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In Imperial Year 1175, as every year, the Blue Sea Moon deposits a blanket of dry heat over Fódlan’s Central Plateau.
“Blue Sea” is a taunting name for a month of shimmer and sweat. Students at the Officers Academy roll up what they can to expose their wrists and ankles to the occasional breeze. Making clothes of black velvet seemed wiser in winter.
Despite the heat, Ashe volunteered to labor over the hissing stoves to prepare food for the campus-wide ceremony on the Rite of Rebirth.
it will be coolest before sunrise. For a difference of degrees, she staggers early out of bed, when the shade of night matches the fabric of her hoodie.
Waking fills her head with cotton, pushing out the nighttime questions of who she is and who she could be. The texture of her footfalls surprises her still-dreaming mind. When she walks to the kitchen, her steps stay on the stone paths by muscle memory more than sight.
In what feels like another life, she did this daily, gliding down stairs to wash dishes, working to the smell of bake bread until roosters cock-a-doodle-declared it real morning. She doesn’t rise early like she used to, can’t imagine that routine returning. It was a simpler time when she knew who she was. Unbelievable nowadays.
The thought makes her heart brittle, her chest rise like proofing dough. She handles it with care, wraps it deep and away.
She didn’t sign up for the Officers Academy to exhume memories of a bygone time. She signed up to confront the loneliness gnawing at her. What little tied her to the generations-long posturing games of nobles evaporated with the death of her new father. Assisting with the Rite of Rebirth could get her in the good graces of someone who matters.
The fantasy of knighthood as she formulates it is to be meaningful to someone with power. With no close friends, Garreg Mach is hollow, hot and strange.
“It’s locked,” Dedue murmurs. His voice betrays film of drowsiness over wariness of a deeper kind.
When did Dedue get here? Ashe scrunches her face and shakes her head, blinking. After a pause that’s only awkward for her, she stumbles out a “good morning.”
“Hm,” Dedue grunts, acknowledging that it could be better for both of them.
They wait in the cold, which would have passed for warm in winter. Already they can’t see their breaths mist. Ashe’s throat is dry. It’s going to be a hot day in a hot month.
Orange and pink bleed into the lowest stretches of sky. Ashe shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Well, we should get started.”
Dedue closes his eyes and breathes through his nose. “You know it’s locked.”
Ashe cocks her head, then tuts. “Could you look that way?” When he does, she kneels and coaxes the lock. She nods, presaging a satisfying kathunk as the bolt turns.
Dedue only pouts. “What a useful skill.”
“No one needs to know, okay?” Ashe holds the door open and ushers him in. “It will make a better surprise that way.”
The wooden door doesn’t creak shut after she passes through. Dedue knocks on the frame with two knuckles and follows her in. The day is barely hatched and already his face sags into a frown. Most times it seems stuck like that.
Ashe and Dedue divide and conquer the ingredients awaiting them. They both know their way around a kitchen, around a knife. On mountains of ice, several kinds of fish gaze blankly at of piles of monastery-grown produce: potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, turnips to feed every mouth on the grounds today. This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest dinner service she ever did at her parents’ restaurant.
As they peel, dice, chop, skin, cut, she times out the staging of dishes in her head. It dawns on her they’ve been given hours to do what should reasonably be done in days, and with many more people. Attacking the ingredients alone will eat up an hour if they rush. The other monastery staff who would usually be cooking are caught up in ritual preparations and security.
At the other end of the long wooden island, a drowsy Dedue is also lost in thought. Repetitious work of the body frees the mind to wonder and wend. Ashe doesn’t find out until later that he also thinks of home.
To avoid memories of the restaurant, Ashe sulks over the morning’s turnout. She doesn’t mind Dedue, but she catches no one’s eye when no one is around to see. Do her noble classmates consider cooking beneath them? The stream of baked goods from the second-floor dorms would suggest otherwise. Maybe it was the lack of pocket money in the picture that kept them away.
If anything, this set-up is more dangerous for Dedue. Ashe can imagine the blame for any imperfections tilting in his direction. Most students don’t know what to make of him. It’s an open secret that he has tense relationships with the Blue Lions nobility. At the same time, in the thorny way that truths aren’t simple, he’s joined at the hip to the prince of Faerghus.
