Notes: This is my first for the Mother 3 fandom. Inspired both by one of my favorite Vienna Teng songs and a conversation I had with LittleLinor about what kind of emotional and mental state it would have taken for Lucas to successfully commune with the Dark Dragon. Hope, we agreed, was foremost among those qualities. I hope you enjoy it!

Fandom: MOTHER3

Characters: Lucas

Warnings: spoilers for all chapters, speculation.

Disclaimer: I do not own Mother 3, nor do I stand to profit from this story in any form. All mistakes are my own.

Shine

Mother used to keep a box of sunflowers on the windowsill.

She would tend to them while Claus and Lucas played in the front yard, gently sifting the fingers of one hand through the rich soil to test for moisture and tipping the long-necked watering can to offer them water with the other. Even during the winter months, when father kept the sheep inside the barn and Hinawa made the boys bundle up in layers of coats to shield them from the cold, she was constant in her attentions. The flowers had already withered by then – everything had, even the grass – but she kept at it, her gaze resplendent with patient warmth.

Lucas slept in even later during the winter, only emerging from his cocoon of blankets when he could no longer keep warm beneath their patchwork quilt. His brother was only the slightest bit more prone to being recumbent in the cold, but this was a great comfort to Lucas all the same, who treasured the quiet moments when Claus was still. Short as they were, those moments were theirs – Lucas and Claus's – and no one else's. Flint was usually tending to the sheep by then, and mother could be heard in the kitchen, humming to herself as she prepared breakfast. As soon as the smell of the cooking omelets wafted its way into their room, Claus would be up and out of the bed. Until then, however, there was nothing but his brother's warmth cradling his and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against his back.

His waking was inevitable though, as was the gradual ebb of the warmth Claus left behind among the sheets. When Lucas had soaked in all that was left, he would go about rising with great reluctance, steeling himself for the shock of his bare feet against the cold wooden floors.

It was on one such morning that Lucas stumbled into the kitchen to find his mother gazing out the window as she washed the dishes from that morning's breakfast. Claus was nowhere to be found, which meant that he was already outside playing in the snow. Somewhat sullenly (he never did like being left behind), Lucas made his way to his mother and, leaning up on his tiptoes, pressed a kiss to her cheek in greeting.

Her lips curved into a smile as she bent to press her lips to his forehead. "Good morning, sleepyhead. Your brother is already playing outside. Do you want breakfast?"

Lucas nodded silently, and Hinawa scooped his omelet out of the pan and set it on a plate for him. He picked at it distractedly for a while, as his gaze focused on his mother, who continued to stare out the window as she finished the dishes. It took him a few long moments to realize that she was peering at the desolate dirt of the flowerbed, and that the small downward tug of her lips must have been out of some kind of concern for the dead flowers.

"Mom?" he called.

"Yes, Lucas?" she replied somewhat absently.

"Why do you worry so much about the flowers? They're dead, aren't they?"

Hinawa paused in her work. After a moment, she turned to face him, grinning with something warm and bright that Lucas could not quite identify.

"It may look like that, but they're just taking a nap," she explained.

Lucas scrunched up his face in thought. "Sorta like the bears in their caves?"

She nodded. "Yes, Lucas. Exactly like the bears in their caves."

"But mom," he continued, his omelet forgotten and cooling on his plate, "how do you know they'll wake up again?"

Hinawa smiled that smile that was equal measures of warm patience and brightness. "I just do, Lucas. Just wait, you'll see. They'll wake up again."

Lucas wanted to ask why she knew that, but then Claus was knocking on the windowpane impatiently and beckoning him to come outside to play, and before he knew it, he had forgotten, more preoccupied by having his mother comb his hair and help him dress in his heavy coats so he could join his brother.

— . . . —

Come spring, the snow began to melt and the weather became warmer. Claus was out of bed earlier and the sheep were beginning to take to the fields again, his father taking Boney out with him to herd them. Gradual as the transition always was, it was still jarring to Lucas, who often woke alone to the sound of his brother's yelps from out in the yard.

