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“They’re blooming again.”
Dimitri startled; his eye lingering on the lavender fields spread out like a soft blanket upon the rolling hills that bordered Garreg Mach. The stems swayed in the gentle breeze and silken petals fluttered like a butterfly’s wings against a windowpane.
“I apologize, Professor,” he said. He nudged his stallion forward, leading the platoon back to the monastery. He had been distracted. “I am afraid I did not quite catch that.”
Byleth hummed. She rode beside him on a white mare. Her armor was worse for wear, but she was unharmed, much to Dimitri’s relief. The skirmish that they had endured had taken more effort than they foresaw.
“The lavenders,” she clarified. She made a vague gesture to the fields. “They’re blooming again.”
“I do not believe I have ever seen them bloom.”
Byleth smiled, though it did not reach her eyes. “Five years ago,” she said.
The underlying meaning behind her words struck him. Five years ago, when he and his classmates were students, when Byleth had been their professor assigned to them with no experience teaching, when there had been no real battles to fight except the ones inside themselves.
He did not reply, instead focusing on the rest of the journey ahead. The summer sun made the road glow gold and baked into him a warmth he had not grown used to. He tried to focus on these things—and not the way Byleth’s eyes spoke a thousand words he could not hear, the aroma of flowers rising through the heat waves, nor the way the sunset made her hair shine.
They reached the monastery with an hour to spare before they had lost light to guide them.
Then, just as he had for the weeks since he had come to his senses, Dimitri beelined toward the Blue Lions’ old classroom. They had been using it to strategize and have seminars, but he had additionally repurposed it into an office of sorts. It was there that he had piled the papers and missives he had ignored for months while he was on his rampage of single-minded revenge, and cloistered himself at a desk that was both too small and too rickety for him to sit. Not that it mattered.
He needed to redeem himself.
How many hours ticked by, he did not know. The strain on his eye caused the text he read to blur, and he rubbed at the eye hidden under his eyepatch as it ached in protest.
He barely registered the door creaking open. A more alert version of himself would have considered looking more presentable as steady footfalls made their way toward him.
“You haven’t slept.”
Dimitri glanced up and was met with Byleth’s emerald eyes. The flame of the oil lamp on the desk flickered in them, oddly inviting.
“No,” he replied. “But I will.”
She tilted her head as if about to ask a question, but her gaze lingered on him. He watched her nod after a moment, then walk with a hesitant step into the hall where she disappeared.
And, like the liar he was, he did not sleep.
He only realized that morning had arrived when he heard chirping outside. The birds had awakened with the dawn.
He stood, the too-small chair wobbling as he left it, and noticed that the oil in his lamp had fizzled out anyway. He lifted it from its spot, intent to bring it back to his quarters to refill it later. But when he stepped out into the courtyard, he remembered the summer heat. He was not sure how he had forgotten, considering the number of furs he typically wore, a fact that others not from Faerghus had scolded him for in the past.
But here he was, submerged in the morning light of an unforgivable sunrise, finally accepting that he had sweated through both his smallclothes and the undergarments he wore beneath his armor.
It was with a heavy sigh that he decided he needed to bathe.
Dimitri picked out the stall in the bathhouse that he normally chose, and was surprised to note that there was fresh, warm water that filled the tub. He blinked, at first calling for someone. Perhaps he was stealing their spot? But no one replied, and there was no one around.
He succumbed to his exhaustion, plunging into the water and surrounded by a somehow familiar scent.
Later that morning, he found himself napping against a pillar in the ruined cathedral when he had wanted to beg the Goddess for forgiveness as the ghosts of his father and Glenn haunted the outskirts of his vision.
Then, he noticed he smelled that scent everywhere. At meals, Mercedes baked biscuits laced with it. He could not taste the honeyed bread like the others could, but that same sweet and calming fragrance perfumed his broken palate. Byleth’s content smile as she bit into one was enough for him to know he could not have been the only one.
At night, the rough cotton of his pillow cocooned him with it until he slept without the nightmares of failures cloying at the far reaches of his mind.
He did not know where this scent came from, this fickle, delicate thing. After a few days, he started to look for it. In his food, in his baths, and even in the new welcoming scene of his room.
But there was blood on the battlefield that day. Too many soldiers had died by his hand. Their heads flew, their limbs torn to shreds, the Empire simply an enemy to defeat.
So, he sat once again in his too-small chair at his too-small desk.
An hour passed, and Byleth entered, holding a tray with a teapot and two cups. She placed one full cup before him, and her fingers brushed his.
Without a word, he took the handle of the cup offered and sipped from the rim. His eyes widened.
“Lavender,” Byleth said. “It calms the nerves.”
Dimitri’s lips parted, hovering over the lip of the cup. Beyond the steam that curlicued from the tea, she was a beautiful enigma coming to light before him.
The scent of lavender pulled them together.
“Fear is a sickness,” Byleth murmured, “You don’t have to abide by it.”
He slept well in her arms that night.