Disclaimer: I do not own Tales of the Abyss or any of its properties.

Notes: This was written forever ago as a response to a prompt on tumblr. After deciding to update my FF.N account with something, I decided to have a trial run with this. Contains violence and suggestive themes.

Undesirable Number One

Luke awoke to stiff soreness in his shoulders and sharp pain in his neck.

The pain was enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut, his lips twisting into a grimace as he pulled himself to consciousness. He'd slept wrong, that he knew. Like all the times he woke up with his neck crooked and his chin touching his shoulder, he was now going to suffer through an entire day of pain and comments about his poor attitude. But there was something wrong—something more than just twisting into an uncomfortable position in his sleep. As he finally found the strength to open his sleep crusted eyes he saw that he was not at in his bedroom, an inn, the Albiore, or a campsite; he was instead in a dimly lit stone room he didn't recognize, taut leather cutting into his wrists as it bound his arms behind his back. The only door was across the room, composed of thick steel with a tiny window too small and too high up for him to see out of. Even standing, he was sure he wouldn't have been tall enough. All the same, newfound adrenaline made the crick in his neck seem more like a distant ache than a persistent bite, and so he struggled to push himself to his feet, his every joint screaming in protest, his head throbbing.

Just as he finally made it, a note of triumph ringing against the pain he felt, the door to the room opened and three men entered.

"He's awake," one of them said—unnecessarily, Luke thought, given that he was sure the other two could see that for themselves. The speaker was short but stocky; his head looked tiny on his broad shoulders, not helped by the fact that he had hardly any neck visible. One of his companions was at least as tall as Guy, but looked lanky and strung out, like someone had taken a string of cheese and stretched it too far. The last one was just big, in both height and body weight, and held his arms like cinder blocks by his sides. Luke pressed his back against the wall and tried to work his wrists against the ropes, but he could already feel rope burn stinging his skin with no progress to compensate for it.

"Have a nice nap, replica?" the lanky one asked. His mouth was split in a leer, the yellow of his teeth visible even with the very faint fonstone light.

"I—wait, how do you know I'm a—who the hell are you?" The men laughed at Luke's questions and he pressed his back tighter against the wall, pinning his hands between his body and the stone and preventing him from working the ropes further.

"We're the ones that's gonna save Auldrant from the crisis," said the man with cinder block arms. Luke frowned; confusion did nothing more than make his head hurt worse.

"What's that supposed to mean? What crisis are you talking about, you're not—" his head throbbed painfully again, and he winced, "—I've never even seen you before in my life, and I'm—we're—my friends and I are the ones that are working to save the everyone, so what are you—"

"Your friends? You mean you replicas?" spat no-neck, and his two companions laughed. "You replicas are the problem. You're the reason us real people are running out of resources. You took our food, and our—and our resources, and you come in our lives and pretend to be our loved ones—"

"We don't—that's not on purpose, and that's not what—"

"And we're sick of it, that's what we are, sick of you freaks of nature going about, doing that. So we're gonna take care of it." The man with no neck hitched up his trousers higher, his chest puffed out, and Luke felt a chill raise goose pimples on his arm.

"What are you talking about?"

"We got it all worked out," said the lanky one. "We got a lot of people together. The King of Kimlasca-Lanvaldear won't solve the problem, and neither will Princess Natalia, or even Emperor Peony in Malkuth—we've asked, and we've waited, and we've waited long enough. We got enough people together now, see. It doesn't matter what they say, we can do it."

"Do what?"

"Replicas really are just two-bit human lookalikes, aren't they?" said the man with no-neck, and his companions laughed, but their laughter didn't sound kind at all to Luke's ears. "They look like us and walk like us and sometimes even talk like us, but they don't have the intelligence, they're not smart like us."

"Good thing I'm not smart like you, or I might not know how to dress myself in the morning," Luke muttered. His voice was just loud enough for them to hear, it seemed, for they glared at him, their eyes scrunched close enough together that they looked like dark slits.

"What did you say, replica?"

"Nothing," Luke said, a little louder. "I still don't get what you're talking about. You have enough people for . . . what, exactly? And where are you guys even from? Your accents don't sound Kimlascan."

