Cold Water [Tales of the Abyss, Asch/Luke, PG]

[midnightdiddle]

Title: Cold Water
Author: midnightdiddle
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Word count: 2686 words
Summary: The difficulty in being reborn is the newness. That, and sharing a body (and mind) with another person. Prompt: June 23 - Tales of the Abyss, Asch/Luke: postgame body-sharing - At first he'd thought it was Luke's issues that made Luke turn down Tear and only his

Comments

[laryna6]

*laughs* It's interesting that a comm with 'kink' in the name has ended up producing so many gen and near-gen fics. I love what you've done with the prompt, it's a great exploration of one of the less depressing readings of the game's very Miyazaki ending (eg. Spirited Away: Chihiro forgot what happened and will never remember).

The difficulties they experience and that they're still putting up with this and still care about each other is highlighted by using Asch's POV, although the prompt leaned in that direction. I'm not entirely sure why the melting snow metaphor for Luke. The equivalent for Asch is quite appropriate to Asch the Bloody (it shows up in the nightmares), but if I had to use snow/melting snow for a character in ToA it would be Jade, no question. Luke's more associated with wind/breezes to me. Mind filling me in on what I'm not picking up on?

[cephy]

Mm, lovely. I like! :D

[lian_li]

Interesting. I only recently though about this because, weirdly, I had always assumed that it was Luke who came back. It never convincingly crossed my mind that it could've been Asch. Or, hey, both. So I particularly enjoyed this exploration of "what if...". Thanks! <3

[laryna6]

Check out the contamination sidequest. I don't know if it's up on YouTube or not, but there are four events. The first one explains why Jade can pull his spear out of nowhere and the fourth one says that when the Big Bang occurs after Asch dies (part two is talking with the Ortion Cavern cheagle in Sheridan: it's the original in the replica's body) there won't be anything left of Luke in that head but his memories. You have to do all four events & the Nebilim sidequest to get it (sometimes I play games the real way. Sometimes there's so much cool stuff I need a guide and I still miss out on cool stuff and feel emo about it

[lian_li]

Huh. Wait, I need to switch into thinky mode...

...There. Thing is, I *have* done the sidequest (I am a medium-grade perfectionist: I do not need to have collected each and every item [will some day manage with ToS, I hope! I want Genis' title!], but if there's a sidequest I've missed, I'll replay -- esp. with the Tales games, because sidequests tend to figure so much into character development*), but it's been so long, and I alternated playing it with my sister (it took months that way) that I obviously did not connect the dots too well. Thank you for making the effort to spell it out to me -- I'll totally have to re-watch the relevant scenes and discuss this revelation with my sis. (yay fangirl meta! ^_^*)

*which is why when I see people complaining about poorly developed characters in ToS or ToA, I tend to think they have only played the bare-bones storyline and missed about 75% of the relevant behind-the-scenes-stuff.

[yhibiki]

Oooh, I love what you did with the prompt. The imagery regarding the two personalities was particularly lovely. ^^