Chapter Text
“Hey, Teach?”
Byleth looks up from her desk as Claude saunters into the classroom, a lopsided smile on his face, hands held behind his back. “Yes?”
“You settling in okay?” He asks, leaning against an adjacent desk, bringing his hands around to reveal a small parcel. He smiles at her, silently goading her to ask what it is.
She knows he’s trying to tempt her into some kind of trade of information, so she chooses to ignore it for now. “Sure,” she nods, turning her attention back to the forms Seteth had asked her to fill out. She doesn’t know the answers to more than half these questions about her personal history, and she can already imagine the look of disdain on his face when she hands this in.
Restless as ever, Claude leans closer, trying to peek at the few words she’d scribbled onto the parchment. “Whatcha doing?”
“Faculty stuff, none of your business,” she answers curtly, and he huffs pitifully, leaning back. “Did you need something from me?”
“Actually, yes,” he straightens, clearing his throat. “Lysithea — white hair, short, gets a little feral when you treat her like a kid — was asking about a syllabus. The Black Eagles and Blue Lions have already gotten theirs, and the little eager beaver wants to get ahead on the reading before our first class on Monday.”
A fair request as house leader, she’ll admit. One she unfortunately hadn’t prepared for. She’d just been appointed this new post a week and a half ago, and with her distinct lack of experience, drawing up a decent syllabus had proved nearly impossible. With her first official lecture approaching, she supposed it was her duty as a professor to provide.
She feels Claude’s eyes on her as she silently grabs a blank sheet of parchment, dipping her quill into the ink pot, thinking. A syllabus defined class expectations and responsibilities, but she’d never been filled in on those, had she? This was a military academy, the students would be expected to excel in both real life combat and training exercises. Tactics and battle. Magic and weaponry.
The premise, ultimately, was to stay alive.
With that in mind, she crafts her syllabus. When she’s done, she hands the new syllabus to Claude. “Give that to Lysithea,” she says, watching as he scans over it himself, an amused chuckle escaping his lips.
“Oh, I can’t wait for her to read this,” he grins, folding the paper and tucking it into his pocket. “Before I leave and let you get back to Seteth’s little questionnaire,” he’s certainly more shrewd than she gives him credit for. He slides the parcel across her desk. “This is for you, from Lady Rhea. Consider it your official welcome gift to the Officer’s Academy.”
“I’ll be sure to give her my thanks,” she says, placing a hand on the parcel, fingers fiddling with the twine wrapped around it. There’s a fresh white lily tucked into the bow, the exact kind that Rhea wears in her hair.
A gift from the Archbishop? Oh, her father wouldn’t be pleased.
Claude lingers for a moment, hovering a safe distance from her desk, but eyeing the package. “I’m not opening it here,” she tells him, and he holds his hands up in surrender, bidding her an official farewell and finally retreating out into the afternoon sun.
“Ever so nosy, that one,” Sothis laughs in her head. “We certainly have an interesting year ahead of us.”
For the first time since Sothis had spoken to her, Byleth finds that she agrees.
__________
Claude thought that Fódlan was strange.
His aimless wanderings around the monastery had provided him with more information than any book, illustration, or tale from the library back home ever had. Words, pictures, and cryptic folklore simply could not capture the depth of Fodlan’s cultures and practices, and each discovery he made was more fascinating than the other.
That being said, there were still many things he didn’t understand about Fódlan, but who better to learn from than the people who inhabited this strange, new land that he would soon play a role in leading? It was then that people watching had quickly become his favourite pass-time. He thought it was kind of fun, seeing how his classmates reacted to things.
He’d met Edelgard and Dimitri first, at a stuffy noble dinner where Lady Rhea had given them her blessing as new house leaders for the coming school year. It’d been awkward, as all first meetings were, but he’d managed to carve out a hollow idea of who they were.
Or, who they pretended to be.
At surface level, Their Highnesses were slightly similar. They moved with the same stiff, practiced mannerisms, were unbearably polite, and didn’t tolerate any of his nonsense. They were decent enough, and Claude was having fun feuling their subtle game of one-upmanship.
