Chapter Text
1
Ashe is ten, almost eleven, when they meet.
It’s 5 o’clock. Christophe has after-school classes and soccer club practice, so Ashe wanders around the school with no particular destination in mind. He goes to the gardens first, because it’s easiest to pretend he’s an adventurer in the middle of a forest there, finding new medicinal plants (white-petaled flowers) and noting down interesting species of monsters (a bright orange butterfly), but the gardener chases him out after a few minutes. He tries the library, but it’s only open to the older students this late in the day—he heads to the playground, but there aren’t any other kids his age.
So Ashe walks through the hallways, ventures into parts of the school he hasn’t seen yet, areas he knows he isn’t allowed in—the empty high school classrooms, a deserted room that once belonged to a literature club, a storage room filled to the brim with memorabilia. Ashe picks through them all until his hands are black with dust, making up stories for each item he finds. Sometimes he tires of waiting for his older brother like this all the time, because there are only so many things to do alone in school, but Ashe has grown used to it—and anyway, it leads to him making more discoveries like this, even if it is just a dark, dank storage room that smells of wet rat.
And then, as he clambers down steep metal stairs that jar his legs with each step, he hears it. A splash, when he had just passed by the empty swimming pool earlier.
Silently, Ashe hurries over to the swimming pool, the stink of chlorine in the air so heavy it’s almost tangible. The usually-locked gate leading to it has been left ajar, and Ashe peers inside, squinting at a cluster of figures at the far end of the pool. Late afternoon sunlight is streaming in, and the ceiling shimmers with reflections of the glittering water.
“Freak!”
The voice echoes through the room, and then—
Splash, again, and only now does Ashe’s vision sharpen enough for him to see one of the boys, blonde and green-eyed, standing at the edge of the pool. He shoves someone’s head down into the water—and holds them there.
Their—victim, Ashe supposes is an appropriate word—struggles uselessly, thin flailing arms sending ripples out across the water. They’re short and small, and no match for the boy who lifts their head up just long enough for them to take a deep, desperate breath of air.
Long enough for them to lock eyes with Ashe, all the way across the room.
For a long, cold second, Ashe does not move.
And then the boy pushes them down again, laughing all the while. His friends—two of them, one flanking each of his sides—are saying something, but Ashe can only hear a ringing in his ears.
Ashe had gotten in a fight once. The situation had been fairly similar—someone was picking on his younger sister, and he had jumped in to help her. He’d been promptly beaten black and blue and had to be sent to the infirmary for the rest of the day after he passed out. Afterwards, Christophe had told him, “I can’t say I don’t approve, because I would’ve done the same, but you’re not exactly made of muscle. Either pick your battles and cut your losses, or learn to go around them.”
He turns around and bolts out of the room.
Of all teachers he could have run into, Ashe is glad it’s Professor Manuela who’s nearest—in his panic he can’t even form words, and the most he can manage is to drag her by her long white coat towards the swimming pool. “What is going on here?” she snaps, first looking at Ashe and then over to the boys, who yelp and scatter at the sight of her. “Oh! No, you come back here, you little rascals!”
But Ashe is less concerned about the fate of the bullies, and more about the student they’d been—he shudders just thinking the words—trying to drown. When he sees nothing and no one else at the edge of the pool, he takes a confused step forward—and then breaks into a run, when he sees the bubbles rising to the surface.
Ashe is weak. Ashe can’t win fights. Ashe certainly can’t swim.
Yet he isn’t thinking when he leaps into the pool, uniform and all, and grabs hold of the body slowly sinking to the bottom.
Briefly, his eyes stinging from the water, his clothes sticking heavily to his skin, Ashe thinks this would look nice in a book—the sunlight dancing across the waves, only reaching until a certain level until it’s completely filtered out, and the darkness of the ocean depths Ashe just barely manages to keep the other student from falling into. His grip on the student’s arm seems to shock them conscious, for all of one second, before their eyes—the color indistinguishable underwater—slip shut again.
Then he drags the both of them back up to the surface, and immediately both oxygen and logical thinking return to Ashe—this isn’t the ocean, this is his school, and the student in his arms isn’t moving. “Hello?” Ashe tries, ignoring the tremble in his voice. “Are you—Are you awake? Hello?”
Had Ashe been too late? Had it taken him a second too long to find Professor Manuela, a minute too long to reach the swimming pool, an hour too long to go down the stairs? Had he witnessed someone drown, and, inadvertently, let it happen?
“Wake up,” he whispers, staring down at the student’s face. This close, Ashe can finally tell that the student’s a boy, with long purple hair and the prettiest eyelashes Ashe has ever seen. “Please be okay.”
He almost doesn’t notice when Professor Manuela hurries over to the edge of the pool, bending slightly to tug Ashe and the boy closer to her. “Come on, climb up,” she urges, frowning down at the still-unconscious student. “Oh, how did this happen? Ashe, come on now, get out of the water. You’ll both catch colds.”
“Is he okay? He’s not—” breathing, Ashe can’t say, because the word rings with the sort of finality he doesn’t believe in. How had this student fallen in at all? Had the bullies pushed him? Or had his head been held down in the water long enough for…
Professor Manuela helps them both up onto solid ground again, then moves the student to lie flat on his back on the floor, tilting his chin upward. Ashe watches, a little numbly, as she goes through what look like well-practiced motions—she presses down on his chest the way Ashe’s seen people do in movies sometimes, and only when the boy’s eyes fly open and he coughs and hacks out mouthfuls of water does Ashe let go of the breath he was holding in.
“Wh—What—” His eyes are wide and wild, and when he whirls around to face Ashe, he looks like a cornered animal finding itself caught in a trap. “The—Where are the—”
“You’re safe now,” Professor Manuela says, her voice softening as she lays a hand on his arm. He stills, looking up at her but saying nothing. “We got to you just in time. Come on, let’s get you to the infirmary—let me just see if you need anything else. Can you walk?”
He nods, slowly, as if he still doesn’t quite understand what’s happening—his gaze drifts back to Ashe again, but Ashe can’t tell what he’s thinking based on those eyes alone. Professor Manuela guides the boy with a hand on his shoulder, but when she looks back at Ashe, she smiles wearily. “You did well, Ashe. It’s late, you should—”
“I’ll go with you,” he interrupts. Then, at Professor Manuela’s somewhat-surprised look, “Let me go with you?”
After an unsure glance down at the student, who stares fixedly at the floor, Professor Manuela sighs. “Oh, fine, but calm down and don’t look so worried. You’ll get wrinkles, and you’re only ten.”
At the infirmary, Professor Manuela leads the boy over to one of the beds and asks him some questions about how he’s feeling—when he answers, mostly with only one or two words and completely avoiding the question about why the bullies had tried to drown him at all, she nods and says he’s free to stay here and rest until he wants to go home. Then she returns to the front desk, leaving Ashe and the boy alone in the backroom.
“Um… what’s your name?” Ashe asks, drying his hair off with a towel Professor Manuela lent him. He had his gym clothes to change into, but the boy apparently doesn’t even have a schoolbag (anymore, he’d said), so he settled for drawing the blanket up to his chin.
The boy doesn’t look at him, and it takes a while before he responds, as if he’s thinking about his answer. Which is weird, since it seems like a pretty easy question. “Yuri.”
“Yuri.” It’s a pretty name. It doesn’t sound like a common one, certainly. “I’m Ashe. So, uh… are you okay now?”
“Mm.”
It’s barely an answer, but Ashe will take it. “I-I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything myself,” Ashe stammers. “If I’d tried to fight those boys off, I wouldn’t have been any help.”
“Mm.”
Ashe frowns. “Why… did they do that?”
It’s a question Professor Manuela had tried to wheedle the answer out of three times earlier, and a question Yuri had ignored all three times as well, but for some reason Ashe asks it anyway. For a long while, there’s no answer—then Yuri finally breaks his gaze from the ceiling to look at Ashe, for the first time since the one-sided conversation. “Do they need a reason?”
“Oh.” Ashe worries on his lower lip. “I guess not.” He’s never understood bullying. The teachers are always talking about how they should be kind and understanding and think about what the bully might feel, which kind of feels like a joke, because Ashe is pretty sure what the victim might feel is a little more important in these situations. How could it get serious enough that they’d drown someone? He once read that it only took 60 seconds for an adult to drown, and 20 seconds for a kid their age. And how long had Yuri been in the water for?
“Don’t know,” Yuri mumbles, and only now does Ashe realize he had said all of that aloud. He blinks, and Yuri is giving him another look from the bed, having drawn the blankets further up until it covers his mouth now. “But I think you’re right.”
“Huh?”
“The victim’s more important,” Yuri repeats, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up in a telltale sign of a hidden smile.
As it turns out, Yuri spends lunch break alone at the rooftop, which explains why Ashe has never seen him around until he actively searches the guy out. It takes him a while, and a lot of sneaking around to bypass the watchful eyes of teachers in parts of the school he shouldn’t be in, but eventually he makes his way up to the rooftop.
Sunlight sparkles off lavender hair. Yuri sits cross-legged, leaning back against the railing, gaze angled up towards the clouds.
“Yuri!”
Yuri jerks in surprise; Ashe hurries over, nearly dropping his lunch tray on the floor between them. “So this is where you were! I spent forever looking for you.”
“What are you doing here?”
That hadn’t been the welcoming greeting Ashe had been expecting. “Um… eating with you?”
“Why?” Yuri scowls.
