Six hours after the events in part 2:

Edelgard von Hresvelg walked through the silent streets of Fhirdiad. Embers from the fire, snow from the recent storm, and rubble from the explosion were scattered around the empty path she walked, mixed together like one of those horrible alcoholic drinks she swore to never lean on. One foot in front of the other. Right, left. Right, left. She told herself not to think about what had happened here. About what she had done.

And then it came back to her. The screams. Mother. Father. The faces of her siblings, haggard and withering from the treatment Thales and his kind forced on them. Blood, pooling up below her. Was that blood real from the battle, or was she imagining it here? Edelgard closed her eyes, but then she was back in the dungeons of Enbarr. Footsteps… she was on the floor, and when she rose to her knees she heard the sounds of squeaking.

To others, she knew it was an innocuous sound. But she had experienced this waking nightmare before. She knew what was going to happen.

When the jailer stepped up to her, their body collapsed and their clothes deflated. Out of them swarmed hundreds of rats, rushing through the cell bars. An army of red rodent eyes stared at her, and she let out a scream. The rats climbed onto her body, crawling under her clothes. Teeth gnashed and her body lit up with pain.

This isn't real, she thought. This isn't real…

It didn't help. She knew this wasn't real. It didn't stop the visions her mind conjured up from being so vivid. It didn't stop the pain.

And who cared if this wasn't real? Her siblings all suffered fates as bad as this. Because of their crests… all because of the crests…

"Edelgard."

Huh. That voice didn't sound like anything her imagination usually showed her in these moments of panic.

"What do you need, Edelgard?"

She blinked, and then she was back in Fhirdiad. Her hands and knees were on the ground, and her arms were shaking. She reached out a quivering hand towards the axe that dropped next to hurt her.

"It's okay," the voice said. "I'll protect you."

"My… teacher?"

Edelgard rose to her knees and looked up at the person. Squinting in the sunlight, she wanted to say that the figure above her matched Byleth's. But she promised to stop lying to herself years ago.

"Lysithea," Edelgard said. "What happened? I saw the explosion, and-"

"We regrouped outside the city," Lysithea said. "All of us except Petra and the professor. You went back into the city on your own to search for them. You commanded us not to follow you. Do you remember, Edelgard?"

Lysithea's voice was softer than Edelgard remembered. Was this truly the same person who blasted an entire legion of her soldiers back in Derdriu before being surrounded and surrendering? And all this time, Lysithea was so serious and called anyone who cracked a joke childish.

"I… yes, I do remember." It started coming back to her. "I'm sorry, Lysithea."

"You don't need to apologize to me."

Lysithea offered a hand. Edelgard accepted it, and Lysithea pulled her up to a standing position. The girl was stronger than she looked.

"After all," Lysithea said. "We're basically sisters, right?"

Sisters. Not because of blood, not because of a common household, but because Edelgard and Lysithea were the only people in the world to bear two crests. Their white hair was the scar they bore, and the clock ticking in their hearts was counting down until the day a few years from now when their bodies were going to collapse from bearing so much "holy" energy. That was how it went with the Church of Seiros. Get too close to divinity and it left you with burns.

Except for one person, who was able to harness the highest powers for good without letting it consume them. After what happened to her, Edelgard swore to never believe in miracles again. But with Byleth, there was a chance.

"Sisters," Edelgard repeated out loud. "I like the sound of that. Thank you, Lysithea."

"Are you all right?" Lysithea said. "We could head back and recruit the others."

"We should keep going." Edelgard glanced around. "Do you know where we are?"

"The professor and others were fighting Rhea to the north. Dorothea and I got caught by a wall of knights and couldn't blast our way through in time."

North. Edelgard could do that. She continued walking, her legs still shaky.

"Are you angry at me for disobeying your orders?" Lysithea said.

"All I care about right now is finding Byleth and Petra," Edelgard said. "And honestly, I'm glad it's you rather than Hubert shadowing me. I appreciate his drive and hard work, but there are parts of me he doesn't know like you do."

Lysithea powerwalked until she was next to Edelgard, smirking.

"That's what the rest of us decided," Lysithea said. "At least, that I would be better at supporting you, both physically with white magic and emotionally."

Edelgard offered a nod. It was all she had the energy for. After a minute of speechless footsteps through the city of ash and rubble, Lysithea turned to her.

"Is that what you were remembering?" she said. "The past, I mean."

It was a broad question, but Edelgard knew exactly what Lysithea was talking about.

