where have all the flowers gone? [open]

[prince_of_beasts]

WHO: Dimitri & you
WHAT: Where IS everyone?!
WHERE: Around the ship
WHEN: December
WARNINGS: the usual for stressed Dimitri

1. gone to children, every one (promenade, day)

Dimitri patrols. It's just him and Dedue left, of the usual crew. It's the only thing he can do that feels useful.

When Dimitri was a child, he saw a cougar in a noble's menagerie: a miserable animal, ribs showing through its mangy, matted coat, its eyes dull and dead. It had walked the edge of its cage, around, and around, and around, and around, and around. Dimitri -- he couldn't have been more than seven -- had been caught trying to break open its cage, and he'd cried for hours after his father pulled him away.

He walks his route again and again, covering every shift that's been vacated. It keeps him from thinking.

2. gone to husbands, every one (kitchen, day)

Dimitri practices his baking. It's a change. It's stress relief. He can't cook, but bread is nice, isn't it? When they get back, there'll be fresh bread, and -- and maybe that will help. At least they'll know he cared. At least he'll have done something. He can burn four to eight hours a day in the kitchen, tearing all his helplessness and frustration and terror into raw dough: put a batch in the oven, run a patrol loop or a set of training exercises, come back, take the loaves out. (He's running out of places to put them.) Repeat as many times as it takes.

Or, repeat until some faultline slips, and Dimitri loses an hour. When he opens the oven, he chokes on an eruption of smoke and soot. Coughing, he grabs for the bread-pans. His gloves shield him from the worst of the heat, but panic amplifies his tremors; his hands slip, and the glass pan shatters on the floor, along with the blackened brick of its contents.

Instinct takes over. He shuts the oven door, and turns it off. Sets the fan running. Almost slams his fist on the counter. Doesn't. Punches his own thigh, instead, and shouts a string of curses so vehement they skip translation.

Stands in the middle of the kitchen, aware that he should do something about the broken glass, unable to move himself from the spot.

3. gone to soldiers, every one (sports deck, early December)

Training has never let Dimitri down before, and it won't now. At any hour of the night through morning, he's on the sports deck, running drills or running laps. He misses Darcy. He misses Ruby. He misses Erin. Nobody comes to fight club. Hacking at the training dummy relieves a little stress, but it can't substitute for a real partner. Everyone's gone --

The Crest of Blaiddyd crackles. Dimitri's training saber hits impact foam and snaps. The broken end flies off into the shadows. The dummy isn't even scratched. Something in Dimitri's mind slips, then catches. He hurls himself at the dummy with a scream.

...

When he's exhausted himself, he slides to the floor, shaking, sobbing, spent. The dummy remains untouched.

4. gone to graveyards, every one (sports deck, night, late December)

A pool of yellow light suffuses the memorial. It flickers from an old lantern, set beside but apart from the collection of belongings.

a.
Dimitri sits in its ring of light, arms wrapped around himself, rocking back and forth. His eyes are open, unblinking, their red nightshine glassy. His lips move silently, frantically.

b.
Come closer, and there's a large yellow cat hunched beside the memorial. Its ears slant back. Its tail wraps tight around its haunches, tip twitching. It does not move.

5. gone to flowers, every one (meta)

a. the cabins
A large yellow cat sits by the door to cabin 121. Sometimes it paces. Sometimes it curls into a ball, tail over its nose, shoulders and spine bunched too tightly for rest. Sometimes it paces up and down the hall, sniffing, pawing at the doors of other cabins. 108. 128. 130. 134. 137. 123 and 140, vainly. But mostly, it sits by cabin 121.

It waits. It waits. It waits.

b. the cottage
The garden still blooms; the trees still rustle in Autumn colors. Dimitri tries to find that reassuring. If Ossie and Giles were dead or gone, surely the cottage would vanish, too? If nothing else, surely their imprint upon the place would vanish? It blunts, or at least lays a thin muffling sheet over, the growing certainty that they're never coming back and Dimitri's been abandoned to watch the place crumble without its rightful owners.

He spends most of his time as a cat. The lonely quiet feels worse on two feet, where he's so used to the fussing of his hosts. On four, he paces the grounds and the cottage interior (though never the kitchen), slipping beneath the thorns of the rosebushes, batting at the tassels of the curtains, curling up to sleep beneath a chair or on the doorstep.

The first time he finds his own stray orange hairs on a cushion, he bolts out to the garden and huddles under a rosebush, shaking, hackles raised, until the sun sinks behind the trees.

oh, when will they ever learn? (wildcard)

As usual, find me on Discord bird#1312, or DM me here!

Comments

1

[takethatnature]

Wilson crosses paths with Dimitri no less than eight times one day in the middle of December. Whether he's eating at Sand Dollars, bowling with Maxwell, running experiments in the spa or a corner of Bobby B's, picking over the clothes in the near reaches of the Tommy Bahama, feeding sheet music to the piano in John's, helping himself to ice cream in Scoops now that he only has a quarter of the people to compete with for the stock, or reading in the library, sooner or later the blond kid marches briskly through the premises checking for trouble. It makes Wilson feel a bit surveilled, except Dimitri didn't check up on him in particular yesterday when all he did was loll around in his cabin reading mystery novels. They just keep running into each other.

At half past midnight, while Wilson's adding a third cocktail umbrella to the colorful drink he's poured himself in Stan the Man, here comes Dimitri again. He looks tired. "Haven't you done anything else today?"

2

[hate_gettin_older]

"Hey," says a voice from the kitchen doorway, not too loudly.

Edgar followed the sound of swearing, alarmed, and is now even more alarmed by the sudden silence.

3

[actuallyawolf]

Ylva watches Dimitri attack the dummy from a distance; interrupting him at that moment seems... unwise. So she waits, and when he collapses on the floor, she's right there beside him.

"Did it help?" she asks, honestly.

4a

[glassaxolotl]

Dedue finds Dimitri at midnight.

He has been trying to give Dimitri his space, since there are so few others on the ship that Dedue doesn’t want to smother him. But he always tries to check at mealtimes and bedtime, to keep him on some sort of schedule. It is well past that time, and Dedue can’t find him in any of his usual haunts. Finally, Dedue decides to check the memorial, which he had been putting off for last. Visiting the memorial is hard for him now.

Once he does approach the memorial, Dedue sees that mop of blonde hair and is about to greet him. But when he sees the way Dimitri hunches over, rocking to himself, Dedue shuts off whatever he was about to say and rushes over, kneeling next to him. “Dimitri...” he mumbles quietly, concern written on his face.

1

[knotawolf]

[He watches from his perch on the pipes near the ceiling, he's laying on his back, flip-flopped feet kicked up on the wall, eyes following the blonde man as he walks his rounds, circling back every hour or so. Again. And again. And again.]

Where are you going? Is time repeating? [He's seen that before, someone trapped redoing the same thing again and again until they were knocked off the path.]

1

[hadnoright]

Daisy hates the waiting. She's always hated the waiting. Waiting for the system, waiting for Prey to give her a reason, waiting for Basira to come back, waiting to die, waiting to feel better, waiting always waiting.

Excursions are never this long.

Daisy feels like a dog that's been left in the back garden tethered by a chain barely long enough to pace. Every day that passes, it gets shorter. Every day that passes, she urges more and more to tear it from the wall.

She's pacing the ship top to bottom again. Trying to excise the restless energy before it can turn into aimless aggression. She turns out of the stairs onto the promenade, planning to walk down to the opposite set, but stalls part-way down when she spots Dimitri.

Ugh, c'mon. Fine, she'll just walk faster and avoid the kid.