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Chapter Text

When the world stopped shaking - or had it stopped?, or had it merely slowed its manic shuddering until the stones and the glass had ceased singing but the air and the subtle things, the open pages of his book, the flame of his candle, still moved like taut harpstrings after a final crescendo -

- when it stopped, or slowed, the Potions lined up in a row on a shelf swirling slowly, seeming to emit spirals of light in their dim midnight colours, Edward got up from his chair and walked upstairs to the roof.  He could hear people shouting below.  Twice, he passed someone rushing away from the heights.  He stood on the topmost balcony and looked out across the land, seeing nothing but a few distant lights.

Everything felt red.

He looked up, and saw it.

It wasn't that the red moon looked so large tonight.  That happened sometimes, and Edward was one to look up while others spent lives on the ground.  No, it was that there was a moon. A moon.  Every night of his life he had seen two.

He ran back downstairs on feet that trembled so hard it would have been easier to tumble down the spiral.  He felt desperately afraid and alone, and didn't know who he should call to him.  He ran inside his room and slammed the door, leaning against it.  He should summon his general.  His chancellor.  Ask them what he should do.  No, he was king now, and he was meant to be telling other people what to do.  Gods, so alone.  There was no one in Damcyan who could help him, or even tell him to calm down -

He ran to his window and opened it wide.  He found the Whisperweed in a case under his bed.  It was so out of tune, and his hands were so unsteady, but that didn't matter so much as knowing he'd be heard.  He leaned against the windowsill, and played a song he hadn't so much as thought of in years.  It was a memory of peaceful times when he'd not had to rule over anyone and the only danger he knew of was the fear of being separated from Anna.  It was warm and loving and none of the lyrics made sense.

Cecil would probably think it was pretty silly but Edward didn't care.

*

Afterwards, he summoned the general and the chancellor, commanded them to keep order but to be kind to panicking Damcyans and to, as much as was reasonable, let them come and go as they pleased.  He went back to his room and stared out of the window; the stars seemed unfamiliar and distorted, shaped like parts of constellations hidden behind panes of bottle-glass.  The red moon was still huge, and had a darker shadow across its centre, like the middle of a bruise.  He worried for the Lunarians - what had happened to them?  What had they done?

A little after midnight, he heard a strange clang from the Whisperweed.  That tended to happen when Cecil dropped it.

He wished, foolishly, for Tellah or Cid or some other wise person he could speak to.  Someone who understood the moons - he thought of things he'd read and pictured the tides frozen in the seas, too heavy for the red moon to draw them along alone.  He watched the moon set, imagining it descending into the sea, emerging again the next night washed completely clean.

He ran back to the balcony to look at the rising sun.  It seemed normal, but perhaps dim and distant, and he wondered if he was simply imagining its distortion out of fear, or simply imagining its normalness out of hope.

He stared around the sky, hoping to see an airship.  A carrier pigeon would do.  Some sign that he wasn't forgotten.

Every so often he noticed the people on the ground, entering or leaving the castle - coming to seek safety, or leaving to seek answers.  He kept looking up, paying them no heed, watch the sun get higher but no brighter; it was as if it shined on him through a wall of thick glass.  But he kept watching for a sign til his neck ached.  He rested his head against a parapet, trying to keep watching.  What else could he do?

There he remained until the second lieutenant of the Damcyan Castle Guard clattered through the door, followed immediately by Rydia.  "I tried waving to you from the road," she said, sounding tired and happy and furious, "but you weren't looking down at me."

She looked ready to fall and she took great gulps of thin air, as if she'd run all the way upstairs from the Feymarch to the top of Edward's tower.  He stepped towards her and took her arm, found it steady beneath her disarrayed veils.  "You heard me play Whisperweed?"

"No."  She looked blankly at him.  "I had to run away from the Feymarch, and Odin told me to find you."  

Edward's hand went to his mouth.  "You had to - Rydia, what has befallen the Feymarch?  Is it gone, like the True Moon?"

"No - what?  Someone came there to kill me.  What was that about the True Moon?"

Edward swayed on his feet, remembering the other time in which reunion with Rydia had brought so much gladness and so much confusion.  Child of Mist and Fey, subterran and friend to eidolons, heedless of the sky.  And my, did she know how to get herself into trouble.

"I think," he stuttered, "that maybe, we should discuss this over breakfast."

*

"Odin recognised him," Rydia said flatly.  "I have no idea how, but he did."

Edward absorbed this statement while watching her bury her mouth in a handful of fruit.  It was an impressive display of hunger.  Rydia was somewhat picky about food, and she always ate with her hands, which were rainbow-hued with jam and juices and speckled with sugar and biscuit crumbs.  She only ate bread in the evening, but at breakfast she sometimes spread butter on slices of grapefruit.  He'd dismissed the castle maids to spare their delicate sensibilities of this sight.

"You could try starting at the beginning?" he asked hopefully, and tapped his egg with his spoon.

"Uf."  Edward appreciated that Rydia had had a strange childhood, and apparently no one had ever told her not to speak with her mouth full.  "Ff Earf waf -"  She swallowed.  "The whole earth started shaking, and I think we were - breaking, like there were pieces of the Feymarch that had forgotten how to speak to the rest.  I couldn't find Asura..."  She looked upset, and remorseful, and angry.  "And a man appeared and said - said he'd burned through time itself to find me.  I didn't understand, so I cast Bio on him, and then Odin told me I had to run.  He carried me up to a hidden place near here -"  Edward had read that routes to the Feymarch were as plentiful and changeable as dreams, and only Rydia seemed capable of passing through them easily - "and he said we were close to Damcyan, which was where I needed to be."

"I can see you needed breakfast."  She laughed, and juice ran down her chin.  "Rydia.  I can keep you safe here.  I'll deploy the whole army to keep this murderer from you if I have to.  But that feels like only the beginning of our problems."

"Did you say the moon -"

"It's gone.  And the red moon seems closer than it should - or larger."

Rydia stood, absently grabbing a napkin as her chair scraped gratingly over the stone-flagged floor.  "I need to go back up to the roof," she announced, mopping her chin as she walked.

"What's wrong?" asked Edward, following her with perhaps slightly more social grace, as if there were anyone present who cared for it.

"I can't summon Bahamut in your dining room.  He has no manners at all."

*

Edward wondered belatedly if he should have made a prior announcement to his populace to inform them that Damcyan wasn't being attacked by a dragon.  The possibility of panic was there, like an open door, beckoning anyone who wished for escape from all this uncertainty to drop their burdens and dance through it.  A dragon landing on the castle roof, however majestic and however good its intentions, could easily rupture the very wall which that open door ingressed.

He was very thankful then that some people lived on the ground while others looked up at the sky.

Edward could never become used to the sight of Bahamut.  He felt fear even to look upon the great Lunar-wyrm - it could have easily ripped him in two with one steel toenail.  He had no way of communicating with the great dragon, and so he sat on his battlements and watched Rydia, with her upstretched hands braced against Bahamut's face; she was a speck in the eye compared to his vastness, like a moth to the scale of a man, and Edward envied her fearlessness, was grateful that he did not have to have dealings with eidolons.

Bahamut raised his head, and Rydia spun on her toes as his wingbeat caught at her clothing, lifting capes and veils in a rippling circle behind her; no wonder there were stories that claimed the summoners of Mist knew how to fly.  "Edward!"  She was yelling over the sound of moving air.  "It's getting complicated -"

Edward clung to his battlements as the dragon ascended, and he watched the sunlight shine through the thin flesh of those crystal wings.  It seemed like seconds, or forever, before Bahamut vanished - gone through that wall to the fey skies beyond, too magical and mad for ordinary existence.  Gone to the place that Rydia too called home, so if she was talking complicated he wasn't even sure he wanted to -

"Edward, look!"  She came to him and held up a hand to help him step down.  "Is that - no - yes -"

He stepped down beside her and followed her eyes to the confusion that was their object - a shadow on the sun that gave his heart a ringing second of hope...and then vanished.  It reappeared, closer, and then winked out again.

"Complicated, you say."  Edward thought then that he'd been right, that the world had never stopped trembling.  The Lunar Whale came, in broken spurts of motion, close enough that he could be sure that it was indeed itself - afloat in a cloudshadow existence, weaving from reality to nonexistence.  What in the world had befallen them all?

"As the sky, so it is in the Feymarch," she said.  "Bahamut told me so, and there are souls we can't speak to any more -"  She looked as troubled as he'd seen her since she was a child.  "And he said the moon you saw was - more than the Red Moon we know.  He dwelt beneath the Red Moon for centuries.  He'd know."

"I don't understand -"

"Neither do I," she said shortly.

He judged that the Lunar Whale's situation had been improving as they spoke - its present moments were longer, its vanishings briefer, and the clouds that parted around it seemed to form a dense honour-guard that outlined the path it took through the air towards them.  When it was almost overhead, Edward saw the hatch open in its underside.  The ship began to bank - to slow - to vanish against a crackling wall of lighting that seemed to tilt its nose and tail in some way that its body somehow ignored, as if its very presence were unstable - and when somehow the airship righted itself, Edward saw a speck tumble from it.  A second later, that speck became a cloud of silk.

He was aware that Cid had, under the tutelage of a master librarian of Fabul, been studying means of leaving an airship without troubling to stop and land the thing, but he would not himself have been willing to trust such a device.  Yet Cecil's expression as he drifted towards them was almost serene.

Rydia was tilting her head curiously, as if trying to unravel the natural magic that allowed his gentle descent, and Edward considered that, when Cecil landed, he would have the chance to make some witty declaration about how good it was that his friend had dropped by for breakfast, but in practice as soon as Cecil had touched the ground Edward took his arm and held it, feeling the strength in Cecil's disoriented earthly presence, feeling so grateful and glad to have not just one friend in this rupturing world, but two.  He felt Rydia catch his other hand again, and he looked from one to the other - Rydia barefoot, unarmed, her veils ravelling around her in the wind like the strangeness of them - describing her, cloaking her, sometimes flowing out behind her like wings.  Cecil was all familiar strength, a sword at one hip and Whisperweed resting in a case over the other, moon-pale hair tangled by his latest act of daring (and he never lived a day without one of those).  He watched Cecil join hands with Rydia, and one whole complete silent moment passed between them before all three started talking at once.

"What did I do that the both of you chose -"

"It's so good to see you - we have to -"

"I came as fast as I could but did you two see the -"

It was Rydia who broke away first, and turned to the stairs, moving gently and urgent, as if stepping in to a dance, skirts rustling.  "We have to get underground."

"Rydia, did you feel the earth -"

"Of course I did.  But I have to.  I'm losing touch with him and Bahamut said that something -"

"With who?"  Cecil followed her, and Edward heard the windchime-tingling of crystal-plated boots striking stone.

"Titan.  My eidolon."  Edward scurried behind them.  There were few whose company could make him feel so plain - in all the world, maybe only these two, the earth's daughter and the moon's son.  They were tidal forces in his life.  He tried to listen to her words over the pull of their presence.  "The eidolons are all mine because I'm all they have left, but I'm Titan's and earth since always."  Earth was what she called an element, Edward knew.  She could open it up, breathe it, move through it.  If she'd been Ifrit's, perhaps they would have found her and her Feymarch in the heart of the sun instead.  "Bahamut told me there was something waiting for us underneath the castle."

"What?"  He almost stumbled at the thought of what the gods might have done to Damcyan Castle's cellar.

"The end of time.  I think.  It's complicated.  Cecil, would you please stop treading on my dress?"

Edward persuaded them to pause, three floors below the roof, so he could collect the other Whisperweed.  Rydia was insistent that there wasn't a moment to waste, but a pause in the beat was worth taking if it ensured that the beat would go on.

*

"This is wrong," she said, cruciform in the cellar doorway, arms pressed to the walls on either side of her.  "This is all wrong."

Cecil laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, as if through her he somehow hoped to feel her contact with the world.  "Rydia, you told us to come here -"

"He's gone."

"Titan?"  Edward exclaimed.  By his meagre understanding, such a thing was not possible.  Titan was the earth.

"Gone.  It's like we're not in Damcyan any more."  She shuddered, held upright by her finger-grip in crevices between Edward's ancestral stones.  "But - Bahamut sent me to - so it can't matter that -"  She blinked, and sagged back against Cecil, as if her attempt at connection was at an end.  "There must be something else here for us.  Something that -"

Edward walked past her, looking far down the narrow corridor, one hand tracing the wall beside him.  There was something - not a distortion, not the kind of thing they'd seen up in the sky.  It wasn't a barrier to his eyes' focus, but an enhancement of it.  He heard the others following, close behind.  He would have spoken, but he didn't come down to these reaches very often, and didn't trust himself to say it.  Perhaps Rydia's words had merely poisoned his mind with the idea of it.  He wished he could trust himself to say for sure.

He felt the stones change under his hand, smooth sides that felt brushed by water giving way to something rough and dry and, somehow, older.  He looked back and met Rydia's wide eyes, hoping she understood.

Edward walked faster, fingertips dancing on the stone as if he were playing its melody.  This wasn't his home any more; he was no longer here as a king, but as an invader.  He felt Cecil step up beside him, and in a passing glance he saw Cecil's pale hands resting on the hilt of his sword.

A grotesque, guttural moan sounded from somewhere nearby.  Cecil drew his sword.  Rydia froze, her mouth hanging open as if she no longer trusted her own incantations.  Edward, for the first time since their madcap descent, looked back.

Nothing seemed out of place; there was no break in his manic focus, no place where what was not Damcyan became Damcyan again.  He could no longer see the open door that had admitted them only minutes ago.

They had no way to return.  Wherever they were, they would stay.

Chapter Text

Laguna watched from the Ragnarok's window as Esthar passed below them; he was glad it was night, and its weave of lights were simply that, lights, distorted by the pulsing and unbreakable seal around them into shapes he didn't even recognise.  In day, it would have still looked like his city.  And he was locked away from it.  He understood why - well, he didn't, and he wasn't sure anyone did understand time compression, not even Ellone - but it was frustrating to him.  Funny, too, after years of the seclusion policy that had kept him trapped inside Esthar.  That had been his choice, though, out of a list of bad ones.

Whatever part of him loved diving into wild situations also felt better if it was in control.  It wasn't, and he watched the city pass beneath them, a floating lotus made of glass and light drifting on downriver.  The red moonlight made it look bloody at the edges.

It had barely passed from his sight when a light on the other horizon caught his attention.  It was green, and seemed to spiral, a bit like a giant Draw point.  He was wondering if anyone else had noticed, when the ship suddenly lurched and tilted toward its nose.  "Hey!" he yelled, clutching the back of a seat to keep steady.  Then he remembered that no one could hear him.  Except for Kiros and Ward, who were asleep.  Well, they'd been asleep.  Until he started yelling.  Oops.

The intercom buzzed on.  "We're going to investigate that strange light!"  Selphie seemed happy to see something new.  Laguna didn't blame her - with time frozen like this, things got old fast.  "Sir Laguna, do you know what it might be?"

He thought about it, trying to figure how fast they were going.  Vectors; not really his strong point, except when bullets were involved.  The Ragnarok wasn't far off a bullet.  "We're not far from Grandidi Forest, I guess.  Didn't we figure there was a portal there?"

"Yeah -"  That was Squall's voice.  "But there wasn't -"

"Hold on," said Quistis, "Maybe something came through it?"

