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For all her hatred of its source, Edelgard’s strength grants her a shred of savage satisfaction as she pulverizes the parchment with a single clench of her hand. She flings the scraps into the hearth of her office and watches them flare and char.
Betrayal tastes of ashes.
“I have fallbacks in place to stall Byleth’s advance,” says Hubert quietly, from behind her. “They will not take more of our territory.”
“They have taken enough from me already,” Edelgard says, and she can’t suppress the bitterness from her voice.
She should not be bitter. Bitterness does not befit an emperor who must forge onward and onward along her red path. She must gaze forward, not back.
And yet the night is cold. She remembers bright, laughing faces at the monastery, all of them now lost to her. All of them. She thinks of the young professor with old eyes, their quiet regard, their small, rare smiles, and knows that something has been stolen from her that she’ll never get back.
Only Hubert remains.
And now he turns, preparing to leave as noiselessly as he’d come. He is thoughtful, as always. Left alone, she can gather herself, regain her fraying composure. When he returns, they can speak of the war.
“Stay,” she says instead.
Hubert stops. She walks to him, the only sound the crackle of flames in the hearth.
Here is the proper distance between an emperor and the vassal they address. She takes another step. And another. Hubert is very still as she places a hand against his chest.
Only he remains. The front of his coat is good fine wool, still carrying a faint chill from the night outside. His body is solid underneath. He’s been taller than her ever since she can remember, and the difference in height is more apparent than ever, standing so close. Her mind feels strange tonight; a strand of half-forgotten mythology crosses it. He is her pillar in a storm-tossed world.
He is hers.
Her hand curls against his chest. Slowly, deliberately, she takes a button and pushes it until it unslots. It’s decided, then. She takes another button, and she can hardly feel the chill of the metal against the rush of heat it wakes inside her.
Hubert’s hand stops her. She looks up. The dark of his pupils have consumed his pale eyes. “There are more befitting places for this than your office, Your Majesty. It is best if we—”
Edelgard shoves him with just enough calculated force to put him against the wall.
She strips off his cloak, then tries his coat, realizes she needs to get his belt first, wrests that off too. She’s never done this before. Her life has been filled with too many terrible, momentous things to leave room for the sentimental.
This isn’t sentimental. This is—
Hubert’s breathing grows ragged as she works a hand down his trousers. He’s hard already, his bloodless skin fever-flushed. Maddening arousal pulses through her veins. She fumbles at his trouser clasps, clumsy with need and furious at herself for her clumsiness. And what will she do afterward? Angles, logistics, with him pinned against the wall? Poor planning!
“Please, Your Majesty,” rasps Hubert. “Let me assist you.”
Edelgard struggles for breath. She nods, a little too jerkily. “You may.”
Until now, Hubert’s hands had stayed at his sides with his strange brand of propriety, allowing her free rein with him. They settle at her waist, now, guiding her to her desk. Her skirts spill to either side as she sits, and he pushes them out of the way efficiently. He doesn’t fumble with her underthings, but displaces them with the ease he would a badly formed skirmish line, and then she’s muffling sounds against his shoulder as he slips fingers between her thighs.
There’s hardly resistance. She’s wet already, hungering for this, hungering for more, only—
She lifts her head. “You’ve done this before.” It doesn’t come out as the clinical observation she’d hoped.
Hubert stares back, a wildness to his eyes. He smiles, trying for self-assured irony and utterly failing. “Would I entrust my emperor to a rank amateur?”
And then her hands are grabbing his hair, digging into his back, as she pulls him in.
He braces his arms on either side of her, insisting on entering her with measured, agonizing care. There’s only the barest sting, nothing compared to the sweet, aching push, the sensation of being filled.
They rest like that for a moment, joined, foreheads resting against each other’s. Hubert’s eyes have fallen shut, and his gaunt cheeks are flushed with color like she’s never seen. Edelgard touches his face wonderingly. He stills, as if afraid to lean in.
“Continue,” she murmurs.
“I will,” says Hubert hoarsely. Air hisses out of him, a sound of pleasure and pain in equal measure. “I’m sorry. I must collect myself. My past preparations prove…inadequate.”
When he opens his eyes again, he begins to move—exploratorily, at first, until he finds the angle that makes Edelgard gasp and wrench his hair. Then, relentlessly.
She pants against his shoulder, her thighs clenching around him to keep him close. She wants him. Here. “Stay with me, Hubert,” she breathes, and a terrible, ravaged noise escapes his throat. It sounds like dying, she’d say, but on the battlefield she’s heard him inches away from death, and he hadn’t sounded like this.
But he doesn’t stop moving. Heat builds inexorably in her core. Her hands catch at the unfamiliar shortness of his hair, seeking to pull down his face, his lips, where she can reach.
She doesn’t expect him to pull free from her grasp, so that all she gets is a single hot droplet splashing onto her own parted lips.
She tastes it. It’s blood.
Edelgard finds the matching smear on Hubert’s lip, where he’s bitten it bloody. His eyes are shut. His arms are tremoring. She realizes, it’s to keep himself from—
She comes in great wracking waves with the taste of his blood on her tongue, and in its aftershocks, he follows.
Hubert's arms give way, but even then he carefully avoids putting his weight on Edelgard. He falls to his knees in front of her instead, permitting himself only to fractionally rest his head against the inside of her knee.
“Don’t,” says Edelgard, extending a shaky arm toward him. “I told you to stay with me.”
She drags him up, pressing him to her bosom. His weight is not a burden, but a refuge.
If there’s further blood, it disappears against the red of her gown. Together, they catch their breaths in the firelight, their hands curled in each other’s hair.
“My path is beside you,” says Hubert quietly. “You will never walk alone while I live.”