Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Just who the hell do you think we are?!

                                                  GIGA!

                                                                   DRILL!

                                                                                      BREAK! ”

The sounds of crunching, grinding metal is all he needed to know that Gurren Lagann’s drill had hit its mark, Thymilph’s gunman reduced to some floating pieces of former limbs falling away from the hole bored into its middle. It rings through his head on loop, the awful screech of the metal being ripped through that echoes just minutes prior before Gurren had been unceremoniously ripped through like paper and an awful, searing pain had spread its way through his torso. 

It’s odd, because he feels like now is the time for his head to be held high; they won! Dai-Gunzan -- no, Dai- Gurren was theirs, Thymilph was dead, he can hear Simon’s high pitched laughter and the rest of the team’s cheering through the radio and he knows his voice should be ringing the loudest, setting an example on how to party for the team. His plan worked.

Despite that, his limbs felt suspiciously sluggish and heavy, and no matter how hard he tried to drum up the final bit of energy he can to let out a victory howl to rival his finishing declaration just minutes prior, the sound dies in his throat; he barely manages to tilt his head down slightly to blink owlishly at the amount of blood pooling in Gurren, and a guttural, strangled laugh makes its way out of his mouth. Again, he felt like he should know why his poor gunman is just soiled with blood alongside the ripped metal Thymilph and Viral had tore through, but it was just so hard for him to think. So horrifically foggy and distant, and even though he was trying his best to formulate a response to the radio cheers, his vocal cords had just given up on him.

When the noise over the intercoms starts to get fainter and more distorted, he gives up on trying to keep his eyes open, slumping down in the control seat and barely registering the garbled, faint “ ...Bro? ” that comes from Lagann’s microphone.

‘It’s fine,’ he thinks, letting himself drift off into dark, dreamless sleep. ‘I’ll just take a nap, and when I wake up, we’ll throw the best party these people have ever seen.’

“Kamina! KAMINA!”

Simon’s not actually sure who’s screaming the loudest as he jumps out of Lagann’s cockpit to pry open Gurren, Yoko’s voice hoarse with horror over the radio and Kittan already visible on the distance, running down to them. His own voice is raw, thick with fear and a barely suppressed sob as he frantically tries to lift the “teeth” of Gurren open, barely able to move it an inch despite all of his weight put into it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Kamina should’ve been the first to boast over the intercoms, roaring their victory with a rousing speech, congratulating Simon on capturing the Dai-Gurren. He should’ve hopped out of Gurren Lagann instantly to boast at the sky and plant their flag, and Simon would follow with a big grin and cry a little and tell him to never, ever put himself in that kind of danger again.

He chokes out a horrified, strangled sob as his fingers slip and he crashes into the “mouth” of Gurren helplessly, and a moment later Kittan is there gently pushing him to the side to crank open the gunman. Simon barely registers the help for a second before he throws himself back into forcing the cockpit open, and with a violent snarl from Kittan Gurren tumbles open with a sickening slosh from inside.

Simon barely registers the ear-piercing wail that splits through the air as his own voice when Kittan grabs him abruptly and forcefully places him on the ground, out of eyeshot of the blood-soaked cockpit.

Kittan’s breathing is ragged and comes in short gasps as he numbly acknowledges the grisly situation; Kamina’s torso is bleeding profusely, with a disturbing amount of blood that should be inside of him splattered across his gunman instead. But, most crucially, his eyes catch on one important detail as his brain tries to reboot into some degree of functionality.

Breathing.

Kamina was still breathing, albit in short, barely visible gasps. Kittan slammed his hand against one of the buttons on the dashboard of the gunman, a snarled scream frantically ripping itself from his throat as the radio weakly crackled online. “ He’s BREATHING! Yoko, Leeron, get me a fucking gunman down here NOW! Get the hell on Dai-Gurren, is there medical supplies?!” 

He doesn’t wait for a reply; he braces one leg against the outside metal and leans in to shakily scoop Kamina’s body into his arms, his breath catching in raw horror as he immediately presses the worst side of the wound into his shirt as a pathetic stopgap of pressure against the bleeding. He almost can’t wrap his head around how deep the wound ran, or how the hell he was still breathing; the distant sight of Byakou’s spear piercing straight through Gurren flashes through his mind, and he barely chokes back a scream, shutting his eyes tightly for a moment. Oh, Kamina, you fucking idiot.

Pulling Kamina out of the gunman as delicately as he can while shaking the thought away, he barely has time to remember Simon is still right there and utterly terrified that his brother was fucking dead, and he manages to glance down at the poor kid as he tries to figure out a good way to climb down without moving Kamina too much.

Simon stares at him with wide, tear-filled eyes, and suddenly jumps up next to him, sparing him only a brief glance to seemingly confirm Kamina’s shallow gasps were not just a trick of Kittan’s imagination before scaling to the top of Gurren Lagann with a shocking amount of dexterity. The next thing he knows, Lagann is detached and lands perfectly next to him, and Kittan immediately understands the idea. He lets Simon use Lagann’s arms to pick him up, and stares numbly at blood-matted blue hair until he becomes vaguely aware they’re on the Dai-Gurren and Leeron is so very gently prying Kamina out of his grip with Dayakka’s help and Rossiu frantically discussing the medical equipment he’d managed to locate in one of the rooms. He doesn’t want to let go, but he doesn’t have the strength to resist, either.

Once Kamina’s free from his arms, they manage to move him onto some sort of mobile, white bed and wheel him away, and Kittan’s left to stand there thoughtlessly. He doesn’t know how long he spends like that, in a state of shock at the sudden turn of events; all he knows is that the world around him gradually fades into a kind of white noise.

After a while, he blinks slowly, and he’s suddenly alone on the bow of a battleship that he’s not quite sure was worth the price.

“...You should… change your clothes.” A tiny, hoarse, quiet voice breaks into Kittan’s blank stare, and he spares a dazed glance to the side to see Simon staring at him with a look in his eyes that he’s fairly certain matched his own depressingly well. It finally registers that it’s night out, and his vocal cords react before he can, making some sort of an ungodly cross between a sob and a laugh. When Simon slowly reaches for his hand, he wordlessly lets himself be led off to another room on Dai-Gurren.

“...He’ll be okay. He’ll… that bastard will be fine, y’know?”

He whispers it, almost more to himself than to Simon, who soundlessly nods. He’s not sure who he’s trying to comfort more with the statement.

If his hands are shaking, neither of them acknowledge it.

Kamina spends a while in the dark, after that. At first he thinks that his dreams have really only gone downhill over the years, but especially the past few months; it’s only when he starts walking around the odd, empty void does he realize he has a startling degree of control over this one, even if it had absolutely nothing to speak of within it. But he can move and open and close his hands and he’s lost his cape and nodachi, which is more self-control than he’s used to exerting in dreams, so he wanders around and tries to will a chair into existence after an indeterminable amount of time.

“C’mon, I know my dreams can be weird, but this sucks. Can I have anything to do here?!” 

He’s not even sure who he’s snapping at, but his words just ring uselessly around the space, landing on no one’s ears and failing to change anything. He grimaces, kicks the ground for a minute or two, and forces himself to keep walking.

That’s all he can do, for the longest time - it’s just walking. There’s no sound but his own voice, no sign of life or furniture or anything but darkness, darkness, and more darkness; at some point, he starts shakily monologuing to himself just to give himself something to listen to. Anything but a dark, quiet zone with nothing but himself for company or entertainment, really.

He’s fairly certain by now he must be in some sort of weird dream-purgatory, which sucks . There’s nothing he’d rather be stuck with less than himself and his own thoughts in a never ending loop. After a while, he always ran out of interesting or funny ideas to throw at others, and it just all circled back to whispers at the edge of his mind reminding him that underneath the facade of impulsivity and bravado, he was just...

He shudders and shrugs off the thought, stamps his feet on the void-ground, and breaks into a sprint to clear his mind. It’s all he can do to keep himself above the metaphorical drain his mind threatens to break into at any point, because he has no idea how long he’s been walking and it’s clearly been long enough for the distractions to all fall away.

With no way of knowing how much time passes after that, aimlessly walking and trying to avoid thinking about anything in particularly great detail, he’d like to think it’s a good chunk of time later before his shoulders sag and he comes to a stop, exhaling slowly and glancing upwards.

“I miss Simon.” 

He mutters it to no one in particular; it echoes for a bit, ringing hollowly, and it takes a startling amount of self control at the smothering silence to not lose it then and there, just collapse to the ground and try to sleep within the dream. Instead, he waits a little longer before he kicks the nothing-ground as hard as he can and forces himself to get back to walking.

Kamina gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the gnawing voice in the back of his head that reminded him he’d be dealing with this so much better if his brain had had the courtesy to conjure up a Simon to help him keep his cool, or at least inspire him to keep walking at a steady pace.

He tries to imagine Simon’s patient, monotonous drilling to keep him going, and hisses a slow sigh.

It’s another unquantifiable amount of time before he finally slumps to his knees, letting his legs awkwardly splay out to his sides with an undignified, exhausted whine. He’s tired of walking, he’s tired of being stuck alone with his thoughts, and the only good portion of this that he can think of is being able to drop the tough guy facade and just be unhappy and sad. He’s not even sure why he’s spent so long walking, at this point; it’s just a dream.

With that thought, he allows himself the luxury of slumping further over practically onto his side, and can’t stop himself from complaining out loud just to shatter the silence.

“ Fuck , dude… I miss Kittan, too.” 

Which is silly, because he’ll wake up and be able to tease Kittan about how he landed the finishing blow on Byakou any time now. It probably hadn’t been that long since he fell asleep; dream time was just… weird. And he’d been walking for a while, which probably has further distorted any perception of dream-time he could have. Presumably if he just lays here and doesn’t do anything, his sub-consciousness will get bored of this psychological torture nightmare and he’ll wake up, and he’ll bother Simon and Kittan and laugh to himself about this entire shitshow.

It’ll be comical, really. He almost starts laughing to himself at the thought of their faces when he tells them about this stupid dream he had, where he was just walking for ages with nothing to do and getting progressively more frustrated, and it’ll sound funny and just like him. Not like a horrific nightmare that he’s secretly becoming more and more uneasy and frantic about, because that’d just be silly.

(Even so, you’d think someone would notice you having a nightmare.) His mind sneers, and he shoves away the thought with a frustrated scoff.

  ‘I probably just fell asleep in a weird spot again, and Simon and Kittan aren’t near me. It’s happened before…’

He stops mid train of thought when it suddenly occurs to him he doesn’t actually remember falling asleep. 

He doesn’t remember when, or why, or where he fell asleep, which he would normally just write off as more dream weirdness; but this time, he had too much lucidity for him to write just that little bit off as weird alterations.

Kamina inhales sharply, shoves himself up on one arm to a half haphazard sitting position, and he thinks.

“Kamina?! K-M--A!” 

“He’s BR--TH--G! Y---, --e--n, g-- me a g----- -”

The distorted, garbled sound of metal being shredded. Staticky radios cheering.

He screws his eyes tighter, forces himself past the fog hazed over his thoughts, and tries to remember. It’s important. Where did he fall asleep? Why did he fall asleep?

The stench of blood hit him like a truck, and his eyes snapped open as the distinct feeling of realization poured over him like ice water. 

He was leading Dai-Gurren to capture the Dai-Gunzan. Byakou impaled Gurren, but he managed to destroy Byakou in return, and then the world got too hazy and he took a nap in Gurren and--

For the first time since Kamina had been wandering around the dark, empty world, it changed. He blinked in slow, nauseous horror as the foggy scene replayed itself around him: himself, passing out in a pool of his own blood in Gurren, very faint shouts filtering through before he woke up here. 

“ Fuck.” Oh, god, how long had he been here? He wasn’t just dreaming, he had no fucking idea how to go home, and Simon--

Simon. 

A new wave of nausea forced Kamina to his knees at the sudden, raw realization of how utterly terrified Simon must be if he doesn’t know Kamina is alive (he hopes he’s alive, he realizes with… a startling amount of apathy, really. He hopes he’s alive for Simon’s sake, then.) and had to pry his bleeding body from Gurren, or something. 

He has to fucking go home, because hell and high water will keep Kamina Giha from wandering this stupid hellscape now that he fucking remembers what he was doing and where he needs to be and that he isn’t just dreaming, he needs to go home because his brother is waiting for him. And his boyfriend, though-- though he’s still not used to that; two people waiting for him to come back, not just one. He’d come back through hell for Simon alone anyways, though. (Even if- even if the temptation to just sleep here forever is kind of nice. No more responsibility to shoulder. No more faked boisterous laughter. No more--)

The sight of a skull that never once thought about coming back for him briefly crosses his mind, and he snarls almost unconsciously as he tears off in the vague direction of the Dai-Gunzan over the hazy memory of the battlefield that had shaped the world around him with this new info. If his fingernails are digging into the palm of his hand, he doesn’t notice the pain.

Kittan spends his days shakily directing team Dai-Gurren, suddenly finding himself thrust into the position of temporary leader while Kamina was in critical condition as “the guy besides Simon closest to him” and “the oldest, probably”. He’s not actually sure he envies Kamina’s position anymore; he has no idea how the hell he manages the stress of so many people looking up to him, so many people depending on his words and plans. He feels adrift in an ocean without a float as he blankly makes up plans on the fly and tries to keep morale up.

He spends his nights sitting in the shitty plastic chair Leeron was nice enough to find and move into the medical room Kamina was unconscious in, dozing off into restless and nightmare-plagued sleep and trying to keep an eye out on the dozens of monitors plugged into him and the bed to make sure nothing got jarred loose, or in best case scenario, to see if he’s awake yet. Eventually, sometime in the morning Simon will slowly stumble back in, and they’ll trade places and Kittan will sit on the floor and wordlessly squeeze his hand in a silent gesture of solidarity before Yoko or someone else inevitably comes to fetch him to repeat the cycle.

