I'm about to upload my 108th fanfiction, and it has to be a Suikoden fic, right?
Luc is one of my favorite characters of all time, but he's hard to write about. There's a lot of nuance to his character. I doubt I did him any justice, but I hope you all enjoy this fic anyway, despite the author's shortcomings.
Luc is a newborn baby, incapable of realizing that he's not a baby at all, but a tool or perhaps a monster to be. He's in pain, although he doesn't yet know what pain is or why he's in so much of it, let alone why the adults surrounding him and his twin are talking over him. He cries because it is primal instinct, because his baby mind knows there is something wrong, wrong, wrong with his body from the time he takes his first breath.
The beginning of his life is filled with pain. He doesn't know it yet, but the ending will be too.
x
Luc is four years old, and this is where his memories truly begin, although he's not aware of his exact age at the time. As an adult, he will only have vague recollections from this point in his life - in which the bulging veins on his chest, bloated by the True Wind Rune's magic entangled in his heart, slowly begin to shrink. They never fully disappear, even after he becomes an adult, but they do become a part of him.
He is still four years old when someone teaches him how to count, and from that point onward he begins to count everything. Fingers and toes, the ribs protruding from his sides, the features of his face, and the long, tan strands of hair that fall onto the floor whenever he can find them. Once he becomes tired of that, he counts the bars in his prison cell and the number of people walking past; usually none. Then he starts on counting the number of cobblestones or bricks in his cell, although he never gets very far.
"Ten" is the highest he can count. It's apparently all that he needs to know, for that's as far as anyone's taught him.
He knows a few other things as well, like the words for night and day and the names of all his colors. Even the rankings in Harmonia's system of government, but as those are all things Luc has never seen from inside his prison cell, he mostly becomes really, really good at counting to ten.
x
Luc is six years old.
Counting doesn't pass the time as well anymore, and since it's always dark inside his cell he never knows how much time has passed to begin with. He falls asleep or wakes up whenever he wants, until his captors wake him up for his meals. The only reason they continue teaching him new things is because they don't want him becoming too feral - Luc has no idea what that means, but he has overhead a couple of the higher ranked bishops talking about clones before. He doesn't know what that means either, but apparently if their cloning attempts are successful he can finally leave his prison cell and experience the outside world. He hopes they succeed soon.
(What he doesn't know, at least not yet, is that the only way he would've experience the outside world was as a corpse.)
To replace his counting, Luc learns how to make the breeze flutter in time with the beating of his heart. It's easiest when his heart is mid-beat, because that's when his fingers become all tingly and that's when he feels the strongest - and that's roughly the way he explains it to his captors when they ask, because that's the only way he knows how to explain it.
x
Luc is seven years old.
Until recently, he never dreamed when he fell asleep. Now he has all but mastered his control over the breeze, and can make leaves and rocks fly into his cage for his own entertainment. He makes a game out having them chase each other around the sky, pretending like he doesn't know the winners even though he quickly realizes he's in complete control of the matter, or watching as they dart between the bars of his cage. In and out, in and out - he wonders what it would be like to leave like that.
Because he doesn't know the answer, and because he's already tired of doing the same things over and over again from the time he learned about counting, the games are monotonous and boring to Luc almost from the first time he plays them. He doesn't enjoy his lessons either, as they appear to becoming shorter and growing farther apart.
Controlling the wind was all Harmonia's priests wanted to see him do, and now that they's seen him do it, they appear to want nothing more from him. Perhaps they've decided he's not feral after all.
So there's no one around to tell when he begins to have dreams in black and white, because the priests have recently forbidden him from talking to anyone other than they. Luc follows this rule blindly until he finally gets brave enough one day to ask one of his other captors instead - they're not really a guard, because there's never anyone stationed in front of his cell, but they do bring him food and empty his clay chamber pot, sometimes.
He tells them he's seen an entire world in black and white, and they inform him that it's normal for people to dream without color.
x
He's lonely, but he doesn't yet realize that is sometimes a good thing. The high priests made it a rule that no one was allowed to touch him aside from the wet nurse, and from the time he was placed in his prison cell no one has dared disobey that rule.
