Archive of Our Own

1. The Secret of Forgetfulness

‘So when the cold winter comes to our lives and the sun starts to go down in the west, it would be well, as our pleasures fade, if we always lost the memory of them, and discovered, as Themistocles said, the secret of forgetfulness.’

If Dimitri’s eyes were always glued on their professor, Felix’s weren’t and never would be. He decided that on the very first day. The boar could watch her blue hair and contemplate pleasures of the flesh, but such things were frivolities. What he should be paying attention to was how the Professor was an exemplary fighter.

“The legend tells us,” Professor Byleth was saying, “When offered the secret of eternal memory, Themistocles disparaged the offer. He pointed out what a better blessing it would be to know how to forget. What do you think he might have meant by that?”

“Why am I even here?” Felix had muttered to Sylvain in the next seat over.

“Because you want to ask her to ‘spar’.” Sylvain used air quotes and wiggled his eyebrows. “Nothing to be ashamed about,” he purred, “I want to spar with her too.”

Felix elbowed the other boy.

Owwww, Sylvain complained, rubbing his rib.

Byleth ignored them and peered around the room sizing up her students. There was no getting a straight answer from Sylvain, it was unlikely that Felix would answer at all. He had his head ducked into his notes and generally wasn’t one for contemplation.

Annette raised her hand and the Professor surveyed the rest of the classroom before calling on her.

“Sometimes there are things in our past we’re be better off forgetting to make our lives easier,” Annette explained.

The professor watched her students carefully. Dimitri turned his head away, a rare action from the usually attentive boy. Sylvain was watching Felix. And Felix himself kept his face in his notebook. Ashe stared around as if intruding on a funeral, while Ingrid started organizing the writing supplies on her desk in front of her.

Byleth had only been teaching the Blue Lions for a few months, but she had already discovered that each of her students had something in their past they would be better off forgetting. The topic wasn’t just one landmine but a whole inextricable field of them.

“Good,” Byleth responded, and the orange-haired girl grinned into the praise. “Everyone stop looking down at your hands and forget about your feelings for a second. Put your emotions aside and think tactically. Why is it a good thing to be able to forget when you’re an officer? What sort of things should you forget?”

To her surprise, it was Felix who raised his hand.

“If you want to survive,” he spoke coldly, “it’s important to forget that the other side might have a valid stance as well. You need to demonize them, forget that they’re human, and then you can cut them down.”

“But every story has multiple sides,” Ashe spoke out of turn, looking at Felix with a shaken expression. Byleth allowed it.

“Of course it does.” Felix waved Ashe’s comment out of the air with his hand. “But when you’re in battle, and your opponent is convinced that it’s you or them, you had better be convinced of exactly the same thing.”

Byleth nodded and cut in before Ashe could offer another rebuttal that would further illustrate the inhumanity of war.

“We can’t afford hesitation if we want to protect what we care about. Of course, you’re right, Ashe, there are times for negotiation, and there are people who are exemplary at negotiating. Maybe you will be one of them. Tactically speaking, though, on the field of battle, it’s important to cut yourself off from all of those feelings entirely…”

“That’s why they call you the Ashen Demon, right professor? Because you can be so expressionless when you take on your opponent.”

Byleth nodded, but she wasn’t looking at the red-head’s lazy flirtation. Much more interesting was the wolfish boy beside him who was looking at her with something between calculation and aggression.

The professor registered no surprise when the young man approached the desk after class. She raised an eyebrow in invitation.

“I’m going to train. Come spar with me,” Felix said.

“Shouldn’t you get to dinner?”

“tch, I’ll eat afterwards. Are you trying to get off the hook of sparring with me? Afraid that I’ll beat you?”

“No.”

“So you’ll come?”

Byleth promised to meet Felix in the training hall and shooed him out of the classroom. If she needed the sparring as much as he did, she would never let him know. Her responsibilities at Garreg Mach were a dense weight on her shoulders. Sparring allowed her to narrow the world to action, and action was the blessed forgetfulness she needed.

On her way to the training hall, she passed some of her own students gossiping with others she hadn’t met. Their pasts were riddled with complexities, and their futures—her own future—stretched unknown.

Yes, action was good. Action was the thing.

2. Bodily Senses

‘For our bodily senses are so untrustworthy they often confuse our judgment as well.’

“Taking Arianrhod was worse than I thought. Is Sylvain healing well?”

“He’ll live. Sword up, By.”

“I’ve been thinking about what I did wrong. I shouldn’t have sent him around the side like that without someone else in heavy armor. And he took an archer battalion with him? I should have known he wouldn’t know how to direct the archers. Why didn’t I send him with more cavalry?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Felix feigned toward Byleth, hoping to put her on her guard and force her to focus. “We’ll do better next time, only natural.”

He took a swing at her and was glad when she parried. His wooden blade came swiftly at her again.

“It’s important to review our work, so we don’t repeat mistakes.”

Her dodge didn’t unbalance him nearly as much as she wished it would.

“Just save it for dinner. We’re sparring now, and it’s not sexy when you sound so inconfident.” He almost notched a hit against her, but she ducked away in time.

