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"You leave for Almyra soon, don't you?" Dimitri says, and Claude stops with his hand in his pocket, fingers around a ring, because the proposal he planned for hadn't accounted for Dimitri figuring it out.
It was a romantic place for Dimitri to be swallowing his heart. High up on some ledge that lined the outside of the cathedral, a pleasant little niche that imparted the feeling of being comfortably invisible. A place above a crowd where eyes would not naturally go to, where Claude and Dimitri could watch the banners of victory without a pause in their fluttering for pointing, and no expectation of formal address. The night had been warm, so the dawn was pink, a sweet color Claude was no stranger to in the mornings, and yet, this was the first time in his adulthood that it did not make a bitter sight. The first time it did not rise on an oncoming battle, that its tender light did not feel mocking, where its obvious kindness would not shine on the blood of so, so many. He'd felt the sun like a heartache. Like the waiting pains of hope. This time, it felt earned. It felt hospitable, like ushering in an old friend from the cold, and though the horizon of its face was scarred with horrors untold, it lived to smile again, to press its cheek into Claude’s shoulder in embrace, and warm his neck with its hair.
And by far the sweetest thing it had done for him was halo Dimitri’s hair. It welcomed him into that new day, thawing him out of Claude’s memory as the first love he'd lost tragically at the start of the war. Claude had frozen him in time with precious memories that he'd held tight in his chest, trying not to envision what the sweet prince who chewed on chamomile flowers had looked like before execution, after months of being killed in the dungeons of Faerghus.
Dimitri had come back to him cold, and jagged, and frost bitten. A face of untold horrors. A scar where his eye had been. Scars where shackles had been. Scars that he attempted to count and stopped when it made him feel like a voyeur, ashamed for trying to put stories of war to the body of a man he'd once loved. In those moments of Dimitri’s unconscious recovery, on a day so thoughtlessly lovely, Claude felt everything good had been taken from the world. How could it do this to him? How could it do this to Dimitri?
Misery was obvious and comfortable. Fate was uniquely cruel for tasking Claude with a hope as strong as his own. He couldn’t fall too. Who else was left to fight for a world where a soft heart might exist again. A new one, where it might not be carnaged this time.
Claude didn't think he'd get to see it in his lifetime.
And yet. Here Dimitri is. Changed, and tormented, but still Dimitri in the end. The softness of his heart was as inevitable as a softly colored morning. (That was something Dimitri had once been bitter about, too. He would have ripped his own heart out if he could. They suffered terribly when he tried to.)
Dimitri came back to him, and Claude gets to stand with him in the dawn of their victory, at the beginning of the end war celebrations. The perfect time to propose. The perfect time to apologize, because fate was uniquely cruel, and it tasked Claude with hope.
But Dimitri beat him to the news.
"...You figured it out, huh?" Claude admits, ring in his fist, fist resting in his pocket.
"I may have been too… indisposed to attend to matters of statecraft upon our reunion, but it is still a language I know, and I have returned to my desk since then." He pauses, tongue darting at the corner of his lip. He's nervous. Claude’s nervous, too, though he hears no upset from Dimitri beyond the expected tension the topic has introduced to their perfectly romantic morning. Claude meets him with waiting silence, and Dimitri continues,
"The Archbishop is dead, and Seteth has asked Garreg Mach to be in the care of the Holy Kingdom. Adrestia’s royal bloodline has… dried; and the heads of Imperial houses have either succumbed to their war or surrendered. But in their surrender, even those closer to your territories than mine have taken to the Faerghus banner. I had no intent to cut into Leicster’s territories, though I understand the dissolution of a country is nothing but confusion.”
And in my search for clarity, I come to find out, the reason for that is because there is no Leicester for them fall under. The Alliance was dissolved to a state prior to its constitution.” Dimitri says, and that was the part that Claude had kept out the fanfare.
