Chapter Text
When she had been a little girl, Dorothea had dreamed of one day standing inside of the Imperial palace. When she had been very young, she had still had the spun-sugar dreams her mother would weave for her about the lives of the nobility and the Imperial family. Even to work inside of the Imperial palace as a scullery maid would have afforded them with more riches than Dorothea could even imagine, when they were living inside of their draughty hovel in the slums and every rainstorm in the summer turned the floor into a quagmire. Even scullery maids inside of the Imperial palace were assured of meals at daybreak and nightfall. Even scullery maids were assured of somewhere dry and warm to sleep once their duties for the day were done. And it wasn’t like the work would have been any more difficult than what Dorothea and her mother were already doing out in the streets of Enbarr. It might have actually been easier, since neither of them would have to be learning new things every morning, and there would have been actual rules about what they were doing.
(It would have been safer than pickpocketing, too. But Dorothea had had to learn quickly, and there was no swifter school for teaching than the school of hard knocks. When her mother was still alive, her own extreme youth had always saved her from consequences more severe from being knocked to the ground and relieved of her own ‘earnings.’ Even then, she had resented it. It had always been men who would never have even marked the loss of a few coins if they had not felt that bony little hand fishing around in their coin purse for a handful. It would never have hurt them to lose the three or four coins she had needed to secure supper for herself and her mother. But men like that were always the angriest when they realized what they were doing, and eventually, she had grown old enough that though her resentment only burned hotter within her heart, she had cause to be considerably more fearful of what those men might do to her if they caught her at it. Extreme youth wasn’t a protection anymore, and you always heard stories about what happened to the unluckiest pickpockets—you never found them, exactly, but you would find… bits of them.
She was always looking for things safer than pickpocketing. Somehow, nothing ever was.)
When she had been a little older, Dorothea’s dreams had burgeoned in scope and ambition. When she dreamed of standing in the Imperial palace, she dreamed of doing so in silks and jewels, clean and perfumed, with flesh enough on her bones that her bones were no longer visible beneath. Never mind that even before Manuela had found her and she had gone to sing on a stage, she had come to despise everyone who dwelled within that place except for the scullery maids she had once dreamed of being like. Never mind that no matter how polished she look, no matter how alike to a lustrous gem, there would still be those who sneered and whispered of the mud that stained her soul. It had been what she wanted more than anything. Everything else promised her only loneliness. Every other dream she had ever had, she had woken up with phantom hunger clawing at her stomach, her mother’s death rattle beating on the walls of her throat. There had been but one escape.
Dorothea had entertained many dreams about the Imperial palace. The only time she had ever stood in it was in the imagination of her audience. In time, those dreams had faded. That was, in the end, the only fate of all of her dreams. They grew ragged and moth-eaten with old age and long abuse, stretched so thin that the more the years the wore on, the more difficult it was for Dorothea to put a name to what she had ever found appealing about them at all. (But she still needed to do something if she wasn’t to wind up the way her mother had wound up, she had to do something…) She had stood in the middle of opera sets and sang until her throat ached, and for a time the crowds would forget she was just a singer and really believe her a princess, but Dorothea was never similarly transported. No clouds every brushed her head, and her feet were always planted firmly on the ground.
She hadn’t thought about it seriously in years. The business of survival had always taken primacy over all else, especially once she had left Enbarr behind her and struck out for the mountains surrounding Garreg Mach. You couldn’t ever afford to let your head rest on a pillow of clouds when you never knew where your next meal was coming from. Dorothea had known girls like that, back in the days when the only ways she could ever scrape up any coin was by pickpocketing or begging or diving into fountains to see what people had tossed in (And praying no one would cite the public nuisance laws). She’d known a lot of girls like that. Lots of things had happened to them. None of those things had been good.
If Dorothea did think about those past dreams, then it had been with a bitter pall thrown over her thoughts. She would have just been miserable, anyways. Those had always been her choices—misery, starvation, or both. They had been her only choices.
Were still her only choices. The years wore on, and the world burned and burned out and burned anew around her, and no matter where Dorothea’s feet might carry her, no matter who she met and what she did, there was only ever sorrow to sing of.
And death.
How… how could she forget?
There was always death to sing of.
Dust motes glittered like stars in the throne room as her fellow victors milled about listlessly, like shambling corpses if shambling corpses were actually capable of breathing and murmuring to each other, rather than recurring characters in the stories she and the other girls had whispered to each other when circumstances had forced them to shelter in the necropolis for the night and one of them or all of them decided that sleep was just for the weak. No one seemed to know what to do with the mountain that was the carcass of the Demonic Beast they had felled perhaps an hour ago. No one seemed to know what to do with Dedue’s body, broken as it had been on the talons of the beast. No one seemed to want anything to do with—
Deep breath. Deep, steady, dry breath. Not here. There were too many people here who could look up and let their eyes light on her. Few of them were her friends. She must…
Of all of the ways Dorothea had ever dreamed of one day standing in the Imperial palace, reality had proven to be utterly unlike even her darkest dreams. How, after all, could a poor girl from the slums ever dream of one day marching into Enbarr at the head of an invading army? How could she ever dream of breaching the palace gates and throwing down the emperor and her most trusted allies (The only allies who had stayed by her side, the only ones who were true—)? It was beyond dreaming. It was totally unthinkable.
And yet, here she was. Not standing, but sitting in an alcove on the far edge of the throne room, wishing there was a curtain she could draw so that no one might see her face. Staring across the gloom of the throne room at the small figure lying prone on the floor before the throne, like a sacrifice upon a pagan altar, obscured by a dark cloak while a sea of blood lapped at its hems. Her stomach lurched. She could not tear her eyes away.
A story fit for a song.
A scene that would live in her nightmares even after senility had rotted all waking memory away.
(Had anyone even thought to bring Hubert’s body inside? It was boiling outside. The air was thick with flies and Enbarr had long been a haven for crows and seagulls alike, had anyone thought—)
She didn’t know why she was… Why should it come as such a shock? This was the conclusion she had been trudging towards for months, ever since she had returned to Garreg Mach in the frosty light of the Ethereal Moon and had stumbled across classmates she’d not seen in years and a professor she’d not thought she would see ever again. Whether she had willed it or not, whether or not she or any of the other Black Eagles or their professor who had returned beyond all hope had actually wanted it or not, their path had been bringing them here, all this time. Here they were, walking past Hubert’s grave on the way to their end goal. Here they were, stopping at the finish line to dig Edelgard’s grave.
