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Byleth’s restless legs fed her restless mind, and as sleep continued to evade her that night, she found herself walking a path from her quarters to the Black Eagles’ mobile suit hangar, passing on her way under the artificial sky of Garreg Mach. The hangar made for her a comforting sight; it called to mind the time spent with her father in the Blade Breaker’s own hangar bay, learning the finer points of mobile suit maintenance over his shoulder. Those moments had never struck her as anything special before she had arrived at Garreg Mach, but now, after five months here, she found herself thinking more and more wistfully about them.
She gazed upon her students’ collection of mobile suits. When she’d first arrived here, they’d all piloted a uniform squadron of Zaku IIs—all in Zeon black and red, save for the solid crimson of Princess Edelgard—but since then, they had all begun to specialize. Brand-new Kampfer, Gouf, Dom, and Efreet units, and weapons customized for individual pilots, mingled with the comparatively pedestrian Zakus and their more standardized arms.
At the forefront stood the Creator Gundam, its gold V-fin gleaming in the light; near the back of the hangar, the black Ruin Gundam stood like its shadow, light dancing off the spiny protrusions of its armor. Even discounting what had just happened to Miklan, it possessed a baleful aura, and Byleth wondered if she had made the wrong decision in not handing it over when Rhea had asked her to do so (as much as she wondered why Rhea had been so quick to acquiesce to her own wishes in the first place).
Her thoughts strayed again—as they did more and more often, she found—when she saw the open cockpit of Edelgard’s customized Efreet and the flash of a shock of silver hair within. With a low buzzing hum, the Efreet’s monoeye lit up in a cool shade of lilac not so far removed from the color of its pilot’s scintillating eyes.
Byleth shook her head. Scintillating eyes? She ought not to have borrowed one of Dorothea’s romance novels, she thought to herself, moving toward Edelgard’s custom Efreet. A nail on a chain cast in gold-plated steel was suspended from its chest, and Byleth recognized it as the same ornament adorning Edelgard’s uniform—a fourragère, a sign that the wearer would never dare run from battle. Five months here had taught Byleth that the symbol fit her student particularly well.
Edelgard was not wearing her uniform as she sat in the cramped pilot’s seat, her fingers flying over her laptop’s keyboard at dizzying speeds as she ran diagnostics on her new mobile suit’s systems. She was in her nightclothes, a red silk and taffeta set of pajamas—Byleth would have even gone so far as to call it a pantsuit—that only a noble would think of wearing to bed. In her shorts, tank top, and jacket, Byleth felt particularly underdressed in comparison, which was silly, because people weren’t supposed to go to bed overdressed.
“Can’t sleep?” Byleth asked Edelgard as her lilac eyes roved across reams and reams of diagnostic feedback scrolling across her laptop screen. Edelgard frowned and bit her lip, as she always did when concentrating hard on something.
“Edelgard,” Byleth said.
Finally, Edelgard’s fingers froze and her eyes darted upward. Instantly, the hard look on her face softened, Byleth thought she could almost see a smile.
“Professor,” she said quietly. “I apologize for ignoring you. What did you say, just then?”
“Can’t sleep?”
She glanced to the side and let out an evasive little laugh with absolutely not a trace of mirth in it. “Ah. Yes, Professor. I despise being cooped up when sleep evades me, and I find that some fresh night air does me good.”
Byleth looked around the hangar for any sign of Edelgard’s so-called ‘fresh night air.’ Edelgard was a terrible liar. “What are you really doing here?”
“Exactly what it looks like,” Edelgard sighed. “I did go out for a little walk, but decided it was prudent to take a look at our house’s mobile suits now that everybody else is asleep. One thing led to another; I decided to run a few tests…”
“You fear sabotage,” Byleth noted.
“And what are you doing up at this hour, my teacher?” Edelgard asked her, avoiding the question—though Byleth could feel a pang of fear in the back of her own mind, like a sort of phantom pain.
“I went for a walk and decided to come here.”
