Chapter Text
Dimitri doesn’t know how much time has passed since he’s been on the run.
He may be used to the frigid chill of Faerghus winters, but it’s a different story when he is constantly trying to avoid being spotted by people who may be hunting him down.
With only the luxury of a steed and the clothes on his back, he has been wandering in the forests of southern Faerghus without a destination in mind. He hunts when he’s hungry. He finds a river when his horse needs a drink. He tries to sleep when he feels like he will pass out.
Some nights he sleeps to the crackle of his small fire, slowly going out, his lance an iron grip in his hands. Other nights he snaps awake from the haunting shadow of a nightmare, unable to reel in the cries he makes.
The detailed features of his loved ones have long marred away with time, but it won’t have mattered anyway if his mind can make it up with some filler. He can feel his loved ones’ eyes loom over him, their eldritch skulls clamoring beside both of his shoulders. They whisper at him to waste no time and gather his bearings to exact revenge as soon as possible.
Dimitri would feel the shadow of his stepmother’s touch on his shoulder and feel her smile instead of seeing it. His father is right behind her. He watches him with all the patience of a kind father to his child while pressing pinpricks into his brain that Dimitri almost convinced himself that he is bleeding internally. A dichotomy of the warm assurances he remembers being told as a little child, all the while their kind words sick him heartlessly through mind wrecking headaches.
His head hurts and he can feel his eyes burn, begging to be closed.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles to his father with a quiet whimper after a disapproving look was made his way. He is far too tired to say anything else that he might have started swaying. “I’m too far away from the capital to take her head.”
That only makes his headache pulse harder.
Something shifts in the bushes. Dimitri only realizes that extra presence a moment later. He flinches when the movements become more obvious and it only takes another moment before he’s surrounded by five bandits.
He can hear the bandits murmur to each other, recognition glowing in their gruff talks, and sees their smirks growing distinctly twisted and depraved.
Dimitri feels his blood run cold.
He hears one of them yell, making him alert enough again. Dimitri barely dodges the first blow when he sees an armored fist coming straight at him. He hears them spout obscenities and feels the greed feeding into the hungry slashes of their sword.
Worthless dross, he hears his father snort. Kill them.
For better or worse, it gives me the boost to steady his iron lance in a white knuckle grip. He will wipe them out, Dimitri promises his father with a sort of glee he doesn’t want to admit lately. No mercy for the wicked.
The bandits must have recognized him as the exiled prince of Faerghus, so none of them will make it out here without his lance to the back.
“That’s the crown prince, ain’t it?” One of them yells, glee evident in their voice upon thinking they were right. It makes his stomach hurl. “Get him! We’re gonna drink good tonight, boys!”
“-Ngh!” Dimitri struggles to parry a blow from a blind spot, managing to get away with a shallow slash to the forearm, his gauntlets taking the brunt of the force. Another one comes in without a break and he cries out in pain as a sword slashed through his back.
With only the moonlight and torches thrown to the ground as the only light, Dimitri attempts to back down to the light source to intercept the rest of their blows.
He meets the blades with great effort, his crest barely saving him from another fatal blow. He is bleakly reminded that if he cannot even deal with a small group of bandits, he won’t ever see the chance of making it out of the forest, of retrieving that woman’s head on a pike.
He let out an animalistic growl as another slash made a home on his other arm. And then he no longer cares. The five bandits are already morphed into sinister enemies that must be eliminated. He hears himself let out a snarl and sees more red splatter before him.
More blood begin to pool at his boots. He doesn’t stop when the next enemy comes into his view, and he spears them into the chest with so much force that when he slams them onto a tree, the trunk seems to heave a giant breath before a school of leaves trickles down, adorning a new grave.
Dimitri hears something close to a smothered cry wrenched out from the bandit under his tight grip, but he ignores it in favor of barking a hollow, sadistic laugh. A body thumps onto a muddy puddle. Dimitri smells the acrid smell of bile from one of the bandits before seeing the look of horror in their wide-open eyes. Thump. He hears something like a plea when he has a single hand around the neck of the leader.
And he pauses. Dimitri sees the glazed eyes of himself reflecting in the bulging ones of the bandit leader before his hand clenches harder, lifting him into the air. The bandit scrambles to loosen his death grip around their neck, choking on his spit before his eyes lolled to the back of his head. The man’s body twitches once or twice before it goes completely limp.
In the center of the blood and gore stands Dimitri only, catching his breaths with violent huffs. The more he tries to breathe, the less air that seems to make it to his lungs.
“Damn it—!” He curses through the tiny gulps of air he manages to find. His head is burning so much that he thinks he will melt.
Before he knows it, he’s slumped to the ground on his knees, scratching and hitting his chest to do its job. It hurts, but it hurts even more if he’s doing nothing.
The shadows crouch over his shoulders once more, taunting voices roaring into his ears louder than before.
“Do something!” Dimitri cries out with a pathetic sob. As if to spite him, his chest vehemently refuses to let him breathe, and then the adrenaline finally wears out, the pain that he deserved returning to him once more. It hurts. The gash on his back had it the worst. When he hears something shuffle near him, he catches the sound immediately, almost managing to startle him out of his sudden bout of breathlessness and panic. But it did distract him enough to make him prioritize the sound.
The squelch of boots stepping over blood follows into his ears.
Please, Dimitri mumbles out. No more.
Even as Dimitri begs for a moment of reprieve, his hand reaches down to his lance. Without waiting to see who was behind him, Dimitri braces all of the strength he has, yelling out with a desperate cry to skewer the heart of the next person trying to hurt him-
Something snaps. His back wound hammers down on him hard from the sudden movement.
His lance breaks in half and falls against each other onto the dirt. It had broken with a simple parry of a sword he does not recognize. Following that is a tiny, tiny whimper, which sounded so pathetic that he doesn’t even recognize it as his.
Dimitri’s gaze wanders mindlessly to his broken weapon and the torch on the ground. He wants to say something but his lips quiver but nothing comes out.
To be honest, death seems easier than living through a life of exile with no end date. An easy end, it is almost tempting. His entire body is on fire and he cannot move a single limb. Yes, it does sound much easier.
He doesn’t want to look up to the one that will kill him, but the stranger kneels down slowly for him.
This stranger has dark hair. Short and dark blue, he can faintly see that. His eyes are of the same color too, though he cannot make out any more features as his vision is beginning to blur.
“Are you…” Dimitri finally says weakly with a dry cough. Even the force of his chest heaving to let out a cough is enough to make him hurl forward, only to puke out nothing, but the bitter taste remains in his throat.
The stranger catches his shoulder when he bends over again, the only touch that he has felt in many moons that wasn’t followed by the glint of a poisoned blade. He can briefly make out some more footsteps trailing in front of him, but he doesn't have it in him to panic anymore.
His voice is hoarse when he tries to speak again.
“Are you here to kill me too?” Dimitri asks him in a low resigned whisper. He falls over something warm, and he stays there for the rest of the night.