Disclaimer/Author's note: I got the idea for this fic back in November, typed up a few parts, and immediately hit a brick wall. Then, four months later, I was laid up by a bad throat virus, which was apparently my cue to complete the rest of this deal through a haze of pain and general disorientation. Go fig. I don't have to tell you I didn't make Fire Emblem Awakening, right?

Edited 2015 Sept.

There are faces floating beneath his eyelids. He tries to recall their names, but they slip away from him. Tries to recall his own, but that recedes, too. He should feel alarmed, but all he can manage is a dull, matter-of-fact indignation.

Then he opens his eyes, and some of those faces are real.

"I know you," he says.

The girl giggles.

(And I will love you above all else.)

The girl's name is Lissa, and her brother is Chrom, and their guard, he learns, is Frederick. Frederick is the only one with sense among them, and so it doesn't take long for Robin

(Robin?)

to secure passage to the capital, under the brother's aegis. Chrom is almost eager to offer his protection, in fact—kindness for the sake of kindness.

Robin hates him immediately.

Later there is a town, and a bandit who dies, but that is hardly important.

(We offer this blood to you.)

It is no mere earthquake that interrupts the watch. There's too much movement, too much fire. Something else is shifting there, more than the ground beneath his feet, and when Chrom tells Robin to run, he clasps Lissa to his side and follows behind.

And then a hole opens in the night sky, and soldiers with rotting faces and burning eyes stumble toward him.

He hesitates for a moment, but he has his tome, and dead flesh burns as well as living, and so it is simple. A step foward, first, to shield Lissa behind him. Then he raises his arm, chanting, letting the familiar

(rightful)

magic turn through him—

The corpses burst into flame before him, shrieking, crackling, boiling. It's a feeling something like satisfaction.

And then a woman in a mask sweeps through the fire and the dark smoke, and she, too, is flesh to overpower and destroy, but she has taken him by surprise before he can prepare another spell, and his body is weak, and already the point of her blade is at his throat. It's only when she notices Lissa, half-hidden, her fingers pinching the cloth of his robe, that she falters.

"Who are you?" she says.

"Who are you?" he bites back.

(Did you believe you would escape me?)

She is Marth, she says, and takes her leave as soon as she's certain of Lissa's health—and only Lissa's.

He hates the capital, too, almost as much as he hates the man who takes him there. It is too clean, too whole. He is given a room, a place to stay until it is decided what will be done with him, and he spends most of that time resting, curled in his bedding, legs tucked to his chin, and it is degrading to sleep (he has slept so long already) but his body is weak so all he can do is read tome after tome of strategy he already knows until his mind dims from the exhaustion of it.

His dreams, when he has them, are vivid. He dreams of flying. He dreams of killing Chrom, impaling him through and watching the blood spill over. He wakes up and he is standing in front of the looking glass, watching himself through, his expression, his mouth, his tongue, the muscles that twitch (under his skin) across his face.

"Robin," he says. "Robin."

He is not sure who the name belongs to, but it is a familiar taste behind his teeth.

He falls back asleep, and when Lissa wakes him with a frog in the back of his robe, it is almost like a reprieve.

Lissa burns time in trying to torment him, in slipping things into the sleeves of his robe and giggling behind her hands as he tosses them away. "Why do you persist in annoying me?" he asks her one afternoon, when she is in his tent and there is still no reason for it.

"You're always so serious," Lissa says, smiling. "I guess I just wanna see you react."

"You have no right to that," he says, but the next time she puts a worm in his boot, he screams, and stutters, and protests, and everyone laughs and laughs.

Except for Lissa. "You were faking," she accuses him later, invading his tent once more.

"I pretend many things," he says.

And he expects her to turn up her nose, stomp back outside, and ignore him for most of the next week, but what she does instead is look at him level, quiet, the quietest he has seen her in a long time.

And then she says, "Why do you hate my brother?"

There, in that moment, he realizes that she is more perceptive than he has ever given her credit for. "I don't know," he admits, and the admission is a strange weight and a strange weight relieved.

Lissa frowns. "You don't just hate someone for no reason."

"And I tell you that I don't know." He adjusts his robe around him, gently feeling for anything undesirable in the folds. It is habit, now. "I hated him from the first I saw him, when he pulled me up in that field. That is all there is."

"Well, do you hate Frederick?"

He thinks little of Frederick. The man leaves the impression of a bottle fly. "No," he says.

"Do you hate Sumia?"

"No."

"Do you hate me?"

"No," he says. "I would have rid myself of your presence some time ago, if that were the case."

"Hey, I'm a princess, you know! That means I can go anywhere I want to, and you'll just have to live with it!"

"Of course," he lies.

Because a princess can be taken apart as easily as any other.

"Oh, you're mocking me now, aren't you?"

He snorts. "I inflict upon you only the mockery you deserve."

"You have to sleep sometime. And when you do, I'm gonna find you a dozen frogs." And she folds her arms and glares at him until her glare softens into something else. "But seriously," she says, "try to get along with Chrom, okay? I know he can be kind of hard-headed, but..."

