Author Note:
I recently got an account on AO3, and this ended up being the first fic I posted there. As I'm working on two fics right now, though, I realized that I've been posting one of them on AO3 and the other one on this site. It seemed kind of silly that I had two different fics on two different fic sites, so now I'm making an attempt to consolidate them. Going between the two sites is kind of a pain, and really the only thing preventing me from consolidating everything is laziness.
This fic pretty much came about when I thought, "I wonder what Tales of Xillia de-aging fic would be like." And voila! It's Alvin/Jude, but Leia plays a pretty big part as well.
Disclaimer: I don't claim ownership to anything
Rating: T
Summary: Alvin gets to relive his childhood, literally. Jude quickly realizes this is not a good thing. [Spoilers for post game and Alvin's backstory.]
Pairing: Alvin/Jude
We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories... And those that carry us forward, are dreams.
-H.G. Wells
...
The one thing Jude had noticed over the past few months since he and Alvin had started – well, he didn't really know what to call it; 'dating' was probably an appropriate term – was that there were certain topics that he was better off not bringing up with him.
It was when he had been visiting Xian Du for a weekend and helping out Alvin with his newly formed business that he'd first noticed it.
As soon as Jude set the heavy box down he'd been ordered to move on top of the closest stack he could find in the warehouse, he turned to Alvin.
"Is this okay?"
Alvin was too busy glancing down at the clipboard in his hands, so he waved a hand in Jude's general direction before answering, "Yeah, that' s fine."
"You're not even looking," Jude pointed out as he walked over to where Alvin was looking over the clipboard.
"I trust your judgement," Alvin answered absentmindedly.
Jude took a peek at the clipboard as he stopped next to Alvin. At the very bottom in fresh ink was Alvin's signature. As Jude looked it over, a question popped up in his mind.
"Alvin, how come you don't use your real name? I mean, this is a business that'll be operating between Rieze Maxia and Elympios, right?"
At the time it had seemed like such an innocent question, but Alvin's usual easygoing expression had immediately darkened. He looked away from Jude.
"I have my reasons."
"Your reasons?" Jude wasn't quite sure he understood.
Jude felt Alvin's arm around his shoulder, a gesture he was all to used to by now. "It's a lot easier to just sign with 'Alvin,' you know?" He said with a laugh. "My real name's far too long."
Yet when Jude looked over to Alvin, something was off in his expression. The smile seemed forced, and his eyes hinted at something else that Jude couldn't quite figure out.
It was then that Jude realized that even after everything that had happened, there were just some things you just didn't bring up around Alvin.
...
You worry too much, Jude! Alvin will love it. Besides, I've already gathered all the stuff we need for the party. Too late to back down, now!
Jude read over the last sentence of the letter written in Leia's messy handwriting. Despite having everything set in place, he couldn't help but worry regardless. Birthdays tended to remind people of their past, and with Alvin he could never quite be sure of whether that was okay or not.
Jude sighed as he put the letter down on his desk and turned back to the spyrite research test results he'd been looking over before. He ran a hand through his hair in frustration as he recalled just why he'd taken a break to read some letters instead. A certain recurrent variable that neither he nor his research team could make sense of kept popping up in the printed out results. It didn't seem to affect anything, but the fact that it was there in the first place flew in the face of every bit of theory Jude had worked to construct over the past half year.
He ended up so absorbed in the words on the page that he didn't even hear the door to his office open. He almost jumped when he felt someone's arms around his shoulders.
"Still the ever-studious honors student, I see," came a voice from right next to his ear.
"Alvin!" Jude jumped in his seat. He hadn't been expecting him for another few hours at least. He spun his chair around. Sure enough, Alvin was standing only a few feet away with that look of casual amusement Jude was so used to seeing by now.
"Am I?" Alvin rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"You said in your letter that you'd be here in the afternoon," Jude pointed out, sounding more annoyed than he'd meant to. He resisted the urge to glance back at his desk. There was a stack of letters he needed to hide.
"You say that like it's a bad thing." Alvin was leaning over Jude in his chair now, one knee against the seat to keep himself balanced. "I finished up things in Xian Du sooner than I'd anticipated, so I figured I'd get started on my trip early. I left last night."
"I would've appreciated some notice ahead of time." Jude tilted his head up to meet Alvin's eyes. It was embarrassing how Alvin could still make him flustered just by being in his personal space like this.
