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“Thancred.”
People have a way of saying his name and assuming he will act to their unspoken interests. People have a way of assuming he knows what they want, because he usually does. He has made it the work of his waning teenage years to not be an underfoot little wharf rat, far flung from the breast of a mother who never cared for him, much less loved him—to be helpful, competent—to do chores before he’s asked and slit the throats of all who he is told—to bring home valuable information from abroad and leverage blackmail against his adopted homeland’s enemies—to continue to earn the fresh marks they have tattooed to his neck because it was not enough simply to be thanked—
“Thancred,” Ameliance says, again, and he for once does not know what is being asked of him. “Thancred, you have to hurry.”
Alisaie is shoved into his hold. She’s barely a year old, and he needs the hands that instinctively cradle around her to fight off the Imperial hoard literally breaking down their door. He has knives sheathed at his waist and arms full of a toddler fresh from her nap.
He starts to say, “Ameliance. You need to…” before he realizes he has no idea what she needs to do. The Imperials are here because Fourchenault is the on The Forum, the de facto ruling power of their humble republic. The Imperials are here because Louisoix has made a public spectacle of the Leveilleur name as an insurgent across Eorzea. The Imperials are here because she is here. They are looking for her, her husband presumably taken as a political hostage or worse—summarily executed—alongside what passes for an army in the damningly and evermore neutral, proud nation of Sharlayan.
Thancred should be with the militia, dying in the streets, but he is here on behalf of the family that, with only a slight sense of reluctant obligation, took him in and made their grand estate his brief home. Alphinaud is passed to him, too. He presses each child to his chest. It’s awkward, but the only way to hold them both at once.
“You have to go,” Ameliance says.
“You have to go,” Thancred replies. “Take the kids. I can hold the door.”
“They are looking for me,” she spits, enkindled with something furious and maternal and desperate.
He is starting to put the pieces together.
He says, “No.”
She says, “Thancred,” like that’s all she needs to fucking tell him. Like he’ll heed her unvoiced intention as a well-heeled dog might, because he has every time before.
He says, louder, “I won’t.” He says, deeply afraid, “I won’t, Ameliance. I won’t leave you. I won’t—I can’t.”
“Please,” she says. It’s all she says. Maybe he’s being too hard on her; maybe she cannot bring herself to ask what he realizes is being requested of him. “They won’t think to look for you.”
He’s a scruff of a plain, seventeen year old Hyur man and she is the beautiful Elezen wife of one of the most politically prominent man in Sharlayan, and the daughter-in-law to a known insurgent. She’s right and they both know it.
He scrunches his eyes shut. He says, “Fuck,” even though he knows she hates when he swears in front the children, even though they can barely babble for their mother. “Fuck. Help me find something to carry them. I won’t get far with my hands full.”
It’s settled without further negotiation. A stroller is out of the question. They arrive at the half-panicked solution of a sheet crossed around Thancred’s torso, each twin tucked close to his chest and strapped in the swathe of cloth. He feels as if he is swaddled himself, but he can reach for his knives and—if he doesn’t push his luck—he can probably maintain a light, quick step without one of them slipping free.
Ameliance ties the last of the fabric off and then, with a slow, even backstep, moves away from him. She looks frightened to be near him, suddenly. It’s as if she fears her mere presence will harm the children she has labored long and hard, before and after the birth, to bring into this world.
The door to the nursery bangs open, and a servant stands bowled over at the entrance.
The woman says, through gasped breaths, “My Lady,” and “they’re here,” and, “broke through the entrance seals.”
Ameliance’s face falls bitterly neutral. She says, “Tell the staff to lay down any attempt at arms and assemble. Our guests will want a headcount.”
“My Lady—“
“We’re surrendering,” Ameliance states, and that is the end of it. That is the end of all of it. A chapter in Thancred’s strange, neverending story closed. Another home stripped from him in a long line of roofs impermanent.
She looks back at Thancred, but he does not wait for his name nor the silent implications it may hold. He has his orders. He needs no further prompting.
