Title: Bury My Bones
Author: GirlMood / passivesky
Fandom: Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Summary: They had names for the baby, and now they can't use any of them. Naesala, Leanne, and trying again.
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: It's official: I'm trying to drown the fandom in angst. I mean, seriously. Just look at my last two stories. :T ...On a more serious note, I'm not quite sure about this one shot. I feel kinda iffy about it - so feedback would be doubly appreciated. As always, I reply to reviews. :]

Bury My Bones

Leanne loses the first child.

They had names for the baby and now they can't use any of them because what's removed from her body isn't a child. Leanne is weeping, and her face is bloated and blotchy and strings of mucous run down her nose; he takes her into his arms and loves her, and he says, "This isn't your fault. No one's fault. No one's."

Except his. Look at what you've done to her. Look at your failure.

The midwife is half-senile, but no one stops her when she wraps up the not-child in a blue blanket and presents it to him with a smile.

"Beautiful," she says; and Naesala takes his failure into his arms and looks, and he sees fused arms and legs. There is no heart; there isn't even a head. An odd, yellow eye lolls lazily in what may have been a shoulder.

"Oh yes," he whispers, and Leanne reaches for him, wild-eyed and agonized, screams out in broken common tongue: don't touch it don't touch it don't touch it. His hand curls around a three fingered bird foot and he feels the tears on his cheeks, tastes them in his mouth.

Look at what you've done.

"Beautiful."

Tibarn sits with him after the funeral, but they don't talk. Instead, they drink Gallian liquor into the late night hours. When they run out, Tibarn pulls out a bottle of the strongest Phoenician wine and they drink that too; Naesala throws the glasses at his feet with each new shot and takes off his gloves so that he can bend down to pick up the pieces, so that he can cut his fingers on the shards.

The Hawk King stops him and gently, carefully picks the glass out of his fingers with his claws. Naesala laughs at him, mocks him – you've caught the crow. why don't you eat him, hawk? tender his wounds and tender his meat – and he stumbles and reels; and Tibarn's face is drawn and taught, pain in his eyes, an ancient agony that Naesala doesn't want to relate to, and he fights when Tibarn takes him by the shoulders and helps him inside.

The crow-self shrieks in his head, berates him, says: he doesn't need help, he doesn't want help, he can go on his own, he can to go her, to Leanne, and he has to go to Leanne, hold her and love her and never make mistakes no more mistakes no more monsters growing in her belly no more headless failures that he couldn't make into make miracles it's your fault your fault your fault-

Naesala doesn't remember falling to knees once he crossed the threshold, doesn't remember the Hawk King putting his arms around him and telling him a story about a beautiful hawk bride who was buried beside her first stillborn child, doesn't remember how Tibarn cried with him, rocked him like a fledgling, and said: I know, I know, I know, and he doesn't remember how his leaping heart banged against the inside of his chest and tried to skewer itself on his ribs.

But he remembers thinking that it should.

He is lying in bed, holding Leanne to his ugly, unfortunate body when she tells him that she wants to try again.

Naesala trembles, smooths her golden hair with a shaking hand, and says, "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she speaks into the hollow of his throat, then moves to kiss his throbbing pulse. "Please. Again."

He sits up and looks down at her; and he's afraid to touch her. She is thin, bony, and her skin is a dull off-white, sickly in the moonlight streaming from the window; even in the dim, he can see the faint lines of early age around her eyes, but when she meets his gaze, there's something there that makes Naesala bend down to kiss her, that makes him take her hands and press them to his chest so that she can feel his nervous, erratically beating heart.

"Okay," he agrees, and he feels Leanne rising to touch him, to put her hands on his face. "Okay."

His crow-self is silent. And Leanne begins to sing.

The moment that he holds the twins in his arms breaks him.

Naesala weeps unabashedly as he looks upon their perfect bodies, and he thinks, Ashera. My goddess has shown Mercy.

And although he has never loved that goddess, he loves her now.

Leanne reaches for him, for them, smiling beatifically; and he sits beside her on the bed, hands her the dark-haired twin, the one with black crow wings, and croons to the heron twin – golden hair and translucent skin. He leans against Leanne, kisses her sweaty hair, and she is so beautiful and their children are so beautiful and he is so, so happy.

The midwife approaches.

It's a different one than the last birth, a young woman with dark eyes and a large smile.

"Beautiful," she tells her King and Queen. "Perfect."

"Oh yes," Naesala says as he gathers his family in his arms, spreads his wings across them, and tucks his chin over Leanne's head, closes his eyes. "We are. We most certainly are."