Chapter Text
Academy Phase
Chapter One - Is It Really You?
Hubert could not pinpoint the exact moment he awoke.
To put it simply, one day he had existed as his normal self – his new self, of a young boy befitting his young, childish mind and all his stupid fantasies – and the next morning he had awoken to the startling, thundering echo of a whole other life’s memories in his head, filling it to the brim to the point of bursting. In just one rise of the sun, a new dawn, Hubert had awoken as his old self. A von Vestra, Minister of the Imperial Household, Imperial Spymaster, murderer, an assassin, a-
A dead man – a corpse broken upon the front steps of the Imperial Palace.
But no longer. Now, somehow, Hubert von Vestra lived and breathed again. His old self, ruined and stained, had pushed out – no, had carved out, hollowed and consumed – his new self, the young boy. Hubert had absorbed that naïve child until they were one in the same; an ugly clashing of classical and modern design that no longer fit clean to its cracked foundation. Now, Hubert was an abhorrent culmination of something that, by all stretches of reason, should never have been allowed to exist by any law of nature. Nor by the laws of ethics, either – but Hubert von Vestra had never much cared for those.
Thus, throughout the duration of the heated hours of his sixth summer, Hubert’s young body had been confined to his bed as his dual lives scrapped for its control, the cooled hand of his mother pressed to his burning forehead his only reprieve from the burning within, though always brief.
And her eyes – a jaded shade so familiar to Hubert in all but context – had possessed a constant gleam of worry as they loomed over him. This was not surprising, for who would not be concerned for their son who could not bring himself to rise out of bed, who muttered seemingly insane ramblings, who flickered at random between loving and scared and hostile and confused.
He was no boy that summer – or no longer just a boy, at the very least. And yet, cradled in the embrace of those warm months, though the heat was nothing in compared to the utter blistering within him that burnt at his insides like an enraged phoenix attempting to break through its dead ashen skin, Hubert had allowed himself to be coddled by a woman he had never known and a man he had personally executed, alive and together and worried for him – their son.
And slowly, trapped with a heat that reminded him of the flames that had turned Enbarr to a blackened hull before his eyes, Hubert von Vestra attempted to piece together the new yet wholly familiar shattered shards of his soul.
His attempts had stung horrifically despite his careful, cautious efforts, his past unafraid to slice him when he touched a shard too sharp, a sherd too caked in blood to catch its deadliness early enough. But there was no alternative, for there was no wise hand to guide his own, no experienced words to teach him in turn how to navigate the foreign, painful battlefield he had found himself trapped within without finding an arrow in his shoulder or a broken sword thrust through his foot.
In truth, it seemed as though Hubert had been shot from the sky, torn free from his wings, and ordered to fly even as he spiralled into an endless descent.
But Hubert von Vestra was not one to roll over at the first sign of difficulty, no matter how excruciating that difficulty might have been. He had remained loyal, had stood upon the Imperial palace’s steps until the miserable, final end, after all. And so, no matter how bloodied he became, how horrific the reflections within his fractured past became, Hubert von Vestra pieced himself together.
By the time the golden colours of autumn and the waning of the earth came to greet him, Hubert – von Vestra, that was – made enough progress in organising himself to steal the majority of the control over the body he now inhabited. The Hubert that had once lived within unchallenged and alone had taken a backseat, dulled and quiet though not yet dead. But that was enough, any threat he could have imposed properly neutralised, and von Vestra left him be. He had more important issues to address, after all.
Hubert knew he had not yet been dealt all the pieces of his past. Rather than the full picture, he had simply been given the edges to the unbearable puzzle that was himself. He knew its size and a vague outline of its contents that the edges afforded him, but its innards, its details and complexities – these were lost to him, just out of reach but unreachable all the same.
In the end, for all his painstaking work, von Vestra knew only three things for sure.
A war;
Utter devotion to something – someone – stood so high above him, free of the blood and muck that stained his boots;
And utter despair, its weight dragging him down and trapping him in a rotted grave as the world above burnt.
A combination of these two, red and black, high and low, bubbled together into something so acidic it had thrown him into a fit of uncontrollable, inextinguishable hysteria at the dining table – just when his father had begun to believe Hubert’s lies about his bettering health, too.
It all had been one step forward into a beartrap that had sent him stumbling five more back.
But Hubert continued. He endured. And by the early, foggy breaths of winter and the slow withering it brought, Hubert had managed to wrestle himself into presenting an acceptable façade, his surface whole enough to give no one a reason to second guess whether the shards beneath were the same.
His mother remained worried for him, if his observational skills were to be trusted – which, naturally, they were. But once he recovered from his outburst at the dining table, once again able to walk on his own two legs without fear of crumbling, she let him explore the house away, if with a careful warning and tucking of his bangs back behind his ears. She was a threat – this von Vestra knew well – but in his first life she had died before the age he now inhabited, and he knew not what strategy would best serve in countering her needless, alien motherly affections. Thus, he was extra careful in exploring his home with new eyes burdened with the bags of a man twice his bodily age, and if he heard his mother’s soft footsteps vibrate along the floorboards of the house, he made sure to remain out of her sight and hearing. A von Vestra did their best work without the weight of eyes upon him, after all.
The house’s layout was simple and easily remembered, and the little information found within – family photos, awards set on the mantel, stray papers – were just as easily categorised away for future use. This von Vestra knew well. This he understood.
But much he did not.
