The barracks were surprisingly quiet this time of day, most of the members of Team Elma out for one reason or another. Most, save for Soteka, who was looking over the details of a cavern on the western end of Noctilum. "In the tunnels, huh…?" he thought to himself. "Looks like we'll have to get to it on foot." It had been a couple weeks since the Lifehold Core had been secured, with many BLADEs using this opportunity to take things a bit easier, but the Harrier instead kept himself busy as usual.

… Even so, Soteka finds himself glancing around the empty living quarters with a small frown. Apparently he just missed Elma and Tatsu, the two having gone to their separate meetings about what to do now that the Lifehold is theirs. Lin left not long after he arrived, headed for the Industrial District to help with something and leaving Soteka by himself for the afternoon. Well, despite all that happened with the Lifehold and being hailed as heroes because of it (much to his chagrin thanks to a certain lobster-themed bomber), they've all been plenty busy with planning out what to do next. Perhaps even more so…

Soteka shook his head, trying to turn his focus back to the reports on the comms device before him. The door to the Barracks soon slid open, however, snapping Soteka out of his thoughts and prompting him to look up from the couch to see who had entered. Heels clacked against the floor as a pale-skinned woman rounded the corner to the main space with a sigh, her crystalline hair shimmering faintly under the lights. "Oh, Elma," Soteka greeted. "Didn't think you'd be back so soon."

Elma raised a brow in surprise, before a small smile formed on her lips. "I could say the same." That smile shifted to a smirk soon enough, though, as she moved around to sit on the couch across from Soteka. "It's rare to see you in the barracks while the sun is still up. Nowadays, I'd find you in the Commercial District with Mia or H.B., or out hunting with Gwin and Yelv."

"Ah, well." Soteka scratched his chin and set his device on the table. "I figured I could take a bit of a break, at least before I head back out again. Lin left a while ago, though. Said she was meeting up with Alexa in the test hangar for some 'routine maintenance'," he remarked with air quotes.

"'Routine maintenance', huh?" Elma repeats, the two chuckling. "Honestly, it's a miracle we're able to get either of them away from a Skell for long. But I suppose as Outfitters, it's part of the job."

"Heh, yeah. Speaking of jobs, uh…" The Harrier rubbed the back of his neck, mentally kicking himself for the awkward transition. "How was the meeting? I-If you can talk about it."

Elma crossed her arms and leaned back on the couch. "It's not exactly classified, considering you all were there. We were just discussing what to do about the Lifehold's… destruction." The hesitation in her voice was prominent: none of them really liked to think about such a thing. Their hope for Humanity, the very thing supposedly keeping them all alive, was broken down. Gone. "It isn't something we can just announce to the people of New LA, but we can't just keep quiet about it forever."

"Mm…" Soteka clasped his hands and looked down, unsure what to say as his mind turned down a road he's been doing his best to ignore.

"… I understand your hesitation in asking," Elma spoke up, clutching her arms and glancing aside with a slight grimace. "Us higher-ups kept a lot of secrets about the Lifehold," she started, unfolding an arm to look at the iridescent white of her true self, "and I can only imagine the toll it's taken on you and the others, but now you know everything we know."

"Right…" Soteka didn't look up, and for a moment didn't move much from his head-held-low posture. The silence that followed was unnerving, yet at the same time irritating to them both. After what felt like forever, though, he reached for his device once more.

Elma opened her mouth to speak, a stern look on her face ready to interrogate the man before her, when it finally clicked for her. Why Soteka had been working so hard lately, why he was rarely in the barracks during the day, and why he spoke so little of the Lifehold now despite all their efforts in finding it and his seeming eagerness in doing so. He wasn't avoiding them, like she believed, otherwise he wouldn't show up for dinner, or help them out in the Test Hangar or with training recruits.

"… This… isn't about the secrets, is it…?" Elma asked, her voice adopting a softer tone of voice. Soteka's hand freezing over the device was all the answer she needed. "We hadn't talked about it for a while now, and you've become so comfortable and confident with yourself and your duties as a BLADE that I assumed…"

"… Yeah…" Soteka retracted his hand and clutched his knees. "Everyone would talk about their old lives on Earth, the foods and places they miss, the family they left behind…" He remembered clearly how his friends looked whenever they brought it up. Lin's resolve, Frye and Phog's fondness, Irina's regret. All of them filled with remorse. "I always felt out of place whenever they were brought up, y'know…? Maybe part of me understood, but could I really? Even you, Elma, you remember what Earth was like. Earth, and… your old homeworld."

"Soteka…" While there was the longing for her previous life, what happened was decades ago, and right now, Elma could only feel a pang of guilt as she listened to him. Was he bottling this up all this time? Seeing that he finally looked up, worried that he might have overstepped a boundary, she simply nodded to let him continue.

