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1. TOUCH
Lately Lucina’s come to think that there is nothing her eyes miss when it comes to watching her father. During her surveillance, she’s come to learn him in a way she’d never had the chance to before; can read his face, his moods, his body language. She watches the way he never goes easy on anyone in a practice match, but is quick to offer a hand to help them up afterward. She can tell when he likes someone’s cooking and when he’s just being polite. She aches to let him know he has a small tell right before he’s about to advance, and that’s why he can’t beat Frederick. She watches him as he begins to watch Robin.
Chrom brings the Shepherds back to Ylisse after Emmeryn has fallen. She sees him rally the troops, sees him come home to take his place as ruler, feels that his shoulders have never been bigger. It’s only after the coronation and during the celebratory festivities, when she watches Robin reach quietly over and gently entwine the tips of her fingers in his, that Lucina realizes her father’s hands are shaking.
She knows that in the coming days things will only get harder, that there’s no end in sight but tragedy, that there isn’t a place for her here. But she sits there and watches as Chrom’s fingers stiffen, then relax, pulling Robin’s palm to meet his.
2. LULLABY
Lucina is used to sleeping sitting up, one hand gripping her sword, eyes only barely closed and flickering open at every strange noise, any possible threat to the past, present, and future that her still-so-young father represents. It’s a surprise, then, when she wakes up from her first full night in the Shepherds’ camp to discover she’s slept a full twelve hours. More than that, she’s slid down to fully horizontal, one leg hanging out from her bedroll, free from the oppressive heat of blankets. Falchion lies forgotten off in the corner, and someone has managed to come in and give her another pillow sometime in the night. Needless to say, she’s puzzled, an emotion which is only really trumped by her mortification when the same deep sleep comes to her a second, third, and then a fourth night.
As much as she searches for a reason for her new ability to sleep, she can’t manage to place it – practicing swordplay with her father is exhilarating on an emotional level, but he’s no more of a taskmaster than Gerome was, and she secretly finds herself thinking that Cynthia could show him a thing or two in a duel with lances. Her anxiety levels also have not diminished, as she finds herself barely able to let Chrom out of her sight during chores, much less on the battlefield. In fact, being able to experience life with the Shepherds up close has if anything increased her burdens; far from the experienced, cool-headed veterans of her memory, she finds her father is honorable to a fault, her mother gets stuck in books for so long she forgets to take care of herself, and the Shepherds in general represent to Lucina the largest band of completely incongruent personality types she’s ever met. With the addition of nearly the entire camp marrying each other, Lucina finds it amazing that they manage to accomplish what they do.
The mystery of her deep slumbers continues for weeks, well past when they find and recruit Tyki. She seeks intelligible patterns – she sleeps badly in hard terrain, or too far from Ylisse, or before hard battles. When she sleeps well, it’s for complete trips. It doesn’t matter where her tent is set up, or who is near her, or who was in charge of dinner the night before. Ultimately she consults the Voice, who simply smiles and asks Lucina if she’s ever thought of taking a walk before bed.
A few nights later Lucina does just that, strapping Falchion to her hip and setting out silently into the camp. It’s a cool, crisp night, and they haven’t seen a Risen in weeks – something she worries about, as she knows that means that they’re somewhere else, attacking someone else.
Somewhere in the camp a woman’s voice begins to sing softly, untrained, but with strength. Lucina freezes in her tracks when she hears it – she knows it’s Robin’s voice, but can’t place the melody. She traces the notes back toward the tent Robin and Chrom share, listening as her father’s voice joins in – only on the chorus. Neither of them will win any singing awards, but there’s a sweetness to their tone that makes her heart ache for something it’s been missing.
She’s almost on them when she hears a third, quiet, babbling, and realizes they’re singing to her.
Or, more properly, to their baby girl – Robin has her in her arms, and Chrom has reached out and is lightly tickling her foot. For Lucina it’s a strange, surreal moment – her father lives for his country and the Shepherds, and her mother is constantly formulating plans and strategies; Chrom always has someone to practice with, someone to support, and Robin always has someone to consult with, someone to learn about. She’s never seen them like this, completely absorbed in themselves and in the little person they share.
