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Upon returning to Garreg Mach, when news broke of Dimitri’s survival – though ‘Dimitri’ might be pushing it, he wasn’t really himself, but a king is a king all the same – Cyril knew there was work to be done. Spending the last five years training under Shamir was good for the battlefield, but his home needed a different skillset.
Dust had settled on every surface, and rats had chewed the edges of all those red silk curtains that blocked stained-glass windows in the moon’s glow. In an ideal world, he’d have one thousand Cyril’s ready to clean, ready to return the school to its former glory, but in this one there was only him.
And, of course, as Dimitri’s survival spread to the Blue Lions house, they all returned too. Annette, who had grown her hair out. Mercedes, who had cut hers off. Felix, Sylvain, Ingrid, and whatever inter-house gossip the three of them had brought up, followed by Ashe. Ashe. Lonely as ever, with his hair grown out and his features all a little sharper.
Byleth, too, who had hardly changed. His hair still wrapped around the base of his neck where he’d neglected to cut it, still that odd shade of green. Within only a month of being back, Cyril had walked into bathrooms only to meet his former professor staring at his own reflection, as if in a moment of reprise, remembering his lines—remembering who he was.
Cyril couldn’t blame him, really. If he woke up one day after five years, unchanged, while the world around him had kept spinning, he’d probably do the same thing. Just, not for so long. He had more important things to be doing, obviously.
Five years of empty space had done a number on Garreg Mach too, only populated by Dimitri’s aching body and the cape that trailed behind him. It was easy enough to see where Dimitri had spent most of his time by the how thick the dust was in different rooms; the path up to the centre of the Church always much cleaner than that to the greenhouse.
(‘He left the plants to die,’ Cyril thinks to himself, surveying the rotten palms that no longer stretched out the way they had in his youth. He was taller now. Eye to eye with those foreign flowers.)
But all that meant to him was the start of a long working day. Find the plants that had a little life left in them, mark all the rotten door hinges to fix later, gather all the books that had been left askew those five years ago, right before the whole place had been abandoned. In the middle of those three raging empires, it seemed a little strange to have such a palace populated by nothing but the ghosts of their teenage years.
Though perhaps those teenage years spent planning wars were a little strange too. There was nothing particularly natural about it, anyway, not from the snippets of conversation Cyril had caught in towns of old women reminiscing on their youths together and watching 16-year-olds selling salted meat on the street sides.
Though it was never as if those things concerned him. He was always on the outside when it came to organising those things, even with Shamir, only shooting whatever looked like it needed to be shot.
The rest of them had probably spent the past five years killing things too.
.
Everyone was different in their own ways too. If not their hair, then their height. War changed their attitudes and their outlooks; made Felix a little softer and Sylvain a little more daring, and Manuela seemed more desperate than ever. The seat in the room Dedue once held seemed larger, emptier than ever, but it was nice to hear Annette and Mercedes chattering between themselves during breakfast.
(Dimitri was, he supposed, a little too far gone to feel the echoes of movement around him.)
It was true, too, that they’d all spent the past year searching for their king, and these years had taken some type of toll on them all. Gilbert, tired than ever before, slept short, early nights, before returning to a small desk littered with papers. Sylvain’s voice didn’t bounce off the walls the way it used to either, while Ingrid, with barely a fraction of the hair she once had, took up a little less space too.
And Ashe always caught his eye for long, tempting moments.
Ashe, his one friend from back in their childhood, who would sit on his shins and beg Cyril to let him help organise leather-bound books in the library shelves. He had always thought it was some weird tactic Ashe was using to steal the books away – he could recognise a former thief from miles away – until he caught Ashe telling off some kids half his age for not filling out the borrowing register properly.
Only then did he let Ashe hang around him during his library duties. He really wasn’t one for staring at that roster, trying to make out the familiar strokes of pen he could never quite wrap his mind around remembering.
Whatever. It barely even occurred to him that these books had something in them and weren’t gaudy symbols of inane wealth. Leather only from the finest beasts, decorated with delicate engravings filled with gold, jewels pressed into some of the more special copies. Really, they were just things that took up space. Things that needed to go where they belonged and look nice, if not so Lady Rhea can have peace of mind upon her grand return to the monastery.