Dimitri tilts his head to Claude to catch sight of him in his remaining left eye. It's almost violet in the light. He looks at him like Claude's been caught in his own web and wasn’t certain if it was on purpose, skeptical of its construction. Claude’s no stranger to skepticism. It’s always different when it comes from someone that cares about him. There’s concern in place of distrust that he’s not as capable of shrugging off. He’s left with an acute awareness of someone he loves watching as he climbs ever higher and spins up new plans, resting his weight on delicate complexities as he reaches for the next one, and they wonder if there is even enough grace in existence for him to pull himself out if his next step were to fail him. It’s why he’s a “ask forgiveness and not permission” kind of guy. Looking back would give him vertigo; and that’s definitely one way to get stuck.
But eventually he had to come down and explain himself.
“Mm. it certainly was.” Claude hums, because how would this be news to him? “I mean, I was there when the remaining Dukes all agreed to it, so I’d hope it stuck. Now if it was suddenly back together and I didn’t know about it, that would be a problem.” Claude says, poking the air. Dimitri sighs tentatively, as if he’d just finished sharing a secret.
“Of course. You don't make mistakes like that.” Dimitri says.
“Maybe it’s not a mistake, then.” Claude rebuffs, nonchalant as he leans back on the railing. He didn’t think he’d be stuck talking politics in what should be a proposal. “The Leicester Alliance was five Dukes agreeing to let a border wrap around their territories, and two of them decided to let the Edelgard pop it like a bubble without our permission. Some considered Leicester gone at that moment. What is the Alliance without its round table agreements?” Claude asks, looking up at the remnants of night in the west. “It’s a question that got on my nerves for years, because you need to be at least a little patriotic if you’re hoping to win a war; but now that it’s over, and with the way things turned out, I can admit that I just needed Leicester to be around a little longer than the Empire was. So no, I didn’t accidentally dissolve my country. I don’t even think you can do that by accident.”
“So it wasn’t by mistake that you’ve made yourself powerless at the foot of Fodlan's cradle." Dimitri says, and the truth lingers like the imprint of emeralds on Claude’s palm.
“...” Claude fidgets with the ring.
"In your reformations, you've left yourself no authority, when you, more than anyone, have a say on the matter of Fodlan’s future. You intend to make me the King of Fodlan. You have made me King of Fodlan. I would be no King at all if I let something like that slip my notice." Dimitri says. Claude sighs,
"You caught me." Claude says, putting his hands up in the air like a surrender. "I've gotten my fill of Dukedom holding this half of Foldan together for the last five years. Or, six? Yeah, it's coming up on six now. So six years, if you round up. I figured there'd be no one better to leave it to." He gives up the last second star gazing and looks back at Dimitri, who is trying to will the tension out of his jaw and failing.
"Claude, please." Dimitri says with a shade at the lighter end of desperation. It would be too good if Dimitri didn't know what he was saddled with until the glow of a fresh engagement softened the enormity of his duty. Claude shouldn’t have assumed this was a “forgiveness later” situation.
"I'm serious, Dimitri! You've got my complete faith. I'm not just saying that to be a slacker all of a sudden- you have all Fodlan rallying behind you. The Leicester nobles understood there’d be no going back to the way things were when half the noble houses on the Alliance flag betrayed it, and Seteth gave you the Church on his own. I can’t imagine anyone better to leave Fodlan to." Claude says. Dimitri’s lips purse, as he's trying not to be as troubled as he is.
“So you do intend to leave.” Dimitri says.
Claude can’t meet his eye anymore.
"...Would it mean anything if I said that's what I wanted to talk about up here?" Claude asks, allowing himself to be sincere, abandoning the may-care attitude he took on in impulse. "Or at least, that's part of it." He puts his hands down before Dimitri sees the outline of a ring having been pressed into his hand.
"It would." Dimitri says. And he means it- though, still troubled. Claude’s gaze meets an eyepatch as Dimitri looks out to the crowd, turning over his own thoughts. Claude steps back at his side, quiet in the melancholy of a lovers quarrel. He tries to keep it, tries to think of anything else, even picking at the stone of the railing with a gnawing curiosity rising from whatever feelings of remorse settled in.
