Falling One Cloud at a Time

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Warning: Contains exploration of depression (seasonal and otherwise), anhedonia, and sad things happening to small children. Also some "non-explicit suggestive adult themes," as the rating system puts it.

With apologies to Ernest Hemingway

Alster, Manster District, 762

The low-hanging clouds condensed into a silent misting rain shortly after Finn turned his horse back towards Alster's fortress. Though the soft clay roads and poor visibility caused Finn to slow his pace, he was in no especial hurry. Water began to seep through the wool of his coat and dripped down in beads from his hair, but it wasn't unpleasant. The rain fell because rain must do exactly that, and it didn't bother him. He didn't miss not having a view of the farm houses and pastures and low rounded Alster hills, as he'd seen it all on the way out and it would soon be dark anyway.

The sky was very nearly black by the time he reached the castle.

"Did you enjoy yourself?" Raquesis asked as she helped Finn with his sodden coat and muddied boots.

"Yes," he said, and felt it was nearly the truth.

The state of not being unhappy, of not being able to muster up any anger or other dark mood against the rain or the mud or the lack of anything genuinely good in the day, came close enough to enjoyment as Finn saw it. It was the first day in recent memory- recent memory stretching back well into the previous year- that he hadn't been unhappy at some point, and so Finn decided he must have enjoyed himself.

Raquesis was suggesting now that on the next sunny day they go riding together, that she could get someone- Princess Miranda's nanny, or perhaps the young daughter of Count Dorias- to watch the children, and that they could have a day to themselves. Finn could think of some objections to this plan if he tried, but he didn't put much effort into trying, and so he agreed that a ride together would be a welcome outing.

The next day's weather couldn't be called "sunny" by any stretch of the imagination; that blanket of slow-falling mist had settled over Alster Castle and never lifted, and so Raquesis didn't want to go out in it. Finn couldn't say he was pleased over the delay, but at the same time he didn't feel disappointed. It was raining, and at some point it was bound to stop, and until then there was nothing he could do about it. The rain continued for the next day, and the next, and the day after that; when Lord Leif grew tired and cross of being denied "Outside," Raquesis told him a story of a curious little cloud that wanted to be with people and so slowly drifted down from its place in the heavens and came right down to Alster to that it touched the very cobblestones, and there it stayed. This quieted Leif, for now he wanted to meet the cloud and make friends with it, and so Finn carried him Outside just long enough for Leif to chatter at the gray expanse that didn't answer him back. Leif seemed contented by this.

Raquesis, in spite of her own happy story for Lord Leif, wasn't content, and after a week of mist and rain and gray she had a few sharp things to say about Alster and its miserable weather. Finn agreed it wasn't very nice, but it wasn't as though Alster was renowned for its weather, and it wasn't as though they were there because they wanted to be, and he really couldn't say it was making him miserable. Nothing was making him miserable at present, and Finn found this almost surprising- but not actually surprising, because a genuine surprise brought with it some intense burst of feeling that he didn't have right then.

Even an audience with Alster's king didn't make Finn miserable, though really it should have, as the king offered some soft promises that he clearly wasn't going to keep and retracted some that he'd already made, and made some uncharitable comments about Finn's late lord in the bargain. Finn was getting used to that, though, and the real almost-surprise of that afternoon was his own reaction to the king's words. Finn should've been angered by the things that His Majesty said about Prince Quan- angered, and a little ashamed, perhaps, because a tenth or so of His Majesty's claims were rooted in truth- but instead Finn left the audience only irritated and not much caring about His Majesty's opinions.

Even as he related this dismal interview to Raquesis, Finn continued to be almost-surprised (he really did need another term for it, but couldn't think of any) in that he was able discuss the circumstances of Quan's death without feeling much of anything. And yet, his distillation of the king's comments managed to upset Raquesis, so their content really was quite terrible. They upset Raquesis enough to bring out that gruff, oddly masculine undercurrent in her voice, and Finn found himself finding ways to mollify her rather than the other way around.

