Teardrop on the Fire

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

Set in Archanea (FE1/3 & 11/12); inspired more by 11 and 12. Caeda and Marth, post-war, with spoilers for all of the games.

Every year, the world takes another piece of him from her. It's nothing less than the price of their existence.

i. confession

Alone but not alone, they face each other across the black eye of of the world, this sacred ground made vile by the blood of men and dragons alike. She stands amid the wreckage in her ruined armor; he sits above her, perched upon the throne meant for kings of another race and another age. He breaks the silence, his voice an echo in the dark, his face pale as old marble beneath the violet shadows.

"I'm sorry for making you suffer."

It sounds so absurd to hear him say the words that other men use to plead forgiveness for their infidelities, especially when he uses those words to apologize for a year of scorching heat and blood-chilling cold, of fatigue and hunger and every other privation including the lack of air to breathe, of shattered bones and shattered souls. And yet he means it truly, as though he believes himself to be somehow at fault for the tide of destruction that has engulfed their entire world. As though, out of all the sorrows of this war, her own sorrow is somehow most unforgivable.

"I couldn't help you one bit. I'm the one who ought to be sorry."

Not fast enough, not strong enough, not sturdy enough to protect him, except with her prayers. She has never been able to ease his burden, to take up his great sword or carry the weight of his shield. That sword and shield- now resting at the base of the ancient throne- repel her with their significance, the cold representation of the duty that sets him apart from all of humanity... including her. She must step over them if she moves to embrace him.

But he speaks now, the words tumbling out as though he can't stop them. She's being silly, he says, and he tells her of how he could never have endured this long without her, of how he needs her, needs Caeda, at his side to face the tasks now laid before him. And those hasty inelegant words give form to the truths she has long carried in her heart, crystallized into a guide-star, but has never once heard spoken.

So she tells him, for the first time, of the oath she has sworn to herself, kept to herself... and kept herself to. She tells him at last of her vow to be at his side no matter the hardship, of her promise to have faith in him no matter what travails fate may set before them. And in that moment, at the end and the beginning of the world, she tells him for the first time that she loves him.

(transformation)

She remembers the first time Marth admitted that he found her beautiful- before the word escaped fully he retracted it, pretended that she drew him in by her bravery alone. And it touched her even so, for it flattered her to be called beautiful, but it meant more to her as a knight, as a princess, to imagine he might draw some inspiration from her in the thick of a fight.

Beauty fades. Already, when she takes stock of her own reflection, she thinks something is missing. Caeda sees her face as smooth but unremarkable; her mouth is too pale, her brows too straight. Then again, she supposes she is fortunate to have come through the wars with both eyes and all of her teeth. If the last few years have left her both a little more and a little less than she used to be, than she might have been- well, how could it not?

Besides, it's not as though Marth is quite as he was on that sunny day three years before when the word "beautiful" nearly slipped out. She remembers the boy with the cocksure smile, the one who could not resist taunting his enemies, the one who found exhilaration in the whirl and clamor of battle... up to a point. Now the balance of the heart has come down on the other side and the prospect of a fight no longer brings a glint to his eye.

By the time she joined him in Altea, he had already changed. So serious, always, she thought upon their reunion. It took some months to realize the serious moods weren't any different; rather, Caeda realized that something had gone out of his smile. The spark, the edge, the animation that made his moments of awkwardness endearing to her- all gone, as the patterns in a snowflake vanish at the touch of a breath. But if she had changed, and he had changed, then perhaps between them they had simply grown up, come into their true selves as women and men do, even without a war or two shoving them along the path.

If he doesn't smile quite as he once did, he smiles for her nonetheless, and on fair days they slip away together. Some days they steal a few whispers to themselves on a particular balcony of Altea Castle; some days they spend an hour or two in the countryside with the wind in their faces and the sunlight streaming down upon their skin. His land is such a pretty place- all blue rivers and green fields, with no dark thickets of forest where ghosts and shadows breed. Even the mountains of Altea are charming, a line of perfectly-formed peaks dusted with snow, a far cry from the jagged, brooding Samsooth Mountains or the terrifying heights of the Temple of Dragons. The island makes a restful garden, a place where they might just spend a while recovering themselves. That's how it feels, anyway, when they ride a distance away from the castle, across the river to some low-lying spot where they can't see the great scars across the landscape. On the other side of the gleaming water, the wall around the castle town looks as though it never was breached, and no one would ever know that some of the cheery buildings with their red-tile roofs are burned-out shells.

