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Byleth dies in a hail of arrows and magic combined.
She's leading the assault on the throne room, her students, colleagues, and comrades behind her. Most of the soldiers under her direct command are old veterans, the ones who had stuck with Jeralt for years before finding themselves under the employ of the church - none of them are able to bring her to cover in time, and Byleth can only berate herself for the mistake.
She'd been getting careless and desperate in her bid to clear out the room, having already gone through all of her divine pulses. Byleth brought up her sword, blocking one fireball and a couple of stray arrows that got to her early, but that's all she can manage. Pain lances through every part of her body - she falls to the ground, knowing that this is it. This was the bed she'd made, as her father had been wont to say. Now it was time to lie in it.
"Sorry, Sothis," she murmurs to herself, before a hot flash and a chill runs through her and everything turns to black.
...When Byleth opens her eyes, she's not particularly surprised. She remembers how she and Sothis first met - how she'd been about to give up her life for Edelgard over a careless mistake, only for the world, time and all, to freeze in place.
What's surprising, though, is that she's not in that peculiar space. There is no throne, no ethereal green glow, no Sothis. The space around her is remarkably normal, if decidedly alien. There's someone holding her (she has green hair, not pale like hers or Rhea's but muted and dark instead - like Seteth), looking down at her with all the love in the world in her eyes, but to her left and right she can see metal boxes with coloured sides that change...? Byleth tries to move but all she manages to do is twitch her arm.
She looks around again, notices how the woman holding her seems so much bigger, and—
Was she just born?
Byleth remembers her father's account of her early days of life. How she hadn't cried, hadn't had a heartbeat, had barely talked (or babbled, rather). She has a heartbeat, but aside from that she feels her new life is going to be largely the same. Her pulse and the movement of her eyes is enough to assure everyone around her that she's alive and conscious, but she wouldn't pretend to be a baby even if there was a sword at her throat.
Her mother - one Midoriya Inko - lives on her own, working as some sort of healer from what she's gathered. Byleth has seen neither hide nor hair of any Church of Seiros paraphernalia, nor anything that could possibly be part of a healer's stock or equipment. No tomes, no staves, no baubles or medicinal herbs. Either her work is completely separated from her home, or (like the room she came into, and half of the items and fixtures around the house) the practice of healing has become completely foreign to her.
But she is still but a baby, unable to even move from where she's been put. Byleth wishes that Sothis were here, that she might have someone to talk to, but whenever she dreams she finds herself in that throne room again, with Sothis perched on her throne, asleep. Whether the dream is real or simply like those battlefield scenes she used to see, she's glad for the chance to see her again.
But still, she's left without anyone to talk to: Sothis isn't there, obviously, and her mother speaks some language that she's only been able to pick up the barest specifics of.
The days pass by swiftly and peacefully, albeit boring beyond comprehension. Byleth occupies her time with sleep, naps, and the study of whatever's nearby in an effort to take her mind off of what she's left behind - but that life was lost the moment that Byleth lost her own, she reasons, and now she's stuck here, in whatever afterlife or reincarnation she's found herself in.
A year passes by too quickly - a benefit, Byleth figures, of her young age. Days blur together and before she knows it a week has passed, ad nauseam. She's fine with that: she can crawl on her own now, has picked up a little more of the language her mother speaks, and now has a 'friend' in the form of one Bakugou Katsuki.
It's nice enough, Byleth decides after his second time over. He's a little moody and half of what they do is roughhouse - Byleth doesn't have experience with having friends at this age, the company always devoid of them, but she'd hazard a guess and say that this is what it would have been like.
There's one problem though: everyone seems to insist on calling her 'Izuku', and whilst for a while she'd hoped that it was simply some way of referring to a child, she's started to lose hope. She's not too keen on the name, frankly, and though she doesn't think she'd get away with trying to call herself Byleth, she'd rather have another name.
Byleth's not so certain that she can just mulligan that, however.
It's probably fine. Either it will grow on her (it won't) or future Byleth can make that someone else's problem. For now, she's content with her life of lazing about, learning her mother's language, getting into (and winning) scraps with Bakugou, and waiting for Sothis to wake up.
