The whole incident had happened so quickly that Bernadetta hadn't had enough time to realize she was in any sort of danger until she was on her back on the floor, her head throbbing and two men standing over her, both looking shocked (and in one's case, angered) at what had happened. "Whoa, didn't expect you to come out of your room anytime soon," Sylvain admitted with a shaky laugh, his eyes glancing towards the man next to him for a second before he was looking back down at Bernie, the wooden sword he'd slammed into her with discarded and sliding across the floor. "You just kind of snuck out of there, didn't you?"

"Don't attempt to put the blame for this on her," Felix muttered, not bothering to see how his words landed in his friend's ears before he was crouching down, offering the fallen woman a hand. "I deeply apologize for his buffoonery; you know how Sylvain can get when he's given a chance to spar with someone. Complete disregard for everyone and everything else that may be present."

"That's not true, first of all, and secondly, you're just pushing this onto me when you're just as guilty as I am!" Sylvain's voice had gotten louder as he tried to point out the flaw in what Felix had said, and the raised volume was enough to make Bernie's head ache more than it did from hitting the stone floor. "It was your idea to have the sparring match in here in the first place, you can't act like you had nothing to do with it."

"I will admit that I may have made that suggestion, but you were the one wielding your weapon like it was real, and you were the one who attacked someone who was otherwise completely uninvolved." Having had to grab Bernie's hand for himself after she just stared at him in a daze, Felix was getting her back to her feet, watching as she didn't seem to be able to see straight. "Are you going to be fine, Bernadetta? Do we need to call for someone? I know of someone who would make for a fine messenger."

She pressed her eyes closed, her world made up of stars and spirals behind her eyelids, and when she reopened them she felt like she was seeing even less straight than she was before. "I-I'll be fine," she assured him, trying not to make it obvious that she was not physically well in the slightest after the fall. "My head hurts a bit and I think it'd be best if I just…laid down for a while. Can…can I do that? Please?"

"I'm fairly certain you shouldn't lay down with a head injury, but I am not incredibly knowledgeable with medical things so I suppose I cannot tell you no." Felix's hand gripped hers tighter, followed with what sounded like something slicing through the air, followed by Sylvain yelping out in pain. "You go get someone anyway, as you're the one who knocked her down in the first place. She'll be in her room, like always, for whenever you return."

There was a lot of grumbling as Sylvain gave in to following along with the demand, and as he was leaving they were going back into the bedroom they were right in front of, Bernie not even fully comprehending where she was despite being incredibly familiar with the room she'd been calling home as of late. Her new home in Faerghus felt much warmer than her previous one had, even if the climate chilled her to the bone every time she so much as looked outside; that sense of warmth was absent as Felix led her to the bedside, trying to coerce her to lay down without saying a word. She felt like she was supposed to rebel against the silent demand, but something inside her urged her to go along with it, and go along with it she did; soon she was curled up on top of her blankets and quilts, Felix trying to pull them out from underneath her to wrap her in them. The last thing she solidly remembered before her eyes closed was him grumbling something about how difficult the situation was, but she couldn't find the energy to ask him if there was anything she could do to help before she was drifting off through pounding waves of pain.

When her eyes opened next she was not in her bedroom at all, nor was she anywhere she'd seen before in her life, and it was in that moment that Bernie knew she was dreaming to some extent. The forest she found herself in was unlike anything she'd ever seen in Fódlan, especially not anywhere close to where she now called home, and yet she didn't feel the overpowering need to hide herself away. In fact, she felt free to explore as she pleased, walking down a slightly-trodden path with wonder in her eyes as she looked at the towering trees, the leaves rustling as birds came and went. "This is amazing," she remarked, reaching out and touching the rough bark on one gnarled tree along the path, feeling it as if it were real. "I never knew I could dream so vividly!"

She giggled as she realized she could feel the grasses that made up the path tickling her legs, the sensation so lifelike that she would have thought it were some critter crawling on her if she didn't look down and see the grass for herself. Her soul felt so much at peace that she didn't ever want to leave the dream forest for anything. But the path winded on, and soon she was coming up to a clearing, the only notable thing visible within it a cottage that looked like it had seen much better days in its life. The stones making its walls were chipped and sliced, a training dummy decapitated and shredded near its front door, and yet, even with the homely and rustic look Bernie felt compelled to take a closer look.

