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.



Lucca's hold on the Gate Key tightened as the red gave way to an abundance of brown and green. A tangle of tree roots met her feet, sending her scrambling for something to save her balance. Her free hand caught Nadia and brought both girls crashing to the ground.

"Be thou sure of foot," said Frog, taking Lucca's hand and pulling her up. "The earth proveth treacherous."

"So I've noticed."

As Frog helped her to her feet, Nadia asked, "So where- when are we?"

"Not about to set Sandorino on fire," Lucca replied, squinting at the area. It seemed familiar in a way that she couldn't quite place, but the dense underbrush and haphazard trees clearly weren't part of Fiona's forest. The trunks were too gnarled, the land beneath them too rocky. Lucca's next breath told her that the air was thin, which narrowed the field down to "mountains."

Nadia bounced, albeit carefully. "Okay! Let's find Renaldo and get him away from Jill!"

"Prithee hold." Frog spoke as if he had been half-strangled. In the ensuing silence, Lucca detected the dull roar of water, carried on a rush of wind.

Realization hit her like a series of jabs to the gut: the moment that has to change- Cyrus's hopes and dreams- be careful with Dreamstone-

Lucca kicked the nearest tree so fiercely that her entire leg rattled.

"What is it?" Nadia's voice was a step away from panic. "Guys, what's wrong?"

From beneath them rose an anguished cry and the sound of shattering metal. Frog darted forward into the bracken before Lucca could catch him.

Dammit! There was no sense in calling after him, so Lucca gritted her teeth and set off in pursuit.

The undergrowth was thick and scraggy, biting at her bare calves as she ran. Twice an exposed root caught her foot, and the second one sent her tripping forward into the open. In the time it took her to catch herself, Lucca saw that she was on a narrow, rocky ledge, at the tip of which Frog stood with a rigidity that was broken only by the visible twitching of his muscles.

"Don't do anything stupid," Lucca said under her breath, working her way toward him. "Don't do it, don't do it..."

At the moment she reached him, a war cry echoed up from below. Frog's arms tensed.

Judging by how loud the sound was, the ledge couldn't have been very high above the site of the battle. Yelling at Frog would only guarantee disaster. Instead Lucca whispered, "Don't even-"

An explosion of magic cut her off. Cringing, Lucca looked over the edge to see flames engulf a figure in golden armor, then blast him back toward a screaming boy. The world reddened as supernatural energy drank and distorted the sunlight.

Frog staggered back from the edge. "Cyrus," he croaked, as if his throat were lined with rust, "oh, Cyrus, forgive me..."

I'm sorry, Lucca wanted to say, but her voice was gone. I'm sorry for bringing you here, and I'm sorry for assuming you'd snap. Her fingers clenched the Gate Key until they were almost numb. And I'm even sorrier for thinking I knew what I was doing.

Footsteps pounded out of the trees. Before Lucca could stop her, Nadia slipped on the loose stones and slid sideways with a yelp.

The sound jolted Frog from his grief. Rushing to intercept, he caught Nadia in the crook of his elbow. The rocks beneath her scattered over the edge.

"Ohshit." Lucca's voice returned as a squeak. "Get off the cliff!"

A shower of ice burst up from below, borne on frigid winds. Each chunk glittered crazily with crimson and violet light. Between the flashes and the darkening of the sky, it took Lucca a wild moment to distinguish the edge of the tree cover from the edge of the cliff.

Goose bumps rippled up her neck. An instinctive dodge to the right saved Lucca from a jagged block of ice but cost her her balance. As she tried to scramble back to her feet, a frozen chunk crashed into her wrist.

Lucca bit back a cry as her fingers fell open in a explosion of shocked nerve endings. The Gate Key went spinning over the edge.

Frog hooked his free arm around her waist and pulled her into the brush, but Lucca was only dimly aware of it. I lost the Gate Key. I lost the goddamn Gate Key, and we're stuck in the wrong moment, and we can't get home. Part of her wanted to scream in frustration and didn't particularly care that the action could prove suicidal.

A pained gasp alerted her to another problem, and she turned to see Frog doubling over as a blue glow enveloped his chest.

"I mean she's /gone/," Crono had said. "There was this blue light, and- look, I don't know, you're the smart one."

