Work Text:
The first raindrops seep into Sylvain's gloves, a scatter of darkening russet to stain his hands. It’s a prelude. Mounted at the forested edge of Gronder Field, it’ll be a matter of minutes, not hours, before he’s covered in more blood than the rain could ever wash away.
It should be snow.
Adrestia’s Great Tree Moon is sweltering. This rain will soak the field and drum up a dangerous blend of slick grass and slippery mud, terrible for battle. Were he fighting in Faerghus, he’d have a horse born of frost, undisturbed by the glaze of ice that would slow his foes.
Allies. The sun-warmed warriors shouting on this field fight with him, not against. Were they fighting in Faerghus, they’d lose.
Not for the first time, Sylvain wonders if he chose wrong.
Overhead, the clouds shudder, and a hoarse whinny derails his thoughts. It’s familiar. Raw and furious like an infected wound.
Sylvain tilts his head back to watch the pegasus Egil descend. He laughs, hollow and bitter.
Death by the lance of a valkyrie is the most ironic end he could meet.
“Sylvain!” Ingrid’s shout is as hoarse as her steed’s. “What are you doing? Ignoring your house duties is one thing, but this? Siding with the enemy?”
Egil hits the ground running. Pure muscle memory hefts Sylvain’s lance up into a defensive grip, but Ingrid skirts him in a wide, assessing arc. More than the roll of thunder and battle cries or the threat of watching his own carcass slump on the sleek shaft of Lúin, her avoidance sets Sylvain’s nerves on edge.
He tugs his steed to face Ingrid as she circles.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Around one another, falling into the step of starving wolves coveting the same rotting carrion. Ingrid snaps her jaws and moves to drag the stinking corpse back to her den.
“I am fighting for my country, as any honorable soldier should!”
But Sylvain’s fangs itch to rip the thing to finite shreds.
“I’ve seen you lay waste to half a battalion in one swoop, Ingrid. This isn’t fighting. It’s fraternizing.”
Across the field, a black and purple dome of light spells disaster for an entire blue-clad battalion. The Adrestian steed beneath him doesn’t flinch. But Egil rears up with a frantic screech, powerful wings blasting Sylvain with a rain-laden gust to the face. The droplets cling to his lashes. In Gautier’s biting chill, they would have crystalized.
Ingrid curls her fists in the reins, but her falcon-sharp eyes are on Sylvain.
“Is this all a joke to you?”
Hooves come down, and mud splatters as high as Ingrid’s silver greaves. Sylvain watches the rivulets stain her knightly image.
“C’mon, Inga.” The quirk of his lips is weak, more grimace than smirk. “My whole life’s been a joke so far. No sense quitting now.”
He keeps circling, until Ingrid is forced to spur Egil back into motion.
“You should be ashamed,” she hisses. “How can you stand by while your countrymen are slaughtered at your feet?”
“Easy.”
He chuckles, tasting metal in the back of his throat. The blood-red palms of his gloves creak tighter around his ruinous lance – to wield it, to still it. To turn it on himself.
He asks, “Who do you think did the slaughtering?”
Lightning flashes. Gold should follow, the glint of Ingrid’s spear slashing out his traitorous tongue. But she gives him nothing.
The ensuing thunder shakes Sylvain’s bones.
“This isn’t what you want,” Ingrid growls. Her eyes are emerald flares. “You’ve always let your loins lead you, but even you couldn’t lay down your life for something so empty. You wouldn’t kill your king, your friends, over a boyhood lust for that heretical murderer!”
“Who says I wouldn’t?” In the sharp gnashing of teeth, Sylvain finds his grin. “You’ve always been so quick to tell me I’m an unloyal, two-timing heartbreaker who leaves you to clean up the fallout. So why are you surprised when I fall in line?”
“Because even you have principles!”
He does. Ones that she has never understood.
Ingrid made martyrs of the girls convinced they could milk relationships from one night romps, and reduced all his desperate cries for help to the roux of a womanizer. Now this, the first step he’s ever taken toward saving himself, wrenching free from the toxic mire of Crests and inherited duties, is taken only as a betrayal of Dimitri.
As if Sylvain hadn’t loved his bleeding-heart prince. As if he hadn’t stopped to wonder if their gentle liege might find a peaceful means of liberating Faerghus from outdated tradition. As if he hadn’t stood at the edge of a wash basin night after night, armor soaked in foreign Crest blood, and asked himself if these violent depositions were truly the only paving stones to a Crestless world.
