Work Text:
Claude couldn’t sleep.
Now, normally, Claude did not consider restlessness to be a problem. He was restless in the night quite often, but it wasn’t a problem. After all, as King of Almyra, there was always something he needed to get up and do if he found that sleep eluded him. And fortunately for him, his husband was a rather heavy sleeper once he finally did drift off, so Dimitri didn’t mind it when Claude left the bed to go light a candle and read over some documents in the plush chair by the window, or even if Claude left the room entirely to go down the corridor to his office and spend the night penning letters, laws, or edicts. Dimitri was always attentive to him in the mornings if he woke up and found that Claude wasn’t still in bed – he made sure that Claude’s insomnia didn’t catch up with him and take its toll, as it often did during the war and even in some stressful periods after that. When things got bad, Dimitri made sure that Claude got his rest.
But tonight, even Dimitri was tossing and turning, little huffs leaving his lips as he turned his blue eye to stare out the window where Claude’s gaze had been fixed for the past hour. “I can’t believe we can hear him from here,” Dimitri remarked, and Claude hummed softly in reply. The loud, mournful calls echoed all across the royal villa from the sturdy pen in the lower courtyard.
“He’s sad,” Claude murmured, feeling a tug on his heartstrings at one particularly long, loud wail. Sarbi had been crying like that ever since they’d had to move him to the courtyard away from his sister, but there was little that could be done about it. Dimitri had been the one to notice Sarbi taking ill, and his innocent little question of ‘do wyverns normally sneeze?’ had been the precursor to finding out that half of the wyverns in the capital had come down with bronchitis. If left untreated, the disease could become much worse, and it spread easily so they’d had to quarantine a good number of the beasts in their roosts while moving the healthy ones outside the city. The royal wyverns, though, were an exception. They had their own roost within the palace but somehow Sarbi had come down with the illness anyways – Claude blamed Nader, who had asked the King to come supervise some aerial drills with him earlier in the week. That little excursion had given Sarbi all the exposure he needed to catch the illness, and while the other sick wyverns were being kept quarantined elsewhere in the city, Claude couldn’t bear to be too far from his wyverns at any time, so he’d gotten in contact with the manager of the menagerie and got a special, sturdy pen set up for his boy here in the villa. That way, he was kept separate from Jamshid (who thankfully had shown no symptoms so far) but still close by for Claude to take care of.
Even if everyone in the palace was starting to resent Claude for it due to the unending screeching that filled the villa. Even the little lion cub that slept at the foot of the royal couple’s bed was unsettled, and when he lifted his head and rumbled, yawning and sighing, Dimitri clicked his tongue and patted his chest as a signal for the cub to come up.
“Here, Dedue…” Dimitri beckoned, and the cub squeaked and got up, picking his way carefully up the bed to flop in between Claude and Dimitri with his head draped on Dimitri’s chest. Dimitri scratched Dedue’s ears and Claude pouted. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t Sarbi be in here, too, kept close by for Claude to comfort him when he needed it? Nevermind that the wyvern couldn’t fit inside the door…
Heaving a sigh, Claude tried to distract himself by reaching out to poke at Dedue’s toes. The lion’s ear flicked but he tolerated the touch. Dimitri glanced over and hummed.
“Careful. Poking the beans puts him in attack mode sometimes,” he cautioned, and Claude snorted.
“Poking the what?” he asked.
“The… the beans,” Dimitri repeated, and Claude glanced up to see that Dimitri was blushing even though he looked perfectly serious. “That part you’re touching is called a toe bean.” Claude’s snort, this time, was closer to being a real laugh.
“Ah, I see… are toe beans exclusive to lion anatomy?” he asked. Dimitri shook his head.
“No. Any cat.”
“Mm. You’re a lion, too, Dima. Does that mean you have beans, as well?” Claude asked. Dimitri blushed and opened his mouth to reply when the loudest screech yet interrupted them, filling their ears and making the walls shake.
“Goddess,” Dimitri said instead of answering Claude’s question, while Dedue pulled his ears flat against his skull and did a lion cub’s best attempt at a roar in response to the noise. Claude, ears ringing, sat up.
“I’ve gotta go see him,” he decided, and Dimitri just sighed.
“Nader said-”
“I know what Nader said,” Claude interrupted, pouting. Nader said that if they didn’t respond to Sarbi’s cries, eventually he would stop. That if they instead gave him attention for making so much noise, he would figure out that they couldn’t ignore him and keep crying when he wanted anything. But how was Claude supposed to ignore this? “That’s my brother out there, Dima…” he said, rolling out of bed to throw a robe over his nightclothes and find his sandals, slipping his feet in quickly and doing up the straps in record time. “He’s sad…”
By this point, Dimitri, too, had sat up in bed, watching Claude with a little frown. Claude could only guess that Dimitri was trying to formulate an argument that would get him to come back to bed… but in the end, Sarbi’s screaming was keeping Dimitri awake, too. Keeping the whole villa awake, possibly the whole damn city. If anyone was going to get any sleep tonight, something needed to be done. Dimitri seemed to recognize that and just shook his head softly before flopping back down among the pillows. Claude started towards the door, but at the last moment he doubled back across the room to press a kiss to Dimitri’s forehead. Dimitri hummed contently and Claude smiled.
