#He helps Byleth find Rhea for his own curiosity AS WELL AS Byleth's sake (and their ACTIVE WANT to find Rhea) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years

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heart of a falling star

Self-indulgent Byleth fic because I maintain that all of Byleth’s shit could make for a really interesting character if they weren’t a near-silent avatar character, so I’m taking it upon myself to explore the possibilities.

Featuring B from my Verdant Wind run, and Claude, and her response to Rhea’s revelations at the start of Ch 22.

(I know some of the questions raised here are answered in Silver Snow, but I hadn’t played that when I wrote this fic. And besides, while I know it now, this is still only what Byleth gets in this route. And all that Byleth gets to know in Verdant Wind is....just enough for it to be super fucked up when you step back and ponder it.)

----

“There you are.”

Shadow swallows the monastery cemetery. Beneath her hands, the grass and stone are cool, and high above her head, the sun is nowhere in sight, hidden behind the high towers and walls. B looks up from where she sits sprawled on the ground next to her parents’ grave; Claude stands over her, his eyes moving from her to the freshly-plucked blossoms, pulled right out of the greenhouse, laid on the stone, to the Sword of the Creator resting in the grass. The cemetery is empty but for them, the rest of the monastery engaged in frantic scrambling over the new army on the horizon. And B should be, most of anyone, but she needed a moment to process the fantastical tale that Rhea wove. Her head as it is now, she would be of no use in a strategy meeting or a war council.

“Went looking in the captain’s old office first,” Claude adds lightly.

She’s not surprised that’s where he went - that he knows that habit of hers. Certainly it could be Alois or Leonie haunting the captain’s old office with a candle lit late at night the way they both carry torches for a man B isn’t sure any of them really truly knew - it was her, not either of them, who barricaded herself in that office for a week after Jeralt’s murder, food left at the door by worried colleagues and students. It is still her who goes back there some nights when she can’t sleep with the burdens of war. So either Claude on some late-night wanderings of his own has swung by her room to see if she’s there before concluding that it’s her in Jeralt’s office, or he’s just made a guess that happens to be correct. And just taking guesses isn’t quite his style.

“I didn’t know you came out here.”

“Once or twice,” she replies. After the battle in the Sealed Forest, she leaned up against the headstone, pulling strands of her new bright hair out in front of her eyes as she told her father’s grave what had happened and wondered if he would still recognize her, his own strange child, after this transformation. And then again after the Flame Emperor unmasked herself, another development that she thought for sure Jeralt would want to know, she sat down and told him about the chasm that opened between her feet in the Holy Tomb and how she still hadn’t found her footing again. Then, and then, and now this.

Claude shifts his weight, seeming to be deciding what he wants to ask. To indulge his curiosity about the past, or to remain mired in all their present difficulties. “How are you feeling?” he asks. “Now that we finally have answers, and they’re all that. I mean, my head is spinning, and I can’t imagine that you…”

There’s so much to think about in what Claude has just said that B does not know where to begin. We. We finally have answers. It wasn’t always we - at what point did it become we? True, they both always wanted to unravel the secrets of the Church, Rhea, and Byleth herself. And true, when Claude had asked to read Jeralt’s diary, B had determined that, just as fighting an enemy is easier with an ally at one’s side, two heads are also better than one for unearthing truths buried deep.

But she had also handed him Jeralt’s diary knowing as she did that she was opening up her dead, unnatural heart to someone who was not seeking answers for her sake. Even as a student Claude wanted as much information as he could gather about anything, to have it and use for his own benefit. Gathering cards to hide up his sleeve, but those she knew he had in hand he always kept close to his chest, and he’d made it clear in conversation, at the Goddess Tower, in the library, on missions, that he wanted her on his side in pursuit of his ambitions. As long as there was nothing to gain from revealing what he read in Jeralt’s diary, and her allegiance to lose, it would remain a secret between them.

So now: we. He isn’t wrong to say that, though she can’t pinpoint just one moment when it shifted. A series of moments. When Edelgard unmasked herself and the whole world was upended and the enemy gave them a face, but such a familiar one, to unite against. When the Imperial army was closing in on the monastery and he told her that this couldn’t be it for them, not with his ambitions still unfulfilled and her secrets still buried, and he wasn’t going to say goodbye to her, his friend, not yet. When she, still soaked through to her skin by the river, reentered the monastery and found him waiting for her as though she hadn’t spent five years vanished from the earth. Moment by moment.

