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It would be unfair to you, Lucca, to say that Lara's accident made you all that you are. How horrible, how tragic, how frightening, to be so singularly defined by the way your mother screamed.
You did not need a red Gate to remember that when you were small you loved hiking, that bitterness sat heavy in your heart when unfairness sieged your life, that you will never be humble or shadowed. These things are still true now, after all. You did not become a new person when your mother's heavy skirts caught and her bones broke. You simply scrubbed some rust off of yourself, tightened a few screws, and got to work.
You were always going to fall head first in love with the act of creation.
Your parents have always worried about you. There's a fire in your heart and they are so afraid of the toll it will take on you - brilliant girl, shining girl, they are so afraid you will burn out. It's a rare thing the world is kind to genius.
Lucca, you are not a genius of a generation. You are not the brightest mind of your era. You are once in history. You are fire, Lucca, its destruction and its creation. You have traveled across history and legend, and there is no one like you in all of it.
There are a few others who could count themselves your equal. The Gurus, surely - Gaspar, who built a haven and light at the end of all things with nothing but War; Melchoir, who molded dreamstone and winds with nothing but a hammer and words; Balthazar, who even without his reason pieced together time and life. Norstein Bekkler, whoever and whatever he is. Azala, too, you think, and sometimes you mourn for the loss of what could-have-been. The loss of the knowledge that built a castle that withstood millions of years, built intelligent robotics towering over trees and roaring fire, built a safe haven untouchable to the rest of the world that kept safe so small a remnant of her kind, while, Lucca, your own ancestors had not yet even learned to scrabble in the dirt. And others, there must be others, for you traveled through so little of time. But none of them can do what you do like you do with what you have been given.
Balthazar built a ship to coast through time, given a latter half a lifetime to work, an earlier half of lifetime of focused study, and free access to an apocalyptic landscape piled hundreds of feet high with supplies. You took a day, and with half a guess in a world before the internal combustion engine, forged a key that did the same. Azala built castles, built robots, built hidden passageways that stood the test of time, but she stood blind to the world around her, and could not stop that falling star. You did. You did, Lucca, while Azala turned her head and refused to imagine a world in which her people lived. There is nothing more important to you than life, and she chose death.
Your father is a genius. Taban builds shining armor, forges gears and gadgets, and ensured the kingdom of Guardia’s peace long before you were born. The people in Truce laugh and say that the Ashtears have their own island for the safety of Guardia. Well, they aren’t wrong, are they? The king granted Taban little Ashtear Isle so that your blacksmith father would have the room and the privacy needed to build the weapons of war that keep Porre, Choras, and El Nido in cautious peace, and stop Medina from retaliating as they have wanted to do for so long. (You think it’s a little unfair that Guardia holds so much power, since Guardia is only you and your father’s birthplace by chance, because fairness is lodged so firmly in your soul, but you also appreciate peace. After your odyssey through time, you learn to appreciate peace a great deal more.) Your father is great, Lucca, and he is nothing compared to you. He does not pretend he is, just lifts you and supports you and praises you every step of the way. You are lucky to have him, and the world is lucky to have you. Any you, from any color of Gate or timeline.
Lara’s accident did not make you who you were, Lucca - she was a catalyst, but there could have been so many catalysts. There have been so many. When a little boy in Truce died from spoiled meat, you invented an icebox that kept food cold with no ice at all. When a village up north in a mountain valley caught a plague that traveled by water, Lucca, you invented a plumbing system that kept cities clean. The Telepod was inspired by a doctor’s comment that so many patients died before help could even reach them. When you realized who Marle was, that girl that Crono chased through time, when you realized what could happen to her as you painstakingly put together the Gate Key… Well, Balthazar has nothing on you.
You create as easily as you breathe, Lucca. This was always going to be true. You make life from death.
You wonder, then, why you had a red Gate and none of the others did. The moment you changed did not change you, not really. You still remember that sickening crunch, that inhuman scream. You still remember finding blood in the floorboards years later, and the way your mother’s eyes grew pained and shadowed as a decade passed. If saving Lara was needed to ensure your desire to invent, thus setting you on the path to save the world, well, in that case you could understand why the Entity chose you. But you would have followed the same steps regardless of your mother's health.
