Speak from the Diaphragm

by Duo Himura

Eliwood and co have gathered for a reunion at Castle Ostia. While Nino and Erk try to help each other through relationship problems, with some unwanted assistance from the others, chaos ensues. Oh, and bandits attack at some point. Gotta love the bandits.

Author's Note: Dear God that was a long time…One very important lesson this has taught me: Don't promise people you'll update things, you will screw those dates up. Oh well.

Allow me to explain some of the reasons for this. Basically, I couldn't resist writing a Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken fic after playing the game all the way through. When I first got it, I dropped it, which I now regard as one of the worst mistakes I've made in gaming, next to forgetting about quite a lot of other games, but hey, I've only got so much time I can devote to gaming. At any rate, feeling compelled to write an RnK fic, I, of course, ended up with two. But the second of these actually came later. I've still been busy with school, more so than I would like, certainly. I've also been working on a completely new hopefully-novel… it sounds bad to say that I've switched from my original idea to a different one, but this one feels much better, and I've got a better grip on who my characters are, I think. Not that it really is relevant to you, I'm sure, though if I get published at some point I'll be sure to brag about it.

So, between that, school, trying to not drive myself crazy with stress, and ending up writing a second RnK fic, I've been quite busy lately, and in fact, it's mostly luck that I had a bit of time today and felt like polishing this off in the first place. Or should I say, wrapping up the first half.

Yes, this is a seldom mentioned "two-shot." It was –meant- to be a one shot, but that was…oh… about 22 pages ago, 30 using spacing. As much as I love trying to set records, the idea of writing a 50 page fanfiction (probably that long, anyway) and uploading it as one chapter didn't appeal to me, for all the obvious reasons.

So, in short, I'm back in business. I can't say when I'll get to work on part two of this, I'll probably try to work on my other one-shot first, can't say when exactly that will be up, I'd say a week or two, depending largely on school work, is probably the maximum. If I haven't just jinxed myself. Anyway, my present goal is to complete both fics before I leave on vacation, in latish June, and as much as I'd –love- to scramble to get them done in the week between school being over and us leaving, I think I'll pass on that and try to work on them before then.

For those following "This Path of Radiance Seems Awfully Familiar," um… it's on hiatus… I can't really say if I want to pick it back up at this point. It's not that I don't like it, it's just… I don't know, for some reason I feel more attached to Rekka no Ken's cast, in fact, it's easily my favorite Fire Emblem game right now. Maybe it was the support conversations, or the fact that more characters get involved in the storyline directly, or that it doesn't feel like it was building up towards something, only to not go anywhere with it (cough Path of Radiance cough). Anyway, I've got loads of other ideas, to the point where trying to write them all at once probably really –would- drive me insane…

Anyway, that brings me to what you need to know about this fic. I don't own Fire Emblem, and if I did, the only thing I think I could get them to do better would be find a way to allow you to see more support convos per playthrough, I don't even care about the bonuses that much, but I like to see more of the characters. Of course, this means no more polygamy (well, not TECHNICALLY speaking) for Eliwood and Hector and Lyn and co, but that's a small price to pay. As long as it's HectorxFlorina. I'm… really not sure if that statement is necessary, given that this is going up on a place for Fanfiction (Okay, why does the site delete the phrase "Fanfiction," followed by if that's the name of the site? Dropping it out of the middle of a sentence kind of distorts things...) but everyone else is doing it, and if all the cool kids are doing, normally I'd make fun of it and whatnot, but this is so I figure there are no "cool kids," here, so I'm just gonna go along with it.

Let's see… other important things… um, if you missed it, this thing is really long, even for me, at about 30 pages in Word using the style paragraph spacing, that is, skipping a line in between paragraphs. It probably drags pretty badly at points, I'm not entirely certain. I did a pretty decent job of trying to include jokes regularly, but sometimes that results in some not so great ones as well, so, basically, expect the usual, (hopefully) pretty funny in some parts, but it gets slow in some parts as well. You may even want to chop this one up a bit, it is very long…

Also, I'm not sure if this fic is worse than "This Path of Radiance Seems Awfully Familiar," but expect sexual humor. I have a lot more to work with in the Rekka no Ken universe, since Path of Radiance, well… either I have terrible luck picking supports, or there were no real romances going on there. Maybe it's more realistic, but I missed it, to be perfectly honest. Anyway, being a big fan of several RnK pairings (Hector x Florina, Eliwood x Ninian, Jaffar x Nino) gives me more material here, as well as a greater sense of understanding of many characters, and my attachment to the characters led to some jokes about their character endings. In fact, this is spawned from a quick 2 page or so script that I wrote up, basically poking fun at all of the things I though were wrong or odd or stupid about certain character endings. Those'll come up in due time.

Anyway, since I seem to have lost my point, I'll just restate it, this fic is probably not for the easily offended. I hope that doesn't turn off too many people. If you think this fic is inappropriate for its rating, as far as I'm concerned it's a debatable point, so if you want to request it being changed, I guess I can't stop you. I don't think this is going to mentally scar anyone, certainly nothing is graphic, so if at all possible I'd like to avoid scaring people off. Anyway, if you feel inclined to report this as being categorized wrong (again, I think it could be debated either way), I'd appreciate it being done in a manner that doesn't get my account suspended or anything…

Oh, yeah, I'm back (Said in a bad attempt to be cool). Oh, whatever, hobey ho, let's go! (If you don't read the Pendragon series by DJ Machale, it comes highly recommended, first one is called The Merchant of Death)

Fire Emblem: Speak from the Diaphragm

Part, The First (I always wanted to have a crazy name for "Chapter 1," like that, or Death Note's "Page 1," ect.): An Unexpected Official Reunion

And so it was that the dragons were vanquished, and Nergal besides, and peace was restored to the land of Elibe for all of 20 years or some such amount of time until the game designers got lazy and decided to make a sequel. Before anyone says anything, yes I DO know that Rekka no Ken came after Fuuin no Tsurugi, you don't need to tell me.

A large, blue-haired man paced back and forth anxiously along the carpeted floor of the main hall of Castle Ostia. He was tall, and had a very muscular frame, accentuated by the armor he wore. Technically he was supposed to be wearing a ceremonial suit of armor, or better yet, something that DIDN'T have a use for killing things, but as he frequently pointed out to his wife, there were very few objects that couldn't be used to kill someone. About half of them would be less effective than just pounding on them with one's hands, but that was beside the point, as far as he was concerned.

Anyway, he preferred this armor to the ceremonial version. He had had some good times in this armor. Sure, most of them involved suddenly discovering that he was NOT dead and just really badly bruised, but that was hardly the armor's fault. And not all of his memories of wearing the armor involved fighting, either. He had met his wife for the first time wearing this armor, developed a close relationship with her mostly while wearing it, had even been wearing it when he proposed. And he was STILL wearing it when he proposed a second time after mercilessly hacking to pieces the bandits who had ambushed him while he was in the middle proposing the first time. There are some other firsts involving this particular suit of armor, but those I'll leave to the imagination of the viewer, where it can cause far more havoc than I ever could by simply repeating it.

Anyway, so Hector, Lord of Ostia and thereby holder of its position as Leader of the Lycian League, was particularly fond of this suit of armor. And more to the point, the makers of this particular Fire Emblem were too lazy to script more than 8 attack animations for him, and half of those were just slight modifications of the other half, so damned if they were going to sprite him a whole nother set of armor. This raises the rather interesting question of why there never seems to be a means of making one's armor better in the first place in Elibe, but Hector had long since realized not to think about stuff like that. Not only would he not receive any answers, but before long he'd start to feel like he was unwittingly taking part in some great cosmic joke for the amusement of beings who existed outside his own reality, controlling his fate. Imagine that.

Returning, hopefully for the final time, to the point of all this exposition, Hector was pacing up and down the length of the Main Hall in Castle Ostia anxiously, stroking the slight blue stubble he was trying to cultivate into a full beard, mostly to prove it was physically possible, but several bets were also involved. A soldier approached him and saluted, asking for recognition to speak.

"Eh? What is it?" Hector asked, turning to face the man, who conveniently for some but not for this particular writer had no name. His face was also conveniently obscured by his helmet, preventing onlookers from his facial features, if, indeed, he actually had any. For the sake of simplicity, this soldier shall henceforth be referred to as Generic Uniformed Nameless Designation-less Anonymous Man, or GUNDAM. You think you're SO clever, don't you Fukuda? Well, -I- can invent meaningless and redundant acronyms too!

"Sir, there's something I've been meaning to ask you…" the GUNDAM began.

"Yes, Florina is on top," he replied brusquely.

"What?" the confused GUNDAM asked.

