it’s a parabolic story, and it ends like you’d expect.
at night, you dream of glenn.
sometimes your dreams are obvious nightmares: duscur, but not duscur, you and glenn the same boy, arching over dimitri ( when did he get so small? ) with arrows in your back and burning, burning, and you look down, and the boy beneath you is a boar with blood on its tusks. sometimes you dream of a lance dropping. who is dropping it? you don’t know, but it hits your chest, and you hurt. you dream in metaphors, symbols and swirls of images that mean nothing and everything at once.
rarely, though - rarely, you dream lucid, whole dreams that feel like real life except for the fact that glenn is there. he’s older in these dreams, twenty seven and dressed in shining knights armour. you don’t look at it. he is dead.
“felix. fucking hell.” he says, and his voice is still that of a seventeen year old’s because you don’t know how his voice could sound as a grown man. you’re in your battle clothes, all light and for moving around. a mercenary’s clothes, for killing and surviving. glenn’s horse whinnies behind you. you don’t look at her. “you look like shit.”
hearing his voice here hurts, because you know it’s not real.
“i’m sure you look worse. go away.” and because some sick part of yourself that’s so similar to the boar that it makes you want to retch likes the fantasy of glenn being alive, you settle for being rude rather than calling your own shitty mind out on it’s bullcrap.
he barks out a laugh, achingly familiar, and settles down next to you. maybe you should have told him to stay. glenn always did the opposite of what you asked. there’s a smell from him, of apples left out too long and maggots crawling in them. he smells like dirt and blood and moulding flesh. “you didn’t challenge me to a spar, kid. weird. normally you draw your sword the moment you see me.”
“i don’t spar with corpses.” your voice cracks slightly. “i don’t talk to them, either.”
“god, you’re such a little brat. lighten up!” glenn laughs, pushes against your shoulder. you push back, all razors and snarl.
“get off me. you’re dead. this is a fucking dream. you died in duscur. shut up.” you’re not the boar. you don’t give into your weird fucking dreams or urges. you don’t meet them on their level.
“felix, you’re not looking after yourself.” glenn’s voice is starting to sound more and more like your own, or like byleth’s or like the boar’s, or like your father’s. it sounds like several voices all rolling on top of each other, like an ocean, or like a dying scream. “you know what the medics said: you’re ruining your body. you’re going to die, kid.”
you sigh. “everyone dies, glenn.” and you turn. “and if my dreams are going to lecture me, could they fucking not do it with my death brother’s face?”
but you turn, and it’s not your brother, it’s a wolf, black and cold with brown eyes and horse blood on its mouth. your brother had blue eyes, like your father. you stand, stare at it, for one moment, before you realise you’re in front of a mirror, and it smashes, a thousand wolves tumbling towards you in tiny shards, cutting your skin, and you don’t make a sound, you snarl, and -
wake. your whole body hurts. your blanket is round your ankles. you look over, see your sword glisten on the side, and pull yourself up, pick it up, and head over to the door to the training grounds, to hit that training dummy until you can’t remember your own name.