#the fact that he supposedly resembles AWS in the looks department does not help

[nonexistent-alfa]

I wonder if Alver would make Cale his sworn brother if he knew all the things that very dongsaeng will put him through later down the line. For instance I imagine him sitting in his office on a random Tuesday and just going "you know what? I would have been perfectly fine not knowing my ancestor was a criminal with a God complex." And his attendants and aides look at him baffled because what does the crown prince mean his ancestor was a criminal???

[nicolewrites]

We Stand, Fate-Tested - III

Social distancing? More like stay up super late and write more. Stay safe and take the necessary steps to help out your community everyone.

Rating: T+ Genre: Mystery, Friendship, Romance Characters: [Byleth/My Unit, Dimitri B.], [Byleth/My Unit, Claude R.] Words: 5,488

Claude likes Almyran Pine / A familiar face pays the monastery a visit

AO3 | FFN

III - Tea and Conversation

Garreg Mach University - 16 Horsebow Moon, 732 AU

Byleth arrived before Claude did. She ordered a cup of tea and sat at one of the tables in the corner of the café. She sipped at her tea silently and observed the bustle around her. As the café on campus, Anna’s was busy from its opening hour right up until when it closed. The time Byleth had chosen, 4pm, was right in the middle of lecture slots, but the place still had a line to the door and barely any open seats.

At five minutes past the hour, Byleth checked her watch. Claude had been so interested in meeting with her, but he was late. She wondered if he was standing her up for some reason. She would give him another five minutes before she left, she reasoned. While she waited, she pulled out her laptop and looked at the form on the screen in front of her.

She was currently working at forming the application questions for the undergraduate application to Seteth’s research team. She had the general points hammered out that she wanted to include, but the specifics were bugging her a little. Seteth was supposed to reply to the draft he had sent him that morning, but there was no email in her inbox yet, so Byleth felt stuck.

“Hi Teach,” Claude greeted and Byleth snapped her head up. Claude stood in front of her table, grinning and sounding just the tiniest bit out of breath.

Byleth raised an eyebrow. “You’re late,” she pointed out.

Claude shrugged. “Practice ran long, I’m sorry. I made it though.” He glanced at the teacup on the table in front of her. “Ah, darn, I was going to pay to thank you for doing this.”

Byleth waved him off. “It’s only a few coins, I can handle it.”

Claude sat down and Byleth closed her laptop, sliding it off the table. “Even so, I wanted to be polite. I did ask you here.”

“To talk about archaeology,” Byleth said. “It’s not a date.”

Claude laughed and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. Byleth stared for a moment before she dropped her gaze to the table. Claude was pretty, but he was also her student so she didn’t really want anything to do with his charming face.

“So you just really want to talk about archaeology, do you?” he questioned.

Byleth glanced back up at him and studied him for a moment. He was wearing a yellow t-shirt with the emblem of a deer on it. The shirt stretched across his chest as he reclined in the chair, stretching his arms over his head leisurely. He wrapped his hands behind his head and smirked at her. The action caused his forearms to flex, showing off the wiry, toned muscles in them.

Byleth rolled her eyes. “That’s what you said you wanted to discuss,” she noted, raising an eyebrow.

Claude chuckled. “Alright, I guess I can start then. Why study the Guardian? You could have picked any discipline, so why focus on the Unification Era?”

“It’s the single biggest archaeological field in Fódlan. It has the most funding,” Byleth said shortly.

Claude clicked his tongue. “See, I might have believed that if I didn’t know you weren’t lying. In tutorial, you could have had us categorize any artifact and you chose the Guardian’s Blade. That, to me, indicates a specific interest in her. Plus, your thesis is specifically on her disappearance isn’t it?”

