The Bravest | Fire Emblem 7

[farina]

Title: The Bravest
Fandom: Fire Emblem 7
Words: 2,871
Summary: Lyn returns to Lycia 20 years after she left to ask a favor of Eliwood.
Pairing/Characters: Eliwood/Ninian, Kent/Lyn, mostly Eliwood & Lyndis interacting, though.
Credits: Prompt was, “Visiting Lycia once again” and this was for fe_fest over on LJ.
Rating: T.
Warnings: Character death.
Genre: Friendship mostly, angst, romantic elements.

Notes:

OH MAN. I’ve been meaning to re-write this for years and I had the house to myself tonight so I literally spent my entire evening working on this. Felt good!

As far as rewriting notes go, I wanna say that this ‘fic hasn’t changed dramatically from the original. If you read it back in 2011 and you just read it now, you may not even have noticed some of the changes.

But I did rewrite the entire thing and only kept a few original sentences (while rewording most of everything else). 

So, some little notes of things I changed and why, just in case anyone does remember:

• Added in more Eliwood/Ninian. Originally I wanted to be pretty short and to the point about their relationship, because the bigger focus of the fic was the strangers/not strangers relationship between Eliwood & Lyndis, with the background kind of being KentLyn and grief and all of that. Reading it this go-around Eliwood felt strangely disconnected from Ninian even though Kent and Lyn would undoubtedly remind him of her, so that was immediately something I wanted to adjust.
• Lyn is generally less talkative in this one. This might feel like it goes against her character a little, but it’s been 20 years and she’s been through a lot in that time period. In recent years I’ve started to feel like Lyn is the kind of person whose privacy gets more important to her the older she gets, so while she tells Eliwood a little bit about Kent’s issues, she doesn’t spill all the beans like she did in the original. She’s also not in town to become BFFs with Eliwood again, so I didn’t want to send mixed messages there.
• I had Lyn lifting her skirts to show her burned leg in the original and now she just gestures because it just seemed more fitting for her age/wisdom.
• The ‘husband’ hiccup was originally intended to be explored further and I wanted to find a space for that but...didn’t. The truth is that Lyn and Kent never did get married (per their ending which refers to Kent as her lover). That said, they think of each other as basically being spouses, but in Sacae they don’t use that terminology. Lyn uses it in Lycia as a kind of...shield.
• Kent hurting his leg taking Lyn to Caelin is talking about what happens if he is defeated during Lyn’s Story.
• I felt iffy about the handkerchief staying in but I kept it ‘cause why not. It was obviously Kent’s, carryover from his life in Caelin.
• I probably should have implied somewhere that Eliwood gets Kent some kind of medical care, but the basic idea is that there’s nothing that can be done at this stage so it seemed like almost a waste to slap it in here just for the sake of saying that Eliwood tried. Of course he did! 
• Originally Kent’s hair was like, greyer? But since I put grey in Lyn’s hair anyway, and grey shows up more obviously in darker hair, I was like...nah, he'll show grey less easily than Lyn would, anyway. They're not that old, but neither am I, and I have a lot of grey already so it feels plausible enough.
• I let Lyn and Eliwood and Kent talk longer, just because it seemed like it was too rushed in the original.
• My biggest regret was not being able to find a good place/reason for Kent and Eliwood to talk, but I slapped in the ‘forever a knight’ thought and that made me feel better (because Kent took a lot of pride in being a knight so this was a kind thing for Eliwood to think). Almost like he's still trying to fulfill his promise to stay at her side until he can't anymore.
• I honestly cannot remember what I intended with Lyndis in the original but current!Me sees only menopause, which isn't impossible, but I'm sure it was originally intended to be her struggling with her own (clearly eventually fatal) health problems.
• I really wanted to capture this idea that Eliwood doesn’t know what Lyn and Kent lost other than their home. Considering Kent's poor health, it would be rude to ask too many questions, and this is also why Eliwood doesn’t mention Roy; he worries they may have lost a child/children in the war. This wasn’t even mentioned or even alluded to in the original at all but it seemed strange that Eliwood wouldn’t talk about, you know, HIS SON, to his OLD GOOD FRIEND LYN.
• If you're looking for "per author intentions" on the whole situation: it's implied via their injuries and what Lyn says about the battle/fire spreading to their homes that perhaps they went in to try to save someone (thus suffering injuries in the process). So yes, they lost a child in that fire.
• Originally Eliwood watched Lyndis leave from a window in the castle but that seemed too impersonal and I liked what I added to his thoughts about the garden swing, so he moved there. I actually think it changed the entire ending mood of the piece in a way the original wasn’t able to do.

There are other little changes but those are the bigger ones, I think.