little green tassel, the fic
Dec. 10th, 2020 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luckycricket33When Mercedes declared him fit to leave the first aid tent, Claude waved goodbye to Marianne and headed straight back to the battlefield. Ingrid, still splattered with mud, was already standing there.
"Oh," he said, spying the sliver of green in her hand. "You found it!"
"Yes," said Ingrid, sounding pleased. "Such a relief."
She was staring at it with altogether too much fondness, and Claude considered for the first time that Ingrid might like him. He couldn't imagine allowing himself to smile at a little trinket like that, show that much uncoated affection - frankly, he was embarrassed on her behalf. In the back of his head, Claude was aware that he was also staring at her right now, as the wind tugged her cape and her flyaway hair, but he pretended this was different and did not count.
"Well, no point wasting time," said Claude, "give it here."
"Oh, that isn't necessary! I can reattach it myself," said Ingrid, finally looking up at him.
And it would be expedient - a matter of practicality - to have her do it, so Claude tamped down his nerves and turned around. It was no small thing to show one's blind spot, especially not for him, especially during these times.
"Okay," he said. "I'm sure you know it goes under the hanging gold bit at the bottom of my pauldron. There's a loop for it." Claude turned his head over one shoulder to keep an eye on her. "Don't stab me in the back while you're ther-"
"What?"
Claude faced her again. Ingrid was squinting at him and her characteristic frown lines had returned.
"You're not gonna do it after all? That's okay, hand it over," said Claude. "I can put the little green tassel back on my own armor when I go back to my room."
"What are you talking about?" said Ingrid crossly. She held the tassel up to her own collarbone. On one end of Ingrid's fur collar, affixing her cape to her armor, was a silver button with a dangling green tassel. On the other side, there was just a silver button.
Ah. That would do it. Yeah.
Claude's day was about to get a lot longer.
---
"It's mine, it is clearly mine," said Ingrid, scowling as they stomped off the field and back toward the tents together. "My outfit is green, the tassel is green, it just makes sense." Ingrid's outfit was more gray and mud, matching the churned-up ground and overcast sky at this point, but Claude kept this to himself.
Instead, he said, "My outfit has green on it too." People already noticed the sash, he was sure, but still.
"No one can tell," Ingrid fired back. She craned her neck to glare at the back of Claude's shoulder as they walked. "It doesn't even look like you're missing anything back there! You must be lying."
"Why? What does that gain me?"
"How should I know? You're the one who always says you're scheming. Probably getting out of work or something."
Claude pinched his eyes shut. "Avoiding work is the exact opposite of what I want to be doing right now."
"So let me have the tassel."
"No, because it's mine? It's an important part of my armor."
"It's a more important part of my armor! Honestly, can't I at least fix it back for the time being?"
"No," said Claude. "We are gonna find people who have paid attention to my back, verify that I am not lying, and until this whole thing is sorted out I forbid you from trying to sneak the tassel onto your armor so you can feel like it belongs to you. That's an order from your commander."
"Unbelievable," fumed Ingrid. "Abuse of your power." Claude noted, however, that she did as he said.
---
"Okay, just tell her what you told me and we can get this over with."
"Certainly," said Lorenz. "When the last battle concluded, I was walking my horse back to the paddock with Leonie. We passed Claude and she clapped him on the shoulder, and that's when I noticed it missing. Most unbecoming, in my opinion."
Ingrid still frowned. "It probably fell off when Leonie smacked his arm, then. Why don't you check by the paddock?"
"Fine, let's go." Claude began to walk away.
"It would be so much faster to let me have it," she grumbled, moving to match his pace. "This is all still a waste of my time. You may have nothing good to do, but I-"
"-Am attacking the integrity of your superior officer," Claude finished for her. He really needed to curb this newly-developing habit of pulling rank, but it felt nice to be listened to, after dealing with the unruly Alliance Roundtable nobles for so long. Ingrid merely stuck out her bottom lip.
"You know, Claude," Lorenz called after them, "as slovenly as you appear without the tassel, its absence is far more egregious on our dear pegasus knight's armor. I suggest you let the lady have this one."
