There was no way for Asch to stop something like that. He didn't like having to do it, it was probably his own mess and the child, no, man who now looked younger than him (even if only by three years instead of thirteen) had just gone to sleep. Not to mention that he'd spent those three years being forced into truly relying on himself both by Luke's memories and his friends' pushing. He wasn't someone who simply reacted anymore, he wasn't someone who demanded unreasonable things of children, he was a man in control of himself despite the careful manipulations Van Grants had used on both him and Luke to keep them children.
He hadn't even seen that the chains were there until he'd seen how they were placed on Luke and realized he bore the same ones.
The fate of Auldrant at stake and he'd wanted to squabble over who Van loved more. Sickening.
He wasn't that weak-hearted trash anymore. He'd wanted to be the rock Luke leaned on from now on, to repay abandoning him and never giving him anything but abuse while on the other hand taking his life, in the end.
Guy had been the one to force him to .see that if he'd taken Luke's life he had damn well better start living it.
He'd thought Luke was weak and he'd given up like that, when Luke never had. Trying to be Luke when he woke up because Luke, in the end, had been the stronger one.
Like he was stronger now, and Asch had wanted to save him but it looked like he'd just made things worse and now Luke was going to have to clean up Asch's mess. Again. Luke had spent his entire life doing that.
Not anymore, he promised himself again.
But the shield that protected the capital from war spells was a second away from tearing like cheap paper. Luke!
The old link hadn't conveyed feelings, what he felt was through his attunement to, resonance with Luke's fonons. Alarm, wakefulness, an increase in the resonance as Lorelei used the fonons in Asch to look through him, a disconcerting experience, and then real alarm.
Not panic, but something that would have turned into it if Luke were any weaker. Instead resolve replaced it and he could feel it as the city's defenses were replaced by something that made the hymn's protective spell look like that cheap paper did next to fonic armor.
I didn't even think of that! Asch somehow knew that of course Luke's 'that' was the Grand Fonic Hymn. An instant later they were next to Tear (of course Luke could find Tear) and Luke was frantically telling her not to sing it.
The wedding had already been disrupted since Princess Natalia had felt the attack on the wards and everyone was in the process of scurrying to a safe place or their emergency station.
"The fonon level," Jade started to ask Luke: Luke cut him off.
"Yeah, Slyph. Asch realized Tear was going to sing the hymn and prayed to her. She's trying to kill Tear."
"Wait a second, Sylph?" Anise knew that Luke wouldn't lie like this, but they all knew that the other fonon sentiences, although more understood than Lorelei, weren't in the habit of manifesting like this, especially in response to a mere prayer.
"They all felt me get a body, and Asch has my fonon frequency. She though he was me: that's why she listened." Luke looked up. "I can't keep her out, not for long, and she'll call in Rem and Efreet for backup pretty soon. She's not going to let me go through that again."
"You mean, the Grand Fonic Hymn?" Tear seemed a bit confused. "But it freed Lorelei from Van."
"By reminding me of the pact. The problem is that it could be used to make a new pact or restart the old one, and you're the only person left in Auldrant who knows it and is capable of understanding it." Asch could feel, now that he looked at Luke's abstracted expression, some form of argument going on. Slyph's presence was all around and she was indeed yelling at Luke.
"Can you convince her to stop the attack long enough for her to cool down?" Jade was all business, the scientist suppressed by the soldier whose emperor and future empress were at risk.
"Slyph doesn't stay mad, but that's because she barely ever needs to." As witness the instant decision to apply lethal force to a threat. "She wants the threat the Grand Fonic Hymn poses nullified. Killing Tear is the most direct method."
Despite the immediate problem, Jade was interested to note Luke's mask slipping. When he was being Luke he acted like Luke. When he was dealing with something in Lorelei's domain he could use words like nullified and appeared capable of… no, saying he hadn't been capable of logic before was insulting him. "How much time do we have?" They might need to sacrifice Tear to save everyone else here.
Asch's sword had begun to leave his sheath when he paused.
"Slyph doesn't need a curse slot. If you can cast fonic artes of her type then you're vulnerable," Luke confirmed Asch's paranoia as Asch forcefully pushed the sword back in and removed his hand from the hilt.
Jade should have guessed. "Is there a way to satisfy Sylph that the Hymn will no longer pose a threat?"
"That's what I'm negotiating about. She wants Tear dead on general principles and because she's Julia's descendant and Van's sister, but if I erase her memories of it and we destroy everything linked to the hymns…"
A strange gasping sound came from Tear, and then she started to frantically grasp for breath. Of course: Sylph could use the air fonons to not let her breathe. Luke's eyes widened and a hiss of indrawn breath appeared to ease Tear's pain, although she still couldn't speak. "I can keep her from dying of lack of air too, but…" Not for long. "I'm sorry, Tear."
They all could tell that Tear would be saying, "Don't blame yourself, you idiot," in her strangely consoling way if she could speak.
No more apologies, no more excuses, no more helplessness. Asch, Tear, and Natalia, as well as Florian who hid behind the altar, all sensed Luke's determination in the face of helplessness turn into anger, turn into rejection of fate.
And Tear fell to her knees, lungs heaving to bring in life-giving breaths.
Luke also sighed with relief.
