Author's Note: This chapter is a rewrite of the one written roughly four years ago, on the initial posting of this fic. My intent is to actually keep with it this time, but I just couldn't continue on from old writing and maintain a coherent voice and writing quality. Updates will be more frequent on AO3 because FFN's whole setup is the most user-unfriendly interface I have ever dealt with.

There are a few "minor" changes and clarifications used here to make Chrono Cross itself more compliant to its own established lore. Firstly, Lynx (in Serge's body) has an innate color of white, not black; Serge (in Lynx's body) still has an innate color of black. I will also not be writing out everyone's accents in order to make the reading experience less awkward, although Harle's Franglais will still be intact for the most part, minus the phonetic spelling.


Chapter One: Where a Choice is Made


The Dragon Tear was far too light, at least compared to the shattered remnants of the Tear from the other world. The shards seemed heavy, colder to the touch and undeniably darker in color, with flashes of grey and black deep in the core of the broken structure. In contrast, the intact artifact Serge now carried wasn't weightless by any means, but it seemed to shift in his hand to stabilize its own weight like a living thing, only slightly cooler than the exposed skin on the palms of Serge's hands and glowing from within.

He supposed that the Dragon Tear had to be aware in some sense, if not truly alive, in order to key into the wants and needs of its holder and "decide" how to fulfil them appropriately. The contrast between the two was starker still with the realization—if this one was alive, then the broken Tear was most certainly dead.

Steena hesitated as they stepped into Fort Dragonia's main hall, tilting her head back to follow the curved walls of the fort's central chamber, already raised to allow access to the lift and the chambers above. "Was this your doing?" She queried, turning to Serge. Her expression was calm as ever, but Karsh responded to the question with a frown, brows furrowing in concern. His worry was evident: had someone else gotten here before them somehow?

Serge gestured for them to hurry up with a nod of his head, pointed ears flattening slightly as he stalked toward the double doors leading to the other room. "I came back here not long after I got home," he explained, words slow and careful to keep his words clear. It was progress worth noting, but both of his present traveling companions knew better than to comment; it had taken almost a month for him to finally figure out how to speak clearly through the foreign feline muzzle and too-sharp teeth Lynx had cursed him with, but the achievement served only to make him more anxious and less comfortable.

"Harle thought it might be worth checking out," he continued, "but there was nothing here."

For the most part, Fort Dragonia had been completely deserted, a completely different scene than the one painted by General Viper and his beastly ambassadorial guest on Serge's first visit to the ruin. Deactivating the crystals was the same, puzzles and games identical to those in the other world—but then, the structure had been built thousands of years before the timeline split in two. A decade of difference wasn't enough to change much in a location so ancient.

The doors slid open when they drew near, revealing that this time the fort was most certainly not deserted. A young man, late in his teens but nowhere near true adulthood, sat on the dais in the middle of the room, one leg pulled up close to his chest while the other hung down toward the steps below, just too short to make contact.

Serge stopped, eyes narrowing into golden slits as a growl rumbled from deep in his chest.

"Lynx," Karsh ground out, swinging the axe off his back in preparation. Serge gestured shortly with one hand and the snowy-haired Deva held his ground, taking a deep breath and speaking through clenched teeth. "To what do we owe the pleasure this time?"

Lynx—with dark hair and large eyes and a rich tan that belonged to Serge, not to him—just chuckled slightly in a voice simultaneously eerily familiar and inherently wrong, flashing white teeth in a grin. "I was just curious." His accent was off, consonants a little too sharp and vowels too short, speech patterns that Serge now recognized as necessity for speaking as a demihuman lacking a humanoid mouth. "I wondered how far you would be willing to go in order to get in my way."

He slid off the platform and swung his scythe seemingly out of the ether to balance on his shoulder. Red eyes—red, not the deep violet Serge had inherited from his mother—cast over the small group for a moment before settling on Serge. "Where's Harle?"

Serge's growl deepened automatically. "I'm sure you'd like to know," he replied, words just this side of intelligible through the anger, belying the way his stomach clenched at the question.

Harle had been missing for weeks, and there was no doubt in Serge's mind that Lynx knew it.

"You have no idea what that girl is," he chuckled, shaking his head. "I can promise, in all sincerity, that your merry little band is better off without her. One can only hope that she finally realized that she's better off without you."