The electric lights; the doorbell; the phone – these all confounded him, confused him as Faith had once in a life that did not at all seem that long ago.
Yet Hubert the boy, held hostage in some dark corner of their now-shared mind, knew these contraptions well and with such strength in his familiarity that it burst in the place between his eyes. Hubert of the present, then, barely managed to keep his mind from splintering, from stumbling countless steps back and staining irrelevant all the progress he had so far suffered in scraping together.
What he did not manage to do quite nearly as successfully, however, was keeping his body from jerking, spasming with painful nostalgia, and smacking into the hallway console.
Ultimately, though Hubert succeeded in preventing himself from fracturing upon the floorboards, his head pulsing in his trembling hands – the vase had not been granted a trace of that same kindness.
Hubert the boy, weakened from the darkness and the cruelty of von Vestra who demanded complete submission, had quaked then, so scared of the certain scolding and inevitable disappointment that awaited him when his mother would eventually find her way to the ravaged sight, alerted to the sound.
Hubert von Vestra, however, had broken far more valuable, much-loved things.
So, when questioned by his mother about the shards on the floor, he stared up into her green eyes full of concern… and he lied.
With that, Hubert the boy finally died, doomed to wither like the flowers from the vessel that could no longer contain them.
One particularly infuriating aspect of Hubert’s holey, patchwork of a secondary – or was it first? – memory was its absolute refusal to work as he wished.
Hubert the boy – dead and gone and by all accounts a much happier child – had known Edelgard prior to his newborn awakening. They had been friends, and close ones at that, though not as intimately entangled as Hubert von Vestra and Emperor Edelgard of the past, of course. This bond of children had not yet been tempered by the forging fires of war, both emblazoned in its youth and weakened in its final hours, after all. But it had not mattered, as for a time Hubert did not remember who Edelgard was, ignorantly unaware of her existence in either life until his father came to him one day and announced that a friend wished to see him again, now that he had recovered enough to handle leaving the safety of the home.
Confused yet unwilling to allow a chance to investigate the strange world he now inhabited to slip through his hands – and to escape the stuffiness of the house and his parents’ near suffocating care, perhaps – Hubert agreed, and permitted himself to be taken to a house close to his own, curious and cautious all the same at the world that passed him by, as a Vestra was born to be.
But then he saw her; a little girl held close to the side of her father at the top of their driveway, trembling in his firm hold, barely contained.
And then, drowned by a tsunami of grief and joy and nostalgia that could not choose a side between the two, it seemed to Hubert as though there was no distance at all been the foreign present and the missing past, as if the great gap the size of a literal lifetime between him and Edelgard von Hresvelg was small enough to be rendered entirely insignificant.
Because he was alive, and here – and she was too, though changed.
She was younger, obviously, the same age as himself. But her hands were unscarred, clean in all but the colourful stains of pens. And her hair… the sight of those glorious, healthy brown strands struck Hubert like a blow, cast the air from his lungs and sent nausea into his stomach so strongly he briefly thought himself poisoned.
But he had not, not in this life, and Edelgard was so ecstatically excited to see him in a way only a child could be – as any friend would be, truly, after not seeing the other after such an extensive time part. Months for her, and a lifetime and a death for him.
Hubert let himself be torn from his father’s side and into the Hresvelg home, pushed and pulled by a will not wholly his own – just as it was always meant to be, overwhelmed yet blissfully so at the hand of his Emperor, at home in her great shadow.
And yet, as she playfully knighted Hubert with a plastic sword in the centre of her living room, the cold realisation of the truth of their relationship finally washed over him.
The Adrestian Empire had lost the war. Hubert had failed Her Majesty, who now was not but once had been. Her Majesty, a woman breathing and determined and desperate for a future just out of reach, only to fail and fall before the light of the dawn reached her fingers, hidden by smoke and clouds.
The details swarmed like fish in a pond within Hubert’s head, slippery and with a mind of their own, flashing their vague silhouettes in taunt but remaining mysterious, ultimately uncatchable.
But Hubert did not need to distinguish their colour, their texture washed unknown by the depth of a sea of memory. He had failed Edelgard – that was all he needed to know.
Thus, as she rested her fake sword upon his shoulder and giggled some childish vow that made no true sense and certainly did not follow any real procedure, Hubert took them to heart anyway and pinned them there with pride. There was no war to win, no enemies to slaughter, no great revolution to steal onto his shoulders and carry – no bloody path to carve. Not anymore. Yet it did not matter.
“I will devote myself to you,” he repeated, knelt upon the circular rug in the centre of the living room, and meant it more than any in the room had the right to know.
The girl that meaninglessly vowed him into her service was one Edelgard von Hresvelg had never truly been allowed to be – with brown locks and ten siblings and an innocence behind her violet eyes. In this life, Hubert would ensure it remained that way.
Edelgard, with pale hair and a strain clear along the line of her shoulders, had once questioned what Hubert’s life would be like without her, he remembered as he rose to his feet, knees slightly stinging. But it did not matter – what Edelgard wanted was insignificant to what she needed, Hubert had long come to understand. His Lady may have wished for him to find his own path without her, and might have voiced such a thought if she was here with him now – but the girl before him, fresh-faced and young and innocent, needed someone to keep her that way, to guard her as she grew, protected from the malicious force of hands stronger than her own.
This Edelgard needed Hubert – of that there was no doubt. And she would have him, just as she always had, even if she did not know it.