For Dedue, that looks like being on the receiving end of loud whispers and held out shoes. Books mysteriously falling off desks, jumping like lemmings. It only happens when Dimitri isn’t around. Ashe had made it a point to take Dedue’s side afterwards. Soon her things were on the ground with his.
To fix this, Dedue had latched onto a tomcat with rainstorm gray fur and eyes like mint leaves. Dedue called him Mint. Ashe gave him several pats on the head and added the -y.
Minty was a prop and they both knew it. Animals underwhelmed Dedue, but people could believe he was a monster and still dote on his pets. It worked on the wrong audience; it was that cat that first endeared him to Ashe.
That first day, feline semi-liquid Minty leaked halfway through Dedue’s arms, constrained but content.
It was early enough in their tenure at Garreg Mach that they still got lost on the way to class. With no lead-in, Dedue had presented the cat to her. His assessment was, “Your eyes are the same.” Ashe's heart beat nervously in her chest. The cat was the calmest among them.
“Our eyes?” By then Ashe was no longer hesitant around Dedue. He had struck her as reserved and deferential, and because of that perhaps, safe. They shared interests in cooking and plants, but were strangers to each other. Ashe had taken his side against the others because it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Dedue also guards himself closely. Despite his massive frame the space between his shoulders could pass for a void. And here the mountain spoke. “Green eyes. He’s like you.” Minty wove himself between her ankles, but it was Dedue who purred joyously. “He likes you.”
Ashe laughed and jiggled Minty’s cheeks. “I’m family already.”
Repetition chops away at Ashe’s attention. When the knife scrapes her fingernails, she realizes she’s been elsewhere.
In the kitchen it’s well after sunrise. The sky is a confused felt blue through the windows. Dedue slices through stacked celery. His motions lack vigor. A tremor beats in his wrist as if each crisp green fiber resists the blade.
Ashe sweats and sweats. She wipes her forehead with her wrist and it comes away shiny. She washes her hands.
After the third time, Dedue turns to her, his hand working the skin off an onion, shick-shick. “It’s hot. You could take off your hoodie.”
That’s not happening. Ashe’s sense of self is a pile of shards. As they rework themselves into a new mosaic, the hoodie keeps her together, keeps the veiny seams and gristle tucked neatly away.
Cutting potatoes is not the time to think about who she is. As the knife slides through this small, starchy world, she tells herself it will be okay. This is something she can control. The more she obsesses over peeling, chopping, slicing, the less she fixates on herself. Taking out the eyes is her favorite part. Despite needing to be noticed by nobility, she lets herself fantasize: what a joy it would be to be unseen.
Inside the chrysalis, a would-be butterfly first turns to mush.
“Your long sleeves are thick too,” she deflects.
Dedue closes his eyes and cycles a slow breath. He works at the buttons on his cuffs and rolls up the fabric. Yellow-purple bruises splotch his arms like wine stains.
Ashe gasps. The rhythmic cachunk-cachunk of her knife through potato flesh falls silent.
Dedue doesn’t look up. “I have seen Manuela. I’ll be fine.”
“Who— what happened? why?” Ashe runs through interrogatives. The knife in her hand relaxes on the cutting board.
Dedue pours his attention into peeling another onion, listening to the chatter from the crinkling of its flaking skin.
“It’s in the past now. I will be fine. They— may be less fine.” He allows himself a guarded smile, like a flower budding through a crack in stone.
Ashe’s thoughts spark and branch like lightning. Who is they? One or many? How dare they. Did Dedue fight back? Should she have been there? Perhaps is Dimitri could beat up Dedue’s attackers behind the magic classroom. What would the teaching faculty do? Troubles at Garreg Mach have a way of dissolving into non-issues in the wake of royalty.
“I’m not one to doubt his highness.” Ashe smirks as she blinds another potato.
A hitch in Dedue’s peeling says she either got it very right or very wrong.
Outside, the groundskeeper fires unholy words like a bumpkin spitting sunflower seeds. Her curses are distant, but her stress ricochets through halls.
“Is something wrong?” Ashe swipes potato cubes to the side with a knife blade. Tat-tat-tat, they fall into a copper vat. “It’s okay if you’re tired. You can rest if you need to. I won’t tell—“
Dedue sets his knife down and deflates. Caught in his throat a sound Ashe has never heard. “The cat is gone.”
