Chapter Text
Byleth sees ghosts.
This is both far less and far more complicated than it sounds.
“It isn’t that simple,” her father warns her. He speaks in hushed tones, his voice just barely drowned out by the dissonant sorrow surrounding them. “Most people don’t see what you do.”
Byleth stares outward onto the open sea. There’s a flaming boat out there, flickering further and further from a pyre to an ember to a setting star, and she can’t understand why people are sobbing, knee-deep in salty waters when the man’s right there.
He stares out into the waters, too. There’s a glazed look over his eyes, cheap marbles at the market, and his mother (breathing, crying) reaches out a warm hand to claw at the no-longer him through the chest.
“I don’t get it,” she says to her father, and is met with a look she can’t understand.
“You don’t have to,” says her father. “Just know it. That’s enough.”
Jeralt’s Mercenaries—that’s the trade name their group goes by.
It isn’t very creative, but it gets the job done. Jeralt’s Mercenaries sees people come and go, roped in by the sweet song of gold, taken away by love and illness and injuries.
The ones who close their eyes and let their hearts fall still slip out of everyone’s view and clamber into Byleth’s.
“I always knew there was something weird about you,” the newly-inaugurated Jacob mutters. “Always so creepy and quiet.”
“And alive,” Byleth says flatly.
Jacob throws on the pettiest pout he can muster and kicks at a pile of firewood. His foot phrases right through, and his non-existent weight carries him into the spaces the world doesn’t quite know how to fill in.
Byleth rubs the last of dried blood off her sword. “Did you have any family?” she asks.
Jacob pushes himself out of the perfectly undisturbed pile of wood. “What,” is his shaky and unhelpful response.
“Family,” Byleth repeats.
“None that would come to my funeral.”
“Good. We buried you on the side of the road. I carved out a gravestone for you.”
It takes every shred of decency in Jacob’s translucent form to form his next words.
“Thank you,” he forces out, like he’s missing half his tongue. He isn’t. He died by blood loss—a traumatic injury to the head with an axe. He shuffles in place, like he’s missing his toes, too. “I...” he begins. “that was kind of you. I guess,” he finishes lamely.
The two of them sit in silence for a bit. The hustle and bustle and miscellaneous sounds of the mercenaries settles in, stirs around a bit.
“I’d like to go see it,” Jacob blurts out.
Byleth sheaths her sword.
“My grave,” says Jacob. His face makes a weird shape. “I feel like I should. Just once, at least.”
Byleth stands, and from the corner of her eye, she sees her father stare. He’s the only one that notices her departure. That’s usually how it always goes.
The road isn’t very wide or very well-paved, but it’s unfair to write up a fancy rubric for the ground beneath her feet. Byleth walks; Jacob follows behind her. The road crunches beneath her feet.
“I never knew you could see ghosts,” Jacob says all of a sudden.
His voice doesn’t make the night brighter, but it sure makes it louder. “I didn’t tell anyone,” says Byleth.
“You know, I always thought you were a ghost,” Jacob admits. A snort, then a more subdued: “Didn’t expect to be the one haunting you.”
That’s a strange way to put it. “Would you rather it be the opposite way around?” Byleth asks.
“I don’t want you dead,” Jacob says, offended. “I just—” He makes a vague gesture with his hand. “You always haunted us, is all.”
Apparently Jacob is blissfully unaware of the fact that the haunting part only comes after death. Then again, he did just take an axe to the head, and she’s not sure how much brain matter there even was in his head before it was rudely evicted, so Byleth puts on her respectful face and kindly points out, “I’m not really dead yet.”
“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” Jacob says dismissively, which only reinforces the theory that he probably didn’t lose that much to the axe. “Point is, if you could always see ghosts, you should’ve said something!”
“Like what?” Byleth asks.
“Like, I don’t know, ‘I can see ghosts.’ How’s that?”
“Awful,” says Byleth. “Nobody would believe me.”
“Just as blunt as Jeralt,” Jacob mutters.
Byleth kicks her foot back. Her heel catches a stone, and it goes sailing through Jacob’s ghostly visage.
“Just as rude as him too,” Jacob snaps. Then, because he likes making bad decisions, he sneers and says, “The resemblance is uncanny.”
His tone of voice suggests a joke. Byleth kicks another rock through his forehead.
