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Hubert had forgotten about the Millennium Festival. In five years of long nights as the nexus of Lady Edelgard’s intelligence network, dates scarcely held meaning to him in an ordinary, mortal sense. Only days and weeks, the expected time it would take an army to travel – supplies to allies, and reinforcements to enemies.
It was only on an idle comment from Linhardt that reminded Hubert of that promise of reunion, the one he had long buried along with every other fancy. Byleth is dead, Lady Edelgard. We must win this war without her.
Hubert did not have the luxury of sorrow. Any scars his grief marked him with must be turned to his purpose. Losing Lady Edelgard to Arundel only hardened his loyalty to her. Losing Byleth when they did, so soon after accepting that perhaps he could rely on her… he worked so that he did not dwell on it. He must become the commander of their forces that she would have been. That was all.
He stood where she once stood, at the head of their old classroom. The fingertips of his gloves and the black cuffs of his jacket stained bone-yellow with chalk dust from drawing maps and formations across her blackboard, before rows of her former students. Lady Edelgard was late, but Lady Edelgard was already painfully familiar with his thoughts on the Great Bridge of Myrddin.
Intelligence from House Bergliez to the south, House Gloucester to the north, and from their loathsome allies from the shadows, wherever they had embedded themselves. Hubert knew not to underestimate Duke Riegan, but the information the Empire had access to most likely outclassed what Claude could know, in that embattled corner of Fódlan.
Hubert heard his head only slightly at the sound of Lady Edelgard’s armoured footsteps.
“I’m sure you still recognise everyone,” Lady Edelgard said, her voice rattling with rare and joyful nerves. “I suspect we haven’t changed that much.” And by her side, guided by Lady Edelgard’s red-gauntleted hand…
The last time he saw her, she had been looking over her shoulder, coated in the dust of a collapsing building. Her cloak was still filthy, her wild hair still in disarray, as if she had stepped straight from that battle and back into her classroom.
“Professor?” Hubert said, a shiver crossing his shoulders. The chalk slipped from his fingers and clattered to the hard stone floor.
Lady Edelgard had grieved Byleth furiously, in a way Hubert had not seen her grieve since she had returned to him without her siblings. She scoured Fódlan for word of their missing mentor, and Hubert carried out her every request and followed her every lead. He could tell himself it was a tactical necessity, knowing that Rhea was chasing her all the same. But he knew it was for himself too, to sate his desire to know what had happened to Byleth. Whether he had truly failed to save her, or whether she had managed to save herself.
And now, his answer stood before him.
Benches scraped, heads turned. The same childish excitement as when Byleth returned to class, bandaged but well, a few days after the altercation with Solon that had turned her hair near-white.
“It’s as if in a dream,” Ferdinand remarked. “Did we not all dream of her return, these past five years?”
Hubert knew that his purpose was to distrust. To discard what he had to admit were private hopes of her return, and wonder whether this was another of Thales’ doppelgangers. The protection he had once given only to Lady Edelgard, he now extended to those former classmates he had once turned his scrutiny upon, now that their trust was assured. Only with his careful, guarding doubt could they have their dreams without danger.
“You all survived,” Byleth said quietly.
But still, he hoped.
Her dark, careful manner, the very slight softening of that stern expression, the unbidden release of deeply felt emotion in the heaviness of her words. So familiar to him even after all these years, from the intensity of his observation of her during his year as her student. He hoped they were returned to him, even as he tried to quiet himself with duty and reason.
It was only in her absence that had Hubert been able to admit how much he had come to… depend on her. That they’d had only had a week of honesty, between Lady Edelgard’s declaration and the Battle of Garreg Mach, was something of a scar between himself and his Emperor. No matter how he assured Lady Edelgard that he had acted as necessary and did not regret the distance he had kept from the rest of their now-allies, she blamed herself for his duty denying him the year of friendships that she herself had enjoyed in the year before the war, particularly when it came to Byleth.
“Well, we didn’t want to miss seeing you again,” Dorothea replied, a tearful edge to her voice. She threw her arms around Byleth. Hubert smirked to himself at the brief, bright confusion that crossed Byleth’s face, before she relented into Dorothea’s embrace. “We’ve all been waiting for you, Professor.”
Hubert back turned towards the board and watched from the corner of his eye as Lady Edelgard led their Professor the length of the classroom, taking her students’ joyous and tearful welcomes in turn. Hubert had never been an aid to the Empire’s morale, and he suspected that his manner would only dampen his classmates’ now-rare pleasure were he to involve himself. His hopes, his fears, his tangled knot of feelings.
The other students had more need of Byleth than he did. He didn’t need reassurance or inspiration. He had turned from those for most of his life, needing only a goal and the means to reason his way there.
Not that such means had been enough, even with Lady Edelgard’s strength.
Lady Edelgard kept leading Byleth forward, between quietly received embraces. He tried to look for suspicion in them, some clue as to whether it was truly Byleth, but every strangeness he saw was only confirmation – she was as incomprehensibly peculiar as ever, and no copy could confound him quite so much as the real Byleth could.
Only as they made their final approach did Hubert realise that Lady Edelgard intended for Byleth to reunite with him too.
