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Byleth has played the game before.
Which, it is a game now, some sort of race to find the best outcome—only, she is not racing anyone, and getting to the finale always seems to involve Edelgard’s cape as a carpet, red from the fine Imperial threading as much as it is from her blood.
Edelgard’s cape is not red in either way yet, still only crimson from the Church’s handouts, hanging loosely over her shoulder to signify her leadership over the Black Eagles. Byleth, too, has leadership over the Black Eagles, only it is her first time, and it is Edelgard’s third, whether she realizes it or not.
And, like a game played before, where the script cannot be changed until after she’s comatized herself, Byleth is able to anticipate all enemy movements. She keeps tabs on Mercedes’ little brother as much as it won’t help, she asks Ferdinand for his tea set early so that she’ll have more time to convince people to join her side (convince them to let her spare them later on), she keeps a record of every movement from her peers and herself, one in a notebook filled with timelines that denote the Saviour King or Master Tactician, the newest written in a brand new section for a brand new Byleth.
Edelgard is truly fascinating, truly unpredictable. Where Dimitri was sentimental and fragile, and Claude was cunning and steeled, Edelgard fell on neither side of the spectrum, disregarding it altogether. Byleth did not pride herself on her ability to read people, but after interacting with this cast of people two times over, she figured it wouldn’t be too hard to try and understand the Flame Emperor’s intentions.
For Dimitri’s sake, Byleth really wants to understand Edelgard’s intentions.
Thus, for someone who has played this game before and has a notebook written with every scripted event of the first half of it, Byleth is a little shaken when after the feast held for the Black Eagle’s prowess during the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, Claude, Dimitri beside him, insists that she and Edelgard follow them to investigate a suspicious individual. Garreg Mach is filled with suspicious individuals, but it isn’t her place to point them out earlier than she’s supposed to and mess everything up, and this conversation never happened before—
Edelgard obliges. Byleth, by extension, has to as well. And suddenly, the four of them are standing in front of a mysterious hole in the brickwork of Garreg Mach, a torchlight somewhere far at the end of this mysterious tunnel, illuminating the descent into… where? And suddenly, Hilda has dragged Linhardt and Ashe—when did those three start talking?—to follow her, and Ashe is insisting they be allowed to join on the not-school-sanctioned excursion to the sewers. It does not help that the House Leaders actively support them coming, because there is nothing Byleth fears more than the unknown, and she’s never seen this fucking hole before—
So Byleth goes into the hole. And there are people in the hole. A whole civilization is in the hole. There is a House in the hole. And Byleth has played the game before, but these are conversations she has never heard. Never before had she heard of Balthus von Albrecht or Constance von Nuvelle or Yuri Leclerc or “Hapi”; never before had she heard of Ashe’s childhood friend, or Hilda’s brother’s best friend, or Ferdinand’s childhood lover and Mercedes’ childhood friend and who doesn’t Constance know?, or… well, Hapi. The more time she spends down in Abyss, the less she likes it, all unpredictable in the face of someone who has planned the next year of their life to be as predictable as ever; students who have never spoken to each other above the surface begin talking, forming friendships and whatnot.
Hilda and Balthus are inseparable. Ashe has a shy blush on his face whenever he talks to Yuri. Dimitri and Claude chat regularly on the surface, so it doesn’t surprise Byleth when that continues in the underground. Linhardt and Constance take up the library together, chatting amicably about forbidden history while Hapi laughs about Seteth’s banned romance books.
With Hubert on the surface, Edelgard is mostly alone. Until she is not.
“Pardon the odd question, but something has been bothering me for a while now.” Dimitri says from down the alleyway, Byleth casually over-hearing as she sets about giving all the smithing stones she has away to get Claude’s axe and bow repaired. The blond’s voice echoes down through the stone walls as he asks, “Your hair… was it always that colour?”
Byleth freezes.
Edelgard herself pauses, but her voice does not betray whatever she may be feeling if not indifference when she answers, “That is an odd question. But yes, if you must know, it was a different colour when I was a child.”
Byleth blinks, and thinks of Lysithea.
“How could you know that? Is it possible that we met before the academy?”
“Your hair changed colour?” Byleth can’t help but interrupt, voice carrying from her spot at the blacksmith’s station. Either House Leader look up in shock at her sudden question, clearly not expecting her presence.
Eventually, Edelgard says, “It’s… a long story. Now is not the time or place.”
Edelgard is, inevitably, going to throw the country into war. Staring at the 17-year-old she once called husband, Byleth reminds herself that she chose the Black Eagles to stop the fiasco before it even began, resolving to somehow find a way to break down Edelgard’s walls and convince her not to plunge the entire country into war, not to send Dimitri into insanity, not to erupt the Kingdom and Alliance and all their inhabitants into chaos. Convince her not to invade the Church and, therefore, be the catalyst of Byleth’s five-year-long slumber. But Byleth has talked to Edelgard, and learned her reasoning, and in regards to the personal strife behind it—siblings dead, you know, despite the fact that one of them is standing right in front of her—she’s come to the conclusion that it would be very difficult to find any sort of leeway or sway that might make the Imperial Princess reconsider her plot.
Byleth blesses Dimitri and Lysithea and all four fucking Saints because she has just found her way in.