Replaying Tales of the Abyss. Just got Jade's Soft Meanie (aka Tsundere) title & ran around to get materials for all the capacity cores available from Din's shop so I'd have them second playthrough - my original late-second-playthrough-with-most-titles save file was stolen with my last PS2. Decided I didn't really have any reason not to get some of the other exclusive stuff like Guy, Natalia & Anise's best armors while I was at it.
Also, the three percent regen accessory will make certain arena battles so much easier - looking at you, Jade.
"Luke? Please answer me, Luke! Oh, Luke, please be alright!" The familiar feeling of Natalia hugging him brought Luke back to awareness gradually. Her voice was strained, but familiar and safe.
Suzanne might be his original's mother, but Natalia, although only eleven years older than him, was the person who Luke really saw as Mommy. Suzanne's illness and responsibilities as a duke's wife and king's sister kept her tired and drained, although she loved both her sons dearly.
"Na," his attempt was interrupted by a yawn. "Natalia, what, what happened?"
"Oh thank goodness." He could hear her relief in her voice and feel it in her relaxing grip. "Do you hurt? I can still use fonic artes without a weapon, and they won't care since all I would be doing is healing."
"I'm fine. Asch?"
"He's right here."
"Guy?" Natalia adjusted him in her grip a bit so Luke could see that Asch was on the other side of the same bed, Guy watching over him. "Why isn't he awake yet?"
"We thought we'd best wake you up first. Now then." And Natalia's eyes hardened. "Luke fon Fabre, what were you thinking?"
He didn't need to ask about what. "He needed me."
"He needed you to be safe! And instead you as good as hand yourself over to the man who created you solely in order to send you to your death! He's going to blame himself, you know he is, and…" Natalia lost hold of her anger, and the sadness and worry were far worse. Not to mention the disappointment in him.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize to me, apologize to him. Because he'll try to reassure you it's not your fault and that conversation will hopefully help it sink in that it's not his either. Luke, we're captives now." Seeing Luke's look of horror she tried to reassure him. "It's not your fault, he would have gotten Asch no matter what you had done at that point. But… Well, if you had escaped and taken us we would have had a much better chance of getting him back, but only if he'd been able to endure captivity alone for long enough to be alive to rescue. I understand why you did it. I don't blame you, Luke. We were outnumbered and outmatched. It's just… I'm sorry." She tugged him tight. "We tried so hard for so long to keep this from happening to the both of you…"
"I don't think Asch is the only one who needs to be watched to keep them from making off with an unfair share of the blame. Natalia, you couldn't have kept him from coming here. He was the one that leapt before he thought." Jade was here too? "We're here, blame is pointless, although repeat mistakes should be avoided."
"Should I start trying to wake him up now?" Guy poked Asch gingerly from a safe distance. In this sort of situation a half-awake Asch might try to maul someone he thought was an Oracle solder who had come to drag him to the replication machine. It had happened even in Baticul.
"I'll do it," Luke murmured. Hopefully if the first thing that Asch saw was that Luke was reasonably okay things would go better than they might. He went to Asch, hugging him. Asch tensed, but only for a moment. Luke had pressed his cheek against Asch's, and that meant Asch's dreaming mind could tell that this wasn't a stranger, it was his other self by scent even if with his fon slots closed the other sense was closed off. "Asch," Luke coaxed.
The noise that came from him wasn't a whimper, but Asch knew that whatever he would wake up to would be horrible and didn't want to. Wanted to stay asleep, warm, and with Luke here.
"Asch, I'm sorry." He didn't want to do this to him. "Please wake up. Natalia and I need you."
For them, for them he would.
Only Luke, drawing back a bit, could see the horror on Asch's face when he realized his fon slots were sealed. "Look at me, Asch, I'm here! It hasn't happened again!" Luke had been separated from Asch while Asch was sealed like this and a captive of Van. "Please, look at me!" Don't get caught in the flashbacks! "Asch!"
"My he… Luke?" Asch's question was tentative.