Ashe shakes her head. She turns the gas and lights a match. “What do you mean?”
“Someone took the cat.” Dedue’s mouth forms a bow, lips tightened. He scrunches his face to cry but there is drought on his cheeks.
The space of their grief is small but deep. Minty is the most unconditionally friendly being either of them has at Garreg Mach.
From outside, the groundskeeper’s yell permeates the heavy doors before they swing open as if weightless.
“Wait!” She bellows both lungs empty. Her high-stacked hair sways when she skids to a stop. “Wyverns got out— last night— manure— gas— in the vents.”
Too late.
Ashe lights the stove. A bank of colorless gas meets the match head’s sunrise flame. Both burst in a moment of white. The fireball blooms— first the size of a walnut, a pomegranate, the great globe in library.
A flash of heat scathes her skin and dries her mouth. It takes the wetness from her eyes. Her thoughts through this are silent because they are unaware. Everything opens and is over in the space between breaths.
A scientist in Dagda hypothesized that the universe grew like a tree, from a seed. Stars hung from the new branches like ripest fruit. What Ashe sees is the white foliage bursting petals and then it's gone, erased between the memory of synapses.
Dedue roars as he funnels the plasma into a blazing wreath around him. It dances like a star around a black hole, locked tighter and tighter in its grip.
When Ashe finds words again, she cries out for Dedue. They accompany each other, voices clashing against the turbulence. The wind screams for her.
A bead of fuel hits the fire and it flares again. After seconds that feel like hours, Dedue releases it. In a long string it slithers away out the chute.
“Ashe? are you—” Dedue kneels to examine her face. She passes out in his arms.
The groundskeeper stands still, mouth agape. she stammers, pointing where the fire was. “Where did you learn that.”
“Nowhere now.” Dedue clears wisps of hair from Ashe’s forehead. He looks up to the groundskeeper, eyes startling as an icicle in her chest. “Get Manuela.”
“Yes, yes.” She quickly checks Ashe’s vitals to have something to tell Manuela. Ashe’s lungs breath and her heart beats.
Dedue envies her fingers at Ashe’s neck but says nothing. Then she about-faces and he’s alone with Ashe and the floorboards slicing at his knees.
Dedue cradles Ashe’s head, supports her neck. He hums a lullaby to comfort her, or is it for himself? Atonic, with a rhythm like a pulse. He sings the same song to the plants in the greenhouse as they fall out of season: close your eyes and rest for now, the time for blooms will come.
As the words leave him, sparks trickle from his fingertips over the contours of Ashe’s cheeks.
He hears new silence as Manuela’s heels stop clacking. She forces a smile to her face that disappears when she sees Ashe nestled in his arms.
The groundskeeper is back. “What are you doing? The issue here is smoke inhalation. There’s nothing to cauterize, or whatever that flame is doing.”
“Wait, wait, let me see.” Manuela’s twirling gesticulations are stage-large.
Little golden motes meet Ashe’s freckles. Dedue doesn’t look up. “It’s spiritual.”
Manuela’s shoulders fall. “Well. I guess I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Stepping forward, she wobbles like she’s underwater, still climbing out of last night’s bottles.
She bites her lip and pushes hair out of her face. It falls right back where it was. “So, that kind of day already. Okay.”
*
It’s a nice dream while it lasts.
The restaurant is lit in sunset oranges, cozy with the scent of roasting meat and sound of clinking tableware. Ashe is there. Her siblings take orders and deliver food. Her parents chat with regulars. Dedue is there too, moving smoothly along the tables and waitstaff.
By the gaps her tongue finds in her front teeth, the squish of gum instead of enamel, Ashe is maybe eight.
The plates are all empty on arrival. Smiling customers pass forks through air and bite down on tines, contented. Then the plates serve fire. Flames erupt from diner’s mouths, leap onto tables, climb to the rafters.
No one else notices when their skin blackens and bones burst, only Ashe. She bends the fires back to their sources, glowing embers in every bone, every beam. The growing conflagration ignores her.
Dream Ashe frowns. She can’t bend, doesn’t learn how for several years.
