While the Springtime Turned, Slowly Into Autumn
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes- like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.
C.S. Lewis
Eliwood gripped the clasp of his cloak and stepped into a world that seemed not to know which way it faced. The snow-drops finally had given way to pale clusters of narcissi, but even now, in the fifth month, only a faint mist of green buds graced the trees. Ragged gray clouds hung in the sky like clumps of wet wool, and the breeze that tugged at his cloak felt like the breath of autumn, not spring.
"Seasons out of time," he murmured to himself, a fragment of some nursery song. The chill air brought on the dry cough that punctuated his mornings, an irritation that Eliwood hoped would ease as the days lengthened and the sun finally broke through this interminable winter.
It was sad, he supposed, to have so few flowers blooming on this, the full moon of the fifth month. To most of Lycia this was no holiday, but here in the court of Pherae, some observed the custom the late marchioness had brought with her from Ilia. On the fifth full moon of the year, as winter eased its grip upon that snowbound land, the people of Ilia would pay tribute to their mothers. The tradition delighted Eliwood; in years past, he had taken Roy out at the break of day and gathered flowers to give to their own mothers. He remembered Roy's small soft hands filled with golden jonquils, red-streaked tulips, and starry blue hyacinth, remembered the warm color in Fiora's face as she bent down to kiss Roy's tumbled curls. He remembered the light in his mother's eyes, the same rich color of the violets that he offered her. Lady Eleanora would be disappointed this year; only a few violets bloomed in her gardens. He would gather what he could, Eliwood supposed. Gather what he could in this unwelcoming spring where even the flowers looked cold, shivering upon their thin stems.
He and Roy would do something- together, with Lady Eleanora- at some point in the day. They'd do something... but later. Right then, Eliwood needed to mark the day as he'd done, in private, the past four years.
The air in the chapel was no warmer that it was outdoors; Eliwood could see the fleeting traces of his own breath upon the air as he spoke.
"Four years. Has it been so long already, Fiora?"
She wasn't there, not really. The elaborate memorial of Fiora, Marchioness Pherae, was appropriate to her station in its profusion of carved flowers interspersed with the heraldic device Eliwood had concocted for his bride. It said nothing of the woman- Fiora, commander of the Fifth Wing, daughter of Ilia. It said nothing of the determination that blazed in her eyes like the flash of a pale emerald, of the northern lilt that made her words so beautiful to hear, of the way her solemn face would flood with color when something delighted her. But it was right and it was proper, and it was had he had given her when there was nothing else to give.
It was right... and he knew, in a sense, that it was what she would have wanted. There was almost no hint that this Marchioness Pherae was not born to a noble house of Lycia or Etruria, almost no sign that she had been "plucked from the frozen mud of Ilia" instead. One would need to thumb through the gilt-edged books of heraldry to determine that Lady Fiora's device, with its lance and feather, was a fiction; one would need to be a scholar of botany to know that the three-petaled flowers cut into the marble of her shrine would grow only in Ilian soil. So history and custom closed around Fiora; after Eliwood's own generation went to dust, who then would remember the sing-song voice of his lady?
Sometimes Eliwood wondered how much Roy even remembered. Four years was a great stretch of time to a child. Roy had been seven then, just beginning to write in script, just old enough for his first lessons with the sword. Another four years would take him to the threshold of his majority- old enough to fight, to lead, to take his place before the world. To Fiora, time had stopped, or had lost meaning altogether. To Eliwood, it had slowed, and held him the way this unseasonable winter held onto the world. But time rushed by for Roy, flowed as fierce and unpredictable as the water in streams swollen by the melting snow. What moments time embedded in Roy's memory, and what moments time erased for him, Eliwood could not know.
Eliwood did not speak aloud to his wife- not often, anyway. But he held silent conversations with her at times, believing that she could hear him well enough without spoken words. He did so now, updating her on the small triumphs and afflictions of the past year.
You would have been happy with all this snow, Fiora. We've never seen such snow in my lifetime, not in Pherae. I'm sorry we couldn't share in it.
She answered him in his imagination. It comforted him that he could recall her gestures, the subtle expressions of her face, the way her voice rose in surprise and deepened in rare moments of upset. Comforted him... and bothered him somewhat. The Fiora that yet lived in his mind, offering guidance and assurance... was she not his own creation born of love and grief? A collection of memories woven by his own fancies into some semblance of his wife? There was a word to define such a mockery of a human, after all.
In the end, the Fiora that answered him now was no more a reflection of his living wife than was the noble lady commemorated in the marble before him. He built her one shrine, then another, and whether solid or intangible, they covered her true self up, like dust. Like snow.
Eliwood walked back across the courtyard to his apartments, focused on the tasks ahead of him and not on the ghost of Fiora. As he walked, the wooly gray clouds sent down one last handful of snow in flakes like small white blossoms. Eliwood held out his sleeve to catch a few of them- perfect, symmetrical, each one a delicate marvel- and watched as they became shapeless beads of water. And yet, it made him smile.
Fiora- the true one, whose spirit lay outside the walls of memory and marble- was watching over this autumnal spring. And when Eliwood reached Roy's room to check on the boy, and found upon the breakfast table a sheaf of white flowers and a sealed note addressed to "Mother" in perfect flowing script, he felt warmer than he had in long months without the grace of the sun.
The End
A/N: I must say I've become absurdly fond of Eliwood/Fiora of late. And of Eliwood, really, for despite the apparent cloud of tragedy over his life, I still feel he is, at his center, an extraordinarily resilient person. He loves, and he grieves, but in the end I do believe he survives.
Written for Mother's Day, obviously.