Disclaimer: I own nothing from the Fire Emblem franchise, though Yuri and Claude might own me.

A/N: Ashen Wolves has ruined me. That's all. (Also, I published this on AO3, too. I promise I am not a dirty plagiarizer.)

Teach and the Tricksters

Chapter One

A glimpse of purple hair illuminated by moonlight was all it took for Claude to change his plans for the evening.

His walk to the library promptly halted when he spotted a figure twisting around a corner, disappearing behind the officer's academy almost as soon as Claude laid his eyes on them. His feet started towards them of their own volition, his mind lagging behind as he tried to parse out what he had just seen. Who could that have been? It was well past midnight, far beyond curfew, and beyond that—most of the monastery was locked up for the night. No one with good intentions could be sneaking around this late (case in point: Claude was sneaking around this late, and he certainly harbored no good will towards the church).

He considered his options, all possibilities proving endlessly intriguing. It could have been Lorenz, and if it was, Claude simply needed to know what he was up to. He hadn't had much time to get to know the heir to House Gloucester yet, but one thing was clear: Lorenz despised him. If Claude could catch him doing something less than savory in the dead of night, then maybe he could blackmail him into acting with a bit more propriety. Claude didn't want to make enemies in the Alliance, but sometimes you just had to concede a lost cause. He had a feeling Lorenz was one.

And then there was Bernadetta, and the novelty of that potential sight alone was enough to ensnare his curiosity. In his short time at Garreg Mach, he'd only managed to catch fleeting peeks at her as she scurried from class to her quarters ad infinitum. He wasn't even sure he'd seen her eat in the Dining Hall. She was either ridiculously shy, or she had something to hide from her classmates. The ambiguity of it all was what chewed away at him, encouraging him to move forward.

Despite all the possibilities Claude was running over in his mind, he had to admit having a knife shoved up against his throat as soon as he turned the corner was still a massive surprise.

"On an evening stroll, are we? Anything I can help you with?"

Claude bit down on his lip to avoid gasping out. His attacker was behind him, their chest rising and falling against his back as they brushed the cold, sharp piece of metal down his neck. In a strange way, it tickled, and he had to tense every muscle in his body to keep from shuddering. Unfortunately for him, this was hardly the first time he'd been in this position, and moving always made things worse.

"Probably not," he bit out an answer to his attacker's question, silently impressed with how steady his voice managed to stay.

Like he said, this was hardly the first time someone had tried to knock him off. He'd stopped keeping track of just how many assassination attempts he'd lived through in Almyra when the number dipped into the triple digits. Poison. Kidnapping. Ambushes. He'd seen it all, and so far survived it all. He did his best to remember that now: somehow he always made it out of these situations, and he had no intention of marring his perfect 'staying alive' record tonight.

The voice hummed, the sound vibrating below his ears. That meant the person was likely shorter than him, and from the feel of their chest against his back he'd wager they weren't particularly strong, either. And...probably male. He could almost certainly take them in a normal fight, but he needed to get out of this position first.

"Then why," the voice hissed (and yes, they were definitely a man) as the knife pressed just a bit more harshly into him, earning a wince. "Did you decide to run after me?"

"I wasn't running after you."

"You weren't?" the man sniffed, his voice low and simpering. It was the same sort of arrogant, know-it-all tone of voice that Edelgard seemed to get off on using when he spoke to her. The implications behind it made his eyes twitch, and if he were in any other position...

"I wasn't." He settled for reaffirming his answer instead, growing tenser by the second. He forced himself to sigh. "I didn't have a clue who I was running after. I assumed you were one of my classmates. I was curious."

There was a brief moment where the knife let up ever so slightly, the man's warm chest pressing into his with a deep breath. He didn't relax enough to let Claude escape, but Claude took the moment to swallow without fear of injury. As he did, the hint of a sweet scent drifted towards his nose.

Did his captor smell like strawberries?

Before he could determine whether or not his nose was trying to fool him, the knife returned to its former state.

"Now you've got me wondering what kind of lowlife creep goes around chasing random classmates after midnight."