Now that we have answers, and they’re all that. That; ghastly secrets Rhea kept for a millennium. A bloody burdensome truth that B has heard twice now, first when Rhea told them on the terrace, and then from B’s own lips as she repeated the whole story to her father’s grave. Before his death, Jeralt had begun to wonder if he made a mistake by leaving the monastery. She wonders now, if he were possessed of the full story, would he take back those words? If he knew, she wonders, would he have tried to run from Alois even in Remire Village, try to flee the Knights of Seiros because to go with them was the more unthinkable alternative? Would he never have brought Byleth along for a job in a town so close to Garreg Mach, never risk coming close enough that she could fall back into Rhea’s hands?

How are you feeling? The one question Claude actually asked, the response he is waiting on. He watches her with his head slightly tilted, concentrating, studying her, while her thoughts run circles through her skull like rats scuttling across a day-old battlefield. How does she feel? She knows an answer, the only feeling she can manage to grab hold of and focus on: “Somewhat relieved.”

He could assume that meant that she is relieved to have any answer at all. Someone else would, but Claude won’t. He assesses her with his bright eyes, knowing there is more of a mystery here to be teased out of her in some way or another. And she just wants to tell him, to spit out this thing that has been eating her for months on end, and she doesn’t know if she even can get it into her mouth after the way it has so deeply twisted itself around her insides.

But if she can’t tell Claude then there is no one left living in the world that she can tell. Never anyone but Claude, who stood in the cathedral with her and told her he couldn’t believe in a goddess whose divine protection stopped at Fodlan’s borders. Claude, who told her that he hoped Rhea was alive so they could get answers (these answers) from her, but otherwise he was curious to see what a Church without her could look like. How it could change. How they could change it, together, without Rhea. (Again: we.)

“I’m relieved,” B repeats, “to know why she was so interested in me. That it was because…”

The words writhe around upon her tongue, worms in a bucket of bait, vultures and crows wheeling about in the sky. Already the words aren’t right, aren’t what she knows. No, it wasn’t just that Rhea was interested in her; interested is the wrong word. She could have lived with Rhea being interested in her, but interested implies too much emotional detachment. Hanneman was interested in B’s Crest of Flames. Rhea, however, was not interested in B. Rhea was invested in her. Rhea loved—

“You saw how happy she was to see me in Enbarr,” B says, knowing that she is flailing wildly from one thought to the next, and that Claude will just have to trust her that she’ll double back and map for him the connecting path between. “Not just happy to be rescued. Happy to see me.” Another pivot, and another wild swing in a new direction. “I never loved her the way that people like Cyril or Catherine love her.” Claude snorts, no doubt thinking that very few people do. “Or the way a lot of members of the Church do. But I also didn’t love her the way she loved me. I felt guilty for that. That Rhea loved me so very much more than I ever loved her.”

It sounds, as the words leave her tongue and finally fall into the open air, so petty. So inconsequential. They have fought battles that shape the future of Fodlan and another looms on the horizon eclipsing the faint hope of dawn’s light, and she is concerned with - this. Guilt. Silly, childish guilt.

“That sounds like it shouldn’t ever have been your burden,” Claude says, leaning against the wall that surrounds the cemetery, his eyes scanning the horizon and the sheer cliffs that drop down into mountain mist. “That sounds like that was Rhea’s problem.”

“If only Rhea’s problems remained simply her problems,” B says. Claude inhales sharply, the preface to a laugh that never comes, and his eyes are solemn and serious when he looks back at her. “But I’m relieved to know now that it wasn’t ever about me.”

She might as well finish this confession; it is already halfway out of her mouth and she cannot swallow it again the way she has held it down for the better part of a year. Held it deep haunting her since she came back to life and learned that Rhea still hadn’t been found, spoke with Seteth and Catherine and Cyril who were so desperate to find her, desperate for B’s help in the search when B would rather offer her sword to the war.

(If their aims conflicted, if their paths diverged, B would choose Claude over Rhea every time. She has. She trusted Claude with her secrets when he asked for them because they could use those to get to Rhea’s secrets. She placed her heart in his hands years ago and left him to it. She never could have trusted Rhea with the same, even when Claude’s intentions seemed murky then too. Knowing nothing, B threw her lot in with him. Knowing everything, she is glad she did.)