Nadia looked wildly from Frog to Lucca as the glow intensified. "What's happening to him?"

"Paradox." The part of Lucca that wanted to scream was in direct competition with another that wanted to laugh until everything dissolved, and between them her voice was taking on a manic pitch. "The same thing that happened to Marle. We can't-" All the jagged little pieces inside her came to a compromise, and Lucca choked on a sob.

Nadia said something, too loudly, about how she wasn't going to let that happen, gripping Frog's hands as if she could hold him against time. The air hummed.

"I..." Frog's voice was thin and ragged. "I failed thee-"

"Stop it!" Lucca grabbed his arms, which had already grown translucent. "You never failed us!"

Frog tried to speak again, but the light overcame him in a silent burst of azure-white shrapnel.

Like the Telepod, only all the little lights won't have anywhere to go home to. The thought rode out in a moment of shock, and in the next Lucca hated herself for thinking it. Curses caught in her throat.

But when the dazzle cleared, the lights still hovered in front of her.

"Frog?" Nadia whispered, sniffling. "Are you-"

The lights began to whirl around each other in spirals and eddies. A pattern emerged, and Lucca scarcely had time to recognize the emergent shape before the world flashed white again.

When her vision returned, Lucca saw a wiry man, clad in raddled leather armor, huddling against the bushes. Moss-colored hair wilted over his eyes and shoulders.

Nadia made a sound that resonated with any number of emotions. Lower lip quaking, she reached out tentatively to touch his hand. "Frog? Is that you?"

If it's not, the space-time continuum is in even worse shape than I thought. Lucca held her breath as the man raised his head and blinked.

"This..." The timber was unfamiliar, but his voice had a reassuringly archaic lilt. His next words left no room for doubt: "'Tis like unto mine erstwhile form." Frog (or "Glenn," Lucca supposed, though "Man" might have better fit his naming scheme) gently dislodged his hand from Nadia's and stared at it in wonder. "I am warm," he said in a quiet daze.

"You're also a very fetching pink," Lucca replied, wiping away the last of the evidence that she'd been crying. "And pretty darn lucky. All that chaos must have let your younger self get away instead of killed."

With a distracted nod, Frog turned his bare hand to study it from different angles. Fingernails in particular seemed to fascinate him. Before he could move on to further anatomical marvels, Nadia tackled him with enough force to bury both their upper bodies in the nearest shrub.

Lucca's relief faded as the indistinct sound of voices carried up from below. Glenn must have heard it as well; he jolted upright and hit his forehead against a branch that his amphibian height would have let him avoid.

"Up here!" whispered Nadia, already scrambling up a nearby oak tree. Years of escaping from Guardia Castle came to her aid, and she disappeared into the foliage before Lucca had managed to pull herself up to the lowest limb.

Halfway to the next branch, Lucca heard a dull thud and looked down to see Frog recovering from the conclusion of an unsuccessful leap. His left palm bore testament to the victory of bark over bare skin.

Lucca inclined her head at the lowest branch. "You're tall. Use that."

With a sigh, Frog reached up and took hold of the limb. "'Twill require some adaptation," he said, then grunted as he pulled himself up. "Mine own flesh hath become alien to me."

So will your memories. But the rising volume of the voices took priority, so Lucca held her tongue as she joined Nadia in huddling against the trunk. Frog joined them after an awkward moment of figuring out the length of his legs.

The voices reached the level of their cliff, then stopped. A single set of footsteps was audible, and Lucca hoped that it was Magus who had foregone levitation. She had a dim memory of watching him resort to pedestrianism after a particularly taxing battle in the Black Omen, and she could think of no way in which an exhausted Magus would be a bad thing.

The talking resumed:

"Probably just kilwalas," said Ozzie with a dismissive grunt. "This rotten mountain is infested with them."

"Kilwalas," replied a condescending and unpleasantly familiar voice, "look very little like pillars of light."

Lucca had been expecting to hear "you cretin" attached to the end of the sentence, and the omission gave her pause. Her efforts to remember when Magus assumed full authority over the Mystics were cut short when Ozzie spoke again.

"Feh. We should be preparing for a celebration, not chasing pranksters."

The footsteps halted. "Then would you care to explain what kilwalas were doing with this?"

"Dirty, thieving pranksters. We're wasting our time."

