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After all’s been done and over with, from the great puppeteer who orchestrated this great tragedy, to her collaborators and puppets and all the great sin shenanigans she does not even want to wrap her head around has finally been dealt with, it’s all over.
A happy ending, one might say, even through all the grief and sadness and what-if’s of lives treated as collateral for one evil woman’s great and selfish ambitions. It’s peaceful, or, as peaceful as it can be for the people who are left picking up the pieces.
Germaine’s pieces aren’t really the political fallout that came after everything, nor was it finding and collecting the deadly sins that caused this tragedy in the first place.
Rather, it’s herself, it's pieces of herself and her grief that she either hadn’t had time to or flat out refused to address all these years ago. She spent all her time running away from her grief, of drinking her sorrows away, or running away and chasing around the great conspiracy of evil that caused her this grief in the first place…and now that everything’s over, that she does not have to run anymore.
It’s heavier, this grief. It hurts all the more.
So she distracts herself again. Chartette tells her she’s going to travel, specifically to the east, where they had never gone before, to Jakoku.
With nothing and no one else left, Germaine follows.
Their travels were nice, Germaine thinks. It’s nice to be with her friend, and it’s nice experience a new scenery and culture. Chartette seems to be enjoying it too, earning a reputation for being an excellent blacksmith all over the country.
Chartette was so well-loved in their new environment, that she met someone, An odd man with an obsession with monkeys, and they both fell hard for each other. Germaine thought the man was quite weird; but she also concedes Chartette was quite an odd one as well, so they were perfect and Germaine is happy for them, happy for Chartette who has found someone who she could share her eccentricities with.
Germaine is happy for her, she really is.
But this life isn't for her.
"Be careful, Big Sis," Chartette– or, Saruteito, as she now insists to be called– sobs into her big sis’ chest, “Visit often, ya hear me?! I’ll always be here, with a buncha liquor for ya!”
Several tearful goodbyes and a twin-drilled girl being pulled away from her big sister later, Germaine journeys on—alone this time.
What is she looking for? She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know.
But she has to keep going.
One day, she has had too much to drink in a town where she knew no one and knew no place to turn to.
She wakes up, and finds she was nursed back to health by a large older man, whose laughter is boisterous and loud that it startles her at first, and pats her on the head out of habit.
"Sorry," the large man says, "I used to do that to my kids."
The older man was apparently visiting the cemetery to pay respects to a fallen loved one, and came across her drunk ass on one of the gravestones. Feeling pity for the woman, he takes her back to his home, prepares a warm futon that used to belong to one of his own children, and waits.
She asks him why he did it, for a stranger.
The man thinks, “As a father myself, I’m sure your parents wouldn’t like you freezing out there, yeah?”
She thinks about it, and agrees. Leonhart was a stern and hardheaded man with a fearsome reputation—that much she knew, but she also knew him as a kind man, with compassion for the people who needed it. He took her in, after all, after she had allegedly been orphaned as a result of war. And he died, after all, as a consequence of trying to help the starving masses.
"Got nowhere to go, huh?" The man asks, "been there, done that. Feel free to stay here for as long as you want. Gettin' real lonely in here, anyway."
The man's children had grown out of the house to pave their own paths, and his wife had reached the end of her path a few years ago, so the man was on his own, in this old rickety house.
And so, she stays.
For both of their sakes.
As much as the older man insists that she was a guest, and that she didn’t need to help around the house, she still does anyway, as to not feel like a freeloader like she already is, and how this wasn’t how Leonhart had raised her. Grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning after herself...nothing she hadn’t done before.
One day, while eating dinner with the man, enjoying some sake with him—it's...alright, though she still preferred wine—and laughing and telling stories, she is hit with a wave of nostalgia.
She...used to do this with her dad. Eat dinner together, drink together, sometimes they'd sing together old Beelzenian folk songs Leonhart remembered from his youth and most times they'd be off-key, and Allen would cringe and sink into his seat as they did so, but they didn't care.
But now this man is teaching her Jakokuese folk songs, and once they get drunk enough they sing together off-key—and they didn’t care. He also told her stories from his youth, and while it's not as exciting as her father's war stories, of glory and fame and justice, she was still glued to every word.
It feels...like home, in a way.
But she has to keep going.
Eventually, she tells him that, and the man continues drinking his sake.
"Well, alright," says the man with a melancholic smile and a pat on her back, "just don't get into too much trouble out there, yeah?
A roll of her eyes, a quirk of the corner of her lips.
Bah. It's such a "dad" thing to say.
Just as she likes it.
And so she keeps going, to her journey of…what? What was she looking for? She didn’t know.
She didn’t know.
But she feels lighter now, happier than she had been for all these years, as if a part of her broken heart had healed, little by little, during that time she spent with the old man, that a part of her yearning for her father’s presence again, for closure…had become satisfied, if even for just a little bit.
And that’s enough, she thinks.
During her journey, she comes across a boy, alone, probably cold and starving.
