Chapter Text
Sitting at a dinner table was weird, wasn’t it?
Edelgard couldn’t recall the last time she’d done it. It had to have been before Agartha, she’d spent weeks in her room after that, afraid to be out in the open where someone could snatch her up and drag her back. During her High School days, her extra curricular activities kept her away from home and made it so she ate most of her dinners either in her car or on the bench in front of the school. And then, of course, she’d never bothered with a table in her dorms or apartments at university. Maybe she’d simply forgotten how to use one?
So it was odd that she now found herself in a wooden chair before a circular table inside of the Eisner’s RV, watching as Jeralt plated the pork chops he’d pulled from the oven. She hadn’t even known RVs could have ovens, really.
“Need help?” Byleth asked. She was sitting across from Edelgard, her hands folded on the table and her eyes fixed on the tiny kitchen area and the disproportionately large man who was occupying it. He waved her away.
“Nah, I got it, kid. You can clean up when we’re done if you’d like.”
Soon Jeralt came stomping over, three plates of sizzling meat in his hands. He carefully set one in front of Edelgard before distributing the other to his daughter and dropping the last at an empty seat. He reached under the table, and Edelgard could hear the click of a plastic latch and the rustling of ice before he held a dripping silver can in front of her.
“Do you like beer, Edelgard?”
“I do.” she lied. She actually wasn’t a fan, but she certainly wasn’t going to impose on Jeralt’s hospitality any more than she already had. She took the can and cracked it open, watching as Jeralt took his seat.
“I cannot thank you two enough.” Edelgard said, glancing at both Eisners. “I do not mean to impose on your home and your mealtime.”
Jeralt scoffed. “You’re fine, kid. We weren’t going to leave you out there or let you go hungry.”
Byleth nodded, but said nothing, although her gaze didn’t leave Edelgard.
“I promise you, this won’t happen again.” Edelgard fought back the shame pushing at her face. “Finding myself in that sort of position is not something I do often.” She was powerless. Alone and powerless. She swore she’d never be powerless again.
If Jeralt had a retort, he seemed to hold it back, simply spearing one of the porkchops on his plate with his fork and raising it up, beginning to eat. Byleth mimicked the motion, and Edelgard felt slightly out of place cutting her meat into pieces with a knife and fork. It tasted wonderful, once she got around to eating it. The pork was tender, there was a light and tangy garlic flavor seemingly cooked into every bite, and it was seasoned just enough to be tasteful but not overpowering. The fact that it was the first food that hadn’t come from a wrapper Edelgard had eaten in about a week certainly didn’t hurt matters.
“Sorry if the place is a bit more of a mess than you’re used to.” Jeralt muttered, between gnawing bites. “I washed the whole thing down, but we took a little road trip last month to the Greenwoods. It might still smell like pine needles and dirt.”
“I like that smell.” Byleth stated.
“It’s quite alright.” A curious smile spread across Edelgard’s face. “Did you spend all that time in the woods?”
Jeralt nodded. “Yeah, we try and get out every few months. Byleth and I are travelling so often that it helps to just get away from things for a while, y’know?” Byleth’s face lit up as Jeralt spoke, nodding deeply with a chunk of porkchop in her mouth. Edelgard took a sip of the beer, instantly regretting the way it ran bitterly across her tongue. She and Dorothea had once spent most of an evening trying every bit of alcohol the actress could scrounge up in an attempt to find something Edelgard would like, but came up empty. Or at least, Edelgard thought they did, they both may have been too tipsy to actually notice.
“Enough about us, though.” Jeralt had finished his first porkchop, and he was pointing the cleaned fork in Edelgard’s direction. “What are you up to, Edelgard?”
“Oh!” She had assumed this was coming. It would have been rude to have asked so many questions of the Eisners and not expected any in return. “I’m a graduate student at the university. I teach some of the undergrad chemistry classes.”
“Interesting.” Jeralt mused. Byleth quirked her head.
“Are you going to be teaching for a living?” she asked, and Edelgard wished to any higher power out there that she could say yes.
“No.” slithered from her mouth, burning on the way out. “I’ve actually had an offer made for me upon graduation. There’s a chemical supplier that wants me as a research director.”
“Huh. Well, I’m afraid I don’t know much about that sort of thing, but it sounds like a pretty nice gig.” Jeralt returned the fork to his plate, beginning to devour his second porkchop. “Whatever makes you happy, kid.”
Edelgard forced a smile on, as she so often had, and nodded at Jeralt, silently relieved that this line of questioning seemed to have passed. “I’m quite happy, thank you.” When she caught Byleth’s eye, she noticed the slight frown on the woman’s face and the sadness in her wide eyes, and immediately realized something potentially horrifying.
