Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As a matter of scientific interest, he’s been observing the new professor.

He has to convince himself it’s scientific, because that way it’s interesting. He’d strictly decided that at school he would not do anything that didn’t interest him, so this way he could justify the attention he’d been paying. When his father sent him to Garreg Mach, Linhardt couldn’t have been more relieved. It would be, perhaps, the one opportunity he’d ever have to be on his own, to pursue the things he actually cares about. Dredged out from the political swampmire of his home and family, he was determined to allow absolutely nobody to take his time away from him. They would try, of course, to determine how he was allowed to exist—but none of them were his parents. They weren’t allowed to fill his pillowcase with nettles or remove his bedroom door or or poke him with sewing needles when he nodded off at his desk. At a school like this, whose reputation depends on maintaining relations with nobility, who is going to be the idiot who offends one of them by mistreating their child? The authority these people were going to have over him held absolutely no water when measured against the position of his father. “Student” is the closest thing to “free” he is ever going to be. On arrival, he had firmly intended to pack this one bright patch with enough self-enjoyment and peace and leisure to last him the rest of his life. Because it needs to. He’ll never get any more of such things for as long as he’s fated to live.

But he can’t very well ignore the crest of flames, can he?

In the few months since the school year began, Byleth Eisner has been the source of mountainous levels of gossip. Sorting through it to get to the truth seems an insurmountable task, but one thing can’t be contested. He bears Nemesis’s crest. Linhardt, having expected little more from his time here than a peaceful delay against the dreadful beginning of his life, is not sure whether to be overjoyed or exasperated beyond belief. He had planned to spend this time avoiding doing much of anything, but here now is something—someone, who makes him want to act, to do work. Just to find out. He never could resist a mystery.

Figures that a long-lost crest of legendary power would resurface right in his face, positioned between him and all the slacking off he’d so been looking forward to. Figures that the crest-bearer would speak like the mist crawls and look at him with seaglass eyes.

Linhardt had so far spent his time at Garreg Mach drifting in lukewarm currents, snagged occasionally by odd fishhooks tugging him in different directions. There is Lysithea, who he is fairly certain has never occurred before in the entire history of crestology. There’s Marianne, who wouldn’t have even had to worry about him investigating her secret crest if she didn’t make such a fuss over hiding it. Flayn had the major version of his own crest, and that wasn't even the most interesting thing about her. Hanneman, the reason he’d convinced his father to select Garreg Mach as his school, always regarding Linhardt with the eye of someone evaluating tomorrow. And here now, above all, there is Byleth, who every single person in this place seemed to have a theory about, each one wilder than the last.

He seems to be a bit lost at first, unsure of himself in this new responsibility, and Linhardt can certainly sympathize with that. He sometimes catches a glimpse of him lost in the hallways, and offers directions. That was their first conversation, as a matter of fact. Two days later he was surprised to be approached by the Professor with a thank-you gift in hand. By then, Linhardt had entirely forgotten the thing he did to deserve thanks, but he'd certainly not turn down a free owl feather. Maybe that's what first grabbed his attention, or broken the ice. He looks for ways to help Byleth when he seems to flounder in his new social situation, or stumbles in his new environment. But the Professor is quick to adapt, and shows a rapidly growing aptitude for teaching that soon has his students and colleagues alike talking. He approaches everything he attempts with complete, though often silent, earnestness that propels him and his students forward in bounds. The chatter about him amongst monastery inhabitants only grows the more he blooms. And a fine bloom it is. Linhardt finds himself looking more and more for opportunities to appreciate the sight.

They’d lately made a habit of taking tea together. Which is something no one had expected of a mercenary, much less expected him to be any good at. He is. When Byleth first invited Linhardt to one such evening, he’d leaped at the opportunity to interrogate and examine the first-hand source. Things had not gone at all to that plan. The Professor has a way of directing you onto whatever course he’s charted and tricking you into enjoying yourself. Tea time, apparently, is tea time, and nothing else. Somehow they’d ended up discussing not crests, but the merits of live bait verses lures, and where Linhardt’s hairband came from, and who may have put that note in the counselor’s box about dreaming to be a Pegasus knight. The time they’d passed together didn’t gain him what he’d sought, but somehow still didn’t bore him. It was very…charming. He. Is charming.

The new Professor has a penchant for distraction. The way he pours water over chamomile and smiles as gently as the spring thaws makes Linhardt think of leisure and peace, of powdered sugar, of featherdown. All the best things about life. And does he have to be so…ngh. Suffice to say that looking at Byleth makes it hard to look at anything else.

It's not in Linhardt's wheelhouse to know how to cope with all the unexpected by-products of this field study. He's stubbornly not recording all the ways Byleth affects him, because they're foolish and not worth dwelling on. Like the way his carefully organized thoughts all fall into a jumbled pile when the sunlight hits his hair. Or how his stomach aches every time he senses that he's upset and won't be soothed until he sees him at ease again. He'll often find that he's been reading the same page over and over without absorbing a word, because he can't figure out what that slight twitch of Byleth's brow had meant during their last conversation. Experiments have lately been ruined when a beaker explodes after he's left it too long on a lit burner because someone said that the new professor was out in the courtyard playing with the stray cats, and how could he possibly miss out on witnessing that?

However, because he is nothing if not diligent, Linhardt had managed to get in a few prying questions during the course of his investigation. He's asked Byleth about his crest. About his background, his abilities. Family history. And he's come to find out that Professor Eisner has no clarity to offer in relief of his own mystery.

Oh, but he's rather not, is he? Mysterious. For all the reputation he'd garnered, all the foggy scenes that illustrate his story—once one investigates him, there are simply no answers to be dug up. And not through lack of cooperation. Therefore Linhardt has to conclude that this grandiose, unapproachable question is not seated within Byleth, but rather, had been crafted and perpetuated and added on to by all those around him. The Professor hides no secrets, certainly never tries to deceive—well, what had he to conceal, even if?

The way Byleth’s eyes dull when asked such things—about his age, his childhood, his mother—it chimes a dusty bell in the back of Linhardt’s mind. Its tone rings of overworn bitterness and makes him inexplicably sad. The way Byleth closes up like wood sorrel at dusk every time he lacks an answer for a question, staring at the floor as he waits for the disappointment of others to wash over him and then ebb away. That sort of reaction makes it hard to interrogate him for long. Linhardt always ends up changing the subject, looking for one that might make Byleth edge close to a smile. That in itself is an entire field of study—one which poses a very real threat of getting him sidetracked for a good while.

He realizes quite quickly that Byleth is made entirely of glass. It's just opaque, frosted. Perhaps stained in pieces that form a mural if looked upon in full. He's an open book in a dead language. And isn't there something prideful in the way Linhardt just knows he can decipher it? Something possessive, private. That, even though everyone is looking, Linhardt is the only one who really sees him. Or could, if he’s clever, and if he's any good at what he does.

Yes. This time. Focus. He will absolutely stay on task.

"Professor," he asks, at the first opportunity. "May I ask for your assistance in learning something new?"

Backlit by a tall window in a way that makes his dark hair glow, Byleth raises his head from a stack of paperwork. In the empty classroom, he appears to be grading exams. Lindhardt has no idea why—reflex? habit?—but he steals a quick glance at the top of the pile (Hilda is in deep trouble in the area of horseback riding) before Byleth deftly flips the paper over.

His expression mild, he speaks deliberately, as he always does. "That is the description of my job, yes."

Linhardt's tired eyes light up, because he had spent some time crafting his approach in just such a manner as to elicit this response and is quite satisfied to find that it had worked perfectly.

For Byleth's part, he is quite content to let his attempt at humor fly right over the earnest student's head.

"That's what I thought you'd say," Linhardt's quickened voice is colored with a dose of happy satisfaction. "It requires a sample of your DNA. If you'll just use this vial, and make sure to secure the cork tightly so that the sample won't become contaminated."

Staring at the small glass bottle now sitting in front of him on his desk, Byleth's eyes wash over with a cloudiness that Lindhardt recognizes as a close relative of disappointment. Trepidation, perhaps?

"Yes," he ventures, "that really is is all. Not much effort at all, is it?"

Linhardt seems rather proud of that, Byleth notes, as the crease to his brow tilts fondly upward. Without further hesitation, he picks up the tiny bottle and pops it open, and Linhardt's mind begins to race with all the possibilities about to open up before him. Once he puts these hairs into Hanneman's machine—oh, he'll need to wait until his office is deserted, of course, and find a way around the lock on the door—then what might he discover about that crest? He really had been right; all he'd needed to do was ask. The professor is so unguarded, in fact, that he hadn't even asked what the sample was for, like anyone else would have. Suppose he wants to uncover the secrets of himself as much as anyone else. That would be only natural. If Linhardt is able to make some kind of breakthrough that Hanneman hadn't, it would be for the Professor's benefit too. He could have some answers and perhaps stop feeling so downhearted about the whole mess.

So preoccupied is he with this internal rambling that he hadn't at all noticed Byleth pulling out a knife. It flashes in a glint of pale sunlight from the window, and Linhardt feels his whole head go cold.

"Wait—!"

The tip of the blade sinks into Byleth's palm with the horrifying sound of a wet puncture. At once, the room begins to swim. It rushes upon him, all the blood draining from his face as that first drop of Byleth’s oozes out of broken skin.

Sensing a shift, Byleth looks up, his pale eyes sharp with worried confusion. The sight blurrs before Linhardt's eyes and he gasps, fumbling to grab for the desk.

"Not—like that..." he whispers, and faints dead away.

--------------

He’s never quite so embarrassed than annoyed when this happens; he’d long run out of energy to navigate the shame that he stirred like muddy water around the Hevring estate for its son of “delicate constitution”, and therefore had disregarded caring about it. To the best of his ability. Even still, the thought that won’t leave his mind as it shakes off the dregs of unpleasant sleep (yes, such a thing exists) is that look on the Professor’s unusually emotional face.

Linhardt groans awake. Muted, cream-colored sunlight blurrs his vision and the fourth afternoon bell chimes outside. His surroundings, and the downy bedding he’d brought in to replace scratchy sheets, are familiar. Knowing what’s about to come, Linhardt covers his face and wishes he could sink into his pillow until it swallows him whole.

“Oh, look who’s here! What a rare and unusual event that never happens.” Rings a voice somehow both mellow and chipper at the same time, which can only belong to his own house teacher.

So that he doesn’t just groan by way of greeting, he says, “Hello, professor.”

Sharp clacks mark her steps across the hardwood, followed by a flood of sunlight as she parts the curtains. Turning to him with a dramatic expression of inspiration, she claps her finely manicured hands together.

“I’ve had the most wonderful idea for you, Linhardt. A punch card! Every ten visits to my infirmary and you get a free coffee.”

Linhardt has to close his eyes so they don’t roll right out of his head. “I’d prefer pastries.”

“I’m terrible at baking, I’m afraid.” Manuela crosses the room with clicking heels and a glass of water in hand, stethoscope in the other. Having memorized this routine, Linhardt sits up, taking the water without looking at her and leaning forward so she can press the cold metal disk to his back. He preemptively holds out his wrist to afford access to his pulse. When examinations have checked out and he can accurately recite the day and time and archbishop’s name, Manuela asks, “Does your head hurt?”

“No?” Wait. A little. He lifts his hand up to the focal point of it and feels a bandage, as well as a spike of pain. “Oh. Yes.” He knows a cut that small wouldn’t respond much to magical healing. Those measures only make a significant difference to wounds less superficial. He tries not to think about his own skin having opened up.

“I’ll send you home with something to help. It seems that on the way to the floor, your forehead made a very quick stop at the corner of Professor Eisner’s desk.”

The memory makes him cringe, and he lays back down to cover his head with the blanket.

Manuela tugs it away, standing with her hand on her hip. “Linhardt, sweetie. I do believe I’ve told you, both as your doctor and your teacher, that until we can get you past these fainting spells you ought to avoid looking at blood.”

“It seems I have failed that request, professor,” is all he can argue back, without a single fuck to give as fuel in his attempt at self-defense. “But I’ll have you record that I did try.”

“Oh, what did you expect when you asked for his ‘DNA’? Poor thing was terrified. He very nearly burst down my door to get you in here. My locked door. Which was locked.”

He’s about to retort that the infirmary has no business ever being locked, but it’s then that he recalls it: a flash of brief, blurry awareness. He remembers feeling cold and listless, shivering against an arm around his shoulders. A hand cradling his head. The backdrop of this scene is the ceiling of the golden deer classroom, and in the foreground, Professor Eisner’s face. Surely he’s remembering it wrongly, because no emotion had ever shown so strongly in those blank eyes. More importantly, is the Professor…holding him? Linhardt’s heart leaps so hard that he forgets to breathe for a second.

“Oh, my. He didn’t.”

Manuela’s grin curls like a cat’s tail. “But of course he did! Why, I wouldn’t worry, though—only a handful of people must have seen him carrying you all the way here. In his arms. Bridal style.” Her voice prowls across those words, slow and deliberate.

“…Are you punishing me, professor?” How unbecoming of a physician to get annoyed at the sudden appearance of a patient to interrupt one’s day. Even if she was long past tired of seeing Linhardt in her infirmary with yet another non-emergency and a big fuss over nothing.

“Oh, not at all, sweetie! It isn’t your fault that you’re so fragile—and I must tell you, seeing Professor Eisner so animated was well worth the trouble. I hardly even minded that he scared off the…er, companion, I had in here.”

Of course. But at this point, Linhardt really can't tolerate any of Manuela’s charades. Maybe it's her jabbing toward his shame at himself, or her constant teasing over what she call his 'adorable little crush' (it is not a crush, it is an area of study.) Maybe he has no room left for politeness under the pressing matter of the new professor having learned of his weakness. Either way, he is in no form for playing nice, and quips back languidly, “Oh, good; at least it’s fortunate that one person was rescued from their terrible situation by result of my own. Perhaps there is a silver lining to my weak constitution after all.”

Manuela’s fake smile sloughs into a distasteful scowl. “Brat.”

“Crone.”

Manuela huffs and sweeps away, tossing aside her stethoscope and rifling through one of the towering cabinets full of medical supplies. “…You’ve been ‘organizing’ again.” Her tone is sweet and chipper to the most sarcastic degree.

Linhardt smirks. “Yes, I believe I did that the last time I covered morning infirmary duty for you. It was utter chaos before, just like your room which you made me clean. I wonder what Seteth would think of a professor engaging in shady deals with her students for her own personal gain?”

“Oh don’t give me that; I held up my end of the bargain.” She’s doing her best to put all his fine work to ruin again, in her futile search for whatever it is she’s after. “You wanted a stronger sleep-aid, I provided the very b—oh, for goodness sake, Linny, have you color coded?”

Linhardt tsks, sighing with profound weariness. “It’s a miracle nobody has died while waiting for you to find the right medicine amongst the mess you make of this place. Now it is all sorted by category. I can list them for you if—"

“How very helpful of you. Where have you put the willowbark, my dearest most responsible C-student?”

“Second cabinet clockwise from the door, fifth drawer from the top. Where the blue bottles go.”

With his direction, she finds the right bottle and begins counting out a few pills of crushed herbs, dropping them into a small paper bag. She drops it onto his bedside table and lets an unimpressed glare linger on his very best innocent eyes.

“Thank you, Doctor Manuela.”

She throws him a sarcastic smile. “Mhmm. Perhaps I ought to be giving you lessons in acting instead of medicine.”

Before she mercifully leaves him in peace, she pauses in the doorframe and snickers like a little imp to herself. “Oh, but he was quite worried, that boy. He kept asking me if you were really alright—like he didn’t believe me! In a little while, I think you’d better pay him a visit, just to let him see so for himself. It appears that’s the only way that one will believe anything.”

…Magnificent.

He waits until she’s a good pace down the hall before calling out loud and clear, “Tell Professor Hanneman he left his field notebook in your bedchambers again, madame.”

----------------

Of course, Linhardt has absolutely no intention to do anything but hide from Professor Eisner after such a display. Surely it can’t be that big a deal to him, anyway. Manuela had already assured him that the student was fine, and surely—or with any luck—he would soon forget all about this incident in favor of the manifold demands that came quick and often with shepherding his frolicsome flock of deer.

So Linhardt is not going to find Byleth; he is on his way to a secluded garden corner stuffed with hydrangea bushes which are very old and well tall enough to shade and conceal a stolen slumber. And just about the worst possible thing happens to him before he gets there: someone calls his name.

Linhardt produces a keening whine, because this is unreasonably not fair; hadn’t he earned his peace after the miserable day he’d had? Just one little indulgence for himself?

He is half between deciding to run or talk his way out of this when a hand grasps his elbow and turns him to face “…Professor Eisner.”

The young teacher stares, slightly out of breath as he surveys Linhardt with a scrutinizing eye. His gaze lingers long on the bandage on his forehead. After what feels like an awkward hesitant silence, he finally says no more than, “You’re alright?”

Ah. Well then. Manuela, it seems, had not been lying just to give him a hard time. Byleth really had been that concerned—enough to come and track him down, apparently. Maybe Linhardt had been overly callous in assuming he wouldn’t mind the matter. ...Linhardt is definitely not short of breath because he's thinking of Byleth worrying over him. He's just, still weak from passing out. Hours ago.

“I’m quite alright, Professor, yes. Do forgive me for startling you. It didn’t occur to me to warn you; I hadn’t expected, ah, blood. For future reference, please know that whatever I may ask of you, it will never be to hurt yourself.”

Byleth looks relieved, then perplexed. In his way. A subtle incline of his brow is really the only change to be read in his expression, but Linhardt picks it up and so clarifies, “I’ve what people call a weak constitution when it comes to such things. The sight of blood—well, even the thought of it, revolts me.” Recalling that bright red drop leaking from Byleth’s palm, Linhardt subtly presses a curled fist to his stomach. He suddenly he finds he doesn’t at all want to see the professor’s reaction. He tries to pull away, but his arm is still firmly caught in Byleth’s grip. Likely because his color has gone off. Again.

“Blood makes you ill?”

He swallows. He really wishes he was asleep right now. “Yes, well. Some people are such.”

Byleth pauses, then arrives at a hardened sort of seriousness. “What happened to you today was my fault. I’m sorry.”

He’s surprised. A bit. He’s not sure what he expected, but it wasn’t an apology. He manages to meet Byleth’s eyes again, because he’s intrigued now. The professor lets go of his arm, now that he isn’t trying to escape any more. “Sorry? …Ah, perhaps you’re still getting accustomed to being a teacher. I believe you’re supposed to scold me now.”

That tiny crease returns to the spot between Byleth’s eyes. “For what?”

Linhardt isn’t sure if the professor is testing him, or if he’s just as socially ignorant as he himself can be. “I’ve been told by all other teachers that it’s a big problem for a student of the Officer’s Academy to have such an aversion to…well, the exact goal of combat.”

“Garreg Mach teaches more than combat.”

“Mm. Yes, but it’s ultimately the point, isn’t it?”

Byleth glances downward. He has no way to refute that without lying.

“But.” Linhardt goes softer, meeker. “I don’t want to overcome that aversion.”

He can sense that Byleth is seeking eye contact, but he definitely isn’t up to that. He watches a couple stray cats lounging in the grass at the edge of the courtyard. “Battle is not something I ever want to get used to. I understand that, for some people on certain paths, it’s necessary to become callous enough to ignore the consequence of one’s violent actions. But why is that treated like the norm? Why do people who can so easily end a life want to tell me I’m the one who’s got something wrong with him? I find it not only natural, but right to be abhorred by bloodshed. Maybe if that was treated as ordinary, less people would bleed.”

Linhardt realizes he’s been speaking for much longer than most people let him, and chances a glance at Byleth. He finds no trace of impatience there. But he feels self-conscious all the same, so he swiftly brings his explanation to its point. “If that’s a weakness, fine. I’d prefer to stay the way I am, all the same.”

He prepares to endure a proper lecture, then, because surely hearing that will make the Professor’s cloudy eyes flash with disapproval. It will be sharp and (goddess grant him) quick, and it will drill down into the same old cavities: the importance of having the right sort of attitude and other such failings. Afterwards, he will retreat with stinging knuckles to a soft grassy haven. All he has to do is wait it out.

What the Professor says instead makes Linhardt’s mind go blank.

“Would you like to join my class?”

“…Pff—” He can’t help it, he’s just taken by surprise. He covers his mouth to hide the blush on his cheeks as he holds back further rude laughter. “Goodness, Professor, forgive me. I just—well, I think you’re probably the strangest person in this entire monastery. The most interesting, certainly.”

“Is that a no?”

“That is…a. Well.” Linhardt clears his throat, but his face refuses to smooth over into his usual placid countenance. A smile is firmly rooted there. “I will thoroughly consider it.”

-----------------

He forgets all about it. He’s very occupied with increasingly dramatic things. Busier than ever covering infirmary duty for dispatched Manuela and trying to find out who Monica is. He uncovers nothing. Her history ends on the day she disappeared, and then seems to pick back up the day she was found. A blank page year. Soon after she is incorporated into their class, the coming days see an ever-growing thickness to the air: a foreboding feeling surrounding the way the imperial princess and her new best friend speak to one another when they don’t care who eavesdrops. Linhardt thinks they must discount him as disinterested, and thus don’t see a need to put much effort into hiding things he surely wouldn’t be interested in knowing. They don’t see that one cannot be fully ignorant of things one chooses to ignore.

He very well knows when he’s being prepared for something. Put into others’ plans. Linhardt feels shackles closing in around him again, sees his mother more and more in his darkening dreams. He studies magic he hates, because Hubert thinks he’ll uncover a secret hidden talent for setting people on fire if he just sticks to the program. He avoids snake-quick darting eyes, pretends letters from home got lost in the post. He steals sleep tucked away in the infirmary and Manuela slowly stops getting cross with him for taking up a bed, because it’s the only place Edelgard won’t wake him from. His naps stretch as long as the shadows that slowly grow over the Black Eagle house.

The next time Linhardt sees Professor Byleth will be at the Battle of Eagle and Lion, watching from the safety of an old wooden platform in the far corner of the field, from which he flings out healing spells to reckless Caspar and liable Bernadetta. In vain. Bernie seems all too happy to be given an excuse to leave the field, swiftly fleeing before the rushing blue tide which floods the central hill and swiftly drowns poor Ferdinand on its way south.

Linhardt soon finds that the standing gentleman's agreement between himself and Dimitri, of turning mutual blind eyes to each other regarding curfew-breaking nights in the library, does not extend to his comrades on the battlefield. He's ruthless in a way that rattles those who have only known his mask. The way his eyes crave war could make one sympathize with Felix's disdain. The lions and deer clash on the hill, but Ingrid does not join them, her Pegasus carrying her high over the frontline and deep into the eagles' main force. She scatters their formation a fair bit and puts up a good fight, but has sorely overextended, and her land-bound reinforcements take longer to join her than she’d bet on. Not a sweet victory for Dorothea, who feels so guilty she leaves the fight to escort her sweetheart to the medical tent. Things soon begin to feel dire and, frankly, unfair, when the other two houses devolve into a race against each other to shoot down as many eagles as they can.

While Linhardt is occupied with desperate attempts to save anyone caught in Felix’s blazing path of destruction, Claude has snuck through the northwest treeline on a swift path to claim Hubert as a bragging-trophy. Dimitri has Edelgard weakening rapidly until he's sniped in the back by Ignatz (how is his range so far?), leaving his unclaimed victory to be snatched up by Hilda. He winces; Edelgard is going to be so annoyed to be taken out by someone whose reputation for laziness rivals even his own. When the Black Eagles’ house leader falls and leaves an open path to the makeshift little fort Linhardt now occupies entirely by himself, he will passively muse, Oh, bother; I ought to have been on that side.

He throws up his hands immediately. As Raphael whoops in the background and spins Ignatz round in his hulking arms, Claude tosses Linhardt a wink before sidling over to land the facsimile of a punch to his chest.

“You lasted longest out of everyone. Not bad.”

Linhardt’s eyes go dull with annoyance. “No need to mock.”

“I wasn’t. Honestly. No matter how one does so, it’s admirable to be the last man standing. A healer ought to be, anyway.”

Hm. How very Leicester.

When Claude steps away, he meets Hilda’s high-five even though she jumps to try and make it too high for him. He also passes Byleth, waiting a good distance away, positioned in such a way as to support his students but not get in their way. Claude claps a hand on his shoulder, grinning hopefully and joyfully as if the sun is about to rise—not set. The look that passes between the Professor and his house leader makes Linhardt stare. It’s foreign and audacious and intriguing. It’s mutual pride, security in each other. They’re friends.

Edelgard never looks at any of them that way; that’s why it’s something new to him. When anyone in the Black Eagles achieves something, meets an expectation, they would receive from their house leader solid satisfaction dosed with an appropriate amount of polite thanks. It isn’t that she lacks sincerity. In fact, Edelgard always makes sure never to let good merits go un-rewarded. It is all very earnest, and quite strategic.

But nothing in the eagles would ever approach this weird sense of freedom, the lucky fecklessness he sees now between this unruly group. Cheering their victory. But it isn’t just the winning that they share between them, is it? There’s something else they all seem to know. And he doesn't. To Linhardt, it looks more than interesting. It looks like a liferaft. It isn’t often that he encounters such a feeling—the flicker in heart and mind he has no name for, which tells him that he wants to know. Wants to discover this, whatever this is. Just to see.

He looks long at the ashen demon. Linhardt was not aware that Byleth could smile so warmly.

“Professor,” he blurts out, interrupting celebratory shouting and drawing many eyes. “I’ve an answer to your recruitment inquiry, now.”

Byleth’s eyes grow like a waxing moon, soft and alight.

Chapter Text

Only when leaving a group do you find what your role in it had been.

Perhaps he should have thought before he acted. He neglected to realize that joining a new house meant leaving an old one. Linhardt is unprepared for the way it feels. It’s uncomfortable and bitter and he’s not sure why he is devoting so much brainspace to thinking about what the others’ opinions of him might be. Or why he cares at all. He does, though. And he doesn’t like it.

Caspar can hardly be blamed, given his short-sighted and honor-bound nature, for many sidelong glances full of betrayal and disdain. It feels…terrible. To be looked at like that, by him. Linhardt has no idea how to resolve the issue, or what else he might say, because no matter how many ways he explains it, Caspar has already decided he’s too hurt to listen. It wasn’t Linhardt’s intention to hurt anyone. It never is. But that has never stopped people from getting hurt anyway.

Even when thick-skinned Princess Adrestia announces Linhardt’s departure with nothing but understanding and well-wishes for his education, doubt lingers like miasma among his classmates in the eagles. The timing is too damning, he knows that. And the fact that Edelgard apologizes during her send-off for not being able to secure them all a victory doesn’t help his case.

“It really isn’t about losing,” he insists, yet again, to a tired-looking Dorothea.

“Of course not,” she soothes, “Winning is the last thing you’d care about, we know that. Don’t worry, Lin. I’m sure everyone is just sore about the defeat right now. They’ll understand after they think about it for a bit.”

He picks at a loose thread in his sleeve. “I’m sure Edelgard will be a very strong leader. In fact I’m certain of it. That’s precisely why—”

“Yes, dear. I know.” Dorothea’s voice is muted, her eyes soft with the kind of fear that can only see the future. She turns to him as it smooths over with a kind smile. “I hope you keep hold of yourself, Linhardt. Through whatever is coming. I’ll feel much better if I know you’re not leaving for nothing.”

He has neither energy nor skill to make reparations to things he never intended to rend, so he doesn’t. He joins the deer, because there is none better to teach one how to dodge arrows.

The transition is different than he’d expected. Maybe he thought it would be no less than his arrival into the Eagles had been—ordinary, quiet, and largely overlooked. It seems, however, he’d come to the wrong place for subtlety.

The way Raphael slings his arm around Linhardt’s shoulders does not allow him to slink away into the back of the classroom. The way he continues chattering on while he drags him to the gathered throng of his fellow students leaves him no space to interject. And the way they all batter him with questions and welcomes and apologies certainly does not alleviate his exhaustion.

