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“No one’s seen you in days. I should have known I’d find you here. What better place for a beast?”
The rest of the monastery is asleep at this hour, but Glenn was always dedicated. It’s not so surprising that he would be the one to find Dimitri here.
No one will leave him alone when he comes here in the daylight. They’re always asking him questions he doesn’t care about. But he can’t neglect his training. Not if he’s to give the so-called Emperor the bloody death she deserves.
Glenn stalks in, unsheathing his sword. “Come on, boar,” he says. “Let’s fight. Perhaps that will knock some sense into you.”
As ever, Dimitri can rely on Glenn. Thinking and talking are no good. Crossing blades is the only thing that matters anymore. “All right,” Dimitri says. “I’ll prove to you that I’m strong enough.” He levels his lance at Glenn. It’s been an extension of Dimitri’s arm since he was young, but it feels different since the Kingdom fell. Since then, the lance has become something hungry. His hand aches when left empty for too long. “I’ll crush her for you. I swear it.”
“Please,” Glenn says with a scoff. “If you were strong enough, you wouldn’t be looking at me like that. Like a ghost.” He lunges. Dimitri knocks him back easily. Glenn never used to be reckless on the battlefield or in training. What’s left of him has none of that caution. Dimitri supposes being slaughtered will do that.
Knight though he was, Dimitri bested him more often than not. Glenn used to laugh it off. Of course, he never laughs anymore. “Come on,” he snarls. “Where’s the beast? Don’t pretend. You’ve never fooled me.”
“I told you. When I find her, I’ll rend her limb from limb.”
Glenn knocks his next strike back and darts in close. He slams Dimitri against the wall, elbow to his collar, sword pointed straight at Dimitri’s heart. “I should gut you here and now,” he says. “We’d be better off without you. Your recklessness is only going to get us all killed.”
“I promise,” says Dimitri. His head hit the stone; his ears are ringing. But even when he can’t think, there are things he knows are true. “I promise I’ll kill her for you.”
“Dimitri.” Glenn never sounded so wretched before he died. “Can you even hear me? Has the beast truly consumed you? Am I just talking to a corpse, wasting my time the same way that you are? How pathetic.”
“Perhaps,” says Dimitri. He laughs, nearly choking on air as he does so. “But corpse or no, I will complete my task.”
“The dead don’t walk, Dimitri. They lie in their graves and feel nothing. Any vengeance you find will be hollow. No matter how much you pretend, you are alive, and so am I.”
“Glenn—”
Glenn fists a hand in his hair, shaking him. “Look at me,” he says. “Glenn is dead. I’m what’s left. Look at me, you bastard.”
Dimitri does. Glenn’s eyes are hollow, his mouth drawn, but his gaze is as sharp as ever. Dimitri has felt the accusation in it like a blade for these past five years.
“I’ll join you when I can. Once I have her head. I never meant to leave you alone—”
“Damn you,” says Glenn, desperate like the moments before he burned. He kisses Dimitri viciously, biting at his lip. The pain is the brightest thing Dimitri’s felt in years.
He jerks back, but Glenn—but Felix—won’t let him go. Felix snarls and bites him again, his fingers digging into Dimitri’s scalp.
Dimitri yanks out of his grip, panting. His lance is on the ground, Felix’s sword beside it.
“I never meant to leave you alone either,” Felix says. He wipes at his mouth angrily. His hand comes away red. “But you never gave me a choice.”
“Felix.” Was his voice that rusty before? Why didn’t he notice?
“Hello, boar. Are we among the land of the living now?”
“As much as we ever are.”
“Don’t talk like that.” Felix shoves Dimitri by the shoulders, forcing him against the wall again. He could stand his ground if he wanted to; he’s much more solid than Felix is. But it doesn’t seem worth the effort. “You’d know if you were dead.”
Dimitri tips his head back, staring up at the ceiling. The world seems to tilt. It’s only solid when he looks back down at Felix. “Would I?”
“Five years, boar. Five years I spent sure that you were gone like the rest of them.”
