Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Author's Note: To anyone still keeping up with Offerings to a Star, it's not abandoned. There is slow progress happening on that front. I do graduate with my BFA in two weeks, so I will hopefully have much more time on my hands to be working on things.

We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption."
-Suzanne Rindell

Yuan supposed he should have seen this conversation coming. Particularly since Kratos had up and left with Derris-Kharlan.

(And Yuan can't even grumble at him about it. It's an alien thing, being apart like this. They've been friends since they were ten years old. Even with Cruxis, with all the lies and the schemes and the betrayals, Yuan had been able to sit in Kratos' office, feet on the desk because he knew it irritated him, and drank his wine as he grumbled about whatever happened to annoy him that time.

These days, Yuan doesn't have anyone to grumble to. He spends his days with the Spirit of the Tree—and he's not touching that psychological evaluation with a thousand foot pole. He's perfectly aware that it can't be healthy, spending his days with the Spirit who shares his wife's face and name, but who isn't her. Then again, his mental health has always been up for debate. Genis hangs around sometimes. He likes to talk to Martel, and help her with weeding or whatever needs to be done. Lloyd and Colette come more often, when they can. Sheena is closest, physically speaking, since she'd moved Mizuho to a location near enough that the entire village can keep watch over the Tree if needs be. Yuan doesn't talk to them often. Sheena brings tea sometimes, and they sit in a silence they've learned to make comfortable)

It had been—four years? Yuan wasn't good at keeping track—since the worlds had been reunited when Lloyd found him one morning.

"I brought lunch," Lloyd said, holding up a small covered pot. "Beef stew."

Yuan lived out by the Tree now, had constructed himself a serviceable cottage out of the ruins of the Tower. He didn't often get visitors, not to his home. The only people who came here were his Renegades, and he'd long ago become accustomed to not treating them like guests, particularly when they would invite themselves in and upend his life for a few hours. "….It goes best with rice. Come in."

As an angel, Yuan's dietary needs were essentially nothing, but he enjoyed food and eating with people, even if the latter was much more rare these days. As Yuan sprinkled in salt and garlic, and set the rice to boil, ("If it doesn't taste like the ocean, you're doing it wrong," Martel had said so many years ago after tasting his rice for the first time. He'd just rolled his eyes at her. She and Mithos had hid out in port-cities for so long her cooking had adapted their customs.) he asked, "What brings you here?"

"I have questions."

Yuan waited for a beat before making small circles with his hand. "About…?"

"Kratos."

For someone who had saved the world, Lloyd looked so incredibly young standing in the doorway to Yuan's kitchen. All manner of insecure, but trying to seem more collected, still awkwardly holding the pot.

"Well put it on the stove so we can warm it up," Yuan said, searching for bowls.

"No need!" Lloyd said brightly. "The pot is one of Dad's. It keeps itself warm."

Lloyd held out the pot for Yuan's inspection. There were indeed a row of dwarven runes carved around the rim of the pot as well as the rim of the lid. Yuan knew only the bare basics of dwarven magic, but Dirk was a truly talented artisan and smith, so it didn't shock Yuan to see his handwork be applied to something so practical.

"Then put the pot down so you can help me set the table." Treat the boy like one of his Renegades. That plan, Yuan could work with. He'd considered asking him to be a Renegade, when Botta had discovered that the boy was in fact Kratos' son. But no. At seventeen, Lloyd was too old to be convinced over to work with them. Not out of the blue.

For a man who lived alone, Yuan had a rather large dining table. The Renegades tended to descend on him in packs, and he very quickly got sick of trying to coordinate them around the house, so he'd constructed himself a dining table that easily fit eight. The table had been known to seat twelve, if no one cared much about being squished. Yuan often used at least one section of the table for any personal projects, and the rest he kept clear for eating.

Yuan pointed Lloyd to the dishware that Selene—one of the older Renegades, at forty-seven—had cheekily bought him as a housewarming gift. They were floral-patterned, and not in the tasteful way of Mizuho, but tacky in the way that only Altamira could produce.

"What took you so long?" Yuan asked, stirring the rice a bit before setting the lid on the pot.

"Between everyone being so busy, and—I think I just. Didn't think about it. I never thought you'd actually answer any questions I had."

"And what made you change your mind?"

Lloyd shrugged, leaning across the table to place silverware. "I didn't. But I figured I may as well try."

They remained in silence, which was more than Yuan would have thought possible. He got the impression that Lloyd was the talkative sort, but perhaps he'd matured a bit. Finally, the rice was done, and he spooned out portions on some of the plates, passing them to Lloyd to portion out the beef stew before they sat down.

"What—" Lloyd started, but fell silent.

Yuan took a bite of mutton stew—Dirk was proving himself again and again as an excellent cook—while he waited for Lloyd to find his words.

"How did you meet Kratos?" Lloyd asked finally. "You two used to be friends, right?"

First of all, Yuan wanted to correct, he and Kratos remained friends to this day. But he didn't think that Lloyd was capable of understanding a friendship that endured such heavy betrayals and genuine assassination attempts.

