Without Vocation
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Warning: This piece, in addition to some adult themes, contains pairings from FE4 (Seisen no Keifu). All pairings mentioned are possible in-game, without hacking, but are not necessarily "pre-destined" or popular. If you flip out over the idea of, say, Patty marrying Sharlow, you may not like some things referenced here.
This was inspired by Aideen's dialogue with Sigurd in Chapter One, where she explains her motivations for becoming a nun instead of a knight... and the idea of Aideen as an active knight presents quite a contrast with her retirement into a convent by the time Seliph and the Tirnanogue gang take up arms!
She never has forgotten that the Mother Abbess did not want to teach her.
"You were born to be a knight, and have a warrior's heart."
"Isn't that what you need in your order? A knight bound to serve the Light?"
Disapproval etches a V into the forehead of the Mother Abbess.
"One without a vocation should not take vows. You have no vocation."
But the name of the Jungby family, the support of Prince Kurth, is enough to overrule the misgivings of the abbess.
Aideen wonders, now, if this was not her first error.
-x-
"Mother, the Lord of Jungby is here to see you."
Aideen feels a chill despite herself; the name raises too many ghosts. Images of her father, her brother flicker in her mind, and only once they pass does she think of Lester. It doesn't seem in keeping with her son's character to announce himself in such a fashion, though, and she is filled with doubt as she follows the novice to the reception room.
The Lord of Jungby cannot be Lester. He is fair-haired, wiry and of middling height. When he sees Aideen, his small tense mouth opens into a collection of flashing teeth. There is no malice in the smile, though, only playfulness, and for a moment Aideen thinks that this is what Andrei should have been.
"Aunt Aideen! Do you remember me?" His eyes are a muddy shade, some uncertain cross between brown and blue.
"Yes, of course. Faval." Briggid's little boy, last seen by her as a squalling face peering over Briggid's shoulder. Faval wanted to stay and play with his cousin, and Aideen wonders what might have been had Briggid only allowed it. If Briggid had come with them. But that door is long shut, and the grown man standing now before her has opened another.
Faval has come to escort his aunt home, so she can live at Jungby in style instead of being locked away in some remote corner of Isaac. Faval, she realizes, is impressed with his own newfound status, and thinks he ought to make the most of it. This is one way of doing so. Aideen refuses. The ducal seat of Jungby, after so many years, is not her home. She entertains Faval for a week and more, getting to know this long-lost son of her longer-lost sister, but in the end, she does not cross the convent gate with him.
Before he leaves, Faval does ask one thing of her.
"Who was my father?"
She tells him, and the grin falters, then inverts itself into a grimace.
"That bas- sorry, Auntie," he says, and then his teeth flash brightly again. "I guess I owe Patty a thousand now."
Her sister's children. A hitman-for-hire as the new duke of Jungby, a thief become a respectable lady in New Thracia. But they survived, and they thrived and found their places in the world, so she cannot cry over what might have been if Briggid hadn't gone off alone. She can only wonder where Briggid might possibly be.
-x-
So Aideen takes her vows, though she admits freely that her motive in doing so is not purely to walk the path of the Lord but to walk a path that will lead her to Briggid. This, in its way, must surely be the Lord's will. Why else would her heart be filled with such certainty that only by abandoning knighthood will she see her sister once more?
The Lord's will, in the end, leads her back on the path of a warrior. The cascade of events that places her in the midst of a war- the fall of Jungby, her imprisonment in Verdane, her release and all the battles that followed- surely must be some thread of fate unspooling, or great unseen wheels spinning beyond their comprehension. She might have been a knight of the bow in this war, sending out a rain of steel arrows at the enemy, but instead it falls to her to heal the injured, to send home the exhausted in the midst of a fight.
She grows used to measuring herself against men like her commander Sir Sigurd- good men, decent down to their bones, but unreflective men. In their company, Aideen feels like the guiding light she ought to be: serene, with goodwill in her heart and an unwavering faith in the sacred driving her forward. When she measures herself against Father Claude of Edda, Aideen feels the deficiencies in herself. Claude's calling is so inextricable from his will that it seems safe enough to say he was born to it, that his Bragi bloodline defines him. Priesthood is not a costume to him; the staff in his hands is not some marvelous toy.
If Adean were not already married by the time Claude joined their struggles, she might have been compelled to follow him, to learn his secrets, to learn the inner mechanism that drives him. But the force that drives her is now satisfied, for on the very day Father Claude arrives in their midst, Aideen at last finds Briggid. She places the holy bow Ichival, the bow she never could have fired, into Briggid's hands and restores the missing half of herself, and in that moment all her choices seem blessed.
