FicWad

Author's Note: This took so long for me to get around to writing that it can't help but be disappointing. Sorry! I will try not to fail so very hard at the next update.


Lucca awoke with a heavy head, a parched throat, and a tongue that felt as if it had spent the night in a laundry hamper. When she made an probative noise and pried open an eye, the universe became a bewildering mass of pink, gold, and green.

"Good morning!" Nadia chirped, her nose less than an inch from Lucca's. "It's time to deal with it!"

"Mwmph," said Lucca. Sheer exhaustion prevented her from flailing. As she tried to work out what she was meant to be dealing with, Nadia pulled her into an unsteady sitting position. The room came into crooked focus as Lucca's glasses were shoved onto her face.

Blinking, Lucca adjusted her frames and became aware of the excited chittering of the gophers of memory, which had never quite figured out the card catalogue but had managed to cut and paste the previous night's events into a colorful collage. She pressed her hand against her forehead. "I did something really stupid, didn't I?"

"Uh-huh." Nadia's voice was still brittle-bright.

"I—I hired Toma."

"You sure did."

"I gave Toma our money."

"Yep."

Lucca's other hand joined the first in supporting her head. "I had an idea," she began, then turned to massaging her temples in hopes of remembering the finer details.

Nadia huffed. "Oh, don't stop now. You haven't gotten to the part where you got really drunk in a room full of gross perverts and made me worry about you—"

"I'm sorry," Lucca said, and meant it. She reached for her scarf to clean her glasses, remembered she had lent it to Nadia, and settled for using her tunic. The motion soothed her and gave her a moment to wrack her aching brain for excuses that didn't make her sound pathetic.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a tackle-hug that smacked her shoulders into the headboard and set off an explosive headache. "I really was worried," said Nadia. Her words registered only weakly, after running the gauntlet of lead clubs inside Lucca's skull. "Don't you dare ever do anything stupid like that again."

Inside Lucca's brain, a cynical thought about her inability to make that promise met a grisly end between her throbbing frontal lobes. Instead she replied, "Yeah, I screwed up. Weight of the world, you know?" Lucca tried to smile but ended up biting her lip. "It's a lot to carry."

"Then let me help you." Nadia sat back on her heels, her eyes intense, and continued, "I mean, why do you think I'm here? You're not the only one who wants to save the world! And I'm not a great fighter or a super-genius or anything, but I can still do something."

And "doing something" has worked out so well for us so far. Sarcasm seemed unlikely to result in drawn curtains and rehydration, so Lucca went with, "If I agree with you, do I get some water? My head's killing me."

Nadia demonstrated the Guardian royal family's mastery of the set jaw. "Well, that's what you get for drinking all that. Seriously, Lucca, this is the second time I've seen you get all wacky. Are we going to have to have an intervention?"

"Only if I can fit 'Hello, my name is Super Genius Lucca, Not a Mad Scientist, No, Really, Mwa Ha Ha' on my nametag."

Nadia smacked her with a pillow, which Lucca felt counted as an act of greater aggression when hay and hangovers were involved. "Here," she said, picking up a wooden cup from the nearby stool and handing it to Lucca. "Frog went out to the well and got us a bucket, 'cause the water here is really scary."

At least the ale had come by its bugs honestly. Trying to forget four centuries of medical discoveries, Lucca downed the contents of the cup. She'd drunk worse, she knew, but the gustatory memories had left her.

Without making eye contact, Lucca tapped her fingers against the cup and said, "Frog's doing that 'I'm not angry, just disappointed' thing, isn't he?"

"Actually, I think he's just depressed."

She winced. "He's still using Frog-speak, right?"

"Yeah, but he's pausing a lot, like he has to think about it." Nadia shifted to sit cross-legged. "I think he doesn't like whatever new memories he's picking up."

So which is worse: Losing yourself all at once, or piece by piece? In a dusty alcove of Lucca's memory, Nadia's voice echoed from Marle's mouth in the shape of the word "cold."

"Anyway," said Nadia, snapping her fingers for attention, "didn't you say you had a plan?"

"An idea." Plans didn't come drenched in alcohol and sticky with speculation. "It's not a good idea, but it's the best I've got."

"Well, that's something. You scare me when you don't have ideas." After a pause, Nadia added, "I mean, even more than when you do have ideas."

"Har, har." Lucca handed her empty cup back to Nadia and tried sitting up straighter. When her head failed to explode, she shifted her legs over the edge of the bed and watched them dangle, waiting for her blood and body weight to redistribute themselves. Her limbs and head felt like sacks of wet cement.

