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The first rays of the sun have already found their way through the window into the room Byleth shares with Edelgard to gently caress her face with its warm rays. It makes her sneeze. Around this time of year, it means that sunrise was at least an hour ago. Blindly, she feels under the covers for a familiar warmth – the sigh of relief she lets out upon touching the sleeping form of Edelgard feels like the first breath she’s taken after waking up.
She blinks against the sunlight. It’s new. Before this, before the strange period of not-quite-peace after Rhea’s death, she can’t remember a time she hasn’t been up before sunrise. Back with her father, among the mercenaries, she was always the first to leave her tent. As much as the other mercenaries tended to avoid her, they appreciated having someone to fetch and heat their water, prepare their breakfast rations and chase away the rats. Even more so, they appreciated not having to be that someone. And after that – well. Time always seemed in short supply then, every hour she spent sleeping feeling like an hour wasted when there were students to guide, friends to protect, wars to win…
She stretches like a wildcat in the sun, taking a strange satisfaction in the way her joints pop. She’s growing old. Or perhaps she’s growing idle? She’s almost wistful for the days of mercenary work, waking up and knowing exactly what to do. The war against Those Who Slither in The Dark is not that. It’s a war that is fought not with swords, spears and infantry but with subtlety, subterfuge and information. She’s never been good at any of these things. She can decapitate two enemies in one strike, she can plan and win an assault on a base, but this? This is a war to be fought by Hubert and the like, and she…
Well, she does all she’s good for. What she’s always been good for: Putting her sword and body and life on the line for the only one who’s always been worth it: Edelgard.
Something brushes against her arm. She isn’t even alarmed; she knows the weight of Edelgard’s hand against her own by heart. If she were to go blind tomorrow, she would be able to tell the touch of her hand from a thousand others by the feeling alone, that gentle power and the topography of her scars belonging to only one.
Edelgard must be waking up now, too, as she lets out a sleepy noise, somewhere between a yawn and a snore. She snores – they both do, but apart from a disgruntled kick in the dead of the night they don’t bring it up. It’s become one of Byleth’s favourite sounds, actually, because it lets her know that everything is okay. El is safe. They’ve had their fair share of close calls, their fair share of midnight assassins. Byleth didn’t expect anything less in the aftermath of the war. They can’t even bear to sleep apart anymore. She doesn’t know if it’s an unhealthy thing. All she knows is that her heart – her actual, beating, living heart – will only let her rest if she knows that El is nearby.
Some have taken to calling her the emperor’s lapdog. She doesn’t mind it.
She watches the emperor wake – slowly, blinking lavender eyes and scrunching up her nose adorably, then with a start.
“You should have woken me earlier,” she croaks, her voice hoarse from sleep.
Byleth cocks her head to the side, as if actually considering it. “On the one night you were actually getting some proper sleep? I don’t think so.”
Edelgard smacks her upper arm lightly. It’s new too: That physical side of affection. It’s rare, mostly when all other eyes are turned away, and it makes Byleth feel…something. Proud, maybe, that she is the only one who can melt the splendid, larger-than-life figure of the emperor down to just Edelgard. But there is guilt, as well. The guilt of making a promise she can’t keep.
“I can rest when Adrestia is in safe hands and we’ve made it to some secluded mountain village where nobody knows our name,” El yawns.
“So it’s up to me to milk the goats?” Byleth challenges playfully.
They’ve talked about this, about leaving everything behind. Byleth is glad for it, really, since Enbarr holds so many painful memories for El. She was robbed of a childhood there, the least she can do is reclaim the latter half of her life.
And since the first time Edelgard brought it up there has never been a doubt in Byleth’s mind that when that day comes, she’d be there at El’s side. It’s where she belongs, after all, a future without her seemed absurd to picture. She must have gotten used to El’s presence, she’s always been a creature of habit after all.
They get up, eventually, and they get dressed. The first night Byleth stayed the night in Edelgard’s room, they gave the poor chambermaid the fright of her life. They leave them alone in the early hours of the morning, now. She might not be the most socially perceptive, but even Byleth is aware that by now all of the servants must think they are…intimate.
Byleth hates it.
She’ll be El’s lapdog every day, her sword, her shield, her shelter, her servant even (she empathises with Hubert now, to some extent, though she still maintains that she is better looking and has less need for his dark posturing), but she can’t…she doesn’t…
It’s not fair to get El’s hopes up like this.