Time is not a closed circuit - or, if it is, then you and your friends live outside of it. Marle spent a childhood with her family’s history drilled into her. She remembered the rescue of Leene. When she read the history books a year later, they were different - but Marle remembered the first series of events. Crono still squawks like a chicken when he sees the man in Porre who in another timeline used to pay him gold to do so, and in this one would be ashamed and embarrassed to know he could have ever demanded it. You do not know for sure, but you pray to whatever Entity may listen that Robo is still Robo in the future he left you for.
Changing your timeline did not affect you - you wonder if perhaps your mother has some integral role to play in the future, this new future you have made by stopping Lavos. You cannot know without living it, you suppose. You will not cheat and skip ahead to find out. You have dismantled the Epoch - carefully, carefully, so that it may be repaired one day - because time isn’t a closed circuit. It was worth the risk, to save the world from an alien parasite hundreds of millions of years old intent on consuming the planet. But you are beyond genius, Lucca. You dismantled time itself with nothing but a key. You know how fragile it is.
Let others play with that fire. You have your own.
But you digress. You do not know why the Entity chose you to fix a past loss - not Glenn atop the mountain with Cyrus, not Marle with all her healing magic as Aliza died of sickness, not Janus any of the times Schala was ripped from his desperate grasp, but you for whom it did nothing but bring you and your family peace. You don’t like not knowing things, but you are a genius, even if on occasion a mad one. You know when to say thank you and move on. So you move on. Lucca, brilliant girl, your mind never stops churning, your hands never stop moving, and you will never let them. There's a reason Spekkio told you yours was fire.
You have always been heartsick with love for the world. You have always been unable to stop yourself from saving it. It was the reason you got back up even as the despair tried to worm its way into your heart when you realized what Lavos was, what it had already done to the world. The sheer unfairness boiled in your burning blood and you got up.
You have always been who you are. The Master of War may have unlocked the magic of your flames, but he did not light them. You've felt them burning in the laugh at the back of your throat and in the grace at the tips of your clever, clever fingers for as long as you can remember. This is what drives you - the need to create. People tell stories about the destruction of fire, and they're right, of course. You've cast flare often enough to know just how ruinous flames can be. But remember, Lucca; that you cannot make steel without first destroying carbon and oxygen. The jungle around the base of a volcano is so vibrant, so rich. Old mast on the forest floor burns away to bring a spring of new life. Your parents sat over the table late at night as they heard the strike of your hammer down below and they worried, worried, worried, as they loved you, as they forgot that fire is what made mankind.
You have always been who you are. You do not know why you have a red Gate, though in the last moments of your life you will, perhaps, suspect. You have always been who you are, but you are not without change. Fire destroys - it may be needed for creation, for salvation, but as you carefully, carefully destroy the Epoch, most of your friends gone to live their lives again, and your two best and last friends newly wed and beginning their own life… your heart hurts, just a little, Lucca. You miss them - Glenn, who gave you courage, and Ayla, who gave you strength. Janus, too, really, who showed you determination in the face of extreme loss. And Robo… you ache with his memory more than you think you can bear, some days. You are so tired of death, of loss. You have seen such awful wars, such heartrending misery.
Here is your reward. Here is where you have come, will come. Clever girl, see what you are owed. Shining girl, see your parents' fears burn out. The world is so rarely kind to genius, but you are so very kind to it, and for you, the world will be fair.
There is a small robot who trails behind you now - more will come to litter your home in the coming decade and a half. None of them will be Robo, and you will not try to make any of them be so. He deserves better than that, and so do they, and so do you.
But the design is familiar. You are so tired of death, and all that time spent with your hands gently and firmly twisting your friend's wires, soldering his plates, adjusting his gears, has taught you the shape of life. One shape of it, at least.
Here is another shape - a baby, lying between the roots of a tree.
You spend days, searching for any trace of the one who left her there, in that small grove on Ashtear Isle. You find nothing, and while you search your mother bounces the child in her arms as she putters about, while your father tickles the baby under her soft little chin. You come home in the evenings to a laughing child with bright eyes, as bright as the eerily familiar pendant far too big for a baby girl's neck.
