Chrom was used to his bedroom being a disaster whenever he entered it, usually with clothing strewn everywhere or occasionally papers he'd lost track of, but when he came inside after being out with his friends one day he found it to be messy in a completely different way. "Er, Robin? What's with…all this?" he asked his girlfriend, who was sitting on his bed with several empty books around her, and every reachable surface covered in pictures. "Where did you find all of this?"
"Oh, I wasn't expecting you home so soon," she replied, closing the book on her lap and pushing some of the clutter aside so there was room for Chrom to join her on the bed if he so chose. "I noticed that you had an unorganized box of pictures in your closet and I figured they could use some sort of system for finding them, in case you ever wanted to look through them. Whoever put them there made sure to date them properly, thank Naga, but I'm still shocked at how many there are."
He had been coming to join her on the bed when he heard her say where the pictures had come from, and his feet began to drag across the floor, stopping him from going further. "Those were something Emm left me after her death, because they're family memories and someone needed to keep them. I've never gone through the box, admittedly, but I'm glad to see that you're having fun with them." He felt trapped in place, not wanting to come closer to see pictures with his older sister in them, but not wanting to seem rude by leaving. However, he had a way to work past that second point, which included using her own words against her. "What was that about you not expecting me home? Should I go?"
"No, by all means you're welcome to stay! After all, this is your place, I'm the one who should go if anything!" Robin laughed, sounding so happy to be doing what she was in the middle of yet so serious about leaving if needed; interrupting her happiness was never something Chrom wanted to do so he decided to let her be, finding a good place on the floor so that he could watch her as she worked. "I'm afraid you might get a bit bored with me doing this, it's just a bunch of organizing the pictures by date as I group them together in the albums I bought."
"That's fine, I'd be doing something equally 'boring' if I were elsewhere." He wasn't sure if that was the case, as it was completely possible going elsewhere would mean napping or finding some friend to keep him company for a while, but he enjoyed being in Robin's company and didn't really want to leave it. "Besides, if I'm here, you have me to tell you the stories behind the pictures if you're curious."
"I had considered that when saying that you could stay, but then again Lissa did a fine job of telling me a bunch of your stories from childhood back when we first started getting to know one another." Her laughter had faded away, and Robin was back to sticking pictures onto the pages of one of the albums she had handy, occasionally grabbing scissors to cut away corners or unnecessary parts of the images to make them fit. "If I see anything that I'm at a loss about I'll make sure to have you explain though, so thank you for that offer, Chrom."
"Maybe I shouldn't have offered," he said to himself, chuckling as he leaned back where he'd chosen to sit down. "I should have figured Lissa would've said something to you already, and who am I to pretend like she doesn't know what she's talking about?"
Setting the scissors down as she heard him laughing, Robin raised her eyebrows in Chrom's direction, asking him, "Are you finding something hilarious about what I'm doing right now? I'm trying to make your life a little less cluttered and more organized, so maybe someday you'll be able to look back on these memories you've got fondly." She sounded slightly distressed at her own mention of these being memories she was dealing with, and it was then that Chrom began to understand why Robin was so insistent on getting this done.
He swallowed down any remaining chuckles and looked to her apologetically. "Sorry about that, I suppose I never thought about how you doing this would let you learn about my past, which isn't exactly something we can do for you." He'd not known her for very long (especially compared to some of the people in the pictures she was working with), but the first thing he had gotten to find out about her was that she had zero recollection of who she was before she'd met him, something that he'd accepted about her without question. No wonder she was so adamant to organize his memories, she wouldn't ever get the chance to do it with her own! "Here, I have an idea," he said, hoping he'd be able to set things back on a positive course. "I'll help you with this, so at least we know for sure that everything that belongs together, stays together."
"That sounds like a plan to me," she replied, still not moving to get back to work. "Why don't you come on up here and make sure everything looks right so far, just to check what I've already finished? I'm fairly certain that everything that has dates on it was dated by Emmeryn herself, so it can be trusted, but…" Her voice trailed off as she watched Chrom pick himself up off the ground and come to the bedside, sitting down on the cleared edge she'd provided for him when he'd first entered. Carefully, as to not disturb anything she'd done, he picked up the only closed book on the bed and began leafing through its pages, stopping only a couple pages into it to stare at what he saw.
