Disclaimer: Fire Emblem 8 and the characters in it do not belong to me.

Oddly, Neimi couldn't find it in herself to cry. She walked through the destroyed village feeling nothing but numbness; even the rain that plastered her hair to her face and put the last of the fires out failed to cause any feeling when it hit her skin. Bow at the ready, she walked the length of the village several times in her search for survivors. There were none. Somehow, she'd known that.

Colm avoided her gaze, unnerved by her demeanor. Neimi couldn't blame him; she didn't know why she wasn't a sobbing mess, either. They didn't speak a word as they gathered the dead, placing names to faces that were once familiar. Some of their friends were so badly maimed and burned that she could only guess at who they were. Every new discovery gnawed at her insides, but the pink-haired girl couldn't bring herself to feel their loss.

When they had found everyone, Colm began to dig. The thief tossed his heavy cloak aside, and it almost seemed to Neimi that he let the rain wash his own emotions away as he fought with the wet earth, his features grim. She busied herself by finding something –anything- to make the markers with, etching names into wood and stone alike with one of his daggers. The howling wind swallowed up the scratching noise, and the noise of Colm's shovel.

The wind ate everything they used to know, she thought with strange bemusement as she continued her work. Night crept over the village and then abandoned it to a gray, sickly dawn, and neither of them rested. Neimi thought the sky must be shedding the tears she couldn't find, and that it planned to drown everything in sight with its sorrow. She wondered if that would be so terrible. Colm wordlessly filled the holes back in again, while she placed the markers.

Somehow, they decided sleeping in the graveyard was more bearable than trying to rest in any of the houses surrounding it.

"I'm going after them," he said when she joined him the next morning. He looked grim and tired and so much unlike Colm. "They couldn't have gotten far with all the things they stole. I can still catch them."

"And do what?" Neimi asked. Her voice felt funny to her own ears. "Be outnumbered and killed?"

"They took your mirror." He said the words as though they explained everything.

"They took a lot of things," she countered, her voice shaking, "and if you go I could lose the very last thing I still have."

"I'm going." Colm's tone made it clear that he wouldn't change his mind, so Neimi dropped the subject.

It wasn't until they were on the muddy road with the village behind them that her tears began to fall. Colm held her tightly as she cried, and for the first time he didn't tease her about it. It took a long moment before Neimi realized he'd been crying, too.

End