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Everything is the same, and yet nothing is.
Mercedes and Annette make their way to Garreg Mach together. It’s not intentional on either of their parts- rather, the path they’ve taken lines up along the road. Like the reunion of fate, Annette doesn’t let herself question it for long enough that she might realize, if she is, that she is in a dream.
“You’re a better travelling companion than father. He’s too fast for an old man.” Annette says.
I love you, she means. There’s not a day in the past five years I haven’t thought of you.
She keeps her mouth shut, even as Mercedes giggles gently, reminding Annette of kinder, gentler times. Though her apprehension of a potential ambush makes her brain anxious and rash, Annette reminds herself that she’s grown past silly things like impulsive confessions of love.
Garreg Mach does not make for an easy climb. If she misspeaks, there’s no telling how long they’ll be left to stew over it on the mountain steps. As a physical arbiter of her desire, Annette digs her fingernails into the sinews of her palm, flexing her hands when the indents are cast too deep. She repeats, and repeats again. Her gaze fixes on the spring sky; the milk-white stars barely revealed by dispersing clouds.
During idle moments, no matter the length of the silence, Mercedes still looks over to her. Her gaze is amicable; still, Annette can’t fight the feeling she’s being appraised.
Selfishly, she hopes Mercedes still wants her around.
-
Dimitri has lost his mind. There’s no two ways about it. He’s back, somehow- as is Byleth- but Rhea and Dedue are gone. Missing and dead, respectively. Dimitri seems to think himself better off joining Dedue, and hardly in the sense of a companionable lunch.
In the face of it all, Annette goes about her daily life. She can do little else, save for giving up. Past any need to fulfill her father’s wishes, it’s Mercedes that keeps her firmly where she is. Making up with Mercedes is simple and painless enough to make her regret not doing it before the war began, though neither of them could have predicted it.
“You’ve made progress. Have you been practicing?” comes Mercedes’ lilting voice from the oven room, watching Annette plate fish dishes by hand on the counter. Now they’re not students, and hired help is hard to come across, cooking seems to have taken up a lot of Mercedes’ time. It shocks Annette somewhat that her help on the matter is wanted.
“A little.” She’d tried cooking for herself, mostly as a method of distraction from circumstance. Her cooking hadn’t improved much, though she’d gotten better at timing. Plating, on the other hand, was gratifyingly intuitive. “We were lucky to have enough food to eat. I tried to make sure I wasn’t wasting anything.”
“My.” Mercedes coos. “Seems you’ve had a lot of time to think, too.”
One-by-one, Annette slides the plates to their places on the table. A choice of dinners isn’t feasible for the army at the moment, so people get whatever Annette gives them, and she has to remind herself to not feel so giddy on the minor power of dictating people’s lunches.
“It’s nothing special. I just got used to roasting leftover vegetable peel.”
“With what?”
“Honey.” Annette replies. “Herbs, too! But only if they were in season.” She’d planned to regale Dedue with her ability to remember the names and flavours he’d taught her years ago. Like a lot of things, that was not going to plan.
“Sounds good. Once we’re finished, would you like to take dinner with me?”
Annette nods before she thinks- before she fully processes the words. She doesn’t regret it when she does.
“Of course!”
Not a date, Annette reminds herself. Even if they’re both old enough to drink wine together now, getting tipsy until the sun peaks in the sky and Mercedes slips off her hat to abate the heat. A quick pinch to the wrist is all she needs to stop herself saying something impulsive.
They finish quick; Annette’s feet fast and solid on the ground. She feels Mercedes’ gaze on the back of her neck as she darts around with plates in hand, but doesn’t stop for silence. Miscommunication has never done wonders for their relationship. By her own seat, Annette lays down her own meal, followed by Mercedes’ next to hers. Mercedes made it, so Annette doesn’t bother to question its quality for a single moment. The second best thing, next to Mercedes, is her cooking.
“Do you like cheese gratin? I don’t think I ever saw you eat it at the Academy.”
“Not really. But it’s okay. You made it, Mercie.”
