Chapter Text
“What the fuck is going on,” Mercy muttered to the only person left in the room who spoke her language and wasn’t crying for some reason.
Viyan just smirked and shrugged in reply. “Ask Aggie,” they suggested.
“Agnus,” Mercy said petulantly, with the old church pronunciation that absolutely did not have a hard G, “is busy.”
“She and Baba will leave the two of them alone in a sec,” Viyan said. “Give her a hot second. That’s her mom, didn’t you hear?”
“Yeah, see—” Mercy folded her arms and squared her stance in front of Viyan. “I thought we already met her mom. Lady Marianne von Edmund. So what’s the deal with that?”
“That’s her other mom,” Viyan replied as if it were obvious.
“Which one is her real mom?” Mercy asked. “Like, her birth mom.”
“Oh, both of them.” With little success, Viyan tried to chew down a smirk.
Mercy’s squinting eyes began to twitch. “That’s not how birth works.”
Viyan raised their eyebrows innocently. “Isn’t it?”
Mercy opened her mouth and found no words in it. All of them spun around in her head trying to figure out whether Viyan, despite looking either her age or older, somehow did not know how birth worked, or whether Mercy herself had been mistaken for all of her life. On the slim chance that it was the latter, she clamped her jaw shut again, teeth clacking. She had seen Agnus flip a bird at Viyan before, so she knew the gesture would be appropriately received.
The voice of the devil herself boomed in from behind at just that moment: “You two makin’ friends already?”
Mercy whirled around to find Agnus looming directly over her, wearing her usual infuriating nothing-smile—a smile that said nothing, meant nothing, because she could keep hidden ties to the king of Almyra with that smile, she could hate your guts with that smile, and it all looked the same.
Viyan said something vaguely taunting in Almyran, and Agnus listened to that secret message with that smile, and flipped Viyan a second bird with that smile. So at least she was on Mercy’s side this time, maybe.
“Knock it off, Vi,” Agnus said, waving them away. She looked down at Mercy—always down, in a way that seemed like more than their height disparity. “You got a lotta questions, I figure?”
Mercy’s lip twitched towards a scowl. “You got answers?” she retorted.
“Sure do, sweetheart.” Agnus scrunched up the right sleeve of her robe all the way up to her shoulder, where a piece of cloth hung tied like the world’s most ineffective bandage. “Answers for everything. This here’s the last cat I had in the bag.”
She pulled the sloppy knot in the fabric loose, revealing a tattoo of black spirals that wove their way up to the cap of her shoulder in the fierce visage of a roaring lion.
“’Member how I was tellin’ y’all about transgender folk, way back?” Agnus said.
“Oh, thank gods, you did tell them that already,” interjected King Khalid as he ambled into the conversation from over Agnus’s bared shoulder, wearing the same kind of nothing-smile as her. “When you said they needed a primer before meeting the queen, and you didn’t even mention trans people, I was like, what the hell are you thinking?”
“Where is this going,” Mercy interrupted. She flicked her eyes to Viyan, whom she had assumed was the reason for that discussion on the topic of gender. Initially, she had thought that Agnus was trying to make fun of her for, Goddess forbid, not behaving like a noblewoman.
“Well, Her Majesty’s transgender,” Agnus explained in a softer voice, nodding her head back to indicate the queen, who was still crying in Byleth’s arms. “Y’all knew her by a different name back when she was in Faerghus.”
The queen being transgender and originally from Faerghus answered a lot of questions in and of itself, or perhaps just explained some observations: things like the gangling size of her frame, the low pitch of her voice, and the fair colors of her complexion compared to the rich melanin of Almyra. The primary question it answered was how Agnus had two birth moms. Adding that whole story up was as simple as basic arithmetic.
What she didn’t understand was what it had to do with the lion tattoo on Agnus’s shoulder, until very suddenly, and yet very slowly, like watching the catastrophic roll of an avalanche down a distant slope, she did understand.
“You were lookin’ for a king,” Agnus said, “an’ I’m afraid there ain’t no king to find.”
“Queen Alexandria is—”
As soon as Mercy opened her mouth, everyone around her raised their hands and bore tight grimaces as if her voice would wake a wild wyvern. Khalid pressed a finger to his lips with a desperate shushing noise.
“We don’t say her dead name in this country,” Viyan reminded her matter-of-factly, the most relaxed of the three. “Forbidden word. Punishable by death or dismemberment.”
