Chapter Text
“We shouldn’t even be here.”
That’s what Felix told them as the army formed ranks to prepare for marching on Gronder Field. While Sylvain and Gilbert debated last-minute strategies, while the boar seethed and paced with an impatience that spilled out of him and agitated the troops, Felix spit the words at them even knowing they wouldn’t listen. Knowing it didn’t matter, because they were already here, and this battle was happening whether anyone but Dimitri wanted it to happen or not. Because the crown prince could inspire blind loyalty in everyone here just by existing--Goddess knows he didn’t earn it--and they all followed him like cubs destined to die in the lion’s bloody wake.
Felix included.
And now destiny has caught up to them, not one by one but in droves, in huge swaths of the Kingdom army obliterated in moments by flame and darker magics, of a kind even Annette and Mercedes have never seen before. Now the battle is over, and they have lost--though, Felix thinks as he bleeds out there on the matted grass, you wouldn’t know it with the way Dimitri is still snarling and fighting to the very last, unable even to surrender or negotiate for his people’s lives in his mad rage. Felix can do nothing but watch, weak and fading quickly, as the Boar Prince struggles to stay standing--bloodied and beaten, surrounded, doomed , yet still he lashes out with more strength than a dying man ought to have. One Imperial soldier falls to Areadbhar’s wicked blade, then another. But it’s not enough to save him, and finally, finally, he falls to his knees and can no longer rise.
Felix knows their deaths are Dimitri’s fault. He ordered them to march south for Edelgard’s head rather than take back their own fallen capital; he abandoned any semblance of strategy and rushed headlong into the fray with only his very first order to guide them. Kill every last one of them. As tactics go, Felix thinks with a certain lightheaded amusement, it lacked nuance.
Felix knows this, and yes, he’s angry. His blood boils in his grief and horror . He was forced to watch Ingrid fall out of the sky, shot down by Alliance snipers; to watch Sylvain ride to his death when the central hill erupted in flames he couldn’t escape; to watch Annette die in Mercedes’ arms. But his fury seems to seep out into the dirt along with his life’s blood, and in his last moments, all he feels is awe. He can’t help it. It’s impossible to watch Dimitri’s fearless last stand without admiring him. In his stubborn refusal to die, Felix almost sees the king he could have been.
What could have been. If only. I never wanted to die with regrets.
It’s Felix’s last thought before the end. He doesn’t see them drive their spears into the kneeling prince; doesn’t see the Emperor herself raise her sword and plunge it through his heart; doesn’t hear Dimitri’s final howl of anguish and rage and despair ring out across the field, loud enough that even the Leicester army in their retreat hears it and knows: The rightful king is gone, and with him goes Faerghus’ last hope.
That was the first time Felix died. He’s lost track of how many more times he’s died since then.
Daybreak comes early on the morning of the battle. The Kingdom army rises with the sun, unbothered by the dawn’s chill. The cooking fires already blaze, sending the smell of stewed meat wafting over the camp. Just like always.
Felix gasps awake and immediately lets out a soft, wretched groan, dragging his hands down his face. It happened again . He hauls himself up to prepare for battle once more--for the same battle--and thinks that it ought to be horrifying, the extent to which he’s gotten used to remembering his own deaths, but he mostly just feels resigned. He’s learned to push the memories aside with relative ease to focus on the here and now. If ‘now’ is a word that even means anything, anymore.
All the little things stay the same each time. Annette always passes by his tent singing softly, unaware that anyone is inside to hear her. Ashe always offers him encouraging words over a shared meal. Mercedes always leads them in the traditional Faerghan battle hymn to pray to the Goddess for victory. And Sylvain always, always makes the same stupid, macabre joke that nonetheless manages to make things seem less dire.
This time, though, something’s different. Explosively different.
