003 » i wrote a song about being weak

[bladehand]

fanart by Living201882687.
for dimitri at animehamlet.

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[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... ]