Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is a warmth that lingers as Edelgard awakens.

Its peace suffusing her body, the transition back into consciousness neither painful nor jarring, she might believe herself for a moment to still be beside Claude in his bed.

In the next, she reopens her eyes and only registers the dining hall.

So their respite proves to be another futile attempt, but perhaps she still feels better for it, Edelgard enjoying the benefits of a night's rest without having believed it would truly see them through to the morning. And as Ferdinand again continues with his same speech, it’s unbothered that she sits there, actually picking at her sorbet after having gone so many nights without partaking in it.

“You make fair points,” she tells Ferdinand when he eventually comes to pause for breath, the ends of his sentences already straining with an upward lilt as if he is surprised she has not tried to stop him sooner. Momentarily stunned, he merely looks at her as he processes her response in full.

In recovering, his hand lands emphatically upon the table, rattling it into motion. “Finally, you see reason!”

“There’s no cause for such overreaction,” Edelgard responds, eyes still on her sorbet. She works her spoon around her plate, picking off another morsel, though she does not move to immediately eat it. “But you’re not mistaken that I’ve been distant and uncommunicative with you and the rest of our house lately. That I’ve kept things to myself. I’m sorry for that, both for your sake and my own. I never intended it to last much longer, but now…”

“Yes?” he asks.

Looking upon him as he leans in closer, Ferdinand the picture of intent, she only comes to shake her head. “There’s just one thing I’ve always meant to say to you, Ferdinand.” In preparation of it she lays down her utensil, the better to face him more squarely. “I won’t play power games with you like our fathers before us or any other emperor or prime minister before them.”

As the words settle, Ferdinand turns to a frown. “I am not interested in playing power games either,” he argues back, as frustrated as he is forthright, and she wonders not for the first time how he could be his father’s son—the man who had consigned Edelgard and her siblings to a fate of being tortured and murdered. There is none of that man’s cruelty in Ferdinand, for all of his own shortsightedness when it comes to the misdeeds of family.

“Let me be even clearer so that you understand me more fully,” she insists. “There is only a certain point up to which I want power, and my reign was always to be short. My only hope was that during it I could bring about change and correct injustice. After I had seen to that end, I have never cared who takes power from me so long as they are qualified. All I’d ask is that they’d work hard. To prove their way and not take anything for granted. Including any status or advantages provided by nobility.”

“Edelgard,” Ferdinand says, going still. A moment passes before he can put the rest of his words in order. “What do you think I’ve been doing all this time? I have always been trying to prove myself. To you or to my father or my station in life. That I’m worthy of it. That is the expectation I was raised to meet.”

Slightly, Edelgard inclines her head, her lips pressing into a fine line. “For what it’s worth, Ferdinand, I think you have both the necessary ability and work ethic, and I’d hoped you would use them both to work with me one day. For us to accomplish something more, together, in the time we’d have before I was gone.”

“I’ll confess, I do not like how ominous you make that sound. Though I do think I understand you better now on this matter.” Squaring his shoulders, he regains a fuller height, his words landing more decisively. “Only you are not gone yet, Edelgard, and there is no need to wait. Let us also work together in this time we have here.”

And though it still seems an impossibility that she should continue to exist even in this capacity, he is not wrong on that account, either.

“We should,” she agrees.

***

To that end, she considers, eventually going to Claude with the thought.

“What now?” he teases. “I can tell you’re on a mission.”

“I am,” she says and lays out her suggestion so that he might assist her.

“Fighting bandits?” he says amusedly. “That’s your idea for raising morale?”

“Do you have a better one?” she asks back, somewhat goading but also curious.

“Maybe,” he says with a smile, but in the end he doesn’t deter her any further, only agrees to provide his help.

The task of delegating and rounding everyone up falls largely to him and Ferdinand then, Edelgard having need to see to one person in particular when the night resets.

Once more it’s to Bernadetta’s door that she returns, attempting what has often felt like the impossible. But rather than overwhelm her as she’s done before, Edelgard merely knocks and then sits and waits, perched on the ledge in front of the dormitory.

Audibly, the door creaks open behind her as Bernadetta surely peers out; Edelgard does not witness it herself, still purposefully facing away towards the exterior of the dining hall.

“An unofficial mission?” Bernadetta balks when Edelgard poses it to her. “And you want Bernie to come with you?”

“I could hardly go without my house,” Edelgard answers, “and that includes you, of course.”

In certain terror, Bernadetta’s voice still jumps. “But fighting bandits?”

With the same kind of conviction and assurance Edelgard would have once hoped to bring to a war table, she now rather turns back around to say: “If nothing else, Bernadetta, for tonight at least I can promise that I will let no one harm you.”

Bernadetta does not move, rendered momentarily frozen and speechless. When she does repossess herself it’s only to flounder still, closing the door on Edelgard as she falls back to her room. But as Edelgard sits there and watches the sun die down, so also comes the sound of the door reopening.

“Y-you can’t just stay out here all night,” Bernadetta protests.

“For you, I wouldn't mind it," Edelgard says back easily and hears the door close more tentatively the second time around.

It reopens only a minute later, Edelgard hearing footsteps as they land closer to her, Bernadetta come fully out of her room to peer down at her. Edelgard smiles up at her in turn and stands to lead the way. En route, though, Bernadetta shortly passes her, stepping more quickly in her anxiousness so that she first meets the rest of the Black Eagles beyond the monastery's walls.

The evening is the same as it ever was, the rising moon looming with its same splendor and attended by the same chill in the air. Yet tonight it might almost feel balmy, the breeze inviting them along as it slopes down from the monastery and out towards the village where those bandits Edelgard had once picked off on her own still await.

Closer ahead, rise the backs of her classmates. And at her side, Claude and Dimitri.

“Good of you to join us, Dimitri,” Claude says, “and to have us all together.”

“As you say…” Dimitri responds but does not spare them more than that, already moving ahead to join the rank of their classmates. And if his sudden dismissal somehow stings, Claude is still beside her, unconsciously holding a hand out to her as the mountainside grows rocky underfoot.

She does not need his hand and yet she still takes it, letting him ground her as she steadies his own steps in turn.

“Do you remember?” she says as she recalls herself, brought back to a certain night by the hand she again holds, its weight and feel familiar to her. “When I said I wouldn’t have chosen you to live out this night with?”

With his free hand he clutches his chest in exaggerated emotion. “How could I forget? You had me up the whole night in utter agony.”

She laughs in spite of herself, just a short burst of sound before she shakes her head at him, not willing to lose her meaning or sincerity. “It’s true I wouldn’t have chosen you. I wouldn’t have even had the thought.” Around his hand her grip tightens. “But that would have been my loss.”

He quiets in the gloaming as the shadows ahead lengthen. “I wouldn’t have chosen you, either,” he says at last. “But the thing is, I don’t know who I would have chosen instead. If I’d have chosen anyone.” Past the shade of pain in his eyes, he smiles. “Even if it was like this, I’m glad we at least got a chance to know each other.”

For a stretch they merely keep apace with one another, the earth turning more solid beneath them again. “Hey,” he adds, squeezing her hand back. “Do you think we ever could have gotten on this well without some kind of grand intervention?”

“It is difficult to imagine,” Edelgard says, perfectly frank. “Given how we’re both so impossibly guarded.” And this far into the night, they can even share a wry smile over that fact. Claude goes so far as to laugh himself, continuing to hold her gaze and hand.

