WIP dump: ye old Radiant Dawn fanfic
Jan. 12th, 2021 03:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI was nostalgically digging around in some old folders tonight*, and I found a draft of the Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn fic I was using to advance my bizarre Micaiah/Leonardo agenda, e.g. "Edward dies then Sothe dies."
* I also found a short story I wrote when I was, like, 13. It is titled "Chasing the Phoenix" and it features a kickass chick named Keri with her pet hawk, and they are on a team of SKY PIRATES. They get way lucky and sight a PHOENIX, and phoenixes are literally made of rubies in this universe, so of course they wanna shoot it down and loot it. But then at the last minute, the hawk gets nervous and sad, and snaps his jesses, and flies down to try and warn the phoenix, and then both the hawk AND the phoenix die, and Keri is way bummed out, the end. so yeah I'm going to write the same shit over and over until I die apparently lmao
I last poked at this draft in, uh, 2015? While I was fond of it at the time, I no longer have any intention of turning it into a real fic. But I'm sharing the (incomplete, messy, not-great) draft here for posterity/historical interest, mainly because the MELODRAMA of the opening scene made me chuckle. Apparently my tastes changed in the past five years, who knew :P (And like, yeah, maybe that's the reason I didn't finish this one, who knows!)
Cold Lazarus
And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? —John 11:37
When Edward fell, Leonardo knew. He knew, though he still screamed out Laura's name, like that would change what had happened. When the tiger had lunged at Edward, it bit so deep that it wasn't just blood but guts that poured from Ed's stomach, and that tiger pinned Ed and twisted the boy's spine at an angle it wasn't meant to go—Leo swore he'd heard the sick snap, even standing twenty paces away. Someone, a lanceman, speared the tiger and pushed it back, giving Leonardo a clear view, and he knew. He knew because he'd seen this before, because he'd seen the boys from the academy pulled to their deaths when they'd tried their first taste of battle, none in such a savage way but it was all, savage, in the end. It was a war. He knew what could happen, but still, Edward—
Laura didn't come and he screamed for a healer, any healer, anyone at all. He couldn't even hear himself, that was how loud the battle was, the cats and tigers all roaring and snarling—a lone tiger broke through their ranks and Leonardo, without time to string his bow, grabbed an arrow from his quiver and jabbed it through the tiger's eye—almost without noticing, almost wholly on reflex; he was still running toward Edward. Around him a platoon of swordsmen surged forward; a handful of tigers fell at once and they gained a precious snatch of ground ahead. Leonardo rushed, grateful for the cover, knelt and scooped Edward into his arms. Edward let out a sharp, pained breath, and Leonardo winced—it wasn't good to move him like this, haphazard in his hands—but he knew he couldn't just leave him out there either; Edward would bleed out before the battle's end if left alone.
At the back of the army the healers were huddled together; Leonardo ran to them, and set Edward down as gently as he could while he was stumbling through the mud.
The healers hovered anxious; they knew that Edward had been in the first Dawn Brigade, knew his worth. One healer, tall but lank and not much more than a boy, stepped forward and started chanting; beside him an older woman pulled out a vulnerary, poured it in her hands, and rubbed it into the wound.
It took everything in Leonardo to keep his hands away. He watched their expressions. Were they always so dour?
Then at last one of them said, he's gone, and another nodded softly, it's over.
No, Leonardo said, please, keep trying, please, it's my friend, kept saying that couldn’t be right. He only listened when Laura finally said it—and he could hear the fear in her voice when she said it—because she'd never seen Leonardo this way.
Ahead of them, the laguz were retreating, the Daein soldiers were cheering, but Leonardo didn’t move from where he’d fallen to his knees. He spent the whole night moaning, nonononono, moaning like a wounded beast as he lay hunched over Edward's corpse, clinging to it, weeping into the cloth of his sleeves.
Morning came, and the crows were on the corpses before the soldiers could finish burying them. Volug stalked between the bodies, snarling and snapping to scare the birds away, but there were too many of them, and he couldn't keep them at bay for more than a few moments at a time.
Leonardo could hear the cawing through the trees, a quarter-mile away. He hadn't liked the thought of Edward lying among those bodies, being flung into those hastily-carved pits that served as mass graves. So Leonardo had pulled his dead friend's body away from the battlefield, and had buried him right before daybreak—meant to do it alone, but Nolan appeared beside him, unbidden. Leonardo didn't say anything, and Nolan didn't either—just helped him dig. When they put the corpse in the grave, Nolan quoted something soft and pretty from one of his books, and Leonardo couldn’t manage to say anything more than a single husky “goodbye.”
