Archive of Our Own ^beta

In the greenhouse, the air was warm and oppressively humid. The professor didn't feel it. He was completely unbothered, sitting on the edge of a raised flowerbed, preoccupied with a cat that paced around him on the stretch of stone. Dimitri entered. All he gave him was an aloof glance, acknowledging his presence before a tail brushed his face and drew his attention elsewhere. Being able to spot the glimmer in Byleth's eye as he enjoyed some small pleasure used to bring so much joy. Every bit of glass was fogged over in condensation, coming from inside, outside, or maybe both. Here, they were the only souls in existence. The serene indifference Byleth showed towards Dimitri in this stuffy place created hypnotic tension. It calmed him, but there was something he had to do to get his attention, here, in this moment trapped in honeyed amber.

He started towards him.

"Where have you been?"

Eyes flicked to Dimitri, and then went back to the cat as she dropped from the ledge, falling dead on the floor. Byleth immediately slid down to check on her, his fingers coming up with blood from her mouth. Dimitri grabbed him by the shoulder, soaking his own hands in even more blood. Byleth's hand flew to cover his mouth. Dimitri caught his wrist.

"STOP."

He was as soft, warm, and melty as the trout meunière he used to make. His hand slid from the joint like a hunk of fish under the fork. He did not try to stop it.

"You're not getting out of this that easy professor. I won't stop until you give it to me."

At last, Dimitri caught his gaze for longer than a second. The professor stared in blank shock, the light gone from his eyes, though there were some life left in them.

"I-I wouldn't have to, if…" Tears welled up in Byleth's eyes, and Dimitri almost shed a few as well, but it would be for nothing if he stopped now. He started shaking him.

"Is this it?!" Red warmth flowed through his fingers. More of the professor fell apart. "Scream for me! Cry professor, cry! Give me something other than this, th-this sea of NOTHING!"

Byleth panted and gasped in pain. The corner of his gaping mouth twitched, and for a brief second Dimitri's hopes soared, but then those pretty eyes of his fluttered shut. He escaped without a sound. Dimitri released the body and watched him fall backward, joining his pet in the pool of blood with a wet thump. All was silent. The coppery stench cut with fertilizer brought on an air of stagnant peace.

Dimitri had to leave.

Last he remembered, he was still walking, but when full awareness returned, he found himself propped up against a weathered old wagon without wheels. Falling asleep didn't seem possible. He was more exhausted than ever, his legs were heavy, his bandages itched, and his eye radiated a hot, sharp pain that worsened with each passing day. The patchwork bits of armor covering a shoulder and a leg were too small and tightly constricted him, causing his skin to chafe against the worn clothes he had on underneath. All the while, his omnipresent migraine throbbed so consistently that it could be used as a measurement of time, counting by the sledgehammer blows to the inside of his skull. Neither shade or wind could help against the blanket of heat settled over his body. Dimitri had degraded into a walking font of misery. Comfort was a foreign concept to him, and sleep only existed in legend. The one thing to suggest that his vision might have been a dream were its contents: the stuff of old, recurring nightmares.

It'd start as a fantasy of the professor, be it perverted or as pure as him enjoying a cup of tea. Inevitably, Dimitri would give into temptation and reach out to him. Wherever he touched, he would be gravely wounded. A finger that brushed hair out of his eyes bit him like the blow of a claymore, blood everywhere, no matter how gentle Dimitri tried to be. He'd desperately try to help the professor, putting more hands on his broken body, butchering him even worse. The realization that his touch was what hurt him always came too late. Dimitri would dream the same dream again and never learned his lesson, and so he would maim Byleth all over again. The first time it happened, he woke half the residence hall with his screams, and for the entire day he avoided so much as even looking at the professor, out of fear that he'd be punished for the sin of catching his eye in the waking world as well.

All that anticipation, dreaming of his death, and yet Dimitri still failed to do anything for him when the end of those innocent days finally came. He wasn't even there to see Byleth breathe his last. For all he knew, the professor could have died utterly and completely alone. Was that why he had yet to appear now? To make Dimitri feel the abandonment he felt?

He was alone now, but someone would come to remind him of his reason for out here if he didn't keep moving, so he pressed on through the forest. Travel on better known roads became more of a hassle after the bounty on his head had been raised, and Glenn was getting fed up with the time he wasted killing sellswords instead of imperial soldiers. Heading straight in the direction Enbarr, path or no path, would bring their salvation sooner. Glenn pushed for this plan so aggressively Dimitri had to give in. Cutting through woodland proved to be as quick and uneventful as he'd promised, so much so that it made Dimitri anxious for something to happen. He didn't know what anyone else thought of Glenn's arrangement. Would his father or someone be disappointed to see him running away from the bloodshed he owed them?

Despite the crisp and sunny afternoon, Dimitri could not shake the dreadful scenario of upsetting everyone else from his thoughts. He knew he was being watched. Not knowing when their confrontation would come put him on edge. A branch would sway in the wind, and he'd look it up and down to confirm with himself that it really had moved on its own, not because of someone's hand. He misheard a squirrel scuttling up a tree as a whisper, and almost saw blood when he passed a bush with its berries starting to come in.

The stew of paranoia dredged up tensions. When his mind was already racing, it threw Dimitri for a loop when he came across the start of a wooden fence. Suddenly he was not alone in the way he thought he was. The fence had seen better days, but it wasn't worn down enough to seem completely abandoned. Dimitri put a hand on it and paused. Nobody had any complaints. When he listened for any voices, he only heard the clicking chirps of insects in the grass, leaves rustled by a breeze and a rooster's crow, not so far away. Continuing down the fence eventually brought him to a busy little hutch. Dimitri paid a quick glance to his surroundings and saw no one staring back at him.

Feeling a bit more secure, he tore the highest few boards off the fence and stepped over it. His shadow cast over the entrance of the hutch. For a while, he stood there and just quietly watched the chickens go about their lives, pecking at the ground in stilted motions, a flock of warm-blooded automata. They didn't pay him much mind. No fear, no hatred. The brindle hen surrounded by chicks was Dimitri's favorite one. For whatever reason, a pure brown hen started to harass her, giving a few mean pecks that Brindle took without a fight. He stepped in, picked Brown up and ripped her head off, casually tossing it over his shoulder before walking away. She'd become the first meal he's had in days. The only sharp object he had on him was the dagger he'd given to that rotten girl all those years ago, which would be perfect size for the job. Over the fence and back to the woods.

His first lessons in dressing wild game must have been from some early lance instructor, or possibly Rodrigue, but the professor's demonstration was the only one that stood out in his memory. When he did it, he would barely say anything. No verbal instruction unless explicitly asked for. Without the distraction of words, the artistry of his handiwork took center stage, so that everyone would watch the steps of his hunting knife as he made it dance across skin, scales, and hide. If he concentrated, he could still see a black glove snapping the legs and wings of a naked pheasant. Bone had to be sawed for those parts to be fully removed. Ingrid and Ashe were there, in academy uniform, but now a half-blind creature stood between them to complete the semicircle. His classmates did not react to his transformation. The ghost of the future was invisible to them. Ashe turned away when bird's crop was slit, seeds spilling out.

"Leave if you need to. This lesson is optional." The professor said. He had a voice.

Dimitri dropped the wing he pulled off, bubbling with laughter, giddy at their reunion, well worth Byleth's condemnation to the hell of staying at his side. He'd be strung along by the same failed promises of salvation that kept everyone everyone else he loved chained to the brimstone. Dimitri threw his head around in search of him, possibly hiding among the trees. His laughter petered out. Wind and crickets filled the newborn silence.

"This lesson is optional!" He fought it. Begged. But nothing happened. His breathing became heavy. "It was, this lesson is…" He swallowed, tongue thick and dry. "This lesson is optional."

When the energy to emote left him, he almost sounded like his teacher.

He forgot what he was doing with the dead hen. He killed, skinned, and ate all sorts of things since the start of his exile, but now the guidance of the past was slipping through his fingers. He cut to skin, shaving off portions of meat with the feathers. If he wanted those parts that badly he'll eat them as is. The butchering was an act of catharsis more than it was for food. It yielded half a usable breast. He left the meat aside on the forest floor, not caring about the dirt and dead leaves it picked up. For this one he'd start a fire.

