Chapter Text
About one month after classes began - three months since Khalid realized his Adrestian may not be as good as he thought and that his plan might, actually, be fucking stupid - Khalid and Hilda attempted to sneak into their classroom and hold a midnight smoking conference, only to find it otherwise occupied.
Khalid and Hilda had met each other over a year ago, during the fabulous yet improbable party that celebrated Khalid’s coronation. She had been on the prowl for somebody with money, Khalid had been on the prowl for somebody with clout, and the second they met they fell in love. Khalid and Hilda were the sort to prioritize finding allies, and their identical wavelengths allowed for instant identical double-sided exploitation. They were currently mutually testing the waters for when they would start making out and become a power couple. Hilda was great at explaining the Fodlani social norms that flew over Khalid’s head, and Khalid was great at getting her brother off her back. Bizarrely, Khalid even liked her 80% of the time.
Khalid had planned on making his move tonight. He felt good about his chances - in Fodlan guys asked first, so Hilda had been making increasingly obvious signals for the past few days. Khalid had read three whole books on Fodlani mating rituals, so he felt sure he had this one in the bag. Jewelry was universal, so none of this could be that hard.
This was the only topic on Khalid’s mind as he opened the door to the classroom. This was the first time he would ever ask a girl out. His eternal rival slash arranged fiance since age two had finally agreed to break things off - Khalid had to pull a ridiculously complex gambit to make her realize that she wasn’t actually attracted to men, and even then she held onto the agreement with her fingernails out of sheer spite - and Khalid was a free man. His plan was good and this would be successful. He would ask her out tonight because he was smart and his plan was good and he spoke Adrestian and this would be successful. He would -
Byleth blinked at them.
Byleth was standing in front of the blackboard. For a wild, stupid moment, Khalid thought that Byleth had snuck into her classroom afterhours to smoke too. But she was holding a book in one hand and a piece of chalk with the other - not the average look of somebody about to get high, or least somebody normal about it - and the blackboard was covered in chalky scribbles. She stared at them, forever unblinking.
Khalid looked to his chair. There was a guy sitting in his chair. He looked across the aisle at Lysithea and Leonie’s chairs. There were two other women sitting in their chairs. They were all taking notes and listening attentively.
“Uh,” Khalid said.
Byleth stared at them. The other students finally turned around too, sizing up Khalid and Hilda. A redhead looked unimpressed. Khalid felt as if he was being horribly rude by barging in like this. He shouldn’t have felt that way. This was his classroom. A purple guy was sneering at him.
“Hello, Claude. Hilda.” Byleth nodded at the both of them. Hilda’s jaw was dropped. “Can I help you?”
“Hm,” Khalid said. “You know what. Yeah. Teach, who are these people?”
“They’re my students.” Byleth said this as if it was true, which was interesting. “I’ll be happy to speak with you two later, but right now you’re disrupting the class. You’re free to join us, or you can leave and we can speak in the morning.”
“You guys don’t even go here!” Hilda yelped. She turned to Khalid, eyes wild and pleading. “Since when do we have night classes? Did you know about this?”
The purple guy turned around completely, scowling at them. “Didn’t you hear your teacher?” he asked, impossibly snide. “We’re sort of in the middle of something.”
“My genius flow is being interrupted!” a blonde woman complained. “It’s impossible to learn in this environment, Byleth!”
“Figures,” the redhead muttered. “Knew this wouldn’t end well.”
Byleth tilted her eyebrows at Khalid and Hilda. Hilda stepped back, as if to leave. Khalid grabbed her elbow, bowed apologetically at the room, and slid them both into the back two seats. Hilda thumped down on the dusty seat, eyes wide and betrayed, but Khalid pressed a finger to his lips. Byleth resumed lecturing, as easily and simply as if she’d never been interrupted, and Khalid made a show of folding his hands on his desk and listening attentively.
The material was strange. It wasn’t on battlefield tactics or politics. It appeared to be a literature class. They were covering a famous book in Fodlan, one that Khalid vaguely recalled as a book that the ordinary Academy students read in their first year.The strangers were taking turns reading out loud and stopping to discuss the passages. The redhead stumbled awkwardly through the passages. Blondie read the passages well, but had to stop and think hard when Byleth asked her questions about the material and characters. The purple guy read the passages smoothly, but he frequently had to stop and ask Byleth to define a word.
Khalid wished he could take notes on the words, but Hilda was sitting next to him bored out of her mind. This material had to be insanely easy for her - Academy kids started a bit younger than the Officer’s Academy kids, and the nobility received the best education. She had probably already read this famous book. But Byleth was teaching these students with no judgment or impatience, encouraging the redhead when she needed it and patiently defining every word for the purple guy no matter how many definitions he asked for, as if she didn’t care that they hadn’t read this famous book at all. And because it was Byleth, because Khalid knew for a fact that the woman cared about nothing, the next time the blonde woman read out a word Khalid didn’t know and the purple guy didn’t raise his hand, Khalid raised his hand for himself. Byleth even nodded at him.
It was shockingly difficult to even force the words out. Hilda would know this, so Khalid ought to know it too. Anybody would know it. But he had these questions every day, and he couldn’t exactly ask . If not here, then where? Hilda would just have to assume he wasn’t as smart as he pretended. Give her a secret to dig up, that’ll leave her happy. Hide the bigger ones.
“Teach, what does ‘egregious’ mean?”
