Trinity
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Warnings: This is a non-linear exploration of Camus aka Zeke aka Sirius and is therefore jam-packed with spoilers for FE1/11, FE2, and FE3. Spoilers are basically inherent in the subject matter. Pairings include Nyna/Camus and Zeke/Teeta.
Dedicated to Shimizu_Hitomi
(an infinite lie)
It does not matter what I know or think.
I have absolutely no idea who or what I am.
"General Zeke, you are opposed to this war, are you not? Please, I would like to ask you to lend your strength to our cause."
"I cannot," he says, and it is simple fact. Even if his opponent has done him a favor, to ally himself with the leader of the Sofian rebels would go against the grain of his very being. He can no more betray his sovereign than he can mount a pegasus and flitter away from his obligations. "The only reason I aided you was to defeat those who have caused great suffering to the people."
He is the loyal servant of the emperor of Rigel, the protector of the people of Rigel. This is all he knows. It is all he may ever know.
-X-
Ten days pass before Teeta allows him to sit up and take some nourishment beyond clear broth. He would complain, but he knows-- why, he cannot begin to say-- that a man who goes too long without food will die if given a plate and allowed to sate his hunger.
"This is not exciting, but I want to know you can eat before I load you up on meat and peppers."
This is what he hears when she speaks; the words do not all make literal sense to him, and yet he understands the meaning.
"I'm sure it will be fine." He does not, after all, have any recollection of his own likes. He does not know why the words that come from his lips sound so different from hers.
She gives him a bowl of some white vegetable with a mealy texture and an earthy taste; to him, it is like eating spoonfuls of dirt topped with salt and butter. Strange how he can imagine the taste of dirt, yet cannot remember any detail of his home-- the color of its soil, the scent of its air. He knows that he has never eaten this vegetable before, yet cannot picture what he would be eating on a normal evening, were he not here in Teeta's house with an unexplained scar across his chest.
He looks down at the scar, then sets down his half-filled bowl to trace the outline of the healed skin. Teeta watches him; her eyes, he thinks, are beautiful, intense, filled with something he cannot name.
"The wound you bore was deep and narrow, like that of a sword-thrust or the tusk of some beast." Her hands are folded, the fingertips resting lightly against each other. "The creatures of the sea went into the wound, deepened and widened it, made it what you now see."
"It was a sword," he says. "I was a soldier." It feels right, it is right, and yet everything beyond that escapes him.
Teeta kneels down before him; she kisses her fingertips, then lightly transfers the kiss from her fingers to his scar.
"Soldiers are blessed, for they do right in the eyes of Lord Doma. When you are well, His Majesty will want to see you."
-X-
"His Majesty Rudolf has been just like a father to me. I cannot possibly betray him."
He does not fully expect the young hero of Sofia will accept his answer, calm and reasoned as it is. It surprises Zeke when Alm turns hesitant.
"I understand.... I must apologize for my rudeness."
"Not at all," Zeke murmurs, but he looks over Alm and feels a shadow of doubt fall upon his heart. This, he thinks, is not how this conversation is supposed to go.
-X-
"Zeke, my boy...."
Rudolf greets him as he always does, by throwing his arm around Zeke's shoulder in a paternal embrace. Zeke has only been in Rudolf's court a few months, and already the place is rife with gossip that the childless emperor will make this yellow-haired foreigner his chosen successor. Zeke hopes it is not true but so far has been unwilling to ask.
"The plans you've devised for the new fortress are stunning. It will be impregnable...."
Zeke nods as Rudolf lavishes him with praise for the octagonal design. He tells himself, to keep fears of the imperial crown at bay, the Rudolf cherishes him for his intuitive talent. He has brought to Rudolf's military enclave both the sensibility of an engineer and an innate grasp of tactics that exceeds the skill of any senior officer. He does not deserve to be Rudolf's heir, but Zeke knows he does deserve to be the newest general in the Rigelian army. When Rudolf tells Zeke that his ideas are revolutionary, that they will win him a thousand battles, Zeke can accept the praise, for he knows his plans are brilliant. He simply does not know where these plans come from, who schooled him, who shaped him.
The emperor breaks off in mid-sentence, and Zeke notices a change in Rudolf's demeanor, a strange contemplative look in the emperor's eyes.
Please do not see me as a son, Your Majesty, Zeke silently implores. I cannot be. I must not be.
"Zeke, there is something I must ask you to keep in your mind... and your heart."
-X-
"Zeke, should you ever meet one who bears a cross-shaped birthmark on his right arm...."
It is pure luck that Alm's right vambrace is missing. Pure chance that, through the grime of battle, Zeke can see a lopsided "x" in the skin, the same shape as the cross that hangs in the southern sky at night.
