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I.
Sylvain is the first of their friends to find out. It isn’t that surprising — in her head, if she’s ever thought about it, Ingrid would have bet on either him or Dimitri. Sylvain is far more romantically-minded, but something about Dimitri has the weight of fate, destiny, all of that type of thing sitting over him, a devil or angel on his shoulder.
He’s sixteen, and they’re a mix of thirteen and fourteen, and Ingrid is halfway through her seventh Dorito, and Sylvain is explaining to them all how he knows now where the map of his future leads.
Felix and Dimitri, predictably, don’t care beyond the sheen of politeness that overlays everything Dimitri does. Ingrid, on the other hand — well, Ingrid wonders. Sylvain sounds so sure, like it was a good experience, something to actually put some kind of stock in, which is profoundly unlike the Sylvain she knows. So, when Dimitri offers Felix a rematch, she leans closer to Sylvain under the guise of sharing the bag of ridiculously over-powdered corn chips, which he sees through immediately because when does she split food?
They know each other; even at that age, they know.
“So what’s this really about?” Sylvain says, after he’s moved to take a chip from the proffered open bag and been swatted for his trouble, which Ingrid should really be nicer about since she is the one who asked him if he wanted any.
“You seem fine,” she says, calmly. Sylvain is like one of the horses on Dimitri’s parents’ land, skittish any time you show fear, hard to predict when responding to emotion so she keeps her voice level. “Like, about the whole thing.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asks. It’s a stupid question, and he knows it based on how he’s watching the screen and not her, not looking at her, not giving her an entry point, which means she knows it too.
“I don’t know,” she says, and she’s young but she’s also already learning to walk the line with Sylvain, to not push too hard or make things too serious. “Just… seems like you’d be more… I don’t know.”
She doesn’t feel she’s doing well, conveying that she’s worried, but Sylvain looks at her then, all of a sudden, with a kind of fondness that makes her fingertips warm and her eyes burn, something rare and memorable and a little scary, like he’s staring at her from across a battlefield with a sword in his guts. She smiles, a little, uncertain.
“I kinda think it’s a good thing,” Sylvain says, and he’s back to watching Felix completely kick Dimitri’s ass, and something stirs in Ingrid’s mind even then that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to know, for sure, that someone isn’t going to let you down. Even if it doesn’t seem on the surface like they love you. Like a private secret for you to hold with someone else. But she is thirteen and the thought is ephemeral as the radioactive dust she brushes from her fingers back into the bag.
IV.
“Hey there!”
It’s a cheery voice through her music, headphones Dimitri overindulgently bought her for her birthday after she’d left her wishlist tab open a little too conspicuously during a study session. Ingrid lets her wingspan spread again to relaxation, not letting go just yet of the handles on the machine, and turns to see a very sweaty and very hot woman with orange hair smiling at her on the left. She thinks of Sylvain and tries not to. It’s distracting.
“Mind spotting me?” the woman asks, pointing to a bench Ingrid distinctly does not bother to look at. She already knows she’s going to follow her wherever this person wants her to go. “You look pretty strong. I think I’ve seen you in here before, too, so I figure you know how it works.”
“I do,” Ingrid says, wild visions of a wedding on a beach flashing through her mind before she realizes she’s being an asshole, and a foolish asshole at that. “I know how it works.” She releases her death grip on the machine.
“Great!” The woman has a voice that is distinctly alive, not something Ingrid has ever really thought before about a person but maybe she’s just spent too much time in Faerghus and this is how everyone at Garreg Mach sounds, where the soil is warm and the sun shines and people smile by default half the time. “I’m Leonie, by the way. I’d shake your hand but we both look pretty gross.”
Leonie does not at all look gross to Ingrid, but she laughs anyway. Leonie’s grin, frank and somehow practical, makes her want to laugh. “Ingrid,” she manages to say, trying hard not to sound as tongue tied as she feels. “I feel pretty gross too.”