"I believed this path would lead me to my sister. I have found her. I give thanks."
She means every word. She does mean every word.
-x-
They left as rebels and return to her as conquerors. Shanan and his new bride come to see the Mother Abbess in her convent, and more than that, they want her seen. Aideen belongs at their wedding, at their coronation. She was a mother to Lakche, was a guide and then a friend to Shanan, and by all means she must be present for this triumph.
No. She doesn't belong there. Shanan's ascension day should be of Isaac, for Isaac and Isaac alone. A noble of Grandbell has no place in the congregation, not after what Grandbell did to Isaac. That wound may one day heal- if the Lord is willing, that day may be in her lifetime- but now the wound is still too new, too raw. It festers, and Lady Aideen at the court of King Shanan would be additional poison.
-x-
At first she has no time to contemplate her fate or anything else. Not with four small children on her hands (and her back, and at her feet...). Five children, once Delmud is left in her care. Six, once Lana is born. There should have been eight, she thinks, but Briggid didn't go to Tirnanogue. She went straight east, toward the Thracian peninsula and what she thought was safety, and she took Faval and Patty with her.
Shanan and Oifey do the best they can do help her, but these are young men- boys, really- and there is much they don't know. But they do learn... as they must. There is nothing else for them to do now; Shanan is too young to fight, and Oifey has no army to advise anymore. Holyn cannot help them any; the fires that destroyed his right arm and damaged his leg are beyond Aideen's ability to heal. Perhaps Father Claude could have saved Holyn, but Claude is dead and the line of Edda dead with him. Claude is dead, and her old friend Lex, and that little rascal Dew, and Sigurd himself and the three knights who served him, and...
Some names she cannot bring herself to say. They stick to her tongue like clots of blood as she holds Lana to her breast and weeps.
Holyn dies a few months after they reach Tirnanogue; Aideen thinks that at least he died in his native land, and prays that one day his bones will be moved home to Sophara. She grasps for these small comforts because the great sweep of the world holds no comfort at all, beyond the thought that the dead no longer suffer. Unless they look down on the world they left and see its devastation, that is. She prays that they don't.
Each night she falls into the dreamless sleep of the truly exhausted, and wakes in the morning light feeling that she hasn't slept at all. Sometimes she does not even finish her prayers.
-x-
Lester sends her a letter. He tells her of the reclamation of Jungby, a difficult task given how deep the Empire's corruption penetrated into Grandbell. Worse, the unrest in Verdane has spilled over into the western duchies of Grandbell, and chaos reigns more often than law.
"This is no place for you, Mother. Not yet."
Not yet, maybe not ever. Aideen is relieved; she was afraid her son's letter would be another invitation back to her ancestral seat.
-x-
The little boys get older, old enough that they want to spend their time sparring in the yard with Oifey and Shanan. Lakche joins them, as she joins her brother in all his games. That leaves only Lana at Aideen's feet all day, and Aideen mothers Lana as she never could the others, simply because Lana is the last of them and there is finally time to expend all that love and attention upon one child. She decides to train Lana to follow her into the convent, and Lana takes to it as naturally as Lester took to the bow.
In teaching Lana her prayers and the art of the staff, Aideen rediscovers her faith. She learns alongside Lana as though hearing the teachings for the first time, as a child in spirit. This newfound faith is not a comfort to Aideen; it is a terror.
For the first time, she sees the magnitude of their errors. Of their sins. Of her sins.
-x-
Another letter arrives, on better parchment and with grander seals, and this time Lana is asking for her. Will Aideen not come to the wedding, to see Lana joined to Emperor Seliph? It means so much to them both, Lana writes, and the words she uses are so artless, so nakedly sincere, that Aideen considers it. Isn't that the natural act of a mother, to sweep down into the imperial court and arrange for her daughter the perfect pageant of a wedding that she never had, that Briggid never had?
The Aideen of twenty years ago would have done it, but the Aideen of today cannot.
"I will keep you in my prayers," she writes, and then squints at the words she's just laid upon the paper. Is that a harsh dismissal of her daughter's dreams? Or is it the most loving act Aideen can now perform?
She really doesn't know. It might be both.
-x-
They failed. Had they earned such failure, such total catastrophe? They had, Aideen realizes, earned them through pride, through recklessness, through misplaced trust, and the gods whose bloodlines they carried showed them no mercy. Good men with good intentions created a hell upon earth, and with just enough time to realize it as they burned. Were they merely reaping the harvest of the chaos sown in Agustria and Verdane? Could the outcome have been altered, or did it all play out as though scripted by some invisible hand?