“Because we’re friends?” Ashe tries. They are, aren’t they? As far as Ashe is concerned, he’d rescued Yuri from the swimming pool in a heroic act of… heroism, and now they’re friends. Is it that difficult to understand? Or does Yuri not consider that friendly enough for him?
Yuri crosses his arms. It takes Ashe a second to realize he doesn’t have a lunch tray with him, or anything nearby that might hint at him having eaten anything at all. “No, we’re not.”
“Then we will be,” Ashe says; then, before Yuri can argue, “Haven’t you eaten? Here. Sweet buns.” He pushes his tray under Yuri’s nose until Yuri has no choice but to hesitantly take one of the sweet buns off the plate. “You should eat. You’re really thin. I bet that’s why the bullies went after you.”
“Because I’m thin?” Yuri mutters, looking amused.
“Because you look easy to push around.” Ashe frowns. He has a feeling he’s going to be doing that a lot with Yuri. “If we’re friends, I’ll make sure to protect you if anyone goes after you again. But no one should be going after you in the first place!”
Yuri rolls his eyes. “You’re not even stronger than me or anything. Actually, I think you’re weaker.”
“Yeah, probably,” Ashe agrees, to Yuri’s evident surprise. “But the teachers like me.”
“That…” Yuri trails off, takes a bite of the sweet bun, and chews it slowly before eventually responding. “You’ve got a point.”
Ashe never really finds out much about Yuri. He knows little things, that Yuri likes sweets, that Yuri thinks makeup is pretty but pretends it isn’t, that Yuri is allergic to dogs and cats which is really disappointing because this means he’ll never be able to visit Ashe’s house, that Yuri tenses up whenever they pass by the bullies in the hallway. But Ashe never really finds out much else, like where Yuri lives or if he has siblings or what his mom’s job is. He doesn’t even know his last name. Yuri itself might just be a nickname.
But they’re friends, even if Yuri tries to say they aren’t, and that’s enough for Ashe. During breaktime and after classes, he brings Yuri to all his favorite spots—the garden, definitely, but also the little areas in the school they both know they aren’t allowed in. Yuri isn’t much for stories, but he listens to Ashe whenever Ashe thinks up a new quest for the two of them to undertake, and Yuri always plays along and helps Ashe slay the mighty dragon hiding behind some old cardboard boxes in the storage rooms they infiltrate. Ashe takes to cooking even more often, finding ways to reach the top shelves without Lonato’s or Christophe’s help, and makes Yuri lunch whenever he can.
And in return, Yuri brings him gifts—books, specifically, that Ashe can’t find in the library and are always too expensive to buy in the bookshops, even when Lonato says they can more than afford it. “I just find them,” Yuri explains, every time Ashe asks where he gets these. “It’s no big deal. I don’t need them, but I thought you would.”
“Oh.” There are unspoken words buried in those sentences, words Ashe thinks he’s only too familiar with. “You shouldn’t have, Yuri.” Why didn’t you get more for yourself?
Yuri always just shrugs. On some days, he says, “I wanted to.” On most, he simply waits for Ashe to read the book aloud to him.
Ashe supposes another thing about Yuri he finds out about is that he isn’t much for words, especially when they’re around other people—he speaks mostly through nodding or shaking his head, or just giving Ashe a variety of looks that Ashe learns to differentiate. Maybe Yuri’s only talkative around friends, Ashe theorizes, but then Ashe never sees him with anyone else, so it’s not like either of them would know. It’s a little frustrating, because Yuri has a nice voice, and Ashe thinks he would sound nice singing.
Still, that just means every word and sentence Ashe gets out of Yuri brings a smile to his face, even if it’s usually just a dry remark.
When the next school year starts, on some unbelievably hot day in the first week of August, Ashe is asked to clean up the folders and files in the teacher’s table—only the first day, and already it’s a mess, because apparently they hadn’t bothered to move everything from one classroom to the next, whatever. But it’s okay, because aside from always having extra time after school, Ashe knows this just makes the teachers like him more.
It had been pretty lonely without Yuri around for the first day, though. But he tries not to think about that—sometimes Yuri didn’t come to class for days, then popped back in after nearly a week of absences without even a hint of an explanation. Ashe had learned to stop expecting one.
He rifles around in the desk drawers, separating useful files from pointless ones, thinking vaguely about the extra, uneaten packed lunch in his bag—then Ashe blinks, and looks down at a loose sheet of paper dated back to last school year. A class list, he realizes, filled up by the students themselves. Ashe remembers their homeroom teacher asking them to answer it with their nickname and add in information, like their favorite food and their birthday or something.
Ashe probably shouldn’t, but he skims through the names curiously anyway—this isn’t his class, and he doesn’t recognize many names. But at the very end of the list, written in small, unassuming letters: Yuri. Beside that, Birthday: August 12.
“Ashe?” Their new homeroom teacher peers around the doorway; Ashe immediately shoves the paper back into the dusty plastic envelope he had found it in. “Are you all done there? You can go home once you’re finished.”
“Oh—yeah, almost done…”
After the teacher leaves, Ashe peeks back down at the paper. August 12… that’s in just a little under a week. Surely Yuri will be in school for his birthday, won’t he? Besides, it’d be trouble if Yuri doesn’t go to school so early into the academic year.
More importantly, though, Ashe needs to learn how to bake a cake. Right now.
Yuri doesn’t come to school for the next four days.
Which is fine. Totally fine. Ashe tells himself this for the rest of the week as he pores over recipe books in Lonato’s library and goes through batch after batch of not-sweet-enough cakes (that his siblings eat up) until, finally, he gets himself just the right flavor that he’s sure Yuri would like. If only Yuri had a phone or a Facebook or literally anything Ashe could use to contact him with, Ashe just knows he could somehow coerce Yuri to go to school through a picture of the cake alone.
But it’s fine, because Yuri will go to school on his birthday. And even if it weren’t his birthday, he has to go to school—any more absences and the teachers will call his mom or issue some kind of punishment. Yuri had never really stayed home like this for so long, so Ashe is sure he’ll show up soon.
He does not.
Yuri isn’t in his classroom when Ashe peeks in, as he’s been doing for the past four days. Yuri isn’t at the rooftop, watching the clouds pass by overhead. Yuri isn’t at the gardens, staring idly at the flowers swaying in the breeze. Yuri isn’t in the library, picking out books with nice covers and silently handing them to Ashe. Yuri isn’t in any of the storage rooms, sitting atop a box and swinging his feet just shy of touching the floor.
Ashe’s arms are getting tired of carrying the heavy cake around the entire school. And he has a feeling it isn’t going to taste very well the longer it’s out in the August heat. So where is Yuri? It’s his birthday, so maybe he’s celebrating at… at home, or something, and yet why hasn’t he come to school for days? Why hasn’t he come to school since the start of the year? Why doesn’t he ever tell Ashe anything?
At the next corner he turns, Ashe lifts his gaze up to blink at the sign in front of a door—the infirmary. He rushes in, still doing his best not to jostle the cake around, and Professor Manuela looks up from where she’s sitting by the desk. “Professor?” Ashe manages, somehow managing to keep his voice from breaking. “Do you know where Yuri is?”
Professor Manuela frowns. “Sorry, dear. Who?”
Yuri itself might just be a nickname… “P… Purple,” Ashe stammers out. He’d say it’s all he can come up with, but the rest of the words his mind conjures—pretty, long lashes, too quiet, likes sweets—probably won’t help. “He has purple hair, and eyes, and… and, it was that time, at the pool…”
“Oh, him,” Professor Manuela says, murmuring something that sounds like a name under her breath, too soft and fast for Ashe to hear. “He didn’t tell you? He transferred.”
Ashe freezes in place.
“Who knows where, though? He didn’t write anything for which school he was going to. It’s possible he dropped out entirely.” Professor Manuela’s expression softens, and she opens her mouth to say more, but by then Ashe can’t hear anything over the softest of sounds—the hum of the air conditioning, the creak of the door as he pushes it open, the shrill buzzing of cicadas in the nearby garden.
He doesn’t know how long it takes him to walk to the soccer field, but when he finally catches Christophe’s eye from where he’s standing with the rest of his teammates, Ashe’s legs are aching. “What’s wrong?” Christophe asks. “Your friend’s still not at school?”
“He didn’t tell me…”
Christophe crouches down, ignoring the other soccer club members calling him out to play, and holds his hands out. “I’ll carry that. You wanna go home early today?”
Ashe clutches the cake box tighter. “N-No. It’s okay. You go.” And then, before Christophe can convince him any further, he makes a break towards the bleachers and sits himself down on the seat as far away from the field as possible, gripping onto the box like it’s the last thing he trusts himself not to lose.
Why didn’t Yuri tell him? Had he been planning to leave when they all went home for summer vacation? Had he been planning to leave, and hadn’t told Ashe? The last time Ashe had seen him, they’d been reading in the garden together, because the last day of school meant the gardener went a little lighter on them and let them stay there longer than they were allowed. But the book was too long, and Ashe hadn’t been able to finish reading it aloud—he still stumbled over some of the longer words that were harder to pronounce.
“It’s okay,” Ashe remembers saying, when he’d closed the book and stood up from the rock he’d been sitting on. “I’ll finish it for you when we get back to school.”
He hadn’t seen how Yuri had looked. Had Yuri known, then, that there would be no finishing that book that has been burning a hole through Ashe’s bag for days? Ashe doesn’t want to let this go so easily. Surely Yuri remembers. Surely Yuri wants him to finish the book, too. Surely…
Ashe doesn’t realize he’s crying until the tears hit the box on his lap. Inside, the battered cake has already begun to melt, icing drooping sadly down its sides.