Then Nolan left, and Leonardo stayed behind. Ostensibly he'd told himself he was here for target practice—the clearing here was good for that. He'd always trained hard, often trained alone; no one would think twice about it. But instead of shooting at the rough target he'd marked for himself on the side of a tree, he was still sitting on a stump, idly twanging the string of his bow, staring at his shoes. He took an arrow from his quiver, turned it over, then drove it into the ground.
He was still sitting that way when he heard a rustle in the bushes, and a voice: "Leo."
[Micaiah was there now.]
"I'm so sorry,” she said.
"Micaiah…" What he'd meant to say next was, It's okay, or, It wasn't your fault. Because those were the right things to say, and they were true.
But instead he blurted: "Why is Daein in this war?"
Micaiah stiffened—which only made Leonardo bullish. "That's all I want to know," he said, standing, "just so… so…"
He struggled for words. Micaiah stood mute. "Begnion's not…" he tried. "And Pelleas…"
Begnion's not an ally. Pelleas isn't a king.
He probably looked pitiful, he realized, as Micaiah looked him over. He hadn't slept, hadn’t bathed, hadn’t even wiped Edward’s blood out of his hair. His arms ached. His chest ached.
"It's for Daein. It's what we fought for as the Dawn Brigade, what all of us—"
"You know that's not true."
Micaiah finally looked away. "I-I can't give you the answer you want."
He breathed in. Breathed out. Felt the feathers of the arrow he’d driven into the ground. Grabbed it, stood, strung it, all in one motion, and fired—at the tree in the other direction, away from her. Away from everything.
"Okay,” he said. Then he slung his bow and walked away.
The next day they marched—they knew the alliance would try to ford the river again within days, and spies had informed them that the next crossing would be in some shallows a few miles downstream.
As they left that camp they left the dead laguz as well, the hundreds felled in battle against them. No captures; Daein didn’t take prisoners where laguz were concerned. They didn’t bury their corpses, either.
Leonardo said nothing, at the time. But as they marched toward the pass, he noticed Volug lingering, uncharacteristically slow, his eyes drawing slowly over each of the tigers, every cat in turn. Then he met Leonardo’s eyes, made a strange, short, guttural howl, and walked on, quicker than before.
[insert interstitial scene where Leonardo starts to suspect Sothe and Micaiah are hiding something from him]
There’s a war council meeting. And there's a hangnail on his finger.
Leonardo picked at the thing doggedly. Tore up all the little bits of skin around it. Finally he got a firm grasp on the thing and started pulling back—slow, like a bowstring, peeling back and back until a red sliver appeared, and he winced but kept tugging that bit of skin—
"Leonardo."
He glanced up. Sothe was glaring at him.
"Did you catch all that?"
Leonardo didn’t answer.
Which only made Sothe angrier: “I don't know what's gotten into you, but you can sit this fight out if you've got a problem—"
"Sothe," Micaiah interrupted, her tone cutting. Then her face softened: "Leo, are you feeling alright?"
No. “Yes.”
[Sothe gets another dickish barb in; Leonardo says he’s a little distracted but he’s trying damnit; Micaiah defuses the tension for now]
When Sothe and Leonardo had the fight—and they all knew they were going to fight—it was about Ike—though it wasn't really about Ike and everyone knew it.
Sothe was in the middle of some story about the Mad King’s War, while they were killing time at camp: “…he’s really great, you know, he had this really clever plan once we were in Begnion…”
"He's not great," Leonardo snarled through gritted teeth.
Sothe cast him a look. "And who died and made you the expert?”
A pause. Then Sothe realized what he’d said, and his mouth fell open in horror, too late.
Leonardo lunged; he’d always been taller and heavier; he knocked Sothe straight to the ground. [Description of rest of fight here.]
[Micaiah goes to Leonardo after.]
"Sothe told me about what happened."
Leonardo said nothing.
"If you want to go back home I'll understand."
He shrugged, pulling his knees closer to his chest. “I don't really have a home."
[they chat for a bit longer]
[They’re close to getting holed up at Castle Nox and things are desperate.]
[Leonardo’s asked to help train a new recruit. When the recruit shows up, they look WAY too young to be in the army.]
"Rayne,” Leonardo said, looking at the kid’s bow, so small it looked like a toy. "Look, Rayne, I know you want to help Daein, but you’re a little young—“
"I'm fighting to protect my home,” the kid protested. “Anyone who wants to do that is old enough. Sothe told me so."
Leonardo’s felt his blood turn to ice. "Sothe."
"Uh-huh. Me and my brother both volunteered.”
[Leonardo excuses himself to go have a word with Sothe, and…]
"They wanted to fight," Sothe said, not looking up from the ledger he was staring at. "They volunteered. Same as anyone else.”