*

They set the Ragnarok down among the sparse trees outside the forest, and gathered outside the ship to discuss their next move.  It was always like that when they landed; like a quiet and unsettling kind of cabin fever, spilling one by one down the ramp because even if they weren't going to stray far or do much they needed to see the world they were in, familiar but frozen, barely navigable, favourite places barred to them.  It tended to be the most tragic places that were still reachable; the ruins in Centra; Tears Point, where the Lunar Cry had happened; the mausoleum near Deling City.  Quistis had a theory that the Guardian Forces were holding those places in this stuttering frozen moment with them.  Even if this current disturbance turned out to be a dead end, they would have seen the world and that was enough to make them all feel alive and fascinated and a little less desolate.

So when they got a chance, they all climbed off the ship en masse, for the sake of seeing more of the world gone wrong.  It had been days now - searching for portals and accessible places, killing monsters and time.  The SeeDs were re-arming and honing skills, he knew that.  He?  Probably shouldn't be here.  But he'd wanted to see things through, and hadn't wanted to leave Squall alone - well, alone except for all his friends and the dozen or so Guardian Forces who followed them around everywhere.  He and Squall had a lot to talk about, and so far, Squall had said barely a damned thing.

Not that Laguna blamed him for that.

Squall was leading the battle council; he always did.  "We've got the rough coordinates for the portal."  He tapped his wristband, and Laguna saw numbers running quickly across it, glowing blue before racing away.  "But if Quistis is right, whatever came through it could be anywhere in the forest by now.  So we'll have to start by heading to the portal, and then keep searching from there."  Laguna chewed his lip.  Not a great plan.  Grandidi was pretty huge, and so dense you could miss seeing that light if you were ten metres from it.  "It's not safe out there, so I think we should send only two parties -"

"Hold on," said Laguna.  "You've got Diablos, right?"  Rinoa nodded, tugging at the rings around her throat.  She seemed very subdued - perhaps because she had more to fear from Ultimecia than the rest of them.  "Then there's no reason we can't all go, and split up so we can search more of the forest.  If we use Encounter None, then none of us will get attacked by monsters - well, not unless we run into them on purpose.  But we won't be doing that.  Right?"  

Squall looked sceptical.  "That should work.  There's a good range on that ability, once you've activated it."

"Good, because it's kind of a big forest."  Though he wondered - if maybe - "I've been through it a few times.  I can stick with you if you want a guide."

"No, you were right - we need to split up to search.  Selphie -"  She'd already pulled out a map, though Laguna had no idea where on her person she had kept it.  "Give us all search vectors.  We need to get going.  If any of you find anything, you can call me."  

*

Selphie was circling the Ragnarok around edge of the forest, dropping each of them at their mathematically determined optimal start point, plus or minus a few annoying trees, all set to comb their assigned area and eventually meet at the portal before heading back to the ship.  Laguna was the next to last to leave; he kind of wondered if Squall was trying to get back at him, by minimising the chance of him finding anything.  It was definitely making him stir-crazy, alone down on the decks while Selphie engaged in delicate navigations up in the cockpit.  Or maybe - you never know - maybe Squall was trying to protect him from possible harm.  Not because he was the President of Esthar - he didn't think Squall gave a damn for his beloved city - but because -

- nah, be realistic.  Squall didn't make decisions that way.  Did he?

There was a sickening creaking sound, quickly followed by Selphie's voice.  "Yikes, sorry!  I hit a tree.  And we're in Esthar, so I guess it was your tree!"  She sounded strangely contrite.  "Just let me drop the ramp -"

Laguna mentally riffled through his supplies.  Plenty of potions, his old gun, a modified M-Stone that could shed light for a few days, a few weirder supplies - protective stones and so on - plus a wristband to keep track of his position and to let the SeeDs all know where he was, in case he got into trouble.  Which he wasn't going to.  He didn't have any magic or anything, but with Diablos hiding them all he wouldn't be needing it, not even if he were the one to find what they were looking for.

Everyone else had a head start, but he knew Grandidi better than they could ever hope to.  Selphie was right - Esthar was his turf, from Trabia Canyon to the deserts in the far south, his home and his life's work.  He could do this.

Strange green light, here I come!

*

It was strange to tiptoe past Grandidi's monsters.  The faeries were beside him in the night, not inside him, but he felt like he might be one of them.  He imagined letting ichorous moon-beasts eat crumbs from the palm of his hand.

He was safe here because of some Guardian magic he didn't understand; not because he knew these woods, or because he'd fought for them.  He wasn't even sure that they cared, and figured they probably hadn't voted for him in the last election.  Maybe he should promise them that he supported a paper-free political system?  Though he wasn't sure how the rest of Esthar's populace would react to him talking to trees.  Sometimes, he missed the time when he didn't have to worry about that kind of, as Kiros called it, public relations issue.

Except, in time compression, everyone was alone.  There was no one here except himself and Squall and their friends, and great green lights and blurred white walls and portals.  No time passed and no one was watching.

"Hi," he tried.  His surroundings didn't respond, though he heard something lumbering through the forest some distance away.  Probably just a dragon.

Oh, well.

One of the things he understood about Grandidi was that it was a complex place; it had dense and sparse areas, interlocking ecosystems - most of which had just been trashed by the Lunar Cry - rises and hinterlands, paths used by hunting monsters and monster hunters.  He headed for a small stream he could see marked on the tiny map on his wrist communicator, hoping to see something along the track it cleared through the forest.

He held tight to a branch as he leaned out over the rushing water, and then the branch snapped and he stumbled into the knee deep water, twisting over on the foot he landed on, and as his hand (still clenched around the broken branch) hit the stony riverbed knuckles-first and oh Hyne was that wrist thingy waterproof?  It wasn't like it was going to electrocute the entire forest but knowing his luck it might - oww - no, but he had a splinter now, and he could see a glimmer of light straight ahead of him!  Success!  It wasn't the moon, either.  He hoped not, anyway, because it was greeny-bluey-yellow.  

He ran downstream, his boots heavy and squelching, and he felt nightbirds take flight around him, tried to ignore the way Grandidi's living roots shifted against his legs.  They wouldn't hurt him, not unless he tried to attack them, and he'd already decided he wanted to get their votes.  The stream was leading him to one of the places where the forest thinned, and he could see the dancing light getting brighter, spreading in his vision - and finally, he saw its origin, and he came to a splashing stop in the water.

It was a sorceress.  Had to be.  Normal people didn't dress like that - but nobody dressed like, like her two knights, outside of a movie set; one wore armour in strange crystal tones with horns growing out of its shoulders, and held a glowing blade out in front of him - didn't even have a hand on the trigger - and the other was a patchwork of bright folds of cloth and onyx-black leather.  The main reason Laguna stopped running, though, was because they were defending themselves from a dragon.

Surprisingly well, seemed like, but he recovered his wits and his manners well enough to jump out of the river and start shooting.  

It didn't do squat, not really - he'd grabbed his favourite gun even though it was a piece of twenty-year-old trash and he wasn't even using pulse ammo, but the vicious damn thing turned its four-foot jaw and opened wide to show Laguna its incisors.  Oh, wow.  He felt the pressure drop and his hair lift off his neck as the dragon inhaled all the air in his vicinity - and he ducked and started running.  They couldn't see great, he knew, so he should be able to get out of its flame range provided he -

- he could sense the flame in its first colourless heat, before he saw it - provided he -

- and it bloomed behind him, and he all but keeled over from the hellish heat and the smell of the air, grass and rocks burning, but it was alright, he was completely safe, because he'd always figured you wouldn't get hit by a dragon's flame just provided you ran directly underneath the thing.

And he'd been right all along!  There he was, right between its two nasty treetrunk legs, and barely even singed.  Since he was there, he unloaded a clip into its soft underbelly.

The dragon stomped, tearing great gouges in the earth.  He'd just started wondering how you got out from underneath a dragon when that hard line of light he'd seen in a man's hand only moments ago came back into his vision, hacking the dragon's foot off at the knee.

It screamed and reared backwards and Laguna did the only thing his muscle memories knew would help; he reloaded.

He'd barely started to fire again when a huge lump of rock descended from the sky and hit the dragon on the head.  That never happened in the movies.  It tumbled over with an earth-shaking thud - he wondered who else had heard the battle-noise by now - and he saw, staring at him from just the other side of its tail, the new sorceress and her entourage.  They seemed to flicker in his vision, like the city under seal only strobing on and off, like they were and weren't real in this plane of time -

- and he remembered what they'd all done, what Ellone had told them must be done.

Whoever these people were, Laguna Loire believed in them.  As of now.  He'd seen them take down a dragon.  He had no idea who they were but he believed in them.

*

One thing he'd learned a lot about in the Estharian Revolution was how to approach heavily armed people without, you know, emphasising the fact that they were heavily armed.  He put his gun down between two of the dragon's toes, because if a sorceress wanted to kill him a little toy like that would be irrelevant anyway, and most people felt bad about shooting someone who walked straight up to them, hands empty, and offered to shake one of theirs.

He tried the man who was wearing less armour.  He seemed the least trigger-happy.  "That was pretty good," he said encouragingly.  "I'm Laguna Loire.  Pleased to meet you."

An awkward moment later, the man clasped his bare hand with an armoured-gloved, surprisingly gentle grip.  He seemed shook-up, but not hostile.  "I'm Edward von Muir.  Of Damcyan."  He tried to indicate the others but it was hard because he was holding - really? - some kind of musical instrument in his left hand.  "Cecil Harvey, of Baron, and Rydia of the Feymarch."  Laguna blinked.  Even if he'd heard of those places, that wasn't any form of Sorceress title.  Sorceresses were another thing he'd had to learn a lot about, back then.  "I'm afraid we don't know where we are -"

Laguna saw a light in the woods behind them - a gentle blue glow that he knew for his son's unsheathed gunblade, a favourite night-hunter's light.  "Don't worry about it.  We'll get you back on track in no time.  I've just got to -"  He stepped past them as Squall entered the clearing.  "We can all - hey, Squall - see, I told you I knew this forest - I don't think you should point that thing at her, she seems like - Squall?  I know that you and sorceresses aren't always the best -"

There was a cling as the tip of the other knight's blade touched Squall's, and Laguna fell silent.  He saw Squall search the stranger's eyes, his arms completely unwavering, a shaft of light seeming to shine over both of them, emanating from the place their blades met.

Squall's arm dropped, his eyes staying dead level.  "You're no Sorceress's Knight."  

He sheathed Lionheart, and it was as if he slunk back into shadow, his contribution over.  The other knight - he sure looked like one - lowered his weapon silently, and Laguna stood by him as Squall stepped away into the trees, calling Selphie with a sequence of rapid button-pushes; he felt his presence, there to welcome rather than threaten, was holding an awkward peace.  "Edward?  You're in Esthar.  Things are a bit different from usual here because this sorceress we know has compressed time -"

"I knew it was something like that!" yelled the green-robed sorceress.  Like she said, Laguna didn't think she seemed surprised - she seemed angry.

*

"Strays."  Squall stomped away up the ramp as Selphie jumped down off it, clearly eager to see what he'd meant by that comment.  Laguna would question whether time compression excused being so damn rude to strangers, but it wasn't like Squall needed excuses and it wasn't like Laguna had any real chance to ask for them.  Hopefully Squall would never have to learn diplomacy.

The girl in green - Rydia - stared at the ramp for a few seconds, her eyes following the path Squall had walked, and then sat on it gingerly.  "Gods, I'm tired."  Edward stood beside her and patted her shoulder, and she sighed.  "I'm not even sure how to explain this to you.  It's like Blink magic gone horribly horribly wrong."

"I don't get it myself," admitted Laguna.

"I kinda do, but it took Quistis maybe five tries to explain - um, hi.  I'm Selphie."  She grinned as Laguna made another round of introductions, clearly seeing chances here rather than threats.  "We should really get in the air again and go pick up the others - then maybe we should all make dinner!  We've not found any open restaurants but we've got real good at doing stuff in the microwave."  

Rydia was staring at her with an expression that read I have no idea what you're talking about; Laguna felt like her face was used to that one.  Sorceresses had the strangest lives.  "Thank you."  She reached up, and Edward helped her to stand, her scarves parting and regrouping in ways that a non-sorceress might consider immodest.  "I have a lot of questions to ask you - but some food and rest would be most pleasant.  We've been fighting through those woods all day."

"Those Lunar Cry monsters are the worst!  It can't be too much trouble for a sorceress, right?"

Laguna sensed the sly intent behind Selphie's relentless chirpiness.  He wasn't sure if Rydia did too, or whether she was just frowning at the unfamiliarity of it all.  "I know a lot of magic, if that's what you mean?"  

"I saw her make a rock land on a dragon's head," Laguna said in confirmation.

Selphie grinned at him.  "That's called a meteor, Sir Laguna.  Come on aboard!"  Laguna stepped up behind Rydia and Edward, and he felt Cecil's footsteps behind him, his tread somehow light in spite of his excessive armour.  Maybe he had (Laguna was starting to get the hang of this, since he had all these people around who talked about fighting all the time) Float junctioned to his Speed stat.  "This is the Ragnarok.  I'm the pilot, but really it's Sir Laguna's ship because it belongs to Esthar, and in Esthar, Sir Laguna is in charge!"

Edward paused, and looked back at him.  "Are you the king of these people?"

"No, I'm not.  We don't have queens and kings any more.  I'm the President of Esthar."

Edward blinked at him, as if too tired to fathom the distinction.  "I see - we should have greeted you properly -"  He looked past Laguna, and Laguna saw that Cecil had bowed his head to him slightly, his hand on the hilt of his sword.  

That was what you did where they came from?  He tried it too, and ended up holding his gun the wrong way up.  At least he hadn't dropped it.  He straightened up again, and shrugged lightly.  "You guys are welcome here.  That's all that matters, right?  Man, I'm hungry."

Better to pretend it was all fine, he figured.  Mysterious guests were pretty minor on the scale of complications he'd encountered lately.  It was difficult to rule a country when it didn't have any time for the trains to run on.  And there wasn't much he could do about that, other than smile and trust his son to somehow sort it all out.

Chapter Text

Edward was holding the two Whisperweeds, bound back to back for their journey.  He couldn't tell them apart.  That was the point, that was their destiny - to be one and the same, in two different forms.  He set one down on the floor in the centre of the airship cabin, sat on his bunk, and began to play a duet with himself.

It felt immediately soothing - for too long now he'd had the company of only one Whisperweed, and he played it only when he needed to.  He had no desire to disturb Cecil and Rosa with a sudden rendition of Chocobo-Chocobo.  But now, he could play with the echoes and the minuscule time lag, that feeling that the Whisperweed did not sound until it had heard itself play, like thunder following lightning as they sing the same song - yes - he had missed its peculiar beauty, and could now enjoy it while disturbing no one but himself.

He sang softly, holding long notes that bridged the gap between the two sounds.  He vowed that one day he'd play Whisperweed in a great temple, or in a cavern, just as soon as he could gain entry to such a place alone.  He liked to have an audience well enough, but as a king, he'd grown tired of them.  He played, and people applauded, perhaps from fear that he might have their hands lopped off otherwise.  No one listened to him sincerely any more.

But Edward was no king here in Esthar.

