Disclaimer: Suikoden is the property of Konami. Rating is for language and mild suggestive themes.
Firelight
I picked up a bottle and smeared away a layer of dust from its yellowed label. I'd guessed the year right, and being right filled me with a bit of grim humor. I don't know how it was on my face, but it was there, because she asked, "What?" looking at me, not the bottle.
"This was laid up the night this castle was completed." I pulled two glasses out of the cupboard and swung the door shut. "I remember it." I remember it twice now.
She took one of the glasses and stepped around to the table's other side. I could feel her watching me. What for this time? I swear, the less I try to convey through my face, the more she watches. I poured the wine.
"Cheers." She raised her glass to me and drank. Then she ducked under the table a moment and came up with a purring gray cat in her arms. We sat, and I watched her fondle the cat before taking my own drink.
"Do you know what a female cat is called?" she asked.
"Ignorant."
"A queen."
"So purr back at her."
Her eyes flashed up. Once again, I was the focus of her attention. No more witticisms.
I took a second drink, feeling the distinctive taste of Bude Huc wine spread through my mouth and down my throat. That alone resurrected memories, vivid without any help from either of the True Runes I'd carried. I set the glass back down, my eye irrationally expecting to see Seioras sitting across from me.
His memories threatened to suffuse me a moment -memories of drinking, and plotting, and being patched up by firelight he'd conjured from his own True Rune; memories of missing the home he was fighting for. Desperate fears of failure. Annoyance with followers. Yearning for Sana. A long ream of disciplines he'd applied to himself.
I looked at Queen, glad I had found someone who enjoyed my company without needing to talk, about it or anything else. Joker is the same, though he goes under far too quickly. Queen doesn't ever need to know I compare her to Joker.
She was staring out the window, turned away from my lamp, face blanked by shadow with only her neck and cheek lit. Tonight, she didn't seem likely to talk without me speaking first. We can handle silence.
The True Fire drew me to look at the lamp, to look at its incarnation, much as the True Lightning had never let me relax during thunder storms. The white flame reminded me again of Seioras, and as I stared, my thoughts paralleled some he'd had fifty years ago. But only paralleled. He was different from me; he rarely tolerated silence, saying it invited addictive brooding. But the three of us all rarely spoke of what really preoccupied us. We all brooded. The True Runes brooded with us.
Experimentally, I let myself slip entirely into Seioras' mind that night fifty years ago, a night after one of our more disastrous battles. He'd called a bonfire from his Rune and was sitting alone under the dark night, staring into the twisting flames. He hated firelight.
Someday, this war will be over, and if I live through it, this damn Rune will give me plenty of time to review the death of every man I've ever killed. But not now. Not. Now.
It's sick, how we kill to give people hope. We kill Harmonians because we say our massacres are for nobler reasons than theirs. When our units are decimated, it's a defeat; when the Harmonians burn, it's a celebration. We make ourselves into monsters for noble reasons. But they are noble. If this land has to bleed before it can be free, I'm willing to cut it.
The ones we're fighting for, our children, won't know what we're going through for them. I hope they never have to know. Unless we do a bad job. This Rune tells me they could have their own wars. Temporary peace. Temporary relief.
Seems useless right now. But this duplicitous life is what we have, and we should fight for it. And one half's no less real than the other; carnage is real, but so are children playing in a sunny field. You can't really deny either.
I'm glad we're not fighting to gain territory. I'm glad we're fighting for hope, a world that doesn't have to hunch its shoulders against Harmionia's whip. I don't like how some of the guys are talking about taking Caleria. We don't have the power. And I want to fight for what is rightfully ours. Hope for conquest...I don't know, I think that turns to greed.
We need pure hope to win. And we'll always have it.
But...
We Runebearers don't have hope, at least, not for ourselves. We suffer for others, which is noble, but I've never met one Runebearer, through myself or my Rune, that was truly happy. Geddoe. Heh, you say life's not lived for happiness, it's lived for duty. Well, isn't doing your duty ultimately supposed to make you happy?
No. No one can prove that yet. And...I'm a coward. I want some happiness, something real and lasting. All this pain -mine, my friends', and every other Flamebearer's pain and his friends' pain, back to the day the Sword and Shield shattered. My pain began on the world's first day, it may never end until the last.
Why do the Runes come to us? Why us in lieu of others? Runes will wait for hundreds of years for the right Bearer. Does Fate make Bearers different? Are we naturally able to carry this pain? Does seeing the world and people around us age and die actually affect us less? Or are we no different, just a slew of wanderers who place all their courage on duty?
We aren't supposed to die, yet we lead the most wretched existence on earth.
I admire our friends. Sorry, Geddoe. I will never resist the impulse to make friends. And now I can almost hear you saying, if you were provoked, "Can you resist having Sana?" I don't have her, in any sense of the word, dammit. I don't want her body or her heart. I mean I do, of course, but I know it's useless -dammit. I need to stop imagining what it would be like. I need to stop tantalizing myself.
Maybe I should do as so many other Bearers do. Leave. Entirely.
Leave her.
Coward. That cold feeling all around me, that's cowardice! Even something as beautiful as love turns to greed when it's not yours to have.
Damn, Geddoe, if I thought you were happy than I'd want to leave everything behind as you do! As it is...
Is it ever anyone's duty to ruin his life?
But if I renounced the Rune-
How do you know what choice will ruin your life?
I frowned. Your duty can ruin your life, but the ruination isn't the goal. I broke the memory and found myself sitting under my own darkness with my own firelight at hand. The flame in the lamp angled toward the Rune in my hand, then bent away in a slight breeze.
I brought my glass to my lips, kept it there a moment as I considered drinking, then put it back down untasted. My mind's eye was remembering Seioras scrawling the label.
I didn't agree with you fifty years ago. And now I have to live with your memories, every one under the Rune even to the moment you chose to relinquish it. And I know something of your spirit still resides in it. Are you going to try to explain yourself a second time?
Damn. Your arguments will never make sense. If you aren't willing to sacrifice everything, you have no business trying to change the world.
I paused in my thoughts suddenly, aware that I was frowning deeply and waiting for Queen's voice to ask "What's wrong?" I looked across the table to her place.
It was empty. I sat opposite darkness and lamplight cast on the back of a wooden chair. Her glass was also empty and set to one side. Even the cat was gone.
How long had I been concentrating on the Rune? Did she just leave without saying good night? Or did I just not hear? But she would've said something to get my attention.
Did she take one look at me and see I wouldn't respond, so just left without a word?
The candle strained toward me.
I didn't see how I could casually ask her in the morning. I probably would never know what she had thought when she turned back to me. Nor would the True Rune, or any of its future Bearers.
If I died.
In battle.
I, and the True Fire Rune, recall this years later as the night I began to hate firelight.