FicWad

Disclaimer: Chrono Trigger and all its attendant goodies belong to Square-Enix. I'm just playing in their sandbox. Further information can be found in the header for Chapter One.

Thanks to Myshu and Xyn at fanfiction.net for catching the rogue typos. I proof and I proof, and they do not go away...



"Wow!"

It had taken Nadia a moment to recover from the shock of seeing a spherical distortion in the fabric of reality, but now she was almost dancing around it, poking at it and giggling when her fingers passed through the pulsating blue. After a few more swipes, she turned to Lucca and said, "Hey, why didn't anyone see this at the Millennial Fair?"

"Because they didn't have this." Lucca pulled the Gate Key out of her knapsack and waited for Nadia to admire it. When all she got was a curious nod, she deflated a bit and said, "I call it the Gate Key. Unless a Gate is 'opened,' for lack of a better term, no one can pass through it." She indicated the blue sphere and added, "One of my especially clever features is automatic Gate detection, which excites any Gate in a thirty-meter radius into visibility."

Nadia's attention had already wandered, and she gave only a vague nod as she stuck her forearm through the distortion. Like Marle, her interest in science didn't seem to extend past things that lit up or exploded. Lucca crossed her arms and waited for the novelty to wear off.

"I'm not sure if this is really cool or really creepy," Nadia said, standing so that the bright sphere appeared to have replaced her upper torso.

"They're unstable, you know. Sometimes they open by themselves."

In a flash Nadia had put a safe distance between herself and the Gate. Lucca suppressed a grin.

After a pause, Nadia turned her attention back to Lucca and said, "So you're going to go through this and try to fix everything?"

"Yeah. I'm going to see if Robo is still in the Middle Ages, and then work from there." Lucca noticed that her hands were clenched and consciously relaxed them. "Listen, I know this is weird, but would you-"

"Of course I'm coming along!" Nadia dashed away from the Gate and retrieved her crossbow from the ground, slinging it back over her shoulder. Even the bounce was identical to Marle's. "I can't just stay here while you save the world! And this place stinks, anyway."

Was that why she was willing to believe? Lucca sighed and said, "It's not like your other life was perfect, you know. Sure, you had Crono and your father and a lot of bragging rights, but you still had some problems. I mean, you still got clingy whenever anyone brought up the death thing, even after-" The words were out before she had finished weighing them, and Lucca groaned. Mouth, please consult brain.

Ignoring Nadia's repeated attempts to interrupt, Lucca condensed Crono's death and something akin to resurrection into a thirty-second information dump. There was a long silence when she'd finished.

"But he was okay in the end," Nadia said, as if that settled the matter. "And anyway, we've got to save the world!" She pointed at the Gate. "C'mon, Lucca! Let's get going!"

A smile tugged at Lucca's lips, but it came with a pang. "Crono would be right behind you."

Nadia's face softened. Clasping her hands behind her back, she said, "Hey, Lucca, would you mind telling me a little more about Crono? It sounds like he was really important, and, well..."

The vague urgency in the back of Lucca's mind was a poor match for the front-and-center need to talk about what she'd lost. Letting the memories bubble up from where she'd tried to ignore them, she began, "Well, he was an absolute angel when he was sleeping, which was about half the time. The other half he spent getting into trouble. Crono didn't usually think much before acting. And he was too brave for his own good."

Nadia smiled. "What did he look like?"

"The defining feature was definitely the hair." Lucca moved her hands overhead to pantomime Crono's unique approach to style. "Bright red, too. And he had fashion sense worse than mine and kind of a dopey grin. Nice eyes, though. They were..."

Something twitched in the recesses of Lucca's mind. Where she looked for the color, she found only a hole. And new memories flowed like molten metal, pouring into the void to give themselves form: a lonely girl who convinced herself she didn't need friends, inventions no one was willing to risk, a family too dysfunctional to share meals.

"Shit," she muttered, digging through her bag for a pen and notebook. "Why didn't I think of this before?" As Nadia watched in confusion, Lucca's pen tore across the page: "mom walked crono lived in the house with the green door you saved the world crono was your friend-"

The pen was snatched away. Lucca glared up from the paper to find Nadia giving her a worried look. "Lucca? Is something wrong?"

