Chapter Text
The morning of the grand melee dawned bright and early, sunlight cracking through the shutters on Linhardt’s east-facing bedroom window. Even beneath the covers, curled into the tightest possible ball, barely conscious, he could already tell that it was a beautiful day outside. The kind of day you only got once a year, where the weather was just barely fall-crisp, a stiff breeze in the shade that kept the sun bearable, smelling of warm grass and with big, fat, cotton-puffy clouds in the sky.
It had to be.
He was too fucking hungover for it not to be.
At breakfast in the overcrowded cafeteria, there were no empty seats for his brain to fill with missing, half-remembered friends from another lifetime: between the Garreg Mach student body, parents and dignitaries from around the rest of Fódlan, and the entire visiting Almyran force there wasn’t even enough floor space to spit. Instead, he was able to fill seats with living friends. Ferdinand sat across from him, similarly hungover and unattractive in the way that only the deeply hungover can be, almost put together but just quite not put together enough to pass for anything other than exactly what he was. Khalid sat next to him, a solid, warm, and annoyingly chipper. The bastard was completely sober, as if he hadn’t had half a bottle of Almyran Badeh the night before and then proceeded to attempt to teach Linhardt and Ferdinand how to do a one-handed handstand and kicked himself in the nose hard enough to bloody it.
When Linhardt failed to finish his breakfast, picking over the fruit and half-cold fried potatoes, he hesitated.
On a normal morning, he would have taken his plate and tossed the remainder when his conversation with Hanneman had petered out.
Today, he had his friends here.
Linhardt slid the plate toward Ferdinand and Khalid, and within moments they’d wiped it clean, bickering with each other like they were fifteen years younger.
Afterward, Khalid swept off with a jovial bow, looking handsome in his gold brocade tunic and leather archer’s armguard, mounted his wyvern, and flew off to the Almyran side of the mustering line. Once more, they were divided over the lines of battle, but this wasn’t the kind where you fought to the death.
By midmorning it was growing to be a hot day, Linhardt’s medic’s tent humid despite the shade. What little breeze there was cut off at the walls, and sweat was dripping down the back of his neck beneath his hair even before lunch. The melee was to start officially after the noon bell rung, and in the silence in the minutes before the starting horn, Linhardt just sat on one of the cots and stared at his hands.
“Why am I here?” He asked, staring at his shaking hands, so pale that he could see the veins beneath his skin. “Why did I come back?” It was quiet. Part of his return had been to fill Manuela’s role as the head of the infirmary, and he had already treated his fair share of injuries—weapons were not forgiving toys. A blade, even a blunted one, could break bones.
B ut there was a difference between the sprained ankles and broken wrists of the training grounds and a child, bleeding from an arrow in the shoulder, shot in battle. Friendly or not, blades could kill. Bows could kill. Magic could kill.
That was why he had left. Edelgard had offered him an out, and Linhardt had taken it. He’d run away, buried his head in his books, and pretended the world hadn’t kept turning. He’d spent a decade inhabiting his past, even as everyone had moved on.
Linhardt still remembered the haunted, hollow look to Khalid’s eyes from his surrender at Derdriu ten years before. How he had kept reaching up to touch his face where Hilda’s blood had spattered when Ferdinand had ridden her down.
Last night, Khalid had drunk and played with Ferdinand like a brother. As if Ferdinand hadn’t ridden Hilda down like a boar on a hunt. When had his wounds healed? When had his raw heart once more scabbed over?
Edelgard had let Linhardt escape for so long that he had forgotten what being present meant, and that present was filled with the past. When he was with others, it dulled that pain, but alone in the silence but for the distant ringing of steel and the cries of battle, it was the War all over again. It was sitting in the healer’s tents when he got so jumpy from the front lines that he threw up with anxiety, pricked himself while giving stitches.
He should never have run away and hid.
(He should never have come back out.)
T he injured came in trickles rather than droves. A fighter here, a bloodied nose from a fist. A myrmidon there, strained tendons that left her limping and whining. An Almyran archer, who had been taken from her horse by a lucky javelin, a broken leg and a bruised shoulder remarkably little to write home about. One of the Faerghan squires, too young to yet join the battle properly, who had gotten heat-sick his first time in armor.