Ingrid's face contorted in several directions at once, caught between triumph over Claude and disgust at the descriptor "dear" and the idea of being in any way indebted to Lorenz. For his part, Claude experienced no such conflict. Ingrid could barely make out some of his muttering about "Fodlan nobles and their middle names" - but that couldn't be what he was saying, as it didn't make sense.
---
They didn't find any green on the trampled ground by the paddock, but they did find Sylvain and Hilda there. Sylvain was hanging his horse's armor away and Hilda appeared to be sitting on a pile of hay, doing nothing. Claude and Ingrid entered the scene shoulder to shoulder, scanning the dirt.
"Oh, my little Ingrid's all grown up," said Sylvain. He mimed wiping a tear from his eye. Ingrid ignored him.
"Hilda, thank goodness," she said. "Could you please tell Claude that this green tassel I found on the ground is an exact match for the one on the front button of my cape?"
Hilda, without sparing a glance at the green tuft in question, said "I'm one hundred percent confident it is."
Ingrid turned her head to glare at Claude. The look on her face - he'd almost call it gloating, but there was something less smug and more pinched and righteous about it.
"Now hold on, Hilda," said Claude. "This is the same green tassel as the back of my pauldron. You know this one."
"It's definitely the same kind," said Hilda. She had pulled one glove off and was examining her nails instead of looking at him. "And I know this for a fact because every time one of you loses a tassel, the replacement comes out of my jewelry-making kit. You've cleaned me out of green ones."
Claude looked at the tassel in Ingrid's hand, dismayed. He had proven twice over that this thing belonged on his armor, yet had come no closer to proving it wasn't hers either.
"This is just precious," cooed Sylvain. "The two of you have been matching for over a month." He leaned out over the stall's half-door, grinning like a circus had come to town.
"Well, but I should still get to keep this one, shouldn't I?" Ingrid said.
Sylvain grimaced and dropped the teasing tone. "Um, well, why don't we head back to the mess tent and get a meal in you first?"
Claude recognized this as a strategy to placate Ingrid and immediately steered them toward the mess. He heard Hilda whisper something to Sylvain as she followed along, but did not concern himself with what she said. He had a feeling he knew.
Sylvain pulled Ingrid ahead, one hand clamped around her upper arm, and began to talk to her about his day. She scowled at him, green tassel still closed in her gauntleted fist. Hilda, as a testament to her loyalty and friendship with Claude, mustered herself into a little half-jog until she walked beside him, matching his pace.
"Claude, are you sure it's not just wiser to let her have it this time?" said Hilda.
"You wound me," replied Claude. In his mind, he formally retracted the thought that she had jogged up to him out of loyalty. Let the court record show that Hilda V. Goneril was a traitor of a best friend.
"You could both stand to be more like Petra," said Hilda. "Outfit chock full of little green tassels. Hasn't come to me for a lost tassel this entire war."
Claude pouted, unable to let this slide without defending himself.
"Petra's fringe is woven into the cloth..."
--
Ingrid gnawed furiously on the leg of some poultry next to Claude on the bench. He pushed a fried vegetable across his trough. The tassel business had gotten nowhere all day and Ingrid wouldn't let him out of her sight.
"Oh, there's actually a fable about this," said the professor from across the table. They had been spending a good deal of time with Seteth of late, and now took every opportunity to bring up a new folk tale they'd read in his book. Most of the tales were also unfamiliar to Claude. (At first Claude believed it a failure of his own research, but Hilda had informed him, tipsy one night, that Seteth made up many of the stories whole cloth himself.)
"The Wise King of Morfis." said Byleth. "It goes like this:
Two women came to the court of the wise King of Morfis both claiming to be the mother of the same baby. Since he was renowned for his intelligence, they asked him to determine which of them would keep the child, both agreeing to abide by the ruling.
After hearing each of the women plead their case, the King said, 'I cannot decide which of you deserves more to keep this baby; therefore, we will cut the child in twain, down the middle, and each woman will walk away with an equal half.'
The first woman, in her rage, replied 'Fine! This babe is my blood and I will bring it home one way or another.'
But the second woman immediately fell to her knees and wept. She said, 'Your majesty, I love this child and do not wish for it to suffer. Please, do anything but kill my baby. The other woman can have it; I only wish to know now that it grows up safe and strong.'
