In which the plot ends, of course for a given value of plot. I'm not happy about the… nevermind, you can review with concrit and spot it for me. There'll be a several years later epilogue-thing next weekend: I'm posting this in sections per recent usual.

-

"So… What do you think about Luke and Asch kissing and making up?" Guy wasn't sure how to feel about it.

"Well…" Natalia didn't know either. "I suppose that it's not very likely that Asch is pretending all this. It seems real, and dramatic. Like Luke's change after Akzeriuth." Only with a new wardrobe instead of a haircut. Luke liked long hair on men. And nice abs. Natalia wasn't complaining.

"If he hurts her I'll kill him, but that would be after the fact, you know?" Guy would rather keep it from happening in the first place, which was why he had given Asch that death threat as a deterrent.

Asch had growled at him to get in line, and it looked like the first one in that line would be Asch himself.

"Yes, of course," Natalia agreed, although she was mostly thinking about something else. "He's acting a lot like… No, he simply doesn't know what he's doing. I suppose, considering the others… There was nothing there but hate. I don't think he knows how to show that he cares unless it's to manipulate and lie, as Van did. He seems embarrassed. It's not just shyness." She had hoped it was that, when she and Asch were attempting to find their way back to understanding each other, trying to regain what they'd had as children. "How strange. I always thought that Asch, or my Luke, and I would be together, and you and this Luke, even if as servant and master, and here we are. Or, I suppose not exactly. They are planning to raise the child together, and I can't see them… Of course it is possible that they'll not get married, in fact would it even be legal? Our country's laws will need to be changed to account for replicas…"

Marriage. Of course, Guy obviously wanted children, and he wasn't going to let them be illegitimate, so of course he was going to get married, but even if he was technically a duke his duchy had sunk into the miasma and there was now not much but scythed-bare islands with a permanent storm over them left of the Hod Archipelago. Well, yeah, there were Feres' ruins and the replicas there, which he was going to take responsibility for, of course, but Natalia was the future Queen of Kimlasca and… Well, who was she going to marry? If she wasn't the rightful heir then Asch was, but Asch had repudiated his family ages ago and his claim to the throne recently. Natalia really should marry back into the royal family, not even a, um…

Was Guy technically a Malkuth nobleman? He'd never personally sworn any oaths and you couldn't really get more broken a king-liegeman oath than what Malkuth had done to Hod. Which essentially meant that Feres, and Guy, were independent. So, if he married Natalia, one of their kids would be the next Duke of Hod/Feres, and so Kimlasca would have title to the place.

That would probably be enough of an incentive for the king and nobles to go for it. He'd probably be stuck with Prince Consort to a Queen Regnant instead of King, but…

He was 22, Natalia was 18, so… And if they had kids, they could play with Luke's, and… "Um, Natalia?"

"What is it, Guy?"

"Um…" Was there some way to ask a woman if it was okay to ask her to marry him? Maybe Jade would know, he'd been raised a commoner. Nobles were engaged as children and didn't have to worry about this. The last thing you wanted was to be in love with your spouse. If you were in love with them then you could fall out of love and that sort of thing led to wars. Of course, most commoners married who the Score told them to also, so maybe that wouldn't help.

Were they even compatible? Let's see, she was hot, and competent, and really helpful with the whole phobia thing. If she could put up with that she could put up with the rest of his quirks, probably. Like the whole fontech thing, she was fine with that. If he could use it for public works projects she'd be all for it, even, and that meant he could do really cool stuff with fontech… Oh yeah, there was a biggie. "How many children would you want to have? I mean, theoretically."

"Hmm… Well, at least two, obviously." The traditional heir and a spare. "And I want a daughter, of course, and I always wanted a sister," so four, "and obviously the Lanvaldear style needs to be passed on. Luke and I were only children, so we wanted to have a huge family. And if I married a noble their family line would have to continue as well." For instance, Luke or Asch was the next Duke of Belkend. "Is there any particular reason you're asking?" Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

"What a coincidence, I always wanted to have a lot of kids too. Hey, if you had a son first, and they married Luke's daughter, wouldn't that solve the succession problem?"