“And that’s what sparring is about, is it?” She theatrically smacked his sword with her own.

“You know the answer to that, Professor.” He made it into a test of strength, leaning into a lunge that would help him overpower her.

Annoyed, she disengaged and swung back at him with her over-the-head strike, but he was too quick.

“And how sexy is it when you compare me to your brother while we’re sparring?”

“By, I’m asking that we stop talking about death and everything for a moment and just enjoy this. Faster, stronger.” He jumped backward from her strike, one leg extended in a lung that was poised to launch him right back at her. “Can we just enjoy that?”

He ran toward her, hoping his brute force would help to get his point across. She dodged him at the last moment. Not quite managing to trip him as she wanted, she still got a smack across his back with the sword that made him pivot around to her.

“Yeah,” she said, knocking the sword flush out of his hand as he turned. “Yeah we can.”

Her knees threaded between his. Her wooden sword dropped tip-first to the ground. Byleth had her hand on his ponytail forcing his face closer to hers.

Felix laughed.

Two of his fingers dripped onto her lower lip before they found their way into her mouth. Byleth bit down and Felix let her teeth scrape his fingers as he pulled them back out. He had roped his other arm around her shoulders and was pulling her closer. 

Their lips crushed, too competitive for soft touches. And then her lips were moving and his tongue was pushing, and her tongue was fluttering. It was like the sparring all over again, parry press shove kick, until she had him against the wall.

“We shouldn’t be found like this again,” she said to no one’s benefit as her hands dug into his leather armor and attempted to drag apart the lacing with her fingers.

“You started it.” Byleth’s armor was much easier to bypass, all he had to do was go for the gap in the stomach.

“There have been complaints.” But if Felix could head for the low-hanging fruit, she could too. She found the gap in the side of his armor and tugged up the black turtleneck so that she could crouch and put her mouth on his hip.

“Sour grapes.” His hands were in her hair, and his hips jut forward while he kept his shoulders thrown back against the wall. Byleth rose to find him, and they reversed again, as he pushed her this time, hoping to spread her open even if he had to do it through her armor.

“Do you think anyone else was planning to train tonight?”

“Unlikely. He pulled back, one hand resting on the wall, the other leaving her inner thigh. “Is this a ‘No’?”

“No, it’s not a ‘No’. Definitely a ‘Yes.’”

“Then stop talking.”

3. The Shore is Receding

‘Because of this, it seems to me that the old resemble those who, as they sail from harbour, keep their eyes on the land and imagine that their ship is motionless whereas the shore is receding, though the contrary is true.’

They were barely back at Garreg Mach a few weeks when the Professor came up to Felix asking him to give a seminar on sword work. He only agreed because it gave him something to do. The professor was intent on forging ahead. She had always prioritized action over wallowing. She had them cleaning rubble, holding war counsels, and training harder than ever. 

Nonetheless, some things rock your foundation more than you ever want to admit: the shock of seeing Dimitri alive and insane, seeing the Professor looking like nothing had changed from the day they lost her. They were two living, breathing ghosts in an already haunted monastery, and it was no wonder that the rest of his recently reunited peers were twitchy.

As Felix anticipated his seminar, the butterflies in his stomach grew bat wings and claws. He spent days on his script, which meant hours away from training.

Felix stood at the front of the Blue Lions classroom, ignoring the eyes on him, and every so often throwing glances at the professor.

“There are many skills to have, but there is only one way to become skilled,” He began. “You fight and you grow stronger. You sacrifice yourself to it. You do it, over and over again. You become myopic and forget about everything but the present moment of striving.

“If you do it right, you will find flow. Distractions fall away—loss and loneliness, frustration and defeatism—you can overcome it all. If you train yourself to your bones, it is an act of devotion to the person you will be once you rise through it.

“And if you train enough, you might save yourself on the field of war. Hell, you might even be able to save one of us. Think about that the next time you’re training.

“I was still a child when I won my first tournament, but it wasn’t enough. The age bracket was beneath me. I felt my brother’s eyes on me the whole time. I used the jabs he had taught me. I had practiced them so often, they were internalized into my muscles. That kind of muscle memory—you can only draw upon it when performing the act.

“It is, if you must know, my favorite kind of memory. None of that overdressed nostalgic sentiment. No, with muscle memory, you do something, and it recalls all the times you’ve done it before. You have become who you are by performing that action.

“Glenn’s jabs—I still use them every morning when I warm up, and it’s useful. What use do I have for sentimental images of his face?

“I prefer my experiences. The ontological Glenn and I, we likely shared many things, our heredity, our intelligence, our crests, our way of speaking.

“That Glenn is gone now, and the Glenn I still have is the one I experienced, living inside my movements, working through my sword arm, useful in a way that grief isn’t.

“Now, let me get back to explaining my sword work.

“That was the first tournament when I was able to stop caring that I was being watched. I found myself able to completely focus on the win. Because skill is something you have to do yourself. The onlookers don’t matter. Your actions matter…”

---

Felix concluded to a long silence before the polite murmur of thank you. The others filtered out of the classroom in clumps, some of them looking like they wanted to say something to him before thinking better of it.

“Well Professor, you asked me to give a seminar. Happy now?”

