expiationlogs | My own self-fulfilled prophecy

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fire emblem geneaology: ethlyn

My own self-fulfilled prophecy

Who: Ethlyn and Claude
Where: The apothecary
What: Ethlyn tries to serve her sentence.
Warnings: Content warnings should be here. If there's explicit content in your log, it should be locked.

Reflect on whether you must bear the responsibilities for a whole nation.

That was, more or less, what the sentence had been. It sounded too good to be true--all she had to do was go home and think for a while? Confide in a friend? She'd given Altena worse punishments than that for sneaking out of bed... still, it couldn't hurt. And if it got her a step closer back home, a step closer to saving her children from a grueling upbringing, she would take it. The next steps would be worse, she was sure... the labyrinth had shown that there was little this place couldn't do to them. She would rather have had the plant colossus return than face that terrible maze again.

She hadn't broached this as the reason for visiting Claude in his newly-claimed apothecary, though. No, this visit had a dual purpose: reflection, and also reassurance that he hadn't yet managed to fatally poison himself. Oh, and to see about trying to extract their own antibiotics in case of an emergency.

Ethlyn had made sure to bring some fresh snacks with her, along with her little containers of bread with mostly-green fuzz, and pushed the door open. "Claude? Is this a good time?"

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"Ethlyn! It's always a good time for you. Come in, come in!"

For a man that Ethlyn must know hasn't worked a proper job a day in his life, Claude looks entirely too comfortable at the desk he's set up behind the counter, no longer wishing to clutter his precious workspace with the frankly criminal amount of paperwork that he has to get through in order to run this place properly -- and hopefully at a profit, or else a lot of this effort will be in vain. He hops to his feet, rubbing some stray ink off of the curve of his palm and sticking his pen behind his ear.

"Ooh!" He makes a beeline to greet her warmly, peering nosily at her wares. "And you brought gifts! Come on and have a seat -- I'll boil some water for tea."

"They're gifts of an unusual kind," said Ethlyn, smiling back at Claude's infectious good mood. The landlady at her boarding house had been none-too-pleased when Ethlyn asked if she could use some of the leftover bread for mold cultivation at the clinic, muttering about food waste, but Ethlyn was sure that the experiment's results would be worth it. She brought out three sealed containers of moldy bread slices, an effort to follow the principle that 'samples' should be kept from mixing with each other--as well as a cloth bundle of teacakes.

She sat down, looking around at his apothecary. There was a startling amount of paper on the desk--if it wasn't for the powerful scent of herbs and old chemistry, she might have thought that he had become a scribe instead. "There was something else I wanted to discuss as well." She wasn't sure how to broach the topic, but Claude was one of the people who had been there--who had seen what the labyrinth had to show her.

And it had shown her his past as well--more than that, he had entrusted part of it to her. That was why she had decided to go to him for this conversation.

"Is that so? Then you'd better sit down too," Claude says, gesturing down at the table he had been sitting and writing at. Seeing the mess on the table preventing them from relaxing comfortably, he frowns... and promptly picks up all the papers and drops them directly on the floor, nodding approvingly as though he had made some concerted effort to tidy up and hadn't just moved mess from one spot to the next. It is how he has always lived, he'll gladly admit, and how he will continue to live; he has never been in any place where he didn't feel comfortable having papers, herbs, bottles, books and all other sorts of doodads spread willy nilly around the floor. He intends to tidy it up before he turns the apothecary into a functional business, but that's a problem for future Claude.

He takes the kettle and hooks it above the fire, busying himself with a couple of mugs (only one chipped along the rim; he takes it for himself) and props a few jars of tealeaves in front of Ethlyn. "Give them a smell and see which one you'd like."

For himself, he grabs a tea made up of what appear to be pine needles, a strong, earthy, herbaceous scent that is almost certainly not to everyone's liking. Whichever Ethlyn chooses, Claude is quick to prepare a couple of mugs for the both of them, and soon they're both seated with steaming mugs in front of them.

"There. Now. What is it that you wanted to talk about?"

Oh, gods. Seeing Claude's method of "tidying" was enough to cause Ethlyn physical pain. It wasn't that she didn't understand the impulse. Dealing with the medical records of half the people in town made it a tempting fantasy. But she couldn't help but wince nevertheless. "You are going to regret that later," she said.

