During class when their eyes meet for the briefest of seconds, Edelgard flashes a smile that drives her teacher's eyes to the floor. When she catches sight of her within the dining hall, she steals the seat beside her, Hubert across from them both, and makes sure to brush up against her as much as possible. As they eat and intermittently discuss the content of their upcoming mission to the Kingdom of Faerghus, she lays a hand on Byleth's lap and hears the breath audibly catch in her throat. Hubert observes this all too nonplussed but says nary a word, for which Edelgard is grateful, because although she performs her flirtations with an air of confidence about her it is but a facade masking her rattling bundle of nerves.
Edelgard von Hresvelg is not a flirt. Romantic affection is something she has never once imagined herself being on the receiving end of let alone presenting to someone else. Yet here she is doing exactly that in an attempt to win over a terribly strong ally and to eliminate a disastrous potential enemy. The implications of her actions toward her professor set her head in a tizzy and damn near has her heart beating through her ribcage. She considers slowing down in her approach, but how can she when opportunities present themselves to her in abundance?
Evening has settled in by the time Edelgard spots Byleth seated on her own on the upper floor of the library. No other students, no faculty, no knights or monks populate the area. Thinking a chance has arose to pick up where she left off the night prior and not being one to let opportunity pass her by, she saunters over to her teacher taking a deep breath.
"Professor," Edelgard exclaims. She forgoes the chair beside her teacher, passing around her with a playful tap on her shoulder. She instead lifts herself to sit on the table at which Byleth is seated, gaining a vantage point against her doe eyed prey. She crosses her legs and places both hands on her knee.
"Catching up on a bit of reading, are you? We'll be departing for Kingdom territory the day after tomorrow. Wouldn't your time be better spent preparing for our excursion?"
Byleth glances upward, her lips pressed together in a thin line. "Just a moment." She returns her focus to her reading material. She takes her time finishing the page she's on before placing a marker and inclining her head to give Edelgard her undivided attention. "It's a starter book on white magic Manuela recommended to me. The upcoming mission will be too soon, but I think it will be beneficial to learn it for any that come after."
A bemused snort escapes Edelgard's nose. "That's quite proactive of you. Did my little accident last night truly trouble you so much?"
"I suppose it did motivate me somewhat," Byleth says, "but I've wanted to learn for some time. I haven't had an opportunity until I came to the monastery." Her eyes roam over to Edelgard's left ankle. "It seems like it isn't troubling you any more."
"Yes." Edelgard rolls the joint for emphasis. "I had Hubert bring me to Professor Casagranda before class this morning. She wasn't in the best state of being at the time," to put it lightly, "but she did her job well enough."
A smidgen of a smile graces Byleth's lips. "I'm glad."
That smile lights a fire within the pit of Edelgard's stomach. A pleasant warmth bubbles up in her core and spreads throughout the extremities of her body. It fills her thoroughly and emboldens her.
"It's been some time since you last invited me to have tea with you, professor. Would you care to join me for a hot cup of bergamot?"
"I wouldn't mind, but it's dark out now. It's also cloudy, so there won't be any moonlight to help us see." She tilts her head and rests it against her open hand, adopting a thoughtful expression. "Tomorrow is a busy day for me, but I may be able to schedule a tea time with you in place of lunch."
"That won't be necessary, professor." A little chuckle escapes Edelgard, giving rise to a curious look from her teacher. "This may be presumptuous of me, but why don't we use your quarters for tonight?"
Byleth's eyes widen a fraction, clearly caught off guard by the suggestion. Her eyes trail to the side away from Edelgard and she blushes, imperceptibly shaking her head at whatever she sees. "I don't know. Last night was one thing, but for me to bring a student into my room for something unrelated to class or training... It's..." Byleth finds her thoughts going astray when suddenly Edelgard places her hand on her own. The glove that usually adorns it has been removed, allowing Byleth to feel Edelgard's soft and warm skin. She swallows. "Indecent."
"What's indecent about me wanting to spend time with the one I care for?" Edelgard says feigning ignorance. "Don't you want to spend time with me, my teacher?"
Byleth's eyes flicker to her side repeatedly, and she mumbles something under her breath. Her face grows ever redder. "Yes. I do," she says. Her hand flips beneath Edelgard's, and through her fingers she threads her rougher, more calloused ones. She holds her hand tightly.
Edelgard barely suppresses a gasp at her teacher's brazen move. Her already drumming heart beats faster. "Okay," she says. "Then let's go."
As Edelgard awakens from her deathlike slumber, she is greeted to the sight of a shifty pair of grey eyes just centimeters from her face. They halt in movement as the owner registers that Edelgard's own periwinkle eyes, previously shut, are now open.