Hours later, when Hubert was forced to say goodbye to his oldest, greatest friend – as it was far too late an hour for children their age to be awake, let alone away from home – he wondered if the Edelgard that hugged him goodbye knew him as much as he did her. If the Emperor Edelgard of the past had swallowed and slaughtered and replaced Edelgard the girl, just as Hubert had done to himself.
But no – Edelgard bid him farewell with all the emotion of a friend forced to part for a night and already saddened by his absence, and not of an Emperor to her greatest confidant after a lifetime apart, and Hubert had his answer. Still, he held her close until his father pulled him away, as even though she was not his Emperor anymore, Hubert was still her retainer, her Vestra, and she was still his own greatest, oldest friend. This unequal levelling of the world could not change that.
As Hubert was carried back to the car, held against his father’s shoulder with the memory of brown hair and a glittering innocence appropriate for a child flashing behind his own fluttering eyelids, Hubert thanked whatever deities were alive in this new, strange world for the miracle of her ignorance, and knew he would do anything to protect it.
He had failed her once, long ago. He would not do so again.
The world had changed much, Hubert was soon to discover in the proceeding years of his new, second life.
A world without Crests rendered him not the unfortunate firstborn and only heir to a noble house, but instead only another face in the crowd, with anything resembling their divine power restricted to the fictional bonds of knights and dragons and wizards, if at all. Crests themselves Hubert could not find any reliable hint of, and the Saints and Heroes of their origins even less so.
Noble houses still existed of course – any passing look at a history book could tell anyone of that – but Hubert’s family was not one of them, not even from some distant, forgotten branch as he had discovered while searching through his family tree. Wealthy and privileged enough to be comfortable, the Vestras were without a doubt – but grand nobles to the nation they now lived within they were not. Hubert considered part of himself pleased at this – his miserable rat of a father in his first life had not been rewarded for his misdeeds in this one, it seemed.
Except, his father in this life was not the same that had thrashed in his death throes at Hubert’s feet long ago. Hubert would not stretch so far as to say his father was a good parent, but he could honestly claim no thought of patricide had ever crossed his mind, unless reminiscing on a murder no longer relevant counted. It was just another aspect of this new life Hubert was forced to adapt to, and adapt he did.
The Hresvelgs were not Imperial royalty, either. Though, they were wealthier than the Vestras and close familial friends at that, with eleven, living children under their roof. Hubert adapted to this, too.
Despite his best efforts, Hubert found he could not summon even a speck of magic between his fingers, even if he drew the required signs to perfection. This change, this loss, struck him especially hard; Hubert was not a naturally strong man, and he was just as lithe and physically weak as he was at twelve as he had been the first time. The only consolidation for his lack of strength the first time round had been his talent in Reason, his ability to wipe out entire battalions with just a shout and flick of his hand, physical weakness be damned. It had come at a cost, yes, but all good things did, and such consequences had been insignificant to Hubert. What were black, numb fingers to the glorious goal of the revolution, to the betterment world and the dawn it accompanied? Every change required a sacrifice, some destruction to rise from, and if his fingers were to be the price, so be it.
But there was no change, now. No magic. No black, numb fingers. His hands were unstained; spindly and pale – pristine, even. They did not suit him. Not considering the crimes he had performed with them, the blood he had loosed. Out of any difference from his previous life Hubert had uncovered by his twelfth year, it was his clean, feeling hands that disturbed him the most.
But a von Vestra did not falter because they were something so insignificant as uncomfortable. So, Hubert continued, pulled by the unstoppable, slow forward march of time, following in Edelgard’s shadow and planning for her success, whatever that presented itself to be.
In this world there was no war to win, no Kingdom to overcome and Alliance to topple. No goal, no bloody path for Hubert to carve, as those cuts had long since scarred over, irrelevant to a world that had never known an Empire or a Kingdom or an Alliance at all, nor a Goddess called Sothis.
This world was strange, yet Hubert fumbled through it in the boots it forced him to re-lace more than once. He endured.
And yet, despite all its strangeness, in some ways the world remained ironically the same; for even as Hubert attended to his education, he held a world-altering secret beneath his beating heart, entirely certain no one would believe its outlandish beating even if they pressed an ear to his chest and listened.
At the start of high school – the local one in town, run by a local administration and not tyrannical scaled creatures hidden beneath a second, kinder flesh – Hubert was struck with the backhand of his first life once again.
Just as he had been unaware of Edelgard’s crucial presence in his first life until he saw her face again, Hubert lived in similar ignorance of the absolute rage that had fuelled him throughout the war – unbridled now, with no spec of magic in the world for him to twist into dark Miasma between his fingertips – until his eyes fell upon the face of Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd again, lips pulled into a friendly smile and hand outstretched in welcome.
It was a miracle Hubert did not strangle him there and then, magic or not, with the painfully vibrant memory of a burning, invaded Enbarr flashing behind his eyelids. Dimitri, oh King Dimitri; the wild, savage boar that had killed so many, blinded by his ignorance and hate and his own unwashed hair. Yes, Hubert remembered him well.
It was also a miracle Hubert managed to nod in greeting – though certainly not in welcome, an important distinction – and turned away before he spat in the boy’s two functioning eyes, no matter how his throat had prepared the projectile and he desperately wished to give the order.
