Chapter Text
“It’s cold as fuck out here,” Byleth hissed under his breath, sticking his hands under his armpits. He didn’t know what he expected, coming back to Washington all these years after living in California for the majority of his life. In the middle of autumn. During a cold spell.
The cold wasn’t all that bad though. It was a nice change of pace after the sweltering heat of Southern California’s summers, even if he still didn’t have the appropriate clothing for the season. It wasn’t his fault though—Byleth didn’t have much time or money to change from t-shirts to heavyweight coats so quickly.
“Hey, Professor Eisner!”
Byleth turned towards the booming voice, spotting a large blond man by his classroom door. It’d only been a few weeks since class started and Byleth was still having trouble with some of the students’ names. He couldn’t forget this one’s though. The man made quite sure of it, albeit in rather unpleasant ways.
“Hello Raphael. You’re here pretty early, aren’t you?” Byleth pulled his phone from his pocket, tapping the power button on just long enough to check the time. “It’s an hour before class starts.”
“Yeah, about that,” Raphael started, rubbing the back of his neck, “I’m sure you probably already know, but I’m not doing so well. Like at all.”
And he wasn’t. Every week, Raphael somehow managed to turn in assignments completely unrelated to the assigned topic. It was as if he was doing another subject’s homework and turning it in to Byleth. It was almost impressive, really, if not for the subtle frustration it evoked.
“I just don’t get it. I participate in class, I answer all your questions—”
“Not with the right answer.”
“But I try!” Raphael whined, his frown deepening. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
Byleth pulled a keycard from his pocket, briskly walking past Raphael and unlocking the classroom door. Fuck if he was going to have this discussion with Raphael in 20 degree weather. “First off, do you actually read the textbook? Or do you just skim it?”
Raphael followed Byleth’s lead, standing in front of the desk he was unloading his handbag onto near the front of the lecture hall. As Byleth looked up at the man, he saw the nervous glint in his eyes that answered Byleth’s question before he even answered.
“Neither?”
That definitely explained it, but that was only one part of the problem. “And why’s that? I don’t think you’re entirely uninterested in history, given your eagerness to participate in class.”
Raphael huffed. “Well, that’s different! When you’re lecturing, you actually make it fun to pay attention. It doesn’t seem like just history, ‘cause you give examples and relate it to current events and stuff. The textbook doesn’t engage me, it just confuses me.”
Byleth would ask what about the textbook confused him, but he could guess as much. While Raphael certainly wasn’t dumb , he wasn’t the brightest student either. It was likely the terminology in the book that was tripping him up—it was something Byleth was worried about when he was first looking into the curriculum he was to follow.
“Okay, well...it’s good you came to talk with me then. I get you’re pretty worried about your grades, what with you being a senior and all. And you seem to want to get them up, because you’re putting in the effort in assignments even with all the F’s I give you.” He wondered for a moment what the best method to helping Raphael out was. He didn’t want his student to fail—didn’t want any of his students to fail—but only relying on information from class lectures was going to be Raphael’s downfall. What could he do to make information more accessible to him?
“...Raphael, what’s your class schedule look like?”
“Huh? Oh, well this is my only class today and Wednesday, but I have two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays are my free days. Since I took so many classes in my first year, I don’t gotta come in as much now. My advisor said that was best.”
Good. So their schedules fit together nicely after all. “That’s good, because I want you to continue to come in an hour before class every day so I can teach you personally. It’s not the ideal solution, but I think it’s the only thing I can do. I can’t exactly force you to read something that you’re having trouble with.”
Raphael’s eyes widened. “You’re sure about that, Professor? I mean, I can definitely come in, but won’t that take up your time?”
Warmth flooded Byleth’s chest, letting him forget the chilled feeling from before. This was what he loved most about teaching: the ability to help others in ways they needed most. “Of course. I’d be happy to help you out.”
