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In the depths of winter, Claude witnesses a miracle of spring.
It starts with a letter, heavy paper spiced with incense, delivered to Rhea by pegasus messenger. It’s an invitation—perhaps challenge would be a better word—by the Western Church. A competition to honor the goddess on a holy eve—twenty silver shield knights versus a hero of the Central Church’s choosing.
Byleth is the rumored contender, of course, but Claude doesn’t worry about Teach. It’s worth a laugh, imagining his stoic, stockinged professor feeling moved to holy battle against a squadron of knights, so when Claude overhears Seteth worrying Rhea over the invitation, he rolls his eyes and keeps it moving to the dining hall before the pheasant’s all gone.
He hasn’t even picked his way through the first bird before he hears Alois congratulating Teach loudly on her upcoming fight. Startled, Claude looks to Byleth. She is nodding to Alois’ booming voice, her eyelids dropping just slightly in an expression he recognizes as boredom. But then she meets Claude’s look and her face brightens, green eyes widening.
But maybe he imagines this. Caspar breaks their line of sight as he elbows in next to Claude, still lugging his training axe, and reaching over him for the pheasant.
---
The match is set for evening, two days later. There is no space in the training ground large or grand enough to fit the visiting bishops, so the grassy field outside the monastery is anointed with sacred water, laid with stone, and outfitted with wooden stands to fit every last curious onlooker.
Velvet clouds press back the moonlight, and only the weak light of candles dimple the darkness. As her house representative, Claude is to stand by Byleth at the edge of the fighting ring as she receives Rhea’s blessing. He saunters now to the edge of candlelight. Not too fast, not too slow. Loose and easy, like his favorite teacher isn’t about to fling herself into a ring of sword steel. Wave to Dimitri and Edelgard. Bow a bit to Rhea, wink at Seteth, ignore Seteth’s valleyed brows.
Byleth arrives.
She strides out from the hall to tumultuous applause and prayersong. Claude blinks in surprise. Twenty knights to fight, and no Sword of the Creator at her hip, just a silver knife and a needle rapier. She hasn’t even brought a shield. Byleth greets him at the edge of the ring with a nod.
Claude steps closer to Byleth and whispers, not allowing his smile to slip as Rhea closes her eyes and begins the prayer.
“Hate to be the one to tell you Teach, but you seem to have left most of your fighting gear in your room. Unless you plan to stake them like meatballs with that skewer of a sword. Raphael would like that, I guess.”
She shakes her head and fixes him with her bright eyes. “Are you worried about me, Claude?”
He tries a shrug, then a scheme.
“Don’t get me wrong Teach, I have complete faith in you. But just in case… give me your hand.”
When she does, he slides a ring on her finger. Slightly modified with his knife and a bit of candlefire at his desk, the soft gold of the accuracy ring shows a deer breaking through a bramblebush. Claude can hear the scandalized students in the stands around them clamoring and straining to see what he’s doing. Standing with Rhea before them, the scene certainly looks as scandalous as he’d hoped. He leans even closer to whisper in her ear.
“It’s for good luck,” he says, not letting go of her hand. “Let them think it’s poison, or better yet, a lover’s token, eh?”
A harmless nip and swipe at the Church when the archbishop’s throwing Teach to the silver wolves is surely fair. Rhea finally opens her eyes and glares at Claude.
But Byleth surprises him by placing a hand briefly over his. Her smile, so intimate and so close, ignites something in him, and he’s glad for the dark that hides his expression as he turns and ascends the stairs to the student’s seating. There’s something about her eyes lately, and it’s not just the fresh, dazzling color that keeps Claude spellbound when their gazes intertwine.
As Claude squeezes in beside Dimitri and Edelgard, Rhea introduces the knights and her champion for the mock battle. Some of the knights carry iron training axes, blunt but no less deadly if they hit bone or organ. Others have ceremonial swords, but the ‘ceremonial’ name doesn’t make their bite less sharp. West’ll play this off as a sign of respect for the powerful Central Church, but it’s not the church that’ll get hurt if the night is a loss, it’s flesh-and-blood Teach, who is examining the stone floors as if a fascinating story is written there.