Her former student had always been of the opinion that there was more to the Ashen Demon. And maybe there is some truth to the matter – Byleth knows now that she can cry, can mourn, and she can rage like a storm clashing against a cliff chipping away at the rocks over eons. She’s a destructive force, and the most tenderness is capable of giving is using her power to protect those close to her. Giving herself up completely to Edelgard – it isn’t love, but it is something.
She takes a breath before getting ready to leave the room, preparing for a day of letting Edelgard do most of the talking and her own imposing presence take over the rest, when she feels another light touch on her upper arm – one of El’s favourite places to touch her, she’s found. Her upper arm and the part of her back where her shoulder blades stand out like the fin of a shark from a calm sea are the places she’ll find Edelgard’s hands wandering to the most. Sometimes it’s the barest whisper of a touch, quick and easily concealed in public, but in darkness, when she’s shaking by nightmares, she’ll grip onto Byleth like she’s a raft in a storm. It makes her feel…something. Something ugly, probably. But El reaches out, and even though she can barely feel the weight of her hand under the layers of armour (how small these hands are, and how much strength they hide!), and Byleth tries not to think about how comforting the touch feels. How selfish of her to just take and take and take without being able to give back, not in the way El wants.
“Thank you”, El says, “I think I needed that morning’s rest.”
She’s so tired. Looks like it, too. Edelgard snorts when Byleth mentions it.
“Thanks for that compliment, my…Byleth.”
“Your Byleth?”, the former mercenary asks, bemused.
“Are you anyone else’s?”, El asks, raising her eyebrows. It sounds like a challenge. Byleth has never been able to back down from a challenge.
“Only yours. Always”, she says, and the world stops for a moment. Byleth wants to kick herself. El looks at her a little incredulous, a little sad, but still like Byleth hung the stars and moon and sun in the sky and made them shine for El alone. Byleth straightens her back and nods.
“Let’s go, then.”
She’s almost wistful as she watches the soft familiarity of El wash away and the emperor take her place.
It’s better, really. There is so much to do, and Edelgard can’t afford to waste away loving the Ashen Demon.
Of course, she can’t always be at El’s side. There are peace talks to lead, ministers to elect, and this is El’s world as much as teaching was hers. Intellectually, she knows this. Edelgard is more than capable of protecting herself, she has loyal guards and friends that have fought by her side for years. She knows this as well. But still, the worry never really goes away. So she spends her time doing the two things that have always taken her mind off things: Training and making tea. Not at the same time, of course, and since the rigid structures of the Garreg Mach schedule don’t apply anymore, she finds she can never get a hold of anyone she’d like to have tea with, she busies herself with rigorous training. Maybe she’d prefer having tea. Having someone else to talk to, someone she doesn’t have to keep at arm’s length. People just seem to slip away from her so easily.
The training is another holdover from her mercenary days. In her experience there was nothing better for shutting out all her doubts and anxieties than a day of hard physical labour until her bones ached and her muscles burned and there was just no more room for any higher thought.
Making tea is more complicated to explain. Byleth is no woman of science in any sense of the word, but there is something so controlled and exact about brewing the perfect tea. She’s developed a feel for it by now, an intuition of sorts. Manuela has more than once bemoaned the fact that Byleth hasn’t yet tried her hand at mixing drinks. Memories flood her at the thought, some more fond than others. She’s had her fair share of experiences with alcohol, especially among the mercenaries when she was younger. She liked the buzz, she liked how it made her head feel funny and her limbs wobbly, she liked how much easier it became to laugh when intoxicated, and she liked how much more bearable it made long nights spent staring into the fire, not thinking about much at all and feeling even less. Still, the hangover has never been never worth it.
Tea was the alternative that let her include her students, back when they still called her professor. Like a bucket of icy water dumped over her head, she remembers how young they were, how young they still are. She is, too, she supposes, but it’s different for her. She never really got the hang of playing pretend and other silly games or frolicking or whatever kids were supposed to do when she was young. Childhood was wasted on her. Chills seep into her bones when she thinks about what her students, her comrades, her friends lost to war and crests, and she drives her sword harder into the training dummy as if the burn of her muscles could drive out the cold.
“So what’s this guy done to you to deserve such harsh treatment?”
Byleth spins on her heels, sword drawn. She misses Dorothea’s neck by inches. She could have easily taken her head off, taken her head off and stare into her expressionless eyes and her mouth gaping open like back in Derdriu before pulling her back from the brink with Sothis’ blessing…
Byleth can see the shock written on Dorothea’s features, but her expression smoothes over almost instantly. A brilliant actor, as always. She’s alive, Byleth tries to tell herself, Dorothea’s alive. I saved her life with the Divine Pulse.
