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rose_in_winterPairings/Characters: Kain Highwind, plus cast
Rating: R (overall), PG (this chapter)
Warnings: Spoilers. Violence and language. Occasional sexual content. Other warnings may apply that are not listed here.
Notes: This fic belongs to the Lucis Ante Terminum arc. Chapter list is here.
Summary: Though it is possible to return home, it is rarely possible to return affairs to their previous state. Sometimes the only course of action is to move forward.
Wordcount: 2200 this chapter.
Beta:celeloriel
Fifty-four years after Zeromus
Mountains were, by their nature, slow to change. The people who climbed them were rather less so. Once, Kain would have disdained bringing four of the household guard with him merely to climb Mount Ordeals, but at nearly seventy-five years of age, he had to admit he was not capable of fending off all the undead himself. Even had he tried, Elizabeth would have none of it.
"If you need more rest, we can wait."
Kain glanced sideways at his heir, Robert Darmin Highwind, whom he had fostered at age ten and adopted when he turned sixteen. Matthew had insisted the name of Highwind must not be allowed to die, and Robert had been the first and most trustworthy of the boys Kain had fostered over the years. He had his mother's sweet nature as well as a hint of her white magic, and had served as the captain of the Dragoons for the last fifteen years, though he said he would soon step down to assist Kain and Elizabeth in running the estates.
"I am not yet so feeble as all that," Kain said, and Robert laughed.
"Be sure that you aren't, for I am not explaining any injuries to Aunt Elizabeth," he said.
"Let us go." Kain straightened his shoulders and took the first step onto the mountain path. Fifty-four years had not dulled the shine of his holy spear, nor had it dimmed the power that had been folded into the metal. Undead enemies fell beneath his weapon as surely now as they had after Zeromus, though his strikes were less sure and strong than they had been. Their climb was all but silent. Kain kept his eyes forward and thought of the place that awaited him.
He had twice climbed Mount Ordeals, and twice turned away from the sanctuary that sat above it. Now, he sought to enter; not for power, but for closure. Rosa had passed on last summer. Yang had been gone for over a decade now, and Cid twice that. Aged by time in the Feymarch, Edge and Rydia had died there nine years ago. Absent the Mysidian twins, Kain was the only one left of those who had fought Golbez and Zeromus.
It was lonely.
His body was not as responsive as it once had been, and Robert had to aid him in the rougher patches more than once. Kain did not often need to use a walking stick, but he found himself wishing he had brought one. The path had not been so difficult the last time.
Then again, he had been forty years younger the last time.
They fought their way upward, stopping to rest frequently. Robert's white magic was not as strong as his mother's, nor yet Cecil's or Jalen's, but it sufficed, largely because his spear was swift and his aim true; the undead fell before they could strike. It was not nepotism that had made him Captain, but rather skill.
When they reached the safe zone on the summit, Kain stared across the bridge. Someone had been keeping it in repair; he thought Jalen might have sent materials or money to Mysidia for that purpose, but he had not sat in a Council meeting in over a decade. Jalen did not need his assistance, and such pursuits were better left to the young. Kain was weary, and he had served enough. Unlike Robert Nerthic, he refused to grasp at credit he was not due.
"We could make camp here," Robert suggested, but Kain shook his head. The afternoon light gleamed pearl-soft off the sanctuary where KluYa resided. Long shadows stretched eastward, velvet-dark and concealing.
"I would see this through," he said.
"Just remember I am really, really not explaining any injuries to Aunt Elizabeth," Robert said, and beneath the jest, Kain heard the concern. He pulled Robert aside, and spent a moment studying this man who had become like his son over the years.
"I do not plan to do myself harm," he said quietly. "Besides that Elizabeth would never forgive me, I have nothing to prove, and a great deal yet to enjoy."
Robert looked doubtful, but he nodded. Kain began to remove his armour, and Robert assisted, laying aside the pieces of formal Dragon Knight steel with reverent care. Kain left also his spear and the dagger he wore at his belt.
Robert led the honour guard that conveyed him across the bridge, as Kain had led Jalen's. The door of the sanctuary lay in shadow, a miniature night to cross on the path to dawn.
"How long shall we wait?" Robert asked. Like Kain, and like Matthew, he had never chosen to take the trial of Mount Ordeals.
"It takes as long as it takes," Kain said, recalling Yang's words. "I do not know, in truth."
