Chapter Text
The car ride was silent, unusual given that Byleth normally had something to say about whatever place they had just been, but understandable given the gravity of what they had just gone through. Dimitri could only wonder what was going through her mind, but he wouldn’t dare ask her right then, it’d be a question best saved for that evening after dinner or perhaps before bed. Either way, as he focused his one working eye on the road ahead of them, he felt for her and everything she was going through, even if she didn’t want to talk about it.
He wanted to glance over at her, to make sure that she wasn’t suffering too badly in her silence, but by the time they’d come to a complete stop and he could safely look in her direction, she’d turned and faced away from him. “Byleth…” he started, before sighing as any further words he’d been thinking about the whole time trailed away. “I’m sorry. We’ll get through this, together.”
Her murmured response wasn’t made up of words, but rather a glimpse of the rare emotion she tried her best to keep tucked away. When she did find it within her to speak, the words were raw and made Dimitri’s heart pang to hear them. “We say that every time and it never gets easier,” she slowly said, voice quaking with every word. “I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, not to us.”
“Sure it will, it just—” He was cut off by their car making a strange sound and the steering wheel jerking suddenly to the right, like something had tugged it despite him holding it. After carefully getting it parked on the side of the road out of the way of traffic, they sat there in silence once more for a few moments, his previous statement disappeared entirely from memory.
“Are you going to call someone to come fix it?” Byleth sounded distraught, the same shakiness to her voice that had been there before, and she looked over at Dimitri to await his answer. “Whatever happened, it didn’t sound great.”
He hesitated on responding, not sure if calling for help would be the best course of action or not, but after seeing the pain in her eyes for himself he chose the option that could get them back on the road faster. “I’ll take a look, see if I can get it back working well enough to get us home,” he decided, her pursing her lips at the choice but not arguing against it. “Come on, Byleth, you know that whatever it was, it couldn’t be that bad. Felt like something happened with one of the wheels. Shouldn’t be too hard to at least put a temporary fix on.”
Exiting the car with confidence, Dimitri got down on the ground near the wheel well he thought the problem had stemmed from and began poking around at it, having to get up and grab the spare tire and jack from the back of the car at one point. His initial thought was that the tire had gone down, but it looked perfectly drivable when he got it off after some effort; this led to him getting under the jacked-up car, trying to see if something had bent out of shape while he’d been driving. All the while, Byleth was still in the passenger’s seat, minding her own business and biding her time in her sorrows.
Or so Dimitri thought, anyway.
After poking around at the axle for a while, he came to the conclusion that whatever had happened was beyond his scope of understanding, and he got out from under the car to get his phone and call for some help. When he stood up, he looked into the car fully expecting to see his wife’s face staring back at him, but was greeted with the harrowing sight of her having gone wide-eyed and paler than he’d ever seen before. After looking behind him to make sure that she wasn’t reacting to something in the distance, a second-long look that had his eyes off of her for no time at all, he opened the door to the car. “Mind getting me my phone so I can call for help after all?” he asked, to no response.
“Byleth, please, I’d like to get us home sooner rather than later and you not helping isn’t going to make things any easier.” Cracking a smile as he was met with the still silence, Dimitri leaned over her to grab his phone, his arm brushing against hers and finding it just as unmoving as her lips. That was when it hit him that she wasn’t putting on an act, she wasn’t pretending to ignore him or be frozen—she really was sitting there, completely unmoving, beginning to cool as her body no longer possessed its life.
The frantic call Dimitri made wasn’t to a tow company like he’d first thought he’d be making, but to emergency services, calling asking for them to rush to his location for his wife, who seemed to have had some sort of medical emergency while he was unaware of what was going on. Speaking to the kind-voiced operator on the other side meant hearing all sorts of assurances that things were fine, that they would have someone on the way immediately, that there would be a way to save her life, and he was staring at a lifeless corpse wondering why he was being told anything less than the truth. Sure, there was no way that the operator knew the full extent of the situation, but he could only take so much of her attempts at positivity that he ended up setting the phone down on the car’s dashboard and ignoring the rest of what was being said on the call.
While he waited for someone to get there and see what he was dealing with, he carefully maneuvered things to pull Byleth from her seat, unbuckling her and watching her slide from her seated position to something more akin to a floppy toy discarded and unwanted. Fighting back the urge to cry and scream at what was going on, Dimitri managed to get her out onto the side of the road, laying her out like she was merely taking a nap in the sunshine. Her eyes, glazed over and unblinking, showed a sign of terror he hadn’t noticed before, meaning that whatever had taken her hadn’t been instantaneous, and if he’d been paying attention he could have been aware things were going wrong before they got to this point.
Time seemed to move impossibly slow there on the side of the road, Dimitri running his fingers through Byleth’s hair as if she was alive and about to react to his kind gesture. “Wake up,” he murmured several times, the words coming out in tandem with his fingers tightening in her seafoam locks. “Wake up, we have our whole lives ahead of us, you can’t be gone now. Wake up!”
“I…am awake?” There was a voice coming from Byleth’s body, but it wasn’t her voice. It sounded younger than her, with an annoyed tone he’d never once heard Byleth take with him. That was what prompted Dimitri to look where he’d heard the words and saw, out of nowhere, a girl with bright green hair that flowed all around her sitting over Byleth’s chest, looking puzzled at him. “Who are you, and why am I here?”
“I could say the same to you, on both accounts,” Dimitri replied, voice rough with his emotions on full display. “Why are you sitting on my dead wife?”
The girl, still confused, looked down at where she was sitting and found herself staring at Byleth’s cold face, before looking up back at Dimitri with a perplexed expression. “Your dead wife…?” the girl repeated, sounding every bit as confused as she looked. “I wasn’t aware that this body of mine had gotten married. A recent affair, is it?” She seemed so genuine in her question that it took Dimitri, stunned at the sort of question it had been, several moments of staring at her before he could manage to mutter anything. “I didn’t catch that, speak up, will you?”
