Title: The Turning of the Years
Author: GirlMood / passivesky
Fandom: Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Summary: The irony is thick and viscous: a daughter outlived, a friend's granite headstone, and the laguz who reads last rites in troubadour songs. Calill, Lethe. Amy was not the beginning.
Disclaimer: I do not own FE or affiliated properties. All rights are reserved by their respective owners. I make no profit from this writing.
Notes: This is probably the most ambitious piece I've ever written. I put it all down today and wanted to share it with the fandom. At the rate I keep writing, I'll need to go beta hunting soon! Feedback is really appreciated; all reviews are responded to! : ]

The Turning of the Years

Calill is holding her hand, looking right into her eyes when Amy dies.

She doesn't remember crying. At the funeral, she tells Marcia that she's fifty-two and that's a good enough amount of time to run out of tears. Weeks later, when she can't stop herself from setting the table for two, she takes a trip into the countryside, to a small town growing toward the edges of Melior, and she tells the same thing to Nephenee's tombstone with a perfectly made-up face, charcoaled eyes and rouged, wrinkled lips.

A boy comes up to her. He's been laying flowers on stranger's graves and he asks to put some on Nephenee's; and when Calill looks at him, she sees that he is dressed in starched shorts and a crisp uniform cap and that he carries his schoolbag over one shoulder. In Nephenee's time, she thinks, boys would be farmers and towns would be villages.

She thanks the boy, lets him put posies in the ceremonial vase, and prays together with him. Calill is rather feeling vindictive so her's runs along the lines of:

Dear, Ashera. I am old. Thank you for this most gracious gift. The End.

Lethe visits her in the summer, and she hasn't aged a day and she has two laguz children at home and all her laguz friends are alive and well; but Calill is too tired to feel envious so she lets her in.

When Calill's hand shakes too badly for her to set the tea kettle, Lethe does it for her. Her hands are small, rough knuckled with neatly filed claws that handle the beorc object with surprising skill and domesticity, and Calill has to wonder who taught the cat to play house.

"I was wondering when one of you would grace themselves in my domicile," says Calill with a little of her old flourish, and what she says is true. She is the last one now – no one expected Marcia's tumble from an unbroken Pegasus.

Those laguz hands display even more surprising behavior when they take her by the shoulders and gently guide her into a chair. She shudders and knows that Lethe can hear every bad rattle in her bones, every hopeless doctor's diagnosis.

Lethe strokes her arms with a gentle sincerity, a new behavior that Calill doesn't recall her possessing years ago, as she kneels at the old woman's feet, takes her shivering hands in her own and kisses each in some farfetched Gallian gesture that Calill vaguely remembers Amy prattling to her about years ago: a sunny day, her daughter weaving daisy chains in the grass, Largo stretched out with his head in her lap; happiness, she could be indulgent once upon a time. Callused fingers wipe the tears from her eyes and Calill marvels at Lethe but not really at Lethe, tells her:

"Didn't know I had any left."

"Old friend," says Lethe, and it's strange, because Calill can almost believe that Lethe looks like she's about to cry. "Old friend."

"We weren't really friends then."

"Old friend," Lethe says anyway, and suddenly Calill understands, remembers Jill and Mist who died years before: Jill's body so badly burned by mage fire that Haar had to identify her by the family crest engraved on her armor; Mist's two week dance with a disease that ate up her insides and turned her skin bubbly and purple before she died in the middle of the night, Ike sleeping unaware by her bedside; and the others. Oh, the others.

Nephenee's lonely gravestone.

"It's okay, it's okay," and Calill pretends that her kohl is sleek and pressed, that her eyes are sharp again; shadow hands press on her back, something ugly inside rears its head and mocks her.

Haha, finally.

Lethe rises; and for a moment, in a wild delirium, Calill mistakes her for one of those pagan God-Laguz statuettes that the beast robbers of the Sea of Trees worship – jewel eyes, eater of the living, the dead cross the River Lethe – and she throws herself from her chair, crawls across the floor as her old bones scream. The polish flakes from her nails and she is weeping when Lethe picks her off the floor – an easy thing, she is so diminished and thin – takes her into her arms; and Calill is sobbing and pleading and she doesn't know what she's saying but she doesn't want to die.

"ashera ashera ashera ashera," she thinks she says and Lethe is whispering laguz prayers in her ears, the soft language of slaves and what was before Gallia.

In the morning, Lethe reads to her from an old religious text that Largo had kept stashed above the liquor cabinet. Calill doesn't cry anymore, lies sedately resigned underneath the covers of her bed; Lethe has brushed out and oiled her hair, made up her face with an artisan's diligence. Occasionally, she will reach out and touch Calill on the shoulder, the cheek, all without breaking intonation.

"Stop."

Lethe does. Watches her with a somber intensity that Calill thought better suited for Ike. (If he was still alive, but it's been twenty-something years and there are some epic journeys that heroes do not return from.)

She swallows, and it hurts; Lethe leans in.

"Something else," is the request. There isn't any disguising the wobble in her lips, the tightness in her jaw. "Please, something else."

The rest of the morning is filled with an enthusiastic rendition of the adored Crimean classic: The Adventures of General Ike and Company. Lethe is smiling and Calill doesn't think that she's ever seen that before; and she is feeling indulgent (once upon a time it was not) when Lethe glosses over Makalov's drunkenness, recounts the explosive fruits of Tormod's studies, and drops her voice three octaves to speak of the Battle of Talrega in low, thick tones that sound as if she were choking on her spit.

"And there came into General Ike's mercenary company, a sage of remarkable magical ability."

"First class magic. Top notch. Best damn sage ever."

"She was."

"I had a meteo tome. Iwas damn good."

And then they are laughing, and it hurts but Calill doesn't remember Lethe ever doing that either, so it's okay. Everything is okay.

Okay?

Okay.

Lethe is saying something to her, rising quickly and pushing back her eyelids, but Calill is still laughing and she doesn't want to stop, even if Lethe says she has to, even if Lethe is crying now (she is, she is, Calill knows she is) so she closes her eyes and dreams a never-ending dream.

Gallians mourn in orange.

When the boy looks at the laguz lady, at her long orange hair and the sweep of her orange cloak, he can't help but think she's been in mourning for a long time. He comes up to her, offers her posies for the grave she's looking at. It reads: Nephenee. Prettiest Girl To Wear A Helmet. Ever.

(The 'Ever' looks newly chiseled and the grave is conspicuously clean; the expensive granite headstone polished and gleaming and the boy can see now that this is where a great lady lays.)

The woman smiles, thanks him, and asks for a second bunch. Please. She'll pay.

"For my old friend in Melior," she says by way of explanation, and he looks at her funny.

"They won't last the trip, miss." He tells her honestly, even though it may cost him good coin; he likes laguz – the town has a statue of King Reyson in the square, standing beside General Ike's likeness. The old folk tell stories about the town heroes who went to war alongside beasts and birds, show scars that would have been mortal wounds without a clawed ally's intervention. "Flowers don't last too long."

The woman smiles again; she's pretty in an exotic way, with violet eyes and bronzed skin. When she leans in and pats the boy on the head, he smells greenery that he doesn't know the name for and the thin, faint-smelling perfume that laguz traders like to sell. She speaks, and he can hear the irony in her voice, thick and viscous and unwanted; he can hear the turning of the years:

"I think that would be most appropriate."