"Says the man with a knife against my throat." Claude winced at his own big mouth, but he couldn't help it.

The man laughed. "Cute. I've never met someone who's been willing to talk back in a situation like this."

"You've never met me before. Claude von Riegan," he deadpanned, figuring at this point he'd rather go out being an asshole than trying to be polite. "Nice to meet you, my friend."

"The heir to House Riegan?"

Up until that point the man had remained unflappably calm, but now the shock in his voice was obvious. A small grin broke out on Claude's lips. That meant the man didn't already know who he was when he grabbed him. The probability of him being a hired assassin just dropped to zero.

"The very same," Claude confirmed, smirking at the soft hitch in the man's breath. Yes, definitely strawberries. "Now, if you'd be so kind as to drop the dagger, I'd be more than happy to sign an autograph. I can make it out to anyone you want."

"I think I'm alright." The man's tone was incredulous.

"Your loss." Growing bold, Claude shrugged in the man's grasp, now certain he'd not be in any danger. Common thieves and bandits wanted nothing with him, or his title. And killing the heir to any noble house was a messy business. Too messy for someone who wasn't paid explicitly to do it.

"Listen, friend," the man growled, a darkness curling his words that hadn't been there before. "I'll let you go. When I do, I'll run away. You'll stay where you are and count to thirty, and when you finish you can continue stalking your poor classmates to your heart's content. But if you try and follow me, I won't hesitate to kill you where you stand. Got it?"

The man had moved during his little monologue, his mouth now pressed against the shell of Claude's ear. There was something so strangely intimate and intimidating about it that there was no stopping the small shiver that echoed through his skin.

"Sounds like a great plan."

The knife was off him before half the sentence had left his mouth. The man was silent as he hurried away, so much so that Claude wouldn't have known he left had it not been for the sudden rush of cold air against his back, chilling the sweat that had pooled between his shoulder blades and down his neck.

That and the distinct lack of strawberries in the air.

He made it to twenty by the time he got bored, deciding his would-be-killer had been given more than enough getaway time. He shook his head to clear it of the fog the man had left it in, a hand subconsciously trailing up to his left ear. The feel of something sticky startled him, and pulling his hand back he could spy what looked like...lipgloss?...sparkling against his thumb.

Something about the sight completely shut him down. His mind went blank as he began the trek back to his quarters, his previous plans to search the library completely forgotten.

Purple hair. Strawberries. Lipgloss.

What kind of a criminal was that?

It wasn't until Claude reached his quarters and his fingers were wrapped around the doorknob that he noticed his hands were shaking like a pair of wyvern hatchlings.

So. People in Fódlan wanted him dead as well.

The thought plagued him as he walked inside and took extra care to lock his doors. He proceeded to collapse onto his bed, his entire body like jelly. A discarded faith textbook he'd never bother to read dug into his pelvic bone and he swatted it away. It flew off the bed and landed with a definitive thump against the hardwood floor.

It wasn't that Claude was expecting Fódlan to be better. After all, Almyra was where he grew up. He knew the culture first-hand, looked enough like the people, and they still wanted him dead. In Fódlan he stuck out like a sore thumb, and who could forget the countless nobles who thought he was taking the throne away from a proper heir, like Lorenz or Holst. So no. Claude did not expect Fódlan to be better. If anything, he could have wagered it being much, much worse.

But in the name of every god and goddess he never believed in: couldn't the Church of Seiros at least afford some decent security?

The answer to his question came about three days later when he was out training in the forest with Dimitri and Edelgard. Rhea had insisted they do so, blathering on about the importance of having the three future leaders of Fódlan learn how to work together. Claude supposed she had a point, and he had to admit having Dimitri and Edelgard as allies would be more useful than not in setting into motion his plans for the future of Fódlan. But somehow he doubted the effectiveness of sending the three of them on a supervised field trip where their only objective was to beat the shit out of one another.