(Was it the finish line? Was even this the end? They were still searching the palace for any sign of the archbishop, and given just how massive the palace complex was, and how likely any staff they were might find still here were to be cooperative, they could well be searching for days. And even when they found her, that was no guarantee that things would really be over. They had gone down the eastern half of the Empire, and left the western half largely untouched. It wasn’t as if Edelgard had been a despot ruling with an iron fist. People had believed in her; would they really just throw down their arms and capitulate to the Church just because she—)
This was always the conclusion the story would come to. This was always the final note of the song she was singing. Ever since she had left Enbarr behind her, ever since she had resolved that she would not seek Edelgard out and offer her services as a general or a mage or whatever Edelgard might have had her do in this war of hers, ever since Dorothea had gone to the monastery on the promised day and found Professor Melusine and Seteth and Flayn and the other Black Eagles waiting, she had been walking a path and singing a song that could lead only either to this conclusion, or her own death. It was always going to end this way: her in the throne room, stained with the blood of her friends, worn to the bone, wishing there was anywhere she could go where none of the knights or other Church officials could see her.
It was always going to end like this.
Sit up straight. (She had been leaning against the hard, unyielding wall. Almost imagining that it was someone’s side. Wishing that there was an arm wrapped around her shoulders.)
It was always going to be like this.
She had brandished her blade, and held it to the throats of her friends. How could she have ever forgotten that when she slid that blade across exposed flesh, that blood would pour forth, and life would ebb away?
It was always going to be like this.
Another deep, shuddering breath, and Dorothea had to remind herself not to look down at her hands. They were dry. She knew they were dry. But she still imagined they were wet. If only there was somewhere she could go to be alone…
Don’t put your arms around yourself. (There had always been herself for comfort, even when there was nobody else. Often, there was nobody else. But if anyone thought she needed comfort now—)
It was always going to be like this. So why did she still feel this way?
No tears. This was like being on stage. This was like being directed into the sitting room of some nobleman or rich merchant or another’s townhouse after management had prevailed on her to get in his carriage when he asked, only to find that he had wanted to bring her back to his home rather than simply take her on a ride through the streets of Enbarr. This was like being in the cathedral during Mass and pretending that she felt anything at all during prayers and hymns and exhortations to look towards the emerging Blue Sea Star in hope. There was a face she needed to affix to her head, a certain sort of expression she needed to affect, and if rarely ever did that face and that expression have anything to do with what she was actually feeling, well, long experience had been quite an able teacher. She knew how to put on a show. She knew how to keep people from realizing that she was doing it. It was simple. No one ever realized it.
Hardly anyone ever realized it.
She was not alone here. She could never have believed herself alone. Even when she shut her eyes, there was still the susurrus of murmuring voices, still the clank of armor, still the groans of the wounded, though they had been hauled out of the throne room to somewhere a little less crowded a little while ago, so that Manuela and Flayn could see to them without having to hop and skip over all of the corpses. (Those, she did not dare look at. She had known a lot of people when she had had no home in the many streets and avenues and narrow alleyways of Enbarr. Many of them would have joined the army when the war started or sooner, the only way they could imagine that they could ever even have a chance of earning their fortune being in the army, by making a name for themselves in battle. But people like that, people who emerged from the slums to join the army, they weren’t the ones out there distinguishing themselves and earning acclaim. They were the ones who died—in droves.) She was not alone. Sit up straight. Don’t put your arms around yourself. People can see you.
The others had… They’d gone. Caspar and Petra were helping some of the soldiers pile weapons in one of the side rooms. (She wished she knew the names of any of the rooms here, besides the throne room. But then, Dorothea had never been in the Imperial palace before, and she had found it a veritable rabbit warren of rooms and passageways.) Bernadetta was… Dorothea thought she had managed to do what Dorothea herself couldn’t bring herself to do, and had taken herself off somewhere private to cry or throw up or whatever else it was that might rule her now. Ferdinand had gone off somewhere with Melusine and Seteth a while ago; she hadn’t been close enough to hear just what they were saying, but his voice had been high and full of strained jocularity, like he, too, was an actor, and trying to cover for his having forgotten half of his lines. Linhardt was—
Someone came and sat down beside her. Dorothea could not at first find it in herself to turn her head, look to see who it was who had decided to come and share her seat, share her sick, hollow grief. (I’m so sorry, Edie; I just couldn’t…) Didn’t want them to see her face. Couldn’t tear her eyes away from that little dark lump at the foot of the throne. She kept telling herself to sit up straight, kept telling herself not to wrap her arms around herself, but she couldn’t keep from clasping her hands tightly in her lap. Afraid of what she might find herself doing with her hands if she did not keep them bound to one another, if she did not keep track of what they were, did not keep them still.
The person who had come and sat down beside her heaved a long, long sigh. At first, Dorothea responded to this only by sticking her neck out, staring even more determinedly at the straight line afforded her by her vantage point. But it occurred to her, after a few moments, that that voice was familiar to her.
She could have smiled for the irony of it, if there was anything that could have persuaded her to smile at all. Or was it irony? Was that really the word she was looking for? She didn’t know. She couldn’t be bothered to think of what might be more appropriate instead? Edelgard and Hubert were dead, and Dorothea’s hands might be dry, but they were red with blood, anyways.
Anyways, Linhardt did have the habit, whether it was a bad one or a fortuitous one, of stumbling on her when she was in tears, or on the verge of tears, or swallowing them down and hoping that no one would notice. She’d wonder if he was doing it on purpose, if she didn’t think that he would never have been able to hide that that was what he was doing, if it was the case. It would have been obvious by now that he was doing it on purpose, if so. If he would have even bothered hiding it, that was, and Dorothea wasn’t certain that he would.
Slowly, ever so slowly, couldn’t find a way to do it more quickly and couldn’t find a way to do anything quickly, feeling like her body was trapped in amber or, considerably less romantically, tar, Dorothea wrenched her gaze away from the sight of Edelgard’s cloak-concealed body, to look over to Linhardt.
