Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘Boys will be Boys.’

That’s what they say, isn’t it? The inescapable refrain serving as one’s declaration of diplomatic immunity, and the warning painted above another’s dungeon doors. That all boys, plucked from the box and arrayed upon the game board as boys, will only ever be boys – even those who don’t quite ‘boy’ correctly – and so it is, and shalt always be, such is the Goddess’ mandate for the natural world, et cetera, et cetera, praise Sothis.

The first time this mantra is invoked of Sylvain Gautier, as far as he can remember, he wasn’t doing a damned thing wrong, honest! He’d use a saucier swear, but he won’t learn any of the good ones for a few years, yet, being a scraggly young thing of ten.

Dimitri’s Da– Er, King Lambert had some uppity noble Dad business to talk about with Sylvain’s, but instead of doing the polite thing of inviting everyone down to that big, fancy castle in Fhirdiad, he just had to sneak up with a small contingent to crash in Gautier, stoking the stuffiness values of everyone around to new heights. To top it off, he didn’t even bring Dimitri for Sylvain to play with on dreary nights like this!

It’s probably not sedition to call the King a bit of a jerk, but Sylvain keeps it to himself… and the horses, to whom he’s muttering.

Unceremoniously booted from the dining hall lest such a nosy child get underfoot, but too wound-up for any of the servants to have success in shuffling him off to bed, the currents of Sylvain’s boredom carry him out to the stables by the east end of the estate. The King’s small retinue this time around didn’t bring with it any fun new stories or leave any neat weapons laying around to gawk at, but it did come with one rare inclusion for a kid to fawn over.

It takes hardy pegasus stock to hack it in the north, and the Kingdom has always made do, but Gautier has often felt a step too far. If not for the beasts themselves, then for their riders, liable to freeze, fall, and shatter into a hundred billion pieces after half an hour in the icy air.

Add to that the fact Margrave Gautier’s not exactly been pleasant employer since the death of Sylvain’s mother, much less kindly towards women with enough money or martial clout to have scored an education, and you get a recipe for no pegasus knights posted this far north... Not unless the King himself has a hand in it, like tonight.

Because one of His Majesty’s retinue rode a living, breathing, flip-flapping pegasus all the way up to the Margravate on this expedition, and like heck is Sylvain gonna let this opportunity slip him by. What else is he supposed to do with his night? Read a book about a cool knight instead of snooping on a real one?

Preemptively drafting a handful of easy excuses for roaming the estate so late, Sylvain casually slips from the well-lit halls and galleries, with their warmly-colored wood-panel walls, to the winding stone corridors at the outer verges where soldiers and servants mill. Short of ducking into a broom cupboard when a thunking series of bootsteps nearly catches him dead to rights, it’s as simple as any other night, sneaking out to pester the animals.

At least the other horses don’t have to worry about enduring Sylvain’s pesky, one-sided chatter, tonight; as he creeps off the polished stone of the interior halls and onto the hay-littered dirt, the young heir need only peek past two stalls before he catches an eyefull of the biggest – technically only – pegasus he’s ever seen from this close in his life.

Unlike the archetypal, pureblood Fodlanic pegasus enshrined on every other tapestry or stained glass mural of a great battle, with a coat so white one could lose it in a blizzard at five paces, this mare’s coloring leans a velvety gray, not far from the dull metal of her armoring. The darkest dappling disappears beneath the thick, Faerghan-blue caparison draped over her back to keep her toasty.

But, that’s normal horse business! It’s the wings Sylvain wants to gawk at, though in hindsight, he can’t exactly blame her for keeping ‘em well tucked beneath the fancy blanket, even on a milder night by northern standards. The few feathers he can see from here are already pretty neat; the pinions dyed darker at the base, paling white at the tips, like each one is frosted, and sweeping his fingers across would dislodge a smattering of snowflakes.

As he silently studies the mount, the common adage ‘it’s dangerous for little boys to go near pegasi’ scarcely flies any red flags in his mind. Its contextual implications soar right over his head because grown-ups say the same about tons of things; ooh, it’s dangerous for little boys to play with swords, whoa, it’s dangerous for little boys to walk on frozen ponds in the spring – no big deal, right? Just adults overreacting, as usual.

Like, when Sylvain scrambles partway up the side of the wooden paddock fencing and folds his arms on the highest rung, he doesn’t catch a horseshoe to the face or anything! The beast tilts its head his way, still too far for his undeveloped arms to reach out and pat. He settles for looking.

“Hi, er… I’m Sylvain. So, you can fly, huh? That’s cool.”

The pegasus blinks at him. This, to a boredom-stricken child, constitutes a clear line of communication.

“So, hey, how did they even come up with pegasi, anyway? Did some horse haf’ta get married to a bird and hatch you guys outta eggs? Probably not; I think I would’ve heard about pegasus eggs by now. You could make a really big omelette– Not that I’m saying I’d eat your babies or anything! Sorry!”

Both the pegasus’ wings shudder at the joint for a moment, just as it slumps its head with a snort, and if he didn’t know any better, he’d think the thing just sighed at him. Ouch. Tough crowd.

Sylvain’s moping is cut short by a lurch in motion; he almost catches a sheaf of feathers to the face as the mare shifts its weight, horseshoes tamping down the mat of hay. Turned to its side, she lazily bumps against the fencing, dragging her wings against the scratchy wood once or twice.

In years to come, Sylvain will rationalize the creature was likely tending an itch, or even hoping to shoo the nosy brat away so she can catch some shut-eye before her rider comes back. But Sylvain is young, and optimistic, and bored, and might be internally exaggerating the lattermost to cover for that dangerously genuine interest in something often condemned as ‘girly,’ and thus, anathema.

And, well, the saddle’s three feet away from his face – if Sylvain drops down and shuffles off to bed like a good little boy instead of an interminable rebel-in-the-making, he knows it’s gonna bug him all night! All month! All… uh, however long it’ll take before Dad lets them visit Galatea again, when he could maybe have Ingrid run interference with one of her family’s pegasi!

Nope. He’s already scaling the side of the paddock with fervor, perched at the top like a frog waiting to leap to a lily-pad! Except the lily-pad is harder and more leathery and distinctly saddle-shaped, and the water is several hundred pounds of aerial equine warbeast, and this is suddenly a mite more intimidating than–

“Alright, who’s skulkin’ about in there?! I’ll have your head if – Sylvain!? What do you think you’re doing outside the house? Get away from there!”

Welp.

Not to tell Mister Shaggy Nightshift Stablehand Guy how to do his job, here, but maybe – just maybe – if you spy a kid about to pull a cool, daring leap of faith, and you’d like for him not to do it, mayhap consider: NOT startling him so bad he flinches into a humiliating, flying flop across the creature’s back?

An embarrassing groan is squeezed from his lungs on impact, but the dull smack hardly hurts any more than the boot to the ribs he caught from his older brother this afternoon. Sylvain didn’t even slide off! He pulls his face away from a scratchy cloth surface to find the pegasus’ far wing raised to catch him on the gaudy barding at its shoulder. Do they get trained to do that? Wait, no, real knights’re probably way too heavy.

That said, even if it was a fluke, the mare seems fairly ambivalent to his presence, minus some intentional wiggles to smooth out its blanket. Sylvain swings a leg over the saddle to straddle it properly, and tries to lend a hand.

“Are you tryin’ to get yerself killed!? Get down this instant, that thing’ll – it's a pegasus, it’ll trample you to pieces, y’dense little brat!” fumes the stablehand, who, in hindsight, actually hasn’t stopped screaming since Sylvain got busted, and not for any reason he can fathom.

“Nuh-uh.”

“The fuck do you mean, ‘nuh-uh!?’”

Goddess, what is the deal here!? He’s sitting. He’s sitting on a fancy horse, minding his own business, and occasionally grating its nerves with lukewarm comedy. Oh, it’s a royal knight’s steed, you say? Well, he’s being extra careful, isn’t he? What’s that, the fancy horse has wings? Whoop-tee-doo! A whole lot of danger he’s in.

Besides, Sylvain has yet to fully cool off from his unceremonious shuffling-off from the grown-ups’ meeting, and a secondborn child is so often prone to obstinacy when denied the things they want.

All this to say, it’s a great deal of griping and sulking and raspberry-blowing refusal to dismount the stolen steed, covering his ears for dramatic effect as the stablehand fumes from afar at his Lord’s bothersome youngest.

Fuming’s just about the only thing the man can do, after all. Three times over, he attempts to tiptoe closer to the stall, arms up and out, ready to snatch the ten-year-old like a common cutpurse, and three times over, the pegasus snorts and rears, nearly bucking Sylvain in the process of trying to stamp this intruder’s skeleton into a fine white powder.

The guy’s face is a riot, about as hilarious as it is eerily discomforting – despite shooting his mouth off, the longer Sylvain looks, the more he realizes there’s something akin to fear in his eyes, some sort of incomprehension as he meets Sylvain’s placid expression. Is it ‘cuz the pegasus hates him?

Pff, it’d make sense to Sylvain. Like, he’d just wanted someone to talk to! He wasn’t being rude like that guy, minus the accidental quip about the pega-omelettes, and he’s already apologized, so, y’know!

The smart thing to do would have been to bolt the second the man throws up his hands in agitation and storms back towards the keep for reinforcements, sneak back into his room and play dumb to any accusations. Not that they’d believe him, but at least he could relax in a nice warm bed for a few minutes before he’s verbally dressed-down.

Alas, Sylvain Gautier is ten, annoyed, and growing rather fond of this completely random, nameless equine companion that doesn’t belong to him, whom he’s known for all of fifteen minutes.

The saddle feels different beneath him, less chunky, more graceful, and the wings bracketing him on either side are oddly inspiring, ready to fan out and catch the wind, offer the child an implacable sense of protection and tease him with visions of freedom; saying ‘go to Ailell’ to his tutors and his angry father and frostbitten Gautier as a whole, stealing this steed and just… going! Flying so far and so high the Kingdom of Faerghus becomes as small as the one on his father’s maps, flying anywhere but here!

“Well, well, don’t you look comfortable up there?”

Damn. That brings him back down to solid earth again.

Posted up ever-so-casually against the doorframe leading back into the estate, an unfamiliar woman with a light auburn braid, faded battle scars nicking her chin and the bridge of her nose, fixes him with dark, sea-blue eyes and a quirked brow.

There’s less agitation to her voice than the first adult to scold him out here, short of what one expects of a tired adult wishing she weren’t sidetracked into rounding up unruly tykes. Moreover, she hasn’t moved to rip him off his pega-pedestal like what’s-his-face, comfortable enough waiting there with a dry wisp of a smile and folded arms.

It takes a moment to click, with most of her armor obscured by the cloak of warm, winter furs, but the boots and gauntlets still bear the bright silver-white and golden accents of a soldier from Fhirdiad. One of the King’s own pegasus knights!

Y’uh-oh.

She waits. Sylvain waits. It’s an unexpected amount of waiting, come to think of it, just starin’ at each other. The pegasus under his thighs has to urge things along by stomping in place and bending to preen a wing.

“Er. Kinda?” escapes Sylvain’s mouth before his filter is even out of bed. It’s the truth, after all, and grown-ups say honesty’s the best policy, or whatever. “My dad’s horses are way ruder. And the saddles are harder, and they smell way worse for sure. Do pegasi always smell better than horses? I hear their poop’s magic, or something.”

The knight snorts – Yes! Disarming naivete saves his butt again! – and shoves off the wall to wander close at a leisurely pace. Unlike the impotent back-and-forth charges of the scandalized man from before, the assembled steeds hardly remark her presence, save for the one Sylvain’s squatting on. It clops to the edge of the stall, poking its head over the wooden fencing and nuzzling the knight’s waiting palm.

“Farming folk can call ‘em ‘pegasus blessings’ all they like, but it’s all horseshit at the end of the day. Fact is, though, this here’s my mount – her name’s Erianna, if you’d care to know – and I’m afraid I’ll be needing her tonight. His Majesty needs a missive relayed back to the capital as soon as possible, which means I’ve got a pretty big trip ahead of me.”

“Whoa, flying all night long? The whole way to Fhirdiad!?” Sylvain balks. “How do you keep from falling asleep in the sky?”

Erianna tires of mere brushings of her mane and rears her head away only to softly butt her muzzle into the knight’s shoulder, over and over, until the woman chuffs and reaches into a pouch under her furs. This must be an old routine. A carrot mollifies the needy beast for the moment.

“Most nights – y’ever heard of ‘coffee?’ It’s this Goddess-forsaken liquid tar from overseas, gives you jitters in your bones.” She snickers under her breath, like she’s teasing one of her comrades who isn’t around to take offense. “But no, I won’t be making the capital by sunrise, not with the weather movin’ in. I’m set to curve around through Galatea, first, then take a straight shot from there.”

Sylvain’s head shoots up. “Oh! One of my friends lives in Galatea! Her name’s Ingrid! Hey, if you see her, can you tell her I said hi? And, uh, and that I’m pretty awesome, ‘cuz I rode a pegasus even though everybody was all, ‘hey, Sylvain, you’re too little to do that!’ But I did, and I didn’t even get kicked!”

The knight rolls her eyes, which settle on Sylvain’s feet still failing to reach the stirrups. He tries to correct his posture to how the grown-ups ride, but alas.

“Not sure I’d count it as ‘ridden’ when you’ve yet to touch the reins. Sat on, perhaps?” Erianna presses up against the stall door for the necessary angle to nose at her rider’s bags for more carrots, to no avail. Said rider’s too busy scrutinizing Sylvain in a way that might normally tick him off, instead kicking off this contradictory mish-mash of vulnerability and safety.

“I won't say I’m not surprised you’ve taken to it so easily,” she settles on saying. “Didn’t they ever tell you it’s dangerous for boys to go near pegasi?”

Something in her intonation hints at hidden contexts Sylvain can’t parse at this point in his youth, like that fancy Fhirdiad double-speak his tutors warn him he’ll need to be fluent in, someday.

Whatever. “Uh. Maybe, but I’m ten. I mean, come on, ten? That’s double digits! I’m basically… Okay, maybe I’m not a man yet, but I’m not just a boy, either!”

That might not’ve been the right thing to say, or it might’ve been more perfect-er than he knows, because the knight looks torn right down the middle between a grin and a wince. Not a grimace, that’s too dour. A grince? Yeah.

There’s a distant wooden rap from a closing door, and the chatter of guardsmen meandering across the grounds. Contemplative, the knight leans in on the door and lowers her voice for effect. “I’ll tell you what. You were bending the rules out here, but you weren’t doing harm to anyone. So! In exchange for hoppin’ off Eri without a fuss, how about I bend a rule, and tell you a secret before I go?”

Oh, Flames. Kids love secrets, and Sylvain, despite his proud proclamations of double-digitude, is still a kid. He nods so fast a muscle in his neck pinches, and swiftly dismounts – to wit: falls off with grace – Erianna to land in the scattered hay. One short scramble later, he’s flipped over the stable door and… realizing how small he feels, compared to this armed and armored warrior.

If he weren’t Crested nobility, a knight like her could’ve skewered him through with one of any number of sharp, death-dealing metal objects, and the world would say she had the right of it for killing a horse-thief. Er. Flying horse thief. Thief of flying horses.

“S-so, what’s the secret?!” Crud. He wasn’t trying to sound so immature.

The knight pops open the stall door and walks right in – Sylvain feels dumb for climbing; the thing wasn’t even locked – and throws him the occasional glance as she gets to work shoring up her mount for a long journey.

“Folk’ll often say there’s something of a ‘sorority’ among those who work with pegasi, but things are rarely so clear-cut. This little secret, you won’t be hearing it from many pegasus knights this far north, nor from the Knights of Seiros for that matter. But I was born down in Gaspard, out near the Empire, and Lonato’s stables welcomed all kinds. Even met a Dagdan there, and a fair few Leicester folk after Lord Lonato fronted my tuition to Garreg Mach. All this to say… I’ve met more than a few fliers from all ‘cross Fódlan to whom this certain secret applies, in my time.”

All this build-up! If Sylvain weren’t standing up, he’d be on the edge of his seat. It’s a little embarrassing knowing how rapt he must look, like Ingrid nerding out over one of her chivalry tales. But this isn’t a tale of knighthood, this is… sisterhood? Or something? Whatever.

He balls up the mounting suspense in his tiny fists, and tamps down the urge to excitedly hop in place. “Okay, okay, big pega-secret, gotcha, but what iiiiis iiiiit?!”

Moving around Erianna to fit the bridle, the knight reaches over and ruffles Sylvain’s hair, freezing him in place, a phantom chill raising goosebumps even as something long-dead pulses in his chest. Mom used to do that. Is that what this weird comfort he’s feeling has been? Something maternal about this stranger? Uh oh.

Oblivious to Sylvain’s foggy flashback, the knight has kept rambling on, and he shakes the clouds from his head to latch back onto her story.

“...that it’s a rather privileged secret known only to the most veteran pegasus knights – those who truly understand the meaning of sisterhood. The secret is this: no matter what the masses claim, there are only two fundamental truths to becoming a rider. The first truth? No pegasus will ever accept a man at the reins. It’s naught to do with their scent, nor size and weight, voice, attitude, not a bit of it – No man can ride, simple as that. The second truth: anyone can ride a pegasus if they want to.”

That’s… But… But if men can’t– And anyone is anyone, but if only… what?

She’s gotta be lying, right? Sylvain’s brain hurts. “Huh? But…  but you just said… A-and if boys can’t ride pegasi, then they’re not anyone! And Erianna already let me on; you saw! So how could they both be true, if...” Sylvain screws his face up, wrinkling his little nose. “You’re a weird lady.”

“Heh. So’re you, little lordling. So’re you.”

Chewing on all these puzzling thoughts like a thick piece of pine nut toffee, Sylvain says little and less as the knight readies to depart. He steps aside and watches with creeping fingers of jealousy tickling the insides of his ribs, coveting the freedom to fly far away from here, the sense of purpose in life he’s too youthful to have found, the… beauty, of the figure they cut together, knight and steed?

No, that can’t be right. Boys aren’t supposed to want to be beautiful, just to have beautiful girls on their arm. It must be something else he’s feeling, this tiny flicker of intrigue and want in light of a young life spent acting on impulse, with few deep desires at all.

The knight doesn’t say goodbye, but she does let Sylvain pet Erianna’s muzzle one last time, and reaches down to muss up his hair even more clumsily than the first time. With a flick of the fingers in salute, she trots her pegasus out of the stables and into a gallop across the first flat stretch of dead grass she finds. Wings unfurl, armored high at the joint but spilling sleek feathers to catch the open air below.

As the grey-blue blur takes to the sky, threading through a narrow rift ‘twixt the heavy clouds smothering Gautier lands, bound for the distant horizon, Sylvain wonders to himself if he should have tried hopping on at the last second. Let her carry him far away from here. Like how some disgraced children scamper off to join disreputable, touring theater troupes, except… like, with pegasi, and cool armor, and heroism ‘n stuff.

He daydreams – is it still daydreaming if the sun set hours ago? – there for a while, staring at that thin break in the clouds, and the winking stars beyond it, until a guardsman spots him and gathers him up at last.

The scuttlebutt across the keep that evening is hardly prime gossip; the servants will have something fresher to fuss over come sunrise. But tonight, the story circulates: The Margrave’s younger son aimlessly wandered into the stables and bothered a pegasus – does the boy have a deathwish? Thank the Goddess he wasn’t hurt!

Perhaps the beast was too tired to attack, some offered, or because he’s not yet a man grown. What a reckless child, ignoring the warnings of his elders… but, oh, these things really can’t be helped, can they?

Boys will be boys, after all.

It only occurs to Sylvain as he curls up in his bed, an hour and one lukewarm scolding later. As he’s watching the smoldering logs in the hearth and turning the knight’s paradox over in his head, eyelids growing heavy, he realizes that he never asked her name.

The mild embarrassment of one random night in the stables is swept away with the passing of years, the unsolved mystery of that enigmatic knight and her teasing gone dormant in lieu of more pressing issues, like starting his first lancework lessons atop a ground-bound steed of his own. A cavalier in the making.

The absence of powerful wings on either side leaves Sylvain feeling off-balance every time he spurs the thing along, but it’s not like he can complain! His trustiest tactic, a toothy, self-degrading smirk, is plastered over the tender spot like an ill-fitting bandage, and soon, he’s worn it long enough that even he himself forgets why it’s there at all.

It’s sore, but a dulled ache numbed by time and willful ignorance – when the grown-ups of the Gautier estate try to sneak a jab in, tease him about ‘that time with the pegasus,’ the incident haunts him like the ghost of some long-dead relative denied their due, what better way to stave off terror than with mockery? Join in on the joke, nod and smile like an affable hellion, claim to have learned better, because wow, wasn’t he such a dumb little kid back then? Not anymore! He knows better!

Because Sylvain is twelve years old.

Sylvain is twelve, and bored, and none of his friends are around, same as usual. Dimitri’s absent more and more, cleaved to his father’s side in Fhirdiad as the King wards off whispers of dissent among the landed gentry fearing last year’s Insurrection of the Seven down in the Empire could see a Faerghan encore. Neither Felix nor Ingrid are as interested in Sylvain’s hijinks of late, both commisserating over Glenn’s absence in his new duties to the crown.

He’s not sure if Miklan’s absence is due to another fight with Father or a genuine call to business, but Sylvain’ll take what he can get. Especially because he’d never live it down if Miklan caught him like this.

Stopped dead in his tracks, his trek through the woods behind the Gautier estate for good play-fighting sticks interrupted at the sight of… a dress, of all things.

One of the subtler servants’ entrances through the outer walls opens straight into a small clearing in the woodlands tickling against the edges of the keep. The trees’ve long since been thinned save a few reduced to nice, even stumps for seats near the new well, perfect for doing the washing. Strung on high ropes between the branches – or, ropes that look high to a tween – the latest round of laundry sways languidly in the breeze.

This shouldn’t interest Sylvain. Shouldn’t interest anyone, really! It’s the mundane byproduct of household chores! It’s wet clothes getting… less-wet! And like, clearly a woman’s business, which double-clearly doesn’t concern him; he learned his lesson from that debacle with the pegasus, already!

(Did he? Or does he regurgitate it so often to others that he’s begun to believe it himself?)

But the thing is, no matter how uninteresting or not-his-business it may be, as he’s walking through with his wobbly stick-sword, his eye catches on that stupid slip of fabric flagging his way.

There are no more fine ladies in residence at the Gautier Estate; with the death of the Lady Gautier and few visitors who fit the bill, there’d be no cause for any fancy-schmancy gowns to be hanging around, nope. Which makes Sylvain feel all the stupider for this implacable curiosity over a plain, woolen serving-girl’s dress.

It’s not finery, but that doesn’t seem to matter, nor that it’s from coarser cloth than silk. Maybe he just likes the color? Long in the sleeve and hem, but not as heavy as winter fare, the body of the dress is an understated plum shade that catches Sylvain’s eye, with cool teal accents. Nothing too loud, just enough to make his hair really pop. Someone’s hair! Is. What he meant. Just, red hair, of a particular–

H-his mother! That’s it, he wasn’t imagining his own, that’d be… No, yeah, Sylvain’s pretty sure he’s seen his mom in that sort of color combination, in one of those old portraits Father ordered the staff to pull down and bury in the cellar, somewhere. And he’s fond of his mom, so it makes sense that such a thing might distract him if he’s feeling lonely, yeah?

Rationalizing fierce and fast enough to feel like someone’s squeezing on his temples, shutting all the mental doors behind him, there’s little brainpower left to stop Sylvain from indulging in a thoughtless impulse. He drops the bristly twig and reaches for the dress on the line, grazing his fingers down the soft, inviting skirts–

Fwump.

Well, shit. (That’s one of the cool new swears Sylvain’s learned in the last few years, and this definitely feels like an apt occasion.)

He didn’t mean to pull it off the line – honest! – but one moment he’s running his fingers down the patterned bodice, and the next, the thing’s slipped from its support and flopped right atop his face. Smothered with the scent of soap and thyme, Sylvain falls flat on his bony arse, where the damp grass leaves a splotch on the back of his pants.

Smooth. At least there aren’t any bystanders to chuckle about his clumsiness, Sylvain reminds himself, and he stands, draping the dress over his forearm. The vacancy on the laundry line taunts him like the specter of a scolding yet to come, but a-ha, Sylvain is not so naive as once he was!

He knows he’ll be in for it if he chucks the thing back over all lopsided, and a single glance would betray it’s been tampered with. Twelve-year-olds understand nuanced concepts like covering one’s tracks! Too bad he’s still too damned short to arrange it nice and neat.

Maybe if he borrows a horse from the stables for two, three minutes, tops, to get a bit of extra verticality? Hm. Nope, staff’ll be swarming the place at this time of day, and like hell is he gonna trot up there with a soft, pretty boring old dress in tow. Could always try rooting around for a spare mop bucket behind the–

When Sylvain hears the door to the servants’ chambers give a warning creak, he does as all frightened children do, confronted with the potential for unforeseen consequences beyond their expectations.

He bolts, with little thought for direction, in the hopes of hurriedly hiding the evidence – no logic, no foresight. After all, what answer could he give that they’d actually believe? His mischief is presupposed! So, no, it’s not the thought of getting caught that drives his feet, he’s been there, done that; it’s having to explain.

“Huh,” observes one voice, once he’s ducked past a thicket of trees. “Could’ve sworn I hung it up with these; has anyone seen my...“

“Did the wind catch it?” asks another.

Oh, come on. Sylvain skitters to a halt atop some overgrown tiles and smothers his dismayed groan in the clean-smelling fabric. Of course it evades him ‘til he’s already fled the scene of the crime that leaving the stupid thing right where it’d jumped him could’ve passed as a fluke, an act of the Goddess.

But there’s no worldly way a dress would’ve fled its kin and rounded the Gautier estate counter to the lazy breeze to end up here, on a disused patch of cobblestone in a lesser-used stretch of the property. There are a few stagnant puddles dotting the area like tarnished mirrors, but something tells Sylvain the old, abandoned well at the center is still just as dry and useless as the day it was ditched in favor of its younger brother by the house.

Sylvain gets a whole three seconds into piecing together an allusion to his relationship with Miklan before the mental voice of his brother threatens to strangle him, so he nixes that.

Instead, feeling extraordinarily foolish about this whole cascade of embarrassments, he plods to the edge of the busted old well, pausing at one of those milky-beige puddles, which tempts him like no Goddess-fearing boy should ever be tempted.

So, it’s at this point that Sylvain does something stupid, because of course he does.

He leans over the puddle, and with one sleeve left dangling loose, holds the dress up to his own frame. In the foggy, wriggling reflection, a gangly, short-haired, redheaded girl looks back at him. She looks kinda stupid with her arm out like that, and her face is entirely indistinct, and the belted waist doesn’t quite sit on his hips where it would for a real–

And that’s enough of that.

Ha. Stupid, he’s being stupid. Boys shouldn’t even entertain the faintest wisp of a thought about wearing anything unmanly, especially not at his age – he’s not a child with ‘confusion of the sex,’ or whatever Dad says! It’s just another silly fluke. Like the adults that do embarrassing stuff when they’re too deep in their cups; the unforgivable becomes a cheeky anecdote, and nothing more!

Plus, rumor says that down south in Adrestia, pervert boys dress up like girls to trick other boys into kissing them. Sylvain is pretty sure kissing boys would suck – an assumption which could, admittedly, be a problem of low sample size in his social life; he can’t see Felix kissing someone without drawing blood, yeowch – but otherwise, it clearly means he’s not some pervert boy-kisser wannabe.

And not that he’s, y’know, prime altar boy material, but the Book of Seiros says some junk about thou-shalt-not be-weareth a garment of the not-right-sex, lest ye be chucked into Ailell and burned for a bajillion years or something to that tune. Even if he’s not a huge believer, it’s not a pleasant vibe.

So, he should stop.

He should stop thinking about it. He should stop looking.

Any. Moment now.

But Sylvain doesn’t stop looking. Even as he bides his time, staring into that foggy blob-shaped not-boy in the puddle, waiting for confirmation through that prickle of disgust. Counting on it, even, to arrive at any moment.

A half-minute ticks by, and he’s not stricken by a thoron-bolt of guilt or heavenly inspiration or anything so extravagant. The problem isn’t what he feels.

The problem is that he doesn’t feel anything at all. No revulsion. No wrongness. It’s just pretty fabric, and kinda soft, and it smells nice, and what’s really so wrong about girls that somebody shouldn’t wanna be one, anyway? Sylvain hasn’t believed in cooties since he was eight, and even then, he was only playing it up for an excuse to mess with Ingrid.

The Goddess must’ve just awakened from her nap and realized there was a sinner to karmically spite, though, for at the precise instant Sylvain’s mind turns a knob and makes to open a door into a terrible thought, a terrible thought like, ‘what if I wore this?’ A voice reaches out from the treeline to take a blind swipe at him.

“Wait. Was that the little lord down there? ...Sylvain?”

And this is when we run!

There’s no stuffing the thing under his shirt with his pursuers closing in, the various puddles too shallow – with reflexive fear banishing his reason, Sylvain discards the incriminating item the first place at hand.

He tosses the bundle into the dark of the dilapidated well, launches into a sprint, and never looks back.

As he weaves through trees and loops back through the front of the estate, Sylvain whips up an internal promise to rub like salve on his aching guilt; that he’ll take some of the parchment he’d been given for lessons on formal letter-writing and begin to compose an apology, too terrified of those unanswerable questions to do so face-to-face.

(Because they’ll puzzle out Sylvain’s involvement soon enough. But they’ll ascribe nonsensical reasons to his actions, whip up a childish crush on some older girl on the serving staff to whom he’s never spoken more than three words at a time. “He’s just a little rascal, a flirt the same as his father was in those days!” they’ll say, in the days to come. “It just means he likes you,” and "boys will be boys!")

But it was never about flirting, or liking. He wouldn’t even know the face of the girl it belonged to if she looked him in the eye. It was something else he felt, something invisible and nameless, as his fingers let go of the thing. A different, deeper kind of discomfort, as that oddly comforting slip of fabric vanishes into the dark at the bottom of the well.

He won’t rejoin it for some years yet.

“You just had to ruin everything!” Miklan roars, looming twenty-odd-feet above. He smashes a fist into the circle of crumbling stone that frames his face, his shape turned silhouette by a cold gravel sky.

“What kind of sick fucking joke is this, huh!? How am I supposed to lose my claim – much less to you? How’re they putting Gautier on a silver platter for a brat who still cries like a little girl?! They need a man to keep those Srengese savages in line, not some– Ggh! Fuck it all!”

How is Sylvain supposed to stop crying? He’s just a kid, but he’s pretty sure crying is a reasonable reaction to several broken bones and being hurled down an abandoned well in an attempted fratricide cautiously tipping towards completed fratricide.

He really has no idea what Miklan’s talking about, either. Isn’t he always gonna be Sylvain’s big brother? That’s kinda how time works, as far as he knows. And big brothers get the birthright… right?

“All because of a fucking Crest…!”

Oh, yeah. Crests. That glowy thing slithering around in his blood his tutors taught him to conjure a few years back. It’s never made Sylvain feel any more Goddess-blessed, personally, but the adults in his life, his Father and his retinue especially, seem convinced it’s ‘divine providence’ or some junk like that. That it’s proof of good breeding, and will net him a good, worthy wife, the works.

There’s a raspy, hocking noise, and something wet hits Sylvain in the face, too sticky to be rainwater, too brackish to be his own tears, and tainted with the reek of ale. Eh. Well, that’s nothing new.

Some divine providence. Pretty sure none of the heroes in the Book of Seiros died abandoned in the bottom of a grimy old well, shivering incessantly and spat upon. Except maybe one of those martyr types, and Sylvain’s pretty sure those guys had to have a cause, or something. Sylvain’s cause this morning was to run some practice lance drills and come in for lunch.

What a riveting chapter that’ll be for the history books. Here died Sylvain Gautier, a sniveling brat covered in cold mud, blood, a hocked loogie, and… Whatever slick thing keeps brushing his elbow every time he convulses. It’s too dark to see much, so it’s the work of a few minutes to cautiously squirm his compacted form the right way to get the thing out from under his ass, and once he does...

He almost laughs, in spite of it all. Of course. Of course this thing comes back to mock him in his last moments alive. Maybe it really was where he went wrong. Where he doomed his chances at becoming a man Miklan could tolerate for a brother.

That old servant girl’s dress, gnawed and threadbare in patches, its plum coloring paled anywhere the water hasn’t darkened, is nominally intact even after its long abandonment. Maybe the fact it’s been constantly frozen off-and-on in the same dank puddle has helped ward off the worst of the vermin.

His head still hurts from the knock it took in the fall, so his thoughts are a bit unfocused, and it’s a slow, winding river of sentiments before the embarrassment of the day he stumbled across the dress turns into something like bitter medicine that might’ve come too late, and he’s just as liable to cough back up.

The thought that a girl wouldn’t be in this situation, not if that girl was him. If he was inevitably doomed to be born into noble squabbles, if he was doomed to be born with a stupid Crest… then at the very least, had he been born a girl, the mantle would’ve remained with Miklan – or, at the very least, become the burden of her prospective husband, like the shit Ingrid’s going through, which is its own brand of misery, but…

But they could be sisters in misery. Two miserable noblewomen of Faerghus, afforded all manner of luxuries save that of having dreams. At least their suffering wouldn’t be their own fault, right? It’s just the nature of their birth, and birthplace, and nothing could be done about it.

Because boys will be boys.

And Faerghus will be Faerghus.

That’s just the way it is.

Another shivering convulsion rattles Sylvain’s aching frame, stirring up the myriad aches across his body. With a tattered old dress clung to his chest by his good arm, throat hoarse from cries for help, and dark thoughts growing mire-thick by the minute even without the aid of his concussion, Sylvain Gautier shuts his eyes, and succumbs to restless, sobbing sleep.

He dreams of the sky, and soaring to freedom on an eagle’s wings.

Chapter Text

It’s a different creature that comes out of the well, that much is apparent over the years to come.

Packed with potential and the capacity to dream, wracked with traitorous feminine thoughts, the child is left to molder down in the dark, while the servants of House Gautier fish up something eldritch from the depths in its place.

It’s a faceless thing, a creature of masks which imitates its oppressors for safety. Who feigns pride in seizing Miklan’s birthright, and flaunts his Minor Crest of Gautier like a peacock’s tail, turning the unappealing future as Margrave, which hung heavier than a millstone about his neck, into a pick-up line. Who reframes his inexplicable past interests in feminine affairs and aesthetics as the product of lust, beginning a years-long crusade of self-destructive skirt-chasing.

Because that’s the only reasonable explanation. Boys already shouldn’t foster such unbecoming pangs of longing, so men? Not a chance in hell– and Sylvain Gautier’s a proud young man, now, or at least the kind of monster that can uphold the masquerade. A sucking wound further stretched around an unfitting frame with each passing year.

He takes to the bottle and gags the first time, and the second. But men of the north have to hold their liquor, and so he learns how to freeze his features and hide the distaste.

He beds girls, the gullible and greedy alike, and hates it – not that they’re women, with the silent envy they evoke, but the artifice of it all – and what the task would demand of his body to do it ‘right.’ 

Sylvain’s burgeoning reputation as a ‘gentleman’ for tending to their satisfaction over his own, his silver tongue renowned for its other uses, is the sort of thing that happens when the thought of shedding his own smallclothes makes him patently nauseous. Goddess forbid someone coerce him into it one day, through temptation or by force, and he can’t pull away in time. If they start to get pushy, start to ask questions too pointed, it’s time to discard them and move on to the next.

He tells himself it’s because he doesn’t want to be a father, having such a shoddy role model. It tracks.

He tells himself it’s because he resents those girls trying to jump his bones and lock him down for a shot at a baby with a Crest of Gautier in its blood. It’s not a lie, not at all. He knows he’s little more than a vector for the spread of a plague some loons want to catch on purpose.

It’s also not the full story, but it’s the point where Sylvain slams the book shut every time.

Life becomes a cavalcade of assorted miseries. King Lambert bites the dust, Dimitri the last survivor of his family, his youth gone up in flames. Duscur is put to the torch in response, and one of its survivors chained to the crown prince’s side by social obligation. After following the prince to quell a local peasant uprising, Felix relays a dark tale of a bloodlusting boar with eyes full of ghosts, and Sylvain is saddened how easy it is to believe him.

Felix is cold now, too. Glenn is dead, leaving Ingrid a widow before cinching a wedding she’d never even asked for. Her father scarce gives her a few weeks to mourn before he drags her to the proverbial auction house, a glorified broodmare back on the market, a sacrifice at the altar for Galatea County.

Sylvain finds the nostalgic memories grow foggier by the month, recollections of the times the four would play together, carefree with futures unblemished. Grief and undeserved obligation keep them separate for years, birthdays missed, streams of letters dried up.

In the year I.Y. 1180, Sylvain José Gautier sets out for Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy with a face twisted into a dull, incessant smirk, like the world is just one big joke, and Sylvain is both punchline and the unfunny sod trying to deliver it.

Once upon a time, filed among those memories buried by his mental censor, a nameless pegasus knight from Fhirdiad told Sylvain that Garreg Mach was a great place to meet new people, get new perspectives on life…

That knight’d probably be ashamed of him, now.

She wasn’t wrong, though.

Garreg Mach isn’t as much a glorified prison as Sylvain might’ve feared. For every stern, overbearing instructor (lookin’ at you, Seteth!) dead-set on keeping him in line, there’s another of his old friends hanging around to commiserate.

Sylvain’s posse of childhood pals and Dimitri’s retainer comprise the most familiar faces among the Blue Lions, with the rest of the Faerghan house filled out by lesser nobles, commoners, and in one case, commoners who used to be nobles, albeit on the south side of the border.

They’re an okay lot, for what it’s worth, but something is quick to feel off about their chemistry compared to the other houses.

Like the eclectic gaggle of clashing personalities in bizarre harmony from the Golden Deer, difficult to sort into cleanly-cut categories, the unusual, unhereditary structore of the Leicester Alliance writ small. Marianne’s sweet – Sylvain would chat her up more often when they meet in the stables, if that Hilda chick weren’t hovering two feet away with a hefty axe – and Claude’s smile, never quite reaching his eyes, speaks to secrets buried in his past Sylvain can tragically relate to.

