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These are the last things Hilda sees: the sky above Derdriu, cloudless and endless, and the ships in the harbor flying white sails.
A little before that, it would have been Claude. Only it was Claude as she’d never seen him before, standing a stone’s throw away from where she lay, wearing this incredible face—the eyes wide and dagger-bright, the mouth all twisted up, like he was in pain. There’d been a cut across his cheek that had still been bleeding, the red going theatrically all the way down his neck, staining his collar and cravat. She had almost asked, Does it hurt? You should do something about that, but something had gotten in the way—a pain of her own, twisting between her ribs, and the sound of her own breathing, whistling and wet.
That’s all she can hear now, those breaths. Like the whole world has somehow scaled itself down to this one narrow pier, this stretch of stone where she lies, still warm from the sun. Freikugel still in her hand and everything, because she’d had a job to do when she went down. Because at some point in this whole bloody business, Claude had once told her: I’m going to need you to hold them off right here, but—
It comes back to her then that oh, yes, he’d also said to retreat, though, hadn’t he? Just turn around and go if things got rough, like he’d always known her to do. And she’s decently sure she had meant to do it. Certainly she hadn’t meant to give her life; it just sort of happened. She’d tell him that, if her breaths weren’t starting to go.
Pretty inconvenient how she’s finding now that if she had the breath for it, she’d tell him all sorts of things. She’d tell him that she remembers what the sea had been like yesterday, when they walked out to this very harbor together and he ordered her not to die for him—so calm, like a sheet of glass, like it didn’t even know the word war . She’d tell him that he has a tell, the handful of times she’s seen him laugh, really laugh—that his head tips back, and his eyes close, and his throat is right there, exposed in the light.
She doesn’t say any of it, not even here. She just closes her eyes, and dies.
Except she doesn’t die. She opens her eyes, and finds herself back in her body again. Freikugel still in her hand and everything, and her arms already hauling it up over her head and swinging toward the nearest man in Empire red, doing what they’ve been trained to do—even if her only thought is that she could swear she shouldn’t be doing, well, much of anything anymore. And that’s not just to get out of the day’s duties, for once.
She shouldn’t be here anymore, and the last thing she sees shouldn’t be Claude, dying. But that’s what’s waiting for her when the man she cuts down falls away in front of her—Claude surrounded on the end of the pier, a stone’s throw away. Claude and a tempest of arrows fletched in Empire red. Claude broken and bleeding out onto the stones, into the sea, a cut across his cheek that would have left a scar if he’d survived it.
Hilda tells herself this can’t possibly be real, because Edelgard’s archers are fast, but she’s faster. She should have been fast enough, because she can’t possibly live in a world where she has to remember him this way.
She tells herself: there’s no world where Claude dies by the arrow. She tells herself: the first time she ever saw Claude, he’d had a bow in his hand.
In this world that’s not real, she’s not fast at all. The arrows fly again, and then the sky is red, too.
Except it isn’t red. The sky is blue today over Derdriu, divested of any clouds, and when Hilda opens her eyes again it’s quiet all around. Every soldier she can see looks like they’ve forgotten themselves and what they came here to do—allies and enemies alike all standing still, weapons lowered by their sides.
Across the bridge she’d been guarding—just a minute, just a life ago—is Claude, on his knees on the stones. Claude, blood on his face and blood on his collar, no more than a stone’s throw away. And before him: Edelgard, the emperor, and the professor by her side.
“Right until the very end, I’ve read this whole thing terribly wrong.” He sighs, as one might over spilled milk, and looks Edelgard in the eye, steady. “Will you give me about thirty seconds? Just thirty seconds, for old time’s sake.”
Edelgard has an axe in her hand and no reason whatsoever to grant his request—but she does. That’s how Hilda knows: none of this can possibly be real. “As you wish.”
Perhaps the most impossible thing of all, though, is this: there’s no scheme Claude sets into motion for these last thirty seconds. He has no plan. All he does is sit back on his heels, and look at her.
“It’s all right,” he says. “You can look away; it’s all right.”
It’s not an order. Even if it was, Hilda wants to remind him, she’s never been good at compliance. Only it feels like she’s forgotten how to speak—all she can do, in turn, is shake her head.
