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No longer a haven, the long since abandoned monastery now stood as a mausoleum, holding nothing but shards of bone and the vermin that fed on each other. A suitable place for one as gruesome as Dimitri, for it could function as a gravesite as much as it was shelter. And as the days faded into nights, and nights into months, years- all lost, all pointless - he becomes a little less. Day by day he hollows out like a great tree left to die, marking nothing significant save for his own putrid soul rot.
The once lively halls had been abandoned, and the only noise Dimitri had ever heard was the sound of his lance shattering skulls- always the same loud crack, then silence, and finally the scuffling while the rats scattered in fear. He’d chase after them, every single one, because it was his duty, his reason, his pleasure.
Even now, after reuniting with the professor and his former friends, he thought nothing of them. The sight of them is clouded with the veil of his own misery- phantoms seeking something just out of reach. Something he can no longer give them.
"Is it really safe here?” Annette’s pitched voice echoes in the halls, foreign to his ears.
“Annie, we’re all together. It’ll all be fine.”
“I know, but… there’s a lot of memories here. That’s all. We had to leave everything behind so suddenly.”
“It’s all right where we left it, isn’t it?” Ingrid comments, her steps quickly falling into line, marching through the ruins of what they once called home.
Behind him, Dimitri can feel their melancholy. That, and their palpable unease as they carefully step over corpses and broken weapons. Years ago, he would have felt great shame at the physical display of his callousness, but now, he almost relishes in turning back and seeing them avert their eyes. What looks like pity is grief to him, and he tells himself that they are right to grieve for a dead man, because it’s only his still beating heart that betrays the death surrounding him.
And yet, after everything, she came back. She had returned, silently stepping into the ruins of his mental state, as despair and loneliness ebbed and flowed in those five years since she died. This, a moment to moment reminder that he had nothing to live for, nothing to prove, and even less to reclaim. The academy days were behind him indefinitely, and somehow, with her open palm held out to him, he’d felt something akin to relief, before fear had stricken him down, just as his family was cattle for slaughter. That had been the first time he’d seen her face in five years, her face unchanged, still unreadable, only he had seen- no, imagined, a hint of warmth.
Whatever he had seen, it was not for him.
“This is only the beginning. We’ll stand together, and we’ll triumph.” Simple, and decisive. She’d said the same before the battle of the eagle and lion many moons ago. She looks over to him, reading him like an open book, and looks to him as her second in command. She hadn’t changed.
“Fine.”
He’d been weak, agreeing to work alongside everyone, if only because it led him closer to slitting Edelgard’s neck, as though the rush of her blood spilling out would simultaneously release the poisonous hatred within himself, and make the ghosts fall silent. Two birds with one large, boorish stone. Maybe then, he could finally rest.
However, fate, in fact, was indeed as unrelenting as Dimitri had remembered.
“Is it wise, milord?” Gilbert questions- the only person save for Felix who will challenge him.
“I care not for the wise, nor the wicked.”
The professor stares at him blankly, neither agreeing or disagreeing. He could never read her. For a moment, he thinks he’d seen a flash of disgust in the professor’s face. It was as though she had given him the mercy of not haunting him in exile, but would do so now, in the flesh. It was with a vengeance that she would float behind him, seeing through and into him- seeing him as the beast he truly was.
“It’s not as though there aren’t… other options. We can always discuss-” Sylvain tries, a feeble attempt at diffusing an uncomfortable situation that leaves Felix glaring as he marches out of the makeshift war room. He leaves behind him a string of curses. “Guess we can just decide not to do anything, too.”
Dimitri hardly registers anyone else in the room, and glares at her- can only manage that. Wordlessly, he turns on his heel and abruptly leaves to lock himself in his quarters.
Though Felix and Sylvain’s rooms were so close to his own, Dimitri is relieved once he realizes that they don’t return to their quarters, likely having chosen other rooms for the sake of keeping their distance. His own room is bare, nothing save for a bed and several pieces of broken furniture, and he contents himself with sitting on the cold, stone floor, back pressed to the edge of the bed. He holds his lance close to him, ever ready to strike, and stays alert. Sleep would surely evade him, like always, especially with how restless he was. He dares to shut his eyes, if only to be able to put a face to the voices who admonish him.