The Ashen Wolves, who aren’t exactly a real house, per se, are just as mercurial, and only half the size. Sylvain plays wingman, sneaks down to Abyss and grabs drinks with Balthus at one point, purely to leech off the raw manliness he projects – a cunning plan which seems to backfire, making his own rote imitations of a real honest-to-Goddess philandering lout look wooden and forced by comparison. That, and Yuri sauntered through and dubbed him ‘interesting’ in the sort of tone that keeps a guy up at night, picking over his every last action to find the crack in the dam.

And when it comes to the Black Eagles– Honestly, what is it with every house leader but Dimitri seeming to see straight through him? Where his own Prince, the boy who will be King, his friend since before they could walk, can’t figure him out, but even the Adrestian crown princess can tell he’s a mess?

Because Edelgard von Goddess-damned Hresvelg is as eagle-eyed as her house’s twin-headed namesake, and don’t even get Sylvain started on Professor Eisner. He feels naked every time he catches their eye, and not in the ‘haha, hello there, ladies, you’ve caught me indisposed, wink-wink-flex-the-pecs’ kind of way. It’s sorta-kinda-absolutely terrifying, actually!

As for the former case, he has few and fewer successes in finding chances to chat up the Princess, no doubt courtesy of his self-sabotaged reputation and her menacing retainer, but Sylvain’s pretty confident in his ability to judge character...

The shame Sylvain is hiding away is cold and caustic, a slow burning sort of rot on the verges of his heart, but whatever Edelgard has buried deep is big. Something sulfurous and explosive, grander than petty personal identity crises or marriage woes, sure to make all sorts of waves the moment it’s dragged into the light.

It could be his latent craving for any excitement at all that could jostle him from the well-worn track of his life and its inexorable bend back towards the Margravate, but some part of him wants to be there when that powder keg goes off. It might even give him an excuse not to go home.

And hey, he did try. Back near the start of term, Sylvain put on the old, suffocating Gautier charisma and sidled up to the enigmatic Professor Eisner, coyly hinting at how stifling his old house has grown – not to slight his friends, but it has – and how he’d love to see what all the fuss was about.

(“You could grow quite a bit with the Eagles, I think,” Byleth had said, “but no.” And before Sylvain could recover from the whiplash of denial, “Why exactly do you want to be in my class?”

“Because… er, because what guy wouldn’t, what with all the cute, kickass ladies you’re hoarding in there, right?”

“Hm. There are a lot of good girls in my class,” mused the Professor, and Sylvain expected Her Highness might’ve fainted on the spot had she overheard, “but if you want to join them, I’d first need you to be honest with me.” She paused. “And with yourself.” )

Cryptic as ever, thanks!

Fine. If Sylvain can’t convince the Professor straight-out, he’ll just have to start by befriending the students themselves! Then they’ll have to let him in!

Too bad he’s doing such a poor job of it.

The library is one of the last places the Blue Lions would begin a search for Sylvain, and that is precisely why it’s become his hangout of choice when he lacks the energy to prop up his overwrought gigolo persona.

That, and – who’d have guessed it – there’re occasionally some pretty cool books layin’ around in here, hidden between mind-numbing agricultural histories or sermon transcripts; nuggets of intrigue that’ve escaped the censor’s happy little book-burnings!

Alas, sometimes that quality literature is, in truth, the unpublished passion project of an extremely anxious classmate who looks ready to combust at the prospect he’s read a single word of her private story: an engaging romantic epic about knights and heiresses and defying the world’s cruelties in the name of love... And oh, was that love steamy.

He, uh. He might’ve burned through the tale in a single go. And again, for good measure, which is what he’s trying to apologize for, at the moment!

“…trying to tell you that I liked it, I swear!”

“D-don’t lie to me!” squeaks Bernadetta, the Black Eagles’ own mousy sniper-savant. She wrings her arms around herself, the volume of her protest steady despite her clear desire to shrink and hide. “You hated it, didn’t you? I’ve heard what they say about you, y’know, you like to play with girls’ hearts – you’re just gonna make fun of dumb ol’ Bernie…!”

As if. Bernadetta makes him laugh, sure, but in a way he hasn’t in years. Every sensible chuckle at her escapades feels real, a warm updraft ballooning inside his ribs until it can’t be contained.

And she’s cute! Deadly, too. Sylvain once saw her drop Felix on his ass in two seconds flat during a panicked escape, and Felix is no slouch! She gets anxious during cross-class melee drills more often than not, but if someone told Sylvain she could pin a mosquito to a tree from fifty paces with her bow, hey, he’d believe ‘em.

“Okay, how about this?” Sylvain goes to set his hands on her shoulders for reassurance, but second guesses for his own safety after another twitch on her part, merely waving them out in front. “You’re a little embarrassed about your perfectly good manuscript – for reasons I can’t possibly guess – so what if, uh… What if I told you an embarrassing story about me, so we break even? Tit for tat!”

A head of purple hair pops up out of the anxiety stormcloud. Bernadetta’s eyes rapidly flit between fear, scrutiny, the detached homicidality of a woman planning how to dispose of his body, and back to uneasiness again. Still, she doesn’t run, and Goddess knows she can take off like one of her own arrows if she wishes.

Sylvain waits patiently, struggling to piece together a backup plan to keep from blowing his shot at making things up to her; his proverbial quiver is empty, refusing the temptation to fall back on old flirtation. Bern’s not like that! She… she deserves better from him, honestly. Oof.

Thankfully, before Sylvain can suffer the gruesome consequence of looking into what he’s become at length, his introspection’s jostled by a meek, even tentatively interested voice.

“Um. That might be okay,” offers Bernadetta, and– Oh, hell, she’s even smiling a little, and who cares if it’s hesitant – how can Sylvain not smile back!? That’d have to be a crime.

He bends to grab the chair he’d sent toppling to the floor in shock when Bernadetta rushed him before, setting it upright and dropping down with his elbows on the table. He tilts his head towards another on the opposite side of the library table, and with only her usual level of antsiness, Bernadetta slides in to mirror him.

Sylvain clears his throat, and launches into that self-effacing anecdote he always, always seems to find himself returning to, for whatever reason.

“So once upon a time, when I was little, Dimitri’s dad – er, the late king, I mean – he came up to visit Gautier, right? And I was totally dying of boredom that night, ‘til I drifted by the stables and saw this pegasus…”

Bernie’s fear is subsumed by a little sparkle in her eye, and even – hey, even a twitch of a full-on smile, not just a worrisome quirk of a lip! And hey, if there’s anything Sylvain Gautier’s good at, it’s demeaning himself to charm a lady.

Yet, those encounters were empty, dull reminders to himself like pressing a knuckle into a bruise. Bernadetta’s engaged with his silly little story of childish naivete, she prods with questions, she gasps at the sudden surprises he hams up for effect, she giggles at the antics of his past self.

How long has it’s been since he’s hung out with someone like this? Like, not for some end goal or anything, just… spontaneous, honest, vulnerable, nobody angling to get in anybody’s pants for a Crest or anything. The tensions and collective grief that consume Sylvain’s childhood friend group aren’t so heavy here, and for all the guilt that squeezes at his lungs over the thought of such ‘betrayal,’ he can’t help but wonder if he couldn’t do this more often.

If Bernadetta might want to… just, like, hang out, sometimes. Talk literature, and knights, and shitty dads.

Maybe she could even be his first non-Faerghan friend.

That’d be pretty cool.

It’s a miserable day at Magdred Way.

The better part of the entire month’s been miserable, truth be told, since Archbishop Rhea first announced the blasphemous plots of the Western Church, and the involvement of one Lord Lonato of Gaspard in this rebellion.

Ashe’s dad. Adopted or not, it doesn’t matter. Goddess, the way you could see his heart break in that moment, played out right there on his face. Sylvain can’t blame him. If he’d actually had a father who wasn’t an asshole growing up, hearing that the most powerful religious body in the land wanted his head for some nebulous disloyalty would probably be a gut-punch, too.

While the student body of the Officer’s Academy were delivered orders to support the Knights of Seiros as the rearguard to their offensive, Ashe begged off claiming a sudden sickness, and nobody had the heartlessness to dig any deeper than that. He’s probably curled up in bed with heartache back at the monastery, while the Blue Lions are stuck out here following Professor Hanneman through the absolute worst terrain for a march, distantly flanked by the other houses.

The forests of Magdred Way are dense, and the fog is denser, clouds intermittently spitting just enough rain to reduce the dirt below into a constant quagmire. Sylvain’s pretty sure his boots’ve got more mud in them than foot at this point, and he’s riding a horse. That, and it’s cold – most Faerghans wouldn’t blink at the temperature, of course, but Kingdom cold is a dry cold! This is… this is wet, and cloying, and its only benefit is as an excuse for catching shivers on the battlefield, rather than fear.

The Knights of Seiros’ vanguard disappeared into the mists some ten minutes ago, by Sylvain’s reckoning, chasing the glowing beacon of Thunderbrand in the knight-captain Catherine’s grip. It became, in all respects, an immediate shitshow.

Maybe ground troops and mages have an easier time of it, but as a cavalier, Sylvain needs space and momentum to work his own lance-ey magic, and despite Hanneman’s efforts to keep track of their troops in this blinding, sopping, deadly grayness they’re chugging through, Sylvain’s up and lost track of the other Blue Lions within minutes.

Their line is mostly broken by overextension, once a proudly bellowing Dimitri charges straight into a freshly discovered enemy line without much heed for the rest of his pack. Couple that with the pea-soup fog, and you’ve got a recipe for tangled formations, no matter which class one rode here with.

Sylvain knows he’s taken his horse around a wrong turn when he spies movement behind a smoldering black tree-trunk, recently felled by loose magic. His arm’s halfway to drawing a javelin by the time he parses the sneaky, purplish shape sniping from behind the waist-high cover as his new favorite author.

“Ack! G-go away! Nothing to see, here!”

“Bern, it’s me– Sylvain! Maybe don’t turn me into a pincushion just yet?”

“Eeeh…?! What’re you doing over here? Wait! D-did I run the wrong way? The Professor’s gonna be so mad, stupid Ber– oh, no, you don’t!”

Snapping into near-perfect form in a flash, Bernadetta nocks another arrow and looses it before Sylvain can even follow her eyes to the target – one of the blurry, blue-white-gray shapes skating their way through the churning clouds overhead throws its head back, yowls, and plummets into the oblivion of the thicker, ground-level fog.

Then, as though he could possibly un-sear that display of raw sharpshooting aptitude from his eyeballs, the good Lady Varley returns to her anxious wiggling. “This is hopeless! I should’ve stayed back at school; fat lot of good Bernie can do about fliers at a time like this! ...Especially that one!”

While Bernadetta’s prior kill had been combing over the terrain at a modest height and cautious speed, the one that’s got her flummoxed is either too daring or too blind to keep to sensible altitudes, with breakneck speed to boot.

The enemy air-captain is a piece of work, untouchable atop her steed. Together they ride the wind beautiful and deadly, making sharp, unpredictable dives to spike Knights of Seiros from their saddles like a regal kingfisher spearing into a lake to snap up its prey. Upside down, barrel rolls – gravity’s merely a polite suggestion they’re opting to ignore.

Yeah, this could be a problem, especially if someone were to agitate ‘em, and Sylvain didn’t notice that someone setting up to do just that in time to stop her.

Squinting and squirming, with her tongue peeking through her teeth, Bernadetta lines up a shot along the invisible path stretching ahead of the pegasus in question, and sends her shot.

There have to be preternatural reflexes at work, here, because Sylvain’d swear that the rider seems to know the arrow’s coming from how sharply they swerve. She stops short and pivots her mount so cleanly it’s as though it had been standing still. How the whiplash doesn’t bend them in half, Sylvain’s got no clue. All that matters is that they’ve got her attention.

Understandably pissed about someone trying to add a few pointy-tipped feathers to her steed, the pegasus knight spurs the thing into a great, telegraphed corkscrew towards their position, one Sylvain’s gut screams is a fatal feint.

Bern’s little dugout was a safe enough spot for taking potshots at targets of opportunity who wouldn’t spot her in quick sweep of their surroundings, but for someone who’s got her cornered, who’s been spotted spearing prey at right-fucking-angles? Zero cover.

Sylvain kicks his own mount into motion just as the realization hits, the enemy above reaching the apex of another loop. At some unseen signal, the rider tucks tight against her pegasus’ neck, the beast’s legs curled up towards its body, narrowing their silhouette for speed and evasion and the mental image of Bernadetta taking a spear to the chest smacks a scream out of Sylvain.

He spurs his horse harder than absolutely necessary, leaping right as the rider above bends into their dive. His angle’s not perfect, not even good, but his spear connects with the rebel’s in midair above a fear-frozen Bernadetta, bathing her in a spittle of sparks.

But it’s enough – just in time to parry the thrust away, scraping the tip of the enemy spear through the mud, rather than Bern’s chest, thank the fucking Goddess. That the sheer force of it rips Sylvain from his saddle and he plants half of himself in that selfsame mud puddle is a sacrifice he’s willing to suck up.

The enemy recovers with an unfair amount of grace, slipping off Sylvain’s guard like water and looping around for a touchdown a short distance away. He calls his horse to form a barrier between the rebel knight and his friend, while he climbs back aboard, lance readied should their foe try a desperate charge.

Turns out, she can rock Sylvain’s world from all the way over there, without lifting a finger.

“I’ll be damned,” shouts the knight, her tone bafflingly casual over the primal roar of combat from the surrounding mists. “Heard she was sending children out to die for her, but I’d not figured I’d be seeing your mug again, Gautier.”

Sylvain hopes his laugh sounds more cocky than the panic response it is, and those hopes are in vain.  “I see my contentious reputation precedes me, ma’am, but I’m afraid you have me at a disadvant…” Wait.

“Do I?” asks the knight.

Does she? Sylvain rubs his eyes, which honestly worsens his vision with the specks of wet dirt he’s got to blink out of them now. Once he’s got the chance, he squints, trying to break the habit of intentionally forgetting the names and faces of fleeting female encounters.

The sweeping shape of her helm masks the upper half of her face, but it fails to hide an old scar positioned just so around her chin, nor the amber braid struggling to maintain structural integrity after such high-speed flight. Not least of all, her voice, something about it so familiar, tasting exactly like childhood nostalgia.

No fucking way.

“It’s you…!” Sylvain’s used to having his past come back to haunt him, albeit less in the ‘living, breathing soldier with a spear that could redecorate his ribcage’ way. But he remembers. Even the parts of the conversation he discarded in favor of a focus on those puzzling words near the very end come floating back.

The once-royal lady-knight from Lonato.

“I’ve had worse reunions, believe it or not,” she says, poking a pair of fingers at his horse. “Can’t help but notice you’re looking a little ground-bound, there.”

“Well, yeah, I mean – pff, c’mon, could you picture me on the back of some nasty wyvern?”

“No, I can’t say I could…” She sighs, and not for the first time, her sync with her pegasus is impeccable, since the creature follows suit in slumping her head. “Have you truly not figured it out, yet?”

“Figured what out?”

“Ech. Of course not. That’s the Kingdom for you.”

Recovered at last from her freezing episode, Bernadetta cups a hand around her mouth and whisper shouts loudly enough that the secrecy’s moot. “What is she talking about? Do you two know each other? Are you in cahoots?!”

Ignoring her squeaking for the time being – Sorry! – Sylvain presses on, shouldering his spear for a nonconfrontational stance that could still look lively at any moment. “W-why are you flying with the Western Church? Why are you doing this – you were a royal knight, don’t you have, like, oaths and shit?”

“I swore an oath to King Lambert, not that rat-dastard regent who helped get him killed, and certainly not Rhea.” The Archbishop’s name drips like hot bile off her lips. “The Central Church isn’t exactly fond of folks like me, who aren’t keen to bend over ‘n lick boots before they've earned my respect, much less put Duscur to the sword at their say-so. And make no mistake… they’re certainly not fond of folk like yourself.”

For a split-second, the chaos of battle goes quiet around Sylvain, only a hastened pulse thumping in his ears. “What, an entitled, Crest-bearing nobleman? I’m all of their favorite things!” He waggles a hand behind him, fingers outstretched, to stop Bernadetta from groping for another arrow, and sadly, they’ve yet to achieve a ‘perfect conversation through eyebrow movement’ level of friendship, so her bafflement is plain.

“Three of the four, maybe,” the knight drawls, which makes no sense because Sylvain only listed three in total, but whatever. She clears her throat, only for a call from the northern treeline to heave a bucket of cold water on her thought.

“...think I saw him bungling over this way. Sylvain! You’d better not have gotten your dumb ass killed!”

Felix. Ever the charmer.

The knight reels her pegasus around, a battle-hardened tension settling back into her shoulders. “Sounds like we’ve not got the time. A shame. Do yourself a favor, Gautier, and think real hard about where you’re headed.”

The pega– Erianna! Ugh, of course, he remembers the pegasus’ name, but never knew the knight’s in the first place. Whatever. Erianna hurls her wings wide to take off, and from behind Sylvain’s shoulder, Bernadetta hisses. “D-do I shoot her now?”

“No! I mean–“ He raises his voice. “Hold it, I can’t just let you leave!” Oh, wow, he sounds pathetic. Like a child demanding his playmate not to go home for the evening. Who’d listen to him? Not the knight, who doesn’t even look back, simply takes to the air in one majestic bound, vanishing into the cold, gray southwestern sky.

Sylvain stares, not for the first time, as she goes, and it’s the least he can do not to shout after her, begging her to at least leave a clue to all these stupid riddles she’s dumped on his doorstep both times they’ve met. His eyes only break from the clouds at a tug to his pant leg; Bernadetta, reaching up on tip-toe to get his attention.

“O-okay, so, that was really weird of you, and Bernie’s no snitch, but – but you’ve totally gotta tell me what that was about!” Her mouth screws up into a squiggly frown, fingers wringing tight on her bow. “Not, um, necessarily at this very moment! Because this place is getting really scary and I could maybe-sorta use a ride?”

“I’ll let you know just as soon as I do,” Sylvain promises, and offers his hand with an easy gallantry that surprises even him. “Hop on.”

Sylvain still can’t work up the courage to up and ask Professor Eisner about that transfer again, always flinching from that imaginary rejection and the vague implications that pack her words like a rock hidden in a snowball, but that doesn’t mean the woman in question is shy at all about requesting his presence on Black Eagle missions as the hapless tagalong.

And sure, it’s a nice bit of extra credit, but he has really gotta stop nodding and smiling when Professor Eisner comes a-knockin’ if it puts him in situations like this.

“So, this is how it is?” grits Miklan.

This is how it is: Conand Tower, a dilapidated heap of stone in the southern Kingdom. A seedy hive teeming with murderous bandit scum, who – despite the Church often covering their eyes and pretending they’ve forgotten how to read when pleas for aid from poorer, less reverent territories come in the mail – have earned the Archbishop’s ire for stealing the Heroes’ Relic of House Gautier.

And who should Sylvain find holding the damned thing but his dastard of a big brother, gesticulating wildly with the Lance of Ruin he so dearly coveted that he once tried to kill his own kin. And look at that, he’s back at it again!

It’s weird, Sylvain feeling this sore clench of guilt in his chest when, deep down, he doesn’t feel that bad about drawing steel on blood relations at all. Where others might grapple with second thoughts and pre-emptive remorse, Sylvain reaches deep, fingers the empty crevasse where familial love might’ve fit once upon a time, and comes up with fingers cold and bare.

Miklan cocks his chin high as Sylvain silently shoulders past Bernadetta, who briefly touches his arm in passing, past Edelgard and her tight-mouthed nod. As he arrives at the front of the pack, the older Gautier flexes, slamming the Relic’s shaft into the gritty stone tile of the tower’s upraised central stage.

For a moment, his body is rocked with an unnatural convulsion. His hand twitches, less readying to chuck the thing and more as if he were in pain – that’d track, given how he’s spitting through grit teeth at this point, his words slurred around the edges. Even his bandit goons eye him with concern.

“If that Arch-bitch thinks she can cow me by sending my feckless brother after me, she’s got another thing coming! Maybe a dead princess on her conscience’ll teach her a lesson!”

Sylvain brings up his own silver lance, a polished and clean mirror of his brother’s gnarled, bone-hewn weapon.

“I’m no brother of yours,” he says, and Goddess, he wasn’t expecting that feeling – each word is a breath of precious air in a moment where the rest feels sucked out of the room. A confession without shame attached, one he’s yearned to voice since the day Miklan first learned about his Crest.

His brother had become a monster, then.

His brother becomes a monster, now.

The Lance of Ruin, crying out for Sylvain’s Crest-cursed blood, revolts at whatever it finds in Miklan, and the man is soon engulfed in darkness, a howling, wretched beast. The assembled Black Eagles – minus Edelgard, Hubert, and Byleth, all flinch back into ready positions, while the remaining bandits turn tail and flee for the hills. Sylvain doesn’t move a muscle until the beast locks its baleful eyes upon him and lunges.

Somehow, none of this surprises him. After all, he’s had this nightmare before.

Sylvain’s mind shuts off, after that, entrusting his body to his training, pure survival instinct allowed to run wild until this monster from his past is put out of Fódlan’s collective misery. All he really remembers after the fact, once he’s safely holed up in his dorm at the Monastery, is that the Professor let him have the final blow – a leaping spear through the skull, and the burbling of a melting monster, the tarnished holy item left in its wake.

Guess he’s the owner of a legendary Heroes’ Relic, now. The fame-chasing, falsely-flirty girlfolk of Garreg Mach’ll sure get a kick out of that, huh?

Whoopee.

Chapter Text

Moons pass in a blur, tensions mount, and the hits keep coming, ‘til Sylvain’s so punch-drunk a trip to the tavern sounds like a waste of gold.

Cute little Flayn, snatched by a comically cliché kidnapper with a skull on his head. A devastating loss at the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, crushed by Eisner’s class and their uncanny tactical acumen. Remire, a maddening bloodbath straight out of Mercedes’ ghost stories, without the satisfaction of a giggly ‘the end!’ to separate fact from fiction, and all of it wrought by the doddering old librarian who’d lurked the fringes of Sylvain ‘n Bernie’s unofficial book club get-togethers.

And c’mon, ‘The Flame Emperor?’ That’s just overkill.

By the time the White Heron Ball comes ‘round – ostensibly to drag the students’ morale up from the depths of trauma – Sylvain can’t even muster the wherewithal to publicly debase himself for kicks. He lurks the fringes of the gathering hall in his plain ol’ uniform, nothing fancy, nothing like the social butterfly he’s portrayed thus far; a shocking contrast which renders him all-but-invisible to the public.

The ‘real’ Sylvain would’ve been out there flaunting his moves, twirling from girl to girl fast enough he can’t remember their faces five minutes after the fact, nor think too hard about their soft, lithe bodies compared to his meaty bulk, the implicit understanding he’s to ‘lead’ each waltz without question.

He sticks long enough to chuckle at his friends. Like Felix, internally screaming whilst Claude of all people – do they even know each other? Maybe Sylvain’s missed something, not keeping up with his fellow Lions as well as he should – dedicates a solid twenty minutes to gleefully pestering the swordsman off the wall and onto the dance floor, likely for the personal satisfaction of achieving the impossible.

Ingrid, on the other hand? Her father’d mailed her a dress for the ball, in the blind hope he could, what, trick his tomboy daughter into appealing to the typical male gaze? Shit, Sylvain had seen prostitutes flashing less cleavage than that thing promised to cover; Count Galatea was off his rocker if he thought that would fly. There was no way Ingrid was attending, not a snowman’s chance in Ailell, until–

(“It’s been many a year since I’ve danced in the Faerghan style,” Edelgard had pondered aloud, casual-as-you-please, at the far end of the dining hall table. “I’ve likely grown shamefully rusty. Might you be planning to attend, Ingrid? If so, I would appreciate the advice of one unlikely to gossip about the foreign princess’ abysmal footwork…”)

Ingrid, in all her aspiring, knightly chivalry, caved on the spot. Didn’t solve her dress woes, though, so Sylvain – knowing a wellspring of friend-teasing material when he sees one – might’ve pulled a few strings, getting his seamstress bestie Bernie to pull a few threads, dissect the dress, chop up Sylvain’s own unwanted formalwear for spare parts, and… voilà!

A downright dashing compromise in fashion, taking cues from ruffle-obsessed Adrestian haute couture and a bit of Almyran mens’ formal garb – a shar… sherwani, is what she said? – to produce a cinched, knee-length silken tunic in rich blues and gold trim, neatly buttoned down the middle, dress sword at her hip, with a crimson sash draped over one pauldron and belted across her chest.

The cravat’s a bit silly, but she makes it work, the whole ensemble flowy enough in its silhouette to feel feminine, without compromising on Ingrid’s dealbreakers like… you know, trousers, and not having her tits out. Bern even did little feather-embroidery on the cuffs, too, because, y’know, pegasus wings!

And hey, between Eisner and Ingrid, let the record show: even mighty, unflappable Hresvelg is not immune to weird girls with muscle tone and an air of gallantry.

Speaking of Bern, though – she’s Sylvain’s escape from the whole ordeal. On her birthday a few weeks back, he’d promised that instead of hassling her into putting on her own dancing shoes for funsies, he’d steal a couple plates’ worth of cake from the dining hall and smuggle ‘em to her dorm room for a lower-key kind of party. Just the two of ‘em – and her adorable legion of stuffies – without any pressure of parading themselves around the perfumed meat market across the monastery.

It’s… nice, actually. Moons ago he’d worried his bad reputation would always be a wedge between them, and now, here he is, learning the names of her personal plush battalion and the rich intricacies of their imaginary social lives from the girl who rarely lets anyone into her bubble!

Goddess forbid, Sylvain might actually feel proud of himself for once – the real kind, not cut with artifice and unwarranted self-importance! – and for one fleeting evening, he can honestly say things are almost looking up. Almost!

...And then, Monica happens.

Which, in hindsight, isn’t a very generous assessment; it wasn’t really Monica. Edelgard’s creepy friend, with whom she'd never actually acted very friendly, had been raising eyebrows and hackles both with her behavior since her rescue from the Death Knight – Something about folks who knew the girl before her abduction feeling she hasn’t been meshing with her reputation as a childhood crush of the princess, as an obedient sweetheart transformed into a complete and total bitch-and-a-half.

So, maybe people shouldn’t be so surprised she’s a face-stealer. She murders Byleth’s dad and bails, which sucks for every living soul in the Monastery, clouded by a collective gray haze of mourning. Hurts a little extra for Sylvain; the guy’d felt like some fairly-decent dad material, judging by his own broken metric.

He’s long since drawn up a proper transfer application, filled it out in full, and entombed it at the bottom of his desk drawer beneath a stack of unread letters from home. At the time, he’d hoped that if he was lucky one night, he’ll get drunk enough to submit it one evening, and pin the blame on the alcohol.

But, with such a tragedy dampening the already-veiled emotions of the oddball professor, Sylvain second-guesses pestering her. Professor Byleth looks like a zombie for weeks, after losing Jeralt. Not like, her normal, simultaneously-airheaded-and-omniscient affect that charms half the people she meets, but…

What she looks like is Sylvain, after the well. A body drifting through the motions, but no fire burning at the hearth indoors. He doesn’t have the heart to harass her about accepting his transfer for a good while after that… and he isn’t keen to disappoint her with his lack of an answer to her cryptic question.

At least some others manage to escape the morass of the Faerghan house. It shocks Sylvain infinitely less than the rest when Ingrid quietly ducks out of the Blue Lions, and takes up among the ranks of the Black Eagles – not after her asshole dad tried to sell her Goddess-damned uterus to some sleazy merchant, who then tried to murder her in the fiery cauldron of Ailell once the Black Eagles (and Sylvain, yet again!) went on a little field trip to pry into his history. Ingrid’s eyes rarely left Edelgard for a moment after that. Girl’s down bad.

Dimitri’s quiet boil of anger at her betrayal was too hot for Sylvain to ever believe him any time he slammed on a lid of ‘it’s fine, she’s only showing gratitude for their help, she’s still with us in spirit.’

What spirit? Nobody’s had spirit for months! All the conspiracies and assassination threats and… Honestly, Sylvain’s starting to have difficulty remembering the exact order of tragedies that’ve befallen the Academy. It’s all mushing together into one moldering heap of horrors.

Ch’yeah, in hindsight, aside from a faint speckling of tender moments, this entire year’s been a shitshow writ large… So, what happens the day of the Black Eagles’ trip into the Holy Tomb is pretty much Sylvain’s own fault for not predicting.

The Lance of Ruin slips Sylvain’s grip midthrust and impales itself in a wooden dummy behind the one he’d been aiming for, knocked off his footing, face-first into the gritty dirt floor of the training hall by a minor earthquake.

This trembling lessens, ceases, then spikes once again with a mighty, bestial roar and an explosion of ancient stone foundations – Sylvain’s barely scrabbled to his feet and grabbed his weapon by the time a second-long shadow darkens the open-air practice field. He looks up only in time to catch the side profile of what he can only describe as one big fucking wyvern wing, a pure pale white unlike any breed of wyvern he’s ever seen.

People without a deathwish run away from flying monsters, or at the very least, take shelter in place. Sylvain grabs his rucksack.

Throwing the door open and rushing back towards the courtyards, Sylvain soon finds himself caught up in a chaotic stream of traffic: half panicked students seeking safety from loosed stones falling from the sky – are those chunks of the cathedral?! – and the rest, knights and gawkers alike, rushing across the bridge to the historied building, now sporting a gargantuan gash in its side. This is gonna be one of those days, isn’t it?

Okay. Okay. Demonic beast attack this close to home? Terrifying, but he can cope!

Pfft. On second thought, no. Sylvain Gautier, coping? No way in hell, because that’s not a demonic beast. That’d be simple, that’d be a Sunday afternoon training exercise with a firm pat on the back and a frosty mug of something foul and numbingly alcoholic at the tavern after-the-fact.

Nope. That white devil soaring around the monastery is a fuck-mothering Goddess-be-damned dragon.

“The Immaculate One…!” breathes a nearby knight-chaplain with tremulous awe; he drops hard to his knees in a flutter of embroidered robes and hidden chainmail, and begins belting some droning prayer, much like a few other prostrate figures Sylvain can spot through gaps in the fearful crowds.

And that does confuse Sylvain a teensy bit because, like, in those snippets of sermonizing he does actually recall not sleeping through, he seems to remember ‘The Immaculate One’ as Sothis’ own lizardy attack dog or something, so smashing through the walls of her mommy’s favoritest cathedral seems a touch out-of-character!

Minding his sharp elbows to the best of his ability, Sylvain at last makes it out of the gatehouse to the left of the cathedral itself, and dotting the gentle hill curving down this side of the mountain plateau, he can piece together the reason for the ruckus.

Given that those right there’re bright red Imperial troops dancing deadly with the Knights of Seiros, and they are not here for an educational skirmish. There’s blood on the grass, random patches alight from the magic flares of mages dark-clad and holy alike.

Hey, Edelgard, quick question: what the fuck? Sylvain starts to think, before a muscled mass barrels into him and clamps a hand on his shoulder. He’s startled into an unbecoming shout, but Dimitri shouts louder.

“Sylvain! The Knights say Hresvelg is the Flame Emperor, and Eisner’s betrayed the Church – she was another assassin, working for Edelgard to kill the Archbishop; Adrestia’s stabbed us all in the back!” This info-dump spills from his dear old friend’s lips with a trophy-hunter’s fervor, the gentle, baby-blue eyes he’d once known gone a little too hungry for Sylvain’s liking.

“What? No, that’s insane! There’s got to be more t– Hold up, where’re you going?”

Dimitri’s already dashed back towards the open gate, waving down… is that Dedue, in the distance? It’s Dedue or someone tall, Dedue-esque, and ready for war. “Vestra’s stolen away with Hresvelg and the False Vessel using that damned warp magic, but we can still hunt down the stragglers! Search for the other Lions, Sylvain; we’ll gather everyone together and cull these traitors!”

Which, uh, Sylvain was already keeping an eye out for any familiar faces, but even as he tentatively steps out onto the edge of the impromptu battlefield, most everyone is armored in their standard colors, only a few headed down the mountain pass who break that mold and might be Black Eagle stragglers.

Hopefully, that shrimpier purple-haired passenger he spies on Petra’s wyvern is proof someone’s getting Bernie to safety, and… And down below, galloping towards the woodlands, is that Mercedes riding sidesaddle behind the actual Death Knight?!

Saints, this is bad. If the Eagles are – whether they’re guilty of something or not, if some of them are still here, there’s a chance that Ingrid might’ve gotten caught up in the...

A sick, sick sense of humor, the Goddess has. Because when Sylvain thinks to scan the sky for any sign of his friend, he’s treated to a fiery phantom spike to the chest so visceral he glances down to double-check it wasn’t a real wound from magic crossfire – he finds her the split-second before a tiny, fletched line appears in Ingrid’s flank, and without her guidance on the reins, her panicked pegasus wavers towards the ground in three slow, spiraling slumps.

Uh. Okay, so… Dimitri, technically Sylvain’s crown prince – a few months from being his king – did technically order him to search out the other Blue Lions. ‘Lions’ was the operative word, and Ingrid is, pointedly so, no longer a Blue Lion, even if she started that way, even if she and His Highness were on civil terms!

The Black Eagles, on the other hand, are a facet of Adrestia at large, who seem to have started a fucking war a handful of days before graduation. That’s not usually a good look. It’s actually, come to think of it, a ‘all sympathizers will join them on the pyre, thus is the will of Sothis, amen’ kind of look. Sylvain’s not all that attached to his mortality, but Rhea’s idea of a send-off party isn’t one he’s keen to entertain.

But.

But it’s Ingrid, damn it! And Ingrid’s hurt, and she would absolutely stick her neck out for him, no matter how much he screamed at her to save her own skin, and... to hell with it!

He might be betraying more than the Church here, giving into this rush of adrenaline, might be betraying Dimitri, betraying Felix, the rest of his house, even his country, but Sylvain’s already running a frantic serpentine through the pockets of clashing infantry before he’s given his legs the order.

He’s hounded by a few affronted shouts of “Hey, you!” along the way, but luckily enough, Sylvain’s subconscious already has a highly-trained response to a shouted ‘hey, you,’ and that is to get the hell out of there.

“Please be breathing, please still be breathing, you know my Faith magic’s dogshit, c’mon…”

Sylvain stows his spear and skids into a crouch as soon as he reaches the fallen flier. Artemis, Ingrid’s pegasus, looks none the worse for wear, save some mild scorching from magic that failed to pierce her hide. The mount has curled a wing nigh-protectively around Ingrid, but thinks nothing of lifting it to shield Sylvain as well.

Careful re-education, some self-inflicted, is setting off alarm bells and lighting warning beacons in his brain, insisting that he shouldn’t linger so close to a pegasus even in a time of crisis. That the time he sat atop one was a poorly-remembered fluke. Despite it all, Artemis’ uneasy stamping never rises past what one expects on a live battlefield.

Ingrid herself is groaning, and while it doesn’t thrill Sylvain to hear her vocalizing her pain, at least it means she’s alive. He turns her over as gently as he can, a hiss escaping the both of them as Sylvain gets a look at the arrow in her side.

His B- in field medicine from Professor Manuela is good enough to do a quick diagnostic – lung’s not pierced, thank the Goddess, but she hadn’t been wearing her full armor; the Academy uniform doesn’t lend itself to blocking projectiles, and it’s… oof. It’s in there pretty deep. From the daze she’s in, he’d guess her head took a bump in the fall, too.

“Syl…?” Ingrid burbles.

“Yeesh, you guys really went and kicked the holy hornet’s nest, didn’t you?” Sylvain squeezes out one of his fakest laughs, too hurriedly to pass muster.

He carefully snaps half the protruding arrow-shaft to keep it from jostling any worse during their escape – right, escape. Should’ve planned for that – and makes the appropriate, sympathetic noises to match Ingrid’s groaning. Stupid black fabric, He can’t tell how bad the bleeding is with how it’s soaked in, and like hell is he stripping his friend mid-combat.

Options are looking slim. If he carries her back to the Monastery, there’s a chance she’ll end up like any of those other ‘heretic’ heads rolling off the executioner’s block at the Archbishop’s order, whether or not she did anything at all.

“Hey, stay with me. Where were you guys going?” he asks her, afraid she might not stay lucid much longer. “The, uh, the Eagles, I mean; I saw some of ‘em all high-tailing it the same direction, where are we headed?”

“Y’don’t… have to–“

Sylvain squeezes Ingrid’s shoulders a little harder than he means to.

“Nuh-uh, outta the question – I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I know I’m not leaving you.”

Ingrid lets out an angry mutter that reluctantly dovetails into a sigh. It’s a very ‘I appreciate you, but I’m also going to slug you, later’ kind of deal. “Heard ‘em say... ‘perial camp at– Khgh! C-Conand… Tower.”

Conand. Well, of course! Why the fuck not!

Does Sylvain want to return to the site of Miklan’s final stand, his brother’s final moments wrought at his own hands? Not on your life! Is he gonna just ditch one of his oldest friends to get horrifically Church’d to death just because she picked up a knightly crush on a foreign firebrand princess and chased her to another class? Maybe don’t ask such stupid questions.

Sylvain tries to heft Ingrid up with an arm behind her shoulders, another below her knees. Internally, he promises this isn’t a ‘princess carry,’ lest he steal her chivalrous thunder. Okay. Now what?

He’s not gonna get far on foot, plus there’s no clear route to the stables from here that won’t be guarded, and people are beginning to notice him, and… And there’s really no way out for them, is there? Not unless…

Sylvain tilts his head just in time to have a pegasus nose butted into his face, and a snort of warm air to follow. Artemis shakes her back vigorously and gives her wings a stretch, before thumping the grass flat with a stern forehoof.

“You can’t be serious,” he blurts on instinct. Come on. This is such a bad plan.

Artemis glares – or, well, her brow kind of scrunches in that glare-like way, and y’know, Sylvain’s getting the idea that he can ditch what the grown-ups taught him way back when, because right now, he’s about to get trampled if he doesn’t climb on the damned sky-horse.