Khalid aimed a finger at them with a stern look in his eyes. “Okay, that last part’s not true,” he said, “but everything else… well, yeah.”
“But,” Mercy all but sputtered, pointing at Agnus with a loss for words except, “You.”
Agnus inhaled, puffing up her broad chest, and stood up straight, elbows crossed in front and back like a proper Faerghus bow, the lion emblem facing proudly forward. “I am Agnus Ursa Blaiddyd, daughter of Queen Alexandria, granddaughter of King Lambert, and descendant of the King of Lions. If you’re lookin’ for the king of Faerghus…” She brought her fist from her waist to her chest and thumped against it. “You found her when you found me.”
The hidden tattoo. The secret crest. The way she looked almost vicious when Byleth and Mercy said Alexandria’s old name.
Lambert. Lamb bear.
“I hate you,” Mercy hissed, not entirely of her own volition.
Agnus just smiled—just smiled—and said, “I know, sweetheart. Sorry.”
None of this was acceptable. Not the King of Faerghus being this insufferable farm hick, but especially not Mercy Gleanna Fraldarius, the Shield of Faerghus, saying to the King’s face that she hated her, and the King apologizing for it.
She could barely see her way out of the room through the tears in her eyes, but it barely mattered, since she didn’t know where she was going, anyway.
Viyan said the same thing they had said to Agnus twice already, which had no direct translation from Almyran but could be approximated as, “You’re gay as shit.”
Agnus, for the third time, responded with a middle finger.
“Aw, did somebody fall in love with her sworn shield?” Viyan jeered, rubbing at the corners of their eyes like a crying baby. “Did somebody get attached to the traditional roles she swore off when she was a kid because the next in the line of Fraldarius turned out to be a cute girl?”
Agnus used the most polite conjugations she knew to respond, “Would Your Highness kindly shut the fuck up.”
“And here I thought it might strain your relationship if your parents got married,” Khalid sighed with amusement. “Nah. You’ve been siblings the whole time, anyway. No doubt about it.”
“Your Majesty,” Agnus said through gritted teeth, “please do not make me tell you to shut the fuck up.”
Khalid just barked a laugh at that, patted the siblings on the back, and ushered them out of Alexandria’s room. “Let’s give them some time alone,” he said, nodding over his shoulder.
Byleth and Alexandria had torn away from each other’s arms and settled for sitting side by side on the bed, hands clasped together, speaking quietly through teary smiles. Agnus gave them a long, lingering look, particularly at her mother, who looked happier and healthier than she’d ever looked before, but sighed and left alongside the Almyran side of the royal family.
“So she’s a lot better,” Agnus said in Fódlan, or asked, or communicated in whatever way wouldn’t tempt fate to twist her words, as soon as they left the room. “A hell of a lot.”
“That’s just what a trans-ed gender does to a motherfucker,” Viyan remarked.
Khalid did that kingly thing of his where he squared his stance, rolled his shoulders back, and exhaled to root the heavy weight of himself and the burdens he carried into the ground. “She went through a lot to get here. All of us did,” he said darkly. “I don’t know if you knew, but she tied a lot of her delusions specifically to the Flame Emperor.”
“Oh, yeah, I knew,” Agnus said with a shake of her head and a bitter laugh. “She’d tell me to go kill the emperor for her all the time when y’all left the room, when I was a kid.”
Khalid blanched, eyes aghast. “Shit, Aggie…”
“Naw, ain’t nothin’, s’alright,” Agnus said, waving that childhood trauma out into the air like nothing more than a particularly potent cloud of incense. “She said a lot o’ fucked up shit, couldn’t control it. That weren’t any different. But yeah, she thought the hallucinations would stop if she killed the emperor, right?”
With sagging shoulders and lingering guilt in his downward gaze, Khalid answered, “Yeah. So when she actually died…”
Viyan let out a soft, low whistle and folded their arms behind their head. “That was a whole event,” they joked.
“Did y’all tell her?” Agnus asked. “I mean, I wouldn’a figured she’d believe it if she didn’t have the woman’s head.”
“That’s what I figured, too,” Khalid said. “So we decided to keep it from her. But she found out on her own, which…”
“Was honestly the best way for her to find out,” Viyan finished. “Yeah, it was an honest mess for a few days, and there was a lot of broken trust, but if we’d tried to tell it to her straight from the start, I think to this day she still wouldn’t believe it.”
