Chapter Text
Death was something that Elizaveta had thought too much and not enough about all at the same time.
Of course she was familiar with the concept – blood and swords and war and the moment you skewered your enemy and watched the life exhale from his body; the soft drifting of her own people as they passed on from her, whether they were dying for her on a battlefield or slipping away from her in a hospital bed.
She knew too much of loss and war to not understand death.
But at the same time, it had never really been a possibility for her. She was too strong for the clutches of death to ensnare her like it did so many others, and the lives of her people thrummed eternally in her veins like one central heartbeat alongside her own, keeping her strong.
Once, she thought Gilbert had been strong too.
Once, she thought he was unstoppable, a force of nature, all wild white hair and bloodthirsty red eyes and flashing steel and the grin of the devil.
Now she knew better.
Now she knew that his fingers were soft when they traced her skin – sweet and almost reverent, like whispering silk. Now she knew that his lips were gentle when they pressed against hers, his hands tentative and loving when they rested on her hips. His words were feather-light when he whispered them into her ear late at night – soft promises that she was the only one he’d ever love, his sweet Elizaveta.
Their first kiss was full of fire, the passionate proclamation of an unstoppable force and an immovable object colliding and melting together.
Their last, though… their last kiss was like dying embers, soft and subdued and fading quickly.
Far too quickly.
Towards the end, he had seemed fragile in a way that surpassed a failure of flesh and bone and seemed to cling to his very spirit, suffocating him with the weight of several centuries’ worth of memories and pulling him down into the mire of a millennia of regrets.
He had started to cling to anything familiar and had begun to pray more and more, subconsciously realising that the meeting his maker had scheduled for him was drawing nearer and surrounding himself with a religion he’d long since deserted.
Not because he was afraid of being judged by the powers that be, but because it offered comfort, like a well-loved toy from childhood that still smelt like home when held close.
Latin Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s still slipped smoothly from his lips like he was made to speak them, and Elizaveta supposed in a way, he was – his people may have spoken German but he was born with the “Amen” of a knighthood that had taught him bloodshed and death were the work of God.
It hadn’t surprised her when he’d asked her to come with him to the Order that morning, and she’d known when she’d had to almost carry him down to the church that he wouldn’t be coming back.
But there, as she watched him stumble and fall on legs too weak to support him as he walked to the altar…
It was then she realised that she wasn’t ready for him to go.
He was too light in her arms as she held him, as though there was little of him left and he was just a hollow shell pretending to be whole. He smiled up at her with a tiny twitch of his lips, a ghost of his usual grin – a lie that tried to tell her “I’m fine.”
It was meant to reassure her.
Instead it just broke her a little more.
His hand was cold where it was clutched in hers, but she didn’t look down at it for fear her composure would break when she was able to see the green cotton of her skirt through his arm.
He wasn’t dying, like so many of his people had before him.
He was fading.
Like a dream or a memory that no-one had any time for anymore; a nation that now existed only in history books that were gradually gathering dust.
An ageless idea whose age had come to an end.
Smiling weakly, he lifted one of his hands to her face, tracing her cheek gently, and though she could barely feel his incorporeal fingers she leant into his touch.
“Liz, you’re… you’re crying.”
She let out a sob, a sound she almost managed to disguise as a laugh and raised her hand to cover the one on her cheek, feeling a fresh wave of tears at the way she could feel it and then not, as though it were pulsing in and out of existence with his heartbeat.
His lone heartbeat.
His people were gone – he had no heartbeats beating alongside his own, no pull and push of thousands of lives keeping him afloat on the sea of time.
He had little left but scant moments snatched from the clutches of death.
Elizaveta took a shaky breath and squeezed his hand a little, trying to summon a smile – one last smile, just for him.
“Gilbert… does it hurt?”
He smiled, hand falling exhaustedly from her cheek to her lap. She didn’t even feel the impact when it fell onto her thigh.
“No. It just feels… soft, like when you’re going to sleep after a long day.”
He took a shallow breath through lungs that were refusing to inhale, smiling unseeingly up at the ceiling.
“I’m ready, Liz.”
She gripped his fading hand a little tighter, as though trying to anchor him. He just returned his gaze to her, red eyes soft and nostalgic.
“I want to go home and see Fritz, and everyone else. I’ve conquered all I was ever going to and I’ve done everything I was meant to. I’m meant to go, now.”
He coughed weakly, silver hair flickering in the candlelight from the altar.
“I’m going to miss you, and Lud, and everyone else. I'm going to miss you all so much, but… Liz, listen to me. If there’s a way…”
He stopped to take a breath, grabbing her hand in both of his and just managing to lift it a little bit.
“If there’s a way for me to come back, I’ll find it. If there’s a way for me to see you again then I’ll do it. I won’t leave you.”
His eyes, glazed and unfocussed, slid gently closed, and she let out a genuine sob, leaning down and giving him a gentle kiss.
She felt the smallest smile on his lips, and she pulled back a bit and whispered shakily, not trusting her voice.
“I love you, Gilbert.”
His smile broadened a little, and he whispered back, his voice no louder than a whistle on the wind.
“I love you, Elizaveta, and I’ll love you for as long as this old world will let me. The eternal afterlife’s going to be boring without you.”
She smiled, giving his hand one last squeeze before she gently laid it on his chest, watching as his body faded, becoming more and more transparent until he was little more than a shadow lying on the stone.
Just like going to sleep, she said to herself, reaching up to brush his silver bangs away from his eyes and hoping he could feel it as her fingers went straight through them.