It was because of this, perhaps, that he had never developed too much of a fondness for change. In the spring he missed those treasured moments with his brother in the winter mornings, but come summer he missed the cooler heat of the spring and the sight of the wobbly-legged newborn lambs as they learned to walk. By summer they had already grown and become more confident in their manner, walking surely and straying from their mothers more and more.

After hastily eating the breakfast Hinawa had left out on a cloth-covered plate for him and dressing himself, he ran out of the house and was met with the sight of his mother by the windowsill and the sheep in the field. Claus, however, was nowhere to be seen.

"It's about time you woke up, sleepyhead!" his mother called, her tone playful. "Claus already went off to town to play with Fuel."

Lucas was struck by the feeling of abandonment with a pang. His chin wobbled dangerously and his eyes began to fill with tears at the sensation.

Noticing, Hinawa hummed and folded the boy into her arms, stroking his yellow hair comfortingly. "There's no need to cry, Lucas," she cooed. "Claus is your brother; he'll always come home. Besides, he's only a walk away! You could join him, if you wanted."

But Lucas did not like walking into town alone, and this did nothing to console him. Realizing her mistake, Hinawa clucked her tongue at herself and guided Lucas toward the windowsill, her hands on his shoulders.

Once he was standing in front of it, she gestured at the empty flowerbox. "Tell me what you see," she prompted gently.

Lucas hiccupped. He did not see anything but dirt. "N-nothing…"

"Ah, then you aren't looking closely enough. Look closer." He did, tears subsiding in the face of his curiosity. "Now what do you see?"

"Dirt?"

Hinawa chuckled. "Oh, Lucas." She pointed then, her fingernail hovering over a section of the dirt. "Look there. Do you see it now?"

He scrunched up his eyes and looked really hard, and sure enough, he did see something. It was a shoot of green among the blacks and browns of the soil. His eyes widened and he gasped at the sight.

His mother's hands squeezed his shoulders. "See? The flowers always come back in the spring if you love them enough."

Lucas poked his finger at the frail shoot gently, feeling the stem against his soft skin.

"Why don't you help me take care of them?" Hinawa asked. "If they have two people loving them, they might wake up even quicker!"

"Really?" Lucas asked wonderingly.

"Let's find out," she said before leaning down and pressing a kiss into his hair.

And so it was that Lucas took to helping his mother in the mornings, watering the shoots and rubbing the soil between his fingers to see if it was healthy. Claus must have gotten a bit jealous after a while, because one day he started lingering around the house, eying them curiously until Hinawa invited him to join them. The other boy was not as gentle or patient as Lucas was, and he often jabbed at the shoots too hard or watered them too much, so Lucas steadied his hands and taught him just how long to water them and how to touch while Hinawa looked on.

Eventually, the shoots grew into bright yellow sunflowers. Lucas and Claus ran their fingers along the crown of petals wonderingly, and Hinawa did the same, a pleased smile on her face.

"We did it, mom!"

"We sure did, Lucas." She placed a hand on each of her son's shoulders. "We sure did."

— . . . —

They went to visit their grandfather's house a week later, and when Lucas was brought back home from the soot-covered Sunshine Forest, the sight of the flowers made him cry even harder. Claus just gritted his teeth and made his hands into angry little fists.

When Lucas woke up the next morning – the morning of the funeral – his brother had already gone to the cemetery. He exited the house to find the flowerbox empty, its flowers strewn all over the ground and trampled underfoot.

— . . . —

He almost decided not to see them ever again after what had happened, but after Claus disappeared and his father took to wandering the mountains, it felt like they were all he had left. So Lucas taught himself to cook his own breakfast and sweep the floors and feed Boney. He put bandages over his own cuts and soothed his own tears when he burned himself on the stove. He learned how to ignore the jeers and judgmental looks of the villagers because of his refusal to order a Happy Box and renovate the house, instead opting to explore the forest with only Boney at his side.

And all through that first winter, he learned to keep warm on his own by bundling himself up in his jackets and his brother's sweaters to compensate for his absence. He ran his fingers through the dirt of the flowerbox and pressed prayers and little wishes for sunflowers and snapdragons and lilies, or even dandelions, into it.

