Chapter Text
When Fiora woke up, the first thought she had was that the ether felt wrong.
Being able to feel the ether was one of those weird things that came with her Mechon body. She didn’t know how to describe it – it was like some new extra sense that she just had now. Linada probably mentioned something about it when Fiora was in surgery after falling from Galahad Fortress – something about a sensor array in the ring around her head, maybe? – but that was ages ago.
It was weird, anyways, just suddenly having this extra sense. It served as a constant reminder that she wasn’t the same flesh and blood Fiora, the Homs girl who had grown up with Shulk and Reyn. And maybe that was why she hadn’t talked to anyone about being able to sense ether – Shulk would probably be fascinated by it, and he would try to understand how it worked, but the last thing Fiora needed from him was to be picked apart like a machine. Shulk was unfailingly treating her as normal, somehow, and Fiora knew she couldn’t risk ruining that.
But all she knew right now was that the ether around her felt strange.
She blearily struggled to open her eyes, but the only things she could make out were brightness and sand. The sand seemed wrong, somehow, as well. Too fine to be the sand of the beaches of the Fallen Arm, or even of the shores surrounding Colony 9. Was she someplace new?
Zanza had ranted about a “recreation of the world”, and maybe this was that? Maybe tantrum-throwing gods couldn’t quite get the feel of the ether or the texture of the sand right when they decided to unmake and reform all of creation.
But no, wait, they’d won. Fiora distinctly remembered looking up at Shulk as the last remnants of power in her mechanical body failed and seeing him cleave Zanza in two with a bright, shining new sword.
Maybe she was dead. Except that didn’t fit either, because she’d been at least mostly dead before, and that had just been all silence and darkness and absence of sensation.
And as her consciousness slipped away, Fiora had the distinct thought that even if she had died, then that was okay. Because they had won, and that meant that Shulk was safe.
The next time Fiora woke up, it was to an argument between voices she didn’t recognize.
“What do you mean there’s no Keves field protocol for severe ether deficiency?”
“I was Special Forces, you muppet! ‘Protocol’ meant just patching the poor sap up and getting them off to the med team proper!”
“And if your unit got separated from the main force, you weren’t supposed to be able to treat this? Eunie, I cannot believe –”
“Stuff it, you! I know enough, and right now that just means getting her stable and then getting her back to Oleshandra, so –”
“Which, by the way, was my idea in the first place, so you aren’t exactly assuaging my doubts about Kevesi medic training.”
“Guys!” a third voice cut in, “She’s coming round.”
Fiora blinked her eyes open to find herself lying on the ground with a red-jacketed, black-haired young Homs man crouched over her. It wasn’t eye-blindingly bright anymore; she now found herself under some sort of rocky outcropping. As she tried to struggle up onto her elbows so that she could sit up, a High Entia girl with small headwings appeared from behind the Homs.
“Careful now,” the girl said softly as she helped bring Fiora up to a sitting position – this was clearly one of the two people she had heard arguing, but the girl was now taking a much lighter tone. “You’ve got serious ether exhaustion and dehydration, so don’t push yourself moving too quickly. We’ll help you out.”
The Homs moved from his crouch to take a seat on the ground in front of her, and Fiora saw that the there was a second Homs man standing behind him – also young, but darker-skinned and bespectacled and wearing a frighteningly orange scarf. His intense gaze and furrowed brow reminded Fiora of the looks she got around the rebuilt Colony 6.
Not that Fiora would begrudge most Homs for being skeptical of herself. The Machina were one thing, especially as it became public knowledge that the Machina not only existed but in most part had nothing to do with the Mechon invasions. But to be a machine with the face of a Homs, to be someone that people knew had died in the assault on Colony 9 and yet now was walking around in front of them in a gleaming metal body, even after these people had seen their very own loved ones killed, bodies taken by the Mechon…
Well, even walking around next to Shulk didn’t keep the stares away.
“I’m Noah,” said the first Homs, pulling her out of her concentration, “and these are Eunie and Taion. We found you just north of here passed out in front of a wrecked Levnis. Are you okay?”