Claude had thus far avoided most of the fighting. Instead he hung upside down from a tree branch, fiddling with his bowstring as Dimitri and Edelgard bickered endlessly in the clearing below. Some petty squabble about proper sword techniques that seemed to have a mountain of subtext beneath it that Claude hadn't quite unravelled yet. In all honesty, whatever it was in Edelgard and Dimitri's history that made them constantly butt heads wasn't particularly interesting to him.

Edelgard was difficult to get along with, to say the least, and Dimitri was so tightly wound Claude had never heard a genuine word come out of his mouth (not that Claude himself was in the habit of being genuine, but Dimitri was pulled more taut than his bowstring). Their fighting seemed to him to be a simple clash of personalities. So he didn't really pay attention to the fighting.

Then an axe whizzed past his ear.

His first instinct was to shout at Edelgard. She was a monster with an axe in ways that Claude was fairly certain should be impossible for someone as small as her. She also had (pun whole-heartedly and unabashedly intended) an axe to grind with him, for whatever reason. Probably because he knew how to smile.

But when his eyes sought her out, he realized they were no longer alone in the clearing. Bandits. A lot of them, too. Pouring in from the trees into the area like water into a barrel. Dimitri and Edelgard stood frozen, pressed back-to-back in the center of the clearing with their training weapons held tight in their hands like the literal lifelines they were.

Claude jumped down from his perch just in time to see the professor who'd accompanied him booking it through the clearing.

"Professor!" Edelgard sounded furious as the small, mousy man disappeared from sight, unintentionally luring half the bandits with him. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Bastard!" Claude snapped, shaking his head. Seriously: where did Rhea find these people?

Dimitri's eyes were gleaming with some emotion Claude had never seen in them before, and Edelgard—usually unflappable—looked as meek as a mouse as they ran towards him.

"What do we do? We cannot fight them all—"

Claude didn't stick around to hear the rest of her sentence, already flying through the trees by the time she finished speaking. Maybe it was selfish of him to abandon them, but unlike their professor, he wasn't being paid to protect anyone else. Especially their royal stuck-up highnesses. He trusted them to figure out their own means of escape, after all, they were both smart enough to know not to follow—

"Good thinking, Claude!" Dimitri's voice manifested beside him, sharp and infuriatingly chipper in his ear. "There is a village just a short while away, if I'm not mistaken. We'll be certain to find someone to assist us there."

Claude bit his tongue to avoid snarling something nasty at the prince. Admitting he'd been planning to abandon them to save his own hide probably wasn't the best way to forge those unflappable bonds Rhea was so obsessed with. And Dimitri seemed to trust his benevolence, which meant he'd get away with that little stunt. Edelgard was probably suspicious, but he couldn't help that. She was determined to despise him, and Claude would let her.

"You're dead, von Riegan. If these bandits don't kill you first, I will."

At least, he was fine with it for now.

Claude knew how to read people.

He excelled in it, really, because he had no other choice. Back home, putting his faith in the wrong sort of person was a surefire way to get himself—or the few people he cared about—hurt. When he was a child he'd been far too trusting, and...well, he was lucky his parents had no qualms about killing anyone who threatened their family, or else he'd be six feet underground by now. Soon enough he learned to judge people at a glance, and while it completely wrecked his sense of trust, he was proud to report that his intuition had yet to steer him wrong.

So when they stumbled upon a free mercenary gang in the village they'd run into, Claude knew the man they spoke with could be counted on. Trusted? No. But he'd do the job for them; of that Claude was certain.

The girl though. She was something else.

She appeared like a ghost, her pale face peeking out from behind the mercenary leader's massive torso as the man relayed a series of instructions to her. From the moment he laid eyes on her, something seemed off. He couldn't quite place it until they began fighting, and that's when it dawned on him.

Her face.

There wasn't anything wrong with it, per se. Claude would go so far as to admit she was rather nice to look at in the objective sense...if you were a fan of the Fódlan type of beautiful, that was. Two big lavender eyes peeked out from behind long eyelashes, framed by soft features made up of smooth, pale skin. Probably about his age, if not a year or two older. She honestly looked more like an noblewoman than a mercenary, and if it weren't for the massive sword twirling between her fingers, he never would have guessed her profession.

