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i.
Ingrid’s been having this strange dream.
She’s standing in the middle of a wasteland. Glenn is there, and he has his knight’s helmet tucked under his arm. The horrible, awful thing is that he looks older—he’s taller, his eyes are sharper, his face is smoother. He looks older, the way he never will be. His mouth is moving but Ingrid can’t hear anything he says.
After a moment, she asks, “When will I see you again?”
Glenn’s eyes turn sad now, and all of a sudden he’s the boy who died—the one who left her and Felix and everyone else behind. There is something burning in his gaze, but Ingrid cannot figure out what it is. He opens his mouth, but Ingrid cannot decipher the silence that comes out.
He talks, and she does not hear a word of it.
ii.
Sylvain is worried about her. This is funny, because she’s always been the one to chase after him, to clean up his messes, to yell at him to pay attention in battle. This time, though, he’s the one to yank her aside, take her in worriedly.
“Are you okay?”
Ingrid frowns, crosses her arms. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sylvain’s gaze flicks to her side. “You’re bleeding, Ingrid,” he says quietly, and that’s when Ingrid registers the wound.
Her right side is completely drenched in blood. She reaches down, probes the wound with her fingers absentmindedly. It should hurt, but all she feels is cold, reaching into her bones and under her skin. For a moment, all she can do is stare at her bloody fingers, fascinated by the color. It’s brighter than anything she’s ever seen.
Sylvain curses. “Come on, Ingrid,” he says, and his voice is so low that Ingrid almost laughs. She’s never heard him this worried, not really. Then again, the stakes weren’t always so high.
Mercedes heals her, of course. A battle rages around them and the sky almost splits in half, yet Mercedes is calm and composed, her white magic filling Ingrid’s wound with warmth. Sylvain stands in the back, jaw clenched, arms folded. Ingrid wants to tell him to leave, to go save other people’s lives, but he stays until the wound is completely stitched up.
When Mercedes is done, she leans back. “Ingrid, I do not mean to sound rude,” she says, voice sweet, eyes fearful, “but that wound was quite deep. How did you not…register it?”
Ingrid glances at her torn uniform. Even though the wound is gone, she can still see the blood on her uniform, on her hands.
“I don’t know,” she answers, and when she hears Sylvain sigh, she knows the truth was not the right answer.
iii.
Glenn talks in her dreams again. It is nonsense, all white noise. Ingrid’s right side hurts, the way it didn’t in battle. When she looks down, there is blood trailing down her sides, her arms.
“Am I dying, Glenn?” she asks him. He closes his mouth and does not say anything.
iv.
There is blood on Ingrid’s hands again. The difference is that she is not on a battlefield, it is late at night, and her skin aches the way it never has.
She scrubs her arms with a wet rag, trying to relieve herself of it. Her brain wanders back to the battle the other day, where her right side was a mess of red. The funny thing is, she does not remember how she got that wound. Nor does she remember ever dismounting her pegasus, staggering through battle with only her lance. It seems as though it happened in a dream, except the blood on her uniform is very, very real.
She washes the blood again. It doesn’t seem to leave her hands. She doesn’t know where this came from—she did not scratch herself in her sleep, did not toss and turn. In her head, Glenn is gazing at her sadly, his eyes full of knowledge that he could not give. Ingrid wonders if it’s her death sentence. She doesn’t want to know.
So she keeps scrubbing. Scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing until her skin aches, until she hears a knock at her door. Sylvain.
“Are you okay? What are you doing?” a pause. “You’ve been in there all afternoon. The day’s almost over.”
Almost over. So it’s not night after all. Ingrid slumps against her door, and wonders how time slips through her fingertips without her noticing.
“Fine,” she says through the door. “I’m fine.”
If Sylvain hears the catch in her voice, he does not say anything. Ingrid closes her eyes, and sees red.
v.
Glenn didn’t die in a war. Had he, it would’ve been another knight’s tale, one to chalk up to the fairytales. But Glenn died alone and in a tragedy, and that is the worst of it. Ingrid thinks.
“Did you know you were going to die?” Ingrid asks him. “Did you ever suspect it?”
She asks questions all the time, yet expects no answer. Still, Glenn tries. His mouth is a wicked thing, and she longs to hear his voice again—but she can’t. Glenn only raises his hand and talks silently, into the void.
Ingrid glances back at her fingertips. They’re dripping red. She is always covered in red when she sees Glenn, and she doesn’t know if this is a warning sign or not. She wants to ask someone, but she doesn’t know who. Sylvain is worried and she would turn to him first, but he could never understand the grief, or the symbolism of all this. Felix would lash out, leave deeper scars in her that both of them would regret. Dimitri is too consumed by his own ghosts to notice.
“When will I die, Glenn?” Ingrid asks. He shakes his head and says something, but a barrier still separates them. Still, he tries, and his mouth makes shapes she cannot hear.
She can pretend he is saying her name.
vi.
The thing about dying in a war: it is not as romantic as the stories made it out to be.
When the arrow skewers through her chest, Ingrid is aware of it. She is aware of the blinding pain, of the blood streaming down her chest in an almost perfect line. She is aware when another arrow slams into her body, adds a heavier weight. She is aware when the third arrow drags gravity back to her, hooks deep into her and brings her back to the ground.
She is aware of it. But she does not feel it.
The earth slams into her spine, and she rolls over, limp and hurting. On the other side of Gronder Field, somewhere in the distance, she hears Sylvain scream her name, hears Felix gasp, hears Dimitri cry Edelgard’s name—but she also hears someone else. Someone dead, someone who she hasn’t heard for awhile now. Someone asking to her look up.
So she does, with the last of her strength. Instead of the sky, she sees Glenn. The horrible thing is that he’s a boy again, and it strikes Ingrid how young he was, when he died. She had a few more years on him in the grand total of things, but here they are, both dead and young.
“Now, Ingrid,” Glenn says, and she doesn’t know if it’s an illusion or not. She just clings to his words. “Now.”
Ingrid’s mouth tastes like blood. Now, she thinks. Now I am about to die.
She clings to that word until the cries of a war fade away, until she hears nothing but the awful silence that haunted her dreams. She closes her eyes.
In the distance, someone calls her name.