In those moments, Marth appears to forget about the breached walls and empty buildings and everything they mean to him. He rests his head on the cushion of her knees and gazes up at her with eyes so brilliantly blue that the sky itself pales in comparison. There is no need for words; he is silent in her arms, and in that silence she can measure his contentment.

ii. devotion

They have not been married for a month before violence erupts in the borderlands along the western desert. The first reports claim a remnant of the dark tribes, servants of the ancient ones, have come out again from the shadows like toadstools after a rain. An expeditionary force dispatched from the frontiers of Grust sends back news more disheartening; this uprising is the work of genuine rebels, organized men and women who use the "barbarian" bogeys as a smokescreen. Marth's forces need support, need supplies, need a show of force to turn back this blow aimed directly at the kingdom's fragile unity.

Caeda can read the true plea contained in the cries for help- and the threat encoded in the rebels' venom for "the Altean king." If Marth intends to hold onto the mainland, he must see to it personally. The people of the west will not stand for yet another absentee king, another distant emperor who shuts himself away in the eastern splendor of Millennium Court while his servants twist his orders to their own advantage. The new-crowned King of All Kings must either meet the challenge of the frontier rebels, or yield the west before reconstruction has truly begun.

"Go to them," she says, before Marth even can speak. "Let them see you with their own eyes, let them hear your words. You are Archanea, and they are your people. I know you can make them believe it to their souls."

The small details of the room register with her in turn- the glass of honey-wine upon the table, half-drunk; the garlands at the window, whose petals are withered but not yet fallen; the dispatch upon the table, already creased where his fingers and hers have gripped it with too much force. And, in the middle of it, her husband, who is busy trying to smooth out the creases in the parchment, meaningless though his effort may be.

"It always does seem to happen this way," he says, still looking down at the dispatch. And it does, in truth. The clan revolt in her homeland, timed to coincide with the news of their engagement. The last rebellion in Grust, that in effect delayed their wedding for two more years. Now this. "Caeda..."

And he will apologize to her now, just as he did then. She doesn't need to hear these apologies. She pulls him close, silences him with a kiss of blessing and farewell. She slips her hands beneath his, separating them from the wretched dispatch, and he grips back with a pressure that tells her, more than any words, how much he resents this turn of events.

Her heart has not wavered from her earlier vows. As long as war rages in the hearts of men, those vows will live in hers; Marth's mission in the world is still the most important goal in their lives. Through the wars, she believed it was worth her life to attain his victory; she knows it is worth a few weeks of her happiness to keep it.

(dreams)

He promised her life would be difficult for them- more difficult even than war itself. And she, no sheltered child, imagined she had some inkling of what "difficult" might mean for their lives now. A king's only daughter, a prince's bride, ought to know the predicament of a new king and queen.

She had no idea. The new Archanea, this seven-part kingdom, is so unlike her father's Talys, so unlike Altea before the great wars, that a peasant girl placed upon the throne for a day would feel the same bewilderment that Caeda often feels. Her father ruled the nobles of Talys as the patriarch of a large and oft-contentious family, governed his subjects as their benign shepherd. His flock, all told, numbered two hundred thousand. Her husband stands above tens of millions of people- widowed, orphaned, wounded, homeless, destitute- who have been told that he is their agent of salvation. These people have heard the new age is upon them and the darkness vanquished, yet the clear light of morning shows only their ransacked homes and ravaged fields. They cannot eat hope for breakfast.

And these are people whose hopes have already been raised once- raised in that brief summer between wars, then betrayed, cruelly and utterly, by the lords and generals who should have protected them. Beneath the smiles and cheers for King Marth and Queen Caeda swells an ocean's worth of anger. Even in Altea, the scars of humiliation spoil many a heart, for when the kingdom faced its greatest disasters- the armies of the Shadow Dragon, the fury of the dark emperor- their king could not protect them. Marth could be their agent of deliverance, striking back at the darkness just as hope waned to a sliver, but he could not prevent the darkness. He could not stop it. He could not keep them safe.

