Work Text:
The first of her deaths Byleth wakes up after is the most disorienting.
Her first death is as a child. She has a sword in her hands, a toothpick of a blade, and she’s swinging it wildly at any of the large men advancing on her. Her natural ability is nothing in the face of her lack of training, her small frame, their overpowering smell. Their axes are dull, but the edges glint in the setting sun. In the distance, she can barely make out the sound of her father’s voice, calling her name. Byleth, Byleth.
“She’s just a kid,” one of the brigands says, a tremor in his voice, but another grins and hefts his axe.
He slices Byleth clean in half. She remembers every scorching moment of it afterward, the white-hot flame pushing through her skin, pain exploding from her side into every crevice of her being. Dead before she can blink for the last time.
Then, she wakes up, the sun high in the sky. Her shoulder’s fallen asleep; she’s laying haphazardly on her side across one of the log benches situated around the main fire. Next to her, Jeralt sharpens his sword with a ridged whetstone.
Warmth floods her, but she does not cry. Byleth stares blankly into the fire, recalling how death felt like burning.
Maybe she’d dreamt it.
“You all right, kid?” Jeralt pauses to peer into her face, tenderness in his gaze. “You gave us quite the fright, passing out like that. What’d I tell ya about eating enough?”
“Sorry,” Byleth murmurs, hyper-aware of the way her eyebrows furrow only the tiniest bit when she speaks. The camp is exactly how it was before the ambush in her dreams, and Byleth—she’d been following the stench of corpses.
One of the mercenaries stops on his way by, brandishing a sheet of parchment, and says, “Captain, I took inventory earlier. Here’s the report.” Jeralt takes the paper with a nod, and Byleth’s blood runs cold. Inventory, once a week, which had happened earlier on the day of her death.
“Dad,” Byleth says, “What day is it?”
Jeralt frowns. “Don’t tell me you hit your head that hard.”
“Just—please.”
“Uh.” Her father scrunches his eyes tight and thinks. “Twenty-seventh of the Wyvern Moon… I think?”
So it’s the same day. Earlier. Somehow, Byleth’s come back before the ambush, and before she died.
“Dad,” she says seriously, “there’s gonna be an ambush from the northern side of camp in a few hours. During dinner. We have to be prepared.”
Jeralt does not ask her how she knows this. He scrutinizes her face before letting out a resigned breath. “Sure,” he says.
That night, they catch a horde of brigands attempting to swarm their camp while they’re distracted with dinner, and Byleth stays alive.
She does not die again for a long time. Byleth trains herself ruthlessly, learning the sword as an extension of her body. She picks up any weapon near her and teaches herself its use, how to adopt it into herself. And, when three noble children of high status come crashing through the forest woods, she takes up arms to protect them.
The first time, she chooses the Blue Lions. Dimitri snaps a pencil between his fingers the first time she steps into the classroom, his blue eyes fixated on her with a contradiction of gentle lunacy. Her Lions are a defensive bunch, noble children afraid of battle, afraid of death. She does not deny them this: war, up front, is the most horrific of crimes.
After their first battle, Byleth holds Ashe’s hand in the back of the group as the rest of the house plods ahead of them, weary and battle-worn. Furious tears glisten in his green eyes, cursing the injustice of it all, and she pretends she doesn’t see them. Why did some deserve to live, and some deserved to die? In the front, Felix twirls his sword nonchalantly, no stranger to casualties.
(Why did Byleth come back, all those years ago? She is afraid if she tries again it will not happen the same way, and she will be but a pathetic anomaly of time. Sothis’s fingers ghost around her throat.)
Her Lions grow battle-hardened, though, and they learn the best points to make warriors fall. They’re making progress: fighting through confusion, taking the academy by storm. Byleth would dare say she’s proud of them, were the circumstances of her pride less tragic. Not that it’s ever mattered. This world builds atop itself with the bones of lives lost, and each of them is another cog in that machine.
Then, her father dies. Then, Edelgard declares war. Then, Dimitri snaps.
Then, Byleth falls.
She thinks she dies. Death, however, is unkind, and rouses her—Sothis’s irritated voice ricocheting off the corners of her mind is what beckons her alive again. She finds the monastery, derelict, and Dimitri, destitute. Dimitri has lost an eye, and with it, the rest of himself.
Byleth resolves to find him again. Pull them all through a losing war for no reason other than she loves them, her Lions. Cut down battalion after battalion descending upon them with a sweep of her sword, bark orders and organize pieces on a map. She does all this, and more.
It takes Rodrigue’s death to bring Dimitri back. Then, things get easier.
