Chapter Text
Luke Fon Fabre dies on Eldrant. That’s alright. He’s the scion of Lorelei. If anyone can exist beyond death, it’s him. He dies smiling.
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Luke wakes up slumped over a table on the Tartarus, and he panics. That time, he dies much sooner, trying to plead with the God General who wears his face.
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The next time he wakes up on the Tartarus, he keeps his head. He makes it all the way to the mines of Akzeriuth, and dies tackling Van into the miasma. It’s not what he wanted to do.
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Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He dies fighting – pointlessly, this time, so pointlessly.
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Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He needs to tell Jade something– anything – he needs an excuse for crying. Jade doesn’t believe him, but they go down fighting – and they get so far, so very far – back to back. It’s something. It’s not enough, but it’s something.
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Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He pleads his case to Tear, but it’s not like she trusts him, not at this point in time. Lorelei, Lorelei is the solution, isn’t it?
… Luke Fon Fabre dies on Eldrant.
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He wakes up– Luke refuses to wake up on the Tartarus. He wakes up in Choral Castle. That’s new. His body is small and weak, and he can see Asch strapped to a table. Two men in white coats are standing over him– one of them is Spinoza. It takes a moment longer to realize the other one as Dist.
Luke tries to stall, tries to argue– He probably would have gotten somewhere, had Van not walked in.
“I didn’t expect it to talk,” says Dist lamely. Van frowns.
“I see,” he says.
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Luke wakes up in Choral Castle. He keeps his mouth shut, even through all of Van’s tests. He keeps his mouth shut until Guy finds him, then looks up at his mother with wide eyes and asks where the other him is. He can fix this.
He waits with bated breath as his parents search for Asch and argue with Van. He’s kidnapped again while he’s still too small to fight back, and he soon finds himself strapped to a familiar machine.
“I’d like to study you more, you know,” says Dist. “But it isn’t my call.”
They break his back. He lives, lives, lives– it’s not like he needs to walk to know the truth. Guy helps. So does Natalia.
Tear attacks her brother in the courtyard, one day, and oh mercy Luke doesn’t feel seventeen, he feels so much older, but he’s still there and Van grabs him like a shield, and then the hyper-resonance rings like eternity.
“I’m sorry,” says Tear. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I do,” Luke replies. “That is, I’ve read about it.” Her eyes light up slightly.
He dies in Akzeriuth, that time, and it’s such a waste.
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Luke wakes up in Choral Castle, and fights all the way. He’s desperate for change, and leaves a trail of chaos and destruction all the way to Van’s dead body. Then, he lives until he’s fourteen, physically, and war breaks out with Malkuth. Jade is a powerful ally, but he’s an ever more powerful enemy, and he tears through battalions of White Knights with a terrifying ease.
It’s nice, honestly, that it’s not Jade who kills him. A dark-skinned girl soldier, no older than sixteen, plunges a sword into Luke’s chest.
“For Hod,” she spits.
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He wants to wake up earlier. He wakes on a collapsing island. He dies on the collapsing island.
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Luke wakes in Choral Castle. That time is less of a disaster, if only because he can’t summon up the energy to argue with anyone for a very long time. He wants to save everyone, but there’s nothing he can do– not for Hod, not for Akzeriuth, not for the world.
He jumps to protect Van, because that’s the script. Tear chides him for being too passive, later, but he has energy enough to warn Jade about the ambush. They detour. Luke lies, lies, lies, lying is second nature when everyone thinks you’re a child but you’re so much older now. He prevents what he can, says all the right things, lies there at night pretending not to see Jade pretending not to watch him suspiciously.
Anise doesn’t betray them, not this time, because Luke heads her off and pays off her debts.
Anise doesn’t betray them. Guy does. Guy doesn’t have anyone to hold him back this time.
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Luke wakes up in Choral Castle. He does everything right this time, as his heart breaks for all of those shattered lives. He does everything right. It’s still not enough, and that’s the worst part.
He faces the end with Guy and Tear and Anise and Ion and Jade and Natalia and Asch and Sync and Arietta and even Largo, and it’s still the end, the world still ends, slowly and painfully.
He tells them the truth, in the end. Jade looks at him askance, and asks how many times he has lived.
“Too many,” Luke mutters. “I saw Hod fall.”
“It doesn’t start on Hod, though,” says Jade. He’s the only one who is still calm, possibly because he can’t be anything else. “The war didn’t even start on Hod.”
The world ends on Hod, though. On the replica Hod. It’s some sort of symbolic.
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Jade has a point, though– it’s Van’s story, Guy’s story, Tear’s story, all of those that start on Hod. Hod is the end of a war. Hod is the end of an era. Luke needs to find the beginning of one, like Choral Castle. He doesn’t want to wake up there.
Images fly by him in an iridescent stream– people and places that have become so very familiar to him. Choral Castle swirls around him, but he pushes past it and through it. Hod collapses in slow motion, full of golden light and glory and suffering. It pulls at him, the echo of that hyperresonance. It’s the same as him, it seems to say, it speaks the same language and fills itself with the same power. When he pulls away, he feels like he’s falling back, back, back, head over heels.