Caeda knows the memory of failure at his back drives Marth as relentlessly as the shimmering ideals in front of him. And so he must be everywhere at once, striking out at evils before they emerge, before they can claim any more of his people. Let no child fall into an untended well, no aged soldier perish in the street- he must save them all. It is madness, and she tries to hold him back, laying before him the truth that that he simply cannot be the invincible god-king the people want him to be, that no one can. The gods themselves once took human form and yet could not do what Marth wants to do now, build a world free of pain and suffering, a world where no children cry in the night for absent parents and no parents mourn their stolen children. They can work toward it, certainly, they can build a world where the knights and soldiers protect the people instead of abusing them, a world where law and justice have both meaning and function, where the word of the state, of the Crown, is the standard of righteousness.

But she sees the guilt, the self-recrimination, that floods his heart over each perceived shortcoming- when he cannot be present to commemorate the dead of every flood and fire, cannot stand in person to judge or spare each wretched prisoner in his lands. And so she lets him go, for he must be here, there, everywhere... Altea and Talys, Aurelis and Gra, Archanea and all of its holdings. And she would go with him, ride alongside him for peace as she did for war, except that a separate duty and expectation encloses her now. And so she stays- to tend the hearth, as it were- while he runs from one end of the continent to the other in hopes of dousing a different, more troublesome fire.

Once, she nearly mentions in jest the dark magic used by their enemies, the spell a man could use to copy himself over once, twice, a dozen times and so be in as many places at once. Caeda thinks better of it before the words escape; she cannot risk the chance that Marth will take her idea seriously.

iii. stories

An absence of one month stretches to four. He should have been home at the apex of summer, when the Dog Star returning is first glimpsed at dawn, and instead he arrives after the crops are ripened, the grain threshed, the new wine laid in the cellar. After the bonfires have flared to the skies and gone cold. All the joy in his face turns to shame as he takes the measure of her gift to him, of the feathery hair and little grasping hands of their daughter.

"I am so sorry I could not be home earlier."

"Shh. You would only have worried over me."

"Do you think that I didn't?"

The baby has one of his hands tight in her implacable grip. His eyes flick back and forth from the baby's face to Caeda's and back again, as though it's too much for him to choose which of them to focus upon. She makes the decision for him, stepping behind him so that her breath falls upon his shoulder.

"Isn't she beautiful?" Their daughter has taken ahold of the finger that wears Marth's coronation ring and now pulls the pretty sparkling thing toward her mouth. "No, lamb. That's not a piece of candy."

Marth laughs then at the daughter who would gladly pop a sacrosanct gem into her toothless mouth. The tension in the room diffuses and they can speak again in the elliptical sentences of two who can finish one another's thoughts. Instead of the irreplaceable days he's missed, they speak of the days to come, of the reborn world their daughter and all the other children now coming into the light will inherit when their great work is done. And when Marth leaves again, as he must, they tell themselves that every day of separation is worth it to give their daughter that future.

(sacrifice)

In three years, they have lived as man and wife for all of twenty weeks. Each time they face one another, it seems to Caeda that the world takes him from her one piece at a time. It is nothing more than the fulfillment of the promise of their wedding day, their coronation day, when he married her and Archanea in the same hour. He wears her ring on his left hand, Archanea's ring on the right, as though each vow carries equal weight. But they are not equal, and in all the years she has followed Marth, Caeda has understood, and accepted, this fate.

She accepts it. That does not mean that it gives her any happiness to see what the tension between the man and the king does to him. One side loses, always, because the right hand will always have precedence over the left. She remembers that Marth once said that he must be a prince before he might call himself a son or a brother. He has never referred back to that declaration and does not have to. Caeda knows the truth of it in her blood and her bones, just as she knows that a queen cannot be a wife and a mother only. Her little girl is not merely a precious collection of soft skin and dimples, smiles and mischief and the odd fit of temper. The holy blood that runs through her daughter's fragile body makes one small girl worth the lives of ten thousand men. Truly, the idea should terrify her, and Caeda is not entirely sure how her mind has been able to accept that, either.

