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There were two reasons why Seteth never learned how to bait a hook.
First, he harbored an intense dislike for insects and other creeping things. It was not that he was necessarily afraid of the creatures… They just…made him… Uncomfortable. Particularly when he was required to take one in his hand.
Second, he had always been too busy admiring his wife and the way the light reflected off the water onto her face, or the smile of anticipation she always wore to actually pay attention to her explanation of the process.
Aoife had gently teased him on more than one occasion when he had been too enraptured by her to listen to the words coming out of her blessed lips, but he never had managed to lose the habit.
Seteth reached up to remove Saint’s saddle, loosing an involuntary gasp as the action twinged at the fresh injury in his side.
“Seteth, are you hurt?”
He would know that voice even if five hundred years had passed. He looked toward its source and found himself lost in green eyes swimming with concern.
“I am fine.” He gritted his teeth and pulled at the saddle again, willing himself not to make a sound even as he struggled. The enormous wyvern war saddle was unwieldy on a good day; today he found it the task nigh impossible.
Wordlessly, Byleth stepped in and added her strength to his, slipping the saddle free of the wyvern’s back. The tiny woman’s size belied her strength, and Seteth’s arm burned in a new way at the contact she had made between them.
Burden relieved, Saint rumbled and shook himself appreciatively. “You are hurt,” Byleth accused. “Why aren’t you in the healers tent?”
“It is nothing,” Seteth insisted stubbornly. He was not human. He was made of stronger stuff than the humans, and the healers were spread thin. He would not waste valuable resources simply for the sake of his own comfort.
Byleth’s eyes narrowed, and she shoved him against the wall of Saint’s body. The wyvern squawked in alarm and Seteth grunted at the impact, but he was more preoccupied with the way her eyes were scanning him with open suspicion. They widened again when she found what she was looking for a moment later: telltale traces of dried blood on his armor and soaking the fabric of the gambeson beneath.
White magic immediately began to glow in her palm, which she pressed to the wounded ribs under his arm. Seteth bit back a groan of relief as the magic’s warmth washed through and quieted his pain, soothing even though the insistent prickle of reknitting muscle and skin. He had taken a vulnerary to stop the bleeding, but the torn flesh had remained.
“How did this happen?” she demanded softly.
“We were in a battle,” could have been Seteth’s flippant answer. For anyone else, the question was strange, even silly. But Seteth was very rarely injured in battle, and Byleth knew that. His enemies rarely managed to touch him, and it was generally a fact of which he was quite proud. This wound that he had attempted and failed to hide from her was therefore an alarming exception.
But due to the circumstances of his injury, neither could he tell her the truth: As he had flown through the air, keeping an eye on Byleth and any threats pointed her way, he had found himself admiring her. The way she wielded her sword with such fluid grace and lethal precision, voice ringing with command as she directed their soldiers while her ethereal green hair floated around her head as if it were a divine halo.
And that was how he found himself stricken with the sudden and breathless realization that he, Cichol Son of the Goddess, was in love with Byleth Eisner. A moment later he had found himself struck breathless with something very different: an arrow, lodged firmly in the side of his chest in the gap of his armor between his chestplate and his pauldron.
But he couldn’t tell her that.
Byleth watched him struggle for an excuse with a steady, patient, unyielding gaze. It pinned him in place as surely as her hand upon his other shoulder, as surely as his battle-weary, leaden feet. He wanted to cup her cheek in his hand and bless the goddess that it had been he who was injured and not she. And the longer he searched for words to satisfy her without revealing the truth, the higher her eyebrow arched.
He could have kissed that eyebrow. But he could not allow himself to give form to the words that now rang through his soul: he loved her. He loved her, he loved her, he loved her. A fact as real and solid and unavoidable as the Oghma Mountains.
And so he said, with a smirk and as much pretense as he could muster: “Even I am not invincible, Byleth.”
For now, he would have to continue to fish without bait.