Work Text:
The sea rocks their ships like a mother would a cradle. Lucina thinks of the palace in Ylisstol where there’s a baby who must have been laid down by this time of night, who should have been rocked to sleep by her mother. Instead Robin is here, on this swaying ship, with her daughter the interloper from another time, instead of the baby that is truly hers.
Their Plegian ship floats at the head of their Ylissean-Feroxi fleet, a fleet made of half as many ships as it was this morning. The water, full of ash and wood and bone, scrapes past the hull; hundreds of dead lie beneath the waves, damned there by one woman. Robin’s tactics are genius and unhinged and devastating for anyone who stands against her. Lucina learned the sword from her father, knew his skill and his potential from watching him, but she never could conceive of her mother’s tactical talent until now.
How many of the battles that she has led her friends through could have been won with more ease if she had her mother’s steady hand and level head guiding her? How many people could she have saved with her mother at her side? With both her parents?
Can she find out? In this time, she can find out, if she can keep them.
(But if she must keep only one—)
She is not their daughter, not really, and she should have stayed a distant ally but she clings to every moment she spends with them. Every word to her, every smile, even every stern glance, she commits to memory to refresh and supplement the oldest hazy recollections that she has been terrified to lose. She could not pry herself away now.
“Sweetheart? Can I have a word?”
Her mother’s hand on her shoulder; Lucina would carve that gentle touch into her heart. She would never again forget how her mother has never used a nickname or pet name for anyone but Lucina; she calls everyone else she knows and loves by their given name but Lucina alone is only Lucina in the heat of battle. Did she stop with Lucy and dearest and the like before Lucina was old enough to remember? Or is this something new, her mother slightly different in a slightly different time.
“Of course, Mother,” Lucina says, and her mother takes a seat next to her on the deck, looking out across the dark water and the starry sky. The ocean is vast and unfamiliar; Lucina is not sure if she likes this new experience of sailing. She looks at her mother instead, searches for some familiar feature shared between them, a curve of the cheek or slope of the jaw. Lucina knows she most resembles her father, and her father’s face was not so lost to time and faded in memory as her mother’s, because Lucina could see him in herself. She wants to see them both in her bearing, carry them both close to her heart and in her every action.
(Even if—)
“What you said earlier, before the battle, when your father asked you about his death - you don’t know anything more than that about what happened?”
Robin speaks of it with an even tone, one Lucina does not know how she manages - but when she looks closer she can see the tightness at the corners of her mouth and the slight crease on her forehead. Robin wears a mask, not as obviously as her little Lady Marth did, but there is a sort of one over her face nonetheless.
“No,” Lucina says, and she presses her own lips together and tries not to think too hard about the memories behind what she is saying. When the Shepherds, what could even remain of the Shepherds without Chrom and Robin, came home with the Fire Emblem and Falchion and not the man who wielded them. The one memory that could never fade with time, that still burns fiercer than anything else she has ever known, is what it was like for Lucina’s own heart to break.
“Nobody - no one wanted me or Morgan to hear more than we had to.” And for good reason, if the pieces that Lucina knows fit together the way she fears they might and prays they don’t. “There were just whispers I wasn’t supposed to hear and then - then everyone who knew all that happened was - then they were gone too.”
The remaining Shepherds never spoke of that day, and they fell by ones and twos and left no one who could even talk about it. They left only orphans, just like Lucina.
She discarded her mask long ago but for a moment she wishes for it. She turns her head away and lets her hair fall between them, a curtain to hide behind. “Oh, darling, I’m sorry,” Robin says, and she reaches out and sweeps Lucina’s hair back out of her face. “I don’t want to make you think more about it, but I had to ask. I’m sorry.”
“What did you want to know?” Lucina asks. She won’t have the answer that Robin wants but she wants to understand even a part of how her mother’s mind works. She wants a glimpse into the thought process of a woman who can set the seas aflame.
(If she can better understand her mother then maybe she can finally grasp why she—)
“If you knew who the name of who it was that betrayed him.” Robin hooks Lucina’s hair back behind her ear, and her hand lingers on her cheek. “There would be no point to telling your father, of course. He’d never believe a one of us capable of such a thing, even if our own Lady Marth told him.” The smile on her face is fond and wistful and sad. Lucina deeply admires her father’s faith in people; she has never been able to muster the same. “But I thought… if you knew, I couldn’t let you shoulder it alone. Anything I can do to help, I will. For your sake. For your father’s sake.”
It takes all of Lucina’s strength to not break into tears. How much Robin loves Chrom - how could Lucina ever suspect her of doing the unthinkable? And how could she not, when there is no one that Chrom loves more in return? Betrayed and murdered by his closest friend - who could that be but the woman sitting beside Lucina, swearing to do her utmost to save Chrom from betrayal and death?