2
“Hey, Ashe!”
Ashe turns a page of the book, glancing up just long enough to catch the librarian giving Caspar a weary glare. “Come on, keep your voice down,” he admonishes, though he knows that’s hardly going to change anything. “What is it?”
Caspar grins, turning around to look at someone behind him. “Remember I told you I wanted you to meet someone? This is Lin!”
“Linhardt,” a soft, sleepy voice mumbles. “Really, at least get the rest of my name out.”
In retrospect, Ashe thinks looking up from his book at that time was the biggest mistake of his high school life.
Linhardt is Caspar’s best friend. Apparently he was previously homeschooled by his doctor parents, which is why he has an unnecessarily extensive knowledge of medicine, but they had finally decided to enroll him into the same high school Caspar (and Ashe) study in.
And he is pretty.
Ashe’s only experience with romance is in books, as should be expected. Most of the novels he reads have romance subplots, even though they’re honestly overused and so cliché that Ashe can predict all the tropes the moment the hero and the damsel in distress meet. And that experience really isn’t the sort of experience he needs for a crisis like this.
This being sitting across Linhardt at the lunch table, with Caspar scarfing down his lunch and generally being very unhelpful next to him. Normally, Ashe talks—he tries to get Caspar to study for their next test with him, or he narrates some… interesting events that happened throughout the day (because with Claude as a classmate, everyday is interesting), or anything. Caspar usually listens, because he tends to be too busy eating to respond coherently.
Now, though, all Ashe can really do is stare blankly at his lunch and pray to whatever gods are listening to have mercy and take him now.
Linhardt, at least, doesn’t seem to think the silence is at all awkward—he’s reading something under the desk, some thick book that isn’t from the library, nor is it one of their textbooks. But is Ashe really expected to just sit here, in complete silence, for, what, 40 minutes? He’s on the verge of pulling a page from Caspar’s book and eating as loud as humanly possible just so he has something to do that isn’t zone out, but just watching Linhardt’s long fingers turning the pages of the book is enough to make Ashe lose his appetite. In a good way. In a bad way? He has no idea.
“What is it?” Linhardt suddenly asks, in that sleep-soft voice of his, and Ashe guiltily looks up from where he had been staring under the table. “You look like you have something to say.”
“Huh? I mean, oh, yeah, uh…” In Ashe’s head, one brain cell repeatedly beats the other brain cell up and shakes it by the shoulders until a singular coherent thought floats into existence. “W-What book are you reading? It looks… interesting.” That statement is interesting in itself, considering the only thing Ashe can see from here are indistinguishable, upside-down letters on the pages.
Linhardt brightens. Ashe’s heart feels ready to bounce right out of his chest and splat wetly on the cafeteria tiles. “It’s the third book of this trilogy. Have you heard of it?” He lifts the book up to show Ashe the cover, and Ashe feels his eyes widen at the familiar author and cover design. “It isn’t as good as the first two, and some parts feel shoehorned, but it’s at least developing the relationship between these two characters…”
“The swordsman and the mage, right?” Ashe blurts out—now that he’s on familiar territory, this whole talking thing is suddenly much easier to do. “Are they really talking more in that one? I’m only caught up with the second book, and I hated that the author let them have, what, two scenes together and nothing else when it feels like they have amazing chemistry!”
“If you only have the second book, you can borrow this when I’m done reading,” Linhardt offers, so casually that Ashe suddenly remembers who he’s talking to. “As long as you promise not to get food all over it like Caspar, anyway.”
“Hey!” Caspar swallows a mouthful of meatball and says, “That was a one-time thing! And you wanted to get rid of that textbook so your dad wouldn’t make you study it anymore, so really, I was doing you a favor, Lin!”
“Right,” Linhardt says, the corner of his lip curling up in an amused little smirk. Predictably enough, it’s suddenly all Ashe can focus on, for the next 40 minutes and for the next four days.
Ashe had never really believed books about high school when they said being 16 or 17 or whatever appropriate high-school age was hard, but at 15, he’s starting to wonder if those books had made points after all. He searches up articles online, making sure to clear his history before Christophe gets on the computer, but none of them are any real help, because mostly he needs to know what to do now that he does, in fact, like boys, and maybe he’s not using the right keywords or something, but he really isn’t looking for… He doesn’t even want to think about some of the results that came up.
Not for the first time, he wishes Yuri were here—or that he at least had some way of talking to Yuri, wherever he is. Yuri always seemed to know what to do when they ran into problems. But it’s been so long, sometimes Ashe wonders if Yuri had ever really existed at all.
As promised, Linhardt lends Ashe the book, and Ashe devours it like he needs it to live. As it turns out, Linhardt is the sort of person who writes in his books, a habit he gained after having to keep himself awake and entertained while reading medical textbooks, so during class Ashe lets himself trace the tiny comments scrawled in the margins—this fight scene is too drawn out, this conversation is useless, I hate this character I hope he dies at the end. Ashe imagines hearing all these in Linhardt’s voice, perpetually bored and monotonous, and smiles to himself when the teacher isn’t looking.
It occurs to him that it’s probably the same sort of smile his classmates get when they’re texting their crush, and the thought makes Ashe want to crawl into a hole and hibernate for as long as it takes to get Linhardt out of his life.
But like all things, Ashe very slowly begins to get used to it. They have lunch together, and Ashe actually starts speaking a little normally. They watch Caspar’s soccer practices together, and it turns out they both know more about the sport than they care to. They go to the library together and have very serious discussions over their opinions on characters of different books. And sometimes, during archery club, Ashe sees Linhardt and Caspar sitting at the side, Caspar grinning every time he catches his eye and Linhardt looking up from his book every so often to nod at him.
Ashe makes sure to spend extra time nocking his arrow and poises his arms just so, but by then Linhardt’s always back to reading. Which, okay. Ashe probably should have expected that. It’s not like there’s much to see on his arms anyway. But that doesn’t stop him from trying every time he gets the chance.
Somewhat unfortunately, it means that under the influence of familiarity and friendship, the nervousness and stuttering begin to morph into what Ashe realizes is clinginess. He can’t stop himself from touching Linhardt’s elbow for no real reason while they’re talking, or sitting a little closer than necessary if they’re on a bench or a couch. Is it a bad thing? It’s probably a bad thing, because Ashe would never touch someone if they didn’t want it, but then Linhardt never says anything or moves away or looks annoyed. He always just… looks like himself, which is to say sleepy and bored.
“Caspar,” Ashe says, one day, when Linhardt had decided to stay home during their PE class, “I’ve got a question.”
“Is it that important?” Caspar whines, leaning forward. They’re doing a practice game of baseball today, and Ashe had reluctantly agreed to a bet that Leonie’s team would win against Lorenz’s. “Okay, quick, while they’re taking a timeout! What is it?”
Ashe frowns. He never has to worry about Caspar judging or thinking badly of him, mostly because Caspar does very questionable things, like leaping out of the school building from the third floor, that Ashe knows he can’t do without him. But… “Do you ever… Um, have you ever had a crush?”
Caspar frowns. “No? Gross?”
Of course. “Let’s say you have one right now,” Ashe decides.
“I don’t, though—”
“Let’s say you do,” Ashe insists. When Caspar huffs and crosses his arms, but still looks like he’s at least listening, Ashe continues. “Would you… you know, theoretically… have a crush on a… guy?”
For a moment, Caspar looks perfectly blank, his expression reminiscent of the face he often wears whenever exam season rolls around. Then he says, “Ohhh,” like he’s comprehending Ashe’s question five seconds later, and then another moment of silence. Just as the tension is about to eat away at Ashe’s skull, Caspar says, “So, you too!”
“Me—” Ashe sputters. “What do you mean, me too?”
Caspar just grins and gives him a thumbs-up. “I get it! You should ask Lin for help!”
“Linhardt?”
“Yeah! He’d know more about this than me. Shame he’s not here right now.” Caspar looks around the gym like Linhardt’s about to just stroll in the front doors. Which Ashe remembers Linhardt actually has done, several times, just a few minutes before PE would have ended.
Ashe worries on his lower lip. “I don’t want to talk to Linhardt about this.” He tries putting as much emphasis on Linhardt’s name as possible, if only to get the point across to Caspar without actually needing to say the truth aloud.
As expected, Caspar just frowns again. “Aren’t you guys friends?”
This is hopeless. “Never mind,” Ashe mumbles. “Uh, sure, I’ll talk to him about it or something…”
He does not talk to Linhardt about it. What exactly would he gain from that aside from making his stupid crush even more obvious to the other guy? Ashe is content with just this, with just lending each other books and listening to Linhardt drone on about medicine and reading together in the library—like now, a few days after that pointless conversation.
It’s quieter than usual today, with less people around, so Ashe has to lower his voice a little too when he waxes poetic about the cleric in the latest fantasy series they’ve grown invested in. “It’s so cool that he knows so much about this tiny niche topic that everyone just sort of glosses over and takes for granted…”
Ashe looks up when Linhardt doesn’t reply right away, and realizes he’s already nodding off. “Oh, Linhardt… um, do you want to go home, or…”
“Mm. No, I’m fine, I’m awake…” Linhardt yawns, and his eyes flutter open, the deep ocean-blue color standing out against his pale skin. “I agree. And this mercenary character is the only one who ever listens to them when they’re rambling. I find it sweet.”