He’s pretty sure he’s just drifting through the days, really. Simon, too; he goes out with Rossiu in a complete fog, almost possessed in battle, then comes back and curls up on the chair or the floor of Kamina’s room until Kittan comes in at night, which he takes as his cue to go sleep for a bit in an actual room.

It’s not healthy, but he doesn’t blame the kid.

The thing is, being the leader meant dealing with that ‘possessed-in-battle’ coping mechanism first-hand, because Simon frankly gives up on any cooperation with Rossiu or any sense of self preservation, a dark echo of darker blue hair and impulsivity that feels like ice water down his neck when he sees it in action. And it hurts. 

It hurts to watch, because he knows if he was in Simon’s shoes and wasn’t forcing himself to try and glue Dai-Gurren together he would be pulling the same stupid, careless stunts just to keep his waking thoughts off the medical bay. It’s worse because he isn’t Kamina and he doesn’t know the perfect thing to tell Simon to make it all seem okay, to make him relax and care a little bit about his own life in the slightest; all he wants to do is shake him and wail that this isn’t what his brother would want him to do.

A little, selfish part of him wants to lose it, tell him that it’s this complete lack of thought outside of his immediate emotions is why they’re in this mess to begin with, wants to shake him senselessly and scream, ‘ Why the fuck do you want to put us all through this AGAIN?! What’s WRONG with you?!’ at the top of his lungs. 

But he knows that wouldn’t fix anything, just make it all worse. It’s not his fault Kamina’s comatose, and just because Kittan wants to have a mental breakdown and project all his own fears and faults onto the kid doesn’t make it actually Simon’s problem.

He does still wish he could wave his hands and magically give him a sense of self preservation, though; if not for his own selfish sake, then for Rossiu’s. Rossiu isn’t faring much better at calming him down, and he has to pilot Gurren in Kamina’s absence, putting him directly in harm’s way on the battlefield in a gunman being primarily piloted by someone so consumed by grief that he doesn’t even consider himself being caught in the crossfire. It’s a dangerous position, and it’s one that he’s gone back and forth on volunteering to pilot Gurren in his stead over.

Deep in his heart, Kittan knows the reason he hasn’t taken over is from his own desperate, selfish desire to not have to think any harder about his boyfriend than he already is. He’s pretty sure if he steps foot in the cockpit, he’ll just be overloaded by the mental images of the battle for Dai-Gunzan, and he’s just not ready to deal with that yet.

As it turns out, ignoring the problem or halfheartedly repeatedly asking him to maybe consider his co-pilot’s wellbeing for five seconds doesn’t effectively deal with self-destructive coping mechanisms or self blame.

Thusly, he can’t deny the complete terror that seizes his chest, halts his breathing for a solid minute when Lagann goes over a ravine edge one rainy, horrible day out of many formless, identical days, when Rossiu screams himself hoarse and Kittan’s already jumping into King Kittan because fucking damn it, he can’t let Simon get himself killed, he can’t let Kamina down that hard. This is his fault to begin with for not having the guts to co-pilot Gurren Lagann; the least he can do is make fucking sure they don’t get killed from his own selfishness.

(Can’t risk losing anyone else?) His brain taunts, and he shuts the thought down and goes on instinct when he dives off after just in time to deflect a gunman’s attack from striking an empty Lagann directly.

He meets Nia a few hours later; after everything is settled, the beastmen are defeated, and Lagann is recovered, Simon slowly and shakily makes his way over to Kittan at the deck of the ship, looking more exhausted than normal and leading a small girl with white hair and a blank, cheery smile on her face to him. He immediately begins preparing a scathing rant on just… picking random people up when they’re clearly constantly under attack and don’t know friend from foe when Simon clears his throat to speak.

“This is Nia.” His voice is quiet, brittle. “I found her in a box. She saved me.” 

She waves cheerfully at him as if to state her agreement with the general summary of events, bouncing up and down on the tips of her toes in excitement.

“Nia,” Kittan repeats, a bit dumbfounded, and any initial thought he had of scolding Simon for bringing some random person onboard dies in his throat. “Well, uh, alright? Thanks for saving Simon, I guess…?” 

“You’re welcome!” Her voice is so incredibly chipper that it sounds foreign to his ears, and he just stared dumbly at her as she continued to speak unbothered. “Nice to meet you, Ki-ttan!”

“...Whaddya mean, she was in a box?” He directs towards Simon, shifting uncomfortably in lieu of a reply to Nia; he doesn’t know how to approach that level of happiness right that moment. The way she knows his name tells him Simon probably told her a little bit, anyways.

“She was in a box. I think- there were more boxes.” A pause. A much quieter follow up. “They’ve been there a while, I think.”

It takes a minute for the implication to kick in, and Kittan forces a wave of nausea back. “Maybe they’re empty. You can-- show her around, just. Not…”

“...Bro’s room. Right, I got it.” 

He watches Simon leave with the weird new girl and slumps against the ‘wheel’ of Dai-Gurren in a wave of sudden deep exhaustion.

A few minutes later, and a still visibly shaken Rossiu slowly approaches him, throwing a blanket over him with an unspoken question written on his face. Kittan exhales slowly and manages a thin smile at him, raising an eyebrow questioningly. “Yeah? What’s up?”

“...You seem tired. I just… wanted to bring you something in case you fell asleep out here.”

“That’s it, kid? You seem like y’got something on your mind.”

Rossiu visibly hesitates, and for a second Kittan’s suddenly struck with a chill. There’s no way he came to deliver that kind of news, there’s no way Kamina is--

“I just… wanted to apologize for my incompetence today piloting Gurren Lagann,” his voice is barely above a whisper, and Kittan’s mouth falls open before he can stop himself. Rossiu continues hurriedly, tears pricking at the corner of his eyes as he speaks. “I tried very hard to get Simon to calm down and retreat, but he refused to listen to me. S-so… I’ll do better next time. I swear it.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Rossiu.” He blurts the words as soon as he’s finished, eyes wide. “You can’t be expected to control someone else’s actions, you know? I’ll… try and talk to him. This one’s on me, kid; I’m the leader. I should’ve put my foot down a while ago. This stuff affects the team, and shit.”

Rossiu pauses, seemingly contemplating his next response while Kittan silently berates himself for his complete lack of action to the situation. It’s his own fault, after all, for thinking that since Kamina wasn’t dead that grief and guilt would just magically evaporate when he’s not even dealing with his own struggles from the event that well at all. Plus, the uncertainty of the entire thing still hung heavy above their heads; it was hard to not still feel grief when he was still unresponsive.

“Please be gentle with him, Kittan.” Rossiu’s voice is incredibly soft, almost fragile, and Kittan’s head jerks up sharply in surprise. “Despite all of this, he’s just… he blames himself, you know. For everything. So…”

“...Yeah, I will. Promise.” 

Rossiu abruptly spins on his heel and manages a curt nod, and Kittan gets the feeling he wanted to leave before he was caught crying, so he lets him and slumps onto the floor next to the steering wheel, feeling more exhausted than he did a few minutes ago somehow. 

He really is finding that the whole leader thing didn’t work great for him besides when he was taking care of his sisters.

Kamina was really starting to get sick of this place three crashes into nonexistent walls later.

Turns out charging blindly in frustration across a landscape that you only vaguely remember to begin with doesn’t accomplish much, especially not when you’re trapped somewhere that was beginning to reveal itself as very disdainful of his newfound knowledge that he was not asleep and needed to get home. It kept a sense of unease hanging over him as he tries to traverse the seemingly short gap between Gurren and the Dai-Gunzan; every small bit of progress that he makes, and the world around him shifts, slamming unseen walls and barriers directly into his face and forcing him to backtrack and try a new route. The world was actively working against him, trying to keep him away from -- from something, though he wasn’t quite sure what yet; all he knew was that this place was seemingly sentient, and his patience was running thin.

An attempt to climb back up the cliffside and go around met him with another sudden slap to the face and an impossibly large weight on his chest, sent tumbling back down to the foot of Gurren, and Kamina’s temper snapped.

“Fuck! God, just let me THROUGH! Fuck OFF!”

 He wasn’t quite sure if his snarls were even being heard, but he punctuates it for emphasis anyways, slamming his fist directly into the last unseen barrier that he’d ran into with all of the force he could drum up. The pain was immediate and horrifyingly real, his fist still tightly clenched and pressed against seemingly nothing as he grits his teeth through it and lets out a strained hiss. Yet despite the physical pain he felt, nothing was cracking, breaking, or even displaying some sort of visual sign that his punch had actually done shit .

Feeling frustration boil over inside him, he howls a “FUCK OFF!” at the top of his lungs, yanks his hand back, and drives his fist right back into the wall.

This time when nothing happens, raw rage and frustration numbs the pain in his knuckles as he pulls back for a third punch, putting all of his weight he possibly can into it. The fourth time, in between seeing red in blind fury, he swears he hears a somewhat sickening crunch when he drives his hand into the wall. The fifth, and when he cocks it back, he swears there’s a smear of blood seemingly suspended in midair. The sixth is when his fist won’t quite form right and it makes his blood boil worse as he uselessly slams it back into a suspended patch of blood repeatedly, very little force behind it.

The seventh, he swings his left hand with a choked, guttural sob escaping his throat.

“ God DAMN IT! ” 

He loses track of every subsequent punch after that; he only comes back to reality when he balls up his left hand only for sudden, earth-shatteringly sharp pain to streak up both of his arms. The shock of the sudden feeling drops him to his knees, as he begins to register the giant patch of blood smeared all over nothing and pain seeps back into his brain; his eyes nervously flick down to his hands, and he instinctively cringes in surprise at the bloody mess covering his knuckles. 

The way his fingers on his right don’t want to bend anymore, Kamina’s pretty sure that he might’ve fucked them up a little worse than bloody knuckles, and he’s made exactly zero progress from this outburst.

Unable to force the energy back into himself to stand back up, he sucks in a breath, suddenly aware of how exhausted and simultaneously taut he felt, and tilts his head back up to the sky to wail. Tears were already running down his face before the pain receptors in his arms decided to work again; he vaguely recalls breaking into an almost hysteric sob somewhere in the middle of trying to punch his way through, and lets himself have the relief of wailing and gasping on the ground, blinking rapidly through the searing pain in his hands. 

He just wants to go home. He just wants to see Simon again, reassure him that the great Kamina’s all fine, hug him and pretend he’s not tearing up into his hair, banter with Kittan again, see how excited they both are because they won and Kamina isn’t there to celebrate with them --

「That’s the problem, isn’t it?」

The words pierce his skull like an icepick, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, surrounding him; he gasps sharply in a mix of shock and agony, momentarily forgetting the pain in his knuckles as he reflexively grabs at his head with a choked whimper.

“Who the hell are you?!”

「What is the point of returning? You yourself do not care.」

He shudders. “That doesn’t-- it doesn’t matter! I care about other people’s lives! I can’t just fuckin’ abandon them! WHERE are you?!”

「Irrelevant. If you did not have obligations with other lifeforms, you would not be fighting your inevitable fate. How foolish.」

“They’re not OBLIGATIONS! They’re my FAMILY!”

「Meaning that you give others, not a meaning created by your universe. This bond you speak of exists only in your own head.」

He realizes faintly that he’s curled into a tiny ball on the ground, his voice hoarse and cracking from sobbing and pained wails; he shuts his eyes tightly and clutches his head tighter, every word like a hammer to his skull.  “They… that’s not true. Who the hell are you?! What the hell do you want?!”

「You cannot even justify your own rationale to yourself? Remarkable. Who we are is not relevant. What we desire is the safety of our universes. And you…  you have the potential to join us.」

Despite the searing pain hammering against his head from seemingly every direction, he catches the ‘we’ and hangs onto it as his only piece of information, oblivious to his fingernails digging into his head in agony. “There’s more of you bastards?!”

「Why do you clamor for unnecessary knowledge? Our speech hurts you due to your unwillingness to accept fate; why prolong that agony?」

“Because I make my OWN fuckin’ fate! I make my own damn choices!” He made his own choices when he gave up caring about blind spots in combat, certainly. He made his own choice to charge recklessly into everything without a care in the world if he lived or died. But he’s not just going to leave Simon behind .

「Remarkable. We cannot even deny your words fully; it is your own initial obliviousness, and now stubbornness that has kept you here, instead of passing on to the Extradimensional Labyrinth.」

His blood runs cold. “Passing on? Fuck-- absolutely the hell not! Simon needs me!” A shuddered pause. “People- people’ll miss me. I have to go home. ”

「It is intriguing how you do not believe the words you tell me.」

“Shut UP! You don’t know what the hell I do or don’t believe, asshole!”

「You are mistaken.」

“YOU’RE mistaken!”

「It is even more intriguing how you can be so full of despair, yet refuse to give up at the same time.」

He wants to scream; it comes out only slightly louder than his previous replies, unfortunately. “Listen here, you won’t ever fuckin’ understand how I feel, ever. Now let me the hell out of here before I KILL YOU!”

There’s a lull between the thing -- the things? -- responding that gives him time to unclench his hands from around his head in pain, frantically stumbling back onto his stomach and then onto his knees in the dark, his eyes still screwed shut tightly. He almost hopes for a second he’s scared whatever the hell is in here with him off.

「Lifeform, I will tell you this, for your puzzling spirit. At least part of the barriers trapping you here are from your own creation. We cannot break those for you.」

“...What?”

「We find it amusing, your passion covering such a dark pool of emotions. It reminds us of a warrior we fought long ago. Therefore, we will not impede your determination; show us your desire to return to reality.」

The world falls silent around him as he tries to digest this new information, gradually cracking one eye open and flinching against the daylight he’d been shutting out while the voice -- voices? It seemed to come from everywhere around him, yet only had one distinguishable ‘voice’ that he could pick out. -- was speaking; he manages a shuddering, ragged inhale and forces himself into a cross legged sitting position. 

