[Closed] April Catchall

[finesseblade]

Who: Felix + Various
When: Throughout April
Where: Throughout Aefenglom, and a little Dorchacht too
What: Quests, Events, and Shenanigans!
Warnings: Maybe a little blood, a little body horror, all kinds of fun stuff

If you'd like to plot something for this month please pm me or contact me at ruddyowls

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[finesseblade]

[ Felix's eyes flash. For a second, the answer the beast on the other side of the fire would like to give hangs on the tip of his tongue like a temptation—it was you, you killed him—but then it hangs, and it hangs, and never manages to tumble from his lips.

Felix didn't often speak to his old man face-to-face, but he knew him. Stubborn. Proud. Committed to his ideals to a fault. Rodrigue never would've let anyone else take the credit for his own willful self-sacrifice.

And the last, cursed thing Felix wants is to watch Dimitri make a martyr of himself over Rodrigue's death a second time.

All of the heat goes out of him, sapped away as the first drops of rain begin to fall upon the battlefield. He averts his eyes. ]

Tch. Idiot Boar.

[ He pries stiff fingers from the front of Dimitri's shirt and lets him drop gracelessly, turning from him, taking two steps toward the ashes of a pyre that burned too rapidly to be anything other than a dream. ]

He died by his own choice, for his own cause. There's no vengeance for you here, and no one left to take it upon. Do you understand?

[boarddyd]

[The clouds loose their rain, but the droplets do nothing to dampen the bonfire. Wind claims the smoke and twists it into nothing, but even as more rain begins to fall the pyre burns.

A rage that cannot be quelled by any amount of tears.

Dimitri watches it when he's released, transfixed by the fire licking around the form within.

A body obscures his view - Felix is talking to him, answering the question he'd asked moments ago. His focus returns to the lone Fraldarius, but there's no understanding on his face.]

Someone cut him down. Someone did this. [His rage will not be tempered by the idea of noble sacrifice - there's no such thing. Felix should know that. Even if Rodrigue truly believed in such honor...

Nothing came of his death but a corpse on a pyre and two boys left orphaned.]

If you will not tell me, I will simply-- [Kill them all.

He cuts himself off. Not to preserve any shreds of humanity, but to think. To compose a list of murderers in his head to be strewn in bloody shreds one by one.]

[finesseblade]

[ Dimitri stops talking, and Felix thinks: good. I should ignore him. He should, but he can't, immediately turning his head and glancing over his shoulder to see why the hell he's shut up all of a sudden.

It's frightening, almost, how he can read the track of Dimitri's thoughts—that vacant look, the yawning distance that says his thoughts have gone somewhere else. Felix can almost see the trail of bloody bodies piling up in his eyes.

He feels, at once, sick to his stomach. ]

Do you not—

[ Do you not understand? he wants to ask, but he stops, because of course he doesn't. The Boar is off in his own head, fantasizing about a pointless revenge he's not going to get, and he has never, ever understood, because Felix doesn't even know how to speak to him anymore to explain.

Felix growls. ]

Do you think, [ he's still growling, his voice low and rough as he turns back around, ] that I don't want revenge, just as much as you do?

[ He doesn't know when his sword went from his hip to his hand, but it's there as he drops into a crouch in front of Dimitri, dropped point-down into the mud and held there with trembling fingers. ]

Do you think that I wouldn't have sated my own blade with the blood of the person who did this, if I had the chance?

[ He's in Dimitri's face now, his expression tight with anger, and the only evidence that maybe it's more parts grief than rage is the tremble in his lower lip. ]

Look at me. Listen. Not to your damn ghosts, either. She's already dead. Just—just some idiot girl with a point to prove. There's no one left to kill, and no vengeance to be had.

in this tag dimitri wildly misinterprets felix! its a party trick of his

[boarddyd]

[A 'king' and his knight - ghosts of Dimitri and Glenn - kneel mudsoaked and desperate on foreign soil. Rodrigue's bones have begun to crumble, and perhaps once he's gone there will be no true Fraldarius left. Just as the Blaiddyds died in Duscur.

