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“Will you sing me something, Edelgard?” Her voice is frail, thin and weak, and when she coughs the sound is wet. The grip of her fingers is loose around her wrist, a feeble manacle. The warmth bleeds from them as the moments pass, but her eyes are still bright. Expectant.
“I wasn’t trained to sing, Lysithea.” From when she could bear the weight, she was trained to hold an axe, to press forward without mercy and to not stop until the enemy could no longer rise. Any softness was stamped out of her early. She was separated from her siblings when it became clear that she was the best of them, and without their presence there was little to focus on except improvement and the satisfaction of bringing down the next, stronger training partner in the string that was provided.
“Please? You should do as I ask, I’m dyi—”
“Alright, just, give me a moment.”
The song she picks is a lullaby that she remembers from a lifetime ago along with a hand carding through the locks of her brown hair. It sounds wrong in her own voice, not at all comforting, and on the higher notes her voice cracks.
When she finishes there’s silence, before a choked bout of laughter that trails off into a series of anemic coughs.
“That was terrible,” Lysithea says, but the smile she is wearing is sweet though flecked with blood. There is a tense moment where she thinks it will end, that Lysithea will stop struggling through breaths, and the fingers around her wrist will fall. But, she is strong willed, and it seems determined to say one last thing. “Find Claude, okay? He’s still out there.”
He is. His face isn’t one that had appeared in the sky accompanied by the sound of a canon.
“Would you like me to give him a message?”
“Tell him that I won’t forgive him if he dies, and… that I’m not mad that he treated me like a kid. I know he was just trying to protect me.”
“I will.”
It startles her, the warm track of tears down her own face. She had told herself that she wasn’t going to cry, that no matter what happened she wouldn’t give President Seiros the satisfaction of seeing her weak. But here she is, bent over Lysithea’s body, shaking apart.
“I won’t forgive you if you die either, you know. So, stop crying. Claude and I got separated at the cornucopia so start there. He’ll come out of hiding if he knows it’s you, and he won’t shoot.”
She wants to ask why Lysithea would think that. They are all enemies here, and she has had little interaction with Claude other than at the parade when his eyes had slowly raked over her form before he had grinned and said ‘Nice getup, Princess.’ She had wanted to say that it wasn’t her doing, that it was Manuela who had designed her and Hubert’s costumes. But by the time she had gotten the words together he had gone presumably to bother the other tributes with his infuriating smile.
The light in Lysithea’s eyes fade, her fingers now cold and rigid. She knows from experience that she does not have much time left. Minutes, maybe.
“I promise I’ll find him.”
“Good.”
“Lysithea I—”
“I’m not scared. I knew this was going to happen. I’m not strong like you are.”
She hadn’t said anything about her being afraid. The insistence that she isn’t only means the opposite, and Edelgard forces her breathing steady, her expression into something less marred with grief.
“You were never meant to be,” She thinks of Lysithea the day before they entered the arena, staring wide-eyed at the mountain of sweets available at the party they were all forced to attend. She thinks of Annette who would have provided a better song in these last moments, Bernadetta who had stared at her with watery gray eyes and had asked if she was afraid of anything, said that it would make her feel braver if she knew that she wasn’t alone in her fear. The canons had already sounded for them both. “None of us were.”
“Stay with me?”
“I’ll be here, just close your eyes.”
“Okay.”
Her eyes shut, and her breaths slow. The lines on her face slowly smooth out, and the canon sounds once.