As they continue down the path, Byleth’s steps get a bit wider, and Jacob wanders a bit closer. It probably has something to do with the remnants from their most recent battle—specifically, the one in which Jacob came to realize just how open-minded he was.
“This sucks,” Jacob grumbles, breaking the eerie silence.
“All in a day’s work,” says Byleth.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Jacob, doing that hand-waving thing again. His lips make a brittle line. “Although,” he adds contemplatively, “I wanted to see a few more days than this.”
Byleth shrugs.
“Your empathy is greatly appreciated,” Jacob says flatly.
Byleth shrugs again. She’s used to this by now. Death is the most confusing topic to plague her life, and it doesn’t help that lost spirits want to dive into her brain and wrangle out answers about the great beyond, reincarnation, the worth of a life, etc, etc.
If Byleth knew any philosophers, she’d redirect all her ghosts their way. But alas: no philosophers.
Then, out of nowhere, Jacob falls completely still.
Byleth turns to look back at the disembodied soul. “What?” she asks.
In a very quiet voice, Jacob says, “Has your hair always been green?”
“What?” Byleth repeats, looking down at her very blue and very not green locks. She pinches the uneven ends and frowns. “It’s blue,” she points out. Then she remembers schematics and says, “Or a very, very, very dark green.”
Jacob stares at her a bit longer. His eyes go wide, then narrow, and then he looks away. “Never mind,” he says.
Maybe the whole axe-to-the-head thing rattled Jacob worse than Byleth expected. “My hair is blue,” Byleth says calmly.
“I said, never mind,” Jacob snaps.
And that’s about as far as the conversation goes.
In the silence that lurks in the air, Byleth scans her surroundings until she spots a slab of rock, jutting out of the ground like someone had tried real hard and failed to get it to stand up straight. Which she did.
“Here we are,” she tells Jacob, gesturing to the makeshift gravestone.
Jacob floats closer. Byleth kneels down, and he follows suit.
It’s an awfully quiet night in Faerghus. It’s not the kind of weather Byleth prefers; everything seems so barren and cold, and she’s half convinced someone in their group is going to get mauled by a bear before they leave for the Empire.
They both stare at the words etched into the rock.
Then:
“It’s Jacob with a k, you idiot.”
Byleth frowns. J-A-K-O-B? That’s a dumb way to spell Jacob, and everyone knows it.
“No,” she says.
Jacob turns to face her with the flattest expression she’s seen on his not-mutilated face. “No,” he parrots, visibly trying not to lose it. “What do you mean, no?”
“That’s not how you spell Jacob,” Byleth answers firmly.
“Yes it is!” Jacob shrieks. He gestures something violent toward the gravestone, which Byleth would like to remind him took her a very long time to make with all the curvy letters in his name. “It’s Jakob, not Jacob!”
There’s no difference in the pronunciation, so Byleth counts his point as invalid.
“Fix it,” Jacob demands. “Make it right!”
“It’s already right,” Byleth insists.
“It is not,” Jacob screeches. His ghostly voice sends a cold gale barreling through the trees. If Byleth gets murdered by wolves, it’s all his fault.
“Fine,” Byleth eventually relents, kneeling down in front of the slab. She gives Jacob a very flat look, then unsheaths her knife and begins drawing a straight line right next to the offending c.
Every tap-tap-tap of the stone hitting the hilt of the knife is interjected with rude comments like “Your hands are so unsteady!” and “Didn’t you learn how to read?”
Byleth ignores them. She does, however, hurl the rock at Jacob once she’s done.
“There you go,” she says, deeply unsatisfied. “Jacob with a k, because nobody spells it that way.”
“Read a book,” Jacob demands, like that’ll be of any help.
The two of them stare at the refurbished gravestone. Byleth now has to come to terms with the fact that there is, apparently, more than one way to spell Jacob. On the other hand, Jacob has to come to terms with his untimely demise.
But really, is there really a timely way to die as a mercenary? Probably not. Personally, Byleth would like to live a life free of ghosts bothering her at every turn, wailing something about tragedy and regrets and burdens, etc, etc. Then she’ll die, and like any good spirit, she’ll find a nice abandoned building to haunt and lounge around in for the rest of eternity.
Or something like that. Maybe she could fish for ghost fish? That would be cool.
