[Gundam 00] The Subtle Grace of Gravity (Arc 1)
Title: The Subtle Grace of Gravity
→ Arc 1: Waking
Fandom: Gundam 00
Characters/Pairing: Eventual Lockon (Neil)/Tieria. Right now it's something of a Ptolemy ensemble piece with heavy emphasis on Neil and Tieria.
Rating: PG for now, eventual NC-17.
Wordcount: 6,347 (first part)
Notes: This has been in progress since shortly after the end of the series, and is still in progress now, so please be gentle and forgive the occasional discrepancy. Its main purpose is to let me write Neil interacting with post-series Tieria and eventually get to some awkward sex, so also please forgive the overall gratuitousness of the idea. I'm still doing my best to keep it IC and interesting.
Summary: Exploration of the secrets of Veda turns up something--or rather, someone--completely unexpected.
It had been three months, one week, and six days since Celestial Being had retaken Veda, as humans measured time. Tieria knew this because he was human, in his own and different way.
Two weeks and one day had passed since he'd unlocked the data describing the secondary base the Innovades had kept beneath the surface of the moon. Two days after that (or one week and six days ago), he had first felt the pull of unexpectedly familiar information from the domains of Veda that mapped to that most secret base's physical location. He continued to measure time as humans did, and he had a feeling this was part of why that information was familiar.
But it was also part of the problem. A natural human mind could not have accessed Veda at all; an altered human mind could only just begin to touch it; and the mind of an Innovade who had become more human could merge with it, but would find himself fumbling in the dark as he advanced deeper into its electrons. Once, he knew, he could have learned anything from this kind of access to Veda. Now when he tried to reach for secure information, it twisted his mind in painful ways, and his mind was all he had left.
Tieria could have let it go. But there was information here that Celestial Being needed, and moreover, curiosity was a human trait. It was more than acceptable for him to keep trying. It was necessary.
It didn't help that he could feel another presence here, flickering as easily as light through the electronic passages, slipping itself through the keyholes of doors that Tieria fumbled with clumsy fingers to unlock. And thinking like that was part of the problem. He didn't need to have fingers here, or a body at all. But still he clung to it.
Five days ago, he had discovered the cloning chambers in the secret base.
They were one of only two parts of the entire complex that were directly linked to Veda. The other was a heavily protected entrance, and Tieria could not undo the codes to that. But as for the cloning chambers, Veda gave him backdoor access.
For five days, as humans measured time, Tieria had thought about what he had found. All the while the sense of familiar data tugged at him. There were important things in that base.
He funneled information to the one point he could access in the lunar complex, feeling out its digital contours even as he told it about himself, and he understood that this was the way in, and there was a reason it was so well-hidden.
Tieria gave it DNA patterns, the connections of neurons, and the codes that identified what he was now, and he waited.
Winding its easy way through Veda's electric halls, the other presence could have been laughing. You could call it cute that you want to go back.
Regene was baiting him. Whatever was down there in those secret corridors, he already knew, and watching Tieria find out would be fine entertainment.
* * *
There weren't...
(Fractured old memories of family too close to the feel of triggers under his fingers. Setsuna without a weapon in the good ones, blood and dust in the bad.)
...very many dreams.
* * *
Seven months, three weeks, and one day had passed since Celestial Being had retaken Veda, as humans measured time, and Tieria was surprised to discover that a new body was already waiting for him in the lunar complex. As he understood it from the information he could access in Veda, it should have taken just under two years. Something was different about it. As much as curiosity compelled him, he knew better than to transfer himself into the new shell before ascertaining its safety.
Regene knew. Tieria chased the glimmer of his presence through Veda until he was close enough to feel the truth of any information he imparted (and with it a carefully aimed thought: Still so clumsy even here! If you improve, you could reach out and take it).
He framed the words as if he were speaking them, although it was unnecessary. Tieria knew that he would eventually have to give up more and more of these human affectations to get further into Veda, but with everything he had lost to acquire them, he didn't want to let them go easily. "I only need to know one thing. What is different about the bodies created on the moon?"
It was a game to Regene, so he formed the words as humans did too, only more elegantly than Tieria. "You still don't understand? It's in the brain."
"The brain is lacking?"
"Only what it doesn't need."
Tieria waited for Regene to say more, but there was no more. Finally, he asked, "Is it safe?"
"Will you be able to come back intact if you enter that body? Yes."
Regene faded back away into pulses of light, but Tieria could see he hadn't been lying. He waited in the digital darkness for three more minutes, as humans measured time, and then reached out to the new form waiting on the moon.
He was himself pulses of light for a split-second longer, and then--
--his own body, feeling slightly strange, but only because he'd been away from it for so long. This was the physical shape he knew, down to the last biomechanical nanomachine. Until, just as Regene had said, it came to the inside of his skull. There wasn't enough in there to coordinate his body and support his thoughts--or there was, but it wasn't there. It was still in Veda, guiding this body like a puppet. Or was Veda a puppet, and he the master now?
Another metaphor, and at first glance a silly one--Tieria didn't really understand why puppet shows were supposed to be entertaining. But it was accurate, in this case. He thought he understood some of what the moonbase was for now. Risking Innovade bodies with such complete connections to and power over Veda out in the world at large, that would be dangerous. In all likelihood, Ribbons had been the only one. But down here, isolated, perhaps they could be of use...and now Tieria could find out just how much use he himself could be.
But there was more than just a super-connection to Veda here. From that connection, Tieria could feel the map of this place spreading out in his head. Somewhere there was something he knew; he could feel it stronger than ever, even outside of Veda (but not really outside; this was different). Finding it seemed more important even than he'd thought before.
He dressed, feeling desperately wrong in the sterile outfit of the Innovade that was provided for him in the cloning chambers. He would have to have a new Celestial Being uniform made for him here. But it could wait. Whatever the familiar thing was, he couldn't shut out its pull any longer.
Tieria wouldn't have minded the blank halls of the lunar complex once, but now they were unsettling. He had started to learn how to find clues about people in their surroundings, and only now did he realize that he missed that. There was a comfort to the way the rooms on the Ptolemaios had acquired subtle differences. He still didn't entirely understand why, but he knew it was true.
The differences here were not subtle. One room held vast arrays of electronics that even he could not identify; another, racks and racks of test tubes. A whole hall led to rooms containing data disks kept safely out of reach of Veda--and anyone else who might have access to it--until the necessary moment. But none of this was what he was looking for--or what was looking for him (and that was a human thought, irrational, as information of course could not "look" for anybody, but it felt right somehow, and Tieria accepted that for now).
He found it behind three sets of locks, each of which took him an average of fifty-seven minutes to break open. No one without this mainline to Veda could have done it at all. But somehow, there were already people behind those locks, all of them ordinary humans, and none of them awake.
Tieria moved silently through the bare room and its pillars of frozen, half-living people. There was nothing wrong with them, save their suspended animation. He recognized none of them on his own, but Veda supplied names to all--but first it supplied other names. People who were the reason these had been taken and stored here.
Lost lovers, children, partners, siblings. Where humans had seen full lives to be treasured, the Innovades had only seen levers to be used to manipulate prominent political and military figures--and anyone else that got in their way. Tieria couldn't tell how many of them were reported dead, how many said to be missing, how many, if any, known to be kept prisoner. He would have to tease the information out of Veda bit by bit; he was still too human to pull it with a thought.