She wasn’t fooling her.
The rest of the dinner passed without incident. They made small talk around the table, touching lightly on the weather, the quality of the dormitories, Byleth and Jeralt’s wilderness trips, and Jeralt’s old friendship with Alois the groundskeeper. None of these topics were dangerous, so Edelgard didn’t mind talking about them, letting it take her mind off of the fear building in her heart that Byleth would somehow learn her secret. At least, it felt like fear.
By the time Edelgard finished the last bite of her meal, Jeralt and Byleth had clearly been done for a while. Byleth rose quickly, rubbing a napkin between her hands. “I’ll start putting things away.” she said, beginning to gather up the plates. Jeralt nodded at his daughter before glancing at Edelgard, pointing towards the back of the RV’s main room.
“We put your bag over there. Want to make sure everything’s still in it?”
Concerned about her students’ papers, Edelgard got up and walked to the rear wall. Her tote bag had been laid out on an old leather couch that seemed to be riveted to the floor, appearing to be closed up but otherwise mostly untouched. She didn’t want to worry about the Eisners taking anything, they were lovely people, but a bit of paranoid fear did admittedly poke at the back of her mind, and she hated herself for it. Of course, as she opened the bag and began to rifle through it, everything was present. There was her phone, the binder she kept her research for Hanneman in, the stack of halfway-graded student papers, and of course, her favorite deckbox, emblazoned with the plush black eagle. As she opened it to check on her cards, (some of them were quite valuable by now!) she was surprised by a sudden chuckle from Jeralt.
“Oh, yeah, Byleth told me you played Fire Emblem.” She hadn’t even noticed that Jeralt had followed her over until she saw him there, his arms crossed and a smile on his face. “She mentioned you were pretty damn good, too.”
Edelgard smiled. “I certainly hope so. I’ve put very much effort into it.”
Jeralt looked over his shoulder, Edelgard following his gaze. Byleth had gathered up the plates and silverware and was beginning to hand-wash them in the sink, along with a sizable stack of other bits of cookery that had to have been remnants from earlier meals. “Looks like Byleth’s gonna be busy for a while. Care to humor an old man with a game?”
While Edelgard hated to continue abuse the Eisner’s hospitality, “Edelgard” wasn’t always the one making that choice. No, of course, when it came to Fire Emblem, she was the Emperor.
And the Emperor never passed up a challenge.
Jeralt played Fire Emblem like he was trying to break down a brick wall with a wooden stick. His Lord was Greil, Heroic Exemplar, and his entire deck seemed to be focused around beating down his opponents with pure overwhelming force.
“Elbert and Lorenz!” he crowed, setting down a pair of cards featuring a redheaded nobleman and an old general with an eyepatch. He immediately rushed them towards Edelgard’s Lord, already putting him in a fair amount of danger. It was the second turn of the game.
As Edelgard looked over the cards in her hand, trying to decide if she should weaken the newly present units with a barrage of Meteor fire or play it safe by deploying Hardin to protect Emperor Arvis, Jeralt made small talk.
“Byleth didn’t scare you when you woke up, did she?”
Edelgard’s eyebrow quirked as she gently slid Hardin onto the table.
“No, not at all.”
Chuckling, Jeralt pulled his defeated warriors back, neither having made much of a dent in Hardin’s stellar defenses.
“That’s good. Heh. When she was younger she used to wake up before I did and just wait for me to get up. Can’t tell you how many times the first thing I saw in the morning was a pair of wide blue eyes starin’ down…”
Edelgard giggled as she made her next move, a sharp contrast to the mental image of the Emperor ordering her loyal Paladins to put a violent end to her weakened foes.
“That does sound like Byleth…”
Upon glancing up, Edelgard noticed a pair of thin cords dangling from Byleth’s ears as she worked, occasionally gently shaking or twisting as Byleth vigorously scrubbed at a mug with a pink washcloth. They connected to her phone, which peeked gently out of the back pocket of her jeans. Edelgard noticed all of this because she was wondering if Byleth could hear their conversation, and certainly not because her eyes were somewhat drawn to Byleth’s backside.
Jeralt hummed to himself as he looked over the table between him and Edelgard, his face contorting as he surveyed the board. “Huh. Never seen some of these cards before. Dunno who the hell “Ryoma” is, but he seems pretty effective.”
