Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
It was an odd feeling being reintegrated into Bretonian society, far from the war that continued to plague the rest of the House. There wasn't really any use dwelling on the past like he had done so many times before, one would guess that he was actually fortunate enough to be considering himself alive even after all the hardships he had faced getting to this point in time. With a deep breath and a slow sigh, he leaned back on the bench looking down at his splayed out hand, an engagement ring wrapped around the ring finger - a reminder of what life could have been.
The ring served as a memory. Of past lovers, of his service within the Armed Service, of the men and women he fought side-by-side with while fighting a resistance on Leeds, the friends he made within the Liberty Navy. All of it was a nightmare that plagued him like Gallia plagued Bretonia, and if he had a choice to do it all over again? Of course. He was stubborn like that. A reckless hotshot pilot with a chip on his shoulder and a sense of undying loyalty to a cause that was... hollow. If anyone who knew him prior to breaking would tell you that he had lost sight of who he was, and that was the reason why he found himself in darkness - always trying to do what he thought was the right thing to make it back to the light.
He drew in a long and hot breath, pushing himself to his feet and taking a moment to slip the ring off of his finger. His hardened eyes focused now on the granite wall before him, with a plaque that read: "In memory of those who perished on November 29th, 819 A.S." He approached the podium on which the plaque was situated, and placed the ring down. "I'm so, so very sorry." He mumbled, "What I had done can never be forgiven. It should have never happened the way that it did, and for that... I am sorry." With that he removed his hand from the ring and slowly withdrew from the podium.
This was his ritual. Every day for the past few months - rain or shine - he would come out to this memorial, leaving something behind to commemorate the dead, sometimes it was flowers other times it was small trinkets. Did it help? A little bit... it made a small part of him remember that he was human, despite being considered a monster in some peoples eyes. His name had thankfully been dragged through enough mud that he was considered a thing of the past. Bretonian's had more to worry about now than getting a chance to put a few punches into someone who was once considered a hero. Fights he had allowed them to win, on multiple occasions.
He let out a sigh as he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his old flight jacket and turned on his heels away from the memorial. He slowly began making his way along the sidewalk, leaving the memorial and the park behind, and he wasn't in any hurry to get anywhere in particular. The city was alive and bustling around him, a couple of squads of recruits were making their way downtown, no doubt having just gotten off of a shuttle from the Norfolk - probably taking a short weeks shore-leave before they're shipped out towards the front. Grass recruits for the meat grinder, the thought made him frown as young men and women marched past him. A draft was recently placed upon the populace and many quickly quit pursuing their dreams in order to secure their homes from an invading enemy - much like he had done when the Kusari Imperial Navy invaded. His thoughts interrupted as a young man bumped into him, he quickly and quietly apologized, then thanked the cadet for his service before he carried on with his way.
Even though he was of age for being drafted, he never received a draft letter - and his only guess was that the Armed Forces didn't want to risk putting him in the seat of a combat ship again. Hell, not even the Privateer's would take him due to what he had done during his military career, and they were the lowest of the low. Or so he had thought, regardless - at the moment he was warily happy that they wanted to keep him as far away from the conflict as possible, and even if he did receive a draft letter... he would prefer being in jail than placed in a cockpit again.
With no destination in mind, he continued to make his way down the street.
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
Music blasted around the bar as he sipped quietly on his beverage. His face was cold and expressionless as his eyes held the view of the holo-vision before him. The feed was thankfully drowned out as he idly stared at the flashes of images, a news report showing the statistics of the war with the Gauls, and the newest theater that had opened up recently in the Omega systems. The last thing he would have expected - corporate and neutral entities declaring war on the House that's in a desperate position, though the moves to annex specific systems and stations made sense in the grand scheme of things. In a way it reminded him of his service, the thought of which forced him to take another sip of his bland tasting ale, forcing the thought once more to the back of his mind.
His gaze eventually shifted from the futile news reports, and slowly began wandering across the bar filled with people wanting to escape from the normalcy of what was essentially the beginning of the end. The universe, in his opinion, was growing more and more desperate for a means to an end. He's seen protests and riots in the streets in the past few weeks, all from desperate people trying to grasp for the life that once was. The constant state of war, the constant threat of suddenly finding hostile troops landing in the streets. Cambridge wasn't as safe as it use to be, enemies were closing in from all sides, and if he ever had any intention of packing what little he owned, where would he go? Transport ships leaving for Rheinland were most likely being stopped by Rheinland authorities and turned away, or shot down by IMG and Corsairs, and getting to Liberty? Out of the question.
