Things Which Are Not

by Helen1969

Two philosophies. Two brothers. One woman. Do you wipe out pain and loss and guilt by embracing life? Or by wiping away your sins with the push of a button? Two heroes whose lives went in very different directions. One brief intersection: a junction in time which, in hindsight, was inevitable. (CGIverse, 10 years after the Homecoming War)

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not

John Donne: A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Night

Planet "Mirage", 2888

She was always on the alert, had been for what seemed an eternity. Every shifting timber in the house, every gust of wind, even the pitter patter of raindrops on the dusty windows was the drumroll which could herald the end of their small world, contracted to the walls around her. Even the friendly knock of their neighbour, to take the children to school in the mornings when Alex was away set her nerves on edge, and she would reach for the escape bag and gun always kept ready near the door.

So the sound of footsteps - heavy with the weight of the metal soles used on board battleships, had her reaching for the gun even as her heart threatened to leap up her throat, it was pounding so hard.

They came from the girls' room. Anastasia had been sleeping with her tonight, after waking from a nightmare, but her sister...

As silently as she could, she edged towards the slightly open door. Pausing before the doorway, all she could hear from inside was her youngest daughter's gurgling laugh - the one she gave when her father held her.

Stepping into the doorway she held the pistol in both hands, pointed at the figure in black who stood in front of the rustic cot, holding a giggling Sasha in both hands, his back to the door. A tall man, easily the same height as the boys' father. Dark hair curled over the high collar of a long leather mantle, all black except for the blood red lining. As he moved slightly it swirled away heavily to reveal the tip of a gravity sabre slung from his left hip. Knee length boots - also black - had black pants tucked into their tops. In the darkness of the small room, a faint blue wispy glow seemed to surround him as he moved, leaving a ghostly afterimage.

'Put her down, gently, and step away, or I swear I'll shoot.'

'Do you really believe I'd hurt a child, Maya?'

And dear God, it was his voice. He turned to face her, still holding Sasha, and it was him.. a face she'd only seen in nightmares these last ten years.

'She's not yours!' she blurted out, still holding the gun aimed at his face. His beautiful, scarred face now bore testament to yet more pain, she noticed: a black leather patch now covered his right eye.

'I can count, love. I saw the other little girl this afternoon, when I watched the house. It seems you didn't wait long,' he added roughly, and she flinched at the pain in his voice. Rubbing noses with the daughter she'd wanted to give him, he placed the child back in her cot and turned to face her again. 'I came back for you as soon as I could…'

'You died…' she whispered. 'We watched from the bridge of Deathshadow Zero as your ship fell into a hell of your own making. No-one could have survived that. God alone knows, there are days I wish I hadn't.'

'Maya..' he took a step towards her and she raised the pistol to point at his once beloved, once so perfect face.

'Stay back, Harlock. Don't come any closer!'

'I told you I wouldn't harm your daughter - why would I harm you?' he asked, a look of genuine bemusement crossing his face. It even reached that lone, cold eye.

'I watched you murder thirty people in cold blood, Harlock. Watched the Deathshadow Four's guns burn through the atmosphere and vapourise three helpless transports. My father was onboard the lead plane. And then you turned on your fellow captains. And if the blood of hundreds of people who looked up to you - who trusted you- was not enough, you then turned an entire planet into a blackened wasteland. In the space of an hour, you wiped out three billion men, women and children.

'When they put out the bulletin five years ago saying you'd been seen, we knew you'd show up, sooner or later. They say you're a terrorist - a traitor, and now a pirate. If the reports we're getting are accurate you don't seem to care too much about who gets in your way these days. So ask yourself why I don't feel like lowering this weapon.'

'It was an accident…' he murmured, not looking her in the eye.

She sighed. 'Opening fire on three unarmed civilian transports was an accident?'

'No, that I meant to do,' he replied quietly, finally raising his eye to meet hers. 'And Justin begged me to do it, so do not put his death on me. He knew the price, he was willing to pay it. They betrayed us, Maya. Their so-called peace agreement…'

'The one that put a stop to the slaughter of billions?' she retorted. 'Yes, I heard your broadcast to the fleet. And the rest of the fleet gave you their answer.'