“What brings you to the training range?” she asks, as if nothing had happened. She finds she can’t talk about it, the war that’s still following her like a great big cloud, bathing her in shadow. What is there to talk about in the first place? It’s not like Dorothea hasn’t suffered under it too. Best not speak of it, best not open up any wounds. Still, it’s odd to see her here of all places. Byleth would have thought Dorothea to be among the first to cast her weapon away and never spare a glance for it again after the fighting was over.
“Edie, actually”, she begins, but Byleth can’t let her finish.
“Edelgard? Is she safe?”
Dorothea’s smile is just on the indulgent side of patient.
“Down, girl. Edie is safe and sound in whatever asinine detail of the proceedings the old imperialists have fixated on now. This is about you just as much as it is about her.”
Byleth cocks her head to the side, and after a few moments of silence, motions for Dorothea to continue.
“Byleth, you’re miserable”, Dorothea says, stressing each syllable as if she is pointing out that grass is green to a very stubborn toddler.
She blinks.
“I am?”
She’s never really thought about it. She is happy, sometimes. There are moments where she loves life, loves being alive. She can’t be miserable, can she?
“I’m trying to stage an intervention here, Byleth, because I can’t watch you and Edie dance around each other as if holding each other’s hands will get you executed!”
“We’re not dancing around each other!”
“You’re right, because Edie is dancing at you, and you keep covering your eyes pretending not to notice!”
Byleth opens her mouth to argue, but instead the image of El aggressively dancing towards her brute-forces its way into her mind and she has to snort. She’s never seen her dance, well, aside from the few stiff, formal affairs where propriety demanded it. She’d like to, though. She bets El would excel at it, like she does at anything else. She imagines El, smiling in the middle of a crowd of raucous people, doing the sort of synchronised dance she’s only been invited to once or twice in the villages where her mercenary group was stationed, with ale flowing and the bonfire crackling. She imagines her spinning on her heel, ivory hair whipping in the wind, catching her eyes and throwing her head back in unrestrained laughter –
She balls her fists. Someday, someone will get a chance to make El as happy as this, and all that will be left for her to do is make sure that they are worthy.
She really is starting to sound like Hubert.
“I never thought I would have to say this to you, but the way you’re treating Edie has to stop. She’s already sounding like a smitten schoolgirl – and believe me, I know what that sounds like, I’ve been her best friend since the academy days – wondering why her crush will sleep with her but act like she’s just another job in the daylight.”
“We are not intimate”, Byleth stresses. She’s almost surprised to find herself disappointed with Dorothea, who should know better than to believe any such scandalous rumours.
“Oh trust me, I know. Edie’s made sure of that” Dorothea says wryly.
And – well. She can’t just not imagine it, after Dorothea tells her El has…mentioned her, in this context. Byleth knows she’s considered attractive, of course, she’s aware of it just as much as she is aware of El’s…reactions, especially to her muscled arms, her toned torso, and of course her thighs.
She shouldn’t indulge.
She’s thought of it once or twice, of course. Maybe more often than that.
Byleth likes sex, pretty much the same way she likes alcohol. It’s fun, and even though for her it was harder to come by than alcohol before she arrived at Garreg Mach, being an early riser made the mornings after much less miserable than a hangover did.
But she can’t. Selfishly, she wants to keep El close to her, and her concept of a quick fuck would ruin that. She’s never stayed with anyone before. She’s never felt the urge to.
Deep down, something inside her is probably wrong, so wrong even a beating heart can’t fix it.
“Dorothea, I…”
What does she even say? Byleth hates talking about herself. Conversations don’t end well if she does. Never once has she added a personal detail in a conversation and had not later found out that others found it strange, unsettling even.
“I don’t want to hurt her” is what she settles on.
“Then don’t”, Dorothea says. If only it were that easy.
“You don’t understand-“ Byleth begins. Dorothea narrows her eyes at her.
“Try me” she says, and there’s a fierce protectiveness in her voice. Dorothea is someone Edelgard could easily be happy with. She’s proven time and time again that her heart is loyal, staying with them through the toil of war no matter how much it weighed on her. She loves her comrades, but she’s unafraid to confront them. Really, she would be the perfect partner for Edelgard…but Byleth can’t quite seem to picture them together without an ugly, possessive part of her mind boiling up inside of her.
