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“You and me live in different worlds. There’s no point lowering yourself into mine.”
It only occured to Lysithea some time after that she’d never wanted something as much as her own, personal goals for the academy and Ordelia territory.
It had been on her mind ever since Cyril said it to her in the same blunt way he usually spoke to people. As the expert of pushing people away, she was also an expert at covering up her emotions she didn’t want others to see as a result. Her interaction with Cyril had been no different- is what she wanted to say to herself, and would say to others, but Lysithea knew better than to lie to herself.
He’d been so straight forward with what he thought that it caught her off guard. As a result, she let guard down even more and let her disappointment slip through the cracks of her carefully constructed armour. Lysithea knew that Cyril was a hard worker like she was, just on completely different ends of the scale. While she worked hard to excel at her academics, Cyril worked hard to excel at making sure the menial tasks around Garreg Mach had been completed each day.
She saw the way he looked at the Golden Deer classroom as he passed by carrying items or going on to the next odd job for the day. She was sure that Claude picked up on this, and evidently did when he approached him one day to speak to him as he passed by. Cyril ended up shooing him off, but the glance she received from him before his back turned told her all she needed to know.
In the same way, Lysithea noticed a certain habit she developed herself ever since then. Every time she walked back from the library, she would pass by where ever Cyril was working, half tempted to ask him if she could help. She’d watch him go about a part of his day, scrubbing parts of the floor, moving and cutting down logs, and more all on his own.
She knew better than to ask to offer her assistance knowing Cyril, so she devised a plan of sorts.
Every time the professor was free, she would request one-on-one lessons with her for Brawling. She saw the magnificent physical strength that the likes of Raphael, Dedue, and surprisingly Caspar possessed, knowing they practiced Brawling; it was elementary, really. They could easily lift those pieces of log Cyril had to lug around and more and while she could easily ask them to off their assistance, Lysithea knew that would mean Cyril’s words rang true.
She respected Cyril’s work ethic greatly, but she knew even he needed help; and so left the opportunity for Lysithea to prove something. That her soft, dainty princess hands could lower herself to his world, that she too was cut out for the work he stressed himself over every single day.
She was frail, that much was true. Being in the possession of two crests had not only shortened her lifespan greatly, but also weakened her body. But she refused to back down from the challenge. She would persevere. If push came to shove, she didn't want to be only useful for running away when she ran out of magic on the battlefield.
And as such, that was how she explained her intentions to her professor for her sudden interest in Brawling. Her Professor took her reasoning into consideration and judged them valid concerns, and yet there was a strange glint in her eyes that seemed to see right through her.
And so, when Lysithea encountered Cyril and asked her to read out a list for him, she finally saw an opening and offered to teach him how to read. Her Professor, who somehow became knowledgeable of Cyril’s inability to read (as if she overheard her and Cyril’s conversation) soon convinced Cyril to join the Golden Deer class on a semi-regular basis.
The Golden Deer welcomed him in their usual Golden Deer bravado before the professor had to cut the festivities short. As most people guessed incorrectly, on the first day, she sat him next to Lysithea, as if she knew she tutored him with reading among other things when they both have the time outside class. Not only that, but to the rest of House’s shock, she wasn’t annoyed in the slightest at their arrangement. In fact, as far as they could tell, she… actually enjoyed his company.
And at first, the arrangement was pure. Weeks go by without a hitch and the professor’s noted a sharp improvement to Cyril’s reading comprehension and Lysithea’s impressive strides with her strength training considering her circumstances.
Then things change.
At first it was their seating arrangement. Then the group tasks. Then the assignments. Then Cyril joining them in Lysithea’s Brawling training. But the final nail in the proverbial coffin was the Friday before their next mission for the month. In the most un-professor like act ever, she looks at Lysithea, then Cyril, then back at her and winks at Lysithea when no one is looking; something she no doubt picked up from Claude.
She can barely concentrate for the rest of the lecture when she feels her face heat up, trying to contemplate why her face flushed more than why Loog was so stupidly brash on the battlefield.
Whispers of gossip began to crop up amongst the house too, no doubt from Hilda, talking about how cute they looked together. She didn’t pay them any mind, as did Cyril, assuming he bothered enough to listen to Hilda.
But it did cause her to question her motives. She’d spent so much time dedicated to Brawling to strengthen her body, just so she could prove a point. Cyril’s voice echoed in her mind, saying once again: ‘You and me live in different worlds. There’s no point lowering yourself into mine.’ And she hated it. She hated how she couldn’t be of any help to Cyril when he constantly worked himself to exhaustion everyday. She hated how he lifted her up so much, praising her for her hard work teaching him how to read and with her progression on Brawling, but always humbled himself when it came to his own work.
