Disclaimer: Tales of the Abyss and its characters are copyright Namco Bandai Games Inc. This work is not for profit.

She started singing when she was little. She didn't really remember when it happened, just that it had. It was a part of her. Indispensable.

"The seventh melody... you've learned it... Tear..."

The songs that shaped her childhood weren't sleepy lullabies or childish nursery rhymes. They were hymns.

"I remembered... You sang it to me while I cried."

He used to sing her to sleep when she was little. The melodies soothed her when she was upset, carried her off to a land of quiet dreams when her eyes wouldn't close. She didn't know why they calmed her so deeply. She'd always thought it was because of him.

"You knew what the fonic hymn meant. You were telling me everything... right from the start."

She couldn't sing them without thinking of him. The hymns were the link that held their broken, splintered, bleeding family of two together. Even when she sang them in the midst of battle, he hovered at the back of her mind. She owed him more than they would ever know.

"Thank you... Van..."

Over the years, she'd watched his eyes change from gentle to calm to determined to fierce to angry to bitter to ice. Now they looked up one last time at a sky that seemed farther away than it had ever been from her home in the Qliphoth.

"...Farewell... Mysterica..."

When she was little, she'd never imagined saying goodbye. As the days went by, he spent less and less time in Yulia City and she spent more and more growing up. But her world still revolved around him. He was everything to her. He was her brother. Her role model. The singer of her hymns.

(Goodbye... my beloved brother...)

She would never sing them again.

The valley was too quiet.

She sat listening to the chirping of nighttime insects and the rush of the nearby waterfalls and looking out toward the shadow looming before the water that sparkled in the moonlight. Except for the shadow, it was too similar to the night it all began.

It hadn't been a promise she'd made to herself back then. It had just been what felt right.

What felt right now was giving that up.

The first note of her song carefully pressed into the silence. She knew the words and melodies just as well as she had the last time they'd passed her lips. That, at least, would never change.

Her vocal chords felt calloused at first. They shouldn't; it wasn't as though she hadn't spoken over the past months. She just hadn't let these particular words rise and fall.

Her song blossomed into the quiet, and she let her hand stretch toward the distant sky. For him. She couldn't sing them without thinking of him.

As her song faded, she pulled it back, cradling it close against her chest.

"I promise."

He was the one she sang for.

"I'll come home."

A/N: It's in my headcanon that the Grand Fonic Hymn might have been what ultimately brought Luke (or however you prefer to interpret him) back, perhaps with time and other factors contributing as well. If that is the case, I'm sure Tear had no idea of that when she was singing it, and quite possibly not even after the fact.

I used the word "he" in the second part ambiguously on purpose. In case of confusion, though, the last sentence does refer to Luke. The two uses of "him" just before that can be interpreted as referring to Luke or Van – I think a little bit of both, myself.

Lastly, all italicized dialogue comes directly from the game, so I take no credit for it.