Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rex might make a crack about the White Void if it wasn’t for the rush of sensation that hits him over the head like a particularly aggrieved Bunnit the second Origin plummets into the center of Aionios.

He’s no stranger to sensation on sensation—that’s what a bond between a Blade and a Driver is, really, a second heartbeat here, a flood of another’s feelings there—but the things that come over him once his place as an Avatar clicks is like that times a thousand. He can see and hear a million different things:

Arduns roaming Rae-Bel Tableland. Snow falling on Captocorn Peak. Those fakes lurking in their stolen Castles. A Kevesi and an Agnian Colony battling it out, oblivious to the fact that their world had just been saved. Said saviors of the world, a distraught Glimmer among them, staring at where Origin had landed. Z watching from a theater. Nia asleep in her Cloudkeep—

Nia…

And more and more and more. Things he can’t even process. Things that seem familiar. Everything and anything. 

Aionios exposed to him, down to its very smallest movements. 

The only movement Nia makes is the near-imperceptible rise and fall of her chest, but the Kevesi and Agnians are snarling like beasts and tearing into each other with as much ferocity, and Matthew is shaking his motley crew into action, and N reappears in a theater with his blank, dead eyes, and the grass crunches under the Ardun’s feet when they walk, and, and, and, and.

Shulk’s hand tightens on his, and Rex hadn’t even clocked that it was there at all, metal joints ice-cold against warm fingers. 

“Rex,” he says, like he’s done a hundred times, and again, “Rex. Rex. Focus on me.”

He doesn’t look too good either, as Rex tries to filter out the other noise and focus on his face. His blue eyes keep darting back and forth and then snapping back to Rex like he has to force them there. But he lifts their joined hands and shifts closer to Rex, and, like in Aionios, he is a grounding force: his cool prosthetic and the warmth of his other hand, coming to cup Rex’s cheek; the tickle of strands of his hair against Rex’s bicep when he leans in; his low voice. Right. OK. Right.

Shulk’s there with him, just like he’s always been. Just gotta get his head back on straight, like he’s had to do for Shulk a million times…

The other visions of Aionios don’t fade, exactly, but they aren’t front and center anymore. He can see Shulk and A and the White Void much more clearly now.

A takes in the two of them and nods, seemingly satisfied.

“Sorry about that,” Rex says, blinking the static out of his vision. 

Shulk rubs his thumb against Rex’s cheek, brief, and drops the hand that was there. “Don’t be,” he replies. “We’re not exactly used to being supercomputers, are we?”

“That what we are now?” 

Though Rex isn’t really asking. Guess it makes sense, if they’re one with Origin now. Just another thing he’ll have in common with the girls when he sees them again.

“In a sense,” says A. A settles next to them, but does not reach out, simply looks with sharp eyes. “We are the Trinity Processor, or, a mimicry of it, for however long there is information that Origin must process.”

There’s silence in the White Void, but not in Rex’s head, with all the sights and sounds still at war with each other in his periphery.

Eventually, Shulk asks, a strange hesitance to it, “Alpha—while you were one, that is—you were doing this all yourself?”

A sees the question for what it is. “As I was in Zanza’s world. As I was in your new world, even when I was in slumber. Alpha only became what he was because here, in this world, he had no one to counterbalance him. He had, and I have, no qualms with being a processor. There is no need to feel guilty.”

“...Right.”

“It is my purpose,” says A, but this only seems to trouble Shulk. 

“It’s rough, though, isn’t it?” says Rex. 

The shapes and sights still flicker in his eye, land and sea and countless people and Moebius and monsters. How A, Ontos  was ever able to process so much information and be able to act as an arbiter at the same time—it’s mystifying. There’s so much to see and hear. So much, even in this tiny, false world.

A appears indifferent. “You will grow used to it. It takes focus—some focus. And time.” Now a slight smile, wry. “And we have nothing but time.”

Rex laughs and squeezes Shulk’s hand, just to remind himself it’s there. Shulk can’t feel it but just seeing Rex do it must be enough, because he pulls himself together and squeezes back.

-

In the time that passes, A tells them to try to focus on different things. To call upon certain places or spaces or people and try to dismiss the others. It takes that time, a lot of it, and it’s not as easy as A makes it look, sitting cross-legged in the White Void they three have made their own and gazing out into nothing, still as can be. Other sights and sounds try to force their way back into Rex’s mind whenever he looks one way or the other.

He breathes in and breathes out, shuts his good eye, and tries to focus in through the sights and sounds and sensation, all flowing in and out. Can’t think too much about it—just gotta feel through. 

Slowly, Nia’s Cloudkeep comes into focus. It’s cold and lonely up here, and the sun’s gone down, casting the place in the moon’s weird pale glow. Behind the golden pod, Poppi whirs and hums like a machine, not with the cheerful voice of a friend. And inside Nia sleeps. She’s silver and pale as the moon, his girl, her sunny eyes shut, her chest only barely rising and falling. He feels strange watching her: he can look close, sure, but it’s like he’s a creep, all of a sudden, not like he’s curled up next to her in bed watching her stir in a dream. Her ears don’t even twitch like they used to. She might as well be—

No. He’s not going there.

Rex keeps watch for some time, a long time, wishing he could let her know somehow. Tell her she’s not alone. Do anything. But no matter how hard he wishes for any sign that she’s noticed him, nothing comes.

Figures.

At least he got a bit of a handle on this whole information overload… none of it’s gone, but it’s not really present, not even the White Void, since he shut Shulk and A out. He’s spent enough time moping for now. He should look somewhere else, see if he’ll still have a handle on things.

He skims through space like Mythra used to be able to skim through books, taking in so much information at once that she could flick through them like nothing. Eventually he settles back on that strange, dark theater, where N is standing alone, staring at the blank screen. It’s inside Origin. Couldn’t be far away at all, and yet the Moebius seems as distant as the image of Glimmer and Nikol and the Ouroboros Stone in his periphery.

Another Moebius flickers into view at his side in motes of light. She’s a Gormotti, with long silver hair and silver armor, and she also looks at the screen with large, golden eyes. She resembles Na’el, actually, the same soft features and wide eyes. Then she turns to touch N’s shoulder, and the light catches on her armor, and Rex for the first time processes her core crystal. It’s a diamond set in the center of her chest, blue stained bright red.

It’s Nia’s.

And all of a sudden he knows. Just like with Glimmer.

It’s Mio.

If Glimmer being a soldier was a nightmare, Mio being a Consul is even worse. Or—she must be M, then. Consul M. Architect above… At least Glimmer, however hard her life had been, had some spark left in her. Mio’s eyes, her once-bright, golden eyes, are so dull and cold he can barely even recognize them as hers.

And her hair—she grew it out. Like when she was a little girl. Well, she never stopped being a little girl; she was barely ten on the day of the Intersection. But weeks before it happened, he remembers, she’d been sitting in front of him in their home away from the castle in Fonsett, letting Rex comb through her hair, and she’d abruptly said, “Da?”

He’d paused. “Yeah, kiddo?”

Mio had clasped her hands in her lap, all polite. “I think… I want a haircut.”

“Oh? Well, you’re due fer a trim, I guess—”

“No,” Mio said, a little loud. “I want it—” She gestured around the middle of her throat. “Here.”