“I said, what do you mean ‘this body’, like you own it?” He’d ignored the question about how long they’d been married entirely, because this girl’s entire presence was beginning to grate on him in one of his more vulnerable moments. “You happen to be sitting on a dead woman, claiming her body’s yours, and you see nothing wrong with that?”
“Do you suppose I should find something wrong with it?” The girl didn’t seem to stand up or even move, yet before Dimitri’s watching gaze she rose above Byleth, stretching her legs and arms and giving a long whine as she did. “I’ve only been living inside that body for years now, it really is as good as mine. Or, was, since she seems to be deceased. What a pity.”
As he watched the girl hovering inches above Byleth, Dimitri wondered if he was simply hallucinating or if his grief had gotten too strong to bear and he was beginning to act drastically. “You asked me why you’re here, but shouldn’t you know why if you’re telling me about living inside…you know,” he grumbled, waving toward the body on the ground between them. “Shouldn’t that all make sense to you?”
“I cannot say that it does,” she replied, finding her way back to sitting on Byleth’s chest like she had before, her hair settling down around her and creating a throne of sorts that she reclined into. “I only know what I’ve figured out since arriving here, that this woman was my body and now I’m out here to see you.”
“So you’re Byleth’s soul,” Dimitri concluded with a snarl, knowing without a doubt that he was hallucinating at that point.
Her eyes going wide, the girl rapidly shook her head. “Oh, no, I’m no one’s soul! I’m the goddess Sothis, couldn’t you have already figured that much out by looking at me?” All she did was fuel the idea that none of this was real, and at her declaration of being the goddess Dimitri reached over to brush her away, and found that she was a corporeal being, flesh and blood, much like the body she sat on. “Hey, did I give you permission to touch me?”
“You—I thought—how are you—this can’t be happening.” His thoughts jumbled as they all attempted to break free of his mind, Dimitri stared at Sothis as she rubbed at the part on her arm that he’d grabbed in his attempt to dismiss her. “How can the goddess be living in the body of my wife without either of us knowing?”
“I haven’t always lived inside her, if that helps matters,” Sothis said after squishing her face in thought for a few seconds. “There was another body, before hers, where I lived until they died, then I became one with her. But now she’s dead and I don’t seem to have anywhere to call home anymore.”
While there were plenty of questions Dimitri would have asked Sothis, almost exclusively about why she was in that body to begin with, he didn’t get the chance to ask a single one before he could hear the faint wailing of sirens, salvation coming in the form of paramedics far too late. Sothis heard the noise as well and seemed to pale at the sound, her hands reaching up to the sides of her young face as she grasped her cheeks in apparent agony. “If they take her away, they’ll dispose of me,” she slowly told him, Dimitri realizing that there was nothing he could say or do to prevent that from happening. “You fool, how could you call for help when I was around?”
“I didn’t know you were around,” he pointed out, the sister realization that losing Sothis like that would mean losing Byleth forever as well, barring a final viewing before her body went on its way to her eternal resting place. “If I had known before, I still would have called, because what good can a goddess do for something like this?”
“Hm, that is quite the conundrum you present me with.” Her fingers drumming on the sides of her face as she surveyed her surroundings, making careful note of Dimitri based wholly on how much she kept going back to staring at him, Sothis eventually gave a soft chirp as she came into understanding something. “You see, I am only here because my flesh body has been stripped from me, which I was not anticipating or even expecting, especially since this is not the body I last remember calling my own. Her—this Byleth, your wife—her death is what has prompted my appearance, but…”
As she trailed off, she began floating above Byleth’s body again, flipping herself so that she could look down on her with a slowly-shaking head, her hair flying out all around her. Dimitri, at a loss for how he was supposed to proceed from there, did what the grief building in his chest prompted him to do and lunged toward Byleth, wanting to hold her as close to himself as he could for what little time they had left together. “Oh, you aren’t as stoic as I first took you to be. Does your wife mean that much to you, that you’d coddle her dead body on the side of the road?”
“Yes, she does,” Dimitri replied instantaneously, his words muffled as he pushed his face into Byleth’s collarbone, taking in every breath of her that he could. “I would think that a goddess would understand love, but here you are, showing your ignorance on the matter.”
Swinging her head from side to side, bringing with it the wave of hair that never quite seemed to hit Dimitri no matter how close it got, Sothis floated in closer to him, before brushing against him, ultimately coming to rest on his back while he still held Byleth as tightly as he could. “Such insolence, speaking to a goddess like that,” she said, haughtiness in her voice, “but I suppose that my experience with romance comes from times long ago. What a pity that you shall be losing the love of your life and that there isn’t a single thing you can do to prevent it, given that you called for help before you gave me a chance.”
“I already told you, I didn’t know you were around.” Dimitri felt like his reminder was wasted breath, this goddess wasn’t going to do anything for him anyway and she never intended on doing it.
Or so he thought. “I have a power,” Sothis started, her words sing-songing in tune with the approaching sirens. “It is a power I cannot say I use too often, but in times of great distress and sorrow I suppose I can use it, especially when it means giving my body a second chance at living her life.”
“Go on, keep talking.”
“Now that I bring up my ability to save your wife, that’s when you want to hear what I have to say!” Sothis laughed, her whole body vibrating with the sound and making it all the harder for Dimitri to stay focused on being with Byleth. “But as you wish, I can explain myself quickly but you won’t have much time to make your choice. Shall I proceed?”
In moments of grief and pain, thinking straight was not an option, and even though he still wasn’t fully convinced that this apparition wasn’t a hallucination he’d created to console himself over Byleth’s death, Dimitri gave his answer. “Proceed, before you can’t.”
