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Byleth sat against the chapel wall, pressing the back of her head into the cold hewn stone wall for a semblance of relief. Her mouth was dry and she could feel her eyes burning, surmising that perhaps her pupils were constricted.
It had been a good morning with Edelgard.
A good morning with El, Byleth correcting herself as she smiled at the memory.
They hadn’t caught any fish, more to El’s sorrow than Byleth’s own, but they had made plans to go fishing again.
Edelgard had said that they hadn’t planned at being in Garreg Mach for long, using it as a waystation en route to Leicester lands, but that having Byleth among their ranks changed matters. It was a difficult location to keep supplied and easily cut off with neither Edelgard nor Hubert afforded the luxury of staying in one place for long as they bore both the burdens of executing the war and administering the Empire at once.
But with Byleth on their side, Edelgard believed it could be an asset to control rather than a liability, and Byleth had been quick to validate that thinking. Not only because that line of thought made her feel wanted, valuable, but because that was precisely what she had done in her past lifetime with Garreg Mach.
Garreg Mach may be difficult to keep supplied, but it was an ideal staging ground for highly mobile forces to quickly pivot across all of Fodlan.
The details hadn't been ironed out yet, Byleth still thinking through her approach for finding her wayward students and bringing them home. She knew that a pile of Hubert's reports waited for her to help guide her decision making and she wanted to read them but-
She clutched her head tightly, one hand wrapped around her temple as she squeezed at it in vain. Her head had been throbbing for what felt like hours now and she wasn't about to bother Edelgard with such a minor nuisance.
“You are poisoning yourself.” Hubert hovered over her, his black hair slicked off to one side. He stared down at her, a distance of several feet between them, and he chuckled as his black cape billowed in the wind. “A pity, really, seeing as how I wished to do that once. Perhaps I still do for all you know.”
“How is that?” Byleth stared up at him, ignoring how the afternoon sun wanted to gauge her own eyes out.
“Alcohol.” Hubert shook his head, making the closest noise he could to a wry laugh as he watched her squirm on the ground. “I suspect nobody bothered informing you that it is, in fact, a poison. It dulls your wits, your senses, and your body develops a taste for it that isn’t easily forgotten.”
“I hadn’t realized.” Byleth grunted, fighting to get onto her own two feet. She leaned against the wall for support as she ambled upright, one elbow against it for support as she stood. “Is there a cure?”
He stared at her for a moment too long, the silence between them growing awkward, but Byleth smiled in the face of his power play.
Hubert seemed unsettled by that.
Byleth had too many awkward conversations over the years with Rhea to care much for his antics. If anything they made her feel more at home, knowing that Hubert at least deigned her worthy enough of his derision and that was a kind of victory all on its own. She looked up at the top of the chapel, the sunlight glinting off the belltower, and winced as she looked back to Hubert.
“Time and sobriety, nothing else will do.” Hubert clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in disappointment, eyeing her up and down. “Lady Edelgard tells me that you believe yourself to be an ineffectual fighter.”
“I don’t believe, I know.” Byleth corrected him.
She couldn't rewind time.
Hadn't led a proper army since the original war a century ago, only dealing with bandit excursions and shows of power since. Largely on her own, no less.
Was a bit fond of the bottle which evidently had contributed to her loss of stamina for the total of these two days she'd been truly human.
“Why is that?” Hubert pressed, glowering at her. “Why would you bother Lady Edelgard with your presence if you are useless?”
Byleth hadn't known Hubert to be a mind reader in the first timeline, she laughed mirthlessly as her grin turned to a scowl, but perhaps things were different this time.
“Because I want to help where I can.” She nodded, licking her dry lips and she nodded another time. “Because she believes in me more than I do myself.”
If she thought for a moment that Edelgard was truly better off without her, that she believed their cause was weaker for entertaining Byleth's presence, she would depart for the ruins of Remire and live there for the rest of her days. But Edelgard had insisted every time that they talked that she believed, against all odds and all logic, that Byleth had a place at her side.
“You already spurned her once.” Hubert glared, never blinking as his dark pupils stared into whatever constituted the remnants of her soul. “Have you come to hurt her a second time?”
“No.” Byleth swallowed both the lump in her throat and the memory of impaling Edelgard on her sword, shaking her head. “Never.”
“Your hair is your old color, any dye would do that trick.” Hubert scoffed, pacing around her as he jabbed his glove hand toward her navy hair. “Your tale is so far in the clouds that there is no way we could possibly verify it.”
She didn’t know if he meant her regrets for betraying them in the mausoleum or her connection to Sothis, but she didn’t ask.