Dimitri shuts his eye. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sorry.” Felix’s voice is flat.
“I never meant to haunt you.”
Felix laughs. “You didn’t. I’m not like you. I bury my dead.”
It isn’t true. The dead won’t stay buried; they dig their claws into your flesh and they never let you go. Dimitri learned that the day he watched his family die.
He remembers the way Glenn looked at him as he burned. He tried to tell Ingrid years ago. There was no nobility in it. Only anguish.
It’s what he sees on Glenn’s face now when he looks at Dimitri. Like it’s killing him all over again to face what he’s become.
Dimitri lets his head hang down. He laughs. “Do you remember your first assignment?”
Glenn gets a hand in his hair again, forcing Dimitri to meet his eyes. He’s gone tense, as if he’s waiting for a fight. “At the monastery?”
“As my knight.” Glenn was at the Officer’s Academy long before Dimitri’s time. “Those bandits attacked us on the road, while we were traveling to meet my father. You defended me admirably. I remember I couldn’t take my eyes off you, the way you swung your sword. You said it was the first time you’d ever killed someone. You said…” He trails off, waiting for Glenn to pick up the story. But he only stares at Dimitri with dying eyes. “You said you thought you’d feel the blade as if you were the one being cut. That your swordmaster warned you it would be like that the first time. But instead you felt nothing. Just the satisfaction of a job well done. You thought there must be something wrong with you. I told you there wasn’t. I told you that you saved me, that someday I wanted to be just like you. You ruffled my hair, remember?”
“You were there the first time I killed someone, Dimitri,” Glenn says. “It was an assignment from Rhea. The professor was there. It was only five years ago, boar, surely you remember.”
“I admit,” says Dimitri, “once you died, I was a little envious. To kill and feel nothing...I wish I could live like that.”
“To kill and feel nothing is the curse of the Fraldarius men,” snaps Glenn. He reaches up and grabs Dimitri by the back of the neck, none too gently. He bares his teeth. “Even a beast should feel something when he kills.”
“I do,” Dimitri says, and then Glenn yanks him down into a kiss. Dimitri thinks he wanted that once, more than anything in the world. He can’t remember when.
No, he can—it was in the monastery. Felix leveled his practice sword at him with a sneer, and Dimitri knew it quite clearly, before brushing both the sword and the thought aside: he looked beautiful like that, cold and haughty and deadly. His hatred did nothing to diminish that. Dimitri could dart in, get past Felix’s guard. Watch the way his eyes would widen. Kiss him quickly, before he could bite. Ask if it was the sort of thing a beast would do, before Felix would wipe his mouth and storm out.
He never could have done it, of course. It was one of the parts of himself that Dimitri had learned to fear: what Felix called the beast, and what Dimitri could only think of as his ever-hungry heart, possessive and yearning. It wanted Felix to look at him with something other than scorn. It wanted Felix to smile at him, and tell him he wasn’t broken inside. It wanted Felix to lie.
Dimitri kept it tucked away. He remained polite and distant. It was the only thing he could do.
Felix is kissing him now, his grip tight at the base of Dimitri’s neck, his nails digging in deep. Dimitri gasps, feeling them like fresh cuts.
He drags Dimitri’s collar aside and bites him hard on the shoulder, worrying at the skin. “Don’t you dare look away,” he says. “I’m right here.”
Dimitri laughs. “I don’t understand why,” he says. “You made it quite clear, all those years ago, exactly what you thought of me. You should leave me in peace.”
“You’ve always been a fool.” Felix bites him again, lower down along his collar. “That beast stole my friend from me. And I wasn’t strong enough to get him back.”
“I’ve only ever been me,” says Dimitri.
Felix grips Dimitri by the arms, dipping his head. He sways forward like his strings have been cut, pressing his forehead to Dimitri’s chest. “I wish I could say that I won’t let you go again.”
Glenn gets like this, sometimes: regretful and clingy. He comes to Dimitri and apologizes, over and over, for leaving him behind. He begs him to do what Glenn cannot, anymore.