"Yes," Edelgard said. "Does it ever happen to you? Where one moment you're going about your normal business, and then you see something that reminds you of that time and then you're just a little girl at the mercy of those mages again?"

"Not as much anymore." Lysithea looks at the ground. "But in my dreams, the past can catch up to me. I know I can only keep running for so long before it claims me. That's why…"

"That's why you had to be a prodigy," Edelgard said. "Why you needed to leave your mark on the world."

"Nobody else understood," Lysithea says, "Why I couldn't be a child any longer. And it's not their fault. I would never want them to go through what we did. But it was so lonely."

Alone… Edelgard clenched her jaw. She was not going back there again.

"I thought I was done with my past," Edelgard said. "I thought I seized my destiny. We won, Lysithea." She gestured to the rubble around them. "Why does winning look like this?"

"Do you regret your path?"

"No. This destruction tears my heart in two, but deaths from Fódlan staying the way it is are just as terrible as deaths from Fódlan changing. People like Claude tell me I have no compassion, but it feels like I'm the only one who cares about the people who are already suffering from the church."

"The church is full of lies," Lysithea said. "They told us that you forced your father to step down as emperor, and then they sent Marianne to her death. It was only after I left that I understood they were trying to puppeteer us the entire time."

Edelgard gnawed on the inside of her mouth. Did she do the same with Byleth and Petra? After everything they had been through together, Edelgard was prepared to believe that Byleth couldn't be killed by any force in the world. Even through this explosion, she trusted her teacher to be alive. But if that were the case, then why hadn't Byleth returned?

"Leaving can he hard," Edelgard said, "But staying often ends up being worse. You were brave to join us, Lysithea."

Edelgard knew Lysithea's classic response. It was Claude who told her to surrender and assist Edelgard in fighting Those Who Slither in the Dark. It seemed that despite his schemes and games, he did care about his people in the end. Thanks to him, the Alliance was still prospering. This time, though, Lysithea didn't say anything.

"Have you ever fallen in love before?" Edelgard said.

The words were out of her mouth before she could take them back. Maybe they were sisters if Edelgard was letting this embarrassing stuff slip out around her.

"Never had time for it," Lysithea says. "Any particular reason for asking?"

"Well, I don't know how much this is love, exactly, but…"

A smirk. "We all know you and Byleth are infatuated with each other. It's okay, Edelgard."

Really? They all… knew? She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks.

"We all support you," Lysithea says. "Even Hubert. He said that you were in higher spirits when the professor was around and that it rubbed off on the army."

Of course Hubert thought that way. But it was a relief that they thought of her as a person and didn't mind that she had emotions. She could probably think Byleth for sharing so much of the burden of authority. If the Black Eagle Strike force only looked up to Edelgard, she would need to be all business and reassuring confidence. But with Byleth around, it was okay for her to have moments of weakness and let people turn to them at times instead.

Though Byleth always told her that love made people strong rather than weak. It sounded like something out of an idealistic child's tale, but…

"When I'm with them," Edelgard says, "The nightmares go away. The bad memories vanish into the morning like mist. What you saw was the worst it's hit me in months."

"Because Byleth isn't here?"

"Because I don't know if they'll ever be here again."

Edelgard thought about a cold bed without Byleth and shivered. The two of them had started sharing a bed out of necessity. Edelgard didn't have nightmares when she was with people she trusted, and travelling back to the past every night left Edelgard restless and exhausted in the mornings. That wasn't a way to accomplish her tasks as a ruler, so she asked Byleth to share her bed to let her get a good night's sleep. It was obvious in retrospect how they got closer and closer until… well, Edelgard could reminisce once she knew that Byleth was safe.

"We'll find them," Lysithea says. "If Claude was right about anything, it was how strong Byleth is. Besides… they seemed to know this was coming."

"The explosion? How?"

Lysithea shook her head. "It made sense to Claude. They used words I don't understand. Have you ever heard of a 'nuclear' weapon before?"

So Byleth had even more knowledge and secrets. Once, the mystery was part of what made Byleth so intriguing. Now, Edelgard wished Byleth would open up and tell her everything. She was dedicated to Byleth, and their secrets couldn't be harder to handle than the ones Edelgard spilled on Byleth.

"Edelgard." Lysithea's voice shook. "Is that…"

Edelgard followed her finger to a wyvern standing in the street. Petra's wyvern. Edelgard ran up to see the reptile nudging a body with her snout. Nonono. This couldn't mean-

She took a deep breath. Edelgard von Hresvelg was not going to let denial and difficult truths rule her. Not after she swore to bring permanent peace to Fódlan and eliminate the knives and blood magic in the dark that the church was refusing to bring to light. She had known her path was going to be stained with blood. So she looked, and she saw exactly what she expected.

