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~*~
He’d been so close.
How many times has he seen this play out?
Too many. Too many times. Edelgard and Dimitri, defiant to the end. One or the other will not leave this place alive.
(There is a world where Edelgard’s dagger hits home. Where they fall to their knees together in a deadly embrace, and stare at each other, wide-eyed and gasping, their last moments soaked in seething hatred and the faintest, bitter hints of regret.)
He has seen it. He has seen it, time and again, and in his hubris, he doesn’t wait to confirm history’s course before he tries to change it.
He points with two fingers, a glyph flashing around his wrist. A precise jet of magicked flame flies from his fingers and slaps Edelgard’s dagger out of the air. He whirls around, Sword of the Creator at the ready to parry Dimitri’s thrust and disarm him in turn--
A mistake. A blind spot in his thousand lifetimes of collected wisdom. A miscalculation.
He’d been so fucking close.
As he spins into the strike, sparks flying from where the Sword scrapes against Areadhbar’s haft--
He’s too slow. And Dimitri’s too strong.
The spear punches into his torso just beneath his ribs.
(There is a world where he isn’t a healer. Where he focuses solely on the sword. Where, when Edelgard crumples to the ground with a spear in her stomach, all he can do is try to hold the awful wound closed with his bare hands while she begs him to let her go.
“There’s nothing left for me here,” she whispers.
In his next cycle, he discovers his talent for white magic. Every cycle thereafter, he’s a beacon of faith.)
“Professor!” Dimitri and Edelgard both cry out. The first thing they’ve agreed on in six years.
Byleth falls with nary a sound.
Shock wrenches Areadhbar from Dimitri’s hands where Byleth’s gambit could not. His spear clatters to the ground, forgotten. He snatches up Edelgard’s fallen dagger without a second thought and starts tearing strips from his cape. Edelgard cradles Byleth in her lap, hands pressed tight over the awful wound, her bright crimson gloves growing darker by the second.
“Why, Professor?” Edelgard pleads. “I was ready. It should have been me.”
“Is that what that was?” Dimitri hisses in alarm. “Not one last act of spite, but an assisted suicide ?”
Their eyes meet, just for a moment. A seed of bitter sympathy, of grim understanding, takes root between them, bought by blood and watered with shame.
“Listen, you two,” Byleth whispers. Despite everything, Dimitri and Edelgard do as they're told, urgent, attentive.
“This world needs to do more than heal. ‘Back to normal’ isn’t good enough. It has to change,” Byleth says, holding Dimitri’s steely gaze. He turns, meeting Edelgard’s eyes. “You changed the world too fast. The price was too high. But I know why you did.”
“You do?” Edelgard urges.
(“There’s no time,” Jeralt laments, in every possible world. “There’s never any damn time.”
Despite Sothis’ warnings that some events are set in stone, through agonizing trial and error, there is a world where Jeralt survives.
It doesn’t stop the war.)
Dimitri wraps the scraps of his cape tight around Byleth’s abdomen, before standing and bellowing for a healer. At his feet, Byleth reaches into their robe and retrieves something-- a journal, marked with dozens of colored ribbons, filled to bursting with additional notes and annotations. He presses the leatherbound bundle into Edelgard’s hands.
He wonders if there is a world where this journal saves his life from the stunt he just pulled-- but he doesn’t reach for the Pulse to try it. What’s in that book is more valuable than any one life. Even his own.
“This book holds the key,” Byleth intones. “The key to your future. All futures.”
Edelgard’s no mage, but she can still feel the haze of magic emanating from the book’s pages-- charms to protect against weather and damage, to stop ink from running even as the margins get filled with Byleth’s cramped, hurried scrawl. She opens the book to a page marked with a ribbon. A blisteringly complex magical formula stares up at her.
The product of Byleth’s research. Lifetimes of research.
(There is a world where Byleth, Hanneman, Manuela, and the finest minds in the Empire devote themselves to the task of discovering a way to safely remove a person’s Crest. After years of research, they’d finally thought they were making progress--
--until Lysithea’s death destroys their morale beyond repair, and the Crest Institute crumbles.)
“What is it?” Edelgard asks, breathless with wonder.
“The cure,” Byleth whispers, reverent. “And the way to the true enemy.”
(There is a world where the cure is found, not in the Crest Institute, but in the archives at Shambhala. Where Byleth’s swift and decisive strike recovers Agarthan research documents before they’re put to the torch, and paves the way for a breakthrough at the Institute mere weeks after his return.)
“‘The true enemy’?” Dimitri wonders. His eyes flash Edelgard’s way.
“...Not now,” Edelgard murmurs.
“...Edelgard…” Byleth whispers. His voice is paper-thin. “You wanted a war to end all wars. You said… to drench your hands in blood so that none need ever bleed again.”
“I did,” Edelgard says, and doesn’t stop to wonder how Byleth knows this-- how he’s quoting her from a different life, but in every world, her vows are the same.
“Fodlan united. No more Crests. No more dead,” Byleth intones. A mantra. An oath. “Do you trust me, Edelgard?”
“I do,” Edelgard chokes out, and in every world, in every life, she means it with all her heart.
