Disclaimer: So do not own Suikoden.
Now that we've got that settled. This is a one-shot in where I'm not quite sure where I'm going with it. I've seen the Gaidens but of course can read only the Japanese characters my friend has taught me (I really just like to look at the pretty people), so please forgive if characters like Lena or Young!Nash seem out-of-character. This is sort of just my interpretation of the ending to Suikogaiden 2 and the thereafter. Oh yeah, also there's a NashxSierra warning as of now, so if you're not into them going all Sonny and Cher "I've Got You Babe" you better hit that back button now.
Update: It's been reuploaded and tweaked very slightly to make it seem like I wrote it more recently (it's really like, two years old).
Oh yeah, and I decided to nix the song the story's named after, just because I don't want another deleted piece on my record. It still is a good song and applies to the theme of the story, though. If this story even has a theme. Oh, I don't know anymore.
Read and review please.
Night enveloped the town, darkness holding to the modest cottage. Even the white of snow appeared a flavorless gray from the window's view. Nash stared blankly at the timely drift of snow and how peaceful it looked from the eyes of someone warm and full and housed. He recalled, however briefly, many nights fought against such weather with nothing more than matches and a ripped canvas tent. Knives he could take; searing heat was really no trouble; but the deathly cold of winter months drove him wild. The answer to how he had survived such frozen nights evaded him now.
Out of necessity, he wrote in the deer-skin-bound ledger, fingers loose against the pen's cracking metal shaft. Wish I had some goddamn money these days.
Other things evaded him, too, among the list other trivial things such as sleep. Some passion inside had kept him from drifting off as he had done easily every night that he could remember, some passion he couldn't pinpoint and solve. He had pulled out his ledger and decided to read over the expenses; if it wasn't money worrying him at this point, he ought to be out of his mind. Sure enough he was able to estimate what they had spent and the low sum they had left to see them through to his next mission, but his heart still pattered breezily.
This is almost unnerving, he jotted in a margin by a drawing of a bird, its lines slick but somehow not succeeding in looking like what it was. If stuck here any longer, I might go insane.
He read over his notes and his mouth crinkled in amusement.
It seems I'm talking to myself. Discard last comment.
The bed sheets rustled over past the stove serving as a fireplace, so faintly that Nash creased his brow, wondering if it came from in the room or from the outside world. But only a second proved it was Sierra, delicate chin supported by her midnight-clumsy elbow. He focused on the sharp red eyes squared with his own and found nothing in him to muster up his usual smile.
"Morning, dear," was all he said before looking down at the ledger. Though he didn't bother to begin writing again, because rarely did his wife leave any conversation at that.
"It's hardly morning," she snapped, with the slightest lift of her slim eyebrows. "Come to bed or sleep outside. I am finding it difficult to sleep with that rickety old chair creaking as loudly as--" she yawned and left the comment with no finish.
Nash rocked in the chair teasingly and wiggled his eyebrows at her, full of suggestion as to what he would rather be doing. She smirked and said, "If I was no woman, suffice to say I would have bitten you at my first chance."
"If you were no woman, suffice to say you would be a man," he answered with the faintest of grins twisting his lip. It was one of the few things he enjoyed doing when all he felt was wanderlust: To be with his wife and never have to worry about her probing or crying or boaring into his mind. Sierra was intricate as a wife yet could still remain so very simple. Holy union had brought them together, but there was nothing to be done about their slight emotional reserve. By silent agreement, he knew it was the way they both preferred it.
"Good night," said Sierra flatly before she held a downy white pillow and lowered it over her face, if only to silence him. She'd softened in retrospect to what he had married. Love failed to give him any power over her but it erased the pleats of loneliness around her eyes.
Nash loved her too dearly for what she was. He realized often that Sierra was not without her flaws. She was a woman old in fashion and pale of cheer, with a frame too slender and a mouth too delicate to pair attractively with eyes that sometimes flashed in fathomless anger at him. She swayed on the border of loving and plainly mean; a porcelain face did not excuse away any of her verbal abuse. And yet despite all these flaws, or perhaps because of them, Nash could only help but love her.
Love could be such a strangely familiar and clouded feeling sometimes. He'd never been much in love before Sierra, and wondered at times if he could ever identify the feeling. If just maybe it was his body that led him more to her than his heart; but this was as stupid as thoughts came. He had loved. Granted not in the way he was now, but the few things he felt so often matched against things he'd felt before. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted her to be happy. Happiness for the single person he loved so long ago--still loved--had meant never seeing her face again. It had been two years ago, ancient history to someone as young as he, but during cold nights a whisper he couldn't suppress placed some blame. Placed insecurities Nash thought he was over. It hadn't been an epiphany that day, especially when he knew in his heart it would never be the same. But the pain still chilled his limbs like a splint of icicles, because--because...
