animus_network

...No, if you're lucky about anything, it's seeing the truth before something irreversible happened.

[He glances off, sighs a bit.]

It really is taking the first step that's hardest.

[She guesses that's true, though it does little to really ease the dark pit of horror in her chest. The empty feeling that's been there since that one anonymous commenter, and Sertoria's definition.]

It's... everything in my head is all jumbled up now. [She leans against a bookshelf, pulling her hands up to rub at her eyes.] How... how long has this been going on? How far does it go?

[Does it go back home? How much of a part of her is this?]

For you?

[He knows how far his goes. His goes back to Choral Castle and a visit home.]

I don't know. It goes back to when you started accepting things instead of acting.

[His words set off a flurry of thought, of trying to pinpoint where and when things began. Where they changed. Had they ever changed? Had she. She doesn't know. She didn't find out about her future until she came here but when- when Riku had told her what happened and Namine had told her about Roxas and she'd met him and seen and met Sora and found out she couldn't-

But what about before that. What about home when she'd tried to decide what to do, whether to stay with her friends or go back to where she belonged? Or was that something else entirely.

She'd told Zo she didn't want to go home. She wanted to stay here. She didn't want to go back to a future where she could do nothing she could change nothing but could she really do nothing or was that this, some conditioned reaction, some fear of what could happen if she stepped outside the bounds that had been defined for her.

But at what risk? Her friends? The people nearer and dearer to her than life? She can't risk that! She could never risk- what if they died or something and it was her fault and-

But how was here so different? Sure they never died here, not yet at least but it felt real, it seemed real enough that dying hurt and it hurt your friends and those who cared about you. The decision they'd made, to place the chips, had put everyone they'd ever cared about who'd left in great and terrible danger, moreso than they could ever face here. How was that so different?

A feeling she hasn't felt since before Reno left bubbles up in her chest, filling the empty void, making her muscles tingle and itch and she wants to do something, something to relieve this uncontainable wellspring of emotions that she can't handle. To run, to hit things, to do something. She pulls her hands away from her face, shaking furiously. Aqua wasn't there to hug her until she stopped kicking and screaming this time. Reno wasn't there to hold her there until she calmed down.

All she had was herself. And suddenly even that seemed like far too much.

Her face screws up, the feelings twisting until they finally managed to escape in a howl of rage and misery that she's only ever made once before in her life. She picks up a book from the nearby shelf and hurls it at the floor, so hard the spine breaks a little.

From there she turns and sinks to the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees and burying her face in them.]

[...Well, shit.

There's no missing that reaction, although Xion's forgiven for missing Asch's wide eyes in turn when she sinks down to the floor. No point in asking if she's okay because she's so obviously not. But he doesn't really know what to do. Any words of sympathy sound empty to him, and it's not like he had anyone to model after, anyone to support him when he turned away from Van.

(That's why it took so long. He didn't want to be alone. Wanted to keep clinging to the only person who told him things would be okay...)

After a long moment, he peels out of his seat and crouches next to her.]

You're not alone. I'm here.

[He's not going to say it will be okay, because it might not be. It probably won't be. And he won't be the person who lies to give people comfort.

But he'll stay. That's the mistake, the place Jason failed and Van succeeded. To make someone truly despair, you can't allow them to meet anyone else, anyone who might give them hope.

They're not alone, in this place, even if that's all they can do.]

[Xion doesn't answer for a while. It's not quite the same as Reno and definitely not the same as Aqua, but no more was she expecting him to be. Truth be told, she feels like doesn't know what to expect from anybody anymore. Even herself. Especially herself. Or maybe nobody else has really changed, and she herself has changed so much that everything else feels uprooted by comparison.

Finally she lifts her head, her eyes very red. There's a tremor in her voice still, and she hiccups frequently.]

F-for over a year... Almost since I've c-come to the Tower... [Ever since she met Roxas for the first time here] I've known wh-hat'll happen to me back home. And for al-lmost as long... I've thought... that I can't d-do anything. To ch-hange it. Not without h-hurting everyone I've ever cared ab-bout.

[Sora... Axel... Roxas... Riku... not to mention what it meant for the wider worlds as a whole. She doesn't want to risk that just for her own sake. She can't.

Sound familiar to you Asch? Because it does to her. Maybe it's not the exact same thing, but it's very close. Very close.]

[A slow breath. Yeah, it sounds familiar enough - to anyone who lived in Auldrant, really. He still doesn't really know what to say, though.]

If you don't like the options you have, make your own.

[A shake of his head, and a sour note in his voice.]

I suppose it doesn't matter much now, though.

[He's trying to not sound callous about it, but it's the truth. Even if they win, even if they can go back... They can't turn back time. Can't step back into their worlds and go back to the way things were.

He wishes he was more help. He knows the feeling of a hanging doom, at least, but he found his way out of it more by accident than design.]

All we can do is keep going forward.

[If there's irritation in his voice, it's at himself, not at her. Nothing he hates so much as being useless.]

I don't know enough.

[Her voice is shaking, she seems on the verge of tears again.]

