While You Were Sleeping

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

(Confessing)

The next day, when Azel tried to speak with Tinny, she let him in.

"This is a pretty room," he said upon entering her sanctuary of silk taffeta in soothing tints of dove-gray and lilac. "It suits you, Tinny."

And he caught himself, because what right did he have to say such a thing? He didn't know her.

But perhaps Azel knew her better than he thought, because Tinny said in reply, "These were my rooms before. I got to stay here when Blume and Hilda brought me to court. Ishtar's rooms are right through that doorway."

Azel looked at the closed door in the bedroom wall and tried to place the name "Ishtar," which took a few moments. Then he remembered her- Blume's daughter, now dead. He thought he recalled something about her being involved with Prince Julius.

"Would you like to have any tea, Father?"

Azel thought he heard a slight tremor, the briefest possible hesitation, in her voice just then, but he accepted the offer. And so there was tea, and biscuits with cream, and more tea, and after that Azel found himself sitting on the silken counterpane of his daughter's bed, chatting to her as he might have chatted to a female playfellow in the days when he was too young to even think of marriage. As he might have chatted to Tiltyu.

Then again, Tiltyu never would have talked over two decades' worth of warfare and politics with him.

"Anyway, so then Arvis institutes this thing called the involvement clause."

"Oh, I know about that," she said. "Uncle Blume used it to deal with the rebel sympathizers in Thracia."

"Um... that'd be Prince Leif's supporters, right?"

"A lot of them were," Tinny admitted.

"Okay. So I don't have to explain how bad the involvement clause was. Well, after it went into effect, nobody who'd been willing to help us before wanted anything to do with us. I can't blame them- it'd be their own lives and those of everyone they cared about at stake. At that point, your mum and I really didn't have anything else..."

He felt his chest getting tight.

"So I decided to appeal to the emperor personally. I kind of talked myself into the idea that I could make Arvis see sense about what he was doing to the people. Tiltyu didn't believe me, but she let me go... like I said, we were pretty much out of luck by that point. So I left... and yeah, it didn't work so well."

He stared at a random point on the opposite wall for some time after that.

"Were you and mum sweethearts before the war?"

"No, we weren't." He couldn't lie about it, and there was no point in lying anyway, not when Oifaye and Lewyn and the rest might've already told her, or could tell her at any given moment. "When I was a kid, I saw Lady Aideen of Jungby and I fell for her. For ten years, I couldn't think about anyone else. Your mum was my friend through that whole time, but..."

Azel shook his head and looked down at his feet. He was sitting now on the bed with his knees drawn up, and he realized too late that his boots were on the counterpane.

"Oh, sorry. Should I take my boots off?"

"Don't worry about it," she said, and he thought there was a hint of a giggle in her voice then.

"All right, Tinny. Anyway, when Lady Aideen got kidnapped by some thugs from Verdane, that's what dragged me and Lex into the conflict where I met up with Sir Sigurd..." He had a sudden memory of Lex then, grinning beneath the springtime sun. You just can't stay out of these things, can you, Azel... "And after a couple of years, your mum got involved too. She was acting as an escort for Father Claude of Edda. And that was right about when we all got declared traitors and had to flee to Silesse, and we both fell in love with Silesse and with each other."

Even to his own ears, the tidy ending to the story sounded rushed and unsatisfactory. What had Tinny heard in the gaps between each spoken word? "Yeah, Lady Aideen was someone I went to war over. But when it came to your mum, I left her sitting undefended in Silesse with the two of you kids."

But Tinny smiled at him as though she believed in his story, and then she politely pointed out that it was time for dinner and they both ought to dress for it. So he hopped down from Tinny's dainty bed and headed back to his own apartment, cursing himself all the while.

"She had to know something was off. I can't do anything right. I've been wrong in every way since before I was born, so I guess my luck's not going to change now."

The guilt might not have wracked Azel so much as it did had it not been for the treacherous feeling in his heart when he'd first seen Lady Lana, looking so much like Aideen from twenty years before.

-x-

Azel understood perfectly well why he hadn't been looking for Arthur the way he kept trying to catch up with Tinny.

If Tinny was his precious lovely girl, a newborn to cradle and caress, Arthur'd been old enough to be more than a baby to Azel. Papa's little buddy, Azel thought, and the words sounded in his head like they'd been spoken in Lex's long-gone voice.

Arthur was a terror from the moment he learned to walk, falling into puddles when he wasn't dashing off toward the stables to pet the horsies. Sometimes Azel would tuck Arthur securely into bed at night only to find the boy burrowed into the space between Azel and Tiltyu in their own bed in the morning. Arthur made up his own language to talk to the dogs. Arthur sat on his lap, pointing to words on the page as Azel read aloud to him. Arthur crushed up dust and berries to make paint and then left tiny handprints all over the walls. Arthur went fishing with Azel in the sparkling stream by their cabin and tried to catch silvery minnows by the fistful. He had a thousand memories of Arthur, the beautiful and the heart-stopping, and more than that, Azel'd had plans. He cherished the idea of the spells he'd teach Arthur and the things they'd do together and the moments they'd share when Arthur was a little older, or a lot older, and...