Secret revealed, glowing tongues of flame leap free. Bodies can’t contain it. They turn to dust and updraft carries them away.
The cavernous space speaks to itself in crackles and pops. Ashe is alone.
*
Ashe wakes up sweating, pulse knocking at her breastbone. What time is it? What day is it? Her dream fizzes into the abyss of memory. Empty plates. Dedue. Dust.
Did she miss the festival? Fuck. Her brain tells its body to right itself. The nerves shrug it off. No dice. Her body is smothered and itching beneath a heavy blanket. From the neck down she swims in sweat. It's uncomfortable but safe in here.
“Oh, thank the goddess you’re awake." Manuela trips over her own feet. From feet away, she reeks of whiskey. “I mean, Ashe dear, hello.”
Ashe sits up, frowning as the fabric falls from her body. A thick blood-red velvet all wrong for summer but right for curtains.
“What day is it? Have you seen a cat?” she creaks. The pallor of her skin makes her look for her sweater. She rubs her forearms.
“Calm, dear. Dedue will want to know you’re awake.” Manuela fills two shot glasses. “He tore himself up over whether to go back to the kitchen. I assured him you’d be fine under my watchful eye.”
She juts out her hand, one glass’s contents sloshing. Ashe scowls disapproval.
“Oh please, it’s not that much, and it will make you feel better. The best you can get without using magic, which we are not allowed to do.”
Ashe lets the implications linger in the air. Her shirt lies flat against her chest. “Can magic reshape bodies as it heals them?”
“You think these are real?” Manuela’s silky voice cackles dissonantly. She gives herself a lift. “Hah... that’s enough from me, bottom’s up.”
Ashe holds the covers with one hand while toasting with the other, wishing impossibly for more time. Smiling half-heartedly all the while, she holds her breath and swallows. Fire rests on her tongue and burns pleasantly all the way down.
Manuela smirks as she collects Ashe’s glass. “Many things are possible, even if you can only imagine them now. But for today, you’re all fixed up. My job here is done.”
Ashe darts for her sweater, shedding the blanket in heaps like a staled cocoon. It crumples stiffly toward the floor, light catching on its fuzzy folds. Manuela bolts to catch it before it meets the wood. She's enviably spry in heels, but not faster than gravity.
Ashe knows she’s done something wrong and catches herself, but isn’t sure what it means. “Did I—? I’m sorry if—”
Manuela blinks away Ashe’s apology and shakes her head, smoothing wrinkles and picking dust from among the fibers. “It’s fine. really, It’s fine.”
Ashe wastes no time winding her way into the familiar fabric of her sweatshirt. On the opposite side of the bed sits a pot of daisies, drops of yellow at their center. To test her suspicion, she sniffs the soil. From the greenhouse.
“I think you know who left those,” Manuela offers, pouncing at the chance to change the subject. “I’d like to get flowers like that again. Not with the dirt still on them though.”
Ashe picks up the pot and walks carefully. Her mind is on the kitchen. They’ve lost so much time.
“Take care of yourself, kid.” However Manuela means it, it comes as a warning.
*
The kitchen is empty. All the vegetables are chopped. The fish filets are marinating. The turnips and garlic smell heavenly. Pots of nascent cabbage stew almost simmer. Clear signs of progress keeps Ashe from tearing her hair out, but Dedue isn’t here. Ashe could scream. Neat piles of chopped everything show he’d kept working, and then what? Where is he?
The search takes her through the halls.
She doesn’t realize she’s still carrying the daisies until a clump of dirt falls and breaks on the toe of her boot.
“Those are nice flowers,” Dimitri nods with raised eyebrows, “you and Dedue are skilled gardeners.”
“Yes, your highness.” Even for the sake of modesty, disagreeing with the prince will get her nowhere. “Speaking of Dedue, have you seen him?”
So normal is it for Dedue to stand stitched to Dimitri as tightly as his shadow that a phantom of his presence fills the air in his absence.
“Not since yesterday. He should be cooking, with you.” Dimitri’s brows shade his eyes like a cloud passing over the sun. “He’s doing well I trust?”
“Well, yes. Actually—" Ashe tears herself apart. “Don’t make me lie to you, your highness, it’s not going well. Um. I imagine it’s not going well for Dedue’s...” She glances you know and lets Dimitri’s princely mind fill in what she can’t say.