Still, she picked out a tea--relieved that he had managed to locate something so normal as tea in this fairy's tomb of mysterious herbs--and clasped her hands around it. Claude had seen and heard what happened to her, but that didn't make this an easy subject to launch into. Yet after hiding from her own memories, her regrets, for so long... carefully stepping around the subject and backpedaling whenever a conversation came too near... it was a relief, in a strange way.

She had died. Maybe that was her own fault. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she would never know for certain.

"I've been sentenced," she said, withdrawing the slip of parchment from her pocket. "Escorted by a soldier of the Council to face their judgment--but my atonement is not what I'd expected."

She unrolled it so that Claude could see the words: the crimes of the Grannvale Empire.

"I have to reflect on this with someone I'm close to," she said, "and since we know so much about each other now--I decided to come to you."

"No I won't!" Claude jives back, as irritatingly cheerful as ever. This sort of thing is usually what makes the likes of Lorenz want to throttle him. In at least one instance, he knows Lorenz has come close, and he has made it his eternal mission to see if he can goad the man into actually putting him in the headlock that he deserves.

He has no such aspirations with Ethlyn, though he seems to find her irritation with his organizational habits (which is to say, very few of them) to be deeply entertaining. He sobers quickly enough, however, planting his elbows on the table and leaning forward to gawk at the piece of parchment, eyes round.

"Wow. I've heard of people getting further sentencing before, but I never quite figured out what they were asked to do..." His fingertips brush the edge of the parchment. "Reflection, huh? Not a sentencing I've ever heard of."

He sits back on his haunches, giving Ethlyn his full attention. It's getting off easy, he thinks, but it's not as though he wants to be strung up in the square and lashed. A little reflection is a far easier thing to bear -- physically, anyway. Emotionally... maybe some here would prefer the whip.

"I'm honoured that you've come to me with this." He places one hand on his chest. "Whatever you tell me will stay between us, on my honour."

It would not surprise Ethlyn one bit to learn that Claude had a friend at home who wanted to strangle him for such habits. She would only be able to sympathize after this display. But the subject of their current conversation was too grave to continue her appraisal of his habits (even if she would have been happy to continue the argument at any other time).

"Nor I," she said. "In truth, I expected something far more brutal... when Jerry said that it would be brief, I assumed that it would be trial by ordeal." She was sure that Claude would know the sort of thing she was talking about--hot coals, boiling cauldrons. And she still couldn't help but think that there was a catch in this somewhere.

But she had chosen Claude. He was one of only a few people left here that she would be comfortable picking over her own past with--and even of those others, she had a feeling that he might look at things in a more clear-eyed way. With all that she had seen for herself in the labyrinth, she knew that Claude was no stranger to painful political realities. If there was truth in her accusation--or if it was as unjust as she had believed for so long--she knew he wouldn't say that it was all fine just because they were close. "Thank you, my friend." She leaned back in her chair, her cup of tea held in both hands. "I used to tell everyone here that I've been wrongly accused because I tried to stop my birthplace from falling into corruption. But now I wonder if we really did all we could--or if there was some way that we missed."

It might require a lot of history to get at the answer.

"Well... we'll sort this out together, won't we? I wouldn't be so quick to go back on your innocence, but if discuss we must, then discuss we will."

He knows Ethlyn well by now -- even better since he discovered the truth of her life, her death, the distraight pit in her gut she must feel each and every day knowing the true fate of her family and her home. He doesn't envy her. He's not sure if he would have the strength that she's had here. Without his aspirations for his home... he's nothing. He wouldn't know who he was without them. But here Ethlyn is, forging forwards with a sense of duty and determination that have nothing to do with her noble birth.

He takes a sip from his teacup, letting the tea's earthy warmth sink down to the bottom of his gut.

"First... I think you're going to have to tell me more about the crime they decided you bear, and everything that came before it. I've been told I'm quick to pick up foreign policy, if it helps." He waves at her with a flourish. "The floor is yours."

Where to begin... she had already discussed the origin of the holy bloodlines of Jugdral and its startling similarity with the Crests of Claude's own homeland. So she didn't at least have to cover the history of the Loptrian Empire and its overthrow.

"Grannvale is a little different than the other nations of my homeland," she said. "Where others have a king or queen with Holy Blood--if that--we have six noble houses who descend from the Crusaders. My father's is one of them. So is King Azmur's. And over the years, rivalries have sprung up. When the king's son came to my father for solace and counsel, two dukes in particular turned their rivalry into hatred--they were the ones who eventually framed my father and brother for treason."