Fiora had just opened her mouth to reply when the High Entia girl – ‘Eunie’, it seemed – cut in, hands now on her hips. “Y’know, for a musician, you’ve got pretty terrible ears, Noah. I literally just said that she’s got an ether deficiency, and you just told her that we found her passed out in the desert. Doesn’t pass for ‘okay’ in my book.”
“I –,” Fiora stuttered, finally finding her voice, “what? Desert? Where… what?”
The man in the back (‘Taion’, by process of elimination) rolled his eyes. “Eunie, you have the worst bedside manner of any medic I’ve ever met,” he said with a pointed look at the High Entia in question. He turned his gaze back to Fiora, but it was no longer quite as intense. “We’re at the southeastern edge of the Dannagh Desert, just north of Colony 4. They had noticed an odd signal coming from this way, which we’re now assuming was a distress beacon from your Levnis,” he explained, but there were several things in his statements that just simply didn’t make sense.
“Colony… 4?” Fiora asked, her tone full of confusion. She might not have slept through Homs History like Reyn had, but she was pretty sure that Colony 4 was supposed to have been lost at least a hundred years ago. And these three kept using words she didn’t know, like ‘desert’ and ‘Levnis’.
“Yep,” Eunie answered in a way that was clearly supposed to be helpful but answered exactly zero of Fiora’s questions.
“But…”
Noah was fussing with a canteen and handed it gently to Fiora after removing the cap. “Drink slowly,” he said, looking into her eyes with a soft expression. “Once the others get back and you’re okay to move, we’ll take you down to Colony 4 for proper medical care. Your armor looks Agnian, but if you’re with us, they won’t bother you.”
His eyes clearly lingered on Fiora’s mechanical fingers as they closed around the proffered canteen, but he didn’t say anything else. And as Fiora took a slow, small sip of water, she realized that she was absolutely parched.
The group remained there in silence for a few moments as Fiora took gentle sips of some of the most refreshing water she’d ever tasted. She had vague thoughts of another time she had awoken to a drink of water while lying on the sand, except that that time had been under the stars and under the titans and straight from Shulk’s mouth –
“What’s your name?” Taion interrupted her reverie, “And what colony are you from? I know we’re trying to minimize the detours,” he said, glancing at Noah, “but if it’s stationed near here or on our way, we might be able to free you from your Clock.”
His last statement once again made no sense whatsoever – there was a pattern emerging here, and Fiora didn’t like it. She felt herself becoming more lost than she had been during the time Reyn and Riki had spent upwards of four hours arguing about what counted as a sandwich. She could at least make an attempt at answering his questions. “I’m Fiora, from Colony 9.”
Judging from the looks on Noah’s and Eunie’s faces, her confusion was contagious.
“Mio? Are you there?”
“Noah? It’s not like you to call my Iris. What’s wrong?”
“Er, well, nothing’s wrong, but things are kind of weird. When will you three be back?”
“We’ll be back in just a moment. Noah, this Levnis doesn’t look like any I’ve ever seen.
Not just at Gamma – not in training, and we didn’t see anything like this at Iota or Lambda.”
“That’s strange. Maybe I’ll – just a second.
“What, Taion?
“Upper torso? Okay, I’ll ask her.
“Taion wants to know if it has a colony designation anywhere. Apparently Agnian Levnises are all supposed to have a marking on the upper torso for helping with cross-colony maneuvers?”
“Sena! Are there any colony markings on the upper torso? Taion says to check!
“No, nothing. Sorry. What do you mean things are a bit ‘weird’?”
“Fiora woke up – that’s her name. Eunie and Taion are looking after her, and that’s all good, but she seems really confused.”
“I’d be confused too if I was in a Levnis crash and then woke up surrounded by strangers, probably.
Noah, why are you asking me about colony markings on the Levnis when you can just ask her?”
“That’s where it gets strange, Mio. She says she’s from Colony 9.”
“What?”
“Exactly. And Taion was checking her for a concussion after she said that, and he told me that there’s no hint of an Iris in either of her eyes. Like I said: things are weird.”
“Is she okay to walk? I’d rather try to figure this out back at the colony. Or anywhere that isn’t the desert.”
“Eunie says she’s got a bad ether deficiency, but she’s mobile. I offered to help her take her armor off so she could deal with the heat better, but she just looked… I dunno, sad? Comes to worst, we can just make Lanz and Sena carry her.”
