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There is no break in the grinding of stone and howling of worn machinery that hangs in the air over Asticassia. Like a hunter after cornered prey, the cacophony follows Sabina down into the cell where she lays, turning over on her cot; feeling doubt with its long claws reaching in to rend her open at the ribs; turning over again.
Sabina thinks of open space, instead: her post-sortie ritual. Every movement, every choice, accounted for. Win or lose, this is the constant that Sabina returns to; reminisces on the wonderful machine that is Grassley’s formation (and now, the two times that it’s been beaten). That duel before, they’d all been too spread out. Scattered. Easy to pick off. Sabina had moved in too eagerly, then, too hurriedly. Gotten herself torn up by GUND-bits for that effort. She lay awake in the long night that followed, lost in thought and the sounds of Renee trashing and cleaning and trashing the lounge. Then in the morning, she presented her findings over breakfast, and everyone had nodded and said they’d learned–
And done everything in the exact same way all over again.
Some of it was unavoidable. Henao was escorting Zenelli. They were a man down. But then they (no, she; Sabina alone) had broken formation. And there, with stars screaming around her in silver lines, a single sword drone had managed to catch her off guard. Rembran had said that Shaddiq’s weakness was his inability to trust anyone, and for some nights after she carried an inexplicable bitterness in her heart that could not be assuaged. But Rembran was wrong– Sabina understands that now. How could Shaddiq be faulted for wanting to do things himself when Sabina couldn’t even do her job right and finish off a pinned target, nor even learn anything from their previous defeat?
(She was the one who peeled off. She was the one who rushed in to help Shaddiq, and got her mobile suit gutted for all the good she did.)
If she’d had her Beguir-Pente, and not the Heindrees they’d gone out in– no, Sabina won’t make excuses for herself. She’s supposed to be above that. But anyone worthy of sitting at Shaddiq’s side should be able to hold their own, regardless of the circumstances. Beneath the impassive cold settled over her in place of a blanket, Sabina finds there is only one conclusion she can arrive at: no longer is she fit to bear that right, the privilege and burden, of calling herself Shaddiq’s second.
Away from the others, from Henao’s calming presence and the stare of Ireesha’s ever-present plush companion, Sabina catches herself wondering if she’d even want to, anyway. But what else might there be?
(The blue of the ocean and bandages wound tight with a care she has never shown nor felt from the others with whom she flies in formation, and after so many weeks at last Norea’s barb slides home– traitor.)
It does not have to come to this, Sabina chides herself. There is another, more reasonable possibility– that, perhaps, they hadn’t been meant to win at all. Any reasonable commander would have seen the odds were stacked against them. No amount of skill or quality of their mobile suits would’ve changed the fact that Cathedra outnumbered them three, almost four to one. More enemy positions to track, more firing angles to mind– they would have been worn down eventually.
But that is no consolation, either. Even if Sabina’s presence with the other three had stemmed the tide of their defeat from crashing over them for another moment longer; even if she came to Shaddiq’s aid– what had she accomplished? Weighed out upon the scales of battle, her efforts amounted to a non-factor. To zero. To nothing. (Years of trying, of being noticed and gratified, and of trying even harder– nothing.)
They had won. Shaddiq said as much as Cathedra descended in around them. Now, the Benerit Group has no choice but to make a move, and so play itself along the lines that Shaddiq had laid out long before– but that had not been them at all. It was the Earthian Witch who caused that: destruction so wanton and vast that Sabina wonders, doubts if that had truly been Shaddiq’s backup plan all this time. It had all worked out, this assemblage, Shaddiq’s perfect storm– but here, now so far from Grassley’s warm halls, Sabina lays out the mosaic of his plan and finds (not for the first time) that she cannot recognize it anymore. She cannot glimpse the role she was meant to occupy– or had she ever had one at all?
No. She must have. Sabina will not allow herself to think otherwise, and not for Shaddiq’s sake. Not even for her own. When their subterfuge was discovered, when Guel put it to open air, Shaddiq had those three let go– and so, if she must find any meaning in their fight at all, let it be that. (Let it be her smile. The roughness of her hands, fading with time spent idle.)
Another fleeting, faithless thought– Sabina is glad that Nika hadn’t listened to her. Her fate will not be yoked to theirs. Nika is free. Now it’s Sabina who sits enclosed by four unmarked and darkened walls, but Nika is free–
If there is anything that Sabina has done in Asticassia that might amount to anything, let it be that.