Serge lunged forward, Steena calling his name as Karsh moved just too slowly to stop him, and took a swing straight at Lynx's smug and painfully familiar face. In a flicker of gleaming white he was gone, leaving Serge's claw-tipped swipe to cut through empty air.

"Oh, relax," Lynx crooned from above, flicker back into existence overhead, several feet out of even Serge's reach. "It's far too late for you or her to make a difference." He leaned his head slightly, amused. "Nonetheless, we do have so much to talk abou—"

Something green sparked by the door, slicing through the air toward the body thief above. Lynx's arm jerked up in a show of reflex that left Serge infuriatingly impressed—as the person who actually owned that body he'd thought himself fully aware of its capabilities, but Lynx's raised hand shattered the spell on contact. He regarded Karsh, who stood rightfully stunned down below, with a look of distaste.

"Was that necessary?" Lynx tutted and shook his head once more, then turned back to Serge as he lowered his hand. "Best of luck to you, Chrono Trigger. I look forward to seeing you in the Sea of Eden. Hopefully you'll be in better company."

In another flicker of bright white, he was gone.

"Son of a bitch," Karsh ground through clenched teeth. "How the hell did he do that? How is he ever here?" Lynx may have had Serge's body, but Serge still had the amulet that opened the gate between timelines wide enough for a person to slip through.

"As far as I am aware," Steena replied, looking up into the empty air where Lynx had floated in place, "this Lynx character is a being of great power on more than simply a physical level. It is possible that a great measure of that power is bound to his spirit rather than his body."

Serge gave a mirthless chuckle that sounded more like a growl. "Considering I couldn't have done that when I had my own body, and I can't do anything like it now that I'm in his, I think that's obvious."

Steena hummed to herself, voice low and eyes narrowing slightly in thought. "Perhaps you simply lack training."

He resisted the urge to shudder at the concept. "I don't intend to wear this body long enough to figure that out. Come on."


The rest of the short trip through the fort was uneventful, no words exchanged until the trio reached the chamber suspended high in the air above the fort. Serge took a step toward the doors that had plagued his nightmares even before he fell through the rift in time and space, but stopped when Steena put one pale hand on the black leather of his sleeve. He turned to look down—and down and down, Lynx's body was tall to the point of ludicrous—and she pulled back.

"From here, you must go on alone."

"I wasn't alone last time," he replied.

She nodded once. "Which may be to blame, in part, for your current condition. Think of the Dragon Tear as a writer. When Lynx stole your body, the only task was to trade a few pages between his story and yours. This time, those same pages must be preserved while everything around them is rewritten from nothing." She held his gaze, unblinking. "The power of the Dragon Tear is attracted to will, to the strongest focus present. This is why Lynx was able to use it against you to do the impossible, and why you must be alone this time. There can be no distractions, no chance of another story interfering. You must be the only one the Tear can reach."

Serge had never been particularly bad with magic, but the long-dead Dragonites had been on a different level. He had wondered just what getting his body back would require, especially considering he wouldn't be able to just switch back with Lynx. The Dragon Tear was the most obvious prerequisite, along with a return to Fort Dragonia, but this was new information.

"Sounds time consuming," Karsh said, folding his arms. "And dangerous."

"Highly," was Steena's simple response, amber eyes darting momentarily toward the Deva before she closed them, exhaled slowly and looked back to Serge. She placed that hand on his arm again, the touch delicate but steady. "Listen to me, Serge. The Dragon Tear will rewrite whatever you need in this world based upon what is most important to you at the moment of its activation. Your sense of self must be paramount when you face the Tear, or you will fail." Her normally calm, even stoic expression had taken on an edge, a hint of fear rimming her eyes. She knew just how easy it would be for Serge to screw this up, her trepidation at the possible results strong enough to be visible in her face. "As you work through your story, you cannot lose your way. Remember why you came here. Focus. Do you understand?"

Taking a deep breath, Serge clenched his jaw and nodded.

Steena withdrew and lowered her head. "Then you are ready."

Karsh clapped him on the shoulder. "Good luck, junior. Hopefully we'll be seeing you—the actual you—soon."

Again, Serge just nodded. He turned when Karsh pulled away, pushing the doors open with both clawed hands and stepping into the low, cool light beyond.