She remembered what Emet-selch had said when she'd explained some of this to him... that Dukes Lombard and Reptor would have seen her father as a sycophant currying favor, as they themselves would have been. Byron had refused to behave with any more or any less friendship towards Prince Kurth in spite of that.

"My father acted in friendship and he was an honorable man. But maybe he should have taken more care--tried to allay their suspicions. But his intentions were only good and he believed that his actions would speak for themselves."

Even as Ethlyn speaks, it occurs to Claude that, much like the fact that she can only learn about the land that he comes from from himself and Marianne, he can only take Ethlyn's word for it. Was her father a good, kind man, with only honour in his heart? So few Kings are. But it is a bitter pill to swallow, that your own parents may have been flawed - though these days, Claude finds himself ruminating on his own royal parents more and more, their follies, their flaws, the errors that their kin will pay for - and certainly not one he'd ever ask of anyone who had tragically lost those that they had loved.

He decides to take her word for it. That her father was a kind and just man, and raised a kind and just daughter. And that he had suffered for it, apparently, as kind and just men are wont to do.

"An internal rebellion... I'm familiar with that sort of thing." He thinks about offering his condolences, but holds his tongue. He wants to hear the whole story first. "Sometimes the enemies that you hold close at hand can be even deadlier than those from afar. What happened next?"

"Many things." Ethlyn interlaced her fingers together and leaned forward, resting her forehead on them to stare into her tea. It felt so long ago--longer than the three years it had been. "A neighboring country launched an unprovoked attack on a town in Grannvale, and Grannvale went to war. Its neighbor on the opposite border took this as an opportunity to seize territory--and a family friend. Rescuing her is how my brother got involved, and my husband and I went to support him."

How had an expedition to save Edain spiraled into this? Ethlyn stared at her tea and the grain of the table, the mess and disorder of Claude's new establishment in her peripheral vision. It should have started and ended in Verdane. They'd rescued Edain, the king had died, his one principled son could have taken the throne and ended it. But then there had been Agustria to the north, and a royal patricide... "We had to help another friend right afterwards--thrown into the dungeon for trying to advise his king. But everything went wrong that time. I'm still not sure how. All we did was protect his sister... his lands from the other lords of his country. Somehow or another, it spiraled into a second full-scale war."

It's beginning to make sense.

It makes sense for Ethlyn, especially. She's a kind woman. She's been kind from the very first moment that they had met, when she had told him all about the healers brigade she had founded, steadfast on her goal of helping the people here whether they wanted it or not. It's much the same back home, only that sort of nobility when it comes to political situations like that... they have long-reaching consequences. Getting involved isn't always the wisest thing. There's a reason why he hasn't been able to get involved with the Kingdom, no matter how much his heart aches for his old classmates.

But they were just classmates. If it were Hilda that were taken, or Marianne, or Lorenz, would he not do the very same thing?

"So you went on an effort to save your friends - fellow royals - but in doing so, got caught in an international incident," Claude summarizes. His tea, stronger than Ethlyn's scents the room; a pleasant earthy pine, of damp soil and growing branches. "The lords you were protecting his sister from. They're the ones who started a war? Over the land you were protecting?"

Ethlyn nodded. "Eldigan's old rival attacked. And then another lord to the north took the chance to raid the surrounding villages, so... we had to put a stop to that too, of course. And then by that point we were so deep in the country that the third lord decided that we must be there to invade..." She took a sip of her tea. It had cooled as she had related the convoluted tale. It had seemed absurd to her at the time--paranoid, on Lord Clement's part.

But she recalled how Lewyn had rebuked her brother--a simple bard, she thought with a trace of a smile, who just happened to have very strong opinions on the responsibilities of royalty and nobility. "...We were warned. By an incognito prince, in fact. He had a lot to say about how our efforts in Agustria was hurting the ordinary folk who lived there."

Claude can't help but sigh, hearing Ethlyn's tale of woe. "That's the hardest part about leadership, isn't it?" He says sympathetically. "You could do everything right, but as long as the other people in charge are bound and determined to see nothing but the worst in you and your people, even as a flimsy excuse for further bloodshed... well, there's not a lot you can do about that."

He laces his fingers together atop the table between them, watching as Ethlyn's expression shifts, her stoicism a clear front for how difficult this must be to speak of. "So... this incognito Prince. On what grounds did he think you were hurting the townsfolk?"

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My own self-fulfilled prophecy

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