Byleth Eisner (she still holds to that name, rejecting Midoriya Izuku even after nearly three years now) has so far compiled a six-odd point list of the biggest mysteries in this world she's... found herself in, for lack of a more concrete term.
One) There is no war economy, no need for mercenaries, and hardly any need for a military. Bandits have given way to people called 'villains', and those who apprehend them are simply called 'heroes'. Byleth knows what goes into the making of a hero, remembers how Dimitri had once been decorated as such by some, and wonders if her idea of a hero can even apply to what exists in this world and age.
Two) Magic and Crests, too, have all but disappeared in name - but not in effect. She's learned enough of the language of those around her to start asking questions (and her mother, for one, had nearly cried tears of joy when she finally uttered a full, if broken sentence), and she knows that everyone is instead possessed of something called a 'quirk'. They're mostly inherited, like Crests, but their effects are half the time like magic, half the time like nothing she's really seen before. There have been times when she's seen someone on the television (another marvel of this world) and wondered if she was looking at a demonic beast, but no; it was just a person. Her mother's quirk lets her move small objects towards her, but nothing more than that. Others, meanwhilst, grant them strength beyond compare - there's one belonging to some hero named 'All Might' that makes her think of Dimitri's strength, but with the speed and endurance to match. It's frightening to think about.
Three) The television is but one technological advance that she would never have dreamt of before, with everything from cooking to anticipating the weather having been touched by the myriad upgrades. Something like it, Byleth has found, is the 'internet'. Her mother showed it to her once, after she'd asked about some machine, and she was startled to learn that the internet could connect her to anywhere in the world, let alone just on the continent. The part of her that kept up with logistics and message-sending for the company shivered. In the same vein are cars, trains, and planes - vehicles that would have transformed much of Fódlan with their invention.
Four) There's hardly any sort of government like there had been back in Fódlan. The closest she can find, as far as she's been able to so far, have been various countries that operate similarly to the Leicester Alliance's group of nobles, except every person in those groups is elected or appointed by someone who had been. She likes it, but she still can't quite wrap her head around it. Politics had been more her father's thing, after all.
Five) There's... hardly any widespread lack of access to needed resources. Towns and cities have only become larger and more frequent, and with vehicles even the cities farthest away from her are more accessible than some neighbouring villages that Byleth had travelled to. Famine and drought seem to be concerns of the past, and drinking water - perfectly clear, even - is available right within her kitchen. It makes for a cushy life, especially since she doesn't need to work for any of it.
Six) The treatment of children seems to be much more... lax, she would say. Sure, it was a somewhat unorthodox upbringing, but Jeralt had been teaching her self-defence and the basics of weapons from the moment she could stand on her feet. It was probably so that she wouldn't cut herself on a stray unsecured weapon, but there had been a few times when his lessons had come in handy. Here, meanwhilst, she's still coddled like a babe and expected to learn how to read, talk, and hold herself upright. Byleth misses having something productive to do with her time, though she can't imagine her mother would say yes if Byleth were to ask for a sword for her birthday.
All in all, it's not bad by any means: she's confused by half of everything she learns, but she doesn't have to worry about helping her mother with work or hoping that she'll bring home enough money to keep them warm and fed come winter. Her mother's as nice as she could ask for, too, but still she can't help but miss Sothis. It's been years, and all she's had was the sight of her (oddly young) body, slumbering on her throne in her dreams.
Another year has passed and Byleth has been enrolled in school, attending alongside Bakugou Katsuki. She learns many things there: more words, the grammar to use them correctly, and a lot of other fundamental things, some of which she knows, some she doesn't. One such thing she's learnt is that they're all at that age where their quirks begin to come in, apparently. There's one kid in her class who can stretch his fingers out, and another girl whose head is beginning to sprout branches. Byleth has already tried to use a divine pulse, to no avail - either that option's been taken from her, or she just needs to wait for Sothis to wake up.
The list of people without quirks dwindles down by the month; Bakugou gets his before her, something fancy that lets him make explosions out of his sweat. The teachers praise him, talking about how cool it is and how it's suited to heroics, though Byleth can't help but think it's unsuited to missions requiring stealth.