And nothing. Today's Arthur stood before him as a youth fully grown, almost the age Azel had been when he and Lex set off on their mission, and every fond plan Azel had for his son had come to absolutely nothing... on Azel's end, anyway. From the sound of things, Arthur had done just fine without him. Crusader. Warrior. Mage Knight. Hero.

Not existing was bad enough, but not needing to exist made Azel half-wish he could climb back into his glass coffin and fall again into the dreamless sleep of oblivion. Instead, he and Arthur had dinner together.

The first thing Azel noticed was that Arthur's table manners were decidedly... rough. Especially compared with Tinny's dainty court gestures. The plate sounded like it chipped every time Arthur hit it with his fork.

The second thing Azel noticed was that his earlier impression of Arthur as being somehow like Arvis wasn't mere illusion. Maybe it was the way Arthur carried himself, the proud head and confident straight shoulders. Maybe it was the long, elegant fingers. Some of it was definitely from Arthur's angular face and the cascade of hair over his shoulders. But there was some glimmer of House Velthomer's legacy in Arthur in spite of his pale Freege coloring, and this realization made Arthur's words all the more... striking.

"So, Father. I take it you'll be governing Velthomer from now on?"

Of all the things he'd dreaded Arthur might say, Azel never anticipated that.

"Why would that be?"

"My inheritance passes through you," Arthur replied, and an odd little smile flickered over his face for a moment. "With you here and likely to enjoy many years yet- and Tinny and I do hope that is so- there's no need for me to take Velthomer's throne."

"I don't care," Azel said without even thinking about it. "I never dreamed of ruling Velthomer and I don't want it now."

Stepping into the space left by Arvis was the absolute last thing on earth that Azel wanted to do.

Arthur wasn't pleased by that answer. His pale eyes narrowed just a little, and it seemed to Azel that Arthur's guard went up in some indefinable way.

"Please consider it, Father."

"Okay. I'll consider it."

Azel mostly said it to shut down this line of conversation. Arthur showed that twitch of a smile again and it struck Azel that he didn't like the way Arthur smiled.

He didn't like a lot of things about Arthur.

He didn't like Arthur.

He didn't like Arthur. The part of Azel that was, now and forever, the scared little brother of Duke Arvis of Velthomer was silently screaming that this young man across the table was someone Azel shouldn't want to know, should get away from, that there was something bad and wrong about him.

"Are you all right, Father?"

"No," Azel said, and he pushed his chair back from the table. He batted away Arthur's hands, those long pale hands that once left berry-juice handprints on the walls. But though he had every intention of standing up and walking in a blind haze towards any place that wasn't this one, this time Azel gripped the armrests of his chair and took a few deep breaths until the wave of nauseating disgust passed. Then it was Azel's own turn to force a smile.

"I'm sorry, Arthur. I don't think I'm used to being alive quite yet."

"Right," said Arthur, and he nodded as though this made a convincing explanation for his father's odd behavior. Maybe it did. Azel didn't really know what ordinary behavior was supposed to be in the context of where and what he now was.

"Why wind magic?" Azel then asked.

"What?"

So it was indeed possible to rattle Arthur. It wasn't ever possible to rattle Arvis like that, to make him start a little in his chair.

"Tinny said you specialized in wind magic. Any reason for that?"

"I was in Silesse. That's what everyone learned."

"But you had all my tomes of fire spells, didn't you?"

"Yes," Arthur admitted. He sounded just a little sheepish now, and he was looking down at the tabletop rather than at Azel.

"Didn't you feel any affinity for fire?"

"Not really."

"You never wanted to do this?" Azel formed a little sphere of flame in his hand- pure parlor-trick magic, useless in combat- and held it up to Arthur's face, right in front of his nose. "You never wanted to fall into it, to embrace it, to let it consume you?"

"No."

Azel could see the flame reflected in Arthur's eyes, but beneath the glow of the fire he saw an obvious procession of thoughts that all revolved around how deranged Azel might possibly be.

"Good." Azel snapped his hand shut and extinguished the flame. "Fire magic is the most useless branch of magic there is. Once I learned thunder magic I preferred that to everything else."

Arthur blinked and then let out a bark of stifled laughter, the sound of discomfort mingled with relief.

"I never knew that about you," he said. "I don't think anyone mentioned it."

"Well, we have a lot to learn about one another. I guess this is a start." Azel was gripping the armrests of his chair too tightly again, but inside he was pleased that he'd managed to completely wrest control of the conversation away from his unsettling son.

But he still didn't much like Arthur, and a part of him was dying from that realization.

To Be Continued

Author's Note: this is, of course, a nod to how lousy fire magic is in FE4 compared to the rest.