While You Were Sleeping

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Obligatory Health Advisory: This chapter includes grown-ups using substances as grown-ups of many nationalities often do.

(Retreating)

Azel went to find Tinny to make amends for bolting on her that morning. Beyond his door it seemed that everyone else was celebrating in a party as merry as the one the night before- Azel heard raucous music in several different styles as he searched for Tinny's room. Sounds came at Azel from strange angles as he searched down corridors that had changed in the past twenty years; he encountered dead-ends and branching hallways that were foreign to him, and Azel felt his heart beat ever faster as he grew flustered in his search.

"Uncle?"

"Ah... Julia?" He whipped around to see the princess standing several paces behind him. Her pale hair and robes made her look as serene as a saint's ivory statue in a church.

"Is everything all right?"

"I was wondering where Tinny might be."

"Oh, Tinny. She's gone to her room for the night, but I think she'd like to see you. She's on the second floor, just past the Dragon Fountain."

Azel had a fair idea of where the fountain was, so he thanked Julia and went up the nearest staircase. It didn't entirely surprise him that the Lopt sect had vandalized the fountain, blackening its white marble and staining the waters crimson so that a dark dragon romped in pool of blood. A gesture worthy of a petulant child, Azel thought, and he wondered if his dead nephew Julius had personally done the act or if the Lopt mages had done it for him.

Thinking on the statue worked to distract Azel from the meeting with Tinny right until his knuckles touched her door. She came to the door quickly enough, but her reaction on seeing Azel proved all too telling.

"Eep!"

If Tinny had inherited any measure of Tiltyu's spunk, it was long gone. One way or another, it was probably his own fault. Azel jammed his foot into the doorway in case she was tempted to close it on him.

"I'm sorry for leaving you abruptly today, Tinny," he said. "It was the first time I'd tried to talk about your mother since... well, since this, and it just wasn't easy for me."

He could see one of her eyes through the opening, and the expression in that eye softened. Tinny opened the door the rest of the way so they could face each other.

"It's all right, Father." He didn't hear any telltale hesitation in her voice.

"Um... we can talk now? Maybe?"

"We don't have to tonight," she said. "I think we'll have plenty of time now, right?"

Azel wasn't sure if she was being kind to him or rejecting him, and he decided to pretend it was the former.

"Right. We'll have lots of time," he said. His forced smile might have even been convincing, because she smiled back at him. It was a very sweet smile, more like what Azel remembered of Tiltyu's little sister Ethnia.

"Good night, Father."

"Good night, Tinny."

Azel stared into the wood-grain pattern in the door for several moments after she shut it on him. Concentrating on that helped him to keep his mind off his little baby girl who didn't exist anymore.

-x-

Azel came back downstairs in a fog. He didn't like the merry music any better than he had on his first circuit of the halls. A lot of it sounded Isaachian, he thought, and he never had enjoyed what passed for music there. He remembered calling Lex tin-eared over it once, after Lex fell over himself praising something just to please Ayra. Not that it had helped Lex in his pursuit of Ayra any, not with Holyn around...

Azel stopped himself. All of that seemed so real, so close, even though he hadn't seen them in years in his own time and they'd all been dead far longer than a couple of years...

"How stupid of me," he mumbled, and began to blink rapidly to keep tears from welling up. In this state, he nearly collided with someone in the hall; Azel looked up to find Oifaye regarding him with either sympathy or pity. Azel always did have a bit of trouble telling which of those was which.

"Come on, it's a little quieter in here," said Oifaye, and he led Azel toward a room that had, long ago, been a sacrosanct place for adults.

Azel needed no prodding to accept this invitation into the smoking room. A little quiet sounded exactly what he needed in that moment, and being alone with his own thoughts was just what he didn't need. The smoking room, even in decay, matched the rumors he'd heard back when Alvis was Captain of the Royal Guard- arched doorways and inlaid walls, barbaric designs made acceptable through the hands of Grannvale artisans. Shanan was already there, seated cross-legged on the floor with a blown-glass water pipe in front of him.

"We've been trying not to expose the children to our own bad habits," said Oifaye as he gestured to the water pipe.

"That's beautiful." Azel stared at the undulating shape and luminous color of the glass. "Where did you find something so nice?"

"The previous occupants left it behind," said Oifaye. "Loptyrian mages turn out to have a great range of vices."

"At least this vice is preferable to goat mutilation," Shanan put in as he took his lips from the pipe for a moment. "We won't mention the crop designs, though."

"What?" Azel already felt lost.

"There's a long-standing argument within our party," Oifaye said as he gave Shanan the eye, "over whether or not Loptyr's adherents taint crops by pressing arcane designs into the fields."

"Of course it's Lopts. Who else would do it? They cut a path through the fields with their foul spells and then you have to burn the whole field to cleanse it."

"Whereas others claim that it's something any bored villager can do with some rope and a wooden plank and that there's nothing wrong with the crops from a 'tainted' field."

"Just because Finn said they caught a couple of idiots trampling an oat field in Thracia doesn't mean the rest of them aren't made by Lopts," Shanan said as he waved off Oifaye's argument.

"This would be a mere difference of opinion if the future King of Isaach didn't endorse burning fields as a solution to this facet of the Loptyrian problem and some key allies didn't have strong objections to this policy," Oifaye concluded.

