Title: Hurt

Author: NinthFeather
Rating: T

Characters: Setsuna F. Seiei, Lyle Dylandy, Neil Dylandy
Summary: This hurts like nothing else Setsuna has ever experienced.

WARNINGS: Angst and spoilers for Setsuna's past, Neil and Lyle Dylandy's pasts, and the season two episode "Anew Returns". Includes spoiler for a major character's death.
Disclaimer: Unless having a plushie replica of Exia counts, I do not own.
AN – This is an extremely subjective interpretation of this scene, and I don't have a lot of evidence to support it being correct. So, just think of it as speculation. Thanks to StormyMonday for beta-reading!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

There was a part of Setsuna that, despite the completely inappropriate situation, wanted nothing more than to laugh. It was a side-effect of his guerilla training, probably, that he could laugh under such circumstances. But there was something horribly amusing about the sheer irony of this situation, so much so that he nearly did laugh aloud.

Setsuna F. Seiei was a child soldier and a self-made orphan. He was also a Gundam Meister. If you named a traumatic experience, it was likely that he'd experienced it at one point or another. But this particular experience hurt like none of the others had, and it was happening in the middle of his own ship without an enemy in sight.

Bracing himself, he looked up. Lyle Dylandy's face, twisted by grief and anger, swam in front of his eyes as the other Meister drew back his fist to punch Setsuna again.

Setsuna wasn't going to complain. And he wasn't going to fight back. He knew how much Anew had meant to Lyle. In fact, from the moment he took aim at her Gundam, he'd known this would happen. He just hadn't expected it to hurt this much.

Not physically, of course. Lyle was a sniper for a reason-his hand-to-hand combat abilities were average at best. His technique, while not flawed per se, was very basic…and Setsuna was distracting himself with combat analysis again. Even he knew that wasn't healthy as a coping mechanism.

What it came down to was this: Lyle looked like Neil, being that he was his twin. Setsuna, despite his best efforts to ignore Neil, had come to look up to the man and missed him greatly. As a result, the experience of being hit repeatedly by a person with the same face as Neil, and having to watch those green eyes fill with hate and know that all of it was directed at him-it was not a pleasant experience.

Lyle was not his brother. Setsuna knew this. He found that this fact did not really make him feel any differently about the situation, not because Lyle meant just as much to Setsuna as Neil had. He didn't. This wasn't Lyle's fault, of course. Neil had been the only thing standing between Setsuna and a mental breakdown for quite a while, and, moreover, he had willingly occupied that position despite Setsuna's brusque refusals of his help. He had been…he had been an older brother to Setsuna. Lyle was a comrade, a friend, and a good, reliable man. He was competent, had a good sense of humor, and Setsuna believed in his abilities as a Gundam Meister. But he didn't mean to Setsuna what Neil had meant to Setsuna.

No, this hurt for a different reason. Setsuna hadn't forgotten what Neil had told him about the bombing that killed his family. For a while, he knew, Neil really had hated him, or at least, the idea of him and the others who were part of Ali Al-Saachez's terrorist cell. At one time, Neil's eyes had held that kind of hatred for him. And even if Neil had forgiven him later on, the time when Neil had hated him still remained.

That was the part that actually hurt.