“I can turn back time as far as possible, which I do believe will only be a few days, and you can do everything in your power to keep my body from befalling this fate once again. Whatever brought her to this death is set in stone, how you proceed around it isn’t.” Floating up and over until she came to sit on the ground by Byleth’s seafoam hair, Sothis looked at Dimitri with an inquisitive expression, waiting for him to respond.
He spoke nothing in return, but choked out a strong sob that he’d been holding on to, the power of his grief finally breaking his demeanor. “Oh, you may want to know that there is a catch to this,” Sothis continued, leaning in closer so that her words could be heard over the loud sirens that were now upon them. “If you so much as hint at Byleth that she dies, it will happen again no matter what you do. This is a burden you must bear all on your own, one that you can never share with her, even after her survival past this point.”
“I’ll do it,” he replied, words garbled with how choked up he was and how he had yet to raise his head from where he’d buried it in Byleth’s neck. “Anything to fix this, to bring her back, to make her mine once again.”
Even though he couldn’t see it, Sothis smiled, her eyes shining with mischief that should never have been present in such a dire moment. “Then it shall be done, her soul shall return to her flesh and the world will return to how it was days before, so that you can set things right. My divine pulse will only work this once, so if you fail there will not be a second attempt.” Before Dimitri could give any indication that he’d heard and accepted those terms, he felt himself falling asleep, the sound of the sirens and the feeling of cooling flesh disappearing from his world as he drifted through an unconsciousness he’d never felt before. The world around him was dark, almost like he was in some purgatory, not quite the beyond but not reality either, and he floated aimlessly until the distinct sound of an alarm brought him to sitting up with a jolt.
One second, he had been clutching Byleth’s dead body on the side of the road, the next he was sitting in his bed with her right next to him, holding the phone ringing with their alarm right beside him. “You overslept by a lot,” she said, completely unaware of the journey he’d just been on mentally, and as she turned the alarm off he noticed that she was fully dressed and sitting with legs crossed on the bed, in a similar position to how Sothis had sat over her corpse when they’d first met. “Everyone’s going to be here soon and you’re still going to be getting ready for the day, do you know how much we’re going to hear about that?”
“A lot, I’m sure,” he replied, thinking about when this conversation had first taken place; he ended up having to look at his own phone to see the date, jogging his memory when he saw that it was exactly three days prior to the incident that had taken Byleth’s life from him. He knew how that day’s visit with their guests had ended—and knowing that he was going to have to live through it again, he had to inwardly groan and hope for the best while expecting the very, very worst.
Three days prior to Byleth’s death, they had decided to spend their afternoon entertaining a bunch of old friends with a lunch in their flower-filled backyard, which had been planned around the idea of showing those friends the fancy, upper-class life that they’d been leading. It wasn’t any surprise that they lived in the lap of luxury, Dimitri was descended from royalty if even the royal titles had long since been retired, but Byleth hadn’t grown up in that culture and found it amusing to see how other people reacted when they were brought into the life for a little while.
She’d done all the planning for the lunch, making sure that she had plenty of food and an adequate amount of seating for the number of guests she’d planned to have over, while Dimitri had stayed on the sidelines watching her have her fun. Byleth was not the sort of woman to find forced enjoyment in housewife behaviors, yet she seemed to be having the time of her life putting together the lunch event of the year. Unfortunately for her, the first time around the lunch had fallen apart not long after it had started, when a fight had been picked from an innocent comment that one of the guests had made, something that had irked Dimitri and caused him to go a little off the deep end in his reaction. All of Byleth’s careful planning had been wasted as everyone had gone home angry, and she’d spent the night locked in her study, uninterested in speaking to Dimitri to hear his side of things.
As he lay there in the bed after having gone back horizontal after his rather abrupt awakening, still hearing her chattering about how he was going to make a poor impression on their friends with his laziness and lack of preparation, all he could think about was how he could change things for the better. He was given this opportunity for a reason, and while it was very unlikely that the argument that broke out at lunch had anything to do with Byleth’s untimely death days later, there was no reason that he had to keep it the same way. But with that in mind, he hadn’t been the one to start the initial arguing and it would be nothing but suspicious if he completely avoided getting heated when things started to spiral out of control. There was a lot of careful treading that needed to happen in order to pull off the lunch without the heartbreak it had caused the first time.
“Seriously, Dimitri, they’re going to be here any minute now and you haven’t even gotten up for the first time today,” Byleth chided, throwing a pillow at his lower body as she paced around the room, watching his every motion. “Can’t you get up and get yourself together? You know for a fact several of them are going to have things to say if you look even half as disheveled as you do on a daily basis.”
“What, do you have a problem with my everyday appearance?” She didn’t, and he already knew that without her needing to say a word—her stifled laugh was enough to make that clear. “I think that if they know what’s best for them, they’ll keep their opinions about my appearance to themselves.”
“You’re not going to make a big deal of it if they don’t, are you?” Mentally, all Dimitri could do was cringe at the question Byleth posed, not because he knew the answer the first time he’d been asked that exact same thing, but because he knew that it had been an off-handed remark about how he’d come into the lunch party the first time looking like he’d just gotten through with a fight with a wild animal that had set him off. “Please, just get yourself ready however you can and try to make at least a half-decent effort at looking nice. That’s all I ask of you today.”
He finally sat up again, kicking the blankets and the thrown pillow off of himself to bring his legs over the edge of the bed. “I’ll consider it, how about that?” he told her, a response that she didn’t want but one that she’d expected to hear, based on how she shook her head and headed out of the bedroom. With Byleth now gone, Dimitri was able to get out of the bed properly and run to the closest mirror, inspecting his reflection like he was peering through a magnifying glass. The entire concept of needing to relive three days, three emotionally and mentally destructive days, in order to prevent the love of his life from dying, it felt surreal and yet there he was, flesh and blood, standing in a place and time he’d stood before.