“Okay! Message received! Not a great situation for the both of us, but sure – do me a solid here so your rider doesn’t die, and I’ll try not to get too much… man-funk all over you. Deal?”

Ingrid, only loosely conscious, is the first up. Sylvain helps her onto the front of the saddle, where she distractedly strokes at her mount’s mane, and he follows her up, feet kicking their way into the stirrups.

So far, so good, no bucking. He lashes the reins around one hand, halfway wrapped around Ingrid’s midsection at an angle to avoid the arrow, with the Lance of Ruin at the ready in the other, rippling with that eerie bond it’s struck with his Crest.

Not that it’s likely to see much use, because it only dawns on Sylvain in this most crucial moment: he has never actually flown a pegasus. He can do horses just swell, horses go flat-directions! This horse needs to go up-directions. Like, right now, immediately.

Either Artemis senses his trepidation, or simply doesn’t want to stick around after the Immaculate One scythes down from the sky to breathe a trail of two-story flames that bisects the route back to the monastery gatehouse. A gentle kick is all it takes for the beast to break out into a gallop, and Sylvain sheepishly lends a tug or two to angle her towards a straight shot of land, perfect for–

White wings are hurled wide, and Sylvain’s gut drops so sharply it nestles down in one of his feet. Feathers catch the air, and by whatever magic rests within, gravity loses its grip on the three of them. They leap towards the clouds, and the ugly world beneath gets smaller, and smaller...

(If Sylvain wasn’t wrestling with fear for the life of his friend and, to a much lesser extent, his own, this might qualify as a sort of religious experience. If he didn’t know the view behind is a holy slaughterhouse, he might savor the wide, forested horizon as the most awe-inducingly beautiful sight he’s ever seen.)

Sadly, he is, and does, and after immediately regretting the single look back he spares himself, Sylvain shuts it all away, shoves it aside, one of his greatest talents. He can unpack it all when they land somewhere without people killing each other. When Ingrid’s safe. When he’s actually succeeded at doing something that mattered, for once.

Just need to survive that long. Sylvain roots around in Artemis’ saddlebags – the one that wasn’t torn off in the tumble, apparently – and finds a single, half-empty bottle of vulnerary to slow Ingrid’s blood loss. It’ll have to do.

They drift in a vague, northwest line for some ten, fifteen minutes, before Sylvain realizes the mount he’s riding might actually expect him to steer. Once he’s righted himself by landmarks, Sylvain puts his brain to sleep for the remainder of the flight, not yet ready to contend with the questions that’ll come when he lets it wake.

Questions like, ‘what the hell are you doing here,’ and ‘aren’t you with the Kingdom,’ and ‘drop the weapon and dismount immediately,’ which isn’t really a question, but Sylvain’s fraught nerves are feeling the answer’s ‘not quite yet, thanks!’

The stony ruin of Conand Tower, last Sylvain had seen it, only had a small team of bandits picking around its carcass. Now, a modest encampment of tents, a few white and burlap amid bold Imperial red, span out along the fields to the southwest, patrols on the ground and in the crumbling parapets.

If it were up to him, Sylvain might’ve made sure to land about a half-mile out in the nearby forests and approached at a nonthreatening lope, but, as has already been established, Sylvain does not know how to fly a pegasus, which also encompasses the discipline of ‘how to make the fussy thing not-be-airborne-anymore.’

Artemis, making up her own damned mind with some implicit worry over her (real, female) rider and not this (useless, male) lunk seated just behind, sees fit to land inside the rings of patrols and trot right up to the guarded front gates, heedless of Sylvain’s hissed pleas to stop.

He really didn’t need the attention.

“What in the void is the meaning of this? Why have patrols stalled at such a crucial time as... Gautier!?”

Carving a dark swath through the mingling soldiers like an ink-black shark fin rising from the crowds, Hubert the Living Scowl grumbles his way to the fore, followed in short order by Her Highn– Er. Her Majesty? Yeah, guess she’s Emperor, now, from the sound of things.

Said newly-minted head of state affords Sylvain little regard at first, examining Ingrid with a naked concern that breaks right through her imperious mask. Edelgard un-bristles by half once Ingrid takes a shuddering breath, then spins her axe off her shoulder, its heavy head planted into the dirt. A hand comes to rest atop the upturned bottom of the shaft like a deadly cane.

“Explain,” orders Her-recently-Majesty, and so, Sylvain does, with minimal embellishment to his recollection. Not lookin’ to catch a blade to the throat.

Sylvain’s not so oblivious he’d miss the looks he’s catching for riding in on a decidedly unmanly mount, so there’s no chance he’d miss how Hubert is practically blasting him with heightened scrutiny, eyes repeatedly flicking down to Artemis for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. As the story stumbles to an end, Vestra clears his throat and bows in at the Emperor’s side, pulling her into a conspiratorial conversation of whispers, mouthed syllables, subtle tilts of the head.

It goes on for much longer than it should reasonably take to determine whether or not to stab him or not, in Sylvain’s humble opinion.

"–which you believe… same as your…" Edelgard falls silent and turns a painfully curious look upon Sylvain, sizing up his disheveled self like there’s far more to him than meets the eye. "Oh."

Wait, what’s got her all flustered? It's beyond rare to see Edelgard on the back foot like this.

"Very well, then. You'd best get inside.” She flicks her fingers, and the simple motion parts the teeming courtyard to clear a pega-sized path. “Arrange quarters for them alongside my strike force," she orders of a nearby officer, and adds, with a sweep of her cape, “For now… ensure this side of the battlefield is where you truly wish to stand. Tarry too long, and there may be no turning back. The Archbishop is not a creature known to forgiveness, and I fear your liege is keen to follow her example.”

Sylvain’s stomach tightens. Isn’t that the damned truth… Dima, what happened to us all?

As Edelgard shoulders her creepy, knock-off relic axe – damned thing looks like an evil crab-claw, if you ask Sylvain – she passes close enough for Artemis to stretch her head out, silently soliciting a pat on the head that Her Majesty provides without a second thought… and Sylvain is just smart enough not to comment when that raised hand passes over to rest, thumb brushing back and forth, on Ingrid’s knee.

“Wherever you feel your allegiances lie, you have my gratitude for delivering Ingrid from a fate in Rhea’s hands; she has fast grown… important, to m– to the makeup of the Black Eagle Strike Force.” Edelgard forces a cough, and wow, for a chick who somehow hid a crazy revolution plot from everybody, she’s worse at straight-faced lying than sweet little Annette. And she’s Annette!

Ingrid gives some kind of whispery, mush-mouthed input that doesn’t quite make it clear whether she’s truly conscious or not. Edelgard takes it as a sign of urgency nonetheless, and resumes her authoritative ‘Emperor’ stride back towards the repurposed ruin.

“Go. We will speak later, when the Professor has returned from her rounds. In the meantime…” Edelgard lets the dauntless mask dip in favor of a wan smile. “I believe I have good news to deliver to one Lady Varley, wouldn’t you say?”

Bern’s alive! Thank the G– Thank… whatever up there’s listening and isn’t pissed at everyone in this camp right now. Yeah.

Edelgard struts off, shoulders level and unburdened by the weight of her axe. The reddish-black surf of bodies develops a trail behind their departing leader, and Sylvain is about to gently nudge his borrowed steed along when it strikes him that Hubert hasn’t budged an inch.

The dark mage continues to gawp at him in a decidedly un-Hubertish manner, and hey, if this was in the wake of Sylvain doing something badass to show up a few stodgy Imperial nobles, maybe he’d revel in it. This isn’t that.

"Um. So, hey,” Sylvain tips his head. “Won’t pretend I'm not still pretty confused, but... Thanks? I think?"

That does it – with a heavy flurry of blinks and tensing of shoulders, Hubert is snapped from his trance, and needs a few moments’ recovery before that threatening glint is back in his eye.

"Hmph. Do not mention it– Literally. And for your own sake, I would highly advise you adhere to terrestrial steeds for the foreseeable future."

"What? Oh." Sylvain realizes he hasn't exactly considered it much. "Yeah, for sure. Can't expect 'em all to give the ol’ life-or-death exception for their rider's best bud, huh? Was pretty great while it lasted, though."

But Hubert continues looking at him, silently. And getting ogled is nothing new for him, never has been. What's got a bee buzzing under Sylvain's thinking cap is the fact it isn't a scowl, isn't suspicion. There's something that – and yes, Sylvain hardly knew him as a classmate so this is a total ass-pull – but if it were anyone else, that stilled, stark, distant look the dark mage wears might even pass for vulnerable. Worried. As though something about Sylvain’s existence is putting Hubert on the spot.

Which is stupid and makes no sense, right?

Fine, if the guy won't talk, Sylvain'll leave it be. "Uh. Anyway, I'm gonna mosey on and find the medics. Happy revolution?” The last he sees of Hubert is a scoffing eye-roll; at least that’s a reliable constant in this topsy-turvy world dancing at the brink of war.

Now that he’s cleared the gauntlet at the gates, Sylvain trots along with impunity, giving Artemis the odd rub along her neck for reassurance in light of the crowds. If there’s anything good about the small-scale army flooding the place, it’s that all the gleaming steel and Adrestian banners help disguise the fact Sylvain’s riding through his brother’s gravesite.

He passes under a high, stone-arched intersection, spying to his side the path that once took the Eagles (and him!) to the center of the bandits’ den, now refurbished to house some big, thick-walled command tent. Here’s hoping that if Edelgard wants to talk, she’ll settle for interrogating him somewhere Miklan’s specter won’t be shouting so loudly over his shoulder.

It’s about five minutes of wandering and worrying, hugging an incoherent Ingrid muttering wordless curses at her entire situation, before Sylvain sucks up the anxiety at having to explain again and asks for directions. When he actually finds the makeshift infirmary, he’s not sure if he’s more or less thankful the person in charge, poking their head out to interrogate him, is a face he already knows.

“Now, what do we have here?”

Manuela Casagranda looks about as bushwhacked as any of the others who’ve fled from the monastery, and alarmingly sober. He’d ask why she’s here, of all places – she can’t be sticking her neck out just because the Mittelfrank’s from Enbarr, right? She has to have a personal stake. Dorothea? – but Manuela’s patience is visibly drained at this point, and Sylvain isn’t aiming to test it.

“Yeah, I get it, I’m kind of crashing the party, but–“

The ex-diva, ex-professor, current field doctor cuts him off. “No, seriously – what have we got?” She flicks that little pointer-thing she loves toting around at a few attending healers, who bustle over to take Ingrid off his hands.

“Oh! Er, archer got her on the left side, don’t think it hit anything major. Arrowhead’s still in there. Knocked her head a bit when she fell out of the saddle, but she was still ‘with it’ enough to point me here.”

Manuela gives him half her attention, nodding in the right places and giving the girl a once-over of her own before dispatching her new underlings to get her into the tent and onto a bed. “That’s a relief. Of the casualties I’ve seen come through today, none yet have been students, and Goddess willing, I hope it stays that way.”

“With what just happened, I’m not sure she’s in a great mood. Doubt any of us’ll be getting gifts for St. Cichol’s Day this year.”

“Ugh. I’d thank you not to remind me. Consolidating my personal faith with Church corruption can wait until after I’ve sewn up the next dozen soldiers and can afford five minutes to go scream at a wall.”

The conversation falls into a lull that seems to muffle the rest of the base.

“Gautier.”

“Yes’m?”

“...Are you riding a pegasus right now, or did I already fail my vow of sobriety for the day?”

Time to go! Right now! Immediately!

“Haha, right, uh. I’ll be… I’ll just–“ Sylvain gives a light flick on the reins, but Artemis doesn’t move before she’s taken the chance to pin her ears back and give a snorting whuff that has to be laughter at her interim-rider’s humiliation.

“In a hurry to be somewhere?”

Wincing, Sylvain slows their trot to look over his shoulder, where he finds Manuela giving him this weirdly soppy look in lieu of the dry disdain he’s always earned from her with his past conduct.

“Flight stables’re out that gate to the left, and another left past the armory,” she tells him. “And I’ll remind you I’m a licensed practitioner of both magical healing and medicine… Should you find yourself in need of the latter, in the days to come. Just saying!”

Saying what!? Either say more, or say less, for cryin’ out loud! Sylvain taps Artemis’ flank, and promptly flees, before he can wonder exactly what that was about. What any of this has been about.

The directions are right on the mark, and he’ll retroactively thank Manuela for that. Better to endure one jab at his dignity than keep having to ride this beast he’s been left in charge of in great, meandering circles around the keep, all the better to be seen and stared at. Just one more gauntlet to run, and he can beg for a bunk and tap the hell out.

Thinking about the sheer gravity of what he’s just done today can get in line.

That one knight from way-back-when was a big liar for one of… possibly several reasons, but that one bit, about pegasi shit smelling just as bad as normal horses’? Sylvain’s gonna go down on record as saying ‘yeah, fair.’

The stables back in Gautier were small enough to keep all equine creatures generally housed together, but between the surviving structure of Conand Tower and the Empire’s preparations, there’s room enough to keep the pegasi in their own, nice little nook, which…

Alright, the Sylvain of a year ago, running his mouth without letting his brain in on the action, would’ve shot off some line at barging into a tight-knit, nearly private training area, entirely inhabited by gorgeous, dangerous athletic women and steeds to match them in both respects.

He’d have done it with his head held high, chest puffed, grin holding an invisible rose between his teeth, all that shit. Fantasy-Sylvain’d probably expect it to smell like fresh flowers and spun sugar, and the conventionally beautiful lasses running around topless in rumpled breastbands would be a lot less bloodied or bruised. There’d be giggling, comparisons of chest size, probably even a hay-based pillow fight analogue.

Instead, Sylvain slides off Artemis’ back and brings her into the dimly-lit chamber without a peep, less leading her by the reins as sidling alongside her, hunched and practically hiding under one of the pegasus’ wings. He knows he doesn’t belong here, and it’s not helped by the curious eyes and slowing of conversation from those who actually note his presence. If he was any sort of lucky, the creatures within would’ve rioted before he even ducked inside, and – ‘Oops, guess I can’t handle it myself, you’ll get her set up, won’t you, great, toodles.’

But they don’t drive him off, because the vindictive beasts want him to suffer. Truly, this is a worse punishment than a horseshoe to the face: the mortifying ordeal of being tolerated. When he has to pull Artemis past a trio of resting riders to get to an open stall, nobody shouts or throws anything, or gets worked into any sort of tizzy. They just judge.

He keeps his head down, tries not to glance their way again.

"Got another one," mutters the first of their number as he passes, to a rustle of snickers. She’s helping a shorter, if burlier comrade shed her fliers’ plate, a heavier make than he’s ever seen Ingrid use... though she tends to prefer riding mares to stallions, a wasted double-entendre he can’t even snicker about with her health in dire straits. “Been quite a few years, I’d say we were due.”

Once the cuirass pops off, the second luxuriates in a tall stretch, and slumps against the wall. Maybe she knows her ‘whispering’ is loud enough he can hear, maybe not. “Are you sure? I mean, do you know who that is? Kingdom noble aside, they say he’s a playboy, a shameless flirt! A 'man's man!' You don’t actually think this is another case of…”

“M’not counting it out if there’s gold to be made. Hundred in the pot for starters. Whaddya say, captain? This’n remind you of… you-know-who, or too much of a stretch?”

“No, no,” chuckles the last of their number: the weathered knight in armor far too new, too clean, to fit her years of veterancy. The one with a scar on her chin, streaks of gray creeping into her auburn braid, and a knowing sharpness to those sea-blue eyes. “I’ll take that bet.”

Chapter Text

Hot take? War blows. And by the time Sylvain next has a chance to speak with Ingrid at length, Fódlan’s gone and plunged elbows-deep in it, with the Church setting up shop in Fhirdiad, and Claude pulling Leicester into a nonaggression pact as trustworthy as the man himself.

The arrow Ingrid took escaping the monastery wasn’t as life-threatening as the archer responsible must’ve hoped, but the infection that followed kept her bedbound for weeks, and that’s not accounting for the nasty concussion.  She was none too thrilled about being grounded on the Emperor’s order, forbidden from flying out for the Black Eagle Strike Force’s first deployment at the Battle of Garreg Mach.

Worse yet, they’ve lost the Professor in that selfsame scuffle. Fucking ‘Immaculate One.’ Every time that dark day’s come up in conversation, Ingrid’s sworn up and down she could’ve dove into the trench if she’d been there; caught Byleth before they vanished into the deep.

It’s an unhelpful thinking pattern, blaming herself for things outside her control, but Sylvain isn’t about to open his hypocritical mouth to knock her for it lest his best friend call him out on his own attitude, ‘til there’s nothing left but a very humbled skeleton.

No, he lets it float, just another bit of repetitive grousing that fills the air during off-duty lulls like these, helping tidy up the stables at the Monastery, be it the two of them, or with a friend tagging along like Marianne has, today. Mari’s great. Should’ve talked to her more in school.

All in all, it’s a pretty average afternoon. Fair weather for the season, warmer than Kingdom standards, nice breeze, somebody in the mess hall’s roasting something nice and smoky, a scent only mostly ruined by the whole… equine funk. It’s almost peaceful, which must be precisely why Ingrid decides to annihilate that thoughtless zen with the merciless precision of a Knightkneeler maneuver.

“You know, all this time, we’ve never really talked about it.”

That’s how she launches the attack, propping her pitchfork against a wall, ever-so-casually. Something in Ingrid’s tone makes Sylvain certain that whatever it is, he still doesn’t want to talk about it. They’re cleaning the same stall, so he can’t pretend not to have heard her, and Sylvain settles on a wordless noise of inquiry.

Ingrid pops a thumb back towards her pegasus, dozing off at the far end of the stables. “How you rode Artemis on the way out to Conand, the day this all started. Flew her, even. The whole way to the rendezvous.”

Cichol’s crusty taint, of course she’d still bring it up, weeks later! Why did he think he was in the clear!?

“She seems to like you very much,” observes Marianne – who’s gone from enjoying the privacy of the stables to all-but living in them since the war broke out, an empty silhouette in the shape of a Hilda seeming to lurk behind her every move.

Sylvain instantly regrets the snappishness that comes out in a “Yeah, so?” Marianne flinches, and he wonders if running himself through with that spare pitchfork would be sufficient penance.

“N-not that I mean to imply anything! I, er… It’s merely that… she’s told me she feels safe around you in, um. In a way pegasi simply... don’t, around men? And especially Artemis; she’s a bit…” She lowers her voice to a whisper behind her hand. “Temperamental?”

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “No use hiding it. I know her bad reputation, and so does she; men’ve always ticked her off something awful... even more than the average pegasus who, as you’ll recall, also shake you down for mane-brushings and sugar-licks on a daily basis instead of trampling you to mush. C’mon, Sylvain. We’ve known each other our whole lives – you think I don’t know what it looks like when you’re hiding something because you’re genuinely scared?”

So much for that temperate, early-Autumn breeze. Sylvain’s spine may as well have taken a dip in an icefisher’s hole, a night and day contrast to his face catching fire.

C’mon… witty quip, obnoxious flirty line, gimmie something. He gives his brain-box a few desperate shakes, and nothing’s coming out but torn cobwebs and wrinkled IOU’s.

“Um.”

Marianne pads closer, hovering just outside Ingrid’s orbit. The healer’s hands are raised, like he’s some frightened fawn she’s trying to soothe. She might even be right. “You needn’t say anything if it’s too much!”

“There’s nothing to say; you guys’re making mountains outta molehills, here! I’m not a...”

Silence. Hell, even the stable’s native inhabitants quiet down to lump on the pressure.

“No, really, I’m. It’s probably… You know, maybe it’s my cologne, or… Or my sweat, or weird Crest shit, I don’t know – there are always exceptions to the rule, right? We don’t have to make it a big deal! Because that’s all I am, nothing special, just… some guy!”

Blowing hot air for all he’s worth, Sylvain sags as his words fall flat at his feet, useless to sway his impromptu judges in this surprise inquisition. It goes without saying that this is bad, but he’ll think it again for good measure.

Behind Ingrid’s eyes, threads are knitting together, impossibilities rendered fair game by deductive process, deflections and lies turned on their heads, shards of childhood memories reassembling to a whole.

Frozen by fear, that ice wrapping his spine leeches outwards into his every vein, running colder than a Srengese winter. Sylvain sees the moment it hits her, clear as day.

“No.” Her eyes blow wide. “You’ve got to be kidding me. All that bullheaded, chauvinistic peacocking, all the flirting, playing around with women you don’t even like – I knew it was all compensating for something, and there might've been a solid chance, but...!”

“I didn’t say anything!” insists Sylvain.

“He really didn’t, Ingrid,” Marianne adds in his defense, only to be stricken with the same thoron-bolt of enlightenment, and turn a gasp of wonderment on the increasingly red-faced redhead. “Wait, you can’t mean…?”

Nothing means anything!

Ingrid’s boots rustle-clomp through the strewn hay on the stony floor. “You absolute idiot.” Sylvain grits his teeth for impact and screws his eyes shut, only to find the impact is softer, lower than anticipated, and surprisingly, not a fist.

She’s… Ingrid’s hugging him, for what feels like the first time since the Tragedy of Duscur, an innocent act so foreign now that Sylvain can’t help his spiking nerves. This… this is weird, and way too sudden!

“I– I still, uh. Haven’t said anything, you two! Let’s not rush to conclusions!” Dumbass! They’re just going to get more suspicious! Make up a proper excuse, any excuse!

“Can’t believe you’ve been hiding such a– remember where you are! You don’t have to be the man your father wanted you to be! You don’t have to be some dutiful, Crest-bearing son who dupes someone into pumping out a pile of Crested babies. Don’t you get it? Edelgard’s vision is putting an end to all of that. She’s making a future that won’t need the ‘Sylvain Gautiers’ of the world, so, if you’re in this for the long haul… you’re better off losing the dead weight from back home, like I did.”

Dead weight, huh? The cold, clinging corpse of a traditional worldview wrapped around his back, trying to drag him back across the border, back into the long winters, the empty oaths and blind obedience, drag him back down into that fucking well. Abject hopelessness.

Sylvain can only force out a whisper in his defense: “It’s… not that simple.” It’s still not an admission, either.

“I-isn’t it, though? A little bit?” Marianne’s hands join over her heart, one fingernail worrying a short pink line along the opposite palm as it fidgets up and down. “All my life, I’ve believed I was born a monster because of my Crest… B-but, Her Majesty likes to remind us we’re not defined by our birth, so neither are you, even if yours were a different ‘situation.’ I know the Church– The Archbishop was… critical, to put it politely, so I never thought I’d meet someone like yo–“

“I’m not like anything,” Sylvain interrupts with a burst of raw, self-preservation reflex, “whatever it is, I’m not that.” Ugh. He must sound pathetic. He sure feels it, verbally flailing like this without even a sliver of that sleazy charisma he could tap into at the taverns.

Sylvain’s charisma, that is.

Maybe he can’t draw upon it, anymore; maybe he can’t, because when push comes to shove, he’s not Sylvain. He’s never been who he was told he was meant to be, so why would this be any different? Maybe Sylvain is someone else, and… is there even a point to him?

Put bluntly, Sylvain’s wanted to die since he was a child old enough for his big brother to beat on, and his tutors to trap with an inescapable future as Fancy Mister Margrave. He craved that death for freedom’s sake, and passively, of course – because taking great efforts to see it through would take… effort. And Sylvain was tired, has been, still is.

Maybe Fódlan’d be better off if ‘Sylvain’ finally bit the dust. But if he did… Then what would be left in the empty space he occupied? More importantly, who?

Ingrid releases her hug, but the eye contact holds strong. “It’s okay,” she whispers, and it’s so infuriatingly tempting to believe her.

“You two can’t just say things like that, it’s… This is crazy talk,” complains ▓▓▓▓▓. The thought of their name, all of a sudden, makes their skin prickle with goosebumps, and fitfully rubbing at them doesn’t help. Something they’ve been attached to, all these years, now intolerably foreign.

It barely even feels like their own body at the moment.

No, ▓▓▓▓▓ has more in common with a loose tooth, ceaselessly jostled by the frustrated lashing of a tongue that can’t stand its presence any longer, no matter the pain of trying to push it loose, of clearing the way for new growth. A sorely outdated thing, bound down by one last strand of bloody sinew, about to snap.

“I’ve got responsibilities!” they whisper-shout, an inch short of hysteric, “I still have a life, even if it’s not a good one; I can’t just give up on everything that makes up ‘Sylvain Gautier’ to go around playing as … Oh, I don’t know – as fucking Sylvia!”

...

Welp. There it goes. The spark that lights the signal bonfire. Here comes the obligatory death by humiliation-borne heart attack in three, two…

“That’s what you’re going with – Sylvia?” Ingrid chuffs. “Very original.”

There’s a short-lived flare of indignation that dwindles into gentle embers at the sight of Ingrid’s dry smirk. Her mockery isn’t caustic and judgmental, it’s the mockery of someone who’s been a dear friend since they were knocking each other’s baby teeth out playing knightly games of pretend.

Guess that loose one got clobbered out, after all.

“W-wait, I’m not ‘going with’ anything, that was just the first thing that popped into–“ 

“I think it sounds pretty!” Marianne chimes in, her gentle affect effortlessly stomping the defensive rant into silence. “Sylvia Gautier… See?”

Oh.

Fuck. Ow. No, okay, that– That’s not fair, saying it in her pretty, breathy voice like that, all warm and dusted-sugar sweet? It shouldn’t ache so much, ‘Sylvia’ shouldn’t sound so right. She’s a man, isn’t she? Wait. No, he’s a man, not… Saints, this is bad.

“Men can’t just… not be men at the drop of a hat! They could pretend, maybe, but I’m a bit too old for that – except for the guys who do it for sex stuff, and… Hey, it might be that, for all you know! You can’t prove I’m not just a pervert!”

Yikes. That bit at the end? Solid contender for the top ten ‘Things I Never Thought I Would Say’ ranking board, right there. High score.

A year ago, even a few moons ago, Ingrid never hesitated to call out skeevy behavior, always keeping an eye out for such shallow, performative perving. She remains unfazed, even folding her arms to boost the sternness in her glare to new heights.

“All these years you’ve been playing yourself up as a man, name one time you’ve ever needed to pass yourself off as a woman in order to make an ass of yourself.”

A-ha! An out!

“There was that time at the, uh. Let’s see, think it was… Right! Year’s-End festival in Fhirdiad, the year Dimitri ditched us for that southerner girl – you beat me at fencing and I had to swap out for your dress? Guess what! I threw that fight ‘cuz I thought it would be fun. Bam. Manipulation of women for my own sick pleasure. Guess I’m just a bad guy after all.”

Marianne hums, uncertain. “Speaking as an outsider, I’m afraid that does not sound like the… ‘bam’ you believe it to be.”

With a firm nod of agreement towards the good Lady Edmund, Ingrid jabs Sylvia’s sternum with a finger. “I knew you were faking the fall, jackass. Go ahead and remind me – what ‘manipulation’ and ‘perversion’ did you get up to for the rest of the night, ‘til my father came to drag me away? Speak up.”

Damn it.

“Mrgh… Danced ‘n ate sweets.”

Seemingly emboldened by camaraderie, even Marianne musters the chutzpah to playfully click her tongue and sigh. “Goodness. What a monster. Whatever will you do, Ser Ingrid?”

It’d be more heartwarming to see her coming out of her shell if it wasn’t in the interest of bullying Sylvia out of her own. Ingrid isn’t content to let the momentum die, so she keeps on hammering.

“I’ll state for the record that was one of my last memories of seeing this stubborn oaf actually, genuinely happy. Not a care in the world. Back before we all had to give up on our dreams.”

Give up on her dreams? That sounds about right. But doing this, being this, wouldn’t that be giving up even more than she already has?

She never had dreams of being a noble leader presiding over territory, like Dimitri. Never cared as deeply about martial mastery for its own merit like Felix, never really dreamed of knighthood with as much clarity of vision as Ingrid always has.

In fact, Sylvia’s dreams were…

They, uh...

Fuck. Did she even have dreams?

Or was her future so rigid, hewn from cold northern stone and carved into the mold of yet another manly Margrave Gautier, that any aspirations beyond that scope boiled down to two words total: ‘Not This.’

Reaching into the annals of memory, it’s hard to remember if her younger self even had dreams to chase. If the innocent, bright-eyed child with little love lost for manhood or a lack thereof, who died in a cold, dark hole in the ground, face soaked in salt and rainwater alike, ever dared to think it could end any other way but going with the flow and hoping the crash at the end won’t hurt so much.

Ingrid loosens her arms to better reach up and thwick Sylvia in the nose, startling her from her fugue. “You were overthinking.”

“Ow! Hey, you’re always complainin’ how I should think before I act. Thought I’d give it a try!”

The comedic sideshow scores a gentle giggle from Marianne, who picks up on the cues that they’re slogging through deeper Faerghan drama, now, and instead excuses herself to work a few stalls further down the row, fitting a grey-coated mare with a feedbag.

Goddess, even pulling the most mundane of chores, Marianne still has the effortless grace of some fairytale princess. For void’s sake, a passing sparrow dives through the open window to perch on her shoulder, chirping nonsensical birdsong as she works. Her voice, when she murmurs back, is mercilessly feminine.

Envy wells up like a crude splash of bile Sylvia is forced to choke down.

When Sylvia pinches her mouth tight and tears her eyes back down, she finds Ingrid already watching her. Great. As if this entire experience weren’t humiliating enough.

But, Ingrid isn’t like Sylvia’s ill-fitting shell, that smirking, sneering tease who’d turn that against her so easily. Instead, Ingrid’s the one letting her gaze travel far into their frigid past, slumping backwards against the stall door.

“You remember how I’d always complain when we were kids, that I hadn’t been born a man? Back then, I was sure I wanted to be, if only to escape a future pumping out crest babies ‘til I died in childbirth. Lady Edelgard showed me there was hope for a world where I had a shot at my dreams, and goddess forbid, actually start to like being a woman, my own way, without the baggage.

“And I know that’s not exactly the same dilemma – because, sure, in the world Her Majesty’s building, someone raised a man could be free to wear dresses and makeup and everything frilly and still be a man if he wanted, but… That’s not what this is, and you know it, Syl. I still remember the grown-ups’ stories about the first time you tried to ride a pegasus, when we were little. I never forgot.”

Sylvia sighs. When she makes to rub the back of her neck, the fact the hair she brushes away only hits her shoulders brings with it an ache no longer unnamed. “Sure seemed like you did. Never brought it up, all these years of sitting on a blackmail goldmine, so why now?”

“Because you were such a little shit after Miklan got banished that I convinced myself I’d just been seeing things… and partly because I didn’t want to jinx it. I know I can be stubborn, you don’t have to remind me, and if I pushed too hard, I figured I’d lose my only shot at having–“ Ingrid verbally stumbles, only for her fair cheeks to take on a dash of pink as she groans dismay into the back of her glove.

Ooh, are the tables turning? Sylvia gives it a nudge. “At having…?”

Ingrid glares at her, but it’s more of a pout with teeth.

“My older brothers, we were too far apart in age to get along well, so I didn’t exactly have playmates in Galatea besides the horses. For a while, when you’d all come over, I could pretend you, Felix, and Dimitri were like… my real brothers. Look, it’s stupid, alright? The thing is, after a few years, I always wondered how I would’ve turned out if I’d had a sister somewhere in there, too; if that would’ve made it eas– What? What is that face for?”

In her very limited defense, Sylvia wasn’t aware she was forming the brazen, face-splitting, shit-eating grin until it’s pointed out to her. On the other hand, she refuses to relinquish it. She can’t. It’s out of her hands, now.

“Are you saying you wanted me to be your big sister?”

“That’s not what–“

“Oh, Saints, you are so cheesy–“

Sylvia Gautier’s first slapfight as both an apprentice-level woman and honorary older sister lasts an impressive thirty-eight seconds, culminating in an anticlimactic finale via tripping over a water bucket, and a quick tickle of Marianne’s healing magic before the new bump on her ass can deign to bruise.

Being an older brother would be awful – she’s learned well from the template how that shakes out. But being a big sis...

Sylvia doesn’t know more than the bare-bloody-essentials when it comes to womanhood, given she’s never climbed over the gate and into the garden to see what else lies beyond, so she hardly feels she qualifies for ‘big’-ness in any measure but height. On the other hand, Ingrid’s shunned so much of femininity thus far solely to dodge the damnation Faerghan dogma had made of it; she’s never had the chance to poke around the buffet and find the flavors she likes without fear of poison in every bite.

Woof. They might not be starting off on the exact same page, but the two of ‘em have been stuck on the same chapter for sure, huh?

The trio clean up the strewn debris from the playful tussle – Marianne gathering up fallen tack despite both her compatriots insisting it’s not her mess to clean – and hasten to meet the bare minimum for whipping the stables into shape for one more day.

Marianne finishes up by spoiling her personal pony-of-choice, Dorte nickering in response to her gentle, affectionate whispers – people humor her, but Sylvia’s starting to think that horse can actually talk. That, or it’s just plain paranoia, plastering intent behind the way the beast tilts away from its owner to give Sylvia a very soulful look.

“These horse girls, I swear,” Sylvia snarks, heaving herself up onto the empty workbench Ingrid’s sitting on, slouched and taking pulls from her waterskin. She pauses midway through, catching the redhead out of the corner of her eye.

“You’re a horse girl too, genius.”

Oh. Right.

Honed reflexes mean a sarcastic quip is taking shape in her throat by the time Sylvia nixes it, letting a bone-deep sigh carry some genuine sentiment out along with it.

“Eeeyeah, y’got me there. Suppose I’m still not used to actually thinking too hard about it, without throwing myself at a cheap bottle or cheaper brothel to make it all go away for another week, much less…” The buzzing of nerves pinch one of Sylvia’s fists into a ball, and she cradles it with the other in her lap. “Much less anyone knowing. And yeah, my– My brain knows you won’t screw me over, but the rest of me hasn’t gotten the memo.”

Ingrid looks at her in that sad, Ingrid-ey way, the ‘Even The Knight I Want To Be Can’t Vanquish That For You’ frown. She holds out the waterskin to Sylvia and shakes it; it’s a silly gesture, since her own is like, five whole feet away in her saddlebags and there’s a well another ten after that in the courtyard, but the thoughtfulness still eases the squeeze in Sylvia’s chest. Gives her something to do with her hands and an excuse not to talk.

(Besides, if they’re supposed to be sisters, tolerating a little backwash is part of the job description, right?)

As Sylvia sips, Ingrid’s face darkens by a shade, and she turns to watch Marianne’s adorable fussing over her horse to help lighten the weight of whatever heavy thoughts she’s thinking.

“I still want to slug you for keeping it to yourself this long, but… I’m glad you told me before it was too late.” Ingrid’s sigh is a close cousin to a sob. “I already lost Dimitri to his ghosts… and Dedue, before I could really apologize. I might have lost Felix – I still haven’t gotten a letter back… I’m not losing you to yourself, Sylvia.”

Hey, wow, it’s raining indoors! Sylvia’s not tearing up, that’s as absurd as a cavalcade of feathery horses knowing her better than she was allowed to know herself. “Look, this has been nice, really, but nobody else can find out about this–“

“We won’t tell anyone until you’re ready,” says Ingrid, who checks for a nod from Marianne before continuing. “But it might be a little late for that; I hear the gossip among the other fliers every morning, ‘sis.’ There’s been a betting pool for weeks. Captain Cerri’s gonna clean house, since she got in on the ground floor, but I won’t be doing so bad for myself, either. Felt like such a long shot, and I wrote it off as a bit of wishful thinking at the time, so it wasn't that much gold...”

“You bet on me!? You, the goody-two-shoes knight in shining armor, indulging in such pedestrian vice as gambling? Why, Ingrid!” Sylvia stops her wet snickering long enough to wag her finger with matronly disapproval. “I’m beginning to fear your no-good sister is a bad influence on you...”

Ingrid smites Sylvia’s hand out of the air with a limp smack.

“She gave me more proof I made the right choice siding with Edelgard. So, if that’s my sister’s influence, I’d say I could do a lot worse.”

Who even gave her the right to drop such sappy, heartfelt lines? No snarky retorts burst forth from Sylvia’s brain, leaving her little choice but to keep her mouth shut and stew in this tumult of emotion until Ingrid checks in again. Softer. Genuine concern.

“Syl?”

“You’ve been getting cozy with the new boss-lady for months, so you know her better than me, I’ll give you that, but…” Sylvia gnaws at her lower lip, quietly resenting the stupid thing for its indelicate roughness. “She’s a smarty-pants idealist, she gets this stuff. You can’t expect me to believe I wouldn’t get laughed out of the fucking army the minute someone less ‘revolutionary’ gets a whiff of this. I know I’m never gonna pass myself off like a real… Goddess, just look at me.”

She punctuates it with a bitterly swooshy set of gestures towards herself, accentuating the absolute nonexistence of her curves, and her garish height to boot. For all that Miklan took after father’s physique more closely between the two of them, the second rotten apple hadn’t fallen overly far from the tree. Bulky. Broad. Bristly stubble. There’s a reason she’s been as anal about her daily shaving as Hubert.

“They say– The fliers who’ve served around women like you,” Ingrid begins, and ‘like you’ flows out so nonchalantly for something that still carries gut-punch impact. “It sounded like they used some kind of medicine that… helped their ‘physique?’ A little? Rumor is, it tasted awful and their squads made running jokes of the ‘mysterious ingredients,’ but it was better than nothing.”

On one hand, Sylvia’s done infinitely more shameless things for far less reward than chugging something foul in the name of femininity. Still sounds a bit too good to be true.

“Weird lady-potions, huh. No offense if I don’t get my hopes up, right? Sounds like something out of a Kingdom fairy-tale. ‘Nasty heathen witches luring brave sons of the North from their duties, drugged with evil potions and led into lives of depravity!’” Sylvia wiggles her fingers for effect, and when Ingrid doesn’t laugh, bumps her with an elbow. “Though, the brave knight’s usually the one saving the kid, not egging ‘em on.”

“I’m not gonna force you to go out and shout it from the top of the cathedral, but I’ve got a hunch you’ve got more people in your corner than you think. Goddess knows if someone talks trash about my sister – undeserved trash, at least – I won’t hesitate to slug them.”

