2023-03-29: Mauviette

• Cutscene: Mauviette
• Cast: Lark Straye
• Where: X Point
• Date: 0097 03 29 (And Several Weeks Earlier)
• Summary: What happened to Lark after the Gwennangorn crew was split up?

---

DECEMBER 0096

When the crew of the Gwennangorn had been called back after Captain Aiden's actions, Lark had assumed the worst.

They know who I am.

So when they'd picked up her and her MSA-0120, Lark simply... vanished. A deserter to the Federation.

It had triggered a serious look into her background. Most of the records on Lark Straye were missing, because she was Neo-Britannian, and Neo-Britannia had escaped to the stars - there was simply no way to get to those records.

But there were the signs of hasty electronic edits to Lark Straye of Londo Bell's identity, and they'd found out that she was not Lark Straye at all. Someone eventually turned up a lucky picture from a fundraising event that happened to have the Strayes in it. The real Strayes, including the real Lark Straye - Neo-Britannian daughter of a wealthy family, who Londo Bell's Lark Straye didn't resemble all that much.

Someone had hacked 'Lark Straye' an identity by stealing her name and numbers, but the Federation hadn't been able to find out who, and as the war with ZAFT hit a tipping point, nobody had the time for one pilot in Londo Bell who hadn't been able to steal any secrets - there were none on the Gwennangorn to steal.

The official line from Federation Intelligence is that 'Lark Straye' must have been a spy, probably from ZAFT. And that was, for the moment, that.

---

EARLY JANUARY 0097

Lark had, without really meaning to, found her way to the X Point.

It was appropriate, once she thought about it. It was a place where remnants of the old war went to be forgotten until someone dug them up.

There were crews of scrappers and Vultures here, but - critically - none of them cared who she was. None of them asked her questions she couldn't answer about herself; there was a certain amount of anonymity that was expected, even respected. Nobody even asked about the mask.

She'd been asked more questions about the mobile suit she'd landed with; fortunately, 'it was a test model I dug out of an abandoned warehouse' was an answer they understood, and that's as far as it went. Lark might be worried about people trying to steal it, but she wasn't worried they'd pin the word 'deserter' on her - or if they did, they might not care.

Maybe this was somewhere she could finally fit in.

---

LATE JANUARY 0097

Lark didn't fit in.

You'd think that being a Vulture would be, if not easy, at least simple. Find something old, dig it up, sell it. It would take hard work, but the actual steps weren't complex.

Except she wasn't good at any of them. Finding things was impossible. She probably would have done better on a more recent battlefield, but she wasn't willing to do that. Three times she had found something, but in one case it had clearly already been picked over, in another it had someone actively working on the site, and in the third...

In the third she'd found a body. Someone dead - a Vulture rather than a soldier. As best she could tell they had died years ago trying to excavate a Guza, a unit very few people would have recognized as anything. But she did, because she'd piloted one.

She'd piloted this one.

She'd found the place in the cockpit where she'd put a sticker, because she was still a kid: a puffy cloud and jagged lightning bolt, though she didn't remember why other than it was the sticker that she'd had at the time. The sticker was still there, hidden down underneath the seat, where you could only see it if you climbed in while being short and ducked your head a certain way. These days, even though she wasn't all that tall, she had to really get low to even spot it. She wasn't supposed to have done it, and to the best of her knowledge nobody had ever noticed. Surely they must have, over the years, when the cockpit seat had maintenance done... but it was still there.

Lark had no idea how it had gotten here. She'd had the Guza taken away from her and replaced with a mass-produced Qubeley before she'd ever gotten into live combat. Which was a joke, because she had not been any good with the Qubeley, but had been - well, 'skilled' was pushing it, but 'decent' worked - with the Guza. Someone else had piloted the Guza into battle, and she could no longer remember who. Had she ever been told? They hadn't left anything in the cockpit that might have identified them, nothing but her own lightning bolt.

Someone had gotten the Guza partially free from where it had been buried, and died for it when its shield apparently fell off and onto their little Jeep, with them inside. And then time had happened, years at least. The Guza must have been here for at least five years, and she had no idea who had brought it here or why. Nobody living did.

Lark spent a lot of time thinking about that.

---

FEBRUARY 0097

Lark survived.

She had buried the long-lost Vulture, and then she'd used her newer unit - the nameless MSA-0120 - to excavate the older, bigger machine.