'And I gave them mine!' he shouted. Sasha started to cry and heedless of the danger, she rushed to her daughter's cot to pick her up and comfort her, rocking her gently against her shoulder. 'Sorry,' he muttered. 'I didn't mean…'

'No,' she told him sadly. She placed Sasha back in her cot and tucked her in. 'It seems you do a lot of things you don't mean to - and somehow, so many people get hurt anyway.'

He had no answer for that; he just stood there, waiting, and she knew that pose all too well - standing tall, but not meeting her gaze; a stubborn schoolboy caught doing something he shouldn't but refusing to own up to the deed and take his punishment.

'You should not have come, Harlock. If anyone sees you -'

'They won't. I was -'

'Careful?'

He flinched at the implied accusation, but stood his ground. She took a step towards him and tried to look up into his one remaining eye. 'Look at me, Harlock. Let me see…'

He raised his head and lowered his gaze to meet hers, and she took an involuntary step backwards. There was so much loss, pain and anger in that singular gaze she could barely encompass it. And something as cold as the depths of space, and as hot as the interior of a sun at the same time moving behind that sherry-dark window onto a soul she thought she knew better than almost anyone.

She'd forgotten how young he looked. But not his almost unearthly beauty. Never that.

'Why did you come here?' she asked sadly. 'There's nothing for you here. Not now...'

'There's you… and the boys - or so I thought.'

Her turn now to flinch at the implication in his tone.

'You were dead - I didn't see any way you could have survived that… I watched all of the Deathshadows fall into that maelstrom when the planet heaved and boiled, Harlock - and I didn't stop crying for weeks. Do you know how many times I re-watched it? Over and over again, looking for any clues that might tell me you'd survived? Listening to almost everyone around us telling me what a monster the man I loved had become?

'You shouldn't have come,' she repeated sadly, turning away. Because if she stood there so close for much longer, she might break, and reach out to touch that ruined face, and then she would lose every precious thing she'd held close and built for herself since those terrible months more than ten years ago.

'It took me years to find you - and you tell me to leave?' he asked, a universe of sorrow and loss in his voice, which cracked on the final syllable. 'Do you love him so much?'

'I wouldn't have married him if I didn't,' she said sadly. 'You were officially dead, so do not try to claim I broke our vows, Harlock. I didn't.'

'Which bit? For better, for worse? In sickness and in health?'

'Until death us do part!' she raised her voice only slightly, to avoid frightening Sasha.

'But Mamoru.' He said the name dully. 'Mamoru? My half-brother? The bastard? The accountant?' he sneered, and she could hear the hurt in his voice. She turned back to face him, because she owed him this much, to look him in the eye.

'Yes. The man whose family you killed in your insanity. The man I nursed back to health when all he wanted to do was lie down and die. The man who got our boys to safety and salvaged as much as he could of your fortune before it was sequestered by the Coalition for your crimes. The man who has repeatedly put his life on the line to protect us from the results of your grand folly. So don't you dare try to put him down in my hearing. He was there when I needed someone. His gentleness, his compassion were what saved me, and I owed him for that.'

'I'd have thought a decent stipend could have covered it - you didn't need to open your legs…'

She cut off his words with a right cross to his jaw that staggered him slightly. 'Bastard! How dare you! You don't get to judge us, Harlock - not now, not ever. You lost the right to do that years ago. If you wanted your life back after the war, you should have thought of that before you opened fire on unarmed civilian ships. Or before you decided in your arrogance to destroy an entire planet.'

'I was trying to save it!' he shouted.

Sasha started crying again and she picked up her daughter and comforted her, ignoring the looming, anguished form of her former husband.

Well. Trying to. Ignoring him had never been an option.

'After you and Mamoru sabotaged the Jupiter plasma array, I knew we couldn't just leave Earth undefended. We couldn't be held hostage to weapons like that again. I wanted to create a true sanctified zone around Earth,' he began, his voice hoarse and strained. 'I begged Mimay to unleash the dark matter - it was supposed to have formed a shield. Instead…'

'You over-reached yourself?' She faced him, Sasha clinging to her neck, her face on her mother's shoulder. Harlock's head bowed, and for a moment, she thought she saw a single tear roll down his scarred cheek. 'You stupid, brave fool - you never did know when to quit, did you?' she whispered.

His head jerked back up. 'Don't pity me, Maya. That's one thing I don't want from you.'

'I'm not sure what else I have to offer,' she told him bluntly. 'You really shouldn't have come.'

