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Before Edelgard heard her, she sensed her. She was announcement carried in on the breeze; ice cold nothing seeping through to the very soul. She was fear itself. She was the end.
Tonight, Edelgard was to die.
For what must have been hours, she had been sulking in the dark, alone but for the false company provided by so many limestone and marble piles of rubble dotting Garreg Mach’s cathedral. When she had asked for that time alone, Hubert offered up a fight, same as ever, same as always, but there had been something different in his eyes speaking of the simple truth that he, for once, did not intend to refuse her.
It was a betrayal Edelgard had yet to live, but one expected all the same, and even before Hubert relented with a smirk, it was there: a lightness, a knowingness, a somethingness. It permeated every facet of him — voice, mouth, hands, and the rest — as if he knew something of her future she couldn’t possibly have begun to fathom.
Impossible, of course. No one left alive was capable of such a feat. No one still cursed to draw breath knew more than her. Not in their current life, not in their last, and not in what came before. Only she had been burdened with the weight of remembering each new end and every new beginning.
A fate handed down by the petty hand of false gods. It came again, and again, and it pushed her deeper, and deeper, and it did not cease.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
Though each life was the same, so too was each different — always changing, always shifting, always, always, always the board and its players rearranged to lead all to new ends. Each the same, and every different, and this the most terrifying of them all. The professor came to her, died for her, returned to her, offered surrender to her, and it had…
Dorothea was…and Hubert…
Edelgard exhaled slowly, worrying circles into the soft skin at her temples with the still-armored pads of her thumbs. Crimson dyed steel dug into flesh just gently enough not to cut. It scraped up against the gilded ram horns of her crown.
Her closest allies were hardly the only ones with a blind spot the shape of the professor. She was the difference. They couldn't be blamed.
But even still, the blind spot grew worse in every new life. Those whose hearts the professor touched were changed in ways that would have been utterly unfathomable had Edelgard not been caught in her unending Hell long enough to witness that slow descent into change.
Slow beginnings were vanished altogether; those closest to the professor remembered without memory, as if some intrinsic part of their very sense of being was changed forevermore against will or awareness. No longer was she simply a fascinating and unfamiliar face, but a dear friend and ally who draped herself in an air of warmth and sociability so powerful that one glance was all it took to feel as if she had always been known, and always been loved. Somehow. Some way.
She was a curse spread through presence until the whole of Garreg Mach was, in every life, every cycle, and every new beginning to their unending war, lost in a fugue state of falsified emotion. They were strangers, they were friends, they were long lost lovers meeting again and for the first time. They were cursed to feel just as they were cursed to forget.
It didn’t matter that every new chance saw Bernadetta spending more time in the company of others. It didn’t matter that Dorothea and Petra both took growing personal insult to every new instance of Edelgard’s steady growing grudge against self-care. It didn’t matter than Hubert and Ferdinand hardly still bothered to hide their bond behind an affectation of irritation, or that Caspar and Linhardt always found opportunity to lead her to quiet or to food the very instant her traitor body made known that she needed either.
None of it mattered, because all of it was a lie.
Edelgard tilted her head slowly back, looking to the massive break in the ceiling. Moonlight spilled in like a fall, teal and white cresting over the lone mountain of rubble before her to flow slow and steady down the aisle at her back. It faded the cathedral to nothing more than stray pews and pillars painted in the ethereal glow of liminal space. The candelabras were knocked over and scattered through what open space remained, broken husks of black steel and tallow. The presence was closer.
She could imagine the exact moment of Hubert’s betrayal as clearly as if it were playing out again before her eyes: discussion by way of silent stalking. A cat and mouse footrace stretching the length of a day and the full distance of the monastery grounds, culminating in one silk-gloved hand reaching out to tuck messy, pallid green locks — something once so beautifully human, now nothing more than goddess-stained reminders of death — behind an ear. A smile so small that it barely still qualified as a smile, a softly cleared throat, and, how wonderful to find you here, professor; I was wondering if I might ask a favor.
A cold swept through her, stronger than the last.
Before Edelgard heard her, she sensed her. How fitting, that. How fitting, to once again experience the ceremony of proper warning. How fitting, to be given time to grieve what life still remained unlived. A quaint reminder of past deaths so infinitely more ostentatious than one set to come in silence, in the dark, in the bombed-out rubble of her youth.
Before Edelgard heard her, she sensed her. She was the absence of being. She was a horrible, bone-chilling void hidden just beneath the surface of an otherwise so unassuming woman. She was a work of art carved from the most flawless blocks of marble. She was the crushing weight of blank space, bending and burning everything inward, straining eyes that dared find courage to see. She was a blessing. She was a curse. She was unnatural hair, stolen eyes, and sickly pale skin. She was death. She was beautiful.
With a breath and blink, Edelgard squared her shoulders and waited out the approach of that terrible nothing.
The professor had mentioned, once, in some other time, in some other place, to some other someone that was not her, the odd stillness of her heart. Back then, it was easy enough to shrug off as a joke, because back then, those wide hawkish eyes were nothing but beautiful, nothing but human; each unique kaleidoscopes of turquoise, and chestnut, and mist flecked against that bottomless morning glory blue. Whole worlds worth of magnetic curiosity. How cruel, then, to see them torn so viciously away by the goddess and made to stain Edelgard’s world red with arterial rage. The goddess was death, and so too were her saints. So too, the professor.
Before Edelgard saw her, she heard her. The echoing clack of heeled boots against stone grew louder and louder with each second. It drew up the first flight of stairs, the next, and further before bursting out to touch every wall, every corner, and every inch of unmarred stone with the unmistakable echo of presence.
Edelgard knew from experience how easily the professor could vanish into silence. That she hadn’t was as good as church bells ringing out to mourn new death. At last, at last, their song declared, the end was come.
“Professor,” Edelgard said sharply, only once Byleth was close enough to reach out and wield ends like a bludgeon. As she spoke the title, her voice fell calm and low, soothed by the peace of knowledge that after short, short moments, it would all be over to begin once again. “You’re awake so late.”
The lack of response was unsurprising. Silent as the goddess in all things. Silent as the goddess handing down judgment. Silent as the goddess and all of her saints. Even now. Even now.
Edelgard cleared her throat. “Professor?”
It was only once she made to turn that the professor moved: she stepped forward, crossing that last stretch of distance — two confident clicks against the stone — and Edelgard was frozen to the core in her halfway aborted gesture, unable to see, unable to know, unable, even, to speak. At last, the end was arrived.
Except.
Except, except, except, that for once, for the very first time, she did not die quickly. The professor dragged the bare palms of both hands torturously slow up Edelgard’s arms from wrist to elbow to shoulder — extensor carpi radialis longus, anconeus muscle, triceps brachii, deltoid, and —
Her cloak and her mantle were both peeled away in one fluid movement, and the weight of worlds left her shoulders from right to left; collar, and shoulders and further. But the professor did not move. The end did not come. Instead, her cloak was carefully folded — halved, quartered, and patted to shape — with an effort to stay heard and an effort for grace so practiced that Edelgard no longer knew how to react. She felt frozen within her own body.