“What lie? Dedue’s what, is he okay?” One hand reaches out, the other reaches down. Dimitri’s un-knowledge is sincere, but the way his hand reaches too quickly for a weapon is unnerving. Ashe watches royal fingers loosen.
“You know what? He’s fine. Yes, fine.” Ashe nods like a seismometer recording a quake.
The monastery bells ring for midday. As the noontime sun overhead eats her shadow, Ashe is sure no one is coming to Dedue’s rescue.
Around her whirls the sense of powerlessness she came to Garreg Mach to never feel. This is why she’s here: to grasp at power and wield it for good. How frustrating to be so close to someone who already has it and yet— solutions are the too-high apple just out of reach.
After circling the grounds, Ashe finds Dedue chopping firewood by the stables. A pained grunt follows each axe swing as part of the rhythm of the work. Watching his arms work like that, Ashe feels something. Dedue would give good hugs.
“I wanted to feel better and we needed fuel. Two birds.” Dedue frowns and organizes the cuttings.
“Do you feel better?”
“Hm. Yes. Now that you’re here.” Dedue's smile is also like a daisy, understated with a drop of sunshine at the center.
“You can firebend,” Ashe whispers equally to Dedue and the daisies. She doesn’t fully believe it’s true, that she’s standing in the sunlit grass because of it.
“Everyone in the Blue Lions can firebend with enough study.” Dedue shrugs. “I’m nothing of note.”
“You can firebend well enough to save my life, even though you don’t take part in classes.“ During class, Dedue’s quills flurry frantically over his notes, but he never calls on flame. Projecting the image of a good student is something Ashe knows well; she does the same and is cold with fear at the thought of being exposed.
Dedue taps a finger on her chest, softer than a butterfly landing. I am speaking to your heart. “Please, Ashe, not now.”
She sets down the flowers. “Trade you. I’ll carry back what you’ve cut, okay?” She thinks about the food and the hours of work undone. Splinters catch in her sweater with every jogged step. How pleasant that sleeves are good for more than hiding what she doesn't want to see.
She stands on side of the room farthest from the stove, where she floats a drop of flame through the air. or she would, but the thought never comes to her. Long is the shadow of the last time she bended and lost Lonato.
Ashe wants to hide from this, from the inevitability of time, from the impossibility of success. Instead she does what she needs and wrings the fear from herself before Dedue gets back. She doesn’t need Dedue to see her worrying about him.
She chokes a matchstick into splinters with her thumb, hesitating to use even natural fire. The vents are free of wyvern shit, probably, and the gas that fueled the morning’s burst. Still she worries. Her reaction is rational, her fear is not.
“Don’t worry, we won’t use the gas.” Dedue arranges wood in close spirals around the pots.
Ashe tries to reconcile the time they don’t have with the food still waiting to be cooked and comes up shorter than before. “What will the monastery do if the food isn’t ready?”
Dedue thinks about it and meets Ashe at the same conclusion. “No food, no feast.” If he worries, he hides it well. A body that big can’t disguise the shoulders and his are unbunched.
“Let’s not talk about that chance anymore. Otherwise the goddess might make it happen.”
Dedue has a special frown for the incomprehensible practices of Fódlan. “Why would she do that? Am I a monster to her too?” Closed eyes keep the questions rhetorical.
If Dedue's eyes were open, he would see her giving every flashing tell: fidgeting, touching her neck, looking at the ground. “You know, I realized I forgot to add something to the herring stew. Have you seen the herbs growing among the grass? The professors make us pick them sometimes."
Dedue places the last of the wood and scowls. “The weeds?”
“Some people call them weeds, but they're herbs. They add another dimension of bitterness.” Ashe is an awful liar. Her sweat-soaked body prickles with the hypersensitivity of deceit.
“His highness pulls this prank on me too. We should not eat the weeds. Manuela would be inconvenienced.”
Ashe shrugs. “Potayto, potahto.”
“Potatoes aren’t weeds.”
“Dedue, please.” Every moment he lingers, Ashe’s determination sublimates into doubt. “Please.”
The second please tips the scales. Dedue shakes his head. “Broccoli, that might be a weed.” He walks down the hall with a conspicuous silence to his footfalls that has always mystified Ashe. "Perhaps I don't understand Fódlan cuisine."
