[Challenge #002] The Blood behind the Veil
Title: The Blood behind the Veil
Game: Fire Emblem 10
Word Count: 2800
Pairings/Characters: Haar, Jill (maybe Haar/Jill, I suppose)
Warnings: Violence and blood; probably about a T rating. Also, spoilers for chapter 3 of FE10!
(Author's Note: I don't know if I'm entirely happy with the way this turned out, but I'm at least glad I was able to complete it. At any rate, I hope you all enjoy it. :D)
Haar is convinced that Hell is a cold place. As he flies over the dark, fetid swamp waters of the Ribahn River, he wonders lazily about the mysteries of humankind. As he flies, he stares down into the gray-black murk below him and it looks back at him through amorphous eyelids. As he flies, he thinks. As he flies, he wonders.
What does not kill me makes me stronger, he thinks as the rain begins to fall on him. It is a cold day, and it seems to Haar that bad things always happen on cold days.
Haar yawns. He has returned to Begnion, and the memories, one by one, flood his mind again. The gates have been opened. The image of Begnion that knifed itself in most foreigners’ minds was the surreally-white dreamscape of spires and cathedrals. Begnion, the goddess’ chosen land, home to the descendants of Altina herself. Haar looks around at the grayness and the reeds and the little swords and axes rising and falling in the world below.
This is Begnion, too, he thinks. This is their dirty little secret.
Sienne is the pretty little mask Begnion wears on stage to fool the rest of the world into believing in its righteousness. Without the great grille on his helm down, Haar can see, even with one eye, what most refuse to see with two. The dark, opaque waters of the Ribahn marshes are a microcosm of Begnion itself: the bloody Begnion that few outsiders ever knew, the cold unforgiving Begnion that made monsters out of men and spirited its ghosts away in glass jars, dusty laboratories, and lightless oubliettes. Haar wonders if even the little apostle knows what the people of her land truly believed. Maybe she hides from the truth, or maybe she is old enough to know that she must lie, that the truth kills as surely and as painfully as any sword or poignard in the back. The veil concealing the whole of Begnion is white and gold, but its heart is cold and bleeds a muddy, wretched black.
Now I remember why I left. Shiharam always did prefer Talrega to the ivory towers, didn’t he. He’d rather raise his daughter in an honest place like Daein, where the darkness doesn’t hide behind a pretty face.
Haar sighs and keeps gazing downward, peering into the abyss, because he fears the alternative. When he finally looks up, he sees the great green wyvern and the red rider pulling on its reins and he wishes he were somewhere else, somewhere warm and quiet and peaceful. He watches with his one good eye as she approaches, and he thinks, how easy it would be to close that eye and pretend this were a fight like any other. He clenches tightly onto his poleax. One swing is all it would take, he thinks. Only one.
But Haar does not close his eyes. The backs of his eyelids watch him in the darkness, and Haar does not like being watched. So instead he keeps his one good eye wide open as Jill closes in on him, her silvery lance catching fragments of whatever light remains in the day.
She really is a woman now, Haar thinks, wondering why it seems so strange to him that she might have grown up just like everyone else. She was always Shiharam’s little girl to him, and Haar had trained her and mentored her largely out of gratitude to her old man. His mouth goes dry. There is no way he can fight her.
She finally comes into range, but instead of darting in to strike, Jill pulls up just close enough to let them share glances at each other’s faces. When she realizes it is truly, genuinely him, Jill gasps, and for a few awkward seconds, says nothing. Then: “C-Captain Haar! What are you doing here?”
“I should ask you the same thing! How did you get wrapped up in all this? Were you one of the soldiers who helped the new king of Daein depose the Begnion occupation?”
“Yes!” Jill says, rising upright in her saddle. She smiles. “These people are my friends, my comrades.”
“So what are you fighting for now? Last time I checked, your army was fighting against Begnion. And now you’re fighting for them?”
“We were, but—our commander gave us the order. I can’t let my friends down, not after all we’ve been through.”
That’s a pretty stupid reason.
“What about all of us?” Haar says. “We’re your friends too, in case you haven’t noticed! Are you going to fight us?”
“I—I don’t know,” says Jill. “Daein is my country. I can’t just betray them!”
“What sort of things have they been telling you? You’re too easily swayed by the opinions of others, Jill.”
“D-Don’t lecture me! I don’t deserve that!”
“Do they deserve you? After all, you helped them shrug off Begnion’s chains, and what do you do? Climb back on their horse. That doesn’t seem right, does it?”
“You don’t know! You haven’t seen—”
“Do you really think they care about how you feel? Do you really think they’ll care about what happens to you or Daein once we’re all dead?”
