bonnefois | fic: Seeds to Wind

Title: Seeds to Wind
Series: FE7
Character/Pairing: Eliwood/Ninian
Rating: G?
Summary: She is no longer an oracle to anything but her own waning days. Eliwood/Ninian.
Word count: 718
A/N:(Old)!

52_flavours /52. To the last syllable of recorded time. Happy late birthday,

sarajayechan. I didn’t actually know it was your birthday until about a week later. Whoops?

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She did not predict her meeting with Lord Eliwood, and it seems a grave lack of foresight in retrospect. But the world of dragons and humans were different and their dreams poured from a separate amphora. The colors and smells are less vibrant, she cannot feel the steady rise of energy humming in the air. In the world of humans and without Nils she feels a lack, as if she has been blindfolded. Still, Lord Eliwood is here, and the child that grows within her. It keeps her tethered down and keeps her from floating like a seed and disappearing deep into the thin air.

It is shortly after the conception that she begins to hear the beating slow, as if a clock ticking backwards. Her time is limited, for this is not a world for dragons. It tears and pulls at her, and she feels as if she has climbed a great deal and the air has thinned. She is ephemeral and fading, even more without Nils.

Lord Eliwood is there at her side. A constant. Her constant. And she sees it so clearly, every day of recorded time that will follow. Her allotted time is five years and she has already lived with Eliwood for three and a half. Each day living within this world she will grow steadily weaker until she will become bedridden. And then, and then.....

It has been her choice and she would not take it back given the chance. She is no longer an oracle to anything but her own waning days. The only person who truly gives her the respect she once held among thousands is Lord Eliwood, but his is the only respect she wishes for.

She slides her hands through this consciousness as if dipping them in water. She sees it all to come – her son’s birth, the soft beauty of each day to come. Lord Eliwood coddles her in the most unconscious of ways. He does not know, for he still talks of the future. She does not break his hopes and lets him dream a little longer of old age and twenty years to come. His hand on her shoulder is worth the praises, the millions of years she could have lived out in a world of dragons.

She reads out the dreams and comforts her son before he has yet been born. She has held in her dream-arms so many times she can only hope it will make up for every time within his life that she will be gone.

She stretches herself thin and sees more: a girl, another war, a happy life without her broken by a war and then mended again. Even if she worries over the last, she cannot prevent it. If she shifts just one ion, the fragile framework will fall apart. If she pushes aside the war, it will only come later and then there may not be any hope for them at all. She has dabbled in fate too much already.

She lays by Lord Eliwood at night with his arm loose about her waist. Her hair falls across the pillow, sleek and more ashen. It comes free now, falls out and lines her brushes. She hinds the missing strands within a refuse bin and covers the thinning with combs and plaits. Her skin whitens, even more and she is always one step from illness. The days flow like sand within glass, her fate is inescapable. At night she stays at the side of a cradle of a son who has yet to be born.
In her dreams she has sung him a hundred lullabies already.

She drifts, drifts further away as the days go on and her sleeping child comes into form. Soon she will dance and float above them, unseen and unfelt. Arrows will deflect, sicknesses will abate, precious toys will be found. A dragon never truly dies, and mothers are what beloved ghosts are made of.