Her eyes fixed on his hair first, for some reason. His hair hadn’t fared a great deal better in the intense humidity of an Enbarr summer than hers. When she had been in the opera, she had been pushed and pressed to apply oil to her hair to keep it from expanding into a frizzy, tangled mess—or so they had always called it. (Manuela would always tell her not to let them get her down about her hair, but that she would find her hair so much easier to brush and comb if she applied the oil—and, most crucially, found a variant which smelled considerably better than the bottle she had initially been supplied with. The sweeter-smelling oil was appreciated. The comments management had made about her hair in the first place: less so.) She’d not had that oil or anything like it to hand this year, and her hair had been showing the consequences accordingly; she’d not taken it out of its braid in… two days?
Granted, Linhardt’s hair had not suffered to the extent that hers did in these brutal summers. Then again, his hair wasn’t quite so thick as hers was. It looked as if it had not been brushed in days, though Linhardt was neat enough about his appearance that she knew he must have brushed it that morning. His hair was curling at the ends, too, in a way Dorothea had never seen it do before. The curling at the ends was actually quite a nice…
She didn’t want to be thinking about these things. She shouldn’t be thinking about these things, not now, why was she… Dorothea tried to wrench her gaze away again, disgusted with herself, but it had been a long time since she could count on her mind not to go to inappropriate places at inappropriate times. Of course she’d be thinking about something like that now, when all she wanted to do was find it in herself to get up and find somewhere private to just… she couldn’t even say. It could have been simple crying or it could have been screaming, it could have been finding vases to hurl against walls or furniture to smash, some violence to commit that wouldn’t be against flesh and would have made no impact but to exhaust every spark of errant energy in her body. All that, and she was thinking about hair instead.
Instead, Dorothea turned her gaze away from Linhardt’s hair to the face of the man himself. She was given a few moments of uninterrupted scrutiny. Linhardt’s eyes were fixed on just the same sight that hers had been fixed on, so totally that she could almost have believed he didn’t realize that she was there. There was no color in his face; his skin had bleached a nasty grayish-white, stretched taut over cheekbones and lower jaw. There was a glaze over his eyes like a film of sleep, except that no film of sleep would have ever sparked and shone like that, not so wetly.
It was nice to see someone reflecting her own feelings, at least in one way. Opprobrium directed against two instead of against one would be just a touch easier to bear. Not much, but at least she wouldn’t be alone when opprobrium came.
“So,” Linhardt said at last, so faint and dragging out the ‘o’ so long that it barely sounded like speaking at all. More like a whisper of wind, so far away that Dorothea could have debated if she had actually heard anything at all, if not for the fact that she had seen his lips move.
“So,” she said in reply, so short and clipped that Linhardt would have been forgiven for missing it over the clanking of plate armor as soldiers and knights yet milled around the throne room—Dorothea couldn’t help but wonder if some of them were not weighing just how much trouble they might get into if they started looting the place of its many, many valuables.
Did she want conversation right now? If it had been any of the soldiers or knights who had come and sat down by her just now, even if it was someone she knew, the answer must certainly be ‘no.’ Flayn and Seteth, and the answer would still be no—Dorothea could name a few people who might be less sympathetic to what was storming in her heart just now, but not many. Melusine, and still ‘no’—not Melusine who always saw further into Dorothea than she liked, not Melusine who always saw everything which Dorothea most wished to conceal from the sight of man, not Melusine who had stepped before Edelgard when she was brought down to her knees and let the Sword of the Creator cut a swift, merciless path in the air which barely faltered on flesh. Linhardt… She didn’t know. She just didn’t know.
(She had been whispering something. Dorothea was certain Edelgard had been whispering something, she’d not been close enough to hear but even in the dusty gloom could still see her lips moving. Those words had not been for her, and Dorothea knew too well that the idea of what they could have been would haunt her until memory rotted straight out of her head.)
Linhardt was looking at her now. She wasn’t sure when he’d started; she had been… she had been distracted. It wasn’t pity writ large on his face. She had seen pity there before, never failing to bristle at it even when she knew she shouldn’t, and she thought she knew what that looked like on Linhardt’s face by now. This wasn’t it. There was something almost antsy about it, something frantic dancing under the taut planes of his face, something burning sickly-bright behind his eyes.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like that before.
It was impossible to enjoy it. Impossible to enjoy the idea that there was someone who felt like the world was collapsing just as much as she did. But Dorothea didn’t know what she would have said, what she would have done, if he had been able to look at her with placid eyes and a tranquil expression. Nothing good, and Dorothea just wanted… Not that. No more of that. Not today. Not ever. She was done.
So when she watched him attempt poorly to arrange his face into something like the face she had most dreaded seeing, she could watch without wanting to scream at him. Without wanting to claw some semblance of emotion into his skin. When they were in the Academy, Linhardt never seemed to grasp why he should even bother plastering things he didn’t feel to his face. He was still learning what she had learned very young. She’d sooner be a kinder teacher to him than the world had been to her.
“Do you want to go find the kitchens?” Linhardt asked her abruptly.
Dorothea… blinked. Blinked again. Wondered if she had really just heard him say what she thought she had just heard him say. Decided to just try a bewildered “…What?” and see where that got her.
Linhardt’s brow furrowed slightly. “Do you want to go find the kitchens?”
He had definitely said what she thought he had said, then. No way would she mishear that twice. But her own bewilderment did not abate. Just because she had heard him properly did not mean that what she had heard actually made any sense. Beating down the bubble of a hysterical laugh that she was afraid would have turned into a crow’s cawing, “…Why?”
Linhardt rolled his shoulders, almost casually. Almost. “It will be time for supper in a few hours, anyways, and if we don’t get there ahead of everyone else, there won’t be any food left by the time we do get there.”
Temper flaring hot and sudden in her breast, “Lin, is now really the best time to be thinking about food?!”
“Nobody warned you about me?” Linhardt retorted. “I don’t care if others think me strange, and I eat when I find myself in distressing situations.”
Dorothea opened her mouth to fire back—and shut it again. She knew that wasn’t true. She knew he had once told her that it did bother him when others gossiped about him, even if he didn’t really let it show. And he didn’t eat before battle, any more than she did. Neither of them could keep food down before battle, not when all they could think about was all the killing they were going to have to be doing in a little while; even if Linhardt usually stayed in the backlines with the other healers, it had become depressingly common for the enemy to break through to the backlines, and staying in the backlines had been no defense, no defense at all against looking towards the coming battle and imagining his hands running red with blood. She squinted up into his face, frowning deeply—
—And Linhardt set a hand on her arm and shot a long, sideways look at everyone who could potentially have been their audience, mouth pressed in a thin, tight line.
