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Comment fics: Fire Emblem
Done for a meme with a bunch of one-word prompts. These run 250-600 words.
1. L'Arachel and Rennac, "snow"
L'Arachel said, "Rennac, do you suppose" – and that was all he needed to hear, because nothing good ever started with "do you suppose." Do you suppose you could find this for me, never mind how heavily fortified its last known location? Do you suppose we'll have good weather for rooting out abominations tomorrow? Do you suppose my masquerade ball will be better held in the spring or summer? Do you suppose you can muster up a hundred square miles of silk in three days?
And yet the other shoe didn't drop; she didn't finish the thought. Instead she narrowed her eyes slightly and put her head on one side. "You flinched," she said.
He folded his arms and leaned back against the door. "I'd sooner be out of the supposition business, if it's all the same to you."
"I'm not being unreasonable, Rennac. It would do you well to learn to take my requests with better grace."
He had to admit, when he thought about it, that in recent days she had been... less unreasonable than he'd come to expect. He had expected, when he'd first heard the princess was to be confined to such a small suite of rooms, to be sent all over Rausten on the most petty and inane of errands all day and night, fetching pastries or tisanes or fifteen musicians to stand outside her door and play to her while she slept. None of these were unprecedented, sadly, and she'd made those orders when she wasn't even sick. He hadn't expected her to take this illness philosophically, and he had expected her to take it out on him. That was the usual order of things. She was so very generous, he'd thought sneeringly; she never experienced a single misfortune without selflessly passing it on to him.
But she really hadn't been so bad. This was the first she'd called him in all day.
He sighed and uncrossed his arms. "What do you need, Princess?"
"Open a window for me," she said, and pointed to the one nearest the fireplace. "That window."
Rennac blinked. "It's the middle of winter."
"I know," L'Arachel said steadily, "and it's snowing."
"So what could possibly possess you –"
"I want to see it," she said. "You know how I adore snow. I may be ill, but I will not miss this spectacle." It was her turn to cross her arms, as though this settled the point altogether.
Rennac stared at her in consternation. "Uh, but you are ill. Are you sure this is wise?" She still looked pale and tired – not as bad as she had when she'd first collapsed, when he'd had to carry her home, but bad enough. And she'd been reasonable, which was a sure sign something was desperately wrong with the world.
"Rennac, dear, when have I ever been unsure of anything?" She sat up straighter in bed and squared her shoulders. "I shall be perfectly fine in a few days' time, and when I am, I'll remember how accommodating you were. Or otherwise," she added, with a certain offhanded ominousness that reassured him, more than anything else, that she would be all right.
He opened the window and immediately got a faceful of snow.
"Oh, it's wonderful," she said, as it began to swirl into the room and onto her rug. "And the air smells so clean!"
Rennac walked out.
He walked back in a short time later with an armload of blankets, which he dumped at the foot of her bed. It would save her the trouble of pestering him again later.
2. Shinon and Gatrie, "space/cosmos"
"So I met this girl," said Gatrie, fidgeting with the navigation console.
Shinon groaned. This story never changed. He looked up from the diagnostic readouts on his plasma rifle only long enough to make sure Gatrie saw how hard he was rolling his eyes. "She'd love to go out with you, but she's got this thing, cryogenically froze her dad, clerical error, can't raise the funds to thaw him back out, blah blah blah." He made a few adjustments to the power settings, selecting for a narrow beam that could punch through two or three inches of lead, and the gun beeped at him in protest. "I know what I'm doing," he muttered. "Can't Greil turn off the safety protocols on these things?" He was getting tired of having to do it himself every time they made planetfall, and he could've sworn the weapons' rudimentary AIs were learning new tricks to keep him out.
"She has family in the Gallia system, but their FTL communications went down, so it'll be 27 years before they even know she needs their help. Isn't that tragic?"
"Just tell me you didn't pay her yet."