While he went around gathering dry twigs, a pair of feet came skittering over crunchy leaves. Dimitri got out of bending position to stand at full height, provoking his visitor to start growling. It was such a mean and hateful noise that he expected to find a wolf when he turned around, but instead caught sight of a brown and white blur running back into the undergrowth. Dimitri suprised himself when he crouched back down and held out his hand. It didn't feel like he was the one who decided his body would do that. Perhaps knowing this, the dog rejected him and flew into into a tirade of barking, flashing teeth as white as her coat, spittle flying with her whole muzzle wrinkled in a seething anger that mismatched her floppy ears and long, fluffy hair. This was not some pathetic fleabitten thing he could project some sort of kinship onto, no. This farm dog was on the job, and had fulfilled her duties in finding him, covered in blood and feathers like some sort of mangy human-shaped fox. Dimitri wasn't sure what to do about the dog. She hated him very, very much, but she had yet to bite, and her medium size didn't strike him as being particularly threatening. Killing a dog wouldn't appease the dead.

"Peony!"

Her name was called from afar, followed by a whistle that made Dimitri's head jerk up just like the dog's did. Two short, shrill phwee-phwee calls, almost in the pattern of birdsong when spaced out across multiple calls. Dimitri knew it by heart. When separated by bad terrain, bad visibility, or simply the flow of the fight, that exact whistle was how the professor signaled where he was, telling his students that he wasn't dead or injured, just far away.

The dog, Peony, jumped the fence bounded across the rolling green as fast as her legs would carry her, trying to escape the animal on her tail. Hearing his mentor's call again after all this time sent Dimitri into a blind bolt towards the source of the sound, and his mind raced breathlessly.

It all made sense why Byleth had not come to haunt him; missing didn't mean dead! Dimitri never saw him fall with his own two eyes, that was just the most popular rumor about his disappearance, he himself had gone to that supposed cliff and spent hours ripping up rubble, finding no broken remains, not even a drop of blood that wasn't his own! He only accepted his death because people he held dear always died, and took his absence during the kingdom's turmoil as confirmation of his demise. But if he knew nothing of Byleth's whereabouts, any number of things could have happened!

He could've suffered unspeakable things at the hands of the Imperial army, thousands of times worse than losing an eye, yet he managed to escape here where the farm owners kindly hid him in their home and nursed him back to health but oh, without the resources of the monastery his recovery was a long long road away after what they did to him, and so he found himself imprisoned once again, fighting to drag his crippled body from the sickbed, but it was never his fault that he wasn't there!!! If he had known and were able to he would have come running the day Dedue died, or at any point Dimitri teetered close to death's embrace!

None of what happened mattered now, not when he had the professor in his sight. He stood in the middle of the field with his back turned to him, black coat ruffled by the wind, exuding the dangerous, mysterious air that unsettled Dimitri in the first few weeks of learning under him. Remembering that hit him like an uppercut. Everything had become so much worse since then. But a remedy stood right before Dimitri, he need only to reach out and take him.

"Professor!!!"

The figure in the field changed. He was much smaller when he turned around, his posture was hunched and wrong, and Dimitri's heart sank for a second before his disappointment gave way to outrage. A thief. He wore a coat that did not belong on his body, wore the skin of the deceased, just to torment him, to spit on the professor's memory. The dog reached him first and whipped around, baring her fangs with a snarl as she squared up defensively between Dimitri and the old man. An ugly, shriveled up thing, he was, with a bulbous nose and not a single hair on his head. That coat was much too elegant to be draped over the tiny body of a geriatric goblin.

"W-Who are you?!"

The old man backed away in a couple of trembling steps, already knowing he couldn't outrun someone who could keep up with Peony.

"It doesn't belong to you! Give it back, now!"

"I don't have any money on me, I'm sorry!"

The horrible wall of a man rushed at him, fast and inevitable as the tide of floodwater from a broken dam, and equally wild. He carried an odor of old blood and rot with him. His left eye was the only thing the old man saw, a canyon of infection ruled by crusted blood and pus. Staring at it made him sick. He had to clap his hands over his nose and mouth, to keep the stench out and his scream in.

Dimitri lunged at the old man, managing to get hold of an arm before Peony jumped on him and sunk her teeth into the arm that seized her owner. For all her ferocity, it took nothing for Dimitri to grab Peony by the neck and rip her off of him. The dog managed to stand again, but he swiftly kicked her in the ribs, and this time she stayed down. Her shrill whines pierced the air. Her owner fell to his knees before her, too stunned by how swiftly she'd been broken to make a sound. The old man resigned himself to the whims of a violent stranger.

Taking the precious coat back was as simple as peeling the sleeves off his arms. It occurred to Dimitri that had the thief not immediately given up, the teacher's relic could have been torn in any sort of scuffle over it, thanks the clumsy strength running in his Blaiddyd blood. Every breath the dog struggled to take in came out as a whine. The old man sobbed over her, completely ignoring Dimitri. The professor wouldn't approve of what he'd done to get his coat back. He already killed his cat in his dreams. Just like when he offered a hand for Peony to smell, Dimitri didn't feel much control over his legs as they carried him away from the scene, leaving the old man unharmed.

At the edge of the fence he looked back at him, confused. The tearful old man seemed even more confused than Dimitri.

No matter. After he put the farm behind him and could no longer hear the dog's cries, Dimitri began to feel normal. He was pleased himself for having rescued the professor's coat. It soothed his eye to follow the familiar path of silver embroidery that drew three almond shaped ovals together at the center of Byleth's upper back, forming the vague shape of a spear's tip, trailing off into three lines that made an upward sweep towards the back of either shoulder. Another offshoot of the silver thread took the form of a running stitch, a dashed little line along the outside of the sleeve that ran until it hit the elbow, where another decorative spearhead began. The detail was so well crafted that it seemed to be engraved into the cloth, a carving set in wool. Complex. Breathtaking. Yet perfectly symmetrical, each and every thread in harmony with one another. A showcase in the aesthetics of order.

He ran a thumb along the slight ribbing the three embroidered lines created in being so close together. It felt wonderful against his skin. Like heaven, compared to the rags he had to settle for up until now. Dimitri rubbed his face in it. He always wanted to do this, but could never muster up the courage to steal a piece of clothing whose disappearance would be so noticeable, even if he only used it for an hour or two as Byleth slept peacefully through the night. A crying shame he didn't, for the inside was lined with a thin layer of wool, soft as a cloud and more luxurious than fine silk. Dimitri walked and walked without paying any mind to his surroundings. Caught in nostalgia's thrall, he could keep fondling this garment for days. Perhaps he did.

Dimitri picked up a sleeve and watched it flop as he let it go, smiling. Wasn't it cute how Byleth almost always wore it over his shoulders, and would only ever actually put his arms through the sleeves when the weather forced him to? He lifted it again, another sleeve dropped. Something was wrong this time. He looked up to find that his feet unknowingly carried him back to Duscur.

The dry grass, trees, and dead leaves burned in a great fire that roared as one. A thick haze of suffocation enveloped all. The back of his throat stung and his eyes welled up with tears, but he fought the urge to wipe them with the coat, not wanting to sully it in pus from the infected one. Crackling flames gave way to screams. The dying pleaded for mercy, the dead lamented for the families they'd never see again, and the desecrated gurgled, too broken to even give so much a scream. Dimitri watched them writhe, the piles of bodies in a broad spectrum of decay, unfairly obscured by the smoke so that they appeared more to be a mass of gaping mouths and clawing hands instead of a collection of human beings that once had their own thoughts, feelings, and dreams. Dimitri was not allowed to look away, no more than he was allowed to cover his ears at their endless wails. Who else would save them?

The sole bit of reprieve he had from this hell was the professor's coat. Dimitri smothered himself in it. He bit the wool so that it swallowed his cries, and through this, he discovered that it was easier to breathe through the coat than he would in the smoke, steeped in the stench of decay. Blessed by Byleth, his coat was a ward against rot and evil. Its filter made burning flesh smell like pinewood smoked tea. He imagined a steaming cup on standby as Byleth lost himself in grading, deaf to the soft sound of his quill scratching away.

"Lapsang's a bit stronger than chamomile, no floral notes. Not sure if you'd like it, but you're welcome to have a sip."

"Th-Thank you professor!! I will!" Dimitri hid his blushing face deeper into the perfumed coat. "Your lips must have touched that cup… And to do that you'd be holding the saucer in your very own hands!" He bit the coat even though it wasn't very effective in blocking the delirious whine that tore out of him. Hearing the professor's voice again made him so happy, he just couldn't contain it.

