Drink Your Glasses Empty

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Came from the prompt "Finn and Glade's epic bromance" posted on the emblanon LJ anonymous meme.

For some reason it took me more than a year from start to finish. I don't know how "epic" they wanted, exactly, but this ended up being far longer than I'd planned.

Warning: Contains a scene with bullying. And consumption of alcohol. Rather a lot of it.

757

"His Majesty just told Prince Quan he could take you because he knows no one'll miss you if you don't come back."

The other apprentices had mostly stopped saying cruel things to Finn's face and put their efforts into making him feel unwelcome through quieter methods. That day's news of the Crown Prince's decision to bring Finn on an actual campaign had curdled the humor in the trainees' dormitory as surely as vinegar dumped into milk, though, and in response it seemed that everyone had lost their senses. The scene that Glade came upon in the common room looked like some kind of hunting tableau; they had Finn circled with his back up against the actual wall and no means of escape short of physically breaking his way through their ranks. Glade looked at his friend's clenched fists and tense jaw and decided that an eruption of this sort was all too possible.

"Hey," Glade said, but nobody seemed to hear.

At that point, Troy- not Glade's least favorite among their fellows, but damn close to it- offered his loud and unwelcome opinion on the real reason Lord Quan might have decided on Finn and began to elaborate on what Finn might actually be good for.

"Are you questioning Lord Quan's judgment? Maybe you'd all better go home and think that over."

Glade knew how to raise his voice the way their instructors did, and he stood at least two fingers in height above every one of the others, including Troy. When he spoke now, the more timid faces of those who had merely been watching turned skittish and the faces of those who'd been enjoying the scene went blank or defensive. But each one of them suddenly remembered they existed to serve Lord Quan and not to undercut his will, and as Glade shouldered his way into their midst, they dispersed- some abashed, some grumbling and no doubt anticipating the next time they'd get to corner Quan's favored apprentice.

"So, you're headed out tomorrow," Glade said, once he and Finn were the only two left in the room.

Finn nodded, but rather than look at Glade he kept glancing from one open doorway to the other, back and forth in a constant flicker. Glade realized that just pretending the last few minutes hadn't happened at all wasn't going to work this time.

"Come on, let's go upstairs."

Rarely had Glade been so relieved that fifth-years had double rooms with actual doors instead of a quad or the great open hall where the first-years all slept. There was of course no lock on the door, but they piled up Finn's luggage to prevent anyone from barging in. Glade wasn't surprised that all of Finn's belongings were already packed.

"You know Lord Quan chose you because you did better on your examinations than any of the rest."

Finn didn't acknowledge either the truth of the compliment or the spirit in which it was offered.

"They wanted to provoke me into something that would get me in enough trouble that I'd be suspended and Lord Quan would have to take somebody else."

He sounded perfectly calm now, but Glade just shook his head at his friend's observation. On the one hand, Finn was almost certainly right. Troy and Dermot and Ciaran and the rest of that gang weren't just expressing their own hurt feelings over being passed over for this special assignment. On the other hand... it did mystify Glade a little that Finn could always give such good explanations of things and yet came across so oddly when he needed to talk to other people.

"You looked a hair's breadth away from doing exactly that just then," Glade said in return. "I wish I'd had a mirror so you could've seen your own eyes."

Finn looked down at his boots.

"I'm sorry."

"For what? You didn't do anything." Glade shrugged. "Forget about them. You won't be seeing any of those guys for months, and I got us something to celebrate."

He opened his jacket and produced a gleaming bottle half-filled with the warm amber of fine whiskey.

"Where did you get that from?"

"I've got sources," said Glade, knowing that Finn would assume that he'd pilfered it from the kitchens. He hadn't, in fact- Glade had coaxed the little daughter of Count Dorias into making him a present of some whiskey out of her father's personal stores.

They knew how it was supposed to be drunk, but Glade hadn't been able to cajole Selphina into giving him any little whiskey glasses and so they poured it into a plain pewter cup.