Thancred wakes at dawn. It’s a beautiful morning in The Black Shroud, in the way mornings tend to be beautiful so deep in the woods around Gridania you can’t hear the bullets of Magiteck guns shooting at fauna venturing too close to the city gates.
The kids are still asleep. They’ve been sleeping a lot since they hit their first growth, so much so he worked up the nerve to ask the Elezen leader of the local Adventurer’s Guild if that was normal. (It was, apparently.) Alphinaud and Alisaie have their own tiny loft in their once-abandoned cabin, the closest he could manage to a separate bedroom with a single sack full of Gil he swiped from the family coffers before making his dramatic exit from Sharlayan. He’s had to work hard since then. He would do it all again.
He pulls himself from his bed and sets out for his morning tasks. Firewood first, the season was drawing colder and he wanted a stockpile. Then new arrowheads, he could never have too many on hand. A bow was essential to their foodstores and he often supplemented his sporadic work at the Adventurer’s Guild with fresh meat from the surrounding wildlife. Then he’ll make breakfast. That will wake the kids. The only thing the twins liked more than sleeping at the moment was food.
He handles his quota for split firewood for the day. He gets to work on the arrows. He uses an antler to sharpen stones to points and then fastens them to stiff, straight shafts. It’s a difficult art, but he’s gotten used to it. His cursory, indulgent stint as a bard in Sharlayan has honestly served him more than his espionage training since moving to The Shroud. He’s been putting the survival portion of his Archon mark’s designation to good use.
He’s on his third arrow when he hears a piercing scream break from the house.
It’s Alisaie. Alphinaud’s voice has been pitching deeper, recently, but even if it hadn’t Thancred knows the edges of Alisaie’s shriek. He bolts back for their home. He bangs open the door and takes the stairs to the loft two at a time. He nearly topples over in his rush—damn it, he’s out of practice, he needs to keep sharper—but he manages to bring himself to a stop with only a minor disgrace to his espionage training. A great parental instinct roars in his chest. He’ll blame his missteps on that.
Alphinaud is at Alisaie’s bedside, hands upon her, healing magic sparking weakly at his fingertips with inexperience and his own panic. Alisaie is sat up in bed looking very, very pale.
There is a pool of blood beneath her. It has soaked into the sheets. It is not a lot, but it is enough that she has raked up the hem of her nightdress to determine where it is stemming from. Her thighs are stained with a smear of red. Her smallclothes are blackened with the worst of it. She is very still. She looks very scared.
Ah.
“Help me!” Alphinaud yells, still attempting to blindly channel healing magic into her. “Thancred! She needs a chirurgeon!”
Thancred’s threatened posture relaxes but his expression falls to guilt. He has failed to warn Alisaie. He genuinely thought he had more time. He might be bad at this. All of this. “It’s alright,” he tells them, both of them, because Alphinaud is in a state and Alisaie appears to have made peace with her imminent death.
“It is not alright.” Alphinaud is yelling at him. “She’s bleeding out.”
“You are not bleeding out,” Thancred corrects, immediately, because Alisaie is trying so hard to not look frightened as it is. “You’re alright, Alisaie. This is normal.”
“Normal.” Alphinaud parrots.
“Alphinaud. I’m not talking to you.”
Thancred takes a seat on the end of the bed. He pats Alisaie, twice, on the leg. He doesn’t usually offer the two of them much in the way of affirmation, much less affection, much less physical affection, so he’s pretty sure he may have just confirmed to Alisaie she is indeed going to die. This close, he can see the wet rimming her eyes.
“It’s normal,” he echoes, just to her, and then attempts to explain.
Alisaie sits naked in the clear stream by their home. She still looks a little shocked from it all, but she’s evened out. Alphinaud is on breakfast duty. Thancred is washing the sheets and the nightdress in the river before they permanently stain. He scrubs at the red gruffly. She glances at him occasionally. Some of the horror in her has fallen to shame. She’s embarrassed. She has already washed herself but she looks reluctant to leave the running water, where the blood is swept away from her before she has to register it.
