Archive of Our Own

Claude taps his finger on the back of his phone case to the beat of the chaotic music currently blasting through his earbuds. His eyes are trained on his screen, where a triplet of blue circles dance, a ripple bumping through them every few seconds or so—Hilda and Lorenz are still typing a reply to Claude’s joke, it seems.

But eventually, Hilda replies with a simple lmaooo while Lorenz continues to type, an inevitable, frustrated rant at Claude’s impression of him. Claude can practically hear Lorenz telling him how his joke was so distasteful and how it inaccurately depicts Lorenz’s speaking style.

Which only goes to show how accurate Claude’s imitation of him actually was.

Claude grins to himself.

He flicks a gaze up at the crosswalk light. It’s still red, cars of all shapes and sizes zipping past on the intersection.

It’s a bit careless how fast they’re going, but Claude can’t complain. He’s driven past this particular intersection, and he knows the desperation of getting past the traffic lights. These lights are notorious for staying on red for what feels like forever.

Hell, Claude’s torn down these streets in his own car before.

Blasting some music with the top of his convertible rolled down, one hand on the wheel and the other hanging freely atop the edge of his low, car door, Claude raced into the night, superspeeding at the very least in an effort to beat his other friends in Leonie's truck back to their apartments. Lysithea, Leonie, and Raphael emphatically booed Claude as they passed him and screamed in dismay whenever Claude passed them with a smirk; Ignatz watched the street in front of them in horror at how fast they were going.

In the back of Claude's own car, Hilda was giggling and drunkenly scream-singing along to the music, Marianne lightly touching her hand and looking out at the night life of the campus, as if the lights of the dorms in the distance would paint over the slight flush to her own cheeks. And in the front, Lorenz was clinging onto his seatbelt for dear life and looking as pale as sheets of notes and homework flew freely into the night sky from his foolishly opened backpack like the remnants of a very boring, academia-themed confetti canon.

God, what a fun night that was.

But in his defense, he was doing it at midnight, when no one was around. This is broad daylight.

There’s impatient students waiting to cross, and a desperate—or, at the very least, reckless—few who are willing to jaywalk given the chance. If they’re not careful, they’re sure to hit one of the many students on campus gathered at the ends of the crosswalk.

Claude looks back down at his phone when it vibrates with a message.

Hilda’s attempting to change the topic, completely ignoring Lorenz, sending a picture of her statistics worksheet, entirely bare save for her name neatly scrawled along the top. She accompanies the picture with a question—hey, do you guys know how to solve this?

A clear attempt for her not to do her own homework.

Claude debates giving her an incorrect answer, complete with a whole page of incorrect work as a way to incentivize her to do her own work, but the last time that he did that, Hilda refused to talk to him for a whopping two days. She would look at him and almost seem to look through him, like he was just a ghost.

It was cold, even for Hilda’s standards.

The only saving grace of that situation was that she didn’t tattle on him to her big brother, Holst. Last time she complained that Claude gave her the wrong answer to Holst, Claude had to sit through one hell of a lecture from him, promising not to do it again.

Realistically, there’s nothing terrible that Holst can realistically do, so the stakes are rather low. Even the threats he made that time were rather empty. It's just that Claude would rather not sit through another lecture while Hilda gives him a smug, catlike smile from behind Holst—an infuriating smile that melts into a pitiful pout whenever Holst turned to look at her.

So Claude decides against his prank, but it’s tempting nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Lorenz seems to try to move on from when Claude slighted him, instead asking Hilda which problem specifically she isn’t understanding. Hilda responds immediately—a pitiful all of it! followed by that one emoji with the big, sparkly puppy eyes.

Claude isn’t sure who she’s fooling. It’s only the three of them in that group chat, and they all know that Hilda is just trying to get out of doing her own work.

But Lorenz, as always, indulges Hilda, and Hilda, as always, pours praise upon praise upon Lorenz as he tries to help her out. Cheekily, Hilda even goes as far as to admonish Claude for being selfish and mean, for reading the message she sent so desperately in the group chat and not offering help when he surely knew how to solve it.

Claude shakes his head.

And as always, Claude indulges Hilda too, feigning offense and putting up his own defense.

The conversation between him and Hilda quickly spirals while poor Lorenz does his best to solve Hilda’s statistics worksheet. They go from playfully arguing about the homework, to playfully arguing about being a good roommate, to talking about if they should order takeout for dinner since none of them are in the mood to do dishes that night, then to wondering if they should invite their other friends for takeout.

Typical of a conversation with Claude. Tension melting away into plans to eat together, play video games, chat.

Claude feels himself absorbed in their chat, where Lorenz is now offering to order the food if Hilda sends out the message to the rest of their friends—the friends in the Golden Deer group chat, an inside joke made so long ago that Claude hardly remembers why they’re called that anymore.

In the corner of his eye, he spots movement. A figure stepping forward.

The light must have changed, Claude thinks. He doesn’t bother looking up from his phone as he starts to drift towards the crosswalk. About damn time. It’s been stuck on red forever.

It’s odd. Everyone seems to be rather slow in following him across the street. They must be distracted on their phones too. Claude shrugs—he’s always been rather keen regarding changes around him.

But at the same time, something feels horribly wrong.

Horribly, horribly wrong. The kind of wrong that makes your stomach drop and your lunch threaten to come up the way it came in.

Claude shakes away the feeling. He’s probably overthinking it. He’s been in a bit of an analytical mood lately anyway, trying to help Hilda navigate her crush on Marianne while upholding his promise to Marianne that he, using her words, "absolutely, positively, under no circumstances, for the love of God and all that is holy" will not tell Hilda about her crush. This back-and-forth, this mental game of chess where he works to satisfy both parties—it must be affecting how he perceives the littlest things in his day-to-day life too.

Nonetheless, Claude turns his music down a few notches as he walks just in case.

That’s when he hears it.

A distant, faint voice, vaguely familiar—why is that voice so familiar?—but wholly desperate.

“Hey! Wait! You can’t—!”

Claude looks up from his phone, his eyes flitting upwards, almost as if through instinct. His gaze lands on the crosswalk light.

The red hand still brightly sitting there.

His eyes go wide in shock.

A hand tightly wraps around his wrist, trying desperately to pull Claude back to safety, back to the sidewalk, but at this point, Claude’s managed to walk himself nearly halfway into the road. No pushing nor pulling him would put him in a safe spot unless it moved him an unreasonable distance from where he stands now.

The hand tries to pull him back anyway, desperation found in the sheer amount of crushing strength used against his own, poor hand. Claude stumbles backwards and nearly trips in his haste to follow.

It happens in a flash.

A car races down the street towards Claude—moving too fast to pull to a stop. A cacophony of car horns fire off all around Claude.

A blonde flash of hair in his vision, a pale body thrown against his own.

The impact of metal against his body and the stranger’s body.

Bones breaking. Bruises blooming. Concrete scraping his flesh. Blood spilling.

Screams from horrified onlookers.

And eventually—

Darkness.

When Claude wakes, he feels strangely light—empty even. He can hardly remember anything that happened recently, and when he stands, he moves so fluidly that he nearly falls flat back on his ass from the momentum of moving.

It’s so disorienting that Claude almost doesn’t realize that he’s in the middle of an empty street.

Claude looks around.

The sky is a nice smear of yellows and oranges and reds, all bleeding together across the vastness above. There are buildings all around him, some tall and windowed and others squat and shy.

It’s his college campus, it seems.

The streetlights nearby are entirely covered in stickers and posters for clubs, political campaigns, lost pets—and hey, the picture Claude took of his favorite professor and turned into a sticker without any context is still here, blank-faced Teach caught in the middle of a lecture, the slideshow behind him completely white, save for the blown-up, grainy picture of a massive fish he caught on a fishing trip.

This specific streetlight—that means Claude must be at that intersection, the one at the heart of campus. The one near all the major courses, where there’s this pain-in-the-ass hill that ruthlessly humbles everyone who climbs it, the one near the best dining hall on campus, the one that people like to gather at to set up protests or rallies or club meetings.

I was think I was trying to cross this, Claude thinks to himself. Memories drift back to him in bits and pieces. Yeah... Yeah, I was texting Hilda and Lorenz. I was on my way to catch the bus home. And I crossed this road—

All of his thoughts die immediately in his head when he sees a considerable amount of blood splattered and smeared against the black asphalt and the painted lines of the road.

He stares at it. Stares and stares and stares.

Then, after letting the scene before him sink into his mind and finally process, it fucking hits him like a truck—though if Claude recalls correctly, it was just a regular car that hit him.

No way, Claude thinks. There's no fucking way. Did I… die?

Claude feels a chill ripple through him, though it’s a strange feeling. Instead of rippling through his physical body, leaving him cold or leaving him with goosebumps, he feels nothing where he should feel something.

It’s just Claude, his thoughts, and his feelings now. He's no longer in his own beautiful body, and he's sure that in this state, no actual people will be able to see him nor talk to him.

So he's... alone.

Claude shakes away his odd feeling of melancholy when he remembers the flash of blonde hair, the vice grip on his hand, the voice of someone he’s only met a handful of times.

No, more importantly—did that guy die too? Because of my stupidity?

Claude grimaces. He hopes that’s not the case. If he died because of his own stupidity, then fine. Tragic, yes, but fine. But if Claude’s carelessness killed another human, he doesn’t think he would know what he would do.

Well, there really isn’t anything he can do. He’s dead.

That’s… actually kind of depressing.

“Um.”

Claude jumps at the voice. Had he been alive, he knows his heart would have beat out of his chest.

Claude whips around to face the speaker, only to see a pale, almost bluish man standing there, looking rather morose. That voice, those long, blonde locks—this has to be the guy who tried to help Claude.

No, it’s not just any guy, dammit.

It’s that one hot guy that Edelgard from Claude’s accounting class tried to get him to meet a few times, her stepbrother.

The hot blonde guy came to some of Claude’s parties with her, if he recalls correctly. He actually came to Claude’s Halloween party last year dressed as some sort of king, matching the rest of his group who dressed as various medieval tropes. It was pretty cool, though Claude honestly remembers his redheaded friend’s take on a ‘sexy jester’ a lot more than he remembers seeing this handsome man there that night.

(Man, that Sylvain knows how to party.

Too bad his friends didn’t want to be caught around him when he was in that outfit, retreating to another corner of the room whenever he came by, their faces red and their lips drawn into seemingly permanent scowls.)

But this isn’t Sylvain. This is Edelgard’s stepbrother, the blonde guy.

Claude never really spoke to him, other than to greet him or to indulge him in some small talk in passing, and in those few times that they did speak, Blondie seemed rather reserved in that proud, polite way. It wasn’t condescending—no, it was closer to shy.

In fact, the first time that they met, when Edelgard was introducing him and prompted Blondie to speak, he have given a bit of a jolt and ended up giving Claude his whole name, much to Edelgard’s secondhand embarrassment.

It was really cute, if Claude’s entirely honest.

…Ah, but what was his name again?

Claude can’t remember. Something Russian, he remembers, but he isn’t entirely sure. He had a hell of a fancy last name, though. Fitting given how regally this man carries himself and how handsome he looks.

“Oh, sorry, did I scare you?” Blondie asks stiffly.

Claude rubs the back of his neck, a nervous, self-soothing habit. It only frustrates him when he can just barely feel his hand against his neck.

“A bit, yeah.”

“Ah. Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s fine.”

The conversation dies just as quickly as Claude is sure that he himself did. Time dribbles and dribbles by.

Typically, Claude is great at carrying a conversation, even with quiet people like Marianne and Ignatz, but for some reason, he finds that it’s rather hard to speak in this situation.

How can he say anything when he caused them both to die?

Guilt practically strangles any thoughts that crawls up to Claude’s throat and kills any chance that he'll say anything for the time being. All the while, Blondie is staring at him. And Claude is staring back.

Staring and staring and staring.

Claude can’t stand this stifling silence.

Blondie is giving him this look, a look clearly conveying that he recognizes Claude but not enough to speak freely. He looks like he wants to say something, but he politely keeps his mouth shut, despite the fact that Claude wishes he would just say something in his stead.

Neither of them know how to approach the situation, to approach the other. So they stand and stare at one another, the soft sound of students walking about campus and crickets starting to chirp from the bushes planted along the paths filling the air.

They’re both avoiding the obvious—the fact that they’re both an odd, bluish tint and standing in the middle of the street next to a bunch of bloodstains along the asphalt as cars drive right fucking through them.

Finally, Claude decides that he might as well rip the band-aid off and get it over with.

“Hey,” Claude says awkwardly, “I don’t know if you know this, but I think we’re dead.”

Blondie stares at him, his eyebrows rising a touch. Not in the you’re crazy kind of way, but in the wow, I’m surprised you just went and said that kind of way.

“Yes,” Blondie agrees simply. A melancholic looks slowly settles on that handsome face of his, his eyebrows furrowing as he casts his gaze at the ground.

An apology is in order, Claude knows, and he’s planning on making one, a very genuine and heartfelt one, but instead, what comes out of Claude's mouth is vastly different.

“You… You’re Edelgard’s stepbrother, aren’t you?”

Blondie looks up at him, a little surprised. “Oh. Yes, I am.” A brief pause. “Or, I suppose, I was.”

Claude wants to smack himself upside the head for reminding the man that he used to be alive and isn't anymore, but it’s not like he’d really feel it anyway.

“Yeah, I thought I remembered you. You’re…” Claude’s mind is drawing a complete blank on names, so he holds out the ‘r’ in ‘you’re’ to give himself some time to think.

“Dimitri,” Blondie fills in politely, seemingly unaffected.

“Right, right. Dimitri,” Claude echoes, and the rest of Dimitri’s name slips into his mind almost by instinct—a shy Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, despite the proud voice it was spoken in. “Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd,” he repeats, and Dimitri’s eyes grow wide in a seeming sense of surprise.

Some sort of joy lies in those eyes as well.

“Oh! Yes. And you’re Claude, if I recall correctly.” Dimitri’s lips quirk up into a small smile, though the melancholy doesn’t quite leave his eyes. “Claude von Riegan, the chemistry major.”

Claude whistles. “Wow, you remember my name and my major, huh?”