"Well, I don't think we should order people to marry each other anymore. That is obviously one of the Score-bound traditions that need to be discarded. And women mature faster than men, so if my son were too much younger than Luke's daughter he would probably be far too juvenile to interest her." Marry someone around five years older than you if you want decent conversation: that noblewoman's truism had really been hammered into Natalia by the entire Luke situation. Well, Asch was only one year younger than her, but it seemed to be a significant one. "What about you, Guy? What would you think about Luke becoming an in-law that way?" Luke would be Guy's cousin-in-law if he married Natalia.

"Well, we're already family. No harm in making it official." So… okay. "There's a bit of a problem, though. The Gardios' family's jewelry got looted, including the ring my father gave my mother."

"I could look through the records and find out what happened to them, Guy. In fact, I'll do that as soon as we next visit Baticul."

Okay, so that sounded like a yes. And… "Do you think Asch and Luke would ever tie the knot?" Double ceremony?

"Well, they wouldn't want their daughter to be considered a bastard. If we put it to them that way, then perhaps. Why don't we speak with Aunt Suzanne about that?" As both the mother and future mother-in-law of both parties she would be best able to pressure them.

"That sounds like a good idea."

-

Lorelei was happy.

Oh, it wasn't a happiness derived from laughter at those trapped by fate. It wasn't the self-righteousness he'd actually thought that Lorelei had to possess, that all this was good and going according to plan. It wasn't the knowledge that anything would turn out okay.

There was still the deep mourning that Van had sensed from Lorelei since absorbing it. There was still the self-hate and the hopelessness that came from both the Score it was (trapped by) and Van dooming it and the world whose memory it was.

Or perhaps he should say that Lorelei was still desperately unhappy, but there was something that was making it happy, just a little, a fragile delicate joy like what caused it.

Lorelei loved Asch, and the replica as well. Van had been enough entangled with it when it sent them the Key to sense that, the desire to protect them, its precious isofons. The helpless desire. Van had told Lorelei that they were doomed, and Lorelei had not been able to argue.

But this was not in the Score. This was not in his plan. They should have melted into each other and dissolved along with the new manifestation in that very instant, flooding the world with seventh fonon, more than enough to speed Eldrant to completion despite all the damage the replica had done to Van's plan.

Instead, they had not only survived calling into existence a new isofon of Lorelei but decided to keep it. The arte they had cast had been broken and the thing still lived.

Perhaps happiness wasn't even the right world. A delight, a bit of, of hope. Hope had brought fear with it, the other side of the coin, and Van enjoyed that, because Lorelei had despaired before and it was hard to torment something that already despaired. Lorelei had grown used to the knowledge that it was doomed and so it was hard to make it suffer any more.

Something beautiful, something precious to it. But then Asch and Luke had always been precious to it. Auldrant had always been. Yet it had known for two millennia that they were doomed. This new life was a new child.

Love, joy, loss, pain.

So he gave up and let it stay awake, for the moment, because the more it hoped, the happier it was, the more he could crush it. Something that had drifted helplessly in the very core for millennia? Didn't have much farther to fall. Also, he could reach along the link somewhat, or more tap into what Lorelei felt, and it was disconcerting.

Eventually, however, Lorelei weakened: reaching them had been exhausting even before he captured it. What it did then was unexpected. "Thank you, Child of Yulia." Its power twined around him both affectionately and sadly as he stood there in shock.

Lorelei was easily sealed away again, and Van should have been grateful, but those words took all the victory out of it. He wanted vengeance, on Lorelei and this world, and it thanked him! He wanted revenge, he wanted an enemy, not someone who…

…just like Asch had wanted to hate the replica Luke and be hated back.

But that thing had no right to see him as a lost child!