"So she doesn't get crushed under my weight, you see, her being so much smaller than I am." The GUNDAM just blinked in response, too stunned to talk. "Oh, come on, I know it's a bit unorthodox, but seriously, man, if you'd just be a little more open minded about these sorts of things I think you'd find-"

"I-I was just going to ask where you wanted this…" the GUNDAM stammered, gesturing to a big bag that he had been lugging with him and now lay at his feet.

"Oh… there's fine," the Marquess replied.

"Great. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to be violently ill," the acronymed soldier said calmly.

"Um… good luck with that I suppose…" Hector answered uncertainly, giving the man leave. The soldier then promptly marched straight to the nearest window, and, as if on cue, began to barf out of it.

"Um… Hector…" a feminine voice from behind him spoke. It was a soft voice, though not quite as timid and frightened as it once was. Hector spun around, a slight grin on his face as always at hearing that voice. He came face to face… well, with a bit of head inclination, he came face to face with a orchid haired woman, relatively short and rather delicate looking. He paused for a moment to consider where he had pulled the word orchid from, and why it in particular always seemed to accompany thoughts of his wife's hair, and nothing else in particular, but again, he quickly stopped, for fear of amusing some cosmic being that gained some bizarre, sadistic pleasure out of bending his universe to its will. For the record, it is actually quite entertaining.

Florina was every bit as kind and, much as Hector and I both dislike the use of the word, sweet, as when he had first met her, but several years with the rather straightforward Marquess had alleviated some of her timidity, and she wasn't quite as afraid around men anymore. One could attempt to attribute this to particular events that occurred in the course of their relationship, but really, that sort of thing would at best produce a few cheap laughs, and quite a few more groans, so that sort of thing is better left where it belongs, namely in the minds of our hormonally stressed youth.

"Yes, darling?" asked the blue-haired hero and, much to everyone's surprise, hopeless romantic.

"Well, it's not that I so much mind you talking to the soldiers about our, uh… private life, but I'm not sure THEY really want to hear it," she explained.

"What makes you say that?" her husband asked.

In reply, Florina gestured to the wall where the GUNDAM had recently been, for lack of more elegant phrasing, uping his chucks out the palace window, revealing a whole row of similarly occupied soldiers. "Well, all of them except Fred anyway…" she amended, pointing at one soldier who was, apparently, taking notes. "Now, you've been assuming random questions are related to our sex life all morning, is something bothering you?"

"Well, it's just… I haven't seen Eliwood and the others in so long, I guess I'm more than a little nervous about that," Hector explained. "You know, what if they're like, really old or something, that'd make ME really old too. Besides, Eliwood and I have a bet going on and… um… well it's not been going so well for me, and that probably explains some of my uh… behavior this morning, I guess."

"What kind of bet?" she asked.

"I'll let you know if I win," Hector replied, evading the question.

"That probably means I don't want to know, right?" the Pegasus Knight asked.

"Probably…" Hector replied after a short pause.

"Presenting Lord Eliwood, Marquess of Pherae, and Lady Ninian," announced one of the few soldiers who wasn't busy throwing up out the window of the castle. A man in his early twenties with brilliant red hair approached the couple. He was clothed in ceremonial white robes, and beside him stood a similarly garbed woman with long green hair.

"Eliwood!" Hector cried, walking over and clapping his old friend on the shoulder.

"Good to see you, too, Hector," Eliwood replied, returning the gesture. "It's been a while."

"Almost fifteen years…" Hector agreed in a nostalgic tone.

"Um… what?" asked the red-haired marquess. "It's been like… a couple months, at most. For god's sake, man, we're twenty years old!"

"Oh… yeah… sorry about that…" commented Hector, shooting the scriptwriters a dangerous look. This was rather difficult, as he didn't know who, what, or where said scriptwriters were, but he assumed it was just another one of those inconsistencies you had to learn to live with to stop yourself going absolutely nuts.

"Florina!" Ninian called cheerfully at the sight of her friend.

"Ninian!" returned the Pegasus Knight, and the two embraced, then quickly went to stand by their husbands, placing particular emphasis on their actions for reasons unknown to them. As far as they could tell it was something to do with spiting all the fanfic authors who throw them together in femslash fics. And, if either of those guys are actually reading this right now, I just think they should know that I've heard worse, but it STILL doesn't make a lot of sense.

"So, where's the rest of the gang from Pherae?" asked Hector after several more hand shakes and other such greetings between the old friends.

"Well, there was an… erm… incident out in front of the castle…" Eliwood said uneasily.

Outside the castle was an assorted group of rather damp-looking warriors, presently going about the business of blinking repeatedly in stunned silence. Their garments, more ornate forms of the type of clothing each was accustomed to wearing, since they were technically there as an escort to Eliwood and Ninian, even if the whole point was to reunite the group who had adventured together three years ago.

"Please tell me this isn't human vomit…" Lowen, a green-haired knight dressed in golden armor now damp with substances best left unmentioned, asked.

"Um… okay, but can you turn around first?" Wil replied. He was a man of average height, with a more athletic than muscular frame and a head of brown hair. A huge bow strung across his back and his now very probably ruined uniform marked him as one of Pherae's archers.

"Why?" asked the knight, confused.

"I can't lie to someone's face. My eyes give me away," Wil answered truthfully.

"Well, why do I have to turn around?" Lowed persisted.

"Well, I could turn around, but it's rude to not look at someone when you're talking to them," came the reply.

"A true man doesn't turn his back on the truth," interjected an older knight, clad in silver armor, placing one now stained gauntlet on each of their shoulders.

"I know that, Marcus," Wil told the newcomer. "I'm telling him to turn his back so I can lie to him!"

"Oh…" Marcus said thoughtfully. "Well, that's different, then."

"Here, I've got a blindfold for training here," Lowen said, rummaging around in a pouch at his waist, then withdrawing a damp strip of black cloth. "Use this."

"But it's wet with things best left unmentioned!" Wil complained.

"So is everything else," Lowen returned.

"Meh, good point," Wil conceded. He grabbed the blindfold and wrapped it around his head, tossing his wet hair back from his face as he did so. "So, do I have legions of female fans ready to die for me yet?" he asked.

"Um… no…" came the reply from both knights.

"Aw, and I heard the blindfold look was in…" Wil said. "Think maybe if I grew my hair long, and then bleached it…?" he trailed off.

"No," both replied at once, walking off before he could continue any further.

"I can think of one female willing to die for you," said a feminine voice from behind him, not that he was really sure which direction was which. Being an archer, training blindfolded had never really appealed much to Wil, and so he was more or less completely lost without his vision.

"Rebecca?" he asked questioningly, turning around and reaching out with his hands.

"Um… Wil…" Rebecca began just as Wil felt his hands brush against something like damp cloth. "You just…" she started, then, gingerly removing his hands, continued, "Oh, never mind." Those gifted with artistic abilities should strongly consider the number of ways this can be interpreted, and hasten off to draw it. Hey, I'm doing something for YOUR amusement here…

"Thanks," he said as she undid his blindfold.

"Why didn't you take it off yourself anyway?" asked Rebecca, a woman who wore her green hair in two ponytails, also marked as an archer by her uniform and the bow she carried on her shoulder.

"I don't do well with my eyes covered," was his indirect reply.

"But you can't normally see your own head…" Rebecca said, slightly confused.

"I don't do well with my eyes covered!" Wil cried in response.

"O…kay then. Let's see what we can do about getting cleaned up…" Rebecca said, taking his arm and steering him back towards the castle's main gate.

"I dunno, this gives me a few ideas…" Wil commented thoughtfully.

"Let me answer them while we can still pretend this is PG-13," Rebecca said. "No, no, no, and no."

"I didn't mean it like that!" Wil said, taking a step back in shock. "Or did I?" he wondered aloud. "Well, now we'll never know!" The green-haired archer smirked and winked at him, then continued walking toward the castle gates.

"I knew there was a reason I didn't want them puking out of THOSE windows…" Hector murmured from his vantage point at one of Castle Ostia's many, at that time unoccupied, windows.

"Why… were half of your soldiers vomiting out the windows?" asked Eliwood, rather confused.

"It's a long story…" Hector began, dodging the question again.

"Hector, we're the leaders of two provinces of Lycia with five months' worth of catching up to do, and you're worried about boring me with ONE long story?" Eliwood asked his friend.

"Say, ever find our friend the tactician? I know you and Lyn were trying to see if he'd be interested in an official position as one of Lycia's tacticians, but I never heard how that went," Hector said, changing the subject.

"Ah, you mean (insert your name here)? No, I have no idea where he went, you'd think a tactician of that caliber would leave behind some sort of trail of unlikely victories, but then, he always was kind of quiet," Eliwood replied.

"He was mute, Eliwood," Hector said after a short pause.

"Really?" asked the red-haired marquess.

