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—•~ I. Running Stitch ~•—
The first scars Dedue gets are tiny, nearly imperceptible dots on his cheek and arms. They sprinkle the backs of his hands. On his knee, there are the kinds that children get when they are too young for language but old enough for curiosity. They collect as each learns that the world is a place with rough edges. Each will learn they are not cushioned against stone. As a lanky kid, Dedue has lots of skin to teach.
Then there are burns that fly, little dots at the arcing end of cackling pots of golden boiling oil. Nothing good comes without cost. This is the price for crispy sweet dough and sugar to powder it. Dedue recoils as he drops pale rings into the fryer. All of his donuts come out slightly oblong, but they taste better because they are his.
When it comes to other markings, warts and moles and skin-tags are all promised with age. Birthmarks are the biggest crapshoot. Dedue has none to splotch his skin, but his parents reassure him that’s fine. All the angst starts when a trader from Fódlan he meets in the market tells him that birthmarks are where the goddess whispers to you in the womb. Everyone knows Duscur people don’t often have birthmarks. Dedue knows knows the implication.
His mother reassures him, that’s nonsense. His parents say that these accidents of heat and touch, which end up strangely pigmented, are the angel kisses of domestic life. Whatever the goddess could tell you could only be as good as scrapes and burns. They teach a child, as Dedue’s mother coos to him nightly, “you are not immune to the world, but neither is it immune to you.”
One day he reaches for the belly of a lazing cat. It’s a calico and he is interested in its fur, whether the different colors feel different when you pet them. Instead of granting an answer, the cat writes two lines into his arm that soon read gleaming red. Write and scratch are the same word in Duscur’s tongue, reasonable given the birth of writing as etchings in stone, but one of them is far less kind. It stings more because his curiosity is unsated. Once the bleeding clears and the blood-bark scab falls away, there are parallel rubs of pallor where the cat marked him. To that point he had never sought the companionship of cats and he feels even less compelled now.
—•~ II. Interrupted Suture ~•—
When he can count his age on three or four hands, depending on the reckoning, and little pits from acne’s ghosts speckle his face, he plans the first and only set of deliberate scars in his life. They will almost cross his chest. By his choosing, the thread that holds them closed will be a bright gold-white, not just a color that stands out against his skin, but a little strand of sunlight to hold him closed. That doesn’t carry the stench of hubris in Duscur; the sky god spends half the day blanketing the earth and will not miss another beam. This is not a summons or an equation of status but an echo of abundance.
Fascinated by the idea of himself as the site of design, Dedue practices the stitches the temple doctor will use on him. He experiments on the cooked white-gray flesh of boiled chicken parts. No one else is as amused by that as he is, least not his family when they bite into thread one dinnertime.
“Flossing is for after meals, not during,” his mother scowls disapproval as his father chuckles at his offspring’s ingenuity. “Couldn’t this be done with magic?” She asks what everyone has thought on and off for the last several weeks.
It’s true that magic would be nearly instant, while waiting for this surgery feels like waiting for the eye of a hurricane to pass as the rest marches over. Dedue shakes his head. “It has been tried. In the wrong hands, half of my ribs would go too. Too risky.”
Dedue’s father swallows a mouthful of chicken to add, “it makes sense that magic is not for detail work. That’s why there are no enchanted smithies.”
“Yes dear, I appreciate your continued employment.” Young Dedue lacks a rhetorical palate sensitive to irony but understands the softness intended by how his mother rubs circles into his father’s back.
On the day of the procedure, Dedue inhales fumes from an herbal concoction before sun-up. He wakes to a dinner of clear broth he eats spoonful by spoonful with help from his father, who doesn’t know how to not dote on his son’s new body. As the clear liquid coats his tongue, the herbs that numb the nerves as he reshapes his flesh raise the tide of thought beneath his mind. He remembers a verse embroidered on a cloth with Almyran fractals, pine trees reduced to triangles. If the wound is where the light enters, is the scar the skin yearning after from where it left, or where the light made a home to stay?
In the weeks that follow he thinks about shapes. His body has a new shape that is more Dedue-shaped. It is flatter. He was told that the residue on his chest will look like anchors, but Dedue’s town is on a small and languid river where baskets full of rocks suffice to hold little boats in place. He has never seen the ocean and the anchors that would make his father faint for how much metal they carried. So as he heals, he thinks of more familiar things. He knows pot lids, dandelions sprouting from the ground, trimmed topiary in the common gardens. His sister contributes comparisons to sailboats, eyes, and finally smiles. “Now that you have two smiles, you have three,” she exclaims, the only one remotely as mirthy as he is. She’s excited that where she once had a withdrawn, uncertain sibling, he now holds himself like he cares what he’ll wake to. He’s less excited when she accidentally nudges him in a still-healing nipple and crackles of pain spiderweb in his vision.