-

The way to kill Van was simple, in fact, simple enough it was intolerable to Asch at first. They, Luke and he, had loved Van, mad as he was. They had all loved the man Van had pretended to be, or perhaps tried to be was the better word. The child that had been murdered at Hod, the one used to destroy his home and told that it was his destiny, that all the torment visited on his people was justified because he was a monster and would one day kill them all even before they had decided to force him since he would not, he would never.

Just as Van had forced Luke, in the end. Van had been blamed for Hod, felt guilt and a need to atone for it, but he wasn't responsible any more than Luke had been for Akzeriuth, both their powers forced out of control.

Van had become what they'd tried to make him, the one Van would rather have died than be. The one they couldn't bear to see him as. Asch, Luke, Guy, Tear: they all loved the real Van. And the man they loved, their teacher, friend, brother, had wanted the world's freedom. Had wanted, once upon a time, not to be used to kill.

Asch still wanted to get through to him, to revive the person who had died before Asch had met his ghost. Yet, that person would not want to live with this. Eldrant, this insane scheme, had been the only way he could see to both get vengeance and to atone. If the Score did this, destroyed his home and made children murderers, then the Score needed to be destroyed.

Perhaps if Lorelei were separated from Van, if they captured him, they could fix his mind. That, however, Van would never forgive them for, would be the ultimate perversion of their powers, worse than the Score.

The kindest thing, what Van would have wanted, the way he always told them to be was to just kill him. If someone was your enemy, if they would not change and needed to die for you to do what you must then they needed to die. Guilt would change nothing.

It was speaking with Lorelei, realizing that Lorelei did not want to live either that forced Asch to recognize what their best and perhaps only option was. Lorelei had spent two millennia experiencing the memories of all the score-bound. As a manifestation of the seventh fonon, what Lorelei wanted was for life to continue. Individual identity as a person didn't matter to it the way it did to a human whose self was their own personal self instead of millions of selves, all those who lived, who the fonon protected. Lorelei saw no difference between another person's death and its own. In fact, Lorelei could be said to value its personality less than the life of any peasant in Engave, because if a person died then they died but the fonon that Lorelei was a manifestation of would endure as long as Auldrant did.

For Asch, who had had his identity taken from him and until now hadn't been able to truly realize his own worth as an individual Lorelei's perspective was almost impossible to understand until he managed to think of it as a tree shedding leaves to endure the winter. Lorelei saw itself as a leaf, a manifestation that had come about to save Auldrant from the war that had created the miasma and only managed such a costly delaying action.

Lorelei didn't need to be freed. The fonon needed to be freed from humanity's control, but Lorelei was expendable. Luke couldn't see it that way but Asch was a soldier.

Sacrifices were acceptable for the greater good, but only self-sacrifices. No one had the right to use another as a pawn.

If they used hyperresonance to erase Van, convert him into blank seventh fonon without any self or memories, then he would die. Seventh fonists were said to live on in the fon belt, their personality and memories surviving in the fonons that had been within them while they lived. That legend was true. Van hadn't wanted to spend eternity bearing the guilt for what he had done. Eldrant's hyperresonance would have overwritten everything in order to overwrite the Score and Lorelei, everything including Van's own self.

Asch could understand wanting to die to atone for a crime. Only Van couldn't simply kill himself or get himself killed assassinating the Emperor who had ordered that done to Hod or anything along those lines, not with a baby sister to look after, a world to save, and a power that would force him to endure, carrying his guilt, even after his own death.

They both wanted to see Van again, at least. Say goodbye. But would he have wanted them, anyone to see him like this?

Luke didn't like it. Luke couldn't, not a being of the same nature as Lorelei, the guardian of all. Still Luke had learned how to force herself to kill for the sake of helping those she cared for, and if they waited too much longer Van might give up on the hope of figuring out some way to bring about Eldrant. If that happened, then Van would throw subtlety to the winds and use Lorelei's power to kill as many of the Score-bound fools he hated as he could before he was brought down. It was far, far too easy to destroy with their power.

