#once again shout out to tumblr mobile and I pray to god my format doesn’t get obliterated

[officialtrashbin]

~* Middle Grounds *~

An Edelclaude appreciation ficlet for @villtura! There’s no excuse for this one, I’m just here to help feed the Edelclaude fans.

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A woman in the shape of a monster | a monster in the shape of a woman | the skies are full of them

- Adrienne Rich, Planetarium

***

She finds him shortly after the Battle of Eagle and Lion’s impassioned conclusion, and though their encounter is likely entirely incidental he allows himself to imagine she had witnessed his tragic fall from grace and experienced an inkling of empathy in his wake. When she gets closer, he sees now that her crimson armor is like a streak of blood red paint on the gilded landscape canvas he spotted Ignatz coloring just yesterday—a contrast so sudden, so striking he believes for a moment she might well and truly exist as only a painting: a conjured figment of his desire, or a memory of someone he’d never met but would like to.

“Do—” his throat is dry. He swallows and tries again. “Do you paint?” he asks, more clearly, as her face comes into view above him.

Edelgard starts back a step. “Who told you that?!”

So that confirms the art supplies she once carried back to her room from Bernadetta’s were not, as claimed, borrowed for an assignment. He opens his mouth in a wide smile and says, “You did, just now. It was only a question and I otherwise would have never guessed you have a talent for the arts.”

She stammers out a half-hearted reply before reconsidering her tone, opting instead to salvage her pride. “I’m not talented by any means. I just enjoy it, is all, and—you’re bleeding.”

He is definitely bleeding. It’s simple to deduce, both by the pounding headache he initially developed in his collision with the field and the dangerous warmth sliding down the left side of his face, that he’d struck either the ground hard enough to split open his eyebrow or maybe an upturned stone positioned just right.

“Did anyone see that?” he hears himself ask, and it only now occurs to him that he’s still under the same tree he vaguely recalls crawling to for some semblance of cover. If only his sisters could see their little brother all grown up and splayed in near pieces across the dirt—the bastard duke in all his glory.

“You mean Sylvain grounding you with an impressively hurled javelin?” Edelgard glimpses out to the greater expanse of the field and spots Ignatz and Lysithea, their hands over their faces as the Gautier boy gloats nearby. “...Probably not.”

Claude stares half-lucidly up at the lightning crack of bright blue sky formed by the close proximity of tree branches. He wonders if the fall has made him home sick, or if he shouldn’t have underestimated the way Leonie warned him at intermediate sword practice that arrows aren’t the only dangers from below. In a real battle, it would have been his real death. But like a painting, that’s only a speculative idea encompassing more what-ifs than he cares to dwell on. It isn’t a mistake he can afford to make back home. It isn’t a mistake he can afford to make again.

“Tell you what,” he says, “I’ll...cut you a deal.”

She gives him a sideways look. Slowly, he raises his hand and extends his fingers towards hers. An act of trust, he doesn’t say because he doesn’t need to. “Don’t tell Lorenz you saw me like this and I won’t tell anyone you have normal hobbies.”

Edelgard has no reason to agree to such terms but he notes the way her own fingers twitch in apprehension. She might be considering his words, mentally turning them over and over to find the truth somewhere underneath, as certain of him as he is of himself. Or maybe she’s going to bite, because that’s all this exercise has ultimately been for their classes: an act of aspiration against oblivion. The division of people who have hopes, who have dreams, and who know better.

Her hand flexes. Raises. Reaches out. He continues to gaze up at her from this angle, at the halo of warm hues around the back of her head from the low noon sun. It feels like looking at her for the first time. Like he didn’t spend every other day meeting her in the courtyard for tea, intaking the essays of her political ideologies and ambitions in spite of the world, knowing the future existed simply because she claimed it did—he commits this moment to memory because he doesn’t think he will ever fall in love with anyone else again.

He allows her fingertips to glide over his, pantomiming a snake sliding through the grass, unassuming but always inclined to strike—and to his surprise she grasps his wrist, bringing them together into a hold he hasn’t made the mistake of replicating since his last trip to Almyra.

Did she know?

“I might paint Gronder Field tonight,” she tells him when he misses his opportunity to continue the conversation because he’s preoccupied mentally tramping down his terror, and then releases her grip as if to forget it ever happened. Claude almost laughs but then she would know he’s shaking.

“You’ll have to show me sometime,” he says distantly instead, and closes his eyes against the glare of the sun.