Just for good measure, Dimitri pinched his cheek, right underneath his scarred eye where he would only feel the strongest of touches; while the pinch itself caused no pain, the pressure of his fingers pushing on the skin was felt by the surrounding nerves and made him cough out a rough laugh. “What in the name of the goddess did she do to me?” he asked, letting go of the damaged skin and continuing to stare down his reflection in its one-eyed glory. “No one can travel back in time, it simply…can’t happen, can it?”
Pausing to listen for if Byleth was back to check on him, when he was sure the coast was clear he tilted his head up toward the ceiling in prayer, something he almost never did in the years since he’d sustained that facial injury—and since he’d met Byleth. “Sothis, wherever you are, I hope to do you proud with this task.”
There was no response, which was to be expected, but for a moment Dimitri could have sworn there was a hand tousling the back of his hair, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared to start. Whether it was Sothis telling him she was watching or not, he couldn’t be sure, but he intended on making good on that prayer. It wasn’t every day that someone got a second chance to make things right, and he was going to make sure that he did all he could to keep his wife alive this time around. But first, he needed to get ready and avoid making a scene by showing up to the garden lunch late, and dressing up was never something Dimitri had been fond of doing. Still, to keep up the appearances and to make the first change, he had to do it with at least a half-hearted attempt to do it right, and so that was exactly what he did.
Dress slacks and an untucked button-up shirt were the choice of fashion that Dimitri went with that afternoon, picking from his wardrobe of various shades of blue shirts to settle on one that had more of a lion motif going for it. Byleth always mentioned how much she adored his lion apparel when he wore it, which wasn’t very often anymore but back when they’d first fallen in love it had quickly become his go-to for impressing her. If anything was going to set him up for success, it was going to be making sure that Byleth was happy first and foremost, especially after his late morning in the bed. “Here goes nothing,” he said after finishing getting dressed, making sure his shirt was buttoned appropriately and that his hair didn’t throw the outfit off too terribly much, and his final look-over in the mirror told him that he was at least doing a good job filling his wife’s one request.
He headed out of the bedroom to the ambient sound of other people gathered in the house, many voices blending together in his head. These were snippets of conversations he knew the original conclusions to, but now that he was doing it all over, who could be certain how they would end this time? He looked over the railing that lined the upper floor of the house, down past the large staircase that led up to the landing he stood on, and couldn’t see anyone waiting there for him to come down. That was promising, meaning that they were at least on their way out to the garden already, but that meant that he was late to the party and that his arrival was going to be abrupt and cause some ruffled feathers. All he could hope was that the feathers he ruffled didn’t result in the same fight as the first time around.
As he went down the stairs, the collection of voices got louder and less distinct to pick apart, everyone seemingly speaking at once, until several of them went silent—meaning they’d gone outside while others had stayed in. Steeling himself for what could possibly be awaiting him when he got onto the lower floor, Dimitri murmured some affirmations to himself about how he was doing the goddess’ work and saving the love of his life, and he could handle anything the world was about to throw at him. What he didn’t expect was to get onto the main floor of the house, round the corner in the direction of the grand kitchen and dining room, and watch as someone actively tripped and sent a platter of food that Byleth had prepared flying into someone else’s chest.
“Annette, you were warned to be careful while carrying that, weren’t you?’ the stern, yet caring voice belonging to Dimitri’s closest friend Dedue asked, him looking down at the smears and stains that had just appeared on his shirt. “How are you going to explain to Byleth that her hard work has been ruined in a single step?”
Clearly panicking, the small and nimble Annette set the tray and what remained on it down on the first table she could and ran to start picking everything up at Dedue’s feet. “I’m so sorry, and I’ll tell her that too, I just thought that I could be helpful for a change and I totally screwed it up!”
“Is this a bad time to come in?” Dimitri asked, figuring that merely remaining on the sidelines of an event he didn’t remember seeing before wouldn’t be the best course of action. Annette looked up from the food on the floor and visibly paled at his appearance, while Dedue gave him a solid shake of his head. “I’m sure Byleth will be completely understanding about this accident. Things happen, after all.”
“You really mean it?” Annette sounded almost terrified with each word, and when Dimitri came to her and knelt down with a reassuring expression upon his face, she seemed to calm down a little. “Oh, thank everything you know her well enough to know she won’t have my head for this! I really wanted to help her out, just like Mercie is, but I…” She trailed off, her face falling back toward the food she’d dropped. “I messed it up. That’s what I did.”
“You messed up Dedue’s shirt more than anything else, all of this can be easily replaced.” As he spoke, Dimitri remembered that he had seen stains on Dedue’s shirt last time he’d lived through that afternoon, but he hadn’t asked about them because they’d only come to his attention in the moments he was being restrained by his friend. “Go, tell Byleth what happened, I’ll stay here to clean it up for you.”
She nodded in understanding and acceptance of the task he’d given her, but the moment Annette was gone Dedue was stepping further into the kitchen, heading for the sink to wash himself off as best as he could. “You really believe Byleth won’t be upset over this, hm?” he asked, Dimitri’s ears catching the dour tone in the question. “I would think that she would, after all, that was her hard work Annette just ruined.”
“I’ve ruined worse,” Dimitri replied, without missing a beat or flinching at the grunt he got in return. “Well, it’s true. Besides, she has been in a rather accepting mood since she woke me up this morning, I think if any day’s a good one to ruin her food, it’s today.”
Dedue, having reached the sink, took off his shirt to soak it in the water as he said, “We shall see how true those words end up being.”
