Snow Woman, Plains Woman

Title: Snow Woman, Plains Woman
Series: FE7/Rekka
Character/Pairing: Lyn/Florina, past nameless OMC/Florina
Word count: 2,129
Rating: R
A/N: kink meme, to the request of: Lyn/Florina; lactation. The reference here to the ‘snow woman’ is a Yuki-Onna, a spirit tale of Japanese myth.

--

Florina came to Lyn all tangled and wet after her husband’s death. An avalanche had claimed him, such a common death for Illian men. The snow woman had breathed her frosty breath and enclosed him in her twisting tendrils of ice-tipped pine needle hair. She’d enraptured him up until there was nothing but a frozen corpse somewhere in the mountains where wolves would pick at his bones. It was a common fate for Illian men, the ones who the pegasi didn’t choose and were left to fend for themselves on the gelid mountains.

Florina’s sisters understood when two months when there was no chance that his frostbitten-yet-alive body would stumble from the mountains. They knew, even as they held tight to husbands of their own. Illian women were strong, they accepted the harshness of death and clung to their pegusi as a last hope. Without a their flying steeds, they too might be left as bones for the carrion pickers.

And Florina knew as well. But unlike so many other Illian women, she had seen the sun. She had touched the plains during her girlhood and stayed there in the wildflowers with a girl with hair just as green as those stems. She did not, could not simply raise her chin and allow winter to steal every last thing from her.

So Florina took Huey and a leather bag and the clothes on her back . She was a good daughter and sister, she left a note and made a promise to write. She knew that she would never return or set her foot deep in the overpowering paleness about her. She would never hear the ice-covered crunching of snow under her feet or watch the children make snow riders with their crooked wings.

Winter turned to Spring, and Huey and Florina flew south, back to a land and a girl she had known in her younger years.

*


Lyn ran to greet her. She practically tore her friend off of her steed, gripped her so tight as to be
painful.

“You have to tell me everything, Lyn! You’ll have to introduce me to your family, and your children–”

“I never married,” Lyn replied.

“Not Eliwood?” Florina queried.

“He married Ninian. She bore him a son, and died shortly afterwards,” Lyn said. She softened with regret, and the memories that swirled between Eliwood’s loss and her own loss on her beloved plains.

“And Hector?” Florina prompted.

“He married some Etruian noble girl, I can’t remember who. She bore a child but has been in poor health since then.”

How many other stories of the war were lost, scattered to the wind? Some had married, like Rebecca and Lowen, Bartre and Karla, Serra and Erk. Others had vanished into other boots, names and faces, like Legault. None of them had remained the same after the was, least of all Florina herself. She wasn’t a shivering waif of a girl any longer, not one to cling to her friend’s coattails.

She embraced Lyn again, this time of her own accord. She was back home.

*

Florina had kept it a little secret, intending to tell him later but never finding the time. She thought he would be happy to know of the child of his that she carried. Her breasts swelled, her stomach too began to grow. About the size of a grapefruit now, but soon to melons and deep oval shapes. There would be no masking it soon.

But on the plains there are no talks of such things. The Sacae accept each child as a gift from the sky, a blessing from the earth. There are no whispers of the parentage, and if they should, Florina knew that Lyn would draw her blade to the first who dared to say such a thing.

Florina knew Lyn would, if it had happened that way. And she knew that she would do the same if it had been Lyn who came to her all frostbitten and mourning.

*

She slept in Lyn’s hut, and waded through the depths of the rolling green seas of plains about them. Memories lay deep here, and for Florina they were honey sweet. To Lyn they might have been more bitter tinged, but this was her home and she would not have it any other way. She would not let her parent’s ghosts left to wander without the offerings and proper burials to entomb them. She would not let their deaths be the end of a cycle.

Florina missed the pure whiteness of Illia sometimes, like the cloudlike softness of pegasus wings. She missed the comforting grey clouds, like a great wool blanket set about the lazy sky. She missed the mountains and the crisp cold air as it hit her lungs. She missed the pine trees encased in frost, slipping over the ice. But that nostalgia was too golden, she forgot the feeling of shuddering and breathing on her fingers to warm them. She forgot the frostbite, the shivering under blankets, the endless color blind days of winter.

Like an old lover, Illia beckoned with promises of change. The nights would be warmer, the fires would be enough to beat back the cold. The air missed her, the snow wanted for her.

But Florina chose this life, this love of plains and Lyn and whatever days this would entail. Not even her sisters could bring her back to the frozen wasteland she had once called her home.

*

In the nights Lyn massaged her back. It had begun to ache with the months she had accrued in this place. The weight of carrying the unborn child, now almost to the size of a small globe. Days were not the only things gathered, small intimacies, brief touches, and many other things came upon the nights. When they were younger they hadn’t known or perhaps it was just Florina who hadn’t known, perhaps Lyn knew all along and never quite said.