Dorothea sucked in a long, shuddering breath. “…Fine. Lead on.”
It wasn’t as difficult for them to slip away from the scrutiny (whether real or imagined) of the many knights and soldiers of the Church of Seiros as Dorothea had thought it might be. Ever since they had returned to the monastery in the light of the Ethereal Moon, Dorothea wondering what the Millennium Festival might have been like and wondering if the others pondered the same, they had been kept under an uncomfortably close watch. Seteth and Flayn and Manuela and Professor Hanneman might have been friendly to them, but the rest… less so.
Oh, how pleasant it had been, she and the other Black Eagles all piled into a single room in what was left of the inhabitable spaces in the Academy dormitories for fear of what might happen if they lined up into separate rooms and made it easier for them to find themselves outnumbered. It would have been easy to dismiss it as paranoia on, say, Bernadetta’s part, if not for two things. One, Bernadetta had been the sole member of the Black Eagles who had not elected to share a room, instead holing up in her old room on the ground floor and trust to her own abilities to keep herself safe from anyone who might try to break in while she was sleeping. Two, was the way some of the knights would look at them when they went about their business during the day. There were only so many times Dorothea could watch a man’s hand stray to the hilt of his sword when he looked at her before she began to suppose that he meant something by it—and that he meant had nothing to do with any desire to impress her with his valor on the battlefield.
Eventually, things had relaxed just enough that they had felt like they could sleep in rooms to themselves again and not have to worry about waking up to find someone in the room with them who had very much come in uninvited. Eventually, things had relaxed that much, but Dorothea could not say that things had relaxed much further. They’d never been allowed to do anything particularly important around the monastery. Melusine had vouched for them, and that had ensured that they would be allowed to stay, rather than being turned out at the gates and forced to fend for themselves—she and Ferdinand and Caspar could well have just gone back to what they were doing before, but Dorothea thought things would have been just a touch more difficult for Linhardt and Petra and Bernadetta, who would have been barred from returning to their families (And Petra’s situation in particular would have just been… ugh, Dorothea couldn’t imagine how she would have handled that, herself). That was how far Melusine vouching for them got them. The rest, they would have had to do on their own, and Dorothea didn’t know about the others, but she couldn’t say that she’d managed to make significant strides away from the starting line of not being turned out at the gates like she was nothing but a nuisance.
They still watched her closely when she went about her business around the monastery, such as it was. They watched her closely, and not in the way Dorothea had previously been used to men watching her. It felt more like the way shopkeepers would watch her when she sheltered from the rain in their shops when she was a little girl, at least before they picked up their brooms and swept her out with the rest of the trash—at least, if those shopkeepers had also been making the calculations of how long it would take to hack away at the frozen earth to make a grave large enough and deep enough to suit a woman of her stature. Dorothea still didn’t care for the way they were looking at her, and she had often found herself avoiding people as a result (Though it was perhaps not the only reason she had often sought solitude in the monastery, after five years of war). If they were so suspicious of her, if they thought her so thoroughly treacherous, she would have thought that nowhere would their scrutiny be more unbearably constant than it would be in the Imperial palace.
She would have thought that they would have eyes on her here constantly. She would have thought that they would have considered the very concept of letting Dorothea roam about where she pleased in the palace as akin to letting her slide a knife between the gaps in their armor. And Linhardt? Linhardt, the son of one of Edelgard’s ministers? She would have thought they’d be watching him even more closely. Surely, the two of them together wouldn’t just be allowed to… just slip out.
And yet, that was exactly what they did. Not out through the gaudy doors that served as the main entrance to the throne room, but through a significantly plainer side door that Dorothea had thought to be the access point for a servants’ passageway, until Linhardt pushed the door open and revealed a lavishly decorated hallway beyond.
“Now,” he was muttering, “I… suppose we just have to figure out where the kitchens are.”
The door creaked shut behind them, and it was like a leaden cloak had fallen off of Dorothea’s shoulders. She pressed her back against the wall, shuddering. She could just… she could just stay here a moment, right? There wasn’t anyone watching—well, there wasn’t anyone watching who would judge her for the way she was acting. She could stay here a moment and just… just breathe.
If only it wasn’t so hard to breathe.
“I guess you wouldn’t have ever been to the kitchens in a place like this,” Dorothea muttered in turn, reminding herself again and again not to look at her hands. (They still felt wet. She knew they weren’t.) “Nobles don’t really go to places like that in their own estates, do they?”
“I am actually very familiar with the kitchens at home,” Linhardt told her, so serenely that Dorothea might have laughed, if she hadn’t been afraid that she would start laughing and just wouldn’t… wouldn’t be able to stop. “My parents went through a phase of trying to insist that I only eat at mealtimes as a child, but there was always a cook who would turn a blind eye if I was quiet and stayed out of the way while she was working. I think the necessity of prying me out of the kitchens might well have been the only reason my father ever knew where they were, though.”
Alright: Dorothea laughed. Maybe it was just because the man served as the Minister of Domestic Affairs, but the idea that Count Hevring might not have known where the kitchens were in his own home if not for the necessity of enforcing rules on a naughty child was beyond belief. Absolutely ridiculous—and even if Linhardt was wrong about his father in general, the point still stood. Dorothea knew for a fact that this city was full to the brim of rich men and women who had never once in their lives beheld the parts of their fancy homes that might have been humbler to the eye, but nevertheless were absolutely vital to the continued maintenance of their homes and their lives. They had servants to do the beholding for them. Dorothea couldn’t cook worth a damn, but if it had been her living in one of those massive manor houses they had passed on the way to the palace, she would have made it her mission to know exactly where everything was, exactly what everyone was named, and exactly where all of the hiding places and exits were.
(She had, perhaps, a few lessons that needed unlearning. But then, there had been times when it had served her better than anything else to have made a note coming in of which windows looked like they would actually open and which of those unadorned side doors looked like they opened up to servants’ passageways instead of just rooms. It had served her well sometimes to seek out the maids’ quarters; there was usually someone there who would let her hide under a bed and play dumb until it was possible for her to flee the house entirely. She couldn’t have told you if she would never need to make use of those lessons again.)
Anyways. If not for the fact that Dorothea knew all too well that sufficient quantities of gold could get you any number of things which should never have been yours in the first place, she would have to wonder how it was that every noble line in Adrestia, and possibly the Kingdom and Alliance as well, hadn’t managed to go extinct sometime in the last two hundred years, from just… everything.
