Woah, a lot of reviews from that last chapter. I genuinely wasn't sure if that styling would find an audience, but it seems to have. Thanks for the support! As this continues, more subplots will be introduced to break up the main quote unquote "plot" and I'm aiming for chapters to begin focusing on more than just one scene, while still revolving around a main scene and an underlining mood. The tone will continue to ease itself into a mixture of offbeat non-sequiturs and macabre, with just enough straight-faced tonal whiplash to slap you in the face but at the same time, leave you with a morbid curiosity to keep turning the theoretical pages (amazing to think that this can be a profession for which one is paid to do, it might also shock you to know that the entire plot of Fates was not only loosely based upon rough drafts penned by someone specifically commissioned for the job, but that all of those rough drafts, all of those compensated contributions, were ultimately discarded with all of the newly-birthed gaps and plot holes in-between filled in by the internal crew to fit the narrative of a game plot rather than a novel, remarkable).

Word Count: 3,669 words.

04. - Another Doleful Detour

Monotonous.

Absolutely monotonous.

Every day is the same.

Nothing is new.

Nothing is different.

Nothing ever changes.

Every wistful event of the day is but a cog of a habitual cycle meant to maintain a stale status quo.

If a duller tedium exists, he's yet to encounter it.

Laslow awakes in his bed, no different than he was when he stepped into it the night before. A part of him refuses to even get up, the other fraction is numb, it doesn't care what the rest of his body does so long as it doesn't exert too much energy. Minutes pass without action, and he ultimately has to force himself to get out of bed, force himself with a level of gravitas that would be more at home heavy lifting than being expended on such a menial task.

He doesn't even get halfway across the room before his muscles begin to cramp, aching with a vengeance. Groaning in a near-silent agony, he stretches every muscle and pops every bone in his body before completing his taxing trip to the mirror.

He stares in the glass with bloodshot eyes and dark rings adorning them, adjusting his collar so that it reveals just the right amount of chest (right amount for him, as no women cast even cursory glances at him these days). Not too much, not too little. Just enough to get through the day.

He stands in place afterward, persisting with nothing but his own static thoughts to keep him company (not exactly sunshine and smiles).

'Wonder if I should sigh..'

He pulls it once or twice, every so often, unevenly spread here and there, trying to breathe fresh air into a rotten corpse of a routine with whatever minute deviations he can drum up.

'Would she even notice?'

He's tried it eighteen or nineteen times as far as he can remember, and she's raised concern over none of them.

Laslow counts down the seconds to her debut—the same time as always—and times his own moves to intertwine with hers.

It sounds like a dance—a lovely dance, and perhaps long ago it might have been the loveliest there ever was, but lately it's more of a process.

A monotonous process.

He exhales and that's her cue to gallop across the room in a matter of seven sweet and sugary skips.

"Peri knows you'll never guess what's for breakfast!"

She leaves him with that quip, bloodied cleaver in hand, and his sigh peters out into the mirror before him.

'Nothing.'

'Like always.'

Another minute of blank reflection into the foggy glass, and Laslow shuffles down the stairs—a kaput shell of a man who's all but lost his trademark smile.

"Staff meeting in fifteen minutes. Come presentable. Don't be late."

A faint blush dusts Flora's cool cheeks (he has such lovely enunciation), but Jakob is already out the door before he can notice.

Rallying troops is something easier done than said, and a huge facet contributing to that absence of difficulty stems from the fact that Valla's new base of operations (if it even deserves to be referred to as such) has more-or-less, ten simple-minded worker drones operating it at all times. A skeleton crew in every sense of the word.

The majority of the king's ragtag, mixed-kingdom army had mutually disbanded upon Anankos' anti-climactic demise, most seeking to return to their own shallow lives—now improved immensely without an invisible madman manipulating their every whim and desire. The king allows it with nary a qualm or concern because it's the least he can do for all the troubles and scars they've endured along the way (aside from a monetary compensation and a gift basket commemorating their valiant services on the front lines and unrivaled courage in facing the Silent Dragon, but the army never sees a cent).

What remains at the end of all the inevitable valedictions and farewells is little more than the exact same retainers and servants he started out with (and some stinky farmer girl with nowhere else to go, go figure). Not necessarily the worst of outcomes all things considered, but the king admits behind closed doors that it rather stings to know that few people genuinely wish to aid him in rebuilding a tattered kingdom anew, people that aren't already doing so out of regal or chummy obligation.