If I do something wrong, Sora, the person I come from, he could be asleep forever. Or-

[But no, Xion, stop. You're sounding exactly like you're talking about. Exactly what this whole thing is. Too afraid of the potential bad to act at all. Unlike anything here in the Tower you know there's a future out there where everything turns out all right.

So you may not know enough, would you let that stop you here?

Once, maybe. But now... now she wants to know the truth, to find out what's really going on. What they can do to fix things. Her hands on her knees clench tightly. The threat of bursting into tears is slowly vanishing. She's clearly considering his words. In all of a moment, it's like her thought processes seem to shut down in exhaustion, and the memory of what she told Zo floats to the surface]

I guess I could stay here. If... if we fix things. Stop the admins from hurting people.

[But is that really solving anything? Or is she still running away from what can be fixed at home...]

Wait - he?

[Asch. That is less important than the girl having a breakdown in front of you. Keep your replica issues to yourself. He tosses his head thoroughly because not important.]

It's your decision. Ultimately, if you ask me, that's what we're fighting for.

[The chance to make choices of their own, for themselves, unbound by any chains of prophecy or admin power.]

[She gets what he's trying to say.]

To be able to make our own choice...

[So... maybe she doesn't have to think about it now. Think about whether she wants to stay or go home and face - or perhaps fight - her destiny. There's a squirming in the back of her mind, as if it knows that the issue isn't really resolved, just postponed. She nods, still a little shaky, but some of the tension is easing out of her shoulders.

She glances over at Asch finally, a bit nonplussed]

Yeah... him.

[Why?]

[Yeah, okay, serious discussions are over, here. Admittedly Luke isn't perfectly identical to him, but...]

Fomicry doesn't work that way!

[You have officially broken his mind please hold.]

[You are getting the most awkward and half-embarassed look. He never used the term with her before. The name sounds a bit like a word she's heard, though she's not sure she can guess the meaning behind this particular word]

Fomi- what?

[World-specific terminology problems.]

The science of creating replicas. It creates perfect physical duplicates, or nearly perfect. Not...

[He gestures a little awkwardly. The point's pretty obvious.]

[It's the "phsycial duplicates" that drives it home. And now Xion's curling up again awkwardly, clearly a little self-concious now.]

I'm made of Sora's memories. That's... that's how replicas are made back home, I think.

[She looks forward]

Most of the memories I'm made of are Sora's memories of his best friend. A girl named Kairi.

...But that's...

[Congratulations, Xion, you have thoroughly flummoxed him. He certainly looks confused enough - just imagine the Asch version of this face instead of the one actually in the icon.]

Replicas on Auldrant don't have memories. They're born as blank slates.

[If they did, then proving himself to be the real Luke would have been six kinds of hassle.]

I... I didn't either. Not at first. At first... I didn't really understand anything. Only what they told me to do.

[A faint frown crosses her features. Her first couple weeks were a blur, of training and tests and black coats and voices that she can't remember the details of at all.]

It... it wasn't until later that I started to remember things, memories that weren't mine. I... I didn't know back then. I'd thought they were real. I thought I was remembering my life before I became a Nobody. But...

[Xion breaks off with a faint gasp. As if to back up this sentiment, there's a momentary break. A second where suddenly the walls and bookshelves are film and she and Asch are wireframes of purple with a glowing light in their center.

But then she blinks, and everything's back to normal. "Normal."]

[He's paying careful attention, although he glances around at the flicker - no, no changes. Once the glamour is back in place, it holds steady.]

No, our replicas are nothing like that at all. Even as my perfect isofon, Luke will never get any of my memories.

[And if Luke had had his memories, would Asch have lost them? Or would there simply have been no way to tell, which of them was real and which the replica?]

He wasn't in a state to take any kind of orders after he was born, either; some replicas are programmed with basic tasks, but most of them are helpless as infants.

[Xion hesitates.]

I think... I guess our world's replicas are really different, maybe. Though... I think, I was programmed, to do and know some things...

[She looks down at her hands]

We were trying to infiltrate the admin levels, a couple weeks ago. As a decoy. And so I had to hack the elevator and... It's like my hands knew what they were doing, but I didn't.

[It was really unnerving, to tell the truth]

It seems to be. Then again, I suppose the methods were created by different people.

[A physical copy formed of Seventh Fonons, compared to a creature seemingly literally made of memories... At least Xion containing the memories of a girl explains her form.]

On Auldrant, programmed replicas usually have some level of repressed personality and emotion - the more they're programmed, the less human they behave. The worst cases have no reasoning power of their own and are good for little but cannon fodder.

[Which is exactly what Van used them for, he's sure. After all, when you're sucking up all the Seventh Fonons by replicating the planet, a few human-sized replicas here and there won't make much difference.]

In that respect, I suppose you're lucky.

Just like puppets made to be thrown away when they're not useful anymore.

[Oh that's a suddenly very, very bitter edge to her voice. You may think she's lucky and in some respects she may be, but she doesn't feel like it. Certainly not right now.

In several ways she feels not very different from those bits of canon fodder]

I guess some things aren't that different.

[Puppets. And yet out of all people on Auldrant, it's replicas who do not dance to the Score's strings, replicas who drove them off that road of destruction.]

Some things aren't.

[And not every puppet was a replica, either.]

But you can still refuse to play along, just like anyone else.

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