Archive of Our Own

Felix had his back turned to Dimitri when he died. He came back to this detail in the aftermath, in the tricks that all minds play when looking for someone who isn’t there. 

It was a mess. Felix suspected that the entire thing had always been a mess, but he was no longer Felix but Duke Fraldarius, and Faerghus was no longer Faerghus, but an annexation of the Empire, and the Blaiddyds had all died—there was no room for questions. The Empire had no use for Felix, but a stray Fraldarius they wanted. Felix did not correct them when they talked of their strategy around the enormous butcher-block table that lived in the war room at Enbarr. 

But Felix had learned his lessons early and they surfaced no matter how furiously he beat them back, and he knew that the last Fraldarius had died on the Tailtean Plains with his back turned. 

Felix had heard it since he was a child. The graves of those with lingering regrets would darken no matter the material they were marked with, that they would turn the earth putrid and sour. He had solemnly inspected them, taking sedate steps from one grave to the next, looking for cracks in the earth, sniffing the air, following Dimitri in a mock procession. 

“Nobody here died with regrets,” Dimitri said, and his voice stumbled over the phrase. He had probably learned it from one of the enormous boring books he had to read, shut up in the library while Felix luxuriated in his freedom from the study back in Fraldarius, catching bugs and setting up traps for rabbits in the courtyard.

Felix looked over the graveyard. “Too bad.” 

“Felix,” Dimitri said, shocked. 

“What,” Felix said, resisting the urge to scrub at the back of his neck in embarrassment. Ever since they were little kids, Dimitri had never skinned his knees and cried, though Felix had always known he wanted to. 

“You shouldn’t,” Dimitri said, looking at Felix imploringly with those huge eyes. “We—” 

“Glenn said it’s not real,” Felix said, which settled it for him. He watched Dimitri twitch at that. 

“Still,” Dimitri said, clearly anguished. They looked over the neat squares of the graves, each one set firmly in the grass with its somber stone. “No regrets,” he said again, quietly, and then let Felix coax him back into the courtyard before the old gravekeeper found them stepping on the threads of new spring grass struggling through the earth. 

The body had been recovered as a favor to Felix, he had been informed. Hubert’s tone left no room for guesswork—Felix’s pulse felt fragile and fast in his neck, thinking of the damage the request had done. But there was no way around it. And Felix had nowhere else to turn but the Empire, or rather there was only the Empire in every direction. His lands loaned upon royal decree, the people of Faerghus lined up against the wall, every person who’s face he could picture clearly in his mind cut cleanly into the next life. So he had knelt on the ground, clenched his jaw for the blow, and asked. 

“It’s not like you to be sentimental,” Edelgard said. When he looked up in reflexive fury he couldn’t make out the fine features of her face in the shadow of her headdress against the sun. 

“You can call it that,” Felix said, and resolved that after this there would be no more of this, the instinct of a child raised in the cradle of a kingdom that had been obliterated and betrayed. 

“The body was sealed,” Edelgard said, dismissive, and sent him off to Hubert. 

During his time at the Academy and a little bit after that, Felix had stayed alive and awake at night and stewed in the hatred of him that Felix fed like a loyal dog. He had thought naively that there would be no person that he could hate more. It was a child’s certainty, Felix thought, watching Hubert gloat as they walked silently outside the castle, feeling his fingers want for a sword, a sharp implement, or any blunt one. 

“I know you hate me,” Hubert said, as they walked in circles around the castle. Felix had counted five left turns and welcomed the distaste that pooled in his mouth at the sight of Hubert’s gleeful face. Felix ignored him. He had caught snakes as a child, and had been awful at it—he went straight for the head bare-handed as Glenn shouted at him in surprised horror. He knew now how to wait. 

Someone had sealed Dimitri’s body under three layers of magic and inside an unmarked wooden coffin. Felix traced a finger against the edge of the lid, and thought about how once he would have cared about the spellwork, and who had laid it, and whether it would keep. He was exhausted now. 

“I’ll be taking this,” Felix said, nodding at the coffin. 

“As was promised,” Hubert said, smiling. Felix entertained a brief fantasy of cutting Hubert’s fingers off one by one. 

Hubert was apparently content to stand and watch Felix stare at the coffin. Felix, sick of it all, turned heel and left before he could do something truly ill-advised, and there would be nobody left alive who cared enough to bury Dimitri’s dead body in the ground. 

Felix could remember a time without a hole for a chest. It required an alignment of conditions that were scarcer and scarcer to come by, the space in his ribs land lain fallow and dried to a cracked husk. But still he went up the hill behind the ancestral Fraldarius graveyard to the scattering of stones that lay beyond. 

He was laid to rest here, though Felix doubted he was resting. He imagined his body twitching even in eternal sleep, nerveless rotting fingers itching to dig through the packed dirt above, reaching for—

Felix took a deep breath through his nose, and let it out. He brushed the leaves that had fallen on top of the stone aside. There was a streak of clay that he should have wiped away. He had left the gravekeeper’s rag down below. Felix licked his thumb and smudged it thin.    

The coffin had been so heavy that to carry it alone, his Crest had activated continuously. He had been trained from birth to pull on it in bursts, letting it flood his body in a sudden shock. By the time Felix had lowered the thing into the ground, his body was so drained that he had nearly toppled over, muscles spasming. He had gone on his knees, breathing so harshly he was inhaling lungfuls of dust. A child could have bested him in the moment. 

There had been no way around it. There was nobody else to do it. Ingrid and Sylvain had died before him. Now only Felix remained, the last vestige of Faerghus’s great houses, a dog of the Empire kept on a leash and paraded out. 

He looked at the white stone a few beats longer, and then jerkily pulled himself back to his feet and walked down the hill, where the gravekeeper’s eyes followed him as he pulled the gate carefully shut behind him. 

The Lecuyers had always tended the Fraldarius graveyard. It was a half-day’s ride from the Fraldarius capital, which had always been enough time for Felix to grow tired of the entire affair and pick fights with the old gravetender, an ancient man who looked like he rattled when he walked. When Glenn had been alive, they had chased each other around the slender saplings that grew spindly towards the wide sky. 

The graveyard was sunken into the very bottom of a valley, and in Felix’s memory was perpetually green, a grassy meadow marred by the enormous white stones that marked each grave. The air was too cold for anything more than the thin grass and the twiggy trees, so the valley existed in a constant state of sickly sunny green. The Lecuyers lived in an unassuming stone house just outside the perimeter. Only Farren remained now. Felix cast back into his memory to search for her in the visits of his youth, but he could only remember the ride and the old man. 

She hated him. They stood in tense silence outside the stone house, Farren with her hands clasped demurely behind her back, eyes flinty. 

“I’m going now,” Felix said jerkily. His voice was rough with disuse. 

“You should visit them,” Farren said. She was holding herself very still. If he put a hand on the sword at his hip, he wondered if she would flinch. 

Felix snorted. “You don’t need to stay here.” All she had ever known was this grassy valley and all the inert bones that lay below it, and Felix had no use for them. 

He was almost out of earshot before her voice came on the wind. 

“Then you would know they can’t rest.” 

Felix whirled around. “They are resting, forever.” She was still standing defiantly at the gate, hands still behind her back. 

“Duke Fraldarius,” Farren said, and now her voice pinched in the middle with anger. “Why do you come?” 

He strode back towards the gate. It had been some time since he had felt compelled to move in this same way, driven forward by a burst of something inside instead of leadenly moving his body through its paces. He didn’t know what to say to her at all, at her young face already lined from the sun and the stress, the accusation that lived in her eyes like water in a well. 

“What else is there for me to do,” Felix said, and felt each word leave him helplessly. 

Farren’s lips were a thin white line. “Who did you bring?” 

Felix didn’t expect the blow and it floored him, stole the breath out of his lungs, like someone had tapped hard on his solar plexus with the butt of a lance. He sucked in a lungful of air. It had been years, but still there were ways that he found to hurt Felix even after all this time. 

Felix turned back towards the gate and saddled his horse. 

He did not like the time he spent in Faerghus, branded as he was as an Imperial soldier in all but name. But he hated the time he spent in Enbarr even more, despised even the sound that the metal-soled Adrestian boots made against their polished stone tiles. 

He was required in court. The war was ongoing but Edelgard sat on the throne here, and Felix was required to show his face in the war room, where he sat and tried to turn to stone. There was a window directly across from where he sat, and if he was still he could see the shape of his reflection in the blurry glass. 

They talked like they were friends. Felix watched them interact with each other out of his peripheral vision and stared straight ahead at the window, feeling his skin prickle with discomfort that came in endless waves. 

Claude was alive still, and Rhea too. And so the wheels of the war turned, ever so slowly—shipments of ammunition to be intercepted, wyverns raised from eggs to be killed in the dead of the night, speeches to be painstakingly smithed to strike the right tone at the right time, on and on and on. 

None of them tried to engage him in their planning. They were excited about the prospect of war still, which was nearly unbearable. Nothing will change if you win , Felix thought, in case one of them could read his mind. Though if they won, at least some of their lives would be spared. And if they lost—well. They would soon understand everything. 

Felix had nightmares now. He had almost never dreamed as a child. He had been a deep sleeper, something that had been trained out of him by the time he turned twelve, but curiously the dreams never started even after that. They came to him now like mosquitos to blood. 

He dreamed of seeing Dimitri, of his familiar back. Sometimes when Dimitri turned he had a bloody maw for a face, or no face at all. He dreamed of his corpse, animated again in fury, and sometimes speared through with the great trunk of a tree or picked over by great white herons, their beaks dyed vivid red. They took off in a whirl of feathers when Felix approached. 

Felix burned with resentment over them. When he woke with a cry trapped deep in his throat or the muscles in his back aching from tensing he rolled over onto his stomach and willed himself to sleep again, and again, and again. He dreamed of watching Dimitri be swallowed up by the earth, gored through with flocks of arrows, withering into nothing, dreamed of putting a hand on his shoulder and having it rip straight through the imaginary skin and muscle. 

Mostly he dreamed of Dimitri being still—standing motionless in the blank white fields of Felix’s dreams, his face blurry. When Felix approached he seemed to turn towards him. Once—Felix woke up with his face wet, and realized he had been crying. 