As he lay next to her wishing for sleep, Finn reflected on the trials of that summer and found them oddly distant, images viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass. All the details were clear enough, from the way Leonster's castle glowed from within during its death throes to the expressions that crossed Queen Alfiona's face as she bid farewell to her last grandchild, but yet they'd lost something. Before he could think on this any more, he heard the small fussy sounds from Nanna that usually heralded a scream, and he hurried to soothe her before she could wake either Lord Leif or Raquesis. It turned out to be a long night, and Raquesis had a few more gruff words in the morning, this time aimed at Finn for the way he'd set Nanna free from her swaddling clothes.

"She wanted out of them," he defended himself, but Raquesis didn't believe him.

"A little baby would much rather be bundled up," she said, and set about rolling Nanna right back up into her clothes. "Think about it. They go from being somewhere that's warm and dark and quiet to a place that's either too hot or too cold, the light is too bright and there are too many noises. You'd scream, too."

"I'm sure that I did," he said. Nanna fussed regardless and made it seem that neither of them knew what they were talking about.

-x-

That morning proved as wet and dull as those before it, and the roof of Alster Castle's cavernous gymnasium leaked rain around them as Finn and Raquesis engaged in a sparring session. Neither of them had been practicing as they should during this stay in Alster, and in between her lack of balance and his lack of control, Raquesis landed on the floor more than once. She was flushed and laughing the third time he helped her up, though Finn found their current state more sad than anything. He returned to the gymnasium that evening, intent upon making a habit again of regular practice. It wasn't quite as stimulating without a partner, and his thoughts began to drift to the places they so often did when he was alone- Yied, Belhalla, the ruins of Leonster itself. Finn thought of the dark shapes of wyverns flitting through flames and streaming smoke, and yet his hands stayed steady on his lance and he hit his targets perfectly. There wasn't any sense of defeating that memory, really, not even if he pretended to strike down imaginary Thracians in retaliation for all they'd done, but the memory itself wasn't holding him back, wasn't blinding him with fury or making him clumsy. Not any more.

Finn went though various scenarios in his mind as he practiced over the next several days, forcing himself to relive the worst moments of the last few years to see if all of them had been defanged. He'd no shortage of memories to test; there was that farewell to Lord Sigurd in Silesse, those foolish last words he'd offered to the Holy Knight as encouragement. There was the moment when he learned that Prince Quan wouldn't be taking him on campaign again, that he'd be left to guard the children when Quan went to aid Sigurd. There was that vertiginous moment when he'd realized the wild rumors were true, that Quan and Princess Ethlyn and Altena were never coming home again. There was the moment in Lord Leif's nursery where he'd realized that even Leonster's own king didn't see much hope for their future. Finn forced himself to remember his last day with Lady Altena, of her hard little fists beating against his shoulders right up until Princess Ethlyn scooped Altena up and carried her away, and he found even that terrible moment had lost its power.

He must have finally exhausted his capacity for grief, Finn decided. He could remember feeling chagrin and horror and embarrassment, but the memories by themselves no longer evoked those feelings anew within him. He could relive the moment of his last glimpse of Altena over Ethlyn's shoulder without intense shame flooding through him. This was, he supposed, an improvement.

-x-

Raquesis began to practice again also; they couldn't often go together, unless young Selphina was willing to watch the children for a little while, but together or apart it was some productive way of passing the season. Raquesis said after only a few days that she was feeling better for it, and she claimed that she thought Finn was looking better for it, so that again seemed like an improvement in their general condition. Finn noticed another improvement of sorts- Nanna didn't fuss over the rain or the cold or the lack of Outside. If anything, she fussed less as the chain of gray days stretched out unbroken. After months on end of being jolted awake by screams every second hour, having Nanna not fuss came as much as a relief to Finn as the state of not being unhappy did.

"Of course she's settling down," Raquesis said. "They always do around this time. I've said the first three months are the worst."

Finn hadn't noticed. He'd been around the newly-born Leif, of course, but in those days his time had revolved around Lady Altena while Leif stayed in the care of his wet-nurse and nanny; having an infant share one's bedroom was an entirely different experience. Finn remembered Leif as mostly sleeping sweetly or as just staring up at the world with large bluish-grey eyes that swiftly darkened to brown.