'I wanted… maybe… to see if I could make things right. I thought…'

'That I'd come with you? Leave what peace I've been able to find for us and follow you into exile? Because there's no place you can go they won't hunt you, my love. Ever since they put out that alert for you after your ship raided that munitions store off Titan I've been dreading this - if you could find us, so can they - and they'll use me and the boys against you, you must know this.'

'The boys…? Are they?'

'Safe.' She hesitated. 'They missed you - Steffie didn't stop crying himself to sleep for months. Richard's always been more stoic - he hides his feelings, much like you do.'

'I can't see them, can I?' he murmured.

'It's better if you go now, before they get back.'

He nodded. 'I'm putting you in danger.' It was a statement, not a question. She nodded.

'If the Gaia Sanction find out you were here, they will want to know why. If they find us, we're dead - there's an outstanding warrant on both our heads as well. I doubt they'd spare the children.' She laughed harshly. 'The real joke is, they won't even admit to anyone why we're wanted - did you know they hid your handiwork? No-one outside of the Solar System even knows Earth's gone. But they found plenty of war crimes to pin on you regardless. Even the ones you don't blame yourself for.'

'I had noticed. But if you need anything...'

'We don't.' She tried to soften the rejection she saw in his eyes. 'Alex - Mamoru put aside most of the funds he hid into trusts for the boys and Aurora, but he's made sure we have resources if we have to make a run for it.' She didn't add "again", but if he'd found her here, under the names they were using, he'd know this wasn't the first time.

He nodded. 'Fine. Tell him it's all his - anything he can salvage from the family coffers. Don't let him get any honourable ideas about paying for his own children out of his own damn pocket. He always was an idiot about things like that.'

'Harlock?'

They'd both been so caught up in the moment, that neither of them had heard the man who now stood in the doorway behind Maya, silhouetted against the light, a young girl peeking out from behind him.

'Alex!' She saw Harlock flinch at the relief in her voice, but the need to flee into the safe harbour she'd found over the past few years trumped her guilt. She swallowed hard as he walked over to her and placed an arm protectively around her waist.

'Why don't you take Sasha and Anastasia into the next room?' he asked quietly. He kissed her cheek gently. 'Go. I'll be fine, but the girls are scared.'

He waited until the door had shut behind her before he turned again to face his brother. 'I thought you were dead…'

'Seems to be a lot of that going around,' Harlock replied coldly. 'Thou shalt not covet the nakedness of thy brother's wife… Leviticus 18:16 if I recall correctly.' He glared at his older brother from under his long brown hair. 'You fucking bastard. She's my wife…'

'You really don't want to go there,' Mamoru warned him.

'Why not? You did, it seems.'

He didn't bother to put up a defence against the right hook that staggered him, but left him standing. He wiped away the blood from his split lip with a gloved hand, and smiled grimly as it healed in seconds, the blue flames floating around his fingertips as he drew his hand away.

'What of mine?' Mamoru asked, his normally tranquil hazel eyes blazing with their own quiet fury. 'What about Miranda, Albrecht? What about Elena? And Ekaterina? What about Annelise? Tochiro's girls?'

'So? You take my family in retribution, is that it?'

'I took nothing, baby brother. You were dead - you, Tochiro… Khal.. We thought nothing survived that fall - I was there, on the edge of that explosion. I saw all four ships fall into the hell you turned Earth into. And yes, I did go back to check, before they locked down the whole system. There wasn't a trace of any of you.' His voice cracked. 'Any of them. I couldn't find Heilegenstadt, Albrecht. I couldn't even find Franconia…'

Harlock looked away and down, away from those haunted hazel eyes. 'It wasn't supposed to…' he muttered.

'No. With you it never is.' Mamoru ran a hand through his hair and sighed. 'You haven't changed.'

'That's hardly fair…'

'No. I meant how you look. Apart from the eye, that is. When…'

'When they killed Tochiro. The last broadside.' Said with that flat tone he always used when he didn't want to talk about something painful.

'I'm sorry.'

'You look… old.' His manners hadn't completely deserted him, so he quickly amended that. 'Older.'

'I'm almost sixty, Albrecht - just what did you expect?'

'I don't know… I…' he took a deep breath. 'So does she…' he finished on a whisper. 'Ten years… I didn't think…' He raised a finger. 'Don't say it.'

'Wasn't going to .'

