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Felix decided there had been enough silence.
They had set up camp on the outskirts of Enbarr six days ago with the intention of sending a messenger to the capital – to the emperor herself. Though news of Edelgard’s arrival had sent tongues wagging throughout the camp, only the king and the professor could attest to what had transpired during their meeting, and neither one had been willing to delve into details. In the end, all it had amounted to was a breakdown in what little diplomacy had been attempted during this war.
And now, on the eve of their planned assault on Enbarr, Dimitri had made his noble proclamations and pretty rallying speeches and then disappeared into his tent. As the morning sun cascaded into afternoon and the afternoon faded into night, the camp had remained utterly silent. Of course, there had been noisy preparations to attend to – weapons to forge, armor to temper, soldiers to feed – but they had been idling within striking distance of Enbarr with no further word from their commander and king, and his silence had been so loud.
Felix’s path was lit by solitary torches, blazing bright in acquiescence to the restless night.
The pavilion was at the northernmost edge of the camp, bearing on either side of its entrance flap the familiar banners of Faerghus royalty. Felix stopped before the entryway, where the torchlight could no longer overcome the darkness of night, and in his moment of hesitation, he looked from one side to the other. Whether from genuine concern for their rest before the morning’s march or in a foolish bid to be left alone, Dimitri had dismissed Dedue and the guards for the night.
Not that they would have been able to stop Felix, regardless. He was determined to put an end to the silence, even if he had to wring the words from the boar’s throat himself.
He flung the entryway flap to the side and pressed forward, the heavy canvas falling back into place behind him.
There was a small desk in the middle of the tent, a single candle burning in its center, wax trickling down the sides of the holder and onto the reports scattered atop a large map. With the parchments strewn about the floor and the map left askew, its corners dripping over the edge of the table like they had melted from it, it appeared as though the papers had been cast aside in frustration.
At one corner, there was a trunk for the king’s clothing and accouterments, though it had been left ajar, a baldric left hanging over the side and a tunic wedged haphazardly between a few others, as though it had been ravaged in a panic to find a piece which had never been there.
And at the opposite corner, a folding bed draped with quilts and furs alike, nothing like the simple bedrolls afforded to the rest of them. Befitting a king, but too ornate for a beast.
A swell in the candlelight dared Felix to examine closer, and at the farthest edge of the bed was Dimitri himself, his cloak pooled around him as he sat hunched over with his hands clasped together between his spread knees, still clad in his full armor like it was an extension of himself, a veil of unkempt hair obscuring any view of his face.
Like an animal skulking in darkness.
And now everyone had seen it, what Felix had known for years on end. Everyone had given Dimitri sidelong glances and shared hushed whispers among themselves even as they followed behind on his bloody path.
The apprehension embedded within their near-reluctant loyalty had vindicated Felix’s belief that Dimitri was a beast in man’s clothing, the basest form of self, far beneath reason – bloodlust and cruelty and madness all buried beneath a statuesque façade.
He saw it when they were nine, and Dimitri swung a sword with such force it snapped in two, and then had the gall to seem surprised by his own strength. He had looked askance at Felix, hands trembling around the hilt, and finally dropped the weapon and his gaze all at once.
He saw it when they were fifteen, and Dimitri ruthlessly slaughtered the Western Kingdom rebels, some sort of maniacal expression plastered upon his face as he watched them suffer by his lance. He had enjoyed it: the agonized screams and dying breaths of traitors, their blood staining the ground beneath his feet as he stormed from one to the next like an insatiable beast.
He saw it six months ago, when he witnessed Dimitri wandering the monastery alone at night, chasing the shadows he himself had cast upon the massive walls of the Entrance Hall. His gauntlets had scraped across the stone as he blindly stumbled forward, reaching for the dark silhouettes flickering in candlelight, the grating noise punctuated only by his own shuddering breaths and pleading whispers to the ghosts in his head.
The mask had been torn off and cast aside.
Dimitri died a long time ago. To call the boar by that name was to tarnish the memory of the boy Felix had once called his best friend.
Then he finally looked up, his lone eye a dulled blue hue as the faint yellows and oranges of candlelight tried in vain to reach it.
“Felix…”
It was tired, unsteady from the fatigue of what was likely another sleepless night. He stood abruptly, took a few precarious steps forward, and then stopped.