Hubert knew the Dimitri stood before him speaking to Edelgard was not the Dimitri he had once known and, though Hubert would never admit it to anyone but himself, had been equally disgusted and petrified by. Hubert was a man of reason and Dimitri had abandoned it all together – a man like him had had nothing to lose. Hubert remembered receiving the missive that the King had burst through Enbarr’s defences, just as he remembered the all-encompassing embrace of doom, of finality, that had accompanied it. If there had ever been one man Hubert had been frightened by in their life before, it had been Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd.
But this Dimitri, still young and growing, possessed no misery and thinly-veiled insanity behind his eyes, his blond hair carefully parted to reveal them both. What was even more telling, Hubert considered, was that this Dimitri did not threaten to hang Edelgard’s head from the gates of Enbarr upon catching sight of her – not even as they shook hands.
Just as concerning his Lady, Hubert was grateful for his ignorance as well.
And yet, despite the knowledge that the Dimitri standing in their mathematics classroom was not the same King Dimitri of the past, Hubert certainly did not feel it. No, that distinct, bitter taste that made itself obvious in Hubert’s mouth whenever he heard Dimitri’s voice or glanced upon his profile did not cease, no matter how many times he assured himself the ruiner of the Empire was gone – dead.
Nor, no matter how many days, weeks, years passed, could Hubert swallow away the phantom, metallic tinge that lined his gums.
Even though the school they attended was not Garreg Mach, nor a specialised school of any kind as far as Hubert could tell, he was met with many familiar faces in his year’s student population.
Edelgard was rather friendly to Dimitri in this world – a fact that never failed to boil Hubert’s blood – which meant that her circle mixed with his circle; a social act that was just as common with students as it had been with royal nobility, it seemed. Hubert tried his best – truly, for his liege-who-was-no-longer-his-liege’s sake – but nothing could stop his grimace at the onslaught of memories upon being forced to endure the presence of Ingrid, Felix, and Sylvain once again. He remembered their uncertain silhouettes as they introduced themselves, outlined by the embers of Enbarr, and kept his hands by his sides lest he attempted to strangle them, too.
Hubert excused himself following the proceeding of the polite amount of time. He could endure much, but the grinning face of Sylvain was a unique torture Hubert was not equipped to handle, at least not yet. As he walked away, he vowed to be stronger, tougher, more enduring. And he did.
The following years of his education brought to him many old enemies in fresh flesh, some he knew the faces but not the name of, not until his second round of introductions. Hilda, to some surprise, attempted to flirt with him the first time they came across each other in a claustrophobic hallway, and her doe-eyed face sent his heart seizing and feet faltering with an emotion she did not intend. If there was one soldier Hubert dreaded coming across on the battlefield – excluding Dimitri of course – it had been Hilda Valentine Goneril. Behind her façade of uselessness, she could rip open a man’s chest with startling little effort, especially if she wielded Freikugel in her carefully-manicured hands. He managed to slip out of her grasp by mentioning something about Marianne – he had seen the girl in passing a few days before – and she did not bother to bother him again.
Claude found him, rather than the other way around, which Hubert deemed rather fitting. His sharp grin still managed to set Hubert’s jaw clenching, despite the master tactician’s efforts of trickery being reduced to weakening Hubert’s coffee and not assisting the Kingdom to crash against the unsuspecting Empire troops. Despite the lifetime between them, Claude was still an utter nuisance bent on making Hubert’s life as miserable as he could manage, and so Hubert took to avoiding him as much as possible.
On the other side of the coin, Mercedes seemed particularly determined to befriend him, no matter how much he glared or pursed his lips into something distaining. Perhaps it was because of her friendliness, but for a moment Hubert wondered if the woman was like him – another layered soul forced to fly, or glide, as Hubert found himself doing. But no amount of subtle prodding revealed to him her second skin, if one did exist. She was simply a friendly soul, and all the more naïve for it.
Besides, if Mercedes had truly remembered her first life as he had fleetingly suspected, she would have screamed upon seeing his face. She had done the same when his Dark Spikes crushed her ribcage, last time.
It was better this way – Hubert alone with the burden of a first life solely weighted on his shoulders. Accepting that Mercedes did not remember him, that no one did, had… hollowed him, was perhaps the best word to use. The chance to have someone relate to him, to understand the cypher hidden within each gesture and glint behind his eyes, to perhaps help him make sense of it-
No. There was no one. It was for the best.
Hubert had never been entirely known, not in his life before and certainly not now. To be known was to be understood, and to be understood was to be defeated before the battle even begun – and that was unacceptable. If Hubert was the one only to remember their past, so be it. He would endure and plan around it, as he always had.
Lysithea came a few years into his high school years – with hair as black as coal, and wasn’t that an eye-opener.
Hubert, in his life before, had always held out a string of hope that the girl would join the Empire’s cause – as an obviously talented, hard-working mage, her sheer presence on the battlefield nearly enough to secure any outcome, anyone would have been a fool not to claim her for their army. Well, perhaps it had not been hope exactly – Hubert did not hope, it was unreasonable and unwieldy and superficial, but he had wished all the same. Lysithea had held just as much a reason to join the Empire as she did to reject it, Hubert understood now, but ultimately she had rejected it when push came to shove. Hubert had almost regretted killing her at Gronder back then, when her blood among many had still been fresh – but there had been no time to regret dead, old acquaintances on the battlefield, and so he had not.
But now Hubert was not on the battlefield, nor in the past; a fact made clearer each and every day, gaining in opaqueness behind his eyelids as he slept and woke to each new dawn, eyes drawn to the ceiling of his bedroom that was not anything like his at Garreg Mach or the Imperial Palace, but in the uncertain, watery colours of morning almost appeared to him as so. Yet still, he did not regret the dead, not when they kept emerging from the grave.