The next thing Byleth knew, he was being crushed within strong arms, the breath knocked straight out of his lungs. “Thank you so much, Professor!” Raphael boomed, his voice reverberating through his chest so hard that Byleth could feel it in his own bones. “You won’t regret this, I promise! I’ll be the best student you’ve ever had!”
Byleth coughed, though it sounded more like a wheeze from how he was being squeezed. “N-No problem, Raphael. Can you, uh, please let go though? You’re much stronger than you realize.”
Raphael only laughed, though to Byleth’s relief, he complied and let go. Instead, he slipped his backpack off his shoulders, setting it beside Byleth’s on the desk. “Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt ya. Anyways, can we actually start now? I’ve got a couple of questions about the last assignment that didn’t make sense to me…”
The hour with Raphael seemed to drag into infinity. It didn’t help that Raphael asked the same question seventeen times in a row, all just phrased in slightly different ways to elicit only slightly different answers. But after what felt like an eternity of hell and 1940s U.S. culture, Raphael was showing signs of actually absorbing the material.
“And so, if you could summarize the 1940s in a few ideas, what was culture like given the time period?”
Raphael, sweating so hard after so much thinking that even his shirt collar was soaked through, furrowed his eyebrows in thought. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, then rubbed at his forehead. Byleth almost thought he wasn’t going to answer at all before something clicked behind Raphael’s eyes and he, for once in this entire hour-long session, looked confident in himself.
“Mostly focused on World War II!” Raphael barked, looking pleased with himself. “After the Great Depression in the 1930s, a bunch of Americans were bummed out. Which was understandable, ‘cause the economy was trash and a lot of people suffered because of it. But when the war happened, propaganda kinda made everyone forget about their hardships. And especially with Pearl Harbor, a lot of white people in America started spreading stuff against Japanese people too. So because of all that, most of the popular culture in the 1940s was about hating Japanese and German people.”
While not exactly the words Byleth would have used, he had to admit that Raphael definitely wasn’t wrong. Which was a huge step-up from his usual take on history. It made him radiate with pride.
“Good! You’re getting it. While I would love spending more time with you on the textbook,” Byleth said, not being able to stop the sarcasm from sneaking into his tone, “class does start in five minutes and I’d like to be able to prepare the lecture notes before everyone else comes in.”
If Raphael could hear the sarcasm in his voice, he didn’t appear to mind it. He was just as chipper and eager as ever, even if he was ten times more damp than he was an hour before. “Sure thing, Professor! Thanks for helping me out with this. It’s more fun when I actually know what you’re talking about!”
Byleth smiled to himself as he turned towards his handbag, placed on the side of the desk. Even if he was utterly exhausted on the topic of the 1940s, he couldn’t deny that he enjoyed explaining it so thoroughly. If there was a way he could make subjects easier for students to understand, especially if they were in his fields of interest, Byleth would do just about anything to help out.
Seteth passed a scalding coffee cup between his burning hands, passively thinking about the irony of being too hot in the middle of a cold front in Washington. He didn’t usually stop at the campus’s cafe for coffee—it was much too sweet for his tastes—but he was running late this morning after staying up until ungodly hours of the morning grading papers. Procrastination wasn’t a habit Seteth would say he practiced often, but the daunting task of going through hundreds of disinterested history papers wasn’t his idea of a thrilling night.
“...I think I got it now! That was in the early 1920s, right? ‘Cause of the Prohibition?”
A loud voice Seteth recognized well sounded around the corner, echoing off the buildings’ brick walls with surprising clarity.
“Exactly. See, you’re starting to get it! Eventually you won’t even need my hints.”
Unfortunately, Seteth recognized that voice too.
Looking past the corner of the building, Seteth saw Byleth and Raphael sitting together at one of the courtyard’s tables, a pile of books and an even higher stack of notes littering the top.