And he was still in Duscur! That he could make Dimitri feel this way as the royal guard burned alive and melted together was proof that he had been an angel, some sort of conduit between Sothis and the people she abandoned to the earth. In Edelgard's crusade against the church, of course he'd be the first to go. Byleth did not appear to him because the goddess had reclaimed her knight. His place was at her side, not in the arms of some reeking, bloodsoaked sinner, whose soul was bound for the deepest pits of hell, if he wasn't there already. He understood it but he couldn't accept it. If Sothis was the one keeping Byleth away, then Dimitri would simply have to claw his way up there to rip him out of heaven with his own two hands, even if he had to kill the goddess herself to get what he wanted. She deserved it for not lifting a finger during the tragedy that unfolded before him once again.

So much blood flowed that the grass shone red, and Dimitri could feel it seeping through his shabby boots. Every tree burned away into charcoal statues. The victims of dark magic littered the area. Hades' dark tendrils had a penchant for limbs, looping around them to drag someone to the ground in an attempt to bring them under, blocked by the restraints of a physical body against earth, which the spell did not acknowledge. Dimitri stumbled over part of the end result; a soldier missing both his legs, his head firmly bashed into the ground, teeth sprinkled around the impact site. Ashy smudges left by the tendrils were the one hint it had been black magic and not the work some demonic beast. Mire was the spell that sickened him the most. Its black rot ate the human body from the inside out, but left its target alive long enough to see and feel themself melting into decay, not succumbing until minutes later. The temptation to throw the professor's coat over his head was never stronger.

"Hey there, little prince. Didja do anything fun today?"

Dimitri wasn't a child anymore. Glenn didn't need to squat down to his level for this question, but he still spoke down to him. He found a new way to greet Dimitri by jabbing a finger into a poorly bandaged gash on his arm. All these years later, the mud he rolled in as he died stuck to his black curls and his face, never drying. His chest and belly were one single gaping cavity ripped open by Mire's destruction. When it first happened, the spell gutted him like Byleth would a fish, everything slipping all out once after his ribs started to crumble. The hole only continued to widen with the passage of time. Over half a decade later, Mire had eaten so much Glenn that he was starting to develop slit wide enough that Dimitri could almost see straight through him, and it would only continue to widen the longer his murderers roamed free, unpunished.

Inky blood dribbled from the jagged bottom lip of the cavity as Glenn trotted out in front of Dimitri, like sand in an hourglass. Fetid decay erased the last dregs of the professor's tea aroma.

"What's that?" He pointed at the clothes in his mouth.

"It's the professor's…"

"Coat?"

"Yes."

An amused huff came from Glenn's nose.

"No it's not."

Dimitri shrunk without a response. He was in trouble. A princeling again, in for a scolding.

"Silly Dima, that's black, not grey!"

The smoke tears became tears of disbelief. Dimitri straightened out the coat and held it in front of him, and to his horror, Glenn was right. It looked wrong. Different. But beyond the wrong shade, he couldn't put his finger on what exactly set this coat apart from the real thing. He tried to recall the true, grey version of his coat, and failed. The black coat had infected his memories. It was there for tea, during sword practice, at every class, and even followed him to his failed confession at the Goddess tower.

"You're a real piece of work, aren't you? We lost an entire year to him, and you can't even remember his voice or what he looked like. Did you even go to that school at all, or are you just imagining you did?" Glenn slipped an arm around his own back and continued tearing into him.

"Maybe if you went to class, someone could've taught you how to keep your word, instead of leaving us all to rot while you played with your cock, thinking about someone who never loved you." Two fingers emerged from Glenn's gore slit, and he scissored it open for Dimitri with a wet schlik, forcing him to dry heave.

"And you never loved him either, you just wanted a warm body to use for all your sick little fantasies. That's why you can't remember him. He wasn't a person to you, just set of curves, a dick, and an ass! Did he ever, even once, show that he cared about you in any way beyond the petty niceties bought by your tuition?!"

Something stirred beneath the waters of lethe.

"Dumb question, I admit." Glenn caught it before Dimitri did, and released it with an eyeroll. "Any memory of that might as well be more fluff you've cooked up in your head to get away from me and everyone else who died instead of you."

The lull in his speech was filled with Dimitri's sobs. He waited for him to stop, or at least quiet down enough so that he didn't need to shout every word. The sneer carved into his face shifted into a wistful smile.

"You always did have a big imagination, didn't you? It made a few of the tutors worry, all 'Oh, he wouldn't need imaginary friends if there more children his age who he could see every day,' they'd say. I felt bad for you too. Sure, I was like, thrice your age at the time, but I tried to find the time to play with you as best I could."

The soft eyes he laid on Dimitri turned to stone.

"Is that why you didn't help me back then, and won't help me now? What, was I never good enough for you?"

"No, no! I-I didn't because I was too weak, and I fail now because I'm too stupid to control myself! I'm to blame, it was all me! I might as well have killed you myself with my own bare hands!"

"Alright, settle down. I believe you. Look, I'll even throw you a bone."

Glenn reached into himself again, this time from the front, using an entire hand. A slow, agonizing process. The struggle to force himself through his uncooperative wound had him teeter to his knees, groaning low and loud over the squish of shifting meat.

"Stop it, stop hurting yourself it's getting worse!"

A mean chuckle broke in between Glenn's moans of agony. His hand finally made it in. He rooted around for something inside himself, his eyes alight with recognition once he found it. He began to pull it out, repeating the nightmare of his hand stretching and moving through the deep wound, all while Dimitri continued to beg for him to stop. A hand coated in black Mire-cursed blood popped out, bringing a strip of grey with it. Glen continued to pull more and more grey out of him. Animalistic screams poured from his mouth. The bleeding worsened, but Dimitri no longer had anything to say about it. He slipped into a trance, his eye fixed to sleeve dangling from the hole in his old friend's chest, following its pendulum sway. He forgot that there was no running stitch on the professor's true coat.

Glenn gripped the coat's shoulder tightly and flashed a grin. In a final surge of effort, he ripped the rest of the coat from his body. It sloughed out into the rest of Glenn's chest cavity in once piece as he bugled like an elk, creating a guttural sound that welled up deep from within, growing in intensity until it finally boiled over the top of his lungs in an explosive, shrill bellow, and the wild light of dying stars flickered in Glenn's eyes as he threw his head back to scream his final scream. Tears streamed down Dimitri's face. He covered his ears, but he knew it was useless. The echo of Duscur would reverberate against the walls of his skull for the rest of his life.

He'd been merciful this time. Glenn did not writhe in the mud, nor did he arch his back and vomit blood. After his scream he let his head drop, sitting completely still as he listened to Dimitri snivel. Pleased with what he'd done, Glenn stood up, cleared his throat, and swept the hair out of his face with an actor's flourish, as if nothing had ever happened. Then, he wrung his blood out of the professor's coat and waved it in Dimitri's face.

"Here boy, go fetch!"

He reached for it, but Glenn pulled away last minute and wadded up the coat into damp bundle, flinging it straight past him. Dimitri could only give chase. He swiveled around in direction it flew away and found himself somewhere entirely different. The smoke lifted and the sun returned, filtering through the leaves of perfectly normal trees. Byleth's coat lay in a light-dappled patch of grass. Dimitri's heart jumped to his throat, and he fell over himself to snatch it up, only for his heart to sink back down at the sight of black, not grey, cloth.

It was the fake coat again, the parasite of his memories. But the real one was somewhere out there—Glenn showed it to him! Holding a shoulder in each hand, Dimitri tore the ugly rag apart, savoring sight of thread going taut before they finally split with a nice, loud rip. Even in its destruction, the coat upheld its commitment to symmetry and tore for Dimitri in two perfect halves. He tossed the twin fragments to the ground, but on a whim, he smoothed them out with the toe of his boot, so that even when separate, they would still be perfectly aligned. Chaos seemed to be the only constant in his life, so it made him appreciative of the small semblance of order he salvaged for himself in doing that.

Satisfied, or perhaps unsatisfied, he turned on his heel and abandoned the coat to the elements. He'd been tricked by a lifeless piece of cloth, but that old man was the one who baited the hook, flaunting it the way that he did from across that grassy field, his back deceitfully turned. Roiling anger chased the exhaustion from Dimitri's body. He'd walk over hot coals for a week just to get his hands around the old man's neck. Whatever distance between him and that farm was a trifle.

The march back began. Dimitri tramped over patches of wild goldenrod and frightened a fox from its burrow. The scenery had a bit more variety than before. Woodland gave way to clearings, leading into rolling fields that he only explored with a sidelong glance as he continued through to another good swath of trees. Although he never strayed from the straight line he traveled in, it was a relief whenever he stepped back into the forest. The shade soothed him. Dimitri felt exposed when he went out onto the sea of sunny grass and blonde reeds, not to mention hot. When the sun touched him, it was as if his body absorbed the heat and stored it inside, just to make him miserable, weak, and sweaty. Too much light would provoke his migraine to throb harder.