Whatever Julie needed, Nash knew it just wasn't him.
I wonder where she is now.
Nash stared down at a ledger page for a minute and frowned, ripping the paper away from the spine and crumpling it in his right hand before it bounced feebly to the floor. The next page was blank and yellow-tainted with crooked lines to write on, and an ink stain that had bled through from the last page covered an entire corner. He tried his best to burrow into thought and pull out anything that might have bothered him at this time of night, and when that failed, decided to join Sierra in bed.
His ledger was left, forgotten, upon the floor and fell by chance to the second page. It was the same as the other pages but its date marked two years earlier. The ill sketches of a cameo paralleled what was written in the margins between calculations and comments, scribbles and travel plans:
Life without regret is just impossible, but I feel something ending within me...
…I feel myself disintegrate.
An empty cameo. It burned in his grip like he was holding a smooth piece of molten rock, yet he refused to let go of it for fear he had missed something. His gloved hands shook, green eyes swelled in tearless sorrow, mouth pressed into a thin, disappointed line. Disappointed in himself, who had come so far and now, for what? But then, did he expect forgiveness? Did he expect half a decade's worth of dishonesty and abandonment to go unnoticed?
His temples throbbed in frustration to the point where he said words to Lena out of instinct in place of thought. Minutes slipped away and he went on quietly to her, voice unwavering and deceitfully calm.
"You're welcome to stay," came her reply, the tones sounding soft and pliable and not like Lena's voice at all. Nash shook his head on it, confronted again with how much his family had been distorted once he'd stepped into obscurity: It would be much easier to drop it all and leave if she had sounded like the girl he once raced through the courtyard and who'd stolen his tin soldiers when she was eleven. It would be much easier if she hadn't sounded so hopeful.
He could scarcely recall what Julie looked like, besides that, like him, she had the same wheat-blond waves for hair. The same eyes that tipped up just slightly at the corners, though hers were like burnished cobalt and fringed by paler lashes. Like a sheet of paper once crumpled and then flattened he could remember the delicate slant of her nose and small mouth. And her laugh--soft and full of an understanding that only a sister could have for her brother. He'd always protected her when she needed him, and even when she thought she didn't, as he realized now. But it was the small things growing up, like switching their mittens and chapped, bleeding lips and the many things he was better off forgetting that made it that much more difficult to forget, to realize this cameo meant that Julie could take care of herself and she no longer needed her brother there to help her along.
He regarded a courtyard he remembered so very vaguely playing in, learning in, where he'd sat like a proper young man through many tea parties and tortured Julie in turn by making her play with wooden swords (she'd always managed to work her way into the role of dainty princess, somehow). There was a certain seal around it that provided comfort and safety from the world beyond. The Nash who'd once so resolutely played there was a Latkje and was rich enough to remain in that bubble, impassive save for the smiles and nodding. But he was now twenty-two, a more worldly and aware Nash who could only see standing there an empty and flowerless courtyard that held nothing for him of benefit.
"I...don't consider Crystal Valley my home any longer." He turned and met Lena's stare, gentle and sharp as if those two things could be one and the same. Maybe it was the color of her uniform, a navy blue that matched the deep tides of her gaze to perfection, that made it so penetrating. But nonetheless was he able to pocket the cameo and face her with what he thought must have been a very adult face, and accepting of all that was to become of him.
Only now, Nash refused to let things become of him. It was time to stand his ground and leave with dignity; he'd finished what needed finishing and could let Nash Latkje and all his now-settled scores die right there in the courtyard. Grosser Fluss and that loathsome man were now buried under the crippling weight of earth and that was all Nash's heart needed to sate him for that moment. Happiness, the fleeting lady always a step out of reach, could be pursued later.
Lena's mouth opened but she was nothing less than silent. She took Nash in, heard his voice and words and felt she could barely unearth in that her nephew. "Don't be stupid. Listen to me. If you can't stay for your sister...would you stay for...?"
The courtyard lapsed into silence again; Lena was too proud to finish a statement that she knew would only end up in regret, because by the look on his face such pleads were a lost cause.
"Nothing, Lena, can keep me here."
"Might I ride on the back of your wagon, sir?"