Byleth sighed. “Fine, you’re right. When I started learning about the Unification Era, I looked into the leaders of the time, as most people would. Notably, there was the Saviour King and the Guardian of Order. There were almost no records that survived the Scorch of Garreg Mach in 101 AU, but some of the documentation was preserved after the riots in Fhirdiad the following year. The King’s disappearance is explained a little there: he was killed in battle, presumed to have been in the Sreng region fighting off an invasion. The Guardian, on the other hand, was much more ambiguous. She outlived him, that much is clear, but it doesn’t make sense why she would just up and vanish like she did with very little explanation.”

Claude’s eyes gleamed as he listened to her explain. “You think she left for a reason,” he supplied.

Byleth nodded. “I do. I don’t know if archaeology is the way to prove that, but I’ve been digging into the Royal Collection and the artifacts of that era as much as I can to try and figure out why she would leave so suddenly.”

Claude nodded. “Makes sense to me.” He paused and ran a thumb over his lower lip, thinking, for a moment before he looked Byleth in the eye. “I think you’re looking in all the wrong places though.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you’re so interested in the Guardian, you should know that she was supposedly the Archbishop of the Church of Seiros at the time. Why look in the remains of the Royal Collection when you could look into the Old Church records and such?”

“She was married to the King,” Byleth said simply. “That, and the fact that many of her personal effects were found as a part of the Royal Collection.” She glanced out the café window at the university’s main building. “Plus, the Old Church has never made looking into their records after the Scorch easy to do.”

Claude considered her words. “I suppose so. Still, the GMU used to be the central monastery of the Church, didn’t it? Wouldn’t there be more answers there?”

Byleth shrugged. “Honestly, I hope so, but, as I said, there’s never been a full excavation of the old monastery.”

“But there was an excavation,” Claude said. He tilted his head and the green of his eyes was cuttingly perceptive and Byleth bit her lip. “Everyone tries to keep it all hush-hush, but there was an excavation, wasn’t there? You’ll have to excuse me as I’m not entirely caught up on archaeological news.”

Byleth took a sip of her tea. She had ordered Chamomile because it was her favourite decaf tea and it was too late in the day for caffeine now. Claude clearly knew something about the failed excavation. It felt like he was testing her to see how much she would tell him or how much she knew herself.

“It was supposed to be a full-year endeavour,” Byleth said finally. “It was a professor from the University who received private funding from a benefactor to lead a team below the old monastery. The security coordinator pulled himself from the project and it ended up falling through just shortly after it began. That was five years ago and no one has had approval from the Old Church and the government to be down there since.”

“Privately funded?” Claude questioned. “For an expedition to a historical site of religious and political importance, I’m surprised it was allowed to happen at all.”

Byleth paused. She had never actually considered that point herself, but it explained why Seteth had been jumping through so many hoops with the museum’s board as well as with the university to secure permission and funding.

“What do you think you’d find down there if you went looking?” Claude continued, watching her curiously.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know the whole story with the last team, so I can only wonder if they really articled everything they found down there, or if something else happened.” She sipped her tea. “Who knows, maybe there’s some kind of written record of the Guardian. That would certainly make my life interesting.”

“You know, Teach, for someone who was so hesitant to meet me, you’ve sure told me an awful lot of stuff,” Claude said teasingly.

Byleth rolled her eyes. “Most of it is common information for someone in our departments. You could have learned all of that yourself, so why did you want to hear it from me?”

“You’re interesting,” Claude admitted. “You have this air of cool and collected around you, but that first day, when I mentioned that you bore a resemblance to the Almyran depictions of her, you got uncomfortable. Then, when I placed the Guardian’s Blade as a Relic without background information, I startled you.”

He was right, of course, and Byleth hated it. “My physical resemblance to an unproven depiction has nothing to do with my studies,” she replied sharply.

Claude held up his hands. “Woah, I didn’t mean that it did. Besides, you’re my TA, so am I not allowed to just be genuinely interested in you as a person?”

“You haven’t asked me anything personal.”

Claude leaned forward onto his elbows and smiled challengingly. “I wasn’t aware I was allowed to.”

