A/N: Set just after the beginning of chapter 4. I did my best with canon, but that's a pretty daunting task with Suikoden...
The boy's name is Thomas. She met him, briefly, even if she was standing back and letting Caesar practice being a Silverberg. He needed time to grow into it, and she'd met with Lord Salome of the Zexen Knights, knew this was a battle they didn't want to win. It was a safe practice field for him. Soon enough he wouldn't have one.
Thomas remembered her, and she had to fend off gratitude from him, his butler, and the extremely enthusiastic captain of the guards before she could get them to lead her to a room. He did his best to maintain a stream of polite small talk along the way, but she was tired, and they'd lapsed into silence well before they got to this floor. Finally he stops, and bows to her. She blinks, unused to whatever customs he was using – by his accent, he wasn't Zexen, but that didn't really narrow it down much. Finally she bows back, a little.
"I'm afraid it's not much, but it's one of the best we have," he says.
She peers into the room. Clean. Bed, chest of drawers, desk and chair. Window. "It's lovely, Thomas. No cause for alarm, I assure you. I've been in much worse." A castle still stinking of the undead and haunted, if not by ghosts, at least by the memories of ghosts and whatever it was that kept pulling Viktor down to the charnel house near the docks. Her first room there was little more than a chamber of a cave. They all slept on bedrolls for the first two months and it wasn't until three weeks after they moved in, when feverish work finally got Leona's tavern up and running, that they had food cooked on stoves.
"Really?" He looks so young, and she has to remind herself that she was that age once, and in the middle of a war at the time. None of these children are much younger than she was, or her friends.
"Really," she replies. "I've been living in clothes I bought in Duck Village ever since I last left this castle. I believe my luggage stayed here. Do you know—"
He interrupts in his eagerness to please. "I think you're right! I'll check with Muto and see if he knows. I'm sure it's here somewhere. We never throw anything away if we think it's of any value at all."
"Well, good," she says, feeling guilty over her amusement.
"I'll go check right now," he says, and bows to her again before he trots off down the hall. She smiles after him, feeling vaguely old, and goes into her room and shuts the door.
The people here don't quite seem to know what to make of her. Caesar gives them hints. He's brash, he's rude, he tells them what to do and how to do it and why they should listen. She stands quiet, doesn't speak. If she needed to, she would. But she doesn't need to. He's doing fine so far, and if he needs her, she's there. She could make them listen to her. He may be a Silverberg, but she has experience they could respect. A few - Lord Salome, for one - already know that. She's been down this road before, or one so like it as makes no difference. Before she was nineteen, she traveled the world, guided armies, shouted at the leaders of men, knew what three different true runes looked like up close, and made decisions that cost lives – always cost lives, on both sides. She doesn't see the need to say so right now. She'll tell them, if there's a need.
She sits on the bed. The coverlet's rough, homespun wool, but should be warm. Castles by lakes always seem to lose heat of nights. The bed seems comfortable enough. The room is clean. All she can ask. She rises and walks to the window, which gives her a view of the lake and a glimpse of the shore as well. She can see a Karayan girl running along the beach, a few ducks wading out into the water. She's in another war, and it's like the others, she can feel it already.
Caesar looks at her, very nearly disbelieving, when she tells him stories from her other life. Sometimes, she looks at herself disbelieving. That life is gone now, or so she thought. She's not a strategist anymore. Now, she writes books – a history of the War of Succession and a study on kobold culture have been published. She's still working on Mathiu's biography. She may never stop working on it.
And she teaches, balancing carefully between her own desire to make the world see it her way, to make things right, and the desire for objectivity, neutrality. The former desire she thinks she picked up from Mathiu, though he'd probably have laid it at Odessa's feet. The latter she's sure she learned from the others, all of them Silverbergs by birth or adoption. And make no mistake, if he taught you strategy, Mathiu had adopted you and you would always be his child, even when he handed you your books and your bag and stood arms folded in the doorway as he had for Shu. The Silverberg stamp never faded. A feud like that might even be another mark of it, she sometimes thought, and thought more often as she learned more about the clan.