Only when the act was finished did she remember herself enough to breathe. Only when the act was finished did the professor step away, gliding toward the nearest row of pews without once allowing the announcement of sound to fade.
For a brief, flickering moment, Edelgard had the audacity to think herself mistaken. Maybe her end was not coming so soon. Maybe the professor wanted something else.
But those footsteps spun back in her direction, a rhythmic clack, clack, clacking as the professor stepped away from whatever detour of ritual had pulled her away to begin with. Edelgard did not allow herself to look. Not even when the professor was on her once again, too close, too warm, breath a steady stream of burning ice on the back of her neck. Not even when the very tip of the professor’s nose pressed to the part of her hair. Not even with the professor used the pads of two fingers — index, middle — to trace over the expanse of bare skin at Edelgard’s upper back. She did not look. She did not shudder.
She clung, in that moment, to the empty of lost sense. She could not feel the professor’s absence of presence or predict her next move, but she could feel the hairs raise on the backs of her forearms; could feel each and every deceitfully cold breath fade to nothing against her own body; could smell the faint aroma of salt, and sweat, and the almost accidental perfume: roses, and blackberries, and sweets. She did not look. She did not shudder.
Lifetimes ago, she might have longed for a chance at closeness steady enough to notice such things.
Now, at the end of it all and the precipice of yet more, the knowledge of the professor; the feel of her; the scent of her, was nothing more than unsteady footholds crumbling slowly to pieces amid the crushing pull of Hell’s dark.
There was no comfort to be found in what secrets proximity revealed. There was no welcome in the thought of two bodies, too close, for too long, and less still in the secondhand memory of painted lips pouting, brown waves bouncing, perfume spreading, and a full body press of contact to ask the question, Professor, why don’t we head to the baths and see if we can’t scheme up some way to cheer Edie up, hm?
The thought was ice cold chill piercing the fire of touch. But Edelgard did not look. She did not shudder. She did not tremble.
Slender, manicured — still rough, still calloused — fingers slid to the edge of bare skin and slipped beneath fabric. They moved up, and up, and up to the thankfully impassible barrier provided by her gorget. They drew empty shapes along the base of it; ran paths over the top of it. Superior trapezius. Occipital base. The professor’s touch did not affect her beyond the physical. It did not pierce down to the bone, down to the marrow, down far enough to freeze blood to ice and thaw it in blaze. Splenius capitis, levator scapulae, rhomboid minor, major, still working, still intact, still her own.
Edelgard reminded herself of her body’s function, its movement, its shape. She did not think of the delicate — human — way that the professor’s hands turned over and fell lower, rolling pad to side to knuckle in their ongoing and utterly indiscernible exploration. Transverse trapezius. Inferior trapezius. Latissimus dorsi.
She did not allow herself to wonder at the purpose of the professor’s touch.
Not even when, rather abruptly — sacrospinalis — it stopped. Not even then. Edelgard did not wonder. But neither was she frightened. Neither was she trembling. She was stock still and unaffected, because at last and again, the end had come.
She did not tense, as she waited for the pull.
The professor inhaled. The professor exhaled. She was calm and steady as the very first day they met. In. Out. In. Out. Once, twice, thrice, and again, and again, and again. She was not more horrifying than ever like this. She was not a white noise build of terror soaring to a crescendo of wordless screaming in Edelgard’s ears. It did not last for an eternity. It did not last for a million eternities.
Because the professor was moving again, both palms flat against the small of Edelgard’s back. They slid left, they slid right, they slid around — external oblique, serratus anterior, rectus abdominis — and Edelgard did not shake as they settled on either ilium of her pelvis. She did not breathe so heavily, so unsteadily that each and every exhale rattled its way through her lungs and each inhale carried with it the faintest sort of whimper, because she was not shaking, because she was not scared, because she was not —
Lips chapped, scarred, soft, soft, soft enough to still hold the most wonderful plush give painted a path over the line of her jaw — temporomandibular joint, lateral and medial pterygoid, masseter muscle — and Edelgard’s world faded momentarily white. Her legs nearly failed her completely.
But only nearly. She jolted free; three firm steps toward the mountain of rubble at the cathedral’s head, and turned sharply to meet her professor’s waiting gaze.
She did not acknowledge one second of the undying fire of need within her stoked further to life by that newfound loss of contact. She did not acknowledge the inhuman shape that flickered momentarily through the lines of the professor’s body.
For less than a second and less than a fraction, the professor was not the professor, but a creature that only vaguely resembled something familiar, and even less resembled something human. She shifted and cracked open like lava floes, charred and burning, skin stretching, and crumbling, and forming into chitin-like armor before repeating the cycle once over and again. She was power. She was absence. She was death.
But Edelgard did not acknowledge it. She blinked, and it was gone.
Her professor — human — simply watched on, unbothered. Like she wasn’t the very warden of this Hell. Like she wasn’t half naked in nothing but her training clothes: that too-tight black top cut too low and too small for her chest, cut too high to cover enough of her too-toned abdomen, and the too-tight shorts that didn’t cover nearly enough of those impossibly defined thighs, moonlight draping over every rise and fall of hard muscle and scar-drenched skin and —
Those awful pale green eyes, so flawlessly unbroken and beautifully blended into the perfect, perfect, perfect representation of everything Edelgard hated down to the very fiber of her —
Her limbs stretched and extended to unnatural lengths, caught somewhere between animal and somewhere between human, and that horrifying rush of heat burst again through the cracks of yellowed, dying flesh, flaring out like the surface of the sun, and —
Her professor — human, not creature, not monster — did not so much as blink. She did, however, smile.
She smiled that perfectly symmetrical smile on that perfectly symmetrical face, and it made her look impossibly ancient; a being of unfathomable strength buried beneath the weight of countless lives.
She smiled that perfectly symmetrical smile, and she looked human; she looked five years younger; she looked exactly the same as she always had: unknowable, unreadable, unstoppable.
She smiled, and Edelgard did not tremble.
“I didn’t expect to see anyone here,” Her professor said in her usual — human — gruff tone. She had the voice of the saints. She had the voice of the goddess herself. She spoke with the vocabulary of a woman raised by mercenaries and farmers. She sang the most beautiful siren’s song Edelgard had ever known.
And at Edelgard’s silence, her professor tilted her head curiously to the side. Her features flickered and fluctuated, tangling for the barest instant into snarls of white-hot light.
Edelgard blinked, and it was gone.