So the voice-- fuck, this was confusing. The-Assholes-Observing-Him promised that they wouldn’t impede his whole ‘fuck dying’ stunt he was pulling; that conflicted with the barrier still very much in front of him and still very much smeared with his blood. They’d also said that some of the obstacles in his way were his own doing, which just couldn’t be right. Because he wanted to go home, dammnit.

He did, he really did, and nothing they said that implied otherwise was right. Because his own feelings didn’t matter, here; he just needed to go home. People needed him.

‘This bond you speak of exists only in your own head.’ 

The thought echoes in the back of his skull, and his next swallow feels like sand down his throat.

He’s not quite sure how to measure time in this place as he tries to collect himself and figure out an actual plan of action; however, as he sits in front of the nonexistent wall between him and the Dai-Gunzan absentmindedly ripping off strips of his pants to wrap around his knuckles, he eventually notices the blood smeared across it was starting to dry, and decides to qualify that as “a few hours have passed”. 

So a few hours passed between his meltdown, the-creepy-hivemind talking to him, and his subsequent calm-down time and breathing; he’s still not sure how to deal with the invisible walls, but he has a new plan that might have a few screws missing from it. It’s the only thing he can think of that might possibly have the strength to shatter them, though. 

Kamina takes a deep breath, rises slowly to his feet, and lets himself sway a little before turning to face Gurren, a thin smile on his face. “Hey, buddy. Sorry I let ya get so fucked up. I need your help again, though, kay?”

His gunman doesn’t respond, though he doesn’t expect it to; instead, he gingerly climbs up back into the cockpit of it, grimacing slightly against the uncomfortable sensation in his hands as he lowers himself into it. The stench of blood washes over him like a landslide , and fills him with a vague unpleasant feeling in his stomach; he supposes it could be worse, and considering it’s his own blood he’s not nearly as nauseous or unsettled by it as he could be. He runs a few fingertips over the dashboard, assures that the mech is in vaguely workable condition somehow, and closes his hands around the controls. 

It’s an odd sensation; as Gurren stalls a bit before roaring to life, a calm sort of peace washes over him. Because no matter how bad things got, he had a tendency of forcing his way through any challenges, and Gurren was almost the proof of that to himself. Proof that his bullshit had results, that he’d made it to the surface, that he was good enough to stand by Simon as an equal, that he could carve a path for his dream. Even relatively covered in his own dried blood, if he shut his eyes and leaned back, he could almost hear Simon’s laughter and commentary over the radio during their day skirmishes.

The thought rekindles a fire in his soul, the tangible reminder of what he’s working towards, and he snaps his eyes open with determination, struggling a bit to unstick the controls before Gurren creakily roars to its feet. His thin, worn-down smile blossoms into a genuine one, a voice-crack laden laugh ripping from his throat instinctually. “Atta boy! Let’s smash through here and go home, and then I’ll fix the real you right up.”

He yanks Gurren’s arm back, shifts all the power left in the mech to winding it back as he yanks the boomerang blade back, and snarls as he charges into the barrier with all of his strength.

This time, a few things happen.

The first is Gurren’s glasses briefly pierce the barrier, and Kamina hollers in joy; almost in response, the crack widens, and the blade gets halfway through before suddenly freezing, his expression immediately dropping into confusion at the sight.

The second is the loud, thundering crack that pierces the air, which he initially assumes is the barrier until something sharp stabs its way through Gurren’s torso and comes within a hair of Kamina’s stomach; with a startled inhale, he vaguely recognizes it as Thylimph’s spear, and his heart drops.

The third thing he doesn’t notice immediately, too busy carefully extracting Gurren from the spear and then spending a few frustrating minutes trying to yank his blade back out from the barrier; to his surprise, it’s as if the barrier had reformed around the middle of the blade, just as unbreakable as before. He howls in frustration and slams a hand down onto the dashboard, trying to figure out a new plan; when he drops his hands to his lap to think, the sudden wet feeling on his left hand startles him enough to yank it up as he glances down.

The third thing, as it turns out, is that the left side of his stomach was bleeding for seemingly no reason.

He inhales a slow, steady breath, clenching his teeth as he gingerly runs his already soaked in blood hand back down his side; to his confusion, he can’t feel any open wounds. It takes him a minute before the muted memory of Thylimph’s attack comes back to him alibit foggily; it takes him just a bit longer to realize that the blood matched up to where the spear had pierced his torso in the real world.

“Oh, very funny. Thanks, asshole-hive-mind-soundin-thing.” He mutters, more to himself than anything, and kicks the spear still sticking out of the ground to the side before a metaphorical lightbulb switches on. He quickly grabs the controls back, maneuvering Gurren to grab the spear, and reoriented himself for a second attempt at shattering the wall.

“Well, you think this is funny, eh?! I’m about to be fucking hilarious, then! BARRIER-SHATTERING SPEAR RUSH!”

He’s not sure if his boast goes heard or not, but he feels a little giddy as he rams into the barrier facefirst with the spear and hears a horrifying screech of metal and things snapping and breaking. For a second, it’s not a barrier that he’s piercing, but a gunman with a Beastman general screaming in horror, and he feels a sense of vengeance at the thought.

The still-lingering terror that said “things” were Gurren was in the back of his mind, but evaporates quickly as the barrier, with a displeased cacophony of noise, is forcibly cleaved in two, releasing his gunman’s blade as he immediately kicked the turbo on to bolt through and grab the shades before the damn thing reformed again. He hollered in victory, fistpumping with a resounding yell.

“FUCK YES! Eat shit, assholes! That’s how I ROLL!”

The next morning, Kittan’s woken from his somewhat restless sleep by a very gentle shake on his arm. He blinks slowly as he stretches from the plastic chair in Kamina’s room, the steady beeping on the monitor threatening to lull him back into unpleasant sleep as he tries to clear his eyes of blurriness. He can barely even remember coming in here, after last night; he’s vaguely sure Rossiu had come back and found him asleep on the deck floor and gently woke him up to move him.

It takes him a few minutes of blinking to register the person shaking him as Simon, and he immediately straightens up a bit, yawning with a stretch before offering a weak smile. “Hey, kiddo. Sorry, did I oversleep…?”

“A little.” He doesn’t elaborate, so Kittan furrows his brows at him before standing, a bit lost as to what that could mean. He hesitates a minute before awkwardly patting Simon on the head.

“...A’ight, well… I’ll leave you to watch over him. Before I do, though…” He grimaces as Simon’s expression immediately darkens, suppressing a sigh. “Listen, just. Stop being so reckless in combat, okay? Rossiu thinks it’s his fault you went over the cliff yesterday, and I can’t say it brings me any peace of mind either when you’re constantly running into the middle of battle with no thought.”

He doesn’t add it, but the unspoken ‘like Kamina’ hangs in the air heavy between them, and Simon sinks into the chair Kittan had formerly occupied a minute ago with a quiet sigh. “Whatever.”

“I mean it, Simon.”

“Okay.”

“...Seriously. I understand, just…”

“You understand,” Simon echoes bitterly, and Kittan immediately tenses. “Sure you do. That’s all I’ve heard for days, it’s either ‘oh, I understand how you feel!’ or ‘why are you being such a baby! He’s ALIVE!’. Sure you understand. Apparently, everyone does!”

Kittan tries very hard to steady his breathing, trying not to rise to the bait. “Don’t- why the hell are you saying that to me?! I’m trying to keep this team in semi-working state, I’ll tell off the rest of the team giving you shit again, can you just fucking listen to me and stop trying to get yourself killed?!”

“Why do you care so much?! It’s not like you’re any better in combat! You don’t understand, none of you do, so stop saying that you do! You don’t understand a damn thing! You’re just focused on your new power high and ordering around everyone and telling people how they’re fighting wrong!” He’s yelling by the end of it, glaring furiously at Kittan with one fist closed.

To his credit, even as Kittan inhales sharply, mouth already curling into a disbelief-filled snarl, he knows he’s about to fuck up big time. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?! You think I’m on a power high? You think I give a SHIT about that right now?!”

“It sure is all you ever talk about!” He cuts in, dropping his voice into a mocking imitation of Kittan’s. “Ooh, as the new leader of Dai-Gurren we have to do this! We have to patrol that! You’re not fighting caaaarefully enough! We got team COMPLAINTS! Do it THIS way! Don’t bring aboard new people!”

“You think I don’t fucking understand what you’re going through?! I don’t fucking want this! I don’t want to be the fucking leader! MY FUCKING BOYFRIEND IS COMATOSE! I don’t want ANY of this, but noooooo! Mr. I’m gonna try and get myself fucking killed too because MY problems are the only ones that matter!” He’s uncomfortably aware his own volume is rising rapidly to meet Simon’s, hands shaking. “Wanna know why I care so fuuuuuucking much, in your words?! Because I don’t wanna fucking see Kamina’s brother in the same state as him, or worse, FUCKING DEAD!”

He regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth, because Simon recoils like he’s been slapped and Kittan is faintly aware that his own hands are shaking, tears streaming down his face. He forces a very sharp, ragged inhale through his body, screws his eyes shut, and spins to face the door, breathing unsteady.

“Fine, do whatever, fuck. I’m going out for the day.”

He storms out and slams the door shut behind him, furiously wiping his eyes as he beelined for the control room, oblivious to the very small group peering around the hall at the opposite end with wide eyes. 

Yoko, to her credit, gently put a hand in front of Rossiu, eyes wide and voice quiet. “...We should leave them both be. They’re… they need to rest.”

“But they just--”

“I don’t think we’ll help them, Rossiu..”

Nia hums thoughtfully as Rossiu helplessly glances towards the medical room door and back to Yoko, before finally speaking up from the opposite side of the hall. “Perhaps I should meet everyone else officially? I have never met others like me before, and if Simon is busy… he can rest at the same time!”

There’s a surprised pause from the other two, before Rossiu very slowly nods, eyes brightening. “That’s a good idea… Nia, is it? Come on, let’s go to the control room.”

“So, your name is Nia, right?”

“Yes!” 

She swung her legs excitedly off the chair, drinking in all of the different faces surrounding her. Yoko had said pretty much all of team Dai-Gurren was crammed into the main deck to ask questions, minus Simon and also noticeably minus Kittan; while she’d certainly got a lot of questions when she’d arrived, she had plenty of her own to ask. Plus, if Simon wanted to be left alone, it felt like an easy way to accomplish that task.

“So, you said you didn’t know what village you came from… do you know the name?”

She thought about it for a minute, humming softly; she can’t recall a time her father had told her of the place she’d lived all her life. At least not the outside world part of it. “No, I do not. My apologies!”

“That’s okay. Hm, but you said you’ve never seen so many people like us before… did you grow up around Beastmen?!”

She tilted her head with a quizzical expression at that question. “Beastmen?”

“The guys who pilot the gunmen! They have weird animal features?”

“Oh!” Nia punctuated the thought by lightly tapping her closed hand against her palm, eyes brightening. “Yes! I’m used to beast-men, so I was very surprised to see Simon’s smooth skin!”

Whispers quickly swept the room after that, though she couldn’t quite figure out why. Finally, a man with light green hair spoke up, looking at her with an oddly wistful expression. “That must’ve been rough… a young girl growing up exclusively around Beastmen? How horrible…”

“It was not that bad!” Nia corrected brightly, shaking her head lightly. “I did not see them very much, and they were nice to me when I did!”

“Well, that’s good, at least. But… how lonely! Did you only talk to your father?!”

“Most of the time, yes!”

The room quickly became abuzz again, though again she couldn’t quite understand why. For the first time, it awkwardly occurred to her that perhaps her isolated lifestyle truly wasn’t normal for other ‘humans’, and she shifted uncomfortably trying to think of a topic change when a sudden loud crash rocked the ship.

“Enemy gunman on deck! Where’s Kittan?!” 

“An enemy gunman?!”

Nia blinked in surprise as she was somewhat ungracefully yanked back behind the steering wheel by a brown-haired girl wearing glasses, glancing out the main window in surprise. Almost immediately, the entire team seemed to have scattered to their jobs, and with record speed she caught a glimpse of blonde hair streaking over to them, his eyes wide. 

“What’s the enemy status?!” Kittan yelled, already bolting towards the Gunmen hangar; the pale green-haired one shook his head slightly, too focused on the scanners to seemingly object to the hasty demands.

“One gunman, on the deck of the ship.”

“Just one? Are they fucking with us?!” 

Nia found herself tuning out the frantic chatter in order to focus on the visuals of the gunman, curious to see what these ‘beast-men’ that pilot them looked like; her mouth unconsciously opened in surprise, however, when the scorpion-like mecha opened its cockpit to reveal Adiane. Her legs almost immediately moved on their own, a gasp escaping her as she bolted past the immediate gasps of shock out onto the deck.

“Adiane?!”

“What?!” The redhead from earlier yelled it towards her as she ran by, but she was too focused on getting within speaking range of the gunman. Ignoring the shrill yells of protest, she skidded to a stop in front of the mech, stretching her arms out firmly.

“Adiane, cease this!”

“What?” She peered down at Nia with a widening eye, disbelief apparent on her face. “It can’t be.”

“I, Princess Nia, daughter of the Spiral King Lordgenome, command you! Adiane the Elegant, you will stand down at once!”

She didn’t really feel fear in the face of Adiane’s gunman; staring up at her with her arms outstretched, she could only feel determined. She knew Adiane; the four generals visited her and father so regularly, they almost felt like family. She could remember faintly a night upon which Adiane had snuck into her sleeping quarters to gift her a forbidden book that she had recovered from one of her surface missions, a mischievous smile on her face as Nia almost cried in excitement. 

Staring up at Adiane’s shocked expression as she slowly bent down on one knee, she had nothing to fear, smiling gently at the gesture.

“Princess, have these human scum kidnapped you?! Do they know no lows?”

“They have not!” Nia corrected immediately, frowning. “I am currently within their company and hospitality after they rescued me! They mean no harm, so please leave us in peace!”

Adiane leaned over to hiss something into her radio as Nia stood her ground, gazing firmly up at the mech, before she shook her head and returned back to her mech seat, scowling angrily past Nia. 