Leonie laughs then, like molten gold, like a throatful of medicine. She can lift what looks like twice her body weight, and she trusts Ingrid with her beautiful tan face caught between stunning and striking, and she listens when Ingrid offers her a suggestion on elbow positioning, and she doesn’t give Ingrid her number when they separate at the door into the midday sun but she does say she’ll be the one doing the spotting next time. Ingrid nods, waves, looks over her shoulder like her gaze is subjected to the gravitational force of Leonie’s ass as she moves toward the convergence of perspective lines along the sidewalk.
She pulls out her phone, forces herself to look back in the direction she’s going, and pulls up her thread with Sylvain. Stupid fucking Sylvain.
did you know not every redhead is ugly with a bad personality? she says, without even an emoji to soften it. Sylvain doesn’t reply immediately so she opens the conversation with Dimitri next.
when you met marianne —
so how did you, like —
She pauses. He’ll take it too seriously, she thinks. It’s a girl she met at the gym. Still, she finds herself listening for a knock on the door of the shitty suite she’s afforded as a res life staff perk, but the only one she gets that night is Sylvain, drunk off his ass about Felix’s new and clearly to everyone but him temporary hookup which is just what Ingrid fucking needs.
II.
Ingrid is lying on Mercedes’ bed. She’s looking at the ceiling. She’s feeling surprisingly good considering the reason she’s there.
“Is he usually that pushy about it?” Mercedes asks. Her voice is so calming, she’s concerned for Ingrid, she wants her to be well and happy. They’re good for each other, both the designated responsible one of their family and friend groups for one reason or another. The five years between them feel like hardly any time at all when Mercedes tells her about Emile getting into yet another fight at school, or when they both show up at Annette’s door when she’s sick with soup and hot tea because they know her mother is busy and Sothis knows her father will never perform the role appropriately, or when Mercedes gives her a knowing little smile while she explains Sylvain’s latest personal tragedy.
“Not really,” Ingrid replies. She replays the conversation with her father for what has to be the tenth time, the hinting about some coworker’s son getting louder and louder with every repeat performance, the implications of his expectations heavier and heavier. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking. Maybe everything is fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Mercedes says, decisively. She looks tired. It’s just after her midterms. Ingrid tries not to feel guilty for taking up her free time, not that Mercedes would ever complain — or even want to complain — about it. “You have the right to make your own decisions. Arranging that kind of thing is so... medieval.”
Ingrid frowns. There’s a hairline crack in one of the cheap ceiling tiles and she follows it with her eyes. “But you said your father tried to—”
“Yes,” she says, “which makes me the authority on whether it’s right or wrong.” She smiles a little, Ingrid doesn’t have to look at her to know. Mercedes has the kind of smile you can feel in a room.
“What if—” Ingrid starts, then stops. Mercedes might not be the person she trusts most in the world but she should be, Ingrid is smart enough to know that Felix and Dimitri and Sylvain have their own problems, and they’re boys which doesn’t help. She does look at Mercedes then. Her soft blonde head is cocked to the left, like all her thoughts have shifted to one side of her brain.
“You’re going to university next year, right?” she asks, apropos of apparently nothing.
Ingrid’s brow furrows, but she nods. “Right,” she agrees.
“It won’t matter so much then.” Mercedes’ voice is reassuring, but then it always is. Her smile is soothing, but then it always is. She lives alone in an apartment that Ingrid couldn’t really call run down — but that’s more from Mercedes’ influence on the place than from any characteristics it has by default. She mostly sees Emile to try to counsel him out of his father’s house and his misguided decisions. She misses her mother. She doesn’t speak to her own father.
Even with all that, Ingrid smiles back. “Maybe you’re right,” she agrees.
“And who knows?” Mercedes asks, airily, turning the conversation away from the painful edge of the topic. “Maybe you’ll meet your soulmate there.”
V.
“So,” Leonie asks from behind the door of the locker where her wallet and keys are, brown eyes peering through the slots with interest, “I really do see you here all the time. Are you an athlete?”