Dedue recuperates in the company of an old calico who lies on his belly as it goes up and down. His chest scars graduate from red to purple to brown, the wound-pit around them from purpled to yellowed to just the rich brown of skin. The body makes a rainbow as the light passes through it.
They are just about healed enough for his range of motion to return when his whole body becomes a battleground. The winter snow melts to puddles along the roadside by the heat of the land and its people burning. When the fires die down, the muddy pools refreeze in the night as ice with the same sheen as a scar.
—•~ III. Faerghus Knots ~•—
The largest scar from the Tragedy is one of the spirit. It fills not only a man but a people, exists between people, binds them in a collagen of grief. Dedue sprinkles bits about his family just to keep them alive a little longer, like the priests of Seiros flinging holy water on congregants on feast days. At one of his first services, he pretends not to hear “don’t let it touch him. He'll sizzle” because he knows it would be unbecoming to punch someone in a church. After the service, he asks the fool who had the nerve what the wand the priest uses is called. To his surprise, the fool knows. Dedue learns it’s called an aspergillum, which is an overgrown word for “sprinkler.” “Take it and shove it up your ass” isn’t his most eloquent repartee, but the knuckle-to-nose contact that follows is crisp and satisfying. He sees the prince approaching from behind and snaps to anxious attention. “I saw nothing,” Dimitri shrugs.
After a time, telling stories about his dead feels like picking at a scab to keep the wound fresh. He curls up at night in his closest pillbug impression and silently wishes “I want to go home” but wakes up and he’s still among unfamiliar stones in Fhirdiad. He tells Dimitri that the lines on his chest are wounds from the tragedy. “Someone tried to chop you open,” the prince says with a strange mixture of awe and disgust Dedue doesn’t interrogate. Dedue knows the more impressive side, that he chose it and it made him better, excising only what wasn’t supposed to be there. Still, it feels like betraying himself to save himself. He only has two smiles again. He thinks of his sister and forgets how to dream.
It changes at Garreg Mach, by degrees. Sunrise tints both faces in the greenhouse pink. A too-orange butterfly lands on Dedue and Ashe sucks in a breath, the clear wishfulness on her face of wanting a moment to stay contained in time like a bumblebee in clasped hands. But the palms of those hands face darkness; moments that last forever are dead; so life goes on and Dedue looks over at Ashe every so often out of habit, like a scribe running out of paper and re-setting their wrist to the margin. Dedue watches Ashe watching the butterfly alighting on his nose. In the triangulation he loses track of himself. A startled cat scampers from the foliage. Dedue stumbles forward. As he falls, he slices the underside of his forearm on the thorns of a plant with pink petals.
Not native to Duscur floats to mind as an automatic tag along with its name. It’s still the broadest grouping for how he categorizes plants, a way he wont grow out of for some months until he sees more of the continent. It’s easier to categorize students that way too— there are a tiny handful to remember relative to the several hundred plants.
Dedue puffs his cheeks and squeezes his eyes teary. Jagged words escape his mouth like trickle from a needle prick. “Ow! Shit, that fucking hurt!” It’s his first time using words he knows Dimitri and Ingrid and Felix and Sylvain know, and it feels good. Ashe gasps. “You’re rougher around the edges than I would have tho—“ the vowel falls to the floor as she sees the ladybird sized drops of blood dewing on his skin.
Many things grow in the greenhouse; they both reach for the leaves of another plant to crush its oils into ointment, laughing with only a little nervousness as their fingers touch. (He still thinks of that touch when he sees the thin scar on his forearm.) Although they both know the sap would be as good as any medicine, he still insists they go to the infirmary. “I would be a burden to everyone if it became infected.”
“So, a tree fell in the forest and someone was around to hear.” Manuela is visibly impressed, nodding as she pokes at the skin on either side of the scrape.
Dedue’s brow bunches. “I’m a man, not timber.”
Manuela bats her lashes tiredly. “Well, yes, that’s why you’re here and not in the greenhouse.”
Ashe clears her throat. “How long to fix him up?”
“I could use magic, but this is shallow and will close without a blemish if cared for properly. So instead, i’ll cast something to speed up the healing process.” Ashe and Dedue mutter perfunctory thank yous in unison. “So that solves that, but— the other thing.” Manuela shakes her head, pendulous gaze swinging to Ashe. “Well, that’s not my job, but I am here.”
“What thing?” Dedue squints, looking for an explanation. “I don't know the other thing.”
Ashe shrugs unconvincingly.
Manuela escorts them to a bed in the infirmary and replaces the makeshift poultice as Dedue drifts in and out of sleep. “You know,” she tightropes between inside voice and whisper, “the plants next to these in the greenhouse are good for reducing blushing.”