Petra's body lying motionless on the ground, her eyes glazed over. Her face was still intact, but the rest of her body looked bad. Edelgard turned away.

"She died because of me," Edelgard said. "I'll retrieve her body after we're done."

"She made her own choices," Lysithea said. "We all did."

This wasn't supposed to happen. Petra was with Byleth. She was supposed to be the safest one. It shouldn't have ended like this, with her dying a thousand miles away from home. Edelgard promised that she was going to set Petra and Brigid both free from the Empire's grasp. Now Petra wasn't going to see the sun rise over her liberated home.

All the others had to go through this, Edelgard reminded herself. Dimitri and Claude lost friends as well. Make her death worth it by building the world we promised.

It was a daunting task, but one that Edelgard was devoted to nonetheless. She expected Lysithea to be in the middle of a breakdown when she turned back, but the young mage looked calm and collected. Edelgard reminded herself how many bodies Lysithea must have seen over the course of this war. Of how many bodies she must have created from living people. Her and Edelgard both.

In the quiet, she could hear sounds of talking ahead. Byleth? Edelgard rushed into a sprint. Her muscles were tense and stiff from the fight, and she nearly tripped over her own legs. She kept running and turned a corner to see a crater in the ground, which must have been left by the explosion. And standing inside were Cornelia and Edelgard's uncle Arundel. But Arundel wasn't his real name.

"Thales." The word came out as a hiss before Edelgard could stop it.

He turned to face her. And in his arms was an unconscious, slumped-over Byleth. Parts of their skin were charred, and they looked like they were on the verge of death. If they weren't dead already.

But no. That couldn't be. Edelgard promised not to look away from hard truths, but Byleth defied the truth. They weren't capable of going down like this. Something deep in Edelgard's bones told her that, and she was right about that feeling the first time when Byleth went missing for five years. Seeing their body now, Edelgard was absolutely certain that Byleth was still alive.

"Well, my dear niece," Thales said. "How have you been?"

"Were you the one who caused those explosions?"

A too-casual shrug. "Now, that doesn't matter much, does it?"

"It was them," Lysithea's voice comes from behind. "Byleth said so themselves. It was like they knew the explosion was going to happen."

And yet Byleth still ran towards the flame. They must have been trying to save whoever they could. That was one of the reasons Edelgard loved them so much. War revealed people's true colors, and Byleth's were a sparkling rainbow. They weren't the type to look away from what was inconvenient, whether that be gore or the truth, yet they didn't let it consume them. They fought to protect every life they could even as they waged war.

They really were the better half of Edelgard.

"Do I know you, child?" Thales said, narrowing his eyes at Lysithea.

She bristled, but didn't explode at the comment. Thank goodness.

"You know may not know me," Lysithea said, "But your kind does. Look at the color you drained from my hair if you want a clue."

"Ah, so you're the Ordelia child who lived. You're welcome for the power we bestowed you, by the way. To think that we were nice enough to not even charge."

Edelgard needed to take control of the conversation before Lysithea did something she was going to regret.

"I see that you have one of mine over there, uncle," she said. "I'm going to request them back."

She didn't think she could fool him into believing that Edelgard only saw Byleth as a talented general, but it was worth a shot.

"This person?" Thales said. "You want this shabby excuse for a vessel?"

Vessel? Edelgard filed that away for later.

"They look dead to me, uncle. I just want to make sure they get a proper burial. I bet they don't even have a pulse."

Byleth never had a pulse. That was one aspect that Edelgard didn't believe until they shared a bed together and their bodies were pressed against each other. Byleth was warm and felt like the home Edelgard never had, but when Edelgard pressed her hands to their chest or her fingers against their neck arteries she didn't feel a heartbeat. Byleth told her that for as long as they could remember, they never had a pulse. They lost blood like normal when wounded, but it didn't flow through their body like it would for a normal person. Jeralt acted like it was normal, and they didn't know what to make of it when they realized that nobody else in the world shared their condition. Edelgard never minded. A heartbeat was something that came and went, but when Byleth wrapped their arms around her, she didn't have to feel their life force recede for even a moment. It only made sense, after all, that Byleth would transcend the rules others lived by.

"You are in no place to make demands of us," Cornelia said. "We should grind their body to sludge and use it as fertilizer for the Agarthans."

Edelgard narrowed her eyes. If Thales and his kind lacked natural fertilizers, it could tell her something about where their hideout was.