Aideen doesn't know, and without that knowledge, she cannot blame any of the dead... only mourn them. She keeps them all in her prayers- separate prayers, for the living and the dead, and with each passing year there are fewer for whose safety she must pray, and more for whom she must say, "Lord, keep their souls ever in your embrace."
It takes months, sometimes years for news to filter up to Tirnanogue; too often Aideen learns she's been hoping for the safekeeping of someone already passed from the world. The news often comes in the form of a traveling bard, singing of the sorrows of Lady Tiltyu, of the tears of Queen Fury. Once Aideen eagerly awaited the bards, looking to them as heralds of the world beyond Tirnanogue. Now, she shuts herself away as they sing, and she lets Oifey sift the grains of truth from the dusts of romance.
Oifey is past thirty now, tall and broad-shouldered with a fierce mustache. He was a soft-faced boy with wispy fair hair when they embarked on this course of disaster. Aideen does not look at her reflection; a noble of Jungby needs to see herself in a mirror, but a nun needs to look first to her soul. Every time she looks into the mirror of her soul, she sees the word Briggid inscribed across the glass.
Bards bring no news of Lady Briggid, dead or alive. It's as though she simply vanished from the world.
-x-
The next visitor to the Mother Abbess is the one she doesn't expect. Letters come her way- from Patty in Thracia, from Lana in Barhara, from Faval and Lester in their battles to secure western Grandbell. But the visitors come less often, perhaps because anyone who wishes to disturb the peace of Mother Aideen has already done so. And yet he comes- on foot, unaccompanied, armed with only a cheap iron sword.
She has not seen him in more than two decades. She knows him on sight yet feels he's a stranger; his face has changed little- surprisingly little- but everything else about Finn is unfamiliar to her.
"I've found Briggid," he says, and his voice carries so little emotion that "Briggid" might be mistaken for a small dog or a child's toy. "Your sister is alive, and well, though she has no recollection of her past."
The moment feels as brittle as aged porcelain. When Aideen speaks, she is almost surprised that she doesn't fly apart into sharp little pieces.
"What part of her past?"
"Anything before the year 766. She denies her heritage and doesn't know of her children."
He tells her of a small village near the eastern coast of Thracia, where Briggid lives a simple life under another name, with an adopted daughter and a small militia under her command. There is more that he's not telling her, Aideen senses, but she leaves that alone for the moment.
"I took Lady Patty to see her, hoping the sight of her daughter would restore Briggid's memory," Finn says as a conclusion to the improbable tale. "It did not."
"How did Patty react to the sight of her mother?"
"I never told Patty the reason for the visit. I didn't want to raise her hopes falsely."
"And are you telling me this because you think I should go see her?" I do not have the Ichival to press into her hands this time, Aideen thinks. Faval has the Ichival, far away in Jungby, so she can't awaken Briggid with its power.
"I am telling you so that you know that she lives, and is happy. Briggid knows a part of her life is lost to her, many years of it, but she is content in Fiana. Her daughter loves her and all there respect her." He pauses, and then he adds, with what seems like regret, "She fights with a sword now, as though she's also forgotten how to handle a bow."
"It can't be Briggid." Briggid would not forget, would never forget. Even if her mind didn't accept her heritage, surely her hands, her sinews, her blood would know how to fire a bow.
"Forgive me, Mother Aideen. I didn't come this way to trouble you."
The use of her office catches Aideen off-guard, and this time she thinks she may truly fall into pieces. She fights to keep her voice as steady as his.
"Are you telling me that Briggid is better off not knowing anything of her past?"
"That wouldn't be for me to say."
She reaches out, and he recoils, as though expecting to be struck. Instead, she takes him by the arm. The cloth of his shirt is coarse, as uncomfortable as the habit of a penitent. She doesn't allow that sort of mortification in her convent.
"You must stay the night. We've more to talk about."
He stays for several days more, longer than he'd intended. It seems to her that Finn thought he could deliver his message and disappear into the black night, and Aideen doesn't allow him so neat an escape. In truth, she clings to him for as long as she can. He once had a passing fancy for her, and she thought he was a nice boy (and he was a boy then, barely older than Oifey), but the reason she doesn't want him to leave goes far beyond any fleeting connection from their ruinous youth.