Nadia's hands closed around her wrists and tugged, whereupon the cement sloshed into Lucca's feet. For a sour moment Lucca wondered how she had managed to nurse a poi-induced hangover through a jungle maze, but that memory frayed into red strands.

"We need to find Glenn first," she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. She felt too light and exposed without her helmet, and something irrational in the back of her mind suggested that its presence would ease her headache. Pushing the thought aside, Lucca added, "Toma didn't take off, did he?"

"No, but I think he's already on his third breakfast beer."

Lucca didn't recall giving Toma all of her remaining coins, but she hadn't been in a position to bother counting them out, either. Fleeing an unaffordable tab would be exactly the sort of culminating experience she had come to expect from Sandorino. As she picked her way slowly toward her bag to assess her financial situation, she said, "Just as long as he can walk in a straight line when I need him. He's kind of integral to my idea." She stopped to sigh. "It's really not a good idea."

"Um." Nadia tugged at the scarf in her hands. "Can you think of another one?"

"There's no /time/." That wasn't quite right—there was too much time, twisting and overlapping where it should have been smooth and flat—but Lucca didn't bother to correct herself, on the grounds that there wasn't enough time where she needed time to be. Her fingers brushed enough metal on the bottom of her knapsack to reassure her that at least she wouldn't have to try fleeing with a hangover.

When Lucca looked up, she found herself presented with a mostly clean rag. "I rubbed my teeth with the other end," Nadia explained. "It sort of helped."

Emphasis on the "sort of." Lucca was still polishing her molars with her tongue as she and Nadia approached the entrance to Frog's room. He had left the door ajar and stood waiting just behind it, notebook in hand and makeshift sack slung over his shoulder. The pale skin beneath his eyes had darkened to a bruised shade of exhaustion.

"Good morning again," said Nadia with almost convincing cheer.

Frog nodded slowly, as if too quick a motion might have dislodged his head. "Art thou well now, Lucca?"

/No, and neither are you/. Aloud she replied, "I'm standing. Let's just get back to Denadoro before something else goes wrong." She began to turn, then reconsidered. "You—Glenn's still there, right?"

As Frog's eyes twitched and drifted out of focus, Lucca wondered if hers looked the same when she tried to untangle her own timelines. Perhaps she at last had a reason to be grateful for her thick lenses.

He nodded again, even more hesitantly. "He hath not yet departed, so far as I may see, yet 'tis difficult to discern with certainty. To regard mine own memories as alien—"

"Don't. You'll lose them if you do." Lucca hadn't meant to snap. She attempted a softer tone as she asked, "Do you want me to hold on to that notebook for you or—" his fingers tightened around the spiral binding— "on second thought, you'd better keep it."

Nadia glanced back and forth between them and smiled, but the cheekiness appeared forced. "Guess I'm the only one without a crazy parallel universe diary now, huh? You guys are gonna make me jealous."

Lucca was already jealous of herself for having grown up with a friend who kept her grounded, whose hand kept her from stopping short or going too far. It was hard not to regard as alien the memories that felt most like invaders.

Okay, that's enough standing around in the hallway going crazy. She took a deep breath, straightened up, and headed out into the now sparsely populated public portion of the inn, tossing a reminder over her shoulder to Nadia to tie the scarf back in place. Little details made all the difference.

Toma was back at the bar, enjoying a breakfast beer and a plate of something that wobbled along the boundary between eggs and porridge.

"We'll be back later today," she told him, giving him a disapproving look as he signaled for another drink. "I want you to find us a boat."

"A boat, eh?" His grin was mocking, but the spark of interest of his eyes was unmistakable; apparently she'd hit his legitimate adventuring nerve. He twirled his spoon between his fingers. "Hey, fine by me, long as you're still paying. Up for a little hair of the dog before you go?"

It was, Lucca realized, very difficult to assume the moral high ground with someone who had watched her vomit out a window the night before, so she tried a lower route as she went to settle up the last twelve hours of damage with the bartender: "Just make sure you can still walk in a straight line."



No Mystics attacked them on the way back to Denadoro, though Lucca half-wished one or two had; Frog couldn't have been tenser if he were rolled into a wire and coiled into a spring, and that he now moved more easily in his human shape seemed only to put him more ill at ease. Nadia kept her crossbow loaded and her gaze fixed on the sky, until Lucca snapped at her after the third time she tripped.