In bringing her daughter into the world, in conceiving the second child whose heart now beats within her, Caeda has made herself a willing party to the machinations of fate. As a child in Talys, each year she would surrender a treasured possession into the harvest bonfire as an offering to the gods. The world itself is a bonfire now, burning at the gods' command, and Caeda sends up offerings not knowing if they will be enough- if anything will be enough. Caeda suspects it will not be, any more than the sacrifices she was willing to make in war can be adequate now. Then, it was enough to be willing to die that Marth might live to fulfill his destiny. The dilemma before her now requires a different, colder courage. She is not being asked to lay down her life; fate asks from Caeda nothing more than the grace to surrender those she most loves to the world's inferno.

They carry on, enfolded in the knowledge that their lives can never be their own. And for the most part they are each too busy to spend time brooding over that or anything else; such thoughts are kept to the most quiet hours of the night, in the waking moments between troubled dreams. But sometimes Caeda does look at Marth and imagines that she can see the fracture lines in his heart, like the cracks in mirrored glass that reflect light at odd angles. Is this the inevitable fate of any man who must step into a costume assembled by the dragons of old, the role of the divine Hero? It is certainly what does happen to someone whose life has been consumed by the absurdity of fighting to end wars. Fighting for peace.

The great wars are history, yet fighting rages on in the battles that surge from the southern shores to the great northern plains. And while no one weeps for the slain bandits, the barbarians or the fallen pirates- not one but their own kin, at least- some of these battles are episodes of the great wars in miniature. Knights and mercenaries alike fall to the earth shouting Marth's name, and while a king should... no, must consider each such death to be a duty fulfilled, he cannot quite distance himself from the human tragedy of every wasted life. And though Caeda flinches at the pain in his eyes, she will not be the one to tell Marth to shut the door upon his conscience and surrender to the idea that his reign and his glory dictates that these men and women must die for him.

The insistent needle of that conscience keeps her husband, her lover, alive inside the shell of the Hero King, and when the pain is too great to bear alone, it is to her that he turns for comfort.

iv. union

It hurts to see him leave; at times she takes to the skies on her pegasus to give herself the greatest vantage point and the longest possible farewell before he disappears into the world. Yet homecomings are no easier, the urgency of each reunion carries with it the shadow of the next separation.

Then, too, coming home is, to her husband, an oft-painful reckoning, an accounting for how much he has missed. On campaign, when one day blurs into the next and the horizon changes with every dusk, time flows differently. Only when one is finally forced to remain still for a moment does the wrongness of it all become apparent. This reckoning is especially dramatic, what with their son already scampering around on light feet and their daughter now reading and writing, speaking in the polished sentences of a girl twice her age.

It doesn't help that Caeda's lapdog fails to recognize Marth and growls when he attempts to pet it. The children respond to him eagerly, though- they know him from stories and pictures, and his arrival is the occasion for shrieks and laughter and a hundred demands- show me! Tell me! More! He is, Caeda realizes, less a father to them than a well-traveled uncle, one who comes to them with wonderful gifts and tales of adventure and then leaves again before they ever become used to his presence. The children take it all in stride- father to them is a great man who does great things someplace far away, and as yet they've seen too little of the world to know any different.

When the children fall into the sound and happy sleep brought on by overexcitement, they at last can speak to one another. Marth tells her of the reconsecration of the Temple at Raman, how thieves stole the newly-blessed vessels from the high altar and vandals hacked carved medallions out of the walls. He relates these offenses in a detached monologue, though the agitation in his hands as he picks at the embroidery on the seat cushion gives his feelings away.

"Sometimes it seems as though the fighting never will end."

So much lies beneath that quiet, reluctant admission. In that moment, they both can glimpse a future as bleak and as bloody as the preceding age, an era in which no amount of persuasion, of exhortation, will convince men to lay down their weapons. A world in which the fighting never will end, not until the last human beneath the sun falls upon his own sword.

"Perhaps that's what the ancient ones knew when they set the Guardian God over us to guide and protect us."

She does not mean it as a reassurance. Marth does not take it for such; he after all has just returned from the holy ground of Raman, and Raman is holy because it was there that the Guardian God, his essence spent and his task not entirely done, lay down his sword and shield and so died. But Caeda sees the doubt rise in Marth's eyes, and immediately she regrets prying open a chink in his defenses. He of all men must believe in his own ideals; if he loses faith, then no heart will ever be moved by his words. And so she moves to place herself in the space between Marth and his doubts.