They take Derdriu. Arianrhod. Fort Merceus. Enbarr.
In the end, Edelgard does not go quietly. Scales line her cheeks and wings sprout from her back, a dragon-human toeing the edge of mortality. Unblinking, even Byleth is scared.
She dies in this battle. She remembers their monastery days, Edelgard’s messages in the advice box. When she’d come up to her after her classes with questions despite being in a different house, because Manuela and Hanneman were never quite so frank with her. She can’t bring herself to charge forward.
Then she comes back, and does the battle again. This time, she moves forward. This time, she leads Dimitri forward, and the two of them strike Edelgard down. It hurts in the space where Byleth’s heart should be, but she’s never had one to cite this pain to.
There are no wings, no bird-webbed feet, no leathery skin and scales. Now, it is just Edelgard, her knife plunging into Dimitri’s shoulder. And so, he takes her life, vowing to keep her ghost close.
Byleth turns. It does not do to dwell on corpses. She keeps Dimitri from looking back, and the two of them step out onto the streets together.
There are no real victors in war.
Byleth does not like being Archbishop. She is not devout, and she does not like the church. People ask the goddess Sothis for help, and Byleth answers, fingers around her throat.
She feels overgrown. Melancholic in the way of nature reclaiming man-made stone. And so, she dies by her own hand, praying Sothis takes her back to the beginning, to make a different choice.
There’s a different ending. She knows it.
This time, she picks the Golden Deer. Claude winks at her during their first lesson, and she rolls her eyes. She recruits most of the Lions and by the end of the fourth month her class has doubled in size.
The Deer are even less used to death. Lorenz nearly hacks up a lung at the smell of blood when he cuts down a brigand, and Hilda entreats Raphael to do her fighting for her. Ignatz does not like the slaughter, but he holds himself together well. After their first fight, Byleth tracks down Marianne at the lake surrounding the monastery, scrubbing her hands clean and raw.
So too do her Deer grow hardened. They are quick to adapt to death. Fast learners, the whole lot of them, and yet, they are still children. If Byleth regrets anything, it is this world that forces them to learn firsthand the value of a life.
She sucks on her teeth and plans lessons for them not only in swordplay but in diplomacy, in the intrinsic art of getting along with others. It’s not much, but perhaps this will save them before their swords do the talking.
Again, her father dies. Again, Edelgard declares war. Again, Dimitri snaps.
Byleth and her Deer defend the monastery, and again, she falls. She wakes five years later to a Claude with a careful beard and a sweeter tongue, tempered by war. He had never been a stranger to slaughter; he’d come to Garreg Mach with firsthand experience, and so, Byleth had never had to hold him through battle. He’d come out the other side with his fist held high, questioning her tactics, pushing her harder.
They reunite with the rest of the Deer like they promised, like she’d promised her Lions last time, too—they came for her then, and some of them come now, too. Ashe does not tremble at the stench of blood in the air, and Sylvain spends more time staring out over camp and watching her organize pieces on a chessboard than fruitlessly chasing skirts.
This time, they are less broken when she comes back. They have a capable leader in Claude, who’s been keeping the Alliance together with a fraying thread and a promise while sending all their available hands west to meet the Imperial Army. Upon closer inspection, his beard is less trimmed than it is unkempt with the illusion of care, and the small smiles he shares with Byleth are fewer and rarely reach his eyes.
He calls her my friend more than he calls her Teach. It warms her, a little.
When they defeat Edelgard, she asks specifically for Byleth, who is already there. She steps forward with her Sword of the Creator, blades strung together by a whip. Edelgard looks up at her and says, “It has to be you.”
“Me?”
“It would be an honor,” Edelgard rasps, “to die by your hand, and yours alone, my teacher.”
So Byleth raises her sword, and she cuts down this girl she is beginning to admire, one who can’t be much older than she is now, with the weight of the world on her shoulders.
It hurts. It hurts more than when Dimitri had killed her, and Byleth had known then, too, that Edelgard wanted only to die by her hand, and no one else’s.
There is pride to be had in dying. Sometimes, there is no better person to take your life than someone who loves you. Someone who understands you.
…Byleth has much to think about.
She’s about to force herself back again when the letter from Hubert arrives telling of Those Who Slither in the Dark, so she and Claude demand answers. They question Rhea, and Claude is harsh; everyone tiptoes around him for days on end—Claude was always mild-mannered at best and scheming at worst. To hear genuine frustration in his voice was a privilege Rhea did not deserve.
That’s what Byleth thinks, anyway. She, too, is starting to get fed up with these games they play, these secrets the upper-level church members keep. She’s starting to think there’s more to it than religion, something baser.