She sneaks back to her tent and sleeps like a rock. The next morning Robin sits next to her at breakfast, smiles that smile like she knows one thing more than you want her to, and says in a voice only Lucina can hear,
“Would you like me to teach you? The song.” Apparently sensing her daughter’s shame before it even rises on her face, Robin’s hands go up, protesting. “I mean, you could also ask Lissa – she taught it to me, originally.” A wistful smile dances across her mother’s typically keen features, and she adds, “Since I don’t remember anything from my childhood, I don’t have any family traditions or songs or anything of my own to give you – but I think that this is yours anyway, don’t you? If you’ll have it.”
Lucina doesn’t know what to say, but her mother’s sweet face shines when she nods silently, and she inexplicably feels like she’s found something she was looking for.
3. RECOVER
She didn’t see the moment when her father died in her own timeline, which in some ways is much worse than if she had. Lucina's fear of her father’s death is amplified by his tendency to put himself into harm’s way, and even once she has revealed herself to the camp she spends an inordinate amount of time dreading the one time she isn’t fast enough to deflect a killing blow.
When Chrom goes down in a particularly fierce battle it’s exactly as she’s always seen it when she’s in between waking and sleeping – an arrow, of course, because no one could take her father in a swordfight – it had to be the fell dragon himself, or an arrow, or dark magic. In her imagination time slows down and the battlefield gets eerily quiet, but in reality it’s fast and loud and smoky and she can’t see well. She screams anyway, nearly dropping Falchion in her haste to get to her father. She doesn’t realize Brady is grabbing and lifting her until she’s already draped across his mount – newly minted, as he’s only recently become a Dark Knight.
“Let me go! I have to!” Her voice sounds unfamiliar, even childish, and rings unpleasantly in her ears.
“Whoa!!” Brady wobbles, unsteady in the saddle as she fights him. “Hey! HEY!!” She freezes when he finally shouts at her. “It’s not like I don’t get it, Lucina, but you got to stay out of the way, damn it!” She stares blankly at him, then back toward her father. Sumia and Maribelle circle above him, pegasi keening lowly.
And then something happens which she hasn't foreseen – her father, new Exalt of Ylisse, curses loudly and stands back up.
“Gods, that hurt!”
He hasn’t even noticed her and Brady – he looks up and waves lazily at Maribelle with his free hand, grinning like an idiot.
“Sorry, Maribelle! Wasn’t watching my back, I guess!”
Maribelle does circles in the air, almost lazily. Lucina thinks she hears her replying that no matter how close she had cut her spell, there was no call for a man of Chrom’s upbringing to use that kind of language.
She’s dumbfounded. It’s too easy, too relaxed – Vaike has the unmitigated gall to literally throw Chrom’s sword to him, and Henry’s laughter from his spot next to Robin and Tharja carries toward the children. She can’t find an appropriate reaction. After a moment she feels an arm around her waist, and Brady is lowering her to the ground. He smiles at her, shyly, which is always an expression she’s found strange on him.
“I know. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it, either.”
Suddenly Inigo is at her back, and she remembers – Robin told them to stick together. She shifts her grip on Falchion and rejoins her friend in their assigned positions. She must still look a little spellshocked, because when she apologizes for abandoning him he murmurs lowly to her,
“This isn’t home. I can’t explain it, but somehow, no matter how many times they go down – they always seem to get back up.”
Inigo flashes her an unusually pure, sunny grin. On her other side, Kjelle yells a war cry that sounds like laughing. Somehow, she can feel the muscles in her back un-tense, and she slides into her fighting stance more easily than she has since she first saw Grima.
4. SMILE
Awareness that the end could come at any minute - that it is coming, inexorably, from tick to tick, that every second counts down until the end - it has a way of distorting sense of significance. The children of Lucina's generation have grown up outrunning their parents' fates, conscious even as they move forward that there's ultimately nowhere to run. Lucina herself bears the brunt of this tendency, as the slightest hiccups in her plans tend to send her spiraling into uncontrollable panic attacks, certain that this is the moment at which all will truly be lost.
She'd fared better than Morgan, however. In their own timeline their mother's death had made him into a moody, dark child; over time he'd become increasingly strange, rejecting even his closest friends and those things which had made him happiest. When he'd disappeared there was nothing they could do about it, Gerome said, and Owain and Cynthia, more defeated than Lucina could remember, had simply nodded and stayed silent. Lucina had deferred to Gerome's judgement, stood up and returned to the room she had shared with her brother. She sat with her back against the wall, staring fixedly at where she'd last seen him sleep, and tried to forget the way despair and fury had contorted his face even in the depths of slumber.
