Chapter Text
Before her eyesight fully left, Katejina’s last view of her life was of Uso in his gundam. The vibrations told her that the beam launcher had fired.
A loud rushing noise filled the Gottrlatan, the first sign that something had gone wrong. The red and pink mobile suit suddenly buckled.
Her cockpit shuddered and groaned. The feeling in her gut told her she was falling. Alarms blaring warned the now blind woman that her mobile suit was in critical condition.
For what felt like an eternity, the Gottrlatan fell from the Angel Halo. All the while, Katejina Loos rubbed at her face, trying desperately in vain to restore sight to her now blank eyes.
The Gottrlatan finally crashed into the snowy mountain where, minutes ago, she and Chronicle had dueled that brat, Uso Ewin.
The airbelt and magnetic points on her pilot suit kept her from being launched from her seat and crashing into the monitors. Despite the best efforts of Zanscare’s engineers, Katejina had still struck her head against her seat.
She couldn’t tell when she had woken up or even that she had fallen unconscious. Without sight, she couldn’t even tell if she was truly alive and not in some pitch-black hell.
Wait, she could feel the irritation of her eyes, they were getting dry. Even if she couldn’t see, she could still feel her own eyes blinking. The pain of her head and body after falling several hundred stories down.
She reached down towards her waist, feeling for the familiar touch of the Gottrlatan’s airbelt. She undid the safety device and tried to stand up, only to lose her footing and fall back into her seat.
Was the mobile suit on its back or its side? How could she tell? She reached for the buttons on the main monitor. Muscle memory kicked in, allowing her to ascertain the button that would open the cockpit.
Freezing air filled the cockpit. Katejina, using gravity and the cold air to navigate, clambered her way out of the remains of the Gottrlatan and face-first into a pile of snow.
Shivering, she stood up. Though her eyesight was abysmal, now that she was free from the cockpit of her wrecked mobile suit, she could just barely make out that it was bright on this cold, snowy mountain. The sun must be out.
She couldn’t sense Uso or anyone else around her. There were no sounds of battle, the slopes were quiet. Not being able to see, Katejina picked a direction and started walking, the snow crunching underfoot.
*
Stopping to take her breath, Katejina realized how doomed she would’ve been if she hadn’t been wearing a pilot suit. Designed for the extreme temperature fluctuations of space, the pilot suit was the only lifeline making her survival possible.
She regretted not having the helmet, her face felt severely numb now. Her ankle bumped into something, nearly tripping in the process.
Holding her hands out to get a feel, she appeared to have reached a boulder. She navigated her back to it, sliding down until she was sitting against it, a brief respite.
She could tell from how easier it was to walk now that she must be heading downwards. From what limited vision was left to her, she could tell that it was getting darker. Would she survive the night?
*
Katejina had slept uneasily, cold and hunger sapping at her remaining strength. Perhaps unwisely, thirst wasn’t a problem with all the snow around her. Simply grabbing a handful and licking at it kept her refreshed at the cost of making her colder.
Of course, despite the inherent risk that she’d get herself sick doing this, surviving another day was imperative. Standing up, Katejina did her best to get a sense for her surroundings.
She heard water! A river? If she followed it, she was bound to reach some manner of civilization eventually. Crunching through what seemed to be a forest, judging by the trees she kept walking into, she arrived at the river.
The ground was different here. Reaching down, she felt the area around her. She couldn’t exactly tell what was different, maybe just the water close to it.
Though she had a vague sense that she was going downwards, she had to make sure. Holding her breath, she slowly dipped her gloved fingers into the river. The river was going downstream then. Getting to her feet, Katejina resumed her trek.
*
Hunger had led to migraines and a general feeling of exhaustion. She awoke on the second day of her travels wishing she had died in battle instead of suffering like this.
On the third day of her travels, she received a boon. As the riverbank crunched underneath her, she felt something. A twig snapped to her left. She stopped moving immediately, her hand moving to her sidearm.
Heavy snow crunching… too heavy to be a person. Breathing, deep. Snapping branches told her that it was an animal eating. Lifting her pistol, she focused. Shoot there a flash in her head told her.
*BLAM*
The creature dropped instantly. Katejina stumbled through the snow towards her first meal in three days. Dropping to her knees in the snow, she started feeling the outline of the animal.