Marianne pops out of a stable enclosure long enough to blurt out, “I– I’ll slug them, too! If needs must!”

Sylvia’s already given to understand a bit of nuance about Marianne: Most would take her dormouse demeanor as evidence she couldn’t throw a punch even if her life depended on it, but on the contrary!

See, Mari’s such a dear that flippant acts of violence are utterly unthinkable to her, ergo: if that girl ever gets ticked enough to say she’ll swing, it’s not a threat, it’s a promise.

Goddess. If the second-shyest girl in the entire Strike Force is brave enough to lend a fist to the cause of a walking disaster like Sylvia, then there’s really no excuse for backing down, huh? She’s not going to get away with hiding this like that dusty transfer application she left in her desk at the monastery.

Sylvia pops off her dirtied work glove finger by finger, then roughly runs them back through her messy frock of too-short hair, pushing out the longest of sighs.

“There’s no going back, is there? For me. For us. For… any of this.”

“Welcome to the Empire,” says Ingrid. “We’re all a mess, but we’re a mess with a future.”

Following the trend of unintentional revelations, it comes out on accident the next time after that. It’s months down the line, when Felix makes his unceremonious appearance by tracking them down at a forward operations camp in northern Arundel.

He didn’t write ahead, because of course he didn’t – ‘Would’ve arrived the same time I did, so what was the point?’ – he simply rides right into camp at a lazy trot, throws up his tent on the fringes behind the others without speaking to a single soul, and takes a nap. Or so the story goes, at least; Sylvia’d been out on a morning patrol further down the mountain.

Wouldn’t be a huge surprise if it were true, though. If he’d come for anything but talk on his mind, he’d’ve swung for the first neck to come within reach of his blade. Even the Emperor only runs him through the most cursory of interviews on where his loyalties lie before he’s settled up as an honorary Adrestian. Felix has never been the kinda guy with the patience for double-crossing.

The guy practically pouted when his ‘demands’ to earn loyalty from himself and a small detachment waiting back home turned out to be things Edelgard was already planning on doing in the first place; amnesty for the common folk of Fraldarius and any soldiers who join the cause, aid to rebuild after the war, the usual spiel. 

By the time Sylvia bumps into Felix the following day, within three sentences he’s demanded she spar with him, which is Felixese for ‘I hath missed thee dearly, o precious friend of mine.’ So, yeah, Sylvia squeezes into her grubby, lightweight training kit and gets her ass kicked a little for old times’ sake.

It’s almost therapeutic, falling back into these timeless habits, until Felix pulls a fast one on her, right after he’s unleashed one of his tricky swordmaster sweep attacks to send Sylvia sprawling in the flattened patch of grass at the camp’s edge.

Thoroughly disarmed and flat on her back, her old friend strides up with the sun at his back, draping her in his shadow. Only then does he go for the jugular, as recent developments come clawing back to the fore.

“You know, Ingrid’s been acting strangely when it comes to you,” says Felix, “she’s talking circles around you, doesn’t even like mentioning your name, and every time I press her, she says you’re fine? She never covers for your dumb-ass stunts, so you can’t have pulled something that unforgivable, and you’re obviously not fine, so... talk, already.”

It might have to do with the fact that Felix is steadily lifting her chin with the gleaming tip of his sword, which – look, Sylvia’s still ninety-three percent sure she’s only into girls, but the action itself is pretty damned hot on principle, so now that she’s been put on the spot, splayed and vulnerable, with a flutter of her heart it just… slips out!

“M’ghrl.”

Okay, so it doesn’t slip out easily. Felix squints, and she tries again, enunciating even though the effort’s as appealing as pulling teeth.

“She found out… I’m a girl. On the inside, I mean, it’s this whole– That’s probably why Ingrid’s cagey about my name– She’s the only one who knows me as Sylvia, her ‘n Marianne, and… alright, I think Hubert’s spies might’ve caught on, but that’s all!”

The tip of the training sword pulls back, dropping Sylvia’s chin and freeing her from that stupid, swooning damsel paralysis it’d locked her in. It’s far less hot when Felix raises it and prods her square in the forehead, instead, thank the Goddess.

“A girl. Tch. Is this some shameless ploy to get me to go easy on you, Gautier?”

“What? No!” Please, don’t let this become a shouting match. Shit. Sylvia let her guard down with Ingrid, she forgot she can’t rely on all her old friends to be so open-minded by default; why would they – they’re all children of the fucking Kingdom!

Felix just stares, flat and accusing, with those grumpy housecat eyes. Stares, and stares, and–

“Whatever. Makes as much sense as anything else around here.” He kicks her shin. “The hell are you stalling for, Lady Gautier? Know you’ve got one more round in you.”

Unbelievable. Sylvia cracks up there in the dirt, which only frazzles her friend more while he waits her out. The revered Fraldarius Eye-Roll is out in full force, today.

“Love you too, asshole,” Sylvia says as soon as she can breathe.

The sun must be getting in her eyes, because Sylvia’d almost swear she caught the slightest twitch of a smile on the man’s sun-haloed silhouette.

Sylvia’s starting to feel like she’ll never get to announce herself to anyone on her own time, at this point. Never when she’s good and ready. Troublesome truth keeps seeping out the cracks in her shell when her guard is down, and folks keep slipping on the puddle.

It’s been over half a year of schlepping hither and thither across the continent, praying to never find a familiar face on the far end of her spear, and silently thanking Ferdinand’s lengthening locks for taking some of the gossipmongers’ suspicion off her own small, messy bun.

The Imperial Army Encampment just west of Myrddin is on the smaller side at present, a foothold for a strike against some false-flagging bandits and an implicit warning to keep Claude from concocting any funny ideas about crossing the Airmid. Serving alongside a skeleton crew suits Sylvia’s nerves just fine, especially with her clownish antics scaled back so hard in recent months that folks’ve started second-guessing whether they’d brushed past ‘Sylvain’ or merely a lookalike.

So close, yet so far.

Even so, Sylvia’d stalled ‘til late in the evening before rolling into the healers’ tent to pick up a very special delivery, and true to form, later-than-most-are-awake is the perfect time for Bernadetta to sneak on through for a bit of healing without so many prying eyes.

No big deal on her end – caught a bit of magic scorching on her forearm from a rare bandit mage, an easy fix – but curiosity wins out as to why ‘Sylvain’ is lurking here of all places, hovering over Linhardt’s shoulder like a six-foot mosquito.

One thing leads to another (“H-hold on, are you really sick, or something? You haven’t looked sick! Oh, Goddess, are you gonna die?!”) and outright lying to the girl’s face makes Sylvia’s insides revolt too viscerally to swerve away from the truth, and...

“Sylvia?” Bernadetta repeats the name a time or two, different speeds and inflections, really rolling it around in her mouth. “Sylvia. Syl-vi-a. Oh, wow.”

The pair of them sit on an empty cot draped atop some empty wooden crates in the ‘chief healer’s office,’ a cramped berth only isolated from the rest of the tent’s ailing occupants by a few draped sheets and a highly-practiced muffling spell. At this proximity, it takes a conscious effort to keep their shoulders from rubbing, though their shuffling feet occasionally bump into one another and dart away just as quick.

“Yeah. Not very creative, huh? Ingrid said as much.” Sylvia crosses her legs after one such accidental toe-tap in the hopes of stemming the jitters. No such luck. Her knee starts bouncing instead.

This is stupid. Why is she letting it get to her like this? Felix finding out wasn’t so bad, in the long run, and neither was Edelgard, despite her power to crush Sylvia’s life in the palm of her hand if she wished.

“No, it’s– It’s fine! Very fine! Bernie gives it two thumbs up!” Bernie doesn’t give it any thumbs up, because her folded hands’re presently clenched tight enough to turn sand into pearls like… like cute, clammy little sea clams.

It’s hardly one of the best visual metaphors Sylvia’s ever whipped up for Bern’s hands – and not like she’s spent an unreasonable amount of time pondering them apropos of nothing – but Sylvia’s razor wit is dull as a saucepan right about now, and this drafty tent is starting to feel as sweltering as a busy kitchen.

The bulwark of awkwardness thrown down between them could block a ballista bolt. The only mercy is the lack of absolute silence; they’re saved by the white noise of Linhardt’s medical busywork at the other end of the ‘room,’ grinding herbs and mixing reagents at a worktable so cluttered Sylvia can’t tell the color of the wood.

“Sorry my stuff’s taking so long,” mumbles Sylvia. With the spellwork at play, there’s no real reason why she couldn’t use her normal tone, but damned if that tone hasn’t felt too deep and damning as of late. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting with a wound.”

A mortar’s worth of orange powder is tapped out into a fizzing phial. Linhardt doesn’t look away from his work to interject: “If that’s your way of hurrying me along, I could always break for a nap,” he warns.

Gulp. “I’ll be good.”

Doing her own research has been forbiddingly daunting, so Sylvia might’ve thrown herself on Ingrid’s mercy to ask her fellow pegasus knights for a lead on that sketchy brew. Unfortunately, when it came down to sourcing the stuff, Manuela was waiting with the grin of a cat who caught the canary all the way back in Pegasus Moon and been waiting all this time for the poor thing to realize.

(That’s Sylvia. She’s the poorest thing.)

Her upfront acceptance was appreciated, once the teasing tithe was paid, Sylvia just wishes that hadn’t meant cutting any of the other medics in on the action if she wanted a shot at acquiring these dodgy supplements, an annoying consequence of, y’know, being in a war. Patchy supply lines, merchant guild squabbles, scorched farms. Fun times.

At least Lin won’t judge her. Will he overanalyze? Sure, the guy’s a slut for novel scientific research, but somehow letting him diagnostically dress her down hasn’t made her feel like as much of a butterfly on a pinboard as she’d feared – he’d treat anyone the same if they brought him a new quandary to… quander. Caspar came in with a funky green boil on his leg the other week and you’d’ve needed a team of horses to pry Lin away, and another for his notebooks.

And it’s pretty stupid to think Bernie of all people’d be holding on to some super judgey views deep down, so Sylvia does feel a smidge guilty about her anxieties even pitching the possibility…

But, hey, after having such luck thus far with the tiny handful who’ve cottoned on or shaken the truth out of her, reactions ranging from neutral to bubbly, Sylvia doesn’t know what she’d do if the first bad roll of the dice happened to be the first friend she made at Garreg Mach.

So! The fact the truth hasn’t spawned a look of deep-seated disgust or a spate of projectile vomiting is pretty great! She just, uh. She just wasn’t expecting Bern to be lookin’ at her like Sylvia hung the moon – and brought her back some kinda carnivorous, alien moon-plant as a souvenir. It’s pretty nice!

Still… Bern wasn’t supposed to be here! Not that Sylvia doesn’t love to hang with her, or anything, totally the opposite, but ‘I’m not dying of the plague, just a critical lack of breasts’ isn’t a chat she’d drafted notes for, yet!

Assuming this junk even works. She’ll still be way too damned tall, that bit’s a lost cause, but it’ll be nice if it could round off her features a little. Make her look a bit less like her father with his chiseled slab of a face.

Screw it. If she’s going to die in this stupid war, she’ll be going to the Goddess’ bosom with tits of her own.

“Wait, wait, I just remembered!” Bernie rubs her knees together in a gentle, sawing motion. “When, um. That one time, when you stole my short story–“ (“Stumbled across! By accident!”) “–and you told me about that thing that happened when you were little? Did that all happen because of, um. This?”

Sylvia smirks, bittersweet. “I don’t know if it’s proof that pegasi’re really that smart, or proof I’m really that dumb, but it sure proved something.”

Respectfully, she inserts a pause should Lin wish to seize the low-hanging fruit by drawling ‘the latter,’ and moves on when he seems more interested in his alchemy than her and Bern.

“In my defense, I really didn’t know. Was pretty easy to pass off as a fluke once I got older. Turns out, break enough girls’ hearts and you get a free alibi for just about any jackassery you get up to, no matter how damning…” Sylvia nips at an irritating bit of chapped skin on her lip, eyes falling out of focus between her boots. “Safer to be a no-good heartbreaker than a ‘degenerate,’ up north, so break ‘em I did… Took Ingrid shaking some sense into me to admit the girl I was hurting most was myself.”

Sylvia’s always been ginger with Bernadetta – ha, redhead pun – to avoid all the prickly anxiety brambles her upbringing left strewn around her. She has no idea what she did, only that Bern’s face sinks abruptly into ‘kicked puppy’ territory. At first glance, it could be pity, but...

No, the non-sequitur that follows is baffling, little clue as to the logical leaps it took her to get there.

“So… If breaking girls’ hearts wasn’t you being yourself, I... Um. I suppose this means you’ll be on the hunt for a… nice, fancy husband now, huh?”

See, where that snap assumption came from, Sylvia can’t even guess! “Huh? No, Bern, I’m – I’m saying I am a lady, not that I don’t still like the ladies.” She carefully bumps elbows with the archer to lighten the mood, and the girl’s blush thunders back with a vengeance.

“Good! Great!” exclaims Bernadetta at once, putting the muffling spell through its paces. She shoots to her feet like she’s been shocked and straightens out her dress on her way out of the would-be office. “A-anyway, you two are still so busy, and nobody needs Bernie getting in the way; I’ll just come back later, good luck with your special potion, g’night!”

“I’m finishing up as we speak,” Linhardt calls after her, to little avail. Actually, ‘calls’ might be a stretch, inasmuch as the man’s voice never raises an inch past its sleepy default register and she’s already bolted past his magic bubble of silence before the second syllable crawls on out.

“What was that about?” asks Sylvia. “D’you think she’s mad at me?”

Instead of eviscerating her with any number of sharp medical implements within arms reach, as Linhardt’s suffering expression suggests he’d like, the mage thumbs a cork into the amber bottle of the foul, lifegiving ‘girl juice’ and thumps it into Sylvia’s chest, instead. “You’re hopeless.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I could start, but we’d be here all night, and I’d prefer to spend at least a few of those hours asleep.” Once Sylvia’s taken the bottle, Linhardt moves to pack its dozen siblings into a cloth sack. “A task which will be a lot easier when you’ve vacated my bed.”

It’s hard to feel embarrassed about huddling up on a man’s bed when you’ve already seen him fall asleep on just about any horizontal surface big enough to accommodate the upper third of his body.

“Rrrrright. So. This is it, huh? When do I…?”

“Every morning, ideally alongside the first meal of the day for better digestion. However, in the interest of caution, I’d advise you sample the first here and now.” With his foot, he slides over an oily-looking wooden bucket, its insides tinged a darker shade. The implications make themselves pretty clear, if the scent wafting from the thing hasn’t already.

Sylvia pops the cork back out of the first phial with her teeth, and– Goddess, it smells like licking the floor of an Abyssian tavern on a weekend must taste, with a tragically mismatched clash of spearmint struggling in vain to overpower the rest.

This is far less magical than the ‘potions’ from errant, childhood daydreams Sylvia’s only recently allowed herself to recover. The ones that smelled like fruit and honey, glowing and iridescent, promising instant transfiguration in a single sip. This is just an orange bottle of inexplicable swill made with the only ingredients they could scrounge, that could just as easily turn her insides to jelly by sunrise.

Fuck it. She’s drunk worse on a dare, and all of it to wipe away her past, not clear a path to her future.

“If I die, tell Her Majesty it’s been real. And, uh. To maybe throw Ingrid a pity-date, sometime.” Deep breath, deep breath. “Bottoms up!”

Sylvia throws her head back and quaffs the sloshy, herbal brew. It tastes just as bad as it smells, a complete shock to the system and a challenge of her gag reflex to wrestle it down. It tastes like death.

Unfortunately, she’s never felt more alive.

Chapter Text

The ever-starving beast named War gorges itself on the wasted lifeforce of the fallen, and the precious time of all who remain. It devours messy chunks of the calendar in a single bite the instant one lowers their guard; entire moons’ worth of marching and patrols gone in a blink, save for those suffocating pockets of calm before the storm of battle – stretching tense quarter-hours into eternities.

When the date crosses over itself, marking an entire year embroiled in the fires of revolution, there are no raucous celebrations of survival, no memorial gatherings among the Black Eagle Strike Force. Merely a lighter duty schedule, more leeway on late sleepers, and as generous a portion as the pantries could endure come the dinner bell. No speeches or songs or flagons raised en masse.

Rank-and-file from other battalions offered their commiseration, when they transferred through. Felt sorry that Edelgard would run her own personal troops so ragged, ignore such an auspicious day on the grounds it would only slow them down.

Thing is, though? She’d put it to a vote, and not one of the Garreg Mach alumni disagreed.

The anniversary’s a different phenomenon for the masses. For them, it was only a beginning, a valiant charge into the fray to conquer a systemic wrong left to fester through the ages. It hadn’t come entwined with the loss of something irreplaceable; with the Immaculate One’s first rampage in centuries, and its toll in blood.

It wasn’t the kind of anniversary one likes to remember, no. Though it does signal the approach of one anniversary Sylvia does have circled red on her calendar, a scant few weeks later – one she’d probably have felt silly for giving a damn about in the past, before she began scraping away at the masculine pretense inside her and allowed herself to indulge in silly sentimentality.

One year since the death of Sylvain Gautier.

Within Sylvia’s own mind, that is; ‘Sylvain’ is still very much the name on the rosters, or the angry letters from home. The one that turns her head when shouted across a crowded encampment, makes her grit her teeth when uttered by friends who don’t know any better, because she’s still too scared to tear the final curtains down and bare everything to the sun at once.

(And, yeesh, was she always this schmaltzy, all the time? Sylvia chooses to blame it on her ‘girl juice.’ Her emotions’ve been bucking like crazy these past moons, grasping to find her new normal.)

In the end, it might not matter at all. She’s known this was always a grace period; that sooner or later, word would get out, and she’d have to start taking risks, brace herself to take the brunt of the public’s disgust right to the chin. Better to have it be on her own terms, for a good cause – because ‘for her own wellbeing’ just ain’t gonna cut it – and there’ll be no hiding what she is in the moons to come.

Not once they’ve seen her wings.

“I’ll be blunt,” said Edelgard, as though she’s ever been anything but.

It was a couple of weeks ago, during a return march to Enbarr, when Sylvia found herself seated across from Edelgard, hands folded in her lap, halfway expecting an encore of her various ‘counseling’ meetings with good ol’ Seteth– albeit given a red and regal dye-job.

There at the modest tea table nestled away in Edelgard’s personal tent, Hubert hovered behind the Emperor’s seat like an unusually fidgety shadow. There’d been… well, not raised voices, per se, but some very impassioned whisper-debate shooting back and forth by the time Sylvia answered the informal summons, and her urge to eavesdrop didn’t eclipse the fear of Vestra spearing her with a dark magic spike right through the tent flap if she were caught.

Still, the man was both abnormally quiet and possessed of a rare bit of color in his spooky vampire face, for a change. Maybe Sylvia’d done him a favor by dropping in and putting their bickering on pause.

Edelgard sampled her tea, possibly for the dramatic pause alone, only linking eyes with the cavalier after returning her cup to its saucer with a dainty clink.

“We’ve a dire need for more trustworthy fliers in our ranks, and fliers with greater resistance to magic, at that; Petra’s wyvern has been placed in jeopardy too many times for my liking as of late, and I don’t want her flying Árdghal into an early grave. Now that the Church has fully subsumed the Kingdom’s military structure, they’ve begun a clear play for air superiority, and I personally refuse to cede the advantage of the skies.”

Shit. That’s what this was about. To make matters worse, Sylvia had been saying the same thing – Ingrid was continuing to prove herself a prodigy in aerial combat, even a bit of a showoff if the Emperor herself had personally taken the field, but even a praise-thirsty Ingrid couldn’t dominate the skies of an entire campaign by her lonesome.

“Couldn’t you haul Constance up here? She can handle herself in the air, and she’s always bragging about wanting to show off her schmancy breed of Nuvelle super-pegasi, why not turn ‘er loose on the enemy?”

“Constance is… formidable, we can all agree, but I’m afraid I can’t spare her from our research corps. Not to mention, her weather-sensitive ‘condition’ would compromise her safety on long deployments in fickle climates, and presently, we need fliers ready for any forecast.”

Sylvia slouched in her seat, tapping a chipped fingernail on the rim of her own empty teacup. “Ugh. Okay, with all due respect, you can stop beatin’ around the bush. I know where this is going.”

The fact a razor-sharp throwing knife didn’t embed itself in the table an inch from Sylvia’s impolitely-placed elbow for such disrespect was another sign of a worryingly cowed Hubert. Whatever he grumbled under his breath instead was inaudible from her side of the table, and Edelgard shut him up with a side-eye.

“You and I – frankly, anyone privy to your truth – know you’ve an uncanny affinity for handling pegasi, even without specialized training. You’re a natural, Sylvia, and judging by your evident prowess as a Paladin, with a little focused effort, you will soar.”

Her Majesty slid out of her seat to calmly round the table, and Sylvia could already hear the rusty iron trap snapping shut. This was about to get sappy, she knew it in her bones; Edelgard was gonna come over, place a hand on her shoulder, talk to her all soft and – Ah-ha! Right there, hand on the shoulder! Called it!

If only it wasn’t working.

“I won’t order you to do this, not as the Emperor,” said Edelgard, “but I would ask, as one who would risk imposition to consider herself a new friend, and who knows you’ve wanted this…”

She paused then, cocking her head to shoot Hubert a cutting glance out of the blue; the retainer merely rolled his eyes in a rare display of brazen disrespect for his liege, the sort that’d earn anyone else a menacing flash of a poisoned dagger. Maybe that’d been what they were arguing about, earlier– it wouldn’t be out of place for Hubert to grouse about placing such responsibility on the shoulders of a listless lug like Sylvia, and hey, she’d’ve had to agree with him!

Nonetheless, Edelgard had her by the tail. This tête-à-tête was over before it started, and Sylvia upheld what little honor she had left by making sure to roll her eyes and sigh, emphatically, before throwing up her hands and waving the invisible white flag. “Fine. You got me.”

“Thank you, Sylvia. We could arrange to begin in secret, if you like. Better you remain earthbound yet know how to fly in a pinch than put it off indefinitely. I’m afraid I’ve been keeping Ingrid too busy to double as a dedicated trainer as well, so you’ve my word that any instructor I assign will be vetted for…” Edelgard grimaced. “Familiarity with less-conventional students?”

Nice save. “They’d better be, or Ingrid’ll be the one turning ‘em into a pincushion. By the by, did she talk you into this? Breaking the news all nice ‘n soft over teatime?”

Edelgard shook her head with a painfully fond sigh. “Were this Ingrid’s plan, it would consist of pushing you into a wall and ordering that you, quote, ‘get on the damned pegasus, Gautier.’ I felt the diplomatic approach was best; I trust my knight’s counsel, but feared you’d fall straight through the wall of a tent, and I wasn’t keen to delay until we reached the capital.”

Sylvia laughed, politely, but could not for the life of her tell if Edelgard was joking. Wisely, she decided not to test it.

The hanging mirror is nearly knocked from its bent-nail perch when Sylvia shoulders into it, blindly fumbling with yet another finicky clasp on her new cuirass. Grunting a curse, she wedges the thing against the wall with her armored hip until she can free up her hands, lest the thing topple, shatter, and lump another seven years of bad luck onto whatever standing debt karma keeps coming to collect on. She didn’t have to bother with all this hassle when they were on the march.

Alas! As a decorated officer of the Black Eagle Strike Force, Sylvia’s warranted an actual, factual room of her own in the red-bricked military garrison latching onto the Enbarr Palace walls like a needy sibling. It’s up on the third floor – enough distance for privacy from the rank and file without making her unapproachable, and a straight shot down the corridor to the Imperial Aerie.

Yeah, real subtle room placement, especially since Edelgard dumped her here well before she’d nudged Sylvia into giving this pegasus thing a try. She can’t bring herself to get ticked off about it, in hindsight, since it lessens the likelihood the gossip-loving grunts down at ground level will catch her like this.

Rolling her shoulders to test the range of movement under her pauldrons, Sylvia steps back and reseats the mirror on its hook. She’s found herself especially unfond of mirrors, or well-polished windows, or shields, or… uh, just about any flat, suitably reflective surface over the last year-or-so, when her gut reaction of revulsion towards the person leering from the other side still puts her off her appetite on a bad day.

A tall, scraggly, musclebound woman stares back with the cheer of a dungeon dweller. When she tries to crack that time-tested, ‘Classic Sylvain’ combination-eyebrow-smirk from the olden days, it sloughs from her face like water off a greased duck. That expression that doesn’t belong to her anymore, and she only misses it for the lack of a better mask to hide behind.

Her face is unpainted; dabbling in the dark realm of makeup remains a step too far, too incriminating if the wrong person poked through her things, and trying to pass it off as ‘guyliner’ might be flying too close to the sun at this point. In the meantime, she’s rustled up some skin-care tricks from Mercedes that’ve put a healthier, downright human glow in her complexion, less ghastly than the way her fairer Faerghan skin used to blotch after a few weeks training under the southern sun.

She didn’t ask for any perfume, mind you – it’s just, well, Bernie had been infodumping about the new plants she’s tending in the royal greenhouses, see, and it’s not like she made a big deal about Albinean Chamomile or anything, but...! But then Sylvia ran into Mercie 'n Emile at the market, and Mercie just happened to have a spare bottle of the oil, and Sylvia also just happened to recognize it, by chance, and it was practically forced into her hands and it would’ve been impolite to refuse, and–

Breathe, Gautier!

Breathe she does, taking an ounce of solace from the calming scent. Logically, she shouldn’t’ve wasted even a drop of the stuff this morning, when she’s liable to smell like sweaty horse ass in a whopping five minutes no matter what she does, but… If it takes the edge off her hackles getting all-a-raised over the fear of so much as smelling like a man to the pegasi, that’s just a bonus.

Continuing to grow her hair out has helped in the looks department, even if convention keeps her from dabbling in styles too fancy, too froofy to pass as a man’s mane. Its tangles tickle her collarbone, now, still an inch or two behind Ferdinand’s commanding lead, but Sylvia knows it’s only a matter of time ‘til the Prime Minister takes the time for a trim and strips her of a convenient excuse why she hasn’t bothered to do the same.

All those medical tinctures haven’t given her the sort of heaving tits she used to dream of, long before she’d parsed that she wanted them mounted on her own damned chest. No, she’s yet to truly bloom, and the only thing these buds have done for her is force her wardrobe down a trend towards the baggier and breezier when off-duty, lest someone notice the incipient shift. That, and hurting like a motherfucker any time she bumps one into the back of a chair, or a doorframe. Nobody warned her tits can hurt like that!

At least armor remains the great tit-equalizer, even amongst the troops expected to have them by default; for this first training session, Sylvia’d been given a set of spare fliers’ plate ahead of time, sparing her the indignity of having to strip and wriggle into the stuff under the impatient eye of her new instructor.

The set’s not as graceful as the stuff she’s seen the real women of the pegasus knights running around in, much less those with compact, athletic frames like Ingrid, though it’s got a splash more color than the drab, matte-gray metal trainees used to wear at Garreg Mach.

Sylvia runs her fingers over the shallow scuffs in the red-painted steel of the cropped chestplate, then down to the skirt pleated faulds at her hips, pockmarked here and there with scrapes of varying thickness and hammered-out dings from clumsy falls. Maybe she’ll’ve added some of her own before this circus is over, when the creatures inevitably buck her right off their backs because they know she’s not a rea–

Knock-knock!

Ah, hell. Sylvia reaches to snag a spare leather tie for the end of a hastily-cobbled braid, calling over her shoulder, “It’s open!”

She’d up and braced herself for a surly, skeptical stranger to barge through the door, at first, so the friendly, freckled face of another former Blue Lion is a welcome surprise.

“Hey, Sylvai– Er, Sylvia?” stammers Ashe as he slips inside. The blatant mix-up stings for a second, sure, but she’s been introducing the idea so cautiously that the guy’s only been in the loop a whopping seventy-two hours, so she’ll cut him some slack. “The flight instructor said I should come check on you? Technically, it was phrased ‘drag her out of her hidey-hole,’ but–”

“No, no, I’m coming!” Sylvia waggles a hand. “And hey, what’re you doing running toady for the air cavalry, anyway? Some big, mean lady mistake you for a squire? Because if I need to punch someone...”

“Huh? ...Oh, it’s not like that! See, I actually know the captain from back home!” Ashe says, eyes brightening. “I was pretty surprised to see her here, but I’m really glad she’s on our side of things! It just goes to show Edelgard was right; borders on a map can’t dictate ideals.”

Ha. It’s cute how Ashe gets all soppy when someone gets him started on Edelgard’s manifesto, nearly as bad as Ingrid – both of the Blue Lions’ resident chivalry nerds managing against all odds to reinvent their vision of formal knighthood in service to an otherwise-knightless nation.

As she turns to face him, Sylvia’s hand lags when it hovers past the divine weapon lazily propped against the wall, swaddled in a discarded green travel cloak like a toppled coatrack. She can’t deny a temptation to drag the Lance of Ruin along for moral support, rather than using the barracks’ training spears; if she’s recognized out there today, she figures few would have the guts to hurl taunts to the face of a woman toting a Heroes’ Relic around.

Ashe crooks a brow at her spaciness, and she brushes her hanging hand behind her neck with a flat chuckle instead, bustling them both out the door. “Ah-ha, right. So, ‘from back home’ like Lonato, or just the Kingdom in general?”

The guy never fails to grimace when his late, adoptive father’s name comes up, something he’s gotten better about soldiering through over the last year. “From Lonato! She started out as a scout flier running messages, but she proved herself in tourneys, and– and even went on to serve under King Lambert!”

Aw. There for a moment, gone the next, that fawning sparkle. Ashe’s tone loses its luster once more, quieting as the two of them exit the living quarters into the officers’ common area, and press past an assortment of folks stealing a quick lunch. It’s a very ordered chaos, smaller than the Monastery’d given the Knights of Seiros to work with, but cozier for it, with a hell of a lot less dirt on the floor. Sylvia can give-or-take all the red velvet décor.

Little mind is paid to Sylvia and her escort, though a few allies catch her eye. Curled up cozy against Petra’s side on one of the couches packed close to the crackling hearth, Dorothea shoots Sylvia a nefarious wink, the group currently too ensnared by Caspar’s highly animated storytelling to break off from the group and lovingly heckle the redhead with higher precision.

The chatter of humans begins to mingle with animal brays as they reach the north end of the hall, where the warmly-hued wooden interior paneling cedes way to the raw stone of the fort. Sylvia has to fight an atrociously gormless smile trying to seize her face as Ashe darts a step ahead and insists on opening the door for her– a sweet gesture spawning a complicated three-step shuffle of emotions about chivalry and feminism Sylvia hasn’t got the nerve to wrestle right now.

Instead, she prompts him back to the topic at hand as they enter the Pegasus Wing (pfft) of the Imperial Aerie; the more intel about this new mentor she can come equipped with, the better. “So, she liked Dimitri’s dad well enough – gonna take a wild crack at it and guess she wasn’t too fond of the Lord Regent?”

“Mm-hm. Duscur was… well, you know how it was.” Ashe smiles at the rows of resting pegasi as they pass, keeping a respectful distance to avoid agitating the beasts, even as a few heads pop over the gates at the mere sight of Sylvia, and the promise of potential sugar licks. “She deserted with the squads who refused the purge order… Apparently, my father had been sheltering them in secret, until the Central Church sent inquisitors for an inspection. I’m just glad we didn’t bump into her at Magdred Way; the thought of having to fight her...”

Something tickles Sylvia’s gray matter just then, which she chalks up to nerves. Of course she’s nervous! The sensation of a tacky sweat’s stuck to her skin since she fell out of bed this morning, even though she’s bone dry.

The fliers’ side of the barracks is lightly staffed today, many of the regulars pulled away for joint training operations with the ground forces. The handful of women who still roam these horse-scented halls are, by and large, the sort of keen-eyed veterans who’d sussed Sylvia’s secrets out many moons ago, and were none-too-shocked to see her turning up for this one-woman boot camp.

“About time, slacker!”

“Ha! Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Good luck, Syl!”

“If you choke up there, try to crash in the dirt – I don’t wanna get stuck mopping you up!”

From the way the ladies chuckle, Sylvia’s forced smile and uncharacteristically timid wave in passing must be hilarious – and that’s okay, as long as she’s being a jackass on purpose! Which she is! She’s not nervous, she’s not terrified of getting bucked off the beast the second her ass hits that saddle!

Oh, who the fuck is she kidding? This could go so many kinds of wrong, enough so that even Ashe slows to a halt right before the final threshold – the broad double-doors leading out onto the rooftop training grounds – to spare her a sickeningly sincere smile.

“Don’t worry about a thing, I know you’ll do fine! Nobody will judge you if you fall – They might, you know, snicker a little, but not judge, promise!”

Even Sylvia’s patented cynicism can’t hold a candle to that, not for long. “Right, right. And from how desperate Edelgard’s been for fliers, she might just court martial the first person to crack wise.” She slaps her own cheeks, twice, draws a deep breath through her nose, and squeezes it out slow. “Here we go. How do I look?”

Lounging against the opposite end of the doorframe, Ashe’s brows knit close, lips pinched in thought. “Um... You want brutal honesty?”

“I’m a big girl; whatever you’ve got, I can handle it!”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Hit me, Ubert.”

Ashe gives her a contemplative up-and-down assessment, then hums in revelation. “A little constipated.”

Pfft. “A ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one,” Sylvia chuffs, jamming her pauldron against the sizable door and giving it a solid heave, as she steps out into the warm, early-autumn sun.

The skies above are offensively blue today, threaded with long, cottony strands of cirrus, and one plump cumulonimbus lounging out over the western coastline. Half the garrison’s taken to fussing how the breeze has turned turned ‘brisk’ of late, but to a northerner like herself, Enbarr may as well be a tropical paradise. There’s a slight smoky haze over the city, but due westward, the air’s so clear Sylvia wonders whether, if one soared high enough, they could even catch a glimpse of the Brigid isles from here.

Probably not, because of all that newfangled heretical world-is-round shit, but still.

Sprawling out before her, the aerie’s rooftop training ground is a clean, orderly stretch of fenced-off drill stations broken up by lopsided heaps of supply crates and toppled target dummies, pointy bushes of discarded javelins looking like a giant tripped and fumbled their jar of toothpicks. Faded paint outlines, sandbag rows, and tracks of soft dirt hauled up from ground level carve out a series of short runways, lined up one after the other for a squad’s simultaneous takeoff.

At the far end of the training grounds, a thick watchtower squats square in the middle of the garrison’s long, curving roof, separating it neatly into gated halves like a demilitarized zone. Now, one might expect the Emperor’s finest not to fall prey to internal rivalries and factionalism, but their mounts sure do– There’s some immaterial field, imperceptible to the human eye, that the pegasi and wyverns have somehow worked out amongst themselves delineating their aerial turf.

(Surely, you’d think, the riders would be more reasonable than the beasts, but after the second or third time you watch a startled pegasus’ hind-kick snap a horn right off a wyvern’s skull, you can practically taste the imminent disciplinary write-ups in the air even before their riders try to improvise an honor-duel to the death.)

But, nobody’s brawling today, it seems; a few brown-scaled wyverns patrol the air over Enbarr’s outskirts, and one pegasus-borne Imperial messenger is shrinking into the eastern horizon, roughly where Sylvia’d peg Garreg Mach to be. Not crowded at all. The only living beings out here are herself, the short-king powerhouse of encouragement that is Ashe, two pegasi tacked-up in Adrestian red, and the mystery teacher.

Don’t panic. The last ‘mystery teacher’ she’d had chucked into her life was Byleth, and the Professor wasn’t so bad, right? Give or take fanning the flames of an existential identity crisis or two.

As they draw near, Sylvia cups a hand to her mouth to call out and seize the advantage by announcing herself with some witty, self-effacing greeting, only to pause and fall slack. “Wait, you… you said the instructor was there at Magdred, yeah? Because after we got scattered, Bern and I...“

Her whispered aside doesn’t go unnoticed. The fully-kitted pegasus of the pair – a proud, but weathered creature standing offside as the trainer finishes up fastening a fresh bridle on its dusky-coated counterpart – cranes its head towards Sylvia and gives it a curious tilt. It brushes its rider with a grayish wingtip, prompting her to turn, and that, that right there, is when it all goes to hell.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“Ahem.” The stranger grins at her, a stranger who all at once seems not-so-strange at all. “You’ve gotta be shitting me, ma’am.”

The instructor – a captain, going by the gold insignia clasp on her well-worn fliers’ cloak – is a middle-aged woman, falling an inch or three shorter than Sylvia at the end of her frustrating growth spurts. The gap might narrow even further, if she weren’t slouching to favor the wooden crutch under her left arm. She’s not quite so broad in the shoulder, either – very few are, much as it stings to admit – but broader than a civilian’s build, her confident stance alone seeming to imply the musculature hiding under crimson plate and oiled leather.

Her skin, a few shades fairer than the Adrestian norm, carries a familiar ‘forgot my sun lotion’ blotch Sylvia’s seen in her own mirror time and again, complete with the little streaks of discoloration from the stray battle-scar, and the odd slant of a nose broken more than once in her career. The barrage of sunshine illuminates her hair a bold, northern auburn, bleaching out several of the gray hairs streaking through her low ponytail.

And she hits Sylvia with those strangely smug, frighteningly knowing ocean-blues, the eyes ensconced in that a certain childhood memory worn all to pieces by years of constant retreading like a well-loved book that’s gone missing a few pages.

“I-it’s you! The… the, uh–“

“The ‘weird lady,’” purrs the weird lady, almost Claudelike in her coyness. “If I correctly recall.”

Sylvia sputters. “I was ten!”

“Wait, you two have already met before?” Ashe interrupts, frowning as he eyes the two back and forth.

The trainer leans her crutch against the saddle to better fold her arms under her chest. “You kidding me? I’ve known Sylvia for years! Was even there for this smarmy brat’s first pegasus ‘ride,’ so I s’pose the Goddess figured it’d be a hoot if I had to do it all over again ‘til she gets it through her skull.”

