Chapter Text
There’s a problem with the Professor’s plan.
Staring it down at the war council, Felix can’t think his way around it. No one else has raised any objections. They’ve all nodded along like this is fine and continued discussion of how to smuggle their soldiers into Dukedom territory. Ferdinand suggests using the Imperial armor he and his people had fled with as a disguise. Ashe shares useful information about the Gaspard territory. Ignatz offers to slip troops through with his and Raphael’s merchant allies under the guise of a trading venture.
Every one of them seems to have missed the gaping flaw in this idea that they can hide their identities enough to get a quarter of their army to the edge of Baron Dominic’s lands. So now Felix has to be the asshole. Again.
“Professor,” he says.
The Professor looks at him briefly and pointedly. Felix rolls his eyes. Then he raises his hand.
“Yes, Felix?” the Professor asks.
“You forgot the boar.”
He expects some reaction, even from someone that muted: confusion, surprise at the lapse, irritation at him for bringing up the boar (not) in the room. He does not expect the Professor to state with utmost calm, “I didn’t forget Dimitri.”
“Really.” Felix drops his hand so he can fold his arms. “So, what. You’ll have him masquerade as one of the Victor Company merchants? Or perhaps a wandering opera singer?” Sylvain starts snickering; Felix shoves him. It is, as Felix regularly tells Sylvain, and as Sylvain regularly refuses to believe, the only reason he sits beside him at war council. “The boar is no longer pretending to be human, Professor. It may still put up the charade of walking on its hind legs, but that’s it.”
“Felix,” Ingrid warns, but she didn’t raise her hand and the Professor gestures for her to wait her turn.
“I didn’t forget Dimitri.” The Professor more pronounces than says it, and then their attention shifts to the rest of the room. “Any other comments?”
The dismissal rankles, but there’s nothing to be done for it. Felix has gotten this far trusting in the Professor, and there’s no backing out now. For the rest of the meeting, they pool their collective knowledge of the territory around Dominic lands, determine which battalions they’ll be able to bring over and which should stay to defend the monastery, and discuss bringing back provisions on the return trip.
“This is only a contingency plan,” Byleth reminds them before close of meeting. “If things go well with Baron Dominic, we won’t need to fight.”
To Felix, that is all but a guarantee that they’ll be spilling the blood of Dominic soldiers by the end of the week. But apparently no one cares what he thinks.
Ignoring dinner offers from Ingrid and Sylvain, and then Mercedes, and finally from Ashe, Felix begins the exhausting route back towards the Cathedral to check the damn beast hasn’t eaten a rock or something, only to be stopped by the Professor outside one of the offices—Seteth’s—saying, “I’d like to talk to you about the rest of the plan.”
“Amazing. Thanks for letting me in on it,” Felix replies, which the Professor completely ignores. They step into the empty office instead, and Felix follows.
“You’re right that we can’t expect to smuggle Dimitri into the Dukedom the way we would any other soldier,” the Professor tells him. “He’s too recognizable and too quick to fight enemies.”
As usual, being right does not make Felix less irritated. “Then what? We can’t leave him behind. That creature barely eats without Mercedes or Ashe showing up to offer it dinner, and even then it leaves the plate untouched more nights than it doesn’t. If you leave him here, the boar will starve to death.”
“I’m not abandoning him.” Simply and insistently, like they’ve anticipated all of Felix’s objections and are just guiding him to the obvious answer. “He’s coming with us.”
“How.” Felix rakes a hand through as much of his hair as he can, which is none of it, and immediately regrets the messy consequences. (“Do you have… three parts?” Ashe once asked, while Annette tried to get up on her toes to look at the top.) “How are you going to get the One-Eyed Demon of Garreg Mach, the Boar Prince of Faerghus, smuggled past Dukedom soldiers? What plan could you possibly have to get a creature that incapable of even pretending it isn’t a bloodthirsty beast into Dominic without getting caught?”
The Professor gives him one of their steady, unreadable stares. They definitely do not and could not possibly have answered him, “You’re going to pretend to be married to him.”