Felix shook his head. “You’ve been hiding all day,” he said.
“I suppose I have.”
Dimitri let his gaze fall to the floor, then away to the canvas walls of the tent, then to the table in the center, all while his feet took to the same aimless path, meandering about with no direction or purpose, as though he were uncertain where he belonged. When his eye met Felix’s once more, Dimitri stood still before him, the soft candlelight casting the right side of his face in sharp shadows.
“These could be our last hours,” Felix muttered. “If you’re not going to spend them with your soldiers, try to get some rest instead of pacing around like a caged animal.”
“I have not even tried.”
“Hmph. The last thing we need is you collapsing somewhere in the streets of Enbarr.”
A pathetic laugh escaped through Dimitri’s slightly-parted lips, only to then dissipate into the space between them, receding his expression into a furrowed brow and a deep frown.
“I hear Edelgard’s voice in my ear even now.” His voice was barely above a whisper, but it wavered nonetheless. “I… I don’t want to have to…”
The words trailed off into silence, and Felix folded his arms.
“You’ve ranted and raved about nothing else for months,” he scoffed. “An enemy is an enemy.”
“It seems we were fated to destroy each other, one way or another,” Dimitri said, a long sigh capping off the very thought. “I finally understand her vision, only far too late. The future she sees… it is soaked in blood.”
“And your path hasn’t been?”
Dimitri winced, the wounded pride of a predator whose prey had escaped its grasp.
“It has,” he said, sadly, regretfully. “Perhaps that is why she…”
Again, he left words unsaid.
He looked down at his hands, his palms upturned, faint orange lines of light tracing the length of his fingers. Felix found himself watching the way Dimitri’s hands shook, the metal softly clanking with the slightest movements. They reflected back at him the fires of Ailell, of Gronder, of battlefields strewn with new enemies and old friends alike, bodies laid bloody and dying by Dimitri’s own hands. Those gauntlets were the honed claws of a beast.
“You tried diplomacy,” Felix began. “It didn’t work. Now there’s only one option.”
“Fight.” Dimitri said it softly, as though testing it out. “Perhaps meeting with her was a fool’s errand after all.”
“It never would’ve mattered in the end,” Felix shot back, uncrossing his arms so he could lift his hands in a vague, disapproving gesture. “She made her choice.”
“That is why I must stop her,” Dimitri countered. “Should I have to end her life to do so… in the future we will build, there will be no forgotten parted souls. Not even hers.”
Felix had posed the question before: knowing they were family, knowing Edelgard was an old friend with old memories attached, could Dimitri bring himself to kill her? He had received an answer then, and a different answer now. But the idea that she would – or should – join the ranks of the ghosts hovering over Dimitri’s shoulder was sickening.
“Is that what you think?” Felix demanded. “That glorifying death will build a better future?”
Dimitri shook his head, wordlessly fumbling on a few unfinished thoughts before he finally spoke.
“No, you misunderstand, I—”
“What kind of king are you, to build your legacy on the bodies of the fallen rather than the survival of the living?” Felix cut in. “There should be no martyrs. Let the dead stay dead.”
Dimitri’s breaths were short and shallow and quick, lips parting and closing again and again in a few attempted refutations, the panicked gaze of his remaining eye darting back and forth between Felix’s. But Felix refused him any reprieve from the onslaught.
“The people who’ve died in this war… not one of them died so you could put them up on a pedestal,” Felix said, and hated the way his voice cracked on the final word. “Stop putting on a show for their sakes. Or mine.”
Dimitri said nothing, and did nothing, his shoulders slumping under the burden of his friend’s anger and venom, his eye falling half-closed in surrender to the sharp, piercing glare leveled at him. A few malformed words devolved into hitched breaths and frustrated mutterings, pain forming deep new lines upon his brow even has he struggled against it.
And in a single, broken breath, he finally whispered, “Why are you here?”
“Why—”
Why?
Mere months ago, it was a question Dimitri had posed to all the Blue Lions when they had finally found him, but it had taken a caustic edge, tacitly demanding they leave him alone to maim and kill and then die. But now – this was reminiscent of old arguments between the two of them, heated exchanges which seemed to have no real impetus and no true conclusion. They usually only ended when Felix walked away, refusing to stand idle before a statue bearing cracks in its very foundation.