Studying wasn’t exactly one of Raphael’s strong suits, Seteth thought, knitting his eyebrows together as he watched them converse back and forth on the subject of history. He knew it rather intimately, in fact. Among the worst piles of papers Seteth had to read for his own class, Raphael’s took the crown for being one of the most poorly written. Even remembering it now brought him to yawn.
Shifting his focus to Byleth, he internally questioned how he was getting the student to be so receptive to information. Despite Raphael’s absurdly high engagement in the class, Seteth found that he consistently failed every assignment given. There was no way Byleth figured out a way for the man to retain information that quickly—right?
“Professor, I don’t get this question. It says that the 1970s was a time for progressives and rights movements, but wasn’t the 1960s when all the Civil Rights Movement stuff started happening?”
“Yes, but... You’re an athletics major, yeah? So think of it this way: the 1960s, in terms of progression movements, was like a warm-up stretch to the 1970’s actual play of the game. The events that took place in the 1960s were a very important precursor to the demand of rights that were rising in the 1970s.”
Seteth grimaced, almost disgusted with the oversimplification. To equate the two decades to a sport of all things—
“Oh, I get it! So after people started working on rights in the ‘60s, it paved the way for everyone else to start speaking up about what they wanted too, right?”
Exactly . Seteth’s jaw dropped. He had no idea how such an example could lead to Raphael actually getting something correct. Seteth attempted to get Raphael to pick up on his own class content before, but after an hour, Raphael lost all knowledge about what he’d been taught, almost as if someone wrung out a wet towel.
Suddenly, Byleth’s gaze moved from Raphael and caught Seteth, who was still standing by the corner of the building a good thirty feet away. Embarrassment at being caught burned his cheeks red, heating to a higher temperature than the coffee cup he’d been holding. Just as Byleth opened his mouth to call out to him, Seteth walked back around the corner, towards his classroom. He’d stated earlier that he wanted nothing to do with Byleth, and he intended to keep his word.
There was a time in Seteth’s life where grading papers was actually fun. However, after years of watching students come to his class only to receive their required history credit, the fun aspect quickly turned into frustration. He couldn’t understand why students would pay such a high tuition only to do the bare minimum for their classes, even if they weren’t related to their major.
Seteth straightened the papers in front of him for a fifth time, feeling his eyelids growing heavy. He looked at the clock. 10 P.M. He used to go to bed at this hour, before he had such a high workload caused by the increasingly short amount of staff on hand. But still he graded, noting with rising annoyance that his red pen was starting to run out of ink.
Today’s papers were part of a monthly exam relating to the topics of the last month’s lectures and readings. It wasn’t too terribly difficult in his own opinion, but clearly his students thought otherwise. He hadn’t found a single exam that didn’t have at least some red markings on it.
His eyes scanned over another student’s exam and he immediately felt his eyes glaze over in preemptive fatigue. Raphael’s name was scrawled messily on the top-right corner of the paper, despite the rest of the exam being typed.
Maybe this wouldn’t be as terrible as he thought. Raphael did seem slightly more confident than normal when turning in his exam—he didn’t wear that guilty look as he slid his paper over his desk face-down as he usually did. He at least prayed that it wasn’t as bad as the rest of his exams. Thoughts of the third exam, where Raphael somehow earned a negative score , came to mind and Seteth shivered.
Reading over the entire exam only took two minutes, but by the time Seteth read over it for a third time in disbelief, thirty minutes had passed. He was sure he was going to run out of red ink by the time he was through with this paper, but as Seteth held the exam in his hands, mentally calculating the score over and over in his head, he could only find a very few amount of mistakes in his exam. To be precise, only 20% was wrong.
Raphael got an 80% on his exam. He had the highest score in the class.
Seteth immediately reached for his landline, positioned just behind him in his home office. Before he could realize what he was doing, he was searching the faculty directory and already dialing in a phone number.
“Hello?”
Hearing Byleth’s voice over the phone startled Seteth back into the reality of what he was doing, but clearly not enough to stop the next word from tumbling out of his mouth.