"You first," Glade said as he handed the cup to Finn. Finn took a long swallow of the whiskey. He closed his eyes for a moment and rocked back on his heels.

"I think I like it?" he offered when he opened his eyes again.

"Good." At this, Glade took a drink of it himself. Something about the way it smelled let him know he really shouldn't down it as he would summer ale. It burned and filled up his throat like honey and he had to clench his teeth and force himself to swallow it.

"How'd you get that down without choking? This is strong stuff."

He almost called it "vile" and caught himself just in time. It tasted like the worst medicine he'd ever been forced to take- or even worse, like medicine smeared on old bandages. His eyes were streaming, and Glade began to fish around in his pockets for a handkerchief.

"Here."

"All right, laugh at me," Glade said as he accepted the handkerchief Finn extended to him. "I'll get the next one down better, you'll see."

Finn had already finished his share of the cup.

"It's not so bad," he said as Glade steeled himself to drain the remainder of it.

"A minute ago you said you liked it." Anticipating the second mouthful was nearly as bad as actually drinking it. "I think we'll save the rest of the bottle for when you get back."

"That's fine," Finn said. He'd settled down on the heap of his luggage.

Glade decided to sit down on his bed and pray silently that he wasn't going to be sick. The whiskey definitely wasn't summer ale. In short order everything seemed to get very bright, almost as though he was seeing the world through a sheet of crystal. Glade looked around just to orient himself. The room itself didn't seem right; most of what had been in their room was Glade's anyway, but the walls and shelves did look wrong with Finn's belonging all packed away. At least Finn's bed was just neatly made up and not stripped bare, as when somebody died.

"They'll probably have me room with Denis now. All he ever wants to talk about is how things are back on the farm." Denis lost his own roommate to brain fever earlier in the year, though the rumor in the dormitory claimed that Denis had bored the other youth to death.

"I guess I should be even more grateful to be the one going away." Finn tried to hide his smile behind one hand. "Death by Denis doesn't make for a very good epitaph."

"Yeah, you can look at it that way." He was thinking now of the strange commotion in the hallway on the night when Denis's Dead Roommate got carried out. "Don't get killed, okay?"

Finn's eyes went nearly as wide as the blue porcelain saucers that Princess Ethlyn used when she invited the apprentices to tea.

"I... I don't... you know that if-"

Some intuition of Glade's said that he didn't really want to hear what Finn was trying to spit out, and so he cut Finn off.

"Nah. I know you won't get yourself killed. You're too careful."

He said it as lightly as he could muster, but it didn't banish the uneasy feeling in the room. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment that broke only when Finn had to yawn.

"I think I should sleep now. Lord Quan won't be pleased with me if I'm late in the morning..."

"Yeah, you should sleep." Glade didn't even want to move anywhere- up, down, or sideways. He felt something cool and hard against his foot and realized the bottle of whiskey had rolled to him and was halfway under the bed. He didn't feel like rescuing it right then. "We'll sleep. It's a big day tomorrow."

760

"Who are you again?"

Glade's outraged disbelief upon seeing this tall young knight in immaculate fancy-dress wasn't entirely feigned. Of course he wouldn't ever take that tone with someone who outranked him- and the insignia on his coat made it clear the "stranger" now did- but somewhere in the last three years Glade had acquired just a little bit of resentment. Just a little.

"You were supposed to be gone for six months! First you were in Grannvale, and then some other place, and then Agustria. We heard you'd all been killed by the Grannvale army, and we heard you'd been on a boat sunk by pirates, and then we get word that you're safe in Silesse. Next thing we hear is there's a terrible war going on in Silesse, and now you turn up here."

"It couldn't be helped, Glade."

His voice wasn't quite the same, but everything else was. The same wide-eyed and earnest way of explaining himself, more sorrowful than defensive. Anybody else would've raised their voice in turn, or made excuses about long distances and letters being lost along the way.

