51For ninthfeather who originally suggested the premise for this scene. Happy birthday! And thank you for everything you do - your fics and meta and headcanons are always such a delight!
This fic takes inspiration from a number of places, including Laora's amazing fics Auld Lang Syne, and it's just you and me and all our fears, in addition to the Interim comic Coming Home, and, of course, the new trailer (which I still cannot believe exists omg)
Title from Deadman's Gun by Ashtar Command
Fallen Angels and Dylandy Family spoilers through the beginning of season 2, Rated for language and angst
the storms you've been chasing
July 15, 2018
~ for ninthfeather ~
Lyle leans against the door as soon as it slides closed behind him. He lets out a long breath and deflates with it, shoulders slumping now that he'd reached the safety of his cabin for the night. For a few hours, at least, he would be free from the stares of the crew and Tieria's endless griping.
He gratefully peels out of his jacket and tosses it on top of the table as he crosses the room to the bed. The orange Haro that continually follows him around flies over to nestle on top of it and closes its ear flaps, entering sleep mode until Lyle calls for it.
He doesn't think he's going to need it tonight; as he sinks down onto the bed, the ache in his chest that he keeps trying to push away threatens to spread, bone-weary through his arms and settle heavy in his gut.
He misses Katharon.
He misses his own comrades, his friends, the few people in his life who never knew Neil. Who met him and never felt the need to compare him to anyone else or to any impossibly golden standards. He misses drinking with Lyle and hashing out breaking headlines with Shirin in strategy meetings where he didn't have to pretend to be completely clueless. He even misses the coffee. It had been awful but at least it hadn't been freeze-dried and shipped to space in bricks.
One hand ran through his hair and the other hovered over the fingers of his terminal, tempted for a moment to call Klaus if just to hear a familiar voice. He sighs and quickly discards the idea. As much as he might have wanted it, it just wasn't worth the risk of contacting them now from the middle of the Ptolemy when he had nothing at all to report.
He pulls up their secure internet browser next and considers catching up on local headlines, instead. He could use the Haro to track the movements he could identify as Katharon's even if he couldn't talk to them directly. Or catch up on the finer details of life in the Middle East… or even in Ireland if he really wanted to plunge down that rabbit hole.
Lyle takes a deep breath and sighs. Suddenly, the thought sounds exhausting and he's just tired.
The Haro's lights are off and it's all the way over on the table. Too far to reach from here and no longer worth the effort.
He falls back onto the mattress, legs hanging off at an awkward angle since he hasn't even bothered to take his boots off. He tries closing his eyes, but then opens them again a few minutes later to stare blankly at the ceiling. His vision unfocuses but changes nothing about the smooth metal above him, and he's not sure he thinks about anything, really, but the weight settling in his chest for the night.
He blinks a few times, slowly, then whips up when he hears the soft "Yo," from the far side of the room.
He stares, heartbeat hammering so powerfully in his chest that his jacket flutters against him in time with thebeat. He doesn't even notice it, though, because he knows that voice like his own. He recognizes that figure like his own reflection and he risks a glance at Haro to see if this is some sort of hologram, if the AI unit has started projecting the thousand hours of footage it's stored in its databanks, because that's his brother but Neil is dead.
Neil has been dead for years and—
And this can't be a hallucination because even when he imagines his brother's last days, even after knowing what his flight suit looked like, and mentally correcting his hair after watching him in recordings—and realizing exactly why everyone aboard this ship looks at him and sees a ghost— he's never pictured him with an eye patch like that.
The Haro is still dark and unresponsive on the table and when he looks back, his brother is still leaning against the wall.
His mouth works, suddenly dry, and he can't seem to do anything at all.
His brother grins. "What?" Neil says conversationally, as if this were an everyday occurrence. "I don't even get a 'hello?'"
Lyle just stares.
Neil's grin widens as he snaps off a lazy salute.
He manages an incredulous, "Neil?" his voice breaking somewhere in the middle of it and Neil's one eye glints in amusement.
"Expecting someone else?" he asks.
Lyle gapes at him, still not believing what he's seeing but this vaguely transparent version of his brother is speaking to him and responding to him and he can't seem to wrap his mind around what he sees in front of him.
"You're dead," he tells him.
Neil doesn't seem to have heard. His smile doesn't change as he stares around the cabin, taking in the stark bare walls that he still hasn't bothered to make his own. "Not quite like home, is it?" he asks, turning to face him straight on.
Lyle can see the corrugated metal ridge that runs around the walls through his chest. He shivers. "You're dead," he whispers again.
Neil still seems to ignore this all-important reality.
He's leaning casually against the ledge that's built into the wall as if it was his own. Lyle wonders, not for the first time, if this hadn't originally been Neil's cabin. It hasn't ever bothered him before, or, at least, bothered him less than everything else about his life aboard the Ptolemy, but suddenly he feels like he's intruding in a place he never should have come.
Neil's staring at him appraisingly. "I… never expected to see you here, honestly," he says finally in that warm, familiar drawl.
"Me either," Lyle replies without thinking about it. He glances around the small cabin, at his jacket and the powered-down Haro, his terminal half hidden in the folds of the rumpled sheets on his bunk. "I almost said no," he admits, "when Setsuna contacted me."