“I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you weren’t fond of it.”
“Make whatever you like, Mercie. I’m happy to just to be with you.
“Alright.” Mercedes concedes. She sits down delicately, careful not to twist the bustle of her dress, as Annette watches her for any read on her emotions. “It’s not as if we had many other ingredients.”
“Are we getting supplies in from Edmund territory tomorrow?”
Mercedes shrugs. “Who knows? Hopefully. But-” her voice lilts in a sigh- “who knows. I’ll be glad for anything, though.”
It’s been like that for a while. Getting anything on time is a cause for celebration.
“More cheese?” Annette inquires.
“Likely. But I’ll make something you like next time around.”
-
A blade twists through Annette’s skin. The wound it carves is clean and efficient, the weapon itself impossibly sharp and precise. Blood trickles, raindrops on a window-pane, down from the incision onto the thicket of bandages wrapped tightly over Annette’s breastbone. Pain freezes her in place- she can’t move. Even if her body needs to, the feeling of it going deeper overwhelms, leaves her powerless to do anything but grit her teeth and ball her hands into tense, clasping fists- not now, not now, it hurts-
“Ow! Shit!”
A brief second, and the ugly pain only lingers. It’s stopped. But the scalpel is still between Mercedes’ fingers, poised in her grasp like an artist’s brush.
“Is it really so painful?”
“Yes.” Annette spits. The wet feeling on her lips makes her humiliatingly conscious of how hard she’s been biting down, all for a simple removal. Curse their herbal shortages. “You’re sure the shrapnel won’t… I don’t know, fall out by itself?”
“Perhaps it might.” Mercedes says it with a sweet smile- one Annette knows better than to take on the surface. “Or you could get a truly horrible infection. No doubt much more painful than this, of course.”
“And you really can’t use your healing magic on it?”
Mercedes curtly shakes her head. “I wouldn’t want to risk it. Only if it were an emergency.”
“It hurts, Mercie.”
“Pain isn’t an emergency. If you need a distraction, try thanking the Goddess for our survival in that last battle.”
Annette doesn’t feel like it. Even if Mercedes is usually full of good advice. Instead, she stretches before lying back down against the back of the infirmary’s bed. Watching Mercedes take the chance to wash her scalpel off, careful not to touch the blade with anything but the towel she’d cleaned before the operation. Gentle, though her soft hands and stubby fingernails are coated in a film of dried blood.
“Are we doing that badly? That the Goddess herself has to intervene?”
“I’d like to think she protected us against the artillery.”
Annette, for one second, doesn’t register the re-entry of the blade into the soft slit of flesh. Until she does, yelping in pain, desperately resisting the urge to contort herself in some way that her primal self thinks might abate the pain-
“Or; the Empire didn’t teach their soldiers to use it very well. But I would be very careful about straying into the line of fire of those things. Even if you think you saw Petra’s wyvern be downed on the other side of the battlefield, and decide you’ll be providing flank support all of a sudden. Right, Annie?”
Goddess, she loves Mercedes. She wouldn’t take this from anyone else. They’d be as right as Mercie is, of course. But it matters that it’s her, for reasons arbitrary and inexplicable and, frankly, humiliating.
The tweezers dig in, and Annette lets out a small, pained yelp. The sight of it is grisly, and she closes her eyes as Mercedes plucks it out, wraps it up in tissue and places it on the clean side-table. But it’s over quicker than it began. The jabbing pain in her chest isn’t there any more, allowing her to breathe a sigh of relief.
It returns when Mercedes leans over her to clean and dress the wound. With no other option than to get close, her warm breath lands sweetly on Annette’s collarbone and the nape of her neck each time she exhales from the dutiful effort of cleaning the wound. Their bodies have never been closer.
Annette grips the cool metal handlebars of the small surgical chair even tighter. Her palms, flushed with warmth and sweating furiously, make them slick in a matter of seconds.
“Am I- will it be okay?” she stammers, wincing one final time as the rubbing alcohol seeps into the wound. Mercedes, in the midst of applying the final cloth dressing, laughs gently underneath her breath.