"I know," Glade said then, and now he felt a little annoyed at himself. "I know. It's... it's just been a while, Finn."

Yet within a quarter of an hour, it almost felt as though those three years hadn't passed at all. Glade's room might have been their old room from Fifth Year what with Finn's fine new coat draped over a chair and his souvenirs spread out on the bed.

"I managed to get this out of Silesse," Finn said as he pulled out one well-wrapped parcel. "I thought you might like it."

Glade whistled as the wrappings fell away to reveal a shapely bottle of crystal-clear glass containing something as transparent as pure water. It wasn't water, though- all the elaborate seals and trimmings on the bottle made that evident enough.

"Whoa. Silessian firewater? I never thought I'd get to try this stuff."

He'd heard about it in songs, but couldn't recall even seeing any. Even Count Dorias didn't have any in his cellar, as Dorias thought the Silessian concoction improper for knights of Leonster.

"It's supposed to be served on ice. I don't suppose you have any?"

"I can get it," said Glade.

One of the perquisites of not being an apprentice any longer was that he could order an apprentice to fetch him a bucket of ice. Before long they had their private party assembled- a bowl of ice with the bottle of firewater sticking out of it, two whiskey glasses Glade had picked up on a trip to Manster, and a plate of salted nuts and sausage cubes.

"In Silesse they serve it with little plates of cucumber salad or buckwheat cakes with fish roe on top," Finn said.

"Yeah, we don't have anything like that here," Glade said as he assembled himself a tiered stack of sausage cubes. "Fortunately. So, did you even rescue that princess?"

"Which one?"

"Which one? Come on now... wait, you're not kidding. How many princesses did you get to meet out there?"

It turned out the army assembled by Lord Quan and his friend Sir Sigurd had princesses to spare. Finn spoke at inordinate length of the Princess of Isaach with hair like a raven's wing and dazzling skill with a sword, of the elegant and gracious Silessian queen, of the golden-haired noblewomen of House Jungby. When it came to the valiant Princess of Nordion, though, it seemed to Glade that Finn clammed up, that he picked his words with exceptional care and was trying far too hard not to say too much. Glade did gather that Princess Raquesis had liquid dark eyes like whiskey at the bottom of the glass, but beyond that he had to fill in the spaces.

The bottle of firewater had frost around its neck by the time Finn decided his allotment of words for Princess Raquesis was spent. Glade tipped back the first shot of it in one motion, just as though he were drinking whiskey. And then frowned.

"This really doesn't taste like anything."

"It's not supposed to taste of anything," Finn said. The laughter in his voice seemed to be aimed at the drink rather than his friend's ignorance. "If it were low quality, it would taste of something, but the best firewater tastes like nothing at all."

"I guess I don't understand," Glade said, and he wondered what they'd do with the rest of the bottle. Tip it into a bowl of punch at the next officers' ball?

"You'll get used to it. We learned to drink it to pass the time in Silesse. The nights there are longer than you'd ever imagine."

"I bet they are. Well, just in case you think I spent the last three years moping around the castle without you..." And Glade proceeded to give an account of his own two forays southward into Thracia in the company of Count Dorias. It might not have been as exciting as riding around half of Jugdral in the company of half-a-dozen princesses, but Glade tailored the story to emphasize the parts that weren't boring, and Finn didn't seem bored by his account of it. The questions he asked indicated he actually cared about what Glade had been up to, anyway. Then, once the firewater and nuts and sausage were all gone and Glade had only the dull parts of his adventures left to tell, Finn asked a question Glade wasn't expecting.

"What was it like the first time you had to kill someone?"

"The first time? I... ah..."

Glade knew he'd wounded a man pretty badly. One of the brigands infesting the Thracian border had tried to make off with their horses and Glade fended him off with a javelin. The brigand ran off and they never found his corpse, so he might have survived.