“Oh,” he’d said again, surprised. Then hastily: “Er, that’d look great on you, kiddo! Just like your Mam. Caught me off guard, is all. Y’usually never want it higher than your back.”

Mio turned, her little face scrunched up in determination. “I wanna start training soon! Training to fight, like you and Mam and my Mums! And long hair will only get in the way… so I want it short!”

Rex? told himself his kids weren’t living in a world where they had to fight to survive, like he did. He reassured himself that the three of them were approaching ten, and that age came with big dreams, that’s all. Dreams. So of course he—Rex? —let her cut her hair. He’d sat with her on their porch, with Nia by his side on one of her rare moments of freedom before the Intersection, Rex! the smell of wood wet after rain and the hint of salt from the new sea, and the feel of the breeze on his face—

Rex!

His focus snaps. Shulk kneels in front of him, a hand on his shoulder, presumably about to shake. A sits one leg crossed over the other on a wooden rocking chair—his wooden rocking chair. Behind the two of them is Rex’s yard, and swaying trees, and the distant sea. Stars twinkle above in the night sky. The breeze, the smell of rain and salt. 

Fonsett. His memory.

“Well done,” says A, half-smiling. “You’ve changed the Memory Space.”

“I…” Rex blinks, trying to shake the imprints of his wife and daughter from his eye. “Yeah, I sure did.”

“Must have been a good memory,” Shulk says kindly, removing his hand.

“Yeah,” he says again, still a little disoriented from how real it felt. A water droplet trails from the cracks between the planks that make the porch’s little roof and lands, unceremoniously, on his cheek. A’s smile changes, perhaps widening. Rex huffs, smacking a knee and getting to his feet. “Well. Now that it’s here, y’might as well come inside.”

So they follow him through the strong wooden door and inside. He didn’t get to hang around here too often right before the Intersection. It was their home away from the Castle, away from all of that, really, where Rex could come home and see his aging Aunt and the rest of his family in Fonsett. Where the Castle was large and pristine and white, the house was maybe too cozy for a family of seven, and all wood and stone, flush with rugs on the floor and blankets on couches and low lamps that colored the walls orange. Shulk and A look a little strange standing in the doorway, blue-eyed and curious. A Kevesi and Aionios’ heart in a memory of Alrest.

Not a bad strange. Just. He’d never think of it on his own.

“Take a seat anywhere y’like,” he says. “I wonder if I’ve still got—”

“If it was in your memory, it will be here,” A replies without him needing to even say it. “It is all a construct.”

Right.

As he chops carrots for Pan-Fried Tartari, just like how Pyra used to make it, he angles himself to get a look at Shulk and A with his good eye, through the noise. A leans against the dining table, conversing lowly with Shulk, who keeps looking at the walls and couches and lamps and windows as though they might reveal some hidden secret about Rex. Once, hundreds of years ago, they’d gone to Erythia, their little group, but that wasn’t quite this. The hints of Leftheria there were a half-remembered thing, even more than Shulk made Colony 9 out to be. And Shulk’s always been the curious sort, so Rex doesn’t mind him looking.

Eventually Shulk settles down at the dining table. His flesh hand rubs at his other arm, where metal meets skin, and he’s still talking to A, but looks at neither of these things. The kitchen and the noise in his own mind make it difficult to parse what either of them are saying; Rex isn’t sure they’d want him to.

Sooner or later he’s going to have to really contend with the fact that he’s jealous of them.

Of Shulk, because yeah, Drivers and Blades didn’t exist on the Bionis and the Mechonis, but A’s his Aegis. The way they move in sync and communicate with just a glance, like he and Pyra and Mythra used to do…

Of A, because of the way A slots so easily into Shulk’s life. It’s amazing, it’s refreshing deep in his soul to see even a counterpart to the Driver-Blade relationship in this world. But it reminds him of the core in Matthew’s gauntlets, quiet, waiting, just out of reach. 

Shulk gestures at the shining earring. A shakes A’s head. 

He just—misses that relationship. That bond. Even though he’s never seen Shulk and A so much as kiss, let alone touch for too long, he knows the thing between them is as deep as what he had with Pyra and Mythra.

Has, and will have again once this is all over. He has got to stop thinking in past tense.

Rex knows that Shulk and A spent relatively little time together outside of Aionios, a few months compared to the decades that he got with his own family. But it’s been so long now that it might as well not matter—he and Shulk have both spent more years together than with their Aegises. Have formed their own bond in each other’s empty spaces, which has grown into something more than that. Rex doesn’t need to put a name to it. He’s not that kind of guy. He just needs to feel it, that’s all.

“Alright, here we go,” he says, setting a steaming hot plate in front of Shulk, and the table was not set before, but it certainly is now. “Pan-Fried Tartari! Just like Pyra used to make it.”

A finally pulls out a chair and takes a seat. “Pyra,” A says, testing out the name. “One of Pneuma’s selves. Yes?”

“Strike me—guess I never sat down and told you it all. Well, eat your food first, it’ll get cold.”

Shulk glances up. “It doesn’t have to get cold, does it?”

“It is all a construct,” says A, again. Shulk nods.

“Well, maybe I want it to get cold,” Rex argues. “Just not natural for it to go any other way.”

With Nia always running back and forth from their home to the Castle, Rex isn’t unused to his dinner table not being full, but it is strange to see it this empty. The four other chairs, pushed in tight against the table, put something cold in his chest, so he looks away. Shulk and A eat and thank him and wipe their mouths, and Shulk rubs at his arm again.

“The mention of Pyra disturbed you,” A says plainly.

Rex touches his face, as if he could feel whatever A saw there. Nah, just scruff. “Maybe a little,” he admits. “I just miss her. All of them. But I’ll see ‘em again soon. You could, too, when this is all over.”

“Yes… perhaps.” Now A is the one with a strange look.

Shulk glances at A, glances back at Rex. “That’s,” he starts, pauses, keeps going with, “not really it though, is it?”

Rex pauses.

“It’s us,” Shulk says, with that pained kindness he’s gotten very good at. “Here.” He points at the table with one metal finger.

He finds Shulk’s tendency towards absentmindedness so funny because of things like this: when he pays attention for even a moment, he can cut right to Rex’s heart. He’s not sure if it’s the hundreds of years together or if Shulk has always had this quality about him. Either way, he slumps back into his wooden chair, defeated.

“...Yeah. Y’got me there.”

“That's a natural response,” says A.

“Of course. Think of how I felt with you in Colony 9,” Shulk says. “It’s strange—it’s all strange. We won’t hold it against you.”

In spite of himself, Rex cracks a grin. “Yeah… you never would. I know that,” and Shulk flushes, all pleased, which is a sign that Rex’s said the exact right thing. “That, and, y’know. I’ve only ever seen you in camps and tents and canteens for so long. Now all of a sudden it’s a life. ”

Shulk’s pleased little smile shrinks a little. “Yes… that’s true.”

“Then let us go somewhere else,” A says. Through silver hair, those sharp eyes seem far away. “It will be much time before any of us have a proper life. A proper home.”

That’s not exactly what Rex meant to say.

-

Nikol’s not any taller than he was when he stood against Alpha, but he’s putting some muscle on those scrawny arms, and Rex can at least be proud of that. Those soldiers don’t eat right to begin with, just one of Z’s cruelties, and being a gearhead like Shulk can’t help. Nikol and Glimmer like to do this thing where they sit in the same spot and work and only occasionally talk—odd, but they both seem to like it.