“I’ll see you in the morning, beloved,” he whispered before turning on his heel and heading for the courtyard.
Trotting down along a well-worn path, it was not long at all before Claude saw the iron bars of the pen they’d put Sarbi in. Claude liked to think it was big enough for his brother – there was plenty of room to stretch out his wings and even run around a little despite it not being tall enough for Sarbi to fly around in. They needed to limit his movement while he was sick so that he wouldn’t get up to too much activity and wear out his lungs (as though all his screeching hadn’t been doing exactly that). Still, the cage looked small as Sarbi circled its perimeter, whining and trilling. Claude could see him building up for another scream, his chest puffing out as he took as deep a breath as he could manage, but before he could release the sound, Claude chirred softly at him and Sarbi’s gaze immediately snapped over to him.
“Hello, my darling…” Claude spoke in quiet Almyran as Sarbi charged over towards him, stopping just short of the bars. The wyvern tilted his head and gnawed at the iron, trying to get through it to go to Claude, and a sad little laugh left the King’s lips. Sarbi’s pen was a wreck; it looked like a small hurricane had traveled through it. Any piece of foliage that had been on the inside of the pen was shredded all to pieces and even the large blanket that Claude had brought to Sarbi for him to use as bedding lay in tatters, the down from the inside of the comforter strewn about the courtyard. It looked like a crime scene where a thousand chickens had been murdered, minus the blood. Gods, the gardeners were going to have Sarbi’s head for this one.
Still, Claude could not bring himself to be upset in the slightest at his brother, who was just lonely and sad. Almyran wyverns were flocking animals; they didn’t do well in isolation and Sarbi, who’d had Jamshid and Khalid with him for his whole life, had pretty bad separation anxiety which was showing itself now that he had to be kept apart from his sister. That didn’t mean he had to be totally alone, though – wyvern diseases were not communicable to humans. So it was no problem at all for Claude to slip in-between the bars of the pen and join Sarbi inside. Immediately the wyvern was nuzzling up against him and trilling, though the noise sounded thinner, rougher than usual. Patting his neck, Claude shushed him. “Sarbi, shh, you’re going to wear yourself out with all that yelling,” he said. As if in response, Sarbi coughed – a loud, ugly sound coming from a wyvern. Claude patted his brother’s chest before leading him over to the water trough they’d left out for him. It was a miracle that it hadn’t gotten overturned, and the water still looked untouched. Calming down now that Claude was here, Sarbi took a long drink from the trough while Claude looked around the pen, letting out a low whistle as he surveyed the destruction once again.
“What a mess…” he remarked to himself before looking to his wyvern once again. “And here I was planning on snuggling up with you on that nice down blanket… ah, well. I guess the ground will do if you give me your wing,” he said. Sarbi probably couldn’t understand every word Claude said, but he at least seemed to understand that Claude was going to be staying with him for the rest of the night. As soon as he finished drinking, Sarbi came back over to Claude, flopping down atop him as Claude grunted, then laughed as he was shoved onto the ground.
“Sarbi, no, you can’t be my blanket, you’re too heavy!” Claude laughed. Sarbi rumbled in response, pinning a squirming Claude for a couple more moments before he shifted to the side, showing his belly. Claude gave it a few rubs before he settled in, leaning against his wyvern and sighing as Sarbi draped a wing over him. “That’s a good boy,” Claude murmured. Finally, Sarbi settled, and Claude was able to close his eyes and started to drift. Just when he was about to nod off, though, Sarbi shifted and trilled, jostling Claude and waking him back up. Claude glanced up to Sarbi first, seeing that the wyvern’s stare was fixed on something outside the cage, and Claude hummed. “Sarbi, what-” he began, only to follow Sarbi’s gaze and see… ah.
He couldn’t help but smile as he watched Dimitri shoving himself in-between the bars of the pen, grunting as he squeezed through. He was a bit broader than Claude was, but he managed it all the same, and in no time at all Dimitri was flopping down beside Claude and Sarbi. He didn’t say a word as Claude reached out and brushed his fingers through his long golden mane.
“Can’t sleep in an empty bed?” Claude asked gently, and Dimitri shook his head. Claude chuckled. “What about Dedue?” he asked.
“Dedue seems to have no trouble with it,” Dimitri answered. That wasn’t exactly what Claude had been asking, but the response made him laugh anyways.
“If you left that lion unattended in our room and we come back to shredded sheets…”
“It will still be less of a mess than what Sarbi’s made out here,” Dimitri retorted. Claude glanced around once more and conceded the point. He laid back down once again, sandwiched between Sarbi’s stomach and Dimitri’s chest.
“Goodnight, Dima. Goodnight, Sarbi,” he said instead. Dimitri and Sarbi both rumbled a contented noise in response, both of them already too far gone to sleep to respond properly. Smiling to himself, Claude closed his eyes.
All was quiet for the rest of the night.