But that knowledge made him wonder: was there ever a time when he would have sympathized with what Ribbons (and how many others who knew about it?) was doing here? It was a crude form of manipulation, he knew now, but subtlety wasn't really his own strong point, either. Would he have ever considered it effective enough to be justifiable?
Tieria shied away from the thought. He didn't need to ask himself what he might have done, had circumstances been different. He would plan for the victims' release later, and that would be enough. For now, there was another door at the far end of this room, and he could almost feel the mysterious-but-known dataset coalescing just beyond his reach.
He paid little attention, this time, to how long it took him to break through the security.
The room on the other side was smaller, and at first Tieria thought it had been put to the exact same purpose as the one before. But Veda told him otherwise even before he fully grasped just how it was different. It was the same purpose overall, yes, but these captives were special. More elaborate technology hummed around them--medical devices, extensive life support equipment. Some were shut off, their tasks completed, their charges returned to the same basic suspended animation as the ones in the previous room. Others were still running.
Of course, it would be easier for Ribbons to arrange for the disappearance of those already injured, even left for dead, on the battlefield. But--Veda began to fill in the blanks here--more effort was required to repair them and keep them alive. Only those with vital connections to important pieces of the plan would be salvaged. That was the language Ribbons had used to describe this.
Tieria could feel the familiar pattern almost as heat on the back of his neck. He thought he knew what it was, if he let himself realize it. In any case, the name attached was his own. This lever will bring Tieria Erde back to us.
He wondered: if he'd hesitated a little more, would they have told him? If he'd been just slightly more receptive to their ideas, would this have been produced as a lure? Why had they stopped?
Regene would know; maybe Regene was responsible. But Tieria didn't want to ask Regene. He just wanted to turn around, and--he did so, carefully facing the controls for the last of the capsules, not looking at just what it was supporting. He couldn't yet.
Finish biological repairs as necessary, yes, he did want the machine to do that. Warning: this requires full consciousness to complete.
"It's all right," Tieria said as he and Veda keyed in the necessary codes. "I'd like to see full consciousness, after all."
Lights flashed across the capsule's display. Even with all the power of Veda behind him, Tieria found himself struggling to comprehend them. It wasn't that they were that complicated. But his mind was moving in skips and jumps, unable to stay put in the present, racing ahead into the future or back into the past, afraid of what was happening, exulting in it--
There was, perhaps, a glitch in the new body's special brain. Regene could have been wrong.
The lights on the display blinked out, one by one, and the doors to the pod slowly peeled away. Tieria moved before he thought he'd made the decision to move, catching Lockon with both hands digging a little too much into his shoulders. More glitches; his control over this body was faulty as well. He would fix that, somehow, when he could move away from here.
Perhaps his perception had errors, too. For a split-second, as Lockon blinked uncomprehendingly, trying to adjust enough to the light to see where he was and who held him, Tieria thought he saw disappointment mixed in with the confusion on his face.
Veda offered him no model to explain that.
* * *
Reality came back too slowly for Lockon. A small room, glaringly artificial and unadorned, where he lay on a bed with no blanket. A screen on one wall, with Tieria standing in front of it as colors shifted across its surface. None of it seemed very believable.
There was something about accepting death that made it a lot harder to acknowledge life again afterwards--the thought flickered through his mind and was gone. He couldn't quite manage to examine it too closely now. It didn't matter, anyway; it was hard to believe anything here did. Probably he was still dreaming, his dying brain piecing together its last fragmented thoughts into a strange hallucination.
This didn't make a whole lot of sense, since Lockon had never seen a place like this before, but the idea that it was after, that the battle was over and he'd lived...that just didn't work at all.
Lockon sat up. He wasn't wearing anything other than a loose pair of white pants, which made it all the easier to see the unfamiliar scars on his body. What did that mean, when you dreamed up new scars? Not that it really mattered.
"Lockon." It was Tieria, of course. "You shouldn't move. Veda informs me that sudden fatigue is a common symptom of this regenerative process. You'll hurt yourself if you're caught unaware." There was something odd about his voice--it was still Tieria, without a doubt, but under the shakiness he sounded almost gentle.
Lockon smiled at him. Even in whatever limbo this was, it seemed wrong to show anything but a kind face to Tieria. Even if it was all an illusion (it had to be, somehow, but it wasn't really his style to devote a lot of thought to just how). "It's all right. I just wanted to have a look around."
"There isn't much to see," Tieria said. "And you will not leave this room to see more until I've contacted the Ptolemaios to inform them of--the situation." His voice caught in an extraordinary way there; Lockon blinked in surprise. He sounded vulnerable, openly so. Was this the Tieria he'd hoped to help create instead of the one he'd actually known?
The idea of this actually being the future, the place where that Tieria could naturally exist, felt like the wrong shape in his head. He shied away from it. If this was the future, he wouldn't be here. That was fact, like the sun being hot and the world being broken. But whatever this Tieria was, he was still looking to Lockon for an answer now.
"Why don't you fill me in later?" Lockon said. "I have a feeling I'm not thinking straight right now."
"Of course. As I said, this specific regenerative process has side effects." Tieria hesitated, lifted a hand, then pulled it away. "It's efficient, but crude. Why they felt the need to allow injuries they could have healed entirely with more energy to simply scar over, I don't understand."
Lockon reached out to take hold of Tieria's arm, only to realize too late that his own hand was ungloved. What kind of dying vision wouldn't let him keep his gloves? But he felt Tieria tense up, then relax as if by instinct, at his touch. That was the important thing. "It doesn't bother me," he said. "Scars like this look cool, right?"
Tieria stared at him. "That's absurd, Lockon." His voice caught again on the name, and his gaze lingered somewhere on Lockon's face for a moment, then shifted too quickly away.
Lockon frowned, letting go of Tieria's arm and raising his hand to the place Tieria had been looking. His fingers settled on a web of scarring extending from his brow almost to his cheekbone. Oh. Yes. "I'm more worried about not having...any clothes..." He sagged back down onto one elbow, trying to stay even a little upright.
Tieria's attention snapped back to him, his eyes suddenly full of incomprehensible guilt, as if he could have done anything. "I told you about the side effects."
"You did," Lockon agreed, slowly letting himself drop back down onto the bed. "It was a good warning."
"Lockon..."
He didn't know if Tieria said anything after that, because consciousness left him for a little while. He found himself thinking what a relief this was. Whatever that dream had been, it hadn't felt right. He wanted to let go of it now.
The hint of voices reached him, and Lockon abruptly realized that if he could think at all, even enough to be glad the strange vision was over, it wasn't over after all. He was awake again, and somehow, not dead yet.
"--else know yet, Tieria?" Sumeragi's voice, sounding some weird combination of shellshocked and excited. Lockon wondered what it was that had shaken her so much.
"This location is secure enough that it was difficult even establishing communications with you," Tieria said. He sounded a little calmer now, but there was still something different about his voice. "There's no danger of that. It will be difficult enough allowing additional access to the complex. I should eventually be able to open the outer doors at will. For now, I expect I can reprogram it to allow an additional person in with every twenty-four-hour cycle."
"Only one?" Sumeragi sounded oddly worried about that. Lockon couldn't figure out why, nor could he pin down the reason behind the long pause that followed. They could decide more easily than that who would be the first through the doors of wherever this was.
