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Byleth goes to bed at the same time every night, precisely at the second bell. It sets a good example for the students, and prepares Byleth to wake up with the dawn, early enough to hit the training ground and squeeze in breakfast before class. Like all the professor's tactics, it is theoretically and practically sound.
But going to bed at a regular time does not mean going to sleep at a regular time. At midnight, having tossed and turned for hours already, Byleth gives up and lights a candle. They spent their childhood sleeping rough -- tents in winter, the rest of the year beneath the stars. They have not gotten used to the feeling of stone walls around them and wooden beams above. Nor the pumps that dispense water, nor cooking in an oven rooted to the ground.
Nor, they think uncharitably as they pull supplies off the shelf of their small room, being the child of a Knight of Seiros.
In the morning, the first students to rise will be greeted by the sight of their professor sprawled on a bedroll on the strip of grass before the dorms, snoring contentedly. It is no longer unusual, and they keep a polite distance. When the rays of dawn wake Byleth, they will gather their travel bedding and deposit it indoors, then head to the training ground. Nobody who sees them there will mention what they saw. We all do what we must do to sleep.
#
Dimitri blinks, and the candle is suddenly much shorter. He rubs his eyes. He's been reviewing the reports of crop yields from the central provinces of Faerghus. He orders them all sent to him at Garreg Mach, and returns strongly worded letters to those lords who try to hide surpluses instead of donating them to the less fortunate regions. This usually works. But it would be a lot more effective if it was a king sending the strongly worded letters.
He rubs his eyes. If Dedue sees the light under his door, he'll probably give Dimitri an earful about endangering his health by not resting. Which is always very rich coming from him.
He's right, of course. But there are other factors at play. Lately, any moment that Dimitri spends asleep feels stolen from the people to whom he owes all his waking efforts. No sooner does his head hit the pillow than the ghosts begin to murmur, asking whether he really deserves sleep. So he stays awake, even as the words of the reports grow fuzzy and dance across the page.
#
Edelgard awakens from yet another dream of chains and skittering feet, and clamps a hand over her mouth. If she cries out, Hubert will hear it, and then he'll probably poison someone without asking Edelgard's permission. It can be a great burden, sometimes, to be cared about.
She lights a candle. These days, the only thing that soothes her back to sleep is making the preparations for her coronation. She keeps the necessary correspondence within arm's reach of her bed in case of a nightmare: dozens of letters to minor court functionaries and landholders, discreetly shoring up her base of support.
El supposes she should feel guilty about conspiring against her father, who is just as much a victim in all this. But she can no longer live without the knowledge that she's moving forward. Much more than the Emperor, it is the face of Professor Byleth that gives her pause now, their disapproving stare sharper than the holy sword they wield.
#
Claude has had ample opportunity to regret spending this entire night squatting on the top shelf of a broom closet. He's inhaled at least a mugful of dust -- deeply ironic, with all the dustcloths in here -- and he likely won't be able to feel his legs for days to come. But the plan is too far along for him to back out now.
He laid his trap carefully. A few rumors here and there about a haunted closet in the recesses of the monastery, tossed off so casually that those who repeat them won't recall where they first heard them. Supernatural messages and strange noises, performed at dawn for the credulous monk who's always the first one in here.
The end result: a place in Garreg Mach everyone is too frightened to search, where nobody will notice Claude storing some sensitive notes. A few clues to the great mystery he doesn't want anyone to know he's researching.
#
Hubert sleeps soundly, despite how many people in his life have asked him how he can possibly sleep at all. He has always lived outside the sight of the Goddess; it gives him great comfort to know where he stands.
The only disturbing thing is how often, lately, he dreams of Her Highness Edelgard. In positions that can only be described as...compromising. With Hubert himself intimately involved.
It is a deeply unwelcome distraction. Tonight, when Hubert wakes yet again to sweat-soaked sheets, he seriously considers a harebrained scheme of paying a local courtesan to grow her hair long and dye it platinum-white. He discards the notion when morning arrives. Edelgard reviews her accounts too closely to miss where the money would be going.
#
Hilda snores softly, curled up on her unmade bed. She was busy today. First there was class, where she took copious notes to ensure she could skip studying for the next exam. Then training, which she does religiously, keeping herself in peak physical condition so that moving around requires as little effort as possible. Then socializing in the dining hall for hours, making sure that people remember her smile the next time she needs a favor.
The final piece, of course, is ample beauty rest. Hilda knows it's all important. Yet, as she drifts off, she sometimes wishes that being lazy didn't require so much work.
#
Dedue will not sleep until Prince Dimitri does. His excuse is that someone must look after His Highness's health, since Dimitri certainly won't do it himself.