Caesar doesn't seem to be able to see her in these stories, and she can understand that – she could never see Mathiu as a youth bowing to Leon's judgment on the Kalekka incident, could not see Mathiu as anything other than he was, as anything other than the leader she knew. Even when he told her stories about it, she'd never been able to see him as a teenager ignoring his sister – "younger than you," he'd say – for his books, or, later, when he was a young man and she "a few years older than you," quarrelling with her over her lover, his politics, her politics. She couldn't even envision Odessa, despite the small sketch of her he kept in his desk, showed to her once or twice when she asked. When they had to go through his things after he died, she'd kept it for years. She meant to give it to Flik after the Dunan war but lost her nerve. It's still in her desk in Greenhill.
So it's really no surprise that Caesar can't understand it, can't see her as a scrawny child of fourteen with thick spectacles, a dusting of freckles on her nose and a thick mop of hair cut blunt around her face, standing straight and proud and very small before Mathiu with her hands clasped behind her back while he looks over her shoulder at Tir and asks "Why did you bring her here?"
"She wanted to come," he said. She thinks of him as Lord McDohl in memory, though time and writing and more lectures than she cares to count have turned him into McDohl or Tir.
"She's a child!" Mathiu snapped. He didn't seem to realize, or just didn't say, that so was Tir McDohl, a boy of seventeen. Eighteen, maybe, or twenty, but he'd been seventeen.
"I can help you!" she said, and he finally looked at her.
"Apple," he said and his voice is gentle, the way she'd rather remember it, "this is war. This is no place for you."
"Where else am I going to go?" she asked.
He closed his eyes, sighed heavily. She knew she'd get to stay. Even an orphan girl whose parents are vague bright faces in memory can tell when an adult has given in.
Looking back, even she has a hard time believing all of it. "Apple, where should Viki's mages go?" he'd ask, and she'd squeeze her hands together, bony knuckles pale, and think, before she ever pointed at the map. Leon was never there for those sessions, even after he joined them – he and Mathiu must have consulted in private, if they ever did. She wonders now what he thought of it, of her sullen gaze, her clinging to Mathiu. She barely spoke to him; he terrified her. She wonders how Mathiu felt about it all, about letting her make choices, about listening to her if she showed a better instinct for guided killing than he did.
She wishes more desperately than she ever likes to admit or contemplate that he'd lived. She wants to ask him these things and so many more. The way she misses him, she can understand why Flik named his sword as he did, brought up Odessa whenever Nina or Anita or Rina got too friendly.
"Promise you'll keep in touch after it's over," she'd asked Viktor, just before the final battle, when she was trying desperately to distract herself from the pinched worry of Fukien's face and the drawn paleness of Mathiu's. She'd asked everyone, but she remembers it for Viktor because his failure to keep in touch, to let anyone know he and Flik had lived, was so much more spectacular, and spectacularly proven wrong in the end, than was Meg's fecklessness or Viki's not-unexpected disappearance.
She was older for her second war, more confident, though still gawky and uncertain and not as talented as she needed to be. She missed things, failed to see them in advance, and felt every death as a weight of nonspecific shape on her conscience, a failure of hers. To this day she still can't decide if it was wisdom or cowardice that made her seek Shu, if it was courage to bear the weight of the men you failed, or if inability to bear it was a mark of some greater strength.
She's startled out of her thoughts by the knock at the door, and she gets up to answer it, which seems to confuse the kobold. He's golden, fluffy, and dressed in full human garb, which is more than a bit unusual, and she'd let the instincts from her study of the Dunan tribes click into place if she weren't so tired. "Hello!" he yips.
"Hello," she responds, cautiously. The trunks look familiar.
"I found your things!" he reports, happily. She can't help smiling.
"Thank you," she replies, and stands back as he hauls them in. Then, with real dismay, she pats her pockets. "I am so sorry," she says. "I have absolutely no money, spent the last of it on the inn in Chisha – can I owe you for the tip?"
"The what?" the kobold asks, blank. "Oh! Thomas told me about those! No, no, it's fine."