But the notion isn't totally unreasonable in hindsight. The process of restructuring is long and grueling, and the dismal politics that come with it are nothing short of exhausting, nerve-racking really—a textbook definition of a bad package deal. Everyone is far too smart to willingly throw themselves through such fool's labor, and would much rather trudge through their own stew of bottomless affairs just waiting for them back home.

"Oh well, whatever." Jakob scoffs as he makes his way down the hall. "Less messenger work for me. To hell with anyone that disagrees. 'Many hands make light work!', pah! How utterly absurd."

The hall is empty—almost disconcertingly so, with only loud footsteps and a distant breeze accompanying the two-faced lackey.

"Hmph.. one more to go." the servant muses to himself, a whisper that's amplified by the emptiness around him.

"Tch. Which one of these rooms does that dusty old cock frequent these days?"

"It's a cheese sandwich!... with the crusts cut off.. and eggs!"

Laslow spares a moment to stare into the goopy, unappealing yolk that stares back at him, exchanging silent grievances. This is hardly their first encounter, and from the looks of it, it's far from the last.

Peri is not for one subtlety, or variety, or much of anything that doesn't concern the intricate ins-and-outs of unadulterated homicide and bloodbaths. There was once a time when such lunacy would frighten the philanderer, make him blush, regress into that shy and submissive cake boy who couldn't bear to be gawked.

Now it's like, who cares.

It's her gimmick. Her thing.

It can't be helped.

He doesn't actually notice her at first, but Soleil is present too—the sole product of their union, with little to show for it beyond being an offensively-volatile mirror image of her father with a fraction of her mother's sense of morality (the former of which Laslow concedes to being a direct result of imprinting while in the magic maybe-baby time chamber).

Incidentally, mid-war 'comrade coitus' (or 'sex' as all the hip kids call it) is banned from the army following his daughter's recruitment, a mutual decision encouraged by both a public petition on its soulless lack of humanity toward the spawn bred within it (with Soleil as the propaganda's prime example of a 'potentially pure youth warped by impressionable alternate dimensions and a lack of parental supervision')—and a couple of untraced anonymous complaints.

Ironically, Laslow not only signs the petition but also pens nearly every anonymous letter, and their barefooted leader ultimately approves of the proposition if only due to his own contrived reasoning.

'It's stupid and hits too close to home, so uh, just don't have sex. Jerk to yourself and use your imagination, I suppose.. Psst, Jakob, what exactly is sex, again?'.

'It's that thing you say you partake in the time.'

'Ah.'

Unsurprisingly, most of the men in the army are vehemently against the ban, not due to their nonexistent aspirations of becoming parents at such a young age, but due to their horny, poonhound desires of busting hard double nuts in their respective wives' big fat butts (the sole exception being resident judicious buffoon—Arthur, who suffers from chronic erectile dysfunction ban or no ban).

On an entirely unrelated note, ear sex experiences a healthy rise in popularity following the embargo.

At any rate, Soleil is the pinnacle of talking the talk but never walking the walk, with a novelty as twice as tired and half-baked as her father's once was, and Laslow often finds himself at a loss as to whether love her regardless of such things or disown her outright as an utter misstep in the game of life (an addendum to a chain of missteps).

There is, in short, literally no reason for her existence. It's a cold, unavoidable truth, one that Laslow doesn't want to accept, much less admit to her face.

In the end, he settles for a vague, neutral sort-of acceptance, because that never hurts anybody and his wife and father would have his head on a pike if he did anything that would jeopardize the sanctity of his family. Judging by the stagnancy of their relationship following the war, Soleil has no issue with it.

"I had this dream last night," his daughter suddenly announces with a straight face, unprompted, like it's the most important thing she has to talk about and it needs to be discussed posthaste. "Everyone was dead. Dead bodies all over the place. It was just me. Me and this group of faceless ogres. They told me we had to 'sex like taguels' in order to repopulate the world, but I didn't want to."

"I wasn't sure if they were girls or not, see.." she laments with regret—never mind the fact that she isn't entirely opposed to the idea had they suited her taste.

Impervious to her questionable fantasies at this stage, Laslow pokes at his eggs, but pokes a little too hard. What starts as a jab becomes a stab, and the yolk spills out, seeping into the crustless sandwich.