“Yes, I know the ones. Dedue and I planted them together.”
“I don't think that increases the effectiveness, but you may find them useful for your symptoms.” Manuela whispers. Ashe glows like a red wolf moon come early. “Yes, like that. Oh, love.”
When Dedue wakes, Ashe is there, whispering to him, “you are not immune to the world, but neither is it immune to you.”
Something left of vertigo blooms in Dedue’s stomach with petals of incongruous warmth. His heart beats outside his body in another time and place. “That is not a common saying. Where did you hear it?”
“Is that so? From my adoptive father. He would always say it when I fell off a horse.” Ashe reaches for her elbows automatically.
“Oh.” Dedue isn’t sure whether to chuckle at clumsiness or solemnize injury.
“I fell off a lot of horses, actually.” Ashe laughs nervously for them both.
Dedue has already dozed off into deep breathing with his head inclined towards Ashe, a smile on his face. Ashe talks anyway, about the casts from breaking one arm and another wrist, how she got the cast off a week before riding for the academy. She closes that saga with, “okay, you’re asleep now.”
Dedue shakes his head with eyes still closed. “I’m listening. Every word.”
Ashe goes on until he doesn’t object to her stopping.
—•~ IV. Back Stitch ~•—
One stint in the nurse’s office does not deter a determined Dedue. He spends even more time in the greenhouse, knees bent against the ground. His form imitates a knuckle curled into a fist, striking earth instead of flesh.
The black threads in his slacks wear thinner and thinner. Seteth had once chastised him for wearing a light Duscur wrap-skirt while gardening— “using the greenhouse is a school activity. According to regulations, a full dress uniform must be worn” — and threatened him with a uniform referral if it happened again. Other students with paler complexions did not seem to be so subject to Seteth’s scrutiny.
During mass one day, the threads give out right as Dedue genuflects in the pew. Not one but both knees yield to the brown of his skin kissing through to the kneeler. The whole congregation is treated to a mid-speed brrrap, a noise mistakable for a wet fart. Dedue has heard of knight kneeler as a technique—this kind of embarrassment might be called a fright kneeler for how he wants to sink into the marble floor. He buries his face in his hands. Head and shoulders above the others, he is in plain view, but no one connects the dots out loud. Manuela looks around. Mercedes smiles with her eyes, the rest of it hidden piously beneath a judicious hand. When the service begins, Dedue finds he has forgotten all the words.
In Dedue’s mind, the arrow of blame is fiery and has a clear arc to fly. It gives him the excuse he needs to not attend future masses, which despite being highly recommended are optional and not all that interesting. Until this humiliation, Dedue had been going to make a show of piety for Dimitri and the others who would whisper suspicions, a kind of when-in-Fódlan crossed with thinly veiled appeasement. All that had gone out the window when the church refused his offer to help with security during the rite of rebirth. His pretense hadn’t mattered and he was sorely aware that he had been wasting his own time. Dimitri was kind enough to give him a broken lance fragment to once more break in half with his fury. The catharsis was worth the splinters.
Duscur’s religious tradition holds grafts like a citrus tree, eager to carry all customs to the point of contradiction. While this includes the basic theology of the Church of Seiros, the particulars of uneventful sitting and sometimes standing for almost two hours is not something Duscur had the patience to adapt. Dedue can’t say he misses it. He spends the extra time back in the greenhouse, stubbornly refusing to have learned any lesson.
“The goddess always forgives, you know,” Mercedes says to him later when they’re scrubbing washing dishes beside each other. “It's the people who are less reliable.”
“That has been my experience as well,” Dedue lies. The original gods of Duscur are elemental forces with little stake in matters of morality. It’s better that way, in his estimation. If he had believed whole-heartedly in a forgiving goddess as a child, he could only read his life as a screed of reasons to stop believing. He was told faith works in mysterious ways, but the only thing that has put results in hand is a tight-knit and stubborn diaspora. It seems a foolhardy luxury to embrace a serendipity that has never come.
He deepens his scowl and scrubs at a crusty bit of seasoning and marinade that has turned to cement on a grill. It distracts him from looking at Mercedes's hopeful face. He gives up to let it soak more.
Mercedes blinks thoughtfully, rubbing at a spot on a mug with a gloved thumb. “Did you know that Ashe looks for you when you’re not there? Up and down the aisles during services. Scanning…” She widens her eyes ever so slightly, donning the curious expression Dedue would recognize on Ashe’s face, and leans forward to imitate looking down the long pews in the cathedral.
The plate Dedue is scrubbing sinks between his open fingers to the bottom of the tub, hitting with a bubbly thud. “Really?”