As for the why: Felix was simply here. Watching over him. Watching him put his life at risk. Watching him rise and fall both on the battlefield and off. Watching him bloody his gauntlets in the name of honor for his kingdom and justice for the fallen.
But with the vulnerability in his gaze, he seemed less the boar and more Dimitri, lamenting his own fragility in Felix’s presence, seeking something buried deep beneath the man’s stern glare and sharp tongue – seeking an answer Felix was not sure how to give.
Felix dismissed the thought before it could encroach any further.
“You’ve worn two different faces for so long, it’s hard to know which one is speaking,” he spat. “I’ll be waiting to see which one of you comes out the other end of this war.”
He turned on his heel without another word, without waiting for any sort of reaction, without giving Dimitri the opportunity for rebuttal – and then stopped mid-step when a firm hand grasped his arm on the backswing. He peered back, glaring over his shoulder to find Dimitri’s eye wide and lip quivering on more unspoken thoughts, shaken and confused by his own actions.
So many times, Dimitri had simply let him have the final, scathing word and walk away, but not now. Now, the silence festered in the air between them like an open wound.
Felix yanked his forearm from Dimitri’s grasp, and Dimitri let it go without a fight.
Dimitri stood up as straight as he could, but faltered on an aborted step backward. “Forgive me, I… I have had much on my mind these days,” he finally said, and waited for Felix to turn and face him properly, even if it had to be with that skeptical sneer on his face. “You’re right: these very well could be our last hours. Our last stand. Our last chance to do right by all those whom we have lost.”
Felix took a moment to just look at him. Even now, Dimitri put on a brave face. But the new mask bore deep fissures, spreading and twisting steadily over the months since Rodrigue’s death—
—since Rodrigue’s sacrifice.
Felix had not cried at the news. He had not reacted much at all – not outwardly, at least. It was his role as a Fraldarius, after all: to succeed his father in protecting and serving the king as his shield, stoic and inert.
But Rodrigue had told Dimitri to live for what you believe in. Felix had heard it secondhand from Dimitri himself, spoken softly and quietly but not enough to hide the tremor in his voice. Maybe Dimitri only told him out of obligation, or maybe because he genuinely thought Felix deserved to know, or maybe because he thought speaking it aloud would make it a tangible reality.
Or maybe because he sincerely took it to heart.
“I still hear their voices,” Dimitri continued, and there was shame embedded within it, a rueful undertone to his confession which made Felix’s usual scowl soften. “Perhaps I always will. I have not yet atoned for all my sins. Maybe I have taken more lives – and done things in the name of hate – than I could ever truly atone for. But I have finally learned how to live without the crushing weight of such hatred. The Kingdom is my responsibility, and yet, I am not alone. The future is waiting for us to take hold of it. I need you by my side for this. I need you—”
He stopped there.
The only sound Felix could hear was the clamor of his own heartbeat thrumming against his eardrums.
Dimitri slowly lifted a hand into the space between them, but it hesitated halfway, fingers curling in toward the palm as if in surrender – but there was a flicker in his eye, clarity, decisiveness he usually reserved for the battlefield, barely perceptible in itself even as he held the rest of his face stoic. His other hand undid the clasps and straps holding the gauntlet in place, deftly pulled off the cracked leather glove beneath, and then cast them both aside to the floor.
He brought his bare hand to Felix’s cheek, and all Felix could do was stand utterly still.
Felix had expected it to be cold, but it was warm. Callused, rough from its perpetual grip around the stingingly-cold steel of a lance, traced with old scars and new – but warm.
And in the warmth of it, his traitorous heart skipped a beat.
Yet, his heart was vindicated by the familiar feeling blossoming in his chest.
He felt it when they were eight, and Dimitri led him up the highest hill in Fhirdiad he could find just to show Felix the view. He confessed he had not shown Sylvain or Ingrid – something about Sylvain not appreciating it and Ingrid being too focused elsewhere – and then sheepishly admitted he wanted it to be just for the two of them.
He felt it when they were twelve, and Dimitri offered to give Felix his gloves on a particularly cold day when Felix had stubbornly refused to wear any. Felix had turned down the idea multiple times before he finally caved to Dimitri’s equally-stubborn insistence. They finally compromised by each wearing only one glove.