Sweet… Ashe swallows, looking down at his notebook. They’d been studying together at first, but had quickly given that up in favor of a more interesting conversation. There are eyes doodled in the margins of his notebook, big and blue, and Ashe hastily flips to a blank page before Linhardt can notice. “U-Um, yeah,” he murmurs, only capable of looking at a spot on Linhardt’s cheek and no further. “Yeah, it’s nice, right? When someone listens to you.”
“It also means the cleric gets to explain a lot about the Crests in the universe,” Linhardt says, evidently completely missing the atmosphere Ashe had been aiming for, “which means we get more lore than we know what to do with. So it doubles as a bit of worldbuilding, too. And there’s all the talk about their weapons, which normally I wouldn’t find very interesting, but when they explain the mechanics behind their Caduceus Staff—”
Ashe rests his chin on the edge of his palm, trying to keep himself from smiling dopily, but Linhardt’s interrupted fairly early on in his tangent by someone stopping next to their table. “Caduceus Staff?” a girl repeats, tilting her head—Annette, Ashe remembers. His classmate. They don’t really talk much, but he knows she’s at the top of their class in science. “Are you reading those books too?”
Linhardt blinks. Every time he gets cut off when he’s talking, it always seems like he needs a second or two to process the situation and respond accordingly. “Oh, yes. Hello.”
Annette beams. “Hi! I’m Annette! Oh, Ashe,” she chirps, turning to face him, “I didn’t know you liked this sort of stuff! So you these are the books you read under the table during class all the time, huh?”
Ashe feels his cheeks heat up. Had she caught him smiling like an idiot at the books sometimes? He hopes to the gods she hasn’t. “Haha, uh, yeah… I didn’t know you did, either, Annette… B-By the way, this is Linhardt,” he says, just to direct the attention away from himself. “He, uh, he’s really into this sort of stuff, too! It’s not just me!”
The way he worded that makes it sound like the books are something taboo, but Ashe tries not to think too hard about it. Finding out you like boys? No big deal. Talking to girls? Still a complete mystery, as far as he’s concerned.
Linhardt nods, giving Ashe an odd look. “Nice to meet you.”
“Who’s your favorite character?” Annette plops herself down on the seat beside Ashe, their elbows knocking together, and Ashe almost falls off the chair entirely. “I really like the mage! She’s super cool, and she can use a warhammer!”
She’s looking at Ashe when she speaks, and Ashe’s brain short-circuits. He looks to Linhardt for help, then realizes he shouldn’t have expected Linhardt to help him with literally anything involving human interaction, because Linhardt just stares blankly back at him, so Ashe goes with the first thing he thinks of. “Um, I like the, uh—the cleric! Yeah, I like the cleric best!”
From the corner of his eye, Ashe can see Linhardt shaking his head, as if suffering from secondhand embarrassment. It surely can’t be worse than firsthand embarrassment.
Thankfully, Annette takes it in stride and grins widely. “Ooh! He’s quiet and lazy and saves his energy for only the more important stuff, so it makes you think he’s super smart but trying to hide it! The cleric does sorta look like your type, Ashe!”
“Hahahaha,” Ashe laughs, perhaps a bit hysterically. He sneaks a glance at Linhardt, who suddenly looks very interested. “Yeah… uh… what other books do you read, Annette?”
When Annette has to leave—apparently she had dropped by the library for an errand she had completely forgotten about for half an hour—Ashe slumps against the backrest of his chair, exhaling deeply and feeling like he had, for some reason, run the longest marathon of his life. “That looked exhausting,” Linhardt observes, looking amused. He hadn’t said much throughout the conversation aside from a few comments here and there. Good for him.
“She’s nice,” Ashe says. It’s true, anyway. It’s just…
Linhardt tilts his head, looking thoughtful. “Do you like her?”
Ashe blinks. “What? Uh, well, she’s a good person. She helps me out sometimes during science cla—”
“No, I mean,” Linhardt sighs, flapping his hand, “do you have a crush on her or something?”
“Huh?”
“You know, you were all… stuttery and blushy and what-have-you.” Linhardt snickers. It’s not the first time Ashe has heard him laugh like that, in a smug, vaguely-evil sort of way, but Ashe reddens at the sound all the same. So what if it’s kind of cute? “You don’t even like the cleric. Isn’t your favorite the thief?”
Geh. Ashe had been hoping Linhardt had forgotten about that. In Ashe’s opinion, there are two types of favorite characters—a character you see yourself in, and a character you like-like. It should be obvious which category the cleric fits into. “T-That’s not it…”
“So, what? Were you just shy?” Linhardt shakes his head. “Boring… You know, some of my classmates are already getting into relationships. Or at least getting crushes.”
Ashe stiffens. Linhardt sounds one word away from asking Ashe about his nonexistent love life, and Ashe is not ready for that conversation. “What about you? Do you like anyone, Linhardt?” It’s hard to imagine someone as generally apathetic as Linhardt liking someone, but Ashe is willing to do anything to get out of this situation.
“No. Gross.”
Of course. Like Caspar, like Linhardt. Then Linhardt waves a hand in the air again, and Ashe unfortunately remembers his current predicament. “So what about you?”
“Uh… me…?”
“Yes, you. Do you have a crush? If not on Annette, anyway.”
Ugh. Of course Ashe does. By this point, he’s not sure if Linhardt knows and is just doing this to tease Ashe about it or something, but that sounds like too mean, even for Linhardt. But… if Linhardt doesn’t know, then what better way to let him know than now? This stupid crush has been wreaking havoc on Ashe for two, maybe three months by now, and he’s honestly starting to worry it’s just going to get worse the longer he lets it grow.
He swallows. Now or never. “Um… I… I do, actually.”
Linhardt leans forward, eyes sparkling in interest. “Go on,” he urges. It’s kind of cute, how unassuming he acts when he actually adores gossip. Then again, Ashe finds a lot of things about Linhardt cute when they really aren’t, or at least really shouldn’t be.
“You know…” Ashe forces himself to maintain eye contact, if only because it’s polite. “I-I wasn’t lying. The cleric really is my favorite character.”
Linhardt’s brow furrows, but he says nothing.
“He, uh… He acts really aloof, but he actually cares a lot for his close friends,” Ashe babbles. “He’s really knowledgeable and intelligent, but he doesn’t show it off, because he only really cares about the things that interest him most… and I-I like that! I admire him for it!” Is he still making sense? If he stops now, though, Ashe is sure he’ll never be able to say anything like this again, and so he pushes through despite his last two brain cells desperately screaming for him to stop. “And! I really like his long hair! I think he looks very p-pretty!”
Okay, that’s enough, his mind says, like they’re tugging on the reins keeping his mouth shut. You’ve gone above and beyond your embarrassment limit for the day.
Across the table, Linhardt sits in perfect silence, staring at him like he’s learned a particularly interesting fact, but not interesting enough to warrant a reaction out of him. So, the same expression he gets whenever a classmate he dislikes regales him with a strange-but-useless story. “I… see,” Linhardt eventually says.
Ashe buries his face in his hands. “Can you forget everything I just said, please.”
“You like me.”
“Yeah.” Ashe peeks out from between his fingers, but Linhardt’s expression hasn’t changed. “I… I like you! So… there. Now you know.”
“Hmm.” And then, without a shred of emotion, “That’s nice. Thanks, I guess.”
“Wh… Huh?”
“Sorry I don’t feel the same,” Linhardt says, not sounding very sorry at all, “but you’re not the first one to tell me this.” Ashe hears the unspoken “get in line” loud and clear. “I never knew people got crushes so easily. I’ve been cornered under staircases and asked to go to the rooftop five times now…”
When Ashe is too shocked to form words, mostly because he’s trying to imagine other students their year confessing to Linhardt, Linhardt frowns and starts looking genuinely concerned, which Ashe hadn’t thought possible until now. “Is there… anything else you want me to say?”
“W-Wait! Just like that?” Ashe squeaks. He doesn’t mean to, his voice just ends up going a pitch higher than it should. “Are you… Don’t you hate me or anything? For liking you?”
“No?” Linhardt looks extremely confused. “Why would I hate you for liking me? That seems very contradictory.”
Of course Linhardt would say something like contradictory in casual conversation. “How… How did the others confess to you?”
Now Linhardt just looks put out. “Terribly. One girl simply would not stop bothering me until I learned how to tune her out, and then she had the gall to lure me beneath the staircase with some cake just so she could tell me about her love for me. Which is strange, because we’ve barely talked, and she’s only known me for about a month.”
“Cake?” Ashe’s voice definitely cracks this time. He’s not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Linhardt nods. “Another boy wrote me a love poem and left it in my shoe locker, and invited me up to the rooftop to meet him. I only went because he promised a gift in the post-script.”
Love poems can have post-scripts? “And… what was it?”
“Socks.”
Ashe laughs—the image of Linhardt being gifted a pair of socks, of all things, as part of a love confession, is enough to make him just a bit more hysterical than he had already been. “What—What kind?”
Linhardt looks slightly worried for him. “Well… they were soft. I tried them on at home—after washing them, of course—and they were fairly warm. So not bad, all in all. But the poem really was too awful for me to stomach, so I had to turn him down as well.”
Ashe laughs again, and this time he can’t stop—he has to push his chair away from the table to give himself space to keel over and clutch his stomach. Knowing the librarian is probably glaring at him from behind is just making him laugh harder, and when he looks up to meet Linhardt’s bewildered gaze, he almost starts crying entirely. “Sorry,” he gasps out, “I just—wasn’t expecting this. Any of this.”