“Come on, Hilda my love, you know I only ever want you to see me at my best.” He smiles at her, gently, but it doesn’t quite touch his eyes. She knows the difference; she’s just never put him on the spot by pointing it out. “It’s all right.”
When Hilda turns away it’s toward the sea, glistening beyond the pier, and something—the whisper of it, the way the sun makes a slender knife’s cut against the surface of the water—moves in her, and makes her cast her weapon down. She takes a breath, the longest breath she’ll ever take—the last one before she runs for the edge, and jumps.
“Come on, Hilda my love,” she hears Claude saying again, from the bottom of the sea. “Give me a hand up, won’t you?”
Coming back here doesn’t surprise her; not really, not anymore. But the sight of Edelgard that greets her when she turns back over her shoulder, Edelgard already walking back toward the city with the professor on one side and Hubert on the other, heads bent close together, saying things she can’t hear—that does.
The sight of Claude, still wounded and on his knees but also still whole, still suspiciously and wondrously whole—that does.
Someone with her head on straight would look at the two of them—the emperor and the deposed duke—and ask what happened. What scheme on his part, what feat of strange compassion on hers. But Hilda figures it’s too tall an order to ask her head to stay on straight, at this point. It doesn’t make sense, does it, to make such unreasonable demands of someone who’s already died thrice.
One thing at a time: she reaches for his hand. When he comes up onto his feet—and his knee buckles and makes his body tilt forward into hers, she doesn’t stagger. She puts out her arms and holds him, and tells herself, think nothing of it .
“Claude, where…” It’s not the sudden weight that makes her hesitate. It’s not the warmth either—not the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, not this proof of life. “Just where are you going to go now?”
“Somewhere far. There’s a dream of mine I can tend to there, as well.” He’s already gazing over her head toward the lone ship docked at the end of the pier, and past that to the blue line of the horizon, probably all too eager to leave the theater of this defeat behind and start again. Typical Claude, always looking forward. “Or, well, you might say it’s the same dream as the one that led me here. Perhaps I’m just taking the scenic route to see it come true.”
Hilda would like to think she knows a fair bit now, having died and been reborn, about how to tell when something is happening for the last time. It’s only reasonable to imagine this is not much different: if she lets him onto that ship, she won’t see him again. He’ll go without her, over the horizon and into his impossible dreams, and never come back.
She says, “I’ll never understand you.”
When she withdraws her arms and lets him go, that should be the end of it. The end of—whatever this is. She should be able to see Claude up the gangway of a ship with white sails, and watch it leave the harbor behind, and let that be all. She should be able to move on with her life after that, in more ways than one. She could live in a world like that, do just this one selfless thing.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Claude murmurs, with a smile that’s not a smile, and extends one unwounded hand across the space between them. By the time Hilda feels it make contact with her face—just one touch, thumb to cheekbone, tracing a path that ends too soon—it’s already receded. “Be seeing you.”
“Over the horizon,” she hears him saying, and feels his arms again on either side of her, and knows. There’s something here—Claude, or fate, or a passing god with a terrible sense of humor—that’s not letting her go.
“There’s a dream of mine I can tend to there, as well,” Claude is saying, and she almost repeats it. She could repeat it, if she wanted to; they’re that fresh in her memory, these words he hasn’t spoken yet. “Or, well, you might say it’s the same dream as the one that led me here. Perhaps I’m just taking the scenic route to see it come true.”
The scenic route again. All of it the same, word for word for word. It’s all so funny the only thing Hilda can do for a moment is stare at him unblinking, whatever answer she ought to be giving this time completely lost on her.
Claude’s back shifts a little, side to side, under her hands. That’s when she blinks, and finds her eyes are wet.
“Hey, now, are those the good old Goneril crocodile tears I see?” he teases, peering more closely at her face to belie the way his arms tighten around her. “You’re really gonna miss your dear old Claude?”
The temptation flares, briefly, to push him off the pier. And then maybe to follow him down, to see if that’s what ends all this. It’s short-lived, though; if she’s learned anything at all in here, it’s just how well exiting stage left into the ocean worked out the first time.
“I’d never waste my tears on you, Claude von Riegan, crocodile or otherwise,” says Hilda, wrinkling her nose to stave off a telltale sniff. “It’s just—it’s just the salt in the air, that’s all.”
