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“And so it is that we have honored Gilbert’s request to allow Dimitri’s forces to safe passage over the Great Bridge of Myrddin,” Seteth explained, his tone formal, all of the focus on delivery of his report.
But Byleth pounced on the words, interrupting whatever remained of the briefing. Nothing else mattered. “Dimitri is alive?”
She knew it. She knew it.
Seteth paused long enough to raise one eyebrow in response. “Indeed. It seems that despite reports of his death, Dimitri has been hiding out in Fraldarius territory, biding his time for a counter-offensive.”
“Then we should join him,” Byleth stated decisively, her voice louder than she intended as she attempted to wield her authority.
But Seteth’s eyes merely narrowed in response to her command. “Hold a moment. We have just finished a fierce battle, and our forces are few. To march straight for the main body of the Imperial army and challenge them? It is too soon.”
Byleth opened her mouth, but Seteth fixed his gaze pointedly upon her. “Do not forget the responsibilities the archbishop left in your hands. Lady Rhea and all of Fódlan are relying on you, not just Prince Dimitri.”
Responsibilities that she had never asked for. It was an effort to not curl her lip as she hurled her next snarled threat, “Those responsibilities mean that this army is mine to command!” But the fear she had been harboring since waking of commanding anyone to their death had her already revealing her feint. “But if you refuse to relinquish them to me, then I will march to Gronder Field myself.”
Seteth’s next words were ice cold, but Byleth was certain that the malice she heard in them was coming from within herself. “I doubt that you would make it in time in your condition. You may have chosen to keep the details to yourself, but it is clear enough that your health is deteriorating.”
She wanted to scream. She wanted to rage. She wanted to throw herself against another’s blade, the only thing capable of sating the ire screeching uncomfortably within her. But she could already feel the tickle in the back of her throat. Her time was up, and it was enough to send her wordlessly fleeing from the room.
It was with a terrible retching sound, one which echoed harshly through the glass panes of the deserted greenhouse, that Byleth finished disgorging herself.
She had barely made it in time after running from Seteth’s office, driven by the incessant scratching in her throat, barely made it in time before she couldn’t hold back the fit of coughing any longer.
She swiped her hand across her chin, pulling it away to reveal a taste of what awaited upon the ground: a single white petal streaked with blood.
The floor of the greenhouse was littered with a grisly arrangement of greenery. Stems and pistils, petals and stamens. Delicate collections of baby’s breath mixed in with the soft blue of forget-me-nots, surrounded by the trumpets of white lilies.
All of it sullied with blood and spittle.
Seteth was not wrong about her health. And her resentment was not really meant for him, rather for herself that she had not abandoned the monastery to search for Dimitri earlier. Her resentment was meant for herself as she cursed her own cowardice.
She’d nearly shattered upon receiving the news of Dimitri’s death. The idea that he had faced execution in the city that should have been bestowing him a crown while she uselessly slept left her disconsolate and verklempt, content to allow Seteth to make the decisions and simply swing her sword where directed.
Until her ailments had begun.
It started small. Periodic fits of dry coughs that would on occasion produce a petal.
That had sent Byleth to the library--many an hour had been spent diving into obscure medical texts to find a few rare accounts that seemed to match her own. They all came to the same conclusion; they called it lovesickness.
Left alone, flowers would spread and begin to grow in the lungs, in the stomach, in the heart. Left alone, flowers would grow until they killed the very host they preyed upon.
There were only three cures.
The first was simple and ideal in theory: the reciprocation of the love in question. But a simple love was not the kind likely to drive the heart to illness.
The second was a procedure that seemed to carry such a high risk that it had only been attempted in dire circumstances: incising into the body cavity and forcibly removing the growth, roots and all.
There had only been one record of a successful operation performed by a doctor and a team of white mages. The patient recovered, but it seemed that it had not just removed her sickness; it also took her love.
The final cure was the most devastating to imagine, but also the one that had given her hope--hope that was easy to cling to without verifying the truth.
The final cure was the death of the beloved.
Byleth had known that Dimitri was alive because of the very affliction that now prevented her from rushing to his side.
Because she could hear it too as she busied herself with hiding the evidence of her malady amidst the soil... the prolonged death rattle of her breathing as her lungs slowly became occluded with flowers.
Sometimes when she closed her eyes she imagined what it might look like. Climbing vines winding between her organs, tangling with her veins, twisting around her heart and squeezing as if it could be forced to beat.
What a grotesque and beautiful bouquet her innards must be.
Death itself had not been able to shackle her, but love was enough to cripple her. Each burgeoning blossom just waiting to split her open and tear her apart; she’d rot along with them in the end.
Seteth had been kind enough to not question Byleth’s outburst earlier in the week or question her health again. Nor did he address her growing restlessness as the days dragged on, agitation that she felt must be obvious as she attempted to feign focus on the minutiae of the current meeting.