Eventually, you give in. Princess Nadia and her husband Crono could certainly find a good home for the baby - they tell you so - but you have always been a genius, even if a mad one. The baby is there for a reason. And you are so sick of death, Lucca. The ring of steel on a battlefield, the whistle of wind on an apocalyptic plain, the agonizing crash of an entire kingdom falling onto a murderous tundra, the scream of a parasite with its mouth agape to eat the world - some sounds echo in your head for as long as you live. You have seen your fill of destruction. You are so ready for life.
They ask you what you will name her, and your voice sticks in your throat. You know this child's name. She has a name, a terribly old name. It would be wrong to take that from her, from the woman beyond the end of all things. But it would be wrong to saddle this child with that name, too - she is a fresh start. Old mast burned away for new growth.
You call her Kid. It isn't a name at first - just a thing to whisper, "hello, kid, good morning, kiddo, what do you want for breakfast today, kid?" at a baby who waves her fat fists and giggles. She is such a happy child.
But it sticks. Soon, Taban calls her Kid as he throws her up in the air and catches her to Lara's worried but still laughing protests. Lara calls for Kid as she lays out a basket of apples, as she asks after that bright child's day, as she chases Kid around in some convoluted game of tag only the two of them understand.
Your daughter - because she is your daughter, now, isn't she? - loves you. Oh, she loves you; Kid loves so fiercely and so greedily, even before she can walk. And she loves her grandmother. You still reel, sometimes, just a little, at the life in your mother. Memories of the altered timeline slowly seep into your mind the longer you stay fixed in time, steeped strong and bracing like good hot tea, but you still remember the first life you lived. Now, though, you understand why Taban, brilliant and bold and bigger than life, fell so in love with thick blue hair and sharp eyes and a laugh like a hearthfire.
One day, the queen - because your Marle is a queen, now, the radiant Queen Nadia, and it almost hurts to look at her, she's so brilliant - comes to your door, with the hand of a child barely old enough to walk clutching two of her elegant and calloused fingers.
You stare.
"You're so good with Kid," Nadia says, without hesitation, because she has never hesitated. "I don't need you to take Jo for long. The orphanage in Truce is…" Nadia's clear and crystal eyes turn glacial, "...under reconstruction." (You know better than to push for answers right now. You'll ask Crono later.) "I've got the rest of the children in the castle for now, but Jo…"
"Don't like th'castle," little Jo mumbles. "Too big." You guess there's more to it than that, but decide that's another question for Crono later. Crono is good with questions. Nadia is... less so, when she gets like this.
The icy glare that has so far quelled Porre's threats of war melts as she favors the boy with the smile that has even the meanest mystic in Medina ready to sign treaties. Nadia, of course, is fully aware of the effects of both. It is a fool who thinks Nadia's bright cheer is simply saccharine stupidity. "I know, little one." She lifts her sharp chin to face you again. "It really is temporary."
The guards behind her shift. They learned long ago not to question why their regent chose to do so much herself, picking up such seemingly small tasks and refusing to delegate them, constantly taking the long road from Guardia Castle to her capitol city. They worried, at first, concerns of safety and priorities barely held back from their tongues.
But you know the smell of war in the air. Marle has always been royal, been brilliant, even when trying to hide it. She paints the veneer of impulse over decisiveness, sweetness over nobility, foolishness over rage. Long before she picked the name Marle, Nadia had a childhood of lessons on tactics and strategy and logic, memorizations of battle formations and history books. She does not act without thinking. Her kindness is deliberate, is shored strong - and none the less genuine for it. There is a war coming, and Porre will only be held back for so long. For all her father's attempts to hold peace, he did not endear himself to his people. There is a war coming, and Guardia will fight for Nadia. They love her, their bright young queen, who rebuilds orphanages and slays monsters with her own hands.
Nadia is preparing for war, and you take in the little boy. Your house is huge. sprawling, and recently even (mostly) babyproofed. (Jo can walk, you should probably start locking the door to the basement forge. And the back sheds. And the- well, you'll figure it out.)