"I don't know that I've actually killed a man," he confessed, and Finn seemed strangely disappointed by the news. "I guess you're saying you have?"

"Dozens," Finn said, with more wonder in his voice than anything resembling pride. "I kept a count for a while, but somewhere in Agustria I lost track and stopped counting."

"You killed dozens of people? All by yourself?" Finn had gotten taller since Glade last saw him, but he was a stripling compared to someone like Dorias, much less King Calf or Lord Quan.

"Mostly by myself. Brigands. Pirates. Agustrian knights. Thracian mercenaries." Finn looked down and lowered his voice before admitting the next part. "A troubadour."

"You killed a woman?"

"I might've killed two. That was in Agustria, too; I think we had to fight every standing army in that kingdom."

It wasn't wrong, exactly- Leonster had a few female knights, of course, and they fought and sometimes died alongside the men- but it didn't seem right.

"Sounds like you got a real education out there," said Glade. He already knew too well that the things they'd learned in class didn't help much in the field. "Well, since you've done all that- what is it like?"

"You feel terrible afterward, but in the moment... I was just looking for a weak point to hit, to take them down. You look at another person and decide where to strike and then do it, and before there's time to realize what you've done, another enemy's there and you must do it again." Finn had taken off his gloves along with his coat before they'd started their little party, and now he was looking down at his hands like he expected to find some proof of guilt or dishonor there on his palms. "It didn't always seem real. I wasn't always certain that I was real."

Glade wasn't sure what even to say then. He'd always known that riding with Lord Quan wasn't just some grand if perilous adventure spanning the breadth of the continent, that it was war, real war, where surviving until sundown meant ensuring that other men never saw their home or families again. But knowing it and knowing it were two different things, as great as the difference between hearing about Crusader Nova in church and standing before one of Nova's descendants and feeling her presence around them. He reflected for a moment on that encounter with the borderlands brigand- realizing the man needed to be stopped, letting the javelin fly and not thinking twice about it. Feeling a more than a little disappointed that the brigand got away.

"I don't think that's how it is for everybody," Finn was saying now. "Some of the other knights, the ones with more experience, they talked about the art of the sword and poetry of battle and things like that, but..."

"Poets are liars." And drunks and womanizers, based off the bards that Glade had actually met.

"Not all of them," Finn said, and Glade sensed there was a story behind that, somehow. "I wish we could've both gone with Lord Quan..."

"Next time," said Glade, secure in the belief that there would be a next time, and another after that, and so on for twenty more years.

764

"Cheers."

The dull tap of their ceramic tankards didn't sound all that celebratory.

"It's not exactly Conote whiskey," Glade said of the drinks he'd bought with the meager bonus Count Dorias awarded him.

They both knew this tavern had quite a store of it; the red-haired barmaid served it up to those patrons who could afford it nearly every night they'd come here. But nothing so fair made its way into their cups, ever. Not anymore.

"We'll have some real drinks one of these days," Glade added.

Until then, a cheap and potent brew of malt would have to suffice. The taste of it summed up their exile well enough: too sweet on the front of the tongue, too bitter at the finish, too bland to ever be satisfying.

Glade would've liked to share the details of the past five weeks he'd spent making contacts with anti-Imperial groups to the west of Alster, but he couldn't breathe a word of it in public, and even if they were alone there were too many things he couldn't tell Finn. So he had to keep the whole tragicomic tale of his dealings with other would-be rebels to himself. But this tavern, despite the fine things it had in stock, was as smoky and noisy as any other and they could, at least, talk about something.

"Well, how are the kids?"

This was their public shorthand for the situation going on at Finn's place.

"Nanna's fine. I don't know how well she could talk the last that you saw her, but she's speaking beautifully now and asking so many questions."

"And Lugh?" Glade prompted.