It works; his restless fingers leave off destroying the seat cushion. His touch brushes aside the doubts in Caeda's own mind and so they come together, inexorably drawn and unable to resist, even if their love should create another small hostage to fortune. Another daughter or son of Archanea, bound to serve.

(imagine)

This balcony was once their refuge, a place where they might stand and imagine themselves apart from the world. From this secluded part of Altea Castle, the red-roofed buildings below look like houses for dolls, and the snow-sheathed mountains in the distance appear almost within reach. Marth leans over the balustrade, far enough that she places one hand upon his arm out of concern that he might lose his balance. He stares down at the little castle town that now is a city, overspilling its century-old walls and sending out tendrils to the river as though the buildings have come alive and multiplied themselves.

She breathes a small sigh of relief when he stands straight again and steps back from the edge.

"I've thought that, perhaps, when the children are old enough, we might leave it all to them and just go off on our own, together, and enjoy the rest of our lives."

And she smiles at his hesitant confession; it has been so long since she has heard this wistful strain of fancy in his voice, the sound of someone who imagines for a moment that he might desire something for its own sake. That he might have something simply because he wants it.

"Where do you imagine we'll go?"

Some quiet corner of Altea or Talys, some small isle to themselves in the glittering sea, some new continent beyond the ocean. Possibilities dance before Caeda as she waits for his answer.

Somehow, it is the wrong thing to say.

"I don't know."

The fanciful light fades from his eyes, leaving them dull as unpolished mirrors raised to the sky. That unnamed, unseen realm where they might be together is another of those things he cannot let himself imagine, and so he steps back from the brink of fantasy, back into the world of red-tiled roofs and mountains that can't quite reach up to heaven.

He never speaks of it again.

v. truth

"I'm sorry for making you so unhappy," he says.

As she looks down at him she sees a strange sort of wonder in his eyes, an echo of the stunned clarity she remembers from the battlefield, the epiphany that sometimes falls upon survivors who cannot rationally take in the devastation before them- and that more often is given to those who will never leave the field.

"You haven't made me unhappy. You don't..."

Even as she corrects herself, the tears spill over without her consent, flow in stinging trails down her face to drip from her chin to fall around him. It's nothing that he's done, or hasn't done, that strikes at her heart. It's the stark knowledge that this is the moment she fears she can't endure, the moment when she must give him up completely. This is the hour when the ancient ones claim what they've long marked as their own.

And yet, he won't yield to them. His fingers entwine around hers and he stares up at her with desperate intensity. He believes, even now, that he can cling to her and to the world through mere force of will. And he believes, all too clearly, that he must. Beyond the walls of this chamber are those people, those tens of millions who lift their hearts in prayer for him now because there is always one more battle to fight, one more demon to slay, one more thing he must do for them all.

"Caeda... I truly did love you."

She hushes him on instinct, never mind that there will be no later time, no more appropriate time, to hear whatever he might have been keeping back. In times of battle, they might have died at any instant, and yet they kept thoughts and words to themselves. This in essence is no different.

Now, as then, she can do so little for him.

"I'm only sorry that I can't... I can't..." The words catch upon her tongue, and as they fail her, Caeda realizes that there is something, in truth, that she and no other can do for him. She cups his hand in her own and presses it to her lips while the right words materialize in her heart, then leans in to tell him what no one else will ever say. "It's all right. You can stop fighting now. We'll be all right."

The final say, through every lonely and turbulent year, has always been hers. This time, stay here for me. For the children. For yourself. If you must go, let me come with you. We'll go away together, and never worry about any of these troubles again. And if she never said it before, if by her silence she held him to duty as surely as he held himself to it, she holds him close now and gives him permission to be nothing more than human.

"Let go."

The fire burns more brightly than ever, if only for a moment, and the flames evaporate her tears.

The End

"Do you really think it would turn out this way?"

Often with post-game stories, the answer is "Not really." "It's just a what-if." Or, "No, I was just inspired by this novel or play, or this historical figure."

In this case, my honest answer is, "Convince me it doesn't."