Carry On
Warnings: Largely speculative with some official Judith novel details tossed in (but no earthshattering spoilers, I promise).
Notes: My guess as to what some of Judy's past and growing up may have been like. Written because today is Father's Day and Judith's backstory about her dad still makes me want to cry every time.
Hermes didn't even so much as look up when Judith walked into the study, a tray full of food balanced in her small hands, and the young girl pouted to herself at the lack of reaction. She wasn't surprised, no, she had learned long ago to expect this of her father since he so often immersed himself in work, occasionally to the point that he was oblivious to everything else. But even so, when Dad got so deep into this mindset, it could be hard to get him out of it.
"Dinner's ready, Dad!" Judith cried, making her voice as loud and shrill as possible. Hermes, who was hunched intently over his work desk, finally glanced her way as she approached, allowing her to watch as that dazed expression he always got when he was lost in thought started to fade. Satisfied to have his attention, Judith held the tray up in offering while shooting him the sternest look she could muster over the soup bowl.
"You should eat it while it's hot or it won't be as good," she declared, more as an order than a suggestion. "And I worked really hard to make this so you better eat it all. Or else I'll be very mad at you."
Hermes stared blankly for a moment before quirking a brow at her threat. Chuckling, he accepted the tray and set it down on the desk in front of him, then swiftly scooped Judith into his arms without warning and dumped her in his lap. The girl's tough demeanor quickly gave way to surprised squealing and giggles as Hermes kissed her forehead and reached out to grab the spoon.
Judith didn't have to do all the cooking like this, she knew, because in their household of two, she was only six years old and her dad was perfectly capable of making his own meals if he just took the time to. But Judith cooked for him because she wanted to, because she liked being able to help. Because when Dad obeyed her demands and immediately helped himself to some curry and smiled like it was the best dish he'd ever tasted, Judith treasured that smile with all her heart.
Hermes was the only family she had and she loved him more than anyone else in the world.
Judith hugged him for that, clutching his middle as tightly as her tiny arms could manage, then she let go and leaped out of his lap with a flourish. "Remember, eat it all!" she insisted, shooting one last glare of warning up at him from the floor as he gazed down at her, his eyes twinkling fondly.
"Of course," Hermes laughed, reaching down to gently muss up her hair.
And as she playfully swatted his hand away and scurried off to leave him to his work, Judith knew he meant that as a promise.
Judith dug her fingers into soft fur and clenched as Ba'ul took off, rapidly distancing them from the ground beneath. The wind was ideal today, wild enough to whip back her hair and antennae just how she liked it, but not so rough as to put her in any danger of falling from Ba'ul's back. A few months ago, back when flying had still been new to her, Judith would have put her hands up over her head and cried out in glee at such perfect weather, but now she just closed her eyes and tried to feel at peace. She didn't come to Ba'ul for joyrides anymore.
She came for solace.
When Judith flew, it was to forget, to escape, to get away from the heavy, looming aura that had just recently started to hang over her house. Nowadays, Dad was always cooped up in his study when he was home, constantly slaving over diagrams and running experiments and never leaving the room, not even to eat or to go to bed. Hermes had always been very dedicated to his work but this was something different, something desperate, something that kept him from sleeping at night and caused him to yell and curse during the day, that smothered the once vibrant spark in eyes so that his gaze seemed to Judith almost like that of a dead man.
Dad was slipping away and Judith just couldn't understand why.
She wanted to help, more than anything she just wanted to be there for her father like she once was able to, but this wasn't the type of problem that could be solved with just her homemade cooking. She was only eight, and both her dad's blastia research and his now agitated behavior were beyond her comprehension, and Dad was unwilling to fill her in on anything.
Judith held back a sigh. Ba'ul, sensing her distress, flew ever faster as if to help her somehow outrun her troubles.
They flew and flew and flew until the sky grew dark.
By the time Judith snuck back in through her window, it was well into the night, and the sounds of low mumbling coming from the study informed her that Dad hadn't even noticed that she'd left. That, or he just hadn't cared enough to worry about her. She didn't know which would have been worse.