“You could define it as ‘outstandingly bad’.” Byleth had put on glasses. It was adorable. “Something that’s remarkably or blatantly bad or shocking. For instance, ‘the student dropped out on the first round of the sword tournament - his performance was egregiously bad’.”
“...how do you spell that?”
Byleth spelled it. Class continued.
By the time that class ended, Khalid had overcome his five stages of grief and reached acceptance. He was tempted to write it off as another bonkers Fodlan thing, but Hilda was just as confused as he was. Khalid was beginning to worry that this school year might not be normal or something.
Khalid lingered a strategic few minutes after Byleth dismissed the class, waiting for the bizarre students to bow in thanks and begin packing up their own materials. Khalid and Hilda exchanged a glance and colluded in silence - Khalid would corner the students, Hilda would corner Byleth. They nodded at each other - Break! - before scrambling out of their chairs, driving home towards their respective quarry.
Purple guy was obviously the leader. He spoke first, rose and bowed to Byleth first, and collected his materials first. Khalid cornered him just as he was about to turn and begin exiting the classroom, flashing his biggest and most disarming grin. Purple guy seemed unsurprised and unamused. Greeting, greeting, most appropriate greeting - no, not that one, one suitably annoying -
“Howdy!” Khalid chirped. Nailed it. “Claude von Riegan, at your service. Can’t help but notice you’re in my seat!”
“Can’t help but notice you’re blocking my way,” the purple guy said dryly. “My apologies. I’ll be out of your hair in a second.”
“Hey, stranger, it’s polite to give a name for a name.” Khalid knew that for a fact - he’d read it in an etiquette book.
“It’s Yuri. If you’ll excuse me.”
Purple guy - Yuri - stepped to the left. Khalid easily stepped to the left too, blocking his way. Keeping the grin pasted on his face, Khalid said, “Most people toss in a last name there too. Or do you want to stay a stranger?”
“I’ll stay a stranger if you know my name or not.” Yuri’s expression was easy and loose and blank, like white linen clothing hung in the sun to dry, but Khalid picked out a faint shadow growing. Khalid was aggravating him - no, he had started the conversation aggravated. No. Still wrong. Defensive? “I suggest you make your life a lot easier and pretend that tonight never happened. It’s for the best if your world and mine don’t touch, Claude von Riegan. This is nothing you want to get involved with.”
“You do realize that’s the one thing you could have said to guarantee my interest, right?” Khalid stretched his eyes wide and nonthreatening, but the shadow over Yuri’s face grew. “Come on, I don’t want to snitch about this. This after-school program can stay between us. But as house leader of the Golden Deer, I really ought to know -”
“Let me guess,” Yuri drawled, folding his arms. “This program can stay between us if you answer my questions? Oh, and then it can stay between us if you do what I say? You promise you won’t tell anybody if I do this and that? Don’t waste your breath. Byleth promised to protect us from you. Pull that on somebody without protection. Maybe an actual child, who is actually afraid of you.”
Khalid jerked back, hurt. Who was this guy seeing? Was Khalid really coming off like that - as if he was trying to bully or threaten Yuri? Maybe he was working up to a deal, which maybe could be interpreted as blackmail if you wanted to be uncharitable about it, but it wouldn’t have been anything serious. People didn’t need protection from Khalid. He wasn’t that sort of person. Khalid was the person who needed protection from everybody else, frankly.
But maybe Claude was that sort of person. Maybe this was a portrait of Claude - a person that Khalid could never see as clearly as he liked.
“Got a problem?”
Then the redhead was standing next to Yuri, expression flat and unamused. She was completely unarmed, but she held herself as if she had one hand on her weapon. Claude knew the right time and place to back down, so Khalid shook his head and held up two hands in a plea for innocence.
“No problem at all.” Khalid made a show of stepping back, sweeping into a messy Fodlan bow. It had been perfect before he even arrived here, but after a year he had finally hammered it down into an easy and casual grace - just incorrect enough for a sloppy young man who’d bowed like this more times than he could count. It was the details that always caught you. He used to enunciate far too much. “Have an excellent night, pursuers of knowledge. Sweet dreams.”
The blonde woman swayed by them, performatively flipping her hair. “You must jest!” she yelled, far too loudly. “For the night has only just begun! The to-do list of a genius doesn’t wait for business hours! With that sort of lazy thinking, you’ll never get ahead.” She laughed, a real classic ‘ho-ho-ho!’ style production, as the redhead rolled her eyes and turned to follow her out. “Eat my dust as I far surpass the daylight people! The rats that crawl latest crawl the furthest!”
Yuri looked exquisitely pained, but he turned to follow her too. “The rats thing was an insult , Connie. That innkeeper was insulting us.”
“I am reclaiming it! Just as the innkeeper reclaimed the hundreds of rats in his -”
“You’re welcome,” the redhead said.
And, just as easily and mysteriously as they came, they were gone. Khalid was left standing alone in abject and uncomfortable shock. Only Hilda startled him out of his stupor - when she grabbed his elbow and dragged him out of the classroom, Khalid hurrying to keep up with her.
They broke back into the freezing night air, wind pricking at his skin. Cold, cold, endlessly cold . No wonder these people wouldn’t know a scientific advancement if it bit them in the ass - they were too busy hibernating through the cold half the year. Khalid eventually regained his bearings well enough to keep up with Hilda, finally grabbing her shoulder and slowing her to a stop. She didn’t seem traumatized, shocked, broken-hearted, or otherwise distressed. She actually seemed…happy. Peppy, even.