“From now on,” Hilda giggles, clasping his hand in both of hers, “things’ll be smooth sailing! Trust me. You can basically do whatever you want now.”

Linhardt blinks at her, working his fingers uncomfortably within her grip. “I… doubt that.”

“When are you gonna learn to be less overbearing?” snorts Claude, prying her off as she shoots him a glare. “You’re smothering him. Like you do to everyone.”

“Hey! I’m just trying to make him feel welcome! Since our ‘leader’ isn’t doing it.”

“I welcomed him with my words. Not my very sharp manicured fingernails.”

As the two delve into an argument which mostly consists of Claude examining the ceiling while Hilda snarkily points out his many flaws, Ignatz fills their place and shoots Linhardt an apologetic smile. “What she means is, Professor Byleth is really good about letting us choose our own paths. If there’s something you want to study, just talk to him about it, and he’ll work with you.”

“Hrm. Within reason…” mutters a downcast Lorenz, prompting a derisive snort from Leonie.

“Just because you wanted to be a wyvern rider for a week doesn’t mean the Professor’s bad at curriculum,” she chides.

“…It was two weeks.”

Linhardt feels like a lost ball in high weeds. With no idea what to say, but sensing that the following pause of silence is a prompt for him, he states flatly, “It’s…not like we’re meeting for the first time. There’s no need for all this fuss.”

He gets the sense that he’s said the wrong thing, or maybe just the unexpected thing, by some of their reactions and the silence in which they now aren’t sure how to respond.

Claude does, though, and Linhardt gets the idea there aren’t many scenarios where that one would be lost for words.

“Yeah, we tend to go kiiinda overboard sometimes. Ok, lots of times. Sorry about that. But hey, least you’ll never be bored.”

He doubts that, too, but this time he doesn’t say so.

Lysithea is the first to leave his welcoming committee, curtly turning on her heel and stomping to her desk at the very front of the room, closest to the blackboard. She hasn’t said a word. Probably none too pleased that her own personal badger is now that much more involved in her daily life.

“Linhardt,” says the meekest voice in the room. He turns to see Marianne, staring at the floor, her hand pointing to a desk in the back. “…If you sit in the second chair to the left, you’re hidden behind that pillar from anyone standing…there.” And she points then to the spot directly in front of Byleth’s desk. She doesn’t further torture him by waiting for him to answer, just turns away and seats herself in a different corner of the room. …He isn’t sure whether she’s offering an olive branch or just wants to make sure he sits far away from her, but neither of those things will save her; he is going to find out what crest she has.

Linhardt takes the seat she recommended, head buzzing, far too overwhelmed for a nap now.

-------------

“Would you like to take your bishop’s exam?”

Linhardt is running out of ways to say “not yet.”

Byleth doesn't wait for a response, though, perhaps never expecting an answer in the first place but rather reminding Linhardt that he is overdue. He leaves the classroom with little more than a smile which promises that, after their next lesson, the professor will ask again. And again.

He had not been nearly ready for the warlock exams Hubert wanted him to pursue, so Linhardt had long been happy about the fact that he needn’t worry about the matter of examinations. Of course the first order of business was taking him off those dreadful black magic courses, which made Linhardt practically soar with relief. But when Professor Byleth assessed his aptitude for white magic, and witnessed his application of the craft, he had wanted Linhardt to progress past the next level of qualification as soon as possible. And so, study toward this goal began in earnest.

He’s not sure what Hilda’s idea of a lax class schedule is, but it does not match his. Professor Byleth has not wasted one of the seven days Linhardt has been here. But it has not been at all similar to the way school has ever been for him. Linhardt does poorly with lectures, so Byleth does not attempt to lecture him. Practical application becomes his method, paired with a surprising allowance for Linhardt’s many flaws. He gives him breaks in the middle of lessons. He gives those lessons in safe places of comfort, in gardens, in the library, on couches surrounded by pillows and snacks. He never applies books sharply to the back of his head when caught dozing off. He never snaps his hands with a ruler when they are idly separating each one of the strands in his feather quill from each other. He never shouts.

Another thing he never does, though, is allow Linhardt to intentionally avoid things that are within his capability. In Byleth’s tutelage, suddenly all the power behind his weaponized incompetence is rendered useless. It’s impressive and endlessly annoying how sharp Byleth is for picking out the times when Linhardt is and isn’t trying his best. So, for the first time in his academic career, Linhardt finds that he has been skillfully maneuvered into…applying himself. That’s hard. Harder than relentlessly giving up until his instructor gives up as well. “Give up” is not included in Byleth’s curriculum.

On top of a wild new school structure, there are the oddities posed by his new classmates.

In the Eagles, he kept mostly to himself, and only attended what he was required to. There was no extra-curricular, no socializing beyond what was forced upon him by (usually) Caspar and Dorothea. The Deer are much more…familiar with each other. When class is over, they seem to just mill around, visiting each other’s desks, tossing around plans for lunch or free time. It’s a shock the first time he’s invited along, on the first official day of his recruitment. He declines. And nobody is offended by it, even if Hilda pouts.

“Offer’s always open,” says Claude, waving over his shoulder.

Linhardt never goes. Until, one midnight, he wakes up in the library with a quill stuck to his face and the smell of stew in his nose. He blinks, dazed, at the spoon Raphael is placing into his hand for him.

“…Food isn’t allowed in the library,” he mumbles sleepily.

“I know, but it’s the only place you ever go! I don’t know how anybody ‘forgets to eat,’ but since I never do, I’ll take care of that for you. Here, try the sweetrolls with it.”

He starts going to lunch after that. Which is the perfect place to get invited to sorts of other gatherings he can’t find out how to say no to. The subtle, courtlike etiquette drilled into him since birth, which had worked on most of the Black Eagles, doesn’t seem to be forceful enough here. Hinting that you are too busy to attend study group only results in study group being moved to a time when you are more free. Telling Marianne that his singing skills are horrendous only makes her more happy that she won’t feel inferior at choir practice. And, no matter what, Lorenz will not be deflected from company over high tea. Compulsively, Linhardt suggests Ferdinand. Then remembers Ferdinand hasn't spoken to him since he left.

It must be infectious. Or he’s adapting, subconsciously, as defense. Because the more he’s drawn in to the Deer, the more he catches himself having thoughts about them even when they aren’t around. One morning, he was reading for his own leisure when he came across a passage on combat via horseback. Suddenly he had underlined a portion solving a question that had lately cost Hilda her exam. She passed the next one and credited it to him. He had no idea why he did that.

One day he recognized a notebook left behind in the library because Lysithea’s drawings were unmistakable and all over the cover. He slipped it under her door without telling her, just so he wouldn’t have to convince her he wasn’t there in some new attempt to uncover the truth about her crest situation.

Once, he saw the way the sunlight hit the lake outside the eastern window and looked for Ignatz’s canvas on its banks.

He asks Manuela about Edelgard.

For the first time in many years, the dawn of each day is beginning to make him…uneasy. With newness. Unsettled. As if something might begin to matter, soon.

Things progress this way for him for a week, unfamiliar and without breakthrough, until his birthday, when the Professor gives him a gift.

Over tea, of course, because the Professor marks all birthdays with tea. He makes Linhardt’s favorite blend and the table is piled with pastries in flavors he loves. Near the end, Byleth reaches under the table and retrieves a large pillow with a ribbon-bow tied around it.

Linhardt wants to laugh at first, but when he takes it into his hands, his eyes widen in awe. “Eider down,” he murmurs, squeezing it in his arms. It’s impossibly soft and pleasantly warm.

“Mm.”

“It takes so much to gather it. The ducks only breed on Icelandic islands, and each nest only contains about 15 grams of feathers. Harvesters walk for miles to find the nests. They would have hiked for days to get enough for a pillow this size. Also it’s waterproof.” He places the pillow in his lap and kneads it as he talks, squishing it over and over again. Remembering himself, he stops and looks up. “Oh. I suppose you knew all that. Otherwise why would you have sought it out.”

Byleth shakes his head. “I only knew what the merchant told me. That it was rare and excellent for lining bedding or coats. I thought of you.”

Linhardt sinks his chin into the pillow, closing his eyes, and spends a moment there. “…When I was back home,” he says, voice muffled by the thick feathers. “My father replaced my pillow stuffing with stinging nettle, to stop me sleeping through politic classes.”

In the ensuing silence, Linhardt doesn’t want to open his eyes. His father is a loyalist. The pillow smells faintly of Byleth’s scent. Sagesmoke and tea leaves. A long while passes in quiet, as Linhardt basks in the knowledge that conversation is not a requirement, here. Always available to him, but never expected of him. Byleth rarely breaks these moments first.

Linhardt’s mind is allowed to wander. To worry. The events of the past few weeks illustrate to him that he is in the process of choosing a side. Running into people in the hall. Finding himself still concerned over what Edelgard might be doing when she can’t be found on campus, even though that is not supposed to be his problem anymore. Words and glances, changes and confusion. He’s never been more confused, he thinks. Because he’s never cared so much. For life and how it might be changing. For the goings-on around him, the people, who speak to him with voices he remembers, and appear in his recollection with actual faces instead of blurred shapes about their heads.

Caring about his Professor’s opinions is new. Maybe that’s what opened his mind to the newness of caring about his classmates’ opinions too. New ones, and old. When he was in the Eagles, he couldn’t care less about most of them even though he should. Now that he shouldn’t care anymore, he does. Now that he’s put himself on the opposite side of whatever line his whole country is trying to draw. If things continue…

“I would like your advice, Professor,” he says, raising his head.

“Mm.”

“My former classmates resent me.”

Byleth looks sympathetic but unconcerned, if such is possible. He doubts it is really true, but believes Linhardt feels it anyway. “Are they treating you badly?” There’s comfort in the softness of that, the way his brows tilt down and his glass eyes stare until Linhardt looks away from them.

“I…don’t think so.” He mumbles, picking up his teacup. He has lately found himself attending tea with the Professor more and more. Always an excuse to slack off, as Byleth rarely spoke of studies or work at the tea table.

A moment of polite waiting, then Byleth prompts helpfully, “What have they been saying to you?”

It’s hard to know where to start. Byleth has never rushed him, though, and doesn’t now. “That depends on who.”

“Mm. The most recent one.”

Remembering clearly the exact cadence of that tight and biting voice makes Linhardt’s stomach knot, and he wraps his arms around it tightly. “He said he’s always known I was lazy, but he didn’t think I was a coward too. And I have no sense of right and wrong and I only care about myself.” He recites it like something he’s memorized from a textbook, droll and tired. Feeling his throat start to get tight, Linhardt thinks he is very lucky that he’s no longer able to cry in front of other people.

Byleth reaches across the table, toward Linhardt’s hand. For half a moment, his fingers hover in the air just above his wrist. Hesitating. Linhardt stares at it, almost hoping. He finds this is one time when he would not mind to be touched.

But Byleth’s hand changes direction by a mere centimeter and moves to pick up Linhardt’s teacup and saucer. He tops off the cup with fresh, hot tea, then places it exactly back where it had been—even the handle is facing the same direction. “One’s anger is often as strong as one’s love. He very much cares for you, so he was very much angry.”

“…I appreciate that that is supposed to make things better, Professor.”

Byleth breathes out a dry laugh, his smile self-deprecating. The air seems a little lighter. Linhardt finds a genuine, though subdued smile of his own to offer.

Byleth inclines his head in a farce of apology. Apparently trying to offer something more helpful, he offers, “He’s welcome to join the Deer, if he wishes.”

“He…” Fidgeting, Linhardt uses his teaspoon to carve apart a biscuit on his plate, crumbling it apart like a little excavation. “Caspar’s too loyal to leave. Which is why he’s so angry that I did. But.” His brow knits in frustration. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of loyalty if that’s what it means? Why go down with a ship if you can all leave safely and live another day?”

The wilting, drowsy call of evendoves swoops through the air. Byleth stares thoughtfully at the rows of gladiolus and thyme enclosing their secluded corner of the gardens. “His heart is young. Filled with much more valor than direction. He’s yet to learn where loyalty is best placed.”

“And where is that?”

“To oneself, I think. You left to avoid losing yourself. He stays for the same reason.”

“Well, but then… Which is more important? How can neither of us be wrong and yet it all feels wrong?”

“Mm. Otherwise why would there ever be war?”

Linhardt is quiet for a long time.

“How was the fishing today?” Byleth asks. “And would you like to take your bishop’s exam?”

----------

Wrapped in sterling new bishop robes, Linhardt waits on the edge of a long green field which begins the foothills of a mountain slope. People wade through the wild weeds like parting water, clinging to swords and bows and justice. Linhardt imagines grass-nesting mice running from their boots. He thinks about his bed and misses it.

Byleth, beside him, asks, “Are you sure?”

The fog of his voice is even more faint than usual in competition with the rush of Linhardt’s own pulse hammering in his head. He swallows for the fifteenth time and takes another deep breath. “It appears I will have to be,” he answers, staring intently at the treeline that stretches along the meeting of two mountains. “They’ll be here soon.”

“If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. I can have the knights escort you back.”

Linhardt doesn’t much care for the twinge of affront he feels at that. Of preemptive guilt. He’s definitely not pouting when he retorts, “I said I’d try… Anyway it would be much worse having to deal with Lorenz lecturing me about noble courage and loyalty if I leave now.” It’s only some silly bandits on a weekend, not even a real mission from the church—something small. To try. Just to see.

“I’ll keep you in the back,” the Professor says, keeping calm and steady. “You won’t need to be up close to the fighting. If someone gets hurt, I’ll send them back toward your position. Help them from a distance. Stay out of anyone’s range.”

Hurt. His job is going to be dealing with bleeding people. Guess that’s better than producing bleeding people. Linhardt grips his own sleeves, grimacing as he presses his forearms into his stomach. The fighting hasn’t even begun and he’s already… Oh, he’s going to be useless. Insufferable Lorenz will be proven right. “I…feel dizzy.”

A hand rests on his shoulder. Byleth’s breath drifts across Linhardt’s ear as he speaks, cold in the most pleasant way. “Remember the techniques we went over. Count your breaths in pace. Focus on me if you’re overwhelmed. I’ll keep you safe.”

…The way hearing that makes his heart pound is not something he has time to examine right now. Linhardt pretends he’s made of steel, like he knows he can do this, like he’s anything similar to Byleth.

“Nnn. I’ll get over it… I’m already here, so. I might as well be here.” It belatedly occurs to him that he sounds quite bitter, which he is, but still he feels the need to clarify, “I won’t fail what I’m responsible for here, Professor. In case that’s. In question.”

With absolutely surety: “It isn’t.”

When the bandits round the bend of the dried-out riverbed far ahead, Byleth’s gaze drains of all the softness and care held for him. It looks like a windowpane frosting over. Silent, he strides forward, and many eyes follow his path. Linhardt immediately feels much smaller without him near.

Raising his steady voice over the pounding boots charging towards them, Byleth begins his work. He sends Claude and newly recruited Petra on a pincer course east of the trees. He leads all the others straight ahead, swiftly claiming that small clump of forest before the oncomers arrive. Linhardt’s feet fall in uneven places as he follows, jogging along behind the main force. He watches Ignatz draw his bow, tries not to hear the scream as the arrow lands somewhere out of Linhardt’s sight.

He starts counting fish in the pond inside his mind. Visualization is one of the techniques Byleth worked with him on, things that will help him in a fight. “Not to change you,” he’d said. “I want to give you ways to work with yourself, the way you are. Tools to get through what’s in front of you.”

Tools to live through what he can’t avoid. He has to go to battle. Byleth wouldn’t have forced him. But when the Professor approached him with those crestfallen eyes and asked him to come here today, Linhardt knew why. Things are changing around them, subtle as a river rising. Edelgard is getting sharper every time she wakes up in the morning. The stones under all their feet are shifting. He has to get used to new footing, or else fall. Byleth doesn’t want him to fall.

And anyway, what use is a healer sitting in an infirmary if people die in the field? What good would he be to his classmates…to Byleth, if he isn’t even there when needed? You can help the wounded, not the dead, and the divide between them is a time sensitive matter.

So in his head he counts fish, and in reality, lingers back and waits for someone to need his magic. He looks for the Professor very often, because…because he’s not sure why, but when he’s in sight everything seems much less horrifying and breathing gets easier.

Byleth’s orders minimize damage. Hardly anyone gets injured, and Linhardt is beginning to gain confidence that maybe he won’t have to do anything at all actually. He tries to adjust to the rancour and battlesounds. He’s just started picking out which shouts are only effort and which ones signify pain, when Hilda gives him a prime example.

She’s out in front of the main force, flanked on two sides by sword-wielding fighters who seem little more than pesky flies to her. The problem is a distant mage who has snuck unnoticed through the ranks with a far-reaching spell range he has no business having. Adorned in a small iron mine’s worth of armor, Hilda isn’t well known for her speed. Or her resistance to magic.

Linhardt feels his legs going soft as he spots bright red streaming from the seam between her pauldrons.

There’s that cold water rushing through his skull again. He pinches his wrist, counts his breathing. The mage is casting again. Moths flutter behind his eyes, but he shakes them away, has to stay awake, or else Hilda is going to—

He shouts as a burst of healing energy leaves his hands and nearly knocks his target to the ground. But she uses the extra momentum to propel herself forward, slinging down her mighty axe, and Linhardt looks away before he has to watch what happens to that unfortunate man. He searches frantically and snaps his focus into place: onto Byleth.

The Professor is standing behind Claude, having linked back up as the pincer closes around their final target. Linhardt keeps his eyes locked on him and no one else. Covers his ears, even. And slowly starts to feel less like a baby deer.

The bandit leader is the last one standing. As Marianne thrusts a spearpoint forward to put an end to this fight, Linhardt looks away once more. His heart has never worked harder in his life. But he’s pretty sure he’s not going to shake apart, for now. Linhardt catches his breath, hands on his knees as he hangs his head. Suddenly, in front of his eyes there is a hand holding out a canteen.

Hilda beams down at him, holding a triumphant warrior’s pose against the sky. “Thanks for saving me and also good job!”

“…You’re welcome.” He drinks the water and Hilda gives him a wink as she takes the bottle back.

“I always make sure to properly thank people who help me out. So? How can I return the favor?”

She’s totally relaxed. How is she behaving as if they’ve just gotten out of a lecture on a Tuesday afternoon? Is pretending that awful things aren’t awful her way of getting through them? Surely that can’t work.

She’s still waiting for an answer. “Uh.” He really hasn’t the faintest idea how to respond. Which is perfect for Hilda, because now she gets to decide exactly how much effort she has to put into his thank-you.

“Do you like sweets?”

“Yes.”

Hilda’s eyes shine decisively and she makes a flashy show of clenching a determined fist. “I. Am. On it!”

Why does he have the feeling that he’s going to be up to his knees in candy made by Lysithia?

Before he can ask as much, Hilda bounces away, honing in on poor Marianne to shower her in praises. Linhardt feels a familiar tug at the back of his mind, like he’s recognizing something. This post-victory aura between them all. He’s in it, this time, not just observing from the losing side. From this perspective, he sees that the elation, the smiles and thanks and congratulations—these things stem from the shared knowing that they all brought this outcome together. That everyone is safe and well, the threat gone. That it would have gone differently had someone been absent. Even just one. Even him.

Byleth finds him quickly after the fight. Jogging over, the Professor stops short, checks himself for blood, and quickly tucks his right arm behind his back. As he approaches, he keeps the stained sleeve hidden well out of sight. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because Linhardt has never been more relieved to see anyone ever, he’s almost sure.

Byleth stands beside him and puts a hand on his forearm. He smiles like green tea, subdued, bitterness in the aftertaste. “You did well.”

Linhardt has no idea why hearing that makes it hard to breathe, makes each bone in his ribcage glow like heated iron. “I didn’t do much at all, I thought.”

“You’re standing. You kept all of us standing. Well done.”

Linhardt furrows his brow. Isn’t that the bare minimum for a healer? He looks off away in a poor attempt to conceal the blush he feels sweeping across his face. “Well. Thank you, Professor. Can…we go home now? I am splendidly tired.”

Byleth’s hand rests on his back, just between his shoulderblades, and becomes a focal point for all his senses.

“Of course.”

Linhardt is exhausted and overwhelmed, but he’s sure that if he had the extra brainspace for it, he’d also be happy. He did that. Hilda is safe, and he did that. He feels relied on, but for perhaps the first time in his life, that doesn’t feel like an iron necklace. Byleth’s pride in him glows like a lantern inside his chest. He helped him. He was able to do something. Useful. For him.

Even so, part of him is uneasy to feel that way—more than that. Scared. That he’ll begin to get accustomed to seeing this, being part of this. He never wants to be proud of being in a fight. He never wants to forget that this is awful, that it’s wrong. He feels for the first time an urge to forget all that, to soothe his guilt. …He won’t forget. Ever. Linhardt has to wonder, though, if he can achieve something that seems so contradictory. Healing injuries may be the opposite of harm, but logically, the end result of his actions only means that people can spend longer fighting each other. Can the warrior hate the war, even as he actively works to extend it? Shun the battle and march on its field? It’s an audacious question to pose. He is going to put it to experiment.

--------------

Chapter Text

Byleth has been acting strange this month.

Even those who don’t know him very well would notice that something is amiss. Exhaustion, they might assume, a toll taken by his hard work preparing for the Battle of Eagle and Lion last month? But Linhardt does know him. Linhardt knows the length between each of Byleth’s steps when he walks. He has timed an exact count of how many seconds he spends taking a breath, and what it should sound like when he exhales. He has recorded the measure of dexterity in each of his hands and solid curve of his posture when he stands like a statue choosing its base. Byleth is breaking all of those normal patterns. The data is entirely abnormal.

He’s ill. Somehow. He won’t say, or—more likely—doesn’t know with what. Manuela infuriates with her selectiveness over which rules she suddenly cares about. Alright to bring her trysts into the medical ward and use the beds meant for the ill, but “patient confidentiality” is a line she won’t cross? Lindhart can’t even get Hanneman to talk, and it’s supposed to be impossible to make that man stop rattling on. Maybe if he baits him with an agreement...? He’d like nothing more than for Lindhart to continue his crest research as his apprentice. He could…agree to “think about it”, on the condition that he tell him what the hell they’ve all been finding out about Byleth’s health.

The students have begun to stir about it, a few. Claude, mostly, though he takes care to cover it up. He does have…intuition, for leadership, and no need at all for spotlight. A clever pair of qualities. Lindhart sees him distracting the more energetic classmates when Byleth appears fatigued—deflects more work than is necessary from reaching the Professor. He doesn’t let on that anything is wrong. Marianne can tell, of course. But she’s so unconfident that all she can do is worry about it. Linhardt feels…sad for her, sometimes. Similar. But Byleth concerns him now, more than…well, anything. Everything. He’s keeping a scientific journal about each incident he spots. He’s making analytic graphs. He’s looking for patterns.

He seems lethargic, overall, and pale, and looks as tired as Linhardt complains to be. He notices moments of unsteadiness. Byleth uses the railing of stairs, sits rather than stands whenever he has the option, and misses footsteps. Linhardt is uniquely equipped to recognize the symptoms of lightheadedness—Byleth keeps getting dizzy spells. Linhardt is always afraid he’s going to collapse one day.

This day, during lecture, the professor trails off in the middle of a sentence. He’s writing on the blackboard, so his back is turned to the class, betraying little. But Linhardt lifts his chin out of his palm as quickness comes into his eyes. Byleth does not lose his train of thought; he thinks everything out before speaking.

The slight tremor in the hand holding the chalk would not concern many. Is Linhardt making a big deal out of nothing? Or is today the day he finally watches the Professor hit the floor?

“Um, Professor?” Claude pipes up, raising his hand. “Could you go over page twenty-nine once more, the part about feinting in an inequal duel to gain the upper hand? I’m not sure I completely understood it.”

Byleth is able to get back on track, then, but Linhardt remains concerned about a whole different type of “feint”.

After the ten-minute-early end to class, Linhardt stays seated while the others pack up around him. He’s usually the first one out, but more and more he finds himself dawdling when lessons end. Not really sure why. Except this time, he has clear designs, which he’s been chewing on for about a week. If even Jeralt couldn’t make his child heed a medical prescription of rest, what would be the best strategy to accomplish that goal?

Linhardt has one he’s quite confident in. Time to test his ongoing translation of Professor Eisner.

Byleth sits at his desk, his shoulders sagging and his bangs in his eyes as his head hangs over an open book. He’s been “reading” the same page for nearly five minutes when soft but deliberate footsteps approach.

“Professor?”

It’s like he hadn’t noticed anyone was there; he starts a bit as he raises his head. Linhardt does a poor job at hiding the concern that crosses his face when he is afforded a good look into Byleth’s. He’s paler than parchment and the dark circles beneath his eyes could rival Marianne’s.

“I…apologize for this request. I’m afraid I need your help with a very important matter, if you’re available.”

The flicker of dismay in Byleth’s eyes is quickly snuffed out. “Of course,” he replies, without hesitation.

Byleth never asks what he needs before agreeing to it. His plan is working so far.

“Excellent. Shall we go then?”

He knows he doesn’t need to check; Byleth will be following him. He chatters as they walk. “There’s been a matter causing me a lot of stress lately. It’s all I’ve been able to focus on. I’m afraid it’s most distracting and I won’t be able to make any progress in class until it’s resolved.”

“Mm?” comes the listless, though worried reply. “And…how can I resolve it?”

“That will be much easier to explain once we arrive.”

“…” There is another span of silence. “But you’re alright?”

Linhardt feels his heart constrict in a way that makes him unsure of the answer to that question.

“…You’re always so. Selfless,” he mutters. And then he falls quiet.

-------------------

“We’re in the—"

“I must thank you again for your assistance; it may prove invaluable. Alright. Now, the first thing I’ll need you to do is remove your shoes.”

Byleth blinks at him, slowly. Linhardt offers no elaboration. Eventually, the professor sits on the infirmary bed and bends down to unlace his heavy boots. His movements belie a clumsiness only brought on by fatigue. The boots thud to the floor and Byleth looks up for further instructions.

This is easier than Linhardt thought it would be. He smiles. “Very good. What I’ve been worried about concerns this…” Pulling out a small velvet pouch from his pocket, he opens the drawstring and shakes the contents into his hand. Two round pills pop out and roll around his palm.

Byleth’s browline goes flat.

“You see, Professor Manuela has assigned me to making medicine as part of my…” he almost chokes on the word “apprenticeship.”

He is not, nor will he ever be, apprentice to that crone.

“I see.”

The fact that he can no longer read anything behind Byleth’s tone sets off alarm bells. Oh, don’t wisen up now, for heaven’s sake.

“Yes. This one is supposed to help with ailments such as lethargy, as per my susceptibility to such. But I’m not sure I’ve got the formula right. It seems to have very little effect in my case. I need to see if the problem lies with the medicine, or with me.”

Byleth softens with fondness and a bit of something that looks like sadness. Linhardt stares back, eyes wide but blank. If his little scheme had been found out, the Professor doesn’t seem to be calling him out.

“And you decided I would make a suitable test subject,” says Byleth.

Linhardt puffs a frustrated sigh and rolls his eyes, irked that he’s been seen through. He really thought he was going to pull this whole scheme off flawlessly.

“Well?” he sulks. “Who else is walking around the monastery like a thrall, ready to fall to a strong gust of wind?”

Byleth laughs. It’s as soft and small as the brush of a cat’s tail against your leg, little more than an exhaled breath. When Linhardt looks at him, his eyes are warm and shining, and the weary smile on his face finally resembles a human being instead of a wax doll.

“Were you worried about me?”

Linhardt stares at the floor. “…I apologize for causing offense. I should have known better. You’re much too clever to fall for a trick so obvious.” He starts to pour the pills back into their bag when Byleth reaches out and puts a hand over his. The Professor takes him by the wrist like he’s picking up a teacup. He holds his hand beneath Linhardt’s and tilts the pills into his own palm. Then tips back his head and tosses them into his mouth.

