Disclaimer and Notes: Fire Emblem belongs to Nintendo and its various licensees. No profit or claim to fame is sought or expected.

A "For Want of a Nail" tale. I got to thinking about Game Over deaths in the game (Chrom and the Avatar) vs. expendable characters and how vital things in the story might change if the story actually went on without one of them.

For the purposes of readers connecting to the narrative and other factors, this story uses a generic default Robin – male. Various aspects have some basis in the adventures of both of my avatars. (My female, for instance, got killed pretty viciously by Gangrel the first time around and my male likes the furries). Some artistic license is taken (for example, I decided that I liked my version of Robin's early childhood better than simply being "snatched from his crib"). I've gone on to edit this to correct a misspelled name (I apologize to those of you who were reading "Tharja" as "Thraja" for the first few chapters before the changes – I really need to pay closer attention to character-names rather than trusting my brain. A thank you to reviewer Makokam of fanfiction . net for catching that for me)!

Cross-posted to Archive of Our Own.

ARISE

By Shadsie

Chapter 1: He Was the Biggest Mystery of Our Group

They were pretty sure that he was a Plegian, but they did not care. Robin was the biggest mystery among the Shepherds and it seemed like everyone wanted to figure him out – everyone except for the man himself.

Miriel assured everyone that despite his pale skin and white hair, that it was scientifically impossible for Robin to be an albino because of his brown eyes. Silver-hair on a young person who was not albino was not an unheard of trait among Ylisseans, but it was far more common among Plegians. His coat was covered with Plegian designs although he just liked it for its warmth, weatherproofing and inside pockets for his magic-tomes. The most ominous feature their tactician held on his person was the mark on his hand, a mark that he had no memory of receiving in any fashion, yet felt an instinctual need to keep covered. Those who'd grown closest to him during their campaigns noticed that he seemed reluctant to look at it, like he was afraid of it even though he said he did not know its meaning.

Everyone had their own little theories about the man that went around their campsites. Sir Frederick thought that he was a spy for the enemy, until Robin saved his life and, more importantly, the life of Chrom. His theory shifted to "Maybe he was supposed to be a spy but got knocked on the head really hard." Chrom and Lissa seemed to think that Robin's mark was a slave-brand even though his coat was the fancy affair that one would expect to be worn by a high-level sorcerer or court-official. Gaius thought the brand was a prisoner's tattoo for reasons he would not go into. Tharja, a Plegian that the Shepherds had recruited from the enemy forces, said matter-of-factly that it was the Mark of Grima, something worn upon the clothing of higher members of the Grimleal cult.

"He's probably a rebel or something," she said to Chrom dourly one afternoon. "Someone probably tried to kill him. The brass has very high penalties for desertion. My poor sweet, little Robin…"

"I still think, whatever it was about, he was probably forced," Chrom asserted. "That doesn't matter now. None of that matters now. Robin is ours now, he's one of us."

"I can hear you," the subject of the conversation said as he walked past like a dark ghost, headed back to his tent from a trip to the latrine. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't stand around talking about me. There is much to do before our next march."

"Oh, so sorry, darling!" Tharja said, shifting and sliding up behind him, her hands gripping his shoulders. "Do you need a little massage to… relax? Or maybe a little sleeping-hex?"

"Leave him alone, Tharja," Chrom said. "That's an order. He's right. Robin needs to work and so do we."

"Do me a favor and check the tomes inventory," Robin told the dark mage. He gave her a small smile. "It'd be a big help to me. I want to equip you with something really devastating."

"Very well," Tharja acquiesced.

Diplomacy was one of Robin's strong suits. His War-Tent was always open, even when he was working late into the night. Others tried to avoid bothering him if he was deep into concocting strategies, but if someone needed to talk, he was always willing to lend an ear. He exchanged reading with Sumia, took to trapping game for the larders with Donnell, tried to rein in Vaike on his "love of wildflowers,", talked science and magic with Miriel, noticed Kellam, talked Cordelia through sorrows, put up with Lissa's playful pranks, seemed to be keeping Tharja from doing terrible things to them all though the sacrifice of some of his own patience and sanity, and he had become something of a nag to Chrom about his personal safety. It was understandable. Chrom had saved his life so he was big on returning the favor, even if he had already on the battlefield several times.

