Since I wanted a lullaby for family fluff and symbolism/characterization/foreshadowing purposes, but Chronicle Key & Reisha's Lullaby are incredibly depressing, this one is from Singing Hill – Ar Ciel, Ar Dor, which is about the birth of the world, going from 'lump of star stuff' to habitable. AbstractGarden on Youtube has a translation video. The lyrics of the lullaby are actually taken from two parts of the song: you can hear the first part best at 1:38 to 2:07 & the later part starts at 5:22ish. Go listen to it: Ar Tonelico's music is gorgeous. Although, while the rest of the song has some nice bits, some of it won't make any sense unless you know a bit about the AT verse's mythology and laws of physics. While I'm at it, I don't own Ar Tonelico: Gust/Banpresto do.

By the way, this isn't an Ar Tonelico crossover, or even a fusion: I'm just borrowing its reality-warping programming languages for how elf powers work. Because they are awesome and the Megaman 'verse has a music theme going back to Classic anyway. I'm still convinced that Alia should have been Aria, as a homage to Classic naming if nothing else.

There's also a reference to a bit from Journey to the West. I may be getting it mixed up with something else (yeesh, my memory), but if I recall correctly: the monkey king defied Buddha, and fled. He went all the way to one of the pillars of the universe… Only to find that it was one of the Buddha's fingers, and he had merely crossed from one side to the other of the palm of his hand: he'd been within his grasp the entire time, while he crowed that he was free. I joke that the moral is that it's generally a bad idea to tick off people who are one with the universe, or even just the dimension you happen to be in at the time. Finally playing Lunar: Eternal Blue reminded me of it, because apparently the maker of the game viewed this as an insult to human potential, that for all his effort and genius, this was all that the monkey king could do, faced with a god. I tend to think that if he were that wise, he would have known it wouldn't work and done something else.

"Wee yea accrroad omnis manaf," X sang softly, combing his fingers through the hair she'd never had, although there had been plans to build a body compatible with her. The plans and sketches were still there in X's memory banks, versions where there were extensions on her helmet meant to invoke the imagery of a legendary elf's pointed ears, like Harpuia's winged helm, and versions where she didn't wear a helmet and well-modeled human ears came to graceful points.

The former outnumbered the latter. X had truly believed in peace, but not enough to leave his children defenseless, thank god-no, thank goodness, which actually existed. Here, at least.

"Wee yea accrroad sos hartes yor," he sang, even though a lullaby was useless since she didn't sleep. Unlike X, who was the fruit of decades of experience, with a century of fine-tuning, she had been cobbled together in a hurry. If it came down to it, all they'd needed, and they'd needed it desperately, was for her to survive long enough to purge the world once. If she died doing it, well, how many children had died, made to join the Hunters, to die at the hands of the mavericks or, worse, to have their souls devoured by the virus?

She couldn't sleep any more than the lesser elves could, because her energies were her self-sustaining mental processes, "Like computers before solid-state memory," X had said once. If she stopped thinking, she'd die. And they couldn't have that, not before she'd accomplished her task. So she didn't have the capability to escape into oblivion, even for a few hours.

It was still calming, and she needed that, with Weil out there. If she grew too frantic, if she summoned too much power, it would overpower X's and Weil might detect her.

Even though X really was growing stronger, growing happier. Even though he'd had to give up his greatest treasure, even though this was forcing him to pay attention to the outside world again.

Because Zero.

X had started to feel again. Not aching pain or numbness, but enough happiness, enough belief that the world could be made better, to put processing power behind this song, to make it more than empty words in a language almost no one but elves knew.

Not much power, but it was what he had, and he would give her, give all of them, what he had.

He couldn't sing the second half: it would hurt too much, but he did what he could, so she didn't begrudge him it, even though he'd sang it for the children he'd built with his own two hands.

There was a moment of silence when X finished, but then, "Wes yea ra gyen art noes anw noes…"

It was hard for her not to think of X as frail.