Progress took him out of the patches of light. The forest grew dense and Dimitri found himself ripping thin branches to combat the fauna that caught on his clothes and scratched in raw places. Leaves were lost in the fight, and more crunched underfoot. Where was he on the calendar? It looked like fall, but it didn't feel like it. Realizing the change planted a seed of sadness in his chest. Byleth had been born in the sweet spot between summer and fall, under the Horsebow Moon. His birthday came and went without Dimitri's notice. What was his excuse? He had ears and wasn't deaf, he heard the cicada song gradually fade as the evenings come sooner. Lowly insects could remember the date, and they did more to keep the professor's memory alive than his own student. ("His?" He already heard Glenn laughing.)

His mood improved slightly when the trees thinned. Not into an open field, but to a more reasonable amount of plants. About as much as there was in the vicinity of the farm. Dimitri's momentum picked up, and the scenery around him faded from relevance. He only paused to forage through a handful of brown mushrooms freckled in white. He shortly came to regret eating them, because one bite of anything was all it took for hunger to come rolling in like a storm, striking him with more pangs of want. Eating was not worth Dimitri's time when a fistful of grass would encourage his stomach to cry for a whole meal that was nowhere in sight. His pace lagged to starvation until he got to thinking about the coat again, which summoned more anger to carry his sails. It was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he ever let that black mockery of the grey coat slither into his arms, as if that detestable thing had actually done the honor of guarding Byleth's skin! Twigs broke underfoot, but he soon had to calm himself. He found where the fence started again. Late in the day, its rigid form spread a long shadows over the clovers and weeds that grew along its border.

All of Dimitri's thoughts stilled. He drifted from the fence to the brush, then continued, much slower and cautious about where he would place his next step. He honed in on every little noise around him. The whisper of wind and tree had persisted through the whole day. Birds chirped, though they were not as inclined to sing as they did in the morning. The crickets picked up the slack with chirps from the dandelions. Dimitri crept through this ordinary soundscape until it was interrupted. A clack. Wood on wood.

When he thought of killing the old man, he thought of breaking windows and ripping doors, backing him into a corner with a shard of glass in hand. This would be even easier than that. An occasional scrape of wood was a bread crumb for Dimitri to follow. He loved his subtlety. Besides a dropped plank, the sound of the old man working was no racket. It felt like a small achievement, tracking by a less than obvious noise. Dimitri had the self control to not immediately pounce after the first sound, and now he was rewarded for it with the slow build of excitement as he tiptoed closer, listening well to the old man's busywork. He had become such a good hunter. Would the professor be proud?

Closer and closer. Eventually, the old man came into view. Dimitri's heart stopped, and then it raced. He was wrapped in grey. A breathtaking, magnificent shade of ashen grey. It overjoyed Dimitri as much as it enraged him. The professor's coat was not lost. The thief held onto it. He fooled Dimitri with the fake so that he could keep the real one all to himself, the greedy bastard. But he had a second chance to make things right. In a calm stride, he left the shadows, making sure to step on a twig along the way. Another clack. The old man dropped his fence repair project and whipped around to face him, letting out an almost comedic scream at the sight of him. Dimitri smiled as if he were an old friend.

"You, Peony…" He covered his mouth again, his voice catching over the lump in his throat. "You broke her ribs, she's dead."

Dimitri drew near. He enjoyed the vantage of his height. It made it easy to see how small and insignificant this withered creature really was. He froze the thing in its place with a hard glare.

"You gave me the wrong coat."

"Wha- wrong?! What do you mean wrong?!"

"It wasn't the professor's coat."

"What are you talking about?! That was mine, i-it's always been mine, until you took it! I've worn that same old thing every winter for years!!"

"You have it on you. Give it."

"What…" He hugged the ashen coat closer. "This one? It's my wife's! What do you want with her clothes?!" His confused pleading shifted into anger. It was odd to see from someone so meek, as odd as a pretty dog snarling. Dimitri's voice was a growl much like hers.

"Is she the one who stole it from him?"

"Ida's stolen nothing from no one in her whole damn life, unlike you!!"

Dimitri closed the little distance between them in a single step and slapped him hard, knocking the old man to the ground with a single blow. He picked the coat off him as his head was still spinning. One foot already in the grave, Dimitri could kill him just by breathing on him the wrong way. He rolled him over with his boot and planted it firmly on his chest.

"What, do you want my shoes too?!" With words, there was some fight left in him. He hardly seemed like the same sad sack of bones who did nothing but cry the first time Dimitri came around. It intrigued him. As an experiment, he drew his dagger and showed it off.

Despite everything he'd gone through with that thing tied to him, it remained in excellent condition, looking as ugly as it did the day that masked demon dropped it. The only way to get rid of the wretched thing would be to plunge it into Edelgard's heart. But for now, the dagger would have to settle with smaller prey. A practice kill. Dimitri angled it, letting its polished face catch the dimming sunlight in a threatening glint, then ran his finger up to the sharp tip. It drew the old man's eye, yet he was unimpressed. Did death threats have less of on impact to those already close to dying from age?

Interesting. The taunting continued. Dimitri smiled down at him and brought the dagger closer to his own face, so that he could draw his tongue across its flat surface, finishing with the tip caught between his teeth in a coy nibble. The old man huffed, and reached for something underneath him. A weapon?

"What is it you're here for? What else could you possibly want? We aren't rich!" He held up a little drawstring bag. "Do you want my leftovers? Is that it?" Something inside rattled as he shook it for Dimitri. It sounded a lot like the professor's jasmine pearl leaves shaking in their container. Dimitri grabbed it before he even noticed his hand move. There was a large grease stain on one side, and it smelled like butter.

Starvation dug its heels into the walls of his stomach. It barged in with a presence nearly as persistent as the throbbing in his head, the hollowness sitting hard and heavy in the cavern of his belly, kicking in pangs that reverberated throughout his whole body a plea for anything at all to fill him. His mind went back to the professor slitting his pheasant. Dimitri never ate that meat he carved out for himself, but if forgetting it played any part in him finding the coat, then every cramp was worth it in the end. His body disagreed. A second breath of that smell had him seeing stars, fuzz closing in on the corners of both his vision and his thoughts. Mutiny. A primal voice screamed that he would instantly drop dead if he did not eat something that very second. Dimitri would have liked that, but he was a marionette to his hunger. The strings tugged, his boot lifted from the old man's chest, and the dagger rammed back into the sheath fixed to his frayed belt.

"Could've used your damn words..." The old man pulled himself up with a mumble.

Dimitri heard it, but he did not react the way he wanted to. He couldn't be cutting tongues in the state he was in. He wouldn't have the strength to hold the dagger to his throat, it'd shake in his hand and he'd make a fool of himself when this tiny thumb of a man overpowered him because the hole in him was as big as Glenn's. He was light and hollow enough to be pushed over. The rest of him would cave in on itself unless the emptiness could be satisfied in time, before he folds and breaks in half and truly disappears for forever. On wooden legs he ran. Ran into the forest where it was safe and cool beneath the tree shadows.

Desperate hands tore open the satchel, scraped out the butter, reduced to a small lump, and brought it to a needy mouth. Like so many other things, he forgot the once familiar texture and was taken off guard by how slick it was against his fingers, mouth, and tongue. He sucked on all the fingers that made contact with the gold to get as much out of it as possible. A reach for more brought out a butter knife. Useless, tossed aside. There was a half eaten slice of bread. Dimitri swallowed it in an instant. Most people put butter on their bread, he remembered. The familiar rattle came from a small jar of nuts that he bashed open and dumped into his mouth. An edge of broken glass cut his upper lip. He wouldn't be bleeding and picking almonds out of the grass if he thought to unscrew the lid.

And that was all he had. It smelled like something more had been in there, maybe even meat, but it wasn't there anymore. He turned the satchel inside out to make sure. These were scraps. If they weren't thrown to him last minute they would've been thrown out. He didn't feel any better. Worse. The hunger deepened. Dimitri ate weeds to make the emptiness leave him alone, and it did him about as much good as the leftovers. At times like these he hated having a body. It got hurt, got hungry, got sick, got tired, and it bled. How could anyone put up all with those demands on repeat, day after day? And for what? To continue enduring more pain?

