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Agony.
Hatred.
Powerlessness.
Poorly tuned piano keys playing a mockery of an ancient lounge tune, stabbing at her mind like countless sowing needles with every careless press of its rotting ivory keyboard.
The slow, somehow perpetual motion of the platform this ancient instrument was sat upon - giving her a slow, panning view of the equally rotting hotel lobby that has now become her makeshift prison.
And then, the chatter. The endless, ever-pointless chatter of her captors – flooding the unbearably humid air of this doomed city with a cascade of noise which only occasionally resembled something that could be considered meaningful speech. Most of the time, however, it only contributed to the all-encompassing torture existence had become for the past several weeks.
Bound and gagged like lamb to the slaughter, Lieutenant Commander Sark watched with vitriol as two of her captors, one EFF Lieutenant Pat “Lone Star” Mitchell and his cohort, one EFF Lieutenant Holden Backs, proceeded to defile the piano she had been rested on, having one of their usually surreal conversation with another Federation officer, the very same Cav Walker that had been giving her prison guards so much trouble. From what she could discern, it mostly concerned reaching the Orlando Space Center, the supposed wisdom of solving problems with overwhelming amounts of violence and “Lone Star”’s supposed musical training. Oh, and the possibility of Walker strangling her slowly there and then – an idea he had never failed to express at least once a day since they had taken her captive.
Obviously, the mixture of physical and mental anguish she found herself at all times made it difficult to focus on whatever the imbeciles were talking about at any given time – and so she didn’t, as she instead let her mind wander off: scheming escape plans, observing potential weaknesses, planning on what to do once back within the fold of the Earth Invasion Force...and other things, too. Personal things, the kind she reprimanded herself for thinking about in the middle of this life or death scenario she had now been thrust in for two weeks.
Time went by surprisingly quickly when she did that, enough to slightly startle her once something brought her back to reality. Often enough, it was the dull sting of a pool cue, the mild impact of an empty cream corn can or the unmistakable feeling of a piercing, hateful gaze locked onto her – often from Cav Walker.
Sometimes, however, it wasn’t. It was a relatively rare occurrence, but it happened – and sometimes it puzzled her.
This morning was one of such times.
The “Mobile Anchors”, or whatever this maniple of rogue Federation officers went by this week, was huddled by a fire, probably scrounging together some form of breakfast that went beyond whiskey and barbecue sauce. It certainly involved cream corn, because a first empty can had just bounced against her head, followed by the hooting and hollering of that “Lone Star” character.
Then, one of them raised from his seat and walked up to her. It was the older, quieter one – Lieutenant Commander Jack “Madgun” Gether. A callsign which betrayed a mostly calmer nature, the few times alcohol wasn’t in his system.
This morning seemed to be one of those times.
Without warning, he picked her up and set her on the floor next to him, slowly sliding a tray of “lunch” in her direction before untying her gag. He then sat still, staring at her for a few moments before finally speaking up.
“So, you feelin’ any chattier?”
Puzzled by such an unexpected question, the Zeon officer raised an eyebrow, before squinting at her captor as if trying to pierce through his form. All that did was burn the slogan written on his t-shirt into her brain. A damp, stained thing that other woman, Lieutenant Commander “Tiny Dancer” also wore under her uniform’s jacket.
It read “Cool Dudes at the Beach”.
Sark wanted to end it all, but she chose to reply instead.
“...why would I?”
Gether made a noise, something of a sigh. Then he turned his gaze to the group, eyeing someone Sark couldn’t see – mumbling something, before turning his attention to his prisoner.
“Well, somebody’s been taking care of ya. I figured being in better shape would have helped with that.”
So it was always at least two of them keeping watch at night.
She’d actually never noticed before, so she made a note to thank this particular fool once she had him by the throat during her upcoming escape. That said, she still needed a response for him – so she decided to put forward her genuine surprise, hoping her captor wouldn’t realize the importance of what he’d let slip out to her.
“Wait, how did you...”
The older man simply chuckled, his lips curling in a surprising mischievous smile. Like a schoolboy who’d just been told of a new and exciting cuss word to scribble under his desk.
“I hear you and Rast bicker over it every night. Well, mostly him. You make like...mouth noises, I guess - gag and all. Didn’t take him for that kinda guy, but I guess you guys get taught first aid too.”
Sark didn’t take him for that kind of person either.
“You know...he’s kinda green, but I reckon he’s got the best shot between us all.”
