‘ you can hate me forever if that’s what you really want ’
poetry starters / accepting.
the two of you grew up similar, with oh so many expectations placed on your tiny backs. boyhood grows strange and twisted when you have adult futures on your backs. it looks like swords in hands before the age of ten. it tastes like staff testing your food before it comes to you for poison. it smells like firewood burning in the winter. ( only it’s not firewood, and it’s not harmless, but you never ask those questions, do you? ) only you were the little runt, with shorter legs than glenn or sylvain or dimitri or even ingrid, always running behind and crying for everyone to wait, don’t leave me behind! you could always hear the huffs of annoyance when your father asked them to take you along. you might have been a similar age to ingrid and dimitri, but the weight of youngest childhood, both in the group, and in your family unit, turned you into a little brat.
dimitri had shone to you, then: a light second only to glenn in its brightness. you’d argued, sure ! but he’d been so strong, so cool, so capable. the same age as you, but wise! and he loved swords, too, and the two of you would sit for hours in the armoury talking about everything and nothing, as kids do. as children do. but children grow up.
you had admired dimitri so much that sreng had felt like a slap in the face and a sword in the gut. funny how you knew exactly what both of those things felt like at the tender age of fifteen. ( your father backhanding you in an argument, when you’d yelled at him that you knew he wished you had died instead of glenn, and the steely glint of his eye as he told you, we shall not discuss this any longer, felix. ) ( the flash of a blade a few weeks into your forced squireship that you knew was just because your father was tired of seeing you round the house like a ghost. a healer had run to you, but it would scar. it would be the first of many. )
you had always associated dimitri with knighthood, even after duscur. as a child he’d always explained it to you, in such wonderful terms, that if glenn hadn’t been a knight, you’d’ve been convinced again. knighthood had never been meant for you. never. you weren’t taught great sweeps of the sword and how to ride horses. you were taught how to taste poisons. how kill, quickly and efficiently. how to survive on the battlefield for days at a time. you were meant as a dirty, underhanded sword. but oh, you had longed to be a knight, to be like glenn and dimitri, to be as strong as they were, as kind as they were, despite the fact that everyday you were taught a new way to kill someone.
knighthood was already a rotton concept to you by sreng. but dimitri had been the final nail in the coffin. your two childhood emblems of knighthood, glenn and dimitri, dead and corrupted. you watched him, grin, eyes wild and teeth bared like an animal, like the boar your father had cornered while hunting, all survival, all gore, all blood on tusks, made you sick.
but you had realised, in that moment, that in a lot of ways, nothing had changed about dimitri. perhaps it was not, you thought, that chivalry had been corrupted. perhaps your eyes had been opened.
and, to be honest? that scared the shit out of you.
“i don’t hate you, boar.” a truth. how could you hate someone who had brought you so much light as a child? the boy you were before glenn had died is as dead as he is. you froze him over in the night. you took a sword and a black spur and stabbed him over and over until nothing was left, and there were no more tears to cry, and remade yourself from the ground up out of ice and steel and flint. “i don’t give enough of a piece of fucking shit about you to hate you.”
the corpse of your old self cries in you then. you wonder, if he still believes that knights are good, and that sometimes people die beautifully, and that the goddess takes the dead to the sky in her gentle arms and holds them forever, like the drivel lady rhea spills out over a numb congregation.
you can ignore him all you want, but you’re lying. you still look to dimitri on the battlefield. you still feel something like worry spark in your chest when he’s hurt. you still, you still, you still - some part of you remembers being boys in the armoury and laughing until your ribs hurt. some part of you wants your friend back, wants things to go back to the way they were before things were openly complicated and it all came back to the surface.
but he scares you. he scares you so much that you shake sometimes. something has to give, you can see the tension stretching in the air like a string pulled tight. it’s going to break soon. and if your familes’ histories are anything to go by, you are going to be there for the fallout. you’re just preparing for the aftermath.