"You thought you were interpreting SIGN LANGUAGE from a man who had full use of his voice?" Ostia's lord exclaimed.

"I did think that was a bit odd, but then, I don't get the chance to practice sign language much, so I didn't really bother asking about it…" Eliwood answered.

The Marquess of Ostia sighed. That was very like Eliwood, to attribute something like a disability to a personality quirk. Then again, that was probably what made the slender man a better diplomat. Hector momentarily contemplated this, then remembered that it wasn't really in keeping with the Ostian people for their leader to be a skilled diplomat anyway.

"Speaking of Lyn, do you know when she's supposed to get here?" Hector asked, switching to another topic, hoping to eventually find one that they could stick with for more than 2 minutes before he felt compelled to switch topics again.

"No, although I'm sure she knew in advance that the date was today, so she should be here at some point," Eliwood answered.

"Lyn?" came an exclamation from across the room, and from where they stood talking, the two lords could see Florina's head jerk more upright, suddenly alert, causing her hair to bounce up and down a bit. Her head snapped in the direction of the conversation, staring out the window with an eager expression on her face.

"She's not actually here, yet, Florina…" Hector began softly, when suddenly the window next to him that had served as his and Eliwood's vantage point burst inwards. A pair of legs which I'm sure are all too familiar to the male fandom shot through the open window, followed by the rest of the Sacaen woman the group had just been discussing, her green hair whipping out behind her as she turned a somersault in midair, then fell to a crouching position.

Hector merely gaped in astonishment at the woman before him, now climbing back to her feet a short distance towards the middle of the room, her breathing barely changed from the display of acrobatics she had just put on. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her clothes consisted of the almost uniform-style shirt, which extended into a dress of sorts, if the term can be applied to a strip of fabric in the front and back, that she typically wore.

It took considerable effort to get Lyn to change into anything that could be considered 'more appropriate,' for special occasions, or even just for the sake of personal image, and a reunion with friends, in whatever guise it took, hardly merited that much work, so her retainers had left her alone about it. Of course, at the time, they didn't know that there was an aerodynamic reason behind her desire to wear her usual attire, but there probably would have been little they could have done anyway.

Ostia's Marquess blinked several times, his eyes darting to his wife, then back to Lyn, repeating the process several times. Eliwood had had the etiquette lessons to not leave his mouth hanging open, but there was no disguising the look of absolute surprise on his face at seeing his old friend suddenly and inexplicably leap through the window.

"Thanks, Matthew!" Lyn called out the window, and then turned to Hector and Eliwood, opening her mouth to speak, but anything she might have said was instantly cut off.

"Lyn!" Florina shouted enthusiastically, throwing her arms around her friend in what could nearly be described as a tackle, nix the intent to knock the target to the ground. Intent aside, however, the noblewoman hadn't anticipated such enthusiasm, though previous experience would have cautioned her otherwise, and the two toppled to the ground anyway. It is worth noting that fully 4/5ths of the relevant characters in the room at this time are currently married to a member of the opposite sex, so all you yuri authors and artists and fans can just stop right there.

The two broke out into laughter as they picked themselves off the floor, dusted themselves off quickly, then embraced again, rather less forcefully. As they broke away and turned to face the others, the onlookers had finally gathered their wits enough to form coherent sentences. Well… as coherent as they usually are anyway. None of them is going to go out and write a best-selling novel or anything, but you get the idea.

"Since when can you do that?" Hector demanded of his wife, shock still apparent on his face and in his voice. The purple-haired woman laughed softly without answering, leaving the blue-clad noble completely in the dark as to the origin of her Lyndis-detecting abilities.

"Lady Lyndis, it is good to see you again," Ninian said formally, approaching the others.

"Ninian…" Lyn said, sounding slightly exasperated, "I've told you, you don't need to call me that. Just 'Lyn,' is fine."

"Good luck with that," Hector said with a laugh. "According to Eliwood, Ninian didn't stop calling him 'Lord Eliwood' until some time after they were married. Bet that made for some interesting moments."

"You know, I seem to remember a similar story related to Florina's shyness around men in general and you in particular, Hector," Eliwood said jokingly to his friend. "And… something about you not being able to stand sniffling?"

"Hey, no need to go there…" Hector said quickly as the others began to chuckle.

"I'm sure it's nothing the whole castle hasn't heard already…" Lyn interjected.

"So no interesting stories about you and Rath?" Hector asked a moment later when the laughter had abated. "And don't try to deny it, because I have it on very reliable information that you two-"

"Rath went back to Sacae right after we defeated Nergal…" Lyn said before he could continue.

"Oh…" Hector blinked a few times, then said aloud, as if making a note, "Right, doc Serra's pay."

"Presenting," came the call of the guard who had ushered in Eliwood and Ninian, "Sirs Kent and Sain of Caelin," the guard gestured to the two newcomers, dressed in ornate red and green armor, respectively. The 'social knights,' turned to face their Lady, Kent with a rather stern, disapproving stare, and Sain with his typical winning smile.

"Lady Lyndis," began Kent in a stern tone, "you really shouldn't do things like that. If anything should happen to you, what would happen to-"

"Lady Lyndis," interrupted Sain, doing his best, or perhaps his worst, at assuming a stern tone, "you really should refrain from having any sort of fun. If you should enjoy yourself, just think what would happen to poor Kent here. Why, he might look like even more of a stick in the mud than he does now!" Kent glared at his companion as the others laughed with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The guard who had announced the arrival of the previous guests, not quite out of breath from running back and forth from the entranceway of the Castle to the room where the Lords were gathered several times in quick succession, burst into the room for the third time that morning. He stood, panting for a moment, before gasping out "My Lords… may I present… everyone else you invited to this reunion… they're… waiting for you… outside…"

"That's not a very detailed report," admonished Oswin, a man clad in very heavy looking armor, who had apparently been waiting in the shadow of the door. "Announce which guests are present."

"Everyone… anyone… cares about…" the guard said between panting breaths.

"Don't speak that way in the presence of your Lord!" Oswin shouted at the guard. "If you are a messenger it is your duty to report accurate information!"

"Fuck… you…" the guard gasped. "I'm… a tailor… They were short staffed…"

"Oh…" Oswin replied. "That's right… it's vacation week, isn't it? Sorry… My Lord," Oswin turned to face Marquess Ostia, but found that the man was already gone, along with the others.

And so the three Nobles of Lycia who had joined forces to vanquish the Black Fang some three years ago were reunited with each other, and with their associated spouses, and also two knights, they did march out of the Castle, where they found everyone the Author cared to include in this story, i.e. everyone the author feels comfortable writing due to personal attachment and not having killed them off at some point in the game. And so there were many "Hellos," and "Good to see you agains," and the Author did take note that none of these were especially funny, and who really wants to just see Hector and Eliwood and Lyndis walk around and say 'hi' to everyone anyway? And so the Author did choose to omit these lengthy segments in favor of a King James Bible-style narration explaining the turn of events to prevent loss of interest and readers in what he can only assume is the beginning of the story. And the Author did see this very paragraph eliminating the need to write many short, unfunny conversations, and he was pleased, and the story resumed its normal voice and narrative style, and it was good.

A young man in a red cape stood, waiting, at the refreshments table, which, it is worth noting, stretched some 50 feet, hopefully enough food for all involved, given the appetites of some members of the former band. He sighed, and brushed a lock of purple hair from his face absent-mindedly. For this was one of those rare occasions when Erk, mage of Eturia, and student of Lord Pent, had absolutely no idea what to do.

He had battled demons more terrifying than those that haunt men's nightmares, he had helped to fell a great evil that threatened the entire world, and he had endured torturous training to gain the power to do so, a fair bit of which involved escorting a particular pink-haired woman quite some distance, while having to put up with her attitude the entire way. And yet, when it came to women, he completely fell apart, which frustrated him, and so then he would snap at said women, which, suffice it to say, did not go over well 9 times out of 10. The tenth time he had been so shocked that the woman in question hadn't gotten upset with him that he completely slipped up and ruined the conversation anyway.

Erk had read hundreds of books in his comparatively short lifetime, granted most of them involved the most effective way to carve a swathe of destruction through opposing forces, but at least two or three of them were romance novels, he recalled, and yet he still couldn't help but freeze up whenever confronted by an attractive woman. It was all very frustrating. And, to make matters worse, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was falling into a terrible cliché.

"Hey, Erk," called a vaguely familiar voice from off to the mage's left. Turning, he came face to face with a young woman of about 17-years old, with shoulder-length green hair.

"Um… sorry, have we met?" Erk asked the girl. She seemed rather familiar, but he was having trouble placing exactly who she was.

"Erk, it's me," she said, sounding slightly annoyed, pulling her hair up behind her head to mimic a shorter hairstyle.