Private Rast Marco having the best shot at anything sounded like wishful thinking in the best of cases, but the Zeon officer couldn’t notice a kind of somber...sincerity in her captor’s words. She already knew him to be a fool, but something about this particular expression of foolishness was now picking at her brain with increasing intensity.
She waited a moment, watching as the enemy pilot downed a long sip of whiskey, before voicing her curiosity.
“...The best shot at what, pray tell?”
Lietuenant Commander Gether, in a typical display of Federation etiquette, let himself burp before letting out a contented sigh. Then he spoke up, the smell of alcohol tickling Sark’s nostrils like some kind of barbed feather.
“Saving himself.”
Silence fell between the two, and the Federation pilot scooted closer to his prisoner – beginning the much hated feeding ritual that Sark only let herself be part of as a means to extend her time on this Earth – and with it, her chances of escape.
If there was a silver lining to this specific instance, that was the fact that Jack Gether had at least made sure to clean the spoon he was now using to feed her “breakfast”. Some of his compatriots didn’t, and some even thought of it as humorous. Under Zeon rule, Sark would see that every single Federation citizen with a similarly uncivilized mindset would be put to forced labor until their joints exploded.
Then, she would shoot them in the head and kick them down a ditch.
Herself.
Every single one.
If anything, that odious brute Cav Walker had refused to even partake in this humiliation outright, stating he wouldn’t have been able to resist prying her eyes from her sockets with the aforementioned spoon if given enough time alone with her.
Lieutenant Sark appreciated his sincerity.
As quickly as it had began, “breakfast” was over – and busy as she’d been, fantasizing of endless mass graves filled with the corpses of her enemies, Sark barely noticed time passing by. However, as she focused back on her present situation, the Lieutenant noticed something strange about the killing fields lining her mindscape.
There was no rage to them anymore.
She was seething, every waking moment and most of her sleeping ones, but the scenes she’d began picturing to keep herself motivated, to keep that righteous anger burning inside, they’d all gone... grey. Their decaying vividness did less and less to distract her from the awful flavors of the spoiled Earthen slurry her captors enthusiastically passed off as “food”. In fact, the more she tried to focus – on the final goal, on her rightful throne, and her ultimate victory – the more she felt her tongue sting, the backwash of “breakfast” slithering in her palate like a venomous snake.
That’s when, without thinking, she spoke up – trying to catch her captor’s attention as he got up, his morning duty to the prisoner fulfilled.
“Gether.”
He didn’t even flinch, so she tried raising her voice – her tone raspy, and her throat hurting somewhat. Only an accurate medical evaluation back among her forces could truly enlighten her on how many disgusting Earth diseases she had probably caught during her period of captivity.
“GETHER!”
The Federation officer froze in place, side-eyeying her. He remained silent, but the cue was there: what is it?
“...May I have a sip?”
As barbaric as she considered this particular lot of Earthnoids to be, she realized Gether’s constant state of inebriation probably helped him process his circumstances a lot better – and, which is what actually interested her, probably made their ramshackle meals more tolerable to boot.
Madgun eyed his bottle, then his prisoner. Then his bottle again. Then, once again, his prisoner.
Sark sniffled – probably due to all the Earth diseases coursing through her, and definitely not to engender some mercy into the enemy combatant. The fact that it had produced that effect was a completely unrelated side-effect.
And so, Jack Gether sat back down in front of her, gently placing the bottle to her lips and slowly tilting it, letting the golden-brown liquid trickle into his enemy’s mouth with a surprisingly delicate touch. Sark could have almost sworn to have felt his thumb linger on her cheek, before swatting away such scandalous notion of lascivious fraternization from her clearly feverish mind.
Then, Jack Gether scooted back to where he’d been sitting during their previous exchange. He raised his bottle towards her in the mockery of a toast, and took a swig himself before addressing her once more.
“You’re welcome."
Sark let out a cough in response, not used to the burning of such a strong liquor – much stronger than the carefully-selected choice of wines she’d been raised on, back home.
On Side 6.
The fencesitting scum.
Very few people in the ranks knew that had been her birthplace, as she considered it a mark of great shame to her image as a warrior – a woman with a purpose, with an ideal, with a reason to fight and focus and live.
Her cover story, however…
She still cursed herself for it.
She’d only been 16 when she began spreading it around the Academy – when she began having her retainer bribe people to, little by little, forge her new personal details that would ultimately cut all ties with her hated birthplace. Her family never knew, nor they were ever notified – and she had no intention of coming back to them, spineless excuses for “spacenoids” that they were.
