#i have to run through dissent + night terrors and then give him the book and if that still doesn’t work then im fr fucked

[elvhenmage]

guess who probably has to replay six+ hours of da2 because she didn’t realize until starting act three that a bitter pill never triggered for fenris due to low friendship levels

[empathicstars]

if i killed someone for you

what: an unedited drabble of Aella dying to save Linus, who’s been turned into a morph when: an AU in my Fire Emblem verse, sometime after Linus is turned into a morph why: I had it as a vivid dream and of course I had to torture Kristopher despite my lack of FE knowledge  for: @herousanimarum

   She sees the pain on Lloyd’s face, and it is nearly unbearable. Perhaps she senses it more keenly than she would sense another’s pain, due to having linked her mind with his prior ( there appears to be an unrelenting joining between the two of them, now, due solely to recalling each other’s memories in their heads ), but perhaps it is the severity of his agony that keeps calling her attention to him. They are on their way to find where Linus has been taken, where he’s stationed along with many of the other morphs. They are there to fight as many as they can, but Aella knows that as far as Lloyd is concerned, they are primarily going for Linus.

   There is little to no way to save him. They don’t have the necessary information. They all know that. Lloyd does not live under any illusion that anything can be different. The hopelessness in his form nearly crushes her.

   ( After all, humans were made and meant to have hope. What would a human be without it? )

   He’s staring emptily at a campfire they’ve made on their way to battle one night, and something about his gaze is what sets her mind on it. She pulls a book from her satchel and begins to write. It is not an unusual sight, her bent over a book, writing utensil moving, and she is grateful that no one questions her.

   She’s unsure what she would have said, anyway.

   She puts a leather bookmark in where she’d written, closes it carefully and returns it to her bag.

   She knows what she ought to do.

   From that moment on, her fate is more or less sealed, despite the fact that they have not even seen Linus yet. Aella has often been seen as relenting and obedient, and that she is, but in the rare times her mind is set, it is ironclad. Nothing and no one can sway the assuredness in her soul. It is not a difficult potion to swallow, the idea that her death is just around the corner. Somehow, it is relaxing. Somehow, it is freeing. Lloyd’s depression serves only to strengthen her.

   Soon, he will be better.

   Soon, it will all be the way it should be.

   She’s armed and has trained long and hard, so when Aella insists on following Lloyd into battle, he has to relent. Perhaps it is the fog of sadness that makes him not question it more severely. Perhaps he truly trusts her bravery, her strength. Perhaps he now counts her among the Black Fang, and would find it hypocritical to doubt her when she pledged her allegiance to him and his fight. Either way, the pair of them make their way through rooms and ruins, caves beige and dripping from upwards with water. She senses in many of these people, these other assailants, what she’d sensed in Sonia, what she’d desperately whispered to to Lloyd in the doorway of a small room in Bern. It was too little too late, it seemed, to save Linus.

   But she would, now. She would, now.

   They find him as they believe he will be -- skin yellowed, eyes the same, hair dark. She feels the pain in Lloyd, feels him tighten his grip on his weapon. She breathes, steps forward, between them.

   “Do you trust me?”

   He’s confused, but it’s not as visible on his face as it may be on another one. Aella has only asked that question a few other times -- when she is about to do something that extends into her powers. He answers then as he’d answered always.

   “Yes.”

   “Then stay here and do not move. All will be well.”

   There’s something like dissent in his body, but he’s already pledged to her that he’d trust her. Now he must follow through. She steps forward towards Linus, armed and ready, and holds her own dagger tightly in her hands.

   Of course, she’s not planning on using it. She does not need to. The point is for him to hit her.

   And hit her he does -- much to the dissent and call of Lloyd. Metal collides with skin, slides deep within her with ease that only comes from tremendous strength. Momentum pins her against a cave wall, his taller form slumping, pure anger, pure energy above her. The hand closest to Lloyd curls against rock, tightens into a fist as if that will suppress the pain of being torn open. Mouth gapes as if to scream, but nothing comes from her lips.

   Her other hand shakes as it raises, goes to press against his face, line his eyebrows with two fingers, press two others against his cheek. She does not close her eyes, but she no longer sees.

   Her world is champagne colored, now, within the meld, as though her brain had been dipped into such, and she wades -- wades away from the pain of her own corporeal form, unmoving, and into his mind. It is a mess, unkempt at the edges, pages torn, clothes rugged with seams ripped at, but she gives him a backdrop to help find himself, formulate enough for communication. He will not understand the shifting messages of the mind as easily as some others may -- and there is no cruelness of that thought, just stark reality. She pictures the world in which they are in now. Cave walls, her with her dagger still in its hilt. When he appears across from her, paled as he should be and orange-haired, he stares down at his hands as though he is looking for his weapon. As though this reality is made weaker without the inclusion of him stabbing her through.