“Of course you will, Annie. But don’t go running around and opening it again, am I clear?”
“Y-yes.”
“And let me know if you suspect it’s getting worse.”
Before Annette can say another word on the matter, Mercedes’ hand rests on her forehead. The ebbing pain gets sharper again, and if it weren’t for her holding her breath against the pain, Annette knows she would have let out an ungainly squeal.
“My, you’re warm.” Fuck! Fuck. Having Mercedes’ cleavage at eye-height is already much too much. The touching is near-overwhelming.
“U-uh. Um.” Her fault. But Annette wasn’t going to tell her that.
“Please keep an eye out for any signs of an infection.”
Annette stifles a long, heavy groan. She hasn’t been caught out- not yet. But what an awful job she’s doing in hiding it.
-
Rodrigue’s memorial is a somber affair. Spare, and traditional; though not for a man of his position. Not when it’s hard enough to get food and medicine past the border and down to Garreg Mach. Chatter flies in the meagre gathering afterwards about having a second celebration once the war is over, more in line with the knightly honours and fineries once delivered to the coffin of Faerghus’s shield. Nobody commits, though, at least from what Annette overhears. Everyone is loath to admit it, but they’ve just lost their best and most well-connected general. Dimitri might be turning a corner- she hopes, beyond hope- but there’s a dull hopelessness in her father’s eyes each time they exchange words about the future.
Felix attends- and disappears right afterwards. But her wound is mostly healed, and Annette isn’t ready to give up her plan to comfort him without a fight.
Despite the rain, she chases him according to inconsistent reports of his movements sourced from those lingering aimlessly in the grey halls of Garreg Mach. Their directions are a confusing mess, and Annette nearly trips several times on the wet pavements and where the mud spills over from banks of grass onto the paths. It’s a necessary speed- when he truly doesn’t want to be seen, Felix is very competent at ditching a scene. But it leaves her out of breath, to finally give up outside the old classrooms, using her aging capelet to protect her nicer dress from the clinging droplets of water on the bench.
It’s unclear how long Mercedes has been watching her struggle by the time she speaks up. Behind the pillar, fiddling with her hands, and somehow completely unseen despite having never been more than a metre from Annette’s resting place.
“Are you looking for someone, Annie?”
“Felix.” Annette replies curtly, still a little out of breath. “I wanted to talk to him. And maybe stop him from doing something stupid.”
“Anything “stupid” in particular?” Mercedes inquires, still cleaning dirt from underneath her close-cut fingernails. Maybe. Annette can’t see, though she spends a lot of time fantasizing about Mercedes’ hands.
“I don’t know.” There’s a brief pause. “Try and kill Dimitri, probably.”
“Mmm.” Mercedes mumbles under her breath. She comes to sit down next to Annette, seemingly unconcerned with the rain she’s no longer sheltered from nor the water on the seat. “I had the same thought. And like you, I went to look for him.”
“I suppose you had no luck either.”
“On the contrary. I was able to get in a word with him.”
“Really?” Annette exclaims. Mercedes only sighs.
“I advised him to rest. Sometimes, that’s the best you can do for someone. He heard me- but he might have ignored me.” Mercedes hums sadly. “He was so quick to make himself scarce.”
“I’m glad he’s alright.” Annette furrows her brows. “For now.”
“We’ll know there’s something wrong if we hear crashing in the night. It’s best not to dwell on it.”
“Yes.”
For a few minutes, there’s silence. Save for the rain, and the wind, and Mercedes’ heartbeat, which have all melded into the impenetrable mass of idle background noise. Neither of them talk. Nor do they look at each other, either. Nothing of any interest is in front of them, but both Annette and Mercedes face forward. Annette fails to ward off her perpetual consciousness of Mercedes’ presence, humming and lingering and overwhelming.
If she loses Mercedes, there’ll be nothing to fill that gap. There might never be. If that knowledge isn’t love, it’s a damn good imitation of it, tantalizingly close to what Annette always imagined it to be like. What Mercedes thinks- what she feels- is beyond her, though.