Besides the meager funds he had left wouldn't allow him to leave Cambridge anyways, and it forced him to get a part time job just to keep up with the rent on the apartment he was staying at. He brought the mug up to his lips and tried to take another sip, but much to his dismay, it was empty. A sigh followed as he sat the mug down, pushing it slightly away from him. "Jim," He called out over the music, raising his hand in the air. "Can I get another refill? The same thing would be fine." The Barkeep gave a curt nod before disappearing into the back.
As he waited, he slumped back into his chair and drew in a deep breath. His attention turned to focus on the people in the bar, many were young - full of life, a couple were around his age who seemed to be drowning their worries out just like he was, and others were wearing partial uniforms of the Police Authority and Armed Forces alike. Eventually his surveying of the room ended on a small group of hooligans who were being rather rambunctious, they were properly either Privateers or Buccaneers. That was kind of the beauty about how the war was going, different ways of life mixing together with barely any issues between the others. A small sense of unity in the dire times. Normally there would have been a bar fight or two while the various parties butted heads.
Eventually Jim approached the table and sat down another full mug of ale. "Keep this up, Austin, and I'm going t' have t' charge ye rent."
Austin shrugged it off and hoisted the new mug up. "That's why I'm sticking with the cheap stuff. To be able to pay you for whenever you decide to charge me. Besides, it's not like you owe me anything either."
"Yer right. It's not like ye saved my life and that of plenty more folks or anythin' all those years ago durin' that terrorist attack that practically made ye the face of the House." Jim shook his head disapprovingly and promptly left the table that Austin was seated at. "I... told you to never bring that up, I was just doing my bloody job." Austin mumbled against the mug as he watched Jim once again disappear into the back of the bar, he took a deep swig and slammed the mug down onto the table, pushing it away he laid his head down against his outstretched arm, staring down at the table.
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
"Austin Goodman," a voice called, in tandem with the telltale scraping of a bar stool across the floor to his blindside. "Is this the piss they serve to war heroes these days?" He inquired, tilting the mug towards him and taking a sniff, hocking up a nice thick loogey and ejecting it with pinpoint accuracy into Goodman's pint of whatever it was that people who liked a little beer with their water drank. "Barkeep!" the newcomer shouted from across the counter. "A Taddy Porter for our mutual friend here, a real man's drink for a real man, and another for myself." He proclaimed, placing a credit chip on his thumb and tossing it into the air, slamming his fist upon it to reveal it had landed RFID side down. "Tails, bollocks. Looks like the next round is on you."
"Lieutenant Rick Holden, sir." the pilot introduced himself, donning an identical service jacket to Goodman's own, an 814 to 818 run. "I saw action on the Tau front, sir. We all looked up to you. How'd a low place like this find itself around a high man such as yourself?" he asked, surveying the grungy interior of the Lounge until the barkeep returned with their drinks, one pint each of the hearty aphotic brew.
"Seems it's your lucky day, Austin." Jim said with a hearty chuckle, picking the credit chip off the counter and twirling it between his fingers. "This man just paid off your whole tab."
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
"Austin Goodman." Someone called out, which was immediately followed by the scraping of a bar stool. This commotion caused him to sit up, almost expecting to be met with a fist to his face, not a common occurrence thankfully, but one he was pretty wary of should it happen. He frowned shortly after watching the man hock a loogey into his drink that he was seldom enjoying. "If I had any fight in me, that would have been the biggest mistake you could've made." He muttered aloud as the man rambled on to the barkeep about more drinks. Austin then slowly pushed the now contaminated bland ale away from him just as Jim sat down a Taddy Porter in front of him.
"First and foremost, Lieutenant. I'm not a war hero. The men and women who died out there, and continue to die out there, they are the war heroes. The rest of us poor bastards are nothing more than cowards." He replied sternly, leaning back into the chair and clasping his hands together on the table mere inches away from the porter. His gaze met that of Lieutenant Holden's as the Lieutenant carried on his commentary about the Tau front, and the grungy bar locale they currently found themselves in. "Secondly, it's a helluva long story 'bout how this place came to be around me. But the gist of it is was that Jim here built it around me while I was sleeping off a cardamine high, right where you're standing." His words were laced with sarcastic vitriol, but as he continued his tone changed. "Though if you want the truth. Its the only damned place left where people like you wouldn't find me, and now I don't even have that. So thanks for paying my tab. I guess." He finished reaching forwards for the porter and taking a swig.