"She's waiting for me at the station. I thought after this job, maybe..."
"No way." He pressed a few more buttons on the rifle's display, and it finally acquiesced. "What we're doing when we get back to the station is dropping in on that new bar. Remember?"
"Ooh, right, that just opened..." Gatrie said distractedly.
Shinon shoved a gun and a helmet at him, which he absently accepted. "You want to throw all your money at green-skinned space hookers after that, be my guest, but after six months in this death trap, our first stop is somewhere they can actually synthesize a decent whiskey." This last was projected directly at one of the microphones used by the ship's onboard intelligence.
"He didn't mean that," said Gatrie, into the same microphone.
"Yes, I did."
"You weren't complaining when you were drinking it."
"Helmet up, asshole, I'm opening the doors." He stared out over the alien landscape. "Let's get this over with."
3. Elincia/Tibarn, "shadow"
A shadow swept over the sun, and Elincia looked up.
"King Tibarn," she said a few short moments later. He shimmered into man-form a foot above the ground, landing neatly in front of her at just the appropriate distance for respectful conversation.
"Queen Elincia," he said, and took a step closer, only to suddenly take his eyes from hers and glance at her pegasus. "Your beast didn't even bat an eye. I was flying close enough to touch her."
"Pegasi live a long time," said Elincia. "I think she's seen enough not to be surprised by much."
Tibarn grinned, looking back at Elincia. "I hope the same isn't true of you."
"Why is that? Has there been a change of plans?"
"Not much of one," said Tibarn. "We'll still be flying together, but..." He took another step closer, so she nearly had to crane her neck to see his face at all. And then he picked her up, as though she weighed nothing at all. "The view's a little more interesting this way. Any objections?"
"You won't be off-balance?" said Elincia, who might possibly have been a bit more flustered than she wanted to let on.
Tibarn chuckled. "Please. You don't need to worry about that."
After a moment's hesitation, Elincia wrapped her arms around his neck. "Then, no, I suppose I've no objections."
Two powerful wingbeats later, she was watching their shadow shrinking rapidly on the ground beneath them. They rose ever higher on each downstroke, with much greater force than her pegasus had ever managed (and the poor thing looked incredibly confused right now, stretching her neck upward to watch her rider fly away with someone else), and –
It really was a more interesting view.
4. Legault, "sheets"
Much of the old guard was illiterate. They'd had hard lives, many of them, with no time to learn any language but that written by a blade on flesh. They were given their orders by word of mouth only, to be committed to memory, so that the only evidence of their activities lived in their own heads. Letters were useless, and worse, susceptible to interception - so when you left on a job, everything afterward was left to your discretion. It was simple and neat (and it made cleanup, in most cases, blessedly easy - he killed the target, he destroyed or displayed their corpses according to his own orders, and then he vanished) but it required a certain level of trust.
And that was changing. All of it was changing. Legault pulled the knife from between this latest traitor's ribs and eased her back down onto the pillows. She had never awakened, and there would be little blood. He arranged the bedsheets around her and smoothed them out - and felt a telltale crackle as he did.
It was amateurish, he thought, both on her part and on Sonia's - the letter would be from Sonia, he knew without even looking. And this girl had fallen asleep reading it. He flipped the sheets back and pulled out a thin sheet of paper, spidery with that woman's irregular handwriting. Legault was one of the old guard, yes, a Black Fang since before that had meant anything at all, but he could read and write as well as most nobles - certainly better than Brendan Reed. And the contents of this message were disturbing indeed.
It could be a trap. Perhaps he had been meant to find this letter this way. Perhaps it was part of someone's plan, now, that he would present it to Reed and bring on another spate of deaths, potentially including his own. He didn't know which possibility he liked less - that, or that the Black Fang he'd once believed in was so riddled with mistrust, incompetence, and these little... call them ideological conflicts.
He folded the paper and slipped it into a concealed inside pocket. For the sake of the old Fang, the one he could see dying before his eyes, he would take that risk.