“Yes,” she choked out as quickly as she could. “Yes, I’ve…I came here to think. The mess makes it easier to…”
The professor stepped closer. The glow of the moon flattered her more than was worldly possible. Her features peeled apart into fractals of ten and twenty more. Her skin was burning bright and shifting through colors like breaths, hot enough to sear, hot enough to kill, hot enough to —
“Professor, was there something you wished to discuss?”
Her professor’s unblinking gaze faded dark; pupils blown wide enough to reveal the very depths of what Hell still held in store. She was human. The whites of her eyes were bright feathers like tongues of flame. She was human.
Edelgard cleared her throat. “Because if not — it is late. I am sure we could both use the rest.”
Seconds turned to minutes turned to hours, and days, and weeks, and years before condensing back down into their original form, and still, her professor did nothing but watch. There was forever hidden in the lambent fire of those eyes. There was eternity in the silence.
Her professor blinked then, only once, and turned without violence for the pews. It was such a fluid movement — so soundless, and careful, and smooth — that Edelgard hardly registered it had happened before the distance between them was disappearing all over again. The professor’s hands, so human in that otherworldly light — too yellow, too pale, too bright, but still human — were holding something.
And so Edelgard let her eyes fall closed.
Those hands contained death, and she let them come.
Except.
Once again, she did not die.
A set of fingers danced playfully over the back of her left palm, and when Edelgard snapped her eyes open to make sense of the touch, there was nothing but one hand splitting slowly into two. Empty space filled with molten light. Shape spilled from flesh and set itself ablaze, burning into suns. Ten fingers were twenty, twenty were thirty, thirty were ten, and each burned with the intensity of stars.
The touch should rightfully have singed, but Edelgard felt nothing beyond peeling callouses and meticulously maintained nails. The fire was there, but it wasn’t. The hand was there, and it was lifting Edelgard’s own to rest somewhere nearer the base of her ribs. She did not gasp. She did not scream.
Those — human, human, human — fingers ceased immediately in their transformation and slid wristward, snaking around in feather light touch to tilt Edelgard’s palm toward the moon.
Something dropped rather unceremoniously into her grip.
A training sword, she realized. A simple wooden training sword.
Edelgard snapped her gaze up in search of explanation, and her professor was smiling. Her head was tilted again, and her lips — Edelgard had only just noticed her lips — were dry and cracked, chapped, and bloody, and red. A matching training sword was tapping against her shoulder in some unknowable rhythm; tap, tap tap, tap, tap tap tap. Her professor leaned closer, lower, until she was nearly bowing.
“Spar with me,” she said, and her smile was still so perfectly even.
She was beautiful. She was growing new limbs and shedding still more, each of them nightmares of movement covered in ten thousand eyes and ten thousand lights. She was human. She was beautiful. Edelgard tightened her grip on the oak sword handle.
“Lately,” Her professor went on, moving with an unnatural grace to take a fighting stance. The light in her faded, almost embarrassed as she spoke, as if only just now aware of itself; only just now scared to be seen. It dulled, and slowed, and receded to tails, and wings, and limbs, and less. The professor was a monster without form. The professor was human. She was human. “You’ve been so scared of me.”
“I haven’t,” Edelgard pleaded. She did not know why. She did not wince at her lack of control.
Neither did she tense at the way the muscle in her professor’s arms rippled in moonlit glow as she spun her sword lazily back and lazier forth. She did not choke at the way her professor’s biceps flexed almost absentmindedly, pressing in against soft fabric and softer breasts and sinking in ever so gently —
Through lips that were not trembling, Edelgard whispered, “My teacher…”
But her professor, her teacher, did not give voice to an answer. She nodded in response to that betrayal of Edelgard’s tongue. Her sickly green eyes were as still as ever and forever. They did not belong on her face. They did not belong in the world. They were wrong in the light, and worse in the dark, and they split apart, and sewed themselves back, and they were broken, and seamless, and horrible, and flawless, and they were impossibly, unfathomably beautiful. Edelgard shut her own to them, and she did not shake.
“Spar with me,” her teacher spoke again. Edelgard’s eyes opened just in time to witness those very human lips crack red with blood once again. “Until your fear disappears.”
Edelgard tightened her grip on the training sword without thought. She took her stance obediently — off hand balanced gentle at the pommel, legs wide, balance low — but the fog of unsurety did not leave. She did not sob. She did not shake. Her death was arrived, and it was a game. Her death was arrived, and she was playing along.
“Come,” said her teacher.
And though she did not know why, Edelgard went.
She lunged in an instant; a one-handed strike aimed for the throat. Anyone else, it would have disabled and disarmed. She doubted her teacher would so much as flinch.
And her teacher did not. She parried the blow with barely a blink and no more than a flick of her wrist, stance softening, growing more fluid in the aftermath. Edelgard was barely halfway recovered from her own force of momentum before she realized the change.
“Again,” said her teacher, rolling her shoulders. Edelgard was not shaking.
She dove forward again, brow furrowed in what she told herself was concentration. Her teacher slapped the blade to the side with the back of her palm so softly it felt like an insult. So gently that Edelgard may as well have attacked with the breeze.
It was whole seconds before her mind caught up to her body. The world was shifting beneath her feet, willing and ready to rip her sense of equilibrium straight through her chest. Her teacher was playing. Her death was a game. Her death was arrived, and she could hardly keep up.
“Again,” said her teacher — human, not a creature, not a goddess — and Edelgard was not shaking. She tightened her grip, squared her stance, and struck again, blinded to the outcome by the unwelcome roiling of something unfamiliar in the depths of her gut. Except, except, except, except, except that the moment it came, the world slowed to a halt.
Her teacher’s weapon was in the air and she did not know why, only that it was twirling uselessly toward the cathedral’s front gates. Her teacher was practically floating on the wind. Her teacher caught the flat of Edelgard’s wooden sword between both hands — opponens pollicis, abductor pollicis brevis, flexor pollicis br —
As if it were nothing, because it must have been nothing to a goddess — except that she was human —
Her teacher wrenched the blade free and sent it flying away with all the destructive force of a bolt. It shattered to splinters against the far wall, less than inches from its companion.
“Again,” her teacher demanded, and she sounded both exactly and nothing like her usual self. The pattern of her voice was the same, but the sound of it, the feel of it, the taste of it; it echoed within itself and quieted to a whisper. It filled Edelgard’s very sense of being with emotion she did not know how to describe. She was frozen. She was awestruck. She put up her fists.
The professor was human. Unchanged. Unaware. Smiling.
And that unfamiliar bubbling crystallized to familiarity at the sight: Edelgard was angry. Her death was a game. Her death was enjoyment. Her death was a source of pleasure for the creature before her, and she was playing along without question. Edelgard was angry.
She moved. She moved in hate. She moved in fury. She lashed out, one jab aimed for the shoulder, dodged too quickly, too easily.
One for the throat, deflected with nothing more than a gentle press of forearm to wrist.
Pirouette, bounce, arms swung side to side, her teacher was playing.