"How'd you factor Almyra into all of this?" He has to know. Claude asks it gently, without any blase pretense. He catches the turn of Dimitri’s head in his peripheral,
"I won't deny it, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but I’m worried what might happen if others catch on the same way you did." and he feels a little bad for asking after blindsiding Dimitri with the weight of a continent, but he needs to know if he got sloppy.
He looks up at Dimitri, and Dimitri looks back at him with all the sympathy in the world, "Because you're homesick." He says, and it's true as it is simple.
Folly of Claude to assume a papertrail. Being loved made him known, being in love made him known, and Claude loved Almyra, and it made him want Dimitri to love it, too. His plan to tell Dimitri about his origins had been to do it in a way he’d meticulously constructed to seem like an accident, testing the waters in a way that was probably not as subtle as Claude thought it was, looking back, but he’d been trying to warm just a few people up for Nader’s arrival, as the old family friend gave them aid in the war. He wanted Dimitri to stumble across the truth Claude had laid out, ask him about it gently, privately, as Dimitri always did, and to bargain his sympathies for secrecy; thus would begin a long and fruitful allegiance between Fodlan and Almyra.
Then Nader shook Dimitri’s hand, looked at Claude, and loudly asked, Is this the dead prince you’ve been in love with? and the curses Claude bludgeoned Nader with were unmistakably Almyran. He swore Nader out to Dimitri once he got the general to leave, gobsmacked that he could expose so many of Claude’s secrets in one sentence, and accused Dimitri of being way too tickled by the whole thing for his liking. Dimitri unconvincingly denied it, but Claude kept on, grieving about Nader embarrassing him until he cooled off, and somewhere along the way his venting became fond, and his stories became more detailed, and Dimitri learned he was born under the name Khalid.
He spent hours talking about Almyra in the quiet of night, in the softest of voices, in his most vulnerable of moments. The man Claude had once missed becoming an outlet for the home he still missed. He wanted Dimitri to love Almyra, too. And you can’t love something so much without missing it terribly, and having that be terribly obvious.
The spot where he kept his longing was tender when poked.
"Yeah you… got me there, too." Claude admits. It's his turn to look to a horizon, ached by the fact Almyra was on the other side of it. A wind from the north came to slip the braid from behind his ear, and briefly he wished it came from the east, just so he could feel a little closer to the place he'd been born. He closed his face to the rising sun the way he did as a child and tried to remember what the air in Almyra smelled like.
“I can’t abandon Almyra.” Claude says, nostalgia hardening into determination. “It’s a lot like Fodlan in the way it has a lot of problems, and a lot of good people suffering because they can’t imagine the world being any other way.” He swallows a lump in his throat, swallows his longing, and swallows his remorse. “I could’ve left Fodlan as soon as the war broke out, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind the people who needed me. People who, despite all our differences, couldn’t accept a world whose path keeps being decided by who can shed the most blood. That’s all I ever wanted, Dimitri. To make a better world, where things are different because people are willing to try and make it different, where they can embrace the changes they desperately need.”
This is what it’s all been for. His battles, his schemes, his hope that reached far past the horizon, in places midday and midnight. Claude raises his head with purpose, determined in his goodbye, because he knows of the good that will come after it. “I’d never be able to enjoy a peaceful Fodlan if I haven’t done the same for Almyra. That’s why I can’t stop here. We have proof that things can be different, and I have to take that as far it can go. I have to.”
He looks boldly to Dimitri, a confession as much as a declaration. Dimitri does not meet it, staring down into the crowd, the black leather of his eyepatch as unreadable as a mask.
“...I would never ask you to choose between me and Almyra, Claude.” Dimitri says, which squashes some of Claude’s fears. His fingers curl on the railing. “I only wish I could have begun saying goodbye to you sooner.”
Claude softens immediately, and he’s met with the familiar feeling of longing for Dimitri. He reaches out, placing a hand on his arm in the way he couldn’t during the five years he was dead, and the months Dimitri insisted he was dead. “Dimitri…” He whispers.