Meanwhile, Jacob seems to be walking a more dramatic road.
“You know,” he says, his voice barely a whisper, “I really didn’t want to die.”
Byleth hums.
“Like, I know I’m just a mercenary, and we drop like flies, but I at least wanted to see more of the world,” says Jacob. “You know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was born in Faerghus. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“It’s awful. So cold, and the soil isn’t fertile at all.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. My old man probably still hates me for running away from home all the way to the Alliance. But you do what you gotta do. Right?”
“Right.”
Jacob heaves a deep sigh. “I never even got to see Derdriu,” he says sadly.
Byleth contemplates his words, the strange emotion in his voice, the dying grey of his limbs. “Lots of water,” says Byleth. “And... archery?”
“Your knowledge of the world is astounding,” says Jacob, with tangible sarcasm.
“I’ve never been either,” Byleth says defensively.
Jacob sighs again. “That makes two of us, I suppose,” he eventually grumbles. He settles for sitting directly in front of his own gravestone with an utterly silent movement. It’s probably cathartic, staring your death in the face.
“It should last for a while,” Byleth tells him. At least, she thinks it will.
“I wonder what Enbarr’s like,” Jacob muses aloud. “They have really sweet pastries there, apparently. And one hell of a canal.”
“I’ve never been there either.”
“And I hear the Rhodos Coast is a pretty sight as well. Should’ve made plans to go before an axe decided to bury itself in my head.”
“Guess so.”
“There’s some kind of monument there, I think. A big, shiny grave for some hotshot. Lucky bastard, whoever that is.”
“Not a mercenary.”
“But Fodlan’s so small compared to everything out there,” Jacob says, and his gaze grows cloudier. He directs it upward at a moonless night. “I’ve always wanted to go to Almyra. Those wyverns... I wonder what it’d be like to fly?”
There isn’t much left to talk to at this point, but Byleth says, “If I ever meet a wyvern rider, I’ll ask.”
“The sky,” Jacob mutters. “Was it always so big?”
And then he vanishes.
His forlorn gaze doesn’t actually hang in the air, but something gives it that distinct impression.
Byleth sits around for a little longer. Once the cold starts numbing her fingers, she brushes the freshly moved dirt off her knees and knocks twice on the gravestone.
“Bye, Jacob-with-a-k,” she tells the cold stone. “I don’t have flowers for you. I don’t think you’d like them anyway.”
Jacob is, unsurprisingly, silent as the grave.
That’s about it for tonight’s extracurricular activities, Byleth thinks.
The walk back is quiet, almost peaceful, if not for the fact that ghosts really love hanging around places of death and violence, and their merry band of mercenaries just made a place of death and violence out of an inconspicuous road. So Byleth ignores the disembodied voices and marches forward and back into camp.
Her father meets her at her tent.
“Done for today?” he asks, a single brow quirked up. He doesn’t say much, but his accent of silence rests firmly in the region of exasperated parent.
Byleth nods.
“Jakob was a good kid,” her father tells her. She can hear the k. “He was dumb, but what kid isn’t?”
This is his attempt at normalizing Byleth’s frequent interactions and association with ghosts. “He wanted to see the world,” she says. “I think he should’ve kept his eyes on the battle first.”
His father sighs and runs a calloused hand through Byleth’s shaggy hair.
“You’re in need of a haircut,” he mutters, mostly to himself.
Byleth pretends not to realize his poor attempt at deflection and raises her knife.
“While many problems in life can be solved with a knife, I’m relatively concerned at your ease in defaulting to that answer,” her father says.
Byleth raises her sword instead.
“No,” says her father.
Byleth frowns. While she isn’t too comfortable with an axe yet, it would be pretty convenient to tie her hair to a tree stump and just swing it all off in one go.
“No,” repeats her father, with emphasis, presumably noticing Byleth’s creeping gaze toward a tipsy mercenary's axe. “It’s late. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Byleth, and that brings an end to the conversation entirely.
So she crawls into her tent, brushes whatever remains of Jacob’s face from her memory, and goes on with her life.
The term ghost only starts to sink in once Byleth is old enough to hold her own in battle against every single member of their group, save for her father.
There’s ghost, which is a fun thing that dislodges itself from someone’s soul and makes for a terrible conversationalist.