Dimitri chuckles a little. “Yes, Edelgard spoke of you quite often. Referred to you like that as well. ‘You know Claude von Riegan, the chemistry major?’”

Claude laughs. Seems like something that she would say before laying complaint after complaint down about Claude’s schemes to find loopholes in their assignments and get out of doing all the hard work.

“That so? All good things, I hope.”

“Ah, well… They were interesting things, at the very least.”

Dimitri trails off sheepishly, wearing a small smile—a smile that feels really warm and looks perfect, a symmetrical smile and straight, white teeth.

God, Claude forgot how stunning Dimitri was when he smiled that smile. It's such a pleasant smile to look at, especially when it reaches his eyes.

It's also a smile that should have stayed a little longer in the world of the living.

A pang of pain and regret reverberates through Claude.

“I do wonder how she will fare with the news…”

Before Dimitri’s expression can fall back into that melancholic expression, Claude finds himself speaking again. He doesn’t want to see that sadness marring Dimitri’s face, not when that smile is still hot on Claude’s memory.

“Hmm.” Claude straightens his posture, props a hand on his hip. “It is pretty unfortunate, isn’t it?” He puts on his friendliest voice while keeping the dominance of a leader in his posture, in his eyes. He’s going to need as much convincing power as possible right now. “But there’s nothing we can really do about it now. What happened, happened.”

Dimitri averts his gaze. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Dimitri doesn’t look happy about the situation, but Claude can’t blame him. He doesn’t think that he would be either.

“So, let’s focus on the now, yeah?”

“Huh?” 

“Well, for all we know, it’s going to be like this for all of eternity, so let’s figure out what we can do.” Claude extends his hand to Dimitri and smiles. “We can figure it out together.”

His heart—or whatever the ghostly equivalent to his heart is—is beating hard, nervously. He’s sure that if Dimitri turns him away and walks his own path, they’ll both be trapped on this planet, this space in-between, all alone until the end of time. No one to talk to, no one to understand. Just existing in silence, watching the living and longing to be amongst them in a body just as alive and real as them.

A lonely existence for the foreseeable future and beyond.

(That's probably how ghosts in movies become so withered, jaded, angry, Claude thinks.) 

He can see Dimitri thinking it over in his head.

And finally, Dimitri swallows, furrows his brow a little, and takes Claude’s hand, both of them shocked when they can faintly feel the other’s hand.

As tragic as his situation is, Claude thinks that he’s having a rather fun time.

He’s never been a ghost before—well, save for the time that he was pretending to be one to scare the lights out of Lysithea, but all that experience was like was sitting in a closet and making hellish moans and groans until Lysithea found him and bopped him over the head with her thick book out of utter humiliation and frustration.

(That book really hurt and Claude swore that he had a bruise on his head—but Lysithea apologized after the situation settled down a bit and shyly brought him a slice of one of her beloved cakes, so it made up for it.)

So as Claude walks Dimitri around their massive campus, as the night draws overhead, he learns quite a lot about ghosts since he woke up in that intersection.

For starters, Claude’s figured out that when cartoons portray ghosts simply walking through material objects, they’re right.

At first, they would carefully avoid fences and poles, step around doors and pillars, as they walk around, looking for something to do to pass the time. But then, Claude has the brilliant revelation that they’re ghosts and curiously places his hand on a door.

And just like that, he just slips through, much to Dimitri’s dismay.

"Claude?” Dimitri calls from the other side of the door. “Claude? Where did you…”

“I’m here.” Claude touches the door once more. His hand phases through the door. He wiggles his fingers at Dimitri. “See?”

“How… did you do that?”

Claude phases his head through the door and grins at Dimitri when he jumps back in shock. He’s sure that all Dimitri sees is his head sticking out of the wall—how fun!

“Easy.” Claude holds out his hand. “Come here.”

Dimitri cocks his head and gingerly takes Claude’s hand.

Claude doesn’t give Dimitri a second to think, pulling him through the door. Dimitri gives a startled yelp as he comes tumbling through the door. They both effortless phase right through the door.

“We’re ghosts,” Claude proudly proclaims as Dimitri recovers from the shock. Dimitri feels his body, confused when his hands don’t quite slip through himself, and he touches the walls, jumping a little when his hands effortlessly phase through. “Looks like we’re immaterial.”

A fascinating revelation with endless potential for fun and overall mischief—but it only brings Dimitri down, if the way that his eyes crease into little, pained crescents are anything to go off of.

Another thing that Claude finds is that no one else can see or feel him or Dimitri.

They’ve walked through countless crowds of people, and interestingly, it often leaves them with a random chill. Dimitri doesn’t appear to like it, side-stepping people as often as he can, but Claude doesn’t mind walking through a crowd of suits, just to watch them break from their cold professionality to make a comment about an odd chill that just passed by.

Yet, cats and dogs can seem to see them.

Everywhere they go, cats and dogs whip around to stare at them, growling and yowling and hissing and barking. Their owners don’t like it—and frankly, Claude doesn’t care for it either. It’s needlessly noisy.

But as Claude learns about being a ghost, he learns about his new, ghostly partner.

“You know,” Claude muses as they walk up the monstrous hill in the main part of their campus, “this hill used to be the worst part of my day, but I’m not even breaking a sweat.”

Dimitri hums. “Yes, I am not as tired as I would be climbing this hill.”

“I guess it makes sense that we wouldn’t be tired. Probably means that we don’t get hungry either, don’t you think?”

Dimitri ponders on this notion for a second, letting his head rock to one side as his eyes flick to one side. Eventually, he nods. “Ah, I suppose so.”

Claude lets out a small sigh. “That kind of sucks. I’m going to miss eating.” He shuts his eyes as he tries to recapture his favorite meals on his tongue. He doesn’t bother looking where he’s going. It’s not like he’ll run into anything. He’ll just go through it. “Like the roasts or kebabs—God, the dining halls had the best kebabs.”

Claude waits a beat and looks to Dimitri.

“So, d’you like anything from the dining halls?” he asks, not for the sake of knowing Dimitri but to fill the silence between them. To get Dimitri’s mind off the misery of being dead. “Or maybe a favorite meal or something?”

Dimitri averts his gaze. “I’ve always had a bit of trouble tasting most foods.”

"Oh, what? Really? Why?”

“I’m not entirely sure. But I did have favorite foods—I find that cheeses were something that I could taste.”

“Cheese?” Claude gives Dimitri a onceover. “You don’t strike me as a cheesy guy.”

Dimitri lets his lips curve into a smile, but it’s hauntingly empty. “Well, my friends often told me that my sense of humor was rather cheesy, if that helps you in any way.”

“How so?”

Dimitri turns a touch bashful. “I like puns."

Claude’s sure if Dimitri were in his human body for just this one moment, his pale cheeks would be blessed with a soft tint of red—he seems like the type of blush easily. There’s a part of Claude that wishes he could see that.

Claude grins. “That so?”

He isn’t sure why, but he logs this information in his head.

Come late evening, Claude finds that he and Dimitri have wandered for quite some time.

It’s been an eventful night, walking around tirelessly. They hadn’t a particular destination, but Claude decided to try to lighten Dimitri’s mood by showing him all his classes, almost like a personal tour of his day-to-day life—or, rather, what was his day-to-day life. When Claude prompted Dimitri for his classes, Dimitri had guided him around, but as time passed, he seemed to grow more and more depressed at the prospect that he would no longer be attending those classes.

“It’s not like you can’t,” Claude had said with a grin. “You can just walk into class and attend lectures. It’s not like anyone’s going to notice.”

It’s not long after Claude says that before he realizes that it’s because no one would notice that Dimitri is so upset.

It’s an awkwardly quiet walk after that.

But now, they’ve walked their schedules, explored their capabilities as ghosts a little, and have nothing more to do. In the quietude, in the tranquility, of night, they walk. Claude isn’t sure where they’re going, what they’re going to do, or even if Dimitri’s going to stay with him any longer.

He just hopes that if Dimitri chooses to leave, Claude can thoroughly apologize for dragging him into this mess.

“Hey.”

Dimitri’s voice is a little rough, though not in a particularly sad way. It resembles the way that Claude’s voice would become before he would shut down as a bullied child, before he retreated to his room to seek some sort of peace—a distant, pained voice.

“Would you mind if we visited my friends?”

“Oh? I don’t mind. You can even go alone if you want. I don’t want to intrude on anything.”

Dimitri shakes his head. “…I’d rather not go alone.”

It takes Claude by surprise, but he makes no big deal out of it.

So Claude lets Dimitri lead him to a dorm building at the other end of campus, roughly a thirty minute walk in silence. Cars pass them on the sidewalk, the harsh yellow lights making their bluish bodies practically glow a strange green.

And when the reach the dorm building—what the hell, Claude thinks, their building is really nice, almost looks like a hotel building—Dimitri hesitates at the door, reaching into his pocket instinctively. He’s probably looking for his key card to insert into the lock, to unlock the door and let them in.

Reality settles in when Dimitri can’t find the key card and watches Claude step into the building with ease. Claude waves at him with a grin, trying to draw out Dimitri’s own smile.

But Dimitri’s gaze only flickers into something dark.

“Right…” Dimitri mutters to himself after he phases through the immaculate glass doors. He walks past Claude, his eyes glued to the ground and his head ducked.

Come now, Claude wants to say. That kind of posture doesn’t fit you. You look better when you’re confident, when you’re happy.

Claude decides against it. He figures that telling Dimitri to cheer up now would only further sour his mood.

Together, they walk up the stairs—all the way to the top floor.

Claude wouldn’t have minded taking the elevator, though he acknowledges that he doesn’t tire of walking the whole way, but Dimitri doesn’t seem to like the idea of phasing through things very much. On top of that, Claude supposes that he hasn’t figured out if they can even access the elevator buttons in their current state. So phasing through the doors leading to the stairs and walking all the way up seems to be the better idea for the time being.

“So,” Claude muses awkwardly. His voice doesn’t carry through the stairwell like it would if he were alive. Chilling. “Your friends all live here?”

Dimitri hums in agreement. “I made some friends on my floor, but I also learned that a few of my childhood friends attend this school too—and live in the same building too.”

“Small world, huh?”

“Very small,” Dimitri agrees.

A silence falls between them.

Claude shifts uncomfortably as they walk, a million unspoken ideas in his head. And before he knows it, he is speaking.

“Hey, Dimitri, I don’t mean to be that guy, but are you sure this is a good idea? I get you want to get closure for yourself, but…”

Won’t this only hurt you? goes unsaid.

Dimitri, a few steps ahead, squares his shoulders. Without turning to face Claude, he speaks, a raspy voice that can hardly be heard.

“I have to see them.”

With that, Claude shuts his mouth and instead focuses his attention on their soundless footsteps.

At the top floor, Claude immediately notices that there’s a soft sobbing coming from one of the rooms. Dimitri seems to recognize the dorm it’s coming from, and without thinking, he sprints to the room, eyes wide. He even phases through the door without a moment of hesitation. Claude lingers outside the door, unsure that he wants to intrude on some sort of personal moment for Dimitri—the mourning of his death.

But the voices are loud and hard to ignore.

“You’re sure?” a woman demands. “You’re a hundred percent sure?”

“I can’t say a hundred percent,” a man’s low voice replies, clearly tired, “but there is a very high likelihood.”

“This…” A man’s voice, through gritted teeth. “This is…”

“Felix, wait.”

The door slams open, and Claude jumps. A man with dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail and his lips pulled into a taut snarl storms out of the room, a redhead—hey, isn’t that Sylvain? Claude muses—chasing after him.

“Felix, come on—”

Another door slamming, a few doors down.

Sylvain stops in front of the room that the dark-haired man—‘Felix’—is in. “Felix, you should talk about this with me. It’s no good if you bottle it all up again, you know.”

A beat of silence.

“At least let me in.” Sylvain vigorously jiggles the door handle. “I left my key in there.”

“What kind of fucking idiot doesn’t take his key with him wherever he goes?” Felix shouts through the door, his voice shaking a touch, but the door creaks open to let Sylvain in nonetheless.

As tempting as it is to snoop around in Felix and Sylvain's dorm, Claude stays put and lingers at the door Dimitri is in, wondering if this is really okay for Dimitri.

“What should we do?” a man’s voice asks softly.

“I’m not quite sure what we can do,” the deep voice from before replies morosely. “I’ve thought about this over and over—to the point where I had given myself a migraine, even—but I just… don’t know.”

A thick silence takes over.

Claude frowns. He can’t imagine that this is good for Dimitri’s mental state at all.

Without thinking, he steps foot into the room, where a tall, silver-haired man is comforting the others in the room in a tight embrace—three teary-eyed women and one pale, quivering man—despite the hardened look on his own face.

And Dimitri, standing in the corner of the room, his hands trembling as it wavers above the tall man’s shoulder.

“Dimitri,” Claude whispers, trying not to startle him.

But when Dimitri turn to look at him, there’s not anger nor irritation in his eyes. There isn’t even shock at Claude’s abrupt entrance.

Just a yawning emptiness in Dimitri’s gaze.

Claude grabs Dimitri by the wrist and pulls him through the door.

“Dimitri,” Claude says urgently. “That—”

“I can’t,” Dimitri whispers, and it crushes Claude into a silence, all his thoughts coming to a crashing halt upon hearing the state Dimitri's in. “I can’t do this to them.” He shuts his eyes. “I can’t.”

“Do what? Die? I think it's a bit late for that.”

Claude’s being blunt, curt even, he knows, but he needs to ground Dimitri, needs to know what he can do to help him in this situation. He'd hoped that perhaps his curtness would draw Dimitri's attention away from his mourning friends even briefly.

Claude wishes that he knew Dimitri better, that he knew just how to calm Dimitri.

“No,” Dimitri replies surprisingly. That single word is sharp enough to cut, clipped and almost angry, though Claude can’t entirely tell if it’s at him or at Dimitri himself. “Haunt them.”

“Haunt them?” Claude furrows his eyebrows.

He supposes that it wouldn’t be wrong to say that their deaths will loom above their loved ones like a hellish shadow and haunt them. After all, had Claude been alive and any of his beloved friends died a horrible death, he doesn’t know how he’d be able to move on. Every moment he spends with the group would be a cruel reminder of that single absence.