Khalid began to panic. He grabbed both of her shoulders, begging her to look him in the eyes and understand his desperation. “What did Byleth say? What were those people doing there? Who were they? Night classes?”
And Hilda…squealed.
She held her hands to her cheeks, in a distressingly familiar pose. As she spoke, Khalid’s stomach dropped lower and lower. It was the one thing he hadn’t wanted to hear. The one loss condition. His greatest ally had failed him, and his greatest enemy had turned her against him. Khalid was truly on his own now - a single desert rock failing to weather the tumultuous tempests of a mountaintop. All was lost.
This always happened. Time after time, all roads ended here. For every step Khalid took, a wyvern threw him three steps back. And so Khalid beat on ceaselessly against the raging tides of fate and duplicity.
“The professor’s so cute !” Hilda squealed. “Isn’t she just the nicest , sweetest person ever? Can you believe it? She must be the best teacher in the world!”
“Please,” Khalid begged, “why were there mean strangers in our classroom.”
“Oh, she said they’re adult learners! Apparently they really wanted to go to school, and she was like - why not! Isn’t that darling?”
Khalid screamed into his hands.
Byleth couldn’t keep getting away with it.
Somebody had to figure her out. It couldn’t just be Khalid who knew the truth - he couldn’t possess the sole pair of eyes that saw through her deceptive spells. The woman had all of the wrong spirits and none of the right ones. But he was surrounded by backwards Fodlani who wouldn’t know a spirit if one bit them on the ass, so Khalid knew that he would be the sole holder of the truth. Normally that was the way he liked it, but this time it was definitely driving him insane.
Maybe it was unavoidable circumstance. Khalid’s first experience with the woman was watching her decimate a troupe of bandits singlehandedly. It was a religious experience for all three house leaders. Byleth squeezed Edelgard’s hand after saving her life and Edelgard promptly stuffed her glove in her pocket, never to be washed again. Poor Dimitri still wasn’t over it. It was insanely hot, but Khalid was stronger mentally and had the good sense to be terrified by it.
That was a side of Professor Byleth nobody else had ever seen. Byleth’s introduction as a teacher to the Golden Deer was the first moment she walked into their first class. Hilda and Leonie had decided it would be funny to play a prank on their teacher/establish dominance, and they had set up a bucket of water above the door. Raphael and Lorenz had explicitly found it hilarious, Ignatz and Marianne had muttered something about getting in trouble before giving up, and the very invested Lysithea had called them all childish to cover her tracks. Khalid had limply tried to dissuade them, but their class dynamics had already firmly been set and he had been completely ineffectual. He hadn’t tried very hard - the woman had, again, single-handedly slaughtered a company of bandits. She would never fall for something so basic.
Byleth walked through the door. The bucket of water fell on her head. She had been absolutely drenched.
Byleth had blinked at them, water dripping in rivulets across her hair. Most of the class was laughing their ass off, even Khalid. An absolutely atrocious first impression on their teacher, but the students had successfully won dominance. They had driven away their first teacher in tears and they could do the same to this one. Every student in the class either hated to work (Hilda and Marianne, for surprisingly identical reasons), hated being told what to do (Leonie, Lorenz, Lysithea), or went along with the rest (Ignatz and Raphael). There had been no intention of bowing down to an authority figure. What were they, the Blue Lions? Bootlickers ?
“Is there a leak?” Byleth asked.
The laughter died. Everybody stared at Byleth. Byleth tilted her head.
Slow, tremulous, Ignatz pointed at the bucket. Byleth looked down, squinting.
“Oh. Why was that there?”
Straight faced, Hilda said, “Maybe the custodian left it.”
“Okay.” Byleth had walked forward, taking her place in the front of class. She bowed, a little stiff and awkward. “Hello. I’m your teacher. Please treat me well.” She looked up, eyes crinkling faintly in what Khalid would come to recognize as her edition of a smile. “I’m happy to be here.”
The tone was set. Byleth was unflappable.
Salt in her coffee? She drank it all without flinching. Hidden alarm clock set to ring during class? She found it instantly. Frogs labeled 1, 2, and 4 in the classroom? Byleth sadly noted that 3 must have been eaten by a hawk, and she spent the rest of the class delighting over her shiny new frogs. Watching her feed the frogs little worms was adorable. It was so cute that the pranks stopped. Nobody could stomach it anymore. She was too innocent.
Khalid, famous for his honest, straightforward, and upfront nature, hated liars. And Professor Byleth was stinking of deceit. Nobody was that adorable. She had a plot and he would sniff it out.
It was ridiculous. Byleth knew where that water had come from. She knew conveniently numbered frogs hadn’t just hopped into the room. Salt was not a secret ingredient in Garreg Mach coffee. But she never once called them out on it. No confrontation, no discipline, no putting the hammer down. She bore their pranks with a stoic countenance and limpid eyes. She invited them to dinner, cooking lessons, tea parties, and sauna trips.
Lorenz’s distaste of commoners was overcome by Byleth’s grace, elegance, and modesty. That was the beginning of the end.
Byleth could out-eat Raphael, winning his admiration forever. Byleth magically knew the language of the horses and understood Dorte’s needs as well as Marianne did, convincing Marianne (and Ingrid, and Dimitri, and Ferdinand, and Lorenz - ugh, what was with Fodlani and horses? They didn’t even have fangs!) that she was a goddess among women. Ignatz taught Byleth how to paint and, good gosh wouldn’t you know it, she was a natural . Byleth offered Lysithea all of the extra tutoring she could handle and solemnly asked her opinion about taxes and marriage, cuing a week-long bragging session on how the Professor thought Lysithea was an adult probably because she’s such a good teacher and she really gets me . Hilda noticed all of this and was overcome with admiration for Byleth’s ability to get people obsessed with her.