Curiosity getting the best of her, Judith silently slipped down the hall and peeked into the study. Dad was hunched over and scribbling frantically, looking as haggard as he always did these days. "There's not enough time!" Hermes hissed to himself, voice harsh and hopeless and broken. "I can't. I can't possibly—!" He cursed and then flopped down into the desk almost lifelessly, like a puppet with its strings cut. With his head buried in his arms, her dad started to give muffled sobs, and suddenly, Judith couldn't stand to watch anymore.
So she bit her lip, turned, and hastily went back to her room without a word.
When Judith came flying into the hidden city of Myorzo on Ba'ul's back, her face and hands were dirt-smudged, her left sleeve was blackened and charred, and blood that hadn't completely dried yet stained her clothes almost entirely. Contrary to what must have been the initial belief of the observing citizens, the blood wasn't hers.
That fact didn't provide her any sort of comfort.
To their credit, the people of Myorzo were gentle, hospitable, reacting as well as could be expected to the sudden presence of a bloodied, anguished, terrified nine-year-old girl. Nobody was tactless enough to ask what had happened. Someone asked where she was from, but when she pursed her lips and couldn't bring herself to respond, the subject wasn't pushed. Another asked, kindly, if she was hurt anywhere and needed treatment. Again she was silent, only this time, it was because she didn't know the answer.
If her physical body was in any pain, Judith couldn't tell, because in her mind, she was on fire, screaming, reliving every moment of destruction with vivid and torturous clarity. The burning buildings, the falling debris, the smoke in her lungs and the explosions ringing in her ears. The bodies crushed by wreckage, burned by fire, blown to mere smithereens so that nothing was left behind. The blood that sprayed everywhere and rained upon her like a sickening shower.
The Fortress at the base of the mountain, where she knew Dad had been, decimated, disintegrated, nothing more than shambles and ashes.
Temza was in ruins and Judith didn't dare hope that any of its other residents had escaped the same fate because Ba'ul saving her was the only reason she was here right now.
Everyone else was dead.
Dad was dead.
That realization ran repeatedly through Judith's head, had been running through her head ever since the moment of her miraculous rescue, hanging over her, constantly painful, yet still not fully sinking in through the shock. The thought alone left Judith largely unresponsive as she let herself be cared for, as her left arm—which turned out to have a second degree burn—was rinsed and bandaged, as her ruined clothes were stripped from her with the assurance that they would be replaced, as her skin was scrubbed and scrubbed of grime and blood until she was a thousand times cleaner than she actually felt.
Judith was given a new set of clothes after her bath, as promised, but that wasn't all she got, because apparently there had been something in the pocket of her old set and now it was offered to her. The woman holding it out towards her didn't seem to have a clue what it was but Judith recognized it instantly—a "thermo blastia" as Dad had called it when he'd given it to her as a gift over a year ago.
Dad...
Judith just stared at it, too stunned to react, until the woman asked if she didn't want it and Judith immediately shot her hands out to grab the blastia and clutch it tightly to her chest and refuse to so much as even loosen her grip. It was sheer chance that she'd had it on her when the chaos broke out in Temza, and she wasn't about to lose it now.
Though a vacant bed was offered to her that night, Judith refused it soundly, instead opting to stay on the outskirts of the city with Ba'ul. She couldn't stand to be separated from him for long, not when he was the only familiar thing here, and if her caretakers were reluctant to leave her with him, she didn't know nor care, because all that mattered was the feel of Ba'ul's warmth and his fur brushing her cheek and his consciousness telepathically linked with hers, of something strong and steady and reliable when she had nothing else left.
...Dad was dead, she remembered again as she lay there, the thermo blastia in her hands sparkling elegantly, hauntingly, painfully in the moonlight.
And it was only then, with just Ba'ul and the moon as witness, that Judith finally allowed herself to dissolve into sobs.