“Whoa, what kind of scene have we walked into?” a voice closer to the front door asked, and Dimitri turned from the mess he was picking up to see Byleth’s friend Claude standing there, a finger pointing from where he was kneeling toward Dedue at the sink and back. “The two of you get into a food fight or something?”
“Annette tripped and threw a tray of food at Dedue, I had nothing to do with this.” While his clarification did nothing but raise suspicion, especially since Annette was now outside and therefore away from the scene she’d caused, Dimitri felt like clearing the air was what was most appropriate. “What are you doing, showing up late to this party Byleth’s put together? Don’t you think she’ll be a bit annoyed at you not being timely?”
“Wasn’t exactly aware of when she wanted us here, she was kind of vague on the timing.” With a shrug, Claude came closer, his girlfriend Hilda right behind him looking very much like she’d just rolled out of bed; in looking at them both Dimitri realized that he’d changed one thing already about the day in beating the two of them to coming down to the party, even if he hadn’t made it outside yet. “Everyone else already here, I’m guessing?” Claude continued, gesturing toward the back doors with his shoulder. “You won’t be too mad if we skip helping you clean up your mess and go socializing, will you?”
“It wasn’t a food fight,” Dedue asserted at the same moment that Dimitri, knowing that causing any sort of contention between himself and the other two men there in the room would lead them down a slippery slope, said that it would be perfectly fine if he did just that. Once Claude and Hilda both were gone, Dedue turned the water off and began wringing his now-wet shirt out over the sink, grumbling, “You know he will be out there blaming us both for this mess, don’t you?”
“If Annette’s smart she’ll own up to what she did, and since we both know she’ll do that, I don’t see what the problem here is.” There wasn’t a problem there, not one that needed to have any lingering impact on everything else going on around it, but Dimitri couldn’t exactly say why that was without jeopardizing everything. Not waiting for Dedue to say anything else, he went right back to cleaning up the floor, thankful that the majority of the mess was solid pieces that could be picked up easily. He couldn’t allow for his mind to dwell on the what-ifs of the moment, given that none of this had ultimately mattered the first time.
After getting the floor as clean as he could, Dimitri stood to grab some rags to wash the floor down with, but Dedue stopped him at about the time he got to the trash can to throw the food away. “You need to get outside to be with your wife, to console her if needed after finding out about this. I’m familiar enough with this kitchen to know where the cleaning supplies are, I can handle it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive, yes.” Despite being shirtless, the shirt in question still rather wet and needing a lot more time to dry, Dedue seemed steadfast in his decision and Dimitri knew better than to try arguing with him, lest he want to get escorted outside rather unceremoniously. With that in mind, Dimitri thanked his friend, cleaned off his hands in the sink (avoiding getting the shirt any wetter than it was), and headed outside to see what was unfolding out there that he’d missed the first time around.
The gathering in question wasn’t too large, only a handful of people having been invited to the lunch, but Byleth seemed proud to be looking out at each and every one of her friends that were out there at their sunny little tables surrounded by her plants and flowers. “Dimitri, Annette says you saw what happened and can confirm she tripped, is that so?” she asked, not even giving Dimitri a chance to announce his presence before he was being addressed. Unsure of why that wouldn’t be seen as the truth, he started to form a way to express that it was indeed what had happened, but he was cut off by Annette herself, looking just as scared as she had when she’d first fallen to the floor inside.
“I swear I didn’t mean to do it, I just tripped over my foot!” she sobbed, leaning over and resting her head on the shoulder of the man next to her, who looked between Dimitri and Byleth like he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to console her.
“She does speak the truth, that is what I saw,” Dimitri finally said, giving his wife a somber look. “And as you can see and hear, Annette didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“W-we can pay to make up for it,” Ashe, whose shoulder who was currently being taken hostage by Annette’s crying, quickly added. He glanced between the two, very obviously skittish about what had happened. “It couldn’t have been too much to cover it, right?”
Her eyes narrowing, Byleth was thinking over how to respond before she relaxed and gave a very succinct answer: “Correct, because you’re not paying to cover it. Accidents happen, and I wouldn’t ask you to pay for this one.”
Those words echoed what Dimitri had said earlier, and he nodded at hearing them, hoping that with Byleth being the one to say them this time they would be listened to. Evidently they would be, if going by the last time he’d lived this day was any indication, but he couldn’t be too sure. “You’re as kind as always, thank you,” Ashe said, before whispering something into Annette’s ear to get her to calm down, if only slightly.
With that matter seemingly settled, Dimitri finally made his way over to Byleth and offered her an arm for a hug, which she declined by pushing it down. “Not now, I have guests to entertain,” she told him, her face flat while she spoke. “I’ve been so busy handling Annette and her worries that she ruined lunch that I haven’t gotten to greet everyone else.”
“Surely you can greet them after we get to hug,” he retorted, but she was unfazed by it and merely walked past him to go mingle with Claude and Hilda, both of whom had plenty to say about what they’d seen inside upon their arrival. With a sigh, Dimitri looked around the garden to see who he could talk to instead, if his wife was not an option; Mercedes was sitting at one table alone, beaming toward him, but at the table next to her were two people that he’d personally introduced to Byleth way back when they’d first met, neither looking in his direction but both in the middle of conversation. A perfect time to interrupt them. “Say, aren’t you missing a third wheel?” he casually asked as he strolled over to their table, his eye shining as he looked between them.
Without so much as flinching, Ingrid waved a hand at him. “Felix decided to skip out on lunch today, we already told Byleth that. I told him his portion’s mine and he told me to piss off, so that’s where we’re standing today.”
“Dude’s got a stick shoved so far up his ass this week, it’s for the best he didn’t come with us,” Sylvain added, also not looking to Dimitri as he spoke. “It’s for the best he’s not here, he’d really kill the ‘chill garden party’ vibe Byleth’s going for if he showed up.”
