xenologue 1 | if you hear the hunter's coming then you hide or keep on running [closed]

[hegemonwings]

🧙 WHO: byleth eisner and YOU
⚔️️ WHAT: catch-all for may! closed starters, tdm continuations, lots of quests and hangin' around probably.
🕒 WHEN: throughout may
🗺️ WHERE: multiple places
⚠️ WARNINGS: n/a for now
📝 NOTE: feel free to pm this journal or hit me up at clockworkbrain if you'd like a thread with byleth!

Comments

[flame_emperor]

"Mmm." As Byleth reaches out to stroke her hair, Edelgard leans into the motion, pressing herself against the older woman fondly. Eyes closed, she listens fondly. "We were both drawn to the other from the start. A promising beginning." A thought then occurs to her, so absurd and yet close enough to the truth that it makes her chuckle. "Though you realize this does mean we owe the entirety of our relationship to the departed Kostas." And not just because Edelgard had hired him in her guise as the Flame Emperor to attack the three young lords on their wilderness survival training in the first place. If in his desperation he'd tried to attack anyone other than Edelgard, if she hadn't lost her axe in the fracas...well. "It almost makes me regret running him down in the Red Canyon." Not a great deal given his long list of other character deficiencies, but it cannot be denied; she and Byleth are together because of that bandit chief.

However, her eyes open. "Byleth...I've never doubted your commitment to the Black Eagles...to me, since you turned the Sword of the Creator on Rhea." She assures the other woman, reaching down for her hand and grasping it tightly. "Finding out about these other worlds where our paths diverged doesn't change that. You are you, and I am me, and we're both where we belong. Put such cares from your mind." That is the privilege and joy of having achieved that understanding Byleth speaks of; their bond is far too strong to suffer even the smallest cracks from the knowledge that Claude and the others of his world brought.

[hegemonwings]

"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.