Felix couldn't stand how happy everyone was being. They were still at war; they had won the battle, but there was so much more to go. He was doubly irritated that now they had to change course all the way to Dierdru to save Claude from his own irresponsibility. And that was to say that Claude's letter was truthful and he wasn't working with the Emperor. Felix knew Eve trusted Claude, she had even spoke up in favour of them giving aid to their Alliance neighbours when the letter had been addressed earlier. But Claude wasn't particularly trustworthy and Felix remembered him for being a conniving bastard.
"What are you doing here?"
The words sounded harsher coming out of his mouth than he intended, but as he wandered the halls of the castle he was startled to see Eve standing there. He had expected her to be with the others, reconnecting and laughing jovially like she had the last time the Blue Lions thought she was dead.
"Oh, Felix." She regarded him with surprise before a flash of something sadder darkened her eyes.
"I thought you'd be with everyone else." He said, trying to soften his tone as he walked up beside her.
He turned to look at the wall she was gazing up at. Felix had found her in the weapon's hall, a part of the castle that used to be accessible to the general public on special occasions filled with memorabilia and replicas from kings prior. He wondered why she would be here of all places; he couldn't imagine her being invested in the wars that came before them while she was still living out the horrors of this one.
"When we got to Fhirdiad, I didn't trust anyone." She said, seemingly ignoring Felix's comment. "Dimitri and I had just rode from the battle that started this war, so I was understandably on edge."
Felix didn't say anything in response, allowing Eve the space to say what she needed to.
"I hid these here." She continued, reaching up onto the wall to grab two blades that Felix had failed to recognise as her Relic. "I know Hubert's been looking for them all war."
"They've been here this whole time?" Felix asked in disbelief, remembering when Sylvain had told him that her Relic was missing.
"I didn't want to keep them on my person— I was, rightfully, afraid of being captured." Eve explained as she turned the blades about in her hands. "I thought the best place to hide them would be in plain sight."
She gestured vaguely and Felix looked at the wall before them. There were not only actual weapons wielded by kings and lords before them, but there were replicas of some of the Hero's Relics that came from Kingdom families. Areadbhar, Luin, The Lance of Ruin, and even the Aegis Shield had replicas hanging on the wall; of course no one would think anything out of the ordinary about her two blades hanging up with other Relics.
Felix turned his attention back to Eve, watching her carefully. He knew there wasn't likely to be another moment where he would have her to himself like this. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her, so much he wanted to know about the last five years. But all the words seemed to stick in his throat because at the same time he did not want to ruin this moment with words. He just wanted to be with her, to witness the woman he had loved all this time living and breathing before him.
But he couldn't help himself. There was one question that had been burning in his mind since the moment she stood before him, and it had only amplified when she had stood beside Dimitri on that balcony.
"Was it always him?"
The words felt like vomit forcing their way up his throat and out his mouth. He watched for her response, trying to ascertain any information from it.
"What?" She turned to look at him, genuine confusion in her features.
"I want you to be honest with me." He said slowly this time. "Was it always him?"
"Always who?" Her brow furrowed, not any less confused.
"The boar." Felix stated. "Dimitri."
"What do you mean, Felix?" She asked.
"Back then, you always talked about struggling to choose between your heart and your duty. You acted like you couldn't possibly choose between me and him." Felix felt stupid for asking, but he had to know. "But then you chose him. You married him and you died for him and you came back for him. You say you loved me, but you came back for him."
"Felix, I didn't come back for Dimitri." Eve shook her head softly, a small frown on her lips.
"You expect me to believe that?" He scoffed, the anger he had been trying to hold back seeping through. "You let me believe you were dead for three years. You promised you would come home to me. You promised you would come back for the Millennium Festival. But you waited to come back until word spread of Dimitri's survival."
"The Great Bridge of Myrddin." She said.
"What?" Felix's brow furrowed.
"I came back because of the Great Bridge of Myrddin." She clarified. "There had always been rumours of Dimitri being alive. I had no way of knowing if the Empire knew I was actually alive, so I had to assume all of them were attempts to get me to reveal myself. I never put any stock into the rumours. So even when people started talking about Dimitri and the Professor being alive and the Blue Lions returning to Garreg Mach, I didn't go. I wanted to believe it so badly, but I couldn't get my hopes up. But when you won the bridge back I knew there had to be some truth to the rumours."
"Even without those rumours, did you have any reason to believe I was dead?" Felix asked.
"No, why would I think you dead?" Eve frowned.