“I see,” Dimitri said, pretending to stroke his chin as he didn’t see anything at all. What they were describing was fairly standard Felix behavior, reasons that he was usually fine with him not showing up places, “Well, at any rate, it’s nice to have you both here today.”
No response, not even a smile or a faked laugh, causing Dimitri’s eyebrows to furrow slightly as an automatic reaction. He opened his mouth to comment on that, but before he could say anything he watched Sylvain’s eyes darting toward someone else there in the garden, followed by Ingrid’s doing the same, and when he casually followed the gaze, he saw that they were both looking at Byleth. That was when his heart sank, finding residence down near his stomach, which was conveniently the only place on her anyone seemed to bother looking anymore.
At once, why they were acting so strange toward him made sense and he backed away from the table, hoping to avoid the obvious question he knew was coming. This time, it wasn’t obvious because he’d heard it asked before—he still hadn’t shown up by this point the first time—but because it was the question everyone always seemed to be asking them. A question that he had no interest answering, given that he knew how the next few days went in regards to that exact problem.
“Everything okay, Dimitri?” Mercedes’ kind voice asked as he walked away from the other table, and he went right up to the empty chair next to her and took a seat in it, hoping she’d pick up on his physical cues that he had no interest in that conversation. “Byleth has been keeping me updated on everything going on, you don’t have to worry about any pesky questions coming from me.” She beamed at him, which was far from reassuring to his tired mind. “I do know that things will come together for you both, exactly as they should. The goddess would never let you two suffer in silence forever.”
Apparently how they should come together involved Byleth dying on the side of the road and the goddess stepping in to intervene herself, but it wasn’t like Dimitri could say that, so he forced a smile at Mercedes. “Of course, we can only hope and pray that things work out in our favor soon enough.”
“Dedue and I both have been praying as well, for you and for ourselves on the same point.” Mercedes shifted slightly in her chair, her arms fidgeting on top of the table as she tried to maintain her pleasant expression. “There can only be so many heartbreaks before good news drops into our laps, you would think.”
This was not a conversation Dimitri wanted to be having either, but at least it wasn’t being made into a joke or laughing matter like it would have been with Sylvain and Ingrid had he been able to get them to say anything. “Perhaps when things come together for the two of you, they’ll come together for the two of us at the same time. That would make for quite the story in the future, would it not?”
“I like the way you think,” said Mercedes with a small bow of her head, expressing her agreement from head to toe. “Let us hope that it happens soon, I’m growing quite tired of the pokes and prods and the long waiting game.”
His eye glancing toward where he’d last seen Byleth but finding her gone, Dimitri’s attention shot right back to Mercedes as he replied, “I’m sure she feels the exact same way right now, but I can’t speak for her on all of that. Who knows, maybe she’s grown fond of the poking and prodding, she takes the needles like a champ.”
“Are you really talking about that right now?” As much as he expected it to be Byleth having appeared behind him to overhear what he was saying, Dimitri wasn’t too surprised for it to be Dedue, having salvaged his shirt enough to make it wearable after its hasty rinse in the sink, and he waited for the man in his seat to get up so that he could sit down instead. “I assumed today’s lunch would be a break from the medical discussions and the thinking about how cruel the goddess is to pick and choose who can—”
“You just said you though it would be a break,” Mercedes teasingly interrupted, raising a hand to gently reach over and poke Dedue’s scarred face in several places, “yet here you are, getting more into detail than either Dimitri or I did!”
“—right, my apologies.”
“Either way, the prayers are appreciated,” Dimitri said, knowing that they were ultimately meaningless in this particular instance but unable to make that the least bit evident. “Who knows, maybe this will be the year that things change for us all.” He had said it in jest, a joke that was meant to be light-hearted, but memories flashed across his mind with those words: Byleth’s dead body, the sound of the sirens as he stared down the goddess Sothis, the feeling of a corpse in his arms as he made a decision that was meant to change her life…
Nothing about this time-travel situation was going to be easy, not with the particular days that he was going to be reliving, and without another word to the two he went on his way toward the only other table he currently had any interest in visiting. Yes, he was sure that talking to Ashe would be fine, but Annette was still an emotional disaster after her fall earlier and she would be doing nothing but apologizing yet again. Besides, Dimitri knew that when he originally showed up at the party, the first table he stopped at was the one he was now going to, so he was beginning to right things back on their intended track.
“You two really decided you were going to show up late as always, hm?” he asked as he approached Claude and Hilda at their table, watching them go from playfully hitting each other with cloth napkins to sitting as tall and rigid as they could manage, almost like they had been caught in the headlights. “Not like it mattered too much, but what if this was a more important event than a simple lunch?”
“Then I’d wake up earlier and get ready quicker, next question,” Hilda replied, batting her eyelashes and reminding Dimitri that he should have done those same two things that day, both times he’d lived it. “You clearly have something else you’re here to talk to us about, so just spit it out already, we don’t have all day to wait for you to talk.”
Sputtering a bit as he processed the venom that had just been lashed at him in such a cheerful voice, Dimitri managed to say, “I…didn’t have anything else, actually. Just that.”
“Why are you over here then?” she continued, while Claude began to look at her with a bit of confusion in his eyes. “We showed up perfectly on time for things to get started, even if it might have been later than we were told to get here. You can’t tell me you’re not here to start chewing us out about something else, because that’s a total non-issue.”
The first time around, it had been something that Claude that had said that spiraled into a full-blown argument, but Dimitri felt himself wanting to snap back at Hilda and get a different fight going. “What’s the heat over here for?” Byleth asked, coming up to the table with a plate of cups on a metal tray, setting it down on the edge of the table to pass a couple out. “I don’t mind when they got here, if that’s what you’re picking fights over.”