As the moment extends further, a different emotion stirs across his face—the color of dusk settling on his cheeks before he abruptly turns towards the sun as it disappears entirely. “I can’t help but be sad for our other lives then. But I still hope you’d be happy, wherever you were or whoever was at your side. Whatever you chose.”

Amidst the nascent darkness, her voice all but wavers. “More likely for you, still, I think.”

He frowns, saying her name.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, willfully stamping out that pervasive melancholy that always threatens to loom over her. “What’s the use of worrying over other possible lives? This is the one we have.”

Slowly, he nods, his mouth quirking up at the corner. Ushering her along in his handhold, he quickens his steps after their classmates. “Then let’s go make something of it again.”

***

Much as Edelgard had intended, their encounter plays out, the roving bandits they pursue no match for their combined numbers, though they lose their element of surprise as Caspar yells headlong into battle. Meeting Ferdinand’s eye, she nods, and he is quick to back Caspar as their advance is soon followed by those from other houses. Edelgard herself stands back to keep abreast of the field and better see the confrontation unfold, Linhardt sighing nearby to her and happy to not be needed as Bernadetta hardly comes out of her shadow until the last straggler runs off and the rout is all but declared over.

But if Edelgard’s roused or enlivened the spirits of any of her classmates, a tension only mounts for there to be no greater release—now that the hint of danger has passed so quickly. Her fellow students on the verge of splintering off, she looks upon them all still gathered by her own cause and rallies to address them.

“I believe the village would more than welcome us tonight. We might as well have a proper time of it.”

Dismissing the mixed and surprised response that her words meet, she cuts a path forward to lead the way. Behind her, Claude only raises his own voice with the promise of some new mischief.

“We really should, shouldn’t we?”

She makes the mistake of not turning back towards him—leaving herself an entirely open target as a sudden burst of coldness shocks the back of her head.

In reeling around and brushing back the snow, she only allows the next attack to meet her head on, Edelgard reduced to sputtering snow out from her mouth and swiping her eyes clear. She searches for Claude before she can even fully see again, Edelgard falling to the ground to gather her own clump of slush in retaliation. But when she launches it at him, he only laughs, evading her throw so that the snow lands in Caspar’s face instead.

“Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be?” Caspar asks in overblown betrayal.

“Caspar, no,” she commands as he makes a throw back at her, and she is the one to dodge now so that it instead hits Mercedes who is not at all above responding in kind.

In exasperation, Edelgard once more seeks out Claude, but she can hardly spot him now in the quickly evolving chaos of the night. Across the mountainside snow and slush soon fly, her fellow students either joining in the fray or ducking for cover in a flurry of movement that drives them nearer yet to the village. While Edelgard makes note of Bernadetta taking shelter behind Dedue, it’s the Blue Lions as a whole that naturally come to lead the brunt of the attack, their members more than capable of surviving a fight in the snow.

Exhilaration running freely through her veins, Edelgard also lands herself in the midst of battle and often alongside her fellow housemates. Briefly, she is surrounded out in the open with Ferdinand, the two of them fighting back to back until they are able to break through a gap in Flayn and Ashe’s line of defense. In the snow she kneels with Petra, rolling out new projectiles as Caspar dives forward to draw out others in hiding.

Armed already, Edelgard believes she has the advantage when she later spies Claude trying to sneak up on her. At the last possible moment he merely drops into the slush so that again she misses and nearly hits Lysithea coming up from behind him. Seeing Lysithea seem to grow in stature through her ire, Edelgard holds up her hands in peaceful surrender. But it is not Edelgard that Lysithea is after; it is rather Claude as he now uses Edelgard for cover, pelting Lysithea in rapid succession over her shoulder.

Lysithea’s responding glower could tear the world asunder.

“She’s just so easy to get a rise from,” Claude laughs in Edelgard’s ear, and it’s that proximity that is her undoing as Lysithea stalks over, her arms raised in an incantation that knocks Claude clean off his feet and half buries him in a thicker drift of snow. Edelgard hardly escapes, landing flat upon the earth as a shroud of displaced snow blankets her from head to foot.

She's halfway to her feet when Claude tries to scramble free, slipping on a patch of unseen ice and reaching for her. Caught unawares and left unbalanced, she is helpless to keep them both from tumbling back down through the slush. She feels his laughter as it overtakes him, his body shaking with it in a sound that is both muffled yet wholly irrepressible.

Her own answering call of laughter surprises her as it rolls through her chest and down her spine, tears reaching her eyes as she turns skyward to fill her lungs with new breath. The kind of laughter that builds and surges until it transcends even her body—its power lending her a brief, consuming belief that she might truly be invincible, capable of outlasting even the world or time’s existence.

Above, the stars flicker as they have always done before, watching her yet.

Let them look, she thinks, and let them weep or writhe in envy. For tonight, in spite of everything—in this moment at least—she was happy, and they would never know such a good and intensely human feeling.

And so it’s the laughter of others that reaches her next accompanied closely by the sound of footfalls, their classmates running or trudging ahead to cross over into the village proper.

Buoyed by feeling still, Edelgard follows in their wake until she spots Bernadetta alone once more, hanging along the village’s outskirts and obviously contemplating a retreat.

Ensuring her approach audibly carries, Edelgard makes no secret of her arrival at Bernadetta’s side. Nervously, she glances away, Bernadetta saying nothing as she shifts from one foot to the other. Edelgard’s own gaze lingers ahead to where their classmates vanish from sight as they dip inside the nearest tavern, a promised warmth rising from its chimney.

“Let’s at least warm up and have something to eat after that excitement,” Edelgard encourages. “No need to stay longer than that if you don’t wish to.”

It’s with slow, careful steps that they proceed down the street while others still move past in a blur, powdered snow streaming from their hair and clothes to be caught upon the wind. Edelgard first recognizes the wheezing gasp of Claude’s laughter before she sees him again, following Marianne’s lead as she skates her way along the patches of ice that line the road. In close pursuit remains Lysithea, now the one to slip and flail in her haste to overtake him.

By the time Edelgard and Bernadetta walk through the tavern's door, their party’s merrymaking is already underway. At the bar, Caspar excitedly regales the tavern keeper with their recent bandit exploits, and in return the man is all too happy to top off their drinks, either in genuine thanks or to handsomely serve up so many with larger coffers. In the corner, a small band of musicians also seems to eye them with opportunity, their tune already changing to one more pleasing to this particular set of patrons—or perhaps merely to suit Lorenz as he hovers so close by to them, happily intervening.

Between a flute, a fiddle, and a lyre they work up as stately a repertoire as they can muster, playing on as Raphael sets to work to push back tables and chairs to better clear up space for movement. As others begin to find their way in dance, Edelgard also lets the rising music sweep over her, reaching instinctively for Bernadetta’s hand. And as surprised as Bernadetta proves to be, she still allows Edelgard to lead her in at least a minute’s worth of shaky dance before making her excuses and running off to seek out something to eat.

Even without a partner, the room remains bright, the candlelight warmly encircling Edelgard from the sea of tables as the great fire of the hearth also crackles. When she comes upon Dorothea, standing apart along the edge of the dance floor, Edelgard does not think twice in sweeping her up in her arms to finish out the dance. Dorothea only offers up a startled gasp of a laugh but is otherwise perfectly poised through the sudden series of steps, the movement even bringing some pleasing color to her face.