“We always knew that we would walk on this path alone.” He muttered under his breath, more to himself than to her. “We don’t need your help, Lady Edelgard’s thoughts to the contrary.”
She hummed to herself for a moment as something slowly dawned on her.
This anger, this venom of his, wasn't entirely for Edelgard's benefit nor entirely on her behalf.
Hubert was hurting too, and had been hurting for the last five years.
Edelgard had tried to make friends while at the Academy, tried and failed because Byleth-
She shook her head.
Hubert had been so certain that they could never make allies, let alone true friends here, that he'd never opened his heart to any of them. But she had spoken with a time or two, deeply and meaningfully, after finding his favorite coffee beans and returning his favorite razor that he had misplaced. They weren’t close, Byleth wouldn’t delude herself, but she found him seeking her out and managing to relax as much as the man could relax.
He had wanted to believe in her, had wanted to be wrong in the walls that he had built, and Byleth could feel the wind knocked out of her as she found the sole person who might truly understand what it was like to be surrounded by people who pretended to like you for a century and-
“I am sorry.” She squeezed her eyes closed, clenching her fists at her side, and slowly exhaled before opening to face her former student. “I am sorry that I abandoned you, that I abandoned El. I never meant to hurt either of you, certainly never in the ways that I imagined, and if I could have rewound another five years to that fateful day in the mausoleum I gladly would have to spare you both the pain of these past few years. I wanted you to like me, then, and I understand that maybe you did before everything-”
She shook her head, wiping her fingers at the corners of her eyes to clear away the growing tears.
This was about Hubert and his pain, not about her.
“As for proof, I have nothing truly tangible that isn’t circumspect.” She nodded, wearing a weak smile. “But I didn’t come empty handed.”
Edelgard was right. She knew things. She could be useful. She could do this.
“I know for a fact that you are planning on staging a coup in Brigid to try and pull them over to your side, with or without Petra.” Byleth smirked. “You deem it important enough that you will oversee the operation personally.”
Hubert scowled at her. “That is a top secret-”
“Speaking of Petra,” she reached into her coat pocket to fetch her borrowed flask and reached out to offer it to him, “I believe this is a flask that she stole from you as a prank during the school year.”
His eyes watched her carefully as he took the flask in his hands, carefully checking the bottom and his eyes widened as Hubert clearly found whatever mark he had been searching for. He whispered something underneath his breath, too quiet for her to hear, as he looked to the sky for a moment.
“My last piece of evidence is perhaps the flimsiest, although the most damning if you’ve realized it already.” Byleth exhaled slowly before inhaling, aware that she was basing this last gamble purely off the conjecture of those final visions she had seen before being wrenched away from her connection to Sothis. “You have a crush on Bernadetta, you’ve dreamed of having coffee in the morning with her while she crochets.”
“That is preposterous!” Hubert blushed as he shouted, looking around for a moment before glaring at her. “My life is Lady Edelgard’s-”
“And she would want you to be happy.” Byleth smiled with a small nod, circling around Hubert to put his back against the wall instead. She smiled not because she was winning, though that was enjoyable in and of itself, but because they both knew she was right.
Edelgard would want both of them to be happy.
“I don’t want to fight you, Hubert. You may keep me in the dark, you may stalk my every shadow, you may have spies tail my every move. I don’t mind.” Byleth shrugged her shoulders, rubbing the back of her head even as the migraine made her wince.
“No torture that you could surmise would beat the century that I have endured and every day in this timeline is a blessing that I will cherish.” It was her turn to stare into his eyes, to look into his soul, and she laughed to her own surprise as she beamed in glee. “My mission has no bearing on your own, nor even the campaign itself for the time being.”
Hubert’s natural scowl reasserted itself over his face, his eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “What could you possibly do that our forces could not achieve?”
“I’m getting my students back.” Byleth grinned with a nod of her head, tapping her hand against the Sword of the Creator at her side. “All of them.”
“An admirable, if lofty goal.” Hubert grinned sardonically, clearly skeptical. “The other Eagles have scattered, bereft of their nest in the Empire thanks to you. If you return them, perhaps we may speak again.”
“I would expect nothing less.” Byleth stepped away from Hubert, giving him the room needed to comfortably walk away. “I didn't come back only for her, Hubert. I care for you too.”
“May your actions bear out your words.” Hubert said in the guise of a threat as he walked by her.
Byleth heard it as a hopeless prayer, coming once more to rest again on the ground outside the chapel with her head against the cold, hewn stone.