Ingrid tries hard, ridiculously, not to blush on the bench where she’s still stretching out a hamstring that went stubbornly tight on her during her last mile on the treadmill. Leonie thinks she’s an athlete, that she could be. Does she think Ingrid looks like a swimmer, lithe and powerful, or like a gymnast, strong and energetic, or like a softball player...? “Uh,” she stammers, over that thought, “no, I don’t think I’d have time for it. I used to play in high school, though. Lacrosse.”
Leonie snorts. “That’s a rich people sport,” she announces, then pokes her head out from behind the metal of the locker, “but you don’t act like a rich person.”
“My family’s not really rich, just have a lot of rich friends,” Ingrid explains, not really sure why she does or how it’s so easy to tell this girl she’s traded spotting duty with no more than five times something that she kept shameful and secret with her brothers for nearly two decades from anyone she could keep from seeing their neighborhood or the labels on their clothes. “Kinda the risk that comes with that. I did a lot of rich person stuff we didn’t really have money for otherwise.”
“Got it,” Leonie says. “Can’t relate, I grew up dirt poor in a dirt poor town. Basically took everyone there to get me here in the long run.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ingrid tries to mask how interested she is, feels like it might be gauche, the schadenfreude of someone else’s suffering rather than the universal cutting feeling of not being able to afford something you want so terribly. She’s only at GMU because after Dimitri’s parents passed away there was a significant amount of leeway and kindness going around for the friends of such a star legacy student — by the time he ended up dropping out and transferring to Fhirdiad it was too late for them to rescind everything they’d given Ingrid.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. Rich friends.
“Yep!” Leonie is cheerful, keys rattling as she tugs them out of the locker. “My whole town did a bunch of fundraisers to get my application submitted, and books covered and stuff when I got in. All the places I’d worked, wherever my dad had helped out or pitched in, friends my mom has. It’s a pretty small place, there’s not a lot of people who even want to leave.”
“But you wanted to?” Ingrid asks, before she can stop herself, before she can remember it might be too soon in their so far gym-only relationship to ask that kind of question. She winces, a little, forehead pressed to her thigh atop that troublesome hamstring.
But Leonie doesn’t seem to mind. She’s so open. Ingrid likes it, finds herself drawn to it after so many years pulling at teeth with anyone in Faerghus. “Totally,” she says, without shame. “I love Sauin — that’s where I’m from — but I wanna see things, you know? New people, new places. I want to make something of myself.”
“Yeah,” Ingrid says, and the pressure finally starts to ease out of the tendon bearing most of her weight where she’s still pressed against the bench. “I get that.”
“Hey,” Leonie says, suddenly, light with the air of a subject change, “are you hungry at all? I got way too many extra tomatoes from my friend who works at the Dagdan place on Arrow, and if I don’t have someone over to help me eat some of the sauce I’ll be stuck with the same thing for a week.”
Ingrid thinks about it, thinks about how she’d told Felix and Sylvain she’d get dinner with them sometime this week, thinks about how many times they’d bailed on her — both individually and together, the morons — and it’s a pretty simple call. “I could eat,” she says.
III.
“This stuff is such bullshit,” Ingrid announces upon entry to her dorm room, where Sylvain is helpfully propped up against her headboard, neck deep in what looks like a very dull book about, loosely, business.
“Whatever you’re talking about, I totally agree,” he says, monotone from behind the cover of his tome. He’s actually taking notes.
“Is that from your dad?” she asks, in lieu of elaborating or rising to the bait, gesturing at the painful just-off-primary colors spelling out a brusque title and a self-important subtitle. Wonderful.
“Basically,” Sylvain replies, which is a weird answer, but she doesn’t get to question it before he’s dotting an i or crossing a t, snapping the book shut with aplomb, and fixing her with the kind of look that makes more easily persuadable people want to sleep with him. “Come on, Ing, what’s bullshit? Hey!” he adds when she glares, hands up defensively. He has a smudge on one index finger where he rubbed over his own still-damp ink. “If you didn’t want me to ask you wouldn’t have said anything.”