“…You took them.”

Byleth smiles again, and now Linhardt identifies the sad ache in his eyes as apology, appreciation. “Don’t worry any more,” he says. His voice floats like incense smoke.

For a moment he feels so guilty that he almost confesses everything: those were sleeping pills, the exact opposite of what he’d said they were. The extra strong ones he’d bargained off Manuela. But he only stands in silence, watching Byleth’s eyes slowly unfocus. When he begins to sway, Linhardt steps closer.

“Pardon me, Professor,” he murmurs softly. With the tips of his fingers, touching as little as possible, he peels the fabric of Byleth’s coat away from his shoulders. He slips it off, lifting his arms out of the sleeves for him. Linhardt notices keenly the veins in Byleth’s forearm as his hand hangs limply in his own.

Overcoat shed, gentle sleep-warmth radiates from Byleth’s back as Linhardt places his hand between his shoulderblades. He’s half-gone and pliant, easy to maneuver into bed. Linhardt lowers him to the downy pillows and his head sinks into their comfort like a priceless jewel placed on a velvet cushion. He pulls plush blankets up to the line of his collarbone.

Linhardt sits in a chair by his bedside and watches his eyelids fall. His every muscle drains of tension and he does not fight to keep it. Very soon, he’s gone to Celephaïs. The crease in his brow softens. His breath comes and goes with a force beyond itself, a seabreeze riding a steady tide.

He wonders how many have seen Byleth this way. As real as he ever is. The latency one holds in sleep is the most vulnerable iteration of a person. How Linhardt wonders what it must be like, to be seen in such light, to be looked upon as he now gazes at Byleth. Many have seen Linhardt sleep. None knew what they were really looking at.

Linhardt is not good at recognizing and identifying feelings when they happen. But it’s hard to mistake this one. Ache. It feels just like when he watches sunset. It’s what he feels when he is lying in bed on a free afternoon, next to his open window, with the spring breeze carrying in the song of evening birds. When he’s looking at the world at golden hour and the day is at its most beautiful, just as it’s about to end. Ache, sharp and gnawing. And it doesn’t make sense.

Byleth is here. Suddenly that feels precious. Suddenly it feels…uncertain.

-------------------

That Saturday, his bedroom door is nearly beaten off its hinges long before the first lark is due to wake up. He’d only been asleep for an hour.

“Gone.” He repeats the word, as if it will make more sense then. It doesn’t. His head feels like it’s full of fog. Exhaustion still buzzes in his chest, but fear chases it away. His head pounds with his heart. Gone could mean several different things.

“Can you hear me?! I said we’re leaving. Hurry up!” Leonie is eager to move on to the next doorway. The corridor is full of the sound of knocking and sleepy questions, worried voices, clanging equipment. The air of unease and urgency. Three people are locking Hilda into her armor, Ignatz can’t find his quiver… Linhardt doesn’t even know what they’re all getting ready for. What are we doing? Nobody answers the most basic questions around here…

“If everybody could hurry, that’d be real great,” Claude is saying. He sounds so unbothered. “Teach already has a head start on us, so we’ve got a bit of a gap to close to catch up to him.”

Oh. That sort of gone. He glares after Leonie, but there’s little room to tell her off. “Missing,” she should have said.

But this is only marginally better. Missing is still bad. Do they know where to look? Is he alright…? Linhardt is trying to find a thread of logic to follow, apply himself to a solution, but… he can’t think. Cold water replaces his blood. Byleth has been strange all month, and now he’s left sometime in the night, all alone, and nobody seems to think it was for a leisurely nighttime stroll. Why would he do this? He’s ill. Is that why? Is he not in right mind?

Someone runs past him—Leonie, tangled in a heated debate with Claude over whether they should go and find Jeralt. Because after all, it’s his son. Claude won’t hear of it. No time, he says, and Byleth can handle himself, they’re only going ‘just in case’. Leonie asks what if he gets hurt out there, what will she tell Jeralt then?

He’s ill. Why would he go? Where? Why alone?

Linhardt snatches his outermost robe off the floor on his way out. He doesn’t even need to grab anything; he has his spellbook in his head. He starts toward the stairs—but then realizes nobody can go anywhere until everyone gets moving. They’re helping each other. He should…do that. Solve problems at their source. He doubles back, looking for a room with a knightly-type in it.

“For heaven’s sake…” He moans when he sees the state of Lorenz’s plate mail. His hair is insane and he’s still got his sleep mask hanging round his neck. Nobody has ever looked less noble. “Your breastplate is on backwards.”

---------------

“Because it’s impossible to see,” Claude snips, which is unlike him, but being fair he has had Hilda screeching in his ear every time he touches ground. She wants to know how in the world he could have lost the trail. The lack of a moon and the poor weather has made it difficult to see, and they’ve lost Byleth’s track somewhere in a rocky valley where the path branches. Petra is still scouting from the air, and anyone with a horse has been sent to explore the numerous branching paths on foot. Some of them search for signs of passage. Like they’re tracking a wild buck through the woods. Linhardt was once forced to go on a hunt, very courtly and sporting. It was a boar. They scream and have a right to.

“Where would he go? There’s nothing out here.”

“I’m going to search east again. You go that way.”

They both go off in opposite directions. Hilda finally has her horse, so she gallops away, leaving those of the deer who are on foot to search the big intersection. There are about five roads stemming from this one spot, and nobody can figure out which one Byleth took.

Leaned up against a rock, Linhardt is struggling. Moving so quickly on such little sleep has given him a headache to rival all, and he isn’t just tired, he’s half dead. It’s freezing and he’d forgotten that when he ran out of his room with nothing but one robe over his sleep clothes. Damn this. If he knew this was going to happen tonight, he wouldn’t have stayed up late…

“Are you alright?”

It takes him a moment to realize that question is directed at him. He stares, and the look on his face must not be very reassuring to Ignatz. “Do…should we put you on a horse? Do you need water?” Raphael is there too, looking at him like… Linhardt bristles. How old do they all think he is? How helpless?

“He’s fine.” Another voice cuts in. Sharp, high, her eyes as she glares at the three of them. Lysithea approaches, arms crossed. “It’s the Professor you should be worried about. Get your priorities in order!” She turns to Linhardt specifically. Looks him up and down. “You’ve looked worse. How long are you planning on dragging everyone down? Are you going to get moving or what?”

“…Pardon?” he sneers flatly.

“Look!” She points to the rest of the deer, all scattered out, calling out to each other and searching high and low. Galloping hooves, sweeping wings. Action. Even Lorenz is on his hands and knees in the ignoble dirt, trying to spot footprints. “Everybody’s looking, and still none of them can figure it out.”

“We’re doing our best,” Ignatz rebuffs, a bit indignant. But Lysithia isn’t listening to him anymore, her petulant eyes drilling into Linhardt’s. He doesn’t know what she’s expecting, though.

“Did you hear me? Are you deaf?” She snaps her fingers and points again. “Nobody can figure it out.” She waits. Prompts him with her eyes. She’s got a look on her face like she’s never seen anyone denser.

She. She’s right. Because…look. He sees it. Scattered. Nobody is…okay. They’re all doing separate things. Nobody is putting anything together. Wait. “Wait.”

He rushes forward, and behind him, Lysithea groans, “Ugh, FINally.”

He watches the Deer for a while. He keeps a record in his mind of where each of them are, what they’re doing. They all move around him, scurrying, and he observes. They’ll think he’s weak or lazy or…whatever. Doesn’t matter. He can see it. He knows what to do—he can see where it’s all messing up. Something is missing—Byleth, and that’s the problem, and that’s where it’s all gone wrong. Nobody’s organizing them. Nobody’s putting the pieces in the right places.

When Byleth gives them orders, he knows exactly who should do what and why. The most effective person according to their talents gets assigned the job they can do the best. Putting those people in the wrong spots is how things don’t get done. It’s how they fail. Byleth is so…essential. Important. He’s the pin that holds the entire operation together. What Linhardt sees now is the keen absence of him, the disaster of his void.

Linhardt raises his head, searching for wings in the dark sky. “Clau—ugh.” He turns to Raphael. “Can you get him for me.”

Raphael raises his enormous voice to the heavens to call Claude’s name. You could hear him ten miles away, even if you are riding a wyvern up in the winter wind. Claude motions to Petra and they all recall the scouts—soon, the deer are gathered again.

“Did you find something?” Leonie asks eagerly.

“No—nobody can find anything.”

She looks indignant. “We know that! Why would you stop up from looking!? Did you call us back just to complain?”

“Don’t—we don’t need to search all the spots you’re going,” Linhardt begins. He isn’t saying this well, he knows, and knowing makes it even harder to be clear. “Look, you... You can’t coordinate. Lorenz has scoured the east road like he’s looking for dust on his mirror—but it wouldn’t matter, he wouldn’t know what tracks look like.”

Lorenz looks aghast. “At least I’m doing something. And not just here to insult the people who are.”

“It’s not—I’m not insulting, I’m saying, Leonie should be doing that task! Or Petra, or anyone who knows about tracking and…wilderness things. More importantly, they already did. Raphael,” Linhardt turns to him. “Didn’t you go down the east road already?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“How far?”

“I mean, I followed it up until the rockslide.”

“Rockslide?” Claude asks. “I didn’t see…where was a rockslide?”

“Bout half a mile out. Covers the whole path. Figured there’s no way the Professor coulda gone that way even if he wanted to, so I quit and came back.” Everyone is quiet. Seems he didn’t tell anybody about his findings; both Lorenz and then Leonie had checked that same path right afterwards, not knowing it was a dead end.

Linhardt observes, “You’ve all been following each other’s footprints without knowing. And the scouts—” he looks toward the wyvern riders, horsemen. “You’re looking at the big picture, so of course you’re not going to catch any details. Don’t look for Byleth’s presence, look for the potential of Byleth’s presence. What’s the most likely road? Start there, see if there’s evidence to support it, then move on to more viable subjects. Er, roads.”

“Hm. That’s right… We need to go from the ground up, not the top down,” Claude announces, dismounting from his wyvern. “Has anyone gone down the southwest path?”

Three people speak up—Lysithea, Ignatz, and Lorenz. None of whom have a horse or wyvern. All the other paths have been checked for a few miles out, but not this one.

Claude turns to Petra, and she seems to understand without words. Only a glance, and she nods, starting out along the path on foot. She's searching for tracks, moving carefully and slowly. Claude sends Leonie down another road, and Raphael down one more. Claude himself takes a fourth, and the search begins again.

Waiting with the others at the crossroads, Linhardt shuffles in place, uncomfortable. Lysithea catches his eye, and he could swear he saw a smug grin before she sees him looking and turns up her nose. He isn’t sure what that means. He felt compelled to speak out when he thought he saw the solution—but what if he wasn’t right after all? Has he cost them too much time now? His heart is pounding.

Finally, the call comes back. Leonie has found a footprint.

An hour later, they’re at the edge of the red canyon. It’s an impressive space, wide open sky, huge walls of orange rock reaching up to it.

Claude hovers within shouting range. “I think I can see where he went. There’s only one way into the canyon on foot.” He’s hanging from the saddle of his wyvern by standing in one stirrup, leaning out as he stares off into the distance. His eyes are sharp. Everyone hangs on his word.

“…Is he there?” Linhardt asks.

“I think…so…” Claude is not saying what else he sees. On purpose. “Um. Let’s hurry,” he clips shortly, swinging himself fully into his saddle. He rises to join Petra in the air, swooping ahead toward the red canyon.

As they approach the mouth of the canyon, a cry rises into the air. Beast-like, but with an intelligent rage in it that can only come from a knowing mind. It’s hideous. Linhardt feels the vague, hazy unease of nightmare creep into his heart. Everyone around him quickens their pace, and he begins to fall behind, not for want of trying. Several hundred meters away, dark wings rise above the rocks, and another strange scream blooms beneath the overcast clouds.

Why is this…happening? Everything was normal last month. What’s Byleth doing, what’s wrong with him? What’s been wrong with him? Where did this all come from?!

There is a hand on his arm and he flinches away; if someone tries to comfort him now he’ll fall apart. Marianne understands, pulling her hand away. “Let’s just get to him,” she prompts. She’s in the saddle of her pretty new white-dappled war-mare. “Do you want a ride?”

-----------------

“Listen Teach. No one likes aimless wandering more than me, but it’s not worth dying over.”

The tremors still haven’t left his legs. The rest of the deer mill around in the relief of a victory, while Claude and Hilda laugh and joke with Byleth in the aftermath. Linhardt sinks to the ground, knees up, putting his head on his arms with a yawn.

“How are you sleepy now?” Leonie is asking, as she grins and runs through triumphant sword drills.

“Be…cause that’s the normal consequence of exertion? How can you not be tired?” he asks, wiping yawn-tears from the corner of his eye.

“After a fight like that? I’m pumped! I’ve never fought so many demonic beasts at once before!”

He yawns again, putting his head back down. “I’ll let you have all the fun, then, don’t mind me…”

“Oh, Professor!”

He perks up immediately. Linhardt stares up at Byleth. The Professor is looking down at him with a brand new expression on his face. Sheepish.

“I miscalculated,” he says.

Oh, there it is again. Hollow, gnawing, cold fire in his chest. But he can’t stop looking at Byleth. He’s so very…pretty. …Is this…bad? This might be bad.

Byleth is surrounded soon by his students. He casts them all a fond, proud look. The small smile on his face grows.

“Thank you all for bringing me home.”

Linhardt aches.

----------------

Aside from occasional nightmares where demonic vultures swallow him whole, Linhardt makes sure to relax well and often after they return from that mission. The month becomes calmer. He needs to take advantage and enjoy it fully. There are two weeks left before their end-of-month assignment from the church, which is looking to be a nasty situation in Remire. The villagers are under the influence of some strange illness. Speaking of which, Byleth’s health stays…the same, but doesn’t worsen, and he takes more rest. Linhardt finds himself with a bit more free time now that his professor is taking more breaks, and he spends that free time with…his classmates. His whole world is brand new.

It’s just as well. He would like to avoid whatever has begun happening to him when he sees the Professor lately. He’s convinced himself it’s nothing but valid concern over his health giving rise to feelings of worry, and that’s all. Everything will go back to normal soon. But normal looks different now. He used to sequester himself in the library, or his room, or the gardens, preferring no company at all. Sometimes he’d get dragged out by Caspar. Now he goes to choir practice with Marianne and lunch afterward.

He passes old classmates sometimes, in the dining hall, but Caspar always makes sure to leave if they ever find themselves in the same place. Today, that happens, and Marianne must notice, because she looks at Linhardt softly.

“Is everything alright?”

Linhardt is staring intently at the lunch menu, a troubled look on his face, brow furrowed. “…No, not at all. They have only fish on the entire menu today—not a single thing without it.”

“…Eh?” She turns to the menu board, glancing between it and Linhardt. “Um. That’s…too bad.”

“Oh well. I’m quite used to skipping meals, so I will be alright for one night.”

“You…what?”

“Have I said something distressing?”

“You’d rather go hungry than eat something you don’t like?”

Linhardt nods. “Of course.”

Marianne looks even more distressed. “I-it’s not healthy to go hungry…please look after yourself.”

Dorothea greets him on the way to sit down. She’s sitting with the Blue Lions—Ingrid and her boys. She briefly smiles at Linhardt, catching him by the sleeve. “I’d like to talk to you sometime,” she says. Apprehension fills him. “Oh, it’s nothing bad. Promise.”

“I…alright.”

She lets go of him. “You look well, by the way.” She smiles. “I’m glad.”

He walks on, wondering why you’d ever tell someone you want to speak to them but not what about. Linhardt would never put anyone through that sort of anticipation. She…did seem genuine, though, when she smiled at him.

Marianne has taken him to sit next to Lysithea. He almost turns back to Dorothea, but… Oh well. There’s something he’s been meaning to do, and now’s as good a time as any.

She’d been digging into a parfait with girlish glee, but when they approach, she checks her expression and elegantly folds a napkin into her lap. He never rolls her eyes at this posturing—if anything, he’s jealous. If he’d been able to wear the etiquette mask as well as she can at her age, he would have avoided a great many sore knuckles at the dinner table.

“Lysithea,” he greets, but then pauses. “…Where did you get a parfait?”

She smirks. “I asked for one.”

Oh, well, that will never work for him. She’s just too good at this, blast her.

Unlike Dorothea, Linhardt is a staunch believer in getting immediately to the point, so he says, “In Zanado, you had no pity. I wasn't pulling any weight. Everyone else let me, but you appraised my potential value as higher than my contribution. You were the only one who treated me like a…an asset.”

She looks up at him. “Well, why shouldn’t I? I mean, aren’t you?”

He glances down. “…I’d like to be, I think. I can be.” He thinks for a moment. “Yes, I can be.”

For a moment, the silence is tense, as she surveys him with her sharp eyes. Lysithea humphs, closing her eyes as she takes a dainty scoop of strawberry and cream. “You can get off-menu dishes from that mousy cook with the yellow hair if you bribe her. She likes white wine and hair jewelry.”

He lights up, honing in on the cook in question as she bustles behind the counters.

Marianne and Lysithia glance at each other. Good. Maybe if…if they begin to see him as a resource. On crests. Maybe then either of them will utilize him, regarding the mysteries about their own. That’s not an angle he ever would have thought of taking, he didn’t know about it. He’s learning a great many things in his new class, that’s certain.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Professor Byleth enter the room. At once, the conversation he’d been part of becomes nothing more than background noise, his focus narrowing in. Lysithea humphs at his rudeness, but Marianne smiles and looks down at her plate.

He starts to stand. “I’m going to…” He looks at Marianne, searching for an out.

“Um…oh, please.” She picks up quickly, bless her. “If you could just go and ask him that one question for me…I’m embarrassed to ask myself, I just can’t seem to figure out that homework he gave me…”

Linhardt wonders why he ever thought she was incapable. She’s impeccably helpful. He only wishes she’d let him return the favor.

Leaving behind the girls, he bolts toward the Professor, who’s on his way out the door. Lately he’s been taking his meals back to his room, or else someone brings them there.

“Professor,” he calls.

Byleth turns around—there, further evidence to support his theory, that every time Byleth looks at him something strange happens in his chest. Especially when he smiles.

“Hello, Linhardt.”

And says his name.

“I…” his mouth is dry. “Hello. I was just wondering about…some questions. That I had, regarding white magic. I feel I could use some extra…curricular. If you have the time.” He notes the bags under Byleth’s eyes, tries to measure them against how bad they were yesterday. Are they any worse? “…How are you feeling? I suppose I should have lead with that.”

Byleth inclines his head in a patient nod. “I’m well. Let’s talk over lunch? You haven’t eaten.”

Linhardt shakes his head. How did he know that though…well. He knows everything about his students, doesn’t he.

Byleth serves sandwiches and apple blossom tea in the garden. Linhardt hasn’t a clue what to talk about, or why he did this. If he didn’t have anything to say, why did he ask for conversation? …He just wanted to be around him longer. He just didn’t like the way it felt when he was about to leave the room.

“You’ve been getting along with everyone a bit more lately.”

“Hm? Oh.” He nods. “You saw me with those two. I think I’m figuring out how to make them confide in me about their strange crest situations…perhaps. It is taking quite a lot of time, though. This method is very slow.”

“Friendship is.”

Oh. Is that what this is. Hm.

Linhardt clears his throat. “I am…” Concerned? Worried? “…curious about…what happened in red canyon.”

“I found something, yes.” Byleth is staring into his empty teacup.

Linhardt reaches for the teapot himself, for the first time. Why hadn’t he ever? Well, it would be rude to the host to pour their tea. It…doesn’t feel rude now. Byleth is tired. So Linhardt does it for him. That’s all it feels like.

Byleth’s eyes are wide as he watches his cup fill. He picks it up, staring into it until Linhardt has begun to wonder if he did something wrong after all—until Byleth smiles.

“Thank you.”

Oh my.

“What—” His voice comes out higher pitched than he wanted and he has to start again. “…What did you find?”

From inside the folds of his robes, the Professor produces a small gem, so clear it almost looks to be made of glass. He gives Linhardt a stare he doesn't know how to react to. Is Byleth...excited? He indicates he wants Linhardt's hand. He gives it.

What a strange way to hand someone an object. Byleth slips his hand beneath Linhardt's, cupping, shaping it into a bowl. He then uses his other hand to place the gemstone into his palm. He cradles Linhardt's hand in both of his own, not enclosing, but supporting from beneath.

"This is called a Knowledge Stone."

His hands are so cold. And gentle.

"It helps with focus, allowing your mind to make full use of input and information. It will ensure that, whatever you are studying, the learning will progress more quickly."

Or maybe Linhardt's hands are just very warm.

"...I thought of you immediately."

He slams back to earth. "You...w-were right to. I mean--" That's not how he should phrase that. "It's perfect. A very specific and well-considered..." He isn't sure if it's a gift, or a tool a teacher gives his student. Like a quill or a notebook. "Thank you very much, Professor. I shall get much use from this, I'll make sure to use it well."

Byleth looks relieved. He sits back in his chair, humming softly. Fatigue is taking him, again, and Linhardt is quick to suggest a nap.

"Please don't take this as another iteration of my quirks, Professor, but I wholeheartedly recommend you get some rest."

Byleth nods--or is he nodding off?

"Have you...or anyone, found out anything further about this vertigo of yours?"

Byleth struggles—brow furrowed. That’s not an expression he wears often. Sometimes when he doesn’t know how to explain something in class. Never lasts for more than a moment. But now, it doesn’t fade. Linhardt hesitates. “If…it’s something you would rather not say. You needn’t.”

Byleth shakes his head. “It’s a…complicated matter.” He leans back in his chair, briefly closing his eyes.

“Is it...well. A matter of great concern?”

Byleth smiles, tired eyes cracking open to stare at the clouds. “Oh, maybe.”

He isn’t used to such candid…spontaneous answers. Byleth usually never speaks in anything but absolutes. Maybe isn’t a common word in his vocabulary.

“Oh.” Linhardt isn’t sure where to go. He frowns. "You know, Professor, you're all mystery and no answers. It's not fair."

“...Hm. So. You want to uncover the mystery of me?”

His face is on fire, suddenly. Linhardt locks up, staring at the table and not moving.

Byleth laughs.

And Linhardt aches.

“If there is anything I can…do,” he begins, mumbling. “Please don’t hesitate to let me know. I confess I have less expertise than perhaps Manuela—but I have been learning from her for quite a while, in the medical field. I may be able to see something she missed. I…can be an asset, I’m sure. I can be of help.”

Byleth looks at him closely. Then he leans over and touches his arm. “You are helpful to us all. Already. In very many ways.”

He’s…overwhelmed. He swallows, his back straight as he nods stiffly. Is he nervous?

"There is something you can do. Specifically.” Byleth retracts his hand. “Focus on the situation in Remire. A healer is precisely what’s needed there. And you’re among the best I know. No one matches your aptitude for white magic. We’re going to need it.”

He takes a shaky breath. Among the best…

When he talks about Remire, Byleth looks so troubled. It’s dreadful. It makes Linhardt want to reach out and smooth the wrinkles from between his eyes with his thumb.

“Remire means a lot to me.” He sighs, a twinge of headache behind his eyes. “I can’t let them down.”

Linhardt stands up immediately. “I’ll make sure to research as much as I can. In fact I was on my way to talk to…” he winces. “Professor Manuela…about accessing some medical journals. Perhaps we can yet find what obscure disease afflicts them. Or…perhaps you.”

Byleth’s eyes, when they turn toward him, make Linhardt want to stay right where he is, and also to run far afar away. They’re not just soft, or tired, or vulnerable. They’re also…grateful.

He’s grateful for him.

For the next two weeks, Linhardt adopts a new subject of study. Fervently. If he doesn’t figure out what’s wrong with Remire, he might as well go home.

----------------

The word for this is carnage. Their hapless herd of deer run lithe through a town turned bloodmoor, overrun by too-early customers for coffins. He can smell iron, hear hell. They plunge into the nightmare, some more resolved than others. Ignatz is like a colt at Raphael’s side, protected by the massive brawler so that he can fire off long range miracle shots. His aim doesn’t suffer despite the tears in his eyes. Leonie has disappeared into a burning building that produces terrified screams, Jeralt shouting an ignored recall after her. Petra’s wyvern soars unimpeded over the blockades, descending swiftly upon whoever is trying to tear apart their neighbors. Lysithea calls down dark fire and impales mad farmers on black spikes. It is death and insanity and no amount of meditative breathing will stop him from knowing that.

He wasn’t prepared at all. It had been two weeks of ceaseless study and medical journals and double shifts at infirmary duty, waking up to discover Manuela has moved him from the desk to bed again. Hours and hours of stacks of books and reports, experiments with new drugs he concocted and used on himself. And none of it bore fruit. The most he could do is prepare spells and medicines meant to target the specific symptoms reported of the Remire sickness. But he couldn’t find a root cause, or a cure. It simply has never happened before. Not in any report he could get his hands on. He thought perhaps once he got there and observed the situation firsthand, things might be clearer. Easier to fix.

They aren’t. It’s the worst place he’s ever been. He wants to run far away, wants to hide and wait until it’s dealt with by people stronger than him. He can’t do that, though. He doesn’t turn away. Here, more than any place he’s ever been in, his skills are needed. By both sides of the conflict. There isn’t too much danger to his classmates, but it’s very difficult saving the villagers who have kept hold of their minds. They’re panicking and running outside his spell range. When the insane ones fall by his classmate’s hands, he tries to stabilize them without re-waking them. They need to stay down, but not dead…what a line to walk. There is no time to avoid getting covered in blood.

Marianne stays near him. Keeps him lucky. Keeps him sane. Her sunken, dark-rimmed eyes are sympathetic in a way that speaks to knowing the same horrors as haunt his nightmares. “Goddess save them. We do what we must. What we can.”

When people need her, Marianne is not the prey animal she is in a cathedral. Linhardt can’t think of anything to say back to her. But he stands a little steadier at her side.

One worry above all others. Where is he?

Linhardt fights the chill grip of desperation and tries to sort through the hellish chaos to find Byleth. The fact his father has come along provides a modicum of assurance—surely he won’t allow harm to come to his son—but Linhardt has never been good at leaving important matters in the hands of others. He must stay close to him; he’s in poor health. He might need him. He never should have come here at all. Neither of them should. None of them should.

Where is he?!

Someone calls for him—it’s Ignatz, pleading a respite for Raphael. Lindhardt has suggested a thousand times that he wear more armor. He throws a healing spell to him and immediately Raphael’s knees leave the ground—he’s roaring again, Ignatz is thanking the goddess. Like the goddess is the one who just…nevermind.

Great red wings swoop above them as Petra drives her wyvern over their heads, pulling around in a circle as she lands. She looks every bit like she belongs here, streaked with soot and fury, her axe glaring by the fires. A warrior defined, on the field, but Linhardt remembers when he had to explain to her what the phrase "lead a horse to water" meant, and she giggled while thanking him.

"Take them!" she shouts, which must mean the pile of unmoving bodies on the back of her saddle. One of them is gripped in the claws of her beast.

As his fellows begin laying out the villagers, Marianne kneels and begins healing. Linhardt does the same, his hands shaking as he holds them out for a spell to knit a girl's torn arm back together.

Petra is about to take off again, but he manages to shout at her, "Have you seen the Professor?"

She winces. "I can not be finding him. Do not be defeated by fear, Linhardt. I will go looking again. Remain strong."

"Please," he replies, and she swoops away.

The girl at his feet is stirring, and he is forced to stop before the spell is complete. She's still injured. But if she wakes up... He's afraid of her. And he hates himself for it.

There is a brilliant flash of dark energy far afield…he’s found the Knight of Death. He’s found Byleth.

There have been times in Linhardt’s life when he was afraid. Mostly when he was much younger. These days, all he can muster would be something approaching a rolling sense of dread. Anxiety. That he might have to encounter something unpleasant, do what he doesn’t want. But now he knows. He remembers what fear is.