“Apologies,” she mutters, which makes him worry, because she is not usually the type to apologize unless he has demanded it of her.
“Part of my job,” he says. He often says such things: that this was a job, a mission, something that will be complete someday and he can move on as he always moves on. It’s been over a decade. He has no idea if her parents are alive. He’ll have to serve in place of her mother as much as he has served in place of her father. Washing moon-blood from sheets was not so different from washing the splatters from the clothes worn when he killed a target. All a part of the job.
She looks away from him. She asks, “When will it be over?”
He thinks on this. “A week, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
He confesses: “I don’t know, for Elezen.” He should honestly have looked into this before it inevitably crashed into him. He really thought he had more time. She’s overdue for a Hyur girl, but she’s not Hyur, and—he doesn’t have an excuse. He adds, “I don’t know when it will return, either.”
“Return,” she scoffs. “It will happen again?”
“For Hyur, it’s roughly every moon.”
“Every moon.”
She looks horrified. He expressed the base mechanics to her, assuring her all the more that this was normal, she was healthy, she was fine, she can have children, one day, but this part is the worst of the news to break.
“I am not doing this every moon,” she says, like she has any choice in the matter.
“It will stop, eventually.”
“When?”
Thancred has no idea how long Elezen can conceive. “End of forties, for Hyur. Maybe later for you.”
Alisaie snaps, like she once again has any choice in the matter, “No. Absolutely not.”
“It’s a sign of health.”
“Absolutely not,” she repeats.
“It will happen with or without your agreement,” Thancred replies. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
She settles back down into the water. It comes up to the tips of her shoulderblades. She looks like she never wants to leave its frigid embrace.
“I’m going into town,” Thancred tells her. “I’m going to get the details. I’ll let you know all I find out.”
“You’re going to tell someone about this?” She looks mortified.
“I’m going to ask a friend,” he says, “in confidence.”
“You’re going to tell someone about this,” she says, before dunking herself underwater entirely.
When she emerges for breath he is waiting for her.
“Elezen from the beginning of history have bled,” he informs Alisaie. “Your mother did before you.”
He so rarely brings up her mother. He tries not to mention the fact that they very much have parents, lest they assume their death, or worse: imagine them somewhere, beyond their grasp, waiting for their return while Thancred keeps them cooped up in a cabin. It’s easier to keep the parent situation on the precarious edge of yes, they exist, yes, they might be alive, but they also might not, so try and prepare yourself for either reality, the answer of which will not come unless the rest of Eorzea gets really interested in Sharlayan news from eleven years ago, so don’t get your hopes up for that either. It’s cruel and he knows it. What else can he do? They already stand out enough as the Hyur man with the Elezen twins living in the woods, of whom will buy any books that cross a local merchant’s wares for a decent price no matter the subject, and of whom will dodge almost any question posed of them but especially the ones about the mismatched kids.
“Your fingers are presumably pruning,” Thancred notes, when Alisaie doesn’t respond to him after a long moment.
“I don’t want to get out,” Alisaie says.
“We’ll get you a rag for between your legs and a drought for the cramps. You’ll be alright.”
“I don’t want children,” Alisaie states, sudden but sure.
Thancred understands. Thancred never wanted children either.
“That’s a decision you can make,” Thancred says. “Come. Alphinaud has breakfast ready by now, I’m sure, and he’ll be cross if it’s cold when we get back.”
Mother Miounne clicks her tongue at him when he comes for information unrelated to the many jobs, Imperial and citizen alike, she is tasked with assigning to adventurers.
“You should have asked me before it happened,” she says, and he knows that, “the poor girl deserved to know what was coming.”
“I’m asking now,” he says. “I told her what I know of Hyur women.”
“This is why you should be in the city,” Miounne says, like she has any idea of who he is and why he is in the woods at all. “They deserve to be near their own kind. It takes a village.”
