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“Oh Ferdie,” Dorothea gasps. “Ferdie...”
He feels quite fine, actually, laying in her lap. There are worse places to be. Some time ago, with a wound that had bled profusely but posed little threat to his life, Ferdinand had reported to the medic’s tent for mending and seen the truly wounded, men and women who had been carried from the battlefield so cruelly that they’d perhaps been in worse agony than they’d started in. Waiting for a free mage, he’d watched a man in a nearby bed beg for death, screaming things not fit for pious ears, crying “that this is a kingdom of hell, no one can doubt!” and cursing the church to damnation.
Ferdinand had thought a fair bit, then, about what it was they were all dying for. He had heard it said many times that those who eschewed the goddess would still pray to her in times of need, when trapped in proverbial foxholes, but maybe that wasn’t true.
Maybe in death people realize the absurdity of shedding blood for the esoteric; it seems doubly true when in the arms of the love of one's life. That is what he is realizing now.
Ferdinand is dying.
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Dorothea’s hair tumbles down her back. She is nineteen, and unspeakably beautiful, and her tongue is sharp enough to cut. She tells him at least once a week that she hates him — but these days, it’s seldom forced through her teeth or spoken to him with the clean, cool efficacy of one of Seteth’s seminars. No, these days he has the privilege of hearing it said with a smile, and sometimes even with a laugh too, when he ribs her in just the right way, in moments where she knows she’s wrong and knows he’s right and most of all knows he’s too polite to rub it in her face. I hate you, with all the affection of a person long used to being bound to another.
Ferdinand catches a finger around long chestnut brown lock of her hair and twirls it. She sighs and lets him. He has half a mind to sigh and tell her that his feet are going asleep with the way she’s laying on him, but he lets her. There are battles that don’t need to be picked, and if he speaks up, she may move, and he likes the feeling of her skin on his.
“You’re not so mean to me these days,” he hums.
“So what?” Dorothea asks.
“So,” Ferdinand replies, “I think you've grown to like me. Even just a little.”
She gives him a look, propping herself up on her arm, right against his chest. Oof.
“Don’t get things confused,” she says. “You were the one who came to me with a sob story about never having been with anyone. I felt sorry for you. That’s not the same as liking you.”
Double oof, but...
“What were all the other times, then?”
She looks down at him, and he looks up at her, and a grin spreads across his face. Dorothea is the picture of delighted disbelief, ready to argue every point and yet maybe — just maybe — thrilled to be known.
“That is not...” she says, pointing a finger into his breast, so taken aback she actually falters.
“Not what?” He teases. He sees an opening and he takes it, bowling her over so she’s trapped under him. His hips end up between her legs, pinning her, and out of either habit or reflex, she wraps her legs around his and digs her heels into the backs of his thighs, even as she tussles with him. She is pretty, laid out under him, face inches from his. Her eyes are bright. He teases her again: “Not what, hmm?”
“It’s not fair!” she spits, laughing now. “Well, maybe I come to you because you’re the only one around here who gets it right. So many of the men here, all those stuffy, stuck-up nobles...”
She rolls him, pinning him in turn. Straddling his hips, wearing only a bed-wrinkled white shirt (his, actually), he thinks she might be an angel. Looking at her is almost overwhelming, almost maddening — he loves to look at her and get that heady rush of warm feelings. He might actually die if she never returns his love. He thinks she already does, even if the idea needs to percolate more.
And they say he has pride.
“So no one gets you off like I do,” he says.
“That must be it,” she says, coyly — like it isn’t actually true. She rolls her hips a little, and Ferdinand spans his hands up her thighs. Even more coy: “you’re not getting attached, are you?”
There's an note of concern there.
“It’s much too late for that,” he says.
She goes a little pink, but her voice lifts with a crisp, cool retort nonetheless: “Oh, Ferdie. You’re so sentimental, you really were a virgin.”
"You're surprisingly unromantic," he remarks. And then: "Have you never had feelings for someone before, Dorothea?"
Dorothea sighs, and she bends herself over him, to clutch his cheeks and order, almost against his lips: "Would you please just put your mouth to better tasks so we can get to class? We don't have a lot of time."
He knows he's right, and she knows he's right, but until she's ready to admit it to him, he'll just have to be content with making love to her.
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"Please don't die," she sobs. "You said we'd do so many things, we were supposed to go to the opera house when this was all over, and we were supposed to––"
"Dorothea," Ferdinand murmurs. He still feels quite fine, actually; not in much pain, not like he expected it would feel. Edelgard had once said, matter-of-factly, that they would fight together until they fell together, and somehow he'd never quite tangled with the idea that it was that inevitable. He supposed maybe he wouldn't have time to think about it –– a sword through his neck, and arrow through his heart, an axe to his thigh.
A few fat tears fall on his face.
"Dorothea," he repeats. "I love you."
"You can't say that now," she says, almost angry. "That's so not fair, you can't tell me that and then die in my arms!"
"I have been telling you that all along, sweetheart," he replies.
She makes a noise, a protest, and her hands must be so tight on his wound, but he can't feel it at all. It all feels so dreamlike –– her touch featherlight, her tears like nothing, her anguish... well. He feels a great bit of anguish at that in return, especially considering all the things they never did together, but there's nothing to be done about it now.
"I know," she says. "I know you have. I'm sorry –– I love you. I should have said it so along ago. Before now, before this––!"
"It's all fine," he says. "I knew."
He can't even hear the battlefield anymore. There's just her, forevermore.
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