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“Would you do me the honour of joining me for tea?”
Jeralt stares. He blinks. He stares some more.
His daughter blinks placidly back at him, as if she hasn’t just said the strangest and most confounding thing.
“Uh, what was that, kid?” he asks. He sets down his quill and drags his attention away from the uselessly boring minutiae of being the Captain of the Knights of Seiros. He hadn’t missed this, when he’d left to be a mercenary. There were plenty of details a mercenary band needed to keep track of, of course, but Jeralt had been able to do it however he damn pleased. The Church of Seiros is much less forgiving.
“Would you do me the honour of joining me for tea?” Byleth repeats, just as formally, voice falling into exactly the same inflections. There’s no impatience, no irritation at having to repeat herself – just a swift fulfilment of his request. As if the issue really was just that he hadn’t heard her.
It still doesn’t make any damn sense.
Byleth isn’t talkative, social or formal – three things which compromise the fussy noble tradition of tea parties. He’d heard some twittering from Manuela about the ‘new professor’ and tea, but he’d mostly assumed it had been the other woman catching Byleth and trapping her into it.
Maybe it hadn’t been?
“This is the part where you say ‘yes’,” Byleth prompts, tilting her head fractionally to the side, as if Jeralt is hesitating because he doesn’t know how to respond.
Which… is not untrue, exactly. He’s just more confused than anything.
“Yes?” he hazards, because saints it’s not like the kid ever really asks for much. He’s not going to say no.
Byleth nods sharply and spins on her heel. She strides towards the door, walking like a powerful fighter who knows that everyone will get out of her way, and then pauses.
She looks over her shoulder at him.
“Now?” Jeralt says, but of course she means now.
He’s not sure why he even thought it wouldn’t be immediate. He’s never been one for much forward planning – time is slippery and seems to run away from him too fast and, alright, he’s sometimes a little forgetful – and it’s clearly a trait he hasn’t managed to teach Byleth. If she means to do something, she does it. Immediately. “Okay, hold your horses. I’m coming.”
He rises from his desk, shoving a cork on the ink bottle haphazardly and leaving the paperwork strewn across his desk. It can wait. He hates doing it anyway.
He trails after Byleth, lets her lead him to the little courtyard to the north of the dining hall. The gardens are divided into little squares with over-manicured hedges, and a few of them have been crammed with tables and chairs. In the centre of the square there’s a large urn of water, kept boiling hot by a carefully maintained enclosed fire. People go to and fro from it, filling their personal tea pots and retreating to their tables. There are more people here than he would have expected, but nobles are crazy for this sort of stuff and Garreg Mach is full of nobles.
One of the tables is empty of people, set with a teapot and cups and a tower of small sandwiches and cakes. Byleth slides into the chair, clearly having claimed it for herself, and arranges the sleeves on her houppelande so they hang down her sides and don’t drag over the table.
Her air of expectancy couldn’t be louder.
Jeralt eases himself down opposite her, moving carefully in case the flimsy wood of the chair gives out on him. It’s been known to happen.
He moves to grab one of the sandwiches – he’s hungry! – and stops when Byleth gives him a stare that’s as good as slapping his fingers away from them.
“What?”
“There are,” she says, severely, ”rules. Ferdinand taught me.” There’s a tiny crease between her brows, barely enough to be called an expression, but it’s something.
Ah. He eyes her thoughtfully and leans back in the chair. It creaks. “Alright,” he says, so mildly it’s teasing. “Teach me your tea party rules.”
It wasn’t exactly that Byleth disliked change – they’d moved too much as mercenaries for Jeralt to ever provide any sort of stable routine – but it took her a long time to grow comfortable with it, and to learn how to react. Interacting with people, in particular, had always seemed to be a long and tedious process of trial-and-error and by the time she’d trialled enough to have successes… most people had long since moved on.
Maybe a set of ‘rules’ was what she had needed all along.
Maybe the stuffy and constrained noble etiquette was good for something after all.
Byleth nods at him, and that tiny crease between her eyebrows fades away.
“First we choose a tea,” she says, reaching for a long oblong box filled with smaller packets of tea leaves.
It’s quite the collection and – knowing both how expensive tea leaves are at the market and how much Byleth gets paid – one he’s sure she hasn’t bought herself. She’s probably filching tea leaves from around the monastery, but as he hasn’t heard anything about theft being reported to the Knights, he’s not going to ask.
“Your favourite,” she says and then stops.
He watches as her hand hovers over the leaves. On her face, that small almost-frown-line comes back.
“Coffee isn’t allowed at a tea party,” she goes on, something like consternation entering her voice. “And I don’t think ale is either.”
Jeralt smothers a smile at how stumped she seems, and after a minute of allowing her problem solving abilities to tackle the task and fail, says, “well, pick your favourite then.”
Byleth gives him a blank stare.
A little piece of his amusement fades. Of course, even if she had been regularly having tea with multiple people, expecting her to have likes and opinions is apparently asking too much.
“Just pick one you haven’t had before, then,” he says. Maybe, having introduced the idea that Byleth could have a favourite… she might start evaluating them. Or not.