A new voice spoke up. "You should get ready to go when we get there, Setsuna." Only it wasn't a new voice at all. It was an old one.
Lockon almost laughed at how out of place it was. But that was a comfort in a way. If his brain couldn't even keep his memories of Celestial Being separate from his memories of his brother anymore, this bizarre interlude was probably almost over. He lapsed easily back into sleep.
When he woke up again, he was starting to become more frustrated than confused. His head felt less fuzzy, his body less awkward, but the whole situation was no less ridiculous. Tieria still stood at the screen, concentrating on something on the other side of it, and he was still here himself. It felt even less right than before.
Tieria looked away from the screen and back at Lockon the moment he sat up again. He hesitated, then walked over to him in careful, measured steps and held out a hand. There was a black cloth in it. Lockon focused a little. It was a new eyepatch. "If you need anything else," Tieria said. "Tell me."
"Thanks, Tieria," Lockon said, reaching out to take it. "But I don't know what else I should need right now. Give me a little while."
Tieria looked down. "The Ptolemaios has just arrived. If the reprogramming worked, Setsuna should be here in a few minutes." He was struggling to say whatever came next. Finally, he said, "I'll leave you until then, and go to meet him." He lifted his head with obvious determination and, before he could reconsider, turned and left the room.
Lockon lay back down, staring blankly up at the ceiling. It wasn't getting any less vivid, even though he was sure it all should be fading by now. He no longer felt the downward pull of unconsciousness, and that worried him for some reason he couldn't pin down. He slid the eyepatch between his fingers, wishing Tieria had gotten him new gloves instead. Somehow actually putting the patch on seemed like an acknowledgment of something he wasn't too happy about, but he couldn't see what else to do with it, so he sat up again and started to put it back in place.
He heard the door open, glimpsed the distribution of light and shadow shifting just enough to tell him that someone had come in. For now he finished putting the eyepatch back on, then looked up, already opening his mouth to reassure Tieria.
It wasn't Tieria. Setsuna looked back at him, and Lockon realized several related things all at once.
The first was that he was older. At least twenty--no, more than that. The second was that there was actual emotion in his eyes, and the third was that he was smiling.
"Lockon Stratos," he said.
Lockon understood the fourth thing then: this was real. He was alive.
* * *
The narrow halls of the lunar complex had not felt so empty when Tieria had first walked through them a few hours ago, and that had been when he hadn't known there were others there. They had only felt sterile then. Now, knowing that Lockon waited in one plain room along the corridors like any other, it seemed intolerable to Tieria that he should be out here alone. He told himself that if anything happened, Setsuna would be able to help Lockon. It was a logical thought, and for some reason it did nothing to comfort him.
He stopped, finally. Instead of continuing to pace on needlessly, he reached out with a thought and summoned a communications screen to the wall next to him. Tieria knew that to the others it seemed he was mastering the capabilities of this new body and the secrets of Veda at a rapid pace, but he could just barely feel how much still lay ahead of him. This was only the start.
The blank metal surface shimmered slightly, then projected a screen two centimeters out from the wall. Though that had been easy enough, Tieria had to concentrate for a moment to establish the link to the Ptolemaios, waiting outside on the surface of the moon. He would establish a timeframe for the updates that would allow the ship's crew members to travel freely into and out of the moonbase, and then he would go back to see if Setsuna was done speaking with Lockon yet--
The grey screen resolved into the bridge of the Ptolemaios. "Tieria?" Feldt said. "Do you...have you made any progress?"
Somehow, the fact that it was Feldt threw his plans off kilter. It took him a moment to gather himself for a reply. "Not yet, but there may be a chance," he said. "I expected to have to suppress multiple alarms when Setsuna entered, but the security system recognizes and allows him as an Innovator. However, I don't expect to be able to get the doors open again for some time."
He and Feldt had worked together to open the doors in the first place. For him, it had been a fluid matter of rearranging electrons and bits inside Veda--not easy, but at least graceful. But through Veda's connections he could sense that her task was more awkward, could feel the uneven way she deciphered and then entered the corresponding codes as he transmitted the raw information he had pried from Veda's grasp. Were those without this connection to Veda (humans, he would have thought once, but he was human too, so normal humans perhaps, or those who weren't Innovades) always so clumsy, viewed from the other side? Or was there something tripping up Feldt's calm?
"I'd like to help," she said, with a hesitant smile. "Would you tell me if there's anything I can do?"
"I'll grant you as much access as is possible," he said. Reaching into Veda with a thought, he sought out Feldt's biometrics where they were stored on the Ptolemaios and introduced them to the moonbase's system. He could see some doors opening for her, but others remained shut, some of them even to him. Tieria knew that if he could stop seeing them as doors instead of simply access points, he'd be able to unlock more of them, but that was how it was.
He returned to the analog world in time to see Feldt giving him a slightly unsettled look. Blinking, he made a note to himself to be more careful about his connection to Veda in the future; it must have looked disturbing to others when he retreated back along it. "It's done," he said. "You should be able to reach the first few levels of data now, and there may be some ways to influence the physical access there."
"I'll try," Feldt said. She was hesitating again, and Tieria couldn't figure out why. After a moment, she spoke. "Thank you, Tieria."
He found himself swallowing against a lump in his throat. That didn't make sense; he wasn't sad. Even now, after everything he'd been through and everything he'd learned, some things about humanity--his own and that of others--still baffled him. "I understand why you'd want to help, Feldt. I won't turn it down."
"Of course," she said, looking away quickly. "I didn't mean that you would--"
She broke off, and he realized that there were tears in her eyes. "Feldt, are you..." He searched for the right word, but couldn't quite find it, so he settled on: "Are you hurt?"
Feldt blinked furiously and lifted her head to look straight at him once more. "No..." She was smiling again. "Tieria, people can cry when they're happy too. I didn't learn that until today."
"It's a basic fact of biology," he said. "Tears relieve stress, both positive and negative." No, that wasn't the right thing to say and he knew it. "I'm happy, too." That was better. "I'm grateful we could work together on this." That wasn't quite perfect, but it was better than Tears relieve stress.
"I am, too," Feldt said. "Let's do it again. When you find out how to control the doors better."
Tieria started to reply, but then stopped as his connection sent him a new alert. The other two current occupants of the complex were on the move. He said instead, "Yes. I'm sorry, this requires my attention now," and ended the communication.
Guided by Veda, it didn't take him long to find Setsuna and Lockon. They were both wearing Celestial Being uniforms, although Lockon was still adjusting the jacket on his.
"You should have told me you were bringing uniforms," Tieria said. "If you had, I would have asked for one."
Setsuna nodded. "Next time."
Feeling oddly defensive, Tieria added, "And any unexpected matter could have set off the security systems. You should be more careful." He lowered his gaze. "I will make sure to warn any future visitors of this."
"Hey, Setsuna," Lockon said as he finished adjusting the jacket. "Where's this one from? The fit is...almost perfect..." He trailed off, his gaze going distant.
"It's a spare," Setsuna said. "It belongs to--"
"I get it," Lockon said, his expression clouding.
Tieria felt his stomach twisting up. Lockon wasn't supposed to wear that expression. He was supposed to be happy now. They'd won, and he was alive, and they'd all done everything they could to live up to him. But--
Then Lockon's hand was on his shoulder. "Don't look like that, Tieria," he said. "I was just confused for a minute there."
