In 2009 I decided to do the 365 drabble challenge - writing a 300 word ficlet every day - and for some reason I kept coming back to a story about Regal and Lloyd training together at night. We jokingly called it the "Regal and Lloyd Do Manly Things Together Saga" back then, and it had always been my intention to come back to it when I could do the story justice. If you're looking for the roots of this fic, it's in bits and pieces in a much older collection of mine on this site, "Once in Every Lifetime".

I hope you like it!

It Happened At Night

(a prologue. we had no choice)

With Kratos, it happened at night. After the rest of the party was asleep, depending on what they had planned for the next day, Kratos would pull him aside and teach him a little. Lloyd had never had a sword tutor before, and had always assumed that if he swung hard enough and fast enough whatever was in his way would fall before his might - and it was nice, too, to pretend like he had an older brother, even though Kratos was a little old for that.

For Lloyd, who had never been away from home before, those training sessions gave something to look forward to on the Journey of Regeneration, other than the thought of having no home to return to. It became their little ritual, and by the time they reached the Tower of Mana, the lessons gave him almost a nice sense of rhythm to the whole thing. If there was one thing he could always count on, it was that Kratos would have something to criticize, hinting at something that Lloyd could improve on. It made Colette's slowly waning humanity a little easier to bear.

It happened at night, the last night before they were going to approach the Tower of Salvation. They were sparring just outside of Hima when Lloyd had the joint realization that there was no reason a hired mercenary would stick around after the regeneration ritual was completed, and that he'd never thanked Kratos for teaching him. He thanked him, called Kratos 'master' in the shade of a flat-leafed tree, and when Kratos said he had no right to be called such a thing Lloyd thought nothing of it.

So when it all went wrong in the Tower of Salvation, and they learned that Kratos had been their enemy all along, it had been more than losing a teammate or friend - he'd lost a mentor, a teacher, a goal worth working towards. The situation spit them out in Tethe'alla with more questions than answers, stranded in a world not their own, scrambling for meaning in the middle of a crisis. By the time the dust had settled and the Key Crest he had cobbled together brought Colette back from the dead, they were on the run from Desians and the Papal Knights, criminals being chased down by convicts, and (in a way that Lloyd would not have been able to put together in as few words) he was worried his swordsmanship was stagnating, and homesick, besides.

No, not homesick, Lloyd found himself thinking, as they raced towards Ozette and the promise of healing Presea. I miss Dad, but it's not that. I miss having someone like Kratos around. The Professor was sort of like him - heck, back in the Sylvarant days he and Colette used to joke that it was like two parents and three kids - but she was not Kratos, and she needed her sleep.

And then the trees rattled, and the blue-haired prisoner dropped into their midst, demanding to talk to Presea. Lloyd had enough of people demanding things without explaining why. He drew his swords.