AN: Listen to Sunrises by Secession Studios for appropriate mood music.
Noctis' face was the first she had seen—too young to be real. Everything else came after, all fuzzy and bright and warm with sunshine.
Of the days that followed, she later remembered very little—they were all a blur of sharp images and emotion. She remembered hatred. She remembered a driving need for vengeance; later that was washed out by something softer—the need to preserve those whom she held dear.
She remembered Drautos' last breath. Maybe it was better than he deserved, but with that final exhale came some certainty: he would never hurt anyone ever again. And that was that. Insomnia was safe. Lucis was safe. Niflheim was half crippled. They wouldn't be a bother again. Not for some time.
After that was the gap in her memories. She had no recollection of returning to the Citadel, though she must have done so. She had vague recollections of Cor coming to see her, but it was difficult to tell what had been real and what had not.
Someone tried to take the ring from her. Father. He always was trying to spare her something. She closed her fist as tight as she could manage and mustered enough strength to mumble those few words:
"Don't you dare."
When she woke, she was still wearing it.
The light was the first thing she noticed—streaming in through the window, bright and hot and completely unveiled. She didn't understand what it was, at first. So much light. She could hardly remember a time when that much light had existed on Eos. But there it was, when her eyes adjusted—blinking and aching and protesting the unusual treatment—hanging in a blue sky: the sun. The sun that she was never meant to see again.
The second thing she noticed was the bed—soft and plush all around her. She had been asleep. Asleep long enough to lay down in a bed. The first rarely happened. The second never did.
The ceiling overhead was distantly familiar—like a memory from a dream half-remembered. The grandfather clock to her left, which chimed eleven even as she looked at it, was similarly familiar.
Reina bolted upright. She knew this room. She knew this bed and that clock and the skyline outside. But there was no portrait on the wall behind her, no plaque dedicated in loving memory of a fallen king and father.
A head appeared between the cracked open door and the doorjamb. The face, like everything else, felt familiar but too far away to place. His eyes widened, then the whole head disappeared.
"Your Majesty!"
Reina shut her eyes, tucked one knee up and rested her forehead on it. "Don't call me that," she mumbled automatically.
"She's awake, Your Majesty!"
Footsteps—rapid but uneven and accompanied by the click of a cane and the clank of metal against tile. She knew the sound of those footsteps, too.
The door flew open fully. Reina looked up when it hit the wall and found him standing there. She took a breath and didn't let it go. Her vision blurred. She lifted her hands and covered her stinging nose and open mouth.
"Reina," he breathed, as if he didn't believe it any more than she did.
Reina shook her head. The tears fell. He was at her side faster than she remembered him ever being able to move, gathering her up into his arms and letting her cry into his chest. Every emotion she hadn't dared to feel in the days before—that first time she had woken, that first time she had seen his face again, the first time she had realized that this, this was real and she could tell the difference—now it came flooding out of her. Mostly it was relief and elation—but there was panic and terror and uncertainty all mixed up in greater or lesser parts until she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
She cried.
She cried for the ten-year-long Dream, thankful it would never happen and regretful that it never had. She cried for her father—still alive. She cried for Insomnia and home. She cried for the warm bed and the stupid stuffed chocobo across the hall. She cried because no one here would ever know what sort of person she had become—for better or for worse.
She cried up until the memories of the night before came back more clearly. Then she sat up so suddenly that she knocked her head on her father's chin.
"Cor," she said.
"Safe," he said without hesitation. "And increasingly annoyed that you had not woken up."
"And Ignis? Iris?"
"Both fine—"
"Noct?"
"Quite well—"
"Clarus?"
Her father lifted his hand to quiet her. "I can see this will be faster if I answer all at once: there were some few deaths in the city—civilians, Crownsguards, gate guards—and they are being seen to. So far as I am aware, none were in any way acquainted with you. Our friends have sustained some injuries; most will heal in time and leave them none the worse for the wear. It seems likely that Cor's knee will never completely recover—" Reina opened her mouth and he reinforced his desire for her to remain quiet. "—but the doctors assure me that he is much too stubborn to not regain his mobility, nevertheless. Given the circumstances, I refuse to accept your sympathy for him."
He tapped his knee brace pointedly with his cane. Then he smiled—a teasing smile—she had forgotten what that looked like. "Cor will be fine. The only other lingering concern is with Clarus—who sustained a back injury; he is currently not walking. It remains to be seen whether he will do so again."
Clarus! All those years he had lain in the treaty room, killed by his own sword. At least the sword had never come, this time. But she should have—
"None of these things are your fault," her father said, guessing where her thoughts strayed. "You have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I guarantee that both Cor and Clarus would willingly give both legs for that."
"Niflheim has retreated in full. The only remaining ships are those you and Cor brought down; the only remaining imperials are those you struck bargains with." He raised an eyebrow at her. "Though I am loath to allow them to walk freely in the city, both the commander and the chancellor have refused every suggestion of departure, insisting that they will speak with you before they take their leave of Lucis. Lady Lunafreya, meanwhile, has the unique circumstance of being tied to no one for the first time in twelve years; she remains as well, though she seems disinclined to abandon her opinions of you." The deepening of the creases between his eyebrows made clear his displeasure. For some reason, warmth surged through her at that.
"The Old Wall put itself to rights after you lost consciousness; all save the Mystic, who is still missing. I have had curious reports which claim to have found a portion of his head amidst a pile of rubble and stone dust near the west gate. I cannot fathom what might have done that to him, but I suspect King Somnus was one of the casualties of the empire's last push against us."
Ardyn. She had some distant recollection of him being near and then not. Had he gone to visit vengeance on his brother, even while Reina extracted her own?
"As for Insomnia itself, the city is in great disarray, but we are putting it to rights, piece by piece. Your brother has been uncharacteristically helpful in that. Sometimes a prince requires dire circumstances before he accepts his fate. Young Ignis, Gladiolus, and Prompto have all been doing their best by him, though I have noted Ignis lurking beyond my door on more than one occasion. Perchance he hoped to glimpse you."
He smiled and smoothed her hair back from her face. She couldn't make her face remember what it felt like to smile for real, so she only leaned against him and breathed in his scent.
Later, when she was thinking and breathing again, once she had washed ash and soot and blood from her hair and traced the faint lines of burn-scars down her arms and neck, once she had checked her eyes in the mirror to make sure they were not bleached with magic, they all gathered together.
For the first time in ten years, Reina ate a meal and enjoyed it.
Insomnia was a mess, but it was still salvageable. No buildings had come down. The casualties had been surprisingly few. Lucis was still Lucian. The empire was fled. Drautos and the emperor were dead. And everyone was still alive.
Father. Noctis. Clarus. Cor. Ignis. Iris. All alive and whole and hale. She never wanted to be apart from them again.
AN: Ahhh! Only one story left in the whole series! Thank you so much for joining me on this wild ride of a fix-it fic. I hope you'll stick around for the last leg of it. Of everything, it was definitely the shortest, simplest, and most straight-forward story. Part of that was due to not writing anything in Reina's POV until the very end. I initially tried writing from her perspective and realized I couldn't have her processing what was happening without absolutely destroying the fast pace and tone of this story. So I wrote everything from outside, leaving everyone wondering wtf is going on in her head. The answer, as revealed in this chapter, is 'very little.' She does not process anything that has happened during this story. She hasn't faced down the reality that the last ten years of her life never happened.
Yet.
We do that next. ;)
Reckoning is up now (or it should be very soon). If it's not there when you're done reading this, set a timer for like 30 minutes and check back. Sometimes ffn has a delay like that.