Nanna's eyes stayed blue, but the rest of her changed. The red-faced little being who could not be placated whenever she was awake became a normal sort of baby with a tuft of fine blonde hair. She could sit content in her mother's arms and look out at the world with what seemed to be a measure of curiosity. When Nanna did fuss, at length and for no clear reason, Raquesis dealt with it as she always had, bundling Nanna up so that she looked like the crude dolls carried by peasant children, nothing more than a head on a limbless trunk made from rags.

"Isn't that bad for their limbs?" Finn was certain he remembered stories about children from Isaach who'd been bound too tight, and for too long, and ended with with crooked legs instead of the straight proud figures their parents wanted.

"They like it," she said yet again, and she claimed it reminded babies of that nice place they'd been before birth, that place where they'd been warm and cozy, with nothing to see and no place to go. "A few hours a night like this won't hurt her any."

Finn pondered this in the dark while waiting for those words to be proven false. Strange that the memory of being yet unborn should have some power, he thought. Really, it seemed quite wrong, in a philosophical sense. Wishing to not be able to move, to not see the world, to not breathe, to not be in light- it struck him as uncomfortably analogous to wishing for death.

"Is this world such a terrible place that you want to be out of it almost as soon as you're here?"

These were not good thoughts, but as ever the combination of small children and death brought poor Altena to mind, and Finn now wondered at her current state of being. Instead of enjoying fields of flowers or some place of endless summer, perhaps Altena was now kept some warm, dark, comforting place like the one that Nanna supposedly wanted to recapture. He imagined her curled up asleep in this featureless place, bathed in some dim light that somewhere between red and no color at all, perfectly content to be where and how she was. It was a nice thought- if a bit foolish, as this imagined spirit of Altena still wore her ruffled dress with the matching crimson headband- and yet the act of imagining it bothered Finn. Contemplating the dead Altena in her new abode did something to him that his final memories of the living Altena didn't. There was almost a feeling. Almost. Almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. But, in the end, it wasn't, and the impulse toward something ended in yet another of these not-quite-feelings that had no name that Finn had ever learned.

An outburst of sound from Nanna's corner came as a relief. Nanna did not like being immobile in a cocoon like an unborn child or a dead one. Nanna did not seem to like anything, at least not at that moment, but her fervent dislike of sleeping, sitting, rocking, being bound, or being unbound was some part of being alive.

-x-

Days passed, and Finn did have meetings to attend and small tasks to carry out but it seemed to him these meetings and tasks were infused with a sense of going forward that they didn't really deserve.

"It's just spinning in circles," said Raquesis, as he related the newest plans of Count Dorias to her.

"We won't be leaving Alster any time soon," he agreed.

This unhappy news appeared to affect Raquesis more than it did Finn, and he wondered over this. Getting out of Alster and back into Leonster should've been the thing he wanted most, or one of the things he wanted most, so why did he look at the prospect of another six months or year in Alster and say to himself only, "Well, did you truly expect things would get any better?"

Nothing significant had even changed, as they'd no new allies, no additional recruits, no source of funding beyond what Alster's queen persuaded its king to grant them. How, under these circumstances, could they possibly move forward?

At least their sessions at the gymnasium showed actual results... some of them unrelated to weapon proficiency. Even here, a long bout of sparring had the effect on Raquesis that it usually did, and it occurred to Finn now that the low months where they hadn't bothered to train had been months where they hadn't bothered with other things. He realized with a strange cold clarity that he hadn't missed it or even noted the loss. And now that she was looking up at him with a familiar glint in her eyes and a particular sultry curve to her lips, he felt strangely unenthused at the prospect.

She moved on him almost the instant the children were put to bed, a lioness sending a a low growl in his ear as she nudged him into taking off his nightshirt. Finn followed along, though he wasn't much engaged with what she wanted until Raquesis made her figurative killing strike. She knew exactly what to perform in order to bypass all the conscious thoughts in his head, and it worked here as well as it ever did.

"I think we got out of practice in this, too," she said afterward, and her kiss left a mix of dissonant flavors on his lips. "We'll have to work harder at it."

Finn said nothing. He'd no idea, even now, what ought to be said in such a moment.