"If I may ask, how did you get Sylph to cease her attack?" Both information on a sentience and valuable tactical data: of course Jade just had to know.
"I told her that this was my problem, and if she killed one of my friends because she thought I was too weak to handle it then I'd be really angry with her."
"Is that all it took?" Natalia had been busy casting defensive spells on everyone in sight during most of the conversation.
"She's my big sister, even though we're not a normal family. Not to mention that she hates it when people stay angry and since we're both associated with communication I would have been practically screaming how angry I was at her for the next several thousand years at least, even if I wasn't talking to her." Luke wiped a few drops of sweat off his forehead. "But I'd better keep that promise to make sure the Hymn's not a threat, because otherwise she'll do it anyway to keep me safe."
"Do I have to forget it?" Tear would if it was necessary, but the hymn was… Ion's last gift, and Van's lullaby: so many memories and her most powerful spells.
"She can find you now, and she'll know right away if you start singing any of it even though it's a prayer to me, because sound travels through air." In other words, if Tear used any of those spells she would die.
"What would the Grand Fonic Hymn do, exactly?" Anise asked. "Would you really have to make a new score?"
Luke grimaced. "If they'd managed to bind me with the Planetary Fonic Arte, and she'd sung it then, I'd probably be making one now. I wouldn't have a chance to say no. And this time, it would be one that I couldn't get around by becoming human. The Score was meant to be a certain method of saving Auldrant and bringing it prosperity. That means that it has to be one that as far as I know I have no chance whatsoever of preventing, one that no one does. As far as I know, at least, and I know a lot. I scattered the catalysts, but the Grand Fonic Hymn would still… I have to comply with a pact. The Laws of the universe are more important than anything, they have to be or everything dies. The Hymn would make it so that I wouldn't see anything wrong with there being a score anymore. I wouldn't object to making one, I wouldn't be able to really feel how wrong it was when it was being sung." He shook his head. "That was why I didn't tell Julia to reword her request. I couldn't think of that until it was too late."
"Julia? Yulia Jue?"
Luke nodded to Tear. "This wasn't what she meant to happen." This wasn't what they had meant, he pleaded for them to understand that even though he accepted that good intentions or bad, it had happened and was therefore his responsibility. "I hid the catalysts where no human could get to them so that side's fine, but I need to make it so the hymns don't mean anything anymore. You can still remember them, but they won't have any effect from now on, either the individual hymns or the Grand one."
"Wait, you hid the catalyst weapons?" Anise looked put out. Those were treasures of the order. "Wait, they managed to steal the catalyst weapons? We had them in the vault with the fonstone pieces!" She looked from Tear to Asch, the three of them wondering who had been able to get in there without sounding alarms.
Luke was glad she wasn't looking at him: he hadn't been around at the time so he had no idea.
As Luke calmed down Florian was the first to yawn this time, coming out from behind the altar. Jade and Anise looked over to him almost in unison, noting that it was strange that he was that tired. "You okay, Florian?" Anise beckoned him over to her and despite the fact they looked about the same age it was very clear even to Luke that to Florian, Anise was Mommy.
"Florian Tatlin, what have I told you about using Daathic fonic artes?" Luke had never received a scolding from his father, but if either of his parents had ever scolded him he would have recognized the tone Jade took now and been really creeped out.
"That I'll die and I'll deserve it and Anise will be really mad at me for being an idiot and reminding her of Ion?" Florian first got Jade's nod that he'd remembered it correctly before claiming that, "I didn't use them, though!" He yawned again.
"Then why are you so tired?"
"That's my fault." Luke did pick up that it was odd for Jade to be so clear about it. Luke had never heard of the Socratic method, but Jade was teaching and Jade had told Luke long ago that he hated to teach. "I'm tired, and he and Asch are picking up on it." Asch, without being prompted, steadied Luke. Luke leaned against him without making any sort of issue of it, knowing Asch wanted it that way for some reason. For Asch to just help him out naturally? Luke could get used to that. "Asch, don't call on my siblings for awhile, okay? Not even regular fonic artes. You're lucky it wasn't Shadow. Shadow is really cranky when they get woken up for nothing."
"Is there going to be any more excitement?" Jade asked, having pulled a medical instrument from a hidden pocket and checked over Florian to his satisfaction. "Because before you decided to finally start keeping your promises we were in the middle of something here."
"Oh, my wedding!" Natalia had gotten utterly sidetracked conferring with the royal fonists after her last contribution to the conversation. It was so very like Natalia to think of her subjects first and the 'most important day of a woman's life' second. She looked over at Peony, who shrugged.
"I brought my rappigs and rappig handler. If you want to postpone it we can postpone it. I'm not in any hurry to get back to Grand Chokmah." This was a lot more interesting. Or that was what his tone claimed. You would have to be an idiot to think that Peony's façade was all there was to the Malkuth Emperor, especially since he regularly one-upped Jade, of all people.
"Uh…" Luke tried to think. "The group that wanted a new score might not all have been there, but you'd think their leaders would have been, since it was so important. Of course, I missed the last few years, so you guys would know more about what could go wrong than I do. I mean, I didn't know Tear would sing the Grand Fonic Hymn. It's outdated."
