Chapter Text
They’re sitting on the couches with a cup of tea each, Soren flipping through a ledger and Ike across from him looking at nothing in particular. The sun is only just beginning to set, sending spindles of light across the room, and when they rest on Ike’s hair he looks like a portrait in the stained glass windows of the castles they’ve been to and left.
“Soren, what do you want to do?”
The question startles him; it’s vague in a way Ike isn’t and his brows are furrowed more than usual. Soren tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear to buy himself time to think.
“What do you mean?”
“This.” Ike waves his hand around the room, around the fort, around the town, around Crimea. Around Tellius. “What should we do here?”
Whatever you want to do here, Soren doesn’t say. “I assume our mercenary services will be in relatively high demand with the reconstruction efforts,” he says instead, fixing his eyes on a stitch in Ike’s collar rather than his face, “so I believe we will have no shortage of contracts.”
“I know,” Ike says. The silence between them fills with the clanging of pots and pans and a few of Mist’s light swears from the kitchen. “I know,” Ike begins again, “but do you want to do that?”
Soren stares. Mercenary work was always simply part of the package: Ike is the Commander, and so, yes, Soren wants to work for him.
Ike sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “I just mean, with all that’s happened… I want to start somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” Soren echoes.
“I tried to just fade off and go back to our old jobs after the Mad King’s War, but it didn’t work. Bastian found us and another war happened. And now, Bastian said some aristocrats in Crimea were trying to marry me to Elincia or something, and I know every reigning monarch on Tellius on a personal basis, and I don’t think ‘Commander of the Greil Mercenaries’ is what people associate with my name anymore.”
He’s right, on all accounts; Ike cannot return to obscurity. Such is the price of fame.
“Nailah said there’s more past Hatari.” Ike’s voice has grown quiet, unsteady in a way only his closest friends would notice. “I’m thinking it wouldn’t be impossible to go there, see what it’s like.”
Ike has never struck Soren as the type for wanderlust. He knows, in that moment, that this isn’t wanderlust – Ike is not exploring the world beyond, he’s searching for a somewhere else to make a life. He is not, Soren thinks, planning to return.
Soren’s throat is dry when he dares to speak again. “When will you leave?”
“I dunno,” Ike says. “Soon, probably. I don’t want some big send-off. I already – I sort of talked to Mist, back at Castle Crimea, about her and inheriting the company, but I don’t – you’re the first person I’ve actually told outright.”
Soren supposes he should be grateful as the first one Ike confides in. It doesn’t matter, though; it’s outweighed by the crushing force of the knowledge that Ike has deemed there is nothing for him here. Nothing, no one.
His failed attempts at measured breathing are interrupted by the shift in weight on his couch. Ike, having moved from his chair to Soren’s side, hesitates, a little further from Soren than he usually sits and with his hands hovering awkwardly in the air above his lap. “I get it if you don’t want to. I know the company means a lot to you and it’s the only home you’ve ever had, so…”
“What?” Soren asks, barely more than a croak.
Ike frowns. “If you don’t want to come with me, I get it.”
Oh.
“You… are asking me to come with you? To… wherever?” He can’t stop the pounding in his chest, but he has to be certain, to make sure his mind isn’t playing a trick on him only to take it back and leave him in the dust.
“If you want,” Ike emphasizes. “You don’t have any obligation to me. I just like being with you, is all.”
It leaves him in a rushed whisper, desperate to set this moment in stone lest it blow away on some cruel wind. “Yes,” he breathes. “Yes, I want to go with you.”
I wouldn't go anywhere else.