Does He Love You?
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Rated T for adult themes. Contains various Raquesis pairings, including some unconsummated feelings for Eltoshan and subsequent match-ups with Beowulf and Finn. But not at the same time. Not in this story.
(I was a child, I wasn't worried)
He loves me.
One white petal fluttered off, carried by the breeze until it dropped into the reflecting pool, where it floated.
He loves me not.
Another petal fluttered away, this time landing on the lawn where it gleamed like a pearl on green velvet.
He loves me.
That petal joined the first in the pool. They bobbed together, a pair of white skiffs.
He loves me not.
The fourth sailed on the wind beyond the hedges, out of her sight.
He loves me.
Raquesis kissed the fifth and final petal and dropped it into the pool, where a golden carp surfaced and tried to swallow it. She smiled down at her distorted reflection in the rippling water. The rose had told her the truth again.
When Raquesis took the petals off a calendula, or a daisy, or a chrysanthemum, she never knew what the answer might be. But the sweet white roses in the western courtyard always told her without fail that Eltoshan loved her. And they ought to know; they were Elto's own flowers, for each day he wore a white rose on his coat, above his heart. As one season passed to another, she let the other flowers alone, let them keep their fickle frills of petals, and asked only the white roses to divine her future. The roses and Elto became the same thing in her mind, until their fragrance spoke with his voice.
The roses kept assuring her that Elto loved her, even after he brought home his bride, some lady from Leonster who didn't care for roses and missed the flowers they had back in her homeland- the harebell, the aster, the wild anemone. Raquesis didn't know them, but she felt quite certain they weren't as good as the flowers in Nordion. She was quite certain they wouldn't tell her the truth.
And it was the truth, for Eltoshan continued to wear a white rose pinned to his coat, not some rustic harebell or frail anemone blossom. He would still dance with Raquesis, would catch her up in his arms and whirl her around, would even carry her up the staircase now and again. And Raquesis would rest her head upon his shoulder and breathe in the scent of his rose, and she'd feel like a bride being carried home. Through her eyelashes, the light of the chandeliers became the corona of a saint, bathing them both in a golden glow. She promised herself that she would never wed any man who wasn't as perfect as her brother... which meant, of course, that she would never wed any man who wasn't Elto.
But when the time came when she was of the age to marry, the world began to spin out of control. Fate wrenched Eltoshan away from her and set them on opposite courses. They moved now in a different dance, of captures and rescues, plot and counter-plot, betrayal and counter-betrayal. Raquesis consulted the roses wherever she found them in that summer of war when she rode with Sir Sigurd's army against her own brother.
Does he still love me? Even now?
She had her answer when they were joined again, in a reunion that neither of them could have anticipated. Someone had tucked a five-petaled white rose into the basket along with Eltoshan's head. Even to the end, he had loved her, it said.
(Waiting for love, I was late)
Sir Sigurd and his men could have taken her then and buried her alongside him, crowned in roses and sealed in clay, and she'd have been content. But they didn't. They left her in the light, in the air, and it felt as painful to her as to a fish seized tail-first and flung out of the pond. She couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't keep riding...
"Git back on the horse," one of the mercenaries told her when he found her drooped beneath a tree, wishing its bark would grow up and enclose her. "Yer brother's murder was shameful, an' we all feel it in our guts, but carryin' on like this isn't helpin' any. It's sure not helpin' Eltoshan any."
"Leave me alone," she said. Beowulf had claimed to be an old comrade of Elto's, but old friend was nothing at all compared to being Elto's sister, and it irritated her that he could pretend to share in her grief.
"Suit yerself," he said, and left her. After a few paces she heard him whistling some crude tavern song, as though he hadn't a care beneath the sun.
"Rude man," Raquesis muttered, but she watched his easy, confident stride as Beowulf departed. She didn't understand what she found in him worth watching; he was different, maybe. Not like Eltoshan, not like Elto's friends Lord Quan and Sir Sigurd, men who made fighting look beautiful. He was just different, she decided.
And yet, he worked his way under her skin.
"Here, princess. Yer favorite."
She glanced up at Beowulf's offering- a wild rose, with a fuzzy stem and a center caked with golden pollen. Its petals were a pristine white, with just a hint of color at their base.
"Thank you," she said, and she let him pin it to her hair. His thick fingers proved surprisingly deft.
"Found it by chance." She had to pay keen attention to untangle his thick Conote accent. "Don't usually see the white ones, not out in the wild."
She braced herself for some kick-in-the-tail metaphor, no doubt comparing her to the un-wild roses that belonged in the security of a palace garden. But it didn't come, and his hazel eyes seemed contemplative, without their usual glint.