Robert nodded and took up a guard position. "Then we shall wait as long as it takes," he said, his expression daring the guards to disagree. None did.
Kain pulled himself straight and walked forward until cool shadows fell across his face and enveloped him in surprising darkness, given the brightness of the day. The weighted door swung easily on its hinges, eerily silent, when he pushed it.
Beyond was a light such as he had never seen. The crystal tiles in the core of the Moon had been dazzling, a shattered chaos in which monsters and their party had been reflected dozens of times over, entangled until it was difficult to discern which was the monster and which the warrior. Yet that had been a variety of colours. Here, the tiles were a white so pure they hurt his eyes, and the light refracted in rainbows brighter than any he had ever seen, even high in the clouds where Barbariccia had taken him flying.
The scar on his back twinged at the thought; he ignored it.
He saw no one, and heard nothing. When he looked back over his shoulder, the door was gone. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the brilliance, fighting the nearly instinctive thought that he was not worthy of this place and never could be.
"I have been waiting for you a long time." The voice was less heard than experienced, words simply falling into his mind and making themselves known. Kain shuddered; the edge of this magic felt like Golbez's, Lunarian to its core.
He was a Dragon Knight of Baron, and he would not flee.
"I am sorry to have delayed you." Did one address the ghost of a Lunarian as "you"?
"You have avoided coming to see me. Why?"
"I thought it ill-done to seek power of which I had no need," Kain said. The expectant silence indicated that KluYa knew that for the half-truth it was. The next statement was harder by far to make. "Also, I thought I might not be worthy."
"Because you served one of my kin unknowingly?"
Kain shrugged. "Because I served Golbez. Because I could have betrayed Cecil and Rosa both; because I lusted after her. Because I failed my King by not recognizing Robert Nerthic's betrayal. Mostly, because a paladin is a warrior of light, and I am the shadow." The words were simple and unemotional.
KluYa did not reply. When he was younger, Kain would have spoken only to fill the expectant silence. Now, he held his tongue. Perhaps attempting to outwait a seemingly immortal spirit of holy battle was foolish, but he was old enough not to mind looking a bit foolish now and then.
"And now?" KluYa asked at last.
"Now..." Kain trailed off. He had rehearsed his speech dozens of times since deciding to come here; now the words fled his mind and left his tongue fumbling. "I would know if I have done well," he said, very quietly.
It was a child's request, a plea for approval, but truly he could think of nothing else to ask.
He had the impression of a sigh. "You have never been as evil as you would have sentenced yourself to be. Did you think my younger son never had impure thoughts? Did you think Rosa never wished to act selfishly? Did you truly believe you were the only person on the Blue Planet to struggle with his desires?"
Kain winced. Put that way, he sounded more childish than his request had made him.
Light shimmered and coalesced into something approximating a human shape; KluYa was half again Kain's not-inconsiderable height, and had flowing white hair and beard much like FuSoYa had. His face was unlined, and his eyes were as blue as Cecil's.
"Had you come seeking to become a Holy Dragoon," KluYa said, "I would have made you so."
"Your approval is comforting," Kain said, and realized it sounded more sardonic than he had meant. "Truly, I am grateful, but I had no need, and I thought it...greedy to seek such a position if I would not use it."
"You feared becoming trapped," KluYa said. "You feared that if you became a Holy Dragoon, you would be bound to make different decisions, purely by possessing the power."
Kain smiled faintly. KluYa was no one's fool, even after seventy-odd years alone on a mountaintop. "True," he acknowledged. "Having once lost my own volition, I was not eager to do so a second time."
KluYa inclined his head. "My elder son treated you poorly."
Kain noted the form of reference: differentiating his sons by age, not by name. Then again, Golbez had not been his birth name. "I am not entirely blameless," he said, since an answer seemed expected.
Light rippled around him; he wondered if that was KluYa's form of laughter. "No one here has asked you to be so," he said. "Why, then, demand it of yourself?"
"If I do not strive to be better than I am, then I am no knight," Kain answered. It was oddly familiar, like the questions Odin used to ask them when they were young, testing how well they had absorbed his lessons.
"Is that why you can never reach your own goals for yourself?" The question was so gentle that it took Kain a long moment to realize how sharp the edges of it were.
"What purpose this questioning?" he asked. "I am not here for your trial."
"Did you expect a blessing to be freely given?" KluYa shook his head. "You should know better."
