One Particular Moment

by maevestrom

I don't remember you. And you don't remember me. After being carved into like a smith's template for so long, you will see, then, why I was delighted to have a clean slate.

I remember every detail.

I remember the way the screams of townspeople rang through my pointed ears that I could never block, never hear at anything but their most invasive. I remember the feeling that iron swords and blighted claws had against my scales, always damaging, rough like an emery board that never made me stronger, just more damaged. I remember the constant fear that we would run out of dragonstones- like we ran out of armies, of families, of cities, of space- and I would be useless, dead, absolutely nothing to them, a figment of the memory of no one. I remember it all.

I don't remember you.

And you don't remember me.

After being carved into like a smith's template for so long, you will see, then, why I was delighted to have a clean slate.

Hello. You likely do not know I am. I am always the smallest of any group of us. Always the quietest. Always the most pensive. I have been told I radiate an energy. I am not entirely sure what that energy is, and how I can possess it, but I would imagine it's close to what happens when a girl is promised thousands of years and is forced to grow up in the first twenty.

So, in short, I am the opposite of you.

I have never been quite so amazed at my fellow person, not quite as gobsmacked, as when Severa commented that you haven't been what we've been through like there was folly to be found in that. Were I the first- I never am- I would have said that in a wistful way, chasing the dream like a Nah that never was.

That dream. My best friend. My darkest fantasy.

At times I have wondered "can I?" This was the life that fate gave me. These were the friends that I forged in such unforgiving times. Naga would strike me down were I to reject it, I'm certain, but I see you… happy, blissful, naive… and I wonder who you are, and what I could do to capture just a small piece of you.

Would you mind giving me just a piece of your heart?

You remember nothing, this is true. Everything I can never forget, you can never remember. Were you here? Were you there? Were you our friend? Our foe? Were you in a timeline so distant from our own that you will never know us as more than strangers from a fantasy? Maybe the potential impermanence of you is what drives a wedge between you and the others who hail from the future. Even your presumed sibling, Lucina, our Exalt, tries and fails to understand you. You are not what she knows- famine, pestilence, destruction, death. You are Morgan, son of Robin and Chrom, brother of Lucina, and you are on the far side of everything we hate.

So why do they detest you as well?

Maybe they do not outright say as much- perhaps my status as being nobody's favorite has led to their keeping their resentment on their tongue- but when you interact with them it's a study in contrast. You invest yourself in their detachment, you crack jokes they refuse to smile at, and everything you say is so much more authentic than their routine lines. You press on, as disruptively kind as you are against people who once could only be at peace when they thought themselves dead. You are loud, you do not understand, and you are too caught up in the ideal to be able to put yourself there. I believe Severa is right in what she said- you will never be one of us.

I pray to the deities you never become like one of us.

You talk to me sometimes. The first time you left a presence to be noted, I was praying to Naga, the one reliable voice and pair of ears in my life. She is the reason I am here in the past to take you in, the reason the air I breathe doesn't scratch my throat, and so to thank her I tell her of how grateful I am, and what intrepid fighters myself and the Shepherds are, and nothing of how I wish everything in my life was different and I could forget it all, be like you- and then you interrupted me, asking what I was doing.

My response was "Praying. Please leave me." I believe so, at least. If that was not what I said, rest assured it was what I meant. I believe you blurted a nothing response, and told me with a grin in your voice that you would see me later, and I resumed telling Naga how thankful I was supposed to be.

You evolved to me over time. You would say hello to me, then notice I was praying, then shout an apology before I could say anything, leaving me in stasis. Sometimes you would start to talk, then notice and whisper one. And then, you would stop addressing me altogether, leaving me to praise and thank her like I was scared I would open my eyes and be back in the dying corner of Mount Prism I came from, all the while resenting the fact that the one person showing any standout kindness to me was one I felt I had to put off for a lifetime of professing the glory of someone who gave me everything at the cost of nothing.

One of the most recent times you saw me, you whispered something about "leaving this here" and shouting for me to enjoy as you ran off as though that was going to be less invasive. Internally I rolled my eyes with the utmost affection, and recall praying quicker and cutting the conversation short before I opened my eyes and looked to the cut log next to me, to see a pan full of golden brownies lying atop it.

I don't know how you knew. You weren't from the life I was in. My mother aside, I was the first manakete you had ever met- at least, as far as we know. (What we both do not know is probably the first thing that unites us.) You did not know that hunger was familiar to me. Of the few plants I dug up along the side of every road we traveled to put something, anything in my stomach, because I refused to take food from the mouths of my fellows. That my stomach was a massive, unsatisfied beast that could only growl and stalk those who were unable to fill it. Maybe you knew details- your mother does read quite often- but you did not know me.

You only had your best guess. And your best guess was one of the best things I had eaten in my life. It was pure indulgence after I could not stay my mind from basic survival, raw necessity, only able to thank Naga for the fact that I had my life back but never feeling as though I could explain to anyone, even her, exactly what feelings bubbled in what was likely but not definitively my stomach.

Naga likes to ask me what new experiences I've had, and when I come up lacking I feel as though I have wasted her gift. I may go the thousands of years in my lifespan never feeling like I have repaid what she has given me. Those brownies… a full tray just for me, that was so long out of your day. Hours, possibly. You spent hours putting together the concoction solely for me to consume greedily and, you would assume, forget about. I told her; how could I not? The warmth in my gut spread and moved further to a new home in my heart days after I ate, and I took time in my prayer to praise you, because even if you only gave me a few sweets, even if I were to leave your life to become the background character to your reckless glee as I have in the lives of many, you have given up more for me than even Naga ever will.

When I met with friends, it was never with one- it was always a group that I could be suitably outmatched in. Any word in edgewise I accomplished was a feat in itself, so instead I listened, like a good little adoptive sister. They reference things that I can only appreciate from a distance, assign to them like the brownies to you. They only mention you offhandedly, a guest to the circle set up by the walls a twisted future past drew out of them.

Oftimes I think about how fate is at once my savior and my punisher. One that threw me into a horrible situation just to save me from it. As much as I should be grateful for the fact that it saved my life, it was my lot in life to begin with. It's why my head is filled to the brim with memories I won't forget for millenia, why I cannot connect with myself and others I spent so long resigned to losing, why I have seen such things in the first days of my long life that will change who I am forevermore, and why I am so used to starvation that you could steal me away with a batch of brownies.

I felt your care in every bite. I felt how this was personal to me. It isn't to my surprise that I hear of you doing things to cheer up everyone. To strengthen them. To better them. You pick flowers for Lucina. You try to help Noire with her fear of bugs. You indulge Owain in his playful fantasies. You do so much to heal on the surface that it comes to light that there is a lot you don't know. That Lucina hates to see any of the world destroyed for her sake. That Noire has been on guard for so long that the slightest disturbance to her shields can crumble them. That Owain tries to bring a little light into the darkness fighting for control of his heart by making things more than a game. You do so much for others, but you don't know why.

You don't know why because no one tells you, and I would like to be the one who does.

I would like to start my life off right, and I would like to make yours better.

The first twenty years of my life have left a mark on the rest I cannot even fathom with more than words. Perhaps the only thing I can truly understand is the empty feeling inside of me- and how one particular moment with you has been the first thing to start to fill me up, to cure the starvation and hunger for more than food that this backdrop character has struggled with for so long after she thought it gone.

You were the one who noticed me.

And if it's not too sudden, I would like to be the one for you.