Leonie had been a final hold-out due to her weird obsession with Captain Jeralt, but even she fell eventually. Something about Byleth asking for her help in choosing father’s day gifts. And none of this was fucking touching her efforts on the rest of the monastery. It was dismal.
Khalid had begged Hilda, tears practically in his eyes, to see the extent of this woman’s manipulation. It couldn’t be natural. It was far too targeted, too pointed. But Hilda never believed him. She would endlessly bring up how Byleth couldn’t have a manipulative bone in her body. Adorable women weren’t manipulative, the most manipulative teenage girl in Garreg Mach claimed. It was hopeless. She had closed ranks among her own. Hilda was going down on Byleth’s ship.
“Please, Claude,” Hilda had sniffed. “You think she’s some sort of criminal mastermind? She can’t even teach.”
“What does knowing how to teach have to do with being a criminal mastermind?” Khalid had hissed, thumping the dining table. On the far end of the table, Ashe yelped and narrowly saved his glass of milk from overturning. Khalid would have to knock it over on purpose next time. The Faerghus obsession with milk was obscene. “I’ve never seen her make a facial expression, Hilda. That’s not natural.”
“We only have four days of classes each week because we convinced her that the other houses only meet on the last day because they always have detention.” Hilda crossed her arms, implacable. “Then I had to define what detention was. Then I had to pretend the Alliance had no cultural concept for it. No criminal mastermind is that gullible.”
“Just because she can’t control our class -”
“We get her off-track from the lecture topic almost half the time. We’ve convinced her to end class early for physical training, like, ten times so far.”
“The physical training was her idea!” They convinced her? They convinced her ? Did Khalid live in a different reality than these people? Did their pathetic excuse for a sewer system rot their brains? “She’s tricking us into spending all of our time in battle simulations and physical training!”
Hilda sniffed again. Did they teach you to do that in princess charm school or what? “We don’t do battle simulations . We’re just playing games.”
They were battle games. Khalid didn’t vocalize this, since he had found no other way to trick Hilda into actually training. “Sure, whatever. Look, the fact that we’re covering almost nothing from the syllabus and that our class schedule is wildly off track doesn’t mean anything. It means that Byleth doesn’t care about these things. She cares about - you know, about other stuff?”
“What other stuff?” Hilda asked, unimpressed. “Games? Telling stories about her life?” They were all stories of battles she’d fought and they were all educational! Khalid had noticed ! “Why are you complaining when Professor Byleth makes class so fun? Just enjoy it and stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I’m not talking about her horse obsession!” Khalid cried, exasperated. “I can’t enjoy being played when I don’t know somebody’s ulterior motive. Doesn’t this unsettle you?”
“ Goddess , Claude, we’ve talked about that literal mind of yours.”
It took almost ten minutes for Khalid to realize that he had fucked up an idiom again. Damn it. Professor Byleth had successfully convinced Hilda to do actual work and he couldn’t even recognize a stupid idiom. Maybe Khalid was just pissy that she was better at this than he was. A con artist knew a con artist, and a jealous con artist knew every trick in the book.
After that first night, Khalid went back to attend the night classes many more times. It was for the express purpose of keeping an eye on the strangers. But Khalid liked to think that he was honest with himself, even if he was honest with nobody else alive, and he knew it was a stupid sort of relief to finally ask Byleth stupid questions. Questions on topics that any high lord would know, and that obviously Khalid did not. Khalid had hoped optimistically that everything he needed to know would be found within books or in the endless fountain of knowledge in the form of his mother, but as usual life had disappointed.
He should have prepared for this eventuality. In truth, it had blindsided him. Khalid had convinced himself that everything would come easily in Fodlan. He had literally just shown up and they gave him the keys to their country! When you belonged somewhere, life was easy street. If you could convince everybody that you belonged there then you basically belonged there, and everybody knew the Fodlani were easily fooled. They didn’t even have algebra. If you handed them a triangle they would have no idea what to do with the thing.
Khalid had been looking forward to belonging somewhere for once. Even if it was a lie, it should have been good enough. Lies could become true if you told them to the right people. Khalid could figure it out. He just had to tell the right lies to the right people and have everybody believe the right thing. Then he might as well belong.
Still, the information gathering mission was successful. Confrontational wasn’t Khalid’s style - judging by Byleth’s eyebrow, he would have been kicked out if he had tried - and he wasn’t able to directly collect any information on the strangers. Adjacently, from context clues and oblique references, Khalid was able to pick up a fair amount.
Yuri was a gang leader, underground boss, and probable drug dealer. So that was fun.
Hapi was a commoner who had extremely sparse educational experience, partly due to her childhood spent as a kidnapee. There was also that.
Constance von Nuvelle was his greatest lead. Khalid had high-tailed it for the library the second she pompously announced her full name and lineage, but for once books hadn’t helped. Her family was once nobility, but they had been officially stripped of their titles and prestige only a few years before they were decimated by Brigid. There wasn’t even any records of survivors.
She had bragged about her education at some royal academy of magic - as if their magic schools were better than the ones in Almyra, which were thousands of years old - and Khalid had promptly wrote a letter and bought a roster of attendees from the school. Sure enough, a Constance von Nuvelle had graduated a few years prior. At least one of them legally existed.