She’s proven right.
When they take down Nemesis, when Rhea becomes a dragon and begs Byleth to become her mother, Byleth knows. Even if they win this battle, even if she saves Fodlan again, even if things all go well…
So long as Sothis is inside her, it’s possible she will never know peace. It’s possible the world will never know peace. So long as these three kingdoms have a conjured enemy to fight against, they will not stop.
Claude names her Queen and zips away to Almyra. It’s a fitting role for Byleth—not too far a cry from tactician, and she’s always had a knack for reading people, anyway.
The problem is, if Byleth didn’t like being Archbishop, she likes being a queen even less. She’s done her time, and politics is a different kind of battlefield; she cannot thrust her sword through any wealthy aristocrat that disagrees with her, having never done real work a day in their life. Byleth, who has always had control of herself, finds herself seeing red.
So she takes the Sword of the Creator to her own chest again, to start over.
Another time. Another chance, and she’ll get it right.
This time, hopefully the last time, she chooses Edelgard. She chooses the Black Eagles.
The Empire students are much more used to the bloodbath of the first battle. Hubert charges ahead, Miasma glittering with black magic over his fingertips and reflecting in his eyes. Not to be outdone, Ferdinand chases after him. After the battle, the students chat amongst themselves on the trek home, a far cry from the silence of the other houses. Save Bernadetta, who locks herself in her room as soon as they return to the monastery, and Linhardt, who Byleth finds crouched in the library with his tome between his legs, staring blankly at his hands smoothing over the cover. She does not touch him; she claims the spot next to him and watches the unchanging titles lining the shelf in front of them until he lets out a shaky breath, a watery smile, and retires to his quarters.
She knows that feeling well, though it’s been a long time since she last felt so acutely the life perishing at her blade. It’s something one grows used to. But this hatred for it—this aversion to blood and gore that Linhardt has, that so many of her students have—it is pure in a way Byleth forces herself to remember. The value of a human life. Even soldiers have lives, have families to go home to, just like her.
Later, she thinks about this—she’s started thinking a lot more since coming here, learning and turning information over in her mind—sitting on the steps outside her dorm room, when Edelgard finds her.
“Something on your mind, my teacher?” she asks.
“I suppose so,” Byleth responds. When she looks at Edelgard, she sees every time both of them have died for their beliefs. It is painful; it is humbling. She sees Edelgard, on her knees, begging, it has to be you. Knife in hand, eyes begging, it has to be you.
Edelgard brushes the dust off her skirt and takes a seat, her leg pressing into Byleth’s. “Might I inquire further?”
“If you’d like,” Byleth responds. All this time, and she’s never managed to rid the flatness from her voice.
“What are you thinking about?”
Byleth takes a deep breath and says, “It is a luxury many of you have not been afforded, to fear the slaughter of battle.”
Edelgard makes a small noise at that, somewhere between pained and understanding. If anyone understands this, it is her, and the past she keeps close to her chest.
“I see,” she manages finally, and watches carefully the grass between her feet. They sit there until dark falls, lost.
Byleth recruits some of the Lions and a few of the Deer, what numbers consider the Black Eagles and her viable options. Many of them attend one class and are sold. Her class, once again, doubles in size.
Again, her father dies. Again, Byleth cries. It hurts more the third time, knowing she’s been fighting it. Knowing as much as she tries, they kill him, and they kill him again. Each time she tries going back, just a few seconds, and they catch her every time.
She sees Edelgard crowned. She sides with her in the catacombs.
“There is much to be done, my teacher,” Edelgard murmurs at the Black Eagles headquarters, a few paces shy of Garreg Mach; she and Byleth spend hours that first day poring over maps and reorganizing troops. Byleth places units where she remembers them to be, where she’d put them the last two times, when she was on the opposite end of the battle.
Byleth responds with, “We will do it,” and they go to battle.
Again, she falls. Rhea knocks her into the very same ravine, and she forgets which house she is with; five years pass in the blink of an eye and Sothis rouses her again, despite her brief hope that maybe this would be the last time, maybe this time she won’t make it. Maybe she’ll see her father in heaven.
But she wakes, and this time, it is Edelgard who greets her at the monastery, her hair pulled in horns on either side of her head. Edelgard’s head rests comfortably on Byleth’s shoulder now; they are the same height, give or take.
So, they launch into battle again. The Eagles reunite at Garreg Mach and set out marching across the country. They take, and they take, and they take, until there is little left to conquer.
Then, once they’re done, once there is nothing left of Rhea to hate with the Crest in place of Byleth’s heart and Those Who Slither in the Dark are a memory, she dies.
