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“After all that, don’t you think you should at least try to survive?” Dimitri heard from above him, the words light, almost musical, a strange melody to score the throb behind his eyes, the weariness that kept him from opening them.
A murky sort of consciousness was returning to Dimitri, and the groan he stifled lodged itself in his throat, settling there, too tired to swallow or voice it.
Awareness spread from that singular sensation like a fog, and Dimitri cataloged the feelings distantly, faraway observations, as if they had nothing to do with him at all. Only the unspoken stone in his throat felt real—felt tangible to himself—an uneasy lump he could neither extract nor accept, an uncomfortable reality he had to teach himself to breathe around.
His body was sore. There was a cut on his back, something untended, and he could feel the tacky pain of dried blood as he shifted, his stiff limbs regaining sensation. His head pounded, but that was nothing new, nothing worth registering. He thought he might be hungry, but he wasn’t sure.
None of that felt strange, remarkable, and Dimitri almost drifted off again, too tired to care what had woke him, unsure what he had heard. Perhaps another soldier—another group of them on his trail. Someone poised to kill him while he dreamed, Dimitri considered. But the thought did little to shake the haze of exhaustion from his mind. So be it, he thought. And then, so what. It hardly mattered. He didn’t care.
“Come on, Your Princeliness,” the voice continued, and he felt a light tapping on his forehead, something quick and impatient. Two taps and then one, and then the staccato pattern again. “It’s time to stop sulking about. Don’t you think you owe us at least that?”
And Dimitri knew that voice, pretended he didn’t. Wrapped himself tighter in his cloak, shifting uncomfortably against the ground.
But the ground beneath him felt chilled and soft like earth, rather than the cobblestone streets of Fhirdiad he had developed an increasing familiarity with. Dimitri inched his finger out from where they were wrapped inside his cloak, and he felt icy, wet dirt beneath him. He shivered. He was cold, Dimitri suddenly realized, but that was nothing new either.
He considered going back to sleep again. It would be easier than opening his eye, simpler than facing the truth. But he knew better than to think Claude would let him.
Dimitri cracked open his eye, comprehending only a watery image of Claude’s outline before it solidified into something more recognizable once the details filled out the portrait.
His dark curls, his ever-present braid. Deep, green eyes and a glinting, gold earring.
A tacky track of blood down his forehead, a matching trail leaking from his mouth. His torn officer’s academy cape. The dirt and flecks of red that marred his sleeve. Exactly how Dimitri had last seen him, but Dimitri knew Claude must have looked worse, eventually.
“Even you, then?” Dimitri questioned, gaze caught in the play of gold and red. Of green and shadows. “I suppose I should have known.”
“Even me, then?” And Claude hardly sounded pleased, but as he stared down at Dimitri, he smiled, all teeth, and his teeth were red. It was still beautiful, Dimitri thought, or still striking—it still drew Dimitri’s eye, as Claude’s smile always did. Like looking at a crimson sunset, the light slung low enough in the sky to be safe to stare. Claude continued, “That’s not exactly fair, is it? If I’m just trying to help you save your own skin?” Claude paused thoughtfully, significantly. “Can’t really do anything if you’re dead, yeah? We’re both well aware of that.”
“Why… now?” Dimitri sat up slowly, attempting to study Claude more closely. He found it hard to discern the details of Claude’s expression, the exact shade of the raised eyebrow Claude cast his way. It mattered, Dimitri knew, the subtext of Claude’s carefully arranged countenance, its subtle variations. But Dimitri was out of practice reading the nuances, and Claude stepped forward, casting himself in shadow as he stood backlit by the sun. “After such—Why not before?”
“Why?” Claude shrugged, and when he smirked, it said there was a joke being shared, if Dimitri was smart enough to get it. “You’re so sure there’s a why? Or that you’d really be able to parse it out? Let’s try and be realistic here, Highness, for both our sakes.”
Dimitri winced, nodding. He cast a hazy look out to the forest beyond, so he could turn away from Claude’s mute, unimpressed eyes. They were a flat green, almost dull, like Claude was staring at nothing at all. Or simply nothing worth seeing, nothing that could catch their usual, intuitive light.
“This is… just below Fhirdiad.” He recognized it immediately, though he couldn’t remember the steps that led him into the dense pines and away from the protective canopy of the city walls. And when had he laid down? But he couldn’t remember that either.
Claude snorted. “Astute. Any other keen insights you’d like to share with the class?”