For a moment—just a moment—the yolk flickers, and he sees his wife in its sloppy, gloppy reflection.

The image disappears as quick as it comes, leaving the philanderer staring at his yellowed likeness once more.

'What.. Wh-What was that..?'

For a moment death stares back at him.

'Am I.. losing it?'

He wonders how far-off things have gotten for him to be even thinking such things, trick of the mind or otherwise. Peri is crazy, but cute, she still has her charms—her bloody, bloody charms—and he could never in a million years bring himself to do such a thing to her in spite of current events.

Love is kind of odd in that way.

"I'm.. ah.. heading to work now."

"Okey dokey, be safe! Peri loves you!"

"Laslow lov—er, uh, I mean—I-I love you too."

A daunting shiver haunts over the philanderer as he exits the dining room and makes way to repay his copious debts to society.

After that illusion, the last thing he wants for her is to be near him.

Lilith is something of a wild card through and through. Even before her permanent transformation, Jakob could never make heads or tails of his feelings toward her. It's as if she stands on a middleground, the center of a spectrum scaling the nuisances of the world with Felicia on one infuriatingly klutzy extreme, and Flora on the other, tolerable if not forgettable and just a little bit self-deprecating.

The thing about Lilith is that she is on neither side, she's just sort-of.. there. Existent. No offense is to be had if she happens to be in the room, so she's already a step above Felicia in that regard, but there's no substance to work with either. What little interaction the butler has with her is steeped in stolid remarks—the bare minimum, never more than necessary, never unrelated to work, with only a mutual degree of respect and acknowledgment.

They don't despise each other, at least.

'And now she's a dragon.'

'Okay, whatever.'

An Astral Dragon, one of the last of her kind supposedly. A bombshell like that—to discover that the flowery servant girl so devotedly attached to the king's hip is in actuality, a being of a higher plane from beyond the stars—would make others drop dead from pure shock alone. To Jakob however, it's just one of many unfortunate events in a chain of ridiculous revelations, twists, and turns. Each one less plausible than the one before it, with Lilith's 'origins' paling to them all.

'Now that I think about it... Not much has changed since that day, has it? Introduce us to a safe haven in an alternate dimension and retreat into a shrine, she's about as useful now as she was then.'

'Except now she doesn't do housework. Just eat.'

'Eat, eat, and eat.'

'And excrete solid gold.'

'And milord encourages it.'

'And we have to pick up after her.'

'And fulfill all of her former duties.'

'. . . Maybe that hand-to-work ratio holds some truths to it after all..'

The devoted dragon is among the first of willing cronies that the butler drops in on, and the only one he has to seek out twice, the second instance on account of losing his sense of direction, every hall looks the same and only she cares enough to memorize the way through the new castle's labyrinth.

Jakob scrunches his nose and takes a sharp left, approaching a door at the far end of the corridor.

'Lord Corrin sincerely needs to consider renovating this place if he intends to rule from it. Gods, I'm at wit's end here!'

'Perhaps I'll be able to talk him into making it a priority once this whole gardening nonsense is done with..'

Jakob halts before the door, but a pertinent thought pelts him before he can grip the handle.

"Hm, gardening.." he says to himself. "Is this really what our kingdom needs to prosper? Could milord be onto something?"

"..Or is he just on something?"

The foundation of a good business thrives on the pillars of good location, good productivity, and good word of mouth. A damning truth—Cassita's falls short of all three and survives only by miracles and low-key tax evasion (it's an honest business aside from that though, honest).

The flower shop is empty more often than not, what few people that come in tend to mistake the establishment for either of the frothy brothels sandwiching it, and none of them stay long upon being corrected (the sickos).

What's left is a handful of dedicated floral enthusiasts—a pathetically niche demographic for Nohr—who drop in day by day. They're never punctual, never slaves to a schedule, they could camp out hours before opening or arrive minutes after closing. Their timing (or lack thereof) leaves staffers with zero room for leisure, lest they miss out on one of their only two sales of the day.

Life behind the counter is, without question, just as monotonous as it is back home.

But it's not all bad, it's not always a drab, dreadful endurance round. Peace and quiet provokes thought, thoughts can go a long way, and the flower boy has much to think about. Friends, family—especially family, would his mother even want to see him again if it had to be in this mood?—and pretty faces of all kinds flourish in his mind as he mulls back to a bygone era stretching across time and space. Sweeter days, he considers them.