“What would you do, if you knew?” Lucina asks. “I don’t know what I would do, if I knew, and I’ve come all this way but I still don’t - I’m not a great tactician. I can’t - I can’t do what you can.”
“What I would do is nothing,” Robin says curtly, before Lucina can admonish herself any more, “because sometimes it’s better to assess, not act. If I first knew who, then I could try to understand why. And once you know why, you can glean from that the best course of action.”
Why, why, Lucina has laid awake so many nights across time wondering why. Why would a bond such as theirs break? How could this be their destiny after so long at each other’s sides? How long had they known each other when they fought together against Emmeryn’s assassins in Ylisstol, when Lucina saw not just her parents but two seamless halves of one great warrior? How long had it taken them to reach the point that Chrom could duck and Robin cast lightning over his head, through the space where moments ago he had stood, to strike the opponent in front of them; how long for Chrom to learn to not even glance back, trusting that Robin would not hit him? How long for Robin to learn to not bother looking over her shoulder when she sprinted ahead, trusting that Chrom would be right behind her?
Before she was his wife and mother to his children, she was his tactician, and they loved each other as much then as they do now. Lucina saw that clearer than anything else.
Tears are more and more difficult to hold back. “There was so much I wanted to learn from you,” Lucina says. She presses the back of her hand against her mouth. “Your magic - you promised me that once I had mastered all the basics with Falchion that you would teach me magic - and Father would show Morgan the basics of swordplay - he was supposed to learn the sword from Father, not from me—”
So much was supposed to happen. Morgan was supposed to be taught properly, not lean on his magic in battle because his knowledge of the sword is pieced together from imitating Lucina. Lucina was supposed to learn magic instead of sticking to her one sole strength. Lucina was supposed to be strong, and stay strong, for the sake of everyone she has to save; Lucina isn’t supposed to be crying on her mother’s shoulder in the middle of the ocean, aboard a vessel given to them by the kingdom responsible for all of Lucina’s nightmares and the end of the world.
“I’m so sorry we couldn’t keep our promises,” Robin said, her voice somewhere above Lucina’s head. “Oh, Lucy, I’m so sorry. Tell me whatever you want to learn from me and I’ll make the time for you. Your brother already harangues me at odd hours for tactical guidance, you know. Ask him to bring you next time.”
Lucina chokes on her laugh and it transforms into another sob. Of course he does. She wants to remember - gods, does she want to remember - every moment she had with her parents long ago, stolen in between their duties and their battles. Morgan has forgotten, and so he does not crumple under the grief of remembering promises broken by two people who wanted nothing more than to keep them. But someone has to remember the future if it is to be changed. To lose all of that pain would mean losing her foreknowledge, and if she forgets how her father died then how can she save him?
In her mother’s arms it would still be so easy to forget what she knows of her father’s murder. Lucina sits back and wipes her eyes.
“How old were you when we died?” Robin asks, like Lucina has ever mentioned her death. There is so much about her in Chrom’s dying days that Lucina does not understand, but Robin speaks of Chrom’s death as though it is a given that Robin died there too. As if they could never have a separate fate.
And if Lucina could forget what she heard whispered when she was not supposed to listen, then she would believe without hesitation the same: that Robin would die before she left Chrom’s side, for whatever good or ill that would do. She would believe that her clever, clever mother could lose her level head and any sense of living to fight another day if she saw Chrom fall before her.
(So how could she also believe that—)
“How long do we have to prepare? It must have been - well, obviously Morgan was born by then, for one thing. How much older than him are you?”
“I - I don’t remember.” How long ago her parents died, or how old her brother is, or how old she is, or how many years between them. “It was like time stopped, and - and sped up so much more. It feels like it’s been an eternity since then but it was also maybe yesterday.”
She feels like a fool saying such but her mother nods solemnly. “It’s always felt like that for me, too, in times of crisis. The war against Plegia lasted either a week or a thousand years - I know for sure it was one or the other, but I still can’t say which.”
All that Lucina could answer is that it was a shorter war than expected, and its end was bittersweet; she skirted through the streets of Ylisstol and found them full of crowds celebrating Plegia’s defeat and mourning their Exalt in the same breath. Lucina saved Emmeryn only for her to die weeks later, but it was her death that caused the bulk of Plegia’s soldiers to lay down their arms. Lucina saved her father from the dire injuries that plagued him through all of her memory, so that he could personally lead the armies of Ylisse and Ferox to victory over Gangrel, claiming the Mad King’s life and with it, justice for his sister.
