He doesn't understand what he's looking at for the longest time.
Oh sure, he understands scar tissue. He has several himself; some silvered over with time and others that look as grotesque as the ones on Edelgard's too pale arm from where he couldn't do more than try to keep the wound clean. He understands that she's been in and out of combat multiple times throughout their time in the Academy and outside of it these last five plus years and can't manage to remember when, if ever, he's seen her take a direct hit.
He's missing something with the revelations of the scars on her flesh and it's even more maddening that he should know what that something is in tandem with her words.
You left Fhirdiad and then what?
You heard Dimitri, I became a monster.
Dimitri studied the badly healed wounds on her arm and let his gaze travel up to the defiance on her face. Willed himself, even in his fury that she would try and use such things as an excuse for her betrayal, to try and see what she wasn't willing to- or able if that were possible- say aloud. There's fear there, but not of him, not of Claude or Byleth. She doesn't fear what they can, and will, do to her if they put their minds to it. If they chose to kill her, she would fight until her final breath.
What did she fear and why now?
It was so long ago his own memory is hazy when it comes to the day they parted ways as children. His earnest insistence she take the dagger, his bold words- childish now that he reflects on them- given to her in hopes that she would remember them while they were apart and be strengthened if times grew difficult. She'd been nervous, he thought it was because she'd come to like Fhirdiad and didn't like the idea of the unknown when her uncle had called for her.
Her uncle. His eye narrowed. It couldn't be, the man had been fond of his niece. Had been fond of his stepmother, Edelgard's mother, and had tolerated his own pestering and questions the way any uncle to nobility might have. "...are you saying that Lord Arundel is complicit alongside the Prime Minister and they gave you those scars?"
It's brief, so brief he almost believes it to be a figment of his imagination, but there is a flash of something that looks like hope there in her violet eyes. Her face is almost the same color as her hair at this point and that's one more thing he realizes that's been different and he, to his embarrassment, didn't even think about. "Your hair also changed since then, is that due to what caused those injuries too?"
"That's an affirmative, at least on the scars, and I'd be willing to wager money on the hair too." Claude replies on her behalf, his voice serious compared to before. Dimitri turns to him. It's rare that Claude has that tone of voice and the look on his face matches.
"How…?" Edelgard doesn't know how to finish that sentence without divulging more information than she wants to, and Dimitri recognizes that too.
"How would you know such things, Claude?" Dimitri finishes for her.
He hates her with every fiber of his being. Has hated her for the last five years and wants to still keep hating her because it's easy and because she is responsible for so much pain. He's convinced himself of this and yet… and yet something about her behavior, the careful way she has with words and the mask she continues to force on her face, and those Goddess-damned scars on her arm is sliding an invisible blade he doesn't want to name into his ribs. It's creating a hole in his hatred and what lies beneath is terrifies him as much as he finds a part of him desperately wishing to believe what it tells him.
The corner of Claude's mouth lifts briefly and falls again. "Lysithea."
Edelgard's attention is on Claude and the look she gives him is enough to make his chest hurt with the intensity. The Alliance leader practically threw her a rope while she was drowning and she's just barely refraining from grabbing on to it with everything she has in her. Claude's expression isn't entirely sympathetic, he's still watching her with that same analytical look he gives pretty much everyone he's suspicious of, but there is something in there that resembles understanding that Dimitri doesn't understand.
He isn't sure if he wants to understand. Understanding might mean having to choose between his hatred, his reason for existing, and having to give it all up and being left with nothing but the voices of the dead and no direction in which he can truly take to avenge them all.
Don't, Claude, don't take that from me. It's all I have left. Whatever you do, whatever you are about to say, do notmake it difficult for me to continue hating her.
"That would be the young woman in the Golden Deer House," Dimitri replies slowly. "She was fairly small, talented in magic, and the youngest in your class?"
"With white hair." Byleth adds to help jog the faint memory.
White hair. Like Edelgard's.
"That's the one. Sharp-tongued and brilliant. Loves cake and is terrified of ghosts." Claude adds on to build the image of the young white-haired mage. He offers Dimitri a look the other man can't decipher before his attention turns back to Edelgard.
Given what he knows of the dead, Dimitri can't say he blames this Lysithea for being afraid of ghosts.
"I know her," Edelgard responds a little too sharply. "Why do you say her name?"
"Her scars look like yours." He tells her. "I didn't mean to see them, but I had a question for her and might have walked in on her at an awkward moment."
"You walked in on her doing what, exactly?" Byleth asks.
Claude had the decency to look embarrassed. "Changing. But she wasn't totally naked, just, you know, from the waist up."
"Dimitri, please return my dagger. I find myself in need of it." Edelgard replies immediately. Her bare hand outstretched and beckons for him to hand the blade over. She even has scars on her fingers, each and every single one of them.
"Hey! I turned around the moment I realized it and she tried to set me on fire for the next three hours!" Claude protests. "Don't look at me like that, I swear it was an accident. I knocked and everything."
"You did try to spy on me in the bath." Byleth reminds him when he looks to her for help.
Dimitri and Edelgard both give Claude the dirtiest looks they can manage.
He holds up both hands as though to fend off any attacks that may come his way. "I caught Sylvain trying to spy on you and was unjustly punished for being in the same location. If you recall, he was the one with the black eye from the shoe, not me when class started the next morning."
Dimitri says something pithy about his childhood friend that leaves Claude laughing and Edelgard somewhat mollified. He shouldn't be surprised by the revelation, but damn it, Sylvain. If he ever sees the red-headed nuisance, he's going to lecture him twice and then allow Ingrid to have her turn.
"Anyway," Claude hurries on with the topic. "the point is; I saw her scars. If I'm right, those don't stop at your arms either."
"They do not." She agrees tersely.
Dimitri actually hates this conversation more than he currently detests Edelgad's existence as a whole. It's too much for him to take in. Because if Edelgard was being tortured, and by the sounds of it, Lysithea as well around the same time?
No. He can't just…
Wait. The Tragedy of Duscur.
"...where were you when the Tragedy of Duscur occurred?" Dimitri demands. "You claim to have had no knowledge, no hand in it, how do you explain Lord Arundel-" He stops speaking as the answer to his question neatly arrives within his own mind.
If what she is saying is the truth, and he doesn't believe her, not entirely, then what if Edelgard had been stolen back to the Empire and…
"I was beneath the castle back in the Empire." Her voice is so terribly bitter it draws his attention back up. She's cradling the naked limb against her chest as though she can erase the scars or the damned thing pains her.
Goddess. "Being tortured."
"Experimented on." She corrects him.
"Is it not the same thing?" He snaps in return.
She looks surprised at the question and nods, reluctantly, in agreement. "I suppose you are correct."
Which means she lost her mother at the same time he lost his entire family.
"What of your siblings? Were they with you?"
Edelgard refuses to meet his eyes and her expression twists in an all too familiar way.
Do not make that face. Do not tell me…
"They died." Byleth's voice is as gentle as she can make it, but the two words are damning all the same.
He looks to Byleth, a silent question he doesn't have the heart to ask on his face. She looks to Edelgard, who is trying to find it in her to pull whatever pride she has left up and return to a callous, cold state of mind after the current conversation runs its course, and back to him.
She nods.
They did not survive the experiments. Edelgard, like Dimitri himself, witnessed their deaths first hand.