A fucking gigantic guy showed up sometimes, but he mostly just slept and corrected Byleth on several counts. His rough and tumble accent was fake as hell, and Khalid was 80% certain he was a noble trying to hide it. Khalid scoured his lineage books for a ‘Balthus’, but found nothing. Illegitimate? Why were two shamed nobles hanging out with a nobody and a gang leader? In Khalid’s classroom?!
After several weeks, Khalid decided that this had gone on for long enough. Confronting people rarely got you anywhere, but after three weeks of nothing useful sometimes you had to try another tack. It was time to push Byleth to the wire and extract real information from her.
These strangers were unknowns. Khalid liked unknowns, but mostly because he could turn them into knowns and snag himself a secret. Khalid liked knowns to himself and unknowns to everybody else. These mystery people were a known to literally everybody else but him - some sort of cosmic joke held by a select few people who seemed to live underground (???) and who withheld all knowledge of their existence or purpose from Khalid. It would have been a fun little mystery if it didn’t actively piss him off.
Khalid chose the option with the least escape routes and decided to crash Byleth’s little flower club. It wasn’t any sort of official club. It didn’t even involve gardening - Byleth could frequently be found in the greenhouse with Dedue, hands in the dirt in companionable silence. It was more of a combination flower arranging and flower pressing group. It was also exclusively women, and Khalid wasn’t a disrespectful asshole who barged into women’s spaces. He was mostly an ordinary asshole, so he settled for sitting on a bench near the door and making a show of reading a book as he listened in.
He actually didn’t know much about the group - just gossip from Hilda. Again, women’s spaces, Khalid was an ass but he wasn’t a dick, etc. He didn’t even know the club members. He was actually shocked to see Bernadetta sitting next to Byleth, carefully arranging pressed flowers into a book. Khalid had no idea Bernadetta went anywhere but her room and her classroom, much less interacted with anybody else. She was comparing two different sorts of flowers and solemnly deciding which ones matched the other one or whatever. Bernadetta seemed…not stressed.
Marianne was sitting on Byleth’s other side, arranging a bouquet. Marianne. Who wasn’t in the vicinity of a horse at all. She seemed calm and happy. Khalid buried his face in his book.
Across from them, Dorothea and Petra sat next to each other. They were making flower crowns. Petra’s was white and Dorothea’s were purple. They might be making them for each other.
As expected. As unexpected, Petra was speaking.
“I am to feel the isolated. All the students are kind, but many to mis - um, not understand. Students try, and it is kind, but…not perfect. I am to feel more bad.”
Dorothea squeezed her hand. Petra looked down at her lap.
Khalid winced. As usual, her Adrestian gave him secondhand embarrassment. It wasn’t her fault - she had obviously studied it as hard as she could, but you couldn’t speak a language if nobody spoke it with you. And clearly nobody wanted to speak with her. Say what you will about Prince Tall Glass of Milk and his Right Hand Bootlicker - Dimitri had made damn sure that nobody would ever be able to mock Dedue for his accent or speech. It had to have been a one-person effort - they spoke identically , down to the inflections, which was deeply funny.
“Would you like feedback on that sentence?” Byleth asked gently. She was always soft-spoken and breathy, but she seemed more somber and understanding than usual. Petra nodded, squeezing Dorothea’s hand. “You are feeling isolated. All of the students understand, but many misunderstand. Students try, and it’s kind, but it’s not perfect. It makes you feel worse.”
Petra nodded fervently. “You understand!”
“It’s a very difficult feeling. But you’re always trying to connect with others, Petra. It’s very brave of you.” Byleth looked around the group. “Bernadetta, Marianne? Do you have comments for Petra?”
Fucking amazingly, Marianne looked up from her flowers and smiled shakily at Petra. “I…think you’re really brave too, Petra. I…I couldn’t talk to - to people like you do. I can barely talk to people at all, and this is my home…”
“Then Marianne is very brave also!” Petra said heatedly. “Difficult is difficult! A person must always respect the difficult that is do.”
“I - I don’t understand at all either, obviously!” Bernadetta hid behind her book of flower pressings, speaking fixedly to the page and pretending that Petra wasn’t there. “But I think you’re so cool, Petra! You love being outside and fighting and being like a boy and - and everything I’m not! Even if I don’t understand, I - I think it’s cool that I don’t understand! Maybe! Sorry! I’m sorry, I sound like an idiot -”
“In Brigid men and women are outside,” Petra said, serious and intent. “Girls can go to the outside. You must believe.”
“Believe in…my ability to be outside?”
Dorothea smiled, eyes crinkling. “You’re outside now, aren’t you? I don’t think you sound like an idiot at all, Bernie. You sound like you really know what you’re talking about.”
Bernadetta squeaked, hiding behind her book again.
“Everybody admires you, Petra,” Byleth said gently. “Even if we all come from different backgrounds, we can still care about one another. Maybe we can’t understand you as well as we like, Petra - but we all want to keep trying. Because you’re cool.” The circle nodded fervently. Petra looked as if she wanted to cry a little. “Thank you for sharing. Anybody else?”
Marianne raised a tremulous hand. “Ah - Professor? Does my bouquet look okay…?”
“It looks lovely. Have you considered adding in some green to bring out the light blue?”
With a slow and dawning sense of horror, Khalid realized that Byleth was holding flower-assisted group therapy in the greenhouse.