There are Imperials in the city. Imperials that have no idea what two twin toddlers look like a decade later, and have probably long abandoned the search for them anyway, especially this far away, but he won’t risk it.
He gathers what information he can. He asks relevant questions, and departs with his haul. He feels weighed down by the maternal woman’s obvious disapproval. Alisaie deserves an Elezen to walk her through this. Alisaie deserves a mother.
His thoughts go silent when he steps onto the grounds of his home. He’s a tracker at heart, a bloodhound in nature, and he immediately notes the sink of small, heeled boots into the mud of his yard. They do not belong to either of the twins. He pulls his knives. He approaches his front door. He tries the doorknob—unlocked. Someone has been let in. Someone should not have been let in. Alisaie and Alphinaud know better than to receive guests when he is not present. He tries to think of reasons. Maybe they invited a friend over. Sometimes they socialized with the children of the local Miqo’te tribe. Maybe Alphinaud gave into his anxieties and actually called a chirurgeon.
He deftly steps into the main room, a combination of a kitchen and living space and also where his bed is tucked in the only corner the home can spare. There is indeed a Miqo’te at his dining table, but she is too old to be a young friend of the twins. She’s roughly his age, in that precarious tip of twenties into thirties. A mug of tea is in front of her. Alisaie sits across from her, and the strange woman is in the middle of presenting his child with something wrapped in cloth.
Thancred lifts a knife and, in a single, swift arc, sends it sailing at the head of the woman.
It embeds itself in the wood of the wall a few inches from her face. She startles.
“I won’t miss next time,” Thancred says, voice venomous. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Thancred!” Alisaie yells.
Alphinaud is in the kitchen, watching a pot. He calls out, “She knew the passphrase!”
Thancred taught them the Circle passphrase when they were young, to distinguish enemies from friends that never did come hunting for them. The woman’s sharp gaze sweeps to him. Her ears are tucked back in displeasure at the threat, but she’s—she’s familiar. She’s so startlingly familiar. The shade of her skin, the white of her hair. Sharp, knowing, green eyes. Her dress is Eorzean but the tattoos needled to her neck peek out from her collar. The frown. It has been over a decade, but he’d know that look of contempt anywhere.
“Y’shtola,” he says. He breathes it out and then doesn’t inhale. His chest struggles for air.
“Thank you for the warm welcome, Thancred,” Y’shtola says. She looks back at Alisaie. “Fold it like this. It will hold more.”
What he thought was a package in Y’shtola’s hand turns out to simply be a rag, creased with experience and in sympathy.
Thancred takes a stumble of a step forward. Y’shtola sighs, annoyed, and stands, inconvenienced, and then they embrace. He holds her tight to him. He holds her so tight he can’t imagine ever letting go. He does, though. He pulls back but keeps his hands on her shoulders—like she might slip away, like he might lose her again.
“You’re alive,” he says.
“I thought you were dead, too,” Y’shtola hums. “You seemed like the type to make a final stand.”
“Ameliance told me to take the kids.”
“I see that now.”
Sees that now—was she not there for them? Did she not come here looking for the twins? He’s been waiting over a decade for someone to come looking for the twins.
He must look confused, because she elaborates, “I came to visit my sister.” She nods to him. “She mentioned an Archon was living in the woods with two Elezen children. I think she intended to note a mere local character, but the description was too suspicious not to investigate. You should be more careful. Many know you’re out here.”
He looks at her blankly. “You’re here to visit your family?”
“Why else would I be in Gridania, of all places?” she asks.
“On Circle business.”
Her expression is perfectly neutral when she informs him, “The Circle fell with Sharlayan. What’s left of us are trying to keep our heads down and noses clean.”
“The twins,” Thancred says, further, voice pitching up. “You’re not here for the twins?”
She glances at Alisaie, who still holds the limp rag in her hand, and Alphinaud, who is neglecting the stove in favor of watching this conversation play out.
