Author's notes: It always bothered me how Cross isn't shown during the "Your Voice" scene at the end of the game. I somehow came up with this terrible head canon and here it is. This is a retelling of chapter 12, so massive spoilers for both Xenoblade Chronicles X and Xenoblade Chronicles.
-If you need me, I'll be dead-
"Despite everything we've been through, with the Ganglion and everything else, that dream is almost a reality," Elma said.
Lili listened to her team captain's speech. She didn't know what to think, what to say. However, she knew that it had been the right thing to do to save as much of humanity as possible. Now, it was over. They just had to reconnect the backup power system and then go back to their real bodies. Who cared if they weren't the ones they were born in?
Suddenly, dread overcame her. Without knowing why, she looked over to the Vita; it was still deactivated. Still, she knew by experience that destroying a skell didn't necessarily mean that the pilot was dead.
"He's not dead," she said.
"W-What do you mean?" Gwin asked.
All at once, everyone in the room remembered that they hadn't been just fighting the Vita, but also Luxaar.
"Let's make sure that slug is dead before finishing up here," Doug said.
Carefully, they approached the Vita. Doug and L boosted Lili, Gwin, Lin and Elma to the top of it so they could see into the cockpit better. Lili saw movement inside and immediately told everyone to get back. They jumped down quickly. Gwin landed roughly, but he was fine. It took half a second for Elma to realise that Lili was still on the skell. She looked back and her blood froze.
Luxaar had left the cockpit and had grabbed Lili by the neck. "Humanity is the cancer!" he shouted, "you should all be wiped out, once and for all!"
Elma pointed her gun at Luxaar, but couldn't bring herself to shoot. Hitting the Ganglion leader would also mean shooting Lili. She and the others could only watch in horror as he raised her higher while she struggled for air.
"You will never see your people reborn, you will all die in those puppet bodies of yours!" He threw Lili onto the ground. Elma didn't know it was possible for someone to bounce after landing on a hard surface, but Lili did. She rolled on the ground for a few seconds before skidding to a halt about twenty feet away from the Vita.
"LILI!" Lin ran toward her, hoping, praying that she was alright. She took out her comm device and quickly checked Lili's vitals.
Before Lin had even called out, Elma had shot Luxaar. He stumbled backwards before standing upright and charging what seemed to be an ether shot. It was aimed not at them, but at the structures containing all of Earth's DNA above them and the main control center.
Doug, Irina, Gwin and L shot Luxaar, but they were too late. The ether shots had already been fired and struck the containers. Alarms started blaring. The only thing they could hear over it was Luxaar's laughter.
"Attention: this is Lifehold Core control," a female voice sounded above the alarms, "The system has detected a threat to Core integrity. Now initiating internal defensive measures."
"Damn it," Irina exclaimed, "he's targeting the main control system!"
"We have to stop him, no matter what it takes," Elma declared. She looked back to Lin, "how's Lili?"
"She's…" Lin didn't let herself to finish that sentence-didn't want to.
"That's it," Irina declared, "the slug dies right here, right now!"
Lin looked up, "Wait, look over there!"
Inside of the vats that would be used to regenerate life from Earth, abominations were created. They broke the glass and slowly crawled toward the group.
"What the hell?" Gwin exclaimed.
"Those things are the internal defense measures?" Irina said, her tone mirroring how everyone felt.
"The system's malfunctioning," Elma said, trying to keep calm. "We have to stop it!"
"How absolutely perfect," Luxaar laughed. "Hideous humans destroyed by their own hideous creations."
"Who are you calling hideous?" A familiar voice resonated within the core.
They all turned to the source of the voice, somewhere above. Lao jumped from the alcove he's been hiding in and landed on the Vita. Without hesitating, he stabbed Luxaar in the back- both literally and figuratively.
"He's not going anywhere," Lao shouted at them. "You deal with the defenses!"
The battle against the chimeras began. It was a chaotic mess. Those whose skells hadn't been destroyed during the fight against the Vita used them while those on foot surrounded Lili, protecting her from anymore harm even if it didn't really matter at this point. They managed to get rid of the things fairly quickly, even if both Irina and Lin lost their skells, making Doug and Gwin now the only ones with functioning skells.
The Lifehold Core control sounded again: "Initiating internal defensive measures, final phase."
Far below them, the protoplasmic fluid started solidifying.
Unbothered by everything going on around them, Lao and Luxaar spoke.
"Don't you humans have any principles?" the Ganglion leader asked. "What about our bargain?"
"Principles?" Lao scoffed. "When you deal with a traitor, you shouldn't be surprised when you get stabbed in the BACK." He put emphasis on the last word by putting his javelin even deeper through the other one's chest.
"Have you forgotten what they did to you, to your family?"
"Oh I remember all right. My family'd still be here if you hadn't brought your damn war to our doorstep! Now there's only 20 million of us left. That gives me 9.98 reasons to want you dead! It's because of you that my wife and daughter are dead!"
Luxaar screamed and the Vita, along with him and Lao, sunk into the protoplasmic fluid.
"Lao!" Lin shouted, panic clear in her voice.
"Damn it, get him out of there!" Elma ordered.
Luxaar dissolved into the fluid while Lao tried to swim for the surface. He was caught in the thing that had been forming in the fluid and engulfed by it. He couldn't think straight as he was absorbed into it and as all life on Earth flowed into him.
The thing he'd become emerged from the fluid. It was horrible to look at; it was a mixture of all species on Earth, but mixed in a way that only made him seem like a monster from a child's worst nightmare.