“I…” Dimitri trailed off, a blurry recollection of movement and pain washing over him, but the details were elusive, ephemeral. Only the image of outer Fhirdiad—its high, stone walls—lingered clearly in his mind. His eyes stung, and his chest felt tight. “I should not have left. I…”
I will never see Fhirdiad again. He was certain of it, that he couldn’t return. Not after such a narrow escape, not with his hands empty, his crown shorn, nothing to show the city he abandoned. And it sat heavy, painfully in his chest—under his lungs, a new notch in his breathing—a hidden bleed, one too deep to truncate.
“You were always going to get caught. You weren’t hiding well enough,” Claude pointed out, sounding detached. Reasonable. “And you’ve been healed enough for travel for weeks,” a note of disapproval entering into his voice, and Dimitri looked his way to see Claude already frowning at him, “so why have you been lingering?”
“Fhirdiad is my home,” Dimitri whispered. “It is my—mine to protect.”
“Well, it’s not really your anything anymore, is it?” Claude argued, waving a hand through the air, Dimitri’s words of a flimsy enough constitution to brush away with little more than the sweep of his fingertips. “So might as well let such rosy notions go. You’ve gotta look forward. Keep your eye on the prize, and you’ve already bungled that one beyond repair, I’d say. It’s time to move on.”
“I suppose,” Dimitri conceded because Claude didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, only giving voice to truths Dimitri didn’t wish to hear.
Claude nodded, saying nothing. Then, he reached back, plucking an arrow from his own shoulder, taken from some hidden wound on his back. He examined the blood on it dispassionately, nearly bored. He began using the thin edge of the arrowhead to pick at his nails, edging under them, cleaning them of dirt and blood. Dimitri watched, abstractly transfixed, as small flecks of brownish-red fell to the ground, adorning the snow in a constellation of minute, subtle gore.
Dimitri couldn’t say if it was more dirt or blood, but it felt significant, as though the information were somehow vital. As though he could read meaning into the configuration Claude created, if only he knew the composition of visera that constituted it. He considered asking Claude, but then had the absurd notion that it would be rude—prying. Eyes still trained to the delicate motions of Claude’s hands, Dimitri remained silent.
Eventually, Claude looked up, a vaguely displeased look on his face. “Well?”
“…Well?” Dimitri parroted, feeling slow—stupid. The pounding in his head was getting worse, but that was hardly an excuse.
“Well, you’ve already cracked your crown on your fall from grace. Though, how far it really could have been…” Claude shrugged, accenting the gesture with a suggestive grin, because he and Dimitri both knew the unspoken answer. “Let’s try and pretend you didn’t crack anything else on the way down, yeah? Put that head to use, and find a next step, even if an actual plan is probably beyond you. At the least, we can’t stay here.”
He dropped his arrow as he finished speaking, letting it litter the forest floor. It pointed just north of east, toward Fraldarius. Dimitri stared at it, trying to decide whether or not to read into the gesture, why it would matter even if he did. He had no intention of heading east.
“South, then,” Dimitri decided, hauling himself to his feet, vision spinning as he did so. He cut his gaze from Claude so he could avoid the knowledge of Claude’s careful observation, his keen insight. How easily Claude would catch the gap between Dimitri’s fortitude and his obligation, how it seemed to ever widen, waiting for Dimitri to fall in. And to avoid the certainty that this would dull Claude’s eyes like the rest of Dimitri did.
It didn’t surprise Dimitri, not exactly, that dead pupils didn’t glow; that Claude’s gaze barred light like a flat stone. But it grieved him regardless, the ugly emptiness that settled in place of Claude’s former spark.
“South,” Claude confirmed, but it sounded like a joke. Or a farce. But when Dimitri looked back, Claude was already walking away, a strange, sad whistling that seemed not to come from Claude so much as follow him trailing in his wake, and only his arrow left on the ground.
Dimitri sagged, strangely, and considering the arrow carefully, he thought of picking it up, carrying it with him on his quest toward absolution. But Dimitri was no longer interested in the veneer of sentimentality, or pretending he could hold onto things that were once dear. The arrow was little more than a figment of a past Dimitri couldn’t change, and Claude’s trailing figure through the woods was a more potent reminder of that failure than any one talisman could replicate.
He left the arrow on the ground. Against a nearby tree was propped a bloodstained lance Dimitri didn’t recognize, but the grip of it felt natural in his hand when he grabbed it. He made south.
***
Dimitri ran his lance through the throat of a dead dukedom soldier, watching the motion of the blade, and then the fresh blood that coated it, absently, almost abstractly. Trying to stitch the thrust of his arm to the severed head in the snow with a thin thread of emotion, anything to connect him to the scene before him, anything other than a hollow sort of indifference, as though a ghost to his own actions. A flat shadow to his own movements.
And the soldier stared up at Dimitri with dead, glassy eyes, and he felt absent to that as well. Their beedy judgment, their reflective horror—the steady, inert certainty worn only by the dead, a more absolute confirmation of death than an ugly wound, than a growing pool of blood. And Dimitri wore a gash that spanned his lower back that served as a reminder of the danger of such assumptions without true certainty.