The person everyone noticed going into his tent the most was Panne. The last Taquel had her own reasons for being drawn to the mysterious and magnetic tactician. First, they claimed that they were speaking about Taguel culture, which Robin was intensely interested in. He loved to learn and he tended toward wanting to know the troops. After a while, when they'd both miss the dinner-call, he'd cook in his tent for the both of them. Everyone knew when Robin was trying to cook because the smell would waft over the camp – smells of burning, smells of ingredients that really shouldn't' go together and other things that tempted some to lose their dinner.

Everyone dreaded when Robin was assigned cooking-duty. It was one of those duties that rotated among the Shepherds being one of those "lowly" but necessary things. In fact, it would have been forgotten, leaving everyone hungry and scrambling for cold rations and depleting the hardtack if it wasn't allotted as an assignment. The tactician tried, he really did. He really wanted to make something nutritious and edible and to make everyone happy. He asked once if there was such a thing as tactics books for preparing food.

"Yes," Sumia informed him. "They're called cookbooks."

Unfortunately, none of those had fallen off the last wagon she'd salvaged books from, so everyone had to endure Robin's mealtimes played by his taste. Panne seemed to like his cooking a lot. It wasn't humoring him, either: She genuinely seemed to enjoy it as long as he remembered not to include anything her species could not eat into his attempts at stews. She had a love for his carrot-stew especially – which was mostly carrots boiled into a mush with a few wild-gathered herbs. Everyone else thought it was vile while she treated it like ambrosia.

There was, with Panne, a general disdain for human-animals – not without good reason, they all supposed, but it had begun to dissipate for the Shepherds over many weeks and many battles with Risen. The way she spoke and walked alongside Robin became especially noticeable. She had started treating him as an equal. After a while, it seemed like there was something more between them.

It was sometimes said that "love is a battlefield," but rarely does love bloom under constant war. It was happening among some of the Shepherds. Fighting together and living in close quarters were getting hormones and affections up. Sully and Kellam had a small wedding in camp. Neither of them could afford or were inclined to anything fancy, but the Shepherds created a bower of wildflowers for them. Chrom promised himself to Sumia after the war was through and only then. Robin and Panne just announced one morning that they wanted to be married and went off to the woods to have some alone-time. This was before they'd met Tharja. Gaius put himself on "Tharja-distraction-duty" whenever Robin and his bunny-wife wanted some alone time to keep her from sneaking off after them to watch or to ruin their activities. Robin still got Panne a ring.

The Shepherds had their triumphs and their tragedies. Thanks to Robin, they lost none of their core-group. His status as a tactician was becoming legendary even among their enemies. His ability to minimize casualties was especially noted. The man tried to deal with the enemy with minimal losses to their side, as well. Risen, of course, were just wiped out wherever they appeared, but with human beings, Robin looked for paths that took as few lives as possible. Some were tempted to call his plans foolish, but they got results. Lissa had once said of him that "The best strategists are supposed to be a little nuts, aren't they? Robin's out of his mind. We can't lose!"

Robin had overheard and smiled at that.

The only time a plan of his went south in an un-recoverable way had been very recently. His strategy was sound until Aversa outfoxed him with overwhelming reinforcements. Chrom was standing near to him that day. He remembered Robin's eyes. The white-haired man's eyes darted to the hills, the skies and across the field, like he was already cooking up something to pull out of his tail to get them out from between the rock and the hard place when Exalt Emmeryn basically decided their next course of action for them all. After that, it was Robin who was shouting at Chrom the loudest to move. "We have to move, gods-dammit!" – His voice had come to the prince as if it were through water. When the Shepherds and gotten to safety, the tactician blamed himself to no end. He was also angry. "I was going to save her!" he said to himself, over and over again with clenched fists and tears. That was when Panne gave him a smack and pointed to Chrom and to Lissa, who needed support more than any of the rest of them.