Harlock looked at the two beds - the large cot, and the child sized bed opposite. 'More girls?'

'Alexandra, and Anastasia. Sasha and Stasia. Two and six.'

'Richard? Stefan?'

'Both away - Richard's eighteen - first year at university. Stefan's staying with a friend tonight. He'll be fifteen next week, in case you cared…'

'Cared, yes. Kept track of time since… No. Not so much.'

'You don't look a day older…' Maya's voice, from the doorway. She walked back into the room and shut the door behind her. 'Not a single day…' she whispered sadly, staring at him as though drinking in every detail.

He looked at her properly, then, for the first time, and seeing what he'd missed the first time, in the bittersweet moment of seeing her again. She was - what - forty-two? Forty-three? There were lines around her eyes that hadn't been there before. A tightness around her mouth that suggested she rarely laughed. And her short hair - and he wondered when she'd cut off the long hair he'd so loved to feel against his skin - had silver streaks in it, hidden by the gold, but his eyesight - even down to one eye - was sharp enough to pick out the way they glinted in the light.

He smiled sadly then, at the cosmic joke that had been played on him by fate. 'No. Apparently I won't get any older, either. This body... ' he looked down into her eyes, then back up slightly into his brother's, 'is functionally immortal, whilst the Arcadia's dark matter engine still lives.'

'Then turn it off.' Mamoru's reply was direct and to the point as ever.

He shook his head. 'It's not that simple.'

'Then why,' Maya asked softly, 'Did you come here? Did you think I'd just give up everything I have to follow you onto that damned ship? Oh god, Harlock - what happened to you? That explosion…'

'Killed me.' He laughed harshly at the looks on their faces. 'A phantom in truth, now - isn't that more irony to pile on? And the joke's on me, because I thought…' He took a deep breath. 'What would you say, If I told you there was a way I could put things right? Make it so all of this never happened? Take time back to a point where this never happened… where Earth was green and blue and we -'

'Undo this? What - like a restore point on a computer game? You don't like the choices you make so you'd just reset reality to a time before you made them?' Mamoru shook his head. 'You never were one to just take what fate brings your way, were you? You don't get a do-over, Harlock. Even if you did - what about the cost? What about the choices you wipe out as collateral damage? Would you have me give up my daughters? Trade the lives of my new family for the old? Miranda would shoot me for even thinking it, and you for suggesting it.'

Something flew past Harlock's head and crashed against the wall behind him. Lightning fast reflexes - and the split-second, conditioned response to seeing his lovely wife reach for something breakable - saved his head from being responsible for breaking a rather rustic earthenware vase. 'She wouldn't be the only one,' Maya snarled. 'How dare you!'

He hadn't come to beg, but he'd come too far now to give up. 'There is a way… the Nibelung…'

Mamoru frowned. 'The Nibelung wiped themselves out in their pride and arrogance - thinking that they could control the most primal and powerful forces of nature. Look where it got them - did you learn nothing from their history? I warned you - you and Tochiro - back when you first encountered them, that accepting their technology was dangerous.' He shook his head again. 'No. And I hope to God, or Gaia or whatever there is left to pray to that you aren't planning on trying anything stupid. You made a mistake, you gambled, you lost. Like the rest of us, you'll just have to make the best of the life you have left.'

Harlock was avoiding his brother's gaze again and Mamoru looked at him in dawning horror. 'Oh dear God - you've already begun, haven't you? The oscillators you stole… Harlock - what are you planning? Whatever it is… damn it - where's Tochiro when you need him?' he looked around the small room wildly, as though hoping against hope that the small, annoyingly chirpy little man was somehow hiding, waiting to walk out of the shadows and tell them it was all a bad dream...

Harlock raised his hand to almost - but not quite - touch his eyepatch. 'I couldn't save him.' His hoarse whisper held a lifetime of pain and regret. Mamoru reached out for him, but Harlock shifted away, and Mamoru's arm dropped limply to his side. 'But I can make it so that it doesn't even happen. Maya… Nii-san… … It doesn't have to be like this. I can put it right. I just need a little more time, to place the oscillators… I can unchain the nodes of time, free us from linear time.'

