Chapter Text
He isn't sure how long it had been since he left for Mount Ordeals. Time was a difficult beast to track on that cold barren rock and it's passage only marked by the familiar rise and fall of the sun as well as the waxing and waning of the now singular moon.
So naturally, Kain felt out of place standing in the empty throne room of Castle Baron. Feeling more akin to the shambling bodies often found on the mountain he now called home.
He was ushered in earlier upon his arrival by an attendant and instructed to wait for an audience from the King and Queen. So here he waited. Alone with his warring thoughts.
It was cold, he noted. The attendant had been dressed warmly, layered with clothes and thick gloves. Perhaps it was closer to winter? It was always snowing on Mount Ordeals, and he had grown accustomed to his own frigid armour that it never occured to even consider the climate outside of the mountain.
Kain drops his gaze to the red carpet beneath his armoured feet, his mail clinking softly in the silence.
So cut off from the rest of the world, he truly had no sense of time of the year.
Perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps he should leave while he still had ti--
"Mother, I want to continue training today--!"
The doors abruptly bursts open and Kain spins around on his heel, excuse already caught in his throat only to stare straight into the eyes of a child. For a brief, terrifying moment, he thought he was looking back into the eyes of Cecil from so many years ago.
The memory fades and he blinks back into the present. The boy stares back in surprise, a wooden blade in hand. He looked seven, perhaps even eight. Sporting the same shock of pale hair his father had as well as his mother's soft eyes.
He had been gone.
For that long.
It's more than he can take, before he's quickly striding past him and out the door.
"Kain, wait!" A frantic lilting voice abruptly freezes him in his tracks.
Kain ducks his head, hiding his gaze in the visor of his helmet as a petite woman hurries past him to the boy.
"Ceodore dearest, return to your quarters,"
"Who's that, mother?"
"Ceodore, now."
The boy squeezes past him, casting him a curious glance before scuttling out of the throne room.
The silence that follows is suffocating.
For most of his life, anxiety had always been an alien concept. The Commander of the Baron Dragoons wielded confidence as naturally as he wielded a spear. That is, until the day Golbez pried his psych apart to lay the darker pieces of his heart out for the world to see.
Since that day, anxiety dogged his heels like a shadow.
And on this, cold, godless day, as Rosa approached him from the back, he had never felt it loom larger over his head like a guillotine.
"Kain..." came her gentle voice.
"I apologise for my intrusion, my Queen. I was just about to take my leave,"
A dainty hand comes to rest on his gauntlet, her soft touch pinning him in place.
She tuts dismissively, "Oh, posh! How long have we known each other for? I've missed you." Her voice grows misty,
"We've missed you..."
Something crumbles in his cold bitter heart, crying out.
I've missed you both too.
Yet this isn't what he's here for, isn't it? What was he here for? His gauntlet chinking as he clenches his hands into fists. Rosa pulls back a little, and the cold barren thing in his heart reaches back out to her desparately.
Come back.
And like all monsters, it had to be slain. With strength normally reserved for eichons, he takes a sharp deep breath and puts one foot in front of the other. Steeling himself past the sound of Rosa pleading for him to stay. He only makes it out of the throne room's bounds before his path is barred by a figure in white armour.
Kain is quick to duck his head once more, careful to avoid eye contact.
"Kain...?" Even as a child, he always was so soft spoken.
"Surely you are not leaving, already?"
Keeps his gaze trained on a spot in the pavement between them and remembers to breathe evenly. His armour had never felt more like a vice around his chest.
"Forgive me, My Lord. I have been away from my training for far too long."
The words feel squeezed out of him. Yet his King steps closer, and he tries not to fly into a panic.
"Kain..." his voice is as sweet as he remembers it.
"Will you not stay the night? We haven't seen nor heard from you in years, old friend."
The longing in his voice, surely a conjuration of his own darkest desires, Kain grits out a painful, "No, sire."
He has to leave. He has to leave, quickly. The sudden contact of soft fingers on his face snaps his eyes back up to meet Cecil's gaze. His eyes, sorrowful.
"Please, speak to us," the King of Baron, begs the outcast dragoon.
And it's the last straw that sends Kain ducking out of Cecil's hold, past the guards and into the chilly evening. The moment he reaches the open, he leaps into the air and away. Deaf to any and all pleading.
No one needed to know of his escaped shadow from Mount Ordeals. He would shed this cursed armour that choked him from the inside out and chase the demon of his own making down himself or die trying.