But it soon became obvious that, despite her deceptively gentle looks, there was a massive and overwhelming flaw that made his head spin in confusion.

She cut through bandits like butter without so much as a frown. Her lips remained pressed together, her brows furrowed together from the physical exertion and nothing more. She seemed by all accounts emotionless, taking no pleasure nor pain in the lives she was cutting down. Even when he learned she was the daughter of the mercenary leader, and that he was the famous Jeralt Eisner, the Blade Breaker, Claude remained certain she had something misfiring in her head.

No one killed like that without having some serious psychological problems.

Then she saved Edelgard, and his theory all but went to shit.

"Are you alright?" Her voice was a low alto that was entirely dissonant with her face, but harmonious with her profession. The look of a mercenary she might not have had, but she at least sounded like one. He wondered if that was on purpose.

"Thanks to you, I think I am." Edelgard nodded eagerly, stars shining in her eyes as she stared at the strange woman. "I appreciate your help back there. Your skill is beyond question."

Edelgard was looking at the woman like a decadent meal, and the sight admittedly shocked him. She was almost as paranoid as Claude was—how could she not have seen what he had? For her to brush off the woman's apathy so readily...

Was he wrong about her?

And before he could even understand what had shifted in the personalities of his two companions, Claude found himself vying for the woman's attention as well. He still wasn't sure about her, and he most definitely didn't think he wanted her—for the Alliance or in any other sense of the word—but the thought of Dimitri or Edelgard getting their hands on her and not him made something twitch inside of him.

Apathetic as she may have seemed, the woman did risk her life for a complete stranger. One that hadn't even paid her. That was enough to intrigue him, and he was only a little surprised with himself when he insisted on her returning to the monastery with them. He attributed it to her skill on the battlefield; she was a good warrior, that much was certain. Maybe he'd find a way to use her in his plans, or at the very least ensure he wouldn't find himself at the business end of her sword.

And come with them she did. The four of them walked in step, while the Blade Breaker and Alois spoke in hushed tones up ahead. And at some point along the way it dawned on him that they still had yet to learn her name.

The realization was so startling that he exclaimed, "Who are you?" before he could even consider how rude the phrasing would sound. Edelgard growled something about manners, but the girl herself didn't seem to mind.

Her expressionless gaze shifted to him, and if he looked close he could swear he saw a bit of surprise glinting in her eyes. Or maybe it was just the sun. Even so, it made him realize she probably wasn't used to people asking her about herself.

"My name is Byleth," she said flatly, nodding a bit in greeting. "Nice to meet you."

There was something inherently deadpan and awkward about her delivery that had him cracking a grin. Maybe she wasn't a sociopath. Maybe she was just...socially inept. He could deal with that. Hell, he didn't have a single Golden Deer that wasn't.

"Nice to meet you, too."

She blinked slowly at him, and something silent passed between them. Before Claude could really analyze what that something was, however, Dimitri was cutting in to the conversation.

"Do you think you'll become a student at the Officers Academy?" he asked the girl, his voice bright. "It is a wonderful place to learn more about fighting. Most attend it to become knights, but I know some who want to become mercenaries as well."

It might have been the dumbest thing he'd ever heard come out of Dimitri's lips.

"I'm already a mercenary," she pointed out, and Claude had to hold back a laugh at the prince's mortified expression.

"Yes, yes of course, I just..."

Two days later she became his professor.

Claude didn't know how he felt about the news at first. She was interesting, yes, but she was hardly older than him. He'd wager a few of the students were even older than her. And while she had skill, his mind kept going back to her apathetic look on the battlefield. Was she really someone he could trust to fight alongside him?

Then he saw Dimitri and Edelgard, and the barely contained fury on both of their faces when he told them the news was enough to make him feel like he'd won something, at least.

He could work with this. He was certain he would. Could use her, even.

"Hey, Teach!" he called to her when she entered the Golden Deer classroom that morning. "Just couldn't bear the thought of parting from me, I see."

She stared at him blankly. "Claude, right?"

He deflated.