“It was …” She weighed her words, a line creasing between her eyebrows, “motivational.”

“Motivational? So not good enough.”

“No, it’s not that! Everyone here should be able to sympathize with your discussion of skill. It was… encouraging. Your discussion of loss, though— well in some ways it was a lot more than I was expecting.”

“More than you were expecting? What are you complaining about?”

“It’s not a complaint. I just expected you to speak more on handling the blade. A few drills that others could use to practice, some dodge maneuvers that have helped you out.”

“Isn’t that your job, professor?”

“Yes, but now that you’re all—all so much older, I thought you could help each other by sharing your experiences.” The word fell out of her mouth before she could consider it.

“tch, that’s what I did, sorry to disappoint.”

Byleth had not meant to make his face so angry, his eyes so—was it hurt? He had, after all, given a very good talk. It just hadn’t been what she was expecting.

Felix pivoted on his heels, the swordsman’s grace never faltering for a moment. In some ways, that perfect footwork made the gesture feel even more sore.

“Felix,” Byleth called out, “Wait!”

He paused, the stance of his shoulders clearly communicating that he wouldn’t be turning back around.

“Thank you,” she said, weighing each word to not further tease or humiliate him, “for sharing your experiences.”

Felix scoffed and walked out.

Byleth fell back into the seat behind what had once been her desk and sunk her head in her hands. She had lost time with them, and it was showing. Though Dimitri might wear his wounds for all the world to see, each of her former students had secrets they weren’t sharing.

Secret doubts, secret concerns, secret hopes and fears— What had she failed to protect them from in those five years while the imperial army encroached on their kingdom? While they transformed from students into soldiers?

And she herself, was she truly unscathed? Felix was right about one thing, though, the only way through these thoughts was more action.

4. The Ship of Mortality

‘For, like the harbour, time and pleasures of life stay the same while we, sailing away in the ship of mortality, cross the stormy sea which engulfs and swallows us up one by one; nor are we ever permitted to regain the land but, constantly assailed by hostile winds, eventually we come to grief upon a rock.’

A few weeks before their deployment to Ailell, the dining hall was not the comfortable place it had once been. There were too few students, noticeable gaps. The knights of Seiros who had begun trickling back into the monastery helped to fill in the seats, but their presence exacerbated the wartime rations and mediocre meals.

Byleth couldn’t help but pay attention to the empty spaces more than the full ones. Particularly while she was surrounded by them, eating alone. Before the war, she never ate a a single meal on her own always sharing her time with students.

Right when she was feeling ready to leave her plate half-finished and high-tail it out of there, another plate came down quietly and Felix slipped into the booth directly across from her. His plate was stacked with heavily spiced skewers of the fish she had caught that morning.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at Byleth. He just picked at his fish.

Felix held secrets in his hands, riddles in his gestures, but his frown when he finally looked up at her was the biggest secret of them all. Something was fucking with him. She could tell that clear across his face. It was twisting his own personal sense of honor and making him—

“Enough of this, come spar with me.”

“Fine.” She was grateful to get away from the haunted dining hall. Action was good.

They walked into the quiet training hall and took their wooden swords from the rack. They circled one another, before taking identical side steps. Then they parried and thrust and tumbled and struck.

Their movements held a lineage. His training in Fraldarius with Dimitri, Glenn, and his father’s soldiers. Hers full of her father’s techniques and fighting with the mercenaries from their camps. These were influences that Byleth and Felix had shared with each other, sparring together so much that they had grown and learned from each other.

And there was also something striking about how well-matched they were. Many of Felix’s movements were so like her own that she had to wonder how much of her was in his muscle memory. For five years, when he thought her dead, had he practiced her style, bringing them into his own experiences?

They tumbled and twirled and clashed. There were a few times that Felix was open and Byleth could have ended it all, but she decided against it, because something about their spar was meant to be drawn out. She wanted it to last as long as possible. Their wooden swords clacked and chimmered in a rhythm that was all their own. Their feet hit dirt with a pattering baseline that seemed to tick out the heart-beat that Byleth would never have.

Yet, Felix kept leaving himself open. Felix kept making mistakes. And, finally, Byleth nailed him.

“I yield,” he said, looking insolently at the line of the sword she was resting on his collarbone.

“What secrets are you keeping, Felix? Is it Dimitri weighing so heavily on you?”

He scowled at her, a sore loser dusting dirt from his knees. She scowled back, the corner of her mouth deepening in a veiled smile.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

Her sword tip was angled toward him where it had fallen to the ground, and she left herself wide open. Felix reached out and grasped the wooden sword at its middle. He pulled it, dragging her along as she clutched the handle. She let herself be reeled in like a fish on the line, until she was inches from him. Her eyes startled and round as the moon that would assuredly be hanging above them, whispering its own secrets to conspire their lunacy.

His lips brushed against her forehead, touching like a phantom against her startled brow, before they began running a quivering line down her nose. Then, he tilted his head so slightly to notch into the space above her lips. There, he waited nervously, his lips the breadth of a sword away from hers.

He waited for her to slash him to pieces, to buffet him across the head with that same wooden sword he had used to reel her in.

