Work Text:
The thing that finally pushes Hubert over the line is the cake. Which sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense in context – or that’s what he tells himself, anyway.
It starts like this; Ferdinand turns up one morning bright and early, letting himself into Hubert’s chambers when his knock goes unanswered. He ducks down as he enters, avoiding no less than three separate poison arrow traps which fire across the room when the door swings open, hops lightly over the loose tile near the bottom step which conceals a drop-pit full of spikes, and skirts carefully around a pressure plate hidden under one of the rugs.
“Good morning, Hubert!” he says, cheerfully.
“There’s a new one,” says Hubert, not looking up from the papers he’s been hunched over all night. “Second left flagstone in front of the carpet by the fire.”
Ferdinand freezes with one foot in the air, and then gingerly brings it down fractionally to the right of the offending flagstone. “What does this one do?”
Hubert scowls. “Ferdinand, the fact that you know it’s there in the first place is a significant security hazard. Let me have some secrets, won’t you? Suffice to say that the results of stepping on that particular stone would be… hmm. Unpleasant.”
Ferdinand sighs, carefully tip-toeing his way over toward the desk. “Really, Hubert, you ought to disarm some of these traps. One of these days I’m going to forget about one of them and end up dying a horrible death right here on your floor.”
“This wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t keep letting yourself in uninvited.”
Ferdinand ignores him. “Mind you, if I did die here, all the bloodstains would at least give you an excuse to replace the carpet. It’s getting rather ratty. Hmm. Anyhow,” he says, plonking a large, ribbon-wrapped box down on the desk directly on top of the papers Hubert is trying to read, “here, I got you something.”
“Something?”
“Cake.”
“I don’t-”
“Eat cake, I know. But this one is coffee flavoured, and – I am reliably assured – very bitter indeed. Just like you!” Ferdinand beams, and Hubert looks up, properly taking in for the first time the vision before him. He’s casually dressed, his shirt half-unbuttoned, mud around his boots and splashed up his jodhpurs, a faint flush high on his cheekbones – he must have just got back from an early morning ride. Perhaps, in fact, he rode into town to buy the cake. The thought makes Hubert feel strangely warm, in spite of the morning chill.
Obviously, he can’t let Ferdinand know that. So he just says, “Get out of my office, von Aegir, before I tire of waiting for you to fall into a trap and kill you myself.”
Ferdinand grins. “Sure. Still on for tea later?”
“For coffee,” corrects Hubert, shifting the cake box aside and dumping it unceremoniously on top of another, slightly less urgent stack of papers so he can focus on the work at hand.
“For a hot beverage of some description, certainly,” says Ferdinand, ducking out of the path of yet another poison arrow on his way out of the door. “And do let me know if you’re going to be late, won’t you?”
The door swings shut, and Hubert can hear the cheery bastard whistling as his strides off down the corridor. Insufferable git.
After a moment, he sighs and puts the cake box back on top of the urgent papers, gently tugging at the pale blue ribbon on top. The box falls apart delicately as he unties the bow, unveiling what does, he has to admit, look like a rather nice cake. It’s small, and largely unadorned, but the familiar sharp-warm coffee scent rising from it is… appealing. His stomach rumbles. Come to think of it, he should probably eat something, anyway. It’s been a while since dinner, which he skipped, and longer still since lunch, which he had barely time to pick at between reports. He pulls a knife from his sleeve and then pauses. This is one of the poison knives. Probably not good for cake. He hesitates for a moment, then draws another, smaller knife from his belt. Hmm. Also poisoned, now he thinks on it. He sighs, picks up the blunt silver letter-opener from his desk, and cuts the cake with that. It’s not the most elegant solution, but he can’t think of another remotely knife-like object in a solid fifty foot radius that isn’t poisoned, and he’d rather not die for a slice of cake.
The cake is… alright. He’s not a dessert person, but it’s acceptable. He’s halfway through it when he realises he never even thought to check if the cake itself was poisoned, which is absurd, because he’s been checking all his food religiously since he was, what, seven? Eight? It’s unlikely Ferdinand would deliberately poison him, at this point, but that’s no excuse – he has no idea who baked the cake, or who else had handled it before it got to him. In fact, he has no way to tell that Ferdinand hadn’t been replaced by an imposter, set on poisoning him – although, no, he’d known his way around Hubert’s traps too well not to be the real Ferdinand. There’s nobody else – barring, perhaps, Edelgard – who knows enough about Hubert’s office to make their way around the room unhindered. Mind you, the fact that he’s allowed Ferdinand to garner such comprehensive knowledge of his security measures is, in itself, a serious problem…
And Hubert looks down at the plain and unassuming cake (well, half a cake, by now), and he thinks, shit. Shit. This is it. This is the end of enough.