Soteka shifted in his seat a bit, his gaze shifting downward again. "When we started accepting the other races into NLA, I got… curious. I wanted to know more about Earth, so I started reading up on the archives we managed to save from the Ganglion, but that could only give so much…" He looked back up at Elma, fully this time. "That's kinda why I wanted to help find the Lifehold. It's kinda selfish, yeah, but I did still want to find it to save humanity from dying out. I was just hoping that getting my real body would have given me my memories back. I could finally understand what was so special about Earth. But…" Soteka's hands began to shake, and his gaze fell once more. "Not only was there no body for me, or any of us, but the database with everyone's consciousness and memories was trashed. All of it, ever since we crashed onto Mira. Whatever memories I could've had are gone." His voice began to raise. "I- I don't even know if I'm supposed to exist. I shouldn't exist. I mean, how can I if the Lifehold was gone long before I woke up?"

"And yet, you do exist." Elma got up to sit next to Soteka. "I don't know how you came to be, but you do."

"Who am I, then?" Soteka looks over to her, tears welling up in his eyes. "What am I, if not just some fake person in someone else's body."

Elma places one hand on his shoulder and the other over his to ease the shaking. "You are Soteka, a renowned and skilled Harrier that I rescued from Starfall Basin nearly a year ago. As the human saying goes, you wear your heart on your sleeve with your willingness to help others. You're able to keep H.B. from stepping out of line while pushing him to do his best. You helped Mia to become a proper member of Blade all on your own, despite her apparently stealing a Skell in the process. You and Doug have tested Lin's flight module when no one else would because you believed in her. You helped Ni Zain become a chef and found a concerning tolerance for spice to rival your sweet tooth." She couldn't resist cracking a small smile now, chuckling softly before adding, "You lost a Skell once because you, and I quote, 'understand now why everything returns to crab'. I still don't understand what that means."

A small smile crept onto Soteka's face as he wiped his eyes with his free hand.

Though the chuckling stopped, the smile stayed on Elma's face. "Even if you don't have any memories of Earth, you've made plenty of memories here on Mira. You've proven your existence to the world… And that makes you just as real as the rest of us."

Soteka looked into Elma's eyes now, their purple hue a significant change from the blue he had been used to, but still holding the same caring look from the day he woke up all those months before. "I… I don't know what to say, I…" He stopped and shook his head, already knowing what to say. "… Thank you, Elma. I guess… a part of me wanted to know I had family so I could relate to the others. But I know I have a family: you all." He sat up now, the confidence that shattered when the Reclaimers returned from the Lifehold starting to return to him as his smile grew. "You, and Lin, and Doug, Irina, Gwin, and L. Even Tatsu. You're all my family, and I wouldn't want it any other way."

Elma's smile matched his as she nodded, gently rubbing his shoulder. "That's good to hear. Now as your family, I ask if you could extend your 'little break'." She removed her hand from Soteka's, grateful that he's calmed down now. "I'm not normally one to tell others to hold off on a mission, but it's best to clear your head every so often so you aren't charging off to your death out there."

Before Soteka could say anything further, the barracks door opened again with footsteps following after. "We're back!" Lin announced, Tatsu waddling in behind her. She stopped, though, when she rounded the corner to find Soteka and Elma sitting with each other, raising an eyebrow. "Oh- Are we interrupting something?"

Tatsu just barely stopped himself from walking into Lin, looking up at the two. "Were friends busy while we were gone?"

"No, not at all." Elma shook her head, lowering her hand. "In fact, you're just in time. Soteka here was telling me how he considered us his family."

"Aww, really?" Lin brightened up at this, coming closer to the two. "You think of us as family?"

A faint blush formed on Soteka's face at this, though he knew he couldn't try and deny it as he rubbed his neck. "Well, yeah… I don't remember much of anything about Earth, but with my time on Mira and with you all, I don't think there's any other way I can put it." He smiled at the three now, repeating what he said to Elma just moments ago, "You're my family."

"Yeah, of course." Lin smiled back, though it quickly turned devious. "Although, teeechnically if we are, then you'd be my little brother."

"L-Little brother?!" Soteka sputtered out. "No way, I'm older than you."

"Oh, how splendid! Tatsu finally have siblingpon that don't confuse Tatsu for Dadapon." With that, the Nopon began to do a little jig. "Tatsu do dance of family."

Lin simply hummed in thought, placing a finger on her chin. "No, I'm pretty sure thirteen is older than one."

Elma could only giggle at the banter between the two, leaning back while they playfully argued. Even though he didn't have any memories of his past, the memories he's made in the present are just as important. Both his own, and of those around him.


Author's Note: This is a bit out of the blue, huh? To tell you the truth, this was something I had in my backlog ever since I finished the original game on the Wii U. I don't think I played a game with as wild an ending like that before, and it's part of why Xenoblade Chronicles X had been on my mind so long. Also, in case it wasn't clear, Soteka is the Cross in this story. I considered just using Cross for the name, but this story was something of a personal project for me.

The original draft I wrote up back in 2017 was significantly different than what I ended up putting here, being a lot shorter and more of a script I intended to make a little comic out of, and leaned a bit more into the weird psychological mystery of who Cross, the player character, is. Though I wish I could say what I was cooking back then, because it ultimately was left unfinished. And with the Definitive Edition showing that Elma had indeed showed the others what she found down in the Lifehold's database, as opposed to the original leaving it up to the player's interpretation, I decided to go a bit of a different direction. You can thank my growing interest in the Tales series for this one, namely Tales of the Abyss for obvious reasons.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see y'all next time.