He thought of Laguna's easy welcome; not announcing himself as a ruler, not giving orders as such, not commanding an army, but reaching out as the arm of the land, offering friendship.  Perhaps he was of Esthar in the same way that Rydia was of the Feymarch - caring so much for so long, and receiving the land's blessings in return, and somehow becoming one with it.  If so, Laguna was doing a good job of concealing any fear for the state of this timebound country.  He had an optimism, a faith in others, that overruled it.

Edward sensed that not all was resolved within the company they'd fallen into.  There were the cohort of young warriors - younger even than Cecil, and yet so seasoned and so very well-armed - and then Laguna and his two robed aides, who seemed to regard the others fondly but not to be a part of their quest, nor an authority over it.  And the abrasive knight-general who snarled and strode about the ship, who had so little to say and assumed so much responsibility; such a man was opaque to Edward, who embroidered his tender feelings in patterns on his sleeves, but he felt there was something between him and Laguna personally.  They were like Whisperweeds, two songs playing almost together, except that they seemed nothing alike.

He felt uncomfortable among them.  He understood that it must be awkward, to be out on the edge with your friends beside you, be it in the caverns of the moon or here at the end of time, and then to suddenly have to deal with a clutch of strangers come from nowhere and with no idea how to get back there.  They did not seem to do what Cecil had always done, and to take lost warriors into their band and fight with them as friends did for friends.  They were a unit, and that, mostly, seemed to be that.

Beyond savage practicality, magical science and oh for hell's sake he still didn't begin to grasp this whole time compression thing, Edward was a human being who sang songs and tried to do the best he could for the people he ruled.  He had yet to uncover the humanity of these strangers.  They flew, they fought monsters, they produced food from devices and ate as if it was airship fuel, they made ready for war.  Beyond that, all he had was one outstretched hand.

He would play his song, and hold the notes across that silence before the other one answered.  That was all he could do.

*

Rydia was shuffling cards.

They'd shown her to a tiny airship cabin with a window that didn't open, and told her to ask if there was anything more she needed; what, like a safe path home?  She knew Cecil was in the cabin next door, and Edward was in the one next to that; they were corralled together, distrusted.  Except by the man who said he wasn't a king.  Things seemed confused here; a silent world, held out of time, and the king-who-wasn't deferred to another leader.  She found it hard to see who had respect for who.  People didn't always let things rest on their surface.  When Edward travelled, he often neglected to say he was a king.  Cecil was what he was - a paladin and one of the two wise rulers of Baron, a great warrior, and he could not hide anything any more than a mirror could hide the sun.  She, too, was not much good at putting on a mask.

So what was a sorceress, and why did they say she looked like one of them?

The cabin had only the barest of supplies, but she had looked over them curiously; some of them were unfamiliar but at least made sense, like the bedding that was made of something soft that rustled when she touched it, and an empty white cup.  Others were essentially useless to her - artifices dotted with buttons that she had no idea of the function of, a book in a script that may as well have been gibberish to her.  Then there were complete mysteries, like the folded spills of paper that, inside them, had several different substances - mostly utterly unfamiliar to her but one of them was definitely sugar.

And there was the deck of cards.

They weren't like the cards that Edge and Cid played with, not that she'd expected them to be.  Dozens of them, each with a different picture and four numbers written in the corner; some were incomprehensible, but there were a few different dragons, a chocobo, other recognisable creatures.  Some had stylised human faces.

And then she turned over one that, quite plainly, was a picture of Ifrit.

She gasped.  These people knew about her eidolons?  That was more than most of her own people did.

She kept turning, seeing more touching familiar faces - she found she was worried for them, so far away in a disintegrating patch of strange time, and the pictures in her hands, Shiva and Leviathan and Bahamut, seemed to focus her sense of foreignness; sketches of her truest, deepest home.  But then there were others - cards interspersed that looked like eidolons but which she didn't recognise.

Well.  She certainly needed something now, so she wrapped the cards up in a fold of her skirt and set out into the airship.  Her door wasn't locked, but she had no idea which way to go or who to ask or even what to ask - so she walked boldly down the hallway, turned a corner, and knocked on the first door on the left.

"Come in," someone called.  A young woman.  Presumably human.  She would have done as the voice suggested, but the door had no handle - only an array of buttons.  She pushed four of the small ones and then the largest, and after a few seconds of anguished bleeping, the door slid open.

The cabin behind it was smaller than her own, but more cluttered.  Someone lived here, if only temporarily, and that person seemed to like books, and pictures; in addition, there were several devices crammed into a corner with their tails all tangled together.  That person was sat at a folding table in the corner and seemed to be using yet another device; she wore a pink dress that looked far too warm for summer, in Rydia's opinion, and had a pair of eyeglasses on her face.  Like Cid's.  Surely she was an artificer.  Rydia looked up at the girders of the airship's ceiling, and wondered if the blonde woman had built it.

"Um," she began.  "There's something I need to know about."

"Well, come on in," the stranger replied with a smile.  "I'll be glad to help you.  Would you like some coffee?"

"Some what?"

A curious smile crossed her face.  "Something to drink.  Would you like to try it?  It's, uh, made by passing water through ground seeds.  It's a bit bitter by itself, but most people add sugar to it."  Definitely an artificer, thought Rydia as she nodded tentatively.  This opinion was reinforced as the woman began to fiddle with one of the devices in the corner.  She shuffled the cards in her hands awkwardly, not sure quite what was expected of her here.  There was so much technology; that must make its wielders powerful.  "Oh."  A hand was extended towards her, and she stilled her cards to grasp it, holding it steady.  "I'm Quistis."

"I'm Rydia.  I found these..."  

Quistis dropped her hand, and unfolded a chair that Rydia hadn't even noticed was there.  She sat, feeling it creak against its mountings on the airship's hull; Esthar seemed to make things out of strange metals cut finer than crystal, but their work held fast.  Quistis pulled her chair close to Rydia's, and looked at the cards in her hand.  "It's a Triple Triad deck.  It's a game.  Do they play card games where you're from?"

"Yes - well, no - Edward plays cards, and I heard people in Fabul play the best and the oldest games, but we don't play in Mist, or the Feymarch.  Those are the...places that I'm from."  It was complicated enough trying to explain her life to strangers in her own world.  At least they knew what a summoner of Mist was.  "But they don't put eidolons on their cards."

"Eidolons?"

Rydia fanned them out in her hands.  Leviathan, Ifrit, Shiva, the strange ones.  "Those -" the ones she knew "- are friends of mine.  These others, I don't know."

She realised Quistis was looking at her, surprised.  "They're our guardian forces.  We call on their aid, and they help us use magic, but I've never heard anyone describe them as friends."

"But I live with them.  In the Feymarch - it's not like the rest of our world.  Time flows differently there - it has pockets and ripples.  They were my guardians too, after Mist was destroyed.  They raised me like I was their daughter.  Other people don't know about them - so I didn't understand why their pictures would be on cards."

Quistis frowned.  "You know, I've always loved this game but I've never been completely sure about that.  I think it's sort of like...research.  When a Guardian is discovered, someone makes a card for it.  Sometimes, people make cards for people they care about.  And when you play the game using those cards, you're sharing that knowledge and caring with others."  Rydia nodded slowly, trimming this information down into its most important parts - that the eidolons had a presence here, that they were known and seen.  "Would you like to play a game?"

"...I'll try it.  How does it start?"

"Take five of them."  Quistis had slipped another deck out of her pocket, and was riffling through them herself.  "Don't worry too much - I'll go easy on you this first time."  Rydia looked down at her friends, feeling strange to be playing with them but - if she understood Quistis correctly - using their cards was like sharing.  Like summoning to help a friend.  Maybe, if the people of Mist had shared their friendships with the rest of the world...  No, best not to think of that.  Blame was long since exhausted, buried in the time mires of the Feymarch.

She chose Ifrit, Leviathan and Shiva - old friends, the oldest.  She chose a picture of a chicabo, because it was something else that the two worlds seemed able to share.  Her last choice was something unfamiliar - a skeletal face that was embedded in, she wasn't sure, but maybe the frame of a device.  It looked unhappy, but powerful beings often did.

Quistis cleared off the desk in front of her, and Rydia saw a grid of nine squares painted on it, or emitted by it - strange lights seem to dance over the table.  She wasn't even certain the grid had been there a moment ago.  Quistis determined, with a spinning top that she produced from her pocket, that she would put down a card first - it was a picture of a dragon, and the odd paper it was printed on seemed to turn pink as she set it down.  She explained then how the numbers worked, how each gave strength to a different edge - Rydia studied her cards, and put Shiva to the right of the dragon, and saw the colour of the dragon turn blue.  She reasoned that the light behind it had changed.  Like a battlefield map, in glowing pastel.  She had to be aware of Shiva's exposed lower edge, the vulnerabilities that existed alongside her strengths.  Not everyone would forgivingly ignore them as Quistis now did, placing an unfamiliar mammilian beast in the middle of the array.

Quistis smiled when Rydia played the chicabo.  "Oh, you have chocobos?"

"Yes.  Many colours."

"Really?  Ours are all - like that.  Soft yellow."  She played some kind of insectile monster, and Rydia responded with the strange, sad-looking eidolon.  "Huh, you know Doomtrain?"

"No.  No, I don't.  What is it?"

"The ghost of a railway train."  Rydia stared blankly at her.  "A machine that runs on rails.  It takes you places, like an airship, only it can only go where the rails run - maybe more like a boat on a river.  Doomtrain seems to go where he likes, though."

"That doesn't make sense.  How can a machine have a ghost?"

"I wish I knew.  Maybe he's more like - like the spirit of machinery.  Old machinery that's broken or disused.  Ancestor machinery.  He's primal - we first called him with medicine, steel pipes and poison vines, and those are things that humans have been using for...a long time.  It's his most primal self, like meeting Shiva in the snow."

Rydia thought of Babiel, a constructed monster as big and as lively as a small city.  Babiel was a made-thing, and had no soul of its own.  "I don't know an eidolon like that.  Maybe that's the difference between us and you.  We don't have nearly so many devices."  She tried to untangle cause and effect.  Was it the devices that created the god of artifice, or the god of artifice that inspired the devices?  Maybe the Lunarians knew, with their superior grasp of these things.  Here in Esthar, it seemed almost silly to wonder who was an artificer and who wasn't - they seemingly all were, in the same way that all the people of Mist were summoners.

Quistis set down a card that turned her chicabo pink, and Rydia laughed at herself because she didn't care and oh how strange it was to be so glad to see a Malboro!  It was true, she thought - they were sharing their knowledge, their friends, even their enemies.  "I hate those things," she said merrily, and Quistis smiled.

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Everyone who's ever seen one."  Which, evidently, they both had.  Why would they share the Malboro, of all things?  It seemed a reasonless process; some things were held in common between them, and outside of that there were things that were lit blue and things that were lit pink.

Their board was was mostly blue, and became more so as she set down Leviathan.  He was very vulnerable from below, but in an empty square on the bottom row he would be safe, she felt.  Down on the seabed.  He wasn't meant to sail through the air.  She smiled at that, as Quistis laid her last card in the only empty square that was left.

Rydia frowned.  "But...that's you."

"Yes, it is.  Think it's a good likeness?"

Rydia looked down at the card, and then up, and she reached across the table and boldly pulled Quistis's eyeglasses off.  "Good enough.  They got your nose wrong."

Quistis laughed.  "After this is over, I'll have to find her and tell her that..."  Rydia tilted her head questioningly.  She was still holding the eyeglasses, so tried putting them on.  "A former student who really admired me.  I used to be an instructor and some of the younger kids...well, it was just embarrassing."  The glasses weren't nearly so thick as Cid's but they made everything look distorted, like the air that Cecil had flown through to reach them in Damcyan.  Quistis seemed patient with her investigation, which was fortunate; Rydia needed to do things.  It was how she learned, how she became comfortable.  "You won, you know?"

"You let me."

Quistis grinned.  "Just trying to get you started as a collector.  Because you won, you get to take one of my cards."

The lights under the board had shifted, and every card was showing its original colour.  She put her hand over the picture of Quistis without even pausing to think on it.  This is how you shared knowledge, caring, friendship, in this frozen faraway world.  She gathered the blue cards one by one, leaving Doomtrain until last, staring at its empty eyes in wonder.  "You've been very kind to me, but can I ask for one more favour?"

"What is it?"

She set down the eyeglasses, and the picture seemed to rush towards her, from distortion to reality.  "I want to speak with it."

*

At first Laguna had thought that the kids had a strange way of dealing with the end of time itself.  They had no fear, and it they felt shock it was lesser to their sense of adventure.  They were more heartfelt, maybe, but had none of that desperate emotional recklessness that he remembered from those times that that revolution had come close to obliteration.  

Then he remembered that they'd been raised for this battle.  No wonder you wouldn't have known that they were so close to the edge of their world.  They'd been trained to thrive here.

He sure as hell hadn't, and he felt like a creaking old ghost as he paced around the hallways of the Ragnarok, sleepless and yearning to somehow - through that white wall of temporal static that might as well have been made of mile-thick moonrock - be back in his city.  And feeling like a fool for feeling that way about it.  You couldn't be in two places, even if the whole Junction Machine Ellone thing proved you could be in two times, and he'd spent so long living with his choice of his city over his family...

He was here because he'd decided that enough was enough and if the world was going to get crushed into a flat microsecond with nothing in it but a sorceress he may as well spend those last concertinaed hours watching over his son.  You couldn't be in two places at once.  He'd had to try the other path, the might-have-been.  And if it turned out that the end of time was seventeen years too late to be walking that way and he should have stayed home - home! - instead, well, it was his own fault.  All of it was his own fault.

He heard music coming from somebody's cabin.  Nothing he recognised, but it sounded pretty good.  

Laguna diverted his pacing to one of the thin observation decks on the Ragnarok's underside, and he gave a long, trilling whistle to the sight of the huge red moon rising over the sea; a tingling step and a shift of red reflections made him belatedly realise that he wasn't the only one there.  "Oh.  I didn't mean to disturb you.  I just came here to look at the moon."

The great thing about looking at the moon on troubled nights was that you always knew it had more problems than you did.  That had been especially true right after he'd first pinned Adel up there.

"As did I."  Cecil - not a stranger any more - gave him that polite nod-thing again.  It wasn't like an Estharian court-bow or anything (Laguna had never figured out how to do those, so it was lucky that he was the President and would never ever have to, unless he resigned, or stopped winning elections, but for now handshakes were totally fine).  More like a gesture that passed respect between equals - which, hey, Cecil hadn't given him at first meeting, though there kinda had been a dragon in the way at the time.  Laguna reminded himself to ask someone whether Cecil was king of anywhere.  He'd feel really observant if that were true.

The Ragnarok swept a curve over the ocean, and Laguna leaned his head against the window glass, keeping his eyes on the moon's jagged red eye.  In the quiet, he thought he heard music, thought he heard the airship engine thrum like one of those primitive trains they had back in Galbadia.  "I don't know why I find it so beautiful.  It looks wounded, right after the Lunar Cry.  Like it hurt itself as much as it just hurt us."

It wasn't right after the Lunar Cry.  It wasn't any time.  The moon looked hurt because if you take a moment out of time, it would be hurting.  It was always hurting.