"We're going to have to cancel that portion." Anise gently detached Florian and went over to the altar. "That should make up the lost time. Jade, where was I?"
"The thinly veiled threats portion."
"Which thinly veiled threats portion?"
"Honestly, Anise, you'd think after all these years you'd have gotten a long enough attention span to keep track of your own sermons…" Jade followed her to the Altar as Florian decided to use the pad he had been kneeling on as a pillow.
"Master!" Luke turned around to find Mieu at eye level.
"Hey, Thing!" He hugged him, letting the little guy steady him instead of Asch for a moment. "I thought you weren't here!"
"He was resting up for his part of the ceremony," Guy explained. "He is a sacred cheagle, you know."
"I know, Guy." Although once he hadn't.
"I'm so happy you're back, Master!"
Luke grinned. "Me too." Mieu didn't seem to mind supporting Luke's weight, but then he'd been able to carry him in full gear. Not for long, though. Luke kept an eye on the remaining power in the ring as people started filing back into the hall.
"Excuse me." Luke looked up to see Jade. "Would it be too much to ask that you get out of Natalia's way? Oh, and an unconscious ringbearer isn't much use."
"I'm not asleep," Florian protested, yawning mid-word.
"Okay, Peony, how do you say, 'stop smuggling and pay the tithes or we'll start blowing up ships again' in priestly talk in under fifteen minutes?" Anise seemed to have started conferring with the royals on the sermon revising.
Luke was at the point where he'd be falling over if it weren't for the flying thing and the hand on his shoulder. "I'll use hyperresonance to get back to bed. Once I'm asleep Florian and Asch should be fine."
"Will you be okay?" Tear asked. She seemed to feel that this was her fault, even though there was no way she could have known what the Grand Fonic Hymn would do.
"I'll be fine, Tear. Even if I lose the body I used a memory circle: unless something as drastic as the score-breaking happens again I can get it back."
"I'll keep an eye on him," Guy promised.
"Thanks, Guy." Tear beat him to the punch but still didn't look satisfied. Tear couldn't leave, she was the maid of honor, but Guy wasn't any sort of fonist. Jade was highly skilled but he wasn't a seventh fonist and he was best man. Florian? Of course not. "Asch, do you think it's a good idea for you to go with him?"
It took Luke a minute that Tear hadn't arrived at Asch by process of eliminating unsuitable candidates. She'd been hesitating to ask him for some other reason, possibly the wedding's security. Tear trusted that Asch would both help Luke and be willing to help him. Tear, who had been the one to stay by Luke's side while he was unconscious even though her mission was to kill her brother and Asch had gone looking for information on Van, was willing to let Asch guard Luke in her place.
Luke just had to smile, and he had to watch it: Florian was not a mood ring but if Luke kept resonating like this he might as well be. They'd been working together as god-generals all this time. Of course they'd ironed out their differences, Anise wouldn't tolerate Asch's old attitude anymore.
He'd always wanted Asch to be their friend. Maybe it had been worth taking awhile to come back if this was what he had come home to. There had to have been problems, and huge ones given how messed up Asch had been, but they were a team now, and one that included Luke.
He felt like he'd come home. He'd never felt like that before until just before he'd become one again.
"I would have suggested it even if you hadn't," Asch agreed. "If I can be mistaken for him by the others than I need to find out how that works. It took him to fix my last mistake, and I'd prefer to avoid that. I still have a large amount of access to his power and can read his status, which might be useful. I think I had better stick close to him, for all our sakes."
"Would I be a third wheel?" Guy asked, scratching the back of his head. "I mean, I'm a good swordsman, but…"
"You're not a seventh fonist and you've built up an immunity, so you should be as resistant as anyone can be to Luke's tiresome nature." Jade again. "I don't want to trust House Fabre security alone with this." With a Lorelei about to fall asleep on his feet while potential threats of that magnitude were waiting in the wings. "Even if the original group is wiped out, it's almost certain that others who want a return to the security of the score will try to make use of him."
"I'll be fine once I get everything straightened out," Luke assured him.
Jade was clearly amused by the idea of Luke making anything nice and neat. "Mieu, it looks like we're going to be cutting your portion of the ceremony since Tear isn't singing the hymn. Why don't you go with your master?"
"Of course!" Mieu's ears flared with excitement.
The sorcerer's ring and Mieu's small size could make him quite useful. He would likely be able to escape and warn the rest of them if something happened. Not to mention that Luke was glad to see him. So the gang was all here.
"Should I use hyperresonance to get all of us over to my room? It's a bit showy, but a lot less than walking through a crowd that wants answers."
"Good idea." Doubly so because Jade wanted to see that in action.
"Ready, guys?" And Guy.
Asch nodded.
"Ready!" Mieu piped up.
"Ready when you are."
"Okay." Luke made a show of focusing to give them an instant's more warning, although he realized afterward that it might not be a good idea to let Jade think he needed the time (or was being a show-off), before they appeared in his room. Luke, specifically, appeared on the bed. Under the covers. It was where he had left from, after all. Mieu took his usual position, although this time Luke hadn't wordlessly left that side of the pillow for him. "Hey, move over so Asch has room." He wasn't sure what to do about the 'Thing' thing. Names had significance for cheagles, and Mieu had kept careful track of how many times in a day Luke called him Thing for a reason. It would hurt his feelings a bit if Luke didn't call him that. On the other hand, Tear wouldn't be happy if she thought he was insulting the little guy. He'd worry about it in the morning, along with the other name problem.