Faerghus had seasons. They were less pronounced than the exuberant way that Adrestia seemed to burst into life and die back each year, but it was hard not to notice in the winter when the cold seemed to slide its way into a permanent spot underneath his skin as the Moons passed. He could feel it now, underneath all the layers he was wearing—a second skin, a second skeleton. 

He went to the graveyard. The last of the grass crunched underneath his feet, brittle with frost. It hurt to breathe, the air stinging the inside of his nose and lungs as he took a breath and held it. The sun hung white and bright above him. Each stone had no shadow. 

Farren was nowhere to be found in the graveyard. He had brought coins for her, and a hunk of cheese taken from the castle kitchen. It hurt his head to think about the bureaucratic nightmare that war presented, how the pay had to be distributed and the taxes collected. He assumed Farren was being paid, through the temporarily appointed head of the Old Kingdom treasury, until the gold could be weighed and counted by one of the Adrestians. After the war ended. 

It was dragging. It had been eight years since the war started, and three since Dimitri had died. There was no end in sight. The Professor had sided with the Church, and so the war ground on. 

Felix left the package on Farren’s swept doorstep and went through the gate and up the familiar hill. There was no wind today, so he could hear every footstep against the frozen ground. 

The graves were beacons under the light. The stones had been polished by centuries underneath the wind and the rain, tumbled as smooth as any pebbles in the river. All the Fraldariuses since the time of Nemesis were interred here, one after another, in neat rows. Felix passed his father, and then Glenn, and stood on top of his own grave. It was not his grave any longer—there was nobody alive who would know to bury him here after death. 

The Blaiddyds had a graveyard, and a keeper as well. Felix had been only once, with Dimitri when he was too young to remember where it was—the location was lost to him now. The location was a secret, given only to the retainer.

“Sorry,” Felix said, staring down at the blank stone. It was pristine. “You’re here instead.” 

When he was back in Adrestia, summoned for discussion on another campaign against the Church, he found that the superstitions that always seemed to shroud all things in Faerghus had slithered  their way into his mind and made a nest. 

It was painful still to think of Dimitri’s death. To die without Felix noticing, of blood loss, when so much hinged on his continued life. 

Felix did not believe in ghosts, did not believe in old wives’ tales. But it needled at him, the white grave. Dimitri  was interred in the wrong graveyard even. 

The ceiling of his allotted room was covered in red fabric that looked like dried blood in the yellow lamplight. Felix stared up at it and felt dread like a rock in his stomach. 

Felix had just one day left before he was required in the Imperial court. When he saddled his horse and looked at the grey clouds gathering over the horizon, the dread weighed heavily on him. It would rain within the hour and the air smelled wet and sharp with ozone. The roads would turn to slippery mud, and being caught out in the weather as the temperature dropped after sunset was a sure way to catch pneumonia and spend the next month coughing brutally. He turned his horse in the direction of the graveyard and set off. 

The sky opened up when the capital was still visible in the distance, wreathed by rolling thunderclouds. Felix grit his teeth and pulled hard at the reigns, feeling his horse tense in terror under him. The rain was relentless, pooling inch-deep over the earth, fat raindrops falling almost painfully on Felix’s exposed face. Felix swung off his horse with a curse. 

He showed up to Farren’s house at sundown, drowned and shivering despite his best efforts. The wind had abated an hour or so ago, and now the rain went on steadily. His horse had given up on shaking the rain out of her eyes and had followed Felix blind as he towed them through the brush. 

Farren was still awake. The candle in the window had been lit just minutes ago, and Felix watched a drop of wax slide down its long column as he stood in the doorway, feeling every part of him ache. He breathed deeply through his nose, scrubbing one cold hand over his face. 

He knocked on the door. When she answered, Farren’s face was as impassive as ever, as though the storm often brought in disgraced dukes, shivering like newborn fawns in the cold early spring. 

“Duke Fraldarius,” Farren said, lowering her gaze and inclining her head, as Felix shivered and pooled water on her step. 

“Do you,” Felix said, and then paused, biting the sentence off with a jolt of irritation. “May I stable my horse.” 

Farren nodded, and waited. 

Felix’s stomach was hollow and fragile with it. It felt as though he would shatter with the slightest pressure. They stood staring at each other, Felix’s hands curled into fists, his fingertips pruning and painfully stiff from clutching the lead. He stretched out his fingers and bit back a hiss. The ground would freeze solid within the hour this early in the year, even in the valley. 

“And if it’s—I’ll stay the night.”  

Farren asked no questions. There was a second tiny room, sterile with disuse, that she showed him to. Felix stripped down to his underlayer, laid out his wet clothes in a haphazard row in front of the dusty hearth, and laid awake for many more hours, heart pounding. 

He was due in the Imperial Court in a matter of hours. The thought barely registered. He thought of Farren, living alone next to the graveyard in the years Felix had spent with the smell of blood in the back of his nose—his clothes soaked through and dried stiff with it, the sting of it in his eyes and the dark crescents of it that would collect underneath his nails. 

In the morning the ground would thaw in the weak light of the sun, and Felix would put this ghost of his to rest. 

Felix did not sleep. He dozed with an anxious alertness that he associated with those bloody years, body perpetually tensed for an incoming blow. When the tepid light that filtered through the curtains had reached an acceptable level of brightness that signalled morning, Felix pulled on his wet boots with a wince and stole outside. 

The spade was in the same place he remembered it to be. He wondered if it had been used at all since he himself had used it, nearly a full year ago. The air was almost humid this early in the morning, the weak warmth of the sun collecting a thin mist that rose over the ground as Felix hoisted the shovel over his shoulder and set off into the graveyard. 

The oldest Fraldarius graves were barely visible in the grey dirt, the stones weathered rough and yellowing with age, grass struggling in the cracks. Glenn’s was as immaculate as the day he had been buried. Felix stopped in front of it and felt the familiar pang like a brass bell struck. He was afraid of lingering, that the urgency that gripped him would leave him shame-faced and weak if he did not keep moving. The momentum carried him completely, past Glenn’s grave, past his father’s, past the mother he had barely known, out the back gate and up the hill. 

He had not asked Farren for an inscription, but she had carved one anyway. In rest , Felix read, and touched a fingertip to the cold stone. It looked as if it had been carved from whole rock just yesterday. Dust rolled off it like water from a window. There was not a single hairline crack, not one black vein, no grey cast. 

Felix placed one palm on the rock, offered a momentary apology to Farren and her grandfather, and then rose to his feet. He had judged incorrectly. The ground was still frozen despite how hot the morning had turned, and his body strained with the effort of digging spade-tip into rocky earth. 

His body remembered the motions, fell into the rhythm as easily as any sword drill or training routine. They were, after all, the twin motions of war. It had been a while since he had activated the Crest, and he fell back into it without thought, shifting into it to push the shovel in the last spade length and prying upwards. 

The coffin came into view, ghostly pristine. Felix’s vision was gritty with dust, and he felt bile rising in his throat at the sight of it. He had already come this far. He could not go back. He put a clenched fist on top of the first seal and pushed with his Crest. It came apart smoking. The second cracked open, and then the third. 

His vision was whiting out, and he could barely see through the dust and smoke and light. He reached blindly for the lip and flung it open, fingers scrabbling against the wood for balance. 

He fell to his knees in the dirt and looked, fighting to keep his eyes open. 

It was empty. 

Felix turned his head to the side and vomited. 

He was sweating through his clothes. He staggered to his feet and spat, acid burning his throat and ears. Dimitri was not here. Where was his body? There was too much to take in all at once, though one thought rose to the forefront of the fragmented mess—he was going to break both of Hubert’s kneecaps and his nose.

Felix picked up the spade, and then dropped it from his nerveless fingers. Was he alive? The thought made his breath catch, crept a fragile tendril through the dense misery he had cultivated as a second skin. He beat it back desperately. 

The sun had come up in earnest, gilding the clouds. The hole was an unseemly pockmark in the earth, gouged deep and irregular, but Felix had no time. He hauled the stone and the shovel down the hill, Crest burning sluggishly in his chest. 

He laid the stone in front of Glenn’s grave, and knelt. He could hear his own unsteady breathing, feeling his right leg shake as he shifted his weight. Felix did not know what to say, now that he was here—had turned his back and paid dearly for it, only to find that the universe had been rearranged without him knowing. He rolled onto his back on the grass next to Glenn’s grave and stared at the sky, the blanket of white clouds that disappeared into the horizon, and felt so strongly the grave tilt of the earth and the dizziness he associated with the sharp burn of relief. 

Glenn had taught him how to swim, had gently knocked his head down underneath the freezing water repeatedly until Felix had learned how to hold air in his lungs. He used to look up through the tears and the water to the light above. He was surfacing now, his balance shot, the ground shaky from time spent staring at a watery sky. 

He met Farren at the gate. She had led his horse there and now stood waiting for him, a girl alone on a windswept plain. 

He leaned over her shoulder to take the reins and wondered what there was to say—what could possibly be said. She would have to fill in the empty grave, remove the stone, sit among the dead while Felix—while he—

“I’m going to find him,” Felix said. He watched her face carefully. 

“So you do see the signs,” Farren said, and with a shock Felix remembered that she was a child still, smug with her victory. 

“Be well,” Felix said, embarrassed despite it all, and then swung up onto the saddle. He was a half-day away when he realized he had forgotten to thank her. 

Something had sharpened within him. As he closed in on Enbarr the feeling grew keener, the edge cleaner, and he put a hand to his stomach and found that it was hunger. 

He had wanted nothing. It dawned on Felix now that he had not wanted nothing, but rather had wanted impossible things, things so out of reach they might as well have been on the moon. Now that he had scented them on the wind, he could not help but run in their direction, ravenous. 

He arrived at the castle out of breath, hair caked with sweat and dust. His thighs burned with the exertion of riding non-stop against the wind. His horse was covered with a gleaming layer of sweat. The attendants fluttered at his heels, wringing their hands about the hour, and whether he had an appointment, and the state of his clothing from time on the road. Felix knocked a guard’s outstretched hand aside and threw open the throne room doors. 

The council was in session. Edelgard looked up, eyes narrowed, and got to her feet. 

“I’m assuming there’s a reason for this, Duke Fraldarius.” 

“Your Majesty,” Felix said from the door, and it came out like a lash. Edelgard’s face tightened. Felix strode the length of the room and tossed the shovel at the foot of the throne, watched it skid a dark mark against the crimson carpet.  