Edelgard doesn’t think of how she must look until Dorothea comments on it, bemused but smiling. “What’s gotten a hold of you, Edie? I’ve never seen you act like this or smile so much. And here I was, worried about you lately.”

Edelgard frowns, inevitably thinking of how Dorothea had come to her in this night before, comforting her when she’d needed it most. “Worried about me? Even before tonight?”

“Well, you have been pretty busy and distant lately, and every time I do see you it’s with that scowl of yours as if you’re lost in some troubling thought. Honestly, we haven’t even graduated yet but somehow it’s felt like we’d already lost you.”

“Ferdinand said much of the same to me,” Edelgard only fully recognizes as she speaks the words.

“But you look better now,” Dorothea continues with a certain fondness. “Happier. I’m glad.”

Fleetingly, Edelgard looks out upon their dancing classmates, then back to Dorothea. “The feeling comes and goes,” she admits with some reluctance, not wanting it to slip away when she has possession of it again. Imperceptibly, her grip tightens around Dorothea’s waist.

“It always does, doesn’t it?” Dorothea responds, and her voice, suddenly so wistful and melancholic, brings Edelgard back to their time on that bridge before the cathedral. “Sometimes it feels like you’re just grasping at air, unsure of what you’re even chasing.”

Slowly her gaze regains its clarity, only to turn slightly wry at Edelgard’s look of concern. “I know I talk of getting my happy ending all the time, but I’m not so naive in life. I know there’s no such thing, really. Just the hope of some security with another person. To find someone who can bring you happiness while also helping you to bear the bad that’s still to come.”

And wholly unbidden, there is one person towards whom Edelgard's mind strays.

She swallows, fighting back the natural instinct for her eyes to also wander as their dance comes to an end. She rather redoubles her focus on Dorothea, only making note of their surroundings to better observe the attention that Dorothea draws as they step aside. “You have no shortage of admirers,” Edelgard tells her. “You should go dance with someone else.”

Dorothea hums, fixing the length of her hair as she looks uneasily about the room. “I don’t know, Edie… It’s unlikely I’ll find anyone of means here, and I seem to be as forlorn in love as ever. Just today, things fell apart with another potential suitor.”

Edelgard goes still. “What do you mean? You hadn't mentioned that to me.”

“Well, when was there even time to?” Dorothea comes to laugh, eyeing Edelgard a bit strangely. “It happened just this evening, right before we all gathered. And so now here we all are.”

“There was time,” Edelgard says staunchly, not willing to sacrifice the point. “I still should have known. When you’ve been looking out for me…”

Dorothea’s smile turns teasing now. “You can leave the dramatics to me, Edie. They should fall more to my expertise. Though I can’t say I mind you playing the part of my protector.” In thanks for the dance, she leans in close to chastely kiss Edelgard’s cheek, her mouth soft as the air turns sweeter in her wake.

Face warmed over, Edelgard offers her arm to at least lead Dorothea back towards the company of their classmates. Met with both Ferdinand and Petra’s open admiration and even Linhardt’s detached observations of Dorothea’s dancing prowess, however, it is not long before her hesitation to dance again begins to waver, Dorothea unable to quite refuse the requests of those she would call friends.

Watching Dorothea step out again, a different kind of peace settles over Edelgard, threatened only by a pang of yearning that finally leads her to survey the room in full. And there, just as she goes looking for him, is Claude, already looking back towards her from across the room. For a moment they only stare at each other; then he inevitably moves, holding her eye still as he easily weaves his way past those currently locked in dance.

He was always better than her in crossing their physical distance at least, and he proves it again in standing before her. Offering her a new excuse for them to touch, he says, “Done with dancing already? You looked like you were having fun, and I was hoping maybe you’d spare me some.”

“For the right partner, perhaps,” she quips even as she walks out with him, accepting his hand as he extends it towards her again. Needlessly, he laces their fingers, and never has she felt the presence of her gloves more keenly, their material wrapped so tightly against her hands and preventing her from feeling his touch properly.

Before them both he raises their entwined hands as they come to face each other. Still standing apart, he steps off to the side, Edelgard following in the direction he leads. To the music’s tempo they move, side to side and forward and back, Claude keeping her guessing at a maddening distance until suddenly he advances and pulls her in by the hand.

A gasp of laughter escapes her as his free hand comes to rest at her back, a solid presence she could lean into if she wasn’t more inclined to lean forward instead. Along his arm, her own hand instinctively runs to nearly meet his shoulder, their pose far more promising now though it leads nowhere sensible still.

“This isn’t how any dance goes,” she says as he spins her out spontaneously, her breath catching in surprise and even in the thrill of coming back together in his arms. On one such spin he rather catches her hands from behind so that they face in the same direction, Claude leading her forward to cavort about the room and dodge other couples in quick tandem.

“Maybe I don’t know how it should,” he laughs, and the sound of it travels the length of her body.

“You really don’t amount to much of a noble,” she decrees, voice as even as she is able to make it.

“Good thing, too, huh? Considering your less than admiring thoughts for the nobility.” He spins her again for good measure, and the movement coupled with the words leaves her momentarily breathless.

When she regains her footing it is to stand firmly in place, her arm coming around his waist to dip him backwards as momentum lifts one of his legs clear off the ground. A little wildly he laughs, his hands clutching at her upper arms as she leans over him now—not so unlike when she’d once disarmed him back at the training grounds.

The focus of his undivided attention, she wants again. Not just what lies beyond the night, but him. She knows that he also wants with his dreams. Perhaps even her, the way he stares back until Edelgard forgets the rest of the room as it turns over with a new song’s dance.

His eyelids lower until she can barely make out the green of his irises, and now, Edelgard thinks. Now something will be, both terrifying and exhilarating. But Claude does not close this final distance and neither does she, Edelgard hesitating when faced with something still so new and delicate that she might destroy it irreversibly.

Unmoving amidst a floor of other dancers, it’s inevitable that someone comes upon them; it just so happens to be Annette as she crashes into them in a moment of clear discoordination. Startled and caught off guard, both Edelgard and Claude’s holds loosen until he is slipping through her arms to land soundly upon the floor. Wide-eyed, Edelgard looks down at him, barely registering Annette as she anxiously apologizes. Claude, for his part, splays a hand wide across his face, obscuring it from her view even as his ears seem to burn.

It requires a few moments before he bounds back to his feet. “Need some air or a drink?” he runs off, glancing about the room as though he doesn’t already know where he might procure one. He bites at the knuckle of his thumb. “Because I think I could.”

So they sit with two tankards full of cheap mead between them, Edelgard ignoring the taste as she swills her drink fast to chase the feeling she’s after. Growing tipsy while trying to maintain her decorum, quicker and quicker she turns to laughter and finds herself invited to drinking games that she only half plays at while Leonie handily outdrinks all her competitors.

It's more than one game of cards that Edelgard is rather drawn into, playing with a variety of others. She relies more on feeling than any strategy, hardly able to think over the rising sound of the room’s joined voices—bright and loud and bleeding into different strains of local dialects the more inebriated everyone becomes.

Claude, too, has a lilt to his voice that both fascinates and threatens to distract her from the way he plays fast and loose with the rules of every game they play. When Cyril calls him out for cheating, glaring and entirely sober, Claude merely grins and throws down another hand with far too much flair, the cards flying off the table.