Ferdinand showed up at some point, his wrist sprained, and then went out again as soon as Linhardt had seen it better.
There were others who came and went, judges and soldiers, students and teachers. The afternoon wore on in dust and sweat, Linhardt’s throat dry when he forgot to drink, his back aching and his temples pounding with exhaustion.
“Professor Linhardt!”
Linhardt turned to see one of the gatekeepers, and leaning heavy on her shoulder was—
Hanneman.
His face was ghastly pale, his cane clutched in his free hand. His eyes were unnaturally bright, sunken and bruised, and he was panting. If the gatekeeper hadn’t been holding him up, he probably wouldn’t have been able to stand—the entire right leg of his pants was slicked flat with blood, his foot dangling, unnatural.
Linhardt moved without thinking, practically tripping over his feet. He didn’t even realize until he was halfway across the tent that he’d forgotten his cane, his bad hip immediately aching without the support, his leg dragging awkwardly at his step, his balance off. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
“Bring him here,” Linhardt snapped, his voice unrecognizable, ragged and shaking in his mouth. The guard staggered over to the nearest cot, helped Hanneman onto it, and it was closer to falling than sitting down.
Hanneman sobbed, clutching at his leg, and for a moment Linhardt stood—here, now, and there, then.
(A dark tent, cold, snow still on the ground from a late-spring frost, the smell of blood and iron and sweat in the air, the screams of the dead and dying in the air. On the wrong side of the battle lines, Linhardt separated from the Adrestian forces, caught up with the church, unnoticed for now. Manuela, halfway between hysterics and shock, Hanneman barely conscious on a bloodslick pallet. The snow around him is all red, his right leg laying beside him almost like it isn’t a part of his body any more. His skin is grey, his pulse visible, fluttering in his temples and his neck.
His breaths are so shallow and weak they barely make clouds in front of him.
There is white bone standing out in his thigh, at the top of his hip. Mud caked to his pants and his robe. He’s conscious, his teeth grit, his eyes wide and unseeing.
Linhardt smells bile and blood and worse.)
His hands shook for a moment, and he stilled them by force. Linhardt bit his lower lip until he tasted blood, shook away ten years ago. He pulled the tie from within his pocket, knotted his hair up into a tight bun, pushed his bangs out of his face.
This was no time for holding onto the past.
Linhardt undid the buttons of his coat, tossed it aside, and rolled his sleeves up. He hadn’t napped all day, despite his exhaustion, and it dogged at him now, dragged him down, dulled his senses.
“Bring me a basin of water and my tome,” Linhardt snapped at the first person who would listen to him, not taking his eyes from Hanneman. He knelt beside the cot, coaxed the other man to stick his leg out, and caught the curse that Hanneman hissed, wheezing between breaths.
Linhardt sliced the leg of his pants open from ankle almost to groin, and spat a curse of his own when he found the site of the injury. The puncture wound had both entered and exited, and unfortunately, the offending weapon hadn’t been left in to staunch the blood. “Javelin,” Hanneman whispered, voice grating in his throat. He shook as Linhardt washed his hands in the basin someone handed to him, t ook the cloth atop it and began to wipe away the blood. “It was an accident.”
Linhardt pretended he didn’t see the old scars that ringed the puncture wound, the ones that started at the top of Hanneman’s hip joint and then vanished beneath his smallclothes. The ones that he still remembered making, every stitch seared into his memory.
“Did they pull it out?” He asked, not looking up, cleaning away small splinters and blood. Hanneman nodded, jerky out of the corner of his vision. “It missed the bone,” Linhardt murmured, lips pursed. Focus. Focus on his hands. Focus on his motions. Focus.
( Shattered bone. Screaming . Hoofprints. Bruises. Blood.)
Javelin wound. Wood. Linhardt had treated dozens, caught between chinks of armor. Usually, he picked them out himself after the shafts had been snapped, let them hold the blood in. They’d likely had to pull Hanneman free of it, if it had pinned him down.