Sabina is glad, now, that she is alone in her cell. Were the others imprisoned with her, surely one of them might scent the hesitation unbalancing each tumultuous breath, the guilt which hangs upon her gaze and drags it to the floor. For she is glad, you see, that Shaddiq’s carefully wrought plan crumbled and split apart, if only so that Nika could slip out through its cracks.
Nika is free, and she is alive. She must be. Sabina believes it to be so– there cannot be any other possibility. (For if Nika is gone, then her ascension through Grassley’s ranks means nothing; only that whomever she’s attached herself to will always ever be at risk of Sabina’s good intentions.)
Besides– she saw an unknown mobile suit as Cathedra marched her to this holding cell. It was distinct enough from the Demi Trainer to be something new; familiar enough to be something of Burion’s. Sabina knows only one student who would readily pilot something like a Demi Trainer, especially with that armament; and Panlunch would only trust one person to calibrate her mobile suit. Therefore: Nika Nanaura is alive.
But Sabina doesn’t know.
Nika could be out there, yes. Breathing in the dusty air, safe again with Earth House. Or a body buried deep in a concrete mausoleum with not even the true sun shining upon her face as she breathed her last–
No, no, no, Nika is alive.
(Sabina realizes, now, why Nika chose as she did back in Grassley with heart resolute and gaze firm as the metals and machines she surrounded herself with. Better to cling hope to where one finds it, than to be consumed– to sit in the darkness, eaten up by one’s own thoughts, feeling the certainty of the world crumbling away.)
Sabina turns over. The wall greets her. Bitterly, she thinks, the concrete slabs boxing her in might not even hold a touch of the true Earth in them. Ships can only carry so much cargo, and gravel takes up so much space; it is almost always easier to grind up the gutted entrails of the anchoring asteroid than to rip that same amount irrevocably from the planet– a lapse from the usual procedure.
What Sabina wouldn’t give, now, to feel even that little comfort– cool rock beneath her fingertips, the vaguest semblance of her old home. But Spacians do not care for things such as the sun or the wind, and so they are content to lock their prisoners away in boxes as if they’re nothing but just more assets.
She should not yearn for memories long since left behind. On the day Sabina left Earth at her back, taken up to join Shaddiq, she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew that she might not see Earth or her comforts again for some long years to come– but never might she have guessed that it would come to this; that she might never feel the touch of Earth upon her again. Still, Sabina allows herself to imagine, to dream; the salty coastal spray; the driving summer rains; eyes and hair the unmistakable blue of the wild, open sea–
–Those things, like Earth, will remain forever out of her reach, not to be grasped again.
Sabina has accepted this. This is what she tells herself, a chant echoing in the dim of the cell and her mind: it is her natural consequence; it is just; it is right. Too long has she enmeshed herself in bloody work to come away from it, even in part. Her hands are dirtied– that is the price, the cause she agreed to undertake, her entry into Shaddiq’s covenant. And she knows what Shaddiq in his self-righteousness had forgotten, or else deluded himself into believing could not apply to him– that hands so stained with blood do not deserve to blemish that which still clings to hope.
But there is something that Sabina has also forgotten, let herself forget, until now. She knew all along that the road would not be smooth, nor easy, nor kind– but convinced herself still that the end result was all that mattered. She let herself believe, in error, that nobility of belief and cause was enough to delude fate into casting its die favorably for her. In this unilluminated cell, reality and gravity at last pull Sabina back into their grasp– she remembers now what she had known all along, but let herself forget. If such a thing as fate exists, it will mete out her deserved sentence; nothing more and nothing less.
It is only right. This perpetual waking, too, is not unearned. It is only fair that Sabina lies awake upon the unyielding slab of a cot, the consequences of her actions rumbling up through the ground at her, never knowing if Nika is out there, breathing, alive. Her hands, bare, wind circles in the ends of her hair. It steadies her, that motion, keeps her occupied; for the alternative would be to know by her stillness that they are dirtied, and by extension to wonder if she did let Norea kill that student after all; and Sabina’s stomach wrenches to the burn of acid against the back of her throat and hot liquid stinging her palms–
And all the years she spent under Grassley hiss to her, with the patter of salt and iron upon the cell floor, that she deserves this.
–The next morning, breakfast is pushed through a slat in the door.
Oatmeal. Lukewarm.
Sabina looks at it– laughs. Laughs, and laughs, and laughs until her chest and gut both ache too much to eat it, were she to have the stomach for it anyway.