Because, at the heart of it all, that’s what he was preparing for. Lady Rhea to walk along those red rugs laid out clean on the floor and look at the Church building dedicated to her—to the Goddess—but to her too. The giant lump of rubble that blocked the altar was like a pulsating reminder of her absence. Stones and bricks and shards of glass piled upon each other, and Dimitri’s unmoving body before them at the late hours of the night.
Cyril wasn’t one for conversation with Dimitri, but they had stood together and looked at the rubble. Thinking the same thing, probably. That’s a lot of rubble, where once there was a lot of Church.
So, he decided, that was for later. The rubble was so Byleth could stand behind Dimitri and listen to him being crazy or whatever it was that Dimitri was doing. The rubble was for those who care about Church politics enough to draw long analogies about loss and destruction, and not for Cyril to start cleaning yet. He would, soon. But maybe once the whole place had quietened down a bit.
It’d be a shame, sure. He’d hate for Lady Rhea to return and see that ugly stain, but there was hardly anything he could do about it now. There were other rooms to clean, papers to store, fires to light.
And Ashe, same as he ever was, offered to help. Seldom upon his first arrival, where he seemed almost desperate to avoid Cyril. Not that there was much point in talking now anyway. He was busy with the war effort, Cyril supposed, not that he was really paying attention to the whole thing.
It wasn’t until the first month was over, and Cyril was standing in the hallway outside the library, trying to push an iron candle holding back into the wall, when Ashe saw him. Sitting at the back of the library, still a mess, looking quietly down at an unopened book in his hands.
Brief eye-contact, before looking away. Whatever. Cyril wasn’t going to pretend he understood whatever was going on in Ashe’s head. He always was a bit weirdly stupid.
.
It was a late night, maybe the third following their arrival, where Dimitri had gone deeper into his broken mind and Rhea had yet to return, and the whole school was still an ugly mess, when Ashe found him asleep on the library floor.
Placing his lantern on the nearby table, he knelt down beside him to nudge his shoulder. “Cyril…” he cooed in gentle whisper.
Cyril slowly opened his eyes, taking a moment to remember where he was, who he was, before scrambling to sit up. Ashe shuffled back too, and Cyril could see he hadn’t really slept, if the dark lines under his eyes told him anything.
“Sleeping on the floor… I’m sure there’s enough beds if you’re desperate,” he smiled, pushing his bangs out of his face. “This place is a lot emptier than it used to be.”
Cyril nodded, one hand propping him up and the other rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He must have fallen asleep for a while, though he could have sworn he only closed his eyes for a second to take a break. The library was always warm compared to the other rooms—something about the ideal keeping temperature for paper, and Hanneman’s obsession with preserving things for those coming after themselves.
“Yeah, I guess I dozed off, huh…” Looking around him, there were still so many piles left to be organised. It was easy work with some manual labour, putting books on shelves according to the first character on their spines – that much he could make out – then accounting for the losses. Books taken out and books stolen, it really didn’t matter much to him anymore.
A sick little part of him had wanted to return and find that all the books had been stolen, or maybe some thief had just torched the whole room to ashes in an incomprehensible rage. Sure, Lady Rhea would be sad, but she had her own private collection too. This was more for the students and researchers, neither of which group he was ever going to be a part of, and just took up space.
“Are you here to find something, then?” he asked Ashe, making out his face in the dim light.
Ashe took a moment, sighing. “More like I couldn’t sleep. I’ve missed this place a lot, actually. Out there… it’s hard to find somewhere to sit and read.” He looked around him and Cyril studied the way his profile cast shadows.
He knew what the library looked like. He didn’t know what this newer, older Ashe did.
“Can I help you?” Before Cyril could protest, Ashe smiled the same way he did when he was sixteen, and added, “It’ll be like old times.”
Hm. Ashe really had grown into his features.
“Sure. Just don’t mess up anything and tell me if there’s anything too heavy for you.”
He heard the smile in Ashe’s breath. “I’m sure I’m a lot stronger now than I was then. I’ve been doing axe training, you know.” Pause. “Axes! They’re a lot heavier than they look, I have no idea how Hilda throws them across the battlefield.”
Ashe shuffled around on the floor to face Cyril, looking at the messy stack of books left between the two of them, while the rest towered on unlit desks.
“And I’m taller than you.”
Cyril pulled a face, but it was more of a smile than anything. “Only by a little. And I might still grow.”
They both laughed, and it really was like old times.
.
Maybe an hour had passed when the candle burnt out, and Cyril hopped up to fish a replacement one out of some aged drawer.