A sudden ache of deferred longing ran through him. The last time Lockon had touched him like that, it had been little more than a nuisance, something strange and irrelevant. But since then, Tieria had spent almost six years wanting to feel that hand on his shoulder again.
"You shouldn't be up and moving," he said. "You should rest."
"I'll rest when I'm on the Ptolemy."
"What?" Tieria regretted the word immediately; there was no need to say it. He knew what Lockon meant. But somehow he couldn't keep himself from asking.
"I'm leaving with Setsuna," he said. "Don't get too worked up--we'll be back when you figure out how to open this place up to more people." He glanced at Setsuna. "Right?"
Setsuna nodded again. "It's necessary to update Lockon on everything that has happened in the past five years and nine months, approximately." He stopped and smiled tentatively. "It's easier if as many of us as possible are there. We'll establish a link from here to the Ptolemy for you, if it's possible."
"I understand," Tieria said, and he did, of course. But somehow he felt disappointed anyway. "Then...I will see you when I next contact the Ptolemy."
He knew he should have been working on the program that controlled the main doors, but somehow he couldn't keep himself from staring after Lockon as he followed Setsuna down the corridor and away. He almost managed to force himself to look away as they approached a corner--but then, as Setsuna went ahead, Lockon turned and looked back. He lifted a hand to wave, and he smiled.
For some reason, Tieria had trouble focusing on his connection to Veda. In this body, it should have been easy.
* * *
There was too much to absorb.
Lockon had sat through the recounting of the last six years as calmly as he could. In some places, that wasn't very calmly. He'd held in the outbursts of rage, shock, and guilt as well as he could, but he knew that here and there he'd slipped enough for his brother, at least, to see the cracks. He was afraid Setsuna could too, but he put that thought from his mind as quickly as he could.
When Setsuna had mentioned just who had razed Azadistan, Lockon had actually lost control. He was halfway out of his seat before Lyle grabbed his arm and said, "He's dead now, so you can sit back down."
He'd kept better control of himself when Lyle talked about the woman he'd loved and how she'd died, but it had hurt in a way that Lockon had never wanted to hurt again (he thought, briefly, that if he wanted to hurt like that again, he'd go back to being Neil Dylandy instead of Lockon Stratos, and he had no intention of doing that). That had taken him by surprise.
They'd left him alone in the empty room he'd been given, afterwards. Something felt wrong about that. They drifted back to their tasks, and all he could do was go over what he'd learned in his head and try to find a place for himself in it. After a little while, he gave up and went to sleep.
Waking brought a perverse kind of relief. Tieria had sent him information on the side effects of the regenerative process that had kept him alive for all that time he'd missed, and one of them was a lot of stiffness and sore muscles after first sleeping. Sure enough, he ached. It was a welcome distraction from the turmoil in his head.
Or it would have been, except that while he was asleep, Feldt had had painkillers sent to his room. She'd read up on the side effects too. Lockon made a note to thank her, and he took the drugs, since there was really no excuse for him not to. He didn't have a reason to let himself keep hurting this time, after all. There was nothing he needed to be alert and aware for--everything was taken care of without him.
In any case, these were high-quality medicines, and the sedative effect wore off long before the analgesic effect did. Once again Lockon found himself alone in a room that wasn't really his, and now he was looking at recordings as they scrolled across a screen. Dozens of battles he hadn't been able to take part in--how many more people would have survived if he'd been there? How much pain could he have spared Lyle? Why was he here now, when there was nothing more he could do?
A more recent memory came to his mind uncalled for: his last look back down the corridors of the place he'd been kept for the past five years, now with Tieria guarding their secrets. He'd recalled the image a few times since leaving there, even though he couldn't quite say why. There was something about the look on Tieria's face as Lockon turned back for a last look at him. No one here looked at him with that kind of earnest, oblivious need. Not even Feldt; after five years, the way she looked at him was simpler, easier to deal with, more understandable. He didn't mind that--it was a relief. It was true that something about the way Setsuna looked at him, like he understood, was upsetting. But at least Setsuna gave him some space.
It was a good thing, he told himself, that he was away from the lunar complex--even if there had been something appealing as well as worrying about the way Tieria had looked at him.
He shook his head and turned back to the computer. It offered to play him Cherudim's recording of the fight with Arche Gundam. Lockon shut it off, feeling suddenly sick--with what, he wasn't sure. He knew better than to blame the painkillers he'd taken, but he didn't want to think too much about what it really was. Instead, he checked up on the locations of everyone on board. It wasn't a feature he'd used a lot in the past, but then, his brother hadn't been on the ship in the past.
Now he was in the hangar, checking up on Cherudim. Lockon made his way down there.
It was familiar enough to be unsettling. All the Gundams had been repaired as much as possible since the last battle with the Innovators and A-LAWS. If he looked away from GN-Archer and 0-Raiser, and squinted a little, it was easy to pretend these were the Gundams he knew, and all he needed to do was wait until the next battle and he could take his place in combat again. Except he knew that really, he didn't want there to be another battle. He wanted it to be over, and it was, as much as it ever would be--but he was still here. He started to feel a little sick again at the idea. Maybe he should try to blame the painkillers after all, he thought.
There was movement, over near Cherudim. Lockon quickly slipped behind a bank of consoles and watched. This, at least, was familiar, maybe the most familiar thing here: watching his brother from a safely obscured vantage point.
But it was also unsettling. Lyle seemed entirely too comfortable with the Gundam. Like he belonged with it. Lockon thought of the statistics he'd read earlier, the ones detailing his brother's performance in combat. His accuracy rating--78%, 79%, 79%, 78%, 80% and then the sudden inexplicable jump, at the end: 91%, 93%, 96%, 97%, 99%. Better than Lockon had ever been (and he had a sneaking suspicion that now, even with time and practice, he'd be lucky to reach 75%).
Lyle pushed away from the Gundam, and then he stopped. He sighed and said, "If you want, Neil, we can talk."
The sound of his real name was alien. Lyle had used it once earlier, while explaining about Anew, but it still sounded weird to Lockon's ears. He said nothing. He didn't think he'd given his position away, after all. Lyle was probably just guessing, although it wasn't like him to be so forthright about it--probably. For all the information he'd amassed from watching his brother over the years, it had still been a long time, even without counting that missing time, since Lockon had spoken to him.
Lyle glanced around a moment longer, then made his way to another bank of consoles and called up one of the largest screens. Lockon could see most of it clearly from his position.
"I'm going to show you something," Lyle said, and he keyed in a request. He was asking the computer for the location of Lockon Stratos.
The screen flashed and threw up an answer: Lockon Stratos is using Computer 7E, surrounding Cherudim Gundam. It blinked, as if uncertain, and then added, Lockon Stratos is near Computer 5D, not in use, near Cherudim Gundam. It had given Lyle's location first.
"This is going to take a while to sort out," Lyle said. "Hey, Neil. Are you really going to walk away?"
As a matter of fact, Lockon was walking away, but being called on it so directly stalled him. He found himself turning around to face his brother.
"There's probably a lot you want to know," Lyle said, "that we didn't really talk about before."
Lockon still wanted to walk away. Barring that, he wanted to say something inconsequential and push the topic further and further away from himself. He looked at the expression on his brother's face, and he realized he wasn't going to get the chance to do either. He looked for a middle ground, but it wasn't coming.