"The same. He's bright and filled with energy. Restless. Climbing the walls might be the way to put it." Finn kept his voice low, as he always did when they discussed Lord Leif in any fashion; Glade had to lean towards Finn a little to even hear anything. "He wants to go outside the castle and of course I can't take him there. He should be learning to ride, and we haven't been able to do that either."

"Well, we're working on that," Glade replied.

"I know."

They finished the first round of drinks and Glade signaled the barmaid to bring them another.

"Sounds normal for a boy his age," he said, when it became clear Finn didn't have anything more to volunteer regarding Leonster's young heir. "How's the wife?"

Glade wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know. It seemed magical at first when, in the midst of tragedy, Finn's battlefield princess simply showed up in Leonster one day with the justification that she was there to help Finn look after Lord Leif. Glade had to admit that Lady Raquesis did shower upon Leif the love that Princess Ethlyn would have given him, and the arrival of a daughter some months later gave Leif a playfellow. Raquesis and little Nanna couldn't replace Leif's true mother and sister any more than Finn could truly step into Lord Quan's boots, but it seemed they'd all made the best of a terrible situation. At first.

"She's restless, too," Finn said now of his golden-haired princess with eyes the color of the whiskey they couldn't afford. "She's homesick, I think."

"Aren't we all?"

"Not in the same degree." But he didn't bother to illuminate this difference of degrees, and so left Glade guessing what it was that set Raquesis in her grief and her longing apart from any of the rest of them. "She has Selphina come over to lend a hand with the children, and they talk about..."

"About what?" Glade prompted.

"Nothing."

This, Glade knew, was a dodge- or, in its own way, a lie.

"Something hasn't been right with you," he said then. "I used to think one day you'd laugh at even a simple joke again, but it's been so long I've stopped telling them."

"I'm sorry."

"Quit saying that. But don't quit... talking," Glade added, lest his irritation at hearing apologies over nothing be taken the wrong way. "So often you seem on the verge of saying something, I don't know what, and then you let it die unspoken."

"Don't worry about it, Glade. Not every passing thought needs to be said, after all."

"That's true, but it doesn't mean all you ever can do is brood about... whatever it is."

"I suppose not," Finn said, the most non-committal and inconsequential form of agreement possible.

Glade drained his tankard and set it on the table with a clack that expressed his irritation better than words.

"All right, I think we're done here."

If Glade were drinking to actually be drunk, the malt liquor would've had some virtue, but Dorias might call on him at any time to go riding off to contact some other group of dissidents, and he couldn't afford the hangover. He paid the barmaid and ignored the flutter of eyelashes as she winked at him. He and Finn walked out to the street, shoulder to shoulder against the cold.

"As bad as it smelled in there, it's no better here in the open. Alster's king can't even get the streets cleaned."

They had to step over piles of rubbish, ranging from a broken chamberpot to a dead dog, as they walked toward the crossroads where they normally took leave of one another. Drops of freezing rain fell in large splatters around them, and by the time they reached that crossroads they were the only two people in sight. Finn must have been emboldened by this, because instead of simply saying goodnight, he swung around, and looked at Glade with an intensity that hadn't surfaced in long months.

"I wish that there was anything at all I could do..."

"You know it's best you stay out of it."

"Not knowing the details of what you're up to won't save my life if we should fail."

"If there is anything at all that gives you an added measure of protection, that in turn protects Lo- Lugh." Glade believed that to the depths of his soul, even if he wasn't sure that sparing Finn the details of his recruiting misadventures actually counted as protecting either of them.

"Then why am I allowed to be seen with you at all?"

Glade didn't have an answer for that- not a good one, a solid one, an answer that couldn't be refuted. The answer he'd arrived at himself was something he couldn't really tell Finn: Because if you don't get out and have a drink or two with a friend now and again, you'll go mad from sheer boredom and then we won't have anyone to look after Lord Leif.

"Look... Count Dorias has more experience than the both of us put together. We must keep faith in his plans."