The corners of Neil's mouth twitch. "He can be pretty persuasive when he wants to be, can't he?"
Lyle snorts. Then, "He misses you. They all do."
He nearly adds "I miss you," but thinks better of it before he can actually say the words aloud. From the way Neil's smile softens, though, he wonders if his brother didn't hear it anyway.
"I know," Neil says quietly.
Lyle's throat tightens and his eyes begin to burn. "You… bastard," he chokes out when Neil's already translucent form starts to blur. "You bastard, you were flying blind."
He'd seen it in the shaking real-time footage aired non-stop as Fallen Angels unfolded, had known from the erratic unresponsiveness of the machine that the pilot of the green Gundam wasn't operating with a full field of vision. And to go out against the united world powers despite that… it had been suicide and his brother was smart enough to have known that.
"You should have—" he begins, but breaks off because really, what else could he have done? It was a miracle that any of them survived as it was. The entire world had been convinced that Celestial Being had been obliterated in that operation. There was no chance that any of them would have lived had their sniper not entered the battle.
He knows why Neil did it, knows exactly why he did it, but—
"To be fair, Tieria and Allelujah did try to lock me in."
Lyle jerks up in surprise.
"For all the good that did," Neil offers with a wan smile.
Lyle's mouth begins to waver. "Do you know," he asks, "how it feels to be told that your family—" he chokes out, suddenly remembering that, yes, of course his brother knew exactly how it felt to be told that your family was dead, to watch them die in front of your eyes, to see their death replayed on the television screen over and over again.
Neil doesn't say anything as he works his jaw, trying to get himself back under control enough to continue. "You disappeared, Neil," he manages after a minute. "You dropped off the face of the earth. After graduation, just some letters, the occasional check and then… nothing," he accuses. "I thought you were dead."
He blinks back angry tears and gestures to the ghost of his brother. "You are dead. You're dead," he chokes. "You're dead and I'm the only one left, Neil. You're gone, you're all gone!"
He presses a fist to his mouth, wishing his brother was solid enough to punch some sense into. "You could have— you should have—" he takes a shaky breath. "Couldn't you just have—"
"But I got him, Lyle," he interrupts, his one eye gleaming as he stands up to his full height. Which is strange, because his legs taper away into wisps of nothing before they reach the floor. "I got the guy who planned it, who was responsible for the bombing," he presses, more animated than he has been since he first appeared.
Lyle stares at him, his throat closing up.
"They're all gone," he whispers.
"Yes, but I killed him," Neil says again, "Ali al-Saachez, I got him. I got him, Lyle—"
Lyle shakes his head. "I don't— that doesn't matter," he says, hollowly. "It doesn't matter, Neil, because you're dead."
Neil blinks.
"I don't care if you killed him," Lyle says, voice rising. "I don't care— it doesn't— it didn't bring them back. It was never going to bring them back. And now— you're dead and— I'm—" he struggles to voice the words so desperately trying to come out. "It wasn't worth it," he says. "It wasn't worth you dying too," he says again, trying to pound it into his brother's head.
The light dims a bit in Neil's eye and he has the shame to look away. "I've been dead for a long time," he finally says, quietly, and Lyle swallows thickly as he realizes he's known this for a long time as well.
Neil eventually looks back and the ghost of a smile quickly fades from his face.
"I'm sorry," he finally says, because it's the only thing he can offer.
Lyle tries to blink back the prickle behind his eyes but tears threaten to pour down his cheeks anyway.
"I'm not sorry I got him," Neil says, passing a hand down his face, gloves covering his burned hands trailing over the piece of cloth hiding his mangled eye socket.
He stares at the ghost of his brother as the tears begin to fall in earnest now, hot and heavy against his cheeks.
"But… I'm sorry for... all the rest of it," Neil says. "I— I wasn't able to… let go," he admits. "Not the way you did."
Lyle chokes back on a sob.
Neil smiles at him. "But you were so much better than me at letting go," he says, his voice full of a thousand unspoken emotions, "and you made a life for yourself. Not exactly sure what kind of life it was for you to end up here, after all," he says, almost grinning again. "But you'll be able to do it again," he assures him.
Lyle looks up, panicked. "Neil," he gasps, starting to push up from the bed as a wave of bone-chilling finality sweeps through the air.
But his booted feet are wobbling as he gets them beneath him, even in this low gravity, and he has to put out an arm against the cabin wall to steady himself before he can move forward.
Neil still smiles at him from his easy perch at the end of the cabin. "And they will too. They've all grown so much," he says, his legs beginning to disappear from beneath him. "I'm proud of you," he says and Lyle's throat seizes up.
"No—" Lyle breathes, stumbling forward.
He can't let him leave, he can't— he reaches out an arm, some part of his brain knowing full well that even if he were to reach his brother in time, he wouldn't be able to grab hold of anything solid, but Neil was disappearing, his legs were already gone and his torso was following—
"I'm sorry," he says again, his voice just a whisper now. "But you'll be fine. You'll be more than fine."
He smiles, calm and radiant and almost the only thing that could be seen, now.
"Neil!" Lyle lurches forward, reaching with an outstretched arm until his fingertips hit the cold metal of the wall behind him and there is nothing in between for them to hold on to. He catches himself on the ledge and looks around the cabin wildly with a tear-stained face, but his brother is gone.