She brought her lips to meet his. Still as the night, now that they had stopped flashing around with their acrobatics and their polished wooden blades, neither dared to move.

Felix brought his swift hands to wrap around Byleth’s upper arms to pull her closer. It broke the stillness, and it reignited the sparring, as he began earnestly kissing her. His lips teased and bit, as if he was afraid to go all in.

Impatient, she opened her mouth, hoping to drown him.

Confused, he pushed her away.

Pissed, she closed the distance again, roughly pulling his face back down to hers.

As she kissed him, he raised a fist up toward her, but halfway through it became a caress, as he softly looped his fingers into her hair and held her head. She grabbed his pony-tail, pulling it down so hard he grunted as she began kissing him aggressively under the jaw.

He pushed her again, this time staying in her space.

One step, she bit hard on his neck.

Two steps, his hand fisted in her hair.

Three steps, her hand dropped to the open space in his armor right above his hip and started tugging upward on his sweater.

Four steps, he bumped his chest intentionally against her body and watched her breasts bounce.

Five steps, he had her against the wall. And they looked into each other’s eyes.

“Felix?” She asked, her voice soft and hoarse.

“What are we doing?” His eyes dropped like he’d been scolded. But there was nowhere safe to drop his eyes to, and he found himself looking at Byleth’s breasts before turning his head away to stare off into the training hall.

She had been his professor. She was his commander. She would always be his comrade. And also, she was the only woman he had ever felt this way about.

She raised a curious hand to his face, her pointer finger traced the line of his jaw, and he realized he was still pressing against her.

Finally, Byleth spoke, “This would be a foolish fling for both of us. If you have tension that you can’t work out by training, perhaps you should try taking it somewhere else.”

Felix let himself linger as he took a step back. Need he demonstrate just how willing she had been to take advantage of his affection a moment ago?

“It doesn’t have to be a fling. I could be here for you. You could tell me things.”

“Here for me?” It sounded a lot like love. “I’ve never been in love before.” Her voice was flat, cautious.

“Me either.”

“It sounds like a terrible ordeal.”

“We could face it together,” he mumbled into his hand.

Something bumped and rattled in the medicine-cabinet of her memory and she almost found herself saying, If we’re to get along, I think not. What she actually said then surprised them both: “Touch me again, please.”

His hands were gentle, despite the callouses they both cultivated with pride. Wearing his heart on his tongue, he ran his mouth along her neck. Stepping away from the wall, she guided his arms around her, just to hug her, as she dropped her head against his shoulder. Her weight, as she leaned against him, was comforting.

“Let’s get some air.”

They walked out of the door of the training hall and up the steps of the bathhouse, all the better to look out into the night as they talked.

“Spill,” she said.

He passed his hand across his face before saying, “I’ve had a lot of time to think how we’re different from the others.”

“Different? How so?” Byleth was letting herself relax into this idea of Felix as something more than a friend. Something about it was natural, easy. 

“It’s sprezzatura like you taught us. Nonchalance—effortlessness—enlightened self authority.”

“But Felix, you train all the time, and I do too. That’s not effortless.”

“I think you do have to work hard to have that kind of authority. The important thing is that other people don’t see you as weak when it matters.”

Byleth laughed, high and cold into the night, and Felix let his hand brush her wrist.

“Did you ever finish reading that book?”

“No, but I understood it.”

“All of that gets dismantled in the second half. Nonchalance is a facade. Nothing is effortless.”

“Why?”

“It was all posturing, the sprezzatura. Court manners developed to cover up the fact that the courtiers were deeply lost. They had no idea what to do, so they made up fashionable ways of seeming authoritative.”

“…the absent Duke,” Felix huffed

“How many plays are written about a sovereign—a king—descending into madness? And the rest of us just do the best we can.”

The quiet of the night hit them like a muffling sheet covering the face. What was missing? Students’ voices chattering throughout the monastery, laughing and joking into the night. The villagers boasting their wares in the marketplace. All the things that had once made Garreg Mach feel strong and stable.

Byleth counted the stars. In the dark of war, it seemed that there were more up there than ever before.

“Whatever. I don’t care what happens after this. I still want to kiss you now.”

She looked at him sideways, and her face crooked into a half-smile, “Then do it.”

5. Palates Spoilt Through Sickness

‘Since, therefore, the senile spirit is an unsuitable vessel for many of the pleasures of life, it cannot enjoy them; and just as even rare and delicate wines taste sour to those whose palates are spoilt through sickness, so to old people because of their incapacity (which does not, however, lack desire) pleasures seem cold and insipid and very different from those they recall having once enjoyed, although the pleasures themselves are the same.’

The Duke Fraldarius was becoming a silver fox at an age before even his father Rodrigue’s hair had begun to gray. Part of it, he claimed acerbically, was having to advise the Boar king. His criticisms always made Byleth smile wistfully, and any smile he could win from her was worth it.

Byleth had no laugh lines, no frown lines, no fine lines. Byleth had no gray hairs or white hairs. She wasn’t gaining weight in weird inevitable places, like Felix, shame-faced as he was about a minimal thickening around his once perfectly taut waistline.