“Truthfully, the longer I stand here, the more ashamed I grow of my aching.” Dimitri says, not shrugging away his hold but not turning into it, either. “A part of me knew you would not be the person you are if your ambitions stopped here. The better parts of me know I am being ungrateful for all you’ve done. And yet I cannot help but ache. You’ve been there for me through so much of my grief, it is selfish to ask you to do it again.”
“C’mon, you can be a little sore about it.” Claude says, half joking in a bittersweet kind of way. “It would break my heart if you didn’t miss me at least a little bit.”
“I should do better than just miss you.” Dimitri says, finding enough of himself to look up again. Claude steps back, letting Dimitri turn to him and wonders what mix of emotions he will find on the King of Fodlan’s face. He discovers something hushed and proud, twinged by melancholy and as deeply fond as the face of love. “You’re an incredible king, Khalid. One unlike any other. It is my honor to be able to miss you as much as I will.”
Color sweeps easily across Claude’s cheeks, catching the poor man by surprise, “I-I’m not gone yet- and I’m not king yet, either! Who’s to say I’ll be king.” He falters.
“I’m comfortable in my assumption.” Dimitri says, self assured. “You could have been king of Fodlan if you’d wanted, I have no doubt you’ll be handed the opportunity again in Almyra. You play fate as an instrument.” It is a relief to hear him talk like this. Claude worried what Dimitri’s broken heart might have done to him. If it would be enough to send him tumbling back. That didn’t seem to be the case so far, so Claude blushes freely.
“Maybe fate’s a sucker.” Claude mumbles, then shakes out his fumble, “But I am sorry for blindsiding you! It’s nice that you’re taking this better than I expected, but, I didn’t mean for my silence to be cruel.” Gods this was supposed to be a proposal, “I wanted to do something special with it, I guess…” Dimitri still shows him that sad smile,
“I’m sorry you went through all this trouble to protect my feelings.” Dimitri says. Claude frowns,
"Hey, why do you assume I'm protecting your feelings? Maybe it’s my own feelings, too." he says, intolerant of any self blame or even the suggestions of it.
"Because of how often I've asked you to stay by my side." Dimitri says. Claude has no rebuff. That, too, is as simple as it is true.
Dimitri accepts his silence. And all of a sudden, that doesn’t feel acceptable.
“Claude.” Dimitri speaks up again, before Claude can rediscover his nerve. Dimitri’s eye drifts down, flickering over more thoughts, more nerves that Claude is not privy to. He's steeling himself for something, and Claude wants to but in, to grab the reins of the conversation like he thought he would get going in- but something makes him stay. He's rarely seen Dimitri be so nervous.
"The first thing I will do as the King you have made me is to honor your faith.” Dimitri holds out his hands, and Claude takes them without hesitation. Dimitri clasps them like one would hold prayer beads- often, and with devotion.
"You took the burden of Fodlan on your shoulders and held it there for six years. You gave me more grace than I deserved when you found me, and then at the end of it all, you hold my heart in your hands, and scowl if I dare call that a burden." Dimitri says. He’s facing Claude like true north, so earnest he’s almost fervent, so sincere he’s almost a zealot. Morning light so warm it felt like it came through stained glass, shining down to the devoted, and it’s the only time Claude feels holy. “I want to do more than miss you. I want to pay back a fraction of that kindness you have shown me by putting your mind at ease, so you may never be weighed down by doubts of losing what you have fought for here. If you trust Fodlan to me, then I will do everything in my power to be worthy of that trust, to protect and nurture Fodlan, and do so until the very last bit of my strength has left me.”
“So please, let me take this burden from your shoulders. Let me hold Fodlan. Let it make you light enough to fly home."