The urge to hit her head against the trunk almost overpowered Lucca. Why, yes, that's /exactly how things could be worse. Thanks, universe./ At least she felt a small rush of vindication for putting a security code on the Gate Key. She also felt something slimy creeping down her neck, either because had found herself rooting for Ozzie or because a tree slug had found its way under her scarf. Resolving the issue could wait until it was less likely to result in yelling and thrashing.

Ozzie broke the silence with a snort. "You've tapped yourself out, Magus. Nice work breaking the Masamune and offing that idiot knight, but you gotta know when to quit. You couldn't even hit the kid after that ice storm."

"The little fool wasn't worth my time."

"And that's why you kept tossing fireballs after him, eh?" Ozzie laughed at a cringe-inducing volume. "And just look how long it took you to-" The last word slid into a nervous squeak. "Which is not," Ozzie continued at almost twice his usual speed, "in any way a criticism. Eh-heh."

There was a prickly pause. "Very well," Magus said sharply. "If you're too feeble to keep up, return to the castle. I have more pressing concerns than dinner."

Ozzie muttered for a moment, then adopted a more conciliatory tone. "You could let Flea handle this. He keeps saying he's bored."

Nadia tapped Lucca on the shoulder, then mimed the firing of her crossbow and the resultant death throes of whoever happened to catch the quarrel. Lucca waved her away irritably.

"Hmph," said Magus, who had never, in Lucca's experience, taken a graceful exit gracefully. "It is true that Flea has been inexcusably idle."

As the single set of footsteps retreated, Ozzie broke into sycophantic babbling. The noise faded, swelled briefly when it seemed to be originating from the edge of the cliff, then descended into silence.

"Well," said Lucca, once she was certain they were gone, "at least we know where the Gate Key is." After patting the back of her neck, she added stiffly, "We also know that there is a slug on me. Please get it off."

As Frog reached over to pluck the creature loose, Nadia wrinkled her nose. "Okay, ew."

"Vile creatures," said Frog, without so much as a glance at the gastropod he had just returned to the wild. "To mock nobility and sacrifice, when naught dwelleth in their hearts but cravenness..."

Nadia nodded. "Yeah, I kinda picked up on the evil. So why didn't we-"

"History," Lucca interrupted, "has had enough for one day, thank you." She investigated the trunk with her foot for a moment, then began the slow, clinging process of returning to the ground. "Let's discuss this where the slugs aren't."

Getting Frog out of the tree was simpler than getting him into it, largely on account of gravity. To be fair, Lucca supposed that having innate and acquired reflexes at odds with each other made things tricky, but she couldn't suppress a cringe when Frog tried to land as if his legs were still natural springs. He needs time to relearn everything, and time is the last thing we can spare.

Nadia offered him a hand. "Um, people-legs don't work like that. Are you okay?"

"Worry not," he replied, letting her assist him to a seat on a stump. "I am sound."

But Frog didn't have enough control over his human facial expressions, and Lucca rushed to steer the conversation away from the mires of psychoanalysis. "So let's recap," she said. "It's 590 AD and Magus has our Gate Key. Even if our Gate home still exists, we have no way of opening it now. And more importantly, there's no telling what kind of havoc Magus could wreak if he figures out what the Gate Key does."

Nadia looked up from where she had been prepared to fuss over Frog and said, "So in other words, we have to get it back from the evil warlock who just tried to kill us." She shrugged. "Still beats the killer robots."

Frog laughed bitterly, the sound oddly thin without a croak behind it. "For a decade did I crave vengeance, for a year did I despair of it, and now 'tis offered me when I have not the strength to take it."

"No vengeance," said Lucca quickly, trying not to envision a timeline more mangled by Magus's absence than by his presence. "Not because you're weak, Frog- you're not, really..." She trailed off. "And it's really weird calling you 'Frog' now. Is 'Glenn' okay?"

He turned away and shook his head. "Pray persist in thy use of 'Frog.'"

"Well, that'll be a little awkward at parties, but I guess we can pretend you're in a band."

"No way," said Nadia, putting her hands on her hips. "You just want us to call you that because you feel like you failed, but you didn't. You didn't do anything wrong. If I hadn't run out there like such a stupid klutz-"

"Which you wouldn't have done if I hadn't panicked." Lucca turned to Frog and added, "I'm sorry I didn't trust you. I was-" /projecting/- "on edge."