As if waiting for Dedue to leave, loud mewing starts outside the door. Ashe knows Minty’s calls anywhere.
Minty lies on his side on the stone path to the kitchen. Around him is a broken bullseye of clumpy dirt. Round fragments of terra cotta that once formed a pot lie farther out. On Minty’s ribs, the daisies, roots clotted over his heart, their petals all plucked, loves me, loves me not.
“No... no... who did this to you?” Ashe rubs Minty’s ear and scoops up daisies and dirt. This time she yells, “Who did this?” No one answers.
Ashe is too nervous to move the cat. She waits outside until Dedue arrives.
“I’ve brought the weeds.” He sees Ashe’s shoulders and her back shaking. “I mean herbs, yes.” He hears her sobs and steps closer. “Minty?”
Ashe is a tangle of tears and fury. She rips leaf from stem and across veins, shredding tinier and tinier pieces until she has nearly a paste. That gives her hands somewhere to be besides tight against her body, her nails in her palms.
Dedue considers the plants on the ground. “These are no good anymore. I’ll throw them away.”
“They were never for eating.” Ashe laughs through sniffles. “You break them open to get the sap and hold them to your bruises. They’ll hurt less and heal faster. They were for you, but maybe now, you can share with Minty.”
“Thank you for thinking of me, but I will be fine.” For the second time today, Dedue calls sparks to his fingertips and sprinkles them like benevolent snowfall on a waiting face.
Minty sneezes and stands.
“All better.” Dedue celebrates with a smile.
“And what about you?” Ashe almost touches Dedue’s forearm. Instead she brushes his fingers. “The food for the celebration. We’re... so late. I’ll stage it best I can, but—"
Dedue raises a stern hand. The other, he holds knuckles to the ground. “Watch.”
A candle-sized foal made of flame tumbles from his open palm. Ashe has never seen fire animals before, not ones that kept their shape, not as this delicate scale. Keeping multiple simple rings coherent is impressive. This is a level apart.
Ashe inhales surprise when it moves. Its shaky legs reflect in her widening eyes.
It matures and moves quickly, a slow trot breaking into a gallop in seconds. The wood serves as a track for its motion, turning to spent coals beneath its hooves. With each footfall it grows, accruing glowing orange until its head is the size of Ashe’s hand.
“It will go around and around the pots, faster and faster until the dishes is done. In minutes, not hours.”
The broth inside the one nearest them already bubbles. Minty regards the moving flame with suspicion, trailing it as it circles.
“I—” Ashe has too many questions that bundle in the asking. She settles for staring at Dedue, in utter awe of what life comes from his tired features.
Dedue samples from the nearest pot, cabbage and herring stew. A wooden spoon in the energetic liquid. His face curdles at the taste.
“That bad?” ashe’s heart falls against her stomach as she reaches for the spoon. There’s no time to start over.
An attempt at a smile doesn’t creep past Dedue’s mouth. “I’m just not a fan of fish guts. It’s supposed to taste that way here, among these people. In Duscur, we would have made it sour.”
“Let’s do that. There are fresh limes in the pantry.” Ashe doesn’t wait for an answer before dashing to the storage and tossing one his way.
“One is enough. Even a hint of Duscur will be too much for some.” Dedue’s smile is real this time. His eyes brim with memories only he can see. “They might not taste it, but I’ll know it’s there.”
Dedue halves the lime, mutters a prayer, and squeezes the juice into the stew. The other half he offers to Ashe. “join me?”
Ashe sprouts a wide grin as she crushes the lime half. The first semblance of relief winds its way through her and into the yielding soft flesh, poor lime. The rest of her body is loud with anxiety. Fortunately, as her stress baker classmates taught her, the feeling doesn’t end up in the food.
Sshe fishes out a small herring by the tail and whistles to Minty. He devours it, mewing with his mouth full as he crunches on the bones.
“We’re all accomplices now.” Ashe shrugs.
She licks the juice from her fingers, her mood also a swirl of sour and celebratory. She knows what’s like to rebuild after loss, knows that Dedue is fighting to gather enough in the present to have fragments of a future. What will her classmates see? The taste of food fades quickly on the tongue.