“I’ll be back, you scum! Don’t think you’re off so easily!”

Nia didn’t want to move until Adiane’s mech was safely underwater, a good distance from the Dai-Gurren before she slowly dropped her arms to her side, feeling suddenly exhausted; behind her, a cacophony of noise from the Dai-Gurren had erupted as she very slowly turned around to trudge back inside. 

“You’re a princess?! ”

“You can make those Beastmen bastards listen to you?!”

“You know her?!”

Nia found herself overwhelmed with the sudden flurry of questions, eyes wide; before she could respond, Kittan cut in between her and the rest of the group, rubbing the side of his head with one hand.

“Alright, people, back it up. Exciting developments! I’ll question her myself, so give her a second to regroup from, ohhh… y’know, telling off a general to her face , and we’ll get this show on the road!”

“So, listen. My name’s Kittan, as you met me yesterday and might know, and I’m leader of team Dai-Gurren,” He gestures with one hand behind himself, to the relative crowd of people kept at bay by Kiyoh and Kiyal on his plea. “And this is an interrogation, since you’re the kid of the guy who’s been throwing garbage at us since we all came up here.”

There’s a beat of silence as Nia nods thoughtfully at him; he immediately wonders what the hell Kamina would do in this scenario, so he inhales slowly and starts again.

“Soo… I’ll be doin’ the talking, okay?! So don’t forget: you’re part of the enemy!”

“Kittan?” She tilts her head at him with an innocent look, and Kittan is struck with an uncomfortable reminder of the fact the poor kid’s probably Simon’s age. “What is an ‘enemy’?”

Ah, that wasn’t the question he was expecting. He blinks a few times, opening and closing his mouth, before sinking down into a chair with a sigh. “Uh, an enemy is someone who pisses you the hell off.”

“What does ‘pissing someone off’ mean?”

“...It’s- it’s when you’re super irritated, and you wanna beat the hell out of someone.”

“What is ‘beating the hell out of someone’?”

Kittan drops his head into his hands with a muffled scream, trying to ignore his sisters’ snickers behind him. “It’s when you-- it’s when you use your fists or your gunman or somethin’ to hit that person until they run away crying!”

“Oh!” Nia immediately smiles at him as if he’s just politely handed her a gift, and his mouth drops back open. “I understand! Thank you; you are very kind, and you do not do the pissing of me off!”

He silently stands up, turns around, and claps Kiyoh on the back. “You know what? You do this! I’m gonna, like, go sit down.”

He ignores Nia’s chipper “goodbye!” and his sisters’ cacophony of laughter as he leaves, practically trudging back to the main deck to collapse on the floor near the wheel where he’d passed out yesterday. Because the rest of the team could easily find it funny, whatever, but Kittan was still feeling like shit over his outburst at Simon earlier and he knew he didn’t have it in him to yell at another kid just trying to live.

Besides, he’s kind of grateful for her actions, because he doesn’t think he’d have the guts to stand in front of one of the four generals with nary a weapon to his name, simply arms outstretched without a fear in the world. She’d bought them something valuable: time. 

It’s about 1 am when Kittan sucks it up and goes to take his sleeping shift back from Simon in the medical room, grimacing as he quietly opens the door and shutting it behind him. Simon immediately glances up at him with dark-circle rimmed eyes, staring warily; he lets out a quiet sigh as he crosses the room.

“I’m sorry.” He mutters quietly, not meeting his eyes. “About earlier.”

A long pause. Then, even quieter; “...I’m sorry, too.”

“...You should check on Nia,” He manages after another uncomfortable stretch of silence, finally glancing up. “She saved us, today. From one of the generals.”

“...Huh?”

“She’s the kid of the Spiral King, I guess.” A thin smile crosses his face. “Surprisingly nice for a technical enemy.”

Simon looks at him like he’s about to burst into tears, and Kittan crumbles, closing the gap between where he was awkwardly standing and staring blankly at the hospital monitor and the chair to quietly bring him into a hug. To his credit, Simon doesn’t cry, but Kittan feels him trembling just a little. 

“It’s not your fault, kiddo.” He mumbles, exhaling slowly. “It’ll be alright. Talk to her, okay? Seems like she gets along with you the best out of anyone here.”

“...Okay.” His voice is muffled against Kittan’s shirt, and he stands there for a few more minutes holding him before Simon quietly extracts himself and gets up to leave. Kittan wordlessly collapses into the chair, glancing briefly to the object he’d been quietly drilling when he’d arrived; he catches a brief shock of unkempt hair and immediately suspects he might know what Simon was working on.

“...Goodnight, Kittan.”

“Night, Simon.”

When Adiane comes back the next day, the only thing that runs through Simon’s head is how much dead weight he is without Kamina.

He tries, really tries - he drags Lagann out of the garbage pile as frantically as he can, shoving the core drill into the keyhole in a desperate attempt to make his gunman respond just this once to rescue Nia. Just one run, it’s all he needs - he can’t just sit back and let another person get critically injured, let alone die. But Lagann remains unmoving, useless, and he finds himself cursing under his breath in desperation as he casts the gunman aside to sprint to the deck of Dai-Gurren, praying desperately he’s at least fast enough to shove Nia out of the way.

He is, at least in part, until King Kittan sweeps in and grabs the both of them before Sayrune’s guns go off, landing where they’d landed only seconds prior. Nia’s trembling in his arms, her eyes wide with terror and hurt, but they’re both unharmed outside of being shaken. Yoko shouts something to the two of them that filters through Simon’s thoughts as unintelligible, and then Kittan drops them both near the pilot’s quarters and Nia sways onto her feet and touches his shoulder gently with a shaken attempt at a smile.

“...Thank-you for coming to save me.”

“I didn’t. ...Save you, that is.” It’s the first thing he can think of to reply back, voice hoarse; even if he had made it to Nia in time, they still both would’ve died if Kittan and Dayakka hadn’t been on the scene. Just another failure on his belt.

“But you were the first one who ran to try,” She murmurs it back, trying to disguise the tremble in her voice as she gently withdraws her hand and laughs unsteadily. “Even without a Gunmen. Thank you, Simon.”

He watches her hold herself upright, pretending that she isn’t still trembling with the aftershocks of something that clearly felt like a personal betrayal to her as she walks away, and wonders what’s wrong with him when everyone around him is able to cope with fear and guilt so much better. 

It’s a little surprising to him when Nia visits his room two days later, a quantifiable amount of time only because she tells him it’s been two days since. He’s been so caught up in statue carving that he’d honestly lost track of time and meals, and no one had bothered to come tell him the meal schedule except for the one time Rossiu had stopped in to bring him dinner and quietly request that he comes out and talks at some point. He feels a little bad for saying no, now that he’s not carving mindlessly to stop feeling.

“These are really good, Simon!” Her voice is bright and tinged with genuine shock as she picks up one of the smaller ones, glancing at him with visible amazement. He tries not to feel jealous at how effortlessly she’s bounced back from Adiane and lets his shoulders sag.

“...thanks.”

“Are these all the ‘bro’ person…?” 

He thinks for a minute on how to answer, settling on a quiet nod as he starts to drill into the stone piece he was working on again. “...Digging is all I’m good for. So…”

They sit in surprisingly easy silence for a little bit as he searches for the words to try and justify, or even just explain what he’s doing, the gentle monotonous squeaking of his drill turning keeping them both company. “...back in Giha, the village I came from, no one… wanted to talk to me. No one wanted to be around me. They said I was weird, or gross, and… I think even the chief was sick of having orphans around. He was only nice to me because I was good at digging.”

Simon pauses, sighing quietly and blinking back tears pricking at the corner of his eyes; the movement makes him realize how bleary and burning his eyes and head feel, but he shoves it aside to turn the stone to an uncarved side. “Kamina’s… the only person who liked being around me, who thought I was cool and special. He pretty much raised me… and he’s so cool, and energetic, and inspiring, and unafraid. I just… wanted to be like him. But no matter how much I try to be, I just… can’t.”

The silence refills the room over the soft pattering of stone carving, and Nia gently hums an affirmation she’d heard what he said before gently putting her hand over his, a small smile on her face. “Can I stay and watch you carve a little longer?”

He wonders what it’s like, to not compare yourself to anyone else and feel so content with who you are. He thinks he might envy Nia’s ability to stay so cheerful. “...I don’t mind.”

“Kittan, we’ve got an incoming transmission.”

“From who?”

“A village, from the looks of it,” Kinon pauses, a flurry of soft tapping filling the otherwise quiet command room as she quickly pulls up the video on the main monitors. “They’re under attack… apparently.”

“Why d’you sound so… like, doubtful?”

“Well…” Kinon gives him an exhausted, vaguely amused smile as she finishes with a loud ‘click’ and a grainy video fills the windows. “Just… see for yourself, brother.”

「”Please help us, somebody! Our village is under attack by Gunmen!”」

The video’s audio quality is surprisingly good, and even the video itself wasn’t horrible, displaying the voices speaking as three teenage-ish girls vacantly staring at the camera. Almost immediately after the pause for the request, they pivoted to point off-screen, the video itself rumbling. 

「”Oh, no! Here they come again! Please, save us! Ahhhh!”」

Kittan spends a moment blinking in vague disbelief at the abrupt end to the transmissions, rocks apparently having fallen and crushing the camera; Kinon, behind him, was smothering something of a giggle of her own as Leeron audibly sighed, tapping his fingernails against the dashboard.

“Well… can you trace the signal? We should probably at least go check on them?!”

“...Doesn’t something about it seem off to you, Kittan?” 

He spins to glance at Leeron, who made a show of shaking his head wearily. “I mean… all of them sounded pretty monotone.”

“And… do villages even have camera equipment like that, brother?” Kinon adds, a tiny smile on her face. “Littner seems like an exception, not the standard…”

“Oh, c’mon! NOW you’re getting bogged down in the details after we rescued the damn spiral princess from being literally left to die?! Maybe these people just talk like that!” Kittan’s vaguely aware of how fast he was jumping to being utterly defensive of an idea he hadn’t really thought through yet, but even if there was a chance it was a trap, he couldn’t just let the other 50% go by. If they really were a village in danger and he just let them die, he’d never forgive himself. “What I’m saying is, we’ve had way crazier shit happen to us!”

“Kittan, are you sure you’re not just letting your emotions get the best of you?” Leeron retorts, clicking his tongue in disappointment; the unspoken ‘and on sleep deprivation?’ hangs between them.. “Shouldn’t we evaluate this like a threat, not a distress beacon, and prepare for the worst? The enemy will have surely received this as well.”

“Oh, just-- just track the damn transmission, okay?! Is it such a fucking crime to want to help others?! It’s what Kamina would--”

The sentence dies in his throat immediately, feeling distinctly like he’d suckerpunched himself in the proccess; the room goes quiet around him, with Leeron giving him a pitying smile before turning to work on tracing the signal. He lets out a long, strangled sigh and speeds off to the medical bay, fists clenched tightly by his side, and no one bothers trying to stop him.

He’s almost a little surprised to find it empty besides the comatose Kamina, and it’s a strangely hollow feeling in his chest as he settles down in the chair next to him, leaning his head against the bed. He’d gotten so used to Simon sleeping in here that seeing the subtle, depressing shift in the status quo as he’d shut himself in his own room to carve all day felt oddly like a personal loss.

“...I wish you’d wake up soon,” he mumbles into the bedsheets, inaudible except to himself. “I’m doin’ pretty shitty at this leader thing. And I dunno how to keep Simon going.”

A pause as he shifts slightly in the chair, trying to strike a balance that wouldn’t leave him waking up in a few hours with horrific neck and leg pain. With a long, drawn sigh, he let his eyes drift shut, hopeful that Kinon or Leeron would come and wake him up when they were halfway towards the transmission signal or something equally important.

“...I miss you, too.”

It’s a day later when Kinon opens the door to the medical bay to poke her head in, glancing at him with a twinge of concern.

“Kittan? We’re closing in on the location of the broadcast.”

“Thanks, Kinon.” He lets himself have a few more minutes of staring exhaustedly at the steady beeping of the monitors before dragging himself up, stretching his arms with a series of loud ‘cracks’ and ‘pops’ before following Kinon out to the command room. Leeron is already organizing the operational weaponry he’d managed to restore, and informing the gunmen pilots to stay on standby until they’ve all secured the village; he glances up at Kittan when he enters, and gestures to the windows with an amused smile.

“Well, here we are,” Leeron announces, leaning back in his chair. “You take charge, leader. They seem to be fine down there currently.”

“Got it. Thanks, ‘Ron,” He mutters, rubbing two fingers against the side of his head in a futile attempt to get rid of the forming headache. “I’ll get down there and see how they’re faring.”

“Not bringing King Kittan?”

“Seems safe enough to go down there for five seconds. ”

Leeron shoots him a look that says ‘you are so reckless and stupid’ , and he decides to politely ignore it as he bolts to the deck of Dai-Gurren.

“OI!” He shouts between cupped hands as he sprints over to the group of girls that recorded the transmission, waving their small group towards the ship.”Hey! We’re team Dai-Gurren! We got your rescue signal!”

“Our hero!” The three girls chirp it almost in unison, and Kittan immediately is sure there’s something to his theory that some villages overrun by beastmen really just talk in that oddly stilted way. They don’t offer much else in the way of small talk, preferring to tail him back to the ship; he can sympathize with the immediate need to get out of danger, at least.

As it turns out, the actual reason for the lack of small talk was because of the beastmen surrounding and flooding into the Dai-Gurren. The girls had served their purpose as a flimsy distraction, and as Kittan was roughly shoved down a set of stairs into the village with a gun to his head, he swore violently for what felt like the 30th time. “Fucking bastards, picking a bunch of girls to use as bait…”

“I told you this was a trap.” 

“Shut up, Leeron.”

“It wasn’t even a good trap! Kinon warned you, too!”

“Shut it! I just didn’t want to take the chance it wasn’t, okay?!”