"And here I thought you liked surprises." Alvin closed the distance between them with a slow, languid kiss.
Forgetting everything else for the moment, Jude couldn't help grabbing at the lapels of Alvin's coat and pulling him closer. It had been more than a month since he'd last seen Alvin, after all.
"Alvin," Jude said with a hint of amusement in his voice as he pulled back. "What have I told you about distracting me when I'm at work?" He could feel Alvin laugh as he moved down to kiss Jude's neck.
"That it's something you really enjoy and you highly encourage me to continue doing in the future?" Alvin voice was a soft rumble against Jude's throat.
Jude stifled a moan as he summoned every ounce of discipline he could at the moment. "As much as I'd love to continue," his breath hitched as he felt teeth brush against his skin. "I am kind of busy right now."
"Fine, fine." Alvin pulled back, standing back from Jude's chair as he regarded him with amusement. "You're cute when you get flustered, you know that?"
Jude spun his chair around as his blush only deepened. "It's a miracle I ever get any work done when you visit," he muttered as he surveyed the mess of papers on his desk. There was a stack of letters he'd meant to put away before Alvin arrived. Hoping that Alvin wouldn't notice anything, he shuffled the letters with some research notes and shoved them into a drawer.
"But now that you're here early, maybe you could help me out." Jude stood up out of the chair and stretched. He'd been sitting down since he'd gotten into the lab in the early morning and it was good to finally move around again.
"You want me to chat with your patients again?" Alvin arched an eyebrow.
"Please?" Jude looked at him hopefully. "They really like you, you know."
He sighed. "It's good to know I'm so popular among a bunch of grandmas."
Jude laughed. "Well, for them I think it's a relief to talk to someone who isn't asking them about how they feel all the time. If you're stuck talking to a bunch of doctors in lab coats all day, it probably gets really tiring. But you're different."
"And here I thought it was my natural charm." There was a touch of disappointment in Alvin's tone.
Jude patted him on the back as he headed for the door. "That's what I meant by 'different.'" He smiled at Alvin as he opened the door. "Come on, they're in the examination room downstairs."
Alvin followed Jude out the office door and down the hallway. "How are they, anyway? Are those new… spyrites working for them?"
"That's the thing." Jude sounded doubtful. "They're working far better than we anticipated. And we can't exactly figure out why."
"You say that like a bad thing." Alvin shrugged. "So you've come up with a medicine that's better than you'd planned. Sounds good to me."
Jude shook his head as he reached the foot of the stairwell leading down to the second floor. "When you're dealing with live human test subjects, you leave nothing to chance."
"So what're you going to do?"
"At this point? I was thinking of stopping the tests until we get a clearer picture of what's going on. I don't want to continue anything that has even the slightest chance of harming our patie-"
Jude's words were cut off by a low rumble rolling through the entire lab. He lost his footing on the steps and would've fallen the rest of the way if Alvin hadn't grabbed his arm.
"What the hell was that?" Alvin looked around as though expecting to find the source of the shockwave in the stairwell itself.
"That felt like it came from the second floor. That's where the examination room is!" Jude broke off into a run with Alvin following close behind.
By the time they reached the second floor, the whole place was already in chaos. Smoke was pouring out of the examination room. A woman from Jude's research team was running toward them.
"Dr. Mathis, we've got to get the patients out of the examination room!"
"Did someone shut down everything in the control room already?"
The woman shook her head. "I'm not sure. I can go check the control room if you need me to."
"The patients' safety comes first." Jude stepped forward but stopped when Alvin stepped ahead of him.
"You work on getting to the bottom of what caused this. I'll get the patients out, okay?"
"But Alvin-"
"Don't worry about me!" Alvin dashed into billowing smoke without another word.
Jude rushed into the control room next door to the examination room. Another member of his research team was already inside handling the monitors.
"What's going on here?" Jude demanded.
"I'm not sure! It seems like some kind of reaction-"
Jude pushed past him to get a good look at the monitor. The technology had been brought over from Elympios to assist with the research over on this side. None of it used spyrix technology of course. All it did was monitor everything they did in the examination room. And right now the results it was giving were…
"This doesn't make any sense." Jude reread the text on the screen as though doing so would somehow make it conform to some semblance of logic.