Byleth bit down a retort. “You mentioned a practice earlier as the reason why you were late,” she commented instead, swinging the topic to a different place.

He raised an eyebrow. “So you get personal questions and I don’t?” Byleth held his gaze and waited for him to answer the question. Finally, after a good three seconds of eye contact, Claude gave in. “Archery,” he replied. “I’m the team captain.”

She gestured to his shirt. “Does the deer have anything to do with that? It has the university crest on the sleeve.” It wasn’t a detail she had seen immediately, but on the right arm right above the hem on his bicep was the logo for Garreg Mach University.

“You don’t know about the Houses?” Claude asked. He sounded genuinely surprised.

Byleth shrugged. “I guess not.”

“You did your undergrad here, so how did you not know about them?” he asked.

Byleth shrugged again. “I wasn’t the most social person. Especially in my first year.”

“Ah,” Claude noted. “Well, in first year, students can pledge one of the three Houses at the University. You get an upper-year buddy and get invited to specific social events and it’s an integration assistant basically. I’m a part of the Golden Deer House.”

“That explains the deer. And the yellow.”

Claude laughed. “It does, yeah. Some of my best friends are from the Golden Deer, so I can’t really say anything negative about the House system.”

“Are Edelgard and Dimitri in the Golden Deer?”

“Nah. Edel is part of the Black Eagles and Dimitri is part of the Blue Lions. They both followed in their parents’ footsteps in that regard and I just decided to be contrary to them since I didn’t have any previous connections here at the university.”

Byleth nodded and sipped her tea again. It was almost cold now, so she placed the mug down on the counter and spun the teabag through it, studying the ripples it left with interest. Claude didn’t say anything for a moment and Byleth let the silence hang over them.

“I’m going to grab a cup if you’d like a refill,” he offered after a moment.

Byleth blinked and noticed that he had extended his hand to take her cup. She slid it over the table to him. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Claude just picked up the mug and headed for the line in the café. She watched him stand in line and pull out his phone to check something as he waited for a till to free up so he could place his own order. It only took him a few minutes to get a refill of hot water for Byleth as well as his own mug and he made his way back over to her, placing the two steaming mugs between them.

“Thank you,” Byleth said again.

Claude smiled again. “No worries.” He paused to stir his own teabag through the hot water before taking a tiny sip. He raised an eyebrow when he noticed Byleth was staring at him. “Teach?” he questioned.

“What kind of tea?” she asked before she could stop herself. There was something itching in her brain and she felt like it hinged on the type of tea that Claude preferred.

He looked a little surprised at the bluntness of her question. “Almyran Pine,” he answered. “It’s an old favourite of mine.”

“Bitter and very caffeinated,” Byleth supplied.

Claude nodded. “Almost as much caffeine as green tea.” He glanced at her own cup. “It sounds like you’re speaking from experience. Do you usually drink caffeinated teas?”

Byleth curled her hands around her own mug and felt the hot porcelain sting against the sensitive skin of her palms. “I’ve never actually had Almyran Pine,” she admitted. She knew it’s flavour profile, but she’d never actually tried it. She was more partial to the softer floral teas or a black tea like Bergamot.

Claude looked almost offended. “Everyone here seems to be like that. Edelgard and Dimitri think I’m strange for liking this blend. Honestly, Anna’s doesn’t even have a particularly good blend of it.”

“Can I try it?” Byleth asked.

Claude shrugged. “Sure.” He slid the cup across the table to her and she could already smell the fresh, earthy aroma wafting up to her.

She lifted the mug and blew gently across the liquid to cool it. She took a small sip and was instantly struck by the sharpness of the tea. It was bright on her tongue, tasting quite similarly to how she imagined biting a pine needle would taste.

“So?” Claude prompted as she placed the mug down and slid it back to him.

Byleth furrowed her brow, trying to process. “It tastes familiar,” she murmured. It was a strange admission to make, especially since she couldn’t remember ever tasting it before. She had never really been a big tea drinker before university, and she knew that she had definitely never ordered the Almyran Pine blend from Anna’s in the 5 years she had been studying at Garreg Mach.