The hour passes without any customers.

Seven more and he can go back home.

"Hey, rise and shine, old man! Staff meeting in ten minutes! Lord Corrin's orde—!"

Jakob opens the door with the kind of rousing jeer only he can deliver, expecting to exchange a few sharp-tongued jabs with the inveterate fogey he so furtively takes orders from.

Instead, what greets him on the other side is a wave of pitch black darkness spilling out into the hall. The butler's jest runs short, as do his movements, but he overcomes the lapse long enough to take a hesitant step inside.

"Tsk. Don't tell me you've died already, old man." he sneers, slowly adapting to the unwelcoming scenery. "I thought for sure you still had a few years left in you,"

When no immediate response comes his way, he keeps going, topping gibe after gibe. "Or maybe you're merely slowing down in your old age. No longer able to wake before the sun rises and police everyone around, huh? Is that it?"

Again, his pestering goes unheeded, but it doesn't deter him in the slightest.

"Come to think of it, I haven't seen much of you since we relocated. Have you been hauled up in here this entire time? Whatever for? Counting the days until your aching back finally gives up on you? That doesn't sound like the codger I know—"

"...nrrn..."

At last, a faint groan badgers at him from across the room. The butler tracks it down to the source, whereupon he stumbles across the knight of the hour, solemnly bedridden.

"Ah, there you are, old man." says Jakob, impudent as ever. "I've been calling you. Did you not hear me? Or are your ears failing you as well?"

Gunter winces, not from his remarks but from his incessant noisiness, and slowly turns to glower at him.

"I see winning a war hasn't dulled your defiance."

"Why would it?" the butler retorts. "I'm not like you, old man, lying around in the dark as if there's nothing left to do. The world doesn't stop revolving because a dragon aiming to conquer it gets sent back to the festering hell it crawled out of. Rest doesn't come so quickly. Bringing about real change is a far more gradual process, so forgive me if my mood hasn't so easily settled from what it was a few weeks ago."

"Hrmph.." the elderly knight grunts. "I feel as if this is something I should be lecturing you about.. I don't suppose I'm rubbing off on you after all, am I, urchin?"

A cold chill runs up Jakob's spine. "Wh-What!?" he stutters. "Preposterous! I just said we were nothing alike! How deaf can you possibly be?!"

"Not at all if it's your tone we're assessing."

"Tch! Why do I even bother?!" the butler huffs. "...worthless trash..."

"'Worthless trash' is redundant. Something considered garbage already possesses a lack of value. You're only running your mouth, urchin."

Jakob twitches his eye twice, moments before venting out his ire at the nearest wall.

When he returns, his knuckles are beet red and he's drawing heavy breaths.

"Hrm. Did you need something?" asks Gunter, calling no attention to the tantrum. "I very much doubt that you're here on your own accord."

Suppressing his innermost yearnings to sock the codger in his wrinkled face, Jakob folds his hands behind his back and answers him through the slits of his teeth. "Ergh.. Lord Corrin is requesting an impromptu meeting to discuss current and future affairs, or so I've been told."

Any desire to take his request into consideration is sent to the backburner upon hearing his liege's name.

"Is that so? Hrm..."

"Please be sure to send him my regards, then."

Jakob flips out accordingly, and this time it's justified. "W-Wh—What? You're not attending?! What for!? What could you possibly have on your plate that's more concerning than Lord Corrin, old man?!"

The elderly knight is unresponsive, feigning silence once more, and all it takes is reading the expression on his sullen face to understand why.

"By the gods.." Jakob curses, lowering his voice for once. "This isn't still about that whole traitor ordeal is it? It is, isn't it? I swear, you've nothing else going on in your fossilized life to be so bent out of shape about. That has to be it."

Though Gunter doesn't directly confirm his suspicions, the twinge in his face when he brings the matter up is all he needs.

"I see I've struck a nerve. Or a dusty old vein. It's hard to tell the difference." says Jakob with an absent shake of the head. "I don't understand what it is you're so hung up about. Lord Corrin already forgave you, and he did so as soon as you came back to us. You'll gain nothing from making a show out of it."