“Explain yourself,” Edelgard said, and the force of her bore down on them, rendered the council statue-still. 

Felix knelt, and willed the rising ride of his fury down. 

“The traitor king of Faerghus’ grave is empty.” 

There was a wash of noise now. He looked up at her face, and found it wiped carefully blank. She had known, Felix thought, and felt his stomach cramp in a howl of reflexive anger. When he looked again she had arranged her features into a careful outrage and was the Emperor once more. 

“I will fill it,” Felix said, and held her gaze. 

He had played his role with little faith for these years, but still had rolled over when told and never bitten, had stayed out of the court and the machinations that followed it in a noxious cloud. He had never been good at politicking, even when he had been reared for the Duchy—had always found it irritating to the point of pain, like wading through waist-deep mud. It needled at him now, the feeling of strings he could not see. 

“So it was empty,” Edelgard said, and her voice rang through the room. Felix could not read her face nor her tone. “Thank you, Duke Fraldarius, for your report. The Empire will commit all that it can to investigating the issue.” 

The council was lining up all at once, clamoring expectantly. Felix rose to his feet and shouldered through the great golden doors. She did not stop him. 

Hubert materialized next to him as he was stalking towards the gates.

 “A great performance,” he said, so close it raised Felix’s hackles in instinctive aggression. 

Felix did not deign to look at his face. 

Felix clenched his jaw so tightly he could hear it click. Dimitri was alive. He was alive, he was alive, he was alive. It sang through him with every step. Next to him, Hubert was matching him stride for stride. 

“You’re wrong,” Hubert was saying, his mouth twisted in an ugly grin. “If you think—”

Hubert reached out a hand towards Felix. A mistake, thought Felix, catching in his peripheral vision. They were far enough from the castle that no wandering eye could see them, shadowed as they were by the fortified outside wall. Felix backhanded Hubert across the face, hard enough that his hand stung and  Hubert went sprawling to the ground. 

“Goodbye,” Felix said, and laughed. 

The last thing Dimitri remembered was the feeling of sinking down into the blood-soaked earth, the slick feeling of blood and water pooling in the back of his throat, his body too weak to cough. 

He was alive. Bleeding out steadily in a stone cupboard of a cell, but alive all the same. The hook of the axe had caught him later after he had passed out, ringing his body in a deep gouge that spanned from shoulder to hip and across his back. The pain dulled to a manageable roll and he struggled to keep his eyes open, to piece together why he could still feel the blood against his skin and the pained fluttering of his breathing. 

He slid back into darkness. 

When Dimitri woke, Claude was sitting in the only chair in the room. Dimitri’s entire body ached, and there was another moment of the simpleness of that ache before the situation mired him once more. He levered himself into a sitting position, feeling for the brutal gash in his ribs. It had been bandaged over, and was now stiff with days-old blood. 

“Careful,” Claude said, and he reminded Dimitri of a cat’s sheathed claws, silent against the stone. 

His body only had enough energy for him to prop himself against the crude wall, empty stomach heaving. He felt for the edge of his crest in the space behind his heart and then gasped as his body spasmed painfully. 

“I said to be careful,” Claude said mildly, tapping a foot against the floor. “If you die after all of that effort to get you here, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.” 

“Where am I?” Each word lodged painfully in his throat. Dimitri guessed he had been unconscious for at least a week, and his fingers scrabbled weakly against the floor as he tried to push himself to stand. 

“Drink,” Claude said, and that was Dimitri’s only warning before Claude tossed him a water skein, caked with dust. The water smelled of rust. Dimitri emptied it. 

“You’re in Adrestia,” Claude said, slouching in the chair so that Dimitri could only see the veiled suggestion of his eyes over his shoulder. “Don’t think about leaving.” 

“Edelgard,” Dimitri said, and the familiar furor rose in his stomach and burned. 

“My problem now,” Claude said, and sighed. “Be a good boy and stay.” Claude had joked before, had been cheeky and boisterous when eyes were on him. Dimitri knew him well enough that he could picture the snakes in the surrounding hills, or the spies in the house a stone’s throw away, or the sharpened stakes under the soft earth. Claude could knock an arrow years in the past and shoot it true through time. 

“I cannot,” Dimitri rasped. 

“You will,” Claude said sharply. “I don’t need to spell it out for you, but I’m not asking.” He stood, and Dimitri finally struggled to his feet, breathing fast and shallow against the pain. They stood staring at each other across the packed earth floor. 

“Believe me,” Claude said, and he curled the brightness of his charisma around it to mask the steel and went out the door. His wyvern screeched, and there was the sound of her enormous tail scraping the earth, before she launched them into the air. 

Dimitri settled against the wall and breathed. 

Dimitri hadn’t known Claude well. Who they would grow into forbid it. He thought about that now, breathing in and out evenly, counting each breath. He was distracted by his own breathing, each labored inhalation that pushed his ribs up against his skin, and each thought melted quickly into nothing. 

I’m tired , he thought, and then that thought too skittered and disappeared into the darkness. He let his eyes close. 

Dimitri spent the first full day of consciousness in what he cautiously estimated to be two weeks watching the square of sunlight from the window crawl and stretch across the floor. His stomach felt as small and hard as a rock, a foreign body lodged in his abdomen. His crest was keeping him alive. He could feel the throb of it pushing sluggishly through his body, trying desperately to close his wounds and offset the hunger and exhaustion. 

The house he was in was little more than a cottage, the ceiling hardly taller than Dimitri’s head. The door had a simple wooden plank for fortification that hung loose. He was in a farming village. He could hear the sound of children shrieking, the low hum of activity that wound through the air. So he wasn’t alone, Dimitri thought, tipping his head backward until it hit the dirt wall behind him. An unexpected mercy and a threat. 

His back was itching fiercely as the skin painstakingly knit back together. In another week, should he find water and a meager meal, he would be able to carry his own weight again, and with luck—a light weapon. He would be able to walk again, to haul his battered body from this village to the gates of Enbarr. 

He would never make it. Dimitri was a prisoner here, the invisible chain around his ankle shackled to the knowledge that around him there were children laughing and shouting as they ran through the fields. 

Beyond the fact of it, there lay a vast and densely layered patchwork of exhaustion. 

All of those who had taken up arms for him were dead. He had watched them be pierced with spears and burned alive, crushed underfoot and run through. 

He had thought to join them. Instead he was here, alive still. 

Outside, a woman was calling for the children, her voice straining. He could not move yet even if he had the will to do so, wounds barely scabbed over. He would decide later, Dimitri thought, and drifted numbly into a tenuous sleep as the village grew quiet in the twilight. 

As a prince, as a king, and as a general, the world was vast. Villages ten times the size of the one he was currently in existed as little dots, a series of numbers, a name logged in a minor dispute. During the war, Dimitri had counted men by the thousands, villages by the hundreds. All he knew now was the inside of this single room and the square of grass and sky visible from the window from where he lay. 

It did not seem smaller. It was enormous, how magnified everything was in this little room to Dimitri. He had never paid so much attention to the individual aches of his war-torn body, lavished so much focus on tracing the line that divided the floor and the walls.

He should walk through the door. He was the sole carrier of something too enormous to even contemplate, a weight that bore relentlessly down without reprieve. It sat like a stone in the back of his throat. He could feel it moving with each breath. But still he lay, pinned to the ground. With grief, and something else. 

His dreams were strange, refracted through a layer of heat that made him woozy. He surfaced into wakefulness dizzy, convinced he had fallen through the ground to find himself on top of a cliff, looking down. He was sweating water he could not spare, limbs lead-heavy and sticky. 

In a moment of clarity it came to him. The feeling of relief, breaking gently into his consciousness, before he was swept back into the turbulent sea. 

“I have food and water,” someone said through the door some time after Dimitri had feverishly lost count of the days and the hours. Their voice shook. 

The room could not have spanned more than five strides from corner to corner but he was breathing heavily by the time he put a hand on the door. It was a testament to how battered he was that the door stayed in one piece, Dimitri too sick to do anything but let the will of his body run rampant. 

He probably looked a fright, a reanimated corpse pale as death, his body caked with blood and dirt. It was a woman outside the door, hair bound up severely, holding a woven basket. She squeaked in surprise when the door swung open. 

Dimitri struggled to pull the right words up from inside himself. “Thank you,” he said, forcing the words out past the scorched ruin of his throat, and then heard her say something in alarm as he swayed backwards. 

She was saying something else, putting the basket on the ground, when his eyes rolled back into his skull and his knees buckled underneath him. He instinctively reached out a hand to protect the tender newly-healed stretch of his ribs before he was out like a candle blown. 

When Dimitri woke again it was morning. Someone had moved him from the doorway to lay him next to the straw pallet, and a spike of reflexive fear went through his body at the thought before he boxed it in. The disgusting bandages had been peeled away, and only the worst of the scabs remained, the new skin pink and puckered. His head was clearer. His fever had broken over the night, and he lay gasping for a moment in the luxury of the feeling. 

There was a child outside the window, eyes just visible. When Dimitri levered himself into a sitting position, the child disappeared from view for a moment, before Dimitri watched him run down the path and towards the village. 

Someone had left a bowl of water on the solitary stool. It was filmed over with a layer of dirt. Dimitri drank it gratefully, wincing as his throat worked. He had just set it down when there came a knock at the door. She was polite, Dimitri thought, and moved to open the door. 

She had a baby swaddled across her front this time, its tiny face framed in wispy curls. Her arms were locked defensively across the child. 

“Good morning,” she said, and Dimitri wondered what on earth she was seeing as she looked at him. He was still tall. No amount of emaciation would shrink his bones. But the rest of him was a mystery, his body draped in the remains of the uniform he had been dressed in the Adrestian jail, scratching at his ankles as he stood in the door. 

“Good morning,” Dimitri said. 

“We don’t know who are you are,” she said, and her voice shook slightly as she hefted the child up on her hip more securely. “But—” 

“I mean you no harm,” Dimitri said, and had to close his eyes briefly. It was a strange feeling to search for a kernel of anger to fan into flames and find it missing. He had been scooped empty, all rind. He could not summon the strength nor the will to cut a course towards the capital, had no pressing desire to skim tactical information off any of the people or things he was seeing. She might have known something about the Empire, might have seen Claude and his wyvern, but the only energy he could summon was the knowledge that she was a village woman, a concerned mother. 