“Might have to carry me, too, if this heat keeps up. We’re heading back.”
Fiora’s three new acquaintances (caretakers?) had been giving her weird looks over the past several minutes, but they had been giving her space. She appreciated that; she was, after all, just slightly overwhelmed by everything. Now that she had had some water and could notice sensations other than how weird the ether felt (seriously, what was going on with that?), Fiora took a moment to stand up and get her bearings.
Taion had called this place Dannagh Desert, and it looked like nowhere Fiora had ever even heard of. Behind her was a rocky wall, but on her other three sides were just dunes and hills of sand. It wasn’t like it was some huge beach, either – it was all just sand. Dunban or Melia might be able to say something smart about the geography of the region, but Fiora was at a complete loss. There was nowhere on Bionis (and this would have to be Bionis, since that wall was rock and not metal), as far as she was aware, that had this much sand. Maybe that was why the ether was foreign to her? She’d never seen anywhere on Bionis with so few plants, and that would certainly make a difference in the atmospheric ether. It was also incredibly dry in a way that Fiora had never felt before. Was that why there were almost no plants?
Fiora was brought back to her earlier idea that Zanza had somehow succeeded in remaking the world. Maybe killing him in the middle of that process had caused it to be remade differently?
Killing Zanza.
Shulk. The others. If Fiora was here in this strange place, where were they? Were they okay? Fiora felt a wave of panic of a strength she hadn’t felt since she saw Dickson shoot Shulk square in the back. These people said they’d found Fiora passed out here, dehydrated. Aside from needing power from Meyneth’s Monado, she had one of the most durable bodies of the group – if whatever had happened had wiped her out like that, what had happened to the others?
Fiora scrambled forwards, out from under the rocky outcropping. There were hills here; if she got on top of that short hill there, maybe she’d see where this group had found her? Maybe she could see something that would indicate where Shulk might have gone. What might have happened to him. She dug her feet madly into the sand, struggling to find purchase, but she finally reached the top of the dune. A vantage point reached, Fiora desperately cast her eyes around for anything, anyone.
Sand. Sand, sand, sand, sand! This place didn’t make any sense. Fiora could feel her breaths becoming shorter, but she forced her eyes around. More sand. What was this place?
There! Three figures in the distance, heading towards her! But none of them looked familiar. Dimly, Fiora recalled Noah mentioning “the others”, so was this the rest of his group? And past them, an incredibly faint ether signal, a glint of sun on a piece of white metal, both familiar in an aching and terrible way – was that Face Nemesis? But it had been wrecked on the beaches of the Fallen Arm!
And past that, there was either a huge downward slope or perhaps even a gigantic cliff. And past that…
A sword. The sword. An incredible distance away, the sword of the Mechonis was stuck blade-down into the ground, its wielder nowhere to be seen. The completely intact sword of the Mechonis, not broken in half like it had been in Egil’s desperate duel against the Bionis. Not with a damaged hole surrounding Galahad Fortress from which she and the others had fallen. No, the sword stood there whole, with its hilt towards the heavens as if its titan had simply planted it there and walked away.
This place was impossible. Fiora put her hand on her chest to desperately try to calm herself, but that only served to draw her attention to the complete lack of a Monado on her chest. Which itself wouldn’t have been an issue if somehow, for the first time since before Meyneth had sacrificed herself to save them all, she didn’t feel like she was dying.
Oh, she’d grown used to the constant drain of energy, the constant feeling of time running out. Fiora had never known exactly how much power her body had had left; Linada had mentioned that it could be measured and quantified, but Fiora didn’t want to know. It hadn’t mattered how much time was left as long as it was all spent fighting to keep Shulk safe. And during that final climactic battle, it felt like she had hit her limit, like she may have taken her final steps and breathed her last. Fiora remembered that sensation with the same intensity as she remembered being killed by Metal Face, but now it was just gone.
