Work Text:
“A visitor has come for you,” Hubert announced, returning to Edelgard shortly after he’d left her to break her fast.
She noted both his glowering expression and the tightening of his mouth and could not help but grow alarmed at the anomaly.
By necessity, she had exceedingly few visitors these days.
“And who drops by unannounced?” she questioned.
Hubert’s expression further soured. “Riegan himself.”
A sudden chill overtook the room that the hearth could not quite penetrate. “I see,” she said, though she did not. “And should I ask how he has found me here?”
“It would seem our network of informants has been compromised.”
She raised an eyebrow for elaboration.
Duke Riegan appeared first, strolling into the dining room with hat in hand and looking about his surroundings as if wholly at his leisure. The peeling wallpaper, the water stains, and humble furnishing of the small rented apartment he did not scoff at.
“Quaint.” His mouth upturned. “But warm.”
If she didn’t know better, she might have believed the smile fully reached his eyes.
Any proper suitor, having once been rejected, might have had the decency to grow less appealing and attractive with age. Duke Riegan, of course, looked unfailingly well and dare she say better for his journey, his longer hair windswept and falling becomingly against his face which was heightened in color. And if he was not taller, he was also undeniably broader, filling out his green woolen tailcoat with ease while smartly offsetting it with yellow gloves of kid.
That he did not wear either insignia or token of the Alliance did not escape her notice, either. So this was not to be an official visit of state then.
“As indecorous as ever,” she drolly commented, trying not to dwell on the fact that she herself was wearing the plainest muslin dress he had ever seen her in and one without her usual chemisette to conceal that vivid scarring splayed across her chest. “Walking in, entirely uninvited.”
Having dined frequently with him and the rest of the continent's gentry, her hands, similarly bared and scarred, were no actual secret. Still she clasped them together, feeling more exposed than she'd like as she stared up at him.
To his credit, his gaze did not stray from hers.
“But wasn’t that what first endeared you to me, back when you were being suffocated by stuffy court life?” This he said without even a moment’s pause—as if they were resuming an old exchange they had not quite finished.
They'd shared many during that long season they'd spent together before she'd brought it to its bloody conclusion.
“Besides…” he added, “I rather thought you were beside yourself, waiting upon me to answer for all the attention you’ve paid me as of late. Or did you think I wouldn’t notice how my correspondence has been tampered with and slowed by a day?”
He took in the room again and both its occupants. "Untangling your spy network in my spare time has been quite the diversion, I’ll admit." And that was surely meant to antagonize Hubert further, even as Duke Riegan’s eyes landed squarely back upon Edelgard. “But you rather did expose yourself, Miss Rosalind Veil.”
He subsided into a touch of laughter. “A little too on-the-nose, don’t you think? Not to mention trying to play off a character we’d once discussed together... I would say it was not your finest work, but then it did seem more like an invitation to call.”
That, then, was to be her explanation. Roundabout and teasing and vexingly verbose as it always had been with him.
“And so you have come all this way by yourself, just to pay your respects?” she asked with at least some of her wits about her.
“Utterly,” he avowed, gloved hand upon his heart. “I wouldn’t have anyone intruding upon our dearly awaited reunion, now would I?”
Hubert did not see it as such, cutting in acidly to remark, “I will assess that for myself.”
With his brusque departure the room seemed smaller and her visitor nearer as he smiled as handsomely as ever at her. But where she might expect someone else to press their advantage, he did not. Instead he merely stood there, choosing to while away the minutes with pleasantries and even talk of mutual acquaintances.
It seemed as if he was testing her now—waiting for her usual directness when it felt like she had been caught out already, badly misstepping out of turn in a country dance.
And before she might collect herself in this new dance of theirs, he surprised her again by excusing himself.
***
“My sources confirm he is alone, checked in under his own pseudonym at a local inn,” Hubert pronounced upon returning. Edelgard could not tell if he was more or less pleased that Riegan had been telling the truth.
What she could discern was that he had plenty more to say on the matter.
“Head back to Enbarr,” she said to curtail him instead. “There is an assembly to attend.”
“I would not leave you alone to deal with the likes of Riegan and the threat he poses.”
“I know you’ve always wished to ease my way, but there are some matters you cannot deal with on my behalf.”
They rarely argued openly, but Hubert was clearly slighted now, declaring, "I remain more than capable of dealing with any danger that may present itself towards you."
"Is there present danger though? If he meant me outright harm he would have acted already when surprise was still on his side. As it stands, he would not come just to torment me first." It was only in saying it, however, that she came to realize the extent to which she believed it to be the truth.
“No, that was not his way,” she continued aloud. “Frustratingly oblique, yes, but never cruel. If he means to converse it will be a long, drawn out event to settle his intentions, and that is time no minister has. Rather you return to Enbarr and mind your own entanglements so that I might be bothered by them less secondhand.” And here she brandished a letter that undeniably bore the penmanship of Ferdinand.