Felix was becoming an old man. His scolding was no longer considered cold; instead, he was now gruff, the way you talk about veterans.

“I’m getting older.” It was an excuse because Byleth had beaten him yet again, her sword steady in a hand that still never wavered. There was nothing that made Byleth feel more grateful for a homecoming than watching Felix’s sore-loser eyes glare at her from the ground.

She reached out to pull him up, “But you’re as strong as ever.”

“No, you’re as strong as ever—look at you. And you’re a bad liar, Byleth.”

“Then you must know I’m not lying about still wanting you. I have a thing for veterans.”

His smile quirked upward and he reached out for her. “You’re a veteran too.”

“Hopefully you have a thing for veterans too.” She let herself be pulled back to his side.

“No. Just for you.”

His hand was tender when he cupped her jaw, as if she were a long-forgotten dream come to carry him back in time.

“Let’s go somewhere we can get some privacy.”

She laughed. “We never cared about privacy before.”

The older Felix got, the gentler he became during sex. With embarrassment, he recalled the days when he wouldn’t even give Byleth time to undress. Now he wanted to undress all of her, to see everything about her, the woman to whom he had devoted his life, even though they had never truly been together, not the way they meant to.

6. Change is in Themselves

‘In consequence, feeling themselves deprived, they grumble and condemn the present as evil, not appreciating that the change is in themselves and not in the times…’

“Every day that the war’s over, I feel myself getting a little slower, a little weaker. Without battle, I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

She toyed with his hair, running a chunk of corvid blue through her fingers with a single strand of silver mixed in. There was something so beautiful about it. Felix could carry time in his body. His skin was a time-capsule, his body a landscape landmarked by scars.

He was growing metallic, his proud head of hair imbued with the silver of his swords. In some ways he grew more attractive with age. His cheeks hollowed just slightly, his cheekbones became more distinct cliffs, and a softness began to surround his eyes and mouth.

“You’re an adviser now, to the King no less, it’s what you were always training for.”

“I was training to be a weapon. You made me a good one. But now I’m rusting, some useless purely ceremonial blade.”

Byleth laughed. “Are you done feeling sorry for yourself?” She rolled over on top of him and began running her mouth across his collarbones.

“I’m bored, Byleth.”

“I can spice things up if you want.” Her hand slipped down to his hips under the sheets.

“I don’t mean right now.” His hand idly traced the outline of her chest. One finger, softer than it would have been a few years before during the war, rose between her breasts to trace the scar over her heart. His eyes closed. “I mean in life without the war. I mean, it was terrible but…”

“I know what you mean.”

“I thought you might.”

Byleth let herself fall onto his chest, trapping her hand between them. For so brief a time, they had been level. During the war, they were matched. They were the same age and their skills were a-pace. They were swordmen and they strategized together.

That brief window of time had laid the groundwork for a lifetime of love—an eternity in Byleth’s case.

“Did I change you?” She asked into the v-shape of Felix’s chest.

“What kind of question is that?”

“Just answer it.”

“You’re the one who made me learn Reason, Byleth. You should know how this works. You’re a Cause in my life, the Effect is a changed me.”

“You told me you would always feel more comfortable holding a sword than a lady’s hand.” He moved his hands up and down her shoulders, down her sides feeling her breasts pressing out from under her chest. She sighed involuntarily.

“And I stand by it.” Byleth laughed, her body moving against him. “But comfort isn’t everything.”

His hands moved down her back, until they rested on her butt. She flicked her eyelashes against his neck knowing that those soft touches tickled him.

“I didn’t know what to feel then. I couldn’t imagine the blessing it would be to hold the hand of the strongest person I know. If you’re worried about change. If you have regrets… that’s your own problem.”

Squinting at him bitterly, her hand reached to touch him below the bedsheets. “Enough pillow talk. Another spar,” she said.

He grasped her arm to still it for a moment.

“My regrets are my own business. Do me this favor, though Byleth, and regret nothing for me.”

7. Pleasures of the Past

‘…and on the other hand, when they remember the pleasures of the past they also recall the time when they enjoyed them, and they praise it as good because it seems to carry with it the savour of what they felt when it was present.’

The relief of leaving the Valley of Torment and making their way to a climate where it was actually useful to light a campfire at night seemed to affect everyone but Dimitri. The soldiers settled grates over their pyres and mugs for tea water into the flames.

A few of the soldiers close to Rodrigue pulled instruments from their packs. One grabbed a tight-skinned drum that was hanging on his horse’s saddle. Felix sat beside Byleth at the campsite and kneaded the tension from his long legs.

“Stop worrying about it,” Felix growled.

“Worrying about what?” Byleth ran a whetstone across one of the segments of the Sword of the Creator, her motions self-correcting automatically to ensure the perfect angle.

“The ambush back there. It’s over, we handled it, and you need to stop dwelling on it.”

The sound of four instruments tuning up—two lutes and two stringed instruments—interrupted the grating rhythm of the whetstone scratching against the bone blade. Felix scowled up at his father tuning a violin.

Byleth peered over curiously, “Back when we traveled with mercenaries, there were some musicians.” Felix let the ‘we’ slide. It didn’t seem like the right time to bring up Byleth’s absent father. “Never a group like this, though.”