When he turned around to ensure the same for the second soldier, Claude was stood over the body, toeing curiously at his split skull with his boot.
“Pretty grisly, Highness,” Claude commented, training a curious eye at his stained shoe. “You don’t think this is a bit too conspicuous as far as identifying evidence goes?” Claude asked, looking from the body to Dimitri. He wiped his toe in the snow as he spoke, creating a short trail of red leading toward Dimitri. “Not many other men who can kill like beasts.”
“The only ones who would think to make the connection already know I am alive,” Dimitri argued, though he knew that was only half the point. He hardly cared. He added, voice suddenly dark, “And they hound at my trail regardless of my actions. They are more than welcome to endure the consequences of finding what they seek.”
Claude shrugged, and Dimitri didn’t look at him as he ran his lance through the other soldier, a spot just below his shoulder protesting the jerky, brute motion. He briefly studied the scene, but it made him feel just as little as the first.
He set his lance down, inspecting the blood that trailed down the front of his tunic instead. Too much to ignore, not enough to justify a real deterrent. He could keep moving today, then.
Claude wandered over, poking his torso, tracing a playful finger along the thin line of the gash. He studied the blood for a moment, before wiping it against his own uniform. It blended in with the black of the fabric, except for a single spot where Claude caught the uniform’s gold detailing, staining it a reddish-brown. Dimitri thought about rubbing a thumb into the spot, trying to remove the mark.
But it hardly mattered: a matching line of red ran down his yellow undershirt, while dirt clung to his uniform’s gold cuff. It was the least of Claude’s dishevelment, but it held Dimitri’s attention, catching the light less like a stain than a brand. Somehow a mark more permanent than his own dried blood.
“Remember the mock battle, way back at the start of the year?” Claude asked, apropos nothing. “When I cornered you outside the training ground to talk about Teach?” Claude paused, long enough to cut his gaze from Dimitri’s injury to his face, pinning Dimitri with the careful shadows of his eyes. They appeared to swallow the light around them, giving them a gravity that was difficult to read. “I was pretty impressed by you, too. Maybe you noticed that? Even though I didn’t say it.” He tapped the cut again. “For the best, I think. Obviously I was wrong.”
“What do you want?” Dimitri demanded, the comment stinging more than the touch. More than it had any reason to, if only because Claude was right. Because Claude didn’t voice conclusions he thought were untrue, and two soldiers were hardly enough to justify anything other than a minor obstacle, an easy victory. “Why are you here? You have hardly…” Dimitri trailed off, considering his father’s anger, Glenn’s prodding demands. His stepmother’s sorrowful eyes, her silent pleading. The chorus of anger and agony that surrounded even them. “You don’t… you haven’t—“
“What, I’ve got to beat you over the head with it? Start ranting about revenge and the emperor’s head, then?” Claude frowned, leveling Dimitri with an unimpressed look. “Not really my style, I don’t think.”
“So you would see her dead as well?”
“Why not?” Claude shrugged. He spoke like he was bored. “It’s the only way to make things right. And you owe me at least that, I would think.”
Dimitri nodded. This, at least, he understood. And if Claude was asking as well, then Dimitri had no right to deny him—would not even think to. Claude asked for nothing more than what was just, and Dimitri felt eager to give it to him, to offer it up as the only penance worth presenting.
“I know,” he agreed belatedly. He sat down, suddenly exhausted. His shoulder was beginning to throb more insistently, and his vision swam strangely, though he was sure he had eaten as recently as yesterday. “I will.”
“And yet…” Claude trailed off, waiting for Dimitri to look up and at him. “Edelgard isn’t in Blaiddyd, Dimitri. I’m sure you at least know that. Although,” he paused, making a thoughtful noise, “your absent wanderings around your territory—well, former territory, is actually the most accurate, I guess—doesn’t really make that clear.”
“I do not see you offering up anything of use, Claude,” Dimitri bit back, a nerve struck, sending Claude a glare before turning back to the cut on his chest, where it rested just below his shoulder. He grimaced; the location would hardly do him any favors in the fights to come. And it would at least need a bandage, and he had none. He grabbed part of his cloak, tearing it off with too much force.
“I’m here for a bit of perspective,” Claude replied easily. He maneuvered so he was standing in front of Dimitri directly, before crouching down to put them at eye level, tilting his head and tapping his own face, on the right side near his eye. “Something you’ve got in short supply these days, I’d argue.”
Dimitri huffed, gritting his teeth as he began to wrap his makeshift bandage awkwardly around his torso.
“How generous of you.”
