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The evening before Gronder, while the others are swallowing down the last of their rations, Dimitri slips away for a smoke.
There’s a tree he likes overlooking the edge of the field, broad enough to be comfortable when he slouches with his back to it, and just out of the Eagle sniper’s range. He shakes out a cigarette from the squashed pack in his waterproof pocket, presses it to his lips with one hand and lights it with the other. The first inhale’s always the longest; it prickles in his lungs, hotter and hotter, until he lets it go in a rush and the grey smoke swirls in front of his eyes, thins and is gone.
He draws another breath, slower this time. No sign of Edelgard in the Eagles’ encampment, but he knows she’s there. He’d caught a glimpse of that dog of hers earlier, still wrapped in his long coat despite the warm spring air. As Dimitri watched the light glinting off the buckles of his uniform, his hands had itched for a rifle.
But there was the matter of his eye, the way his hands hadn’t been steady since Fhirdiad, and Hubert wasn’t the one Dimitri needed dead, anyway.
There’s movement beside him: the professor, the shock of his pale hair. He always approaches from Dimitri’s good side. Some of the others—well, there’d been incidents. Most people learned quick, but the professor had already known.
“Those things will kill you,” the professor says as Dimitri takes a drag. His gaze is aimed downward, at the flickers of movement still visible in the dimming light; his voice is flat. So: not quite disappointment, for which Dimitri would have nothing but contempt. Something else, which is harder.
“I’m already dead,” Dimitri reminds him. He thinks it’s true. There’s a bullet out there with his name on it, and it should have found him in Duscur, in Fhirdiad under the gaze of Cornelia’s firing squad. It won’t miss him again; he’s running out of time.
The wind kicks up, cooler with the sun going down. He cups his hand briefly over the glowing end of the cigarette, pulls in another lungful of smoke. The professor, closer now, is radiating heat despite the chill. He smells like everyone else here, gunpowder and oil; it’s the scent Dimitri dreamed of in captivity, couldn’t get out of his nose. Their shoulders brush.
Deftly, the professor reaches out, plucks the cigarette from Dimitri’s hand. He considers it for a moment, turning the thin white cylinder between his fingers, and Dimitri expects him to drop it and grind it under his heel.
Instead, the professor raises his hand up to his mouth. Brings the cigarette to his own lips and breathes in.
The professor’s hands have always been steady. Fine, but strong. Dimitri has watched him field strip a weapon in thirty seconds flat, put pressure on a bleeding wound without flinching, pull together a tear in his fatigues with tiny, even stitches. Dimitri dreamed about those hands before the war, was haunted by them during the five long years the professor was MIA, and now those fingers are holding a cigarette still damp from Dimitri’s lips, pressed to his mouth gentle as a kiss.
“Thought you said they’d kill you,” Dimitri says, watching a curl of smoke slip from a corner of the professor’s mouth. It’s getting harder to see, all shadows and silhouettes, but in the glimmer of embers there’s a twitch of a smile.
The professor tilts his head up, exhaling smoke into the darkening sky. Save for the quiver of his throat he could be a statue, some long-forgotten god of the battlefield. “Yeah,” he says, a low rasp in his voice. “That’s what they say.”
Once, during survival training, Dimitri had lost his footing navigating down a cliff and slammed straight into the rockface. He bruised his ribs to hell—it was a miracle he hadn’t cracked one—and lost his lighter, besides. That night he and the professor hadn’t lit a fire, slept crammed into the same sleeping bag with the professor’s back to Dimitri’s chest. Dimitri’s heart had been pounding so fast he wondered if the professor could feel it, the desperate thump-thump pressing under his shoulderblades, but the professor had fallen straight asleep, and only Dimitri had been awake to notice the way fine hair curled around the shell of the professor’s ear, stirring with his every breath.
Now, the professor breathes, flicking ash off the end of the cigarette, and something has changed. He would not fall asleep so easily, Dimitri thinks, and wonders if this is the war’s doing. The professor still goes quiet when someone asks him about those missing years, face like marble. Dimitri alone has never asked.
The cigarette burns and burns; the professor doesn’t let it go out until the glow is kissing his fingers. “Come on,” he says then, the smoke still in his voice, and reaches for Dimitri’s hand. Warm, despite the wind, despite the chill that's settled into the night and turned sharp. “Let’s get out of here before some Eagle tries for a lucky shot.”
Dimitri is dead; there is only the most tenuous of links, thin as smoke, binding him to the living. But the professor smells like ash, thick and bitter, and his mouth had curved around the cigarette like a lover. Dimitri hadn’t smoked at the academy; neither had the professor. That's a kind of understanding Dimitri knows by heart. So he says, “All right,” climbing up to his feet, and turns away from the encampment he can no longer see. Lets the professor lead him to warmth and to safety for another night.