“Annette?” prompts Mercedes. Time has passed, but the weather hasn’t changed and nobody else has shown up. They’re both soaked through. When Annette turns her head in response, the first thing that catches her eye is Mercedes’ gossamer shirt plastered to the nape of her neck, and she has to pull her gaze away.
“Yeah?” Annette murmurs.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Of course. A-always.” Don’t be so anxious-sounding, Annette chides herself. You’ll make her regret it.
“I didn’t feel sad at the funeral. I couldn’t make myself.”
Annette remains silent, for an absence of anything meaningful to say.
“It’s not Rodrigue’s fault. He seemed- a nice man. Even if he and Felix had their problems. But I’m exhausted.”
“Yeah…?”
“Half my work is feeling sorry for people. Their pain, or the pain of the people who lose them when there’s nothing more I can do. Seeing his body only made me feel empty. Like a reservoir, run completely dry.”
“I’m sorry.” Annette murmurs.
Mercedes shakes her head. “It’s not your fault. I don’t want to make you feel bad. But you’re the only person who can hear this.”
“Is there anything I can do for you? I’d like to, if I can.”
“...Could you come to my room? With me?”
-
Everything is warmer inside Mercedes’ room. They’re soaked to the bone, but Annette already feels herself drying off. It’s not a home-comfort, but it’s a comfort of some sort, and it’s enough.
The knowledge that she’s undressing in her friend’s room is a horribly awkward one; nevertheless, Annette pulls through. Layers come off until she’s wearing only the insulating basics that go over her smalls, off-white and conservative. Mercedes does the same- though Annette doesn’t look. Sure, they’ll be cuddling on Mercedes’ request. But there’s no need for her to gaze too deeply, too attentively, at Mercedes. It’s unlikely to do her any good.
The storm rages on as Mercedes pulls the covers of the bed to one side. The mattress underneath is revealed, the dark shadow over it casting it as if it were the mouth of a cave. Mercedes glistens, a thin film of water forming a sheen on her skin. Annette follows it, like light from the sun beckoning her to the surface of a deep lake.
“You can leave. If you change your mind, if you don’t want this-”
“It’s okay.” Annette nods, decisive. “You should have this.”
Mercedes sidles in, slow, waiting for Annette to follow. When she feels Annette’s weight on her back, she curls inwards, a beautiful conch-shell that Annette doesn’t even need to see. She’s impossibly warm, and Annette holds her comfortingly from the back.
“I’m scared too, Mercie.” Her hand skirts from the clothed small of her back up to the vulnerable part of her neck, feeling Mercedes’ trembling heartbeat. It feels, despite everything, right. “But I’m going to take care of you.”
“Thank you.” Mercedes breath trembles with the weight of it all, faltering on the individual letters, never quite stopping. “It’s been so long.”
“It’s been so long.” Annette concurs. “I’m here. I’m here, Mercie.” And though her confidence might be faked, her love isn’t. It aches, gentle and unspoken.
“I love you.” Mercedes whispers. She lets it flow. Even as Annette struggles for an answer, she doesn’t take it back, or apologize.
“I love you too.”
-
They fall asleep before the sunset, and wake up before the dawn. Annette’s eyes blink slowly open when sunlight starts to seep gently through the curtains, illuminating the room. Mercedes’ isn’t awake, and Annette doesn’t wake her. Rather, she stretches, and runs her hands through Mercedes’ short-cropped hair and down to the nape of her neck.
She’s warm, and the world feels brighter and gentler. Even if she doesn’t know where they stand- not yet. Maybe soon, or after the war. First, they have to survive. It feels so easy to doubt that they will. But for Mercedes’ sake, she can’t give up. She has to be strong for her.
Mercedes barely stirs in her sleep. It’s the warmth of her body, her slow and still breathing, that reminds Annette of her life, beautiful as it is. She’d do almost anything to preserve it, to shoulder her burden. If only Mercedes had told her how she felt earlier- if she’d paid more attention-
Nevermind. They had this, right now, and it could be enough.