Even putting her helmet back on hadn't proven the psychological panacea that Lucca hoped.

Four hundred years later, she was scribbling diagrams in the margins of a history book and ignoring a lecture on the loss of morale following Sir Cyrus's disappearance. In another decade, in a different life, she was laying his ghost to rest and trying not to feel awkward in the presence of Frog's grief and even more awkward in the presence of an afterlife. Was he damned to haunt the mountains now, moaning in the water and the wind, as he once echoed his doom through centuries of crumbling stone?

Even afterlives were subject to the space-time continuum. What did it mean to rest or unravel after death if three stupid kids with a time machine could reroute eternity?

Nadia's hand caught her shoulder. "We're here. So who else feels like we just left?"

/Frog probably feels like he never left at all/, Lucca kept herself from pointing out. In the jumble of broken pieces in the back of her mind, there remained a few sharp shards of watching herself from the outside. The world was uncomfortably different on the other side of the eyes, with the filters of memory stripped away. And Frog wasn't even the same person.

Wind agitated the leaves and grass all the way up the mountain, far past the angle at which Lucca was willing to bend her neck. Even at the outskirts, the noise of the falls drowned any but the most thundering footsteps. The Denadoro range was alive, breathing and pulsing, offering easy cover to Mystics and lost squires alike.

Lucca took a step back from it, trying not to see the white flicker of Flea's skirt in the glare of the sun on the water. "So where do we start?"

"I..." The same breeze that stirred the foliage drew Frog's hair back from his face, exposing him briefly as hollow-cheeked and pallid, with skin like a weathered palimpsest. He rubbed at his forehead with one hand and curled the other tighter around the sack containing the Masamune. "I return now to grieve. With the advent of dawn I could no longer bear to hide."

He paused too often, and guilt filled too many of the gaps. "Hiding was smart," said Lucca, using her gun to gesture at the places along the path where smaller trees had been uprooted and haphazardly strewn, their limbs stripped of leaves.

"Yeah, or that flea would have found you." Nadia sounded less upbeat as she took in the destruction and added, "Wait, is he the one who—"

"There's a reason we didn't hang around yesterday."

Frog said nothing; Lucca suspected he just didn't have the energy to focus on grammar and competing memories and walking all at once. Sword drawn, he led the climb.

From the look of it, Flea had hunted in fits and tantrums, uprooting concentrated clusters of foliage before flitting to the next point of interest. If he had left underlings to continue the search, they were either well-hidden or already departed; every movement that drew a shot from Lucca or Nadia turned out to be a false alarm, a caprice of wind or water.

Frog lunged at nothing and reacted only in the aftermath.

"He's not okay, is he?" Nadia whispered as they neared the scene of yesterday's ruin.

"No." The word came out louder and harsher than Lucca intended, and it still didn't distract from the question of what she would do if she confronted her younger self. Shoot myself in the head, she thought, with more bitterness than practicality. Delusions of sacrifice were a waste of dreams; without her, the Millennial Fair would have passed without incident and the world would have gone on turning toward ruin, just as it had without Crono and just as it would without Marle. Kick away any leg of the tripod, and the critical moment collapsed.

Nadia winced. By the time it occurred to Lucca that an apology might be in order, she realized that the reaction hadn't been to her tone; they had nearly reached the end of the path, and mixed into the thundering of the falls were keening sobs. She darted ahead to block the rope ladder.

But Frog wasn't rushing forward. He hunched in place, hand curled tight against his chest, and all the wildness of the wind couldn't disguise his trembling. His words tripped out: "I still—'tis still—I bleed afresh. Cyrus..."

The word overlapped with a wail from above.

"Don't just stand there! What if he's hurt?" Without waiting for arguments, Nadia shouldered her crossbow and bumped Lucca aside to shoot up the ladder. When she vanished over the lip of the ledge, the cries came to an abrupt end.

Lucca sighed, then turned to Frog to ask, "You're not violent or anything, are you?"

"Nay." His face scrunched sharply, as if he had been struck in the forehead, and his eyes were dark and fogged when he opened them again. He drifted forward as if underwater.

Halting him proved almost distressingly easy. Lucca thumped her palm against the worn leather on his chest, firmly told him "no," then turned and hurried after Nadia.