"Because you promised you'd come back to Fraldarius!" Felix cried out in frustration. "Even if you didn't come back for Dimitri, you also didn't come back for me."
Immediately he snapped his mouth shut, embarrassed by his outburst. That was the truth of it and he knew it— he was fairly certain Eve knew it too. This wasn't about him believing she came back for Dimitri, though that is what he believed, it was about the fact that all this time she never came back for him.
"You were fighting a losing war, Felix!" Eve shouted back, though there was no anger in her voice. There was sadness and anguish and regret, but no anger.
She took a breath, running her hand through her hair that Felix hadn't noticed she had taken down. And for a moment he felt like he saw her mask slip— underneath it something tired and broken and…ancient.
"I…" Eve sighed, running her hand through her hair once more. "I tried, Felix. The first thing I did when I left Enbarr was head for Fraldarius."
He listened as she recounted her first weeks after leaving Enbarr. She had left the Empire capital with nothing but the stolen clothes on her back and had immediately planned her route to Fraldarius.
"I couldn't go west because that meant passing through Arianrhod." Eve shook her head. "And going through central Fodlan meant having to traverse mountains that I was ill equipped for. So that left my only option to be the longest route— heading east to sneak through one of the smaller bridges and cutting back west to reach Fraldarius through Aillel."
"Does that path take three years?" Felix scowled.
"I had to stop almost immediately for supplies." She brushed off his comment with a look that made him feel like a petulant child. "I got lucky and came across a convoy with food and general supplies. I sent the merchants away because I wasn't going to hurt civilians. But then I found a letter outlining where they were taking their goods."
Felix hated the way that look made him feel. There had been a handful of regrettable times he had been on the receiving end of it back in their academy days, and it had always brought to light the ugliness of the jealousy in his heart. He had always despised the way his love for her made him act like some kind of idiotic child, but at the same time could never help it.
"The convoy was meant for a camp full of Empire soldiers." Eve continued. "It was a stop on the way to everywhere else. Soldiers would first stop there for a few months before being deployed to wherever they were needed. And when I found that out I realised the opportunity I had."
She went on to recount how she left the cart where it was and waited for the camp to realise their delivery had never arrived. When they sent scouts to find out what had happened, she disposed of them. And when the scouts never returned and a group of more soldiers went out to investigate, she killed them as well. Little by little, she chipped away at their forces all while living off of the cart of supplies.
Finally, she had done what would later become her signature. Stealing an Empire soldier's cloak to conceal her identity, she used her Crest to dispose of a large group sent to find the others leaving only one survivor to return to the camp and report back.
Of course, no one would take the soldier seriously. He would tell of a ghost who they couldn't harm— a single assailant that took out a whole battalion. No one would believe him until weeks later when the ghost struck again.
"I hadn't formed my plan yet back then." She pursed her lips, eyes glazed over with memories. "But I knew I could do damage to the Empire's forces while I made my way to Fraldarius. And so along my path I kept doing the same thing, pillaging camps and convoys and leaving only one survivor to tell the tale."
"What changed then?" Felix leaned forward, anticipation making his heart race. He wanted a reason, any reason, to believe that she hadn't simply abandoned him. "Why did you stop your path home?"
"I was almost to one of the bridges to cross into Alliance territory." Eve said. "And I intercepted a letter writing about the dire situation on the front lines in the Kingdom. They said that as winter approached without the troops and provisions they had been expecting they would be forced to retreat. The Adrestian army wasn't built for a Faerghus winter and with how much disruption I had caused they weren't going to be able to make the push they had hoped for."
Suddenly it dawned on Felix, it was shortly after he and Sylvain and Ingrid had found that flier spreading news of Eve's execution. He had remembered that winter to be particularly harsh. But for those from Faerghus is was manageable. The loyalist forces had counted on the harsh winter putting the Empire at a disadvantage. And it had, more so than they had even hoped for. But now he understood it wasn't the northern conditions that had forced the Dukedom to retreat, it had been Eve's efforts from behind enemy lines.
So she had taken this knowledge and applied it to the rest of the war. She had continued within the borders of Adrestia chipping away at the Empire's forces. Eve had created a legend that left soldiers travelling on edge, she had disrupted aid from ever making it to the front lines. And Felix knew it was because it was the only way she thought she could be useful to them. She might not have been an actual ghost like the stories said, but she had certainly been living like one.
"You understand now, don't you?" Eve cocked her head to the side, watching Felix's features carefully.
"I understand what you did." Felix shook his head. "But why didn't you come home? Was all that more important than coming back to me?"
"It was." She said gently, regretfully. "I'm sorry, but it was."