A good fight, as opposed to an honorable one, was one where the target was never given a chance to fight back, where they never saw you coming, where you were nowhere near the scene of the crime and hence you (and the Order) couldn't be held responsible.

Forget cutting Lorelei out of Van so Van would lose the power that they would like to believe was the only thing that made him too dangerous to live. Forget letting him live, a danger to their world and their child.

The right way to do it was for Luke to fight Lorelei for control of the fonons in Van's body, both the ones that made up Van and those that made up Lorelei, and while Lorelei fought to keep the conflict from setting off hyperresonances that would have destroyed both him and Yulia's child…

Before Van had even an instant to register that something was going on, Asch could use his control of the fonon to force Van into a destructive hyperresonance the way that machine had. So Van could die the way Hod had, his own power turned to calamity.

It was the most logical, the most appropriate, the perfect way no matter how much they hated it.

Lorelei survived. For a few moments they thought that Lorelei would disperse, feeling Van die despite his efforts to protect him (bound by both Yulia's hymn and his own nature) the final failure that would make him decide that the fonon was better off with Luke as its lone sentience.

That Auldrant would be better off without the one who had failed to prevent the war that had ravaged it, whose best effort to preserve it had been such a nightmare.

"I want my daughter to have her family. All of them." As Luke had never had Van's love and now never could.

That was her name? Luke had named her daughter before she'd decided that child's gender… after the world? After what Luke fought to protect, after what Luke had been sealed away from in the manor, after… Everything?

"You don't like it?" The battle might be over, they might be back in their bodies but it wasn't over enough that they had pulled apart, that speaking this way didn't feel more natural, their minds weaving and embracing.

"No wonder you couldn't bear that I wanted to destroy her." She meant that much to Luke, and Asch had tried to destroy her as Van had her namesake. "It's a wonderful name."

"The new world." Lorelei, reaching back to them, to their child. "The world reborn, a new beginning." A tentative smile, a tentative happiness. "But can I be trusted with her?"

"I'm letting Asch touch her, aren't I? I'm a fragment of your soul, our soul, and I'm her mother. You're her family. Maybe we won't be the best family, but you can't pick family." Thoughts of Van leaked from Luke a bit, but they couldn't see the contents. "So we'll all have to do our best for her. We won't let ourselves fail her, I won't. I didn't want to lose Van, but I had to. My daughter will have her family and they will love her for herself. We can't fix the past, but the future is unwritten now. We won't fail that future."

-

A/N: In his final battle Asch says that "It's not about logic!" which is tantamount to admitting that no, he's not sane at all at that point. The battle that he claims is to confirm his identity is really over nothing more than who Van loves more. Even up until the end, Asch never broke free of Van's control. After the end, of course, is another story.

The final battle here might seem anticlimactic, and that's because it is. The climax has already happened, Van is no longer the center of their lives, no longer someone that they should put themselves at risk to give a fair fight. If Luke had used his power more in the game... Luke is, as Lorelei says, Lorelei's equal and own self. Luke is god-mode, and very, very capable of doing any number of nasty things to Van. Instead he fights him as a human, in essence going easy on him, partially due to fear of his power after Akzeriuth, partly due to other issues, and mostly because he fundamentally is still centered around Van because he's a seven year old child and Van is his father/creator. It's not like the party steps up to the plate: they still think he's a teen in every sense but birthdate.

In this, however, Van is their past, they have another future that they value/love more, and I like big bads getting anticlimactic ends (did it in a Legacy of Kain fic), since they puff themselves up so and it's liberating to the characters for them to not matter anymore. It's not a satisfying end to Van, but the issue is that he never satisfied the needs he manipulated them into investing in him, and so doesn't deserve a satisfying end. He deserves to be 'handled' in the way most advantageous to Asch, Luke, and their own needs and priorities.