Azel watched this back-and-forth, unsure whether he ought to laugh or not. Not only was the problem not really a joke, he couldn't watch the pair of them without seeing the two little boys they'd been superimposed on the scene. Shanan with his ragged hair pulling faces as Oifaye tried to explain something of grave importance, Oifaye turning pink in the face when Shanan didn't respond to a well-reasoned argument...

Well. At least they were alive... though Shanan, under the influence of his water pipe, was soon with them only in body. Azel wanted to join him in the place where pipe-smokers went to be happy, but there was only one pipe and Azel didn't feel comfortable asking. Oifaye didn't have any such compunction; he took the pipe from Shanan with an ease that said they'd been through this a thousand times and took a place on the one settee that looked like it could still hold the weight of a grown man.

"Take a seat, Azel. We threw out the cushions that had rats' nests in them."

Azel sat down on a pile of brocaded cushions that were only a little tattered and stained.

"I can't believe this place is such a ruin. You'd think even a Dark Lord would want his capital to be grand."

"You'd think a Dark Lord would want his subjects alive to serve him, but He seems to have had concerns that were... not of this world. And His servants ranged from holy men gone wrong to common criminals," said Oifaye as he passed the pipe to Azel.

Azel took a tentative sample of the pipe in case it made him cough, but the smoke proved sweet and smooth and he didn't even feel a tickle in his throat from it. He drew in a deeper breath and settled back against the cushions.

"I guess I'll just never understand," he said. Oifaye shrugged and they passed the pipe back and forth for a time, just relaxing while muffled sounds of the party trickled in through the inlaid walls.

Oifaye seemed the most, well, normal of the people Azel had once known. Lewyn was... Lewyn. Shanan had changed so much from the kid that Sir Sigurd had rescued in Verdane that he might as well have been a different person, plus he had that something about him that went with having major holy blood and it made Azel uncomfortable. Also, Azel couldn't get the image of Shanan kissing Patty out of his head and that made him uncomfortable too. And with Finn things were uncomfortable in the opposite direction; a holy-blooded Velthomer was too high above Finn's station for them to ever be friends when they were younger, and that hadn't changed in the last fifteen years.

Azel also had the unshakable feeling that Finn resented him for being alive and unscathed when other people from Sigurd's army weren't. It wasn't anything that Finn had said in the few words they'd exchanged since Azel woke... it was just a sense Azel got. But Oifaye was perfectly cordial and there was just enough of the boy-tactician left in him that it put Azel at ease.

"I suppose I ought to apologize on behalf of, well, everyone for bringing you here and not doing anything to make the change easier on you," Oifaye said now. "But in our defense, it's been like that for a year and more. 'Here's the sister you never knew about,' and 'By the way, your entire existence is founded on a terrible lie.' Things like that."

"Ah."

"And I think that, for those of us who ought to have been responsible, it was easy to brush some things aside and say, 'Well, we went through all these terrible events without breaking, and so can they,' and to just get on with our mission."

"Some did break." It was Tiltyu who popped into his head again, but Azel knew it hadn't only been Tiltyu.

"I know." Oifaye took another puff off the water pipe. "Shanan and I have always counted ourselves lucky. We had one another to rely on, and Aideen supported the both of us. It was never easy, but I don't think we ever had the sense that what was given to us to bear was more than we could handle."

Azel was feeling very calm and a little sleepy now. It was far from blissful peace but he'd gladly take it.

"My mum used to sing a song to me... about how the wind god gentles his winds for the little shorn lambs, so they don't feel the cold."

"I've heard that song," Oifaye said as he passed the pipe back to Azel. "It doesn't always work that way."

"No. I guess not." Azel didn't feel like breathing in any more smoke; he set the pipe down on the floor in front of him and stared at the colored swirls in the glass, the gold filigree decorations on the bowl.

"There were a lot of little lambs in Isaach and everywhere else who didn't have the winds gentled for them, and if what they suffered was a better fate, I don't even want to think about it." Oifaye sighed then, and his tone shifted from stern to reflective. "I guess it's all a matter of perspective. You've heard about what happened to Father Claude?"

"Yeah, Lewyn told me." The ceiling was beautiful too, Azel thought, and he wondered how many years of work had gone into this single room in the vast palace.

"He might have said that his own fate wasn't a burden too heavy to bear. That may be the difference between a saint and the rest of us."

"Yeah." After a long pause, Azel added, "I think I need to go now."

He really didn't want to fall asleep there on the floor the way Shanan seemed to have gone into a trance. He pushed himself up from the cushions; Oifaye rose as well and he walked Azel to the door.

"There're better days ahead," Oifaye said, and he patted Azel on the arm as Azel turned to leave.

Something about that didn't sit well with Azel, and only several minutes later, as Azel passed by a defaced mural of Saint Heim's exploits, did the reason for that discomfort hit him.

"He was reassuring me like I was one of the kids," Azel to himself, and despite the entire "men only" context of their conversation, that's exactly what it'd felt like. "I'm one of the kids now."

From his place below the mural, Azel had a view of three long corridors converging into one. Three figures were approaching him from the right, and in Azel's disoriented state he briefly took them for Sir Sigurd, Prince Quan, and King Eldigan, all of them young and unbowed and come to join the party. Only as they drew close to pass him did Azel realize they were the three princes of this new age- Seliph, Leif, and Ares.

They didn't seem to notice him, anymore than they'd notice a servant. Not that there was any reason they ought to, Azel thought. No reason at all.

To Be Continued...

So Azel's attempt to bond with Tinny isn't going so hot. Keep in mind this has really only been the second "day" of Azel's new life, though. We get to see more of Arthur next chapter.