In spite of his endless rule changes, Edelgard still beats him in their final game, playing quick and merciless until he throws up his hands in mock despair.

Into his hand he then lowers his chin, looking at her overly long and with a faint smile. “You're still in good spirits, though. I'll have to take that as its own victory.”

“Trying to make winners out of us both now?” she asks, heated again.

“That’s the real challenge, after all,” he says, and she hums, warm and relaxed and more drunk on his continued attention than from any drink as the night begins to unwind in earnest. Across the tavern she looks as the kitchen closes and the last round of drinks are served, people beginning to disperse back into the cold.

The need for her own breath of fresh air suddenly strikes her, Edelgard rising to clear her mind of its remaining stupor. She gets no farther than the tavern’s entryway before she rather ends up alone with Dimitri.

More than a trace of awkwardness follows them out into the night as they sidestep each other, but it's Edelgard's continued contentment that allows her to linger in his presence, if only in the spirit of a night’s shared camaraderie.

In dim silhouette against the night’s greater darkness, Dimitri stands tall and undeterred by the chill in the air. Edelgard suppresses her own shiver to meet his eyes, the blue numbing like the touch of ice.

“What is it, Edelgard?” he asks to the point, and not for the first time she wonders what has come over him for his perfectly polite demeanor to falter as it has.

As if in answer, he raises a careful hand to his temple in seeming pain.

It would be so easy to burn their bridges, here and now. For so many nights already she’d left them kindling without a second thought—Edelgard believing that he simply hadn’t concerned her. And truly, why make the effort of smoothing things over between them when it would all be unmade again?

Still, she speaks to him, keeping at least to pleasantries. “I hope you were able to enjoy the night.” In the remaining charged stillness between them, she looks upwards, thinking of the agitation that would soon beset the sky. “Though you might wish to head back now. It won’t be long before it snows.”

“Yes, I can tell as much,” Dimitri answers shortly, his eyes also turning skyward.

“It reminds me of my time in Faerghus, however brief,” she reminisces then, moved by the feeling.

“Your time in Faerghus?” Dimitri asks and then surprises her with the quiet, broken tenor of a laugh. “Are you thinking of it fondly now? It had seemed as though you had no care or thought for it at all this past year.”

She frowns. “I care for Faerghus as I do for all of Fódlan.”

“Do you?” he says, sharper than perhaps she’s ever heard him speak and yet still somehow vexingly opaque. “Including its people?”

“And why would I not care for them, too?” she asks with an edge to her own voice now, making no secret of her rising ire.

His hand moves slowly in response, withdrawing something that momentarily gleams as it catches the moonlight. A weapon, she registers before anything else, Edelgard instinctively reaching for her own before stopping short at better sight of the one he holds.

She would recognize that dagger anywhere.

All trace of warmth—of permeating, ebullient feeling—that has carried her forward since falling asleep now vanishes, Edelgard forgetting to breathe entirely as Dimitri speaks again.

“It would seem you might at least care for this. Were you missing it?”

And she is still so overtaken that she says openly: “How did you know that was mine?”

“Can you really go on acting like we are nothing to each other?” he asks, looking increasingly unwell as his face twists up in a grimace. “You know who I am. The boy you befriended in Faerghus. The one who gave this dagger to you.”

No. She does not— It was as though she’d always had it, but— It must have come from somewhere. How could she have never thought its origin through? She searches her memory, and there— There, she conjures up the image of a boy gifting that very dagger to her, telling her to cut a path to the future… One with the same coloring of hair and complexion and gaze of blue, though his eyes had been warmer then.

Did she—could she—remember more? Nothing else surfaces as her thoughts begin to spiral, Edelgard wondering how she could have forgotten him. Forgotten a friend when she'd had so very few to name throughout her lifetime. But looking at him in this moment, trying to reconcile him with the gnawing chasm of her past, it is clearly not as friends that they now meet.

“But even if you would not acknowledge that connection,” he adds, “perhaps you might have still acknowledged family. Even now, I am still your mother’s son by marriage, El.” And at that use of her nickname—at that mention of her mother, so intimately related to him—Edelgard feels sick herself, nausea rising in her chest as the world drops away again.

How could there still be so many gaps in her knowledge and memory, and one as wide and as jarring as this? It is terrifying, but not more so than his next words.

“Only when did you lose the dagger, Edelgard? Because I found it under the most distressing of circumstances.”

Edelgard has no ready response, her throat painfully dry as she again goes searching through her thoughts. When had she lost it? Hadn’t she had it last when she’d— Been walking the surroundings of the monastery? Yes. But as herself or—

He knows, she realizes, Dimitri’s stare piercing her even as his fringe half conceals one of his eyes, his hair sticking with sweat to his forehead.

He knows, her mind repeats unceasingly, and a cold sweat of her own breaks out along her neck. Even now he does not put it to words, perhaps waiting on something—a disavowal?—from her yet. But in his mind he’s all but confirmed it for himself, hasn’t he?

When the wind sweeps back around she only feels it as a lashing, only hears it in its taunting laughter.

To think. To think she’d spent so many nights concerned over what Claude might know or learn. When all along Dimitri had always known who and what she was and in ways even she had not.

Around them, the darkness abruptly roils—someone unfolding from its depths to wrap an arm around Dimitri. Sylvain, she realizes, his face bright like his hair and with a smile that is lopsided.

“What’s wrong, Dimitri?” he jests. “Have too much to drink after all and can’t keep up with us?”

It’s only then in looking beyond their smaller circle that Edelgard spies Ingrid and Felix, the both of them having come back out of the night to stand like sentinels, their eyes trained not on her or even Sylvain but on just Dimitri. An enviable kind of loyalty running through them that Dimitri and country and shared history must inspire.

Of course, they’d have noticed something was awry with him, just as her own housemates had seen the change that had come over her.

“No point just standing around like fools, just waiting to catch our death,” Felix snipes at last, trouncing off and spurring them all back into motion.

Chiding him, Ingrid just as soon turns back to Dimitri and offers a strained smile. “Let’s head back, shall we?”

“You heard the lady,” Sylvain says, pulling Dimitri away as Dimitri allows himself to be led, his gait unsteady. Out of his hand the dagger falls, forsaken as it cuts clean through a bank of snow.

It’s not until they've receded into the shadows that Edelgard stoops down to retrieve the weapon, its metal cold enough to sting her even through her glove as she continues to hold it in her trembling grasp.

Had she just been playing at a fool’s game, after all, pretending she could ever be someone else? That she could ever truly escape or divorce herself from what the past has already made of her?

Her breath comes short and staggered, Edelgard gone lightheaded again yet somehow still aware enough of her surroundings to register the sound of approaching footfalls through the snow. Quickly, she stores the dagger away as Claude comes into view.

“There you are,” he says, and at his artless smile, she ducks her head.

Heart pounding in her ears, it’s Edelgard that then falls behind while Claude leads the way through a close knit patch of pine trees, shaking free a dusting of snow that settles upon them instead. At a low lying branch he stops short, pulling its length back and waiting so that she might pass more easily underneath.

In unease she stares back at him, but there is no sign of mischief about him now that she can detect.

Why, she wants to demand. Why had he grown to be so considerate towards her? Now, when she feels so unequal to it, his kind regard threatening to break her as the ground beneath her further gives way.