"'Twas a not unreasonable fear. E'en now doth mine heart reprove me for following the counsel of my mind."

Lucca shook her head. "What matters is what you did, not how close you came to not doing it." She stopped to review her words. "I mean, what matters is what you didn't do, not how- you know what I'm getting at."

There was a pause as guilt shifted like a restless sleeper.

"Okay, other stuff first," said Nadia, who had apparently decided to let amphibian appellations stand for now. "How'd we end up here?"

Guilt rolled almost audibly over onto Frog. Crossing her arms, Lucca said, "Look, it's nobody's fault. There were too many factors that we couldn't control." Because no one wants to save the world, just a handful of people who matter. "And what happened after we got here is a lot more important right now."

She glanced at Frog to find him rubbing at the space between his fingers where webbing had been. His unkempt hair blocked her view of his face, but Lucca didn't need to see his expression to guess at what he was feeling.

"Mine apologies," Frog said hoarsely, then shook his head. He met the girls' looks with a set mouth and steady gaze. His voice was even as he added, "'Tis difficult to comprehend what hath befallen me."

Lucca sighed. "And that's putting it lightly. As far as I can tell, you're still here because you are part of the cause of the current history, and you're human because there's nothing causing you to be an amphibian anymore."

"Weird time stuff," Nadia translated. "So anyway-"

"No, not 'anyway.' This is serious." Lucca hung her head in a way that she hoped demonstrated the gravity of the situation. "When I changed my own history, I came out relatively stable. But Robo got caught in the middle of two major paradoxes, the future's and the forest's, and he ended up-" /erased/- "anchoring the timestream. Since Frog isn't turning into some kind of insane vortex, Robo must be anchoring him, too."

"Uh, knock on wood," Nadia said.

Frog rapped obligingly on his stump.

"So my point," Lucca continued, "is that the timestream can't take much more of this strain. If we keep letting this paradox expand, well... Causality already isn't matching up. It's like something just erases the effects that don't have causes anymore and expects everything to line back up again." She took a moment to follow the line of thought to its end, which wasn't a happy one. "All this can't just be natural law playing out. There's something else meddling in the timestream."

Nadia cleared her throat. "Not that I'm hopelessly lost in all the crazy or anything, but shouldn't we be more worried about the evil warlock meddling?"

"Right. We should probably get off the mountain and figure out what to do about that." After a quick rifle through her knapsack to make sure that nothing had managed to fall out, Lucca added, "Hey, Frog? Would you mind getting the Masamune?"

As he headed deeper into the woods to retrieve the halves of the sword, Lucca tried to calculate the odds of getting herself, Nadia, and a physically disadvantaged Frog into Magus's lair and out again without being killed, let alone without splintering history. Part of Lucca's mind suggested wearing funny hats and face paint, but it was hushed down by the parts that were in no mood for that sort of thing.

Geez, at least the last time I got stuck in history, there was poi.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Nadia raising and aiming her crossbow into the distance. "I could see them through the leaves," the princess said quietly. "The war won't end for another ten years, will it? And all those people are going to die." Before Lucca could say anything, she shook her head and lowered her weapon. "I don't I think I really could have done it, anyway."

"Look at it this way," said Lucca. "At least the war ends."

Footsteps came from the direction in which Frog had left. He emerged from a patch of bushes and lay his makeshift sack at the foot of the oak tree, then said, "'Tis heavier than I remember."

"Metaphorically or literally?" Lucca asked, before running a quick mental comparison of his biceps to those of the soldiers she could remember meeting. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your new self didn't spend much time working out."

"I..." Frog closed his eyes in concentration. "'Twould seem I-"

"Don't." Lucca was surprised at the vehemence in her voice. "Don't focus on it." She snatched a blank pad of paper from her bag and shoved it at Frog, along with a pen. "Write down everything about your old life. Write it down now before you lose it."

"She's serious," Nadia chimed in. "She doesn't care how many fleas show up."

It took Lucca a moment to follow that thread back through the conversational tapestry. "Flea," she said, the word serving as a combination correction and curse. "Okay, don't write everything. Just as much as you can in-" she glanced at her bare wrist and caught a flash of memory, of studying Robo's Time Gyro to see if she could pattern a watch after it- "fast. Shoot for a page."