Instead he said, "Tell me about Setsuna, and how he's changed."
→ Arc 1: Waking
Fandom: Gundam 00
Characters/Pairing: Eventual Lockon (Neil)/Tieria. Right now it's something of a Ptolemy ensemble piece with heavy emphasis on Neil and Tieria.
Rating: PG for now, eventual NC-17.
Wordcount: 6,347 (first part)
Notes: This has been in progress since shortly after the end of the series, and is still in progress now, so please be gentle and forgive the occasional discrepancy. Its main purpose is to let me write Neil interacting with post-series Tieria and eventually get to some awkward sex, so also please forgive the overall gratuitousness of the idea. I'm still doing my best to keep it IC and interesting.
Summary: Exploration of the secrets of Veda turns up something--or rather, someone--completely unexpected.
It had been three months, one week, and six days since Celestial Being had retaken Veda, as humans measured time. Tieria knew this because he was human, in his own and different way.
Two weeks and one day had passed since he'd unlocked the data describing the secondary base the Innovades had kept beneath the surface of the moon. Two days after that (or one week and six days ago), he had first felt the pull of unexpectedly familiar information from the domains of Veda that mapped to that most secret base's physical location. He continued to measure time as humans did, and he had a feeling this was part of why that information was familiar.
But it was also part of the problem. A natural human mind could not have accessed Veda at all; an altered human mind could only just begin to touch it; and the mind of an Innovade who had become more human could merge with it, but would find himself fumbling in the dark as he advanced deeper into its electrons. Once, he knew, he could have learned anything from this kind of access to Veda. Now when he tried to reach for secure information, it twisted his mind in painful ways, and his mind was all he had left.
Tieria could have let it go. But there was information here that Celestial Being needed, and moreover, curiosity was a human trait. It was more than acceptable for him to keep trying. It was necessary.
It didn't help that he could feel another presence here, flickering as easily as light through the electronic passages, slipping itself through the keyholes of doors that Tieria fumbled with clumsy fingers to unlock. And thinking like that was part of the problem. He didn't need to have fingers here, or a body at all. But still he clung to it.
Five days ago, he had discovered the cloning chambers in the secret base.
They were one of only two parts of the entire complex that were directly linked to Veda. The other was a heavily protected entrance, and Tieria could not undo the codes to that. But as for the cloning chambers, Veda gave him backdoor access.
For five days, as humans measured time, Tieria had thought about what he had found. All the while the sense of familiar data tugged at him. There were important things in that base.
He funneled information to the one point he could access in the lunar complex, feeling out its digital contours even as he told it about himself, and he understood that this was the way in, and there was a reason it was so well-hidden.
Tieria gave it DNA patterns, the connections of neurons, and the codes that identified what he was now, and he waited.
Winding its easy way through Veda's electric halls, the other presence could have been laughing. You could call it cute that you want to go back.
Regene was baiting him. Whatever was down there in those secret corridors, he already knew, and watching Tieria find out would be fine entertainment.
* * *
There weren't...
(Fractured old memories of family too close to the feel of triggers under his fingers. Setsuna without a weapon in the good ones, blood and dust in the bad.)
...very many dreams.
* * *
Seven months, three weeks, and one day had passed since Celestial Being had retaken Veda, as humans measured time, and Tieria was surprised to discover that a new body was already waiting for him in the lunar complex. As he understood it from the information he could access in Veda, it should have taken just under two years. Something was different about it. As much as curiosity compelled him, he knew better than to transfer himself into the new shell before ascertaining its safety.
Regene knew. Tieria chased the glimmer of his presence through Veda until he was close enough to feel the truth of any information he imparted (and with it a carefully aimed thought: Still so clumsy even here! If you improve, you could reach out and take it).
He framed the words as if he were speaking them, although it was unnecessary. Tieria knew that he would eventually have to give up more and more of these human affectations to get further into Veda, but with everything he had lost to acquire them, he didn't want to let them go easily. "I only need to know one thing. What is different about the bodies created on the moon?"
It was a game to Regene, so he formed the words as humans did too, only more elegantly than Tieria. "You still don't understand? It's in the brain."
"The brain is lacking?"
"Only what it doesn't need."
Tieria waited for Regene to say more, but there was no more. Finally, he asked, "Is it safe?"
"Will you be able to come back intact if you enter that body? Yes."
Regene faded back away into pulses of light, but Tieria could see he hadn't been lying. He waited in the digital darkness for three more minutes, as humans measured time, and then reached out to the new form waiting on the moon.
He was himself pulses of light for a split-second longer, and then--
--his own body, feeling slightly strange, but only because he'd been away from it for so long. This was the physical shape he knew, down to the last biomechanical nanomachine. Until, just as Regene had said, it came to the inside of his skull. There wasn't enough in there to coordinate his body and support his thoughts--or there was, but it wasn't there. It was still in Veda, guiding this body like a puppet. Or was Veda a puppet, and he the master now?
Another metaphor, and at first glance a silly one--Tieria didn't really understand why puppet shows were supposed to be entertaining. But it was accurate, in this case. He thought he understood some of what the moonbase was for now. Risking Innovade bodies with such complete connections to and power over Veda out in the world at large, that would be dangerous. In all likelihood, Ribbons had been the only one. But down here, isolated, perhaps they could be of use...and now Tieria could find out just how much use he himself could be.
But there was more than just a super-connection to Veda here. From that connection, Tieria could feel the map of this place spreading out in his head. Somewhere there was something he knew; he could feel it stronger than ever, even outside of Veda (but not really outside; this was different). Finding it seemed more important even than he'd thought before.
He dressed, feeling desperately wrong in the sterile outfit of the Innovade that was provided for him in the cloning chambers. He would have to have a new Celestial Being uniform made for him here. But it could wait. Whatever the familiar thing was, he couldn't shut out its pull any longer.
Tieria wouldn't have minded the blank halls of the lunar complex once, but now they were unsettling. He had started to learn how to find clues about people in their surroundings, and only now did he realize that he missed that. There was a comfort to the way the rooms on the Ptolemaios had acquired subtle differences. He still didn't entirely understand why, but he knew it was true.
The differences here were not subtle. One room held vast arrays of electronics that even he could not identify; another, racks and racks of test tubes. A whole hall led to rooms containing data disks kept safely out of reach of Veda--and anyone else who might have access to it--until the necessary moment. But none of this was what he was looking for--or what was looking for him (and that was a human thought, irrational, as information of course could not "look" for anybody, but it felt right somehow, and Tieria accepted that for now).
He found it behind three sets of locks, each of which took him an average of fifty-seven minutes to break open. No one without this mainline to Veda could have done it at all. But somehow, there were already people behind those locks, all of them ordinary humans, and none of them awake.
Tieria moved silently through the bare room and its pillars of frozen, half-living people. There was nothing wrong with them, save their suspended animation. He recognized none of them on his own, but Veda supplied names to all--but first it supplied other names. People who were the reason these had been taken and stored here.
Lost lovers, children, partners, siblings. Where humans had seen full lives to be treasured, the Innovades had only seen levers to be used to manipulate prominent political and military figures--and anyone else that got in their way. Tieria couldn't tell how many of them were reported dead, how many said to be missing, how many, if any, known to be kept prisoner. He would have to tease the information out of Veda bit by bit; he was still too human to pull it with a thought.