Sweat beaded on Linhardt’s forehead, dripped down into his eyebrows, burned his eyes. He blinked it away. He wiped blood onto the pages of his tome as he turned between them, channeling magic through the ink. It buzzed against his hands, numbing tingles like cool water. Like always, it woke him right up, burned the doze of narcolepsy away. It left him exhausted, the magic draining him of energy even as it sharpened his focus, as if he was using it to treat himself. Anything that could even vaguely be considered illness or pain was fair game for healing magic; it magnified the body’s own latent healing.
It woke Linhardt up, but he’d regret it later. He always did. Nights spent restless, afternoons spent passed out facedown on tables.
A hand, set on Linhardt’s shoulder, stilled him. He looked up and found Hanneman staring down at him, his eyes tired and his expression pinched, but he looked—steadier. “You can leave the rest,” he said, and Linhardt pressed his fingers over the wound just barely knit shut. “It will heal from here on its own.”
In the last ten years, Hanneman’s skin had grown thinner, more papery. It was warm under Linhardt’s fingers. He tried not to shake, kneeling between Hanneman’s thighs, hands covered up to the elbows in the other man’s blood.
Linhardt rested his forehead, exhausted, against Hanneman’s other knee, his leg warm through the cloth of his pants. He stared, unseeing, at the dirt below, blood speckling it here and there. Just dirt. No snow.
His jaw felt tight, aching.
“Linhardt,” Hanneman said, softly. His fingers hesitated, and then settled, cool on the back of Linhardt’s neck. “I’m all right.” Linhardt trembled. He bit his lip again, shut his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it when no words were forthcoming, just tried to breathe. Weathered his panic attacks the same way he had for ten years: as if nothing was wrong, because someone had to act as if nothing was wrong.
“That day,” he finally whispered, his voice dry. “In Faerghus.” He swallowed, tried to clear his throat. “Caspar died.” Hanneman said nothing. Waiting. “Because I wasn’t there.” He had come back and Edelgard had been forced to pull Linhardt off of Caspar’s body. He didn’t remember any of it, except for the freezing sleet and the way his throat felt raw and his chest felt empty, scooped-out. “If I had been with Edelgard, Caspar would have lived. But you would have died.”
Hanneman’s fingers pressed into his skin, gentler now. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m a poor replacement.” Linhardt shut his eyes tighter, as if by doing so he could stave off tears. As if he could keep himself from crying, his heart racing so fast the fingers of his left hand were numb, stop the panic that had frozen him, locked him to the ground kneeling where he was. “ Forgive me for being selfishly glad you saved my life.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Linhardt replied, half-sob half-whisper, and he felt Hanneman bow his head above him, pull him close, cradling him in a half-hug. “It was my fault.”
“No,” Hanneman told him, fingers carding through his hair. “No. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” Linhardt shut his eyes tighter. Bit his lip again, tasted blood on the back of his tongue. “Not yours. Not Edelgard’s. Not mine. Not even Rhea’s.” Linhardt had begun to cry, clutching one-handed to Hanneman’s remaining trouser leg, doubled over and sobbing into the cloth. “I’m sorry,” Hanneman said again, softer, and it was easy to pretend there was nobody else there, because Linhardt wasn’t in a tent in Garreg Mach in 1196, he was bent over a straw pallet in Faerghus as snow fell, needle and thread in his hand while Manuela’s voice shredded in her throat, worn raw from singing magic until she collapsed; he was screaming and clawing red welts into Edelgard’s skin as she and Hubert held him back from trying to throw himself into the pyre with Caspar’s body, tears salty on his tongue, his chapped lips cracked and bleeding.
“I loved him,” Linhardt admitted it for the first time, fingers shaking as he held onto Hanneman’s knee, onto Hanneman’s hand, narrow, graceful fingers cool in his own. He sobbed. “I loved you.”
“I know,” Hanneman murmured, brushing the hair back from Linhardt’s face. His smile gentled his voice, kindness and affection mingled as one. “I know.”