As he laid awake that night, his temperature inching upwards, he thought of her face, etched with exhaustion and resolve as she met him at the door, and the tiny perfect face of her child, swaddled and held close. 

It took several more days until he sweated the fever out, waking up every morning with his hair damp and his throat scorched. When the fever had gone for good, Dimitri found that the dull edge of his anger had returned to its place in his bones. He stood at the foot of his pallet and thought desperately of home—the air smelled different in Fhirdiad this time of year, still cold enough that a lungful would freeze in his chest. Adrestia’s spring was mellow already. 

The war was not over. That much was clear. Claude had taken him and left him here, presumably so that at one point in the future Dimitri could be notched like an arrow and shot towards the Empire. He had been born and raised for this.

His lance had been taken. Edelgard had nearly torn his torso in half. The wounds, steadily closing, still pulsed angrily when he moved and kept him from sleeping, sending needles of pain into him as he shifted his weight. She would finish the job with ease if he dragged himself across Adrestia now, as defenseless and uncoordinated as a spring fawn. 

He would need to heal. He took off the disgusting shirt and scrutinized the pink ring of new skin stretching across his torso. It would undoubtedly scar. He ran a finger over the raised ridge of one of the punctures, pressed down—and flinched in pain. 

Another week at the very least. No, Dimitri amended, looking at each visible rib and the sunkeness of his stomach, hard as a rock. A bit longer. He had been starving, was starving still, past any point of hunger that he had ever experienced before. He was in uncharted territory. 

He had to eat. His body had gotten him this far, but he had lost the feeling. He entertained the idea of lying still and turning slowly to stone. Whether he survived or not, whether he ran on foot to the Enbarr gates to exact his promise—it was not his choice, not really. His feet had been pointed in this direction for a long time. It was his true north.

Dimitri forced himself to his feet, and swayed with the effort. Every shallow rise and fall of his ribs hurt. Even the expense of that little energy, enough force to move his chest an increment, made him feel tired with every successive minute. 

He pushed the door open and went out into the world. His stomach felt hard, like a clenched fist. He could feel it as he moved. 

He could not tell the temperature outside. He was hot and cold at once, his skin stretching and prickling over his bones as he felt blindly towards the forest in the distance, tripping over stones he could not see. 

“Hey!” came the call from behind. He turned around towards the voice. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. The sun was high up in the sky and it turned everything a hot, bright white. 

It was the same woman from before. She was as defensive as before, standing with her body angled away from him. 

“Come eat,” she said, and showed him the bowl that she was carrying, and he stumbled back to the house, knees wobbling in relief. 

It was only after he had lowered himself on shaking legs to the floor that he turned his gaze upwards to where she was hovering in the doorway and found that it wasn’t the same woman before at all. She was turned inwards, shoulders sloping down, as she watched Dimitri fight first to eat slowly and then to keep the food down as his stomach revolted. 

After Dimitri had coughed and sweated and finished the bowl of grain, stewed to mush, they sat in uncomfortable silence. She was staring at a spot on the floor next to him with great concentration. 

He was still weak and his throat was burning from the exertion of eating. His stomach was painfully hard. “Thank you,” he rasped finally. 

She nodded. Dimitri had been half-delirious, and was still more starving than not. 

“My name is Aliona,” she said finally, and took the bowl from the table and stood to leave. 

“Dimitri,” he said, before he could think of whether it was smart to reveal—how much they knew—but his mind was sluggish, and she nodded and left him. 

There were a hundred or so people in the village. They were on the edge of Aegir territory, Yera told him, nervously wringing out Dimitri’s shirt. She and Aliona were identical twins, Aliona had said when she had introduced Yera to him at the door. 

He was embarrassed to have her touch his shirt, to watch her scrub it and bully the stains out of it, as he sat uselessly by. He was in a borrowed shirt and trousers that Yera had offered him from her missing husband’s closet. He did not press her for the details, but she had stared at the clothes in her hands for a beat before offering them to him, and Dimitri felt the familiar grief wash over him like the tide coming in. 

So many had died. He watched Yera scrub determinedly at the shirt as Dimitri breathed in his borrowed clothing, kept alive by a wary kindness. Claude had spared his life, snatched it literally from fated death, but it had been Aliona who had showed up at the door. 

They must have had an inkling of who he was. Mysterious men did not just drop from the sky from wyverns, barely stabilized from life-threatening wounds. But still they had offered him things Dimitri would not have thought twice about in a previous life—safe shelter, a cautious care. 

He didn’t know what to say. He had been trained for so many scenarios and in so many fashions over the course of his life. He had learned diplomacy, how to wield ten different weapons with equal efficiency, how and when to bow, had learned to lead armies and to kill. Even bound and struggling in the Empire’s jail he had reviewed the lessons in his head, had thought grimly and stoically about the surety of his death at Edelgard’s hands. 

Nobody had accounted for this. A lost prince of no kingdom, moored on a wheat field, starved until his bones showed through. 

Dimitri breathed carefully through his nose. Yera’s hands were shaking. Her knuckles were white and rimmed with red as she worked. He might sit quietly and speak politely, but he was a wild animal nonetheless, trapped and chained as he was. 

After she wrung the shirt and shook it out with a crisp motion, she laid it carefully flat on the grass, turned and left without a word. 

There was a town meeting about him. After the first week of intermittent consciousness, he had resurfaced into the waking world and the town had been forced to confront the strangeness of the situation. Aliona had brought the news along with a pale broth, more water than anything else, on the first day that Dimitri had been able to stay awake for longer than a couple hours. 

He had not been invited, but Aliona had stopped by in the morning, before the sun had risen, while Dimitri had been lying awake in the shadows staring up at the thatched ceiling. 

“Dimitri,” she said through the door. “The meeting is today,” and she trailed off. 

A meeting about him, about the strange scarred man who had appeared without warning, with no possessions and no explanation. What Claude had told them he had no idea—but Dimitri could not leave, unless they were counting their lives forfeit. 

“I cannot leave,” he said through the door, and hoped that Aliona would understand. 

There was a pause. “You’re certain.” 

“Yes,” Dimitri said, and felt the familiar web all around him. He had never had a choice. It was just becoming more obvious lately. 

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” 

He thought about that. “I mean no harm.” 

“Noted,” Aliona said dryly, and then there was silence. 

He took the opportunity to wander through the village while all the adults were in their council. The children were playing some kind of game in the empty fields, freshly tilled for the new year. Their shouts carried on the breeze. 

The sun felt good on his face. He still moved slowly. The relic-inflicted wounds would take some time to heal and might not heal completely, deeply gouged as they were. He wondered who he would be without full use of his right arm, and then wondered who he was now at all. Even in his thoughts he shied away from it, exhausted. 

Standing in the sun, it was hard to imagine mustering up the strength and will to leave the valley for the bloody fields that haunted his dreams. It was too early to make such a move, but the choice sat on the edge of every thought. 

Dimitri had been raised to be decisive. It had been easy during his lessons to make the right choice. Sacrificing one battalion for the lives of two others. Growing grain instead of grapes. Bargaining for trade routes, rather than military might. After he had outgrown his lessons and lost his parents, the choices seemed more obvious still—go to Garreg Mach. March towards the Empire. Only now, after death, did it seem like a real choice had risen out of the wreckage to confront him. 

Dimitri had worked hard in the past, had worked himself ragged and to death. This was a different kind of work. 

It had been a little awkward in the beginning—nobody had handed him a sack of seeds to spread or a broad sickle to clear the field of its scraggly underbrush. He had never joined the army. He had been born into the army. But he imagined that the new recruits were handed an iron sword and a scratchy cotton bed-roll and told exactly where to lay it. No such directives appeared here, but the food was offered to him—half a loaf of dark bread, a handful of foraged greens in a thin broth, the last of the apples from last year, insect-bitten but held preciously. And so he had gingerly picked up the tools and went into the fields for lack of anything else to do. 

There was little to do but work, and the village people plainly felt relieved when they saw him make his first meager attempts. Dimitri had lost all of his muscle to starvation and a month of immobility but he was young and able-bodied still, had a crest still. 

It was unsuited towards activities that were not killing. He had known this in a way, with how disaster-prone he was even in the training grounds, much less the kitchen. It had not mattered, really, that he snapped the wooden training swords when he attempted to teach, or that he could not be trusted to wash dishes, when he was a prince. Princes rode off to battle. It had been his job. 

He was not a prince anymore. Tools were not made to withstand the crushing force he could unthinkingly access. It mattered now that he could not handle them. And there was work—so much work—that didn’t involve strength in all:  children to be watched, seeds to be counted and put away, inventories to be taken, chickens to be fed and observed, food to be made and stored. 

When he emerged from his house, he tried to fill in the holes in what needed to be done for the day. 

The town had halved in size since the war had started. Nobody had told him explicitly, but Dimitri had been trained in the art of calling to war, had even taught others how to galvanize an army, how to draft. He could see the etchings of it everywhere he looked now. Men missing, the children who roamed without supervision, the scant number of tools tipped with any usable iron. 

Aliona ran the village from the table in her humble kitchen, balancing her baby on one hip.

“Good morning,” he said to her through the window. 

Her head went up from where she was bent over the table. “Dimitri.” 

He watched her tap the tip of her finger against the table. “The grapes are being trellised today,” she said, and then turned her attention back to her work without another word. 

The vineyard was in the most fertile spot near the spidering streams of the nearby river. Nobody was paying a premium for wine amidst the war, but Dimitri understood the desire to go through the familiar motions of a routine. 

There was another woman in the field, someone Dimitri had met and forgotten. He lifted a hand in greeting and she did the same, and pointed him towards the end of a tidy row. 

The vines themselves might have been older than Dimitri himself, roots dug deep into the floodplain and carefully tended year after year. They only thrived here, in the gentle sun and ample water that the Adrestian coast could offer them. 

He watched her hands work, tying the vines upright to the wooden trellis, and copied her. His hands fumbled with the twine. He accidentally crushed one of the vining stems and came away smelling of dark green. 

As the day wore on it became harder and harder, his hands slippery with the green residue the plants produced and his eyes stinging from sweat. In the last of the golden sunlight he reached the end of the row and looked over it, at the sun in the leaves and the tidied vines, and felt satisfied. 