-x-

The next day Raquesis went off to the College of Magic to visit their library, and she decided to take Lord Leif along with her. The library might not be the most suitable place for a boy Leif's age, but allowing Leif to do something other than stew in their apartment seemed sensible. That left Finn to deal with Nanna, who was being fussy again.

"It must be terrible to not have the words to express anything," he said as he lifted her and began to rock her in the long, smooth arc that worked best at calming her. "If you had the words to ask, the world could at least tell you a Yes or a No, but they can't, so all you can do now is scream."

She answered him with a little squawk. Finn had never thought of it in quite that way before. Babies couldn't talk, and then they learned it once they'd been properly taught, and Finn had always supposed that the need to speak- the desire, rather- and the ability to do so went together. He'd never entertained the idea that an infant's fragile head might contain anything more complex than "Hungry," "Sleepy," "Wet," or "Frightened," and yet there was something in the depths of Nanna's basic displeasure with consciousness that seemed to go deeper than these primal states.

Maybe she'd noticed that Leif got to leave with Raquesis while she stayed inside. Maybe she didn't like the color of her blanket. He had no idea, really, but after a time she did calm and began to look around at things- at her own small hands, mostly, but also at Finn. She appeared to find him as puzzling as she did the motion of her own fingers, which seemed appropriate enough to Finn given how perplexed he was by her. They were still locked in this circle of odd observations when Raquesis came in with her stack of tomes and and a very muddy Lord Leif.

"It's just terrible out. This winter will never end," she announced as Finn dealt with the effects of two filthy boots as worn by a lively little boy.

"Can you really say that after a year in Silesse?"

Her brows arched as she gave quite the impassioned argument against his comparison.

Silesse was beautiful beyond measure, she reminded him. Silesse was emerald jumbles of ice upon the banks of silent rivers and rose-tinted mountain peaks against the dawn; Silesse was black, black nights lit by crystalline stars and sheets of glorious color. Silesse should not be mentioned in the same breath as Alster, which was dark and dank and dreary and just a lot of endless, pointless, nothing.

-x-

In the course of Alster's endless pointless nothing, Leif began to recognize words upon the page and Nanna cut her teeth, which gave her something quite explicable to fuss about. King Alster made more soft promises and retracted some others yet again. Raquesis busied herself with her books, but too often Finn noticed a shuttered sadness in her eyes.

"How can people live in a place without any sun?" she once asked after slamming her volume on light magic closed.

"It does come back," he offered, but there wasn't anything he could do to bring that about.

He did try to think of something that would cheer her, or at least put a halt to this slow dulling of her own brightness. Finn remembered Raquesis at her lowest, just after her brother's execution, when she'd seemed so far removed from life as to be a shade herself. She hadn't eaten, hadn't slept, had looked through them all as though seeing a different world entirely. He remembered, too, the cure for that decline; she'd been tucked into bed like a small child and had stayed there for three days before rejoining the living.

He should have thought of that before, when she was being the advocate for keeping Nanna bundled up. It didn't work on Raquesis now, though; she didn't want to hide beneath thick blankets in the dark. All Alster lay under its blankets, she said. She wanted to wake up this time.

-x-

Alster's dreary winter finally reached its nadir with a few weeks of frost on the windows and dustings of snow that lasted two or three days at a time. Lord Leif enjoyed the crunch his boots made in the gritty snow and Raquesis said it didn't compare to the glittering snows of Silesse. Even if she was correct, Finn didn't think the observation had to be made. Not even Alster's own bards sang hymns to the snows of Alster.

Then one morning dawned blue and crisp, as though the winds couldn't decide whether they belonged to autumn, winter, or spring. Raquesis decided that at long last they ought to take their oft-delayed ride together, and Finn didn't see any reason to put it off, so they arranged for Selphina to watch the children, collected the horses, and went trotting across roads that resembled small rivers. Alster hadn't quite come awake yet, but it was getting there. Small white flowers bloomed in the mud and ice gave the trees flashing silver spangles in place of leaves.

"This is so nice," Raquesis said, and it seemed to Finn that he could actually see the color creeping back into her face as Raquesis rose in the stirrups to lean into the light. "It's like the sun itself is using a healing staff on my spirit."