Cecil was at the next window, seeming transfixed, as if he were speaking silently into the glass.  After a few seconds quiet, he said, "My father came from the red moon.  We have two, you know?  A true moon, and a voyaging world of magic and monsters.  Yours seems like both as one, shining both white and red."

Laguna trembled.  "You're a -"

"Of the Lunarian people.  Half-human."  Laguna stared at his face, red-lit flesh and sharp valleys of shadow, and he realised he'd been about to say 'a monster'.  "For most of my life, I didn't know."

...Maybe he shouldn't feel that bad about the surprise he'd dropped on Squall.  Yeah.  This was one of those nights when the moon had the same problems you did.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

For making other people live with my choices.  People who didn't even get to vote on it.  "Because...you can't be in two places at once," he said weakly.  He hadn't really meant to say anything.  If it had really been Squall standing beside him, he probably wouldn't have done.  

"I don't need to be.  I am where I am, in any world"  Cecil smiled, and with another nod he silently bid him goodnight.

Chapter Text

Laguna fell out of his bunk and woke up, or maybe the other way around.

He'd been dreaming about Moombas.  It was pretty bad - he liked Moombas just fine, but he'd first got to know them when he was a prisoner at the Lunatic Pandora Laboratory.  His friendship with their culture was like a treasured possession he'd saved from a burning building.  So, as if the whole not-being-in-Esthar thing wasn't enough for his brain to grouch over, now he was wondering where the hell the Lunatic Pandora had gone.  Figures; he could overdo anything, even moonwatching.  All the horror that spawned on its skin had got into his sleepy head.

He tried not to wonder where Cecil was now.

He rubbed at the bump on his head and stood up, slowly.  Somewhere, maybe not far away, there would be breakfast.  He staggered out into the hallway and headed towards the kitchen.  Halfway there, Irvine grinned at Laguna as he walked past, carrying a teatray towards the elevator; it had become his morning routine, taking a plateful of breakfast up to where Selphie slumbered in the pilot seat.

He leaned on the button and the kitchen door opened.  He'd assumed that at least a couple of the others would be there - but he hadn't expected that the room would look like a fight between a Tonberry and the Timber Maniacs printing press.  

It wasn't a huge kitchen, but it did the job so long as they took turns; no gas range like they had in Galbadia or a set of ether-crystalloid heatrods like they had in Esthar, but there was a cooker that somehow siphoned heat from the Ragnarok's exhaust - Odine had built it and promised that it was at least 103% non-carcinogenic, though Laguna was bad at telling when Odine was lying - anyway, it could feed a few hungry people.  Five of them were in there already; Zell, standing by the microwave and twitching his feet, Ward on an improbably tiny chair by the door, and Edward balancing a bowl of cereal and dried fruit on his curled-up knees.  The dining table was fully occupied by dozens of sheets of paper, each one covered in notes and symbols and numbers, and there were more of them spread over the all the countertops and even the walls.

Quistis was leaning over the table, poring over one of the most dangerous-looking Venn diagrams he'd seen since the Sorceress War with the glow of an all-night caffeine bender shining in her eyes.  Rydia was sitting cross-legged on top of the table, annotating one corner of the chart as Quistis read it.

Laguna stared.  It was, clearly, a lot of information to take in while his stomach was grumbling at him and there was a lump growing on his head, and that was on top of the kaleidoscope of nightmare-memories that had passed through his sleeping mind.  The corner of the table nearest to him seemed covered in lists of monster subgenera.  There was a page that had two different sketches of Shiva, pretty similar except for her hair.  There were equations he remembered from high school.  A timeline of Sorceress Wars.  A map of something, no idea what.

Three pages pushed together in the middle had some kind of vanishing-point diagram of what looked like a railway train, but it sure wasn't any train he would have ridden on.  Each monstrous feature was annotated, like someone had been trying to reverse-engineer a revenant machine.

He figured he was looking at those someones.  "Uh.  Good morning."

Ward covered his brow with one hand.  Edward smiled, nervously.  Zell tipped back his head, and the Ragnarok's hull clanged as it met his skull.  Quistis and Rydia looked up at him like they'd only just realised he was there.  "Good morning," replied Quistis.  Her eyes seemed to shake.  "Would you like some toast?  I think we were going to try to make toast while we tested out Fire magic -"

"Odine built this kitchen," he almost snapped.  "It's barely safe to breathe in here."

Rydia grinned, looking dazedly at him.  "So much for - Quistis, what was it you called it - science?"  She yawned, and it made her look like a flower opening at sunrise.  Not a bad analogy.  "Oh my.  I guess I need another cup of your coffee."

"You know," Laguna said wearily, "we're in time compression here.  The whole world's in stasis.  So there's no point in skipping sleep - you could test whatever it is that you're testing forever."

Rydia tilted her head at him.  "You have a point.  In compressed time, what is breakfasttime?"

"It's whenever I have my first cup of coffee," said Quistis, and took a hearty sip from her mug.

Rydia laughed.  "But he does have a point.  Goodnight, Quistis!"  She jumped down from the table and breezed past Laguna, errant folds of her clothing brushing against his knees.

Quistis rubbed at her eyes as the door slid closed.  "Well now.  I guess I better tidy up..."  She grabbed another piece of paper from a small - depleted, for sure - stack of blank sheets beside her elbow, and wrote a quick stream of spidery notes on it.  Laguna recognised the habit from his own years as a writer; never put something down without leaving a mental handhold that would help you get back into it again.  She chewed at the end of her Estharian space pen, and then began collating their scattered ream of abstractions.  Shuffling the other papers into a stack, she gestured at the one she'd been working on when Laguna came in; the riot of Venn circles.  He thought the marks on them looked like the element symbols on Triple Triad cards.  "Given how different our homes are," and the cap of her pen touched the place where several circles interlocked, which was generally larger than the remainder of each circle, "It's remarkable how much we have in common.  Most elements, many spells.  Maybe that's what's important here, not all the differences."

"Language," Laguna added, mentally tracing the shape of his name.  He'd lived off of language.  Most of his life.  "Don't you think it's remarkable that they can even talk to us?"

"I didn't think of that."  She folded the chart away among the many others.  "I was thinking more about fundamental laws of nature...but you're right."

Edward pulled his chair up to a cleared corner of the table.  "Maybe something wishes for us to be able to talk," he said thoughtfully.  "If we didn't have that commonality, we couldn't share our differences at all."

Ward raised his index finger to his lips.  Edward nodded, acknowledging the response - some shared in words, and some in silence.

Quistis sat in a chair in the corner, her thick wodge of paper held to her chest.  "I wish I could see a pattern to it all.  But maybe you're right - maybe what's important is that we're all here."  She thumbed tiredly through the stack, not seeming to be looking for anything.  "I also wish I knew how we'd coincided in the first place.  Rydia is pretty mad about it."  She smiled, and Laguna felt the gap between the edges of those circles; it was kinda fun, meeting people who seemed to come from some other universe, but being away from home and unable to return was becoming unbearable.  "I meant to talk to you about that."  She was looking at Edward, uncapping her pen again.

"Me?"

"Yes.  Rydia told me about leaving the Feymarch...  She lost contact with all the - the Guardians, the eidolons - that we don't share.  We wondered if that's why the Feymarch ruptured, but who knows?"  Laguna could have given himself a headache just thinking about that - he knew little enough about Guardians to begin with, and picturing a place that they lived in was just too much.  "What I don't understand is how you got here.  She wasn't too clear on it -"

Edward sighed.  "She was angry, and it wasn't the first time she'd lost her only home."  Laguna noticed that Quistis held his eyes, but made a pen-scratch on her papers as she did so.  This wasn't science, or cultural exchange now - it was getting personal.  "All I can tell you is that we descended into the lowest cellar of my home, and it was no longer my home.  The stones changed.  We pressed on because we couldn't go back."  

"And you ended up in Grandidi Forest?"

"Not immediately.  We had to fight our way out of the place my home had become - some ghostly folly of a castle, full of monsters.  Can't say I thought much of the décor.  But we found a portal outside, and so there we were."  He picked at his food, morose.

Zell blinked at him.  "Hang on.  You guys just appeared in Ultimecia's castle?"

There was a silence, in which Ward raised his hands and then brought them slowly apart.  His meaning was pretty clear to Laguna - they could talk, sure.  They shared a language.  But they didn't share even a basic idea of what was important and what was really going on.  The silence drew on.  Quistis had even stopped writing.  It was broken, eventually, by Laguna's stomach giving off a fantastic growl.

Oh.  Yeah.  Breakfast.  He reached up to a cupboard, trying to find the Sugar Frosted Fire Bombs.

Quistis dropped her armful back on the corner of the table, looking puzzled and exhausted in Edward's general direction.  "It sounds like your home got transposed with Ultimecia's castle -"

"I don't even know who Ultimecia -"

"You live in a castle?" added Zell.  "How come you -"

"I'm a king," Edward replied terribly quickly.  "I've always preferred being off on adventures but -"

Quistis grabbed her pen again.  "King as of right, or are you married to a queen?"

"I'm not - what kind of question is -"

Ward buried his face in his hands again.

*

Quistis and her attached ream of parchment eventually left, saying she needed to try to sleep.  Zell followed, looking back inquisitively.  Two others - the fierce young general, and a dark-haired woman - had stopped by, but left at the sight of the gathering.  That left Edward with the two older Estharians; the quiet one seemed, in spite of his size, to somehow blend in to the airship's fittings.  His silence held the space together, like a huge girder.  Laguna was able to more than make up for the other's lack of words.

"Hey," Laguna said, looking apologetic, one hand caught up in his own hair.  "I'm sorry if they're annoying you.  I think they're kinda stressed out about the world ending."

Edward couldn't help but smile.  "I sympathise.  When our world was..."  He trailed off, studying Laguna's face.  He was so much older than the cadre of warriors and while he had no less energy than them, his was somehow different in character.  "You don't fight much, do you?"

"Not any more, no.  I was a soldier, at one point.  And later I was a revolutionary.  These days, I just get on with presidenting, mostly."  Edward hadn't heard of presidenting before and wasn't completely sure that it was a word.  "I'm glad I've got Squall and everyone to leave all the rough stuff to."

Edward nodded.  "That's where I was, when our world was at a crisis.  Cecil and Rydia were fighting, with a few others.  I wish I'd been strong enough to fight.  I sat on top of the castle and worried for them, and played my harp.  Which wasn't as hard as what they did, but still."  Sitting out an ending, while others wrote it - Edward realised, amid the jumble of memories, that there was a most basic inquiry he hadn't yet made.  "You have our language, and numbers.  Do you also have music?"

"Yeah, sure!"  Laguna grinned.  "I saw that guitar-thing you were lugging around."

"It's a lute.  It's useful for fighting monsters - they find it debilitatingly lulling."

"Woah, really?  I have to try that!  First you've got to teach me to play, though - I'm kinda tone-deaf -"

Ward laughed, and Edward found himself startled by the sound - a grating of breath, almost noiseless and yet unmistakeable.  He rose, refilled his cup from the pot of that strange brown liquid, and raised it to them as he left.  

Laguna sighed.  "He's right, but I didn't mean to."  Edward was perplexed by the amount of detail Laguna seemed able to get from Ward's gestures - perhaps they had been friends for many years.  "Oh.  Yeah.  What he said was that I was being like Quistis."

"As if that were an insult!" Edward replied gamely.  He would admit privately that Quistis had a level of curiosity that was close to overwhelming, not least given the early hour at which she had chosen to exercise it.  How Rydia had borne it so cheerfully he had no idea.  "Is Quistis always so..." he tried to choose his words carefully, "Intellectually ferocious?"

"You make her sound like some kind of book monster.  I don't really know her too well - it's a long story, I've had a connection to those guys for a long time but I only met them a week ago."

That, given what he'd seen of how they spoke to each other, seemed stunning.  "Truly?"

"Yeah.  But they know me.  It really is a long story.  Two long stories, could be.  Lots of time compression in it."  He sighed.  "I don't know what Quistis's diagram was meant to be of, but if I'd drawn it, those little circles would have been infinite.  I don't think there's an end to all the things I could ask about you, or tell you about me.  And it's all kinda useless information when what you really want to know is how to go home!"

"Well," caged Edward, "Without examining this problem, we're never going to learn how to find home again.  Knowledge is never wasted, and nor is friendship."

Laguna smiled brilliantly.  "Truer words were ever forgotten!"

Edward tilted his head.  "That's not the phrase we use..."

"Language is amazing, isn't it?"

*

Rydia had no idea what time it was, but by Quistis's reasoning it was probably lunchtime.  She looked through the little window in the wall of her cabin; the sun was setting in wherever-they-were, and the airship was at rest on a grassy plain.  Funny that she'd always thought that was the trouble with airships - they destroyed your sense of time - but here time itself was in ruins.  Rosa had always told her that it was a strange thing to complain of anyway, given that she was used to the sunless eons of the Feymarch - but time in the Feymarch was different.  She could have drawn its contours, like lines of elevation on a map, steep slopes and shallow.  Feymarch time was precise and wonderful.  Airship travel just made a mess.

She had slept surprisingly well, and dreamed about numbers and about magic cut in pieces.  That had scared her more than pretty much anything Quistis had told her.  Magic stacked in, and she liked the old word Quistis had used, quanta, like coins in a piggybank, rather than just appearing from inside you when you needed it.  Her dreams hadn't been bad ones, just extremely confusing.  

Quistis had said that Rydia's way of casting meant she was a sorceress, like Selphie had said last night.  (Had it really been only last night?  Time was indeed playing tricks on her mind.)  Rydia decided she was tired of trying to put labels to everything, and she needed to merely be, and she let her mind detach from her troubles as she went about rearranging her clothes, getting out of the tiny cabin, trying to find some more coffee, pondering asking Selphie the Pilot if she could go take a swim in their sea, as Leviathan's presence was one she was still in contact with.  

She watched her own feet leaving faint pad-patterns on the grey metal floor of the hallway, thought about the sharp lines and flourishes that made this beast different from the Lunar Whale, more akin to Bahamut than to Leviathan, red-eyed and grey-scaled, and engrossed as she was in her environment, she didn't notice Squall until she almost walked in to him.  She spluttered an apology and he looked down at her, amused.

"I was looking for you," he explained.  "Needed to ask about something you said last night."

Yes.  Last night.  Even trying to sort through who she'd said in front of what and when, they had met in the forest only last night, and spoken very little, though perhaps he'd heard more than he'd spoken.  Squall did not seem to be the talkative type.  "What is it?"

"This all started when someone came to your Feymarch."  She nodded.  Strangely, their attempts to find an explanation and an answer in the realms of parascience had made her discount the human harbingers of disaster.  A man had come, and then the world began breaking into pieces.  "Tell me about him."

"He said he was there to find me.  He was...very tall, and angry, and he had a sword that he held rather oddly."  She held a hand to her head.  "I don't remember very well.  The most distinct thing for me was that Odin knew him, and was - almost afraid of him."

Squall raised one eyebrow thoughtfully.  "Makes sense."  He didn't say why.  "We'll have to show you some photographs later -"  Photo - graphs?  The shape of the word confused her.  "But I'm pretty sure that you got chased down by Seifer Almasy."  He spoke the name with a leonine snarl, teeth showing behind it.  Whoever that was, Squall cared about them, and not in a good way.  "And I'd love to know why."