"We have to stop him!" Irina shouted.
They ran toward him and Lin placed herself in front of him, shielding him from the others. "No! You can't!" she pleaded.
"Get out of the way Lin," Elma ordered. "I won't hesitate to shoot this time."
"Elma, please!"
"No, Lin, she's right," Lao said from behind her. "I'm not in control of his body anymore. It's not me. Please Lin, put an end to this. Don't let me be the one who ruins everything humanity has worked toward so far."
"Lin, you need to move," Elma ordered.
She turned back to her captain. "Ok, but I'm fighting too. Not just for our sake, but for his!"
"We're with you, Lin," Doug declared. "We'll free Lao together."
They fought the thing Lao had become with renewed determination. The battle was hard. There were times where Lao would manage to gain control of the beast for a few moments and tell them about the Ganglion, the Samaarians and Luxaar. Eventually, while it hurt to do so, they killed Lao and he faded into particles of light.
There was silence. No one knew what to say or do. They'd won the battle; the Ganglion leader was dead, but they'd also lost two friends while doing so. The only sounds that could be heard were Lin's footsteps as she ran toward the Core's main monitor. The others joined her in the center of the platform.
"Is it still running?" Doug asked her.
Lin typed something in and a screen appeared. "Looks fine, it held together."
"Oh thank god!" Gwin exclaimed, "we saved it, we all did!"
"But we couldn't save Lili… or Lao," Lin replied. She turned back to where he's been just moments ago.
"On the contrary," Elma said. "By stopping him and preventing from destroying the system, we saved them both."
"That's right," Doug added, "their DNA, their memories... all of it is still stored in here."
"Yes and now we finally have the means to bring them back," Elma declared.
"But would Lao even want to come back?" Gwin asked.
"All of the things he did…" Lin said quietly. "He'll be able to remember them all, right?"
"All the more reason. You can't make up for your mistakes if you're dead," Irina scoffed. "He's got a lot to do, wrongs he needs to right."
"What about Lili?" Gwin asked. "What if it's like last time and she doesn't remember anything when she wakes up?"
"I'd say the chances of that are pretty low," Lin shook her head. "If anything, odds are she has a better chance of remembering everything when she wakes up considering all of her memories are stored in the core."
"I guess you're right," he agreed, "then let's restore the system."
"Everyone wait," Elma said as she turned toward them. "There's one more thing I need to talk to you about."
Lili realised it didn't hurt anymore. She slowly rose to her feet and looked around, scrambling her brain to remember where she was and how she'd gotten there.
Right. This was the Lifehold Core. She saw the others standing on the central platform. She walked to them. She felt sluggish and tired. She saw Elma collapse onto the ground and froze.
"I haven't died," her voice resonated through the core, "my consciousness has just returned to my real body."
Lili, or Liliana as she now remembered, watched as Elma left her stasis pod. She really was beautiful. There was a long conversation that followed. She zoned out after a while, but Irina sounding happy made her snap back to attention.
"We have all the time in the world now," she said with a wide smile that Lili had never seen before. "Let's head back to the city."
"Yeah," Gwin agreed with an even bigger smile, "let's go home and get ready to bring everyone back."
Lili watched as her friends turned to leave. She saw Doug pick up Elma's mim and L pick up her own. She knew they would be used for two very different things. Elma's would be in case she wanted to go back in it while her own, well, she'd worked with the Reclaimers enough to know what happened when they found the remains of a mim. It would be taken apart and used for spare parts.
"Is that really that much of a problem?" a voice behind her asked.
"Considering the database is destroyed, no," she'd remembered everything he'd told her moments before her death. "They can't bring anyone back; they'll need as many spare parts as they can."
"Indeed."
"Tell me," her voice echoed through the now empty core, "did you predict my death when you saved me?"
"Your death was always a possibility." From the start, the spirit of Mira, or Alvis as she'd eventually learnt, was an entity driven strictly by logic.
"Then what was the point of telling me all of those things when I was sleeping? I didn't even remember them when I woke up."
"You remember it now, don't you?"
"Well, yes," she didn't understand where he was going with this, "but they can't bring me back, so I can't share it with them. When you really think about it, I died the day we crashed on Mira, my consciousness doesn't exist anymore."
"Yet here you are, your memories and conscience intact,"
"You're right, I guess I'm just overreacting to all this," she paused, taking a moment to take everything in. "You never told me why you saved me."
"When I found your mimesome, somehow still intact from the crash, I decided to merge with it to observe humanity and their struggle from up close instead of from afar. However, your consciousness was struggling to stay attached to it, since you weren't awake to maintain your sense of self. I decided then to observe indirectly, so I merged with your mimesome, which allowed your conscience to cling to it. However, it was too much for your brain to handle so you lost your memory."
Liliana didn't how to respond, so she stayed quiet.
"Everything went as fate predicted," Alvis continued. "You played your part and now your species will thrive here on Mira."
"So I don't have a reason to be alive anymore?"
"I didn't say that," though he now appeared in front of her as a green ball of light, she could visualise him shaking his head. "You are one of the most valuable lives on this planet."
"What does that mean?"
"When I merged with your consciousness, you became one with Mira, a part of its sentience. Though your consciousness was destroyed along with the database, it lives on in Mira herself."
"That doesn't help clarify anything."
"I believe it is time for us to depart, for you to learn your new role."
"I don't really have a choice, so let's go."
"Indeed."
Unseen and unheard by anyone, two spirits disappeared from the lifehold core. It was the start of a new era on Mira, and they would be the ones to oversee it.