She smiled wanly at him as he rankled at the correspondence. "See to your affairs and I will try to settle mine."
***
It was easier said than done, facing Duke Riegan down again.
“Are we to have a real tête-à-tête now?” he said conspiratorially as he noted Hubert’s absence on his following visit.
Reluctantly she led him into her drawing room, if only to stage this encounter on her own terms. He might have set himself down upon the settee, the better for her to look down upon him, but as she still stood, he saw to dutifully mirror her.
“That would require you to speak less banally,” she retorted. “Let me hear why you’ve really come.”
He was all smiles again. “Then by all means, let me borrow a page from your book and be more forthright. Do you find yourself enjoying your new life? Trying at a new identity and not so subtle espionage?”
For a moment’s breath she hesitated, unsure of where he meant to lead things now. “It is a different sort of occupation and in some ways rather freeing,” she said, adjusting the cuff of her own waistcoat that she had chosen that day alongside breeches.
Here he spared an appreciative and quite unnecessary comment about her appearance, noting how well she wore the outfit. She, of course, had no choice but to pay the compliment back in kind, half perturbed as she was. She did not fail to tack on, “Though that is not the point here."
“And does it vex you?” he said in return. “That Prime Minister Aegir is in power while you are pushed aside?”
“I do not much enjoy the public eye or endless politicking,” she told him frankly. “Moreover, we still live in a civil society, if only. No one wants a bloodbathed murderer on the throne. Better it sit empty entirely as I fade into obscurity.”
“Or legend? The kind people tell their kids one day to scare them and keep them on the better path?” He sobered at her unamused look. “You can’t think people will forget you.”
“Far better if they would.”
“Have a little compassion for us poor, admiring souls," he said with certain feeling now, the warmer inflection of his voice nearly arresting her. "The truth is, you are quite hard to.”
Without any sensible reason, she thought of them dancing. Of his hand at her waist, their hands intertwined and clasped. Their repartee in the book store, stolen moments of debate amongst those narrow bookshelves. His secretive smiles directed just for her across a table or a ballroom.
She knew because she had watched him back.
“Duke Riegan is a charmer,” Dorothea observed after an opera performance as she watched Edelgard in turn. “Be careful you’re not in danger of losing your heart if you don’t mean to.”
“Neither of us are,” Edelgard simply said, but she would still admit to enjoying the repartee with someone who would challenge her.
“He would still appear to be making every public indication of offering for your hand,” Dorothea said pointedly to the hyacinths of blue and purple hue that Edelgard held then.
“People of our station do not marry for love,” Edelgard had replied, though she understood that their match still made abundant sense on just the political level.
But hadn’t that been why they’d mutually leaned into the appearance of courting, using each other so that they might draw attention away from their real endeavors—whatever his might yet be?
Still, Edelgard was left to wonder what was going through his mind as he had visited her in her receiving room in the palace, her attendants dismissed as he descended to one knee.
Did he think of these moments still? Why did she?
Of course he did not fail to notice her unintended reverie now and roused her from it rather abruptly.
“Are you at your leisure then? I had thought that the prime minister’s last address as reported by the papers had a touch of the acerbic that spoke more of another’s influence.”
“You would choose to credit me when it is all Minister Vestra's doing? Their working relationship produces frequent collaboration.”
“Ah yes, their relationship,” Duke Riegan said, showing he knew it strayed beyond the professional. “And what Vestra has a hand in has nothing to do with you? Is he really so separate from you now? I could have sworn I met him here, still trying to attend upon you.”
“I do get lonely,” she said, before she could think better of it, there being more truth to the words than she would like.
His lips flattened into a fine line. He nodded as if to himself. “Then perhaps it is a good thing that I have come, after all. I will be sure to stop by again."
***
He came again the next day, as promised. Edelgard’s impatience only grew alongside her ire.
“You still have not told me, Duke Riegan,” she demanded, “why you have come. It is hardly proper to keep calling upon me in such a manner.”
Even so she did not move to impede him as he this time showed himself into her drawing room. “Don’t tell me you’re actually concerned about your perceived virtue. You’ve already killed the holiest woman to walk the land.”
She frowned at his back. “That being what it may, I would hope you would not trifle with me.”
He slowed to a halt before her, turning back around. “That I could never do,” he professed. His eyes and his mouth went softer around the edges, his look almost fond or perhaps merely exasperated. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
Her heart stirred in spite of herself. If he’d meant to unnerve her by his coming he had done well, she thought. Edelgard responding to him and his words as though he might actually be courting her again and she no more than an ingenue.
It would not do.