“How?!”
There was a cough from the other end of the line, and what sounded like sputtering, but eventually Byleth gained enough composure to answer. “Seteth, you know it’s 10 P.M., right? You’re lucky I’m in my office at all. And what do you mean, ‘how’?”
Seteth, momentarily ignoring the use of his first name, looked back down at the 80% circled at the top of Raphael’s paper. “Raphael!”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that.” Seteth swore he heard Byleth laughing.
“He got an 80% on his exam, Mr. Eisner!”
“Damn, I knew he had it in him! Though, it doesn’t sound like you’re too happy about this.”
“What in the world did you do to make him score this high? I’m sure you’re aware I saw you speaking with him a day before the exam!”
“I just taught him what he needed to know, what do you mean how?”
“Mr. Eisner, Raphael has never gotten that good a grade in his life.”
The line was quiet for a while, and Seteth almost asked if Byleth was still there before he spoke again. “...You realize that’s reflective of you, not him, right?”
The notioned earned a guffaw out of Seteth. Him? A bad professor? Smart, coming from the person whose entire educational career summed up to a whopping total of four weeks.
“I’m serious, Seteth. Have you ever sat down with Raphael? Figured out what his issue with the material was? Weren’t you ever curious about why he does so well in class, but never on take-home assignments?”
“I—”
“I’m not going to disclose information that he said to me in private, but you should really ask him yourself. But the bigger issue here is how you’re viewing your students.”
“That’s rather rich , coming from you—”
Byleth only cut him off again. “What’s the median score of that pile of exams you’re grading right now?”
Seteth was taken aback. He mumbled for Byleth to give him a moment as he rustled through papers, scribbling down numbers while holding the phone between his ear and shoulder precariously. After a few seconds, he came up with a number he couldn’t decide whether to be ashamed of or frustrated with.
“Fifty-six percent.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not, Mr. Eisner.”
Byleth laughed again, but this time it wasn’t filled with humor as it was before. “I can’t believe you don’t see the issue here. How about this: you sit in on one of my lectures, just one, and I’ll show you how I can get students to listen.”
“I can hardly see why my students’ failing scores are indicative of my failure as a professor.”
“Exactly why I’m inviting you to my class, Seteth. I think you’re so caught up in your own ‘perfect’ teaching style that you’ve completely forgotten that school is about the students, not you.”
Byleth’s words stabbed at him like knives, and yet his tone was completely flat, as if he didn’t care. It was jarring to say the least. Infuriating to say the most. “I believe you’re stepping out of line, Mr. Eisner.”
“So I’m guessing that’s a no to self-improvement, then?”
“...I did not say that.”
“Perfect. I’ll send you an email with my class schedule. You’re welcome to pop in whenever you’d like, but I recommend you sit in the full lecture if you can. I’ll also send you my cell’s number so if you need to call me again, you’ll have a higher chance of me picking up. You’re lucky I forgot something in the office today.”
With that, the call came to an abrupt end, leaving Seteth stewing in an uncomfortable mix of emotions. Anger, apprehension, confusion, to name a few. Including a few others he couldn’t quite place a name on.
He wasn’t a bad professor. After all, he was the department chair’s right-hand man and was well revered by his peers. In prior years, all his students stated he was the best professor they’d ever had. What did Byleth know, anyway? He was only four months a professor.
Still, when Seteth received Byleth’s email as promised, he opened it and looked through the listed class times. Most of them conflicted with his own, but his Wednesday class, just before noon and only 50 minutes long, seemed to fit perfectly. He could finish up his own class and walk the short distance to Byleth’s hall and end just in time for lunch.
Byleth’s phone number was written near the bottom of the email. Seteth, at Flayn’s request, had a cell phone, but he never used it. He much preferred landlines if he had to call people at all. But considering that he had no way to save Byleth’s number to a landline, he pulled out his phone in defeat.
So much for keeping separate paths.