“Every time.” Mercedes nods solemnly. “Like a lost sunflower, looking for light. It’s especially bad since, you know, her father died.” She’s polite enough to look away as Dedue’s face wrinkles into a damp frown.
Later that night, Ashe sits on Dedue’s bed, half-wrapped in the rarely-used comforter. Her hands fit, palm and all, through the holes in the knees. She wiggles her fingers as if this is all unreal. Dedue recognizes it as a sort of exhausted delirium, supported by purple semicircles below her eyes.
“You probably remember when this happened,” Dedue nods in Ashe’s direction. “I wanted to disappear more than usual.”
“I’d say it was the most exciting thing to happen since one of the ministers dropped some of the ceremonial food on the floor and had to eat it. Not that it was exciting for you— or the minister— ” Ashe catches herself and resets her facial expressions. “I can imagine how awkward it was, seeing as you’ve been gone all these weeks.”
“Awkward— that’s a kind way of putting it. Truthfully, I've put off mending them. Maybe it helped solidify my decision to neglect to attend services. But all that does is torment me. I think I'm ready to put this whole thing behind me.” He leaves it unsaid that mass attendance will remain left behind.
“Do you need help patching them up? I have all sorts of experience. The elbows on my hoodie, for one— and two, I guess.” She holds up her other elbow and laughs nervously.
Dedue looks at her hands to avoid the bags under her eyes. Grief is a thief of restful nights and she is ready to think about anything else. Dedue knows the cycle of half-formed sleep and fitful waking well.
“I can sew fine.” Ashe droops as Dedue starts, distracting and winding him like a punch to the gut. “But, uh— I wasn’t going to get to them until later, so if you’d like to help—“
Whole seasons play on her face in fractions of a second, segments of a blink. “I’d love to.” She's ready with a needle and dark thread from who knows where.
Dedue rubs his chest. “What if we used a gold thread instead?”
“Very funny mister, it’s supposed to be all black. In the uniform code—“ Dedue’s eyebrows buoy on surprise. He can’t tell if she overplays the loopiness or if he’s softened to her charm. “I read it once to put myself to sleep, only I didn't fall asleep. Did you know there are specific regulations for how to wash dishes with the school insignia on them?”
Dedue replays his afternoon in the kitchen and recalls following nothing of the sort. He shakes his head and nudges Ashe’s shoulder. “Perhaps small rebellions prove some things can be overlooked.”
He places a lustrous spool in her palm with a gentle but secure grasp, one that would keep fireflies in the silence between hands.
He doesn’t expect her to take his hand so tightly. Her fingers tap his wrist to feel the truth in his pulse. “Did you mean it about wanting to disappear? Maybe it goes without saying, but I would miss you.”
Dedue picks his words carefully like standing on a ladder beneath a fruit tree. “There is too much to be done.” That sounds excessively morbid, so he adds, “And who would tend to the plants? There are so many of them.”
Ashe nods slowly, satisfied to be in on multiple secrets, and gets to work. She involves herself in the task like the needle burying the thread beneath the fabric. Dedue smiles and watches concentration line her face as she sews.
—•~ V. Chain Stitch ~•—
Dedue’s fingers are thick and stubby, So Ashe is all the more mesmerized as they push the fine needle through the cloth. As a bribe maybe, Dedue embroiders tiny portraits of all of his classmates for the Fódlan gift-giving holidays. Each is no bigger than a wax seal, but it takes a long time to render everyone in thread.
He shows them to Ashe when they’re done. They spend an hour laughing, bent at the waist guessing how their house members will react.
“Dedue— I’m— flattered, you shouldn’t have. How can I repay what you’ve done” Ashe-Dimitri says stiffly before curling in on herself, wondering if she’s committed treason.
“Not as nasally. You need to bring it down into your throat. But that posture!” Dedue puffs out his chest and stands as still as he can before sputtering.
“Looks almost as good as the real thing,” quips Ashe-Sylvain, who rubs his thread-face. “Are my teeth really this white?”
“He would check out an artistic rendering of himself. Ahem.” Dedue unfastens his little ponytail and pretends to arrange invisible hair past its ends. “You’re very good at this,” says Dedue-Mercedes. “The goddess herself would be proud.”
“I don’t know about that,” says an ever-modest Ashe.
“I think you should stick to cooking,” says Dedue-Ingrid, “I can’t eat this.”
“That’s mean. I don't think Ingrid would say that. The first part anyway”
“While she may be more tactful on the surface, I genuinely think she would rather have an edible gift. Unfortunately, steak sculpture and pork portraiture are not one of my strong suits. If Raphael and Ignatz worked together, perhaps.”
“If they were one person, maybe.”