"To hell with this war, to hell with Fodlan." Felix reached forward to grasp Eve's hands tightly in his, squeezing them as if afraid that if he let go she would disappear once again. "If you had just come home to me we could've gone anywhere. Stop acting like the future of this nation is your responsibility!"
"This is my mother's home." Eve murmured quietly. "I lost my home, it was my fault. I won't lose her's too."
They both looked down at their hands in silence. Felix knew he was holding her too tight, but his trembling hands couldn't loosen their hold on her as he finally processed what she had said.
"Wait, what?" He frowned at her.
"I've said too much." Eve said solemnly, withdrawing her hands from his.
"What do you mean you lost your home? Is Fraldarius not your home?" Felix balked.
"It is in all the ways that matter." Eve smiled gently before leaning forward to place a bittersweet kiss on his forehead. "I'm sorry, Felix."
His words stuck in his throat as she walked away from him. What could he possibly say to her? He had known all along, but now it was so painfully obvious that he would never know her. For as long as she lived this life of being whatever she believed others needed of her, he would never truly have her.
Eve wandered the castle for most of the night. Before the war, she hadn't been to the Kingdom capital in quite some time and even then she had mostly been confined to servant's quarters and passageways when she wasn't with her lord. But wandering the halls now she felt more like a ghost than she had all these years living like one.
On the occasions she had been to the castle, the place had been bustling with life. Lords and Ladies and attendants and servants had filled every crevasse of the place with their quick steps and loud voices. But now the halls were empty, only the faint sound of revelries happening in the grand hall and in the town below reaching Eve in the remote corner she had found herself in. As she turned the corner down the corridor, though, she heard a new sound. She could hear someone pacing and saw a door at the end of the hall with a beam of light flickering in the gap where the door just barely didn't meet the stones below.
"Hello?" She said timidly as she came to stand before the door.
"Who is it?" A gruff voice that Eve immediately recognised as Dimitri's came from the other side.
"It's Eve." She said, hesitating a moment before adding, "may I come in?"
"If you wish." He answered.
Eve waited a beat as if expecting him to rescind the invitation. But when he didn't speak again, she carefully opened the chamber door and stepped into the quarters. She recognised the room almost immediately as the King's quarters from the time she had accompanied Rodrigue to comfort his friend who was bed-ridden with grief after the loss of his first wife. She wondered how she had managed to meander all this way and why Dimitri had come here.
All was silent as she closed the door behind her. Dimitri was facing away from her, looking out the window as the fire in the hearth cast shadows all around. She wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling.
"I'm sorry." She whispered, her voice sounding unbelievably large in the silent room.
"For what?" Dimitri kept his back to her and she wished she could see his face.
With his back to her and the harsh shadows of the fire thrown all about the room, she could not discern his mood. Was he angry with her? Defeated? Did any of those emotions he once held for her all those years ago still stand?
"I should have come back sooner." Eve looked down at her hands in shame, still feeling the effects of how tightly Felix had gripped them earlier.
When she looked back up, Dimitri was right in front of her and she could see in his face everything she had feared— or perhaps hoped— would be there.
He still loved her.
"I don't care how long it took, I only care that you have returned to me." His voice was barely a whisper, but it seemed to echo in the room around them.
Half a decade worth of words unsaid stuck in Eve's throat as she looked up at him; her eyes traced every feature that the last five years had changed on the face she once knew so well. A mixture of sadness and rage flared in her chest as she examined the scar that raged over one of his eyes, his iris now cloudy and unseeing.
"Forgive me, I was not expecting company." Dimitri said suddenly, reaching for the desk beside them where his eyepatch laid.
"No." Eve reached out on instinct, grabbing his wrist to stop him.
He looked at her, puzzled, and she dropped her hold on him to instead bring her hand up to his face. She could feel his one seeing eye watching her closely as she gingerly reached up to trace the scar along his other lid.
"What did they do to you?" She asked with a shaky voice, whether from grief or anger she could not tell.
"I don't remember." Dimitri shook his head and she let her hand fall back down to her side.
"Don't remember?" She frowned with a furrowed brow.
"Up until very recently, I'm afraid I was not quite myself." He watched her reaction carefully as if worried she would turn away from the man he had become. "Much of the past five years is an unintelligible blur in my mine."
"I understand." Eve nodded.
She did, in fact, understand all too well. Eve viewed the past five years in two distinct halves— before she escaped Edelgard's grasp and after— and everything in between was just a jumble of grief and bloodshed.