She knows it’s a cowardly thing to do, to retreat into the easy jokes and jibes they both love, but it’s what comes. If nothing else, it makes Claude laugh—a quick open-mouthed thing. His eyes close a little when he does it, from the corners.
“It really is pretty salty, huh,” he says. “I’ve had trouble with that myself.”
He’s still laughing when his arms fall away to allow her to step back—one step away from him, then two, toward some pretense of safety. It’s a laugh that’s not a laugh.
“You’re really gonna miss your dear old Claude?” says Claude. What he might as well be saying, to Hilda, is you’re going to have to try a bit harder than that.
He’s still got his arms around her. He’s got his arms around her again, and hers are hooked down around his waist, fingers anchored in the folds of the sash he always wears.
A woollen sash of many colors. She’s never told him so, but she’s always admired the weave. You don’t get wool-work like that, this side of Fódlan’s Throat—she’s befriended enough weavers and tailors in search of trade secrets to know.
“Claude,” says Hilda. On an outgoing breath, a sigh that’s not a sigh, she decides she’ll give a little more. “Is there… anything we should talk about, before you go?”
He looks at her a long moment, then, before he answers. Hilda, by now, likes to think she knows a fair bit about Claude’s repertoire of Looks—ones for scheming and ones for secrets and ones for hope, ones that mean to level mountains. This one, the brow slightly furrowed, the mouth just a little tight at the edges, is not any of those.
She’s never seen this look before, like he’s grasping for a word and coming up short in every language. He’d never have betrayed such a thing to her, before.
“I can think of a few things I’d love to talk to you about,” Claude says, voice low, as if this too is a secret she’s twisted his arm into sharing. Like he’s afraid of who might be listening, or what they might do with what they hear. “Trouble is, you see, I don’t know that this is the time or place. You understand, don’t you?”
“I…” she says, and lets it trail. Considers telling the truth, for a moment, and saying, I saw you die three times . Considers saying that no, she doesn’t understand any of this. Considers asking, what do you want from me?
Except that’s not his question to answer, and there’s nothing around them that would tell her what she wants to know as easily as all that, either. Not the sky or the sea, not the stones of the pier under their feet. So, instead, she asks another question—decides that if it’s not good enough, then it’s not good enough.
“Have we been here before?”
Claude says, “Haven’t we?”
Claude says, “You understand, don’t you?”
These are the things Hilda understands, having died and been reborn. The first is that the cut on his cheek will likely leave a scar, but that a scar’s a small price to pay, at the end of the day, for a life to continue. The second is that she had never meant to retreat from the bridge he asked her to defend, even when he told her to—that this has been true since the beginning, but she is only just finding out how true. The third is that she remembers the day they met: in the training yard at Garreg Mach, on Entrance Day. He’d had a bronze bow in one hand, and in the other an arrow fletched with a red feather.
She tells him none of these things, because in the place where they are now, Claude is looking at her again. Again, he looks like he’s waiting for her to tell him that word he doesn’t know.
Hilda’s not sure, herself, if she knows that word. She knows only that this place where they are now is a place where she can meet him.
She says, “Take me with you, then.”
Here’s another look she’s never seen before: the eyebrows high, the eyes widening. His arms are tightening again, all on their own, and then he’s pulling her closer despite himself.
“You’re yanking my chain,” he says.
I’m not, Hilda doesn’t say. I stopped doing that two lives ago.
“You know, I don’t think I am for once. I think I’m as good as finished here, the same as you.” Telling the truth, it turns out, is easier when she doesn’t have to look at his face. Somehow this is still the case even if the alternative is letting her cheek come to rest on his chest and finding him too warm. Too alive to look at straight on, now. “And this isn’t the place, you said, right? So show me where the place is.”
Claude’s answer is two things before it exists in words. The first is a laugh—but a laugh she’s never heard before, a laugh that’s not so much a sound as a long, wondering exhale. Proof of life.
The second is a gentle weight on the top of her head—his chin settling there against her hair, and remaining, and remaining.
Then: “You are impossible, you know that?”
I’m not, Hilda doesn’t say, I just don’t want to be without you again. In the next minute or so of this life, they’re going to get on a boat, hand in impossible hand—and maybe that will say it for her like nothing else has.
These are the last things Hilda sees: the sky above Derdriu, cloudless and endless, and the ships in the harbor flying white sails.