"I-I'll just sneak a peek and be back on my way through the forest," she assured herself, picking up her pace as she ran towards the ajar front door. There didn't seem to be anyone around, she certainly didn't hear anyone talking or moving around inside, and with the door opened already she figured it couldn't hurt too much if she went in to get a better look. Right away she could tell that she was meant to do exactly that, as the door swung open as she made her final approach, but there was no breeze or person around to cause it to happen.

That did give her a bit of a shock, but after she'd calmed herself down and steadied her heartbeat the best she could, she stepped inside the waiting house, hoping that she'd find some direction for where she needed to go next and be right on her way. The door slammed closed behind her once she'd entered, and she gasped, trying to let herself back out—but the damage was already done and it seemed to be jammed, or at least locked from the outside. "That's weird, a door that you can't open while indoors, and not because I locked it on myself. I…hope that's not a sign that this was a huge mistake."

She gave the door a hopeful push, finding that it wasn't going to budge, before turning to explore the house for somewhere to hide until she could leave. The main room seemed to be what she would consider normal for a house in such a location, filled with weapons and furniture made of animal furs that would have easily been hunted in the woods. There seemed to be three of everything, three chairs, three small tables, three hooks on the wall for hanging jackets. "Whoever lives here better be kind, or else that's the end for poor Bernie!" she squeaked, taking a closer look at the biggest of the three chairs to find that it was well-worn from top to bottom, implying that whoever usually sat in it was big enough to fill all its space. From there she looked at the medium-sized chair, which was rather plain aside from the sewn-in pocket on the side that was filled with papers covered in pictures; and finally, she looked at the smallest chair, which wasn't much smaller than the previous one but looked to be a lot sharper and dangerous than the two it was next to.

Convincing herself that she was in the home of people who would, under every circumstance imaginable, murder her for trespassing on their property, Bernie's goal became to quickly find a safe place to keep herself completely hidden from the residents, rather than just to hang out there until she was able to escape. Her feet carrying her as fast as they could, she ran into the bedroom of the house, finding three beds in varying sizes, much like the chairs in the other room. The largest bed was neatly-made, with no wrinkles in the blanket that covered it, and after peeking underneath it she found that it was completely solid down to the floor, making hiding underneath it impossible. The second bed was in not quite as nice of a state as the first one, but before Bernie could look underneath it she noticed that the blankets looked rather stiff and she couldn't fathom touching them. That meant that her last hope in the room was the third bed, which had the blankets thrown in a giant heap, as well as a sword draped across the pillows.

"Can't go under it," she said as she noticed that it was completely solid as well, "but who'll notice if I'm in those blankets? I can just hide there until the coast is clear, and then it's freedom for me!" Thinking about how it was funny that the script was flipped, and that she was trying to get out of a place for once in her life, Bernadetta carefully hid herself in the pile of blankets, feeling their warmth and taking in their oddly-familiar scent as she tried to make it look non-obvious that she was hiding among them.

She must've lost all track of time while in there, the coziness too much to ignore, because the next thing she remembered, she felt toasty and warm, her body covered in sweat, and she could hear the unmistakable sounds of voices in the rest of the house. "I'm telling you, if the door was locked, that means we've got a visitor," one male voice told whoever he was with, striking Bernie's ears as a voice she should remember but she couldn't place a face to. "I really hope it's a lady, it's been a long while since we had one of those come around."

"Think with your head and not other parts for once, will you?" a second voice replied, sounding unamused but even more familiar to Bernie, as if the smell that she was wrapped in was connected to it somehow. "If someone's in here, that means we've got a rat to root out, and I'm sure we could use the weapon practice. Shall we search?"

Feeling the hair on her arms and neck bristling at the mention of searching for whoever was in their home, Bernie knew that her attempt at hiding until she could escape safely had backfired, and that she would've been better off to have stayed in plain sight until they had returned home. There was more conversation happening between the two men, but their words sounded jumbled and unintelligible to her ears as she was internally panicking, berating herself for what she'd chosen to do. She was just about to tell herself that no one would miss her too much when she inevitably never made it home when she heard people enter the bedroom, the breathing of three distinct people present.

"They are not in my bed," the third voice said, stern and steady. "If they were, the blankets would be askew and they are not, as you can see."