   ( It’s, of course, on one of his hundreds of belts, at his side. She is nothing if not detail-focused. )

   He’s confused, for the briefest of seconds, and she cannot help the automatic telepathy of answering, before he can fully get the hang of an imagined form crouched within his own mind next to her. How is she doing this, what happened to him, what is she doing, why, why, oh God, why is she doing this. I’m not worth this, she hears, and though he may feel the emotional horror those words elicits, he’ll never allow her to respond.

   “You’re an idiot,” he says, as he would if they were both across from each other. Ah, yes, this idea of a backdrop to center himself was much more helpful. He could play at an illusion that their thoughts were separate, even while hearing her contemplation on the fact that they were not.

   “I never claimed otherwise,” she says, while I know beats in response. Something about this is near-dizzying, near-impossible, slipping beneath the weight of a hold over his mind, finding him intact and dragging him free of it, shifting her to it. She’s weak with it. She has to find her strength.

   Lloyd.

   Her memories are as clear for him as though projected behind her on the wall, as though part of his own history, own memory. Waking up to see him above her, blurried. Cold fingertips finding one another. Her smudging blood from the crease of his face. The two of them leaned against each other, books open in their laps, fast asleep. His smiling behind a mug of tea she’d made him. The two of them standing near each other, protectively, sides overlapping. Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.

   This was all for him. To save Linus.

   So many responses swirl through him -- to poke fun at them, an ache for something similar, an anger for her doing this to him, a surprise that she could even care this much. He stares at her, unspeaking.

   She’s pushing the hold over him, the hold that turns bones to concrete, blood to ice. That makes nothing matter anymore.

   “Stop it.” He sounds annoyed.

   Part of her wishes to do as ordered. To release herself this pain and sink into nothing. But she is too far back to stop.

   She thinks of his melancholy, his emptiness, his heartbreak these past few days. How listless and numb he has appeared. How broken he has been.

   She compares it with him by his brother’s side. Begrudging smiles as Linus knocks into him. Tsks that sound more friendly than chastising. A sharp laugh.

   Linus watches it all, simmers with horror at the knowledge of what she’s doing it. “Stop it! Goddammit, fuck, I told you to stop!”

   “He needs you.” A flicker back to him at their campsite, days ago. Head hanging. Haloed in gloom.

   “He needs you!” A flicker now, forward, to the memory of his voice ringing out in terror as she’d been run through with his weapon, but it is almost immediately overridden with overwhelming self-loathing, written on every wall.

   Children’s disapproving faces, saying she is not good enough.

   Her mentor, saying she will never be enough like her mother.

   Her, in the ashes of the Nova, knowing she will never be strong enough.

   “He will forget me,” she says, to drown out him listening to her pain, to drown out his shock at how overcoming her feelings truly run, how deep her shame lives. “You are his brother. The two of you have an unbreakable, unchangeable bond. One I will never fully understand. He needs you.”

   Linus is furious, and she feels it as though lava seeps up from the floor, as though the anger and his mess of thoughts are there to flood her, distract her totally from the careful work of taking the morph mind from his. He tries to move for his sword, but she is faster -- she pulls out her dagger and closes steps between them, presses the blade of her weapon to his throat.

   He stares at her, a mixture of total confusion and shock.

   “I am sorry,” she says, gentle as though it is true. “Here, I have the advantage.”

   He doesn’t quite like that. Of course he would not. He trained long to be physically strong, long as she spent to be mentally strong. He thrashes, but inside the world of the mind, he does not move.

   Outside, however, he is beginning to be freed from the hold of the morph, beginning to be given feeling back -- arms, legs, hands, all his own, and he pulls his weapon from her, stabs it forward again, once, twice, three times, desperately, over and over, four, five, stabbing her as though that will stop it, stabbing her as though it will save her, stabbing her without real meaning to his actions.

   “Linus, stop! No!” Not her voice, outside of them.

   As though he’ll feel something, as though it’ll be okay, as though he can save the girl his brother loves by doing this, he can’t be all, he’s not enough, Lloyd would never forgive him, never, not ever, stabbing over, and over --

   “LINUS!” Ringing against the walls.

   But it does not matter. It is done. The mind is slid into her, and she retreats before she can hear any further of his thoughts, steal any more of him.

   “My book,” she says to him, stepping backwards, sinking into cavern. “I wrote to him. See that he gets it.”

   And then he is gone -- or rather, she is. She slips from his mind and slumps against the cave, gasping at the darkness, the brightness, the feel of a mind holding over her that is not her own, beginning to release her as they feel her fade away, feel her die. Shadows shift before her -- one retreating, one growing closer -- as she begins to slide towards the ground.

   Knees weak. All body weak. Lips pouring blood as freely as one may cry.

   It hurt. It hurt so much. She felt cold and alone and small.

   She closed her eyes.

   It would be good. This death. She was saving someone. More than one person. She was doing her duty.

   It was more penance than for which she could have hoped.