#// wanted to play around with different potential fathers some more as well as the subkids haha

[yewfallen]

substitution

   “ You were taking care of orphans before, weren’t you? That’s so wonderful, Febail. ”

He stands there heading into Grannvale, speaking with Lana as their army made their final push back to Chalphy. Her smile is as he remembers it, he almost feels nostalgic for it.

“ Yeah, well that was Patty‘s idea, not mine. I’m really not all that big on kids, you see. ”

“ Hah… I know better than that. I saw all those crying children clinging to you when we were leaving the Munster District. You’re like a father to them, you know. ”

“ S-Stop it, would you? I just… Look, I... ”

But he doesn't finish what he knows he had said that day in a flustered frenzy. He stares, wide eyed as it's no longer Lana and her bouncy, sunshine colored hair that teases him but instead another girl — one so similar yet not at all who beams at him.

Short, dark hair. Sorrowful ashen eyes. Isaachian features.

Who is she? he wonders. She's certainly not his cousin who knows him so well, but here she is in her place, saying the same words and looking at him the same way.

“ Muirne...? ”  the name eventually comes to him. She nods, and suddenly that feeling of looking at a stranger turns oh so familiar until he convinces himself too that, yes, she knows him, knows him as well as Lana, and that they've been fighting together all this time— that Lana doesn't exist and neither does Lester— that they never did, for Aunt Edain never had kids and thus he never had had cousins.

He's never known family besides Patty, he tells himself, and that loss is so keenly felt as the darkness sweeps his vision and takes him elsewhere.

“ Ru, c'mere, ”  his mother calls for him. He's surprised to see her in such clarity for the first time. She lifts him up— his body that seems so small now in this memory— and nuzzles his nose with her own. She wears the same white headband across her forehead that he does growing up, and her golden waves fall and frame her face in such a way that makes her truly look like a goddess rather than a human being just like him.

Though he supposes with the holy blood flowing through his veins, he too was never just a mere mortal either.

“ We're heading to see your old man. Look alive! ”

And when he turns to look at the man the two of them walk towards, he finally gets the answer he was looking for. Besides knowing now what his mother looks like for certain to try and find her, he discovers the identity of his father too.

There he stands, smiling at him, green short wavy hair and a devil-may-care grin. He reaches out to ruffle Febail's hair, but when he does, his visage changes.

His father is now a blond man wearing red with a stern but caring mien. He morphs into a giant with a goofy smile but a big heart. He changes to a shorter man with hair as bright as the flames that consumed all those executed in his hometown of Conote. He becomes a pompous guy with blue hair, one that looks like a good-for-nothing type. Then a man with a low green ponytail. A man with darker skin and brown hair and a mark atop his forehead. A younger looking fellow with a severe expression and blue hair. A gladiator with blond hair that shines like the stars above. A similar looking man, somewhat older, one that surely has been around. A younger Lewyn this time, he's sure. A man of cloth, one with long flowing blond hair that cascades like golden waterfalls.

And lastly, another younger looking fellow with blond hair bunched into a short ponytail as he takes Febail from his mother. The sky grows dark, and the thief is running— from what exactly, he doesn't know.

“ We gotta get ya to Conote. Hang on there a bit more, li'l guy! ”

The world all around them looks as if it might end, and Febail clings to this mystery man as he escorts both him and a picnic basket bearing his younger sister Patty but when she was but still a newborn.

All these memories that had been so hazy to him before return to him more vivid than ever, but he's not sure which is the right one. And as the thief lowers him from his back onto the doorstep of the Conote orphanage alongside the picnic basket, Febail realizes he has returned back to the moment when he had no family at all anymore save for himself and his sister.

All these seasons spent looking for it, looking to be a son again, only to be shown visions that taunt him with contradictory clues and robs him of any progress he's made...

The gods really do enjoy spitting in his face, after all.

He returns from his trance, back at the seedy establishment within Tagzig, and he has to blink a few times before feeling like he's on stable ground again. Was it the drink that gave him those visions? Or that strange magenta-haired person?

Aes had told them all they could connect to all different points in reality, and even without arriving at the lab, Febail wonders if that's what he had just done then in what felt like nothing more than a bizarre daydream...