Ardwen sat down next to Porter on a log. He sunk his feet into the sand of the beach, looking out over the sparkling waters of the ocean. They had been on the island for two days now, and not a single word had been spoken among them. Once they had arrived they had scattered. Only Sigma and Shotuku had gone around talking with each student, and they had all met Roth and Allyson once again before going their separate ways. It seemed that nobody wanted to acknowledge what had occurred on the battlefield or who was missing from among them.

"You couldn't have done anything different." Ardwen picked up a shell from the beach and flipped it between his fingers, feeling the ridges along his skin. He whipped it out towards the water, watching it skip a few times before sinking. The sun reflected off the spray that shot up, flickering in front of his vision and blinding him for a moment and he smiled at the perpetual positive symbolism that could be found in nature.

"It's not about doing things differently. It's not really about anything."

"Well nobody is talking."

"We don't have anything to say anymore." Porter didn't move his head while he spoke, his gaze transfixed on the horizon. He had been here for both the days, just staring at the world outside the island, and Ardwen hadn't been the first person to approach him, though nobody else had spoken to him as of yet.

"Then maybe we should acknowledge what happened back there."

"A lot of things happened." Porter's short answers shut down any attempt by Ardwen to break through to the youth. The pair sat for a while in silence once more, and Ardwen found a few more shells over the time to whip into the ocean.

"Fine, if we can't talk about the past, then what do we do in the future?" Ardwen shifted his body to face Porter, trying to gauge the young man's emotions. Porter's face was a blank though, hollow and devoid of emotion, he continued to look forever forwards. Finally, after a brief moment of emptiness between the two, Porter's eyes slid over towards Ardwen.

"You need the past to make the future."

Ardwen resisted an urge to throw his hands up in frustration. He was tired of cryptic messages and unspoken feelings. He wanted something resolved and he wanted it now. "Chase is dead Porter." The teen flinched at hearing the words, and Ardwen recoiled a bit. He hadn't expected such a reaction out of the stoic Porter. An ocean breeze stirred between the two of them, blowing a few leaves down off an overhead tree. The leaves fluttered down onto Ardwen's lap before sliding to the ground. "Listen, I didn't want anyone to die either. I was the squad leader, that was my plan, and that loss is my responsibility. But Chase didn't die so we could mop and sit around and pity ourselves. You and I both know that."

"I know it, but it doesn't bring him back from the dead." The wind ruffled Porter's hair as he spoke, exposing his eyes to Ardwen. They were ringed with red and clearly exhausted. It seemed Porter hadn't slept the entire time he had been sitting here and had spent every second of the last two days mulling over everything. "You know, we shouldn't have been there."

"You shouldn't have been in Beijing either." Porter gave Ardwen a surprised glance, raising an eyebrow towards his friend's knowledge. "Shotuku told me." Ardwen shrugged before smiling. "We've all done some pretty crazy things before. We snuck into the Omnicorp, you and Chase went down to the United Eastern States, we fought Gremlins without our Goliaths or the aid of the teachers, and we've been deployed multiple times now. Remember when you nearly died in the mountains fighting Sigmeund? What would have happened then? You could've been killed when you were only supposed to buy time. Chase died when we were at war with an enemy we've never experienced before, that nobody has ever experienced before."

"It's not about whether we should be in a location or not." Porter suddenly stood up from his seat on the log, his fingers clenched into shaking fists on either side of his body. "There shouldn't be any of this war, there shouldn't be any death or violence or fighting all so that one country can say they own more than another country. My brother doesn't have a body, my father doesn't have a life anymore, and I'm now missing a friend. And who else has died before this?" Porter opened up his hands and stared down at his palms, a tear sliding off his nose and landing on his skin. "How many people have I killed Ardwen? How many comrades did we take the lives of before?"

"Well..." Ardwen hadn't been ready for that kind of question and had certainly never thought about the implications of his actions like that before.

"We see them as only the enemy, as people who not only need to die, but deserve to die. But then we are allies with them, fighting next to people we once tried to kill. Those are lives we toy with, lives we extinguish one by one. I have been sitting here for days now, and at first I was thinking about Chase being dead but now I'm thinking about so many others. What were the stories behind those lives? Who were the people involved and what did they do? How many of their friends did we send spiralling into depression> How many families no longer have a father or a mother? How many futures did we cut short before in the name of things like justice, and in the end we are fighting so that what? So that an emperor can get his name in the history books?"

"That's a soldier's dilemma Porter." Shotuku stepped over the log, cutting between the two youths. He immediately spun on his heel to face them both. "There was once a philosophy that taught that each life held a weight, a certain value, and that every life started out equal. But if you took the life of another, you took on the weight of their life, and it pressed down on you. The more you took, the heavier you became until you could no longer move. It was a warrior's belief I believe, one Ochenkov may have been able to describe in better detail." Shotuku shook his head a bit at his own lack of knowledge in the subject. "But that is irrelevant. The point of the tale is not that all people can be swallowed up by the burden of death, but that they can instead make sure they use the weight properly. If you are heavier, so are your choices and the consequences that come of them. When you all started in the academy, things were somewhat carefree weren't they? As you progressed, as more people died at your hands, your weight grew to this point but you were not aware of it until today."