They left him mostly alone. The women and the few men of the village skirted around him nervously, flinching at the strange tone of his accent. The children were different, halfway to feral, peeking into his window like curious magpies eyeing a pearl. They liked to run in wide looping circles around him as he worked, descending with glee upon any stray bird that dared encroach, watching him split wood with a kind of awe that Dimitri almost felt self-conscious about. 

He had been a prince for nearly his entire life. He had been watched with curiosity, envy, and malice, had led his class during his academy days, had sat briefly on a throne with a thousand eyes fastened to his every move. Now the uncomplicated curiosity bowled him over, the simple questions they fielded when feeling especially daring. 

“How did you get so strong?” one of them asked. He had waited until Dimitri finished for the day, the tools stowed back into their proper place, before darting after him like a sparrow. 

“I listened to my mother,” Dimitri said, and the boy made a face. His name was Theo, Dimitri remembered belatedly. He was so young. Barely six, an age that to Dimitri felt like it had happened several lifetimes ago. He could barely remember anything of what it felt to be that age, uncomprehending of so much—the heavy hand of fate, the pain of a broken bone. It made his head hurt, like he was looking at it at the bottom river cloudy with churn, but only now, so far removed from it he might as well have been on the moon, could he see the signs. An invisible net had been woven around him, that he could still only see glimpses of. He swallowed around the lump in his throat, touched a finger to the fragile skin. 

“Oh,” Theo said with a disappointed air, and he lagged behind Dimitri as Dimitri made his way back to his house through the shrub, sending lazy swarms of gnats into the thick summer air. Theo caught up to him with a burst of speed. 

“But there must be something,” Theo said, bouncing up and down as he tried to match Dimitri’s gait. 

Dimitri didn’t answer. He had earned this, at the very least—the right to be the stoic and silent hermit who lived on a hill alone. What he also didn’t want to say was that there was no way at all to obtain the kind of strength Dimitri had, that wars had been fought for Dimitri’s ability to snap bones without thinking. 

“You’re still young,” he said finally, and watched Theo frown. “You’ll grow up strong.” 

When he and Felix had been that age, they had already started training. He could remember how Felix’s face had looked at age six, drawn in determination. They had had time to run through fields and make forts in the snow that piled high in Fhirdiad as the winter approached, but it was hard to imagine ever living in the kind of innocence that Theo had, even in the shadow of war. 

Theo had grown bored of being told platitudes. “Okay, sure,” he said, and then hastily added, “Thank you.” Dimitri watched him run ahead, back to his mother’s house. 

He still cut an imposing figure, and now that he was eating and sleeping again, he put on some of his lost weight. Dimitri looked different now though, he was sure of it. When he caught his reflection in the moment water pooled on top of the flooded field before it drained, he did not recognize the shape of him, the slope of his shoulders. 

It sat on the back of his mind, the stranger in the water, until he had spent a day hauling the never-ending piles of material from field to field—weeds, rocks sifted out of the earth, iron-tipped tools, Aliona’s crying babe, buckets of water. 

A lifetime of training drills and a years of endless fighting had done nothing to save him from this different ache, that pulled differently and settled easier. He was rolling out the persistent knot that had taken up residence above his right shoulder blade when he blinked and found that he was the stranger—a body built day after day in a different life.

He circled his wrist and slid a hand up his forearm, cupped his elbow, pressed on the knot of muscle on his back. He rolled his neck. It had been a year, a year and a half, since he had died and Claude had sequestered him here. In that time his body had learnt a new set of motions. 

He was—grateful. It brought him up short, how the feeling welled up in him. His body had propelled him this far into the future, into a version of himself that was undeniably alive and breathing.

The ability to wield a spear as he had before had probably been lost to him. Dimitri had not tried. But he could feel the way that the muscle pulled when he twisted too far to the right, where the scar tissue overlaid the cruel punctures. 

He tried to see if he cared. 

He could still shoot an arrow true, and pull a plow. He could crouch down over the fields to look at the little green shoots as they came up in the spring. Often it felt like enough. 

There was no inter-bleeding of the past into the present here, and the future stretched only so far as the next year. Each day had a steady rhythm. He woke before the sun now and propped open the door, so that he could better hear the murmur of the village and the gentle clucking of the chickens scratching at the ground. He liked to watch them as they spent their days wholly focused on the singular task of locating bugs to eat, the way they scratched determinedly at and inspect the ground with their beady eyes for a glint of anything in the dirt. 

He had never had the luxury of observing before. There was always work to be done, but after the work there was leisure of a kind he had never experienced. He napped sometimes with the door open after lunch, when the sun was its peak in the sky, and felt warm all over and inside when he drifted back to wakefulness when the remainder of the work was set to commence. 

He had lived in luxury—the castle he had been raised in was built from sturdy rock and manned by a closely-supervised fleet of cooks and cleaners who guaranteed his dinners and the temperature of his rooms in the frigid Faerghan winters. He did not have to maintain his own home. He had been busy, with statecraft, and the training for the looming specter of war, but he had never eked out an existence from the dirt or thought too much about it. 

There was more work and more rest now, somehow. The work was harder, and more relentless, but it tapered off sweetly at points and he had time to sit by the stream and watch the way that it tumbled over the rocks and earth. 

After the tragedy he had slept poorly, and then during the war poorer still, haunted by the stench of blood and rot that seemed to live in the back of his throat. He could still feel it sometimes, hot and burning. But now sometimes  he would fall asleep exhausted and wake to the gentle grey of the beginning of sunrise, blissfully unconscious. 

There was a strange tree that grew to the north of the orchard. 

On days when the labor was slower and kinder, Dimitri had taken to rising early and roaming the land to the edge of the fields, where the methodically tilled and tended loam gave away to the harder rocky earth that supported densely packed grasses humming with life. 

Work started a little before dawn, so the night was still here, pooling dark around the trunks of the trees. Dimitri made his way through the orchard, straining his eyes to see the low-hanging branches, laden with unripened fruit. 

Dimitri had originally thought the tree a straggler. Stray seeds dropped all over the fields over the years and sometimes managed to thwart birds and malnutrition and brutal early frosts to grow. This tree was growing with roots half-exposed and crooked in ten different directions, bark peeling painfully in paper-thin strips. 

He hadn’t thought anything of it until the trees in the orchard had started growing fat with fruit, green peaches fighting for space, and the crooked tree put out its first flowers. They were ghostly white, petals almost translucent. When Dimitri touched one with a finger it almost seemed to melt away into nothing like a snowflake. 

It rained the next day, a light shower that the village celebrated, and Dimitri walked across the sodden ground to reach the edge of the field and found that all the flowers were gone. 

He had a reason to celebrate the rain now. The summer had descended in earnest, the sun scorching the tender leaves of the grapevines, and the days were devoted solely to the upward battle against it. The irrigation channels had to be dug, and dug, and dug, and the weeds squashed as they sprung up in what seemed like minutes. 

Dimitri had pulled weeds before. He was woefully unprepared for the onslaught as the days grew longer. 

“Dimitri,” Aliona said, from where she was crouched in the neighboring row of grape vines. “You must be gentler. You’re leaving the roots.” 

He had been crushing the leaves as he pulled. “Yes,” he said, chastened, and tried to mimic the motion of her hands as they worked. It was more of a digging motion. 

It seemed more miraculous now that any food was produced at all. That the growth of a single wheat plant was managed through a year of labor and a lifetime of knowing. At times Aliona or Yera or even the little children who had been born into this world put their hands over Dimitri’s larger ones to show him the motions, and he was always struck with a tender embarrassment. 

The pea plants spiralled towards the sky in the Garland Moon. The rains that poured over the land sent them into a frenzy, their leaves unfurling like so many rows of pale green flags that fluttered in the wind as they raced upward. 

They harvested them by the basket. Dimitri was tall, and he was quietly delighted to be handed the basket and showed the pinching motion that would take the pods cleanly off the vines. Others had already picked the lower vines clear, so Dimitri walked through the rows scanning the tangle of green offset against the brilliant blue of the late spring sky. 

Later that evening he helped Yera shell peas—an activity that was possible for anybody but could be practiced at an impossible speed by few. He watched Yera’s hands work and the steady fall of the discarded pods around her. It smelled unlike anything he had ever experienced before, the fresh newness of it that wafted around them as they worked, the fragrant shells underfoot. 

When she reached out to put her hands over his he found that she was watching him too. “Like this,” she said, and pressed his thumbs together underneath hers until the shell cracked open, and he could see the perfect row of peas sitting neatly inside. 

He emptied the peas into the pot and then repeated the motion as she watched, her own hands moving without her attention, and she nodded, and they went through the rest of the basket before the sun set. 

Before he left she caught his wrist and laid his hand out flat. “Thank you,” she said, already turning away towards the next task, and in it she put a little handful of peas. He cupped his hand around them and carried them back to his house, and ate them one by one in the cooling night. He had never eaten something like this, so carefully and with such anticipation of the next. 

They tasted nothing like the peas that turned up in the kitchens at Fhirdiad, dried and grey. Each one burst into a shock of verdant green. 

As the summer tipped gently down from its feverish pitch into the gentler days of autumn, Dimitri felt something that had been locked tight in his ribcage loosen. Some part of him had been tense and ready to fight for nearly all of his life, and it was only the absence of it that he noticed, a jaw finally unclenched. 

There were a handful of children who had been young enough when the war started to have been spared the draft, a grizzled old man who walked with a pronounced limp, a woman who lived in the house next to Aliona’s, and Dimitri. They formed a strange hunting party. 

The bows were stiff from a year of storage, and the children crowded around Dimitri as he worked the wood flexible in his hands. 

“Where’d you learn that?” one of them asked, mimicking the motion on a bow too big for him. He was just shy of adulthood, still lanky and awkward as he moved. 

Dimitri had learned in Fhirdiad, from the arms master. It had been his chore when he had first started training. He could still hear Silas’s severe tone on the importance of weapon maintenance in his hand as he gently twisted the bow, feeling the tension and working it loose. 

“I picked it up, a long time ago,” Dimitri said, and rearranged the boy’s hands on the bow. All of the village’s hunters had disappeared into the Adrestian foothills to serve their nation, and so now it was only Dimitri who could teach him this. 

Dimitri had been on hunting parties in his youth, first as a prince, and then as a student at Garreg Mach. He had stalked grotesque demonic beasts and the great screeching eagles, more battle than hunt. Now they were looking to trap a deer, and maybe some rabbits. 