She sighs. Best to get it over with. She lets her sword clang to the ground and sits down cross-legged on the sandy ground of the training pit, motioning Dorothea to do the same. The singer pulls a face.
“Not everyone enjoys getting down and dirty like you do”, she points out, then pulls over an empty weapons crate to sit on.
“I can’t give El what she needs. I don’t…I don’t feel like you do. I feel…less. Muted.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Byleth furrows her brows. She must have noticed. People have a sixth sense for that kind of thing, for weeding out those that don’t truly belong. The pretenders.
“I barely smile, I have to force myself to laugh. It took my father dying for me to finally cry. You can’t tell me this is normal!”
“You can’t tell me that you don’t feel after everything you’ve done for us. After how much time you spend on us, with us. Making sure the Black Eagles were looked after, helping us through each of our difficulties – if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have come back to us. It would have been easier for you. But you still came back, for me, for Bernie, for Caspar, for Ferdie, for Linhardt, for Hubie, and for Edie. So no, I can’t believe you when you say you don’t feel as much as we do.”
Byleth supresses the urge to just get up and walk away. She hates this, hates this turn this conversation has taken. She’ll have to disappoint Dorothea, that much is clear. Because everyone could tell that she was wrong inside when she grew up, and they can’t all have been wrong, right?
And if they were…
But they couldn’t have been.
“I care about you all”, she says, slowly, “but I can’t love E-… I can’t love anyone. Never could.”
Dorothea regards her for a long time. She looks…sad? Byleth never could get the hang of people.
“Edie tells me you’ve already made plans to leave together – don’t deny it! I know the title of emperor has always been curse for her more than a blessing, I’m not surprised she’s going to leave as soon as she feels she can leave a more stable and fair country behind than the one she was born into. So you are trying to tell me that you are platonically cuddling up to her, letting her feel your muscles – yes, Edie tells me these things, she can’t handle her wine – and planning a future with her?”
“I owe her! I only want to protect her!”
“Liar!”
Dorothea’s eyes widen the second the word passes her lips. She takes a deep breath, as if forcing herself to calm down.
“If you only wanted to protect her like you want to protect any of us, why do you only spend your nights with her? We’re all targets. She’s the one with dozens of armed guards. And yet, you’ve never felt the urge to cuddle up to me in the night?”
She chortles a little, and adds: “I’m almost offended, really”, at Byleth’s questioning look.
Byleth digs her hands through the sand. Balls them into fists. Feels the sand slipping away between her fingers.
“It’s different.”
It’s all she can manage. Because it’s true, it’s not as easy as Dorothea wants to make it seem, but she can’t seem to find the words or energy to make her see.
“Byleth-“
“It’s different.”
Tension in her mounts. She can’t sit still anymore, can’t be here anymore –
She doesn’t even remember whether she gave an excuse or not, said goodbye or not, said anything before getting up and storming out of the training grounds.
It’s different, she chants to herself.
Liar, her mind replies, and its voice sounds like Dorothea.
She ends up in their room. It’s almost nostalgic: She’s forgotten how many days she’s spent sequestered on her own in childhood (even though alone is a relative term, given the whole Sothis situation she has grown up with).
She’s always been good at being by herself – an almost worryingly low maintenance child, as her father would put it. Right now she wishes she were anywhere but here – there’s thoughts crawling through her brain like maggots and she wants to stop thinking, but the notion of being among others is equally sickening.
She wants to stop having to think about the way she’s seen herself for years. She wants to stop Dorothea’s words from ringing true, wants to stop her world from shifting on its axis. She wants to cover her ears like a child, pressing her palms into them until the rushing of her blood drowns out every other sound, but she finds that it doesn’t help – liar, liar, liar.
She must spend quite some time there, because the thing that tears her out of this sorry state is Edelgard quietly entering their chambers.
Byleth looks up at her. She’s sitting on the bed, knees pulled against herself, making her feel even more like a toddler throwing an utterly silly tantrum. El is so small that even when sitting down Byleth can almost look into her eyes. Strong, though, in heart, in body, in her convictions. Byleth feels herself shrink. She dares not look into El’s face, but looking away seems worse.
Her expression is unreadable, a roadblock Byleth hasn’t encountered in a long time, not with El. She can’t read people’s emotions from their faces with the instinctual ease others seem to have, but she’s had lots of practice, and El’s expressions have become as intimately familiar and comforting to her as the smell of their bed and the heat of a campfire when she was just a chid.