"Yeah, yeah, they're not in mine either," the initial voice pointed out with a heaving sigh. "Which is kind of sad, if they're an attractive lady I'd be impressed to see her laying in my bed of all places. What about you, Felix? Is she in your bed?"

Bernie could feel hands on the blankets she'd so carefully wrapped herself up in, shaking them and unwrapping them to reveal what was hidden inside; the moment a calloused hand touched her arm she couldn't help but scream and her revealing herself earned three loud announcements of finding who they were looking for. "It seems the rat called my bed home after all," Felix muttered, undoing the blankets until Bernie's entire body, curled up in the fetal position, was exposed for all to see. "What a surprise. Sylvain, grab me my sword so I can do the honors."

"Whoa there, no can do, buddy. You're not killing her, she's got to have some reason for why she's here in your bed." Sylvain seemed insistent on getting some interrogation in, but Bernadetta would have much rather preferred death by Felix's blade than she would have talking to him. Yet, when she uncovered her head from where she'd been protecting it with her arms, she looked at the glaring man standing over her and her whole body felt like it was melting, an unexplainable sensation given the situation. She should have been trembling with fear, not feeling like she was somewhere that she actually wanted to be.

Before she had a chance to really consider why she felt like she did, the stern voice had something to present to them all: "I have an idea. Felix, you let the woman live, at least long enough for her to explain why she is in your bed. Sylvain, you keep yourself away from her long enough to not make her resent me for not letting Felix kill her. As for me, I shall prepare her a meal for her to explain herself over." He seemed to be the boss of the other two, based on how they both reluctantly went along with what he asked of them, and soon enough she was sitting on a log at their dinner table, there only being a chair for each of the men there to begin with.

"So, what's a pretty lady like yourself doing this deep in the Faerghus Woods?" the red-haired one named Sylvain asked, his hands curled up under his chin as he leaned in towards Bernie, her shrinking backwards to get away from him. "Last time we had any visitors that weren't friends of ours, ol' Felix scared them off with just a look. Kinda surprising you've stuck around this long."

She opened her mouth to speak but she was too terrified to say anything, her explanation catching deep in her throat. "Look, you're coming on to her too strong, do what Dedue said for once in your life and let the woman breathe." Felix, with his dark hair messily tied back out of his face, was side-eyeing Sylvain and not actually paying any attention to what expression Bernie was wearing. "It's obvious she's here as a spy from the Empire, and that means we're meant to kill her to keep the rest of the country safe."

"A girl like that acting as a spy? I doubt it, she's too cute to be asked to do much." The conversation felt like it was something Bernie should have been understanding, but there was too much disconnect from where she was compared to where she knew she belonged. It felt like her dream world—which she was still certain she was in—was pulling things from real life, but she couldn't make sense of what was real and what was fabricated. "Oh, don't look so concerned there, miss. What's your name? That should be a good place to start."

"M-my name?" Bernie seemed surprised to be asked that question, even though it made perfect sense, given that she was a stranger in their home. "W-why do you need to know that? Are you going to use it against me?" The men assured her that her fear wouldn't be realized and that it was a harmless question and she relaxed a little, but still hesitated on going through with introducing herself. "My n-name is Bernadetta. I didn't mean to get stuck in here, it was just that…your door…trapped me inside! Please don't hurt me!"

Sylvain leaned in even closer to her and gave her a wink. "Wouldn't dream of it, Bernadetta. You're safe here, as long as me and Dedue are around for you. Get stuck here alone with Felix and that's a different story."

"Stop scaring her," Dedue cut in, his voice sounding equally friendly and scolding. "She must have a reason for being here and telling her that Felix would harm her is no way to get it out of her."

"Right, right, let me just…get on that." Why Sylvain was the one in charge of interrogation, no one was going to explain, but he went right along with what was expected of him and asked Bernie a second time why she was in the woods. With a lack of response because she wasn't quite sure herself, he gave it a third attempt, and a fourth, and just kept on trying in different ways until he was interrupted by Felix giving an exasperated sigh. "What's that for? I'm just doing what was asked of me."

Shaking his head, Felix chose to point out the obvious, motioning with a single hand towards the cowering girl who'd buried her head under her arms against the table somewhere in the middle of the incessant questioning. "She isn't going to respond to you, you moron. Clearly she has no desire to speak to any of us, so let's just get on with getting rid of her."