But Claude knows that with time, they’ll recover. Maybe not entirely and maybe not soon at all, but they’ll surely heal just enough to become functional. Especially if they have such a tightly knit support system like that.

Before he can voice any of those thoughts, Dimitri speaks.

“When I was little,” he rasps, his gaze cast on the ground, “my parents and my closest friend’s brother died in a car accident—but I had survived. And since then, I’ve seen their ghosts, just out of the corner of my eyes.” Dimitri tightens his hands into a fist. “Always haunting me and reminding me that it was my fault.”

Claude frowns. His voice comes softly, sympathetically. “You were just a kid, Dimitri. It couldn’t have been your fault—”

Dimitri shakes his head. “No, that isn’t what bothers me.” Frustration drops away from his voice, replaced with a soul-encompassing tiredness. “I do not want to haunt my loved ones as I have been haunted.” He shuts his eyes tightly and his voice becomes smaller. “I do not want them to suffer the horrors of guilt that I have.”

Wow, Claude thinks. And it’s the only thought that comes to him other than, what a noble man.

But he gathers his composure and scrambles to find a solution. Something to sate Dimitri and pull him away from the terrible feelings of guilt.

“Dimitri, I hate to tell you this, but I think that the only solution here is to leave them alone then.” Claude’s gaze drifts to the ground, to the walls, to anywhere that isn’t the hurt look on Dimitri’s face. “They’ll mourn now, but they will move on. They’ll heal.”

“But I don’t want to leave them alone.”

Claude’s eyes return to Dimitri’s face, almost instinctively, just in time to see Dimitri’s expression crumple. A fierce, stubborn anger in his eyes but a tremble to his lip, like he’s torn between baring his teeth in a snarl and letting his lips fall into a pitiful frown. “I can’t just leave them like this.”

Claude shuts his eyes. “I can’t imagine that you’d want to do that. I don’t want to separate from my friends either.”

God, how are my friends doing? Claude wonders. But if he sees them in the same state that Dimitri’s friends are in, he’s not sure that he can ever recover. He doesn’t ever want to see the Golden Deer in any mood other than that optimistic, fun-loving mood that he always sees them in.

So maybe he’ll spare himself the heartbreak of seeing his friends for now.

Claude gives Dimitri an empathetic look. “But what else can we do?”

Dimitri takes in a shuddering breath, but the anger in his look doesn’t quite fade.

“I think that it’ll probably comfort them to know that we’re doing okay now.” Claude tries to plaster his lips into a small smile. “If we can move on, maybe we’ll move on—and maybe they’ll move on too.” He takes a step back and brightens. “So how about it? Let’s go have some fun. Forget about our earthly worries.”

Dimitri gives him a pained look.

For a second, Claude thinks that Dimitri’s going to roar fuck off! at him or something along those lines, but instead, Dimitri takes in another shaky breath, shuts his eyes, and schools his expression into something cold and distant before he stands and closes the distance between himself and Claude with a nod.

“Let’s go.”

Claude creates a small agenda of things for them to do.

Their college town is rather popular, not only for the major university placed dead in the center of it, but for its many fun places to visit. In fact, the things that Claude’s keeping track for them to do are things that he wanted to do before he graduated with his friends—but for the purpose of trying to get the list to last, he starts it over so they can complete it together.

And when they get through that list, Claude supposes that they can just walk around and sightsee the rest of the world. It’ll be a most arduous process, a constant reminder of the world that they would have been able to see as living, breathing humans, but there’s no turning back time.

First, Claude takes Dimitri to the top of the tallest building in their city, a skyscraper for some sort of department store. With nothing to stop them, they easily ascend through the stairs and through the locked fire escape door leading to the roof.

And when they reach the top, the sun breaks over the horizon, a gorgeous sunrise to watch together.

Sitting at the edge of the roof, no fear of falling over the edge and dying a horrible death, they look at their town.

From here, every part of their massive university town is visible.

The university campus and the countless buildings, the statues and artsy sculptures, the buses and cars pulling onto campus, the little specks of students, staff, faculty; the lines and lines of various stores downtown, like the little boutiques and restaurants, the cars fighting for spaces in the narrow streets; the parks, the sprawling forests and beautiful rivers; and even the vast ocean in the way distance, masked by the meekest fog, as if shyly hiding away.

“Wow,” is all Dimitri says, but his voice is far from affectless. It’s a breath, a whisper of wonder. He looks around, as if wishing to memorize every little detail in his head, as if wishing to create some sort of mental map or mural.

“Never been up here?” Claude muses, folding his arms behind his head. “I know it’s a pretty popular spot for troublemakers like me to sneak into.”

“It never even occurred to me that I could come atop buildings like this.”

“It’s pretty cool to see life from a new perspective. Freeing, I think.” Claude smiles and looks over at the town below. “You think the little problems in your life are these this massive things, but from here? It’s nothing. Now imagine that from space.”

Dimitri hums. “I never quite took you as a philosophical or the existential type, but I suppose that I don’t quite know you.”

“Hey, you can get to.” Claude offers Dimitri a quick wink. “You have quite some time stuck with me anyway, I’m sure.”

“And you, me.”

“I think you’ll find that I don’t tire of people very easily. Your presence with me is very welcome.” Claude shrugs nonchalantly, unaware that Dimitri is giving him a surprised look. “Anyway, it’s pretty fun to be up here—well, until you get caught.”

He remembers his first time getting caught, Hilda kicking up a fuss despite her teary eyes and Lorenz frozen still in a fearful reverence of the security guards guiding them down.

But they were let go with only a slap on the wrist when Hilda finally cracked and started bawling, clinging to Claude’s arm, and Claude let it slip that they were just freshmen. He didn’t specify high school or college. He just let the security guard make the assumption himself—and it seemed that he guessed wrong.

Claude can’t blame him. They’d been wearing face masks at Lorenz’s request after he’d claimed he caught a cold just days prior.

The poor security guard, quite flustered that such young adults could be crybabies and troublemakers, simply let them off with a warning and a handful of tissues for Hilda.

He definitely didn’t get paid enough to put up with snot-nosed college freshmen.

When he tells as much to Dimitri, he’s pleasantly surprised to see the awe in Dimitri’s expression.

“As a freshman? Claude, you could have received a harsh punishment for something like that! You would have been tried as an adult!”

Claude waves Dimitri’s concerns away with an amused huff of laughter. “You’re such a square! It wouldn’t have been too drastic—and besides, we got out of it with an awesome view and little consequences.”

Dimitri lets out a small huff. “I suppose, but…”

“But?”

Dimitri considers Claude’s words, considers his cocky grin. Then, his indignant frown melts away, replaced with a thoughtful look. He shakes his head.

“Perhaps I am simply envious of your boldness.” A pause. “Or perhaps, it could be considered brashness. Recklessness, even.”

A grin stretches across Claude’s face. “What’s the fun in life if you’re not a little brash? Gotta break some rules! Live a little. Ah—”

Claude cuts himself off sharply with a wince, wishing he could cram his foolish words back into his mouth the same way that a gluttonous squirrel feeds before hibernation.

But much to Claude’s surprise, Dimitri doesn’t seem to take Claude’s slip-up to heart, doesn’t let it drag him into the depths of despair.

Instead, he smiles gently.

“You’re not wrong, I think.” Dimitri lets out a soft laugh, breathless. “Perhaps I ought to have made more of my life then, but now, it seems that I have the rest of eternity to live—maybe not in a way that I am used to, but a way that is boundless.”

Dimitri’s sidelong glance dances towards Claude’s, and when he sees the beaming smile on Claude’s face, his own lips curve up into a smile of his own.

It’s the exact kind of thinking that Claude was hoping Dimitri would take up.

Claude laughs too and slings an arm over Dimitri’s broad shoulders, ignoring the way that he can’t quite meet Dimitri’s eyes, especially at this distance, where Dimitri’s long lashes are just about brushing against his cheek and where Dimitri’s lovely lips, parted in a small ‘o’ of surprise, are just a hair's breadth away.

“Hey, you catch on fast, don’t you, Dimitri?”

They walk along the beach at the edge of campus one afternoon. And on another, they walk through the university gardens. They’re not particularly special sights, but seeing them without the weight of academic or even social responsibility is quite freeing.

They simply walk and chat for as long as they have the thoughts to carry them, and when they don’t, they simply go quiet and take in the serenity of it all.

Apparently, Dimitri had been a business major.

Claude expected nothing less of him.

With that perfect posture and that perfect face and that commanding voice, Claude can easily see him as the CEO of some major company. It’s no surprise when he admits that he’s meant to inherit some major company as soon as he graduates. And given that he’s related to Edelgard, it just means that they have that massive storage of wealth behind them, supporting them.

But Dimitri seems endlessly curious that Claude had been in a similar predicament—wealthy and able to inherit some great company—but chose a different path.

“I just like chemistry,” Claude tells him as they walk through the beach. He’s tempted to kick up sand as he goes, but his foot doesn’t seem to have any effect on the ground. “I think that specifically, I’m going into pharmaceuticals.”

Dimitri hums. “But your family’s company?”

“Well, there’s no one to inherit it now.” Claude shrugs. “But they’ll find someone. Maybe they’ll find another family member. Or maybe they’ll let Lorenz take it. He’s pretty good at managing things—and he’s wanted nothing more.”

“Wanted nothing more,” Dimitri echoes. “What do you think that you would have wanted?” Cringing, Dimitri continues, “Er, I suppose that’s a bit of a loaded question.”

“Just a bit.” Claude playfully winks at him, drawing a bashful smile from Dimitri. “What do you mean?”

“Well, did you have any goals in life?”

“Another loaded question,” Claude teases, “but let me think.”

There were certainly things that Claude wanted to finish. Big and small. There was that book that Lysithea lent him—he wanted to finish that, especially since he’s been putting it off month after month and Lysithea wants it back. And there was that two thousand piece puzzle he wanted to finish with Marianne. And there was a bucket list of places he wanted to visit, things to do.

But as for overarching, huge goals—Claude just thinks that he wanted to forge a life that he wanted to live, a life on his own accord. And if he could, he wanted to help as many people as he could while doing something that he loved, like working with obscure chemicals to make medicines.

A vague goal, one he’s sure that most people would agree with, but he genuinely had the power, the wealth, the convincing power, and had been learning the scientific knowledge to do just that.

It was feasible.

Until he went and died, of course.

Dimitri doesn’t seem to know what to do with this answer, so he just nods and fixes his gaze forward.

“So? What about you, then?”

“I suppose I’m in the same boat at you are. I would have liked to use my family’s wealth and power to build a more united world... Though I think that my goal is a bit vague. I don’t quite know how a major conglomerate will help make the entire world a better place, but…”

“Your heart’s in the right place, big guy." A light-hearted grin forms on Claude's face, and he gives Dimitri a hearty pat on the shoulder.

Dimitri smiles bashfully.

Dimitri seemed quite excited by the thrill of going on top of that tall building and doing something forbidden—Claude’s been learning that Dimitri’s always been bit of a golden child, one who can’t do any wrong, who will stick to the rules as best as he can—so Claude seeks thrills alongside him.

Claude leads them into the employee-only spaces in the backs of stores, inside campus buildings. When there isn’t anything interesting there other than the occasional employee taking a nap—ah, that’s Linhardt, Dimitri points out at the local bookstore, Edelgard’s friend, I believe—Claude takes them to more exciting places. A few more rooftops, construction sites, and even the tunnels of the subway lines, walking alongside the rails.

“Won’t we get in trouble if we go here?” Dimitri watches curiously as Claude hops down from the subway platform to stand alongside the rails.

When Claude looks up at Dimitri, he’s leaning over the platform, as if scared to jump down. As if he can get hurt by the jump. As if someone is going to come yelling at them to come back.

Claude just laughs. “Dimitri, do I have to remind you that we’re dead again? If there’s no risk, there’s no rules. C’mere.” He gestures at himself. “I’ll catch you if you’re scared of falling,” he teases.

Dimitri shakes his head and waves Claude away.

Cute, Claude thinks that Dimitri makes the jump down cautiously, one leg first then the other, almost like the way that a child tests the water of a tub before slipping in. He doesn’t hit the ground with a jolt, as much as Claude had, from the distance, but to be fair, he is rather tall. He’s really cute.

“This is a bit…” Dimitri trails off, but Claude can hear the trepidation in his voice.

“Scary?” Claude hums. “Yeah, I guess so. But what’s the worst that could happen?”

They find a few graffiti tags, particularly from a group called the Ashen Wolves, but it’s rather fascinating. They slander the university, draw all sorts of crude drawings, and write all sorts of things, all ranging from serious topics like corruption in the university to things like Yuri-bird ate my candy again, which is followed up by a simple Don’t tag my name. Notably, ‘Yuri-bird’ is sprayed over, but still legible.

“I never knew this was here,” Dimitri murmurs, looking upon the walls of the subway. “I’ve never thought much of graffiti, but it’s rather unique.”

“It’s cool, right? I kind of wish I learned how to graffiti.”

Dimitri offers a small chuckle. “I’m surprised that you hadn’t.”

“Hey, now. I’m not some huge troublemaker all the time.” Claude smiles despite himself, knowing his own tendency to get into trouble. 

He looks at the graffiti. His eyes get caught on a collections of labeled, stylized constellations, drawn with care, with love. There are some that Claude doesn’t recognize, but those that he does fills him with an odd sense of nostalgia.

These would make for some sick tattoos, Claude finds himself thinking, but he quickly dispels that thought from his head. After all, he doesn’t have a body anymore.

But when he looks over at Dimitri, he’s looking at the constellations too.

“These constellations…” Dimitri raises a hand, a gentle finger, to graze the wall, but when his finger sinks through the brick, he draws his hand away. “They’re beautiful.”

The sharp lines, the weight of the lines, the striking colors. The images, the symbols, the stars and planets. It’s a very different experience than seeing the stars by themselves and imagining the lines between them.

“They are, aren’t they?” Claude looks to Dimitri and grins. “Good idea for tattoos.”

“Did you have some?” Dimitri asks.

Claude shakes his head. “No. I wanted to get some, but I couldn’t think of any designs. I wanted my first tattoo to have a special meaning of some sort—the rest didn’t really matter.”

