Chapter Text
Dimitri stumbled through the underbrush, his sight dark in one eye, which burned with a physical pain he had absolutely no possible comparison for… and which he barely noticed over the cacophony of the dead.
His father, bleeding from injuries that would never heal and never stop bleeding. “Avenge—”
“I can’t—” he howled back at him. The ghost, as was customary, did not notice in the slightest.
His stepmother, beloved, with her dead eyes, mouth open in a scream that never ended.
Dedue…
Dedue.
Dedue, freshly joined to the legion, with none of the subtle humor or warmth in the back of his eyes that he had in life, no words, not yet, no screaming, only staring at the one who had been his lord, who should have been strong enough to protect him, pityingly.
“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her, but I can’t now! Please, please, I can’t—” he wanted to sleep. He’d be more worried about the eye later… maybe. It wasn’t like it was going to kill him… he wasn’t that lucky. He had work to do, and he couldn’t die yet. Not while the dead still demanded payment for his survival. “Please, please, I just.. I need…”
He thought he’d gotten far enough away from the pursuers, and if not… and if not, then he was going to fall. Or kill a lot more people before he felt true rest. Or… go mad. If he hadn’t already.
If he hadn’t already.
As if madness mattered. As if he cared one whit if he was mad, when the dead needed payment. He had survived because they died, because they were gone and—
“Kid, there’s no one else here,” a distantly familiar said in tired tones, as if he had said this many times before and was used to being ignored. “There’s no one here. Just you and me.”
“Who said that?” he snarled, gripping his lance—broken, but that wouldn’t matter if he used enough force—with fresh vigor. It wouldn’t last. The wave of anger would leave him more exhausted than before, and the ghosts louder than ever. There was a surprised silence, and he whirled, trying to find the source of the voice… and found yet another ghost. Captain Jeralt. Byleth… Professor Byleth’s father. “Not you too.”
“You actually hear me now?”
Dimitri took half a step back. This was new, and new was bad. The ghosts never did anything new without everything getting worse. “I will kill that woman, I swear it, you need not remind me of my duty—”
“Rhea’s sacred tits you foolish boy!” Jeralt snapped, and that was so unlike the other ghosts… and somehow, though he had never heard the man use this… particular profanity, so like the man he had been, that Dimitri jerked away from him, startled like a horse. “Stop talking and listen to me. You’ve lost an eye and if you keep being stupid, you’ll lose a lot more. I have no idea what woman you’re talking about, and I don’t care—but you’re going to stop now and help yourself or you’ll be so damned fevered you’ll try flying like a bird or something equally stupid.”
Dimitri blinked, though he only saw it in the one eye. The ghosts demanded payment for survival—they had no eyes for him, for his state. No ears to hear him, no matter how he pleaded. All they saw was the instrument of their vengeance.
Jeralt heard him.
“I…” Dimitri whispered, and took another step back. He was shaking hard, and to his horror, he felt the beginning of tears.
Just from the one eye. The other was too ruined, apparently, even to cry.
The ghosts finally took notice of him, stunned by the weakness of their instrument, and their eyes and voices grew pitying and scornful by turns.
“Hey! Look at me—Just me. I don’t know what else you’re seeing, but you need to focus now. There are willows over there—if we’re lucky, running water, if we’re unlucky, a pond. You have anything metal on you?”
The boy shook his head, slowly.
“Alright. Well… work with what you have then. We need to wash out your eye and wrap it up before it does something stupid like get infected. Understand?”
Dimitri nodded shakily. The other ghosts were making noise… but he could focus. He always had for the Professor. Had he not promised her vengeance, assistance, for her father?
If her father was… demanding this… it was probably to make it so he could avenge him later. But… that was only his due. It was… kind of him, in his own, rough way, to consider Dimitri at all. As a person. None of the others did. Not anymore.
He died a little inside every time he saw his father’s eyes, and saw none of the warmth he’d had in life. He dreaded what he would see in Dedue’s.
But… Jeralt had a right to command him. He put one foot in front of the other, to obey the ghost.
***
Either the boy was fevered, or the shock of the injury had gotten to him, or… the horror of seeing Dedue fall had. The boy had been done for—he’d known it, and cried out only to urge Dimitri on, out of sight, away to safety.
Or… something worse had happened to the young prince’s mind. Not that the horror had gotten to him… but that it had broken him entirely.
Jeralt had never seen him crying out to the air around him like that before. He’d kept an eye on the kid ever since the battle of Garreg Mach… ever since he’d gotten a reason to regret choosing to stick around in the world of the living a while longer, to see what became of his daughter, to be near her, and instead of watching her live, watched her fall.
Granted, there had been a lot going on the battlefield, and a part of him hoped, though it was a dimmer part every day, that she might have survived. Byleth had always been… odd. To say the least. Strong and clever and odd. And beloved. And his daughter.
And Rhea….he’d guessed many things about the Archbishop over the years, but this was not one of them. And… he wasn’t sure what that meant, what it implied about his daughter that… that took an interest in her.
That that had given him her blood, so many years ago.
No. That didn’t matter. She was his daughter, whatever else she was, and if it turned out that she had a bit of dragon in her… well. Maybe it would give her a chance at still being alive. He’d only known, in the horror and chaos of a battlefield that he could barely affect—he’d managed to blow a few arrows slightly to one side, a few times, but even that was exhausting—he’d still known that if she was alive, she would find her way back to her students eventually. Particularly this one, whom she prized. She had been… fond of Dimirti, he knew, though she’d hidden it admirably—he was her father, and he noticed things that no one else knew to watch. The way her eyes lingered a bare second longer than on other students, the way she was just a hair tougher on him than the others when she tutored him. The students wouldn’t have noticed, and that was as it should be… but Jeralt saw it fine.
He wasn’t sure what form it would have taken if his daughter had been a normal girl… or if she’d had more time with him. He was only certain that if his daughter was alive, she’d fight her way back to her students, and to her, Dimitri was the heart of the students, as if they were one beast entire.
The beating heart of her class, currently, was on his knees, trying to clean his eye… what was left of it, himself. He wasn’t whimpering… he probably wanted to be, but he wasn’t. His hands were shaking though.
Honestly, being dead wasn’t all bad. There was no pain, for one. But being unable to touch… if he’d been alive, he’d have been able to just tell the kid to lie down and let him handle it. But his hands passed through everyone he reached out for.
He had tried. He’d tried to push Dedue forward, out of the way of that first swordstroke… but…
It had no more effect than the first hundred times he’d instinctively tried to help.
He still lurched forward when Dimitri finally let out a sob—of pain or at Dedue’s death or at whatever he was hearing in his screwy little head, Jeralt didn’t know. And once again, Jeralt moved forward, like he would have in life, to try to help… but this time, his hands closed around Dimitri’s wrists, and not around nothing at all.
They both froze, Dimitri slowly looking up at him out of one wide eye.
“I’ve…. Not been able to do that before,” Jeralt said aloud before he could stop himself, then shook his head. “We’ll figure out the why later. Right now, what’s important is that I can help you.”
“I… will slay her, I swear it…. Your death—”
“Is not the issue at hand right now. Lay back and let me tend to you.”
He didn’t really like that Dimitri was meekly obedient to a dead person… but maybe that was to be expected, between the shock and the trauma and the reappearance of a lost authority figure.
He’d figure it out later.