The doors swung shut behind him with a boom that made him flinch, fur rising down his spine and ears flattening. Finally losing all that would be nice. Hiding how he felt was all but impossible when he had hackles and ears and a tail that shifted, twitched and turned seemingly of their own accord with the express purpose of giving him away. At least the tail was short enough to hide under the length of Lynx's robe. Serge has actually caught himself wondering on more than one occasion if the tail was the reason Lynx had worn the robe in the first place, since it took his most intense concentration to stop its constant switching back and forth. It would probably be difficult to plot the destruction of humanity while concentrating on keeping it still.

Regardless of reason, he couldn't wait to be rid of it. Months in this body had done nothing to make it more familiar or more comfortable, and while a great deal of that was intentional on Serge's part, that didn't mean he wanted to see what it would take to make him feel like he owned this monster of a body.

He didn't even think he would miss how quickly his eyes adjusted to low light like this, the weak, limited glow cast up from the floor more than sufficient for demihuman eyesight. The circular room was identical to its twin in the other world, each of the six dragon statues seated on a ring of colored light and joined to the pedestal in the center like spokes on a wheel. Serge placed the Dragon Tear on the little platform, took a deep breath and waited.

A bloom of light in one side of the room revealed part of a massive mural, faded and ancient but visible for what had to be the first time in centuries. The cracks in the colored stone obscured the image somewhat, but Serge couldn't have lived in El Nido for his entire life without being able to recognize the simple, stylized imagery for what it was: the ocean.

Blue light concentrated in the heart of the low glow emanating from the mural, forming a sparkling orb the size of Serge's fist that drifted slightly along the gentle curves of the ancient painting.

'All life on this planet was born in the sea.'

The voice was deep, almost guttural and oddly familiar. It reverberated through the chamber, seeming to originate from the little glowing sphere in spite of the way it rumbled up through Serge's feet. As it drifted, lighting up new portions of the mural on the way, the blue glow wove a story that Serge had never heard, a story that he was certain had never been told to a human before. Was it responding to him differently than it had General Viper because he was alone, or because his body wasn't human?

The light spoke of the dawn of life on Gaea, ancient civilizations, the very people who create Fort Dragonia and the other Dragonite ruins. The people who crafted the Einlanzer and disappeared into the annals of prehistory with no explanation. At least, no explanation until now.

According to the tale painted on the gentle slope of the wall, the greatest portion of the dragon civilization had been brought down by an entity familiar in name if not in story.

'That one was known as "Lavos!" The great crimson flame…'

Lavos—Norris had found some information on it during their journey through the Dead Sea, albeit very little. According to that, Lavos was some kind of parasite, a mass of spikes and death that slept deep in the earth, waiting to wake for some great and terrible purpose. Even in the future, in records dated more than a thousand years forward in time, there was still very little to say what the creature was.

The gleaming ghost of memory left in the only surviving Dragonian fortress in the world went on to claim that Lavos was to thank for humanity existing in the first place. That wasn't what Serge had expected when he first learned about it on the way through the Dead Sea.

He frowned, remembered Harle's clear lack of surprise, the way she used words he didn't even understand—Norris seemed to figure it out, but "download" wasn't a term that Serge had ever heard before—in an attempted to haul up more information from deep in the broken technology of the future. They had all been disappointed when the display went black, but Serge felt that Harle knew more about what they'd seen than she let on.

But then, Harle had always been like that. She always knew where to go and what to do, always had some secret insider knowledge. She knew so much more than she ever told anyone, in possession of an understanding that was utterly unmatched even by Lynx on his mission to reclaim the Frozen Flame.

Serge missed her terribly.

The glow finished the story, drifting to the center of the room to settle in the Dragon Tear, dimming to create a low gleam in the heart of the relic. Serge looked down into the honeycomb pattern within, remember what Steena told him. The Tear could rewrite anything, but it would only rewrite that which was most important to him at that moment. It could only follow the story he had chosen to take part in.

He thought back on the start of all this, falling through the sand and waking up somewhere both close to and further from home than he'd ever been. Talking to Leena, the hike up Cape Howl, politely declining Kid's offer to join in on whatever fool's errand he'd been drafted into. Termina, meeting Glenn and Guile. Viper Manor, meeting Lynx for the first time.

