Chapter Text
Linhardt stood alone in his new room and took in the silence. Despite being an empty stone chamber—his furniture still not delivered, the only presence within it his own body and the suitcase he held—there was no echo, no yawning reminder of his size. It was just empty, and silent, and strangely small.
“I’m back,” Linhardt said to himself. The quiet met and swallowed the words up, and he slowly sat down the suitcase at his feet. He let out a slow breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “Not a very warm welcome.” The empty room said nothing; not that he’d expected it to. It was just an empty room, after all—there was nothing special about it.
The mere idea of unpacking what little he’d carried with him ahead of his furniture was so depressing—putting knickknacks on the floor, setting folded-up clothes onto windowsills—that Linhardt gave up before he ever even began.
He left, locked the door behind him, and went to go find something to eat.
Garreg Mach hadn’t really changed all that much from his memories. It was still the same: timeless, echoing flagstone halls, house banners hanging from windows and braziers, the clatter of armor and the dozing of guards and the constant tamp of footsteps. Garreg Mach teemed with life, filling up every room that it ran into, slamming doors and opening windows left and right.
The cafeteria was where it congregated and congealed—at least normally. During working hours.
At half-past eleven at night, there was nobody there.
He could fill those empty seats with memories, ghosts that took up chairs and tables. Dead friends. Dead enemies. Children, long-gone, on the other side of a war lost and a war won. Once upon a time they had sat together at these seats, broken bread and laughed over missing homework and fresh-caught fish.
Ghosts.
Linhardt walked through as quickly as he could, his uneven footsteps and the metallic click of his cane echoing on the walls, bouncing off of the tables. They sounded like the clack of silverware, the bubble of laughter, and if he listened too closely then he would surely hear voices, would feel hands tug at the hems of his robes. He could hear Edelgard now, pitching her voice softer than she had to, trying to hide her pain: “I could have told you that going back there wouldn’t help. What did you think you would find waiting for you, Linhardt?”
He grit his jaw, hurried his steps, as if the rapidly-approaching door to the kitchens was, instead, flying away from him, disappearing into the distance, the room elongating as he ran.
Linhardt grasped the knob, the same old brass as all the other door handles, a texture that his palm remembered as if it had been burned into his skin with a brand. He curled his fingers around it, tightened his grip, and pushed the door open, the hinges creaking as it swung open.
Hanneman looked up at him, and Linhardt froze, rooted to the spot, unable to move. His breath caught in his lungs, his whole body poised half-balanced on the ball of one foot.
He lifted his teacup, as if in a salute. “Good evening, Linhardt.”
He—
The last time Linhardt had seen Hanneman, it was during the war.
At the time, Linhardt had been unable to shake the feeling that they would never see one another again. And yet, here they were, all these years later. Face-to-face as if nothing had ever really changed, as if they were still all those years ago, except Hanneman’s hairline had receded another inch and a half and he had replaced his monocle with a thick, heavy pair of glasses. His mustache was thinner, wiry and white, the crows feet beside his eyes heavy. They gentled his face, made him look softer.
Manuela had returned to the Mittelfrank Opera Company two years before, and Linhardt had seen her now and again, their paths crossing whenever he had been attending a performance or she had shown up to some party. He hadn’t needed to talk to her to know that she had only come back because whatever she’d had with Hanneman had come to an end, for better or worse. Linhardt hadn’t wanted to ask, because there was always that niggling fear that maybe Hanneman had died.
But here he was, alive and well.
“Good evening, Professor.” It was so familiar. To be standing here, in this place, with this man. It was like he’d never left and the war had never happened.
It had, of course. Both of them had the scars to prove it.
“Come now, Linhardt.” Hanneman set down his cup, closed the book he was reading. He’d set up a small charcuterie board next to him, and he gestured to it. “You’re as much a Professor as I am now, there’s no need for such formalities. Care to join me?”
Linhardt had come here looking for food, after all—there was no reason to deny the invitation. He tucked his cane up under his arm and came over to sit down on the opposite side of the table from Hanneman, who slid the charcuterie board to him. Linhardt hesitated for a moment—he didn’t want to eat Hanneman’s dinner—but the silence, the expectation, was waiting.
He took some cheese and started to eat. Hanneman refilled his cup from the teapot steaming at the end of the table, and then uncapped a flask and tipped in something that smelled strongly of alcohol, a heady, dark whiskey of some kind. Linhardt watched and said nothing, just took more food, and enjoyed the strangely reassuring, comfortable silence between them.
“I must admit, Professor, I wasn’t...expecting to see you again. Here.”
Hanneman had not seemed surprised to see Linhardt. He did not seem surprised that Linhardt had been surprised to see him. Indeed, he just shrugged slightly, his narrow shoulders looking all the more slender for the bulk of his robes upon them. He’d lost weight. “I’m afraid I’m a man most suited to staying where I’ve grown roots. I’ve been here more than half my life. Why leave?” Hanneman cradled his cup, and his eyes looked far away. “A better question would be why you chose to came back.”
Linhardt did not answer it. Nor did he ask why Hanneman had stayed when Manuela had left. He cleaned the rest of the food off of the cutting board, and then ran his fingers over the head of his cane, the wood cool and reassuringly curved against his touch, the well-worn whorls of the grain as familiar to his hand as any other part of his body.
Hanneman’s cane was propped against the table next to where he sat.
The War sat at the end of the table, an uninvited guest, and waited to speak with a studied, patient stillness that would outlast the end of the world.
Three days wasn’t enough time to unpick the knots that had grown into the threads that bound Linhardt to Garreg Mach, but it was all that he had before he was supposed to start teaching, and most of it was spent locked in his rooms, buried in unpacking. That was easier than socializing—easier than wandering hallways that were familiar, standing in rooms full of ghosts, and thinking about being a child, who knew nothing and hoped for everything. He kept his own hours, prepared for his classes, and unpacked.
On the final night, a sharp knock on the door to his rooms revealed a gate guard with mail: a single letter, addressed to Linhardt in Edelgard’s distinctive, dagger-sharp cursive.
He took the letter, and sat with it in the center of his desk for a long time, long enough that the candle he’d lit burned out and Linhardt was forced to light another. When he opened it at last, it was short—unusually succinct from Edelgard, less than the full front of a page.
It said about what he expected it to. Linhardt folded it back up and put it once more into the envelope after he had read it, and then held it over the candle flame to burn into cinders. There was no point in responding. Edelgard was not awaiting his reply.
Everything he had to say to her had already been said.
Linhardt had accepted an offer to teach the history of Fódlan, both modern and ancient, at Garreg Mach. In theory, this was perfectly fine—history was the backbone of Linhardt’s belief system, the foundation of his life, an understanding of what came before which would underscore that which came after—but in practice, he got up in front of his first class to introduce himself, exhausted from waking up too early after not enough sleep, and—
The faces of two dozen children looked back at him. Two dozen strangers, today the youngest class, none of them a year older than thirteen. These children, this new generation that had been born after the War, coming to Garreg Mach, and they had never known anything about the world as it was, before. What was history to them but what it had once been to Linhardt?
Before you lived it history was a theoretical exercise, a hyperfixation to return to when you needed something to do with an afternoon.
There was a saying that Claude had told Linhardt one long-ago afternoon when they had been reading in the library: pity the king who lives in a time of battle, for he wishes for nothing but the ease of slavery in a time of peace.
At the time, he’d thought he understood it.