He’s right. That doesn’t mean she has to like it. She slumps onto the foot of her bed, head against the wall, knees bent over the edge leaving her toes dangling above the floor. Sylvain slides slowly into her field of vision, orientation of his face akimbo, grin as always at the corners of his mouth. She shuts her eyes. “I just had to sit with a girl for like half an hour who was crying because she saw her soulmate making out with another girl,” she says. It’s true, maybe she wanted to talk about it, but it doesn’t make it easier. Sylvain is still stupidly cagey about whatever he saw when he was sixteen, and relentlessly promiscuous as if in defiance of the whole framework. “It’s just so… whatever. It’s so unfair. She said he doesn’t know yet. Does that justify it?”
“Well, if she doesn’t tell him how would he know?” Sylvain’s voice has that closed-off quality, the one that says I know more than I’m letting on but I will never fucking tell you about it and if you ask I’ll crank it up further and probably be a complete asshole about it.
Ingrid glares, and goes for the jugular. “You’d know all about that, huh?”
Sylvain chuckles, which tells Ingrid clear as day that she’s lost. “I know about all kinds of stuff, Ing,” he says, and then bites down hard. “You’re kinda the only one in the group that’s still in the dark, you know?”
It’s actually too low a blow. Sylvain knows it; that’s why he said it, but she’s spent enough time dealing with his bullshit that she knows he’ll feel worse about it later than she does right now. And he’ll let her in on whatever’s really wrong in time, so Ingrid just snorts. “Whatever,” she replies, lamely, wishing she had Sylvain’s ridiculously precise aim with some of the cutting remarks he spews their way when he’s angry about something. One iota would be more than she really has. “At least I’m not the one making problems for myself. It’s one thing to be pathetic, it’s another thing to make yourself that way all on your own.”
Watching his face, she can already see he’s moved on to the sorrier-than-you-are phase of this spat, and he barely reacts to her statement, even though she winces a little. Sylvain waves his hand dismissively like her armchair diagnosis is so many fruit flies. “It’s called ‘self-sabotage’, Ingrid, and it’s very in right now.”
“In what?” she asks, swatting at his stupid head where it’s still hanging over her like the sword of Damocles. “In your dumb brain?”
“Your banter’s getting good,” he laughs, backing out of her reach to settle against the head of her bed again. “You making smart friends here at college?”
“Smarter than you,” she snips. The earlier conversation is gone, yes, but not forgotten.
VI.
Ingrid screws her courage to the sticking place as she sidles up to where Leonie is stretching out on the mats.
“You owe me at least a cardio session,” she calls, and the redhead looks up, startled expression morphing into a grin laden with recognition. “I couldn’t find you in here the other day and I had to ask a girl from the track and field team to be my spotter. She was way out of my league weight-wise when I got her back.”
“She must’ve been pretty strong,” Leonie says, and Ingrid tries her damndest not to flush. “Fine, treadmill today then.”
“Ellipticals,” Ingrid haggles, and she rolls her amber eyes but nods agreement, tugging the outside of one elbow across her chest. “I thought maybe you found a better gym.”
“There’s definitely better gyms out there than this, but there’s no better price than free,” Leonie says, and she has a point as usual. “Nah, I was… well, to be honest with you, me and a couple of my friends crashed a party one of the guys in the Leicester complex was having.”
“Sounds fun,” Ingrid, who has never crashed a party or really even dreamed of doing such a thing, comments. “You couldn’t score an invite?”
This, strangely, seems to touch a nerve, although Leonie doesn’t seem angry. The crease on her forehead from the strain of her muscles etches a bit deeper. Ingrid bends to encircle one spread ankle to avoid any uncomfortable eye contact. “He’s a pretty good friend of mine, actually,” Leonie says, eventually. “It was just a specific kind of party.”
“What, like a guy thing?” Ingrid asks. Growing up with Sylvain, Felix, and Dimitri she’s unfortunately very familiar with exclusion from events that are for the boys. She’s sympathetic to Leonie. She wishes she’d just come over to Ingrid’s instead of crashing. She has to get her head on straight.