The king, who had only been bluffing, awarded the child to this second woman. He judged: 'regardless of who birthed the babe, it should go to a home where it is loved and protected, and this woman has proven willing to set aside her own happiness to ensure the child's life.'
The end."
"That's... real interesting, Teach," said Claude. This was one of the fables he had heard before as a child. "But this is an inanimate object that can't feel pain or die, so your metaphor breaks down, and it belongs on the back shoulder of my armor."
At the same time, Ingrid tried to speak over him: "I have a set of two tassels and I'm already trying to not break it in half."
"Ah. Well," said Byleth, "would splitting the tassel in half solve your actual problem in this case?"
Ingrid said, "what, would I take the two half-tassels and give him the bigger one? Or walk around with two tassels of uneven size?"
"It's not even really big enough for that, I think," said Ignatz, passing behind Claude to return his dish to the front. "The color is familiar though..."
"Oh, you are correct!" exclaimed Flayn, over the professor's shoulder. "Why, if it isn't the same shade as my hair! This must be the solution then: I shall cut off a lock of my hair and fashion you a new tassel from it."
A look of panic crossed Ignatz's face, and several people shouted "No!" "Nooo" and "Please, please do not."
"Definitely don't do that," said Claude, "because Seteth will skin us alive if we let you walk around with an uneven haircut."
"Well hold on," said Leonie, from further down the bench. "There's nothing wrong with an asymmetrical haircut, they're perfectly fine." Lorenz nodded from next to her.
Lorenz and Leonie were attempting to grow out the shaved sides of their heads. Claude suspected they had some sort of solidarity pact to resist cutting it again; Leonie complained constantly that it itched, and Lorenz felt that the length was now "unbecoming" and both of them wore their hair over one shoulder to hide it. They had also been making their discomfort everyone else's problem.
"Flayn, you'd want an undercut like us, right? You would look so tough with it," Leonie wheedled.
Sylvain got up from his seat on the other side of Ingrid. "Nope," he said, "no, no, no, this is not happening right now, you are not doing this. Go." He began to push them out of the tent.
"Ingrid... can you just give it to him?" Sylvain called over his shoulder, as he shepherded the other squawking cavaliers outside.
Ingrid looked up from her potatoes in shock. "Why? You don't have my back on this?"
"Now, Ingrid," said Mercedes. "I'm sure Sylvain just means... say, wouldn't it be nice if the two of you matched?"
"No, why does anyone think I want us to match?" she said, growing visibly upset. "I want one side of my collar to match the other side of my collar."
---
"This is stupid," she said, wind whipping through the ribbons in her hair.
Ingrid and Claude, each unwilling to relinquish the little green tassel to the other, had been sent out to do chores as a unit. Professor Byleth had no problem with this, swapping Claude's original job over to Raphael, and that was how Claude ended up on a double duty sky patrol with Ingrid like back in their academy days. Though Claude obviously adored the feeling of soaring with Kamilah, he couldn't help but feel cheated this time. He shouldn't be back on a wyvern so soon after being shot in the pauldron, even if it was only a bruise, and his thighs still burned, deprived of a proper break between flights.
Hypothetically, arrow to his throat, Claude would still swear that he hadn't enjoyed the bickering and bantering and wasting of time over this tassel even when they'd been on the ground; but the physical discomfort was getting to him in a way rudeness and inconvenience had not even approached.
"You can end it now by giving me my tassel back," he called.
"My tassel," she called back. "You don't need a tassel! Use one of your pom-poms!"
A small thread snapped, quietly, in Claude's brain. "You have no concept of what these pom-poms signify. No idea of why I can't move them around on this costume like I please."
"I think you invent Leicester traditions just to inconvenience me," Ingrid said.
Claude, sore and tired, pulled Kamilah's reins to glide her back down. Ingrid followed on her flying horse.
He's always astonished at the brutal facility with which she can talk about the condition, as if it's a mundane piece of life, instead of the kind of thing a man would hop continents for.
dining hall
-hilda
-sylvain
-cyril-flayn
-lorenzie
---
chores
claude tries to exit the conversation after spending the whole day together
period cramps wont work on me again claude
no i get them
no you don't
why would you know
i know felix
felix isnt recruited
she gets quiet
he feels guilty for bringing it up so even though it makes no sense he lets her have it
feather next day
"Oh," he said, spying the sliver of green in her hand. "You found it!"