He walked away before she could reply.  The name meant nothing, but she wanted to shake Squall's head in her hands and ask what he knew about Odin and fear - she hated being powerless among silent people, hated not knowing.  She had to find Quistis.  Quistis would help her to know.  "Squall," she yelled after him.  "Squall!"

He turned, staring back down the hallway at her, silent and tense with that emotion he'd placed in that name.  "What is it?"

"Have you seen Quistis?"

"She's asleep."

Rydia scowled.  She should have remembered that relying on humans was a bad idea.  "Then could you show me to - a reading room, if you have one."

Squall nodded, and she scurried to him as he set walking again.  His stride was much longer than hers, his boots much harder on the airship's steel deck.  "We've got a data library you could use."  She tried to keep her bearing as she followed him, hoping it wasn't too far from the tiny kitchen.  The ship was confusing, considering how small it was - perhaps it was her own unfamiliarity with artifice that made it seem so.

He thumbed a door button, and admitted her to a very small and plain room.  She didn't understand.  "Where are all the books?"

"In there."  He gestured to a desk.  It glowed, like Quistis's, and when he removed a glove and touched it, a raised slope in the middle of it filled with lines of text.  "There's no network connectivity in compressed time -" as if she knew what that meant, "- but the entire contents of the Estharian National Library are in there."

She placed a tentative hand on the desk, and lights swirled around it, words following in her fingertracks.  It was like magic.  A touch at the front of the desk brought up a grid of individual letters, and she wondered what they were for.  "Thank you," she said uncertainly.  Artifice-words.  She wasn't sure how to handle it, but she'd try.  She almost wished she'd brought her cards and that picture of Doomtrain, for luck.  She sat down in the chair in front of the desk, and crossed her legs underneath her.  She should be comfortable here, at least.  

"Tell me one more thing."  She looked up at Squall, and saw something like a glimmer of curiosity on his face, penetrating his natural grimness.  "Are you really a sorceress?"

"I have no idea.  That's one thing I want to find out.  Could you tell me one more thing?"  He raised a hand to his brow, not denying her the opportunity.  "Who is Seifer Almasy?"

"Someone I used to know."  As if that wasn't obvious.  "He works for Ultimecia now."  His hand moved over his forehead, tracing the fantastically rough scarline there.  "If Seifer Almasy came after you," he told her, "then Ultimecia wants you dead."

There was something about the way he stared at her - a hostility that was almost protective, a shaft of lightning behind a stormcloud.  She wanted to ask him what vow it was that made someone a knight here, whether it was an obligation to one sorceress or all or to one against all others, because she couldn't imagine that the feeling he was radiating could be personally related to her.

It wasn't, was it?  She could feel Odin raising his sword, gesturing to the far horizon.  This Squall Leonhart didn't give a damn who she was, only who it was she was fleeing.  Odin gave her that instinct for forming friendship upon mutual enmities.  She felt his steel in her spine, supporting her, and replied, "They can try."

To her surprise, he smiled slightly.  "Yeah, whatever."  She smiled back, because stones and eidolons was it rare to find a complete stranger who took her so utterly seriously.

Chapter Text

Edward found Cecil outside the airship, watching the coming of evening on a strange world.  The airship had landed in a meadow - he didn't know why, or what it was for, or which beasts grazed it, or which monsters they risked encountering, but he saw a flight of butterflies skimming over the closing buds of unfamiliar wildflowers and he felt something like contentment at the sight.  Maybe something more desolate than that; all worlds crawled with vines and insects that didn't care what earth they were on just so long as the sun kept shining down.  They had no guarantee that it would.  They got on with being beautiful.  Edward had no way of arguing with their gracefulness.

Cecil was sitting on the ground; he seemed to be watching the moon rise.  It was a night of sunset at both horizons, as they said in Damcyan - the rising red moon full and in perfect counterpoint with the sun, and the true moon nowhere to be seen.  Cecil's sword lay flat in the long grass beside him, catching rays of red light, reflecting them.

Edward sat beside him.  "Everything alright?"

Cecil continued to stare at the moon; so unlike the one they knew.  It wore its redness like a bloodstain that ran from a deep cut to its core.  "Two nights I've spent watching this moon, now.  I can't feel anything."

"And should you?"

He blinked, reverie broken by Edward's peculiar query.  "I thought I should, looking up at a red moon that is and isn't home to my kin.  Shouldn't I be able to understand what I'm seeing?"  Edward shrugged, wanting to tell Cecil not to expect too much of himself.  Some of the Lunarians are incredibly magically gifted.  Cecil was not among them.  A touch, yes, but that could just as easily have arisen from his devotions as his silver blood.  "Did they tell you about the Lunar Cry?"

"Yes."  What a curse, to be regularly colonised by Lunar-monsters - the most vicious of all monsters - in a wave that defied the moon's own gravity, a freefall of ichor and flame and gristle.  "What of it?"

"We're lucky enough to not have it - and I wonder if our luck is one of the most fundamental differences between us and them. What's built on our earth isn't destined to be torn up by our moon.  I fell more gently," he added softly.

Through curiosity, and kindness, and love, as Edward understood Cecil's life's-story.

He had the sense that Cecil was trying to lay a finger among the chaos of comparisons - the jumble of knowledge that Quistis and Rydia had smeared over paper as if it were made of soft butter - and point to the lynchpin.  The fundament.  The moon and its inhabitance.

Cecil's instinct and their analysis mixed in his mind to form a word.  "Why?"  He curled his hand around a tuft of grass.  "Why do they have Lunar Cries, and why do we not?  What's behind them?"

Cecil looked thoughtfully upon Edward's agitation.  "You're assuming that it's their world that has a reason for being what it is, and that ours is simply as things should be -"

"Of course I assume that.  What's the point in adventuring in far-off lands if you don't?"

Cecil laughed.  "So tell me, why have you always loved to travel?"

"To see.  To hear, and sing.  And you?"

"To do what's right."  He sighed.  "Let's find our way home, Edward.  We can't help this world, but maybe we can still help our own."

*

"Hey."  Rydia looked up, and rubbed her eyes.  Gods, she'd been so absorbed!  And here was Quistis at the door, carrying a little tray.  "Have you been reading all this time?  I figured you might need a bite to eat."  Rydia nodded dazedly, and Quistis placed her burdens on the bright-glowing reading desk and pulled another chair close for herself.  There was a jug, she saw.  And two cups.  She realised she had no idea what these people ate and drank at times other than breakfast - did they have tea?  Maybe not - Quistis had brought water.  She felt an urge to give Quistis tea, one day, somehow.

There was bread - she tried it tentatively, and found it was soft and airy.  And some kind of smoked fish - under the salty flavours, it tasted a bit like chicabo.  "Thank you," she said, genuinely grateful.  The differentness of all the little things was unsettling; she'd been from her childhood in Mist, to adventures all over the world, to the Feymarch beneath, but she'd always, without even knowing it, carried that sense that it was her world and her fae underland, her magic fundamental to it - she hadn't even been aware of that feeling until she'd come here and lost it.

No wonder she'd been so happy to ignore the world and read until Quistis had brought her food.

Quistis was smiling a little, glad to see her enjoying the unfamiliar lunch.  Dinner.  Whatever.  "I hope all that reading made things a little more clear..."

"Yes, and no.  I still can't work out how para-magic feels - it's like magic ground up into sand, to me.  I'm trying to picture this world in my head, and it keeps telling me that everything I know is wrong.  So I don't think I'm a Sorceress, or anything else you'd know."

Quistis frowned.  "I'll admit, I was still riding a hunch that you were."

"I'm just a summoner, and it seems like anyone can learn to summon here -"

"If a, an Eidolon accepts them -"

"- but I'm hardly a rare bird then, am I?  You can all summon.  So truly, I've not been this normal since my village was destroyed."  She hadn't really meant to say that - didn't want Quistis to make platitudes about it, not right now - so she ploughed onward.  "Supposing I was a Sorceress, though?  Just supposing?"

Quistis leaned her elbow on the desk, her chin on her hand.  Bright green lights appeared around her arm, responses to pressure.  "Yes?"

"Would you be my Knight?"

There was dead silence for about the next five seconds, and Rydia wondered what horrible faux pas she'd committed this time.  She had a sudden terror that Quistis would start laughing.  But she didn't.  "That's...I'm surprised that you wouldn't rather have someone from your own world."

"And how would they know how to defend me in this one?"

"Good point."  Rydia realised she liked very much the fact that Quistis was examining the question rather than merely responding with impulses and posturing.  "I hope you realise, it's not normal for a woman to take that position as a subordinate to a -"

"I'm not good at normal.  Are you?"  She tried to take the measure of Quistis's beautiful foreign face.  Found she couldn't.  "So that's a no, then?"

Quistis reached up and pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose.  "What?  Oh.  Oh Odin and Bahamut and all the gods we have in common, it's a yes - if you're completely sure?"

"Quistis, I'm not even sure there's anything sorceressy about me.  I'm really not.  But Ultimecia's coming after me anyway so I may as well ask someone to protect me.  And you know this stuff, and you're strong and clever and reliable -"

"You're so romantic."  It took Rydia a second to work out that she was being sarcastic, and then they both burst out laughing.  Rydia reached over and took Quistis's eyeglasses from her face - they made a pretty pattern on the desk - stroked her face from crown to chin, and breathed, watching her, as Quistis put a hand over hers, and smiled.  It was with Asura's kind of bravery that she kissed her, a first taste of a new world.

It was awkward, sitting two feet apart and wanting to be close and warm and learning everything she could about all new things, because much like these strange laws of magic, reading about it didn't get you at all close to real understanding, and - even in strange circumstances, they could stop this and talk and be sensible.  Rydia was more or less capable of it and in any case was about to fall out of her chair.  She drew her face a bare inch away from Quistis's.  "I think we should, um, find a more suitable -"

"What we say here is 'get a room'."  Quistis was smiling.  The pink of her lips was smeared - Rydia hadn't realised it was painted, like Edward's eyelashes, rather than a natural colour, like Rydia's own green lips were.

Well, that explained one of the odder tastes.  "I have a cabin," she said, puzzled at the imperative.  Quistis smiled broadly and slung an arm under hers, pulling her upright, her hand sliding down to Rydia's hips.  It wasn't quite fair, she thought, that Quistis was wearing so much more clothing than she was.  "So.  Does this always happen when a Sorceress chooses her -"

"It's not compulsory, I don't think," she replied, reaching back for her eyeglasses.  "But I wouldn't be surprised if it did."

*

Hours later, lying on her back in a room lit only by red moonlight, Rydia felt sensible for the first time in some while.  She had indeed found herself asking a lot of questions, but most of them had been fairly silly ones.  Quistis, for her part, had been surprised to realise that all of Rydia's hair was green.  Not unappreciative by any means, though it had been an odd time to start talking about alleles.

She sat up slowly, aware of Quistis making soft-happy-sleepy noises beside her.  She felt...well, it wasn't often she thought about how she felt.  She ran on instinct and affinity, recognising the kind and the cruel where she found them, not often interested in what they might offer her in a human sense.  For years of her life, she'd barely talked to other humans.  She was detached from them.

And she had just discovered attachment in a rather intimate sense...  Quistis was evidently a veteran of these encounters and Rydia was only glad that Quistis had received her own hungry fumblings with such grace and, yes, pleasure that made her heart brim with pride to think of.  She hadn't shied from tell Quistis that she'd never had sex, and Quistis had reacted no differently to when she discovered Rydia had never had coffee; just another new delight, a new scrawl in the middle of the chart made of circles, a thing they discovered they had in common.

And she felt, in Quistis's murmuring and the feel of her body lying against Rydia's in the tiny bunk, her warm-iron muscles and soft places, exhalations against her skin, that there was a commonality that it would surely be hard to put on a piece of paper; something golden that had crept inside her.  It felt at once peaceful and mindlessly ravenous.  It would not tolerate a gap between them.  She touched Quistis's hair with her hands, lifting it off the back of her neck, laying fingertips there as if to leave an imprint.

She looked towards the window, and saw the lowest edge of the moon, perhaps descending towards them as it made its way towards some temporally meaningless morning.  It didn't wax or wane here.  It repeated the same moment, just like they all did; a red light over their exile ship, as they floated becalmed between their two disasters.

It would be much easier to stay here in this feeling than to fight her way back armed with an answer, but Rydia was quite violently opposed to the idea of being the sole survivor of another cataclysm.  So had she made her bed and laid in it only to climb out and burn it?  Eidolons of underearth, she hated the moons and all they shone down on, she felt blissful, she felt calm and able to do any amount of good for anyone.  And her thread of detachment told her it wasn't a rational place to be.  It was soul-alchemy.  It had faces, and a name.

Everything that lived inside her had its name.

"Asura," she invoked, and nothing happened.  She hadn't expected it to.

Quistis stirred, and opened her eyes; the red moonlight completely destroyed their colour.  "What did you say?"

"Asura.  An eidolon - one of the dearest to me.  She can't hear me call her now, because our worlds don't have her in common.  She has three faces - one that shows joy, one that shows benevolence, and one that shows anger."  Rydia took a deep breath, aware that her words wove a kind of blasphemy, or at least a sort of human intimacy her soul had never broached before.  "You make me think of her.  And you make me feel like her."

Quistis sighed, and Rydia watched the shape of her frown - she knew that she saw what she wanted to see, graceful and wise lines that had the seeming, like their moons, of being transposed from her world into this one.  Asura's three tones formed a chord, and her heart sang it, merrily and angrily and kindly - and she wanted Quistis to hear it.

She saw the frown become a smile.  "They always told me I was a one for mixed feelings..."  She looked up at Rydia, eyes like two red jewels from far below the earth.  "I know this isn't - oh - Rydia, I'm your knight and that means I'll defend you and aid you for as long as you're here in this world.  And part of that is helping you save your home.  I promise."

"Thank you," she said, still simmering.  Someone she felt like this for would promise to force the two of them apart again, because it was the right thing to do?  How could she not cry to Asura, even blame her, for filling her own absence with this?  "We still don't know what to do -"

"We could sleep?" suggested Quistis.  "I have a few ideas.  And I maybe need to talk to Squall about this whole knight thing.  He might even crack a smile over it."

*

Quistis had them - the foreigners plus anyone else who was interested - convene in the passenger deck, which was the Ragnarok's largest open space, depressingly early in the morning.  Squall was there, and Laguna was kinda surprised about that; so were Ward, Kiros, and Selphie.  Quistis had brought all her bits of paper, and Selphie had helpfully hacked the room's navigational display so they could - well, Laguna wasn't yet sure what, but Selphie seemed pretty enthusiastic about it.  They'd all settled themselves into chairs except for Quistis, who leaned on the display apparatus and addressed them - Edward, Cecil and Rydia in particular.  They'd sat together at the front, looking varying degrees of weary.  

Quistis was clear enough on their aims.  "We need to figure out what we can do to make your home safe, and we need to get you back there.  Sounds easier than it is, right?"  Rydia frowned and folded her arms, bits of cloth crisscrossing other bits of cloth.  She had an air of immense frustration.  "There's enough going on here -"  She gestured at her stack of paper, "- that I don't even know what we should be focusing on."

"Can't see the chocobo for the cloud of feathers, as we say," said Edward.  Laguna grinned, because that sounded better than the Estharian version.

