i don't want to live in a world without you

Chapter 12

When Byleth wakes up, she is terrified, for a moment. It is the deepest sleep that she can remember having in a while, and she is terrified that, once again, she fell asleep on the battlefield only to wake up years later. And she knows that she was on the battlefield, she can remember those last moments before she collapsed, and she is so afraid that she has lost more time, and that this time, nobody waited for her. She and her father were so close to the life that they were fighting for, and if she really left him again, if she really disappeared to sleep for another five years, then...

"She's awake!" a voice she thinks she recognizes calls out, but things are so fuzzy right now that it is hard to place it. But then, another voice responds, a voice that she knows she recognizes, and everything begins to come into focus.

"Kid?" Jeralt leans over her, coming into her line of sight. "Are you finally done napping?" He asks it in such a casual tone, and yet when she looks up at him, she can see the tears in his eyes, and knows that he is only putting on a front, either for the sake of the others present, or so that she does not worry about him while he is worrying about her.

In the moment, she does not care if she lost time or not, just as long as he is here with her again. No matter what may have happened while she was asleep, as long as he is here with her, she knows that everything is going to be just fine. She throws her arms around him and sobs, wondering when she became such a crybaby after spending her entire childhood completely tearless. He holds her close, and she knows that, if there were not witnesses, he would have kissed her by now. It takes all of her self-control not to kiss him.

~X~

Eventually, she is able to figure out that it has only been a few hours, rather than a few years. She passed out or something, right around the time that they killed the archbishop at last, effectively putting an end to the war. There are still things to clean up right now, and even more things to handle politically in the coming weeks, but for the most part, the conflict between the Adrestian Empire, and the rest of Fodlan, has finally come to a close.

"What happened to you?" Jeralt asks, not for the first time since she has woken up, but Byleth still has no real answer to that. All she knows is that her chest felt tight and things went dark, and when she woke up, she was afraid that she had slept for years again. When she tries to recount that, she rests a hand over her chest, her eyes widening as she looks up at him.

"Do I have a heartbeat now?" she asks, not sure why she expects him to have an answer, but he nods.

"We thought you were dead at first, Edelgard and I. But when I was holding you, your...your heart just started beating, for the first time in your life," he says. "I don't know what happened, but I can guess that it had something to do with whatever she did to you when you were born. She's dead now, and we won't ever be able to ask her about it."

"That's alright," Byleth replies, and it is. She realizes that she no longer cares so much about answers, not with the perspective that she has gained simply from nearly losing everything, from having to fear that she had lost years of her life simply because she closed her eyes. And she has a heartbeat now, so something broken inside of her has been fixed, when she never before thought that was possible.

"That's not the only thing," he says. "You look, uh...well, you look beautiful, of course, but you look...like you did before." For whatever reason, he seems to have a hard time phrasing it, but she understands what he is saying even before she takes a strand of hair between her fingers to see that it is no longer the bright, almost white shade of green that it had become the day Sothis gave her power over to her. It is the color she was born with, the color that she has been told her mother's hair is.