Jill breathes in deeply. “I—they—”
“Jill, you’re shaking.”
She lowers the visor of her helmet. “No. I’m a warrior. I can’t betray these people…not again. It doesn’t matter why—I have an order!”
“Oh, come now. Now you’re just being stupid.”
Jill tugs on the reins of her wyvern.
“Do you know what loyalty is, Jill?” he yells, but she has already lowered her head.
Her mount soars forward and Haar knows it is time to move. He spurs his wyvern downward, just barely flying past the blow of her long spear as she cuts above. He holds his weapon down at his side and refuses to lift it up.
“Jill!” he cries as their beasts turn about in mid-flight to face off for another tilt. She doesn’t even hear. As her beast splits the sky, he can hear her shouting with all her might. This time, Haar is too slow to evade the strike, and the silver head of her lance scrapes across his wyvern’s black scales. The beast cries out and Haar pulls back on the reins; it is all he can do not to fall off.
She’s going to kill me. I’m finally going to die here.
Their mounts soar forward again across the ashen sky and again the tip of Jill’s lance digs through the side of Haar’s wyvern. Lubricous pieces of ebony scales fall and splash inaudibly into the muddy swamp below. It seems nothing distracts Jill now, not the sound of his wyvern growling and gnashing, nor the sound of the black wind whistling a dissonant dirge through the air. She turns her wyvern around quickly and sends it rushing in again.
Goddess, Jill, do you want me to die?
Haar pulls his mount downward again to dodge the lance darting towards its belly. The silvery head flies over the beast, but Haar himself is not so lucky. The lance clangs violently against his helm and he feels steel slam against his forehead, colliding with his teeth. The force of the blow throws him back against the cantle of his saddle, and when he rises up again and turns his beast around for another tilt, his head is spinning and his mouth is full with the taste of blood and loose teeth. He only hopes that beneath his dark mask she cannot see the blood flowing down his scalp, trickling down his chin.
Hurts…
Haar has barely the time to straighten his helm before Jill races at him again. He cannot see under her scarlet helmet, but in the third eye of his mind—the only eye that was ever good to him—he thinks he can see Jill smiling, baring her teeth at the prospect of the hunt. He thinks he can see her laughing, trying to coat her festering wounds with a balm of mirth and joy, trying to spirit away all the lies she had been told and all the doubts that gnawed longingly at her with a salve of numbness.
All his thoughts keep Haar from reacting in time. Jill’s lance catches him in the left shoulder where his spaulder did not keep him, and the entire head broke off in the rings of his mail, its tip puncturing shallowly in Haar’s flesh. He cries out in pain and his left hand slips from his poleax.
She’s going to kill me.
With his one good arm, he clenches his poleax tighter. It is now only the thin electric strands of adrenaline giving him the strength to lift the weapon he once could lift effortlessly. He can hear the sound of Jill grumbling angrily as she casts aside the silver-steel shards of her broken lance and withdraws a poleax of her own, a child of the one that Haar holds desperately in his hands.
I can’t die. Not yet.
She turns her wyvern around, its great green wings slicing through the air. The way it turns is so effortless and quick. In a few seconds it is ready to charge again, as full of life and energy as it had been when first it had charged.
I need to tell you what he told me.
Haar gasps for breath, spitting out the last loose tooth. Beneath him, his jet-black wyvern whimpers and cries out to the heavens or perhaps the hells.
This is the end for me.
He is cold. His fingers cold within his gauntlets, his toes cold inside his greaves.
Help
The time passes in splinters.
Kill me
Heartbeats.
Want to die
In broken fragments. He can't even see past his hands now. The world is a fog.
Kill you
She raises her poleax up high into the air.
So tired
His wyvern moves and he doesn’t know why. If his beast is moving it is because instinct is driving it forward.
That’s war
He’s too far away now. His entire consciousness is in his right arm.
Just hate
He lifts his poleax and screams.
Death
In his mind’s eye—the only eye that has never done him wrong—he sees her mouth “Daddy.”
Just die
Just stop
With every last infinitesimal piece of strength left in his body he brings his axe crashing down right into the soft underbelly of her wyvern, and she does the same. He can’t see anymore. The mist is thick, too thick. But he hears screams. The shrieking of drakes and the startled cry of a girl barely a woman. Then their mounts collide in a burst of quaking wings and squamous flesh scratching and scraping together. Unceremoniously, the two riders fall together with their entangled wyverns, a comet of ill omen streaking menacingly towards the nothingness below. When they make contact with the opaque grey marsh below, the splash that rises up makes an awful crashing sound, and the winged combatants locked in combat high above spare precious seconds to gaze at the scene below.