"Five hundred empty rooms in the castle," she tells Laurent later, "but we shared a room all the same."
She keeps her breathing even, reminds herself that this isn't her fault, that she can still fix this, that the end hasn't arrived yet.
"I think in the end he hated me a bit - I don't know, for not saving Mother, for not going back sooner, for not reminding him more of her, for not knowing what to do with him."
Laurent doesn't say anything - she knows anyone else would have.
"All that, and we shared a room."
Inhale for a count of five, exhale for ten - when you feel short of breath, it's because you're forgetting to exhale, she hears Gerome admonishing her. A trick he'd told Morgan about concentration and calm when he'd still been interested in magic.
"I think I was always scared that I'd wake up and he'd be gone, too."
Laurent again says nothing, because again there is nothing to say. Fate moves inexorably. In this timeline it cannot be changed. Lucina is certain the only thing she can do is move backwards - she's lost everything here.
Morgan isn't gone, however; just as with her mother and her father, they are also reunited, like a miracle, in the past. In a way, though, it's as if he was never lost - indeed, his recovery is one of the most miraculous parts of the past.
He's an almost entirely different person from who he was in the future, bright and sunny, her mother's aggressive desire to experiment and grow intermingling with her father's warmth and easygoing foolishness. He plays with Owain when everyone else is too tired to humor him. He competes with Cynthia when everyone is tired of her. He rubs Brady's back when he cries and applauds Inigo's pickup lines and pays Severa the attention she desperately craves and reads with Nah and asks Laurent questions and protects Yarne and laughs endlessly at Gerome. He carries Kjelle's burdens for her and brings Noire medicine when she's poorly. He embarrasses Chrom and follows Robin around incessantly and steals food from the kitchen and never manages to finish his studying without falling asleep face-first into his tome.
He tries to remember Lucina with everything he has.
In a way, the difference is contagious, and soon Lucina finds that she is meeting new people in her friends. Inigo is reliable. Kjelle sings when she thinks she's by herself. Brady won't kill spiders. Laurent is an amazing storyteller. Nah snorts when she laughs. Yarne begins putting himself in the line of fire to protect his friends. Noire is picky about vegetables. Severa calms herself down by plaiting other people's hair. Cynthia learns to apologize. Owain is an incredible swordsmith. Occasionally, Lucina catches Gerome in what might be called a smile.
She has a harder time, possibly because she knows her father must come first. Even months in, when everyone else has settled into their new lives, she still finds the tightness in her chest remains, that even small setbacks send her spiraling out of control, gripped by panic.
After her father is grazed by a Risen axe - "a bad haircut", he had joked - she retreats into her tent, head spinning, chest gripped tight, gasping for breath. Morgan surprises her - first, by being there when she's expecting to be alone, and then again, by how much more gentle his concern is now than it was in their timeline.
"You okay?"
She shakes her head, gulping air that doesn't come. After a second, he puts a hand on the small of her back, then laughs and moves his hand to hers, sits next to her and pushes his shoulder gently into hers.
"Hey, big sister. You're fine." His grin is a mile wide, and it dazzles her how sunny he's become. "You're just forgetting to exhale."
She wonders if this is something he doesn't know that he carried with him from before, but she laughs anyway, feeling tears well up pointlessly anyway.
"Yes, you're right of course, Morgan." She turns her hand over, laces her fingers with his. "Thank you for reminding me."
5. ENDGAME
In every timeline Lucina knows, it is Chrom who dies. In a way she lives mourning her father, watching as everyone who loved him tries to deal with the loss. In a way, she's prepared for it - put her father before everything else, don't build bonds with those closest to him, prepare for him to leave.
The one thing she was never prepared for was to watch him lose her mother.
( exhale )
The one thing Lucina knows, the one thing she has learned from her father and her mother, is to no longer fear the coming day. Even when it feels like all is lost, there's nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other. That anything can change. That you have to move forward.
When her father returns from his travels, the grin that dances across his features is unmistakable, and Lucina knows that he's found what they've been looking for.
The most important thing she's learned from her parents isn't swordfighting. It isn't strength. It isn't strategy, or kindness, or friendship.
When Chrom brings her mother home, Lucina takes her hands in hers. She looks deep into Robin's eyes. She remembers how to breathe.