The real distribution is less exciting. Real Felix stares, holding eye contact through the thinning atmosphere before deciding Dedue is not, in this moment anyway, suspicious. “Thanks.” He huffs like no one’s given him a present before.
“Hey handsome,” Sylvain says tentatively. “Thanks, but I'll use a mirror.”
Felix scoffs for some reason. Out of earshot Ashe muses, “I think it would have been different if a girl had given it to him.”
“It feels strange to say that he’s the one with a soft spot for women, but you’re right.” Dedue slows to a halt beside a column.
“So that’s all of them,” Ashe says in a scrunched voice that poorly conceals her real thoughts.
“I figured you’d have guessed.” Dedue pulls one more miniature portrait from the bag and offers it to her.
Ashe tears up and holds her hands to her face. “I knew it was coming but I'm still tearing up. Oh,” she sobs, “goddess help me.”
“I had to work on this one when you weren’t around.”
“Oh.” she runs a finger over her neatly stitched freckles. “This isn’t like the rest of them.” she says, rotating it to watch how it catches the light.
Dedue sees it too, nodding. “The eyes seem brighter.” He worries for a moment that he got the shades of green wrong, but this is the one he double-triple checked. “Maybe because I look at them more. I know them best.”
“Is that what does it? That makes sense.” Ashe looks at Dedue’s face while he looks at the ground.
“Yeah. I—“
Dedue looks up. Neither of them know what to do but give in to the magnetism that brings their bodies together.
The light changes. Dedue sees he got the green right after all. Maybe the freckles— he looks to check but there is no room for light. He stops worrying and closes his eyes. He leans in. Ashe's hand is hot on his cheek as their lips find each other.
—•~ VI. Fly Stitch ~•—
After the professor vanishes and the class scatters like a kicked dandelion, Dedue finds himself hurtling back and forth like a bell clapper between the Duscur quarters of the kingdom’s cities. “Quarter” is in most areas a euphemistic syllabic spackling-over of “slum”, reducing to geography what continues to be a matter of deliberate displacement and neglect. Donggg, donggg, the churches in each settlement have a unique timbre to alert adherents of a goddess who does not help his people. He sees sunburn and frostbite among the threadbare masses huddled houseless. Shelters made of wood and canvas caught outrunning a cycle of decay seep funds from the existences the Duscur manage to eke out.
Dedue writes to everyone he knows, asking, begging, pleading, entreating. He runs Fódlan’s tongue dry of verbs for his people to end up equipped for anything more than the bare minimum of survival. The kingdom was a hard land before it decided to invade a self-sustaining peninsula and only gave itself more mouths to feed. Help will not come from the north.
Raphael and Ignatz send cartfuls of well-made shoes. Leonie sends a shipment of quilts. Ashe sends socks and scarves and a letter Dedue can’t bring himself to read, until one evening curiosity gets the better of him. It’s mostly business, the bureaucratic maintenance of running a beheaded territory. Ashe was always a better reader than a writer. Dedue sees her false starts crossed weakly through. “I will wait for you” “Do you think of me?” “I’m cold without you too.” The same happens to Dedue when he writes back, his quill quivering with what he can’t bring himself to write wrinkling what he can. He sends his extra sheetfulls of lover’s nothings to prove he’s guarded some softness in himself despite the brutality of life. “Do you remember…” “If I could see you, I…” “I think of your smile.”
None of the nobles send money or supplies. Dedue tells himself it’s because they’re not handling their correspondence, that someone else doesn’t know who this no one from Duscur is. Yet nothing changes when he stamps the royal seal of Faerghus into the hot wax. Maybe they then think he’s a no one from Duscur who’s also seeking to defraud. At least Dimitri's excuse for not answering is that he has simply vanished.
One day he gets an unsigned shipment of fabric that had rounded Sreng from Derdriu to Fhirdiad, bolt upon bolt of sturdy cloth to mass produce clothing. He and an army of volunteers stitch and sew by sunlight, moonlight, candlelight. He hears his mother asking “couldn’t this be done with magic?” “No,” he imagines telling her. He wakes and does it by hand, and he does it by hand, and he does it by hand.
In his dreams, his mother is alive. In a flashy swipe, she clears the workspace of sewing tools. Hands flying in movements she never knew, she casts a spell that assembles a thousand suits, all made of something shimmering and sun-bright.
Only at that point does he realize the illusion. He can accept a subconscious that raises the dead, but he has not been able to find that gold thread anywhere. It is a small insult among increasing injury as the kingdom shows no signs of returning the land of Duscur to its people. Some people speak of going to the Empire or the Alliance for better treatment. “This is our chance! When else will it be Duscur’s turn? Die a hero today or die hungry tomorrow!” read hastily hand-written flyers, posted on every bulletin board, in the language’s flowing glyphs. Dedue is uneasy about how living is already precluded from the feasible possibilities. Others speak of undercurrents of war across the continent, stoked embers of old animosity.