“I thought you said you’d never had it before,” Claude commented, furrowing his brow.

Byleth bit her lip and took a drink from her own tea, trying to push away her discomfort. “I haven’t.”

Claude was definitely caught off guard by this, as evidenced by his silence. He sipped his tea himself and just watched Byleth curiously. She kept her gaze firmly either on the table or at the bottom of her own mug.

“Dr. Cichol is putting together a team for a dig below Garreg Mach in the new year,” Byleth confessed after the silence had lingered for too long.

Claude’s eyebrows shot up and he almost choked on his tea. “I thought you were saying it was hard to get approval for that.”

“Hard, but not impossible,” she corrected. “Seteth has been working at this for four years now and he’s finally got the clearance. He’s taking on everyone in his lab, including me, and a group of undergraduates.”

Claude straightened. “Wait, this is only the second major expedition to the old monastery ruins below the university and he’s taking undergraduates instead of a full team of professionals? Which students?”

Byleth nodded. “The idea came from the Board of the Fhirdiad National Museum of Unification who is funding him. They want it to be an educational experience too to give students some practical hands-on training.” She paused, pursing her lips. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about this until the application is finalized.”

“Application?” Claude inquired, a gleam in his green eyes that was equal parts interest and mischief.

Byleth sighed. “Students in Archaeology 356 class will have the opportunity to apply for the eight spots as student researchers.” She lifted a finger and jabbed it towards Claude. “You are not supposed to know this information yet, so you are absolutely not allowed to say anything to anyone until the application is released.”

Claude grinned. “Won’t tell a soul,” he promised. “Why did you tell me, if I can ask?”

Byleth honestly didn’t know. “You’re passionate,” she said. “You’re interested in history and archaeology and I know you’ll be applying anyways.” She studied his face before adding, “and you remind me of myself when I was in undergrad. I wanted to learn everything that I could and I was just so damn curious that Seteth finally sat down with me and just handed me a brochure for the graduate program and didn’t let me leave until I committed to applying to it. I see the same spark in you.”

Claude’s lips twitched into a half-smirk. “The graduate program, hm? Is this a recruitment speech now?”

Byleth rolled her eyes. “No. This is me answering questions you had about my research and having a conversation with a peer that I share interests with.”

Claude nodded. “Fair enough, although, I will admit, I haven’t asked many questions today.”

Byleth frowned. “You still have questions?”

“Sure, plenty,” Claude answered. He glanced at the watch on his wrist and gave a faint smile. “More than I have time to ask, unfortunately.”

Byleth sighed. “Well, honestly, this wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I’m usually here Wednesdays and Thursdays after 4 doing reading or work.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“It’s an open comment,” she refuted. “I’m still your TA.”

Claude shrugged. “Peers with similar interest,” he parroted her earlier phrase. He drank the last of his tea and set his empty mug on the table. “It’s been a pleasure, Teach. I’ll see you next week.”

Byleth watched him lift his backpack up and walk out of Anna’s, pulling his phone out to make a call as he went. He left her with no context for his farewell. She had no idea whether he meant he would see her Monday in lecture, Tuesday in tutorial, or Wednesday or Thursday in the café. It was a fitting ‘Claude’ reply and Byleth now understood Edelgard and Dimitri’s warnings and apologies about their friend.

Byleth sipped at her tea again, but the chamomile tasted more bitter than it had previously. She could still taste the lingering, strangely-familiar Almyran Pine when she swallowed and she frowned, looking at the door to the café.

- ~ - ~ - ~ -

Garreg Mach Monastery - 7 Ethereal Moon, Unification Year

Byleth was in the garden on the third floor of the monastery when Seteth found her. She heard him coming and turned around as he approached. She gave him a small smile as he bowed respectfully.