As much as Hubert came across old enemies, his first years of high school also bore the sweeter fruit of old friends that perhaps he could never have labelled as such once before. But he could not care less for his relationship with them before, not while the sight of them alive and breathing brought him such equal measures of shock and relief that his knees threatened to buckle every time. There was only the now, the present, and now they were alive, their relationships with him fresh slates, unstained, that he could repaint however as he wished.
Hubert had always felt a fondness for his sovereign of Black Eagles – a pleasant ache that had only grown throughout the war, but ultimately one he had been unable to truly express nonetheless, even near the end. They had been at war, after all; there had been more important things to care for than silly friendships. But not anymore.
As such, Hubert made sure to slightly slouch – and not loom – when he introduced himself to Bernadetta once she chose to make herself known, and not a moment before. It was important she understood he respected her strange but fundamental boundaries, and Hubert was rewarded for his patience when she later shyly offered him an embroidered yellow orchid to pin on his uniform pocket. With Dorothea he made sure not to scowl at her passionate opera ramblings or insistent questions over who he liked, for the Goddess’s sake. She seemed slightly shocked by his refusal to be callous, but accepted it all the same, and they found themselves discussing the newest school intel whenever they met. Linhardt still possessed the special talent to irritate Hubert with his medical hypotheses, but his yawns made Hubert’s chest ache in a way he refused to call sentimental. Hubert, too, refused to encourage Caspar’s yelling – he had limits still – but neither did he discourage them, even when they made his ears ring from a whole hallway away. Petra was no cornered animal this time, and he never once compared her to his Lady, for she was her own person of great determination, that difference made clearer every day.
His fellow Black Eagles, though such a class did not exist in this world, were more… receptive to Hubert. It made sense; he had nothing to hide this time – excluding an entire previous life – and no ulterior motive that would upend their lives come graduation. Perhaps it was this change that made him more approachable, if the increased attention was anything to go by. He would not go so far as to call everyone his friend per se, but by the time they entered their final year together, Caspar ate with him, Linhardt studied with him, Petra asked for his advice, Dorothea tried to get him interested in theatre, and Bernadetta did not tremble when he entered a room, even unannounced.
If any of his Black Eagles held questions over how he knew their favourite gifts, or if he was the one who slid notes of their worst subjects into their bags when they turned their gazes away, they were swept under the metaphorical rug. It was not as though he was spying on them after all – this time, at least.
In this world, with nothing so important as their lives or the outcome of the world desperate for his attention, Hubert allowed himself to care for them with all his heart, as heavy with grief and melancholy as it was. And… it was a strange feeling, he had to admit, one entirely separate from his old life, its memories flaky and often translucent as they were. Indeed, his blooming relationships with his Eagles, allowed to grow in the sun unheeded and unrestricted, were new steps for Hubert, a merging of old and new into something he was unfamiliar with, though facilitated and even cherished, anyway.
He greatly preferred it to his inability to get the images of their corpses from his head.
And yet, as time marched on and his Eagles grew into feathers all their own, Hubert never managed to remove the ache right beneath his heart, no matter how hard he attempted to fill it.
Lorenz Hellman Gloucester had been a pain in Hubert’s past life – a defector from the Alliance and a general to the Empire, though not an exceptional one in Hubert’s purely reasonable opinion – and he continued to be in this one. Hubert had been glad to see him die at Gronder, an arrow lodged in his shoulder and half buried beneath his horse. Hubert had half a mind to organise it again with Ashe when he recognised the once-noble's lithe figure sauntering his way down the hallway with purpose.
It was with little to no surprise that Lorenz invited him to tea – as pompous, foppish nobles often did, Hubert remembered distantly. It was also no surprise that Hubert rejected his offer – he did not suffer tea, and he would not suffer Lorenz more than he had to, either. However, the idiot insisted his presence was necessary for their upcoming lunch break, which Hubert found a touch strange. Though, Lorenz had tried requesting Hubert’s morbid – and the be honest, openly hostile – presence over tea a few times back at the Academy too, so perhaps it was not overly alien that he did again now. Hubert would just have to teach him that Hubert was not a man to irritate – again.
And so, offer accepted, Lorenz guided him to the school’s garden as if Hubert was a new student unfamiliar with the grounds or an idiot, and proceeded to torture him half to death.
The event was not pleasant. In any way.
But it had not been the conversation that ground Hubert’s bones so unpleasantly – he had tuned it out, flittering in and out often enough to hm or ah at some conversation about horses and Lorenz’ childhood friend. Hubert thought any friend of Lorenz must be just as infuriatingly superfluous at the man himself, but he kept that thought close to his chest.
No, his shared teatime with Lorenz ground his bones and set his heart thumping at an irregular rhythm for a reason Hubert could not pin down. He recognised the nausea building in his gut, bubbling and boiling, as the same one Sylvain’s presence sometimes made Hubert when the sunlight filtered through his hair in such a way that tinted it lighter; in the same way a javelin in Dimitri’s hand made him; in the same way the particular squeak of riding boots made him – or any mention of horses.
