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I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, on a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water; grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.
Mary Oliver, "Sleeping in the forest"
INT. IN THE CENTER OF A LAKE — DAWN
Who am I? Who am I? I don't want to answer yet. May a star fall into itself, and may a forest of alder trees in the north rise in the night toward the Milky Way with me, and may it say: Remain here! And I will stay.
And I would have stayed forever, in exile, if it meant forgetting. If it meant shedding the names I once answered to. I would have abandoned all language, all life belied in my waters, all memory, all sound, if only the world could narrow down to this: a dark sky trembling with fallen stars, the earth breathing against my sides, the hush of unseen things folding themselves into sleep.
I thought you a stone at first. A holy weapon discarded by time. But you were still warm. Still humming with the wrong kind of silence. I cradled you in silence, tucked my reeds around your ribs, and waited.
Waited for the goddess to leave you, or for the goddess to rise. But neither happened. You remained in my bed like a painting of the old worlds, suspended in time. Minnows hid inside your hair and dragonflies landed on your belly, surrounded by life in spite of the lack of it in you. Even in death, life was abundant.
It was easier, almost, to believe there was nothing left worth waking you for. Easier to believe that the world had already ended, and I merely cradled the aftermath.
I had no wish to be found.
I am a river, I believe I’m a river. I mean (I cradle dead things)(I am always reaching for the shore; always trying to escape my body). This is simply how it was always meant to be: Ophelia’s beauty in death, Sybil with her dagger, Dante’s blessed Damozel up in the heavens. This is how you fulfill your role without a single line in the script.
Someone is calling, someone is waking us up from our resting place. Have they finally found a purpose for you?
&&.
You see it coming when your heart gives out for the first time. It’s a sudden thing, written in fine print on the price tag of borrowed time that was bestowed upon you, a blessing and a curse of repeat and reset and repeat—, fragile time weaving itself in a knot as it unspools whatever thread that had been keeping your body together.
But it works. The only thing that matters is that it works. The arrow unlatches from where it had found the center of his skull, Ashe draws his bow and not his last breath. The screaming of soldiers, human or not, return.
And you hear it before you feel it, how your body betrays you when you pull the threads and rewind the loom. How your heart hesitates in its existence. A miscalculation of a beat, a flare of red in your vision. The hand that holds the Sword of the Creator is bathed in blood, the hand that holds the threads is paralyzed. A full-body shiver, then the lateral tilt of the axis of your being which is to kindly say you fall face first down to earth, hard, and don’t get up again.
Child, it’s no time to sleep, can’t you hear them screaming for you? Or does the static reach all the way up to your temporal bone, sticking its rusty knife between motor nerves and bright red viscera? It’s a funny thing, a dramatic art display when a vessel bursts. Like a faucet, like the fountain the village at the foothill of the monastery used to have. Blood coats the back of your mouth, drips from your nose, sour and curdled in your heart’s bitterness.
They see it as a bolt of lightning, almost. The way it strikes and how you crumble quick after as if your nerves have been cut, vision blacking out. Ashe screams out your name but we cannot move, cannot scream back, cannot even breathe in our pitiful state.
It all comes back to this: You ask, Who will watch its back, now? and I reply, Are you its keeper? Not that my words can reach you. No. If you don’t go back again, they’ll spear it down and hang its pelage down the imperial halls as a trophy of war. If you go back again, I know nothing will be enough to protect you from yourself. The infarcts have already bloomed, its only a question of when they will lead to our death. And I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think the beast will live long enough to see what its actions have costed us.
We won’t go gentle into the good night. We do not get to have that kindness.
You can see how your chest was pried open for all to see, how weak and red and fleshy it was underneath the blackened stone from forcing its way through time over and over again. The heart is drowning in the ravine, the one that never beat in the first place, a stone as heavy as daylight that bleeds into the evening—
It weakly shutters in your chest once, twice, like a bird’s. And gives out.
.
..
…
EXT. ACROSS THE BLOODY FIELD — EVENING
TAKE 13
When we first saw you we almost thought you were dead.
The stillness of your aftermath turns into the ringing of ears. Circled around you are your former students, the urge to protect coiled tight in their shoulders. I liken them to birds lost without their guide to take flight.
Not far away, I find the beast as a ghost, gore still stuck to its lance. You should be glad that it was still breathing for we thought he would kneel over next— with how heavy its footsteps fell, with the lack of blood— as if it were dragging the chains of his cage behind.