“Your Grace, I was hoping I might have a moment of your time,” Seteth said. He gave a cursory glance toward the entrance back to the monastery where Cyril was standing guard.

Byleth gestured for Cyril to head inside. “Give us a few minutes, would you?”

“Of course, Lady Byleth,” he said, immediately turning and heading inside, leaving Byleth and Seteth alone under the moonlight.

“What can I help you with Seteth?” Byleth asked curiously, turning her full attention back to her advisor.

“You have grown into your role beautifully, Your Grace,” Seteth said instead, seemingly disregarding the question.

Byleth pressed her lips together and nodded. Many of the Archbishop’s duties she had already been carrying out before her official ascension to the position, so in reality, she hadn’t really taken upon that much more in the last few weeks. Most notably, it just seemed to limit the amount of time she was able to spend training.

“You’re not here to compliment me on the role I have been groomed for, Seteth,” Byleth pointed out.

He paused, but then he nodded. “Fair enough.” Seteth looked up, squinting at the moon where it hung in the sky. “I assume you remember what I told you that day, back at the monastery.”

Byleth’s eyebrows rose and she bit her tongue. This had not been the direction she had expected Seteth to take this conversation. “I do,” she agreed.

Seteth looked back at her and gestured to one of the benches on the terrace. “I did not tell you everything, nor did I explain the things I did tell you well enough. I gather you have figured out that I am one of the Nabateans, and that Flayn, despite her mortal mother, has taken after me.”

Seteth paused to let her process and things started to slide more concretely into place in her mind. Seteth and Flayn had Nabatean heritage and since Rhea herself was supposedly Seiros–her brain short-circuited. “Seteth,” she breathed. “How old are you?”

He chuckled lightly. “Don’t you know you should never ask people their age?” Byleth levelled him with a stare and she watched his eyes take on a far-off look. “I am from the old era,” Seteth finally admitted. “Flayn and I had been with Rhea for a very long time.”

He fell silent together and Byleth studied his profile. Something clicked in the back of her mind and Byleth put it together. “Cichol. You’re Cichol.”

“And Flayn is Cethleann, yes. Macuil grew disgusted with humans and conflict and he isolated himself away from it all. Indech hid away as well, taking on the mythos of a great protector. Flayn and I changed our names and moved around. After the fire at Garreg Mach where your father left with you when you were a baby, Rhea called us to the monastery. She always believed you were alive, even when Jeralt said you had perished. I supposed she could feel the Crest Stone inside you.”

Byleth held up a hand to get him to stop. “If she knew all this time, why did she let Jeralt take me in the first place. Wasn’t I her means to an end?”

“At first, Rhea searched for you and your father, but Jeralt knew Rhea well enough by this point and he knew how to hide from her. I suppose then that she knew she couldn’t keep looking for your without tipping Jeralt off and causing him to go deeper underground, so she waited for the right opportunity.”

“In Remire Village, when I first met Dimitri and Edelgard and Claude, did she have anything to do with that?”

Seteth shook his head. “As far as I have discovered, the bandit attack that drove them to Remire Village was actually orchestrated by Edelgard in an attempt to remove the heads of the other houses. Your mercenary group being there was probably a happy accident and a massive wrench in her plan.”

Byleth nodded. It made sense. As twisted as it was for Edelgard to attempt to assassinate Dimitri and Claude, it unfortunately aligned with the in-depth plan that Edelgard had created in order to orchestrate the war against the church. “So you and Flayn are Nabateans by blood and Rhea is Seiros, the last surviving child of Sothis. I don’t understand why you’re telling me all of this right now,” Byleth confessed. She touched her engagement ring and bit her lip.

Seteth sighed. “Byleth, I have to admit, Flayn and I have been looking into all of this for some time and I didn’t know when it would be important for you to have this information. Everything that happened with you and merging with Sothis, surely you have noticed something about yourself?”