Lucca wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, and the sound that escaped hadn't make up its mind, either. "I should have thought of this," she said, her hands shaking the as she clutched the notebook. "I knew memory replacement would happen- it happened before- but not this /fast/."

Crying seemed to be winning. Furiously she wiped her eyes as Nadia said, "What on earth are you talking about?"

"His eyes." Lucca managed to laugh, but the sound was hollow. "I've already forgotten what color his eyes were."

Nadia shook her head. "I have trouble remembering eye colors, too. Don't freak."

"That's not it." Lucca shoved her supplies back into the bag. "I'm forgetting, and I'm going to keep forgetting, and it looks like it's happening a lot faster than last time. We have to hurry."

Even if Nadia wasn't sure what Lucca was talking about, she had the sense not to push for an explanation. Instead she patted her crossbow and nodded.

Brandishing the Gate Key, Lucca keyed in the sequence of buttons to activate the portal. At least the eerie sound and flash of blue were still familiar.

Nadia let out a little shriek as the Gate stretched and flattened itself into a hole. To her credit, though, she composed herself and grinned. "Ready or not," she said, and they stepped forward together into the flickering energy.



Lucca managed to remain upright when she was tossed into Truce Canyon, but Nadia let out a startled squeak and tumbled face-first into the grass. Making a half-hearted effort to hide her amusement, Lucca helped the princess to her feet.

"Wow, that was a rush!" Nadia bounded across the clearing and stared wide-eyed at the landscape before her. "So this is really the Middle Ages, huh? I wanna see the knights and the old villages and-"

Sighing, Lucca grabbed Nadia by the shoulder and yanked her back into the ring of trees. "There are Mystics around here," she said. "Leaderless but bitter and probably still very aggressive Mystics. So unless you're up for a fight, do what I do." Returning the Gate Key to her bag, Lucca drew her gun, put a finger to her lips, and motioned for Nadia to follow.

They had almost reached the fields when two dark shapes came screaming down from the sky.

"Left one's mine!" Lucca called, taking aim. As her shot knocked the bird off course and sent it fluttering dizzily to the ground, her suspicions about the gun were confirmed- it had been designed to stun, not kill. She sighed and turned to sight the other bird.

To her surprise, it was already plummeting. Nadia cheered and began a victory dance.

Lucca grinned. "Not bad, Princess. Escape through Guardia Forest often?"

"Maybe." Nadia returned her grin, then stopped mid-wiggle. "The dance is too much, isn't it?"

"A little. Please don't tell me you did it every time you brought down the woodland population."

"Nah, I never had an audience." Nadia giggled. "Anyway," she added, turning south, "Truce is still this way, right?"

Nothing else attacked them on the way, suggesting that northeastern Zenan wasn't a popular area for Mystic raiding parties. Or else the Mystics were still shell-shocked from the sudden death of their leader. Lucca remembered enough history to know that human-Mystic skirmishes continued for years after the war and petered off only after the founding of Medina, but apparently the area around Truce, at least in 601, was secure. If any Mystics were still holed up in the canyon, they seemed reluctant to carry the battle to the fields.

As the first of the town's outlying houses came into view, Lucca stopped Nadia and gave her a critical look. "I don't think they'd mistake you for the queen when she's not missing," she said, "but you'll definitely draw attention to us. We should stay off the main roads."

Nadia nodded. "How far is it from here to Sandorino?"

"Less than a day's walk, if the bridge is still repaired." Keeping a safe distant from the buildings, Lucca began a course that would take them through the areas with the sparsest populations.

"And what if it isn't?"

"We hope someone's got a boat."

"Seriously?"

"More or less, yeah."

They walked in silence for while, broken only by Nadia's periodic fascination with the landscape. Lucca couldn't see how it differed much from what she saw in her own time, but the unsettled land around the village did have a certain rugged charm, if you liked that sort of thing. Lucca didn't. Sure, she was never one to turn down a good camping trip, but she had a hard time appreciating empty fields.

