Disclaimer: I do not own Tales of Symphonia.

Summary: Yuan, Presea, and the difficulties of lost time. One-shot.

Perplexities

He should fix that light, he knows.

It's been flickering on the brink of going out for some time, and he swears he'll fix it, but it just keeps getting put off. Yuan wasn't usually a man to put things off, even if he had all the time in the world, but this...he was having difficulties with.

Why it was even bothering him at all when it shouldn't in this millisecond of a thousand lifetimes, he pins down on her. The short axe girl with the pink hair. Miss Fix-It-All.

He was so not doing this to spite her.

Okay...maybe he was.

He remembered spending springs like this with his own goddess, who had since faded from this land, so it was awkward to think of it with anyone else. But when the girl with the set jaw and hard eyes had appeared on his doorstep, he hadn't turned her away. He didn't think she'd have let him, anyway.

The victim of lost time, though not near as much as him, but the look in her eyes haunted his soul. He could swear he saw two people behind that mask - a girl and a woman in one. And when she spoke it was neither speaking, it was one and both and neither. Her soul was bitterly torn, though in his selfishness he protested to himself that it was he who had endured more, and he was drawn to her.

For whatever reason, whether by spell or pride or chance, he did not ask her why she had come and she did not offer an explanation. In fact, in the weeks that she stayed in the Renegade base, the two hardly spoke at all.

"No one will give me back my time. Who will give me back my time?" she asked him as he passed in the hallway. He felt a flash of irritation. All this...farce...for this? He should kick her out right now, if all she wanted to do was whine. Who did she think she was addressing, anyway? Oh, right. Him.

"You will not get it back," he replied shortly. "It is gone, girl."

She looked up at him with a calculating look. "You deny it, though. In your heart. The woman in the tree is dead."

"I know she is dead," the seraphim snapped. "What do you take me for, marching in like this to complain? I am no friend of yours. Get out."

"I am here to fix you," she said calmly. That made him freeze.

"Should I bother asking?" he growled. She shook her head.

"I do not have words other than bluntness. But neither do you."

"You are a child," he said automatically, realizing instantly that she wasn't. "I do not know what you mean by this "fixing me" nonsense, but I'd have you leave. Do not take me for one who is faint of heart to stop from making you leave by force."

"You...do not need fixing, then? You are not broken?" she asked him, looking up. He paused, utterly surprised and puzzled.

"That's my business. Leave." And she did.

The light wasn't broken, and neither was he. He'd lived this long, after all. For her to talk about lost time and broken things...it was a foolish thing. But he couldn't make head or tail of it and it was bothering him as much as the damn light.

...because if he admitted that the light was broken, he'd admit that she was right...

Fin.