Bernadetta launches off of Edelgard with a deafening shriek. Her hip clips the edge of a nearby nightstand and she collapses with a painful wail.
"It hurts, it hurts," Bernadetta cries aloud.
The von Varley girl's display of misfortune would have elicited either a pitiful sigh or chuckle from Edelgard five years ago, but after years of separation and having chosen opposing sides in the war, all she can do is stare at the girl perplexedly.
"Where am I?" Edelgard wants to say, but her voice is hoarse, her mouth devoid of any moisture, and her lips chapped and in danger of bleeding from any more attempts to move them. She instead coughs, painfully, uncontrollably, and so hard tears may have begun to bud at the corners of her eyes had she the ability to produce any at this point.
Upon hearing the hacking and wheezing of the bedridden Edelgard, Bernadetta forgets her own pain and leaps up from the floor to snatch the pitcher of water and a glass from atop the nightstand she hit. She fills the glass quickly and moves beside the bed, working to sit Edelgard upright. Shakily she feeds her the water as she rubs and supports her back.
Once the first glass is emptied, Edelgard hastily demands "More." Bernadetta pours her another full glass and she is only to happy to chug it. She drinks it greedily with excess water dribbling from her mouth and down her chin and until the pitcher is empty. With her thirst sated she mutters a torpid "Thank you". She raises a hand to wipe the water from her face. It rises, but with it comes a suspicious weight alongside the sound of clinking metal.
Edelgard looks down to find her wrists shackled. A length of chain extends from either one, past her, and lay bolted into the stone wall immediately behind her and the bed she sits in. Her eyes dart around the room from corner to corner. She only grows more confused. Apart from the chain and shackles used to restrain her, it appears completely normal.
"What's going on?" she says, her breathing growing erratic.
Bernadetta slinks back from Edelgard's bedside with a start, fumbling about the glass in her hands. She gulps and clams up, her eyes on Edelgard yet looking a thousand yards past her at the same time.
"Bernadetta," Edelgard tries to say as sternly as she can, but her constitution is weak and so is the delivery. Nonetheless, it hits the violet haired girl much the same.
"All I know is you're dead but you're not and you're here and the professor has been way more confusing than usual lately and it's my turn to watch you and we've got to go underground to fight these guys crawling in the shadows in like a month or something and... I-I don't know. " Bernadetta shakes her head wearily. "It's all so hard to understand. I just want to go to my room and eat cake," she whines.
Bernadetta's verbal vomit is a mess to wade through in her current state, but Edelgard manages albeit slowly. "You're going to confront those who slither in the dark? How did you learn their location?"
"Hubert left us a note." Neither of the room's occupants had heard tell of a third person entering - Edelgard far too physically and mentally deficient to focus on more than one thing at a time, while Bernadetta never could utilize her uncanny sense of perception when not on the battlefield.
The voice is easily recognized. It causes a tightness in her chest, and she knows not what emotion is tied to it. Fear, anger, or perhaps a longing to once more see the owner of that voice. Slowly does Edelgard tear her eyes off the jittery Bernadetta to regard the newcomer.
Byleth stands within the doorway, a tray of food in hand. She looks the bedridden girl up and down, watching how she withers under her gaze. She moves over to Bernadetta, setting the tray down along the way, to take away the glass and pitcher and return them to their place on the nightstand. She places a hand on her student's cheek and smiles at her tenderly. "Thank you for watching her for me, Bernie. You did a great job. You can go ahead to dinner now. They're making your favorite saghert and cream."
Bernadetta's jitters altogether stop at Byleth's soothing touch. She leans into it, grasping the hand on her face and nuzzling it as if it were her mother's. "You're welcome, professor. Um... yeah, I'll head there now." She releases her teacher's hand with a wistful sigh and makes for the door. As she's heading out she looks toward Edelgard one more time.
"For what it's worth, I am glad you're alive."
The door shuts and the room grows still. The sound of Bernadetta's footfalls carry through the residence all the way up to another closing of a door. Byleth moves then. She picks up the tray she set down and pulls a chair over to the bedside from beneath a desk situated on the wall opposite the bed. She sits down and situates the tray on her lap and readies a spoonful of soup looking over to Edelgard expectantly.
Edelgard, for her part, feels the agitation inside her head mount. Grasping at the chains, she turns to Byleth with her eyes narrowed and her breathing erratic. Though these shackles and chains do not enclose her neck, she still feels their tightness there. "What is the meaning of this? What are you-"
"Quiet," Byleth interrupts the ensuing panic attack before it has a chance to start. "Calm down and eat. I know you're hungry." She appears as cool as ever with her piercing seafoam eyes. She moves the spoon closer to Edelgard's mouth, urging her to open up. Reluctantly, she does so. "Good girl."
