Comms and Other Long FE Oneshots

The Dead Must Have Their Tribute

*For the Autumn Promptest on Wattpad. Golden Deer Post-Timeskip Spoilers.

There was a choking stench of blood in the air. Felix shivered in it all, on his knees in the stained grass. There was red on his hands and on his pants as well. He barely managed to swallow back his bile, looking out over his home.

Fhirdiad was ruined, ransacked, demonic beasts with those horrible, stupid masks crashing into houses and ruining it further. The hazy person among them shifted from a young woman with long white hair to an older woman with white skin and three wagging tails, to a somber figure with a mask of red and white and feathers arching out of a black cloak, to a mage with pale white, sagging skin and black robes crouched cackling over the dead.

The dead...

"Why do you kneel?"

Felix froze. The voice was soft, young, but it was still his. Against his will, his head turned.

Prince Dimitri stood over him- thankfully clear of any blood except for what was on his hands. His hair was longer than he'd kept it at the academy, back when... back when... "Why are you kneeling?" Dimitri insisted, blue eyes scrunched up in anguish. "They're still attacking. They've taken everyone, the..."

"I'm not you." Felix hadn't realized he was hyperventilating, he shot to his feet, nearly tripping in his hurry to get away. "Be... be... bego--"

"You would throw me aside again?" Dimitri hissed, expression morphing from pain to rage in an instant, and he approached, still in the accursed body of a child. "I understand why you hate me, but did they really deserve this?" Dimitri waved his hand towards bodies that Felix forced himself not to look at. "Annette, Gustave, your own father? Abandoned simply because you could no longer look at me?"

"I... owe... you..."

"The dead must have their tribute." All anger cleared from the child's face, and he smiled ever-so-prettily up at Felix, reaching up with his bloodstained hands.

Hands that had crushed a man's skull.

Hands that could hold a woman's gently at a ball in a distant past.

Hands that gripped a relic weapon likely until the very end.

"I owe you no-- I hate--"

"Shh, you'll never finish that sentence." The smile remained, a child's expression on a beast's face. "You know you could never get rid of me, Felix." Dimitri's small hands curled around his tunic, and he grew more serious. "I can't avenge them. It's up to you. The dead must have their tribute."

"The gravestones you slung around your neck are not mine to bear!" Felix cried, managing to move, grip the child's wrists. Throw him off. Throw him off. He's gone, he's dead, he--

"Kill them for me," Dimitri begged, his blue eyes wide. "Take her head and hang it from the gates of Enbarr."

"I'm not you--!" Felix sobbed, the bile rising in his throat again.

"Felix," he pleaded, his hands wrapping around Felix's wrists. "Felix--"

Felix!

Felix thrashed his way right out of Fhirdiad, into a bundle of blankets, and was barely stopped from falling onto the floor of a room by a strong grip on his wrists. "Let-- off--"

"Felix, you are panicking."

A heavily accented voice cut through the haze, and he froze. The grip on his wrists vanished, and then there was a presence carefully moving onto the bed with him, even though... he couldn't hear her moving over his heavy pants. "I will not harm you, you know this. I am going to be hugging you."