(And this was the world she had spent a significant chunk of her girlhood dreaming of entering. This just had to be the only world she knew of that could offer her even a chance that she wouldn’t just end up like her poor mother. It wasn’t as if everyone who hailed from that world was as detestable as some of the men Dorothea had known as a singer. She had met more noble children in the Academy whose company she actually enjoyed and whom she could actually find it in her heart to care for than she had ever thought she would—and one of them was sharing the hallway with her now. But that world itself was little more than pretty poison, and to think that she had to trade into it and then stay there just to make sure she wasn’t going to spend her last moments choking on mucus in a hovel in the slums was just—
She generally tried not to finish that thought.)
So Dorothea laughed. And contrary to her fears, it wasn’t actually all that long before she was able to make herself stop.
“Still—” Linhardt had turned away from her, hands clasped behind his back, staring down the hallway towards what Dorothea could just barely make out as a crossroads of some kind “—I can’t say I know where the kitchens are here. I…” A hint of doubt crept into Linhardt’s voice “…don’t actually know where anything is in the palace.”
Any trace of laughter, edged with hysteria or otherwise, died entirely out of Dorothea’s mouth. “Lin, haven’t you been here before?”
He turned his head back just far enough for her to make out a single eye, wide and ambivalent. “No,” he said, so swiftly that though Dorothea could hardly doubt his conviction, it still felt unreal. “Neither have Caspar or Bernadetta. I could not speak for their parents’ motivations, but mine always seemed uneasy with the idea of my coming to court. Even my mother never came here but for when her presence was required for some function or another.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings, considering the role tradition had been demanding that Linhardt play in the Empire’s government, the idea of his having never come to court was just bizarre. Dorothea might have known noble society only as an observer, but it was possible for an observer to learn things that way. (And it was nice to have a distraction from the reason she was even here in the first place, if only for a little while.) And Bernadetta and Caspar, too. Bernadetta was sailing along in the same boat as Linhardt, or had been before the start of the war, and even if Caspar was a second son, it wasn’t as if there was no purpose to his coming to court. If Caspar had actually been of a mind to try and make his way as second sons with no inheritances coming often did, he would have been in desperate need of the sort of connections he could forge at court.
That none of the three of them had ever been to court was bizarre. And Linhardt in particular… Hmm. Dorothea could definitely see a pair of “respectable” noble parents being leery of the kind of things Linhardt might get up to at a particularly stultifying court function. Not long after they had met, she had brought up the fact that most nobles tended to look down on such scandalous practices as sleeping in public, and Dorothea wasn’t even sure what could persuade Linhardt to care about that. And while it would certainly be entertaining to turn Linhardt loose in all of his bluntness on a bunch of puffed-up fops, she could also guess just how his parents would have looked on the prospect of Linhardt, after a certain boredom threshold had been reached, simply no longer caring about whether or not whatever he said to Lord or Lady whatever happened to offend their delicate sensibilities.
But still, the idea that they would have just kept Linhardt away altogether still made no sense to Dorothea. Ominous warnings of dire consequences to follow if Linhardt did not comport himself as they expected? Sure. But keeping him away from court altogether, ensuring that even if he did meet courtiers outside the confines of the palace, he would only have secondhand tales from his father about the way things in the palace actually worked? Uhh, yeah, that still made no sense, no matter how Dorothea tried to think about it. She couldn’t say she knew how things in the palace had worked before Edelgard became emperor, or even afterwards, but then, every last sneering lord and lady who had ever looked her way, including those among them who had also looked at her with lust, had agreed that there was no place for her in glittering halls such as what these were supposed to have been, once upon a time. But as for the man who, before everything had taken such a different path from what Dorothea had supposed it would, had been born to become the Minister of Domestic Affairs, the idea that he had come to manhood knowing so little of what things were like in the palace… Yeah, that certainly was an interesting decision on his parents’ parts.
Not that any of that really mattered, now. Edelgard was dead. (Those words were going to take some getting used to. But no matter how used to it Dorothea might potentially become, they would never lose that acrid taste.) Edelgard was dead, and Enbarr had been humbled before the Central Church. No matter what became of the Empire, no matter what became of Fódlan, nothing was ever going to be the same. The world would never be the same, and Dorothea had helped crack it open and dash it against the floor with her own hands. Nothing was ever going to be the same. Who even knew if either of them would ever come back to Enbarr again?
I’m so tired.
Dorothea swallowed on a lump that had grown up hot and thick in her throat, and resisted the urge to dig her fingernails into her arms.
Linhardt shrugged, but it wasn’t the long, leisurely roll of his shoulders that she was used to. It jerked, like someone had been making a puppet shrug, and had yanked on the strings at the wrong time, too strongly. “You would have to ask my parents, if you ever found them in a temper to answer. I never questioned it when I was a child.” Mouth quirking with an emotion Dorothea couldn’t have hoped to name, “Court sounded so dull. The only time anything interesting seemed to happen was when Father would come home ranting about Count Varley trying to interfere in the blasphemy trials again. Everything else just seemed to be endless bouts of uncomfortable clothes and heavy food and boring conversations.”
Was it possible that Dorothea had once been a person who might have scolded him for not taking it more seriously than that? Was it possible that she had once been able to see a future in that world of pretty poison that did not end in total misery for her?—if her lips did not wind up coated in the glistening shine of that pretty poison anyways. It might be possible that she had been that kind of person, in some other lifetime. But the girl who could have scolded him about such things felt a half-formed dream. She did not think she could recall that dream and weave it into anything substantial. The thing she was now was… was something she had never really examined at length.
“Let’s keep going,” she murmured. “If we stay too close to the throne room, somebody might find us here and put us to work stripping clothes off of the corpses.”
She didn’t know if they really would. The army with which she had thrown her lot had been short on many things since they had begun to go on the offensive, but simple clothes had not been one of them. And the clothes soldiers in Enbarr were wearing in high summer would have been so utterly inappropriate for winters in Garreg Mach that someone could hardly have done greater harm to themselves than if they had stumbled out into the white of a blizzard completely naked. But it had the desired effect (Did she desire it?). Linhardt’s already pallid face blanched even further, and he shook himself as if shaking off lethargy. “Let’s. I’ve had my fill of death for one day.”