“Glimmer,” Nikol says, looking up from his notes, “why’d you think they did it?”

“Think who did what,” Glimmer replies, thumbing a string on her lute.

“Shulk. And Rex. Why’d you think they…” He gestures at his blank arm, where, once, his term marker burned against his skin. 

Glimmer sets her lute down. “Ugh— why do you always ask these questions at the worst times?” she grouses, but it’s defensive; her eyes gleam with discomfort. “Where’d this even come from?”

“Well, I have this idea for the new City, but it’d be so complex it’d take… what do they call it… decades. And our lives—“

“Not all of that.” Glimmer presses her lips together, then shakes her head, something fierce beneath the skin. “I—I don’t know, okay? I’ve been… thinking about it ever since. And I just don’t know. It must’ve just been… convenience.”

“Convenience,” Nikol repeats, a little furrow to his brow. “Because, I don’t know, we were just there?”

“Why else? I mean, Rex… he didn’t even like me.”

Rex’s heart cracks. Nikol’s head jerks up. “Glimmer, you know that’s not true!” he exclaims. “They liked all of us. He was just a little harsh at first because you… you know.”

Glimmer crosses her arms and says, “Well,” but really has no defense to that.

“He gutted that Anlood for you,” Nikol adds. “I don’t think you do that unless you care a little about making someone happy… because that was really gross. We were all friends.”

“…Yeah,” Glimmer allows, her arms dropping with her guard. “And, y’know. I was pissed about that thing with us and the Ouroboros Power. But, now that we’ve been here a while… seems like older people just… worry about younger people.” She scowls. “Even if they’re kinda assholes about it.”

Nikol nods. “Right. …I just… I don’t know.”

“I know,” Glimmer says. “It doesn’t make sense. To do that for just anybody. But they were weirdos, the whole lot of them.”

“I guess,” Nikol says, not pleased, and turns back to his notes. 

-

In the night, the memory of Uraya shimmers with light. All pink and purple and pretty with petals that dance on the breeze. A does not look directly at any of it, eyes suggesting A is somewhere else entirely. Shulk has a cigarette between his teeth and peers up at the trees, the fake breeze always blowing exactly how he wants it to and carrying the smoke away. Rex is laying in the grass, but his mind is split—half here, half on the ruins of Fonsa Myma in Aionios below.

“Y’know, out there, this is all still around. But the trees don’t glow like they used to.”

Shulk takes the cigarette out of his mouth, dangling it between two metal fingers. “Where’s that at?” and only a few seconds later, “Oh, I see.”

“Aionios saps at the uniqueness of each world,” A says, as if only half-paying mind.

“Well,” says Shulk, “maybe this would happen anyway. Even without Z sapping at the two worlds. Maybe we’d just lose some beautiful things. That’s the nature of change.”

“Real glass half full type,” says Rex, and laughs at the frown Shulk sends his way. He’s not wrong, is he, but there’s really only so much of Shulk and A’s combined philosophical musings a man can take.

Shulk sits heavily down on Rex’s good side, though neither of them are sure it matters anymore, now that they have become something else. It’s what he’s done for a decade, so it’s what he keeps doing. 

“You haven’t said much about your time in this place,” he says, in that way where it’s so gentle it pains. “Bad memories?”

“Some good. Some bad. Just, ah, a lot.” 

Rex sets aside his view into Fonsa Myma and looks at the memory replicated above him, blossoms continuing their dance on the breeze that sweeps Shulk’s smoke away. In Origin they don’t need to eat, don’t need to sleep, don’t need to even breathe, but they still do—even A. His hand shoots up, catching a petal in his right hand. 

Feels real.

He wonders if Mythra is like this, down in Aionios. He half-shifts his attention to Matthew, trekking through Pentelas, almost to the ruins of Uraya himself. Kid’s determined. It’s a shame that Rex hadn’t known when he’d met him that they were family—his stubbornness has passed down through generations. He doesn’t know what he’d prefer: that Pyra and Mythra were awake to watch over him, or that they were asleep, spared of this burden.

“This is the place I met Mythra for the first time. And Vandham—I told y’about him. Changed my life. But…”

“I understand,” Shulk says. His flesh hand settles in the grass, flexes. He appears for a moment as if he’s about to put the cigarette back in his mouth, but doesn’t. He shifts to press a kiss, a hasty, smoky, fleeting thing to Rex’s mouth.

Feels real.

When Rex looks again, A is properly looking back at him. 

-

In their makeshift City square, another musician, a Machina girl with a wicked smile, sits aside Glimmer with a violin. She plays in time with Glimmer, which sends Glimmer into a competitive frenzy. They play and play until there are welts on Glimmer’s fingers, and long past; until the City folk have long since stopped dancing with them. They play only for each other.

The Machina girl sets her bow down. “You’re good,” she tells Glimmer, and disappears without another word.

Glimmer looks after her, sputtering.

“I just can’t stop thinking about her,” Glimmer says to Linka later, her face flushed with exertion. “I just want—I want to… to beat her! That’s it!”

Linka looks to the sky as if she knows he’s watching (and she’s a clever lass, so she probably does). Looks to the sky as if to say, why did you leave this to me?

-

There’s another Mio in Aionios—a Mio with short hair, close to fifteen. In her Colony’s training yard, her Dual Moondancers flash in her hands as she darts and strikes, lightning quick. 

“There aren’t supposed to be… clones,” Rex says slowly, after he’s long recovered from the shock. “I mean, there aren’t gonna be other versions of Glim runnin’ around, are there? Or two of—” He stops. He can’t afford to think about that. Imagining another Glimmer stuck in the system after he’d managed, in a miracle, to break her free… or imagining Shulk suffering the same with Nikol, it’s—

“Mio is an aberration in the flow,” says A, eyelashes lowered. “And the boy—”

“N. Noah,” Shulk murmurs, his golden hair catching the glow from Arguentum’s many strings of lights.

“They’re hope.”

“But not yet,” Shulk says.

A’s smile is brittle. “No. Not yet.”

-

“No, no, no, no!” Glimmer barks. “Just—get away from it! Get away from the pot. You can’t cook, let me just—”

Nikol glances at his watch. “Glimmer—”

“I can FIX THIS.”

“Glim—”

“Nnnope! It’s a double date, I cannot let you ruin this. Just… Just let me…”

“They’re almost here,” Nikol says with a grimace. “I don’t know why you even suggested this… we both can’t coo—”

“Then why’d you accept!?” demands Glimmer, for which he has no answer. 

There’s three raps against the door to Glimmer’s new abode, and a “Helllooooo?”, and two cries of despair from two Founders.

“That’s it,” Glimmer says. “Fix your little ponytail, it’s falling out, and then distract them. Got it?”

“Distract them until what? Until what? Glimmer!”

-

The memory of Torigoth as it was on his adventure is almost eerie, in the absence of people. Rex is sure he could make people, or rather, fakes that look like people but are nothing but memories and code, just like the Queens. If the aesthetics of a Torigoth in its prime yet empty, appearing as though everyone in the world had disappeared overnight, bothered him so much, he could simply make a Torigoth where everyone had not done so.