Frog politely but firmly attempted to return Lucca's writing instruments. "Ne'er would I endanger us for the sake of reminiscence."

"It's not just about remembering," Lucca replied. "It's about not losing yourself."

He locked eyes with her for a moment (his were a dark, woodsy green, she noted, and it occurred to her that he might have been handsome if he looked less like a serial refugee), then nodded and slipped away through the trees, opposite the direction of the cliff.

"It's going to be worse for him," Lucca said once Frog seemed to be out of earshot. "I wouldn't be surprised if his memories are already being replaced."

Nadia shivered. "Have I mentioned how creepy that is?"

"Yeah. I'm going to check something." Pursing her lips, Lucca picked her way through the brush and bracken until she re-emerged on the ledge. Rustling indicated that Nadia had decided to follow.

The visible spectrum had sorted itself back out for the most part, but the ice melting on the rock still had a slight violet cast. "Watch your step," Lucca called over her shoulder, then used her foot to nudge a misshapen frozen chunk out of her way. While a humanoid frog had, once upon a collapsed possibility, survived the fall to the base of mountains, she didn't see a human body having the same odds. And there was no supernatural force likely to tip the scales in her favor.

Kneeling carefully, Lucca peered over the edge at the cliff below. Ghosts of smoke still skirled from Cyrus's remains, and a gleam several feet away from him seemed to belong to the Masamune's blade. What was almost certainly the hilt glinted near the cliff's edge. Lucca frowned.

"Huh," she said. "This just keeps getting messier."

"What?" Nadia peered over her shoulder, then drew back with a retching noise. "Oh, God, how can you stand to look?"

"Because we're pretty far away, and I'm working my way toward 'callous bitch.'" Before Nadia could protest her self-assessment, Lucca went on, "But what matters here is that Glenn ran away. In the old timeline, I'm pretty sure Frog returned to put the blade back in the cave and bury Cyrus."

Nadia looked thoughtful. "So you're worried Glenn's going to come back and get killed by Magus's pet bug?"

"Well, now I am. And I need to explain Flea to you at some point." Lucca paused to file that concern under "Great, I Really Didn't Need This," then said, "Glenn's not going to have the same life. He's not strong enough as a human to carry Cyrus's body all the way to-" /where was it, where was it/- "where he carried it. He didn't take the hilt with him over the cliff, either. There is absolutely no reason for Frog and our Masamune to exist here."

"Could you not say that?" said Nadia. "It makes me nervous."

Lucca rose and started back toward the trees, watching her feet to make sure that they didn't rest on anything likely to skid out from beneath her. The ice nearest the edges had begun to melt into thin, dribbling waterfalls.

Messier, indeed.

When Marle's appearance had almost caused Leene's death, Marle had vanished. It worked out neatly, from a historical perspective: the queen returned, then vanished, again and forever. Paradox would have been pressed from a loop back into a line.

What bothered Lucca, both at the time and in retrospect, was the pre-emptiveness of it. Leene hadn't died yet, so what had triggered Marle's sudden failure of existence? The precision was suspicious, as well- if Marle had vanished less than a minute earlier, in the presence of a servant, the quest for Leene would have resumed, and time would have coiled up again like a serpent and bit its own tail.

So who the heck is responsible? Lucca envisioned a Gasparesque old man sorting through the pieces of several billion jumbled jigsaw puzzles, trying to get the edges together first and saying "hmm" a lot. Religion struck her as even less sensible than usual.

Or perhaps the pieces were jumbled on scales, and the concern was less that they fit together than that they remained in balance...

The forest grew out of impossibility, but as long as no one knew, it didn't matter where the roots lay. Observation changed things. The loss of memory undid the damage.

But even if a tree could fall silently without anyone around to hear it, a helmeted forehead couldn't run into one without an echoing thunk.

As Lucca tried to pick herself up from the ground, Nadia said, "Wow, are you okay? I didn't think you'd really hit it."

"Mmph." The impact rang in Lucca's ears as she managed sitting. "You could have warned me."

"Nah, you looked pretty out of it." Grinning, Nadia offered her a hand and added, "Lighten up! Smart people walking into things is funny!"

