Common Ground
Nov. 12th, 2008 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinonTitle: Common Ground
Fandom: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Characters: Pelleas, Naesala
Genre: General
Word Count: 500
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilertacular.
Notes:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fe_drabble Challenge 03 - Awkward. Seems that's a tone I can't pin down, since everything else I tried to write for it turned out hella dark and weird. So here, have my failure to pin down Naesala instead!
He was in no position to question any of Queen Micaiah’s decisions. Sothe had made a point of telling him so. With knives. But while he couldn’t do anything about it, he presumed so far as to be acutely unhappy about this one.
It made sense; that was arguably the worst part. The queen couldn’t just drop everything to welcome her guest, and the distance he had to cover meant it made more sense for him to show up early. She had to send someone. All of it made sense, except for the part where being stuck with No-Formal-Title-Yet-But-Remember-How-Badly-He-Mucked-Up-Being-King Pelleas wasn’t meant to be an insult.
They had fought together in the Tower of Guidance. They had both been there when a Crimean general matter-of-factly mowed down a god. They had both…
Did it matter? He wasn’t about to walk up and say, “Remember that time we were forced to commit unspeakable atrocities so our respective countries wouldn’t be depopulated by inches? I hate when that happens.”
Someone announced “Lord Naesala of the United Bird Tribes,” and in walked someone who still looked the part. He bowed. Pelleas did as well, and stayed that way longer than he’d meant to, collecting his thoughts.
“You can stop that any day now,” said Naesala.
Pelleas straightened, his face burning, and mumbled something that stretched the boundaries of what could be considered a word before falling back on the script. “Her Majesty deeply regrets that she is unable to receive you in person at this time. She will see you tomorrow morning. Until then, the grounds are yours.”
Naesala looked amused. “Does she have any idea what a bad idea it is to say something like that to a raven?”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind.”
Neither of them spoke much more than protocol required of them. Pelleas showed Naesala to his accommodations and elaborated, to the extent he was allowed, on the matters the queen wished to discuss the next day. Things were going well, he decided, aside from a suspicion he could not quite shake that Naesala was smirking at him.
“Excuse me,” he said finally, “is something amiss?”
“Hm? No.”
“Oh,” Pelleas said lamely. “Well, in that case, I think that concludes our –”
“I was just thinking. We’ve done pretty well for ourselves, haven’t we?”
All too true. He bit his lip. “It… doesn’t really seem right sometimes,” he blurted out, his eyes lowered. “That I get to live –”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Naesala said wryly, a little too quickly. “Maybe you should talk to someone about that.”
Pelleas made a serious attempt at melting into the floor. Of course – he’d just been reading into it too much. A true king wouldn’t really…
He formally excused himself, looking up as little as possible. He saw it, though, before he left – it was too difficult even for the great dissembler to conceal, and made his departure all the more urgent.
He hadn’t misinterpreted anything. Naesala understood. He’d had the nightmares, too.
Fandom: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Characters: Pelleas, Naesala
Genre: General
Word Count: 500
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilertacular.
Notes:
fe_drabble Challenge 03 - Awkward. Seems that's a tone I can't pin down, since everything else I tried to write for it turned out hella dark and weird. So here, have my failure to pin down Naesala instead!He was in no position to question any of Queen Micaiah’s decisions. Sothe had made a point of telling him so. With knives. But while he couldn’t do anything about it, he presumed so far as to be acutely unhappy about this one.
It made sense; that was arguably the worst part. The queen couldn’t just drop everything to welcome her guest, and the distance he had to cover meant it made more sense for him to show up early. She had to send someone. All of it made sense, except for the part where being stuck with No-Formal-Title-Yet-But-Remember-How-Badly-He-Mucked-Up-Being-King Pelleas wasn’t meant to be an insult.
They had fought together in the Tower of Guidance. They had both been there when a Crimean general matter-of-factly mowed down a god. They had both…
Did it matter? He wasn’t about to walk up and say, “Remember that time we were forced to commit unspeakable atrocities so our respective countries wouldn’t be depopulated by inches? I hate when that happens.”
Someone announced “Lord Naesala of the United Bird Tribes,” and in walked someone who still looked the part. He bowed. Pelleas did as well, and stayed that way longer than he’d meant to, collecting his thoughts.
“You can stop that any day now,” said Naesala.
Pelleas straightened, his face burning, and mumbled something that stretched the boundaries of what could be considered a word before falling back on the script. “Her Majesty deeply regrets that she is unable to receive you in person at this time. She will see you tomorrow morning. Until then, the grounds are yours.”
Naesala looked amused. “Does she have any idea what a bad idea it is to say something like that to a raven?”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind.”
Neither of them spoke much more than protocol required of them. Pelleas showed Naesala to his accommodations and elaborated, to the extent he was allowed, on the matters the queen wished to discuss the next day. Things were going well, he decided, aside from a suspicion he could not quite shake that Naesala was smirking at him.
“Excuse me,” he said finally, “is something amiss?”
“Hm? No.”
“Oh,” Pelleas said lamely. “Well, in that case, I think that concludes our –”
“I was just thinking. We’ve done pretty well for ourselves, haven’t we?”
All too true. He bit his lip. “It… doesn’t really seem right sometimes,” he blurted out, his eyes lowered. “That I get to live –”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Naesala said wryly, a little too quickly. “Maybe you should talk to someone about that.”
Pelleas made a serious attempt at melting into the floor. Of course – he’d just been reading into it too much. A true king wouldn’t really…
He formally excused himself, looking up as little as possible. He saw it, though, before he left – it was too difficult even for the great dissembler to conceal, and made his departure all the more urgent.
He hadn’t misinterpreted anything. Naesala understood. He’d had the nightmares, too.