Secondly, they'd been more than simply friends. They were brothers, comrades. They had been just about everything one person could be to another.

Yuan glanced at his left forearm, rotating it so that the brand on the underside was easily visible. "I was a slave on his father's plantation." It used to be difficult to say those words, but he was so far removed from that little slave boy that it was like he was speaking about someone else.

"A slave?!" Lloyd repeated, face pale and horrified. His eyes were stuck to the mark that he'd never properly noticed before.

"Are you going to interrupt me at every sentence, or are you going to listen to the answers you requested?"

Lloyd shrank back in his seat, eyes still on the brand. "Sorry."

"As I was saying—I was sold to him after my village was attacked. I was assigned to be a house slave, and due to the fact that I was close in age to the master's son, I was assigned to him." Lloyd looked like he was going to be sick, so Yuan added, "Your father never agreed with slavery. Even as a kid, he was opposed to the whole idea. He had a very promising future back then. A general's son, with a talent for military operations. He could have been well off for the rest of his life."

"But?"

"But he threw it all away. He escaped with me instead, when we were fourteen."

The sick look was fading, replaced by a pleased, almost shy smile peeking out of the corner of Lloyd's lips. "He helped you escape."

"I can say a lot of things about Kratos, Lloyd, but if there is one defining trait to him, it is his loyalty to the people he loves."

(The sense memory hits Lloyd like a wall of bricks. Kratos in the Tower, the rest of them bleeding and bruised, trying to catch their breath that first time that they really believed Yggdrasill to be gone. Kratos not quite meeting his eyes.

"He was my apprentice, and a valuable friend."

"So you'll forgive anything someone does just because they're your friend?")

"…What was he like? Back then?"

Yuan snorted before taking a sip of cold barley tea. It was a summer beverage popular in Mizuho and Palmacosta, and Yuan had become rather fond of it lately. "You wouldn't recognize him. As a kid, he was…terrified of just about everything, but particularly people. He was…sweet-natured, I suppose the term is."

"'Terrified' doesn't sound like a person who helped you escape."

(For a moment, Yuan is looking at Anna. Something about the wry tone to his voice, the look in his eyes. He doesn't see her in him often, not in looks. He has her coloring, but in looks he is very much Kratos. At this moment, however, he is his mother's son)
Yuan offered him a crooked smile. "You mistake 'terrified' and 'brave' as opposites. Bravery requires fear, just as much as the other way around."

"But he grew out of his fear, didn't he?" Lloyd asked, dropping his eyes to his gloved hands.

What was Lloyd afraid of? The boy had gone up against every version of a god their world had, and had come out on top. Was it something as nebulous as a fear of the future? Yuan couldn't relate to that. He had never been afraid of the future; after having grown up almost guaranteed to have no future at all between his blood and the War, any future at all had been so full of opportunities. Every moment that Yuan lived was another glob of spit in the eye of the universe.

"In some ways. Kratos was—very shy for years, even as an adult." Even after four thousand years, Kratos wasn't shy in the same way, but he was awkward socially in a way he had never grown out of. He wasn't comfortable with people, ever. "And he struggled with self-confidence."

"Kratos did?"

Yuan hid a smirk in his tea. What a mind-boggling concept that had to be for Lloyd, who had only ever known the taciturn angel. He had never heard Kratos' stutter, had never seen him shrink away at new people, or babble nervously. Perhaps Kratos wouldn't want to share this sort of information with his son, but if he wanted an opinion on what Yuan told him, he shouldn't have left with Derris-Kharlan.

"It's part of what makes him such a good teacher, I think. He knows what it is to struggle through learning something."

"He always makes things look so easy." Lloyd wasn't eating properly. He'd taken some bites, but he was pushing the food around on his plate more than anything. Yuan wanted to call him on it the same as he would any of the Renegade children, but this wasn't the time.

"Four thousand years of practice does that. But he wasn't a natural genius with a sword. He worked for it."

"…Did you know my mom?"

"I did." Yuan paused to get himself more beef stew. It truly was delicious. "Not well, but she was a remarkable woman."

"I heard that Da—Kratos met her at the ranch."

"I've heard the same."

"You don't know for sure?" Lloyd had stopped with the pretense of eating, setting his fork down.

"Kratos was very secretive, especially in those days. I found out only when the alarms went up for when he broke her and several other prisoners out."

"…what was she like?"

Yuan could tell Lloyd how absolutely full of hellfire and spit Anna was, how absolutely ready to never be dragged back to that ranch. How mischievous and caustic she could be. How very much she loved her son and husband.

But those weren't the things Lloyd wanted to hear. Yuan knew how little good those types of stories were to people left behind.

So instead, Yuan told him, "She loved photography. She picked up a camera in Palmacosta, and she loved to take pictures of everything, but I think her favorites were of landscapes." Of a free world, a world she could explore and live in. A world without bars or shackles. Yuan could understand that. "And she was a hell of a cheat at cards."

"Are there any of her pictures left?" Lloyd's face was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.