But he feels weird enough as it is, calling Torigoth to the Memory Space. Putting fake people in there would be, putting it simply, beyond creepy. And desperate, and kind of sad. He could fancy himself a little Architect, he and Shulk and A, doing whatever he’d like to the Memory Space they shared, but it’d all be fake. All of it. Not like if he could reach down and touch Aionios.

A might ask him if Aionios itself is any realer, just to rile him up. Shulk might agree, tell him that the whole thing is rather ghoulish, isn’t it. As it stands, they both took their leave to walk around the thing that resembles a city. Shulk is often the one who leaves first—it’s weird how he works. Rex is usually the one to crack, but Shulk is the one who gets upset first, chasing avenues to shut his own fury down, just give me a moment alone, just a minute to cool off, you know how I can be.

Rex can count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Shulk truly mad in all the years they’d spent together, which was a testament to how well it worked. But it worries him. He hopes that whatever Shulk did when he was alone wasn’t just banishing his emotions but working through them. The last thing he wants is for any resentment to brew between them, anything more than the flickers he knows they both feel on occasion, the sparks that never catch fire.

A is an enigma, and works to maintain this reputation studiously, even though Shulk knows A soul to soul. Though, as Rex understands it, soul is new to A. Not just sapience but emotions, unshackled, unbound. Not just receiving them but generating them.

Pyra and Mythra didn’t remember the old world, except in brief snatches. Their life truly started with Addam, and Torna, and all that brought Pyra into the world. After hearing about Alpha, and A… Rex is sure now that even when they had that new form, that wasn’t the Trinity Processor Core, Pneuma. That was them, Pyra and Mythra, the Blades, the people. They had no memory of a time before personhood.

A might still be struggling with just that.

Eventually he finds A lingering on one of the pseudo-Torigoth's bridges, looking out over the Cloud Sea, out to the World Tree. He’s learned enough about A to at least know that this has got to be on purpose, on some level or another. So he steps out onto its bridge, walks to its center, to stand by A.

This is another way Shulk and A like to bond; to stand together in silence, and communicate something anyway.

Rex doesn’t have the Blade-liked bond with A that Shulk does, and being the Master Driver doesn’t help any when A’s not actually a Blade to begin with, but he thinks he might understand something passing between them anyway, as they look out onto the oldest world’s creation together, stretching high into the sky.

“We didn’t know about the world that came before,” Rex says, low. It breaks the silence but A does not startle. “About what the Architect really was. We all thought it was, y’know, a tree. Most people thought Elysium was a fairytale.”

“But not you,” says A. “No?”

Rex shakes his head with a wry smile. A nods.

“It’s not around anymore. Even, ah, outside of Aionios. We…” 

Pyra and Mythra together, as one, smiling that horrible sad smile. You’ll be fine without me now.  

“All the better, that the last of him is gone,” A says. “You’ve seen what his gifts have wrought.”

Admittedly, he shared some of the sentiment. Alpha was proof enough of the words A spoke. But at the same time… it might have been a much younger Rex who stood in front of the Architect and thanked him for giving them life, but it wasn’t something he, the Rex that made one third of Origin’s Trinity, could regret saying.

So he sets a hand on A’s shoulder. “Not all bad,” he says. “You know that.”

-

Glimmer patches up Na’el with a scowl on her face. Time she never had has allowed her hair to grow even longer, and she’s done it up and out of her face in a long braid, something new in her new life. “You,” she says to Na’el, “need to learn that when you get the enemy’s attention, you run. ”

“I’m not that frail,” Na’el grumbles, her ear twitching. “You don’t need to look after me, all right?”

“If I don’t,” replies Glimmer, irritated, “every kid in the City’s gonna hunt me down. You want that?”

Despite herself, Na’el huffs out a laugh. “No… guess not.”

-

Mio bobs and weaves through a Kevesi onslaught. Her short hair shines in the sunlight as her Moondashers flash in her hands, up and down, in and out, with a speed like Mythra’s own. 

But they keep coming. Her speed is starting to give out, exhaustion evident in her golden eyes. If she would just have the sense to run—

-

M watches N, silent.

-

Mio yelps in pain.

-

“Now, you’re gonna keep off this leg for at least a week.”

“A week!?” exclaims Na’el.

Glimmer bares her teeth in a sardonic grin. “What? You want it to get worse?”

Though they still wage war against Moebius, this is the closest anyone will ever get to peace in Aionios, a world of endless war. Glimmer laughs, carefree. Rex can’t bear to look away from her, to properly watch Mio, though he can hear the gunfire and the clanging of swords and shields, and can still see her in his periphery, no matter how hard he tries to focus.

But he has to, doesn’t he.

-

Two soldiers have Mio on her back. Blood oozes from his little girl’s mouth. One of the soldiers, a High Entia girl, raises her gunstaff, squints an eye—

Mio bares her teeth in a snarl, and then:

-

M shudders violently.

Rex doesn’t think she knows why.

-

“She’s already back in a Cradle,” Shulk says, one blue eye open, one squinted shut.

“I know,” bites Rex, all teeth.

“This will happen again,” A says, merciless, both blue eyes piercing.

“I know!”

That doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t undo his daughter on the battlefield. Doesn’t undo the red staining her white hair, the tufts on her ears, her clothes, before the light motes took her away.

A exchanges one of those wordless looks with Shulk, and it only makes his blood boil further. Then: “She lives, Rex. Grieve. But don’t forget that.” 

Rex clenches his jaw, turns his face away. There’s more A’d like to say, clearly, but Shulk says, “A,” all pained in that way of his, and A sighs, disappearing into the white nothing of their shared Memory Space.

A does what A needs to do. But A can’t—A can’t know how it feels. It’s Shulk, a man in a position just like him, who takes him in his arms, buries Rex’s face in his chest, holds him tight even when he tries to thrash out, tighter when the tears finally fall from his one remaining good eye.

“I’m gonna have to see it again, aren’t I,” he says into the fabric of Shulk’s sweater, and he hates it. “And again, and again, and again—”

“That’s what we volunteered for,” Shulk says, not reprimanding, just tired. Just pained. Like he was when he held Rex like this, one-armed, after Alpha. “So no one else had to.”

He presses a kiss against Rex’s hair on a shaking breath.

“One day it’ll all be over,” he murmurs. “And you’ll have Mio in your arms, and she’ll be safe. And I’ll have Crys, and he’ll be safe. And—”

He falters.

“My daughter is dead,” Rex spits.

“And she lives again. And will, over and over and over,” Shulk says sadly, raking his flesh hand through Rex’s hair. “You’ll have to be so strong, Rex. But don’t let anything fester there. I’m here…”

In the absence of memory, the tears and the weight of Shulk’s body are the first things that have felt real in years.

Chapter Text

After Mio, Shulk takes it on himself to provide the Memory Space. He’s never particularly wanted to like Rex did, but the White Void is too cruel and empty for the three of them to stay sane long, and Rex isn’t in the place to provide for it. Satorl Marsh at night glows pinks and purples and blues, the ether in the air thick as a fog and yet pleasant, cool, without the sun. The trees shimmer and shine so bright the glow along their branches is almost white. Shulk sits in the grass, legs crossed, and watches the ether dance around the plant life. He’s gotten better at tuning out the noise of Aionios, but even with it, the Marsh would be beyond real, more vivid than he could ever call to mind alone.