'Then what?' Mamoru didn't raise his voice. He rarely needed to. 'Albrecht… have you even thought this through? So you unwind the last what - ten years? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? What's to stop the same mistakes happening all over again? Go back far enough, and what if we never even existed? For God's sake…'

'God? What god? What god would stand by and let this happen? The "benevolent" spirit of a dead planet that the Gaia Sanction would have us all worship? ' Harlock almost spat the words out. 'What little faith I had died during the war. There's no-one watching over us, no-one coming to save us from ourselves. We're utterly alone out here. I have to try something - it's better than the alternative. What else would you have me do, aniki? Wander an empty universe looking for a place to die? A Flying Dutchman for the space age?'

'Live,' Mamoru told him, reaching out again. 'Oh Albrecht, please...'

Harlock slapped the outstretched hand away with a barely veiled snarl. 'Live? For what?' He glared at his brother and his former wife. 'You've got the only thing left I had to live for.' He laughed harshly. 'Dle Fleigende Hollander in truth… condemned to wander eternally in search of that non-existent ideal, the constant woman.'

Maya snatched the closest object - a large serving spoon standing in a bowl on a side table, and strode towards him, jabbing it at him. 'Why… you…'

'What do you plan on doing with that? Put the other eye out?'

'I'd aim a lot lower than that.'

'Go ahead,' he sneered. 'Why not do in the flesh what you've done in spirit?'

'Harlock!' Mamoru's voice was raised this time. More softly he added. 'Maya - please. The little one's crying again. Leave this to me.'

She hesitated, looking from one brother to the other. Harlock with his face averted, refusing to meet her eyes. Mamoru's softer, hazel eyes holding only sadness. She nodded once, and left, the door closing behind the swish of her long skirt. She didn't look back.

'Albrecht… Wirst du weiterhin andere verletzen, um deinen eigenen Schmerz zu vertuschen?' he asked softly. 'Look at me.'

'There's nothing more to say,' Harlock said harshly. He didn't look at his brother. 'How do you do it?' he asked. 'Live with it? Wake up every morning, seeing it happen, over and over again, powerless to stop it. How do you move on from that moment, unless with the hope that you can make it so it never happens?'

'You pick yourself up, put one foot in front of the other, and you live, little brother. You live, you love, and you find something in your heart that gives you that reason to carry on, and you fight to protect it with everything you have. There will never be a day I won't mourn for Miranda and my daughters, but I still have a family, and I love them just as fiercely as those I've lost. It hurts, little brother, it hurts like hell, but there's always loss, and pain, alongside love. But it's better than the alternative - only the dead feel nothing…'

'Maybe that's the problem,' Harlock whispered. He walked slowly towards the door, passing his brother by and ignoring again the outstretched hand that reached for him. 'I'm already dead, after all.'

'I'll stop you,' Mamoru called out, as Harlock paused briefly to open the heavy wooden door.

'You can't kill what's already dead,' Harlock replied. And like the ghost he'd once been named for, he was gone. A few seconds later the door to the house closed on a whispered hiss.

Mamoru walked over to the window, to watch the dark, cloaked figure stride away, silhouetted against the dawn sky. 'I never said anything about killing you, you stubborn fool,' he muttered. He felt, rather than heard, Maya walk up behind him, and slid his arm around her waist as she leaned against him, laying her head on his shoulder. Her quiet tears quickly soaked through his shirt, and he pulled her closer.

'I promised myself I wouldn't do this,' she sniffled into his collar. He hugged her. 'How soon before we have to leave?' she asked eventually.

'Tonight,' he replied sadly. He dropped a chaste kiss on her forehead. 'Sorry you had to face him alone, I made the best time I could but we were almost out of range; if the alarms on board the Deathshadow Zero hadn't gone off when the Deathshadow Four entered the system, we'd have been halfway to Lar Metal. Besides, it's time we moved on anyway. I only waited this long to let him catch up with us. I'll call Con and Lizzie. We'll lose ourselves near Destiny for a few years - there's a little planetoid called Carmilla, near a dusty little world called Tabito that I've been outfitting. Call the boys, we'll meet them at the ship.' He kissed her softly. 'You weren't tempted to leave with him?'

She smiled fondly at him, and wrapped her arms around his warm body. For a man close to sixty, he was, she thought, still remarkably well-muscled and slim. 'That ship sailed a long time ago. Besides, he didn't come here to take me with him.'

'No?'

'No.' She stared out of the window, in the direction Harlock had walked. 'He came to make absolutely sure there was nothing left to hold him back…'