“Oh, I… I’m sorry,” says Ashe, so genuine he manages to disarm the woman and cut short a lengthy tirade of teasing already begun to brew. “I would’ve said something earlier if I’d realized you both knew each oth–“

“Not to worry, dear,” she sighs, predatory glee gone in a flash. Given the snippets of backstory Sylvia’s heard, it’s no surprise the woman’s soft around him. “It was ages ago, not accountin’ for a little attempted murder at Magdred. I’m just glad she got her act together ‘fore I had to put a spear through her. You run along, now; I’ve got a mandate from Her Majesty to squeeze Gautier through the wringer and every intent to fulfill it.”

The attempted murder sends Ashe’s eyes shooting wide with alarm, but when it seems his friend and the woman he regards like a cool aunt aren’t about to trade blows, he scuttles along with a quick goodbye and a promise to meet the captain for lunch, someday soon.

“Cute kid,” she hums. “Glad he’s not given you guff about your bein’…” The captain needn’t clarify, and Sylvia’s thankful for it. “Else I’d have to give the boy a talking-to. I may be sworn up to Hresvelg, now, but even she knows I’m ever loyal to Lonato’s memory – and I know for a fact he wouldn’t’ve wanted his son grown up a closed-minded gobshite.”

(Sylvia barely catches Ashe’s scandalized, wiggle-nosed whine of “Hey!” in the distance.)

Abrupt profanity has a wonderful power to rupture unpleasantly pregnant pauses, and Sylvia can’t not ripple with a poorly-contained hiss of laughter. “No, he’d never.” As the stable doors groan shut behind them with a final, echoing thunk, guaranteeing the most privacy they’re liable to manage, standing out atop a roof in broad daylight, she flicks a lazy salute.

“So, uh… Sylvia Joséfina Gautier, reporting for her imminent demise?”

Instead of going to shake the hand Sylvia’s so awkwardly outstretched, the captain goes for her forearm instead, squeezing her bracer in a warrior’s greeting she’s more oft seen from the likes of Petra and Shamir.

“Cerridwen Teague – Cerri for short, ‘til such a time as you piss me off. Former Faerghan Royal Guard, less-former Imperial Air Cavalry, current drill instructor, and soon to be your new least-favorite person.”

Captain Cerri. Welp. Now she feels like a complete dumbass. For the better part of a year, the name’s zipped by in conversation, often on Ingrid’s lips in the midst of an anecdote shared over supper, but Sylvia’s never gotten a good, close look at the woman in question without her helmet in, oh, more than a decade.

The years haven’t been kind to either of them, not since that chance meeting at the family estate, sickeningly wholesome in hindsight. From the way she carries herself, Cerridwen must’ve sent those years packing with a black eye or two for their trouble.

It’s harder to see Faith-based magic scarring on pale Faerghan skin, but this long fighting under the southern sun has offered the trainer a tan that barely puts the old wounds to light – the desaturated discoloration often left in the wake of a nasty Nosferatu drain or Abraxas bolt.

With pegasi’s natural resistance to magic, Sylvia supposes it makes sense their riders more visibly bear the brunt of their insane charges against one poor mage company after the next.

Imagining the insane battering that must’ve left those burns means it’s only a short lily-pad hop for Sylvia’s wandering attention to land, rather impolitely, on the captain’s wooden crutch – long enough for the woman to notice, and nearly lose her balance with a mighty guffaw when her new student recoils with a stuttered apology.

“Yes, this here’d be why I’m not out at the front as we speak, spearin’ Knights of Seiros like buttered shrimp on a skewer.” Cerridwen lifts the crutch and thumps the blunt, metal-capped end against the gritty tile for show. “I won’t be flyin’ the vanguard any longer, that’s plain as day, but I can still hold my own. More than spry enough to spend a few moons whipping late-bloomers like you into shape.”

When Sylvia doesn’t appear visibly chastened enough for her liking, Cerri bonks her shin with the crutch-tip.

“Oi. I’ll tell you now– try going easy on me once we’re up to lance drills, and I’ll kick your arse so hard your Daddy Margrave’s balls’ll ache.”

Terrible mental image, thank you! Certainly going to see that one added to the nightmare rotation!

Now that she’s had a minute to settle, Sylvia actually looks at the pair of pegasi, and neither of them stir up that sense of nostalgia come to life she’s gotten from the captain. She knows she’s already stuck her foot in her mouth, but the prying question dribbles out nonetheless.

“Duly noted. So, you’re not flying– What was it, Eri… Erianna, anymore?”

An invisible stormcloud rumbles behind Cerri’s eyes for a spell, until it’s blinked away, the pain crammed back into its compartment and duly locked. The question would’ve come up sooner or later, best to have it out of the way.

“Shot down by the Archbishop’s bootlickers, not long after our little ‘get-together’ at Magdred, as it happens. Fought through it like a champ, she did – crossbow bolt to the lung, another two in the flank, and still had it in her to ferry me ‘cross the border into Arundel before she couldn’t take my weight… Might still have a workin’ leg, if she hadn’t landed on it. Not her fault, no.”

Cerridwen’s eyes remain bone-dry, but painfully wistful, as she slams the door on that memory, aiming the tip of her finger right at Sylvia’s chest. “Let that be your first lesson, girl. You nurture the bond ‘tween rider and steed, and that be-sainted brat of a flying horse will fly through the fires of Ailell to keep your sorry carcass intact, even if you tell them ‘no.’”

“Ah… Shit, I’m– I suppose I only met her the once, but she seemed… nice? For a pegasus? If she’d bucked me off just because she was cranky that night, I might’ve never figured out I was… Ergh, you know what I mean. I owe her a hell of a lot.”

Wow. Real eloquent, Gautier. The practice of making sympathies sound sincere is a new field for Sylvia, after years of crooning empty comforts to crying maidens from behind that masculine mask nailed to her face, buttering them up in a process she’s ashamed to admit was downright transactional. An equation. Cheap sympathies, multiplied by pretty girl in need of an open ear, equals a bump in reputation and an evening spent muffling the dark voices that haunt her with a ‘real’ woman’s thighs wrapped ‘round her head.

Utilizing that sixth sense instructors always seem to have for catching their students’ wandering minds, Cerridwen clears her throat. “That you do. And since she’s off gobblin’ oats in the equine afterlife, you’ll have to settle for payin’ it forward, instead. I’d say you can start right here.”

The captain wedges her crutch under an arm and crosses to lean on what must be her own chosen mount, its tack lacking the same freshly-oiled sheen as the steed she gestures towards with a showman’s sweep of the hand, and a waggle of brows.

For so long as she has left to live, Sylvia Gautier will have no hope of dodging the Horse Girl allegations, because when she regards this pegasus before her for the first time in earnest, knowing it as her own, she materializes a frighteningly strong opinion that hers is the prettiest damned sky-pony in the whole Adrestian army, bar none.

One could guess its pedigree from a single glance at its coloring; nearly inverted from the more conventional image of a pegasus, its solid black coat and the liquid-midnight sweep of its mane and feathers easily mark it as one of Nuvelle’s Nightwings – formerly, a more modest ‘Nuvelle Sable,’ until a certain overzealous heiress rebranded every remaining export of her defunct House for additional marketing flair.

Whatever their title, they’re a breed famed for more than looks, touting an affinity for impeccable aerial acrobatics and a borderline-reckless refusal to balk in the face of even the flashiest magic. A breed of such rarity since the fall of House Nuvelle that their number must scarcely breach triple-digits across the whole of Fódlan.

And they’re just giving one to her? Sylvia? A late-blooming first-time flier, and part-time owner of a death wish?

“A dark horse from a dying family, huh? Guess that makes two of us. Does it, er…” Sylvia hunches over for a quick gander at the undercarriage, grimacing at the bitter irony of upholding the sex-gender conflation even outside her own species. “Does she have a name?”

“That she doesn’t. Stablemaster’s pitched a few stand-ins to sort her out from the others, not that any have stuck, and she’s yet to have a proper rider since they flew a few of her kind up from the Viscounty, few moons back. Honor’s all yours, if you’d like, but it’s not me you’ll have to convince.”

Okay, don’t fuck this up. First impressions, and all.

“Er, hey there. I’m Sylvia. Which… I suppose you already heard. Right. Sorry to say I can’t speak horse as well as Marianne, or else I’d ask if you had a better name in mind. I know it’s not as gloomy-grandiose as a fine lady like you deserves, but…”

Keeping her movements slow and predictable, Sylvia brings her forehead to rest against the side of the creature’s muzzle. “Level with me here: are you gonna bite me if I call you Laetitia? One snort for yes, two for no.”

Admittedly, the whuff from the beast’s nostrils sounds more like a laugh at Sylvia’s expense, at the mere notion she’d play along with her idiot rider’s games – but with no second snort nor bruising bite forthcoming, Sylvia’ll count that as a win in her book!

As for her choice itself, the name’s been knocking around her head for so long, it slipped her mind that the first human to hear her provide it might possess enough of a Kingdom background to sniff out the origin.

“Laetitia, eh?” Cerri rubs at her chin. “After the first Margravine Gautier? Wouldn’t’ve pegged you of all people for getting homesick.”

As a late tenth-century self-made war hero, first Warden of the Ruska Mountains by decree of ol’ King Banfig, and heritor of the Lance of Ruin, General Laetitia could trace her lineage back to the feared-and-revered Gautier of the Ten Elites, himself.

Admittedly, siding with Edelgard has cast a pall on Sylvia’s by-the-book childhood tutors in recent years, but if the texts had even an ounce of credibility, for three straight years the Srengese ‘hordes’ swarmed down from the north, and for three straight years, their raids broke upon Laetitia’s defenses like an errant wave against the rocky shore.

Whether or not the nomadic tribes of Sreng were truly the instigators, muddled as Fódlan’s Church-approved history has become, Laetitia became renowned as an inspired defender of the people and gave birth to the Margraviate of Gautier.

She’d shot from simple soldier to landed gentry, folk heroine, and bearer of a holy relic in but a few short years, in a time when patriarchal social mores had an even tighter stranglehold on a woman’s upward mobility than they do today, and laid precedent for the Gautiers’ historied role as defenders of the northern borderlands.

A historied role Sylvia’s recently chucked aside in the name of tits and pronouns, but that’s another matter.

“Laetitia, yeah. Maybe ‘Tish’ for short, if she doesn’t veto me. Just a little reminder.” Sylvia can feel that bitter smirk threatening to curl her lips just so, and tries to school it into a less concerning variety. “It was a woman who founded this fucked-up family, after all, so it might as well be a woman who runs it into the ground… right?”

There’s a dull impact against Sylvia’s back, and it takes a second’s pause to realize she’s been whapped with the top of a wing. Pegasi may not be fully fluent in Fódlanic, but they sure seem to recognize a self-deprecating tone when they hear it.

“Or, a woman who puts it right again. Ever think about that?” Cerridwen’s challenging stare leaves little wiggle-room for Sylvia’s usual deflection. “Even if you never set one sorry foot in the Margraviate again for the rest of your days, you’ve already done better for her people than generations of Gautier menfolk running the show… Too craven to do anything but stay in their rut and rot.”

“But that’s, ah… It’s not like I’ve–”

Once she’s wrung out every last drop of enjoyment she can from Sylvia’s chastened puppy-dog pout, Cerridwen lurches back into motion with a scoff. “Saddle up. If we’re going to keep chin-wagging, you’d best learn to do it midflight.”

In a bound-and-a-half, with only a meager hit to her grace from managing the crutch, she swings herself up into the stirrups, and once the cumbersome thing’s tied down to her saddlebags, gestures for Sylvia to follow suit.

As she climbs into place, queasy thoughts of inadequacy re-emerge; fears of being bucked off at any moment by an unfamiliar pegasus who decides the bulk of her feels too much like a man, wrestling in her stomach with old nightmares of tumbling from a great height – whether thrown from the saddle or thrown into a well, rock bottom charges towards you with the same fury.

The trek to the orderly rows etched out amid the clutter of the rooftop training yard is at once an age’s worth of suspense, and not nearly time enough for Sylvia to catch her breath. Wrapped up in the snare of her thoughts, the rebuke of a brother long dead by Sylvia’s own hand drowns out Cerridwen’s guidance until the knight’s already started down the runway.

“...let you fall right out of the gate. Keep ‘er a horse-length behind Gwayn ‘til you’ve a feel for it, and don’t fall behind! Hya!”

Wait, what? Even if Sylvia had uttered her confusion aloud, the captain couldn’t’ve heard; she’s shot forth like an arrow, or perhaps a flier intent on dodging one.

Whatever training Laetitia’s had already keeps her from acting without her rider’s input, a fact that fails to alleviate Sylvia’s stress when her flinch of surprise squeezes the pegasus’ sides in the unspoken signal to Go.

Shit. This is nothing like her hazy, fear-muddled memories of that flight from Garreg Mach, where her sole qualification of ‘having opposable thumbs’ was enough to warrant a participation credit in the affair, whilst Artemis did all the heavy lifting in more ways than one. There’d been no time to overthink, whip her fears into a creamy lather.

Then again, they hadn’t been barreling towards a drop of several stories onto a hard, paved terrace that day, either. Charging blindly into the unknown’s a whole lot easier when peril is but a few feet behind, not dead ahead.

Okay, okay. Think back. How did Ingrid always do it? Ingrid, whom she’s witnessed taking off a hundred times before without a hitch, a sight ingrained deeper in the annals of memory than whatever primer lesson went in one ear and out the other.

Gentle tap from the spurs, that’s all it takes, no need to overdo it; Laetitia’s not a lemming, she knows what to expect. Just lean into the movement, lower your profile, reins angled down, light tap a smidge further back than normal, and–

Solid ground sinks away, and Sylvia Gautier, a young woman once given to brooding on rooftops and pondering tall ledges more than she ought, who measured the course of her life in one long fall down a bottomless well, takes flight.

Yes, there’s a hairsbreadth of time amid the sudden secession of gravity where her stomach surges up to kiss the back of her throat, and subsequent lurch of her heart making a new home in the bowels of her gut. There’s a positively wretched noise like the bleat of a constipated goat coming out of her, somewhere under the deafening rush of wind belting her face and catching underwing, like obsidian sails stretched to either side. There may have been a split-second prayer to a Goddess she doesn’t quite believe in.

But all that? That was just the leap, wasn’t it?

That one glacial wall of terror was the hurdle to clear, not the brisk climb, galloping up some unseen slope towards higher altitudes, nor the sight of terra firma shyly pulling away. This, Sylvia’s already done!

She blinks, and somewhere around the sixth or seventh, it feels like her eyes are finally registering what her anxious gut has known the whole time. A sight her ten-year-old self could only marvel at, pine after, in earthbound futility. That dream of freedom, that once escaped her into the clouds is here in her grasp: safely tucked within a coil of leather reins in her fist, as Sylvia sags forward and wraps her free arm around the side of Laetitia’s neck in a clumsy, and wholly necessary hug, mussing the creature’s mane with a tear-streaked cheek.

“Thank you,” wheezes Sylvia, heart battering itself smooth on the insides of her ribs. “Thank y– Swear on all the Saints, I’m gonna get you so many carrots once we’re home.”

Laetitia, longtime fan of the word ‘carrot,’ nickers her enthused agreement.

The moment’s delicacy is shattered by a projected cough, coming from just above. “Meh, I’ve seen worse,” calls Cerridwen, swooping down to match their altitude in an elegant arc.

Once she’s close enough for Sylvia not to crane her neck to spot it, the snark of her teacher’s tone isn’t reflected in the painfully nostalgic expression on her face– Professor Eisner, flat-faced even in the heat of battle, was no less vulnerable to the understated smile of pride watching her students succeed.

Damn, Sylvia wishes Byleth could’ve been here to see this.

(“If you want to join them,” the Professor once warned, having just shot down a girl who’d yet to face the crucible of her own denial, “I’d first need you to be honest with me... And with yourself.”)

To this day, Sylvia may not know what she wants to do with her life, when the war is over, the lances racked. No clue if she’d ever go back to Gautier, much less if she’d be welcome, nor whether she’d be the right woman to shoulder with responsibility for running the place.

What she does know is that in this very moment, for the time being, this dream might just be enough – to be herself, to fly free, to fight for a cause she feels in her heart is right, amongst a family who’ll love her just for trying. That if she has to die, that she dies as Sylvia.

That tragic mask called Sylvain, with all its hard angles and deep pockets of grief, would never fit over the unabashed smile on her face. Whatever else she’s yet to discover about herself, her needs, her indeterminate goals, Sylvia feels the most honest she’s ever been.

The next hour in the air settles back into comfortable familiarity as a former cavalier, give or take the additional height axis. Captain Cerridwen talks her ears off running through takeoff and landing protocols amid a series of increasingly wild hypotheticals.

Given she’s only just met Laetitia, Sylvia isn’t exactly psyched to picture crash-landing her with a pierced wing, but far better to err on the side of caution, with the phantom crunch of her mentor’s crushed leg in her ears proving a highly-motivational cautionary tale. Once these grislier necessities of the lesson are packed away, the captain declares they’ll focus on feeling out the air currents and high-altitude coasting for the rest of the ‘class period.’

Frontloaded with such an adrenaline spike, finishing out the day’s training with two leisurely loops around the city walls, the salty taste of fresh coastal air in her lungs, feels like slacking off to enjoy the sights: the beating, metropolitan heart of the Adrestian Empire itself reduced to a field of reddish dollhouses at her feet – where a careless tumble from the saddle could crush the Artistans’ District and half the Port Bazaar as easily as a surly Miklan stomping a six-year-old Sylvia’s snowmen.

(And for whatever reason, from up here in the clouds, the ache of such memories feels a million miles away.)

Before long, the dipping sun paints a fiery orange shimmer on the very edges of Laetitia’s pitch dark mane. A flock of gulls milling over the docks squawk indignation as the fliers bank through their turf, and over a neighborhood readying their lanterns for the night.

“So, when are we heading back?” Sylvia shouts towards the front of their humble, two-flier formation. “It’s getting kind of late, isn’t it?”

“I’m your teacher, Gautier, not your babysitter! Lesson’s over, and besides… I know that look.” A steel-plated finger waggles smugness in Sylvia’s general direction. “Half the girls I put in the air get that look after their first run– planning to show off a little?”

“No idea what you’re talking about!” Sylvia lies through her teeth. “Hadn’t crossed my mind, but now that you’ve mentioned it–“

She has to duck a protracted wing as the captain slows her steed unannounced, successfully blowing Sylvia’s bangs every which way with a smack of white-gray feathers, then eases into position at a safer distance on her right.

“Get your girl stabled by midnight, and it’s no skin off my nose. The real education starts tomorrow, so you’d better rest up – might even wish you’d killed me back in Magdred by the time we’re through!” Cerridwen cackles. “Guarantee you’ll be saddle-sore, sick to your stomach, and cursing the sorry, abacus-up-his-arse arithmetician who invented ‘g-forces,’ but that’s the life of a pegasus knight. Welcome to the club, Gautier!”

Signing off with a two-finger wave, the captain pulls a nimble loop-de-loop that terminates in a shallow dive towards their starting point, and leaves Sylvia fluttering in place, considering her options for the evening.

In hindsight, there’s really only one place she could possibly go.

Her course doesn’t deviate that far from her teacher’s, not until they’re close enough for the red ants crawling the dollhouse-scale battlements to start looking people-shaped again. With all due care to come in slowly and avoid an arrow-happy archer getting any wise ideas, Sylvia guides Laetitia towards the eastern side of the Enbarr Palace block, and a familiar patch of greenery and sunset-dyed glass amid the dull reds of the surrounding cityscape.

Of the two separate gardens within the palace walls, the western terrace is oft considered the more luxurious. It’s a far larger space, for one, with an ocean view, seasonal blooms, a hedge maze festooned in topiary, gazebos – Shitty rich nobles love gazebos down here in the south. The tiny botanical garden cordoned off in the east is quieter, more enclosed, and subsequently, the Emperor’s favorite teatime haunt, provided one of the Black Eagle Strike Force can haul her from the bulwark of her desk long enough to partake.

(It also plays host to the greenhouses, and the greenhouses, in turn, frequently play host to Sylvia’s favorite blurry lump of purple.)

Loosing a few leaves from the trees with a flap of her great, obsidian wings, Laetitia slows to hit the ground at a manageable trot. A few faceless soldiers guarding the periphery brace hands on their spears, and are promptly set at ease with a dismissive wave from the Emperor.

Seated in the center of the gazebo-less garden, at a small, uncomplicated tea table lacking even a single lace doily, Edelgard von Hresvelg lifts a cup to her lips, not a single drop spilled in surprise over her uninvited guest.

Her retinue, on the other hand, have mixed reactions. As the Emperor’s newest retainer and exemplar of Adrestia’s progressive knighthood, Ser Ingrid has her face buried in her palm, groaning. Gloomy ol’ Vestra on the other hand, midway through emancipating Edelgard from her horned crown for the evening, looks fit to break into a sweat, with a fumbled hairbrush resting on the tip of a boot.

But, Sylvia’s not here for them.

The greenhouse doors don’t creak open, not when one of their most frequent visitors isn’t keen on drawing attention, and sees to their regular oiling. Dirty trowel in hand, a small bag of some obscure fertilizer under one arm, Bernadetta peeks out through the crack until she catches a glimpse of the rider.

With a gasp, that crack shoots wide, and the archer hustles through with a dozen questions on her lips and only one mouth to try and fit them. The gardening supplies are discarded as an afterthought at the threshold, as Bernie toes as close as her burgeoning courage will allow to the new specimen Sylvia’s perched on.

“O-oh! That was today!? What are you saying, stupid Bernie, of course it was today, she’s already riding the–“ Bernadetta shakes her head to clear the jumble. “But, you did it! W-what’s their name? They have one, right? I don’t want to get bit for being rude!”

Sylvia’s chest tightens, in that good, cathartic way an excitable Bernie never ceases to bring about. It’s surreal, remembering they met as two outcasts-of-sorts, failed nobles both, disappointments to their houses, equally terrified of sharing their true selves with others for fear of retribution.

Here, now, a newly-anointed pegasus knight eases out of the saddle, and takes a renowned master archer’s hand in her own to guide it against her mount’s mane to make introductions. Not shambling blobs of shame and self-hatred, but members of the Black Eagle Strike Force, known faces in the war for Fódlan’s freedom from oppression, allowed to be people instead of afterthoughts in the book of bloodlines.

Would that life-loathing ‘boy’ and the hopeless recluse, barely more than strangers whisper-shouting in the Garreg Mach library over a misplaced erotic romance manuscript, even recognize them like this– chattering themselves breathless as Bernadetta holds up a few leaves of freshly-pilfered greenhouse cabbage for Laetitia to munch on?

Sylvia feels kinda floaty, to be honest. The soreness in her legs is distant, waiting offstage rather than interrupting the scene at hand. Maybe the ups and downs and existential shifts of the day are catching up to her. Everything’s got soft edges, and tiny details feel more poignant than ever… Though, half of those details belong to the young woman standing on the other side of a preening pegasus’ head from her, lips twitching as Laetitia’s tongue skids over her palm in pursuit of the last leafy bits on offer.

With golden daylight dwindling behind the bulk of the palace high around them, and the lamplighters loathe to intrude on Her Majesty’s relaxation, the brightest lights left in the garden are the magic, flameless lanterns from behind the greenhouse glass, lending them each a hint of ethereal blue-green glow.

And sure, it does wonders for Laetitia’s naturally mystical vibe, that’s great, but Sylvia’ll think fancy, painterly thoughts about her pegasus some other night, when it’ll be easier to tear her eyes off of Bernadetta von Varley.

Because, like– here’s the thought that jumped Sylvia like an alley prowler and mugged her for all her brain cells: Bernadetta’s always been cute, duh, that’s a fact you’d have to fistfight the entire Strike Force to disprove, but…

Has she always been this pretty?

They’ve both grown a lot, in some cases literally – Bernadetta’s actually taller than the Emperor, now, much to the latter’s chagrin – but there’s something more. Her twentieth is coming up this winter, but it’s not age by-the-numbers that’s been lending her this newfound maturity. Baby fat burned away by warfare, sculpting a cutesy cherub into something verging on angelic? After all, the timeliness of her arrows have gotten her labeled a guardian angel more than once!

All this time, Sylvia’s been fighting to be worthy of calling herself a woman, and that’s one thing, but… in her own way, Bernadetta’s fought through to reach womanhood, too. The kind that inspires Sylvia to feel something more than envy or lust alone, an undercurrent to their friendship as inescapable as gravity– and even a pegasus knight can’t fight gravity forever. They’re gonna fall sooner or later.

“Sylvia?” Bernadetta asks. Her head cocks to the side, and her bangs tangle in a way that practically begs a hand to brush them back into place. “Did… Did you wanna try feeding her, too?”

“Huh? Oh, no, that’s– I can do that whenever, back in the aerie. You go ahead!”

Fuck, if Sylvia didn’t know any better, she’d wonder if this incessant tug in her chest was...

Fate, Karma, the Will of the Goddess, whatever one wishes to call the great cosmic killjoy, simply isn’t having it when a certain pair of hazel eyes link up with gray in this tender moment. For once, they stick without flinching, without panic or bluster, even as six seconds becomes seven, a damning eight.

Whatever thoughts might’ve been percolating are knocked over when metal rattles over stone, the bubble of wonderment burst by an iron-backed chair when Her Imperial Majesty pushes up from her spot over at the garden table.

“As a leader who endeavors not to dismiss the more personal plights of those under my command,” she begins primly, “it would be unbefitting for me to gloat, or say ‘I told you so,’ of this I am aware...”

With a sweep of crimson cape, Edelgard readies to return inside, pausing only to reach for the last biscuit on the tea service tray, and dip one edge into the dregs of her cup. “Ser Ingrid?” she prompts.

Hand to her heart, the knight bows her head in respect as her liege departs, only to snap up and stare Vestra, Bernadetta, and finally Sylvia dead in the eye.

“She told you so.”

Chapter Text

“ ...But, what of my wicked step-uncle,” she exclaimed, “if he catches you speaking to me, if he discovers you’re a–“

With a tired smirk, the witch-knight pressed an armored forefinger to Brunhilde’s lips. “I know how my kind are seen, and it dissuades me not. By your judgment alone shall I abide; neither your dastard uncle, nor the Shade-cult, nor the crusaders of the Boreal Tsar himself could strike me down ere I wrest you from the shackles of that false betrothal.”

“Oh, Ser Soleil,” cried Brunhilde, grasping fervently for the taller woman’s cheeks, “one day, we shall quit this place togeth–“

“Bernadetta!”

“ Yeep!”

In a violent rush, the cloudy comforts of Bernadetta’s incredibly vivid brainstorming session are stolen away on a gust of frigid, wintry air, hauling her back to the present moment by force.

Crouched across from her on the dusty planks of an old wooden longhouse, a small, half-shaded lantern lends a dim glow to the shape and sharp eyes of Shamir – former Knight of Seiros-turned-mercenary captain, fighting under the twin-eagle banner of Adrestia.

Bernadetta was always a little spooked by her back in school – she walked with the same silent steps Bernie’s aimed to master herself, yet none of the anxiety that always led to getting caught, or startled into a revealing yelp – like, y’know, just a second ago.

Shamir had seemed loyal to the Archbishop back then, attached at the hip to that one lady-knight – only to resurface alongside that Leonie girl from the Golden Deer, wrangling the wayward survivors of Ser Jeralt’s mercenary company back into a cohesive unit heavily favoring contracts against the Knights of Seiros.

(Yes, Bernadetta knows she can still be a little naive at times – try ‘almost all of the times’ – but she knows a personal stake when she sees one. No Bernie-bear’s poking that bear any time soon!)

The lantern’s barely bright enough to keep them from straining their eyes, and the narrow window running the length of the rustic longhouse offers little aid – it’s a punishingly dark, moonless night out there, with intermittent flurries of snow sugar-dusting the dead grass of the Faerghan borderlands.

Spread across the opposite incline of this narrow valley sits tonight’s target, tucked away between the northern ridges of the Oghma mountain range, presently under Adrestian control, and the southernmost hills of Charon. Overlooking a winding dirt road that has long since lost its status as a popular land trade route since the war’s outbreak, the humble mining village of Renby sprawls drunkenly up a series of staggered plateaus, like mismatched stairsteps built by a half-blind architect several hours deep in his cups.

Her Majesty’s spies relayed the Kingdom’s intent to annex Renby, shipping the villagers out in discrete caravans and seeding the place with soldiers, building up fortifications under the guise of thatched-roof cottages and ramshackle barns. This quiet route has been a blessing for the few neutral merchants in central Faerghus still amenable to trade, and any Imperial fliers on northbound scouting runs– and thus, if a kingdom outpost were to spring to life on these hilltops, bristling with a dozen ballistae, seemingly overnight?

That would be… well, that’d be really, really bad! Which is why it won’t be happening, not when Edelgard has Bernie on the case!

Cupped carefully in her knuckles to conceal the smoldering tip, Shamir raises a tiny bundle of rolled herbs to her lips and inhales; the way she pushes the resulting smoke out of her nose in a tiny, fragrant cloud sorta reminds Bernadetta of a fire-breathing wyvern.

“Focus up. We’ll have confirmation on the targets soon, once…” Wrinkling her brow, Shamir pauses until a muffled, gargling cry of terror shuddering up from the root cellar door subsides. “Once Vestra’s man is done wringing out our guest.”

“R-right! This Bernie’s ready for action!”

Setting aside any unsettling interrogation tactics currently in play, Bernadetta loves stealth missions, as a matter of fact! They’re basically what she’s been training for her whole life – staying unseen, unheard, un-perceived in every way possible, staking out locations for prolonged stretches, with plenty of downtime to let her mind wander!

But, um...

Bernadetta reaches for her rucksack and sets her fidgety hands to restringing her bow in preparation, and unsurprisingly, that wandering mind of hers leaps at the opportunity to drift towards a certain subject, a certain individual– the same one it’s been gravitating towards the last few moons, no matter how much Bernie scolds herself.

While her various hobbies help curb stress and curtail unwanted thoughts, Bernadetta’s creative writing pursuits have always been the best diversion, serving as both a dumping ground for her messiest feelings, and a pleasant, productive distraction from them!

Usually.

“Are you actually ready?” Shamir inquires. The razor-sharp eyebrow she raises Bernie’s way could cut glass. “Or have you been fussing over your little crush?”

The accusation buries itself dead-center in the bullseye beating inside Bernadetta’s chest. The way her voice cracks halfway through her protest doesn’t help. “N-no, I’m– And there’s no ‘crush!’ Bernie’s not in the business of crushing anything!”

“Uh-huh.”

“ It’s true!” whines Bernie, who has never been good at lying – another reason she’d always fail her father’s ‘good wife’ lessons as a kid.

Shamir won’t let her off the hook that easily, alas. “Any time I see you staring into space like that, it’s either because you’re having a panic attack…” Those herbs are brought to her lips again, and she meets Bernie’s eyes through the measured exhale of smoke. “Or because you’re daydreaming about the featherbrained sap you’ve got wrapped around your little finger.”

This is patently untrue! Bernadetta has, in fact, been drafting a new entry for her latest tale – the harrowing, but hopefully heartwarming saga of the exiled witch-knight, Soleil De Galanterie, whose nomadic struggle, several installments ago, brought her stumbling across the path of the utterly original, yet very relatable protagonist of her last series – Brunhilde of Bjorn, daughter to the late chieftain of the half-bear laguz folk!

And oh, the angry, blistered brand between Soleil’s collarbones marked her body as profane – a blasphemer punished for seeking heretical enlightenment from the Flame of Truth – yet Brunhilde oft could think of little else but her yearning to rest her head atop it and know the gentle drumbeat of the witch-knight’s steadfast heart.

In the latest chapter, Brunhilde has been trapped behind enemy lines, but she isn’t afraid! Before parting, her trusty companion surrendered to her an enchanted, undying ember – a fragment of the witch-knight’s own inner flame now awaiting Brunhilde’s command, lending the power to light a hexed beacon and summon Soleil’s magicks unto–

“See? She’s doing it again,” Shamir drones to some unseen newcomer.

Oh, darn it! Bernadetta hadn’t even heard the cellar hatch rattling open. The head peeking out isn’t the beak-masked mage they’ve been waiting on to confirm just which part of the hornets’ nest is safe for kicking, but that of Petra, the last in their trio of accomplished archers.

The Queen of Brigid – Edelgard’s insisted upon use of the proper respects, even with coronation delayed ‘til after war’s end – crawls up from the dusty cellar with leonine grace, taking up position between Bernie and Shamir.

“Because of the fearing, or the crushing?” she asks, peering closely at Bernadetta’s face. A heartbeat later, her eyebrows pop, and she answers her own question. “Ah! The crushing, then. You should really be doing something about that, Bernadetta.”

Shamir chuckles that low, smokey laugh that sounds the way whiskey smells, passing Petra her bow from the jumble of supplies heaped in the corner. “How do they put it, here in Fódlan? 'Shit or get off the chamber pot?’ ”

“Shamir!” Petra laughs, sounding only a fraction as scandalized as she must’ve intended.

“What? It’s true. Same advice I gave your Emperor – not that it sounds like she’s listened, yet.”

Come on, this isn’t even fair, ganging up on her like this! Making all sorts of completely unfounded accusations that might worm their way across the grapevine to certain people who might get the wrong impression and hate Bernie forever and never let her practice flying on her pegasus again!

“I-it’s not like that!” exclaims Bernadetta. “I’ll have you know I was thinking about a story I’m writing; Sylvia has nothing to do with–“

It’s common knowledge that Bernadetta von Varley isn’t a woman prone to frequent swearing, courtesy of her father’s wifemaking education. Her inner voice, on the other hand, has no qualms in belting out a resounding ‘fuck.’

The other two archers chatter amongst themselves for a minute as Bernadetta spirals, the river of anxious thoughts racing but utterly opaque. By the time someone throws her a rope, Petra and Shamir have swapped places, as the latter reaches over and gives Bern’s shoulder a shake to ground her.

“Hey. I’m not messing with you, here. This whole thing between you and Gautier...”

With the limited lighting, it’s difficult to tell whether the woman’s face even looks any more ‘serious’ than usual, and her voice has scarcely budged. She’s speaking more slowly, though, and while her brows retain their stern slant, something in her eyes is soft enough for Bernadetta’s soul to squirm back into her body.

“Women from Faerghus can be dense about their feelings, and that goes double for their knights. Take it from somebody who’s already learned her lesson, partnering with one. Tell ‘em and get it through their thick skull, before it’s too late.” The Dagdan sniper settles back on her haunches, then, leaning against the window’s outcropping in a rare avoidance of eye contact. “Before you lose them– To another woman, to their own recklessness…”

Oh.

It’s like reaching for a single book and toppling the entire shelf, instead. Bernadetta feels like she’s filled in one stray plot hole and suddenly the whole narrative plays out more cleanly than she’d ever intended.

She stops herself before she can blurt out a ‘Sorry.’ Shamir’s probably too cool and mature for empty, obligatory sentiments. Bernie just shuts her eyes and gives a slow, single nod, barely a dip of the chin – which works, because Shamir coolly returns it before resuming her vigil.

This doesn’t last long, as the wooden cellar hatch groans open again, its weight crinkling the wonky hood of the dark mage underneath. “Miladies,” they grunt, then gesture Shamir over with a suspiciously-stained glove. The mage’s weird, beaked mask adds a haunting sort of echo to their words as they relay the results of their ‘information-gathering,’ proving Edelgard’s hunches to be right on target:

Fearing the resurgence of the Imperial Air Cavalry across the surrounding territories, the Kingdom has already concealed several state-of-the-art, swiftly-reloaded ballistae among the shacks and shanties of the innocent village-folk who’ve yet to be moved, indistinguishable from afar.

For all that Lady Edelgard was technically pretending to be that scary Flame Emperor for a while, and how she’s made a whole bunch of tough judgment calls over the course of the war, it’s no secret that her weakness – in the eyes of more conventional generals – is her mercy.

No matter how simple it would be, Edelgard could never order catapults to raze Renby in its entirety, nor the mage corps to smoke the knights out with a wildfire, simply to curb the threat to her fliers and supply caravans. Thus, the bad guys must assume, she’ll either waltz into the trap and take terrible losses, or pull her forces away, conceding this territory as an unavoidable sacrifice!

Ha. Not on Bernie’s watch, no sir! Or, uh, Shamir’s, either, or Petra’s, or– Well, there’s also the scouting detachment on standby to the south, so them, too… Not on all of their collective watches. There we go.

While Shamir finishes going over the map with Vestra’s mage, Petra unfurls a bundle of very special arrows, portioning out a few for each of them. “I was once joking that the old Bernie was like prey – but Shamir speaks true,” she muses over her work. “Perhaps the new Bernie is needing to be the hunter, yes? ”

The thing is, Bernadetta’s already a hunter. She hunts! ...For food, that is. And when she hunts, she gets all wracked with guilt about hurting the poor things, and the only thing worse than striking true and bringing them down in a single shot is bungling it up with nervous butterfingers and leaving her prey wounded, fleeing off into the night, too far gone for Bernie to make up for her mistake!

Can she even risk that, with Sylvia? The knight once said she was still attracted to other women – and Bernie isn’t even touching how she stumbled headlong into acknowledging her own same-gender attraction because of her – but this whole time, the whole war, Sylvia’s barely flirted with anyone , not even as a clever tactic to duck stressful conversations!

(A completely unrelated, 100% academic, theoretical inquiry raised with Manuela a couple moons back revealed that some who take the same ‘corrective medicines’ have been said to lose their bedroom passion; is Sylvia in the same boat? Would she even interested in romance anymore, let alone, er... that? Much less with a weird, unmarriageable, clumsy ol’ Bernie-bear, who can only turn heads with her panic and never her looks?)

Sylvia’s so nice, and funny, and… and patient, the way she doesn’t hate Bernie for her ‘episodes,’ just like she tries not to judge Sylvia for those really depressive days. Oh, or when she offered to teach Bernadetta how to fly – not for battle or anything, just for fun, because it’s breathtaking once you soldier through that initial bout of absolute terror! Pegasus knights’re famously protective of their mounts, but Bernie gets to come in and feed Laetitia leftover seeds and greenery whenever she wants!