Rex left some time ago to… Shulk isn’t sure what. To be alone, at least. So it’s only a matter of time before A comes back from wherever A had gone and sits in the grass next to him. The ether light turns silver hair shifting lavenders and soft pinks.

“Nobody’s upset with you,” Shulk says.

A makes a noise somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “I’ve made plenty of people upset, Shulk. And you’ve witnessed much of it firsthand. That is not my concern.”

“Hm. You didn’t seem very happy when Matthew was angry with you.”

With near-imperceptible eyeroll: “I am not the one who is in need of reassurance—that is what I mean.”

“He wanted to be alone. I let him be.”

A is quiet, but the look Shulk gets is enough.

“He needs time, A. And we’ve nothing but.”

“Not for this. Only ten more years until it happens again,” A says bluntly. “If he’s lucky. And even less so for your own child.”

Shulk breathes in a deep, shuddering breath. The memory of the ether-rich air is grounding.

A’s eyes shift—a tinge remorseful, now. “I am merely trying to make you see the reality of the burden you have accepted. The sooner you understand it, the sooner you embrace it, the less you will be hurt.”

In that moment, Shulk cannot put a name on exactly what he feels. Maybe it is pity.

“They’re our children, A,” he says, as kindly as he can. “It won’t ever stop hurting.”

He calls Aionios back into focus. Crys is a soldier in the Kevesi army, like his brother was. He was the older of the two on Bionis, but here on Aionios, in this moment, he is younger. An eighth-termer. Still he is older than Shulk has ever seen him. A is right, even if it is cruel: death will come for him soon, whether it be tomorrow on the battlefield or in two years on his Homecoming when the Consuls strike him down. Nikol’s freedom was a trick of fate—after all, A was involved. Their Crys won’t be so lucky.

Shulk wants to cry thinking about it, but what good would it do, shedding tears now? He must face it when it comes and take bitter comfort in the knowledge that Crys will live again and again and again until they are all free.

Mio died in the early morning. It is reaching noon, now, and Crys eats lunch in the canteen, chatting with his fellow soldiers. He is healthy as a soldier gets, his golden hair grown long and his eyes creased by a gentle smile. One day perhaps the painful contradictions that make up this world will slide into place.

In Origin, A inclines A’s head wordlessly. An apology. Shulk accepts.

Hours pass. In the dead of night, Crys creeps out of his bedroll and into the dark to carve a piece of elder. Shulk already knows it will be a flute, like the one he played day and night when he was young. Soldiers shouldn’t know what such things are. Soldiers shouldn’t even have the desire to. But Moebius just can’t stamp it out of them, and Shulk glows with pride.

Time trickles by. A pulls a lute from the ether and begins to play a strange, soothing song, a slow yet lilting thing. After enough time A begins to sing quietly, too, in a language Shulk has never heard and cannot understand. Crys tucks the elder away and returns to his bedroll, but with Shulk A keeps playing and singing, voice carrying on the false breeze.

A could probably do it forever. A does not itch under the skin like Shulk and Rex do in here, because of course A is older than time itself, and has plenty of experience with patience. It’s easy for Shulk to forget. In the earliest days of the new world, he used to wonder how far A’s sight stretched—how long ago A had seen a future with him in it, when A had chosen that fate. How long A had waited for just him.

-

Gunfire rings out across the valley. Smoke and sparks and dust fill the air. The Founders, already exhausted from a long week of exploration, watch one of many Colony battles from above and argue fiercely.

Shulk only half-pays mind. Ashera, Panacea’s little sister, is down there. He’s been keeping as much of an eye on her as he has on Crys. She’s sharp as a knife and twice as dangerous, with no regard for her own life, and it’s obvious in every reckless, lightning-quick move. A faint white scar circles her neck.

“…Are you crazy?” Glimmer barks over distant gunshots. “We have to free them!”

“How?” Nikol says.

“How? The Flame Clock!”

A pause.

Nikol, resigned, murmurs, “We can’t break Flame Clocks, Glimmer.”

Shulk could, and so could Rex, A, and Matthew, but they’ve all gone now, all four of them, left them to fend for themselves. Something curdles in Shulk’s belly.

“But we have to do something,” Glimmer snaps, a note of something frightened beneath the anger.

“Why?” Panacea asks. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest and a mask of cold indifference over her face, but Shulk recognizes this look enough to know what she’s hiding. She watches Ashera dart around a fire-haired girl, her violet gaze following the tiniest movements. “There’s not much left of them, anyway. They’re just going to kill each other.”

She’s gripping her arm so tight she might draw blood. Shulk wishes he were there—but he is there, isn’t he?

“You can’t be sparking serious. We can’t just let them die!”

“We can try. But they won’t listen,” puts in Na’el, hands set on her hips. Her gold eyes are flinty. “Not unless we can break their Clock.”

“You—”

Na’el’s unphased. “Y’didn’t listen till my brother broke yours, didn’t you?”

Glimmer looks around desperately, to the trembling Panacea, to Linka with her logical gaze, to resolved Na’el, and finally to Nikol, who is looking away from the destruction with lowered eyes. “You can’t be serious,” she repeats, stunned. “No way you’re all such cowards. I’ll go myself if I have to!”

The fire-haired girl lands a nasty hit on Ashera. Something cracks horribly. Shulk’s not sure if Panacea can hear it, but she can see it, and she flinches, squeezing her eyes shut.

“We can try,” Nikol echoes. “But I… I don’t think we’ll do any good.”

Shulk sends him an apology for leaving him—all of them—so hopeless. But when Nikol has to drag Glimmer off of the battlefield a bloody mess, it doesn’t do any good. Entrusting the future to someone is as much a gift as it is a burden. In the late hours of the night, Nikol brushes off any more medical attention to hunker down with the Ouroboros Stone. Across Aionios, his brother carves a flute.

-

It takes days for Rex to return, but when he does, it’s to A teaching Shulk to play the lute. Shulk’s decided to let the Memory Space roll through day and night, and now the false sunlight shimmers blearily through the heavy fog. He and A sit together on the roof of Exile Fortress, A behind him, a hand on his elbow as he adjusts his hold of the instrument. It’s unwieldy and Shulk has never had a musical bone in his body. Also, it’s his forerunning hypothesis that there’s a nonnegligible chance he’ll forget all this once Aionios ends. Still, he feels the urge to learn.

Shulk’s starting to fumble with the strings when Rex clambers up onto the roof himself. He comes to sit next to them; Shulk gives him a half-smile and A gives him a nod. Rex doesn’t say anything, just puts on a grin and nods back.

A turns back to Shulk, nimble, gloved hand shifting his fingers on the strings. “Like so.”

“I was close,” Shulk says. He strums the lute and delights in the sweet noise he creates. “I see—it’s not so different from a machine. You just have to know how to use it.”

With an undercurrent of amusement: “Hm.” A still doesn’t let go of his hands, though, and smells sweet and earthy, of flowers, like Fiora used to. Like she will again. A’s presence makes it easy to put Aionios’ noise aside.

“Was that you singin’ earlier, A?” asks Rex. There’s still weight to it.

A nods. “It was an ancient High Entian song from many years ago, when many of them still lived in the region. I remember it well.”

“Is there anything you don’t remember?” Shulk asks absentmindedly, strumming just to enjoy having learned to make a noise.