"Of course we understand that your teacher has sentimental value to you," Thales said. "But we are looking for something in exchange." He strokes his chin. "How about this? We will return what is yours if you return what is ours. We want Aymr back."

Edelgard looked down at the axe in her hands. She was born with the minor Crest of Seiros, and later had the Crest of Flames implanted in her. Crests allowed people to link with specific relics and unlock their full potential, like Catherine and her blade Thunderbrand. But the Crest of Seiros didn't correspond to any natural relic weapon. In fact, none of the crests from the saints were associated with a relic. To give Edelgard an edge, Thales and the others crafted her a pseudo-relic weapon made from a material called Agarthium that she had never seen used outside of Those Who Slither in the Dark. The weapon enabled her to use the Raging Storm combat art to speed up her body after unleashing an attack, allowing her to either continue the assault or retreat at inhuman speeds. It was integral to many of her military victories.

But Byleth meant more.

"That's acceptable," Edelgard said. "It's difficult to repair this axe without the materials you used, so I believe it will be more useful in your hands."

Thales turned to Cornelia. "Looks like I was right. There's more to this professor than we realized."

Edelgard's heart skipped a beat. He couldn't have possibly figured out-

"If the professor means so much to you," Cornelia says, "There must be a reason. More potent than Aymr… we will study them well indeed."

Cornelia licked her lips, which looked like it was intended to be creepy. Edelgard drew Aymr and stepped forward, but Thales holding a sphere of dark magic over Byleth's unconscious head stopped her in her tracks.

"Ah, so you do think that they are alive," Thales said. "Even though, as you said, they have no heartbeat. Interesting. Well, this is actually your lucky day, my niece. We implanted the Crest of Flames in you for a reason, but now you are no longer needed."

They had a reason for choosing the Crest of Flames specifically?

"You will tell me what you are going to be using my teacher for," Edelgard said.

"We will do no such thing," Thales said. "Thank you for the useful information, Edelgard. Now, let us make ourselves scarce, Cornelia."

The dark orb above Byleth's head vanished, and Thales disappeared with a snap, taking Byleth with him. Edelgard let out a growl and charged at Cornelia, who gave her a patronizing smile before disappearing herself. Edelgard panted, her chest heaving in anger as she looked down at the spot where Byleth used to be. Then came a sensation that she barely recognized. An urge to sink to her knees and sob.

No. Edelgard von Hresvelg, the Adrestian Emperor, was not going to cry.

"We'll get them back."

Edelgard whirled around to see Lysithea approaching her. She wore a comforting smile, but Edelgard could see the cracks in it. Lysithea was worried about Byleth too.

"Byleth spared my life," Lysithea said, "And it sounds like they helped you through some tough times. Now it's our turn to be there for them."

"Of course. You're right."

"The others are worried about you," Lysithea said.

The unspoken words rang louder than her speech, and she was right. There was nothing left for Edelgard to do in Fhirdiad. This city was ruined. Because of Rhea. Because of Thales. Because of her. But Rhea and Thales were going to show their true sides eventually and sink to this level. Taking them out now was the best way to prevent them from hurting all the people they were taking aim at.

She wasn't lying to herself about that, right?

Edelgard took a deep breath and turned away from the spot where Byleth was taken from her. She swore that she was going to put Aymr through Thales' skull. She swore that she was going to get Byleth back, and that the two of them could have the ending they deserved. Byleth started out as Rhea's pawn and Edelgard was Thales' experiment, and both of them were going to escape the bounds of authority and carving their own path in life. She swore to prove that children forced to witness unspeakable violence could get a happily ever after ending too.

And once she got Byleth back, she swore that her first words to them were going to be what she should have said to them before now.

"I love you," she whispered.

Saying it out loud, she could almost imagine that it was real, and that Byleth was next to her, waiting to witness the first sunrise over a unified Fódlan in centuries.

Wait but Edelgard's the bad guy in this story, right?

Hope everyone's doing well! :D In a few days I'll be trying to write my own novel (way scarier than fanfic for some reason... I don't feel prepared!). I might get one more interlude up after before taking that monthlong break. We'll see. If I decide to write the novel all the way through, I might be gone longer than a month. But I'm dedicated to finishing this fic sooner or later.

Notes:

-Edelgard's trauma around rats comes up in the Crimson Flower route. Actually, it's kinda played off for cuteness which I find weird but clearly the 3H writers didn't ask me.

-Similarly, her bad nightmares about her time as the Slithers' test subject are canon, and Byleth stumbles in on one in their C+ support with Edelgard.