[ dimitri will bump into him as he rounds one of the bookshelves at the library in a shower of stardust. sorry i have to extrapolate all these scenes from this hell canon, also i want one back please and thank
You are thirteen and wake up to a terrible pain lancing through your back.
It is, of course, all properly bandaged and healed as best as the clerics can manage. You are the crown prince of a Kingdom, the only son of the late king. Every resource that can be spent is spent to save you.
Still, there's only so much it can all do. Your injuries from the ambush are only just healing. The freshest wounds are huge swathes cut into your back by blades. Even with magic, they will hurt and scar, ugly and painful to look at for the rest of your life.
You do not consider that. Once you can speak, you order your attendants to bring another boy to you—one from the adjacent country of Duscur, no older than you are, and thought by many to be the reason you nearly died (again), despised for it.
...But he isn't who struck you down. No, this boy is the last survivor of his village, which your Kingdom burnt to the ground. No matter how much you insisted that they were innocent, you are not king yet, and the people of Duscur were sentenced, their houses razed, their people killed, their lands to be annexed into your own.
The country of Duscur, functionally, no longer exists.
No, you nearly lost your life because you leapt to protect this boy from your own men. To catch blades meant for him with your back as you huddle over him, clutching a child who has lost everything. Your back is small, but so is he. In the end, that is all your miserable effort amounts to: you almost die saving just a single life.
When they do bring the boy to you, you learn his name is Dedue. You cannot coax any words from him, shocked and afeared as he must be, surrounded by enemies, and you do not speak the same language regardless. He likely expects to die, as his family did.
Instead—you grasp his hands in fierce relief. You hope your emotions are palpable even if you cannot understand each other, total strangers as you are. You wonder if he understands why you feel like weeping, why you are certainly crying now, so grateful that he survived that your heart could burst.
Because if nothing else—you saved one person. A single life. For all that you have wished for death, your life amounts to something still, because it means that this one precious, invaluable stranger could live.
Dedue will spend the rest of his life telling others that you saved him. But the truth is, he saved you.
w3 ; sunday
It is, of course, all properly bandaged and healed as best as the clerics can manage. You are the crown prince of a Kingdom, the only son of the late king. Every resource that can be spent is spent to save you.
Still, there's only so much it can all do. Your injuries from the ambush are only just healing. The freshest wounds are huge swathes cut into your back by blades. Even with magic, they will hurt and scar, ugly and painful to look at for the rest of your life.
You do not consider that. Once you can speak, you order your attendants to bring another boy to you—one from the adjacent country of Duscur, no older than you are, and thought by many to be the reason you nearly died (again), despised for it.
...But he isn't who struck you down. No, this boy is the last survivor of his village, which your Kingdom burnt to the ground. No matter how much you insisted that they were innocent, you are not king yet, and the people of Duscur were sentenced, their houses razed, their people killed, their lands to be annexed into your own.
The country of Duscur, functionally, no longer exists.
No, you nearly lost your life because you leapt to protect this boy from your own men. To catch blades meant for him with your back as you huddle over him, clutching a child who has lost everything. Your back is small, but so is he. In the end, that is all your miserable effort amounts to: you almost die saving just a single life.
When they do bring the boy to you, you learn his name is Dedue. You cannot coax any words from him, shocked and afeared as he must be, surrounded by enemies, and you do not speak the same language regardless. He likely expects to die, as his family did.
Instead—you grasp his hands in fierce relief. You hope your emotions are palpable even if you cannot understand each other, total strangers as you are. You wonder if he understands why you feel like weeping, why you are certainly crying now, so grateful that he survived that your heart could burst.
Because if nothing else—you saved one person. A single life. For all that you have wished for death, your life amounts to something still, because it means that this one precious, invaluable stranger could live.
Dedue will spend the rest of his life telling others that you saved him. But the truth is, he saved you.