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Ingrid finds herself wary of simple comforts after the war, but Enbarr demands that she indulge them in spades.
The city, even from a distance, conquers the surrounding landscape. Small homesteads and farms rest in its shadow, taking advantage of the fertile soil and protection of the Empire to flourish and feed its people. Greystone rises up further back to form tall walls, gates manned by soldiers who are little more than specks of dirt until Ingrid rides closer from the north. The bustle of the capital proper hasn’t reached her ears yet – only the sound of livestock and wind, the trees thinned out to nothingness as her path reached its end.
She breathes in deeply, smells the salt coming from the waves at the edge of Fódlan, and wants to vomit. This was not home.
No one pays her mind as she crosses the threshold of the gates. For all the world she is just another woman returning to the city to rest, or to do business, or to lose herself in the dazzling progress made in the years of reconstruction. Ingrid wears their colors well, keeps her head low, and speaks no more than is needed of her; no longer did anyone fight battles with the remains of Faerghus, but the animosity remained. She, too, held it close to heart – whether the right remained hers, anymore, she did not question.
Instead, Ingrid rides towards the nearest stable to board her mare. She was a stubborn thing, unruly on her best days and resentful of having a rider on her worst. Unfit for anyone to ride for anything more than travel, and while she wanted to feel anything more for the horse, Ingrid only feels a small moment of contentment at no longer having to keep her in check. But she does reach back to gently scritch at her ears before the mare’s led away by a stable boy before setting out by foot.
In her rule, Edelgard wanted nothing short of excellence for the Adrestians. Enbarr, hollowed by the tides of war, was the perfect vessel for innovation. Ingrid knows little of the Church’s censorship except that it was vast and cruel, life-ruining beyond the scope of Edelgard’s campaign: the recipes for medicine to cure plagues that swept yearly over Fódlan; ways to spread the words of scholars without the need for scribes to toil by hand; endless schematics for machines that Ingrid cannot begin to understand, but knows can do what a mage would need to drain themselves ten times over to accomplish. She sees it now, the canals running parallel to the streets rushing against wheels that turn and elsewhere offer the strength to a thing that dimly illuminates the room it rests within. That was a particular accomplishment in its ingenuity; the last time Ingrid was in Enbarr, it was the only thing anyone spoke of.
And she knows somewhere in the most luxurious building that the city offers, the Emperor sits. She sits and she works and writes, penning out her approval for something that will surely improve the lives of everyone in the Empire.
But despite everything, Ingrid wasn’t of the Empire. Her heart was somewhere far away, somewhere colder, bleaker. Progress was little more than the spear driven through her as it carried forward.
She makes sure to not tread too closely to the shadows cast by the homes of House Hresvelg.
•
Tucked away in the back rooms of one of Enbarr’s many, many, many taverns (what else did everyone want these days but to drink to success?) Ingrid strips off her armor and takes stock of her life.
Her armor was disgusting. Having ridden with the intent to avoid all of humanity if possible, she had forsaken basic things like ‘socially acceptable levels of cleanliness’. But now, she has to face it and crinkles her nose at the sight of dirt. It wasn’t worth the effort of having to scrape it off of the soft bits of her riding breeches, or out of the crevices her armor formed. Ingrid wants to look presentable tonight, and it isn’t going to be with this, she decides.
The dirt in her hair and on her skin is easier. There’s a wooden tub in her room, and the water is blessedly warm as she sinks in and scrubs off the top layer of her skin until her skin prunes and flourishes red. Ingrid doesn’t mind what’s underneath: the scars that tell the tale of battle and a body made lean by endless motion. She’s done away with as much of her womanhood as possible and forged it into something else, something stronger. It’s safer that way, too – when she travels, no one wants to bother the man in red and black. The hair that tickles the back of her neck, tries to shape her face into something softer? Ingrid cuts it off with a knife when she retreats from the water and dries herself, having long learned it was best to do it before it dried lest she looks like a plucked chicken.
And that was her comfort. A warm bath, shelter for the night, and little responsibility but to find clothes. And flowers, she thinks. Flowers were important.
A low bolt of something shoots through her that she wants to call excitement, or anxiety. Ingrid rarely allows herself to think of Enbarr, or her reason for returning, but with hours between her having to face it, she finds it best to prepare herself:
Ingrid wants to see Dorothea. Ingrid wants Dorothea. Ingrid wants Dorothea to see her and to want her in return.
…it was definitely anxiety. Anxiety to see a woman, more powerful than anything she’s ever known. It was a bit pathetic to be bound to someone with such frayed threads. What did Ingrid have to offer but herself? It was enough, once. She’s unsure now if it’ll do. On a mercenary’s budget, though? There’s not much else to give but the flowers, and maybe dinner. Surely Dorothea would understand. That was one of the things Ingrid loved about her. Enbarr wasn’t home, never could be, but returning to Dorothea was the closest thing to it.