“As it turns out, there’s not much else to do when you’re dead,” Claude replied as he stood. “Is that your fault, do you think? Or Edelgard’s?” Claude hummed again, and the tune sounded strange, as though the noise was further away than possible. Or like an echo, the original already long lost. He stared down at Dimitri, the blood trailing down from the corner of his mouth catching brilliantly in the morning sun. “I’ll be extra generous, even. I’ll let you be the one to decide.”
***
Claude followed Dimitri through southern Blaiddyd, crossing into Charon, pointedly commenting on Dimitri’s indefinite movements there as well. Not always present, not even often, his interest in Dimitri waxing and waning in an obscure pattern that Dimitri couldn’t identify, and that Claude appeared to have no interest in elaborating. But Dimitri was foolish enough to anticipate his company, miss it when it was gone, although Claude was often hardly pleased with him when he did appear, had little to say other than to press Dimitri in a certain direction, cajole him into a more deliberate course of action.
But he didn’t scream, and he didn’t accuse, even if Dimitri knew he deserved just as much from him as well. And his eyes, when they caught shadows the way they used to light, were playful rather than sad, though he often wore the teasing differently than he did before. A little more pointed, a little less light—and certainly always at Dimitri’s expense, as there was no one else to offer it to. No one else who needed the guiding sting of a barb meant to shock Dimitri into action, prod him toward a certain direction when his will began to atrophy.
He walked with Dimitri now, arms laced behind his head, shooting Dimitri disapproving looks whenever his steps began to lag.
“I’m getting rather bored, Your Princeliness,” Claude drew the nickname out, grinning at Dimitri as he said it.
“Entertain yourself, then,” Dimitri shot back, oddly aggrieved, vaguely challenging. It seemed to be what Claude always wanted from him these days. An argument, or a provocation, something that set the scene for Claude to lure Dimitri into a new type of trap. And only, oddly enough, so he could roll his eyes and offer to help Dimitri out of it. Helping Dimitri back to his feet, requiring little more than for Dimitri to accept the responsibility of tripping on the wire.
“Entertain myself? Just myself? I wouldn’t want to be so selfish,” Claude said amiably. “Actually, there’s something that’s been on my mind. Maybe we can play a little role reversal, and you can offer me up some of your insight for a change of pace.”
“Claude…” Dimitri trailed off uncertainly, not fond of the steel glint in Claude’s eyes. Danger, it warned, but the blade was already swung, and Dimitri was too slow, too clumsy, to get out of the way.
“Kind of weird that I had that sword, huh?” Claude began, an apparent non-sequitur. “I had my bow, too, of course. But it’s strange that I started with the sword. You remember that, don’t you? All those archers lined on the upper ledges of Garreg Mach’s walls? And there I was on the frontlines, with a sword.” He laughed, bright and sharp. “What the hell was I thinking?”
Claude fiddled with his arrow as he spoke, and Dimitri watched how Claude spun the arrowhead, absent yet dexterous. Dimitri wondered when he had retrieved it, had come to think of it as a permanent fixture of Blaiddyd, something that had stayed even if he couldn’t. But it spun in Claude’s hand now, pointing nowhere. Meaning nothing. Light playing off the dried blood as it spun, the effect strange and shining.
“I remember,” Dimitri eventually replied, the memory itching under his skin. He didn’t want to think about it, though he could hardly understand why. And he didn’t want Claude to catch the hesitance in Dimitri’s expression—in his bearing—because he’d follow it, find what Dimitri didn’t want to look for. Pull it out of him with careful fingers, hold it up to the light for them to study together.
“And I wasn’t with the Deer—that’s pretty weird, too,” Claude continued. “Of course, it’s not like you were with the Lions. What were you doing again?”
Dimitri gritted his teeth; it was easier to be angry than anything else. Otherwise, he’d—“Is there a point here, Claude?”
But Claude didn’t answer Dimitri’s question, rather continuing along his own line of musing. “They said I was alone, was it?” Claude asked, something confused and inquisitive settling over his features. “Well, not alone alone, obviously. Someone had to run me through, yeah? After someone else got this arrow in me, I guess,” he held it up to Dimitri, waving it fondly, as if showing off a prize. “But it’s hard to recall the details,” Claude confessed, and it sounded honest. “It’s hard to remember why I would be alone.”
“Please stop,” Dimitri got out in a small voice, even the anger drained away from him. He felt too close to it—whatever it was—balancing on the edge of it. And Claude could see it, would know exactly which words would guide Dimitri over his preferred side of the ledge.
“Stop what, Dimitri?” Claude shot him a blank, bemused look.
“Just stop, Claude,” Dimitri repeated, unsure what he was asking for, certain Claude wouldn’t give it to him regardless.