"What, then?” Leonardo shouted. “We give a spear to any toddler who waltzes up to us? She can't be any older than ten for Ashera's sake—"
"—which isn't much older than I was, when I started hustling in Nevassa—"
"—this is different, Sothe, you know it's different—"
“—it is not—“
"—in the Mad King's War, they didn’t even draft out of the academies if the kids under thirteen, and those kids actually had some training, unlike that kid—“
Finally Sothe threw the ledger aside, and whirled on Leonardo: "You think this is what I want?”
Sothe was furious, but that wasn’t what made Leonardo fall mute. Sothe was angry—and unguarded. The latter, that was new. He hadn’t seen that before.
Haltingly, Sothe continued. "We're down to ten thousand. We had a scout this morning telling us to expect five times that amount from the alliance. We have to make up those numbers somehow. Tell me if you've got a better idea."
Leonardo read the shake in Sothe’s voice, in the slump of his shoulders, and he had a horrible realization. A horrible realization that made all too much sense: “You don't know either, do you."
Sothe cocked his head. “Don't know what?"
Why we're here. Why we're fighting. What Micaiah won't tell us.
Leonardo shook his head. "Nothing." Sothe didn't have a clue, either, he was just as desperate as the reset of them. "Fifty thousand?" Leonardo said. “Fine. I’ll do what I can with the trainees.”
[MUCH later in scene. They’re planning the final siege at Castle Nox. Sothe will have to deploy away from Micaiah, for tactical reasons. Leonardo’s assigned to guard Micaiah directly. After the meeting, Sothe talks to Leonardo in private.]
"I thought she'd be safest with you,” Sothe explained. "You've got a good head on your shoulders."
"Yeah, uh… Thanks."
[Sothe dies. It's sad. When Leonardo tries to console Micaiah, she's just like, "I know you never liked him."]
[Leonardo runs into her while he's on a walk in the middle of the night, on the eve of the giant Part 3 Endgame battle. Micaiah's crying. When he goes to her to ask what's up...]
"I can't see what's going to happen," she whispers. "Normally there's the... the voice, that tells me things, but right now, it's... I'm..."
He couldn't bear it. Couldn't bear any of this. He reached out, hugged her, and she hugged back so quickly and fiercely it surprised him. She knew he wasn't Sothe. And he knew she wasn't Edward. But if he closed his eyes he could pretend, they could pretend, and that was almost enough.
* I also found a short story I wrote when I was, like, 13. It is titled "Chasing the Phoenix" and it features a kickass chick named Keri with her pet hawk, and they are on a team of SKY PIRATES. They get way lucky and sight a PHOENIX, and phoenixes are literally made of rubies in this universe, so of course they wanna shoot it down and loot it. But then at the last minute, the hawk gets nervous and sad, and snaps his jesses, and flies down to try and warn the phoenix, and then both the hawk AND the phoenix die, and Keri is way bummed out, the end. so yeah I'm going to write the same shit over and over until I die apparently lmao
I last poked at this draft in, uh, 2015? While I was fond of it at the time, I no longer have any intention of turning it into a real fic. But I'm sharing the (incomplete, messy, not-great) draft here for posterity/historical interest, mainly because the MELODRAMA of the opening scene made me chuckle. Apparently my tastes changed in the past five years, who knew :P (And like, yeah, maybe that's the reason I didn't finish this one, who knows!)
Cold Lazarus
And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? —John 11:37
When Edward fell, Leonardo knew. He knew, though he still screamed out Laura's name, like that would change what had happened. When the tiger had lunged at Edward, it bit so deep that it wasn't just blood but guts that poured from Ed's stomach, and that tiger pinned Ed and twisted the boy's spine at an angle it wasn't meant to go—Leo swore he'd heard the sick snap, even standing twenty paces away. Someone, a lanceman, speared the tiger and pushed it back, giving Leonardo a clear view, and he knew. He knew because he'd seen this before, because he'd seen the boys from the academy pulled to their deaths when they'd tried their first taste of battle, none in such a savage way but it was all, savage, in the end. It was a war. He knew what could happen, but still, Edward—
Laura didn't come and he screamed for a healer, any healer, anyone at all. He couldn't even hear himself, that was how loud the battle was, the cats and tigers all roaring and snarling—a lone tiger broke through their ranks and Leonardo, without time to string his bow, grabbed an arrow from his quiver and jabbed it through the tiger's eye—almost without noticing, almost wholly on reflex; he was still running toward Edward. Around him a platoon of swordsmen surged forward; a handful of tigers fell at once and they gained a precious snatch of ground ahead. Leonardo rushed, grateful for the cover, knelt and scooped Edward into his arms. Edward let out a sharp, pained breath, and Leonardo winced—it wasn't good to move him like this, haphazard in his hands—but he knew he couldn't just leave him out there either; Edward would bleed out before the battle's end if left alone.