Felix waits for reality to kick. For the real suggestion to be made. Something sane, like We’re going to drug him and hide him in an empty wine casket or We’re going to dress Dimitri as a traveling clown.
Reality does not kick in, and Felix continues to live in a farce.
“That is—that’s completely absurd,” Felix eventually manages. “You’re as out of your mind as he is.”
“As you said, they’ll be looking for Dimitri,” the Professor continues, like they didn’t hear him. “They won’t look for a married couple seeking refuge in the Dukedom.”
These sentences are technically true. They are so technically true, and the conclusion drawn from them so farfetched, Felix cannot seem to find a way to point this out. Despite this, Felix tries his best. “He’s a wild animal. A beast.”
Byleth blinks at him. “Does that mean you don’t want to?”
“Of course I don’t want to pretend to be married to the boar.” Felix is gesturing hard now, while the Professor has barely moved, which makes him seem like the one being absurd. “He’s a rabid animal that hasn’t had a bath since the fall of Garreg Mach!”
“He has probably bathed at least once since then,” is the Professor’s reply.
“I’m not doing it,” Felix says.
“Okay,” answers Byleth. “I’ll ask Mercedes.”
“Absolutely not,” Felix snaps back. “Only I can handle the boar.”
In the moment after these sounds become meaning in the air before them, Felix is struck with exact same feeling of vertigo he gets when he takes one step too far into in a mage’s range.
“Like you said,” the Professor replies. “We can’t leave him here alone, and we’ll need something persuasive and distracting for crossing through Dukedom towns.”
Felix stares at them. They smile at him, steady and slight. He keeps staring. They do not stop smiling.
He looks away, and this time he doesn’t care what he’s doing to his hair by dragging his fingers through it.
“Fine. But first wrestle the damn beast into a bath.”
“I’ll comply,” is the growl that greets Felix when they go to find the boar.
He’s in his usual haunting spot. He does not turn to face them. He continues to stare at the pile of rubble, as if even when it comes to inanimate matter he shuns the living for the dead.
“Thank you,” Byleth replies. They’re answered with nothing more than a grunt as the beast’s full attention seems to return to the broken marble and stone before him. Its fingers curl around nothing—longing for the support of its lance, most likely, but the boar had let the Professor take it away when they pointed out that it would be a problem if he broke all their weapons before they ever got to Enbarr.
“Dimitri,” the Professor continues, still gentle. “We also need you to take a bath.”
Nothing.
“We can add crushed chamomile to the water,” they offer.
“Luxuries are for the living,” the boar rumbles. “They’re wasted on the dead.”
Felix’s fingers twitch. He feel like he is approximately ten seconds from shaking the boar by his blood-soaked cloak, and he has to bite into his palms with his fingernails to make himself stop.
“That’s your problem, boar. You may be dead, but the rest of us happen to be alive. So get in a damn bath before I drag you down to the well and push you into that instead.”
There’s a momentary shift of attention. The boar’s head turns towards him, just slightly. It puts Felix in line of the creature’s good eye.
The boar doesn’t say anything. But it hits Felix: there is one thought that would come first to the mind of an animal so trapped in the past. A boy and his brother. A cold, deep well.
When Felix meets that gaze, he finds no hint of resistance to drowning.
Felix steps back. “This is pointless,” he tells them both. He turns around and then a hand has his arm and he opens his mouth to snap at the Professor, except the hand is too large, gauntleted in sharp metal—
“Felix.” His name is a lingering whisper on those lips. The beast pauses and looks him over, a single eye that seems to see right through him.
Felix fights the childish compulsion to bite his nose.
“Yes,” Felix scowls instead, “It’s me. Not a ghost, not my father, not Glenn. Get off before you spread your damn stench to me.”
Dimitri lets go.
Then the great beast turns away and starts walking. Felix finds himself stupidly still for a moment before he’s at its heels, snapping, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“A foolish question,” the boar answers. “To the baths.”
That should be a relief, but somehow, it isn’t. Felix keeps pace, sneering, “Do you even remember how to bathe?”
“Yes,” the boar says, his eye no longer for Felix but on a distant memory. “There is no tracking Imperial beasts when their scent hounds can find you twice as fast.”