“Well,” says A. “I wouldn’t know, now, would I,” which means no.

A lets him shift his fingers around on the strings, and then gently adjusts them again after enough waiting. He plays another chord. He tries to string the two together—it sounds a little off.

“Play anything besides the lute?” says Rex, propping a hand on his chin.

A’s breath tickles Shulk’s neck. “Just about every instrument on Bionis,” A says breezily, and Shulk chuckles. “Would you like to give this one a try, Rex?”

Rex lets out a gruff laugh. “Not me. C’mon, A, let him have his go.”

Shulk isn’t sure he’ll make much of a musician, but he likes learning the chords. It feels meaningful in a way not much has of late. He likes to try to figure out what they might be himself at first, and A gently shifts his fingers into position whenever he can’t. When he sets the lute down, he feels some progress’s been made, though it’ll be some time before he can even dream of playing like A can. Rex claps for him, and A, despite looking unamused, does too. He bows with a little laugh and hands the lute back to A.

“…Hey,” Rex says into the silence, heavy. “I’m sorry for runnin’ off like that.”

“Don’t mention it,” Shulk says as kindly as he can, touching his arm.

It is just another cruelty in a long line of cruelties: like Melia’s capture, like Nia’s departure, like Alpha. They have no choice but to accept them, however they must be dealt with. He’ll surely need to do the same when Crys’ time comes. Every second, that fate draws closer.

-

Panacea’s passion isn’t art, but she is a beautiful artist. Ever since she was a child she’s had a near-photographic memory, and she can draw on those with incredible skill, even with the meager supplies of the Liberators. She liked it, didn’t love it, but she’d do it for people who needed it.

Ruben, Jethro, and Panacea’s trainees have argued for putting up statues of the Founders, as they’ve started to be called: Glimmer, Nikol, Na’el, Panacea, Linka, and Matthew, whom they all know and love even as he’s trekking regions away. Linka ceded her spot to Rex almost immediately—she’s never been one for the spotlight—and Panacea followed for Shulk. He’s not sure he deserves such a thing. A and Riku were not even suggested, as both of them would have certainly liked. (Well, Riku would have appreciated a suggestion, but in the end would have said no.)

Panacea lays out preliminary sketches for the statues, as one of the few people left who can capture him and Rex and Matthew accurately. Her dark skin stains gray from the pencils as she works away. She has Glimmer and Nikol pose for a few, and they debate, as they always do.

“You’ve got a weird look on your face,” Glimmer says. “Stop it. She’ll put that in the sketch, and then it’ll go on the statue, and you’ll have a weird face for a thousand terms.”

“This is… weird. Right?” Nikol looks for confirmation, but Glimmer stares blankly. “I mean, what’d we do to deserve this?”

“Yyyou’re just being dense on purpose. Right?”

“I just don’t know. What’s the use in people remembering me for a thousand terms? Most soldiers, they’re gone, and that’s it…”

Glimmer’s face hardens. “But we’re not soldiers anymore,” she says, her voice rising. “We should remember the past, especially since they can’t. And if I lived here in a thousand terms, I think I’d like to know where I came from!”

Panacea’s mask of stone nearly slips, but she fixes her face back into severity. The burden he left her, and that Rex left Linka, has been weighing heavy.

“OK,” Nikol says, shrinking in on himself. “I get it.”

“You don’t,” Glimmer says. But she’s not loud anymore—still angry, maybe, not but fiery.

“But I get that it’s what you want. So it’s… fine.”

Panacea interrupts with a sharp, “Good!”, which snaps the two of them to attention. “If you started fighting, you’d ruin my chance at a good sketch, and then we’d have to do this all over again. You don’t want that, do you?” She levels Nikol a glare. “You’ve already barely got enough hours in the day for that Ferronis…”

The pencil trembles in her hand for just a second, though. Nikol clears his throat and adjusts his stance. Shulk looks between them. When this is all over, he’ll be ten years her junior again. How odd that they look the same age. In a few years, he’ll look like her elder.

-

Shulk’s beginning to understand the nostalgic appeal of the Memory Space. There’s still something uncomfortable about it, about puppeteering the past around in a new mechanical body, but it does capture something he’s lost. He’ll never see Eryth Sea as it was in his youth again: high on the Bionis’ head, dark Prison Island and gleaming Alcamoth opposing each other over the water, with the Hilns flying overhead and the waves lapping against the pristine beach and the Mechonis standing across from them, its—her—mighty head held high.

“I knew your titans were big, but, damn,” says Rex, meeting those piercing red eyes, “that’s a biggun.”

“I was afraid, at first, of the Mechonis,” Shulk says. “But then after the Core—I told you about that, didn’t I?” At Rex’s nod: “After the Core… I started to miss the view.”

“Yeah, it is a bit unsettling, just starin’ at you, eh,” Rex mutters, but he sounds a little amused by the prospect, like he is by most big and challenging things. “And that’s all it did? Never moved? Twitched, even?”

Shulk bumps him with his flesh elbow. This feels familiar, which is reassuring and frightening in its own way. “We thought they were dead, remember,” he reminds him.

“Livin’ on corpses. Freaky.”

“Well, it is what the world was like for the people of the Bionis since their birth,” says A, also looking at the Mechonis, serious-faced. “Naturally, they would not find it… ‘freaky.’ Though in the time I lived here, many of them did express that the Mechonis unsettled them.”

“It was our enemy,” Shulk murmurs. “Even to the High Entia who kept out of the war. That’s the belief that Zanza’d passed down to Bionis life through eons. But we escaped then, and they’ll escape now.”

Suddenly Rex looks a little pained. Oh, that was too soon. “Right,” he says, clears his throat. After a pause: “This was your home, A?”

Overhead, a Hiln calls. It’s nearly swallowed up by the rush and sigh of the waves.

It doesn’t take that long for A to answer, but it feels like an eternity. “Yes,” A finally says, and points to the grand, shining capital. “It is not where I am from, but I lived there for many years.”

“’Course, but that makes no difference.”

“Hm.”

This is a less amused hm. Displeased? Shulk lets it go on.

“Leftheria—that’s where I’m from—that got merged with this, when Aionios was made. Just funny, is all, that our homes ended up in the same place.”

A’s slim shoulders are tense. “I suppose.” It’s uninterested. Not cold, at least, Shulk’s more familiar than anybody with when A will simply refuse to continue a line of thought, and A won’t continue from here.

After some time, Rex kicks off his boots to walk along the shore. He’s still a little amused by a seas of water, even though he’s seen them since he was, what, fifteen? They bring him a kind of childlike glee. Just one of the things about him that Shulk is unbearably fond of. Shulk decides he won’t go walking yet, but he takes off his own boots, rolls up his pants, and sits by the edge of the water, watching the waves roll in and out. He used to do this on the beaches of Colony 9 with Fiora all the time.

The memory of Eryth Sea, though, is an uncomfortable reminder that Melia isn’t like Fiora, tucked away in Origin’s storage. Melia’s here, physically, in Origin, just like they are. Not that he can ever forget, only ever push away. Every time he lets the sight creep into view it’s the same, the same Melia with the same expression in the same dress and the same binds, breathing deeply. And Nia, too, it’s always the same. Better than Moebius doing anything worse, he supposes. He wonders how long he’ll have to sit with those views until something changes.

