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The greenhouse is one of the few buildings left fully intact. For all the destruction Edelgard’s army had wrought upon the monastery, it seemed they had bypassed it entirely, too busy battering at the front walls and inflicting ruin following their leader’s crimson path. Dimitri amuses himself for a moment in thinking that perhaps they did not find much appeal in stomping on flowers and uprooting trees. Then he remembers the scorched landscape, the rubble they made of everything else and his amusement flees on the heels of old, long-held anger.
His hands tremble.
Tonight he is almost frighteningly lucid though the ghosts still hiss at the back of his mind. Tonight he stands unblinking in front of a small patch of flowers and remembers a deep voice narrating their origins. He can’t remember all of it, just bits and pieces. His fractured focus sticks mostly to the memory of Dedue’s hands patting down the dirt, gentle in a way Dimitri had never managed himself.
He is dizzy with this memory, so dizzy he buckles at the knees, feeling sick with something that grows heavy in the hollow beneath his ribs and twines into his lungs. He falls fighting for another breath.
The flowers are right in front of his face now and he fixes his eye on the pale petals. Duscur’s flower fields, he thinks in a moment of striking distraction, and only feels worse. He wants to leave this place. His feet should have never led him here, heavy from hours of pacing, hours of promising vengeance for every ghost he ever failed. Hours that left him cold and weak and nailed to the ground now on his knees like a penitent.
He cannot even close his eye, cannot bow his head to beg for forgiveness like he should.
Dedue’s ghost has always been kind to him, undeserving as he is, a kindness he has not earned.
“Your Highness,” it – he says.
“Leave me,” Dimitri chokes. “ Leave me .”
“Your Highness,” Dedue repeats, closer now. His voice is deliberate, measured. Dimitri hallucinates softness into the syllables.
A hand closes around his arm, gentle. The other curls around him and in his weakness Dimitri leans in and does not fight to get away. “Your Highness, I am right here.”
“I know,” he gasps into the empty greenhouse.
Dedue pulls him upright and Dimitri keeps his eye closed as they move. He feels wretched, his mind spilling out the sides of his skull, stumbling on each step even as Dedue half-carries him. Solid, steady Dedue. Dedue whose kindness lives in the center of his open palms.
Dedue who repeats himself. “I am right here, Your Highness.”
Dedue who lowers him down onto one of the greenhouse’s remaining benches, who raises a flask to his mouth and lets him drink. Cold, sweet water that settles his roiling stomach and clears some of the fog from his mind. Dimitri still does not open his eye. He doesn’t not dare to.
Dedue does not mind. He sits by his side and does not speak again but their knees knock together as Dimitri relearns how to breathe. His body is a deep well of warmth and Dimitri unfurls towards him in increments. By the time the rasp leaves his chest his body is listing with exhaustion, leaning to the right where his head is already resting against Dedue’s shoulder.
“You’re here?” he asks, mouth barely moving.
“I’m here,” Dedue responds, just as quiet.
In that safe silence, the rest of the flowers bloom.