Lucas kept believing because it was all he had left.

— . . . —

Lucas was thirteen when he stopped tending to the flowers. It was not because he wanted to, or even because of the way his father looked at him for doing it. The townspeople said that he was too old to believe in fairytales, but Lucas still believed. Flowers had not bloomed in Tazmily since the peddler and his soldiers came to stay, but Lucas had never stopped believing in what his mother taught him.

He stopped because he had to go find Duster for Wes, and after that he had to help Kumatora and Duster find the lost treasure of Osohe Castle, and after that everything got complicated and jumbled and Lucas had no time to do anything but think of the duty that the destiny the Magypsies spoke so resignedly about had thrust upon him – pulling the needles in a race against the Masked Man and his army to save the world.

They only rested at his house because Duster kept giving him worried looks and Kumatora seemed altogether less sure than usual. They had never been a particularly boisterous group, but there had always been a certain glint of grim determination in their walk. Yes, they were fighting an army in a war where the odds were so intimidatingly stacked against them, but they had to do it. If not them, then who? That, at least, had been enough to keep them going.

At least it had been until Tanetane Island.

Lucas was plagued with nightmares after their visions there (Can you feel my heart, Lucas? See? It's like before. Lucas, Lucas Lucas, LucasLucasLucasLucas – let's switch places), and his eyes were soon ringed by deep, purple bruises. He woke screaming in the middle of the night, cold and shivering and drenched in sweat with Boney whining and yowling and gazing at him with his large, long-suffering eyes.

He supposed, then, that Duster and Kumatora's insistence that they rest at his house before going after the next needle was a way of trying to ensure they all had a good night's rest before reentering the fray. Lucas knew better, though. He observed them, and noticed the slight shifts in the way they carried themselves and how they talked less and less each day, letting a tense, silent rhythm settle between their movements in place of words.

"I'll stay with you until the end," Duster had promised, but the way he said end sounded more like he was giving into a foregone conclusion than resolving to fight.

Kumatora, too, seemed to have resigned herself to fate. She did not shout curses at the enemy during fights or scold Duster for being slow anymore. She was quiet more often than not, both in battle and outside of it. In battle, her silence belied a strong, deadly concentration as she weaved her psi into scorching firestorms and devastating lightning strikes. Outside of battle, she seemed to follow Lucas like a drifting balloon tethered to his wrist.

They had begun to lose hope, and perhaps Lucas had too.

Lucas had not been home since he fell out of the sky and into the bale of hay Wes and his grandfather had laid out for him, but being back did nothing to comfort him. His mind was weighed down by the task before him and the mysterious Pigmask commander who had wiped them out with a simple swipe of his sword. Those nagging, insistent thoughts and doubts made him restless, so long after Kumatora and Duster had fallen asleep, Lucas wandered out of his too large bed and out into the cool summer night.

He walked past the flowerbox and toward the ruins of the old barn that had been struck by lightning a year prior. With weary eyes, Lucas looked down upon the scorched earth there. The grass had not grown back yet, and the ground was brittle and dusty.

Lucas heaved a sigh he was not even aware he was holding, and before he knew it, he was pressing his hands into the dirt. Closing his eyes, he folded his psi into countless seed-sized bundles. He tied his wishes into those bundles (let grass and flowers grow, and mother rest in peace, and father come home, and Claus, Claus, please, Claus… let everything be alright) and sewed them into the ground until he fell asleep, exhausted from the effort.

— . . . —

Kumatora woke him the next morning.

"Hey, hey, Lucas!" she said, shaking him awake. "Are you okay?"

He swallowed the stale taste in his mouth and blinked up at her groggily. "Yeah," he replied.

She crossed her arms. "Why'd you sleep out here?"

Lucas shrugged. The truth was he did not really know himself.

Kumatora stared at him reprovingly for a moment before sighing and walking back toward the house.

Shakily, Lucas got to his feet and dusted off his shorts. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and made his way back inside.