...is stealth even something that heroes need? She's not sure - Byleth resolves to look into it when she gets home, all too willing to make liberal use of her time per day on the internet to search for the answers to just about anything. (Still unaccustomed to the language (Japanese, it's called) and the internet at large, the only answer she finds is one big contradictory *maybe.)
Eventually, Byleth's the last one left in her class to get her quirk; she's hardly bothered by it, but the others ask questions all the same. "When's your Quirk coming in, Izuku?" is one of the ones that sticks out to her, if only because - well, how is she supposed to answer that?
The questions continue, as Byleth rightly has no answer to any of them, until—
A yawn comes from her side, the tone and cadence achingly familiar. Snapping her head to her left, Byleth sees her: Sothis, floating beside her, yawning as if recently roused from the deepest of slumbers. "Byleth," she murmurs to only her, "what... what...?"
"Sothis," Byleth says through the connection between them, already clinging to the other's presence like a lifeline. "We're... I think we reincarnated."
Sothis blinks once, then twice. "But that doesn't make any sense!" she yells, and Byleth's glad she's the only one who can hear her. "We died, you buffoon - we don't just magically get to move on to the next life!"
"Don't we?" Byleth says aloud, immediately coughing into her first to try and mask the sound. "Is there a problem with us doing... that?"
Sothis looks at her as if (rather characteristically) exasperated, before her expression softens as she seriously considers Byleth's point. "Well... I suppose it's better than pure oblivion. But..." She frowns. "Even if we were to die, I would expect us to remain within my heart. Asleep, no doubt, but remain nonetheless." A moment's thought on the matter is all that Sothis spares, after that, before she shakes her head and looks around. "Oh, no matter. What's, uh. Do we have an explanation for what's going on?"
This time, Byleth did have answers. "Yeah, so..."
("...Izuku-kun?")
"I died during the assault on Edelgard, and then I woke up right after I was born. They speak a different language here, which I'm learning, I have a mother, things are a lot... nicer? I guess. It's easy to live here." As she gives her rundown of the immediately important facts, Sothis looks around the classroom, floating ethereally above her as she inspects Byleth's fellow classmates.
"Why is this one's hair fashioned like a tree? Did she stumble through a forest on her way here?"
"Oh, she's just like that. So, there aren't any Crests or magic, but there are these things called quirks, and..." Sothis's stare of bewilderment increases as she's briefed on quirks, though she looks more confused than anything by the end of it. "I've gathered that it's easier to just roll with it all."
"Certainly..." A moment passes and a troubled look passes onto Sothis's face, but she shrugs it off. "Is there more?"
Byleth nods. "Hmm... science is a lot further ahead now than in Fódlan," she says, something that makes Sothis immediately float in the direction of the nearest window, "and also, you're younger, too."
The goddess's quest for a look outside is halted by that simple sentence. "What do you mean I'm—" Sothis looks down. "Oh, I see." She looks up at Byleth, too, then floats over and inspects it from just an inch away. "Your hair's different, too. Like... like that Linhardt boy's, if it was curly." Sothis reaches her hand out, expression longing as she moves as if she'll take Byleth's hair in hand. It's something the both of them are accustomed to, from their time spent together before the war, acting as if the other's touch was something that could be felt.
Small fingers ruffle her hair (Byleth knows she can't feel it, and yet she also knows that she did ) and Byleth jolts, eyes darting to the side to look at Sothis without moving too much as the both of them lock in place. "Byleth, did—"
"Izuku-kun!" Byleth kicks herself in the head, realising she's being called, and turns forwards: one of the kids she vaguely knows is in front of her, looking like she's trying to ask something.
"Yes?"
"Do you wanna go play?" Byleth blinks, then glances back to Sothis.
"No thanks. I'm busy tempting fate."
"And whatever do you mean by tempting fate, oh partner of mine?"
Byleth allows herself a little smile. "Have you realised that you're even shorter now?"
Sothis's frown is immediate and hostile. "Like you're one to talk. You're but a babe, freshly weaned off your mother's teat!"
"Sure, but I know that I'll grow plenty."
"Oh, like I won't either." Sothis blinks just a moment later. "I will grow, yes?" Byleth just smiles a little more in response. "Byleth, that's - that's going to happen. Right? I don't want to look like this forever! Byleth!"