Once they'd passed through Truce and started to follow the coast, Lucca caught herself checking for signs of fishing boats. Well, someone has to be the pessimist, she reminded herself, watching Nadia ooh and ahh over the tiny waves lapping at the shore. Of course, Marle and Crono had been the same way. Until they'd found the future in tatters, neither of them had really let go of the idea that time travel was one big game.

When they paused for a breather as the land curved south, Nadia ended a series of observations on the kingdom's dirt roads by saying, "Hey, could you tell me a little more about Robo?"

Lucca hadn't expected it to hurt. But somewhere mixed in with the recent memory of seeing him again and the ever-present worry that he didn't exist in the future was the fear of what waited for her at Fiona's house, and her emotions were a little raw to begin with.

"I'm sorry," Nadia said, misinterpreting the silence. "You don't have to talk about it."

Lucca shook her head. "No, it's okay. It's just that Robo is- was- is such a good friend, and I let myself miss out on a lot of time we could have spent together because I was afraid." She picked at the grass for a few seconds, then said, "I remember when we found him. You were worried he'd attack us if I fixed him, and even Crono looked a little uneasy, but you both trusted me. I could have gotten us all killed, and you trusted me anyway."

Nadia looked away. "Lucca, I-"

"Let's go," Lucca said abruptly, getting to her feet. "It's not that much farther to the bridge."

Again there was silence, this time less easy, until the Zenan Strait came into view, spanned by a dark line of wood. As they drew nearer, the situation clarified itself.

On the bright side, the bridge still appeared to be in good shape in this timeline. Which means Guardia's public works department has actually gotten worse over the centuries, Lucca thought sourly, remembering the ordeal involved in getting the transportation department to remove the remains of a wrecked ferry boat from her family's island. Judging by the clarity of it, that particular memory featured in all of her realities. Of course.

On the side more in keeping with Lucca's luck, the bridge was guarded by a detachment of knights, all of whom were watching the two girls intently. If the cards and dice littering the ground were any indication, it had been a long, boring day for Guardia's finest, and no distraction would be allowed to pass unrelished.

"Halt!" barked the knight who either was the leader or fancied himself so. "Who goes there?"

Another knight nudged him. "Wouldn't it be 'Who go there?' There are two of them."

Scowling, the leader repeated, "Who goes there?"

"Travelers," Nadia said brightly before Lucca could reply. "We're going to Sandorino."

On reflection, Lucca decided that letting her do the talking probably wouldn't be a bad idea. It took a deep level of paranoia to believe that anyone with eyes like Nadia's was hatching a plot.

Of course, the war had turned paranoia into a survival skill. "And who might you unescorted maidens be visiting?"

"Whom."

"/Who/," insisted the leader, shooting a glare at his subordinate. Without waiting for a reply, he squinted at Nadia and said, "Wait. Are you any relation to the queen?"

Nadia giggled. "Nope, but I get that a lot."

The leader gave her a thoughtful stare. "A most uncanny resemblance," he said, shaking his head. "And the person you're visiting?"

"Our uncle."

Lucca stifled a groan as the assembled troops stared at the girls. Way to go, Princess. Announcing that they were time travelers would have netted a less incredulous reaction than claiming a close genetic connection. But there was nothing for it now except to inject some plausibility into the lie.

"We're cousins," Lucca said. When most of the soldiers remained skeptical, she added, "By adoption."

Nadia nodded. "Aunt Betty found her under a tree."

"At an orphanage."

"With a note." At Lucca's withering look, she amended, "But it was just somebody's shopping list. Strangest thing, really."

Silence settled in like an overweight cat.

"Well, then," the leader said at last. "I couldn't help but notice your, er, clothes..."

"Our uncle's sick," Nadia said quickly. "We're going to cheer him up."

The only sound was that of Lucca smacking herself repeatedly in the forehead.

