Unbreakable: an interview in three parts

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

Assumes Azel/Tiltyu and Beowulf/Finn/Raquesis as pairings.

Barhara. Gran Year 770

"Lord Azel." The Lopto priest bowed, but Azel didn't hear any reverence in the man's voice. "The prisoner is awake and ready for your interview, my lord."

"Thank you, Morigan, but what is the purpose of bringing me into this business?"

The younger brother of Grannvale's emperor had his share of duties, but interrogating prisoners wasn't often on his plate.

"This woman's actions defy sense. She was found traveling alone, with one horse, in the middle of the Yied." This voice came from the green-robed man standing behind Morigan; Berdo (another of these Lopto priests) had a suave voice that didn't convey much more respect than Morigan's insolent tones. "Many of her effects point to an origin in Northern Thracia, though nothing stood out in significance."

"I see," said Azel, maintaining an impassive pose even though he didn't honestly see what the Lopto Sect wanted from him today. "And you wish me to uncover her purpose?"

"Yes." Morigan showed him a toothy smile. "She's one of your former... acquaintances. From that other time in your life, Lord Azel."

That was all the warning Azel got before he was ushered into the "interview" chamber, but it was just enough to prepare him for the sight that met him within the chamber. To begin to prepare him, anyway.

"Princess Raquesis."

He wasn't certain if the rebel sister of Nordion's late king was due that title or not, but upon seeing her, Azel couldn't say anything else. Even in her simple and grimy traveling clothes, Raquesis still looked regal. She sat upright on the rude wooden stool used for interviews, her face composed and her long hair flowing like beaten gold past her shoulders.

"It's been a while, Azel," she murmured.

Her voice sounded lower than Azel remembered, and she seemed to look through him rather than at him. Azel studied her for a few moments, taking in her coloring (good) and the overall look of her face (still beautiful). He cleared his throat, uncertain as to where this interview ought to begin. He doubted that he'd have much luck by summoning up the days when they'd found common ground, siblings in the half-light cast by charismatic elder brothers.

Azel decided to begin with the obvious question.

"What were you doing out in the desert all alone?"

"I was going to join my son."

"Ah. Delmud." Azel had faint memories yet of the fair-haired child with a sturdy grip and a placid temperament. "So you were headed for Isaach?"

She said nothing, and after a few seconds of heavy silence, Azel spoke again, just to prod her a little.

"My brother knows the children of Lord Sigurd's army are at Tirnanogue."

"Is that because you told him?"

"No! It's... commonly known."

Azel sucked in a deep breath, one that caused a pang in his chest. She had rattled him already with the suggestion that he'd "told" on them all, gone running to his brother with information...

Azel let that breath out.

"And your son is there, with Lady Aideen."

"That's how I left him... that's how I hoped to find him."

Her accent had changed just a little, he thought; it had taken on a bit of the color of Northern Thracia. She must indeed have been there for some time.

"And you left Delmud with her when you traveled to Leonster to find your nephew."

"I'm glad that you remember all our contingency plans, Azel."

Yes, she was bitter. Azel allowed that Raquesis had reason to be, at least from her own perspective. If he were allowed the time, Azel might be able to show Raquesis why he stood where he did. But, in this moment, it would be wise to change the subject entirely.

"That's not the ring you used to wear."

He recalled her wedding ring, a sparkling collection of stones that threw light into the eyes of anyone near when Raquesis lifted her hand. This band was simpler, more subtle; it didn't call attention to itself.

"I gave Delmud the ring I wore as Beowulf's wife."

He might have picked apart the odd construction of her words, but Azel decided to let it by, to go straight to his current objective. He could return to the subject of Beowulf later, if it should prove useful.

"Then whose ring is that?"

Raquesis sat perfectly still for a moment, her eyes half-closed as though in contemplation. Without a word, without changing her expression, she slipped the band from her finger and held it out for Azel to take. He held it to the light; the gold of the band proved finely worked, even if the inlaid stones were so small he first took them for patterns of enamel. He peered inside the band, seeking the goldsmith's mark or some other sign of the ring's provenance. He did see a small mark, three crosses set in an oval. Azel also saw two names and a date, spelled out in flecks of gold against the enameled inner surface.

"Oh. Finn." The ring felt a little heavier in his hand as Azel realized the likely course of this interview. Raquesis wasn't going to lead them to Tirnanogue's colony of former rebels and their children. This ring pointed to the east and to a different set of threats against Grannvale's stability... and to yet another of Azel's comrades from that other time in his life. "You know the Empire is looking for him. Anyone connected with the Alster Plot is still... wanted... by the orders of King Blume."

Raquesis remained silent and still, her unadorned hands clasped in her lap. Azel's brain began to assemble reassuring phrases.

My brother is just and merciful...