"Who else would it be?" Luke managed a smile. "Natalia's here too, and Guy, and Jade. We won't let anything happen to you."
"What about you?" Luke was, after all, the one in far more danger.
Yet Luke only smiled. "We'll take care of you and you'll save all of us. I… Please don't worry about me, Asch. I hate when you're unhappy because of me. I hate that you're afraid all the time because if either of us dies I do. I hate that I make you so weak."
Asch shook his head. "It's not that you make me weak, Luke. Van did this to me, by tearing you away."
"But if it weren't for me, Jade said that you would have gotten used to it. Most survivors do."
"Luke, I didn't want to get used to it. Feel…" They were sealed. "You know what it felt like. I was empty, and I don't want to know what I would have let move in."
"Or you could have let them kill me, and then I could have come back." Luke put his hand on Asch's chest. "I can't stand it either. I should have run, but I couldn't leave you like that and I couldn't live without you. I don't mind if one of us dies. I don't mind going home. I'm your heart and I beat for you, Asch. Maybe, maybe I should have escaped and then if you'd killed yourself you would have been free, maybe…"
"Don't say things like that!" Asch said it first, but it was echoed by all present. "You may have been born from me, but you're notjust me. You're yourself, Luke, and I don't want to lose you. I don't want to see you like this. You're my heart, and if you're sad I'm sad."
"Excuse me, but it's easy to die for someone. Living is harder. If you're that devoted then promise each other you'll live for their sake and then let's move on, shall we?" The necromancer ignored the ache in his chest with the ease of long practice. He hadn't even known it was anguish for most of his life, and knowing didn't help much. Sorrow couldn't be made to stop hurting with calcium tablets the way heartburn could.
They nodded. Asch tucked Luke against him. It wasn't much shelter but it made him feel better. "Natalia."
"Oh, Asch…" She reached out and hugged them both. "I'm so sorry, I should have realized it was a trap." She should have known that Asch couldn't think clearly when Van was involved instead of trusting her love's judgment.
"I didn't either, and there's no point in regrets now, Natalia. Please." He didn't want to focus on self-blame.
"I shouldn't have expected you to. I should know better. I should have kept calm instead of letting my worry keep me from thinking. What sort of Queen hurls herself and her husband into danger like that?" She was also a year older than Asch, making her the mature one to the childish Luke and the sometimes erratic Asch.
"And I should have grabbed Luke from Jade and ran for it instead of just standing there." Guy wasn't happy with his performance either. "I'm sorry, Asch. Some bodyguard I am. Letting Van take you that time and now both of you. I just… froze. He's not the person I knew once, I figured that out a long time ago when he tried to use Largo against you, Natalia, but…" He shook his head. "I wanted to talk him out of it. I hesitated."
"Will you children please stop playing the blame game? He had seven years to plan this ambush, and he did it flawlessly. The only thing that could be considered to have gone wrong was Anise and I taking those fon slot seals, and it's not a disaster when he had more and it took out two of our combatants. Although if Anise hadn't been sealed she wouldn't have placed Ion's fate in Arietta's hands so quickly and Ion most likely would have been captured. Van has studied all of us, and he put us in a situation where we would react certain ways and those reactions suited him. It was tactical genius and even I was taken in by it. I 'should' have realized that the bridge repair crew was Van's force in disguise, among many other mistakes." Jade adjusted his glasses. "Except I did check, and the paperwork was accurate, the… We were frankly outmatched."
That failed to reassure.
"Not that this will happen again, of course," Jade assured them. "We know the weaknesses he used against us and can guard against them. Most of them, at least." Despite his attempts to wean them off each other… Perhaps having their fon slots synchronized hadn't been such a brilliant idea. Otherwise, over seven years of busy lives they would have been forced to gradually learn to endure temporary separation for longer and longer periods.
"Do you know what he's going to do?" Asch asked.
"Destroy Auldrant to create a new world without a Score, the Eldrant of ancient myth. He claims that the seventh fonstone describes humanity's end and that this is the only way for anything to survive." No, Jade was not kidding. "He seems to think that Luke is an avatar of Lorelei, intended to stop him, because creating Eldrant would destroy the planet's memory and put an end to him and the Score his pact with Yulia supposedly created."
