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“You’re sure this isn’t far enough away yet?” When Inigo called up the trail, Morgan didn’t even look back, still advancing onwards and upwards. Inigo’s legs were burning, and Morgan had to be feeling it worse, but on they walked.
Inigo still didn’t know what this was about; Morgan had refused to say a word to him or to Lucina, who brought up the rear of their little excursion. They’d just… summoned the pair of them, insisted they fly (and that was a chore and a half, getting them all on pegasi when it was a Marth kind of day) three days out of the capital, and then decided they needed to climb half a mountain trail.
All for some peace and quiet. Which, to be completely fair to Morgan, was sometimes necessary — it could get difficult to get away from people when the whole city knew your name and face and might well follow you to hear military secrets, or royal gossip, or… anything. It was nice sometimes, but other times?
Well, Lucina had been away, travelling for quite a while. Inigo was debating packing up a bag and setting out with Severa and Owain soon, perhaps. Scrutiny grated, and being known in a world that was only half their own was getting old.
Speaking of things that were getting old, though: Inigo’s knees, apparently. He needed to sit down sooner rather than later. “Morgan! We haven’t seen any signs of being followed for hours now. Right, Luce?”
“Right,” they called up. “We can stop. Any higher and the air will feel thin.”
Finally Morgan whirled round, their face contorted in a pout. Sibling privileges, clearly. “You’re exaggerating,” they complained, but they cast their gaze around for somewhere they could get off the path and out of the sun.
“I am,” Lucina admitted, closing the short distance between them to scout out a spot to sit. She found one soon enough; a handful of trees had been felled a few metres out at some indeterminable time in the past, leaving scattered logs and splintery stumps. Inigo chanced his luck with one of the logs.
“Alright,” Inigo said, once all of them were settled and he’d taken a long drink from his water flask, “what’s up, Morgan?”
Morgan bit their lip. “I might have messed up,” they admitted. “Badly.”
Lucina frowned, their eyes already calculating as they looked between themself and Inigo. “What kind of problem is it? You need swords to solve it?”
Morgan shook their head fervently. “No, not like that. Definitely no swords. It’s more…” They sighed. “You know… I was born recently.”
“Yes, no one could have missed it,” Inigo said. The long-awaited second child of the Exalt and his Queen — baby Morgan, the youngest future child to make it back to the past. The end of an era, so to speak, and the beginning for many others. “But there’s nothing wrong with baby Morgan, right? I met them.”
Morgan winced. “There is a problem with baby Morgan,” they answered. “They’re — I mean, I think it’s them — they’ve been born… different to how I was.”
“You don’t mean?” Lucina asked, gesturing vaguely downwards, and Morgan nodded.
“I don’t know how it happened,” they said. “Maybe with the amnesia and everything, I came from somewhere different, and this Morgan is different to me. Or… maybe those parts of life, time, whatever, aren’t as immutable as we thought.”
“And you think they might not be like you.” If their first guess was true, it was a problem for Morgan. If the latter was true…
Days of travel from here, there was a toddler being raised by Inigo’s mother and father. Unlike Inigo’s own infanthood, this child had been named Inigo from the moment he was born; before he was born. The baby was assigned a future based on Inigo’s present, but if these things could change, that future could be wrong.
Maybe the baby was a girl. Or maybe he wouldn’t be Inigo; perhaps he’d be more like Lucina, or Morgan.
“Mother and Father have this whole plan,” Morgan said, their head in their hands. “They pestered the royal record keepers to have the baby entered without a gender. The swaddling clothes are yellow and purple, not white for a girl or pink for a boy. And now I might have been wrong.”
“You weren’t necessarily wrong,” Lucina said, but their reassurance sounded apprehensive. “The baby should still be you. Nothing else has changed that much.”
Morgan shook their head. “We don’t know enough about what we did, or what I did. The baby might not be Morgan at all. And if they’re not, then I might… this might hurt them.”
Inigo didn’t want to agree with them. He wanted all of this to be alright — but it might not be. Maybe there was a little girl about to be raised with a name that belonged to someone else, or clothes that made her feel penned in to something she could never be.
He made that choice for someone who couldn’t (someone who still couldn’t, because Inigo had been slow to speak and even slower to assert his true self in that future that never came to be). Lucina did the same, the title of princess offered to a baby vanishing as a child grew in her place, leaving them free to be who they were week to week, day to day.
It was a decision made from kindness. The overriding will that those children of the future would not suffer like the children of the past. It was terrifying conversations cut from the fabric of life, understanding fostered across time streams.
It was a dream Inigo had when he was young, that his parents would just understand. That someone who knew how he was feeling would come out of nowhere and explain it with the words he didn’t know how to use. But now it was a nightmare, a blanket to suffocate someone who might not be like him.
“It might hurt them,” he agreed, voice quiet. Lucina shot him a sharp look; Morgan, in turn, looked devastated. “But it’s not your fault. We acted with all the knowledge we had, right?”
He reached across their little makeshift rest point, his hand falling on Morgan’s shoulder. They offered a small, watery smile, and said, “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Did you talk to your parents?” he asked. He was fairly sure he already knew the answer, and sure enough, Morgan shook their head.
“I didn’t know how.” And how could they have known? They’d had this conversation once, but it was in the reverse. ‘The baby you thought was like me might not actually be like me, but they still might be, sorry!’ How did you even have that conversation?
Their existence made the lives of their not-selves and their parents complicated enough already; how did you break the news that it was worse than you thought?
“They’ll understand,” Lucina said. She moved from the spot on her own log and sat down next to Morgan, slinging an arm over their shoulders. “We just have to work out how to put it into words.”
“They’re used to time travel being strange,” Inigo said, like he wasn’t running through everything that could go wrong in the conversation with his own parents. “It makes sense, really, that their existence wouldn’t be exactly the same as ours. So, Luce is right. They’ll understand.”
Morgan’s fists clenched in their lap, and Lucina shifted a little closer. “I didn’t want to do this all over again. It sucks.”
Inigo nodded. There was no other word for it, really — that feeling of something crawling in his throat, scampering around inside his heart. The half-silences and whole-silences as he stumbled around words his parents had never heard before, and would likely hear from no one but him ever again. He’d done it once, twice, and now it had to happen all over again.
It was probably harder for Morgan. There were no words for what they were, what they wanted. With their memory as it was, could they trust themselves to say what worked in the past? Could they know that someone without their experiences would grow as they did?
“I know, but it has to be done,” Inigo said. “Just so they know to watch out for something that might be different, how to have those conversations when we’re not around.”
Morgan sniffled, but nodded. Inigo gave in and stood from his spot, coming to sit on their other side. It was a bit of a squeeze with the three of them, but he’d cope. Morgan needed this.
He wrapped his arms around Morgan’s waist, and Lucina kept hers around their shoulders. Their chest shook as they swallowed back tears, and Inigo held them tighter.
“It’s going to be alright,” Lucina said. “You did the right thing, Morgan, and you’ll keep doing right by them. They’ll be fine.”
As the world shifted towards a future they could never quite fit into, they’d have to leave their past selves alone to grow into themselves. But if there was anything Inigo could do to make it so their lives were smooth where his could not be, he’d do it. No matter how many times he had to bare his soul to the world.