As she thought of this, Dimitri reached out to cup the back of her neck, his thumb caressing the spot just above her pulse. Eve was about to ask what he was doing when he spoke.
"What did he say to you?"
"What?" Eve's brow furrowed again in confusion.
"Hubert." Dimitri clarified. "When they took you away. What did he say to you?"
The spot where Dimitri's thumb grazed her skin burned as Eve remembered the thin line of a scar that sat there. And all of a sudden she was transported back to when this all began.
Hubert had her braced against him with a dagger to her throat the second his mages had cast Silence on her. She could barely move and she knew the dagger was more a threat meant to subdue Dimitri than her. Despite the weight he spell caused in her limbs, Eve still wriggled against Hubert's firm grasp.
"Don't do anything you'd regret, Your Highness." Hubert sneered when Dimitri struggled to free himself as the guards moved to shackle him.
As he spoke, he dug the dagger into Eve's flesh. She felt the sharp prick of skin being broken and the warmth of blood trickling down towards her collarbone.
"Let him go!" She shrieked, disregarding her own comfort to once again fight Hubert's hold on her.
Dimitri was knocked to his knees, his arms bound behind him, but as their eyes locked Eve could see he was only filled with concern fro her.
"You must be tired." Hubert whispered in her ear as he dug his dagger further into her flesh. "Fighting so valiantly to protect everyone at the Battle of Garreg Mach. And then flying straight here with no rest."
Eve froze in his grasp as she realised what he was insinuating before he said it in plain words.
"I wonder, do you even have one in you?"
"You let them take you to protect…me?" Dimitri asked.
"Why do you sound so incredulous?" Eve half laughed though it held no humour.
"I don't…" Dimitri shook his head as if to clear it. "I guess I thought the only person you would sacrifice yourself for like that would bear the Fraldarius name."
"I am your wife, am I not?" Eve cocked her head to the side, eyes searching his face.
"You don't have to be."
Dimitri looked away and Eve was stunned silent a moment at his response. The Dimitri she had known five years ago would have been elated to hear her say such a thing with such conviction. But now he would not meet her eye and Eve could not discern what he meant.
"I don't?" She echoed, making an effort to sound neither hopeful nor disappointed.
"We made a promise to have each other until the day we died." Dimitri still would not meet her eye as he spoke. "One could argue that both of the individuals who made that promise have, in fact, died."
"What do you want?" Eve stepped forward, closing the already slim gap between them in an effort to force him to look at her.
"I want the same thing I have always wanted." Dimitri finally looked down at her as he shook his head lightly. "For you to be happy."
"What if you were my happiness?" Eve whispered as if afraid of her own words.
"Pardon?" He swallowed thickly.
"My memory of you was the only thing that kept me fighting." Eve explained. "It was my unwillingness to let your death be in vain that gave me the strength to escape Edelgard's clutches."
"That is revenge, not happiness." Dimitri shook his head again.
"And in the moments of quiet," Eve continued, "when I was all alone it was your kindness that gave me hope. Remembering your kind heart, the boy you used to be all those years ago, made life seem less bleak. You gave me peace in a lifetime of war."
And despite what she had told Felix, despite what she had been telling herself ever since she departed to join the resistance's forces, Eve let her heart speak rather than her head.
"I came back for you."
It was unclear who moved first— or perhaps they had both moved in the same instant- but the next thing Eve knew, their lips had met in what was perhaps the most bittersweet kiss she had ever shared with any other being. It was a gentle kiss, their lips pressed together tenderly. And though this kiss held more longing than any of their previous kisses it was not quite as desperate as those prior.
Eve had no idea how much time had passed as she was lost in Dimitri's kiss. At a point, both of his hands had reached up to hold her face to his. And now Eve was made aware of a slight saltiness that she could taste on her lips. It took her a moment longer to realise that what she was tasting were tears— Dimitri's tears as she wept silently into their kiss.
When Eve pulled away to look up at Dimitri, she saw a brief glimpse of the boy she had known five years ago. And without saying it, Eve knew his tears were ones of relief; he had thought he had lost her like everyone else he had ever loved. But she came back to him.
"We should rest." Eve said finally. "We have a long day of travel ahead of us if we are to make it to Dierdru in time to save Claude."
Dimitri simply nodded, his breath still shuddering from his sobs. With a nod, Eve moved to turn away towards the chamber door when he caught her wrist. Eve turned back to look at Dimitri with a curious stare.
"Will you stay?" He asked, voice barely a whisper.
"Of course." Eve nodded.
And for the first time, the two settled into bed as husband and wife.