He had trouble falling asleep the night before, and woke up on the morning of the hunt  with his stomach churning, and he was tensing even now, holding himself rigid to stave off the insistent hum of pain. 

In Faerghus the winters did not creep as much as withdraw in the spring and come roaring back, sharp-fanged and relentless. It needled at any exposed skin, blisteringly cold. Dimitri found the Adrestian winters nicer, though the children complained without pause and went everywhere swaddled in their woollen jackets and scarves. 

Dimitri had lived through twenty Faerghan winters, as eternal as they were. This was more familiar to him than anything else, seeing his breath in the cold air, and the way that stillness seemed to invite the chill into his bones.

There was still work to be done in the winter but significantly less—Dimitri learned to weave. He was as hopeless as he had always been at any delicate work involving his hands, Yera did not mind leaning over his loom to adjust the tension of the threads or to gently correct the placement of his hands. 

“I apologize,” Dimitri said once, deeply embarrassed by the knots that had sprung up like weeds after rain in the skein he was winding. 

“It is fine,” Yera said, and showed him how to slowly unpick the knots. 

She might have thought so but it annoyed him, how clumsy and unsuited he was to work that didn’t involve brute strength or handling a weapon. But still, he thought, unpicking one knot after another, that this life—it was kind to him, in a way he had never known before. 

Dimitri learned to smell the rain on the horizon, to feel it bearing down upon them by the strange pressure it exerted on the back of his neck as he worked. Nobody in the village needed to be told that the torrential rains were coming. They had all learned as children the yearly rhythm of the world around them, and could spot the grey cast on the horizon hours before the clouds would move to blanket the sky. 

The rains brought the wildflowers springing up overnight, carpeting the valley in little blooms that unfurled in the morning sun. The children had all been sent to find the lushest patches in preparation for the last day of the Garland Moon and they came running back with their baskets full of the little roses that grew in great sprawling brambles near all the fields. 

It was never warm enough in Faerghus to celebrate Garland Moon in the same way. The first time had been at Garreg Mach, when he had accompanied Mercedes in painstakingly stringing together the blooms on thread. The memory made his throat tighten up for a moment in longing and regret. He had bent five needles and she had pursed her lips at the last one, and then had smiled and handed him another one. 

To preserve them for the day, the roses were put in wooden barrels lugged into the shade and half-filled with water. When he paused from thinning the seedlings Dimitri looked up and watched Theo run back and forth with a bucket half his size to fill them. 

After lunch they waved him over where they were stringing together the garlands, the smell of roses everywhere in the air, the needles flashing as they worked. 

“We’ll give them to each other,” Aliona said, brisk, the tip of her needle weaving deftly through the buds. “Not to the children.” 

“Hey!” Theo said, arms straining as he indignantly hoisted his overfull bucket.

“I see,” Dimitri, charmed. Last year they had not celebrated, or perhaps he had just been sequestered away for the duration of it. It had been a year already. 

Later in the afternoon it rained from the sunny sky, and Theo came running over the ridge to loop a wilting garland over Dimitri’s head. At Garreg Mach the garlands had been magicked fresh and stayed pristine until midnight when they dried and withered from the strain. He was strangely grateful for the floral smell of rot that followed him, the gentle slump of the browning petals as the day wore on. By dinner time the garland had yellowed completely, and he was shedding petals as he walked, a trail of ghostly wilt. 

It broke apart completely when he tried to lift it from his head, and he left it as an offering at the edge of the wheat field. To the harvest come fall, and selfishly, to the continued tenuous peace that he lived his days in. 

Dimitri had never anticipated fall like this. Each successive day seemed to dawn crisper, clearer, as the last of the summer drained gently away. The fields were lush with grain that moved like an ocean in the wind, the green-tipped stalks of wheat rippling as the breeze ran through them.

The fruit trees were in exuberant health. They seemed to grow fruit faster than it could be picked. It was decadent that a peach should ripen and fall without notice and rot below. He had to avoid stepping on them, half-hidden in the overgrown grass, as he made his way up to the northern tree. The air smelled like melting sugar this deep in the thicket, humid and warm and perfumed. 

The ghost apple tree had grown its strange apples, white as bone. It seemed almost impossible that such a skinny tree should be able to produce this much strange fruit, the apples outnumbering the leaves as they fought for space on the bending branches. 

Dimitri picked one and felt the give of its strange mealy flesh, watched the deep purple-brown bruise form in the shape of his hand. He wound back and threw it in the direction of the woods and picked another, mindful of the branches. Another three fell and rolled into the grass from the motion. 

He kept the apple in his pocket until the day was done, and stopped by Aliona’s for dinner. 

Aliona wasn’t listening when Dimitri asked her. She was stirring something on the stove with a look of deep concentration, staring out over the horizon where the clouds were gathering. 

He placed the apple on the table. In the golden light of the early evening it somehow looked even worse, pallid and sickly, tinged a putrid purple. 

“No,” she said suddenly when she looked over at him, and her face had gone white. “Take it outside.” 

Dimitri swept it away and went out the door to throw it into the far-off fields without a word. He could feel the pounding of his heart, the adrenaline, and the dread bearing down. He threw it with all his strength and watched it sail through the air and disappear into the overgrown underbush. 

When he returned Aliona was watching from the window, face still pale. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and reassure her, and to apologize, to let her know somehow that he understood without her saying a word the strange forces that moved on the earth. He had been raised in such a place, a kingdom steeped in a deep and abiding tradition of letting hibernating snakes lie. 

For a minute she didn’t say anything, twisting her hands together in worry. “I threw it away,” Dimitri said, low, and watched the tense set of her shoulders relax fractionally. 

“Thank you,” she said finally, and told him about the old farmer’s tale of the white apple curse, how it would steal into their orchards and turn the trees into bone. “Even the animals won’t touch them.” 

“It’s an old superstition,” she said, back to her normal tone, flitting around the kitchen once again while Dimitri cast an enormous shadow at the table, a man misplaced. 

“I understand,” Dimitri said, and tried to say it with all that he was feeling, and probably failed. 

Afterwards he went back up to the ghost apple tree. The fruit was so pale it almost seemed to glow in the low light. He picked another and took a bite—and spat it out immediately, coughing. It was impossibly bland and had the texture of wool,  which explained why even the birds fattening up for the winter had avoided them. 

There was nothing to be done about it. It was an unlucky tree, useless as even livestock fodder. But still Dimitri lingered, and admired the strange paper apples that the tree had miraculously produced. In the end he left it, unable to decide what to do—to chop it down or to leave it—and so it remained hidden, and alive. 

The third spring, Felix found him. 

“Dimitri,” Aliona called, leaning out the window to him as he passed by with a great wooden beam balanced neatly over his shoulder. The village was building a new house for the newlyweds. The children had watched Dimitri wack at the trunk with great interest, and then screamed in delight as he tossed the axe aside to topple it with a push. 

He put a hand up to steady the beam as he slowed to a stop next to her. It was still cold enough that the bugs hadn’t exploded into a frenzy yet, and the air smelled wet and new in the morning. 

“After you’re done with that, will you please mend the shed roof?” The melting snow had pooled inside and turned all the iron tools red with rust. 

“Yes,” Dimitri said on an outward exhalation, and managed to settle the beam in the hole without any large incident, as Yera soundly scolded the children for clustering around instead of sorting out the twigs and branches for patching up the walls. 

“Thank you, Dimitri,” Yera said, and without waiting for an answer moved on to dragging Theo by the scruff of his neck back down to the village as he complained sulkily. 

The beam was very heavy. With any luck it would serve as the foundation of this house for a very long time. He stood staring at it for a moment longer, and then left the rest of the house to the rest of them as they shouted their thanks to him. He smiled, and then touched the corners of his mouth in absentminded joy. 

The fields were an endless grey plain this early in the year, the snow melt revealing the yellowing tufts of leftover grass. The green would come in by the end of the week, and then the ground would be tilled and the year would begin in earnest. 

Dimitri was mulling over the seed stock that the village had, and the chances of a late frost, and what the most prudent course of action was, when he looked up and found that a ghost had come with the last of the winter to pay him a visit in the flesh. 

The Felix that Dimitri knew as a child had been all angles, but the years had carved him right down to the bone. He was standing defensively, but feigning nonchalance—Dimitri would have recognized the stance ten years without seeing it, twenty years, a lifetime. Glenn had taught it to them, had patiently turned Dimitri’s tiny feet out at the right angles and taught him how to shift his weight, how to line up shoulders to spine to center. 

He had thought Felix dead. He had without meaning to and without noticing cast the life he had lived outside of the village into a deep and dark well. It had come out into the light now, Dimitri thought, dazed. 

“Felix,” Dimitri said, and watched Felix turn his head slightly to the side like a flinch. “How—”

He broke off. In every scenario Dimitri had constructed with the little information he had, Felix had been dead. That he was alive now, that he was here now—Dimitri found that he did not want to know. He thought of Sylvain and Ingrid, lying dead in the rain, struck from their mounts, and felt the old pain expand so sharply he sucked in a surprised breath at the feeling of it pushing up against his ribs. 

Felix looked hunted. “Why,” Dimitri started again, and watched Felix’s gaze dart around Dimitri’s face to the village beyond and back again. 

“You really are alive,” Felix said, and his voice was a shock to Dimitri too. He had the memory of it, had heard it echo forth from years past, but the sound of it now made him blink. 

“Yes,” Dimitri said. 

He moved past Felix towards the shed. 

He was excruciatingly aware of each movement, of the distance between their miraculous flesh and blood bodies, the gap closed to a mere meter after years of knowing the other was dead. 

“That’s all you have to say,” Felix said flatly, but Dimitri was looking at his face and saw the emotion sit on his sharp-boned face. 

Dimitri forced himself to look away to flip the latch on the shed and push the creaky door open. It was indeed leaking, from a hole the size of a fist in the roof that had rotted through. He laid the flat of his palm against it and pushed to test the damage and recoiled instantly as it threatened to fold. 

Dimitri was breathing fast as he stared at the hole. Felix was not wearing the mark of any nation, nor the church. He did not have his sword. He might as well have stepped out of thin air if not for the wear on the simple armor he was wearing, close-fitted and well-worn. 

His insides were roiling. He felt sick with it. He opened his mouth and then closed it and then opened it again. He thought, maybe if I turn around, the words will fall out of my mouth. He turned and caught an eyeful of Felix, standing just a bit away, and felt something in him wrench sideways. “I-” 

“What are you doing?” Felix said, flat. 