He felt it four months ago, when Dimitri approached him privately after the Blue Lions themselves had buried Rodrigue. All he had said was “I’m sorry,” – nothing more, nothing less – and yet, it was heavy, burdened both by the weight of his guilt and the magnitude of his empathy, the entirety of his heart bared in a single gesture: an apology for his actions and his inaction alike, for his absence and his presence and all the shades of gray in between.
And now, with Dimitri’s hand there, he felt it.
The candlelight finally reached Dimitri’s eye, awash in brilliant blue like the still lakes of Faerghus and glistening like when they had frozen over in the winter – a softness to it like the landscape blanketed in pure, white snow. It reached his hair, highlighting its golden hue like the rare but welcome sunny days of their childhoods in Fhirdiad. It reached his hand, caressing the lines of his palm and the angles of his fingers, like the warm glow of their younger days spent studying together by the light of the hearth while a blizzard raged outside the palace walls.
And in the light, Felix could see the boy from his memory, the man buried beneath the façade – he could see Dimitri.
For Felix, this – this feeling – was what he believed in. Somewhere deep down, he always had.
And Dimitri was there, seeking Felix in return.
Felix turned into the touch, closing his eyes as Dimitri’s hand, rough and scarred as it was, graced over the curve of his cheekbone.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You should know that by now, Dimitri.”
Something like hope sparked in Dimitri’s voice, a tiny gasp punctuating his words: “After— after everything I…?”
“I’ve stuck by you since we were children,” Felix answered. “Even if I haven’t agreed with all your decisions, your little crusade hasn’t killed me yet. There are worse things than being at your side.”
When Felix opened his eyes to look at him once more, the remnants of candlelight were lost in the unfathomable blue of the gaze leveled back at him, shining at the surface with a newfound hope and welling with old emotions long buried in its depths – the color of the cloudless days in Faerghus which were so beautiful in their scarcity that a young Felix always seemed to feel as though they had been meant for him and him alone.
And maybe they had been.
“I have long assumed you hated me, Felix,” Dimitri confessed. “But I had always hoped—”
“I never hated you,” Felix interjected. “You’re not responsible for what happened back then.”
“Felix…”
His thumb stroked across Felix’s cheek, over and over, with a gentleness Felix never could have imagined from one so strong. Their paths had diverged long ago, each treading a long road to the same destination. And they had almost arrived, on the cusp of victory, on the edge of something more as they each strove forward into the unknown, having conviction only in the other.
“You don’t have to bear every burden on your own, you know,” Felix said.
“It is difficult to surrender what lurks in the depths of one’s heart to another,” Dimitri replied, voice low, conflicted. “But if you should offer, I will accept. And gladly. I remember those bygone days of our childhood with such fondness, but now I find myself drawn to the future – a future for us. You and I.” His voice wavered in what little space remained between them, his shoulders shuddered beneath his armor, his hand trembled at his friend’s temple. “I… I need you, Felix. I always have.”
“I’m here,” Felix said. “Don’t you dare forget it.”
The long fingers at his temple drew into his hair, warm breaths wafting about his neck, the distance between them drawing shorter and shorter as Dimitri made a small sound of affirmation, tilting his head so slowly it had been nearly imperceptible. Felix swallowed hard, watching Dimitri unfold before him. The way his sweat-dampened hair clung to his forehead in chaotic lines. The way his eyelashes fanned out as he looked down at him. The way his lips parted ever so slightly—
Felix pulled away, flustered, an embarrassingly loud noise of surprise escaping him as he stumbled back toward the tent’s entrance flap, all while he saw Dimitri straighten his posture, standing tall and imposing, not as a beast, but as a man – a king – with the faintest hints of a smile beginning to peek through.
“S-So,” Felix sputtered, turning halfway in the other direction in an attempt to hide the tinge of pink undoubtedly marring his face, “don’t get yourself killed out there tomorrow.”
A full smile now, a crinkle at the corner of Dimitri’s eye, considerate and genuine like the ones he had offered when they were children. The kind of fond, reassuring smile he had shared while bandaging up Felix’s scraped knee or drying the tears of another lost sparring match with Glenn, when all Dimitri had to offer were consoling words, a comfortable shoulder to cry on, and an outstretched hand – but they were all Felix had needed.
“I cannot,” Dimitri replied. “After all, you will be waiting for me.”
Felix huffed out a laugh.
Of that much, he was certain.