“That war with Plegia lasted many years longer in my time,” Lucina says.
A deadlock, with two rulers too hellbent on taking the other’s head. Gangrel would never offer peace and Chrom would never accept it unless it came with Gangrel’s heart on a platter; Chrom would never offer peace unless he already had that platter while Gangrel would never accept because his conception of peace was the death of all Ylisseans. And the arrival of Valmese ships on the shores of Ferox and Plegia merely created new fronts for each nation to fight on; they never ceased hostilities to unite against the threat from across the sea.
“Father always wanted to lead from the front lines, but sometimes his injuries prevented him.”
Some of her earliest memories are of watching him train while she tried to mirror his movements with a wooden sword, but so often he was forced to stop sooner than he wanted because of the strain on something that did not properly heal. Lucina learned quickly the importance of staying in top condition, of never taking a bad blow; if one injury slowed her down, that left her open to take others. Her father’s scars were not just from the assassins that fateful night in Ylisstol. His wounds compounded each other time and again.
“And you were always reluctant to leave him.”
She hadn’t realized how inseparable her parents were until she arrived in this time and found they weren’t. Was that because of Chrom’s injuries, too? They had been together, Chrom and Robin, on the palace grounds when both Lucina and the assassins found them. In the time that only the assassins found them, when Robin must have seen Chrom nearly killed right in front of her eyes, was she always fearful that she would lose him if she weren’t ever-vigilant?
“All of my childhood, the two of you traveled back and forth. From the palace with me, to the battlefield, and back again.”
She has piled so much upon her mother that she doesn’t know what to expect her to respond to first. “Years,” Robin breathes. “The war with Plegia lasted years - gods, I can’t imagine.”
“You were gone the longest when you went to Valm,” Lucina says. “And when you finally came home—”
But some of them didn’t, brave Basilio’s life lost facing down the cruel conqueror. Lucina set foot in the arena in Regna Ferox praying that the events she set in motion would end with Basilio still living, but Emmeryn is dead and they are sailing to Valm and she is terrified still.
She takes a steadying breath. “When you finally came home, I got it in my head somehow that you wouldn’t leave again. For a while you didn’t, because it was quiet on the Plegian front. But that was just a farce, masking their true intentions, but we were all so tired of war that you hoped…”
“We didn’t have you to warn us,” Robin says.
They didn’t have Lucina, a prophet bringing them foreknowledge while trying to be a hero like Marth; they had Lucina, a child whose favorite pastime was getting to go down to the training yard with her brother and her parents, who didn’t realize how her world, balanced at the edge of a precipice, could so easily fall and shatter.
“You shouldn’t have had to warn us,” Robin adds, before Lucina can muster any words. “It shouldn’t be a daughter’s job to protect her parents. It should be the other way around.”
Robin’s tactics have kept Lucina by her side every battle that they have fought together when Lucina has been Lucina and not Marth. “She has already seen that I am more than capable, hasn’t she?” Lucina said to Chrom, after the second skirmish with Risen, surer then of her place with her father than with her mother. “You know that I can fight.”
“You are our daughter,” Chrom told her firmly, a hand on her shoulder, “and we will always want to protect you. Give her time - give us time. We committed to this war hoping to create a world where our daughter would not have to fight, and here she is now, already on the battlefield. Right now I can only turn my back on you because I know that your mother won’t.”
“You did your best,” Lucina says. “You always have.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t enough.”
Lucina closes her eyes. She remembers Ylisstol, burning.
“When you finally got wind of what they were planning, you and Father took the Shepherds and an army to put a stop to it. So that they couldn’t resurrect Grima and keep the war going.”
Her voice breaks.
“And we couldn’t,” Robin finishes, “and they did.”
“Yes. You were too late to stop the Fell Dragon’s return.” Lucina inhales deeply. Too many winding paths of possible futures lay before them, each battle a new branch. How many of them are scorched and dead at the end? “And even now that we know what is coming, if the Grimleal find out that we know what they’re doing, then they may hasten their own plans. Grima might awaken at any time. We cannot trust that we will have a year, or five years, or a decade.”
“I could not live a decade in Ylisstol with your future hanging over us and do nothing,” Robin says. “When the war in Valm is over we must take the fight to them.”
“You did. You went there and - and you never came back.”
Lucina wore the Hero-King’s name like a mask, praying for his strength; now she seeks the strength of her parents. All of her armor still encases a little girl waiting all this time for her father to come home. He wasn’t done teaching her to wield a sword.
Something must show on her face, because Robin reaches out and lays her hand over Lucina’s, squeezing it. “We have you with us now, my dear. We’ll all make it back home to Ylisse, together.”