“I know,” Khalid sighed. “But if I could do it all over, I would never have sacrificed her trust in me. That hurt both of us, way too much.”
Behind the shield of their hand, Viyan whispered to Agnus, “Fucking lovebirds,” which was another loose way to translate their Almyran taunt about her and Mercy.
“Vi,” Khalid said sharply.
“Okay, okay,” Viyan said, raising both hands, “I know, you don’t want Ag to think the reasons for the marriage changed, I can quit teasing and you can say your whole spiel again about how you would never consider a romantic relationship with such an imbalance in the power dynamic because of her mental health, and you just love her like family, but I’m just gonna cut you off and say the excuse is gonna run dry pretty soon now that she’s on the fast-track to recovery, and one day you’re going to wake up and realize she’s basically just a normal person who has a few bad days and right then and there, you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with the fact that you’re in love with your wife.”
Khalid’s raised finger began to droop as Viyan nailed exactly the point he was going to make and countered it all in the same breath. He looked at Agnus with sheepish bewilderment. “It’s not me, right?” he asked. “Like, I’m not that easy to read or anything. It’s just that this little shit knows me better than I know myself.”
“Can confirm Their Highness is a little shit, Your Majesty,” Agnus replied with an incline of her head.
“Yeah, yeah,” Viyan sighed, then with a seamless switch to Almyran, “speaking of lovebirds…”
“Hey.”
A light punch hit Agnus’s arm from behind. Mercy looked smaller than ever when Agnus found her over her shoulder. Eyes still a fresh pink, she had stuffed her emotions into a sort of glower that looked too tired to be angry. Her eye contact, however, was as direct and unyielding as always.
“We need to talk,” she said gruffly, jerking her head to one side to lead Agnus away from the king and scion.
“Yeah,” Agnus said, scrubbing at the itch of growing-in hair on the side of scalp. “Sure, yeah.”
“Gay as shit,” Viyan taunted one last time.
“Viyan,” Agnus said coldly. “Knock it off. I’m not gonna tell you again.”
Rolling their eyes, they turned on the balls of their feet and sauntered away, followed by Khalid, who had the gall to toss Agnus a wink over his shoulder as he retreated. Agnus hoped her face looked as bloodless as it felt—prickling, sickly cold—when she shook her head at him, but he showed no signs of having seen it.
“What did she say about me?” Mercy whispered as the two retreated.
As soon as she realized Mercy was talking about Viyan, Agnus corrected firmly, “They.”
Mercy’s eyes widened for a beat and flicked elsewhere. “They,” she repeated. “I—I knew that. I didn’t—”
“Don’t gotta make excuses,” Agnus recited more than said. “Just say it right and move on, it’s fine. It’s new.”
“But I knew that, I just—” Mercy clapped a hand over the back of her neck as her head sank. “Usually when people are talking about me behind my back, it’s other girls. So it just… it was instinct to say ‘she’. Like muscle memory. I know Viyan’s they, I get it.”
Agnus could remember Viyan’s words like they were spoken minutes ago, even though it must have been a decade and a half past, if not more. With sticks for brushes and a desert of sand as a canvas, Viyan drew the shape of a person in the ground and changed their stick into a sword as they drew X marks over every vital point in the human body. “You have to know how to defend yourself,” they had said, drawing an arrow to the nape of the neck, when Agnus protested using pacifist language she had already learned from her ma. “Not just in battle. You have to watch these points when people are talking. If somebody covers their weak points, they’re guarding something. They’re vulnerable.”
Mercy’s fingers were white with pressure against the cervical vertebrae connecting her spine to her skull in that soft hollow beneath the occipital bone.
“They weren’t talkin’ about you,” Agnus said gently. “They’re a li’l shit, but they ain’t gonna make fun of you. It’s me they’re teasin’.”
Mercy’s hand gradually slid down away from her neck. “Doesn’t matter,” she muttered, tucking her arms to fold across her chest, tightly over the solar plexus. “I don’t care.”
“Sure,” Agnus said absently.
“Look, the point is—” Mercy stared up at Agnus, and her crossed hands clawed up to the soft lymph nodes under her armpits. “I need to talk to you. We’re talking.”
“We sure are, darlin’,” Agnus said, unable to help herself to a small smile.
“You’re the princess of Faerghus, right?” Mercy said. “You’re… Alexandria’s daughter. Her only daughter.”