Dimitri gathers him close, burying his nose in Glenn’s hair.
“It’s alright,” he says. “There’s nothing to forgive. I promise it won’t be for nothing.”
Glenn had gone pliant in Dimitri’s arms, but at that he pulls back, a sneer on his face. Cold and deadly and beautiful. It reminds Dimitri of someone. “What won’t?” he demands. “My death?”
Dimitri nods.
Glenn throws his head back and laughs, an awful, hollow sound. Just the kind of laughter you’d expect from the dead.
“Are you trying to lose your head, boar?” he growls. He leans up, cupping Dimitri’s face in his hands. It’s a little like how Dimitri imagines it will be when he does the same to that woman, when he rips her head clean off. “Of course it’s Glenn,” he spits. “I knew you liked him.” They’re so close their noses brush. “I was so jealous. I think Sylvain is the only one who noticed. Sometimes I thought—it should have been me that died for you. Then I’d be the one you spoke of with such reverence.” He presses up on his toes to kiss Dimitri, soft this time, unbearably so. “Who knows. Maybe I still will.”
He grabs Dimitri by the shoulders and spins, knocking his legs out from under him and following Dimitri down. Felix lands heavily in his lap, but he snarls when Dimitri reaches out to steady him. He never stops moving. He levers himself up on an elbow and kisses Dimitri savagely, shoving his hand up under his shirt and dragging his fingernails roughly across his skin.
“Is this what it takes, then?” he says hotly. “If I hurt you enough, will you stay here with me?”
“Felix,” he says, trying to remember, and Felix kisses him harder in response, shuddering when Dimitri reaches up to touch his face. He sits back on his heels and presses Dimitri down with a hand to his chest, panting.
“You want to forget who you are,” he says. “I won’t let you. The beast can’t have you.” He leans forward and kisses Dimitri again, a hand in his hair and the other at his heart.
When he bites at his jaw, Dimitri tips his head back and says his name.
All at once, he shoves Dimitri away and throws himself back, scrabbling away in the sawdust. Dimitri sits up dizzily, reaches out a hand, trying to hold on, but he flinches away.
“Don’t touch me,” he says, shaking his head furiously. “No. No, we’re not doing this.”
“I’m sorry.” Dimitri swallows, takes a breath. His heart is hammering in his chest. “Don’t leave me alone.” It’s awful when the ghosts are here. But it’s so much worse when they’re gone.
“Tell me my name.”
“What?”
“Tell me my name. Say it, and I’ll stay. I’ll even get down on my knees for you if you want. Just tell me my name.”
Dimitri opens his mouth. His vision swims. He knows the right answer, but it’s like a lance just out of his grasp. He knows from experience how hard it is to hold a weapon when your hands are covered in blood.
Glenn sneers at him. “Nevermind. I should leave you among the dead where you belong.” He stands, dusting off his knees, and he turns and walks away.
Dimitri should go after him. Stop him. Maybe this time he can save him. But his legs fail when he tries to stumble forward, his hand reaching out and grasping at nothing. He falls. Nine years, and still he can do nothing when someone tries to leave him.
His head hangs. He balls his hands into fists against his knees.
Gloved fingers lift his chin. Dimitri raises his head, and Glenn looks back at him. His eyes are hard now, exactly what Dimitri is used to. Exactly what he deserves.
“Don’t concern yourself with trivial things,” he says acerbically. Glenn never did have any patience. But his hand on Dimitri’s jaw is so light he can barely feel it. “Nothing else matters but her.”
Dimitri presses his lips together. He can’t taste the blood, but he can feel his pulse pounding. His shoulder aches. There was something else, wasn’t there?
Glenn grabs him by the hair and shakes him, hard enough that Dimitri has to blink back tears. It’s better, though: Glenn is right. He can’t afford to lose focus. “Kill her,” he snaps. “Did I mean anything to you? You said you wanted to be like me. Kill her or you never will. Kill her or I’ll never forgive you.”
“Yes,” says Dimitri, to the empty room. “You’re right.”