But instead, for once Claude listened, and when Dimitri looked back at him, he was studying the sky above them. It was a look Dimitri recognized—Claude figuring out a problem, considering the lines of it from a different angle. “Getting rather late,” he observed. “Best we make camp, don’t you think?”
Dimitri nodded in relief. “I’ll start looking for some firewood.”
It was the kind of banal, bland aspect of Dimitri’s survival that Claude found boring, not worth his time, and he typically used moments like this as his opportunity to make his exit. Instead, he followed Dimitri around, pointing out little details of the trees, the birds. The soft powdery snow of Charon compared to Blaiddyd’s soft blankets. Charming, empty talk that was pleasant, that settled in the air with no false notes, no strange melody to score the scene as more than it was.
“I like these woods more than Blaiddyd,” Claude announced at one point, running a hand absently against a tree as he passed it. “They have a better sort of charm. Less doom and gloom, I think.”
“I haven’t been in these woods since I was a boy,” Dimitri spoke the thought aloud as it came to him. He couldn’t agree with Claude; he missed Fhirdiad to the point of aching, felt its presence like a beacon he constantly had to resist against. But he liked the thread of the conversation, enjoyed the way it moved through his memories, not catching on anything sharp. “It feels strange, how little they’ve changed.”
And when Dimitri looked at Claude—to gauge his reaction, perhaps, or in anticipation of a teasing remark—he was already staring at Dimitri, and just briefly, he smiled. A bare trace of his lips, a lovely crinkle at the corner of his eyes. It emphasized the dark, tacky stain of blood that smeared across Claude’s forehead, but it wasn’t enough to ruin the sight, its alluring, nostalgic glow.
It felt like peering into the past, into something long lost—and soon enough, it was gone again, tugged away with the winter wind and back toward where it belonged. In the fields outside Garreg Mach, Dimitri thought, where he first saw Claude smile like that. Or hidden in the early hours in Dimitri’s room, where he had gotten used to seeing it most.
But here it had been, in Charon, at least for a moment. As if they were just like the eternal forest around them, as if they had managed to remain the same as well.
But the notion was sadder than it was true, and less possible than even that. Dimitri and Claude had both died in their own ways, and that left little more than two kinds of corpses, or twin skeletons, sharing a stolen moment in the setting sun.
And when the moment ended, it did so quickly, leaving little more than a foggy sort of late winter chill lingering in the air. And those two corpses, who stared at each other for a moment longer still.
And strangely enough, Dimitri thought, Claude conceded in a way that was no longer like him, and he was the first to look away.
That night, around the fire, Claude made a strange show of warming his hands, of commenting on the fire’s pleasant heat. He asked Dimitri about the food he cooked, the meager rations he scrounged up from the surrounding area. He hovered strangely, oddly attentive, as Dimitri changed the bandage below his shoulder, frowning at the shiny red scab.
Running a gentle finger along the line of the cut, Claude asked softly, “What are you going to do?”
“Clean it,” Dimitri answered, and then shrugged, looking from Claude to the wound. It was easier, for some reason. “There is nothing else to do.”
“I guess,” Claude replied, before brushing Dimitri’s bangs from his forehead, out of his face. His hair was getting long, he realized, some strange sign of life Dimitri didn’t know how to accept. “Best keep all this out of the good eye, yeah?” Claude suggested, but it wasn’t unkind.
Dimitri nodded, oddly struck, unable to form a reply. Claude wasn’t gentle like this; not—anymore, although the hazy edges of a past closeness often felt so far away, Dimitri wondered if he remembered it correctly at all. If he had read something into Claude’s touch that wasn’t there, if he had mistaken their temporary closeness for genuine intimacy, or worse, something like true affection.
And now, he only offered what Dimitri needed, hauling him forward with his words towards the emperor’s head when Dimitri was too lacking to get himself there on his own. And tenderness had no place in Claude’s guidance. Because Claude knew the contours of Dimitri’s weakness just as Dimitri did—that Dimitri would let gentleness hold him in place, that he’d lean into it at the expense of pushing forward.
And yet his touch on Dimitri's wound was nothing but soft, his thumb along the line of the healing flesh held nothing but concern.
“What if I wanted something else?” Claude asked suddenly, seriously, looking up and gripping Dimitri’s shoulder with the words. His green eyes matched the forest all around him. And there was nothing mocking, nothing sharper than the moment, teasing about their edges. “What if I don’t care about Edelgard, or revenge? What if we just… left it all behind? There’s a whole world out there outside Faerghus.” He paused, biting his lower lip. “Even Fodlan.”
“You’re dead,” Dimitri reminded him dully. Because he couldn’t say anything else.