What could Claude do but kiss him after that? His hands fall from Dimitri’s to hold the king by his face and pull him down into a crashing kiss, standing on his toes to meet him halfway. Dimitri meets him with all the promise of an oath- and that would've been tacky if it was anybody but Dimitri, whose devotion he wanted so badly he wanted to seal the deal with a ring. He kisses Dimitri and holds nothing back- he’s someone who made being sincere less terrifying, and who made Claude admit to himself that he really was an idealist at heart. He wanted to hope so much it felt like a curse, he wanted to have dreams made from eyes bigger than his stomach, he wanted to reach out into the world and make it something that was kind, and good, and the understanding place he always wanted it to be as a kid. And he wanted Dimitri to be his. He wanted to have this painfully earnest man, the one who fate cursed to be soft hearted.
There's a ring burning a hole in his pocket and he knows what to do with it.
"Do I get to take your heart with me?" Claude asks, pulling away from Dimitri the inch is all he can bear.
"It's yours, whatever you would do with it, it is yours," Dimitri says, lining kisses on his face between his words, impatiently affectionate.
"Then marry me." Claude says. Dimitri stops,
"What?" He asks, like he's talking in a dream, "you'd marry me?"
"That's why I, hold on," Claude wiggles himself out of Dimitri’s hold, slapping his hand down over his pocket, looking for the ring within it. He yanks it out and in a terrifying moment, it leaps from his fingers and sails over the railing. It takes one, two, three attempts for Claude to rip it back out of the air, all happening in the same heartbeat. "That's why I asked you out here!" Claude says, heaving his breath. That was the most terrifying moment of his life, a war doesn't compare.
When he looks over at Dimitri, he's also holding a ring. Claude’s mouth drops.
"I was going to ask if you'd ever planned to return to Fodlan before-" Dimitri starts to explain. Bewildered, Claude points at him.
"I beat you to it!"
Dimitri is taken aback, and a competitive streak from the prince he once was rears its head at having been beaten at something,
"Yes, Claude, you won at proposing." Dimitri says, as if it's lame. Claude chooses to ignore the tone,
"Hah, yeah I did," He gloats, leaning his elbow on the railing, the ring in a death grip in case it got any bright ideas. "Man, I'm good."
Dimitri sighs, smiling a dry kinda smile that can't mask the endearment in his face. He holds the ring up, a silver band with sapphires and small diamonds circling it- Claude wonders if Hilda had been helping them both figure out the others ring size and how he's going to hassle the answer out of her later.
"I wanted to ask if you'd be back to Fodlan. I wouldn't ask you to make permanent decisions, but I can't bear the thought of not seeing you again." Dimitri says.
"This is my home, too, Dimitri.” The thought that Dimitri might've still married him if he'd never see Claude again breaks his heart in a small way. The consequences of keeping things secret for dramatic effect, he supposed.
“I didn't want it to be like I was leaving you with this mess without some promise of coming back. I guess I should've just said that without making you worry. I kinda have my head in the clouds sometimes," Claude says, closing the distance between them once more. "I couldn’t stop thinking about marrying you.” He takes Dimitri’s left hand in his, sliding off those gauntlets he always has on. Dimitri lets him. Scars of shackles peak from under the long sleeves. A sliced palm from catching a blade ends at the space between his first finger and thumb, and Claude hopes some day feeling will return to both sides of Dimitri’s hand. Carefully, he slides the ring on, and it fits like a glove, probably because Claude stole one of his gloves to get his measurements down right. The emeralds look good on him. The gold band matches Dimitri’s hair. It's perfect.
He holds Dimitri’s hand to his chest, “I never thought someone like you could exist, now I can’t imagine being without you, because every version of a better world I can think of always has you in it. I want to see that world with you by my side.” Claude says, "so don't go martyring yourself with a heart break. I'm going to be back, Dimitri. I promise."
“I…” Dimitri marvels at the ring, like he’s still trying to decide if this is real, and Claude squeezes his hand, smiling proud and honest. “I want nothing more than to marry you.”
Claude does Dimitri the honor of letting him put that blue stone ring on his finger. He kisses Dimitri again, and it’s not enough to stand on his toes, so he leaps up to his height like he has wings, wrapping himself around the man he’d soon call his husband, and laughs like he’s never known a mourning moment. And for everything they’ve been through, they’d never felt lighter in their entire lives.