But behind their pretty speech and mechanical movements, Claude caught the thinly veiled condescending nature of Their Highnesses interactions. He saw the narrowed eyes at the other’s back, the forced, tight-lipped smiles in passing greetings. One could assume that they had some unresolved - as Hilda would call it - beef.
It wasn’t until the rest of the students had arrived at the monastery that he’d realized just how different his fellow house leaders were.
While Edelgard was undoubtedly civil towards her classmates, Claude had noticed that there was an obvious distance between the future emperor and her peers. He found this particularly odd because the majority of them were nobles, and most of them were destined to inherit the positions of their parents, and work closely with her in the near future. This was the perfect time to make connections and establish alliances, so why did she hold them at arm's length and keep the company of her broody vassal? Although, her classmates didn’t seem to seek her out or try to close the distance themselves. The lines were blurry, and he couldn’t properly attribute fault.
On the other hand, Dimitri was true to the Kingdom’s code of chivalry and duty, seemed more willing to bridge the gap between himself and his peers, and they reciprocated. Well, all except Felix, of course. Claude wasn’t sure what was going on there, but the way he’d refused to shake Dimitri’s hand and called him some type of animal during their house introductions told him that there was something rocky going on there. Regardless, according to the snippets of conversation Claude may or may not have eavesdropped on, the majority of the Blue Lions were already a tight knit group. Lorenz had said that Annette and Mercedes had attended the Royal School of Sorcery together. Ingrid had told him that herself, Dimitri, Felix, and Sylvain were childhood friends. It made the rift between the Fraldarius heir and the crown prince even more confusing.
Discerning the hidden truths behind his fellow house leaders was confusing, yes. He added it to his mental list of things he didn’t understand, only one bullet point below the mystery that was at the top of his list.
The bullet point consisted of a single name, was circled, underlined three times, and question marked.
Teach.
The mercenary turned professor who had saved them from the bandits the night they had stumbled into Remire Village. The apparent daughter of Jeralt, whose reputation as the ‘Blade Breaker’ preceded him, dubbed by Edelgard as the ‘strongest knight to ever have lived’ during his time as captain of the Knights of Seiros.
She’d been here nearly a week and a half now, and honestly?
Claude was kind of underwhelmed.
Here was the thing he had learned about dear old Teach;
She didn’t leave her room when she thought no one was watching to meet anyone in dark alleys. She didn’t take unauthorized books from the library. She didn’t mix mild poisons in her room. No, Teach had stuck to the same routine since the day she’d arrived at Garreg Mach. She would rise at dawn and have breakfast with her father. She’d attack a few training dummies, then walk around the monastery to talk to students and pick up odd items, occasionally plucking snails or worms off the ground to use as bait. Then she would fish until lunch. Once she was done eating, she would hole herself inside of her room until dinner. Then she’d head to the sauna and blow her candles out for the night.
For someone so mysterious, his new professor was horribly mundane.
The obvious questions still tugged at the corners of his mind. As far as Claude knew, she’d been on the road as a mercenary for most of her life, and hadn’t a formal education of her own. Yet she had scored a teaching gig at one of Fodlan’s most prestigious military academies. No interview necessary. Despite showing no interest or knowledge in the Church of Seiros, why did Rhea seem so taken with her?
She surprised him though. He’d honestly expected her to pick the Blue Lions, after all. She just seemed to have more in common with the Faerghans. The Black Eagles were more magic based, and the Deer had an affinity for archery. Teach used a sword, like Felix. Her father used a lance, like Ingrid, Sylvain, and Dimitri. He’d even heard rumour that Jeralt was born in Faerghus. Anyone would stick to what they were familiar with, especially a first time teacher.
He’d prepared himself for disappointment, but for once in his life, he’d been wrong and he found that he didn’t mind. She’d instead chosen to teach the Golden Deer. It was yet another mystery in the haze of who she was exactly.
Just like she’d taken the lead that night in Remire, she’d led the Deer to a near flawless victory in the mock battle between the houses. She didn’t break a sweat alternating parries between Dimitri and Felix, and even had Marianne take Dedue out with a Blizzard spell, and had Hilda send Manuela into her own infirmary. This woman knew what she was doing, and during that night’s victory high, Claude had begun reevaluating his plans for the future.
He had a feeling she would need to be part of it.