The mindless bickering, especially after Yoko joins in a bit later, keeps his mood up as he struggles to come up with a plan out of the situation as they’re led downwards to some sort of jail cell-like room. It’s only when he glances around at the group to do a headcount does his blood run cold when Simon’s thrown in roughly and abruptly after them, his breath catching in his throat in sudden horror.

“Simon? Weren’t you in your room?” 

He casts Kittan a brief, terrified glance before nodding his head mutely; Kittan inhales sharply, feeling distinctly like he’s trying to breathe through sand. “They’re searching the ship.”

Silence hangs over the group, everyone turning to look at him with similarly confused expressions, and it takes him a minute to work past the dryness in his mouth before he can even attempt to elaborate.

“Kamina…” Heavy silence blankets them as he struggles to keep speaking, feeling distinctly frantic and terrified at the realization. “If they find him-- all they have to do is unplug monitors-- he can’t, like-- he can’t fucking defend himself,”

Team Dai-Gurren erupts into chaos as reality sinks in, and he’s never been more grateful for when Yoko takes over for one minute, a resounding snarl of “ Get digging! We need to get out of here!” audible above the noise and enough to snap the group into some sort of coherent plan. Yet even with such a looming threat hanging above them - the threat of both execution and Kamina’s life - it doesn’t take very long before the group’s frantic digging and yelling devolves into terrified wails and hopelessness, horrified “ We’ll never make a dent in these rocks!” resounding and people collapsing to their knees in tears.

He grits his teeth at the scene, trying to search for some sort of inspirational thing to say or even just an angry snarl to try and whip the group back into digging instead of just giving up, but his own panic is closing off his throat and he’s not making any progress at all trying to pathetically dig with his hands in stockades. It’s enough to make him want to sink to the floor and wail, sob louder than any other person in the room and get out what was a little over a month’s worth of thinly repressed grief and guilt and terror, when his gaze falls absentmindedly on Simon.

Simon, who had met eyes with him just briefly when it dawned on Kittan how much danger Kamina was in right now due to being completely helpless, who had heard ‘get digging!’ and immediately hunched over in one corner. Simon, who was still patiently digging, steady and focused without a single glance backwards to the group; he caught a glimpse of the core drill in Simon’s hand, and felt something akin to a choked laugh force its way out of his chest instead, a pained grin making its way to his face as Yoko glanced over at him in concern.

“Fuck me, if he isn’t right,” He mutters it more to himself, stepping backwards to lean against the rocky wall and glancing upwards with an exhausted wheeze. “Just like he said. When your back is against the wall, when you feel hopeless and the situation seems impossible… Simon’s always there to keep steadily drilling at it. It’s funny… in this situation, I don’t think I’d want to be laughed at by that back, either.”

It’s so simple in his mind that he looks back on it with amusement, really.

It wasn’t just the terror of being abruptly yanked from his statues and seeing Nia whisked away by Guame. It wasn’t just the self-loathing that he couldn’t be stronger, the hopelessness of the situation, the acceptance of being thrown into the underground jail with the rest of Dai-Gurren, told to simply await execution. All of those things contributed to his epiphany, certainly - but it was the simple realization Kittan voiced in abrupt terror and a familiar order that finally gave it to him.

It was Kamina’s already fragile, unclear life in danger and being told he needed to dig a tunnel that finally clicked such a simple piece of advice his brother gave him into his brain.

“ Don’t believe in the Simon I believe in. Don’t believe in the Kamina that believes in you. Believe in the you…”

“...that believes in you.” He muttered, almost frenzied as he steadily chipped away at the rock wall with the core drill. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have his drill, it didn’t matter that everyone else was panicking as the noise almost faded out behind him to replace the absence of soft whirring from a hand drill. He thought back to the last time they were caved in, stranded in tunnels; when everyone else had given up, Kamina had kept them all together, kept them inspired and energetic and never lost his humor or grin even as the situation felt hopeless.

He might not be able to inspire the rest of the group, but he could dig. He could dig, and dig, and dig, and dig until he broke to the surface and when he got to the surface he wouldn’t let them lay a hand on Kamina not just for his own guilt of not being strong enough, but for Nia, whisked away from them and likely in just as much danger. For the entire team, terrified and awaiting a hopeless fate. For Kittan, who was probably just as terrified as Simon was of them checking the medical bay before they could get out of there.

But most importantly, for himself, because he’d be fucking damnned if he let them touch Kamina a second time. Such a simple realization, really, but it had taken the crushing reality of two different people he’d die for to finally click it in his head.

He’s not Kamina. He’s Simon the Digger, with a skillset uniquely suited to breaking them out of this nightmare, and he’s not going to let his fear seize him any longer.

His next strike of the drill hits metal, and for a second he’s months backwards in time in Giha uncovering Lagann for the first time, and tears fill his eyes as he laughs hoarsely and brushes more soil off the metal.

“Let’s do this, Lagann. For Nia, for bro… and for us .”

Kamina’s victory celebration only lasts until the base of the Dai-Gunzan itself, when he smacks gunman-first into another barrier and wails in irritation. It’s only tempered by his readiness to do the exact same thing, bolstered in confidence by his previous victory over the damned restraints.

The second barrier does not cleave like the first one does, however, and Kamina watches as his good mood immediately evaporates as his glasses-blade shatters against this barrier, his mouth dropping open slightly. “Oh, come on!”

He kicks it with Gurren in a petty expression of frustration, swearing under his breath, when the abrupt sound of tearing metal floods his senses. It’s all he can do to frantically anticipate another spear coming and try to avoid it by dodging backwards; unfortunately, he doesn’t quite have any indication of direction, and when it comes up through the floor and through him an eerily familiar scream tears from his body.

His vision returns through the pain slowly, his breath coming in ragged gasps, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes; he’s pretty sure that with this spear at the very least the idea of using Gurren to break through any more of these is shot, so he painfully extracts himself from the spear and forces the hatch open to crawl out, blinking back tears through the agony until he’s at least haphazardly on his feet on the ground. 

“New plan,” he gasps to himself, barely audible. “Recov’r fr’m blood loss, ‘gain, and then kick this ‘ne down,”

He keeps Gurren open and active just to use the clock inside on the dashboard; he’s got no idea if it’s actually measuring accurately, but it’s something to use as a sense of time and he does. About four hours pass before he’s finally less dizzy and semi-confident enough to have a new plan of attack that hopefully does not involve him getting stabbed a third time, even if it is only in his own mind or some fucked up purgatory or wherever the hell he was. 

Because he’s starting to, just a little bit, understand what the voice meant when it said that he was causing some of these obstacles. He didn’t break the first barrier from raw power; when he tried, a spear had practically apparated out of nothing as if to warn him to stay back.  No, he’d only broken it when he’d grabbed the spear and for just a second, let go of all his thoughts to relive the glory moment of stabbing through Byakou. When he’d acknowledged that he was actually not all that bothered by the threat of being stabbed, but moreso that he didn’t want to let Thylimph away unharmed.

The fact that the second barrier had rebounded his exact impalement from the battle that landed him here was no coincidence. It was a warning, and it was a warning that he was going to have to confront something about himself to get by these stupid things.

So Plan C was to knock on the barrier and weakly ask, “Hey. Can I go by? Like, without being stabbed?”, which as far as plans go may be one of his more flimsy ones, but was worth a shot.

He waits around for a bit in the silence, putting a hand against the barrier hopefully, but nothing changes; he tries to temper his immediate frustration and clears his throat a bit before starting to talk.

“Listen, I dunno- I dunno what you want,” He runs a hand through the back of his hair with a sigh. “But… I really need to go through here. My lil’ brother’s waitin’ for me. My… boyfriend’s waitin’ for me, too. So…”

It’s another long silence, with Kamina glancing back to the dashboard of Gurren to count minutes going by, before the barrier begins to glow a faint pink in the corner of his eye and he whips his head around with wide eyes. Before he can take his hand away, or even move, the world around him and behind him blinks out into a dreamlike, soft pink land, with only the Dai-Gunzan visible behind the barrier.

「How interesting. You’ve acknowledged your own control, at least in part, and can influence the surroundings?」

The voice comes out of nowhere, and still pierces his skull painfully; however, he’s a little surprised to notice the pain was slightly less than it was before, and manages to stay upright with a pained inhale. “I did that?”

He waits, but there’s no further response, and that’s what makes his evaporating patience boil over again, snarling violently and slamming one hand back into the barrier. “Fuckin’ damn it, everytime I make one step forwards I get two steps back and ten questions further! Fuck OFF! What the hell do you WANT from me?!”

“Honesty, that’s all.”

The new voice makes him jump ten feet, and not just for the sudden intrusion; his heart drops to his stomach as he jerks his head up face-to-face with a mirror image of himself, a slight mocking smile curled across his face, hand pressed to the opposite side of the real Kamina’s head on the other side of the barrier.

“Wh- who the hell do you think you are?!”

“You, dumbass.” Mirror Kamina sounds- he sounds so much more tired than Kamina.  

‘ He sounds like how I actually feel,’ he thinks uneasily, and scowls outwardly at him. “Right, okay, sure! Honesty. What the hell do you want?!”

“Relaaaax, geez. Simon taught us patience, right?” 

He drives his fist into the barrier before he’s even aware he does it, and blinks a few times as he registers the action; it takes him a minute to realize the mirror Kamina’s terror on the other side of the barrier, and guilt seeps into the back of his head as he slowly drops his hand.

“...If you were me, you’d know I’ve never had his patience. I admire that about him, though.” He mutters; the thought does calm him down, once he has a second to breathe.

“Yeah, we’re not patient people. Hair-trigger, too, on anything that might be a weakness, huh?”

He thinks of mirror Kamina’s mocking ‘honesty’, and grits his teeth as he realizes what a horrible conversation he’s about to go through. “...Yeah.”

“Why’re you so deadset on acting tough? Never showing anything vulnerable? Wouldn’t that help you, to have someone to carry you when you can’t go on?”

“Because…” Oh, he hates this. “Because Simon needs me, and it’s not fair to put that on him. He’s just a kid.”

“You were just a kid when dad left ya in Giha.”

He digs his fingernails into the palm of his hand and snarls. “Exactly.”

“You don’t want to be him?”

“Never.”

“What if Simon hadn’t wanted to leave? Like, actually wanted to stay, not just was nervous of fightin’?”

“...Then I’d still be in Giha.” It was never a question to him. “That was never a question. If he wanted to stay, actually wanted to stay, I would’a stayed too.”

“Even though the surface was your dream?”

“In a heartbeat.”

There’s silence for a few minutes after that, as mirror Kamina gives him somewhat of a mocking, pitying smile and Kamina fights back the urge to smash his fist back into the barrier and scare him again. He hates this. He doesn’t think about this for a reason .

“You’re scared,” Mirror Kamina acknowledges, shifting slightly with a laugh. “You’re scared of acknowledging anythin’ beyond this, huh?”

“...No.”

“All I want from you is your honesty, kay? If you wanna walk outta hell, you gotta make some compromises.”

He grimaces. “...fine.”

“Do you actually want to live? I haven’t heard a single peep outta you that isn’t ‘for Simon’ or ‘for Kittan’. You know, most people would be begging to go home ‘cause they don’t wanna die.”

“‘Snot true. There’s way more people who wouldn’t say that!”

Mirror Kamina raises an eyebrow at him, and he immediately realizes he’s tipped his hand.

“So you don’t, then.”

“...Does it matter how I feel? I need to… get back to them.”

“It does! Look at it this way: what if they don’t?”

Kamina inhales sharply, clenching and unclenching his fists to try and quell the rising anxiety. “Fuck does that mean?!”

“Relax, relax. ‘m just saying, if you knew for a fact Simon would be fine and Kittan would live his life… would you be fighting this hard to stay alive?”

His mouth goes dry as he tries to come up with some sort of eloquent, smart-ass answer in response to the simplicity of it, looking anywhere but the mirror image staring back at him with an almost sad smile. Finally, he draws a ragged breath and glances up, feeling almost as exhausted as mirror Kamina sounded, unable to drum up anything but the blunt truth in the face of being stuck here with his own psyche and a weirdo royal-we-using faceless voice for eternity.

“...No.”

“Isn’t that sad?”

“Is it?” He snaps back, eyes darkening; mirror Kamina takes a step back with widening eyes at the gesture, despite the obvious barrier between them. “Fine, be fucking sad. I don’t want your pity. I made my peace with this shit years ago, all the way when I figured I’d die in a hole someday ‘cause no one else believed me about the surface! Now I’m fighting for a cause, and I’m more at peace with it then ever!”

“...What if I didn’t let you through? Would you fight me? All because you want to see them again, not because you care about what happened to you?”

“Yeah, I fuckin’ would, and I’d win. And I’d do it every fucking time no matter the odds you threw in front of me, because even- even if I don’t believe in myself, they do.” He draws in a breath as Mirror Kamina’s eyes widen. “They believe in the me that believes in them. And because of that, I can keep moving forwards, even when there’s an obstacle in my path. A blade, a shovel, a tool - they keep cutting and digging as long as someone’s there to support them. And in turn, they support people, allowing humans to accomplish tasks they otherwise couldn’t on their own! That’s what it means to have faith in others!”

He exhales forcefully, barely aware of his own hands shaking as he draws in a few unsteady breaths. “That’s why, even if I don’t have faith in myself, even if I can’t understand what anyone sees in me when they’ve only really seen the persona I put up to support them, even if I don’t know why Simon believes in me so faithfully or- or what Kittan sees in me,” he swallows through the voice crack, shunting that thought aside. “I have faith in whatever they see! I have faith in the Kamina they all believe in! That’s what matters to me!”

There’s a long stretch of silence after he finishes, body trembling as he holds his gaze level with his mirror counterpart; Mirror Kamina regards him with a shocked, slightly open-mouthed expression for a bit, eventually closing his mouth and eyes for a moment to think. After what felt like minutes, he finally spoke.

“You really do only live for the sake of others.”