The spoon-feeding continues quietly and at a sedate pace with Byleth intermittently breaking off pieces of bread to go with the soup. She neither speaks nor allows any discourse on the other's part until all food items have disappeared from the tray. The food now gone, Byleth settles into her chair with one leg crossed over the other. "Okay. Now let's talk."
Edelgard wipes her mouth with her shackled hand, humiliation burning upon her face. "I assume we're at the monastery." A nod. "Yet I have no recollection of the journey here."
"You looked like you hadn't slept for days, so I asked Lysithea to put you into an induced coma. It's been little more than two days since then."
Edelgard ruminates over the thought of her being unconscious for the past two days. The fates of her people, her country, her ambitions... While she slept, they had all been snuffed out. Yet how cruel it is she remains alive in their place. Perhaps her captors plan to punish her by having her see the very world she sought to destroy be restored? The thought of that alone gives her the urge to bite her tongue.
"If you have no more questions to ask, I'll pose a few to you."
Byleth's voice cuts through her haze of negative thoughts and forces Edelgard to focus on the here and now. "There is much I still have to ask you. Namely what more you know of those who slither in the dark and exactly what Bernadetta meant about me being dead. What on earth did she mean?"
The room grows quiet. Byleth doesn't answer Edelgard's question right off. She sits and says nothing for the longest time, opting to instead let her dimly glowing eyes roam up and down the form of the young woman before her. The look unnerves Edelgard, and she pulls her quilt over her more; the garb she had been dressed in while adequate shows more skin than she's comfortable with. Byleth finally speaks. "We know just as much as you do about them. And concerning what Bernadetta said... It's exactly as it sounds. After putting you to sleep, we stripped you of your armor. We placed it on the corpse of an imperial soldier similar to you in build, took her head off, and announced you as deceased."
Byleth's matter of fact delivery of the grisly details of her faked death do very little to comfort Edelgard. Much the opposite. Although, she imagines there isn't much in the way of words to soften the impact of one being told they no longer exist.
"How far along are you, Edelgard?" The question comes up abruptly. Byleth's harried tone of voice and the way she drags her fingers through her hair uncharacteristic of her. It coming after the knowledge of her framed death has Edelgard stumbling over her words.
"That is no concern of yours," Edelgard answers indignantly. She watches how Byleth bristles in response, and the thought that maybe she should have said something else crosses her mind. The odd display of emotion, as subtle as it is, makes Edelgard worry that she may have been too hurtful. Still, she suppresses the urge to apologize.
For the most part, Byleth manages to rein in her temper, though her hands remain knuckled white in her lap. Catching the split second Edelgard's eyes dart to her fists, she flexes them open and takes a deep breath to fully dispel her aggression. "Is it really not? Edelgard," she averts her gaze to the floor and her voice grows somber, "I need to know for certain."
Since her own discovery of her pregnancy, Edelgard had tried to think on the matter as little as possible. Names, the baby's sex, and all manner of things pertaining to it had been kept far from the forefront of her mind. The one thing she thought of constantly, however, was when she would no longer be burdened with this affliction. "I would say I'm roughly five months along. Make of that what you will."
Byleth's head being angled down the way it is prevents Edelgard from seeing her expression, and whatever she says is spoken in such a hushed tone that Edelgard can't even comprehend it. What she does notice, however, are the few tears that plop against the back of Byleth's bracers, how her hands are once again in fists, and how bits of red eke out from the folds of her palms. These restrained emotions wallop her own heart, and before she even knows it, Edelgard is reaching out to provide her comfort.
"Professor... Byleth, I-"
The shackles encircling her wrists come into view and Edelgard stops. The chains are at an adequate enough length that she need not worry about being stopped short, but she ceases her movements all the same. If Byleth heard her calling out to her, she shows no sign of it.
Distantly, a knocking is heard. It distracts Edelgard enough to look away from Byleth and down in the direction it comes from. When she turns her head back around, Byleth is already standing up. Her eyes are visibly clear, no tear stains mar her face, and her hands show not a trace of blood.
"That must be Dorothea." Byleth takes in hand the now empty food tray and makes for the door. Edelgard makes note of her stiff movements. "She and Mercedes will be your primary caretakers. Bernadetta and... Bernadetta and someone of my choosing will also keep watch over you at times. I... I'll be around." She freezes just at the door and looks back at Edelgard as if to give her a chance to say something more before she departs. Or perhaps to say something herself.
Neither of them say anything. They share a look between the two of them but far too much goes unsaid for anything to be conveyed. Byleth leaves without another word.