Edelgard snapped her laptop’s clamshell lid shut and powered down her mobile suit’s systems. Overhead, the Efreet’s lilac eye went dark within its slit visor. She gingerly made her way back onto the catwalk and closed the cockpit behind herself, stowing the laptop under her arm. “You couldn’t sleep either?” she inquired.
“No,” Byleth answered. “I thought I heard the sound of a child crying out for her father.”
For a brief moment, Edelgard seemed nonplussed. Her hand slipped itself into the long tresses of her unmade silver-white hair and brushed it over her shoulder, her eyes darting from side to side. “I… see. You had a nightmare, it seems. It is ill-advised to stay up so late, so perhaps we should both return to our quarters.”
Byleth nodded. “Formation drills tomorrow morning.”
“Of course.”
The two of them strolled down the catwalk, passing by the Creator Gundam’s towering white colossus. Edelgard looked up at it as they walked, her head turning to face it, like the side of the moon that always faced the Earth. “Professor,” she asked, “do you often hear voices in your head that do not belong to you?”
Byleth stopped in her tracks. There was a pressure in the back of her mind, like an iron plate squeezing against her skull. For a moment, she felt as though she were back in Rhea’s audience chamber. Being around Rhea made it hard to think for some reason, but with Edelgard at her side, her thoughts seemed to have the strength to cut through the noise and fog, like a machete’s honed blade through thick jungle foliage. Now, though, it felt as though Edelgard herself was exerting that same sort of pressure on her mind.
Edelgard sighed and rubbed her brow, and just like that, the pressure dissipated. It was as though, Byleth thought, she had just tried to psychically push Byleth’s mind away from her own, or rather push her mind away from Byleth’s.
“You do,” Edelgard noted. “How much do you know about Gundams?”
Byleth’s gaze followed her up to the Gundam’s white face, crested by its characteristic V-fin in gleaming gold. Seams in its armor where the green light of its inner psycoframe would shine through remained firmly closed and dark.
“They’re made from Luna titanium and Gundanium alloy,” she answered, “and use twin high-efficiency Minovsky fusion reactors and I-field generators for increased energy output…”
“…And make full use of a pilot’s Newtype abilities,” Edelgard finished. “That’s what drove Miklan mad,” she said, stealing a glance at the Ruin Gundam. “It isn’t just that Gundams require a particular genetic marker to pilot. They require a strong Newtype as well to handle the mental strain of piloting. He was able to hack into the system and bypass its genetic lock, but there is no faking that aptitude.”
“Newtypes,” Byleth mused aloud. Everybody, especially among the nobility, and especially here at Garreg Mach, talked about Newtypes—and yet even so, she wasn’t sure what exactly they were.
“The true capabilities of Newtypes are a closely guarded secret within the Church and the nobility,” Edelgard said. “It is hardly surprising that you do not know. Newtypes are the next stage of human evolution, a means of bridging people’s hearts and minds across vast gulfs of space and time, or so they say… a guiding light for humanity’s journey through the sea of stars. Every titled noble possesses not only the genetic Crest to pilot their house’s Gundam, but strong Newtype abilities as well, and those who have one but not the other, or none at all, are all too often set aside or cast out altogether, no matter their talents or the content of their character. Does that sound to you as though it is in the spirit of Zeon Deikun’s philosophy?”
There was a note of restrained anger in Edelgard’s voice. Byleth could feel it prickling in the back of her mind.
For a thousand years, the promise of Newtypes has been deferred again and again.
She heard Edelgard’s voice in her head as though she were speaking within her. But as Edelgard looked her in the eyes, her lips did not move at all.
All the nobles and the Church of Seiros use their power for is to preserve a negative peace and oppress those they see as mentally and spiritually weaker, lesser Newtypes and Oldtypes alike, with the Gundam as their eternal symbol of dominance. I will—I must—
Byleth winced. Edelgard’s words were sharp, like the blade of an axe, and burned through her brain like the searing blade of the Gundam’s beam saber—
Before Byleth knew it, she’d pulled the sidearm from its holster under her jacket, and she found the barrel of her gun aimed with a trembling hand directly at Edelgard’s face.