Five years was a long time but still, it threw Judith off to find that Temza wasn't quite the same hellish scene it had been the last time she was here, when she'd escaped with Ba'ul. The once magnificent city was razed to the ground, yes, and her heart ached just to look around her and remember that these ruins were once the place she called home, but all evidence of the mass slaughter that had occurred here, all the blood and corpses of her memories, were gone without a trace.
Judith wasn't sure if their absence seemed to her a relief or a torment, but in any case, the Knights must have cleaned it all up at some point after the Great War's end. She wondered how they had dealt with the bodies, if they had organized a funeral of some sort, or if they'd just tossed all the corpses unceremoniously into the ocean. She wondered if they had dealt with Dad's body.
She wondered if his body had even been intact enough to deal with.
Judith hastily shook her head, banishing the traitorous thought. She really didn't need to dwell on something that was already long over and done with, that she would never know the answer to.
She had come here with a purpose that she had every intention of fulfilling, so Judith cleared her mind of distractions and made her way down to the Fortress. Or, well, what was left of it. A heap of burned and blackened rubble was all that remained of the site where her father had been killed and just looking at it again sent a pang through her, something harsh but only vaguely reminiscent of the horror and grief and agony that had struck her when she'd laid eyes on it five years ago. From somewhere above the mountain, Ba'ul projected in response, Quit thinking about that. You're okay. I'm right here with you, so go on and do what you came here for.
Judith, her heart now considerably lighter just from his support, thanked him earnestly and took a deep breath before approaching the pile.
Her scour was quick, because she didn't want to stay here long lest she unnecessarily drudge up bad memories again, but in the end she picked out a single stone, about the size of her own head, jagged and burnt much like the others but different in that it was quite a bit blacker. Judith wanted different. So taking the rock in her hands, she carried it to a nearby spot behind a row of bushes, kicked away some dirt with her foot, and placed the stone in the indentation so that it could stand upright on its own. Then, almost reverently, Judith knelt before it, brought her hands together, and closed her eyes.
Body or not, Hermes was getting some sort of gravestone. He at least deserved that much.
"...Hey Dad. Sorry I didn't come sooner." It hadn't exactly been easy for Judith to work up the nerve to visit this place again. When she was nine the trauma had reduced her to almost a lifeless shell; now she was fourteen and it was still a struggle for her just to make it through each day, though she had at least found the courage to leave Myorzo and visit Dad in an attempt give herself some peace of mind. "It took a while but I'm doing...well, better, I suppose. Remember Ba'ul? He's still with me. He saved me, and I owe him so much."
You don't owe me anything, Ba'ul cut in tenderly, and Judith couldn't help but smile a bit.
"He still doesn't have any sense of privacy, though," Judith accused her friend, though not without fondness. "And the people in Myorzo were all very nice. It was hard to talk to them, and I never made any friends, but I know they only meant well."
Judith paused there, fidgeting slightly where she sat, her smile dropping from her face. "...I miss you, Dad. Not a day goes by that I don't miss you." Not a day went by that she wasn't haunted by his memory, that she wasn't in some way reminded of his stupid jokes that had always made her roll her eyes, or his big bear hugs that had always been so firm yet so gentle, or his loving smile that had always brightened her world.
Or how in his last year of life, he had drowned himself so completely in his work that she'd never witnessed any of those again.
"Why were you like that?" Judith wondered aloud, more to herself than anything. "Why were you so desperate then? You were trying so hard to do something, but what was it?"
Her hands clenched just a little tighter against each other.
"I wanted to help you so much back then, but I didn't. I couldn't. I couldn't even understand why you were doing that to yourself. I...I still can't understand."
Judith's voice fell even softer now, her tone urgent yet helpless. Almost as if pleading the universe to give her some sort of answer.
"...What happened, Dad? Just what were you trying to do?"
But the only response she got was the whistling of the wind.
It had been Dad's fault.
Everything had been Dad's fault.
Judith didn't want to believe it when the Entelexeia told her about the Hermes blastia, about her father's invention and how it was killing the world, but when she thought back to all of Dad's stressful days and sleepless nights working at his desk when she was eight, she knew what they were saying had to be true. Dad had set a world crisis in motion and when he'd found out what he'd done, he'd dedicated every remaining moment of his existence to studying, to experimenting, to finding a way to somehow fix his own mistake.