And then there’s ghost.
Ghost and ghost are different because one exists, and the other doesn’t.
“Poor man,” her father says, after they’ve dragged out what few survivors they could find from what appears to be the aftermath of a bandit attack. His eyes follow one man in particular: a perfectly average villager whose appears to be staring off into the dying flames of his home.
Byleth nods in agreement. She follows after the man and wordlessly offers her handkerchief.
The man keeps staring. He doesn’t appear to have even acknowledged Byleth’s existence.
Something tells Byleth that it’s probably best to let him be for now.
She wanders back to her father’s side, eyeing the man. “He doesn’t seem well,” she says.
“He isn’t,” says her father. “He’s... haunted.”
Byleth frowns. She narrows her eyes, trying to spot any faint spirits lurking in the area. Surprisingly—relievingly—she can’t find any. “No he isn’t,” she tells her father. “I don’t see anyone.”
“There are ghosts even you can’t see,” says her father, and then he moves to survey the survivors again.
The very thought of ghosts Byleth can’t see is worrying. If she can’t see them, how is she supposed to duel them into the next world?
The point is: people can be haunted without having ghosts lurk in their shadows. Byleth doesn’t really understand, which, in her defense, is a perfectly valid situation to find yourself in when you’re the literal medium between life and death, and apparently there are some things that live outside those boundaries, which is just... no? Away with you, awful prospects?
Mercenaries live and die by the sword, not metaphors and semantics. Byleth has no plans to deviate from that course of action.
When they leave the ruins of the town behind, she thinks about the haunted man, and what he could be haunted by.
Then she forgets.
This, Byleth thinks, has to be the worst situation she’s gotten herself into.
Which is impressive, given the fact that just a week ago she was almost done in by a bandit posing as a tea merchant, and that’s a kind of humiliation that makes you want to scream into a pillow for the rest of forever.
Byleth doesn’t do that because she’s Byleth. Instead, she hacks at trees for a week.
All is well, everything’s just fine, her stance is improving and she’s making quick work of dead trees (lots of those in this area? Weird) and her training sword (all training weapons are, in a way, collateral damage).
Everything’s going great, and Byleth can see something burning in the distance.
That probably isn’t a great sign. Weirdness collects around her, so whenever something that isn’t herself or her belongings lights on fire, it generally heralds events relating or adjacent to the apocalypse.
She follows the trail of smoke into the sky.
Oh. That certainly is a very large plume of ominous smoke.
In a brilliant moment of deductive reasoning, she slides her sword back into its sheath, pats the tree for a job well done, and sprints back to camp.
It takes all of ten minutes for their entire party to move out. Byleth likes to believe that it’s partially due to her ghostly presence manifesting itself in front of her weak-willed companions and scaring the living crap out of everyone.
“What in the fuck,” her father says when they finally catch sight of the flames. “What in the ever-loving fuck.”
Byleth makes an aborted sound of protest. It’s probably hard to hear over the screams.
It’s difficult to tell what’s going on. All that Byleth can tell with certainty is that a lot of people are dead or dying, and she’s not looking forward to meeting with all the ghosts later on.
“Stay close to me,” her father says.
Byleth nods and follows him into the flames. Her father's back disappears almost immediately, and the crackle of fire doesn't do much to soothe her.
She isn’t sure whether the blade in her hands really is as warm as it feels, or if she’s just nervous. It’s probably a bit of both.
The fire rages on. Moans and wails come from every direction, and no matter how hard Byleth searches, she can’t find anyone who isn’t already dead. At first, she’s confused: shouldn’t she be tripping over survivors?
Then she remembers her ghost-whispering abilities. Right. Cries of the newly departed sound no different than cries of the currently departing.
She feels that it’s appropriate to frown, so she wears that expression as she kicks burning debris out of the way and steps over bodies.
A quick survey comes to a quick conclusion: a whole slew of knights died here, and Byleth isn’t sure why. Then again, it isn’t her job to be sure of anything. All she needs to do is make the sureness happen.
There isn’t any reason for what happens next to happen, either. But it does.
“You’re... alive?”
A voice, tiny and thin and weak like paper, grates against the sound of crackling.
Byleth looks down and to the left.
Her brows shoot up. “I could say the same to you,” she tells the unfortunate man who looks like he’s been pinned down at the waist under the wreckage of a house.