It was a missing piece to his puzzle of a first life, Hubert knew – a section large enough for its shadow to be found in almost anything, large enough to render him speechless for a moment, for all the gears in his mind to suddenly halt to an unseen but powerful force, screeching with the effort. But it refused to reveal itself, always temptingly vague in the dim twilight no matter how many times Hubert attempted to bring it to light. It simultaneously tantalised and repelled him, shoved him forward but off his feet, tripped him into a moment of freefall. It usually came to him in small doses, insignificant smears of poison that his immune system fought off easily enough if given enough time.
But with Lorenz in the gardens, sat at their metal table, with the smell of a fruity tea blend and his unending, needless, river of filth-
Hubert’s stomach lurched horrifically. He rose to his feet. “I’m going to puke,” he announced.
Lorenz, midsentence on a topic no one but himself cared about, dared to look annoyed. “We aren’t done-”
But Hubert waved his hand dismissively and turned, ignoring the way Lorenz spluttered behind him. With steady steps, he abandoned Lorenz’ miserable company and fled to the library with as much composure as he could muster.
He was unravelling and tangling into knots all at once by hands unseen; a memory begging to surface but caught under winter ice, pulling apart at the seams that held it caged, uncaring of the ribs in Hubert’s chest it had to break and the lungs it had to squish to do so. A pale hand rose to cover Hubert’s mouth as his heart hammered in his chest; a rabbit fleeing from an unknown assailant and more misunderstood weaponry.
The library was empty when he slipped in, but instead of providing him some solace it instead acted as an echo chamber for the thumping in his head and the cracking in his chest.
He could not pinpoint the cause. Rage? Sorrow? Poison?
No. It was none.
Hubert collapsed at the nearest desk and shoved his fingers that refused to curl into his bag, tearing it open. Reaching inside with his other hand, he grabbed the nearest leaf of paper and shoved it onto the desk with a sound that made his growing headache worsen. His pencil case next, and they rattled within it as his numb fingers struggled to grasp one, any one, knocking together like panicked sheep. The lid of the pen he managed to grasp almost broke when he tore it off with his teeth.
Hunched over his desk, his hands just as numb as they had become during the war, Hubert pinned the sheet down and wrote in sharp, almost unreadable lettering;
Who are you.
Later that day once school had finished and Hubert climbed into the passenger seat of Edelgard’s car, as he had done every day since she first passed her driver’s exam and received her well-earned license, she suddenly asked him, “What happened today?”
Hubert looked to her as he closed the door, but Edelgard had busied herself checking her mirrors instead. She knew she was touching something sensitive, then. Even without her Empirical brand of intensity, her full attention was still something that set Hubert’s heart stuttering – and not in the way Dorothea’s operatic heroines often described, a hand on their chests and ridiculous amount of blush painted across their cheeks. Despite this, Hubert let the silence settle between them for a moment, like the leaves of autumn; he had never found discomfort in their particular moments of silence before, and he would not now.
“Nothing of importance,” he decided on when the silence drew on too long and Edelgard had pulled out of the school’s makeshift parking lot.
She only hummed, eyes on the cluttered road ahead as everyone else made their way home as well. “Lorenz told me you fled from your tea together. You felt unwell, he claimed.”
Hubert held in a tsk. Of course Lorenz told her; he probably told half the school, and Hilda filled in the gaps. Neither understood the concept of minding their business.
“If something is on your mind, I wish to hear your troubles, Hubert,” Edelgard continued, slowing when Sylvain’s car reverse lights came on. That man had a death wish with the way he drove, Hubert thought. “You’re my oldest friend.”
Hubert swallowed at his throat’s sudden spasm and shook his head. “It is nothing to trouble yourself with,” he assured.
Edelgard’s eyes steeled, glinting like the edge of an axe in the rear-view mirror. “Hubert,” she insisted, but it was only a nudge, not a warning. A sprinkle of water in an effort to open up a plant’s leaves gently, rather than the more invasive option of forcing them open with her bare hands.
“There is nothing,” he lied. “Truly.”
Because what could he say? Hubert barely understood it himself, this feeling within him that grew in intensity every day, with every dawn that illuminated parts of his old life yet kept certain aspects in infuriating shadow? How could he explain to her that he felt as though their Black Eagles were incomplete, while the actual class had never existed in this world? How could he communicate to her that Lorenz felt wrong, like some distorted, reversed image of someone’s reflection along the curved edge of a spoon? How could he tell her he wished for the scent of Almyran Pine Needles when the nation had never once existed, or that every set of riding boots he came across scattered across campus manifested within him an ache, or that watching the javelin competition had made his knees week, or that the sight of marigolds reminded him of something Hubert could not name, could not grasp, could not wrangle into something semi-tangible to bring to his own attention and understand, let alone another’s.
He could present nothing believable to himself, and thus neither could he present it to his liege.
“Well,” Edelgard started, sounding not uncertain but neither as confident as she usually did. “If there is, I trust you’ll come to me.”
Not a question.
Hubert nodded. “Of course.”
Not the truth.
He would never tell Edelgard anything he rightly should not remember. It was for the better; a white lie rather than a stab to the throat, he knew.
Edelgard hummed and the subject was appropriately dropped, lost in the thrumming of her engine.
Trial Exams passed with minor issues. Caspar was quite vocally upset over his mathematic marks, and Petra was disheartened with her language results – but these hurts were easily soothed. If a clear explanation to the mathematic and language questions in spindly lettering materialised into each of their bags, Hubert was none the wiser than anyone else on the matter. Well, Edelgard might have suspected his involvement, but he expected no lesser from her excellent observational skills.