Taking a moment to cool himself down before saying anything else, Dimitri cast an unamused glance toward Hilda, who scrunched her face in amusement back at him. “I was only making it clear that arriving on time is appropriate, even for casual events like this,” he explained, hoping that Byleth wouldn’t see straight through his lying and keep badgering him for further elaboration. She didn’t seem to care, though, shrugging it off before pulling him away from the table—or at least trying to, but his bulk was too much for her to drag away without his help.
“You’ve got to promise me you’re not going to fight with everyone here,” she begged him once they were away from the table and could whisper between each other without being overheard. “Seriously, Dimitri, I didn’t put this lunch together for you to ruin it. I put it together to have a fun get-together with everyone before…” Byleth’s voice, already low, trailed off as her attention went from her husband’s face down toward the ground, but he knew that she was intending on looking elsewhere. “I’m just saying, the next couple of days are going to be rough, and I’d like to have at least one day of fun before we tackle that roughness, either way it goes.”
Being burdened with the knowledge of how those next few days were going to go did not make hearing her say that any easier, and Dimitri had to actively turn away from her to keep himself from making what he knew too obvious. “I understand, but they should be respectful of everyone’s time, especially yours.”
“We weren’t even ready yet, it was completely fine that they showed up late. Especially since I didn’t give a solid starting time for this lunch, everyone else just showed up earlier in the time range.” There was a sadness, a melancholic tone, to Byleth’s voice that she wasn’t doing a very good job of masking, despite her eagerness to get this lunch going; Dimitri knew, without a shadow of a doubt, what that sadness pertained to, and he had zero interest in delving into it right then. That was best saved for a later time, so he could start mentally preparing for the obstacle course having that conversation would create.
“I’ve come up with a way to fix my accident from earlier!” they both heard Annette call out, and before they knew it she was standing right there with them, a glimmer in her eyes that didn’t care she’d interrupted a moment between spouses. “I’m just going to order a couple pizzas to make up for the lost food, if that’s fine by you, Byleth? I feel so, so terrible that I dropped the tray and I think that’ll be enough to satisfy everyone!”
“Hm? Oh, yeah, pizza is fine, make sure you order enough for everyone to get at least a couple slices.” Byleth’s answer was immediate, but it was obvious that she was thinking about something else, especially when she looked back at Dimitri and her face was as neutral as it could be. “It’s been a while since we had something ordered in, so it’ll be a treat. Isn’t that right, Dimitri?”
Neither of them were the greatest of cooks—cooking usually involved getting Dedue on the phone so he could walk them through the basics of meal preparing—but in the past year they’d gotten big on saving the money on meals by making them themselves, hence why they’d been staying away from eating delivery. “I suppose so,” he replied, honestly not caring what Annette did to rectify her mistake because he’d already known she was going to do that. But then, before Annette dashed back to her table to place the order, he turned to her in an instant, spooking her as she hadn’t been expecting it.
“Do…do you not want me to after all?” she asked, voice small and all evidence of her cheerfulness gone.
“I do, actually,” he replied, his mind focused on what he knew would happen with her pizzas if all went exactly as it had the first time around. “Try not to get too experimental with the toppings you pick, make sure your money is money well spent.”
As Annette perked back up and promised him he would do just that, dashing back to her table to tell Ashe the decision, Byleth looked at Dimitri with her eyebrows raising in surprise. “I didn’t think you’d be thinking about something like that,” she admitted, patting him on the shoulder gingerly. “Good on you for considering what everyone would like, and their wallets too, I guess.”
That wasn’t going to be damning enough to ruin the whole plot to save her life, yet Dimitri almost felt like he was playing with fire in that moment. He shouldn’t have said anything, he should have left that out entirely and let Annette buy the “specialty pizza of the day” that she’d previously purchased, he should have let it go uneaten and then become a tool in the fight that erupted not long after it finally arrived, the delivery driver completely shocked that anyone had purchased it to begin with. The fight probably had nothing to do with Byleth dying days later, so why was he bothering to stop it from happening in the first place?
To make absolute sure that it actually didn’t have anything to do with the death, that was why, and that was how he ended up stepping away from his wife, toward the table he assumed she’d set up for them to eat at. “You go on and keep mingling with your guests, these shoes are beginning to squeeze my feet,” he lied, knowing that his shoes were well-broken in and weren’t causing him any pain at all. Byleth seemed to know that as well but she didn’t call attention to it, telling him she’d join him later but she had others she wanted to talk to first.
Once he’d settled down in his chair at their table and taken his shoes off (to really sell the bit he was playing up), Dimitri looked out at everyone else gathered there and tried to mentally place them in the same positions the first time he’d sat there. It must have been about the same time he’d initially joined the party, meaning that all the changes he’d made to things ahead of time were now as many changes as he was going to be making. Now it was a matter of everyone else’s actions also changing in reaction to what had been changed, and hopefully making it easier for him to maintain his silence on what he’d been sent back to do. Everyone seemed content with what was going on and in good moods, even Dedue after having food flung at him, so perhaps it wasn’t such a wild idea that things would end better this time.
But all it took was one errant comment to send the fate of the day into disarray, and he knew that he had to keep his wits about him as best as possible for Byleth’s sake. He’d already had to endure some of the more painful talk when he’d been speaking to Mercedes and Dedue, and he was fully aware that it was only going to get brought up again at least once. “Are you having fun sitting there by yourself?” Claude called at him, giving him a wave to get his attention, and Dimitri broke from his mental focus to give him a stern look in return. “Yeah, didn’t think so, bring your chair over here so you’ve got company.”
“I’ll refrain, thanks,” he replied, knowing that Claude meant well but it was even easier for him to get set off by either of them there at that table. No one was particularly safe from getting him roiled up, but there were some that were safer than others, with Claude and Hilda being the bottom of the list. “Don’t want to be away when Byleth decides she’s ready to have a seat.”