The farmer rubbed his bristly gray beard and squinted at the man asking so earnestly for something usually only the seedy and suspicious may have. The traveler's voice was tainted with Harmonian nobility; why someone so tall and blond and fair-skinned would be asking the likes of a simple southern farmer for a ride was beyond him, but the look on this man's face left no room for questions. With mussed hair and tired eyes there was no doubt he was running from something, but he had asked with a tone kind enough for the farmer to nod.
"I have money if you--" Nash reached into the back pocket of his long coat yet what he withdrew was not coins, but smooth of surface and with a shine bright enough to play the early sun into his eyes. What had seemed so crucial that last evening had lain forgotten in his pocket during the passing hours of nightfall. Minutes went by like seconds while he stood there, running a calloused thumb over the cameo's face.
"If you're coming, it's about time to get on!"
He straightened at the farmer's call and enclosed the cameo safely inside his palm, climbing on amongst a bed of hay. Nash signaled forward to the driver and watched his legs hang in the air above the ground, while the horses trudged to a slow walk. The farmer whistled every so often and then mumbled, "Just keep movin', movin' on."
"You have been in a mood all day."
Nash rose the tea cup to his lips and gazed at Sierra over the brim of it. "Why, you might actually sound concerned. Does that mean I should also be?"
"Fine, forget it," she shrugged, her sleek, muscular legs in a knot and white nightgown fanning out around her. "I care not if you're unhappy, so long as you're able to perform your husbandly duties," Sierra added, as though trying to make up for if she had actually shown any interest in him.
"Husbandly duties?" said Nash. "You make it sound like work."
There was a pause, short, solicitous. They could see the gulf of a hundred generations separating them, which squeezed her stomach from the inside and bled a metallic taste onto her tongue. Why age could play a dually key and useless factor in their love was lost on the pair, who were always at the edge of saying something genuine but instead replaced the words with something safe, something teasing, something that wouldn't lose them any ground. Nash studied his wife's eyes, both lovely and frightening in their color of blood.
"I suppose it is, though, keeping you happy," he finished.
"I would not go so far as to say that."
"What's that you say? Have I worked you too hard, Sierra?" he asked, though the words dripped in his playful mockery. "Oh, was it the long missions I went on to keep us in this house? Was it the countless dinners I have had no choice but to make because you can't cook?" Nash held up his cup and shook it for emphasis, the burning contents spilling onto the leg of his pants. "Was it the four feet of snow I had to brave during the wee hours so you could wake up to tea and fresh bread? Alas, a woman's work is never done!"
Any other wife would take those words from her husband and have been devastated, but the lone time when Sierra was not at the contrary to what Nash said was when his eyes were lit in that devoted way of his where no words were needed, because as much as they hated to admit it, they loved each other. And even if the ceiling was beginning to peel away, even if the cabinets lay bare sometimes, even if they had to drink morning tea on the floor in way of a table, it was a twisted form of happiness. That she could feel so young again was miracle enough; she would never say it to him but Nash was all she needed at the time, and everything else, the house and the food and the table...they would all fall into place.
"Do you have any idea of how to treat a lady?" she asked him, reaching across into his open embrace as cups and tea splattered the floor.
He kissed her forehead and said, "Wouldn't know. But if I see one, I shall make it my top priority to ask her."
"Just keep movin', movin' on."
Of all the things to say! Nash grinned sullenly, looking at the cameo and feeling despair again wash over him like a current that sucked him back in. But then, what now was to stop him from swimming to the surface to breathe again? He couldn't imagine what a breath of air would feel like with a free conscience, with ties of everything that had once dictated his life totally severed. He inhaled deeply, the cold morning settling a stinging pleasure inside his lungs. He watched Crystal Valley shrink to nothingness as the wagon was drawn further away, as those battles had and words said became rough at their edges and were soon unable to be recalled.
Nash held his arm out straight and without a twitch opened his vice-like hold, allowing the cameo to fall to the ground. Because he had his whole life in front of him, if only he had before cared to look and realize that, and this was his chance to take the reins firmly in hand. Because Julie and Crystal Valley and childhood and all that, he would neverwant to regret them, no matter what he had thought before. Because whether his life was a course chosen by circumstance or by his own will, it was still his life and that didn't mean he couldn't make the most of everything he did have. Because what the farmer said was how life was, fast and fleeting and over before you could blink a second time. Because it was his life, bitter but very sweet, and it was all finally going to start happening on Nash's own terms. Because, in essence, it really was time to just keep moving on.
Love always, Julie, Nash scribbled in his ledger before closing it, falling back to the embrace of warm hay.
I wish you a long, happy life.