Edelgard wrenched them from the jaws of the Church like a tooth, leaving bloody roots bubbling in their wake. But Dimitri fashioned his kingdom into gauze, sopping with viscera to spare Rhea the pain.
“And what about you?” Sylvain asks. “I thought you wanted to be a knight of Faerghus. When did you swear fealty to the Archbishop?”
“I am loyal to my king,” Ingrid spits. “As you should be. Edelgard’s bloody rhetoric may appeal to your ideals, but this conquest is the work of a savage madwoman. How many of your own countrymen will stain the Crest-powered Lance of Ruin at her command before it’s your lifeblood under her feet? Do you think she’ll spare a single thought when a foreign-born traitor splatters her greaves?”
They stop circling. But every word hissed through Ingrid’s lips keeps Sylvain’s insides swirling. The images flash across his mind: dead eyes and mangled bodies, the maroons and emeralds of Gautier’s emblem over their bloody breasts. His own taste of the ghosts that haunt the feral boar-king who was once his friend.
In a nauseous lurch, he vomits out the only words he can find to make Ingrid’s onslaught stop.
“I thought you approved of dying for your ideals.”
Ingrid flinches back, eyes flying wide and mouth open in wordless betrayal. No one but Felix has ever had the nerve, nor the right, to dredge out Glenn’s corpse and throw it at her feet.
Sylvain is crossing every sacred line like they’re the t’s in his own death warrant.
And still, he sees them. Faerghan youths he had trained beside, cut down by his own hand. Every face is another link in the heavy chains draped across his shoulders, tethering him, inescapably, to the choice he made to change sides.
Sylvain’s ghosts don’t gnash their teeth for vengeance as Dimitri’s do. They don’t need help sinking vampiric fangs into the veins of their killer. Every accusation Ingrid flings at him gives them the strength to feed on Sylvain’s will to fight.
But if he were to lay down his lance and join Ingrid as she begs, as he aches to, every drop of blood that stains his soul will have been spilled in vain.
Unless Edelgard’s victory is assured, the only thing that can give meaning to all that senseless death, is his own.
He looks Ingrid dead in the eyes.
“If you’re so opposed to me fighting for the Empire, then stop me.”
She makes to answer, but he can’t let her speak. In just a few words, she could unravel every strangled knot he’s twisted himself into.
“Come on.” He holds his arms wide, exposing all the knicks in his armor. “Draw your lance. Run me through. Do the world a fucking favor and end the Gautier bloodline right here.”
“I know what you’re doing, Sylvain,” she growls. Her voice is shaking, and she fists a hand in Egil’s mane. “If you wanted to die, you’d have thrown yourself at the first battalion we sent in. I’m not going to kill you. You don’t want me to kill you.”
“You have to!”
War cries grow louder behind him, the tide of battle surging toward their side of the field. The storm batters them with rain. Sylvain can’t feel it against his numb skin. He trembles, but he doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t feel anything.
Ingrid levels her lance. That fist in Egil’s mane curls around the reins instead. They back up, enough for a running start, enough for a clean kill.
“Why me?” she shouts over the rising sounds of death.
“Of course it would be you.”
It’s the poetry of it all. His oldest friend bringing his pathetic life to an end.
Ingrid’s stalwart conviction, reaping Sylvain as his wavers.
“You are the only one.”
Ingrid studies him. Assesses his resolve. Steels her own.
Then she spurs Egil into action.
Hooves slosh through mud, undercut by the rattle of armor on the slope behind him. Other soldiers don’t matter. By the time they reach this standoff, it’ll be over. Sylvain locks his eyes on the glistening tip of Lúin, hurtling closer. Eight feet. Six. Three.
Panic jerks his lance.
Their weapons crack, the sound echoing loudly even with the battle behind him. The roar of Sylvain’s pulse in his ears muffles both.
It’s desperate, animal instincts that urge him to block Ingrid’s next swing at his vulnerable elbow. The self-preservation he thought he’d buried long ago. It must be his body, his hindbrain, hefting up his lance to keep itself intact against his wishes. It must be his body.
”Do you see?” Ingrid demands, as he knocks aside another vicious swing of Lúin just in time. “You’re lying to yourself, Sylvain.”
“Shut up!”
He thrusts his lance straight for her belly, but a quick twist of her wrist blocks him a second short of rending flesh. The Lance of Ruin trembles in his grasp, ravenous for the chance to destroy everything he has left.