"We're from Daath, or near enough," said the man with cinder block arms. The man with no neck scoffed.

"I'm in the Oracle Knights, or was. I quit when they stopped doing the Score readings. I'm not serving an army that turns its back on Yulia."

"No one turned their back on Yulia," Luke said. "Yulia's great, but the Score—"

"The Score is what guides our world!" the man with no neck said hotly. "The Score is—oh, what's the point, no point in explaining it to a replica like you, you wouldn't understand it." He snorted. "You lot are part of the reason they defected from the Score in the first place, I'd bet you anything."

"I had something to do with it, yeah," Luke said. The lanky man made a sound of disgust.

"It's just like Fon Master Mohs said."

"Mohs? Mohs put you up to this?" Luke's eyes widened, yet then he groaned and closed them, his head falling back until it lightly hit the wall. "I should have known. But why did Mohs want you to kidnap me?"

"Is it still not getting through your mush of a brain, replica?" the man with no neck asked. "I told you already, we're solving the crisis."

"What cri—"

"The replica crisis, you trash! Haven't you heard a word I—you replicas are taking everything! Our food, our homes! You're littering our streets, you're—the miasma's bad enough, it's enough we have that to deal with, but you monsters too?"

"The monsters outside the cities are bad enough," said the man with the cinder block arms. "I should know, I've a lot of experience with the monsters around the edge of Daath. Those monsters are something, but you replicas too?"

"We're not—we're not monsters," Luke said. "We're just—we're just different—"

"You're not natural," said the man with no-neck. "Unclean, and we don't see fit to suffer through having you making life hard for the rest of us normal folk."

"So what are you going to do, round us up and kill us all?" Luke snapped, and it only took a second for the sick feeling to rise in his stomach, for sharp tasting bile to burn the back of his throat. "You can't . . . you can't be serious."

"Kimlasca won't do it, Malkuth won't do it, Chesedonia claims it doesn't have to," said the lanky man. "But their people are tired of them not taking action. We've talked to them, the Fon Master of the New Order of Lorelei put us on to it. We've been talking to the people for him, see. We'll be his disciples."

"We've been going for weeks now," said the man with cinder block arms. "All over, talking to the people. It's not easy—lots of people loyal to Kimlasca's princess, and Emperor Peony of Malkuth—but we've gotten lots to our side. Lots that are sick of the miasma. Of the replicas. Of the not having a Score."

"The Score is a bad thing," Luke said, "and we're working on a way to get rid of the miasma—we even found it, I think, or I—I did, maybe, but—"

"But nothing," said the man with no neck harshly. "You, try to get rid of the miasma? You'd make it worse! You'd bring the whole down around you and probably revel in it, probably love the chance to get rid of the rest of us normal humans, wouldn't you?"

"Of course I wouldn't!" Luke cried. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I'm trying to save—"

"Shut up! Fon Master Mohs already said what kind of a problem you are, replica." The man with no neck took a step further. "Told us to get you specially, first. Said you were trying to ruin the world. Said you'd already tried to do it once." The sick feeling from before was nothing like the icy dread that snaked around Luke's lungs, stopping his breath short as his heart tried in vain to escape his chest. "Said if we didn't do something about you right away, awful things would happen. Said you were the reason Fon Master Ion turned away from the Order and stopped the Score readings—said you were the reason he's dead."

"That's a lie!" Luke snarled, but the man struck before he could say more. Lights exploded in front of Luke's eyes as the ham-sized fist struck his cheek, and the opposite side of his head struck the stone wall. His knees gave out from under him and he fell, and for good measure the man kicked him sharply in the gut.

"Said you were the reason Akzeriuth fell," the man went on. "Said you were the reason the Outer Lands fell apart. Said you were the reason the world was gonna end. Said you were the reason for it all."

"I . . . he . . ." Luke gasped. He coughed as he tried to regain his breath, his stomach seizing in pain. "I'm . . . I'm trying . . ."