He says neither that he will or he won't, but he sits across from Chrom the next lunch he eats and tries to fill the space with more than single-word replies. Tries to ignore Lissa, who smiles.

She stops smiling when her sister dies.

He doesn't understand why she chooses to cry into his shoulder.

He doesn't understand the care of these people at all.

(Better a fate by her own hand.)

"Do you think I haven't tried?"

Lissa looks at him over her knees. He can read her gaze. This, too, is simple.

"I am no fool," he explains. Must explain. "I am the tactician of this army. It is my right to send your brother's forces into battle—to direct them to kill in his name. To keep them alive, so they may continue to do so. And this duty is best accomplished when I understand the forces beneath my control. Their strengths. Weaknesses."

Lissa frowns. "I think you missed the point of talking to people."

"I understand the point of talking to people," he hisses. "These bonds your brother is so intent on me forming—nobody but me seems to be able to perceive their uselessness. Bonds will save nobody from

(Dark, billowing flame.)

the sharp edge of a sword!"

He is shouting, he realizes. Shouting without quite meaning to, but Lissa doesn't flinch, only gazes at him further.

And then she stands, and moves herself against the crook of his neck, and her arms to his back.

"What are you doing?" he snarls.

Lissa makes a sound. Maybe a laugh. "It's a hug, silly," she says. "Sometimes I think you need one. It's okay with you, right?"

He can feel her fingers by the blades of his shoulders. He wants to break them. He wants to take them between his own and keep them for himself.

He stands still, stone still, and closes his eyes. "It is not unwelcome," he says.

Children wander into camp, impossible, paradoxical offspring. It matters little to him—only that they can bear weapons as well as their parents.

One afternoon, it is a set of siblings, a boy and a girl.

"Fa—" the girl says.

The boy pulls at her shoulder, hard. "Sir!" he bellows, smiling too wide. "Might this be the brigade of rumor? The fabled army, its name whispered one the wind, destined to shear the twisted vine of evil at its root?"

"He wants to know if this is the Shepherds," the girl says.

The boy is clearly affronted, but continues. "We are two travelers, cast adrift on the seas of time," he says, "and my sword hand twitches to avenge a future that cannot come to pass. Only once my mission is satisfied will its hunger abate!"

"We traveled through time," the girl says. "Is Lucina here?"

And then the boy says, "Mom?"

And Lissa looks up, and the scene dissolves into a happy chaos that Robin sets himself apart of, even as Lissa pulls both her children to her chest, interrupting her son mid-explanation, mid-speech.

"You must have been so brave," she says, and whatever the boy had planned falls away as he nods his head forward and sobs.

They don't tell her who her husband was, once they realize she isn't engaged yet, much less married. It is no matter. He can see, even without the slip of the sister's tongue to guide him.

He knows what blood flows through their veins.

And yet, when Lissa kisses him, in a dirty tent upriver from the Mila Tree, it is somehow still a surprise.

She laughs at his reaction, and kisses him again, and it is no less surprising the second time.

It is strange, that he might do more than hate (and be hated).

"You're too late," Aversa says. She dies cursing them, calling for a master, sometimes Grima and sometimes her father. And when the other Grimleal turns to smile at them from the altar, he is no mere priest, after all.

He has Robin's face.

And then he does not, because he has too many eyes, and teeth, and scales, horns, wings—

"Grima," Lucina gasps. "Then—I was wrong?"

The fell dragon turns as if to answer, demolishing the Dragon's Table around it, unheeding. (What is one table, with the world to devour?) It is smiling, somehow, even without the face to host it, and it opens its mouth and surges forward to devour them—

(Let's have a great life together, okay? Someone has to remind you to be happy!)

He throws himself into the maw and his body falls away.

And at first he doesn't understand, but Chrom and Lissa are so small. And the wind is in his wings. And the dragon's teeth dig into the scales in his side, but he has been injured more seriously than this, by less important foes (Lucina never liked him, even from the beginning), and it is simple to twist himself around and tear at this enemy's flank.

The other flees into the air, but it is simple to follow, too. He could never have forgotten how to fly—how to coil in pursuit, through smoke and dark fire. How to bite down and crush the neck.

There is an almost perverse enjoyment in the other's rage and confusion, in the act itself. Grima is the fell dragon. But he, too, is the fell dragon.

And he, too, may feast at the Dragon's Table.

(You offer this blood to me.)

And then it is finished, and the dragon's body falls lifelessly, skin turning to dust before it even finds the ground.

He turns in the air, faintly aware of the eyes upon him. Chrom stands unsure, hand clenched at the hilt of his sword. Lucina's expression is equal parts fear and anger, her own Falchion pointed toward him, as if she could strike at him from so far away. And Lissa—

Lissa's staff has fallen by the wayside. "Robin?" she says.

"Lissa," he says, and it is strange, because his voice is still so human—

(Robin.)

(Robin!)

(Robin, you big jerk.)

(Didn't you promise me we'd be together?)

(I can't make you happy if you're not here.)

(And you make me happy, too.)

(So you'd better be alive. Even if I have to drag Chrom through every field in Ylisse to make sure of it!)

And he opens his eyes, and some of those faces are real.

"I know you," he says.

The woman laughs until she cries.