Chapter Text
Target: Lysithea von Ordelia
Location: von Ordelia Estate
Relevant Information: Her parents are visiting Deirdru for her medication and on business within the Alliance. The estate is low on staff due to tight pursestrings, infiltration should be ideal. The target is currently faring poorly, known information suggesting that the crest experimentation is the root cause.
Lady Edelgard has a fondness for the heiress, likely due to their shared past experiences. Treat her with care if possible, eliminate her if you must.
Ideal outcome is that Lysithea returns to the fold as an Eagle and joins you in Garreg Mach.
It would be a poor portent should you fail in your first mission, Professor.
See that you don't disappoint.
-Marquis Vestra
***
Byleth huffed as she readjusted the pack on her back, pausing at the edge of the forest before the wide open gardens of the von Ordelia estate. She knew from Hubert’s report that Lysithea’s parents were gone for at least the next few days and a quick scan of the grounds before her validated his suspicion that the estate was understaffed as well.
She smirked, laughing quietly to herself.
At least Hubert hadn’t fed her false intelligence like she had half a mind to suspect. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had set her up but she appreciated that he hadn't. She wanted to believe that he supported her in this effort or else he wouldn't have shared the information in the first place, but it was equally possible he wanted her out of the way.
A small part of her chose to believe that he genuinely believed in her attempts at reuniting their family.
There were no guards posted outside, seemingly nobody patrolling either. That made sense to Byleth given that the war hadn't reached here, the Imperial presence in the Alliance currently bottled up around the Bridge of Myrddin and no official occupation of the monastery yet established.
Byleth heaved her pack off her shoulder, dropping it under the large oak tree, and began to rifle through it for a few things. She didn't want to carry the whole pack through a mansion if she didn't have to and already the hike from her horse through the woods had been an ordeal.
Heavy drinking and abusing the divine pulse had caught up to her body, but it was good exercise. She'd stayed away from alcohol a few days now, her body still struggling to cope with its absence, but she had to be better.
She would be better.
The alternative was unthinkable.
Byleth grabbed a grappling hook tied to a length of rope alongside a loose pouch of gold and a spare knife. She slipped the knife into her boot, secured the gold in the breast pocket of her overcoat, and coiled the rope and hook around her off hand. A quick glance over the rest of what she’d brought, mostly supplies for the road, confirmed there wasn’t anything else she imagined requiring today.
She headed off.
***
Byleth huffed at the top of the balcony, skipping the entirety of the first floor with the help of the grappling hook and rope. As she had drawn closer, a pair of balcony doors overlooking the gardens were wide open and it seemed both the natural entry point as well as likely to be one of the better views in the estate. She picked up the hook from between a pair of granite posts of the balcony, coiling the rope round her hand once more and exhaled as her lungs burned.
She would certainly need to take up a proper calisthenics and running regimen once the pair of them returned to the ruins of the monastery.
Now that she was on the second floor, hopefully avoiding any servants that would need threatened or bribed along her path, she could find her-
“Professor?” Byleth perked up, finally getting a good look into the room proper past the curtains of the balcony as a ball of white hair shifted in a grand bed. “Professor! Where have you been?”
Byleth pulled the billowing white curtain off to one side, stepping into the grand bedroom with Lysithea in a bed much too big for her. Her heart was thumping in her chest, joy threatening to overwhelm her as she saw the ghost in the back of her head turned once more into a real, breathing woman again.
Lysithea was in bed, blankets pulled up to her chin, and a mound of pillows behind her to prop her upright. A few books were scattered to one side, on the other tucked under her arm laid a stuffed bear dressed in the monastery’s school uniform with red highlights and gold trim. She paid little attention to the room around them both, a motley gathering of portraits, books, and clothing.
“I was recovering from the battle years ago.” Byleth caught her breath, hoping to find confidence while doing so but failing. “I was lost, but now I am here.”
“It was quite the blow.” Lysithea glanced down to her lap, belatedly hiding Bernadetta’s creation under the blankets. “Losing you, I mean.”
Byleth found her feet to fall heavy like granite.
Lysithea had great, dark bags under her eyes and her skin was sallow, the bones of her arms and shoulders visible even in the lowlight of her bedroom.