“Nah, not exactly.” Ingrid can’t keep stretching her hamstrings forever, so she’s looking at Leonie’s face again as she speaks. “It’s… Lorenz got his invitation for his soulmate thing. So they were celebrating that.”
Ah. “Right,” Ingrid says. “You don’t… like that kind of stuff?”
Leonie shrugs, rotating her shoulders the rest of the way through the movement, shaking out her arms through the tips of her fingers. “I don’t really care one way or the other. Just sometimes people are too sensitive about it with me since I don’t have one.”
There’s no yet punctuating her sentence. Ingrid thinks she knows what the absence means. Some people just never have one. She’s always felt she might be one of those people herself; maybe Leonie is too. She should probably say something, she thinks in silence as the atmosphere thickens around them.
“Either way,” Leonie continues, maybe forcing a smile to her face, “Hilda got me the building code from Lorenz in class and I went over with Dorothea. We, uh, livened things up for sure. You could definitely say that.”
“Dorothea? From Fine Arts?” Ingrid mainly knew Dorothea as a girl who had rejected Sylvain in a way that was borderline inspirational. It would be heartbreaking to know her better as a girl she could in no way compete with.
“We bonded over making Lorenz’ life miserable,” Leonie explains. “Plus her boyfriend is Lorenz’ soulmate. One of those platonic ones, I think, based on how much he lets Hilda walk all over him.” She kicks one leg out one more time, working out a last kink, and then turns fully to face Ingrid. “Let’s get this over with, I get so bored on the elliptical.”
It’s a lot of information, but Ingrid walks to the elliptical thinking only one thing: Dorothea has a boyfriend.
IX.
Ingrid can hear what sounds like a shower running in the background when Felix calls her to talk him off the ledge of skipping the introduction to his soulmate. It’s ridiculous, she thinks. He’s a full adult. He has a job. He’s in love with his roommate who’s been painfully, masochistically in love with him right back for, like, ten years. And yet he’s calling her from the bathroom so Sylvain doesn’t hear him.
Ingrid does what she does best, what she’s done best for an interminably long count of years, another version of the just talk to him conversation she’s had a hundred times through a thousand arguments among her lovable but emotionally ineffective friends. It’s a quick call. Sylvain probably has his head halfway into the bathroom Felix is camping out in, if he hasn’t changed too much since the last time Ingrid interacted with him.
“Everything okay?” Leonie drops onto the couch beside her, fresh from tending to whatever is in the oven and starting to smell amazing. Ingrid drops her head onto her shoulder.
“Please never go back to Derdriu,” she groans. “Or take me with you.”
“Soon,” she reminds Ingrid, twisting around to kiss her cheek brightly. “But really, anything wrong? That definitely sounded like your Felix voice.”
“Not to be dramatic, but is there ever a time when anything isn’t wrong with that guy?” she asks. Leonie chuckles, she can feel it ripple between their ribs where they’re pressed together, that warm feeling of sharing like the sun shining down. “He’s… I guess he got his letter today. His soulmate thing.”
“Oof,” Leonie exhales on a gust of breath, wrapping an arm more tightly around Ingrid’s shoulders bracingly. “Good thing that quiche is already in the oven.” She’s quiet for a moment. Ingrid listens to her own breathing, to the echo of Leonie’s heartbeat echoing just barely through the pulse in her fingers against Ingrid’s arm. “Felix is the last one from your group, huh?”
She nods. “I mean, he isn’t the only person I know who didn’t have one but he was the last one from our group. Even Dedue had Ashe and he wasn’t even from Fodlan. I didn’t think it would work outside of here.”
“Ridiculous,” Leonie says, flicking Ingrid’s forehead. “I feel like with something like this you can’t assume there’s any kind of rules.”
“Yeah,” Ingrid agrees. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think I would feel this… bitter about it. I figured Felix and I would never get one. Sylvain has been stupid over the guy forever, I thought he’d make it happen through sheer force of will, without the goddess or… whatever… intervening.”
