September - January 759:

Following the incident in Insomnia—and what followed—word of Reina's preference of company spread through Lestallum. She had little doubt who was responsible. Ignis would never have uttered a word without her approval, Iris had only redoubled her efforts as Shield since then, and Cor—in spite of the long, searching looks he now shot her—was as staunchly loyal as ever. No, it was none of them. Her retinue. Such as they were, now.

It was Noct's.

Not that it mattered. So people whispered when she passed by and looked a little more afraid and a little less awed; so her council shot each other covert glances whenever the subject of Ardyn came up. What did she care? All it did was multiply her sense of 'otherness,' and she was already encouraging that. Let them talk. She didn't need a pearly white reputation. She just needed to get them through this in one piece.

It hardly helped matters—or it did, just not in her favor—that every time she drew power from the ring and let that raw energy pour through her, the cracks in her skin faded more slowly. The first time they had vanished almost at once. Then it took minutes, then hours, then days until they lasted right up until the next time she opened them up again. And then they deepened. And they darkened. And she was marked, all across her skin in faint, spindly scars.

For now, they were only noticeable in the right light. But when she was in the right light, people stared.

It bothered the others more than her. Ignis walked through the streets at her side and clenched and unclenched his fists at the quiet conversations her presence stirred. Iris made sure that Reina knew exactly what people thought of her—as if it would change the path she walked. And Cor—even though he wondered, even though he struggled through his own growing doubts of her—had been seen sharply telling off anyone who spoke ill of her.

If she could have, she would have spared them that. Indeed, she did try—if they stopped caring about her like she wanted, they wouldn't have to suffer through this. All she could do—beyond continuing to push them all away—was bear it and wait. Eventually, they would give up. Eventually, they would join the ever-expanding crowd of people who wondered exactly which side she was on.

She had more pressing concerns than being liked.

Diminishing food stores necessitated more hot houses. More hot houses meant more energy spent, and the number of meteorshards coming in through the Glaives was not increasing.

Holly's two-year estimate until their meteorshards ran out dropped to one year.

They debated for hours on solutions. More resources were invested in rebuilding Galdin to recover the fishing port. Several fledgling attempts at animal husbandry sprung up across Lucis—though they suffered from the same issue, given that any livestock would need to be fed and that food would have to be grown.

Unnecessary energy usage was cut to the limit while they worked on the problem. They needed floodlights at every outpost, but it wasn't necessary any longer to rely on those solely. The new walls let them cut those lights by half. Indoor lighting was also severely constrained, diminishing toward one light bulb lit per household at any one time. Most other electronics were expressly forbidden—though as the fall wore on into winter, that presented a potential problem for heating.

A few years ago, Lestallum's residents might have squeezed by in winter without ever turning on a heater. Now, with the sun blacked out permanently, the summers were growing ever milder and the winters ever colder. The cooler parts of Lucis had it worse, still. The whole council knew they wouldn't be able to restrict heating forever; for now they distributed thick blankets and coats, and set crews to harvesting wood for fires. All the trees were dead, anyway.

That was another problem altogether—and not one that Reina had been altogether prepared to encounter. The food and electricity they had always known would cause trouble. But no one had ever much considered what would happen when every tree on Eos was dead—no sunlight to grow by.

It stopped raining—not altogether, but substantially enough that fresh water rapidly became another struggle. She hadn't even known that trees caused rain—or, as Sania repeated in ever-exasperated tones every time someone mentioned it, attracted rain due to something she eagerly referred to as a 'biotic pump.' Scientific interest aside, it was a problem.

And it was one more thing they needed to spend power on, once the wells ran dry and the groundwater grew increasingly murky—just one more way they took trees for granted.

Needless to say, between the more domestic concerns and the ever-present threat of the daemons, Reina's promise to keep everyone safe until Noctis' return was growing increasingly complicated to keep.

No amount of power granted by the Lucii would keep her people fed. No number of spectral arms would keep them from freezing to death. For their part in this, she hated the Astrals more than ever. Every time a child went to bed hungry, every time a parent succumbed to the scourge while Sania's inoculation idled along, Reina cursed them. This was their fault.

And they weren't even going to lift a finger to help.

These were the troubles she brought to her father at night, in those brief moments she had in which to shut her eyes. Some days, the physical world hardly felt real. Some days, she wondered if that wasn't the Dream and the dark moments in the emptiness of the In-Between wasn't reality. It felt closer to who she was—whatever that meant, now.