“Oh! That’s actually a promotional Ryoma from the Hoshidan Dawn release back in 2015. I had class and couldn’t make it to the official release event, but I was able to buy one on the secondary market a few months later. I wouldn’t recommend it now, though, the price has surged, but it might go down a bit soon, he’s not very popular in the metagame anymore. Unless Crossroads makes a pure Swords team viable again, but that seems like a long shot.”
Edelgard had about three more sentences of elaborating on her opinions about the spoiled Crossroads cards left in her, but Jeralt’s eyes were already wide, and she could feel the pangs of nerd-shame starting to creep up her neck. “Sorry.” she muttered.
To her surprise, Jeralt didn’t seem bothered at all. A smile broke out on his weathered face, and the veteran laughed a deep belly laugh, his hands shaking as he continued his distracted play. “No need to apologize, kid. I just don’t often get to hear that much excitement in this house. Byleth does the same thing with stuff she’s excited about, just not so...quickly.” The man glanced over his shoulder quickly, noting Byleth still hard at work on the dishes. When he turned back, his expression was soft. “Honestly, I can see why she seemed so pleased to meet you. You’ve got a lot in common.”
“Is that so? Excellent.” Edelgard fought to keep both her expression and tone of voice utterly neutral, despite the joy that was leaping inside at hearing that Byleth was “pleased to meet” her.
“I’m serious.” The laugh had stopped, and an expression of mild concern filled Jeralt’s face. “I know she’s an adult now, but I guess the parental instincts don’t go away. Byleth…” He checked over his shoulder again. “Byleth can be kinda quiet, and I worry that she didn’t have enough contact with kids her age growing up. That’s my fault. And if we’re going to be putting roots down here, I want her to have friends.”
The imposing figure of Jeralt Eisner sagged his shoulders, suddenly looking small even to Edelgard.
“So thanks for being kind to her. Sometimes people aren’t. That’s all.”
Edelgard nodded. “Of course. She’s a remarkable woman, Mr. Eisner.” Her head was swimming with feelings and thoughts and potential interjections and fears and ideas and explanations and sympathy and pain and Oh Dear God everything was starting to pile up and so Edelgard retreated to the one thing that absolutely made sense in the world.
“Canas casts Luna towards Greil and I’ll play a Spirit Dust from my hand to render it immune to interrupting abilities. I win?”
After surveying the board, Jeralt shook his head. “Uh. Yeah. Good game. You creamed me.”
Admittedly, a little bit of Edelgard had wanted to throw the game to her gracious host. But The Emperor never showed mercy.
After Byleth finished with the dishes, Jeralt had offered to drive Edelgard back to her apartment. She attempted to decline, but the man had a glare that could make an alligator weep. Unfortunately, he certainly seemed apt to use it on unwitting grad students unwilling to accept charity. It was sitting on the couch with Byleth, scooping her cards back into their crimson carrying case, that Edelgard suddenly remembered the whole reason she’d wanted to see Byleth again in the first place.
Or, as it may have turned out, one of two reasons. Not that she’d ever tell Dorothea. But it was time to seize her chance, as Jeralt drove. Edelgard straightened in her seat, putting on her best formal facade.
“Byleth, I wanted to extend an invitation to you.”
“Hmm?” Byleth turned to her, still wearing a neutral expression. “Yes?”
“So, our Fire Emblem League at Nabatea is a Team League. That means whenever you win a sanctioned match at the store, typically in the Thursday tournaments, your team earns a point, and the team with the most points at the end of a given season is declared the victor.”
Byleth was slowly nodding, her attention still rapt even with these most basic of details.
“There are three main teams that compete at Nabatea. The newest one is the Golden Deer, they’re captained by Claude Riegan. The current points leaders are the Blue Lions, lead by Dimitri Blaiddyd.” Edelgard sat a little taller before continuing, unfurling a smug smile. “The oldest established team at Nabatea, with the highest number of recorded season victories, is the Black Eagles. I am their captain, and I found you to be an incredible player, Byleth.” She extended a hand in Byleth’s direction. “I’d like to invite you to join the Black Eagles.”
The next few moments of consideration felt like minutes. Byleth tilted her head back and forth, as if milling Edelgard’s words over in her head.
“Is attendance required every week? My dad might need my help sometimes.”
“Oh, of course not, we have members who show up once a month, honestly. It’s not a big deal.” (She didn’t mention chewing out Linhardt for napping through so many tournaments during the Shadows Of Valentia season that they managed to come in dead last.)
“Is there a prize for the winning team?”
Edelgard grinned. “Their logo is displayed on a banner above the counter for the next season.”
“...Anything else?”
“...No.”
Was lasting glory on the cardboard battleground not worth anything anymore?
Byleth nodded. “Okay. I’d like to join.”