The man spoke up. "That's what I was saying, Dr. Mathis. It looks like there was some kind of chain reaction and then… well, I'm not sure what it's trying to tell us." He shook his head.
"And it looks like everything's already shut down on its own. What could've caused a chain reaction, then?" Jude was talking to himself now. "And the smoke… I don't smell a fire or anything. This doesn't make any sense." Jude turned and ran back for the door. "We'll figure this out later. We have to make sure no one's injured first!"
He ran back into the hallway to find the rest of his team helping the evacuated patients. After looking around, he called out, "Alvin?"
One of the patients lying against the wall pointed into the room. "That man… he ran in and brought us out, but he hasn't come out after he went back to see if anyone else was inside."
Jude looked toward the door to the examination room. The odd smoke was mostly in the hall now, clinging to the ground instead of rising like regular smoke ought to. Jude dashed inside the room, looking around as the smoke cleared further.
"Alvin!" He called out. There was no response. The smoke was starting to clear, but he saw no sign of his friend.
As he tread further into the room, he nearly tripped over something. He looked down as the smoke cleared…
"What the?" He reached down into the smoke and pulled out… a boot? "Wait a second-!" It definitely belonged to Alvin. Jude wondered for a second if Alvin had tripped and fallen or…
The smoke gradually cleared to reveal a rather bizarre sight. Alvin's clothes were laying on the ground sans their owner. Jude's breath caught in his chest. He stumbled back onto the ground, fearing for the worst until the smoke cleared enough for him to see Alvin's coat.
Curled up in Alvin's coat was… a child? The boy lay sideways, seemingly wearing nothing except for the coat and shirt he was curled up in. Jude crawled closer to get a better look at the sleeping boy. The boy's short brown hair stuck up a little as he slept peacefully. Jude reached out and turned the boy over so he could get a better look at his face. As realization finally dawned him, his eyes widened in shock.
"N-no way…" He got up and ran out into the hallway to get some assistance.
Half of the research team was working on evacuating the patients and getting them back to Talim Medical School. Jude managed to get Helena, one of the women on the team, to help him clear out the room. She had the good sense to pick up the sleeping child along with Alvin's coat and take him to one of the side rooms to get him dressed. They luckily still had left over clothes from when they'd had younger patients in the lab.
By the time Jude knocked politely on the door and entered with the rest of Alvin's clothes that he had gathered, the child was still asleep while lying on an examination table, fully dressed in a collared shirt, shorts, and a pair of shoes.
Helena looked at Jude worriedly as he entered the room. "Dr. Mathis, who is this child?"
Jude pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. But I have a hunch. Hopefully we can find out when he wakes up."
"At first I thought he was one of our patients. But we haven't been working with children for awhile. We only had our older patients in the lab for today, didn't we?" She was looking to Jude for an explanation now. Jude wished he had a decent one to offer.
"That's right. I'll have a chat with him once he wakes up. Then we can get to the bottom of this." Jude looked down at the sleeping boy on the examination table. "I'll watch over him for now. Sorry to ask this of you, but could you help the rest of the team get the patients back to Talim?"
Helena nodded. "Today sure has been a day, hasn't it?"
Jude sighed. "I wish I knew what could've caused all this."
She patted Jude on the shoulder. "We'll figure it out once things calm down." She turned to leave the room.
Jude felt bad about leaving everyone else to clean up. But there was no way he was going to leave this boy alone like this. Especially if he was who Jude thought he was.
Jude wasn't sure how many minutes passed as he watched the boy sleep. But finally the boy started to stir. Jude rushed to his side as he started to sit up on the exam table.
"A-Alvin?" He asked tentatively.
The boy sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked around. His gaze darted around the room and then back to Jude.
"Alvin? Are you oka-"
Jude's words were cut off as the boy launched himself off the table feet first into Jude, knocking the wind out of him. Jude stumbled backward into the wall next to the examination table.
There was a click and before Jude knew it, he was staring down the barrel of a gun – Alvin's gun.
"You have five seconds to tell me where the hell I am," the boy demanded. He glared at Jude with narrowed eyes cold as ice.
"Alvin…" Jude managed to get out as he slowly caught his breath.
"That's not my name," the boy answered coldly.
Jude wracked his brain as he tried to figure out what was going on. The voice matched – the pitch was a lot higher but it was unmistakably Alvin. Yet the way he was acting made no sense.