Can Lucina believe that? Why must she distrust reassurance from her own mother? Why must she in every battle both fear for her mother and fear her mother on her father’s behalf?
“It was Frederick who came to us with the news,” she says. “Aunt Lissa was still too much in shock to speak. She started sobbing every time she saw us. But Frederick brought Falchion and I realized, just - just a moment before Morgan asked where Dad was, why didn’t he have Falchion with him?”
Morgan’s memory is haze; everything but the past few weeks of the here-and-now is made of faint impressions and distant visions. Lucina is the one who remembers. She has to remember. She remembers the nights when Morgan crawled into bed next to her, wrapped in their mother’s old dark coat, both of them too tired to cry and too tired to sleep, and Falchion propped against the wall, its silver blade reflecting the moonlight.
“Frederick told us that Father was as brave as ever and fought for us until the end. The things you tell children. But I - one night I remember hiding in the hall listening to Frederick and Phila talk, that they thought they’d failed to protect them both now.”
“Phila?” Robin repeats, and Lucina is about to ask how she cannot recall the captain of her own pegasus knights, but she realizes at the same time that Robin does. “Of course - she died in Plegia, when we went to rescue Emm. But if, without your warning, Emm died in Ylisstol, then Phila might still have…”
Emm pierces Lucina’s heart like a spear. That is how Chrom always referred to his long-passed sister; she has no recollection of Robin doing the same, but when did Robin ever speak of her? How long had they known each other, Robin and Exalt Emmeryn? Does Robin even notice what she’s said, or is this an unconscious habit adopted from Chrom, another mark of their closeness?
“Phila asked him how this was possible, what could have happened,” Lucina continues. “How Chrom could have left with his most loyal Shepherds who would have all died for him and - and they all returned alive when he didn’t. And Frederick said that there was a betrayal. That Chrom was betrayed and murdered by his dearest friend.”
The math is easy, when she looks at it with a clear eye and level head. Chrom died, betrayed by someone dear to him. The Shepherds were his closest companions. Robin was the only other Shepherd who did not come home.
Robin is her mother, so Lucina finds it very hard to maintain a clear eye and a level head.
“If your father didn’t make friends as easily as he breathes, that would be a bigger hint than it is,” Robin says.
And a part of Lucina would scream until her throat is raw, go hoarse spitting blood, demanding her mother to stop pretending to be obtuse, stop pretending that she does not realize. It is you, it has always been you! That will not change in a year, or five, or ten! It could only ever be you! You must know that it is you! You killed my father and damned the world!
And a part of her would cry until her eyes are sore like she is the child she was when she last sat beside her mother too long ago. Of course her mother cannot realize. Robin would not think herself Chrom’s closest friend if that person is responsible for killing him. Lucina could not think her that person either, had she not been orphaned and heard for herself those hushed words. And even now - even after everything - a part of her thinks that she still must somehow be wrong. How could Robin do such a thing to her dearest friend, her husband and father of her children, her commander and her prince?
She wouldn’t - she couldn’t. Lucina sees that clearly. But Lucina has also stood in the midst of Ylisstol burning and seen the Fell Dragon’s gleaming eyes. These are two incompatible truths to the world. Robin would never betray Chrom, and Robin betrayed Chrom anyway.
Chrom was the one Lucina knew she could always rely on, her safe harbor in a storm. Nothing of him was a mystery - her father is a good man, kind and noble, who passed down to her the Brand in her eye and her ability to wield Falchion. Everyone who knew him loved him, and spoke of him with that love made evident. Robin was the unknown, the one who Lucina has been terrified to love again. But she does. She always has. She wanted to learn magic from her.
A few days ago, Robin handed her a Levin sword, and she smiled warmly and showed Lucina the best way to arc the lightning from a distance when she admitted to never having wielded one before.
“Are you all right, darling?”
“Yes,” Lucina says. “I - yes, I’m fine.”
Robin raises her eyebrows, obviously doubtful, but she acquiesces and says, “It’s been a long day and we’ve had a great deal to talk about, besides. It might be best if we head in for some rest before anyone comes looking for us. Just, please remember,” she adds, squeezing Lucina’s hand, “anything you need from me, ask and I will.”
Anything. She doesn’t know what she offers by saying anything. Your life? Would you give me your life for Father’s, if I asked?
“Yes,” Lucina says. “Of course.”
She prays she won’t have to ask. She prays it will never come to that. She doesn’t understand how it could. But it did once already, and carving a new riverbed for the path of time to flow down is harder than she anticipated.