Countless horrified stares later, the leader cleared his throat. "Yes. Well. That is." Syntax seemed to be eluding him. "Be that as it may. Ahem. Maybe you should just pass... on... through." Without taking his eyes off the girls, he dug a sheet of paper out of a bag and held it out mutely. Nadia took it with a cheerful exclamation of thanks.

Without another word, the soldiers split into two lines, creating a wide aisle. Lucca grabbed Nadia by the arm and took off southward. She could still feel her face reddening when they presented their pass to the guards on the southern end of the bridge.

"'We're going to cheer him up,'" Lucca mimicked under her breath as they left the troops' earshot. "Honestly."

Nadia froze as if struck by the iron mallet of realization. "Omigod, I didn't mean it that way!"



The sun hung low in the sky when they reached the outskirts of Sandorino. "I know we're in a hurry and all," Nadia said, glancing longingly at the houses, "but is it really safe to go into the desert at night? You know, with the darkness and the scorpions and everything..."

Visions of dark, whirling vortices of paradox gaping over the moonlit sand flashed through Lucca's mind. Her legs hurt, too. Even hell had to look better after a proper night's sleep.

"Good point," Lucca said, starting toward the R & R Hotel and motioning for Nadia to follow. "We'll leave early tomorrow, though, before it gets too hot."

It was amazing how Nadia could still do the bouncy cheer after an entire day of traveling. It also walked the thin line between comfort and painful reminder. But given enough time, the sense of familiarity would wash away, and the hole it left would be filled. What would Lucca believe had really happened? Would there even be enough of her left to wonder?

A tap on her shoulder jolted her from her thoughts. "Um, Lucca?" said Nadia. "You've been staring at the door for a while now. You okay?"

"Sorry. It's nothing." After paying for a room (and counting herself lucky that any era would accept gold as currency), Lucca made her way to their temporary quarters and sat down heavily at the desk. Nadia kicked off her sandals and flopped on the bed.

"I think I need better traveling shoes," she moaned, raising her feet into the air to examine them. "I can feel the blisters forming."

Pulling off her boots, Lucca snorted and said, "I don't know how many times I told you-"

She caught herself before she finished, but the awkward silence came regardless. She's not Marle, Lucca reminded herself. It's not fair to want her to be.

Although Nadia made a few more efforts at conversation as she got ready for bed, the discomfort had settled in for the evening. At last she gave up and went to sleep early, adding that it was okay if Lucca wanted to sit up with the light on a while.

Lucca didn't want to sit up with the light on, but she certainly couldn't sleep.

It wasn't Nadia's fault, of course. It wasn't right to be frustrated with her for not being Marle, and it wasn't right to remind her that, from Lucca's perspective, she wasn't supposed to exist. But it was also impossible to forget that the point of their quest was to iron her out of history, whether they acknowledged it or not. Lucca suspected Nadia hadn't comprehended, or hadn't allowed herself to comprehend, what was really being asked of her. Risking life and limb to fight for the planet's future was one thing. But if someone had told Lucca that she had to erase herself for the greater good, well... Frankly, she doubted her sense of self-preservation would have stood for it.

After all, this wasn't just a case of "I'm going to shoot you in the head to save the world." This was more to the order of "I want to you to go on a journey without a map, jump through every flaming hoop you come across, and struggle valiantly against reality itself so that you may, in the end, have the pleasure of shooting yourself in the head."

It would hurt to care about Nadia. But Lucca's only alternative was to tell herself that no one in this bastard timeline mattered, and that didn't seem right.

And what, she asked herself wryly, is right about any of this?

Setting her thoughts aside as well as she could, Lucca pulled her notebook out of her sack and opened it to a fresh page. She had more practical concerns now, especially if Fiona's desert turned out to be a dead end.

She took out a pen and began to write.



6/24/601 AD

Nadia, who is not Marle, knows most of what happened. And I remember telling her, so this is probably going to end with me knowing and not remembering and feeling like I heard about it all in a bedtime story. I don't know how far or fast the memory replacement is going to go, so the best I can do is write everything down now. Make memories of making memories, I guess.

Just in case a future me is reading this and doesn't know what's going on, here's a message for me: Stop shaking your head and hear yourself out for a minute. Yeah, we both know time travel is bullshit. It happened anyway.

