It had been hard to find the makeshift airfield, the dirt strip of roughly flat land by the beach had not been prepared in advance. Perhaps this had been somewhere pleasant to live. There were ruined, abandoned houses nearby, but what had caught her attention was a crashed F/C-15 in blue maritime camouflage with a green flare near its cockpit. IRIS didn't mind that the landing was a bit rough.

Nicole Khoury wanted to breathe as she stepped off the ladder. Mirages hung before her with every step closer to the crashed jet… jets? and their flare, visions of her dead squadmates taunting her. Burn. Dagger.

"You alright? You don't look…"

The sand was warm and the rain was soft.

She didn't mind collapsing.

She shook her weary head, and her eyes fluttered open. She felt… someone moving her? "Here." The voice of Burn's ghost— Scott's ghost— fell into her ears. "I think you need this more than me."

She felt the comforting cradle of an ejector seat. It faced the ocean. It faced the sun. The real, honest sun. The rain came down soft.

The rain reached out, and cupped the pilot's cheek. It washed her tortured visage clean; the rain gently swept away her pooling tears and with it she couldn't help but look skywards.

"We're free," Dagger's ghost said. "Did you hear me? We won! The Feds are pulling out. The war's over!"

"It's over! C'mon, talk to me!"

"She's fucked up after this, Dag. Lay off her."

Burn moved into her sight, and she tried to shake herself out of her haze. How could he have… No. It's gotta be an illusion.

"Nicole, right?" He gave her a smile. "Don't think I've ever called you that."

"You're dead. I'm dead, aren't I?"

"No." Dagger's voice came with an unseen shrug. "You're pretty alive, last I checked."

"How'd you…"

He pointed to the flaming wreck of an F/C-16 in the distance. "Any you can walk away from, right? Bluejay made it, too, unfortunately. He made a water landing." Scott chuckled. "You're in my ejector seat, y'know. Don't say I never did anything for ya."

"You seem happy." She didn't know how anyone could be after this.

"The war's over. We lost a lot, but the war's over. There's a life for me after this. One for Dagger, and Bluejay, and you, too."

It was a good view of the sky from the seat. The crisp August breeze brushed through her hair as the rain continued to fall.

"You know, I grew up near the exclusion zone. Every once in a while, a bad storm would hit. Weird thing about geothermal storms? It's not usually raining. Sometimes it's just lightning, ash, and fire." He paused. "But the rain, the rain always came when it was over. We could go outside when it rained. The rain beat down the ash and put out the fires. And eventually, when it was really done, when the storm had finally passed, we'd lean our ears to the wall and hear nothing but the rain."

She nodded. "I hear that now."

"Mhm. It's raining on us now."

She shuddered. "So it's really over?" She choked back tears.

He nodded, and gave his comrade a comforting embrace. "We're safe now. It's over."

She nodded, and as she rose to her feet, she tried her best to believe him.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. This was my first fanfic and I'm proud to say it is my first finished fic.

Dedicated to Elias and Detroit.