"Those worlds don't trouble me," Byleth says, taking a long sip of her wine, and the assertion is mostly honest. "I hardly think of them. Our path is what I chose... what I have a responsibility to. The others are someone else's burden." Those other worlds are inhospitable thoughts, things she finds utterly unconscionable, but they might as well be bad dreams, from her perspective. And whoever those other Byleths are, they're not her. She doubts that they're even fully themselves.

She doubts they ever will be.

She squeezes Edelgard's hand, idly pressing a kiss to the top of her partner's head as they sit in comfortable silence for a moment. Her eyes shift to watch the fairies. "I'm not sure I would give him the credit. He was... an interchangeable piece. He got on stage, performed his role, said his few lines, but..." There's a pause, then. "I think you and I are together because we refused to play our parts. I don't know what connected us, but... we must have met for a reason. Don't you think so?" It had to be something more than just Edelgard's plan going wrong. There was far too much synchronicity in what had happened—not just that day, but even afterwards.