“Not that there’s any kind of real how it works,” Leonie says, “but I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Whatever,” Ingrid says. “Point is I’m kind of pissed.”
There’s another moment of silence between them, thoughtful, emotive. Then, “Do you wish you’d gotten one? A letter?” Leonie asks.
Her voice sounds level and as calm as ever, but something in it makes Ingrid look up at her. Or maybe, she thinks, catching sight of Leonie’s face and her eyes and her mouth and her freckles in the sunshine filtering in through the window of her apartment’s living room, maybe it wasn’t her voice. Maybe it’s the force of her feelings, the gravitational pull toward Leonie that she’s felt since the moment she set eyes on her in the GMU gym all those years ago, that turns her toward her like a sunflower following the streak of the bright star across the sky every day only to do it again the next morning, and the next, and the next. And with that, suddenly, it’s the easiest question she’s ever been asked. “Not really,” Ingrid says. “I mean, I kind of do, but only so I can feel like I’m in the club with them, I guess.” She reaches up to tangle her fingers with Leonie’s against her arm. “That soulmate shit can’t be better than this.”
VII.
“Sorry I bring you all my problems.”
Ingrid is light as a feather in Mercedes’ room again, now with a couple years of university under her belt and one puff of Mercedes’ joint in her lungs and her blood. It turns out it feels good, which means Ingrid will probably never smoke again, but for now there’s not much else to do but let it ride.
“Felix and Annette in a fight is a problem for the whole group,” Mercedes says, and although Ingrid genuinely does feel bad unloading Felix’s version of events on her, it had been Mercedes to call her and ask her over to see how they could put their heads together and smooth things back down. “Besides, you know I want to help any time I can. It’s the only thing I’ve got going for me.”
“That is such a lie,” Ingrid argues, and the force of her voice sends Mercedes laughing for maybe the millionth time since she had asked Ingrid whether she minded if she smoked quick to take a bit of the edge off the stress, and Ingrid for once in her life had been chill about something. “You’re the most incredible baker in the world. Like your food makes me hungry just looking at it. And you’re smart, and you’re nice, and you always look so good. And on top of all that you give really good advice. You’re, like, amazing. Like remember in high school how my dad kept trying to set me up with his coworker’s son?”
Mercedes chuckles and seems very ready to move past Ingrid’s heaping of praise. “I do. You never seemed to have any intention of going along with it, as I recall.”
Ingrid laughs too. Maybe now is the time. “For more reasons than one, I think,” she says. She rolls onto her side so she’s looking at Mercedes lying next to her, close but comfortable on her spartan twin bed. It’s far superior to looking at the plastered-over line on the ceiling where the crack had run years ago. “I think I met someone at school.”
Mercedes’ eyes, red and warm, fill up with tears. “Sorry,” she apologizes, pre-emptively, “I get emotional when I’m high. Ingrid,” she continues then, reaching out with both hands to grab Ingrid’s in a grip just short of vise-like, “that’s wonderful.”
“It kinda is,” Ingrid agrees, shyly. “We’re not, like, together yet or anything but…” She looks at Mercedes for another moment, in wonderment of the kindness and generosity of her that makes it easy as anything for Ingrid to tell her something she’s not sure she’s ever explicitly told anyone. “She’s great. We’ve been spending more time together, at the gym and cooking together and stuff.”
Mercedes… laughs. She drops her head back against her pillow and laughs, lacing her fingers through Ingrid’s, and her voice isn’t mean and she is still Mercedes so rather than hurt or angry Ingrid moves right to confusion. “Ingrid,” she says finally, a couple tears dripping down her face, pulled by gravity, “you’ve been doing all that and you don’t think you’re together? Only lesbians.”
Lesbian. Mercedes had said lesbian. Some kind of smile like the burn of a bush fire crosses Ingrid’s face. “Lesbians,” she repeats, stupidly, and Mercedes pulls her into a hug. It’s comfortable, in bed with Mercedes. It’s safe.