Edelgard struck again. Missed
Again. Ducked.
Again. Deflected.
Edelgard fumed. She paused for nothing but to take her balance and launched herself forward, aiming a wild cross for the jaw. Her eyes shut with the force of it. Her arm felt ready to tear from its socket. The world rocked on its axes. She made contact, but only too late realized why. Her teacher — not a goddess, not a monster — had stepped backward just quickly enough to be missed, leaned forward just quickly enough to be caught, and stained the crimson knuckles of Edelgard’s gauntlet even further red with an innocent kiss.
And she continued smiling that horrible symmetrical smile.
Edelgard did not wait to see what came next. She did not wait to hear how her teacher — human, human, human, not death coming to claim her yet again — would or wouldn’t explain the gesture away. She whirled, pivoting hard on her heels, spinning around and swinging an elbow, and the world was red, and red, and red, red, red, redredred —
Something rumbled.
Something cracked, and crumbled, and brought the world to the cold embrace of darkness through a tunnel built on the neon flash of blinding white light. It was forever before Edelgard realized she was on the ground, and it was longer before the ringing in her ears began to fade. Seconds passed before the world ceased in its shaking. Minutes, before Edelgard realized with a stomach-churning rush that her Crest had activated. The rubble at the head of the cathedral, it must have been, was blown in all directions, and she had —
She was —
Edelgard flexed her fingers. They were caught in the grip of something warm. She could move, but only barely. Hesitantly, she opened her eyes, and —
She —
Edelgard shook.
Edelgard trembled.
As if she were something dearly cherished, Edelgard was being clutched to her teacher’s chest and pinned beneath a shield built from her body. Their faces were touching. The world was heat, the world was fire, the world was skin on skin and —
The air caught in Edelgard’s throat. Disgust and shame flooded her veins like a flare flash frozen to the jagged surface of rage.
“Get off!” she shouted. She did not bother to wait for a reaction as her teacher rolled away toward the pews. She rolled over in chase, clambering on top of her teacher’s still unmoving body — willing, watching, waiting, limp and ready like some kind of human, and not like a monster, and —
If the moonlight made her teacher look wrong, the fog of shattered stone made her look worse. She was unnatural colors and unnatural stillness. An unbroken expression. Unblinking, unfeeling eyes. She was monstrous. The shape of her spiked a little as she followed what happened. The flames of her hardened briefly, monstrous light turning inward and dulled in a gesture so utterly, sincerely concerned that Edelgard felt momentarily choked up. Her teacher was beautiful. Her teacher was human.
Edelgard straddled her at the hips, dragged her hands slow, slow, slow up her teacher’s sides, gauntlets just barely beginning to pierce into flesh as she crossed planes of bare skin and thinning black fabric. Rectus abdominus, external obliques, serratus anterior, and higher still; pectoralis major, and minor, they cut over deltoid and in, and in, to the soft, soft, soft —
Her grip closed around her teacher’s throat. Armored thumbs rest over the soft cartilage at her trachea as each and every finger sought out jugular and carotid. The hold did not tighten.
“I won’t hurt you,” her teacher said then, still staring that haunting, owlish stare. She tilted her head back bare inches more, freely offering up more of herself. Her arms were spread uselessly at her sides, bent at the elbows, palms up, fingers still and unmoving in something that only seemed like obedience —
The confession rang oddly in Edelgard’s ears. She hadn’t been listening for it before, but with nothing else to distract her…it was shaped by something wide, and vast, and endless. It was the stars. It was the sky. Her teacher’s voice was surrender built on a foundation of enormity Edelgard could hardly begin to fathom.
But that was wrong. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That wasn’t how death, or the goddess, or her saints, or even the warden of this worst of Hells would respond; there were inhuman deaths enough to prove that three times over. Which left only the possibility that it was a trick. The worst of the church’s beasts attempting to lure her into unearned passivity in a last-ditch effort to bring death about once again. Because now Edelgard had the advantage. Because now Edelgard held death within her very hands. The steel of her gauntlets bit deeper into her teacher’s — human, human, so tenderly, fragilely human — throat.
“And if I were to turn the full might of Adrestia’s army in your direction, my teacher? If I were to shed this skin in desperation and become a terrifying winged monster? You would hardly be able to look at me; do not dare speak as if —” the words choked off in a half-sob. The words of a madwoman, spoken in fear, spoken in a wave of entirely too much emotion. Her grip went tighter, and a single stream of blood spilled from beneath her thumbs, staining that pale green halo of hair where it lie spread across marble, drop by drop by drop.
“Never again,” whispered her teacher, and when her voice crackled through the air strong enough to taste of ozone, Edelgard knew it was true. One way or another, she knew it was true.
Her grip tightened again. One way or another, she would see it proved true.
The professor’s next breath was a blood-curdling gag, but still her expression did not twitch, and still her eyes did not blink, unbending stare as unbroken as ever, even as she reached up to blindly trace shapes across Edelgard’s body that hadn’t existed for lifetimes and more.
Her touch was gentle enough not to be felt. Her touch was powerful enough to drown Edelgard in memory. She traced a jagged, throbbing shape at the base of Edelgard’s ribs: a spear, and a knife, and the benevolent audience of the goddess’ last child.
She traced something that no longer ran from left shoulder to right hip: vertebrae twisted into only the vaguest semblance of a blade severing flesh from muscle, and muscle from bone, and bone from the very words, I only wanted to walk with you.
She even — with those human hands and that human touch — traced along the long-lost shape of stony scales borne of flesh that no longer was and each individual scar they had grown like extensive root systems burrowing darkness into the core of Edelgard’s very soul. She traced, and she knew, and…
And —
Edelgard’s grip faltered, then emptied of force in one sudden wave, both palms settling flat over the fragile line of her teacher’s clavicle.
“My teacher,” she said, taking care to enunciate each syllable spoken. She did not dare speak the words ringing at the front of her mind. “You cannot possibly promise me that.”
Once more came silence. Her teacher — her human teacher — tilted her head to the side, baring yet more of that vulnerable column of throat. Already, bruises were forming. The truth of her spilled from them, falls of liquid light that expanded in mere instants to the length of the sky. She did not speak, but her voice was like silk. Edelgard could feel it glide almost wistfully along her body’s every inch in intimate rolling waves. It was as if there had never been anything separating them at all.
Her teacher blinked slowly and the sight disappeared. She made no effort to move her arms from where they lie spread across the floor. Signals of vulnerability shining through the still. Slowly, her lips parted, and slower, she said, “And yet I have.”
Armor and body both became unmoving shells in that moment. Edelgard was trapped within herself. She could hardly still see. She could hardly still breathe.
“…You were never a monster,” her teacher said, faint enough to carry on a rush of breeze and break against Edelgard’s lips.
The world began to sway. Her teacher was human.