“Honestly,” she confesses, with very little tact, “I did assume they were killed with their mother.”
There is a still, horrid silence. Thancred feels a deep well of grief sink into his chest. Maybe it had always been there, maybe he had always known, but it makes itself present now—nauseous and cold. Ameliance, kind and gracious. Ameliance, who took him in as a brother even if her husband forbade the use of such terms. Ameliance, who cared for him when he was barely thirteen and she was barely a bride. Ameliance, who gave birth to the children he now had raised.
Alphinaud is the first to break into tears.
“Gods,” Y’shtola says. “You told them she was alive?”
“I didn’t know,” Thancred says, “Y’shtola, how could I have possibly known they were orphaned?”
Alisaie’s face is scrunched. Alphinaud is pressing his palms to his eye sockets. Fuck. He made the wrong call. He should have told them their parents were dead from the start.
“They are not anything of the sort,” Y’shtola says. “Their father is alive.”
A second blow hits him like the kick of a Chocobo to his chest.
“…What?” he croaks.
Y’shtola informs him, “Fourchenault is alive. He has been installed as a puppet in the bureaucracy of what is left of Sharlayan.” She mistakes his shock for disbelief of her assertion. She says, “I assume the Garleans wanted him as a figurehead to usher in the change of guard. I don’t claim to know his reasoning to agree, with a dead wife and presumed dead children, but I admit we haven’t kept in touch.”
Presumed dead. Thancred had, as always, simply been following orders. He never thought that their death would be assumed at default. No one has looked for them. No one has come for them because they did not know that they were alive. Has he in fact stolen them from their family? The two children suffer under Garlean rule, now, even here in the wilds of The Shroud. They could have been suffering under Garlean rule, there, beneath the roof of their father. They could have been raised and educated and loved in the comfort of their homeland, despite its occupation. Thancred has robbed them of that. He has ripped them from their beds and escaped to the wilderness and then chained them here for their entire lives. He didn’t—He did not intend for this. He thought he was protecting them. He thought he was doing the right thing.
“I,” he starts, as if to explain himself. “I did not—I thought—“ Realization of what he has done makes everything feel so fucking pointless. Ten years he has been a villain in a story of which he thought himself the hero. “Fuck. I have his kids.”
“You do,” Y’shtola says, never one for an extension of empathy. “They seem hale and whole, though. I’m sure he’ll appreciate you keeping them safe through the violence of the transition to Garlean rule, if a bit beyond.”
The intention was, their mother dead or alive, always to give them back. He always knew someone would come looking for the twins eventually. Their father. Extended family. The Circle that no longer existed. Someone. He always knew.
“It would be foolish to return to Sharlayan,” Alphinaud states, because everyone is thinking what Thancred is thinking: that they must return to Sharlayan. This misunderstanding must be made right. Alphinaud adds, “If our father has indeed been placed in such a precarious position, then we’ll be used as a pawn against him. I take no delight in playing the part of leverage.”
“Right,” Alisaie says, “announcing ourselves as alive will cause nothing but trouble.”
“They’re bright, aren’t they?” Y’shtola notes instead of agrees. “You’ve done fine by them.”
Done fine by them. Is that what he’s done?
“Their father does not know what has become of his children,” Thancred says. “That is a cruelty.”
“I can inform him of their status,” Y’shtola replies, “or,” and Thancred knows what the or is, “I am heading home at the end of the week. They are welcome to return with me.”
Something in his chest lashes out against this. It says: no. It says: not happening. It says: they are mine, they have always been mine, and they will never be anyone else’s. He takes a great, shuddering breath. He calms himself.
“Take them,” Thancred says.
“What?” Alisaie asks, sharp and shrill.
“No,” Alphinaud snaps.
Y’shtola lifts her brown in surprise at them. “Your father yet lives.”
“We do not know him,” Alphinaud states.
“And he clearly put in the legwork to try to find us,” Alisaie says, bitter, and—Thancred had no clue that is how they felt. Did they resent the fact that no one came for them? Do they hate him, now, for stealing them away too effectively?