“I wonder if any of us have any right to say things like that anymore.” She could feel a shadow creeping up over her heart. Just… just let her get through this without ever having to check its shape.
“When it’s over, I suppose,” Linhardt said diffidently.
I wonder if it will be over. That lump was getting bigger.
They wandered down the hallway, slowly, so slowly. Both of them were drinking in their surroundings with all of the interest of people who had never been inside of the palace before, regardless of whether that was even remotely appropriate for the circumstances. It’s not appropriate. The tone was flat, but the thoughts were still screaming. It’s not appropriate. Edie and Hubie are dead; how can you just be… just be acting like a fucking sightseer while the flies and the crows and all of the looters descend on—
The walls were paneled with rich, burnished reddish-brown wood, which shone so brightly in spite of the fact that the city had been evacuated more than a week ago that Dorothea could make out the indistinct outline of her body in their many surfaces. Not her face, though. These were not mirrors. Lucky for her. Her face didn’t bear thinking about. Her skin was burning, and her mouth was burning, and her eyes were burning, and—
There were no full tapestries here, as had once been found in the entrance hall and reception hall of Garreg Mach, before five years of desolation and looting had ensured that all of them were destroyed or carried off or possibly both. But there were smaller wall hangings, richly-embroidered things that hosted so many diverse scenes of animals and sailing ships and historical events and depictions of the Saints that if Dorothea was to stich them all together, they would likely have been larger by far than the largest of the tapestries which had hung up in the monastery in its glory.
Linhardt eyed a wall hanging of cowled Saint Seiros brandishing her sword with an odd look on his face, jaw working as if swallowing down a hundred thousand things to say. “I wonder if Edelgard ever took the time to walk down this hallway after becoming emperor. Somehow, that—” he gesticulated at the hanging with a hand that shook as if trapped in a blizzard “—does not seem at all compatible with her vision for the future of the Adrestian Empire.”
Dorothea’s shoulders shook. Laughing, or crying? It was a laugh that bobbed in her mouth, but it was also soaked clean through. “When would Edie or Hubie have ever found the time to redecorate?” The gold thread which wound its way all through the hanging warped and wobbled in her sight, sparkling like a string of stars. “She took the throne and then immediately started fighting a war.” Her voice sounded strange to her ears. The words were disintegrating at the edges, like paper dunked in a basin of water. “When do you even find the time to sleep when you’re running the Empire, and fighting a war to conquer the Kingdom and the Alliance? When do you even find the time to…”
The sounds coming out of her mouth weren’t really words anymore. They still came out, of course. To Dorothea’s ears, they still sounded like the words they had been in her head when she first thought them through. But though she was vaguely aware that it was just languageless babbling in her mouth, it sounded like the noises were coming from somewhere else—from someone else. She couldn’t make the connection, couldn’t understand where those noises were coming from, couldn’t understand why she was supposed to care about it at all. Her face was wet. She couldn’t connect that to her burning eyes. Couldn’t connect that to her blurred sight.
Something white edged in at the corner of her vision. She didn’t pay much mind to it, still babbling about how much time and effort and money it would take to redecorate a place like this, and honestly, what were the odds that the Imperial palace had been completely redecorated and renovated at any point in the past three hundred years, it was just a bunch of hassle that most people probably just didn’t want to deal with, and she would have put up with any number of aggravating wall hangings to have had the assurance of somewhere warm and dry to sleep when she was a little girl, maybe Edelgard had been planning on redecorating the place once the war was over, maybe if they somehow managed to find Hubert’s office they’d find all of the plans he and Edelgard had worked up between themselves and maybe the other ministers as well, and, and—
That white thing she hadn’t been paying much attention pressed suddenly against her face, the texture of linen jarring against flushed, wet skin. Dorothea’s heart jumped in her throat, hammering against the lump that had knotted itself there, but she didn’t pull away. Couldn’t find it in herself to move, couldn’t find a reason to want to move. Linhardt had stretched the handkerchief taut against his thumb; the phantom sensation of skin against something that was almost skin as he dabbed at the trails of tears on her face saw Dorothea beating down a series of tremulous, shivering breaths.
“I could have done that myself,” she muttered.
“I…” Linhardt blinked, as if surprised at himself. “I… did try to offer you the handkerchief. You didn’t really seem to hear me.”
Her blood was roaring in her ears. She could barely hear him now. That… that made sense, Dorothea supposed. (She wasn’t going to talk about what she’d felt at the moment of contact.) She ducked her head, wishing she didn’t feel like a green girl hiding behind her hair again. It wasn’t as if she really could hide behind her hair with it braided like this, anyways. “Thank you.” And so faint did her voice sound to her own ears that she had to wonder if she’d really managed to speak aloud at all.
“Like you said…” His hand ghosted on her elbow, before falling down to his side. “If we stick around for too long, someone will try to put us to work on truly distasteful chores. We should keep moving.”
So they kept moving down the corridor. Dorothea occasionally caught sight of a door on either side of the hall, but she could not say if they opened up on rooms or on other hallways. They didn’t stop to check. She didn’t want to check. The kitchens weren’t going to be this close to the throne room. A sheltered lady who’d never seen a speck of dirt in her life might catch sight of a sweaty scullery maid and faint, and then where would we be? It was going to be a long, long walk before they found the kitchens, like as not.
The crossroads they had spied out earlier proved to be more of a rotunda—the word ‘atrium’ had been on Dorothea’s mind until she realized that the light in the chamber wasn’t pouring in from skylights, but from a great chandelier of gold hung high and proud in the center of the vaulted ceiling.
(Who exactly had lit all of those candles? Maybe it was possible that some of the soldiers they had fought—killed—in the palace had once held jobs that could have provided them with the necessary expertise, but really, the reason most people with those kinds of jobs went into the army was so that they would not have to do it again, ever. The citizenry had been evacuated from Enbarr, as much as time and ships would allow. Edelgard had not, not once Dorothea had gotten to know her better, ever really struck her as the sort of person who would have forced the palace servants to stay here even when it seemed all but certain that the palace gates would be breached. She did not, could not believe it of her. Even Dorothea knew what typically happened to people trapped in cities and palaces when they were sacked—the men killed, the women raped and then killed, the children a mix of both, disgustingly enough—and if she knew, Edelgard had to know, even if the reports strongly indicated that she hadn’t tolerated that kind of thing in her own armies. Dorothea had seen neither hide nor hair of any servants here, so she was going to choose to believe that Edelgard had not disappointed her here.