Dawn came up like thunder on the day of the Wasteland Plan. The Shepherds and the armies of both Ylisse and Ferox were facing off against King Gangrel and his Plegian elite forces. The Shepherds made a small camp in the sands far from the valley and marched into it.

"We'll take him," Robin assured Chrom as he walked beside him. "We will avenge Emmeryn."

"Of course we will." The lord answered. "And it will all be over. We will create a world of peace."

"Let us pray it so," said Libra, who was marching behind him.

"I want to use our Pegasus Knights to ferry our units," Robin said, "But I want to keep them back from frontline-fighting. I fear the archers and the mages I saw against fragile wings. My Panne can kick the guts out of the mounted enemy units. Chrom, I think you and I should stick together and go right for the front – Sword and sorcery against the Mad King."

"I like it," Chrom said with a nod.

And so the Shepherds marched, all following what had been laid out in the morning's strategy meeting.

The fighting lasted the better part of the day. The Shepherds took injuries, but thanks to a system Robin had set up for getting the wounded back to camp in a hurry, they had no fatalities. The Feroxi army and the regular Ylissean army did not fare as well. The Shepherds managed to corner the Mad King against a cliff-side. Riken and Nowi glared at him from one end of the sandy battlefield. Tharja and Gaius from another. Chrom and Robin came marching right up to him.

Swords clashed, Falchion against a strange, jagged sword that Gangrel held.

"Chrom, watch out!" Robin shouted as a bolt of lightning glanced off it and struck downward. The prince dodged just in time.

Robin let loose a spell from the first tome he could grab – a cutting Elwind spell. It was one he normally saved for enemies on winged mounts, but it pushed Gangrel back and dealt some painful cuts. More importantly, it gave Chrom time for a good, quick stab…

… Which missed.

This time, Gangrel set his sword to the tactician. Robin dodged, jumping back. Unfortunately, he misjudged the direction of the Levin-sword's secondary bolt.

It hit him square in the chest.

He was sure he heard Chrom screaming as he felt himself fall. It was funny how time could dilate sometimes – moments turning into eternities. He heard Gangrel scream, as well, a death-cry as Chrom ran him through. Robin felt his body hit the sand. He also felt like he was being pulled part, his muscles stiffening and reacting in spasms without his control. His skin felt like pins and needles were stuck all through it and that they were on fire. He could feel muscles stretching against bones as if one or the other was going to snap. All of the air was shut out from his lungs. His teeth grit together nearly hard enough to crack. He was thrashing violently with no way to stop, not until the electricity grounded.

He felt like his bones were being cooked.

Sparks danced over his brain. Oh, come now! This was really unfair! Why was his lost past coming back to him now of all times? His body stopped hurting. He could hear the voice of Chrom over him somewhere vaguely. "Can't lose you now!" and "Open your eyes!" It was all fuzzy-sounding with the sand in his ears and the lightning in skull. Robin tried so hard to open his eyes. His eye-fluid felt like jelly. The lids were like heavy vault doors. He stayed in the gathering darkness and felt distant. Fragments came back to him – memories unbidden and without any particular chronology.

They explained a lot.

He was a child and very hungry. The snow was piled up outside and the trees were covered in ice, their branches sparkling like glass. Mother cut up some shriveled, rotten carrots and scraped them from the cutting board into a cauldron on the hearth. This was the last of what they had in the root-cellar. This wasn't food for taste. It was food for survival… It was how his village did things and his mother even more so…

All of the children of his little Ylissean mountain-town on the border of Pelegia were expected to contribute to the hunting-chores. He lobbed a mud-ball at his best friends from where they all stood in the bottom of the pit. They laughed and had a dirt-fight. They were supposed to be digging a bear-trap.