He’s running. All he can see is the clashing magic auras rising into the air over a barricade—black and green. Behind it, he knows, Byleth is clashing with the Death Knight. But he can’t see them. Linhardt runs. He’s too consumed with it to think of anything else. He must get there.

Someone tackles him to the ground and his head reels as it connects with soggy earth. Stars in his eyes. Fingernails in his neck. All he can feel is annoyed. He was in the middle of something. And now he has this to deal with. Pinning him down…strangling. The face of a…baker, or a farmer, or the town cobbler maybe. Their eyes are full of blood and tears. Linhardt feels the way he does when he’s about to pass out. He can’t do that. He’s in the middle of something…

“Stop…” he chokes. He slams his fist into the man’s face. It hurts his knuckles more than it hurts his attacker. A ruler smacking his hands at twelve years old. He’s so angry. So angry. “Get—off!” He can’t breathe. He’s so angry…

He isn’t sure at first how he finds himself free of the crushing weight, the strangler removed as cleanly as if the goddess has reached down and plucked him off like a tick. But when he hears the roar, he recognizes Raphael. Imagine that. If he hadn’t healed him earlier, he wouldn’t have been able to save him now. There’s something in that. Maybe. He can’t breathe.

“Linhardt!” Marianne is pulling him to his feet. He’s choking, and trying to see where he’d been going. The bursts of electricity that had marked the spot are gone now. What does that mean…where is he—what happened?

“The…he…” he can’t talk, his throat is crushed. God damn it. “Byleth,” he coughs, trying to pull away and run. She holds him in place.

“He’s there!” Marianne points somewhere else. Byleth is standing tall next to Jeralt, accepting an unconscious villager from Lorenz, who keeps pulling more of them out of the rubble of a collapsed house. People flock to help—Leonie, Ignatz. No Death Knight to be found. Linhardt falls to his knees.

In short order, Petra and Claude close in on the man who is not Tomas. It’s done. The villagers collapse, delirious or unconscious. But no longer murderous.

People need healing. Linhardt needs…air. Everything smells like blood and smoke. He can feel it inside his mouth, like slime. Oh, god…

He’s sick in the grass behind the burning husk of a house, clinging to a tree. Never pleasant. But the crisis of the physical process distracts his body from dizziness, makes him unable to spend time picturing the scenes of gore and horror he’d just wandered through. Life is all about trade-offs. He’s heaving, but for the time being, at least, it seems he has escaped fainting.

There’s a hand wrapped around his bicep, a gnat’s whine of a voice in his ear. “Hey…Linhardt? Easy. Here, sit down. Take some water.” Leonie. Is who that is. Kind of her, but he very much wishes no one had noticed him in such a position. “Hey—can someone find the Professor? Jeralt? Can you bring…”

When the ringing fills his ears he knows what’s coming. He hasn’t escaped it, only outran it until now and now he’s trapped, can’t run another step, because the—the ground, it’s all soaked, and he…it’s too—it’s so—sticky—

“Linhardt. I’m here.”

He clutches onto those arms like a lifeline, gasping for breath, latching himself firmly to this anchor in the vortex that has been made of his world. He can’t see, thank god. Gentle and cold hands, one at the back of his head, the other covering his eyes. Somehow, he’s ended up horizontal, a lap beneath him as a pillow.

“You’re safe. Just waking up. You were fishing, and fell asleep on the scotchmoss by the riverbank. You caught a ten-pound trout.”

He pretends that’s true. It works, a bit.

“Can you breathe for me? Slowly. In full.”

It takes a while to remember how. Even longer until he can properly think again. His shaky fingers pull away the hand over his eyes and, with effort, Linhardt registers what he’s seeing. Byleth’s face against the sky. Haggard. Heartsore. Smeared in grime he’s tried to wipe away. He looks like he’s going to break open, and if so, all that’s inside him will be plainly spilt upon the earth. No more mystery. All in open view.

“I’m so sorry.”

Cold sweat and a rabbit’s heartbeat send him into exhausting shivers. He’s here again. Unable to face the reality—the embrace—that he’s in, Linhardt closes his eyes and whines, “I need a nap.”

“You’ve earned it. Let’s get you to a bed. A soft one. Warm. You won’t have to worry about anything at all, just rest as much as you want.”

That sounds like heaven. He begins to sit up, but the arms that enclose him hold him still. Byleth begins to stand up. Before he can protest, Byleth has fully scooped him up into a bridal carry, clutching him close to his chest. Linhardt can press his ear there and listen to his heartbeat.

Byleth carrying him out of hell and into heaven. He stares up through blurry eyes, his head light and dizzy. Seaglass eyes against the grey sky. Heaven.

------------------------

Chapter Text

Hanneman is probably concerned about him, beneath his all-consuming concern for “The Work.” All those years of Crestological research and the portions of it Linhardt has been partnering to work on. That’s certainly important. He came with a basket of oranges, winked at him, leaning in to whisper, “There’s cookies in the bottom, beneath the paper.” That’s Hanneman for you. You always have to look beneath the paper.

Linhardt munches on one while Hanneman plays at pleasantries. “How are you feeling, my boy?” He makes himself comfortable in the chair next to his bedside, clearing a spot on the side table to place the basket.

He groans in response. “Bored. Did you bring anything interesting?”

He hums joyfully, reaching into his inner coat pocket to produce a bundle of papers. “More theoretics. Equations on that—ahem—little tangle we’ve been trying to unravel.”

The little tangle is Lysithea. Trying to figure out how to remove one of her Crests. Be a lot easier if she’d let him know anything about either of them. But even still, he’s made advancements. They were getting quite close, until they both had to redirect all their attention to Remire.

“You know, I’m starting to think your whole ‘get a goal’ idea wasn’t a bad one.”

Hanneman is pleased as a possum. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that, because if you encourage Hanneman even the tiniest bit, he gets so so excited and immediately reaches further. That’s a scientist for you. In a way, a really annoyed way, Linhardt has to admire it.

“I’m happy you think so! See, I’ve been greatly missing your help in the lab while you’ve been away on your mission and now locked up by that harpy. Why it’s been positively stagnant.”

Linhardt twists around in bed to spread out the papers all over it, picking which ones look the most interesting. “Pencil?”

“It got me thinking—ah, yes, here you are—it got me thinking, Linhardt, about how…well, invalulable you’ve become to me. I had hoped to see if you’ve given any further thought to an apprenticeship.”

“Mhm.” If he just knew the composition of the Crest in question…maybe he needs to steal a lock of her hair for testing. But then if she found out, would that make her forever uncooperative to his efforts? That won’t do. He was going to pitch it to her once he found out whether or not it was possible to remove one. Perhaps honesty…perhaps sincerity. If she knows the goal of the research, she’ll be more amenable to it. It will help her.

“Are you listening, my boy? …Oh, you’ve missed a step on that one.”

“I skipped it, it seemed redundant.”

“Ah, it would seem that way. But it actually needs doing, otherwise you don’t have what you need for the seventh step.”

“Oh.” Linhardt goes through and does it the long way, and wouldn’t you know, he’s right. The damn equation only works if it’s overly complicated. “Oh, that’s so stupid.”

Hanneman chuckles. “Yes, it’s utterly vexing.”

“Wow. Bringing homework to a patient in his bed." A voice from the doorway nearly makes him leap out of his coat. "Why, what a dedicated teacher you are!"

Hanneman grumbles. "Speaking of utterly vexing..."

Sharp clicks count down Hanneman’s doom as Manuela crosses the room to chase him away from the bedside. “Ohh, no, don’t leave on my account. I just came to tell you how much I admire your determination. You’re willing to go to any lengths for your research—that’s the spirit! Don’t let a silly old medical prescription get in your way!”

“We were merely conversing,” Hanneman retorts, scooping papers into his coat. “If Linhardt wishes to end the conversation he is absolutely free to at any time. Unlike with you, battering him with reprimands he can’t escape from.”

“If you’d like to see what a ‘reprimand’ looks like,” she smiles sweetly. “Then you’ll still be standing there after I count to five.”

“Such childish games!” he harrumphs. “I certainly won’t degrade myself to play them.” With that, he flees the infirmary—or, rather, he excuses himself from playing childish games.

“Tell me, Linny. What did you think I meant by ‘no working while on bedrest?"

He shrugs. "I thought it meant no chopping wood or polishing swords. Crest research is hardly work."

"Ugh, you two and your Crest research. He can go research all the ways I have to ruin a man’s life.” Manuela busies herself with work, bringing all manner of medical equipment over to Linhardt’s bedside. Half of it he sees no need for.

“Have I filled out my punch card yet?”

Manuela tsks, looking down at him with a mix of reprimand and slyness. All to cover up her genuine concern. God forbid that woman ever express something heartfelt.

“Filled it? You don’t have any card left.” She’s fiddling with his IV, changing out the empty bag. Fluids he’s been on, to keep him alive while he sleeps through meals. “You’ve maxed out your rewards program for the month, I’m afraid. So you might as well stay healthy.”

“Oh, but if I do that, I won’t be allowed to sleep as much as I want and be waited on hand and foot.”

Manuela gives him a look. “Don’t push your luck pal. You may be the new Professor’s favorite, but you are also, helpless. And entirely dependant on me as of now.” She bats at him with a small length of bandage she picked up from somewhere. “So don’t be smart.”

“Tell a fish not to swim…”

It’s the second day since Remire. Manuela had confined him, without argument, for three days of bed rest. He hadn’t been injured, by outside force at least. But apparently he had used so much magic that he’d given himself internal stress far beyond what he could take. Using magic is not all metaphysical—like any effort you can exert, it takes its toll on the physical hardware with which people are equipped. Made from. You can injure yourself by overusing it the same as you can pull a muscle swinging a lance. It’s just that Linhardt pushed a mite further than a pulled muscle.

Manuela sits at his bedside to check him all over with glowing fingertips. Touches his forehead, the spot over his heart, the pulse at his neck. The frown between her eyes doesn’t touch her face, but that’s her biggest tell. When she’s keeping her face expressionless and professional, that’s when you know you’re in trouble. She clicks her tongue, opening her eyes. “Well, you certainly did a number on yourself, Linny dear. I’ve never seen magic channels more fried and withered. You have a damnable habit of overtaxing yourself to the extreme.” Magic channels—you can think of them like rivers, running alongside every vein in your body. They have no borders, but usually follow the same routes. They draw from the muscles they lie within, as well as the mind that supplies them. His are now “like burnt spaghetti,” Manuela so evocatively puts it.

Linhardt shrugs. “There were things I needed to get done.”

“Well, you ‘got things done’ right up to the edge of comatose.” She scoffs. “Just one more spell and you’d be able to sleep for months—heck, maybe ever! Wouldn’t that be nice!”

She’s not shouting, but she’s shouting—she’s got that opera voice. Every sound from Manuela’s mouth carries extra decibels.

“Truly, Professor Manuela, you are a marvel. This is the only infirmary in the world where victims can get kicked when they’re down.”

“I’ll show you a kick, you little—”

“Excuse me…” A delicate voice cuts through, rescuing him from certain demise. The only person who can ever interrupt Manuela when she’s yelling and not get skewered for it. “Why, good evening Professor! Sorry to be a bother. We’ve just come to visit Lin.”

----------

Dorothea has come to see him in the infirmary. She’s got Caspar with her.

Linhardt stares up from his pillows, looking every bit like a haggard and frail invalid, Remire’s smoke still caught in his messy hair. He catches Caspar’s eye for the briefest moment, before staring flatly at Dorothea. “…Ah,” he says. “An ambush, when I am at my weakest. Dorothea, you have an incredible eye for opportunity.”

“Ngh, see—I told you, this was a bad idea—”

She cuts off Caspar, snatching him by the collar as he tries to turn and flee. Her face is the perfect mask of casual and happy, but her grip chokes the words right out of him.

“I heard you had a difficult time with your mission this month. When I told poor Caspar, he was absolutely sick with worry. Buuut, the both of you are too stubborn to do anything about it, so, I thought it was about time I intervene.”

“Hey!” He squirms himself free of her grip. “This isn’t what you said you were gonna say! What happened to ‘don’t be scared, we can go together, I’ll smooth things over’?”

“She uses that voice when she’s manipulating,” Linhardt clarifies. When Caspar falls silent, he looks down at his hands. “It…works on you, rather a lot.”

Caspar glares at her, before glaring at the floor, and then at the window—anywhere but Linhardt. It’s the first time they have been within ten feet of each other since Caspar told him what he really thought of him. When he basically threw Linhardt out of his life in a very ‘you can’t fire me I quit’ sort of manner. What is there to say that he hadn’t already?

“Well!” Dorothea is about to leave him alone in a room with Caspar. Isn’t she. “I’ve already done more than I had to. You boys, do something yourself for a change. Good luck!”

This silence is more uncomfortable than any he’s ever experienced. He waits for Caspar to leave, but he just…stands there, looking at the floor, his face all scrunched up. Why is he not leaving, if he hates this so much? Linhardt can’t leave. And she knew that. The harpy.

“…If you don’t want to be here, don’t let anything Dorothea said convince you to stay,” Linhardt starts.

Anger is very easy for Caspar—a liferaft of sorts. “What, you don’t want me here?”

“I never said that. You decided that was true all by yourself, without my input.”

The silence returns. Linhardt fidgets with the hem of his blankets, picking a loose string out. It only frays further. He’s thinking of all the ways he’s going to get back at Dorothea, but he can’t focus on any of them, because he’s also trying to think of…what to say to his friend. Who hates him. And what he’s going to do about it. If he even wants to try, or if it would be effort wasted. Maybe even if it is wasted, he should still try anyway.

There haven’t been too many people in Linhardt’s life who were stubborn enough to want him as a friend. Fewer still whose motivations were…straightforward. Not politically motivated. The best thing about Caspar is that he’s honest. He was his friend because he was, and that was all. And nobody else ever did that for him, when he was young.

He should try.

“Do you remember…when we were ten years old,” he mutters. “You broke my wrist in a wrestling match.”

Caspar looks so uncomfortable, ashamed. But also annoyed. “I apologized for that a billion times.”

“Yes. I don’t bring it up to accuse. I bring it up to make a point. That is: I never even thought about it after it healed. At all. I genuinely would have forgotten it even happened. But you kept bringing it up any time you could. When some bullies pushed me down, you checked on my wrist first thing—well, after you beat them up. When my tutor tried to make me transcribe “I will not talk back” a thousand times, you told him I can’t because of my wrist, and since my wrist was your fault you’d write it all in my place.”

Caspar is quiet.

“I appreciated that. I still do. But...I never asked you to hold on to all of that for me.”

“Well—too bad!” Finally, he looks up, and there’s that part of him that isn’t afraid. The person who has always forced Linhardt to meet his eyes. “That’s not how it works!”

“How…what works?”

“You don’t get to decide how other people feel about you, Linhardt!”

His voice makes his head hurt, but Linhardt doesn’t say anything about it. Somehow this feels better than the unbroken sheet of ice that had lately divided them.

Caspar sits down in the chair by his bedside. He’s got his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tightly the blood drains from them. Caspar is always emotional, but now, high-strung and worked up into a frenzied storm, these moments have always made Linhardt tired. He missed it. Somehow, he missed this.

“How…do you feel about me?” he tries. Hoping, stupidly, that it will be different than “coward” and “morally bankrupt.” He’s asking questions he knows the answers to because he’s the definition of a fool.

Caspar sighs, half growling. “I’m mad. Because…” he hesitates, then scrubs his hands down his face. “You aren’t…it’s not your fault.”

Linhardt stares. “You are angry with me because it isn’t my fault.”

“Don’t—make me sound stupid! You always do that!”

“If simply repeating your words back to you makes you sound stupid, Caspar, that speaks for itself.”

Caspar’s face turns red. He’ll explode soon. This is good, it’s predictable and familiar, and for the first time Linhardt can look at Caspar and feel something close to the way he used to. He laughs. He relaxes into the bedding, a grin on his face. Caspar groans like a tea kettle and smacks him with a pillow.

“You’re such a prick!”

“I never thought I’d miss being insulted so much.”

Caspar snorts, crossing his arms. “I could insult you every day, if you stuck around.”

“…I know you’re upset with me about that, but I can’t understand why.”

“Tch. Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. You’ve always been dense.”

“You. Calling me dense.”

“Don’t change the subject,” he changes the subject. “You just left! Like that! It was so easy. You decided, screw these guys, I’m just out for myself, and you just. Left.”

Linhardt lets out a breath, long and slow. He’s used to Caspar’s pouting, but this is something beyond that. It’s rooted deeply in truth. Not something that will dissolve by dinnertime. He’s hurt. Badly. Linhardt feels like a…well, a prick.

“I don’t think I…wanted to leave, necessarily. There was just somewhere else I wanted to go.”

Caspar smacks him again. “That’s the same thing.”

“Functionally, perhaps.”

Caspar slumps into the chair. “Why?”

“…Hm?”

He scrubs his eyes, and Linhardt realizes with dread that he’s fighting off tears. Ugh, god, no. Don’t do that. Please.

“Why did you want to go? Aren’t I…Who else is…”

There’s almost an audible click. Oh. Caspar thinks he left him. He sighs. “Oh, Caspar. If you spend your whole life looking for things to take personally, you will end up in turmoil any time anything happens.”

“I’m not—ohh my god, Linhardt, I have never wanted to beat your ass more than right now. You little shit. I’m your best friend, you ass! I’m not making it personal it just alreadyispersonal!!”

“Alright, alright, calm down. You’ll give yourself a migraine. Or me. Relax; I’m sorry.”

“I…” He looks like he’s been doused with cold water. Yeah, yeah, make a big deal out of it. “You’re what?”

“Playing deaf isn’t going to make me say it again.”

“No—what for?” He’s very…serious. “I need to know what for.”

Linhardt squirms, looking at the ceiling, as if searching it for cheat notes. “I suppose…for not considering how you would feel about me leaving. Even though I didn’t tell you to feel that way. I still should have…cared. And I do.” He sighs. “Of course I do. I suppose it just seemed…well. Feelings can’t always change reality.”

“You didn’t even talk to me.”

“I…yes.” He doesn’t feel like this is the time for explanations. “I’m sorry. ...I miss talking to you, for what it's worth.”

Caspar doesn’t break like he thought he would. Usually this is the point where he lets it all go with a smile and a tired sigh. Where he puts a neat little bow onto the argument, resolved, tucked away, what’s for lunch I’m starving. But now? This isn’t something as simple as bickering over table manners or one blaming the other for breaking a vase. Linhardt hasn’t ever seen Caspar look so…scared.

“Are you going to leave Edelgard?” he asks.

Linhardt is stunned. He can’t reply. Caspar has a way of saying out loud the things that everyone else knows to keep shut away in theories and subtle glances.

“Look—” he leans forward, his hand on the bed, grabbing a fistful of blankets. “If you were with me in this, if you just—like it was before, like always, just stick by my side. In any fight, any…thing that might happen…do you really think I’d let anything, anyone hurt you!? Linhardt?”

“Wh…no…” He stares at Caspar’s pleading, earnest face. His hurt. He’s got it backwards. It’s the other way around. “That’s not…it isn’t about people hurting me.”

Caspar gets it. And his disappointment, frustration, stings. He rubs his eyes. “Listen to me. There’s gonna come a time when you have to stand up for something.”

“…I am standing up, Caspar.” He pries the words from a tightening throat. From a tightening grip.

“You can’t be a pacifist forever, Linhardt. Not anymore.” He glances toward the door and back. “Not soon.”

Linhardt doesn’t know what he could ever say. Immovable object, unstoppable force. They value different things. They are different things.

“I can’t be anything else.”

Caspar’s eyes slowly lose their light and unfocus. It’s the first time in his life Linhardt has ever seen him this way. It’s new. It’s an emotion he thought would never hold a place in Caspar’s face. Defeat.

He stands up, staring at the floor. Still holding the fistful of blankets. “…Neither can I.”

-----------

He’s sleeping when Byleth comes in. He only knows because, out of the haze of exhaustion and warmth, he hears the clink of glass and smells calla lily. He pries open his eyes to see the folds of Byleth’s sleeves brushing past Linhardt’s face, placing a vase and a single white flower on the bedside table. He’s still half gone, his self-restraint hasn’t woken up yet, because he mindlessly reaches out and grabs that sleeve, tugging it beneath his cheek.

“…You’re awake.”

“Debateable.”

Byleth laughs softly, drags him out of the mire and onto shore. Linhardt’s head aches, a protest against sleeping too long. He squints against light. “When is it?” he slurs.

“Three in the evening. Your bed rest ends today, Linhardt.”

He groans in protest, burying his face back into his pillow. There is a light tug at the fabric trapped beneath his cheek. He pretends not to notice. Trapped, Byleth sits down on the edge of the bed. “If you’re not feeling completely recovered yet, I’ll have it extended.”

“You did say I could rest as much as I want.”

“I did. But at least stay awake long enough to eat.”

His coat smells like tea leaves and lavender soap. He cracks open his eyes, shifting around to look up at him. Linhardt is struck boneless at the sight, Byleth against the soft light of the window, looking at him so warmly. The gentle light makes his hair look like it would have the same feeling as duck feathers. Linhardt wishes he could test that theory.

When Byleth hovers above him like this, he remembers. Heaven. Hell. He shivers, his head throbbing as the lingering memory of Remire constricts around his skull like a python. It won’t let him go. Bed rest, then.

“I’m not ready to be awake yet.”

Byleth’s hand alights like a moth on his shoulder. Cool and comforting. Linhardt locks up. His heart is not soothed, it’s racing. Byleth pulls away. He’s misunderstood.

“It will still be on your mind when you wake up, Linhardt,” he says, sadly, and yet firmly. “Let me help you face it.”

Linhardt groans. Slowly, he drags himself off the pillow, sitting up in bed. His hair is loose and tangled, bangs stabbing at his eyes. Byleth hands him the hair ribbon he’s worn since he forgot who gave it to him. Then, a glass of water. The headache begins to recede.

They sit in the soft quiet together while Linhardt struggles with the idea of picking up this impossible weight, and Byleth doesn’t hurry him along. Instead, he helps him pick out a place to start. “What’s the part that won’t leave you?” he asks.

“…The senselessness.”

“Of battle?”

Linhardt shrugs. “And all of its participants. Nobody values life. You’d think they would at least value their own, but people don’t do that either.” He rubs his forehead, feeling woozy and angry and helpless. “I want to go back to sleep.”

Byleth’s hand returns, to his other side now—he’s got his whole arm wrapped around Linhard’ts back to hold his opposite shoulder. Surely for practicality. To prevent him from lying back down. But it’s also…is he doing this on purpose? Does he know? How his every touch affects him?

“There are some things we can’t run from.”

Linhardt grinds his teeth. Why do people keep saying that? “Why do they fight until they die, kill without hesitation?” he rambles. “He’s just like them, like all the knights and soldiers…fine, maybe he belongs here; I don’t. Honor and glory, what use are those? They only get good people killed.”

He’s raising his voice again. He’s wishing Caspar had been in Remire, to see innocent people digging out each other’s eyes with their thumbs, to see what blood looks like when it congeals in the dirt of picturesque flowerbeds. Then he’d see. Then he wouldn’t be able to call him weak of heart. Linhardt can picture the look that would come to his face, when he realizes that staking your life on justice is not so goddamed simple.

He curls forward and digs his palms into his eyes, elbows on his knees. “I’m not…suited for war.”

“That’s not a fault. It’s not something you can control.” Byleth waits. “…I admire it.”

He admires it. His voice tinged with sorrow and regret and he admires it, the way one admires a sunset, a phoenix’s last call, the way one reverently touches the petals of the hydrangea’s last bloom before it fades to the touch of frost. He admires Linhardt the way he admires something too fragile to last long. He brings funeral flowers to his bedside. Is he only beautiful because he is doomed? Would he have any beauty in his eyes, any weight in his heart, if he wasn’t?

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. Breathing unsteadily, thinking. Wondering why Byleth looks at him so fondly, warmly, when he’s broken. There must be times…there have been times. Haven’t there? Times Byleth looks at him healthy and whole, in moments of peace, and he smiles just as warmly. During tea, during teaching, over meals and books and games of chess. Byleth holds goodness for him, and not out of pity. He thinks so. He wishes so.

“Professor,” he mutters, lifting his face. “You take the time to lead me and teach me like this every day. Why is that?” He needs to know why, more than he’s ever needed an answer to any experiment. This is the biggest ‘why’ of his life. “Is it because you don’t want me to die in battle?”

“As long as I’m here, I won’t let you die,” says Byleth, a promise as quick as his blade, sharpened with fear and determination. “I won’t let any part of you die.”

Linhardt stares at his eyes, searching for signs. Interpreting. Deciphering. “I don’t want to,” he says. “I don’t want to kill. I want to lie on my back and soak up the sun filtering through the trees. I want you to help me make that a reality.”

“I will.”

“Don’t let me die.”

Byleth pulls him closer. He buries his face into Linhardt’s hair. His voice is low and strong, burning against his ear. “I wont.”

--------

When he returns to class, it’s—predictably—a whole thing. The Deer really will use any excuse at all to cause an uproar. He’s learning that it’s their way of coping, maybe, or just. The way they are happiest. They love to be excited. Hilda has brought him flowers, Raphael is shoving turkey legs into his hands, Lorenz is reciting all the various medicinal benefits of different tea blends. He’s supposed to have cinnamon and citrus every day, or something. And if he’s too weak to make it himself, Lorenz is happy to visit and brew it for him.

It's too much, but he finds himself smiling. Well, it’s not entirely enjoyable, but…the sentiment is. The idea of being missed. People who were waiting for him to come back, now happy that he is. The idea of that is unfamiliar, maybe even comes with a bit of pressure, but he thinks…yes, he decides it is nice. The execution of the idea, however, is…overwhelming.

Again, Marianne is his savior. With her help, and Claude running distraction, he escapes to the greenhouse under the pretense of chores. He shuts the doors behind them, even though that makes it terribly hot and humid.

“Oh, thank goodness. That was enough to make me want to go back to being bedridden…”

Marianne is smiling soflty, putting on her garden gloves. “We’re all just glad you’re feeling better.”

“I’m not sure I am.”

She laughs, then falls quiet. Maybe he likes her company because she’s always so quiet.

While she prunes and weeds and waters, Linhardt makes himself comfortable in a reclining lawnchair, the warmth and misty, leafy smells tempting him with the ideal conditions for a nap. You can hear the fishing pond lapping at its borders just outside the windows. In the corner, some strong-smelling Duscur flowers offer a citrusy fragrance. Greenhouse naps are really in the top tier of naps. The only problem is waking up drenched in humidity and sweat.

“I heard something you might be interested in,” Marianne breaks the silence. “It’s about Professor Eisner.”

He lifts his head from his hands. “Oh?”

“I’ll tell you if you help me harvest the vegetables.”

Ugh. See the trouble with being known by people is that they know how to get you. Linhardt groans as he hoists himself over to pluck at some lettuces, his hand clumsy with the harvest shears.

“I overheard Jeralt speaking with the Professor just after the fight at Remire.” Ah yes. When Linhardt was passed out in the back of a wagon, waiting to be carted back to the monastery along with some sacks of potatoes and a crate of swords.

“Now that is something,” he mutters, more than intrigued.

He’d always assumed Jeralt must know more than he lets on. Alright to forget your own age, sure, he could believe that. But no parent forgets the age of their child, particularly if he had to raise that child all on his own. Jeralt is always unreceptive to such inquiries. He’d given up interrogations quickly, because if there are things he isn’t even willing to share with Byleth, why would he tell them to Linhardt or anyone else? …But it seems something has changed.

Marianne continues, “It turns out, the Professor was told that he was born years later than he actually was. He might have been born in the monastery. When Jeralt let that slip, he said…to come speak with him later, because it was time the Professor knew something.”