Byleth touched her hair as Seteth spoke. Sometimes when she woke up in the morning, the green of it was still startling to her. The changes that Sothis’s power had bestowed on her body had made her different, obviously, but the changes had all been sudden: her hair, her eyes, and the spiking power that had coursed through her veins. “What do you mean?” she asked quietly.

“We are unsure of anything right now,” Seteth admitted, “but there is a good chance that your merging with the goddess has changed you, Byleth, from a mortal with a Crest Stone for a heart, to something else entirely.”

Byleth leaned away from Seteth, recoiling in surprise. “Are you saying I am immortal?”

“I have no idea,” Seteth confessed. “It is a possibility. Flayn and I have established two possibilities for what happened to you: either your body accepted Sothis’s power cleanly thanks to the Crest Stone and you will take on her immortality, or,” he paused, grimacing slightly.

“Or what, Seteth,” Byleth prompted, feeling a cold fear creep through her veins.

“Or the Crest Stone has acted as a conduit to Sothis’s power, allowing you to wield it as long as you have strength. There is a chance that the goddess’s power has corrupted your mortality entirely and,” he trailed off, looking almost ill.

Byleth stood up from the bench and took a few steps away, her head spinning. “And it’s consuming me from the inside,” she murmured, completing Seteth’s explanation. She turned to face him and saw the pain in his eyes. “You’re saying that the power could either make me immortal or kill me and we have no way of knowing which one until one or the other happens.”

Byleth buried her face in her hands and shook her head. “I’m getting married tomorrow!” She snapped her head up and glared at Seteth. “Why did you tell me this now?”

Seteth sighed and Byleth noted that for the first time since she’d known him, he looked defeated and completely bone-tired. “Because you deserved to know all of this the moment I discovered it and because your life no longer affects only you now. I wanted you to have this information so that you could make the decision to tell Dimitri. I am sorry, Byleth. I wish I had more answers for you.”

Tears stung in her eyes and she wiped them away angrily. “So I am supposed to just tell my fiancé that I might either die suddenly or outlive him by thousands of years right before we pledge ourselves to each other and expect him to just accept that?”

“You are supposed to decide when and if you tell him,” Seteth corrected gently. “The information is yours now and I promise you that Flayn and I will continue to work on this to try and find more answers.”

Byleth’s shoulders trembled. “I don’t want answers, I just want all of this to stop!” she cried out. Her knees felt dangerously weak and she lowered herself to the stone floor of the terrace and stared up at the sky.

The moon and the stars blurred behind her tears. Byleth twisted her hands together and felt them warm up with white magic. The healing power didn’t sink into her because, of course, she had no physical injuries, so she let the Recover spell fizzle into nothingness. Even after the magic had physically dispelled, Byleth could still feel the lingering warmth of its power in her veins, a feeling similar to that invoked by the Sublime Creator Sword when she wielded it.

“Where is Rhea?” Byleth asked. She wiped away the lingering tears in her eyes and stood back to her feet. She turned back to face Seteth and lifted her chin up with what confidence she could muster. “Would she know?”

“Rhea did not see fit to tell any of us where she would be going once she left the monastery,” Seteth began.

“Seteth,” Byleth cut off sharply. “Would she know?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Rhea spent a long time trying to,” he winced, “create you, but I don’t think anything about how it happened was according to her plan. Implanting the Crest Stone in you was clearly not something she had intended to do, but I don’t know if she knew what it would lead to.”

Byleth nodded slowly and rubbed at her arms nervously. “Okay,” she said softly. The information was still whirring in her brain and she had no idea how she was supposed to be feeling or how she was supposed to react. Mostly, she was still afraid to tell Dimitri. They were supposed to wed tomorrow and she hadn’t the slightest idea what to tell him, if anything at all.

“I am sorry to spring this on you, Byleth,” Seteth said again.

Byleth exhaled slowly. “I know.”

She didn’t know what she would have done next, but Cyril reappeared in the doorway of the monastery and she instead wiped her face quickly and straightened up. This was not the time for the leader of the church to come across as weak or divided on anything.