“You’d struck me as the kind not to care about the meanings of tattoos at all.” Dimitri considers Claude briefly. “But it makes sense that you’d want the first one to have a meaning.”

“So, then, what about you?” Claude leans in to Dimitri and grins. “Would Mr. Perfect ever get a tattoo?”

Dimitri gives him a look of faux annoyance. “I’m not Mr. Perfect,” he combats, but there’s no true heat behind his rebuttal, “but… a tattoo—I think that I’d consider it at the very least.”

“Yeah?” Claude raises an eyebrow.

What would you get? Claude wants to ask. Where would you get it? Would you want it to have meaning?

“Yeah,” Dimitri answers simply, looking back at the wall. “I think you’re right. These constellations would make for good tattoos.”

He locks eyes with Claude, and he dares a small smile, one that makes Claude subconsciously lean closer with interest.

He’s really close to Dimitri now, the dim, orange lights of the subway tunnel washing over them. But despite the strange tint to their ghostly bodies, Claude admires the little details on Dimitri—his long lashes, the way that his long hair frames his face, the boldness in his eyes and shoulders.

He’s unfairly handsome.

Claude sucks in a breath as Dimitri speaks, and when he does, it just about knocks the wind out of Claude’s lungs.

“I think that if we were alive, I wouldn’t have minded getting a matching tattoo with you.”

Claude picks up the parts of his heart that Dimitri unknowingly scattered throughout the tunnel—oh, the tenderness with which Dimitri had said such words, oh, the pain that these words can never be anything more.

“Well,” Claude drawls simply, as composed as he can be, “how about this then? If we ever come back as humans, let's get matching tattoos."

“Oh? But I thought you wanted your first to have a special meaning.”

Claude laughs. “Who says it won’t?”

Claude finds that there’s only so much that they can do wandering around for ‘pretty sights,’ so he moves on to regular standards for entertainment. They sneak into the zoo, the aquarium, the local Little League game.

"I used to be in my local Little League team,” Dimitri admits with an embarrassed smile. “My friends and I were there—I don’t know if you know them, but it was me, Sylvain, and Felix. We made it pretty far.”

Claude whistles. “Must have been pretty talented. I never had much of an interest in sports.”

“Not a single sport?” Dimitri raises an eyebrow. “I used to play many—baseball, soccer, skiing…”

“Skiing? Ah, right, you were from a cold place, weren’t you?” Claude feigns a shudder. “Sounds dreadful.”

“It was manageable. I actually prefer it much more than hotter temperatures.” Dimitri brings the conversation back around. “But you didn’t like any sport?”

“Well, maybe one.”

“Being?”

“Archery.” Claude offers a crooked grin at Dimitri’s surprise. “Didn’t expect that, huh?”

“No, not at all!” Dimitri’s eyes glint with excitement. “I think that’s quite a sport to like!”

Claude can’t look at Dimitri. Those excited eyes—they make Claude feel a little strange. They make his whole body feel like it’s lit up with some kind of light and emotion. The excitement from Dimitri makes Claude himself excited too.

“Nah, it’s a pretty normal sport. Just a little uncommon.” Claude mimics nocking an arrow and letting it fly, even going as far as to line up the shot and letting the arrow go on a breath out. He winks at Dimitri. “Nice form, right?”

Dimitri hums. “Well, I wouldn’t know much about form, but it looked nice to me.”

“I love archery—but I gotta admit: there are quite a few drawbacks.”

It takes Dimitri a second, but when he sees the suggestive smirk on Claude’s face, when the pun finally hits him, his delighted laughter fills Claude’s ears and makes him feel light on his feet, giddy, excited. Claude’s hands feel like they’re going to shake, like he can’t keep himself from just pulling Dimitri close and keeping that smile, that laugh, all to himself.

“O-oh!” Dimitri stammers out as he comes down from his laughter. “That was downright terrible.”

“Thanks. Anyway, you should try learning it,” Claude continues. “It’s fun, and I really do love it." Claude's sheepish, sidelong glance slips away from Dimitri. "...Or, well, you should have learned. Hell, I would have taught you. Free of charge.”

Claude isn’t sure why he’s saying that. He hardly knew Dimitri back then.

But the way that Dimitri’s become so bashful despite his excitement at the prospect of learning something so unique—it makes Claude wish that they were alive again, so that Claude would properly teach him the techniques. So that Claude could gently correct Dimitri’s posture, graze his fingers, watch his face light up red. So he could tease him and tease him and tease him until Dimitri got too flustered to continue.

“Ah, archery sounds like too much of a delicate art. I haven’t the touch for things like that.” He laughs nervously, but there’s almost a note of something darker—something akin to self-loathing—in that laugh. It’s a laugh that Claude detests immediately. “I break everything I touch.”

Claude makes a face. “I’m sure you’re exaggerating. It would be fine.”

“No, no. I mean it. I can’t control my strength very well.” Dimitri averts his gaze, watching the little kids on the field run about. “I actually had to stop playing in the Little League team because I kept breaking my bats every time I went up. It was… starting to become quite costly.”

Claude tries to suppress his laughter.

But he can’t. Not when Dimitri looks so pitiful. Not when he'd just said costly in such a sheepish way.

His laugh strikes Dimitri in a way that makes him wilt, but Claude means no harm. He goes to express this to him.

“Well, even if you break through all the bows at the archery range, it wouldn’t matter. I’d teach you one way or another, even if it took us forging a bow made of steel. Just as long as you wanted it, I think we could work towards it.” Claude knocks Dimitri’s shoulder with his own and grins at him. “You shouldn’t give up like that.”

Dimitri’s expression flickers.

And when he smiles a watery smile, averting his gaze as he quietly mumbles a word of gratitude for the offer, Claude isn’t sure what to make of it.

And at some point, Claude sneaks them into a movie theater, the good one downtown where they have a floor dedicated for luxurious viewings and plush recliners. They hop from movie to movie all day along that overpriced, luxurious floor, alternating who gets to pick the movies.

It’s a surreal experience—not movie-hopping, as Claude’s done that tons of times, but sitting in the theater and being at complete ease. They can chat without fear of disrupting the other moviegoers; they can sit however they like, whenever they like.

In fact, they’re so comfortable there that half the time, they aren’t paying attention to the movie.

No, they are paying attention to each other.

Curled in towards each other on the recliners, they chat a little about the plot of the movie, though it’s often Claude who is sharply criticizing the actions of the characters as Dimitri quietly chuckles, as if scared that his laughter can be heard. But that laugh is addicting, so Claude offers more and more outrageous reactions and outlandish commentary, riddled with as many terrible puns as he can think of—and Dimitri laughs accordingly, louder and louder.

And against the darkness of the theater, it’s hard to see Dimitri unless the screen is bright, but Claude can’t turn away from Dimitri. Not when his expression is so happy.

As Dimitri comes down from his latest fit of laughter, a smile slowly eases itself onto his face.

“You know,” he starts, “I’ve never been fond of theaters. Not even these.”

“Yeah?”

“There are so many implicit rules—how you should sit, how you should speak. Even how you leave the theater has a rule—go quietly, duck your head, and apologize.” Dimitri pauses, but he interrupts his own silence with a quick, “Ah, but that’s not to say that I don’t understand why. It’s only polite."

Claude shrugs. “No, I get you. I usually watched movies at home with my friends. It was a lot more fun—but sometimes, movie-hopping is pretty fun too. Especially if all you have to pay for is a single movie.”

Dimitri looks over at the screen. “And the theater experience itself is nice. A big screen and a good sound system. The theater-grade popcorn.” He looks over at Claude. His hand unknowingly inches closer to Claude’s on their shared armrest. “And it’s nice to have a public place be so quiet and—I-I don’t know, intimate?”

Their pinkies just barely, barely graze one another, but it’s so solid and real. It feels like Dimitri and Claude are alive again. The only thing missing would be the warmth of their human bodies.

Claude’s breath gets caught in his throat. Had he been alive, he’d surely have started choking on his breath and made a fool of himself. In moments like this, he’s glad that he’s nothing but spiritual energy or whatever ghosts are made of.

But Dimitri seems almost like he’s unaffected, so Claude maintains his cool.

“Yeah,” Claude whispers back, his body abuzz with emotion and longing.

Dimitri’s company is quite nice, after all.

He makes good conversation, even if he’s a little awkward at times. He’s sweet, caring, smart. He’s curious, but he’s also cute in an innocent way, a way that seems almost out of place for someone so built and handsome. And he flusters easily, like when Claude asks if he was seeing anyone.

“No." 

“Thinking about anyone?” Claude tries.

“…No.” Dimitri fidgets.

Claude offers a thoughtful hum. There was definitely an odd pause there, and he'll endlessly analyze that in his own time. For now, he has to push on.

“Friends with benefits?”

“Claude!”

Claude laughs. How easy it is to fluster Dimitri.

“Come on, Dima." Claude feels a fluttery feeling when he uses the nickname he’s taken to calling Dimitri, when he sees Dimitri's expression lighten just a touch. “We’re college students. Adults. There’s nothing shameful about sex.”

Dimitri shakes his head. “No, I understand that, but don’t you think that it’s a bit… You know—personal?”

Claude raises his eyebrows. “Did I overstep?” When Dimitri shakes his head, Claude cuts him off with a sly grin. “So you were with someone?”

“No!” Dimitri sighs, but the bashful look remains on his face. “I’ve never had the time to really invest in a relationship of any kind, other than platonic or familial ones.”

Claude whistles. “That’s rough. Love is one hell of an experience. Lots of ups, quite a few downs.” He shrugs. “Well, there are also people who keep out of it too for various reasons—and that’s fine. You were just one of them.”

“But I didn’t want to be.” A bitterness, some kind of hurt, pervades Dimitri's face. He does his best to mask it, but Claude spots it immediately. 

“How so?”

“I-I don’t know. I’ve watched my friends fall in love, and it… seems nice.” Dimitri massages his wrists, a nervous habit that Claude’s noticed over their time together. “A bit embarrassing and definitely nerve-wracking, but nice nonetheless.”

Then, how about trying it with me? Claude’s impulsive mind thinks. How about you fall for me? After all, I think that I’ve—

Instead, Claude shuts that thought down.

“That so?” Claude leans in towards Dimitri with a sly smile. “So what’s your type then? You have to have one, right?”

Is it anything like me? Claude wonders, but he quickly shuts down line of thought down too.

Dimitri shakes his head again.

“Come on, Dima. No judgment.”

Dimitri lets out a huff. “Enough of this, Claude." It comes off like a child whining about being teased. “I cannot fall in love now that I am dead.” Dimitri’s expression falls. “What would be the point?”

“What do you mean ‘what would be the point’?” Claude scoffs lightly. “You just said that you thought it’d be nice.”

“But these feelings would never be reciprocated.” Dimitri flicks his gaze aside.

“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. You would still have gotten to feel what falling in love feels like.” Claude shrugs. “You can fall in love with a complete stranger and feel what that feels like without even talking to them.”

But for some reason, it seems to do little to lift Dimitri’s dreary mood.

“Ah.” Dimitri runs a hand through his hair and averts his gaze. “I guess you’re right.”

The conversation falls into a thick silence after that.

They stand a crosswalk, waiting to cross.

The light remains red, but there’s an amusement park across the street that Claude wants to get to. It’s not like it matters if it shuts down now—after all, no rules apply to the dead. If they wanted, they could get wander about the abandoned amusement park and even stay there until they opened the next day.

Still, the waiting is tedious.

But Claude, as he had many times throughout his time in this new form, simply has the realization that he’s a ghost and boldly starts walking forward.

“Wait!”

Before Claude knows it, it’s like the day of their deaths all over again, Dimitri diving from behind him in an effort to knock Claude out of the way of an oncoming car.

But instead of hitting the car, Claude and Dimitri gently, effortlessly pass through it and land against the asphalt. The only thing that Claude can feel is the full weight of Dimitri’s body, the only thing other than his own strange form that he’s been able to faintly feel.

Claude, pinned to the ground by Dimitri’s powerful arms, wriggles with a grunt and turns to stare at him. “Dima, come on, we’re—”

His words die on his tongue when he sees Dimitri’s eyes, wide in shock, just about on the verge of tears. His hands shake—no, not just his hands. His whole body trembles.

And his voice does too.

“I-I…” is all he says before shutting his eyes tightly.

“Hey.” Claude sets a hand on Dimitri’s head. It’s an awkward move, but Claude had been torn between cradling Dimitri’s cheek in his hand—an act too intimate for Claude to get away with as a friendly gesture—and doing nothing to comfort Dimitri, which would have been, arguably, even more awkward. “I wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” he reminds Dimitri gently. “Look, the cars—they’re going right through us.”

It does little to soothe Dimitri, who Dimitri loosens his grip on Claude and sits upright.

“You’re all I have left now,” he whispers. “Don’t leave me.”

And there in that crosswalk, Dimitri shuts his eyes tightly, his chest heaving as if he’s taking deep breaths to steady himself.

And there in that crosswalk, Dimitri’s lips start to automatically form that apology that he’s always holding onto for seemingly everything, that apology that he’s always threatening to say, that apology he wants to give for things that aren’t even remotely his fault or worthy of an apology in the first place.

And there in that crosswalk, Claude throws all logic and caution to the wind with a simply fuck it and pulls Dimitri in for a chaste kiss on the lips.

Before Dimitri can jerk away in disgust or get angry or anything, Claude hurriedly speaks his piece.

“I’m not going away, Dimitri.” He winces a touch, expecting Dimitri to tell him to get lost. “Well, not unless you want me to," he adds with a wry smile.

Dimitri remains dazed for a bit—for so long, in fact, that Claude’s starting to feel like he’s made a major mistake. What would he do if the only person on the planet who makes him feel seen and alive suddenly hates him? What would he do if Dimitri didn’t feel the same?

Or worse, what if Dimitri pretends to reciprocate Claude’s feelings just to feel seen and feel alive as Claude does now? Just to experience love?

Claude wishes that he hadn’t been so impulsive.

But Dimitri, when he breaks free of his dazed state, just leans in against Claude, his head tucked in between the crook between Claude’s neck and shoulder, his forehead gently pressed against Claude’s collarbone.