"N-Nino?" Erk stammered in disbelief. She nodded with a cheerful smile in response. Of everyone there, the three years' time that had passed had probably affected Nino the most, having gone from adolescence into adulthood in that time. Without going into too much detail, I feel it bears mentioning that it would now be very hard indeed to mistake her for a ten-year-old. For one thing, she was practically eye-level with Erk, which had distorted him as much or more than as anything else.

"So, how have you been, Erk?" Nino asked her fellow mage.

"Good, I suppose," Erk replied, still a bit stunned. "My studies are progressing pretty well. Speaking of which, did you ever learn how to read properly?"

"Yep!" Nino answered, "with what you and Canas taught me, I was able to self-teach myself the rest."

"Canas…" Erk said sadly. "What an unfortunate end for him."

Nino nodded solemnly, then added, "Killed by continuity issues… what a way to go."

From somewhere beyond what is commonly referred to as "The Fourth Wall," a purple-haired man wearing a monocle watched this with a sigh. "When are they going to realize that I'm not really dead?" Canas asked the woman next to him, currently and for the purposes of this fanfiction shrouded in the shadows of a lack of vital information relating to her, for instance, what she looks like, or even her name. She merely shrugged in response.

The Druid sighed again. In the days shortly after his 'removal,' from Elibe in the middle of a blizzard, along with his wife, he had tried shouting through the portal that allowed him to see back into the realm from which he had come, but no one had responded to his cries. He had tried using dark magic to breach it, and his wife had tried her anima magic, but neither with any success. The powers of two level 10 class-changed spellcasters were simply no match for the powers of the canon. See, it's a joke, because canon is the "real," universe of a series, which in this case states that Canas' son is raised by his grandmother rather than his parents, and a cannon is an artillery weapon, and, in this case, both have "powers."

"Say, have you seen Jaffar?" Nino asked after the two had dedicated a brief moment of silence to the memory of their friend during which the above description of said friend's situation took place.

"Jaffar? Oh, the scary-looking guy with the red hair?" Erk asked, neither of the two being particularly sociable by nature, and thusly not really having met each other. "Can't say I have… what are you looking for him for?"

"Well, we just got married last year, but-" Nino began before Erk interrupted her.

"Wait, you're MARRIED?" he shouted in surprise. "To JAFFAR?"

"Something like a third of the army got married in the past three years, and another third of them are involved in some relationship or other, Erk," Nino informed the purple-haired mage.

"Well, yeah, but…" Erk began, then stopped. After all, who was he to judge other's tastes when his own seemed to defy logic? If Nino was happy with Jaffar, that was what mattered, even if Jaffar's face seemed frozen in a death stare.

"Anyway…" Nino continued after a moment, when it seemed that Erk wasn't going to continue to object. "Some bounty hunters showed up, and, of course, between the two of us we wiped them out in about a minute and a half, but Jaffar got kind of freaked out that people were still pursuing him, and he left, saying something about protecting me, and I have no idea where to look for him."

"So you figured he'd come here?" Erk asked. "Nino, I think you're the only one he even likes… or maybe the only one who isn't too terrified of him to actually talk to him. Why would he come here, where it's known that we're all gathering, to escape bounty hunters, particularly if he left to protect you?"

"Well, for one, if they knew anything about him, this is the last place the bounty hunters would look," Nino said. Erk was forced to acknowledge this point, but Nino went on, and, in a carefully timed act of Fourth Wall breaking, said, "Besides, I know the author's mind, and he wouldn't be able to resist poking fun at Jaffar in this situation."

Somewhere in the cosmos, there was a cry of exasperation, but it went largely unheard, except by the people of a particularly backwards and primitive planet, who then adopted the phrase, "ARGH! WHY DO MY CHARACTERS KEEP BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL?" into their dogma as a cry praising their God, the many footed Petionolith, who inflicts athlete's foot upon the wicked and blesses the good with exceptional 40-yard dash times. It's worth noting that they had no idea what that phrase meant, and adapted it into their own language to read something like "Praise to the mighty, many footed Petionolith, who inflicts athlete's foot upon the wicked and blesses the good with exceptional 40-yard dash times."

"Well, I certainly hope you find him," Erk said. He then sighed, reminded of his own dilemma once again. "Nino, I don't know what it is about you, but for some reason talking to you is really easy for me…"

"What do you mean?" asked Nino, surprised.

"Well, it's just," Erk began, "whenever I try to talk to a pretty girl, I can't think straight and I end up making a mess of things." Noting the look on Nino's face, somewhere between hurt, surprise, and anger, Erk suddenly clasped his head with both hands and let out a cry of frustration. "Gah! JUST like that!" he shouted as he realized what his previous statement amounted to. The purple-haired mage sank to his knees with a sigh, saying, "I don't think I'll ever figure this out…"

"Erk," Nino said compassionately, bending down next to him, "the thing about love is, it doesn't need to make sense. You can't treat love like it's a textbook; you have to go based on instinct. Use your heart, not your brain."

"Nino…" Erk looked into the other mage's eyes. "That's probably the most commonplace, totally obvious, clichéd advice I've ever had someone actually try to give me."

Nino blinked several times in surprise at that reaction. "Yeah, it is…" she admitted a moment later. "So I suppose that means you don't care to hear the 'opposites attract,' bit I was just thinking of?"

"Not particularly," Erk replied, standing back up, rather more calm now.

"Well, alright then, good luck with Serra, I'm off to find Jaffar," Nino said, turning to leave.

"I didn't say I was having trouble with Serra," Erk called after her.

"Erk, Serra is the only person I know of who can mess you up quite this badly," Nino replied with a laugh, walking away from the refreshments table and into the central area of the small section of the courtyard dedicated to the reunion, where most everyone was busy mingling and catching up with friends.

"Ohmigosh! Erk!" A familiar and often unwelcome greeting fell upon the mage's ears. Glancing around, he saw the pink-haired cleric, garbed in as close to finery as a cleric is allowed to dress in without it being considered a little heretical, and perhaps crossing that line a bit, who had been the object of his thoughts of late, much to his annoyance and displeasure, though he wasn't entirely sure about that last one. "So, Erk, how've you been? I bet you've spent the last three years locked up in some dark, damp chamber with musty old books, haven't you?"

"Right from the beginning, an attack on my studying…" Erk thought to himself in annoyance. He just couldn't understand how it was she got under his skin so easily, and why he seemed to like her anyway, unless he was secretly a masochist. Something about her just… "Oh, to Hell with it," the mage thought. Without answering, or really much thinking, he grabbed the white-robed cleric, drew her next to him, and kissed her, an action that probably surprised him about as much as it did her.

When he reflected back on that moment, Erk regarded it as one of his more poorly thought out, if, perhaps, better on the whole, moments. This was particularly the case during the late nights he spent trying to develop Riddlin several hundred years before its time to help manage his horribly ADHD children. And yes, Serra was still technically a Cleric, because unlike certain other Saints I could mention, St. Elimine doesn't consider human reproduction to make people 'unclean,' or whatever. Though he IS sexist, but that's a debate for another time, following the fact that it's really unfair that one of the most awesome units in the game is restricted to females due to "mount preference" or whatever, which will be followed by mourning for the role play characters that never came to be because of this fact. This will, itself, be following a debate as to why Magvelian Pegasi have the ability to transform into Wyverns.

"Jaffar! Jaffar!" Nino called, walking amidst the crowd, drawing more than a few stunned stares as people recognized her. To assist readers with the formation of a mental image, it is worth noting that Sain had to be momentarily restrained by Kent to avoid his interrupting her search, though Sain repeatedly insisted that she looked like she needed a confidence booster, well, up until Kent gagged him with a breadstick.

Nino searched through the crowd for some time, asking old friends and acquaintances if they had seen the red-haired assassin, but apparently no one had. So Nino realized that, Jaffar being an expert at not being seen when he didn't want to be, logic would have to serve in place of her eyes or those of the others if she wanted to find him. Recalling that there was supposed to be a joke somewhere in here, Nino turned around abruptly, and walked straight into Jaffar.

Jaffar blinked several times in surprise, then abruptly stopped because the author had used that line too many times in this fanfiction already. He hadn't been able to resist sneaking a few looks at his wife after their long separation, but for some reason hadn't expected her to actually turn around and look behind her. As he recalled this was what had lead to several botched assassinations, and he made a mental note to consider some more stealthy methods of following targets.

"Jaffar!" Nino cried excitedly, and threw her arms around the red-haired man. Jaffar awkwardly returned the hug, still used to Nino being a bit shorter than him. The two cloaked lovers stood silently for a few moments, during which everyone eventually realized that they weren't going to get to see anything else and turned back to their respective conversations. There's some random symbolism about the fact that both Nino and Jaffar wear cloaks or something, probably along the lines of "concealing their HEARTS!" or something, but in the first place, this is a comedy fic, so giant emotional symbolism has no place here, and in the second, and more importantly, that sounds like total BS.