“Me neither,” Linhardt replies evenly. “Shouldn’t you be a little, er… sadder?”
Ashe blinks. “Oh. Yeah, probably. But…” Mostly it feels like a weight’s been lifted off both his shoulders and chest, and for the first time in a while, breathing feels a little easier than it has been for the past few months. “I don’t know. I’m just glad.”
“Glad…?”
“That we’re still friends.” Ashe smiles.
Linhardt seems as unfazed as ever. “Oh, of course. That’s very like you.” He turns a page of his book, though he hadn’t been reading it, so Ashe wonders if he’d just needed something to do with his hands. Cute, he thinks, before waving the thought away—no more of those. “Want to go get sweet buns?”
Ashe grins. “I’ll pay this time.”
On one perfectly normal morning, a few days after the worst love confession of all time, Annette barrels into the classroom clutching a crumpled letter in her hand. “Ashe!” she shouts, waving the paper around and generally attracting the attention of every student in the room. “Is—Is this from you!?”
Ashe doesn’t even have time to process the question, much less answer it, before Annette is talking again, loud enough that Ashe is fairly sure the classroom next door can hear her. “I’m so sorry! You’re a really nice guy, Ashe, and I think you are cute, in a scruffy, puppy-dog kind of way, but I just don’t like you that way! I’m sorry to turn you down like this, really!”
The room goes quiet after her outburst. Behind him, Ashe can hear Leonie desperately trying to hold back her laughter. And beside him, Raphael not-so-subtly whispers, “Damn, bro, that sucks.”
“Uh, Annette,” Ashe starts, feeling ready to melt under the intense stares of nearly everyone in the room, “I didn’t—”
“You idiot!” someone shouts, followed by the screech of chair legs against the floor. From her seat at the back, Lysithea stomps up and grabs the paper out of Annette’s hand—a cutesy little heart sticker flutters sadly to the ground. “This is from me! How could you not recognize my handwriting!?”
Annette gapes. “What?”
Lysithea fishes a sticker sheet out of her pocket. It’s absolutely full of the same cutesy heart stickers. It’s also absolutely not what resident heavy metal rock band listener Lysithea is into, at all. “You saw these in the convenience store and said they were cute so I bought them and I was supposed to give these to you somewhere private! Idiot! You complete idiot!” And then she stomps off, all 4 feet and 10 inches of her radiating sulkiness.
“Wait! Lysi!” Annette yelps, hurrying out the door. “I didn’t—hey, hold on!”
“Shut up! Go away!”
“Stop running! You’re gonna fall!” Annette kicks the door shut behind her, and the only sound for a good few seconds is the rapid thudding of their footfalls outside the corridors.
Caspar nudges Ashe with his elbow. “Looks like you got rejected, dude.”
“I-I wasn’t—”
“Rejected before you even got to ask,” Caspar muses, shaking his head like a wise sage. “That’s a new level of sad, man.”
Rejected twice within the same week, more like, Ashe thinks—but he laughs a little anyway, because he already knows he and Caspar are going to tell Linhardt about this over lunch later.
3
Dimitri, Ashe thinks, is just too nice.
Dedue had been the one to introduce them, mostly because Dimitri went where Dedue did, and Ashe and Dedue partnered up often in class. Whenever their last lecture of the day was finished, Dimitri always showed up at the classroom door, waiting for Dedue. Ashe found it sweet, but he’d never really paid much attention to the other guy until he had to visit Dedue’s dorm to drop something off.
As expected of Ashe’s luck, Dimitri had been the one to answer the door. “Oh,” he’d said, staring somewhere around Ashe’s neck instead of at his face, “good morning.”
It was mid-afternoon, but Ashe decided against correcting him. “Hi there.” For some reason, instead of just asking for Dedue, he’d gone with, “You’re Dimitri, right? Dedue’s best friend?” Maybe it was just the instinctual need to fill up the silence somehow, as if knowing it was one way to deal with a person who didn’t speak much.
“Ah, um, I don’t know about best friend, but we are close,” Dimitri allowed. He still wasn’t looking at Ashe. “You can, ah… You should come in and wait for him. If you like, of course.”
He talks like a posh socialite, Ashe noted. Not someone he thought Dedue would get along with, but Dimitri seemed like an okay person so far. “Sure, thanks.”
Everything on Dimitri’s side of the room—or what Ashe presumed was his side—screamed luxury: an elegant desk lamp, an ornate dresser drawer, shoeboxes from prominent brands stacked on top of one another. A porcelain tea set was sitting delicately atop a study desk filled with yet more expensive-looking knickknacks, including what looked like a ceremonial dagger. There was a huge fur coat hung up on a rack by the wall, the same coat Ashe often saw Dimitri wear whenever he stopped by their class.
“Wow,” Ashe couldn’t help but murmur. Dedue’s side of the dorm was much the same as Ashe’s own, after all—neat, simple, a potted plant or two—and it just exacerbated the quiet splendor of Dimitri’s. “Your room’s… really nice!” You’re stinking rich!
Finally, Dimitri looked up from his messy curtain of bangs—at 19 years old, he had apparently been in the middle of transitioning from “spaghetti head” to “rat’s nest,” at least according to Sylvain—and then blinked, eyes wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. His eyes were ice blue, the sort of shade you’d see in the waters of the tundra. “Oh,” Dimitri breathed, very quietly.
Out of lack of things to do in response, Ashe politely smiled back. “Um. Yes?”
“You look really nice,” Dimitri suddenly said.
“Haha,” Ashe, dressed in a ratty old sweater and legitimately-ripped jeans, blandly replied. Then, when it became obvious Dimitri hadn’t been joking and was still staring at him like a deer in the headlights, “What?”
He was saved from having to continue the conversation when Dedue walked in, a plastic bag in one hand and packed lunch in the other. “Dimitri, I brought—”
Dedue paused, standing at the doorway, as he stared at Dimitri staring at Ashe.
“H-Hey, Dedue!” Ashe stammered, hurrying over to his side. “You left your folder in my room yesterday, so I thought I’d come give it back—haha—okay, well, gotta go!” He turned around and gave Dimitri a halfhearted wave out of courtesy, though Dimitri didn’t look like anything was registering in his head at the moment. Then, without waiting for anyone to reply, Ashe scurried out of the room and only until he reached the end of the hallway did he let himself breathe again.
Dimitri’s stare was unnerving, and Ashe wasn’t used to it—it had felt like the predator locking its eyes on its next prey. But Ashe assumed he’d overthought, as he was prone to doing, and waved it away—maybe Dimitri was just awkward around strangers. Yeah. That had to be it, right?
At least, that’s what Ashe tells himself when Dedue comes by his dorm, Dimitri trailing shyly along behind, and offers Ashe an elaborate bento box as a gift, “for no reason”—which sounds highly unlikely, because no matter how rich someone is, they wouldn’t give away fresh sushi and excellently-cut crab to a virtual stranger—and it’s what Ashe tells himself when the next time Dimitri visits after class, he offers to carry Ashe’s bookbag for him. Which is sweet, but unnecessary. Really, Dimitri, it’s fine—and, oh, there he takes it.
Ashe has no choice but to blink incredulously at Dimitri’s arm muscles just barely visible under his coat sleeves as he effortlessly lifts Ashe’s bag over his shoulder.
“He likes you,” Dedue tells him, as if this isn’t painfully obvious.
“O-Oh, does he,” Ashe responds, as if he isn’t painfully aware. “Um… he shouldn’t.”
Dedue shrugs. “That’s how he is. It takes a while, but once he gets less shy around you, he should be a little more… talkative. And then perhaps you two can become better friends.”
The idea has appeal. After mulling it over for a second, Ashe quickens his pace a little and falls in step beside Dimitri, who had started walking ahead of them a few minutes ago. “Hey, Dimitri,” Ashe greets, tilting his head up a little to make eye contact. Under the ragged blonde hair, he can just make out Dimitri’s eyes flicking down to look at him. “I see you around a lot, but I don’t really know much about you! So, uh, what’s your major?”
“Oh! Um…” Dimitri looks away again, and Ashe can see the faintest tinge of pink on his cheeks. Is he flustered from a question like that? “Political science. With, ah, psychology as a minor.”
“Cool! What are you studying right now? It’s almost midterms, and I’ve heard poli sci has a lot of readings.”
Dimitri’s blush deepens, and it stands out brightly against his pale hair. “Um, foreign policy, mostly? It is nothing too difficult so far. My father taught me most of what I know—oh, he works in the government, he’s an ambassador…” He looks back at Ashe, and for the first time Ashe sees his smile—it’s small and shy and barely there, but it’s something. “I-I apologize. Did I talk too much…?”
“No, no, you’re fine!” Caspar and Linhardt could say thrice that amount of words in half as much time. A parent working in the government, though… it would explain the posh vibe Dimitri seemed to unconsciously give off. And the money. “Do you want to be like your dad, then?”
Dimitri shrugs awkwardly. “Perhaps not an ambassador as well, but something related to the government does not… sound bad. Psychology is more of a personal interest than anything.”
Ashe chances a glance behind them—Dedue gives him an encouraging nod. “I like psych too,” Ashe says, doing his best to maintain eye contact despite Dimitri’s best efforts to avoid it. “It was my third choice, actually. Which psych are you studying?”
At the dormitories, Dimitri heads into the room first, and Dedue waits a little by the doorway until Dimitri seems sufficiently distracted. “He really likes you now,” Dedue says, although Ashe can’t tell if it’s a statement or a warning. “You should probably prepare yourself. He can be very… enthusiastic about his affections.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Ashe argues.