“It’s so gross to make her fight a mob!” says Hilda from behind him. “What if the professor really hurts herself?”
“She is wise enough to surrender if things look grim,” says Ferdinand. He isn’t the only one worried. Marianne is kneading her fingers, either praying or warming her hands for healing spells, or both, and he sees Dorothea and Ashe leaning far over the railing to watch every move.
The concern of the other houses’ students both fills Claude with pride and plucks at his nerves. Teach is the professor for the Golden Deer, but somehow, her influence has subtly spread under red and blue banners as well. Lindhardt studies magic and Byleth in the library, Mercedes braids Byleth’s hair into a green crown. Hell, he’s near sure he caught Edelgard doodling Teach in the Eagles’ classroom, though Claude didn’t manage to snatch it from her before she stormed away, face nearly as red as her cape.
Dimitri nudges him, blue eyes wide. “What was that you gave the professor? Surely you didn’t…?”
Yes, it can be a fun advantage to have his Teach be so well-liked. “What happens between a professor and her student should stay sacred between them, don’t you think, Your Highness?” Claude says.
“Dimitri, don’t fall to his level,” sighs Edelgard. “It’s but a trinket.”
“It looked like a ring,” Dimitri mumbles.
“A small gift from her favorite student. Since I can’t be down there showing off too, no matter how much I wish it were so.” He sighs and rests his head on Dimitri’s broad shoulder, drawing a blush from the crown prince. It’s so easy to hide his feelings from them, that for just a moment Claude actually relaxes.
“Instead of the professor or by her side?” Edelgard wonders slyly.
Ah. Claude doesn’t get a chance to answer.
A bell peals.
And it begins. To the sound of trumpets, the knights advance, a wall of loud silver and flashing spears. Byleth pulls her rapier. And then she’s a flash of green between the white mountains of snowy armor. He can hear the nick of her rapier as it stings the vulnerable wrist of a knight.
Loosed like an arrow from a bow, Teach dances the brink of defeat and death. Claude has never seen her cast a thing beyond a fishing line and instructional spells, but suddenly she splits the dark with a bolt of blue magic, carving an opening through her foes. Her rapier is a silver exclamation in the dark, finding knees and the inside of elbows through heavy plate.
Edelgard gasps involuntarily as Teach breathes through the narrowest gap between blades, and behind him Leonie cheers as the professor upends a knight entirely with a clever low kick.
All Claude wonders if anyone can see what he sees. If anyone sees her.
Byleth is changed, far beyond her eyes and hair.
The Byleth he had met at Jeralt’s side knew was living, but not alive. Her dreams, unlike his, had no horizon; no goal or grand war glowering like stormclouds in the distant future. When she took the field she was the Ashen Demon, who struck in swift, brutal certainty to secure her next moment wouldn’t end in death. Each second longer lived a prize. Each dawn a miracle. That was the only way to fight like she could—as she had on their meeting in Remire—by using her life itself as her weapon.
But this isn’t mercenary Byleth. It’s—
A sword pierces Byleth’s side. The audience gasps and bobs in their seats. Claude is halfway out of his seat before he realizes it, Hilda and Lorenz’s hands bunched into his cloak, holding him back.
“Control yourself, Claude!” says Lorenz in a squeezed, high-pitched voice, but Claude’s attention belongs to Teach alone as he looks for a dash of green in this ring of death.
There.
Byleth lands a savage kick to the knight’s head, bringing her down with a crash, and Claude sees a healing spell light her hand and the blade of her knife held in it. She jams the glowing dagger into her own wound. A winking thread of blood flies from the knife’s tip as she pulls it out and greets a knight’s axe in a tight deflection.
Knitting up her gaping wound with a direct magic application? Madness.Teach has gone mad, and yet—
She’s blooming. She’s smiling, wincing with pain, instructing. A hundred lessons are being crunched into minutes. This is how your knuckle finds a knight’s helmed eye. This is how you spellcast when a steeled enemy has you under his axe. This is how you disarm the plans of a sweet-talking deer who has been plotting to use you from the moment he laid eyes on you.