"I guess so," replied Quistis.  "So I wanted us to talk about the whole problem together.  Maybe between us we can figure out what's important."  It felt, to Laguna, like they were trying to unravel two balls of strings.  Got to find the ends of them first, right?  And better yet, they were doing it by committee.

Squall spoke up first.  "I was going to ask you about Sorceresses -"

Rydia glared at him.  "I read all about them yesterday and I'm not one but I want a knight anyway.  And maybe one of those headdresses."

"Right.  Fine.  But if you don't have Sorceresses, what kind of powerful magic users do you have?"  He paused.  "It's not a natural phenomenon that sent you here.  It was magic.  And sure, maybe Ultimecia really can reach into other worlds and pull them halfway into this one - but I'd prefer to think that she can't."

"Lunarians."  Cecil's voice was solemn as ever, but was maybe a little unsettled.  "They have powers unfathomable to humans.  They live on the red moon, but most of them are sleeping the millennia away."

"Most?" asked Squall sceptically.  Laguna noted that he didn't press the topic of magical people sleeping on the moon.

"All but three, to my knowledge.  Fusoya is their guardian.  Two others awoke - Zemus and Kluya - but they're both dead now.  I discovered two years ago that Kluya was my father."

Squall stared at him silently for several seconds, and Laguna braced himself inwardly for his son to pass comment on the topic of distant, mysterious fathers.  Oh Hyne Squall I never meant to -

"This is time compression," Squall pointed out.  "It could be originating at any time in anyone's life.  Ultimecia probably hasn't even been born yet as far as we see it."  Laguna realised he'd been holding his breath and coughed painfully.

Quistis drew on the desk with one finger, and a picture of the moon appeared.  "So it seems possible that someone on your moon started this - though I think they'd need a pretty good reason -"

"You never met Zemus," Rydia sighed.  "He was...made of hate, really."

Quistis nodded.  "So is there anything -"

"I was going to ask something," Edward piped up.  "Strange as our moons are, we don't have Lunar Cries.  So I was wondering what caused them.  Whatever it is, it's something you have and we don't."

Quistis tilted her head.  "It's part of our moon's ecology.  I don't know too much about it though."

"I do," said Kiros.  "It's essentially a colonial swarming that happens at the egg-hatching phase of the moon-monsters' life-cycles - there are a lot of different types, but they keep in phase.  They have seasons of a sort, but at a geological pace."  

"Lunalogical," corrected Selphie.  

Was that a word?  Laguna shook his head, merely glad that he had other people around to keep track of this stuff.  Kiros continued.  "The natural Lunar Cry cycle is very slow, but very violent.  Esthar started developing the Crystal Pillar so they could cause more regular, controlled Lunar Cries - maybe filtering off monsters and dropping them in the sea."

"But what Esthar ended up with was the ability to set the Lunar Cry off anytime, anyplace it wanted."  Laguna sighed.  "We don't even know how the Crystal Pillar works, anyway.  Odine won't tell me."

"What kind of crystal is it?" asked Edward.

"I don't know."  Laguna spread his hands, unashamed of his ignorance.  He'd only been forced to help build the thing.  Oh, and he'd had it dropped in an ocean trench afterwards.  That had been his second decision as President, and he'd flown out in a shuttle to watch them gently lower it into its sadly temporary grave.  The first had been to declare the Moomba to be Esthar's National Semi-Sentient Animal.  "I always figured maybe Odine didn't explain the damn thing because he didn't really understand it himself."

Cecil frowned at him.  "Could it perhaps be some form of Dark Matter - ?"

"No, it's kinda a blue-green colour -"

"You're right," interrupted Quistis.  "I've touched Dark Matter, and I think you're right.  The Crystal Pillar almost seems like...a very dilute form of it.  Powerful, but spread into a thin molecular matrix.  Maybe a web."

"Babiel, fragmented, weaving itself into a labyrinth."  

Edward, Laguna decided, spoke like a constant ongoing poem.  "What's Babiel?"

"An artificial monster built to slaughter us.  He's as big as a city."  Rydia sounded as awed by this as she was afraid.  "Zemus made him on the moon, and wanted to bring him to earth to destroy everyone - everything - and make the land ready for the Lunarians.  We're only lucky that he never figured out how to get it off the moon."

Quistis put a hand to her mouth.  "Oh.  Oh."

She looked more horrified than Laguna had yet seen her.  "What is it?" he asked.

"I think he figured it out.  Oh shit, did he figure it out."  Her eyes closed.  "Let me go over this again.  Zemus wants to get this thing from your moon to your earth?  And - Rydia - you got chased from your home by Seifer Almasy?"  Rydia nodded.  Laguna knew they'd added a few pictures of him in a recent update to the Ragnarok's permanent database, most of them labelled WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST ESTHAR.  "They must have made a, a deal."  She was looking straight at Rydia, almost shaking.  "If - if I'm right - Zemus sold you to Ultimecia in exchange for a Lunar Cry."

That - that was -

Laguna could feel the blood draining from his face.  He looked at Rydia - tiny and colourful as a glass ornament, friend to the Guardians, as real a faerie as this world had ever seen.  He'd fought a sorceress.  He'd ended a tyranny.  He couldn't imagine the kind of evil that would trade this girl's corpse for the end of a world.

But Hyne's blessing, they'd underestimated her and her big shiny friends.

"We already destroyed Babiel -"  Rydia tried.

"Time compression," said Squall.  "Ultimecia can undestroy it."

"Listen," Laguna said.  "It's not over yet, right?  Rydia's here, but we stopped time compression so Ultimecia hasn't been able to absorb her power.  We can stop that Lunar Cry too."

"How?" asked Rydia - he really couldn't blame her for looking so damn angry.

"This is - I totally understand this now - the two worlds have been brought into the same place, right?  If we completely separate the worlds, then the Crystal Pillar will have to return to our side of the divide, and you guys will have to be on your side, and then you can't have a Lunar Cry."

"And how are we going to do that?"

Laguna slammed his hands on the chair in front of him.  "We'll think of something.  Even if we don't know enough about this - dimensional stuff - now, there's got to be some way we can find out.  It's not like we're pressed for time, is it?"

Bad figure of speech.  Laguna was going for sarcasm - usually a mistake - but pressed for time was exactly what they were.  He realised it, and his words kinda hung around unpleasantly for a few seconds while he occupied himself by not caring what anyone thought of what a physical and verbal klutz he was.

"Wait," said Squall.  "Did you say 'dimensional'?"

Chapter Text

"I don't understand this plan," said Rydia.

"None of us understand him," replied Squall.  "He's helped us out a few times, isn't that good enough?"

"Odin doesn't trust him."

"We don't have to trust him, only ask him a few questions.  Questions no one else here could answer."

"That doesn't seem like much of a plan," she complained.

"Tell me a better one."

He had a point, really.  No one else had the least idea how to even take that first step back towards their home.  Squall had won an entirely one-sided argument.  And now they were wandering around this meadowland - which she had discovered was an island, an island where you could find the most horrible Lunar monsters imaginable - waiting for someone else to find them because apparently that was what he tended to do when he was bored.

Quistis had assured her that this was true.  Rydia disliked the very concept - a guardian who didn't guard, an eidolon with a human temperament and a suspect one at that.  She did not even want to think about which of Quistis's many diagrams he would have fitted within.  Having failed to reason with Squall, she could at least try Quistis's ears instead.  "What if he won't cooperate?"

"We won't have lost anything except time," replied Quistis.  Gods, how wise and funny and enraging she was.

"Odin said he might make some kind of demand -"

Quistis shrugged.  "We'll see how it goes.  Are you always this set against experimental solutions?"

Rydia sighed, and thought about it.  "Maybe it's a cultural thing.  I've never found stray wandering to be that rewarding."  I could have stayed in my tunnels, and watched them return to dust.  "I've had guidance, I suppose you'd say," she added, and then realised that was one of those ridiculous word play things that Edward would have cooed over.

Quistis smiled at her.  It was unexpected, and all the more striking for it.  "You're a whole other kind of summoner, though.  Always in control.  You call on whoever you need to."

Rydia nodded, a little proud.  "None of this junctioning stuff."

"Odin never liked it either.  He said he didn't want our memories and he wouldn't do it.  Said he'd be there when we needed him, and he was."

Rydia thought privately that perhaps Odin simply trusted her to tell him exactly when she needed him, and not to call upon him otherwise.  Which is what she did, partly because calling upon him was so exhausting.  "And if you have guardians that come at need, don't you think that we're desperate enough for -"

"Dragon," snapped Squall.  Rydia sighed; she was becoming tired of dragons.

*

Rydia was becoming tired, period.  She had once heard Cid say, of his life of artifice, that one never realised which of your devices were the most vital until the time they stopped working.  She hadn't had much use for this idea at the time, because her spells always worked, thus demonstrating their natural superiority over artifice (life in an Estharian airship was making her rethink quite a few of her long-held assumptions about many things, and artifice was one of them).

There were people who didn't come when she called any more.  She felt abandoned and lonely but she could work around their absence, she could stand on her two feet and rely on the tirelessness of those who still heard her.  And her spells worked.  She could still cast all of them.

But Osmose, tiny little Osmose that she kept at the back of her head and reached for the same way she reached for the flask of water at her belt, quenching unthinkingly and then putting it aside again, had no effect on the monsters here.  Their magic was piecemeal, like everyone else's.  They had nothing akin enough to her strength that she could rob them of it.

She was getting tired, and mad, and was considering asking Squall if she could go back to the Ragnarok and try casting Osmose on Rinoa just to see what happened.  Just to see if whatever it was that she had was enough like a sorceress's power that she could leech from it.

"Are you alright?" asked Quistis.

Rydia gave Quistis her best what-do-you-think glare.  "I was trying to ask you," before they had been so rudely interrupted by one of the monsters that seemed both surprisingly vicious and surprisingly numerous on this tiny island given the propensity of monsters to eat each other when you weren't looking, "if we were desperate enough yet.  Only I don't understand.  I think it's another cultural difference, and you should write about it on one of those arrow things with pegs on it.  We've always won through strength, and through accepting all our wildly different skills as meaning that each one of us would come to be in the right place at the right time to do what we must to keep living.  You seem to find unity in each other, and to win because you're so close to losing that you have to win.  You're better exhausted and covered in blood - you get more alive while I get, like this.  Faded."

Quistis smiled brilliantly.  There was a bright blue bloodstain drying on her skirt, and a giant bruise on her face where she'd got in the way of a tailswipe and she still looked poised and strong and so wonderful.  "You're right.  But I don't see the harm in being strong at different times.  We'll help each other as we go."

Squall was leaning on his gunblade, its tip buried in the dirt.  "Closer to heaven, or closer to hell."

"Absolutely."  Quistis hung her whip on her belt, and wiped at her clothes with gloved hands.  "Rydia, wherever we are, we'll find a way."

"I still don't understand," muttered Rydia, because she didn't, especially not Squall, who seemed to have ways of saying almost nothing in poetry, and had she grown so strong only to put her life on the line for a plan consisting mostly of hope that if they were weak enough maybe someone would appear to help them?  "Do I not need my home enough yet?"  She looked at Quistis, and for a passing moment she wondered if she truly didn't.  She showed three faces and one of them was too happy for this nightmare world -

"Are you looking for something?"

Squall's gunblade was in his hand as if it had never left, Quistis spun on one heel, and an ill-advised impatient word with long crystal fangs came a millimetre from Rydia's lips.  She bit it back.  

"Did I startle you?  I'm so very sorry."

Squall lowered his weapon, and Quistis did nothing, and Rydia gasped at the sight of the newcomer, who even if he had nothing else to offer her was definitely the best-dressed person she had yet seen in this world, swathed in his riddle of shawls as if he emerged from them, breeze-blown tendrils of red silk, stirring over the grass like a kite-tail.  Sitting underneath those robes was a dog, though in temperament it seemed very unlike Rinoa's dog.

Squall and Quistis seemed unafraid, and respectful.  This was no friend of theirs, but an enemy of an enemy who was Rydia's enemy too.  "You're Gilgamesh?" Rydia asked.

She felt his smile beneath his mask.  "Yes."

"What are you?"  Not a man, and not an eidolon either.

"A traveller on the road, much like yourself."

His arms were crossed under his clothes, and his arms were also stretched out to his sides, a sword held ready in one hand - an ornate red thing that no ordinary person could have wielded one-handed, at least not unless they were, as he was, at least eight feet tall.  He twirled it, as if in introduction.  As if expecting her to show her power in turn, a spell dancing in a waving hand.

Rydia had roamed enough to recognise the difference between a traveller and a bandit.

Quistis sighed at the unexpected sideshow, and she held her whip tight in her hand, as if she feared the breeze itself would take it from her.  "We were hoping we'd find you out here somewhere -"

"Chaos reigns, so you looked for aid chaotically.  I see."  Rydia felt vindicated.  Gilgamesh could clearly see that it had been a stupid plan, and it had only worked due to a more fundamental stupidity.  "What is it you wish of me?"

"Your advice," said Quistis.  "You once said something to us about...other dimensions."

"Useful things.  I would never have got so far without them."  He reached his free hand down to his belt.  "However, they're a little muddled right now.  I'd advise you not to stray too far from this world."  He drew a second sword - something almost plain in comparison to his other, light and long and finely balanced.  "You wouldn't want to get lost, would you?"

"I don't have a choice," said Rydia.  "I have to go home and separate my world from this one, or my world will fall to bits and get eaten by Babiel."

"Interesting story," Gilgamesh mused.  She felt Squall's eyes on her - a glare that said she was a godawful card player; he lived by never revealing his intentions as plainly as she just had.  Quistis had told her that Squall's Triple Triad deck was enviable.  "And you want my advice on how to escape the predicament you are in?  Bit harder than clicking your emerald slippers together, isn't it?"

She hesitated, and Squall's voice stepped in to her silence.  "You've helped us out of a tight spot before.  We were thankful for that."

"I helped you gladly, because you led me to something I wanted."  His robes shifted as he uncrossed his arms, and a third hand slipped out of his robe.  He drew another sword from the scabbard on his back and gave a wild sweep that severed a sward of the long grass they stood in.

Rydia gasped.  Now she was angry.  "That's not yours -"

"And is your magic yours, feychild?  Nothing is yours until you earn it, and I earned Odin's sword when I defeated someone he could not."  She wanted to say thief, or scavenger, but she felt a plummeting inside, like a rock dropped in a wellshaft, and in the ripples as it struck the surface she read the name of the only enemy Odin had ever shown fear of; Seifer Almasy.  "You ask something of me," he continued, "and I intend to ask you something in return.  I assure you it will not be outside your power to grant my wish, and nor will it pain you to do so.  You ask only advice, after all."  The mask around his face rippled, and she fancied that beneath it, he was licking his lips.  

She nodded silently.  She had no other choice.  He knew that.  He knew a lot, and it was to his advantage.

"You are from another world.  It is not my place to ask how you got here or how it is that you can survive in a world that doesn't know you, but I assume that you cannot return the same way you came.  Normally - for those of us who find it normal - travel between worlds requires entering the Interdimensional Rift, and exiting it at your destination.  The former is easy.  You simply need to be subject to a certain spell.  I call it 'Banish'.  You do not know it - no one in your secluded homeworld does.  But there is one among Squall's company that does, which explains why the lunar beasts of this world sometimes bother those of us who wander through there."  He made a sniffing sound inside his mask.  "Due to some lingering superstitions on this world about the nature of the Rift, I gather that it is known here as 'Rapture.'  I suppose that if they were to embrace the fact that it is banishment, they might be too inclined to wonder where it is that their enemies are being banished to."