It is better to rid herself of it, spit out this feeling that haunts her, let it leave behind merely the faint lingering trace of bile in her mouth. “She didn’t love me for me. She loved me because she hoped I would become something else. If she succeeded I - I never would have existed.” Everything she is, and Rhea would have unmade her. “If she didn’t know I was that child as soon as Jeralt and I returned to the monastery” - could she have sensed Sothis’ heart, or just guessed? Did B look enough like her mother that Rhea would know? Who was B’s mother, she still doesn’t know - “she knew when I picked up the Sword of the Creator.”

She closes her eyes and continues. There’s more; there’s more as she cuts deeper into the tangled mire of her own head. “When she gave it to me to wield as I might, she - she hoped that since I was the vessel for her heart, and the sword was her bones, that would I just - not gain the powers of the progenitor god, but become her. Get swallowed up by - overtaken? Like—” She yanks at her hair like she wants to tear it out. Several times she has barely stopped herself from doing so. “That’s what she wanted, that was her endgame, erase me and give my body to Sothis and all I am would be gone.”

Sothis merged with Byleth. Sothis gave her powers over to her, became part of her soul, changing her irrevocably, because Sothis had the power but the body was Byleth’s, and Sothis could not use it as she was. It was the very opposite of Rhea’s intent: the child should have given rise to the progenitor goddess, but instead, Sothis became Byleth. When B sat upon the throne in the Holy Tomb, she was met with silence.

The goddess is gone. Rhea tried to resurrect her and instead set them all down the path of losing her forever.

Claude shakes his head, though she is sure that the gesture doesn’t mean a denial of her summation. “And you have to wonder what would’ve happened if your father hadn’t faked your death and fled,” he adds.

That strange life she led, that baffling way Jeralt chose to raise her - her birth year unknown and the day to celebrate it simply plucked off a calendar at her choosing, a blade in her hand as soon as she could properly hold one - was to keep her safe, out of Rhea’s grasp. She could not accidentally tell someone when and where she was born if she herself did not know. She could not say with confidence she was Jeralt’s child if he did not even plainly tell her such and merely let her assume their familial relationship. If Rhea was to learn that this was the child who disappeared in that monastery fire, it would have to be from someone else, because Byleth Eisner could not tell her.

(But it was still B who told her, wasn’t it; by picking up the Sword of the Creator, she told her.)

“The amount of power she has,” Claude continues, “I mean, how did she even - do that in the first place? Who knows what she could have done next, when we barely know how she did - everything she did.” He shakes his head, throwing his hands wide in helpless surrender. “I keep coming up with new questions I want to ask her. None of them really urgent to understand Nemesis’ threat, or for the fact that she had to drag herself up from her deathbed to tell us even this much, but still. Why you? Was it because of your father? Had she tried before you, or were you really the only newborn she could get her hands on in a thousand years?”

A thousand years. The next time someone speaks of Saint Seiros, B might start retching. Or laugh. Or, most likely, stand there blankly and say nothing while she wonders what the repercussions would be if she announced Rhea’s secrets to the world once hers and Nemesis’ corpses have cooled. If anyone would even believe her. Rhea isn’t even dead yet. B does and doesn’t want her to die. She does not know how she could grapple with either.

“Perhaps it was my father,” B says. She doesn’t want to consider the possibility that Rhea tried before; what would have become of those children? Could they have gone on to be normal, Sothis’ heart failing to implant, or would the failure of the ritual - would that irrevocably change them? Kill them? “He - Rhea knew him for a very long time.” They met when he was young. That statement hadn’t meant anything to B until recently, when Alois told her how old Jeralt really was. More than a hundred, and that just a fraction of Rhea’s long life. “Maybe she thought a child of his blood would…”

His blood. His blood. He had been given someone else’s Crest-bearing blood. If Rhea knew him when he was young then she would have seen when his aging so drastically slowed. She must have known that he was something more than a normal human. Did she think that could make a difference in her ritual? The risk of alienating an ally she had for a hundred years, compared to the chance that his child could finally be the one that could give rise to Sothis - clearly, Byleth knows what Rhea chose. Rhea chose her mother over Jeralt. Her mother over a newborn child. Her mother over everything.

Claude is staring down at her with raised eyebrows. “Huh?” B asks. He might have said something.

“Thought not,” he says, with just a touch of the smug triumph he always holds when he’s got a plan that he’s not quite ready to unveil, but he knows it’s going to knock the ground out from under their feet when he does. “I asked if your head was still here with me.”

“Oh,” B says. And then the obvious, stupid answer that he already knows: “No. It’s not.”

“Yeah,” Claude says. “As I said, I thought not. But,” he adds eagerly, leaning forward, a sharp gleam in his eyes, “you do look like you’ve just realized something.”