He tried to do the same, to just close his eyes and tip back his head and feel the warm touch of the sun restore him in some way. Finn waited with his eyes closed, and then with his eyes open, and while the skies with their high white clouds and the spangled trees were all very pretty, sunlight on his face didn't feel all that different from the rain. It didn't cause him to feel any different.

They came back later than planned, just as damp and muddy on any winter's day except that now Raquesis was laughing about it. Lord Leif wanted to share in her happiness and before Raquesis could begin a recitation of the newfound charms of Outside, Finn promised the boy that the world was nice again and that Lord Leif could go Outside again as soon as possible. No, not that evening, it was already dark. Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow.

Leif went to bed earlier than usual in anticipation of the good things promised by tomorrow and Nanna was being uncommonly quiet, as though a few minutes of sunlight in Selphina's arms had been enough to calm her for the night. As for Finn, he felt like he wanted nothing more than to fall into black sleep, but Raquesis wasn't allowing him to. Almost as soon as she put out the candles she began to caress him, and it wasn't with the gentle touch that might ease someone towards sleep. Her fingers rippled across the tender skin where the hip met the thigh- teasing, provocative, demanding some manner of response from his body. Finn didn't respond, voluntarily or otherwise; he didn't open his eyes or turn toward her but he didn't pull away, not at first. He lay there as still as he could manage, waiting to see if he would begin to enjoy it. He didn't, really, especially not when Raquesis began to caress with enough force that "caress" was no longer even the appropriate word. His skin began to feel burnt from the attention and so Finn rolled onto his side where she could no longer reach him- but not away from her, not completely. His foot was still brushing against hers, and he could feel her warmth beside him.

He would've prayed silently for sleep, but it was wrong to pray for something so trivial, and so he merely wished for it. Sleep did arrive, but didn't last long; the next sensation he knew was of blue morning light and two eyes staring into his own. These large brown eyes did not belong to Raquesis.

"Come on, Finn."

"Lord Leif, you aren't supposed to get out of bed until Raquesis or I come to wake you."

Finn wondered how the boy had managed to get out of his crib. Leif was on the verge of outgrowing the crib, but he still shouldn't have been able to escape it... but sunlight and clear skies and the call of Outside had Leif in its grip, and there was no resisting it. At least he'd found them in a state of something close to decency...

"Come on, Finn. You promised," said the little prince as he tugged on Finn's nightshirt. Words of the utmost importance to a child soon to be four.

"I did promise, but that doesn't mean we're going right out without having you properly dressed." And washed, and fed.

As Finn sat up- carefully keeping a grip on Leif's small arm- he could hear Nanna making sounds from her corner. He had the passing thought that they seemed like happy sounds, like little bird-chirps.

"Is Mama coming?"

"Raquesis might want to sleep a while more. She'll be along soon."

He looked back over his shoulder to see her- eyes open, hair cascading across the pillow, covers held discreetly below her chin.

"Another beautiful day," she murmured.

"Yes," he began, and he would've liked to say more, would have offered some sort of apology for being unresponsive during the night, but Leif was struggling and Nanna was making progressively louder chirps and there wasn't any choice but to get on with the morning.

He really didn't notice the difference between this and any other day, Finn thought as he fastened Lord Leif's tiny boots while birdsong from outside and birdsong from Nanna blended into a strange welter. But the rest of the world apparently did and it wasn't waiting on him, now or ever.

"Another beautiful day," he heard Raquesis say again, but there was no meaning in it and so he didn't answer.

The End

Author's note: I was one of those people who thought Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) was some crap cooked up to be a new pathology until I moved to a place with very little winter sunlight and got to experience the winter blues for myself. Lack of light is a powerful thing.

Just to be perfectly clear, Raquie's particular case of the blues is in large part seasonal. Finn's is not.

Also, regardless of what people in Our World used to do with small babies, official art of Leif as an infant makes it clear that wrapping up a newborn like a burrito, however cozy it may be, wasn't the common practice in Leonster. You can see his ickle baby hands quite clearly. I figure the women in Sigurd's army, including Raquesis, got exposed to a diverse range of child-rearing practices... and Raquesis has already dealt with Delmud, who is very deliberately not mentioned here.