Chapter Text
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Noah says softly.
So softly that they can hardly fail to hear the danger in it.
Long before the Rejoining of their worlds, Noah and Mio had been the very first first to restart their Interlink and fully regain their memories - the desires and experiences of all their past lives, including N and M. And they’d been the ones to realize that the music of the off-seers was the key to unlocking everyone else’s hidden memories. To take up their flutes once more - not to help people’s lives pass on into memory, but to help memory wind its way back into life.
For years, Noah had confronted people at their most delicate, their most wounded and broken and in need of succor, and treated them all with the kindness and patience that had defined him at his best. For years, he’d never shown a hint of the N that was equally a part of him - even as he, like everyone else, was forced to wait until the scientists could safely engineer the Rejoining. Stranded and separated from his Mio, with the full agony of the remembrance of what they’d been to each other.
(They’d both been absolutely inseparable in the early days of that new, shared universe. There had been no question of spending even a moment apart. And so Noah found himself in the absolutely overwhelming position of meeting Mio’s four parents - one a Queen, and the others equally intimidating! - and brother and sister; and a self-proclaimed Favorite Uncle whose true name was an absolute mouthful but insisted on Zeke or Chum; and one of Sena’s Mums, the Special Inquisitor, who glared at him in a way that promised slow death if he ever hurt Mio; not to mention the quirky Nopon engineer, and her Gramps the literal dragon-)
Noah had been an orphan in this life, his original life. Now he’d been thrown into the deep end of this non-traditional but no less loving family.
He’d gotten used to the sheer chaos of it - eventually.
Mio’s father was a jovial sort, who took absolute delight in telling the most embarrassing possible stories of his little girl, and welcomed Noah with open arms and frequent hugs. The shovel talk came from the Aegis sisters. (Having nothing to compare it to, Noah was still fairly certain they’d have put the fear of their world’s absent God into just about anyone).
Noah and Mio intended to travel, eventually. To see this new world fully; to revel in a journey for the sake of it, without a three-month timer counting down with every step. (To keep playing their joint melody as a balm for anyone in need). But they were waiting for their friends to finish their own business first.
Taion - who, as a full-fledged Blade Eater, found himself in a rather odd position of being so much older than the rest of them - was off doing something dull and diplomatic at a conference between Empress Melia and the rulers of Alrest. Lanz worked day and night with the other Machina as they built themselves a new city. Eunie’s once-reluctant study of medicine had flourished to genuine passion, and she now needed to learn how several new species functioned. And Sena was ever at her mothers’ side, which meant that they saw the most of her.
So Noah lived with Mio’s family, pitching in wherever they were in need of a pair of hands. He only rarely took up his sword, and then only against mindless wild beasts, joining Rex and Zeke on missions to drive them away from affected villages.
The final straw - the snapping of the thread they hadn’t realized was fraying away - came directly after one of those expeditions.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Seeing you in action-” Noah nods in Rex’s direction, but his hand sweeps out to encompass the rest of them. “You’re all so strong. And the heroes from my world felled a god in their time. So how exactly did Moebius rule Aionis for millenia, unchecked? Why did defeating Z fall to… to us?”
To me, he stops himself from saying, but they all hear it nonetheless. The reluctant warrior, the gentle soul. In the end, he’d been the one forced to wield a blade - because the people who should have stopped Moebius had been absent. They’d founded the City, given the people of Aionis a place to start, but faded from history after that, until they was nothing left but statues and snatches of half-forgotten memory.
“That’s… a long story, kid,” Rex says gently.
His hand descends to Noah’s shoulder with all the gentle patience of a man stroking a particularly sensitive cat; Noah flinches at first, but ultimately leans into the comfort of the touch.
“And it’s not just mine to tell. Shulk knew him a lot better than I did, anyway.”
“Him?”
“Yep. The Consul who was always missing from your count: A. He’s the one that took us off the board.”
Seeing that Noah won’t be deterred so easily, Rex sighs - and offers an appropriate number of caveats in which Shulk’s name is frequently invoked as the ‘Alvis expert’ and ‘having a better mind for all this metaphysical nonsense, anyway’ - but, eventually, begins the tale.