Standing, Ingrid brushes off the remnants of hair that cling to her. No more doubting, she decides. She’s here for happiness, however brief, and she knows where to find it. There are clothes in her belongings that aren’t fancy, not quite clean but clean enough. It’ll do. Florists aren’t so hard to find either, now that people grow flowers again. It was a luxury born of peace. She’ll pick out the most vibrant ones.
A plan. Good. Ingrid likes this paltry bit of control. It makes her feel as if she has any idea what she’s doing.
•
It’s a lot easier for her to feel like she’s prepared to see her before the evening arrives when Ingrid tries her best to press out any wrinkle in her clothing. If there was ever a sign that the Goddess blessed her, it was that it smelled no worse than it might have if it were stuffed into a closet and forgotten. Without the heaviness of her armor, she feels exposed as she makes her way toward Dorothea’s apartment.
They’re nice, in an Adrestian way. Old stone and lavish gardens tucked away from the main streets, two floors tall and scarcely touched since their carving. Privacy was a necessity for someone of Dorothea’s position, performing once more at Mittelfrank. Ingrid hasn’t seen one for herself, but she knows that all of Fodlan loved Dorothea as the star of The Lady of Hresvelg . As Edelgard. Ingrid can’t imagine that they could write even a spark of Edelgard properly, but the songs must be nice if Dorothea was the one singing them. It was only through idle gossip in some village in Ochs that she even knew Dorothea would be in Enbarr, for the opera was slated to run for another month before they began to tour properly again.
So, Ingrid rode straight from there to Enbarr, and it left her at a door. Holding a bouquet of red flowers that she knew could not have survived in Faerghus for longer than a week without dying. A knight who had survived brutality in every form. A lonely woman, hesitant to press her knuckles against the wood before her.
It takes far more courage, she thinks, to do this than to run Lúin through a beast.
The sound echoes. She stands and waits an eternity, but then she’s there. Beautiful, unchanged Dorothea. Her hair’s pulled away from her face and she looks at Ingrid with a baffled look, but even though it is not happy it can’t get rid of the giddy feeling that’s shooting through Ingrid, ratting out any of her lingering nerves in one rush.
Her hands move before her mouth, offering the flowers.
“Hi,” Ingrid breathes out, unable to muster anything more.
Dorothea pauses, and her expression shifts. Warmth, but there’s something else, like a woman seeing a stray dog on her doorstep.
“Hello, Ingrid,” and that little moment is swept away into the warmth as she steps forward, taking the bouquet into her arms. They’re nearly the same height, Dorothea barely having to bend so that she can chastely kiss Ingrid’s cheek. “I suppose it’s been some time, hasn’t it?”
She does not ask Ingrid to follow her inside, but she does regardless. She knows that if Dorothea wanted her to leave, she wouldn’t make it more than two steps.
Mittelfrank paid well. Dorothea’s furniture was all soft velvet and dark wood, the very sort of luxury that she wanted for in their academy days. She arranged it in a way that makes the room feel bright, though, everything turned to face the windows that look back out into Enbarr. Ingrid sees doors that lead further in, rooms she’s never seen beyond the bedroom. The thought makes a dent in her happiness, but as she settles in the chair turned just so that the last vestiges of sunlight hit it, she refuses to dwell beyond a perfunctory smoothing of her clothes to get out any of the ugly wrinkles. Only the best for Dorothea.
Who had busied herself with the flowers, back turned to Ingrid. The vase was a small one, banished to the corner of the room. Ingrid watches the other woman’s fingers deftly arrange the petals with bated breath, unable to see her face properly.
“Have you forgotten what it’s like to speak to anyone other than a horse?”
Ingrid smiles, staring at Dorothea’s back. “No, I was waiting for you to be done. I’ve missed you, and I just – want to see your face when we talk. See you.” Silence follows, a long moment stretching thin until Ingrid speaks, her smile faltering. “It’s what I miss the most. That, and your voice, and your wit. I’ve not ridden faster before, coming back to Enbarr.”
Dorothea hums. Ingrid doesn’t know what more she can do to the flowers, but she keeps finding something else to fix.
The anxiety returns, coiling tight in her belly. “I’m sorry that I didn’t come back sooner.”
The hands pause. Dorothea turns to look at Ingrid, and it’s like she sees through the other woman. “Is that what you’re apologizing for? Really?” She sighs and closes the space between them, curling onto the chaise lounge closest to Ingrid.
“...yes?”