Dimitri hated his body, so he forced it to keep going. The professor's coat was tucked safely under his arm. He got what he came for, and he needed to keep going, before Glenn ran out of time. A terrible thumping made itself at home behind his unseeing eye. The strength to continue pushing flagged, so he unfolded and looked to the professor's coat, needing its comfort. Everything was as he remembered it. Silver embroidery and grey wool. Dimitri considered going so far as to wear it, but the moment thought occurred to him, he came up with list of reasons why he shouldn't.

If he wore it he'd wear it down like he did with every other bit of clothing he wore through his exile. When he found something too small for him, it took a tear to get him to stop trying to make it fit. He could've sworn the professor was shorter than him, with a sensibly athletic sculpt to his muscular, dexterous, and graceful body. He was not the gnarled ogre Dimitri had become. The real coat would rip worse than the fake if he forced it on against its will. Dimitri wasn't a fit for the coat anyways. Grey was the Ashen Demon's natural color, so of course he wore it better than anyone else. The neutral shade matched his quiet, elusive air. Dimitri could never hold a candle to that. He was ugly, and the coat would become ugly if he put it on his grimy, bloody body. He couldn't let his filth ruin it.

Though the leaves were starting to change colors, the heat was more oppressive than it had been in the summer, causing Dimitri to sweat profusely. His sweat would be absorbed by the coat and it'd make him hotter, creating yet more sweat to implant his odor between the seams, which would snuff out whatever frail hint of the professor was left. He had no need for the coat's warmth. Even in the dead of a Faerghus winter, Dimitri would not wear it. He was unworthy of its soft embrace. The professor had a sixth sense for finding people's missing belongings. Dimitri could recall that he returned a gauntlet to him once. It was his turn to return the favor. Until he could find him again, Dimitri would do everything in his power to keep his coat in pristine condition, looking the same as it had when it was perched on a set of shoulders he yearned to rest his head on.

His determination to preserve it was such that it came into conflict with his other desires. Dimitri forced himself to hold back from treating this coat as rough and lovingly as he had the fake, lest he be tempted to rub his face against it until there was a hole. Focusing on something else might calm the destructive urges, but Dimitri could not bring himself to. He really wasn't feeling well. When he took his eyes of the coat, he was brought back to his body in all its aching heat. His stomach was a hornet's nest. The hunger cramps stung, having the audacity to attack the scraps that his body pestered him for, as if beggars could be choosers. It hurt enough to slow him. But unless it crippled him, Dimitri did not think of hurt as a something worth stopping for.

He thought he could walk it off until he had to throw the coat aside and brace himself against a tree. The cramp turned into a stab, forcing him to retch with the twist of a knife. Minutes of gagging went on before the first few bits of grass came up. He didn't try to hold it back, and resigned himself to the contractions of his stomach, hoping that it'd stop once he forced everything out. He hated the sounds he made. Coughing, sputtering. It wasn't something Dimitri wanted the professor's coat to bear witness to, but he'd been brought so low by sickness, dropping it as soon as the first heave came on was the most he could do.

Sickness brought him down to his hands and knees, his body burning hot and wracked with nausea. The heat was too much, all his sweat made his warm clothes stick to him, making him an even hotter mess. He stripped. There wasn't any dignity left for him to lose, and even if he still had some, giving it up would be worth the wind on his damp back. Overheating a bit less made it easier to think. Feeling this hot wasn't normal for this time of year, not when there were thieves bundling up in stolen coats. Thinking of the old man made him notice that the thorned coil that snared his guts only appeared after he ate his bribe. Dimitri must have been poisoned.

This was what he deserved for being dumb enough to fall for another one of that old man's tricks. His fearlessness in the face of a dagger should have been a dead giveaway that something was wrong. He wanted revenge what Dimitri did to his dog, and the professor's coat was valuable enough to drive anyone to kill for it. And here was that professor's student, crawling in the leaves and vomiting without any clothes on because he took food from a stranger, and actually trusted it because it looked so meager in comparison to the last meal that did this to him. Embarrassing. Dimitri was an embarrassment to Byleth. No wonder he never showed up. Dimitri learned nothing from his teachings and embarrassed him at every turn with antics like this. His coat would fall into even less desirable hands again if he died because of that food.

He must have looked like the professor's pheasant when he finally came up with the retch that spilled all the poisoned leftovers out, but even after that he continued to spit up bile. By now, Dimitri didn't know if he even wanted to get up from this. If the old man and his poison didn't kill him, then it was only a matter of time someone else would come along and try their hand at ending his life. All the world was his enemy.

From where he lay, the sun started to shine in the corner of his good eye as it continued its orange descent, showering him in the headache-inducing beauty of sunset. Nausea roiled throughout Dimitri, to the point where he could almost feel it in his bones. He might never leave this stretch of dry carpet. In a few weeks the trees would dump all their leaves on him, and then he would be buried in snow a month or two later. At least it would be cooler by then. He dragged himself away from the worst of his mess, closer to the coat. Head on the ground, Dimitri watched individual blades of grass tremble at the merciful breeze fanning him. A beetle visited him as it crawled out from under a browned leaf and over to a twig.

The air shifted behind him. Dimitri's stomach flipped, and he dug his fingers into the grass, ready to tear it up the moment everything got worse. He closed his eye and felt a hand on his forehead. It turned over a few times, gently appraising him with both front and back. Dimitri threw his head up and almost lifted himself, eye open wide in search of someone who was nowhere in sight. He moved too for fast for his own good and gagged. Acid rose in his throat again. But then the hand returned, landing at his back fingers first, then a full palm. The hand pressed flat and rubbed in slow circles. A glove against naked skin. Dimitri put his head down and kept his eye shut for good. He would leave if he looked.

Seconds later, the coat was draped over Dimitri like a blanket. He couldn't remember if he did it himself, or if it was him, giving consent to his coat being wrecked and tarnished by the ghoul that cowered beneath his grey wing. The hand continued to move under it without disturbing the cloth.

"It's alright." He said.

"Breathe for me. It's alright. Just breathe."

Dimitri still felt incredibly ill, but his heart was full from being doted on so lovingly. He followed the command. His reward was the very slight deepening of the hand's touch whenever his body rose with a deep inhale. Dimitri let himself rest under the order that he rest, and he would eventually get up and leave once he was done. It was impossible to not drift off under that gentle touch. He almost slipped back into alertness when the hand went off him, but then he felt it in his hair, petting him. Dimitri completely melted into it.

He was being good. Every breath he breathed would be for Byleth, and Byleth alone. Maybe he would come back if Dimitri kept breathing for a long enough time.

Light hit his face again. Moonlight. It did not make the dramatic show of burning his eye like the sun did. The light only came from the abscense of dark when a cloud uncovered the silver eye of the night sky. Its glow was modest, so as not to irritate the already miserable thing that lay beneath it. Dimitri felt hung over. It took him a minute to remember why he had no clothes, and another, as he dressed, how he managed to fall asleep so soundly that he made it through half the night without interruption. Realization sobered him.

The professor had finally come to him. In due time, his torture would begin. Instead of telling Dimitri to breathe he'd start asking for heads to roll, and quickly, before the pain of being there for him became even worse. His heart would break over and over each time he watched the professor crumble at the hands whatever punishment was in store, but Dimitri made up his mind that the price both of them would pay was still less painful than having Byleth disappear forever, never to be seen again. Dimitri knew it was greedy and cruel to make this decision for Byleth and he didn't care. He needed him.

Dimitri imagined the hand on his shoulder, and it electrified him. He was fully awake, all put together again, and ready to go. The only thing missing was the miracle coat. When he first got up, he shrugged the coat off like any other blanket, ignorant of all it had done for him yesterday. Of course it wasn't far, a coat couldn't sprout a pair legs at random and run away. Dimitri plucked it from the cool grass and straightened it out.

Something was out of place. Glenn's taunting echoed. Maybe there wasn't anything wrong with the coat, just a trick of the light. All the embroidery was in order. Same size as ever. It didn't look strange when he turned it inside out. The more normal it was, the more he spiraled. Dimitri thought everything about the fake was normal until it wasn't. His own judgement couldn't be trusted. Yet, without anything explicitly wrong to point out, Dimitri tucked it under his arm and moved on. He hoped to walk off the bad feeling. Ignore it. Ignore the professor's coat. No, wait, he didn't like the sound of ignoring the coat, what if it missed him? His grand plan of giving it the cold shoulder lasted less than an hour. Dimitri brought the professor's coat out again, shaking away the creases that came from stashing it on him so haphazardly. He ought to fold it next time. Straightening it out dragged his thoughts away from the bad gut feeling he had about the professor's coat, which paradoxically made him realize what was driving him insane. Dimitri stepped out of a long shadow and into the moonlight. He had a clear view of it now. The coat was gray. The complete opposite of grey.