“I’ve made my peace with that. If I don’t actively wanna die, is it really a problem?”

“Oh, you don’t ?” There’s a mocking undertone to the question. “News to me. But… well, I guess even in the face of that, you always let Simon save you.”

“He’s the method to my madness.”

“You let him save you from yourself. You should let Kittan, too, after all of this.”

The end of the sentence catches Kamina off guard, as his eyes widen in surprise; mirror Kamina laughs softly, shaking his head a bit, lips quirking back upwards into a sly smile. “What, think I was just gonna keep ya trapped here forever? You’re the one who was too uncertain. But… as long as you have that desire to move forwards, even for the sake of others… as long as that’s unshakeable, I think you’re certain now of what you actually want.”

“I mean, the thought crossed my mind that y’might, y’know.”

He’s met with resounding laughter, unable to shake the unease from hearing an exact replica of his most boisterous laughs in response to his own comment; after a moment, mirror Kamina’s laughter dies down, and he moves away from the barrier with a small grin.

“Good luck, Kamina. Maybe let ‘em save you from yourself, though, okay? So we don’t go through this again.”

Kamina hesitates at the thought, uncertain what to say or do to it; he doesn’t get a chance to as mirror Kamina waves and turns around, dissolving in a thin, pale green mist and leaving him alone. Cautiously, he puts a hand out to where the barrier should be, and almost screams in fury when his hand is still met with resistance until he realizes that some of the pale green ‘mist’ was coming off of his hand, too.

He carefully drew his hand back to examine it, eyes widening at the realization the ‘mist’ was more of an ‘aura’ and watching as it gradually formed around his cloth-wrapped knuckles, forming gradually into a lighter-colored set of brass knuckles with a drill almost identical to Simon’s in the center. 

Heart warm at the keepsake of his brother, he took a deep breath, cocked his fist back, shut his eyes and drilled a punch into the barrier.

This time, there was no resistance, no shattering, no horrific noise. He opens his eyes to the light sound of chimes as the barrier shatters harmlessly, the tiny drill on his knuckles glowing brightly. He silently blinked back happy tears as he stared dumbly at Dai-Gunzan for a second, before catapulting off to climb up the faintly glowing ship.

「Fascinating, creature of the Spiral. Despite your despair, despite the fact you should be dead, you’ve generated this much spiral power? Even here, where you shouldn’t be able to?」

It’s funny, but the only thing he can think of as he races through the control room to a room in the back glowing entirely green is that the voice doesn’t hurt his head anymore. “I dunno what the hell that is, but if you want fighting spirit… look no fuckin’ further!”

He swears he hears a faint chuckle as he yanks the door open and tumbles through.

Beating Guame causes a celebration as they continue to move forwards almost on the scale of the initial joy of capturing Dai-Gurren for themselves, really. If Kittan cried a little from a mixture of joy and relief that the medical bay had been successfully distracted from, no one mentions it. 

The choice is so obvious that he makes it on the spot, hugging Simon with an odd surge of pride and patting his head with a soft laugh. “Handled like a true leader, Simon.”

“...What?” Simon’s eyes are wide when he glances up at Kittan, and he’s very suddenly aware of the entire team’s abrupt silence and eyes on him. He shrugs, managing his very best smile to the entire group, and straightens up to slap Simon on the back with a soft, exhausted chuckle. 

“I said, handled like a true leader, Simon! You get what that means, right? You’re the leader of Dai-Gurren.” He doesn’t say it, but he thinks back to Kamina confessing the amount of sheer belief he has in Simon, and Kittan thinks he understands a little better what he sees in him. “It’s what Kamina’d want… no, it’s what he wants. Not a single one of us could ever believe in you more than he does.”

There’s a soft silence that hangs over the group as Simon seems to study his face for any possible hint of a joke, before he nods and gives Kittan a very tiny, nervous smile. “...Got it.”

When the team erupts in joyous celebration and hollering, he knows he’s made the correct decision, and hangs back for a bit with a fond smile before retreating to the medical bay.

It’s a few days later on their progression towards Teppelin when Kittan’s awoken blearily from another nap with his head on Kamina’s bed by the bed itself moving slightly, and he blinks sluggishly as he sits up to rub his eyes, not processing the concept of movement on the bed until he hears a very weak cough that makes his head shoot up, the rest of his body feeling distinctly frozen.

“Kittan?” His voice sounds utterly destroyed from disuse, and he seems to visibly recoil himself at the hoarse sound, blinking in vague confusion at him. Kittan’s mouth drops open in some sort of dazed shock, and for a second he’s convinced he’s still dreaming until Kamina clumsily tries to sweep his legs to the side and fails miserably with his own shocked, soft swearing.

“ Kamina, ” He manages, before the rest of his logic brain immediately gets thrown out the window and he leans over the bed to hug him as gently (but rapidly) as he could, eyes welling with tears with a hoarse, choked laugh. “You’re…”

“Yo,” Kamina rasps, another weak cough sputtering out of him. “Feel like shit. Where’s Simon? Where’m I? Why’re you here?”

He doesn’t trust himself to respond, arms shaking heavily already, so he stumbles back from the bed and tries to steady himself before bolting to the door to wail through the halls. “HE’S AWAKE! LEERON, ROSSIU, SIMON--!!!”

Chapter Text

The first sight Kamina’s greeted with upon opening his eyes is an unbrushed, messy shock of blonde hair sleeping vaguely next to his legs, and he’s so relieved to not be alone this time he’s “woken up” that his breath comes out in what was supposed to be a long, relieved sigh. It comes out as a weak, destroyed cough that sends his head spinning, though, and the strong scent of antiseptic and chemicals floods his senses immediately after as he squints in the bright light and gradually tries to get acclimated to it.

It takes a minute as the figure stirs for him to fully register it as Kittan, and that’s when he immediately feels raw joy manifest in his chest, tempered only by the immediate lack of Simon in the area. Still, he tries to swing himself off the bed to hug him, questioningly calling out his name and immediately wincing in the shock of how awful he sounds; the complete lack of proper response in his limbs startles him more, when only one leg follows his wishes and the other ends up tilting him at an awful angle.

He wants to ask where Simon is, but before he can even form the words in his throat Kittan’s arms are clumsily around his chest with a shocked gasp; he’s appreciative of Kittan’s seemingly very conscious efforts to avoid actually touching him, because whenever he takes in a breath he feels vaguely dizzy and his head’s starting to pound. He starts to get the fuzzy realization that however long he’d been stuck… wherever, his body may have healed somewhat but it clearly wasn’t all that happy still.

Still, he manages to force out the questions; where is he? Where the hell is Simon? And, really, why was Kittan there? The thought that Kittan had just been by his side out of concern makes him feel something unidentifiable in his current hazy state; he sure hopes he hadn’t spent too long wandering around nothing just for his sake. He doesn’t miss the tears in his eyes, either, and guilt creeps up the back of his neck.

When Kittan bolts away to shriek through the door, he does feel distinctly annoyed that his questions were so abruptly brushed off; if his voice worked better for more than about three word intervals, he’d be needling Kittan over it. But it fades fast when the sound of many approaching footsteps makes its way closer to him as he attempts somewhat of a sitting upright position in preparation, grimacing at how odd his limbs felt.

And when Simon bursts through the door, tears openly streaming down his face as the rest of the small group sort of crowded around the door, he decides that it’s pretty much the best part of the question to answer as he braces for a tackle-hug and returns it the best he can with stiff, awkward limbs that felt asleep.

“Hey, Simon,” He rasps weakly, trying for something that he intended to come off as an amused chuckle but comes out more of a hoarse wheeze. “Where am I?”

Simon doesn’t even bother with a reply, burying his face in Kamina’s heavily-bandaged chest to sob outright, and he immediately shifts into minor terror mode, fighting his body’s newfound refusal to cooperate to try and hug Simon a little tighter. “Wha’swrong, ‘sokay… ‘m here.”

“I’m,” Simon’s words are barely audible, his body wracked with sobs against Kamina. “I’m glad you are, bro.”

Oh, right. It took him this long to remember the whole ‘getting-impaled’ thing, and guilt immediately floods over him in its entirety as he tries for a reassuring grin. “‘M good. Glad to see,” he pauses to swallow painfully, and makes a mental note to ask for some water or something. “You, ‘n Kittan, and…”

He gestures awkwardly the best he can to the rest of the group, and despite the tears running down his face Simon breaks into an ear-to-ear sunny grin, choked, sobbing laughter ripping from his throat. A girl with white hair that he doesn’t recognize beams at them both, and a second later Yoko squeezes her way past the group with a small clipboard, avoiding direct eye contact with him while she checked the monitors and other odd things he was becoming uncomfortably aware he was hooked up to. 

“You’re in the medical bay of Dai-Gurren,” She announces, waving the board at him; her voice threatens to crack at any moment, and Kamina raises an eyebrow in surprise. “You dumbass. Do you have any idea how worried we’ve all been…?!”

“How’s his vitals?” Leeron breaks into the conversation abruptly, shoving his way into the room with Rossiu trailing him to check some of the other equipment pieces; Yoko hands him the clipboard back and begins discussing what he assumes is his current condition in more hushed tones, whispers that he can only pick out a few words from like ‘pilot’ and ‘stable’. He turns his attention back to Simon instead.

“...Can a guy,” Kamina starts, fighting back the immediate urge to cough. Simon looks at him with wide, teary eyes, and it takes a minute before he can find the strength to force words out again. “Get some water?”

Leeron glances over at him, seems to calculate something very rapidly, and nods at him. “Yes, yes. I imagine your throat can’t feel too good; don’t strain yourself!”

He sends Rossiu out, who comes back a minute later with a cup of water, and Kamina gratefully grabs the cup with two hands and a weak nod before downing the entire thing in one go. He coughs again, handing the cup back and watching the kid vanish to presumably refill it, before he attempts to speak again.

“How long was I,” He pauses, trying to think of something slightly less on the nose. “Um, out for?”

“You’ve been comatose for a bit over a month, closing in on two,” Leeron informs him without glancing over, seemingly satisfied with the equipment’s readings or hookups or both. “Everyone’s been, well… braced for the worst, really. It’s a little bit of a miracle you survived that!”

“Yeah,” He agrees tiredly, not in the mood to boast. “Wait till you hear my end of it.”

“Ron, I think we should let him rest a little.” Yoko cuts in abruptly, glancing at him for the first time since she’s walked into the room; he’s surprised to see tears in the corner of her eyes too, but can’t find it in himself to tease her for it. “C’mon, everyone, let’s give them some space.”

He almost questions who ‘they’ are until it’s just him and Simon, and then he lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, relaxing back into the bed with a hoarse chuckle that sounded at least slightly less awful.

Kamina doesn’t actually remember falling asleep briefly after that, but he wakes up in a cold sweat, breathing erratic and terrified; it takes him a minute to register Simon gently shaking him with wide, bleary eyes before he calms down enough to manage a force, strangled chuckle.

“Sorry. Did I wake you?” His vocal cords are responding a little easier this time, much to his relief; Simon gives him a tiny, overjoyed smile and shakes his head, leaning back onto the bed.

“No, I’m good. I’m just…” His voice cracks, tears already brimming in his eyes. “Really happy you’re alive, bro.”

Kamina genuinely doesn’t know how to respond to that, opting to silently try and ruffle his brother’s hair; it doesn’t quite work out the way he wants it to, but the head-pat gesture seems to get across as Simon beams at him with undiluted relief in his eyes. 

“...I’m,” Sorry I almost died, but like… just because you’re so sad? Would not consider leaving you alone when I had a say in the matter? He ponders how to finish the thought for a minute before he tries again. “Sorry I scared you. Should’a been there celebratin’ with you guys when we captured this sonuva bitch.”

“It’s okay, we can celebrate now,” Simon immediately retorts, eyes still watery. “Just please don’t… be that reckless again, okay? I keep telling you - I don’t… want to lose you. So… just…”

“...I’m sorry,” He echoes, glancing to the side uncomfortably. “I wouldn’t just leave you alone. Not willingly, at least.”

There’s a long stretch of silence between them after that before Simon responds, staring vacantly past him at the wall. “Remember the last earthquake in Giha? When you just stood there?”

“...Yeah.” He swallows, glancing down to the side. “Remember when you told me that same thing? That you didn’t wanna lose me?”

“Yeah. I said it again when you first fought Viral, remember?”

“...And I’ve tried to keep my near-fatal injuries tally low to those requests,”  he half-jokes, wincing slightly. “Remember how both of those times you’re who got me to, uh, think things half through?” Care about my life, vaguely?

Simon glances at him with an unreadable expression before squeezing his hand with a quiet sigh. “Yeah, I do. But you only listen-- or, no… you just only seem to realize how reckless you’re being when I tell you.”

“Yep,” He shrugs the best he can, leaning back and tilting his head up towards the ceiling. “The method to my madness. I’ll keep coming back as long as you still need me, Simon. Every time.”

“I don’t just need you, you know! I care about you!” 

Kamina blinks a bit at the raw fire and emotion the retort is snapped back with, feeling an immediate surge of pride alongside surprise in his chest as he meets Simon’s unsteady, teary gaze. He swallows before continuing his point, gesturing to him with one hand. 

“It’s not just about need, Kamina! You mean something to me! Even when I’m older and we’ve beaten all of this, ” he gestures wildly around the room for emphasis. “I still don’t want you to be so reckless you just get yourself killed! You’re family! So… so…”

Simon’s voice breaks down into crying again as Kamina blinks stupidly at the declaration, moreso shocked by the sheer concern in it. “So please, if I can’t always be there to beg you to not be reckless… can you remember the me that cares about you? You- you always, always have told me that if I can’t believe in myself, to believe in the you… that believes in me.”

He opens his mouth to point out he also said that Simon needed to believe in himself, but Simon continues before he can. “Well… I think I believe in myself, now. But if you can’t care yet, then… remember the me that cares about you, okay?”

