A/N: Written for Wallwalker for Fandom Growth Exchange 2015.
Things were different without Crono.
He was her best friend, of course – up until quite recently, he was Lucca's only friend. Of course she missed him, of course she had trouble sleeping after his death. That wasn't what surprised her. What kept jarring her was how badly she missed him, all the little ways his lack of presence glared her in the face.
They were all resting up at the End of Time, and when Lucca did some maintenance on her blaster, there was no Crono there to silently hand her tools and pat her shoulder when she adjusted the wrong wire or had trouble with a screw. Marle tried, but she had trouble telling the tools apart and eventually gave up; Robo joined in soon after she left, but while he could give Lucca the right tools and even help her avoid mistakes, he wasn't the kind of conversational partner she could just chatter away at. He had comments, he had questions – she had to talk with him, which was pleasant, but different from just letting words spill from her mind.
And there was no Crono listening quietly to Marle while sitting with her on the steps leading into the void. The scene had always sparked some jealously in Lucca's heart. Somehow, without realizing it, she had always cataloged Crono as her friend; since they were little she had only played with him, and as they grew up he spent more time with her than anyone beside his mom, as far as she knew. When she was very small, she had been too shy to play with anyone else. After the accident, other kids found her games boring, found her experiments and her inventions scary, found her dad intimidating.
Crono hadn't thought that she was weird. Crono didn't really talk, but that was okay; he didn't need to, when she could understand him and make up words for him. When she had started to really throw herself into inventing, sometimes he would even sit and help her wire together circuit boards and string together gears.
So it was strange to see him paying so much attention to someone else their age, to see Marle get excited and hug him or turn so sad that she would turn her face down, without knowing what secrets the other girl was telling him. And Lucca knew that Crono didn't belong to her, that he could spend time with whomever he wanted to – and he had made a good choice, Lucca liked Marle and she was sweet and kind. But still, it hurt and made a lump in her throat whenever she saw it. Knowing her feelings were ridiculous didn't stop her from feeling them.
Except now Marle sat on the steps alone, clutching her necklace and tracing patterns of frost on the stone, and that hurt, too.
Crono wasn't turning swords with Frog, either. Lucca had never thought very much about swords – they were so simple, compared to her blaster – but apparently the two of them could spend an entire evening on the subject. Not only would they compare the swords that they picked up and accumulated on their journey, but they would compare fighting styles.
Lucca had been distracted more than once by their exercises or sparring (whichever they had chosen that evening). Crono's swords were curved. For a piece of metal, they almost looked graceful, even elegant, when he wielded them. Crono used sweeping motions with the occasional stab, while Frog's straight swords were more amenable to stronger slashes and thrusts.
When they weren't using their swords, they cleaned and sharpened them. More than once, Lucca had listened in on Frog telling Crono stories about brave warriors from his time, or waxing lyrical about the forging process that turned pieces of iron into dependable weapons.
There had been many times before when Frog had practiced alone, so why did the sight now look strange, even lonely? Lucca had seen it so many times before...
Robo often spent the quieter evenings with her. When they were in her own time period, she would name the constellations for him and try not to feel sad when he expressed how many of them he could see compared to the smog-filled skies of his time. In other times and other places, they made up their own constellations, and sometimes Marle or Frog or Ayla would join in to help make up stories about the new heroes in the heavens.
In the less quiet evenings, Robo would do a last patrol before the rest of them all went to sleep, and Crono would always accompany him. At first Lucca had wondered if it was because he didn't trust Robo's ability to keep them safe, or something silly like that. But when she joined them one night, Crono didn't seem to be thinking that at all – if anything, she would have guessed that he was working out some jitters and reassuring himself.
Here at the End of Time, however, they were quite safe. Once Lucca was done messing with her blaster and no longer in need of his help, Robo plonked himself down in a corner, near the fire they had built to ward off the ever-present chill of this place. It looked like he was staring into it, but she wondered if he did so because he found the flames enchanting like they did, or if he was just copying them – or if he was even processing his visual inputs at all. She went over and sat next to him, reaching out to the flames to warm her stiff hands.
He turned his head and acknowledged her, but didn't attempt any conversation. That was good. Everyone was so quiet, even a whisper would carry all the way around their little camp.
Even Ayla, normally so boisterous, was lounging along the ground in silence. Usually, by now she would have gone off to hunt some meat, or tussled with Robo if there was no good hunting. Then she would settle down for a huge helping of whatever they managed to cook, before digging up the alcohol and offering some to Crono.
