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Of late there were more reasons to be happy - or at least hopeful - than a mere moon ago. They reclaimed Fhirdiad from the farcical Faerghus Dukedom and steadily welcomed more territories and their support into the fold even as they hastened to rescue the Alliance from invasion.
Ingrid should’ve been hard at work training and seeing to her chores just like the rest of her friends and allies, but when she spied His High—Dimitri sitting alone in the dining hall rather than surrounded by knights and commanders and nobles, her feet carried her towards him before she could think better of it. Maybe he wanted his solitude after so much time spent in the company of people who wanted something or other from him, and maybe she had no right to demand more from him than a brief bout on the training grounds.
Still, she slid onto the bench beside him, and when he glanced up at her, a smile poked at her lips.
“Ah, Ingrid, it’s only you,” he greeted her with a slight welcoming smile of his own. “I thought maybe Gustave or Dedue or the professor coming to scold me for being awake so late.”
“What makes you think I’m not here to scold you, Your Highness?” Ingrid wondered.
Dimitri laughed, and her heart lifted to hear it. (She hadn’t realized how long it had been since she simply heard him laugh.) “Maybe I give you too much credit,” he mused, “or maybe not enough. I am tired,” he admitted then, “but…it is difficult to sleep with so much on my mind.”
“Do you want to…talk about it?” she asked, reluctant to prod him. It had been a long time - years, really, from before she feared him as dead as G—dead - since they conversed of anything so…deep, and perhaps even longer since they spent any sort of time together without weapons in their hands for training or battle.
“Another time perhaps,” Dimitri said before he sighed so deeply she couldn’t help resting a hand on his arm. He glanced down at it, his lips twitching into the slightest smile, and said, “And what of you, Ingrid? What keeps you up so late tonight?”
“Another letter from my father,” she confessed. “He must think that because we have the Empire on the defensive now it’s the perfect time to entertain more marriage proposals.”
“So business as usual for you.” He rested his chin in his hand, staring at the opposite wall so his blind side was to her. “I have to admit that’s one of my regrets.”
Ingrid blinks in surprise as her hand falls to her lap. “What is?”
“That I could never help your family and your territory directly before.” Dimitri’s hand, resting on the table, curled into a fist. “Or maybe I was always just so focused on my own…foolish objectives I never considered how I could help you. What sort of king will I be if I let my own subjects starve?”
“You wouldn’t,” she reassured him, because she didn’t know what else to do or say. “You didn’t have any power before the war, not really, and it wasn’t…really your duty. It was mine.” She cleared her throat and glanced away at the same instant he turned back towards her. “Well, it still is, I suppose.”
“I disagree,” Dimitri said, his nose wrinkling with displeasure when she chanced to look at him. “You and the people your family rules are still my subjects, and you shouldn’t be bound to some fate you don’t want because I’ve failed you and them.”
Some sort of…hope made her chest buoyant, but after so long thinking that every refusal - every battle in the last five years - only delayed the inevitable, all she could offer him was a sad smile. “You haven’t failed us, Your Highness,” she told him, “but the Kingdom is big and its means limited, and the war’s just made it worse. At this rate you’ll have to marry someone wealthy to feed all of us.”
“A rather sobering thought,” Dimitri said, “but after the war, we’ll all return to what we should’ve been doing all along, and I do still hope you’ll be in Fhirdiad with m—for your knighthood.”
His encouragement warmed her even as it made her stomach twist into knots. How terrible of her was it to dread the end of the war when she would be forced to return to Galatea and consider any suitor paraded before her?
Idly Ingrid wondered if Glenn was so…reluctant to wed her before death released him from the betrothal. She didn’t want such a permanent release for herself, not while her friends yet lived, not while she could still fight with and protect and serve Dimitri.
“I want nothing more than that,” she eventually said, when she recognized he still waited for an answer. The back of her neck warmed under his gaze, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him and find disappointment in his eye. “But…my duty is still to my family first. Even now I’m here representing my father, at least officially.”
“But you want to be here.” It wasn’t a question, and something about his certainty in her resolve brought a smile to her face.