Her classmate from earlier cocks her head to the side, befuddled - Byleth offers no response and instead goes back to studying the foreign words in her paper, feigning obliviousness to everyone.
(When Byleth crawls into bed that night, she's joined by Sothis; though it was a common enough practice back during her year at the academy, with the newfound contact between them, it feels like the very first time. "It's good to be back with you, like this," murmurs Sothis against her ear.
"It's good to have you back too." Sothis's hand stays over her heart the entire night, the both of them lulled to sleep by its steady beat.)
Now that Sothis is awake, Byleth can't help but sleep in a little. Just like how they can both feel a little of what the other feels, gleam a bit of what they're thinking, Sothis's eternal exhaustion seeps into Byleth, trickling in and sapping at her energy. She doesn't mind, really; her Crest (does she even still have it?) had always helped to more than offset it on the battlefield, and between fights it means that she spends less time awake whilst Sothis is still asleep.
Sothis still naps throughout the day, of course, but at this point - Byleth will take as little time spent without Sothis as possible.
(She'd spent a year thinking she was gone forever and four years hoping she might eventually wake up. Now, she doesn't want to squander any of the time she can spend with her.)
Sothis wakes the first day after her return whilst Byleth is kicking up dirt on her way to the classroom. "Morning, Sothis," she says as the little goddess stirs to her right.
"Mm, morning..." Sothis yawns, then slowly wakes and gathers her wits. "We should—figure out what's different, with us." Byleth nods her agreeance. "Right. First order: how much can we touch each other."
She snickers a little at that: too much time spent with Sylvain, Sothis chides, before she grabs at Byleth's arm and hoists it up into the air. It takes her some effort - too much, Byleth reckons, for a piddly toddler's arm - but it's a starting point if nothing else.
After that comes inventory on everything that they had and have. The Sword of the Creator is obviously gone, as is the Crest Stone that operated as her heart. There's neither any connection between it and her, nor any sign or hint of it existing in some museum or buried pile of rubble somewhere. Her actual Crest, however, is still there: Byleth only needs to focus on it a little and she's able to throw a pebble into the concrete so hard it smashes into two halves and a cloud of dust. ("Perhaps... it spawned anew from me? With our souls conjoined, it's hardly unthinkable." That's Sothis's best guess as to why it's there, and Byleth is equally without answer.) Her magic, too, is there - but when Byleth starts to cast a simple Fire, she cuts it off halfway through. The world around her is so lacking in mana that her only recourse is to cast it with the energy within her: the od, as one of the company mages once explained to her.
At this stage in life, even with Sothis by her side, a mere Fire or Nosferatu would probably drain her of everything she has. "Let's... put all that aside for now," Sothis suggests, and Byleth can't help but agree.
They're at the classroom now. Byleth steps in and goes to move towards her seat, but there's a student behind her with wide eyes and a look of innocent curiosity. "Izuku-kun!" he all but shouts. "What were those lights?"
Byleth blinks, and realises that the boy must have seen her Crest and the sigil from casting Fire. "...my quirk," says Byleth after a moment's hesitation, and the rest of the morning is spent showing off her Crest to the rest of the classroom.
("What a weak Quirk," Bakugou says later, at recess. Byleth uses a little bit of enhanced strength to push him on his ass and asks if he still thinks it's weak.)
Byleth is eight, now, old enough to start questioning the way this world works. She knows about quirks, heroes, and villains - it's impossible to get away with not knowing about all that when you're Bakugou's friend - but she doesn't know many of the specifics about them. For that, she makes use of the computer and the internet, her mother having given her more time on it over the years. Gone are the days of looking up questions and hoping she finds the answers to them: now, she logs onto something called a 'forum', poses her questions there, and waits for someone to answer.
"Why don't heroes simply kill the villains they fight", she’d asked once, only to receive one single answer before her post was removed and her account was banned. (For that one, Byleth simply went to a slightly seedier-looking forum and asked it again, where she got all sorts of answers ranging from people interpreting her post as a call to kill villains to semi-informative points in the right direction.)
Now, her questions are typically less controversial. "How to be a mercenary" gets her a few jaded answers telling her to become a hero or a "dog of the state military", and her question about society pressuring people with certain quirks to become heroes sparks a three-page debate in its wake.