All of the girls shared eventually. Dorothea talked about her issues opening up to men and everybody assured her that men were trash. Bernadetta shared that she had managed to eat lunch in the dining hall today, and everybody clapped and gave her flowers to celebrate. Marianne shared insecurities and everybody reassured her. Byleth demonstrated how to build a bouquet that symbolized friendship.
What the hell was Byleth doing? It didn’t escape Khalid’s notice that she had collected every girl but Edelgard from the Black Eagle house. Was this some sort of campaign to undermine Edelgard’s authority? Was she trying to drive a wedge between the Black Eagles and Edelgard? What was her motivation to do that?
No. Start from her potential motivation and work from there. From Khalid’s month-long observation of Byleth, he could see that her primary (and potentially sole) motivation in everything she did was to…be a good teacher. Khalid had never actually seen her do anything that wasn’t from that motivation - in service of that goal. Granted, her understanding of that goal was loose. Very loose. If everything Byleth did was to be a good teacher, then a flower club slash group therapy session with some of the most damaged and neurotic women Khalid had ever met in his life was…
To help them.
Khalid thought about a gang leader who was desperate for school, a commoner who could barely read, a disgraced noble who needed self-esteem, and a noble from nowhere who helped his friends with their assignments.
Khalid quietly excused himself and read outside instead. The book was another stone in the path he was laying in his journey towards discovering the mystery of the crests and relics, but he just couldn’t get into it today. He wondered if it was the most important thing he could be doing.
Which was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous thought. Khalid had upended his life for his dream. He had designed a person for his goal. He had subjected himself to the agony of Alliance politics in service of this goal. Khalid hadn’t subjected himself to the agony of Alliance politics for the Alliance - for its lords, ladies, and citizens. If they wanted him to give a shit then they shouldn’t be a disaster of a nation. Sure, he was interested in them all, but it was just interest. Not investment.
Khalid wasn’t here for the Golden Deer, and the more he forgot that the more likely it was that he would slip up. Things were difficult right now - not unbearably so, because nothing was unbearable for him short of five assassins at once - but maybe that was for the best. If it was difficult to be Claude von Riegan then maybe he wouldn’t forget that he was Khalid.
Khalid wondered who Byleth Eisner was.
The girls filtered out eventually, arms linked or heads ducked together, and Khalid waited a few minutes before rising and slipping back into the greenhouse.
Byleth was sitting on the edge of a flowerbed, still in the process of packing up the club supplies and putting them back on the shelves. She had clearly grown distracted - she had a large bouquet of bright green flowers on her lap, absently arranging and rearranging them in patterns with meaning only to her. Her focus on the task was absolute, as her focus always was - on the battlefield, in the classroom, at the flowerbeds.
It was a strange thing, to apply yourself single-mindedly towards beauty. Her mind must have been free of all worries and concerns - peaceful, thinking of nothing but beauty and creating the beautiful. Maybe her mind was free of everything but beauty. In those moments, beauty was all she knew.
Why was that so clear to Khalid? Why could he see it?
She let him approach, and Khalid half-heartedly tried to hang around and out-wait his teacher before remembering that he would never succeed and promptly giving up. The woman could out-wait a stone and Khalid was not a patient man.
“Hope I didn’t intrude back there.”
Byleth hummed, rearranging the flowers from one configuration to another. They looked identical to Khalid. He wasn’t a flower guy. Preferred sand sculptures. He suspected that they were both meditative. “Satisfy your curiosity?”
Khalid pasted on a disarming grin, clasping his hands behind his back. “What do you think I was curious about?”
“You care a lot about what I do all day.”
“Don’t make it sound weird, Teach,” Khalid said plainly. “You’ll confuse me for Dimitri.”
“Dimitri’s a good boy.”
“Goddess, don’t say that in his earshot. You’ll awaken something in him.” Byleth tilted her head, confused, and Khalid hurriedly moved on. “I’m your head of house, of course I care about what my very own teacher gets up to all day. Tell me, Teach - how did that little group therapy session start? Word between mouths? Or were you recruiting?”
Byleth returned to her flowers. She plucked one long-leafed flower out of the bunch, frilly and cute. She presented it to Khalid, who automatically took it. Simply, she said, “Zinnia. That’s friendship.”
A flower was friendship? Khalid thought the Fodlani gave flowers as romantic gestures. Like a lot of pan-Fodlan traditions and the language itself, it was Adrestian in origin and spread to the other parts of the continent once they were colonized. Way before Loog’s day the Kingdom was a ‘barbaric’ assortment of disconnected tribes clans, but Adrestia unionized them into one country and grouped the region underneath one roof. It was a little ironic - the Kingdom may have split from the Empire, and the Alliance may have split from the Kingdom, but the Kingdom and the Alliance were ultimately what Adrestia made them. There had been no such thing as a Kingdom before the Empire, and no Alliance before a Kingdom.
You weren’t always where you came from. Sometimes you were who you were made. But the land always remembered, and the people did too. You always remembered.
Maybe the confusion had risen to his face, because Byleth explained. “In some countries, flowers have meanings. If you want to convey something, but you’re struggling on how to do it or you don’t have the words, you can give them a flower.” Byleth removed another flower from the bouquet, twirling it between a finger and thumb. “When I was little, Daddy never understood me. He didn’t know who I was inside. It frustrated him. Then a mercenary friend of ours told me about the language of flowers. I didn’t like making things hard for him. So I thought I could communicate with him through flowers. I remember I gave him a carnation.” Byleth held the second flower out to Khalid, who dumbly took it. “That’s love. Daddy cried, I think.”