“You don’t really think she’s going to be sitting down any time soon, do you?” Hilda asked him, batting her eyelashes and meeting Dimitri’s stern glare for herself. “Okay, okay, sorry, but you know it’s true. She’s too busy playing hostess to think about sitting, especially with you over there, all alone.”
“I suppose that’s true; however, why would she set up a table for us if she didn’t intend on using it?” Dimitri simply did not want to have to sit with the other two, no matter how insistent their offers would get, because he wanted to be absolutely sure that nothing bad would transpire yet again between them. “I’ll be fine here on my own, I’m sure of it.”
The look Hilda and Claude exchanged with each other was one of doubting what Dimitri said, but for the time being they backed off with their offer, merely reminding him that they were there with space if he needed it. There was a voice in the back of his mind begging him to just accept the place at their table and give it a shot, but for the moment he resisted it, waiting for something else to happen to keep him from having to walk down that path a second time. His saving grace came in the form of Dedue approaching him, straight-faced as always and looking like his shirt had finally dried from its soaking. “Mind if I have a seat with you?” he asked, motioning to the chair that was meant to be Byleth’s.
After a moment where Dimitri considered his wife deciding that was the moment she wanted to sit down before pushing it aside, he nodded and allowed for his closest friend to take the spot, at least temporarily. “I wanted to apologize for my behavior earlier,” he started, coming as a surprise to Dimitri. “For what I started to say, before Mercedes reminded me it was not an appropriate topic of discussion for right now.”
Typical Dedue, wanting to make amends for things that had long since been moved past, except in this instance that exact topic was something that was prominent on Dimitri’s mind. “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” he assured him, giving him as friendly of a smile as he could manage in the moment. “At this point, it’s something that eventually gets brought up no matter who we’re talking to, and for you to be the one to talk about it…let’s just say that it made perfect sense.”
“But the appropriateness, that is what needed to be apologized for.” Dedue sat up as stiff and tall as he could, adjusting the collar of his shirt to loosen it a bit. “This party is a celebration of friends, it isn’t the time or place for such a conversation.”
Knowing that this so-called “celebration of friends” had ended up with people at each other’s throats before and could easily end the same way again if they weren’t careful, Dimitri shook it off like it really was nothing. “I already told you, it gets brought up no matter who we’re talking to. The fact that it’s a situation that you and Mercedes are also dealing with, it just makes it more reasonable that you’d try talking about it with us.” He looked over to where Byleth was, and in a stroke of luck she was over with Mercedes herself in the throes of conversation. “In fact, I’d guess that they’re over there discussing it right now.”
“I certainly hope not,” Dedue abruptly said, causing Dimitri to give a double-take to look at him. “It’s all Mercedes has been thinking about for days, knowing that transfer day is coming up and how she wants this to be the last cycle, success or failure, for a long while.”
That felt like the same sort of conversation he’d had with Byleth time and time again, ever since they’d first embarked on their journey to becoming parents. The day they’d found out that the likelihood of them having a child naturally was borderline nonexistent and that they’d need to have outside involvement to make anything happen, they’d had a long talk about how long they’d give it before taking a break. She’d been adamant that things would come easy for them, her specific list of health issues be damned, but that was several years ago and they were still sitting in position where they’d never had more than a chemical pregnancy that may or may not have actually happened.
Everyone’s path to parenthood was different, and theirs certainly wasn’t easy, but she refused to give her body a break until she got what they wanted from it. It had actually been their struggle with fertility that had drawn her closer to Mercedes over the past years, even though they’d already been close to her due to Dimitri’s own bonded friendship with Dedue, and even though Byleth would say all of the people she’d invited were her friends, those were the two she felt the closest kinship with. “It would be nice if things would work for us all at the same time,” he repeated, as Dedue hadn’t been the one he’d said it to before. “These women, they deserve so much better than the…the torture this is putting them through.”
While Dedue nodded and muttered something in agreement, Dimitri couldn’t help but feel guilty having this conversation and knowing that for, at least them, things weren’t going to work out in their favor this time. The correct chemicals were there—as they often were—but there wasn’t going to be anything to show for it, and he was holding onto that information from everyone like a tightly-guarded secret. The two men talked for a little while longer, thankfully moving onto a different topic that ended up with them both leaving the table to go speak with Sylvain and Ingrid for a bit. When they weren’t dwelling on the heavy cloud burdening them, things were brighter and came off as a lot more enjoyable, so much different from the first time this day had happened.
This time, when the pizza was delivered half an hour later than expected, the poor delivery boy wasn’t entering into a warzone that had people screaming at each other from across the yard and throwing chairs. Instead he was coming into a pleasant afternoon of friends and lovely conversations, and was able to make his delivery without pizzas being snatched straight out of his hands. Of course, because he’d been late his departure meant a lot more apologizing from Annette, who felt it was her fault that the food wasn’t on time and that she needed to fix that problem too. Byleth put her right in her place, assuring her that all was still fine and that they could now eat a proper meal for their lunch, just like had been planned from the start.
No fighting, no arguing, everyone getting to enjoy themselves and spend the afternoon talking with friends in a lovely setting, it was almost the exact opposite of the first time Dimitri had lived the day. As he settled back at his table, still without Byleth at his side as she was playing the role of hostess up to the nines, all he could think about was how if one little change could turn the whole day around, what other changes could do to the following days. Some things were undeniably set in stone and he’d have to work around those, but there had to be other tiny details that had led to Byleth’s death, and now that he managed to get through the party in the backyard garden without pizza thrown in his face and his fist being driven into a table, figuring out those details was key.
But if only he could change all of the things that had gone wrong in those three days…