Heavy fur and antlers. A deer or moose? Edible at least. But perhaps not for long. She had to work fast! She dragged the beast towards the river, her tired body feeling like it was about to give out.
Panting, she reached and unsheathed her knife. Without sight, she couldn’t tell if Uso’s blood was still on it. She dipped it lightly in the river, just to make sure.
She then started the slow, laborious process of skinning a rather large animal. Though she had no experience with a task like this, having grown up in a city, the process came to her naturally. Maybe that’s what it meant to be a Newtype......
Having skinned the creature, after removing the bullet from its eye socket of course, Katejina started washing the creature’s body and skin in the river. The skin first, to lay the rest of the meat on. After finishing, she started trudging her way towards the forest the animal came from.
Gathering wood, she did her best to start a fire with which she could cook her meal. After gathering what she hoped was a sufficient enough pile of wood, she picked up a rock and, using the blunt edge of her knife, struck the rock.
After a couple of tries, the sparks finally yielded, as she could tell from the smoke, a small fire. Gathering dried grass, she fed the small fire. Eventually, she fed slightly more to it until it grew.
Once she was satisfied by the size of the fire, informed by the amount of heat, she left, both to gather her food and more wood.
Using her knife, she sharpened sticks into skewers she could use to cook them. Though a fair amount of them had been charred, she ate her fill. Night had fallen by this point.
Sleep did not come easy that night. Every couple of hours the cold would wake her up, the fire having started to die out, prompting her to gather more wood. This went on and on until morning.
After scarfing down more of the meat, she washed the animal skin in the river and dried it out by the fire. Once she was satisfied by the warmth and sure it wasn’t damp, she fashioned the fur into a pouch to carry the rest of the meat and, once again, resumed her march.
*
After another five days of marching, she finally reached what could be considered civilization. A small village. There weren’t any people there, any people alive at least, she had trampled over a couple of bodies.
From feeling around, she could tell that most of the houses had crumbled. After scavenging around, she found civilian clothes. Now wearing several more layers over her pilot suit, she started searching for food.
She found a decent amount of canned foods and a can-opener. Scrounging around, Katejina almost cried after discovering that an item she couldn’t decipher from shape alone turned out to be a fire starter.
After finishing a can of what seemed to be green beans, she resumed searching the houses around her, after putting the rest of the cans and the fire starter in a backpack she found.
The best find, after more cans of food, was a working wappa. After testing it, she turned on the auto-compass and started down what she assumed was a road. She didn’t know where the compass was set to but hopefully there would be people there.
*
She had lost track of how many days had passed. Once the cans ran out, she hoped she’d reach another town or village before she started starving.
After another week, she hunted down another animal with her pistol. She ate very little, now used to rationing her food, and wrapped the rest of meat in the animal skins.
*
After waking from the usual bed she made every night she spent on the wappa, Katejina started counting the amount of bullets she had on her. Yawning, she moved the blankets away. She was having more nightmares lately.
After what must’ve been at least two months, she was now down to three bullets. She had a spare magazine at least, but once that ran out, she’d be screwed.
After wrapping the blankets around her, she got onto her feet. She wasn’t sure what to feel about her dreams. They were about things she didn’t want to think about. Uso and Chronicle….
But, they let her see, she didn’t know if she’d ever have that privilege again. She turned on the wappa’s auto-compass, still unsure where it would lead, and continued on her way.
*
She had another nightmare. This time about her father, Uwig and the death and destruction she saw. She had to go there. She wanted to die there…..
*
From the sound of her footsteps, Katejina could tell she was standing on solid ground now. Snow had stopped falling.
She had a single bullet left now. She had not eaten in days. The last bullet would be for herself, she decided.
As the wappa hovered on, the sound of a river grew closer. So did the sound of a voice. A young girl who she asked for directions to Uwig.
The girl said she’d give her an auto-compass. She had a familiar voice.
There was rustling near her. Someone else? “Hewwo!” A toddler?
“Hello, what’s your name?”
“Karyu!”
“Hmm, that’s nice.”
“Karlmann!”
Snow had started falling again. Tears welled up in Katejina’s eyes.
Oh. Karlmann. The baby she had rescued from Uwig. That voice was Shakti. A familiar prickling in her mind. Was Uso here?