"Selphie can do that?"  muttered Squall.

"As I said, that's the easy part.  Even without the present...confusions among the dimensions, escaping the Rift in your chosen location has always been difficult - but a friend of mine taught me a new technique, a truly inspired solution.  I think you'd like my friend," he added, nodding at Rydia knowingly.  "He's smaller than you are, and braver and wilder than I am.  He seems fuelled by pure curiosity.  In all my treasure-hunting I have never stumbled on a place that he has not somehow reached before me.  If he was a collector like myself, I'd be truly damned, but the little bastard prefers to sell his finds for a pittance and carry on unburdened by them.  It was from his hand that I received this glorious weapon!"  He brandished the red sword triumphantly.  "And his method is both simple and reliable - I have yet to decide if my friend is a genius or a fool."

"And what is his method?"  Rydia still felt so tired, and the epicry that Gilgamesh was indulging himself in was trying her patience.

"Firstly, he always has a map - and if there is none, he'll be the first to draw one.  I've found him in dead worlds, completely alone, scrawling contour lines with charcoal.  If you have a map of the place you're heading, you are much more likely to find it.  Secondly, and for the same reason, he names things.  Worlds are vast, and their souls are like a limitless space buried beneath their crust.  If you note a world's details and name them, you can call out to that soul and control it - you may think of it as akin to how you summon your gods."

"He names things.  Like a hummingway?"  She was trying to understand -

"Yes, he is like a hummingway or like a moogle or like some other bookish little rodent, I don't know.  But I do know I admire him."  His face abruptly sagged.  "I heard he was eaten by a dragon in some far-off plane a while ago, but worse has befallen him in the past and it never stopped him.  Sad, though.  I think he'd actually made friends there, but it would be woefully embarrassing to stick around a place after a blunder like that."  

"Right.  We draw things.  We name things."  She looked at Quistis, thought of reducing those stacks and stacks of papers to a few scrawled lines and a word that was already graven inside her, one that had been there since the day she'd been born.  "There's also the trifling matter that my home's collapsing and there's a disaster from this world about to happen there -"

"Yes yes, you've muddied the waters in which we all swim and now the Rift's worse than usual and your two worlds are hopelessly entwined and you'll somehow have to reassert the integrity of each world from within it simultaneously without there being any significant residual presence of either one on the other.  That's your problem, I don't know anything about stuff like that.  I don't know how you can even exist as a solid being here at all.  But I believe you made a bargain with me."  He stooped over Rydia, his grey eyes dancing.

"What is it you want?"

"Are you a fool?  In return for this information, you must agree to give me Excalibur."

Rydia spread her hands, empty, with not even a spell ravelled between her fingers.  "I don't have Excalibur, and if you think Cecil's going to simply agree to part with it -"

"Hush!  How you misunderstand me."  Gilgamesh drew his fourth sword, and proudly showed her its hilt.

She shook with fury.  "How did you - how -"

"Still so slow!  I did no violence to your paladin, and he still wears Excalibur at his side.  But so do I, and as I said, nothing is yours until you earn it.  Do you agree that I have won Excalibur from you in a fair bargain?"

"Yes.  Of course."  She paused.  "What would have happened if I'd said no?"

"You can't refuse me, so that's not worth our consideration."  Gilgamesh leaned back, raised his arms and threw his swords aloft, and they fell one by one into some other hand than the one from which they'd been launched.  "Then it is mine.  Perhaps we will meet again when I return to acquire it.  Perhaps by then, you will have grown wiser.  Come, Enkidu."  The slathering dog disappeared back under his robes, and he turned on one foot, and kept turning, his swords and robes becoming a gale of steel and silk, until he vanished.

"How are there two Excaliburs?" she complained.

"Time compression," explained Squall.  "He must have got hold of it sometime after where Cecil is now.  Or before."

"That makes so much sense," she said flatly.  She wanted her world so much she could smell it, name it, feel its stones, trace out its shape in the long grass with one foot.  What would she do about its abject lack of her sorceress's knight?  "Quistis, I need to go home."

*

Laguna had just known their plan would work.  It had always been like that during the revolution.  It was the crazy plans involving troupes of dancing Moombas that were the best ones.  Rydia had gone off to sleep, but Squall and Quistis had reported everything to the impromptu committee.  Selphie had got that one look on her face, and he wondered if she was considering trying to cast Rapture on herself now.  "I never knew it could do that."  She grinned speculatively.

"Your limit breaks have always seemed like, uh -"  Quistis appeared to be figuring out how to air her opinion politely.

"Like a game," said Selphie cheerfully.  "I never know what's going to happen!  Yours are more like studying."  

Edward was listening curiously.  Limit breaks were one of those things they didn't do, Laguna recalled.  "So our journey begins with your spell...and it ends with maps and names.  And then we have to remake our worlds, somehow."  He seemed to be chewing over the idea, and then he shrugged.  "Paths have a way of being there when you need them."

"Ain't that the truth?"  Selphie grinned.  "I guess we're done with planning stuff until Rydia wakes up, right?"  She stretched her arms up, yawning.  It was late, and the day the Ragnarok had spent at rest on the Island Closest To Heaven had been the first break she'd had from piloting in ages.  "Gotta sleep on it all, right?"

She left, and Ward and Kiros followed her.  Cecil also stood, and he looked to Squall, smiling.  "I have to thank you.  All of you."

"It's you who's going to be paying Gilgamesh for this -"

"Much less than what my home is worth.  I count it a fair bargain."  He reached for Quistis's pen as his steps passed the navigation display desk.  "I think I should start drafting my map.  If I close my eyes, I can see the seas of our moons, and the faces of old friends."

Squall followed Cecil out without a word - either to speak with him or more likely to go straight to bed.  Laguna chewed his lip, and pulled out a notebook.  Quistis, beside him, looked over his shoulder, but he doubted she could read his rapid shorthand - though it was interspersed with showers of punctuation and odd words of English, mostly adjectives.  "Coming up with a plan?"

"What?  No, nothing like that.  I just wanted to write an article about everything I've learned about these people.  It's what I used to do, you know?"

She gave him a look that said she was beginning to understand why Squall found him exasperating.  "The world's ending and you want to write about it?"

"Can you think of anything more important that I can do right now?  I was never good at fighting or magic to begin with, and now -"  He shrugged, and the cap of his biro went rolling across the floor.  "If we lose the fight against Ultimecia, I can leave a record of what happened for the people who come after us.  I think that's something I've learned, from all this time compression and faery dreaming; there was always someone before you, and there'll always be someone after."

"Time is over -"

"I don't care.  It's still true."

She sighed, and got up from her seat.  He knew she thought him illogical, but illogic had worked out pretty well for him over the years.  "I'll leave you to it," she said.  "See you in the morning."

Now it was just him and Edward.  He felt a bit awkward, trying to write with an audience of one - he'd sat in a corner and taken down his impressions of all kinds of gatherings in the past, but with one person, you were usually better off listening now and writing later.  Even if that one person carried a musical instrument everywhere he went and absently strummed it sometimes.

"I didn't know you were a writer."  Edward didn't seem surprised - kinda interested, really.

"I was.  I used to travel the world and write articles about everywhere I went.  Got out of the habit since I've been President, though."

Edward nodded.  "Before I was a king, I was a travelling singer.  But then -"  His thoughtful face suddenly broke into a smile.  "I got out of the habit too.  I used to write songs to play on my harp - I was never any good at thinking up lyrics, though."

"Hey, nothing wrong with that - I like some songs with the strangest lyrics."  Which made him think -  "Can I, um, play a song for you?"

"You play the harp?"

"No - I mean, we could listen to a recording."  Kiros had long ago advised him against public singing, and he'd become adept at enthusiastically mouthing the words of Esthar's national anthem.  "I programmed it into the airship's computer years ago, so I could listen to it over the intercom -"  He thumbed through the interface, hoping that Selphie hadn't wiped it to make room for more chirpy Trabian pop music - ah - there it was.  "I just feel like, it's a shame we've got all these disasters to worry about because we really need to learn about each other's cultures, not just compare weapons and magic and stuff.  I want to know what music from Damcyan sounds like - and I want you to hear this song."

He watched Edward's face as the music played, saw him captured by the song's emotion.  Edward seemed to be staring through the Ragnarok's walls, as if his heart was searching for Julia; Laguna knew that feeling.

*

"Who is it who was singing?" he asked.

"Her name's Julia Heartilly," Laguna replied.  "She's dead now.  I...I don't tell this to many people, but she wrote that song about me."

Edward's eyes widened.  "Then she loved you."

"I guess so.  And I fucked it up."  He could feel his left leg gnawing at him, probably just out of habit.  "It was when I was in the Galbadian army.  I got injured, never made it back home to her - and I fell in love with someone else.  I think Julia did too.  So I got married, and then I fucked that up too.  At least Julia married someone who took care of her."

"I used to sing songs about Anna."  Edward seemed to be speaking to his own feet.  "Her father didn't want us to marry.  So she ran away with me, and then Damcyan was attacked - she died saving my life."  He looked up at Laguna, teardrops collecting on his long eyelashes.  "So I understand.  I've never married - but - she told me, if I had to live without her then I had to share my love with the whole world.  I think you're right - sharing music is more important than knowing which eidolons are which and how the moon stays in the sky.  I feel like I'm living in a new world made up of pieces of old ones, and I have to learn about how to love it.  Can I play a song for you now?  I wrote it for Anna."   

"Yes.  Please."  Laguna sat on the console, elbows on his knees; his leg had cramped up so bad he didn't think he could stay on his feet any more.  Edward lifted his harp into his hands; Laguna noticed that, before he began to play, he closed his eyes.

*

"That was...really beautiful," he said afterwards.  "I just feel like I really know what kind of person she must have been, from that song."

Edward nods.  "It's wonderful, when you can distil the feel of someone into music and pass that on to all that hear it.  I think you're lucky, that Julia did that for you.  I feel like I know you."  He gave Laguna a melancholy smile, and his eyes reminded him of the shifting lights of Esthar; far away under magical seals and the Rag's exhaust fumes and passing so quickly out of view, but shining.  Shining like home.

He slipped off the desk.  If his leg was that bad, he'd hop if he had to.  He limped over to where Edward was sitting, and said, "I don't know you so well yet, but -"  He was, still, so bad at this.  "I want to.  And even if we both find a way home or we both die, I don't think I'll end up regretting -"

Okay, he was so bad that Edward clearly decided he needed to resort to the inter-universe signal for please stop talking but Laguna had no complaints about the soft lips gently touching his own.  "Oh, believe me, I understand."

They kissed again, and Laguna caught Edward's hand in his own, as if to steady them as they went deeper.  Edward understood, and that alone made Laguna want to hold him close and tell him about what happened as the years went on and you survived to get older, how pain burrowed and shifted, how love endured and grew until it could fill up a city, or a world.

Chapter Text

Rydia stirred from her rest, finding herself caught in a shaft of light from the hallway - not moon or sun, but that light here that was the same as Doomtrain's eyes, artifice illuminated.  She hadn't understood why Doomtrain was a Poison eidolon until Quistis told her that the light was made by an artifice that burned mercury.  Unsurprisingly, it was Quistis who looked down at her from the doorway.  "I'm sorry for disturbing you.  Thought I should drop by to say goodnight, and check you were okay."

Rydia groaned sleepily, and shuffled as close to the Ragnarok's hull as she could go.  "C'mere.  I know's not lot of room - but I don't take up s'much -"  The bunk sagged in the middle as Quistis sat beside her, and Rydia reached for her, needy for contact.  She was close to home now, and felt like she was getting ready to leap down from a tree - lowering herself slowly from her branch, getting ready to completely let go, holding on tight until the very last moment.  Quistis was fully clothed, but she had helpfully shown Rydia how to fix that.  It involved pulling on all the - whatdidshecallthem - zips.

Rydia learned things by doing, and touching, and so it always was for her until that very last moment.  Maybe she was learning that burning ferocity that the warriors here found within their exhaustion.  She was aware that it was now time to detach herself again, not to get her mind and body more deeply entwined with this world than ever, but she knew - always - she'd be touching, knowing, holding - until the second before the next catastrophe.  Nothing lasted forever - no home, no soft embrace.  She may as well exalt in what she had before it was ripped away from her.

She wasn't sure which felt more impossible - staying with Quistis, or getting home.  Not that it mattered.  Many impossible things had happened to her before now.

Quistis touched her face, as if to settle the sand shifting in Rydia's mind with the steady warmth of the palm of her hand.  "What's the matter?"

"It still seems so far from over.  I'm going home - I trust the name of the earth to take me there - but home was falling to bits when I left, and we've still no sure way to stop it.  And what if he's still there?"

"Who?"

"Gilgamesh's enemy.  Seifer Almasy."

Quistis sighed.  "He's dangerous.  But you got away from him before - you can do it again."

"That I can."  She rested her head against Quistis's shoulder.  She knew there were words to be said at such times, but the previous partings that had filled her life had been too violent to allow for them, and they felt strange to her, invocations of what lay just down the - they had flown low over them in Galbadia, Selphie swooping the airship close to the earth so she could see - railway tracks from where they were.    "I'll miss you, Sir Quistis.  Very much so."

Quistis's arms closed over her, like tight bands of iron, like being in some thin tunnel deep down in the Feymarch and touching the earth with both hands -  "I know.  I - I'm not usually good at getting close to people - not people who want to be close to me - and you - you made it so easy.  I think I'll miss you more than I knew I could miss someone.  And, and you shouldn't call me that.  I don't feel I've done enough to be called that."

"You got me to Gilgamesh safely.  And it was you who figured out what had happened - Babiel, and Zemus - it's like you've been fighting for me with your brain."  She sighed happily.  "I like your brain."

"Thanks, I guess?" She made that soft sound that was close to laughter.  "You know, Selphie just told me my limit break is like studying."

"Isn't it? I used to wonder if you were an artificer, or a scholar, and then I realised people here didn't live life in patterns the way we do - but when you become desperate, I think you fight with what's in your soul."  She remembered a passing comment from campfire talk many years ago.  "Cecil once said that I fight by making friends."

"Then you're a very dangerous lady."

"And you're my worthy knight." She pressed her face close to Quistis's, nuzzling against her hair.

"You think so?"  Her voice was hushed, as if she were speaking with a part of herself that rarely spoke.  "Rydia, when you asked me to be your knight, you - it was like you saw the person I've always wanted to be.  Like I was that person."

"You are," said Rydia.  She knew it.  She fell quiet because she knew there were more words that came here, declarations and promises and damnfool suggestions that would go against everything Gilgamesh had said about unmixing their tangled worlds, and that they were both too wise to say them, because even in time compression there would be no way to take any of them back.  

There was no way to tell Quistis that she loved her and they belonged together, because she did and they didn't.  She had to let go, and the words would slip from her hands, and she wondered how long the emotion would remain without them.  

*

Edward awoke to the sound of pages turning.