He remains as restless as a hummingbird. Five years pass, yet like a loop of thread pulled through it seems to disappear, joining distant areas of the fabric as it goes. The future his people wonder about, where Duscur is reclaimed, remains distant. progress is a relative term; each day is paddling against the current to not slip further towards oblivion.
—•~ VII. Satin Stitch ~•—
When he and Ashe reconvene at Garreg Mach, it takes one touch to know they still remember each other and one night to know they never want to leave each other’s side. There’s a lot of touching, a lot of crying, and a lot less talking than either of them expect. Ashe’s hair is longer and Dedue’s is shorter. Silence is remembering each other’s bodies and correcting for the missing years. They recall each other’s faces and necks and work lower. They fall asleep tangled in each other. Do the ends of an untied knot miss each other?
The moments of intensity felt gradual as dissolution, disintegrating over years. Suddenly they are snapped back. War has its own way of tearing, cutting, piercing, slashing. Someone has to repair the damage. Dedue is ready with his thread.
The battlefield sees a shortage of dyes and dyed thread across the kingdom. Bodies can take any shade of suture, but banners and uniforms, by decree, must match the royal blue. Everywhere from the smallest village up to Fhirdiad empties of that one shade. Red, yellow, and white all run out in their corners of the continent. In times of war more than ever, projecting a unified front is a deliberate exercise. Dedue sees through it as a fiction. With his blue thread he improvises flowers instead, little buds on a field of green. The canvas is the corner of his sleeping bag. This qualifies as another small rebellion.
Ashe looks up from her book one evening to see Dedue frowning over the stitches. She wipes blood off the arrow in her own hands. “Isn’t it strange how we kill people during the day and go back to our old lives at night?”
He thinks he makes out a guilty look on her face, not for the bloodshed but for the asymmetry between them. She knows Dedue also draws blood with his weapons, but he is up so close, splattered by flow still hot on his hands.
Dedue doesn’t look up. “If killing a person left serious marks on the soul, my life would be very different now, I think.”
“I… well. We’ve done what we have.”
Dedue pinches the end of the needle. “I was never good with a sword. If I must hold something sharp and made of metal, let it be this instead.”
Ashe is too invested in a future of knighthood to even contemplate laying down her arms. Nevertheless she also takes up sewing in the evening hours, once the day has gone and the lust for blood and glory cools with the earth. Over the weeks, they embroider each other’s clothes. When Dedue’s scarf wears thin, Ashe places a little violet in the corner. With every nick and cut the small gardens grow.
Ashe takes notice when Dedue begins to wear his scarf differently. It’s subtle, a twist under where it used to be a twist over. Around the dinner fire she whispers to him low enough that it blends in with the simmering of stew in the cast iron pot.
“Um,” and the breath that seals this conversation as happening, “did I do a bad job?” Ashe tugs at her collar to indicate the scarf.
Dedue sniffs the stew, tastes a half spoonful, and adds a pinch of garlic powder. “No. What makes you think that?”
“You hide them. So I thought, maybe it was because you didn’t care for what I did. But now that I ask, it seems silly.”
“I’m glad you asked, because now I can tell you.” Dedue looks into the inside of his scarf, where Ashe’s flowers are stitched in bloom. “It’s the opposite. I adore them.”
The line of her mouth wiggles and shakes like a cross section of ripples.
“Exposed to the elements, they will fade. Exposed to me, they could bloom forever.”
Dedue is skilled at making Ashe’s cheeks wrinkle and eyes leak. He doesn’t expect it when she hooks her fingers on the scarf to find the flowers on the inside and pulls him close. The kiss tastes like under-salted root vegetable stew and all the graininess of under-boiled potatoes, but it ranks among the sweetest things they’ve known.
That evening, they lie in each other’s arms in the semi-dark of the tent, kissing each other repeatedly like a compulsion— and the sweetness lingers. They do it to make sure they are still there, that this is real, not yet effaced by the shifting currents of war. Dedue traces the scar on his arm. Ashe traces the scars on his chest. They become pieces of a whole trying to cleave together.
—•~ VIII. Long and Short Stitch ~•—
Once the sun comes up, most days are more adrenaline than air, more reflex than thought. This one’s no different. Dedue barely senses when the edge of someone’s sword comes away with part of his face.
He only remembers in the aftermath, like wind rushing back upon rarefied air at the center of an explosion. Does he see it or does he imagine, having contemplated dying so many times? The blade travels, his life glinting on the edge of it, close enough for his breath to fog. What an extra insult to be felled by a tarnished blade.