In truth, though, Dedue does not spend all his wakeful hours watching over the Prince. He likes to walk abroad at night, breathing in the sweet air of the monastery grounds, sometimes working in the greenhouse by the light of a lantern. Nobody hurls epithets at him after midnight, nor makes tired jokes about whether he's killed any more kings lately.
The night liberates Dedue from his skin, makes him no longer a being defined by his body. He can exist formlessly in a world of scents and sounds. It is the deepest kind of peace, at least of those he can access.
#
Felix pauses his drill, panting, as yet another training dummy bursts into a pile of straw. At some point -- he truly couldn't say when -- he had dropped his practice sword and gone at the dummy with his fists. The hay has left raw red marks on the backs of his knuckles.
It's disconcerting to be so angry and have no idea why. It's only just occurring to him that his lack of close friends is a liability here; he has nobody to ask what might be driving his fists. Sylvain would probably tell him he needed to get laid, and Ingrid would look at him with a concern Felix just can't take right now. Professor Byleth would know, but asking them feels like cheating. The Professor always knows.
Felix tosses the dummy aside and sets up another. Someone will probably bother him tomorrow about fixing these. He hopes it's Annette -- her bothering is just more fun than anyone else's. Weirdly enough, that's the first thought that calms him down.
#
Petra swims through a clear ocean, the sunlight scattering across pools of luminous fish. The water is a warm in a way that nothing in Fodlan is ever warm. She breaks the surface, wiping salt and wet hair from her eyes, and sees nothing but her beloved catamaran and the thin line of Brigid off in the distance.
She shades her eyes. What are those stormclouds gathering over Brigid? Why does the thunder clap before lightning flashes -- should that not be impossible? And what are those shapes, shadows as large as dragons, moving within the clouds? Petra tries to swim toward the boat, but it drifts away, and soon her limbs grow too heavy to swim...
She wakes with tears streaking her face. This is not the first time she has had this nightmare. Her homeland faces danger from every direction, and Petra is trapped on a mountaintop, as far from the sea as it is possible to exist.
#
Lorenz has long known that the duties of a noble never end, even when said noble is asleep. He keeps his sheets perfumed with rose petals, washes fastidiously before climbing into bed, and slumbers on a careful arrangement of pillows designed to keep his body limber. If the commoners ever see him looking disheveled, their confidence in Fodlan's very system of government will falter.
He has even recently begun to keep a dream journal, as he's heard this prepares one to control one's own dreams. Lorenz longs to dream about only suitable topics, ones which won't leave him stammering and embarrassed the next day. When he achieves lucidity, the recurring nightmare about Leonie riding him like a horse will be the first to go.
#
Ferdinand lies on his back, arms behind his head, his eyelids not feeling the slightest bit heavy. He is going over the last training session in his mind. Edelgard had disarmed him with a maneuver too fast to trace with his eyes. A kind of...thrust, and then hook? But how had she gotten her axe on the other side of his lance?
Certainly, the proximal cause was likely some illustration she'd found in the back of an ancient fighting manual. Perhaps she is in the library right now, learning the next one, while Ferdinand wastes time trying and failing to sleep. He wonders how Edelgard sleeps.
He sighs. He knows it's not healthy or natural to be so obsessed with outdoing another person, especially one who clearly doesn't consider Ferdinand a rival. But he has seen a darkness in Edelgard's eyes lately, and it's raised the stakes of their one-sided rivalry. If Ferdinand, who has dedicated his life to surpassing Edelgard, cannot defeat her, what hope is there for anyone else?
#
Leonie isn't tired, so she decides to finally attack the pile of mending that's been steadily mounting on her floor. It's gotten more manageable since Bernie agreed to do some of it, but Leonie is reluctant to dump the whole thing off on someone else. She takes pride in doing tasks herself. Except for cleaning. Hence the pile.
She approves of the Officer's Academy requiring the students to do their own chores, but she suspects the nobles have people handling the tasks for them in secret. Certainly she's never seen Lorenz or Ferdinand stitching cuts in their own clothes.
Fine, Leonie thinks. Let them get soft. It'll only make them easier to beat when she's a real, trained mercenary, fighting by Captain Jeralt's side. She pulls the thread through the edges of the tear in her second-best trousers, and imagines that glorious future day with each tightly controlled stitch.
#
Annette wishes she could find a better way of tracking the time. Candles can only ever be an approximation, and the bells stop ringing an hour before midnight. That's also when the monks kick her out of the library, so most midnights find her wide awake in her room, still reading whatever she was reading when they evicted her.
Professor Byleth -- along with every other professor Annette has ever known -- has a good point about not overdoing it. Except that Annette finds it physically painful to underdo it. Stillness literally makes her itch. Mercy tried to put a cream on it once.
She turns to the next page, crammed as full of arcane diagrams as the last one. She's just now started to get how this spell works, and sleep might make her lose her tenuous grasp on the concept. Annette figures her body forcing her to pass out is as good a way to calculate bedtime as any other.