Everybody knew that Byleth’s father doted on her, but the thought of Captain Jeralt of the Knights of Seiros crying made Khalid’s brain short-circuit. But Khalid couldn’t imagine any father reacting any other way. To go through such lengths just to communicate with somebody - just to tell them that you loved them…
Khalid held a flower in each hand. A zinnia and a carnation. Friendship and love. Khalid didn’t really know the meaning of either. Maybe Byleth didn’t either. Anybody who relied on flowers to feel their emotions probably didn’t know much about emotions at all. But they probably cared more than Khalid did.
“So you’re teaching upright noble women how to express their emotions, huh?” Khalid asked, bending his tone to sound light and teasing. It was a weak attempt to obfuscate the probing nature of the question, but he knew it would be transparent anyway. “Nobody wants to learn how to express their feelings. It’s too tough and awkward. You must have recruited those girls. And it’s just a coincidence that they’re all from the Black Eagles, huh?”
Byleth shrugged. “Rich kids are whack.”
Fuck, Khalid didn’t know that one. Think about the context. Rich kids are…troubled? Traumatized? Judging from Khalid’s purchased intel on those four, probably traumatized.
Khalid adopted a solemn face. He sighed, just for good measure. “They are. I guess supporting whack students is all part of a teacher’s job.”
Byleth blinked at him. He blinked at her, wondering what it meant in her language. She shook her head. “Whack is slang for strange and unusual. It usually has a negative connotation - a bad association.”
Crap! He was completely off-base! This was why Hilda made fun of him. It was a welcome change of pace to actually be corrected. Normally he was just left with the sense he had done something wrong, but figuring out what exactly he’d done wrong could be fiendishly difficult.
“Sorry, guess I’m not up to date on mercenary slang,” Khalid said breezily. Byleth nodded. Great. Definitely mercenary slang. Very normal for a noble young lord not to know those things. “But you do realize that gathering those Eagle girls below Edelgard’s sight might look a little pointed.”
“I asked her if she wanted to come. She ran away very quickly.”
What, had Edelgard thought it was a trap? Byleth couldn’t fool somebody with both hands over their eyes. “I’m sure she has better things to do. When you’re working with lords and ladies everything you do could be interpreted politically, you know.”
“Really?” Byleth didn’t sound too interested. “If Edelgard has concerns we can talk it out.”
“So you don’t really care about politics.”
“Should I?”
“In my experience, Teach, politics tends to care about you.”
“I’m a teacher,” Byleth said plainly. “Not a politician. I worry about the well-being of the students. Not where they came from.”
Khalid’s mouth was dry. Something became abundantly clear to him. So clear that it was almost embarrassing. The question he had spent so long agonizing over had the simplest answer in the world. Just went to show. Sometimes a person was unfathomably complex just because they were too simple.
“Teach.” Khalid opened his mouth, then closed it. He drafted the sentence in his head, then converted it to Adrestian, and redrafted it. Finally, he said, “Did those delinquents ask you to teach them?”
She didn’t need to ask who he was referring to. “Yes.”
Of course they did. Why would it be more complicated than that. Everybody knew life wasn’t complicated. Spirits help him. “Where the hell did you even find those guys?” Byleth pointed at the floor. “In the greenhouse?”
“Underground.”
“See, you all keep mentioning that, and I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If you don’t know you shouldn’t know.”
“And how do you know?” Khalid couldn’t believe this shit. Why did the simplest answers raise the most questions? “How did you even find those rat people? Those four don’t seem like they trust easy. Why would they ask you for help? For school , of all things?”
“That’s a lot of questions.”
Khalid flapped an impatient hand. “I’ll answer four of your questions later, alright?” Byleth held up five fingers. “Fine, five! Come on, Teach, this has been driving me crazy.”
“Speaking with you is always interesting, Claude. I find myself saying much more than usual.” Byleth hummed, tilting her head. Khalid felt a little embarrassed and a little self-satisfied. “If you feel so strongly about it, I can tell you. I had a dream.”
Flatly, Khalid said, “That answers none of my questions.”
“It’s the answer to all of them.”
“You have to be kidding me.”
But Byleth just shook her head. “I had a dream. Almost two weeks after class started. It was very vivid. I felt like I lived almost a week in a moment.” Byleth looked down at her flowers, shuffling the carnations and zinnias between her fingers. “I dreamed that there was a secret underground village underneath Garreg Mach. In this village…four people took sanctuary. They were strange people, but they were brave and good. They were in a spot of trouble, but we helped save them and their village. I dreamed I saw my mother…”
There was no way to unpack the mother thing, so Khalid focused on the important bits. “‘We’ helped them?”
Byleth nodded. “You and Hilda were there, and some other students. I remember you seemed very thoughtful. You didn’t trust Yuri, but you fought for him.” Byleth raised one of the zinnias to her nose, inhaling deeply and smelling the flower. “Yuri behaved badly in the dream, but he meant well. I think we connected. I don’t remember how or why. I only knew that…when I woke up, I felt something missing. I felt bereft. As if I had seen a rare and beautiful flower in the corner of my eye, but when I looked again it was gone.”
“Wait, Yuri was in the dream? Was this before you met him?”
“I had never met any of them,” Byleth said plainly. “I didn’t even know their underground village existed. But then I woke up, and I couldn’t overcome how real it felt. I searched for the entrance to Abyss I saw in my dream, and I found it. Yuri, Balthus, Constance, and Hapi - I dreamed them before I met them.”