Dedue shakes his head like Ashe has no idea.
Come the next day, when Dimitri shows up after their last class again and tells Ashe, very earnestly, “I would like to court you,” Ashe realizes he really did have no idea.
“Uh,” is all Ashe manages. Dimitri doesn’t look anywhere close to joking. Beside him, Dedue shakes his head very slowly, as if he were watching a car crash in slow motion. Ashe clears his throat, and though he has no idea what sort of response he’s supposed to give, he doesn’t want to leave Dimitri hanging. “That’s… great?”
“Is that permission?” Dimitri asks, frowning.
Not for the first time, Ashe looks to Dedue for help. Dedue just continues shaking his head. Looks like the car crash is just starting. “I… I don’t—what?”
Now Dimitri looks confused, too. “Let me try for a few days,” he decides, seemingly on his own. Which is just as well, because it’s not like Ashe would have known what to decide on anyway. “If it is not to your liking, tell me what to do next.”
“I don’t think…” But Dimitri is already walking away, looking deep in thought. Ashe sighs. “What just happened?”
“Dimitri comes from a very traditional family,” Dedue finally decides to explain. “He studied in a private school for a few years, mostly surrounded by childhood friends, and… well, he was also taught about courting rituals. It’s something to do with how his parents’ parents did it, so on. So…”
Ashe gawks. “But—we barely know each other! We spoke, like, four times!”
“Once used to be enough,” Dedue muses, much to Ashe’s horror. “But I wouldn’t let it bother you. If it gets too much, just tell him to stop. This is his first time dealing with… er… feelings of this sort, I suspect.”
When Dedue puts it like that, Ashe supposes it doesn’t sound completely weird. Maybe by “court,” Dimitri means stuff couples usually do when starting out, like going to cafés or the movies together? Maybe Ashe could just sort of… think of it as going out with a friend. Yeah. Not so bad. He’ll find a way to turn this car crash into something salvageable.
Once again, Ashe is hopelessly wrong.
First of all, Ashe just barely manages to convince Dimitri against holding a meeting between them and their parents, because Ashe has no inclination to talk to Mr. Very Rich Ambassador Blaiddyd, and he doubts Lonato does either. Then Dimitri asks what Ashe would rather do instead, and Ashe meekly suggests talking over coffee; this unfortunately means Dimitri brings him to the most expensive coffee shop Ashe has ever set foot in. A single large cup is nearly ¥1,000—Ashe doesn’t even want to look at a slice of cake.
At least Dimitri becomes easier to talk to the more he warms up to Ashe—he’s especially fond of his childhood friends, who all attend the same college they do, though scattered throughout different courses. And he’s far more passionate about psychology than he is politics, because whenever Ashe gets him to talk about it, Dimitri doesn’t stop for the next hour and a half.
So, okay, expensive coffee (that Dimitri pays for, despite Ashe’s protests). Not a bad first start, right? Ashe can bear with it, and listening to Dimitri is nice.
But it doesn’t stop there. Next, Dimitri asks for Ashe’s favorites and interests, and Ashe mumbles something about books, because that’s the easiest answer he can give, and he doesn’t expect Dimitri to do anything with the information. A few days later, Caspar nudges Ashe awake and tells him he’s got a gift, and that’s how Ashe wakes up at 7:30 in the morning to a half-dozen, hardbound, exclusive, signed books.
The downside is that Dimitri probably didn’t know what sorts of books Ashe likes, because the topics range from handling finances to computer science to erotica, of all things. Ashe doesn’t even want to know why Dimitri has that, or how he’d gotten it signed, but, well, he’ll take it. There’s a book on magical realism mixed in the pile, which is a great read and one of Ashe’s favorite genres, as well as a poetry collection that has him occupied for the better part of the following weekend. Dimitri had also taken the time to scratch out the prices, thankfully, so at least Ashe can feel marginally less guilty about how expensive these must have been.
The final straw is when Dimitri presents him with a dagger.
“What is this,” Ashe says. He means for it to come out as a question, but his voice has magically removed all inflection from the words.
Dimitri beams. “A traditional dagger. The kaiken, to be more specific. It is a type of tantou sword, primarily used for self-defense, but in modern times it is more commonly used for ornamental usage. Please accept it!”
Right. Weapons buff. Over the past few weeks, Ashe has learned more about traditional Japanese swords than he thinks he could have learned in a lifetime without Dimitri. “T… Thanks, but aren’t these, well. Expensive?”
“Our family has plenty,” Dimitri insists. The blade of the kaiken blinks up at Ashe, friendly as a dagger can be. “They, um… These daggers are usually gifted to the people we want to protect. This meaning was ascribed by my family, not by traditions, but this does not change my feelings.” And he looks so pleading in that moment that Ashe has virtually no choice but to accept the dagger, even though he’s quite sure he’s never going to use it.
“Dimitri, I really appreciate it,” Ashe starts, smiling a little when Dimitri visibly brightens, “but, um… you really don’t need to do any of these… traditional courting rituals or whatever.”
“Oh.” Dimitri frowns. “Whyever not?”
“Well, it’s the 21st century,” Ashe points out. “Not saying you haven’t been very kind, but… there are other ways to show your feelings, I guess? That don’t involve huge sums of money?” He briefly remembers how his way of confessing to Linhardt those years ago had been through a character from a book, which is very 21st-century of him, albeit embarrassing.
Dimitri still looks a little lost, so Ashe gingerly adds, “I’m just saying, less might actually be more sometimes?” because outright telling him Ashe can’t see him as more than a friend sounds too awful. Besides, Ashe likes to think his fairly lukewarm reactions have made that sentiment obvious by now.
“Ah!” Dimitri claps his hands together. “That makes sense!”
Ashe really doesn’t want to know what Dimitri just made sense of. “So, uh, you get me?”
Dimitri nods, now looking entirely serious. “Less might be more. I understand. Thank you for being honest with me, Ashe.”
“O-Oh.” He sounds so solemn, Ashe wonders if Dimitri really did understand what Ashe was trying to say there. “You’re fine with that, then?”
He means to say more, like, “It’s okay if we stay friends?” or “I’m sorry I can’t return your feelings,” or “I’m sure someone else out there will be better for you,” but Dimitri is nodding again and abruptly walking away before Ashe can add much else. Oh… is he sad? Ashe hadn’t even gotten to clarify things, or at least reassure Dimitri that Ashe still wants to be friends with him. But, well, maybe Dimitri is the sort of person who needs to take time for himself first? Ashe really wishes he were better at this sort of thing, but Linhardt had been the only person he’d had much experience with, and the other guy isn’t exactly a role model.
Ashe sighs and turns back to head to his own dorm. Hopefully in a few days, he could seek Dimitri out and see if he would be ready to talk by then.
A few days pass. Dimitri approaches Ashe out of nowhere while Ashe is on his way to his next class and says, “I like you very much,” without any fanfare whatsoever.
Predictably enough, Ashe drops his books all over the floor. It really doesn’t help that half his mind is still preoccupied with his upcoming midterm exam, and he can’t think up an appropriate response in time before Dimitri’s brow scrunches in concern. “Ashe,” he’s saying, very seriously, “I took what you said to heart. Less might be more. I hope my words, simple though they may be, remain as genuine as they would have been if I had embellished further.”
A passerby in the hallway oohs before ducking into a nearby classroom.
“I… okay,” Ashe manages, but doesn’t really get any further than that. His only experience with relationships has been rejection—he’s wholly unequipped for the exact opposite of such. “Dimitri—”
Dimitri’s eyes widen. “‘Okay?’ Is that a yes? Do you feel the same?” He leans forward, smile the widest Ashe has ever seen it, clasping Ashe’s hands in his own. “Do you mean it? Do you accept my feelings?”
And—Ashe knows he should refuse, because he really, really, really doesn’t see Dimitri as more than a friend, but people in the hallway are starting to stop and stare at them, and the last thing Ashe wants to do is embarrass Dimitri in front of a bunch of strangers who’ll doubtless spread the story around in their free time. “Sure, okay,” Ashe weakly manages, prying his hands out of Dimitri’s iron grip. “Uh, can you help me… my books…”
“Ah! Right! Yes!” Dimitri crouches down and immediately scoops Ashe’s books in his arms, a smile on his face the whole while. “Thank you very much! I am around ten minutes late to a class now, so I must get going, but we absolutely have to speak later! Thank you!”
And then, before Ashe can stop him, Dimitri is pressing a kiss to his cheek in the middle of the hallway.
The veritable crowd of people gasp in near-unison. Dimitri drops the books in Ashe’s arm, then hurtles down the corridor, leaving Ashe to stare blankly at the empty air in front of him, the chaste touch of his lips spreading warmth through his face.
So maybe this relationship won’t be a totally bad idea after all?
Their first date costs just under half of their tuition fee, which says enough about the whole experience.
It’s a fancy restaurant, because of course it is. Dimitri asks Ashe when he’s free, Ashe lists off a few dates, and suddenly he’s got a reservation at a place he can’t even pronounce the name of. There’s the whole five courses, the table napkins have embroidery at the edges, an entire vase of flowers sits at the center of the table and hides Ashe entirely from Dimitri’s view… and there’s wine, to wrap it all up. Not really what Ashe had in mind for a first date, though to be fair he hadn’t had anything in mind, period.
But Dimitri is… nice. Ashe supposes his behavior doesn’t really change much, aside from how he smiles wider and bumps the back of his hand against Ashe’s more often.
And the kisses. Good gods, the kisses.
