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Linhardt and Glenn

Linhardt stood up and stretched his arms up in the air.

“What, giving up already?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Might go read at the library.”

Glenn huffed a laugh. “Oh, you’re such a quitter.”

Linhardt simply rolled his eyes and placed his fishing rod in the little basket at the end of the dock.

“You should go talk to Sylvain about what girl he had over last night. I know you could hear them too!”

He stretched a moment more. “I’m definitely not going to do that.” With the library in mind as the destination, he began walking.

Glenn drifted beside him. “Oh, come on! We should do something I want to do for at least once.”

Linhardt sighed. “If all you’re going to do is beg for me to be your puppet, then why did you bother to die?”

“You that like it’s trivial! How would I have known that it was going to be like this?”

He shrugged. “Fair point. Anyways, if you’re that desperate for me to do something, then be realistic about it.”

“Hmm…” Glenn looked as if he was going to say something, but then stopped and pointed behind Linhardt.

Linhardt nearly paled as he turned around, as was protocol.

A girl he didn’t recognize shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure how you do it. I always thought I was sneaky…” It appeared she wasn’t looking for him, as she walked right on by.

“Did she hear you?”

Indeed, ghosts could not understand the living. Although, Linhardt seemed to be an exception, for reasons he did not know.

Linhardt shook his head. He would have said something a bit snarky, like ‘obviously not’ or such, or complained about drawing any sort of attention so soon into the school year, but he wasn’t about to risk being heard talking to what seemed to be nothing.

You see, Linhardt could speak to ghosts. Ever since he was little, he would always see ghosts hanging around the Hevring castle. He’d always thought that it was normal to see translucent people who could float, but he swiftly learned otherwise when security around him was strict for a year after he mentioned to his father something about the man who would talk to him before bed sometimes.

A few times he’d heard people musing about what they’d do if they could see ghosts. Usually it would either turn into liars arguing that they could, or someone would mention something about ‘getting closure’ or whatever.

This was precisely why Linhardt kept it a secret; trying to give random people closure would be really boring and time-consuming.

“Monologuing again?”

“Sort of.” he whispered. He didn’t care enough to correct Glenn on the use of the word monologuing.

“Whatever. Like I was saying, you should go talk to Felix again.”

“It’s going to look suspicious if I keep talking to him when he’s not even in my house.”

“No it won’t, you just don’t want people to think you have a crush on him, am I right?”

Linhardt rolled his eyes in a total non-answer.

“Well, you should talk to Dimitri then. I’m sure you could just excuse that as being interested in switching houses.”

“Sure.” Might as well be nice for once. And so they went to the training hall instead of the library, Linhardt taking a not-so-bold guess that Dimitri would be there.

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———

“The boar prince isn’t here.”

“What’d he say?”

“You mean Dimitri?” He couldn’t directly answer Glenn’s question. Not now, anyways.

Felix gave him a bitter look and walked away.

Whatever, no use chasing after him. Luckily, there were other people around. Linhardt eyed the Gautier heir whom appeared to be chatting up some girl. He was the closest person, so that was who was going to be interrogated.

Linhardt walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder, causing the Gautier heir to turn around.

“Oh, hey - Aristea, right?” the Gautier boy winked. “Think maybe we could chat later? I’m-”

Linhardt sighed. “That’s not me.”

The Gautier boy- Joseph was his name, right? - Joseph appeared a bit thrown off, but continued anyway. “Oh, my bad! Truly, I-”

“Shut up, Joseph. Anyways, I was wondering if you could tell me where Dimitri is?”

The girl appeared to have left at this point.

“Oh, uh… Right, yeah. He and Claude and Edelgard are off on a mission or something. They’re supposed to be back tomorrow.” Joseph appeared to be intrigued or relieved, for whatever reason.

Glenn was laughing beside him. Linhardt gave him a harsh look, then turned back to Joseph.
“Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem! Say, I was wondering if I could catch your name.”

He shrugged. “It’s Linhardt.”

That seemed to catch the boy off guard. Linhardt assumed that Joseph had thought he was a girl or something along the lines of that.

That was all the information he needed, and so he left.

“Linhardt, you idiot! Did you really forget his name?”

Now that they were out where almost nobody else was, whispering was an option. “Hmm? Oh, I guess so. It’s really only been a couple of days, you can’t expect me to know them all.”

“I guess, but even Sylvain isn’t noteworthy?”

Linhardt paused for a moment. Indeed, that was Sylvain. He really thought that it would have stuck in his head after being forced to listen to girls scream it out while he was trying to read or nap at night, but yet he forgot.