Porter gave no answer, sitting in silence instead and averting his gaze from the professor's. "Exactly,"Shotuku continued. "But you must always remember that it is not about how heavy you are now, but what you do with that weight."The old man walked away then, sauntering casually at first before his gait suddenly sped up towards Riya and Nami, who were lying on the beach.

Porter's fist clenched in front of his face and his teeth ground together. "Perverted old man,"he mumbled through a clenched jaw.

"He's right though. The more we do, the more we are compelled to do."Ardwen scooped up another shell, letting the sand that came up with it trickle through his fingers and cascade back to the ground. He held it out to Porter until the teen finally grabbed it and threw it into the water. It skipped over and over before finally sinking down beneath the waves. "You see, the more weight you put behind it, the further it goes."Ardwen stood up from the log and patted Porter on the shoulder before he walked away, leaving the young man alone with his thoughts once more.

What will I do with my weight now? Porter contemplated the concept he had been handed, mulling it around in his head. His father was dead, Chase was dead, who else would die in the future? What would their deaths achieve?

"Living, dying, they were all the same to me once." Sigma leaned against a tree behind Porter, tossing a coconut between his hands. "When I first awoke, I really didn't care for the value in human life, for whether someone died or not and whether I was the cause. I thought at first it was because of my anger, because of rage at becoming a machine. But as I've thought about it, it was always a part of me, always something I was doing."

Sigma stepped over the fallen tree to stand beside the sitting Porter. He threw the coconut over his shoulder, listening to it rustle through the foliage before bouncing off a rock and falling to the ground, letting out a hollow noise from the impact. "I was opposed to war before Porter. I was a pacifist and I opposed everything that the government was doing by doing nothing at all. Some would say I was a rebel trying to stand up for a cause but in reality, I just didn't think it should affect me. That's it. I thought the wars didn't apply to me, that they shouldn't bother me, that I wasn't a part of them, because I didn't want to be a part of them. There was no greater cause, no noble truth, just a guy who wanted to be left alone. Pretty pathetic right?" Sigma laughed a little, a foreign sound to Porter. He had never heard the android express that kind of emotion previously, certainly not positive emotion.

Porter attempted to shrug as a response, his mind still cluttered with his scattered thoughts on responsibility. "It's not a bad dream to just want to be allowed to live."

"But the means were not justified."Sigma's tone suddenly turned dark, and he glanced down at his feet shamefully. "My actions sent Allyson to prison, got her turned into an Enigma soldier. They put me in prison, they cost me my body, my humanity, and they got our father killed, and nearly took your life as well. My actions, or non-actions really, have had much worse consequences than if I had chosen to take a path at all. By trying to get off the trail of life to avoid loss, I gave up more than anyone else in the world."

Sigma's shoulders slumped, and for a brief moment, Porter felt empathy for his brother and could see a weakness within the robotic frame that had never showed itself before. Sigma was, after all, still Leif on the inside, at least partially, and Porter could see that with greater clarity now than when he had first met the cyborg. And if Sigma was willing to try and be more of a brother at this moment then why couldn't Porter try to be more of one as well to give back? But he didn't want to talk about doing or not doing anymore. The fog in his mind of self-doubt was slowly dissipating, replaced with a bright passion to seek justice for the world. Chase's death was just a piece of the fuel that had ignited such a blaze in Porter's heart, but it was his friends' efforts that were helping him to understand just what the brightness meant.

"Brother..."

"Yes?"

"...What was mom like?" Porter's head tilted upwards to lock eyes with Sigma. While the teen's were red-rimmed and exhausted, the android's purple, machine eyes could only whirl and focus, analyzing and gathering information while wishing they could convey emotion.

"I don't...I don't know." Sigma threw his hands up in the air in frustration. "Most of the memories I have recovered are only from the few years before I became what I am now. Mom was already dead by then, and I really don't know anything previous to that. But everyday I have a chance of waking up to a new memory, so perhaps one day I will be able to answer that question."

"How do you wake up with a new memory?" Porter cocked his head to the side quizzically.

"How do I do anything really? When your brain is a computer, how do you know exactly how it functions or why? I couldn't explain any of it to you really." Sigma began to walk away from his brother, unable to completely understand his own existence.

"All that stuff you said before..." Porter's voice stopped Sigma in his tracks, and the android glanced over his shoulder. "...did you come up with it yourself or did you just read philosophy texts from databases?" Porter smirked a bit as he asked the question before the brief moment joke faded away and he returned to his gloom.

"Oh a little of both I suppose. What's important is the message right?" Sigma continued walking away before he slowed once more. The cyborg held his hand up to himself, a small orb of purple energy floating out of the hole in the centre. The sphere shot out over the ocean before detonating in a dazzling display of light. "Don't do the whole depressed and emotional thing Porter." Sigma looked over at his brother, a warm smile across his face. "I already did that one for a while; it isn't fun."

The android continued walking away down the beach and Porter watched him trail away for a second before a massive wave crashed into him, knocking im off the log and leaving him plastered against the trunk of a tree, a wave caused by the explosion just a few moments earlier. Porter spit out a stream of salty water from his mouth, wet hair hanging down in front of his eyes. He didn't really care about the prank at that time. All he could think about was how, even if just for a bit, he had felt connected to his brother.