I hope I never need to be reminded of this, but here goes. I had a best friend named Crono, and we both helped save the world, and Mom could walk. And I had friends, even if a lot of them were scattered in different eras. Stop shaking your head, future me.

So on to the story. The important part kicked off when Crono brought this girl he'd met to see the Telepod...



A dream about being caught in a giant washing machine segued into a reality of being shaken awake.

"Lucca, are you okay?" Nadia asked, her eyes bright with concern. "There was plenty of room in the bed for you. You didn't have to sleep in the chair."

Lucca blinked at the face in front of her, then noticed the tiny puddle of drool on the desk. "I didn't mean to fall asleep," she said, pointing to the shaky line of ink that trailed down the open page of her notebook. "Guess I didn't realize how tired I was." Stretching her arms over her head, Lucca got to her feet. "How the heck are you this energetic?"

Nadia shrugged. "I went to bed early. And I guess I'm kind of excited." She smiled as if nothing had ever been wrong.

"I'm sorry," Lucca found herself saying.

The next moment she found herself in a lung-compressing hug. "You're my friend!" Nadia said. "And friends help each other out when things are tough! Don't worry!" With a final squeeze, she released Lucca and allowed her to breathe.

Lucca nodded. She wasn't sure what to say to that; she wasn't even sure what she felt. But Nadia nodded back, grinned, and said, "Race you for first bath."

Nadia won. Remembering the joy of the R & R Hotel's state-of-the-art public baths, Lucca hadn't made much of an effort to get there first. She pulled out her notebook as she waited for Nadia to return, no doubt with a little bit of trauma in tow.

Lucca's summary of the adventure that saved the future had almost reached the end before she'd started drifting in and out of sleep. While it was difficult to tell exactly when Lucca's mind had wandered dreamward, the line "Then apocalypse sponge up" was as good a starting point as any. Her cursory description of the battle against Lavos included not only words that appeared to have wandered in from somewhere else, like "boot," but also a few new ones, including the utterly baffling "corplug." The line of ink from when she'd passed out and dragged the pen down the page came at the end of a moving description of the Moonlight Parade: "We said good and everyonebody went back to their ears but Crono momcat-"

Lucca turned over a fresh page and backtracked to the end of the world.

When Nadia returned after only a few minutes, pale and stammering about people getting filthier after being in the water, Lucca decided to follow her lead in passing on the bath and just smoothing out her clothing a little. It wasn't as if they'd be terribly clean after their trek through the desert, anyway.

And she wasn't going to think about it until she got there. Worse than you hope, better than you fear, she told herself, but her hopes were timid and her fears marvelously creative. And what she feared above all else was finding nothing.

Nadia glanced over as she repaired her ponytail. "Wanna hear about the time I kept a baby hetake as a pet?"

Lucca nodded. Sure, she'd heard the story from Marle, but she'd never heard it from Nadia. Besides, if Marle's version was any indication, it was exactly the kind of tale she needed to keep her spirits up.

"Well," began Nadia, brushing herself off as she and Lucca started for the door, "I was eight years old and skipping my lessons to play in the forest..."



"I can't believe you tried to feed Mr. Umbles under the table." Lucca had gone from grinning to snickering as the story progressed, and she was now dangerously close to giggling. Apparently Marle had left out a few of the juicier details, most likely because she had shared the story in mixed company and hadn't wanted to make herself look quite so foolish in front of Crono. If Nadia had any similar hangups, she must have decided that making Lucca smile was more important. The idea was touching.

But it was also less entertaining than the epic tale of When Mr. Umbles Was Disguised As a Footstool, and Lucca was inclined to keep her attention focused on the lighter side of things.

"Yep," Nadia replied. "I had to pretend I was the one doing all the grunting and slobbering."

They were a good distance into the desert now, and Fiona's house was already visible. So far there were no signs of saplings, but there was no telling where the planting had begun. If it had begun. Lucca wasn't thinking about it.