Asch sat down on the floor, leaning against the bed, instead. "I'll stay here. After you went to sleep last time I wasn't as tired. I should be able to keep watch."
"If you say so." Since there wasn't anything else needing attention, Luke drifted out of the body and into the normal state of a sentience, adjusting fonon flows and keeping the world turning. The sort of thing that Lorelei existed for and that Luke was a dangerous distraction from.
It was something that didn't compare to anything in Luke's life. Sometimes his mother had looked like she felt this while embroidering, and there was a kind of drowsy contentment in waking up before he had to in the mornings and just lying there, all warm and cozy. He'd missed this in the core, only able to barely keep things from falling apart when he should have been keeping perfect harmony. The dissonances were like itches that he had to scratch, like monster blood that got on his skin and stung until it was scrubbed off. It was such a relief when they found a place to stop by a stream or could at least have Jade use Splash to fill some buckets. Although this was more like the baths at Keterberg. Warm, the knotted-up and tense parts of his body (his self, the seventh fonon) relaxing, feeling right.
He could lose track of time like this, and he had. The others really didn't care all that much about what the humans were up to, satisfied by their true purpose and its timelessness. Shadow in particular hated to be pulled out of this state. No wonder they'd let the baby dream so long without waking him up. They'd though he would wake up on his own time, when he'd developed enough he was ready to learn about the things his fonon interacted with.
Instead he'd been woken up by a human.
And they wondered why he was so attached to them. It was the same reason Rem asked how high on the way up when Sylph and Efreet said jump. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
This time, he unconsciously kept tabs on Asch as well as his own personal body. It wasn't that Asch was in danger or that he thought he was going to mess up like that again, just that he cared, and that meant being worried.
Asch felt Luke drift off, or out, and he also felt the 'hand' that Luke kept in touch with him via. Between Luke's greater exhaustion (he'd said that a confrontation with a sibling could tire him out even at full power) and that deeper resonance he felt like he hadn't slept in far longer than was healthy. His body, which he'd trained to shut up and endure hardship, was craving his nice warm bed, right there for the taking, with a yearning normally reserved for sushi in the middle of the desert when they'd run out of everything but bread, rice, and what could be stripped from the monsters.
"Are you okay? You look pretty beat." Guy was leaning against a wall, a vantage point where it was easy to see out but relatively hard to be seen. Of course, Guy had been in and out of this room during the tenure of both Lukes (or all three): he knew his way around.
"He's keeping an eye on me and that's making the resonance more intense."
"Resonance? That's when you're in tune with the seventh fonon and it empowers you, right? And hyperresonance is when two people with it also empower each other, so it doubles the effect?"
"Right." Asch nodded. "Only the seventh fonon will let fonists share it like that." The seventh fonon was altogether the most user-friendly, even if few could use it. It lent itself to healing spells, it could be used to call on the other fonons for offense but there weren't actually any seventh fonon combat artes per se, even though it could be very, very devastating. Now that he remembered Luke's feelings about having to kill people he understood why. It wasn't weakness, it was just that he hated seeing people suffer. Luke cared. It seemed like the others didn't, at least not compared to Luke. Luke just hadn't known how to show it, as Luke. "And dual hyperresonance is when two resonances… Hmm."
"What is it?"
"If I was able to use hyperresonance because of Luke's presence even after most of him was removed, then why was he able to?"
"He said he heard voices sometimes that weren't you, remember?"
Asch nodded: he remembered both what they'd told him and what Luke remembered. "Luke and Lorelei were separate manifestations at that point. That might have something to do with how Luke was able to circumvent the score. Lorelei alone couldn't do it, but if having a separate consciousness gave it not only an agent but a power increase… not only that, an agent who wasn't bound by the Pact because he didn't know he was."
"I don't know." Guy shook his head. "My family kept watch on the Albertesque seals, remember? I might not be a fonist and I was pretty young when Hod was destroyed, but I do know that doesn't add up. If you were able to use hyperresonance just because you were connected to Luke, then the two of you being connected wouldn't cause dual hyperresonance, just the regular kind. In my family, we didn't just have to learn Ancient Ispanian, but an older language because a lot of stuff for the seals was in it. Luke fon Fabre means light of the sacred flame now, but in that language Fabre doesn't mean flame, it means smith. Flame was a word that sounded a lot alike, though."
"Light of the sacred smith?"
"More like Creator's Light." Guy shrugged. "You should probably talk with Jade about that. We should have compared notes ages ago, huh." But they hadn't wanted to talk about Luke, not like that. Like a subject, like a curiosity, like an experiment when he'd fought so hard not to be one.
"He created me." Asch's tone was almost dreaming. "He said that he was inside me, that the real Luke had been both of us."
"If one hyperresonance was you and Lorelei, and the other Luke and Lorelei, it still doesn't add up."
"Or myself and the fragments of Luke, the embers, and the other Luc and Lorelei."
"Luc?"
"That was his name when he knew Yulia. He was thinking of using Crux, that it might be less confusing."