"Then what would you have of me?" Kain's voice rose with exasperation. "I have told you why I delayed in coming; I have told you why I thought myself unworthy; what more do you want?"
KluYa tilted his head. "What would you do, if you could choose again? Go back in time and unmake any choice? What choice would you most like to undo?"
The answer should have been simple, and it was on the tip of his tongue, but he found himself hesitating. He wanted to say that he would undo the choice of serving Golbez—and it was true that he had made many bad decisions while so doing—but the servitude itself had not been his choice. To undo said service, he would have had to not accompany Cecil to Mist, and thus betrayed his friend sooner. He might never have come back to aid in the fight against Zeromus. He would likely not have been as trusted by Cecil's new friends, and for all the despair of the war and the heartbreak of losing his friends, he could not say that it would have been any different.
What if, in changing his decision about Mist, something shifted in a way that meant Jalen was never born, or Cecil never became a paladin?
KluYa's smile widened.
"Without knowing how my choice would change anything..." Kain shrugged, spreading his hands out. "I miss Cecil, more than anything. I would give much for him to have been here to raise his children, and rule his kingdom, more wisely than I have. I miss my friends, those who died then and those who have been gone more recently. Yet changing one choice might change all of that. I do not know, and though I also do not know whether you even could change that, I would not do so."
"And if I were to offer you the chance to be a Holy Dragoon, now?" KluYa asked, soft as a summer's day.
Kain shook his head. "As I said before: I have no need of that power. I will not take it for my vanity alone."
"Well chosen, son of Baron," KluYa said, and Kain felt the warmth of that approval like sun on a summer afternoon.
"You have done well, you know," KluYa said, after a while. "Not perfectly, nor the best you could have done, with or without optimal knowledge, but you have done very well."
Kain could only nod. KluYa smiled, and disappeared in a shimmer of light.
Kain was unsure how long he stood there, in the shimmering light of Mount Ordeals' sanctuary, but at length he shook himself free of the reverie and turned to the door. Robert would be waiting for him, and Elizabeth.
He felt lighter, as though the weight of his responsibilities had finally fallen away in truth. His task was done.
He opened the door into a sunrise unlike any he had ever seen before, and his foster-son's tired face breaking into a smile as he emerged.
Rating: R (overall), PG (this chapter)
Warnings: Spoilers. Violence and language. Occasional sexual content. Other warnings may apply that are not listed here.
Notes: This fic belongs to the Lucis Ante Terminum arc. Chapter list is here.
Summary: Though it is possible to return home, it is rarely possible to return affairs to their previous state. Sometimes the only course of action is to move forward.
Wordcount: 2200 this chapter.
Beta:
celelorielFifty-four years after Zeromus
Mountains were, by their nature, slow to change. The people who climbed them were rather less so. Once, Kain would have disdained bringing four of the household guard with him merely to climb Mount Ordeals, but at nearly seventy-five years of age, he had to admit he was not capable of fending off all the undead himself. Even had he tried, Elizabeth would have none of it.
"If you need more rest, we can wait."
Kain glanced sideways at his heir, Robert Darmin Highwind, whom he had fostered at age ten and adopted when he turned sixteen. Matthew had insisted the name of Highwind must not be allowed to die, and Robert had been the first and most trustworthy of the boys Kain had fostered over the years. He had his mother's sweet nature as well as a hint of her white magic, and had served as the captain of the Dragoons for the last fifteen years, though he said he would soon step down to assist Kain and Elizabeth in running the estates.
"I am not yet so feeble as all that," Kain said, and Robert laughed.
"Be sure that you aren't, for I am not explaining any injuries to Aunt Elizabeth," he said.
"Let us go." Kain straightened his shoulders and took the first step onto the mountain path. Fifty-four years had not dulled the shine of his holy spear, nor had it dimmed the power that had been folded into the metal. Undead enemies fell beneath his weapon as surely now as they had after Zeromus, though his strikes were less sure and strong than they had been. Their climb was all but silent. Kain kept his eyes forward and thought of the place that awaited him.
He had twice climbed Mount Ordeals, and twice turned away from the sanctuary that sat above it. Now, he sought to enter; not for power, but for closure. Rosa had passed on last summer. Yang had been gone for over a decade now, and Cid twice that. Aged by time in the Feymarch, Edge and Rydia had died there nine years ago. Absent the Mysidian twins, Kain was the only one left of those who had fought Golbez and Zeromus.