She could feel her tears dripping from her chin, and slowly, she sat back, closing her eyes reverently and taking a steadying breath, feeling the weight on her thighs lessen and knowing he would be gone soon.
She was almost startled when she heard his voice, small and quiet, as though it were echoing to her from several miles away. His hand, a bare trace of an outline now, slipped into hers, and though she couldn’t feel it she saw him trying to squeeze it.
“Liz, say a prayer for me. Please.”
She bit her lip, then nodded just slightly.
She had never been Catholic, not really, but she had heard enough of his prayers in the last few weeks to know how to start.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
His weak voice rose slightly to join with hers, and for a few minutes that was all that mattered. Just the echo of two voices muttering a prayer older than both of them, wishing to delay the inevitable.
Just the echo of two voices uttering the final word together, one shaky but strong, one barely a whisper.
“…Amen.”
He opened his eyes one last time, giving her one last grin and taking a final breath, chest barely even there to rise and fall anymore.
Then, with one final sigh, what little there was left of him faded down to little more than his heartbeat, slowing and drifting away on the breeze.
Thud.
Thud.
…
Thud.
There was a sigh, a whisper – one final grin.
Then he was gone.
Outside, nothing changed; the world continued turning, people continued to bustle by on the streets outside, the heartbeats of her people continued to echo alongside hers.
But in the silence he left behind, Elizaveta’s world shattered.
Part of her seemed to die with him, her chest turning cold and dead as his grin faded from where it had been imprinted on her eyelids, gone with merely a careless blink.
The church was empty, and there was nothing, just a clink as she shifted and her knee nudged something on the ground.
She looked down to spy something glinting, lying where it had fallen on the stone steps to the altar, and shakily, she leant down to pick it up, letting it fall into her palm.
It was an old, tarnished Iron Cross.
And it was still warm.
The first sob burst from her like a bullet, and the rest followed like an avalanche or a flood; unstoppable and immeasurable. She collapsed onto the steps, unable to deal with the crushing grief that swept into her lungs and made it difficult to breathe; the grief that constricted her heart and made her blood run cold.
He was really gone – not missing because he’d been hidden behind a wall that separated him from his brother, but gone. There was nowhere on this earth that he could be.
She was alone.
Her sobs echoed around the church, parroted back to her by the stone walls until she had no tears left to shed and she was just left with a pain that permeated her frame and refused to fade; a pain of loss that felt more real and close now than it ever had before.
Then she just sat – she sat until her knees went cold and numb from the stone floor, her aching eyes staring at the space where she’d last seen him as though it could bring him back.
But there was nothing she could do or say, no magic wish that could make anything better, so she just sat, listening to the world shrugging and moving on as though everything was alright when nothing could possibly be alright ever again.
She faintly registered the church doors opening and closing and footsteps cautiously approaching the altar, and a few moments later she felt a large, tentative hand on her shoulder and heard an even more tentative voice saying her name.
“Elizaveta?”
Ludwig.
She turned to face him slowly, taking in his unkempt state and red rimmed eyes as he sat gingerly next to her on the steps. She watched as he looked around the church before turning back to her with the one question she didn’t want to answer written all over his face.
He’s gone, isn’t he?
She opened her mouth; closed it again. Then she turned away, unable to meet that questioning blue gaze. Unable to tell him the truth.
She knew that he understood the answer in her silence when his shoulders hunched a little and his head drooped, and she knew that he was breaking apart by the short gasp he took trying to hold back his tears.
He spoke quietly, his voice wavering.
“I knew it was going to be today. I knew, and I came as fast as I could, but I didn’t know where you were and I… I missed it. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
His voice caught in his throat, and she leaned over, just barely managing to wrap an arm around his wide shoulders and smooth her hand up and down his arm.
“He was so, so proud of you Ludwig. He was so proud of how strong you’d become, and he loved you so much. I don’t think he would have wanted you to see him… like that.”
She registered the fist in her lap cramping around something and looked down to realise that she was still clutching Gilbert’s Iron Cross tightly. The points, though long since worn to rounded corners, were pressing hard lines into her skin, and slowly she released her fingers from around it, reluctant to let another piece of him go.
But then she looked back up at Gilbert’s little brother in front of her, who was trying to remain as stoic as ever while he tried to deal with the grief of losing his brother and mentor.
She took a breath and leant forward, pressing the Iron Cross into Ludwig’s hands.
“I think… he’d want you to have this. He knew that you would take good care of it.”
He opened his hands slowly, taking a moment to realise what it was – but when he did, all resolve disappeared and he burst into tears, sobbing openly.
“Oh God Elizaveta, it was all my fault, if I’d just protested when everything started merging, but I didn’t, he just gave up everything and I just took it, and – ”
She gently put her arms around his shoulders, rubbing his back as he accepted the embrace and wept into her shoulder.
“Ludwig, you can’t blame yourself for this. It isn’t your fault, not in the slightest. He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself, not when he thought you worried too much to begin with.”
She shushed him softly, her hands smoothing up and down the worn cotton of his shirt. She felt Ludwig sigh shakily into her shoulder, and she began to rock slowly back and forth, humming softly.
“We’ll be alright.”
She took a deep breath, looking up at the high windows of the church that were letting sunlight stream down onto the pair of them, as though two worlds hadn’t just fallen apart at the seams.
But then, the universe was often an insensitive place.
They’d pull through.
They had to.