"So how does the story end?" she asked. "With everyone in the castle grudgingly accepting Mr. Umbles, or with his midnight release into the forest?" Marle had never gotten to that part; Ayla had shot off in pursuit of something outside the inn, which had turned out to be a dog stealing a string of sausages from Porre's nearest deli. By the time they'd straightened that mess out, Magus had indicated, with a remarkable economy of words, that none of this was helping them find the Sunstone, that there was no need to send the Epoch on multiple trips to get everyone to comb the city for the damn thing, that they certainly hadn't needed to stop for lunch, and that while this was the first ridiculous errand they'd dragged him on that seemed in any way likely to result in practical Lavos-slaying power, they were still going about it like a pack of empty-skulled cretins. Magus had been an incredible bitch most of the time.

Back in the present, Nadia's eyes darkened. "Actually," she said, "my father had the guards kill Mr. Umbles. He said that all monsters end up dangerous." Her next step was a kick. "Monsters aren't dangerous when they're eating out of your hand."

He was only trying to protect you, even if he was never good at explaining it. Saying it aloud, though, wouldn't have helped, so Lucca took a different approach. "You might want to try changing the ending. I'm all for Mr. Umbles being appointed Knight Captain."

"Nah, I think he was more of a Chancellor type." Nadia smiled at her, but neither of them spoke again until they'd reached Fiona's house.

Combing the desert aimlessly for signs of trees wouldn't work, but asking Fiona if the mystic seedling had gone missing would at least give them an idea of what was happening in this era. Lucca rapped twice on the door.

"I don't think there's anybody home," Nadia whispered after several seconds had gone by. Shaking her head stubbornly, Lucca knocked again.

This time the door creaked ajar, and a pale, gaunt face peeked through the crack. It seemed to belong to Fiona, but this was a Fiona who looked as if she'd aged a decade in a year. The eyes suggested that their owner perceived sanity as an event rather than a state of being.

Lucca gaped and finally managed, "Fiona?" The question wasn't just a formality.

The woman narrowed her eyes. "Who are you?" she asked in a paper-thin voice. "My husband is gone. Gone long ago and never come back. What do you want from me?"

So in this timeline, Marco hadn't survived the war. Had he fallen at Zenan Bridge? Or had it been one of the later, even bloodier battles against the Mystics who had advanced almost as far as Guardia Castle? Turning the tide at the bridge had once reassured Lucca that they were indeed making history better, preventing so much carnage.

"We're here to help," Nadia said. Her tone was too nervous to be soothing. "Your forest-"

"Don't mention that forest!" A dangerously thin finger pointed from out of the shadows. "Day and night, that- that thing in the north- oh, God, no one else-" Fiona's hand retreated a split-second before the door slammed.

Lucca and Nadia stared at the house in silence until Nadia asked, "Was she like that before?"

"Not even remotely." Lucca pursed her lips, then turned and began walking, keeping the rising sun on her right. "At least now we know where to look."

Nadia seemed too shaken to ask many questions, which was fine with Lucca. She had enough of her own, beginning with "What else happened?" Fiona was too strong to be broken by the loss of her husband. There had been a popular tragic legend in the original timeline about the woman who died trying to resurrect a forest, and it had never occurred to Lucca before that when the story referred to Fiona's "lonely struggle," it meant that Marco must have died. She poked gingerly at the newest set of memories still trying to take root in her brain, but Fiona's story didn't seem to ring a bell. The poor woman must have died forgotten in this timeline.

But how could Lucca's actions have affected something that happened more than a century before her intervention? She knew first-hand that interfering with an ancestor could wreak havoc with a descendent, but it just didn't work the other way around. There was a variable missing here. From the evidence, it had to be something that removed Retinite, horrified Fiona, nurtured the forest, and wiped itself from memory long before the turn of the millennium.

Lucca had thought of an impossibility before. She refused to acknowledge it now.

Nadia suddenly latched onto her arm. So now I'm her Crono substitute? shot through Lucca's mind as she turned her attention back to her surroundings. Following Nadia's gaze, she saw a gleaming shape in the near distance, something that looked remarkably like-

Robo.