Felix wonders, not for the first time, if Dimitri is even capable of not taking a question seriously.
Then he remembers that Dimitri is dead, and this is a corpse lumbering through the bathhouse door and pulling it open. The thing stripping down in front of him is nothing more than a beast that has given up on playing human.
Wait.
It isn’t exactly like Dimitri stripping down to bathe is completely unfamiliar, but Felix still feels a panic rising in his throat and choking out of him, “What are you doing?”
The boar turns, his dented breastplate in hand. He looks at Felix as if Felix is the idiot and not the only person around with any sense. “I am bathing, Felix. That you might enjoy the luxuries afforded to the living. That’s what you want from me, is it not?”
Felix, who is definitely in the right here, snaps, “So you’re just going to do that in my company.”
The boar has the audacity to raise the eyebrow over the one functioning eye he has. “You followed me.”
Felix shuts the door in its face.
Their armor has been packed up and added to the merchant convoys to be sent through with Leonie and Victor's groups. They’ve traded their fine furs for more rough-spun, common clothing. But the boar insists that his cloak—finally laundered, thanks to Byleth’s persistence—be packed with the few goods they are to keep at their sides. When Felix calls him an idiot for it, he only glances back over at him, growls low, and says, “If death finds me on the march, I will greet it in my father’s colors. The cloak must stay.”
A sickness rises up in Felix, ugly and suffocating. He swallows it down and tastes acid in his throat. “It’s packing the cloak that’s going to bring death to you, boar. It isn’t as if I’m trying to drag the damn Aegis Shield with us.”
The beast merely smiles, slow and wide. It’s an awful smile. It burns over memories a decade old. “That is the difference between us,” the beast answers, sounding so rational, so aware. “It has been a long time since you have wanted to die as your father’s son.”
Felix leaves to pack the rest of his things on his own.
But the mission is still happening, whether Felix can tolerate the boar’s company or not. So Felix, the boar, and the boar’s damn cloak, along with a couple of steel swords and spears—silver would catch too much attention—are packed up and brought to the monastery steps for final instructions from Byleth.
“Remember,” Byleth says to Felix, “You can’t use his name.”
“That won't be a problem for him,” the boar grumbles. Felix looks at him. The boar only grunts in reply.
Felix folds his arms. “Remind him not to talk about tearing the heads off of Imperials.”
“Dimitri,” says the Professor, “Remember not to talk about tearing the heads off of Imperials.”
The boar does look at the Professor. The Professor does not blink. The boar keeps looking.
It is a staring contest the boar loses fast.
“Just see to it that this brings me closer to that woman’s death,” the boar mutters.
Accepting this as agreement, the Professor returns to the briefing. “The rendezvous is at the end of the week. You’re Richard—” (a growl) “—and Yuri—” (a scoff) “—Lowell from Galatea territory. You’re wary about rumors of the family breaking neutrality to enter more active warfare, so you’re seeking refuge with House Dominic.”
It’s what Felix and the Professor decided would be easiest. It is too risky to claim to be from either of their family’s territories, and Gautier is too overtly loyalist, but they both know Galatea well enough from their childhoods that they should be able to convince anyone from the region that they are natives.
As long as the damn beast can remember his humanity enough to get them through populated areas.
“How long have we been married?” asks the boar, startling Felix out of his thoughts.
The Professor pauses a moment. “Two moons. You wanted to marry five years ago but were separated in the war. You’ve only just found each other again.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Felix says.
“Language, Felix,” says the Professor.
The boar, unbelievably, has been nodding along to this, as if it is perfectly reasonable. Felix takes this as further proof it is not. “Of course. And companions since childhood, introduced by our fathers, who had themselves been as close as brothers in their time.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Byleth says. “Dimitri is right. It will be easier to remember your story the less you have to invent.”
Felix grits his teeth, tight as he can, but the tension drawing up and down his jaw isn’t enough to push the nausea down. This is stupid. Disgusting. It’s their lives gutted of the ugly reality and returned for the funeral as a sword and warped plate mail.