“I love you, Ingrid,” she says, firm and friendly and everything in between, Mercedes all the way down, and Ingrid presses her palms into Mercedes’ spine harder, like they could merge, like they could always be like this, moving through life wrapped in a friend. “Your secret is safe with me, and when you’re ready for it not to be a secret anymore I’ll be right there beside you. Now tell me about your sweet girlfriend.”
“Well,” Ingrid says, trying to ignore the way her face flushes at girlfriend, “unless you’re a dog or one of the kids at the summer camp where she teaches, I don’t think I’d call Leonie sweet.”
X.
Dimitri and Marianne get married so long after they find each other that Rodrigue had started reaching out even outside his immediate circle to sniff out information. Ingrid had gotten her own text about two months after Dimitri called her to ask for ring advice. She’d let him down easy.
It’s worth the wait if their wedding is anything to go by. Ingrid and Leonie make the trip up from Derdriu — apparently Leonie and Marianne went to high school together, making Fodlan officially the smallest world — to Fhirdiad through a landscape shifting from yellow-green to white as the temperatures change around them. The ceremony is simple, Mercedes tearing up at least a dozen times as she walks them through their vows and shares some simple advice for them to have a happy life together, Felix very clearly crying and not acknowledging it standing next to Dimitri as Marianne slides his ring onto his finger, Hilda Goneril somehow still managing to look cute while sobbing at Marianne’s side.
The reception is a dream.
Dimitri finds Ingrid while she’s sitting and watching Leonie dance with her friends from Leicester, Ignatz and Raphael, who apparently aren’t from her village but were some of the only other poor kids at the school they all got zoned into. “Marianne has only nice things to say about her,” he says as a conversation starter, sinking into the empty chair next to her.
It’s hard to tear her eyes away from Leonie, but Ingrid somehow does it. “Yeah, she’s great,” she agrees. Understatement of the damn century. “She was really excited to see everyone, apparently it’s been a while since they’ve all been together.”
“Funny how you can live in the same city for so long and so rarely see each other.” Dimitri is smiling, beatifically, in the general direction of the spot on the dance floor where Marianne and Hilda have established themselves with Lorenz and Claude, who Ingrid thinks might be Hilda’s plus one and also might be the single most handsome man she’s ever seen. Marianne’s dress catches the disco ball reflections spinning slowly across the room, throwing them into every corner. “That was never the case with us, thankfully.”
Ingrid rolls her eyes. “Our parents would never have let us out of touch, even if we hated each other. Even,” she corrects herself, “when we hated each other.”
Dimitri nods. “Remember when Glenn somehow managed to beat us in that one scrimmage even when we all switched to be on Felix and Sylvain’s team? I didn’t want to speak to him for a week I was so angry, but my father insisted I see him. I got over it, luckily.”
“He was cheating, for sure,” Ingrid agrees. “I mean he was so much older than us it was ridiculous for us to even try.”
“Maybe,” Dimitri laughs. They’re quiet for a moment, not that that means there’s silence between them as the DJ blasts music at an unbelievably high volume. No one on the dance floor is complaining, though. “Ingrid,” Dimitri says then, not softly but still serious, turning fully in his chair to fix her with that sapphire laser beam gaze, “you look very happy.”
Ingrid smiles at him, dear old Dimitri, softened with age and therapy and, no doubt, Marianne’s influence. Dedue and Ashe didn’t hurt either. One of her oldest friends. She’d been present the day he was born, not that she remembers it at all. Even on his own wedding day, he’s worried about everyone around him. “I think I am happy,” she says, grinning first with relief, then realization. Between Ignatz and Raphael, Leonie’s teeth are gleaming in the lights where she’s laughing, the jacket for her suit discarded somewhere long ago for Ingrid to find before they leave. “She’s…” She pauses then, looks at Dimitri who’s looking at her but with his whole body turned, oriented towards his wife, and isn’t that a strange thought. Dimitri has a wife. “I don’t wonder about it anymore, you know? If I’ll ever get a code.”