“...I do,” Kamina mumbles hoarsely, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable and more raw and honest about this topic than he’d like to be with a kid who, despite being his closest family and knew him his entire life, did not deserve to be burdened with his own emotional problems. There’s a pride in his chest that blossoms over realizing just how much confidence Simon’s gained over his unavailability, though. “I really do. You’re my soul brother, remember? There’s not a lot that I wouldn’t do for ya!”

He manages to tap his chest to emphasize it with a weak grin, and Simon laughs through the tears with a shake of his head. “I’m…. really, really glad. Then… do you wanna hear what’s happened since?”

“Fuck, please catch me up on the shit I missed,” He scowls slightly, grateful for the easy topic change. “Who’s the new girl? The white-haired one?”

Simon sits up a little straighter, eyes lighting up at the question. “That’s Nia! I found her in a box, in a ravine, when…”

He’s not sure how many hours pass by as Simon quietly tells him of the girl thrown out and left to die by her father when he got bored, a story that makes his fucking blood boil hearing about all the other children the Spiral King had abandoned. If Simon notices his fingers twitching and gradually curling inwards to dig his fingernails into his palm, he already knows enough about Kamina to refrain from pointing it out, instead explaining that she’s joined them to speak with her father.

He sympathizes with her reasoning more than he’d like to admit, and makes a mental note to try and get to know Nia once he’s allowed to wander around the ship freely. 

His pride in Simon overflows when he hears about Guame’s trap and Simon’s soft, tentative admission that he’d “more or less” saved everybody because Kamina was still stuck unconscious in a hospital bed, grinning and squeezing Simon’s hand with a joyful “I told you you can do anything you feel like, Simon!” and laughing hoarsely at his happy, somewhat humble laugh of his own.

It’s only when Kamina briefly and unknowingly dozes off again does Simon check the clock, sheepishly apologizing for talking so much as he stood up. “I’m really sorry, you’re probably exhausted…!! I just… I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Aw, c’mon, you think I’d take some loser sleep over catchin’ up with my blood brother?” Kamina retorts, rolling his eyes and with some effort managing a vaguely overdramatic sigh. “...Thanks, Simon. Go do leaderly stuff, I’ll be here.”

Simon hesitates at the door, glancing at him with some apprehension before speaking. “Kamina… do you, um… the title of leader, it’s y--”

“Yours,” He cuts in, shaking his head firmly and ignoring the wave of dizziness that follows. “You earned it, they respect you, I respect you and I always have. No one deserves it more than you, Simon.”

Simon ducks out of the room immediately, and he has a feeling it’s to hide another crying fit.

Kamina gets very used to the fitful, 1 hour naps before he’s abruptly jolted awake by terror schedule rapidly; he’s pretty sure the whole “weird afterlife purgatory” experience has given him a small fear of falling asleep for too long, and resigns himself to a very weird sleeping schedule in the meantime.

It does mean, however, that at 4 am the next night when Kittan quietly slides the door open and shut behind him, he’s already awake and bored out of his mind. 

“Yo,” He calls out with a soft, relieved grin of his own; now that he’s sure Simon is okay, he feels somewhat justified in allowing himself a little bit of happiness in getting to see Kittan again, finally. Kittan raises an eyebrow at him as he almost automatically crosses the room to steal the chair next to the bed, leaning his elbows onto it. 

“Why’re you still awake? Geez,” Kittan teases, though his voice gives away the slight tremor to it as he silently sneaks a hand into one of Kamina’s. “Aren’t you ‘pposed to be resting and recovering?”

“I’m tired of fuckin’ sleeping.” He intends for it to be in more of a jokey tone, but it comes out forceful, almost terrified as he reflexively squeezes Kittan’s hand; he freezes at the gesture, before quietly leaning closer on the bed, giving him a worried look.

“...Do you wanna talk about it?”

“...I wouldn’t know where to start.” He admits, letting himself slump back into the bed with a long, shaky sigh. “It’s not that important, though. Tell me how shit’s been going.”

“Kamina, I literally--” Kittan breaks off in frustration, biting his lip for a moment before exhaling slowly and starting again. “It is important, because clearly something else was happening besides you just being near-fatally injured and comatose, and f or god’s sake just fucking talk to me.”

He doesn’t miss the crack to his voice at the end of that sentence, and squeezes his hand silently, trying to figure out a place to start. His dream counterpart’s words filter back through the back of his mind as they sit in silence - “You let him save you from yourself. You should let Kittan, too, after all of this.”

“...I’m gonna sound crazy,” He finally warns, and Kittan manages a dry chuckle.

“You usually do. It’s endearing.”

“Hey, fuck you!” He recognizes it for the bait it is and gratefully rises to it, a hoarse laugh immediately following with a shake of his head as Kittan struggles to avoid laughing.

“Not now, clearly!”

Kamina tries to hit him and only half-succeeds, with not enough force to do anything but make Kittan finally, genuinely laugh, and the sound sort of melts his heart a little bit as he uncomfortably moves himself to the edge of the bed as far as the shit he’s hooked up to will let him to lean on Kittan’s arms. The settling silence is comfortable this time, not oppressive, and he takes a few slow, deep breaths to sort out where he even wants to begin.

“...So I think I had to walk out of some sort of-- I dunno, space between life and death,” he begins, and immediately scowls at Kittan’s muffled snort. “C’mon, I said I’d sound crazy! Go with me here!”

“Keep going, I’m listening!”

“...Right, yeah, so... “ He hates how fast he loses his skill of knowing what to say when it came to him being actually vulnerable. It just… was such a scary concept, talking about himself without the facade of fake bravado. “Um… I was alone. And going kind of stir crazy. And… I thought I was asleep, for a while, but… then I remembered Thymilph,” Kittan winces, and Kamina squeezes his hand again before spacing back off with a slow, unsteady inhale. 

“Uh, so… fuck, the long and short of it is my subconsciousness stabbed me a bunch and made me admit a bunch of very personal things I like to ignore,” He sidesteps the actual ‘things’ delicately, especially when Kittan freezes mid laugh, and forces a very ungenuine laugh of his own. “And now I think I might hate sleeping, like, forever.”

“...That sounds like hell.” 

“It kind of was. Like, my own personal one.”

They both lapse back into silence for a bit before Kittan sighs quietly and leans a bit further onto the bed, mindful to not immediately put his weight onto Kamina’s arm. “Do you want to talk about it? Like… more so. Because believe me, I could sit here and talk your ears off about how stupid you were to just--” He breaks off in something between frustration and a voice crack, dropping his face against the bed for a minute before straightening back up. “And-- how much I missed you,” he mumbles, using his free hand to awkwardly scratch the back of his head. “But… you seem shaken. Or like, you have somethin’ to say but you aren’t, and that’s just-- I’m not used to you holding your tongue, you know?”

Guilt creeps back up Kamina’s throat at the obvious, thinly-veiled implication of how hard Kittan had clearly taken the whole thing, and it took him a minute to swallow past what felt like sand in his throat before he responded. “If I talk about it, you’re gonna kick the shit out of me.”

“Try me.”

“...I don’t think I should’ve lived through that fight, Kittan.” It comes out more of a whisper, not quite the words he wanted but close enough to an admission. He keeps his head bowed after that, not quite willing to look his boyfriend in the eyes yet.

The silence is heavy that blankets the room, and after what feels like a century to Kamina he finally sneaks a glance at Kittan’s face and immediately flinches at the raw terror that’s unabashedly written across it. He swallows his pride and keeps his head down, his next thoughts tumbling out in a flurry.

“I- Simon kept telling me how I never, I’m so reckless and I never notice, like, when I could be in danger, and- and I don’t think I care? Like, I- I genuinely don’t, I didn’t even care that much, the- I,” His rambling picks up a terrified, frantic pace, unable to really stop the complete avalanche of disorganized and ungraceful thoughts and too nervous of any actual response. “I told you, I told you before- most of this is just, it’s just… bravado for the sake of Simon, I-- I didn’t want him to be like me, where he got left to fend for himself for not being ‘strong enough’ because- for the sake of someone else’s fucking dream you just get left behind, and- so I raised myself like this, all bravado and boisterous and reckless but the reality is fuck I think too much, and I don’t like--”

He doesn’t register how hoarse his voice has dropped or that tears had formed in the corners of his eyes until he stumbles and feels Kittan gently wipe away his eyes with his hand, a mixture of raw worry and fear written across his face, and Kamina drops his head against Kittan the best he can with a violent, shaky inhale.

“I don’t think I expected anyone to give a shit if I died,” He whispered, blinking rapidly and clenching his hand in Kittan’s. “And-- I guess that always defined my actions. I just… don’t care what happens to me. So… so coming back from the dead just because I was- I was worried, about Simon, and… and about you,” he rushes past the end a bit, feeling all at once too vulnerable and honest and distinctively small. “And everyone’s all teary-eyed and telling me how stupid I am and if I close my eyes it’s like before and I can laugh it off as “oh, that’s just how Kamina is”, but… the truth is that I didn’t expect any of this kind of a reaction and everyone visits me all the time and I see how much progress Simon’s made visibly and I just,”

His voice cracks, a muffled and raspy sob escaping him before he can forcibly compose himself into some sort of put-back-together state. “I dunno, I guess I just wonder if I should’ve for real died and now I’m just going to set everyone back by having everyone go back to looking to me for every little thing when the reality is I barely even know what the fuck to do about myself?”

“You’re so stupid, Kamina. You think you being alive is going to fuck up everyone’s growth? Their own choices? I--” He shifts to lower his voice back down, blinking back a mixture of frustration and horror. “Everyone here looks up to you because you give them hope. And sure, Simon might be who they look to now for hope, but you know what it took for him to forcibly swallow the amount of pain he’s been in to step up as a leader because he had to witness you nearly die? You almost dying again because the ship got overrun!”

It’s a long silence after that, Kittan silently shifting closer so Kamina can lean into him the best he can with unsteady, shaky breaths and a raspy cough covering up any crying he may or may not be doing.

“...Kittan, I don’t think I know how to come back from the dead.”

“You don’t have to know how.” Kittan snaps back, finally breaking his silence with a rasp to his own voice that clued Kamina into the fact he’d mostly been trying not to cry, either. “You don’t have to do shit alone, you idiot. Fuck. You think you’re coming back alone?”

It’s such a little gesture that makes Kamina completely unable to respond, because it’s so simple. He says it like it’s so obvious - he doesn’t have to come back alone, he doesn’t have to do all of this alone. They’re a team, after all. 

“...I’m glad you’re not dead. Simon’s over the moon that you’re not. Ain’t that what matters?” He murmurs it somewhat bleakly, and Kamina manages a small nod at the honesty of the sentence. “Good. Just… I know that’s how you took care of you two for so long. But we’re all a team now, and-- and, well, you can rely on me, you know.”

“...I’m,” Feeling a lot of emotions, in love with you, about to cry, exhausted, overwhelmed, don’t know how to respond. “Really glad.”

“...Want to hear about that gossip and shit? Change the topic? We can… you can talk later about this. If you want.”

Kamina nods gratefully and shuts his eyes against Kittan and listens to the quiet, hoarse chatter as he begins to fill him in on the other side of events that Simon hadn’t quite recalled or been present for, drifting off to a somewhat-still-fearful, but just a little safer sleep. 

Kittan, despite the awkward angle the two of them ended up talking over, ends up falling asleep like that just so at least one of them got some actual needed rest.

It’s a long two weeks after Kamina’s emotional reunion with Simon and subsequent existential breakdown on Kittan, largely in part to Kamina’s absolute refusal to make anyone’s life easy by just resting and recovering and gradually regaining his strength.

No, it was a lot of Kittan dryly fetching Leeron to help him because Kamina lasted all of about three days bedbound before he started trying to walk around with no prompting or warning, and while his arms were more accepting of their new usage, his legs were much less and he’d immediately lost count of how many times he’d fallen directly on his face from the fact from the middle of his chest down was very uncooperative with him currently.

It took a total of 9 days before Leeron, utterly frustrated and over his inability to just recover, cleared him from being constantly hooked up to things and stuck Kittan (and Simon, when he wasn’t busy) with the job of keeping Kamina relatively wheelchair-bound and not facefirst on the floor, something that while he objected to it (prompting Kinon to lecture him on how Leeron and her had to cobble together the thing from leftover and unused parts on the Dai-Gurren, and how he should be grateful!) gave him much more freedom than being stuck in a room all day, so he begrudgingly accepted it and only bothered trying to stretch his legs back out when Kittan, Leeron or Dayakka had the time and energy to help steady his balance.

In the meantime, he’d busied himself with getting to know Nia after Simon’s initial summary of her; she’d very quickly established herself as someone with a heart of gold despite everything she’d been through, and he found himself immediately protective of her akin to his protectiveness even still of Simon. He couldn’t help but feel a little kinship, even if they were for different reasons, and he admired her surprisingly positive and calm demeanor despite it all.

He’d also been utterly floored, if not a twinge proud of how hard Rossiu had been training to pilot Gurren; even if being unable to pilot his Gunmen made him feel more insecure than he’d like to really admit, he couldn’t help but be glad that Rossiu was its current pilot, because the kid worked insanely hard to keep his skills sharp and Simon had a certain happy energy that he only really shared around Nia around the guy.

With all that said and done, he was still utterly frustrated beyond belief that Leeron insisted he was nowhere near ready to pilot Gurren again, irritated by his legs’ refusal to be strong enough to support him on their own again, and bored out of his mind. So when Leeron called out that they were stopping for a day at the ocean to make some adjustments to Dai-Gurren so it could swim, he was one of the first hollering “BEACH DAY!”

Of course, it had not occurred to him until just this very moment when he was pouting off to the side in the sand stuck in his chair that he couldn’t really… swim, or do beach sports, or bother Kittan the entire day, or dig holes in the sand with Simon, or do fucking anything but sit and complain on the sidelines.  

“I can’t believe I get to visit a beach for the first time, EVER, and I’m stuck on the fuckin’ sides!”