Lyn ran her fingers through Florina’s hair and the distance of the years were erased. Time had recompressed, and it felt like the time before. Before Lyn lost her family, before Florina lost her husband. The presence within her stirred, and Florina felt comforted enough to sleep. She did not want to lose this last thread, this last fleshly tie to him. And so it went for a long time until Lyn kissed her. When that happened, something within Florina was not surprised. She remembered her husband’s laughter, how he told her that Lyn had held him at swordspoint and told him if you ever hurt her, it’ll be my sword you’ll be meeting. She’d sworn on her honor as a Sacae, on Mother Earth and Father Sky. Florina had never questioned the times before, when they had flown and their pulses had skitted about, rattling stones, loud and impossible to ignore. She remembered the times when she had lived for Lady Lyndis and her alone, and she remembered them well.

And when Lyn kissed her, Florina kissed back. It was a natural progression from friend to servant to friend again to lover. It did not bear any rumination or second thoughts. The swell of her stomach was voyeuristic, her dead husband’s last lineage come to haunt her. Florina looked away, as shy as a virginal bride, though she had no need to be. Lyn took off Florina’s shirt carefully, as not to disturb her tender breasts. She traced over the swell of Florina’s stomach, two fingers made water-skater lines over where the seed of new life was germinating. She cupped Florina’s breasts, which were lactating the whiteyellow substance which filled her. She traced a bit of it over breasts and stomach, as if writing a letter to her ghosts or Florina’s or even the unborn child.

A woman knows a woman’s body, and Lyn and her had a skill of being synchronized, in tandem, like a pair of riders. Florina knew that in another life Lyn could’ve had her own pegasus and ridden in Illia and lost her husband as well to the icy reaches of the cruel mountains and the Snow Woman. But Lyn had been born this life, and Florina had chosen it with her. Lyn explored the reaches of the body, even one rounded from carrying another man’s child. She touched over Florina’s throbbing clit, kissed her breasts and her mouth and her stomach indeterminably. Lyn pressed fingers deep inside her until it was alike and unalike the first night with her husband. It was different, closer. This time there was no gnawing fear at the presence of a male body and male organs, no tensing or refusing to look at his erect organ. It was just Lyn, her, and the sleeping child as the hut about them kept their secrets. It was longer than it had been with her husband, with the thick intimacy of years worth of friendship rolled out like a sleeping mat. It was softer, Lyn’s bare breasts rubbing against her tender, milk wet ones. It was so different here in the plains, with Lyn inside her and kisses against her chin, her neck, her shoulder. Florina came, she floated down to the firmness of the sleeping mat made of animal skins, the fur tickled against her back. She floated down to the ache that remained at her back and in her chest, and the overwhelming shiver of pleasure that ran under and through her. It was no longer cold, for Spring had come.

*

Pegasi were not solitary creatures. Huey stomped nervously, it snorted at the sky, and looked to the clouds for more white as a sense of solace. Huey mourned for the country more than Florina did. Florina had a mate, while Huey was left alone. Pegasi were not solitary creatures, they did not do well outside a herd.

Two months later, two more small Pegasi were sent. They were young enough to accustom themselves to a world without the snowy white reaches that proved their camouflage. A whole new limb of the tree would be formed. Her and Huey’s children would roam these lands and their decedents and their decedents on. That lineage would always have the blood call to the color white, to cold days and the direction of north where the Snow Woman waited for them with her magnetic thrall. Maybe even some would go, headed by restlessness or love or simple chance. Not all could stay in the Sacae lands, surely they would fly to every corner of Elibe and beyond until those white feathers spread about like memories of the Snow Woman’s touch and song that was there lullabies.

*

Florina had wondered if the child would resemble him, but the creature came out wrinkled and red, with indeterminable hair. The little girl was a blank note, with no telling signs of the land she had been conceived in and the land that still clung tight in her veins.

Florina didn’t feel regret, for he would have wanted her to move on, and she suspected he always knew from the way his laugh seemed strained when she recounted her childhood adventures with Lyn. She’d thought it silly then, his being jealous of her female friend. It had been almost charming at the time.

But now it seemed clearer, as pristine as the pure water and the cloudless sky. Lyn held the baby up to Father Sky, sprinkled the hair of mother earth, as green as her own over the child’s forehead. She took it as her own child, as if it were her own blood and Florina was her own bride.

And Father Sky and Mother Earth took her on as a surrogate, adopted child. To the Sacae she was for all purposes, Lyn’s own and they treated her as if she had the same green hair as the Earth Mother herself. She was of the plains even if her blood betrayed her and the Snow Woman called her back into her fold with her frosty breath and her feathered wings. No Illian woman could completely hate the Snow Woman, for even as she stole their men she was the creator of the Pegusi. She formed them out of snow and breathed her frost-breath into them and gave them icy souls. But she was no longer an Illian, she stood and let the grass and dust fall from Lyn’s fingertips to her hair. She was crowned as one of the Sacae’s own, she was now Lyn’s, and no Snow Woman could take that away from her.