She knew her student had suffered during the war, that Lysithea was far more fragile than Edelgard was by virtue of being a prototype. But she had always eaten, had seen the sun, and lived for years until-
Byleth blinked, wiping at her eye as she realized she’d forgotten how her students had first been at her return. They had suffered in her absence, they had grown apart and grown disheveled and she would have to reunite them as she had once done already.
The first time had been easy, Seteth and his knights playing messengers across Fodlan to bring her Eagles back together.
This time she would put in the work herself.
“Edelgard lied to all of us and then you disappeared.” Lysithea coughed in her hands, empty and hollow. “I know we made a promise to return to the monastery-”
“We can still fulfill that promise.” Byleth smiled, truly smiled, as she approached Lysithea on the bed.
She didn’t stand, leering over her student like she imagined the nurses, their servants, and her parents did. Byleth shook her head, patting the edge of the bed, and took a seat so that she only needed to reach out her hand to touch Lysithea. In a way, she supposed, that’s all this trip really amounted to.
Trying to close the distance between her and her students so that she might reach out to them again.
Lysithea licked at her dry lips, her bloodshot eyes staring at Byleth. Her student looked at her, biting her bottom lip, and the white hair of her eyebrows furrowed in the dull light that seeped through the curtains. “What do you mean?”
Byleth smiled. “I'm there, so is Edelgard and-”
“But you denied her!” Lysithea cried out, another round of involuntary coughing bursting from her hollowed our chest. Spittle collected at the corners of her mouth, Lysithea scowling at herself as she dabbed the wetness and bubbles away from her cracked lip.
Linhardt would be her next student she found, she had always known this but watching Lysithea suffer like this so early in this timeline-
Byleth knew the war waged around them, but she wouldn’t be taking up arms against Edelgard this time. Faerghus stood strong while the Alliance splintered, Rhea was captive in Enbarr, and Seteth had no mind for military tactics. She would collect her family, one by one, and they would heal Fodlan and purge the continent of the Agarthans.
Together.
But that meant her family had to survive, the strongest and the most vulnerable among them being one and the same in Edelgard and Lysithea. She shook off the growing fear that her blood would no longer be sufficient to keep Lysithea going as it had before.
“I did.” Byleth nodded, her hands squeezing together as they rested in her lap. “It was a mistake, Lysithea.”
Lysithea’s eyes trailed off, away from Byleth, to stare at the manuals and treatises between the two of them. Her shoulders hunched over, fingers clenching and unclenching at the blankets surrounding her. “Is Edelgard too busy to come visit herself?”
“She isn't but-” Byleth bit her lip.
There was no timeline that discussing how busy Edelgard was would mollify Lysithea, not when their rupture had been so deeply personal. She had no ability to rewind time, no way to catch her mistakes and slip-ups, she needed to think carefully and thoughtfully about how she approached the subject.
“I know you regret not taking her side, Lysithea.” Byleth reached out her hand, slowly, and let it rest across an open book between the two of them with her fingers outstretched in an invitation. She smiled, softly, as she looked at her student. “I did, too. But we can fix this mistake, we can make the change together.”
“Professor…” Lysithea trailed off, still chewing on her bottom lip. Her eyes looked at Byleth's hands, but her own remained gripping the blankets instead.
“I'm going to find Linhardt next. I would rather you take my hand, for you to return and join us, but I'll be asking him to begin his research with full funding for you and Edelgard both.” Byleth kept her smile, forcing herself to wear it, and swallowed down the anxieties that plagued her.
It had only been a few days with the shackles of her heart undone, the full range of human emotion available to her, and they were such exhausting things.
“I am tired, Professor.” Lysithea laid back against her pillows, her eyes staring at the plain white ceiling above them. “I am tired of being a drain on my family, tired of counting the months down, tired of being tired. Most of all, however, I am tired of the lies.”
“Lysithea, I am not-”
“I know.” She croaked out, looking to Byleth with the glimmer of a smile. “It isn't you, Professor. I believe you will try, you always did.”
“But she deceived us, all of us.” Lysithea dryly swallowed, wincing as she stole another shortened breath. “She was complicit in Remire, with your father, and I would have followed her but she-”
“Was afraid of reaching out.” Byleth helpfully supplied, trying to smile but finding only the bitterness that had grown in her soul like a fine vintage. “Afraid that we'd spurn her, that we wouldn't understand, and that started with me. I didn't understand, then, but I declined her invitation to Enbarr weeks before.”
“For her crowning ceremony?” Lysithea tilted her head against the pillows, ever so slightly.