It's been five years, and the mood of retribution has passed...

King Blume may have objections, but I'm sure my brother can arrange...

Azel never had the opportunity to make a sentence from those half-finished thoughts.

"You won't find him," said Raquesis, her eyes fully open, her fingers laced tightly together. "You're too late for that. He's escaped your Empire's justice."

"Ah... I'm sorry to hear that," Azel replied, even as an eddy of relief in his heart went against his spoken words. But he was sorry, sorry for Raquesis anyway. Sorry for Finn, he supposed, but dead in some lonely corner of Northern Thracia wasn't really any worse than being used as a salutary example for would-be rebels. "How long ago... was it?"

"Five months," she said, and he saw how she reached for the pale line around her finger where the ring belonged.

"Was that why you decided to go at last to Tirnanogue?"

"Mm." She dipped her chin a little, and Azel saw the flash of watery brightness in her eyes.

"I'm sorry, Raquesis," Azel repeated. He turned the wedding band over in his hand; the upside-down numerals reading 762 glinted at him from inside the ring. "You were together for eight years?"

"Yes."

"Did you and he have any children?"

"We had a daughter," she said, in the same deadened voice that let on that this daughter, too, was lost to her. "Why do you care, Azel?"

"Please don't be angry, Raquesis. I was only asking."

"You're interrogating me in hopes of bringing another rebel home to a cordial welcome from Lord Arvis."

In the silence that followed her harsh words, Azel saw a memory pass before his eyes, the memory of Valflame's sacred fire and a sky ablaze in trails of light. He made no reply to her accusation. When Raquesis again spoke, she once more sounded numbed, drained of all passions. There was something almost childlike in her voice.

"May I have my ring back?"

"Yes, of course." He let her take it and watched as Raquesis slipped it back on to her hand. She closed her fist immediately to keep it secure, lest the band fall from her thin fingers. "I hate to pry, Raquesis, but you understand that I must have this information for the record. You say that Finn is now dead- how did it happen?"

And the corners of her mouth lifted, just a little, in the ghost of her once-charming smile.

"I think the common term for it is 'a broken heart.'"

Azel felt oddly small in his own robes as she faced him with hard eyes and that troubling smile. Her eyes always had been an odd shade of brown, almost red in some lights, and they did look red to him now. Then her eyes closed, and her face relaxed, and she almost was his old friend again. Azel coughed and tried to sound as gentle as possible.

"I think that's all I need from you today, Raquesis. My condolences upon your losses... all of them."

"Take care, Azel," she said, looking through him once more. "Do take care..."

He felt his heart pounding quickly, too quickly, once he was on the other side of the door. Morigan and Berdo stood by, waiting for his report.

"Northern Thracia it is," he said. "I see why you're here now, Berdo, but we'll resume the interview tomorrow."

And Azel dismissed them with what he believed was a solid imitation of his brother Arvis.

-x-

Azel went to sleep that night believing he would ask Arvis for Raquesis in the morning, that he might have her placed under his own custodianship. Doubts crept into his brain in the grey hour before dawn, in the time when Azel lay neither fully awake nor quite asleep. Arvis will not grant her to you, the doubts whispered to Azel. You do not even venture outside the palace walls; he does not trust you with yourself. He will not give you her.

Her. And Azel remembered her smile as it had been, her laughter as he once had heard it, the dazzle of her wedding ring throwing light into his eyes. She won't ever be yours, said the whispers. She'll be thrown in a cell in some distant estate, or sent off to one of those camps in the frontier. They'll work her until her skin withers and her hair turns dry and dull as a bird's nest and no one will ever believe her when she says she once was Princess of Nordion.

"No!" said Azel with his own voice. He opened his eyes to clear them of the imagined sight of Tiltyu languishing in a dim, dank chamber, of Lady Adean reduced to a shell of herself by the harsh climate of Isaach. "If I can get her to cooperate with me... if she can tell me something truly useful... then Arvis will be pleased. He will be gentle with her..."

Azel reasoned with himself out loud as he prepared for the day.

"If she was with Finn when he was involved in the plot against King Blume, then Raquesis might know the others involved, the rest that slipped the net in '65."

Raquesis had him reckoned well when she said he was looking to lead rebels home to face the emperor's justice. Azel could only hope that she would be able to assist him in this. It was, after all, for the best. If they all could come home, as Azel himself had come home... all would be well upon Jugdral.

Morigan and Berdo again lurked outside the interview room, and Azel again locked them out. He began by asking Raquesis if she'd been comfortable, if she'd been pleased with the food, if she needed anything of him. Raquesis claimed she wanted for nothing, and then it was on to the questions.

"Why did you not stay with your nephew? I thought it was for his sake that you went to Leonster."

"It was. His mother did not need my assistance in raising Ares."