It was not until they were ready to set out that he noticed that the patch of earth he had spent the night hunched over was punctured by countless blades of grass. Wide-eyed and disbelieving, he stumbled away from the others and knelt down alongside it. He ran an incredulous hand along the prickly blades; the sensation sent a shiver up his spine. His mind was reeling uncomprehendingly.

"Are you coming, Lucas?" Kumatora called.

Lucas nodded and stood up.

— . . . —

It all raced by in a blur after that.

The temple in the jungle and the fight with the Masked Man, saying goodbye to Ionia and being summoned to New Pork, being told the devastating truth behind it all by Leder, the shackled secret-keeper of their world.

Time only seemed to slow when he came face to face with King Porky.

The king of the cardboard city was ancient. He wheezed and coughed like an old man while mocking and taunting them as if he were a spiteful young child, younger even than Lucas. Everything about the old man felt wrong, and Lucas felt his emotions flare up at the sight of him and the sound of his spiteful words. He was a living contradiction, an outlier. He did not belong on Lucas's islands, nor was he wanted there, especially after everything – the chimeras, the slow death of the village, the mechanical abomination that killed his mother and tore his brother from him – was his doing.

Why? Lucas shouted. Why have you done all this?

The old man had blinked at him almost as if he did not know what he meant.

"Because it's fun," the king replied.

And then he had found out about – about Claus – and maybe a part of Lucas had always known. Perhaps he had sensed his lost brother in the ruthlessly efficient movements of the Pigmask commander, his psi singing like a discordant plucked string whenever he reached for it to use against him, but this –

That monster's name is Claus? Its name was Claus? That almost sounds like a person's name! But now it's my robot. Not even a fragment of life remains inside it. It's Master Porky's slave robot! It does whatever I say! It acts on my will alone. It's my double. It doesn't know anything about who you are!

For the first time in his life, Lucas felt hatred well up within him. Virulent and scalding, it transformed his psi into crackling vortexes of energy every time he unleashed a PK Love on that monster –

— . . . —

Lucas cried for the first time in almost three years when his brother left him.

No matter how much healing psi he poured into his body or how much he begged or screamed, his brother remained motionless, his heart silenced forever. The sound died in his throat, leaving his body to be wracked violently by sharp, sporadic gasps. For years he had kept himself buoyed with the hope that Claus was out there somewhere and that someday they would be reunited. Now, with that hope so cruelly fulfilled, Lucas gasped for air. It was like a dam had finally been overcome by the waters it levied. He was adrift in the wake of the loss, devastated by the suddenness of the emotional miscarriage. He could not breathe. He could not think.

Someone was speaking, but he couldn't tell who it was.

"—now you need to believe in yourself."

And it sounded like his mother, or Claus, or maybe both. When he looked up, there was a hazy silhouette around the needle, refracting its violet light. Lucas forced himself onto his feet despite his wounds, setting his brother's head down gently and stumbling toward the needle feverishly. He set his hand on it and felt something warm enclosing it, almost like a hand.

He would not let Porky win.

Lucas put his other hand onto it; they began to shine a brilliant blue.

The flowers always come back in the spring if you love them enough.

Then he would make it so that spring came to the entire world.

Lucas pressed a wish into his psi. He thought of his mother's flowerbox and kind smile, and of Claus's warm, comforting presence at his back on calm winter mornings, the memory so vivid he could almost feel his brother's heartbeat against his back….

Together, the twins pulled the final needle.

— . . . —

The new world looked amazingly similar to Tazmily, before anything was changed.

After the celebrations and congratulations and exclamations of joy, Lucas returned to his new home and stared at what looked like his mother's old flowerbox. It was filled to the brim with flowers of all kinds, flowers Lucas had not even known to exist before then.

Nothing was perfect, but Lucas would always believe, if only because no one else dared to. Running his fingers along the petals of a sunflower, he closed his eyes and pressed one last wish into the rich soil there….

Smiling softly to himself, Lucas sat down on his porch step and waited for them to come home.

A/N: Thanks go out to my readers. Thank you for taking the time to read this piece. Reviews and feedback are always appreciated!

Thank you again, and I hope you enjoyed reading this story!