Gray. And he thought it was grey. It took a special, one-of-a-kind moron like Dimitri to manage make a mistake even dumber than thinking the professor's coat was black, immediately after he first got them mixed up! Blood rushed to his face, turning him red in hot embarrassment. Or hell, maybe he turned yellow, since he was so good with colors and shades! He didn't even want to destroy this one, the thought of anyone else stumbling across it, even a deer, mortified him. A pile of torn cloth would be an admission that he fell for it again. No, the best way to get rid of it would be to throw it into the flames that were going to devour that contemptible old man's house!

Navigating through the dark was no issue. Dimitri wasted so much time lurking around these woods that he knew how to find the fence with his eye closed. He broke a new gap in out of sheer pettiness and took a post with him, deciding within a few practice swings that it would be his new toy for the night. The weight was good. Dimitri smacked it against his palm to a consistent beat, dreaming of shattered windows and bludgeoned bodies as he approached the black silhouette of a cottage. No smoke came from the chimney. No light bled from within. Even the house itself lay fast asleep, blissfully unaware of the night visitor's approach.

Cold grass brushed Dimitri's ankles, but they backed off when he stepped in, or on, things that were softer than the green. It was registered through touch, but not in his head until he found himself almost at the door. Why were there pants on the ground? Dimitri looked back. A closet's worth of clothing had been strewn all over the place; stockings and suspenders, dresses and aprons, gloves, shoes, shirts, everything everywhere. It was as if a crowd of people had congregated here to be raptured. All of them very short and small, if the clothing sizes were anything to go off of.

This was the work of the old man, or at least someone under his roof. It didn't matter who could take credit when they were all going to be dead soon. Dimitri wanted to not care, but he was so baffled by the scattered wardrobe that he had to stop and stare at it for a minute, trying to pick out some kind of meaning from it. Too much had been laid out for this to be an accident. The spacing of the piles almost created a grid. Was it a sign of something? Dimitri would be the only person outside the household to see it, so was it for him? The last time he accepted a handout nearly killed him. A trap? He could envision it, yes, the old man noticed rags and laid out some better offerings for him, dusted with a skin irritant of some kind, ready to drive him mad all over again. A likely scenario, but he wasn't going hurt himself to make sure. The one thing he could be certain of was that the people who lived in that cottage knew he would be inviting himself in soon.

How prepared was that house? Was the old man waiting for him on the other side of the door, ready to stab whoever broke in? Dimitri almost made himself laugh, thinking of that. It'd certainly be more interesting than cracking a sleeping man's skull open in one swing. He could appreciate a bit of song and dance before blood started to fly.

Dimitri squared up to the entrance of the cottage. Such a little thing, the door was so short that he might have to bow to get in. Instead, he punched in wiggle room for himself by breaking the frame against the fist of his fencepost club. Everything loosened. Dimitri took a deep breath in, for the professor, and then kicked the door with all his might. He nearly lost balance, his foot stuck in the hole it made as the door swung open without any of the resistance he thought he'd be breaking through. The door was not locked, not even closed. Ego somewhat bruised, Dimitri pulled his foot out and pretended that his stumble never happened, resuming the hunt.

The first room was the largest, with a hearth at the center of it all. Aromatic herbs hung from a drying rack on the wall. Cabinets were near them. Dimitri ripped the drawers out. Knives, spoons, forks, and other kitchen odds and ends skittered all over the wooden floor. He brought the fencepost down on the rickety old dining table and smashed it into two splintered halves, and swung again to hear more wood crack, to see more fragments fly. Two chairs were decimated within that same flurry of blows, beaten and broken down until Dimitri couldn't tell what used to be what. All of it became the same thing: Firewood.

The post went through a window, he turned on his heel to strike the cabinets, to smash rocking chair by the hearth, and then to the walls, leaving the wood pocked with inward scars. A shattering cacophony graced Dimitri's ears. He was having so much fun breaking everything in sight that he nearly forgot came here to break people!

There wasn't much furniture left for him anyways, so he carried on, down a short hall with two doors on either side. He let the post drag, wood on wood, scraping heavily. To the right, he opened a door to disappointing stillness. The bed was neatly tucked and its nightstand had no candle, the dresser across it yawned with empty drawers, wearing a fine layer of dust on its top. This room had not been lived in for a while. Dimitri peeked under the bed and around every barren corner for the sake of the routine, even though he already knew there was nothing for him there.

What was behind the left door lived up much better to Dimitri's expectations. As he stepped in, the first thing that caught his attention was a hairbrush on the nightstand, matted with long white hairs. People were here. The bed was ruffled and had one too many pillows to seem comfortable, with one lost on the floor. Much like the other room, the dresser sat empty, but the drawers were not uniform in how wide they were open. The top right was by a slight crack, the bottom left was pulled out as far as it'd go. Dimitri gave this room a more thorough search. It wasn't like there were many places to hide in a house this small. Because of that, he quickly ran out of ideas of where to look when the lived-in room turned up empty. The clothes in the field became the symbol of failure. If they knew he was coming, they must have fled. Breaking things bought them time. His temperature rose again, hot shame burned in his cheeks and his belly, because how could he take Edelgard's head if he couldn't even kill some random, nameless old codger?!

Fool that he was, Dimitri started breaking things again. Not as a game anymore, but a tantrum for not having his way, an outlash after realizing how time he'd wasted on the old man, which wasted more of Glenn's dwindling time as well. He broke another window and felt nothing. No catharsis to be found, no prey in sight. What good was he without somebody to kill? All the drawers were ripped out to the tune of snapping wood, making a hollow, meaningless racket. Dimitri tossed the last one aside halfheartedly. He stared down at it with a blank stare, thinking. The new fake coat was even more useless than the last one. It didn't give him the adrenaline rush of hatred anymore, not even the willpower to destroy the rag like he should. He took it out from under his arm and threw it on the floor.

It thumped.

A dull noise hit the very second the coat touched the ground in a perfectly timed coincidence. Whatever fell, it fell hard, and it brought muffled music to Dimitri's ears. It carried to him well from across the hall. A smile curled on his lips, he laughed, and envisioned the old man crawling on the floor like the wrinkly worm he is, begging for forgiveness he didn't deserve with a boot on his neck. His post dragged in tow as he took sweet, slow steps to the door he heard that beautiful song through. Dimitri's fingers wrapped around the knob, turned it with bated breath, and lightly pushed the door open, so that it would creak as he allowed himself in.

The pole slipped out of his hands, dropping loud into a carmine splatter across the floorboards. Dimitri howled, and fell to the floor on his knees to take the black glove that pawed blindly at the floorboards, squeezing and kissing and caressing the back of his hand with his filthy own in a feeble attempt to soothe him. His other half stood across the room, bracing himself against the windowframe as he stood on one leg. A piercing wail made him shift around to face his student. The arm Dimitri ravenously pulled towards himself was draped in black, accented by a silver running stitch that cut through the dark. The first coat he found had been the right one all along. When he tore it in half, he tore apart what remained of Byleth.

He couldn't see his face, not even his hair. Byleth ended where his collar did. In the place of his split head and neck, there was a rippling shadow that danced like a flame, yet the way it undulated was slow and lethargic, closer to a candle or hearth than hellfire. In this state, Dimitri could no longer see the professor for who he really was anymore. Glenn was right. He just saw a set of curves, now with the distraction a face and a voice gone. He still got a rise out of the singular hip that lingered in the window's moonlight.

A blur of forgotten detail filled the insides that Dimitri's brutality left exposed. Nothing in him could be clearly made out. The red palette of gore he knew so well was there, but a smear that suggested half of a heart one minute became a lung in the next. A torrent of blood should have been spewing out of him, spraying the floorboards and painting the walls, but a weak trickle was all that came.

Byleth's body was the stuff of smoke and mirrors. Looking like this, he could continue to hide from Dimitri even while standing right in front of him. His dreamlike form concealed the true extent of his suffering behind a veil of murky illusion, locking it away from the monster who did this to him, even though he deserved and needed to see everything if he could ever hope to atone for his atrocities against such a precious person.