See it kneeling next to you, armor digging into the ground, the armor that screams with rust and blood drying on metal, screaming in unbearable pain just like its bearer. There are no words in spoken tongue to explain the look in its remaining eye. I have not witnessed a creature more pitiable than this, and I have witnessed centuries. Still as a statue, shell-shocked like an amateur at war. Its words are barely loud enough to be heard, almost pleading with an invisible line. I told you to stay back. I told you— but he didn’t, did he? He only told you to follow. Like something he could afford to lose.
Blood stains the dirt like an offering. Whose blood is it? Whose blood is it? We told you. The earth is no altar, but with everyone watching, you can almost pretend. An offering to the hands of time, spat back out on the silverware with disgust. Someone is scraping the leftovers off.
Someone pushes back strands of your pale hair that has stuck to your neck with sweat and presses their fingers to your carotid, searching for a sign. This one is smart, or maybe you are simply lucky. If she had pressed her hands to your chest surely the stillness of your calcified heart would’ve declared any effort to save you futile.
The same pale hand tries stitching you up in bright white light like a bridal veil to wash out the red. There is no body, no breath, no pain—until there is. Until the ache crawls in from the edges of your consciousness, the echo of your lungs torn from overwork, your heart like a tired bird folding its wings. Is it the warmth of a breath upon the back of your former student’s hand when she reaches out; albeit faint, staggering? See how her still-soft hands cradle yours as the same light of her spell washes over us again like the gentle lap of waves.
Someone shifts behind her. A blade lowers. The air thins out. Everybody holds their breath in exchange for the return of yours. It is not a sound so much as the shape of one—a sound barely caught, more suggestion than certainty. Your chest rises this time, like a newborn fawn on its shaky legs after birth, as though remembering the motion from a distant life.
Will you walk back all the way home barefoot in the mud, to find us at the table waiting for you? We left you a trail of valerians and the door is open, come sit, your place is empty.
You gasp in.
&&.
The king of Faerghus; its orphan, its blade, had always been a wild thing. Restrained, yes. But that was before there was no reason left to pretend. You could mistake his lone eye for a bruise. You could mistake his prayers for a suicide note. What’s left of the boy he once was is starved for kindness and deprived of anything lasting. Imagine a lifetime of goodbyes. Imagine the red table of his heart, the empty plates polished to a perfect mirror. Hunger gnaws its dulled teeth against its bars. Imagine cathedrals crumbling down. Now imagine his last breath like a great oak tree crumbling down with no witness, the insides softened by heartrot; keeping vigil over Ophelia in the riverbed because he waited and waited for you and you never came–
The rougher hands clad in blood-slick armor, not any less kind in its intention but incapable of enacting it, hold the back of your head, to lift you up from the ground.
Someone— Slyvain, maybe— calls its name.
Once. Then again. But the boy does not move. His world is two feet wide and shaking in his arms. He bares his teeth, low and wordless, and not even the goddess could wrest you from him now. And isn’t that waxen face, that trembling vessel a picture to be burned at the back of your students’ eyes? You are covered in mud and gore yet nobody would think twice before reaching out, before lifting their guide up from her would-be grave to be carried home in the muted, ashamed banners of retreat.
They approach their king like they are circling a starving animal. They approach it like they fear the lion will finally bow its head to hunger and close its maw around your neck upon one wrong move.
No one might realize, but I see right through him.
Remember when Dimitri was younger on a kinder evening rather than this one, a spring breeze in the air and quiet laughter under a great oak. Oh, how easy was it to read his face then! The minute twitch of his brow, red so eager to rise to his cheeks at the smallest tease from his peers. Remember how embarrassed he was when you saw the mangled skin of his hands without gauntlets to hide behind, when you traced a finger over the calluses and old burns disappearing underneath his sleeves. How his words tripped over themselves, how a full body shiver followed behind.
The claws of his gauntlets would dig into his own flesh until he drew blood if he could. His hands that keep turning into cathedrals, hands that keep turning into birds and flying away from him. Does it matter if you don’t know this broken body, this tired face if you know what’s underneath? It doesn’t matter that he is standing on his one good leg and trembling like a cornered animal, it doesn’t matter that his face is half-wild, caked with blood and blackened grit.
Grip the matted fur of his cloak and do not let go. This is the only piece of him left soft enough that you can cling to without bleeding all over it. There is no grave deep enough to house this loyalty, no elegy long enough to exhaust this grief. There is no place where sharp things could stay safe.