Fighting against her own limbs, Edelgard reached out in hope for stability or balance. Her body responded, but for neither intention. Her body responded and moved further, moved slower, moved careful, and tender, and without answer as Edelgard watched helplessly on. One armored hand cupped her teacher’s jaw, and one armored thumb pressed to the unmoving curve of her teacher’s mouth. It tested the give of her lips, pressing in softly, softly, softly, once, and twice, and —
The world was blinding white light —
The world was ending —
Her teacher allowed that thumb to push into her mouth, dragging her tongue over and around the shape of it. Her tongue circled one way and the other, the flat and the sides moving in tandem to empty Edelgard’s mind of sense and of thought —
Her teacher closed her lips around it, eyes falling closed, and she sucked on that piece of unresponsive steel just once, just once, just once. But the once was enough, and the knowledge of what she was seeing shot through Edelgard like a lightning strike.
She was surfaced from the daze and jolted away with enough suddenness and lack of control that as soon as she could move, she was tripping and falling in the pooling of skirts over stone. Every inch of her too cold, too hot, too tangled up in some irreversible, primal sense of fear.
She rose, and she fell, and she rose, and she fell, until at last she was on her own two feet and slamming the back of her skull against the flat of a nearby pillar. She clung desperately to the absolute lack of traction as if it might offer a new chance at life.
Why she had let the chance to end things once and for all slip away, she did not know. Why she had so easily succumbed to fear, she did not know. Why she was still there when the chance to flee was so readily being presented, she did not know. She could have so easily given Hubert the order to —
Except that Hubert would never. Not in their current life. Not anymore. Not so deeply lost in his misguided love. Any such opportunity for an easy way out was long lost to worlds that would never exist again.
Edelgard stayed.
And when she did, her teacher — human, not a monster, not a monster, not a monster not a monster not a monster — followed suit with all the graceful movement of someone — a human, a professor, a woman named Byleth Eisner who was raised by humans not monsters not monsters not monsters — who hadn’t lost track of their own sense of self — because she was human, and not the goddess, not a saint, not the face of death or the warden of Hell, because she was not a monster — too many times to count in the last three seconds alone, because she was human, not a monster, because a monster would have killed her, a monster wouldn’t so willingly accept their own death, a monster wouldn’t show such vulnerability for nothing more than the chance to say never again, never again, never again, because they had lived through it too, and they had chased Edelgard through time, and lives, and years, and wars, and her very human teacher was a monster.
Edelgard choked on air. She couldn’t think straight. Her heart was beating a vicious song against her ribs.
Worst of all, three steps away, Byleth Eisner, human, monster, and everything in between, rose effortlessly to her feet. That strange owl-eyed stare turned on herself for only long enough to dust her body off. One sigh, one blink, one gaze matched, and she made a pitying, fragmented expression. It was a smile, but not; worry, but not; so many things, and still not. Her form did not shift. It did not change. She was human.
And with Byleth Eisner — very, very human — three steps away, Edelgard realized that she needed to speak.
Two, and she finally remembered how.
One, close enough to feel the wrong warmth of her radiating far too unnaturally to belong in the world, Edelgard finally managed.
What do you want from me, she meant to ask, only to be betrayed yet again by her tongue.
“Why,” she began, unsure even as the words formed what shape they might take. “My teacher, why must you look at me like that? Why now, after all this time?”
Byleth did not answer. She froze in her tracks, gaze averting momentarily down and to the side. An unnatural shine flickered over the terrible flawless green of her irises. It had nothing to do with what moonlight remained. There was no further change.
Before Edelgard could stop herself, she asked, “Do you truly remember? All of it?”
A beat passed as Byleth seemed to consider the question. She nodded.
Springing into action once more, already moving to speak before that curt nod was halfway to finished, Edelgard went on, “Then why? Why look at me this way now? Why touch me as if we were nothing more than star-crossed lovers when you have spent entire wars hating me with a passion more fervent than any I have ever known? You have hated me through time! You have hated me through life, and death, and warped the very rules of existence to hate me further!
“I have been your enemy for so long that I no longer understand how to be anything else! Do you mean to tell me that I have only ever been some…some plaything? Have I truly meant so little that you could so easily throw it all away? What an existence you must lead, my teacher! What a life, to so easily forget who it was that ended each of mine. What an irredeemable beast you have become to think I could ever forgive you for the pain I have suffered.”
For the first time that night, Byleth’s expression softened. More than pity. More than that perfectly flawless smile. More than even that goddess-cursed glow in her eyes or the monstrous change of before. The whole of her became soft with something so deeply and intrinsically human that Edelgard did not know how to name it.
“You’re wrong,” Byleth said, and she did not move.
It was only the faintest source of embarrassment that Edelgard wished she would.
Those eyes flickered again, but Byleth did not change. “I never hated you.”
The sounds of laughter Edelgard made in that moment must have been half-hysterical, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. She laughed until her lungs strained, and burned, and she clutched harder at the impossible nothing of limestone and marble behind her.
“My —” she began, and then didn’t. She shut her eyes tight, took a shuddering breath, and tried again. “My teacher.” Once more, the laughter cut her off. She licked her lips slowly, pausing for the shortest of moments, tongue held between both, and she began again. “I have lived these long wars wholly at your mercy. I have hated you through too many decades to count. I have hated you in love, I have loved you in fear, and I have feared you in that very same hate.
“Your disgust has meant more to me than the love of any other being in this world, and — and now you meant to tell me that all of it was a lie? That…that — that you have killed me in apathy? Disinterest? Boredom? Why, after all this time, would you expect me to believe such a thing? I have not forgotten the look your eyes held in every one of my final moments, my teacher. Your hate is not a figment of my imagination.”
Seemingly for lack of any explanation, Byleth turned to stare through the front gates. Her thoughts drifted away with her gaze, and the realization that she, with her broken lips and scar ruined limbs, her eyes that weren’t her own and the messy, tangled hair of someone that she wasn’t, was more beautiful than any soul Edelgard had ever known crashed through the silence without warning once again. She gagged on the thought. Her teacher did not change. Her teacher was human.
They were close enough to be nearly pressed together, and that wrong warmth of proximity cranked to a white-hot burn. Emotion washed through Edelgard’s body like boiling tides through empty space. Byleth reached out with one steady hand, the pads of her fingers moments from brushing Edelgard’s face, but something different flashed through her eyes. Something Edelgard had never seen. Something human.
The arm fell slack at Byleth’s side, and she dropped her head roughly against Edelgard’s left shoulder.
“I’m…” Byleth said. She furrowed her brow, moving up, and up, and up until the tip of her nose was tracing along Edelgard’s jaw. Until her lips were resting against Edelgard’s cheekbone. The heat of her was too much. The heat of her would never be enough. “Tired.”
Not a sound came when Edelgard tried to answer.