"Destroy the world? That's insane."
"Avatar of Lorelei?" Asch wasn't anywhere near as surprised. He had been Van's captive, after all. He knew the man was mad. Or was that all of it?
"…I had actually had some thoughts along those lines myself," Jade confessed. "There are some very ancient texts that describe sentiences other than Lorelei taking physical form, and supposedly any collection of their fonon pure enough to have their frequency and large enough to be able to hold a mind will become a manifestation of the sentience. There are legends of a war in which the commander ordered his troops to fire hundreds of the same fifth fonon arte at an enemy king and that man's body became absorbed into a vessel of Efreet. Then the commander created a pact with Efreet and their monarch's remains slaughtered his people. Pre Dawn Age texts are rare and sometimes artes are hidden in them. This one seemed like it might contain an arte, so I was asked to investigate it and it stuck in my mine."
"But, Luke?" Guy asked. "I mean, you're right. He has Lorelei's fonon frequency and is entirely seventh fonons, but it's just… weird." Luke was Luke, just a kid (brother).
"The voice we hear." Asch's non sequitur drew curious looks. "He hears a voice during the headaches, remember? We decided not to mention it because the last thing we needed was our parents thinking he was crazy and using that as an excuse to get rid of him. The person who's speaking might be Lorelei. They say things like, 'my perfect isofons,' and so on." Why hadn't he told them this detail? "Hearing voices is bad enough. Hearing Lorelei's voice? You would have knownwe were crazy." Asch's sanity had already been up for debate, and Luke seemingly brain-damaged until they'd understood about replicas… Yes, that was something best kept secret.
"He's not me." Luke shook his head. "The person who talks to us. We're his perfect isofons, not himself. Like Asch and I. He doesn't mean to give us headaches, it just happens. He… It's an effort for him to. He's… It's like he's chained and it's an effort to get around them for… I don't really understand," Luke confessed. "But everyone says that Lorelei is all-powerful. He can't even really control himself."
"Didn't he call you 'fragment of my soul' once, when you were first working on controlling your power?" Asch reminded him.
"Um… Yes. I thought that was another metaphor. You know how songs have a lot of metaphors? He only talks, he doesn't sing, but he speaks in that sort of style," Luke explained to the rest of them. "He… I think he's lonely, and we're the only ones who can hear him. Or I am, Asch can through me. He always… like when Asch is trying to be romantic, Natalia. 'Rem in Sylph's embrace,' because you wear blue and your hair is yellow, like the sun in the sky? Titles, maybe. More flowery than sappy, but… I don't think there's much else besides us that makes him even a little happy, and when he touches us it hurts us." Luke felt terribly sorry for him.
"'Fragment of my soul' would seem to confirm that Luke is a manifestation or aspect of Lorelei." That was what Jade cared about at the moment. He'd mock Asch's attempts at being poetic later. "What have I told you about keeping things from your doctor?"
"It's not that we don't trust you," Luke started to protest.
"It's thatI don't. You have been a huge help to us, but you're an officer of Malkuth." And Asch was the future king of Kimlasca.
"Asch, don't blame it on that. You haven't even told Natalia. Why areyou so serious about it, because you're not acting like it's why I thought it was?"
Asch sighed, giving up the pretence. "Luke, you still don't understand the lengths people will go to in order to manipulate the Score for their own ends. If you were known to be connected to Lorelei, you would be the most valuable prize on the planet. Forget Fon Master Ion, forget the seventh fonstone. If anyone can change this world's future it's you. Compared to that, the power of hyperresonance is nothing. It's not that I don't trust them, it's just that… anyone can be broken, and I didn't want them to be any more at risk than they already were. But the worst has happened, so it doesn't matter that there's almost certainly someone eavesdropping."
"Oh." Luke hadn't realized that. Everyone else had. "I thought it was because you didn't want to give them false hope."