From the In-Between, the long night in a world without her family just looked like a nightmare. Here, she could wake from that bad dream and find herself in Insomnia with her father at her bedside. So she did.

In the months and years leading up to The Fall, Reina had hardly ever slept in that bed. But she opened her eyes and stared up at her bedroom ceiling as if she was seventeen again.

This world didn't roll around, tossing her backward at irregular intervals. It streamed forward, seamless, solid, real. It wasn't too sharp or too loud or too empty. It had just the right number of other people in it:

One.

"A bad dream, and you did not even allow me to wake you?" Her father smiled down at her and it was just the same as it had always been.

Here she could be. Here she could feel.

She opened her mouth to tell him off for teasing her. Instead, her vision blurred and the tears spilled—hot, endless, with no rhyme but too much reason.

"Everything is—" Her voice quivered and cracked. She shut her eyes and tried again. "Everything is a bad dream in that world, Father."

"Oh, Reina, my dear…" He gathered her up in his arms, just like he had done when she was ten and couldn't sleep at night for fear of the dark and the Dreams.

She curled against him. Then she gathered up all the hurt, all the loneliness, all the emptiness, all the darkness, all the pain, all the stress, and all the strain. And she let them go. They drained out of her in a torrent, making her choke on her own breath. She traded emotional pain for physical until everything ached and she couldn't muster one more tear to drop.

He held her; he smoothed her hair back and kissed her head; he rubbed slow circles on her back, even after she had quieted.

This.

This was the real world.

Maybe she always thought she was Dreaming because she always was. Of course she couldn't tell the difference. Everything in that world was fake. Just a bad dream that she had to keep returning to because she needed to see how it ended.

There was no such thing as a world in which her father was gone. It was not real.

Reina rested her head against his shoulder and held onto the front of his suit; it was all wet with tears, anyway, what did it matter if she wrinkled it, too? His coat scratched against her cheek—like his beard when he kissed her forehead. Wool never was quite soft, no matter how fine they spun it. He smelled like he always did—like earth and soap—like his room always did. Once, half the things she owned had smelled like him, too.

"My dearest, you are so strong. Stronger than I ever was."

She shook her head and buried her face against his collar. "You wouldn't say that if you could see…"

"I see enough. I see Lucis lit by your light. I see the sacrifices you make. That is never easy—by now you must know that it never will be. But you are too strong to give in."

She didn't feel it.

"They all hate me."

The whispers on the streets. The long looks across the council table. They didn't bother her, she told herself.

"It is not a monarch's job to be liked. Sometimes the world demands that you set aside public opinion for the greater good. A good queen is so rarely a good woman."

She looked up at him and he down at her. He smiled. It was a melancholy smile as he brushed his thumb over her cheek, but it was a smile.

"Alas, you spent many years striving to be loved. That you were so successful only makes it more difficult to experience the opposite," he said.

"I was not successful."

"No? Do you truly believe that, or are you merely feeling contrary, tonight?" This smile was teasing. "My dear, most everyone loved you. Perhaps because you followed directions a sight better than your brother, or because you were so often friendly and agreeable—even if not outgoing. None of those traits, however, is favorable for a ruler in dark times. But you must remember: the ones who matter will never change their minds. They see what is underneath."

"Like Ignis?"

"Like Ignis. Like your brother. And, most of all, like myself; for I will swear to the ends of Eos that none could love you as much as I do."

Her eyes found a few stray tears that hadn't yet fallen—just enough to blur her vision—but she smiled.

He was the only one who mattered.


While Reina warred against Eos, Cor held her army against the daemons. While she kept everyone fed and clothed, he did his part to keep them safe. And while she turned a blind eye on the whispering and the staring, Cor lashed out.

He told himself it was because he stood beside her, no matter what.

He told himself it was because he believed in her.

Not because he couldn't stand to hear his own suspicions whispered by anyone else. Not because he hoped that by silencing the others he could silence himself. Not because every time someone looked doubtfully on her it felt like looking straight into a mirror and he hated it.

He had sworn to stay by her side until the bitter end and the night was far from over. But how could he have these doubts if he was what he was meant to be? Ignis still believed in her; Iris still stood firm. Why couldn't he?

He tried.

