While You Were Sleeping
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Obligatory Health Advisory: This chapter again includes grown-ups using substances as grown-ups often do.
(Questioning)
After his nerve-wracking dinner with Arthur, Azel didn't wait for an invitation to go to the smoking room.
"No Shanan?" he asked, upon finding Oifaye alone on the tattered settee.
"Shanan had other obligations tonight," Oifaye replied as he offered up the pipe to Azel.
That blonde girl, Azel thought as he settled down on a heap of cushions, but what he said aloud was, "Does Lewyn ever come here? I remember him smoking back when we all first met."
"No, Lewyn only associates with the rest of us when there's business involved. I haven't any idea what he does with himself for recreation."
"Good. I didn't want to see him anyway."
Oifaye chuckled at this, then added, "Finn has a drink with us every now and again, but you'll never find him here, either. Not that we've been here very long. It was only a fortnight since the victory on the day that Patty found you."
"Mm." Azel closed his lips around the pipe and proceeded to indulge himself. "This tastes different," he said, upon coming up for air.
"It's a harsher blend than I'd like, but these days one can't be too choosy."
The smoke didn't have quite the same effect as before; it left Azel drowsy but didn't quell his inner agitation. When his inhibitions dropped sufficiently low, he asked the question that'd been floating through his head for the better part of the day.
"Does love go on after we die?"
"What?"
"I've been thinking about my mother, and the stories she told me when I was little about the Crusaders. She didn't tell me the kind of stories I heard at church or in history lessons. She told me things like how when they died, the Crusaders were all rewarded with a grand feast and celebration that'll go on until the end of time. And since I was descended from Crusader Vala, if I was good and strong and brave when I grew up, there might be a place at the table for me."
And then I'd promise Mum that I'd ask Crusader Vala if she could come too. And I hoped my father wasn't there because he couldn't have been strong and brave after what he did, and that meant I'd never have to see him, ever.
"I've been wondering where everyone else from Sigurd's army are now, and what they're doing. Maybe they're having a feast that we're missing out on and they've saved a place for us... or maybe they didn't get a place at the table because they... because we..."
"Failed?"
"Yeah." Azel gazed into his misshapen reflection in the glazed surface of the pipe. "Is Sir Sigurd there with Empress Deirdre? I hope they're with one another. But my brother loved Deirdre too, from what Julia said, so does he have a place there at her side? My brother did good in his own way, or tried to. And how do the gods reward or punish someone like Blume, who tried to do the right thing... but didn't try hard enough?"
Azel had a more nuanced view of his late brother-in-law after talking things over with Tinny. Blume hadn't been all bad, even if he hadn't exactly been good. He'd loved his two children. He might have even loved Tinny in a watered-down fashion. And he'd been enough of a loving brother enough to bury Tiltyu on ice, her body as perfectly preserved in death as Azel's had been in his magical sleep.
"I really can't say, Azel," Oifaye was saying. "I don't think any of us will know until we're there."
"I hope Tiltyu's there. I hope that she's having feasts and celebrations and everything that she liked..." Azel felt a dripping from his nose and blamed the smoke. He wiped his face on his sleeve in a gesture that always got him shouted at when he was younger. "I hope the things she suffered count for something in the eyes of the gods, even if we didn't win."
"I'd imagine that they do-"
"When we were in it, we could keep telling ourselves that everything was worth it because things would get better. Now, I know that it's over, things never got better, and I can't take any of that time back. It's done."
"And you can only find resolution in death itself, like Sigurd and Deirdre." Oifaye sounded like he'd thought long and hard on the matter himself. Maybe too long.
"Except maybe you can't. Maybe we can't." Now he didn't feel peaceful at all, or even the least bit drowsy. Ashes fluttered down from the bowl of the pipe as it sat unused between them. "I mean, if being a dead hero is the best you can be, why'd the gods give us the Valkyrie Staff to call people back?"
He remembered the ceremony where Father Claude revived Sylvia. There hadn't been any hint that this was anything but the best, the greatest, the most gracious thing the priest could do with his gifts when he brought life back to the poor battered body of the little dancing girl. Nobody mourned that Sylvia was getting plucked out of some heroic paradise and nobody suggested that she'd earned a place at the table of the gods by getting herself killed in Sigurd's service. Her death was simply sad and her resurrection joyful.
"Hey, Oifaye, where's the Valkyrie Staff now?"
"I heard that Claude's disciples put in back in the Tower." Oifaye didn't have to say which tower, as they both remembered the austere spire of Saint Bragi rising above its windswept promontory to the north of Agustria.
"But nobody can use it, right?"
"As far as anyone knows, Claude never had children."
The staff was broken anyway, Azel remembered. It snapped in half after its single use, burned clear through by the awesome power of the resurrection spell. But there'd been that slight chance...
And for that slight chance, the faintest of hopes, Tiltyu was resting in a frozen tomb in faraway Alster. It might have been as easy to wake her from death as it had been for Lewyn to bring Azel out of sleep... except that now it wasn't and never would be.
Oifaye rose from the settee.
"I'm sorry to break things off here, Azel, because I truly appreciate being able to have discussions like this with you, but Fee will be cross with me if I don't get back to her soon."
"Fee?" The name of Lewyn's daugher didn't make sense in the context of what Oifaye said, but then Azel noticed the heavy gold ring upon Oifaye's left hand. "You're married?"
That detail must have slipped by him in the last couple of days.
"We try not to flaunt things the way Shanan does."
"Oh. Yeah, that's a lot better for everyone else in the army," said Azel. He remembered entirely too well what it felt like to be on the sidelines when all the ladies started making their choices. "How long has it been?"
"Five months."
"Wow," said Azel as he reclaimed the abandoned pipe. "I bet Lewyn had some things to say about that."
"Not a word, actually," said Oifaye, and his pleased expression turned a little sour and maybe a little wistful. "Not a word..."
Azel stared up at Oifaye, but the Oifaye he was seeing then was Sir Sigurd's young adjutant, the boy whose cheeks colored whenever brave and graceful Dame Fury chanced to speak to him.
"She's Fury's daughter."
"Yes."
"That's pretty weird, Oifaye." It was likely something Azel shouldn't have said, but he was finally calm and a little numb and honestly just didn't care. "I mean, how would all of you feel if I decided to try my hand for Lady Lana? It'd be like getting a second chance at Aideen."
"I think His Highness would be quite upset if you tried to seduce his wife," Oifaye said, and he began to walk away in a swift but regular pace, like a soldier on the march. "Don't make yourself sick, Azel."
And then he disappeared through the beaded curtain that hung across the door. The beads all clacked together in his wake.
He probably shouldn't be causing arguments with the few people who were being friendly to him, Azel thought as he rested his cheek on a cushion adorned with what looked like tiny diamond-shaped mirrors. But if he'd arrived here in 778 to find Oifaye married to his own little Tinny, he'd have been tempted to punch the older man.
No, younger man. The kid with the stack of maps who thought Dame Fury was the prettiest thing in camp. It was definitely weird. Just... weird.
Azel fell asleep.
To Be Continued
A/N: Yes, so here is the obligatory Tiltysicle part of the 'fic. No, there's no Valkyrie Staff user in this timeline 'cause Sylvia married Alec. FE4 gamecanon and notes seems to imply that you do need a body to perform resurrection magic.