And no matter what those faceless jerk soldiers spreading rumors like to say, Sylvia’s pretty, too – even a little cute, if Bernie’s allowed to say that! L-like, those oversized armored bear stuffies at the markets – a big but soft, tough but cute, self-warming stuffie that Bernadetta sometimes wants to grab and drag into her bed and squeeze close all night and find out what sounds she makes when–

“We’ve got confirmation.” Shamir slides back into position. “Looking at seven emplacements assembled across Renby, nine total, so we’ll offset three volleys. First things first – Bernadetta, sight the top plateau, third shack from the left. Petra, next row down, in the woodshed behind...”

Bernadetta sets down a knee and crouches higher, lifting her bow onto the sill. A distant mote of light from a patrolling guardsman – dressed as a peasant, but forgetting to shed a soldier’s swagger, nor conceal the fine steel sword at his hip – crosses right in front of Bernie’s target.

The sniper has her mark.

With the order given, Shamir softens again, long enough to add one final aside in their personal chat: "You're an archer, she's a pegasus knight – so do what archers do best, and pin her down before she flies away." She tips her head towards the opposite plateau, then holds out the smoldering end of her rolled herbs. “You’ve got the first shot.”

Bernadetta raises one of her special arrows to meet it, a shaft with a thin bundle of cloth sealed behind the head with twine. A single tap is all it takes to spark, and the copper sulfate salts within begin to react, counting down mere seconds until they’re due to erupt in an unnatural, unmistakable green flare. She nocks it without delay, and her companions do the same.

Okay! Just gotta… adjust for the added weight on the arrowhead, account for wind direction...

The diluted divine blessing in Bernadetta’s bloodstream cracks an eye and rouses as it feels her ready for battle, the Lesser Crest of Indech adding its off-beat timpani to her heartbeat, magic rumbling through her finger bones and curving up the bend of her shoulder.

(...and such magicks were never the princess’ forte, but all t’would be in vain – the laguz refugees’ lives forfeit – had she given herself to doubt. With fair Soleil’s sculpted features centered in her mind’s eye, Brunhilde cast forth the hexed ember, and commanded the witch-knight’s fires of justice to...)

Knuckles twitch. She lets fly.

Too dim to discern the vanishing shot through the flurries, all becomes breathless uncertainty. Not until, a small eternity later, the highly-flammable roof of the annexed hovel ignites with a bright, emerald beacon. Bernadetta feels bad for the folks who’d lived there before, but not as much for the soldiers who rush out in confusion, shouts a distant murmur, about the roof – Now two, now three! – transformed into eye-achingly strong alchemical signal fires.

In the lull, the three archers divvy up their arrows, ready to light the next volley to come, just as soon as…

High above the sheet of clouds that moonlight can’t hope to pierce, a midnight sun roars to life above Bernadetta’s mark, as a Heroes’ Relic taps its bearer’s matching crest and begins to resonate. Another Relic shines forth to join it, offset a ways, followed by a darker, purplish curl of angry dark magic even further out, but Bernie keeps her eyes frozen on the first.

(Sylvia once said previous bearers of the Lance of Ruin called this technique Ruined Sky, but from where Bernadetta’s sitting, it’s the ground about to take the brunt of the relic’s wrath.)

Amid that distant haze, a pegasus knight astride a steed as black as the night itself stabs her relic spear towards the hidden siege weapon far below, and a fiery afterimage surges forth from its tip.

Hurtling towards ground level, the phantom spear tears through the hut’s roof like wet parchment and detonates the Kingdom’s finest military engineering with the force of a half-dozen black-powder kegs. The tightly-contained borehole of a crater left in its wake seethes with molten metal and superheated stone, whilst the darkened homes to either side catch little more than splinters.

Surprising very few, Bernadetta isn’t accustomed to feeling powerful. Oh, she’s been told she’s clever, quick, and keen-eyed on a regular basis, and a valuable friend with a good heart, all that stuff. She’s been commended for adapting well to a life where dealing death becomes routine, for what little it’s worth, an adolescence of anxious dissociation dulling the claws of guilt-borne nightmares.

But when she watches the systemic decimation of a formidable, foolproof strategic offensive by the Church of Seiros unfold without even a single Imperial casualty – when her brain begins to catch up to her heart, reflecting on that implicit trust in Sylvia, Sylvia’s in her, and how together they’ve kept on stealing little personal victories from the jaws of unavoidable loss…

Bernadetta von Varley finds herself feeling just that little bit more powerful.

Maybe powerful enough to go on the hunt.

“Are you sure it’s not too late to take a vow of silence? Pick up that, uh… interpretive Morfisi hand-sign stuff? Because–“

Dorothea pays Sylvia’s usual complaints no mind, merely pressing a mug of tea into her hands on the way back to her seat. The songstress slides onto the plain, wooden stool by the vanity with the sort of dainty pomp Sylvia could only dream of accomplishing with her own cumbersome proportion, almost laughably elegant – considering the dingy tent environment and their mutual exhaustion.

“Oh, I might’ve prayed the Goddess would strike you mute once or twice, but that ship’s long since left the harbor.” Dorothea leaves her own drink to cool to one side of the vanity, which, not to split hairs, is just a flat plank balanced on two wobbly sawhorses with a mirror on top. She goes to adjust her hair, but catches Sylvia’s eyes in the reflection and squints.

“You know, it would be easier if you kept up with the exercises on your own time. I’ve got big plans in the works, and I’m not about to have you show up to the festivities with a throat too sore to speak. Now, go on, drink up!”

One hand raised in surrender, Sylvia lifts the mug and inhales deeply, drawing in the lemon and ginger-root scent that’s quickly grown so familiar. Her overtaxed vocal cords, formerly in open rebellion over their mistreatment, are placated by warm relief the tea brings as she gulps down a full half of it in one go.

So, Sylvia’s gotten to be a pretty okay pegasus knight over the last few years – and that’s great! Youthful dreams coming true in grisly grown-up clarity aren’t all for naught, and Cerridwen’s turned out to be a surprisingly patient instructor, if one learns to spot the care behind the casual heckling. Unfortunately for Sylvia, managing high-speed aerial acrobatics and martial discipline atop a living creature with a mind of its own is nothing compared to the rigors of learning femininity at large.

Which is a lot of schmancy words to say things like ‘loitering in Dorothea’s tent getting laughed at while the diva runs Sylvia through vocal drills.’ She’d rather spend an evening mucking out the Strike Force’s stables in their entirety than plant her ass down and listen to her own deep, wretched, undeniably unfeminine voice crack and wheeze as Dorothea insists she’s forgetting to ‘raise the larynx’ yet again.

But, here she’s ended up, regardless; joining Dorothea for the choir practice from hell once or twice a moon, provided they’re deployed together and not paralyzed by the post-battle shakes. The return trip from securing Renby’s proven relatively bloodless, and paid off with some hard-earned breathing room.

“Festivities?” asks Sylvia, absently swishing the rest of her tea in slow circles. “Thea, if you think you’re actually going to get Edelgard to sign off on a party this y–“

“It’s not going to be an anniversary ‘do.” Dorothea huffs, tossing her hair over one shoulder. “I couldn’t care less about the calendar; we’ve all been in a rut for moons and something needs to break up the monotony before I scream.”

Sylvia allows herself to be a little proud that her relationship with Dorothea, once nothing more than a heap of empty catcalls, has developed into something real enough to read between the lines; even call her out as a friend, rather than a nosy bitch.

“Meaning, an excuse to get dressed up and drink without everyone pitying you for doing it alone?” Sylvia smirks as Dorothea flexes her fingers to summon an unfinished Reason magic glyph, then lets it fizzle back into thin air. “Explains why Mercie’s back to snooping about my sizes– you two’re still trying to fit me for a dress, aren’t you? I’m telling you, with these shoulders I’d look like–”

The songstress pulls a pouty little moue at her. “It’s not fair that you haven’t gotten to try, after all this time! Every woman deserves one good dress in her arsenal and a chance to strut her stuff– Even our sweet Ingrid has an emergency gown packed away, and she’s more…” Dorothea twiddles her fingers in a circle. “You know, playing the dashing lady-prince angle, since we all know Edie’s a sucker for it.”

Pretending to know what half of that even means, Sylvia just nods. By the time she’s drained the rest of her tea, her voice, while still uncomfortably ‘guyish’ to her own ears, sounds less like a cat hacking up a hairball.

“Still– Hckh. Ahem. Still think you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you, making this work.” Sylvia drops off her empty mug next to Dorothea’s, eyes automatically avoiding any unnecessary glimpse of her own reflection in the mirror. “Not exactly an ‘hourglass figure’ under all these layers, in case you’ve forgotten.”

"Ha! Sylvie, sweetie, I'm from the Opera. ” Dorothea reins in her tittering, quickly throwing on a deadpan look as she leans in, crooking one perfectly-plucked brow. “You think I haven't done costuming for women like you, or men going the other way around? People who felt typecast into one miserable role they could only ever escape on stage?”

“Um,” says Sylvia, who clearly hadn’t.

Dorothea retreats with a coquettish grin, kicking her legs up to lounge – rather purposefully tossing them across Sylvia’s lap at a crooked angle, just to be a nuisance. Casual, platonic intimacy like this would’ve been unthinkable to the hollow husk of her school days; no ulterior motives, no flirty advances. Endless bloodshed makes it crucial to cherish this sort of thing.

Once she’s gotten comfortable – elbow propped on the ‘vanity,’ chin on her fist, one dainty raspberry blown in the face of Sylvia’s indulgent grumbling – Dorothea’s focus trails off into the middle distance over her shoulder.

“The Mittelfrank saw its fair share. Our 1176 run of L’amante del Pirata, we had a leading man nearly miss opening night because our replacement manager booked us for his ‘time of the month.’” Dorothea giggles fondly as she dusts off the memory to indulge a moment of nostalgia.

“We’d been in such a rush, and he had these– These flimsy tearaway trousers meant to rip in the duel at the second act climax, which he’d started bleeding through a full three scenes before the fight! Had to improvise an old war wound that left him limping the rest of the show; audience ate it up, even got it written into his monologues for the rest of the tour...”

Hearing this, when it comes to finding a safe harbor to live openly as herself, Sylvia’s pretty sure she lucked out with ‘the war camp of an idealistic, revolutionary firebrand with a progressive social manifesto,’ but from the sound of it, ‘performing in a touring opera company’ might’ve been a solid runner-up choice. Goddess knows she learned how to play up her fake emotions for an entire adolescence, and presenting herself to the world wouldn’t be half as terrifying with the excuse that it’s ‘all part of the job.’

She’s still yet to make any ‘official’ announcement, even this far down the road from her initial revelation, but is there even a point? Since the day she first flew Laetitia onto the battlefield and dove into the enemy lines together, the final seal on her secret’s been broken.

While the core of the Black Eagle Strike Force and their adjunct battalions have the common courtesy not to go stirring pots on purpose, it comes as no surprise wild rumors have been churning across the Empire, oozing steadily outward across the continent – Sylvia’s not sure just how many actually believe she’s some long-lost daughter of House Gautier, who murdered her ‘twin brother’ to swipe the Lance of Ruin for Adrestia. It must make for better tavern talk than the sordid, unblemished truth.

Whether all that hearsay means her father has heard-say’d about her yet is anyone’s guess. Either she’s stopped receiving mail from up north altogether, or the intelligence officers who undoubtedly snoop through it all might be deigning to burn it before it reaches her hands as an act of mercy.

“Thanks, Dorothea. For all of this. That ‘n putting up with me in general.”

“Don’t you get maudlin on me now. As this army’s undisputed Queen of Matchmaking and Making-over, it simply wouldn’t do for me to give up before the job’s done. I have a sterling reputation to uphold!”

Only a few seconds long, the pair share a moment of quiet, a short-lived ceasefire setting smarm and wit aside. Just long enough to genuinely appreciate the absurdity of friendships forged amid the fires of war between two wounded twenty-somethings who’ve never forgotten the harm they can do to themselves in the absence of friends to keep them steady.

Then the wording hits her.

“Hold on, I don’t–“ Sylvia’s head pops up, sharp. “I don’t need help with any matchmaking, just so we’re clear–“

Dorothea opts to pretend she doesn’t exist. “Why, if you went back to the Academy and told the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Me of yesteryear that one day I’d be giving Gautier advice on how to pick up innocent little Bern, I’d’ve singed your eyebrows off, and yet...”

A rustling of fabrics by the entrance snaps Sylvia’s mouth shut, turning her prospective argument into a muffled, tea-kettle whine. Nerves worn down by constant vigilance into fraying yarn pull taut, too ingrained for rationality to calm them down, until her eyes confirm it’s a friend ducking through the flap.

“More voice practicing?” Petra asks, pumping a fist at Sylvia’s silent nod. “Excellent! You will be making splashes at this secret party of Dorothea’s!”

“Making a splash.” Dorothea’s eyes glint with something wicked. “Though, pretty soon she might be responsible for a different kind of wet spla–“

Eager to smother that topic before it takes off, Sylvia grabs a fistful of the nearest throw pillow and wings it Dorothea’s head. The gamble pays off to some degree, with Petra bemusedly writing off her friends’ antics and occupying herself with stashing her gear for the evening. Sylvia can catch the faintest whiff of smoked meat and wyvernscale oil off her – must’ve flown Árdghal out to catch supper.

Alas, it’s no true escape from the indignity: Getting the last laugh remains one of Dorothea’s dearest hobbies, and their debate endures even as the songstress politely ‘sees Sylvia out’ for the evening, all frantic murmurs and nudges as soon as the queen’s back is turned.

Stepping out into the cool, night air does its part to calm their mutual bluster, as do the soldiers milling the grounds, returning from patrol or winding towards the mess hall for a late supper. Once the closest batch has lumbered by, Dorothea sidles up against Sylvia’s side, staring far up the row of tents to one lonely outlier in particular, always planted on the edge for privacy.

“You’re fun to bully, but right now, I need you to listen: Bern’s come a long way learning she’s allowed to want more than that scum-sucking leech of a father taught her to expect. Wouldn’t it be a pity if the first person she lets herself want is a blockhead so convinced they’re undesirable they won’t give Bern the chance to prove them wrong?”

Ouch, coming for her with no mercy, here. Even spoken gently, Dorothea’s words cut Sylvia clean through, because framing it that way is chilling; she might as well be standing naked out here in the breeze.

“M’kay, that’s… fair enough. But let’s say, hypothetically, that blockhead’s not all that put-together. Maybe they’re just a bunch of gravel clumped together, trying to pass off as a block, but, uh. But, when most people desire… a block, they’ve got expectations, and a real block is solid, evenly-shaped, and–“

Dorothea headbutts her in the shoulder. “Goddess kill me now– Metaphors are not your strong suit, dear. I get it, you’re scared of rejection. You’re scared of setting your sights too high. You’re scared of your body being undesirable, because if you’re undesirable, you’re a failure as a woman– Not to spoil the twist, but that’s modern Fódlanic womanhood in a nutshell.”

Sylvia joins her in a bittersweet laugh, fast to fade. “And people wonder why Edelgard’s burning it down.”

“Good riddance. Romantic Tragedy’s a tired genre; what’s so wrong with a happy ending?” Dorothea reaches around back to hug herself against Sylvia’s side, more and more of that energetic facade peeling away to reveal the heavy-eyed survivor in need of friends to slump on. Sylvia can relate. The height gap makes it feel a bit silly, but hey, they make it work.

“Oh, so you get to mix metaphors, but when I do it–“ No, no, Sylvia cuts herself off there; it’s too easy to ride the spiral of snark up and out, away from the heavy stuff. It’s tempting, and she can’t allow it, not when her heart’s still knocked a half-beat off tempo from the thought of a broken-hearted Bernadetta.

It’s… still impossible, when Sylvia tries to insert herself into the picture. The mental image goes soupy, a blur of finger-painted smudges, not yet able to bank on foolish hopes and believe she could fill those shoes without straining credulity, Especially in light of her own history – how could a former heartbreaker extraordinaire like herself deserve to want things, too?

Crickets chirp their hearts out in the distance. Another soldier ambles by, headed down through the spread of tents; some half-remembered face from the Bergliez cavalry Sylvia worked with once or twice. A wave, a noncommittal grunt of acknowledgment, the usual pleasantries give her time to unjumble the words in her mouth.

“Let’s say someone wasn’t totally convinced they were the ‘desirable blockhead’ in question, but... remained open to advice, just in case?”

Dorothea hums a wavering, five-note chord as she mulls it over, nimbly avoiding the honeyed temptation of the snark-spiral, herself.

“I’m not saying you should ride to market and hock the Lance of Ruin for dowry first thing in the morning, or some other showy gesture to try and take the lead– plenty of women prefer being the one pursued, after all! I’ve certainly been there! If nothing else, just open up to the possibility, give yourself a chance to wake up and smell the roses – or the pitcher plants, in this case. Otherwise, your mutual friends might have to stage an intervention, because you two’ve kept us holding our breath this whole war!”

Hey! Most of that’s fair, Sylvia’ll take it on the chin, but that bit at the end there– Hypocrisy, much?

Sylvia can feel her left eye twitch as she steps aside, gesturing wildly towards the sliver of bronze glowing through the tent’s entrance, towards Petra – Miss Arnault’s wholly-platonic longterm bunkmate, chore buddy, athletic coach, battle partner, hairstylist, and personal Brigidi language tutor of several years.

“ Why, good day, Lady Pot, hast thou met my friend, Ser Kettle?”

For the first time tonight, Sylvia actually scores a hit, and a rosy shade creeps up the mage’s neck. Dorothea snaps back with a barely-audible whisper shout.

“Y-you bite your tongue, novice; I’ve told you, I’m playing the long game, here!” The last three sputtered words are accompanied by pokes to Sylvia’s collarbone. “A commoner and foreign royalty– it takes finesse!”

“Thea, she carries you across camp like a rescued damsel if you so much as stub your toe, she leaves you food when you pull all-nighters in the infirmary, I saw her kiss your forehead– ”

“Who’s to say that’s substantial evidence? The culture’s different down in the Archipelago! More tactile!“

“You’ve never been there!”

“ So? Neither have you!”

(And so it goes.)

After their repartee has run its course for the evening and proper farewells are said, Sylvia drifts towards her own, darkened tent at a thoughtful pace. Her feet take pity and do most of the work for her, amid her growing distraction. As she arrives, she pulls aside the flap, only to feel an urge to pause.

Once more, she looks out towards the far, far end of the uneven rows trailing outward from the encampment’s core, to the tent at the furthest end. If she squints, she can just make out the motions of a shadow cast by candlelight; maybe finishing up a bit of mending, or plotting the next draft for some fantastical story, or sewing big, button eyes onto one of the stuffies intended for war-orphaned children in the villages they pass. The inhabitant of that tent contains multitudes; the opposite of unmarriageable.

Ugh. All those people who say ‘it can’t hurt to ask’ either know they’re liars, or they’ve never loved a friend built into the foundation of a life they’re rebuilding from scratch.

Alright.

Alright, fine.

(Sylvia slips inside her tent.)

Nothing big has to change, no harebrained plans put in play. Aside from the Petra-adjacent skittishness, Dorothea had some pretty salient points, back there. ‘Plenty of women prefer being the one pursued,’ she’d said, and…

(Sylvia strikes a candle, undresses by muscle memory. Her mind’s miles away.)

So much of her personal quest has been a fight. Since that stablehand back in Gautier first barged in on her pegasus-petting at age ten, hollering about what she should-and-shouldn’t do based on the way she was born, it’s all been fighting something, even herself. Fighting simply to prove she exists, more real and tangible than Sylvain ever was.

Sylvain, she thinks, was the classic pursuer. Not because it gave any profound personal satisfaction, but because it was the language taught to him: men take the initiative, the women swoon, babies get made ‘til a crest shows up, the world keeps turning, and if love happens at some point, eh, that’s icing on the cake. Anything else is childish fantasy.

(She knocks back a sleeping draught, portions out her hormone-balancing brew for the morning.)

But in all that time, the couple-dozen beds she warmed playing that role, halfheartedly upholding that endless hunt, was there a single ounce of fulfillment to be had? The occasional bit of physical gratification, sure, but it’s not like that’s what kept her taking tumble after tumble in the sheets.

Goddess, she can hardly envision them, anymore; that long, unsuccessful hunt for relief reduced to a haze of breathy, half-remembered words and vividly-memorized scorn, long-forgotten faces attached to names probably as fake as hers had been. A carefully curated reputation oft omitted the fact she wasn't always the first to wake and flee the scene; philandering 'bad boys' aren't supposed to wake second, feeling empty, used, and alone.

Sylvia doesn’t think she wants to be the hunter, anymore. Maybe she was never meant to be.

(Hair’s taken down, loosened from its braid. She crawls into her lumpy cot, tosses an arm over her eyes. Imagines someone holding her close, tucked beneath the other on her chest.)

Maybe she’d like it, being the one who gets picked, in spite of it all; her body, her personality, her history, her not-infrequent relapses. If she really were worth someone’s effort.

(She imagines giving it all another try, finding what was missing all along, with someone too important to ever rank in relation to old, blurry impressions of skin on skin.)

Maybe this once, she can let herself be a perfectly average, unremarkable woman, with perfectly average, unremarkable hopes of catching someone’s eye. Maybe it’s enough to slow down, lower her guard the slightest bit, catch her breath, smell those pitcher plants.

And that way, unbelievable as it sounds, if the right hunter’s really taken aim at her heart...

There’s no way she’ll ever miss.

Chapter Text

The war has trundled on, as war does: meandering, limping, and dreary.

It’s not the sort of thing Ingrid remembers from the embellished history books, those plucked and trimmed accounts of Fódlan’s myriad wars. Certainly not the fairy tales of her childhood, nor the artful renditions of chivalric lore from her adolescence.

Those scholars painted war with such a lively brush, clashes settled by willpower as much as a soldier’s skill. They espoused that so long as one sowed fealty and righteousness in the fertile field of a loyal heart, they could endure nearly any trial. Surely only the weak-willed, the uncommitted, would ever risk that farm going fallow.

But the bold, bloody crimson of her tabards can’t change the fact Ingrid is Faerghan-born– she’s from Galatea, for Saints’ sakes! Her house in particular knows all-too-well what it looks like when farmers break their backs in futility, struggling to tend a field that fate itself has abandoned to run barren. When the soil is drained of the nutrients needed for growth and sustenance, no amount of tilling will produce a bumper crop.

So, one starves – and what is a years-long war but a famine bent on starving the soul of hope?

As three years of conflict became four, nearly five, the fires've died and passions dimmed, all three nations settling into the long winter of the campaign. Nobody’s itching to dub it a ‘stalemate,’ as veterans know a stalemate is more curse than blessing. The naive can call it a chance to rest, catch your breath – but how, when the enemy might shatter the peace at a moment’s notice?

These days, Ingrid’s fear of catching a blade to the throat or being shot from the sky is a negligible concern, weighed against that soul-deep, sleep-deprived exhaustion piling upon herself and her friends – especially those struggling with terribly complex personal battles Ingrid can’t resolve with her spear: Sylvia’s war to claim her own womanhood, Thea's worsening wartime melancholy, and everything to do with El– er, Her Majesty’s mysterious past, to name a few.

Long story short, morale’s plummeting to all-time lows for all involved, and Dorothea’s overtures about boredom and a dire need for levity, moon after moon, have forced even the Emperor herself to concede her need for a breather.

“To be honest, milady,” Ingrid admits sotto voce, “I’m kind of surprised you finally agreed to it. ‘Girls’ Night,’ and all, at a time like this...”

Tightly clasping the arm of her knightly escort, Her Imperial Majesty matches Ingrid’s brisk, power-walk pace as the pair make the trek from Edelgard’s personal tent to the camp's command center proper. Drawn lopsided around their shoulders, Ingrid’s single, insulated fliers’ cloak can’t exactly shield them both from the cool evening air at once, but far be it from Ingrid to tell her liege to go back and grab one of her own, much less to raise any impertinent inquiries as to why her Lady hadn’t.

She’ll just have to endure. This is fine. Normal. Professional, even! It’s only sort of like hugging, pressed this close together.

Ingrid’s thoughts’ve been beyond reproach over the last quarter-bell, mind braced against straying thoughts, stuck listening to the tantalizing rustle of silken fabrics emanating from the tent behind her. One might think personally attending the Emperor for years might dull that unbecoming, even traitorous curiosity, but one would be dead wrong.

“Am I not to trust my own knight’s counsel? You yourself seconded Dorothea’s proposal,” Edelgard gently rebutts. She squeezes the arm Ingrid’s crooked for her, smiling mildly.

Lady Edelgard’s… probably just staving off the wind chill! Conserving body heat! Even if she weren’t, Emperors are allowed to be a tad handsy with their retainers without it having to mean anything, aren’t they? It’s different down here in the south!

But such excuses have come across weaker with every passing moon, failing to appease the fuzzy, beige-blue wisp in the corner of Ingrid’s eye. The blurry spectre ever-perched on the fringe of Ingrid’s awareness, at the crossroads of Faerghan discipline and faltering sanity, doesn’t heckle her; it’s been silent for some time, now. With each turn of the seasons, Ingrid’s begun to forget the sound of Glenn’s voice, even his image in her memory ground down into little more than an abstract: a stockier, surlier Felix who can only stare sternly at his young widow’s life choices.

Glenn would never have let his family down, of course. Wouldn’t’ve taken up arms against his own countrymen. Wouldn't've helped encourage the heir of House Gautier to succumb to a lifestyle of sin. Wouldn’t’ve been so pathetic, so undisciplined, as unforgivably ill-fated as to find himself slowly, irrevocably falling for the liege who’d accepted his service.

For all that Ingrid’s opened her mind to new ideals, and done her best to shed the old and burdensome, she’s yet to be free of the man she’d never had a choice in loving, nor the guilt over those she did. Over leaving behind blood-siblings who would never choose her happiness, to support the sister she’s chosen for herself.

Before the silent spectre can be joined by more damning proof of Ingrid’s slipping grip on reality – ghosts of the living, her distant brothers, her father, her could’ve-been-King, voices yet to fade like Glenn’s – she’s rescued, as per usual, by her Lady’s mercy.

“No,” Edelgard opts to answer herself, generously avoiding mention of Ingrid’s enduring silence. “We’ve needed this; some lightheartedness, however short-lived, a reminder we’re more than what this war has made of us. I expect I’ll be grateful come morning. Besides, who is to say I don’t have a few schemes of my own at play, tonight?”

Goddess. Ingrid can feel the rosy splash creeping up her neck and across her face from the mischievous glint to the Emperor’s eye, and the knight prays any excess pink can be excused by the evening’s briskness.

Stop overthinking it! Don’t ruin Lady Edelgard’s evening with your stupid wishful thinking!

And Ingrid tries, she does, but Goddess, is that a challenge. Edelgard’s let her hair down tonight, literally. Eschewing her usual crown, snow-white locks flutter down around her shoulders, brushing over a light-red chemise bordering on an adorable cherry-pink.

Though long sleeves are ever-present in the Imperial wardrobe, Ingrid can’t help noticing Edelgard’s hands; the fact that her Lady’s bare, ungloved hands are squeezing her bicep at this moment, a subtle gesture towards trusting their comrades not to balk at the faded scars.

Ingrid kissed that hand, once. A ring on that hand, rather, but– All the same. It felt like she’d made a promise there her oaths could never contain, knelt in supplication at her Lady’s feet, looking for all the world like a statue in the halls of Fhirdiad’s foremost sculptors.

Gah! Focus, Galatea. At least Edelgard isn’t dirtying those feet, tonight, traipsing barefoot across camp; her leather boots look silly kicking beneath her nightgown, with a more tone-appropriate pair of slippers dangling from the free hand swinging at her side. It’s a playful look for a woman she’s seen caked head-to-toe in the blood of zealots, stifling tears at the necessities of war, and that alone makes Ingrid’s traitor heart ache harder.

‘Dressed-up or dressed-down’ was the informal dress code passed along the grapevine for tonight’s impromptu get-together. Ingrid expects most to adopt the latter, leaving the former a convenient excuse to bully certain persons into a makeover, whilst the remainder content themselves with whatever constitutes comfortable evening wear.

And when it comes to Her Majesty’s pajamas – well, Ingrid’s no voyeur, but she’s caught worrying glimpses from the corner of her eye now and again. Hints at just how far those old wounds seem to crawl up Edelgard’s arm, as Ingrid handed her the long, silky undertunic she’s chosen tonight. Again, not her place to nitpick her Lady’s attire, but that thing’s clearly far too thin to stay warm, traipsing around outdoors like this. Just because a mere cold would never fell the former Flame Emperor doesn’t mean Ingrid wants to risk her catching one!

As for herself, unwilling to look too shabby with the Emperor on her arm, Ingrid’s thrown on the laziest iteration of her dress uniform conceivable so as to retain an ounce of dignity– throwing the gold-embroidered crimson doublet over a plain, white tunic, with a lightweight dagger sheath substituting the usual ceremonial sword at her hip.

The others can tease her for insisting on packing a weapon all they like– should an assassin hope to gain an edge on Edelgard while her faculties are impaired, they’ve got another thing coming! It’s not that paranoid, is it? Her Majesty rarely ever ventures out as unprotected as this, her garb minimally-layered, even bordering on dainty; a word Ingrid feels scandalized attaching to her Emperor even inside her own head!

For a blessing, it’s only a short walk. Dorothea’s event-planning efforts have been delayed long enough to plant the Strike Force in a more fortified camp; an Imperial outpost nestled high in the mountain pass bridging Magdred and Varley, built up from a smattering of solemn stone ruins from eras long past. All the core facilities and commanders’ tents’ve been crammed inside an oblong wall of tall, splintery pinewood palisades, high enough to dissuade a prowler, though the biting wind clearly regards them as an afterthought.

Graciously deigning not to disrupt the skeleton crew previously tasked with running the garrison, Edelgard’s recycled their current ‘command post’ from a pantry storeroom, housed in a sturdy – if slightly slouched – stone lodge. Imperial banners hang in parallel with fragrant bundles of drying herbs, furniture of varying levels of finery intermingle with empty wine casks, and the omnipresent war-room table sits arrayed before an old, masonry oven repurposed as a fireplace.

The place dares to border on cozy, despite it all, and as another rude evening chill sneaks over the walls to get the drop on Ingrid, the only thing keeping her from breaking out in a sprint to reach it is the Emperor latched onto her side.

The omnipresent din of military camp living grows louder as the pair zig-zag towards their destination around shallow puddles from recent showers, through changing guards and civilian traders, raucous chatter growing (mostly) intelligible – seems some of the off-duty menfolk have already popped open a few kegs of ale.

Even so, the silence between Ingrid and the woman she’s escorting starts to itch, and for fear of being a damper on her Lady’s mood before they’ve even arrived, Ingrid jumps back in to liven up the lull.

“So, er, would it be presumptuous to ask about these ‘schemes’ of yours, or…?”

It used to feel like someone with large, thick-fingered hands was trying to squeeze her heart like a rotten piece of fruit when Edelgard rolled her eyes at Ingrid; nowadays, she’s learned to differentiate the irritated from the indulgent, and read the tiniest pinch of a cheek for the hidden smile it is.

“You certainly may, but do have some faith in me, Ingrid.” Edelgard slows, Ingrid halting a half-second later before she jerks their arms apart. As the Emperor squints into the red-tinted riot of color made up of mingling soldiers, that nigh-invisible smile perks its way closer to a coy grin. “I suppose that would be one of them.”

Curiosity piqued, Ingrid pries her gaze from Her Lady’s own enchanting ey– Uh. From her… Ahem! She follows the Emperor’s line of sight to a trio of women hastily cutting a path across the dirt thoroughfare. Actually, more like two giggling women hauling along a groaning third, who merely wants to keep her red-haired head down.

Ah. That’s right.

Sandwiched between Mercedes and Dorothea, Ingrid’s found-sister has found herself the victim of quite the makeover in preparation for the night, dolled up prettier than an Enbarr debutante.

Sylvia’s had her hair braided down between her shoulder blades in some high-society style Ingrid couldn’t name to save her life. The remainder, left artfully mussed on either side to frame her face, is tamped down under an amethyst-studded hairband in bronze, undoubtedly on loan from her captors’ bottomless jewelry boxes, same as the earri– Wait, when’d Sylvia get her ears pierced? Is that new for tonight? Saints alive.

They’ve also draped her in a very familiar, very feathery burgundy boa, a gift commemorating Dorothea crushing the Gremory class exams way-back-when. Sylvia’s been all too vocal about her self-consciousness where the breadth of her shoulders is concerned, which might explain her willingness to don something so froofy, to better shape her silhouette.

Ingrid herself would dub it overkill, but then, Ingrid owns a single dress and calls hemlines higher than the shins overkill, so she’ll hold her tongue. Besides, she can’t deny the accessories are fitting accompaniment –  Mercie ‘n Thea have done decent work, painting the other pegasus knight in a sunset gradient; from the bright, fiery reds of her sister’s hair, to that wine-dark boa, rose-gold jewelry, bold eyeshadow and blush, bleeding into the gentle, purplish gradient of her gown.

Over late-night commiserations around the campfire, lengthy marches and airborne patrols, Sylvia’d related to her comrades a sordid tale in piecemeal – of the abandoned well at Gautier’s keep, her history with it, and the unintentionally-pilfered, purple dress a listless child once tried to hide in its depths.

In that confession, she may as well have sealed her fate; with some none-too-subtle prodding on Dorothea’s part, the diva wrung from her enough detail to find its lookalike amid the local markets along the campaign trail, then spruce it up for the occasion – a plum-colored evening gown now embroidered in long, looping strands of gold, in a reasonably modest cut, with only a slightly daring neckline to accent the curves Sylvia’s fought for with every dose of that noxious tonic she’s stuck downing every sunrise.

The trio are too far and bustling too fast for Ingrid to tell, even as they draw close enough to make eye contact, but the way Sylvia’s stumbling like a baby fawn might mean they found a set of those dreadful, spindle-heeled shoes in vogue among Enbarr's nouveau-riche in a size apt to accommodate her.

Already leagues out of her element, Sylvia catches Ingrid’s gaze and drags her feet, mouthing a melodramatic, swooning ‘save me!’ moments before she’s hauled across through the thick red canvas draped over the command post’s threshold.

Ingrid clicks her tongue and shrugs as her sister goes. What could Ingrid possibly do? She’s busy! Tasked with a very important escort! One to whom she leans in and whispers: “When Dorothea gets bored, everyone looks like a mannequin. Better Syl than us; we’ve already paid our dues.”

Edelgard doesn’t laugh enough, that’s a simple fact, so Ingrid cherishes these moments when she’s given the honor of being the cause of one, intentionally or otherwise.

“Quite so,” chuckles Edelgard. “Sylvia masterminded that ensemble you wore for our dance at the White Heron, did she not? And Bernadetta, holding the needle? It is only fair and just that we offer those two a taste of their own medicine, after all these years.”

Having not made any other mention of the Strike Force’s mousy sniper supreme, her casual inclusion in the comment strikes a suspicious chord within Ingrid. Missing a few beats, she glances down at her liege with an eyebrow raised about as high as potential impertinence will allow.

“Sure, but what does Bern have to do with… Oh, don’t tell me.” Groaning out loud would be infinitely disrespectful, so Ingrid keeps it to an uneasy gurgle in her throat as her head sinks. “They’ve gotten you in on the matchmaking, too?”

“I’d hardly deem it ‘matchmaking.’ I would never presume to tell my subordinates whom they’re allowed to woo – they, like yourself, have shouldered the back-breaking yoke of familial expectations on the matter far too long. On the contrary, my aims are merely to remove obstacles and arrange ample opportunity.”

Edelgard isn’t wrong, is the thing, and all ribbing and camaraderie aside, it’s frustrating to watch dear friends tripped up, denying themselves happiness only inches from the finish line.

“Of course, and I want them both to be happy – Goddess knows they deserve it,” says Ingrid, “but some folks might end up taking things a step too far. Did you hear the rumor going around that someone was planning to sneak in a... Uh. A love potion? Or maybe it was a truth potion, which sound awfully fake to me, but either way...“

“Tsk. Don’t be ridiculous,” Edelgard scoffs.

Ingrid’s face is stricken with another faint splash of abashment. “Oh, of course, I didn’t mean– Thea of all people understands the importance of consent whenev–“ 

“I simply recruited Hapi to mention overhearing Dorothea ask Constance about such concoctions within earshot of Caspar, anticipating his inevitable inquiry about the subject with Linhardt, whom I’d already instructed to give a noncommittal answer about their existence, consequently sowing sufficient gossip to set the tone whilst retaining plausible deniability.”

In hindsight, Ingrid shouldn’t be surprised. She herself would’ve tried locking them both in a broom cupboard next time they’re in the capital, but such churlish tactics ill suit Her Imperial Majesty.

“That’s, ah… a bold strategy, milady.”

“Perhaps. But perhaps tonight is the perfect time for boldness. We can’t expect results doing naught but sitting on our hands awaiting Sothis’ Providence, now can we?” Edelgard gives Ingrid’s arm a pat. “Not that I’ve any right to begrudge my friends their hesitation, when I myself have been guilty of the same; withholding the depth of my feelings until it was too late... For my Monica– the true Monica, then for our dear Professor, and now–“

Edelgard catches herself short. Her face is doing that thing it does, sometimes; that strained smile and leagues-away gaze, where it feels like she’s saying three things at once, and Ingrid’s missing two-and-a-half of them. The original Monica, the Professor, Ingrid’s consoled her Lady enough to know the heartbreak attached, but this is the first she’s hearing of any ‘and now!’

So, she asks as much: “And... now?”

And now, Ingrid feels like an ass, because the Emperor’s jolted from her thoughts as though grazed by a bolt of Thoron, mouth uncharacteristically agape for one brief moment, as Edelgard strains to weave a believable bluff Ingrid already knows isn’t where that sentence had been headed.

“And now… with the atmosphere our gracious ‘hosts’ have cultivated, tonight may see us through the end of many a social stalemate,” Edelgard proclaims, decoupling herself from Ingrid’s arm as she starts towards the entrance. “That our campaign has stalled needn’t mean we remain mired in doubt and delay ourselves, wouldn’t you say?”

Off the top of Ingrid’s head, it takes all of four seconds to think up four hapless not-quite-couples in the Black Eagle Strike Force, fluttering around one another in a holding pattern for moons to years, who could use this sort of kick in the pants. “Here’s hoping, milady. I don’t know how much more obliviousness I can take.”