This in itself was probably his fault. He wounded Byleth, broke him down to naught but a shadow, anchored to shreds of those bygone days they spent together, teacher and student. Everything he wore was the same as it was back then; the black plating about his neck and shoulders to keep the coat in place, ringed in the pink triangle design around the collarbone region of his gray tunic. The same cute shade lined the asymmetrical, overlapping edge of cloth that ran down from the right shoulder. More black armor protected Byleth's masterfully sculpted waist, a gray tasseled medallion fixed to the center and a trusty dagger in its blue sheath.

But Dimitri had split this ensemble down from the middle. Broken threads stuck out along the line of the tear, longer ones trailing off into tendrils of smoke in same shade as spectral mass of black that replaced Byleth's face. The pink rimmed cloth stayed attached to his right only because part of it was caught underneath his cracked collar. It had become a ribbon, twirling in a soft wind that only blew for him. The broken strap of the medallion swayed to and fro under the same influence, a golden weight on his hip. Byleth's dagger went with his left, where it lay on the floor near Dimitri, sheath attached to the limp tendril of a cut belt. Apart from these, the only other asymmetrical detail on him was the plating that guarded his right knee.

Each and every granular detail of his visage had to be branded into Dimitri's eye with a hot iron. He was terrified of forgetting. Glenn saw the gaps in his memory and rubbed them with salt; retaliation for the time Byleth stole with a quiet song under his breath and warm cups of tea, little things that made Dimitri forget his loyalty to the dead for an hour or two. But those days were behind him now. The school year ended, leaving Dimitri without a guiding hand of warm flesh and blood, his guardian cloaked in ebony lost to an unknown grave. What if this was last time he would ever get see the professor again?

If his memory of the brief time with the professor faded even more, Dimitri had to cling to this moment, no matter how painful. He steeped his eye in the abstract horror of Byleth, dark and faceless, cut in half and divided across the room. All his doing. The blood was on Dimitri's hands, and quickly spreading all over him when pulled the left into a cradling hug. Byleth's body had almost no weight and he hated it. There was so little of him left. Dimitri repeated his apologies in a breathless mantra, I'm sorry and I love you, until he lost the ability to form words, his tongue stopped by a hitch in his throat, caused by smell.

Notes of bergamot hid beneath the blood's musk. The last time the professor brought bergamot to tea was also one of the last times he hosted outside. He had his coat on and an extra layer underneath, and his hands were glued to the steaming pot while Dimitri sat across the table, completely unaffected by the temperature drop. He teased him for it, because if an autumn chill gave him that much trouble, he'd get frostbite from sitting in front of a fireplace if he ever decided to stay in Fhirdiad with him for a winter.

Bittersweet bergamot. Byleth used to make him hope for impossible futures, as if the dead would find peace one day and let him hang up his lance for good. He brought him high, and in death, he let Dimitri fall, tumbling all the way down to hell without the ground rushing at him with the promise of an ending, doomed to just keep falling and falling like the tears running down his face. His eyes were raw from them, ringed in red, and he couldn't help but rub the wrong the one, even when it left him swallowing screams.

Dimitri wrung the professor's glove as grief wrapped its hands around his neck. He couldn't breathe for him anymore, he hiccuped and choked through a pause in his breakdown, utterly exhausted. It brought on a quiet moment, in which a sound from the professor slipped between Dimitri's fish-on-land gasps. Steel plates rattled. He looked up, and he felt as if he had walked in on Byleth's torn body all over again.

One half of Byleth was in his arms, safe and sound, but the other had been forgotten, left to fend for himself against the force of gravity. He kept the balance he needed to stay upright by leaning his grey-shelled elbow on the sill, holding onto it with a white-knuckled force that could be seen from across the room in the tremors that ran through his lonely arm. It took so much strength to remain upright that it could be heard. The professor fought and rattled, made a wobbling close call but pulled himself back, swooning like a tippler on a single leg that shook as well. He couldn't hold on for much longer.

The muffled thump of his fall repeated itself in Dimitri's head, a sickening noise that curdled his blood upon recalling the twisted glee he felt in the moments before he discovered his beloved teacher was the one who hit the floor so hard. Then he heard tear of past fabric, the present rattles, and struck a new vein of self-hatred for hurting Byleth at every turn. Dimitri began to shake like his professor. How could he have left him to be tortured like this for minutes on end?

Another sharp sob broke through him as he hoisted his half of Byleth over his shoulder, knowing within a panicked second that he harmed him yet again with how quickly he swung his limp next-to-nothing weight around, ending up with watercolor gore pressed against the side of his head, cheek to a gaping wound. Blood smeared thick near to his socket in the scramble for the other half of the body.

An unresponsive arm hung down his back. The hand that drew soothing circles across it mere hours ago bounced lifelessly against him as he made his move, looping his free arm around the professor's divided waist to drown him in his embrace.

"It's…a-alright." Dimitri parroted his words, though from his mouth, they took away more hope than they gave. The Byleth he hugged fell limp against him. He dyed Dimitri's chest red, slid a bit, and the hold on him tightened twice as strong. His student's face crumbled.

He finally had him in his arms, but he was weak and broken to pieces, no lips to catch in his own, bleeding too little, hardly moving. The professor only let himself hang on to Dimitri because it was either him or the floor. This was not the moment that slipped through his fingers at the Goddess tower. When they sparred, he did not earn his black bruises, distracted by thoughts of what sound the professor's body would make when he fell dead against hard wood. But this was the closest he'd ever get to his dead dreams now.

Rich molasses blood wetted Dimitri's face more than the tears. He licked it from the corner of his mouth. Of course he could not taste it, but to borrow words from the professor's tea notes, Dimitri would say his blood had a full-bodied mouthfeel, pleasantly smooth and dense against his tongue, soothing as a mother's milk. It had to hurt. Excruciatingly so. The part of him over Dimitri's shoulder was close enough that if he leaned into it, he could bury more of his face in his insides, which was exactly what he would do if he gave into his cravings and stopped caring about the pain his adoration brought down on his poor professor.

Temptation roared louder in his ears the longer his tongue mingled with silken blood. He didn't have a head anymore, his body had no weight, and he still refused to grace him with his sweet voice, not even a whimper. If he was already so fargone, why hold back?

Dimitri gave in, turned his head and took a few laps at the tear of cloth and skin, but reason's fingers twitched, and he gasped as he felt them gradually curl into a fist, bunched up against the reddened fabric of his clothes for dear life. A part of Byleth remained. Dimitri laughed and cried convulsively, and the world spun harder when he took that hand into his own. Byleth was slow to react, but as Dimitri savored his touch, his fingers shifted once more, and lazily entwined with the other hand. It anchored Dimitri when he might have passed out from sheer happiness, and he squeezed back so hard he might've heard something pop. Laughter became cackling. He couldn't control it and he didn't try to. Nothing made sense and he loved it. He clenched the hand in his and it kept solid, his hand did not pass through him, and he could feel Byleth's arm jerk as he yanked his hand up to his face, so that he could nuzzle it frantically. When he closed his eye for that and opened it again, Byleth was still there. He'd look down and see Byleth, and he didn't see all of Byleth because his blood was warm against his blind spot, giving proof of his existence stronger than sight. He wanted to see more. All of him all at once, the way things were before the professor's dismemberment.

Dimitri slid the portion on his shoulder down to stand its leg, made stable by a good hold on his arm, just as he had on its twin. It pained him to pull his hand away from Byleth's, but he needed to try. His grip migrated up past both elbows, firm, and pushed the two halves back together. Byleth reunited with himself, flesh and blood smacking wet together. He stood on his own, but for only a second. The left started to slide against the right, threatening to make them both fall over like slick dominoes. Dimitri would sooner tear out his other eye before he let him fall again.

"IT'S ALRIGHT!!"

With a frantic shout, he clapped his hands around the professor's split waist and mushed him back together. Beads and bubbles welled up along the red seam. Iron overtook the lingering scent of the professor's bergamot. Dimitri's breath shallowed, seeing how his "help" wet the wood in yet more blood. Under his hands, he felt the two segments of Byleth rub wet against each other, sure to fall the second he released him. But it was alright. Dimitri would never let go of Byleth.

He drew him into another smothering hug, whispering apologies to where an ear might have been. There was an inherent wrongness in Dimitri, something broken that jingled around inside his chest since birth and brought misfortune to everyone around him, growing in intensity around those who he loved the most, always to fatal results. The Goddess hated him and whoever he touched. He was cursed, and had cursed Byleth by loving him. Dimitri could apologize all he wanted, but he knew he'd never learn to walk away, especially not when pulling back now would cause the professor to fall apart, curse or no curse.