1. L'Arachel and Rennac, "snow"
L'Arachel said, "Rennac, do you suppose" – and that was all he needed to hear, because nothing good ever started with "do you suppose." Do you suppose you could find this for me, never mind how heavily fortified its last known location? Do you suppose we'll have good weather for rooting out abominations tomorrow? Do you suppose my masquerade ball will be better held in the spring or summer? Do you suppose you can muster up a hundred square miles of silk in three days?
And yet the other shoe didn't drop; she didn't finish the thought. Instead she narrowed her eyes slightly and put her head on one side. "You flinched," she said.
He folded his arms and leaned back against the door. "I'd sooner be out of the supposition business, if it's all the same to you."
"I'm not being unreasonable, Rennac. It would do you well to learn to take my requests with better grace."
He had to admit, when he thought about it, that in recent days she had been... less unreasonable than he'd come to expect. He had expected, when he'd first heard the princess was to be confined to such a small suite of rooms, to be sent all over Rausten on the most petty and inane of errands all day and night, fetching pastries or tisanes or fifteen musicians to stand outside her door and play to her while she slept. None of these were unprecedented, sadly, and she'd made those orders when she wasn't even sick. He hadn't expected her to take this illness philosophically, and he had expected her to take it out on him. That was the usual order of things. She was so very generous, he'd thought sneeringly; she never experienced a single misfortune without selflessly passing it on to him.
But she really hadn't been so bad. This was the first she'd called him in all day.
He sighed and uncrossed his arms. "What do you need, Princess?"
"Open a window for me," she said, and pointed to the one nearest the fireplace. "That window."
Rennac blinked. "It's the middle of winter."
"I know," L'Arachel said steadily, "and it's snowing."
"So what could possibly possess you –"
"I want to see it," she said. "You know how I adore snow. I may be ill, but I will not miss this spectacle." It was her turn to cross her arms, as though this settled the point altogether.
Rennac stared at her in consternation. "Uh, but you are ill. Are you sure this is wise?" She still looked pale and tired – not as bad as she had when she'd first collapsed, when he'd had to carry her home, but bad enough. And she'd been reasonable, which was a sure sign something was desperately wrong with the world.
"Rennac, dear, when have I ever been unsure of anything?" She sat up straighter in bed and squared her shoulders. "I shall be perfectly fine in a few days' time, and when I am, I'll remember how accommodating you were. Or otherwise," she added, with a certain offhanded ominousness that reassured him, more than anything else, that she would be all right.
He opened the window and immediately got a faceful of snow.
"Oh, it's wonderful," she said, as it began to swirl into the room and onto her rug. "And the air smells so clean!"
Rennac walked out.
He walked back in a short time later with an armload of blankets, which he dumped at the foot of her bed. It would save her the trouble of pestering him again later.
2. Shinon and Gatrie, "space/cosmos"
"So I met this girl," said Gatrie, fidgeting with the navigation console.
Shinon groaned. This story never changed. He looked up from the diagnostic readouts on his plasma rifle only long enough to make sure Gatrie saw how hard he was rolling his eyes. "She'd love to go out with you, but she's got this thing, cryogenically froze her dad, clerical error, can't raise the funds to thaw him back out, blah blah blah." He made a few adjustments to the power settings, selecting for a narrow beam that could punch through two or three inches of lead, and the gun beeped at him in protest. "I know what I'm doing," he muttered. "Can't Greil turn off the safety protocols on these things?" He was getting tired of having to do it himself every time they made planetfall, and he could've sworn the weapons' rudimentary AIs were learning new tricks to keep him out.
"She has family in the Gallia system, but their FTL communications went down, so it'll be 27 years before they even know she needs their help. Isn't that tragic?"
"Just tell me you didn't pay her yet."
"She's waiting for me at the station. I thought after this job, maybe..."