And then as thunder cracks and lightning thorns along her rapier, Byleth fells the last knights as they try to crumple her, unleashing a frightening series of electrified blows from her rapier.
It’s over. Byleth flicks the rapier and dagger downward, sheathes them both, and bows formally to the white-faced Western bishops. The applause can surely be heard from here to Almyra.
And oh goddess, Byleth is still smiling. Dirty, bloodied, and smiling. She nods at Felix in the front row, who Claude has never seen so captivated or close to a smile himself, gives a tender-hearted wave of her hand to Bernadetta to say I’m fine.
And then she’s looking at him, at Claude. His heart tightens under her spring gaze.
She’s not the Ashen Demon, or Professor, not Goddess or even Teach in this moment. She’s simply Byleth, flashing him a subtle battlefield sign, his ring a golden flicker on her finger.
No need for reinforcements.
Claude realizes he’s been standing up since the moment she was pierced.
“Exhilarating,” says Edelgard to the two other future rulers of Fodlan. She is flushed and smiling too.
Claude realizes that he his whole body is tight, and unfists his hands.
Dimitri, who had been hunched over with concentration, straightens out. “Marvelous. There is great efficiency in minding only the end of your sword, and not the life of the one wielding it.”
“A beautiful and dangerous technique. It suits her. I just hope she hasn’t exposed herself too much,” Edelgard says, pointing a gloved finger at the head Western bishop, who is putting a wreath of white flowers in Byleth’s hair.
Edelgard eyes the last of the trio. “Silence doesn’t suit you, Claude. Won’t you tell us what’s on your mind?”
Claude only has eyes for Teach. She looks a bit sheepish now in the arms of Manuela, who’s gesturing and tutting at her wounds.
“Claude von Riegan, actually silent for once?” He whirls on her with a carefully placed grin.
“If you’re going to pine after Teach, you may as well say it to her face, not to each other. I think I’ll save my compliments for her,” Claude says breezily, and ignoring Edelgard’s sputtered protest, he slides his way through the crowd of excited students.
As he leaves, he catches a bit of stray conversation from the flowery bishop’s booth.
“A weapon that can pierce the world,” Rhea is saying to Seteth, and Claude knows she isn’t talking about the Sword of the Creator.
---
When Claude finds Byleth at last, it is in the natural eyries of the church’s steeple. Her eyes are closed, her champion’s flowers still dotting her hair. She doesn’t get up at his approach; only the slightest angling up of her face lets him know she’s seen him.
He peers down at her, grinning.
“It’s like you insist on being as unreal as possible. Is it fun for you to watch people bruise their jaws on the floor when you fight? I think Dimitri and Felix just about died of ecstasy.”
Her brow creases slightly and he laughs.
“So? Hiding from your admirers?”
A deeper crease. A bigger grin.
“Too bad. One of them found you anyways.”
Claude perches on an ugly gargoyle and waits for her. It takes time and quiet to encourage her to speak her mind, he’s learned. He makes faces at the gargoyles.
“What did you think?” Byleth asks at last. He blinks and smiles lazily in delight. As many questions as she has asked him, she’s never asked for his opinion of her.
“You beat down twenty greatknights with a knife and a prayer. As always, I’m awestruck by your power.”
Byleth slowly plucks a few blossoms from her hair and twists them between rough fingertips.
“Then why are you angry?”
Claude freezes.
“Angry…?”
“You won’t even look at me.”
He looks at her now.
“I’m not mad, Teach," he says, his voice all sugar. "I just happen to value your life. More than you do, it seems.”
She shakes her head.
“With all the missions you’ve done this month, you didn’t have to face them at all. You could have requested that Catherine go. Or Shamir. Hell, even Seteth would’ve done it. As irritatingly proper as that guy is, his holiness likes you well enough to fight instead of you.”
“Seteth doesn’t like me,” Byleth says, incredulous.
“Nah, he actually loves you. Everyone loves you,” Claude says emphatically.
