Anything good died on the battlefield. Honor bled out and dried in the dirt.
Anything good was in the past. Dimitri could take bits and pieces of the past and use them on and off the path of destruction.
Mercedes' gentle voice guided him as he drew a needle and thread to suture up a wound. He took great care to not break the needle in his skin.
He could consider himself lucky that so many of his classmates knew how to cook, from the simplest meals to ones fit for a feast. Even if there was no taste it was sustenance. There was no use for fancy meals in a war.
In-between the nightmares and the battles he would reach out for those that were dead, to cease their shouting because he was resolute in his mission.
And sometimes the frivolous, innocent past emerged. Tea parties and opulent meals after a good run of a mock-battle or tournament. Beautiful plants in the greenhouse and Annette singing of beasties. Sylvain's surprise that Dimitri attempted to woo another student instead of the professor.
They had called her a peer and though she made friends with them she was unbiased in her teaching methods. Her smile was a gift. She walked with him to the goddess tower.
But the past was the past. And some days that nostalgia was the most painful.
When she would call her students to dinner, singing in the choir, setting up a tea party and just knowing what his favorite tea was, the way her face lit up when it was her birthday and everyone gave her a present.
Nothing good was to last. Remire village was left in destruction. The beasts got into the monastery. Jeralt died when it was all over.
It was different from spilling blood on the battlefield when the felled soldier was the one that raised you, and worried and scolded and loved.
A parent was not supposed to have his head fall from his neck. A parent was not supposed to disappear into the flames of destruction.
A parent was not supposed to be stabbed by a seemingly harmless, grateful schoolgirl with dark red hair and a cloying, poisonous smile.
Even the professor had fallen to despair.
(Dimitri wondered, sometimes, if in the days afterwards she felt as though her head was fit to burst and her father lingered with his regrets.)
The hands that the professor used to help Dedue care for his flowers, the hands that led Bernadetta to the gardens for tea, the hands that pulled in Ashe for a hug after the death of his father, they grasped a mighty weapon that would've split Monica in half.
And Monica was someone else entirely, as if the student's body was a puppet corpse, and the professor did not kill her. The option was taken away as Kronya's heart was crushed in Solon's hand.
The professor was gone. Her students cried out and even the ones most fearful and squeamish of the battlefield would've claimed Solon's life. Dimitri would have split him open from belly to chest.
The professor cut the sky open like a vengeful goddess and however terrifying that would've been there was too much gratitude spilling out of his heart. She was terrifying but she was hope.
When the war began and she fell into the chasm that hope was forever extinguished.
Dimitri would think of her singing, wonderful, it was the only way to remember her voice without it muddled with the others. But someday it would join the others that urged him to kill.
Originally posted on Ao3 on September 27 2019