"Yes," said Ingrid, sounding pleased. "Such a relief."
She was staring at it with altogether too much fondness, and Claude considered for the first time that Ingrid might like him. He couldn't imagine allowing himself to smile at a little trinket like that, show that much uncoated affection - frankly, he was embarrassed on her behalf. In the back of his head, Claude was aware that he was also staring at her right now, as the wind tugged her cape and her flyaway hair, but he pretended this was different and did not count.
"Well, no point wasting time," said Claude, "give it here."
"Oh, that isn't necessary! I can reattach it myself," said Ingrid, finally looking up at him.
And it would be expedient - a matter of practicality - to have her do it, so Claude tamped down his nerves and turned around. It was no small thing to show one's blind spot, especially not for him, especially during these times.
"Okay," he said. "I'm sure you know it goes under the hanging gold bit at the bottom of my pauldron. There's a loop for it." Claude turned his head over one shoulder to keep an eye on her. "Don't stab me in the back while you're ther-"
"What?"
Claude faced her again. Ingrid was squinting at him and her characteristic frown lines had returned.
"You're not gonna do it after all? That's okay, hand it over," said Claude. "I can put the little green tassel back on my own armor when I go back to my room."
"What are you talking about?" said Ingrid crossly. She held the tassel up to her own collarbone. On one end of Ingrid's fur collar, affixing her cape to her armor, was a silver button with a dangling green tassel. On the other side, there was just a silver button.
Ah. That would do it. Yeah.
Claude's day was about to get a lot longer.
---
"It's mine, it is clearly mine," said Ingrid, scowling as they stomped off the field and back toward the tents together. "My outfit is green, the tassel is green, it just makes sense." Ingrid's outfit was more gray and mud, matching the churned-up ground and overcast sky at this point, but Claude kept this to himself.
Instead, he said, "My outfit has green on it too." People already noticed the sash, he was sure, but still.
"No one can tell," Ingrid fired back. She craned her neck to glare at the back of Claude's shoulder as they walked. "It doesn't even look like you're missing anything back there! You must be lying."
"Why? What does that gain me?"
"How should I know? You're the one who always says you're scheming. Probably getting out of work or something."
Claude pinched his eyes shut. "Avoiding work is the exact opposite of what I want to be doing right now."
"So let me have the tassel."
"No, because it's mine? It's an important part of my armor."
"It's a more important part of my armor! Honestly, can't I at least fix it back for the time being?"
"No," said Claude. "We are gonna find people who have paid attention to my back, verify that I am not lying, and until this whole thing is sorted out I forbid you from trying to sneak the tassel onto your armor so you can feel like it belongs to you. That's an order from your commander."
"Unbelievable," fumed Ingrid. "Abuse of your power." Claude noted, however, that she did as he said.
---
"Okay, just tell her what you told me and we can get this over with."
"Certainly," said Lorenz. "When the last battle concluded, I was walking my horse back to the paddock with Leonie. We passed Claude and she clapped him on the shoulder, and that's when I noticed it missing. Most unbecoming, in my opinion."
Ingrid still frowned. "It probably fell off when Leonie smacked his arm, then. Why don't you check by the paddock?"
"Fine, let's go." Claude began to walk away.
"It would be so much faster to let me have it," she grumbled, moving to match his pace. "This is all still a waste of my time. You may have nothing good to do, but I-"
"-Am attacking the integrity of your superior officer," Claude finished for her. He really needed to curb this newly-developing habit of pulling rank, but it felt nice to be listened to, after dealing with the unruly Alliance Roundtable nobles for so long. Ingrid merely stuck out her bottom lip.
"You know, Claude," Lorenz called after them, "as slovenly as you appear without the tassel, its absence is far more egregious on our dear pegasus knight's armor. I suggest you let the lady have this one."
Ingrid's face contorted in several directions at once, caught between triumph over Claude and disgust at the descriptor "dear" and the idea of being in any way indebted to Lorenz. For his part, Claude experienced no such conflict. Ingrid could barely make out some of his muttering about "Fodlan nobles and their middle names" - but that couldn't be what he was saying, as it didn't make sense.