But that knowledge made him wonder: was there ever a time when he would have sympathized with what Ribbons (and how many others who knew about it?) was doing here? It was a crude form of manipulation, he knew now, but subtlety wasn't really his own strong point, either. Would he have ever considered it effective enough to be justifiable?
Tieria shied away from the thought. He didn't need to ask himself what he might have done, had circumstances been different. He would plan for the victims' release later, and that would be enough. For now, there was another door at the far end of this room, and he could almost feel the mysterious-but-known dataset coalescing just beyond his reach.
He paid little attention, this time, to how long it took him to break through the security.
The room on the other side was smaller, and at first Tieria thought it had been put to the exact same purpose as the one before. But Veda told him otherwise even before he fully grasped just how it was different. It was the same purpose overall, yes, but these captives were special. More elaborate technology hummed around them--medical devices, extensive life support equipment. Some were shut off, their tasks completed, their charges returned to the same basic suspended animation as the ones in the previous room. Others were still running.
Of course, it would be easier for Ribbons to arrange for the disappearance of those already injured, even left for dead, on the battlefield. But--Veda began to fill in the blanks here--more effort was required to repair them and keep them alive. Only those with vital connections to important pieces of the plan would be salvaged. That was the language Ribbons had used to describe this.
Tieria could feel the familiar pattern almost as heat on the back of his neck. He thought he knew what it was, if he let himself realize it. In any case, the name attached was his own. This lever will bring Tieria Erde back to us.
He wondered: if he'd hesitated a little more, would they have told him? If he'd been just slightly more receptive to their ideas, would this have been produced as a lure? Why had they stopped?
Regene would know; maybe Regene was responsible. But Tieria didn't want to ask Regene. He just wanted to turn around, and--he did so, carefully facing the controls for the last of the capsules, not looking at just what it was supporting. He couldn't yet.
Finish biological repairs as necessary, yes, he did want the machine to do that. Warning: this requires full consciousness to complete.
"It's all right," Tieria said as he and Veda keyed in the necessary codes. "I'd like to see full consciousness, after all."
Lights flashed across the capsule's display. Even with all the power of Veda behind him, Tieria found himself struggling to comprehend them. It wasn't that they were that complicated. But his mind was moving in skips and jumps, unable to stay put in the present, racing ahead into the future or back into the past, afraid of what was happening, exulting in it--
There was, perhaps, a glitch in the new body's special brain. Regene could have been wrong.
The lights on the display blinked out, one by one, and the doors to the pod slowly peeled away. Tieria moved before he thought he'd made the decision to move, catching Lockon with both hands digging a little too much into his shoulders. More glitches; his control over this body was faulty as well. He would fix that, somehow, when he could move away from here.
Perhaps his perception had errors, too. For a split-second, as Lockon blinked uncomprehendingly, trying to adjust enough to the light to see where he was and who held him, Tieria thought he saw disappointment mixed in with the confusion on his face.
Veda offered him no model to explain that.
* * *
Reality came back too slowly for Lockon. A small room, glaringly artificial and unadorned, where he lay on a bed with no blanket. A screen on one wall, with Tieria standing in front of it as colors shifted across its surface. None of it seemed very believable.
There was something about accepting death that made it a lot harder to acknowledge life again afterwards--the thought flickered through his mind and was gone. He couldn't quite manage to examine it too closely now. It didn't matter, anyway; it was hard to believe anything here did. Probably he was still dreaming, his dying brain piecing together its last fragmented thoughts into a strange hallucination.
This didn't make a whole lot of sense, since Lockon had never seen a place like this before, but the idea that it was after, that the battle was over and he'd lived...that just didn't work at all.
Lockon sat up. He wasn't wearing anything other than a loose pair of white pants, which made it all the easier to see the unfamiliar scars on his body. What did that mean, when you dreamed up new scars? Not that it really mattered.
"Lockon." It was Tieria, of course. "You shouldn't move. Veda informs me that sudden fatigue is a common symptom of this regenerative process. You'll hurt yourself if you're caught unaware." There was something odd about his voice--it was still Tieria, without a doubt, but under the shakiness he sounded almost gentle.
Lockon smiled at him. Even in whatever limbo this was, it seemed wrong to show anything but a kind face to Tieria. Even if it was all an illusion (it had to be, somehow, but it wasn't really his style to devote a lot of thought to just how). "It's all right. I just wanted to have a look around."
"There isn't much to see," Tieria said. "And you will not leave this room to see more until I've contacted the Ptolemaios to inform them of--the situation." His voice caught in an extraordinary way there; Lockon blinked in surprise. He sounded vulnerable, openly so. Was this the Tieria he'd hoped to help create instead of the one he'd actually known?
The idea of this actually being the future, the place where that Tieria could naturally exist, felt like the wrong shape in his head. He shied away from it. If this was the future, he wouldn't be here. That was fact, like the sun being hot and the world being broken. But whatever this Tieria was, he was still looking to Lockon for an answer now.
"Why don't you fill me in later?" Lockon said. "I have a feeling I'm not thinking straight right now."
"Of course. As I said, this specific regenerative process has side effects." Tieria hesitated, lifted a hand, then pulled it away. "It's efficient, but crude. Why they felt the need to allow injuries they could have healed entirely with more energy to simply scar over, I don't understand."
Lockon reached out to take hold of Tieria's arm, only to realize too late that his own hand was ungloved. What kind of dying vision wouldn't let him keep his gloves? But he felt Tieria tense up, then relax as if by instinct, at his touch. That was the important thing. "It doesn't bother me," he said. "Scars like this look cool, right?"
Tieria stared at him. "That's absurd, Lockon." His voice caught again on the name, and his gaze lingered somewhere on Lockon's face for a moment, then shifted too quickly away.
Lockon frowned, letting go of Tieria's arm and raising his hand to the place Tieria had been looking. His fingers settled on a web of scarring extending from his brow almost to his cheekbone. Oh. Yes. "I'm more worried about not having...any clothes..." He sagged back down onto one elbow, trying to stay even a little upright.
Tieria's attention snapped back to him, his eyes suddenly full of incomprehensible guilt, as if he could have done anything. "I told you about the side effects."
"You did," Lockon agreed, slowly letting himself drop back down onto the bed. "It was a good warning."
"Lockon..."
He didn't know if Tieria said anything after that, because consciousness left him for a little while. He found himself thinking what a relief this was. Whatever that dream had been, it hadn't felt right. He wanted to let go of it now.
The hint of voices reached him, and Lockon abruptly realized that if he could think at all, even enough to be glad the strange vision was over, it wasn't over after all. He was awake again, and somehow, not dead yet.
"--else know yet, Tieria?" Sumeragi's voice, sounding some weird combination of shellshocked and excited. Lockon wondered what it was that had shaken her so much.
"This location is secure enough that it was difficult even establishing communications with you," Tieria said. He sounded a little calmer now, but there was still something different about his voice. "There's no danger of that. It will be difficult enough allowing additional access to the complex. I should eventually be able to open the outer doors at will. For now, I expect I can reprogram it to allow an additional person in with every twenty-four-hour cycle."
"Only one?" Sumeragi sounded oddly worried about that. Lockon couldn't figure out why, nor could he pin down the reason behind the long pause that followed. They could decide more easily than that who would be the first through the doors of wherever this was.
A new voice spoke up. "You should get ready to go when we get there, Setsuna." Only it wasn't a new voice at all. It was an old one.