“Some of my father’s soldiers have traveled with him for a long time. He trains them himself. And sometimes they do stuff like this.” He passed a hand across his face, signaling his disapproval.

Music rose over the campfires, drawing the soldiers’ eyes and lending them its energy. Byleth watched her troop: Sylvain chatted more animatedly with Ingrid, Annette sang softly along to herself, while Mercedes watched the musicians, and even Ashe raised his head from the frustration of his thoughts.

I have lived a life, o' straught and strife
I die by treachery
It burns my heart, that I must depart
And no avenged be 

“Your dad brings a violin into battle?”

“He wasn’t aware of the ambush. He just thought we would all be traveling to Garreg Mach. Some holy knights believe that music can heal people.” When he saw Byleth’s skeptical expression, he added, “I think it’s bullshit too, though.”

“What is this song?” Many people around the campsite seemed to know the words and began chiming in.

“‘Macpherson’s Rant’—apparently it was an old favorite of Lambert’s, and my dad still sings it. A man’s unjustly sentenced to the gallows after sleeping with a married woman. She could save him, but she chooses not to.”

Oh what is death, but parting breath
On many a bloody plain?
I've denied his face, and in his place
I scorn him yet again

“That feels familiar.” Byleth toyed with the whetstone, her fingers involuntarily tapping to the drumbeat.

“Death by a woman’s betrayal? Are you thinking of Sylvain?” When Byleth laughed, Felix registered a point in his favor.

“Not just him.”

“Me? You think I’ll die by a woman’s treachery?”

“I think we all will. I’m sorry, I just can’t stop thinking about Edelgard, and the war she’s sentencing us to. I expect she intends to devour us all, like a spider using her web to catch us out.”

“Fuck, Byleth,” Felix was looking at her from the corners of his eyes. It was natural for her to be bitter, for any of them to be, but there was something scary about a bitter Byleth.

So take off these bonds from round my hands
And give to me my sword
Oh, there’s not a man in all Fodlan
But I’ll brave him at a word

“Your dad’s actually a good musician.”

Felix scoffed. “About all he’s good for. Enough of this nonsense, spar with me.”

Byleth and Felix made a path away from the campsite, close enough that they could still hear the singing but far enough that they could feel alone. Neither of them had brought a training sword on the campaign, so Felix boosted byleth into a tree and she cut down two decent limbs for them to use. She used her knife to cut them as straight as possible.

The clacking of the tree-limbs as they sparred made a softer, reedier sound than their training swords back at Garreg Mach, and the remaining bark increased the drag as they wafted the makeshift blades around.

“Mine’s too bendy,” Felix complained, when he missed her with another jab.

“A likely excuse,” Byleth said, but she was also not fast enough at bringing her branch around to land a hit.

Frustrated by the sub-par weapon, Felix started whipping it toward her with a combination of strong swipes.

She blocked the first one and dodged the rest, hopping around as the music added a spring to her steps, “Dance and jab, Felix. You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?” Felix asked, circling her with his impeccable footwork.

“Slipping into your rote practice, being inflexible.”

“This ‘blade’ is flexible enough for the both of us. And, besides, you’re trying to distract me.”

“You only get like this when you’re already distracted. What is it?”

It was what she had said about Edelgard closing in on them. It was the ambushes and the betrayals. It was the way Byleth fixated on the ring her father had given her when she thought he wasn’t looking. It was the night and the stars and the music. It was Byleth, his armored love, teaching him to dance with a sword.

It was the fact that none of them knew just how close to death they might be at any moment. Why should he scorn them their dancing, their songs, their folk tunes? Whatever got them through this war should be the measure, not the other way around.

Now farewell light, thou shinest bright
And all beneath the sky
May coward shame disdain his name
The wretch that dare not die 

He dropped his branch and raised his hands in surrender. Byleth would likely have won that bout anyway. Her branch tip fell as he stepped toward her. He took it and tossed it aside.

Then one hand grasped hers, and his other went to wrap around her back.

“No more jabbing,” he said, “just dance with me.”

“You want to dance now?” She let her head drop into the nook of his shoulder. “Are you always going to be so mysterious?”

“I have my causes and effects too, Byleth. I have reasons. When you get to know me better, I think you’ll see them.”

He spun her away from him and brought her back in. Dancing was not one of Byleth’s skills. Despite her understanding of footwork, she could barely sway to the beat. Felix liked that about her.

“Why does the joy-candle gleam in your eye, Felix?” She asked teasingly, the diction of his father’s folk-songs falling awkwardly from her mouth.

“You’re ruining this,” he growled, pulling her tight to him, they rocked back and forth, her head against his chest tucked beside his jaw.

They rocked in circles, spinning slowly on the axis of their own secretive communication. The great star-studded cosmos expanded ever outward around them, something so eternal it narrowed their future down to the kind of speck that even mere mortality could manage to handle.

So rantingly, so wantonly,
And so dauntingly sang he,
He played a tune and he danced around
Below the gallow's tree

8. Detest All the Things

‘For the truth is that our minds detest all the things that have accompanied our sorrows and love all those that have accompanied our joys.’