It didn’t start with the cake, of course. It all started with… well, he’s not quite sure, now he thinks about it. The first time he bought Ferdinand that damned tea, maybe. Or perhaps it goes back to the war, and to spending longer than he strictly needed to on stable duty because he wasn’t done arguing with the bastard just yet. Perhaps – his heart sinks slightly at the thought – it even goes back before that, to the odd occasion back in class at the academy where his attention would waver momentarily from the lecture, drifting over to observe the way the sun caught itself so elegantly on the shock of red hair at the desk in front of him.
The point is, whenever it started, it’s carried on for far too long. He has to put a stop to this. He has to, he realises, with a vague sinking feeling, bring the matter to Edelgard.
He doesn’t go immediately. He has business to attend to, and then tea with Ferdinand, which he shouldn’t go to, but he does – he had promised, after all. After that, there’s more business, of a significantly bloodier sort, and then after that there’s a lot of paperwork. Murder, Hubert has learned over the years, involves a surprising amount of paperwork.
Anyhow, the upshot of all that is that it’s long gone midnight by the time he finally puts his work aside and scowls his way along the familiar path to Edelgard’s chambers. He hovers outside, palms sweating in his soft leather gloves. He should just get it over with. Knock, go in, explain his failures and leave with his tail between his legs. It’s not going to get any easier if he stands here waiting. But he doesn’t go in – instead, he paces back and forth in front of the door, half wanting to just leave and avoid having to face up to his own inadequacy as an aide to the Emperor. In fact, he hesitates so long that the guards at the door start giving him odd looks from under their helmets, and eventually Edelgard calls out from within;
“Can somebody let Hubert in? I can hear you skulking around out there, you know.”
The guard swings the door open, and Hubert scurries inside like a scolded cat. Edelgard is sat in her armchair by the fire, dressed in her nightwear with her hair plaited over one shoulder. She doesn’t look up when he comes in, too busy frowning down at something in her lap. It takes Hubert a moment to realise what she’s doing.
“You’re knitting,” he says, vaguely incredulously. And she is – for a given value of knitting, anyway. It’s more a sort of tangle of wool that she appears to be shifting about between two slim wooden needles to no immediately discernible result, beyond making the tangling worse.
“And you’re hovering,” says Edelgard, barely glancing up from her work. “You only hover when you’re nervous. Sit down, tell me what it is.”
He skulks across to the sofa across from her and takes a seat. “I didn’t know that you could knit.”
She shrugs. “I can’t, really. But the professor is trying to teach me.”
Hubert frowns. “I didn’t know the professor could knit, either.”
Edelgard glances up at him, the corner of her lip curving into the vaguest suggestion of a smile. “They can’t. Hence this mess.” She lifts the lump of wool between her needles up and gestures ruefully at it. “It’s not good, is it?”
Hubert strokes his chin thoughtfully and tries to think of something nice to say about the mess that Edelgard has created. “It’s bad,” he says, eventually; “but I suppose that even you must have some flaws. Better for it to be something inconsequential, on balance.”
Edelgard snorts. “It is bad. Possibly even worse than my first attempt. But I find I am enjoying myself, regardless.”
“I see,” says Hubert, who doesn’t really see at all, but would like to talk about anything other than what he came here to talk about, and is therefore trying to stretch the conversation out.
But Edelgard is not so easily distracted. “I feel certain that you didn’t come to my chambers at two in the morning to discuss my miserable lack of crafting talent.”
“… no.”
She sighs. “Just spit it out, Hubert,” she says, her focus already shifting back toward the tangled mess of yarn between her needles. “Hmm,” she murmurs, almost under her breath, “so it’s knit two, purl two, knit… no, wait, it was-”
“I need to take a break,” says Hubert.
Edelgard blinks. After a long moment, she puts the book down, and then the yarn. And then she stares at Hubert, and she frowns. “Come again?”
“I said,” he repeats, barely able to meet her baffled gaze, “that I need to take a break. From- from your service. I, ah-”
“You want to take a break?”
“Yes.”
“From… your job?”
“Yes.”
“From me?”
