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It is only in the aftermath that you feel that something has gone irreversibly wrong, like you have crossed a bridge only to turn at the smell of smoke and see that it has burned to nothing behind you. The sweat on your skin grows cold and clammy as the rising gusts stir the flap of your tent and let in the cold. Even with the breeze stirring the air in the tent, your living space still smells of sex and exertion.
In the tent’s corner, Lucina dresses herself, tucking and binding and buckling all into place. Her pale skin disappears beneath blue leather and steel, like an invitation rescinded. She does not look at you. In the heat of it, she looked at you, sometimes beseechingly and sometimes glaring; now she looks at anything and everything but you, her mouth a flat line and her eyes opaque to you. It is eerie. Even before her mask was broken, she showed more emotion than this.
Lucina cinches her belt, replaces at her side the blade that is a mirror to her father’s. What would Chrom say, if he knew? Will he know? You think of telling him but cannot truly process it, not the words you would use nor the way he would react. For a moment all you can think of is the weight of his child in your arms on the day she was born, the way he smiled at the image of you holding the babe before you passed her back to her mother. The memory of that day and the memory of this night are like oil and water in your mind, filling your skull to the brim but never mixing.
You want to take this back. “Lucina,” you say as she strides toward the still-shuddering tent flap, and then you want to take that back, too: she does look at you, then, and her eyes burn with something that you think is probably hate. “I --” you start, and then close your mouth. You cannot remember ever feeling so at a loss for words.
She sweeps the tent flap aside with an arm, shoving through the gap -- then stops. Lucina turns her head, so that you see her face in profile. She looks like and unlike her father and mother both. A cord stands out in her neck. Then she faces outside again. The wind stirs her hair. “You ruin everything that you touch,” Lucina says, then begins moving again. The tent flap falls closed behind her.
You will not understand her meaning until weeks from now, when her blade finds your neck and her anguished eyes meet yours again.