She was even more the princess on her crude throne this morning, Azel thought. She really was still beautiful, perhaps even more so than she'd been, as though all the tribulations she'd suffered had brought something to the surface that went beyond clear skin and golden hair.

"Ah. And you remained in Leonster for some time thereafter?"

"I had my reasons," she said only, and Azel tried to placate her with a smile.

"Of course," he murmured. "Now, Finn was taking care of Quan's son then, wasn't he?"

"Prince Leif? Yes, Finn was his guard when we were in Leonster."

"And he took Leif to Alster when Leonster was conquered."

"We went together."

"And then?" Azel had noticed the wary look that surfaced in her eyes.

"I haven't seen Leif since the incident you've referred to as the Alster Plot," she said, and began to toy with a strand of her hair. "We were separated from him in the chaos. I... I don't know if he even survived the violence that day."

He sensed a spike of fear in her now, some raw emotion not present in their conversation the day before. Azel had done other interviews that balanced on this sort of precipice, and now that he'd forced Raquesis up to the edge, he wanted very much to back away. He hadn't prepared himself to delve into the central mystery of Thracian disorder- he should have seen it coming, but he didn't, and Azel could feel that lack of preparation in the way that blood was pounding his ears.

"So you lost track of Leif five years ago? I'm sure that wore heavily on Finn... losing that last connection to Lord Quan and Lady Ethlyn."

Azel now wanted her to simply agree so that he could tie this case together with one dark thread, seal it and present it to his brother. He did not anticipate that these words would make her genuinely angry, but a flush of new color rose in her face and her eyes gleamed like the eyes of a furious cat.

"What does any of this matter to you now? Where are your children, Azel? What happened to your little boy? What happened to the child that Tiltyu was expecting when your Lord Brother decided to greet us with an ambush?"

Raquesis did not rise from her seat, but the fury around her was so great that Azel felt compelled to take a step backward.

"Forgive me, Raquesis... I'm only trying to piece together what you've been doing all this time... since you won't simply tell me."

"No, Azel," she said, and the anger drained out of her voice, leaving only a cold and wearied resolve. "I won't tell you a thing. I don't want your brother's justice being visited upon the people who offered us food and shelter, on village girls who looked after my daughter when I needed to go out for an afternoon, on the peddlers who sold me healing staves so I could patch up the wounds that we received from your Lord Brother's faithful servants. You have me, and you won't get my husband or my daughter, and there's nothing more I can tell you."

"Raquesis... my brother isn't like that. He wouldn't ever have some poor girl arrested for..."

"For offering aid and comfort to rebels?"

"No."

"Then why are you trying so very hard to find them through me?" The spoken question was hard enough to bear, but the look in her eyes now pained Azel.

"I'm just want to understand what you've been doing for all these years, Raquesis. I want to understand how you ended up here, like this."

"I was trying to reach Isaach, to find my son, because he was all I had left. There is nothing more that needs to be said."

"If that's the case, I can leave you alone for the rest of the day," he said.

"Thank you." She lowered her head, as though in meditation, but before the door closed between them, Azel saw Raquesis put her hands up to her face like a mourner.

He dreamed of her that night, but her hair wasn't right; instead of being golden it flowed pale as moonlight through his fingers. Almost like Empress Deirdre's hair, almost like Princess Julia's. Almost.

-x-

"She knows the whereabouts of the Prince of Leonster." Berdo wouldn't let it go.

"She did know, five years ago," Azel replied. "There's no leads left to follow with her, and I'm going to recommend that we end these interviews and place her in custody elsewhere."

"A witness who is false in one thing is assumed to be false in all things. Press her."

Azel raised an eyebrow at the priest, and Berdo hastily corrected himself.

"It is our wish to accompany you into the interview today, Lord Azel."

"On whose authority?"

"At the request of Bishop Manfroy," said Morigan, and he showed that repellent smile.

Azel ground his back teeth. Head-butting with the bishop hadn't gone well for him in the past.

"Very well, but if this interview degrades, I will be ending it immediately."

"Of course, my lord," they said. Without conviction.

Morigan began barking out questions before Azel could even tell Raquesis "good morning."

"Where is the rebel named Finn?"

"Dead." Raquesis showed not a trace of fear as Morigan approached her on the left.

"Where is Leif of Leonster?" Berdo asked as he closed in on her right.

"I don't know."

"I don't see that this is helping any of us," said Azel, and he gestured for the priests to move away... which they did. It surprised him a little.

What he could see now was the strain in the face of Raquesis; she was paler than she'd been even two days before, her hands trembled in her lap and he saw a quick pulse beating in her throat. Azel stooped down before her so that his eyes were on the level of her own.

"Raquesis... Finn was entrusted with Leif when Quan and Ethlyn died. Is there any chance at all that he's hiding Leif now?"