Claude’s suggestion lodged itself in Dimitri’s chest, settling against his lungs, making it difficult to breathe. It hurt just to hear the words. He wanted Claude to stop talking.
“And? You’re somehow pretty good company, regardless.” Then he added, “And I don’t think you find me all that bad, yourself.”
Dimitri frowned, staring down at the fire. “That is not…” possible , Dimitri first thought to say. Because he couldn’t lie; he couldn’t form the words to suggest the notion was unappealing, that there wasn’t something warm around its edges—something to contrast against the icy air. And the truth of that burned in Dimitri’s throat, made his next words tight, coated in shame. “No. I cannot— would not do that.”
“No?” Claude’s eyes widened, a false surprise, and there it was, lurking just beneath the surface, but somehow Dimitri had missed it. The jagged mirth. The happy trap. “You seriously looked like you were considering it there for a second, Highness. Maybe you’re not so dedicated as you think? Not so loyal as you pretend?” Claude tapped his chin, as though in thought, and Dimitri watched as the gesture pressed uneven fingerprints into the track of blood.
“That’s not—“
“Who are you acting for out here, I wonder?” Claude continued, cutting Dimitri off as though he hadn’t spoken at all. “It’s just us, Dimitri. Just your dead. The ones you collect without a care. And you’re hardly fooling yourself, let alone those who can actually get a good look at you.”
Dimitri swallowed, any sort of reply getting stuck in his throat. With the guilt. Or the shame.
Claude waited Dimitri out, and then eventually sighed, standing, when he realized Dimitri had nothing to say. He stared down at Dimitri, frowning, before he cast his eyes out, towards the forest.
“We really should get a move on tomorrow, I’d think,” he suggested casually, as though following the natural vein of the conversation, “I don’t even know why we’re still in Charon.” He cut a look back to Dimitri’s injury. “You should finish cleaning that up.”
And then he walked away.
Claude didn’t return the next few days, and Dimitri felt a guilty sort of relief at his absence. He didn’t know how to face the honest disappointment that lined Claude’s accusations, the mirror Claude held up so expertly to show Dimitri the fault lines in his own loyalty, the spiderweb cracks in his dedication. And so he continued on alone, and he told himself it was a quiet that wasn’t lonely.
He woke up in the early morning to the telling crack of wood on the forest floor—someone trying to move in silence and failing—and Dimitri lunged before sleep had fully left him, wrapping his hands around the neck of some soldier and squeezing until he felt the warm evidence of his efforts coating his hands. He stared down at the body afterwards, straddled across its waist, and he sighed out all the tension of the last few days into something like steadiness. Maybe even relief.
He could do this for them, at least. He could be a weapon even if he couldn’t be a prince. And although Dimitri had been raised upon the assumption that they were one and the same, he had survived the unstitching of the crown from his head, and it made the swing of his lance no less deadly, the grip of his hands no less capable of wringing a justice through violence that he couldn’t bring in power.
But the quiet satisfaction faded quickly, and the body beneath him soon disgusted him. The blood on his hands reeked, and somewhere behind him Glenn was laughing, laughing without saying anything, and Dimitri shut his eye, letting the sound envelop him. Eventually, he rolled off the body, opening his eye to stare at the sky above him. It was still hours before dawn.
He was exhausted suddenly, dizzy, and the faint light of the stars streaked across the sky unnaturally, lines forming against the dark blue-black that Dimitri tried to follow—that led him toward nothing. Dimitri felt wrung—slung from one extreme to the other—and he had nothing to wipe his hands on, no way to rid himself of the stench of his actions. Good, he thought, but the notion felt queasy, and he swallowed down bile as it rose in his throat.
Eventually, he got up, searching the body absently for food, even money, leaving it in disgust when he only found a dagger. How pointless, he thought, the whole endeavor. The soldier’s death, Dimitri’s wasted effort. And the wound below his shoulder had begun to throb.
He wandered off soon after, but the movements hardly felt his own, like a shadow without a locus, drifting between the snow and the sky.
And as the days passed, he grew more tired, slower, with the ugly, infected line of his injury sitting below his shoulder like a reminder, an uncomfortable twinge every time he breathed too deeply, or raised his arm without thought. He checked the bandaging again, and white had begun to streak the wound. The pain had deepened, an aching burn that he couldn’t escape.
At night, Dimitri dreamed of fires burning him up from the inside, melting out of his wound, his blood corroded and molten, rusted over inside his veins. And he woke up sweating, soaked in a feverish heat, in the middle of Lone moon, surrounded by clean layers of snow all across the ground. He closed his eye; the white hurt to look at. He drifted, mind a strange slate of unpleasant nothing, but he couldn’t say if he truly fell asleep.