"Listen, I'm really not Leene." Near a large cluster of stones, Nadia crouched beside a shorter and much less gaunt version of Frog's current form, meeting his frozen incomprehension with the sort of expression she might have used to coax a feral cat out of hiding. "And I'm not a vision or whatever, either. See? Solid!" She poked herself, then seemed to think better of the demonstration and poked him, instead. He squeaked. "I'd give you a muffin, but we're kind of out. Um. Lucca? Help?"

Glenn glanced wildly between them, but his eyes had the feverish blear of one who had lost sight of the border between reality and nightmare. Belatedly Lucca wondered if she should have doffed her helmet.

There was, she decided, no way for this conversation to go well.

"It's okay," Lucca said, spreading her hands to show harmless. "We're not here to hurt you."

Glenn withdrew further, pressing his back to the stones, and trembled until words shook loose. His voice lacked both the hoarseness of disuse and the warm undertones of croaks; without the archaic affectations, he sounded almost wholly unlike Frog. Then Lucca caught snatches of "coward" and "failed," which at least bought him back to a familiar place.

"Don't talk like that." Nadia's chin shifted forward into the business position. "You're alive, okay? That's what Cyrus wanted."

His trembling ceased, and "I should have died" turned into a snarl by the final syllable. "Your highness," he added, less venomously.

"Believe me, you shouldn't have," said Lucca, but she captured only a flicker of his attention. Apparently he had decided that if he couldn't escape his hallucinations, he could at least ignore the one that made less sense.

Refusing to meet Nadia's eyes, he muttered, "We're all damned now. Cyrus has fallen, and no one else can turn back the darkness. King, queen, country, all we loved and swore to defend—"

Nadia poked him in the chest. "You can't just give up! Cyrus is counting on you!"

Glenn slumped against the stones as if to disprove her point. "There is nothing for me but to follow. He—I cannot take his place. You must know, how he spoke of you," he began, then broke off and raised his head like a startled deer. After a moment Lucca realized that he was staring past Nadia, not at her, and she turned to watch as the shadowed moss of Frog's hair crested the cliff.

Shit.

A few more inches, and his eyes locked with those of Glenn, who had begun to shake again. Everything shook, hands and grass and light-on-water and the air between them as excess memories tangled together and struggled to collapse.

Lucca had stayed out of her own sight, she remembered, but all that she truly remembered was committing the memory to paper before it was swallowed by the rifts in her brain. She didn't want to imagine what was happening in Frog's brain. Even Magus, who had thought it was a good idea to engage the pinnacle of evolution in single combat, hadn't been foolish enough to engage his younger self in revelatory conversation.

She bit back a warning. I trust you. Bad things happen when I don't.

The fever-fog over Glenn's eyes began to thin. "I don't," he said, voice wavering, but finishing the verb proved beyond him. He blinked slowly, as if to give Frog time to vanish, then adopted the squint of one trying to tease apart fractured memory and déjà vu. "Who are you?"

"Thine uncle," Frog replied.



Even hunched together beneath the chattering leaves, shrouded in the mist of the falls, they could not have been mistaken for each other. Had appearance been the sole consideration, Frog might have claimed to be his own father.

"How weird is it," said Nadia, curling a blade of grass around her finger, "that I look way more like my super-great-grandmother than Frog looks like himself?"

Lucca resisted the urge to shush her; even if Glenn had been transformed, he couldn't have heard her over the tumbling water and his own heated conversation. "Well, Leene didn't spend eleven years on a mountain, either."

Nadia nodded and coiled the grass tighter. "And this is okay, right? That they're talking to each other? I mean, I think Glenn really needs it, but I keep waiting for history to blow up again."

"Frog's being careful." Insofar as anyone could be careful about sculpting himself through a feedback loop. Suppressing a sigh that would have undermined her words, she glanced again at Frog, found the universe still intact, and tried not to think about other ways that it might have been disintegrating, particularly other ways that involved Magus and the Gate Key.

Somewhat pacified, Nadia let the grass blade uncoil and fall. "And he's not going to end up going crazy or anything, right? I mean, really crazy, like that woman out by the forest."

"Fiona."

"Right."

"This isn't the same."

The answer didn't quite match the question, but Nadia declined to press. Her gaze and body shifted restlessly until she made a startled noise and pulled her hand back from a stray stone, which she rolled gently toward the pile at the other end of the ledge. "I just feel so bad for him," she said. "Both of him."

Glenn had come to bury as best he could; the soil didn't allow for much, so he had stacked stones into a burial mound. Despite his interruption, only a few patches of armor, most of them scorched black, remained visible through the rocks. Lucca didn't want to consider whether it was fortunate that Cyrus's remains were downwind.