He'd known that the box of pictures had been in his closet since Emmeryn had died, and that she'd been collecting them up until then—and that after she died, that was the end of the professional-printed pictures. But he hadn't ever made the connection that she'd have collected pictures from when he was a newborn, being held in the arms of parents he barely remembered on a good day. "She really wanted to make sure that we remembered everything, huh?" he asked, turning the page to see more of his baby pictures following the ones of him being held by his mother, father, and beaming older sister. "Typical Emm, wanting what's best for all of us, even if she didn't know what was going to come of her with all that protection."
"She certainly did seem like the kind of woman who'd care for you in this way, from the couple times I met her." Robin didn't know what else there was that she could say right then, given that the whole situation around Emmeryn's death was painful at best to recount, especially given how relatively recently it had happened. It was in that rebuilding phase after her death that she'd become close enough with Chrom to start dating him, and gain access to his home and his life, and she didn't want to make things uncomfortable by dwelling too much on something still fresh on their minds. "Here, you keep looking through that book, I'll start working on the next one. This is where I'm starting to get pictures with Lissa in them, I never realized how close in age the two of you really are."
"Four years isn't all that close, at least, it never felt like it." His hands turning the pages slowly, each picture a reminder of faces he hadn't seen in a long while (minus Emmeryn's, but her face wasn't something he could see every day anymore either), Chrom found himself getting lost in the book, until he got to the final page. Staring down the picture of himself and Emmeryn at what looked to be from a birthday celebration for her, he closed the back cover and sighed, feeling a wave of longing building in his chest. That saddened sigh caught Robin's attention and she shoved the next book at him, her already having moved onto the third one. "You work quickly, it seems. Eager to get this done?"
She shook her head, in the process of rearranging a few pictures by date to get them into her current project. "Not even close, I'm just making sure you have plenty to look at while I'm working. It's amazing to me how long you've known some of your friends. These are pictures from ten years ago that have you and some of them in them! I wonder if…if I had any friends like that growing up." Her mouth closed tightly as she focused back on her organizing, and Chrom was left staring at her, not sure which friends she was talking about or how to comfort her about how this was making her feel.
There wasn't much of a reason to continue dwelling on that, he knew, and so he cracked open the second book and started looking from there. The first picture in it was him and Emmeryn holding baby Lissa together, him crying and her looking peaceful and happy to be with their newborn sister. "Now I get why you realized why we're so close in age, just look at me being just as much of a baby as she was in this! Gods, my parents must've hated having to deal with that until I learned how to accept that I had another sister." There was more to his thought but he cut himself off, remembering that their parents most likely never got to see their son accepting their youngest daughter. This was reinforced a few pages later, when there were pictures of the three siblings dressed in all-black, standing at their parents' funeral after some unexplained event took their lives.
"I considered leaving those ones out," Robin said when she saw which pictures Chrom was staring at. "It didn't feel right to have a showcase of happy memories interrupted by pictures from a funeral, but I think Emmeryn included those in this box for this very reason, so I couldn't leave them out. Besides, Lissa doesn't have any recollection of your parents at all, so if she were to look through these it would be best for her to have the whole story."
"I can agree with you on that, it'd be unfair for so much of her childhood to be ignored because it wasn't the best." Already Chrom was moving past those pictures, getting into when they were a bit older, living under the care of people their parents had put in charge before their deaths. It was a lot of pictures of the kids playing together, or the kids being put through family pictures, but they were powerful all the same. This was the carefree life Chrom had grown up with, under the guidance of some of his parents' former advisors until Emmeryn was old enough to take charge for herself.
The album ended before it got to that point, and he was left watching Robin put the finishing touches on the next one so that he could continue his reminiscing. "Patience, you blew through that one faster than I was expecting," she chided with a laugh, sliding in some pictures into the final pages of the third album. "We're getting to the point where you're going to have to explain yourself on some of these, I can understand forced school pictures with your friends but some of your…games you seem to have played with them don't make quite as much sense."