"Not until she gets a meal." Setting down three bowls at the table, one for each of the normal residents, Dedue took a seat and looked across at his men. "We only have the dishes for ourselves, so she will have to share with one of us. Unfortunately that means she must taste our meals to find one to her liking, but we will manage."

Bringing her head up from where she'd hidden it, Bernie didn't like the sound of what had just been said but when she saw the three men all staring at her, concern in one pair of eyes, flirting in another, and disdain in the third, she was even less thrilled to have to take part. The only thing that drove her to actually grab a spoon and take a bite of the bowl closest to her (which was Sylvain's, based on how he seemed eager to share it with her) was the fact that she didn't want to keep them waiting before they could eat. Sylvain's meal was rather salty, and it dried her mouth out to taste it, something that became obvious with how she puckered her lips after swallowing. "Aw, guess you aren't a fan of salty dishes," he lamented, taking his spoon from her and taking a bite of his own meal, smacking his lips once he'd enjoyed it. "Compliments to the chef, it's delicious as always."

"I'll accept the kind words, but only once our guest has dined." Next came Dedue's own bowl, which he carefully passed over to her before sliding his spoon with it, and when she tasted it she felt it was better than what she'd tried before, but it felt much heartier and too heavy for her liking. She couldn't help but take forever having to chew on it before swallowing, something that Dedue noticed and apologized for.

That left Felix's meal for her to try, and he seemed apathetic to let her get her hands on it to begin with. "What, she's going to hate it as well and then she's going to starve, why should we waste our time on this song and dance?" he complained, before spooning her out a bite and passing only that much to her. It hadn't even hit her lips before she'd noticed that it smelled more appealing than either of the others had, and tasting it told her that she enjoyed whatever he was eating much more than his friends' dishes. That caught him by surprise, even as she meekly asked him for another bite.

"Ha, your bed, your dinner, it seems that Bernadetta here really has a thing for you, Felix," Sylvain said between bites of his food, while Felix was forced to share with the girl. "I can hear the wedding bells now, should we call for someone to come officiate? I'm sure I can get someone out here on short notice."

"N-no, that's not necessary!" both Bernie and Felix stammered at the same time, going red as they looked at each other and noticed what they had done. She felt so at home speaking in time with him that the mere idea was enough to pull her out of her dream world and back into the real one, her head pounding and her heart racing as she sat up in her bed, completely alone in the room like she was so accustomed to.

The unofficial diagnosis for what was wrong with her was that she'd sustained some sort of head injury, which anyone could have told them but the "healer" that (the real, not the fantasy) Sylvain had managed to find was a veterinarian, not anyone trained to work with people. There wasn't anything suggested for how to handle treating it, the poor woman that had gotten dragged in constantly talking about how she never dealt with that sort of thing in her animal patients, and after she was sent away and the bedroom was mostly empty Bernie felt like it was time to tell Felix what had happened when she'd dozed off.

"It was like I was in a whole different world," she explained, thinking about how vivid and real the dream had been, "and you were there, and so was Sylvain, but I didn't know you and you didn't know me and I…I still ended up being in love with you." She felt her face heating up at the admittance of feelings, but it was not unheard of for her to express those things with him in private, given that they were loosely engaged—the only thing stopping them from being official being that neither of them wanted to discuss it in public. "I-I feel weird telling you this, when you probably don't care, and I'm so sorry for wasting your time!"'

"No, Bernadetta, Sylvain bringing in some woman who knows nothing of humans is wasting my time. You telling me that you dreamt of falling in love with me, that's not wasting as much time as you'd think." It was clear that Felix was tired, the stress of watching the woman he cared for getting injured taking a toll on him, but he was doing his best not to sound unamused or annoyed with what she was saying. "Go on, I'm certain there's more to this than you've told me."

She bit down on her lip, hanging her head as she thought through the pros and cons to telling Felix more about the strange dream she'd had. But he was unrelenting on trying to convince her, as every time she looked up he was staring back at her with those tired, yet fierce eyes. "Okay, okay!" she chirped, trying not to sound like she was being murdered to spit her words out. "But you've got to promise that you're not gonna listen and decide that Bernie's too much for you to handle, got it?"

"Forceful, are we? I suppose I can give you that much."