He stares up at the memory of Alcamoth, shining, pristine white, like the Bionis’ body itself. The water laps at his legs. An urge strikes him.

“What will you do when this is over, A?”

“Me?” A says unnecessarily.

“Well, it’s not me, is it?” calls Rex.

With a roll of the eyes, A waves him off, but at least wears a tiny smirk. When A’s attention turns back to Shulk, though, it shrinks. “There is no reason for you to worry—not yet. We’ve time itself ahead of us.” Raising a silver brow: “Unless you’ve changed your mind about taking each day as it comes? I thought that was rather insightful.”

“That’s not very reassuring, you know,” Shulk says with a little smile. He knows better than to expect A to answer with any explicit details about the future, but…

“I will not die. I expect I cannot truly do such a thing,” A replies frankly. “Does that assuage you?”

 “You know that’s not what I mean.”

A purse of the lips. Against silver hair, A’s earring gleams red as the Mechonis’ eyes.

“I mean, where will you go?”

“I will go where I am needed,” A says, “and that is all.”

Shulk can’t put a name on the feeling that brings up in him either. But he’s always been content to let Alvis have the last word when Alvis wants it, and there’s no more A wants to say on the matter. Maybe he’ll try again in another hundred years, since they’re certain to have it.

Piece said, A stands next to him in silence, looking out over the crystalline blue sea, how it shines in the sunlight clearer than Shulk even remembered it. The fake Hilns caw and chase each other in the air. The fake Paguls shift through the sand with their huge claws. The Mechonis looks back. Rex says something over the sound of the sea about the Paguls, but Shulk’s focus on the Space is slipping, and the noise of Aionios is creeping back in. 

He decides to embrace it, turning his attention to the world below. Melia is the same as she always is and might be that way for a thousand more years. Nia, too. Matthew’s scuffling with a pack of volffs and winning quite easily. Nikol and his Hamill are laughing together about something during another hard day’s work on the City’s Ferronis. Glimmer bobs her head while the girl she’s been seeing flits away on the violin. Panacea and Linka are arguing quietly over the letters Shulk and Rex left. The new Mio is still asleep in a cradle. The new boy that looks like N, Noah, is, too. Some of the young soldiers are at rest, bickering and eating and chatting about nothing. Most of them, though, are on the battlefield.

After a long time Rex taps him, turning his focus back to the Memory Space. “Pagul Hot Pot?” he asks. “A told me how to cook ‘em. Says they taste just like they did on Bionis.”

“It is a memory,” A reminds them from Rex’s other side. “So naturally it would.”

If pressed, Shulk doesn’t think he could remember Eryth Sea this clearly, but maybe it’s not one instance of Eryth Sea—maybe it is more like a simulation, compiling multiple instances of this era of Eryth Sea in his mind, predicting what the Paguls and the Hilns would act like from that, predicting how the waves would roll and the winds would blow. Even though he had a hand in Origin, the Ark still escapes his understanding. But he’ll learn. He has to.

“It wouldn’t make much difference to me,” he reminds Rex, but he takes the offering. “Thank you.”

When she was a Mechon, Fiora sometimes would refuse to eat—oh, I don’t need it, you all do, I can just live off of water, she’d say, waving her hands. She had a complicated relationship with food then that he didn’t quite process until years later, when he was truly an adult. Sometimes she’d look longingly at the food after saying no; sometimes she’d not refuse, but then frown down at her plate. Maybe it was a reminder of the untouched Homs body she’d lost.

Shulk sometimes struggled to understand her, but he always tried. He thinks he gets it better now. The texture is nice, the feeling of chewing and swallowing, but it’s not the same as feeling hunger, having a body that craved food. He’ll appreciate that when they’re done here.

“Rex?” he says, when the sun has begun to dip below the horizon, and the stars are beginning to fleck the ether-lit sky.

“Mm?”

“I ought to ask you, too. What will you do when this is over?”

“That’s easy,” Rex says, laughing. “I’ll hug and I’ll kiss the girls, first and foremost. And then… well, it’ll just be like it was, right? I’ll just keep on livin’. We’ll raise the kids, we’ll send ‘em out into the world, and if it all goes well, I’ll go out smilin’ when I’m an old man.”

Shulk smiles, despite himself. “It’s a good plan,” he says, and basks in the sound of Rex’s laughter. “Are you certain, though? That it’ll all be like it was.”

“Won’t it?” asks Rex, like the idea that it wouldn’t hadn’t even occurred to him.

They’d been operating under the shared goal of end Aionios for a while, but end Aionios had gotten displaced by stop Moebius before anybody had really considered the full depth of what end Aionios meant. And it perhaps didn’t matter now, in a physical sense, because all they were doing now physically was propagating Aionios’ existence so somebody else could figure out what end Aionios meant. But Shulk asked questions—it was who he was. Sometimes their practical applications came later.

“I’ve got no idea,” Shulk says. “I know it’s most likely that we’ll forget, but I just have this feeling… now that we’re Avatars, that… I can’t explain it. That it might stay with us.”

Rex turns his head to give A a look, but A merely tilts A’s head. “Well, your intuition’s usually right, innit,” he mutters. “Though there are some things about this I’d… rather forget.”

Shulk nods wordlessly. There’s a lot he’d like to remember, too, though.

“But whether we remember or not—we’ve got no choice, right? Just gotta keep living, like we always do, ‘cause we’ve got people who we gotta make smile.” He must catch something in Shulk’s face, because he leans close to press a kiss against his cheek, his scruff scratching pleasantly against Shulk’s skin. “There are some memories that wouldn’t be so bad to keep, anyway,” he says, because after all, they do usually make it to the same page. Watching the two of them, A isn’t smiling, but radiates contentment anyway.

-

Despite his hesitance towards the whole thing, Nikol’s already incorporated a spot for where the statues will go into his design of the Ferronis. Everything is temporary, half-built, but a temporary home with temporary landmarks is better than none at all. Shulk knows that well by now. At Jethro’s insistence, it comes to be named “Founders’ Hall,” though this, too, seems to be temporary.

Panacea’s taken her dark hair out of its pigtails and let it fall loose. She holds the letter Shulk’s left tight enough to faintly crinkle the envelope.

“Um, Panacea?” Nikol asks, standing at the entrance to the pseudo-Hall.

“Oh. Glad you showed,” Panacea says, with her best bravado. She notes his uncomfortable shifting: “The whole statue thing still freaking you out?”

“Um,” he says again, halting. “I think it’s… a little odd, but I really don’t mind. If, you know, it’s what the City thinks it needs…”

Her fingers twitch on the envelope. “Good man.”

“…What’s that?”

It’s what Panacea wanted him to ask, and still, she doesn’t quite know how to handle it. Her violet eyes dart back and forth in front of her as she considers, and Shulk wants to apologize, not that she’ll hear. Then she draws in a great, trembling breath, straightening her whole body and settling into a commanding position.

“You understand what parents and families are now, right? Your time in the City’s taught you that much?”

Nikol nods slowly, unsure where this is going.

“And you understand that there was—a world before this. Before Aionios. You remember when Shulk and Rex told you that?”

“It doesn’t quite make sense, but—yes. Yes, I know that much.” He’s practically dying to ask where this is going, but he’s holding it in with great restraint.