Guy grimaced a bit, not knowing what to think about that. Luke talking about whether or not he had a right to be called Luke was always something that had to be nipped in the bud in the old days. Still, if Crux was a real name and it wasn't an inferiority complex thing then it was up to Luke. The name did have a lot of baggage attached. Crux, Crux, what did that name mean? He knew he'd heard it before. Anyway, "So you do have some of his power as well as his frequency? And memories, too now."
Asch nodded blindly, having let his eyes slip closed at some point. "I rubbed off on him as well. I don't know if it was just the frequency that made Sylph confuse us. I sometimes feel like I'm missing an arm where he's concerned. At first it was that he had my life, my name. I thought that was what I missed even though if that was what I'd really wanted I could have simply gone home and had him put down instead of saying that was what I 'should' do. I think maybe part of the reason I didn't come home was that he would have been tossed out, or killed, if that had happened, especially before he learned to speak. Then I thought he had Van's love and that was the reason he'd never cared for me even though… Luke got his foolishness from me, it's hypocrisy to claim otherwise. After I died I thought it was this body missing its rightful soul. Now I wonder if it's because we were one once. We were Luke once, and Luke had you, and Natalia, and even if Father wasn't truly caring and Mother was sick and Uncle knew we were doomed and was intending for Natalia to marry us," strange how us seemed so natural, "and have a heir before we died as a weapon of Kimlasca so that she could be a Queen Regnant instead of some noble who would live marrying her and becoming king, even if… Ignorance is bliss."
"You want to go back to the good old days. Like when I wasn't secretly out to kill your father, it looked like you and Natalia would be perfect for each other, and everything was simple. Yeah, I know how you feel." Guy had lost everything, not thrown it away like Asch had.
"It feels as though if I regained him, the part that was pulled out of me when Van created that replica then I'll be whole and everything would be perfect. But that was what I thought happened when I died and took control of Luke's body. I want to be complete, and that was why I started insisting that he was me instead of a fake towards the end… I was utterly insane. I knew I was dying but Dist hadn't enlightened me about the Big Bang effect. I thought that he was finally stealing the last of my life. I claimed the name Luke fon Fabre right before I died. And then I didn't when I came back to life, even though I thought I had the right to. It just wasn't right to steal from someone who had nothing. Everything he had was mine, and I thought he was a thief. But all that meant was that he didn't have anything that was his."
"We kept expecting him to suddenly turn into you one day. And then when that happens we're heartbroken. I guess the grass really is always greener on the other side."
"He, he'd built himself up from nothing. If I hadn't had his memories of how to do that, known it was possible, then not even you could have saved me."
"There's nothing like a good fight to make people figure out that they really don't want to die." Guy's eyes were as unseeing as Asch's now, far away from here. "You took his life. Like hell I was going to let you throw it away like that."
"He actually said something like that to me when he first called out. That he hadn't given me his life so I could lose it. And I nearly did."
"Good thing Natalia let me know you might need someone to get drunk with. Don't worry, I never told her." That after she'd forced Asch to confront the fact he wasn't either Luke Asch had wandered off and started thinking about whether the dregs, the ashes, the ashes that had smothered the flame and doused the light had any right to keep shattering people's hopes and dreams like Tear's when she'd understood that Luke was gone and Natalia's when she'd seen his distance day after day and understood also that Luke was gone and he couldn't be Luke, the Luke that had loved her.
He could only be a coward, a breaker of the hearts of those he loved, a murderer.
And Guy had made him realize what Luke had after Akzeriuth. He couldn't make up for the past, but he couldn't abandon the responsibility to it. The responsibility to live for the purpose of making up for it, even if he never could. He couldn't go back and erase the words that had stabbed Luke through the heart, shattered a child's fragile world built on denial of the fact he was unloved and unknown by those he loved, made him think he was unlovable (how it had felt for his own self to despise him!), threatened to hurt his friends when Luke had shown he cared for Asch because Asch wanted to hate someone who didn't deserve it just so Asch could feel better about himself…
"No wonder Sylph thinks we're bad for him." Humans. "A replica world. If they were all like Luke it might be worth it. I wonder if that was what Van thought? Although he was truly mad there, both despising originals and adoring replicas and despising Luke while adoring me." The latter was, in Asch's hindsight, far madder.
"Well, you've spent more time with them than I have. But they're kind of… once they got personalities instead of working with that programming. They're adults, but there's still a kid in there. Even the ones that got beaten pretty bad before the Tower of Rem. They didn't get why. It didn't make any sense why someone would want to hurt someone else. It reminded me of Luke, when he had to kill. That one time… Do you remember?"
"He couldn't stand to hurt them. Everything in him cried out against it. But it was the only way to protect you. He always hated being a burden, and if that was what it took to actually be of help to you…"
"And we didn't want to pressure him when he was working so hard, so we never gave him a goal or anything useful to do. It was all useless stuff that didn't mean anything. Of course he didn't care about it." Guy sat on the ledge now, kicking his legs. "I can't believe I fucked up like that. I kept expecting him to snap out of it. It really was all makework, stuff to jog his memory, stuff so that he wouldn't embarrass us until he got his memory back, stuff to help him turn into you and he couldn't do that. I want to go back in time and make me realize what Van was up to. It was so obvious! And I just didn't see it. I let all that happen to Luke right under my nose. Some friend I was."