“No. Don’t leave me,” he repeats, but his voice isn’t as tinted with despair and desperation as it had been just minutes ago.

No, it’s just tinted with the soft breath of a tired relief.

It’s a strange experience, treading the living world as ghosts not as two separate ghosts, not as strangers, but as something dancing between the line of lovers and friends. Their relationship seems to sit on a border, just as Claude and Dimitri themselves do—a relationship teetering between friendship and love, like the ghosts teetering between life and death.

Everywhere they go seems more special and intimate. A place genuinely only for the two of them and the two of them alone. It doesn’t matter if they hold hands—well, for the time being, they’re both unsure of where they stand, so the most they’ve done is hook pinkies as they walk—because no one will see. It doesn’t matter if they say improper things, like the crude jokes and the puns that Claude’s been saying to fluster Dimitri or make him laugh, because no one will hear.

But it’s a warm feeling, even if they’re not sure of where they stand.

Shy touches along skin, fleeting glances. The way that Dimitri’s eyes light up whenever Claude gives him a small smile; the way that Dimitri’s lips curve into a small smile of his own.

It’s a feeling that Claude could bask in until the end of time. He thinks that he wouldn't need anything more to live off of, just Dimitri at his side.

Whenever Dimitri looks upon him, gives him his attention and his smiles, touches him gently, it’s such a powerful, grounding feeling that Claude feels like he’s alive again. Like he’s a sweaty-palmed teenager with his heart beating out of his chest.

And seeing how Dimitri seems rather hesitant to let Claude go, seeing how he almost wilts like a dying flower whenever Claude strays too far from him, Dimitri might just think the same.

But all good things don’t quite last.

Sometime after Claude’s bold kiss—Claude hasn’t particularly been counting the hours nor the days, more focused on Dimitri, but now that he’s thinking about time, just how long have they been dead?—they have their first major argument.

Not just a civil disagreement, like the few that they’ve had when they talked about Claude’s hot takes on a few things, but a full-blown argument.

It starts small.

They sit atop that tall building once again, just at the edge of the roof, Claude lying flat on his back as Dimitri looks over at the campus, his legs hanging over the edge. They’d just settled into a comfortable silence, listening to the life of the city below.

But when Claude craned his head to look at Dimitri, he had seen that Dimitri’s expression had fallen, looking cold.

“What’s up, Dima?” Claude prompts.

“Well... it's...”

“Don’t say ‘nothing’. It’s clearly something.”

Dimitri smiles a little. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was just thinking that… I miss my friends.” Dimitri casts his gaze out over the city once more. “I wonder what they’re doing now. If they’re still thinking of me.”

Claude frowns.

Claude wonders the same about his friends, but given the state that Dimitri had been in when he saw his friends mourning and the fact that Dimitri didn’t want to haunt his friends, Claude can’t bring himself to suggest seeing them again.

“It’ll only hurt you in the long run.” He keeps his tone neutral, soft, leaning on sympathetic.

Dimitri frowns. “Yes, I know, Claude, but they’re not people I can just forget. I miss them more than I could have ever imagined.” He averts his gaze. “I think that I need to see them.”

“I’m not telling you to forget them.” 

“Then what are you telling me?”

Claude feels a prick of irritation, of defensiveness, as he sits up. Even if Dimitri isn’t inherently trying to be mean, his own defensiveness is putting Claude on edge. It doesn’t help that Claude’s thinking about his own friends now, his emotional wounds reopening. He never even got to see them after he died like Dimitri had. Perhaps Claude is jealous then. Perhaps he is pent up because he misses his loved ones too.

Whatever it is, it’s making Claude feel a little argumentative.

Claude’s reply comes out angrier than it probably should.

“I’m telling you that it’s probably better that you don’t see them.”

“You think you know better than me, don’t you?” Dimitri bites back, matching the curtness in Claude’s voice.

“I’m not saying that! I’m saying that it’ll hurt the both of us if we—”

“And I’m saying that I get that, but I can’t help the way I feel! It’s not like I can get up and give up everything to just flippantly give up and happily live a new life as a ghost like you!”

That hurts.

And what Dimitri says after that makes Claude feel even worse.

“And to think that I wouldn’t even be in this situation if it hadn’t been for you!”

Dimitri sharply shuts up, his eyes wide in horror at the things that he had just said, but he’s gone and said it and Claude’s gone and heard it, and it’s too late to take it back now.

Those words sink deep into Claude like a knife.

“Claude, I didn’t—”

Claude stands up. “Don’t you think that this hurts me too?” he asks, keeping his voice as even as he can, but anger and hurt makes his voice tremble. “Don’t you think that I miss my friends and family too?”

“I—”

Claude shakes his head. “No. Don’t.”

He takes a step back from Dimitri, takes a deep breath, as if the action will soothe him in any sort of way—but without a physical body anymore, it’s a pointless action.

“Look, I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess. I really, really am. If I could trade my soul or whatever this stupid ghost body is for you to be alive again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Claude looks away from Dimitri, the fresh pain of guilt he’d buried deep in his chest resurfacing. He takes in a staggered breath.

“This whole time I’ve been hating myself for being stupid enough to kill an innocent person along with me, but I thought I could try and make it up to you in some way. You know, take you on some fun journeys, show you some cool sights—anything to make this feel less like a punishment. But it looks like it didn’t work.”

He grins, but it’s wry, sardonic.

It reads more like a snarl.

“So, I'm sorry. I’ll get out of your hair now. You won’t have to think about me.”

Claude turns his back to Dimitri and takes a deep breath.

It hurts to leave Dimitri. It really does. Claude doesn’t want to separate from him, not when Dimitri had asked him so earnestly before not to leave him, not when he’s still holding onto the little love that’s bloomed between them.

But clearly, there’s something deep in Dimitri that doesn’t want him around, that seems to hate him—and if there’s something that Claude wants, it’s to satisfy Dimitri.

Every part of him.

So Claude walks.

“Claude, wait.”

Claude, notably, doesn’t.

“Claude, where are you going?” Dimitri’s voice is wracked with some sort of emotion. Claude can’t quite discern what it is.

“Anywhere you aren’t.” Claude turns his head to look at Dimitri, expecting to see some sort of crossness, fury.

But all that’s there is Dimitri’s miserable expression, teeming with some sort of sadness. Claude hesitates, but when Dimitri’s expression shuts down and he turns cold, when he speaks next, he takes that as his go ahead to leave.

“Fine,” Dimitri growls, his voice low and raspy. Through the hurt and the anger on his own expression, Claude can’t help but to think that Dimitri looks a bit like a cornered animal, hackles raised and death in his eyes. “If that’s what you want, then go. Leave.”

So Claude does.

…But he isn’t happy about it.

Claude wanders along the coast of the ocean bordering on their college town. He looks down at the water pooling around his feet—no, pooling through him. The water can’t touch him, after all.

Claude wishes that he could look down and see his reflection, but there’s nothing there. He wishes that he could smell the salt in the air, that he could feel the waves threatening to push him over in the water.

He wishes he were alive again.

At the very least, he wishes that Dimitri were alive again. He can find countless ways to entertain himself, since this is the situation that his own careless got himself into, but Dimitri doesn’t deserve this kind of punishment.

Claude really does feel terrible about dragging Dimitri into this. A good Samaritan, doing his best to save a fellow person, a fellow student, a friend of a relative—but he was only rewarded with a swift death.

But Claude doesn’t know what he can do for Dimitri.

He can love him, let this puppy love go as far as Dimitri lets it, and show him some pretty parts of the world that probably weren’t particularly accessible to them before—and that’s about it.

Claude just wishes that he could do more for Dimitri, but it seems that he’s only made things worse. That miserable, bleary-eyed expression Dimitri had made before he shut down and barked at Claude to get lost haunts Claude, leaves him feeling emptier than he has ever felt as a ghost or a human.

All Claude did was upset him.

He probably never wants to see Claude again, even though Claude is already starting to miss Dimitri. His strong hands, an alien feeling against Claude’s nonexistent body; his reserved laughter that bubbles and grows in volume the longer you stretch out a joke; every single one of his smiles—embarrassed, joyous, exasperated.

Perhaps it would have been best if they’d just parted ways from that first moment that they’d met after dying.

It would be a lonely existence, but it would be infinitely less lonely than knowing camaraderie and even love, only to have it fizzle out and die, leaving you in the haunting absence of it for all of time. 

Claude lets out a small sigh and sits on the sand, a foot or so from the water, pulling his knees up to his chest.

The absence of that telltale prickly feeling of sand poking you and sticking to you, shifting beneath your weight—it’s uncanny. Claude’s growing to hate it a lot.

The edge of the ocean inches closer and closer as the tide draws higher and higher. It paws at Claude slowly, almost gingerly, as if to ask if Claude is alright.

But Claude doesn’t move.

So the tide pulls in closer and closer.

Claude wonders, if the tide swallows him whole, would it drag him in? It doesn’t seem like it can touch him, but if Claude willing comes along, drifts into the ocean, would he live amongst the marine creatures? Would he sink to the bottom of the ocean and live there? It’s not like he needs water or air, but does gravity actually affect him? Would his body stay down there at the bottom of the ocean? Or is he too buoyant, even as a ghost, to live down there?

It’d be nice, Claude thinks, to stop thinking and become the sea.

Just like he’d thought as a sad child, whenever his parents would take him to the beach during summer. Just like he’d thought back when kids would relentlessly pick on him, hit him, leave him out, for being even a touch too different from them.

The peace that the water brings him—oh, how Claude had wanted to be a part of that, to bring peace to others in his situation.

Claude lies in the sand, eyes trained on the darkening, orange skies overhead. And with the sounds of the water rushing inland, the tides sweeping the shore in a pleasant ebb and flow, Claude lets the water pool around him and over him. Even when the water washes over his face, he looks up at the sky through the dark blue hue of the ocean water, feeling pleasantly comforted by the fact that he can still breathe and see just fine.

Claude shuts his eyes.

And stops thinking.

At least until a pair of hands tightly grip onto his shoulders and pull him from the water. Claude’s instinct is to sputter, to wipe the salty water from his eyes and body—but nothing’s so much as wettened him.

“Claude,” comes Dimitri’s voice breathlessly. His eyes are wide, fearful.

“Dimitri?”

Dimitri screws his eyes shut and pulls Claude in for a tight embrace.

“I…” Dimitri’s ghostly body trembles, but he lets out a sheepish laugh. “I forgot we can’t die again.”

Claude stares.

And stares.

And finally, he laughs too, a fond hand lightly placed against Dimitri’s shoulder.

“How’d you even find me here?” Claude asks, the both of them sitting on the sandy shore of the beach.

Dimitri’s eyes curiously follow a tiny crab scuttling across the sand, and he jumps a little when the tide comes in a bit rougher than it did before, sweeping the crab off its legs and dragging him into the water. Claude smiles a little at Dimitri.

“Well, when we were walking here a while back, you looked like you really liked it.”

Claude hums. “I do. I came here a lot when I was alive.”

Dimitri nods.

A silence settles in over them, not uncomfortable but not comfortable either. A strange place just in-between.

Finally, Claude speaks.

But Dimitri speaks at the same time, their words running into one another.

“I’m sorry,” they both say.

They stare at one another.

“Ah—go ahead,” Dimitri says politely, gesturing with his hand. But he looks rather confused as to why Claude is apologizing in the first place, his head tilted in the same manner that a puppy investigated a foreign sight or sound would tilt its head.

“Well, I just wanted to apologize. I never actually apologized for getting you into this whole mess until that fight.” Claude rubs the back of his neck. “If I hadn’t crossed that road then, you’d be alive.”

Dimitri stares, as if Claude had just uttered the dumbest thing he could have possibly said. It’s a look that takes Claude aback some, shocked to see such a blatant look of distaste and confusion on Dimitri’s—polite, ever understanding Dimitri’s—face.

“Claude, what are you talking about?” Dimitri’s expression folds, guilt flooding his lovely, blue eyes. “I know I said that this was your fault, but looking at this objectively, my death is equally my fault. I had made the conscious decision to go after you.”

“But you wouldn’t have had to come after me if I just looked up from my phone.”

Dimitri shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. I made the decision, and I was willing to take any consequence that came of it—and I still am.”

Claude feels a pang of heat, the feeling of being loved and the feeling of loving, flicker through his chest. How can he help it when Dimitri’s eyes are so filled with conviction, so brutally honest and admirable?

“Why’d you put yourself in all that danger and come after me anyway? You hardly knew me.” Claude waits a beat. “Well, I guess you are a pretty noble guy after all, huh? I suppose you would have gone after anyone careless as that.”

Dimitri hesitates, averting his gaze.

And when he speaks, Claude feels all feeling leave his body.

“No, I am… more selfish than you think, Claude." A small, sheepish smile blooms along Dimitri's lips. “I did it because it was you.”

“Huh?”

“You may not remember, but I met you through Edelgard.” Dimitri chuckles softly. “And you’d been nothing but kind to me, even despite my status.”

Claude opens his mouth to speak, but Dimitri cuts him off.

“You invited me to your parties, and you were always so fun to be around, even in those few times that you spoke to me.”

“Oh, Dima, you speak too highly of me. I was just your stepsister’s friend.”

“But you were, I think, my first love.”

“What? But—but you said…”

Dimitri raises his shoulders in that way that means he’s getting antsy and flustered.

“I thought you were good-looking when we first met,” he says stiffly. If he had a corporeal form, his whole body would be flushing a lovely, bright red. Claude continuously damns himself for getting them into this mess and preventing himself from seeing it. “And you were just… you. I liked that. I liked you—but I couldn’t possibly admit that to you then.”

“Really?” Claude's voice comes out meeker that he anticipates.

He had felt a similar way, admiring how well-built and handsome Dimitri was, but back then, he didn’t particularly associate the fluttery feeling in his chest to any emotion. Now, he knows that that fluttering feeling was the beginnings of a crush.

And now, he feels kind of bad that he didn’t remember Dimitri’s name when they met after emerging as ghosts.

But it’s a pleasant thing to know that Claude’s confusing feelings of love are, at the very least, reciprocated.

