The Earth Alliance officer's throat crumpled in Sting's grip like a discarded soda can. Pinned to the wall by the green-haired pilot, the officer managed only a feeble wheeze before his head lolled forward and he became dead weight. His arm trembled slightly from the strain, but his voice was harsh and commanding.

"Don't...fucking...talk...about...Auel's...mother...like...that. Bastard." He sneered and let the officer's limp body slump to the floor.

"...Mother..." gasped Auel, his strangled voice an octave above normal. Sting sighed and looked down at the other pilot, who crouched less than a meter from the dead officer but didn't seem to have noticed. Auel continued to sob, barely registering Sting in his wide, empty eyes.

"I'm sorry, Auel. I didn't mean to say it again."

"Mother... Mother's going to die!"

"Stop saying your own block word, idiot. You're going to make it worse." It was useless to reason with Auel, now, if it was even possible on the best of days. He clutched his head and tore at his hair; even as Sting watched several ice-blue strands of hair broke free in his grasp. Like himself and Stellar Loussier, Auel had been conditioned to mentally shut down when his block word was uttered. Sting supposed it was designed to control less stable test subjects like Stellar if they fell into violent hysterics but it had been a cruel joke on the part of some Lodonia Laboratory technician to imprint them with fairly commonplace words, thus making it fairly easy to trigger a complete mental breakdown. Some idiot officer had grown tired of Auel's cocky attitude and made some sort of rude comment about his mother, knowing full well that there were certain words forbidden to be spoken on the deck of the John Paul Jones. The bastard deserved what he got.

"I'm got to save her!" Auel managed to stand although his body seemed racked with crippling spasms and his eyes were wide and terrified. Lodonia really did a bang-up job on Auel, thought Sting to himself. "M...Mother..."

"I told you, idiot, if you keep saying it, it's going to keep hurting. Now shut up." Sting clamped a hand over Auel's mouth and pressed firmly, even as the blue-haired boy snarled and thrashed his lean body like a trapped animal. Within a few moments, his struggles had subsided to a weak tremor.

By that time, though, a squad of heavily armed soldiers and psychiatric doctors bearing tranquilizers and stunners had descended upon them. Sting's first impulse was to hold Auel even tighter: then to break through the line of soldiers, make it to the Chaos Gundam, and get Auel away from this place. A stunner bean glanced off his arm, momentarily paralyzing his grip so the soldiers were able to wrench Auel away. A scream died in Auel's throat as a doctor emptied an ampoule of some sort of drug into the side of his neck. With that, Auel's body went as slack as that of the officer Sting had killed, and they were able to load him onto a gurney without much trouble. There would be no daring escape today.

Sting was left with the dead man and a painfully twitching left arm. He supposed that another crew would be along shortly to clear up the mess. The officer's head was tilted just a little too far to the left, and there was a streak of blood at the corner of his mouth. Sting regarded the corpse curiously - he had killed someone, and although he was vaguely aware that the officer was far from the first person to die by his hands, it still had a certain feeling of novelty, perhaps. Frequent memory wipes had dimmed his recollections of previous killings, but he figured he was probably supposed to feel something.

After a few moments of soul-searching, Sting gave up and started to walk back to his room. What was the point of feeling remorse when it would disappear with the next scheduled memory wipe? It was almost like not having to feel anything at all.

Sting closed jade-green eyes, and sighed heavily. Nothing at all. He walked past his quarters and turned towards the medical ward, and took a brief detour through a memory.

"What happens when you shoot people?" Stellar's voice sounded as girlish and innocent today as it had years ago. Sting still remembered some things, like sitting in the break room between training sessions, with Stellar asking stupid questions that he and Auel would make up the answers to. "What makes the ocean blue?" she would ask, and he and Auel would have her absolutely convinced that it was full of raspberry soda. Sting already knew what happened when you shot people, though.

"Duh, Stellar, that's easy," began Auel, his habitual grin taking on a hint of cruelty. "They d..."

"They disappear," interjected Sting before Auel could finish saying Stellar's block word. Stellar was hard enough to control when she wasn't in a delusional panic state.

"Oh." Auel rolled his eyes and went back to his sports magazine, but Stellar seemed satisfied. "They're not real, then. That's okay."

"Huh?" Sting had never heard it put quite that way. He didn't remember killing anyone in Lodonia thanks to mental blocks more sophisticated than Neo's clumsy memory wipes, the three of them remembered very little of their time there but he remembered washing blood off his hands. The blood had been real, or at least he thought it had. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

"That's what Neo says when Stellar has bad dreams. They're not real. They disappear in the morning, so they were never real. Sting is smart like Neo."

Stellar, with her fractured mind, probably wasn't even aware of the truth in what she said. Things that disappeared in the morning were never real to begin with. The missing pieces in his memory were an annoyance, but none of it was real. Auel and Stellar were the only things he could trust not to disappear.

That was a long time ago, though. He couldn't even trust that anymore.

The medical ward was quiet when Sting entered he generally avoided the place, but he expected there to be more activity in such an important part of the ship. He reflected that it was probably quiet today for the same reason that the corridors near his quarters were usually devoid of normal Earth Alliance officers. No-one wanted to be near him, or Stellar, or Auel.

He pushed aside the curtains surrounding the only occupied suite in the ward to find Auel strapped to the bed, his blue eyes partially open but still and glazed. Sting frowned and closed them with his thumb and forefinger. Auel looked much more relaxed with his eyes closed, almost like was sleeping. A yellow-tinged liquid dripped from a bag connected to the needle stuck in his wrist. Auel hated the drugs that the three of them were always subjected to, and usually refused to take them. Sting was always the stable, obedient one, but he found himself pulling the needle from his friend's arm so it dripped steadily onto the tiled floor. With the same curiosity he felt while observing the dead officer, he watched a thick drop of blood well up on Auel's wrist. It seemed very, very real.

"You fucking idiot..." muttered Sting. "Don't you dare disappear." Auel said nothing. It was only the slight rise and fall of his bared chest that separated him from the dead officer. "Did you hear me? I don't want you to disappear."

Gently, with the same care he would use when brushing tangles from Stellar's hair, Sting put his hand to the other boy's cheek. He might have imagined that Auel's face turned almost imperceptibly to rest against his hand. His skin was warm, and softer than Sting would have thought. He closed his eyes and leaned towards Auel, noting with the same matter-of-fact-ness that Auel's lips were equally soft when they kissed. His tongue slipped between those lips, carefully tracing the warm, wet interior of Auel's mouth.

Auel didn't make a sound, but Sting's mind overflowed with noise. The soft sigh of Auel's breath against his, the rustle of cerulean hair against the pillow, and the moan building in his own throat. When Sting pulled away, Auel's eyes were still peacefully closed, but his lips were slightly parted and wet with saliva. Sting wanted to kiss him again. He wanted to promise him that they would find a place where they could watch the ocean and play basketball and make new memories to replace the ones they were better off without. He wanted to promise that he would never disappear.

Instead he stood somewhat awkwardly, conscious of the uncomfortable oversensitivity in his groin, and made his way towards the medical ward's communication screen.

"Neo. It's Sting. I want a memory wipe. As soon as possible." He then flicked off the screen and went back to Auel to brush the stray hair from his eyes. "Hey, Auel. I'm trusting you to remember this for me. Idiot."

Sting ran his fingers through his hair and wondered how many first kisses there had already been. He was glad he couldn't remember.