He knew that Caspar and Petra were not his Caspar and Petra, those he had lost during the war – he understood as well that anyone on this earth were not those of the past, living ghosts like he. Dimitri was not a raving lunatic hungry for Edelgard’s head – yet; it was still a developing situation – and knew that Edelgard was not his Lady in truth, but the twitting of his chest when he saw his fellow Black Eagles upset was just as same as it had been in his past life, if perhaps a bit stronger with the thawing his cold exterior was, admittedly, submitting to. Hubert had no obligation to these people, no war to protect them from to ensure the Empire’s victory. But they were… his friends. The sole figures who had wiggled their way between his ribs and made a home there, to be protected by his own flesh and blood as long as his heart was beating.
This was exclusive to the Black Eagles of course – Lorenz could be left to rot at his feet.
But there remained a hole beneath his heart, even now. Someone else had been his, someone else taken in under Hubert’s wing and protected as long as he had lived and breathed.
Then why had they not appeared with everyone else? Why were they still just out of reach, stood on the other side of an opaque window to occasionally cast their shadow across Hubert’s life but never revealing themselves?
There was no use dwelling on such things, Hubert understood. His memory revealed itself as it wished, against all of Hubert’s desires and ploys. It was like playing a game of chess with an unknown participant, except instead of another player Hubert was the board they played on, forced to endure each scrape of sculpted chess piece across his skin in a slow, endless stroll to a finish line he could not see.
Hubert should not have dwelt, but he did anyway. His four nondescript-appearing notebooks filled to the margins in scribbles of the Vestra Cypher – or rather, an altered variation of the Vestra Cypher he had created upon first entering Edelgard’s service – were proof enough of that. His first three were tucked into the mattress of his bed at home, hidden away from any prying eyes even despite their unreadable nature; one could never be too careful, least of all a Vestra. They were orderly, with sticky tabs and clean headings, cut into sections, just like every report he had ever written – organised in such a way that one might skip to a preferred section and read a summary, or the entire thing instead if so desired. Although they were intended for the sole audience of himself, Hubert would not stand to be disorderly.
His fourth book, the newest addition, had started out much in the same manner but quickly spiralled into an unorganised mess Hubert could almost admit to being embarrassed about. Instead of clear notes making sense of his vague memories of the war, or Crests, or even any new Reason sigils he remembered, his fourth notebook was rapidly filling with the attempted, scribbled recordings of his brief flashes of nausea, instigated by none other than the hole beneath his heart.
Riding boots; tea – both as a whole and with special attention to certain blends; armour polished to perfection, glinting in the sun; hair the colour of marigolds, sometimes braided, sometimes loose, sometimes short, but far more often long; bronze coins; Lorenz, annoyingly; Sylvain and Dimitri too.
These were all endless notes that barely made sense to Hubert, let alone anyone else. And yet he clung to them, pulled them from the sky as they passed overhead and attempted to stuff them into the wound in his chest, to ease the raw twinge beneath his heart.
Sometimes, lying awake in bed or sitting in class, Hubert thought he had successfully tricked himself into believing his efforts were successful – that his written imitations of someone really did soothe him, a balm over the tender skin of his ribs.
He could not tell.
He could not stop.
Dedue Molinaro was a new student, arriving at the tail end of the winter months of the school year.
Dedue was not a new face to Hubert, however.
Hubert knew he had died – that much was obvious. He remembered it quite vividly, too; the cold steps of the Imperial palace beneath him, their corners digging into the skin of his back; the heat of his blood both within and outside him; the bright red of the Empire’s flags above him; the ripple of dark magic crackling between his fingers as it died. As he died.
But he had not remembered who had done the deed – who had finally claimed the prize of killing the Emperor’s elusive, perilous shadow.
He had not remembered Dedue.
Gathered in the courtyard, Dimitri caught the man’s attention first – thank the Goddess – and it allowed Hubert to make his escape unnoticed, slipping away from the crowd of students excited to meet their new classmate. The fresh air of the courtyard only heightened the acidic burn in Hubert’s throat, the excess salivation coating his tongue and teeth, the spasming of his throat.
He felt nauseous, but Dedue did not fit the hole under his staggering heart, did not remind him of riding boots or tea, or time spent pleasantly bantering. He reminded Hubert only of-
Hubert rounded the corner and, once he was free from curious eyes, flattened himself against the wall, struggling to not expel the contents of his breakfast into the bristly leaves of a bush to his left. He squeezed his eyes shut but it did not stop the assault of visualised memories; bloodied gauntlets; punches far faster, far stronger than his own; the air forced from his lungs, the blood from under his skin.
Dedue stepping right over him – as if he was insignificant and not Hubert von Vestra, the Empire’s deadliest mage on the battlefield, a man with a higher body count than anyone to prove it – as the other Blue Lions rose up the steps to the Imperial Palace behind him, set on executing his Emperor.
He reminded Hubert of his death.
Of his failure – of everything coloured black and red as Hubert was forced to leave the Empire burning and Her Majesty to her certain execution.
When Edelgard asked about his health when she saw him next, ready to return home for the day, his lie was easier than expected, though it sat on his tongue tasting of blood.
“We’re getting another student tomorrow,” Dorothea said to him over lunch.
“Another,” Hubert drawled. He had barely recovered from Dedue’s appearance a month ago – he had only wrangled himself into introducing himself to the man just the week prior despite how tightly his heart had clenched, as if an echo of how Dedue’s fists had once crushed his ribcage.
