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“What were you thinking?”
Her voice is never sweet or soft ( or no, not never, but it’s rare. rare enough that he knows to treasure it when she looks at him like she doesn’t look at anyone else, and all of her edges blunt ) but seldom as cutting as it is now, slices through him like a knife, and makes his head pound that much harder. He wants to tell her to have mercy, that he’s already battered enough as it is, and her anger might send him catapulting back into unconsciousness with the force of it. Instead, he turns his head, even that is something as a struggle and it makes his vision swim for a moment turning her into a streak of white and red. Huh. She hadn’t even thought to clean up before coming here to his bedside to share her displeasure. The last he remembers they were in the thick of battle, which he’s never grown a taste for unlike certain dark-armored members of the Imperial army. He doesn’t like the smoke born from earth singed with magic, the sound of weaponry clanging together, and what he hates is the sound bodies make as they crumple and fall. He also doesn’t like stepping over them to move forward, but it is what must be done.
He has started on this path beside her, bloody as it is ( as he had known it would be when they embarked ), and he won’t run now. She had come to him with a dream, an outstretched hand, and had asked him to take it. And hey, he knows an opportunity when he sees it, and that’s what he had seen. He had come to the monastery to find someone who could help him, see his own dream into reality, and well there she was like it was fate. Some would say destiny, but he thinks it was more the fortunate aligning of circumstances.
“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific, you’ll have to forgive me I’m feeling a bit scrambled here.”
Her eyes narrow, and she’s angry and beautiful, his own vengeful angel. The thought is odd, something he wouldn’t come up with normally, but he thinks a strong enough blow to the head can shake anything free including odd comparisons between Edelgard and divinity which she despises.
“It was meant for me, Claude. By all means our positions should be reversed, but you—”
“Saved your skin? Is this going to segue into a thank you at any point, princess?”
She’s not a princess any longer. She had taken the crown from her father, and now she is Emperor and has the dangerously sharp horned headdress to prove it. At one point he had called her that to get under her skin ( ha. and now he is saving it, go figure. ) to remind her that she had been coddled, the empire’s heir who in his mind had stood for everything old and traditional and wrong with the continent. Back then she had been unreachable, sharp and severe, and he couldn’t help but want to insert himself into her space, try to bring something out in her that no one else could just because it was a challenge. He didn’t expect that to lead to this, them wading knee-deep in blood, embroiled in a war that just won’t end.
“It should have been me, I’m stronger, I wouldn’t have ended up as you have.”
“What kind of person would I be if I just stood back and let you take a hit? Is that who you want beside you, someone who would just watch as you went down?”
“I want someone alive beside me. I want you to live long enough to see the world we want come into being.”
It’s… well. It’s a declaration clearer than any he has received so far, and it’s simply that she doesn’t want him dead. He had told himself that he doesn’t need the words from her, not when they are so difficult for her to give, but he wants.
“Why?” The question is simple, and finally put out there between them. “What am I to you?”
They have been, and are many things. At one point he was the rock she couldn’t get out of her boot, who had sought to bring out something human in her. Wanted her attention, is more of the truth. He remembers making a joke about a rat at her feet, had felt vindicated in garnering a reaction until he realized that reaction was terror. Then they had been sparring partners, they had fallen into bed together, and he had seen the scars that cut across her body. She had stared at him chin raised, daring him to say something, daring him to recoil like he knows she had expected. He hadn’t said anything, afraid that if he opened his mouth, too many questions would come spilling out, ones that would drive her from him forever. Instead he had silently traced over them with his fingers and then his tongue.
Now they are allies. Maybe that’s what she wanted from him all along. Maybe that’s the sum of it all.
“Claude you are… undeniably important to me.” She looks frustrated, he thinks with herself. Her hands grip tight into the sheets of the bed, hard enough that her knuckles turn bone white. “I… if I knew what you wanted me to say—”
“Then you’d say it just to please me?”
“No. I would say it because it is true. You have become everything to me.”
It’s just like her, to glare at him while calling him everything. His heart is beating so hard in the confines of his chest that he almost, almost forgets the pain he’s in.
“What if I wanted you to say… that I’m your one and only? That you’ll follow me to the end of the world?”
Her expression softens with his antics, which had been the goal. And wow, here he is in an infirmary bed, and he still cares more about making her comfortable. He knows that it’s ridiculous, that she won’t say it, she won’t follow him until the bitter end she’ll be following her ambitions. But, the truth doesn’t hurt, because their goals are the same.
“Would it satisfy you to simply know I love you?”
It stuns him so badly that his mouth falls open and he wants to sit up but even trying to raise his head makes the nausea return in force. So, he has to be content with gaping up at her like caught fish, and wanting so badly to kiss her that the desire is another physical ache to add to the total.
“For now, I think it’ll suffice.”
“Try to rest Claude. I will be here.”
Okay. He trusts her word, but he still finds himself grasping around for one of her hands until he has it in his own. She leans forward and presses a kiss, soft and sweet at his brow, and he lets his eyes close.