When your hold on the cloak tightens, his face won’t betray anything but I’ll hear the shudder of a breath, the aching relief that comes after. For just a moment, I can almost see the lion through eyes like yours and see the starved man for what he is.
They’ll take you away. They’ll eventually pry you away from his hands and he won’t make a noise. No one will look him in the eye. No one can carry that guilt for him.
&&.
INT. A MOMENT OF RESPITE — NIGHT
You’d think it wouldn’t come to this, that we’d be stuck in a loop of yesterday’s where the bodies of your students never fall but here we are left with a failing body and the war mongers on. At one point you cannot trick Death with a flick of your wrist to pull the strings of Time anymore. Every stolen yesterday leaves its bruise somewhere. In tendon. In nerve. In the exhausted animal of the heart. At one point of history it will demand something in return, and you’ll be the only thing within reach.
Shivering bird on the sidewalk. Say that you’ll sing for us again, the door is closing.
–
A heavy door opens with a groan, the crisp winter night creeping in behind a hulking figure. At such an hour when all things are asleep, he carries himself in pieces. A king in the shape of a man. A man in the shape of a wound.
A hand clad in black emerges from under a heavy cloak, parting the screen that separates Byleth’s bed in the infirmary. And with it, a thin strip of shivering candlelight falls over the worn white linens.
Dimitri bows his head, and the world bows with him. He is the kind of beautiful that hurts to look at: a cathedral mid-collapse. There’s something terrible in it, something true.
Dimitri bows his head and stares down at his mirror with ghosts snapping at his heels, tongues dipped in bitterness and their wrath unrelenting in the dark.
Would they quieten if she hand-fed them the marrow of her bones? For he seems starved for violence, but flinches away from the stillness of the aftermath of death. Dimitri bows his head and Byleth does not have the energy to ask, nor does he seem aware of it. He is listening for something. He is listening for the sound he cannot seem to find: which is her heart, a feverish pomegranate, the stone-sized thing hidden beneath her ribs.
The candlelight trembles across her face, softening the edges of something that, hours ago, had felt so terribly final. Skin flushed in exhaustion even in rest, sea foam hair stuck to her forehead in sweat. Under half-lidded eyes, Byleth’s gaze cannot seem to focus on her visitor.
For a moment it seems as though he might speak her name—but the sound never arrives. For a moment it seems as though he might reach out—if only it would not bring ruin. His ghosts have long since proved to him that he cannot trust sight nor sound. They whisper tales of death and loss, weave tapestries of his tragedy from blood and viscera, and blur the lines between what’s real and not. All his altars are in ruin, and his fears bring forth a sense of shame that freezes him in motion. Somewhere beyond them monks sleep peacefully through the night, ignorant of the fact that the world is ending quietly inside this room.
Is this what it is? Only a tragedy to be recalled centuries later of a fallen king. The clawed hand, trembling, stays hovering right over her chest. If his ghosts were any kinder, they would have wondered at the restraint this creature showed.
That distance Dimitri cannot close for himself, his most beautiful ghost closes for him. Byleth lifts a weak, calloused hand to grip the metal joints of his gauntlet, curling around his index and middle fingers with trembling purpose. His fingers twitch. Surely it’s not comfort she seeks from me, Dimitri thinks. No. The pitiful grip on his hand is not something gentle but more so born out of desperation.
Byleth guides that black-clad hand upward, presses it against the fragile line where her pale throat meets her shoulder, where the pulse beneath the skin should answer him plainly. Foolish, trusting a boar with her life, his father shakes his severed head. Glenn asks if he is playing house again.
If Dimitri wished, he could pull away effortlessly. Snap the tether between them before it roots any deeper beneath his skin. His strength has always existed in ugly excess; even now exhaustion drags at his limbs like a blood soaked cloth and still he could break free.
Beneath his fingers, despite the leather and steel separating them, the faint rhythm of a pulse makes itself known. Intangible proof of Life in the face of Death. Not even his ghosts can deny him this. There: the physical thump, thump of blood coursing through veins.
His solace (not that he would admit it aloud) does not last long. The pulse shifts under his hand. It does not stop, but skips.
A pause too long between contractions, followed by a compensatory surge that feels almost like panic beneath skin.
There— again. Like a failing engine.
“…What did you do?” The muted glim in her eyes tell the king that he’ll find no answers. Another skip. The ghosts reply in her stead, Only what you have ordered her to do. We want to win and you need to focus, Dimitri. Collateral damage does not matter if it means the Emperor’s head on a spike.