He’s barely taken his first bite of stew when a wordless roar erupts from Dimitri’s tent, followed by a loud crash. Felix’s blade is immediately in his hand and he’s running before he can form a single thought, but he skids to a halt as the prince emerges from the tent by tearing it down around him with his bare hands and then stalking away from the remains, muttering to himself. Felix knows that wild, murderous look in the boar’s eye, has seen it too many times, and he knows that if Dimitri’s left to his own devices, the battle will be a complete disaster.
Ordinarily, he’d leave it alone anyway and let someone else deal with it--he has no desire to be anywhere near the prince when he’s like this. It trips something inside Felix that makes his stomach churn and his heart pound, makes it harder to breathe. This time, though, Dimitri’s muttering catches Felix’s attention with the words, “Please, if I must die, allow me to rest!”
Felix goes after him and snatches at his arm. “Wait--” For a moment, he thinks he’s made a terrible mistake, as Dimitri rounds on him with a fierce scowl, and his other hand snaps to the hilt of his sword. But the prince only glares at him for a moment before growling, “What do you want?”
Felix glares right back. “Come with me. We need to talk. Now.”
“Leave me be--”
But Felix anticipates this response and yanks on Dimitri’s arm to pull him closer, hissing, “You keep dying at Gronder and waking back up here, don’t you?”
The prince’s eye widens. “How did you know that?”
“It’s happening to me, too. Now come with me , I’m not having this conversation out in the open.”
The set of Dimitri’s jaw is mulish, but after a moment he nods curtly and follows Felix back to his tent, which fortunately is still standing. “What do you know of this curse?”
“Nothing.” The word tastes bitter on Felix’s tongue. “All I know is that every day, we fight the Empire and the Alliance at Gronder Field, and every day I die there. And then I wake up here on this same stupid morning to do it all over again.”
Dimitri is silent for a moment, and when he speaks again, it’s so quiet that Felix barely hears it. “Is this hell?”
Felix rolls his eyes and exhales sharply through his nose. “No. Would Annette and Mercedes be in hell? Don’t be an idiot.”
A grunt is his only response before Dimitri nods to himself. “Then there is only one explanation. The dead will not allow me to move on until I have slain Edelgard and secured their vengeance.”
“Ridiculous. If that were true, why would they drag me into it?”
Dimitri’s eye roams past Felix to a corner of the tent. “...it must be Glenn’s doing.”
Felix grits his teeth. “I’m not listening to any more of this nonsense. The only way to break this cycle is not to fight the battle at all. Forget about Gronder and march back to retake Fhirdiad.”
"No.” It’s more growl than word. “I will only be allowed to rest when Edelgard is dead by my hand. We will fight this battle as many times as it takes until I tear her limb from limb.” His eye narrows as he looks down at Felix. “You are meant to be my Shield. So shield me. When we take the field, you will stay at my side and ensure that I survive to take her head from her shoulders.”
“What?” Felix blinks, stunned. Dimitri has never demanded such a thing of him, not in all the years Felix has fought under his banner. Which is not to say that Felix wouldn’t do it of his own volition, deny it though he might--but the prince he knew would never order him, or anyone, to stand between himself and danger.
“I’m finished talking.” Dimitri turns and strides out of the tent, leaving Felix to stew in his dread.
Felix has to grudgingly admit that fighting side by side, both he and Dimitri are more effective, as they have always been. The prince plows his way through enemy ranks, opening a path for Felix to slip easily past their guard and take down key soldiers. And although it hurt, hearing that Dimitri values Edelgard’s death more than Felix’s life, he does keep his would-be king alive long enough to face down the Emperor and that cursed sword of hers. A Hero’s Relic, clearly, but somehow stranger and more deadly even than Areadbhar, extending like a whip and eerily reminiscent of a spine. He’d be intrigued, if it didn’t keep killing them. Their brutal exchange ends in a stalemate, and that shadowy lapdog of Edelgard’s teleports them both off the field as the Imperial forces retreat.