*
The celebration itself is a missing page in the manuscript of her mind. After hours of her thoughts growing slippery with dread, her brain is numb to all but the highest volumes of tension. For many measures, she records rests. Surely in the way of catering large gatherings, it was repetitious hours of ladling soups into trays and piling steaming fish onto polished platters. By some miracle, there was enough. Nothing erupted into catastrophe.
Some hours in, Manuela intrudes, smiling at her own imperilment. “Sometimes the wine speaks for me, and it said something to make Seteth quite angry.” Her words run together like amateur watercolors. She runs a finger down a phantom jawline only she can see.
Out of habit, she pours two shots from glasses and a bottle retrieved from who knows where. She offers one to Dedue, then Ashe, and settles on the cat. Ashe’s face goes on a journey.
“Enough.” Ashe takes it from her hand and downs it. “Why didn’t you tell prince Dimitri what was happening?”
“Just jumping right in, huh? Well, it’s because all I am now is a pretty voice. Chirp chirp.” She has a moment of clarity. “My tits are full of secrets.”
Dedue laughs. Ashe’s mouth falls open.
“Oh, sorry, how unbecoming.” A melodious lilt rises from her diaphragm, a lewd reupholstering of a timeless melody. “My bosom swells with the knowledge of others.”
“Listen to me, girl. I know the value of discretion because I’ve lost it too many times. But hiding in plain sight… so much is messy with me that no one looks, no one listens.” Manuela looks into the caramel liquid in her bottle and takes a healthy swig.
She jabs Dedue softly in the side. “See? I still have charm and surprise yet.” She addresses to Ashe. “What I mean is, I make my own bad decisions. But making them for other people? That’s too much.”
Her lacquered nails tweeze grilled fish from a waiting platter. Oil shines on her lips. “This is delicious."
“You think it’s good?” Dedue and Ashe tense and slouch in victory and relief.
“Did you try some?" Manuela eyes the munched fins on the floor. “You gave it to the cat before your selves? Chivalrous.”
Ashe and Dedue nibble on the flaky skin. Dedue bites his cheeks. “I taste the lime.”
“Oh no.” Ashe’s eyes dart to Dedue’s face.
“Yes, it’s a delicious twist. Everyone likes it, even Seteth’s picky, fish-obsessed daugh—, uh, sister.”
“I see.” Dedue closes his eyes but doesn’t relax, tension strung up in his neck and shoulders.
“Now if I may take a stab at your question, Ashe.” Manuela’s wrists bob as if conducting an invisible symphony. “Dedue has come to me before. This isn’t something that his highness can solve. What he wants, what you also want, is a different world that Fódlan can scarcely imagine. Even his highness and the lot of the nobles.”
“She does listen,” Dedue mumbles to his eyelids.
“Right? You’d think more people would find that an appealing trait in a woman.” She sighs and shifts her weight. “Well. I can read a room. Guess it’s time for me to grovel to Greenbeard. By the way, you didn't hear it from me, but I hear there are some Morfis plums in the icebox.” And like that the kitchen door is swinging.
“Make good choices!” Ashe reaches too late in Manuela’s direction.
The foretold plums are in the little freezer in the corner of the kitchen.
“Manuela means well, but—” One bite into the plum and the thought dissolves. Cold juice trickles down his chin. Ashe follows it as it rounds his adam’s apple.
Dedue looks back beneath her eyes. There’s none of the threat Ashe has grown to expect around men. “Well, she talks a lot for a listener—“
“—because no one listens to her.” Dedue nails the rejoinder.
“You’re a listener too, aren’t you Dedue.” Ashe bites, her teeth piercing the purple skin before she can say anything else. The innards of the plum are so sweet and so cold.
“She called you a girl.” Dedue drags his fingertips across his throat, cutting the tear of juice off from its trail. “I wonder. Can you listen to me? Can you know me?”
*
Later that night, several hours after the last bell rings curfew, Dedue knocks with his elbow on Ashe’s door. His arms ache from scrubbing copper cookware to a shine, but Minty settled on his lap and wouldn’t let go, so he carries the cat and ignores the shrill complaints of lactic acid by his biceps.