His stare softened as much as a stare from Felix really could, and that was when she knew that she was safe to tell him, in as much detail as she could manage, about the dream forest and the house she'd stumbled into. With every sentence she grew slightly more confident in her retell, and his reaction turned from doing it solely out of love to being genuinely interested in how things turned out. "And then, after I ate your food, that was when I woke up," she finished after going through every minor detail she could remember, the images oddly vivid in her head even after being awake so long. "So now we're back to real time, and can I stop talking now?"

"Certainly. However, I must ask, are you planning on doing anything with this tale you've just spun for me?" The curiosity in Felix's voice was unusual, and it caught her so off-guard that she yelped and nearly threw herself backwards into the wall, which would have only made matters worse. "Forget I asked anything about it then, if you choose to act like that. I was merely thinking that it would be interesting to look back on your injury-related fantasies when you're well again."

"You…want me to write this down? So I can read it later?" Bernie hadn't really thought about wanting to keep the story anywhere that she could access it, but she could understand Felix's point about wanting to look back on it. Perhaps there was a part of her brain that was being used now that she'd sustained a head injury, and she needed to take advantage of it while she could. "That sounds doable, but, um…you might need me to bring me something new to write it in. Just, you know, not any of my other books, thanks! I don't want you seeing any of my stories…"

Felix cracked the tiniest of smiles at her worry about him reading something she'd written without his direction. "I'll see what I can find for you," he said, giving her a gentle touch on the knee before heading out of the room, coming back minutes later with what looked like a brand-new book and a collection of pens for her to use. "What are the odds that I have something like this laying around? My intention was to give them to you as a gift in the future, but the circumstances right now seem more fitting."

"These are amazing, thank you so much!" The cover of the book was a faded blue, with golden trim that reflected the light in the room, and when she cracked it open she found each page to be crisp and clearly lined, to make writing easier. The pens were just as fancy, all engraved with a tiny B at the top to show that they were hers, and after situating herself in the bed she was right to work on her book, keeping all ink off of the covers and keeping her head from hurting too much as she focused on forming the words. Felix hung around for a while before deciding to find something else to do while she worked, claiming that he didn't want to disrupt her creative process, but she knew better; in fact, within minutes of him leaving she could hear him and Sylvain outside the room, having another mock battle as if nothing had happened.

As much as Bernadetta loved writing her own stories, she'd never had the words come as easy to her as she did there in that bedroom, rewriting her dream so that the world could someday read it. Usually she was so afraid of people seeing her writing, but this time she felt like it was something that needed to be shared, her big break in the literary world, and she wanted to make sure that it was perfect. That meant adding details here and there, describing the house in the woods more, making the three men who lived there feel like they had more importance in the story. It felt strange writing them all with their actual names, but she was in no place to come up with new names for any of them, and that was something she could always change when she prepared to share it with the world.

Her appetite for writing was so great, it overrode any appetite she had for actual food and she never once felt like she needed to stop for a meal as she wrote and wrote, her story spanning pages in her most careful lettering. She finished with a proper ending, not just the one her dream had ended with, and then she waited for Felix to come back to show him what she'd accomplished in that day. He returned to her eventually, and was fine with reading the book to check what she'd written against what she'd said, and even though he was typically stoic he seemed enthralled with the story up until the end.

"It's a…bit strange to read you writing about me in such a way, but it is what it is," he told her after he'd finished, closing the book carefully as to not crease any pages on accident. "But a solid ending, much better than what you'd originally shared. What comes next, do you think? Another chapter in the story, or something else?"

"I-I don't know," she replied, feeling like expectations were being hoist upon her shoulders now that her story had been written. "What I do know is that my head's hurting again, so maybe I should…fall asleep and see what happens."

He nodded, seeing where she was going with that thought. "If another dream comes to you, please do not hesitate in writing it down. I am curious about what you may imagine next, although if it's anything like this in terms of content I may worry slightly about you. How could you ever imagine that Sylvain and I could live under the same roof by choice?"

"That's something you have to take up with my brain, not me." Hearing Felix take offense to that part only made Bernie feel like she'd done something right in having that dream to begin with, but she had no idea that over the coming days, she'd be putting them all into much more bizarre situations without any way to control what was happening. All she knew in that moment was that her head was hurting and that she needed to fall back to sleep, and that whatever happened when she closed her eyes was not her doing.

A/N: this is my first 3H fic that I am posting and I am so excited to see where it goes? I have a few fairy tales I'm gonna be rewriting as Bernie's dreams and you'll just have to see who gets what role in them~