"Now, what is it going to take to make you leave me alone?"
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
Rick frowned. His memory of Austin was that of a rising star within the Armed Forces during the Tau conflict against Imperial Kusari. What was this about cardamine, and hiding in shady dives? Still, he had to acknowledge there was an eight year gap between then and now. He had no way of knowing what had become of this once great man in the time since his fighter was shot down near Harris. Besides, this would hardly be the first time something Rick once knew had changed, and people were changeable things to begin with. He took a swig of his porter, mustering up the closest thing he knew to empathy.
"Sorry mate, I've been out of the game a short while." He said, parting his hair and tapping a long scar from brow to back. "Got my head torn open when my Templar decided to kick the bucket in '17, had me in a coma for eight years. I woke up a few months before the blitz, and there hasn't really been..." He considered his next words carefully, his last desire to incite the wrath of a broken man with a blood alcohol level no doubt steering a course towards permanent liver damage. "There hasn't been a whole lot of familiarity, since I came to." He finished softly, taking another sip of his beer.
"Cowards, though, if you'd called me that any other day I'd have put you on the floor. Lucky for you I just returned from the Omega front after gunning down miners by the dozen, so I'm not altogether clear on what it is I'm even fighting for right now. I suppose that's how someone like myself ends up in a place like this." He sighed and took another swig, beginning to outpace Austin at this rate. "That's right, don't let the jacket or the TBI fool you, I reupped as soon as medical cleared me last yeaaa... the hell?" He muttered, turning his head toward the holo-screen.
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
The holo-vision suddenly flickered to a news flash. The image of a
poster filled the air and receded back to the upper right corner, giving way to the anchor-man of the local network.
"Good evening. In the spirit of delivering a more cheerful set of news, Admiral Kaze Dagon of the Bretonian Armed Forces is to wed Victor Steiner. The Royal House already set to comment on this wedding in the next.. The voice was drowned by the music, that had just increased the tempo.
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
Nesrin kept her eyes down. That was the beauty of intermediate crowds - hunch, move with purpose, and you could blend Charles himself into an active bar.
What was it about spacers and acohol? Why gravitate around self-destruction? Beyond the possibility of intoxicated outreach, It was a method of sacrificing time together. The small unspoken silences that happened anywhere where the conversations blended into the whirr of human machines. The war had taken everyplace down to the margins in clientele, the cracks of almost-apocalyptia could be tasted, even here, where the lights were still coloured and the delusions of peacetime could be found under the tables if you dug far enough.
"Kaistocracy!" A man with a foot less on her yelled at the projector, to no small patter of agreement. The news. "Bunch of' toffers. Where were they when Harris fell, 'eh? Behind the lines, leading from the rear?"
She realised he was yelling at her, zeroed in the haze of steady alcohol substitutes and. An expectant search for bias confirmation. Perhaps he was trying to grandstand, out of the A-to-X misplay that it might help him get laid. He was buggering up the ambience. She took a look-over at him and had him figured for a civillian, although that wasn't evidence of anything. She'd divided herself by several degrees of separation without wearing a uniform anymore - it was a distinction that undermined her. Selectivity, Nesrin.
Nesrin wetted her lips. Drymouthed, she squeezed out of her nose, and rounded on the Loudmouth. "You'd really want a married couple with a gun? Look at their photos; They'd kill each other before they consummate."
He enjoyed that - bias confirmation. Good. She'd yanked a giggle out of him. She took opportunity to order herself a drink before he could dive in and fill the void, a dark, Tughnberry cider, sour enough to blind a highland cow, and downed it till she was swallowing air alone.
You drink and it does nothing. Look at you. All simulacra no stimulation. Thunder, no lightning, friend.
Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
She scanned around the bar for anyone scarred - whilst this wasn't front line bar, this was still Bretonia - everyone was some variation of psychiatric paitent, patiently waiting for the world to come crashing down around them as it had near everywhere else. Even the famous neon was gradually winking out; the saturation had ramped all the cosmopolitan verve out of the comfortably borgeoise Bretonian nightlife that Cambridge used to be renowned for; a land of cults and creatives had drowned in uniform and machine-tooled crying. A night to remember for students and the saccharine had morphed into dead cold hysterics. She searched around the shadows someone who'd lost the colour in their eyes rather than tweaking out in rage, someone who wasn't going to force her into being anything more than another set of shoulders in the cracked vinyl darkness of barely carrying-on Bretonian hulk.
Breathing made her shiver. She'd forgotten that inpulse. Like too much coffee, too few endorphins.