It was lonely.
His body was not as responsive as it once had been, and Robert had to aid him in the rougher patches more than once. Kain did not often need to use a walking stick, but he found himself wishing he had brought one. The path had not been so difficult the last time.
Then again, he had been forty years younger the last time.
They fought their way upward, stopping to rest frequently. Robert's white magic was not as strong as his mother's, nor yet Cecil's or Jalen's, but it sufficed, largely because his spear was swift and his aim true; the undead fell before they could strike. It was not nepotism that had made him Captain, but rather skill.
When they reached the safe zone on the summit, Kain stared across the bridge. Someone had been keeping it in repair; he thought Jalen might have sent materials or money to Mysidia for that purpose, but he had not sat in a Council meeting in over a decade. Jalen did not need his assistance, and such pursuits were better left to the young. Kain was weary, and he had served enough. Unlike Robert Nerthic, he refused to grasp at credit he was not due.
"We could make camp here," Robert suggested, but Kain shook his head. The afternoon light gleamed pearl-soft off the sanctuary where KluYa resided. Long shadows stretched eastward, velvet-dark and concealing.
"I would see this through," he said.
"Just remember I am really, really not explaining any injuries to Aunt Elizabeth," Robert said, and beneath the jest, Kain heard the concern. He pulled Robert aside, and spent a moment studying this man who had become like his son over the years.
"I do not plan to do myself harm," he said quietly. "Besides that Elizabeth would never forgive me, I have nothing to prove, and a great deal yet to enjoy."
Robert looked doubtful, but he nodded. Kain began to remove his armour, and Robert assisted, laying aside the pieces of formal Dragon Knight steel with reverent care. Kain left also his spear and the dagger he wore at his belt.
Robert led the honour guard that conveyed him across the bridge, as Kain had led Jalen's. The door of the sanctuary lay in shadow, a miniature night to cross on the path to dawn.
"How long shall we wait?" Robert asked. Like Kain, and like Matthew, he had never chosen to take the trial of Mount Ordeals.
"It takes as long as it takes," Kain said, recalling Yang's words. "I do not know, in truth."
Robert nodded and took up a guard position. "Then we shall wait as long as it takes," he said, his expression daring the guards to disagree. None did.
Kain pulled himself straight and walked forward until cool shadows fell across his face and enveloped him in surprising darkness, given the brightness of the day. The weighted door swung easily on its hinges, eerily silent, when he pushed it.
Beyond was a light such as he had never seen. The crystal tiles in the core of the Moon had been dazzling, a shattered chaos in which monsters and their party had been reflected dozens of times over, entangled until it was difficult to discern which was the monster and which the warrior. Yet that had been a variety of colours. Here, the tiles were a white so pure they hurt his eyes, and the light refracted in rainbows brighter than any he had ever seen, even high in the clouds where Barbariccia had taken him flying.
The scar on his back twinged at the thought; he ignored it.
He saw no one, and heard nothing. When he looked back over his shoulder, the door was gone. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the brilliance, fighting the nearly instinctive thought that he was not worthy of this place and never could be.
"I have been waiting for you a long time." The voice was less heard than experienced, words simply falling into his mind and making themselves known. Kain shuddered; the edge of this magic felt like Golbez's, Lunarian to its core.
He was a Dragon Knight of Baron, and he would not flee.
"I am sorry to have delayed you." Did one address the ghost of a Lunarian as "you"?
"You have avoided coming to see me. Why?"
"I thought it ill-done to seek power of which I had no need," Kain said. The expectant silence indicated that KluYa knew that for the half-truth it was. The next statement was harder by far to make. "Also, I thought I might not be worthy."
"Because you served one of my kin unknowingly?"
Kain shrugged. "Because I served Golbez. Because I could have betrayed Cecil and Rosa both; because I lusted after her. Because I failed my King by not recognizing Robert Nerthic's betrayal. Mostly, because a paladin is a warrior of light, and I am the shadow." The words were simple and unemotional.
KluYa did not reply. When he was younger, Kain would have spoken only to fill the expectant silence. Now, he held his tongue. Perhaps attempting to outwait a seemingly immortal spirit of holy battle was foolish, but he was old enough not to mind looking a bit foolish now and then.
"And now?" KluYa asked at last.