Dorothea, unaware of this, hummed. “Wealthy boy. Silver spoon and all, apparently.”
Her repulsion towards the wealthy had followed her into this life, then, though Edelgard seemed exempt. “Is he?” Hubert asked, uninterested.
“That’s what I’ve heard. Maybe I’ll convince him to take me out to eat sometime?”
Hubert huffed, the hair covering his eye twitching. He had cut it recently – there was a point in life where his Academy days haircut simply could not serve him any longer, and he had always preferred his cut during the war anyway; it was much easier to manage. And he looked less like Lorenz, of course, which was always a positive.
“The vending machine options not to your liking?” he asked.
“Are they anyone’s?” Linhardt mumbled to Dorothea’s left, his own plate barely touched, though that was hardly a statement of its quality.
Dorothea shrugged. “Maybe Raphael’s?”
Linhardt only yawned, the fist under his chin likely the only thing keeping his head from crashing against the table.
At the sound of the bell Hubert rose to his feet, slipping his bag over one shoulder. “I doubt this new student will be interesting,” he muttered. The only thing interesting about him would be why he transferred so late in the school year. Surely such a choice would have affected his studies?
Dorothea sighed, rising to her feet as well. “No, nobles never are.”
“Hubert,” Lorenz said to announce his unwanted presence from behind him, and in that moment Hubert wished for the earth to swallow him whole and decompose him, even if only to remove him from Lorenz’s presence for a mere moment.
Hubert refused to turn around and kept his eyes on the students before him, once again gathered in the courtyard. Perhaps Lorenz would look for more receptive company if-
“I did not expect you to come greet our new classmate,” Lorenz continued like the annoying fly he was, buzzing at Hubert’s ear no matter how many times he swatted him away.
Neither had Hubert – in fact, he had been quite happy to not greet this new student at all. He had more important things to do. However, both Dorothea and Edelgard had been eager to meet their new peer, and Hubert had been quite literally dragged along.
“That so,” he muttered.
Lorenz puffed. “You did not stay very long for Dedue’s welcome, after all. In fact, you left quite rudely.”
Hubert thought he would make good compost – without magic staining his skin, he would feed the earth quite well. Better than he had on the Imperial Palace’s stairs, at the very least. He obviously did not know where the Kingdom had put his corpse – though, thinking on it now, they probably did not bother to bury him at all. Maybe they had thrown him into the Flowing Mane, the river that flowed through Enbarr and into the sea. Or perhaps he had been burnt along with capital. It did not matter, anyway.
“That’s right,” Hubert said absentmindedly.
Lorenz tsked by his ear, like a needle to his eardrum. “Well, I expect you to stay the entire time. This new student is my friend, the one I was telling you about when we had tea? I’ll have to introduce you.”
Dread surged through Hubert’s organs. Lorenz’s friend? Oh Goddess – he needed to make a tactical retreat before he was hounded by another incessant, tea-loving fop. “I would rather you not.”
“Nonsense! I shall organise tea for the three of us. Oh, look! There he is-” Lorenz cut himself off with a disgruntled gasp. “Hilda leave him alone!”
But Hubert had already looked away, peering over the heads of the other students in search of an escape route. He still had the rest of the school day to suffer through, but he could skip literature class and hide away during his free period before and during lunch. Then, once he figured out this new student’s schedule, Hubert could simply avoid him. If he suffered through Lorenz’s conversations, he was either too dumb to understand their vapidness or had been dumbed down because of them. He would not be in Hubert’s classes then – not yet, anyway.
To the library then. Going left, passed the dining hall, would force him by Dorothea’s keen ears. But if he went right, around the long way, he would only have to pass Linhardt. Right it was.
Hubert felt Lorenz’ presence leave him as he turned away from the crowd, headed to the right. Caspar paid him no heed as Hubert slipped behind him, and though Mercedes and Annette passed him by, one carefully crafted glance kept the young redhead’s mouth closed as they approached the bulk of the crowd, much louder now.
Now, if Linhardt kept to his own business like he always did-
“Oh, Hubert! I was wondering if you’d-”
“I’m busy,” Hubert interrupted through gritted teeth. There was a tinging up his neck – panic, surely.
But Linhardt had already taken hold of his arm, head tilted upwards to catch his gaze, eyes oddly absent of their usual drowsiness. “-look over my hypothesis,” he finished.
“No,” Hubert deadpanned. He needed to leave before Linhardt could start his rambling. He would never leave Hubert alone if he did. “Go ask Caspar.”
“Hubert!” Lorenz called from somewhere behind him. “Come meet my friend!”
Revenge? Was this Lorenz’s revenge, for Hubert abandoning his teatime weeks ago? Surely the man was not that petty.
Linhardt’s voice was loud in his ear, oddly determined. “You see, my hypothesis-”
But Lorenz – “Hubert, don’t be rude! Turn around and introduce yourself!”
The tingling shot down Hubert’s spine, scattered into his stomach and made him queasy, like one Warp too much or the skimming of a lance’s blade to the side.
Tearing his arm from Linhardt’s weak grip, Hubert spun on his heel, lungs and throat readying to give Lorenz the reprimanding he finally deserved, a whole two lives in the making.
“This is-” Lorenz started.
But Hubert was not looking at him. For everything in the world, Lorenz did not exist, because the person standing beside him-
Hubert felt his mouth drop open on its own accord, breath escaping his lungs and into the open air before he could even begin to register them.
“Ferdinand.”