Something tapped against Dimitri’s cheek.
“We’re doing this again, then?” Claude asked. ”You can’t even haul yourself to your feet of your volition?”
Dimitri batted the hand away, turning onto his side. He didn’t make a noise; it was still stuck in his throat, just as before.
“You’re not looking too hot, Highness.” Dimitri slit his eye open, and Claude was crouched in front of him, frowning. “Or, you are, and that’s its own sort of problem.”
Dimitri mumbled out something incoherent, too tired to try and understand Claude’s angle, to look for the wire as Claude set it.
“That bad, huh?” Claude asked. He trailed his hand down Dimitri’s cheek, letting it fall until it caught itself on Dimitri’s shoulder, and then down a little more, resting his palm against Dimitri’s bandaged torso. “You really let it get infected, then?” he continued, pressing lightly against the wound. Dimitri inhaled a sharp breath, his eye widening in surprise, and then pain. Claude crystalized in front of him, and Dimitri felt more present, more attentive. Claude tilted his head, smiling. “Ah, there you are.”
Dimitri grimaced up at Claude. “Here I am.”
“And with your sense of humor still intact, too,” Claude said with approval. Dimitri tried not to let the insubstantial praise buoy him, but he was weak, and Claude’s words were the only thing that didn’t hurt. “Still, we really should see about that fever.” Claude paused, as though in thought. He gave Dimitri a curious look, like studying a skittish animal. “You know how my mom used to check?”
And Dimitri did know. Because Claude had told him, a lifetime ago, whispered between them in the early hours of the morning. A story told for no reason other than to share something, trading memories like secrets as sleep eluded them both.
Claude’s lips had pressed delicately to Dimitri’s forehead, his palms on Dimitri’s cheekbones keeping him in place, holding for a beat before pulling back.
“All good, Your Princeliness,” he had whispered, something shining and mirthful dancing in his eyes. “No fever in you.”
But Dimitri had felt like he was burning up inside then, set alight just by looking at Claude, sharing the same space with him.
But because he couldn’t say that, knew it would embarrass them both just to try, he just shook his head in wry amusement. “Good to know,” he had replied in a dry tone. “Though I cannot recall a particular concern.”
“Well, now you’ve had a demonstration,” Claude whispered in reply, tilting Dimitri’s head up with his hands so Claude could kiss him lightly on the mouth. “Now you’ll know just in case it ever comes up.”
Dimitri felt an echo of that gesture from before, Claude’s lips pressed into the warm skin of Dimitri’s forehead, lingering briefly.
He whispered his conclusion against Dimitri’s forehead. “Really, how should I know?” Claude asked. “It’s not like I can feel anything anymore. But you’re certainly looking worse for wear.”
Dimitri eyed Claude, too tired to respond.
Claude hummed in consideration, before sighing. “Remember all those nightmares you used to have?” Claude moved as he spoke, crawling in next to Dimitri, laying beside him in the dirt. “You were really good at hiding them at first.”
“What—“
“Not good enough, of course, since I eventually found out.” Claude began to maneuver Dimitri, and Dimitri was too weak—or too ill, or too tired—to put up a real fight. He wondered if he would, regardless. Because he was lonely, too, a reality Claude always reminded him of without having to say a thing. “And then I always held you the same way afterwards, like I could somehow hold you together if I tried hard enough. Though I guess we both know better now.”
And it was another reiteration of something lost to long before, Dimitri wrapped in Claude’s arms, bracketed by his touch. It felt oddly cold, like a morning fog, though perhaps it was simply the contrast from the fever.
“And sometimes you held me, too, I guess,” Claude continued, settling Dimitri’s head against his chest, under his chin. “But I would never tell you what woke me.”
Dimitri nodded because he remembered this too.
“You pretended they were not nightmares. That they did not bother you.” Dimitri frowned, looking out into the snowfall. He couldn’t remember when it had begun. “You did that often,” Dimitri murmured, tone muted as if voicing a secret rather than an observation. As if there was anyone to overhear regardless. The body slowly rotting nearby, Dimitri supposed, gently cooling in the snow. “Pretended to feel less than you really did.”
“And I had to become one of your ghosts to learn anything about those shadows that followed you everywhere, whispering in your ear, filling your head with smoke.” Claude huffed out something like a laugh, but it lacked mirth. It even lacked an edge. It sounded like sorrow said a little sideways, the only way Claude knew how to show it. “Two perfect strangers in love. How quaint.” He pulled back, tilting Dimitri’s chin up so he could watch as Claude rolled his eyes. “How completely ridiculous.”
Dimitri couldn’t respond at first, didn’t know how to speak past the tightness in his throat. The pounding in his head. Claude frowned, and then scoffed an ugly noise of disbelief.