"Jaffar," Nino said, tears welling up in her blue eyes (cause I have to throw eye-color in there somewhere, it's like, a law, though less important than hair color, if only because you can identify people by hair color in this game). "Why did you leave? (Begin horrible cliché) I missed you so much… there wasn't a single day I didn't think about you… (End horrible cliché)"

"I missed you too…" Jaffar said sadly. "But I couldn't risk any harm coming to you because of me."

"I'm higher leveled than you are, you dolt," Nino replied, wiping her eyes.

"…" came Jaffar's trademark phrase… or lack thereof. "You're… right…" Jaffar whispered, thinking about it for a moment. Pulling Nino closer he cried, "Oh, Nino, I'm so sorry for hiding for so long… can you ever forgive me?"

"Of course," Nino replied, wrapping her arms around the assassin's shoulders, and kissing him passionately (blah, blah, just pretend that there's an over-used description of extreme love here). "But… hiding?" she asked, confused, when their lips broke apart (yeah, you can pretend there's an overused description there too, if you want, though it's kinda superfluous).

"Yeah, I didn't actually leave," Jaffar explained, a slightly less fierce than normal expression on his face. "I was just hiding in the closet."

"Oh…" Nino said, surprised. Thinking back, it explained quite a lot, not least of all why food appeared to randomly disappear. Bring on the flashback.

"Jaffar! Jaffar!" Nino called again and again in desperation, her voice going hoarse, which takes quite a bit of screaming for someone whose main method of combat involves chanting and shouting incantations.

She ran through the small cottage, back and fourth between the four main rooms, the bedroom, kitchen, den (or equivalent thereof), and the extra room that the two hadn't really found much of a use for other than a few shelves of Nino's book. As she entered this room, filled with books, both familiar and as of yet unread, where she had spent the second largest amount of time of any room in the house (The room where most of her time had been spent was the bedroom, for reasons that can be left to the imagination of the reader. After all, sleeping does consume about on third of a person's life if they get a decent amount of sleep, so if you're in denial, you could always just believe that.), she turned for the first time since her frantic search had begun to the small closet with its folding door.

"No… he wouldn't just hide in the closet…" Nino muttered to herself, but, in the fashion of most anyone who's looking for something they lost, she checked anyway, because if the object were somewhere obvious, one would hope to have found it by the time one considers checking places that the object was very unlikely to be.

Opening the door, Nino was confronted by a large, floating text bubble. It was an off-white text bubble, and shapely, for a text bubble, anyway. Three dots, commonly referred to an ellipse, decorated the inside of the text bubble. "Jaffar…" Nino thought, reminded of the many… um… I suppose "conversations," is the only appropriate word, though I'm not sure how well it fits, where she had heard… or not heard… Jaffar say… or… not say… Y'know what? Jaffar uses ellipses a lot. Seeing one reminds Nino of him. End of story.

Tears filled the mage's eyes, as she called, "Jaffar!" again, her voice like a banshee wail of depression and loss, or… um… something… depressing and expressing loss… Yeah, metaphors suck. She slammed the door, and turned, frantically running through the rest of the house, calling her lover's name again and again. End flashback.

"Well, it doesn't matter now," Nino said to Jaffar, staring into his dark red eyes, a feat that she alone could accomplish without flinching or turning her gaze aside after a few seconds. "The only thing that matters is that we're together again."

"Nino… I can't do this…" Jaffar said slowly, turning away from Nino.

"What?" shouted Nino, moving after him, trying to get around to look him in the face. "Why? Jaffar, there's no need to worry about me, I can handle anyone who comes after you. Unless…" she began her voice reaching a higher level of hysterics, before diving into what sounds suspiciously like her and Jaffar's A support, but was –totally- NOT ripped from there. Yeah. "You're saying you don't love me…"

"Of course I love you," Jaffar replied predictably. "The time I've spent with you is the only time in my life I've ever really been happy. But," he said slowly, "that's the thing. I don't deserve to be happy. I've hurt too many people… killed too many people."

"But, Jaffar," Nino said, crying once again, the similarity between her younger and current forms more apparent as the conversation progressed, "if you turn all Kenshin-y, then that makes me Karou, and I don't want to be the totally useless tagalong female character, despite being the teacher of one of the characters who is much more frequently involved in combat!"

"Nino, do you know what those bounty hunters said when they approached the house?" Jaffar asked solemnly. "They said… 'We've come for you, Angel of Death.' I can't turn my back on my past! People still think of me only as the Angel of Death, even though I've tried to forget and put that behind me, and tried to live my life peacefully, without taking another life. People like me, who've hurt so many people… we don't deserve to be happy!"

"But Jaffar, they were BOUNTY HUNTERS. Of COURSE they only know you as the Angel of Death, they were after the BOUNTY on the head of the Angel of Death!" Nino cried.

"No, Nino, don't try to insert logic into the situation. It's been gone for far too long," Jaffar said. "It's angst- I mean, it's love, it's not supposed to make sense. I'm sorry, but I can't be with you anymore." And with that, Jaffar vanished into the crowd, like… something that vanishes quickly in crowds, leaving no trace.

Nino fell to her knees, weeping openly. This being Fire Emblem, I feel it's only appropriate to include something along the lines of "Nino said, 'sniff… sniff…'" She and Jaffar had been given a several foot berth, and presently this was maintained, the more compassionate members of the group trying to think of words of comfort for the youngest of them.

"I do enjoy a good soap opera," a tearful Eliwood said, turning to Hector who was standing to his left.

"… That was real, Eliwood…" the other man replied to his friend.

"Oh…" Eliwood said, voice trailing off. "OH! Um… Lyndis?" He turned to face the Sacean woman who stood on his other side, saying "Do you think you could maybe… uh…"

"It's alright, Nino," Lyn said, stepping forward before Eliwood could finish, and bending down next to the weeping girl. "Jaffar will come to his senses eventually, everything will work out, you'll see."

"It's not that…" Nino sobbed. "I know we're going to get back together again, it's just… at this rate we'll never manage to have kids in time for the next game."

"Oh…" Lyn said in surprise. "Um… Er…" she stammered for a moment as she searched for something to say. "Yeah, I've got nothing," she said, returning to the others with a shrug.

"Wait, Nino, how DO you know that?" asked Matthew, the blond-haired rogue one of those who had gathered around the scene.

"Matthew, that's not a very helpful thing to say," Lyn said, turning toward the thief.

"What? I'm in charge of Ostia's intelligence network, it's my job to know… well, everything that goes on, and that includes premonitions of the future," Matthew replied.

"If it helps," Eliwood commented, now somewhat recovered from realizing that Nino and Jaffar had actually been fighting and not putting on a show, "I find that in such circumstances that the best thing to do is try again." Everyone stared at Pherae's Marquess for a moment, each wondering which of Nino's problems he was referring to, then deciding that the advice was equally applicable to both.

"Here," Nino said, no longer crying but still looking dangerously close to tears. She handed Matthew a scroll, which the young mage had pulled from a pouch she wore around her waist.

"Alternate character endings?" asked Matthew, but Nino was slowly climbing back to her feet and beginning to walk off, continuing her search for Jaffar.

"Allow me to explain," Erk said, approaching Matthew from where a still rather stunned Serra stood, mute, for once. "You see, as time went by and magic improved, we mages, and other scholars as well, eventually discovered that there exist many worlds, all of which are similar, but different in several aspects. In theory there exist an infinite number of said worlds, expressing every possible outcome of every event. Along with this discovery came the knowledge that there are beings that exist in what are called the 'higher worlds.' These beings exist beyond the normal worlds, and can exert influence on them, or appear to do so by following the worlds where the outcomes they desire have occurred. This list appears to chronicle several different possibilities for what could have happened to each of us at the end of this journey, obviously in worlds where the person in question survived."

"So, in other words, the author really likes Nino and gave her a cheat-sheet, and is now covering it up using a take on the 'Many Worlds Theory,'" Matthew summarized.

"Well, if you want to go after the fourth wall with a bulldozer…" Erk said in response.

"Interesting…" Matthew said, peering at the now unraveled scroll. "This scroll is written entirely in 6pt Blackadder ITC font (About this big)… Man, this is going to take forever to decipher… where's Bill Gates monopolizing the market when you actually have a use for his products?" The others, however, pretty much ignored him, and went on with their conversations, though Nino now dominated many of them, and several of them in ways she probably wouldn't approve of.

Hector, presently involved in one such conversation, one of the general ones involving Nino, that is, said, "Look, Jaffar, I can understand you not wanting to be found by Nino. I've been there myself a few times. But you can't hide behind ME!" Hector turned on the assassin, who had been crouching behind the larger man, out of sight to everyone who would be likely to even take notice of him there in the first place.