The only feeling she had to replace it with was an overwhelming fear. Fiora had made her peace with the fact that she wasn’t going to live past defeating Zanza. There was a sense of completion to her life that left her oddly content with the idea – she had protected Shulk when it mattered, she was able to come back to help him, and she was finally with him in that way she’d always longed for. She knew he'd be mad at her for hiding her pain and her lifespan, but if Shulk had proved anything in his journey across the titans it was that he was resilient. It certainly wasn’t fair to do that to him (or to Melia, especially when Fiora had asked her that unspeakable favor), but it was a trade Fiora was willing to make. She wasn’t going to live much longer, but Shulk would be okay.
Except now that wasn’t true. Now here Fiora was, somehow without a death sentence beating away in her chest, and Shulk was the one missing and gone.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this! They’d won! And yet the one thing that made the victory and the fight worth it had been stolen from her, somehow traded for, of all things, the Mechonis’ sword and her broken Face Mechon. Which, okay, sure, Shulk was the exact kind of idiot who would get himself hurt to explore those things but he was supposed to be alive to make that decision.
A tiny rational corner of Fiora’s brain told her that Shulk could easily be alive and that the simple explanation was that they had been separated by whatever had happened, but that corner of her mind was also preoccupied with realizing that at some point she’d fallen to her knees and was shaking and that her breaths were coming way too quickly and were much too shallow and that she really didn’t need to black out twice in one day and that it sounded like someone was coming up the hill behind her.
“Queen’s elbows, don’t run off like that!” Ah, it was Eunie, who was just now cresting the hill. Fiora’s breathing had slowed just enough that she must have just looked like she overexerted herself walking up here. That was good – she didn’t need this medic she didn’t know fussing over her more than was needed.
Fiora felt a little bad about that, but the chances that a non-Machina would have any useful medical advice were already low, and she’d heard Taion say something about avoiding detours and distractions, so clearly this group had somewhere to be. These were probably young Allied Force volunteers based on the presence of a High Entia, and Fiora was quite used to the idea that the people of Bionis were better without a half-Machina girl making a mockery of life by being around them.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you,” Fiora said, looking up at Eunie.
Eunie just scrunched her face and gave Fiora a completely unreadable look. “I get it. You wake up disoriented surrounded by Kevesi and we immediately try to flip your world on its head. The usual Ouroboros stuff.”
“Oh. Y-yeah.” Fiora was pretty sure that trying to understand Eunie was just an exercise in futility at this point. Time to add ‘Ouroboros’ to the list of weird words (which Fiora decided now consisted of ‘Agnian’, ‘Kevesi’, ‘desert’, ‘Levnis’, and ‘Ouroboros’).
With more effort than she’d have liked, Fiora stood up and turned to look at Eunie properly. “‘Queen’s elbows’? First time I’ve heard that one,” she said, giving Eunie what she hoped was a playful smile.
“Oh, come off it,” Eunie replied, swatting Fiora’s arm. “A girl’s only got so many good role models in Keves, and,” she added, a conspiratorial glint in her eyes, “the Queen’s the only one with wings better than mine. A gal’s allowed to appreciate her leader’s body, and that includes the elbows!”
Fiora was still confused, but Eunie’s enthusiasm was somewhat infectious, and she felt herself grinning.
It didn’t last. Eunie’s expression clouded over, and she gave Fiora a strange look. “Look, I know you don’t have a reason to trust us – well, beyond the whole ‘helping you when you’re passed out in the desert’ thing, so maybe you do have a reason to trust us – but what do you mean you’re from Colony 9? Noah and I have been there for six or seven terms now in Special Forces and neither of us have seen you around. Plus, y’know, the armor. And the Levnis. No way you’re from 9.”
“That can’t be true,” Fiora countered, crossing her arms, “because I grew up in Colony 9 and I’d never met a High Entia in eighteen years. So I don’t see how you’re from Colony 9,” and at this Eunie had opened her mouth to reply, but Fiora kept going, “and besides, if you were from Colony 9, you’d definitely have heard of me and my brother Dunban.”
“I – what?” Eunie was openly staring at her now, and that made Fiora quite uncomfortable. “Eighteen years?”
Fiora decided to match Eunie’s confused stare with a confident one of her own. “Yes. I’m eighteen years old. I don’t really understand High Entia ages, so you’re probably, what, seventy? Ninety?”
The High Entia girl went very quiet and her eyes went very wide. When she did open her mouth, she replied in a small voice, “I’m… I’m ninth term. You’re twice that old? How?”
What?