Still, he guided Dimitri back down, resting his head against his torso again. He felt the impressions of Claude’s hands on his face, holding him in place at his chin, across his forehead, pressing him close. Something close to tender, if the touch didn’t warn a hidden edge. If Claude wasn’t one long hidden edge, now, waiting to strike, to cut.
“I don’t want to remember you like this, Claude,” Dimitri whispered, a confession he had no right to make. But the fever pitched him more honest, more open, than he knew better than to be.
“Like this?” Claude asked airily, murmuring into the crown of Dimitri’s head, the sound still musical despite its low tones. “Like I am?”
“No.” Dimitri shook his head, a small movement. “That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” Claude mused. “Haven’t you already decided it is?”
“No,” Dimitri repeated, still shaking his head. “I didn’t.”
“You did. Of course you did,” Claude said it like a song. The hand on Dimitri’s forehead inched downward, and he smoothed his thumb across the hollow under Dimitri’s eye, before gliding it back up again, resting it on the fabric that covered the recently healed scar. No pressure, but a suggestion nonetheless. A reminder. “You’re different than I remember too, though, aren’t you?” Claude asked. “I liked that pretty little prince. That one you pretended to be. Even with me. But you can hardly make the claim to any of that, anymore.”
“I know,” Dimitri whispered. “I am just… an outcast. A shadow.” His own hand inched up to rest next to Claude’s, the suggestion of something intimate in the brush of their thumbs. And then the word came to him, unbidden, but it already fit. He already knew it was true. “A beast.”
Claude hummed. “I didn’t say it.”
But he didn’t have to. Because Claude only interested himself in the insights Dimitri could not glean himself, and he had no need to tell Dimitri the things he already knew. The conclusions even Dimitri had it in himself to draw from the evidence before him.
Claude’s thumb covered his own, and they rested there, in the hollow of the ground, in the tense space of the moment.
“You could leave,” Dimitri whispered, though he wasn’t sure what made him say it. “You could find somewhere else—better.”
“I’m dead, Dimitri,” Claude reminded him flatly, an echo of Dimitri’s words from before. He added, “I can’t do anything, really.”
Claude’s hands no longer felt gentle, or secure, if they ever were at all. But Dimitri raised his arm, settling his free palm over Claude’s hand on his chin regardless, speaking into their shared contact.
“You could go back to the Alliance. Or… home,” he said almost dreamily. “ Wherever that is.”
“I can’t.”
“You could,” Dimitri argued, but the words already felt muted. Hollow. “You are not bound the way I am. You could.” Dimitri felt certain. “You could find your way home.”
“So that’s it, then?” Claude asked. “You want me to leave? You’ll toss me aside just like that?” Claude’s hands tightened. “I guess I’m not like those other dead you carry around.”
“That’s not what I said,” Dimitri protested. Not what I meant, not even what I want , he thought to add because this biting, sharp Claude was still a less lonely reality than the alternative. The notion that even the dead could find a way to free themselves from Dimitri; that of course they would want to.
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“You would not follow me on this path, Claude,” Dimitri finally replied, hardly even a whisper. Because it was truer than he knew what to do with it. An honesty that revealed too much for Dimitri to parse. “You wouldn’t want to, and—I do not wish to make you.”
“I’m just one of your dead, Dimitri,” Claude repeated, sounding tired. Almost worn. “I don’t get to want things anymore.” He trailed his hand up, pushing his fingers through Dimitri’s bangs. “And you’re our will, Dimitri, the only one we get anymore. So you don’t really get to want things, either, right? You wouldn’t be so selfish, I don’t think.”
“Not for myself,” Dimitri agreed, and it was easy to say, even easier to believe. A forgone conclusion, a burden Dimitri long ago agreed to bear.
“And not for me either,” Claude finished the thought, but that one was harder. More than Dimitri knew how to accept. That he had slung himself around Claude’s neck, even in death. A weight to drag him down, force him to follow Dimitri down the line of fresh corpses to the emperor’s, and then Dimitri’s own, perhaps the only thing that could release Claude from his role as a shadow.
Claude smoothed a hand through Dimitri’s bangs again, and he whispered, the words almost tender, a razored lullaby, “I think tomorrow we’ll be able to make it to Gaspard, even with this little fever of yours. We’ll see more imperials, no doubt. But I know you can handle them.” He pressed his lips to the crown of Dimitri’s head, briefly, like a benediction. “Right, Dimitri? Certainly you’ve got at least that in you? You can do at least that much?”
And Dimitri nodded, his eye sliding shut, caught by the gentle lull created through Claude’s touch, his softly suggested demands.
“I do,” he vowed. “I will.” And then again, just on the edge of sleep. “I promise.”