“Excellent!” Edelgard felt her heart soar at the news. “Unfortunately, we won’t be able to count your points during this season, since there’s a rule against adding players mid-league.” She scoffed. “Ever since Claude bribed a bunch of the visitors during Homecoming to sign up on the Deer and they kept beating eachother for free points...”
Byleth chuckled at this flagrant abuse of the system, but nodded. “That’s okay. Can I still play?”
“Of course! And if you beat some of the Deer or the Lions...they still don’t get points…” Edelgard reached for her phone and leaned towards Byleth. “Do you mind if I get your phone number? We have a group chat I can add you to, I believe you’ll enjoy meeting the other Eagles!”
Slowly, Byleth reached out and gently took Edelgard’s phone into her hand before passing her own over. As Edelgard navigated to Byleth’s contacts menu, she frowned.
Contacts
dad
pizza
hospital
police
She felt a little proud to add her own number, breaking the symmetry a tad with a capital letter. When Byleth finished her work, they swapped back phones and Edelgard quickly hopped into the Group Chat.
Black Eagles Chat
(You are an Admin)
Seven Members
[Edelgard]: Everyone, we have a new member, it is my pleasure to introduce Byleth Eisner!
[Dorothea]: :O
[Byleth]: hello
“Can they all read this?” Byleth whispered.
“Yes, they can.”
[Ferdinand]: Greetings, Byleth!
[Linhardt]: hey
[Caspar]: heya newbie!
[Petra]: Hello!
[Dorothea]: Welcome!!!
[Byleth]: hey all. thank you.
[Edelgard]: She’s going to be joining officially next season, but for now she’s a probationary member.
[Linhardt]: lol thanks for that claude
[Ferdinand]: When can we meet you, Byleth? Will you be attending the party?
“Oh!” Edelgard turned to Byleth with a smile. “We’re having a party...err...a strategy meeting on Friday at Dorothea’s apartment. Would you like to attend?”
“I...I think I would.”
“Great!”
[Byleth]: if i can come sure
[Dorothea]: Of course you can! I’ll send you my address <3
Private Message from [Dorothea]: OMG EDIE THIS IS HER
Private Message to [Dorothea]: Yes, it is indeed!
[Caspar]: looking forward to meeting you byleth
Private Message from [Dorothea]: ...Have you made out yet? :p
Private Message to [Dorothea]: shut the fuck up dorothea
[Linhardt]: say, aren’t you the one who beat edelgard last week?
Private Message from [Dorothea]: <3 <3 <3
[Byleth]: yes
[Edelgard]: >:(
[Caspar]: holy shit you beat edelgard????
[Petra]: Oh my, you are the one who publically slapped Edelgard’s bottom!
[Linhardt]: O.o
[Ferdinand]: What
[Dorothea]: PETRA THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT WHEN I TOLD YOU THAT
[Dorothea]: AOJFJIJIFOEJHIOEFSAOJI
Private Message to [Dorothea]: Your days are numbered.
[Byleth]: ?
Thankfully, mercifully, by the grace of any and all higher beings that may or may not exist, it was that moment at which the RV stopped moving.
“Alright, think we’re here!” Jeralt called, and Edelgard was quickly on her feet and moving for the door. Byleth followed until she reached the exit of the RV, Jeralt emerging from the small room that housed the vehicle’s controls.
“Take care, Edelgard.” he called. “Keep yourself healthy, okay?”
“I will.” She turned after opening the door, extending a hand to shake with both Jeralt and Byleth. “I owe you both very much. Thank you again.”
“No problem, kid.” Jeralt replied. Byleth nodded.
“Will I see you at Nabatea on Thursday, Edelgard?”
She frowned. “Sorry, Hanneman’s got me working late with him, so I’ll have to miss it, but I’ll see you Friday for the party!”
With a nod, Byleth stepped back. “Okay. Goodbye for now.”
Edelgard finally left the RV, waving pleasantly to the Eisners until the vehicle started to make its way down the street once more. It was a typically somber autumn night, the warm sun from the early morning replaced with a thick sheet of dark clouds and chill. Across the street, a light flicked off in a window as Edelgard made her way up the front steps and into the apartment building. She nearly ran up the stairs, the last dregs of adrenaline pumping her weary legs to the door of her apartment. As she unlocked it and entered, the frenzied squawks of a parrot greeted her.
“Lady Edelgard! Lady! Lady Edelgard!”
As Edelgard leapt onto her bed, she excitedly swung her body in the direction of the birdcage, preparing to give her pet the dinner he had missed.
“Hubert, it’s been quite a day.”