"I'm not sure." Yuan remembered the ruins of the Aurion-Irving home in the Iselia mountains, remembered seeing the smoke from miles away, the stench of it permeating the forest for hours. "Most of them were burned." Lloyd's face fell. Yuan sighed. "I'll look through the Renegade files, see if any of them were saved, but I can't guarantee anything."

The rest of the meal was largely silent. Yuan left Lloyd to his thoughts as they cleared the table and washed the dishes.

As Lloyd dried a glass, he finally asked, "Mom must have had family, right? Other than Kratos?"

"Her parents died while she was in the ranch. She had a sister, I think, but I don't know what happened to her. It might be difficult," Yuan said. "But if you speak to older natives of Luin, they might remember her."

Lloyd's hands tightened on the glass. Luin had been its own tragedy nearly five years ago when the Desians destroyed it and Lloyd;s group had been one of the first to the scene. The Renegades had gone later, to help with relief. Yuan hadn't seen a sight like that in years, not since the last proper war that had raged in Sylvarant, nearly a century before when Forcystus had become a war hero. The Grand Cardinals had all had their hallmarks of cruelty, but Kvar had been particular and precise with his.

"I don't like killing," Lloyd said quietly. "I don't think it's the right answer. But…a part of me is glad that Kratos killed Kvar."

(For a moment, Yuan is four thousand years in the past, looking at his best friend, mute with a hundred emotions, having killed the human general who had been his father. A death rightly deserved for the things he'd done, if one asked Yuan, but no less devastating to Kratos)

It took Yuan a moment to gather the correct words. A part of Yuan wanted to tell Lloyd that some people deserved to die, deserved to be killed well before their time. But he knew Lloyd's opinion on the matter, and Kratos' too, even. Yuan could—and had—fought for people's rights to live, for their free will, but that didn't mean he forgave the humans who'd oppressed and enslaved his people, or that he would spend a second missing them if they were gone.

Besides. Yuan had a feeling this was more than just Kvar. Mithos, also, might have deserved to die, but that didn't mean that Lloyd felt any better about killing him.

"Then remember that feeling," Yuan said, not looking at him. His eyes were on his wedding ring, and a conversation he'd had with Martel so long ago. She had been a survivalist first, a Healer second. She had never had qualms about doing what needed to be done if it meant keeping her or her family alive, but when it came to the War…to the hundreds of battles…there, she had questioned how necessary the killings were, how they could justify the deaths of so many people.

He remembered Kratos, twelve years old and being handed a live blade for the first time. He remembered a scared, gentle child who had wanted nothing more than to hide away with his books and, at the time, his only friend. He had never wanted to hurt people, or have anything to do with the War.

"There may well be a solution that doesn't involve it," Yuan told Lloyd. "I'm sorry to say that it may take a lifetime to find, and before you do, you may have to kill again. But it shouldn't feel good, and it shouldn't be drawn out, or cruel."

He remembered Mithos, furiously brilliant and passionate as he spoke and wrote about ways to seek peace, about solutions to slavery, and war, and rebuilding all of the damage. Those words hadn't come from just a fourteen year old child. They had come from every single person they'd ever spoken to, every journal and treatise they'd ever read, the stories passed down, all channeled into a child of war with his family standing beside him.

He remembered Mithos broken, silent after Martel's death, eyes constantly red from tears that wouldn't stop. He remembered the fragility in which Mithos came to them with his plan, when they would follow him to the ends of the earth. And they had.

He remembered Mithos insane, unable to understand the concept of death. Not when it applied to them. Not when it meant being adrift without his family. He remembered the bottomless rage and sense of injustice in him that had warped and twisted into so much abuse and corruption. And always, always behind that madness, Yuan had never been unable to see that desperate, grieving child who'd found a sliver of hope and clung to it like a drowning man to driftwood.

"Just don't let it break you," Yuan said. He could only hope that that was the one true shining area in which Lloyd was his mother's son. "It'll be a fight, for the world you want. Three steps forward, two steps back kind of deal. But I think you're right, and that change can happen. Just don't be discouraged by the steps in order to realize that change."

The way Lloyd was watching him was pure Kratos, thoughtful and analytical. Not something that Yuan associated with Lloyd. He'd grown into himself, Yuan realized. It was subtle, but his face had matured out over the past years. A little bit broader, bones not so prominent.

"I'm not going to quit," Lloyd told him. "I thought you would've figured that out by now."

"Well. Forgive an old man his bad memory."

That made Lloyd laugh, the seriousness a ghostly memory on his face. As he set about packing up the largely empty pot of stew, he said, "Thanks, Yuan."

If it were one of his Renegades, Yuan could be softer, or warmer. But it was Lloyd, and while he wasn't an enemy or a tool any longer, that didn't mean he was family like the Renegades were. So Yuan just said, "Don't make it a habit."

Lloyd only grinned, walking backwards out the front door. (The way he walks and the shape of his face, that is Kratos. The stretch of his smile is all Anna, bold and unafraid, but that casual cockiness, the mischievous joy. That is uniquely Lloyd.)