Haar cannot see Jill sputter and swim from the deep murk to the shallows of the far bank, but he can feel himself being pulled, pulled away. All around him, the sight of blackness, the sound of distant clamor—it is as though his ears are concave bowls and the dying screams of the bloodied will never reach his senses or his soul.
Kill
Floating nowhere, he thinks he sees his master.
Just kill me
His master, his commander and teacher, rarely belied his emotions, but even through the cloudy veil, Haar can see him, and he is smiling.
Just wanted death
The vision of his superior fades and Haar thinks he sees Jill again, naked and exposed behind a veil of silken red. There is no one else on the other side of the veil, and Haar could feel without knowing how lonely she was.
She dead too?
For a moment, he thinks he hears her calling his name.
Can I sleep? Is it my time?
No, now he is sure he hears her calling his name.
“Captain! Captain! Captain Haar! Captain Haar!”
Haar sees the muddied banks of the Ribahn just in time to help a friendly pair of hands pull his waterlogged helm off. On hands and knees, he coughs up the mud and muck and algae and water, throat scrabbling for the slightest bit of air. Three minutes pass, or perhaps three centuries, and Haar finally lifts his head up to see the friendly hands that have been holding his head gently aloft.
“J-Jill.” He climbs slowly to one knee, his sinuses flaring with the overwhelming sunburst of sea. He feels like he could cough forever, but finally he manages to complete a sentence. “You’re…you’re alive, aren’t you?”
“And you’re alive, too.”
“They just can’t kill me,” he said, and laughed grimly, which turned into another fit of coughs. “So…you going to finish me off?”
“Do you want me to?”
Haar looks over at his young understudy. She had removed her red full helm and set her poleax beside her. Her face is almost as bad as his, Haar reckons: her cheeks are crusted with dirt and dried blood and a wide gash on her scalp yields trickles of blood down between her eyes. She gives him a doleful look and suddenly he doesn’t know what to feel.
Haar shakes his head and after a wistful pause and a few remembrances of that day when all he wanted to do was kill and die, he answers, “No. Not unless you want to, of course.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Captain. And I won’t. I refuse.”
He wipes the blood off his chin and spits out another tooth. He’s known her for many years, but for some reason, Jill’s sincerity and her resoluteness thoroughly surprise Haar. Even her feeling of confusion is utterly genuine.
“There’s…something I have to tell you,” Haar says. “What your father wanted for you.”
“Daddy? I mean…Father? What do you mean?”
“Four of the five powers of Tellius might name him traitor,” Haar says, rising to his feet. “But he was true to himself. Other people couldn’t see behind that curtain, that ‘treachery’. They thought him a man who owed nothing to no one and nobody, a false man with no honor and no loyalty. But I knew better, and you should too. He was true to himself to the very end. He took the path he thought was right.”
Haar sighs. “I was going to kill you, Jill,” he says. He cannot bear to look her in the eyes. “But I wanted you to see. You can’t come to me or your father for answers. Shiharam is dead and someday I’ll meet my maker. We probably all will at some point. But…” he turns to her and her eyes are welling with tears. It is all he can do not to cry himself. “If your heart is set here, fighting with this army against Ike’s, then you fight and you live without regretting those choices. I did not come here to recruit you. And if that is what you want…”
Haar reaches into his belt and withdraws a small knife, the only weapon on his person that has not been lost to the marshes. Then he throws it away.
“Then we’re enemies. So kill me. I won’t stop you.”
“We’re not enemies,” she says, through a mouth wet with tears and blood. “I can’t fight you.”
Haar chuckles dryly. “You’re a bad soldier.”
“I know. I know I am. I’m not the soldier my father was, and I’ll probably never be. But I can’t kill you, Captain Haar.”
“All those soldiers, all those knights…they’ve all families, all faces and names and homes and hobbies. How is it you can kill them but not me?”
Jill sniffles. “I—I’m sorry.”
“It’s hard to see, but behind their helms, behind their masks, they’re all made of flesh and blood, just as we are. And each of them is fighting for something. So make sure that you know where your allegiances lie. I’ve already made peace with that. Jill. Look at me.”
His eyes bore into her and she returns his glance. “This isn’t the face of a hero. We’re not heroes. I’m certainly not. We do all we can and sometimes our only rewards are scars like these.” Haar wipes his face with the back of his hand and sees it stained red.
“Do you know what I mean?”
She nods, and he barely has a moment to smile when she leaps at him and girds him with her muddy arms.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.