Well. Pinned isn’t exactly right. Crushed is the more accurate word.
The man somehow has the strength to laugh, but Byleth isn’t sure what he’s laughing at. He doesn’t have a lot to be laughing at right now. “That’s fair,” he wheezes out. His features twist in pain, which is also fair, given his current predicament.
Byleth crouches next to him. He catches her gaze.
“Seems like you know the truth as well as I do,” he says. “You... you’re a child. But you know. You can tell.”
“I see,” Byleth corrects him. “There’s a lot I don’t know.”
The man shakes his head. His hair plasters to his face, half by blood, half by mud. “Do me... one favor,” he says, and that’s not right either, because begs is the right word, but Byleth has the decency to let dying men leave with some semblance of pride.
“Okay,” is Byleth’s curt response.
The man’s eyes close for a moment. Before Byleth can decide whether he’s dead or not, he suddenly says, “Could you... fetch that sword for me?”
His hand gestures weakly at an unsheathed blade a few strides away. It’s a precious thing, most likely an heirloom or something of the sort, all dressed up in blue and pounded into shape from a precious black ore. It’s heavy in Byleth’s grip. The blade is clean, and she can’t tell if that’s an insult for a knight or not.
What she can tell is this: the sword's name feels like a Claíomh Solais. Or something along those lines.
Byleth wanders over and kneels in front of him, lifting the sword up with both hands. “Here you go,” she says.
The man’s hand drops to rest on the hilt.
“Take it,” he tells her.
Byleth blinks the ash out of her eyes. “Pardon?” she asks.
Laughter seizes the man again, this time more literally than figuratively. What’s left of his body shakes violently, and he spits a mouthful of blood onto the scorched earth. “Ah,” he begins, pain finally beginning to take over, “I don’t—don’t want to die.”
Byleth is silent.
“I don’t want to die,” the man says again, as if he’ll somehow be spared from a terrible fate if he convinces Byleth. He doesn’t. His fingers dig deep into the ground, and his face twists into something ugly. “This wasn’t how—I don’t—” His breaths come quick and stuttered, and as his facade burns away, he asks, or pleads, “Why does it hurt so much?”
Byleth is silent. The sword is warm in her hands.
She quietly contemplates whether it’s better to die alone or in the presence of a stranger.
“Hey,” she says suddenly.
The man doesn’t have the strength to look up at her. She can guess where his thoughts are heading; it’s probably rude to interrupt someone’s dying moments. With Byleth, though, dying breaths might be the last someone breathes, but certainly not the last someone speaks.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you want, you can come with me,” Byleth says.
The man stills. For a moment, she’s convinced he’s dead for sure, and then a faltering breath says, “What...?”
“I’ve never seen a haunted sword, but it should be okay,” Byleth decides. She studies the hand on the hilt. Then she puts her own hand over it. The only blood on either of their calloused palms is their own. “Are you okay with dying here?”
“No,” comes the immediate answer. It’s followed by a wet cough and a series of hacking noises.
Comforting has never been one of Byleth’s strengths. Unsure of how exactly to proceed, she lifts a hand and pats his cheek awkwardly.
The man pulls back from her, which is understandable.
“I can’t do anything about that,” says Byleth, “but I can offer you the next best thing.”
The man holds her words in silence. Against all odds, he looks up, up, up at Byleth, and meets her eyes one last time.
That look in his eyes—it’s familiar. What’s that emotion again? Bravery? Determination?
As Byleth watches the man’s hand slip from the sword, she thinks:
Oh.
That’s defiance, isn’t it?
Whatever happens next, Byleth will never really know.
All she knows is that the wind suddenly howls around her, twisting dying embers into screaming flames, and the sword in her hands glows a soft blue as the man’s last breath leaves him.
When she comes to, it’s with bandages over the right half of her body. She can’t see very well out of her right eye.
Her father holds her tight until her arms ache. “I’m sorry,” he says, but Byleth doesn’t understand what he’s apologizing for.
And there, at the foot of her bed, rests a sword.
Years from now, Byleth will look back and—
Well.
She won’t laugh, but she’ll certainly find the situation somewhat entertaining.
Swords are certainly louder than they let on.
“What’s your name?”
“I... can’t remember.”