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Jeralt was cold, annoyed, and hungry as he stepped into his room. All he wanted to do was take off his armor and sink down onto his couch with his dinner. Alois was only slightly less aggravating as an adult and absence had not made Jeralt feel warmer towards him. None of the Knights of Seiros, or anyone in the monastery, was particularly bearable when they started singing Rhea’s praises. He remembered being that devout knight, once.
He could smell his dinner, brought to his quarters as requested, and sighed deeply as he shut the door behind him. Then he paused, frowning, and tried to figure out what exactly was going on. Maybe having a permanent roof over his head had already made him lax. He wasn’t particularly alarmed, because, as he turned his head, the light reflected off familiar blue hair. Ah. Ah? Again?
Byleth sat cozied up on his couch, a stack of neat papers on the couch beside him, and another larger stack on the table. He was engrossed in reading the paper in his hand, a pen being slowly rotated in his grasp.
“Why are you reading in my room?” Jeralt tried very hard not to sound demanding; Byleth could read tone and body language very well.
“I’m grading papers.”
Oh. Right, the kid was a professor now. He tried to be grateful about that, especially given Byleth had never had the most Seiros-approved education in the world, rather than having Rhea sending his son all over Fodlan killing for her. Not that Jeralt had shorted his son in any way, he and several of his mercenaries were very well-educated. He just couldn’t help feel suspicious that Jeralt was a Knight, off on missions frequently, and Byleth was here, teaching future nobles, with her.
“Don’t you have an office? I’ve seen you at your desk.” Actually, didn’t Byleth have two desks?
Byleth looked up from the papers he was grading, the tiny furrow between his brows easing. “I do. It’s loud in there sometimes.”
“Loud?”
“Children.”
The response is both understandable and amusing. He chuckled and gave his son an appraising look. “What, you’ve spent years as a mercenary but a couple of kids your own age send you running?”
Byleth pauses to give him a blank look, and this one is purposefully blank, conveying his disapproval. Besides, Jeralt was all too aware of how awful those squabbling little nobles could be. He held up his hands in supplication.
“I know, I know. Stay here then, if you like. Just don’t bring any of those kids into my room with you, two is enough.”
There’s some odd emotion that filters through his child’s eyes and the way his body shifts, but it’s gone before Jeralt can identify it. Byleth’s chin angled just slightly, almost unnoticeable.
“Seteth’s sister, that girl with the big hair and the ancient uniform. She wanders in sometimes.”
This time any idiot could see Byleth’s eyes narrow, thoughtfully. Jeralt peered over the couch at Byleth’s daunting stack of paperwork. He’d already gotten through more than half of them.
Better him than me. Jeralt had no patience for paperwork, expense reports and briefings were enough.
“Well, what about your own room?” There was a desk in there, too.
“....” That was a troubling silence, and not a Dad, that was so stupid I’m not even going to respond to that silence.
“Kid?” He prompted.
“My lamp broke.”
“It broke.”
“Mysteriously.”
Byleth’s eyes flicked to the corner of Jeralt’s quarters but Jeralt himself couldn’t see anything. Was monastery life already making him superstitious? He knew that some of the students couldn’t even sleep without a candle, but they were literal children. Then again, he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Byleth’s aging process.
“Okay, fine, I’m not going to kick you out, just don’t make a nuisance of yourself,” Jeralt warned, shucking off the light armor he had been wearing all day.
As if Byleth was ever what could truly be called a nuisance. Sometimes he forgot the kid was even near him. Byleth and the mercenaries had ribbed him for days when, mounted on his mare, with Byleth trailing dutifully beside and behind him, he had asked “where’s Byleth?”.
Jeralt settled in on the other end of the couch, listening to Byleth’s pen sliding over paper as he reached out to lift the cover off his tray. Another fish-based meal. It looked and smelled delicious, but why the hell was there so much fish lately? And a glass of wine. That he picked up first, enjoying the sharp, dry bite of it. Byleth’s head turned his way, then eyed the food, then looked back at Jeralt, and then at his paper again. Jeralt tried to decipher that. Byleth was acting more… emotional. At least visibly. Jeralt knew damn well Byleth had plenty of emotions and thoughts and he needed to damn well keep them to himself most days. .
Jeralt picked his way through his meal, trying to name the spices to the gentle sounds of Byleth’s pen. Once his meal was finished, he let his head roll back and his eyes close, letting himself stew a little. Life in the monastery wasn’t so bad, and Rhea had almost been tolerable in her distance from him and his, but by the Goddess if some of the Knights he was sent out with weren’t the most suicidal, zealous idiots he had ever met.
Skritch.
If they thought he was doing something that wasn’t directly in line with what Rhea had ordered--
Skritch. Skritch.
Then they would either challenge him or disobey, and Jeralt had certainly made long, scathing remarks about them in his report---
Skritchskritchskritchskritch.
“What are you doing?” He asked, opening his eyes just enough to see his son, glove off, scratching at a paper.
“Trying to remove this from Mercedes’ assignment.” He sounded… annoyed, but a little amused.
Jeralt lifted his head and saw that “this” was a series of tiny little white dots over the paper, along with a few red lines, which he was reasonably sure came from Byleth’s pen.
“Please tell me that’s powdered sugar.”
“It is.” Byleth showed him the paper though Jeralt’s eyes were drawn more to the marks than the sugar.
“Is this usually how it goes when you’re grading papers?”
Byleth shook his head. “Not every time. They get careless.”
“This Mercedes, she’s one of the nobles?” He asked, seeing another nod. “I would have thought they’d be sticklers for cleanliness, and that kind of thing.”
“Annette’s has coffee on it. Sylvain’s perfume; it might be on purpose,” he said, and Jeralt tried to put faces to names and thought that maybe they were the two redheads.
Byleth made one last feeble attempt to peel off the sugary mess before picking up another paper. His eyes scanned the paper and then quickly--Jeralt would have called it panicked had it been anyone else--lifted the stack of papers and retrieved a thick, well-worn book underneath them. It was bound in brown leather and the light reflected off large gold letters.
A dictionary?
“What are you--?”
“It’s the prince’s paper,” he said, flipping through the, ah, grading aid.
“Ah,” he said, his face tight as he tried not to smile as Byleth read a little, then browsed through the book, then started again at the top. He looked so alive.
“You look like you’re really enjoying being a professor. Maybe we should leave you here at the end of the school year,” Jeralt chuckled, enjoying the pinched look on Byleth’s face.
His son paused in his scanning, trying to reply. Jeralt wondered if he would want to stay, but instead of answering, the response he got was: “I am banning the thesaurus.”
And the red pen made an ominous line on the pristine paper.