‘You sully my name, boy. You took my name and made nothing of it.’ His father spits. Areadbhar in tow, alight with the fury of justified rage. Behind him, the frail frame of his stepmother Patricia looking away, unable to meet his eyes. His father looms large.
Already, their faces fade from his memory due to time passing, as well as his own weakness. His guilty eyes refused to even look at their portraits back home. As a child, he wanted nothing more than to forget, and now, as a man, he burns their hateful words and gazes into his scarred skin like a cattle brand, marking him as the swine he is.
Without realizing, his grip tightens, and with a snap the steel lance in his hand breaks, tumbling unceremoniously to the floor. It’s then that he sees the professor reaching for the broken half of his lance.
“This can be fixed.” She says quietly, bending down and then cradling the rusted, bloodied end of his lance as though it were something precious, rather than the blunt end of a tool that had impaled men as despicable as himself. She stands in front of him, still and quiet. He thinks of Lady Rhea.
But he says nothing, turning away from her, barely able to process her ghostly presence, and what it meant to him beyond shame. He never truly believed she could care for him, and knows that she didn’t, and her pretending now would only serve to taint him further. He did not need this- need her .
“Begone.” Dimitri manages through gritted teeth, unable to say more than that in his agitated state.
She ignores his request, still inspecting the broken lance, and peers up at him with a tinge of softness that makes him grow utterly cold.
He rises to his feet, startling her enough to make her flinch. Inwardly, he winces, but at this point, what did it matter whether she did or didn’t hate him? It would be better if she did. Phantom or not, did she intend to haunt him here too? To dig her thumb into his gaping wounds. He’d wondered why he hasn’t seen her visage until now. Her presence alone upends everything.
“Are you here?” He reaches out briefly, his calloused, dirty hand touching the bare skin in the crook of her arm. “Were you always here?”
She stays put, unflinching. She is open. She is alive. She is here.
And ghosts aren’t so warm.
Before his conscious mind realizes it, his lips are crashing into hers. It’s their lips fumbling together as their teeth clack, until he bends his neck a little lower, angling himself for better access to her mouth. She pulls on his fur collar to drag him open closer, their bodies pressed up against one another as he grabs a fistful of her hair, holding her still.
He’d never kissed her before. Even back in their academy days, when he shyly attempted to convey his feelings to her- emboldened by the fact that she could never reciprocate the advances of a wretch like him. He kept a respectful distance, or at least tried to, as much as his boyish crush allowed.
Here, now, this is as repulsive as he can be. Primal, uncaring. He grunts into her open mouth, parting with a sharp inhale. She stares back at him, open mouthed, and he feels as though he could jump out of his skin.
“You should leave.” is all he manages to spit out, and he avoids her eyes, like the coward he is.
If she speaks, he can’t hear it. Unintentionally, his gaze follows her movements, and he can see her pick up the remnants of his broken lance. She has her knees on the stone floor, mending something irreparable with a look on her face that looks serene. Like the Goddess herself; the born again sun casting away shadows already etched into millenniums of stone.
Moments later, she stands up, taking the lance and gingerly placing it on a nightstand that is covered in cobwebs and years of dust. The lance does not look brand new. It looks crudely fixed- haphazardly pieced together with bits of fabric and metals; a temporary bandage on a permanent wound.
All the same, he feels wounded by her benevolence. He makes no move to acknowledge her, to thank her. Nor does she force anything on him, taking his hostility in stride. It was wrong, so wrong, but he doesn’t yet have it in him to fully push her away. Like before, like always, she pulled him into her aura; his feeble heart trying to go only where she could follow.
“Until tomorrow.”
Behind her, the door is left ajar when she leaves. The sight of the repaired lance momentarily eclipses his usual ruminating; silencing the voices for the evening. Respite comes to him in the form of pale, revived hands.