Chapter Text
the southern ocean, cyrkensia.
Meeting Silas in the middle of Cyrkensia’s most crowded marketplace feels like a dream. His eyes widen in surprise when she calls his name, and it’s into his open, waiting arms she lands when she rushes toward him. Her fingers clutch at the back of his shirt as she embraces him, squeezing in the fabric until her knuckles turn white and he lets out a strangled laugh.
“Silas, Silas, Silas,” Corrin repeats, clinging desperately to him and burying her face in the crook of his neck. “I thought you were going back to the—the Northern Fortress!”
Saying the name sends a thrill into the ends of her limbs, the urge to break away and run dying and fizzling in her fingertips.
“I was.” Silas pulls back slightly — she breathes through the fleeting urge to chase after him, to claw him back to her — and smiles. “But you know I can’t stay there anymore.”
She doesn’t say the words, but they’re both thinking it: the way they both grew out of their childhood home, its winding halls and dark interior too small for them to fit inside and not worth the effort of trying to whittle themselves down to the right shape to duck inside its entrance. It wouldn’t be right to bring the mood down by saying anything.
They hold each other for a little while more, embarrassing themselves in front of passers by, until Silas manages to convince her to take a small boat out onto the blue expanse of the Southern Ocean for them to have a little peace of mind and get away from prying eyes.
The walk to the docks is a blur, her eyes trained only on the figure Silas cuts against the backdrop of Cyrkensia. Without his battle armor on — which was almost all she’d seen of him — he looks smaller, but his shoulders still carry the same weight and his voice drags with deeply-ingrained exhaustion.
She meets his eyes more often than either of them will admit. She won’t call attention to the way his nervous gaze flutters across the crowd, not if he won’t do the same to her. His hand occasionally brushes so close to his hip it’s easy to tell what he’s reaching for. Corrin can’t help herself from grabbing onto his fingertips, forcing a smile past her worry to reassure him when he jerks his head back in surprise.
“I’ll keep your idle hands busy,” Corrin says, drawing up level with him and lacing her fingers through the hand with which he used to carry a spear.
*
“Let me help you in,” Silas offers from the boat, extending a hand.
She accepts it, stepping off the dock and swaying with the motion of the rowboat. Silas steadies her until she can safely sit beside him.
She tightens her grip on the small oar until her knuckles ache, trying to convince herself he’s here and not haunting the fortress like she thought he would’ve been.
As they drift farther out in the harbor, the euphoria of seeing him again for the first time since the dust settled begins to fade. Corrin’s left grasping at the receding feeling, desperately trying not to let it escape.
“What brings you to Nestra?” Corrin asks once she deems them far enough away from Cyrkensia, releasing the oar and watching silently as her friend does the same.
It takes Silas a little while to respond. His eyes stay fixed on the distant horizon, a small frown lingering on his face. “I tried to talk to my brother. I don’t think he really understood what happened to us.”
“How is your mother?” Corrin asks.
The last time Corrin saw Silas was two weeks after the end of the war. They hugged. They talked a little. They eventually went their separate ways, though they both knew they didn’t really have to.
“Trying to salvage her reputation in the ruins of Nohr’s noble court.”
And your father lies buried, Corrin thinks, relieved and guilty that he’d sailed from the harbor of life in his bed and not in a bloodstained casket.
Her right knee brushes against Silas’ left and he speaks again, more slowly this time, trying to string his thoughts together in a way that won’t hurt either of them too badly.
“My brother is… more concerned with reasserting control over the land he inherited, rather than welcoming someone home whom he once believed to have betrayed the Nohrian king,” Silas explains haltingly, his leg knocking against Corrin’s once more. She leans against him. “My mother doesn’t realize what she did was ever wrong. What she stood by and let happen… how badly I…”
Unbidden, Corrin’s eyes sting.
Something drove them apart during the war. Familiarity curdling into awkwardness. Blood lay between the two of them, neither of it their own. No longer had they been innocent children chasing each other through the echoing, suffocating corridors of the Northern Fortress, trying so hard to find even a glimmer of joy.
They had been enemies, bitterly and shortly. When they fought, Silas broke oaths Corrin couldn’t even remember, but that he told her about after it was over — the two of them hunched over in her room writing promises on a scrap of parchment, eyes straining to read their work by the light of a single dim candle.
They had fought with their backs against each other, bearing down so viciously on their unfortunate enemies they could feel each other’s wounds pressing shut on the battlefield, agonizing but necessary. Their blood intermingled. Their armor screeched against each other, wherever it was intact. They could not let go, lest the distance that separated them allow an arrow to find its mark.
“I’m sorry,” Corrin whispers, afraid she’ll see red if she looks down at her scarred, vulnerable hands now.
There lies an oddness in the way he holds himself with his shoulders down and the way his eyes habitually scan the empty sea for danger and how he always seems to be wearing his armor even when he’s taken it off.
She doesn’t remember this about him. She remembers a boy with steady hands and bright eyes who stood with perfect posture because Jakob would heckle him if he didn’t.
Corrin is sure she’s strange to him too, with her short hair and her boots and the little drawstring pouch hanging from her hip that she occasionally has to touch to prove it’s there.
“And so am I, though none of it was our fault,” Silas returns solemnly.
Long months on the road should have afforded her time to reflect on why she’d parted with Silas without protest. She hadn’t even said goodbye, but had watched secretly and tried not to cry as Silas rode back to Nohr. She missed him. She reviled him. Part of her wanted to capsize the boat and drown them both, so that neither of them would have to go on like this.
“You’re so much like me,” Corrin says, desperate not to be trapped inside her own head. She’d been doing so well. Arcthunder; the scent of singed flesh; murky, clotted blood running down Silas’ lance as he pulled it from the neck of one of the Faceless. Joy and sorrow run their course through Corrin. “I don’t know how we haven’t destroyed ourselves.”
“We’ve been through so much,” Silas murmurs, warm and comforting beside her.
It’s hard to face someone who’s tied so inextricably to her best and worst memories. She feels awkward and sad.
“I can’t overcome it,” she says, finally letting her line of sight drop to her hands. They’re marred by years of magical accidents and wounds (both from training and battle) but clean. Silas tries to speak, but she doesn’t allow him to. “What have you done since leaving that place? Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Silas accepts the deflection with as much grace as he can manage.
“Mostly traveling here and there. Helping rebuild if I can. I’m considering putting my work as a knight on hold and…”
Corrin listens as intently as she can to his words after that, but her thoughts keep circling back to what Silas had said about being a knight. It shakes her more than she can rationalize.
It’s almost everything she remembers of him — his desire to protect (though she never indulged him in his idea that she could need saving from anything), to prove himself to his family as a knight. For a second son, it was his best shot at achieving recognition.
She’s lost. She’s adrift in the reasoning behind his decision, trying to tread water, to hold fast to the small shreds of happiness in the years they shared together while the boy she knew swims further away from her.
“Corrin?” Silas asks, concerned and mothering like he always is. The tears Corrin’s been threatening to let fall finally break past the last of her self restraint. “Corrin!”
Silas hovers over her while she sobs, and eventually he can stand it no longer and begins to cry, too.
“I missed you so much,” Corrin says, voice thick as she pushes the words out. She hiccups, and her next sob comes out as something closer to a laugh. Sad, watery, but genuine. “I’m just really glad to see you, Silas.”
Something in him softens, and he pulls Corrin into another hug. “I missed you too.”