They’re mostly on the cheek, so it’s not like they’re being indecent in public or whatnot, but Dimitri is generous with kisses. He does it when he visits Ashe’s room, leaves Ashe’s room, sees Ashe in the corridors, and sometimes for just no reason at all. Ashe does his best to reciprocate as much as he can, but it’s hard to get used to when, once again, his only experience with kissing involves books (and some badly-written fanfiction here and there, but he doesn’t talk about that). Seeing Dimitri smile like the sun whenever Ashe does it does feel nice, though.
But that’s Ashe’s problem—it only feels nice. Not heart-stopping, mind-blowing, world-ending happiness or whatever he thinks he should feel when his boyfriend is happy. Just… nice, in a vague sort of way, like reading a positive news article in the morning and feeling happy for someone far away. Because that’s what Dimitri feels—far away. Distant. Someone Ashe can be—and wants to be—friends with, but not someone he thinks he can go any further with.
“You don’t have to keep spending so much money on me,” Ashe meekly says once, looking down at another book that had been too expensive for him. For Dimitri, it’d been nothing more than a glance and a nod. “Less is more, right?”
Dimitri frowns. “But you wanted that.” His speech, at least, has become a little less formal.
“Well, yeah, but I feel bad if you keep buying me way too expensive things.” I can’t even pay any of this back.
“Oh. Hmm. I see.” Dimitri looks down at the pavement—they’re walking down the street a few minutes away from campus, because the weather is nice out today and they needed a break from all the studying. “I am sorry,” he eventually murmurs. “You’ve told me that many times, but I seem to keep forgetting.”
“N-No, it’s okay! Don’t worry about it.” Ashe tries not to wince—he hates slipping up and making Dimitri uncomfortable. A lot of things make Dimitri uncomfortable, and Ashe is still trying to keep track of the ever-growing list. “As long as you understand, it’s no worry. And thanks, really.”
Dimitri smiles, but it’s obviously forced. They walk in silence for another minute, early evening breeze ruffling their hair and clothes, before Dimitri speaks again. “I am sure you are already aware,” he says, “but I grew up… surrounded by people like me. People of my… status.”
“Yeah.” The bourgeoisie, Ashe’s mind helpfully fills in. The elite. The socialites. The nobles. I could keep going.
“I did not realize how different others were from us until recently.” Dimitri kicks a pebble on the sidewalk—it skitters across the ground before falling into the gutter. “And I did not realize it would be this hard to make friends outside of my immediate circle. So… thank you for being patient with me.”
It really isn’t a big deal, Ashe means to say, until he realizes Dimitri has stopped walking—he turns around to face him, cycling through every possible response, before wisely settling on, “Uh?”
They’re standing under a coffee shop awning. A light rain has begun to fall, dotting the ground and pattering against roofs and windows.
Dimitri looks Ashe in the eye. “May I kiss you?”
Ashe isn’t stupid enough to think Dimitri’s asking for permission for a cheek kiss. He swallows, steels himself, and nods instead of saying anything, because he doesn’t trust his voice to be steady.
So Dimitri kisses him, under that coffee shop awning, under the first rainfall of the month, and Ashe lets him.
He only remembers to smile when Dimitri does.
Ashe stares down at his lap. “Am I a horrible person?”
Linhardt, as dispassionate as ever, barely looks up from his book. “And… what do you want me to say to that?”
“I think med school has made you even worse.”
“You think? I know it did.” Linhardt turns a page, but sighs and pushes it away, rolling to lie on his back on the bed instead of on his stomach, and gives Ashe an inquisitive look. “So this is all because you don’t want to tell someone you don’t like them?”
“It’s not as simple as you make it sound…”
“I think it is.” Linhardt narrows his eyes. Ashe is just glad he doesn’t have any pillows on hand at the moment, because he would have thrown them at Linhardt’s face by now, as stress relief. Linhardt has a bit of a hittable face. “What’s the matter with some nice, open, direct communication?”
Ashe sighs. “Not everyone can be as… straightforward as you.”
“You can say blunt. You were thinking it.”
“I… Okay, yeah, I was.”
“Of course you were. I’m very perceptive.” Linhardt closes his eyes, and if he went to sleep right then and there on Caspar’s bed, Ashe would let him. He’s not sure why he’d even asked the other man for advice on something like this. “Try it.”
“What? Nice, open, direct communication?”
“Yes. It might change your life, you never know.” Linhardt sounds like he might roll his eyes if they were open. “That’s the easiest and fastest solution I have to offer.”
Ashe frowns. “Any harder and slower solutions, then?”
“You could always take advantage of him and—”
“Never mind,” Ashe hastily interrupts. He may not like Dimitri in that way, but he isn’t about to take advantage of him, in any way whatsoever. That’s just going to make Ashe a really horrible person. “Come on, really? That’s all you have?”
“It’s what literally every other person would tell you, Ashe.” Linhardt cracks a single, deep blue eye open to look at him. “I’ve never met this Dimitri, but you make him sound like a decent person, so I am quite sure he’ll understand. Maybe not right away, though, so I suggest preparing for that.”
“Yeah, that’s reassuring…”
Ashe lies back down on his own bed, staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t want to keep doing this. Not just for his sake, but for Dimitri’s, too…
A knock on the door. “Ashe? May I come in?”
Oh, hell. Ashe had completely forgotten Dimitri was dropping by today. “Yeah, sure.” On the other bed, Linhardt doesn’t budge, though he does open both his eyes, which are now shining in curiosity. Great.
Dimitri enters like he always does: pushing the door open just a bit, peering in and looking around cautiously, then finally stepping inside and immediately shutting the door behind him. It’s like he’s permanently on guard for someone hunting him down. He smiles at Ashe—that same, million-watt smile everyone swoons over—but that fades quickly when he sees Linhardt lounging on Caspar’s bed. “Oh, hello. This is…”
“Linhardt. He’s a friend from med school. Just visiting.” Ashe clears his throat. Linhardt is very clearly pretending to not be paying attention. “Lin, this is Dimitri.”
Linhardt grudgingly pushes himself into a sitting position, his long hair all askew. “Nice to finally meet you,” Linhardt greets, though his voice is, as usual, impeccably insincere. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you.”
Dimitri reddens. “H-Have you?”
“But I should be off,” Linhardt dismisses, standing up and grabbing his coat; “Caspar’s waiting at the field. I’ll leave you two alone.” He gives Ashe a meaningful look, then strolls out of the room with a curt nod in Dimitri’s direction.
“Sorry about him,” Ashe apologizes, once the door closes behind Linhardt’s back. “He’s always been like that. Hold on a moment, then, I’ll get the tea.”
Dimitri sits stone-still at the edge of Ashe’s bed while Ashe rummages through his drawers for the teabags. He’d found a tea shop the other day, tucked in an oft-overlooked street, and the chamomile had been good enough to buy some home for Dimitri. “I don’t know many of your friends,” Dimitri says.
Probably because I don’t have many, period. “Well, you know Caspar and Dedue,” Ashe says, “and now Linhardt. That’s sort of it.”
“You seem like the sort to have a large friend group.”
“Do I?” Ashe murmurs. Sure, he’s friendly, but that doesn’t really equal having lots of friends. If anything, he’s too wary to be more than acquaintances with most of the people he encounters. Caspar was a special exception—when they first met late in elementary school, the boy had latched onto Ashe’s arm and refused to let go. And Ashe just couldn’t stay away whenever Dedue talked about succulents. “I’m pretty sure you have more friends than me, Dimitri.”
Dimitri laughs softly, barely a huff under his breath. Ashe has never heard Dimitri laugh, like a full-belly laugh—honestly, most of the things Dimitri does make Ashe think of someone doing their utmost to keep attention away from them. “Oh, I… I don’t know about that.”
Ashe frowns, looking up from his drawer. “What d’you mean?”
“It… Well, it always feels like they like each other more than they like me.” Dimitri squirms in place, fiddling with his hands atop his lap. “Sylvain and Felix and Ingrid. Felix simply doesn’t like me. And though Sylvain and Ingrid talk to me, they’ve always seemed more comfortable around each other… and of course I have Dedue, but… it’s different.” He looks up at Ashe. “You understand me?”
“Oh. Yeah, of course.” Caspar and Linhardt make an effort to involve him as much as possible, so that Ashe doesn’t feel left out, but they’re best friends—they share more than Ashe could possibly dream of. “Yeah, I…”
Has Ashe ever had a best friend? He thinks he may have, once, but it was so long ago, he can barely remember…
“Hey, Dimitri?” When Dimitri looks up, Ashe sighs and fishes out the chamomile teabags from his drawer, setting them atop the desk. “I think… I should tell you something.”
Dimitri doesn’t look surprised. If anything, he looks expectant.
“Um… look. The thing is, I…” Why did Ashe decide to do this now? Why couldn’t he at least have written some sort of script beforehand, so that he doesn’t have to think of the appropriate words on the spot? His last two brain cells are fighting to the death in his head right now. “I don’t think we’re… you know—”
“Meant to be?” Dimitri finishes. His voice is calm, steady, and not at all what Ashe had expected.
Not the words Ashe would have gone for, personally, but they fit. “Yeah. I-I’m sorry, I should have brought it up earlier,” he stammers, “but it’s just—I thought I could like you. You know? I thought I could learn to like you the way you like me, but I—I don’t want to keep leading you on like this. You are a good person, Dimitri, and I do want to be your friend, but… I just…”
Can’t be happy with you, can’t bring myself to like you, can’t be the person you need me to be.