"Alm, that mark on your right arm. Has it always been there?"
"Ah, this has been around forever." The boy is confused, even startled; his entire mien changes as he twists his arm so that he can see the mark for himself. "Gramps said it's a birthmark from what I was a baby."
"I see...."
-X-
"You speak of gods," Teeta says. "Yet I don't think you speak of Lord Doma or the Lady Mila."
"I can't claim to know anything of the gods. Perhaps they don't even exist... or, if they exist, they care nothing for us."
He watches her slow-dawning smile. It's a smile he's seen before, somehow and somewhere, the smile of someone who senses the voice of the gods in her heart. It's a smile that invites him in, invites him to ask, how can you be so certain of the world? Perhaps it is easy to be certain here, where people know that Doma and Mila are real, that their blessings are genuine and their support worth ten thousand human lives.
At the edge of his memory, Zeke can hear someone shouting at him. He pushes the memory away and clings to the support of Teeta's smile.
Teeta pours boiling water over the dark-green leaves she has heaped in the gourd. She recites a prayer five times before pouring the infusion into a smaller gourd, then tops it with with silver straw and passes it to Zeke.
"All soldiers drink this," she says. "It will keep your mind keen and your eyes sharp on the march."
He drinks; it is spicy and bitter, and the metal straw grows warm between his lips, warm enough to almost burn them.
"Is Lord Doma a god of justice or of suffering?"
"He is both," she says. He does not understand.
-X-
"So, when Gramps refused to join in the rebellion, I signed up in his place. Clerbe made me the leader-- he said it was so everybody else could give their best to the fight, but I guess it reassured them in a way. They figured that Gramps had trained me so I would know what I was doing, or at least look like I knew what I was doing."
This village boy turned war commander has lapsed back into his natural speech. Zeke, who does not even remember his own true "voice" or his native tongue, listens to Alm with interest. The youth is comfortable now; he moves with a casual grace and a smile hovers often on his face. In the moments when Alm picks his words carefully, and tries to sound like a boy's conception of a battle commander, Zeke feels unease radiate from him.
Zeke feels unease himself in these moments, and does not know why.
-X-
Teeta's lips taste of the tart red berries she cooked with their supper. Wisps of hair around her ears tickle his face as she kisses him. Some deep-buried part of him still resists, saying it is wrong to seek out pleasure with a holy woman, but everything he has learned in Valencia-- everything he knows as Zeke-- tells that whisper to just shut up. Teeta is his star, his beacon, the hand that guides him through darkness. And she is guiding him to someplace he very much wants to go.
But when his breath catches in his throat, it's not from passion. Pain pulses deep inside him, far beneath the scar tissue. It's not the first time this has happened, and Teeta rises gracefully and goes to fetch the little pot of healing salve she keeps close at hand. Zeke leans back against the wall, breathing through the pain and trying his best to focus on Teeta and her every gesture. When she strips off his shirt and explores the ruined skin with her fingers, there is something more to it than the aid of a healer, and when she rubs the green salve in, it almost seems a natural progression of the little dance her fingertips were doing on his back when the pain struck.
The red glow of the fire casts a strange light upon her hair, and something in his memory stirs.
Lena. One word, and the face of a girl with solemn eyes and grace in her heart. Was she a sister, a lost love, a childhood friend? But the memory of Lena slips away, and there is only Teeta there before him.
"Better?"
"Yes."
Teeta's kiss doesn't make the pain go away, but it almost works. Almost.
-X-
"An amazing boy," says Teeta. "To think that such a hero could come out of nowhere, even as comets appear in the sky with no warning."
"Yes, I feel our confidence in Alm is well-placed." He has his own suspicions about the boy-general and his connection to the emperor, but it is not Zeke's place to entertain such suspicions. Rudolf asked him to dedicate his soul and will to anyone with a cross on his arm, and so Zeke will.
Teeta continues her monologue of Alm and his exploits, of how this village boy has taken the Sofian rebels, most of them green youths, and shaped them into such a devastating fighting force.
"I've never heard of anything like it, even in the legends. He must be touched by the gifts of Lord Doma himself."
Zeke feels a trickle of icy sweat down his back as she speaks, feels the phantom pain in his scar begin to burn.
"Have you ever heard of such a thing, Zeke?"
"I don't know," he says. Even as he forms the words, he knows he is lying.
To Be Continued
Author's Notes: The framing device for this chapter is Alm's attempt to recruit Zeke in FE2, interspersed with Zeke's flashbacks beginning from shortly after the time Teeta finds him washed up on a beach. The "epigraphs" to this chapter are two parallel quotes, one from Chapter 20 of Shadow Dragon and the other from the Alm/Zeke recruitment where Zeke is refusing to join up with Alm. He's just difficult that way!