“How ironic,” Edelgard sighs to herself, and ducks through the door.

After a years-long hiatus filled with twists and turns, triumph and tragedy, and an omnipresent dread of imminent death growing more oppressive by the day, it is once more, officially, ‘Girls’ Night’ for the Black Eagles-and-company – No mere ‘every guest at this get-together just so happens to be female,’ but capital-G, capital-N, purposefully-delineated Girls’ Night – and hey, guess what?

Sylvia’s terrified! Wow!

The command post’s been commandeered for the evening, all the usual suspects known for burning the midnight oil either banished or dragged into the proceedings, with scattered menfolk outside either striking out for patrol or gathering in clusters for their own rowdy ‘boys' nights’ in the periphery.

Where huge lamps hanging from the rafters ordinarily burn day in and out to illuminate the strategic map spanning the long table in the tent’s center, tonight they’re dimmed or snuffed to cultivate a warm, relaxing atmosphere. Even the tapestry-scale war map in question, with all its itty-bitty, whittled wooden pieces dictating the fates of countless human lives, has been packed off elsewhere to clear the way for the solace of food and drink.

A few of the loitering ladies have brought their own bedrolls and blankets, amassing unattended cushions from across the camp, seemingly intent on collapsing in a cozy pile by evening’s end. Those considerably more or less daring haven’t bothered, planning on scampering back to their own tents – with or without accompaniment, respectively.

Sylvia’s presence alone has caught plenty of eyebrows tonight, the majority waggling giddily. Easy, she tells herself, like a flight trainer soothing a pegasus foal. It’s just because this is your first time at such a silly, gimmicky gathering since you leapt the fence, or it’s the novelty of the dress, not how horrendously you fill it out. Unsurprisingly, her nerves fail to pick up on the message.

It’s the context, is all. That simple, symbolic two-word title hung over the evening, a callback to the youthful innocence of Girls’ Nights back at Garreg Mach, is a reminder of how far Sylvia’s come from the swaggering chauvinism of the young ‘man’ who’d’ve surely been loitering on the fringes of such an event, playfully heckling attendees with lurid suggestions and unsolicited compliments... The poor dastard.

Thoughts of him always come creeping back to sour these sweet moments, and no matter how many times Ingrid, Bernadetta, Cerridwen, or the Emperor herself’ve reassured Sylvia over the years, the hulking Demonic Beast in her gut won’t stop twisting up her insides with snarls of worry that she’ll never be free of Sylvain. That even should she be acknowledged as herself, her audience will forever be gazing through the context of him, like jagged glass shards clinging to the edges of a shattered windowpane.

Guilt from how she treated others in the depths of her denial, dejection at her inclusion feeling like a sick parody, with her irreparably masculine silhouette and the farcical tone of her voice, and that pure, homegrown self-hatred, courtesy of a Faerghan heritage… It’s all snarled up in there together in thick cords of thorny vine, slick with blood from years of fumbling at the knots.

(How could someone ever find this attractive?)

Whatever. Tonight isn’t all about her, so Sylvia’s better off dropping the ego. There’re others who’ve needed a night like this, as long-rationed hope runs perilously thin – Edelgard, for instance. Sylvia’s been planted near the head of the table, which gives her plenty of time to eye the Emperor.

It’s one of the few times she’s seen Edelgard let herself lapse back into a… alright, Edelgard’s never been ‘carefree’ in her Goddess-damned life, but perhaps an attitude slightly less overwrought with stressful ‘cares,’ a mood only glimpsed in short-lived glimmers when Professor Eisner was alive and well. Sylvia could count those instances all on one hand, with tonight’s events sitting pretty on her thumb.

Edelgard’s smile is muted, a grimace to rival the best of them, but present – and Sylvia’d bet some of that has to do with the blonde knight cozied up to her side– ‘My knight,’ Edelgard sometimes insists when Ingrid is in earshot, and if Sylvia didn’t know any better, she’d think the Emperor enjoyed watching the woman in question flush warm and squirm at the possessive turn of phrase.

In Ingrid’s defense, she began the evening loitering against the wall in perfect parade rest, like the chivalrous sap she is, but one tankard of honey mead and a few wheedling invitations later, the Emperor’s got Ingrid sitting practically thigh-to-thigh, chairs scooted together, the blonde molding into Edelgard’s side more snugly than any noble Faerghan should ever be caught with their liege…

Then again, they’re no longer Faerghans by any measure but birth, are they? A hundred gold says those two’ll finally smooch by the end of the night. Another fifty says Her Majesty has to pick up the slack and order Ingrid to do it ‘cause Ser Galatea’s too worried it’ll cross her honorable oaths – as though Ingrid’s knighting ceremony wasn’t already the most subtextually sexually-charged spectacle Sylvia’s witnessed in her life, and after all those sleazy inns, that’s saying something!

All the more reason Sylvia’s glad her own knighthood wasn’t marked with some oddly-intimate replica of Faerghan ceremony performed kneeling before the throne in Enbarr; it simply… was. Eschewing any of the dramatics Ingrid and Ashe are so smitten with, Sylvia’s made it a point to keep her head down, both on and off the battlefield, lest she give the gossipmongers something to send back to Faerghus.

In fact, allowing herself to be a ‘guest of honor’ for this silly little throwback party might be the closest to center stage she’s allowed herself to come in quite a while, and–

Gah, Dorothea planned that part too, didn’t she? That woman’s too smart for her own good, as much a stage director and dramaturge as a diva, tricking her comrades into confronting their feelings for themselves and others, all under the guise of a single, ‘low-stakes’ night of leisure amid the liminal anguish of the stalemate. How dare she, right?

Like, Thea may’ve been busy primping Sylvia for her dress-clad debut, but there’s no way she didn’t have a hand in orchestrating whoever helped dress Bernie tonight – and that, that right there, might as well constitute an attack on Sylvia’s life, because, Goddess, that is not the sort of apparel one tosses on for a sleepover with the girls. It’s what one lays out when they want Sylvia to asphyxiate after her heart gets stuck in her throat!

Whoever it was, in the end, they knew what they were doing. Lurking in the corner by the oven, using a stretch of stained stone countertop as a makeshift desk to furiously scritch and scribble away at a stack of parchment, Bernadetta’s foregone the comfy, casual bedclothes Sylvia bets she’d’ve opted for had it not been for the meddling of others. Instead, she… She looks kind of–

She’s hot, alright!?

Rather than her softest, cutest nightgown, Bernadetta’s come equipped with a cropped, burgundy leather jacket – the cut not unlike Shamir’s, absent the shoulderpad and sporting a loose hood like Bern’d sewn onto her Academy uniform. Underneath, a breezy, tunic of silky indigo, unlaced to showcase a downright unfair amount of skin, and some lightweight black breeches tucked into her boots, with her sleeves rolled up to boast sturdy forearms that haven’t passed for ‘dainty’ in years.

When she lifts her right hand to sink her quill into its inkwell, the firelight lights up the purplish patterns tattooed along the knuckles of her index, middle, and ring fingers – a birthday present from Petra, specialized prayer marks befitting a fellow archer of utmost skill, and a battlefield companion of Brigid’s queen-to-be. Maybe she was the one who suggested the light dollop of shadow around Bern’s eyes, too, in which case Sylvia isn’t sure if she should be writing a thank-you note or a final will and testament.

Were it not for the squirmy social anxiety, the uncertain smile and the nervous pinch between Bernadetta’s eyebrows, and the comedic clash of her cutesy, hedgehog-embroidered shoulderbag, the other woman would look downright dangerous tonight. Actually, scratch that; she’s already grown into a dangerous combatant over the years, but this is– Y’know, sexy dangerous!

It’s then that, before Sylvia can chase that thought down a highly inappropriate rabbit-hole, Bern catches her eye, squeaks, and glances away, smiling. The status quo prevails, but for how long?

Further casting suspicion on Edelgard’s potential for mind-reading powers, the Emperor finds a lull in the conversation, now that the last few late arrivals have squeezed in around the war table, and taps her wineglass with a fork.

“Ahem. Before the evening’s proceedings unfold any further, I believe there is one order of business best acknowledged in our collective – if fleeting – sobriety.”

Sylvia cocks her head to glare suspiciously at Dorothea, and finds the songstress already grinning her way. Why is she not surprised?

“Since the Black Eagles’ last…” Edelgard sighs, reluctantly soldiering through the silly phrase. “Our last ‘Girls Night’ so long ago, in those final weeks before this war began in earnest, we have collectively recognized a few notable additions to our ranks. Some, to the auspices of the Empire. Others, girlhood altogether.”

The other guests begin to see where this is going, adding some chuckles to the murmuring susurration. Sylvia can see a few sly looks shot her way; Mercedes buries a laugh behind her napkin when Sylvia rolls her eyes, ensuring she doesn’t interrupt Edelgard’s very important, not-at-all improvised announcement.

“Thus, the Council of Imperial Womenfolk shall at last formally recognize the induction of new blood into our family – combat-tested and loyal to the cause of freedom from tyranny, patriarchal and otherwise.”

Heartier chuckles all around, especially now that even stuffy-starchy Edelgard’s getting into the spirit, self-aware of her own tendency to overdo the speeches. There’s a pause, as Ingrid dutifully refills her Lady’s glass.

With enough wine for a nominal toast, Edelgard puts some extra ‘oomph’ turning that bleak smile-in-denial into something genuine, and lifts the glass towards Sylvia. “On this most auspicious occasion, what say you to the nomination, Lady Sylvia of Gautier, Pegasus Knight, Erstwhile Warden of the North?”

The chatter dims to silence. If the crowd awaits a speech, they’ll be sorely disappointed.

“Er…” Sylvia clears her throat. “’I’m sorry, Women?’”

Snorts and one half-cupped spit-take erupt across the room – fingers remain crossed that the laughter’s leaning more ‘with’ than ‘at.’ After a year fighting side-by-side with these ladies, though, the rational voice in Sylvia’s heart reassures her it’s certainly the former. In a realm where her kind are yet declared degenerates by most, shamed and beaten back into the shadows, the more rational voice of her conscience knows nearly every woman in this room, even those who don’t quite grasp the ‘why’ of her, would snap into ranks to shield her from that scorn nonetheless.

Goddess. Sylvia’s face feels hot, bearing attention from so many eyes looking to her with compassion, rather than Crest-thirsty greed or parochial disgust, and a dumb grin so embarrassingly transparent splits her face that she almost fakes a full bladder for an excuse to beat a hasty retreat.

But, it’s much too late for that. The senseless, simpering expression makes its debut in full, as soon as Sylvia’s wandering gaze catches on a beaming face by the far end of the tent, staring straight back through the blur of animated bodies and glimmering candlelight.

Huddled up in the corner atop a freshly-emptied cask sits Bernadetta, still futzing with that same stack of scribbly parchment in her hands. Bern’s no fan of parties, but instead of constantly eyeing the door, the archer’s staring right at Sylvia with a strange, almost dreamy expression, shadow accentuating her eyes until they practically glow. She doesn’t raise her voice over the affectionate jeers, but she lifts a thumbs-up, mouthing something that looks like ‘Congratulations…!’

Sylvia’s heart headbutts the walls of its cage, and something cracks.

The Emperor waits for the chuckles to recede before pivoting to another of their get-together’s guests of dishonor, just across the table from Sylvia: a gloomy woman of regal bearing and wavy raven locks, pale olive eyes equipped with liner sharp enough to cut steel, the dark-stained tips of her fingers twitching against the stem of her wineglass. A woman whose grim countenance is softened, somewhat, by the delicate, embroidered purple flower Bernie’d pinned to her bodice, once upon a time, and is since scarcely seen without.

A woman who, as it happens, probably needed the subtle validation of tonight’s events as badly as herself.

Seven or eight moons ago, during that mind-numbing stint camped on the Brionac Plateau, Sylvia’d stumbled groggily into the air cavalry’s side of the stables one morning and had to rub her eyes, swearing she’d seen double. Confident she wasn’t drunk or deprived of sleep to the point of seeing things, she was still a tad confused why Laetitia had a doppelganger filling the stall adjacent.

At a closer look, the other pegasus stood a bit taller than Tish, thicker in the neck and the top of the wing, and with a visibly different ‘undercarriage,’ yet no prankster with a bucket of black paint could ever replicate the precise, midnight sheen of a Nuvelle Nightwing’s coat. Their breed wasn’t exactly growing on trees, either!

“What’ve we got here? Never seen you around these parts,” said Sylvia, tentatively offering her hand to sniff. After some consideration on the stallion’s part, a tense look with wings pinned close to the body, he deigned to step forward and pressed his nose to Sylvia’s palm. “Well, hello to you, too. Who’s your rider, bud?”

(Sylvia would prefer to omit from her own memory the fact she’d almost tripped and fallen at the firm clearing of a throat, and a familiar voice, stern as ever though greatly softened in its register, coming from just over her shoulder.)

“I believe you’ve a pegasus of your own to tend to, when you’re quite finished fraternizing with mine.”

She spun around then, Sylvia coming close to whapping the newcomer in the face with the end of her braid, but they’d already shouldered past her into the paddock. A gaunt newcomer in the lightweight plate of a flier, buried under the cumbersome layers of a dark mage’s cloak.

Sluggish with the early hour, Sylvia’s brain could afford her no quick-witted retort, nor any options, really, suited to witnessing Hub– To witnessing… Uh. Minister Vestra, self-professed acrophobe, gliding their bony vampire ass into a pegasus paddock at five-bloody-bells in the morning and beginning to comb the knots from its shimmery, ink-black mane.

“Uh,” said Sylvia, intelligently.

Seriously, what the fuck was she supposed to say to this? What could she say, that wouldn’t result in catching a hot, fresh blast of Flux Σ to the face? It was baffling, not only because of the mage’s long-established public image, but the fact pegasi had gotten testy in their presence before – it all could’ve made sense if it were a ‘man’ thing, but evidently that theory’d just been pulverized with a warhammer.

Shit, stall with smalltalk. Don’t comment on the obvious – just normal, flier-girl smalltalk!

“Er, right! Can’t leave my Tish in the lurch, can I? He’s a handsome one, though – definitely wasn’t expecting to see another Nightwing trotting around here, if they’re still as rare as Connie says. What’s… what’s his name?”

Vestra’s incipient headache was visible on (her?) face. “Fódlan’s native breeds take most casters in stride, yet – courtesy of Church interference down the centuries – remain averse to the residual blemish of dark magic. Only those of Nuvelle’s pedigree suffice for my craft.” They paused, but a moment, to waggle a curry comb towards the post by the enclosure’s gate. “As for names, am I to understand you’ve forgotten how to read?”

Apparently, Sylvia had, because nailed up on a small tack, scrawled in the Strike Force stablemaster’s abysmal calligraphy for all to see, were some answers she could’ve used before putting her foot in her mouth:

“Tenebre” – Male, 9yrs.

Ungelded (Nuvelle’s people would throw a fit; mind your gals)

Mixed Feed – Cycle 3x Weekly – Poss. Mold Allergy?

 Rider – Helena v. Vestra

Still reeling from the revelation that the gloomy, grouchy right hand of the Emperor – the cynical, skeptical dark mage, master of interrogations, one half of the so-called ‘Twin Jewels of the Empire’ – was but another passenger stuck aboard the same, shitty boat as Sylvia herself, it was all she could do not to blurt out something crass and reactionary she knows for a fact would’ve skewered her own confidence, those first days she was witnessed living as a woman.

So instead, like the insufferable clown she’s always been–

“Hah,” Sylvia teased, “You would name yours ‘Tenebre.’”

(The Mire β burn was worth it.)

“...and what say you, Marquise Helena von Vestra, Dark Flier, honorable Minister of the Imperial Household?”

Sylvia’s past self, that slimy disguise no stranger to sniping down others to stay afloat, probably would’ve found it hilarious watching Vestra floundering into femininity, forsaking her motheaten, poison-stained robes for mildly-less motheaten, poison-stained gowns, or, Goddess forbid, caking on the rouge. As it stands, all she feels is genuine cheer on the mage’s behalf… even if Helena herself is still crabbing it up on the outside:

“What I would say is that this pomp is utterly unnecessary,” she drones, “we’ve a march in the morning.”

Someone’s emphatic ‘Aww’ stands out above the laughter and general merriment, causing Helena’s face to twist up in three or four emotions at once, and hides her mouth behind her wineglass before one of them can see distaste give way to an unprecedented quirk of the lips some scholars might call a smile.

Heading up the grand toast, Edelgard lifts her glass aloft, and over a dozen soon join her own.

“By the power vested in me as the Emperor of the Adrestian Empire, I do hereby officially dub thee: Womenfolk of the Realm, afforded all associated rights and headaches thereof, long overdue, and may whosoever contradicts this ruling face my axe.”

Sylvia’s already got enough of a buzz going off the atmosphere alone that she doesn’t repress a wonky, slightly-sniffly giggle imagining Edelgard patting the bony ‘blade’ of that infernal relic-replica in this cutesy nightie, instead of bloodstained, battle-ready Imperial raiment. Damned if that’s not a promise worth drinking to, though, provided she isn’t about to take her dignity out at the legs by doing so.

See, from the stables to the mess tent, this whole last week, Sylvia’s heard the baseless scuttlebutt about love potions or truth potions or otherwise-undefined-but-certain-to-make-an-ass-of-you potions, and their likelihood of ending in one’s glass.

It’s clearly just mindless gossip, that goes without saying; the Strike Force’s favorite matchmaking menace earned that reputation for a reason, but even she would never crib tactics from those feckless, blueblooded fuckboys who’d harangue her after curtains at every Mittelfrank performance, the kind who’d spike drinks without remorse.

What about everyone else, though? Do they buy the obvious bluff, or is everyone expecting things to get overly amorous in a hurry and let long-repressed feelings fly? Goddess, it’d be a convenient excuse to have, maybe let Sylvia test the waters, see where she stands, but things could still go so horribly awry if–

To hell with it. She’ll work up a gentle buzz, nothing too heavy, and let the dice fall as they may.

As cheers ring out, Sylvia joins the others in throwing back her glass, compelled by the strange enormity of such a silly, meaningless moment to down the whole of its contents in their entirety, throat burning only a fraction as much as her eyes. She probably looks quite the fool, blinking frantically to clear away the gloss of emotion, but like hell is she smudging them with her sleeve– Dorothea’d kill her for mucking up all that hard work on her makeup.

The pace of the evening quickens, then, as the songstress in question climbs up onto the table and leads a chorus or three as the party truly opens up in earnest, abiding Her Majesty’s sole condition that none of the tunes be patriotic in the least. Sylvia pretends to be taking a sip any time Thea’s eyes skim past her, but a threatening squint sees her putting those grueling private voice lessons to work.

Oh, Sylvia’s still a terrible singer, have no doubt – but then, so’re two-thirds of the attendees, not accounting for those racing to the bottom of their first share of liquor or singing with a mouth crammed with roast pheasant, and their slovenly stylings only serve to make the evening merrier… Not that Sylvia’s paying them an ounce of attention once Bern pauses her parchment-shuffling to join in on ‘Hearth, Health, and Comrades True.’

With a voice that fair, she’d call it a shame Bern’d never shown up to choir practice back at the monastery, but then again, neither had Sylvia, so fair’s only fair. Rather than sidle around the rustling thicket of limbs that is the dancing crowd to join Bernadetta on the far side, rather than channeling her easygoing, flirtatious past to spark a conversation with the compliment, it shrivels on her tongue, and the night rolls on.

(“Aren’t you going to dance?” Mercedes needles, catching her breath on the sidelines. “The night won’t stay young forever, and I’m sure a certain someone would appreciate the invitation!“)

(“I’m… I’ll get around to it,” swears Sylvia.)

From there, the vices indulged expand to gambling as games of cards break out, wagering piles of nuts and candied comfits in lieu of gold. Arguments over regional rulesets only grow heated inasmuch as the overacted anger becomes another part of the amusement. Constance’s bid to challenge the Emperor at chess is nearly thwarted by a handful of missing pieces, gone astray over the long campaign, forcing both contenders to replenish their ranks with artfully nibbled bread-crust simulacra.

For amusements with a bit more thrill, Leonie and a few of the gals from the Blade Breakers drag Petra out of Dorothea’s allegedly-platonic clutches for a axe-throwing contest, before the competitors grow tipsy enough to make it a public health hazard.

(“C’mon!” sulks Dorothea, denied her own crush and craving cathartic distraction. “You look great – which, you’re welcome for, by the way –  Bern’s totally been making eyes all night, so get your pert little–“)

(“In a minute! A few minutes! Really, I’ll... get it done,” Sylvia swears. "Eventually.")

Claiming diplomatic immunity from gender altogether on the grounds of being a hassle, Yuri briefly saunters through to pilfer a seasoned drumstick and pass Hapi a package before vanishing into the night. Cobbled together in the heart of Abyss, from schematics long secreted away by Church censors, Burrow Street’s very first, prototype metal-mold printing machine has been hard at work creating the novelty their Ashen Wolves have brought to bear this evening:

The item hits the table with an authoritative thump that silences the room. All eyes turn upon the thing, in horror and reverence, as they behold The Tome of Comely Saints, Third Edition, c. 1185. The next half-bell is spent in sagely deliberation and heated philosophical debate, in search of an answer to one of life’s most pressing inquiries: ‘Whom is the sluttiest saint of the Seirosite Ecclesiastical Canon?’

By show of hands, the vote goes to Cichol, but it’s a near thing. Sylvia was personally leaning Indech after a gratuity of topless, river-bathing illustrations, but knowing Bernie’s Crest– Well, it wasn’t worth being called out for potential bias-by-proxy! No, she’s not overthinking it, thank you kindly!

(“Hey, Syl. In case I don’t get a chance later…” Ingrid glances back at their momentarily-distracted Emperor, caught up chatting with Helena. “Look, just go for it. Even if she says no – which she won’t – at least it’ll be over and done with, right? Any landing you can…”)

(“...you can walk away from is a good landing,” Sylvia grumbles, completing one of their instructors’ favorite quotes. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get to it, I just… need a bit more time.”)

Lysithea, ever burdened by her need to project maturity to compensate for her size, hits a bottle that hits back harder, and spends the rest of her evening sprawled across a tittering Mercedes’ lap in a shaded nook, as the latter regales the group with one of her vaunted ghost stories; it’s one Sylvia’s heard before – dead mariner with two hooks for hands, she’s pretty sure is how it ends – but the wine and cider have her feeling the spirit all the same, terrible pun unintended.

There was a time, shortly after the war began, when Sylvia might’ve been more wary of putting any alcohol in her system. Who’d’ve thunk the path to mastering moderation was no longer pressuring herself into chugging down the foulest swill possible in the hopes of proving herself a ‘real man?’ Sharing delectable drinks with close friends instead of faceless tavern hookups? Celebrating a night worth remembering, instead of drinking to forget?

In hindsight, there was something to be said for the way she’d found exceptions to the rule, ways to preserve her presumptive masculinity with an ‘I’ll have what the lady’s having’ on her lips during her days playing the playboy, while those strong ales said to put hair on the chest always made her screw up her face like she’d swallowed a fistful of dirt.

But then, she was punishing herself in those days, so…  Gee. Who’d’ve seen it coming?

As the hour draws closer to midnight, the assembled party begins to bleed members at a quickening pace, citing full bellies or a few too many flagons, responsible sleep schedules or early patrols, among other, more intriguing excuses.

Hovering outside the threshold, Ferdinand politely announces himself and, with an unusual level of trepidation, makes to ask after Helena. The dark mage, uncharacteristically sheepish for a change, takes the opportunity to polish off her glass, hook Aegir’s arm, and vanish out the door in a tumult of black ruffles and lace, before all the affectionate jeers and cheers can catch up to her harried escape.

Before much longer, Edelgard gives her goodbyes for the evening, sweeping an equally-tipsy Ingrid up into her arms and, presumably, escorting her chivalrous escort back to the safety of her tent – one of their tents, anyhow – to the tune of more joyous hooting and hollering from the remaining revelers. Fingers crossed those two’ll have better luck than Sylvia’s had tonight, when it comes to opening up. To facing the crucible of feelings.

With the tip of a glossy, painted fingernail, Sylvia taps out the chorus from one of those earworm drinking songs from a few hours back. Heh. All that chittering about people trying to drug the truth out of her, force her to spill her guts about Bern, and in the end, it feels like damn near half the initial guests’ve gone off to get some while Sylvia’s left in the lurch, soaking up the dwindling atmosphere, not an inch closer to her archer crush than she began.

And whose fault is that, dumbass?

It’s at this point that Sylvia’s dozen-or-so promises to herself and others that she’d take the leap, the prolonged anxiousness over the ‘when’ and ‘how,’ curdle into a heavy, almost suffocating guilt. She wasn’t blind to how many friends were rooting for her to put on the charm tonight, make the most of this makeover, throw out the bait and see if Bern’s even keen to bite.

Sylvia hopes they’re not too pissed at her now, for failing to provide the results they must’ve wanted to fawn over. And, yeah, sure, there’re points to be made how that’s not her responsibility, much less Bern’s, because even if she did want Sylvia, did say yes, they’re more than a spectacle at the end of the day–

Ugh.

She could pick up and leave, maybe even should pick up and leave. It’s kinda getting late, but Sylvia’s long since learned to shoulder the retroactive scorn of her morning-self for pulling long, restless nights with half the sleep she deserves. Besides, the atmosphere is pleasant enough, preferable to weathering these feelings of laziness by her lonesome in the dark of her tent; Sylvia’d be content to sit here and… how would Caspar put it? ‘Just vibe?’

Yeah, Sylvia could stay here and vibe a bit longer, if not for an insistent tug on her sleeve.

“Hey, easy on the dr– Bern?!”

Either Sylvia’d been deeper in melancholic thought than she realized, or Bernadetta’s been taking dark magic lessons on the side and gained the power to warp, because without a moment’s warning, all at once she’s there at Sylvia’s shoulder, hovering at a dangerous proximity, with one hand behind her back.

“So, um…”

Sylvia quirks a brow. Usually, when you go tugging sleeves, you’ve got a line prepared ahead of time. “You need something? Sorry, I’ve been a bit distracted tonight, has anyone– Nobody’s been bugging you, have they?”

Bernadetta shakes her head once, then a flurry of a few more times for good measure, bringing about the bundle of parchment she’s been scribbling and scrawling at all night, nerves causing her to crinkle the edges in both hands.

“No! No, nothing like that, I’m fine, everyone’s fine, a-and you’re fine, more than fine, and– hic. You look great, by the way! And I actually, um. Had something for you? If you wanted to… See, I’ve aaaactually been working on drafting a new chapter, you know, for that Soleil and Brunhilde story? It’s been a bit of a tricky one, and I was thinking… maybe you’d like to...”

Huh. Bit of an odd time to bring up their little book club, isn’t it? Sylvia wouldn’t classify herself as ‘busy,’ per se, but one might expect a hobbyist writer’d want their dedicated preview reader to be stone sober when skimming their newest work.

“Oh, uh. Why not? I’ll give it a look tomorrow, maybe have it done by lunch, if you wanna join me fo–“

Again, Bern shakes her head fiercely, and only now, this close, this focused, does Sylvia notice the subtle speckles of gold glitter dusted in with the dark powder around those big, heartstealing eyes piercing right into her own, threatening to turn her brain to mush. All the while, the sniper keeps on trying, insistently pushing the bundled parchment at Sylvia’s hands.

“Actually, I was thinking you could give it a peek, like, rrrrrright now, maybe? W-we could both give it a look together, review it somewhere a little quieter? A lot quieter?” Bernadetta whispers, an ounce more forcefully than she surely intends. “Somewhere that isn’t here?”

Surely this isn’t a flimsy ploy to get Sylvia alone and… No, there’s no way it could be. These two characters’ve become proxies for themselves in the past, but that doesn’t mean there’s a one-to-one connection– doesn’t mean whatever Bern’s trying to drag her away to discuss in secret is anything more than a particularly compelling bit of prose, and nothing but. Still...

("Plenty of women prefer being the one pursued," Dorothea'd told her, many a moon ago. "If nothing else, just open up to the possibility.")

If this is what it feels like for possibility to come knocking, Sylvia's just going to have to suck it up and pry the door open to find out what's on the other side.

“Okay,” she says, finding somewhere safe and less trafficked by wandering elbows to set her empty glass before standing, straightening out her skirts. “Let’s find somewhere quiet to…”

“To deliberate!” Bernadetta chimes in, her abrupt outbreak of soft giggling paradoxically forced and relieved in equal measure. Still clutching those mystery pages under one arm, she snatches up Sylvia’s forearm with the other, leading them both towards the door.

“Y-yeah.” Sylvia struggles to clear her throat. “To deliberate.”

To deliberate what, exactly?!

Chapter Text

“Mercie. Psst! Martritz. Merrrrrrcieeeee. Mercedes!”

“Hm?”

The healer in question blinks the sandy haze of sleep from her eyes and lifts her head, cap dangling precariously off-balance opposite the cheek she’d smushed into the cool, stone wall, seated atop some stacked sacks of grain in the corner of the command post.

Goodness. Must have dozed off. She can’t’ve been out that long, though; the intrepid hobbyist musicians among their ranks had already hung up their instruments, as of the last Mercedes remembers, the fires allowed to burn lower, but several bodies are still up and about, quiet voices chattering on about this and that.

A dimly-lit blur of flesh-colored motion resolves itself, after a few blinks more, into the hand of a visibly less-than-sober Dorothea, flapping in front of Mercie’s face. Whatever the matter is, she seems in good cheer, and that’s a hopeful sign in itself; Mercedes has healed in tandem with Manuela long enough to know she’d best keep an eye out when the wine is flowing, in the event an unhealthy habit or two have made the jump from Mittelfrank mentor to mentee.

“Mmh’awake, yes, I’m–“ Mercedes cups a brief yawn, blindly reseating her cap and tucking her hair into place. “I’m awake. What is it?” To her disdain, a nasty little pit of worry threatens to open up in her stomach, the same that always rears its head after a late-night jostling.

Peace, she chides herself. The last active warfront is leagues from here, no alarm bells are clanging away, Emile is alive and well only a short walk away, and Dorothea looks entirely too pleased with herself to be reporting some injured rider torn to gory tatters, in need of Mercedes’ magic in the healers’ tents on the double.

To be frank, the more Mercedes examines her, Dorothea almost looks as though she needs to make a run for the privy, wiggling back and forth like so, but– That’s neither here nor there. It’s not the hardened, harrowed look the young women of the Strike Force aimed to set aside for a single evening, that’s what matters.

Dorothea finally bursts. “It’s happening!”

The noise elicits some wriggling from the weighty lump strewn across Mercedes’ thighs. Blessed with the wisdom to lean back in the nick of time, Mercie dodges a rearward headbutt to the chin as a groggy Lysithea shoots upright, blinking hazily at their surroundings. “Whus’ goin’ on?”

“Look!” Dorothea whisper-shouts, pointing somewhere towards the far end of the chamber. It’s difficult to make out any identifying details of the shadowed shapes making their egress until the very last moment, ducking through the entryway, as the pallid moonlight spills in to paint detail onto a very particular pair of bright silhouettes.

A portrait where one Sylvia Gautier is being led away, hand in hand, by a very anxious Bernadetta von Varley. Oh, how the Goddess is good to us, this night…!

“See? C’mon, we’ve got to–“ Dorothea succumbs to another fit of hopeless snickering. “Here, let’s go, before we’ve lost them! Up, up!”

The diva’s enthusiasm is infectious, to be sure, but Mercedes hedges with an uncertain hum. Being among the eldest students in the Officer’s Academy’s final year had always come with an implicit obligation to act as a voice of maturity, and the urge to climb atop the illustrious ‘mom friend’ pedestal and smother such nosy notions was strong, and yet–

And yet, it would be a lie of the highest caliber were Mercedes to insist she wasn’t curious, herself! Even the most stalwart priestess is liable to suffer a stifling of her faith in grisly times, and yearn for proof that there are still day-to-day miracles all around us!

Mercedes is hardly proud of the battering this war has given her faith, but she’s slowly pieced together some semblance of strength in spite of it. Working with a grassroots congregation of more progressive adherents to the Faith sanctioned by the Emperor herself has helped, of course, but a worsening war calls for every healer’s hands, and a long one leaves them precious little time to rest. Not to mention this stalemate, unpredictable lulls between open combat leaving Emile rather testy of late… The slowing of certain correspondence from across the border...

A-anyway!

Anyway, perhaps Mercedes is not so deserving of this gift, and such impertinent nosiness a sin too weighty to be balanced out by good intention, but a pair of dear friends finally summoning the courage to overcome their doubts and take a chance on one another’s favor always counts as a reminder of the Goddess’ little miracles in Mercedes’ book!

Unable to convincingly feign disinterest on her own behalf, the priestess mentally gropes about for the simplest excuse she can lay hands on. Luckily, she needn’t have to look far: she has one planted right atop her legs!

“Ah... Well, you see, Lysi here may have had a bit too much to drink this evening, so she needs her rest–“

“Bah! Rest can wait if those numbskulls are finally making a move!” Lysithea bounds to her feet at once, immediately lunging for the support of the nearest table until her legs are no longer threatening to wobble out from under her. The motion jangles some loose silverware, only drawing more eyes to the conspiracy.

Dorothea’s the first to fly out the doorway, Lysi stumbling at her heels, leaving Mercedes, a nonplussed Hapi professedly ‘up for whatever,’ and a handful of other stragglers to bring up the rear of their motley band; some of them, if Mercie had to guess, veterans of the XIII^th Air Cavalry and IX^th Sniper Corps – Sylvia and Bernie’s battalions, respectively.

Down the path in a loose-dense-loose cloud of bodies they go, slipping along on laughter and the occasional grunt of off-balance course correction, following Dorothea’s lead circling the repurposed command post’s crumbling bulk as stars wink merrily overhead.

The whole thing begins to feel a bit nostalgic, for Mercedes’ part, hearkening back to days at the Fhirdiad School of Sorcery; she and Annette among a gaggle of apprentices flouting curfew to scamper the high, tapestried halls in search of adventure – or more often than not, some unintended youthful mischief.

Right on time, the ache that arises any time sweet Annie’s face shows itself in her memory, and... and Mercedes isn’t going to think about that right now! No, she’s lighthearted! She’s fun! She’s the fun mom friend, whose heartfelt letters will most certainly talk Annette away from the grip of her intractable father before the worst can happen!

...

Goddess, I beg you forgive me my self-deception.

Around the bend goes the chaotic tangle on their stealth mission, catching odd looks and curious calls from passersby that their intrepid leader hushes a mite more loudly than is helpful for secrecy. Lowering that shushing hand, Dorothea slows and presses herself tight against the pocked stone edge of the facility, peeking her head out.

If Mercedes focuses, tries to shut her senses to the usual racket of war-camp living, she can just make something out: the rustling of garments and clink of jewelry, sharp human whispers…

(“...offer my apologies! While I assure you on my –Mf– honor and my House that all such compliments were in good faith, if you prefer I cease, I will do so forth–“)

(“I would prefer you cease your prattling and get to work on this thrice-damned corset!”)

Wait a moment. Those aren’t the right voices at all!

But it’s too late to stop, now – someone at the rear of the pack fails to pull back on the proverbial reins, bumping the cluster of bodies around the corner and into the open.

Taking shelter beneath a canvas overhang shielding a stock of firewood from inclement weather, its draping edges and the building behind offering nearly-but-not-quite privacy on three sides, stands a smartly dressed Ferdinand, one hand raised to tuck the dark curtain of Helena’s hair behind her ear and cup her cheek, the other pressing into the wall behind, thumb dallying a mere inch from her narrow waist.

And my, my, Helena’s face has never looked so flushed – to Mercedes’ recollection – as it does here and now, backed into the corner behind Ferdinand’s broad, cavalier bulk. It’s rather adorable! So much so that Mercedes can’t find herself fazed at all when the dark flier’s eyes flash with murder, prompting Ferdinand to check over his shoulder.

“Oh! What are all of you…” Ferdinand gapes at the intruders, a glossy smudge of someone’s ink-black lip paint trailing crookedly off the side of his mouth. “I-in hindsight I suppose I might have borrowed Helena somewhat longer than previously intended, but if you’ve business with her that needs–“

Looking thoroughly abashed, the group’s true intentions seem to have flown right over Ferdie’s head, the poor man. Helena, on the other hand, is far swifter on the uptake, steeply rolling her eyes before a muttered incantation and flick of the wrist conjures a dark tendril to yank the last canvas flap shut.

Where lesser women would falter at such a setback in her quest, Dorothea isn’t dissuaded one whit. Still overtaken with the thrill of the hunt, she clutches at the first two shoulders she can grip – which happen to be Mercedes’ and Lysithea’s. “Other side!” she exclaims, before leading the pack off on a wild tear after a new scent.

Lysi lags behind; Mercedes catches the tail end of “...gentleman to her, or I’ll curse you bald as your father!” from around the outpost’s corner, until the scuffle of the younger woman’s boots catches up at her back.

Whether by fate or merely the dry, logical arithmetic of ‘good places to hide for an intimate chat,’ their party only endures a little more uncoordinated drifting around the premises before they well and truly spot their marks, having taken up in a cluttered alcove of haphazardly-piled war materiel.

Taking care this time around, voices low, the romantics, gossips, and chronically bored of their mildly-inebriated group pile in together, crouching behind a moldering, waist-high stone fence. It’s not without its slips and hiccups – Hapi’s fingers flying through the stations of a Silence spell for a rudely-awakened feline stray tucked under her arm – but by the grace of the Goddess, they acquire their vantage.

“Ugh, there’s a pillar in the way over here, scoot over!” says Lysithea, hunched at the far end of the row. “Wait, what’s she handing her? Parchment? Oh! Do you think that’s the conf–“

It’s not going to be a confession, Sylvia reminds herself. Don’t overthink it.

Tenuous privacy for the inexplicable late-night literary critique Bern’s requested comes in the form of a crumbling stone storage nook burrowed into the back end of the command post. It’s mostly shielded from the more heavily-trafficked avenues of the encampment, with few tents in sight above the palisade line save Bernadetta’s, planted high up the hillside for an archer’s advantage as much as privacy.