Ingrid urges Egil back, but she does not lower Lúin to charge again.
“You don’t want to die,” she says.
“It’s what I deserve!”
He tugs hard on his reins, the foreign horse beneath him rearing. Ingrid’s eyes widen, but she’s too slow. Sylvain already has the Lance of Ruin arced high overhead. One swing, and it’ll be over.
Inches from striking, he realizes she isn’t looking at him.
Fwip
A sniper’s arrow buries itself in his right arm. Before the pain even registers, Sylvain’s hand spasms, dropping the lance. It falls to the ground with a heavy thud that spooks his horse, who jerks back, loses her footing in the muck, and tumbles over with Sylvain still tangled in the stirrups.
They land hard. Red floods his vision, pain consuming him. Then adrenaline washes him numb. Sylvain blinks away the fog and finds himself staring at his own reflection in the wet sheen of the Lance of Ruin’s Crest Stone.
The Crest of Gautier’s vortex stares back. Pulsing crimson with the blood of every ghost he created and splattered with his own. It gulps him down and still demands more. A feral thing, spiraling ever faster with hunger and sucking anyone near into its rancorous core.
With or without him, Sylvain realizes, there will always be more victims to the bloodlust of Crests. His death releases no spirits. It’s just as meaningless as theirs.
Too little, too late.
Ingrid’s shadow washes over him. She’s dismounted, knowing he cannot rise to stand on his crushed leg, the traitorous horse rolling away with nothing but a limp. Even if he could stand, the sniper’s arrow in his arm ensures he can’t fight back. This battle is over. There’s only one thing left to do.
“Don’t hesitate,” he tells her, flashing his best smile.
Ingrid stands over him, clutching Lúin in a strong fist. Her face is grim.
“Just make it quick, and don’t feel bad, alright? We both earned this.”
There are footsteps, boots pounding in the mud.
“Ingrid?”
Ingrid doesn’t turn.
Ashe swims into Sylvain’s periphery, but Sylvain focuses on the lance in Ingrid’s grip. She curls a second hand around the shaft. Hefts it up, arcing high over her head.
Sylvain watches her bring it down, tracking the entire swing until all at once, at last, his world cuts to black.
“Grab his legs. Careful,” Ingrid instructs Ashe.
He nods and quickly moves to help her lift Sylvain’s limp body and drape him over her steed. Once Sylvain is hanging securely over Egil’s neck, Ingrid brings trembling fingers to his forehead and pushes back his hair. Blood and mud cake the locks together, but from what she can make out, the wound to his temple isn’t that deep.
Hopefully, the flat of her blade will only leave him with a small scar and not a concussion.
“What will you do with him now?” Ashe asks.
“I’m… not sure.”
She traces her thumb over Sylvain’s forehead. It’s jarring how little he’s changed on the outside. She and all her other housemates have grown so much in the past five years, bodies maturing as the war ripped their childhoods out of them. But Sylvain has only pushed his bangs to the side.
Perhaps that was what turned her wrist in the final moment.
“Is it…” she begins, then hesitates.
Ashe steps to her side and waits, sniper eyes always attentive.
“Do you think it’s selfish of me,” she tries again, “that I want to forgive him, even now?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question,” Ashe says. “First when my older brother was taken by the Church. Then, Lonato. They both caused so much harm, and yet, I still loved them. They took me in even after I’d tried to rob them and not only forgave me but helped me become a true knight. I struggled so much to understand how such kind people could end up tangled in conspiracies and attempting revolts.”
Ingrid looks from Ashe to Sylvain. She’s carried those same questions, heavy in her stomach.
Ashe places a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“But I had similar reasons for becoming a thief,” he says. “So, I wonder, if they’d been given the same kindnesses they showed me, could they have been redeemed too? And what does it say about me, that I fired the arrow that took Lonato down?”
The weight of Lúin has never felt so heavy in Ingrid’s palm.
“Have you ever found an answer to that question?” she asks.
“Not one I’m proud of. But as for selfishness, I think sometimes it’s more selfish to rob a person of the chance to redeem themself. Death is final. Sylvain deserves to be held accountable for what he’s done. Just because you show him mercy doesn’t mean you’re absolving him of his crimes.”
Ingrid presses her lips into a thin line and looks up at the storm. It’ll be harder, flying through those heavy clouds with one hand supporting her wayward friend. But she’s made her decision.
Someone has to bring him home.