Hubert knew, in theory, what he was supposed to do. To express welcome, couched in suspicion, and continue on with the practical topic of their army’s health, and their planned moves against the Alliance, keeping to the details that Those Who Slither In The Dark would already be aware of. But instead Hubert simply stood, lips barely parted, and stared at her, mysterious and deadly as ever.
The man he was today needed to suspect her. The Empire’s master of spies could not have such a weakness, such a curiosity. But he wanted to. He wanted the wound his grief for her had left to pulse with pain. He wanted to feel it, be weak for it, for a moment.
“Hubert,” Lady Edelgard prompted. “I know you’ve missed her as much as the rest of us.”
He had imagined that they could become close, the last he’d seen her. She understood his pragmatism better than any other, and he had imagined that perhaps she felt the same about him. They could have walked together, a matching pair of shadows joined by Lady Edelgard’s path.
His father had still been alive when he had seen Byleth last. He was not yet Count Vestra, the Emperor’s terrifying master of spies. How young, and how naïve he seemed to himself. How foolish he must have seemed to her, last they met. He did not feel any less foolish now, now that she was in front of him again. Her firm expression, her star-brightened eyes.
“But he’s not sure that it’s me,” Byleth said, calm and even eyes piercing his skull.
“…It would be foolish of me not to consider the possibility,” Hubert replied, holding her gaze with cool control.
“Hubert,” Lady Edelgard sighed sharply. “Not this again.”
“He’s right,” Byleth replied. “I don’t understand what happened myself. I would be cautious of myself, in his position.”
But still she stood there, something unfinished between them. Hubert swallowed. He was aware that his former classmates were watching them. He knew he needed to say something. Now, before his soft silence became obvious.
“Understand that I… do truly hope it is you, Professor,” he said, feeling faintly ridiculous, burning with honesty. “I have… hoped we would see you return to us alive.”
The guilt he had felt, how much he had dreamed she would return – even if it truly was her, she did not need to know of it.
“I understand that it has been a long five years for everyone,” she said, quietly but steadily. “You look… tired, Hubert.”
Hubert chuckled grimly to himself. He was well aware that had never been handsome, but he knew the years of sleepless nights and overexerting his magic had only worsened his appearance. His thin face turning gaunt, the shadows beneath his eyes darkening and deepening. He knew how he was caricatured, even by their allies – a hunched and skeletal grotesque, the Emperor’s long and twisted shadow, her left and right hand both.
“I suppose we have all been missing your guidance,” Hubert replied bitterly.
But Byleth continued to look at him without revulsion, eyes frank and clear, as they always had been.
Hubert was not sure quite what strange impulse prompted him to act as he did. But as he looked back at her, the grief he had buried for five years returned to him. He stepped forward, stiffly and silently. His limbs seeming all wrong for the purpose to which he was putting them, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, his cloak falling to envelop her, and pulled her closer than he had intended.
Hubert was not as the others were. House Vestra had not been a place of love. He did not embrace his friends, and he had no time for lovers. He pulled her in too tightly at first, feeling the sharp puff of her breath as he pushed the air from her lungs with hands more used to strangling than soothing. He had already tensed, preparing himself for the schoolish teasing of his classmates or the long-ingrained chiding of his father at such a clumsy and ridiculous display of emotion, a movement with no practical purpose.
But they were silent for him. And where he had frozen, Byleth leaned in, wrapping her arms around his waist and reaching her deft fingers upwards beneath his cloak, to press sharply against his broad, jagged shoulderblades.
As he held her, he found his eyes closing, his head lowering, his face pressed against her stone-powdered hair. He found himself remembering every other time he had been almost so close. Her face over his, blunted blade to his throat, as she demonstrated precisely how poor his defences were. Leaning close to her in the silver darkness of the Goddess Tower, interrogating her on why she had disappeared from the ball. Arms reaching over each other and fingers pressing together as they traced Lady Edelgard’s maps before the attack on the monastery. The foolish arrogance of the person he was five years ago wrapped up in every memory, and yet he did not regret remembering every phantom touch.
He hoped it was her. He truly, truly hoped it was her.
Lady Edelgard cleared her throat softly, almost gently.
Hubert released Byleth in an orderly manner, straightening his lapel to cover his embarrassment. Byleth seemed unaffected by any emotion that Hubert could scry from her.
“Apologies, Lady Edelgard,” he replied quickly, with a shallow bow that he was aware was actually completely unnecessary. Lady Edelgard looked… pleased, although Hubert wasn’t quite sure why. “Shall we proceed with the briefing, or shall we adjourn until later?”
Lady Edelgard looked to Byleth. “My teacher, are you well enough to listen?”
“Now is fine,” Byleth replied. “I need to find out what I’ve missed.”
“Then should discuss our current movements,” Lady Edelgard suggested. “I imagine there will be time for us all to catch up further with our teacher afterwards.”
“Of course, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert replied stiffly. He turned back to the board as Lady Edelgard took what was once her normal seat in the classroom, pulling Byleth to sit next to her.
If she was back again, his twin shadow, his counterpart in Lady Edelgard’s vanguard…
Hubert cleared a sharp line through his drawing with the dusty eraser, and scrubbed at the lingering marks. And, casting an eye over his shoulder to her once more, he began to draw again.