He kept his eyes closed for another moment.  Pens here, he'd noticed, sounded nothing like they did back home, and didn't require accompanying inkpots, but the noise of people thinking was more or less the same everywhere; paper rustling and little grunts and a certain type of silence.  He pried one eye open slightly, and saw Laguna sat in the corner of the room.

"Oh, hi," he said absently; thinking people everywhere have a way of noticing observers.  Edward wasn't sure how long Laguna had slept; he was perhaps that kind of king who rarely did.

Edward sat up slowly, feeling - really very pleasant, better than in years - and he stretched his arms out, trying to remember snatches of dreams.  He'd dreamed about music, he was sure - but about reading music rather than playing it.  Perhaps staring at all Quistis's eyewatering diagrams had made his mind dwell on the paper roots of all the songs he'd learned.  

Now that was an idea.  There was Laguna trying to write down Edward's whole culture - all the stuff Quistis saw as irrelevant at best - and in return, even if there was nothing else to take away from this whole mess, Edward could transcribe Laguna's song.

Laguna suddenly looked up, like in spite of speaking to him only seconds ago he'd only just actually realised that Edward was there.  "Ohh!  Good morning.  Um, should I get you some breakfast or anything?  I'm forgetting my manners," he said, with a grin that rapidly fell from his face.  "Long time since I've had to remember them, I guess."

Edward refrained from asking how long.  "That's quite alright - I'm just trying to remember a dream I had."  He scratched his head.  His hair was a mess, though given how they'd spent their evening that wasn't so surprising.  "I've a horrible feeling it might have been important.  Oh well."  He tried to shrug, and it turned into another yawning stretch.  Laguna had sprung to his feet, his notebook vanishing into a pocket.  He seemed to hop between his feet, one held nervously behind the other as if he were afraid to trust it.  "You've a lot of energy," Edward said accusingly.

"Yeah.  People complain to me about that sometimes."

"I certainly envy you it.  There's so much to do now - maps and, and, putting worlds to right -" right rite write, words befuddled him at this time of day  - "and I think all I really want to do right now is write down that song."

"What?  Oh, that song.  Don't worry about it, I can probably print it for you.  Um, if there's a printer here.  Might have to re-engineer the matter synthesiser in the kitchen.  Selphie can do that," Laguna said confidently.  He frowned in thought.  "So you want to sing it sometime, then?"

"Yes.  I know - we have to let our worlds part, but you said yourself last night that it's for the people who come after."  And for me.  I'll be there after, so I hope, and I'll remember your soul by that song.  He stared at the Whisperweeds - one was propped neatly under the window, and the other had been laid on the floor beside it a little less delicately though Laguna really did have a lot more respect for musical instruments than most of the fellow monarchs Edward had previously met, uncultured louts, many of them - though not Cecil and Rosa, of course not, Edward had done what he could to instil them with taste -

He stared at them.  Almost touching.  A sound would pass from one to the other in a moment.

He tried to retrace the wandering of his thoughts, take them back through the paths of dreaming, feeling close to the place where, if he could only lay his fingers on the weave of the riddle, it would unravel in his hands.  He reached out of bed and grabbed one of the Whisperweeds, and wove his fingers through the harpstrings.

Cecil and Rydia could make maps, give names and spill blood to prove what their home was and what belonged there.  Edward could remember the sounds that its soul made as it sang, and what was spoken by one Whisperweed was heard by the other - slowly, as sound travelled - and he saw the Rift open quiet in his heart and imagined a gap so profound that one Whisperweed could sing and leave the other silent.

Oh, eidolons and music and home.

"Laguna," he said, his voice shaking.  "I remember my dream now.  To save our home, I have to leave one of the Whisperweeds here with you."

*

"How does that work?"

Edward had guessed that someone would ask that; it happened to be Selphie, who was at least more curious than interrogative.  He'd come up with an answer in advance.  "I want to go home, you see?  I think almost anyone or anything marooned in a far-off world would."

"Gilgamesh," said Squall.

"Such a rarity that you had to go to great lengths to find him.  Most things are bound to their home, and if they are taken from it they yearn to come back to it."  And he did mean things more so than people, and perhaps one Whisperweed's home was the other Whisperweed?  "So what is it that tells you that something or someone is from your world, rather than anywhere else?"  He let the beat pause for a second while the others considered this.  "It's your cultures, isn't it?  And how many of those have been shaped by the Lunar Cry?"

Ward spread his hands, and his arms, as if to encompass their whole earth.  Kiros, beside him, nodded.  "Yeah, I'd say so.  The lot of them."

"People live differently under your stained moon.  Nothing lasts in that light, yet they dance beneath it knowingly.  They sing in its shadow, and Whisperweed's songs tell of a different light."  He couldn't help but sound nervous at this point.  "My music has the power to - to change things, and to make us stronger.  I think it has the power to make the pieces of the world come together to hear the song of their wholeness again.  And what I truly hope is that the path between the two Whisperweeds will be like a guiding light that will draw the Lunatic Pandora home.  It can't survive in our world once we've separated from yours.  No one believes in it."

"But you're up against Ultimecia," said Squall. "She brought your world into ours to get at Rydia - if she knows Seifer failed her, she's not going to just let go of it. You think your harp is enough to undo her magic?"

"It won't have to be if she's dead."

Squall stared at him, and it was as if the veil over his eyes had lifted and shown the steel beneath. Squall had already determined to end this, long before they came along. What Edward asked of him was nothing, but he asked for it now. He had spent long nights talking to his friends of their battle with Zemus far beneath the moon; he did not think it easy to take that risk that could easily be the last of your life, and he knew they needed time to make ready for that end of all things, but time was not something they lacked here. Squall nodded. "We'll see to it - or we're all dead."

Edward returned his look in equal solemnity. "Then so it shall be."

"You'd stake your life on it?" asked Quistis.  "Your whole world?"

"What would you desperate people of the Lunar Cry do instead, then?" he asked her.  "Here, any plan suffices if you're hurting enough."

She stared at him levelly.  "It makes about as much sense as time compression, I'll grant you. We won't know if you've made it, will we?" She glanced at Rydia, as if to confirm that she was still there.

"No," he admitted. "Your Whisperweed will fall silent." It would mean one of two things.

*

"Laguna," Edward said urgently.  Laguna waited as the others left what had become their impromptu committee room.  Breakfast, or lunch or whatever, was definitely beckoning but not as enthusiastically as Edward.  It was strange feeling, if he were honest about his feelings for once, so wrapped up in someone who was so eager to pack up and run away.  He wondered if Raine had ever felt this way, oh Hyne he'd done stupid things with his life.

"What's up?" he asked.  "Ohh.  You still want that song, right?  I'll have to go ask Selphie to -"

"One moment," said Edward.  "I do, but - there's something I need to tell you and - most of all, I just needed to thank you for helping me get home."

"I did?"  Uh, that was good, right?

"You helped me realise what I needed to do.  One way or another."

"One way or another, huh?"  Laguna allowed himself a wicked grin.

"Yes - you took me back to what mattered.  People, and stories and songs."  He looked away.  "There's one more thing I realised, about why we're all here.  Quistis said it's hard to even survive in Time Compression, and I realised that you - I'm sorry, but I know you do..."  He sighed.  "Laguna, you need to stop believing in me."

"What?"

"It's the faith you have in us that makes it possible for us to stay here.  We can't go home until you stop believing.  Laguna -"  His voice shook a little.  "I'm a story.  A song you heard.  You liked it, for a while.  But then it ends, and you're back to reality."

Laguna stared at Edward's back.  If that was possible -

(if, like he hadn't had years of practice at putting off and aside the important things in his heart because of some mundane demand on his time or other - like he didn't know, as he did know himself well enough to believe in himself totally, warts and all - he knew that it was possible.  For him.  Because he was a fucking terrible person.)

- if he could do that, it would be an insult to both of them.  His world had got into this situation because of memories - because of Ellone exploring his thoughts of the past, bringing his son inside of them.  Memories were important - sometimes, they seemed like all he had, the only proof that the Laguna Loire he believed in was the Laguna Loire that was - the only way of knowing that he'd ever been a soldier, or a monster hunter, or a husband.  It was the only way of understanding that he was someone's father.  Could you really just mess around something like his memories of these people?  Make it seem like it was just some kind of lie, not something important and real?

Had the faeries been real?  

They'd only called them that because, you know, a flight of fancy like that left lots of room for them to not be real.  He knew now.  Ellone had told him.  But in his memories, he was still stood there being not sure either way.

And that was what Edward needed.  

Okay, Laguna told himself.  You're going to have to start doubting.

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling stupid for saying anything.  "I've learned a lot from you, you know?"

"You can learn a lot from a song."  Edward looked back at him, and Laguna thought that he was trying not to cry.  Oh Hyne, did he want to go hold him.  Again.  And try to tell him that it was alright, somehow, that you learned to do without - all that youth and love and stuff - and learned when it was time to stop crying, and when to do it anyway, and -

He couldn't touch him.  No way.  Then he might start realising again that Edward was real, and not some kind of startlingly wise and inspiring wetdream he'd had.  

"I've learned a lot from you too, you know?" said Edward softly.  "You've such strength of heart.  I'm going to go home and write a song about the king of a great city, and how well he sets his troubles aside to put the troubles of others before them."  Laguna suddenly found himself grinning.  Yeah.  He could write about it too.  And it would be fiction.  "Do you think you will be able to tell Quistis to cease believing in Rydia?  None of the others have, ah, been so kind to us as to -"

"It's okay," he replied.  "I think Quistis is the kind of person who...well, she's all about rational inquiry and she has this way of hedging on -"  He was waffling, and it was only making Edward look perplexed.  "What I mean is, Quistis isn't the believing type.  So I don't think she does believe in Rydia.  And I'm pretty sure that's why she likes her - she's finally got something she could spend forever trying to figure out, and still fail."

"I see.  That's - a strange way of loving - but I find all ways of loving are strange."

"Edward," Laguna asked.  "What should I do with the Whisperweed, after all this?"

There was something bleak and destructive in his eyes.  "I would have you bury it.  At a shrine to the god of your moon, if there is such a thing.  One day someone will find it, and perhaps it will open up their path homewards too."

"For the people who come afterwards, right?"

"Yes, or maybe before.  This is time compression, after all."

*

They gathered on a beach at almost sunset, with the tip of the moon rising over the sea.

Rydia, Cecil and Edward had spent all day together, acting like rival gods gathered to cleave the world up more than lost heroes trying to reassemble it; Rydia drew the paths of the underworld, as best she could, sometimes rolling the paper into spills or poking holes in it with her pencil and joining layers together with strands of her own hair; Edward drew the earth's surface, mountains and seas and nation-states and hazardous borders, his here-be-monsters notes often level with the edges of Rydia's charts; and Cecil drew the seas of the moons and the array of the stars in the sky, traced circles showing what could be seen in each season, and he set his work into concave arches that sat atop of Edward's.  Three faces.  A joyful world, its eidolons guiding it lovingly from beneath, and its mysterious, dangerous sky.

What mattered was naming it, knowing it, feeling like if you took a hand of each of your friends in your own you'd see everything, because it belonged to you, because it was you.  They were ready.

Hands were shook; Squall saluted Cecil, and Rydia thought that a measure of respect had been gained between them, by some means she knew not.  Edward took a scroll from Laguna and seemed close to weeping as he tucked it into his belt.

She held Quistis long enough to cause awkward questions, and she didn't give a damn about that.

It was time to let go, and she almost had.

"Ready now?" asked Selphie, cupping a fragile Aura Stone in her hands.  "Because I am."

"Yes, please, let us go," Rydia said softly.  "And - thank you.  All of you."  She heard the stone break like an eggshell, saw its gold glow dimly in her peripheral vision as she held Quistis's eyes, waiting - knowing Selphie was flickering within her own mind, as if turning the pages of her own books of memories until they opened at the right chapter.  For those silent, agonising seconds, her eyes held on, daring Quistis's to do likewise.

"Found it!" yelled Selphie - announcement and warning - and the silence shattered like the golden stone had, Laguna's "Goodbye!" and Edward's "Please, remember what -" and Quistis said "Rydia!" and she said "I -" and all else was swallowed by the Rift.  It was over.

She had almost, almost let go.

Hours ago, Rydia had returned all but two of her Triple Triad cards to the cabin drawer where she'd first found them.

*

The name of the spirit of her earth was on her lips as she felt them rising into the Rift on their wings of nothingness.  'Titan.'

She felt the space opening up to listen to her, felt Cecil's blood and Edward's songs of home and all their mapwork, all their sketches of his face.  'Titan, Titan, Titan,' like her whole life inside out, like begging him to summon her.

*

They passed lost things, old memories.  Monsters looking for souls.  Shafts of moonlight like stained-glass, forgotten green and purple moons, absent comets drifting slowly back to wherever it was that they had been named.

They heard echoing footsteps, and saw a flash of white and fire, and Cecil came forward, a true light against false, and Rydia heard their blades ringing and the name almost fell from her grasp.  She tried to slip magic past it.  She didn't call anyone, didn't want to know who would hear her now.

She heard Edward playing a nocturne, his strange form of combat seeming, for once, so literal and necessary.  He was a thread of sound in the silence, overpowering the emptiness itself and the white-cloaked demon that had crossed it to find her again, try to take her again, fail again.  She flung ice at his face, chilling his inner flame.  It barely marked him.  She felt him laugh at them.

She'd call no one she knew to this desolate place.  But the things she had to abandon - beams of ghostlight crossing their battlefield, running parallel to wherever this place ran out - a groaning voice, the smell of smoke and death and artifice - this was the last moment or beyond the last, a dream resurfaced, one of two cards that she shouldn't still have in her pocket.

A hollow whistle mingled with Edward's music, and behind it came thunder.

She was almost flung back by the force of Doomtrain's passing, and oh how were they unharmed by such a beat moving so fast so close to them - ?  Surely the same way her feet held steady under Titan's earthquakes.  Titan, Titan!

After the dust of its passing settled, she saw a great spinning shadow, a swathe of red.  She saw a huge boot resting on a puny human wrist, a hand reaching down to collect a sword.  'Hyperion', she heard him muse.  'Name of the Lord of light.  Fancy seeing it again all the way down here...'

She grabbed Edward's hand, and Cecil's, and ran towards the name.  She knew they were getting close when she saw lost things she recognised - a quiet circle of nestled rooftops, a cobbled path that wound towards a cave at the foot of their valley.  Mist Village, before it was turned to ash.  She ran with tears down her face, feet dancing over earth just as if she were still a child, felt her heart squeeze it tight before letting go again.

She ran inside and put her hands to the earth, and the secret ways of the Feymarch opened up to her as they had always done, and she sobbed as she drew open the home of the eidolons, feeling Cecil hold her by the shoulders and hearing Edward sing about homecoming and family, and down in the green depths of her earth she saw three faces look up to greet her, and the one that called her name was the face of joy.

She leaned against Cecil's grasp, breaths heaving as if she had run all the way across the Rift - which she had - and she looked behind them, seeing only the steady rock of Titan's skin.  They had no way to return.

Nothing shook except her shoulders.  Every name in her head felt real and present, and she had to slip her hand in her pocket and feel the outline of her last card to even know that - ever, somewhere, far away - she had been to the great elsewhere.

Asura beckoned them, and Rydia stepped towards her, feet dancing over the skin of her home.  "Well, I'm back," she said.