Archive of Our Own ^beta

Gilbert sees her in the dining hall. He sees her in the library. He sees her in the many winding courtyards of Garreg Mach. He sees a great many students wandering the Officer’s Academy—but she is impossible. The perfect shape of his wife in her prime, an illusion, a ghost. It cannot be her. He checks the registry of Faerghan noble lines in the library, just to be sure a year has not been amended to the right of her birth and a ghost does not haunt him in her immortal resentment. He checks his own pulse, alive and rapid, just to be sure he is real and all this is not some divine purgatory.

She haunts him. He sees her at the edge of his vision; always watching. Always hovering, waiting. For what, he can only assume to strike. She keeps her distance like a sword match. She never strays too far forward, but he never manages to slip too far away.

He dreams of her, his wife. She was arranged for him by the Crown itself. A gift from House Gideon on his 40th birthday—a reward, for lifelong service to the Faerghan military. He had intended to die in his armor with his knightly oath to chastity intact. Then, suddenly, he had a wife.

She was a young, spare daughter then. She spread her legs on their wedding night with a grim determination. He slipped between them, shut his eyes, and thought of Faerghus. They joined together like two grindstones crushing grain between their maw. Together, somehow, they produced a son.

-

Annette is soft where so many of her Faerghan classmates are razor-sharp. The boys are cruel to one another. Annette cannot bring herself to be included. Annette cannot bring herself to lash out, as much as the anger and the grief may bubble up inside of her. They know what she is, and they know where she stands. In another life, she perhaps would don her trousers and fight her lethargic cousin for her birthright and stand before them all as the noble, crested, male heir to House Dominic—as horrible and dominant as the rest of them. She does not live another life, though. She lives in this one, in her nightdress and slippers and her place at Mercedes’ doorstep.

Mercedes feigns softness, but she is harder under the surface than she first appears. Still, she lets a teary-eyed Annette into her private quarters to sit on her bed and sob. Annette has long forgotten exactly why she first came here to cry. She just knows she can, when she wants, knock on Mercedes’ door and let her deep-seeded sadness well from her eyes without Faerghan shame.

Mercedes takes her into her arms and hums cooing words. She’s older than Annette by over half a decade and carries with her the wisened comfort of a mother. Annette is unabashedly in love with her. Sometimes she cries because Mercedes isn’t in love with her, though Mercedes has no way of knowing it.

She confessed three months into the school year and Mercedes, well into her twenties, had brushed off her teenage affections with a calm but firm line. Annette should have halted the endless spring of emotion in her chest, then, but Mercedes only seemed to look harder after her, and her desire only seemed to grow beneath the attention.

It’s the attention that gets to her, further than anything else in her life can reach. She has never been so focal to another man or woman’s life. She has always been an ill-proportioned son in a dress but to Mercedes she is a bright spot of sunshine. She has never been a bright spot of sunshine to anyone. She burns a piece of toast and Mercedes laughs. She fails a Faith certification and Mercedes helps her study. She confesses her terrible, terrible love and Mercedes stays her friend.

She tells Mercedes her father is here, at Garreg Mach, and receives a delicious dose of pity.

-

He knows, somehow, that she will come. She does. She stands before him ghost-pale and shivering in the moonlight. She is as scared of him as he is of her.

She opens her mouth and nothing comes out. She opens her mouth as if in a silent scream. Her face flexes, her nose scrunches, and something between a sob and a gasp escapes her throat. He backs up until his shoulder hits the brickwork of the courtyard. Vines rustle. She’s crying fully, now, his wife, his ghost, his son, his daughter, maybe. She takes a step forward and his back draws flush with the wall.

She turns around and flees.

-

Annette has never felt so alone. Mercedes coos and coaxes next to her but she has no tears nor thirst for her attention. She wants to vanish into the unforgiving night. She wants to throw a stone at her father. She wants him to hold her, like he used to, when she was his little scamp bound for knighthood and he was her entire world.

She wipes her hand across tear-streaked cheeks.

She stands.

Mercedes is cooing, again, but Annette is fierce and angry and lapping at an adrenaline spike inside of herself. She has to go. She has to do it, at last. She has to open her mouth and say the words: I am your daughter, you are my father, no amount of new names and pristine uniforms has changed that.

It’s late, now. She goes to the knights’ quarters. Students are not supposed to be here. She is not supposed to be here. She dodges past moonbeams and nightwatchmen and turns a corner and he’s there, suddenly and sharply and not alone. He’s there, and he has her very own professor pressed up against a wall.

Professor Byleth’s usual, dim stare is unchanged in the face of the man mouthing at his throat. He is just a few years older than Annette, younger than Mercedes, and he allows his leg to be lifted so that Annette’s father might brusquely and efficiently snap their hips together. They are fully clothed but the sight is still scalding. Annette’s eyes burn.

She flees, for the second time in just as many days. She goes unnoticed.

-

Byleth sleeps. Gilbert does not. He sought out the much younger man in a moment of weakness and escapism. Byleth had expressed a fetishtic interest in him since his strange arrival to professorhood and—Gilbert is guilty, so guilty, of much worse than an indulgence.

Gilbert traces the line of his companion from shoulder to dip of waist to rise of hip in the moonlight. Gilbert holds his breath, and then Gilbert slips from the bed and into the night.

He’s the only knight not tucked into their bed. He wanders the open-air halls and alcoves of Garreg Mach with aimless intention.

He hears wailing.

He freezes. Ghost stories abound among the nuns of Mach, and he is nothing if not penitently religious. The cries are real, though—no mere wind, shrill and alive and carnal. The kind of sobs reserved for snapped bones and dead children. He follows their siren call to the source. He knows who they belong to, somehow. He knows who is always his shadow; his fencing partner; his ghost.

He sees her, there, on a bench in the walled gardens, beside a gazebo. The perfect mirror of his wife, his haunting, sitting and hunched over herself and weeping into her hands. He steps forward. The grass crunches beneath his feet. He freezes like prey. She stops—sharply—and her head whips up at the sound of an intruder. She is prey too. Her eyes are wide and shimmering. Her mouth, warbling. She looks so small. She’s always been so small.

“Harold,” he says. She flinches as the name is spoken aloud. She looks readied to bolt, again. He wishes, deep down, that she would.

“Annette,” she says, so very small.

The thought strikes him, suddenly, that they are the same. Harboring some illicit flavor for the other. Their only difference is in presentation. He hides his truest self beneath layers of armor only stripped during illicit trysts and his own hand around himself. She wears her skirts in daylight.

“Annette,” he echoes, but she flinches even harder.

He can do nothing. There is no path before him that will not dig sharp spines into her. Placing a comforting hand on her will scald her. Running again will be a strike to her face.

He does all he can do. He sits down on the bench beside her. He places his face into his hands, and cries too.