Clinging to the professor was for his own good. Dimitri stepped to one side of him, hooked one arm around his back and the other behind both legs, and swept him up into a bridal carry, rescuing him from the dangerously slick floor. A light shined upon Dimitri's miserable life, and an incredible warmth washed over him. His clipped flower stayed in bloom. The professor had his knees adorably tucked in together and hugged himself, comfortable and a not as likely to slip apart. Those little adjustments suggested consciousness. Even life. Had his forehead remained, Dimitri would have kissed him there.

He had him now. Wherever Dimitri went, he would join him: to Enbarr, to Duscur, back home to Fhirdiad, to hell. The professor's weight was negligible. Hardly a burden. If anything, he'd be speeding him up, not slowing him down.

"Well, professor…" he breathed, shakily, "shall we?"

His pulse thumped strong and sweet, deep within his chest. He held Byleth close enough that he might be able to feel it as well. Dimitri had to leave, with him. It wasn't safe to stay in one place for too long when he had a target on his back. What if the old man left to tell the imperial army he was in his house? Byleth couldn't get caught up in any fighting anymore. With his head gone he was deaf, blind, and fragile, completely reliant on Dimitri, who would have to make wiser decisions from now on in order to protect him.

Once they started moving, the professor lifted himself a bit, mostly his shoulders, as if he were looking around himself. He couldn't have seen much, but Dimitri took joy in it as a sign that he was waking up from whatever stupor made him look so dead before. Dimitri threw a parting glance behind as well, feeling a tiny pang of regret as he brought the professor farther away from the bed. It made him nervous to be stepping over the wreckage from earlier when he had such precious cargo in his arms, but he managed for the most part, until he came close to the door.

Byleth's sightless seeing did not stop. He sat up in his arms, a tense hand pressed to his forearm in the wordless stop that, on the sparring grounds, told Dimitri he was holding a weapon the wrong way. When he felt that hand right before a fight, it told him needed to drop everything and freeze, because their enemy was waiting for them behind the next corner. That hand put Dimitri on high alert. He looked around the room he trashed for whatever the professor sensed, looking as much as he could with just one eye. There was nothing wrong. Byleth was still tense.

"Shh, shh, it's alright." Dimitri pressed his face into him and hugged harder, to try to get him to relax again, but he felt his other hand pushing back against his chest, resisting the embrace, which he then doubled down on. The professor couldn't know what was going on, maybe he was afraid, and didn't realize it was Dimitri holding him, that these were safe arms wrapping around him. Fresh air would bring him to his senses. He walked closer to the door, Byleth fighting harder with each step. The stopping hand tapped his forearm, wanting to be let down, and Dimitri refused to let him go, knowing he'd hurt himself. It escalated to hitting, even punching. His legs kicked and thrashed, and one half started to slide one leg unhooked from over Dimitri's arm, but he readjusted himself quickly to catch him.

"Stop it, stop fighting! This is for your own damn good, I'm helping you whether you like it or not!"

The professor fought like a fish on the line, unable to hear his words and desperate to break away. Dimitri ran out of patience and forgot his fear of hurting him. He peeled Byleth off by an arm's length and swung him over his shoulder, ignoring the pittering droplets that fell as Byleth was thrown.

"Struggle all you want, but I am not letting go of you, professor! I will never let you leave my sight again, you're not allowed to abandon me again!"

The professor beat his fists against his back in vain. Dimitri kicked the door fragments aside, thinking of rope and other ways to tie his body back together. He passed the threshold with him in tow, into the night.

Byleth burst into flames the moment Dimitri's foot touched the ground.

He burned the side of his face with the heat of the academy's greenhouse, when it used to bake in the summer months like a sauna. It did not hurt, although Dimitri deserved to be hurt. He was in his blind spot again. He saw the blazing shadow that replaced Byleth's head lick its black tongues higher and broader, spread into view of his eye, but then the blur dissipated, the warmth faded, and the minimal weight on his shoulder lifted. Byleth parted with a great hiss of water on fire and nothing else. But Dimitri barely heard it over his strangled roar for the body that left him. Even the professor's blood, painted all over him, evaporated. Dimitri had been gutted, all the soft, loving offal inside dumped out in a stinking pile for the worms, and hopefully the same ones that already devoured the professor a long time ago.

Only one last piece of him lingered in the air. It scratched Dimitri's throat and hooked its claws into his nose, smothering him in a scent more powerful than incense and more sacred than sage. Tea burned in his lungs. It came from the dozens of jars shoved under his nose for an opinion, the mist under the pot lid that the professor would sniff and show to him if it was especially good, the last gasp of spent leaves before they were dumped from the strainer. Dimitri's head throbbed, all his senses were consumed by cloying sweetness of the smoke that came from the professor burning. He could smell every kind of tea he ever shared with him, across over a thousand cups.

Chamomile, lavender, rosehips and currants, bergamot with its brother, earl gray, chrysanthemum and ginger. There were black leaves smelled of new leather, like wheat, like malt, like mushrooms, wood, apricot honey and the savory smoke that came to save him from Duscur. The green leaves were as fresh and delicate as flowers with salt, grass, rosemary, pine, and the jasmine the professor so loved was the centerpiece of the universal blend. But then the wind blew ever so slightly, and the haze of nostalgia dispersed.

His world ended all over again. Dimitri collapsed, howling like he had been caught in a bear trap. He ripped up grass, pounded the dirt with a fist, his body as uncontrollable as it was when he was vomiting, when the professor rubbed his back and told him everything was going to be alright, that all he needed to do was breathe. An impossible task. He could only get in a few gulps of it before the grief dragged him under, into another fit of sobs and screams for him to come back. Dimitri didn't know if he wanted to be breathing anymore, but he also couldn't disobey one of the professor's last commands. So he continued to try. He lifted his head to gasp, the cold breeze he cursed washed his face, hot with tears. It was all so raw, and everything stung so much, he thought his face might rub off the next time he had to wipe his face. Dimitri swallowed more air. He cracked open his reddened eye, barely perceiving anything, except for something off to the side. Under the tree nearest to the cottage, there was a plot of recently disturbed dirt with a plank of wood sticking out from the mound. This was where the dog went.

"Why, professor? You come in and…a-and then you leave! You could've told me I was hurting you if you spoke to me like Glenn and my father and everyone else! And I'd be good, and do everything you tell me to do, I-I'd kill the people who killed you!" Dimitri punched the ground, and wobbled up on his knees.

"What you've done to me, it hurts and I don't understand why you're playing with me like this! If you hate me then TELL ME!!" He barked to the grave. "Stop it, stop it with these games! I'm sick of this, professor!"

Regret hit Dimitri hard, and his crying resumed. He was appalled by the things he said to the professor and he didn't know what to do about the desperate anger swirling inside him, the force that propelled those venomous words. But he knew where it came from. The false hope the professor had given him tonight cut him deeper than Glenn's sharp tongue ever could. And back at the academy, weren't things like this too? The professor would brew a pot of chamomile, knowing it had been his favorite, and sit down with him, just the two of them. It made Dimitri feel special. Then, the next day, he'd see him at that same table, sitting with someone else. Another student, some of them not even in the class he taught! The professor would cruelly dangle his attention, his affection, his smile, right in Dimitri's face, only to swipe it away the second his student tried to snap it up in his jaws. His blood soured, remembering how that felt.

Dimitri lurched to his feet. The sobs from him came automatically, a thing his body did on its own. He went to the grave and pulled up the plank of wood, which had the name Peony carved into it, and thought of Byleth. Love was still the first thing he felt, but he saw the strings that had always been attached to their moments. Anything special he did with him was something that he did with everyone else. Byleth was the one who put up carapace of aloofness that Dimitri's hints glanced off of, meaning nothing to him. He nearly forgot how little he cared. Tears streamed down and made him feel pathetic. The professor was long gone, yet he continued to mess with Dimitri like this, but if he didn't want to stick around to watch him suffer, what was the point of it all?

"I hate you..."

It came out as a weak croak, in between tearful hiccups. It wasn't loud enough for Dimitri to convince himself that this was how he felt. He took in a deep breath, but just as quickly let it go, remembering that breathing was something the professor wanted him to do. If he wanted him breathing, he should be here to enforce it as strictly as Glenn and his demands.

"I HATE YOU!"

Dimitri broke Peony across his knee, those three words christened by the snap of wood. Two clean halves. He threw them aside and walked away, still crying.

"I hate you, professor."

He left the regret of his lie at the dog's grave.