With that, he thumped Finn on the shoulder and they went their separate ways- Finn back to the seclusion of Alster Palace and Glade to the one-room flat where he passed the days until they might kick off their traces and take on the Empire.

776

Thick fog hung over Leonster like a pall. Glade could make out the familiar details of Crusader Nova's banner only because he knew them as well as he knew his own wife's face, and then again only because the banner flew at half-staff- Prince Leif's request to honor those fallen at the Second Battle of Alster. Glade silently offered up a flask in the direction of the banner, then poured a small trickle of the liquor within at the base of the staff, the only tribute he could give at present to those lost at that twice-damned, ill-omened city.

His observance complete, Glade took a sip from the flask himself and then handed it to Finn.

"What's in this?"

"What isn't? Sloe berries, spruce needles...the purest runoff from our fair sewers."

"It'll do."

They sat at the base of the flagstaff, slouched behind the tower wall so that even if the fog should lift in some miracle of light, the most gifted ballista shooter in Blume's army couldn't have a crack at them. The walls and the fog made a shell that encased them in a strange world, silent and gray.

"Come over for dinner tomorrow," Glade said, once he'd tired from the taste of sloeberry rotgut.

"I wouldn't want to inconvenience your wife."

"Selphina wouldn't mind. The more busy she is, the less time she has to think about..."

"Ah."

The flag above them moved with a heavy sound, more a flop than a billow, a commentary on the loss of Count Dorias and his men. The air itself seemed rife with symbolic import, from the sad sigh of the banner to the the curtain of fog that blotted out the green patchwork landscape around them. Somewhere in that gray void, King Blume's army waited. Glade felt he could sense their presence, but he couldn't see a thing- no glint of steel, no shapes of men or horses, no baleful emblems of the Imperial legion.

"This suspense does nothing but grind the men down. What day are they planning to strike? How long will they keep us penned up like this?"

"They'll wait at least until they hear we've been reducing to eating rats," Finn replied. "The question is whether they'll delay until we've been forced to butcher the horses."

That gave them four months, perhaps. Each week they did the sums to see how long they could survive on full rations, on half rations, on half rations with two fast days a week, on next to nothing.

"Before that day comes, should we put it around that we're already in those straits so they make their attack while we still have the strength to repel it?"

"We don't have the numbers." A gust of wind nearly obliterated Finn's words.

There wasn't any counter to that argument; it didn't matter if their cause were just, or their men had spirit, or any other thing that could tip the scales in some romantic ballad. They didn't have the numbers, couldn't break the siege, and were most likely all dead men still going through the motions above ground.

And they'd be eating rats and maggots before they died. The thought of it was enough to make Glade reach again for his flask.

"If we have to make our last stand here, at least we'll die on our own soil."

"We must hold out until Lord Seliph arrives."

Glade didn't share Finn's hope that Prince Leif's elder cousin might be their salvation. After placing his trust in the false "Prince Shanan" who'd proven next to useless for anything except talk, the help of foreign allies seemed a dim prospect.

"Are you so certain we can? You weren't one to be over-optimistic when we lost this castle the first time."

"If we were meant to die on these walls we could have died fourteen years ago."

Glade supposed it was well to keep in mind, even in these days of rotgut and rats, just how improbable it was that either of them lived at all, or that Prince Leif had lived to reclaim his birthright... if only for a few bittersweet months. The banner above them might as well never be raised to its full height, given all the blood shed for its sake- not just King Calf and Prince Quan and their wives, but Troy and Ciaran, Denis and Dermot, and nearly every knight who'd come up along with Glade and Finn. An entire small world died in that year.

"Since it wasn't our part then to die, we must now wait for Lord Seliph."

Glade nodded. It didn't give him much to hold onto, but that one sliver of faith was better than anything he'd come up with on his own. But the promise of Lord Seliph lay somewhere beyond the ring of Imperial troops, beyond the fog and the unseen horizon, and their now was the sorrowful sound of Nova's banner flapping in the breeze...