He hadn't been able to succeed before the Entelexeia attacked.
It was Dad's fault that the Great War had started. And because his creations lived on, the world was still dying.
Maybe it would have been easier to take the news if Judith could let herself be angry at someone, at anyone, at her father for screwing up so abysmally or at the Entelexeia for telling her instead of just letting her live in blissful ignorance, but she loved Dad too much to feel anything other than sorry for him and the Entelexeia had only given her exactly what she'd asked for. Judith had wanted to understand ever since she was nine and only now, at sixteen, after she herself had been the one to actively seek them out, did the Entelexeia finally tell her the answer she had long searched for.
And now that Judith knew the truth, she couldn't just sit by and do nothing.
Blastia research had always been Dad's thing, not hers, never hers, so where he had attempted to solve the problem through tinkering with formulas and devising new methods, Judith instead took to the spear. She threw herself into her training and preparations—traveling around the world, cooperating with the Entelexeia, fighting battle after battle to further hone her skills—until she finally decided she was ready to begin her mission.
Judith was going to find and destroy every last Hermes blastia. She had to, for the sake of the world.
For the sake of her father.
Ba'ul, I know I've only ever burdened you with my selfish requests, Judith told her friend that morning as she donned her armor. His almost immediate reaction was to protest that no, it was never a burden to do things for her, and though she normally would have appreciated the sentiment, today she brushed it off. But now I must ask you to indulge my selfishness once again.
Judith took her spear, her Brionac, into her hand, then held it out between her and Ba'ul. I want you to make an oath with me on this spear. An oath that no matter how hard this may get, no matter if everyone else in the world stands in our way, we will finish this mission together.
Judith knew that such an oath would actually make no difference in the end. Ba'ul loved her unconditionally, he would never bail out or abandon her, and he himself wanted to fulfill this goal and save the world just as much as she did. But she wanted this spear to serve as a symbol of the bond between them. Just as the thermo blastia she still carried served as a symbol of the bond between her and Dad.
So it's a promise? Judith asked, even as she already knew his answer.
It's a promise, Ba'ul agreed, his response fond and earnest and all she needed to feel satisfied, so with a quirk of her lips, Judith nodded and hopped onto his back. Ba'ul took off, heading towards the nearest disturbance of aer, and as her armor clanked and the wind roared in her ears, she ever so slightly tightened her grip on the spear.
"...It's a promise, Dad," Judith whispered aloud, glancing up towards the sky. "We'll fix what you couldn't."
It was only as Judith sat down to dinner with everyone a few days after the birth of Undine that she first realized, rather abruptly, that she hadn't been missing Dad recently. In fact, Hermes hadn't so much as even crossed her mind once within the past several weeks.
That was certainly a sudden deviation from when she had missed him every single day, but somehow, Judith couldn't help but find it a welcome change of pace. Everything was changing nowadays, right before her eyes, and it still amazed her. Only a few months ago she had been a lonely girl on a lonely mission to destroy blastia with nobody but Ba'ul to help her and when she'd first joined this party, she'd never thought that doing so would so drastically transform her goals like this. That she would grow to cherish all these teammates who had managed to turn her whole world upside down.
This wasn't about the Hermes blastia anymore. Actually, it had already stopped being about that the moment they had gone after her at Temza.
And maybe this whole spirit conversion campaign was crazy, Judith thought idly as she watched Rita bicker with Raven while Yuri said something that made Estelle blush and Karol just helped himself to seconds of cream stew, but then, this whole group was pretty crazy and Judith must have been crazy too because she wanted nothing more than to see this through to the end alongside all of them.
"Hey, you gonna eat your fill or what?"
Judith blinked, snapping back to reality as she glanced towards the mage sitting at her side, who had apparently ended her fight with Raven at some point and was now leaning slightly towards her. Rita's voice wasn't loud, per say, not loud enough for the others to hear, but it did hold a bit of a warning edge. "It's pretty good, and Estelle worked really hard on it. The least you could do is finish."