He was supposed to feed the dragon today. He was very excited. His hand was chubby and tiny, but it already showed the chosen-one's mark! Father told him that this was a very special job, the holy-work that he'd been prepared all his short life for. He carried an apple into the ceremony chamber to put on the Dragon's Table. He also had beef jerky in his pocket in case the dragon wanted meat, instead, but apples were good food. That's when the men in the long coats and hoods grabbed him and tied up his ankles and his wrists. He was crying and thrashing.

The first time he ever killed anyone was when he was sixteen. The village was under attack from bandits that had come over the border. All of the young people of the village were expected to defend it from age twelve on. He'd been studying magic and how to wield elemental tomes. Everyone usually chased bandits away without much trouble. He got quite good at it with his friends, devising strategies based upon the lay of the land. He cornered a ruffian who held a long knife to his neighbor, a younger boy who studied magic with him. His friend could not reach for his own tome, so he let loose an electric spell from a thin thunder book with enough finesse to wend around the bandit and his hostage. It stuck the bandit precisely where aimed. The criminal fell and jerked and writhed. It looked pretty awful. He had his first whiskey that night. The village celebrated him as a hero, but he didn't feel happy. The friend he'd saved was at the bar with him and that made him feel better.

He thought he was in love once, but the village maiden rejected him and married the town drunk.

No one beat his mother at any board game, until he started to win against her every time. Checkmate! Checkmate! Checkmate!

She fell sick and died of pneumonia half a year before he set out for travel to pursue a dream.

He decided that he wanted to go to a school in Ylisstol to do formal study to become a proper tactician. He wanted to learn how to protect his village and perhaps all of his adopted country. Mother said he certainly had the brains for it, but that he needed to keep his right hand covered at all times. Despite this, she gave him the priest's robe she'd stolen to keep them both warm against the land's arid chill the night she'd stole him off the Table. He'd needed something to remind him of where he'd come from.

He did not want to feed Father's dragon if it meant it was going to eat his soul! Mama! Help me! I don't want die!

He met his mirror image in a field. He had not expected the doppelganger to attack him. He'd been hurt and he felt himself fading… Who was the man with the blue hair? Why did he just kill him?

Robin vaguely felt himself being lifted, as though someone was trying to carry him. He tried to say "I'm sorry," but words could not come to a dry-cooked tongue and to emptied lungs. Robin only saw darkness.

No more pain.

Don't cry, Chrom, it doesn't sound good on you.

The sparks danced off his brain. He felt his heart stop.

"Libra!" Chrom shouted. "Help! Mend him, now!"

Chrom turned back to the tactician in his arms. "Robin! No! We can't lose you now! Open your eyes! Open your eyes!"

The prince shook his friend's limp form. The fingers shivered and the limbs jerked as lines of electricity ran over them and vanished. A few spots of blood showed through the burned shirt where the bolt had landed. The white-haired man wasn't answering. Libra, the priest and healer, waved his mending staff, sending magical energies into the prone body. They glanced off it completely and shimmered into the ether.

Libra bent down, putting his robes and scabby knees into the thick sand. He took one of Robin's hands and examined the wrist. To Chrom's consternation, the war monk grabbed the edge of the cowl on Robin's coat and pulled it over the still man's face. Chrom looked at him in disbelief. Libra shook his head.

"Heal him," Chrom said pitifully.

"There is nothing I can do for him but pray, Chrom," he answered.

"You mean?"

"Robin is dead."

"No… no… this can't be."

"He was brave and he fought well," the priest said. "Now he gets to take his rest."

There was nothing left to do but to clean up and see to the welfare of the Shepherds. Chrom gave his orders to those nearby as he gathered his friend's body into his arms and made his way back to camp. He'd dealt with dead soldiers before, but this felt different. It seemed unfair that a man who did not have a past to call his own had so quickly lost his future. If only he hadn't missed that vital strike! The sacrifices of this war were wearing on them all.