“Here you go.”, The girl, who she now realized was Shakti, inserted a new auto-compass into her wappa.
“Thank you.” Shakti had to have known who she was.
"Are you okay?" Shakti asked her. She wasn't. The tears were frigid against Katejina’s skin.
"Who isn't sad when winter comes?" Katejina lied. She was good at lying.
The wappa started up again, the auto-compass guiding her back home. As she floated away from Shakti, she passed another wappa.
The familiar pricking in her mind. That must’ve been Uso. She couldn't fight back her tears.
*
She hadn’t thought about what she would do if she met Uso in Kasarelia. The wappa stopped. She must be here, back at Uwig.
She almost tripped and fell down a rather steep drop. She had nearly forgotten how damaged the city was.
She stopped inside what felt like a house. She set up her bed, and sat against a wall. As good a place to die as any other.
A rumbling noise woke her from her nap. A plane? She got up against a wall, her pistol drawn. She felt a familiar prickling in her head. No, it couldn’t be. The plane’s engine stopped.
“Anyone here?!?”, a familiar voice called out. It was Uso….what should she do? The sound of footsteps was drawing closer.
She holstered her gun. If Uso wanted to kill her, she’d let him. She heard footsteps outside the open doorway to the house she was in, the door was missing.
As he got closer, the odd sensation in her brain grew. “Miss Katejina?” It was him.
“Uso.”
“You’re alive.”
His voice sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was happy or angry about that. She turned her head towards him.
“Your eyes, they’re...different.”
“I can’t see, USO!” She snarled. Hatred. Hatred filled her. The same anger she felt when he stood there in the Gundam, mocking her.
“ YOU did this to me!”
“Your own hatred blinded you, Miss Katejina.”
She had nothing to say. That was one of the things she hated most about him. That he acted like he was better than her, smarter than her.
“Why are you here? What do you want?” She heard him moving. No footsteps, so he wasn’t walking.
“If you stay here, you’re going to die.”
“I want to die, Uso. There’s nothing for me anymore. I can’t see! I don’t have a home! A family! NO ONE!..........I don’t have anything. I could’ve been a princess of Zanscare. Now I’m just…..”
“I don’t want you to die. Come with me, you don’t have to stay here. You can still live a full life, Miss Katejina.”
“Why should I? I hate you, Uso.”
“I hate you too!” Uso finally sounded angry.
“You killed so many people!” He went silent and took a breath. “If you wanted to die, you should’ve done that at the Angel Halo. If you really wanted to die, you wouldn’t have made it here.
“..........okay, Uso.” She held her hand out. After a couple of seconds, Uso helped her stand up. She bundled up her sheets and blankets. “What do I do? Where am I gonna go?”
“You….can stay with me and Shakti. You can share a room with Ms. Marbet or Shakti, if that’s okay?”
“It’s better than staying out here.” Uso wasn’t sure if Katejina’s response was a question or not.
Katejina held her hand out so Uso could guide her. A year ago, Uso would have done anything to get her to hold his hand.
But he wasn’t the same person. And Katejina wasn’t either. He led her to the V2’s core fighter. He pushed her into the cockpit first before getting in himself. “I’ll come back for your Wappa. You ready?”
“Yeah.” The sensation of flying but not being able to see gave Katejina a severe case of motion sickness. She clung desperately to the back of Uso’s seat, trying not to throw up.
She knew the journey couldn’t have been long, but it felt like an eternity. Thankfully, the core fighter did eventually land before Katejina emptied her stomach.
Uso lept from the cockpit and moved the main seat forward so Katejina could extract herself from the plane. As she groped around, attempting to feel her way out, she tripped and nearly fell several times.
“C’mon, it’s okay, I’ve got you”, Uso encouraged. Using her senses to feel where Uso was, she fell hands forwards into his arms. They both felt a terrible sense of deja vu.
Katejina still remembered the satisfaction of her knife stabbing into him. Uso still had a scar where she had literally backstabbed him.
Katejina took deep breaths, trying to calm her nausea from the trip. She wasn’t sure if Uso’s hand on her back was helping.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Uso held her hand and led her towards his house. He wasn’t sure how Shakti and Marbet would feel about Katejina. He hadn’t asked them. He definitely should have.
He opened the door. “Ms Marbet! Shakti!”