Time he knew, huh. So he was keeping lifelong secrets. From his own son. Whatever for? “Hmm. Jeralt has something important to tell him. And it’s been a while coming,” Linhardt muses, between trying to find a way to harvest carrots without getting dirt under his nails. “What do you suppose it is?”

Marianne takes a moment to answer. That means he’s about to get a real answer. Her real answers are always worth waiting for, but you have to give her time to discard her initial instinct to hide from the question.

“Perhaps there’s a secret about his birth, something Jeralt couldn’t tell the church.” Her basket is full of herbs and flowers. Linhardt wants to trade. You can pick those without touching soil.

“What part I wonder.”

“Hm…” She puts her basket aside and comes to watch him struggle. “His mother?”

“That’s certainly information I’d like to get my hands on. She must have been the one to pass the Crest down, but nobody seems to even know her name.”

Marianne never says when she’s uncomfortable—most people generally assume she just always is, which is honestly pretty fair—but Linhardt picks up the way her breath stutters when she isn’t saying something.

“What.”

“You’re not going to be able to get them without…”

“I’m sorry. You’ve mistaken me for someone who puts his hands in the dirt.” He sighs, turning to look up at her with begging eyes. “Can you just get these? And I’ll do the herbs?”

“T-these herbs are just for me to use, so it’s safe. But, the vegetables are for the dining hall…they’ll go into everyone’s dinner.”

He stares at her. She stares back.

“Soo…”

“I’m afraid that if I touch them…”

He tilts back his head and huffs a sigh. Marianne is obsessed with the idea that she’s a curse on the world. He won’t have it anymore. Not after all she’s done for him. And for so many people besides him.

“I am just about tired of this, Marianne.” He says, standing up with arms crossed. “Do you remember how awful Remire was?”

“Of course…”

“And do you remember being the only reason I stayed sane amid that awful hellscape?”

“What?” She looks shocked, her eyes wide and bright. “I…I wasn’t…what are you say—”

“Tell me which ones to pick.”

Reeling at the abrupt change of topic, Marianne haltingly follows the instruction. She reaches to point out a ripe tomato, and he waits until her hand is close. It doesn’t get close enough, so he asks, “Which one?”

Her brow creases with annoyance. “That one.” She points an inch closer. Good enough.

Linhardt grabs her by the wrist and jerks her hand forward, where it touches the tomato. As Marianne snatches her hand back, gasping with fright, he picks the tomato and takes a bite out of the side, like it’s an apple.

“L-Linhardt!”

She grabs for the tomato, but he sticks it into his mouth again. She stares at him, then the tomato in his hands. He takes another bite for good measure.

“S-stop eating it!”

“Why. Because I’m going to get smoten by malicious forces of dismal fortune?”

“Because you hate tomatoes…!”

He does. He really, really does. And eating a raw tomato is so…ugh, slimy.

“Erg…” He tosses the tomato into the compost bin, fighting back his gag reflex as he sits down on the ground. She pats his back until he can breathe again.

She flutters over him like a starling. “Are you okay?”

“You—yes. You were the only reason I didn’t lose myself back there.”

“Wh…what?”

“Your Crest is not bad luck. It’s the reason we met. And meeting you is the only reason I could stay in that fight, not run away, the only reason I was there to heal people who would have otherwise died, so it’s lucky for those people too—are you listening?”

She looks like she’s about to cry. “Linhardt…you’re…just being kind. You’re nice to me about my Crest, because you want to study it…”

“Not anymore. If it would harm you to study your Crest—it won’t, by the way—but if it does, fine. I don’t need to know a damn thing about it.”

She’s quiet. She has her hands held close to her chest again, like a mouse. He holds out his hand, palm-up, like he’s coaxing a stray kitten. “I’m quite happy right now, and it’s due entirely to your Crest. I don’t just want to study it because I’m obsessed with Crests. I am. But that’s all I have, to repay you with. If I study it, if I can tell you definitively that it isn’t a curse…then you can also enjoy the comfort and peace that you’ve brought me.”

Marianne seems to have never been told such things in her entire life. She seems to have needed it. As she carefully touches just the index finger of his hand, her tears fall to water the garden bed below. He jokes, “Oh dear. They’re all going to be cursed now. What do you suppose will happen? The turnips will all turn blue—oh, with yellow polkadots perhaps?”

Marianne laughs through a sob. “Linhardt…”

“Mhm.”

She wipes her eyes, and the smile she gives him rivals any flower. “I’m glad you’re my friend.”

He’s happy. Truly. Few people in his life have ever said something like that to him and meant it. He really is happy, but there’s a voice in his head that won’t allow him any peace, sowing discontent. A part of himself, in the background, that looks at the color of her hair and thinks…that it’s the wrong person saying those words to him.

--------

When the Professor promised him that he would never have to take a life in battle, Linhardt believed him. He did not anticipate how he’d achieve that, though. Even if he’d made a hypothetical list of a hundred ways Byleth might find a pacifistic use for him in battle…dancing would never have been on that list.

It has all come about because of this ball. Linhardt hates balls; he always found ways to leave early or avoid them altogether. It seems that he won’t be able to get out of this one. Because if this is Byleth’s way of making sure he doesn’t get blood on his hands, well…Linhardt can’t exactly say “oh, well, thank you for keeping your promise, but not like that.”. He’s in this now. And if he’s in it, he might as well win. He might as well not let Byleth down.

And it isn’t even all that terrible, because. There are dance lessons. Taught by his professor. Just him, dancing with Byleth—ballroom dancing with Professor Byleth alone after class at twilight. There is simply no way of getting out of this, alas.

His face is too warm, eyes staring at a fixed point on Byleth’s shoulder, hyper aware of exactly how much space Byleth’s hand covers where it rests on his waist. Just below his ribcage, a bit toward his back. His other hand is clasped in the air, held like a teacup. Linhardt is being taught to dance, and they are alone in the classroom. At twilight.

“Do you need a break?”

It’s impossible to hide from someone when you’re in a formal dancing position. Byleth’s analytical eyes can catch every microexpression that flits across Linhardt’s face. There’s a subtle, unspoken connection with this type of dance, and Linhardt has never been good with that form of communication. Byleth can not only sense, but physically feel the rigidity with which Linhardt carries himself. Like a rabbit in tharn. His wooden legs, his locked shoulders. His fluster.

“No. I want to figure it out.” He swallows. “I’m finding it difficult to…”

“Relax,” Byleth supplies.

“Yes.”

The ghost of a smile on his voice. “Breathing helps with that.”

Linhardt takes in a short, mechanical breath.

They stop spinning about, but retain their position. A metronome over on the desk keeps ticking, loud and incessant, and how does it sound sarcastic? Byleth stands so comfortably inside his bubble, cradling him, close enough to feel body heat. His hand rests on Byleth’s shoulder—he can feel how loose his muscles are, no tension at all. He’s fine. How dare he be fine.

“You’re doing well. Your technical memory is perfect; you know the steps already.”

“Yes, well.” He glares at the metronome. “It hardly matters if I can’t properly use them. Theory is completely ineffective without execution.”

“Don’t worry so much about proper execution, then. Approach it like an experiment,” suggests Byleth. “If you make this step, how will I respond? If you move that way, which way will I move? Try things. See what happens.”

That…could work. Awakening his curiosity, hoping it’s enough to overpower his nerves. Linhardt takes on a mischievous gleam. “Oh?” he smirks. “You’re giving me a lot of power, Professor. If only you were this cooperative in the laboratory.”

Byleth pulls him back into the rhythm, giving him a small push. “Lead me,” he orders. “You have all the tools. Use them however you wish.”

Goddess save him. If only that meant something more.

Once he becomes interested in the minutia of it, the mechanism…it’s like a microscope slowly coming into focus. Their shoes twist and pivot on the hardwood, metronome perfect. Trajectory and radii, Byleth’s coat swirling in graph arcs around their feet. He sees it. Dance is little more than a series of causes and effects. Prompt and consequence. Yes, it’s almost like science. When he tilts his foot this way, Byleth moves his. He leans forward, Byleth back. Observational research. And he begins to enjoy it, having that power—isn’t it ideal? His test subject, entirely at his behest.

The heart of it all reignites, stirring up his fierce, unrelenting interest. Linhardt is fascinated by Byleth. He can’t be nervous anymore, not when he’s so engrossed in the way his body liquifies, poured into beakers held in his hands. What should he add to this mixture? A twirl? A dip? How would the result vary if he lowers his hand just so, from waist to hip—ah, Byleth corrects his position.

“Professor,” he pouts. “You told me to try things.”

Byleth smirks. And wrestles the lead from Linhardt’s hands. “You’ve had plenty of fun. Now, receive some yourself.”

In the whirlwind that ensues, his heart spins as much as his head. Like everything the professor sets his mind to, he is excellent at dance. He moves him in patterns and swirls like a painter and a scholar. Linhardt can barely keep up—but he does, because he’ll be damned if he’s outdone. Byleth quizzes him intensely, throwing out step after step, barely giving him time to think of the right movements to answer them with. Quickfire calls, demanding response. He rises to the challenge. He won’t settle for a single missed question. He can be perfect. They can be perfect.

Byleth twirls him, twice, three times, and Linhardt feels the floor falling away, equilibrium stolen in an instant. Gravity abandons him, the world flies right off its axis. He’s—

Caught. Suspended in midair. Shivering against an arm around his lower back. The background of this scene is the roof of the Golden Deer classroom, and in the fore…Byleth’s eyes, as real as he’s ever seen them. As dark. As close, and raw, and alive.

“…Nostalgic,” Linhardt pants. Beads of sweat trail sideways down his face.

Byleth smiles with half his mouth. “Don’t faint this time.”

Linhardt laughs, elation flooding his head, making it float away. “Well, professor…as long as you keep looking at me like that…” He grins. “I can’t make any promises.”

--------

Life is so strange to him.

He can’t say it’s been kind to him. That’s not true, no matter how well things seem to be going right now. Life itself is neither kind or cruel, it just happens, and you wait and see. But no matter what, for Linhardt, one thing can be counted on about life: it is always strange.

From the top of the Goddess Tower, he feels like the only person in the world. He doesn’t know why he never thought of sneaking in here before. With the ball going on, and everyone talking about the couples rumor, he just…found himself here. It’s surprisingly remote. Beautiful. You can get a view of the whole firmament from the wide window. The sky is below you here, the night like a lake you could fish stars out of.

He’s replaying it in his mind: the warmth of the grand hall lit by thousands of candles, the violins, every touch of his perfect hands. They had danced in plain view of all. Linhardt had won the Heron Cup and then Byleth had danced with him like they weren’t surrounded by couples. Like they were one of those couples.

What is he doing up here? …No, he knows what. He’s just pretending this romantic silly notion is beneath him. Like love. Like a crush. How foolish; it doesn’t make any sense to pretend a part of him doesn’t exist. Much better to face it, so he can get on with his strange life. He’s just…well, afraid. Because he knows the most likely case is that his feelings are his alone. The worst case scenario, fully possible, is that they’ll go nowhere and yet never die.

Maybe they will, in time. He’s felt strongly about interests before, and they all faded with time, candles burning out. Dropped like half-read books on his bedroom floor. But tonight, he’s here, and he still has this flame inside him. A chemical fire; it could burn for years and years. He’s here, waiting. Daydreaming about scenes that might play out when Byleth comes up those stairs.

He doesn’t even know if he wants this to fade. He feels something brand new and powerful for this man, and he doesn’t know how to navigate it, but…the idea that it’s just his first puppy love, that it’s doomed like the autumn hydrangea, is unbearably depressing. He doesn’t think he wants this to end without resolution, to fizzle out midway through, like everything else he’s ever begun. He wants to get to the end of this book…however it may end. If it has to end, at least he’d know. Knowing is always better than not.

He always thought that was true. But what if Byleth ends it tonight? Here? Before the flowers even bud?

No… He isn’t ready yet. This book still has plenty of pages, doesn’t it?

The stairs creak loudly, like the whole tower is about to go down. Byleth’s steps are light, but he’s too tall to be stealthy, the weight thumping down step by step in time with the thud of Linhardt’s every heartbeat. Or maybe his heart is syncing itself with the footsteps. Now that would be romantic. Tying his lifeline to the sound of Byleth slowly walking closer to him.

By the time he hears the door behind him creak open, Linhardt has his strategy, his decision. His heart is steady. Nothing needs to end. Nothing needs to begin. He will just…see. Whatever happens. He’s here just to see.

He isn’t afraid. Not when those footsteps are drawing near to him. Byleth is the one person in the world he knows can make him safe.

“You’re late, Professor.”

When he turns around, Byleth is there. His seaglass eyes clear with warmth and bright with fondness. But this time, he isn’t looking down at him from above, lying in a bed or in his arms, or on the floor of hell. No pity. No sorrow. He isn’t looking at something that is about to end.

He’s looking far ahead of both of them.

-------

Chapter Text

It is the first time Professor Eisner has ever declared a rest week.

Classes are reduced in frequency, covered by Manuela or Hanneman. They’re all optional. Lectures by the knights and Seteth are substituted for normal curriculum, optional as well. Claude takes some work on, trying his best to follow the Professor’s notes and keep everyone on their individualized study paths. But there is plenty of time to waste. Everyone is all in tumult.

Linhardt is quite lost in the midst of it. He’s unable to dissect and examine the concept of grief, particularly when every single example he observes is so widely varied and different. Leonie alternates between crying openly and screaming at the sky out in the woods. Raphael is compassionate and uncharacteristically wise, Hilda’s cheer is brittle, Claude is focused on action and uncovering the why of everything. That’s the only one Linhardt can even partly relate to. Action. He is left, as always, to chalk this mystery up to the very unsatisfying conclusion of “it’s different for everyone” and thus, indulge in his own unique response to terrible emotion. And that is: solving the problem that caused the emotion in the first place.

There’s no solution for Jeralt being dead. That’s already happened. The only thing he can possibly solve is all of the problems arising from it and surrounding it. The most pressing, of course, being the knowledge that very strong and mysterious persons have deadly designs set upon them all. They’re in danger, and no one knows from who, or when they’ll strike next. When some can’t focus on the task at hand, those who can, must. Linhardt can. So he must start looking for helpful things that can be done.

For about an hour he has lain in wait for the changing of the guards, grateful for this large holly bush to hide in, even if it is prickly. There’s a short window between four-thirty and five when one knight is walking away from their post while the other is walking to it. Linhardt is both critical of and thankful for the fact that they don’t do things efficiently. If they ask him, they should just send the second guard to the post and then let the first one leave. All the better for him that they’re foolish with that.

It’s locked, naturally, but he’s taken the key they let Cyril use to get inside and dust things. Now that was a risk. He’s more afraid of him than he is of any of these guards; getting in the way of that one’s duties to Rhea is definitely courting danger. He’ll be quick to return it under the guise of helpfully returning a dropped item, just as soon as he’s done here.

The door creaks, ancient and heavy oak. Inside, the vault is dimly lit and impeccably neat. There are separate sections for types of important objects—first you see on entering is a very large one for weapons. Shields, axes, ancient halberds sharing floor racks with spears pointing up to the tall walls absolutely covered in swords. There’s a…heavens. There is a book section. Which he must avoid at all costs, because he knows himself. If he sets foot between the twisting tunnels those bookshelves make, all clocks in the world will stop working, and he’ll be lost completely until the guards come find him perched on a pile of tomes like a literary dragon. At which point he’ll be chased away having failed in his goal. A goal which he will now focus on. He…can always come back for the books.

He comes across the section of room which seems to be dedicated to “miscellaneous.” It’s a touch more chaotic than the last. There are wardrobes, locked metal boxes, filing cabinets, shelves, all to house odd items with nowhere else to put them. All the weird and wonderful things collected by the church because they were deemed too dangerous to leave out in the world. He walks between rows and rows of pedestals bearing artefacts and tools, each one catalogued in the same system the library uses. There must be a record of them all somewhere—ah, the enormous tome sitting on a lectern at the center of the room might be helpful.

He doesn’t know quite what he’s looking for. Something useful, but. To what use? There’s no weapon that would be more beneficial than the one Byleth already wields, so he isn’t looking there. Information is their greatest ally now, but it’s likely that none of what they need to know can be found in the hundreds-year-old pages in this library. There must be some sort of…something, in here, something they can use for the task in front of them. At this point he will take literally anything.

Somewhere in his head, Linhardt has a record. A list, of all the things he needs to be aware of in regards to being the dedicated healer on his specific team. He knows the weaknesses he needs to account for, person to person. The situations that would cause his classmates to require his work. He observes, though most might assume he doesn’t because his eyes are so often sidecast. He’s thinking of his list now, pinned up on the inside wall of his skull, for reference. So, when he comes across an entry with a brief description listing it as having “crest suppressing properties”, Linhardt freezes.

The problem with Lysithea is that she’s spending twice as much vitality as her one life is allotted. She won’t live past mid-thirty if she continues to use both crests, and she has no way to turn one or the other off. No more than Linhardt could turn off his own crest, or anyone else for that matter. So if this item aids in the suppression of a crest’s use, would it lessen the drain? Not a permanent solution, but all time is good time, when you’ve half as much.

The thing takes little effort to find, impeccably labeled as it is. It’s a…shackle. The iron band seems to be broken, its in-built lock nonfunctioning, though the tiny key still sits next to it. The shackle itself thrums with a strong, if stuttering, magical energy. Hm. Is it even able to fulfil its use in this state?

There’s a book that goes with it, and it takes him a great deal of restraint to take only that book and none of the others. The shackle is, apparently, difficult to control, a very old thing made for one purpose which it serves stubbornly and singularly. Until it was broken off of the hero it was put on, so that she could go out and win some very important battle. He will have to study this record in detail later, see how the thing works, see if he can re-route its old river to water his fields. He swipes it into his pocket along with its key.

As useful as this suppression shackle is for Lysithea, he came here searching for something to help fend against the people trying to kill them. This won’t do that, not very well. It would certainly not be a bad thing to put a block on the crest of an enemy, but it is only one. As far as they know as of now, everything their enemies can do can be done without crests. Keeping one person from using theirs probably won’t make much difference. Solon seemed to be a very strong mage, and a mage still has spells if they don’t have their crest. And if you’re close enough to put a shackle on someone, you’re close enough to swing a sword anyway.

He turns back to the catalogue, tearing himself away from the bookshelves. Halfway across the room, though, he hears a sound which tells him his time for exploring is over.

Linhardt calls to mind everything Byleth taught him—and which he’s learned during the independent study called “his entire life”—about keeping unseen when someone is looking for you. He slips between the rows of books while guards spill into the room, three of them, unbothered and nonchalant as they split off into the various sections. Linhardt quiets his breath, pressing his small frame between a tight crevice made by two tall cabinets. He waits. He knows he’s too clumsy to scurry about without getting seen. He has only to hope the thunder of his heartbeat won’t give him away.

The knights sweep the chambers. Since they’re doing a routine check, they must be looking for intruders and not missing items, because they pass right by the empty pedestal that once contained the trinket in Linhardt’s pocket. His jaw hangs open. It seems years before all three guards pass by and their footsteps fade into the farther portion of the large room, far enough that Linhardt feels safe enough to move.

He darts like a mouse in the shadows close to the walls, wincing at every tap of his shoes on the floor. He reaches the entrance and manages to slip outside without creaking the heavy door, and only then does he breathe relief. He’s gotten away with that, thank goodness. And come out with a prize. …But he isn’t very satisfied.

Frustration bubbles. He wasn’t done yet. Why are other people always cutting him short when he’s doing something?

Well. No use being annoyed about it now. He might not have wholly succeeded with the vault, but there are still things to be done to defend against their predicament. Probably. Surely... If he only could bloody figure out what those things are. Measuring out a deep breath, Linhardt does his best to ignore the crushing weight of feeling utterly directionless, and turns toward the laboratories. Hanneman might be able to point him somewhere useful.

A shout of effort draws his attention and stops his pace.

The door to the vault directly faces a small graveyard. Not the monastery’s only one, but an important one, it must be. Here is where they put him. The dirt still loose enough to grow lavender in, the headstone dusty with the shavings where they’ve carved him in next to his Delphic wife. And in front of that…a display of fury.

Linhardt watches him twirl and leap, sword burning arcways through the mist of drizzled fog. It’s late, no one else is around, and they’d be scared off anyway if they saw the way the Ashen Demon’s rage blazes. He’s dripping in carelessness, movements too wide and loose as he runs through mockery of his sword forms, his eyes alive with anger that Linhardt has never seen in them. Anger that hurts.

Linhardt steps closer very slowly, like he hasn’t decided yet if he’s going to take one more step. He keeps doing it, though, step by step, and soon he’s standing frozen at the top of the stairs. Byleth stabs the air with a growl which tears feral through his normally soft voice. Tufts of the manicured ground fly from his heels as they cut muddy lines into the grass. He’s not training. He’s grieving.

Linhardt doesn’t know what use or help he could ever be. Certainly not now. Interrupting this seems not only useless, but harmful—Byleth must do what he needs to. Watching it, though, Linhardt aches in a way he has never known. The weight of his own inexperience comes to lay across his shoulders once more. The void of something he knows he should possess. Someone else would know what to do. What to say to him. Someone else might know how to make their voice lilt in a way that brings comfort to a person who needs it. Linhardt…wants to be that someone.

He had wanted to, once, when he was younger, before he gave up on it. It’s been a long time since he felt this. His own inadequacy, the way it hurts the ones who need from him, the way he’s shaped wrong to fill their holes. He knows the face of this monster, not its name. He’s never been able to conquer it.

So he watches Byleth tearing the thin air into shreds, and wishes he could be what he needs.

---------

Hanneman doesn’t point him toward their foes, but toward their allies. When one knows little of one’s enemy, and following that, has no way to gain more information on them, one can only strengthen defenses from within.

“Everyone is hurting right now. Some more than others. Some are simply scared. As much as it seems a great trouble, human beings are ultimately emotionally-based. The morale of an army can propel them to impossible victory when outnumbered ten to one, if it’s high. Or, if it’s low, can turn an assured win into an annihilation. We must raise spirits, otherwise we shall fail.”

Linhardt cringes. “I’ve never been any good with…comforting people,” he says. “I don’t understand how.”

Hanneman chuckles sadly. “My boy, we’ve that in common I’m afraid.” He’s bent over a microscope, because he always is. Linhardt doesn’t know how he hasn’t developed sciatica yet. “If you do manage to figure it out, please share your findings with me.”

“…Have you considered a standing desk?”

“I have tried that out. Arthritis in my knees, though.”

“Mm.” He observes the table briefly. “Shorter chair.”

Hanneman smiles absently warmly. He’s not stopped his work this whole time, one eye in the lens, his hand taking down notes without even looking. Now, though, he leans back, rolling his shoulders as his back cracks like snapping pencils.

“Oouf… Linhardt, I believe I’ve made an observation on you, and I’m not sure you’re aware of it.”

He stares blankly. “Oh?”

“Your instinct lies in identifying where things have gone awry, what is stopping progress toward the end goal. You target the source of the issue and resolve it. In science, this is a great strength. But what have you always done when you identify your root problem, but can do absolutely nothing to remove it?”

Linhardt’s nose wrinkles in a light grimace. “I…”

“You give up on that experiment and start a new one.”

He huffs a sigh through his nose, staring at the work station across the room which has been designated to him and his work. All of it half finished. “Yes.”

Haneman’s voice takes on a softer cadence, sad in its realization. “You can’t give up on this one, can you my boy?”

“No.” He raises his eyes to the Crest analyzer in the center of the room. “I…don’t want to, either.”

After a beat of quiet, Hanneman’s hand lands on his shoulder. “Then you’ll have to confront some new areas of study.” His eyes glimmer behind his glasses. “That is how all pioneers begin to map the unknown parts of the world. By first getting lost.”

-------

In his attempts to map unknown territory, he plans to socialize with his classmates. Both current…and former. Ordinarily, he would simply wait for such hard times to blow over. In life, some bad things can’t be prevented or helped. Some can, and you try all you can to stop them, but after you failed what can be done then? In a situation where the badness can’t be stopped, there’s no use expending useless effort in trying to do so. He’s always thought it was simpler and less hurtful to let the shattered pieces fall, not flail about wildly trying to catch them before they hit the ground. You can pick them up after they stop falling.

He isn’t sure if he’s changed that viewpoint, or if he’s starting to believe it is a narrow one. It only works for himself, he sees. And he’s known for quite some time that it’s not only useless but unkind to try and push one’s own way upon others. If he’s going to help anyone right now, he must do it in their way.

Over the course of the next week, he aims to do as Hanneman says, and find a way to support his allies. It’s his role, after all, on this team: support. As for Byleth…he’ll learn all he can before going to Byleth, so that he’s prepared and well equipped. In the meanwhile, by helping his students, that will be helping him.

He begins with Marianne, of course, and…well, she ends up offering more reassurance to him than the other way around. She’s saddened, but used to being talked about poorly by idiots who can’t recognize a jewel unless it’s cut. Hilda is already taking up the task of shielding her from unkind rumors, as well as being rather distracted with her efforts in supporting Claude in his information gathering campaign. Those two probably don’t need any extra support, he concludes. Neither does Petra, whose heart is the strongest and wisest among all of them. All he can do for her is correct her posture with her spearwork; she seems to appreciate that, asking for his eyes while she trains. Practical, useful things, those are easy to supply. But not everyone is as simple to help as that.

Dorothea seems rather impressed with his newfound interest in the emotions of other people, says he’s grown since he left. Says she’s glad for it. Byleth is “good for him,” apparently. He retorts that the whole point right now is for that to be the other way around. In the end, he simply asks her to try and do something for Bernadetta, whose locked door had proven to Linhardt quite difficult to hold a conversation with. He’s surprised to hear that she’s left her room, quite on her own, to put flowers on Jeralt’s grave.

If Bernadetta can leave her room when times get hard, Linhardt can surely figure out how to comfort his friends.

He considers going to Caspar, but…things are still a bit strange there. A facsimile, or—no, more like a painting of how things used to be between them. Every conversation enjoyable but punctuated with the knowledge that they’re largely pretending, always aware of what they must not speak about. It’s buried beneath the ground, but they still feel it rumbling in the soles of their feet when they stand upon it.

Caspar visits him, instead, unexpectedly. To ask if he’s doing alright, or needs anything. Linhardt doesn’t know what to ask for. Then on, he carries with him the feeling of Caspar’s hand clasped on his shoulder, like a pauldron. A little piece of armor to give him courage.

Byleth teaches less than five classes that week. Wherever he’s present, his eyes are not. The lantern within the lighthouse has gone out. His students sense it and grow restless, unnerved. Linhardt redoubles his efforts.

Ignatz is both kind and meek, so Linhardt thinks he’d benefit from some emotional reinforcement. But when he asks him what he can do to help alleviate his fear, he only seems to withdraw further—perhaps ashamed that said fear had been so easily read. Linhardt assures him that fear is not shameful, it’s the way one is supposed to feel in the face of threat, and that he himself is always terrified on the field of battle. It’s hard to tell if Ignatz really does find solidarity in that, or if he’s just saying so in order to prevent Linhardt from feeling like he failed at the whole interaction.

He isn’t doing enough. There are people who need support far more than the ones he’s spoken to. He’s putting bandages on papercuts while other people hemorrhage.

Leonie will not be spoken to for more than ten seconds by most people. Her only companions lately are her lance and the prey she hunts, emptying the forest of rabbit, deer, and squirrel. And she’s wholly unreceptive to his tone of voice, his lack of visible sincerity, his word choice. He realizes instantly that “I need to help you in some way. It will benefit the both of us if you tell me how I can,” was not the right thing to say.

“Look,” she snaps, whirling on him, stabbing her lance into the soil. “I don’t have it in me to give you whatever you need out of this conversation. Go relieve your insecurity somewhere else, I’ve got my own feelings to deal with!”

Her shaking words, the tears in her eyes, sear into him with accusation that he can’t even deny. Yes, Leonie has a tendency to lash out and apologize later, but it doesn’t always mean her initial explosion didn’t hold a note of truth. He leaves that encounter having learned more than ever about grief. As well as the aching burn of guilt. He regrets that his learning came at the expense of her pain.