But no, she realizes with a sudden burst of unbearable clarity as he still waits upon her, holding back that branch. He’d always been kind, hadn’t he? Claude showing her his first real kindness of this night back when she’d injured herself in the Sealed Forest, so long ago. Only she hadn’t fully recognized it for what it was then—conditioned to rather see him and all his unknowns as a threat. To rather see his glib words and actions as a mere mockery or taunt.

All but capsizing she somehow pushes forward, and in that moment when she passes by him, he only shifts the branch to brush the snow free from her hair, his action playful yet tender.

Unmoored, she comes to a standstill, but if she is affected by the contact so, too, is he—Claude looking away at this close a distance to clear his throat audibly. A little forlorn, his gaze falls back upon the tavern, then moves ahead towards the monastery where others have since dispersed.

“It’s not much,” he says suddenly. “One could even argue it’s pointless in the grand scheme of things, especially on this of all nights. But seeing everyone come together tonight? Across status and origin and dialect? That was a small part of my dream, come to life.”

“It wasn’t so far from mine,” she says in reply, the words falling from her lips entirely without thought. “I wanted to unite Fódlan across its divisions.” All at once, she feels the cold air, the warm lull of the alcohol still in her veins, the panicked race of her heart. “I wanted to remake the world. I was made to.”

Once more he goes on ahead, laughing quietly under his breath at that last part. “I know. You’ve said as much already in all your grand self-importance. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”

Her arm hangs heavily at her side; heavier still, hangs the dagger, weighing her and her every step down. Unconsciously, she draws it out again, thinking of the cutting accusation in Dimitri’s words and her damning silence in response.

Along the blade she draws her thumb, dancing upon its edge.

“I keep saying it because it’s true, Claude.” In his tracks he stops, his back visibly tensing as she adds, “I was.”

When he turns for her his brow is furrowed, Claude knowing something is wrong but not what, exactly.

She does not have to say a word more. Does not have to put herself before his judgment. Could confess to anyone else and have them forget, but—

It would mean nothing in the end.

Perhaps it’s only his perspective that she’s after, his support having gotten her this far in the night and able to survive it as much as she has. Perhaps she is only tired of her own pretense, Edelgard so far passed due to strike down her disguise and subterfuge.

More likely it is to take this fragile thing between them—all their hard-won companionship and this singularly good thing she’s made for herself—just so that she might try and tear it down in a real act of self-destruction. To test the extent of his compassion and see if it could survive even her.

If he is to hate her, let him hate her knowing what she is, and forget any useless sentiment she might harbor towards him.

So she hands off her own proverbial dagger to see if he might fell her in truth.

“That’s who the Flame Emperor was made to be.”

She watches as he works the words out, quick in spite of his shock, because he had always had a quick tongue and an even quicker mind.

“You?” He swallows, pushing down the question, when it could not be suppressed. Not by him, acknowledging an irrevocable truth. “You’re the Flame Emperor?”

His eyes could pierce stone, and she is not stone before him now, but rather parchment thin. Still, she does not flinch to answer. “I am.”

“You’re joking,” he decides suddenly, sounding like he himself does not believe it and is only resorting to humor in an effort to give them both an out. “For starters, the Flame Emperor is like twice your height.”

“Do I need to explain magic transfiguration to you, too?” she replies with no humor at all.

His brow starkly lowers, his jaw tensing against speech. “So you—” His eyes cut to the dagger she continues to openly hold. Weighed down by it still, she lets it slip through her fingers to land hilt up in the snow.

“Yes,” she says, offering herself no defense or mercy and rather wondering if he might merely turn his back on her now and walk away.

But that is not how he works. When presented with something he doesn’t understand, he only grows more determined, digging his heels in to pick apart a greater intelligence.

“The Flame Emperor fought and endangered our classmates, Edelgard.” This statement she also confirms with a nod, but he is not done yet, his words clipped and coming now at a headlong pace. “Was involved in Flayn’s kidnapping and then spotted in the aftermath of the plague in Remire. Was clearly working with those who killed Byleth’s father. And that was you? Just letting them? Or were those your intentions all along?”

“Do my intentions really matter to you, knowing all that to be so?”

“I’m interested in everything you’ve been holding back, Edelgard,” he rather demands of her as his patience completely frays—serving as a new reminder that she could not broach this topic with him and expect to have it end completely on her own terms.

“No,” she allows, “none of that was my aim or direct doing. I never had such control over the Agarthans’ movements and actions. Even so, it is undeniable that I worked with them still.”

His eyes narrowed so intently at her, Claude only compels her towards new provocation. “But if you’d rather take umbrage at something I did orchestrate, hate me for that bandit ambush outside of Remire that put your own life at risk. Though it wouldn't have come to even that if you hadn't chosen to run from the skirmish and set everything awry—introducing Byleth to us when I’d meant to run off and replace our old professor with Jeritza.” Neither grimace nor exasperation can she quite hold back. “Even then you were upsetting everything I had so carefully thought out.”

“Jeritza?” Claude echoes. “So he was in on everything, after all? He really was the Death Knight?”

“Yes, though he had no higher goals. He was only in need of an outlet to assuage his bloodlust. And so I gave him one with direction and purpose.”

In clear, tumultuous thought he paces away, kicking up snow as he goes; just as suddenly, he pivots to reel back upon her. “And that’s why you wouldn’t try to help me learn more about the Agarthans? Because you were always helping them? Are you working with them even now in this night? Are they responsible?”

She did not expect to be tempted to laugh, admitting to so much, but here he succeeds. “Do you really have to ask?”

“No,” he reconsiders, shaking his head. “No. You’ve been just as desperate as me.”

And desperate is an apt way to put it, Edelgard remembering just how low she’d fallen.

“Tell me,” he presses further. “How much did you know then?”

She struggles to hold his stare even as something from within claws for release. “The truth is that I never knew much more than you about them, even though my uncle is among their ranks. You even… uncovered new things. I’ve been working with them and still Hubert and I had no name for them.” Low and harsh she laughs then, but only at herself. “We called them ‘Those Who Slither in the Dark.’ Sometimes it feels like that is all I have amounted to—them making me into what I am. Now, more than ever, never to know the day again.”

“And what did they make you into?” he says with laden breath. “What are you really? Who is the Flame Emperor?”

“A tool for change, but one who wanted to exact it in her own stead and for her own aims. Even if they were aligned with those who harmed her.”

Openly, he glowers now, his every word clear and pronounced. “How did they harm you, Edelgard?”

“You’ve seen the scars already,” she says and witnesses the realization settle across his face. The horror. As detached and as terse as she can manage, she continues, “There were Crest experiments. Blood reconstruction. All in pursuit of a second Crest.”

Breath thin, the air barely clouds before her as she waits for his response—his reaction still meaning something, for better or worse. Bereft of it, she only feels as if she is at last free-falling, her words all she has left as they ring out yet.

“I knew they gave me Nemesis’s blood, but I didn’t realize that meant Sothis, too. I didn’t know the fuller history. They—fed me so much of what I know, and I pushed back against them, I swear that I did. Only I thought I had a clearer mind, a clearer perspective, but—even now, there’s so much I have to second guess. So much I should know but have forgotten, my own mind failing me when I need it most.”

With an eerie, almost mocking quietness, the surrounding boughs of pine shake in the breeze, Edelgard no longer able to bear Claude’s unnerving silence.