And for those passers-by who can still see the pair from here, it’s… It’s not like they’re doing anything incriminating! Just Sylvia, planted on the closest thing she could find to a seat unlikely to ruin the rear of her dress – an Imperial battle standard draped over the iron-studded planks of a disassembled ballista – and Bernie, looming very… Wow, very close. Sitting down like this, Bern’s actually got an inch of height on Sylvia, too. That’s interesting! Wow! Wait, did she already think ‘wow?’ The ‘wow’ still stands. Sorta makes a girl feel–

Bah! Focus, Gautier!

“Soooo… You wanted me to read something?” Sylvia tosses out there, rather lamely. She’s forced to relinquish the snaggle of hair she’d absently set about twining around her fingers when the unkempt sheaf of papers from before is shoved into her waiting hands; the one Bernadetta’s been chipping away at the whole evening, scribbling her heart out on the fringes of their Girls’ Night.

Still, Bern’s insistence on getting it into Sylvia’s hands belies the buzz of her anxieties, the jitters that travel through the split-second brushing of knuckles and nearly rattle Sylvia’s teeth in her gums.

“H-here! Just, um. Give it a really quick look! Or, you know, you could take your time if you like, whichever! Both! I’ll wait!”

Right. ‘Quickly take her time.’ Sylvia can do that. Cute.

Some of their darkest memories have been easier to vent about through the filter of Soleil and Brunhilde, playing shadow-puppets with the skeletons in their closets – Sylvia’s childhood-under-siege at Miklan’s hands, Bernadetta’s dastard father and his efforts to make her a conventionally viable bride, a shared dread of this war and what it will have shorn from their souls by the time the final flag falls.

Even when it’s not couching outright trauma in the soft, palatable realm of fiction, it’s remained easier to loosen their tongues over even the more banal feelings they’ve had difficulty voicing, like their mutual feelings of inadequacy as noblewomen of Fódlan, through a bit of energetic brainstorming over the duo on the page.

Ergo, it stands to reason something as momentous as a sentimental confes– uh, as the thing that this couldn’t reasonably, but could hypothetically be, just probably isn’t? Something as momentous as that could feasibly fall under the same auspices, given as it’s definietly inspired by a feeling Sylvia can’t imagine either of them bringing up of their own volition – not to each other, not out loud, not sober.

“Alright, give me a minute,” says Sylvia, angling to better catch the light of a nearby torch, sitting about as comfortably as a woman can reasonably be with bits of a siege engine’s skeleton wedged into her spine.

As Sylvia begins to read, fears of the morrow’s scoldings for getting splinters in her fine new dress couldn’t slip further from her mind.

First things first: it’s not a love letter. Bernadetta wasn’t lying, to her credit; it really is a scribbly-scrawly draft for one of her stories, the traditionally graceful penmanship Bern likes to apply to her efforts in prose abandoned in the name of speed like the holy hounds of Seiros were at her heels. Good thing Sylvia’s also equally fluent in her friend’s anxious chickenscratch by now; it’s similar enough to parse.

Secondly: these pages do technically contain a romantic confession – of sorts.

(“Soleil,” Brunhilde sighed, “Have we not thoroughly suffered at the hands of our foes? Why, then, must we suffer in leaving such words unspoken? Our long war is ended.” Tapping the very verge of her kind’s shapeshifting magicks, she gently dragged an ursine claw-tip down her dear witch-knight’s flank.

Even sortieing in the furthest tundra, ‘twas never Soleil’s nature to shiver unduly, heated as she was by the profane brand smoldering within her breast. Such reactions were Brunhilde’s domain alone, and the laguz hoarded them selfishly.

“’Twould not be my place,” said the knight, turning her face away from the fireplace glow. “The Czar may haunt these lands no longer, but we’ve duties yet, come the morrow. Your people, Brunhilde – they’ve a throne to fill, and would scarce approve a Chieftain consorting with a living blasphemy, much less as her…”

Brunhilde reached across then, a firm hand upon Soleil’s cheek pulling her face back from the shadow. “The throne of my father is ill recompense for losing you. If my clan wishes me to shoulder that mantle, I shan’t do so alone. If they will not abide my chosen, they’ll not have me at all.”

“They would be fools,” whispered Soleil, “to so disregard your rightful claim.”

“I would be the fool,” Brunhilde returned, in the vanishing distance twixt their lips, “not to claim you as my mate…”)

Eeyup, so much for not overthinking it, Sylvia concedes.

Bernadetta’s no stranger to writing steamy romance. It was the way they met, for Saints’ sakes; getting drawn in by those missing manuscript pages on the subject, about some other harried heroine caught up in similarly self-indulgent, self-exploratory adventures, all of them evocative enough to catch the eye and stir the interest of that lifeless husk Sylvia’s heart’d been trapped within at the time.

It’s just, those fantastical accounts were based on characters several shades more fictional than these two, and sure, there’s always been latent chemistry between Soleil and Brunhilde, but Sylvia wasn’t about to go running her mouth over what seemed to be misplaced optimism and projection. This latest draft, on the other hand– Forget wearing it on her her sleeve, Bern’s sporting her artistic inspiration as a giant, floppy-brimmed hat at this point.

The scene-snippets in the draft depict a triumphant confession of love, bosoms pressed together, every breath saturated with relief at surviving the mad machinations of the Boreal Czar. The land has been saved, the weary masses rejoice, and its heroines abscond to their chambers to bare their battered hearts and bodies alike. It’s the sort of ending, shamelessly too-good-to-be-true, that still drives one to wonder, ‘what if?’

It’s also hastily growing, uh... Candid? Risqué? The leading duo’re making no few leaps and bounds past friskiness and towards the explicit stage of– It’s no baseless exaggeration to call it ‘fucking.’

Yep! From what Sylvia’s skimmed, the pages of resplendently florid confession are but a prelude for a sheet and a half of heavily annotated, eloquent front-to-back fucking, featuring synonyms for certain acts of marriage-bed gymnastics even Sylvia’s never heard employed. It’s not unromantic by any stretch of the imagination – quite the opposite – but mere ‘lovemaking’ feels like a woeful understatement. Implements get involved, for Goddess’ sake! Implements!

What this is, in summation, is the horniest compilation of the written word Sylvia’s dragged her eyes across since her first troubled go at puberty, and as she’s read through it, the stewing intent of the writer’s gaze grows harder to ignore.

Sylvia’d spotted that dreamy-yet-driven look on Bernadetta’s face an hour ago, and written it off as a product of the flowing wine alone; Bernie’s admitted she rarely partakes, something of a lightweight on account of her… lighter weight, Sylvia supposes. It was a perfectly rational assumption in the moment, expecting her to be drunk on drink, and not on the thought of her!

“So, what’d… What did you think?” asks Bernadetta, shimmy-sauntering forward until her knees knock against Sylvia’s, a very un-Varleylike amount of eye contact maintained throughout. “T-too big a leap for the character arcs, bringing them together? Too cliché? Or… mmmmaybe see where they go with it?”

Oh. Things are happening here. Sylvia’s got a clump of ghostly molasses in her throat she has to swallow twice to dislodge before she can sputter a reply. “I’d, ah… Naturally, I’d need a more thorough read-through to give it the evaluation it deserves, but–”

Ordinarily, a tipsy Bernie Bear is more prone to giggles than usual, less anxious, fast to fall asleep, not pushing any extremes. And sure, it’s cute, and Sylvia’s gotten warm fuzzies watching her loosen up, but it’s not what she’s picking up from the shorter woman tonight. That face was Relaxation, and, uh…

This face is Want.

“–but I think I’m leaning towards option three? In theory?”

This tipsy Bernie Bear is a creature of id, given leave to run free in the wild. Not to make light of the alcoholic crutch Sylvia once abused so heavily, nor project assumptions upon such a nice girl or anything, but wow. It's like the anxiety frizzing up Bern’s edges sharpens into crystal, and she becomes a woman who can ask for what she wants, for once... And take it.

Like taking a tentative step forward, and another, hesitation bleeding away in favor of a huntress’ intent while she clambers up the improvised ballista-bench to straddle Sylvia’s lap, clasping the taller woman’s face in both hands. Callused fingers skim the curve of Sylvia’s jaw, thumbs finding their perch atop her ruddy cheeks.

For both amateur novelist and amateur critic alike, words have become a momentary hassle for which neither can spare the time. “Yes?” Bernadetta asks at length, eyes sparkling.

“Yes.”

A dam breaks, an invisible bowstring snaps, and Bernadetta’s lips seize upon hers in an instant, laying unimpeachable claim to Sylvia’s first kiss as a woman – her first kiss that's ever mattered. The liberating force of it stuns her dead, even knocks loose a weak, unbecoming whine before Sylvia reclaims a provisional grip on her senses, throws an arm around Bernadetta’s waist, and squeezes the archer snug to her fluttering chest.

Bern tastes like Noa fruit sorbet and salted truffles, lain over the telltale traces of wine, and even absent the latter, she would be intoxicating on her own merit. Sylvia greedily chases Bernadetta’s mouth before the archer can second-guess herself; they’ve wasted too much time already, they can’t afford even a second needlessly lost to their habitual doubts.

Still, Sylvia does lose a couple of instants to surprise, taken aback at the galloping pace of escalation: her rustiness in the romance department isn’t so dire that she can’t translate the message in the searching flick of a tongue across her lips. And, what, like Sylvia’s going to refuse her?

Saint fucking Seiros, maybe it makes sense Bern’s father is the Minister of Religious Affairs, because kissing his daughter is turning out to be a religious experience.

Sylvia’s lungs, fun-hating chaperones that they are, do manage to wrench the pair apart eventually, albeit only an inch or three, hazy eyes and dopey smiles reserved only for one another as they recover some air.

“Mnh’hey, Bern?”

“Y’uh-huh?”

"I think my brain still works… Could’ja… Maybe keep doing that ‘til it stops?"

While the archer’s sharp intake of breath certainly suggests she’s down to give it a try, they’re startled out of their moment by an outbreak of distant cheers and wolf-whistling from the periphery and passersby.

“Woo! Get some, Varley!” hoots one Balthus von Albrecht – inexplicably shirtless despite the dipping after-dusk temperatures, and hunched over a stump the guardsmen have commandeered for a card table. Peeking up over the top of a dilapidated stone fence, a few other fawning faces duck back behind the battered rock, giggling gleefully, as Sylvia’s eyes scan in their direction.

Damn it! Time screeches to a crawl, the shock on her own face mirrored in Bernadetta’s as they pull away. "Hey, don’t worry about th–“

"Maybe I will!"

“–ose guys, we can… Say what, now?

See, this is the part where, of a typical evening, Bernie might shriek, blood rushing to her face, and all-but-teleport away in a bruising flurry of limbs overcharged by anxiety – and while Bernadetta does indeed hop up to beat a hasty retreat, Sylvia wasn’t expecting to be dragged along for the ride.

Tripping over her own feet every dozen steps, she finds herself pulled away from the center of camp in the archer’s wake: past the card-playing guards, past the palisades, up the lazy serpentine switchback of the hillside towards a certain lonely tent.

Wad of smutty parchment still fisted in her free hand and cursing her dress for its infernal absence of pockets, Sylvia unceremoniously stuffs the draft down its front betwixt her barely-extant cleavage for the time being, allowing her to flail the arm in question for balance. Bern walks fast when she’s on a mission, and Sylvia was already unstable in these shoes before there was liquor in her system!

Speaking of which: this pace really is taking things a little quickly, isn’t it? Obviously, she can swear up and down that the explosion of progress regarding her weird, dorky crush on her weird, dorky best friend is far from unwanted from her side of things, but it’s…

Even in her wildest, most optimistic dreams, Sylvia’d permitted herself to imagine at most shy confessions at war’s end, tentative hand-holding, moons upon moons of veiled allusion before the notion of sharing a bed could be broached; that would’ve been fine! She’s gone this long without getting laid, she could wait until Bern was up for it, if ever!

What Sylvia had never counted on was being pulled towards privacy at the first provocation, mere moments after a first kiss, and – Okay, Sylvia’s no scholar, but she can do her basic sums, and there are only so many solutions to draw from the equation ‘tent plus horny equals blank.’

(And for once in her misbegotten life – even whilst being dragged there by an apparently eager maiden – that breakneck haste gives her pause.)

“Are you sure you wanna go th–“ Sylvia stops short, making an ungainly grunt as she ducks her way through into the tent. “Uh, not that I’m complaining, it’s just that you hit the sauce harder than me – y’know, proportionally – and this is moving pretty fast even for the average schmoe. And you… you mean a lot to me, and I don’t…”

Bernadetta turns, having successfully rustled up a lantern and sparked it to life, starting on another candle. Her wide eyes, awash with a half-dozen emotions, coalesce for a second or two into simply confusion as they alight on the wad of paper crammed between Sylvia’s tits. Squawking, Sylvia uncrumples the pages and sets them aside on the compact writing desk from the baggage train that stands as one of the tent’s few luxuries, right alongside the rudimentary wooden-slat bedframe.

Even trimmed down for travel and stripped of décor, it very much gives off a distinctly ‘Bernadetta’ feel, in Sylvia’s opinion: unstrung bows, a few stuffed animal friends loafing about, empty bowls yet to be returned to the mess tents, hobby goods in varying shades of purple and aesthetically pleasant complements.

Bern’s botanical ambitions, for the most part, have had to remain back in Enbarr, fastidiously maintained by palace groundskeepers at Edelgard’s request. The only bit of recognizable greenery Sylvia can spy falls under the potted variety, playing paperweight to a manuscript on the desk: a pointy-leafed succulent something-or-other from out near the Almyran border territories, picked up amidst one of the off-again phases of on-again, off-again scuffles with Leicester.

Sylvia’s mind associates the place – in all its various, shifting permutations across the theater of war – with respite, friendship, a safe place to get away from the Fódlan on fire outside. Calming stuff! Of course it’s doing weird things to her insides standing here with the memory of her best friend’s tongue in her mouth still fresh at the fore of her mind.

Bernadetta’s hands set to wringing at her waist, frenetic and fidgety, even as her voice holds steady. “Of course I’m sure! I’m not doing anything I haven’t wanted to do for ages!” she insists. “Why do you think a dumb ol’ Bernie’d write all that out and just hand it to you?! I knew I’d panic if I had to say it all out loud in one go, so– so, I put it on the page! ...And maybe embellished a bit, for good measure!”

With obvious impatience but an endearing amount of care, Bernadetta scoots and rearranges the stray, plush occupants of her mattress, kicking some untended laundry underneath, and sits herself on the edge with enough extra space to make the invitation implicit.

Sylvia wobbles her way to the bedside and immediately divests herself of the deathtrap footwear Dorothea foisted on her, planting her toes on the pleasantly fuzzy wolf-pelt rug Sylvia’s pretty sure came as the spoils of Bern’s own hunting. She lets her hand fall as it wilt, and if it happens to hit the sheets close enough for Bernadetta to tangle their pinkies together, Sylvia’ll call it a happy accident.

“Wrote it to prove I meant it,” Bern continues, audibly losing a bit of momentum. “And then all I had to do was –hic– get brave enough to hand it to you, and...”

And it’s so sincere, so clumsily impassioned, laced with just as much stubborn affection as lust that Sylvia can't not laugh, absolutely can’t help it. The throughline of Bernadetta von Varley, strung around and across the life of one Sylvia Gautier, is that she makes Sylvia feel like she can laugh from the heart again. That she might still deserve a bit of joy in this life.

Bernadetta’s panic begins to spur forth. "Hey, it made sense at the time!"

So, Sylvia covers her mouth, undoubtedly further ruining her already unsalvageable makeup, and wrestles the laughter down lest her crush get the wrong idea in her head. Neither the smile, nor the unbecomingly needy ache Sylvia’s trying to put to the back of her mind, are so easily thwarted.

She’s not about to blame Bernie for being nervous, or for her approach to lack the fantastical perfection of her novels’ heroines, now that she’s gotten a willing girl into her bed. After all, it’s the first time Sylvia’s ever been ‘the girl in the bed.’ Neither of them are on their home turf.

“Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I got the gist. And I’d hope if I didn’t make it clear enough down there, the fact I’m still here’d make it pretty clear I feel the same way, about…” Words begin to run thin on Sylvia. She gives a one-shouldered shrug, buying time for her phrasing. “That I, um. Not to get ahead of myself or anything–“

Damn it! Dropping the L-word was never hard for Sylvain, that sad dastard was ‘falling in love’ once a week, way back when. Must’ve told half the girls in the monastery at one point or another, even a few guys just to rile ‘em up! It was loose and weightless, stripped of value and its gravity, tossed out without care, like a wealthy merchant flinging a few coins to the lepers for appearances alone.

And now, Bernadetta’s the one snickering. Huh. That’s... a good sign, isn’t it? Sylvia’ll opt to hope it is. “What? What’d I say?”

“Now you sound like me,” Bernadetta laments. “We’re getting nowhere.”

Sylvia thinks about asking ‘are we,’ which her face evidently betrays ahead of time, and Bern answers with her eyebrows alone. Alright. Fair. “Why is this so hard? We’ve always been pretty good at reading each other – I’d bet you a hundred gold we’re thinking the exact same thing, so why aren’t we saying it?”

“Timing? Phrasing?! I don’t know!”

“Even though we both absolutely–“

“Oh, it’s not even a question–“

Another lull of staring, silence, weird little pinched mouth-shapes. Sylvia has long since honed her aerial spearwork to the graceful lethality expected of an Imperial Pegasus Knight, sharp and nimble, but this obstacle… This one might just call for a blunt instrument at an oblique angle.

“But, uh, as for them,” Sylvia says, with a blasé gesture towards the manuscript upon the desk, the crinkled new drafts. “Now, we can agree those morons have been in love since the whole training camp arc in book one, right? Bare minimum.”

Bernadetta pumps her free hand in the air. The other creeps the remainder of the way atop Sylvia’s to clasp it in full. “The buildup was so obvious! The sparks were there so early on, it felt like the entire fellowship knew before they did! Just because it was a slow burn to the confession doesn’t mean they weren’t in love with each other the whole time!”

“Like us,” hums Sylvia.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I suppose–“ Bernadetta stops short. Blinks. “Hey!”

Goddess, we really are hopeless, aren’t we?

Consumed by a blush as bright as the fires of her indignation, Bernadetta pivots and pounces, landing in Sylvia’s lap for the second time this evening. Grabbing Sylvia’s shoulders, she weakly rattles them back and forth with a defeated crumple of her own.

“No faiiiiir; you took all the romance out of the delivery!”

“We weren’t gonna get any romance done at that rate!”

“I almost had it!”

Bernadetta gives her a look that could strip paint off canvas, an effect mitigated by her eminently kissable moue. It takes, in Sylvia’s personal opinion, a commendable level of self-control not to act on that urge and stick to using her words.

“Look, I’m just saying – us confirming we’re in love and maybe-possibly sharing a bed tonight is objectively more romantic than tiptoeing around it all night like idiots until the sun comes up! Everybody’d see us and go, ‘Wow, looks like you two didn’t get any sleep last night,’ and we’d have to say, ‘Yeah! We really didn’t!’”

“T-t-that’s enough out of you!”

“Come on, you know they would–“

“That’s,” Bernadetta begins again, and fails to finish, opting instead to see the deed done manually by means of mashing her lips into Sylvia’s.

Getting distracted with another bout of kissing isn’t very conducive to the whole, ‘having a productive talk about the finer points of this sex business,’ admittedly, but Sylvia is fast finding she only has so much willpower with which to resist the best thing that ever happened to her, if said best thing wants to smooch.

To her much-deserved credit, though, Sylvia can tell Bernadetta’s fervor is still restrained; there’s urgency, yet no excess of pressure as she nudges Sylvia from the bed’s edge, further back against the piled ridge of cushions and quilts and soft miscellany Bern’s gathered like a nest. Sylvia pulls aside from the pecks but a moment to peer behind her – she’s not about to squash any innocent stuffies, is she? – before settling on her back, Bernadetta knelt on top.

“So… hey,” Sylvia chimes in, once the froth in her mind clears enough to string a sentence together. Bernie’s hands rest splayed across Sylvia’s stomach, and she reaches to take one for a soft squeeze. “We should probably… talk, first.”

“What?” asks Bernadetta, with a quizzical scrunch of her brows. Stalling their mutual, hormone-addled momentum for even an instant brings the other woman snapping back to the present with a mildly dizzying whiplash, newfound assertiveness put on hold in lieu of lip-biting and a mumbled, “O-oh, right. Of course.”

An intrusive thought tromps across the fore of Sylvia’s distracted brain, like a discourteously tall, big-hatted operagoer shuffling in front during a climactic scene, whether Ingrid’s been having this much trouble getting things talked through and underway, wherever she and Her Imperial Majesty ended up for the night.

Sylvia’ll give it even odds. Edelgard’s probably take-charge enough to barrel through all the nervous prevarication, but then again, she might also be the type to hold off on the hanky-panky until it’s been thoroughly discussed in a committee-of-two, all the particulars laid out in writing – non-fiction ­writing, that is – signed and stamped with the Imperial seal.

(But then-again-again, Ingrid’d probably be into that kind of thing. Pff. Weirdo.)

Wishing her found-sister well in the efforts of getting laid, as only good sisters do, Sylvia recenters on her own affairs. She idly glides her thumb up and down the hills of Bernadetta’s knuckles as she stews over the way to most tactfully word her initial concerns to an equally-anxious paramour without disrupting the flow of their burgeoning sexual escapades.

“It’s just, I’m glad we both feel the same romantically, but when it comes to this sort of thing, I don’t want to–“ 

“Y-you don’t want to do this after all?” Bernadetta goes rigid, like she’s taken a cold plunge off the Fraldarius coast. “Gah! So stupid, unforgivable Ber—”

Really tactful! Great job, Syl!

“No, I do! I want– This, you, us! However it shakes out, whatever we feel up to trying tonight, I was going to say…” Sylvia sucks a breath through pursed lips, head flopping to one side on the pillow.

Dignity’s been in short supply these last years, and she can already feel her voice weakening with every word, so hopefully she can finish stronger than a whisper. “First things first, would it... bother you much if I don’t exactly want to ‘take the lead,’ even though I’m the one who’s actually done this before? It’s… There are some complicated feelings there, is all.”

Oof, she can’t look. She can’t. Bern’s silence is killing her. Probably already thinks she’s a failure as a lover; might’ve still believed in some small shred of that fabricated Gautier charm from the bad old days, thought she’d be able to break it out in the bedroom again and–

“So that’s what Shamir meant…” breathes Bernadetta, bordering somewhere between mesmerized and feral, which is. Uh. Really not the tone Sylvia was anticipating in response, if she’s honest, and… Wait.

Shamir said what?

Sylvia looks up sharply. “Shamir said what?”

“Nothing!” Bernadetta yelps, much too fast. She lifts their enjoined hands to her own chest with an emphatic thump. “Not important, because you bet Bernie can handle it! You’re in good hands!”

There’s that assertiveness again, that penned-in hunger that would threaten to weaken Sylvia at the knees if she weren’t already laying supine under the other woman. She’s starting to wonder if those hiccups from before were less to do with any excess of liquor than simple anxiety whipped into a bubbly froth.

Sylvia shifts her free arm behind her head as she stares up at the first love of her life to be worthy of the title. Even though the thoughts swirling in her head are clouded with the odd pocket of heavy subject matter, she’s incapable of stifling the sheepish smile Bern brings out in her.

“I really am, aren’t I? People like me…” She needn’t elaborate; Bernadetta just rubs her hand. “You can probably guess we don’t usually lead long, fruitful lives with a love story and a happily-ever-after. Not in Fódlan. When I committed to all this, started letting myself be me, I sort of figured that was a wrap on romance. Nobody’d love a whatever-I-was... but I still had to, because not doing it was killing me faster than any war ever could. If I had to die out there, it wasn’t going to be as him.

“So, I chalked love up to being a thing for other people, you know? Normal people. No way could I ever be this lucky. That’s probably why it took me so long to get my head out of my ass and see what was right in front of me, but now I’m here, and… And you’re here, and– And I know this really isn’t the courting you deserve, we’re clearly rushing some things…”

So much for clear and coherent communication; Sylvia’s short-lived stint of articulation collapses back into an unhelpful fog of nerves, her breath leaving her in a sulky huff.

Bernadetta just nods, tracing looping, lacy patterns on the back of Sylvia’s palm, probably pulled from her catalogue of embroidery.

“I did, too. Think love was for other people, I mean. My, um. My father, he always…” Her face pinches like she’s bit into some invisible lemon, typical of any conversation involving the man in question. “He always said I was bad at everything to do with it. Attracting suitors, being wife material. Unmarriageable, unloveable, not like a proper daughter of a high house. I looked too plain, I had strange hobbies, I got too scared all the time, was never womanly enough–”

A bittersweet ‘Hey, that makes two of us’ courses up Sylvia’s gorge on a wave of self-effacing bile, but she swallows it down and buries the wince, unwilling to hijack Bernadetta’s side of their vulnerable back-and-forth; the distant affect that mutes her voice as she rattles down the Count’s list of accusations may as well be the man’s spindly hand reaching across the country to clutch at the poor woman’s throat, and Sylvia dearly wants to smack it away.

“–and I’ve always thought about death a lot, too, on account of all the million things that could happen to kill a hopeless Bernie every day, but this is, um. This is war. The for-real kind of ‘probably gonna die.’ It’s already hard to believe I’ve lasted all these years, and there’s still no end in sight. I might die, or you, or both of us, and there is no way I’m dying without… without being brave enough to try. This, I mean. Us, and… this! Together!”

Let it be said: confidence is a maddeningly attractive look for Bernadetta von Varley.

Grégoire von Varley, on the other hand, is a saints-forsaken moron. If he wanted his daughter to be at her utmost desirable, then perhaps instead of tying her to a chair for ‘wife lessons’ like the miserable lunatic he is, he'd've encouraged her to explore a persona like the one she’s embodied tonight – that of the self-assured huntress, the kind with a persistent passion and quirky charms all her own! The kind who does the tying-to-chairs to other, significantly more receptive individuals!

“Reiterating for the record,” Sylvia points out, adopting a coy smirk and lighter tone to ease up a few degrees on the tension, “your father’s a dastard and you’re the only good thing he’s accomplished with his life.”

Bernadetta screws her mouth tight to hold in a tired laugh, but it comes out in a muffled snort, anyway. “What, um. What about yours? Your father, the Margrave? How bad would he take it, you and me, with me being... me?"

Yikes. Sylvia grimaces; maybe she had it coming, bringing up the topic of bad dads, but she’d really hoped to avoid summoning the spectre of Matthias Gautier with her hips an inordinately short distance from that of a potential lover’s. She can almost see his stony glower bearing down from just inches above a pretty head of shaggy purple hair.

"Hate to say it, but in another world, if I were still... how I was, he'd undoubtedly approve. Dad’d be thrilled I was settling down to make Crest babies no matter who it was with, so long as a male Crest of Gautier popped out at some point. Except, after so many years on those herbs, I won’t be making babies as long as I live – No more Crested meat market, no political maneuvering – Now, I’d only ever do this to show an amazing girl how much she means to me.”

Bernadetta beams down at her, and Father’s memory is blasted away by the rays of pure-hearted delight. Good riddance. “You mean it?” she asks softly. “Dumb ol’ Bernie's got dibs?”

A playful, leading rhetorical. Sappy, sweet, and Sylvia’s a total sucker for it. She nods.

Bern releases Sylvia’s hand to flop forward, arms worming under Sylvia’s frame in order to squeeze her tight, all the while rubbing her face against the redhead’s collarbone to muzzily declare, "Mine."

Sylvia chuckles, every point of contact suffused with such a warmth she bets she could walk bare-assed through a Kingdom blizzard and not even notice the chill.

"Yours. Meaning if you’re still feeling up for it, then why don’t we see, uh…”

She can practically feel Bernadetta’s smile pressing into her skin. “’See where they go with it?’”

Goddess, this girl. “See where they go with it.”

Where they go is forward, together, slow and sure.

...

(“How do I even get this thing off without ruining it?”)

(“Oh, Dorothea’s going to be so mad if I tear it, isn’t she?”)

(“She’d think it was hilarious, but it’s my only dress and I’d like to keep it intact!”)

...

(“Guh– Careful, those are… still pretty sensitive.”)

(“Sorry! Er, more like this, maybe?”)

(“Don’t worry about it, just – Fff. O-okay, like that, yeah.”)

…

(“Manuela said it’s normal if I can’t get quite as… y’know, as I used to.”)

(“That’s fine! No judgment!”)

...

(“Since you were the one planning this, I don’t suppose you stashed any–“)

(“Third desk drawer, green phial, cork top.”)

Neither of them quite know what they’re doing, truth told.

Physically, on Sylvia’s side of things, everything’s a tad bit jumbled up, with new rules – like using a checkerboard to play chess. There’s exploring to be done that she’s felt nauseous at the prospect of doing by her lonesome these past years, but it’s a different story with her and Bern finding out together. If anything, being a bit clueless about herself takes the edge off Bernadetta’s first-time performance anxiety. Two birds with one stone!

At least Sylvia still knows the steps to the dance as a matter of reference, all that old muscle memory jogged out of its lengthy slumber. But something’s different now, a good sort of different.

There’s no logical justification why being Sylvia and not ‘Sylvain’ would make her categorically Better At Sex, but there’s likely something to be said for no longer being cast in an unfitting role – letting Bernadetta run the show instead of poorly playacting the unbothered playboy, a gig taxing her soul as much as her stamina.

With the awkward pace stretching their escapades into the wee hours of night, littered with hiccups, fits and starts, little digressions for check-ins and pep-talks, two stark conclusions can be drawn when all is said and done: it’s certainly the least-conventionally ’sexy’ sex Sylvia’s ever had... and altogether the most fulfilling.

With a thoroughly satisfied Bernadetta wrapped around her chest in the darkened tent, sleep comes for Sylvia softly, kindly, no nightmares or restless rumination in hand. Short of being knocked unconscious in battle, it’s got to be the fastest she’s fallen asleep since the war began, if not longer. It embraces Sylvia swiftly enough to spare her the worries just how different things will be come morning.

Whatever happens, Sylvia’s barely-conscious brain supplies, we’ll figure it out.

There’s a ‘we,’ now, after all. A real we.

And Sylvia’d much rather get to dreaming of the things that we will instead of being tragically cut down to a we were.

The propensity to awaken with hair in one’s mouth stands among the sacrifices Helena von Vestra was willing to undertake when she began growing her own at length, yet even on the very fringe of waking, her suspicions are immediately roused.

The consistency of the strands is off, for one, and the overbearing reek of imported argan and celandine oils too flamboyant for her blood, far more aptly suited to a glimmerous fop like–

Ah. Right, then.

Extricating herself from her resting place between Ferdinand’s arm and the sturdy, inviting, woefully counterproductive bulwark of his chest is as much a test of adroitness as it is willpower, but Helena is a stubborn creature. If the fury of the Church crashing down upon their wartime encampments could never break her from upholding her morning responsibilities, neither shall a handsome man.

It’s for the best that Ferdinand has yet to rise; much as Helena prides herself, as any Vestra, on a capacity to move deftly in silence, she’s bleakly aware how ridiculous she must look, draped in a wrinkled coverlet, ambling over and across the bed like an apprehensive spider in an attempt not to trod upon the wide, golden fan of the cavalier’s strewn locks. As she passes above, they deign to shimmer in the narrow band of morning sun sifting through the entrance.

It is distracting.

Now, Helena’s recollection remains impaired by the fog of an as-yet-uncaffeinated morning, but she could’ve sworn she intentionally nestled into the man’s other side to avoid this very problem. That his sleeping self was evidently inclined to roll the pair over and cradle her yet closer in some subconsciously protective, possessive gesture is…

This thought, too, is inconveniently distracting. Self-conscious of her height, Helena has ever endeavored to make her presence fill the room, to be so much bigger than herself as to make her gangling frame seem small by comparison. Awakening in the cradle of Ferdinand's arms, on the other hand, even one such as herself might feel small, if only for a time.

(Not that she cares a whit about such things, mind.)

With a low creak of the folding frame beneath, Helena takes a seat at the very corner of the bed, clutching the wad of fabric to her chest.

Now, priorities. Her typical routine is out the window, and she’s awakening in… not hostile, no, but unfamiliar territory, so she’ll settle for a rush job. Bracing in advance for the sting, she speeds her free hand through a homebrew configuration of dark sigils and plasters the palm to her cheek, her chin… perhaps her bare legs to be thorough, now that she’s thinking of it.

The short-lived burble of weak acid that assaults her epidermis as she does so is a poor replacement for a proper razor, but she can’t yet seem to spot where her garter’s gone off to, and without her best blades at hand, a Vestra makes do with the tools available. Besides, utilizing undertuned dark magic for the meager purposes of depilation is a petty sort of victory in itself. Who else but a master of the craft would abuse it for such fripperies?

The discarded gown laying in a heap at her toes is… in sore need of laundering, and perhaps a seamstress. She resigns herself to pilfering a billowy off-grey robe – the closest in the man’s gaudy wardrobe to her habitual black – so obscenely soft it dares rival Tenebre’s down feathers. If her boots fail to present themselves in the next minute, she’d sooner go barefoot than borrow Aegir’s slippers… And oh, such is the state of her sorry descent into infatuation as to fall for a man who brings his slippers to war.

Having mercifully recovered at least one of her knife-belts, Helena begins to hurry to her morning rounds, when she’s stopped short by a voice from behind.

"Mmnh'lena?" grunts the golden-red man-lump.

Eloquent. If she’d known he was like this upon waking, perhaps she’d’ve done this sooner for the amusement alone. “The same.”

“Mh. Ow. Howm’sh did I–"

"Too much, as the one between us without conditioning towards resisting intoxicants,” answers Helena. “I must see to Her Majesty, but shall return as soon as said duties permit.”

She begins to rise, and a warm hand grasps blindly at her wrist.

"Bring tea?"

Helena ducks down to press her lips to a location she can only estimate is his temple ‘neath the mess of untamed amber.

"I shall consider it.”

“Mmrf... So sweet of you, darling…”

Helena’s lungs convulse, as they’ve taken an interest in doing at every casual endearment. The temptation to crawl back under the sheets has grown too great in strength, calling for a tactical retreat. She quits the tent in haste.

Ferdinand’s neighbors her own, which in turn sits adjacent the Emperor’s, permitting Helena to remain within shouting distance of Lady Edelgard should the need arise. If nothing else, the requisite walk of shame shall be short.

Slinking outside, Helena surmises there must have been a very brief drizzle overnight, as her first breath of the morning breeze is crisp with petrichor, yet the ground not so sodden as to have been a rain that lingered overlong. Good. Minimal impediment to the coming march.

Her abnormal sleeping conditions have upheaved her stringent timetable such that the camp is already abuzz with activity, long-stationed troops tending the fort at an even keel as Strike Force troops hustle to pack away for departure, now and then a hungover, if contented reveler from among the ‘Girls’ Night’ attendees yet drifting to their own accommodations. Not so unlike herself, Helena admits with an ounce of embarrassment.

Lady Edelgard stands just outside her personal tent, crimson nightgown tousled by the breeze, her hair loosely tied in lavender ribbon and tossed over one shoulder. She clasps a mug of some warm beverage or another close to her chest, inhaling deeply of the fragrant steam. When the crunch of gravel underfoot betrays Helena’s approach, Edelgard cocks her head to look the Marquise up and down.

"You know," she grins, "all these years, I'd been given to believe our dear Prime Minister’s bark was worse than his bite, but from the look of things..." The Emperor’s eyes make a point of trailing down the line of Helena’s neck, who urgently flips her hair around the other side to cover it.

"Your Majesty, that is hardly...!"

"Peace, old friend,” says Edelgard, lifting a conciliatory hand. “Besides, I'm sure Ingrid will be glad to commiserate with you, once she's risen."

Helena has known everything there is to know about Her Majesty since Edelgard scarcely stood as high as her breastbone, but being privy to a Hresvelg’s proclivities was neither a key tenet of House Vestra’s private curriculum, nor a frontier she is keen to broach.

Would she die for Lady Edelgard? Without hesitation. Commit acts the layman might consider atrocious, carve a bloody path in order to see the Emperor’s vision fulfilled? Has, and will. Does she have any interest in however Ser Galatea debases herself amidst the throes of… whatever it is the two of them choose to partake in?

Politely, Helena must decline.

Edelgard chuckles softly at the sour face she makes, then gazes eastward, up the grassy incline of the hillside outside the fort, eyes turned towards the lonely tent at its apex.

“So. How do you imagine they fared?” she asks. There’s really only one ‘they’ that suits the context, in this case.

Helena’s chin comes to rest on her knuckles. “If I must lodge an opinion… Should something have occurred, Gautier had no hand in starting it. Her propensity towards self-sabotage is paralleled only by a natural-born talent in denying the obvious. She’d sooner play the damsel and make Varley do the legwork.”

“I see. Remind me, was it you who first professed your undying ardor to Ferdinand, or…?”

Tch. Helena scowls, face warmer than she’d prefer. The Emperor holds that rare, impish smirk a few seconds more before letting the subject drop and continuing:

“I spied no signs of life from Sylvia’s tent when I went for my tea, and I’ve asked Ladislava to retrieve Bernadetta for an early briefing about our departure plans. The former may have already set out for the stables, but… I suppose we’ll see if this branch of the operation has borne fruit any moment now.”

Upon the hilltop, a minuscule brunette in light bronze plate dismounts her wyvern and strides for the tent, coming to a halt at the threshold. After several seconds of indiscernible pantomime, Ladislava spins to face the camp, pacing out to the ridgeside before stoically raising a single fist high into the air.

Out of the corner of Helena’s eye, she can spot the exact moment the weight of suspense is shed from Her Majesty’s shoulders, jostled free by a terribly unguarded sigh, equal parts triumph and – if Helena were to be so bold as to presume – relief.

“Another hard-won Adrestian victory,” Edelgard declares, rewarding herself with a long sip before gently bumping her shoulder against Helena’s arm. “And if this interminable stalemate couldn’t best us, why should a four-year military deadlock?”

The wry tone, if not the subject matter, is enough for Helena to chuff. “Why indeed?”