“Aw, c’mon,” Simon reasoned, pushing his chair somewhat into the shade of Dai-Gurren with a laugh. “I promise we won’t just leave you in the shade the entire time!”

“But SIIIIIIIMOOOOOOON!”

“Promise! I just promised Nia a volleyball game first!”

“I want to play volleyball too!”

“You can judge!”

Kamina makes absolutely no effort to downplay the overdramatic pout he gives Simon, who shakes his head with a laugh before sprinting off to join the majority of Dai-Gurren on the main part of the beach that’d already gotten changed. After that, he tries to make a game out of kicking the sand into some sort of vague hole, not quite trusting his balance on sand to stand up on his own but desperately tempted anyways, when a dry, amused comment almost makes him jump. 

“Dude, are you just gonna dig a pit for us to fall into ‘cause you’re stuck over here?”

“Yeah, I am! And then Simon’ll help me bury you guys for leavin’ me over here!” Kamina immediately retorts with an overdramatic scowl, immediately turning to look at Kittan to continue his incessant and purposefully annoying whining before promptly shutting his mouth.

“Yeah, okay,” Kittan rolls his eyes as he leans on the side of his chair, a vaguely amused grin on his face, and Kamina began a mental swearing tirade of the most important factor of this entire beach day that had in fact slipped his mind entirely, somehow: swimsuits. Maybe he’d mentally grouped that with bothering Kittan. “Sorry you’re stuck up here, Kamina, I’m sure I could beat ya at a swimming race.”

“Could not.” 

“Could too.”

“Could NOT.”

“You’re staring.” Kittan gives him an insufferable grin, and he shoves Kittan as hard as he can with a pout into the sand, ignoring the cacophony of laughter as he stumbles.

“Fuck you.”

“I mean, that seems like it’s on your m--”

He kicks sand at Kittan’s face before he can grab the victory of a better taunt, and folds his arms with a childish scowl as Kittan dusts himself off, chuckling, and sprints off to join the rest of the group.

If he passes half of the time alternating between watching Kittan show off - some of which he swears is on purpose, because he keeps glancing over with a series of amused expressions - and frowning into his hands, that’s his business. Definitely not his fault that his friends and family left him bored and alone in the shade while his boyfriend chose the absolute most insufferable and material-less swimsuit imaginable and also definitely kept purposefully showing off in various activities such as swimming and round one of the volleyball game. If it’s a little more like most of his time watching Kittan with some keeping an eye on Simon, well, no one had the right to complain about it.

It’s a little over an hour before Simon sprints over to him with a big grin on his face and proceeds to push him down to the makeshift “court” they’ve drawn in the sand with a cobbled together net, centering him on one side. Kamina raises an eyebrow at the ragtag sports tournament as Nia waves cheerfully at him. 

“You’re gonna be one of the judges!” Simon announces, apparently dead set on keeping his promise from before; he shrugs with a bit of a grin before meeting eyes with Kittan on the other side of the net’s end and shooting him a quizzical look.

“Second judge!” Kittan calls, a shit eating grin on his face, and Kamina immediately sits up a little straighter.

“Yeah, Kittan’s moved to being our judge,” Simon explains, catching the ball as Nia tosses it to him so they can all get in formation. “But I didn’t want to leave you out, so…! Two’s better than one!”

“Aw, thanks.”

Kamina catches Kittan purposefully paying more attention from the other side of the court to him than to the game, and immediately formulates a plan.

Ten points later, he was giving Yoko an insufferable grin as she hollered at him while her team got back into position after the last rally, marking another notch in the sand under Simon’s team.

“You literally just give every point to Simon’s team, even if it’s OUR point!”

“I’m just calling it how I see it.”

“You’re not even paying ATTENTION!”

“Yeah, I am! Nia hit you in the FACE with the ball!”

Yoko immediately turns with a scowl to Kittan, throwing the ball directly into his face, sending him into the sand with a howl. “Can you STOP-- doing whatever the hell you and Kamina do and actually CONTEST HIS FAVORITISM?!”

“Wh-- I’m trying!” Kittan protests, scrambling back to his feet with a scowl. “No one listens to me!”

“You’re sure you aren’t just staring over here and noddin’ along to anything I say?” Kamina called out with a smug grin, and Kittan immediately turned his scowl towards him. 

“Projecting! You just want Simon to win AND to not do anything!”

“Do not! I mean, I want Simon to win, but he’s doing that on his own! Clearly!”

“Oh, I’m sooo sure!”

Their petty argument devolves rapidly through the next rally, with Kittan and Kamina completely unable to agree on any points, until Kiyoh hits Kamina in the head with the ball and calls for a pause on the game. “Both of you are fired as referees! Geez! We can’t let you two do anything competitively, even unintentionally!”

Kamina raises both of his hands, rolling his eyes slightly. “Guilty. Well, I can’t fuckin’ go anywhere on my own, soo…”

“Oh, you big baby,” Kittan retorts, already crossing around the side of the court to wheel Kamina away with an eyeroll as Yoko kicks sand to reset the scoreboard and flag Dayakka over to be their new referee. 

Kittan, to his credit, leaves Kamina slightly closer to the water before bolting off to bother Kinon to set up the watermelon splitting contest, leaving him alone to pout on the beach again. In the downtime between volleyball ending (he’s fairly certain Simon’s team won anyways) and watermelon murder, Simon sprinted over to him and procceeded to attempt to bury him and the chair in the sand, something that he thought about objecting to but decided to let happen just out of sheer boredom. And the fact that while he didn’t really succeed, he sure got far enough to run off laughing, which was something of a win in Kamina’s book and qualified loosely as digging pointless holes with him.

Simon returned a bit later with Nia in tow to dig him back out of the sand and offer some of the watermelon spoils, something that he accepted with little whining even if he did want to smash fruit pointlessly on the beach and probably could’ve , because he was also hungry as hell and tired of playing up the pouting endlessly. Instead, he’d settled for exhausted frowning at the group from a distance, waving when someone waved to him and watching Kittan while his thoughts drifted and trying not to fall asleep.

It’s a little later when Kittan sprints over to him to disrupt his almost-nap, leaning on the back of his chair with a slightly out of breath laugh. “Hey. Enjoying the sun?”

“Probably’d like it better if I could do stuff.” It comes out a little more honest than he’d like, and he immediately shifts uncomfortably. “Nice to get some real sun, though.”

“Yeah…” He trails off for a minute, and Kamina’s about to ask what’s on his mind when he speaks first. “Hey, did you actually want to go to the beach pretty bad? I’ve been trying to figure out how much you’re playing up for the sake of being difficult.”

“...Yeah, ‘s my first time with all this sun and sand and water. It’s nice, y’know? Dreamed of this kinda cool surface shit as a kid.” He mumbles it a little wistfully, glancing across the ocean with a mildly suppressed sigh. “It’s cool, though, I’m mostly just making everythin’ difficult to entertain myself.”

“Hate being stuck with your legs not cooperating well, huh.” Kittan mutters sympathetically, leaning down to squeeze one of Kamina’s hands; he shrugs in lieu of a response, aware that he already knew the answer. A comfortable silence settles for a few minutes before Kittan straightens up and moves into his view, glancing at him with an unreadable expression. “I’ll be back in a bit, a’ight?”

“I’ll be here.” Kamina offers with a dry smile, and Kittan rolls his eyes before bounding off to rejoin the few people left on the beach; as far as Kamina can tell, everyone’s slowly trickling back to the Dai-Gurren, which probably meant he’s supposed to join them.

He dozes off in the interim instead, lulled to sleep by the warmth of the sun, because he’s awoken by Kittan gently shaking him awake; he blinks a little bit and processes that he’s been moved over to the Dai-Gurren, and deflates a little at the knowledge he’s probably just going to be stuck in the command room all night. He’s about to try and come up with some funny joke to make at his expense when Kittan unceremoniously scoops him up out of the chair with a vaguely smug grin, cutting off whatever half-awake thought he had and earning an undignified yelp of surprise. 

“Sorry for the lack of warning. I didn’t want to wake you when I found ya,” Kittan offers, as if that explains the rest of it as he proceeds to make his way back down towards the water, Kamina clinging to his neck for dear life.

“I like how that apparently explains why you’re basically Kittan-napping me?!”

“Awful joke! And I’m not, you said you wanted to actually do stuff at the beach but I had to wait for Leeron to be done so I could get his permission to take you chair-free before I get yelled at for not stopping you from being stupid again!”

“You let the threat of being yelled at for being stupid stop you?!” It’s more of a deflect to the rest of that, because the actual thought put into ‘carrying him down to fuck around in the sand and water for the first time’ makes him feel simultaniously vulnerable and overwhelmingly warm at the same time, so he focuses on the more banter-able part of his sentence.

“Not really, but this way he won’t yell at us to come back immediately!” Kittan points out, rolling his eyes and slowing to a stop before setting Kamina in the sand for a moment to sit down, scooping him back up with a soft huff. 

For a bit, Kamina couldn’t actually come up with anything else to say, somewhat too taken aback by the simple thought behind this entire mini-escapade and a little caught up in the oddly sweet atmosphere of being carried down to the beach at the beginning of sunset. Leaning back against Kittan’s chest, he tried to push the feeling of his heart in his throat back behind his pride, absentmindedly drawing shapes in the sand. To his credit, Kittan didn’t comment on his sudden lack of energy, seemingly content and smug just at Kamina’s lingering in his arms and mindless sand creatures, and he was mildly grateful for the lack of banter just so he had a chance to recompose himself to his normal, boisterous persona.

Once he’s fairly certain he’s not in danger of some sort of freak hyperventilating fit over such a tiny little event, he yanks Kittan towards the water with a grin on his face, laughing violently at Kittan’s abrupt sputtering and yell of “ HEY!” ; Kittan humors him enough to help him balance in the very shallowest part, and he finds himself laughing and grinning stupidly at his repeated attempts to get in a mildly pathetic splash fight with Kittan, succeeding more at getting water on himself than anyone.

“Wanna try swimming?” Kittan offers after a little bit of this, and Kamina considers responding with a smartass ‘how, I can’t balance on my own yet’; then he catches sight of the genuine smile across his face and feels his resistance meter drop sharply, glancing back away with a slight cough.

“...Sure, but I can’t fuckin’ use my legs properly yet, dumbass.” It’s a compromise in the reply - just enough of a taunt to not give away his pride. Kittan rolls his eyes and leads him to the water with a chuckle before responding.

“Just hold onto me, idiot. I’m not just going to throw you in the sea.”

“How romantic!”

Kittan does playfully dunk him underwater for a fraction of a second at that, and Kamina clings to him with roaring, wild laughter to avoid a full fall into the water before he unceremoniously swims out, dragging Kamina with him. He pretty much shifts from roaring laughter to mild horror, clinging to Kittan’s neck for dear life along the slow, lazy lap. 

“Will you relax? We’re literally still in the more shallow part of everything!”

“Excuse me for being a little uncertain about you being my livin’ life preserver!”

The second lap, he relaxes a little, leaning off his back slightly and letting the water float some of his weight. The third one and he’s gotten to a state of semi-comfortable, kicking water up behind them in a weak and ineffective attempt to make them go faster, which Kittan dryly informs him is impossible with two people hanging onto each other and he sticks his tongue out at. After the fourth lap, Kittan picks him back up and collapses back on the beach with a laugh, sprawling out with a large disregard for the amount of sand the two of them were about to infest the Dai-Gurren with.

“Have fun?”

“Hell yeah!” He can’t even disguise it, reflexively flashing him a wide grin from his spot laying against his chest, feeling overwhelmingly excited and happy; Kittan briefly glances to the side to cover up a genuine smile that crosses his face, and Kamina tries to ignore how fast his heart is beating.

It’s funny; in the moment, lounging in the sand in the fading sunlight, he doesn’t feel like the former leader of Team Dai-Gurren or a guy recovering from a near-fatal wound and inactivity so bad his legs were still recovering and might be for a long time. He feels kind of like a normal guy having one of those picturesque dates that girls in Giha would gossip about, except with all the locations of his childhood dreams that he imagined the surface would have. It was really, really nice.

He lets Kittan push him to the side to stand up before scooping him back up, glancing towards the nearly vanished sun; Kamina weighed the pros and cons of being less of an ass for once before burying his face in the crook of Kittan’s neck with a genuinely content sigh, trying not to immediately rise to the bait of Kittan’s smug laughter. 

“Cozy?”

“You’re ruinin’ it. I’m being nice for once, and you’re ruining it.”

“Am not. You’d miss it if I didn’t flip you shit every time you did something sweet.”

He would. “Yeah, well… shaddup.”

“Ooh, out of comebacks. Guess I win!” Kamina pulls back to scowl pointedly at him, trying to ignore the faint heat dusting his face; Kittan gives him a lazy grin in return and leans in for a quick kiss, and it effectively kills any other good comebacks he could produce, immediately burying his face against Kittan’s chest with a string of indignant (and happy, if you could read between the lines) curses.

He keeps up the pretense of play-fighting with Kittan until they make it back to the Dai-Gunzan and Leeron rolls his eyes at the two of them before informing Kittan that Simon’s on alert duty for a few hours, and Kittan takes that as the ‘go relax’ command it is to set him down and wheel Kamina off to one of the bunk rooms. Once he’s very safely out of earshot of the rest of the team, or as close as you got on the ship, he catches Kittan’s wrist before he can leave to go change with a very tiny, genuine grin.

“Thanks.” It means a lot, is the unspoken words stuck in his throat, so he glances to the side with a soft laugh. “Nice of ya to listen to my whining all day.”

“...Heh. High praise from the mighty Kamina?” Kittan rolls his eyes, a smirk ghosting his face for a second before shaking his head and stepping back to squeeze his hand. “You don’t gotta thank me. But I’m glad you did, so I can tease you about it.”

“Asshole.” 

He laughs anyways, and lets Kittan go get changed into actual clothes, and thinks that maybe coming back from the dead with people he cares about won’t be as hard as he thought.