“Do you really need to clean this much?” Ashe complained, rocking back to lie on the floor in his absence.
Cyril rolled his eyes, hands busy twisting open the little latches on the lantern’s steel door. “When Lady Rhea returns, I want this place to be the way she remembers it, y’know. Like a space she can feel at home in, not like the holding cell they’re keeping her in.” He relit the new candle and closed it again.
“She’ll be different by the time she’s back, you know that, right?” Ashe reprimanded, but pulled back when he saw Cyril’s features tighten, moving to sit up again. “Not—Not in a bad way, but it’s been five years.” He toyed with a leather-bound book in his lap. “Everything changes just a little. She won’t be mad if the school has too.”
Cyril sighed, perhaps a point of resignation, or a silent plea to the Goddess for Ashe to leave him alone.
“Ah… Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure she’d be happy to come back to this place and have it look nice.” Ashe looked around the library, the same as it ever was. “It’ll be nice for her to see everything staying the same.”
“I want it to look like how it did 5 years ago—I… want things to be the way they were five years ago. But they can’t be, I know that.” Cyril’s fingers pulled the book out of Ashe’s hands, leafing through the pages to check how tightly bound they were. “It’s something I think about a lot, ‘cause it all ended so quickly.”
Ashe smiled a little sadly and shuffled towards him on the floor again. “I think that’s what we all want,” he replied quietly. “This war has taken its toll on all of us, and even now, when we’re all together again fighting for victory, it feels longer than it ever had before.”
For another moment, he paused, and Cyril looked up to him.
“But still, I’m glad. I’m glad we could all meet here again after five years. I’m glad I could see you again.”
Ashe seemed to talk with so much unabashed confidence when he was sincere, but Cyril could see the way his hands were in tight balls gripping to his trouser legs, and the way he was avoiding Cyril’s eyes too.
“I’m glad I could see you too,” Cyril replied. “It was getting kind of lonely. All I really did was exchange guard work for a bed for farm lords, and that gets pretty old after a couple of years.”
Ashe laughed under his breath, flattening his hands out on his thighs. “I get it. I really don’t know what I spent most of the time doing, other than training and patrolling. It was nice to be out there I guess, but I’m trying to become a knight, and with no King to serve, I really was just biding my time until something changed.”
In happy silence, Ashe helped Cyril arrange more of the book piles. Those with rotten spines were put to the side for careful mending later, while the rest could be arranged however Ashe wanted to do it. Something about doing it by the letters on the side, or by whoever wrote them, or something. As he worked, Cyril listened quietly to the sounds of Ashe’s reactions to old books; his shocked gasps and contemplative hums, because those bundles of bound papers were more than heavy weights to Ashe.
Another pile done.
“I kinda liked watching you all running around before, to class and to mock battles, and whatever. Gave me a lot of time to think. I used to stand in the greenhouse for hours when there was no work to do or Seteth forced me to take a break, just to close my eyes and take it all in.”
Ashe looked curiously to Cyril, standing to stretch his legs before returning to the ground. “Were you imagining being somewhere else?”
A beat. “I dunno. It’s not like there’s anywhere to imagine being,” he shrugged. “Maybe I was just making somewhere up in my head.”
Ashe pondered the thought for a moment. “Maybe you were thinking about somewhere you were once. Have you ever considered passing through Almyra again?”
Almyra was long in ruins, and everyone connected to him through blood was dead, dead, dead, not even buried in marked graves but left in torn pieces on the sides of roads, rotting in that unrelenting desert sun.
He hadn’t thought about it in so long – could barely bring himself to on good days – but one night on guard watch he’d come across some abandoned Church, populated by a small party of Almyrian teens, all asleep in a cluster by the embers of a once breathing fire.
That could’ve been me.
Yes, could have. Such endless possibilities for someone who had never been kidnapped and forced into servitude by House Goneril. He could be starving on Almyrian streets instead, or wandering far from home in such unforgiving war, or even dead. Maybe his body would be in the same town as his parents, in the same streets as the kids he grew up with. And everyone who walked past that rotting corpse would think, ‘Another Almyrian, died the way they lived.’
But then, he wouldn’t be such an unfamiliar face to everyone around him, or prove his humanity to those rich nobles who filled the air around him. Would it be better, to be a starving Almyrian surrounded by a million others, or to toil away at the feet of everyone around him?