"Frog's strong," she said, half to herself. "Sometimes he needs somebody to hit him over the head and remind him, but he is." In the shadows of the trees, Frog rose slowly, setting a thin hand on Glenn's shoulder. But the kind of strong he can be right now isn't enough. His lank hair fell over his face as he approached, leaving Glenn crouched in heavy silence.

Nadia hastened to her feet with a concerned smile. "How're you doing?"

He tucked his hair behind his ear and echoed her expression, muted and shadowed. His voice faltered: "I fear I am—he is—mine apologies that I have so long delayed us. He hath fixed his mind upon his own unmaking, and I cannot yet discern what path he may follow hence."

Darkness and briars. The space-time continuum, or whatever meddled in it, had known what to do with Marle when she set her doom into motion. Frog's existence still teetered within his own sphere of influence.

The clatter of rock drew Lucca's attention to where Glenn had resumed work on his mound; Frog's followed a beat behind. Glenn seemed less focused on his task than desperate to blot out any focus at all.

Lucca took a deep breath and stood. "So don't leave him."

Nadia's brow furrowed as Frog's gaze lingered on his younger self. "But what about—" popped out before Lucca made a sufficiently firm zipper gesture at her.

"I mean it," Lucca continued. From her current angle, Frog's hair covered most of his face, but she caught the tension in his jaw. "Stay with him until you're sure he has a future. Make it right. We can wait."

Except we can't. We all know we can't. She made zippers again at Nadia, who appeared on the fretful verge of saying as much.

At the edge of earshot, fumbled stones slid and scraped together. Perhaps Glenn was sabotaging himself, unwilling to surrender the last glimpses of Cyrus to the earth and even less willing to face whatever followed. Frog watched a moment longer, then turned back to her, his shoulders stooped. "My selfishness shameth me. Such matters pale before—"

"This is important." The moment mattered, if not in the same way as moments that ripped holes through time. Lucca lowered her voice to ensure Glenn didn't hear: "This is /you/."

If Nadia had any further misgivings, she seemed to be ignoring them in favor of leaning in to whisper. Her hand rested on Frog's arm. "And you're really strong so he's really strong, too, but I think he needs you to help him figure that out. Okay?"

Frog sighed, bending his head lower. "Leene—"

Realization stiffened him into silence, but only after the word had escaped and hung heavy in the air. A gust blew his hair from his widened eyes.

"It's okay," said Nadia, leaving her hand in place.

There had been another of whatever Masa and Mune were, somewhere in Zeal, and she had been less obnoxious than her brothers by sole virtue of not popping up later to converse in circles. She said something that Lucca deemed significant enough to warrant a reference in her notebook, something about butterflies dreaming themselves into bowling balls. At the time Lucca hadn't been able to conceive of dreaming deeply enough to drown identity.

Perhaps all it took was losing sight of the surface.

With effort, Lucca kept her voice low. "Just keep writing. You'll lose whatever you don't write down. And remember to write that you're not crazy."

Nadia patted his arm again, smiling shakily, then flung her arms around him in a hug that drew a startled noise and percussive chorus from Glenn. "You're going to be okay," she whispered, almost below Lucca's hearing. "Just take care of yourself."

Eye contact, Lucca decided, was the least she could do. "Take care. You know where we'll be."

He held her gaze, unblinking, until she suspected that he knew better than she would have liked. "Aye. Look to thine own welfare, as well."

There was nothing left to say that could be said. Frog drifted back to kneel beside Glenn, sparing Lucca the feeling of his eyes as she descended the rope ladder. Once she reached the base, there was only wind and water and the weight of loss. A beat later there was also Nadia, who held tight to the final rung before letting go.

They had made it most of the way down before Nadia spoke again: "You're not going to wait for him."

Lucca halted, since the only thing less comfortable than having this conversation would be having it while tripping over broken boughs. She addressed a pool half-hidden by branches. "I can't."

"Think he'll forgive you?"

"It doesn't matter if he does." This sounded very nearly convincing. "I dragged him into this. I'm not going to let him get himself killed because I screwed up."

Frog trailed along in the wake of the timestream, buffeted by scraps of ruined realities. Even if Glenn's future had been as clear and solid as a diamond, Frog's instability was too great a threat; infiltrating Magus's castle would be a surer death sentence than leaving Glenn suicidal and alone. We'd be lucky if he only got /himself killed./

Reluctance rode out on Nadia's sigh. "I guess. It just feels wrong. Everything feels wrong now."

