But it didn't feel that way to him. To Cid, it felt an awful lot like sending a bunch of kids to kill their mother.
Well, there was no point in mincing around it, that was precisely what he was doing. Edea might not have given birth to them, and they might not remember her (damn those guardians), but she'd raised every single one of the kids he was sending after her.
He sat down heavily at his desk, suddenly feeling old. Normally he liked being around the cadets and the students. It made him feel young, howevermuch Aki might complain that it mad for poor discipline when the headmaster was friendly. Edea would know how to handle him, how to handle the things he was hearing about the garden masters...
Edea would know.
But he'd just sent his children off to kill his wife so it was a moot issue. It wasn't as if he could stop thinking about her just because she was off being a psychotic sorceress somewhere. And wasn't he always telling the children that self-pity never helped anyone?
They'd planned for this. She'd planned for this. It was exactly what the garden was built for. Maybe if he said that enough times, it would mean something.
And maybe if he waited long enough, the sheets would stop being cold and the pillows would stop smelling like her. He didn't know why the pillows smelled like Edea. There was no earthly reason why they should. He'd replaced them when he thought he couldn't stand the smell of her anymore in the dark, but the smell lingered anyway. He lived with it, and smiled in the morning despite himself, before he was awake enough to know she wasn't there.
He remembered when he met her, and she'd just taken in her first little girl quite by accident. The way she smiled wasn't just her lips, or in her eyes like some people. Entire rooms lit up when she smiled. She had stopped by the school where he was teaching to ask advice of a friend, and he just stopped and stared when he saw her.
It took him weeks to work up the courage to talk to her, but after a few awkward sentences the warmth of her smile seeped into him and he relaxed. After they got married, he stopped teaching to help her with her orphanage. People had joked that usually it was the woman who stopped working after marriage, but he would have followed her to the moon if she asked.
He dreamed about those good days a lot.
Sometimes there were nightmares, but not often. Not so much he lost the soft tones of her voice, or the image of her face without the veins snaking out from the temples. But there were nights he didn't sleep, more than he liked to admit, and if someone found him dozing in his office in the afternoon, well, that was just Headmaster Cid for you.
No one ever said a word about it. Some of them had to know. He knew some of the garden attendants were well aware, and some of the instructors had been there when Edea left. He wished someone would say something sometimes, that it would be out in the open and not just clouding over his desk, but that had been her idea too. Don't let the children know, don't let them have any attachment, teach them to use the GFs and never, never ask.
So that maybe they wouldn't know they were being sent out to kill their matron.
So that the sin could be his and not theirs.
And Cid stood, and looked outside, and waited to hear that his wife was dead.