"No way." He pressed a few more buttons on the rifle's display, and it finally acquiesced. "What we're doing when we get back to the station is dropping in on that new bar. Remember?"
"Ooh, right, that just opened..." Gatrie said distractedly.
Shinon shoved a gun and a helmet at him, which he absently accepted. "You want to throw all your money at green-skinned space hookers after that, be my guest, but after six months in this death trap, our first stop is somewhere they can actually synthesize a decent whiskey." This last was projected directly at one of the microphones used by the ship's onboard intelligence.
"He didn't mean that," said Gatrie, into the same microphone.
"Yes, I did."
"You weren't complaining when you were drinking it."
"Helmet up, asshole, I'm opening the doors." He stared out over the alien landscape. "Let's get this over with."
3. Elincia/Tibarn, "shadow"
A shadow swept over the sun, and Elincia looked up.
"King Tibarn," she said a few short moments later. He shimmered into man-form a foot above the ground, landing neatly in front of her at just the appropriate distance for respectful conversation.
"Queen Elincia," he said, and took a step closer, only to suddenly take his eyes from hers and glance at her pegasus. "Your beast didn't even bat an eye. I was flying close enough to touch her."
"Pegasi live a long time," said Elincia. "I think she's seen enough not to be surprised by much."
Tibarn grinned, looking back at Elincia. "I hope the same isn't true of you."
"Why is that? Has there been a change of plans?"
"Not much of one," said Tibarn. "We'll still be flying together, but..." He took another step closer, so she nearly had to crane her neck to see his face at all. And then he picked her up, as though she weighed nothing at all. "The view's a little more interesting this way. Any objections?"
"You won't be off-balance?" said Elincia, who might possibly have been a bit more flustered than she wanted to let on.
Tibarn chuckled. "Please. You don't need to worry about that."
After a moment's hesitation, Elincia wrapped her arms around his neck. "Then, no, I suppose I've no objections."
Two powerful wingbeats later, she was watching their shadow shrinking rapidly on the ground beneath them. They rose ever higher on each downstroke, with much greater force than her pegasus had ever managed (and the poor thing looked incredibly confused right now, stretching her neck upward to watch her rider fly away with someone else), and –
It really was a more interesting view.
4. Legault, "sheets"
Much of the old guard was illiterate. They'd had hard lives, many of them, with no time to learn any language but that written by a blade on flesh. They were given their orders by word of mouth only, to be committed to memory, so that the only evidence of their activities lived in their own heads. Letters were useless, and worse, susceptible to interception - so when you left on a job, everything afterward was left to your discretion. It was simple and neat (and it made cleanup, in most cases, blessedly easy - he killed the target, he destroyed or displayed their corpses according to his own orders, and then he vanished) but it required a certain level of trust.
And that was changing. All of it was changing. Legault pulled the knife from between this latest traitor's ribs and eased her back down onto the pillows. She had never awakened, and there would be little blood. He arranged the bedsheets around her and smoothed them out - and felt a telltale crackle as he did.
It was amateurish, he thought, both on her part and on Sonia's - the letter would be from Sonia, he knew without even looking. And this girl had fallen asleep reading it. He flipped the sheets back and pulled out a thin sheet of paper, spidery with that woman's irregular handwriting. Legault was one of the old guard, yes, a Black Fang since before that had meant anything at all, but he could read and write as well as most nobles - certainly better than Brendan Reed. And the contents of this message were disturbing indeed.
It could be a trap. Perhaps he had been meant to find this letter this way. Perhaps it was part of someone's plan, now, that he would present it to Reed and bring on another spate of deaths, potentially including his own. He didn't know which possibility he liked less - that, or that the Black Fang he'd once believed in was so riddled with mistrust, incompetence, and these little... call them ideological conflicts.
He folded the paper and slipped it into a concealed inside pocket. For the sake of the old Fang, the one he could see dying before his eyes, he would take that risk.