He winces. “Yes, my lady, although I assure you this is not-”
She rubs her eyes, as though she can’t quite fathom what she’s seeing. “You want to- well. Hmm. I… hmm.” She quirks an eyebrow at his pained expression and shakes her head. “Oh Hubert, don’t look at me like that. I’m not- I’m glad you want to take some time for yourself, goddess knows you’ve earned it, it’s just… unexpected. What made you come to the-”
Hubert winces again, feeling himself crumble under the piercing scrutiny of her violet gaze. He can’t begin to contemplate looking her in the eye right now, so instead he stares down at his gloved hands – which, he notes, distantly, appear to be twisting fretfully in his lap, quite of their own volition. “I do not wish to take a break for anything so insignificant as my own satisfaction, you must understand, but circumstances have become…” he shakes his head. “I suspect that at this current moment my presence is a more serious liability than my absence would be.”
At that, Edelgard does frown, properly, leaning forward in her chair to get a better look at him. “What do you mean? Has your spy ring been compromised? Or is there some kind of magical-” she bites her lip, brow furrowed. “Is it- does it pertain to…” she glances around, her voice dropping to a hushed whisper, “to those who slither in the da-”
Hubert shakes his head, firmly. “No. No, please don’t trouble yourself, it is nothing so alarming as that. Merely a personal matter which I have perhaps, ah, allowed to get rather out of hand, and which I suspect is impacting my duties.”
Edelgard does not look convinced. “Hubert, I know you like to tell me as little as you can, sometimes, and I know that you do so for my own protection - but if it is serious enough to take you from my side, then I need to hear about it. A little information, at least.”
Hubert sighs. He’s been mincing his words to spare his own feelings, only now he’s upset Lady Edelgard, and made her concerned when she has no need to be. So he steels his nerve, clenches one gloved hand into a fist until he can feel his nails digging into the flesh of his palm through the fabric, and through gritted teeth he says, “To clarify, the issue is that I have developed a… sentimental attachment. And I am concerned that by indulging myself in such childish fancies, I compromise my capacity to protect and serve you, my lady, and so-”
Edelgard laughs. Not just laughs – she howls, and slams the arm of her chair, and goes nearly blue in the face with the force of it all. She laughs like he hasn’t seen her do since… well, not since her hair was brown, rather than white. He’s almost concerned that she might be sick, but after an uncomfortably long moment she manages to wheeze herself back upright, wiping away a stray tear from the corner of her eye with the crimson edge of her sleeve.
“Oh, Hubert,” she says, “Hubert, really?”
“Yes,” he says, a little stiffly, “and, if I may be frank, I fail to see what is so hilariously funny about your most trusted retainer being so severely compromised in his capacity to-”
Edelgard wipes away another tear of laughter. “You’ve developed a- what did you call it, a ‘sentimental attachment’?”
“As I said, yes, I-”
“Just the one?”
Hubert blinks. She’s still smiling, but the laughter has petered out, and the turn of her mouth has shifted to something more indulgent, something fonder and more kind. “… yes?” he says, tentatively.
She shakes her head. “Really, I would expect you to be more observant, Hubert.”
He feels the burn of heat at the back of his neck at the criticism, however kindly spoken. “Forgive me, but I don’t understand what you-”
“Just yesterday I saw you explaining to Linhardt the particulars of a travel pillow which you had seen in the market square – and then I observed you promising to purchase it on his behalf when he expressed interest in it.”
“I- well, if he will insist on prioritising his sleep above all else, we might as well ensure he can rest in between his duties – he performs better, that way.”
“You helped Caspar organise the dining rota last week.”
“He was taking far too long to do it himself - it seemed only sensible that somebody with a better head for figures should assist him with the task.”
“And just this evening I had a letter from Dorothea and Petra, saying that a mysterious benefactor seemed to have found a way to procure two tickets to that show they had been so desperately wanting to see.”
“Well, they both wanted to visit the theatre, and I felt that for- for the morale of everyone involved-”
“You are currently wearing, Hubert, a small embroidered flower which Bernedetta gifted you, for no reason more complex than that it makes her happy to see you wear it.”
“I-”
“And that is not to mention how well and how carefully you have supported me, all these years, or your tremendous assistance to the Professor, or the hangover cure you procured last month for Manuela, or the endless tea times you seem to manage to find time for with Ferdinand, or-” she cuts herself off, then, and taps her chin thoughtfully. “But perhaps – ah.” She fixes him with one of her more piercing gazes. “No. I see. Would I be correct in thinking that the sentimental attraction to which you refer is of a more… romantic nature than your increasingly undeniable friendships with our compatriots?”