“No,” she says, and then she second-guesses that, and says, “Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters.”

He leans back against the cemetery wall, clear disbelief written on his face. She wouldn’t have brought this conversation to this point if it didn’t matter, except she did. “Defeating Nemesis is the only thing that matters,” she says, “and we know all we need to. We know that the Sword of the Creator, that it, and I, are the only things that will - that can—”

The Sword of the Creator. Sothis. B chokes on her own heart high in her throat. “I’m the only one that can equal Nemesis, Rhea said. The goddess is dead but I’m not. I have her powers - the sword - her - her bones!”

Her bones. The goddess is dead and desecrated and B has the remains lying in the grass at her feet because she couldn’t stand to hold them in her hands.

After what happened to Miklan she was terrified to use the Sword of the Creator, compatible Crest or not, because she couldn’t trust why Rhea gave the sword to her, couldn’t be sure that Rhea wasn’t waiting for something to happen. But Claude in the course of his research found the images of a dragon with a Crest stone in its head (the Immaculate One, Rhea), and when he reported his findings to her she became assured that she would be safe. After all, the Sword of the Creator had no Crest stone. And it seemed to be the Crest stone that caused the transformation into a beast, the Crest stone that held the power. Her Crest was compatible with the sword, and it had no stone. Surely she would be safe.

(She should have wondered how the sword had any power without a Crest stone. She never understood enough to wonder.)

But Rhea did want something to happen. Rhea was waiting for some kind of transformation because of the Crest stone. Not the same transformation into a demonic beast, and not into the Immaculate One, but a transformation all the same. Rhea set her on the throne hoping to wipe away all that she was and for that small price, B’s life, return Sothis to the world.

“The Heros’ Relics are all made out of bones,” B says. Claude - Sylvain - Hilda - and all the others. All of them are carrying corpses, but there is one key difference between the rest of them and B. “I knew her. Sothis, I knew - I told you that she - she was a presence in my mind. She spoke to me, advised me, teased me, lectured me - comforted me, gave up herself to save me! So that I had the power to return to you!”

She finds herself on her feet before she knows it, stepping over the sword and spinning about helplessly in front of her father’s grave. “And then she was gone and I mourned her, I mourned her when there was only silence left in my skull! She was my friend! And I have to - I have to wield her bones into battle because if I do not then all of Fodlan falls.” Everyone she loves will die, just as in her every nightmare, all the times that never came to pass because she bears the powers of the progenitor goddess to turn time back. This must be another time that does not come to pass. “It doesn’t matter what we know - all that matters is that I can stop Nemesis. The goddess is dead but I’m not, so I can’t - care - I can’t - think about the rest that Rhea told us. The truth - her bones.”

Her words don’t make sense. She wants to look at Claude, to see if he understands, really understands what she means, that Sothis was someone to her, a precious friend and ally for the time that B had her voice and not just her powers - and she doesn’t want to look at Claude at all. She doesn’t want to see Claude looking back at a stranger. She remembers him dumbstruck when Rhea told them about the Crest stone, Sothis’ heart; she remembers how long it took for his wide eyes to turn to her. She remembers that he looked like he was looking at something else, something unfamiliar. She doesn’t know if she can look herself in the eye in a mirror ever again, and she doesn’t know how Claude could look at her the same way ever again.

“She was my friend,” B repeats, choosing not to meet Claude’s eyes, to look anywhere but at him, and she looks at her hands tugging her hair past her shoulders. She has never become used to this green that marks her and haunts her and yet is still not even quite the same green as Sothis’ hair. She does not look like Sothis. She looks like Rhea. All she is, is what Rhea made her. Does she hate Rhea for that? She doesn’t know. “Sothis was a goddess but - she was my friend, and I can’t bury her remains. I can’t put her back in the tomb. We have no other option than for me to keep bloodying her bones the way Nemesis did. I can’t let her rest.”

Seiros’ tomb was empty because Seiros yet lives, if perhaps only for a little longer. But the sword was in the tomb because the sword was still someone’s remains. Not Seiros but her mother, the goddess. Sothis.

“No,” Claude agrees quietly. “We really don’t have any other choice.”

“It’s the only way to end this,” B says. “As long as we can win, it doesn’t matter why - why me, why Rhea made me the - it doesn’t matter. I told you it doesn’t matter that - why I—”

A weight presses on her chest, like the weight of magic wielded against her, trying to pull her life from her or drown her in the dark, a growing pressure that she can’t breathe around. Half of her lungs cut off from her throat, every breath a shallow panting one like she’s wounded, and she can’t fathom why. It feels like she remembers crying felt, the only time she ever did. She can’t breathe and she can’t speak and she needs to keep speaking. “Why she made me. What she made me. It doesn’t matter. It only matters what I am now.”

Blood of the goddess, equal to the Fell King Nemesis. Bearer of the Crest of Flames. Wielder of the Sword of the Creator. Ashen Demon. A child that never cried. A heart that never beat.

She lays a hand on her chest. There should be something there. There’s nothing there but heaviness that doesn’t let her breathe deeply enough to stop gasping sharply; she chokes on too much air that she never actually swallows. All of Rhea’s confession finally bears down on her too quickly, too heavily, too late. She wants to scream it at Rhea but Rhea is dying and Rhea isn’t here and B has a thousand more questions for Rhea and B also never wants to speak to Rhea again. “My heart, she - she took my heart. She put a stone in its place, she - she gave me a stone for a heart!”

Until she braces against something solid she has no idea she is trembling; Claude closes his hands around her upper arms, trying to steady her, but her every gasp and cough sends another shudder through her. “Hey,” he says softly. “B - B. C’mon, breathe.”

She can’t - she can’t - why can’t she breathe. She presses the heels of her hands into her chest, like the pressure will finally make something in there start moving, start beating, finally this late in her life work like it should, but all it does is hurt. It hurts, it all hurts, the quick breaths struggling to sink into her lungs and the weight inside of her ribs and up to her throat where it’s tight on the inside, too tight. Everything is wrong. She tips forward until her head finds something solid to lean against, Claude’s chest, and in there he has a heart that beats. His heart, that once he knew about hers, once he knew what an aberrant freak she is, still consoled her by reminding her that the diary made clear that Jeralt loved her, how obvious it was it every word he wrote that he loved his dead-eyed heartless child. His heart, that he hid long after she handed him hers, that he finally offered to her in return, telling her about his goals, his ambitions, his dreams, trusting her to understand.

His beating heart, and hers—

“My heart - she put a stone in for my h-heart—”

“Easy there.” Claude moves his hands from her arms to hold her closer, her hands pressed against her chest that houses a stone now wedged between them, against his chest, and his hands rubbing a small circle on her back. “Give yourself a moment, all right? And don’t tell me again it doesn’t matter - clearly it does.”

Her eyes feel like they are burning, like smoke has found its way into them and they hurt like everything else hurts. “Why did she do this to me?”

They both know why. He doesn’t remind her. “Shh. Just try and breathe.”

If she doesn’t speak, she can simply focus on breathing, finding a steady rhythm to match the rise and fall she feels with her forehead resting on Claude’s chest. She doesn’t have a beating heart, but she breathes, and she has blood pounding through her veins. She’s no ghost, and she’s more than bones. She’s more than a vessel for these broken pieces of Sothis.

She opens her mouth, words at the ready, and instead just inhales another longer, slower breath. One more stolen moment of silence and calm before she has to raise her head and face the world again. Before they have to hold council for strategy in this next battle in a war that won’t end. “I’m sorry,” she finally says, and the words don’t choke her.

“Hey, don’t mention it,” Claude says. “I asked. I was worried about you. Everything Rhea said, and you just - didn’t react at all.”

He had been the one to ask the questions, to make sure they understood each new piece of Rhea’s assertions, repeating her unbelievable tale back to her. And B had listened, silently, with a vacant hollow space growing in her chest, swallowing up all of the emotions she had come to learn since Sothis awoke. Even as Claude had asked, “But the Sword of the Creator doesn’t have a Crest stone. How’s B able to wield its full power like that?”, there was some part of her that knew, had already heard just enough to know, and when Rhea said it Claude went silent, and B was not even numb with it. Numb implies that there is something beneath the numbness that is being suppressed, that will return with warmth. There was nothing in her then, nothing to warm up from the cold, nothing but that emptiness within her ribs stretching wider.

“You put her heart inside me?” she asked Rhea, just to be sure, even though she was sure, sure the way her father in his diary had been sure that something happened that was Rhea’s fault that left his child without a heartbeat. It was a stone, not a heart. She asked Rhea, just to be sure, and her voice didn’t sound like her own; she sounded just as empty of anything as her chest was. Rhea put a dead god’s heart in her, and B felt nothing at all. She looked at Claude, saw the horror drawn across his face, and thought she should share in that, shouldn’t she?

And after too long of a delay, the first feeling that welled up in the hollow in her chest had been that relief, and she hadn’t realized there was that dull horror drowned beneath it, waiting for the relief to subside to surge forward. This haunting revelation - the bones of someone she knew - that led her here.

But just as she knew Sothis - she knew her. She knows what Sothis said as they drifted in the darkness of some other world. The only way for them to return would be for Sothis to give up herself, all that she was as an individual consciousness, and she did. She refused for them to die there, even if it meant for her some other kind of death. B knew Sothis, knows what she did then, and knows if they could speak now that Sothis would scold her as she often did, demand that B pick up her damn bones and bring them to battle because they have no other choice. Are you going to die, instead? Sothis would ask. Are you going to let your friends die? Are you going to sacrifice the world because you’re too much of a fool to pick up that sword? Burying my bones again won’t change what happened in the Red Canyon! It will only mean that Nemesis slaughters everyone you love, too!

B cannot be happy about it, but she will do it. She would never have done anything else. Sothis was her friend, but Sothis is gone. Claude is still here. Claude and all of B’s other friends are still here. And she will protect them, with Sothis’ help, like she always has. With Sothis’ powers and Sothis’ blood and bones.

“I’m okay,” B says. It’s probably mostly true. “I’m—”

She tries to draw back, but Claude doesn’t yet let her go. His hands move to her shoulders, holding her at arms’ length, keeping her closer than she would have stayed. Meeting his eyes, she finds a concerned gaze. Not horror at something right in front of him become so unfamiliar. Just concern, for a friend.

The hollow empty space in her chest fills up a little further with warmth, and she amends her statement. “I’ll be okay,” she says. “And I’m with you. I’m ready to fight as soon as we do. You don’t have to worry.”

“I wasn’t worried about that,” Claude says. “I knew you would be. You’ve never let me down.”

Her throat grows tight again. “What’s our next move?” she asks him. She has no doubt that he already has one; together, they brought together an army, and he maneuvers it to the battlefields it needs to reach, and she leads the charge once they’re there. (And the admiration goes to her, Rhea’s favorite with the Crest of Flames and the Sword of the Creator, though she would be lost without Claude; it isn’t fair, but Claude doesn't care about fair. He cares about winning, and together, they do.)

“Hilda’s fielding any new messengers that might arrive,” Claude says, “and making up a map of Nemesis’ army’s movements. I told her as soon as I get back to her, I expect her to help us start rounding up our war council for a strategy meeting, as quick as possible, so we’ve got to go find her now. I wasn’t starting anything until I had you with me.”

And she had run, instead - her whole life, trained to charge into the fight, and now at this most dire moment, she turns and runs. “I’m sorry,” she says, again.

“Hey, I also needed a moment to process it all,” Claude says. “I mean - Saint Seiros, I just—” He shakes his head, finally releasing B’s arms and stepping back. “We’ll have plenty more time to discuss this when this is over. As long as you’re good right now, I am too.”

Right now. She can do right now, set aside these feelings for right now since she has given voice to them, freed herself of their weight. The Sword of the Creator still lays in the grass by the gravesite, Sothis’ body next to the place that B’s parents are buried. She picks it up, running her fingers along the uneven edge, segmented like a spine, its color almost that of weathered bone. She wants to apologize to it, but Sothis would laugh at her if she did. Don’t apologize. Just go kill Nemesis! Save Fodlan and your friends who are still living! I’m not the one to worry about!

(She thinks she has Sothis’ indignant cadence down, still, but her voice is fading into dim memory. Voices are hard to keep - even Jeralt’s, she has begun to lose.)

Claude, standing in front of her, on the other side of the sword, is watching her carefully when she raises her head. His eyes drift down to the same place hers lingered, there in the hilt the hole where her heart goes. Sothis and Byleth’s shared heart of stone that carries the flames in their blood. B carries Sothis’ Crest in her veins and her heart in her chest and her bones in her hands.

“I wonder who Failnaught used to be,” she says, and Claude looks away.

“Someone,” he says finally, “who I hope would be happy to help us kill Nemesis.”

B knew Sothis, but the rest are empty echoes through the ages. Nameless multitudes, like all of the bones that mingle in massive, unmarked graves on all the battlefields they have left behind during this war. All the slaughtered villages Nemesis leaves in his wake like he did a thousand years ago, devastated, burnt to ash.

“Claude,” she says sharply, and his head snaps back around to face her. He might expect something else about Failnaught, but nothing in her head can move so linearly, not right now, not the way the world swirls around them. “Nemesis marches under the Crest of Flames. He’s slaughtering civilians under that banner. But our army - we also - can we even still—”

Claude shakes his head. “We’ve come this far under that banner. I don’t really feel like surrendering it to a madman now, do you?” He pauses a moment for her to consider that, but he doesn’t wait for her to respond before he continues, “The Crest of Flames is ours. We’re not going to let him take it from us. And we’re not going to let him take Fodlan from us, either. If we lose, here, now, it’s all for nothing, and we’ll never see the sun rise on Fodlan’s new dawn.”

“That’s not going to happen.” B weighs the familiar sword in her hands. It is time to lay this all to rest - no more Red Canyons and Remire Villages. Whatever it takes, her Crest and blood and Sothis’ bones - if it takes her heart, she will give it gladly. If she must lay down her life, then she will. For everyone she loves, and for the rest of Fodlan with them. “We’ll see your dream through to the end.”

Claude grins at her; even with the darkness bearing down on them from the horizon, his eyes are bright. Back before B knew how to smile, she could still recognize that Claude’s smiles were another mask he wore; she could still notice that his smiles didn’t reach his eyes in situations far less dire than this one. His eyes of stone, and her heart. In the time it has taken her to learn how to have emotions, he learned to be honest with his.

“And there’s no one I’d rather have with me,” he says. “Shall we go plan our next move?” He offers her his arm, like in Deirdru entering the chamber that hosted the Alliance Roundtable, displaying to the lords the strength of their united front, Duke Reigan and the archbishop’s titleless mercenary successor. But there’s no one else around, no opposition in front of them to stand strong against - nothing but the doubts in B’s own head, the ones she hasn’t said because she can’t let herself give voice to the possibility that they lose. Her fears, and perhaps Claude’s own as well.

She loops her arm through his and together they leave the graveyard.

#i am allowing each of my byleths one additional breakdown per route and this is B's #no title for this bc that is beyond me and i've been poking at this since i finished verdant wind #which was like two months ago #roddy fanfics: fe3h #edit: updated my note now that i know all The Lore and also added a title finally

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silkhy-john · 4 years

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My fe3h headcanon-that-you-could-say-is-implied-canon-if-you-squint that nobody asked for and that someone has probably already come up with (maybe something exactly the same, or something very similar to it).

It's about NG+

Please forgive any grammatical mistake I make, I'm usually better than this, I'm just tired.

SPOILER WARNING FOR ALL ROUTES. Even though I discuss them in passing, I still do discuss some major points.

I'd like to start by saying I will assign Byleth the pronouns they/them out of respect for different people perceiving Byleth to be different sexes/genders (I flip between male and female in my mind a lot, that's why I chose not to use he/him or she/her)

So, I believe every new game + file is Byleth and Sothis performing a big time leap to the point in the prologue when Byleth has JUST woken up.

Let me explain.

So the first time Byleth ever actually meets the Khalid (Claude), Mitya (Dimitri), and Edgelord (Edelgard) is in the first new game (not new game +)

The game plays out as normal, with the important things to take from the prologue being Byleth and Sothis' first impressions of the three (Khalid's empty smile, Mitya's underlying darkness, Edgelord's constant evaluations)

Byleth, as a mercenary with a legendary kill streak, is used to people evaluating them, but once they reach the monastery, people interacting with them as a normal person as opposed to a tool to score by performance makes Edgelord's first impression on them really rub Byleth off the wrong way, so they don't pick the Black Eagles first (this is important)

This leaves them with a choice between the Golden Deer and the Blue Lions (from now on I will abbreviated the houses' names when and if I do mention them: BE, GD, & BL).

Byleth picks the GD first because they're curious about why Khalid felt the need to hide his true self (because Byleth had/has a lack of strong emotion and doesn't understand why anyone would want to hide themself and their feelings)

The route plays out as normal, Byleth doesn't recruit any students in this route, Dedue doesn't die in the final battle, Byleth achieves full support ranks with all their students, they S-support Khalid.

Those Who Slither In The Dark and Lysithea's talk about her time as a human experiment pique Byleth's interest.

The more they think about it, the more Byleth wants to do about it.

Byleth's curiosity turns into a fervent wish to see how things would have played out now that they know the true enemy. It brings Sothis back.

The day before Khalid (now a king) is to return from Almyra, Byleth leaps back in time to the moment in the prologue when their father wakes them up. It hurts, but had Khalid come back, Byleth would have lost their will to leave.

Now, here is where I discuss the mechanics in new game + and how they tie into my idea (I'm discussing using Renown to raise support ranks, levels, and restore class skills).

In game, Byleth can only spend Renown on students they interacted with in their last play through.

In my opinion, since Byleth spent time getting to know those students, they know the easiest and fastest way to teach them high level skills (skills they had in another timeline, basically) what is required of them to complete their training in a certain combat class, and their personality (thus Byleth knows how to get them to trust them).

The BL route plays out as normal, except Byleth is aware of the madness Mitya succumbed to, this shows in their supports. Byleth recruits the students from the GD, Khalid doesn't accept the offer. Byleth doesn't think much of it.

Story plays out as normal, the GD students find it a bit uncanny how well Byleth knows them. Byleth realises just how bad Mitya's madness is because now they've ACTUALLY interacted with him.

The route continues as normal, Byleth reaches full support ranks with the BL students, and Byleth S-supports Mitya. It's important to note that though Byleth is in love with Mitya, they are still in love with Khalid.

This path isn't a satisfactory to Byleth, because:

1. Everyone except Byleth and Lysithea was unaware of Those Who Slither in The Dark, and Byleth knows they've gone into hiding because they can't seem to find their hideout at Shambala.

2. Byleth is highly curious of Mitya and Edgelord's dynamic, but from Edgelord's point of view.

It's easier to get Sothis to re-manifest this time. Byleth travels back to the prologue of the story.

Everything plays out as normal, Byleth recruits the BL students except for Mitya and Dedue, and the GD students except for Khalid and... Hilda?

Byleth would never fully understand the brilliant girl that was Hilda.

Back on track, the story plays out as normal, with the GD and BL students feeling serious déjà vu.

Byleth now understands the very human motivations behind Edgelord's inhumane actions in the two different timelines they've seen.

They witness Edgelord's ascension to the Adrestian Throne, they feel severely torn between Edgelord and Rhea, since Rhea (Seteth and Flayn as well) is the only one who doesn't really change every time they have to go back in time; Byleth hadn't seen that attachment coming into play.

Byleth chooses Edgelord.

The route plays out as normal, Byleth reaches full support with all of the Black Eagle Strike Force, and S-supports Emperor Edgelord. Yes, Byleth loves her, and yes, Byleth is still very much in love with Mitya and Khalid.

A conversation between Lysithea and Edgelord about injustice against humans for the sake of "science" reminds Byleth that they have still not reached a satisfactory conclusion.

They hop back in time, this time, though, Byleth and Sothis agree that the most impactful choice would be siding with Rhea.

Byleth, though, leaps a bit further back. He chooses not to visit the empire with Edgelord and Hubert.

It feels a bit odd siding with someone Byleth had seen unhinged, but that thought is cast out because Rhea (Seiros), along with Seteth (Cichol) and Flayn (Cethleann) are great people, despite their lies by omission.

Byleth finds that this is the most harrowing route of all, because watching the people they love die is not an easy thing.

Byleth S-supports Rhea, though their relationship feels a bit familial.

There's still one glaring problem.

Those Who Slither In The Dark have still not been brought to justice, and yet they are the biggest threat to Fòdlan.

Byleth is emotionally drained after spending what are essentially 20 years of his life playing for different sides of the same war, but they still have a ways to go, since it seems no path can defeat the true enemy without heavy casualties

Before they go back in time to do what they conclude is the right thing, Byleth writes three songs with the help of Rhea: The God Shattering Star, The Apex Of The World, and The Long Road. Each is a dedication to the three people they love; they will take them back in time with them.

They write a fourth song, Funeral of Flowers, with no help from Rhea. This one is dedicated to her, and they give it to her in this timeline.

Byleth knows that Rhea will hate them the most bitterly once when they go back to do what they need to.

Prepared for what was necessary, Byleth goes back to the prologue. They would forge their own path.

***

Anyway, I kind of dipped into a sort of fic writing style there, which is OOP, not something I should be doing if I want to avoid the urge to edit

It isn't properly fleshed out because that would have to be a mega fic, so,,, (actually, you could right in allusion to events within the canon routes... hmm)

Anyway, conceptualizing the path Byleth wants to take is done, writing and fleshing are a bit more... problematic.

Tell me what you think.

#fe3h spoilers #fe3h headcanons

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