"It's a strange thing to mourn Dorias again," Finn said, as he placed his head against the ancient blocks of granite. "I don't know that I've ever come to terms with the idea that he'd been alive all along, that he didn't perish at Alster ten years ago."

"Well, it's not any great fun coming to terms with the idea that he's dead for the first time, either."

There was a little bit of liquor left yet in the flask; Glade finished it off without even tasting it. Not that he much wanted to taste it.

"Sometimes I don't think I've truly grasped that you've been alive these past ten years either, that we never really lost you." Finn was watching him, was fixed on him, and his eyes looked fiercely blue even with the fog sucking the color and life out of everything. "I don't know if I've yet let myself accept that my life wasn't traded for yours."

"And if it had been, you should have no regrets," Glade replied, because that was what they'd told themselves a decade before and kept telling themselves.

Glade ran his tongue over his lips; his mouth felt numb, and he hoped yew berries or some other poison hadn't gone into that rotgut. It was a ridiculous place to find himself, above the castle in this bubble of stone and fog, an empty flask laying on the stones and a dribble of liquor there at the base of the flag pole, with the pair of them acting like errant apprentices.

"You'll come over tomorrow?"

"Yes," said Finn, and he closed his eyes. "Why not?"

780

"To New Thracia and her newest general."

Small glasses of fine Manster crystal polished to a diamond brilliance, Conote whiskey put into the barrel back in King Calf's time, in the very year of the new king's birth. It went down warm and smooth and tasted of peat and smoke and heather and honey, leather and grass and a hint of salt. Drinking it was tasting twenty years of strife and tears and toil, of torn-up earth and the River Thracia running blood.

"I think I've been waiting all my life to crack this one open," Glade said as he held the empty glass to the torchlight.

Finn smiled at him- not a laugh, not quite- and they sat in companionable silence. Glade was done with talking, after all the day's speeches, and really wanted only to bask in the warm glow of the whiskey and his promotion. There were others celebrating around them, but the revelers and the banners on the Guildhall ceiling and everything else melted into a comfortable, colorful blur. Finn alone was still, a fixed point in the whirl of light and sound.

Then the pretty little red-haired girl who was serving them drinks came around with more whiskey.

"And another for King Leif," Glade said, and raised his glass again, though they'd already drunk countless toasts to the king and Queen Nanna, to Emperor Seliph and his lady, to Princess Altena, to the spirits of Quan and Ethlyn and Calf and Alfiona, to Crusader Nova and the rest of the Twelve. And somewhere in there had been a mention or three of the most celebrated knight in all of Thracia- who, mysteriously, had not received a generalship or any other temporal honor. "What about you?"

"About me?"

"What's your part in the victory spoils?" When Finn stared at him as though the words made no sense, Glade said, "He'd give you anything that you might ask for. Absolutely anything."

"I don't know about that."

Glade couldn't make out quite what it was in Finn's voice, but it was something odd, something arch, perhaps? Something he hadn't heard from Finn in a long, long time. He gave credit to the vintage whiskey and brushed the oddity aside.

"Selphina's stepping down as soon as His Majesty can decide on a replacement to lead the Guard. She wants to... oh, how did she put it? Nurture the peace like she would a garden? Something like that."

"This is good."

"Sure. I'm relieved, really... don't know what I'd do if I lost her. She's talking about... children," he added, with more embarrassment than the admission probably warranted. "I don't know if I'm ready for that."

"It's not possible to be ready," Finn said, and he now smiled at Glade's hesitation.

"Well, I'd say you did all right."

"It wasn't only my doing," Finn said, as though his role in raising Their Majesties of New Thracia had been some thing of little consequence. His smile had vanished.

Glade leaned back and crossed his arms in mock annoyance.

"After all this time, you still haven't learned how to take a compliment."

Finn shrugged off the criticism and took another serving of whiskey as the red-haired girl made the rounds.

