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Winter in Faerghus was silent. There were no leaves on the trees to rustle in the wind, no birds to sing. The frozen ground didn’t even crunch underfoot.
The earth itself was mourning him.
Byleth had been lucky enough to find a florist with a greenhouse, though, so she had fresh violets to lay on his grave. It wasn't the first time she'd given him violets. Before she really understood her emotions, flowers did a lot of her communicating for her. The notorious Ashen Demon wasn't so terrifying when offering a bouquet tied with a delicate ribbon.
But no one's reaction was more gratifying than Dimitri's. With the charming way he stammered and blushed, she made it a point to bring violets to their every tea time, all the way through the end of the war.
She’d never understood the tradition of placing flowers on a grave, when they would just wither and decay like the loved one they honored. But when Bernadetta had left her room clutching a little bundle of lavender for Jeralt, it clicked. The flower was merely a token to show you’d been present.
Being there was what truly mattered.
“I wondered if you’d come.”
Byleth whirled around at the unfamiliar voice. An older woman with her silver hair in an elegant braid stepped out from behind a tree. She fixed an evaluating eye on Byleth, much like Edelgard had so long ago. “I knew you’d be beautiful, of course, but I expected you to be more... grand. If it weren’t for that hair, I’d have thought you the gravekeeper’s daughter.”
Byleth followed the other woman's gaze down to her dusty riding leathers, patched and mended so many times that there was probably nothing of the original left.
“I was never anything special,” she said. “Just a mercenary.” Her initial relief at seeing the newcomer— it wasn’t any of her Blue Lions, thank the goddess— turned to dread when she spied the emerald ring on the woman’s finger. “You’re the queen.”
“Queen Mother,” she corrected. “My daughter took the throne several years ago. Of course, the crown is little more than a figurehead these days, because of His Majesty’s work.”
“Oh, I see. I... haven’t been in Fódlan.”
“I figured as much. It would be quite awkward for you to be caught here.”
Byleth didn’t point out that she had been caught here, and it was quite awkward. Something else in the woman’s words struck her, though. “You said His Majesty. Did you not call him Dimitri?”
The Queen Mother snorted. “Certainly not. Married or not, he was still the king.”
Byleth’s frown deepened. Dimitri had always lit up when someone called him by name. Well, it was really only Byleth that ever did. She’d gotten a taste of what it must have been like for him, after she merged with Sothis and everyone in the monastery started treating her like the goddess reborn.
It was like she was no longer a person, but rather an idea, a symbol. She shuddered to think that she had condemned Dimitri to a lifetime of that feeling.
Instead of thinking too hard about that, she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Rosemary.”
“And your daughter?”
Rosemary looked pointedly at the flowers on her husband’s grave. “Queen Violet.”
Byleth wondered whether to be flattered that he still thought of her so many years later, or offended that he would use something that meant so much to them for his child’s name with another woman.
No, she had no right to feel hurt. It had been her own choices that brought her here, no one else’s. If Dimitri had gotten his way, Byleth would have been his grieving widow, not this stranger. Though she never could have given him a child, unwilling to subject another to this long, lonely life.
She stayed silent, examining the inscription on the elaborate tombstone. “He dwells with the goddess now,” it said.
Dimitri hadn’t been religious— not when she’d known him, anyway. She wondered if it was merely a traditional Faerghan epitaph, or if he had embraced the church in the many decades they’d spent apart.
Or perhaps... could it have been a veiled reference to herself? But if he dwelled in the divine part of her soul, she couldn’t sense him.
Rosemary sighed. “It’s just like he said. You haven’t aged a day.”
Byleth flinched. She didn’t need the reminder. Dimitri’s gravestone wasn’t the first she’d cried over, nor would it be the last. It was her curse to watch everyone she loved age and wither away while time refused to embrace her.
“He told you about me?”
“I think he felt it was the honorable thing to do,” Rosemary answered. “He wanted to make sure I understood what I was getting into.”
“It didn’t bother you... that he loved someone else?”
The other woman shrugged. “I had always known I would be married off for politics. Besides...” She paused, obviously wondering if she should confide in a stranger. But either she decided to trust Byleth, or correctly deduced that she had no one to tell. “The only man I ever loved was a sharecropper on my family's land. He thought the war would be his chance to become a knight so we could marry. But he died.”
“I’m sorry,” Byleth said, even though the loss had probably been fifty years ago now.
She should have been ashamed of how relieved she was to learn the royal marriage had been just a political arrangement. But the truth was, she wasn’t as magnanimous as Rosemary. It pained her to imagine Dimitri in love with another person. No one else had ever managed to capture even a sliver of her attention. She didn’t think anyone else ever would.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Rosemary said. “His Majesty was a fine husband. Very gracious. A wonderful father. But I would catch him watching the horizon when he thought no one saw, as if you might return at any moment.”
Byleth’s throat ached from the effort of holding back tears. It wouldn’t be right to cry over the love she abandoned in front of his wife. Humans lived such fleeting, fragile lives, after all. It would be cruel for someone like her to cause them even a moment’s pain.
Was that why she’d left? To save Dimitri from the pain of growing old by himself? Or had she done it for her own sake? As the years passed, the reasons for her actions became increasingly difficult to recall.
In a century, or three, or ten, would she forget about him entirely?
No, never. Whatever else might fade, she could never forget Dimitri. Of that she was certain.
With the stone in her chest feeling heavier than ever, she turned her back on his grave. “I’m glad you two could find some happiness together,” she told Rosemary.
“And you? Where will you go?”
“Zanado, for a brief visit. Then...” Byleth shrugged. “Maybe Dagda?”
“Well, here. Take this with you.” Rosemary handed her a small package wrapped in brown paper. “He had it on his desk or his nightstand every day I knew him. The way he looked at it, I could tell he was thinking of you. I could always tell.”
Byleth untied the twine and pulled away the paper to reveal a battered leather-bound book. She turned it over and sucked in an icy breath when she saw the title.
Tactics Primer
There hadn’t been a mission in the academy or the war that they hadn’t consulted her father’s old book at least once. Precious as it was, Byleth had no use for it in her nomadic, solitary lifestyle, so she’d left it at the monastery. Dimitri must have found and claimed it.
He hadn’t treated it gently. Notes were scrawled in the margins, pages dog-eared, and she spotted a few brown stains that were almost certainly chamomile tea.
Forget dwelling with the goddess, here was a tiny piece of Dimitri's soul she could carry with her. She hugged it to her chest as if it were him.
“Thank you,” she croaked through her building tears.
“I hope you find a little happiness for yourself, dear.” Rosemary awkwardly patted Byleth’s arm before turning back to her husband’s grave. She might be goddess-blessed and forever young, but this ordinary elderly widow pitied her.
Byleth had overstayed her welcome already, and she knew a dismissal when she heard one. She tucked the book into her bag and left Dimitri to rest in peace with the woman that hadn’t broken his heart. Unfortunately, she was doomed to spend the rest of eternity stuck with the person who had broken hers.