El sighs. Deflates.
“We have to talk about this some day.”
Some day is good. Some day later is better. They’ve been doing well so far; they’ve got a good thing going, and Byleth can’t bear the thought of changing this. Losing this.
It’s a habit. She can’t lose El because being with her has become a habit.
She’s always been a creature of habit.
“We should talk about it now,” El corrects.
Byleth finds herself tongue-tied. She hates talking about herself, she struggles to name the thing that makes her different, struggles with words in general. Her actions prove who she is, what she wants to say, but they aren’t enough anymore, and she tries desperately to make the hopelessly tangled thoughts in her head fit into words –
“I love you, Byleth.
Something pounds in her ears. Something moves in the pit of her stomach, some fluttery, squirmy thing. Does she need to vomit? She’d hate to vomit all over El. She must look ill, because El looks at her with unveiled concern as she sits down on the bed next to her.
“I love you,” El says again, and there is no tremble in her voice, not like before the war when she would blush up to her ears and stammer whenever Byleth corrected her posture.
“Stop.”
Byleth can’t watch El do this to herself. She’s sworn to herself to protect her, and protect her she will, even from Byleth herself.
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
Byleth’s hands are clenched tight, like grasping onto a lifeline, like grasping onto the hilt of a sword.
“I’m doing nothing to myself, my tea- Byleth. Loving you is easy, it’s knowing you never gave up on me, in spite of my flaws.”
She cups Byleth’ cheek in her hand, her bare hand – she’s taken to leaving her gloves on the bedside table when entering their room. From El’s stature and her position as emperor, one might think her hands would be soft and fragile, all silking skin and flawless fingers, but they’re scarred. Scarred, marred, calloused just as hers are.
Her muscles betray her, her neck gives the tiniest twitch. She wants to be selfish, lean into the touch.
“I don’t love like you do, El. I can’t give you what you need.”
She’d expected dejection. Maybe even the fierce willingness to argue her point that Byleth adored to see in Edelgard. Instead the emperor nodded, before continuing.
“I’ve been resigned to the fact that my romantic feelings for you were unrequited all throughout my academy life. I’m not scared of you not desiring me like this, I don’t expect you to. If you truly don’t love me in this way, I will accept this, and I will be fine. But I simply can’t believe you when you say that you don’t love at all.”
Byleth opens her mouth to say – something. Anything. She needs this to stop, she needs to keep her world from shifting into a new paradigm. El silences her by placing a thumb across her lips.
“When Hubert almost killed himself overextending himself in combat, you carried him away from the battlefield in your own arms. You made sure to write a summary of your lessons each and every day and pass it under Bernadetta’s door when she was still too unwell to attend in person for weeks on end. And I don’t know what you did to the boys that used to harass Dorothea in the monastery wherever she went but I know since that one day, they didn’t even dare to look at her anymore! Those are labours of love, Byleth, not duty!”
The fierceness. The fire. A raging inferno simmering down to a gentle hearth as she adds:
“Would you plan our future together if you didn’t love me at all?”
All the voices from her childhood couldn’t be wrong.
All the voices from her childhood were wrong about a lot of things.
The first time she’s cried was the death of her father. She remembers following him around like a duckling in camp, trying her hardest to mimic his speech and mannerisms. She remembers feeling big when he praised her but never small when he admonished her. She remembers something about him that felt like home.
She never had much time for sentimentality around home, never looked back once when leaving behind another town. Even now, with many of the Black Eagles joking that she’s settled down, become domestic, she can’t fathom being hung up on leaving Enbarr. Why would she? She can imagine herself trekking up a winding footpath to a mountaintop cottage, having done some odd jobs in the village below, now taking the spoils of her labour and some letters of her former students home to El. She can imagine staying here.
Her silence seems to change something in El, almost imperceptible to anyone but Byleth, who knows all of her faces by heart. She’s still steadfast, refusing to back down even in the face of rejection, but there is a bit of her younger self flickering through. Uncertain in the face of feelings she doesn’t know how to show. The finger on her lips drifts down, El’s hand holding onto her arm. The emperor shifts back an inch or two.
“If you don’t love me, then say it and I will never bring it up again.”
As she says this, for only a split second, the hand on her arm tightens. Says please don’t go.
At this point, could she ever think of leaving? She tries to imagine the mountaintop cottage again, without El, and in front of her inner eye she sees a home turn into a house, a house turn into a safe place to get rest for the night before heading out again.