"… Very well," answered Jaffar in his typical manner, that is to say, rather coldly and not without a certain "Oh my God this guy is going to kill me…" effect on listeners. "I'll find another place to hide."

"Listen, Jaffar, I understand if you're a bit nervous about confessing your feelings for Nino, but you just have to go for it," Hector said. "I'm guessing that big declarations of love aren't really your style, but then you should say it in a way that's unique to you."

"… What?" Jaffar asked, sounding… well, more puzzled than usual, which still had a hint of death-threat-iness.

"Well, you're a pretty quiet guy, and you should be true to that when you tell Nino about your feelings, but at the same time you have to be loud and open with your emotions and really let her know that you're sincere." The blue-haired Marquess spoke passionately, imparting his wisdom (?) onto the other man. "I guess what I'm trying to say is… sometimes, Jaffar, an ellipse is the only word you need."

Jaffar remained silent. However, if one were, say, required to exemplify this in a text bubble, one would likely enter into said bubble something like the following, "…"

"See, that's exactly what I mean!" Hector cried, sounding relieved that the assassin appeared to have "gotten it." "Sometimes that's all you need to say, and Nino will understand."

"… Nino and I got married over a year ago, Hector," Jaffar told the other man calmly.

"Oh…" Hector said. He took a small stack of note cards from a pouch on his belt and leafed through them, tossing each over his shoulder before looking at the next one, and then, in turn, tossing that over his shoulder. He quickly came to the end of the note cards, called "Lyn! They're already married!" and abruptly walked off in search of his friend.

Jaffar sighed, then slunked back into the shadows. Okay, fine, it should be 'slinked,' but Jaffar is FAR from having a degree in English, and frankly, I think the people involved must have been drunk when they invented the different cases and tenses of that word. Drunk, being the state of being, not the passive form of "drank." Not to be confused with drunken, which can be applied as a passive verb to multiple beverages, or as an adjective in some specific cases, i.e. "What do you do with a drunken sailor?" or "drunken noodles," a Thai dish used to treat hangovers. Like I said, drunk, seriously.

Things had been going so well, too. Okay, so Nino's knowledge of the future was a little unnerving, not to mention the timetable she had laid out for when they were supposed to have kids, as well as specific details like name, hair color, eye color, ect., as well as knowing that they were going to have twins. He had to admit that that kinda took the surprise out of it, but on the other hand spared them the worry of having kids before they were prepared for it.

And then those bounty hunters had shown up, and unwelcome reminder of a past he'd rather forget. Okay, so being married to a girl who was formerly part of the exact same organization had made it a tad hard to forget about anyway, but she wasn't accusing him of murder. Well, come to think of it, neither had the bounty hunters, but that was probably so that they wouldn't seem like hypocrites when they came at him with swords and axes and spears and nunchaku, and shuriken, and poison dart launchers, and all variety of weapons that one might think don't exist in all of Elibe.

When Jaffar thought about it, he was really being rather silly. He loved Nino, and she loved him as well. And, for all of her protests about being compared to Karou, she honestly didn't care about the fact that he had been an assassin. But her advanced knowledge said that he left after bounty hunters came, looking for the Angel of Death. These obviously couldn't be the correct bounty hunters to cause him to leave his beloved, their children were supposed to already be born at the time, but, as Jaffar saw it, if he had to leave anyway, he may as well prove that he wasn't bound by the rules set down on some mystical piece of parchment at the same time. Besides, nothing was cooler than leaving all of your loved ones for the sake of protecting them. Yeah, we've never seen THAT before…

Jaffar sighed again. He felt as though great cosmic forces were battling within him, urging him both to fulfill prophecies and to break them, to trust his heart and mind and to be untrue to both, and, more importantly, to find something to occupy his spare time. All those lewd remarks about there being nothing to do in medieval times now applied to him in a way that superceded their usual meaning, even their normal subject wasn't an option for him. He –really- missed Nino.

"Nino!" Erk called, running after the young mage who was plodding along at a slow pace, looking from side to side sadly. "Are you okay?" the mage asked her in a concerned tone.

"Oh, Erk…" Nino said, looking at him with sad eyes, "I don't know… Maybe Jaffar's right… I mean, I know our kids are supposed to be some of the umpteen spellcasters in the next game, but then he's supposed to leave again, and I'm just supposed to drop the kids at an orphanage and follow him, and it doesn't even say if we ever find each other again… Maybe it's not worth it…"

"When that day comes, I'm sure you'll find each other again…" Erk said, putting his hand on the younger mage's shoulder. "Love will guide you."

"… That was revenge for the 'use your heart, not your brain,' comment, wasn't it?" Nino asked.

"You bet," Erk answered with a smile. "But what I'm trying to say is… if you truly love Jaffar, then you'll totally abandon your responsibilities as a parent and follow him."

"Isn't that kinda twisted logic?" Nino asked.

"So is running from bounty hunters when you're close friends with three of the most influential people in Lycia," Erk returned.

"Got a point there…" Nino admitted.

"Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, Nino," Erk said, looking her full in the face, "If it were me, and my lover vanished to protect me and the family, I'd totally abandon the kids at a random orphanage and follow them."

"R-really?" Nino asked.

"Yeah, of course," Erk replied. "It says so right here," he said, holding up the scroll that Nino had given to Matthew, and pointing to one of the more legible paragraphs.

"Nino and Erk," Nino read aloud, peering at the page. "'They were married after the conflict and were gifted with twin boys. Their time in Pherae was happy until bounty hunters came for Nino. To protect her family, she disappeared. Erk vanished in search of her.' Isn't that like, an exact clone of what it says for me and Jaffar?"

"Yeah, I neglected to mention that many of these alternate worlds involve the same events taking place with different people…" Erk said, referencing his earlier explanation. "It's funny like that. Just like comparing the Fullmetal Alchemist manga to the anime."

Somewhere in a void of nothingness, a purple haired spellcaster cried out "If they've figured all this out, why haven't they realized we're NOT DEAD?" Canas sighed. That would teach him to listen to his wife when she said not to bring a whole stack of non-spellcasting books with him when they were going out into a blizzard…

"What's all this about lazy writing?" Matthew asked as he walked over, snatching the scroll from Erk's hands. Erk muttered something largely unintelligible about ruining all of his explanations, but Matthew was absorbed in staring at the scroll in his hands with a look of amazement, or maybe amusement, or both, on his face. "Hey, everyone," he called aloud, causing quite a large number of heads to turn, though whose will be left out because it would be a long, boring list, "apparently Nino could have gotten with Erk OR Jaffar."

At this the young mage blushed bright pink and began stuttering, "Well, yeah, but... uh… it's only a…"

"Nino, you slu-" Matthew teased, or began to, interrupting her only to be interrupted himself a moment later.

"Let's not go there…" Erk said to the rogue.

"But-," Matthew persisted.

"NOT GOING THERE!" shouted Erk and Nino and Lyn and Hector and Eliwood and Rebecca and Farina (who has appeared only for the sake of this line) and Fiora and Sain and Kent and Priscilla and Serra and many of the others I don't care about that much.

"You're right, guys!" Nino cried, jumping slightly in a sudden burst of energy after everyone had successfully gotten Matthew to, "shut up for five seconds." "I just have to try again, and this time put all of my heart into it! Oh, and maybe sound slightly less like a bad soap opera…" With that, Nino ran off, scanning the crowd with intensely focused eyes.

"You're not getting any further away from the soap opera with that 'put all your heart into it,' comment!" Matthew called after her, eliciting quite a few glares from the other members of the group.

"Jaffar!" Nino cried, running up to the red-haired man. Intently focused on looking for Nino or anyone else following him, Jaffar had, of course, missed her completely.

"Nino… I'm sorry, but I just… can't be with you," Jaffar said, sighing at his repeated failure, both to make his point clear and to use proper assassin technique. "It doesn't matter how many times you ask me to change my mind, I-"

"Jaffar, I love you," Nino interrupted.

The man in black blinked a few times. "And?" he asked, finally.

"Um… that was it," Nino admitted with a shrug. "I realized I never actually said that in our previous conversations."

"And you thought saying 'I love you,' would change anything?" Jaffar asked skeptically, or as close as he ever came to it, anyway.

"Well… admittedly there were a few potential flaws in that plan…" Nino said, scratching the back of her head. "Could you at least tell me why you're so adamant? The Author's far too One True Pairing-esque for it to be another woman."

"Actually… it is… sort of…" Jaffar said. "You left your pocket trans-dimensional rift in space-time lying on the kitchen table one day, and it spit this thing at me," Jaffar held up stack of papers, in marked contrast to the typical rolls of parchment that were used in Elibe.