"You were his best friend. When he heard through me that you were going to go back and wait for him… He was so happy, but it was something almost too good to be true. And I'd just told him that none of you would want to back to him and he'd agreed that I was right."
"You were such a bastard back then," Guy agreed, and it made Asch feel better than sugarcoating it would have. "I'd been wanting a chance to knock you around for how you treated him for awhile. Ended up making you eat dirt for how you treated yourself. Life's funny sometimes." Imagine, him saving his family's murderer's family from themselves.
"I want to protect him. Instead he's only been alive an hour and I've already gotten him in a fight with one of his real family."
"Hey, could have happened to anybody. You were just trying to help, right?"
"And Luke was just trying to help Akzeriuth." Asch snarled silently. "Damn Van Grants. Damn him. He promised him that he could be a hero, that he could help people, that he could be free and come to live with his real father. Almost the exact same lie, only I had far less excuse to believe what he told me."
"It was that…" Sick, that was the word Guy couldn't find. Or didn't consider harsh enough.
"I remember. I remember what he felt, it's almost like I was not just there but him. Like it was my heart that broke when he called me 'foolish replica Luke' and the city died because of me and my friends blamed me…"
"We all blamed him. Except for Ion. Of course, he understood better than the rest of us, huh." It looked like the water Luke had asked for had been delivered at some point. Guy clearly wished it was something stronger. "We didn't want the guilt. Tossed all of it on a poor kid… Do you know how proud of him I am? Selfless idiot. I just wanted it to be just heroism and none of the belief that he didn't have a right to exist." Guy put down the glass he held before he threw it against a wall.
"We treated him like that and Sylph chose to grind Baticul into dust in the very instant for his sake. I wonder when he'll realize that and go back home? No, he won't." Asch wished he wasn't happy about that. Such a selfish happiness. "He feels incomplete without me the same way I do him. He left fragments of his self, or a self, in me. Or something. I don't understand it," he confessed. "How he can care for someone who treated him like I did."
"Don't we all wish we understood Luke." Picking up the glass again, Guy toasted the content figure. "Once the wedding's over Jade'll come by to get inside his head." Jade was good at figuring out people besides himself. It came with thinking so differently from everyone else. Once he decided to start caring about the inferior thought processes of the fools he was surrounded by he was very good at taking them apart. It was, he claimed, due to the outside perspective a monster like him had.
Of course, the people best at getting in Jade's head were Peony and Anise, who were frankly terrible at dealing with most people too. Peony could be blamed on the two of them growing up together in, "Keterberg. That's where we're all going for the honeymoon."
"And it's on the same continent as the planetary art glyph."
Oh, of course Asch would have already thought of that. Jade, too. "So we're heading over there?"
"I can't imagine why we wouldn't."
"Well, security. From the other people that still want a score that Jade mentioned." Guy was the least involved with the Order of the group, being tied up handling Malkuth/Kimlasca diplomacy, plus the fontech revolution. Of course they all met up, but they all had their own jobs to do. Natalia had a kingdom to run since her father had fallen afoul of a slow poison that had only been detected after it had done enough damage for another, not so easily cured problem to set in, Anise had the Order, Jade handled the Malkuth-Order leg, Asch connected Kimlasca and the Order, and Tear was effectively in charge of Yulia City since her grandfather really didn't know how to do much but watch and was adrift in a world without the score.
Now Luke had shown up, Guy expected another rearrangement of everyone's lives to occur. Luke did stuff like that. It seemed a lot more amazing in retrospect than it had at the time, how the amnesiac shut-in had ended up in charge of a group like them and even regained that control so quickly after the disaster. Maybe, like they'd wondered once, it had been the Score that brought them together. There was a lot that didn't explain.
Guy had come after Luke to get the kid back home where it was safe. He should have been surprised to find him, not in his element, but handling something so foreign so well under the circumstances. Maybe it was old habits from when Luke had been Asch that had made him follow, but Asch had always given the sense that he knew what he was doing. Luke tried to protect that, but he'd been figuring it out as he went along and he was good at it.
By the time they got back to Baticul it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for the king, who was the one who had ordered Luke imprisoned like that, to put him in charge of a diplomatic mission that important. Sure, Luke wasn't good at diplomacy, but he could learn given the chance and this was that chance. Guy had been disappointed by Luke acting like typical Luke instead of growing during the trip there, and now he knew who to blame that on. Van Grants.
The king hadn't seen Luke in action. He hadn't sent him there to give him a chance to grow but sent him to die. Maybe that 'happy' life of Luke's had been something the king did so that he'd feel less guilty. Who knew. Or to keep Kimlasca's weapon from being stolen again, to keep Natalia from growing too attached to him.
Guy had been following along because he was Luke's friend and it was time he acted like it, plus he was proud of the kid. The others hadn't thought it through until a lot later. Anise's reason had been Ion, and the fact that the girl was a follower, not a leader. She was choosy about who she let give her orders, but if she made a promise she'd keep it, even to Mohs. Anise was ruling the Order with an iron Tokunaga because she was doing it for Ion. That girl was scary when she had a mission.