Fourteen men fought in the company of Lord Sigurd, and she must pray for the repose of Sigurd and the other thirteen. He is the last, and Aideen has not had this irreplaceable connection to anyone since Holyn died. So she keeps him as long as she can, all the while extracting from Finn every detail he can give her of Briggid- her life, her habits, the daughter she adopted. Only when he will say no more of Briggid- though he is holding something back, always holding something back- does she ask a different sort of question.
"Why did you never seek out your children?"
"It wasn't possible."
Perhaps it's the truth. She can see that he believes it so completely that there is no argument to be made.
"Your son hates you." It's the wrong word, and she regrets it. Hate was what filled Andrei's breast- twisted, corrosive, destroying his soul, driving him to murder. "Not hate... he wants nothing to do with you."
"I suppose that can't be helped."
The Mother Abbess didn't want her, Aideen remembers, because she didn't feel a knight could be turned into a priest, that the two weren't compatible. She wonders what that Mother Abbess would make of Finn's absolute faith, of this belief in his earthly mission so complete that only Father Claude's faith in the divine could equal it.
"Patty already knew before I told Faval," she says to him then, and feels no guilt in the admission. "Or she suspected, anyway."
He doesn't even blink at the idea that the young woman he calls "Lady Patty" like a stranger has figured him out.
"There is nothing I can offer them," he says, and with this Aideen realizes she is done with him.
"Finn... thank you for coming all this way to tell me of Briggid. My heart is lighter for it, now that I know of her happiness. I will not disturb her peace in... in Fiana."
"If Briggid regains her memories, I will send her to you," he says to her before he slips out the gate.
"Thank you," she says again, and this time she means it.
-x-
Perhaps she wasn't selfless enough to be a good nun. Or not selfish enough- sometimes she feels that one blurs into the other, turning bad to good and good to bad.
Selfish. What is her sister's survival against the deaths of so many- not merely the worthy men and women of Sigurd's army, but all the murdered children? What of all the civilians who suffered, a generation who knew of nothing but war and occupation? What does it say of her that she cannot strip away love for her twin, cannot cut it off like a gangrenous finger so that she can better love the rest of humanity. Father Claude could have, she thinks, and in Claude it might have been a beautiful act. But maybe love of Briggid, or love of the children, was what kept her from becoming something terrible after Andrei's murder of their father, after Barhara and all their losses. If she had the ability to cast that love, that need, away... what else might she have lost?
She loves Briggid more than the gods that supposedly blessed them. She's known Briggid for but a few years out of her life- five years together as children, then another brief period as young adults in exile from their homeland- and yet that drives her more than the memory of her long-dead husband or the children who now live so far away. She should have cast aside the veil of her pretensions and followed Finn back into the world she hasn't seen in twenty years.
-x-
Another five years pass, and the letters come less frequently. Lester takes a bride. Lana has a son, then a daughter. Faval rules Jungby well despite the social errors that earn him comparisons to a hilltop bandit. And Patty, it seems, forgets about her aunt in Tirnanogue. Perhaps she's reconciled with her father, or married the young priest who gave her an excuse to settle in Thracia.
And then, one evening, the Mother Abbess is notified she has a visitor waiting. She is slim, spare, her flesh taut across her cheekbones. Her blonde hair is pulled back, except for two wisps that hang down around her chin, softening the sharp planes of her face. Those wisps are both shot through with white strands. Her eyes are dark, and they blaze with recognition when the Mother Abbess enters.
"Aideen!"
"Briggid..."
There is no holy bow this time, but there doesn't need to be. Aideen knows her twin sister's face even now; Briggid is the mirror that she has not looked into for half a lifetime.
But she remembers her role, or at least the role she will have for a few hours longer.
"Briggid, you must be exhausted. I'll have a room prepared for you to rest in; do you need anything to eat or drink? It will take a little while for me to pack."
"Pack?" And Briggid's eyebrows slant in the exact way that Aideen remembers.
"We're going home, aren't we? Together?"
"Yes," Briggid says, and her voice has the old snap of conviction. "We're going home together."
The Mother Abbess was right about her, Aideen thinks as she passes for the final time through the convent gates at Tirnanogue. In an ideal world, Aideen of Jungby never should have taken vows. But she did, and now the last and most fervent prayer of the imperfect nun has finally been answered.
The End
A/N: I left ambiguous who Aideen's husband was because the two top candidates (Midir and Jamka) are both great guys and I didn't want to favor one over the other. It's usually Jamka in my headcanon, but Midir is such a sweet guy that I didn't want to give him the shaft. Of course, they both ended up dead. :/