While You Were Sleeping
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
(Remembering)
It turned out Azel's body did want to simply rest; the unnatural sleep of the last fifteen years hadn't left him very refreshed. Maybe the better term for it was petrified, or frozen like the bodies that turned up in Silessian glaciers during the summer melt. Sometimes the bodies looked freshly dead even when their clothes, their weapons, made it clear they'd been lying in the ice for centuries...
Yes. That was what he was. An ice-man, unthawed, wearing the face and clothes that belonged to his own era even though the world had been spinning away through light and darkness as he slept. And he did look the same; Azel had stared into the gilded mirror on his wall for a few bleary-eyed moments before throwing himself in disgust onto the bed.
"Why am I even here?" he asked again before closing his eyes and wishing himself to sleep. That sleep came on gently, like an unfolding embrace instead of a dark veil dropping down to smother him. Azel was warm, and time seemed to be passing along in its course, and he even dreamed. In the still dark before morning he woke with a start, and the dreams escaped leaving only one thought behind.
Tiltyu was dead.
He still didn't believe it. He'd just left her there, hadn't he? In Azel's yesterday she was hidden away in their cabin with Arthur and the baby. Every detail of her was fresh and sharp to him- the scent of her hair, the taste of her tears, the sound of her laugh and the touch of her fingers running down his shoulders. Tiltyu was real and alive and there, if he could only turn around and get back to her.
After that, he couldn't sleep at all, not when his mind echoed with Tiltyu's dead while his body and heart and soul insisted that she wasn't. Azel dragged himself from the bed when gray morning light trickled in through the curtain and he steeled himself to face the world where his yesterday was everybody else's distant memory.
He took his time about facing it, though. First Azel called for a bath on the excuse that he hadn't had one in a very long time. Then he decided to have breakfast brought to his room. Then he slipped out the back stairs to spend a while staring into the wet remains of a garden courtyard. Some of the plants were still alive, but strange scorch-marks on the paving stones indicated that something unpleasant must have taken place there in recent times. Torture? Executions? Azel stared at the trampled plants until the low clouds drifting across the battlements of Belhalla began to drizzle down a warm rain; mindful of his tendency to get chills, Azel decided he was better off inside.
Of course, the first person he encountered there was Tinny.
"Oh!" she said, and again she reminded him of a little squirrel, with her furtive darting movements.
"Good morning, Tinny."
"I was hoping to see you," she said. "I was wondering if we might talk..."
And I was afraid of exactly that, Azel thought, but since there was no running away now he walked with her to a place he remembered from his childhood, a gallery where he would wait by himself while Arvis consulted behind closed doors with King Azmur. It had changed little; the dark wood carvings and gilded rosettes on the ceiling had come through the wars somehow, and only one of the stained-glass windows was smashed out and boarded over. The smell of it had changed though; instead of polished wood and incense, there was something stale, something rancid about the air in that gallery.
They sat down on a high bench beneath one of the windows, and Tinny's feet didn't reach the floor, just as Azel's feet hadn't reached the floor when he'd sat on that bench, waiting for Arvis and kicking the air. She was smaller than Tiltyu, Azel thought, and he wondered if, at fifteen, Tinny still had some growing to do. That was the moment where it struck him that this girl with two beribboned plaits of hair was actually his daughter, was the very same being that he'd cradled only weeks ago- her little head as fragile as an eggshell in his hands, tiny nails glinting on the little pink stars of her hands.
He'd always heard that children grew up in the blink of an eye. Azel had to stifle a laugh, and quite honestly he felt he was on the verge of being sick.
Tinny watched him with her pale eyes- more of a light bluish-gray than the storm-cloud violet that Arthur had inherited from their mother.
"Tell me about mum when she was younger."
"I knew your mum from the time I was very small," Azel began, and for a moment it was young Tiltyu sitting next to him on the bench, both of them waiting in boredom while the important members of their families discussed grand things with the king. "She and Lex- he was Johalva's uncle- and I were all friends together, though our lives were very different at home. I was raised by my brother Arvis, as you've probably heard, and Lex didn't get on with his father at all. But your grandfather Reptor... he wasn't a good man, but he did love Tiltyu."
Loved her so much he didn't believe for one moment she'd joined with Sigurd of her own accord.
"He spoiled her a little. Your mum got out of lessons if she didn't want to take them, she always had nice things..."
Azel stopped himself there. This wasn't something Tinny would want to hear about her mother from her own father. This was a litany of the grievances that House Velthomer's bastard son felt when he measured himself against the precious daughter of House Freege, the little spark of light who could make the sour old prime minister soften with pride.
"Your mum was pretty sheltered," he said. "She was always cheerful, always smiling, but when things started to go wrong it was harder on her than on the rest of us, I think."
He didn't want to say more than that, because now all the other memories that were still too fresh and raw were coming at him. Tiltyu in Silesse the first time, her bright smile turned as brittle as an icicle. Tiltyu after her father's defeat, too plagued by melancholy to get out of her bed, able to smile at Arthur but not strong enough to hold him. Tiltyu not two months before, weeping as Azel left the cabin because she knew she wasn't likely to ever see him again.
"Tinny... I'm sorry but I can't do this right now."
She said she understood, and maybe she did. But he thought that she cringed, pulling into herself, as he leapt down from the bench and walked as fast as he could without actually running from the stale oppressive air of that ancient gallery and all of its ghosts.
-x-
Azel locked himself in his room after that. It was childish and stupid and completely beneath him, but right then Azel didn't give a damn. He stayed there, face down in the bed with a pillow over his head to block out all every bit of light and noise, until a presence at the end of the bed told him that they'd broken the lock or battered down the door.
"Come on, Azel. There's a time and place for falling apart and this isn't it."
"Shut up, Lewyn."
Lewyn didn't shut up. He'd brought in a flute, and he began to play it now, in a piercing discordant way that rattled Azel's nerves instead of soothing them. All the pillows on the bed couldn't shut out the awfulness of that music.
"Please stop."
"Would you rather I sang? I can sing to you the fall of Silesse, of the bloody occupation of Isaach, of the ups and downs of the Thracian Liberation Front. I'm partial to the saga of Silesse, but there are some parts of it you might not be able to stomach."
"I get it," Azel said as he sat up. "I had it easy."
"You don't know the half of it. Sylvia's out wandering the the world as a penitent- where, even I don't know. Raquesis has been sitting in the dungeons of Silvail for the last seven years. Briggid drowned in the River Thracia; the power of Ulir brought her back to life but all her memories are gone. She wouldn't believe who she really is if you stuffed the Yewfelle into her hands and told her to fire it."
"That part doesn't sound so bad. I can do without some of these memories," Azel said, but Lewyn looked at him then with an expression so fierce, so cold, that Azel had to avert his eyes and mumble out an apology.
In that moment, Azel was too afraid of Lewyn to even think about asking how and why Lewyn knew any of these things. As with Arvis, so many (so many!) years before, it was best to accept that those who bore the mark of the gods were just different. Azel needed to put on his shoes, brush down his hair, and go back out there like a responsible adult.
"Claude was blinded and crippled," he heard Lewyn over his shoulder. "His disciples had to carry him around in a chair until he died a few years ago. And Ayra..."
This time, Azel really did run. He'd learn everything in due time, whether he wanted to or not.
To Be Continued...
Author's notes: both the idea that Tiltyu's father doted on her and the fates of Sylvia, Raquesis, and Claude in this story are all taken, like the basic idea of this plot, from the designers' notes. Again, I am using those as a jumping-off point rather than following them to the letter.