"What sort of flowers do they have in Conote?"
"What? Oh." He looked sidelong at her and flicked a strand of dark-blond hair away from his eyes. "Gorse and heather and thistles. A mess of bees and thorns- nothing you'd care for."
"Gorse and heather and thistles," she repeated. She'd seen thistles, at least, and tried to imagine telling her future in a thistle blossom. She'd have to reach inside the cup of thorns to pull one tassel out at a time...
"The honey's sweet, though," she heard Beowulf call over his shoulder, and Raquesis hurried to keep pace with him. "Heather honey, can't beat it. Brews up real nice..."
Raquesis followed the sound of his voice without entirely knowing why. Maybe it was that she laughed, in spite of herself, at his earthy comments. Maybe it was that he never regarded her with pity... or maybe it was the way he regarded those who gave themselves over to pity, even if they were princes or princesses. Raquesis fell in step alongside Beowulf and began to move forward again. She did not ask the white rose that Beowulf placed in her hair about love. She did not ask permission from the roses and thistles, or any other flower, before she married him.
He carried her to the threshold of their borrowed rooms with a grip that was nothing like Eltoshan's, and he slipped off her dress with a look in his eye that made her realize that he'd been undressing her for months in his mind. She laughed up at him, and shook out her hair, and forgave herself for breaking her vows to Elto.
For a time, Raquesis was content to let the flowers be merely what they were, to let the bees go about the business of harvesting sweetness from amid the thorns. In Sir Sigurd's army, there was no time to fret over the exact number of petals on a rose. Instead, she counted the fingers and toes of the son she gave to Beowulf- five on each hand, five on each toe, just like the roses.
And she thought that was enough, this comfortable sort of getting-by with a husband who amused her, until the day Beowulf turned to her and said, "I think I've wronged you."
Don't die here with me. Go to Leonster, where the children are.
She didn't understand then, didn't understand until after the skies fell on them at Barhara. She thought of flowers then; she needed something, anything, to place in his grave. Raquesis made do with cheap bright things from a flower-seller, splashes of color without any scent. She didn't know their names.
She pulled the scarlet petals off- one, two, three, four, five- as her lips moved silently, the words never reaching the air. She heard them anyway, in her heart.
He loved me. He loved me.
(Tumbling right into ghosts)
Raquesis followed his last request, stumbling toward Leonster where the fatherless sons of Lord Quan and her brother both lived.
She'd thought herself a matured woman- knight and princess, wife and mother, someone who'd gotten past the childish fancies bred by life in a walled garden. Raquesis held that image of herself until she reached Leonster and Eltoshan's widow turned her away. She wasn't welcome there, wasn't allowed to hold her nephew, the little boy that looked so much like Eltoshan that even a glimpse of him sent a thorn into her heart. Adrift in a foreign land, with her husband dead and her son in other hands, Raquesis sought refuge under the protection of Lord Quan's aging father; there in Leonster she fell back into old habits.
He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me not.
The asters of Leonster were like deep-blue daisies that bloomed through the autumn. They had so many petals that Raquesis never knew what they might tell her, but she kept trying. She wrestled with the asters because there at King Calf's court among the angry young men who'd followed Quan, she found an old acquaintance, a lance knight with hair the same shade as aster blossoms. Finn hadn't really caught her attention when they both served with Sir Sigurd; she'd thought of him as little more than an extension of Quan, trailing his master like a shadow. But on meeting him now, Raquesis felt a pull of kinship that quickly spiraled into something else altogether.
This time, Raquesis did understand the wellspring of her interests; she saw in Finn a reflection of the devastation she'd felt over Elto's death. But Finn wasn't moping about under the trees in hopes that someone would come along and bury him; he acted just the way Raquesis remembered. Five minutes early to every appointment, his uniform neat and pristine, each sentence carefully phrased. Reserved, cautious, dutiful. Proper. But something in his heart was bruised and dented now, and Raquesis saw it in his eyes. Finn's eyes, brilliantly blue and outlined by dark lashes, said a great deal more than any of his quaintly-accented words; Raquesis spent more effort than she'd ever intended in trying to get Finn to talk to her using those eyes.
She accompanied Finn on his duties- guarding Leonster's orphaned prince- and watched the way he held poor little Leif, how he spoke to the child and played with him. Even with the layer of formality between Finn and his infant lord, Raquesis saw something genuinely sweet in their relationship, though she had to fight her own thoughts lest she sink into contemplation of the other little boys, the one she'd given up and the one her sister-in-law denied her. Raquesis forced herself to stay in the present, on helping Finn to hunt for Leif when the prince decided to hide in a closet, and pushed away thoughts of Delmud in distant Tirnanogue and Ares just a stone's throw away at her sister-in-law's home.