He feels defeated. It completely unseats him, because…his job, his place in the Golden Deer, is healing their pain. That’s how he belongs here. That is his function. And yet he’s completely useless in the face of heartache and loss. It’s not something that can be waved away with a glowing fingertip and a sip of spoken blood. Why hasn’t anyone figured out a way to apply magical healing to wounds that are not physical?

…Pioneers have to get lost first.

---------

Coming to see Manuela again so soon after being free of her is not what he’d love to be doing, but needs must. There’s no one else on campus so well versed in healing, both practical and magical, besides probably the Archbishop, and asking her would be redundant. Anything Rhea is capable of doing to help Byleth, she would have already, she doesn’t need to do it through Linhardt.

Which…makes his efforts now feel a bit like he’s running in pointless circles. Because. He’s not going to figure out anything Rhea isn’t capable of, is he?

But if he doesn’t try something, he’ll be pacing ditches in the floors until he falls through. It’s been an absolutely, abysmally, miserable week. There’s no solace to be found from the tension which bears down on everyone in relentless waves. Between grief and fear, everyone walks around like corpses themselves, and expects him to do the same. They’re angry when he doesn’t. Every day he endures mindless drivel from substitute teachers when he isn’t cutting class, and every night he watches Byleth train by himself in the graveyard until his legs give out.

Every night he forgets to sleep.

He can’t keep going on waiting, doing nothing, feeling like a ball of yarn someone threw to a cat. He feels awful. He just needs some solution to follow. He’s got a theory, if he could just… Infuriatingly, he can’t make any progress with it. He’s tried, and every failure and roadblock he hits pushes him closer to exploding. Inventing new spells is no small task. And the subject matter is simply beyond his schooling. He’s got to ask a teacher, a doctor, for more material. Collaborate. Maybe she can…help him. Give guidance. Or…or even give him a pill that will make this unbearable anxious feeling in his chest go away, anything.

“Professor Manuela. Wake up. I…there is a matter that requires your expertise.” He listens carefully, but can hear nothing behind the door to her chambers. It's early morning. He didn’t wait for noon as he’d normally need to, because surely, surely to god Manuela will not be hungover now of all times. When Byleth needs her, and many others, to step up and get it together. Surely she will not be going on benders or having crates of wine sent up to her room while she has agreed to take on a portion of work for Professor Eisner, who has just lost his father. Surely she’s not genuinely a selfish ass. So why isn’t she answering?

“Manuela,” he snaps, his eyes tearing up with the strength of his seething anger. He feels like he’s about to combust. “If you are hungover. If you’ve really done this again, now, I will—” He doesn’t know what, he can’t think of what. He’ll hate her. “I’ll hate you. Actually hate you, not just pretend to because it’s fun.”

The door is unmoved by his threats. A looming, growing monument of silence. He doesn’t know if she’s too drunk to wake up, or if she’s pretending, hoping he’ll just go away. Either way, he feels stupid. For ever forgetting the truth he knew about being let down. He should remember that the only one to really be depended on is onesself. That if you ever allow yourself to need something, you’d better make sure it’s something you can provide to yourself, otherwise…

Otherwise you’ll end up knocking on doors that may as well be made of stone.

“Forget it,” he mutters. Then, it catches up. It slams into him from behind, like heat lightning up his spine, a burst of pure white anger that takes him by the shoulders and propels his fist into the door. And he screams. “I don’t need your help!”

He can’t breathe right, he can’t stand still. He launches down the hall, needing movement, only to double back and start pacing. He grinds his hands into his eyes as silent screams tighten his throat. It takes his whole body, every muscle corded and cramping. Rocking from foot to foot. His lack of control bites like sharp teeth of shame, gnawing at the inside of his skull. Even under the blaze, he can hear anxious alarm bells in the back of his mind, telling him he must not be seen this way. Screaming about what people would think, about who he might hurt if he lashes out. How ridiculous he’s being. To just stop it, just shut up, stop .

When at last the battering waves wash over him and recede, it leaves his body shocked and shaking, exhausted. Cramming himself into a corner at the end of the hall below a window, Linhardt crouches on the cold stone floor and hides his face in his arms. He is never more ashamed as when this happens, not even when he faints. This is much different, much worse. He can’t even begin to pray hard enough that no one saw him, heard him. He feels wretched. And tired.

He might be able to sleep now, at least.

Could have been hours, minutes, who knows, before he’s pulled out of the groggy nap he’d fallen into, by the sharp clicking of heels on stone and a thin hand that shakes his shoulder.

“Linhardt? Good goddess, what are you doing on the floor?” Manuela can’t decide between concern and bafflement. “Did you faint?”

He stares up at her, clocking the tidy hair and unmessed clothes, the breakfast scone balanced atop the stack of books in her arm. She’s been…

“You were working?”

She blinks, then scowls as she leans back with her hip jutting out. “Of course I was working. I’ll do you the favor of not asking where you thought I was.”

Linhardt scrubs the salt from his cheeks and stands up. His body aches, his head too. His voice is scratchy. “I need to ask you some questions.”

Manuela’s jaw hangs open and her brow is furrowed in perplexity. “Wh…me first!”

He sighs, his lip drawing back over his teeth in distress. “No.”

She balks.

“I’m not injured and I’m not ill and I don’t want to answer any questions. I just need to get something done.” He hasn’t met her gaze the whole time, but now he flicks his eyes up to briefly touch on hers. “Please.”

Manuela regards him a long time—long to him, at least. A hundred emotions pass through her face, none of which he has time for, or cares to confront just now. Eventually, the furrow in her brows turns upward, and she shuts her open mouth. She takes the scone and holds it out to him. It’s Linhardt’s turn to stare in bewilderment.

“It’s blueberry.”

He slowly accepts it, and while he takes a bite, Manuela goes to deposit her books inside her room. She waves him on as she turns her back, clacking down the corridor without a second glance. The scone has a touch of vanilla in it.

---------

She has him sit comfortably on “his” bed in the infirmary while she climbs up a chair to reach a wall cabinet full of old medical journals and obscure reports. They’re up in the bad cabinet because nobody ever needs them. Linhardt nibbles on his scone and sips lavender tea and watches the chair shake beneath her, his eyes widening momentarily as her stiletto heels wobble back and forth.

“Safer without your shoes,” he supplies, but Manuela is too concerned with reaching into the very back of the cabinet for one more loose piece of paper.

“Taller—with them—on—!” she grunts, between stretching. Finally, she grabs it and lets out a triumphant “HA!” as she nearly falls off the chair.

Linhardt relaxes when she is back on the ground, her arms full of papers. “Now. If there’s nothing about it in any of these, there’s nothing about it anywhere in the monastery.”

She opens her arms to let all the reports waterfall onto the bed. Some drift to the floor. She collapses into a chair while Linhardt starts picking things out, trying to piece documents together whose loose pages have been separated. “Ever heard of a paperclip?” he mutters, already halfway absorbed in reading.

“Ever heard of a plate,” she fires back, picking up the scone he had just set down on the cover page for a report on ‘long-term effects of psionics on the subconscious’. She places the half-eaten pastry onto the saucer from his teacup and then puts them both safely aside.

He scans titles. The spiritual strain of white magic. The effects of prolonged employ of energy-replenishing herbs: a voluntary experiment. Mana mites: treatments and prevention. He throws that instantly to the floor; mana mites were never real and Haufner proved it in his doctoral thesis. Traumatic brain injuries—that might be useful? Oh, no, it’s the wrong kind of trauma. To the floor it goes.

He feels her eyes on him, drilling like a silent woodpecker. “Don’t help or anything,” he grumbles.

Manuela puffs and leans back in her seat, unamused. “Just because you’re overstimulated doesn’t give you a free pass to be nasty. I am helping. But that would be a lot easier if you’d explain what in the devil is going on with you. In more than five words, if you can.”

He tosses out a sigh, frustrated. He already knows what page he’s on, but now he has to catch someone else up. But she’s right. She is helping. When he needs her to help, she is. And he ought to show he’s grateful for that. His terrible mood isn’t her fault, and it might not be his either, but it is his responsibility.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, scowling with shame that burns no less fiercely than it has all his life. “I hate getting…”

“I know. You don’t need to explain that part.” She picks up a stack of papers. “Just tell me what we’re looking for in this mess.”

He really did wrong by her today. Linhardt takes a serrated breath, his eyes stinging in a way that makes reading difficult. He swallows past the lump in his throat and does his best to switch gears.

“Healing wounds can be done through magic. The metaphysical, affecting the physical. In theory, it should be possible to reverse that, to alleviate a less physical type of pain. I’m certain I’m not the first one to think of applying magical healing methods to traumatic injuries on the mind.”

“So what’s wrong with that one you just threw away?”

“It only deals with physical trauma. Concussion, aneurysm, tissue damage.” A quiet beat, filled with the shuffling of papers. “I’m looking for injury to the brain caused by emotion.”

Manuela’s hands stop. She stares at him again, probably wondering about all the ways she could tell him this is a fruitless pursuit. Trying to pick out the kindest words to dissuade him, convince him that magic can’t do that, that only people can. On their own. With time and comfort and gentle words, and everything he’s no good with. Linhardt sighs, glancing up with a barb poised and ready on the tip of his tongue, only to stop short when he sees Manuela dutifully reading from a report in focused silence.

He swallows his words, his emotions. His assumptions. He will have to do less of that—assuming. It makes him so…nasty.

At least five more medical journals get read in total quiet before Linhardt finally manages to pry his voice out of his foolish mouth.

“Thank you.”

--------

He wakes in the infirmary the next day, a ring of papers around his bed and the noon bell chiming outside. Did she give him sleeping pills?

His exercise in futility with professor Manuela has illustrated exactly that which she didn’t even have to say aloud. The only way to heal emotional hurt is by emotional means. No spells or prayers, no concoction of herbs distilled in vinegar and unicorn tears. At least not one likely to be discovered in the next century. Only solidarity spent with someone who walks next to you for a while, even if you’re walking in the dark.

Linhardt has never talked very much with Claude, really, but he has observed him. He’s quick-minded and wiser than he lets anyone believe, and his clever ears miss not one social cue. When Linhardt thinks of sources of information about how to engage with other people, there is no book or paper he can read, no lesson he can learn by himself. That’s the kind of thing only other people can teach you. And on this subject, Claude is an encyclopedia.

When Linhardt finds him in the library, his house leader looks tired. Everyone does lately, to be fair. Linhardt notes the bags under his bright eyes, the candlelight draping him in shadows as he paces between the library tables in random patterns. He’s focused on the book in his hands, several others discarded on tabletops all around. Linhardt wonders what information he could possibly find here that would help.

“What are you trying to find out?”

His voice doesn’t startle Claude, he knows, but Claude pretends it had. Right there; Claude is always making himself seem less…just, less, than he is. Suppose it can only be only useful to be eternally underestimated. Good strategy.

“Oh, Linhardt. Hello to you too.” He doesn’t say it in the condescending, bitter way that means to chastise him for not actually saying the word hello. He says it with casual acceptance. Like he knows Linhardt’s manner and takes it swiftly into the flow of his own river. “I’m just…agh, you’ve probably already scoured this place barren. Spells, I’m looking at, ones used by the church. Probably some obscure ones that might…eh.”

He puffs a sigh and tosses the book aside into a messy pile of others on a table. Linhardt scans a few titles, trying to get a read on what areas he’s delving into. White magic through history, a biography of the archbishop, the miracles of Seiros…midwifery in the church? None of those seem to fit together at all. What obscure spells?

Claude rubs his eyes with his thumbs, groaning as he tips back his head and ambles in circles across the floor. “I’m getting nowhere. I probably ought to stick to gathering intel from spoken words, not written.” He scoffs at the piles of books with a derogatory wave. “Not like I’ll find anything good in this cherry-picked library, anyway.”

Linhardt tilts his head. He wonders if he should share the information about where all the juiciest cherries get sent after they get picked out of her. Oh, that key is still in his pocket. Sometimes it’s delightful to be forgetful.

“Oh. Well if that’s the case, I might have something you’d be interested in. If you’re looking to fill the empty spots on these shelves, that is.”

Claude’s brow quirks. “Yeah?” He leans back on a post, crossing his arms as he leans languidly into it. “Ah, I getcha. Are we making a trade, then? I can’t get you a sample of Flayn’s hair, if that’s what you’re thinkin.”

He scrunches his brow, confused. “Flayn’s—oh, ah, no, that line of inquiry is fairly dead, I think. I don’t believe there is any further use in investigating.”

“Huh. Weird, you seemed pretty fixated on it a couple weeks ago.”

Linhardt shrugs. “The week before that I was fixated on the connection between parasitical infestation and the domestication of felines. Things come and go.”

Claude inclines his head with a small laugh. “Fair enough. What’s the project for this week, then?”

“Healing the trauma of grief associated with death.”

Claude’s mirth drains, replaced by understanding and a sort of resigned softness. “I see. I, uh. Don’t really gotta ask how you landed on that one.”

He blows a sigh and ambles over to the table full of books, taking a seat and offering one to Linhardt. He sits opposite him, glancing briefly at the scattered tomes. While Claude talks, Linhardt absently begins to organize the books, keeping his hands busy.

“You’re his friend,” Linhardt plainly states.

Claude considers that with a brief startle, before smiling. “It does feel that way. Hm. Yes, I think so.”

“Has he spoken to you about…this whole mess? About Jeralt, perhaps?”

Claude seems to hesitate. There’s one book in the pile that is not tossed aside and discarded, one he keeps under his hand as though he’s simply casually resting it there. The thin book has no title and doesn’t look like it came from any shelf, its leather bindings worn, a string of twine tying it shut, with a feather quill stuck between the pages.

He chooses his words carefully. “I know that Jeralt…had some things he was going to tell him. Of import. I’m just curious to know if he ever got the chance to.”

Claude sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “You know about that huh. Well…it’s not really my place to tell anything personal about Teach.”

“What does that mean?” It’s sincere; an inquiry, not a challenge.

“Uh. As in… He’s the only one who gets to decide what people know about him. That’s everyone’s right.”

“Oh,” he says, soft with understanding. That makes sense. Claude is…remarkably willing to explain things, without judging why he doesn’t already know them. He appreciates that. “I see. But, then, how am I to…make him become willing to tell me? Because, if I know…well, then I’ll know, you see—how to help. How to alleviate some of his…troubles.”

“Ah. So that’s what your goal is.” Claude smiles at him, softly, he thinks. “Well. In that case, just…be there for him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Teach is strong, and I know he’ll pull though this. But, yeah, everyone’s looking for ways to be there for him. That’s all we can do.”

Linhardt’s brow furrows. “I…have never been able to understand what people are referring to when they say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“The phrase ‘be there for him.’ It’s so…vague. What does that mean? Exactly.”

“Ah.” Claude looks at him like he’s picking a lock apart, seeing where the gears fit together. He looks at most people that way. “You know, now that you’ve asked, I am finding it hard to explain it. Huh. It is a pretty vague idea, isn’t it.”

He’s relieved. “I have been trying, lately, to learn about what it means to grieve. But that’s difficult when there seems to be no one answer.”

“Mm. I guess it’s different for everyone. It depends on what someone needs, what helps them feel better. Like for you, sleeping. Me, problem solving. Oh, maybe that’s you too.” Before Linhardt can ask, Claude has anticipated his next question, and addresses it as though he’d already said it aloud. “Unfortunately, none of us have known Teach long, so none of us have ever seen him go through something so awful. And the only person who would have some insight into what helps him during hard times, is…”

Linhardt feels his heart drop with disappointment and dread. So, no one living knows how to “be there” for Byleth. “How are we supposed to find out without harming him further?”

Claude offers him an empathizing smile. “Yeah. I…guess that’s the question we’re trying to answer. I’m sorry, but, all I have to fall back on is the only thing I have to give. Trying to figure out the situation—to get some answers for the questions we have. That’s all I can do for Teach right now, and for all the rest of us.”

Linhardt chews his lip. “…So. Are you saying I need to be redirecting my efforts, then, and join you in the pursuit of going after our enemies?” His failure in the vault comes back to prod at him. “Ah, here’s this, by the way.”

Claude stares at the iron key with sparkling eyes, turning it over in his hand. “What’s it open?”

“The vault by the graveyard. Books in there.” He ignores the way Claude’s jaw bounces when it drops open. “Perhaps trying to heal the symptoms without addressing their source is futile. If we all just focus less on raising morale, and instead solve the problem on our hands…”

“I…huh?”

“If you remove the source of the pain, the pain is alleviated.”

“W—well. If the source of the pain is a broken bone, yeah.” Claude gives him a sympathetic look. “It doesn’t quite work that way with this kind of pain.”

Linhardt groans into his palms, scrubbing them up and down his face. “Please, I don’t need any more reminders about how Manuela was right…”

Claude has no clue what he meant by that, but he’s very good at not losing track of the old threads of conversation when he’s thrown a new one. He returns back to the main cord, tugging at it carefully. “Back up a sec. I think we’ve gone out of sync here. I meant, I am taking that particular approach to this situation, because that’s what I’m good at. That’s…all I have, pretty much.”

“…Ah. Right.”

“The reason Teach is so great at what he does is that he recognizes each of our strengths, and uses them in the situation they’re best suited for. And you know that better than most of us, I mean, remember red canyon? We should follow the example he taught us. Don’t try to do what someone else is suited for; do what you’re best suited for. Help him in the only way you can.”

Claude offers him a sincere half smile, which is strangely very reassuring, despite the fact that Linhardt is still walking away from this conversation with vague direction and no real specifics. Claude is good at this. Leading. Making people believe that he has lead them well. And, yes, most of the time that turns out to be the case. Things usually do turn out well when he leads the way.

“Well. At least square one is familiar territory, I suppose.” Linhardt rises from his seat with a conflicted mind, but a somewhat calmer heart. “I will just…try to find out what that is, then. Um. Thank you, Claude.”

“Hey, thank you,” Claude grins, twirling the key through each one of his deft fingers in a wave. “For being an ally in the free pursuit of knowledge.”

------------

He stands on the edge of the first stair once more, frozen in place. There’s a slice of moon in the sky tonight, waxing. It’s very small. Not big enough to shed much light.

Byleth’s drills look worse than ever. Each night the routine has further dissolved, the pattern falling apart like wet paper. Now, Linhardt can hardly recognize any of the movements. This isn’t how he normally fights. He’s just swinging the sword seemingly at random, in huge uncontrolled movements designed to do nothing but use as much power as possible. Linhardt can’t catch sight of his eyes.

There have been many times in his life when he felt woefully unprepared. When he was forced to take college entrance exams by his tutors back home. When Caspar dragged him to the plate in a game of kickball five years ago (he never did again). When he stood in that beautiful, lush valley waiting to face a life-and-death battle for the first time, and Byleth had held him together with a soft word and a smile.

Linhardt isn’t prepared. He doesn’t have a strategy, or a plan, or even a toolkit. But seeing as that is not going to change any time soon, and seeing that Byleth deteriorates by the hour, he can’t keep using “preparation” as his excuse to avoid this.

He’s scared. That’s why. He’s been scared to do this because he doesn’t know how and it’s important. But it’s important. He, is important.

Byleth is important to him in a way he’s never known, a way no person has ever been before. Everything about him is new, every feeling he evokes is one that leaves Linhardt uncertain and unmoored. Every step forward is made in freshly fallen snow. Byleth is out there, in the cold, and Linhardt is going to have to risk frostbite to get to him. He will.

While Linhardt stalls and steels himself, Byleth suddenly lets out a cry that sounds quite different from the angry shouts and growls that Linhardt had gotten used to. His eyes widen to see Byleth hit the ground on one knee, curled into a ball over his left leg as he clutches his thigh. His eyes are angrier than they are hurt. His dropped sword lies in the grass, its edge coated in its master’s blood.

“Professor!”

Byleth looks up in dull shock. Linhardt is running down the stairs to him, worried, scared. That burning, aching hate which had nestled so firmly in Byleth’s eyes slowly drains away. He snatches the edge of his cloak and quickly shields his injury from sight, calling out a firm, “Stop.”

“Stop—yes, Professor, of course, right after I take a few more steps.” He closes the distance and kneels next to him, his hands already glowing. “Oh, now that I’m over here, I’ve noticed that your leg is injured. Shall I take a look?”

Byleth stares—glares?—at him, then tenses up as Linhardt tries to get at the injury. He places a quick hand on his shoulder to push him back, not hard, but certainly not soft either. “I’m fine.”

Linhardt stops. The light fades from his fingertips, and he folds them in his lap as he crouches neatly in the mud and grass. Byleth doesn’t say anything more, and neither does he. It’s quiet, the veil of dusk and mourning draped as it is around the graveyard, the entire monastery. Byleth pants for breath. He lets go of Linhardt and stares at the ground with sunken, exhausted eyes.

“…Forgive me, Professor, but I’m no good at knowing how long to keep quiet for. Have you had enough time to let your guard down yet? I don’t mind to wait, but that cut on your leg certainly won’t extend you the same patience.”

Byleth lets out a long, defeated, impossibly tired sigh. He runs his hand over his eyes, resting that way for a moment. He doesn’t move. The fight is fading from his tense, overused body, leaving behind a boneless, ragged thing that in no way resembles the heart it houses.

Linhardt swallows down his anxiety, the desperate, paralyzing need to do something, be something that can help. He can only do what he can. He needs to get at that wound, right now.

“Did you know the upper thigh is where the femoral artery is located? If cut, it can take less than an hour to…well, for recovery to become impossible.”

He’s annoyed. “Linhardt.”

“I would like to…provide respite to you. Byleth.”

Is that the first time he’s ever said his first name to him? Byleth looks up at him, finally, so it’s done what he intended.

“I wish…I wish it were as simple as this.” He holds up his hand, once again alight with healing magic. “But I know it isn’t. I’ve never learned how to properly grieve. When someone dies, I’ve only ever seen two choices before me: spend my time weeping, or get on with life.”

Byleth stares, hollow, almost baffled. But it doesn’t seem like he’s disappointed. The stare he fixes on him doesn’t ache like inadequacy, or sting like a misstep. Byleth is…just empty. At a loss. Here he is at rock bottom, on the ground of the graveyard, bleeding on it. Back broken under the weight of a tombstone. But not just that. It’s also whatever weight he’s carried with him for all the rest of his life beforehand.

“You’ve been there for me many times when I needed support,” Linhardt says, making conscious effort to speak softer, to kill the monotone and impart sincerity. “I want to do so for you now. I’m…very sorry, though, that…that you may have to tell me how to do so.”

He watches the anger melt away, watches Byleth’s eyes flicker with fondness and…something of desperation. Pleading. Linhardt feels his eyes sting. He reaches out, fingertips resting on his arm as light as a moth’s wing.

“Professor…what can I do?”

Byleth’s breath leaves him in a harsh, breathy sob, as he buries his face into his palm. Linhardt waits, knuckles white where they grip his knee. Then his heart leaps when Byleth reaches out to grab his shoulder, and this time, rather than keeping him away, he’s drawing him inches closer. Linhardt has never had to worry that Byleth might break down on him. But right now, he thinks that might be for the best. He needs it. He’s a chemical reaction trapped in a bottle. It’s dangerous.

Linhardt very badly wants to just let this moment go at its pace. To let Byleth’s emotions move through him in natural time. But…that thing he said about femoral arteries is still very much true, and. Well. He gulps, staring at the grass, feeling queasy. “Professor,” he nudges softly. “I…you um. L-look down, I think, please. Really. Professor, really, you’re actually bleeding, ah—r-rather a lot now.”

Byleth grimaces as he peeks inside his cloak, his brow knitting with annoyance and finally a bit of due concern at the red puddle growing steadily wider beneath him. His face is pale, it has been for days.

“I’ll go to the infirmary.”

Linhardt grabs onto him, keeping him still. “And give Manuela an excuse to give you a ‘full physical’? Let me.”

“Linhardt—”

“I can’t let anyone else do it because I need to know it’s done right.”

Byleth stares at him, caught somewhere between the edge of hopelessness and relief. His eyes are reddened and sunken. His throat works, adams apple bobbing while he swallows down emotion. Finally, he slumps back down, his face as slack as his shoulders. An allowance, at last, however awful it is to see. Like how you can’t save someone who is drowning until they stop trying to swim.

“Let me.” Linhardt reaches out to tug his leg forward. “It’s all I can do. Please let me.”

As the healing energy pours over his wound, Byleth watches Linhardt’s hands tremble over the long gash torn by his own sword. The blood is…a lot, all soaked through the already skin-tight pants, and Linhardt has to try his best not to think about that. God, you can see muscle. Clenching. He tries to hold his breath so he won’t get copper in his mouth or nose, but the lack of air only makes him dizzier.

“Breathe,” Byleth reminds. “Move your hands, tap a foot. Or sway your body. Physicality and mechanism.”

Linhardt’s hands are occupied, so he shifts position to rock his weight back on his left heel, forward onto the right, repetitive. It helps.

“Reroute your emotions. Don’t try to dam the river, just send it elsewhere, so you can focus on tangible action.”

His vision is blurring at the edges, but he holds on, stubborn, employing the good advice. He will not collapse here. Now. Of all the times in life when he really really must not pass out, this is in like the top ten.

“…And.” Byleth swallows, his eyes welling, before he closes them tightly, head dropping. “Stay close to me. That’s all.”

Linhardt stares at him, at his face. He moves closer. Heat pours off of Byleth in waves. There’s barely a few inches between them. To his astonishment, and elation, Byleth’s heavy head falls onto Linhardt’s chest. He can’t help it; Linhardt turns his face into his hair, resting his cheek on top of his head. He pours his magic into him, opening a flow of silent energy.

That’s all he needs? But is it really? Of course, Linhardt is happy to be let in, even a little bit, but…this is frightening, and he can’t help but feel it’s still not quite whole, not what he’d aimed for. Is this really all he can do? Sitting by silently, asking for and following instructions, as Byleth carefully tells him how to be there for him because he does not know. It hurts, it feels like a compromise, instead of a victory. Getting a C on a test.

It’s a hard thing, to discover that you are not intrinsically everything that they need, the source of any resource they may seek, the one they run to for any and all. But maybe that sort of thing is the type of love that can only exist when people weave it into tapestries, sculpt it into idols kept on pedestals in hopeless hearts. In reality, all one needs to do, if they love someone, is be willing to learn how best to do so.

Chapter Text

He’s in the library, watching the armillary sphere languidly spin on its axis. An open book on the table stares up at him hopefully, but his attention can’t be captured. Linhardt is gone. Hopelessly, completely. He can’t think of anything unless it has to do with Byleth. He’s still back there on that foggy night. The events replay on constant loop, whenever the slightest thing brings to mind that memory. It has come to be his favorite memory, though it hurts in a way he can’t manage. It’s burning through every part of him. The way it felt, such closeness, has captured him completely. At the time, of course, he’d felt unsatisfied with himself, his inadequacies. It seems idiotic now, in hindsight, to have been so concerned with his own romantic failings at the same time as holding Byleth in his arms. The smell of his skin, his body warmth. The weight. The soft breath on his neck, burning through every part of him.

In the graveyard two weeks ago, he had served as a cradle to Byleth’s weary body and stayed crouched in the grass there for hours to give him respite. Byleth had slowly collapsed into sleep, falling out of consciousness right then and there, in his embrace. He’d lain his head on his chest and Linhardt fairly felt the universe tilt. He’s like this armillary now. The core at the center of his existence is one man.

He goes back there any time his mind is allowed more than a moment of stillness. He can’t stop it, nor does he particularly want to. It’s his favorite. Byleth is his favorite.

Linhardt had, naturally, been infatuated before in his life. There were a few boys throughout childhood, one or two fascinations that caught his eye. That gardener who worked at his estate for a year. Caspar, once. But this feels quite different. Linhardt thinks he might actually know what people mean when they get a crush and then start saying they’re doomed.

