003 » i wrote a song about being weak

[bladehand]

fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.

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[animehamlet]

[even perched upon a plateau with every footpath up the mountainside ravaged by sabotage and time, the skeleton of garreg mach and the small hamlets still living in its bloated, jagged shadow have fared no better than the rest of the continent with the empire's dogs free to roam loose. they gnaw wherever they see weakness and giddily pull out whatever they can through the wounds they drive in.

beasts. leeches. the week began with dimitri drifting along a muddy, frozen hoof path that served as the only local evidence of any prior road, the voices interrupted only by frightened animals and an argument - a hunter with a buck being accosted by a red-clad patrol that tired of rations.

it ended with a pile of parts-that-could-be-vaguely-assembled-back-into-corpses kicked aside into a thicket, the harangued hunter hurrying back to wherever his hut may have been in the woods, and dimitri with a rondel dagger broken off into his girdle shortly before he pulled the offending soldier's wrist off of his arm.

regrettable. shameful. dragged from his duties by something so trifling in the grand scheme of the dead as a wound to join a mountain of others. at the very least, dimitri's limp didn't prevent him from retreating upriver to find some sort of shelter that hadn't been picked clean by man or monster over the last nearly-five-now years, if the time smearing together in the slurry of his head is at all reliable.

he wanders. wades through the muck. as the river becomes enveloped by a ravine and only the barest hint of moonlight some unfathomable distance above, it decides to toy with him. things - let alone people - did not survive falls like this. they came down in pieces, if solid at all, to be washed further and further downstream until somebody finally picked them from the water or they became indiscernible.

and yet he looks, his eye refusing to clarify further - he blinks through the fever for a good ten minutes, despite glenn's snapping at his dazed standing - at a corpse that is pristine when put next to everything and everyone of fódlan. when a hundred hopes and nightmares - rage and fury and horror, a gnashing tide of 'so this is where you were?' and 'how did this happen to you, how did i let them kill you?' - scream together in his mind, he moves almost automatically, in a haze not unwelcome but unfamiliar.

he waits for the corpse to fall apart in his arms. he waits for the entire charade to slough off in rot, but as he stumbles his way up to garreg mach, the resplendent reverent persists. does that make the entire experience more or less objectively horrifying?

the monastery is a graveyard, a plundered tomb he had avoided since its fall, but he is the walking dead now carrying another in his arms, so is it such an unwelcome intrusion now? he doesn't know where to go. where to set both of them to rest. the mere thought of laying his eye upon sir jeralt's grave with proof of dimitri failing the dead once again roils his stomach - the dormitories are still musty with those who died hiding away and the nests of vermin that have taken their place. the cathedral has all but collapsed, the goddess's maimed figure covered in the year's first layer of snow melting into a dirty puddle at her feet where supplicants once stood.

he settles for somewhere more distant, less pillaged, something not smoldering with stoked embers of sorrowful nostalgia. he finds one of the cardinal's offices, long-picked clean of any writing, art or fine clothing by bugs and bandits both, but still relatively safe after kicking aside some shattered remnants of stained glass from the siege into a corner.

his heart hasn't stopped pounding. he settles byleth in a once-plush chair, considers throwing his still-tacky-with-imperial-blood cloak over him like a tarp over a disgraced statue. he considers screaming every misgiving he's ever had into the void. he considers many things, revolting and reverent both, and crushes them all aside to scour the monastery for some sort of makeshift blanket that hasn't been completely moth-eaten, wandering through the hollow halls as a creature that had long since adapted his eye to the dark.

it's a joke, what he finds. the infirmary, poached of any concoctions or medical supplies, still bears a few clean sheets - so he comes back, shoving the already-creaky door off its hinges.

he still does not know whether he intends to simply stop the frost from growing on the professor's corpse or to cover it until it rots or ceases to haunt him.]

You cannot be, Professor. You cannot be... you have simply bided your time.

[this was why the professor never deigned to join the council of the departed and belittle him or soothe him or hate him - this must be the professor's own uniquely twisted punishment.]

[bladehand]

[ The corpse cannot possibly be real.