He wore his heart on his sleeve, and she could see the scars in his mind. They were so deep that it was easy to pity him and hard to keep in mind what had given him these scars. What he'd survived.

It was hard to keep in mind that nearly losing his ability to care had only honed his ability to kill.

Dr. Weil had broken her, made it easy for her mind to be ruled by fear. It was hard to be scared of X.

It was hard to remember that he had defeated Weil. That most of the time he hadn't even noticed it when the virus tried to infect him, it was second nature to him to smash aside anything that tried to encroach on his mind.

It was hard to remember that he could do the thing that scared her most of all. He'd been the first to do it, in fact. But when his mind grabbed hold of her, caged her in, even if it was only to keep her safe while he lashed out, when all she could feel from his mind was a will to destroy that rivaled Omega's, when his mind screamed "How many times will I have to kill you?" into the void, a fanged, grieving roar of frustration, and was willing to kill and kill again, even onto the end of eternity, sick of it, weary to the bone, but it was the hesitation that had been lost, not the will to annihilate?

Now that he was two drives away, Phantom had enough breathing room to look back on that and realize what a stupid, stupid thing to do that had been.

Hadn't he learned his lesson the last time he did something this stupid? Oh, yes, try to sneak up on X, who had been one of his instructors with that ninja armor of his. Brilliant idea. Oh, sure, he'd managed it, eventually, but that had been the most dangerous part. Because no civilian could possibly sneak up on X, and any ally should know better, so that left enemies. Phantom knew what happened when someone startled X, with his reflexes honed by ages of combat. The first time Phantom had tried it and actually succeeded, since X was working on something technical, he'd nearly gotten his head blown off and then X had hugged him, both of them shaking at how close that had been, his father half apologizing and half yelling at him and if he ever did that again…

X had come out of the war, but the wars weren't quite out of X.

And if that was what happened when someone snuck up on him in the real world, where there were friends as well as foes and X had tried very hard not to kill people by accident, then what had he expected to happen here? When anything that invaded X's mind, be it the virus or elves, would be crushed? That had been Dr. Light's wish, that his son would never have to be afraid of losing himself.

Dr. Wily had done his best to crush that dream, but every attempt had merely strengthened X's defenses. The infinite potential system, under the pressure of constant threats, had evolved him into a juggernaut. He'd rather go back and try a second round with Omega right now: it was much safer.

He had to get out of here, give X time to realize that the voice that had remembered that old lullaby, that old spell, trying to shape the universe, even just a tiny bit more, into a place where they could be safe and happy, had been Phantom and not one of Wily's or Weil's… That he might be X's son, but he was Phantom, not yet another mockery of stolen Sigma sent to torment his father.

Too late.

The defense program that snapped around him now was a clawed hand, a cage of titanium and jagged crystal, and what this meant chilled him to the bone. X had always destroyed evil. If he was aiming to capture, not kill, while Phantom could still feel that brightly-burning rage, then X wanted to hurt. "Did you really think that you could hide from me, here, in my own systems? For all your running, you are still within the palm of my hand."

At least that moment of analysis, to determine what he was and what, specifically, to do to him let X realize that this was, "Phantom?" A humanoid form shimmered into place, and Phantom's eyes widened, surprised.

That wasn't an elf: it wasn't solid because it was akin to a hologram. The crystals this mindscape was constructed out of, the light shattered into countless chaotic rainbows by a host of prisms: that was X. Omega was a beast in a cage: X was this world. Phantom had known it theoretically, that while other reploids had nanites that could be traced back to X, programs written by others, X had been given a place to grow, a framework to grow in, so that he could be himself. Forge himself into who he wished to be.

Omega had Weil's work, and Wily's, channeling him, harnessing him. There was nothing in this place but X and X's will, except Phantom and, "The dark elf?" Of course. Damn it, he should have known. If X could conceal Zero, he could conceal the dark elf. Where were they, anyway-Oh, X had got to be kidding him. Seriously? Seriously?