So the question remained: who lit those candles this morning?)
Illuminated in the light of the chandelier high over their heads was a floor of polished white marble veined with black and gold and blue, the latter of which made Dorothea feel unsettlingly like she was staring at a great plane of flesh so pale that the blood vessels stood out in stark relief even at a glance. It was solid to her feet, though, not soft or yielding as she would have found flesh (though there was a pulse in her feet that she had to spend a mad moment reminding herself was her own) and standing in the rotunda revealed a broad expanse of floor space that could comfortably have held fifty people, no shoulder-rubbing or stepping on toes required. Lining the walls were full tapestries, alcoves which featured vases and statuettes on pedestals, ornate chairs with upholstered seats and backs of deep, deep wine-red—
—And three more open doorways.
Linhardt regarded each of them in obvious indecision, gnawing on his lower lip as his eyes lit on each doorway in turn, but to Dorothea, matters seemed far simpler. “Let’s just pick one,” she said, grateful again for something that could distract her from the reason they were wandering around the palace together in the first place. “So long as we keep moving away from the throne room, we’ll find the parts of the palace the servants use eventually.”
“…Maybe?”
“’Maybe?’ Isn’t that the way most larger estates are laid out?”
“The palace is…” But he straightened and shook himself before he could really stop to answer her. “Actually, never mind.” Linhardt’s eyes flitted over the walls, bright and almost panicked, before they lost that particular feverish luster, and he was looking a little more like herself. “You’re right; we should just pick one and move on.”
Dorothea could not forget what she had seen. It had only been a moment, and already, the memory had dug under her skin like a splinter. But she didn’t know quite what to do with it, not yet. ‘Every time we speak, I show my true self.’ Never did Dorothea think that Linhardt had meant to attempt deception with those words, but still, she had never been able to bring herself to believe them, not really. No one ever showed their true selves in their entirety when they spoke. She didn’t think it was even possible. Now, she was perhaps seeing something in him that he had always hidden, whether consciously or not, and she didn’t know what really to do with it. Not when she had only seen it for a moment. Not when she didn’t know what it meant.
(By the end, she still wouldn’t really know what it meant. But then, he was probably sailing along in the same boat as her. Who was she to judge?)
The doorway that let them cut a straight path from the doorway they had entered through was the one selected. With the other two, they soon took sharp turns which Dorothea could not see past, but which she thought might have been leading back to the throne room. The straight path was true to its name—on and on it went, until shadows swallowed its termination.
“It occurs to me,” Dorothea remarked as they set off down that straight, straight path, “that this isn’t entirely unlike another time we went somewhere together.”
“Oh?” Linhardt’s eye was hooked on a door with a burnished brass knob, and he never quite looked her way. “What occasion is that?”
Bringing it up now, now of all times, was so akin to dancing on Edelgard and Hubert’s graves (would they even get graves? Would they just be dumped in a pit with the other dead soldiers? Would their heads be strung up from one of the city gates and left for animals and elements alike to ravage? Dorothea’s stomach lurched so hard that she could taste bile bubbling up at the back of her throat, hot and sick and sour) that all of the words washed out of her mouth, dissolving in the gall.
He was looking at her now. Curiosity curling up around the edges of the words, “What was it?”
Dorothea shook her head choppily. “Leave it alone, Lin.”
“Well, now I am curious. I think we have gone several places together, and here you are singling one of them out.”
She could have snapped at him. Could have. She didn’t want to think about all of that, not now, not now. It wasn’t right. It was not right, not when Edelgard’s body was still oozing blood on the throne room floor, when Hubert’s body might even now serve as a feast for flies and crows and whatever other scavengers might brave the palace gates now that things had quieted down and they could wander around without having to worry about being killed themselves. (How many times had Dorothea stumbled on a corpse in the slums that had already been pulled apart by dogs or, the closer she came to the city outskirts, boars? How many times had she stumbled on a corpse that had not even begun to stink, and had already been picked so clean that bones were visible where there should yet have been flesh and fat and eyes and—) Why was her mind still going to these places?
Well, why did you leave Enbarr in the first place? Why did you strike out for those mountains instead of sending to Edie and telling her you wanted to help?
She didn’t have a choice. (So she told herself. So she would go on telling herself. The idea that there could have been another way was just, just unbearable. Oh, Dorothea knew logically that maybe there was a way that things could be different, but she couldn’t look at it. Not right now. Couldn’t look at it, couldn’t touch it. Later, maybe, when the dead were bones one way or another, and questions of what if and what might have been were so far in her past that she would have to brush cobwebs off of them if she wanted to think about them at all.) When you grew up in the slums, when you were groomed to be a pretty plaything for the eyes and the ears and the hands and the— When you had to break free of all of that, when you had to break free of all of that and stay free of all of that, you didn’t have a wealth of choices. Choices were, after all, for the wealthy. Without any wealth of her own, the only choices Dorothea had ever had were the ones she had wrested, and there was always someone waiting in the wings to wrest them back. Dorothea had made what choices she could, and though she had always been on the lookout for others, for anything that could maybe make her future look even a spark brighter, she had never seen one that saw her standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Edelgard and Hubert, and not lying dead on the ground, alone and forgotten, to be buried in a pit with a thousand others, or else out in the open, rotting away under the pitiless sun while the crows and the flies and the dogs and the boars made a feast of her flesh. Maybe her vision was flawed. Maybe not. It was too late to change it now.
I’m a coward. And she could have snapped at him. She could have snapped at him for pushing when she had told him she wanted it left alone. But she just didn’t want to. The impulse was automatic; it did not necessarily follow after desire. If Dorothea snapped at Linhardt, he’d just… it would just sort of glance off of him. Maybe there was a part of him set aside from public view where he allowed himself to be hurt by it, but it was not a part of him that Dorothea had ever seen. If she snapped at him, he would not respond in kind. (It was kind of what she always wanted when she lost her composure enough to snap at someone. Even when it was dangerous, even when it was stupid, there was always a part of her that wanted them to bare their teeth in return, wanted them to show her their true faces, their hostility and disgust.) He would just let it roll off of him, like water off of a duck’s back when the rains of summer flooded the canals. No flash of hurt would flare on his face; he wouldn’t even behave as if she was being particularly unreasonable.