"Funny for who?" Brushing herself off, Lucca glanced at the winner of the collision and noticed the sack- made of an amphibian-sized cape that existed despite all logic- lying at the base of it. She untied the knot and shook out both halves of the sword. Breezes curled along her arms until the metal hit the ground.

Lucca straightened up, put both hands on her hips, glared down at the Masamune, and said, "Get out here. /Now/."

The wind rustled the overhead branches, filtering the light in a rapid succession of new patterns, but no movement came from either piece of the sword.

"You arrogant little bastards." Lucca's voice rose with each word: "If you don't get out here /right now/, I'm gonna bury you so deep in this mountain that-"

Nadia's hand landed on her shoulder. "Lucca, tact. Tact, Lucca. Now that you know each other, try working together!"

"You want tact?" Jabbing her finger back at the Masamune, Lucca turned to face Nadia and said, "Magus has the Gate Key, Frog's going to be an even bigger mess than me before long, the world is still ending, paradox law makes no sense, and these two have to know something about it, but they're not telling. Talk to them."

Nadia frowned, then knelt beside the sword. "Maybe there's nothing they can do," she said after a moment. "I mean, they want this fixed, right? Wouldn't they have done whatever they could?"

The Masamune's silence struck Lucca as more petulant than helpless, but she didn't see any point in pressing the issue. Instead she called, "Hey, Frog?"

Movement rustled the brush that lay in the direction Lucca believed to be north, and a moment later Frog slipped into the relatively less dense vegetation that surrounded the tree. "It falleth yet short of a page," he said. "'Tis an enormous thing to reduce life to words."

"That's why I prefer numbers." Lucca watched as he added the pen and notebook to his makeshift sack, telling herself that she wasn't trying to catch a glimpse of what he'd written. Nothing but facts and dates? Or the little stories that make the facts worth remembering? She doubted she would ever shake the feeling that, for every anecdote she'd scribbled in the margins of her notebook, something more demonstrably important had been sacrificed.

Nadia thought that everything was important. Lucca wondered what her emergency autobiography would look like, then berated herself for considering it.

"Okay," said Nadia, a touch too brightly, "so what now?"

Lucca drew her gun. A glance at her wrist as she did so confirmed that it was already beginning to bruise. "For starters, we get out of here before Flea shows up. Then we track down Glenn and make sure he stays safe." At the flicker passed over Frog's expression, she added, "Not yet. Wait until you've written down as much as you can."

As they began to pick their way through the brush in search of the main path down the mountain, Lucca told herself that magic would allow Flea to travel quickly, not instantaneously. Even assuming that he left castle as soon as he was ordered, she counted on being able to reach the outskirts of Sandorino before Flea began investigating the Denadoro area. But no amount of logical reassurance could keep her throat from tightening at each change in the wind.

The trail turned out to be very low on Mystics. Cyrus had no doubt taken care of most of them, and the sounds of the subsequent battle had probably reminded the rest that there were other things they could be guarding, like the nearest well-stocked Mystic encampment.

Nadia ducked under a low branch, cast a worried look at Frog until he was clear of it, then turned to Lucca and said, "Gold piece for your thoughts."

Lucca gave her a wry look. "I'm trying to remember when anti-depressants were invented."

"My nursemaid used to tell me that gin was nature's anti-depressant. I think that's why she got fired."

"Every time you talk about your home life, I wonder how we made it to our thirty-third Guardia."

Nadia stuck out her tongue, then sobered. "I was just wondering how we're going to get the Gate Key back."

"I'll think of something. I have to."

"You know," said Nadia thoughtfully, "I heard this radio show once where they dressed up like-"

"/No/."

The path curved downward into a shallow basin, where the first splash from Lucca's boot sent a pair of amphibians hopping for cover. She forced herself not to look at Frog's face.

"Well," said Nadia over the roar of the falls, "if all else fails, we can just march on in and kick his butt the way we did in the better world, right?"

Lucca's brain dredged up faint memories of the various but unvaryingly unsuccessful overtures of friendship that Marle had extended to Magus after Crono's resurrection, two of which had involved fruit baskets. "Something like that," she replied.

A drop of water fell and burst against her hand, as cold as if it had just melted.