"But I—"
"No no no," he says, and grins at her, that look that she always used to think wasn't really a smile on dogs but that she can't see now as anything else. "Bring me anything you don't want in your room!" he adds, as he heads out, tail wagging gently. She smiles to herself even as she turns to her trunk. One is full of clothes, but of course the first one she opens is the one with her books.
Her own are in there, a matter of vanity though she can never bear to read them. Once those are lifted off the top of the stack she starts hauling the others out willy-nilly. Checking on them. Milich's stack of potboilers, cheaply-bound ten-potch disposables. Bereft of literary value, but she bought them hoping for insight into the man, and sometimes worries that she actually found it. Marlowe's books about the Dunan war, and the autographed first edition of Kahn's book about Neclord. Someone told her the redhead at Lady Lightfellow's elbow was Lilly Pendragon – she wonders if she ought to offer the book to the girl, but then, no one knows as well as she how far rumors can be from the truth.
Much of the trunk consists of those rumors – broadsides and pamphlets and dime novels and scripts, twisting the events she saw into melodrama and political screed and parody and everything else but the truth. She remembers battles, remembers blood and the smell of death. She remembers the smell of ozone whenever Leknaat appeared to tell them about destiny. She remembers Nanami turning up in her bedroom late one night, dragging her out of a sound sleep to tell her everything, how Riou and Jowy had always been closer than brothers, how this war was tearing her brother apart, how she hated it all and it was all so unfair, and besides, Jowston hadn't attacked the Highland Youth Brigade at all. By the end she was grudgingly awake, if hazy and bewildered, and she patted the girl's shoulder as she cried at Apple's desk. She remembers poor Riou – never Lord Riou, especially not after that night – wandering the castle empty-eyed after Nanami's death. She knows what the histories say and don't say. She helped write them, after all.
She's helping write Mathiu's. She learned all she could about the Kalekka incident, in the end – interviewed the few survivors, read Teo McDohl's journals while trying to avoid Cleo's curiosity about the real reasons, and cornered old Leon himself in his den and managed not to quaver as she asked him to answer a few yes-or-no questions honestly.
"I know it's still a secret," she said.
He'd looked tired, and old, in the lamplight. "For what that's worth," he'd said. "I'm the only one left." There were others - survivors, soldiers - but no one else who'd claim the decisions as his own. She wondered if there ever had been anyone else.
She got the fullest version from Tir, of all people. Mathiu had opened up to him, in the end. She's been dancing around that chapter in the book. She doesn't know what Mathiu would say to that. She's not sure she'd want to ask his opinion. He wouldn't have appreciated a whitewashing, and she feels he deserves better than that.
She just also feels he's been through enough.
"I've been told that in South Window, if you wish to curse someone, you might wish that they live in interesting times." She nodded, uncomprehending, and his mouth quirked into a wry smile. "Odessa would never have wished a lifetime of boredom on me," he added.
He'd lived through heroes. Barbarosa was one, once, the young Crown Prince, fierce with grief and righteous anger, fighting for what was his, still so in love with Claudia that he crowned her empress posthumously that she'd have her rightful title. And then McDohl, of course. True Runes seemed to draw people to them, to create heroes out of people who might not have been, otherwise.
Heroes. She seems to fall into the orbit of heroes – of Tir, Riou, Mathiu, Flik and Viktor – Flik would have denied the charge, though, she thinks, Viktor probably would have laughed but puffed up a little – and now of this Karayan youth so very like Tir in some ways. Last she saw Tir he'd taken off on his own. No Gremio, no one. He was talking about the Outlands – she wasn't sure if he meant it, though. She misses him a little, though they never knew each other.
She feels she's going to end up missing them all, because she has a life of her own – a life of ink and words, not blood and swords, but a life nonetheless, one that'll pull her away from the orbit of destiny. Some of them, she's sure, will travel, disappear from view, keep having adventures until they die on them. The True Runes will sink below the horizon, their work done, and the young people who bear them will never be old. The people who loved them will miss them, but eventually die. They'll all eventually die.
And they'll have lived in interesting times. Repeatedly, in her case. She wonders, sometimes, if they'll have been as interesting as Mathiu's.