It still ran, more or less. It needed some maintenance, some of which she could do and some of which she could not, even if she had the gear to do it with, which she didn't; it needed equipment, as it was down to just its clawed shield (which was no longer attached to its arm) and the beam guns that were supposed to be hidden under the shield, now exposed. Despite that, it could stand up and walk around and everything else it needed to be able to do for her to be sure it could be fixed.

A rare prototype Mobile Suit, still operating. Unusual enough to be desired as a historical piece, but with common enough descendants to have people who understood the thing. If she was actually a Vulture, it would have been a motherlode. She could have sold it for enough money to live on.

But she couldn't bring herself to sell it, even as she slowly ran out of supplies and money to get more. She stayed alone, in the desert, with nothing but her thoughts and the occasional trip to a Vulture camp for company.

---

EARLY MARCH, 0097

Lark still couldn't bring herself to sell anything.

She moved back to the Vulture camp, where she settled in. Even Vultures will buy food if there's food to buy, and pay someone to cook it... and that person was not Lark, because she had never learned to cook anything that did not involve a microwave.

But Lark could wash dishes. She could maintain the bikes and Jeeps that were common transportation for people here who weren't hauling anything. She could do odd jobs. That was all she had left.

She drifted from one to another, not really caring what she did. If menial labour was all she could do, menial labour is all she would do.

---

MARCH 22, 0097

It was her birthday.

Not her own, but the only person who wasn't one of her sisters who had ever been kind to her. (Even some of her sisters weren't.) Until she met her, nobody cared about her as anything but a tool. As anything but a weapon, and a failed weapon at that.

So after she'd woken up, Lark had gone back out to where her two Mobile Suits were kept, where the Guza had been buried, and pulled out something that she showed nobody but the desert sky. A little closed-up folding picture frame, small enough to fit in her hand, and for the first time since last March, she carefully opened it. If she damaged it, she would never be able to replace it.

The single picture inside showed two women - girls really; one was maybe fifteen or sixteen, the other a year or two older. The older of the two was tallish, blonde, attractive in a cute sort of way. The younger was short, skinny, with messy orange-red hair cut short, almost androgynous in her build and clothes choice. The blonde was grinning broadly, one arm around the redhead, who was smiling just a little and looked more surprised to be having a good time than anything else. Close friends, certainly. The background looked to be a colony transit zone, with directions to ship boarding behind them.

Lark ran her thumb over the picture. It had been taken in 0093, some time before Axis. She remembered it clearly, but she stared at it as if she was trying to memorize it anyway. Behind her mask, her eyes watered.

And then she did something she never did, except when she was going to sleep (and sometimes not even then). She reached up behind her, fumbling for the catches, and undid the multiple connectors on her mask. It pulled out slightly, allowing her to hook her fingers under it and pull it away, blinking in the change of light.

"...I'm sorry. I know you told me to live a good life, but... I don't know how. I'm going crazy in the desert, and even here I can't run away from my own past." She kept her voice low even though there was nobody around for miles and miles. "I ran away from Londo Bell because I thought they were coming for me, and then when I realized they weren't, there was nowhere left for me. So now I'm a deserter on top of being a coward."

"I just... I don't know what to do. I don't have any money. I'm working in a Vulture camp but..." It's hardly living. "...I screwed it up too. I stole your name and I drove it into the dirt, hiding behind a mask. Maybe it's better if I go back to war. To Zeon, even. It's the only thing I know. Every time I try to do something else, I just fuck it up. I couldn't even save you."

She trails off for a long moment, before: "We should have been able to do this together, but you're gone. It should have been me, and not you. ...I miss you, Lark," Puru Six said, before lowering her head.

Several minutes later, Puru Six very carefully closed the picture back up, locking it. She held her mask in her hands for some time, looking at it but not really seeing it, before she put it back on, pushing it into its accustomed place. She would have to be Lark Straye once again. She had to be. The world didn't have a place for Puru Six in it.

---

MARCH 29, 0097

Lark stared at the transmission from Char Goddamn Aznable, Comet of Ruin, in utter disbelief. She had no reaction at first, which was the most worrying thing yet; no yelling at the monitor, no panic, just blankness. She'd fought Amuro herself. She knew he could be back. But to see it like this, the Axis drop that the real Lark had hoped to stop at the end, but that 'Lark' had only run away from, writ large... Her emotions started to shift to despair, feeling almost like she was waking up. And then, from deep inside, something else. Something she hadn't felt in years and years, if she ever had at all.

Puru Six was gone.

But maybe Lark Straye could do one good thing with her life.