“So this is how you constructed your mask of humanity, is it,” Felix asks the boar. “By taking true things and twisting them into pleasant lies.”
Damn him, but the beast just nods. “The palace was full of those who were eager to see their Crown Prince recovered. It was trivial to persuade them of my survival.”
“You’re lying,” Felix says, unable to help himself, because he remembers. He remembers how stilted and distant Dimitri had been those first few moons, numb to every kindness offered to him, quick to panic when Dedue was out of his sight. He remembers being terrified at the way Dimitri would drift off in the middle of a conversation, or start snapping anything in his hands with an anxiousness that had no clear source, or laugh at nothing until he was sobbing his throat raw.
He remembers his relief when Dimitri finally seemed to have returned. He remembers how it felt when he realized Dimitri was never coming back.
“Don’t pretend it was easy,” Felix tells this inhuman creature, this parody of his friend. “It wasn’t.”
The boar watches him for a moment. Felix waits for an argument, bitter words. A strike.
He gets nothing.
Felix folds his arms. “Fine,” he says to the Professor, tired of talking with animals. “So when I’m asked for inane childhood stories, I’ll bring up the time he ate enough sweet buns to throw up, and not the time he suppressed a rebellion as if he lived for nothing but the screams of his victims.”
“Perfect,” the Professor agrees. “And don’t forget, you’ve been in love with him since you were eight.”
“We’re leaving now,” Felix says and stalks off to their horses. He hears some more fragments of conversation behind him—the Professor’s clear voice, the beast's low grunts of affirmation or refusal—and then the thud of its feet across the cobblestone. Then he has silence as he finishes his work.
Belatedly, he realizes that he shouldn’t have silence. He should have an obnoxious animal trying to prepare for a long ride. Felix half-turns, getting the boar back in his line of sight, only to find him standing a good several feet away from the horse he’s supposed to ride.
“What are you doing?” Felix asks. “Waiting for the horse to admit to being an Imperial spy?”
The beast's gaze snaps over to him, hard and unamused, but it says nothing. Instead, it takes a step closer to the horse and offers its hand in greeting.
And then… the horse backs away.
Felix stares. Horses never do that to Dimitri.
The boar doesn’t move again. He just stands there, useless and still, shoulder stiff and single eye fixed on his would-be mount. He doesn't even try.
Felix grinds his teeth a moment and then pulls away from his own horse, grabs the reins of the boar’s, and gestures for him to come over. The boar merely studies him, all of Dedue’s old impassiveness with none of his warmth.
Felix grits his teeth. “We don’t have all day. Or do you want to leave murdering the Dukedom soldiers to everyone else when Baron Dominic inevitably attacks Annette?”
“I will kill them,” the beast mutters, its voice too imploring for the words to be meant for Felix. “This is no diversion, I swear it.”
Goddess. It takes everything Felix has not to scream. “Boar.”
“What,” the boar snaps back, like Felix is the one interrupting. But at least he’s paying attention again.
“The horse. I damn well know you remember how to approach one. Left side, at the shoulder, both hands to its neck. Get moving.”
The boar does not. “Look to its ears,” he says. “It will not permit approach.”
Felix looks. The ears are pinned. The horse doesn’t want the boar near, and apparently the boar himself is so far gone into his wildness that it’s now somehow Felix’s job to change that.
Felix tries not to growl—someone needs to be the human in this circus—and instead returns to his mount and starts digging through the bags. After a moment, he finds what he needs: carrots the Professor had packed away for them as “healthy snacking.” Felix takes out one and tosses it over to the boar. “Here,” he says. “Bribe it. It’s not that hard.”
The scene that comes next is painful. The boar fails to drop the tension from his shoulders that makes him read as a predator to anything with eyes, and the horse trots a few steps back, ears still pinned, a prey animal perfectly aware that it’s in front of a lion.
Felix does not let himself put his face in his own horse’s mane and scream. He is an adult, and he will not do that. But he comes close.
What saves them in the end is that the boar has spent the past two moons brooding in absolute stillness. For a full ten minutes, the boar does not move at all. Finally, finally, this is enough to persuade the horse to lean forward and take a tentative nibble of the carrot, before fully diving in for the treat.