Agnus shrugged. “I’m her only daughter, sure,” she said.
“Okay.” Mercy closed her eyes, let out a slow huff, and shook out her limbs as she unfolded them.
Then she crouched down and—knelt.
“In the name of my mother Fraldarius and by the blessing of your father Blaiddyd,” she stated solemnly, her head bowed low, “I vow, like Kyphon to Loog, to serve Your Highness as your sword and shield, long may you live, and long may you reign.”
Agnus’s vision went grey at the edges. She had to shift her legs to stay upright in the suddenly tilting room.
“No,” was the first word that fell out of her mouth.
Mercy’s head shot up, petulant fury lining her frown. “What do you mean, no?”
“No, Mercy, get up,” Agnus pleaded, holding out her hands to—pull Mercy upright, or something, to stop whatever fresh nonsense was happening. “We ain’t doin’ this, it ain’t like that. I ain’t doin’ that to you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Mercy demanded. “I’m—I was born for this. I want to serve Faerghus. I know you hate my guts and shit, but I can be fucking professional and do what’s right for our country. I can—”
With a small cringe, she huddled deeper into her kneel, almost hugging her knee to her chest. Agnus felt those words, hate my guts, gurgle in her throat, choking her too much to protest. She felt a lot of things about Mercy—regret and sympathetic chagrin for her wasted dreams, an unfounded philosophical superiority, and above all a certain helpless fondness—but never hate. Hate, she thought, she had drummed up enough of in Mercy that by the time she revealed herself as the only heir of Faerghus, Mercy would be upset and disillusioned enough to give up on the doomed ideals of her family name rather than have to follow Agnus’s lead.
“I can be better,” Mercy promised instead. “I know I’m not shit right now, but I’m training. I’ll train under Byleth and get better and I can fight by your side.”
“Mercy—” Agnus’s voice was all air. She crouched to the ground to put them on equal levels, or maybe just to catch her damn breath. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want you to serve me. I’m not your king—I’m not going to be king.”
Fire rose up in Mercy’s eyes, a feral flash of deeper rage than anything Agnus had seen from her before. “What the hell do you mean, you’re not gonna be king?!” she yelled, barely keeping her fists to herself (but at least she had stopped kneeling, at least there was that). “You said I found my king when I found you, what happened to that? Do you think being king is just a fancy claim to nobility and—and elitism, or does it mean anything to you?!”
“I know what it means,” Agnus grunted with great effort. Each word she spoke felt like the removal of a dart from her chest, and each dart was a word of Mercy’s. “I know what it means, Mercy, honest, that’s why I—”
“Do you know what’s happened to Faerghus without its king?” Mercy railed on. “Do you know what’s going to happen? Do you think we went around taking all the relics out of Conand Tower on a whim or something?! Fucking saints, do you even care?!”
She cared. Once, she cared so much that she had sat underneath needle and ink for hours to bleed for her family insignia, emblazoned in black on her shoulder. She cared so much that she made her mother cry and beg her to stay home.
“Mercy, I can’t,” Agnus said, and she even sounded pitiful to her own ears. “Y’all heard what I promised my ma. I ain’t fightin’ the Empire just because I was born a Blaiddyd. I ain’t runnin’ a fool’s errand an’ dyin’ an’ I ain’t gettin’ you killed alongside me for the sake of tradition, like—” She blinked stinging heat from her eyes. “Like my mother did your father. Mercy, please.”
“No!” Mercy shouted. “No mercy! I’m sick and fucking tired of mercy!”
And she threw the punch. Agnus closed her eyes, waited for it to strike her jaw or her cheekbone or her nose, anything to rattle her skull enough and get her head screwed on straight. It never came.
She opened her eyes, and Mercy had her fist inches away from Agnus’s face, hand shaking from the effort of holding it back, tears lining her eyes from the sheer frustration of her life’s purpose being pulled out from underneath her.
“Fine,” she choked out. She slammed her fist into the ground instead, and her gaze followed it. A drip fell from her eyes to the floor. “Fine. Whatever. Do whatever you want. I’m your shield. I’ll support whatever you do.” She took in a shuddering inhale. “Like a Fraldarius is supposed to.”
“I’m sorry,” Agnus uttered. “I’m so sorry.”
“If you’re really sorry—” The heir of Fraldarius stomped to her feet, and the last Agnus saw of her was her face lined with fresh tears down both cheeks. “—then maybe give a shit about your fucking country before it dies without you.”