"The whole world's wrong," Lucca pointed out, hoping that this signaled an end to the discussion. As she turned away from the pool to resume walking, an unnatural gleam pulled her gaze back. Realization nearly compelled her to pretend that she hadn't noticed anything.

"Is something—" Nadia peered over her shoulder. "Wait, is that the Masamune? I thought Frog had it."

Nothing like time travel to double a headache. "He does. This is the other one." Gesturing for Nadia to keep watch, Lucca pushed aside an uprooted sapling and squinted into the pool until she had made out the full shape of the blade against the stones. The water was cold enough to sting; drawing the sharp half of the Masamune onto the grass left her hands numb and mottled.

She had just pulled a tiny flame between her palms for warmth when her hair fluttered at her ears and a pair of shapes bobbed at the periphery of her vision.

"You're not fixing /anything/," said Mune.

She scowled and clapped the fire out. "You don't know about that. That's doesn't happen for hundreds of years."

"Human," said Masa, with more dismissal than contempt. "She is always dreaming."

A curious noise announced that Nadia had ceased keeping watch in favor of joining what was already too disjointed to qualify as a conversation. "So if you two touch the other two yous, what happens? Does the whole world explode?"

"Why would we?" asked Mune. "We don't overlap."

"You're—" Lucca fumbled for the right word and found every candidate wanting— "fractal. Sort of." Something terribly important flickered like the ghost of a butterfly. "The pieces are so small that time can't hold you, so you don't leave holes."

"Yeah, we have /manners/." Mune flicked his left foot and was suddenly balanced on the tip of a branch, leaves rattling like castanets around him.

The butterfly of significance flitted out of reach. Dammit, just make /sense for once. We don't have time for games./ For all the good she expected it to do, Lucca directed at Masa the sort of look that should have pinned any insect down. "You're not outside of time. You're more... through it. It can't hold you."

"No more than you can hold the wind," Mune interjected, unhelpfully. Nadia made a startled noise as her ponytail went vertical.

"There was a wise man once," said Masa, "who claimed the world was destroyed and recreated every moment. And that's what passes for wise with you." Mune alit beside him, and they grinned at each other as if they had just shared a favorite joke.

"There is no mesh fine enough," said Mune, "and it's only ever mesh. It can't be solid."

"And the arrow can never pass through."

"Except when it always does, because an ignorant lunk with decent aim beats infinity every time."

The grins vanished abruptly as Masa added, "You aren't our lunk," and vanished with his twin in a sharp twist of light.

Lucca waited to see whether they had any additional parting shots, then nudged the blade with her foot. "Well, that was almost completely useless."

A warning wind tore past her, knocking her off-balance and away from the Masamune. Nadia caught her elbow to keep her from tumbling into the pool.

"Let's just go," said Lucca, on the off-chance that this would work.

Nadia shook her head. "What if a bad guy finds the Masamune?"

"It's broken, so the Mystics aren't going to care. And I think Masa and Mune can take care of themselves."

With a worried frown, Nadia knelt and poked the blade. Furious gusts failed to result. When the sword allowed her to slip her palm beneath it and raise the tip from the ground, she looked up and said, "Can I borrow your bag, Lucca? I think they'll let me carry them."

Had history been a wildebeest, it would have been peppered with arrowheads, dragging its broken hind legs, and still capable of snorting frantically at this latest potential assault upon its integrity. Then again, how could a paradox center around itself around Masa and Mune? And it's not like I'm letting her get near the Mystics with it.

Lucca shrugged off her knapsack and took a moment to rearrange its less sword-proof contents. "Don't let it poke out where anyone can see it. I don't even want to know what would happen if someone thinks the new queen's walking around with a broken legendary sword."

"Aye-aye. Yarrr." Ignoring Lucca's efforts to chastise her for slipping into unwanted character, Nadia eased the tip of the Masamune into the knapsack and added, "Maybe I should cut my hair really short and dye it. Has hair dye been invented yet?"

"If it has, I don't know where we'd find it on short notice. Just keep the scarf on in public." Lucca started to reach for the flap of her knapsack, then thought better of it; no sense getting mountain debris blown into her face if Masa and Mune were feeling territorial.

