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Afterward, they lay together in the darkness, slats of moonlight falling across the rumpled bedcovers. The sheets had bunched around her waist, where his fingers traced idle circles into her skin, mapping a ridge of scar tissue near the hipbone too broad and pitted to have been produced by any bladed weapon. A morningstar, perhaps. Or a flail. He couldn’t remember. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember.
Had he been by her side for that battle? Or hadn’t he? Was it before Rodrigue’s death, before he’d remembered that the safety of his comrades mattered more than vengeance did? Had anyone been there to watch her back?
“I can hear you thinking.”
His hand stopped moving.
Byleth shifted, settling her head more comfortably against his chest. “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing,” he murmured.
And it probably was. If anyone had gotten close enough to her to use a close-range weapon like a flail or morningstar, it must have been before she fused with the goddess. Nothing had been able to touch her after that. Or maybe she got the scar during her mercenary days, before he ever knew her.
He felt the corner of her mouth move against his chest as she asked, “Do you like my scars that much?”
“Mm.” It was a minute or two before he could formulate the question properly. “How did you get this one?”
“Mace. I think.”
“When?”
“About a year before I arrived.” Her voice was clear, as if she wasn’t feeling any drowsier than he was. “Lucky hit, really. Came up from behind.”
There was a long silence while Dimitri digested this. His hand settled higher, tucked around the curve of her waist.
“Did it hurt?”
“Not for too long.”
His palm skated up her waist and found her shoulder, where the tail ends of two separate scars crisscrossed each other.
“And these?”
“Sword. Machete. I was fifteen.” There was a smile in her voice. “What’s so fascinating about my scars?”
“They’re … a map of your life, I suppose. Of everyone who ever hurt you.”
“Well, don’t feel too bad for me. Anyone who managed to give me a scar, I turned around and hurt them worse.”
Dimitri smiled too. He let his fingertips circle once, twice, thrice over her shoulder; a soothing, pensive motion, as if he could return to her a little of the peace that had been stolen from her in childhood. This little pocket of warmth and safety would grow, he hoped, until neither of them ever had to go to war again – until they could spend the night together, just like this, whenever they so pleased.
And after the nights, the days, too. There was no earthly law dictating how a ruler of Fódlan might marry the living incarnation of the goddess—but if Byleth Eisner, Archbishop of the Church of Seiros, wanted to unite with someone, there was no earthly power that could gainsay her, either.
Quietly, he said, “Do you ever wonder how things might have happened … differently? If we’d met earlier, I mean.”
She laughed, a single soft exhalation against his chest. “When would we have met?”
“I don’t know. Say Jeralt took a job from my family. Or accepted a position as a royal bodyguard and … brought his daughter with him. His reputation was good enough. We might even have grown up together.”
“I can’t imagine growing up in a palace. I wouldn’t be the same person.” Pause. “Or maybe I would. But I don’t think you would have liked the person I was before the monastery.”
“Why not?”
“Well …” Byleth twisted in his arms to rest her arms on his chest, propping her chin up on her folded hands so she could look at him. “I couldn’t really connect with anyone. I barely felt anything. The world felt distant, like I was watching everything happen through a frosted window.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t have made friends.”
“I guess not.”
Dimitri weighed his next words before he spoke. “I would have liked to know your father better.”
“Yeah?”
“I would have liked you to have a safer childhood than you did,” he went on. “It’s silly of me, I know. You wouldn’t trade your time with Jeralt for anything. But – you have to understand. You’ve become such an important part of my life, I wish you could have been there with me and Felix and Ingrid and Sylvain. We would have stayed by your side, no matter what. We would have been your friends from the very start.”
Byleth laid her warm hand against his cheek. “But you have,” she said gently.
He clasped it in his own. “I would that I had been a part of your past.”
“You are part of my future.” Her thumb traced the hollow beneath his eye. “That’s all I need.”
He knew her well enough to know when she had made up her mind about something. Instead of pressing the matter, he turned his face into the palm of her hand and kissed it, in thanks, in mute concession. Then he slid a hand around to cup the back of her head and tugged ever so slightly. Byleth Eisner lay her cheek back down upon his chest and exhaled softly, and they lay there together for a long time, bathed in the moonlight coming in through the open windows.
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