"Ah, so THAT'S where I left it," Nino said. "Anyway, what is it?"

"It's… another of those weird messages from the Author, I guess," Jaffar said with a shrug. "Only, for some reason, it says that Sonia is still alive, and I'm… in love with her or something… I dunno, somewhere between my utter lack of official education and the various broken rules of spelling and grammar that even I don't know how I know about I can just barely understand it. So, I thought," he slowed down, voice dropping to a whisper, "that if these always come true, that maybe I should just disappear so that I don't do anything to hurt you worse."

"Ah, no, Jaffar!" Nino cried. "That's not an officially sanctioned document. That's a Fanfiction. They're totally different. You shouldn't trust ANYTHING you hear in a Fanfiction, especially one with horrible errors in spelling and punctuation."

"But isn't this a Fanfiction?" Jaffar asked the young mage.

A short silence followed, during which the entire world around the two seemed to flicker, kind of like when you JUST barely miss lighting a candle, so it burns for like, three seconds then go out. Then, Nino replied, "Jaffar, what did I tell you about paradoxes that distort our entire existence?"

"That they're really fun to randomly throw at people?" Jaffar said. "Oh… wait…" he stopped for a moment to think. "Oh, yeah, that breaking the fourth wall to deliver them is a mistake, one that could bring this entire world crashing down around us, leaving us alone in a void of darkness, with no other people, and nothing but a nigh infinite amount of time to do anything we want. What was the bad part of that, again?" Jaffar asked.

"The part where the Author has to rate the rest of the Fanfiction Adults Only, and takes it out on us," Nino replied.

"Oh, yeah…" Jaffar said, the memory returning now.

In the aforementioned void of nothingness, Canas sighed again as he watched them. "It's really not as entertaining as you'd think after the first few months…" he said. At that very moment, out of sheer improbability and irony, a small rift opened in the portal that allowed him to view events as they transpired in Elibe, carrying his words across years and miles uncountable. Suffice it to say, they came out rather garbled, so when Nino and Jaffar heard "It's really not as entertaining as you'd think after the first few months," a phrase that any observer could have uttered, they had absolutely no idea that it was Canas who had said it. Sucks to be him, but hey, the alternative is that he was killed by a pansy snowstorm. The man can take a hit from a dragon. I don't think so.

Jaffar turned to walk away. "What are you doing?" Nino asked, puzzled.

"I'm leaving again," came the answer.

"But didn't we just resolve the whole problem?" Nino questioned. "I mean, you've had, what, two or three different reasons for leaving, and we've shown them all to be either just wrong, serious errors in logic, and… well, generally bad plot devices. Why are you leaving now?"

"Because, I have to leave at some point, that much was said in the 'official,' document," Jaffar answered. "And if I stick around, the Author will have to come up with another excuse, and they're wearing thin as it is. Besides, in a world where some teenager can just rewrite everything the way he wants, what's the point of trying to carry on a relationship anyway?"

"And the fact that he's been hinting every five seconds that he wants us to be together slipped right past you?" Nino cried in frustration.

Jaffar, silent as… well, himself, actually, for lack of a more confusing or pointless metaphor, continued to walk, back to the woman he loved.

"Okay, this isn't working," Nino said to herself. "Time for Plan B." Before she could elaborate, Nino collapsed to one knee, crying out in pain.

As soon as the sound of Nino's cry reached his ears, Jaffar whirled around, a relative look of concern on his face. As he spun, he was greeted by Nino… in the form of a running tackle. Jaffar, never considered especially strong, and now caught off-balance and unawares, offered little resistance, and the two tumbled to the ground.

When they had stopped, Nino having been fortunate or meticulous enough to tackle Jaffar into a small clearing in the woods, began to run her hands along Jaffar's torso, Jaffar himself being too stunned to do much more than stare mutely at the sky, or possibly at Nino's face, the position made it kind of a toss-up as to which he was actually looking at.

"Say, Author," Nino called aloud, turning her head to the sky in the traditional manner of anyone talking to a higher being, note that this probably includes a "God of Earth," which is fairly ironic. "If you're listening, and since you're writing I hope you're doing the equivalent thereof, I suggest you move to a different perspective before you lose any hope of getting this in with a T rating."

Various interstellar mutters, of which little was intelligible beyond "Breaking the Fourth Wall," and "Giving ME orders," and "Think I don't know that when I'm writing this," again went ignored by the universe at large, though they did cause one planet to enter a huge civil war that lasted… eh, you don't care.

"Oh, and could you tell Matthew," Nino replied, raising her voice slightly, "that we can see him just fine, and if he doesn't get the Hell out of here in the next 60-"

"Twenty," Jaffar interrupted, the shock beginning to wear off, as he draped his arms around Nino's slender form protectively.

"Okay, 20 seconds," Nino continued, "we will rearrange his organs such that his chest cavity has positive Feng Shui. Later, I mean," she amended at a glance from Jaffar that she alone could probably read meaning in.

The Author continued to grumble, noting with some amusement when Matthew fell straight out of the tree he had been hiding in, and stumbled over himself a bit trying to make his way rapidly out of the forest.

And thus the Author did… change the perspective of the story to somewhere else, but not before conjuring a random record player (cause they're romantic and jazz) next to the two lovers playing an endless loop (magic, remember) of "I Think We're Alone Now." In his mind, the Author sighed with content at having written a scene he'd been waiting to do for a while, and having thrown in a little bit of not really realistic romance, and wrapping it all up with a bad music-themed joke. He then did a horrible imaginary dance, because he didn't have a clue how to really dance, in both that he doesn't know how to dance in real life and he doesn't know how to dance, really.

Shortly after Nino left the group, Eliwood raised his hands, trying to get everyone's attention. "As long as we're on the subject… sort of…" he began, "I have an announcement I'd like to make." Once everyone looked up at the white-robed Marquess, he continued. "We recently found out that Ninian is pregnant," he said loudly, beaming at his wife. After a burst of applause, he went on. "Hopefully with a male heir because the tactician, who I'm sure you all remember from some of his rather… unusual habits…"

"He was MUTE!" cried those in the assembled group who knew Eliwood well enough to understand what he was getting at.

"Anyway," Eliwood continued, "we asked him to name our first child, and he chose the name Roy, so we're hoping to skirt any serious issues of gender confusion and have a male child."

Following this statement there were several who suggested ways to adapt the name Roy to suit a girl, all of which had come from people who had not by this point read the character endings scroll that was presently being circulated due to Matthew's tendency to disseminate secret information. This occasionally inhibited his spying abilities but more than anything, it had caused the rooms surrounding Hector and Florina's bedchamber to be vacated at night.

However, the overwhelming reaction was shouts of "Congratulations!" and one "Mazel Tov!" from a very lost Rabbi. This congratulatory shout was misinterpreted as a fragment of the incantation "Ysilmar tor Afreim Razel tovron!" which activated the spell 'Excalibur,' causing the unfortunate rabbi to be sacked by the nearby guards, and somehow starting several centuries of Jewish prejudice in Russia. Don't ask. And particularly don't read about it in The Fixer, unless you like depressing tales of torture that don't actually conclude themselves.

"Hector?" Florina said to her husband, who was hanging back from the crowd that had rushed to surround the couple and bombard them with handshakes, pats on the back, hugs, and one slap across the face from Lyn for making the announcement while members of the group were still missing. Eliwood's response was something along the lines of the author being both forgetful and impatient, but that didn't win him any sympathy with the Sacaen, who was pushed aside by the others who wanted to congratulate the pair.

"Huh?" Ostia's Lord asked, snapped out of his thoughts by his wife's call.

"Aren't you going to congratulate Eliwood and Ninian?" Florina asked him.

"Oh… yeah…" he said, blinking several times, then shouldering his way through the crowd towards his friend, with rather less enthusiasm than he normally had going about such a task, not that the other parties involved were complaining. He at last reached the center of the mass, after a brief pause to apologize to Lyn, who was stuck in the midst of the crowd, for knocking Sain out. He was, after all, Hector, and less enthusiasm on his part didn't make his shouldering his way through a crowd any less dangerous for its occupants.

Elwiood smiled winningly at his friend, and Ninian also glanced at him briefly before her attention was drawn back to the cluster of Serra, Fiora, and Priscilla, who were all trying to give her advice at once, despite their own lack of experience. "Congratulations," Hector said stiffly, then turned, ready to shoulder his way through the crowd again, only to find that they had left a path open for him where he had rendered several other members of the party unconscious. However, them being his own or Eliwood's troops, he didn't really have anyone to apologize to, so he had just passed by.

"Oh, and while we have everyone's attention," Eliwood said, raising his voice above the other's, "we'd like to ask if Rebecca, also recently revealed to be pregnant, would serve as the wet nurse."