Power erupts around them. An unearthly wind gusts around them, sending their capes billowing. Light, pure and blinding, etches itself on the ground around Byleth’s prone form, like a jeweler’s molds filling with molten gold. Bracelets of shining glyphs spin into existence up Byleth’s arm. He raises his hand, faith flaring through his fingers, and plunges into Edelgard’s chest.
It’s-- surreal. Impossible. Bewildering. Edelgard stares, dumbstruck, her whole body alight, as if Byleth had reached into her chest and grasped her very heart.
Somehow, somehow, Byleth pulls out his hand, leaving no wound or scar save a fading bloom of golden light. In his grip is an ugly, gnarled knot of ashen-gray tissue around a filthy red light, glowing from within as if it were a hot coal. Byleth clenches his fist, and holy power obliterates the foul artifact into dust on the wind.
Byleth takes a deep breath, and lets out a haggard, exhausted sigh.
“You have all the pieces,” he says, feather-soft. “You have time. You have each other.”
He leans back. He lays his hand over his heart. His eyes flutter closed.
“Sothis,” he prays. “It’s done.”
Edelgard stares, stricken. She gasps, terror surging in her veins, laying her head against Byleth’s chest. No heartbeat-- why doesn’t that surprise her? But he’s so still. He’s so still…
“No…” Edelgard shakes her head, clinging to Byleth like a child. “No, no, no. Professor. Professor!”
Something in Dimitri’s chest… changes. Shifts. A strange feeling flickers down his arm, twitches his fingers. The urge to reach out. To touch her. To hold her in her grief.
Armored footsteps shuffle around him. Not the healers he’d screamed for what feels like hours ago, oh no, but knights-- Faerghan knights, lances leveled, bewildered by the sight of the Adrestian Emperor on her knees and openly weeping over someone who was, for all they knew, her mortal enemy.
“Your Highness?” asks one of the men holding Edelgard at spearpoint.
Dimitri grits his teeth. His hands ball into fists.
“Shoulder arms!” Dimitri barks.
The men stop in their tracks and snap stiffly to attention, their spears clattering against their breastplates. Dimitri stabs a finger towards Byleth cradled in Edelgard’s arms.
“Now salute them, damn you!”
~*~
There is a world where he gives away his mother’s ring.
There’s more than one, even. When the cycles first began, he’d had the luxury of falling in love. But over time, knowing that he’d cut short his own future in the search of a better future for all, romance lost its luster. And with every cycle, his memories intact, the gulf of maturity between him and his students became too much to overcome.
Every world became just a little bit lonelier after that.
There is a world where the struggle seems impossible.
Where he wonders if it’s all been in vain. Appointing himself the divine arbiter of time and history, trading lives for others. Who was he to decide who lives and dies? Who was he to save the life of a familiar face only for a nameless stranger to die in their stead?
There is a world where his power twists him into a tyrant.
Where he orders best friends to fight to the death. Where he tells itself it’s for ‘research’, for morbid curiosity, knowing that ultimately all will be undone. Where lives become distant, petty things, mere pieces on a board.
There is a world where he gets to rest.
Where history finally settles on a single path. No more stubborn resets, no more refusal to accept loss. Where all the pain finally has a purpose. A world where he can call it a victory.
There is a world where life goes on, with or without him. Where he is not a kingmaker, a tide-turner, on whose shoulders rest the fate of nations.
There is a world where he never learns to wield a sword, and never needs to.
Could that be this world for once? Just once?
~*~
There is a world where Sothis has one last miracle to give.
There is a world where, after a thousand failed attempts, the Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy class of 1180 all survive the war. A world where they are reunited a year after what would have been Garreg Mach’s Millennium Festival. The dawning of a new era.
Three years after that, as the world heals, scars, and grows beyond the old status quo, Byleth opens his eyes and wonders why the afterlife smells like onions and grilled fish.
“You’re awake!” Flayn chirps, as if Byleth had merely slept in on seven-day rather than been in a dragonblooded regenerative coma for three years.
Then again, years ago Flayn went through a similar ordeal, and was asleep for far longer than that. Perhaps the novelty is lost on her.
Seteth appears from behind the grill-- thank goodness he’d been cooking and not Flayn-- and tells an abridged history of what Byleth has missed. Byleth nods along, distracted, only half paying attention. If he had a gold piece for every time he’d fallen into a coma and awoken to a changed world, well…
…he’d have two gold pieces. Go figure.
“It must be strange,” Seteth muses, gazing out the window. Their little wooden cottage in Zanado is cozy, quaint, and quite at odds with all the stone ruins they’re nestled in between. “It’s not often one gets to see the laurels laid on their own grave.”
“Just tell me you didn’t have a statue made,” Byleth muses.
“...I convinced Rhea to postpone that discussion,” Seteth chuckles.
“‘And so, Saint Eisner, who was pierced by a lance and died for our salvation, rose again on the third year…’” Flayn recites, with all the gravitas she can muster. She squeaks in protest as Byleth gently bops her on the head.
“Please,” Byleth smiles. “Just call me Professor.”
There is a world where Byleth’s friends and allies eagerly await their reunion. But for once in his thousand lifetimes, Byleth is in no rush. They made peace without him, and will prosper long after he’s gone.
There’s time for him to savor; to explore; to cherish. To witness love in bloom, to share in joy, to wonder at a history that has survived and will survive without him personally holding the pen.
There’s time, at long last. There’s finally time.
~*~