Lockon almost laughed at how out of place it was. But that was a comfort in a way. If his brain couldn't even keep his memories of Celestial Being separate from his memories of his brother anymore, this bizarre interlude was probably almost over. He lapsed easily back into sleep.
When he woke up again, he was starting to become more frustrated than confused. His head felt less fuzzy, his body less awkward, but the whole situation was no less ridiculous. Tieria still stood at the screen, concentrating on something on the other side of it, and he was still here himself. It felt even less right than before.
Tieria looked away from the screen and back at Lockon the moment he sat up again. He hesitated, then walked over to him in careful, measured steps and held out a hand. There was a black cloth in it. Lockon focused a little. It was a new eyepatch. "If you need anything else," Tieria said. "Tell me."
"Thanks, Tieria," Lockon said, reaching out to take it. "But I don't know what else I should need right now. Give me a little while."
Tieria looked down. "The Ptolemaios has just arrived. If the reprogramming worked, Setsuna should be here in a few minutes." He was struggling to say whatever came next. Finally, he said, "I'll leave you until then, and go to meet him." He lifted his head with obvious determination and, before he could reconsider, turned and left the room.
Lockon lay back down, staring blankly up at the ceiling. It wasn't getting any less vivid, even though he was sure it all should be fading by now. He no longer felt the downward pull of unconsciousness, and that worried him for some reason he couldn't pin down. He slid the eyepatch between his fingers, wishing Tieria had gotten him new gloves instead. Somehow actually putting the patch on seemed like an acknowledgment of something he wasn't too happy about, but he couldn't see what else to do with it, so he sat up again and started to put it back in place.
He heard the door open, glimpsed the distribution of light and shadow shifting just enough to tell him that someone had come in. For now he finished putting the eyepatch back on, then looked up, already opening his mouth to reassure Tieria.
It wasn't Tieria. Setsuna looked back at him, and Lockon realized several related things all at once.
The first was that he was older. At least twenty--no, more than that. The second was that there was actual emotion in his eyes, and the third was that he was smiling.
"Lockon Stratos," he said.
Lockon understood the fourth thing then: this was real. He was alive.
* * *
The narrow halls of the lunar complex had not felt so empty when Tieria had first walked through them a few hours ago, and that had been when he hadn't known there were others there. They had only felt sterile then. Now, knowing that Lockon waited in one plain room along the corridors like any other, it seemed intolerable to Tieria that he should be out here alone. He told himself that if anything happened, Setsuna would be able to help Lockon. It was a logical thought, and for some reason it did nothing to comfort him.
He stopped, finally. Instead of continuing to pace on needlessly, he reached out with a thought and summoned a communications screen to the wall next to him. Tieria knew that to the others it seemed he was mastering the capabilities of this new body and the secrets of Veda at a rapid pace, but he could just barely feel how much still lay ahead of him. This was only the start.
The blank metal surface shimmered slightly, then projected a screen two centimeters out from the wall. Though that had been easy enough, Tieria had to concentrate for a moment to establish the link to the Ptolemaios, waiting outside on the surface of the moon. He would establish a timeframe for the updates that would allow the ship's crew members to travel freely into and out of the moonbase, and then he would go back to see if Setsuna was done speaking with Lockon yet--
The grey screen resolved into the bridge of the Ptolemaios. "Tieria?" Feldt said. "Do you...have you made any progress?"
Somehow, the fact that it was Feldt threw his plans off kilter. It took him a moment to gather himself for a reply. "Not yet, but there may be a chance," he said. "I expected to have to suppress multiple alarms when Setsuna entered, but the security system recognizes and allows him as an Innovator. However, I don't expect to be able to get the doors open again for some time."
He and Feldt had worked together to open the doors in the first place. For him, it had been a fluid matter of rearranging electrons and bits inside Veda--not easy, but at least graceful. But through Veda's connections he could sense that her task was more awkward, could feel the uneven way she deciphered and then entered the corresponding codes as he transmitted the raw information he had pried from Veda's grasp. Were those without this connection to Veda (humans, he would have thought once, but he was human too, so normal humans perhaps, or those who weren't Innovades) always so clumsy, viewed from the other side? Or was there something tripping up Feldt's calm?
"I'd like to help," she said, with a hesitant smile. "Would you tell me if there's anything I can do?"
"I'll grant you as much access as is possible," he said. Reaching into Veda with a thought, he sought out Feldt's biometrics where they were stored on the Ptolemaios and introduced them to the moonbase's system. He could see some doors opening for her, but others remained shut, some of them even to him. Tieria knew that if he could stop seeing them as doors instead of simply access points, he'd be able to unlock more of them, but that was how it was.
He returned to the analog world in time to see Feldt giving him a slightly unsettled look. Blinking, he made a note to himself to be more careful about his connection to Veda in the future; it must have looked disturbing to others when he retreated back along it. "It's done," he said. "You should be able to reach the first few levels of data now, and there may be some ways to influence the physical access there."
"I'll try," Feldt said. She was hesitating again, and Tieria couldn't figure out why. After a moment, she spoke. "Thank you, Tieria."
He found himself swallowing against a lump in his throat. That didn't make sense; he wasn't sad. Even now, after everything he'd been through and everything he'd learned, some things about humanity--his own and that of others--still baffled him. "I understand why you'd want to help, Feldt. I won't turn it down."
"Of course," she said, looking away quickly. "I didn't mean that you would--"
She broke off, and he realized that there were tears in her eyes. "Feldt, are you..." He searched for the right word, but couldn't quite find it, so he settled on: "Are you hurt?"
Feldt blinked furiously and lifted her head to look straight at him once more. "No..." She was smiling again. "Tieria, people can cry when they're happy too. I didn't learn that until today."
"It's a basic fact of biology," he said. "Tears relieve stress, both positive and negative." No, that wasn't the right thing to say and he knew it. "I'm happy, too." That was better. "I'm grateful we could work together on this." That wasn't quite perfect, but it was better than Tears relieve stress.
"I am, too," Feldt said. "Let's do it again. When you find out how to control the doors better."
Tieria started to reply, but then stopped as his connection sent him a new alert. The other two current occupants of the complex were on the move. He said instead, "Yes. I'm sorry, this requires my attention now," and ended the communication.
Guided by Veda, it didn't take him long to find Setsuna and Lockon. They were both wearing Celestial Being uniforms, although Lockon was still adjusting the jacket on his.
"You should have told me you were bringing uniforms," Tieria said. "If you had, I would have asked for one."
Setsuna nodded. "Next time."
Feeling oddly defensive, Tieria added, "And any unexpected matter could have set off the security systems. You should be more careful." He lowered his gaze. "I will make sure to warn any future visitors of this."
"Hey, Setsuna," Lockon said as he finished adjusting the jacket. "Where's this one from? The fit is...almost perfect..." He trailed off, his gaze going distant.
"It's a spare," Setsuna said. "It belongs to--"
"I get it," Lockon said, his expression clouding.
Tieria felt his stomach twisting up. Lockon wasn't supposed to wear that expression. He was supposed to be happy now. They'd won, and he was alive, and they'd all done everything they could to live up to him. But--
Then Lockon's hand was on his shoulder. "Don't look like that, Tieria," he said. "I was just confused for a minute there."