Frog drank some of the time, but limited himself so he would be prepared if they were ambushed in the night. Lucca had sworn alcohol off after that party so long ago. Marle would accept a glass or two if they had picked up something good, but no more than that. Crono, on the other hand, had an unexpected talent for putting away just as much alcohol as Ayla without any apparent ill effects – the next morning, he was as ready to go as the rest of them.
Lucca had been a little envious at first – wasn't being able to drink a grown-up thing to do? Her experience with it had only been fun 'till the alcohol wore off again. But before long she remembered that a scientist didn't need to drink; in fact, all the better to have a clear head for thinking. Besides, just watching Crono and Ayla laugh together at something-or-other made her feel warm and relaxed in and of itself.
Ayla wasn't laughing now, though. She was tapping the ground with restlessness – maybe the confined space was getting to her – and glaring at the fire. Lucca wondered if she ought to ask what was wrong, but Ayla's expression stopped her. Besides, what was wrong was probably the reason why everything was wrong: Crono was gone. Lucca felt her heart twist yet again, and she tucked her knees up and laid her head on one of them.
Marle eventually stood, stretched, and came to join the rest of them by the warmth of the fire. She gave Lucca a small smile, then lay down and closed her eyes. Lucca thought that perhaps it was time to join her. Ayla, too, had relaxed from her earlier angry expression and now lay sprawled out in her normal sleeping position. Frog, though, was tense, and as he removed his armor for the night he kept glancing to the one person not sitting in their little circle of light and warmth. Rather, he sat leaning against a fence post at the corner of the courtyard area.
Lucca still found Magus hard to read. Something about him just creeped her out on a base level, too, which she kept feeling bad about before remembering that he was Magus and then she mostly stopped feeling bad. Frog was keeping a close eye on him, and didn't seem to sleep as easily as before, but Magus had yet to do anything terrible now that he had joined them. He wasn't exactly nice, and Lucca could do with fewer of his eyeroll-worthy threats and dark words, but they were all still in one piece.
She wondered what Crono would make of him, when they got him back.
If they got him back.
No, no, when.
It was hard to feel very hopeful in the darkness of the End of Time, where motes of dust floated without end and a void fell away underneath them. Still. She had to hold on to that hope. They would get Crono back, and he would help her with repairs to Robo, and smile at Marle again, and spar with Frog and drink with Ayla, and maybe he would get along with Magus, too. The two of them could brood on a hill over a moonless sea, or something. Dying was something Crono would be able to brood over, once they kept him from doing it.
Lucca rubbed at her eyes. It was probably time to go to sleep, if she was starting to think like this.
She glanced up at Magus again, wondering if she should invite him closer to the fire. But surely he was capable of moving himself closer if he wanted, right? And he was already wrapped up in his cloak, his eyes shut. She would probably only disturb him for nothing.
Lucca rubbed her eyes again and whispered a good-night to Robo, who only blinked a sensor in response. She took her helmet off, shook her hair out and combed a hand through it, and then laid herself down close to the fire. She reached one arm out and briefly bent the flames to her will – ran them around her hand, shuttered them down, then encouraged them up again. It was a trick she had only just figured out, requiring finer control than the kind of magic Spekkio had taught them. She had to show it to Crono when they got him back. He would be able to do something like that – create little globes of light, or draw sparks from the air, or maybe he would be able to cast pretty little glows.
She let her hand drop and curled it under her shoulder. She closed her eyes. The crackling of the fire was close in her ears, as was the faint hum of Robo's power source, the little gurgling noises that Frog made in his sleep, and the tiny whistling noise Marle sometimes made. There was one sound that was gone, now that she listened for it: the deep sound of Crono's sleeping breaths. He didn't snore, exactly, he never had at any of their sleepovers, but he did breathe in a funny way a lot of the time that lent his breath a deeper, more cavernous sound than it should have had.
She had barely noticed it when she heard it every night, but now that it was gone, things sounded too quiet.
This was getting ridiculous. Still, she missed him. She was going to have to scold him when they got him back, for making them all worry so much.
Lucca squeezed her eyes tight and thought of the line of investigation they were going to pursue when they awoke, the one that could – would – lead to their reviving Crono again. She wondered at the mechanisms it would take, picking at one thread of reasoning after another, until the complicated math of time travel had lulled her down to sleep.