The Tactician's Return [Post Canon]
Five years later, she reappears in the world. A short drabble about that last scene plus a little extra.
Haura wakes up to Chrom, Lissa, and Frederick, surrounded by the grass curling around her body and the sun too bright overhead. Her hand reaches out without her conscious input and the leather of Chrom's glove against her skin assaults her senses, too quickly, too much, the roughness, the warmth, the pressure.
Her world spins in vertigo as she is pulled to her feet. Now she feels her lips, her tongue, and her throat. Awareness flows down her body- her nostrils flare, her back pops into place, her stomach clenches, small shudders to alerts herself that she is alive again. But before she can settle into herself, Lissa barrels into Haura and Chrom's hand is nothing compared to how she drowns and goes limp against the intensity of Lissa's touch.
"Chrom-" she pleas and Lissa begins to crumple under her dead weight with a squeak.
"I got you. I got you." Chrom is caught between crying and laughing as he shoulders one arm, Lissa the other. Haura dangles between them and even as her body feel heavy, foreign, alive, she croaks out a laugh.
"I said we would meet in a better life, so why do I feel as weak as a newborn babe?"
It takes several attempts for Haura to figure out her legs again (-amnesia is one thing, having a body dissolve into ether and then be resurrected is another-) but Chrom holds her hand the entire time like he is her father, her brother, her comrade again. Lissa cheers her on and when Haura manages to dance half a jig before tripping and falling on her face, Frederick pulls her up on his back, declares they've wasted enough time, and hides his relief by marching at the front.
The first day is a blur of too many people, too many sensations for this sensitive body to deal with. She learns too much in too little time and there's still more, more that she has missed, adventures, weddings and babies, career changes. Morgan who has stolen her job as Ylissean tactician, has grown to his father's height and it is Haura being wrapped up in his hug as they sob into each other for a good hour. Papa is not here, Morgan tells her. Lon'qu works by Basilio's side these days and the trip to the west of Regna Ferox is a week on the fastest pegasus. Haura is disappointed, but there is little to be done about it and already she has so many faces to greet again, to cry with, that by the end, her nerves are thoroughly shot. She retreats to a quiet, dark room to deal with the overload once she finds a window to slip away.
Chrom finds her late in the evening and tosses his crown onto the couch. The lines in his brow have deepened but the cheer on his face has not faded. "Five years without you was longer than anyone expected." Chrom says. "You look exactly as you did on that day."
Haura says nothing at first, struggling with her drowsy mind to put it into words. She had existed the entire time (a memory of non-being cannot return, after all), but those five years were numbing loneliness, reflection, and boredom, in a hazy, dream-like sleep. Time had stopped for her, both in mind and body, and as she readjusted to her body, she found herself in the exact wartime fitness she had been when they fought Grima. The only difference was how the Heart of Grima had now been purged from her. That eddy of malicious power sleeping in her veins had run dry forever and that one weakness she embraced wholeheartedly.
Chrom on the other hand, had continued on without her for five years and Haura can see the slight grey in his hair, the darker bags under his eyes, the beginning of wrinkles, but also a glow that came from peacetime.
"Are you sure your glow isn't just because I've gotten plumper?" Chrom chuckles as Haura insists. "Don't flatter an old man like that." And now Haura is scowling and hitting his shoulder and Chrom falls back into the old pattern with ease, even if he is rusty from five years of no practice.
She feels as if she has never left for a moment, until Lucina, who is not a babe or a masked woman, but a rambunctious child runs in to demand her father's attention. Owain and Lissa run in next, filling the room with chatter, and Haura smiles. Chrom is fluent with his child in a way that highlights the years of adaptation and progress, into a father and into an exalt. While she wishes she could have seen it for herself, being here, with the damask of the couch under her fingers, the musty smell of the velvet curtains, the laughter of a family in her ears, is already enough.
Tomorrow she will begin her life again, five years later.
A/N: There is a fic I really want to write, but I promised myself I would not start until I at least attempt to finish all my other half finished things. That one is about realistic marriages and what does it mean to be in absent for five years and love being something you work for and we want happy lives, not endings.
This is not that fic. This is more of a prequel/premise summary that says nothing at all. Hopefully it piqued your interest a little! Let me know what you think.