The door was thrown open with a crash, the inhabitants of the room all turning in response to the unexpected noise.
“Emergency!” the scout in the stone frame of the doorway nearly shouted. “In Gronder Field... There’s a... It’s…”
Byleth felt every muscle fiber within her go taut.
But Seteth responded in a measured voice, each word deliberate, “We are in the middle of a military conference. Please calm yourself and tell us what is the matter.”
The words seemed to be enough to shake the soldier from his panic, even as Byleth’s was building. “Yes, sir!” he shouted, his voice still an octave too loud. “It seems the Kingdom and Alliance armies clashed with Imperial forces on Gronder Field. Amid the chaos of three armies battling each other there, the Imperial army was routed.” The next words were a proclamation. “Edelgard sustained heavy wounds and retreated to Enbarr!”
Edelgard had retreated. That had to mean the Kingdom army had been successful, that Dimitri still lived, that he was now pursuing her and Byleth could direct the Knights of Seiros to follow.
“Well then!” Seteth responded with a rather intentional glance in her direction. “I suppose--”
The scout interrupted quickly. “Sir! The Kingdom army was also decimated and...” A breath of hesitation. A breath in which Byleth felt her blood run cold. “His Highness, Dimitri, has been counted among the dead.”
She barely felt Seteth’s eyes on her for the briefest moment before she fled from the room once again.
Byleth didn’t make it as far as the greenhouse this time, not with desperation driving her. She could smell it when she opened her mouth, wafting up from her guts--the sickly sweet scent of putrefaction.
And with the revolting aroma, her terror threatened to spill over. If only it was the familiar tickle in her throat, a suddenly absent sensation.
She barely made it to a corner of the courtyard before she forcibly gagged, attempting to regurgitate any foreign material within her body. She heaved again and again, but the only thing she managed to spew was the dead remnants of flora, which she took up with shaking hands.
If she planted the decaying stems, would they bloom once more? If she restored the rotting roots, would his lungs fill once more; would his heart beat once more?
“It has been a lifetime... Hasn’t it, Professor?”
It was a voice that had her whirling, recovering and standing as swiftly as she could, turning in the direction of the sound.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, clutching the proof in her hands, blossoms in the midst of decomposition.
“Yes... I thought so too,” he responded in a melancholy tone.
It didn’t matter that the tone of voice was deeper. It was still his. It was his melancholy. And as she beheld him, it didn’t matter that five years had passed.
His hair was longer, a disheveled, unkempt mane of blonde. He had been tall before, but now he towered over her, a mass of muscle and broad shoulders. In five years it was natural that he had matured. But the leather patch over his eye was the opposite of routine, instead evidence of the pain that he had endured in her absence, pain that she had been unable to protect him from.
But as pained as she felt, his voice was far more mournful as he continued, “I wanted to slice her throat... but I did not get the chance.”
If only she had not been so ill, if only she had not been such a coward...
Dimitri did not hesitate to fill the void left by her silence. “I let people die, and yet... I still stand. Rodrigue, Gustave, Dedue...”
Take me with them, take me with you, she wanted to beg. But hearing the anguish within his voice, she knew what a selfish request that was.
“There must be a reason you survived,” she insisted instead, the lie tasting bitter on her tongue. Because she knew the truth as surely as she knew the festering taking place within her own body.
She was met with a laugh; a sad sound. “You sound just like Rodrigue. A reason...”
It was a question she had asked herself. A question that had always circled back to him. If he was alive, then she could accept her own miraculous recovery. But without him, what was her own reason?
“Everyone gives such complicated advice, and I can never quite grasp it all. That is why...” Dimitri took a deep breath, offering her the ghost of a smile. A ghost that fit all too well with his overall demeanor. “Professor. I came here to explain my decision.”
Byleth shook her head desperately, clinging to the lifeless blossoms in her grasp as if her grip could keep him here. “Please,” she murmured.
But he was already shaking his own head. “I have no resources to take back the Kingdom capital, much less to defeat the Empire. And that is why...”
“Please,” she whispered again as she pressed the cadaverous blossoms into his grasp, as if it could tie him to life, tie him to her.
The words, the truth, was on the tip of her tongue.
I love you.
“Byleth! You will catch a cold sleeping in a place like this!”
Jarring words shook her awake, ice already settled into her bones.
“Is something the matter?” Seteth asked.
She blinked, trying to place where she was, trying to place where he was.
Seteth’s brow furrowed in concern. “Hm? I am the only one here. Were you dreaming?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t say for certain that you were dreaming, but if someone did come here to see you... That person only wanted you to see their face. Perhaps they wanted you to guide them...”
Byleth glanced down to see her hands empty. She took a deep, quaking breath to find her lungs clear. She knew the devastating truth.
There was no one left to guide. There were no flowers left to even place upon the grave her heart had become.