“I’m,” Dimitri said, heart rabbiting, “Fixing the roof.” 

Felix didn’t make a face, or move at all, but Dimitri imagined the motion anyway—the way his eyes would narrow and the way his mouth would slant in frustration. 

“You’re going to make me ask again?” 

Dimitri stared hard at his motionless face. He imagined peeling off the last five years, back to when they had been young and whole. Felix had always had those dark circles, the jut of his cheekbones, and the creases at the corners of his eyes, but now they were carved deep and weary. 

“Felix,” Dimitri said. 

“What? Felix what?” 

He didn’t flinch. He hadn’t heard that tone in so long. In the intervening years it had lost all of its barbs, worn smooth by time. 

“I don’t want to fight,” Dimitri said, and looked at the tension Felix was holding in all of his limbs. He was holding himself unnaturally still, a spooked prey animal caught in an open plain. 

They stared at each other across the moving morning air. 

“Alright,” Felix said finally, and shifted his gaze over Dimitri’s shoulder to the rolling hills beyond.  

Felix stayed within eyeshot of Dimitri the entire day, as Dimitri patched the hole in the roof and hauled all the tools out of the shed to lie them down in a neat row over the beginning of what was to be a field of grass. When Dimitri went down into the village to report back to Aliona, Felix stole back towards the treeline and stood in the shadows of the bare trees, their leaves only beginning to emerge into the sharp spring air. 

Dimitri was aware of him in the way that Dimitri had always been—conscious of the distance between them, the time it would take for one of them to run towards the other, sword extended. They had been raised this way, so closely that they had always been counting down. Dimitri had never thought it cruel before, but he wondered idly about it now, jarred as he was by the unfamiliar prickle of Felix’s eyes on the back of Dimitri’s neck. 

After the sun had gone down and Dimitri’s body was covered in a layer of sweat and grime, mud drying itchy on his face, he traipsed up to his house. If he concentrated he could hear the barest of sounds as Felix fit his feet in the places Dimitri’s had been just behind him, over the sound of the wind rustling the bare branches in the distance. 

He pushed the door open and stood inside and watched Felix emerge out of the dark. 

Felix made a motion towards the door, as if he thought Dimitri was going to leave him out in the cool evening to sleep propped up against a tree. The village was more than a three-days ride to the next, and at least a week to an inn. Felix probably had slept in the open air, had done so for a while.

He had not told Dimitri why he had come, or where he had come from, or how he had risen miraculously from the Tailtean Plains after it had become more blood than field. Dimitri did not ask. Even past the grace that his three years farming had provided him, he could sense the pain that lay that way, invisible and waiting to bite into the defenseless soft parts of his stomach. 

Dimitri had the urge to step across the doorway, to put himself between Felix and the exit. He could not seem to stop looking at him, running his eyes over his silhouette as Felix took a step towards the door. 

“Felix,” Dimitri said, feeling a rush of affection, unfamiliar. He trailed off, because it was new territory for them, and he couldn’t be sure of his footing. 

“What are you going to say?” His voice was deeper than Dimitri remembered, or maybe he spoke more softly now, voice pitched lower so that Dimitri had to strain to make out the words over the hum of the cicadas. 

Dimitri imagined he could see the whites of his eyes, like an animal in the dark. 

“I don’t know,” Dimitri said, helplessly. “Sleep inside. Please.” 

Felix looked at him for a moment longer, and then turned away, towards the bed in the corner. 

Dimitri insisted with no success that he would sleep on the floor. 

“No,” Felix said flatly. He was still wearing his leather armor. 

“Please,” Dimitri said again, and lay on the bed and pressed himself against the wall to make room. They had shared a bed in worse conditions, in temporary camps during the war, freezing with two people per bed-roll with no space between them. It was the end of the Adrestian winter, breezy and cool, and they were in no immediate danger at all. 

Dimitri faced the wall and waited. 

He listened to the muffled sounds of Felix unstrapping the armor and placing it silently on the floor. 

When Felix finally lay down next to him, Dimitri could feel the cold bite of steel against his thigh, through the thin cotton pants he was wearing. 

They listened to each other breathe. He could feel the throbbing drumbeat of his heart in his chest, and imagined Felix’s doing the same a foot away. It sometimes felt as though nothing could surprise him any longer, having lived past one life and onto the next, but today had been the strangest of days in a strange life—the universe gently lining up the trajectories they had been on since long ago. 

In the morning Felix had fled, or had simply melted away in the daylight. The other side of the bed was cold when Dimitri put a hand on it in idle curiosity. As he pulled himself awake and went through the morning motions, it felt as though the Felix he had seen yesterday, older and sharper, had been architected out of the memories Dimitri had of him and had never breathed in Dimitri’s bed at all. 

Dimitri had touched him though. Had felt him against his back as he laid awake. Dimitri flinched involuntarily at the memory, something running ghostly fingers over the back of his neck. 

He tied his hair up and thought about how everything before seemed so far away it might as well have been a dream entirely, the echo of a previous life. Some days he slept late and by the time he opened his eyes the sun had come up already, washing the walls in gold, and he stared up into the light and felt as though he had done this all his life. 

It was a fleeting feeling. He lived in his body, and it was another story entirely, criss-crossed and ringed and striped with scars that healed raised and shiny. 

He could not remember the last time he had seen Felix’s naked body to confirm the existence of scars. As children they had scraped their knees so many times that they had become permanently a shade darker, and Dimitri idly pressed a thumb to the dark circles now, still stubbornly enduring. Felix had matching one on his knees, and where the leather bracers they wore during training chafed until they bled. 

He could not even imagine what scars Felix would have now, could not picture even vaguely the shape of his days and what drove them—he thought about Felix stealing into the village, a corpse come alive, and felt—numb. 

It was spring. Dimitri was grateful for the reminder that came on the breeze. It was spring and there was ground to be broken and seeds to sort, and little birds to watch as they sprung up in trees overnight, raising their blind heads to the sky.

Felix had come with the last of the frost. It was spring now in earnest, in an unabashed way that sent the forest roaring into greenery as the temperatures steadily increased and the winter crept back out of sight. 

Felix had also brought all that remained of his old self back. The war was still going on, going on still, and when he thought about it Dimitri found he was unconsciously clenching his jaw. Edelgard was nominally in charge, as she had been for the past eight years, but the Church had dug its foundations deep. The village still shipped grain out on Imperial order for the army at the behest of a small bearded man who showed up on horseback from the House of Aegir, brandishing his scroll. 

Dimitri didn’t have much of an impression of Ferdinand von Aegir. His father had died. Though one would be hard-pressed to find a single student among them whose father was alive and hale—regardless, Dimitri felt the similar grief, pricking its claws into the soft interior of his chest. Presumably Ferdinand had no idea that the dead Faerghan king was living in one of his towns, digging irrigation channels, or else he would have shown up and tried to separate Dimitri’s head from his shoulders. 

The soil was hard still from the last of the winter, and as he pressed on the spade Dimitri felt his crest warm up underneath his skin, thrumming alive. It smelled of mud and green and wet. 

The war limped on. Nothing he could do would change that, which Dimitri guessed was the reason Claude had not yet shown up to parade him about the frontlines like a glorified chess piece. And so he remained, like a stubborn weed, greedily unfurling in the fair weather while he still had time. 

He spoke of it with Aliona just once, out of cowardice and also respect. They were peeling carrots that still had frost on the greens, pulled early enough in the morning that they were freezing in Dimitri’s hands as he worked. 

“The grain inspector should be here soon,” she said, dropping a peeled carrot into the basket at their feet. 

Dimitri hesitated for a moment. “The war,” he said, and trailed off. 

“None of our concern,” Aliona said, and took the half-peeled carrot from his motionless hands and finished it herself. 

He was curious. “But it has been so long.” 

“Our lives have been the same,” she said, and looked at him then. “They will continue like that.” 

He felt embarrassed, and could feel the back of his neck heat. He had always believed, with the cushion of station, that it mattered immediately to the people of the land who sat on the throne. He had been raised with this idea instilled. To hear it laid out plainly now made him shrink in humiliation. She was right, of course. Whether Edelgard was there or someone else, Aliona would still wake every morning and work, and the winters would come all the same—they would still toil and starve and have opportunity limited to the hills around them. 

If Dimitri had become king, he had liked to think that he would be fair and just. That underneath him the peasants might live easier lives, and find the days easier to pass. Now he felt silly and young, watching everyone around him work with resignation of the war—something that nobles were fighting with no concern for them, with no dividends for them. 

The realization sat like a burning coal in his stomach the rest of the moon. When he lay awake at night staring all around him at the humble generosity that had afforded him this life, his throat itched. If Claude ever came back for him—

Dimitri took a breath and held it in his chest. He could hear the frogs outside, sonorous. If Claude ever came back, Dimitri had made up his mind, for perhaps the first time in his life. 

The entire growing season passed before Dimitri saw Felix again. Dimitri spent it with his face turned towards the sun like a cat seeking warmth. The village remained, stubbornly, a hardy perennial that flouted the persistent grain shortages that came rolling in with the continuation of the war.

Dimitri had hardly paid attention to it at all in a previous life—where the grain came from, the labor and the dirt that coaxed it from the ground. Now it was ever-present, ingrained into his life. They monitored the plants for pests, and shooed away the intrepid birds and squirrels that threatened the fat golden wheat stalks. In the fever-hot frenzy of the summer he hardly thought of anything but the tasks that lay before him, a routine as familiar now as any training. 

Felix appeared over the hill to the village a little after the sun had gone down. Dimitri was still wading through the wheat fields, parting them like a great golden sea as he made his way back to his house. He looked up over the fields and saw the dark silhouette against the burnt orange sky and felt his heart kick up, just a little bit. 

He stopped, and pushed his hair back. It was damp with sweat. He watched Felix clamber down, sure-footed. Felix had always been as lithe as a cat, each step precise. The old master of arms had told Dimitri many times to watch the way that Felix’s feet moved when he sparred, to study the intuitive way he seemed to know where to step to balance his weight as he flowed from one form to another. 

Dimitri watched his feet now in the dark as he made his way towards where Dimitri was standing. 

“Hello Felix,” Dimitri said, when he was close enough to make out the bruised rings around his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in years. Dimitri probably had matching ones. 