“Of course,” she said. A sigh escaped her, and she half-leaned into him, longing for the old closeness of children, when they wrestled in the dirt and he hugged her too tightly before every parting and she swore she would unhorse him when they were old enough to compete in a tourney. “The circumstances are awful, but this is, in a way, a dream realized. I just wish I could be your—a knight in peacetime too.”
(It was odd to think too that then they’d always been a little closer to Felix than to each other, yet he never failed to accuse them of leaving him out.)
“You speak of duty to your family,” Dimitri mused, “but won’t whomever you marry also be your family?”
“I guess they will be,” Ingrid agreed, frowning, “but what are you getting at, Your Highness?”
He shook his head, and she had the keen sense that she’d disappointed him. “Ingrid, how many times do I have to tell you that you of all people needn’t call me that?”
She faced forward again, as if that would do anything to obscure the blush undoubtedly coloring her face. “It’s a habit at this point,” she said, “but even if it wasn’t, and even if we have been friends for years, I’m not sure I can bring myself to call you anything else.” Her eyebrow quirked, and she flashed him a smile. “Except maybe ‘Your Majesty’, soon enough.”
Dimitri snorted, but it sounded more bitter than amused. “One more burden to bear,” he murmured. “I hoped it would be lighter with another.”
Ingrid turned to face him properly; the longer she spoke to him, the more he confused her. “What do you mean?”
Her whole body stiffened when his large hand covered hers where it rested on her leg. Her heart jumped into her throat, even as he said, “When I asked you if you would support and defend me as my knight, that wasn’t strictly…accurate.”
“O-oh?” Something in his demeanor made her stomach flip. She watched his eye slip shut, his shoulders shift as he breathed, and felt her own breath catch in her lungs. “Then…what is it you wanted, Your—Dimitri?”
His name on her tongue felt almost clumsy - she couldn’t remember the last time she spoke it aloud - but it still felt right, as if the veil of formality she always lifted between them now fell away.
A part of her wanted to lift it up again and hide behind it, especially while the war still raged and she could find herself bereaved after failing her prince and losing her friend, this man she preferred to live for rather than to die for, because she understood without naming the feeling swelling in her chest that it wouldn’t be the same as losing Glenn.
She’d seen Dimitri at his worst, even been frightened by it, by him, yet she stayed with him less out of a sense of duty and more because it was where she wanted to be.
He practically beamed, truly, genuinely, brightly, and she found herself powerless to resist returning it. “Perhaps it should wait until after the war,” Dimitri admitted, “but now I realize it cannot while you need some assurance that you’ll have a place in Fhirdiad with me.”
“Dimitri, it’s like you’re talking in riddles,” Ingrid complained. “Please speak plainly.”
“Um…” His cheeks colored, but his gaze persisted on her. “I admit this is scarcely proper and I should ask your father first.”
“I…suppose,” she said, blinking before she sighed. “I already know he would refuse, you know. You don’t have to bother.”
“What?” His eye widened, but then he squeezed her hand and said, “No, no, my inquiry would have nothing to do with knighthood, or maybe a little because there is no reason you cannot still be knighted if you accept, but it would no longer be necessary, and you have to admit it would be a perfect solution for your problem regardless of your feelings, but I trust that you wouldn’t take advantage and king to be or not you’re free to refuse if you—”
Ingrid cut him off with a hand on his cheek. She didn’t know where the courage to touch him so boldly came from, but something about his rambling made her feel so indescribably fond even as it was almost painful to listen to. His warm breath stuttered against her thumb as his lips parted in surprise, and she smiled despite the heat on her own face. “I can’t accept or refuse anything if you don’t ask, Dimitri.”
His hand covered hers, and she felt his cheek twitch as he smiled. “Right, of c-course.” He took a deep breath and said, “Ingrid, I…don’t have a ring to give now, but”—his fingers wove between hers, and he held her hand between both of his—”after the war, would you be my queen?”
Her eyes widened at the same time her heart fought to outrace her Pegasus at her speediest. She stared up at Dimitri and his almost tentatively hopeful smile, her breath stuck in her lungs and her face as warm as if Mercedes baked it with her other pastries. “What.”