That said, choosing Luna as her cover story had been...a bout of teenage foolishness, one she’d never confessed to anyone. It didn’t particularly weigh on her, but she always wondered – would people mock her for it? Would they care? Would they find it righteous in the face of the Sixers and their criminal lack of conviction in the face of Earthnoid oppression?
Moved by something stirring in her chest, no doubt Earthen bacteria flourishing in the petri dish created by her captor’s choice of meals, Sark made a snap decision – knowing full well that, if anything went sideways, nobody truly loyal would believe the words of some lowlife “Feddies”.
“I’m not actually from Luna, you know?"
She spoke to Gether in a tiny voice, stripped of its usual bravado or seething hatred – as a lure, yes, but also from a place of relative sincerity. She did want him to listen, after all.
Wordlessly, her captor turned to her, tilting his head slightly in a silent “go on?”.
“That...well...that would be my favourite boxer’s birthplace. It’s a story nobody really remembers, hence why I went and uh...took his moniker, with it.”
Jack Gether scratched his beard for a few moments, before his eyes widened in genuine surprise.
“No shit, you mean uuh...fuckin’ Randall Moonfall? That fuckin’ weirdo?”
There was an uncanny nature to how much he took that information in stride – no questions about her real birthplace, nor about why she’d choose to reveal this information to him of all people. He genuinely sounded like he was taking her at face value – which, for all she’d seen, could have also been a trap. Still, already one foot too deep in this line of conversation, she decided to continue – and the words started flowing out from her lips with an increasing sense of relief.
Maybe she had, indeed, been somewhat starved for contact.
“...yeah, the very same."
Sark let herself chuckle.
“I know he wasn’t like, a big winner or anything, but I guess I liked how he carried himself.”
Gether shook his head in response, a tiny smile forming on his lips as well.
“He was a fuckin’ asshole, always biting off more than he could chew. Never got old to see him knocked into the pavement.”
Gether took another swig, and Sark questioned why the two of them were now having this kind of chat – a chat two old friends have at the bar counter, after not seeing each other for a long time. Still, the mix of pride in her chosen moniker, contact starvation and malignant Earthen diseases pushed her to continue – and she obliged it.
“...but he always rose back up, didn’t he?” Sark asked, her words dripping with an echo of youthful admiration.
“He did, him and that shit-eating grin of his.” was Gether’s answer, clearly having seen the man fight during the heyday of the Earthsphere Boxing Federation. Somehow, that relieved her – to know that someone else in this maniple of maniacs knew of the man she’d used to look up with starry-eyed adoration.
“Is that not admirable? Is that not what every warrior should strive to be?”
Something in that statement upset her captor, who once again looked away – at something, just out of her own line of sight.
“Again with the W-Word. Do you seriously not have anything else going for you?”
To know he wasn’t even willing to pronounce the word “warrior” upset Sark in return. What did that mean, for a soldier? To renounce the role given to them by history?
Weakness, she thought. That's what it meant.
“...well, what if I didn’t?”
Gether scooted closer to her, staring at her for a few moments before shifting back to his previous seat, groaning in frustration.
“That’d be sad, I guess.”
By now, the rest of the gang had long since put out the lobby’s bonfire, disappearing into the moldy hallways to procure food for the next day or pursue far less productive, far less sensible activities. What such activities could look like, was something Sark did not have the mental capacity nor will to picture, so she didn’t – focusing instead on the fact that Jack Gether had not left yet.
In fact, he looked like he’d been waiting for something the entire time – lazily waving “goodbye” to his squadmates as they left the room one by one. Him and Private Marco were presumably the only two left – and once him and Gether had exchanged mumbled words, Gether came back to her – sitting down in the exact same spot for the third time in this endless morning.
This time, it was Sark’s turn to be puzzled, as the older officer’s demeanor betrayed a sense of uneasiness. It was hard to read, as anything about that man was, but Sark could see hints of it – and the more puzzled she looked, the harder it became for him to hide it.
Until, suddenly, it happened.
“So, why Rast? Figured someone like you would be into bigger guys. I hear they’re more fun to beat on, if you’re into that sorta thing.”
Before the nature of the question had even the chance to set in, Lieutenant Commander Sark gracefully sidestepped its further implications with an answer as vague as it was, in all honesty, pretty earnest.
“It’s...it’s complicated. I’d rather not discuss it right now.”
Gether took another swig, from a fresh bottle this time, and rested the golden-brown bottle right between him and his prisoner.
“That’s alright, we’ve got nothing but time.”