In the moment, a red concentration banishes everything but his opponent from view. He watches his gauntlets slice flesh. Deep and satisfying is the eventual crunch of bone. The swordholder’s arm falls limp as the man turns to run, his gait now uneven with dead weight. Dedue strikes at his back and in a handful of strides the runner crumples to the ground.
Dedue doesn’t pause to be afraid of what he’s becoming. Striking a fleeing foe means someone else will survive. When did he become like this? Another thicker kind of guilt drips cold sweat on him. He doesn’t want to rest. He wants to return to the front lines and take out ten more. He does.
When he returns to camp, the stares are more a cue that something is wrong than the taste of blood, which has faded to background noise.
Ashe’s hold on Dedue’s wrist is noticeably stiff as she guides him to the medic tent. By magic-bright lantern light she fixes the wound ending at the corner of his mouth, dabbing a sponge dampened with an herbal concoction. she grimaces more than he does, which is fine. He can’t grin or gurn without his matching split lips searing. The anticipation is worse than the prolonged sting of the body already tired of recounting its woes. The fumes lift his head from his shoulders and spin it around. She wrings the rest of the liquid into his mouth. He spits it out before forcing his throat to let it down. A crescent frown falls on his face.
“No, no, swallow it! It will reduce the pain. Can you feel it now?”
The buzz of battle has worn off and in its absence, his body fills with aches. Dedue eyes the rest of the concoction. He has tasted blood all day but mistaken it for the adrenaline that soaks him in sweat. It stings to show teeth and bite his tongue. His lips part. The liquid is already the color of dried blood, just thinner. It will fit right at home within him.
“I don’t like pain, but I won’t drink alcohol.”
“It’s not alcohol. It… arguably, it goes down worse. But I can give you something to sweeten it.”
“Okay.”
Ashe gives him a potion and watches his throat bob as he swallows. When he lowers the vial from his lips, Ashe kisses the unwounded half of his mouth.
A week later, the long cut has healed over pale and waxy. He stands from the bed for the last time. Ashe puts her arms around him and kisses the other side.
Dedue looks her in the eyes adoringly. “You kept track.”
Ashe shrugs it off, but all the tight muscle in her shoulders shows it sticks to her like a burr. “I always know how many arrows are in my quiver and how much I love you.”
Dedue cracks a thoughtful, slight smile and leaks softness in wet eyes. “Hm,” he sniffs.
“One of them doesn’t change. Come here.”
He falls into her arms. “You got me.”
She kisses him again, open mouth.
—•~ IX. Fishbone Stitch ~•—
The one time Byleth puts Ashe on the front lines, they fight in a compact village with a stream zagging through it. It’s a labyrinth of ages-old stone like in the myth; the only difference is that there are windows in the walls. All around, steps splash in inch-deep water, but blind corners hide any broader view.
“Promisebreaker” is not a combat art. They had made the unkeepable vow to each other that they would keep each other to have and to hold and that nothing would befall them. It started as a panicked thing but grew into a habit, inhabiting the seam of ritual that grouts life’s fragments into story. A search for safety sprouts the sweet-nothing white lie, oxidizing and growing rancid.
Sites of impending doom are overplayed for their niceness but this hamlet was decaying, held by the stubbornness of stone against gravity and time. There was not a serene blue sky above, no peaceful songs of unknowing birds. Nevertheless, it happens in the space of an exhale.
What breaks Dedue’s promise is an arrow in her chest.
Ashe gets hit near her heart, once, twice, fwish-thunk-crunch all in the same sliver of sound. She slouches in a recessed doorway and swigs enough of Manuela's concoctions to survive the battle and the ride back to camp. All of her vision has the blur of fast-passing scenery usually reserved for the periphery.
As she staggers in, the façade of immortality wearing thin, Dedue notices the arrows, plural, sprouting like stems from her chest. He hastily scratches out all sorts of clunky archery metaphors in the drafted poems and pick-up lines heaped in his head. She’s walking towards him when she collapses.
This is a rush job for the mages, but their literal hand-waving does nothing. The sigils in the air and radiant ritual circles dissolve into motes of less than nothing. Ashe is left with her heart still pumping blood into too much open air. Before Dedue can open his mouth to wonder what the fuck is going on, one of the mages curses, “magic weapon.” “Like the one that killed Jeralt” follows the kind of space where Ashe wouldn't want to hear her name next to someone with skill.
Dedue pushes his way through the circle to see her. She’s pale, her body almost as lifeless as the marble in the Garreg Mach statuary. Dedue knows this is a side effect of the slowing herbs they powdered onto her tongue, but it still makes him uneasy. This is his first time seeing her naked. Although they’ve been intimate, it was only ever in the dark, when even one candle could have given them away.