A voice echoes across the deck. “Robin? Are you out—”
Chrom emerges from the gloom, his brow furrowed but relaxing when he catches sight of Lucina and Robin. “Isn’t it a bit late for you lovely ladies to still be up?” he asks with an easy smile, one that has always been able to calm Lucina’s heart, the one she missed most. “Robin, I do recall a conversation we had just the other day about getting enough rest and not overworking yourself.”
“I’m not sure how you think time spent with our daughter would constitute work,” Robin replies, and the expression on her face as she glances from Lucina to Chrom and back is full of such obvious fondness that it makes Lucina’s heart ache. How could this end the way it did?
Chrom is waiting, looking expectantly to Lucina, and as she stands she realizes that he is asking her to confirm or reject Robin’s explanation of events. “We only spoke of tactics for a little bit,” Lucina says.
Of his death - of his murderer - but she does not wish to mention that. They can pretend it was for any other battle ahead or passed. “Of course you were,” Chrom says with a slight shake of his head, but his smile is the same, full of affection. “Lucina, would you like to know just how soon after your birth your mother tried to get up and go back to work?”
“Chrom!” Robin scolds. “You don’t need to keep dredging that up!”
Lucina could already have guessed that the answer is too soon, and despite herself, despite the weight on her shoulders, she giggles. Chrom laughs too, and Robin, stifling a grin, smacks his arm with the back of her hand. In battle, they almost seem to function as one unit, so keenly aware of and comfortable with how the other fights. But in these moments, in the quiet, the way they speak to each other, act around each other, is filled with that same comfort and ease. It is a warmth Lucina is happy to linger at the edge of, as she follows them belowdecks and bids them good night.
She missed them both so much. How is her heart to survive it, if she is to lose them again?
But she cannot keep stopping to grieve when she has not yet lost them again. Better to find every way to save them from that fate. Hitching her shoulders up, she tells herself to set these thoughts aside for the night. The conqueror’s war is the most immediate threat to her parents’ welfare. That day in Plegia is still yet to come; she cannot know when, but it will not be tomorrow. They may make landfall in Valm tomorrow.
Morgan found a tiny room probably meant for a few supplies and claimed it as sleeping quarters for himself and his sister. Lucina eases the door open, hoping she can slip inside without disturbing her brother, but immediately she is blinded by the firelight that immediately engulfs the room. The light fades out as her eyes adjust; Morgan, sitting straight upright, wide-eyed, slowly dims the flame he conjured in his hand.
He always slept with a tome beneath his pillow the way Lucina and some of the others kept a blade. The chance of accidentally harming himself with it was much lower, but the threshold for consequences if he did was much higher. Lucina doesn’t know enough about magic to know how much can be done just with a tome nearby, without conscious will. She never learned to wield magic. She never asked.
“Oh,” he says, sinking back down but still holding the light up for Lucina. “Just you. Where were you?”
“I was talking with Mother,” she replies, checking to see that Falchion still rests propped in the corner. “She had some questions about - about the future.”
“Oh,” Morgan says again. He is quiet, dark eyes flickering about everywhere but Lucina, and then he adds, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not remembering. Everything Mother told me about your future was awful, and that was just secondhand. You lived it all. Except I was there too, we lived it all, but you can’t even talk to me about it.”
Morgan’s coat - the coat that was once Robin’s, haunting eyes embroidered down the sleeves, scorching at the cuffs from magic cast by mother and son both - lays over his legs. Lucina has Falchion; Morgan has an old coat. He adores their mother. Even in that nightmare time, long before Morgan forgot everything, she never told him what she heard about their father’s death. Orphans, both of them, and he the little brother who she promised to protect - how could she take their mother from him again?
“It’s okay,” Lucina says. “It’s probably better for you not to, anyway.”
Morgan is quiet. Lucina isn’t sure she sounded at all convincing. But he does not have those specific griefs as she does, and since she does remember them, it is fine for Morgan not to. She just prays that she won’t have to take their mother from him in this time. She’s not sure he would ever forgive her.
The more she thinks about it - she told herself not to, not now, but laying in the dark with her brother breathing softly nearby she cannot help but think about the first time they lost their parents and what she learned of it—
The more she thinks about it, she wonders if Chrom would ever forgive her, either, if to keep him alive she had to take Robin’s life. His dearest friend -
Anything you need from me, ask and I will.
If she truly meant that, then maybe the person most likely to forgive Lucina, should she be forced to kill Robin, is Robin.
The rocking of the ship, the huge hollow cradle taking them closer to war and unkind destinies, does not help lull Lucina to sleep. And when she does she dreams of flames on the sea, and on Ylisstol, and on the training grounds cast from her mother’s hands, the magic she promised to but never could teach Lucina.