Panacea’s eyes flutter shut again. A great breath in, a great breath out, and then with her usual blunt force: “Shulk is your father.”

Silence. In Memory Space, Shulk is practically frozen. Nikol stares at her for a long, unbearably, painfully long moment, bright green eyes—his mother’s eyes—wide.

“That’s… not possible,” he finally says. “I don’t—he’s not—I’m a soldier. We don’t have parents. We don’t have families. It’s not possible.”

“It is,” Panacea refutes. The letter is shaking in her grasp, now, but she keeps her voice strong as metal. “You were all someone else once. My… sister’s a soldier.” Shulk knows how much even mentioning Ashera pains her, but still she holds fast. She jerks the letter out towards Nikol. “He left this for you. Told me to give it to you when the time is right, but I don’t like keeping secrets for very long. So I’m laying it all out.”

Nikol hesitates before grasping the letter, as if he’s afraid the touch might burn. But as soon as he takes it from her shaking hands, it’s like a fire is lit in him, the way he tears it open and starts reading frantically, his eyes darting back and forth over the page. Panacea steps away, clasping her shaking hands and watching him with her steely mask firmly in place.

“I don’t understand,” Nikol whispers at long last. “My… father. Why wouldn’t he…”

Shulk remembers writing that letter. He hadn’t been certain, then, that Nikol would even make it past his tenth term. That Nikol would ever know what a father was. If he’d tried to force that connection when Nikol couldn’t understand, it would have only further widened the impossible gulf Aionios had already put between them. He wanted to appreciate the impossibly small speck of time they’d managed to find together.

He'd tried to put it into words, even if he was never so good with those. He wanted to make Nikol understand that it wasn’t because he didn’t love him. He wanted to describe that even if he hadn’t raised this Nikol, he loved him more than anything, just like he loves the Crys that whittles flutes, just like Rex loves the Glimmer that plays the lute and the Mio that died on the battlefield, just like Panacea loves each and every Ashera that she finds.

“He was afraid,” Panacea says.

That too. She always knew him too well.

“Of what?” Nikol cries. “He’s not the one who has to deal with any of this. That’s us! He left in the end anyway! They all left! Him, and Matthew, a-and Rex and A—they all left us behind! Why do they get to be afraid?”

Oh, his poor son.

Panacea raises a shaking finger to point at Nikol’s chest. “Of this,” she says. “Of hurting you. Of hurting himself. Imagine if he had told you, and it’d driven you away because you didn’t understand. Or if he had told you and you’d understood it, and you’d grown close.”

Nikol is imagining it. Shulk can tell by the pained look on his face—that he’s imagining it and already missing it.

“But you were a soldier. So it goes one of two ways.” She’s trying so hard to keep it together for his sake. “You reach your tenth term, and you die while he lives. Or he gives his life for yours, and he dies while you live. There’s no future where you two could have coexisted. Not here.”

A tear falls from Nikol’s eye and lands on the letter, smearing the ink.

“He wanted… he wanted it to hurt less, whichever way it went.”

Another long silence.

“But it hurts now,” Nikol says, small.

Panacea nods, her lip trembling. “I know,” she says. “He loved you. Whether what he did was right or not, that’s all I want you to know. He was… he was a good father,” and now her voice’s trembling, too, “and he loved you.”

Nikol’s not usually one for touch, and he and Panacea aren’t particularly close in this life, anyway, but he lets Panacea draw him in for a strong hug. Before Aionios, she used to hold him the same way when she babysat him and he cried, except then he was half the size he is now. Even hundreds of years later, he’s still her little cousin.

Shulk still doesn’t regret giving himself up. He couldn’t regret that, not when it meant Nikol could live a real, full life. Not when it was the one thing left that he could do for any of his children. But it is one of the worst things he’s ever felt, watching two of his children cry because of him.

Eventually, Nikol’s tears dry. “Thank you,” he says to Panacea, voice all hoarse and scratchy. Shulk could apologize a thousand times and it wouldn’t be enough. He draws out of the hug, hesitating. “Um. If Shulk is my…” and he leaves it there, which breaks Shulk’s heart all over again, “…then, Glimmer, is Rex her…”

“You were always too smart for your own good,” Panacea mutters.

-

“If they remember, too,” Rex says, “y’think they’ll forgive us?”

Shulk laughs wetly. “I… I’d like to think so. But I can’t say.”

But he was the one who took that risk. He always knew it would hurt.

-

“This is where Nikol used to sleep,” he tells Rex, pointing to the blue-walled bedroom, with the thick weighted blankets on the bed and the tiny machines they built together littering the nightstand and windowsill. “And that was Crys’,” he says, pointing into the yellow-walled bedroom opposite, where Crys’ sheet music was still neatly set on a stand, his flute and violin cases laying by its side. A rests a hand on the doorframe, a foot just before the carpet, almost stepping in, and yet.

“Gorgeous place, huh,” Rex says.

“It is quite nice,” A agrees after a moment, still gazing into Crys’ space.

Shulk heads back downstairs, and they both follow him, A somewhat lagging behind. “There’s really not much else,” he says, leading them back outside. Their house was right on the edge of the Residential District where it connected to the Central Plaza—Shulk had worried, at first, about having a space so close to where Metal Face had… but Fiora’d insisted it was a reclamation, and that she didn’t want to have more bad memories associated with the Residential District than good ones. For the most part, it worked—the District had overhauled so much after the rebuilding started that he barely even remembered most days, anyway.

“Nah, it’s lovely,” Rex says as they cross the bridge back to the Central Plaza. “It’s all very homey. I’d kinda wondered about it in Aionios, since it seemed like there were so few buildings. This all makes it click, y’know?”

Shulk offers him a smile over his shoulder. It still feels wrong, somehow, but he did miss seeing the Colony as it was. It’s strange—A seems a little out of place, but Rex fits right in. Maybe it’s just the years of him living there in Aionios talking.

The calming breeze is soothing against his skin as he leads them to the Commercial District. “This was the only part preserved in the transition, really—I’ve really got no idea why,” he says as he walks. “And Outlook Park, too… I was glad for that. And—” He pauses.

He’s looking at the Command Center and the Gem Man’s Stall. Except it’s not quite. The Command Center—why is it the Command Center?

“Shulk?” Rex asks.

“That’s… not how this was,” Shulk says slowly. He can’t quite call it to mind, but. “There was something else here. It was the same building, but it was something else before it was the Command Center. I don’t know why…”

Rex stops by his side, peering at the Command Center the Memory Space reconstructed in the middle of the New World’s Colony 9. He’s not sure what to say, turning to look back to Shulk and then looking away just as fast.

“Perhaps you’d just forgotten,” A says frankly. “You lived many years in Aionios’ Colony 9. You have lived many more years than any Homs mind expects—it is only natural that a slip happen eventually.”

“But that’s not possible,” Shulk says, still staring. “I saw it almost every day.”

A and Rex have nothing to say to that.

A long, strained moment passes. The Command Center does not change, nor does any idea of what it could have been before come to Shulk’s mind.

Shulk pulls back, disquieted. “I think I’ve had enough,” he murmurs. “Let’s go someplace else.”

Rex pats him on the shoulder. A nods, and with no indication whatsoever simply returns the Memory Space to its neutral state, the empty White Void. Shulk is still staring at where it used to be.

“Maybe it should be my memory, this time,” A muses.