Victor
He remembered Macross Island, he remembered the SDF-1 as a backdrop and he remembered his first time in space, somewhere near Pluto, he remembered helping build a new home near a lake, he remembered how the Zentraedi came and killed all he ever cared about, but for the life of him he couldn't remember his name.

He saw the last few moments of his normal life in his mind's eye replaying themselves his father, crushed under a steel beam saying calmly as he had ever been, "son, they got your mother and your sister, they can't continue to live any longer, make sure they don't get away with it" he remembered pleading for his father to live and wondering why his father wasn't going to help him, then his father spoke again this time betraying the pain he really felt, "here take this ring, don't put it on until you know what it is, always remember, be a victor, but do not lose sight of yourself"

He didn't quite get that last part never had for these past three years since fire had rained from the sky and the thing and the being whose shadow he had lived under all his life had disappeared in one day, the only thing he thought about was revenge on the Zentraedi.

And he had done a good job of it too, of the group of fifty who where on the ground after the SDF-1 was blown apart, the group who went on a killing spree, and killed his family, there where three left. He had tracked them through their path from Macross city to the burnt but re-growing jungles and craters of South America, he watched as city defense forces drove them back or where overrun and even more atrocities happened. He killed them slowly one at a time in hidden traps and avalanches when they thought to move through the mountains. Made the survivors fear for their lives every moment of every day.

Of course he hadn't always been after them; there where times when he had to stop and re-supply get some food, which is where he met Fykes; the man who tried to steal his link to the past. And who had unlocked the ring's purpose for him and who was next to him now looking on at the three Zentraedi's camp.

"You ready?" Victor asked. Victor was what he had called himself, when people asked his name. "Of course, I was born ready," replied Fykes as he readied a shoulder mounted rocket. Victor simply nodded and pressed the detonator to the charges he had set in the encampment beforehand. The blasts ripped apart the two unarmored zentraedi who had the misfortune to be sitting on their ammo crates and tossed the leader who was wearing power armor into the air to land heavily on the ground. "Do it," Victor said, and Fykes aimed his rocket at the power plant on the armor and let lose.

 Even before the explosion died down victor was sliding down the lip of the crater and by the leader's, who was weighted down by his own armor, head. Victor remembered how he had lost it in a battle with the RDF near a town whose name he had never learned. The Zentraedi leader looked at him, a look of hatred at Victor, this look Victor returned, and made the battle hardened zentraedi look away. Victor walked up to the Zentraedi's artery and took off his ring injecting the entire contents into a gash he made with his extra sharp knife. He had at first thought the ring wouldn't be enough to kill a zent but Fykes had told him that there was a non-transferable virus in it, one that would replicate until it had control of the host's brain and everything else it happened to be near. Then it would break it down over days starting with the motor functions then feeling and senses. Until after days of being an invalid the affected would die. Fykes thought it would kill a Zent too.

So Victor backed away from the dying Zentraedi and sat there fueled by revenge to watch him die over five days when he finally saw the Zent stop breathing he fell asleep exhausted and now empty, trusting the thief who would never betray a friend to watch out for him.

When he woke several days later the meaning of his father's final words became clear, "do not lose sight of yourself" Victor now knew from a strange and confused half remembered dream, that "yourself" meant a human, he was a human, not revenge, not hate, and he knew that he had actually failed his father's dying wish, he had stopped being human. At this revelation the hate for the Zentraedi lifted from his shoulders like he was atlas and had put down the world.

Victor smiled at the memories of Macross Island, and New Macross for the first time without feeling the gut wrenching loss, only feeling a small sadness, and thought to himself it's never to late to start having fun. Hadn't his father said that once?

Fykes interrupted his brief reverie, with the simple phrase, "never thought I'd see you smile of all people. so, uh. what are going to do now without revenge?"

"Well Fykes I'm gonna start living and I'm gonna make sure no kid has to go through what I have these past three years, I think I'll enlist in the RDF." To this Fykes simply replied "Do you even know how to fly?"
 
By Victor