Kid is your daughter, but she is not your only child for long. The war hits before the orphanage in Truce is rebuilt, and no one can spare the time or resources to finish it. Nadia leads her armies herself, and when she shows up at your doorstep, it isn't to take back Jo. She comes with plans and maps and blueprints and ideas and one repeated request.
You give her almost everything she asks for. You build weapons of war, advise her on battle plans, design faster ships, prevail upon favors owed by people across the world to the brilliant inventor who has done so much for progress. You even lend her money, as the war marches on - wars are expensive, Lucca, and you have more money than you know what to do with these days.
You refuse her two things, one asked for and one not. Nadia does not ask you to rebuild the Epoch, but you see it in her eyes, the set of her lips. She knows better than to ask, of course, but her conviction was stronger before her people started to die.
Your conviction does not waver. When she asks you to fight on the fields with her, you say no. Over and over. You will build her weapons, you will forge blades and rifles and trebuchets. But you have spent enough time killing things with magic and watching them fall from your firearms. You have seen enough bodies on fields. You are tired of the smell of burning flesh. Your mother and father fretted over you as a child, where your fire would lead you, but you will not let it take you too far. Your place is here, with the hands that reach for you, little ones and metal ones alike. Fire is creation and destruction, but in your heart you have always been called to creation. Brilliant Lucca, clever Lucca, kind Lucca, you will never stop building, never stop saving, but the only destruction you will employ from this day is the melting of metals and the burning away of old mast.
You will not be defined by blood and tragedy.
Nadia does not stop asking, and you do not blame her. Your Marle is a queen, now, and you always knew this would come.
Taban leaves with her, and does not come back.
Lara takes fever. Nadia is sieging a port city, far far away with her healing magics.
Your home is not empty, though, Lucca, and as your tears dry you find you stand tall still - and not only because you are surrounded by those a good deal shorter than you. Your children run shrieking across the island's wide and grassy groves. You are not the only one taking in war orphans, of course. Many go to farms, or are otherwise given tasks they would not be given at so young an age were it not for the thousands of dead adults. Others go to other homes. You're not quite sure when you start officially running an orphanage, but by the time the number of children hits double digits, you figure it's a lost cause, and simply have a few of your robot friends make yet another addition to the house.
You find the time to invent for yourself - you make the time to invent, because you don't know how not to - in between the sticky fingers and tears of kids. The oldest ones are excited to help you in your experiments - a little less excited to watch the younger children, but just as willing. And robots, gizmos, and gadgets tumble about the house just as easily as human and mystic youth. They are minders as much as teachers as much as friends. Gato is wearing down beyond what even your clever hands can do, but the children still flock to him, screeching and cheering and singing along off-key as he creaks his way across the room.
This, you think - this is what defines you.
You never thought you would love children so much. You had so little to do with them, when you were one. You were always too much for the kids in Truce, too much a mad scientist and too little a youth. When Crono had fallen into step behind you, well, even he never quite understood you. That was fine, though, because he admired and respected and loved you anyway, found joy in your joy, warmed his hands by your fire as you basked in his light, and what more could anyone ever ask of a friend?
You never thought you would love children so much, but in hindsight, that lack of realization seems rather silly. Gato wasn't the first intelligent robot you ever made, and Robo was far from the last you ever fixed. Lucca, you create life, you nurture it, a signal fire and a homehearth both. To teach, to guide, to create, to love, these are yours.
(It helps, you admit, that you are rather slightly crazy, and kids are always more receptive to this kind of thing.)
How lovely, how wonderful, how brilliant, to be so willingly defined by the way your children laugh. These days in sunlit kitchens and in smoky forges, as Kid steals Jo's doll when he hands you a wrench, as Rosa leads a charge of wild preteens against a twisted tree, as Janina dangles her foot over the roof and Petyr sings in the kitchen and Raj helps the toddlers find their shoes. There are robots reading books and feeding infants, there are children laughing loudly, healing from the horrors that drove them here. You are brilliant, genius, without compare - once in an existence, Lucca, once in a whole world - and you are glad, then, that you were smart enough to know what is most important.
Your story does not have a happy ending, Lucca, but that doesn't matter. You do not let yourself be defined by cruelties and tragedy. This, here, is what matters. You have made something brilliant, something beautiful, something good. You flick your fingers and your forge lights up.