Byleth licked her lips then. The tip of her tongue just barely lingered on Edelgard’s skin, and it took every last shred of focus within her to stay standing, stay silent, stay aware.
Byleth continued, “I’ve made so many mistakes. You deserved peace.” She tilted her head lower, lips brushing back down the curve of Edelgard’s jaw, almost as if asking for permission to touch, to rest, to fall, to stop, to breathe, to shut her eyes and begin once again, and Edelgard understood more deeply than she ever had before, but…
But she winced away. She angled her face toward the nearby mountain of rubble, staring deliberately anywhere else as her whole body tensed in something that ran parallel to regret. She did not understand the horrible sinking sensation consuming all that might have hoped to grow within her heart, but neither did she question it. She opened her mouth, and she said, “So then, I have been tortured in this Hell to give Fódlan peace.”
“No,” Byleth said.
Edelgard felt all sense of equilibrium leave her. In a desperate search for balance, she clutched with both hands at Byleth’s shoulders. “…No?”
“I don’t care about Fódlan. You deserve peace.”
The grip on Byleth’s shoulders tightened until her hands were fisting up in the hem of her sleeves. Edelgard could not begin to explain why. Neither could she move away.
Byleth, too, remained still and steady as ever.
At least, until she spoke the words, “You deserve so much.”
At least, until she reached forth once more, this time finding whatever strength necessary to follow through; this time moving calm, and steady, and gentle, and tender and too many things to count to begin taking Edelgard’s ramshorn crown apart.
Locks of white hair tugging painfully at her midscalp were untwisted and uncurled. Byleth’s fingers combed and smoothed from forelock to crown in soothing expert motion, and the gilded chains at the back of Edelgard’s head were unclasped and pulled free through the work of that very same too-calloused — human — touch.
Byleth moved with the grace of someone who had spent lifetimes rehearsing, imagining, wishing to know what it might be like to finally have the chance.
Edelgard trembled. The impossible weight of the horns was lifted from her head, leaving nothing but the pain of lost tension and strain. She wanted it back. Her hair brushed her cheek like a comforting touch, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted it back.
And so she shook. Byleth made no effort to move away, the crown lying carefully and in pieces in her palms while one of her thighs wedged insistently between Edelgard’s own. Edelgard shook.
Were it not for the pillar still offering support, she might even have collapsed. Byleth’s lips were close enough that she would have only needed to lean forward and surrender her balance —
Except that Byleth was leaving. She was moving for the pews, for the mantle and cloak folded up at the far edge, where she laid the crown carefully atop that bed of fabric. The world was reduced to a blurred-out tunnel filled with nothing but absence. Edelgard couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t —
“You’re so beautiful with your hair down,” Byleth whispered. She ran fingers over Edelgard’s hairline, very nearly smiling as she tucked some few stray strands behind her ears. When she had returned, Edelgard couldn’t begin to imagine. How much time she lost, she couldn’t begin to know. Her back arched slightly away from the pillar, seeking out that wrong heat from before. The flames, and the wings, and the — the everything.
Dorothea had lied something similar about her hair, once. They had found each other on the balcony outside the archbishop’s rooms at the same ungodly hour of night and spent the dwindling hours until morning in each other’s company, making small talk and not quite making small talk. Sharing. Giving. Taking. Trusting. It was wonderful. It was horrible. Edelgard made absolutely sure no one ever found her there again.
And no one but Byleth ever did.
You deserve peace.
If only.
If only.
She was trapped for a reason, and that reason was not peace.
“Professor,” Edelgard said, or maybe asked. She took a breath. She closed her eyes. She began again. “My teacher, if what you say is true…After all this time — I cannot begin to conceive of a world without your anger. With it, I may be lost, but without it, I am undone. If I have never had it, then…then what?”
Byleth’s unnatural eyes glinted in that unnatural way, but they yielded no answer. Edelgard would have gladly fallen to her knees if she thought it might help. But all Byleth did was nothing. All Byleth said was nothing.
And so Edelgard nodded. It was no answer. It was the only answer she would get. The whole of her felt leaden with exhaustion. “How could I ever be convinced that your words are truth? Do you truly mean to tell me that you have remained by my side, even as you stood against me?”
“Always.”
“But — forgive me, my teacher, but how could you ever prove that to me? After everything you have taken, how could you ever expect me to believe you?” For a moment, the only response given was another blank stare, but Edelgard huffed a frustrated breath, then another, and on the next, she took a leap of faith. She was soaring, falling, readying herself for the crash, and the end, and the next life waiting to greet her in failure. “Would…Will you give me whatever I should want? Will you follow my every order?”
But the end did not come. Byleth nodded.
“Will you die for me, should I ask it of you? Will you do so without argument?”
And the end did not come. Again, Byleth nodded. Again, she did not speak.
And the end would not come. Because something changed, then: Edelgard watched on, helpless as Byleth dropped to the ground before her. She watched on as Byleth knelt, hands splayed flat — soft, soft, soft — over her skirts and over her thighs.
On its own, it might have been enough to steal the breath from her lungs, but the next blow came when Edelgard saw the look in her eyes. She felt as if she might never breathe again.
Kneeling before her was no monster. Kneeling before her was no creature of the church, no goddess-borne abomination heavensbent on seeing her fall, and fall, and fall for an eternity and longer by no one’s hand but her own.
Kneeling before her was a woman.
A human.
One with wide, curious eyes, and a mouth fallen just slack enough to carry the endless forevers of meaning in the shape of those lips. A human ready and willing to accept whatever punishment Edelgard had will or power to give.
The dissonance of it all set the blood in Edelgard’s veins aflame. Her body was an oil slick burning a path to understanding.
I’ve made so many mistakes.
Mistakes made too early, mistakes made too often, mistakes that left no further choice but for love expressed through the singular force of violence. Edelgard understood.
It did not calm or silence the screaming burn in her heart, but she understood.
The air in her lungs began to hitch up and stutter.
She understood.
Could you ever love me in a way that did not mean my death, she at once hoped to ask and yet knew with every fiber of her being that it was not needed. She proffered her right hand, watching through heavy lidded eyes as Byleth moved with eternities of experience to unclasp the gauntlet presented before her. Leather straps moved over, and through, and under, and around, and the full of it was slipped free with a level of care that spoke of fear that she might destroy anyone and anything beneath more than the absolute least she could give.
It was harder with every breath to deny the truth of her care.
The sweat-damp silk glove Edelgard wore beneath shimmered rainbows in the dark, and with somehow deeper reserves of concern and of fear, Byleth slipped it free as well. The pads of her fingers soothed at Edelgard’s newly exposed skin, trails of balm against the fire still searing her body from the inside out.
It was harder with every touch to deny the truth of her love.
For long seconds, Byleth did not blink, did not twitch, did not wince, did not react at all to the scars lining Edelgard’s forearm.