Now it was no longer just about proving a point of capability. Lysithea didn’t come to the academy to make any friends, but Cyril was the one conscious exception she made in her mind. She wanted to speak to them on equal terms. Not as the Princess and the Pauper, but as Cyril and Lysithea.
And if she had to work harder to lower herself into Cyril’s for him to understand that, then she had no other choice in her mind. Actions always spoke louder than words, and she had committed herself to him.
When the thought crossed her mind, she froze, her quill slipped out of her hands and fell on to the parchment. She’d been so preoccupied with her studying that she barely registered the strange thought that just crossed her mind. She flushed a deep red behind the implicative thoughts that came with it. It didn’t help that she and Cyril were a subject of gossip amongst the three houses that reached her ears. Lysithea had no doubt Hilda was the reason for that, and on the surface she seemed to dismiss such absurd gossip without a trace of embarrassment.
And yet here she was, blushing like a fool because she let a perfectly innocent thought get to her head more than it should have. Had the Professor not winked at her so strangely, such a thought wouldn’t have even occurred to her, she convinced herself. Not even Claude had done it either. At least with Claude she could dismiss it as him joking, but the professor normally looked so bored that something so uncharacteristic had pulled out the rug from under her. Cyril had jokingly suggested that he might be her little brother at one point, which Lysithea had viewed him as such since then in her mind when the thought began to temper the nightmares of her late siblings in her sleep.
But for him to become more than that; more than someone with a little brother title, more than someone she viewed as a friend...
With an annoyed groan, Lysithea closed her book quietly and placed it back on the library’s bookshelf, thanking Tomas for his work as she left. Taking an alternate route back to her dorm, she veered towards the forest area just outside the monastery- not too far away from the monastery, but not too close to the Sealed Forest either.
Lysithea spotted a large stack of logs in the distance, ready to be moved and cut with an axe that strewn on the ground, only with no Cyril in sight. She frowned, wondering where he had gone to, the thought quickly replaced by another. Quickly jogging to the stack, she placed her belongings carefully on the ground nearby and crouched down to pick up the fire wood, easily lifting them up and carrying them in a straight line taking them closer to the monastery’s entrance, leading back up into the stables. Placing them on the ground, Lysithea jogged back to grab the axe left on the way side and ran back to the pile of logs. Taking out one of the logs and carefully placing it upright on the ground, she stepped back and pulled up her sleeves and her hair into a ponytail; a piece of advice she’d taken from Cyril himself when they’d been tasked to pull weeds together.
The steel axe that Cyril used was a rusted one. Sharp enough to split wood, blunt enough to not split a head as Raphael had said once… ironic in her mind considering it was Raphael.
Thankfully, her strength training in her Brawling sessions with the professor allowed her to easily swing a steel axe like it was nothing, unlike before where she struggled immensely with keeping a hold of a weapon properly.
Lifting the axe above her head, she swung it down onto the log, the impact creating a small dent in the top of the wood. She pulled the axe out and swung down again in the same spot, denting it down even further, the third strike being the hit that began to split the wood down the middle. Remembering from the times she’d watch Cyril slave away at cutting firewood, she aimed for the lower half and swung it down with all her might, creating a second dent. With another swing, the wood split into two halves that fell the ground. Lysithea’s jaw dropped at the split wood and pride began to swell in her chest. She did it with little ease just like Cyril did, and something about that fact made her borderline giddy.
She understood that certain environmental factors may have helped her, but so long as she could prove herself and see Cyril’s reaction, it was all worth it in her mind. Splitting the halves into quarters, she began to hack away at the remaining logs one by one, the sweat inducing task nearly weakening every hit of the wood, but strengthening her tenacity.
Finally, when all the logs were cut, she fell to the ground and laid on her back panting from the pain in her arms from continuously slinging the axe over her head. She was worn out, but knowing that she got a little stronger from the experience made it all the more worth it.
“Lysithea?”
The Ordelia only-child scrambled to her feet when a familiar face reached her ears. She stood and spun on her heel to be greeted with Cyril’s shocked face. Lysithea’s face turned up into a grin.
“Yes, Cyril?”
“What on earth? Did you…?”
“Yes I did, Cyril,” Lysithea grinned. “Now you have one less thing to worry about, and you can get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow’s lecture.”
Cyril was utterly speechless and befuddled as he walked towards the site with the quarter pieces of firewood. “They’re decently cut… even this one with the knot was split around it. Ya really did this all on your, Lysithea?”
“Of course! You told me that I wasn’t cut out for this work. Now I’m cutting out your work for you,” Lysithea giggled. Cyril furrowed his brow but then remember what he said to her at the beginning of the school year.
“That was months ago, Lysithea.”
