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

Notes: This was written forever ago and posted to Tumblr. In an attempt to update this account with some things, I decided to post it here.

Crashed in the Footi Mountains

Cruxis Crystals afforded their wearer certain benefits: heightened senses, wings, and increased endurance along the lines of the Exspheres, if not a little better. This meant that the wearer could take hits better than an average person, that they could afford to take risks with their own safety with the knowledge that even if it went a little bit south, they still likely would not die.

Still, even Cruxis Crystals had their limits, and Lloyd routinely found out what his was.

He was fairly certain that he'd never been in this much pain before in his entire life. He hadn't hurt this badly when he'd been knocked into the pillar in the Tower of Salvation by Yggdrasill, or when he'd been stunned by the Renegades' electric charge beam, or . . . or ever. It was hard to think. His eyes felt sticky, almost like they had when he was seven and had gotten tree sap smeared along his eyelashes. Lloyd was pretty sure that this was because of the blood that was leaking down from his forehead, but he supposed it could have also just been from the fact that he felt like he could sleep for ten million years and it still wouldn't be enough.

No, he had to stay awake. Stay awake . . . stay awake . . . wasn't that what the professor had always said? Stay awake if your head hurt. Or if your head was hurt, if you had hurt it . . . like all the times he was dropped as a baby, she'd said.

Lloyd frowned. The professor could be pretty mean sometimes.

He couldn't remember what he'd been doing. Or he could . . . he was looking for something. Lloyd peeled his eyes open again, and mustered up all the strength he could to blink a few times in an effort to clear his vision. It sort of worked; the blurred haze in front of him shifted to form a wavy picture of dusty canyon walls and misshapen fallen rocks. Canyon . . . rocks . . . mountain . . . moutains? Foo . . . Footi . . . Footi Mountains? That didn't sound right, but the more he thought on it the more his head pounded. It hurt to breathe. Lloyd licked his lips—they tasted like sand and granite—and sank back against the ground. It was rough and hard but it still felt like the most comfortable bed he'd ever laid in. Just a minute . . . just a couple minutes of . . .

"Lloyd! Lloyd!"

"Fi' mins," he slurred, and it wasn't until he realized that the footsteps and shifting rock he heard were right beside him that he also realized that his eyes were closed, the darkness of his eyelids soothing against the blinding headache. He felt two people crouch down on either side of him, and heard fast, hitched breathing to his left as someone swore softly on his right.

"Healing Wind won't be able to take care of all this mess," someone—a guy, Lloyd thought—said to his right. "I'll do the best I can, but . . ."

"You can at least take care of the bleeding, can't you?" said the girl on Lloyd's left.

"Some of it, yeah. The head wound, definitely, a lot of the scratches . . . but it's the leg I'm worried about. There's no way Healing Wind can pop the bone back in the skin and we can't move him easily like this."

"Well, we'll just have to try. We can't leave him here."

"Really? Because I thought we could build a house for him out of the rocks, you know, just to help him set up permanent residence."

"Zelos . . ."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Not the time."

A cool, soothing feeling washed over Lloyd's body—a balm for his aching, burning face and chest. Some of the tension eased from his head, and as the healing magic washed down over the rest of his body, Lloyd found the strength to pry his eyes open again. His vision was still a little blurred, but not as badly this time, and when it finally evened out he saw two worried faces hovering over his own.

"Colette," he rasped, and she smiled despite the tears in her eyes. "Zelos. How . . ."

"Are you alive?" Zelos asked, and though that hadn't been the question Lloyd was going to ask, he couldn't muster the energy to offer a correction. "That's a good question, considering you did a pretty good job trying to get yourself killed. Seriously, Lloyd, what the Hell were you thinking?"

"Dunno," Lloyd said, and it wasn't a lie; he couldn't remember what he had been thinking, or even what had happened at all. Colette swiped her arm across her eyes.

"Well, it's okay. You'll be okay, Lloyd. Zelos is going to heal you a little bit more, and then we'll see about getting you to a proper doctor, okay? We'll be able to make it to Meltokio in no time if we use the Rheairds."

"We can't use the Rheairds here," Zelos said, and as green magic flared around him Lloyd felt another rush of cooling magic sweep his body. "The ground isn't stable enough."

"We'll have to move him to a more stable location, then," Colette said. "I can try and clear some of the rocks, too . . ."

"Don't," Lloyd said, and he reached over to grab the bottom of her tunic as she made to stand up. She paused, and Lloyd pushed himself onto his elbows, his entire upper body howling in pain as he did so. "I—" His head swam as Zelos used Healing Wind for the third time, and as the magic took effect and Lloyd got a stable hold on his vision again, he finally caught sight of his legs. "Oh," he said. "That's not supposed to bend like that."

"You think?" Zelos asked, a testy note to his voice. As Lloyd stared at the piece of bone that was poking through the skin of his legs (and his pants, he noticed, which was a problem considering he thought he remembered his dad saying something about how Lloyd needed to stop growing because he wasn't getting a new pair of pants every other week, no, his dad wasn't going to make him any more pants, but did ripping his pants with his fib . . . fibu . . . fiba . . . leg bone count toward the "no more pants" rule? Lloyd would have to ask), Colette gently uncurled his fingers from her tunic.

"I'll be right back, Lloyd," she said, and she lifted his hand to her lips to kiss his knuckles. "I'm just going to try and clear some space for our Rheairds, since it'll be easiest to get you to a doctor with those than if we carried you."

"And you," Zelos said, as he gently though firmly pushed Lloyd back into a prone position (Lloyd thought that maybe he should have struggled, but seeing as how he felt as weak as a day old squirrel, he couldn't manage it), "are going to sit still while I try and put you back together. You've done enough damage for one day."

"Mmph," Lloyd said, and it was supposed to be a rebuttal, a remark about how could Zelos blame him for something he didn't even remember, but Lloyd didn't think the point got across because the next thing Zelos said was:

"Yeah. That's what I thought."

I'll tell him later, Lloyd thought, and closed his eyes as a renewed round of Healing Wind swept over him.