“Dimitri,” Felix said, and something in Dimitri sent a shiver of familiarity and longing through his whole body. 

He could not have told someone else how it happened. One moment they were walking along the golden edge of the field with its ribbon of glittering water, and the next they were running—scrambling up the hill towards the woods, dislodging rocks as their feet bit into the dry earth. Dimitri’s heartbeat was thrumming through his body as he ran towards the dark expanse of Felix’s back as he darted ahead, a tiny sliver of the knife sheathed along his hip flashing as it caught the sun. 

Dimitri crested the hill with each breath burning his throat. The day was swelling hot around them as the sun climbed higher into the sky, and the fog that clung to the grass in the morning was lingering now, brushing wet against Dimitri’s ankles as he ran furiously through it. 

He was chasing after Felix now, all their summers blending together. They had run like this through the castle grounds thousands of times when they were children and then through the fields outside Garreg Mach, young and wide-eyed still. 

He leapt over a fallen branch and the feeling made him gasp in sudden joy. When was the last time he had run like this, just for the feeling? Felix was sprinting in earnest now, speeding through the brush. 

Dimitri splashed through a small stream and emerged through a tangle of old vines and could not see Felix at all. He felt cold all over, gripped with a low and keening dread that seemed to emanate from a spot behind his stomach. 

He scanned the clearing, and stood motionless, just watching—straining for any movement or sound at all. It was quiet. The wind moved the branches high above him. 

It tugged at him all the way on the trek back, trying to materialize Felix’s figure in the shadows everywhere he looked. 

When he emerged at the edge of the fields, Felix was there, crouched close to the ground. The relief made him lightheaded. Felix stood when Dimitri drew close, in a fluid motion that Dimitri had seen a thousand times. 

“You’re still so slow,” Felix said, and turned towards the path to Dimitri’s house. 

Dimitri had to stand still for a moment, winded. Felix was undoubtedly real, a solid person made of flesh and blood, but he still had to remind himself of that. Why had he come? Why had he left? Why had he come back, again, and why was he going to inevitably leave again? He wondered if even Felix knew what drove him now—they had lived so far beyond the roles they had played before. Now they were moving blindly in the dark, driven by something that Dimitri had become tentatively comfortable with and was only now beginning to understand. 

He had thought of Felix in his absence after the first time in spring, but he had half-believed Felix an apparition to remind him of all the ways he had loved and lost. So Dimitri had determinedly worked his way through the summer, and it had slipped out of his thoughts without him noticing. 

Now it was impossible to ignore, how Felix hovered on the edge of his consciousness—he thought of him in the morning in the space between sleeping and waking, and again when he paused to take a breath and to wipe his brow during the day. He was alive. This simple fact floored him, time and time again, made his breath catch in surprise. 

Aliona had asked about him, after the first day. 

“A visitor?” She was carefully looking away from him. He felt a swell of tenderness towards her, how she was affording him this small mercy. 

“Yes. He’s.” Dimitri paused. He tried to continue and found he could not—Felix was his—something. No word seem to fit correctly, to name the strange way that the universe had bent them towards each other and then away, and then together again. No, not the universe , Dimitri thought. Felix had . 

Dimitri had started haunting the river. He liked to go in the morning before the heat of the day sent the bugs humming in the wet air, and crouch on the grassy banks and watch the water bugs skitter over the surface and the tiny fish flash in the dim light. 

He liked to look at himself in the moving water. On the days when it had just rained and the river churned a silty brown, he could only make out a shadow of a person, staring back. 

Felix was uncommonly subdued when Dimitri saw him next. He nodded at Dimitri when he appeared at the door like a ghost, dark circles bruised around his eyes. His eyes glittered at Dimitri from across the doorway, the candlelight reflecting in the liquid black. As a child Felix had been the House Fraldarius’ little raven, and the memory came to Dimitri now as he watched Felix perch outside Dimitri’s house, watching and waiting. 

He opened the door wide and stepped back towards the pallet to strip his shirt off, deliberately casual. He was excruciatingly aware of the way he was moderating his breathing, gentling the ends of every exhale, should the slight movement of the air in the room spook Felix back into the night. 

He did not have to worry. When he turned around, Felix had silently closed the door and was toeing his boots off. He had lost the ordered precision that a lifetime of military drills had instilled, and he kicked one off and then the other, letting them splay across the floor. 

He caught Dimitri’s eye as he dropped to sit on the edge of  the pallet, the motion shameless. 

Dimitri had been very, very careful to keep everything he thought about Felix caged in one little corner of his mind. He tried not to look too closely at it as he went about the motions of his life, but he was always conscious of it sitting in his peripheral vision when he paused to catch his breath. Now that Felix was here again, had climbed out of the shadowy land to prowl about the tiny confines of Dimitri’s humble house, he was overwhelmed with it. 

He could still see the boy he had once been. No matter how he had grown around the cruel spike of war shoved brutally through his tender years, Dimitri could still see the shape of him. Felix probably hated it. He had always tried his best to scorn the child  and to leave him behind, but Dimitri never could and had never wanted to—he had loved him. Loved him still, as he looked at the rise and fall of Felix’s chest as they stared at each other from across the room. 

Dimitri could feel it trembling in the back of his throat. He wanted to speak the words into the air between them—to tell Felix—something, to press Felix’s hand against his heart in his chest and have him feel the way it beat. 

He took a step closer to him, and then another. 

Dimitri woke to someone pounding on the door. Felix was already awake, coiled and tense against Dimitri’s back as Dimitri surfaced into awareness. There was an awful rattling noise all around them, the wind shrieking as it fit itself through all the gaps in the thatched roof. Dimitri rose to sit on the edge of the bed and put a hand, gently, on the curve of Felix’s hip—he couldn’t help himself—and then crossed the room in two strides to open the door. 

It was Aliona, her face pale and stricken. All around her it was hailing, ice chips rolling off the roof and disappearing into the dark grass. “The—,” she broke off on a gasp, “The fruit.” 

“I’ll go,” Dimitri said, and bent to put on his boots, one after another, as Aliona nodded tensely and ran onto the next house, and the next. When he turned to tell Felix—something, maybe an apology, he found that Felix was standing right next to him, close enough to touch. 

“It’s hailing,” Dimitri said, and ached a little with the desire to linger a little longer. If Felix was out of sight he often slipped away. 

“So let’s go,” Felix said, unblinking, and stepped past Dimitri out the door. 

Dimitri felt his heart give two strong thumps, one after the other. And then he followed Felix out into the downpour. 

They ran towards the orchard in the dark. He could feel his eyes straining to adjust, to make out the barest of shapes against the black of the night. The falling ice bit at the back of his vulnerable neck. They crashed through the fence and leapt over the irrigation channels, Dimitri finding the way through memory alone. He heard Felix make a low noise of surprise behind him. Dimitri reached out blindly as the world fell all around them—and closed it half in surprise around Felix’s hand,  warm to the touch, and hauled him up onto stable ground. 

The ice was forming piles on the ground now, hidden in the grass and in the dark, and it crunched underfoot as Dimitri ran desperately for the shed. An unripe peach knocked early from the branch was unsalvageable. And if the branches broke off—

He threw the door open and hauled the blankets out, stiff and dusty from disuse. “Cover them,” he said, and then once again louder over the horrible rattling of the ice as it bounced against leaf and branch. 

It was only after they had covered each tree and regrouped at the head of the orchard that Dimitri felt the franticness let go of him, the adrenaline leaving him in a rush that made his fingers numb with it. It was still storming. It had started raining at some point in addition to the hail, and he was wet to the bone.  

Felix hadn’t said a word. He was standing close enough that Dimitri could imagine that he could feel the heat of Felix’s body across the scant rain-soaked inches that separated them. 

The sky was rumbling all around them. In the distance he saw the barest flash of light through the dark, the storm bearing down. The air was sharp with it. 

Felix was looking at him. Dimitri felt speared through with desire. He wanted to laugh, and to reach out to him—to feel the warmth of him pressed close. 

Dimitri swallowed. “Let’s go home.” 

There was a trembling raindrop trapped in Felix’s lashes. He blinked once when Dimitri spoke, and it dropped down his cheek. 

“Like we would sleep outside,” Felix said, and it made Dimitri go weak-kneed in surprise and pleasure, to hear that tone after so long, and to be someone, maybe the only person alive, to hear it. 

It had stopped hailing. The ice collected in glittering piles all over the ground, reflecting the moonlight. They crunched over the ground as they picked their way carefully back. Dimitri would have to repair the fence he had broken tomorrow. He thought for a moment, just to savor it, that Felix might stay to help. 

They didn’t say anything at all on the way back, walking briskly through the waning storm. 

They were soaked to the bone. Inside Dimitri’s house he lit a candle, and then regretted it—Felix looked strangely fragile, dark hair plastered to his face and neck. “Let’s dry your things,” he said, and swallowed. He fished the clothes out of the chest and handed them to Felix, who nodded curtly. 

He stripped himself out of his sodden cotton sleep things and tried not to pay too much attention to the person across the room. When he turned around, he found the shirt was too big on Felix, who had always been slighter and narrower. 

A strange feeling washed over him. He turned towards the dark wall at the burn in his eyes until it had passed. It had cost them immeasurably to be here now. The scale and depth of what had gone up in smoke was almost impossible to grasp. 

The grass grew lush in the summers, until the fields just outside the village looked like a gently rolling sea, a deep green with blue shadows. Instead of crabs and other darting scuttling things, the grass hummed late in the day with bugs and hid the shallowly breathing bodies of nervous prey animals, rabbits nestled defenseless against the sun-warmed earth. 

It also held two people, lying on the clean grass. Dimitri watched an intrepid ladybug crawl up a stalk of grass, and then turned so he could look at Felix’s sharp profile with a background of blue. 

Felix was looking at him. Dimitri’s ears felt hot in surprise. They stared at each other across the foot between them. “I can’t go back,” Dimitri said, and felt something prick at the back of his eyes. He had been rolling the words around in his mouth for what felt like months, keeping them there, but speaking them out loud still brought all the emotion welling up like a mouthful of rain. 

“Don’t then,” Felix said. 

Tomorrow something else would come—but today he was alive, feeling the wind rustle the grass and the cool press of it against the back of his neck. When he looked over, he found that Felix had fallen asleep, warm next to him.