"I told you, he's dead. If he weren't, do you think I'd be crossing the Yied all by myself?" Her lips curved again in that mockery of a smile."No." Azel felt perfectly sincere as he agreed with her. "Not after what happened to... to Lord Quan and Lady Ethlyn."

It was such a simple, plausible story. The basic outline of details fit. And yet... he'd sensed that surge of fear in her when Leif's name entered the conversation. Try a different approach, he thought. Azel placed a hand on her shoulder and he felt her body tense through the thin cloth of her shirt.

"Your daughter... what was she called?"

"Nanna. What's the name of your daughter, Azel? Tiltyu was certain she'd have a girl that time."

Perhaps he'd mistaken anger for fear? She was angry now, no doubt about it; he heard the growl underpinning her words, and when she looked up at him her eyes blazed like embers.

"Yes, the Alster Plot... shall we talk about it? What was that about, Azel? Finn and his fellows all wanted Blume of Freege dead. Does that name mean anything to you, Azel? That's your brother-in-law. That's the man who is holding your wife as a captive in his own estates- we heard all about it in Alster. He has your wife as his captive, and he has your little girl. But not your son; I don't know what happened to Arthur. Do you?"

She raised her hand as though to claw at his arm and Azel let her go and stepped clear. Raquesis rose to her feet, her burning eyes fixed upon him and her voice like the hiss of a serpent as she addressed him.

"And if we'd succeeded, they'd be free now. Did you think of that, Azel? We could have freed Tiltyu and Tinny. Do you think of that, as you nestle here in the bosom of Lord Brother, chasing down-"

If Azel had his wits about him, he might have shouted stop at Berdo before the incantation finished. But he cringed beneath the hammer-blows of Raquesis' words, and he didn't begin to speak until the spell's aura had already enveloped Raquesis. And then there was no burning gaze or angry words, just the glimmer of smooth stone in the torchlight, the shape of an oddly posed statue.

"You might have put her to sleep, but you didn't have to turn her to stone." Azel swore to himself that he would have that priest disciplined.

"The prisoner had nothing more to offer us," said Morigan.

"Are you certain?"

"We could revive her, and use more advanced techniques to interrogate her," Berdo suggested, his voice disgustingly smooth. "We do not believe she spoke the truth about the heir of Leonster."

Azel realized that, for the first time in this dialogue, the outcome truly lay in his hands.

"No, it is not necessary," he said, and asserted himself as a Velthomer. "The full statement of the Lady Raquesis was that the rebel Finn is now deceased and that she had no knowledge of the current whereabouts of Leif of Leonster. She admitted, with her own words, to participation in the attempt on King Blume's life. She couldn't tell us anything more about the enclave in Tirnanogue than is already known. She had no other connections of interest to the Empire."

And this was what Azel wrote in his report of the incident, once the statue of Raquesis was carted away to the place where such things were kept and Azel retired to his own chambers. The finished report was concise; its language revealed nothing of the three days of tangled emotion that went into its creation. Those things were all, as the saying went, off the record.

Azel tied up the packet of memoranda meant for his brother and set it aside. He then opened the lower drawer of his desk and took out a piece of paper inscribed with the names of all those who fought alongside Sigurd of Chalphy. Most of the names were marked with crosses, annotated with details as Azel could gather them.

X Sigurd, noble of Chalphy, ex. 761

Aideen, noble of Jungby, escaped to Isaach

X Lex, noble of Dozel, ex. 761

Tiltyu, noble of Freege, sent to back to House Freege

Azel crossed two of the remaining names off the list.

"That's everyone but Briggid and Sylvia," he said. "And me. But I know where I am."

We said you wouldn't get to keep her, said the voices. We told you.

"I know where I am," Azel said again, as though that might drown out the voices that whispered within his heart. Yet he had to put the paper away, and quickly, before unexpected splashes turned names and fates to illegible smudges.

The End

Author's Notes: I have various ideas about what Azel's life would be like if he did indeed reconcile with Arvis, and the term "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind. And "doublethink." And other things that aren't very nice.

As my headcanon reckons it, Azel dies shortly before Manfroy presents little Prince Julius with the tome that turns him into a monster. So, at the time this story takes place, things are as good as they ever get for House Velthomer.

Raquesis was lying through her teeth (this is not AU), but she knew the buttons to push to convince Azel to drop the "let's go after Leif" angle. Did Azel believe her 100%? No, but he's really good at the cognitive dissonance game by now... and he sure wanted to believe her. And (per my headcanon again) Azel has kicked the bucket himself by the time the imperial troops find out that Leif is in Tahra, so he never faces any repercussions for the way he handled this case. So, Raquesis is in storage, Berdo is held at bay for a little longer, and Azel has one more unpleasant incident to push around in his poor little head.