First Blood
DISCLAIMER: Fire Emblem and its characters belong to Nintendo and Intelligent Systems.
Anxiety.
It pumps through his blood, seeping through his skin. It makes him twitch at every passing breeze, every rustle, every whisper. He breathes slowly, in and out, but even that doesn't calm him.
Before, Oscar thought he could handle the inevitable feeling before his first battle. Now, he's not so sure.
Casting a glance at his comrades, he sees the same feeling etched in their faces. Even that guy, Kieran, he smiles and talks of honour, but Oscar sees a hint of nervousness in his eyes. He's amazingly resilient, though. Some soldiers have already buckled and they haven't even seen blood yet.
The commander of their regiment sent them out at the call for more forces, saying that the skirmish could do them good. Fresh recruits with little training, they could use the experience in battle, especially in the fields against Daein.
Oscar fingers his lance, the shaft of which he has painted green. He doesn't want to stain it red, though he knows it would have happened sooner or later. He even did special mental exercise to get over this, but none of it helps now. He is just a knight, waiting for the order.
Absently he strokes the mane of his horse. She whinnies quietly, as though she is also a little uneasy.
"All knights are to report!" a voice yells. Oscar gently nudges his horse forward. He hears the squad leader issue commands but it's hard for him to keep focus. No, he isn't afraid, he tells himself. Their commander is Duke Renning. His ability is, after all, peerless.
Finally, he hears the trumpets sound. It's time.
Pulling on the reins, Oscar urges his horse onward. He feels his hand tighten on his lance.
Oscar looks around as his fellow knights do the same thing. Everyone here, a knight of Crimea, fighting for the same cause. In this crowd, he feels small. He's feeling anxious again, but the only comfort comes in the fact that the others feel the same.
The black armour of the Daein forces surfaces in his view. He watches the cavalry surge towards him. He watches as some of the front-line forces engage the enemy first. He watches Kieran hack away, kind of surprised that the knight is so into it, but he thinks it's probably just the heat of the battle.
A Daein knight surges towards him. No, Oscar thought, he wouldn't be killed here –
He feels a resonance in his hands as his lance meets the other knight's. Pulling the reins in his other hand, Oscar draws him and his horse back. All of a sudden, he feels shock: he launched an attack at another person. He…
No, there's no time to think now.
His battle training takes over. All the drills and practises he did start to fall in place; he executes a conditioned attack that's almost like a reflex. Oscar goes through the movements fluidly, trying to ignore the fact that the figure is living, breathing.
Like him.
Oscar shakes that thought. Just the same as training. That's –
No more resonance goes through his hand, just a sickening feeling. He thinks he sees the other knight look down at the lance now stuck in his stomach. The lance shakes in his hand, but he sees someone else coming and pulls it out. Fluidly he lodges it in the new enemy's helmet.
Did… did he just do this?
Two lives, already by his hand. Oscar watches the battlefield move on in a daze. Duke Renning is in the corner of his eye, tearing through the battlefield. Is he, Oscar, a coward for hesitating? For despising the splotches of red now over his once pristine weapon?
It keeps running through Oscar's mind, what happened on the battle field.
They won the battle quite handily, but he didn't escape unharmed; he's being treated for a graze on his right arm. It smarts, but healing staves don't do all the work, after all. A bandage is wrapped around his arm to soak up any remaining blood.
Is it okay for him to do this, to splatter blood on the landscape?
He ponders a speech Duke Renning made to them after the battle. The knights had been congratulated for their valour and success on the battlefield, and given words of encouragement. But what Oscar remembers the most is the Duke's last words: "We do this for the land and people we hold dear. Never let the faith shatter."
The people we hold dear.
Oscar recalls the reason why he joined the Royal Knights. It is his dream to be able to go home to his family and see them happy and safe because of what he has done. He is driven by a quiet passion. He wants to protect them: Rolf, Boyd and his father.
But is this able to justify the people he hurts to accomplish this goal? Is it okay to say he's right when there are people in the Daein camp thinking the exact same thing about their cause?
The priest is done treating him. Oscar turns to the lance propped up by his side. Its once polished edge is now laced with blood. The blood stands out against the steel of the lance. It taunts him. The stains only add to the confusion he feels, a reminder of the events that transpired.
He… he can't look at it anymore.
Grabbing a cloth, Oscar dips it into a bowl of water intended for cleaning wounds. The lance he takes in his other hand. He places the cloth on the lance edge and rubs, slowly at first, but increasingly harder as the bloodstains refuse to go away. His arm stings with each move, a reminder of his wound. It confuses him, pains him, scares him.
What other things is he feeling now? Even he can't pick them out.
Oscar tells himself that it's only first-time aftershock – everyone must go through it some time or other. But he's uncomfortable looking at his lance now; how could he bear to hold it in battle?
He sets the lance at its former place again, wondering if his fellow knights are feeling the same thing. Maybe they can help him.
It's easy to find Kieran, at least. He always goes to the training ground, only stopping for meals. Sometimes, Oscar wonders how he can be so insanely focused, but now he wonders even more so. Even sent out, his routine hasn't changed. Perhaps, Oscar thinks, he has a special mentality that can explain why he isn't nearly as shaken as everyone else.
"Hey, Kieran," he says. He doesn't get a response from the hacking knight, so he waits. Kieran's like that.
After a few minutes, the brown-haired knight notices him. "Oscar! It's not nice to not give a salutation of some sort!"
"I did. You didn't hear me. As usual."
"Well, of course! Nothing can break my focus!"
Oscar ignores the blatant contradiction. "Not even your first battle?"
"Definitely not! We still have tests to accomplish when we return to Melior! I will win them all! The marksmanship tests, the horse races, everything!" Oscar's starting to sense that this talk is going in the wrong direction, so he tries shoving the conversation back on track.
"Well, if most of us aren't jittery or injured, we're celebrating, that's all."
"Battles will come, and I've always got to be my best." Kieran continues to swing his axe in patterns.
"But why? You can't spare one night to feel happy?" Oscar frowns. Seriously, this guy takes his stuff a little too fanatically.
"The enemy has their reasons for fighting, and they'll give it their all. I'm not honouring their decision if I don't give it my all! That is why, my comrade Oscar, you must also give it your all! And our horses! And our weapons! And…"
Oscar tunes out the rest of the rant as he thinks about the first statement for a moment. "… thanks, Kieran. It's good that you've got such a one-track mind."
"You insult my behaviour?"
"No, it's just another way to say focused. It's… a compliment." Before Kieran takes anything else the wrong way, Oscar leaves for his tent.
He looks at his lance again. Some of it is still wet from before, though the blood is there as well. That blood, it represents the convictions of those who were hurt by his hand, some of which might even be the same as his own convictions. He has people he wants to protect and they have theirs, and they all risk their lives on the battlefield.
Yes, it is cruel, but Oscar could not possibly refuse his opponents of what they wanted for themselves.
Grabbing a dry cloth, Oscar wipes off the water from his lance. Some of the blood comes off, probably due to the long exposure in water. It's not spotless, but the lance is clean once more.
His blood has been drawn, and he drew blood of others.
But as long as he doesn't lose that strength of conviction, he will be all right.
A take on Oscar's first battle. I wanted to mark a sort of growth in him, since I think that he's one of the more static characters of the game. This is an attempt to inject some sort of realization in him that explains his current personality. It's also been a while since I've written in present tense.
-EmbeRin