Scars writ their skin with their losses, riddling them with commemorative tattoos. Together, they counted them backwards, flipping through the numbered years in a mere matter of moments. Byleth began it, tracing the scars from the rawest pinkest skin to the grayest oldest scars.

First was the one on Felix’s arm from when they two deathless fools had sparred with open silver blades after bearing Dimitri’s coffin into the ground. The widowed Ingrid and their prince Lambert had watched the old comrades carry the pearly-white casket to its rest. 

Restless, Byleth had gotten him good that evening. Felix’s reflexes were slipping with age, and hers were as sharp as ever. It would never heal well; the flesh was just too old. When she dressed it later pressing her kisses against his temples, he waved off the apologies. What was some bloody skin to everything that time would take from them?

Next, Felix found Byleth’s burn from the battle in Adrestia. One of Edelgard’s magical spells had hit her, leaving a red crater across her thigh that weathered with time into a sun-burst blemish.

Felix had dressed it for her himself, once she and Dimitri had stumbled out of the royal chamber in Adrestia. She barely looked down at the wound as he wrapped it, her mind burnt with the memories of watching the light go out of Edelgard’s eyes. What was appropriate to feel then—the dissatisfying ache of revenge? A relief at the end?

Felix had a puncture from an arrow he had taken at Grondor. Despite being an older wound, it still puckered up puffy and gray. He hadn’t allowed Mercedes to dress it correctly, he hadn’t given her the time. Once the words had fallen from Byleth’s mouth, Rodrigue, violin-playing, holy knight Rodrigue—he wasn’t going to make it.

Time. It was the second occasion in Felix’s life that he had run out of time and lost someone who ran so deeply through his experiences that he would be doomed to express the loss for the rest of his days.

Byleth had a long ragged scar on her shoulder from the battle against the demonic beasts where she lost Jeralt. All it took was one claw swipe to open Byleth up all the way across her shoulder blade. Up until that point, Felix had thought of their Professor as so strong. But some parts of her were human. Some parts of her could bleed; some parts of her could hurt.

She suffered blood loss and tissue damage. And yet, she cared not at all for her own wound. She thought nothing of the blood gushing down her back, as she knelt over father and wept for the first time in her life.

Felix had a wide meteor-like scar on his back from the day that he heard of his brother’s death. People don’t talk to children about time. It’s something that must be discovered, must be experienced. As people grow older, the are laid to waste over and over again by the traumas of time. And like so many traumas, it cuts so deeply into their experience that it offered them nothing solid to talk about.

He had been a sensitive child. That’s what they say—he couldn’t remember himself. All he had left were harsh memories, colored by the empty spaces Glenn had left behind. Felix had sought his experiences with his brother. He climbed up through Fraldarius to an old cave where they used to go—to spar, to talk, to be boys. Climbing up to the entrance, though, without Glenn’s hand up, his scramble didn’t land. He fell backward onto the ground and a large rock cut into his shoulder, as he lay winded.

The oldest scar was over Byleth’s own chest. It had come from the day her mother died, the day she was born. The scar came from the abomination of Byleth’s heart. It was a gift. It was a tragedy. Byleth’s time began that day, and it stretched on indefinitely.

9. Rejoices to See a Ring

‘So we find that a lover sometimes rejoices to see a ring or a letter, a garden or some other place, or anything whatever that may seem to him to have been a conscious witness of his pleasures.’

Byleth twisted the ring on her finger.

Before she knew what to think about it, before she understood her life path, she had expected the ring to grow old with her. She had expected dark black grit to tarnish into its niches. She had expected her own knuckle to thicken with lines and grow around the ring, holding it in place like the wood of a bonsai that grows around its training wires. Her flesh should have been inlaid with the ring.

If only they could have grown older together.

Because Byleth’s entire soul, her stupid crest-stone heart, was etched and inlaid with that evening that Felix has called her to the training hall after the war and asked her to be his wife.

She had said yes then, but the arrangements never came; she halted them all at every step. Because neither of them understood what it meant that her hair had turned green, and her skin hadn’t aged, and she had the heart of the goddess inside of her.

They fought about it. Real fights, not sparring. Fights that ended in silence not sex. She could hear it now, as if embedded on the wind, Felix’s voice haughty still despite the slight cracks from the erosion of age yelling that he loved her like it was a battle he could win.

She begged him to take someone else, someone who could give him an heir, someone who knew whether they could die at all. He never did.

They fought about it for years. And then, they decided to stop fighting.

When they would meet it was an act of love. When they were apart, some part of her was always expecting to run into him. His face seemed to step from behind every copse and corridor.

Her world was haunted.

But no, it was not her world anymore. She had overstayed her welcome. She has ceased to be a growing living thing. She was haunting it, as much a relic as the bones that formed the sword of the creator. 

10. The Most Ornate and Beautiful Room

‘On the other hand, often the most ornate and beautiful room will be obnoxious to one who has been held a prisoner or suffered some other unhappiness there.’

Felix would have hated his own funeral.