"I did ask His Majesty for something," he said, once they'd toasted King Leif and Queen Nanna again.

"Good! It's about time. Tell me more."

"I asked for a leave of absence."

"Oh, come on." The joke was flat and absurd even by Finn's standards. "Wait. You're serious. Why now? We've spent twenty years trying to claw our way back into Leonster, and the instant the crown touches His Majesty's brow you decide to head off? I think it's your sense that's taken its leave."

Glade felt he'd borne every misfortune of the past two decades- dirty work, sacrifice, lost battles, lousy allies, a martyred father-in-law, siege and borderline famine- with something close to equanimity. Something that set a good example for the young ones coming up behind him. But this bizarre admission of Finn's caused a surge of anger... and worse, panic... to rise in his breast.

"You always were the strange one," he said in the end, and the tight feeling in his chest subsided just a little. Not completely. "So where are you going?"

"Some place that isn't here."

Now he was lost for words, truly. Why in blazes would Finn want to be anywhere but Leonster?

"All right. When are you planning to be back? Three months? Six?" When Finn failed to respond, Glade pressed him further. "A year?"

"I can't say that much."

Something in the way Finn sounded, something in the way Finn wouldn't even meet his eyes just now, disturbed Glade all the more. He remembered things, odd things, that he didn't really want to remember or analyze.

"Are you coming back?"

The darkest of suspicions underscored every word.

"If Nova's grace allows it," Finn said, falling back on another dodge, another non-answer.

Glade didn't bother with a toast when the serving girl offered up another shot of whiskey.

"If this is about Raquesis, I think you might search ten years and it'd do you no good in the end. We searched every attic and basement and hovel in Manster while you were off with Lord Seliph, all in hopes of finding these supposed prisoners. We looked everywhere in Northern Thracia where the Empire could reach and sought King Shanan's support to search in the Yied Shrine and Darna..." He could only shake his head at the effort expended chasing phantoms. "They're not there. No petrified people. No dungeons filled with remnants of Lord Sigurd's army. We found corpses, but what we did find you would scarcely recognize as human."

The words had no effect at all upon Finn, who merely gazed into the depths of his whiskey glass as though truth lurked there in the dregs.

"So that's how it's going to be." Glade forced himself back into the voice, the stance, the expression, of the equanimous man, the magnanimous general. "Well, then. We'll meet again, in due time, and raise our glasses together and have nothing but good things to talk about."

Never mind that the time should've been now. Never mind the last twenty years. Never mind...

Glade could only shake his head one last time.

"Damn it, Finn. I'd thought we'd finally made it to the future. I thought this was it."

Finn drew in a sharp breath, his lips parted, and he nearly said something- some perfect explanation, or maybe a useless apology, or maybe neither. But he didn't give excuses, and he'd learned not to offer Glade apologies, and somewhere along the line he'd stopped expecting or providing explanations. And so the words never came.

They walked out, shoulder to shoulder as they had countless times before; just as on those other countless times they parted at a particular crossroads, one veering rightward and the other to the left. This time, Glade walked a short distance- forty paces, maybe fifty- before he stopped and looked back in the direction Finn had taken. Yet Finn was lost to his sight already, and Glade turned away and kept walking along his own course.

The End

A/N: The outline of this hews closely pretty to canon. For instance, Finn being an outcast among the apprentices is "canon" if you take the "Lenster's Fall" short story as canon, so I didn't invent that for teh drama. The fact that these two drink socially is canon. That Finn believed Glade (and others) to have died during the first battle of Alster is repeatedly implied in FE5. That Finn seems to have spent 15-odd years in a depressive state is outright said in FE5. The timeline is as close as I could get, given multiple conflicting timelines. So there wasn't much need to manufacture drama out of whole cloth, as it's all there in basic story.

The really murky stuff, like anything to do with Raquesis, I didn't want to touch, because there are other venues for that sort of thing.