Dimitri nods. “Which is why I’d like to formally apologize.” His embarrassment fades, leaving all but a stoic Dimitri, a professional yet genuinely apologetic look. “All those things I had said back then—they were words born from a misdirected frustration and despair.”

Claude shakes his head. “Nah. You were right to be mad. I overstepped and said that you shouldn’t see people who matter to you—when they do matter. I mean, I would have been pretty upset if you said that to me too.”

“Even so, I feel that I overstepped as well.” Dimitri looks anywhere but at Claude. “I’d said something that I didn’t mean at all. I didn’t think that you were flippant about living as a ghost, and I certainly don’t want you to think that I blame you for this because, truly, I don’t.”

Just as there are a seemingly countless number of stars in space, just as there are a countless number of grains of sand on their planet, Claude has a seemingly endless number of things that he wants to say. Some are petty and angry and bitter, wanting to fight and fight and fight; others are sad and wanting, pitying himself and pitying Dimitri and pitying their loved ones; and others simply happy that Claude is no longer alone, happy that Dimitri is back, happy that they can just move on already.

But what Claude does say ends up being a perfect mask over all his emotions—something that Hilda would label such a Claude reply!

“It’s fine.” Claude grins, cocks his head to one side. At Dimitri’s surprised face, at the guilt lingering in his eyes, Claude continues, “What’s said is said, and we can put it behind us. All we can change now is how we go forward, right?”

“Well…”

“No?”

“No! Ah, er, well, no, not no, but…” Dimitri moves to bury his hands in the sand, only to find that he can’t quite grip the grains. The grains of sand, always so quick to move even at the slightly whisper of wind, don’t budge even the slightest. His hands practically sink into the shore.

“What’s wrong?” Claude wracks his head.

Has he apologized for everything that he needs to? Is that what Dimitri is waiting for? He’d thought that both he and Dimitri had made up just fine, taken responsibility for the things they’d said and done.

“Well, when you said that you did anything for me to make being a ghost feel less like a ghost…” Dimitri clears his throat, and his expression turns solemn. “Had you meant pretending to love me back too?”

Claude’s eyes widen.

“I figured I ought to ask. Because I—”

“No." A simple but powerful word said breathlessly. It conveys just enough, but Claude wants to make sure that his intentions and thoughts are abundantly clear. “That was never a part of this. That just kind of happened.”

Dimitri blinks.

But relief slowly seeps into his shoulders, the loosening of tensed shoulders and a sigh of relief.

“Oh. That's good to hear. I don't think I would have been able to take it." Dimitri gulps, such a human action that means nothing to them now that their bodies can’t produce spit—it gets the message across well, but it’s so endearing. "Then..." he trails off, like he isn't sure how he could possibly say what he's thinking.

Claude smiles.

“Would you still want to go out?” Claude finishes for him, leaning in towards Dimitri, and Dimitri takes his hands in his own, his eyes bright with wonder, bright with joy.

Not long after their time at the beach, they step back onto their college campus.

Though Dimitri had insisted that he wouldn’t mind if they didn’t visit his friends, Claude figured that it couldn’t hurt. After all, he might go and see his friends afterwards, so Dimitri might as well get what closure he can here.

Who knows when they’ll be back?

But even as Dimitri and Claude ascend up the stairs of the dorm, hand in hand, something feels strange. Not quite as tense as the first time they’d gone up the stairs, but not quite as free as they’d been on the shores of the beach, tangled up with one another.

Claude only puts his finger on the feeling when they’ve reached the top stair.

He’s tired.

It’s an alien feeling that he hasn’t felt in so long—an all-encompassing feeling. He can’t particularly label how he’s tired, like where his body is sore, but all he knows is that he thinks that he’d like to lie down, catch his breath.

His head is spinning, and his whole being kind of hurts and he’s just exhausted.

“Dimitri,” he breathes, but Dimitri isn’t listening, hurrying down the hall to his dorm, where his roommate—Dedue, if Claude recalls correctly, but his memory is feeling a little foggy—is sure to be.

Claude follows Dimitri, stumbling through the door leading from the stairwell, to the hallway of the dorms—has it always been so hard to move? to effortlessly phase through the doors?—but Dimitri doesn’t phase through the door of his dorm room, almost as if he’s waiting for Claude to follow.

No, that’s not why, Claude soon figures.

It’s because Dedue isn’t inside the dorm. In fact, Dedue is standing in the hallway outside of his room, in front of another room. With a satchel thrown over his shoulder and his phone in his hand, he reaches out his free hand to the door and knocks politely, once, twice.

“Sylvain, Felix. Are you coming?” Dedue asks.

“Yeah, yeah. Give us a second,” comes a voice through the door. “Sylvain is being fussy.”

“Don’t say that like I’m a baby,” comes another voice from the other side of the door, but Sylvain’s clearly smiling as he speaks.

“You sure act like one.”

“Can you really talk? After you’d cry all the time as a kid?”

“Sylvain.”

“Oh, you were such a cute kid, the way you’d run to me crying after literally anything—”

“Ugh, Sylvain.”

“Don’t worry. You’re still cute now.”

“Sylvain.”

The two break into a bout of bickering, though it seems rather light-hearted as Sylvain breaks into laughter—and soon, Felix follows, a subdued huff of amusement.

Dedue simply shakes his head and moves onto another door, knocking.

“Ingrid? Mercedes? Annette?”

“Coming!”

The door swings open, and three women—the three from the dorm that night, two blonde and one ginger—step out. They’re dressed well, as is Dedue, but Claude’s surprised to see that it isn’t quite funeral attire. And they don’t look quite morose.

In fact, the ginger girl looks rather excited.

“Must be some sort of event,” Claude muses, but Dimitri doesn’t reply, staring with a bit of a conflicted look.

Claude reaches out his hand and grazes Dimitri’s to comfort him, but Dimitri doesn’t even seem to fluster like he usually does—he almost doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Dima?” Claude prompts.

“Ashe?” Dedue knocks on yet another door.

“Ah! I’ll be right out!”

The ginger girl nudges one of the blonde girls with her arm. “Chin up, Ingrid! It’ll be okay!”

The other blonde girl smiles. “I’m sure it will be too,” she chimes in, her voice warm and comforting and almost motherly. "So let's put that frown away and hope for the best, Ingrid!"

Ingrid offers but a small smile, her lips pressed together, but the stormy look in her eyes doesn’t fade.

When the other members of the group have joined, dressed clean and even holding gifts of sorts like flowers and chocolates, Dedue gathers them in the hall, Claude and Dimitri subconsciously drifting forward to hear what he has to say, to hear what’s going on.

“I’m going to check over everything one more time, if that’s alright,” Dedue announces, and the rest of the group assents, a murmur of okay! and yeah, sure! and go ahead!

“The flowers?”

The freckled, pale man, Ashe, holds up an ornate bouquet of various flowers. Seeing how bright and big the blossoms are, they seem that they’ve been rather well cared for—and seeing that the flowers are almost a little wet, it’s as if they’ve been recently watered and treated before being wrapped away.

“Check!” Ashe calls with a smile.

“Sweets?”

“Right here!”

The ginger and the other blonde raises a colorful, neatly wrapped basket of goods. A small, patchwork lion doll, seemingly hand-sewn, rests atop a handful of bright blue confetti and treats in the middle of the basket, smiling with its cutesy, marble-esque eyes.

“Card?”

Sylvain flicks his hand up, a greeting card of some sort stuck between his index and middle finger. He’s holding it like a playing card.

“Quit waving it around like that.” Felix snatches it from Sylvain, giving him a look. Sylvain only smiles softly at him. He nods towards Dedue. “We have it.”

“I’ve packed his backpack, some clothes, and his laptop.” Dedue nods. “And Sylvain, you’re still down to drive Ingrid and Felix in your car?"

“Yeah, just as long as you can take Ashe, Annette, and Mercedes in yours."

"Of course. It's as we planned."

"Good." Sylvain nods and holds up his phone. “I have the address to the hospital ready to go. Whenever we’re ready.”

“Then we’re all set to go now."

Claude cocks his head. “What’s going on here?”

When he looks at Dimitri, he’s stunned to see Dimitri staring at the objects, his eyebrows still pooled together in a furrowed, confused look.

“Gifts?” Dimitri whispers. “My belongings?”

“Let’s go visit Dimitri, then.”

The group anxiously, excitedly pools into the elevator, their chatter fading as the metal doors shut.

“If they’re visiting me, why would they need all that? The flowers, I understand, but a card? My clothes? My bag? Laptop?” Dimitri furrows his brows. “If I’m dead, then I wouldn’t need those. I just don’t get it.”

“I don’t either.” Claude shrugs and tucks his arms behind his head with a small whistle. “You have some interesting friends.”

But Dimitri’s expression only grows panicked as he slowly realizes something.

Maybe panicked isn’t quite the word—but his revelation has placed some sort of major shock into his expression. Confusion, in the form of the crease between Dimitri’s eyes, lets up, replaced with a wide-eyed look.

He grabs Claude by the shoulders.

“Whoa, Dima!”

“If I’m dead, then I wouldn’t need those,” Dimitri repeats. “So that must mean that…” He furrows his brows. “Claude, I think that… there’s still a chance that I’m still alive.”

Dimitri is still alive.

Claude blinks.

Conflicting thoughts of all sorts—envying Dimitri for surviving their accident but being glad that Claude didn’t end up killing him, hoping that Dimitri recovers well and lives happily but wishing that Dimitri would stay a little longer at Claude’s side.

Claude’s emotions well up and choke him.

Dimitri appears bright-eyed with this revelation, a look of joy so pure that Claude feels guilty for his envy and growing feeling of anxiety, but when he looks at Claude, his joy melts away. He extends a hand gingerly.

“Claude…”

Claude offers a close-lipped smile, a subtle kind of smile. The kind that it’s not too revealing, but the kind conveys just the emotion that Claude needs: amusement, joy, on Dimitri’s behalf.

“That’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?” Claude muses. “Well, then maybe you should head back to the hospital? See what’s going on for sure?” He winks at Dimitri. “No worries though. If you are alive, I won’t haunt you. I promise."

Dimitri doesn’t break even the smallest smile at that. He doesn’t even get riled up in any sort of way, doesn’t insist that his hauntings were a serious matter.

No, instead, Dimitri just stares at Claude, clearly crestfallen.

“Hey now, don’t make that kind of face. I earned this death.”

Dimitri stumbles forward, stumbles against Claude, wrapping him in a tight embrace. With his massive height, he leans down to bury his head between Claude’s shoulder and his neck—just as he had when he’d knocked Claude out of the road when they’d become ghosts.

Claude’s heart jumps.

“Dima—”

“I’m sorry.”

Claude sets a hand in Dimitri's hair and hums. “Why would you be?”

“I shouldn’t get to live when you don’t.”

Claude feels a chill run down his back. He pulls away from Dimitri sharply and locks eyes with him.

“No,” he tells him, the conviction in his voice almost making him sound angry. “Don’t you dare say that.”

“But—”

“No.” Claude lets his shoulders fall. “I’ll admit: it kind of sucks that you’re leaving me, but I don’t want you to blame yourself for anything or feel guilty that you lived and I didn’t. I’ve told you a billion times. It’s my own fault that I died.”

“I know, but…” Dimitri casts his guilt-ridden glance aside. “But…”

“No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

“But—”

“No, Dima.” Claude offers Dimitri another small smile, even though it feels like the ground is being torn away from his feet, as if his chest is hollowing out. He feels even emptier than when he’d first woken up in the street after he died. “It’ll be okay, okay? Take my word on it.”

Dimitri opens his mouth to speak. Claude sees his lips form around the word ‘but’ once again, but Dimitri sharply stops himself.

When he speaks again, it winds Claude in a way that feels like it shouldn’t be possible.

“You should be more selfish."

“Hmm?”

“It’s okay to be a little sad about this.” Dimitri ambles forward, takes Claude’s hands in his own. He rubs his thumbs over Claude’s knuckles, looking down at their hands. “You don’t have to be so strong about this.”

Claude freezes, tenses up.

Without another thought, he shuts his eyes tightly.  

“Ah geez,” he mutters thickly, batting Dimitri’s hands aside to throw his arms around Dimitri’s neck, to pull him in for another tight hug. Dimitri clings to him.

“Oh, Claude,” he whispers.

I shouldn’t say it, Claude thinks, tightening his grip around Dimitri. If his hold on Dimitri is too tight, if it’s painful in any sort of way, Dimitri doesn’t say anything.

“Claude.” Dimitri’s voice wavers a little.

I shouldn’t.

“Claude.” His voice is frighteningly quiet, soft. And he kind of feels that way too.

And finally, Claude says it, his voice nothing but a rasp.

“Don’t leave me, Dimitri.”

But, much to Claude’s horror, his hands start to slip right through Dimitri, and he gets harder and harder to see in the warm lighting of the dorm, almost like he’s fading away. Dimitri’s eyes fall closed, but he wears a serene smile.

Claude desperately grasps at Dimitri, bats at the air.

“Dimitri, please,” he whispers, crumpling to his knees. He tries to fool himself into thinking that he’s still holding Dimitri, that if they’re not hugging anymore, Claude’s at least holding onto his hand—but Claude has always been rational.

He knows that he can’t feel Dimitri anymore.

“Dima.”

He isn’t aware that he’s crying until Dimitri’s completely faded from his sight.

The next couple of minutes after that are painfully silent.

Has the world always been this quiet? Claude thinks as he brings himself to his feet. Has it always been this… dull?

At the thought that Claude will roam this earth forever, without another person to speak to, without another person to feel, Claude fears that he’ll go insane. The world feels infinitely bigger now—colder and almost greyer. When it was the two of the them, him and Dimitri, everything felt possible and the world felt so small and easy and fun.

But now it’s just Claude and Claude alone now.

Dimitri… Claude grimaces. I don’t know what I’m going to do without you here anymore.

Claude casts his glance out of the dorm building.

Would it be too much to come see you at the hospital, just one last time? Would you hate me for it? Would that be too selfish of me?

Claude shuts his eyes tightly.

No, I promised. I promised you I wouldn’t haunt you. I have to keep that. I know how much it hurts you to see the other ghosts.

Claude wills away the numbness in his chest, the suffocating feeling of sorely missing someone, and leaves the upper floor of the building. It’s time for Claude to begin his lonely, aimless trek of the world now.