When she comes back this time, it’s later. She’s in the same timeline, days after. Her hair is blue again and there’s a strange beating under her skin like a pulse electrified. She takes a wobbly step outside and the sun is bright, brighter than she’s ever seen it—
And there’s Edelgard, head turned toward the sky, eyes closed, like she’s breathing in this new world she’s created—
“El,” Byleth murmurs, and Edelgard turns. This time, there are no swords between them; Edelgard is standing, and she is alive entirely. She smiles brightly, blindingly.
“It’s over,” Edelgard says, and the weight of it makes Byleth want to keel over into the grass. She drops to her knees and Edelgard follows, wiping tears from Byleth’s cheeks with her sleeve. Byleth, who does not cry, feels the world fall away from her. It’s over.
Can she stop going back? Is this when she gets a choice, finally, in where she ends up?
“I think I’ll step back from leadership for a while,” Edelgard muses. She lays back in the grass and lets the sun beat down on her. “Maybe forever.”
“Okay,” Byleth breathes, astonished by the blue sky. “I’ll go with you, then.”
“We could get a cottage in the countryside,” Edelgard muses. “Grow all kinds of flowers.”
“We should get a chicken, too,” says Byleth. Her body feels warm all over and the corner of her mouth quirks up, just a bit. “And a cute thatched roof.”
“And in springtime, there’ll be flowers growing there, too.”
“It’ll be our own corner of the world. Away from politics, and fighting, and everything.”
“Okay,” says Edelgard.
They do. They move out to what was once the southern border between Faerghus and Leicester, into a little cottage with a well out front, a pump-sink, and cupboards with purple flowers painted across them. Edelgard hangs her armor up in the closet, polishing it every month. Byleth practices her swordplay in the yard each morning and the two of them decimate any thieving brigands passing through. Sometimes, they spar, and usually Byleth wins. They plant crocus and catmint and black-eyed susans, watching the flowers bloom with the movement of the sun. They knead dough and bake bread and cut into it while it’s still steaming.
The years pass slowly, peacefully. Historians write about what good friends they ended up, but one morning when Edelgard turns over in bed and kisses Byleth squarely on the mouth, they both know there’s more to it.
Years pass, and Byleth is happy.
She likes being more than her kill count. She likes practicing swordplay without the lives lost, and she likes brushing the sweat from her forehead after work in the sun. She smiles freely and meets Edelgard’s mouth halfway, and there is no it has to be you.
Then, the letters come.
They hear from Sylvain first. Felix has retreated into the Fraldarius manor, killing thieves that dare desecrate his family’s home. Last he saw him, he was feral and rabid, gnashing his teeth at any travelers passing through. The manor has taken on a new local legend: people believe it’s haunted by the remains of the Fraldarius family, who’d all given their lives for the crown.
There’s some merit to it, Sylvain muses. The loss of Dimitri hit them all hard.
Linhardt sends a letter too, about Lysithea. When Edelgard reads it, she balls the paper up in her fists, despair and rage evident on her face. They’re trying treatments, and nothing is sticking. He’s trying his best, he really is, but Edelgard, he hasn’t slept in days, so pardon him if his sentences run on a bit too long.
Claude, and his successes in Almyra with a poorly drawn caricature of him winking next to the signature, to lift their spirits. Dedue’s funeral invitation and an obituary penned by Mercedes, to dampen them.
Seems around the little utopia they’ve created, the world continues to breathe hatred into its veins, and the people they love suffer for it. They hear of Ingrid rallying the remnants of Kingdom loyalists because she’ll be damned if she lets her homeland and its losses fall to Adrestia.
Byleth’s life is perfect, but what of her friends? Her Lions, her Deer, her Eagles?
Her sword beckons for her from its place on the wall.
Jeralt’s obituary was a clinical thing written by the church. His burial, nothing special. Should she not try again, if only to save him, too?
“Byleth?” Edelgard pokes her head out from the kitchen with a soft smile, like she knows. “Is everything okay?”
Instead of an answer, Byleth kisses her hard.
Then, later, when she wakes up, the sheets still warm and inviting, she takes her sword and leaves the cottage. She takes one last long look at it; even if she finds this life again, it will never be the same.
Byleth starts over, again.
If she never finds the monastery, her father will not die. If she never becomes a professor, none of them will have the advantage of her. There is another choice to be made.
She spreads word of her whereabouts, making sure a purple-haired mercenary hears. Makes sure the three lords will be saved on that fateful day without her.
Meanwhile, Byleth will find a new answer. A different choice.
(Sothis comes back to her.)