He tilted his head slightly to one side as he watched her finish up, wanting to ask her for clarification but not wanting to interrupt her more than he already had, but once the book was in his hands and he was able to go through it, what she said had made sense. This was when he was really starting to become the person he was, meeting his lifelong friends and spending all sorts of time with them. While there had been pictures in the previous album of him and his right-hand-man Frederick (since it had been Frederick's family they'd been living with, it was natural for the boys to have become friends immediately), this book started with a picture that Chrom vaguely remembered the circumstances surrounding it. It was the last day of his first real year of school, and his guardians had come to pick him up but he hadn't wanted to leave his friends. They'd taken a picture of it for him to look back on over the break, but he'd forgotten all about it until he was staring it down right then.
"This picture's missing a couple people, but I think this would make a great 'remember where we came from' picture to take to the next friend hangout," Chrom remarked, trying his hardest not to laugh at how painfully awkward he and his friends had been in their young age. "Why, I'm sure I know a person or two who'd be mortified to know that this thing still exists, or that you saw it, Robin."
"Oh, I'm certain that Sumia or Cordelia wouldn't mind at all that I know what they looked like when they were little girls," she replied without missing a beat, as if she'd seen which picture he was speaking about as he was talking about it. "However, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but shouldn't you be the most mortified about me seeing that? I see that unruly cowlick and those disgusting shorts you're wearing there."
"You've already seen me in some dark places, I can't be too bothered by you seeing me clearly dressed and cared for by people with a lot on their plates at all times." He found it humorous that she thought he'd mind her having seen him as a young child, but he learned quickly that the picture they were talking about was far from the most incriminating thing in that album, and by the time he'd gotten to the end of the whole book he was wishing that perhaps Robin hadn't gone through all the pictures. "Do you think it would be possible to, I don't know, get rid of some of these?" he asked, already having pushed the book aside to try and move past it. "There are some awful images in those pages."
"That would be removing parts of the whole story, and if we're keeping the funeral pictures we're keeping those as well." There still seemed to be so many more pictures sitting on the bed, as Robin's pace had slowed down considerably as she was tucking them into the next album. "Besides, if you're going to choose to be embarrassed over some pictures from your youth, how are you going to react to some of your older teenage pictures?"
"Anything I did as a teenager cannot be anywhere as bad as some of what I've had to see. Naturally Emm would make sure that we kept all those memories safe and sound, but I think my life would've been better to not remember the times my friends and I thought it was cool to dress in ill-fitting clothing." Shuddering at the vivid images in his mind of what he was speaking about, Chrom reached over to the pile Robin was grabbing pictures from, taking the top one off and bringing it closer for inspection.
Based on his horrified expression, she knew that she'd been right to guess he wouldn't exactly have a pleasant reaction to it. "All I know is that you really cleaned up after we met, as did your friends," she told him, holding a hand out to get that picture back so she could put it in the album where it belonged. "When I was organizing everything for how I'd put them together, I saw some of your high school pictures and I'm still shocked the you I met is different than the you in your graduation pictures."
Graduation was one of those events that Chrom could remember back to clearly, seeing the happy faces of his sisters in the crowd as he received the diploma he deserved, standing up on the stage for only a brief moment but knowing that he did something to be proud of to be there. He distinctly remembered spending most of the time before the ceremony goofing off with some friends, and after everything was over they'd all gone out for a dinner together to celebrate, but for the life of him he didn't remember anyone ever taking pictures of him in specific. "What kind of pictures did you find about that?" he asked, curious to know what she'd seen that he didn't recall. "Please tell me they're nothing to do with—"
"You and a few of your friends ripping your gowns off after graduation to show meme-related shirts underneath them? Yeah, Emmeryn made sure to get several shots of those." Seeing her boyfriend's face turn bright red as he struggled to explain what the deal with those had been, Robin couldn't help but laugh. "I don't really remember those memes ever being popular, or funny, if we're being honest, but you guys looked like you had the time of your lives pulling that stunt off."