“You had a prophetic dream?” Khalid cried. “But only shamans can do that!”
“I got spirits.”
“That’s a relief,” Khalid said feelingly. “Nice to know there’s an explanation for that.”
“Agreed. Yuri and the others must have spirits too. When I visited Abyss and found them, we realized that we all had the same dream. We knew each other.” Byleth shrugged again, a little awkward. “Yuri said the Goddess must have wanted us to meet. I told him…if the Goddess wanted us to meet, then I think she must have wanted me to help him. I asked him what I could do to help him. He said that he wanted to finish school. I think not having a degree hurts him. I told him I could do that. Does that answer all of your questions?”
Khalid couldn’t believe it. ‘I saw them in a dream’ did answer all of his questions. Gang leaders were always the most religious types. Maybe Yuri only trusted one person, but that person was probably the Goddess.
Maybe Byleth helped the rat people because she wanted to follow the Goddess’ will, but Khalid doubted it. She seemed to believe more in the spirits than the Goddess, but she clearly wasn’t interested in diving the spirit’s intentions through her coffee grounds. If she told Yuri that the Goddess wanted her to help him, then she said it for Yuri’s benefit. Byleth had just wanted to help him.
They had a connection? What was that supposed to mean? They didn’t seem like they had a connection. Khalid didn’t see it, honestly.
At least he had his answers now. They were deeply unsatisfying and just raised more questions, but Khalid knew that they weren’t questions Byleth could answer.
Khalid sighed anyway. “At least now I know. That mystery was really driving me wild, Teach.”
“I’m confused.” Byleth didn’t sound that confused, but she never did. “I can’t tell if you like mysteries or hate them.”
“Like solving them, hate having them.”
“So you seek them out.”
“Got it in one, Teach.”
But Byleth just tilted her head, large limpid eyes staring up at him. “So you have a habit of making yourself happy and sad.”
“Gotta take a little sadness now to get a lot of happiness later.” That was Khalid’s philosophy. His father’s, too. It motivated a lot of his political decisions. “Well, any friends of yours are friends of mine. Your rat people are welcome in the Golden Deer anytime.”
The zinnias dangled loosely in Byleth’s hands, but she spoke with quiet sincerity. “Thank you, Claude. Yuri asked me to involve them in more class activities. He says it’ll be to our mutual benefit.”
“Anything for our good friend Yuri, I suppose.” Khalid pasted on a big grin. “I guess you’ve scored yourself five free questions, Teach. Ask away. I’m an open book.”
“I think I’ll save them.”
Khalid gasped, pressing a hand over his heart. “You don’t care about my secrets? You don’t care about me ?”
“I’ve never been interested in mysteries. I prefer flowers.” Byleth lifted the bouquet, inhaling their fragrance deeply. “Do you know what a perennial flower is, Claude?”
Magnanimous and indulgent, Khalid said, “I do not. Educate me, Teach.”
As usual, Byleth either ignored or didn’t pick up on the sarcasm. She just looked down upon the zinnias so softly, as if she was seeing something far deeper and richer than a color and a scent. “Perennials are plants with more than one growth cycle. A perennial plant blooms every spring and withers every fall. They’re plants that live and die and live again.”
“Reminds me of a school year.” Khalid wasn’t entirely certain if he was joking or not. This lady was getting to him. “Students are always coming in and doing mock battles and holding dances before graduating. Then the school does it all again next year.”
He was rewarded with a small nod. “It’s a lovely cycle. Every student teaches the teacher, and every teacher was once a student. I’m looking forward to learning from you and Yuri this year very much.”
Khalid felt a little awkward. He fought the urge to shift on his feet, and had to settle for looking anywhere but Byleth’s soft eyes. “What about those - what are they called, evergreen plants? The ones that just don’t die at all. Those have to be better than perennials. Plants that don’t die are better than plants that die and come back, right?”
But Byleth just shook her head. “New plants can’t grow without the nutrients from the fertilizer of the dead plants before it. A cycle can’t start before it ends.”
“I don’t understand you at all,” Khalid said plainly.
Byleth’s eyes creased as she looked at him so strangely. Her look made him want to disappear, or to magically become somebody different. Somebody who would know what to do with someone like her. “I like how flowers create each other. It’s not complicated.”
Khalid didn’t know what to say. Professor Byleth had always lived in her own little world, but for the first time that world felt impossibly distinct and alien from his own. He could only watch it from beyond a pane of glass. Searching for it, on some level, yet content to remain where he was. Maybe it was only natural that paradoxes - two unnatural things, held in both hands and burning deep - caused pain. Or maybe they only ached.
In the end, all Khalid could do was look down at the flowers held loosely in his hands. “Can I keep these?”
“Sure,” Byleth said. Her eyes softened - the closest she ever came to a smile. “But just one.”
“Which one do you want back?”
“You can pick.”
The carnation and the zinnia. Khalid stared at them both. His palms sweated a little bit. He couldn’t decide which one. He didn’t know at all.
Embarrassingly, Khalid panicked. He turned on his heel and walked straight out of the greenhouse. He didn’t return either flower. If Byleth was somebody else, she may have laughed at him. Maybe she was laughing internally. Maybe there was a flower for laughter. For the woman who could not laugh, a flower would have to come close enough. Maybe there was a flower for a smile.
He looked up flower pressing in the library that night. Byleth would have been happy to show him, but he refused to ask her.
Khalid had some pride.