Whether lucid or fully mad, Dimitri must know that, in his heart of hearts: the corpse cannot possibly be real. Byleth died years ago. If ever Dimitri were lucky enough to stumble across his body, it would have been nothing more than a pile of bones — perhaps partly scattered and torn apart by animals long ago, or else lying peacefully, still enrobed in the professor's favorite black tunic, unrecognizable save to those who once loved the man that it was.

It should not look like this. The way it does. The corpse should not be so whole, so pristine. So untouched by the hands of time. The professor's face looks exactly the way it did all those years ago, before Garreg Mach fell and he disappeared on the battlefield: strangely beautiful, with features sculpted in softer lines that made him almost pretty rather than handsome, if not for the eyes, so sharp and catlike that they spoke of latent danger, and the jawline, slim and angular and somber.

(A memory: Sylvain's voice from a thousand years ago, a little too deep in his cups one night, opining that the professor was lovely as a woman sometimes, when the sun hit him right, and in certain situations, if a man had to make do with what he had, well, you could do worse than the professor, up until Ingrid had swung by and hit him with a water pitcher —)

Everything else is too well-preserved. The professor's hair, exactly the same length as when he went missing — just a week before the siege, he'd tugged at it mid-lecture and uncharacteristically realized out loud that he needed to get it trimmed, which for some reason had made everyone laugh. The professor's lips — they should be grey and mottled and faded, not so pink, not so flushed. The professor's skin — still soft, his flesh still firm. Impossible. Impossible.

So the corpse Dimitri brought back to the monastery, then — it must only be another of his visions. It cannot be real. Eventually, the wayward prince will wake from his waking nightmare only to find that the professor he has so carefully wrapped in a blanket and laid out over that faded velvet armchair is just some common farmhand or merchant or passing traveler and he has only hallucinated his teacher's face over the dead gray features of someone else's son. Eventually. Eventually. It is only a matter of time.

In the meantime, he can — he can imagine.

Except the dream never ends, and the thing about that — the thing about that is, Byleth is warm.

When Byleth wakes, it is because of the smell. Not a bad smell, in spite of the ruin and decay around him. Just the sort of smell that a building has, when you know that building well enough that you can smell it down to its foundations. His brain realizes that he is home before he does, and then he wonders when he began to think of the monastery as home so fervently. Before this, home had just been wherever Jeralt was, and then when he died, Byleth —

Byleth stirs. His body is warm. The rise and fall of his chest — breathing. And something about being brought back to Garreg Mach has stirred him. His lashes flutter open slowly, with all the elegance of a sleeping princess from an old fairytale. His eyes focus on the one other living being in the room.

And it can't — be who he thinks it is. Because Dimitri never looked like this. The close-cropped hair the prince had once painstakingly styled every morning and kept meticulously neat, now overgrown to his shoulders in piecemeal layers — but even under layers of oil and dirt it is the same flaxen gold of yesteryear, and carries the same tendency to clump in pieces. The large blue eyes that used to seek Byleth's counsel and approval, now reduced to one, sort of sunken and mottled purple from lack of sleep. The face, once healthy and still slightly rounded with boyish youth, now gaunt and pale with a more square jawline than Byleth remembers. But the same sloping nose, the same shape to his lips, the delicate translucence of his pale Faerghan complexion that always flushed too red from even mild heat, all of that is unchanged —

Finally Byleth speaks, in a husky voice that has gone rusty from disuse: ]

...Dimitri...?

[ The last thing he remembers is taking that mage's blow and falling down the ravine... ]

[bladehand]

[ The pots and pans must have been among the first things to go. Wartime prices for metal being what they are, Byleth figures, they were probably stolen and melted down to make weapons years prior. Perhaps not even stolen; perhaps only taken by the monastery's own kitchen staff in the immediate weeks after the siege, once they realized that Rhea was missing and no one would be able to shepherd the flock as it was in times past. Perhaps because they wanted to sell the metal; perhaps only because they knew they would need the tools of their trade to find employment elsewhere.

In any case, Byleth knows how to make do with nothing, but he still manages to locate some clay cookware in the back shelf of a cabinet that no one looted in all the years that have passed. Probably too heavy for bandits to even bother stealing, considering the pittance one would fetch for it. Cooking with clayware is a little finicky after getting used to the luxury of cast iron, but it's still better than what Byleth is accustomed to, grilling cheap meats with fire and stone out in the wilds, sometimes with his father and sometimes without.