“Some things never change, do they?” Bemused, Dorothea looks her over before reaching out to take one of Ingrid’s hands. It doesn’t feel romantic. Ingrid feels like a child again, scolded for running off before she understood not to. “You come back to Enbarr for a bit, and we have a great time together, and then you’re gone for weeks upon weeks. And then you end up here again. But you still think that the problem is how long you’re gone?”
Ingrid flexes her hand. She doesn’t want Dorothea to hold it like this, idly tracing over it with her other hand. But she doesn’t want Dorothea to not hold it. “If it’s the problem, I can stay longer. Really, Dorothea.”
“The problem, Ingrid, isn’t how long you’re gone. It’s that you never choose to stay.”
Oh .
“I can’t stay,” she counters. “You know that it’s hard for me to be here.”
“It’s hard to stay in the city you fought for? The people that you fought for?”
Ingrid jerks her hand away and cradles it close as if wounded before letting it drop into her lap. Dorothea still looks at her like she’s bored , like this is another evening for her – like there is no history between them at all. “That’s not fair, and you know that it isn’t. Whenever I stay too long, it’s like the city’s eating away at me.”
“Then what was the point of fighting for it to begin with?”
“I didn’t know that after everything was over, I’d feel like this! Like I’d feel so…” Ingrid flounders for a moment, knowing that her face is a bright red now, “feel as if I haven’t done what I needed to so that I could fix everything.”
Deeply inhaling, Dorothea composes herself. She stares off through the window, and Ingrid feels as if she’s not even worthy of being looked at anymore. “And so, instead of staying – formally knighted, mind you – to help, you decided to go and ignore that you had everything you wanted placed in your lap? There’s still so much work to do to rebuild everything, Ingrid, and you’re off rooting out bandits who are stealing enough to survive. Is that really what you wanted from all of this?”
“Of course not!” Ingrid’s as nauseous as she was arriving at Enbarr, clenching her fingers into tight fists. This was too close to the things she did not want to think about, let alone talk about when she expected something softer from Dorothea. “I wanted everyone to live , and figure out something. Anything. I know that it’s a fool’s dream, but before it was over there was still hope for it.”
“You could have run away, Ingrid,” Dorothea’s words are gentler, her anger burning out as quickly as it came. She thinks she understands but Ingrid knows that she doesn’t. How could she? What loyalties did she have to betray? Mittelfrank was as Adrestian as they came. The Black Eagles welcomed her with open arms. She didn’t have to fight her friends.
The world around Ingrid is fuzzy, her perception fixated on Dorothea. She knows that she said something else, but the words were muffled. She blinks, trying to orient herself and to keep back the sickness threatening to well up and out of her mouth.
“I’m not that type of person. When I left the Blue Lions, it meant something. I fought alongside you because I saw something changing in Dimitri. He wasn’t himself, and everyone knew it. And then Rhea, everything else… it wasn’t a world that I could bear if I was there to help build it. But I thought that I could…”
Dorothea stops her with a hand placed delicately on her arm. Ingrid stops to look at it, voice dying out. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she’s given more disappointment.
“I’m sorry, Ingrid.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says automatically. This is a burden she’ll carry for her if she can. “You weren’t the only reason that I left them behind.”
“No, not for that. For…” Dorothea pauses as if considering her next words very carefully. “Well, I am sorry for that. Whether or not you believe that, I hold some of the guilt. But for… getting ahead of myself. I’ve been wanting to ask those questions for a long time now, and I never considered what would happen if you answered them like this.”
Ingrid doesn’t know how to respond. She feels as if she can’t sit still, and looks down at her fists and unfurls them. Her hands are shaking. “That’s… okay.” And it’s not, really, but she shakes her head as if denying the fact. “You deserve to know.”
“But on different terms, and not when you’re like this.” Pulling her hand away, Dorothea stands and walks over to one of the doors, slipping inside briefly. Ingrid looks around the room and takes in nothing but the flowers and their sad corner.
Dorothea returns with a cup filled with water, pressing it up to Ingrid’s lips. “Drink.”
She does, and only a little bit drips onto her lap. At least she’s not embarrassing herself at everything tonight. “Thank you. Was that safe to drink…?”
Dorothea gives her a look that wordlessly asks ‘is that what you really care about right now?’, but it’s different than before. Kinder. “It is. They’ve diverted some of the water into a separate system from the canals and figured out how to separate all of the diseases. Not everyone has it yet but, well, I suppose I’m one of the lucky ones now.”
More than anyone, she deserves it. If only for what she’s been put through by Ingrid alone. “Are you… no, I know you must be angry with me still, so I’ll ask how much?”