It’s hardly the time. He feels guilty that it’s hit him now, when Byleth is going through perhaps the worst thing he ever has. So Linhardt is keeping a very, very tight lid on this jar. He wants—and this is how he knows it’s serious—he wants Byleth to be alright much more than he wants to reveal his feelings. As much as he cherishes his new favorite memory, he’d much rather replace it with a brighter one. One where they both lie peaceful together in their fishing spot beneath the willow, the sun freckled on Byleth’s perfect face, the breeze just cool enough to push them together for warmth…

Linhardt settles his head onto the pages of his book as a pillow. He just. Wants to stay there, in his visions and fantasies. For a while. That’s where he needs to be.

The candles have burned all the way down when he wakes, his heart thumping, a voice squeaking in his ears. He looks up to find a distressed face earnestly looking down at him—oh, he knows this face. And this guinea pig voice.

“Nn, yes,” he mumbles. “You said…we’re going where?”

“The sealed forest,” Lysithea repeats impatiently. “Solon is there. Monica is there.”

The armillary looks like it’s spinning much faster now.

----------

The air is thick around them, heavy mist lingering like smoke with nowhere to go. It’s mana-infused, Linhardt feels. There’s a feeling of burgeoning magic, though to what end, he can’t discern. They march through and keep close together so as not to get separated. Linhardt takes particular care to remain toward the front where he can see Byleth, his long legs carrying him on a straight path that doesn’t allow anyone to linger. Linahrdt feels his stomach start to hurt. There’s an oppressive air of fear all around them tonight. Because, for the first time, Byleth does not inspire courage.

He looks unsafe. Not dangerous, not to them. Rather to himself. He looks angry in ways too deep to reach. Linahrdt is reminded of the way Dimitri’s eyes went dark on the battlefield, that day when Linhardt decided to join the Golden Deer. Dimitri had gotten an arrow in the back because he was charging forward toward Edelgard.

He taps Marianne’s elbow with his own. She gives him a glance. “W...we’ll just have to keep an eye on him. I’ll help.”

Up ahead, Claude is speaking to Byleth, and it seems to penetrate the seething aura surrounding their Professor.

“Visibility is awful out here, so we’ll all need to be extra cautious.”

Leading her horse by the bridle, Hilda looks about them with a raised brow. “Isn’t it just a forest?”

“Oh, have you been here too?” Claude glances back at her, knowing damn well she hasn’t. “Ah—nevermind.”

She rolls her eyes, but takes the point.

“Remember, we’re here for information.” He chooses his words carefully. A hand on Byleth’s shoulder helps him catch some eye contact. “Luckily, we can get that at the same time as avenging Jeralt. We’re all here at your side, Teach. Remember that.”

Finally, Byleth’s feet pause, just briefly. He nods to Claude, who then lets him go.

Linhardt is not so reassured. “Professor,” he starts, but Byleth cuts him off with a raised hand and an alert stance. At once, his hand is on his weapon, the other arm held out in front of Linhardt. Beside him, Claude bristles. He calls down his dragon from where it circles overhead.

It seems they weren’t long looking for their enemy.

They clash with armored forces in the bottleneck between treelines and Linhardt finds himself busy at once. Byleth is a whirlwind, sword slicing through armor and the tendons beneath. He’s so, so careless. Linhardt heals him twice in as many opponents. Every single move he makes stokes terror in Linhardt’s chest.

“You’re being inordinately reckless.” He cuts off to fling a healing spell Ignatz’s way. Byleth orders the archer-mage to keep distance and fills his space with Hilda. “Professor, I urge you not to lose control like this. You can’t accomplish your goal this way. You can’t avenge Jeralt by harming his son.”

Byleth whirls on him and for a moment Linhardt thinks he might finally shout at him. He doesn’t get the chance to; the roar of a demonic beast rings out and shakes the leaves of every tree. Petra appears to gouge its scales, her wyvern dipping up and down like a fishing lure beneath waves. Linhardt wonders if that scuffle requires him. An arrow sails past his face and embeds itself in the flank of Marianne’s horse, grazing her calf. She plucks it out like a toothpick.

“Stay strong, Dorte,” she whispers, and the animal does.

Byleth orders her toward the beast and those fighting it. She glances back to Linhardt with no small measure of apprehension, before obeying her commander and leaving them alone in the trees.

He’s commanding very strangely, like he never has before. One by one, he has slowly ordered all his students far away from himself. Then he turns to Linhardt. There’s blood streaked across the bridge of his nose.

“Fall back farther from me.”

Linhardt stares. He can’t tell what the look on Byleth’s face means; he’s never seen it before. Frustration? Guilt? Regret? He freezes; he couldn’t obey even if he wanted to. His legs won’t move. It feels like all the gears in his mind have locked up. He can’t think.

No, but. He has to stay close to him. That’s…what he said. That’s what he needs.

“Linhardt,” he calls. “Fall back.”

Linhardt takes one step backward. Byleth looks grateful. Relieved. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not what he said. This is all very…conflicting. Fundamentally incorrect. He doesn’t think he can allow this. No, in fact, he’s certain he cannot.

Linhardt stops. And like that, quite easily actually, he disobeys.

“What are y—”

“Right away, Professor,” he says. “Right after I take a few more steps.”

Byleth looks halfway between bewilderment and recognition when Linhardt arrives at his side. He lifts his brows and shoulders alike. “One can ask permission or forgiveness. It is rarely useful to request the former.”

He closes his eyes as a defense against a reprimanding glare and steps forward to place his hands on Byleth’s shoulders. Muttering in monotone, he casts a protective ward over him—a trick he picked up from Manuela. Byleth slowly raises his hands to grasp Linhardt’s arms. He gives a slight squeeze.

“Alright,” he mutters, cross, but relenting. “Let’s go, then.”

They move forward, and Linhardt doesn’t disobey any more of his orders, because Byleth doesn’t give him any more foolish ones.

When they all break through the first wave of defense, they run out into a clearing where a strange stone platform spans the ground. It’s there that they see her. Finally, they have some answers—or more questions, maybe—as Monica reveals that she’d been an entirely different someone all along. Much like the Tomas-Solon maneuver. And something in Linhardt’s chest freezes solid. He hadn’t considered it until now. Monica walking around campus with books in her arms, studying in the Black Eagle classroom, whispering in empty corridors with her new best friend…

Caspar’s eyes had been so scared.

Linhardt’s frozen lungs shatter loose when a storm of hooves rushes past him. Leonie thunders, a force of seething doom, her path straight as her deadly arrows toward her enemy.

It was all Linhardt could do to keep her healed while she was just fighting people closeby, but now she’s loose in the wind. He can’t keep up with horses. Marianne takes up the task, mounting her steed to catch up and pepper her with healing magic while Kronya’s daggers split her from heel to head. It’s like pouring water into a bucket full of holes.

Byleth, having diverted slightly to take out a group of soldiers rushing down from the hilltop, has now fallen behind, just barely too far away to join the fray with Kronya. He looks at Linhardt. Holds out his hand—a command, a plea. He could give him another few steps of movement. Just one more action, that’s all it would take.

Linhardt sees the ache, the powerful desperation—he needs to be there, he needs her blood on his blade, and if he doesn’t get it…if he doesn’t kill her… If Linhardt doesn’t help him, if he chooses to protect his life at the cost of the chance to avenge his father. What would those eyes hold for Linhardt then?

He stretches out his hand.

Byleth locks in on him. Their hands clasp, and Linhardt pulls, hard. They meet like wave on shore, chest to chest, his arm around Byleth’s waist and their joined hands together in the air. Byleth’s eyes lock with his—the sea within is a typhoon.

He spins Byleth in a dancer’s twirl, like they’d practiced together, like they’d performed in front of a whole ballroom full of couples. The heron cup, the goddess tower. As he rounds the final step, Linhardt releases him with the added weight of new momentum, propelling him toward his enemy. It feels much like ripping out his own heart and throwing it to a wolf.

Finally within range, Byleth drives his sword forward with a blow that leaves Kronya screeching. Should have killed her, really. The joy in her eyes fades to the touch of terror, and then she’s running, trying to retreat. Unfortunately for her, the Ashen Demon has decided on her death. He pursues his quarry—right into the center of the ritual dias. That’s what it is, Linhardt realizes, a breath too late.

Claude, with baby chick Cyril tucked under the wing of his wyvern, is too occupied subduing a demonic beast to notice that Solon has appeared on the field. Creeping black tendrils shoot from the ground and lock Byleth in place in the center of the stone platform. He can’t break them. Linhardt runs with all he has, knowing he’s too far away, knowing he’s too slow, while the closer he gets the more his head fills with the sound of a hundred droning bees.

The doom of Zahras rises from a crushed heart. Waves and waves of black energy, buffeting all in its path, swallowing up Kronya’s corpse and then…Byleth. No one can see him now. The whole area bathed in darkness. Linhardt can feel its aura pushing at him, at them all, like a wave of sheer force. Soon, it’s strong enough to pluck him off the ground and toss his body five feet through the air. Hilda, walking bastion, catches him firmly and kneels down to one knee to wait out the storm. Raphael is doing the same for Ignatz and Lysithea, one under each arm and Lorenz behind him. Linhardt can’t see Marianne. Petra’s wyvern is twirling fifty feet into the sky like a lost kite. Claude screams Byleth’s name.

When it fades, he thinks he might have gone deaf. There’s no sound, no struggle. No one even breathes. They all stare at the place their Professor once was, and until the first sob from Marianne cracks the air, no one can even move.

“Where is he.” Leonie mutters brokenly, then whirls on Solon to scream it. “Where is he!?”

Claude kneels on the spot Byleth vanished from, touching the stone. “I…” For the first time, he looks lost. He has no idea. His eyes are scared, desperate, denying. “…Teach?”

Linhardt doesn’t understand. He was so sure…he was so motivated. To keep Byleth safe. He was going to help him get his revenge, help him stay alive, and then help him recover after they won. He was so determined, he was doing what he was supposed to. How did it all go so wrong?

---------

For days, tall tales of valor on a mythic scale have set Garreg Mach aflame. Each recount is more fanciful than the last. It was like space and time split in twain, the stories say. The divine blade that pierced the air itself had glowed like a comet. With sword made of light, Byleth called down fire from the heavens and evaporated his enemies until they were utterly obliterated, their bodies drifting away as smoke.

Linhardt grows tired of them immediately. But he does notice that there are some absent voices in the din. Edelgard, and her classmates, are getting quieter all the time.

Dorothea told him last month that they questioned the princess shortly after Jeralt was killed. She told Seteth that Monica was nothing but a friend to her, and she’d no inkling that she wasn’t just an ordinary student, nor where she might be hiding. They simply hit it off quickly as classmates; she even implied a developing crush between them. That’s all she knew. Linhardt doesn’t think Seteth a fool, but how is he supposed to push any farther when there is no evidence to accuse Imperial Princess Adrestia of collaboration with a murderer?

Linhardt isn’t even fully convinced of it. He can’t be. It’s entirely possible Monica really was just an infiltrator, cozying up to Edelgard in the hopes to pocket her. He can’t know for sure, none of them can. But he is becoming more certain of his decision to climb into the Golden Deer’s lifeboat. He is grateful to be in Claude’s sleight hands.

He tries to find Caspar. Caspar isn’t around.

The shaky theory of Edelgard’s potential involvement with their enemies is being kept quiet. Rumors are drowning out rumors, gossipers talking over each other. It seems by design that all of Garreg Mach only wants to talk about Byleth. His triumphant return from Nowhere, his victory over the one who took his father. Monica has been defeated, she is no longer relevant. Linhardt feels sick with it all. Yes, he knows it’s very spectacular, of course, miraculous and divine. But he isn’t so enchanted. What sticks in his memory isn’t glory and majesty alike to legend, or the display of power, the awe. What he remembers most is that the man he loves almost left this world entirely, and only came back because he was secretly vessel to a miracle.

Linhardt had little time to speak with him directly afterward. Byleth returned just long enough to tell Claude what happened, before he promptly collapsed and was swept away to be tended by Archbishop Rhea. Linhardt spent much of the time having panic attacks in his room until at long last Marianne came to tell him that Byleth is awake again, and not only that, but that he is presently strolling along the lakeshore like nothing had ever been wrong.

Taking a moment to catch his breath, Linhardt pants raggedly, hands on his knees, watching that figure from afar. Byleth hasn’t spotted him yet. Beneath a drooping willow tree, he absently holds onto its branches while he walks, staring out over the glassy lake. His hair glows in the golden hour’s sun. Lighter than Flayn’s, matching Rhea’s. Bright, goddess green. Linhardt misses the old shade. He’s worried about what this may have done.

It was dire enough falling for someone. It’s a whole other doomsday when you learn the one you fell for has a mercurial destiny ordained by deific forces of fate.

Anything could happen to him.

Would it not be safer to turn away? To walk back to his room, take his pills, sleep until these feelings are gone. He hasn’t done anything so outright as confess. Hinted strongly, certainly. Byleth knows there is…something. But what does he feel about Linhardt, really, beyond curious possibility? Is there even room, in his changing heart, to consider such things? Amidst all he’s going through, Linhart does not expect to be seen.

So he won’t. That will be fine. But what he cannot do is turn around and detatch himself entirely. Leave him to go through it all. He needs to know that he’s…alright. He needs to make that happen. He doesn’t care so much for where their futures will go. Now is what they have, and the future can’t reach them here.

“How are you, Professor?” he asks, approaching from behind. “Did Hanneman make his ‘I will do no harm’ speech or promise ‘this won’t hurt a bit?’ Both?”

Byleth smiles like candleglow. He’s got life back in his cheeks, in his eyes. He isn’t surprised, like he’d been waiting for him. He pulls two fishing rods from behind the tree.

“Sit with me,” he says, and Linhardt can’t do anything but.

They settle up against the wide, leaning trunk, cradled by its roots. Their lines bob in the green water, hooks baited with beetles. Swans squabble with ducks at the far bank, and there’s wind to move the willowhair. Linhardt’s heart soars to be here, like this, with him. It will do no good to fear. He must enjoy this moment, this precious now that they have, and let everything else fall where it will.

Casting his line into the lake with a satisfying plop, Byleth narrows his eyes. “Hm. Now you do what I say.”

Linhardt produces a sound half between a hum and a groan. “Well, naturally, as your request is reasonable now. Truth be told, Professor, I had assumed that silly order you gave me was a pop quiz in the real-time recognition of unsound battle strategy.”

“…You did well on the quiz.” A moment of silence goes by. “Don’t do it again.”

“How synchronic! You took the words right out of my mouth.” Linhardt closes his eyes, ignoring the tug on his fishing line. “What a relief to know that we’re on the same page.”

He hears Byleth’s soft exhale.

Cracking lazy eyes open, he prods, “I can’t help but point out that you didn’t answer my question.”

Byleth’s mirth washes back in like the returning tide. His laugh is louder this time. His voice has been louder—is Linhardt imagining that?

“I’m alright.”

“Are you sure? Because, I did have some minor experiments I wanted to run…oh, nothing so crass as Hanneman’s poking and prodding, of course. I’d just like to get some solid…mm, reassurances, on your new condition.”

“Reassurances?”

Linhardt gives him a flat glare. “Is that so strange a thing for me to want, after you fully made me believe I had enabled you to die?”

Byleth’s smile is dulled by guilt. “You wouldn’t have been at fault.” He reaches out, hesitates, then lays his hand on Linhardt’s arm. “I’m sorry for making you worry.”

He really looks it, too. “Ngh…Come now, Professor, please don’t look like that. You’re making me uneasy.”

His face falls even further. “Are you unsettled by my appearance?”

“Appearance? Oh, no. Never that.” Linhardt hums in thought. “It’s more the, ah, spiritually fusing with a deity that captures my concern.”

That seems to pluck a different chord, as the tilt of Byleth’s lips turns wistful and almost downhearted. Bittersweet, he’d call those eyes. Loss and gain intermingled. My, he’s acting strange. What more must have changed inside him?

“Are you alright, though?” Linhardt asks. “You seem. Mm. Different, I suppose, would be too obvious a word…”

Byleth lifts his eyes, gaze climbing to the sky. He looks tired, but in a strange way, more at peace than he has in a long time. He turns his gaze to Linhardt, whereupon there is an instant and noticable shift, as Byleth—Byleth, hitches his breath in a gasp. His face turns distinctly pink, and Linhardt watches his adams apple bob. Is he…shy?

“I feel…” He pauses to breathe, and the abrupt flood of expression from him is jarring. Byleth shakes his head. “I don’t know. More. Than usual. Of everything.”

“Oh.” He studies Byleth’s face for clues. His green eyes shift sideways toward him, but quickly dart away when he sees that he’s looking at him. The blush gets stronger. What on earth…?

“You do appear to be more expressive,” he mutters. “That’s interesting…” He’s leaning in very close—to get a better look at his subject, of course—and when Byleth looks at him again his face fills with something close to fear.

Linhardt laughs.

“I like it,” he decides, leaning back with his hands behind his head up against the tree. He glances at Byleth from the corner of his eye. “Very exciting; we have so much new data to discover, Professor.”

“...My name,” he mumbles, hiding the lower half of his face behind his hand.

Linhardt’s eyes widen. “Mm?”

Byleth lifts his face to give Linhardt a smile that could melt through flesh and bone. So, achingly sweet. And so strong. He’s radiant with quiet confidence, security in himself. Alive with it.

“Call me by my name,” he says. “Just now.”

Linhardt is thoroughly dismantled. He sits up to face him properly. Leans toward him. Closer. Their hands rest next to each other on the cool grass, an inch away from touch. Linhardt swallows his heart.

Yes, then. Just now.

“Byleth,” he says softly. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

--------

“They say the Professor is going to get a divine revelation tomorrow.”

Ignatz says it with such wonder and excitement you’d never have the heart to tell him otherwise. He sits between Linhardt and Rahael, who is too absorbed in eating to comment. Across the table, Lorenz delicately cuts grapes from their bunches with a pair of silver scissors. Lysithea, beside him, watches with visible and surmounting impatience.

“Can’t you just eat them?”

“This is the proper way to eat them.”

She grumbles but drops him in his nonsense, shifting her attention instead to Ignatz’s continued fawning. “I wonder what it’ll be like…to think, there’s a chance the goddess herself might appear! Do you think? It seems impossible, and yet…”

Linhardt glances upward when someone enters the dining hall, but it still isn’t Caspar.

“The Archbishop seems to think it’s not just possible, but a hundred percent certain.” She shrugs, digging into her sorbet. “If anyone would know, wouldn’t she?”

Ignatz is practically buzzing with excitement, his eyes sparkling and far away as he looks not at them, but at the painting he’s going to produce later, still inside his head for now.

“Are you crying!?” Lysithea balks, and Ignatz hastily swipes at his eyes. Raphael alerts.

“Aw, I just can’t help it!” he pipes in cheerfully, wiping his dry cheek with a calloused thumb. “This chicken is just amazing, the best I’ve ever tasted, it’s a masterpiece!”

“I wasn’t talking to—” She grinds out a sigh, perhaps regretting making Ignatz feel bad. “Ngh, forget it.”

Linhardt is picking at an unfortunate shepherd’s pie, taking out all the celeries.

“Hey.”

When no one answers Lysithea’s demand, he looks up, to find eyes on him. He stares back. “Hnn.”

“What do you think?” she says. “You’ve read about such things, I’m sure—you’ve probably gone through the whole library by now. Is something like this possible?”

He leans his cheek on his fist and sighs. “Possible? I’m sure I haven’t the faintest. But probably unlikely.”

Ignatz wilts. “What makes you say that?”

“The Professor escaped that spell because the progenitor god gave him her power,” he says. “What further revelation can there be?”

She shrugs, but doesn’t have an answer for that.

“How can you be saying this to me!?”

The whole table startles at the raised voice from behind them. Petra has her boot on the seat of a chair, scowling down a shocked Ferdinand, still seated. He’s got his hands up in placation, leaning back.

“I—Petra, I didn’t mean…look, I’m just saying, if it can be argued that things are no longer safe here, you’d be…it might be best if you—"

“I am not caring about what you think is best for me!”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to suggest that I know better. It’s just, as your friend I—"

“If you are my friend, you should know my heart. Just because you are being afraid, do not dare to think that I am as well. I will not be returning to home until I have grabbed my goal.”

Ferdinand balks. “I—I am not afraid! I have a duty to my home!”

“And I have a duty to mine.” Petra grabs her bag off the table and fixes him with a parting glare. “I am being loyal to what is right. Not who is most strong.”

“Oh, my,” Ignatz mutters, watching her leave through a wave of whispers. “I wonder what that was about…”

As Ferdinand slowly picks up the chair, Linhardt sighs, putting down his spoon. “I’m going to take a nap.”

Tomorrow, they’ll all learn that Linhardt was wrong. There was, in fact, quite a lot of revelation left to be had.

-------------

Ever since Edelgard’s mask fell off, the world has given itself to chaos.

“The Adrestian Empire has declared war of the Church of Sothis.” What a headline.

The reaction is mixed. Shock, fear, the usual—some people pretending they’d known it was inevitable all along. The knights scramble, students flee back home. Villages are ordered empty. People knew something was on its way. They didn’t know it would be the absolute worst case scenario. The growing scent on the wind over the past few months had not been nearly enough to suggest to anyone that it would get this bad this quickly. Conflicting viewpoints, absolutely, secret murder plots and the annihilation of an innocent village, taken in stride, but war? Linhardt would love to pretend he was among those who were cunning and wise enough to not be taken by surprise. He isn’t.

She’s gone right to war. He still remembers when she’d scold him for sleeping through lectures. When she danced with Dimitri in the grand hall. Had she already decided to kill her classmates when she put on her ballgown that night?

The sheer magnitude of it all is what hits the hardest. To outside eyes, she was nowhere near the throne. How long must she have been planning this? How long must her allies have known? Did his father just not care to inform him, or…well, more likely he expected that Linhardt would come running home as soon as he learned that house von Hevring was firmly on Edelgard’s side.

When Count Bergliez came to visit the monastery for the Battle of Eagle and Lion…did he tell his son what was on the horizon? Is that why Caspar was so angry that Linhardt chose that particular time to leave? How unfortunate. He must have assumed Linhardt knew as well, and that it was the reason he left. If Linhardt knew that war was coming, would he have run away even faster? He can’t say. Useless to try and figure it out, anyway.

They say the Imperial Army will be here in two weeks.

Linhardt goes often to the dining hall. He’s unable to eat properly, but trying still to catch a glimpse of Caspar. Or anyone. He isn’t interested in solitude, lately. Every time he’s alone for too long, he starts feeling afraid. That’s not a symptom he’s used to being afflicted with.

The Golden Deer keep him company. They have one last lecture day, a final chance at preparations. Byleth stands at the blackboard, going over each person’s role in their upcoming defense. Exams are flung about the classroom. Ignatz becomes a warlock with a bow strapped to his back. Lorenz leaves his horse and lance behind in favor of using the knowledge gained from Byleth’s win against the Death Knight to become a dark mage. Cyril finally takes to the skies on a wyvern of his very own. Leonie takes command of Jeralt’s old mercenaries. Claude and Byleth collaborate on deciding an action plan for the day of invasion.

“The seed of conflict was always there,” Claude muses. “But…she really did it, didn’t she?”

Hilda wrings her hands, staring out the window. “Back home. My brother must be…”

After a pregnant pause, Claude reaches out and puts a hand on her back. “I know everyone’s worried about their homes. It’s only natural. But all we can do right now is tread carefully on the ground right in front of our feet. Give this battle your full focus, so that you can survive to get back home as soon as possible.”

When the class bell rings, something strange happens. The bell tolls as it always had, that familiar and nostalgic chime ringing with a sour note of farewell. Everyone looks up, falling silent. But no one moves. All stay seated, listening to the gongs drift out and slowly die. Standing at his desk, Byleth surveys his students. He looks wistful, proud, sad, confident. No one knows them better. When it’s his turn for eye contact, Linhardt feels his gaze lingering like the ghost of a fire across his face.

“I will keep you all safe,” Byleth promises. “Don’t forget everything that you are. Rely on your strengths. Look out for each other’s weaknesses. Carry belief in yourselves, as much as I have for each of you. We will not lose.”

They have spent every day learning and eating and growing together. Now they will either survive or die together. How strange life has been to him. He never would have thought he’d be a part of something so close-knit. It feels so bitter though, because, if not for war, there would not be this apprehensive sense of closeness in the air now. They shelter together beneath a storm far more dangerous than a mock battle sure to be followed by a feast of triumph and a shiny reward. There will be no Claude parading on top of the dinner table or Caspar brawling with Raphael while a betting pool is taken. Linhardt thinks back to that day he decided, spontaneously, to leap aboard their ship and leave his own sinking one behind. He thinks about everyone he couldn’t pull along with him into the boat. If he should have tried harder. If it would have mattered.

In their own time, everyone eventually filters out. Some linger a bit to talk, whether in whispers of comfort or further hashing out plan and strategy. Some group off and go to places of solace to seek what courage can be found in company. Marianne gives his hand a squeeze as she passes him by, heading to the chapel no doubt. He grips back.

He waits for Byleth outside the classroom. It takes quite a while. He sits in the grass amusing the stray cats with long pieces of grass. He can hear the low cadences of Claude and Byleth inside for a while, until finally their house leader walks out, giving Linhardt a nod on his way. As a darker blue begins to touch the horizon, Byleth steps out of the door, stopping to look at him expectantly. Linhardt throws the grass to the cats and stands.

They fall into step easily, two streams joining to one river. Byleth walks slow, keeping close to him. Their arms brush against each other every other step.

The graveyard is still. A cluster of gladiolus flowers remain from Leonie’s visit, so fresh that they don’t even know their lives have been severed yet. Byleth takes some yarrow out of his pocket and adds it to the pile.

“I still remember the night you hurt yourself here,” Linhardt muses.

Byleth manages an absent smile. “So do I.”

“Please try to refrain from doing that when the Empire comes.”

“You’ll have to keep a close eye on me.”

“The burden of being useful never ends…”

Linhardt steps back while Byleth stands in front of the headstone. He spends some time with his head bowed and eyes closed. Behind him, Linhardt watches the outline of his form slowly growing darker as the sky crosses the thin border between twilight and night. He’s committing the shape of him to memory. Linhardt has an awful memory. He wants the picture of his form to remain, to press it between the pages of his mind like an embossment.

In time, Byleth turns around. His green eyes seem almost to glow in the dark, gleaming. He steps closer and they stand side by side, staring out at the rising moon.

“What’s on your mind?”

Byleth asks it with such tenderness as to kill the last of Linhardt’s reserve. He takes one step closer to him, letting the fabric of Byleth’s coat brush against his shoulder.

“Life is always moving too quickly for me. I don’t understand how this has suddenly become our reality. All of a sudden we’ve been thrown into in a nightmare… Well. I suppose it only seems sudden, I know it’s not.” He sighs, tension knotted in his shoulders. “I didn’t think she could ascend the throne so easily. She must have been planning this for a long time.”

“Don’t do what Claude is doing.”

“Battering himself about the head and lamenting how he could have possibly missed all the signs for so long, despite looking for them everywhere?”

“I don’t think we could have put this puzzle together until now.”

Linhardt nods. “Mm. The final piece didn’t even exist until her identity got revealed. Maybe that forced her hand. She wanted more time before she sprung this, I’m sure. Very good improvisation, quite elastic of her.”

“We will improvise better.”

“Otherwise we are all going to die.”

Byleth closes the meager distance between them. He’s got his hands clasped behind his back. Linhardt presses himself up against his side, his shoulder beneath Byleth’s. It’s simple. All that lay between them distilled into pure warmth, not yet to boil. For now, it’s warm. And Linhardt will gladly lose himself in warmth.

“I know you didn’t forget what I promised you.”

Linhardt smiles despite it all, the absurdity of it. In the face of nerves and dread of what lay before him, it’s ridiculous. Perhaps he can be ridiculous, too, and hold on to a promise made in peace as the world splits in half.