A sudden ache of deferred longing ran through him. The last time Lockon had touched him like that, it had been little more than a nuisance, something strange and irrelevant. But since then, Tieria had spent almost six years wanting to feel that hand on his shoulder again.
"You shouldn't be up and moving," he said. "You should rest."
"I'll rest when I'm on the Ptolemy."
"What?" Tieria regretted the word immediately; there was no need to say it. He knew what Lockon meant. But somehow he couldn't keep himself from asking.
"I'm leaving with Setsuna," he said. "Don't get too worked up--we'll be back when you figure out how to open this place up to more people." He glanced at Setsuna. "Right?"
Setsuna nodded again. "It's necessary to update Lockon on everything that has happened in the past five years and nine months, approximately." He stopped and smiled tentatively. "It's easier if as many of us as possible are there. We'll establish a link from here to the Ptolemy for you, if it's possible."
"I understand," Tieria said, and he did, of course. But somehow he felt disappointed anyway. "Then...I will see you when I next contact the Ptolemy."
He knew he should have been working on the program that controlled the main doors, but somehow he couldn't keep himself from staring after Lockon as he followed Setsuna down the corridor and away. He almost managed to force himself to look away as they approached a corner--but then, as Setsuna went ahead, Lockon turned and looked back. He lifted a hand to wave, and he smiled.
For some reason, Tieria had trouble focusing on his connection to Veda. In this body, it should have been easy.
* * *
There was too much to absorb.
Lockon had sat through the recounting of the last six years as calmly as he could. In some places, that wasn't very calmly. He'd held in the outbursts of rage, shock, and guilt as well as he could, but he knew that here and there he'd slipped enough for his brother, at least, to see the cracks. He was afraid Setsuna could too, but he put that thought from his mind as quickly as he could.
When Setsuna had mentioned just who had razed Azadistan, Lockon had actually lost control. He was halfway out of his seat before Lyle grabbed his arm and said, "He's dead now, so you can sit back down."
He'd kept better control of himself when Lyle talked about the woman he'd loved and how she'd died, but it had hurt in a way that Lockon had never wanted to hurt again (he thought, briefly, that if he wanted to hurt like that again, he'd go back to being Neil Dylandy instead of Lockon Stratos, and he had no intention of doing that). That had taken him by surprise.
They'd left him alone in the empty room he'd been given, afterwards. Something felt wrong about that. They drifted back to their tasks, and all he could do was go over what he'd learned in his head and try to find a place for himself in it. After a little while, he gave up and went to sleep.
Waking brought a perverse kind of relief. Tieria had sent him information on the side effects of the regenerative process that had kept him alive for all that time he'd missed, and one of them was a lot of stiffness and sore muscles after first sleeping. Sure enough, he ached. It was a welcome distraction from the turmoil in his head.
Or it would have been, except that while he was asleep, Feldt had had painkillers sent to his room. She'd read up on the side effects too. Lockon made a note to thank her, and he took the drugs, since there was really no excuse for him not to. He didn't have a reason to let himself keep hurting this time, after all. There was nothing he needed to be alert and aware for--everything was taken care of without him.
In any case, these were high-quality medicines, and the sedative effect wore off long before the analgesic effect did. Once again Lockon found himself alone in a room that wasn't really his, and now he was looking at recordings as they scrolled across a screen. Dozens of battles he hadn't been able to take part in--how many more people would have survived if he'd been there? How much pain could he have spared Lyle? Why was he here now, when there was nothing more he could do?
A more recent memory came to his mind uncalled for: his last look back down the corridors of the place he'd been kept for the past five years, now with Tieria guarding their secrets. He'd recalled the image a few times since leaving there, even though he couldn't quite say why. There was something about the look on Tieria's face as Lockon turned back for a last look at him. No one here looked at him with that kind of earnest, oblivious need. Not even Feldt; after five years, the way she looked at him was simpler, easier to deal with, more understandable. He didn't mind that--it was a relief. It was true that something about the way Setsuna looked at him, like he understood, was upsetting. But at least Setsuna gave him some space.
It was a good thing, he told himself, that he was away from the lunar complex--even if there had been something appealing as well as worrying about the way Tieria had looked at him.
He shook his head and turned back to the computer. It offered to play him Cherudim's recording of the fight with Arche Gundam. Lockon shut it off, feeling suddenly sick--with what, he wasn't sure. He knew better than to blame the painkillers he'd taken, but he didn't want to think too much about what it really was. Instead, he checked up on the locations of everyone on board. It wasn't a feature he'd used a lot in the past, but then, his brother hadn't been on the ship in the past.
Now he was in the hangar, checking up on Cherudim. Lockon made his way down there.
It was familiar enough to be unsettling. All the Gundams had been repaired as much as possible since the last battle with the Innovators and A-LAWS. If he looked away from GN-Archer and 0-Raiser, and squinted a little, it was easy to pretend these were the Gundams he knew, and all he needed to do was wait until the next battle and he could take his place in combat again. Except he knew that really, he didn't want there to be another battle. He wanted it to be over, and it was, as much as it ever would be--but he was still here. He started to feel a little sick again at the idea. Maybe he should try to blame the painkillers after all, he thought.
There was movement, over near Cherudim. Lockon quickly slipped behind a bank of consoles and watched. This, at least, was familiar, maybe the most familiar thing here: watching his brother from a safely obscured vantage point.
But it was also unsettling. Lyle seemed entirely too comfortable with the Gundam. Like he belonged with it. Lockon thought of the statistics he'd read earlier, the ones detailing his brother's performance in combat. His accuracy rating--78%, 79%, 79%, 78%, 80% and then the sudden inexplicable jump, at the end: 91%, 93%, 96%, 97%, 99%. Better than Lockon had ever been (and he had a sneaking suspicion that now, even with time and practice, he'd be lucky to reach 75%).
Lyle pushed away from the Gundam, and then he stopped. He sighed and said, "If you want, Neil, we can talk."
The sound of his real name was alien. Lyle had used it once earlier, while explaining about Anew, but it still sounded weird to Lockon's ears. He said nothing. He didn't think he'd given his position away, after all. Lyle was probably just guessing, although it wasn't like him to be so forthright about it--probably. For all the information he'd amassed from watching his brother over the years, it had still been a long time, even without counting that missing time, since Lockon had spoken to him.
Lyle glanced around a moment longer, then made his way to another bank of consoles and called up one of the largest screens. Lockon could see most of it clearly from his position.
"I'm going to show you something," Lyle said, and he keyed in a request. He was asking the computer for the location of Lockon Stratos.
The screen flashed and threw up an answer: Lockon Stratos is using Computer 7E, surrounding Cherudim Gundam. It blinked, as if uncertain, and then added, Lockon Stratos is near Computer 5D, not in use, near Cherudim Gundam. It had given Lyle's location first.
"This is going to take a while to sort out," Lyle said. "Hey, Neil. Are you really going to walk away?"
As a matter of fact, Lockon was walking away, but being called on it so directly stalled him. He found himself turning around to face his brother.
"There's probably a lot you want to know," Lyle said, "that we didn't really talk about before."
Lockon still wanted to walk away. Barring that, he wanted to say something inconsequential and push the topic further and further away from himself. He looked at the expression on his brother's face, and he realized he wasn't going to get the chance to do either. He looked for a middle ground, but it wasn't coming.
Instead he said, "Tell me about Setsuna, and how he's changed."