“The Almyra you left and the one you’ll return to, they’re not the same either. They might be in the same place on a map, but a lot has happened since you’ve left. It must have been at least ten years now.”
Cyril nodded noncommittally, debating a reply. “If it’s not the same place I left it, I’ll be another stranger. And if it is the same place, I know there’s nothing left for me.” Cyril looked at his now empty hands, where marks on his wrist and lower arms reminded him harshly of the day he’d been taken. “For people like me, who’ve been here for too long to go back, and with nothing to go back to, there’s no reason to waste time thinking about it.”
Ashe smiled down to his hands. “I—Well it’s not like I can really understand, but I can empathise a bit… I spent some time last year debating whether or not I should return to Lonato’s mansion, just to look around and remind myself of everything I’ve been through, and the people I’ve lost too.”
“Did you?”
He hummed, negative. “I ended up not going,” he laughed. “I guess in my heart I was still a little too nervous to face the truth; that the place I thought was my home really wasn’t the home I had imagined it to be, and I was a child with no understanding of any of what was happening outside my closed door.”
Cyril looked over to Ashe, deep in his own reflection. “It must’ve been hard, having your old man turn into some rebellion leader,” he offered.
Ashe nodded. From across the floor, Cyril watched the way that thin iron clasp holding his hair behind his ear caught the light of the candle for a brief moment, then fell back to shadow. “I guess I always wanted him to be just my father. I never imagined his own unkept anger, his own trauma and the weight of the past pushing down on him. I was naïve. It was me who hadn’t accounted for him changing, and suddenly he was someone unrecognisable to me.”
Cyril hummed.
“I’ve gotten off topic, I just… I want you to know too, that even though you’ve spent years telling yourself that Almyria is in ruins and Rhea is the only saving grace in your life, maybe things have changed there too.”
Cyril lowered his head. “I want to see Almyra one day, you know. Even if it’s all just rocks on the ground.” He leaned back to prop himself on his hands, looking up to the ceiling beams of the library, where orphan mice had nested for the night. “There’s a folktale about the place my parents used to read to me every night, about why our town was called ‘the pearl of the desert.’ Maybe I’ll tell it to you,” he caught a glimpse of Ashe’s interest in his eyes, “one day.”
He really should have considered wiping down all the library books too, because the dust that fell upon them was not coming off with any amount of movement.
“Training for five years in villages taught me something, y’know. You go around to the armouries and the guilds and it’s all pretty usual, but then you’re walking in the streets where everybody else is, and you see families and kids running around and playing, and parents buying their babies the sweetest berries on sale if they behave. Makes me wonder if I missed out on something important.”
This was what Ashe wanted him to do, he knew that well enough. Ashe wanted to, in the nicest of ways, pry. He always seemed to want to reach out to Cyril and try comforting him, but Cyril could never figure out why. Maybe another part of being friends that he didn’t really comprehend, or maybe it was just some strange quirk exclusive to Ashe and Ashe alone.
He went on. “But that kinda stuff, it was never for me, you know. I was put here the way I was, and lady Rhea saved me from the worst of it. I don’t think there’s any point wishing things were different, ‘cause they never will be.”
Another pile complete, and Cyril rubbed his hands against his trousers to get some of the aging dirt out from under his fingernails.
“Sure,” Ashe smiled, “Without her, you’d be in a worse place overall, there’s no denying that.” He stopped for a moment to check the spine on the book he had been fondling mindlessly; some old encyclopaedia on old farm techniques. “But now,” he risked, “you’re out of the darkest time.”
Cyril quirked an eyebrow in his direction.
“I just mean—You know, you’re here! And you’re a soldier with hot meals and a bed to sleep in, and clothes, and shoes, and all that stuff people like us never really thought we’d really have! So, I—I think it’s okay for you to relax a bit.” He sped up as he reached the end of his thoughts, as if terrified of Cyril’s response.
But Cyril barely followed.
“If you tell me that Lady Rhea saved you from poverty and servitude, I think you could take full advantage of that. It’s not disloyalty to her to live your life like the rest of us. To… To make friends and go out, and spend time finding your own hobbies and entertainment. It’s probably what she wants you to do anyway—they’re all privileges that come with surviving, right?” Ashe brushed a stray hair behind his ear nervously.
He never had to worry about his words betraying him, because every nervous habit was so plain to see anyway.