Selfish, her mind hisses, and it hurts like the word is branded somewhere on her body with a red hot iron, but this time, she pushes against it.
Is it truly selfish if it is what they both want?
The grip on her arm loosens, the hand slips, so Byleth places her own over it to keep it in place. Please don’t go.
And there is something inside her, a turmoil of sorts – Byleth hates talking about herself, the words never quite fit. But it is there, and it’s roaring in her ears like the sea and El’s hand on her arm is the only comfort, it’s familiar, it’s home.
“It’s home”, she says out loud. Lending the words a voice makes them more physical, less easy to write off as a flight of fancy her mind has gotten itself into. And El smiles, brightly, but her eyes are also tinged by sadness. She gives Byleth’s arm a reassuring squeeze as she says, slowly, deliberately: “I think that all the time you spent teaching each and every one of us that we are more than our birth and the people around us have made us out to be that you might have forgotten to apply those same teachings to yourself…or maybe you wanted to avoid the pain that came with it.”
Byleth flinches. Wasn’t it easier, back then? It was simpler when she knew where to fit, when everything was a transaction with fixed prices. She was a skilled swordswoman so the mercenary group would go to great lengths to keep her alive, she was quiet and dependable and therefore trustworthy, an asset.
And now she is…Byleth. Without a fixed value, a person for her own sake. A person.
Wasn’t it easier?
Surviving like this, yes. It was simple. But living like this?
She can still feel El’s warm touch, even through her clothes, and even though it doesn’t quiet the turmoil, it makes it less painful. She’s here. She understands. Maybe better than anyone else, she knows the folly of regarding oneself as a means to an end.
“I want to stay with you”, Byleth says, the first words slowly inching their way across her lips like tar, then becoming faster. “I want to stay with you forever.”
She feels light. Floaty. It’s not necessarily a good feeling. Feverish, almost.
“I’m already yours forever” El responds, not wavering for a single second. Does she feel just as feverish? It’s a silly impulse that makes her raise her hand and put it to El’s forehead – she’s flushed, certainly. Byleth doesn’t pull back. Instead, her hand glides down to caress El’s cheek, and she’s pulling her in, no, they’re both moving in together, caught in each other’s orbit. El’s other hand is ghosting across Byleth’s chest now, and they’re going to kiss, Byleth is pretty sure they are going to kiss. She’s never been a big proponent of kissing, but something about the thought of El’s lips on hers makes her heart race. She can feel El’s breath ghosting over her lips and –
“May I kiss you, Byleth?”
Oh, the fact that she still asks fills Byleth’s chest with warmth, a hearth. She doesn’t really notice whether she manages to answer verbally or not, it’s probably some sort of choked sound accompanied by entranced, dumbfounded nodding, but she pulls her in and –
Byleth knows what she is doing. On some level, she must know, she’s done this before, but something about El’s lips on hers, El’s hand unsubtly clinging to her biceps, and the feel and sound and smell of her make all thoughts disappear. She smells like bergamot – or does she remind her of bergamot? Everything is getting muddled.
Everything is Edelgard.
Edelgard is everything.
And oh, Byleth is losing track of time now. Losing track of everything, come to think of it, if the palace had shaken in its foundations and the roof had caved in over their heads, she wouldn’t have noticed. She just…is. They just are. And they are together.
They are together even when they break apart, eventually. They are out of breath (Byleth really must be getting old), and for some reason she feels like laughing. Giggling. Singing, maybe? There is a lightness in her chest that needs out, needs to be expressed, but she doesn’t know how –
I love you.
The thought comes to her unbidden, and that’s why she welcomes it so. Byleth loves Edelgard, she can love, and her love is good and whole as it is, and she just needs to say it –
The words don’t come. She never has the right words, and this time they are painfully stuck in her throat like fishbones and she’s choking on them. Liar, you’re a liar after all, a voice in the back of her head taunts. Can’t even tell her you love her.
The words never seem to fit her thoughts.
But El hears them for what they are anyways.
“Byleth. Listen to me. You don’t have to say the words out loud for me to know that your feelings are real, I know you too well for that, and I wouldn’t want you to pretend someone you’re not.”
One hand under Byleth’s chin, El makes her look into lavender eyes with gentle insistence.
“Love me the way it’s natural for you to love me.”
What was there left to say? Byleth can’t find the answer. Words never seemed to fit anyway.
She pulls El back in for another kiss; scarred, calloused hand in scarred, calloused hand.