“Claude?” she says to challenge him directly, but it comes out all wrong, her voice modulating on a question when she'd meant to temper it like steel.

“Edelgard, breathe,” he speaks again at last, because of course she could not fool him now, Claude already knowing what she’s like when she’s struggling or falling apart.

“What are you thinking now?” she still demands through it all.

Slowly, he further stirs, imparting, “I’m thinking that finally… Finally, you’re starting to make sense. How many nights did I spend, trying to figure you out?” Through his hair he runs his hand, then down across his face.

Too perceptive to the end, he asks, “What brought this about? Why are you telling me this now, after all this time?”

“Dimitri knows, at least in part,” she confesses, and when she briefly closes her eyes, all she can see is that harrowing expression of his, clear as the elusive day. “He discovered something of mine in the Flame Emperor’s wake—something he’d given me, only I hadn’t even known or remembered him.” And as her gaze falls to the dagger in the snow, so does Claude’s gaze also travel.

“So this is you—what?” Claude tries. “Clearing your conscience? Asking for forgiveness?”

“No,” she says, resolute. “I decided long ago I’d moved past all that.” Dismissing him now, she tears her gaze away. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Well, I’m still damn well trying to!” he returns with vehemence, his voice rousing those birds resting among the trees. “I’m at least asking for a better explanation. Don’t you owe us all that? After what the Agarthans have done—what they’ve done to you—why work with them at all?”

“To have the chance to affect actual change in my short time before my body eventually succumbed to their experiments? The Agarthans watching me still, even when they set me loose to do their bidding? Nor can I deny that to a certain end we still did have a common enemy in the Church. And so I required their help and their backing to correct Rhea’s injustices. Beyond that, I would have fought back against them, too. One day…” Painfully, her fists clench. “Provided I had life left in me.”

So much passes over his face as he takes her answer in, Claude clearly struggling still as his gaze bears down upon her. And it’s that same searching regard that further unlocks something within her, Edelgard tasking him with the greater explanation he seeks.

“Do you know why people run, Claude?”

“Why?” he says dryly, showing her even he is in no mood for games now. That he has taken her question as a personal affront or an indictment of his character, when it is not one at all. “Because they’re cowards or weak-willed?”

She shakes her head with one resounding stroke. “It is not so complex as even that. In the end, people only run because they can. But sometimes,” she breathes, the world and her vision narrowing again, “sometimes you are surrounded. Trapped and chained literally in place and fed half truths until even your mind fails you and becomes another prison. And still you are forced to fight. Fighting just for your existence, though it is no longer your own—though it is an utter indignity. Fighting even when there seems like there is no point anymore and wouldn’t it just be easier to die than be tortured and have nothing left as your family perishes before you?”

With some unknown purpose, he takes a step closer, Edelgard laboring to get the rest of her words out and hold even this much ground as his face swims before hers. “And still. And still you exist and you survive and you fight because otherwise what was it all for? How else is there to be any kind of meaning—any kind of answer—for all that you’ve lost and endured?”

He only draws nearer to her as she realizes she is crying openly now, tears tracking hotly down her face. Her voice, her posture, her legs, all wavering in spite of herself as she proclaims, “So judge or condemn me as you must, but I will not apologize for finding a way forward still.”

All that distance that remains between them he cuts down, Claude suddenly embracing her in a hold that is as encompassing as it is delicate—steadying yet loose enough for her to break away, should she wish to.

She considers it, facing down the dual impulse to actually escape now and hold on for her life. From her tears her vision blurs, her fist futilely clenched between them as the fight leaves her. Tentatively, she unfurls it and finds herself gripping his jacket instead. Her arms moving until she has a better hold of him around his middle and back, Edelgard wrenching him nearer than he’s ever been to press her tear-stained face against his chest.

“You’re not wrong,” he says at length, his voice pitched low, and she realizes that there is a tremor that runs through them both as she holds him in her arms. It reaches even his hand that runs along her back, smoothing and stroking her hair. Claude perhaps also taking comfort in that calming motion as he leans upon her just as much as she leans on him, the two of them somehow supporting the other in remaining upright. “That I could run and that I did. I ran all the way to Leicester.”

It is not what she’d expect of him to say next, even more so in that it does not make sense.

“Claude?” she says, and again his name becomes an unwitting question as she lifts her head to meet him face to face.

“Khalid,” he answers, waiting on her realization now.

“Khalid,” she repeats, discovering the shape of it as she peers back at him. And all at once it is so obvious. So glaring that she is ashamed that she had not pieced it together herself, remembering all those things about him that she had not been able to account for...

To the very end, all she could see was Fódlan and its people—so consumed by their plight. But his perspective had stretched beyond it. Had in fact come from the larger world.

“I’m a fool,” she murmurs, stepping back from the greater immediacy of his arms to instead hold him at a distance.

“You only saw what you knew,” he says quietly. “How many people have you met, belonging to two cultures and trying to walk a fine line between them, only to be forced to impossibly choose?” A certain and unexpected thread of melancholy laces through his speech. “Because honestly, I’d love to meet them myself.”

To that she does not have an answer, and he merely nods, his question not really one in actuality. “There aren’t many who see or think of the outside world in Fódlan. Rhea’s seen to that.”

She produces a sound, both anger and frustration mixed together. “That does not make me feel better. To think myself still capable of being shaped by her influence.”

“Well, if it helps, it’s not like I really wanted anyone to piece it together, either.”

She could almost laugh again. To have lost out to him—that is to be her consolation? “It does not,” she says irately.

On this matter, his greater solicitude then ends. “We all harbor our own ignorance,” he says, because never would he let her hide behind her own or willfully disregard an uncomfortable truth. “Ignorance of this land. Ignorance of each other. It’s just a matter of what we do in response to it.”

And put in those terms, what else is there left to do but to turn to dialogue once more, Edelgard still in desperate need of her own explanation.

“Khalid,” she tries once more, working through what she can discern on her own. “It’s Almyran, isn’t it? Your father, he’s Almyran?”

To see his small, rueful suggestion of a smile, there is a disproportionate, gaping relief that sweeps through her, Edelgard realizing just how much she’d feared he would not smile at her again.

“Yes,” he admits.

There is so much to reconsider knowing just this one more piece of him, so defining and hidden from her for so long. And yet overwhelmed by the thousands of questions she might ask, she only inanely says, “No wonder you don’t uphold any Fódlani etiquette.”

He shrugs. “It was easier to forget formality than try and fill in every gap in my knowledge. Besides, it was fun, messing with Lorenz and the others.” The mere breadth of a heartbeat passes. “And you.”

“You always did love to antagonize me.”

“I thought that was half the fun between us.” Against her inner elbow she feels the brush of his thumb. “But only up until a point.”

Disarmed by his deflection—by both his humor and intimate touch—she pauses to properly regroup. “Why… why come to Fódlan then? Was it just the call to power? The title to inherit?” Covering his heart, her hand clenches upon his jacket, Edelgard thinking of that scar of his that she can still so vividly recall. “What were you running from?”

“I know something about having your enemies close,” he says, his own hands clasping more firmly around her arms. “Too close, as family. To be unrecognized and targeted because of my mixed heritage. The power of the Dukedom was its own appeal after finding myself powerless, but even beyond that I was trying... to seek out a place of acceptance and belonging. Only I realized that it doesn’t really exist anywhere, and that if I wanted to see my dream of a world more united, I would have to bring it into being. That’s why I needed the title and influence. It was a place to start.”

