Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandom:
Character:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Series:
Part 4 of Grimatober
Stats:
Published:
2022-10-16
Words:
505
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
4
Kudos:
30
Bookmarks:
2
Hits:
231

just a reflektor

Summary:

Despair can put out even the brightest of hearts.

[Grimatober; Prompts 16-20: war, self, despair, power, darkness]

Notes:

Apparently Intelligent Systems is celebrating Grimatober too... I can't believe we're getting another Grima alt...

Well, now I feel kinda bad that today's fic is rather depressing...

Title is from Reflektor by Arcade Fire. No, I never get tired of playing around with Robin/Reflet's name... (Reflet = "reflection" and Robin = "bright fame/glory/renown")

Work Text:

War

The war was over the moment Chrom fell. Foolish humanity struggles on in vain, but there are none who can ever match Grima. If Chrom—who fought valiantly for his sister’s ideals, who tempered his blade with compassion in the belief it would bring peace in the end, who swore his true strength lay in the bonds he forged with others—could not survive, then the rest of his pathetic lot, who never held any conviction as strongly as he did, cannot be anything but damned.

The current slaughter shouldn’t even be called a war for how one-sided it is.

Self

Humans do not have to look at themselves, or at least not as they actually are. There is always some distortion—a ripple in the water, a fault in the mirror—and always their image is reversed as it is reflected back to them. But Grima has two bodies. He sees himself truly.

It is solely for his own advantage that he envelops the smaller one, the human-shaped one, in darkness. His enemies would glean too much knowledge of him if he walked around showing that face.

This way, he cannot see it, either. But that is beside the point.

Despair

Despair rules. Humans cry their pitiful tears and beg for mercy, as if there is anything special about any of them to merit it. For the first time, everyone is equal—equally powerless, equally worthless, equally hopeless.

… No. Not quite hopeless. Chrom’s daughter still lives, and she rallies her people in the name of the Hero King. But she misses the point. The Hero King’s blade did not cut through the world’s despair. How did the earth dragons feel, helpless, hopeless, doomed to their degeneration?

Grima brings despair, but he also ends it. He doesn’t need hope; he has finality.

Power

The future is built upon the past. The end cannot be changed without unwriting the beginning.

Even Naga knows that this is true, so she grants Chrom’s daughter the only power that can help her now: the power to flee to another time.

It means Naga has given up. It means Grima wins.

It’s pointless. His enemy cannot simply escape him. To erase the fell dragon, she’d have to travel back farther than Naga’s power could take her, farther even than Grima himself could go…

Grima will prove her folly. With his own power, he will follow her. She’ll see.

Darkness

Grima abandons his world of ruin. He has already brought it to its end. There is no reason for him to stay.

Darkness always has the advantage, for it exists effortlessly. All you need to do is extinguish the light.

So Grima returns to an Ylisse that shines in every color of the rainbow. When it is once again dull and lifeless, Chrom’s daughter will see for herself just how inevitable the darkness is.

Lucina is light itself, but despair can put out even the brightest of hearts.

He sees this truth every time he catches sight of his reflection.

Series this work belongs to: