#we're doing partially-verbal autistic byleth this run

[comfort-questing]

before the light

*note: FE:3H characters pre-timeskip -> TW whump of a minor (teen)*

--

The sour taste of early morning was in my mouth, my tongue stiff and my brain slow, with words not yet firmly in my grasp. I'd glanced back and forth at them, wondering and wishing - these three youngsters beside me in the shadow of the village walls.

If I were an ordinary person and not Jeralt's strange Ashen Demon daughter, I probably could have shown them, told them that I was happy to have them by me. But that was tricky and I hadn't the strength to do it then, when firelight outside the walls showed the fleeting shapes of bandits lying in wait for us.

I found my words as we crept forward over the dew-wet grass, the small darts of early morning larks singing somewhere between the ground and the cloudy gray sky. And if my voice was strange as the rest of me, they didn't seem to mind. Laughing gallant Claude, stern-faced Dimitri, Edelgard whose bright intent eyes held some strange note that struck a kin chord in me.

And after that it was battle, a language I had always understood - the dance of swords and shadows and lights, of boots sliding in the mud and the panting breaths of combatants, the smell of blood and sweat that was my own and others' as well.

And then at the end, that dreamlike moment where time seemed both too long and too short. Edelgard, staggering, bloodstained and defiant through the pain of her wounds, putting out a hand to the tree trunk for support, and the bandit leader rushing towards her with his axe upraised -

... I still do not quite understand what happened, after that. I understand it better now than I did then. But she was safe, and so was I, whatever sort of miracle wrought the unwinding of time and the repealing of our near-disaster.

So in the cold stuffy darkness before dawn we sat by the bandits' smoky fire, Alois talking loudly and my father muttering back, the two boys bantering about something as Claude tested the shafts of his re-found arrows, and Edelgard turned half away from the firelight with a splash of dark blood in her pale hair.

You're hurt, I wanted to say, but the words slid away to somewhere besides my mouth. So I picked up my satchel instead and dug out my healer's kit, and tapped her on the shoulder to show it.

She started, but then saw, and a flash of shame and then a quick assured stillness spread over her face.

I help you? I signed, for the sake of ease.

Whether she knew signs or not, the intent was clear enough, I suppose. She sighed and let her hand fall from where she clutched at her upper left arm, its palm black with blood in the faint light.

"Thank you," she said. Her accent was that of the Empire, but with a stiff haughty clarity all her own.

I nodded and tugged at her jacket sleeve, and she slipped her arm free of it, showing the bloody and ragged shirt below. I had to remind myself that blood spread quickly, or be shocked at the amount of it. She didn't turn away as I reached out, or flinch as I touched her, though I saw her jaw tighten ever so slightly. More used to pain than I would have expected from a fancy noble girl, this one.

The bandit's sword had slashed the outside of her arm and skipped briefly across her ribcage as well, it seemed. I searched the wounds quickly with my fingers, not wanting to try her careful proud endurance too long, and figured that the arm could take a few stitches and the rest could do with bandages.

Edelgard gritted her teeth as I stitched the gash in her arm, and I could hear the close-kept inhale and exhale of her breaths. The spatter of blood up the side of her neck was dark against her pale skin.

"It must be useful to be a healer as well as a mercenary," she said, in a voice with barely a hint of strain in it.

"I try," I said, and this time the words did make it to my mouth. "We're all healers if we have to be."

"I suppose so." Edelgard's eyes found mine for an instant, calculating in a way I didn't quite grasp, as if she were seeking something in the firelight and not sure if she would observe it. Then she smiled, briefly, and let her breath out as I pulled the last stitch taut. "Although I haven't been, yet. Maybe it's a virtue I'm not meant to attain."

"Bandages now," I said.

She tried to reach across to help me, but bit her lip and cringed forward as she tried to raise her injured arm. I caught her wrist, without thinking, and steadied her, then pressed her elbow in to hold the end of the bandage over the wad of cloth I'd pressed to the wound. "There now."

"Oh, very well," she grumbled, something between tiredness and resignation, I thought.

But when I looked up from tying off the second bandage I saw her smiling again, a small cold glad look on her exhaustion-writ face, and she nodded at me as she shrugged her jacket back over her shoulders.

"I suppose I've more to learn, then," she said. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," I said, and sat back down on the cold grass, hugging my knees up to my chest as the first true golden line of daylight broke above the treetops. "Welcome," I said again, because it felt right to say it - for her and for myself too, into this strange new story I had entered, with sword and healer's kit, blood under my fingernails and unfamiliar voices on the morning breeze.