Any questions about old countries named Fódlan or reincarnation return nothing conclusive.
Her questions net her a few friends, though: mostly they're just people whose usernames she frequently recognises in the answers she gets, but there's one who sends her a private message and asks if she wants to play "Hall of Heroes" with her, some game that pits a team of heroes and villains against another. From what she can tell, most of the villains are pretty historical - big names that popped up in previous generations - but the heroes are mostly fairly recent. Her friend only plays villains and flames people on the regular, Byleth included, but it doesn't take them long to mellow back to normal.
Between them, Sothis, her mother, and Bakugou plus his friends, Byleth has enough people around her to not feel lonely. It certainly isn't enough to replace her class and all her colleagues from the Officer's Academy, but it patches the hole.
That’s all she really expects.
At ten years old, Byleth decides that future Byleth has finally become present Byleth. She leaves her computer on one night, on a search page that reads "what if you are born in the wrong body", a half dozen other things in that same vein in the search history.
She and her mother talk over breakfast the next day, and once it's done Byleth is very glad she never needed to have this conversation with Jeralt.
(In the end, it turns out there's a quirk to help make things right and a plethora of paperwork to change her ID to read Midoriya Izumi.)
Bakugou takes it well, the rest of her class gets through it with only a couple hiccups, and Sothis merely tuts, says it's about time, and that she should have tried to change her name to Byleth instead of leaving it up to her mother to pick out the new name. Byleth counters by saying that this way only Sothis gets to call her by her true name, and that's more than enough to appease her.
"...Izumi," Bakugou says to her one day on their way home from school.
"Katsuki," she returns, Sothis floating beside her as they both maintain a half-interest in whatever he has to say.
None of their shared friends are there, having gone their separate ways a few intersections ago. "...Let's become heroes together." He's long since come to respect her, Byleth knows; every time since they were young she's won their fights, the decade and a half of experience being more than enough to tip the scales in her favour. Still, she's never quite said that she'd become a hero - and, until this moment, she's been yet to decide. He's trained over the years, and Byleth has trained with him (though, training is a generous word for what they were doing. Byleth mostly just exercises until Bakugou says he wants to spar, at which point she trounces him and offers unwanted pointers.), but she's never said she shared his goal. Byleth doesn't know if he just assumed that she did, or if he'd been aware of that fact.
"Alright." Silence follows as they walk down the street, save for Bakugou's sigh. "...Do you think being a hero gives you enough time off to go fishing?"
A nerve bulges on Bakugou's forehead. "What the hell is it with you and fishing? You've never gone in your life!"
"That's not true," Byleth counters readily.
"Those shitty simulator games don't count!"
She turns to him and cocks her head. "Why not?" She's rather fond of them, frankly, although the two people who know about them - Bakugou and ashestoashes, her HoH friend - both vehemently oppose her opinion.
Bakugou growls, but drops the matter; things quiet down between them as they walk a while longer, at least until they get to where they turn and separate. "U.A.," Bakugou says. "Let's shoot for U.A."
Now that Byleth has a goal to work towards, she starts plotting steps. It's a work ethic she picked up after becoming a professor, and one she then applied to leading the army during the war - take stock of everything, determine the objectives, and move towards them.
She starts by looking up U.A. and researching its requirements. Finish junior high school; that's easy enough, even if it'll take two more years. Have a clean record; Byleth doesn't get into trouble and Bakugou doesn't get reprimanded for half the things he does. If either of those stops being true, Byleth can just divine pulse and fix it. After that comes applying, followed by an entrance exam.
All in all, it's easy enough.
Byleth starts working out a little more intensely, asking her mother for the money for a gym membership and going on morning runs. Bakugou, too, follows suit, pushing himself to train nearly every time that Byleth does.
It helps with his strength, of course, but it's still not enough to give him the advantage in their spars. Byleth might not have something as flashy as his explosive quirk, but she's been there for almost every step in the development of his fighting style. She knows what he'll do, what he'll try, what he'll get caught flat-footed by.
And so, that's how Byleth spends one year, and then the next.
(Sothis asks her, one night, if becoming a hero is really what she wants.
"It's the closest thing to becoming a mercenary," Byleth responds, because that’s really all that she knows how to do.)