“Cyril?” she called to him. Seteth turned, noticing their visitor.

“Your Grace, Seteth, there is important news,” Cyril said.

“News?” Byleth frowned, walking towards her friend. “What happened?”

Cyril looked like he was trying to hide a smile. “There’s someone here to see you, Your Grace.”

Now Byleth knew she looked as confused as she felt. “Wait, what? Everyone who was coming to the wedding should have been here yesterday or earlier. Who’s here?”

“You ought to come see for yourself. They’re in the main hall with Dimitri and the others.”

Byleth sighed and stepped past Cyril. She would take up this conversation with Seteth again later, but for now, she was just incredibly curious about who was showing up at the monastery the night before her wedding to the King of Fódlan. She made her way quickly down to the first floor. Seteth followed her a few paces back and Byleth led the charge through the reception hall towards the entrance hall.

She entered the hall and walked towards the main monastery gates. She could hear familiar voices–Flayn, Dimitri, Ingrid, Annette–and she hurried forward so she could see down the stairs. The first person she saw was, of course, the large frame of Dimitri, but then she saw who was beside him and her jaw dropped.

Claude von Riegan stood next to Dimitri, arms folded and a smirk on his face. He was wearing the armour of a wyvern rider and he seemed to have lost all of the regalia he had previously adorned as the leader of the Alliance.

Seteth had stopped next to her at the top of the stairs and Byleth could feel the ripples of surprise coming off of him that were similar to her own shock. Byleth stepped down one stair and then another, still looking between Dimitri and Claude. The last time she had seen Claude had been in Derdriu when he had ceded the Alliance to Dimitri and announced his intentions to leave Fódlan. She had no idea what he was doing here.

Though she hadn’t led the Golden Deer during their time at the Academy, Byleth had always enjoyed Claude’s company. He had been clever and snarky and just distrusting of the church enough that her father had liked him too. He was an excellent shot with a bow and he was a brilliant tactician, skills Byleth definitely commended. She felt almost affronted that he would choose the day before her wedding to miraculously drop out of the sky.

Her shock faded and her annoyance and anger replaced it and she descended the rest of the stairs quickly. She approached the group of her friends and Annette barely had time to notice her before Byleth was cutting in front of Dimitri and grabbing Claude by the collar of his armour.

“Claude von Riegan, what in the goddess’s name are you doing here?” Byleth demanded.

Claude had tensed as soon as she had grabbed him, but he relaxed when he noted that it was Byleth who had assaulted him and that she didn’t truly look angry, more annoyed. Dimitri stepped closer to Byleth and gently tugged her hand away from Claude’s neck. Byleth resisted for a moment before she dropped her hand with a huff. Dimitri let his hand curl around hers, partially out of affection and partially to make sure she didn’t accost Claude again.

Claude chuckled lightly and straightened his armour. “Hey, Teach, it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

Byleth narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she repeated.

Claude smirked. “Well, when I heard that the King of Fódlan was getting married to the Archbishop of the Church of Seiros, I knew that I couldn’t miss my chance to stop by and give you my best wishes. Surely you’ll be able to find a seat for me at the ceremony tomorrow?”

Byleth pursed her lips. There was something fishy about his explanation–some edge to the words that hid their real meaning. It was a tone of voice she was familiar with from Claude’s time as her student. The wedding was only an excuse for him because he definitely had some sort of ulterior motive.

Dimitri didn’t seem to share her observation because he laughed. “Don’t worry Claude, we won’t turn you back out into the cold. We’ll find you a seat if you tell us where you’ve been this past half-year.”

Claude’s lips twitched. “It’s kind of a long explanation for the night before such a big day.”

Byleth folded her arms and levelled an even stare at the former Alliance leader. “You’re not weaselling out of this one.”

Claude held up his hands. “Alright, alright, but surely we can find somewhere to sit first?”