“It’s been five years. Five years since I last saw you, and you’ve barely changed. And that makes me nervous—you’re the same way you were, and it makes me wonder if you ever had the chance to grow up and think, or if you just never let yourself do it.”
Oh.
“I’ve changed a bit,” Cyril protested. Ashe was right, technically, but was there a need for him to change? Did he need to grow and evolve, if his life only continued so he could repay the debt he owed?
But then, what reason to live if only to thank the person for granting it to you?
They fell back into quiet work as Cyril stood to put away the final collection of larger books left to pack away, and Ashe rearranged the shelves and stored the ones waiting for repair carefully.
Then, picking up his lantern, he and Cyril stretched their backs and walked out into the hallway. The view from the Eastern window taunted them, almost daring them to stay up, keep talking and working around each other, only if it could fill the room with fantastic light.
But they couldn’t. Ashe could barely keep his eyes open, and Cyril watched his own legs as his movements because sluggish, and the books in his hands transformed into steel weights instead.
Ashe smiled sweetly as they parted for bed, returning to his old student dormitory, while Cyril had been assigned the bedroom of some long-dead student, as per Gilbert’s request.
It was still dark enough to sleep, thankfully, and as he laid atop the covers without changing clothes, he watched the wooden ceiling hanging overhead. The dead, long rotten into Almyrian sands… he wondered to himself. I wonder what they would do if they were here instead of me.
.
The next week was slow.
Dimitri was having another series of moments, and Byleth, too preoccupied with the wandering king, could barely make it to their war meetings, so Gilbert took over. Then Ingrid took over, and then they all watched the front of the room silently as Sylvain tried to demonstrate… something.
Cyril had long tuned out by that point, instead, staring at the table and conjuring a list of things to sort out. He needed to scrape the moss that had grown between the bricks on the bridge up to the Church and clean the corners of the outwards facing windows of the whole monastery where dirt always got caught. There was a bee’s nest in the wall of the training grounds too that he needed to dig out.
Ashe, next to him, wrapped his fingers around the back of his chair. He clearly wasn’t paying attention either, instead watching Cyril’s profile as he counted on his fingers the hours left in the day and the jobs he had left to perform.
No one was going to call them out for not paying attention. The whole meeting was rather moot without Byleth guiding the conversation, and none of them were really suited to a real role in war leadership. So, when Felix finally stood up and left the room without a word, and Ingrid tried to say something hopeful at the end to remind everyone to do their daily duties, it took them both a moment to notice that it was over.
Cyril stood up to leave—“Uh!” Ashe interjected as he reached out to grab Cyril’s arm. “Wait. Before you run off to do stuff, can I borrow you for a second?”
Looking skeptically towards him, Cyril nodded without shaking his hand off. Ashe pulled him out of the room, guiding him up to the newly unlocked third floor.
As they stepped into Rhea’s bedroom, Ashe took Cyril by the shoulders to the table next to her bed, gesturing for him to look.
It was the same as it had ever been. Her antique clock still ticking away, while old jewellery and paper transcript psalms laid in a small neat pile. And, tucked away at the back, like it had always been there, was a small potted plant, just barely poking its head out of the patted dirt. A shoot that reminded him of Almyra.
He heard Ashe take a breath behind him, squeezing his shoulders. “I know you’ve separated yourself from them, but even the dead can’t escape us for that long,” Ashe began, stroking his fingers down Cyril’s arms to his elbows. “I know your family are dead. I know you live for Lady Rhea, and you don’t really care about the politics of it all or what’s happening behind closed doors, but I want you to grow too.”
Cyril turned around, the warm colour of his eyes searching for the muted green of Ashe’s.
“Like the rest of us, in this big, changing world.” Ashe stated, his hands at his sides now twisting his gloved fingers against the length of his shirt. “So—I think we can keep this plant here, and when Lady Rhea comes back, she’ll see that everything is as she left it, only… a little different.”
Silence.
“And—And that you’re a little different too.”
Cyril opened his mouth, then closed it. The corner of his eye threatened a tear before he raised a hand to wipe it. “We’re friends, right? Is that why you’re doing this for me?”
“I—Yes, friends,” Ashe smiled, a little forcefully. “Or… something more.”
They’d both grown from when they were kids, Ashe a little more. From where he stood, he took Cyril’s hand, hardened from the body of the bow he’d trained with, and tucked his fingers under the other’s, pulling his knuckles towards his face and pressing the thin line of his lips into them.
“If you would let me.”