Dimitri beams at her. That night, back at their hotel room in downtown Fhirdiad, Ingrid holds Leonie tight.
VIII.
Ingrid almost expects it to be disappointing, for one or both of them — kissing Leonie. She’d read in books and in some articles about the complete serotonin rush of locking lips with your soulmate, scientific comparisons of dopamine levels with soulmates versus non-soulmates. It’s demonstrated, supposedly, that the pleasure chemicals don’t release at the same rate for people who don’t have that stupid fatalistic marker on their relationship.
Turns out that plenty still drop without some painting.
Ingrid being locked to the dorms with her resident life job means that if they want to cook dinner with any kind of materials they need to go to Leonie’s place. Leonie might live with what feels like seventeen other people, and her pots and pans might be second-hand, but she has a stove and a counter and their space is always filled with music and laughter and good smells guarantee that others will stop by for taste tests, Claude or Hapi or Petra or any of the others Ingrid doesn’t know as well.
Tonight, though, they’ve mostly been alone. It’s early for a student dinner, and everyone else in the house is still studying or working, or maybe just elsewhere, and pretty much all Ingrid can think about is the fact that she and Leonie have been spending more time together, catching up outside the gym, dinner and studying together when Leonie’s thesis is stalling out, and now they’re alone and Ingrid really likes her.
“That smells amazing,” Ingrid says, instead of something more humiliating, and Leonie grins over her shoulder.
“The hard part’s almost done!” she announces, enthusiastically. “Then it just has to bake for a while. I gotta say, I’ve never made this with veggies that look this good. I always get impatient when I’m chopping them.”
Ingrid blushes, just a little hopefully in front of the vodka soda she’s slowly making her way through. “It’s the anger issues,” she jokes, and Leonie laughs, giving the skillet in front of her another good stir before removing it from the heat and starting to arrange the contents in the oil-slick pan. “You’re the one making it into something, though.”
“Oh, stop,” Leonie replies, because she’s not from Faerghus and doesn’t have the self-deprecation monkey on her back. Ingrid likes that about her. Really, she likes pretty much everything about her.
“What?”
Ingrid starts in her seat, a little guiltily. Leonie is looking back at her, hands on hips and head cocked in front of the oven now full of baking vegetables. Ingrid knows she’s been staring.
“I… I like you,” she says, before she can stop herself, trying to channel some of the very generous energy Sylvain had put out in excitement for her when she told him she was going to Leonie’s later. Maybe it was the time of year, maybe it was just Sylvain’s general attitude, but it feels portentous, appropriate, sitting in Leonie’s sun-kissed kitchen and finally letting her know.
“Thank the goddess,” is what Leonie says then, and Ingrid’s eyes go wide and her mouth gapes open and if Mercedes was here she would be laughing, laughing. “I was wondering if you were just really friendly.”
“Not usually,” Ingrid says faintly. “More like… frigid.”
Leonie laughs. She’s getting closer to where Ingrid is sitting, slowly, building up. “Not to me,” she says. “I like you too.”
Ingrid rises, not unsteadily now, nothing but Leonie and the smell of spices and a hundred moments built up over the months since they met. “Are you going to kiss me?” Ingrid asks, and Leonie’s grin turns fond, unbelievably fond, and she’s a perfect inch taller than Ingrid, and she wraps her fingers around the hinges of Ingrid’s jaw and they’re warm.
“Yeah,” she says, simply, “if you’ll let me.”
Ingrid’s heart flutters, like a hummingbird, the way she never thought it would watching everyone around her fall in love in certainty, and her eyelids slide closed on their own accord, and when Leonie’s lips touch hers for that first time it’s better than fate, better than magic. It’s handmade, built from the ground up, delicious like candy and hearty like… well, like whatever Leonie has in the oven.
And when they break apart, just for a moment, just to delight in looking at each other with new eyes, Ingrid thinks Leonie looks better than any art she’s ever seen.