But oh, when she did, the world rocked again on its axes. Rough fingers slid up to the elbow, cradling tenderly enough to speak of the worry she would never again see such a chance. Byleth leaned in, eyes shut as her lips ghosted along the shape of each and every scar within reach. She kissed along the long, singular line running from the exact center of pronator teres to the perpendicular intersection of —
Byleth’s lips spread in a smile as she reached the end, and she slowed, and she stopped, and Edelgard’s thoughts blurred into —
Byleth kissed along the long, singular line running from elbow to palm, and she smiled that beautiful, wonderful, perfectly symmetrical smile, and the balm of touch it became sparked fire to molten hot something that put the very concept of flames to shame. Edelgard’s heart clenched, her lungs strained, her stomach fell out, and she could feel nothing beyond an overwhelming rush of something she had not allowed herself to feel in long enough to forget the name.
Byleth met her gaze with that familiar wide-eyed patience. Her eyes were perfect. Her eyes were flawless. Her eyes were filled with something Edelgard had not allowed herself to imagine in long enough to forget the feeling.
The next press of lips to skin landed among the triptych of braceleted scars at her wrist. Edelgard nearly shook herself free of her own body at the sensation, but Byleth’s grip did not falter. Her gaze did not soften. Her touch did not harden. Her lips continued dancing feather-light along some unknowable winding path toward the most tender part of her wrist. Byleth’s tongue lapped out, and Edelgard’s capacity for thought failed her more thoroughly than it ever had before. A kiss warmed the mirrored star burst scars on either side of her palm, but Edelgard barely registered the feeling. She was lost to all sense but emotion, and there was so, so much to feel.
It was only when Byleth had repeated the act step for excruciating step with her opposite arm that Edelgard managed to find a way back to herself. Only once Byleth had finished neatly folding up the steel, and leather, and silks so lovingly accepted did she remember her control.
“To think,” Edelgard said through the shape of an exhale, a sigh, the feeling of words newly unfamiliar on her tongue. “That I would ever be blessed to witness one of the goddess’ children debasing herself in such a manner.”
Byleth tilted her head in question. Her expression did not so much as twitch, but it almost felt, for a moment, as if something joyous flared to life along the line of her shoulders.
“I think I might trust you after all,” Edelgard whispered. That her voice stayed steady was nothing short of a miracle. “Tell me, my teacher…what are you thinking in this moment?”
“Byleth. Call me Byleth,” she answered, slow and deliberate.
Edelgard blinked.
And Byleth said, “I lost the right to call myself your teacher ages ago.”
The ability to speak lodged itself somewhere in Edelgard’s throat, at that. To see Byleth so willingly fall to her knees in defiance of everything Edelgard saw as truth was one thing, but for her to then shed that flimsiest and most meaningful barrier still left between them…she no longer knew how to respond. That they hadn’t been teacher and student for some time was true on only the most technical level. Even through the hatred and roiling rage, some small space in the innermost depths of Edelgard’s heart had never truly been able to let go of the dream that one day — even just one day in a myriad of eternities — they might find a way back to each other. A child’s infatuation given too much time and too much space to bloom, until it was entwined so heavily with the fury and anger that there was no removing one without the other.
And yet, here was Byleth, untangling as if neither had ever truly been joined at all.
Edelgard licked her lips. Her tongue was dry with fear and stuck momentarily. She shuddered on the very next inhale.
Byleth, she thought.
“…My teacher,” she said. “I cannot.”
Byleth nodded solemnly. “I understand, Your Majesty.”
A pang of guilt shot through Edelgard’s heart, but she hid it well, allowing one hand to stroke aimlessly through Byleth’s hair. The way Byleth’s eyes drifted shut almost seemed the truest form of apology left in the world. The way she practically melted into Edelgard’s palm like that small brush of contact was the only thing in the world she had ever allowed herself to want — it almost felt like the truest form of acceptance left in Edelgard’s life.
And it made continuing impossibly easy.
Edelgard ran the pad of each and every finger, one after the last, down the line of Byleth’s jaw until she was cupping her chin between index and thumb. She tilted Byleth’s chin back. She tilted Byleth’s chin up. She could feel the heat of her bleeding into skin and see the fire of her begin to flicker, and dance, and spread through her form with newfound confidence, and it felt more right than any single moment of near death proximity they had lived and died through in the lead up to now.
On the next inhale, Edelgard saw her own gaze reflected in the pale off-green of Byleth’s eyes. “My teacher. My friend…My enemy. Will you defile this once holy place with me?”
Byleth did not smile, but her eyes sparkled with the very same emotion. She moved without answering to slide both hands down the length of Edelgard’s legs, and answered without speaking to undo every clasp her fingers passed over. Poleyn, greave, sabaton, and even the silk stockings beneath were each stripped away with almost more attention to care than the gauntlets before. Left, and right, and so too did her lips trace patterns and paths only she could see across the distance from sweat-dampened knees, to mangled ankles, to the matching circular scars marring the tops of Edelgard’s feet.
When Byleth pulled away, all sense of time had faded to fog. She turned her unblinking eyes back toward Edelgard’s own, question, permission, desire, and the burning flame of ten thousand suns shining in those unbroken irises.
“Breathe,” Byleth said, blunt fingernails scraping along their former path to settle at the ridge of Edelgard’s hips.
When her breathing had stopped, Edelgard didn’t know.
“Breathe for me,” Byleth said again, snapping open Edelgard’s modified corset. It did not fall, still held in place by the press of her back to the pillar, but it did widen enough to slip slightly lower; it did widen enough to allow Edelgard’s first full breath in what must have been hours.
She breathed.
She breathed, and Byleth smiled.
She breathed, and Byleth worked past layers on layers of skirt to reach the hem of the quilted breeches beneath, untying meticulously crafted knots and snapping buttons free, sliding all away with an ease speaking to familiarity Edelgard could only wish she’d had the chance to know. Familiarity earned at the price of her death. She might have worked herself back to anger at the thought, but then Byleth’s lips pressed to the notch in her right hip, skin to skin, flesh to flesh, heat to heat, and oh, her nerves were lightning and oh, that grin was thunder, and coherency ceased to hold meaning for the flickering flash of that moment.
“You — you’re so calm,” Edelgard said off the tail end of an exhale, shuddering as Byleth’s unnaturally sharp teeth grazed the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. She had hoped she might retain some small sense of control over the situation, but so deeply under the influence of Byleth mouthing, palming, smiling against her hips, and her abdomen, and — “Tell me, was this your goal all along?”
Byleth paused then, lips and the very tip of her nose pressing gently to the place her teeth had just marked. She breathed in, and breathed out. She was thinking. Edelgard did not know why.
And then, at last, she spoke. “I had no way of knowing you were here.”