“Before tonight? Horribly so. I suppose I didn’t realize how much until I saw you. You look the same each time, but this time you brought flowers.” Dorothea reaches out, pulling on her arm. Ingrid’s confused until she pats the chaise, curling up her feet to make room. Obediently moving, Ingrid sits and lets herself be arranged until her head’s laying in Dorothea’s lap. It’s nice. Soft. She likes her thighs and the deep maroon of her dress.
“What’s wrong with the flowers?”
“I don’t particularly like them, Ingrid. I think that I might have before, but… they wither. I’d much prefer something that I can keep for more than a week before it dies. Everyone offers them to me, too, after I perform. It felt impersonal, and made me feel all the more like you scarcely knew me anymore.”
“I don’t know if I do, not like you know me.”
She looks up. Dorothea looks down at her and smiles faintly. She runs her fingers through Ingrid’s hair and it’s the nicest thing in the world. “You’ve always been a bit of an open book if you meant the questions. Ever since our time at Garrag Mach, your sincerity charmed me. I never doubted that you wanted to know me for, well, me.”
There’s a quiet voice that plagues Ingrid, despite the kind words. Of course , it wasn’t for anything else, and surely Dorothea knew that too if she asked – Galatea offered little in the way of upward climbing, and there wasn’t anything her family stood to gain if she married someone so common. And now she has a different title, and if she rode back north? Little more than broken, dying fields that struggled to provide for everyone left behind.
If she rode north, Ingrid thinks they might kill her. She deserves it. This conversation has opened her eyes to every wound again, leaving her raw and bleeding. Her eyes close, and she tries to offer Dorothea a smile that feels stretched too thin. “Before we were in the same house, I always thought that you were the prettiest one in the Black Eagles.”
“Flatterer.” The fingers trail down towards her mouth to trace her features. She hears Dorothea sigh. “Whenever I thought about this conversation, this was about the point where you’d be gone. I couldn’t think of anything that you could say to convince me it was worth having you stay.”
“Then why are you letting me stay? And why are you being so nice about it, if you were so upset?”
“Oh, Ingrid. Do you really have to ask something like that?”
No, she doesn’t. Ingrid knows that the answer is: Dorothea has the biggest heart of anyone she’s ever met, and she’s given no small part of it to her to try and care for, as horrible as she is at it. Dorothea loves her enough to tolerate these fleeting moments in their lives. Dorothea waits for her and, even at her lowest, hasn’t the strength to send her away.
Or, perhaps, she’s strong enough to still leave that door open.
Ingrid opens her eyes. The world isn’t a nauseating blur around her anymore. She pushes herself up to sit, grabbing at the hand in her hair before Dorothea can pull it away.
“I – I don’t know how I would stay,” she tentatively begins. “Everything built up in Enbarr reminds me of everyone who isn’t here to see it, but I want to stay if I can. It may not be inside of the city, but I can try to stay within Hresvelg at least. It isn’t perfect, but if you’re willing to… see me again?”
Dorothea considers it for a moment. “It’d be an improvement. And I do believe that Edie wouldn’t ask too many questions about you returning to your former position.”
“I’m not sure if that’s what I want either,” Ingrid replies. And then, more delicately, “I left because of her, in a weird way. She told me that she was…’
“Dying?”
She blanches. “It’s not the same at all, but it reminds me of Dimitri – losing Dimitri, before the war began. He was so obsessed that he wasn’t the same person, and I’m afraid that she might lose her mind the same way.”
“Well, I do believe that our Emperor is… made of firmer stuff than he was. I wouldn’t have followed her otherwise. And that she won’t let herself get to that point, if at all. I’d say that you should at least talk to her about it after you sleep. You’re not in great shape to be making those sorts of choices anyways.”
“Tomorrow, then,” though Ingrid doubts that it will be, really. She feels as if she’s run through the entirety of Fodlan, more tired than any battle. So, it probably won’t be tomorrow, but maybe the next day. It means she’ll have to stick around, just a bit longer. Dorothea would like that.
Dorothea who, apparently, also liked her enough still to lean forward and kiss her. It’s soft and sweet, and Ingrid has desperately missed every small thing about this. The thought of leaving felt laughable, when this was what she was missing.
“You know,” Dorothea says when she pulls away, “it would have been less of a headache had you told me this before. I might not have decided to throw you out into the street before you showed up. But thank you, Ingrid. You can stay tonight if you want. And tomorrow too, however long you want.”
“You might not want to tell me that,” Ingrid’s smiling as she speaks, a real smile. It’s hard to remember the last time that she’s felt so light – whatever weight was saddled upon her shoulders is gone, and she scarcely even recognized it before arriving. She knows it’ll return come morning, but for now, she basks in the warmth Dorothea lends her. “I’ve got ideas to stay now – and I mean it.”