She'd finally had the honesty to confess that the reason she'd been so harsh on Luke was that she hated herself for being a traitor and had been taking it out on him last year. After Jade had essentially forced it out of her by shamelessly admitting that Luke had been the reason he'd started understanding feelings, death, all the things that had escaped him as a child. He'd watched Luke try to become human and felt responsible, even if he'd rejected that responsibility so harshly and so often because he truly didn't want it.
Natalia meeting Asch had finally made her realize that there was a Luke, and she'd ended up, like Guy, following with amazement that this was the person she'd thought she knew.
Tear, though… Wait, Tear. "Asch, about Tear… Asch?"
Without someone talking to him Asch had fallen asleep.
Guy was reminded of Luke, who had often fallen asleep sitting up in the second year after he arrived. He smiled, but then the smile dimmed when he realized why Luke had stopped doing that. There wasn't much point in reading or practicing his writing all night when all it got him was, "Oh, I guess that's a little bit better, but it's still nowhere near where you used to be. Keep studying." He had, and that was all the reaction he'd ever gotten until he gave up.
Hindsight made them all look so stupid, he thought for the umpteenth time as he shook Asch's shoulder a bit before judging that, god-general or no, it was probably safe to move him without waking him up first. Normally he would wake up at any sign of a possible attack so Guy wouldn't dare manhandle him unless he wanted to be stabbed in the guy by reflex, but the guy was sleeping like a rock. Heavy as one, too. He debated changing him. After all, he'd been their manservant and that included helping get armor off and ridiculously complicated court clothes on. It wasn't like Asch had anything he hadn't seen before, and Guy's time as a servant had given him sympathy for the maids who would be stuck fixing up these sheets.
He compromised by removing the boots and armor but leaving him in the underarmor padding. Asch needed to wash it, but it was better than nothing. Pere wouldn't let him hear the end of it if he found out Guy had been doing servant-type stuff again. Taking care of Peony's rappigs was different, supposedly, not that Guy really understood how. It might be lingering resentment of the family, although of course Luke had been Luke from the moment he came and spent hours looking at Pere's flowerbeds, the only living things, the only piece of the outdoors in a house he couldn't leave. The same way they were trapped here by vengeance, also wearing false identities.
Thinking about it, Guy realized that he would be a lot more startled by finding out that someone was secretly Lorelei if they weren't Luke. It explained a lot, actually, although maybe it was partially that he'd already known about the perfect isofone thing. So Luke could act like that because he was connected to Lorelei, even though Asch was supposedly the 'natural' isofone of Lorelei and didn't act that way.
He was more into fontech engineering than theory, but you couldn't build the machines without understanding the fonons. Maybe that was why he'd had the clearest head during Sylph's attack. He flew the Albiores. He knew Sylph, and not just in the way Jade did from using spells to attack. There was a lot more to all the fonons than just military applications and Jade's mad doctoring.
Storms came up suddenly. You dealt with them. Although that part was being a pilot more than an engineer. Getting Sylph to back down: now that was impressive. If he had to pick a fight with one of them it would be Efreet. Not that there was a good choice, Efreet was just the least bad by a long shot. The others were harder to make angry, which meant it would be harder to make them cool down, like Slyph hadn't backed down without a good reason to and would still keep an eye on Tear. Efreet, though, was easily angered and if you did it right easily appeased.
The Albiore's shield was a seventh fonon application. Not to mention… The seventh fonon was what the majority of fontech relied on now. Everything being changed meant that a lot of the previous expectations of how many fonons of what sort would be available where and when went out the window. The seventh fonon was the rarest, and yet it, well, was helpful, and reliable, provided you didn't use up all the supply in the area like some idiots, and versatile. You couldn't use the third fonon to substitute for fire fonons, but if you used the seventh fonon to draw in fifth fonons then even if the local supply ran out the engine could then use seventh fonons until the fifth fonon replenished itself.
Thinking that fonons had personalities wasn't a weird thing like thinking ships had them. Of course the fonons had personalities. They had known that back before the Dawn Age. Still, maybe Guy should have done more than smile when interacting with it made him think of Luke instead of the Order's myths about Lorelei. If he'd mentioned that to Jade then maybe Jade would have made the connection. Or thought he was being sentimental. Jade worked with the fonons directly, he wouldn't understand the seventh fonon through them and it would have been an uphill battle to get him to learn enough about fontech to see the impact the sentiences' personalities had on it for himself.
The reason fontech had always been on the border of heretical might be Luke and the difference between the real Lorelei and the one in the myths. You couldn't see an august god calmly orchestrating the world and serenely sending men to their rightful fates in a fonon that vibrated so rapidly, that went so far in denying fate as raising the dead. A fonon that seemed unhappy, or concerned on a level that the others weren't. The seventh was the least serene fonon. Ginji compared it to a puppy. Treat it right and it would be loyal. The others didn't care unless you did something really stupid.
It had been worse before the end of the score, everyone agreed. Lorelei was confined no longer.
Or so they'd thought. No one had known that while Lorelei had been home Luke wasn't.