Phantom's head sunk into his hands.

"Phantom?" X asked, concerned, the cage vanishing with a thought because it was a thought. "Are you alright?"

"You were here the entire time?" Phantom realized that he was almost whining pitifully, but he couldn't help himself. They had gone frantic looking for X, he'd scoured the world, practically torn Neo Arcadia apart and the entire time, the entire time, X had been in the very center of the same city that prayed for his return.

"You can tell where we are?" X was surprised, and perhaps there was a flash of worry, there and gone.

Phantom didn't know if he wanted to be touched that X had never truly left them or if he wanted to curl up into a ball and die of shame. Or bang his head repeatedly against one of those crystals. "The Sanctum of Yggdrasil?" It was attached to X's private quarters, and no one went there, no one, without X. It wasn't just a memorial, it was the system that held the remnants of this world together, and where better for X to keep the dark elf than close to him, somewhere he spent enough time that his energy signature would block detection of the dark elf's?

That meant he'd kept the dark elf near him since the end of the second Elf War, which was blindingly obvious, in hindsight. It was by watching X that he'd learned what a good strategy it was to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. Forget what X had done by offering Weil's Numbers a chance to have new lives and make up for what they had been used to do as the Eight Gentle Judges: Wily had built an unstoppable super-robot-android-elf-thing to kill X, and X had made it his best friend, his partner-in-arms, his other half.

"I knew I'd be safe here," X said, clearly trying to help him feel better.

Yes, safe. In the center of Neo Arcadia, the city Phantom and the others guarded. In the building where Phantom lived. The one he'd thought he knew like the back of his hand, the one he and his forces constantly patrolled.

Right. Under. His Nose.

This entire time.

The entire time.

His principle, the person he'd chosen to protect, and he hadn't known. He hadn't even suspected. He didn't even know how it was possible, there weren't any secret compartments, or, or… He'd mapped every inch of this place, there were sensors everywhere…

He had utterly, utterly failed. This was just… he felt like he should commit seppuku, or turn in his ninja merit badge and right to be called a bodyguard to someone, because he had just utterly lost his right to consider himself such.

Stupid, stupid, stupid…

And X was looking at him in that worried for him but utterly clueless as to why he was upset way, with that fresh-faced, innocent, general goodwill, that made him look like a human not even done with high school. The one that had made Zero comment, sotto voice, that X was the oldest person on the planet and still looked like jailbait. That had been decades ago and if anything it was even truer now, because this projection of X looked waif-like in that robe-thing.

Phantom had grown used to being the one that knew everything. The one that could find out the others' secrets. Leviathan assuming that of course he knew what was going on with Harpuia was not an isolated incident. He knew why Harpuia and Levaithan were the only ones X had told that Dr. Wily, and hence Zero, were the origins of the virus, while he and Fefnir had been told that they'd just discovered that Zero was a proto-elf while they were researching his immunity and used that to create a true elf and so on. He'd started to pride himself on his abilities when an investigator should abandon pride, keeping in mind the amount they didn't know and how they could be wrong. A guard should never make assumptions.

Alright, normally he avoided this kind of juvenile language, but there was no way around it:

He had just been owned. By his own dad. X had just set up shop right under Phantom's nose, protecting the dark elf, and he'd not only known that Phantom would be unable to find him, he'd turned Phantom's abilities into an asset, another level of concealment.

Wasn't it X that had told him that one should try to turn the enemy's strengths into one's own strengths? Turn their abilities as well as their weaknesses into advantages? In hindsight, he wanted to kick himself. Sure, it should be impossible for X to be here, but this was X! He should have thought of the problem of where X would go in terms of where was the place that best suited X's purposes, not just somewhere to run and hide!

"Well, um, why don't we head over there?" X asked, to end the awkward moment. "Have you told anyone else where I am yet?"

"No, Master X," Phantom answered automatically, barely paying attention.

"Good," X said, and smiled a smile that didn't ring any alarm bells in Phantom's head.