"Sure but… why?" Rebecca answered from in the middle of the crowd.

"Well, um… you see…" Eliwood began, suddenly realizing the rather awkward situation he had just walked himself into, and turning a shade of red to rival his hair, causing more than a few snickers. "Uh… well… I'm sure you're all aware that Ninian is, in fact, a dragon," he stammered, "and… um… well… technically dragons aren't mammals, so… there you have it."

Several of the more wise-ass-ish members of the audience opened their mouths to speak, but before they could, Eliwood continued, the natural color of his face returning a bit, "This does, I'm sure, raise quite a lot of questions, and I think you should all know, that we're not going to answer a single one of them."

Meanwhile in the audience the other archer who hadn't been mentioned for a good 14 pages until this sentence cried "You're PREGNANT?" in astonishment.

"Um… surprise?" Rebecca said in reply, scratching the back of her head nervously.

"But… but… but-but we… and you… and I… and…" Wil stammered.

"Yeah, about that…" Rebecca said somewhat uneasily. "You… remember that party we went to a few months ago?"

"No…" Wil answered, after a moment of searching his memory.

"Yeah, you were completely wasted," she informed him.

"But why don't I remember there having been a party where I got drunk?" Wil asked her.

"Yeah… I kind of wiped your memory…" Rebecca said, shifting nervously.

"What?" Wil shouted in surprise. "Why? HOW?"

"Well, I sort of thought you'd want to declare your undying love for me while you were sober…" she explained.

"So you modified my memory through probably totally impossible means…" Wil said accusingly.

"Only because I love you!" Rebecca persisted.

"I just… I don't know what to think now, Rebecca," Wil said, turning away.

"O…kay, let's try this again," Rebecca said to herself.

"What?" Wil asked, turning around, only to have Rebecca jab a small syringe into his arm. Wil blinked several times, then began to sag forward, collapsing to the ground.

"Geez, I hope I didn't injure his bow-holding arm…" Rebecca said, voicing her thoughts as she stared at the brown-haired archer's unconscious form.

"You're worried about that after injecting him with some chemical that none of us understands?" Erk, who happened to have been shoved in their general direction by the crowd that still surrounded the lord and lady of Pherae, asked.

"Well, if he can't use a bow anymore, then he'd be out of a job, and he'd have to do something else like cooking instead while I was a soldier, and that just totally throws the whole family roles thing into whack," she explained. "And while I'm on maternity leave neither of us would be working, and then we'd have all sorts of trouble raising a child on just what money we have left over even though we're close friends with the lord of the castle where we live, because it's apparently not acceptable to ask your friends for help in this society, and then we'd both end up really bitter and whatnot, and then we'd be in a bad sit com, and it's just not possible to live that down…" she trailed off, letting the impact of that statement hit in its entirety.

"Hm… well, can't argue with that," Erk agreed. "But if you're pregnant, why'd you come as Eliwood's escort?"

"Well, technically speaking I'm not supposed to be here, but we've only been taken as his escort so we have an excuse to throw this reunion," Rebecca told him. "Not that it's very likely for us to need to fight anyway, I mean, what are the odds of some sort of crisis arising at such a convenient time when we happen to already be gathered together?"

"Lord Hector! Lord Hector!" another generic soldier came charging into the courtyard, panting for breath as he shouted for his lord.

"Yes?" Hector asked, forcing his way through the crowd once more, much to the displeasure of most of the people directly between him and the soldier.

"One of the small mountain villages has been attacked by bandits! They're holding the town hostage for a ransom of 10,000 gold, and demanding that you personally come and pay it!" the soldier gasped. "They also said not to bring any of the Ostian army with you, or they'll kill the townsfolk."

"Well, isn't that a convenient excuse for us to reunite as a unit and go kick some bandit ass?" Hector asked.

"That pretty well describes it," agreed Eliwood, who had also managed to get through the crowd, with significantly less harm to those who made it up.

"Oh… I did that, didn't I?" Rebecca whispered to Erk.

"Quite probably," was the mage's reply. "But it had to happen eventually, if Nino had had to try to win Jaffar over one more time, I think we would have lost the three readers we have left."

"You've got a point there…" she answered, as Hector, Eliwood, and Lyn leapt onto a small raised platform that had appeared out of nowhere so they could be standing up above the others. Instantly the conversation died down.

"I trust you all heard that," Eliwood said, addressing the company. "And so you must know that there's only one thing for it…"

"March in there and kick ass!" Hector finished for him.

"I was going to say we'd display our forces and make the bandits understand that there's no good way out of the situation, unless they plan to feed an entire town's worth of hostages while they attempt to escape with the ransom, in which case they'll have to keep them forever or we'll just charge in once they're released," Eliwood said, "but I suppose that works too…"

"My vote's for the plan that didn't turn into a run-on sentence!" shouted someone out of the crowd, but it was impossible to tell who it was.

"Right, well, then let's go! Everyone arm yourselves! We've got plenty of extra weapons and armor around, we leave in 2 hours!" Hector shouted. "Move out… um… Eliwood, what are we called?"

"Someone referred to us as "Eliwood's Elite," the Marquess of Pherae offered.

"Yeah, no," Hector replied. "We don't BELONG to you, you know. Especially in my story."

"Well, what would you suggest then?" Eliwood fired back.

"How about… Oh, I've got it!" Hector cried. "Lycia's Leucous, move out!"

"Lycia's fair-skinned people?" Eliwood asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"Have you ever seen anyone other than Hawkeye who was even tan?" was his reply. Ducking the ornate, yellow/goldish blade that whirled through the hair exactly where his head had been moments before, Hector stood back up and pumped his fist into the air. "And if any spiky-haired sons-of-mercenaries with magic swords also have a problem with my phrasing, they can get back to their own, less cool universe!" he added.

A young man with blue hair that was spiked a bit turned, shoulders slumped, and began to walk towards the main gate of the castle.

"It's okay, he says that about us, too," a man and woman who each had strikingly blue-green hair said comfortingly as he walked past them.

"Yeah, but I was in 3D…" he said dejectedly, never looking up at them. The two could hardly argue with how something could look worse on a more powerful system, and thus merely watched as he kept walking, and vanished back into the cross dimensional rift that form the majority of the author's plot devices.

Suddenly, the two were seized by guards and dragged towards another swirling vortex of energy, colored slightly differently than the one that had just vanished along with the blue-haired mercenary.

"What are you doing? Put us down!" shouted Ephraim, but the guard holding him merely shook his head in reply.

"I'm sorry, sir, we don't negotiate with crossovers." And with that, the two were cast back into rather too short and not as well-written game from whence they came.

Somewhere in the vast expanses of non-existence, a purple-haired man wearing a monocle sighed, and complained that trans-dimensional portals opened for everyone except them. His wife merely shrugged, then resumed trying to knit him a sweater using the Fire spell. Hey, it was a hobby.

Tune in next time for: Giant Robots, space epics, high-speed car chases, western shootouts, and ninja, to NOT appear.

Next time on Speak from the Diaphragm: The presently nameless (well, any name that anyone would actually say, anyway) team sets out once more, only to find themselves forced to contend with a fiendish mastermind, cleverly pulling the strings as he orchestrates this entire event for his own amusement. Oh, and the bandits. They have to deal with me and the bandits.

And… something will be revealed that will shape the future of all of Elibe. Of course, all you ROM DOWNLOADERS and SCRIPT READERS already know what happens, so it's probably no surprise to YOU. What is this mystery that I'm clearly playing up far beyond its actual significance? Tune in next time to find out, same… um… yeah, I've got no good Batman parody to put there…

Time for Duo explains it all, with your host, me!

Ending Note: Okay, there's… not a lot to explain here that doesn't have to do with the game itself, and for things that DO have to deal with the game itself, there are probably too many of them to bother listing here. However, one thing in particular really needs to be said here…

"Sometimes an ellipse is the only word you need,": Okay, much as I'd love to take full credit for this line, it was actually inspired by the description of the fanfiction "Silencing Nightmares," by avi17 of Fanart Central. It's one of like, 4 FE fanfics on the site, hard to miss. Anyway the description was "(FE7) Nino has a nightmare, and it turns out that the best words of comfort may not be any words at all. JaffarNino" which made me thing "Sometimes, an ellipse is the only word you need," and there you have the line.

Title was inspired by Sara Jaye's "Speak from the Heart," a fic about Eliwood botching his A support with Ninian horribly, however, I'm told that it's a common enough… saying I suppose, that it doesn't really constitute me stealing it. Just the same, it was what led to the title, so I feel it should be credited.

Aaaaand that's all folks! All reviews are appreciated, more so if they're not just "I liked it," but I appreciate knowing that the hits my story gets don't just come from someone clicking a link and then clicking the back button, but actually represent people who read the story.