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003 » i wrote a song about being weak
fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.
fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.
fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.
fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.
no subject
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.]
no subject
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... ]
no subject
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.
no subject
well; dimitri supposes they will find an answer. his professor has always been inscrutable in some ways; that thing that unnerved him, that thing that enamored him, that thing that tore his heart asunder when even it couldn't protect someone so seemingly infallible from how utterly wretched this world was.
byleth proves himself corporeal. rather than capitalize on this luxury and go to the emperor's palace to pull her spinal column free from its bearings and dedicate her bloody throne to those whose bones it rests so snidely on top of, he... plays at domesticity? normalcy? whatever bile and curses are thrown dimitri's way by the dead and those he sends into their arms, this has to be insanity.
the office is a nest. a hole. something. dimitri avoids it out of newfound principle for the first few days - he curls into the confessional, wedges himself between bales of hay that have rotted five times over and squeak lively if pressed. byleth may have illusions of what this place once was, what he is, and what to make of it, but dimitri doesn't have the time to spare for such fancies.
he screams himself hoarse at the goddess's feet where glenn spits at them both, asks why is he taking so long? and he torments himself knowing he cannot dredge up a satisfactory answer, because glenn knows, sees inside his head, pries open his skull and sneers at what he finds. dimitri debates throwing himself off a parapet and wondering exactly how many rocks he will feel his body break upon before it all ends - the only brave thing you'll have ever done, his stepmother sighs.
she never looks at him. she never has. when he's nearly halfway over the wall his ever-roving eye catches some distant blur of bright hair accented by the utterly ridiculous contrast of his professor appearing to be carrying crockery around while dimitri prepares to finally put his crest of blaiddyd to its final test. it's absurd.
he doesn't do it. his stepmother barks a laugh - galled but unsurprised, shakes her head, and walks back into the screaming flames. dimitri doesn't know if that's what has finally consigned him to be discarded - it must be. they still berate him, but they do not fuel him with their rage and grief from that point on.
the cardinal's room changes, in the barest ways. broken glass disappears - a pity, it is as effective a weapon as any other - and the pieces of his armor end up scattered in another corner. the fact he has been unable to suit himself without assistance since the tragedy mocks him every moment - his shell, his inevitable funeral regalia, beckons him, but his fingers fumble and his knees lock. there's a sluggish, bone-deep exhaustion that starts to worm its way through dimitri as the faerghan winter's darkest, coldest nights make themselves known in earnest.
take him. do it. take him, finally, an egregious oversight corrected. he challenges, dares - blinks and still feels a pang of impotent rage, befuddlement and disappointment when he clears the haze from his eye and one of the few hours of a new day's sun greets him.
his gut burns - dimitri snatches at his shirt's hem to hike it up (and so naturally it rips) so he can properly glare at still-angry mottling around where that knife had seen fit to nest and where he would have left it for lack of care and the convenience of having a new weapon to pull free if need be. the glaring does nothing but confirm that even his own body is impotent at killing who most deserves it.
sometimes he corners himself under the desk and simply stays there, a creature looking for the tightest nook it can manage. even that instinct fails him tonight - he sprawls on the floor, upper half propped against a wall, catching a rat so lucky (or unlucky, because it still finds its way to him) to be fat on the eggs of nesting birds and carefree even in this monastery that it's no effort at all.
he could crush it. the thing squeals with indignation and it's effortless to prevent it from writhing and twisting and biting him - he's stopped much larger things from such similarly desperate efforts. dimitri's ever-tense jaw works and he swallows thickly.
somewhere in his standoff with a pest still screeching desperately for its life, dimitri hears the distant sound of footsteps and drops the rat entirely. he watches it scramble away - wonders if it will be so stupid as to show itself so brazenly again.
he hopes byleth comes back with a knife or a garrote, but his professor has an armful of blankets and dimitri is sure with the way he feels the befuddlement on his own face that it must be clear to the other man. one is of the expected sort of fare - cheap, standard, undyed. the archbishop's courtesy towards a cold night and nothing more.
the other is familiar in a way that makes him scoff - he knows that patterning, how it was thrown amongst the furniture they'd all played around while their fathers left to debate. how long did gautier last before it inevitably fell? did cornelia butcher all of their horses in the same way as she had blaiddyd's, or had she found some other circus to make of it all?]
...Is that so, Professor?
[he nearly slurs, disbelieving on both fronts. if byleth is resorting to sleeping with a corpse, he is both perverse and doomed - though this is a glorified tomb, so perhaps there's no better place. it will be cold, byleth says? he'll manage, won't he? five years away from all of them and he still had his fingers and toes. dimitri glances towards his own frostbite-scarred feet, tremoring with exhaustion as he tries to draw them closer towards himself.
he hurts, viscerally. the cold gnaws at every stricture stretched drawn across him, old and new. his eye slowly drifts back to the professor, to the blankets, to the slats in byleth's makeshift repairs that will inevitably still have howling winds worm their way in.]
Then you'd best hope those sheets are enough for you.
[dimitri doesn't crawl back under the desk, eager to welcome the chill in until it either takes his heart or starts taking his digits. it is an urge, incredible, incessant - but he doesn't.]
no subject
Rot. Gangrene. Disease. Decay. Byleth has seen all of these things and never even flinched at them, but he has no idea how to stop his beloved student from decomposition of the mind.
Today, especially, he does not wish to humor whatever horrors Dimitri has been seeing. He thought he heard a rat when he entered the room, but he doesn't hear it now, which bodes ill for the creature's fate, save that there is no blood on Dimitri's hands (at the moment). The professor stares at him for a moment, his gaze inscrutable, then calmly deposits his blankets on the bed. ]
I said, "I'll need you to sleep with me," Dimitri.
[ The professor walks over, then lowers himself to a crouch, peering at Dimitri where he has huddled under the desk, shivering, pathetic. Still glowering despite the tremble in his limbs. As for the mottled bruising gash over his stomach where the knife was before Byleth extracted it — well, looks like he could use some more healing treatment, if of course Byleth can convince him to accept it.
Is this sleeping with a corpse, truly? A corpse would never look so frightened, so haunted, so alive. No — it isn't a corpse that Byleth sees before him, but perhaps he is guilty of being perverse. Perhaps he is equally doomed.
Even after all these years, the gleam in Byleth's eyes as he looks at Dimitri — it is still so strangely fond. ]
Come out from under the table.