Finn filled the space left by those thoughts. Raquesis began to draw more glances out of him, began to entice sentences from his buttoned-up mouth that didn't just consist of "Lady Raquesis," "Pardon me," and other rote phrases. Once they truly started talking, the words came easily enough to both of them. They did not have to justify themselves and their losses to one another. They did not have to explain themselves as they tripped through conversations, doing their best not to stumble across any unspeakable name.
Sir Sigurd. Lord Quan and Lady Ethlyn. Beowulf. Elto, Elto, Elto...
Raquesis couldn't turn Finn into a sparkling conversationalist, someone who would've turned heads at her brother's court in its glory. He didn't know how to knock a lady off-balance with an uncouth comment, either, and Raquesis didn't want it out of him. She wanted Finn to be exactly what he was- steady and diligent, gentle and courteous. If he hadn't come into the world with any grace or standing, he'd acquired it through practice, had earned himself a knight's dignity one closely-held scrap at a time. Raquesis felt she loved him all the more for it.
She won him well before the asters passed out of bloom. She won him, and then he married her... it was, after all, the proper thing to do.
He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me... not.
The sixth petal squelched beneath her fingers. These pale-blue stars of a Leonster spring told Raquesis things she didn't want to hear. The white snow lilies and the yellow-trumpeted jonquils gave her the same story. He does not love you.
It was no proper message to take away from the flowers Finn brought to her, newly-opened blossoms still wet with the morning's mist. Flowers painstakingly gathered in the hour before dawn. He'd put effort into it, she could tell; that effort showed in the very way the flowers stood in the vase, the tall stems and the short interspersed in a beautiful fan. Not for him, to just pluck a flower from a hedgerow and give it to his lady with an impudent flourish.
So why was that careful arrangement of flowers sending her such a sour message- on this morning of all mornings, with the sun showing gold through the mist as their newborn daughter slept at Raquesis's side? Raquesis decided not to listen to the jonquils, snow lilies, and little blue stars. She wasn't going to listen to the harebells and anemones of Leonster, either, whenever they might come into bloom. Even here, surely, the roses would bloom at the height of summer. Raquesis would have her confirmation then.
He loves me, he loves me not...
Raquesis never found out what the roses of Leonster had to say. Leonster fell before a single rose could bloom, and she found herself adrift again, this time with Finn and little Nanna... and Prince Leif. Somewhere on the road between the charred ruins of Leonster and the promised haven of Alster, Raquesis sat on a slope covered in clover and wondered at herself. Where were they really going? Had Eltoshan's son survived the upheaval? Was her own son thriving up in Tirnanogue?
Lack of sleep fogged her brain and caused stray thoughts to pass through her mind like so much flotsam on the sea. As Raquesis watched the figure of her husband with Prince Leif, her fingers reached, without conscious effort, for a sprig of clover. She began to shred the trefoil apart- he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me.
Prince Leif pointed to something down in the endless clover; Raquesis could hear his tiny voice piping with excitement.
He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me. I wonder what Delmud sounds like now? He was Leif's age when I saw him last. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me...
Raquesis had gone through five or six springs of clover before Finn returned, something small cupped in his hand.
"Lord Leif found this and thought you should have it. It's said to bring good fortune."
It was another bit of clover, with four leaves instead of three.
"How sweet of him."
Four leaves. If she tore that piece of lucky clover apart, her recitation would end on a not. Raquesis pressed the sprig between the pages of her tome of fire magic and left it there. Why did these little omens bother her so? Why, with everything else in their lives destroyed or somehow beyond reach, did it upset her that she could no longer play her little game with rose petals and be certain of the answer?
"Finn, I think we've rested long enough. We need to be going."
And it was on to Alster, where she and Finn and Nanna settled into a life that revolved around the little prince. Leif was a sweet child, bright and inquisitive, and he wanted to call her "mother" because he felt left out when Raquesis spent time with Nanna. She let him.
"It doesn't hurt anything, Finn. I'm not trying to replace his mother."
Nor was she consciously trying to use Leif as a replacement for those other little boys. She didn't look into Leif's brown eyes- the color of Quan's, but not the shape- and see the golden-brown eyes of her brother in miniature. She didn't see Delmud's hazel eyes, a reflection of Beowulf. Not often, anyway.
As Leif grew, Raquesis found it more difficult to ignore the nagging little voice that told her that Delmud needed his mother, that it was wrong to have him grow up without her while she lived in relative comfort in Alster with her new family. She might have silenced that voice, though, if not for the other whisper in her heart that spoke more fiercely with every month.