“It was my fault.” Byleth nodded, her outreached hand retreating to find its partner still in her lap. “She tried with me first and I… I failed her.”
Byleth scooted along the bed, inching closer to Lysithea as she stared at her student. Her collar bone was clearly defined, the bones in her hand rigid and obvious, and Byleth wondered if it was solely due to the experiments that Lysithea was wasting away. “But it doesn't have to be this way.”
“It doesn't.” Lysithea nodded, her hand growing into a fist and pounding the stuffing of her mattress in frustration. “But having a hollowed out, dying girl at your side is only a distraction now-”
“The pain, the torture, wasn't your decision.” Byleth outstretched both arms, ever so slightly, and gazed upon her fragile student with only the love in her own heart. “You would never be a distraction, only ever someone we care for. Someone we love.”
Lysithea nodded, almost too quick and too little to be discerned, but Byleth had caught her acceptance.
Byleth stood as to not put her weight unduly on Lysithea and leaned over, enveloping her student in a hug. She smelled of medicinal ointment more than anything else, her hair felt brittle and her skin was dry but Byleth didn't mind.
Byleth couldn't mind.
Lysithea was alive, she was alive and that meant the world was still open to so many possibilities before her. She could act, she could change, she could influence the events in front of her and she would bend the course of rivers if that's what it took to save Lysithea.
Even the rivers of tears ebbing and flowing along the curves of her face as she cradled Lysithea in her arms.
Eventually, with a huff from her student not unlike that of years gone by, Byleth retreated to stand once more at her bedside.
“You have given me much to contemplate, Professor.” Lysithea huffed, a smirk growing across her face and Byleth's heart leapt as her student exhibited even a hint of her previous zest. “Despite the years, you are still giving us lessons.”
“You will always be my student, Lysithea.” Byleth grinned even as she grappled with the weight of Lysithea’s words. “But I take it-”
“Correct.” Lysithea bit her lip, slowly nodding and looking anywhere other than Byleth. “I will not be returning with you, I'm afraid.”
“I understand, Lysithea.” Byleth nodded. “If there is anything-”
“I know.” Lysithea cut her off.
She supposed the young woman had heard that turn of phrase enough lately as it stood. Far be it for Byleth to be yet one more amidst a multitude of voices offering only salves and not a cure.
Byleth lingered at the side of the bed a moment longer, Lysithea's gaze fixed to the billowing curtains of the balcony doors. She stood, slowly counting the moments, and realized perhaps that this was Lysithea's way of asking her to leave.
She took one step, then another, towards the balcony whence she came, and nearly broke into a walk as her student cleared her throat.
“Professor?” Lysithea asked, almost meekly.
She turned, looking once more upon her student as a ray of sunlight broke through the curtains to illuminate the pinks of her eyes.
“I don't want our last words-” Lysithea bunched her hands together, squeezing them tight, and offered a smile backed by a nod. “It was good to see you. Thank you for visiting me, even in this state. It means more than you know.”
“I missed you, too, Lysithea.” Byleth grinned, letting her heart latch onto the shreds of hope that Lysithea had offered. “May I write to you?”
Her words came easier to her in letters, not least because she could always rewrite or erase where she had fumbled. She would maintain correspondence with Lysithea, Eagle or not, and she would hold herself to the promise she made Lysithea.
Her students didn’t need to be battlefield savants nor politically savvy for her to love them, for them to be worthy of being loved by her. If the way Edelgard had talked about Byleth’s admission of her own shortcomings was any indication, neither did their house leader. Lysithea deserved to live, deserved the fullest range of the human experience, much as the rest of them.
She would see to it that her student would not only live, but live in a world deserving of Lysithea.
“Of course.” Lysithea nodded, falling back into her bedcushions and pillows as she fought back a rising cough. “You are welcome to visit, as well, but I have made my opinions known.”
“Thank you for the kindness, Lysithea, and if there is anything I can do-”
“You already said it once.” Lysithea scowled at her, breaking into the barest hint of a smile.
“It is important enough to say again.” Byleth grinned back at her with a nod. “Farewell.”
“Safe travels, Professor. I’ll see you later.” Lysithea said warmly to her back.
Her heart latched onto the hope behind Lysithea’s words even as her brain registered this visit as a technical failure.
So long as Lysithea still lived, there was hope for her yet.
That would be enough.
It would have to be.