Fort Dragonia, where it all fell apart.

He took a breath and tried to concentrate, to tell the story he needed to finish.

Why was it that every step of this journey required him to give up everything he'd gained in the process? He lost Leena the moment he fell through the rift—he couldn't even think of the one here as his Leena anymore, not after spending so much time traveling and fighting alongside the other one. And yet he lost her too, he lost everyone in Fort Dragonia. Glenn, Leena, Guile, even Kid, they wouldn't even look at him with anything but disgust and anger so long as he was a monster of fur and teeth.

And yet, while reclaiming his body wouldn't mean losing the friends and allies he'd made since then, it was clearer now than ever that it did mean giving up the single most important person he'd met on this insane journey.

"If you had to choose between the world or me," she asked, red eyes dark in the multicolored light of the Pearly Gates, "which would you choose?" At the time, he'd looked back on everything that had happened so far and spoken the only answer that felt right—and she just smiled and thanked him for lying.

Since she'd disappeared, the meaning of her question and response to his answer were obvious: moving forward this time didn't require losing Harle to space or circumstance, it required giving her up willingly.

This was the only way to move forward, the only way to catch up with Lynx in the Sea of Eden and stop him from reaching his goal, from carrying out the murderous mission he'd undertaken. No one seemed to know exactly what he intended to do when he succeeded, but every moment they spent wondering was one more he spent getting further away from them. One more moment pulling Kid further into the insanity that was the hunt for the Frozen Flame.

He remembered looking at Kid on Radius' island, the murderous gleam in her eyes and how she wouldn't listen, wouldn't even give him a chance to explain himself. And why would she? This was the way things were. Kid traveled with Serge. Harle traveled with Lynx.

The fact that their bodies weren't the end-all of their being seemed to be lost on both young women, at least on the surface.

Serge had lost so many people already, how could he intentionally give up one that had come to mean more to him than any of the others? It didn't matter if they'd been ripped away from him like Kid had or abandoned him outright like Glenn and the rest, Serge could barely fathom what it would take to be the one to turn away.

He looked at the rough swirl of scarlet paint on the wall, Lavos, and wondered what else Harle knew about it. He wondered what it would take to get her back and ask her.

'Your plea to the gods has been heard.' The glow in the Dragon Tear flared again. 'The Daughter of the Moon shall be brought to you.'

Serge jerked and the chamber began to shudder, rumbling as stone and metal scraped on one another overhead. He looked up, shielding his eyes from bits of falling debris as the ceiling slowly opened, like a pupil dilating to let in more light. Different sections of the dome overhead twisted slightly to reveal a perfectly round patch of perfectly blue sky.

The Dragon Tear was still glowing, light flashing from blue to white in the instant just before a beam of light shot straight up through the hole overhead, cutting through the sky like lightning pulled taut. The vibrations in the chamber seemed to pull inward, drawing Serge closer even as the beam of light broadened to a column. Wind swirled about the chamber, raising from a breeze to a whirlwind in a matter of seconds.

It was bright, burning in the backs of his eyes even through tightly slitted pupils; he raised a hand in a feeble attempt to shield himself form the light, finally clenching one eye shut against the gleaming onslaught while the howl of the wind grew ever louder. He slanted his ears back against the increasing scream of energy, but couldn't force himself to look away.

Just as his vision started to burn out entirely in his one open eye, just as Serge was sure he would be blinded for the rest of his life, the column shattered like glass, shards and sparks of light shooting out in all directions.

The figure that tumbled from the light was intimately familiar. Serge lunged forward to catch her before she could hit the stone floor.

"Harle!" He rumbled, dropping to his knees to pull her closer, cradling her head in one large clawed hand. She was shivering slightly, her own hand ghosting up to clench on the flap of his cape. "Are you all right? Where have you—" He stopped, vision at last starting to clear enough to take in more than silhouettes and burned patches of blackness. "Have you been crying?"

The blue and red makeup painted around Harle's eyes was smeared and streaked. When she opened her scarlet eyes they shone with tears. "Oh, mon Serge," she murmured, voice thick as she tilted her head to look past him, over his shoulder. "What have you done?"

Serge felt his entire body go cold as he turned to follow her gaze to the pedestal in the center of the room, on which sat the shattered remains of the Dragon Tear.

"…Shit."