At the back of the army the healers were huddled together; Leonardo ran to them, and set Edward down as gently as he could while he was stumbling through the mud.
The healers hovered anxious; they knew that Edward had been in the first Dawn Brigade, knew his worth. One healer, tall but lank and not much more than a boy, stepped forward and started chanting; beside him an older woman pulled out a vulnerary, poured it in her hands, and rubbed it into the wound.
It took everything in Leonardo to keep his hands away. He watched their expressions. Were they always so dour?
Then at last one of them said, he's gone, and another nodded softly, it's over.
No, Leonardo said, please, keep trying, please, it's my friend, kept saying that couldn’t be right. He only listened when Laura finally said it—and he could hear the fear in her voice when she said it—because she'd never seen Leonardo this way.
Ahead of them, the laguz were retreating, the Daein soldiers were cheering, but Leonardo didn’t move from where he’d fallen to his knees. He spent the whole night moaning, nonononono, moaning like a wounded beast as he lay hunched over Edward's corpse, clinging to it, weeping into the cloth of his sleeves.
Morning came, and the crows were on the corpses before the soldiers could finish burying them. Volug stalked between the bodies, snarling and snapping to scare the birds away, but there were too many of them, and he couldn't keep them at bay for more than a few moments at a time.
Leonardo could hear the cawing through the trees, a quarter-mile away. He hadn't liked the thought of Edward lying among those bodies, being flung into those hastily-carved pits that served as mass graves. So Leonardo had pulled his dead friend's body away from the battlefield, and had buried him right before daybreak—meant to do it alone, but Nolan appeared beside him, unbidden. Leonardo didn't say anything, and Nolan didn't either—just helped him dig. When they put the corpse in the grave, Nolan quoted something soft and pretty from one of his books, and Leonardo couldn’t manage to say anything more than a single husky “goodbye.”
Then Nolan left, and Leonardo stayed behind. Ostensibly he'd told himself he was here for target practice—the clearing here was good for that. He'd always trained hard, often trained alone; no one would think twice about it. But instead of shooting at the rough target he'd marked for himself on the side of a tree, he was still sitting on a stump, idly twanging the string of his bow, staring at his shoes. He took an arrow from his quiver, turned it over, then drove it into the ground.
He was still sitting that way when he heard a rustle in the bushes, and a voice: "Leo."
[Micaiah was there now.]
"I'm so sorry,” she said.
"Micaiah…" What he'd meant to say next was, It's okay, or, It wasn't your fault. Because those were the right things to say, and they were true.
But instead he blurted: "Why is Daein in this war?"
Micaiah stiffened—which only made Leonardo bullish. "That's all I want to know," he said, standing, "just so… so…"
He struggled for words. Micaiah stood mute. "Begnion's not…" he tried. "And Pelleas…"
Begnion's not an ally. Pelleas isn't a king.
He probably looked pitiful, he realized, as Micaiah looked him over. He hadn't slept, hadn’t bathed, hadn’t even wiped Edward’s blood out of his hair. His arms ached. His chest ached.
"It's for Daein. It's what we fought for as the Dawn Brigade, what all of us—"
"You know that's not true."
Micaiah finally looked away. "I-I can't give you the answer you want."
He breathed in. Breathed out. Felt the feathers of the arrow he’d driven into the ground. Grabbed it, stood, strung it, all in one motion, and fired—at the tree in the other direction, away from her. Away from everything.
"Okay,” he said. Then he slung his bow and walked away.
The next day they marched—they knew the alliance would try to ford the river again within days, and spies had informed them that the next crossing would be in some shallows a few miles downstream.
As they left that camp they left the dead laguz as well, the hundreds felled in battle against them. No captures; Daein didn’t take prisoners where laguz were concerned. They didn’t bury their corpses, either.
Leonardo said nothing, at the time. But as they marched toward the pass, he noticed Volug lingering, uncharacteristically slow, his eyes drawing slowly over each of the tigers, every cat in turn. Then he met Leonardo’s eyes, made a strange, short, guttural howl, and walked on, quicker than before.
[insert interstitial scene where Leonardo starts to suspect Sothe and Micaiah are hiding something from him]
There’s a war council meeting. And there's a hangnail on his finger.