Hubert wishes that the ground would swallow him up. Like all other prayers, this one goes unanswered. “… that is correct, yes.” He can feel himself go red and splotchy all up his neck – or redder and splotchier than he doubtless already is, anyhow. “Although, now you mention it, I can see that the issue is perhaps more pernicious than I had thought. Even the friendships you mention might compromise my ability to clear-mindedly aid you in your path; indeed, that I have even become so friendly with you is undoubtably a hinderance to true and impartial service of your cause.” He sighs, deeply, and puts his head in his hands. “Your insight is invaluable. I have failed you more severely than I had even realised myself, and I can only-”
Edelgard has her hands firmly on his shoulders before he even realises that she’s left her chair. “Hubert.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to hug you now. Is that alright?”
“I… you are?”
She raises an eyebrow. “You seem like you might need it.”
He almost says no, on impulse, but after a moment’s thought he shrugs. “I suppose I won’t object.”
She tucks herself in next to him on the sofa, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing so tightly that his vision begins to swim in the corner of his eyes. After a moment, she loosens her grip slightly, and makes an awkward patting motion on his arm. “Better?”
“I think you’ve crushed at least three of my ribs,” says Hubert – which, he has to admit, isn’t exactly a no.
Edelgard rests her head on his shoulder and gazes up at him with an expression he can only categorize as ‘vaguely mischievous’. It’s more than a little disconcerting, coming from her. “Well,” she says, with a grin, “go on then, tell me who it is, won’t you?”
Hubert stiffens slightly. “I don’t see what that has to do with-”
“Hubert! You’ve come to talk to me about having a crush-”
“- I’ve come to talk to you about a serious impediment to my duties-”
She ignores him, “- so you can at the very least do me the courtesy of telling me who all this fuss is about.”
“It isn’t relevant.”
“It is! And besides, if you don’t tell me I shall dedicate my every waking hour to discovering the truth of the matter, and the empire shall fall to ruin, and war will break out once more, and-”
Hubert sighs, but he can’t help grinning a little, too. “That seems unlikely.”
“Perhaps. But in any case, I shall be personally devastated by your lack of trust. It’s not as though you can keep it a secret forever, anyhow – if you don’t tell me yourself, I shall just get Dorothea to weasel it out of you, or I’ll ask Ferdinand who you speak about most often during your tea times, and narrow it down from there, or I could see if Bernadetta knows-” she cuts herself off, as though she has had a sudden realisation. “Ah,” she says, slowly, “Ferdinand. Hmm.”
Hubert freezes. For all that he knows he’s been compromised by this ludicrous affliction of sentiment, but he can’t believe that Edelgard has pinned him down quite this fast. He’d thought – well, Edelgard is a genius, of course, so it was inevitable that she would eventually uncover all of his most wretched and miserable secrets - but he’d thought he’d have more time before she managed it. And in fairness, until recently he’d mostly thought that the secrets she would be uncovering would be the normal sort, like murder and arson, rather than anything so genuinely awful as a crush. He’s going to die, probably, of sheer embarrassment. He doesn’t say any of that out loud, of course. He just puts on the most unaffected tone he can manage, and says, “What about Ferdinand?” with an air of what he hopes is studied disinterest.
Edelgard shakes her head. “Well, it’s just that he will be so wretchedly miserable about all this, won’t he?”
“He… will?” Hubert mumbles, feeling his stomach drop through the floor.
“Of course!” says Edelgard, fixing him with a rueful little grin, as though she hasn’t just personally extracted whatever gristly lump of a heart he had left and shredded it into tiny pieces.
“He- miserable? I had assumed that-”
“Oh, come on Hubert, surely you of all people would know-”
“- we had at least reached a point of civility where my affections would not entirely disgust him, even if I had no hope of-”
“- that he’s been holding a bit of a torch for you since, oh, back at the academy, probably, and really you-” Edelgard blinks, abruptly taking in what Hubert has just said. “Wait, what?”
Hubert blinks back. “Pardon?”
Edelgard stares at him with open confusion. “Are you serious? What kind of spymaster are you?! I- Ferdinand has the most obvious crush in the history of crushes. He’s hardly one to hide it, is he? How have you not-”
“I had decided to refrain from attempting to discern his thoughts on the matter,” says Hubert, a little stiffly, “since I was aware that my own investment in the situation might warp my judgement.”
“Yes, but still-”
“Besides, it doesn’t make any difference. I have no intention of acting on any of this – quite the reverse, in fact.”
“But if you both feel the same way, wouldn’t it be a terrible shame not to at least see what-”
“No,” he says, with a firm shake of his head. “I cannot countenance such a thing. To divide and compromise my loyalties in such a manner would be…” he shakes his head again. “It’s beyond the question.”
Edelgard kicks him in the shin – not hard, but enough to let him know she’s properly annoyed, now.
“Ow!” says Hubert.