Wise-ish words from such a bitter butler—a rarity in hindsight—though if they have any impact on his senior, he doesn't show it. Jakob's dry amusement sours to a blunt apathy, and he soon finds himself turning on his heel, no longer interested in negotiating with a brick wall.

"When you're ready to stop pining for attention, you can find us in the courtyard."

He leaves, and Gunter just lies there.

Licensed psychiatrist and resident drama distiller Doctor Inigo, Ph. D (shorthand for Ph.ilanDerer) skims his trusted logbook for the latest dosage of intel on his most recent patient. Unfortunately, his resources yield no results, so he instead decides to consult the source directly.

"You've been coming here for quite a while now," he notes, assuming a gentle 'I'm here to listen' tone. "But I'm beginning to suspect that we haven't made any significant process."

On the opposite side of the room lies Laslow, staring at the ceiling and pretending not to listen. The doctor continues in spite of this.

"You know, I would never force any of my patients to tell me anything unless they feel one-hundred percent comfortable, but I feel as if we've made enough of a connection over the past few weeks for you to be, well.." he pauses, searching for the right words. ".. a little more open, so to speak."

Laslow folds his hands and turns his head slightly to gawk at the handsome, refined, well-cultured enigma sitting across from him.

"So, with that in mind.." says the doctor as he reaches for his quill, logbook sitting in his lap with a fresh page readied.

"Would you mind telling me what's been bothering you, Laslow?"

The way the doctor says his name, the way it almost slithers out of his mouth, stressing each syllable for all its worth, one would think it's intentional.

Both of them know they can't squander yet another session on complete silence, help isn't cheap after all. Sighing for a nineteenth or twentieth time, Laslow confronts the the machination in his head with a false sense of valor.

"Well.. I suppose you could say.. it all started when I was born."

There is a sort-of "time bubble" going on in this chapter, a vacuum, if you will, perhaps you may have noticed. For context, let's assume "present day" is the day Corrin buys his new trowel. Ergo, all of Laslow's scenes in this chapter take place in the day before yesterday and illustrate a typical day in his post-war, not-quite-beefing-it-out-back-in-Ylisse-yet life, and why meeting incognito!Corrin might have frustrated him so. Why didn't he go back in this deranged timeline, one may ask? Well, being tethered to a marriage tends to do that. Laslow likely won the argument he had with Peri of "where to go after the war" in the context of the game. Therefore we can assume here, Peri hired a professional debate team and mopped the floor with him. His abruptly introduced point of view will be taking a backseat for the now. Everything else unrelated to Laslow takes place in the present time.

There was also some worldbuilding, I guess, as much as you can call my unsubtle criticism of the worldbuilding (or lack thereof) present in the game and my attempts to elucidate and deal with it in this piece. It's mostly so I can write some of these stupid kids into the mix, can't do that if we, you know, took a stab at it from a realist approach wherein anybody with an IQ would not consummate their hurried wartime marriage for the purposes of procreation until, brace yourselves, the end of the war in question. Remember the baby boom, burgerland readers? Well, probably not, I can only surmise that the overlap between people who read Fire Emblem fanfiction and people who play Fire Emblem means that most of you barely skirt twenty. But maybe your parents, grandparents, or local history teacher remember. All those horny, horny soldiers. Horny, yes, but not so horny that they literally porked each other on the battlefield, unlike the latest entries in this series. They were "Horny-in-Moderation" (HIM), we'll call it, and reserved that crap only for when they returned home. The logic of this real, historical event that lead to an entirely new generation of people, is obviously lost on this game's cast.

And so our ensemble cast has been assembled for the most part thanks to the both on-screen and off-screen efforts of Jakob and his bitter ego, and it only took a handful of months. Gunter remains the curmudgeonly holdout, but he won't be for long. Further insights into their shenanigans will observe the new kingdom as it attempts to embrace the art of gardening or die trying, the immediate next in particular focuses the king returning and addressing his troupe amidst chaos and confusion. Look forward to it being posted.. whenever, really. Don't get paid for this you know, maybe if I had one of those newfangled internet-based platforms where subscribers can pay content creators monthly for content, maybe, but the notion alone makes me want to puke.

That said, your thoughts, comments, and concerns are more than welcome here, and act as a good incentive for me working on this stuff more consistently. See the review button? The favorite button? A little flowery words (or criticism) and a click go a long way. Makes me feel good to know if I've made your day just a little brighter with my material. Thank you!