“As much as I want you at my side as a sworn knight,” Dimitri said in a rush, “it would make me…indescribably happy to have your support as my wife.”
“O-oh,” Ingrid said almost numbly. Her pulse rushed past her ears, and she couldn’t summon even a single coherent thought because she couldn’t believe her prince, her longtime friend, to whom she would happily swear fealty and protection, wanted to…marry her.
Her father would doubtless be ecstatic, and all her family’s problems would be solved with such direct royal intervention, and yet…
“Please say something, Ingrid,” Dimitri prompted her as his smile faltered.
There was no yet.
“I would love—I mean, of c—uh.” Ingrid covered her face with the hand he didn’t hold, unable to suffer him seeing her flush or hear her stumbling over her words. Any sort of praise embarrassed her so easily, especially when it came from him.
She cleared her throat, struggling to compose herself before she met his eyes and smiled. “Yes,” she said, pleased when her voice didn’t waver. “I-I will. I—I think I—I mean, I know I love you beyond what fealty dictates, I just didn’t, um, never thought…” She trailed off when his face drew closer, and for a heartbeat she thought - and half-expected! - he’d kiss her, but then his arms wrapped around her and dragged her against him.
Ingrid burrowed her face into his chest, smiling at the feeling of his heartbeat under her cheek, even if his chin did dig a little too much into her scalp.
Time seemed to slip away with them just sitting like this, slumped into each other and sharing the same space. His breath ruffled the hair on her head, and his arms felt secure around her in a way they never did when they embraced as children.
For one, it didn’t feel like he was about to snap her spine; it seemed he did master his strength, eventually.
At last, when her eyes felt heavy and she thought she might fall asleep right there, Ingrid shifted against him. “Dimitri,” she mumbled, “I think we should go to sleep now.”
He jumped, his arms falling away from her - unfortunately - so she had the vague impression he’d started to nod off. But then he stood and offered her his hand. “Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
A yawn split her jaws, and she couldn’t help offering some token resistance, “We’re going in the same direction anyway.”
Dimitri laughed, and Ingrid thought she wouldn’t mind making him laugh more, just to hear it.
They walked across the silent Monastery grounds, dodging night watchmen on patrol and monks seeking the cathedral for nighttime prayers. She half-leaned into him as they did with her fingers tangled with his.
“At least we’re not the only ones still awake,” Dimitri observed when they passed Annette’s door and the light streaming out from under it.
Ingrid snorted. “Likely as not, she fell asleep with her head on a book.”
“That is true enough. Maybe Gustave ought to have a word with her.”
“Mm, try Felix instead,” she said.
“Felix?” Dimitri’s eyebrow quirked in curiosity. “It seems I’m still not caught up on everything I failed to notice when…well.”
“I’ll help you catch up,” Ingrid promised.
All too soon, they trooped up the stairs, careful to keep their voices low so they wouldn’t travel and wake their sleeping classmates. Her room lay at the end by the stairwell, but they paused outside the door, reluctant to say goodbye.
“Eat breakfast with me,” Dimitri said.
“Only if you train with me after,” she replied with a grin.
“Is that going to be the condition for sharing a meal with me even when we’re in—when we’re married?” he wondered, a note of amusement in his voice.
“The conditions may change,” Ingrid told him. “Sometimes I may ask you to read a book with me instead, or to give me an extra piece of meat, or…” She didn’t know where this flash of courage came from (maybe from a voice in her head that sounded awfully like Sylvain’s), only that one moment teasing words fell from her with ease and the next she looped her arms around his neck and stood on her toes to press her lips against his.
His hands rested on her waist to pull her closer, as he kissed her back a little clumsily. But his touch filled her with heat, her heart racing as if it wanted to burst from her ribs and strike Dimitri with the precision of a well-placed arrow, and she still hesitated to part from him when he pulled away and rested his forehead against hers.
Her eyes fluttered open to find a soft smile on his face. “What is it?”
“It’s been a long time since I was this happy,” he confessed. “Odd that it should happen in the middle of a war.”
Ingrid cupped his jaw and swept her thumb under his eyepatch. “Then let’s end it quickly so we can all be happy after too.”