She reached for a deck of cards and sat down at the corner table. As expected, he pulled up a chair directly across.
“You want to deal in luck and chance?” he laughed. “What of our old games of strategy?”
“The game is piquet," she said tersely and he grinned in acknowledgment of a diversion where they might actually know each other's hand—provided they made the right deducements and their memories served.
Shamelessly, he then tried to divert her concentration throughout the exchanging and discarding of cards and over their course of declarations and plays.
But two could play at that game as well, Edelgard pressing him once more on his intentions—this time pertaining to a certain moment of the past that continued to damnably occupy her thoughts.
“Tell me, Claude,” she said, putting aside title and decorum to use his given name as he’d once playfully asked of her in private, nearing the end of that time they’d shared together. She had not obliged him then, but she did now, if only to successfully startle him. “What were you thinking when you proposed?”
“What does any suitor hope for?” he said when he recovered. “A resounding yes, maybe a few tears of happiness. A smile, at least." He smiled now, a little lovelorn, as if the memory caused him pain when she knew it had not. If anything was wounded, it was only his pride in not having been accepted or in one of his schemes having gone amiss.
“For what purpose though?” she said with an edge now. “You don’t think me foolish enough to believe you were proposing for just my lifelong companionship?”
He studied his dwindling cards with undue attention. “I wouldn’t go so far as to do you that disservice, no.”
“I have played my hand for all to see,” she incited when she had no more cards left in their sixth and final deal. “If you mean to procure my cooperation, it is past time you played yours.”
“I did so want your cooperation, back then,” he teased, then laid his final card down at last upon the table, the both of them already knowing it was not enough to overturn her final tally of points. He did not balk from the defeat, only added, “But what I wanted most of all were your connections and influence.”
She frowned at what was not explanation enough. “You had plenty of your own.” And now she revealed that although she’d been found out for her spying, she had first discovered a secret worth having. “With another potential title and country to inherit.”
He stiffened, adjusting his cravat with stilted movement, though he must have guessed at her having at least this much intelligence. “Not in Fódlan,” he said at length. “Not as you did—and still do. I'd still like to take advantage where I have a surer foothold.”
Their game at an end, he gathered up the fuller deck of cards, cutting and then shuffling it with an assumed confidence as he glanced towards her. “I’ll have you know that you rather upended things for me, acting as you did. The connections I'd worked to establish fell by the wayside as the rest of society scrambled in the fallout to distance themselves from one another and any uncertain newcomer."
“So you have come all this way to air your grievances?”
“Not quite. You see, I always wanted to curtail the Church's influence, so unfriendly towards outsiders like myself and the pursuit of greater knowledge. I was just going to try and poison it a little more discreetly from the inside while you rather cut directly to the problem’s root. Only, it still outlives even the previous archbishop, wouldn’t you agree?”
She frowned now at that undeniable truth.
“The fact that you are meddling in my affairs proves that you are not entirely willing to give up your hand in Fódlan’s dealings. So I’ve come to ask you…” He leaned down in his chair, and for one foolish moment she thought he would sink all the way to the floor again and renew his offer for her hand. But no, he merely met her at eye level now. “Would you like to influence me then and in turn lend me your own resources?”
A minute passed, marked off by the ticking hand of the clock.
At her lack of an answer, he sprung the deck now from one hand to the other, a move of all flourish and flair even as she thought he was rather overcompensating for a trace of discomposure.
In impatience she unconsciously leaned over before he could transfer the cards again, touching her hand to the back of his and bringing it down to lay flat upon the table.
He stilled completely at her touch and looked so openly upon her that she grew flushed at both the attention and her own prolonged contact.
It was as she made to pull away that he pushed aside the deck to better grasp her hand in turn. His fingers came up against her palm as his thumb ran along the back of her gloved hand, almost as if he were tracing those scars that lay underneath.
“You’re not the only one who has dug a little deeper into the other’s personal history, needing to understand where they might be coming from,” he said.
She fought for careful equanimity even as she allowed him to hold her hand still, wondering the extent of his own knowledge.
“Do you really think we might survive such a partnership as you suggest?" she asked.
For all that he grinned, it was in earnest that he spoke. "I think it's the world as it stands that wouldn't survive us, frankly."
Once decided, Edelgard did not believe in living with regrets, and she would not admit to any regret in having rejected him before. Making her choice now, however, she could not help but feel she might come to regret not accepting this proposal.
She knew very well that real trust did not exist between them as they met each other now, but there was still a part of him that compelled her towards him and even this scheme of his that would entwine both their futures.
She was not overtaken—did not issue any resounding sentiment or tears or smile—but all the same, she provisionally nodded.
It was Claude who smiled in her stead as he raised her hand to his lips, and it was both the thrill of that touch and new anticipation of what might be that cut her through quite entirely.