"Now..." Kain trailed off. He had rehearsed his speech dozens of times since deciding to come here; now the words fled his mind and left his tongue fumbling. "I would know if I have done well," he said, very quietly.
It was a child's request, a plea for approval, but truly he could think of nothing else to ask.
He had the impression of a sigh. "You have never been as evil as you would have sentenced yourself to be. Did you think my younger son never had impure thoughts? Did you think Rosa never wished to act selfishly? Did you truly believe you were the only person on the Blue Planet to struggle with his desires?"
Kain winced. Put that way, he sounded more childish than his request had made him.
Light shimmered and coalesced into something approximating a human shape; KluYa was half again Kain's not-inconsiderable height, and had flowing white hair and beard much like FuSoYa had. His face was unlined, and his eyes were as blue as Cecil's.
"Had you come seeking to become a Holy Dragoon," KluYa said, "I would have made you so."
"Your approval is comforting," Kain said, and realized it sounded more sardonic than he had meant. "Truly, I am grateful, but I had no need, and I thought it...greedy to seek such a position if I would not use it."
"You feared becoming trapped," KluYa said. "You feared that if you became a Holy Dragoon, you would be bound to make different decisions, purely by possessing the power."
Kain smiled faintly. KluYa was no one's fool, even after seventy-odd years alone on a mountaintop. "True," he acknowledged. "Having once lost my own volition, I was not eager to do so a second time."
KluYa inclined his head. "My elder son treated you poorly."
Kain noted the form of reference: differentiating his sons by age, not by name. Then again, Golbez had not been his birth name. "I am not entirely blameless," he said, since an answer seemed expected.
Light rippled around him; he wondered if that was KluYa's form of laughter. "No one here has asked you to be so," he said. "Why, then, demand it of yourself?"
"If I do not strive to be better than I am, then I am no knight," Kain answered. It was oddly familiar, like the questions Odin used to ask them when they were young, testing how well they had absorbed his lessons.
"Is that why you can never reach your own goals for yourself?" The question was so gentle that it took Kain a long moment to realize how sharp the edges of it were.
"What purpose this questioning?" he asked. "I am not here for your trial."
"Did you expect a blessing to be freely given?" KluYa shook his head. "You should know better."
"Then what would you have of me?" Kain's voice rose with exasperation. "I have told you why I delayed in coming; I have told you why I thought myself unworthy; what more do you want?"
KluYa tilted his head. "What would you do, if you could choose again? Go back in time and unmake any choice? What choice would you most like to undo?"
The answer should have been simple, and it was on the tip of his tongue, but he found himself hesitating. He wanted to say that he would undo the choice of serving Golbez—and it was true that he had made many bad decisions while so doing—but the servitude itself had not been his choice. To undo said service, he would have had to not accompany Cecil to Mist, and thus betrayed his friend sooner. He might never have come back to aid in the fight against Zeromus. He would likely not have been as trusted by Cecil's new friends, and for all the despair of the war and the heartbreak of losing his friends, he could not say that it would have been any different.
What if, in changing his decision about Mist, something shifted in a way that meant Jalen was never born, or Cecil never became a paladin?
KluYa's smile widened.
"Without knowing how my choice would change anything..." Kain shrugged, spreading his hands out. "I miss Cecil, more than anything. I would give much for him to have been here to raise his children, and rule his kingdom, more wisely than I have. I miss my friends, those who died then and those who have been gone more recently. Yet changing one choice might change all of that. I do not know, and though I also do not know whether you even could change that, I would not do so."
"And if I were to offer you the chance to be a Holy Dragoon, now?" KluYa asked, soft as a summer's day.
Kain shook his head. "As I said before: I have no need of that power. I will not take it for my vanity alone."
"Well chosen, son of Baron," KluYa said, and Kain felt the warmth of that approval like sun on a summer afternoon.
"You have done well, you know," KluYa said, after a while. "Not perfectly, nor the best you could have done, with or without optimal knowledge, but you have done very well."
Kain could only nod. KluYa smiled, and disappeared in a shimmer of light.
Kain was unsure how long he stood there, in the shimmering light of Mount Ordeals' sanctuary, but at length he shook himself free of the reverie and turned to the door. Robert would be waiting for him, and Elizabeth.
He felt lighter, as though the weight of his responsibilities had finally fallen away in truth. His task was done.
He opened the door into a sunrise unlike any he had ever seen before, and his foster-son's tired face breaking into a smile as he emerged.