She could have snapped at him. She wouldn’t do it. Dorothea already knew, even without having said anything, even without having sharpened her words to a point, that it wouldn’t make her feel any better. There was something howling in her heart, and this wouldn’t make it be quiet. It would just make it howl all the louder. She just… just didn’t want to.
“I was talking,” and it shouldn’t have been so easy to be civil, not with everything that was clashing against each other in her heart, but the words came out and civility was easy, even if she couldn’t effect anything remotely upbeat, “about that time we ate together in the dining hall in the monastery. Just before we set out for Fort Merceus. It seems like you’re always making excuses to have dinner with me, but you’re still not looking any further than what you can get without paying for it.”
“Well, I happen to enjoy your company.”
And somehow, Dorothea thought Linhardt actually sounded a little sharper than he would have if she had snapped at him instead. Almost like… But she wasn’t going to dwell on that. Not now. (She thought she knew. She didn’t want to look at it just now.)
Linhardt’s mouth pressed into another thin, tight line for a moment, before he shook his head, letting that tension out. “It isn’t as though either of us are flush with coin at the moment. Even if we had gone to a restaurant or a tavern, I doubt we could have afforded anything better than the table scraps the children washing dishes eat for their own supper.” Nostrils flaring on the exhale of a deep breath, “And I doubt we’ll find any such place open in Enbarr right now.”
The Mittelfrank Opera House had been deserted but for a few chorus girls who had, or so they told Dorothea and Manuela, refused to leave for fear of coming back to find their only home burned to the ground by the invading army. They had all been thin and ragged, hunger’s cruel influence made plain in the way they all wolfed down the food they had been provided once they had been taken back to one of the encampments. “You’re probably right,” she said softly. Unable to help the affection that welled up suddenly in her breast, “And I guess the fact that it was such a long walk to the town had nothing to do with it.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Linhardt replied, so easily that Dorothea could do little else but marvel at his audacity. “Really, why go on such a long walk when you know the only thing waiting at the end to be disappointment?” He tilted his head slightly, peering closely at her skin, eyes narrowed like trying to read something written there in tiny, compact letters. “When we eat together, I think I prefer being able to guarantee full meals—even the paltry ones we’ve been having back at Garreg Mach.”
Reduced as the portion sizes had been from when they had been students at the Officers Academy together, those paltry meals they had been eating ever since the kitchens had been, to an extent, restocked were nevertheless heavier than many of the meals Dorothea had eaten as a child, particularly after her mother had died. She knew that, and yet, she had found hunger’s cruel teeth gnashing in her stomach, too. Never for a moment had Dorothea ever forgotten just where it was that she had come from. Even if she had ever forgotten, she was sure that someone would have emerged from the ether who was more than happy to put her in her place and remind her exactly where it was that she had come from (Probably had a bucket of mud saved just for that very occasion, too). All of that, and yet, there had been times when she had looked down at the portions she had been served during the winter months especially and she had longed for the meals that the students of the Officers Academy had been served at that time five years ago—feast days aside, even the regular meals had boasted portion sizes that ensured that Dorothea never walked away from the dining hall hungry, at least when she was a student at the Academy.
She liked to think that she would have responded graciously to being served a plate with such paltry portions that she could have eaten it all in less than ten bites. She liked to think that. But then, they had all been so hungry, and hunger wreaked havoc on nerves and tempers alike. Maybe it had been for the best, after all. (But nevertheless, the disappointment which had lanced her heart for just a moment when he cited the dining hall instead of suggesting they walk down into town and see what could be found there was more than easy enough to recall. Even if it had only lasted a moment, and even if it had quickly given way to enjoyment, she still remembered it. She had been expecting something different. She was still expecting something different.
“Well, maybe there’ll be more food this time.”
And maybe they would have a bit more privacy this time. Linhardt was probably right—when the soldiers started to get hungry (or when an acceptable hour to sup came around, if they were already hungry) they’d all descend upon the kitchens like vultures on a cow’s carcass. If they found the kitchens soon, they might be able to eat alone for an hour or two, if either of them could even find it in themselves to eat. Away from the scrutiny of strangers who picked apart everything she did with critical, unfriendly eyes, she wondered what she might do. Or say. Dorothea was looking forward to it. (She was terrified of it.)
“Considering that Edelgard seemed to have been quartering a goodly number of soldiers here—” there was a flash of regret picking at Linhardt’s skin for just a moment, as if he was regretting having raised Edelgard’s name at all “—I should hope so.”
Annnd they were going to be eating the food that Edelgard and Hubert would probably have been eating tonight if they had still been alive. (If we hadn’t killed them.) As they started walking again, it was all Dorothea could do to beat back a wave of hysterical laughter. They were going to be eating food that would have been presented to the emperor, of all people. If she could go back in time and say that to the little girl she had once been, she would never have believed it.
Edie’s dead, and we’re eating her supper. We’re taking away everything that was hers, stripping her name off of all of it, tearing apart everything she ever—
Not now. Not yet. Dorothea wouldn’t pretend that she or any of her old classmates had any real influence on the course that the Church’s army took. They had all expressed their opinions at multiple junctures, and their opinions were roundly ignored unless they happened to coincide with whatever Seteth thought was the best course of action.
(She couldn’t help but look sideways at Linhardt. Standing before the broken palace gates, sorrow was theirs to drink deep of at how they had gotten there, and sorrow was theirs to drink, bitter as wormwood, for what there was yet for them to do. Linhardt had gone so far as to suggest that they try to talk things out with Edelgard, even with Hubert’s blood drying on her boots. It had struck Dorothea so sharply, even in the midst of her own deep sorrow—and it had surprised her not at all that Seteth had responded as if Linhardt had not even spoken at all.)
But for all that Melusine had brought down the Sword of the Creator without a bare trace of mercy, she had been fond of Edelgard, once. Dorothea had never been too impressed with the flags of their army—Seteth spoke over Melusine and overruled her too often for Dorothea to really credit the idea that he saw her as anything but a figurehead for the troops to rally behind. But the fact remained that Melusine was the nominal head of their army, and that she had been fond of Edelgard, once. If any trace of that fondness yet lived in her heart, then maybe it wouldn’t all be torn down. Maybe the good would be allowed to persist. Maybe.
“Well,” Dorothea muttered, “we’ll have to remember to toast to her. Hubie, too.”
A shadow passed over Linhardt’s face. “Yes,” he murmured, barely audibly. “I think we’ll have to.”