The task fell to Nadia, who shouldered the knapsack with the practiced ease of one who sometimes remembered to pack when she ran away from home. She pulled her ponytail free of a strap, then turned to gaze up at path they'd descended. "Frog called me 'Leene,'" she said quietly. "What if he starts thinking I'm someone he made up because he was lonely?"

Crono was real echoed frantically through Lucca's mind. Mom walked and we saved the world. What she couldn't remember doing she could remember writing down, and a string of failed creative writing assignments assured her that her imagination's contributions must have been minimal.

"I just don't want him to forget me if..." Nadia let the word hang, staring up toward the summit a moment longer, then shook her head as she turned and headed back along the path. "It can't take that long to get the Gate Key back. And he'll be okay while we're gone, right? That's what's important."

"He'll be fine." Glenn's way too confused to try killing himself now.

Lucca's response must have come out sharper than she intended, or else Nadia had wandered deep into her own thoughts; all conversation died until they came to level ground. Then Nadia glanced over with a small smile and said, "Hey, I remember you said the Frog from the better timeline got to meet Cyrus again. I mean, as a ghost. Can you tell me about it?"

They filled in the gaps in her memory together, weaving him an ending from scraps and speculation.



The Queen's Head had done nothing to improve itself in their absence. Nor had Toma, whose daily activity, as far as Lucca could discern, might well have consisted entirely of changing barstools. She caught Toma's eye and moved her forefingers in what she thought was a very clear outline of a boat. When he furrowed his brow and waved his hand in a vague, confused spiral, she shook her head and signaled for him to wait just a bit longer. This he seemed to understand.

"Creeps," Nadia muttered from just ahead of her, turning the corner into the hall. "I bet I could wave the Masamune around they wouldn't even /notice/."

"Let's not test that." Lucca glanced about for signs of any other guests, then let herself into the room she'd used the night before. It remained in the same degree of disarray in which she'd left it. For want of other options, she tossed a scratchy bedsheet at Nadia and said, "Here, wrap the sword with this."

Once her knapsack was free of temperamental spirits, Lucca slung it over her shoulder and adjusted her glasses on her nose, hoping the gesture didn't make her look as nervous and preoccupied as she was certain it did. "Anyway," she said, sliding backward a step, "there's some stuff I have to take care of with Toma, so you can just hang out back here until—"

Nadia's hand caught her shoulder with the force of a lobster claw. "Don't you dare."

So much for hoping this could be easy. Lucca twisted futilely to either side, then sighed and said, "Look—"

"I'm coming with you if I have to glue myself to you."

"You don't even know where to find glue here." This had been the wrong thing to say; Nadia's fingers dug in harder. "Okay, ow. Can we talk about this without giving me bruises?"

Guilt flickered over Nadia's face. The pressure on Lucca's shoulder remained firm, however, until Nadia abruptly let go and snatched both of Lucca's hands in hers.

"Easy" retreated a little deeper into the realm of fond yet distant dreams, leaving Lucca with "blunt." "Look," she began again, resisting the impulse to draw fire into her palms, "just think about this for a minute, okay? This is dangerous. It's /stupid/. And it's not going to get less dangerous and stupid if you're there; you'd just get killed, too. Do you get that? If I screw this up, I'm going to die."

"You won't. I won't let you." Nadia's grip did not relent. "Besides, if you screw up—which you /won't/—everybody's going to die. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

Everybody died in a future so many generations removed that even names were lost, a tragedy as remote as the casualties alluded to in a history lecture. Even first-hand experience of the ruin—the crunch of broken glass beneath a shoe, the choke of dead dust in the air—dulled with distance. The only moment that mattered was the immediate one.

"You wouldn't die /yet/." Lucca's voice thickened in her throat. "You could, I don't know, forget about it. And you could at least—"

It took several seconds to register that Nadia had slapped her. In numb silence, Lucca raised the hand that Nadia had released and pressed it to her stinging cheek. Nadia's arm quivered.

"Sorry," they said in unison.

Lucca weighed her next words carefully as Nadia reached to take her hands again, without indicating whether this was more a promise of no more slapping or a prevention of escape. She was surprised that she had to fight an impulse to cling.

She was still fiddling with the balance when Nadia said, "We're in this together, okay? I didn't follow you through that Gate so you could ditch me."

"I'm not trying to ditch you." Clinging was very near to winning. "Believe me. But I'm going into the Mystic stronghold, which is—" not a suicide mission— "crazy. And stupid. It's a really bad idea, but it's the only one I've got right now."