"So we're getting rid of you, first. These catacombs? Miles under Daath. Everyone in the Oracle Knights knows about them, but no one ever uses them anymore, not 'til now. We'll have our comrades in other countries round up the replicas, and then we'll bring them here, and we'll leave them here, where they belong. But you—you're first. Fon Master's orders."

"He's not . . . the Fon Master . . . of anything important." It was hard due to his hands still being bound behind his back, but Luke slowly managed to push himself back up into a seated position, glaring up at the men before him from beneath his red fringe. "And he—his entire army is made up of replicas. All of his soldiers are replicas. Why are you following him?"

"He's making use of replica filth, yeah," said the lanky man, "but he'll get rid of 'em as soon as he's done. He's said so." The lanky man's face twisted into a sneer. "And that's the thing about you replicas, isn't it? You don't care, you'll do what you're told. You've got no souls. Doesn't matter to you if they're your own kind or not: you'll help kill 'em all the same. Monsters with no souls, that's what you are."

"Don't even leave bodies behind when they do die," said the man with cinder block arms. The lanky man laughed.

"All the better for us, isn't it? No proof for when all's said and done." Together the men laughed, and Luke slowly shook his head.

"You're sick. You're talking about killing people. You know that, right? How can you talk about killing so easily? How can you laugh about it?"

"Replicas aren't people," said the man with no neck. Luke pressed his lips into a tight line. "It's not killing, it's more like . . . getting rid of the trash. Disposing of it."

"That won't . . . it's still . . ." Luke took a deep, shaky breath. "Look, I can get why—I know why you're mad at me. Some of what Mohs said . . . a lot of it was a lie, yeah, but a lot of it wasn't. Akzeriuth . . . but the others didn't have anything to do with it. Mohs created those replicas, he made practically all of them, and he's just using you to try and wage war against Kimlasca and Malkuth. Do this to me if you have to, but leave the other replicas out of it. We'll find a place for them, you'll see, so—"

"You aren't gonna do anything, and we already found a place for them: here." The man with no neck shook his head. "You replicas are the stupidest things I've ever seen."

"Guess you never took too long a look at your buddy there, then," Luke said, before he could help himself, nodding at the man with cinder block arms. The man with no neck struck him again, and this time Luke felt his jaw pop with the force of it.

"Say whatever you want, replica, but you're stuck down here. You're gonna die down here, and the world will be better off for it." The man turned away, and as one, the three started toward the door. "We just wanted to talk to you ourselves, see how you held up, but you're all the Fon Master said and more. The world'll be better off without you replicas in it."

"Maybe," Luke said, and he slumped back against the wall. "But we're not going out like this. You can't do this. The others . . . Natalia would lead Kimlasca's army herself if it meant stopping you. And I'm . . . I'm not worth much, but I'm not dying like this either. I can't. Not until I've gotten rid of the miasma."

"You don't got a lot of choice there, replica," said the lanky man, pausing in the doorway. "You're down here and there's no way out for you. No way for anyone to come find you."

Unbidden, the memory of a person flinging themselves off the land dreadnaught Tartarus and onto the ground below came into Luke's mind. Other memories followed it: memories of someone finding him in trees, in the manor's attic, in the basement swimming pool, in Aramis Springs. "You're wrong," he said, and the men gave him incredulous looks. "Someone will find me. He always does. And he won't be very happy when he finds you."

The man with no neck laughed. "Yeah, we'll see about that."

"I'm shaking," said the man with cinder block arms.

"Terrified," the lanky man agreed. Laughing, the three left the room, and the door slammed shut behind them. Luke heard the sound of a bolt sliding in place, but rather than feeling fear or panic now that they were gone and he was left with nothing but uncertain silence, he instead felt a sense of raw relief. They were gone, and he was alone. The leather was still biting into his wrists, the skin chafed badly enough that he thought he could feel a little blood. His head was pounding, his face was swelling where he'd been hit, and it still hurt to move, let alone breathe. But he was alone, he wouldn't have to see or hear from them at any point in the near future, and eventually, Guy and the others would find him. They would find him, help him, and save him, even if he didn't deserve to be saved.

And then, before they went ahead and solved the miasma crisis (and they were going to, Luke was more sure now than ever, he had to), he was going to find Mohs and punch him square in the face.