“You’re an idiot,” says Edelgard, with feeling. “Let me guess, your plan is to, what, take a break from my service and go wander off somewhere remote to ignore your feelings until they go away?”
“… in essence, yes.”
“Do you think that will work?”
“I-”
“Hubert, for goodness’ sake. You might manage to extinguish a simple crush doing that, but what of your friendship? Not just with Ferdinand, with all of us. Don’t you dare tell me that your loyalties aren’t already divided – of course they are! That is- it’s human. No amount of time away will stop you being human, you know.”
“My fundamental humanity is a weakness that cannot entirely be smothered, I accept that. But I must endeavour to do so, as best I can, so that I can be your blade in the dark, so that I can-”
Edelgard grabs him by both shoulders, her expression a strange mix of fierce and furious and also something infinitely soft. “The war is over, Hubert.”
He laughs, bitterly. “The war is never over. Not for people like us.”
“But it is. It is over, for us as much as anyone else. And it’s easy not to see it because you and I, we’ve been at war since… since we were children, really. As long as I can remember. But it’s done. It’s finished.” Hubert tries to speak, but she cuts him off. “I don’t mean that our work is done. But it’s changed. And we can change, too. We don’t have to be who we were, any more – we can be… I don’t know. Something else. And I know we’ll never be who we could have been, if things were different, and I know that we’ll always find it hard to see the flowers we grew when we know about the bodies that lie beneath the soil, but we have to- we have to try, Hubert, or we’ll be lost. The war is over, but if we’re not careful, it could kill us yet. Don’t you see?” Her eyes are gleaming in the firelight, bright and full of promise.
Hubert sighs, a long, dog-tired exhalation that’s half relief and half utter exhaustion. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything left of me that isn’t made for war.”
“There is,” she says, running a gentle hand through his hair. “Not much, I know, because there isn’t much of me left, either, for this bright new world we made. But we have to try, we have to try to live in the sunlight, now the clouds are gone. It’s… it’s like the knitting, really.”
“Knitting?”
She smiles. “Maybe we’ll always be bad at it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.”
And after a long, thoughtful moment, Hubert smiles back. “I think I could… I could grow to like the idea of that.”
“That’s all I ask. That you try.”
She continues to stroke his hair, and a warm silence settles on the room. In the grate, a log collapses into the embers, and the hazy red glow of the fire washes over them both. Hubert ends up curled up on the sofa under his cape, with his head in Edelgard’s lap while she runs an idle hand through his hair. It reminds him, abruptly, of some distant childhood memory, of being cozied up by the fire in the kitchen while the cook snuck them treats. There were others with them, then, of course – Edelgard’s siblings, the dogs, one of the servant boys with whom they had often played. All gone, now. Long gone. He wonders, for the first time in a long time, what that Hubert would think of him now.
“You know,” he says, after a while, “I suppose there might be some tactical advantages to sentiment that I had not properly considered.”
Edelgard yawns. “Oh?”
“A division of loyalty is not ideal, but perhaps you are correct to say that such things are ultimately unavoidable. And if I chose my friends only from among those already loyal to the cause, then perhaps… perhaps we will fight together better, if the time for such things comes around again. And I suppose it diminishes the possibility of treachery in the ranks.”
She chuckles. “If it helps you to think of it like that, then yes. I’m sure you’re right.”
Silence falls again over the room. It’s a warm silence though – a silence where the clock ticks, and he can hear the soft sound of Edelgard’s steady breath, and the gentle rustle of her hands in his hair coming eventually to a slow, steady stop. Somewhere in the night, an owl calls out. The fire wavers, glowing and steady and alive. Hubert feels his eyes drift closed. And then, quiet and gentle and full of sleep, Edelgard speaks again. “Do you suppose this is how it feels?”
Hubert cracks an eye open. “How what feels?”
“How it feels to live like real people do.”
He sighs. The fire is still warm on his face, and Edelgard’s hand is resting gently on his forehead. “Something like this,” he says, letting his eyes drift closed again. “Yes. Something like this.”
****
Hubert wakes before sunrise. The fire has died, and his cape is slipping off his shoulders onto the floor. Edelgard is snoring softly. He smiles, gently disentangling himself so as not to wake her when he goes. He stokes the fire, and after a moment’s thought tucks his cape around her shoulders – it wouldn’t do for her to catch a cold, after all. She has an empire to run.
And then he pads off toward the stables in the near-dawn dark. He’s going, he decides, to ride into town and buy Ferdinand a cake. In celebration, finally, of the war being over. And in hope of… something.
In hope of whatever strange promise the future has in store.