Edelgard took a stumbling step backward and held up her hands, palm outward, a look of brief shock registering on her face. “My teacher… I… I’m sorry,” she said, taking another step away from her and averting her eyes. Byleth felt the pressure in her head and the noise within it lessen, and slowly slipped the gun back into its holster, shocked at how close her finger had been to the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” Edelgard repeated, still rattled. “I meant not to project my thoughts so forcefully…”
“You’re a Newtype, too,” Byleth noted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, I understand. The fault is mine. It is all too easy to forget that among our kind, words and thoughts alone can be weapons—whether or not we intend it.”
Byleth reflected again on the fogginess she always felt in her head around Rhea.
“Yes,” Edelgard said. “I, too, am a Newtype. Although I wasn’t always one. Do you remember what I told you the other night? About… my past?”
Byleth wondered if she should say she had forgotten—after all, Edelgard had asked her to forget. “I remember,” she said instead, feeling that it was useless to lie.
“My siblings and I were… imprisoned deep within the palace, as part of the coup seven years ago,” Edelgard explained. “I and several others of my siblings possessed the Crest of Seiros, but as a recessive gene, it was unexpressed in all save for one of us. And while some of us had Newtype abilities, none were what you could call potent. The objective of our imprisonment… was to change that.”
Byleth felt no more senses of pressure or fog or prickling in her mind, heard no further intrusive thoughts—yet she could feel Edelgard curling up, curling into herself even as she stood still and straight, pulling away her mind so that she could communicate only with the extreme restraint of mere words.
“But gene therapy is illegal,” she said.
“Illegality means nothing to those with power and means. In order to create a peerless emperor to rule over all the Earth sphere, Earth, moon, and colonies alike, the nobles behind the Insurrection violated our bodies and our minds. Now I stand here before you, the fruit of their endeavor: Edelgard Artesia Deikun, sole heir to the throne of the Zeon Empire.”
There was a bitter note of pride, ugly and self-loathing pride, in Edelgard’s voice—Byleth didn’t need to be a Newtype to discern it.
“But,” she added, her voice growing quieter and more restrained, “it came at too high a price. My siblings… my younger brother Casval perished in agony; my younger sister and older siblings, those of them who survived at all, were regarded as failures and left to rot. And our lives were not the only ones devastated by that terrible process—innocents died as well, without even knowing what they were dying for.”
Try as she might to close off her mind, Edelgard couldn’t help but let something seep through her iron defenses. Byleth caught vague and half-forgotten, half-repressed memories in her mind’s eye, terrible sights and smells, and the same screams that had woken her from her slumber this very night. If Edelgard had not been holding herself back, the memories would have struck her like a psychic assault.
“Who did it?” Byleth asked. There was a flicker of something red-hot and fiery in her mind, something she might have called ‘anger’ if she’d ever felt it before. She didn’t know who it belonged to.
“It was House Zabi—the Prime Minister and his cronies,” Edelgard answered. She’d never looked so small. “They had Zeon under their thumbs—my father couldn’t stop them. He was powerless to save us.”
Byleth thought about her own father. Jeralt was many things. Powerless was not one of them. If she had been in Edelgard’s situation, he would have moved space colonies to save her. Or… would he have?
“I do not just bear the Crest of Seiros,” Edelgard added, again fixing her eyes on the two Gundams that stood in the hangar. “The master Crest once granted to Nemesis himself was placed within my genetic code as well.” Her hand went again to her silky white hair. “Yes… the same Crest as yours. One can see the price I paid for it. When it manifested for me, I swore a silent oath. For the sake of my family and for all the poor souls whose lives were traded for my existence… I will build a world where such meaningless sacrifice is never again sanctioned.”
Byleth studied once more the blank and empty visor of the Creator Gundam looming like a titan over her.
“Thank you for listening, my teacher,” Edelgard said. “You are the only one besides Hubert who knows of this.” She reached out, but only allowed her hand to hover over Byleth’s shoulder, as though an invisible barrier impeded her. “For now,” she concluded, “think of what ‘Gundam’ means to you.”
She strode away as swiftly as her tired legs could carry her, and Byleth stared into her Gundam’s sightless eyes and ruminated.