“Yes, well, it was clear you weren’t going to change your stance, so I had to make it happen myself.”
“Well, you’re not wrong, I guess,” Cyril rubbed his chin. “You didn’t have to do it- no point in learning how to either…!”
Lysithea stepped up to Cyril and pressed a finger to his lips. “Cyril. Please understand. I know I don’t have to learn this. But you work so hard for everyone here at the monastery that it’s not fair you do everything on your own. I do it because I want to- and to prove something. To prove that I’m not just some dainty airhead princess and that you’re not just some pauper that gets ordered around like a slave.”
Cyril’s eyes widen.
“I… I would like for us to be friends, Cyril. I don’t want us to be like the main characters in the beginning of that Princess and the Pauper story I read to you. I want us to be Cyril and Lysithea, not Princess and Pauper.”
She pulled her finger away from Cyril. “I know this may be a bit much, but this is my proposition and you can’t refuse otherwise,” Lysithea smiled turning her back to a dumbfounded Cyril. Picking up a log, she brought it over to plop into Cyril’s arms.
“Now, how about we take these and- ouch!”
Lysithea immediately dropped the log into Cyril’s arms, who dropped it on the ground.
“Lysithea?! Are you okay?” Cyril exclaimed, eyes widening at rather large cuts that appeared on her hands. Lysithea winced at the pain, watching the blood slowly pour out.
“Let me see your hands,” Cyril demanded. He sounded almost desperate.
Lysithea shook her head. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just go find a vulnerary to heal it up…”
“Lysithea, please,” Cyril asked her again, this time his tone was more akin to begging. Lysithea frowned at him, Cyril looking at her the same way the stray dogs around the monastery would when she tried and failed to ignore them and Lysithea could barely manage to resist Cyril’s softened demeanor.
And ultimately, she didn’t.
She held up her hands to his, Cyril taking her hands into his and observing the wound. Lysithea wanted to pull away at the touch of another human’s hands with hers, even if they were Cyril’s small, but slightly calloused hands.
Cyril closed his eyes and to Lysithea’s shock, two large sigils appeared above her hands. He concentrated as much as he could, drawing out the little amount of magic within him to heal Lysithea. The skin around the wound on her hands began to rethread itself together and close up entirely in no time.
“Cyril… that was amazing! When did you learn to do that?!” Lysithea asked, amazed that Cyril had an magical capability (not that she doubted him- he just wasn’t interested when she asked).
Cyril softly smiled, his face red at her praise. “You weren’t the only one who had lessons with the Professor, ya know.” he mumbled. “When I saw that you were brawling in the arena with the Professor one day, she later told me why. She said that you wanted to get stronger to prove someone wrong. And then I remembered your disappointment when I said you weren’t cut out for things like cutting firewood and then it… all kind of clicked for me. So I asked the Professor to teach me some magic and she accepted.”
“But.. why?”
Cyril tapped her hands, where the wounds had once been. “Well, you can’t use faith magic to heal yourself right? Since I had a feeling ya’d want to try something like this, you end up hurting yourself somehow. It’s like in that Princess and the Pauper story right? Where the Pauper doesn't want the Princess to get hurt.”
Lysithea blushed, understanding what he meant. “H-Honestly Cyril, you really didn’t have to go to such lengths for me…”
“But you did for me. So I should do the same, right? That’s what the Professor told me.”
Lysithea’s face dropped into one of surprise, then arched up into a smile. “Well, if that’s how you feel about it, then I suppose I can’t argue with you. But yes. I went to such lengths because… I still want to lower myself into your world, Cyril.”
A small smile formed on Cyril’s face. “Ya really don’t have to. But I appreciate it all the same… Princess.”
“P-Princess?”
“Yeah, just when it’s us. Cos you’re the Princess in this situation, ya know? Nothing wrong with a nickname is there? Claude calls the Professor, ‘Teach’ all the time, so I thought…”
Lysithea pondered the nickname. If she were quite frank, she’d normally hate it. She’d rightly assume that people weren’t taking her seriously and calling her a little girl. But she knew that this time it was a little different.
“Princess… okay. But only under one condition: I can call you Honey.”
This time it was Cyril’s turn to blush.
“O-okay. I think… I’d like that too, Princess.”
Lysithea smiled warmly.
“Well, let's get these logs back into Garreg Mach, shall we?
"Yeah, let's. Oh, and Lysithea?"
The Ordelia heir turned back to him. "Yes?"
"I like it when you have your hair up like that. You should do that more often."
Lysithea lit up bright red again. "Oh. W-well, I think I'll do just that then... Honey."
Seeing Cyril fumble with the logs in his hands when she called him that made her hope she wouldn't pass out from a cuteness overload in the future.