"If I told you it wasn't my idea, and that I only went with it because Frederick told me not to, would you believe me?" He was forcing a smile, hoping that she'd say yes so that they could move on without any more humiliation. When she shook her head and held up a picture of the scene itself, he cringed before sighing in defeat. "Okay, fine, we might've come to the idea together as a group, and it might've been me buying the shirts for everyone, but I hadn't wanted to really do it."
"Something tells me that if you hadn't wanted to, you would have chosen not to do it. I know you're friends with convincing people, but I know they would respect your choice to not participate." Flipping the picture quickly in between her fingers, Robin looked at it once more for herself before putting it back down. "Seriously though, you all changed a lot between then and when you met me. If I didn't recognize faces I would never have guessed that these were the same people."
That was when Chrom went against his desires and grabbed the picture for himself, looking at it and trying to ignore the shirt he was wearing in it (with the overused picture in the middle, complete with impact-font caption on top). "Huh, I see your point on that one," he said after a few moments of looking at everyone else in the image. "We all looked our part of good, clean students, minus the bad choice in shirts. The school was rather strict about cleanliness and appearance, and didn't want any of us getting too wild with how we did our hair on a daily basis."
"You all had such short hair back then. I never would have taken any of you for willingly rocking those kinds of cuts, but if they were forced that makes sense." She was already back to filing more pictures into where they belonged, while still talking about some of the changes she'd really picked up on about everyone in Chrom's group of friends. The whole time she was talking, he was doing his best to aid her in understanding anything she wasn't solid on, which ended up mostly being about social changes in the group between their graduation and when she'd joined them.
By the time they were done talking, almost every picture had been put into an album and Robin was working on the first pages of the last empty album she had. "We're at the part where I got to meet you guys and become part of your group," she said with a soft voice, "and that means we're just about at the end of all the pictures. I'm glad Emmeryn got a few with me in them, but at the same time, I wonder how many more we'd have if she hadn't died."
"You like the physically tangible memories, don't you?" Patting one of the albums, Chrom watched as Robin slowly nodded, her focus still on finishing her work. "I'll see what I can do about continuing this project in the future, because I don't think you're going to fill up that last book there."
"Five full albums with just a few leftovers, I think you're right." The first had been Chrom as a baby, then the second had been with Lissa as a baby, and the third was his first couple years of school. The fourth one was a large period of time, leading into the fifth which was high school and right after, and now the sixth had the start of this friendship but nothing past them getting to know each other. Robin seemed unhappy with the last few pictures in the album, which were large group shots of everyone she'd gotten to know after meeting Chrom, herself included, but before she was able to say anything about it Chrom was grabbing the album from her hands and closing it. "What do you think you're doing with that?"
"I'm going to see if any of our friends, probably Frederick knowing him, have pictures that we can add to this in order. You've organized my childhood memories, now it's time for us to add our adult memories to the collection." Chrom hugged the album tightly to his chest, taking note of his girlfriend's surprised expression. "You deserve to get to look back on what you can of your life, so we're going to make it happen. Now do you want to come with me down to his place to see if he's home, or are you going to just keep staring at me?"
Blinking her eyes a few times to make sure she had fully processed what had just happened, Robin pushed aside everything she'd been using for her project and carefully got off the bed, standing on legs that were wobbly from having been sat on for so long. "When I decided to make these books, I did it to get to know you better, I wasn't ever expecting you to jump to include me in everything," she admitted, watching as he got off the bed as well and headed for his bedroom door. "But if you're offering, I suppose I cannot refuse to at least tag along."
What she had said was only partially a lie, because while she hadn't expected him to want to include her, she was hoping she would be. And she'd come up with her own way to do so, that being a certain younger sister who'd ended up with her older sister's camera after her death, who was so willing to do whatever she could to make sure her brother (and his girlfriend) were happy with their lives. Between everyone's pictures they already had, and the new ones Lissa would be able to take at a moment's notice, there would be no shortage of memories to add to those books in the future, from engagements to weddings to children.
A/N: Written for the Chrobin Week 2k18 prompt "books"