Time and space seemed to bend for them. In the space of a blink, the room was empty of all but a distant handmaid busying herself with dusting as far from the bed as possible. Byleth didn’t know he was at a loss for words until he tried to find them and came up blank, staring dumbly at Alexandria’s face finally free of tears.
“You look beautiful,” he blurted.
Alexandria flushed and dipped her head with a sheepish smile. “You flatter me,” she protested.
“Really,” he insisted, squeezing her hands tighter.
“I am old,” she said coldly, “and disfigured.” The veil over her right eye—or her lack thereof, as Byleth eventually saw—had come loose in their embrace, revealing a jagged scar that had seen poor healing in its time. “I am too broad and too forceful. I have no feminine grace. I don’t fit the skin that I have chosen.”
“But you chose it,” Byleth said. “You’re finally yourself, aren’t you?”
A smile crept up over her scowl.
“You were never,” Byleth began, and settled on, “at ease. You were always on guard, always under pressure. At first, I thought it was the weight of your responsibilities as the future leader of Faerghus, but it was more than that.”
“In many ways, I played the role I thought I had to play,” Alexandria said, twisting at the rings on her fingers. “Not just prince, but warrior. Avenger.” Heavy grief weighed in her eye when she looked up. “I lost the first half of my lifetime to that shadow of a man whom I pretended to be. I would still be—no, I would have died as that man—had Khalid not saved me.”
“He rescued you at Gronder,” Byleth said, since he had pieced together that much.
But Alexandria shook her head. “He’s saved me much more than once. He saves me every day,” she said resolutely. “He saved me from execution, from Gronder—from Fódlan as a whole. He saved me when he carried Dedue’s final words to my ears, to tell me never to seek revenge for his death. He saved me from the ghosts of my friends and family, or the twisted versions of them that I had let haunt me in their memory.”
“You thought I was one of those ghosts,” Byleth realized, “when you first saw me.”
Alexandria took his hands in hers and gave them a feeble squeeze, somehow still too tight for comfort. “I always wondered whether you would come back to haunt me,” she murmured. “I know now that those visions I saw were not spirits, but… simply visions, brought on by the stress of my situation. The fact that they were all visions of the dead at first was mere coincidence.” She gave a weak laugh. “I even thought Anya was a vision when I saw the two of you together. It’s been many years since she was last here.”
“Marianne wanted to keep her safe at home,” Byleth said softly. “She’s your daughter, isn’t she? Yours and Marianne’s.”
Alexandria’s hands fell slack as her head slowly dipped. “She is… much less my daughter than she is Marianne’s,” she admitted. “Marianne was… I…”
Byleth squeezed her hands. Alexandria glanced up, inhaled, and tried again.
“I was badly wounded after escaping the Empire’s execution attempt with her and Khalid’s help, and Dedue’s,” she said. “For a long time, we could do nothing but hide while she helped me to recuperate. I remember so little of those days, only that she was kind and gentle, and I was… cruel.” She shook her head, her teeth clenched. “I left before I knew about Anya, or—I think that I did. It would have been… within my character, at the time, to have left Marianne knowing that she was with child. My thoughts were only of vengeance.”
“I remember,” Byleth said gently.
Alexandria bristled. “I’m sorry,” she uttered. “I’m sorry that you remember that part of me. There are many times that I wish I could cut my past out of my life, but it would be an injustice to those I wronged. My memories are a sobering reminder that I must atone for my past… but I feel such deep shame when I realize others—loved ones—remember that past as well.” She stared at her curling fingers, scrubbed of blood, but never quite clean. “My past of hate, and also my past as a man. It is… so much, not only to carry, but to explain.”
Byleth pressed one hand into Alexandria’s, a steady weight to push back that heavy past, but also to hold it, to touch it, to acknowledge it and love it anyway. He lifted his other hand to Alexandria’s cheek and tilted her head up, looking her in the eye.
“I would meet as many new parts of you as it takes for you to become your best self,” he promised her. “You don’t have to apologize or make excuses for healing. All I want to see is that you’re happy.”
Alexandria curled her fingers inward towards Byleth’s hand, tentatively at first, then with a firm, sure squeeze. She blinked, and a fresh tear beading on her eyelashes dripped down to the corner of her quivering, but genuine smile.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Professor, I am. I’m happy.”