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By the time Claude is seventeen years of age, he has to shave his face almost every day.
Or, he should admit, however ruefully, that the coarse hair sprouting from his skin still seems to avoid certain spots. He couldn’t grow a moustache to save his life. In fact, it seemed the line of his jaw and his hair are all that grow, like vines wrapping a tree. Everywhere else is as soft as a baby’s bottom, smooth as can be.
There is something about the way his almost beard grows, something that sharpens Claude’s eyes when he stands in a mirror most mornings to shave it off. There is something about himself in these moments that make him think he is as far from being a deer as he can possibly be. He looks like a predator, someone with a snarling smile. Someone you should not let your guard down around.
Someone you should not trust.
So Claude shaves every morning, sometimes every second. No one has commented on the shadows that stretch onto his jaw by the time it is late at night. Perhaps because no one sees him late at night.
Well. Except one person, that is.
Nevertheless, Claude turns sharp and calculating eyes on how quickly he turns from boyish schemer to the face of a masculine con, ready to lead those with too trusting smiles down winding alleys of deceit. His body has not quite filled out to match, but it is not far off. Even now, he can’t tell if his legs and shoulders ache from training, or from growing pains.
While he finds it difficult to differentiate that, he still notices things. He notices how his arms and chest, usually a defining part of his lean and muscled lankiness, start to broaden ever so slightly. He thinks he might be taller. He never realised his body was hollowed and not yet grown in certain places until they finally did start to grow.
But in the interim of his cheekbones sharpening to match his scruff, to accentuate rather than intimidate, he finds his beard a chore. It is something he notices none of his fellow students attending to. Dimitri and Sylvain are ever curious, often hovering to see how he does it.
Sylvain will likely never grow facial hair, the baby faced boy charmer that he is, but something in Dimitri’s eyes is quicker. Almost like he is analysing and taking in every step for himself. It reminds Claude that Dimitri’s father is dead, and that he has no one to teach him the ways of becoming a man as he did.
So Claude humours them, playfully chucking shaving cream at them when the silence weighs too heavy. Sometimes they get a little crowd going, whether for the jest and merriment of the three, or because there are boys among them less courageous to follow Dimitri in absorbing all they can when they have no one else. No other father’s.
Claude himself is unsure how he wishes to style it. He thinks it is a bad match for his current image, the suave silver tongued fawn following at the heels of his beloved professor. And while there is truth in that, he knows he must keep up as much of his image as possible. For once, not for the sake of controlling his assets.
For once, it is to control himself. If he lets himself fill out the shoes of the man he is becoming, taller, broader, masculine in a way a seventeen year old cannot be, he is afraid what will change. What lines will be crossed. Claude is afraid that he will not be the only one to see the heady look in his emerald orbs when he wakes with dark hair lining his face like a knife.
It is not a facade, this person he is growing into. But he has also not yet cultivated that person prowling inside him. Claude as he will be is not ready for everyone else to see him.
This is why the professor is so surprised, five years later, when the man that greets her is missing his braid. The man that greets her has longer hair, more artfully tousled then ever before. He has a beard that carefully lines his face, sharpening along his jaw, with a bulk of muscle hiding beneath thick clothing.
Claude has eyes that cut straight into hers, and Byleth feels that stare full force for the first time. For her, it was just days before that she had been chatting with a sly boy in the middle of the night, who flinched when her fingers brushed by scruff shading his face. Gone is the fawn he had been shedding before she left.
In its place, a stag.