“Step aside,” Dedue commands. After objections, he forces out, “the magic must be treated with the mundane.” Said like he knows what he’s talking about. That clears his way.
Up close, he realizes the pool of blood should have been obvious. It’s mostly dried, but a gurgling ruby spring glistens. The place for a suture is at once in her flesh and in his soul.
One of the mages smirks at his pause and calls his bluff. “What can you possibly know that we don’t?”
Dedue pretends not to hear the question, lest he bite their head off. He has been a battlefield medic for these types of wounds since the war broke out. It was a natural outgrowth of his abilities. He's in high demand too, as the proportion of magic weapons used by the enemies increases. The contrast is interesting to him: he cuts wide strokes with an axe or gauntlets, and then labors over a magnifying glass to close fingernail-thin slices out of flesh.
Dedue stares at the mage. In his hands are a needle and a spool of gold thread. In his heart is the stubborn conviction that the right stitches will stop both of their hearts from spilling out.
He cleans his hands, cleans the needle, and cleans the thread. His hands are shaking so much he can barely push it through the eye. He knows he needs to be the one to close it. It needs to be the work of his hands, for her. Tears splatter on the magnifying lens. Maybe he should have studied a stronger magic, or convinced Ashe to wear full armor, or given her a faster horse, or— any of the thoughts people have when searching for any prior moment in their insignificant life that could have diverted this one.
He imagines he’s embroidering a strange flower, no, a star on a gift to give his classmates at the officer’s academy.
Time slows down by a factor of a thousand once he ties the knots and cuts the loose ends. It's almost as if he’s blinked and now the wound has closed by itself, though he knows it was his hand. He knows he’ll have time to untie and unwind what he just did. It will play over and over again at night as he waits.
Hours later, she wakes up and tries to stand. Dedue holds her down with a hand at her shoulder.
“Oh.” She drags sleep-heavy fingers across Dedue’s chest. “We’re the same now.”
“You think?” Dedue’s voice wavers with care.
“Mhm.” Ashe nods without opening her eyes.
“You need to heal, so sleep, okay?” He realizes she can’t see the thread shine beneath her bandages. “Ashe?”
She shakes her head like a windchime in the breeze, smiling lazily at the back of her eyelids until she falls asleep. Dedue doesn’t get an explanation, but he does relearn how scars can exist between people.
—•~ X. Tying the Knot ~•—
When peace settles over Fódlan, it comes like a dusting of snow, or powdered sugar sticking tentatively to a dessert. At first it melts and fills only the crevices, but eventually it’s inevitable.
In what feels like the pinnacle of excess, they sew themselves two pairs of wedding clothes in different styles, one set for the ceremony at Castle Gaspard and one set for Duscur.
They had started to sew the fabric flowers for their wedding clothes on hot battlefield evenings—there was no proposal or verbalization of what it was for. The understanding was that if something were to happen, they would have the remnants as unwilting petals. Others noticed how it gave them something to live for beyond blood and banging and booze. In the assembly, months later, they realize that some of the others who had contributed died in combat.
On his own, Dedue had embroidered a convincing facsimile of Ashe’s wound and then built it into the stem of a bouquet of flowers. When she wears the dress, it bursts from her heart. It works as a sort of penance: from the wound bursts flowers of southwest Faerghus. From elsewhere, flowers of Duscur.
“I wish you could have used my mother’s wedding clothes, but she was a mountain of a woman.”
“I confess to being only a hill of a woman,” Ashe shrugs.
After a decade of growth, the shell of Duscur’s destruction crumbles under the weight of its rebirth. Aggressive trees push through skeletons of scattered structures, their branches wind-swatting at the charred remains until the latter crumbles.
Water is more constant. It flows clean and slow in the old valleys. It’s by water’s guidance thay they find where Dedue’s hometown stood. A river runs through it like a blue seam. He stands in it and knows in his heart that the first loop of his life has been tied. The knot can begin to close.
They hold their wedding in Gaspard territory on the day on the day Ashe passes the inheritance to her siblings. The ceremony involves lots of white, which Dedue grins and bears. White is the color of bone and death in Duscur, but means a fresh start and untracked snow in Faerghus.
It was always the plan to have two weddings, but bureaucracy holds up the second. They were to hold the next ceremony on the same day that Duscur is returned to its people, a knot cut and a knot tied. The first day of spring was chosen to represent the thaw in relations. Ashe and Dedue faced no objections to the symbolic value of being the first wedding in a new but different Duscur.
In the main plaza of the easternmost city of Duscur, most of which is tents and tarps, when the sun is straight overhead, he hangs a knife over a bow at the new border and drops it, slicing the peninsula from Fódlan once again. The ten years apart recede into a past that can be delineated, split off from a future within reach.