Byleth is looking at him wide-eyed. “That’s why you’re angry?”
“No! No. I just… seriously, if you’re going to fight on someone’s orders, shouldn’t it be something you actually want to fight for?”
Her quiet stretches, but it’s different now. She is looking at his ring on her finger.
“I never would have fought that way in the old days,” she reflects.
“That so? I figured that was the daring mercenary that prowls within you.”
“Mercenaries aren’t daring. If they are, they’re soon dead.” Her face darkens momentarily as the clouds draw cover over the moon. “It was careless. A needless display. But you asked why I decided to take up my sword. I thought… it’d be fun. And a good way to show you all how...”
She looks down. “If you’re there, within the swing of my sword, I can always protect you.”
And there it is, what Claude knows to be true. The old Byleth, who had known war before she could walk, who casually told him once that she had eaten cold breakfasts next to dead men on the battlefield, is no more. The silent Byleth of Jeralt’s death is buried too. And in their place grows this woman who loves to fish the deep heart of the lake, who knows everyone’s favorite meal, who delights in her strength not to kill but to best. To show her students that they’re safe. A woman whose eyes he finds it harder to meet without some hot feeling in his chest.
She is blooming before him.
And suddenly, Claude feels his anger, bubbling up from a place where only Byleth had noticed. Guilt, frustration, and rage quarrel in his guts, and he’s pushing away from the crumbling audience of gargoyles, circling her.
Feeling angry on her behalf is silly. After all, everyone should live as they wish, and die if they want to. Unless it’s her.
“You’ve been used all your life, you know that?"
Her placid expression betrays something, but he’s lost his grasp on reading her subtle face.
“A vessel. A whetstone. Jeralt raised you on the battlefield to be his right hand, Rhea flaunts your power for the church. And I—I—”
“You what?”
I wanted to use you too. And now I know I never can. I never will.
Why won’t she look away? How she weakens his resolve, pulling apart his meticulous schemes like so much thread. Why hadn’t he just crawled into bed and waited for daybreak to steal these idiotic thoughts?
This wasn’t the plan.
Fuck the plan.
Claude takes a deep breath.
“I want… if I can, I want to be the one to set you free.”
"Free?"
"To fight without a sword pressed to your throat. To walk away, if that's what your heart desires."
Byleth puts an inquiring knuckle to her cheek. He can read her again, serious and sincere.
“But only after you use me?”
Claude’s throat catches as he looks at Byleth. That hur t. He hadn’t known she had enough power over him to hurt him. But her words hit true. And without thinking, for the first time in his life, Claude makes an unplanned promise.
“Never.” Once the word has left his lips he can’t take it back, but he doesn’t want to. “You’re more than that to me.”
He means it. For her, by her hand, empires could burn. Kingdoms might topple. Alliances could be torn apart. Any fool could see that the future world would be determined by who bore the blade that was Byleth.
And he, the greatest fool that ever lived, releases his hand from the hilt.
“Dark times are coming. And there will be a time—a time when I worry that Garreg Mach will be just a sweet, distant dream. But I won’t force you onto my path.”
And her hand is in his again, but this time they’re alone and the feeling is so much more potent. Something is between them now, something different and unexplainable.
What it is he won’t know fully for another five years, in a darkened, crumbled turret, when he hears footsteps and turns to meet a springtime gaze unchanged by time. But for now it’s here, bright and glowing between them.
“There will be legions of powerful people who want you as their own. And you already know some of their names. But someday, if you decide that the world I dream of is one worth making... then I hope you’ll be at my side.”
“I trust you, Claude.”
This time, when Byleth’s eyes brighten Claude is sure of it. They take in all the starlight he so loves, after all.
“But that means you’ll actually have to tell me about your plans.”
“I see,” Claude laughs. “I will. I have faith in you.”
More quietly now, he murmurs: “You chose the Golden Deer. I hope one day that you’ll choose me.”
She envelopes his hand in both of hers, and nods.
There’s no promise that she’ll be there under his banner. But tonight she’s here, under their stars, and tonight that’s more than enough.