Bingo. Two confused looking men conversing in unsteady voices. They wern't leaning in; not loud enough to be chummy, not quiet enough to be comfortable. No money was being exchanged, so they wern't about to screw or hit the cardi burner, even if the blond one had a jaw large enough to look good on a Baden beach. Strangers. She pressed herself up and tried to draw one whole of Carinea's Own Royal Inches off her height when she wrapped on the table between them, dragging her empty mug with her. "Hey." She tried to smile out a qualifier, but it just came as taught, strangled thing. "Don't mean to bother either of you, I just... don't want to get hit on tonight. You mind if I sit here and pretend that I've got wingmen?"
She shrugged. "Tolerate my silence and I'll buy you a round. It's all blood money in the end."
Neon Lights Lounge
Austin dwelled on his own thoughts as he listened to Holden's comments, it was like a knife that twisted into his own gut. He shook head before knocking back his own porter. Rick and Austin were both soldiers of the same pedigree, and this was how he treated someone who had respect for him without knowing the damnable things that he ended up doing, eventually leading to his own fall? It was a rare sight to see, certainly, and this Lieutenant didn't deserve the lashing he had received, Austin knew that and swallowed what little shallow pride he had left, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize that had happened. Just know I'm not the hero you used to look up to, and I've done things that I regret doing, and every passing day is a struggle to keep those memories at bay while trying to honor the ones who I've failed." He offered a brief apologetic smile, but it faded away almost immediately as he continued, "It seems you're dealing with something similar right now with what's happening in the Omega's... trust me, taking the life of an armed civilian isn't enjoyable, but this is war, and we have our orders. It only gets harder from here." Austin thought it was ironic that he included himself in the statement, he wasn't a currently serving soldier - despite wearing the flight jacket.
He was cut off by Holden's attention suddenly shifting towards the feed that began playing a breaking news story, "Of course she's still kicking around..." Were the first words to come out of his mouth, "You're currently serving, any idea who the hell this Victor Steiner guy is? You might be more in the loop than I when it comes to the current inner workings of the Armed Forces, being an officer and all." He finished, nodding over at the feed as it blinked over towards a well timed recruitment advertisement for the Armed Forces. As he turned his attention back towards Holden a woman slid between them at the table, which caught him somewhat by surprise as she softly spoke; "Hey, don't mean to bother either of you, I just.... don't want to get hit on tonight. You mind if I just sit here and pretend that I've got wingmen?"
"No need to waste your credits on either of us, lass. But I don't have an issue with you sitting here, even if it's startin' to become a little crowded for my tastes. How about you, Lieutenant? Mind playing wingman for a lass in this hellhole?" Austin replied to the woman, and to Holden, sliding his chair a good arms length away from her before returning to a leaning position on the table. He raised his hand over towards the barkeep and signaled for another round of Tabby Porters, and made a gesture for an additional one for the woman that had just joined them.
Neon Lights Lounge
"You don't know Victor?" Rick raised an eyebrow, trying to gauge whether or not Austin was serious. "Sure you haven't been in a coma yourself? He's the Director of the Intelligence Service, Fleet Admiral's brother." He explained, before turning his attention to the commotion over the tasteless piece of propaganda aired a moment before, one voice rising above the others. "Kaistocracy!" Someone exclaimed, presumably the one flipping the bird, as that's about all of him Rick could see of the stout man in the crowd. "Bunch of' toffers. Where were they when Harris fell, 'eh? Behind the lines, leading from the rear?"
"The bloody hell is a Kaistocracy, anyway..?" Rick asked, instinctively placing his hand on his sidearm in case the real toffer in the room attempted to escalate things. A few moments passed in awkward yet comfortable silence broken only by swigs of beer, and the clack of mugs set down upon the counter until a woman approached the pair of soldiers. The irony of her request, one for wingmen, was not lost on Holden in the least. "No need to waste your credits on either of us, lass. But I don't have an issue with you sitting here, even if it's startin' to become a little crowded for my tastes. How about you, Lieutenant? Mind playing wingman for a lass in this hellhole?" Austin asked him, sliding his chair over to make room.
"Do I have a choice?" He replied, sizing up the woman who had stepped in between them. Something seemed familiar about her, but he couldn't quite place it. "And where'd you get the idea I wasn't trying to hit on anyone tonight?" Rick asked, still eying her a little more intently than was probably comfortable. "Where the hell do I know her from?" He wondered, rapping his fingers softly against his pint of beer.