"Don't think I'll hesitate to blow your head off," the boy threatened.
Jude noticed the way the younger boy held the gun – held steady in his left hand with his right hand for support since it was probably heavier than he was used to. Jude recognized that stance.
"Alfred," Jude said quietly. "That's your name, right?'
The boy's eyes widened in surprise. He clearly hadn't been expecting that.
It was now or never – Jude dove for the boy before he could so much as pull the trigger. The gun went flying out of the boy's hand toward the door as he hit the ground. Once he had him on the ground, Jude managed to pin him with ease.
"Let me go!" The boy yelled.
Jude had him firmly held down now, the boy's arms behind his back, which Jude held in place.
"Not until you promise not to hurt anyone." Jude's tone came out more stern than he'd meant for it to.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?" The boy shouted, still squirming. "You work for Gilbert or something? I'm not your enemy, dammit!"
Jude blinked. He couldn't make heads or tails of what Alvin was saying.
"Alfred." Jude was struggling to hold the boy down. He was surprisingly strong for his age. "I'm not here to hurt you."
"Says the jerk who tackled me!"
"You attacked me first," Jude reminded him. "Promise not to try to kill me again and I'll let you go."
Alvin didn't say anything in response. Instead, he went still.
"If it's information you want, I don't know anything."
"I'm not after any information," Jude answered truthfully.
"Then why'd you kidnap me?"
Jude blinked in surprise. "Kidnap?"
"Why else would you drug me and drag me here?"
Jude couldn't think of a response. He felt like he was missing something here. "Wait. What's the last thing you remember?"
"It's none of your business," the boy spat back in response.
This was going nowhere. "Look, I didn't kidnap you. You just lost your memory and-"
"Then where am I?"
"Um…" Jude tried to think of the best way to answer that question. "Fennmont."
At that, Alvin's eyes went wide with surprise. "So we're… in Rashugal?" He asked hesitantly.
"We are," Jude answered slowly.
Alvin went silent again.
"Alfred, I know you're probably wondering how you got here. But I promise you, I'm not here to hurt you."
Once again, Alvin kept silent.
"If I let you go, will you promise to cooperate?"
Alvin nodded slowly, though it was hard to with his face pressed against the floor.
"Okay then." Jude eased up on Alvin gradually. When the boy seemed to offer no resistance, he backed off completely. He watched cautiously as Alvin sat up slowly. Other than rubbing his arms, the boy sat rooted to the spot.
"Follow me, okay? I promise I won't hurt you," Jude reassured him again. He was relieved when Alvin allowed him to take hold of his hand and lead him out of the room. As he headed for the first floor, he kept his eye on Alvin in case the boy decided to try and make a run for it. It was unnerving how quiet he'd become. The Alvin he knew was always eager for conversation most of the time. But this version of him was eerily quiet. The boy simply stared ahead, his face expressionless.
Jude ended up leading Alvin into one of the rooms they usually used for patients toward the back of the first floor. It was a relatively small room with six simple beds and one table. Since the door had a lock on it, Jude figured this was the best place to keep Alvin for the time being.
After getting Alvin settled on one of the beds, Jude knelt down so he could speak to the boy face to face. He couldn't get over how weird it felt to be speaking to Alvin like this.
"Just stay here, okay? I'll be right back," Jude said in the most reassuring voice he could muster.
Once again, his only response was a nod from the boy, who kept his eyes averted from Jude. His hands were bunched up in his lap. Other than that he gave no indication of what he was thinking.
Satisfied that he'd at least gotten through to him, Jude headed out of the room. As he closed the door he took one last look at Alvin. The last thing he saw before closing the door was the boy seated on the edge of the bed, perfectly still as he stared off into the distance. After Jude locked the door, he looked at the clock hanging in the hallway.
"Crap! I'm already late!" Leia's ship had arrived a full half hour ago and Jude had promised her he'd help her carry her luggage to her hotel. She was going to kill him at this rate. But he couldn't just leave Alvin here in this state, either. That meant he'd need to send someone from his research team out to get her instead. Between the accident, dealing with Alvin as he was now, and figuring out just what the heck was going on in the first place, Jude wouldn't be surprised if his team either quit or strangled him by the end of the week.
Comments/reviews are welcome, thanks for reading!