A quick glance down at her untouched meal reminded Judith that she had been so lost in thought that she'd neglected to eat, and the Krityan smiled slightly. "Sorry, just thinking," Judith said, appeasing Rita by helping herself to a mouthful of rice and meat sauce. "I certainly don't wish to offend her."
Judith meant that, too, because Estelle was her dear friend who always did everything she could to help and Judith was so, so grateful that she hadn't killed the princess when she was supposed to. She was grateful for everyone here, really, for Raven who was still aiming to prove himself after he'd already been forgiven, for her guild mates who had accepted her and let her stay despite all the inconvenience she'd caused them, for Rita who regularly called her out and spurred her into action whenever Judith needed it.
Judith loved them. She loved all of them like family, like she had never thought she'd love anyone besides Ba'ul or Dad, and amazingly, for the first time in her life, this wasn't about her past or her mission or anything her father had passed on to her. This was just about her, and her new friends, and what they all wanted to accomplish together.
And perhaps she should have felt guilty, but as Judith dug in and chatted with Rita and laughed when Yuri pulled Karol into a merciless noogie over some playful insult or another, she could only be glad.
Dad's gravestone was literally nothing more than an unceremonious, burnt up shard of rock, but even so, Rita looked upon it with a combination of respectful awe and nervous terror. As much as Judith appreciated the former, the latter clearly showed how self-conscious the mage was, how much she felt like she was intruding and believed she shouldn't actually be here. And that just wasn't right, because Judith would never have brought Rita along if she hadn't wanted her here.
Back during the journey, Rita had been the only person Judith had told about her father's identity as Hermes, the confidante who Judith had trusted enough to give her Dad's thermo blastia to keep. Now, she was the mage who had been using Hermes's book of notes to continue her research ever since all the blastia had been given up a year ago, the young genius dedicated to creating an aerless blastia, who traveled on the Fiertia with Judith in between research stations, and who often got so absorbed in her work that Judith had to do the cooking and then cajole Rita into taking a lunch break until the mage conceded defeat and accepted her meal with a fond smile that Judith was always so happy to witness.
Rita was a dear friend and an amazing scientist who was continuing Hermes's research, and she more than deserved to be the first person Judith ever brought with her to visit Dad's grave.
Someday in the future, Judith would properly admit to the rest of the party who Hermes had been to her. Someday in the future, Judith would bring all of them to visit Dad, too.
But for now, Judith just turned to the mage, who still seemed almost on the verge of panic as she clutched Hermes's book of notes in one hand and the thermo blastia in the other, and gently bumped shoulders with her. The action was meant to be assuring and when Rita sent her a grateful glance and the tension in her muscles visibly dissipated, Judith knew it had worked, but the brunette still didn't look confident enough to speak.
So Judith did it for her.
"Dad, there's someone I want you to meet."
Rita finally took that as her cue to stammer out her own introduction, and Judith could not possibly have grinned wider.
More Notes:
-Judith having done the cooking for Hermes as a child is canon, confirmed by the Judith novels and one ingame skit.
-Hermes spending the last year of his life desperately trying to fix what his blastia were doing is also confirmed by the Judith novels.
-The Brionac Spear is the initial spear that Judith has as the "dragon rider", which she loses once she and Yuri are captured at Ghasfarost. Finishing the sidequest in which you search for the spear reveals that Judith made a promise on this spear, which she views as "a symbol of the bond" between Ba'ul and her.
-Judith letting Rita have her father's research notes, Judith telling Rita that Hermes was her father, and Judith actually giving Rita a thermo blastia, which she calls "a memento" of her father, actually all happen during ingame sidequests. So yeah, I think Judith bringing Rita of all people to her Dad's grave would actually make the most sense.
-Okay so I realize this is not exactly the cheeriest or most father-centric Father's Day fic, but screw it. Judy and her sad dead dad deserve much more fandom attention.