shot of scotch. "If... if she died... I promised to look after them. Just the kind of thing you say in that kind of situation to get a girl in the mood. Then, the next... the next day, she..."

Kai's head tilts back, resting on the frame of the window next to him. "And then everything else happened, and then the war was over... I kept up on them but then I started getting active in Karaba... getting all idealistic... I lost track..."

Kai's arm goes limp, and the shotglass thumps sideways on the table, rolling toward Bright. "...and last month," the emotion suddenly washes from his voice, and he delivers the last in a near-robotic monotone. "Last month I finally find out where they vanished to."

"The Murasame project abducted them."

"Gill was a failed and disposed of experiment."

"Milly has completely vanished into the project."

Gill was a failed and disposed of experiment.

Milly has completely vanished into the project.

"..." is all Bright Noa can muster. It's unthinkable. Yet he's had to deal with every day since the day White Base fled Side 7 with Char's Musai in hot pursuit. Someone's brothers and sisters and children are being lost every day. And yet I keep myself at a distance without even thinking of what it might be like if Hathaway or Cheimin befell the same fate..

It's hard keeping a straight face. Not only for the news but for the emotion that crashes on and off Kai Shiden like waves battering a rocky outcropping.

"I'm sorry," Bright finds himself swallowing. He tries to steel himself as best he can, but it's difficult. Dark eyes glitter with understanding and compassion; though harden as he tries to make his way over it. He takes in another breath. And another. And in fact one more after that.

And then the Admiral does the thing he's had to figure out since the day Captain Paolo took shrapnel to the chest: take control.

"You won't be able to find Milly if you go back into seclusion again," his delivery is icy. It -has- to be. "The moment you walk away, Kai, is the moment you lose her for good."

He wasn't sure if it was the truth at this point; but it was the only thing he could think of to give Kai a sense of purpose.

Kai Shiden says, dully, to the ceiling, "The Murasame project's operational security is unparalleled. They run it like a mafia family. Every contact I ever find cuts me off... or disappears." His fist nearly slams on the table, and then freezes, settling down before he makes a commotion. The picture of Miharu, Gill, and Milly slips from his hand. "For God's sake, they even had Amuro, for a while, and I had no idea until I got close to him, and then..." He kind of waves at his forehead, the common White Base gesture for 'crazy Newtype shit' done by those on-board it that remain, apparently, normal.

Kai shifts, sitting back up, running his hands through his hair before looking at Bright. "It's just... I don't know." For the first time in a long time, he looks at Bright like he's just another man, not even acknowledging the steel in his eyes or the ice in his voice, refusing to let him act like an authority figure here in this bar. "I... I failed the girl... the /woman/ I loved." His eyes drop back down to the picture. "I ain't... I ain't strong. I feel like I might just fall apart. It's all I can do to put one foot in front of the other..."

"Then you're going to have to work harder," Bright brings his no-nonsense attitude to bear. He has no other option. There is no coddling in war. Just the next battle, the one where you stitch yourself together and try to end it right there and then. Kai might not let him be an authority figure here in the bar, but there is nothing he can do about keeping him from being a father and a husband next. "If you loved her," he says carefully, his eyes never leaving Kai's. "Then you won't fail her again. You're /strong/, Kai," he insists.

"More than you've ever given yourself credit for. Strong enough to get through the war. And strong enough to make a difference in that girl's.." he lays a finger atop Milly's shoulder in the picture, "..life. You've got to keep going, Kai. And if you can't do it for -her-, then you do it for all the other Millys who can be saved. And for all the Miharus who don't have to be lost for senseless reasons."

All the difference I made in her life was the one between life and death, Kai thinks to himself... but he's not fully prepared to believe it. If he hadn't intervened, Zeon would've blackmailed her into spying anyway, and in those days, one thing going wrong might've been all it took to kill them all. The only thing that's kept him sane over the years has been the fact that he's put the responsibility for her death on the shoulders of Zeon. It's the real reason he can't look Char Aznable in the eye without getting angry.

"I've never been strong, Bright." He slowly runs a finger down the picture. "I've just learned how to fake it." He gives a sudden, great exhalation, rubbing his forehead for like the fiftieth time in the last few minutes. He suddenly feels like he hasn't touched a drop all day.

He also finds that being on the other side of the interviewing process is liberating, but uncomfortable. A bit of himself coming back, he resolves to never let it happen again. He takes a deep breath, eyebrows knitting together, the same expression he forced onto his face whenever they'd have to sortie after Miharu's death. The expression that saw Kai kicking Zakus off cliffs and using his beam cannons at point-blank range. Soldier of sorrow. "You're right. This isn't me. I'm not a bitch anymore."

Suddenly, Kai sits up, screwing the cap on his bottle of scotch - he did buy it, after all. "I need updates. Get in touch with Karaba, have 'em drop the latest issues and events off at my Alps house. I gotta water the plants and have a drink with Ryuu." He grabs his coat, tossing it over one shoulder. He still looks exhausted and unsteady, and he'll probably spend a few days sitting in the dark working it all out, but then Kai has always spent a lot of time sitting in the dark.

And probably other things in the dark, they've never managed to hide a camera he doesn't find.

"And give Sayla a call," Bright tacks on the last bit to Kai's new itinerary. It takes every ounce of will to not blow it all and let out a sigh of relief. So close to a break down, he wasn't even sure he could pull Kai out of it this time.

The older man slides out of the booth after Kai. And, after a brief period of awkward uncertainty, reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder. "C'mon," he motions with a tilt of his head forward. "You've got a space on the ship already set aside for you."

So close. How much longer do any of us have?

Kai shifts out from under Bright's hand, but not in the 'I'm in a glass cage of emotion' way, but in the usual 'Kai Shiden does not suffer Bright Noa's hand on his body' way. They step out into the gritty streets of High Baltimore, the grey city, and Kai produces a white fedora he's never had before, but it seems to fit right in. "I'll catch up," he says, before vanishing down an alley, blending away like a cloud in a stormy sky.

Bright Noa pauses. "Where did y--" he glances around. "Kai?" his head whips about, looking left and right. "...Kai?"

So it goes.