And that thought, the imagined give of bones under his hands is so promising that the infirmary room turns suffocating. The hot rush of anger is so sudden and vivid that it eclipses this frail reality. The voices swell, feverish and cruel in their demands and the King is helpless against them.
Won’t you fully wrap your hand around that pale throat? Feel the cartilage collapse under pressure. You know how. You’ve done it a million times—
“Dimitri.”
He recoils as if struck.
His hand tears free from her throat so abruptly that he nearly tips over the candleholder on the nightstand in his attempts to get away, cradling the clawed hand to his chest. The trembling candlelight washes over them, almost offended. You wanted proof. Here is proof.
For a moment Dimitri can only stare, breath uneven and catching in his chest, eye wide with something too fractured to name.
One moment you are hacking through bodies you do not feel the warmth of, and you are very good at it and angry, very angry although you don’t remember why. Unease blooms like ink on paper. Don’t look back. The lake doesn’t wait. One moment you think that you see Ashe’s head snapping back with the ugly force of an arrow lodged between the eyes, and the next you don’t.
“Do not mistake me for a child, Professor. I know… I know all things unexplainable will lead to you.”
“The goddess…” he says bitterly. The title twists strangely in his mouth. “Was this her doing?”
It is clear that she is unprepared for this conversation, and if Dimitri were a kinder or patient man he would let it go and return under the collapsed dome of his exile. But he is neither of those things, and he can only move forward. His coherence has always cost him more than madness.
Byleth’s voice is quiet but firm when she finally speaks up.
“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. And if it’s my capability to fight you are questioning, this,” her own hand reaches to touch her neck in passing thought— the faltering pulse, “this won’t hinder it.”
Something in his expression flickers—pain trying and failing to become anger, anger failing to become anything clean.
“You are clearly unwell, and you still mock me.”
“You collapse on the battlefield,” he continues, voice tightening with every word he forces through it, “you can scarcely remain standing afterward, your pulse vanishes beneath my hand and returns as though nothing occurred—”
“The answer would change nothing.”
“It would change everything.”
Here’s a body floating facedown in the center of a lake, or a battlefield. Doesn’t matter either way. Make it two bodies and a waterlogged bouquet of valerians in between. The overwhelming scent clogs your senses. Like how after Duscur there were no bodies left to bury so the streets were filled with flowers instead, and you still couldn’t forget the scent of how a man smelled like roasted duck after the flesh fell off his body. Say we’ll never make it out of here. I can keep making up scenarios where you and I are both dead and we won’t address the time flowing backwards.
“Don’t you see? I’m responsible for my students as much as I’m responsible for the victory they entrust to me. We follow where you lead, Dimitri, and I have to make sure they live to see it. Which includes you.”
Dimitri scoffs.
"And what is the price of your protection, then? Am I to trust the steadiness of your heart with every fight, or should I expect it to give way eventually and suddenly, like it did today?”
"It is my burden to bear," she murmurs, the firmness undermined by the wisps of her breaths. "And I have carried it well."
“Whatever responsibility you imagine yourself to have towards me ended long ago. You mistake me for that boy; foolish, naive and long gone.”
Byleth’s brows draw together almost imperceptibly, almost wounded. In her eyes there is a quiet ache as though he has said something cruel about a stranger she cares for, only to realize too late that the stranger is himself. That unbearable thing in her gaze, the refusal to separate the monster from the man.
“Who stands before me then?”
“…A fool, it seems. To imagine I might get an answer out of you.”
Byleth has a lifetime’s worth of confessions to make. About time folding in on itself. Of rewinding the clock until her veins felt split open with light. Of each arrow he took to the neck, the sword to the gut, spared down to the ground, each time his old classmates bled themselves out to cover his back, each battle lost a hundred ways before it ended in victory. Each ending she rewrote until the paper tore.
If only her leaden tongue would work around the words, if only she could tell she remembered every death his body had forgotten. She would open her hands and swear there was still blood beneath her nails, scrubbed raw though they were. She would take his gauntleted hand in hers, trace the dried crimson caught in the grooves of the steel, and say, See? We are not so different after all.
There he is, hidden somewhere between layers of grief and years lost. Beneath the armor, you see the fragments of someone who is neither a boy nor a beast but a young man trying to become a tragedy. A pale, frozen lake blanketed in white. But isn’t a lake still a lake underneath all that snow? Eventually all snow must melt.
And to risk that glimpse of the man by a mere admission— For even though death is familiar all around them, to gamble what little tether Dimitri has to the living and admit that he was refused the relief of death, that his suffering would only end in screaming. That the only reason he is standing here is because someone stronger than fate refused it.