For one, it was bizarre for Felix to remain at a funeral the entire time. There wasn’t a single funeral in his life that he hadn’t paid his respects and cut out early—not his brother’s, not his father’s, not Dimitri’s. So it was bizarre to see Felix’s body trapped there, sticking through the whole dreadful funeral.

If Byleth could have, if it had been in any way forgivable, she would have carried him off, taking him away from the saccharine violin music that he would have hated, the overly open displays of grief, the pageantry of a Duke’s final moments above the land.

Byleth didn’t carry Felix to his final resting place. She watched from the fringes, one of the few youthful faces in a sea of lined and tired humans. 

Unshrouded, she cried.

11. A Cup Used for Their Medicine

‘And I have known people to refuse ever to drink again from a cup used for their medicine when they were ill.’

His long legs paced the clearing where they used to spar when they needed time away from the stuffy confines and responsibilities of Garreg Mach. It had to be him, she would know the sound of his strides anywhere; though, now, they were slower and had more drag. 

“Felix.”

The lines around his eyes softened as soon as he saw her. “We have to stop meeting like this. Well, since you’re here, spar with me.”

Silver hair reflected the moonlight like an aura around his head.

“I can’t. What if I hurt you?”

“At this point, what loss would it be?”

Everything, she thought. You are everything to me.

She had always known that someday this dream of love would end and she would be left to roam on her own. She had always known that one day, she and Felix would stop meeting in unexpected locations, because there would be no Felix to meet. And in that future, as she wandered around, she knew she would never stop expecting him to show up out of the forests, sword in hand ready to duel.

She watched the lines around his face crease. His eyes, darker now and slightly sunken, were as bright as ever with the prospect of sparring.

“Enough chit-chat,” he said. “Come at me.”

Felix’s muscle memory never failed him. It was the muscles themselves that could not carry him quickly or strongly enough. Unfortunately, his pride never failed him either, and he called Byleth out every time he felt she was taking it too easy on him.

Their sparring was more dance than jab, neither of them wanting to press the other with actual blows. When she saw that he was growing tired and his footwork was slipping, she took the initiative to end it. She bore him to his knees, and gently placed her sword under his chin.

Ever the sore loser, he was frowning up at her. With a deftness and speed that had never rusted, she inverted the sword. Holding the naked blade, she offered him the pommel and pressing her chest into the tip.

“Felix,” Byleth said, “Do it—cut me down this time. I’m ready to taste defeat. We’ll go together.”

“I thought I would relish someday hearing you say that.” He took the pommel and slowly, carefully, he brought the tip of the sword away from her chest. “I thought it would be what I wanted.”

He passed a hand across his lined face. The gesture was ageless, something he had been doing since she met him as a teenager. Except now, it seemed so full of weight, and the hair it knocked aside was more silver than the corvid blue of his youth.

“I can’t kill you, Byleth. I’m sorry if I’m leaving you to live out something much worse. If you’re looking for death, don’t seek it from me.”

“Then…” She was crying tears that only Felix would know about. Just as he knew that she wasn’t as perfectly dry-eyed bearing Dimitri’s coffin as she had pretended to be. Just as he knew that she cried after her first lesson tutoring Dimitri and Ingrid’s son with the sword. “…a kiss?”

“Always, as long as I can.”

12. Praise the Past and Blame the Present

‘To one man, a window or a ring or a letter provides the joyful memory that gives him so much pleasure and seems therefore to have been part of his enjoyment; to another, in the same way, the room or the cup seems to bring back the memory of his captivity or his sickness. And these are the reasons, I think, why old people praise the past and blame the present.’

A lifetime passed and then another. Byleth taught again, but it was not like the first time. She had already found before that she could care for students. That growth was behind her. At some point, you stop becoming an actor, an agent. You become a collector, aggregating all the experiences of the world.

But the more you collect, the more your stand back, stand off and aside, and nothing touches you.

Byleth’s life had gone through cycles. When she began, with the heart of the goddess forced into her skin, she was as plain as the wisdom of the day—feeling little, caring for little. She could have gone any way without attachment.

But she had learned to care. She took on students, liked listening to them, invested in their growth with everything she had. And she had learned to love.

She had watched Fodlan cycle through more wars and conflicts than she could count, sometimes appearing as a nameless hero to add her sword to the fray, sometimes stepping back and hiding in the woods until things blew over. Because one war didn’t end everything. There would always be new wars, new conflicts, as every generation learned for themselves what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth letting live.

The years brought the same experiences again and again. They crashed on her like waves eroding the rough edges of sea glass, leaving her too flat and too soft—wise and old under umblemished skin that hadn’t changed since she was twenty-two.

She had come full circle. Plain as wisdom, she cared for nothing. The only feeling she had was an ache in her heart that she nursed with nostalgia. One would think those memories would eventually dull.

—She was standing in front of a classroom, facing her first students, the ones who had taught her how to care. She didn’t even know what they would mean to her then, kind souls, caught in the tangle of a war that would crush them and reform them like clay. Some had eyes on her as she taught, others were looking down into their books. Byleth recalled Felix’s dark bun slumping against his head as he bent over a page of notes.

“The legend tells us, when offered the secret of eternal memory, Themistocles disparaged the offer. He pointed out what a better blessing it would be to know how to forget.”—