Byleth takes a breath. Under the eyes of his father, the light of the stars, he plants his feet firmly in the ground and forges his heart into the steel it needs to be. Whatever is inside is locked in, and whatever had not yet made its way in will simply have to wait.

“I won’t let anyone else die.”

“Except the people on the other side.”

Byleth looks at him. He shrugs.

“Well, war. People are going to die, Pr…Byleth.”

His brows turn inward with sadness. “You’re worried about your classmates. …I am too.”

“In times of conflict, people love to say ‘they’ve made their choice’. Is that supposed to make it easier that they’ll die—that perhaps we will be the ones to kill them? I can’t be satisfied with that.”

While Linhardt’s eyes flick across the tombstones, Byleth’s eyes lock on only one. “…They aren’t choosing to die,” he says, his voice soft as breeze. “We are all going to have to choose to live. There’s no answer to war that will satisfy.”

“Aside from ending it as soon as we possibly can.”

“That, too, was part of my promise.”

Byleth nudges Linhardt’s head onto his shoulder. They stay that way, in unsatisfied solidarity, until Cassiopeia flies over their heads, distant and unhelpful from her empyrean throne.

-----------

Before the world ends, there is one more project he has to check off the list. Otherwise he’s never going to get it done.

The iron shackle sits beneath an apparatus of Hanneman’s design which scans it slowly via a green light. It looks much like an oversized microscope, if you threw one down the stairs. As it scans, the machine projects its findings in the form of a projection on the air. He scribbles notes with his other hand, taking down data as it appears. Later, he is going to recommend Hanneman make this thing faster. It’s nearly done collecting information, so he can’t go to bed yet. Linhardt’s eyes throb in their sockets; he’s been reading words made of light in a dark room for hours. Interesting words, though. He thinks he could crack this wide open if he pulls a couple more all-nighters.

A sharp, loud knock at the doorway makes him confused. “Why are you knocking on the door to your own lab?” he asks, eyes still glued to the readings off the machine.

“What?”

Oh. He did invite her here, he knew that, just not when. Linhardt pauses the machine and spins his chair around. “Good evening Lysithea.”

She storms inside, the letter he’d slipped under her door clutched in her fist. “I know you’re the one who sent this.” She slaps it down on his desk. “Ugh, I can’t believe you’d have the gall! What a bizarre love letter, besides—that is not how you write one of these.”

Linhardt gives her a baffled look. “What? No. Oh no, of course not. Though, I do wonder…what would you have done if that was the case?”

“…Now I’m just confused. And grossed out.”

He pinches his nose. “I’m sorry but that is not the overall topic of discussion. Do pay attention.”

She gasps at his “gall” to rebuff her, but as it’s useless to listen to her when she’s lashing out, he instead picks up the letter she’d brought and smooths it out on the table. Apparently it will take some verbal convincing after all. He already forgot what he wrote in his pitch. That’s why he wrote it down.

He cuts off her rant about how he can’t tell her anything she doesn’t know. “There is no record of anyone having two Crests. It’s an impossible occurrence by nature. The second one would have been implanted after birth—in that theory, I am secure.”

“Theory?” she snarls. “My life is not a theory to entertain you for a day or two—”

“I believe most things that can be done via science can be undone via science.”

She goes silent.

“Would you like to remove one?”

Lysithea has never quite been that shade of pale. He gets up from his chair and rolls it behind her. With the pencil in his hand, he pushes down on her shoulder until she sits.

“I…could have one removed?”

“Hanneman has been working on that possibility. I have been helping him. It has to do with this artefact I stole.” He indicates the shackle, still waiting to resume its tests. “With some more work, we may be able to use it to place a temporary block on one of your Crests, to extend your life while we search for a way to remove one. Though, I cannot say that I would give up such a unique and incredible thing as having two Crests, if I were in your position. As I said, it’s quite singular, and extremely—”

“You are completely lacking in empathy, so of course you’d say that.”

He pauses. “…So, you do want the shackle, or…?”

She scrubs her hands over her eyes, then folds them neatly in her lap and stares at them. She’s quiet for
a moment, thinking. Linhardt doesn’t push.

“The Imperial Army will be here in five days.”

Linhardt leans back against the desk, rubbing his red eyes. He really just needs to know if he’s going to sleep tonight or not. “And that has to do with your decision, somehow, does it.”

She raises her eyes. “You may be lacking in empathy, but you’re right. Having two Crests makes me very powerful. That’s why they…that’s why I have them.”

She thinks a moment longer, then asks, “It would diminish that power a great deal, wouldn’t it?”

Linhardt makes a small noise of assent. “Oh yes. The thing that makes your magic so potent is the cooperation of those twin Crests; they work in tandem. Take one away and you don’t just halve your power, you cripple it. Divide it to decimals. It won’t even compare to the magic you wield right now.”

Lysithea buries her face in her hands with a growling sob. He can sense a lifetime’s worth of frustration behind it. “Crippled,” she snarls, wiping her eyes. “…I can’t afford that right now.”

He nods, turning off the data collecting machine. “Understood. If you ever do want to pursue this, the option remains open. Hanneman and I will continue the study, so give it thought.”

She stares longingly at the shackle, her eyes watery. “You should…go to sleep,” she mumbles, her voice wavering. “Everyone needs to be at full strength for…when they arrive.”

He stretches his hands over his head, groaning out a yawn. “And whatever comes after, I suppose.”

----------

Over the next few days, Linhardt goes to the library, goes to lunch, and goes to sleep. He spends time with Byleth, as much as he has to spare. He masters the warp spell. He pretends he doesn’t notice the secret suitcases being carted out of dormitories in the dead of nights, loaded into the backs of mail wagons whose destination is the Empire. He leaves the book he borrowed from Bernadetta five months ago on her doorstep with a letter inside containing the address of his father’s estate, noting that should she wish for a locked room to hide away in, his will be empty.

He doesn’t know what sort of future Edelgard has in store. But he sees no likely scenario for this particular course of fate in which Byleth does not stand on the side of the church. And, as Linhardt’s designs include staying close to Byleth, well…

His father will not be surprised, and he’s long built an immunity to being disappointed. Linhardt doesn’t really mind if he is either of those things, anyway. The only thing he cares for his father to be is alive. And he suspects he’ll have no trouble there. Not if he finally sees the merits in reinforcing his alliance with Count Bergliez.

Caspar, on that note, is avoiding him. Linhardt suspects it’s because he doesn’t want to part ways on a fight.

Linhardt has always indulged Caspar with fond annoyance, allowed him his foolishness, up until the point requiring his intervention. That point has come. He can’t find him at the training grounds, dining hall, his room. Perhaps Caspar has employed the use of a brain cell or two and come up with the idea to hide from Linhardt in the places he is least likely to be found.

After the library, he tries the officer’s academy. It’s far past time for any classes, so no one should be there. But as soon as Linhardt gets close, he hears the song of a voice lilting across the air, up and down like the path of a canary.

In the center of the deserted Black Eagles classroom, she stands facing the empty blackboard. Her back is straight, hands clasped, and her head tilts back as she produces long keening notes that reverberate off the closed windows. Linhardt puts his hands over his ears to muffle, but not block, the noise as her pitch climbs, building toward a crescendo. At its peak, she launches into the highest note yet, and halfway through, breaks her voice on the climb.

“That was very close,” says Linhardt, keeping patient while she reacts as if someone has just shot an arrow at her face.

“Lin!” she growls, clutching her heart. “What is wrong with you?”

“Oh, we don’t really want to be here all night, do we?”

She lets out a deep breath and scrapes some of her precious pride up off the floor where she’s dropped it. “If that song was ready for an audience, I would have sought one.”

“But ninety-nine percent of the song was flawless.” He steps into the room and leans back against Manuela’s lecture desk. “Impeccable…emotion.”

She smiles patiently, unsatisfied. “Well. Ninety-nine percent and emotion didn’t get me into Garreg-Mach, and it won’t get me any farther. I’ve been trying to hit an F6 for most of my career… Look, did you want something, or are you just out to sculk around and watch people in vulnerable moments like a creepy sociopath?”

“Sociopath,” he repeats, nose wrinkling in disdain. “That’s unoriginal. Your barbs are ninety-nine percent sharp tonight, Dorothea, that’s not what I come to you for.”

She swats at him in a manner that reminds him oh too closely of a certain doctor-professor. “I’m not in the mood to play word chess with you tonight,” she snips.

“Uhhg. Boring.” He rolls his head on his neck, groaning. “I suppose I don’t need to ask why you’re in such a sour mood. Perhaps you’d prefer to take it out on me; that usually makes you feel better.”

She’s been rearranging her sheet music for far too long, lingering. She keeps glancing at him and stopping herself from speaking.

“Dorothea, as much as I’d love to stand around waiting for your courage to burgeon, I think that if I have to watch you dither about so unnaturally unconfident for one second longer, I might have to cross beyond the border past mildly infuriated.”

She lifts her face, the set of her brows infuriatingly serious. “Linhardt.”

“Not my government name…”

“I think you should go back home.”

There is a clock on the wall above the blackboard, loud enough that Dorthea could use it as a metronome. It clicks steadily through the chilly air, breeze blowing through the open door to stir up chalk dust and premature regret.

“I said I—”

“Where might Caspar be found, if you know? I’ve looked for him everywhere. Our poor boy is avoiding me, I think. He should know that won’t work; he’s already agreed that neither of us will escape from this friendship.”

She takes a deep breath, her hands holding so tightly to each other that they’ve gone paper white. “Alright. Well. I’ve told you.” She picks up her music, cradling it like a teddy to her chest. “So.” She turns to go.

“I think you could hit that note if Manuela had a bit more time to coach you.”

She pauses in the doorway, her back to him.

“I’d love to hear it one day.”

Dorothea ducks her head and runs. On her voice, even sobbing sounds like song.

---------

The armillary sphere twists itself into circles but never knots. Linhardrt stands before it, staring up into its mechanism. There are running footsteps outside in the halls, muffled voices every so often. But the sphere turns, unheeding, on its axis.

Once, when he was considering giving up the pursuit he most loved, Hanneman told him that he would find motivation if he had a goal. Linhardt isn’t sure what his goal is, even now. Some days he thinks it’s Byleth. Some days he knows it isn’t. He feels life shifting again, once-dependable stones flowing out from under his feet while he’d much prefer to stay on solid ground. Everything is changing around him while Linhardt feels locked in place, spinning around a core that can’t be clearly seen.

Suppose it doesn’t matter. Today, his goal is clear; it can be only one thing. Defend Garreg Mach from Edelgard’s war.

The day has drawn on with growing suspense ever since Shamir and her scouts came back with word that the Imperial army had mobilized. They’re marching here, right now. Everyone has their orders on where they’re supposed to go as soon as the first bugle gets blown, or, whatever they do to indicate that a war should start now. Linhardt can’t bear waiting for things, so he’s decided not to participate in the anticipation making everyone pace back and forth on the bridges and battlements, bracing up the parapets and crenellations, hauling out weapons and boarding up windows. He won’t be useful for such things. He’ll only have worth when the blood starts to flow.

Can the warrior hate the war? He’s no warrior. He wouldn’t know. He was never going to be able to answer that question.

“Linhardt!” Manuela shouts from the doorway, out of breath and apalled. “Are you serious?!”

Now that he’s tuned back in, he realizes there is quite a bit more noise around him now.

He turns to her with blank eyes. “…Did I miss the bugle?”

----------

Rhea stands on the top of the stairs behind the drawbridge to the main gate. The Golden Deer gather around her, lined out in Byleth’s formation, each of them placed where they’ll be successful and needed. It’s surreal to watch Edelgard stand on the opposite side, far past the battlements, down the main road that once took them to their school. He wonders if she ever intended to come here for that, or if her plan was always just to infiltrate the church. How long had she been working toward these designs? How impatient have her dreams lain?

Linhardt is standing directly center of the formation behind a wall made of Wyverns when the battle begins. Petra, Claude, and Cyril lift off and sweep ahead in V formation, cutting the sky as they glide through smog down the main strait. Taking along a strike force made of Lysithea and Leonie, Byleth sets his sights east, toward the Death Knight and the entrance that needs clearing up to make way for reinforcements. As everyone surges forward to their goals, Linhardt stays put with an elevated view of it all. He must keep the east and center of the battlefield in his range. The west side, he knows he can leave to Marianne’s capable hands.

She is sent down the western road with Raphael and Ignatz to free up the other entrance there from Hubert. Shamir’s archer squadron can’t come through until he’s displaced. Hubert isn’t even the only one here that used to bring Linhardt notes from classes he slept through. Across the treetops, he can see Ferdinand and…and Dorothea. They’re marching in formation down the main street behind Edelgard, the spearpoint. He can’t see Caspar. He doesn’t know whether that’s a relief or a cause for fear.

Linhardt wonders if half the reason Byleth gave him orders to stay up on the platform with Rhea and the backup knights is because he didn’t want him to have to fight people he once went to lunch with, shared books and borrowed pencils from. He’s grateful for that. He can’t imagine doing what Petra is now—facing down Ferdinand her friend, along with Edelgard. The girl turned tyrant, who’d befriended her as peers, even as she held her as a diplomatic prisoner. She is presently telling Petra to consider, very carefully, down which path she intends to lead her country. What is written, today, will sink into stone.

Petra stands up in her saddle, levels her axe and shining fury toward the Adrestian Emperor, and declares, “Brigid will not be a friend of the Empire. Brigid will not be trampled upon any longer. I will become her queen, and I will be freeing her from you!”

Edelgard sends a brigade of flying riders to intercept her and the wyverns. Negotiations have concluded.

To the east, magic leaps into the air—green and black. Linhardt extends a healing spell to keep the odds fair. He no longer fears Byleth’s fight with the Death Knight; he’s proven in many battles that such an opponent is well within his skill. Linhardt has no doubt any more that he’ll come away the victor. Still, he keeps an eye and an ear out as the two cross blades, because of all the opponents on the field, that is the one most likely to put a dent into Byleth. He can’t let him be weakened and then swarmed by scavengers who sense a cheap opportunity.

Linhardt slings white magic like a circus fool—he’s a juggler. The wyvern brigade needs support as Cyril nearly gets knocked from his saddle by a midair joust with a Pegasus rider. Hilda is single-handedly taking on a flying demonic beast; that pot needs tending to. Next there’s Lorenz, who’s been doing well at pinning down Hubert, trading spells back and forth to keep the pressure on. But he’s fading, and his support in the form of Marianne is being swarmed by five axe-slinging footsoldiers. Raphael’s call for supplementary healing draws Linhardt’s attention to the west road.

Linhardt quickly throws them some relief and turns his attention back to the east—except, he double-takes. Something has changed. Evidently Edelgard has noticed that support isn’t focused so strongly on the west half of the battlefield, and that Byleth is absent from that side. She means to break through on their weaker flank. She’s sent them a problem.

There, charging like a fire-trailing comet with lance held loft: Ferninand von Aiger, banners of his house and home streaming from poles attached to the saddle of his thunderous steed. The one he’d spent so much time caring for, mousing out of class five minutes early so he could go down to the stables and take it for an evening ride. Soldiers who may once have fed it grain are mowed down beneath its hooves.

He reins the monster in as he nears Hubert. With a wide, devastating arc of his glaive-like weapon, five soldiers fall, including Raphael and Lorenz. Marianne gets to work. But as she’s busy healing them, Ferdinand maintains a circle of safety around Hubert, who is now left quite uncontested to finish casting his spells. With magic and might in tandem, the pair spark up a blitz of destruction, gaining rapid ground as monastery troops fall around them.

“Lysithea,” calls Byleth, swiping blood from his cheek as Catherine’s finest swordsmen spill in through the gate he’s just liberated from the Death Knight. “Divert west and deal with Ferdinand.”

She shows no hesitation. Ferdinand is going to be so infuriated when someone her size takes him down. But Hubert might—

Well. All the offense in the world won’t stop an arrow true enough. Ignatz is at the mounted crossbow, and though Hubert’s range is impressive, it’s nowhere close enough to reach him. And Ignatz has long since gotten over his habit of missing shots that matter.

Lysithea stands sure-footed on the path, holding a sword that looks to be made of lightning itself. She simply points it at Ferdinand and delivers a swift end to his glorious charge.

The horse is the one left standing. Lysithea spared it. And, apparently, its rider, who clings weakly to his saddle as smoke billows from his back. Aside from pain, there’s visible rage and fear warring in Ferninand’s eyes as he glances between his destination ahead, and behind, to the crouching, struggling form of broken Hubert on the ground. He makes an awful noise, a crossbow bolt siphoning the life from his lung, and waves Ferdinand onward. He doesn’t go. He pulls hard on the reins, falling back to scoop Hubert onto his saddle and retreat.

Linhardt looks at Lysithea and is suddenly glad she decided not to use the shackle. The way her crest lit the air when she raised that sword. The devastating effect…

His eyes lift, following Ferdinand’s retreat, all the way to the back of the battle, the center. To the main strike force. To Edelgard.

Her white hair. Her vibrant eyes. Her axe held above her head while she casts a torrent of lightning toward lofty Claude as he waves through the stormclouds she summons. Her crest mark shining brilliantly before her, power and edict unspooling from her grasp.

He doesn’t say a word when he turns and runs back toward the keep. Lysithea is screaming questions and insults at him as he retreats, but they buffer against his back and fall to the stones. They’ll all see what he’s doing once he gets it done. He needs to get something done.

Byleth’s eyes meet his when Linhardt crosses the main gate. There is a distinctly harrowing moment between them. A flash of brief, blurry awareness, when Byleth’s eyes grow wide as he watches Linhardt, to all appearances, abandoning him on the field of the most important battle he has ever faced.

Then he’s gone, running up the stairs past Rhea and Seteth and the entire backup defensive line, all the way to the great front staircase of Garreg Mach.

If you’re close enough to put a shackle on them, you’re close enough to swing a sword. So there’d be no point; you’d die trying. Unless the target happens to think that you’re defecting to the other side mid-fight, because you came from that side originally, and because you’re a strategic coward who hops ship onto the strongest boat as soon as the tide of battle turns.

How stupid he’d been. He discounted it so easily, so quickly. He thought there was no way one Crest would make a difference. How short-sighted. How lazy. She was right in front of his eyes this entire time! How has he spent so long, so much specific and fine-targeted study on the function of Lysithea’s crests, and not once noticed that she isn’t the only case?

Hanneman’s study. It should still be there, sitting on the desk in front of the data collector, waiting for stupid, imbecilic, vacuous Linhardt to recognize its value.

Passing through the entrance hall, he finds the bridge to the chapel infested with wyvern riders, swooping in and plucking soldiers off the ground to be dropped into the expanse below. One spots him, and now he’s running back the opposite way for all his life’s worth. Linhardt just manages to get back inside, where the wyvern won’t fit, before it can eviscerate him. He hears its claws scrape on the bricks of the archway he’d ducked inside.

He’ll make a detour. It will be fine if he just keeps moving, as fast as he can.

There is a staircase off the entrance hall that will take him up to the second floor facilities. His legs and lungs burn as he climbs them three at a time. Taller legs, longer reach. He’s so painfully aware of the time he’s wasted with this detour. He needs to get back there, Byleth thinks he ran away, but he knows how to stop her, to tip the scales in their favor and then everyone will know—

He’s nearly to the laboratory when he receives a swift reminder that he should not have assumed he was out of the action just because he was inside, or even upstairs. Because just then, as a massive weight slams into the wall on his right, and a black-scaled forelimb smashes through in a rain of stone and glass, Linhardt is thrown to the floor under the force of flying bricks. A toothed maw bites into the remaining wall while the lizard-like beast scrabbles to anchor itself on its precarious perch. Then it spots him. Linhardt looks up with sheer, absurd terror, the only thought in his mind being that…right…some of them have wings.

Had it been aiming for Rhea’s sanctuary? Was it directed, or is it acting wantonly? Are there a dozen more of it doing exactly this, crawling all over the keep like anteaters on a termite mound searching for little morsels they can unearth? None of it makes any difference, he realizes, when he is about to die.

Linhardt’s head goes numb as he watches the creature raise its enormous paw into the air. It swipes toward him, but catches its claws on the wall, sending shrapnel of wood and stone raining down. Linhardt scrambles away, but the creature is smashing the corridor apart with him inside, its tail and arms thrashing.

A familiar voice screams and a blur leaps past him, over the debris, toward the beast. Caspar’s axe bites into its hide at the base of its neck and hooks grotesquely beneath the skin. Linhardt doesn’t waste time being appalled. He climbs free of the mess while Caspar goes to work slicing and hacking. It doesn’t take too much of that. Evidently, the creature decides this isn’t worth it; the easy target is no longer so easy, and it has bigger things to do before it dies. It detaches from its perch and soars back down to the ground, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the building.

“Casp—” Linhardt has barely gained his feet when Caspar slams into him, nearly knocking the wind from his stomach. He is neatly and effortlessly swept into the air, slung over Caspar’s shoulder with the ease with which he used to carry Linhardt’s bookbag on their way back from the library.

“What are you doing!?” he shouts, breathless as Caspar’s shoulder batters into his abdomen with every step. He’s running down the hall as fast as he can. When he gets to the staircase, he heads—inexplicably—up. Linhardt begins to try and squirm free.

“Stop!” Caspar orders, gripping him tighter.

“The fight is downstairs, Caspar.”

“Shut up.” His voice is raw. “Please don’t make this a pain in the ass.”

Alarm bells.

Linhardt slams his elbow into the back of Caspar’s neck with all the strength he has, and at the same time, kicks against the wall of the narrow stairwell. It upsets their balance on the slope until they both go toppling over, bumping to a stop halfway down the stairs. Something wooden cracks against his head. He hurts in a dozen places, but he’s free, more or less. He thusly starts running at once.

Caspar pulls hard on a fistful of his shirt and there’s no contest; he falls right back to the ground. It’s a chaotic squabble of limbs and fingers jabbed into eyes. The most he can do is try and wriggle free. Kick toward the face. Bite. Be the most painful pain in the ass he possibly can be. Caspar scrambles to get control of his flailing limbs. “Ghh—dammit, hold still!” He’s about to catch hold of his arms, which Linhardt must not allow—goddess, he’s strong. Linhardt gets up to run again but is similarly snatched backward, pulled by the wrist. The wrist.

“Ahh!” he cries in pain and collapses at once. He almost thinks it might have worked, because Caspar gasps with regret. But, no, he doesn’t let go.

“Stop. Fighting.” Caspar orders. “It’s for your own good. Just trust me.”

“I need to get down there.” He’s clawing at his wrist, twisting it back and forth, leveraging. It grinds in its socket like gears that need oil. Scraping. “Caspar—”

Caspar has managed to get his feet under him again and get stable on the stairs. He starts back up, yanking Linhardt along easily.

“Let go.” He rains futile blows on Caspar’s arm, fighting him with every step. “I need to be down there!”

They reach the top floor. Linhardt steals looks at the battlefield out the window, and what he sees chills his blood. Great white wings spread like a blank canvas between the land and the sun. That’s no wyvern. Goddess. He’s read about it; old scholars called her The Immaculate One. What state is the fight out there in if she’s arrived?

Caspar’s dragging him toward the infirmary. Digging in his pocket for something. Linhardt sees doom approaching. Amid mounting fear, his fingertips begin to glow red. He…he’s never hurt anyone with magic. He’s never hurt anyone with anything. Could he keep it from killing him? He’s never…and Caspar is…

That hesitation is one breath too long. He’s thrown into the infirmary with a shove, and though he whirls around instantly, the door is already shut.

Linhardt slams his full weight into the door; it barely moves. They struggle over it. “Caspar!”

“Will you just—” He hears metal in the lock, scraping. He’s trying to— “Cut it out!”

Linhardt’s voice rises so high he could just about reach Dorothea’s coveted F6. “Me cut it out!?”

“This is for your own good, okay! Why are you even fighting me on this—I thought you’d love a good excuse to get out of a fight.” Linhardt nearly breaks his shoulder against the door; it opens an inch before Caspar slams it shut again. “You’ll be safe in there, just, stay out of it!”

This—this is stupid. He can’t hope to match Caspar’s strength. Searching the room frantically for a tool, he snatches the first thing at hand—a metal-cased syringe—and then batters his entire body against the door again. This time, when the crack opens, he sticks the syringe longways into the gap. It’s wedged firmly there, and Caspar grabs it from his side, trying to wiggle it free, but it won’t budge. It pricks his hand and blood speckles the door frame.

“Agh, fuck, stupid little—”

“Caspar, let me out. I don’t have time to explain to you what—”

Caspar cuts him off with a furious growl and then, unexpectedly, Linhardt feels the door give way. When he’s halfway into pushing it open, a force slams into it from the other side and flings him off his feet onto the ground. Caspar has kicked the door shut. The lock clicks.

“Caspar!” his voice is raw with plea.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Caspar squeaks, and Linhardt hears him sob. “Stay out of it. Please, Linhardt, stay out of it, just…please…”

He scrambles to his feet and flees to the window. A red blaze lights up the sky as the dragon sears another scar into the ground. Soldiers spill over the field like ink from an upturned pot. He can’t find Byleth.

“Caspar, there are things bigger than us going on! You have no idea how stupid you’re being right now!"

“I promised,” Caspar calls brokenly, “we’d never have to fight it out. I’m not gonna break it, even if you try and make me.”

Linhardt’s anger flares bright and golden. “Promise!” he laughs, baffled with rage. “If you do this—Caspar, if you end things this way, you need not hold on to any promises between us!”

“Okay. That’s okay, just. Just stay safe,” he begs. “Please be safe, Linhardt. G…goodbye.”

“Don’t—!”

His heavy footsteps thunder down the hall, leaving Linhardt in buzzing silence. God dammit. He doesn’t have time. He runs back to the window and flings it open, cracking glass on the stone wall outside. Shards fall, shining in the sun, they fall thirty feet to the ground. Across the battlefield, on the edge of a canyon beyond the destroyed outer wall, the dragon is being swarmed by demonic beasts. Each one is a third of its size, but there are more than enough of them to take it down. At the feet of the beast, there’s a bright orange glare that shines like a lighthouse across the field. A beam of fire held in the hand of one approaching figure, running toward that mass of claws and scales. Behind him, a cluster of mages, and a growing purple light.

Linhardt whimpers with terror.

Thirty feet. Warp can get him halfway, he just needs to figure out how to use it on himself. That’s fine, theory is useless without implementation. As long as he stays conscious, everything else is irrelevant. A healer ought to be the last man standing. He just needs to stay standing. After he hits the ground.

Linhardt shoves the overwhelming blanket of terror and helpless desperation aside. He climbs into the windowframe, blinking tears out of his eyes. Deep breath. Deep breath and don’t think about it. Go. Just go.

Maybe it was higher than thirty feet. It feels like he fell a bit farther than fifteen. It’s possible that casting warp on himself cost him some range. He can’t think anyway. Everything is agony. The blinding white light that rings inside his head is a blessing, because it numbs and muffles the sharp crackling feeling he gets whenever he tries to move his leg. Of course he landed on the stone, not the grass five feet away. Well. It wouldn’t have made much difference. Is his spine affected, is what he wants to know…

Linhardt hears the roar of the dragon, a whining keen, and until then he would never have suspected that an animal’s voice could be said to convey a feeling like grief. Like loss.

The arm that still works pushes him off the stone. Dizzy. There’s blood, slick on the stones beneath his palm. His lungs won’t work and his body is in full revolt about that. Wind knocked completely out of him. It takes so, so long to get it back. Time he doesn’t have. He has to get up. He at least has to see…god, it fucking hurts…

He can’t see the light of the sword anymore. The dragon is crawling across the ground, trying to climb inside the canyon it looks like. Demonic beasts swarming on her like ants on a dying cricket. No room in this clash of titans for human-sized heroes. No place for Byleth.

Stay close to me… That’s all.

Stay close.

The Immaculate One follows her heart into the gaping wound of the earth.

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