The Guardian chin set itself. "I'm not afraid of Mystics. I've been to tons of formal dinners with Mystics. I even know which Mystic forks to use. I—"

"It's not just the Mystics," Lucca cut in. "It's /me/. I can feel myself changing faster and faster all the time, and I don't know who I'll end up."

Nadia's grip tightened until Lucca half-expected to hear the grinding of metacarpals. "I. Won't. Let. You. Okay?"

"If I say 'okay,' will you stop breaking my hands?"

After a moment's consideration, Nadia offered a wan smile and let go. "And don't even think about trying to run," she said. "We both know I could catch you without breaking a sweat."

"Even in those stupid shoes."

"Even in these stupid shoes."

Lucca looked away first, to forestall a noise that might no longer have been a laugh by the time it cleared her tongue. She addressed the backs of her knuckles. "I really hope you don't regret this."

"Not a chance." Nadia patted her shoulder. "Besides, who else is going to hold you back if you go crazy again?"



I really hope I /don't regret this/.

Lucca wasn't sure yet whether the boat was regrettable. It had two oars, which seemed like the right number, and there were no obvious holes in the bottom, but she was a bit troubled that the boat had, according to Toma, been lent as repayment for a favor. The concept of anyone playing debtor to Toma was too slippery for her brain to wrap around.

"Can't believe I let you talk me into this," said Toma, whose brain seemed to be experiencing similar difficulties; this was his fourth variation on the same theme. He had yet to make any effort to head back to shore, however, despite the advent of evening and the dark clouds brewing in the eastern sky. "This shit is either crazy or some kind of military secret. If you girls aren't mixed up with the Mystics, how come you know about this secret way in, eh?"

This was at least a new angle from which to defend herself. "Listen," said Lucca, holding up the hand that was not pressed against Nadia to count off her points, "it's a long story, you wouldn't believe a word of it, and I'm not paying you to ask questions. And if we were working for the Mystics, we wouldn't be trying to sneak in and steal from them, right?" This sounded roughly as sensible out loud as it had in her head. "And anyway, I'm not totally sure this entrance exists yet."

Toma's eyebrow scampered halfway up his forehead. Dammit, mouth, your turn was over.

"Because it's magic," Nadia interjected. "And the maybe the magic isn't done yet. It's not like she can see into the future or anything. Um."

The lack of personal space allowed Lucca to elbow her in the ribs with no more than a twitch.

Over the course of several long seconds, Toma's eyebrow retreated. He ceased rowing to stretch his arms. "You girls should've brought your swashbuckling bodyguard. Where'd he go, anyway?"

"That's none of your business," Lucca replied, overlapping with Nadia's sharp "He's /fine/."

Tom gave them a long-suffering look that might have worked better on the face of someone who hadn't drunk most of Lucca's remaining cash. After a final roll of his shoulders, he dipped the oars back into the water and said, "Seriously, what's this all about?"

Aggressive secrecy didn't seem wise when Toma was the one rowing the boat. She and Nadia could have rowed in a pinch, perhaps, but Lucca suspected it would be in dizzy little circles. So she shrugged and said, "Saving the world."

He laughed. "What, are you girls gonna sneak in the back door and beat the Mystics all by yourselves?"

"I mean the whole world. If we screw this up, there's no more life." Despite everything, Lucca felt her lips quirk. "Except for the rats."

Nadia looked up from the water. "People, too."

"A kid."

"At least a kid."

Toma glanced between them, muttered something about how lucky they were that he needed the excitement, and squinted at the twilit waves. "So what's this thing look like, again? All I see's water."

"It's a vortex," Lucca replied, then reconsidered Toma's vocabulary. "Swirly water."

"Like that!" Nadia's excitement nearly propelled her off the thwart and tipped the edge of the boat perilously near to the water. By the time Lucca was able to focus on anything other than maintaining a white-knuckle grip on her seat, she could feel the vessel beneath her being tugged into a gradually accelerating spiral.

Toma swore his way up and down the spectrum, eyes riveted to the dark maw of the vortex widening before him, and grinned the manic grin of one whose legitimate adventuring nerve had just locked his self-preservation instinct in a closet. Apparently the passage in this era functioned only on demand, which was either a reassuring sign that it was in use, or behavior ominously reminiscent of a trapdoor spider's. Lucca supposed she wouldn't have to savor that mystery for long, at least.

"Hold your breath," she said, for Toma's benefit, "and hope we don't end up in the kitchen."

The boat twisted one last time before falling forward.