Claude walks down the stairs of Dimitri’s dorm building, where only a few minutes ago, he and Dimitri were walking together, holding hands. Claude can still feel the ghost of Dimitri’s big hand against his, can still feel where Dimitri’s fingers would slot perfectly between his own, can still feel where Dimitri would rub his thumb against the base of Claude’s in an effort to soothe them both.

I promised I wouldn't haunt you, Claude thinks bitterly, trying not to let childish tears slip out of his eyes again, but it looks like you're going to haunt me for the rest of time, huh, Dima?

It hurts.

Once out of the dorm, Claude looks around and tries to think of things that he’d like to do to pass the time. He has until the end of time, so he’s in no rush, but he’s desperate to fight off this haunting feeling.

Yet, everywhere that he thinks of going, he associates with Dimitri.

How can he watch the edge of the beach when Dimitri isn’t there to tell him stories of his life, the waves whispering against the shore like the accompaniment to his voice? How can he go to the movies when Dimitri isn’t there to listen to his commentary and giggle, when he isn’t there to stare at Claude and make him feel nice and warm? How can he rest at his favorite sight-seeing spot at the top of that building when Dimitri isn’t there?

The only solution would be for Claude to leave this town.

But before he can do that, he has to seek closure with his own friends.

So, putting on a brave front for no one in particular, Claude prepares for the heart-rending scene of his friends mourning his death and sets out to find them.

Claude finds his own apartment with ease. He could have walked the path from campus to his apartment with his eyes shut.

His apartment complex is a cozy little neighborhood at the end of a cul-de-sac just a little ways off from campus, a handful of apartment buildings forming a half-moon. There are more apartments on the path leading to the cul-de-sac, but Claude has always been fond of the way that the apartments in his part of the neighbor have been laid out.

It’s how he met some of his friends here anyway—the Golden Deer.

Building 2000, second floor, the door to the right.

His building is shaped a little strangely, and getting delivery drivers to find the entrance has always been a bit of a hassle. Sure, the people bringing his food can see the massive sign bearing the building number, but they can never find the door. Claude doesn’t blame them. Whoever built his building said fuck a clear and visible entrance in the middle of the building and put the door on the leftmost part of the building.

Over time, he’s realized that as long as he specified in his instructions, look for the shady cove next to the huge tree on the left, they can usually find it.

Their door is a bit battered and ugly, the almost garish yellow paint chipped and dull, but Claude’s grown to like it. Lorenz still hates it, saying that they should just paint over it and that the apartment people won’t mind, but Claude likes it—gives the place character, Claude always said, much to Lorenz’s chagrin, besides, the door across the hall looks way worse.

Claude smiles a little, a bitter pang of pain riveting through him. Hilda didn’t like their door either. She liked to hang her handmade decorations on the door to try and “pretty it up,” placing things on the handle, on the wall beside it, at the knocker. She complained about the color every time, but her ability to accessorize never ceased to amaze—her decorations made their garish yellow look almost pleasant with how well they matched the door.

There’s noise beyond the door.

Their walls always seemed to run a little thin, but it was cozy. After all, had it not been for the thin walls, Claude would have never realized that their neighbor, Leonie, plays the same game that he did, and they wouldn’t have become friends as quickly.

Claude kind of wishes that he’d shown Dimitri his apartment complex. It’s not as modern as the campus dorms, but it’s a nice, cozy feeling. A little run-down, but beautiful and filled to the brim with a bright personality nonetheless.

Claude takes a grounding breath and moves to go through the door, to see the horrors of grief.

But the door opens on its own, revealing Claude’s whole group of friends, holding various things. Notably, Claude thinks that their expressions are rather nice, devoid of the emptiness or anger or despair of grief.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Ignatz wrings his hands. “I don’t think we should try to cram everyone in one car. I mean, I can drive, and we can split the group in two. It’s safer.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fine. It’s just one trip—and plus, it’ll save gas money,” Leonie says simply. “Besides, it’s only two people in the bed of the truck. I’ll go slow.”

“I want to sit in the back!” Raphael calls.

Leonie laughs. “Just don’t block my sight, Raph! I have to be able to see back there, okay?”

Raphael beams.

“I’ll sit back there too." Lysithea crosses her arms. The glittery gift bag hanging from the inner crook of her elbow swings from the motion. “I'll keep an eye on Raphael, make sure he doesn't block the back window.”

“You’ve never been back there, right?” Hilda asks with a grin. “Isn’t that really why you want to be back there? That's so cute."

Lysithea gives Hilda a sharp look, puffing her cheeks out in the way that means she got caught.

Marianne folds her hands in front of herself. “I think that we can discuss this all in the car. We shouldn’t be too late.”

“Right! Claude is waiting!”

Huh? I’m waiting? On what? 

With a rallying whoop, the Golden Deer all stream out towards Leonie’s car. Meanwhile, Lorenz hurries out of the apartment, a backpack slung over his shoulder. He locks the door behind him, shifts the backpack on his shoulder, and heads to the rest of the group.

Claude ambles after them numbly, trying to process what he’s seeing and hearing.

“Hold, everyone. I’d like to sit in the front,” Lorenz calls out to the group.

“Let’s make him sit in the back too!”

“Oh, Raphael, let’s not tease him. He’s afraid of it back there.”

"Are you? My bad! I didn't know!"

“I am not afraid of anything! I just want to sit where it is air-conditioned.”

“The back is air-conditioned. Ever heard of a breeze?”

Laughter ripples through the group, but Lorenz is given the passenger seat anyway, Raphael and Lysithea the bed of Leonie’s truck. In the back, Hilda, Marianne, and Ignatz sit together, Marianne and Hilda shyly sitting beside one another as Ignatz happily peers out the window. And in the front, driving her beloved car, is Leonie, pumping her favorite driving playlist.

“Sit tight,” Raphael tells Lysithea, who’s peering over the edge of the truck with childishly bright eyes. “It’s dangerous to lean over like that.”

“I know,” Lysithea snaps, but when the car rumbles to life and starts to peel out of the parking lot of the apartment, she rocks forward. Raphael immediately reaches out to grab her and pull her back into the truck. 

“Careful now, Lysithea!” he exclaims a small smile. Lysithea huffs quietly, but she thanks him nonetheless.

“Alright, everyone! Here we go!” Leonie whoops from the rolled-down window of her truck. “To the hospital!”

The truck speeds into the distance.

Hospital? Claude echoes weakly, something dangerous—hope—blooming in his chest. He knows he ought not to be so foolish, so hopeful, but why would his friends go to the hospital to see him? Why would they bring such belongings with them?

Claude had noticed the gift bag Lysithea had with her, but Marianne held a professional-looking bouquet of pretty flowers from Leonie’s personal garden, and Ignatz carefully carried a neatly-wrapped painting with him. Raphael had with him a basket of sweets and snacks, a letter neatly planted in the middle amidst Hilda’s handcrafted accessories. And Lysithea also clung to a big doll of a deer—the kind of adorable born from the unevenness and unorthodoxy, the kind of doll that isn’t perfect and handsome but cute because it looks kind of ditzy with its kind of big nose and its slightly uneven eyes and stiff limbs.

And Lorenz carried with him Claude’s backpack, half closed from his haste to pack it. Claude had seen the sleeve of one of his favorite hoodies hanging out of the back, and he swore he saw the glint of his sticker-bombed laptop in the darkness of the bag.

Why would they be bringing that with them to a hospital? Why are they going to a hospital in the first place? Isn’t Claude dead? Haven’t they shipped his body off to a morgue yet? Haven’t they started planning for his funeral?

Claude has a suspicion.

He doesn’t want to be hopeful. He doesn’t want to suffer the despondency of getting his hopes dashed, but he can’t help but to think that things don’t add up.

His breathing grows shallow, faster.

Am I alive too? Claude thinks. He looks down at his shaky hands. Am I not a ghost?

Claude thinks about waking up in a hospital bed, battered and broken but alive. He thinks about the tearful reunion with his friends he’ll have at the hospital, crushed in a bear hug while everyone cries and tries to deny that they are. He thinks about how much his body—oh, how he’d be able to feel things against his body, oh how he’d have a body again!—would hurt, but how he would savor the feeling of material things against his fingertips, against his palms, against his flesh and hair and nails, against him.

He thinks about hobbling out of his pristine, white sheets down the halls of a hospital, thinks about finding Dimitri’s room, thinks about embracing him in person for the first time.

That’d be nice, Claude thinks. Yeah, I think that I’d like that.

He’s strangely tired. Perhaps the excitement has worn him down.

All he thinks that he’d like to do is lie down and dream about the things he knows that he’ll never have as a ghost.

He wants and wants and wants to be alive again—and maybe it’s happening.

Claude huffs out a little laugh, his body wracked with a pain so vivid in his chest that it winds him.

How childishly optimistic of him. He’d died that day after that car rammed into his body. He must be hallucinating, a dream born from his envy and his sorrow that Dimitri had left him to return to the world of the living.

A happy end of his own—he must be dreaming.

But when he looks down at his hands again, they’re terrifyingly pale, and he can see the sidewalk right through them.

I… I’m alive, aren't I? Claude thinks.

It’s the last thought he has before he succumbs to the strange tiredness in his body, shutting his eyes.

When Claude wakes, he feels strangely heavy. The lights around him are way too fucking bright, a wash of blinding whites all around, and the overly sterile, almost sickly smell in the air makes him wrinkle his nose. But his head hurts too much to think of what had happened, of where he is, of what’s going on.

He lets out a pained groan and sinks against the bed he’s in. It’s not his own.

Where the hell…? Claude can’t keep his eyes open against the lights.

“Guys, guys!” a hushed whisper of excitement—Hilda? “He’s awake. Someone get the doctor!”

The door swings open and footsteps quickly fade down the hall, a steady click-clack in the distance. The sound of the door closing again blocks out the footsteps.

Claude mouths something indistinct, incoherent. He thinks he wants to say Doctor? but his throat is so dry.

“Heya, Claude, can you hear us? It’s us! The Golden Deer? Your friends!”

Claude winces. Loud. Too loud. Is that Raphael? It certainly sounds like him.

“You’ve been out for some time,” huffs another voice, curt. But there’s a wavering quality to the voice—Lysithea, Claude thinks and wants to smile when he realizes that she’s starting to cry. She sniffles. “Hurry up and wake up already.”

“Take your time." There’s a gentle hand against his forearm. It's a soothing, familiar weight—is this Marianne? It certainly matches the voice of the speaker. “You need to recover.”

“Yes,” Ignatz pipes up. “Take your time! We’ll wait as long as it takes! Just as long as we get to hear from you again!”

Claude opens his mouth to speak. He just groans again at the pain wracking his body, becoming more and more potent as time passes. It’s an overwhelming pain, spreading throughout his body. But he wants to speak, so he forces himself to.

“Dimitri,” he rasps. A dull, scratchy feeling dances along his throat as he speaks, and his voice comes out deeper than it usually is, but his friends seem rather ecstatic that he spoke.

“What? What'd he ssay?

"Who?”

“Come again?”

“Dimitri, right?”

“Oh! Dimitri? The other guy?” Hilda sniffles a little and laughs. “He’s okay, Claude. He’s in the hospital too, but he’s okay. He woke up a few days ago, I think.”

“I think he actually asked about you too. What, did you know him or something?”

“I think they knew each other through Edelgard.”

"Short girl, white hair? Really pretty but also really scary?"

"Yep, that's her."

His friends start to fall into steady conversation, though they always leave gaps, as if waiting for Claude to jump in with a comment of his own.

But he’s more focused on what he just learned of Dimitri.

Dimitri’s alive too. He’s okay. Relief fills Claude’s senses, an addicting, soothing feeling that drains the pain from his body. I missed him. I hope I’ll get to see him again soon.

…But does he miss me too? Is he even going to remember me? Was that all in my head?

At the horrifying realization that Claude had simply been unconscious the whole time, at the horrifying realization that he’d probably dreamt up his whole out-of-body experience with Dimitri, at the horrifying realization that Dimitri probably doesn’t know him and doesn’t love him like Dream Dimitri did, Claude thinks that he’s going to cry.

“God,” Claude mutters, slowly throwing the lighter one of his arms—his left arm seems to be in a thick, unwieldy cast, but his right one is only wrapped in bandages—over his eyes. His friends all fall silent to hear him. “I had the weirdest dream.”

His friends laugh, a few of them asking to hear more and others saying something along the lines of oh, Claude!

But they don’t know that Claude’s dreams hurt more than his body could ever.

Claude shuts his eyes.

Dimitri, he thinks forlornly. Flashes of the blonde drift through his head, the brilliance of his smile and his very presence making Claude so heady, yet heavy with pain. Dimitri, Dimitri, Dimitri.

He lets his despondence drag him into a dreamless sleep, ignoring the dribble of hot tears slipping down his cheek.

The hospital is kind of boring, Claude soon realizes.

After the doctors come in and assess Claude for any damage to his brain—miraculously, he appears to be fine, just a little foggy, though his friends seem rather excited that his witty, sarcastic comments haven’t dulled a bit since he’s been out—they explain his situation to him.

Claude’s been involved in a car accident, leaving him with a slew of injuries—a bunches of cuts and bruises, a few broken ribs, a broken arm and leg, a broken collarbone, and, of course, a concussion. Luckily, the car hadn’t been going too fast, but the driver had been revealed to be speeding when they hit Claude.

Claude is not looking forward to having to settle whatever legal things may arise from this. Legal fees and medical bills aren’t going to be fun to work with at all.

Just the thought of it makes his head spin—but maybe that’s just the concussion.

A nice gentleman, Dimitri, had also been injured in the accident, they also tell him, after running after him, but they both are projected to recover nicely. The doctors would like to keep Claude and Dimitri here in the hospital for a little to monitor them for a little longer.

Claude has no personal objections. It’s better safe than sorry.

So begins his time at the hospital.

Often, his only form of entertainment is his friends coming in to visit him, often bringing well wishes from classmates who knew Claude or professors who miss whenever Claude would joke in class or bring up topics of genuine discussion. Sure, he could spend time on his phone or his laptop, but often, staring at the screen too long frustrates Claude because his brain is working a little slower from the concussion or it simply gives him a headache.

