Sleeping Beauty
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters
This is a little project inspired by my hatred of the original "sleeping beauty" tales, specifically horrifying variants like "Sun, Moon, and Talia." I have pondered this for some time, and the new "Sleeping Beauty" film pushed me over the edge, and I felt the need to write something in the spirit of... correction.
Rated T for adult themes and some darkness.
i. call down to the endless sleepers
The butterflies caught her attention as she walked along the beach; their bright blue wings seemed like fragments of mirror that captured the sky. And yet, she did not find these pretty things a pleasant sight, as Teeta knew too well why they swarmed upon the beach. Decay drew them near- the stillborn fawn in the forest, the withered corpses of the risen dead. In recent months, the fallen of some distant war, man and beast alike, had washed up on the shores of Rigel, and the butterflies blanketed the dead like azure flowers.
And here was another, still bound in a winding-sheet, with half-a-dozen butterflies in attendance. Teeta did not hurry her gait as she approached him- and it was a him, quite tall and broad across the shoulders- and only as her shadow fell across the corpse did the butterflies take flight, off to find the next unfortunate.
The shroud had fallen open to expose the face, the throat, the curve of a collarbone. Teeta saw to her surprise that the pale skin was not otherwise discolored, that the small creatures of the sea had not done their usual damage to the nose, the lips, the serenely closed eyes. He could not have been in the water long, thought the saintly side of her being, and the womanly side in its turn looked upon the unmarred profile and whispered, "Such beauty. Such a pity, too, that he is dead."
She bent over the corpse and pulled apart his shroud, curious to learn more about this particular stranger. There was nothing upon his body to identify him, no insignia of rank, no amulet to ward off baleful spirits, no gold or jewels. No tattoos marked his skin, though Teeta saw to her amusement that this long-bodied youth with the fair curling hair had not been of the priestly class. The dead priests of this unknown war all had been circumcised, but this man died intact, as on the day of his birth.
No, not a priest. Not with that body, firm as sculpted marble, not with those hands, the large hands of a fighting man. And a fight had killed him, no doubt about it, for Teeta saw the the wound in his side- narrow and deep, its edges inflamed. Here, the little sea-creatures had been at work, and Teeta's breath caught in her throat as she looked upon the angry red flesh. No dead man would be so, with his fatal wound still fevered to the touch.
When Teeta thought upon it later, she wondered how this fair-haired man had sinned so greatly, what he had done that he was sewn into a sheet and thrown into the water alive. In the moment, though, the saint and the woman in her both rejoiced that this man might yet be saved.
-x-
He did not wake, not on the journey to her house, not when she placed him on a pallet within her room, not even when she parted his lips to wet them with a trickle of fresh water. He did not so much as stir as she cleaned and dressed the wound in his side. His eyes remained shut, the dark lashes firmly down, even as his cheeks began to show a trace of color. But he breathed, not in the harsh gasps of a dying man, but in the reassuring rhythm of one emerging from illness. He breathed, and he took the water and broth that Teeta poured between his lips, and occasionally he would moan. Teeta would look at his eyes, darting back and forth beneath the closed lids, and wondered if the stranger dreamed.
He had many days and nights to dream there in her care, as the red swollen flesh of his wound became cool and smooth beneath Teeta's fingertips. She took him out in the air to feel the warmth of the sun upon his face, the gentle kiss of new rain upon his bared chest. Once she took him out beneath a nearly-full moon and watched the silvery light spill across his fair brow and curling hair. Such beauty, her heart whispered again. Such a blessed thing that he lives.
In the night, she would curl around him, warming his still-pale flesh with her own body's warmth. Her breath and his would blend into one seamless surge and ebb, and the embers of the hearth cast a rosy glow upon them both. Teeta breathed in the scent of his hair, the hint of salt from the seas that bridged his world and her own, and waited for the day.
She would be with him, always, until he awoke.
Author's Note: For a canon-compliant, gender-reversed "sleeping beauty," you can't do better than Teeta and, er, Zeke. I will say that the fact that "Zeke" was, apparently, buried alive by either his own men or by his enemies raises allkinds of interesting questions. Somebody goofed, perhaps... unless they weren't goofing in the slightest.