Felix steels himself for Dimitri’s tantrum, and he doesn’t have long to wait.
In a sickening way, it reminds Felix of the time when one of Dimitri’s favorite horses escaped into Fhirdiad’s surrounding woods when they were children. The king sent knights out to scour the forest for the beast, but they never found it. At first, the little prince just cried, devastated at the loss. But when he found out which stablehand had neglected to close the stall properly, he stormed off to find the man and shouted at him for a good five minutes, sobbing all the while and breaking half the gear in the stables as he smashed things and flung them around with his Blaiddyd strength that even at that age was formidable.
He would later learn to control his emotional outbursts better, but he was never a calm child.
The difference is that now, Dimitri’s tantrums include threatening his own allies and ripping apart people who are already dead with his bare hands, gauntlets sticky with drying blood. The difference is that now, Felix can’t say with certainty that the prince wouldn’t slaughter his own people in a blind rage. So he keeps his sword drawn even after the enemy is gone, and he waits until the lion’s roar quiets to a growl. Finally, Dimitri’s temper dies down and he just stands there, panting for breath, looking at no one and nothing. Everyone but Felix has backed off to a safe distance to go about the business of vacating the battlefield, whether because they’re terrified of their own ruler or because they want to give him the space he always demands, or a little of both.
So when Dimitri walks up to Felix with his lance still in hand and hisses, “We’re going back. Now. ”, no one else is close enough to see Felix’s eyes widen and then narrow in quick succession.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think it means?” Dimitri rests the butt of Areadbhar in the dirt and draws his sword with the other hand.
“You’re out of your damned mind . ” Felix scowls at the trembling in his hands, clutching his sword as though it were a lifeline. “What do you expect to do, kill each other right here?” That single blue eye just stares at him in silence. “What a fool you are. We survived the battle, isn’t that good enough for you? Do you want to be stuck in this nightmare forever?”
Dimitri simply raises his blade. Would the prince really strike him down? There’s no way of knowing whether this would work, or whether they would just die. Is Dimitri really so far gone? Felix lets the point of his own sword scrape the ground. “I’m not doing this. If you want me dead so badly, you’ll have to stab me in the back like a coward.” The words surprise him even as they come out of his mouth. He hates the idea that deep down, he still believes that the boy he used to adore is in there somewhere, that Dimitri wouldn’t kill him; hope is dangerous. But it’s difficult to think otherwise when he turns his back on Dimitri and walks away.
He expects a protest, an argument, some growled retort. Expects that, perhaps, Dimitri might grab him and force him to stay.
Instead, all he hears is a strangled sound and a horrible, horrible clanking thump. No, he couldn’t have…
Felix can’t fight the trembling now, can’t fight the blurring of his vision with unshed tears as he slowly turns. “You idiot ,” he whispers, staring helplessly at the figure lying facedown in the dirt, eye hidden now by a mop of tangled blond hair. But nothing can hide the copious stream of blood staining the ground just under that mop, flowing from the body’s throat. Felix shivers with a chill colder than the Gautier winter winds, at a loss.
Any minute now, someone’s going to return to check on them. For all he knows, they’ll think he killed Dimitri--he hasn’t exactly been shy about his feelings on the matter of His Highness for the past five years. Even if they don’t necessarily believe it, they’ll have to take him prisoner anyway until they can prove otherwise. And while that way probably lies execution eventually, he has no idea what happens if Dimitri stays dead for that long while Felix lives. He has no idea what’s happening in the first place, much less how it works.
All he knows is that the day resets when they both die here on this battlefield.
In the distance, he can still see the dust rising from the retreat of the Imperial rank and file, those not important enough to waste warping magic on. And when he catches up to them, he doesn’t bother to hide his approach. He charges into their ranks with a wordless roar of grief and fury, with the Boar Prince’s last stand unshakable in his mind’s eye, intent on taking down as many of them as he can before they oblige him with merciful death.