The almost-frown smooths away again, and she picks a packet out, using a spoon to measure out leaves with concentrated precision into the strainer, transferring it to the teapot, filling it with hot water, and then placing it dead center in the middle of the table.
“Not going to pour it?” Jeralt inquires.
“It has to steep,” Byleth says, and that’s apparently that. Tea party rules are that nothing can happen until the tea is steeped.
Jeralt has spent a lot more time in much worse ways, so he resigns himself to waiting. It’s not unpleasant, anyway. The day is warm, the sun is out, his daughter is here. He spends the time studying her – he thinks she seems, if not outrageously happy, then at least content. Her shoulders are relaxed, not carrying tension or readiness to fight, her stillness seems calm rather than coiled.
When she goes to – finally – pour the tea, her movements are smooth and steady. Graceful. He’s pretty sure that, whatever countdown she had used to determine tea readiness, she’d been precise down to the very second.
“Please, have some tea,” she says formally, settling a cup and saucer down in front of him.
And then she waits, expectantly, eyes slightly over-wide and staring at him.
Jeralt carefully cradles the fine porcelain in his large hands. “Thanks, kid,” he says. “Not going to have any yourself? Oh. I get it. The rules are I drink first, right?” He takes a sip, it’s probably a little too hot to start drinking but whatever. “Yep. That’s hot leaf water.”
Not exactly his finest compliment, granted, but there’s a reason he usually avoids these silly noble games.
Byleth nods, as if this reaction is enough to satisfy her, and pours her own cup. “You can have one,” she says, gesturing at the tower of snacks. “And then we talk.”
“I look forward to it,” Jeralt says, in bemused anticipation, taking a small sandwich from the tower. He hadn’t missed the emphasis on the ‘one’ but he might just ignore it.
He eats. He drinks more tea. It remains, disappointingly, hot leaf water.
Then Byleth says, “there are some strange fish in the pond.”
Jeralt blinks in surprise at her, then breaks out into a smile. “There sure are,” he says. Fishing has always been an activity that the two of them have done together, mostly because it didn’t involve a lot of talking. It’s a little strange to discuss it but… nice. It’s nice. “Have you seen the Golden Fish or the Goddess Messenger yet?”
Byleth shakes her head.
“Well,” Jeralt says, digging back through his memories of years and years spent in this place as Captain of the Knights, “there are certain times of the year where they appear-“
Talking about fishing carries the conversation for quite some time. As does talking about her classes and students, and talking about the last battle she had lead the students on.
It’s not exactly the longest conversation he’s ever had with her – they’re not that pathetic – but it feels, in some way, like the easiest. As if the framing and setting and… the rules of it all have finally allowed Byleth some confidence in conversing, as if it’s now a battlefield she understands.
She still doesn’t speak much but –
“I liked this, kid,” he says, when the hour draws to a close and he really should get back to work. “Let’s do this again, alright? We should work our way through that entire box of tea you’ve got there. Maybe we’d find something we both like.”
Byleth nods. She’s not smiling, but her shoulders are held loose and relaxed. She’s even slouching a little, in her chair, not sitting stiff and straight-backed. “There are lots of teas,” she says.
“Then we’ll do it lots of times,” he says back. He finds he likes the idea of it. Hot leaf water and strict snack control and all.
He rises out of his chair and rests his hand on her shoulder for a long minute, then strides off.
On his way back to his office, though, he takes a small detour towards the stable. He doesn’t know many of the Garreg Mach students, or where they tend to spend their days, but there’s a few of them that tend to frequent the stables and he’s in luck today.
“Ah, just who I was looking for,” he says.
The student – the exact kind of stuffy noble that he would have sworn up and down that Byleth would hate to deal with – jumps and spins around. “Ah, Captain Jeralt! Can I be of assistance?”
“You were the one who gave Byleth that tea set, weren’t you?” he asks. Ferdinand taught me, she had said.
“I… was,” Ferdinand von Aegir says, nervously, like he thinks he might be in trouble. He’s obvious and easy to read, emotions splashed across his face and in his voice and in the flustered motions of his hands.
Jeralt might let that linger, if he were in a more sadistic mood, but instead he claps the kid on the shoulder and says, gruffly, “thanks for that. She really likes it.”
von Aegir’s eyes go wide. “You are – I mean, she is most welcome!” he says. Genuinely. He practically sparkles. After an hour of studying Byleth’s face for the barest flicker of emotions, this kid feels a little like staring into the sun.
“Well,” Jeralt says, “she says you’re not horrible with a lance, so if you need any extra lessons, come find me.”
That’s probably a terrible idea. Look where offering lessons got him with Leonie. Or Alois. Or- Well.
Eh, he’s survived worse terrible ideas.
Byleth has a hobby. One that lets her connect with people. That’s worth more than a few hours wasted teaching a young noble how to stab things, surely.
“I am most honoured!” von Aegir says, voice rising and falling. “I will strive to be worthy of your time!”
Jeralt awkwardly pats him on the shoulder again and then beats a hasty retreat.
Not for the first time, he thinks that however much he worries about Byleth, he probably wouldn’t have been a very successful father to a regular kid anyway.