Now he will always have to be without his father. It's just the way of things.

He thought that they might starve if he didn't do something about the food situation immediately, but to his great surprise, finding food to eat is still easier than he'd braced himself for. Merchants do not visit the monastery as they did in years past, no, but Byleth opens the greenhouse doors to find that the plants within have not all shriveled and withered away but instead have grown into a wild tangle untamed by human hands. The more delicate flowers and fruits have all disappeared, but Byleth doesn't have to try particularly hard to find hardy crops worth eating. An all-vegan diet will not suit him and Dimitri in the long run, but so long as it seems that Dimitri has subsisted off of wild herbs and muck in the years since the monastery fell, starting him off on gentler foods and simple vegetable stews seems less likely to shock his stomach. Later, Byleth figures, when he has some downtime, he can try his hand at fishing again; he's noticed that there are still silvery shadows in the monastery pond, which makes sense — one of the monks told him once that the pond was fed by an internal water source beneath the monastery itself, and was effectively self-maintaining. Still later, if he can get Dimitri to see sense, perhaps he can talk the prince into a hunting expedition of sorts; the surrounding forests must still be home to rabbits and deer that could serve as sustenance for them both.

The monastery is still full of treasures. The most likely things — the pots, the pans, candelabras, fine clothing, jewelry — these things have all been taken, but some other things went puzzlingly untouched by thieving hands. Byleth's own personal quarters went completely unlooted, either by the grace of the Goddess or because the bandits found nothing there worth stealing, not even the fine leather notebook in which he had been recording each day's events.

It will be very, very cold soon. It will already be cold tonight. He has no idea what day it is, and neither does Dimitri, but from the scent of the air and the direction of the breeze, he thinks they must be between the Red Wolf Moon or the Ethereal Moon, and the winds are blowing cold air down from Faerghus, chilling Garreg Mach with a Faerghan winter. It might be Dimitri's birthday soon, if it hasn't already passed. Thinking about that makes Byleth's heart ache, so he says nothing of it; Dimitri probably doesn't want to speak of it anyway.

From his own quarters by the commoners' rooms, he retrieves a cheap woolen blanket; then, thinking through his chances, he goes up to the monastery's second floor to locate the aristocratic student dormitories.

Again: Byleth finds baffling behavior, from the point of view of someone currently also guilty of searching the monastery for valuables, but bandits are not known to be systemic. Some rooms, like Ferdinand's and Lorenz's, were absolutely ransacked. Edelgard's one vanity, her fine haircare products, disappeared long ago. Yet Dimitri's room was neglected, perhaps because bandits saw how barren it was and assumed it was unused; somehow, a whetstone that Byleth once gifted him is still the only object sitting on his desk, untouched. Felix's room is similarly barren. Sylvain's room is the one that Byleth was searching for — Gautier territory is farther north than any of the others, and the redhead kept under his bed a fine, thick wool blanket, likely never touched because he found the monastery too warm, still wrapped in a length of red ribbon he was known to favor.

Thinking about Sylvain's little luxuries — the only one of his Faerghan students to enjoy any sort of luxury at all, and even then, what he enjoyed was plain and practical! — makes Byleth smile, even now. He will have to thank Sylvain for this later, if ever he is lucky enough to see the young man again. He thinks that Sylvain will probably laugh, say that he forgot about that blanket, or hated it anyway, but who knows. Maybe Sylvain will surprise him, and say that the professor owes him one now, and give him a roguish wink, and a debt which he will never collect on.

All of this is to say —

— that Byleth returns from his day's events — the attempts to clean whatever he can clean under the circumstances, the gathering of vegetables from the garden, a vague attempt to locate bait for fishing, and the meticulous slow effort to make the monastery a home again which Dimitri has sneered at and hated for weeks — having ignored Dimitri's exhortations for revenge once again, bearing two wool blankets which will not be enough under the circumstances, back to the cardinal's room with the shattered window (that Byleth repaired with a clumsy wooden solution) where they have been staying these past few weeks. ]

I'll need you to sleep with me tonight.

[ His tone leaves no room for argument, but he expects one, given Dimitri's... obvious unwellness, to say the least. ]

It'll be cold.