“I just can’t,” Ashe finishes, lamely.
For a while, there’s only silence in the room. And for once, Ashe breaks eye contact first.
“I see,” Dimitri eventually says, voice perfectly neutral. His hands are still, now, clenched into fists so tight his knuckles have gone pale. “If I may be honest, I was expecting this.”
“I’m sorry,” Ashe murmurs, knowing an apology isn’t going to fix anything.
“Don’t apologize,” Dimitri says, and he sounds so sincere that Ashe almost wants to cry. “It isn’t your fault. I don’t know if I knew for sure, or if I simply had the feeling that this must not be how a relationship should feel… but I knew something would happen, sooner or later. I’m glad you brought it up.”
Ashe leans against his dresser, feeling a headache begin to descend. Looks like his brain cells have finished up their duel to the death. “You—If you’re mad at me, you can just… shout. It’s fine. I probably deserve it. I—”
“You do not,” Dimitri says, sternly. “Ashe. You are a good friend. I promise I would know.”
“But—”
“If you weren’t,” Dimitri interrupts, “you would have kept—what was the term you used?—leading me on.” He frowns, like just saying the words feels wrong. They certainly sound wrong, considering it isn’t the sort of language Dimitri often uses. “I have been around many people who valued me—or my family—for my money. Which means it has become easy for me to tell whether a person truly values me for who I am.”
Quiet again. Ashe opens his mouth, but there’s nothing of substance for him to say. Dimitri smiles, crookedly, and stands up from his seat. “Thank you very much,” he says, as if there’s anything to thank Ashe for aside from wasted time. “Keep the tea for yourself.”
“W—Wait,” Ashe stutters, but Dimitri’s already left the room.
The soft sound of the door falling closed makes Ashe wish Dimitri had just slammed it shut.
4
But now I never know the things to say to you, that help me prove that I'm still on your side…
“Felix.”
I never show just what you do to me, guess I’m what’s always wrong…
“Felix!”
With a huff, Felix turns the volume down on his phone and turns his head just enough to face Ashe. “Yeah?” He’s lying on his bed while Ashe sits on the edge of Sylvain’s, Felix’s roommate.
“Uh… I was just wondering.” Ashe shrugs. “What do you want to do after graduation?”
Felix’s brow furrows. “What kinda question is that?”
“Just answer, please?”
“I don’t know,” Felix eventually mumbles. “Music, maybe. Why do you care?”
“Of course I care. We’re…”
Ashe trails off there, because they’re… what? They’re not dating, are they? They have to at least be friends, but even then Ashe isn’t sure about that. By this point, he’s pretty sure Felix has a completely different definition for “friends” than most people. “You know,” Ashe says, eloquently.
Felix snorts and turns the volume back up, and that’s the end of the short-lived conversation. Ashe sighs—it had lasted a little longer than the average time, at least.
Ashe had seen Felix around a few times, but they’d never really spoken. They first met through Sylvain, after the man wandered into the wrong classroom and sat beside Ashe for half an hour until finally saying, “Huh, this isn’t calculus,” in the middle of a discussion on plant anatomy and physiology. Ashe helped Sylvain find his way back to his dorm, because apparently he was too stoned out of his head to think past putting one foot in front of the other, and a disgruntled Felix had greeted them at the door.
Felix seemed pretty rude at first, but Ashe figured out early on that it was just his own odd way of interacting, so Ashe rolled with it. He sort of reminded him of Linhardt in one of his bad moods, only Felix is a perpetually-bad-mood Linhardt and significantly harder to handle. Anyway, one thing led to another, and on one hungover morning, Ashe suddenly woke up naked in Felix’s bed. He’d rather not elaborate on the hows and whys.
“It’s just that,” Ashe decides to continue, speaking over the music, “it’s our final exams soon, and I don’t really know what to do once we’re out of here.”
Felix sighs. “Yeah?”
He doesn’t turn down the volume, but he doesn’t tell Ashe to shut up, so Ashe takes it as an invitation. “And it looks like everyone else knows what to do already. My roommate wants to be a public defender. I have a friend in med school. You want to go into music.”
“Mm.” They’ll tell me that it’s just bad luck, when will I find where I fit in…
“And I’m just… me.” Ashe stares down at his textbook. He’d been trying to squeeze in some studying after dropping by the dorm, but nothing is processing in his head right now. “Nothing special. It’s just… you know what I mean, right?”
Felix looks at him, nods. “Yeah.” And he doesn’t offer anything else. Ashe supposes he should have expected this.
The thing about Felix is that he just doesn’t seem to care much. Apparently he was several times worse when he was younger, actively driving everyone away and insisting he didn’t need friends, but he’d either mellowed out over the years or gotten so exhausted to the point that caring too much held less appeal than just not caring at all.
Sure, Felix can care about things, if he wants to. He’s an unexpectedly good student. He takes his music seriously. And he likes his friends… most of them. He’s always considerate of Ashe whenever they have sex, and there’s a thoughtfulness to his aftercare that Ashe doesn’t think comes easily to other people. But outside of his immediate care-zone, Felix is just… completely apathetic. Ashe supposes it’s because he hardly ever shares his own problems with other people, and because of that he expects others to treat him much the same, but…
“Hey.” Felix sits up just enough to make better eye contact. “It’s late. Quit studying. You wanna go get dinner?”
It’s the small things like these. Ashe thinks he should be grateful Felix does these at all, because for Felix, offering to go get dinner with someone is like a proclamation of undying friendship or whatever Sylvain said one time before he got pummeled to a pulp. But Ashe wishes he doesn’t have to settle.
He forces a smile. “Sure. It’s on me.”
“What do you want to do after graduation?”
Dedue doesn’t respond instantly, which Ashe hadn’t been expecting anyway—he focuses on watering each of his plants first, giving just the right amount for each flower and succulent sitting on the windowsill, before speaking. “A restaurant.”
Ashe smiles. “Yeah, that sounds like you.”
“A café sounds good as well,” Dedue muses, setting the watering can next to the plants. Behind them, Dimitri is curled up in bed, tapping away at his phone. Apparently, he’s been introduced to gacha games, which Ashe cannot see ending well for anyone involved. “Whichever comes first. I’m not picky. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I… don’t know what I want to do. So I’ve been asking others around.”
“What, for inspiration?”
Ashe laughs softly. His breath ruffles the smaller leaves on the plants nearest to him. “I guess. It sounds stupid when I say it like that, huh.”
Dedue shakes his head. “Why did you take up botany as a major?”
“I like gardening?”
“You could open a flower shop.”
“I could,” Ashe agrees, but it’s halfhearted at best. “I don’t know. It’s just… weird, being suddenly thrust out into the world without any knowledge of what to do next. It’s not like I know the first thing about running my own business. Didn’t exactly cover that one in paleobotany, did they?”
Dedue chuckles, folding his arms over his chest. “If you are so unsure, whatever café I decide to open up could use a chef. You like cooking as well, don’t you?”
Ashe feels his eyes widen. “Seriously?”
“I certainly would not be asking Sylvain for help anytime soon.”
“That’s fair,” Ashe laughs. “Okay. You got it, boss.” He mostly gets takeout when with friends, but it looks like all his practice in the dorm kitchen at 2am will finally be put to use.
People go their separate ways. Ashe knows this. He knows it better than anyone.
Graduation is… something. Lonato had taken an early flight back from his business trip overseas to attend, so he looks sleep-deprived and ready to collapse at any given moment, but he hugs Ashe tight and congratulates him on a degree a stricter parent would call useless. Ashe’s younger siblings doze off during the ceremony and completely miss the speech Edelgard, top-performing student of the year, delivers; Christophe insists on taking pictures that all turn out blurry, with one exception being a photo where Ashe is caught half-blink.
Whispers follow wherever Dimitri and Edelgard’s parents pass, while their children just look uncomfortable with the attention; Edelgard elbows Dimitri every time he begins to space out. Ashe spots Caspar standing alone by the water fountain, staring down at his phone, and drags him by the elbow to stick with his family until a frazzled Linhardt finally shows up and pulls him into an uncharacteristic hug.
Felix, waving off his father and older brother, approaches Ashe alone. “Hey,” he says, voice low. He’s got earphones plugged in, the wire hidden under the hoodie he had immediately pulled on as soon as the ceremony finished.
“Hi, Felix,” Ashe cautiously greets. He has a feeling he knows what this is about.
“Congratulations.”
“Congratulations,” Ashe returns, smiling a little. So Felix can be polite, even when he had grumbled about how graduation ceremonies were far too much fanfare for far too small an accomplishment for weeks.
Felix shakes his head. “I’m breaking it off.”
“Oh.”
“Whatever we were. It was nice, but I’m done.” Felix gives Ashe a scrutinizing look. “Pretty sure you are, too.”
Ashe is, but he doesn’t want to come out and say it. “I… I guess.” Is he supposed to be sad right now? He is supposed to be sad right now, the same way he was supposed to feel happy when Dimitri kissed him. “Thanks, Felix.”
“For what?” Felix huffs.
“For whatever we were.” Ashe smiles again. It doesn’t feel as forced as he thinks it should be, either. “It was nice.”
He watches Felix walk away, rejoin his family, and leave the hall—and Ashe is supposed to be sad, supposed to be asking why Felix hadn’t tried harder, why they had to end here, but—mostly he’s just relieved Felix had been the one to end things, because Ashe hadn’t wanted to do it himself.
People go their separate ways. Ashe knows this. But sometimes he wishes people came back, too.