Leonardo picked at the thing doggedly. Tore up all the little bits of skin around it. Finally he got a firm grasp on the thing and started pulling back—slow, like a bowstring, peeling back and back until a red sliver appeared, and he winced but kept tugging that bit of skin—
"Leonardo."
He glanced up. Sothe was glaring at him.
"Did you catch all that?"
Leonardo didn’t answer.
Which only made Sothe angrier: “I don't know what's gotten into you, but you can sit this fight out if you've got a problem—"
"Sothe," Micaiah interrupted, her tone cutting. Then her face softened: "Leo, are you feeling alright?"
No. “Yes.”
[Sothe gets another dickish barb in; Leonardo says he’s a little distracted but he’s trying damnit; Micaiah defuses the tension for now]
When Sothe and Leonardo had the fight—and they all knew they were going to fight—it was about Ike—though it wasn't really about Ike and everyone knew it.
Sothe was in the middle of some story about the Mad King’s War, while they were killing time at camp: “…he’s really great, you know, he had this really clever plan once we were in Begnion…”
"He's not great," Leonardo snarled through gritted teeth.
Sothe cast him a look. "And who died and made you the expert?”
A pause. Then Sothe realized what he’d said, and his mouth fell open in horror, too late.
Leonardo lunged; he’d always been taller and heavier; he knocked Sothe straight to the ground. [Description of rest of fight here.]
[Micaiah goes to Leonardo after.]
"Sothe told me about what happened."
Leonardo said nothing.
"If you want to go back home I'll understand."
He shrugged, pulling his knees closer to his chest. “I don't really have a home."
[they chat for a bit longer]
[They’re close to getting holed up at Castle Nox and things are desperate.]
[Leonardo’s asked to help train a new recruit. When the recruit shows up, they look WAY too young to be in the army.]
"Rayne,” Leonardo said, looking at the kid’s bow, so small it looked like a toy. "Look, Rayne, I know you want to help Daein, but you’re a little young—“
"I'm fighting to protect my home,” the kid protested. “Anyone who wants to do that is old enough. Sothe told me so."
Leonardo’s felt his blood turn to ice. "Sothe."
"Uh-huh. Me and my brother both volunteered.”
[Leonardo excuses himself to go have a word with Sothe, and…]
"They wanted to fight," Sothe said, not looking up from the ledger he was staring at. "They volunteered. Same as anyone else.”
"What, then?” Leonardo shouted. “We give a spear to any toddler who waltzes up to us? She can't be any older than ten for Ashera's sake—"
"—which isn't much older than I was, when I started hustling in Nevassa—"
"—this is different, Sothe, you know it's different—"
“—it is not—“
"—in the Mad King's War, they didn’t even draft out of the academies if the kids under thirteen, and those kids actually had some training, unlike that kid—“
Finally Sothe threw the ledger aside, and whirled on Leonardo: "You think this is what I want?”
Sothe was furious, but that wasn’t what made Leonardo fall mute. Sothe was angry—and unguarded. The latter, that was new. He hadn’t seen that before.
Haltingly, Sothe continued. "We're down to ten thousand. We had a scout this morning telling us to expect five times that amount from the alliance. We have to make up those numbers somehow. Tell me if you've got a better idea."
Leonardo read the shake in Sothe’s voice, in the slump of his shoulders, and he had a horrible realization. A horrible realization that made all too much sense: “You don't know either, do you."
Sothe cocked his head. “Don't know what?"
Why we're here. Why we're fighting. What Micaiah won't tell us.
Leonardo shook his head. "Nothing." Sothe didn't have a clue, either, he was just as desperate as the reset of them. "Fifty thousand?" Leonardo said. “Fine. I’ll do what I can with the trainees.”
[MUCH later in scene. They’re planning the final siege at Castle Nox. Sothe will have to deploy away from Micaiah, for tactical reasons. Leonardo’s assigned to guard Micaiah directly. After the meeting, Sothe talks to Leonardo in private.]
"I thought she'd be safest with you,” Sothe explained. "You've got a good head on your shoulders."
"Yeah, uh… Thanks."
[Sothe dies. It's sad. When Leonardo tries to console Micaiah, she's just like, "I know you never liked him."]
[Leonardo runs into her while he's on a walk in the middle of the night, on the eve of the giant Part 3 Endgame battle. Micaiah's crying. When he goes to her to ask what's up...]
"I can't see what's going to happen," she whispers. "Normally there's the... the voice, that tells me things, but right now, it's... I'm..."
He couldn't bear it. Couldn't bear any of this. He reached out, hugged her, and she hugged back so quickly and fiercely it surprised him. She knew he wasn't Sothe. And he knew she wasn't Edward. But if he closed his eyes he could pretend, they could pretend, and that was almost enough.
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