Time which, indeed, passed – as slow and excruciating as it always did in her mockery of a gilded prison. Time in which Jack Gether occasionally alternated between further drinking with walking by the windows to urinate into the ocean below – ever a paragon of class, as all Federation officers seemed to be. Until, after twenty minutes or twenty years, he addressed her – a small tinge of impatience in his tone.
“So?”
“So what, exactly?”
“The blond twink thing. What’s up with that?”
Sark cursed herself for making him privy of her moniker’s secret, as this had clearly made him believe he was entitled to ask her whatever floated around his brutish mind.
Maybe, however...
She didn’t like the idea of complying with an enemy’s request to disclose the nature of her life’s most important experiences, but...maybe this particular story could serve her in other ways.
Another snap decision was made, and as quickly as she’d found herself trying to stamp out the seed of curiosity, she found herself pouring fresh water on it instead.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, anyway.”
There you go.
“I see. Hey, did I tell you about the time I threw a propane tank at a guy so hard he died on the spot, and then Copilot - that kid you killed - also shot that tank in mid-air, exploding him? Like, there was nothing left but a pair of legs and blood all over the walls. It was horrifying, and kinda badass.”
Huh?! - Sark found herself thinking and exclaiming at the same time, veritably stunned by Gether’s little anecdote.
“No?! What the-what does that have to do with anything?!”
“I’ve seen and done some crazy shit. I don’t think whatever gave you a twink kink is gonna phase me much.”
Fine, have it your way – Sark thought to herself, taking a deep breath and clearing her throat before beginning her own anecdote. If everything went the way she hoped, she could probably inflict severe psychological damage upon him – which was, for the record of her own sanity, the only reason why she was making him privy to this story.
“A boy I knew in the Academy. He was afraid of me, and I liked that. I liked him actually, and I figured I would...you know...court him, in my own way.”
“Court him “your way”. What does that look like, exactly?”
“Well I’d single him out any chance I got, and made sure other girls knew he was mine and nobody else’s. Made examples out of a couple of them. Broke a few teeth, a few noses, a rib or two when I got really heated.”
Sark caught herself sighing in satisfaction at the thought.
Gether was still as stone.
“There was this one girl who just wouldn’t give up, no matter how many times I’d send her to the infirmary. I still have a scar from when she actually got wise and began fighting back. She’d brought a pocket knife with her, almost gutted me there and then.”
When Gether spoke again, his voice carried a mix of uneasiness and...
“...what happened to her?”
“My father had her expelled, and I’ve never seen her since.”
“And...what happened to the boy?”
“He...well...he was there with her. Helped her drive the knife deeper in my stomach. The look in his eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen before: a sort of...manic rage. He was shaking the whole time, his hands wrapped around hers as she clumsily tore into me with that cheap pocket knife. The blade broke off at some point, so they just...collapsed, breathlessly. I can’t tell whether they were crying or laughing.”
“...so he was expelled too, I take it?”
“Yeah. I have never seen him since and...it’s been tearing at me ever since.”
...disappointment?
The Zeon officer couldn’t mistake it, despite her captor’s façade of grizzled apathy.
He was disappointed in her.
“...so it’s a revenge thing?”
How dared he?!
“What?! No! That’d be just...so pedestrian! Tch...”revenge thing”. I just...I want more. I need more. More of that ecstatic violence. I want someone to fight back. Someone like him: a meek, tender soul I can break, piece by piece, until all that’s left is the raw desire to break me in return.”
Her words came out with a sense of determination that was leaving her captor visibly disgusted – but Sark didn’t care. He wouldn’t get it. An Earthnoid wouldn’t get it. A male Earthnoid wouldn’t get it. Her yearning was something born from a higher place. A higher state of being. A delightful addiction born at death’s door, something no mere “soldier” could even conceptualize – let alone understand.
Only a warrior could.
“I want. A good. Fight.”
As soon as the Zeon officer fell silent - save for some stray, breathless giggles occasionally leaving her lips in the afterglow of her confession - Jack Gether stood up and reached for his holster.
He slid his sidearm from out of it, checked its chamber and pulled the cocking lever.
He stared at Lieutenant Commander Sark, pistol in hand, for a few, heavy moments.
He stared at the feverish, defiant thing squirming at his feet. He considered how kind it would have been of him to finally put an end to her misery. To usher this warrior to Valhalla or whatever psychopathic bullshit had been drilled into her brain by those Zabi thugs.
From where she was lying however, all Sark could see was a tired man staring at her with eyes full of sadness – before walking away, his pistol still in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.