This is the first Fire Emblem fic I've ever written and completed, though I've been a fan of the series for a while now. Leila is one of my favorite characters, so it's only fitting I write about her. I hope you enjoy!
Mistakes
As Leila lies dying, she struggles with her mind -- her last thoughts -- but all she can think of is her mistakes. Mistakes, regrets, everything she did wrong instead of right -- the images flicker and shimmer across her glassy-eyed vision, flighty and skittish like small fish under bright light. She can't seem to focus on anything else -- it is the only thing she can feel besides the pain -- so she counts her mistakes, one by one.
The first mistake she can remember is from her childhood -- the first lie she'd told to her father. Part of the mistake was inherent in the fact that she had tried to lie to her father -- one of Ostia's greatest informants in his own time -- but at the mere age of five, she wasn't wise enough to know any better. It was so long ago that she could no longer remember how or what, but she'd accidentally broken something -- something that seemed valuable -- just moments before her father had walked into the room. Afraid of being punished, Leila had done the first thing that came to mind -- blurted out "It wasn't me!" before her father had even had time to see what it was for himself. Leila ended up not being scolded for the accident, but for the failed attempt at lying itself -- following which her father proceeded to instruct her in the fundamentals at proper lie-telling.
The next mistake that Leila can clearly remember is that of failing to wake up early to say goodbye to her father before he left for his last assignment under House Ostia. It seemed to her, then, at age ten, that saying goodbye to him the night before was enough. It was just another assignment, one he'd return home from in a few weeks; everything would continue as it had. But her father never came home from that one, and as Leila sat on the edge of his bed more than a month after he'd left, listening to Master Uther try and fail to offer words of comfort from the doorway, she knew she'd made a mistake.
Leila's head swims, and the blurred images passing over her vision skip and skim until she remembers Uther -- really remembers him. She'd served him directly ever since the death of his father, Lord Gareth, but the one mistake she'd made with him was never dissuading him. She's known how he felt for some time, but there was never any way around it or through it, it seemed to her. When Matthew came along, it almost seemed to fix things, for a while, but Leila knows that is not the case. She wishes now she'd only ever had the decency -- or the courage -- to confront the issue head-on.
But Leila has never been one for confrontation. Leila knows, only just now, that her next big mistake was failing to confront Matthew. They've been playing a tight-wound game with each other for months -- one that was almost amusing, almost satisfying -- despite all of his failed, flighty attempts to tell her so, Leila has always known what Matthew really wants from her. She wishes now she'd tossed the game aside and proposed to him instead. At least, then, she might have that to die with.
Her final mistake in life is a bitterly shameful one, an amateur's mistake. She could have gotten away clean with the information she overheard, and she should have -- maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe she was just being sloppy -- but Ephidel caught her before she'd even begun to make a move away from the scene. It is the mistake that tears at Leila most greatly. Where she failed at elsewhere, she would have liked to succeed in what she's devoted her life to, but all she succeeded in was making the same mistakes over and over again. They replay in her head, sliding over her vision in a blood-misted blur, but she cannot fix her mistakes now, so she only counts them, one by one.