To offer the admission that nothing matters if it can be rewound, is far too much for these particular walls to contain. There are some truths too large to place into another person’s hands without crushing them beneath the weight. Dimitri doesn’t understand the truth of Divine Pulse, but he owns the terrible intuition of a man who has spent his entire life watching people destroy themselves in service of causes larger than any of them for as long as he can remember. But he understands enough.
“What would you have me say, Professor?”
(She would only ask him to not look at him like that, like she is the one who keeps leaving.)
“Should I thank you now for the inevitability of your sacrifice? Am I to be grateful for the grief I have yet experienced in your death?” A pause, a realization. His voice sounds awfully resigned the next time he speaks: “You ask me to value my life. Yet yours doesn't seem to hold such privilege.”
Dimitri’s eyes are fixed somewhere beyond her now. His father’s ghost frowns upon the way he sounds, almost too fractured to be recognized. Beyond his gaze is a sky split down to the bone, and a figure disappearing into the maws of death. Before his unseeing gaze is a graveyard filled with familiar names. His only tether is a flickering pulse, as though if that rhythm were to falter once more, the rest of him would follow.
“…To stand there and realize that, given the choice, you would leave us…. leave me. And I can't do it.” It’s the most he has spoken in days, almost as if someone else is speaking beyond the mirror, beyond the surface of the lake.
“I can’t do it again.”
This pitiful admittance, the lion bearing its own neck. Won’t you take the offering? Each teardrop a pearl, each shiver that runs through his body an earthquake, those wide shoulders of what should have been a young man bearing an ancient weight.
Five years is a long time trying to find your way home through a blizzard.
Even within the monastery walls, even this far into the night he has dragged his armor and weapons with him yet they do nothing to shield him from his own self. His one good eye is blurry with unshed tears, the betrayal of his own emotions, and this time he bites down hard enough on his tongue for blood to bloom across it lest he make a sound. Glenn, when he hid him behind the rubble of the fire, had made him promise, hadn’t he? Do not make a sound until I come back for you. I will come back for you.
Dimitri is tired of bargaining for scraps like a dog. He is tired of waiting for when death may claim him and he prays and prays that it finds him before it finds her, and the familiar shame that comes alongside it for seeking the easy way out.
Anything gentle left within his reach has always vanished before morning and Byleth has no means to prove otherwise. He is hunched over the bed again and almost can be mistaken for a small thing if she didn’t know better, malnourishment hidden from eyes only by heavy armor, and the ever heavier cape. The armor and the body is a means to an end, and the soul is dragged alongside or behind it. You could see it in the lone eye. You could watch it in the tremble of that hand cradled to the chest.
“Come,” she says softly. “I’m still here.”
Dimitri shakes his head, eye squeezed shut as an involuntary tear escapes.
“For how long?”
The space between them is scarcely an arm’s length. It may as well be every battlefield they have ever crossed.
Maybe that’s why, when that weak hand guides him down again until his knee strikes the wooden post of the infirmary bed, he threatens to topple over like a puppet whose strings are cut. Rusted armor digs against the mattress as he braces himself before the full weight of his body can give way.
Byleth stares up to him with that unbearable certainity, her hand curled around his vambrace as though the cold steel were flesh enough to anchor them both. The hand trembles. The gaze does not.
Warm palms find either side of his face and thumbs away at the tears that await. The world narrows to two points of living heat. His breath escapes him then, ragged, almost painful. He feels it pass between them, warm against lips parted only enough to remember they belong to the living. She is close enough that he can count the uneven rhythm of her breathing against his own, and for one impossible moment he cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
How long can you speak / Without inhaling / How long / Can you inhale without / Bursting apart / When you touch him / A sigh passed / From kiss to kiss-stained / Fevered Mouth / Keep crumbling into / Cathedrals / Into birds / That / Keep flying / Away
They say it’s once in a lifetime you can kiss something and at last make it human, believing anything beautiful enough —when swallowed— might stay. Give me two of these lifetimes. I’ll kiss my hands into an altar of all they have touched— You and you and you.
Our dead remain dead. The war wages on. There is no miracle waiting at the end of the story with clean hands and salvation. Only this: the awful human urge to preserve one another in fragments.
Kiss the trembling wrist. The pulse that is real. That is not stone. Kiss the beast who is more human than you’ll ever be. Kiss the mouth that has only ever known how to speak through clenched teeth and watch that lone eye widen, your name on red lips—
And still the war wages on.