Y’shtola does not seem particularly scandalized by this response. She says, “Very well.” She asks, “Shall I tell him you’re well, then, or would you prefer I keep him ignorant?”
“He doesn’t need to know, he can keep to his Imperial desk job,” Alisaie says at the same time Alphinaud replies, “He should know. I’m certain the lack of confirmation has haunted him.”
They shoot each other a harsh look.
Thancred breaks the tie: “Tell him.”
Y’shtola nods. “He’ll want to see them.”
“Then he can come visit,” Alisaie says, still sharp, still bitter.
“That’s his path to navigate,” Alphinaud agrees.
Thancred looks at them both. This is not—this is not their home. This is not even his home. This is a safehouse. This was always, always supposed to be temporary. Someone was supposed to come for them. Someone was supposed to come, years ago, but Thancred was too good at covering his trail and now he has stolen a childhood they deserved from them. Thancred has done his best but Thancred has never been a paternal figure, much less a father. Thancred has fed them but Thancred has let Alisaie scream about the unknown blood in her sheets. Thancred has protected them, all this time, but they are not Thancred’s to keep.
“Are you absolutely sure,” he asks them. They know what he is asking.
“Yes,” Alisaie says at the same time Alphinaud replies, “Certain.” This, it seems, they are on the same page about.
“You can change your mind,” Thancred tells them, “if you wake up one day, one moon, even next year, and you want to return to Sharlayan, I will drop everything and take you.”
Alisaie looks at him with a questioning gaze. “Return?”
“Return,” Thancred emphasizes.
“We’re not returning to anywhere,” Alphinaud states. “Why would we go back to a place we do not know? We have no memories of Sharlayan, nor our sire.”
Sire.
“Your father loves you,” Thancred tells them.
“You love us,” Alisaie notes, casual, like it is the most obvious fact in the room.
Thancred has never once told her or her brother that he loves them.
“I should return to my sister. It’s nearing dusk, and she was worried about me wandering outside the city late,” Y’shtola says. “I’ll let you three settle this amongst yourselves. Sleeping on it may bring some clarity, I’m sure.”
“Aye,” Thancred agrees, but says little more.
He embraces her, in goodbye, this time, but it feels hollow. He felt as if he was embracing the entire Circle before. It is just her, though, and he’s happy she’s alive, but it really is just and only him and only her and also the twins, the children that have never been his.
“Let’s get dinner before I leave,” she tells him, as if she is a distant colleague and not a once and always fellow rebel. She glances at his kids, and then back to him, and tells him, “You really have done well.”
He has not. Still, he nods.
The twins wish her a safe trip home and then she is gone. Thancred drags a hand over his face when he shuts and locks the door behind her. He keeps it there, shielding his eyes, applying pressure to his temples.
“…Thancred?” Alisaie broaches.
“Two moons,” he says.
“What?”
“Every two moons,” Thancred informs her, “for Elezen. Not one.”
“Oh,” she says, and then they’re quiet again.
Thancred has taken everything from them. They don’t even know what has been denied them; they don’t know about the mansion nor the servants nor the stern but adoring father. They don’t know about their aunts and cousins. They don’t know about the schools and the paved streets and the shitty food and the beautiful buildings standing taller than any ugly Imperial garrison surely erected beside them. They don’t know. They have never even seen the sea.
“Dinner’s almost done,” Alphinaud says, so quiet Thancred almost doesn’t hear him over the sound of his own, guilt-ridden thoughts.
“I love you both,” Thancred says, abruptly.
Neither of them seem struck by the confession he has never before made.
"I love you," Thancred says, "but you need to go home."
“This is home,” Alisaie says.
“This is home,” Alphinaud repeats, like it is the simplest concept to understand in the world and he is an idiot for balking at them for saying it.
This is not a home. These are not his children. He is no father. This was always supposed to be temporary.
What is he supposed to do now.