Dimitri knows he's become nothing more than a monster - a secret Felix reluctantly shares in. The thought of Felix becoming the same is sickening, the way a child can't sleep the night before a trip to the midsummer fair.

Solace in miserable company, and a ruthless, swift, relentless blade to help carve his revenge.

Such a little admission seems to pacify him, and though Dimitri is still imagining bodies falling one by one at his feet, he is no longer stepping over broken lives alone.] Ah-

[He leans in to look at him, to learn the anguish in his eyes.] Not for Rodrigue... but- [No. No need to speak this newfound connection, lest he'll banish the fickle camaraderie.]

Why do you fight this war, Felix?

[finesseblade]

[ Felix blinks, uncomprehending, uncomfortable with the way Dimitri leans in close with that desperate look in his eyes. And then it hits him, and his stomach drops into his boots.

The Boar thinks—

Felix reels back from him as though repulsed by a physical force, stumbling to his feet in the slick mud, bewildered. He can't answer, he doesn't know, he's asked himself that same damn question every single moment since Gronder, but what he does know— ]

Not for you. Not for your revenge.

[ He feels sick, but not in the way Dimitri does. He's been called many things—fickle, disloyal, a waste of talent. They tell him he's fought on every side of this war imaginable. All Felix knows is it's been five damn years, and he's tired of the border raids, the starving refugees, the burned-out husks of villages five minutes too far to save that make him want to scream and throw things and storm straight into the nearest Imperial encampment with his blade drawn.

He growls. His eyes go to the fire, his open fist balling at his side. The same damn thing he'd told his old man: I didn't do it for you. ]

I fight because people are dying. Your people, your subjects, suffering under the weight of a war that has nothing to do with them. [ The words feel too pretty even as he says them, but he follows it with the naked truth: ] The only way to correct it now is by the blade.

[ He may hate the dressed-up violence of his homeland, but he knows he's not the change—just the detritus. He was committed to live and die by the sword before he could walk. He can fight. It's the only thing he knows how to do. He has to make it worth something. ]

⁠—Someone has to bloody their hands to fix this. It may as well be me.

[boarddyd]

[Dimitri's hand hovers where Felix had been, steady as if resting on an unseen shoulder. His fingers splay, to reach rather than to cling, for just a moment before the limb falls heavily to his side. Knuckles dragging in the mud, Dimitri watches Felix's sword as he speaks.

Not a man and his weapon, but a man who is a weapon.

Though, Dimitri doesn't truly believe that about Felix. His answer is too telling: people first, the blade second. Having compassion doesn't erode one's skill in battle - a radical thought in Faerghus, but one Dimitri truly believes.

Even now.

He nods, slowly, and what was frantic grows tired. His eyelids lull, and his shoulders hunch.] I never wanted this war, Felix.

No one did. [No one but her.]

She must be stopped. [At once agreement with Felix's reason for fighting, and a justification for revenge. The extent of his ability to reach out and connect.]

[finesseblade]

[ By rights, he should be angry enough to spit right now, but his white-hot frustration flares and then dies as quickly as it came, drenched in the rain and some yawning sense of loss still unexamined. For the briefest of moments, watching Dimitri slump like a sodden scarecrow on this field of the dead, something like pity stirs in his chest and tries to claw its way up his throat. ]

I know that.

[ Even Felix is flagging now, drenched, hair plastered to his forehead and shoulders falling as he deflates. The words come out more somber than they should, quiet, deadened. Of course none of them had wanted this war, and Felix is willing to take the chance on believing that this version of Dimitri, five years ago, is telling him the truth.

Idly, he wonders if the looming spectre of a man standing at the pyre behind him would say the same, but he resists the temptation to look.

For a moment, Felix lifts his face to the rain, blinking against the raindrops, and wonders if either of them will make it to the end of this.

He wonders if it even matters anymore, when they hardly have a choice but to stop her or die trying.

Felix drops his gaze back to Dimitri, watching him for a moment longer, breath fogging in the cold air as he exhales sharply through his nose. A halting step forward, and he extends a hand. ]

Get up, Dimitri. No more wallowing in the mud. There's nothing left here worth seeing.