Ashe had drifted into dreams with enough foresight to change into sleeping clothes. In a repeat of the morning, she blinks half-awake and trusts her feet to carry her where she’s needed.
She squints at Dedue with half-open eyes and drags a hand through the air. “You should come in.”
Dedue pours the cat into her arms. His gaze wanders over the night sky of freckles on her neck. Everything that was hiding under the uniform fabric is revealed by the short sleeves. It isn’t a problem until she thinks about it and Minty squirms.
Ashe retreats to her bed, pulling her sheets over her knees, up to her shoulders like a shroud.
Dedue’s pajamas look too small, yet he bulges out of the monastery’s largest size. Thighs and hips challenge the seams of his shorts. He folds his hands at his navel and tries to shrink.
“I wanted to check on you. Because I realized that what I saw you doing, I had seen in my years serving his highness. There’s a slope into the dark—”
“You thought I lit the match on purpose, to— no, no way was I trying to hurt myself today. In fact, I was terrified of dying before anyone could know me.” She becomes too aware of herself, the contours of her being out of place, her body heavy against the coarse monastery sheets. Minty rubs himself along her back. “What I want to know about today is, was that your plan all along, to use bending to cook?”
Dedue sits cross-legged on the carpet. “No, that was a contingency. I realized it would be necessary after the morning, but I went in assuming we would have time to do everything. I also think we could have failed without bending.”
“I spent the whole day worrying about you. I feel so foolish.”
“I was fine without your worry, but I appreciate everything you did.”
“If you look at it, I just made things difficult for you. At the time, I didn’t think I was doing something so useless.”
“You misunderstand. Your fear and mine fit together. And what’s more, you want to know about this.” Dedue crafts a double of Minty in fire. It lounges from knee to knee over his crossed legs. “It also fits together.”
Ashe crawls to the edge of her bed, the sheet falling away. The real Minty hoards it and makes a nest for himself in the corner between wall and headboard.
“I’m listening.”
“Years ago, your fear was my fear. Then the Tragedy happened, and now I’ve given up on others understanding what they don’t want to see.”
Dedue glares at something in the past, a look like a double-edged sword, the sensation of slicing and being sliced through.
Ashe’s throat closes around a sob, but the wrong emotion leaks out. She joins Dedue on the floor, knees to knees, hands to hands, fingers laced. She recognizes his pain, but her excitement after unweaving his innuendo is nearly unspeakable. “Are you saying you’re also a girl?”
Dedue runs his fingers through his hair. Even in the evenings the back knot is tight. “Where can I start. No. Almost. It’s like how— the first time I saw freckles, I thought it was blood.”
Ashe touches her face.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t you. Your face is... nice.” Dedue shrugs. “I was saying we are haunted by what we are familiar with.”
Ashe looks at a charcoal etching of Lonato and Christophe framed on her desk. “True.”
His back upright, Dedue finds Ashe’s fingertips and close his eyes. Minty’s fiery doppelgänger disappears, but the warmth lingers between them.
“Everyone in Duscur could bend. Rich, poor, blind, deaf. Bending is connection.”
Ashe closes her eyes too. Dedue’s words will guide her in the dark. “I heard some people say that bending was invented in Duscur.”
Dedue’s voice falls to a softness that couldn’t startle a candle. “I don’t think so. That’s not what we told ourselves. But a culture of benders threatened the empire.”
Ashe thinks of her knightly tales. “Were there bending armies?”
“Your experience haunts you. Bending is for more than violence. Men used it to hunt, women to cook and heal.”
“How can you heal with fire?”
“Closing wounds... cardiac...? heart wounds. It translates poorly.”
“And you healed Minty.”
“And you.”
“Oh? thank you.” Ashe squeezes Dedue’s hands tightly. He squeezes back.
“The Tragedy wasn’t the first time outsiders saw what they wanted in Duscur's people.”
“Is this how... you heal with fire, and you’re a... man? A not-woman.”
“Yes, because I watch over his highness. Such a person could be called a mage? A dancer? Certainly not a man. It doesn’t matter in Fódlan speech, least not when Faerghus people see me as a monster.”
“You don’t need to believe them.”
“Precisely. But I don’t mind anymore. They have words for me and none are mine. I know in Duscur, I was needed and I was free.”
“Just free?”
Minty purrs.
“Just free.”