There is still so much to piece through, but it is one question in particular that now rises above all others. “And why,” she says, not relaxing her hold in the slightest, “would your family go through the trouble of targeting you? Just for your mixed heritage?”

“You know how it goes,” he hedges even in her arms, Claude still too practiced in his evasion though even he seems to be made uncomfortable by it now.

“Know what?” she presses. “Be honest with me now, Cl—Khalid.”

And perhaps it’s how she falters then recovers on his name that makes him answer: “Those political power struggles.”

Again, she is left disoriented and shaken. “In Almyra? What other connections do you have?”

“Let’s just say you’re not the only one who might have inherited a throne someday. Though I had plenty of competition from my relations and older siblings.”

“You, a ruler?” she asks, and it is a glaring reminder that she knows disconcertingly little of the political workings of Fódlan’s eastern neighbor. “Your father?” she demands. “He is Kavad, sovereign of all Almyra?”

“Does that surprise you so much?” he all but deflects again, his tone turning arch. “I know just as much about political theory and governance as you or Dimitri, I’m sure. Likely more about diplomacy. And definitely more governing languages.”

“Don’t be so certain,” she says, rising to the challenge, even now, and Edelgard can only marvel at how they can still fall into such easy patterns after all they’ve said and revealed, upsetting the careful equilibrium and understanding that had stood between them.

“You haven’t even heard me speak my native one. Should we switch to Almyran?”

Her tongue grows heavy to admit, “I would not be able to properly answer.”

The corner of his mouth lifts in another near approximation of a smile. “We can stick to our common Fódlani for now. It’s gotten us this far, at least.”

But where is that, she still must wonder, Edelgard unable to help thinking of the futile future as another night draws to its close, even the stars beginning to vanish as the stormfront sweeps in with the first brush of snowfall.

Having already divulged so much—in the face of what would again not be—the words come easily in the end.

“When the dawn came,” she tells him, “I was going to leave. The Adrestian throne was already mine, waiting for me to claim, and I was going to take it and exact change. Was going to break the Church’s hold over Fódlan, starting in the Holy Tomb.”

Once more their embrace alters, Khalid’s hold the insistent one now as he grapples with her, asking tersely, “During this month’s revelation?”

“Yes,” she says, unflinching. “I would have returned for it and struck.”

“With the Agarthans again?”

“No, at least in this act by just my own strength. The Empire’s.”

Into a taut, stark line he presses his lips. “That would be all but an act of war.”

“I know.” She swallows. “And I would have shortly declared it to make it so. That is the way I knew. The way for Fódlan to be remade. By forcing the opportunity for change.”

Subject to the hardened scrutiny of his gaze, Edelgard cannot help but further predicate, “And you would have disagreed, maybe despised my every choice—despised me—but all the same. You would have taken advantage where you could have, wouldn’t you? Especially if I hadn’t succeeded. Letting someone else create your opportunity for you to take hold and reshape this land.”

He disputes nothing, only says, “And now?”

“And now?” she echoes, voice rising above the gust of wind and snow that sets her hair adrift. The birds he himself has roused call out as they regather, sheltering low amongst the trees to weather a storm that will not fully manifest.

Into what must be the last stirring of the wind, he speaks again. “You said that was the way you knew. And now?”

It is a question that should go unanswered, not just for her lack of a proper response or even its ultimate futility, but by time itself—Edelgard holding her breath for the edge of night to turn them back and bring this encounter to a close. “And now,” she flounders. “Now—”

And then the impossible happens again.

Through the pine branches creep tendrils of the palest light, shadows shifting before their eyes as the dusting of snow that surrounds them is slowly set aglow.

On weakened legs she tries to escape the patch of trees, Claude—Khalid—beside her as they stagger back out into the open expanse of the mountainside. And there along the gaping horizon line is the telltale dawning of day, its light breaking through even the gathering storm.

Instinctively, she grasps at Khalid as he grasps back at her. The both of them attempting to hold themselves upright though they succumb to the moment, crumpling together into the slush—into that growing accumulation of snow that better proves that yes, a new day has in fact come.

She only realizes she is silently crying as flakes of snow catch upon the new tears that line her face, each touch a cold pinprick of sensation; Khalid’s own tears she first hears, his hand raised to his eyes as he chokes out a broken sob of disbelief.

“It doesn’t make sense. How? Why now?” he asks of her, of the sky, of the world—as if there might actually come an answer. “When we haven’t really solved or altered anything.”

But what had not changed to look between them now as they lean against each other? Hadn’t everything, Edelgard thinks, remembering herself back in her room when this dawn was first meant to come. And now to finally meet it—

It is everything she has wanted for so long, having been trapped and rendered so powerless, but not like this— Edelgard faltering and unprepared in the face of this day’s eventuality, her own plans long left to the wayside as greater knowledge had served to trample it all underfoot like old snow.

Amidst new snowfall now—the world shaken and stirred—past, present, and future all ensnare again so that there is no careful delineation or distance to keep a life’s worth of trauma from rushing back. And even wreathed in the rays of the sun as it rises, it's darkness that she is plunged back into to think of the prime minister looming before her. Of her uncle, presiding even further in the shadows. And her father, withering away before them both…

“I—I have to go,” she says unceremoniously, led by impulse and losing hold of Khalid as she tries to clamber to her feet. “My father. The throne.”

She makes it no further than a few strides before he arrests her with just his words, looking up at her as he remains kneeling in the snow. “And then your strike against the Church?”

A shiver runs down her spine, her legs planted and immobile. How to account for him, having told him all?

“So is that it then?” he asks into the resounding silence. “After everything, you’d just cast me off as easily as that?” But for all that his stare penetrates her, there is a hint of underlying vulnerability to his eyes—almost wounded in their candor.

“Wouldn’t it rather be you, casting me off?” she levels, there still being some kind of victory to be the one to push him away first. “When we clearly don’t agree on our approach.”

“We don’t,” he confirms even as he crosses their distance again. “But I’m asking you to see reason. Do you really think, knowing as much as you do, that you’ll win? Fighting Rhea, fighting Byleth and time itself, in the Holy Tomb? Is that really how to best achieve your ends?”

“And so?” she asks, even knowing she cannot deny his point. That it would be a mere declaration, and not a move of sense. “We bide our time after we have bided it for so long? The world needs a catalyst for change. Do you mean to actually herald a new age in?”

“Of course I do, but does it need to be so rooted in violence and bloodshed? Not every door is meant to be opened by blunt force. If we can join both the Empire and Alliance together against the Church, doesn’t that account for more than half the continent?” Unrelenting in his own turn, he continues on before she can even respond. “You even alluded to a history between you and Dimitri. Why not try to use or address it? To work upon him and even Byleth? If we succeed, who is left to oppose us but our truest enemies?”

“And if Dimitri, Byleth, and the Kingdom cannot be worked upon? When there is the inevitable need for bloodshed, even if it is against just the Church or the Agarthans? Would you still stand with me or would you run, having another place to fall back to already? Unlike you, this land is all I have, Khalid.”