Luke was currently sprawled on his back, legs and arms taking up ¾ of the bed with Mieu using an arm as a pillow, the blankets kicked off. What a familiar sight that was. Asch slept more politely and compactly, although he seemed curled up a fourth of the way into a ball, back to Luke in a way that looked trusting by Asch's standards. Asch liked his back against a wall or the edge of the bed. Weird that he'd regard the people he was sharing a bed with as the most likely to try to stab him in the back in his sleep. No, not weird, sad.
Speaking of people Van had messed up, Tear's whole perfect soldier routine shielded a little girl who hadn't had stuffed animals because she wanted to grow up and have her brother be proud of her. Since Asch made Mieu sad he'd been sharing Tear's quarters since he was brought here. Tear needed something to cuddle, which was a lot of why that thing she and Luke had going. Tear wanted someone to cuddle, Luke needed cuddling. Only they were both adults and that meant cuddling had to be the sort of cuddling you don't want from a son or mother figure.
Now, Guy would volunteer to be cuddled by Tear if he could just hurry up and get over that phobia.
The problem was that Tear thought she was in love with Luke the same way Asch had thought he was in love with Natalia, and unless that was handled right it would end in tears. What with Mieu deserting her too, he might have to look into buying her a stuffed animal. He wasn't Dist and Tokunaga was creepy, but he could come up with something.
Tear, in her bed (the god generals had private rooms, what with secure documents and everything), in nightwear that would be less revealing than that swimsuit, sadly, looking all sweet and cudding something he'd made for her and thinking of him...
Guy noticed he was drooling and hurriedly wiped it off and took another drink to cool down. Yeah, he was lucky they hadn't noticed his fantasizing in the desert and gone after Luke instead. Damn phobia. He was okay in emergencies, and he could handle them standing closer than before, but if they grabbed him the way Mary had to protect him, if they were upset or even loud because they were excited… It was almost worse now that he remembered. He could picture whoever it was dying the way his sister and her maids had. He guessed he'd had a reason to suppress that memory.
He could force himself to hug someone but it would be kind of hard to go on dates when his body was screaming at him to get away unless he wanted her to die.
He also had a family line to continue, and he had hormones.
He needed someone to help him get over this. A friend, considerate: what were the odds he could catch Tear on the rebound?
The heirs of the guardians of the Yulian and Albertesque seals. If it weren't for the score being gone he would be worried that it was fated. He'd had enough of that when his home was destroyed, thank all of them.
It wasn't until he sipped at the water instead of gulping it down that he paused. Baticul water always had a distinctive taste thanks to the pipes it traveled through. The tang of iron wasn't unpleasant, they replaced the pipes when that happened, and it was probably as good for you as the city claimed. However, you could get sick of it, especially if you had tasted too much blood in your life, and the city had various methods for dealing with that, from adding wine to lemon juice. The fon Fabres added crushed mint leaves, which had the added bonus of making it taste cool even when it wasn't.
Grand Chokmah, which had been built around water instead of with water as an afterthought, kept its water tasteless by default because of the hazard that now had Guy looking for a panacea bottle. It had been awhile since he'd been to the manor, it might just be paranoia, but he'd been drinking the water here for years and something didn't seem right. If he was wrong, the bottle wouldn't activate, so no harm done. If he was right, they had a problem.
They had a problem.
He took out another bottle and tried to use it on Luke and Asch. Luke was fine. Asch wasn't. Not until the bottle activated, at least.
Someone in the von Fabre household was trying to poison Asch, the heir to the family. That was the least bad of the scenarios that flashed through his mind.
It was obviously a slow poison: with bottles the instant a poison was detected it became useless. They wouldn't think Guy suspected anything: he'd triggered the bottles from inside his pocket and no one should have a line of sight on him that he couldn't see. He knew this room's defenses. A manservant was half butler and half bodyguard. If he kept them thinking he was ignorant, if they remained under the impression that there was no one in this room (Luke had teleported them in and they hadn't made that much noise), then they should be as safe as it got here. He didn't want to rouse the alarm in a two-thirds deserted household which contained at least one and maybe more conspirators. Guy had checked and found the door locked when he arrived. A servant would have to go to Ramdas to get permission and the necessary key, which meant tracking down who had delivered and prepared the water later would be easy. Unless they were part of the extra staff brought in for the wedding, which they very well might be. Worst case scenario, the entire catering company was a fraud, in which case the family loyalists would actually be outnumbered.
Their best chance of catching them was pretending they were unaware until the ceremony was over, the two of them were awake, and they could get backup. Something else wasn't adding up, though.
Asch would have recognized that the taste was off if Guy had. And he hadn't been here since the catering staff moved in, he'd just signed the papers that Ramdas brought. So when had Asch gotten exposed?
The thought that sprung into Guy's mind a moment after a theory did was, 'You've got to be kidding me." The action that Guy sprang into was drawing his sword and, in a single motion, sweeping it under the bed. It didn't connect with anything, or anyone, and Guy let himself relax, chuckling, for the instant before a cloth-covered hand covered his mouth and he realized he couldn't see the hand, arm, anything.
Wasn't invisibility a Daathic fonic arte?
The hand that groped frantically for a panacea bottle was grabbed and forced to hold still as the gas on the cloth went to work.
His last thought was that if he was failing as a bodyguard at least it wasn't going to be because of something as ridiculous as an assassin hiding under the bed.