He doesn't love you. Not the way he should.
At first, she'd taken Finn's cooled attitude toward her as a symptom of grief, of shock, the natural result of losing home, country, master, position, and so many comrades. She understood that pain entirely too well, and expected that they'd move beyond it. Life in Alster seemed stable enough, a number of the Leonster loyalists survived to join them in something of a court-in-exile, and of course they had the children.
Finn didn't move beyond it. He kept moving, kept on being neat and precise and five minutes early to everything, but it seemed to her that his heart was tethered elsewhere. Shared pain wasn't any sort of comfort to Raquesis now, and she tried to break him out of it through excitement, through tenderness, through everything she might imagine to be "love," and for all that she felt like a bird hurling itself at a window-pane. He returned her entreaties with silence.
He could talk with his eyes... but never once, since the fall of Leonster, had he undressed her with them the way Beowulf had laid her bare in a glance and enjoyed the spectacle. Never once... and looking back, Raquesis wondered if Finn ever had at all. Had she simply imagined things during Leonster's final autumn? Had she read the wrong meaning into his flushed cheeks and lowered lashes?
She remembered, now, the slightly numbed feeling of a tolerable existence with Beowulf. That was indeed tolerable compared to the ache of living at close quarters with someone so distant, with sleeping beside someone while mired in the knowledge that she gave him no reason to rise in the morning. If she could simply close her opened heart to him, and accept the role of a sister...
Raquesis heard the echo of the laughing little girl who'd dreamed of marrying her own brother.
And yet, he even now would bring her small gifts of flowers, because that was what he'd been taught a man ought to do for his lady wife. Raquesis tore off the petals by the handful and scattered them across their bed and into the bathwater. Leif and Nanna both found it a game. Which it was, in a way a child wouldn't understand.
He loves you not... and never did.
She knew that on the day that he fell, whenever and wherever that might be, his final breath would not be given to her name.
(I wait for another, don't you?)
Finn told her not to leave in search of Delmud, but didn't seem to understand that he gave her no incentive to stay. Not when he couldn't articulate a reason for remaining in Alster that in any way touched on what Raquesis wanted to hear from him. He objected to her plans to cross the desert in terms a knight would use to pick apart a comrade's flawed strategy... not the words of a lover facing down the prospect of months without their beloved.
She told herself that the separation might do them good, that it would give her some time alone to sort out her feelings, that it might spur Finn to think of her as something other than a reliable source of support. She could count on him to care for Nanna while she was gone, and she expected that he'd be a good father to Delmud as well. Finn wasn't objecting to her plans to claim Delmud because he resented the boy, or didn't want to deal with another man's son in his house.
Raquesis almost wished that Finn would say exactly that, though. It would've made it possible for her to hate him, to pull up love by its twisted roots and throw it out of her psyche. Instead, she left him in the same state she'd been for months without end- hopelessly tangled and frustrated.
The coils around her heart hadn't loosed at all on the afternoon when clouds of sand turned the sun to a baleful red disc above the Yied. Raquesis stared at the ill-omen on the horizon and hoped she had time to reach shelter before the sandstorm struck. Her horse seemed also to sense danger; he began to balk, and she had to waste her breath coaxing him forward, one hoof at a time.
Distracted by her mount's attitude, Raquesis didn't notice the flower sprouting from the sand until she'd nearly stepped upon it. She scooped it up and found it came easily from the barren earth; its stem was already cut. Raquesis blinked. A white rose, just like the ones that bloomed in the courtyard at Nordion...
Out of habit, she seized one petal between thumb and forefinger; her cracked lips moved in silent prayer.
The petal fluttered away, lost in harsh light that gave way to a reddish glow even as Raquesis reached for the second petal. A cloaked figure emerged from the sudden gloom, as though it too had sprung from the desert. Even as Raquesis recognized the apparition and both real and dangerous, she noticed two more, closing in on her from the left and the right. She took a step back, and a quick glance to either side confirmed another pair of these hooded beings.
Dark mages of the desert, five in all. She was surrounded. Her lips parted as she reached for her sword, but no sound ever crossed them. In the space between breaths, the world turned to something gray and silent. In the left hand of the statue that had been Raquesis was a perfectly carved rose. Perfect, that is, save for one missing petal, the emblem of a story interrupted, a question left unanswered.
The End
Lyrics are from "In Line" by Sharon Van Etten, off the album Tramp. This, of course, means that this story will come in search results whenever one looked for "Raquesis" and "tramp," which seems to be fandom's primary take on this poor young woman. I think she was just deeply, horribly unlucky.