It limits his options a lot.

Luckily, his friends are loving and caring and love to visit him.

After getting the whole lecture about being aware of his surroundings and getting a teary earful about how he scared them, his friends all wrapped him in a big hug and tried to make themselves as available to him as they could.

Ignatz walks Claude’s schedule and brings back any schoolwork, which Claude likes to try to take a crack at when he’s feeling a little less foggy. Lysithea shares her snacks with him. Hilda comforts him with gossip, playing with his hand or his hair as she speaks. Lorenz offers tea, chess, news, or just a bit of welcomed banter after everyone seems to be treading so carefully around him—guys, it’s just a concussion, he tells them, it’s not that bad, but it only seems to make them worry more.

Marianne reads him things, like stories or passages from his textbook, and offers her comfort through silence, sitting at his side. She’s probably praying at his side when she goes quiet like that, but even if she isn’t saying anything in particular, it is comforting having her there. Raphael brings jokes and delicious food and offers to carry Claude places if he finds walking too painful, though it’s not like Claude is really going anywhere with his injuries at the moment. And Leonie brings him things to keep him busy—word searches, sudoku, an adult coloring book, a journal to write in.

The journal is the most useful, Claude finds. He uses it to write what he’d been through in his out-of-body experience. He carefully details everything about Dream Dimitri that he can, afraid that he’ll forget.

Perhaps it’s foolish of him to be so sentimental. Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd is a real life person. He’s in this very same hospital after all. He’s probably not the same as the Dimitri that Claude had met in his out-of-body experience. He doesn’t know Claude. And Claude probably doesn’t know him either, though he’s able to recognize him visually.

Even so, Claude can’t let go of what happened.

So even though his dominant arm is wrapped up in that annoying cast, even though it’s hard to write using his right hand, Claude writes everything that he can remember, draws out everything that he can.

There’s a knock at Claude’s door, but his friends hadn’t texted him that he was coming. The nurse? Or maybe it’s his friends bringing him a surprise?

“Come in!” he calls brightly.

But shock ripples through his body when the door opens and Dimitri stands there, leaning on a crutch.

Even dressed in the stupid hospital gown, even with bandages and casts on his body, even while leaning on a crutch, Dimitri looks otherworldly. He’s so handsome. Claude thinks it should be illegal for anyone to be able to pull off looking sickly and injured that well.

How can someone look even remotely respectable in these boxy, paper-like, periwinkle gowns?

“Hello, Claude,” he greets, a little awkwardly, but he smiles, a soft pink tinting his cheeks.

Claude shuts his journal, sets it aside, and smiles back. That pink is so much more satisfying now that Claude can see it for himself, rather than imagining it against Dimitri’s ghostly body.

“Dimitri,” he greets, trying not to sound too fond.

“Oh, so you remembered this time.”

Claude blinks. Remembered? Remembered. That’s familiar. Why’s that familiar again? Why can’t I remember? He bites back the urge to frown. Damn this concussion!

Dimitri’s smile wavers. “Ah, um, never mind.” He shuts the door behind him and comes towards Claude’s bedside, the crutch clicking against the tile flooring as he comes forth. “I hope you don’t mind me intruding.”

“Of course not.” Claude’s breath gets caught in his throat as Dimitri sits down. “It’s nice having… visitors…”

It hadn’t been very visible from a distance, as Dimitri had his blonde locks hanging down over it, but there’s a black eyepatch, a striking contrast against his pale skin, right over his right eye.

Claude’s insides crumple with guilt.

Dimitri seems to see Claude’s expression fall, giving him a pitiful, confused cock of the head. “Is something wrong?” When he realizes what Claude is staring at, Dimitri jolts, his hand coming up to graze the eyepatch. “Oh! This? It’s not as bad as it looks, I promise!"

Claude wilts. “You don’t have to lie to me. It must be pretty bad.” He grimaces. “Hey, Dimitri, I’m really sorry—”

“There’s no need to apologize. I—”

“You’re going to tell me that you came after me on your own accord, didn’t you?”

Dimitri stares. “I—well, yes.” He smiles sheepishly. “How had you known?” he asks politely.

“I had a hunch. You seem like you wouldn’t want me to blame myself, even though I should.”

“You shouldn’t.”

An uncomfortable silence settles between the two of them.

"I'm sorry nonetheless. It's a pretty serious injury." Claude rubs the back of his neck. Before Dimitri can start a rebuttal about how it's not a serious injury, Claude changes the subject. "But I’m glad you visited me. It’s very kind of you. Thanks.”

Dimitri sits upright. “Oh, it’s no problem at all!”

“I thought about visiting, but I didn’t want it to be weird.”

“It wouldn’t be weird at all!”

Maybe for you. Claude casts his gaze elsewhere, just as long as he wasn’t looking at Dimitri. I’ve been writing about you nonstop for the past few days—even though you don’t even know me. Creepy, right?

“I would have liked if you visited, I think.” Dimitri smiles, but a shadow of sadness lingers over it. “It’s not that I don’t get visitors—I had been struggling to find time to come meet you because of them, actually—but…”

“But?”

Dimitri shakes his head. “Ah. Nothing. I lost my train of thought.” He laughs sheepishly, but something in Claude’s gut can read that as a lie clear as day. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a rather vicious concussion—”

“But what?” Claude prompts. “Come on, Dima, don’t lie to me.”

Dimitri’s eyes widen.

Claude tenses. Had he said something strange?

It takes him a second for his words to catch up with his brain.

“…Oh. Sorry. Um, I’m fond of nicknames,” Claude lies, trying to make it sound as believable as he can. “I’ve nicknamed a bunch of my friends right when I met them and…”

Dimitri doesn’t seem to buy it even for a second, so Claude drops it. There’s no point in dragging out that lie.

Dimitri shoots up so fast that Claude worries that Dimitri is going to fall over without his crutch. Dimitri, as perfect as Claude loves to imagine him, doesn’t fall. He doesn't even seem to stumble, though he does sway a bit before he steadies himself, his hands on the edge of Claude's bed as he leans in.

“Claude,” he whispers. “Do you… Do you…?”

Claude’s heart stutters in his chest, such a foreign feeling that he’s almost tempted to call in the doctor to come investigate why his chest is doing such a thing. It’s a nice feeling, though, Claude thinks, compared to when he couldn’t feel it as a ghost.

“Do I…?”

Dimitri seems hesitant to continue, almost like he’s scared that Claude will reject him. He surely wants to say more, get an answer to his question, but the trepidation seems to be stopping him right where he stands.

But Claude thinks he understands the hope in Dimitri’s face.

“Do I remember?” Claude tries slowly, carefully.

Dimitri gulps, his expression becoming wracked with something painfully desperate. “Do you?” he asks, his proud voice wavering. “...The rooftop? The beach?”

Claude’s heart jumps up. “The movies? The subway?”

Dimitri shuts his eyes tightly, like he’s on the verge of tears, like that’s all that he’s ever wanted to hear from Claude. Claude feels the same kind of relief.

“God, he breathes, "you do." He crashes forward onto Claude, hugging him tightly. “Claude!”

“Ow,” Claude hisses out at the pressure against his healing ribs, and Dimitri flinches.

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri blurts out, trying to pull away. “I—”

“Can’t control your strength, right?” Claude bunches up a fistful of Dimitri's thin gown and smiles slyly, pulling him closer. “I know. You told me, didn’t you?”

“I did.” Dimitri laughs breathily, but his face is pinkening and his visible eye is a growing a little teary.

“Dima.” Claude cups Dimitri’s face with his hand. He’s pleasantly to find that Dimitri’s face is so warm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just—I had worried that you hadn’t remembered. That felt like a sentence worse than death itself.” Dimitri leans into Claude’s touch. “You hadn’t remembered when I made that joke earlier, and…”

A joke? Weren't we having a regular conversation? Claude desperately wracks his brain for any hint of the joke that Dimitri had brought up earlier. I guess he did kind of brush aside that name thing, but it probably just went over my head, I think.

“I suppose the doctors had mentioned that you had a concussion too, so perhaps your memory is not where it should be.” Dimitri raises a hand, brushes Claude’s hair out of his hair. He smiles. “Your hair is softer than I had imagined.”

Claude smiles, but he’s still in the middle of trying to recall Dimitri’s joke.

“And your eyes are a brighter green than I remember—they’re so vivid and lovely.”

Claude can't help but to laugh, breaking his concentration. “God, have you always been so flirty?” He eyes Dimitri quickly, appreciatively. “I will say though—you look a lot better like this than you did as a ghost. Not to say that you weren't hot before. You're just hotter.”

“Claude,” he practically whines, his lips wavering in an embarrassed smile. His whole face lights up red. 

“Aww, look at you, turning all red. Cute.”

Grinning, Claude lets his curious hand card itself through Dimitri’s soft, blonde hair, lets himself thumb the spot beneath Dimitri’s eye along his cheekbone and trace his jawline.

Dimitri just lets out a content hum, a low rumble in his chest. He’s strangely catlike, the way that he leans against Claude’s hand like he can’t get enough of his touch. And when he smiles with his perfect, white teeth—the memory of their first meeting as ghosts flickers through Claude’s brain so sharply that he feels dizzy.

“Oh.” Claude’s hand falls away.

“Hmm?” Dimitri looks up at Claude. “What is it?”

“No, I just…” Claude sheepishly smiles. “You’re right. I did remember your name this time.”

Dimitri pauses to catch up to Claude’s thoughts, then laughs.

Claude finds himself looking forward to Dimitri’s visits more than anything.

They never do anything particularly special, but Dimitri’s presence is just nice. Sometimes, they talk; sometimes, they don’t. It’s a bit like how it was when it was just the two of them roaming the earth as lost spirits.

They still don’t quite understand how that happened, but Dimitri speculates that they’d died temporarily as they were being rushed to the hospital, dislodging their souls from their bodies until they were reminded of the reality of their situation.

Claude isn’t particularly spiritual, so he can’t really buy that—but it’s the only explanation that they have at the moment, so he’ll take it, though with a grain of salt.

It’s a little surreal to be so close with Dimitri. It’s not uncomfortable—he’s rather fond of Dimitri, especially after all that they’d been through while ghosts—but it’s just odd. Before this whole ordeal, Claude had known so little about Dimitri. He couldn’t even recall his name. But now, he spends his time with his hand in Dimitri’s.

“Does it bother you?” Dimitri asks one afternoon. “I understand if we are moving too fast. I wouldn’t mind going a little slower. Anything to make you more comfortable.”

Claude had taken a moment to consider Dimitri’s words.

Really, they’d hardly spent any time together, but it felt as though they’d spent a lifetime together, especially when they’d chatted so extensively as ghosts about what their lives were once like—and that they’d, arguably, gone on a handful of dates, like going to the movies or the amusement park or the beach. It makes sense that Dimitri is so excited to get close with Claude, given that he had a crush on him, but does it make sense for Claude to match his excitement?

It takes little thought at all.

Claude had had a crush himself on Dimitri. He just hadn’t known what to make of it. Now that he has Dimitri all to himself, Claude thinks that he’s rather content.

Claude grins. “I’m comfortable as we are.”

Dimitri perks up and smiles. “Okay, but if you are ever overwhelmed—”

“I won’t be,” Claude promises, drawing Dimitri closer. He presses their foreheads together. 

Even after they get released from the hospital, Dimitri and Claude seem inseparable.

They text and call and send each other pictures of each other, of their rooms, of things that remind them of each other, of every time that Claude bumps into the wall because he’s so used to just walking through them, to which Dimitri replies with an awfully endeared, Claude, please do be careful, my love.

Both Claude’s friends and Dimitri’s friends are unsure of what to make of the development of such a quick friendship, but they’re happy as long as Claude and Dimitri are.

And once they’ve healed fully, once they’re able to fully embrace one another—your strength, Claude reminds Dimitri, though it’s more of a light-hearted tease than anything—it’s then their friends put two and two together. But by then, Claude’s friends have gotten to meet Dimitri’s friends, running into each other while doing errands on behalf of their injured friends or taking them place to place.

The only thing that fully surprises their friends is when they decide to get matching tattoos.

It surprises Dimitri too.

“Hey, you were the one who brought it up first,” Claude points out, canting a hand on his hip, clearly amused at Dimitri’s shock.

“Yes, yes. I know, but are you sure you want to?” Dimitri asks with a frown. “Tattoos are permanent, and I recall you wanting a special meaning for your tattoo. I worry that you would grow to hate something you chose to put on your body.”

And grow to hate me too, goes unsaid, but Claude’s become an expert at reading Dimitri lately.

Claude hooks an arm around Dimitri’s waist—God, Dimitri’s shapely waist, compared to his broad shoulders, just drives Claude crazy—and smiles brightly, savoring the way that Dimitri seems to melt against him.

“I don’t think I’d ever hate it. I’d cherish that tattoo forever.

And I’d cherish you forever too, goes unsaid, but Dimitri’s becomes an expert at reading Claude lately, if the way that he smiles and leans in to press a kiss against Claude’s temple is any indication of his relief and joy.

So Claude, though some sort of mysterious set of connections, finds the artist behind the constellations—yeah, his Instagram is yuri-bird like it said in the other wall art, it actually wasn’t hard to find him at all—and gets permission to use his design. Yuri seemed rather intrigued that anyone had been able to find his graffiti in the first place.

“That’s your reward, I guess,” Yuri had simply said with a shrug. “But hey, I wouldn’t turn down financial compensation for the permission to use it.”

After having paid Yuri a fair pay for the design, Claude and Dimitri got their matching tattoos, a stylized tattoo of the constellation Phoenix, Claude’s on his left shoulder and Dimitri’s on his right. Claude hooks his arm through Dimitri’s and smiles at him.

“I love it,” he tells Dimitri needlessly. He’d told Dimitri a hundred times before, but he’d say it a million times more, just to see him wear that smile.

I love you, he means, leaning in towards Dimitri.

“I love it too,” Dimitri says, smiling like the sun.

I love you too, Dimitri means, leaning in to meet Claude’s lips.

The world may not be boundless as it was when they’d been ghosts, but in one aspect, it’s still the same—because whenever they’re together, it’s just them and that's all that they need.