"First Emmeryn" the prince whispered to himself. He was still feeling the loss of his sister keenly – a sister that had been more like a mother to him. Now the man with whom he'd found a strange, indescribable connection – a best friend - was so heavy in his arms he could not stand it! And of course, the brain – this war might be finally over, but should anything else break out, Ylisse needed this man! Robin's brilliance was something they'd never see again.

Chrom walked to the War-Tent instead of to the Medical-Tent upon arriving at camp. He carefully laid Robin down in his own cot. He sat in the chair by the desk to rest, sighing heavily. There were curious murmurs outside. Someone said something about Vaike and Gaius trying to stop Tharja from pursuing retreating and surrendering enemies while lobbing dark magic everywhere.

Panne peeked in. "Chrom?" she asked. "I heard something about Robin being hurt, but that you brought him here."

All Chrom could do was to look up from his position of being hunched over in the chair.

"I hear your heartbeat," the Taguel said, "But I do not hear his."

"That is because he has none," was all Chrom could choke out as the rabbit-warrior knelt down by Robin's cot.

"I see," she said dully as she stroked Robin's cheek. She closed her eyes. "Did he fight well?"

"Yes, very," Chrom answered.

Panne continued to kneel and to stroke her late husband's face. "My warren," she said softly. "He was my warren."

"I'm so sorry, Panne."

"There was something that I was waiting to tell him," she said, her voice uncharacteristic of her, on the edge of cracking. "I was waiting until this fight was over. I did not want him to worry about me nor to give him news that would distract him from his work."

"Oh?" Chrom said, curiosity peaked.

"I," she began, struggling. "We… I know you humans can't detect it, but I can smell it on myself. It is in the early stages, but I am with a litter."

Chrom just stared. "Panne… after the war was over…I was planning to keep Robin on as an advisor. This meant that he would work and live at the palace in Ylisstol. I was going to give you two a set of rooms at the castle to live in if you both were willing to take it." The young lord smiled a sad, but genuine smile. "My offer still stands – for you and your family."

"We were going to be a family," Panne said forlornly as she laid her head down upon Robin's unmoving chest.

Chrom stood and left to talk with Flavia and Basillo as well as to inform his troops of their gains and their losses.

On a cliff-side a lone figure watched the camp, long blue hair blowing in the wind. She was undetected.

"Fate had other plans for this world, it seems," she said. "This is all wrong! It wasn't supposed to go this way! It just means that history is different here already…"

She knew, somehow, that she still needed to change Fate.

Lucina's timeline had been different. What she knew of the past from study was fragmented and certain events seemed to be going at a more rapid pace in sequence here than in the world she'd known. For one thing, the Plegian war had lasted longer in her timeframe. Her Aunt Emmeryn – whom she had never known personally – had been killed, but under different circumstances, ones she'd prevented only for her to die anyway by her own choice. She knew that Emm's death had lead to a devastating chain-reaction of events and suspected that even the differing death would create the same chain. There was still the clear and present danger that the Fell Dragon was going to rise in this timeline just as it had in hers, otherwise, Naga would not have dropped her here.

She had to set right what once went wrong, but Lucina was confused as to what, exactly, would break the sequence.

One thing she knew that had tipped the scales was that in her world, the Shepherds had not lost their tactician this early. Lucina had known her Uncle Robin. She'd grown up with him. He'd been her father's advisor and friend and he babysat her frequently. He'd taught her many games. He smelled like ions and magic and had a wonderful laugh. She and her sister argued about who was going to use him to help them with their study-homework. She'd played all the time with his children, her honorary-cousins Morgan and Yarne.

Uncle Robin had disappeared mysteriously in her timeline but it was not at this point in history at all. He'd gone missing around the same time her father had been reported killed-in-action. She certainly could not have remembered him if he'd died during this battle – and as he existed in this world, he just had.

"No…" was all she could say. "This is all wrong…"

She did not yet know where to go from here. For now, she remained an observer of an alternate history unfolding.

Forward, march!