He struggled against everything he was and had ever been. He struggled because she had taught him—she had shown him—that the only way to truly be, was without walls or inhibitions. He struggled because he should have told her, because they were meant to tell each other everything. He struggled because she didn't. He struggled because she wasn't the same and every time he looked at her he had this horrible, writhing sensation—like he had swallowed a bowl of snakes—that there was someone else wearing her skin.

She spoke to the Lucii, so she spoke to Regis.

She hadn't told him that.

She controlled the ring, so she had overcome whatever challenges they posed.

She hadn't told him that.

She spoke with Ardyn—casually—so they had spoken before. Casually.

She hadn't told him that.

And with each new thing he learned from someone besides her, he wondered:

What else was she keeping from him?

After all that time. After everything they had been through, after cold shoulders and misunderstandings, after icing each other out and refusing to communicate, after shouting matches and lectures. After learning what happened when they didn't. After connecting. After realizing they were really much the same.

She had turned around and thrown it all away.

Even that wasn't as bad as the alternative that Weskham offered. Unspoken, but lingering every time they caught eyes across the table.

"Whatever you say, I cannot believe she did that," Cor said, fed up of the look that was boring holes in the back of his skull.

"I haven't said anything." Wes still sounded the same. Nothing ever bothered that level-headed ass.

"You know what I meant."

"If you are referring to the open question of what, exactly, our princess-regent gave Ardyn in exchange for the ability to see Regis again—"

"You have no proof that she did anything of the sort. Until you do, this is nothing but slander."

Weskham only shrugged in that infuriatingly placid way.

"She would not gamble away lives on the off chance to see her father again no matter how much she misses him." Missed him. Even if she hadn't admitted it, Cor knew she was speaking to him. He only wished she would have said so.

"I can see I won't change your mind," Weskham said, making it perfectly clear that he fully expected Cor would change his mind. He straightened his vest and turned away. "I'll be in Caem if you need me."

Cor fought back the urge to grab him and beat the tranquility out of him. He also stopped himself from shouting after: 'She would never—'

Who was he trying to convince? Weskham? Or himself?

Cor didn't see her again until the next morning when he went looking for her in the training hall. By that time the doubts were eating away at him. He found her alone, as he usually did at that hour—too early even in an age when dawn didn't exist.

"Cor." She glanced at him over her shoulder before dropping back into a push-up.

"Reina." And he stood there awkwardly in the doorway, trying to sort out what to say. For a little while, it hadn't been so hard to talk to her. Now he felt a constant pressure to say something that she wouldn't disregard off-hand. Usually he failed.

"If you have something to say then say it." She hadn't moved but to put her chest to the floor five more times while he hesitated.

Gods take him if he let himself fall back into the habit of stumbling around what he wanted to say.

"I am struggling to reconcile what I know of you with your behavior, these past months."

He watched her drop once, twice more. "What would you like me to do about that?"

"Give me some reason to trust you! I want to help you. I said I would stay at your side and I mean to—I was unable to save your father and your brother is out of my reach, but I would give my life in your service if only you would let me."

"I don't want you life, Cor." It took her that long to even sound strained with effort.

"Then what would you have of me?"

"Put your loyalty in Lucis, not in me." She slowed, stopped, and sat back on her heels, still not looking at him.

It wasn't the answer he wanted but he tried to take it, anyway. If she told him to remain loyal to the kingdom rather than the person, wasn't that reason to trust her? She picked up her towel and dragged it over her face before standing up. For the first time, she turned to look at him. He could see the faint patchwork of scars on her arms and face in the training hall lights.

"What were you doing in Insomnia?" He asked, in spite of his best efforts not to.

"Gathering information."

"About what?"

She only stared at him in that level, empty way. She did that, sometimes, when she didn't want to answer a question.

Cor made a sound of frustration. "Why won't you tell me?!"

"Because I don't want you to know."

Obviously.

"Why?"

She crossed the room toward him, but she didn't stop and she didn't look at him; she just kept moving for the door. Cor made a sound of frustration, turning after her and catching her arm.

"I still love you, damn it! You will never change that."

Reina didn't turn around. But, for a moment, she did pause and he thought—or hoped—he read regret in the downturn of her head, in the slump of her shoulders.

Then she flashed blue and he was left holding nothing.

And, as he watched her walk away, he thought he heard her say,

"I hope you're wrong."