As an adult, Luc still wouldn't know what the punishment for disobedience was, but he would've found out about that rule, somehow, and he would be glad for its existence - he is not so naive to think there weren't people, even in the loneliest prison cell in Harmonia, who wouldn't left him alone without it. Whenever he needed to be punished, they would take away his blankets or limit his food instead. Only a select few people had a key that could open his prison cell.
He loathes to admit it, but he's actually thankful to the priests that created him for one thing. He has enough childhood traumas already.
X
Luc is still seven and he's still lonely, except he has two unexpected visitors, one after another.
The first is a boy around his age, who appears more genuinely impressed that he can perform magic than the priests ever were. The child's name is Sasarai, and it becomes a name that would stick with him until death.
The second is a tall woman with long, black hair who suddenly appears beside him in his cell one day, and she's the first person to ever enter without carrying a tray of food or a glass of water or a fresh chamber pot. Even his lessons are - were - given to him through the bars of his cell. The first time he hears her voice, he thinks he's asleep.
"Don't you wish to see the world?" she asks, even though it's obvious by now that he's never going to.
Until he does.
The woman's name is Leknaat, and she's already pieced together what Luc has been dwelling on in the back of his mind - that he's a clone, which means he was created - but she offers him a chance to live like a real human being anyway. He leaves the cell that very night, and the way Leknaat teleports them both isn't as mysterious as it should be, because he already knows a little magic himself.
x
Luc is eight years old, and the Wizard's Tower where he now resides with Leknaat has more bricks than he could possibly ever count, even if he dedicated a lifetime to it.
He thinks this is freedom until he realizes it is not.
x
Leknaat sends him into war for the first time when he is age fourteen, and again at age seventeen. He is bound to his duties of guarding the stone tablet, bound to fight as each of his commanders asks him to, bound to his destiny by the next time he sees Sasarai - he comes back from both asking Leknaat why, and the only answer she gives him is that he chose to be human.
It's a subtle way of telling Luc he must find his own answer.
When Luc asks the second time, it's midnight. The sky is so dark, even the stars appear to be sleeping, and the only light that can touch the earth outside Leknaat's castle is from the full moon. It's paler than usual tonight, Luc thinks, and anything that passes in front of it becomes a silhouette, black on white. It reminds him of those dreams.
x
The dreams continue to get worse, become more frequent.
x
"True Runes carries the memories of the past," Luc muses one day, as he's supposed to be helping Sarah with her studies. "Do you suppose they could tell the future also?"
"Some of them can," Leknaat replies.
It's an elemental rune. It shouldn't be able to tell the future, but there's no other explanation, no other way to describe the sense of foreboding Luc gets every time he encounters another of those dreams. He knows things he shouldn't because of them - every time he's hit with a flash of deja vu, his thoughts turn to black and white.
x
Some time after that, Luc realizes he doesn't trust Leknaat to provide answers to the questions he asks anymore. She knows them, and he knows she knows them, but she refuses to tell him. He would much rather have a human perspective, and Sarah turns into his new confidante. They talk more than Luc has ever talked with anyone before, and it's nice and it makes Luc feel grounded and Sarah is only sixteen or seventeen years old when she first claims she would do anything for him.
Words cannot describe the weight that falls onto Luc's shoulders when she says that, so he stops trying and their relationship becomes one of silence instead. Silent guilt and silent gratitude, silent obedience, and Leknaat pretending not to notice to top it all off.
x
Luc is already familiar with the Grasslands. Ever since hearing about the Fire Bringer, the rumors that the True Wind and True Earth runes were gifts from the nearby Zexen, he's been studying the clans most astutely. He's also familiar with Harmonia, and suddenly thankful that the priests had spent so much time drilling those seemingly pointless lessons about law and government into his head after all.
And even if that weren't the case, he has Albert now.
He doesn't immediately trust Albert, but the instant he manages to become bishop Luc knows he can rely on him. At the end of his life, Luc has no idea what happens to Albert - but if he'd time to assume anything, it most likely would've been that the man has died along with the rest of his plans.
x
The end of Luc's life is, as foretold by the Runes, filled with pain.
There is also redemption and solace for defying fate.