---
They didn't find any green on the trampled ground by the paddock, but they did find Sylvain and Hilda there. Sylvain was hanging his horse's armor away and Hilda appeared to be sitting on a pile of hay, doing nothing. Claude and Ingrid entered the scene shoulder to shoulder, scanning the dirt.
"Oh, my little Ingrid's all grown up," said Sylvain. He mimed wiping a tear from his eye. Ingrid ignored him.
"Hilda, thank goodness," she said. "Could you please tell Claude that this green tassel I found on the ground is an exact match for the one on the front button of my cape?"
Hilda, without sparing a glance at the green tuft in question, said "I'm one hundred percent confident it is."
Ingrid turned her head to glare at Claude. The look on her face - he'd almost call it gloating, but there was something less smug and more pinched and righteous about it.
"Now hold on, Hilda," said Claude. "This is the same green tassel as the back of my pauldron. You know this one."
"It's definitely the same kind," said Hilda. She had pulled one glove off and was examining her nails instead of looking at him. "And I know this for a fact because every time one of you loses a tassel, the replacement comes out of my jewelry-making kit. You've cleaned me out of green ones."
Claude looked at the tassel in Ingrid's hand, dismayed. He had proven twice over that this thing belonged on his armor, yet had come no closer to proving it wasn't hers either.
"This is just precious," cooed Sylvain. "The two of you have been matching for over a month." He leaned out over the stall's half-door, grinning like a circus had come to town.
"Well, but I should still get to keep this one, shouldn't I?" Ingrid said.
Sylvain grimaced and dropped the teasing tone. "Um, well, why don't we head back to the mess tent and get a meal in you first?"
Claude recognized this as a strategy to placate Ingrid and immediately steered them toward the mess. He heard Hilda whisper something to Sylvain as she followed along, but did not concern himself with what she said. He had a feeling he knew.
Sylvain pulled Ingrid ahead, one hand clamped around her upper arm, and began to talk to her about his day. She scowled at him, green tassel still closed in her gauntleted fist. Hilda, as a testament to her loyalty and friendship with Claude, mustered herself into a little half-jog until she walked beside him, matching his pace.
"Claude, are you sure it's not just wiser to let her have it this time?" said Hilda.
"You wound me," replied Claude. In his mind, he formally retracted the thought that she had jogged up to him out of loyalty. Let the court record show that Hilda V. Goneril was a traitor of a best friend.
"You could both stand to be more like Petra," said Hilda. "Outfit chock full of little green tassels. Hasn't come to me for a lost tassel this entire war."
Claude pouted, unable to let this slide without defending himself.
"Petra's fringe is woven into the cloth..."
--
Ingrid gnawed furiously on the leg of some poultry next to Claude on the bench. He pushed a fried vegetable across his trough. The tassel business had gotten nowhere all day and Ingrid wouldn't let him out of her sight.
"Oh, there's actually a fable about this," said the professor from across the table. They had been spending a good deal of time with Seteth of late, and now took every opportunity to bring up a new folk tale they'd read in his book. Most of the tales were also unfamiliar to Claude. (At first Claude believed it a failure of his own research, but Hilda had informed him, tipsy one night, that Seteth made up many of the stories whole cloth himself.)
"The Wise King of Morfis." said Byleth. "It goes like this:
Two women came to the court of the wise King of Morfis both claiming to be the mother of the same baby. Since he was renowned for his intelligence, they asked him to determine which of them would keep the child, both agreeing to abide by the ruling.
After hearing each of the women plead their case, the King said, 'I cannot decide which of you deserves more to keep this baby; therefore, we will cut the child in twain, down the middle, and each woman will walk away with an equal half.'
The first woman, in her rage, replied 'Fine! This babe is my blood and I will bring it home one way or another.'
But the second woman immediately fell to her knees and wept. She said, 'Your majesty, I love this child and do not wish for it to suffer. Please, do anything but kill my baby. The other woman can have it; I only wish to know now that it grows up safe and strong.'
The king, who had only been bluffing, awarded the child to this second woman. He judged: 'regardless of who birthed the babe, it should go to a home where it is loved and protected, and this woman has proven willing to set aside her own happiness to ensure the child's life.'