Remembering what that older man did for her, she decides to take the boy in and nurse him back to health.
At first, the boy was wary of her, almost hostile, and judging by his state; starving and bruised and battered, due to circumstances he doesn’t say, but she could guess was rough and hard; she doesn’t blame him. But eventually, he opens up. He takes what she offers him, says his thank yous and initiates conversations, and willingly follows her around like some puppy, even after he’s all healed up and better, and no longer needing her.
Apparently, he lost his entire family to bandits, and he was the only survivor, being left for dead in the debris of his burnt home.
All alone in this world, with no place to go and no one to turn to...it hurts how much that feeling is so familiar to her.
After he's back on his feet, he approaches her. "You're a samurai, aren't you? Please teach me how to fight," he begs, eyeing her sword.
She asks him why, worried about him wanting to avenge his family. She's been there, she's done that, and she doesn't want anyone to experience the grief and emptiness she felt afterwards.
"I want to protect the people I care about," he says, determination in his eyes. "I don't want to see anyone get hurt. Not again."
She is taken aback by his response. He is mature and selfless, way more than she ever was years ago, and wise beyond his years. She reminds him of her brother in a way... just not in the way that hurts, and so she smiles. "Alright, then. Follow me, kid, and I'll teach ya."
The boy's face lightens. "Thank you, um-"
"Call me Germaine."
"Je-ru-mei-nu..." The boy sounds it out, his accent making her name sound weird, but it's quite alright. "Thank you, Germaine-san."
Getting to know the boy better throughout their journey, she realizes he's a lot like her little brother. He’s 13, he thinks, and she couldn’t help but think that’s how old Allen was when he left to work in the royal palace—-when he eventually became a martyr. The boy was clever, gentle, and a bit sarcastic. He's short enough that she rests her elbows on his head out of habit, much to his chagrin, and her sparring lessons with him were reminiscent of her father's sparring lessons with her brother.
But she wasn't a mere observer now. A stubborn and curious daughter, spying on her chivalrous father and her little brother sparring behind some bushes, glued to every word her father says, and looking forward to later when she could practice what he taught, alone.
She is the teacher now, and this boy is her student.
She will not let him down.
-
“Your son is a nice boy,” remarks a sweet old lady one day. She was the owner of the inn they were staying at for the night, and she’s been observing them. “He seems to adore you very much.”
Germaine had to do a double take, “He’s not my son,” she says.
“Oh?” The older woman feigns innocence, “By how you bicker with one another, you might as well be.”
“We’re not related,” she realizes how stupid she sounded. Neither Leonhart or Allen were her blood relatives, but she loved them dearly, and that would never change.
And, she does admit, she’s grown to care for this boy, a bit more than she would like to admit.
“So a makeshift family then,” says the old lady, smiling, “how cute.”
Still, she looks at the woman incredulously, “A makeshift family? With that brat? Don’t be ridiculous,” she turns away, and a small hint of a smile graced her lips.
And, little by little, she starts to feel a little less empty.
"I'm hungry, let's eat dinner, Mei-nee." Says the boy one day, after one of their sparring sessions. The boy was growing stronger and more skillful each day, and she’s confident that he will grow stronger than her, in skill and in soul. He’s already outgrowing her in terms of height, which she feels simultaneously proud and playfully bitter about.
(She wonders, too, some nights…if Allen was still alive, if she hadn’t killed him, if he had been given the chance to grow up, would he have grown taller than her, too?)
Germaine nods. Finally. Dinner, she was starving—
Wait a minute.
"'Mei'?"
"Oh! Yeah. Can I call you Mei from now on? Germaine sounds weird," the boy asks, a bit sheepish.
Maybe he couldn't call her "big sister" like her little brother had done so long ago.
But "Mei" is fine too.
Gernaine acts indifferent, waving him off to curb his embarrassment, even if inside she’s overjoyed, "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, let's go. I'm starving."
This wasn’t the home she desperately craved after the revolution. This wasn’t the home where she came home to all those years ago, with her loud, boisterous father whose booming laughter could reach the entire neighborhood, or a reserved little brother whose thoughts could never be deciphered no matter how much she tried, yet she felt his love all the same. That kind of home…could never truly come back. Not anymore. Not really.
But...travelling with this boy she considers her son, meeting new people, learning new things...
It’s...close enough, she supposed.
-
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Centuries later, a doctor decides to name his newborn daughter "Mei", after an old story passed down from generation to generation of his family. A story of a foreign swordswoman who took his ancestor in when he was a young boy who had lost everything, and became his mentor, raising him as her own. He called the woman "Mei"'–though her real name was lost to time–and was known for wearing red, the color of a hero.
"Sounds a bit like the hero of the revolution of my home country," mused his wife, who was Lucifenian.
"A coincidence, maybe, or maybe not," shrugs the man, "all the more reason to name her "Mei", then, yeah?"
“Of course…our daughter, Mei.”