Work Text:
Attending Garreg Mach was not a situation Claude fell into. Aside from the obvious academic benefits, there was a degree of reconnaissance to the situation to which Claude is much more inclined. He was here as a student in body but a prince in spirit. Specifically, a prince from a hostile nation. Not exactly a feature of the idyllic academy days that he’s heard adults try to sell and students buy into with ease.
Therefore, he allows himself to privately feel a sense of camaraderie with those who had also rejected the pitch. Claude himself isn’t so foolish as to wear his refusal on his sleeve but not everyone has the same reasons for feeling ambivalent towards the supposed peace of the monastery. Marianne sulks around like a cloudy night sky and the chip that is Claude’s existence continues to crumble Lorenz’s shoulder away. He’s been working his way through to them, slowly but surely. It’s interesting how two people so different in demeanour can have such similar attitudes towards him, even if one is a “everyone in the world stay away from me” case and the other a “life would be better without you in particular” case. The latter is the more familiar and therefore easier to deal with.
But one kindred spirit to have captured Claude’s eye is none other than the Golden Deer’s Lysithea von Ordelia; sole heiress to the Ordelia estate and land. He can’t say for sure, having only been in the Alliance for under a year, but he feels that at some point there were a few more footsteps walking through the vast halls of Ordelia’s Manor. It’s a pity he hadn’t the opportunity to better investigate the situation before arriving at the academy but fate was on his side, supplying him with the best kind of resource: a primary witness.
The only thing in his way is the witness herself.
He enters the Golden Deer classroom to find Lysithea’s back to him. She’s intently considering the chalkboard and what’s on it: a few rough sketches, the largest being that of a fort, and some equations dotted around it on the chalky canvas. On the desk behind her lie five open books that are organized in a neat row.
She turns, “Oh, hello Claude,” Her expression is attentive but unsurprised; why wouldn’t there be a Golden Deer student in their own classroom? “What are you doing here?”
“Lysithea!” He greets, crossing the stone floor, “Always a loner, aren’t you? You know Hilda is having a study group,” He pulls out a chair from the desk and takes a seat.
“And I’m sure you know that she only holds them to get other people to do her work for her,” Lysithea turns her back to him.
“Last one that bad?”
“Unbearable,” Lysithea groaned, tapping the chalk in her hand against the board. “It was mostly boys, of course, from all sorts of houses. All of them vying for the attention of their gentle flower who always finds it so difficult to understand ‘advanced’ formulas…” For a moment she’s quiet before her head notches up slightly and her hand rapidly writes out a sequence of numbers and symbols. She steps back to consider it. Claude leans back in his chair and lets the silence steep.
Lysithea eventually sighs, “I wouldn’t take issue with it if it were true. Hilda has so much potential but she leaves it to rot. I can’t understand how someone can be so comfortable with mediocrity, especially when they know they can do so much more. I’m sure she knows it. She must,”
Claude thinks about Hilda with her girlish ponytails and simpering false voice. How she cringes at recognition for her efforts and bites back when the professor critiques lacklustre performance. A complicated soul to those perceptive enough to bother seeing.
“Whatever works for her, you know?” He shrugs, “No everyone can be a child genius like you,”
She bristles at that, whipping her head around to pierce him with a glare, “And here I was thinking you viewed me as an equal. Why do you insist on wearing down the trust between us?”
“Argh, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” Well, the jab was intended but it wasn’t the point, “You must have been a child at some point, right? Absent-mindedly solving equations while lecturing your youngers and seniors,”
“No,” She huffed.
Claude made a surprised face, “You were never a child?”
“You know what I mean! Everything I can do-” She points at the books and board, “-and everything I will be able to do will be done because I worked for it. What I’ve made of myself came about because of dedication, not prodigy,” The word is spat with the force of one of her searing Fire spells.
Claude raises his hands in front of him. He realizes, just for a second, that she reminds him of one of the wyverns back home. The pale white one that rears up and beats its wings to make itself look bigger. “Okay, okay! Man, I can never say the right thing to you, can I?”
Lythisea’s metaphorical heckles lower. She looks at him for a long second. “You have your moments,” And she whips back around to the board. He's familiar enough with her to know that she's closed back up.
This’ll take a while. But he’s getting there.