The end."
"That's... real interesting, Teach," said Claude. This was one of the fables he had heard before as a child. "But this is an inanimate object that can't feel pain or die, so your metaphor breaks down, and it belongs on the back shoulder of my armor."
At the same time, Ingrid tried to speak over him: "I have a set of two tassels and I'm already trying to not break it in half."
"Ah. Well," said Byleth, "would splitting the tassel in half solve your actual problem in this case?"
Ingrid said, "what, would I take the two half-tassels and give him the bigger one? Or walk around with two tassels of uneven size?"
"It's not even really big enough for that, I think," said Ignatz, passing behind Claude to return his dish to the front. "The color is familiar though..."
"Oh, you are correct!" exclaimed Flayn, over the professor's shoulder. "Why, if it isn't the same shade as my hair! This must be the solution then: I shall cut off a lock of my hair and fashion you a new tassel from it."
A look of panic crossed Ignatz's face, and several people shouted "No!" "Nooo" and "Please, please do not."
"Definitely don't do that," said Claude, "because Seteth will skin us alive if we let you walk around with an uneven haircut."
"Well hold on," said Leonie, from further down the bench. "There's nothing wrong with an asymmetrical haircut, they're perfectly fine." Lorenz nodded from next to her.
Lorenz and Leonie were attempting to grow out the shaved sides of their heads. Claude suspected they had some sort of solidarity pact to resist cutting it again; Leonie complained constantly that it itched, and Lorenz felt that the length was now "unbecoming" and both of them wore their hair over one shoulder to hide it. They had also been making their discomfort everyone else's problem.
"Flayn, you'd want an undercut like us, right? You would look so tough with it," Leonie wheedled.
Sylvain got up from his seat on the other side of Ingrid. "Nope," he said, "no, no, no, this is not happening right now, you are not doing this. Go." He began to push them out of the tent.
"Ingrid... can you just give it to him?" Sylvain called over his shoulder, as he shepherded the other squawking cavaliers outside.
Ingrid looked up from her potatoes in shock. "Why? You don't have my back on this?"
"Now, Ingrid," said Mercedes. "I'm sure Sylvain just means... say, wouldn't it be nice if the two of you matched?"
"No, why does anyone think I want us to match?" she said, growing visibly upset. "I want one side of my collar to match the other side of my collar."
---
"This is stupid," she said, wind whipping through the ribbons in her hair.
Ingrid and Claude, each unwilling to relinquish the little green tassel to the other, had been sent out to do chores as a unit. Professor Byleth had no problem with this, swapping Claude's original job over to Raphael, and that was how Claude ended up on a double duty sky patrol with Ingrid like back in their academy days. Though Claude obviously adored the feeling of soaring with Kamilah, he couldn't help but feel cheated this time. He shouldn't be back on a wyvern so soon after being shot in the pauldron, even if it was only a bruise, and his thighs still burned, deprived of a proper break between flights.
Hypothetically, arrow to his throat, Claude would still swear that he hadn't enjoyed the bickering and bantering and wasting of time over this tassel even when they'd been on the ground; but the physical discomfort was getting to him in a way rudeness and inconvenience had not even approached.
"You can end it now by giving me my tassel back," he called.
"My tassel," she called back. "You don't need a tassel! Use one of your pom-poms!"
A small thread snapped, quietly, in Claude's brain. "You have no concept of what these pom-poms signify. No idea of why I can't move them around on this costume like I please."
"I think you invent Leicester traditions just to inconvenience me," Ingrid said.
Claude, sore and tired, pulled Kamilah's reins to glide her back down. Ingrid followed on her flying horse.
He's always astonished at the brutal facility with which she can talk about the condition, as if it's a mundane piece of life, instead of the kind of thing a man would hop continents for.
dining hall
-hilda
-sylvain
-cyril-flayn
-lorenzie
---
chores
claude tries to exit the conversation after spending the whole day together
period cramps wont work on me again claude
no i get them
no you don't
why would you know
i know felix
felix isnt recruited
she gets quiet
he feels guilty for bringing it up so even though it makes no sense he lets her have it
feather next day