It was not an answer, not in the slightest, but Edelgard found herself wanting to accept it as one anyway, laughing through an aftermath shaped like the flat of Byleth’s tongue dragging up, and up, and up over that patch of steady bruising skin. The words felt like a past gone unremembered; a future not let lived; either, or both, or neither. They were twilit days of innocence and peace. The beginning and the end together and at once. A time so separate from worry that it might never have existed at all.
The reality of where she was snapped back into crystal clear clarity at the feeling of her right leg being lifted to rest on Byleth’s shoulder. One rough palm held her firmly in place, its fingers splaying nearly the full width of her thigh. Edelgard moaned.
She might have even found the time to be embarrassed had it not so swiftly become the least of her problems.
What came next was noise: a choir’s worth of sound echoing from wall to wall not muffled in the slightest by the scattershot soundproofing of rubble. A faint hope to hide her voice before it had a chance to escape had both hands flying to clamp over her mouth, had teeth biting down on knuckles, but it wasn’t enough, and she began to doubt anything would ever —
Not when Byleth’s mouth, and Byleth’s lips, and Byleth’s tongue, and fingers, and —
The fire and —
Wings, and eyes, and teeth, and the fire. Limbs growing, form stretching, Byleth’s presence roaring to life and swallowing all. There were hands touching her in places Byleth could not possibly have reached and mouths roaming places she could not possibly have —
The cathedral’s acoustics must have carried her voice to every distant corner of Garreg Mach, and Edelgard could do nothing to stop it.
The longer it went on, the less she was sure she wanted to.
It was barely more than seconds, or maybe eternities longer than forever before the thought was abandoned entirely. Her left hand pressed flat to the pillar. Her right fisted in Byleth’s hair. She felt lost beneath the surface of light and darkness, unable to do anything but feel. The echoes of her pleasure could stretch out across all of Fódlan for all she cared anymore.
A flick of tongue against warmth. A tightened grip against thigh. A sigh, and lips, and Edelgard’s fist gripped tighter at Byleth’s hair, straining at the roots until Byleth was groaning something deep and guttural, the full weight of it folding back and into itself before resonating with enough strength to turn Edelgard’s marrow to liquid. The world was ripples in water. The world was faded away. The world was night and starlight, a myriad of constellations stretched out beyond the edges of periphery, and the world was devoured by the all-encompassing inferno of feathers, and teeth, and light, and Byleth.
Byleth’s heat and —
Byleth’s touch and —
Eternity stretched out before her. It was a loss of words so powerful Edelgard doubted she would ever speak again. It was lips, and knuckles, and fingers too countless to know running over and crooking in to burn away evidence of the very Hell they themselves had inflicted; as if Byleth thought she might baptize the both of them in holy streams burned out by fingernail and apology, the only saint in the world still worthy of the act.
Edelgard relented. She accepted. She fell through and fell in, trusting that ceaseless grip to pull her back to the surface as she sank to the depths of a wordless scream, the whole of herself echoing through the forever of lifetimes. She was nerves alight like the breakpoint flash of millions of distant suns burning themselves to life. Agonizing and wonderful at once.
She was alive once again through every past life and dying once more through every past death, all at once and again. She could see beyond even the stars to the depths of void, she could see floating motes of galaxies brought to their ends to create countless new beginnings until everything was blinding light and so too was everything dark. She could see through the end, through the start, through to the center of it all, and at last, at last, at last she understood.
It was waves, it was tide, and she was sobbing nothings of pleasure, slowly regaining awareness while the forever of light and dark faded away like smoke toward the rafters. She was somewhere else, and then she was not, all of her bursting with sensation. Her lungs were worn and sore, her throat scratched raw with exertion. Her voice was the iridescent sheen of emotion slowly lacquering itself to the walls in the shape of long-lost mornings of ease never lived: time outside of time spent tangled together in the forever of life.
She was truly, fully, finally at peace.
So much so that she barely held enough recognition in her to notice when Byleth slid the thigh from her shoulder. She collapsed without argument or fight, allowing herself to be eased into that waiting embrace. Her back was tucked to the soft warmth of Byleth’s chest. Her gaze was lost in Byleth’s flawless, perfect, human eyes, sticking only momentarily on the way she wiped the slick coating her chin toward her mouth, savoring each final taste. One finger slowly toward soft lips and pulled away with away on the wave of a barely audible hum. So too the next.
Edelgard smiled, though she didn’t quite know why. She only hoped that whatever false deities remained alive to see were sufficiently offended by the sight.
Except, something happened then, and the pleasant fog of afterglow turned solid and snapped.
A knife’s blade was unsheathed just loud enough to be heard, and it pressed to the base of Edelgard’s ribs, and she could see the end, could taste the betrayal, could —
The blade faced the open space of the —
The rounded pommel pressed to the base of her —
Byleth took Edelgard’s hands into her own, wrapping one and the other around the handle. The handle which was resting harmlessly against her on the blade which was very distinctly not pointed at her —
Byleth buried her face in the crook of Edelgard’s neck.
“If you still don’t trust me,” Byleth explained. Her touch fell away until nothing remained but the steady rising heat of her.
Edelgard tossed the dagger away as if its very existence were a blight on her life. It clattered and scratched along the floor, spinning ineffectually until it wedged itself in the pile of rubble beside them. Several rocks came dislodged and buried it completely.
Edelgard turned, enough that her mouth grazed Byleth’s hairline. She nuzzled in, breathing in the scent of her before at last speaking the name, “Byleth.”
Byleth hummed.
And Edelgard was shocked at easy the name was to speak. She continued. “Byleth, have you truly been acting for my sake? All this time? Even when you weren’t?”
The answer came not in words, but in movement. She could feel as Byleth froze, disappearing into her own mind for the short beat of seconds before reemerging to nod with conviction.
“I see,” Edelgard breathed. Truthfully, she did not know whether it was safe to believe. But she did know what she wanted.
Byleth slipped lower on Edelgard’s shoulder, almost guiltily resting the bridge of her nose where her chin had once been. Her eyelids flickered, but they did not open. Her lips twitched, and she did not speak. She was human, and she did not change.
Taking one of Byleth’s hands into her own, Edelgard began blindly tracing constellations over the back of her palm. “And, are you still the same woman who tore a path through space itself to return to us?”
Again, Byleth nodded. She pulled away, just barely, and with her free hand brushed strands of hair behind Edelgard’s ear. Just before pressing her lips to the newly exposed patch of skin, she clarified, “To you.”
Edelgard’s heart nearly skipped a beat.
She worked her throat and took two steadying breaths, squeezing gently at the hand held tightly in the grip of her own.
“Then you should know that you have lost no such right to walk with me, or to continue calling yourself my teacher.”
Somewhere in the distance, birds were singing. Somewhere in the distance, others were waking. The moonlight was fading, tinted with the pastel spread of morning sun. The air itself was indescribably changed. A beat passed, and Edelgard tilted her head back, resting her cheek on Byleth’s shoulder. Another and she let her eyes fall closed.