Its ears relax. The boar approaches it at the shoulder, raises up his two great paws of hands, and sets them on his horse.
(Just like Glenn taught them. Felix buries a useless thought back to where it belongs.)
“Fucking finally,” Felix says, and gets back on his mount. “Don’t make me walk you through the rest.”
All he gets for that is another grunt. For all that it has probably been five years since the boar has ridden anything but his own bloodlust down into the Eternal Flames, it looks like horsemanship is ingrained enough that he can settle down and get them moving now that the horse has permitted his presence. And he’s always been a good enough rider that the remaining skittishness should be something he can handle.
As they ride down the winding paths that brings them past Garreg Mach’s half-shattered walls and into the mountainside, Felix doesn’t say anything, and the beast doesn’t either. It’s the kind of silence he would have killed for five years ago, back when the boar wouldn’t keep his distance. Then, the boar would jump at every opportunity to speak with him, eagerly join him in every spar he was offered, take warmly to every group task they were assigned together. No matter how many times Felix pushed him away, Dimitri always came back to try again, acting less like a wild beast than a struck spaniel still smitten with its master.
But now Felix has what he wanted. The beast no longer pretends to be a man. It no longer jumps for attention and affection from him in any way it can get it. Everyone knows it for what it is. And on the long ride down into Magred Way, it doesn’t try to say a word.
After night comes in the forest and they make camp, the corpse lingers at the edge of the space where a living man sleeps and keeps itself alert and awake. It does not pace; it knows that will only wake the living. Instead, it searches the dark of the forest with its single eye and listens for any noise or absence of noise that should not be.
This, for the corpse, is a difficult task. Wherever it goes, after all, there is always an abundance of sight and sound. Its afterlife has not been one of silences.
Glenn curls his hands around its wrists. It feels the heat of his body run through it, charred and wet and smoking. Glenn always sharpens that acrid scent it has never been able to get out of its throat, a bitterness that has flattened all sense of taste since. “Don’t bother. You’ll get him killed like you do everyone else. A dog makes a good guardian, but a boar doesn’t.”
Its lips feel dry. It wets them with its tongue and swallows, keeping its voice low in its throat. “I know.”
Whenever its stepmother speaks, it feels like a whisper, like ash in the wind. Her voice always comes as if it is fading away. “You can’t be distracted. While you tarry here indulging the living, my monstrous daughter adds more to the dead.”
“I must do this.” Its insistences sound weak to its own ears. Why must it do this? It tries to remember the reasons. It cannot be love for the living, it threw that away with all but its duty to the dead. So it must be—what? “They… They add strength to our ranks. Gilbert and Annette.” The names spark sensations at the edges of his thoughts—a gloved hand guiding his with a sword, warm fingers shoving a bound book into his hands.
No. Not his hands. Its. It is a corpse, not a boy or a prince. A beast, at best. There is no warmth and comfort for wild animals or the dead.
“You swore to avenge us, Dimitri.” Its father. The corpse can never look at its father. It knows what it will see and it cannot bear it anymore. But there is no shutting away what its father says. “You have no right to distraction or comfort while our killers live.”
“Are you waiting for more people to die?” asks Glenn. “You really are a beast craving blood. Even my brother's.”
“Glenn, please—”
“You do want it, don’t you? You want him dead. You want him to join us so he'll be trapped with you as we are.”
“I do not, I swear it, I have no desire but to give you rest—”
“You can’t lie to the dead, beast,” Glenn hisses. “We know you for what you are.”
The beast does not curl its hands around its ears. It cannot close its eye. It is on watch, and it knows that. But all it can hear are voices and all it can see are flames. Recovering the stolen cloak that is all it has of its father’s colors, it wraps itself in the heraldry of its family as if that would offer proof of its allegiance to the dead.
“Please,” it begs the darkness, as quiet as a beast can be. “Please, I’m sorry, please—”
“Disgusting,” Glenn reminds him.
A dog makes a good guardian, but a boar does not. And this dead man cannot manage to be even that.