“Even if it isn’t set in stone yet, I still have a clear foothold to power here. I’m not looking to leave without seeing that through.” Intently, his jaw flexes, Khalid lowering his face so that he is eye level with her and inescapable from view. “You’d call me an opportunist, and it’s true—I work with what I have. With who. The question has always just been… who do I actually have?”

Wildly, her heart beats out of turn in her chest, Edelgard wanting in spite of everything to answer this new moment of vulnerability with the assurance and belonging that he deserves.

“I wouldn’t have despised you,” he says while she still reels from the feeling. “Only not seen completely eye to eye. But what we want is still ultimately aligned. Don’t you think we can accomplish more together than at each other’s throat?”

It’s to his own throat that her gaze momentarily falls, watching it work before he somehow finds words to further unravel her.

“If you choose me, I would choose you. So that whatever happens you wouldn’t have to face it alone. Even if we disagree—especially if we do—isn’t there merit in having someone to work through the most important judgment calls? To share the burden of the road ahead and to see all that we might not on our own, knowing there are still things we do not know or understand?”

And how can she contest that point either, Edelgard having been proven unaware so many times in the night that has passed? When there is a part of her that wants nothing more than to lean upon him as she has done before.

Still, there remains the matter of her other entanglements that she cannot so easily escape or ignore.

“You must realize I cannot simply break off ties with the Agarthans,” she tells him, thinking back to that conversation they’d once shared over a chessboard. In choosing to speak now, however, it is not to incite him but rather to lay down indomitable fact. “Beyond them keeping careful note of my movements, to take on both them and the Church at once… that requires immediate standing and assured power. And that you still do not possess, do you?”

“Only because we've been held here. But now, with time moving again… I still have some connections in Almyra that I can rally. And in Leicester, too, I know I can manage to garner support. Trust me to see the Alliance through and—”

“Trust me to manage the Agarthans?” she interjects. “To alter my plans to meet you in the middle?”

“Yes,” he breathes out and neither of them moves as they fully consider that alliance and what it would require of them. His eyes flickering between hers, he speaks as if half to himself, “After all, trust only works if it goes both ways.”

Forcefully, she closes her own eyes to better think. For him to ask her to compromise her path by choice—for her to even consider it. How could she, when it would be a betrayal of everything she’d worked for? A betrayal of even the memory of her siblings.

But then, hadn’t she always compromised the path she would have cut, working with those allies who were closer to enemies? And now to either go back to simply being the Agarthans’ willful pawn, relying on their capricious, vindictive support, or to meet Khalid here in this moment—on open, equal terms.

It is while she is still weighing the full repercussions of that choice that he loses his equanimity again, his voice growing insistent. “Or do you merely want to go back to working with the Agarthans the same as before? Content in the fact that they have the power and the backing you need while I still have none gathered? Unwilling or unable to really place your trust in me?”

In frustration, she bites out, “It is not a question of my own wants. It has never been. If it was then—”

She takes a step nearer to him, her hand reaching out before instinct stills it in the face of all those unknowns that still linger between them. Of all that there is still to learn of each other, now that they have truly revealed themselves.

But in his gaze he remains unchanged as his hand now rises before she might lower her arm, catching her hand in his grasp.

Again, her mind slips back to the first time they’d held hands. Then beyond, to that hand she could not reach, locked away in that dungeon beneath the Enbarr palace.

How many times had she woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, telling herself she’d left that cell behind? But had she simply walked with her captors into the room adjoining: a cell of only a different look and feel and half of her own making? Edelgard in fact locking that new cell’s door from within, a dagger clutched behind her back, as she’d stared down those who had harmed her and declared that to be a greater freedom.

And Khalid now to be like the wind bearing down upon that shuttered room, knocking, knocking—

For her to open that door to see it is the world itself that has come to call, extending even further than she’d ever realized—its uncharted map not yet fully formed and still unfurling. For Edelgard to consider stepping out with him into that life, wondering if that which she wants and that which she needs could truly be so aligned...

Beyond her grasp, his hand shifts, but only so that it might slip down her wrist and even under the sleeve of her jacket. As her breath stutters, his fingers find the underside of her glove, Khalid waiting and holding her eye. And when she does not move to stop him, he slowly slides her glove off until scars and calluses meet, her skin chilled to the bone but warmer for the touch.

Something desperate moves them then, their palms joining, their fingers interlocked, until Khalid rather raises their hands to hold hers flush against the side of his face.

Around them the snow falls more in earnest now, each flake like a descending star set alight in the dawn’s making. The idea taking hold that they’ve somehow shattered the night and upended the world as it rains itself down upon them, paying homage back as it crowns their hair and shoulders and arms. Water coats the tips of Khalid’s lashes—melted snow and unshed tears intermingled—and in his eyes, still as fathomless as any night, she sees the fleck of stars that remain, now that she knows where to find them.

And in spite of all her distrust and all that she is, there is a calling to belief that kindles in her chest and asks her to place a hope upon the light in those eyes, so responsive to her touch and only growing softer as her hands draw his face in nearer to her own.

“I don’t care what this night was,” she declares. “Or even how it has held us here. I still can’t put my faith or belief in any higher power. I can only believe in people, in their capacity, and I…"

She pauses, overcome and needing air. This close, they share it, his hand coming to her cheek to steady her and swipe away the residual streak of tears upon her face in a way that only causes new tears to spill over. Those tears, too, he clears, and again it’s his kindness that breaks her or rather makes her more whole, Edelgard realizing anew how much further she has to heal, but regardless—

“I believe in you,” she says and she kisses him, bidding the world and even the rising sun to wait upon her, just this once so that she might know something good in her own stolen time.

Under the palm of her hand she feels his heart race, feels the flushed heat of his skin as she moves against him, slow but intent until he fully comes alive for her in this new exchange of inviolable feeling.

Seeking one another, he thumbs the contour of her jaw, the hollow behind her ear, Edelgard shivering for him. Her hand she lifts to cradle the back of his neck, her fingers winding into his hair to the root, and quietly he gasps for her, so near now that where she ends and he begins she does not know, nor does it matter.

Abruptly then, he leaves her wanting as he pulls away to draw his own unsteady breath. Still, he only goes so far as to be able to look upon her as intimately as he ever has, Edelgard registering his quick inhalations in the press of his chest against hers.

Drawn across his face is a question as there so often is, but this answer, at least, she thinks she has. Together again, she joins them in a kiss that sooner sets her heart and mind and body aflame, Edelgard rising with him now alongside the breaking day to rival even the sun’s reign.

So at last she draws back, humbled yet exalted in him to meet this moment and all its staggering possibility.

Once more, it’s in speaking her name that Khalid reaches out to her.

“El,” she rather says in exchange for the name he has given her, Edelgard still impossibly wanting him and his endearment.

“El,” he repeats quietly, and she must close her eyes to regain her composure.

“I would still put Fódlan before myself. To give all that I have and all that I am just for the chance to change it,” she tells him, steadfast in that fact still, though she feels the fuller weight of its sacrifice—Edelgard again possessing something worthy of being mourned.

“But if there is a way to see that through. To see it through and live…” Her voice gives way, felled by the hope, and he is the one who kisses her then, trying, and as a pledge.

“We will find it,” he says, and it’s those flecks of gold in his eyes that she sees again—as though in the absence of her casting her dreams up to the stars, they have rather come down to avow themselves to her as Khalid speaks on their behalf. “You and I.”

And she chose to believe that they could make it all so.