A/N: Hello everyone! So, this came to me while I was playing through for the 4th or 5th time and I thought to myself "wait, isn't this a war? Y'know, that really awful thing that is hated unanimously by everyone with half a brain cell? Cause it really doesn't feel like it." That got me thinking, Robin is the master strategist and has to make pretty much every decision for the group. Seems like that would bring up some pretty sucky ptsd.

So I figured, yea I'll write about that.

Warning: This series assumes you have played the entire game and found the majority of the support conversations. If anybody cries about spoilers, I will not hesitate to shoot you with lightning.

Originally posted: 2/25/15


West of Ylisstol

Chrom

It wasn't a particularly loud sound, but it was enough to wake him up.

Chrom sat up the second he heard the rustling in the bushes. Arm instinctively reaching for his blade, just as Fredrick had drilled into him.

He looked around, eyes alert for whatever the source was. Raiders? Bandits?

...Bunnies?

Chrom cast a vengeful glance at the small, fluffy creature as it retreated back into it's lair within the bushes, apparently of the belief that if he glared at it hard enough the creature might conveniently spontaneously combust. His theory debunked, he was about to attempt to regain his peaceful rest when he noticed that Robin wasn't asleep

The mysterious woman had been rather distant ever since their battle in Southtown. A sign of her guilt, Fredrick said. A sign of bad food, Lissa said. Whichever it was, it kept her silent for the majority of their long walk unless directly spoken to. The cowl of her long cloak hiding her face, only the soft trails of her silver hair flowing out of it.

Now that they had made camp, Robin seemed to enjoy occupying her time by staring into their camp fire, so much so that not even sleeping appeared to hold any appeal in comparison even as the bags formed under her eyes. Her gaze was so fixed on it that she didn't even notice when Chrom got up. He had to admit that this was weird; he didn't know what she was like before they met her in that field, but she didn't seem so solemn in the short few minuets they'd spoken. Granted, that could have been because she was too focused on figuring out just who she was and how she got there to put any mind into how she acted.

"Remembering something?" He said, touching her shoulder

She flinched away, startled. "Huh...oh, it's you." She looked back at the fire. "N-no, I'm fine. I just...it's nothing. Go back to sleep."

Chrom looked at her tired face. It was clear that she hadn't slept all night. "When are you planning on going to sleep?"

She shrugged. "In just a minuet." He sincerely doubted that.

He sighed and sat down next to her. She looked at him quizzically, "What?"

"What's bothering you?"

"Nothing..." And Fredrick thought she was a master liar

"Well the 'nothing' has been keeping you up all night. We have a lot of ground to travel tomorrow, and I don't think I'd be able to carry you should you pass out on the road."

Robin looked at him, then back into the fire. "...He looked at me."

"Who?"

"That man. One of the bandits, I don't know his name. I never will...but he looked right at me when..." she started trailing off

"What did he do?" Chrom couldn't abide it. Bad enough the fiend would hurt innocents in his life, and now his actions would haunt this innocent after he passed?

Robin shook her head, "He didn't do anything...least, nothing that I saw. I mean, I know he was probably a horrible person but..." Robin looked at Chrom, "He looked right at me when I...when I killed him." She closed her eyes, "He was so scared...I had just shot a lightning bolt into him and he was terrified...he just couldn't believe that I'd killed him. He didn't want to die. None of them wanted to die."

Now Chrom remembered his first kill. It wasn't his first battle, so he guessed it was probably easier for him, but he remembered seeing that man every night for a month until more faces kept joining him, and after awhile it just became too many to remember. He had forgotten them all.

But Robin was new. Not just new to killing, but new to this whole world. She didn't remember anything about what had happened before; she was practically a newborn in terms of experience. She had just woken up and been thrust her into a battle.

"Is this...common?" she looked at him again, a mix of confusion and sadness shined in her eyes.

"No, it's not," he said resolutely. He had soiled her first experience with the world by making her kill someone. He had to fix this, "There are good people in the world, who do good things. There are places where nobody has to get hurt. Battlefields are the exception; they are horrible places...but necessary. Battlefields exist because bad people try to destroy those places, and we have to stop them."

Robin looked at the fire, then she looked back at him and smiled so innocently Chrom could have easily mistaken her for Lissa. "Will you take me to these good place?"

"Of course."