#
Ignatz knows he should be sleeping, but it's a full moon and the light is too perfect to waste. He's up on the third floor of the main building, having climbed up a trellis with his canvas and paints on his back. Only after setting up the easel does he realize that he's on Lady Rhea's personal balcony -- probably not the safest perch with all the Knights on high alert lately.
It's fine. He'll finish fast. Ignatz is more agile than people give him credit for. The instant that painting became connected in his head to breaking the rules, he started down his path to being something of a thief. It's helped him a surprising amount in battle.
He doesn't think about any of that right now, though. When he paints, each moment is whole and complete on its own, as transient and perfect as the silver moonlight on the southern tower.
#
Ashe sees Petra every time he closes his eyes. It's getting deeply inconvenient, if he's honest with himself. Earlier that evening, she had asked him if he wanted to see her back tattoos, then pulled her shirt off without a second thought. With the courage of Loog himself, Ashe had reached out and traced one dark whorl with his finger. They'd both sat bolt upright at the electric current running from his hand to her flesh.
She's a princess, he tells himself in bed. You're nobody. But that doesn't stop him from being so hard at the mere memory of her that he can't roll over without wincing. Finally, Ashe sighs and reaches into his trousers, resigning himself to once again ruining his only handkerchief.
#
Bernadetta is back in the chair. If she hasn't had the dream for a few nights, she can always count on it coming soon. The chair is cushioned in fine velvet, the perfect showpiece for a plush receiving room of the Varley estate. Bernie is tied to it with ropes her father pulled from the curtains. Count Varley sits across from her, reading a book, pointedly clearing his throat every time Bernie makes a noise.
She doubts he even remembers this day, recalls that he planted her most frequent nightmare. It has scared her less lately, though, since she told Byleth about it. The Professor had walked Bernie through an exercise that calmed her into peaceful slumber.
First, she pushes her father away, enfolding him in the shadows on the edges of the dream until he fades from sight completely. Then she imagines others entering the room. Petra severs the ropes with a dagger. Dorothea rubs a balm onto Bernie's chafed wrists. And Raphael lifts the chair over his head and smashes it on the floor, stomping on the pieces until they're nothing more than dust.
#
Mercedes volunteers to clean the kitchens so she can get two hours alone with the oven. She's been possessed all week by an idea about drying milk in the oven and browning it along with the butter for raspberry tarts. It keeps popping into her head at inopportune moments, usually in class.
The baking project goes even better than Mercedes expected. While she finishes cleaning, she has to fight a swoon when she smells the tarts resting. But she resists. These tarts have a mission, and it's not just to stop her from drooling on her battle notes.
Balancing the tarts on a tray, she hurries across the grounds and up the stairs to the second-floor dormitory. As expected, there's still light shining from under Annie's door. If her best friend won't sleep, staying up with her is the least Mercy can do. And if Mercy's going to be up after midnight, there had better at least be sweets.
#
Caspar practices kip-ups in his room until Hubert, his neighbor, knocks on the door and threatens to Nosferatu him into a coma if he doesn't keep it down. Caspar takes this as a warning that big, loud movements are making him too predictable in battle. He manages to pull off a silent kip-up, then ruins the moment by shouting in triumph.
Hubert doesn't silence him with the dark arts after all. Caspar always knew the guy was a softie at heart.
The truth is, Caspar would like to be asleep right now. He's not an idiot; he knows being tired makes you slow in ways a soldier can't afford. He'll just sleep twice as much tomorrow night instead. He grabs his coat and heads for the side gate, hoping there's some jerk abroad in town who'll give him an excuse to burn off all this energy.
#
Ingrid is up late reading, which is the worst way to be up late, as she's not even trading tomorrow's health for any useful benefit tonight. She's even read this book before; she knows what happens. She can practically recite chapter XXVII, in which Dame Alicia finally squares up to her dark dragon nemesis, from memory.
But she needs this right now. Yet another letter from her father lies on her desk, open, because Ingrid hasn't found the courage to throw it in the midden. Some lady knight she's turning out to be.
The letter is yet another perfectly calibrated guilt trip. There's another suitor, another chance for Ingrid to save House Galatea. She'll face it tomorrow. Tonight, she has her blankets, and a mug of tea, and this book, which may bless her with Dame Alicia's courage if Ingrid reads it just one more time.
#
Linhardt isn't obsessed with sleep. He's just nocturnal. It peeves him how few people seem to get that. As the bells finish ringing and lights flicker off across the monastery, Linhardt does his best work, tearing through his homework assignments by lantern light.
Once he's done, Linhardt isn't sure what to do with himself. He picks up a book on minor crests that he got from the library, but puts it down again soon -- he's pretty sure he knows where the author is taking his argument, and he doesn't agree. The awkward part is that Professor Hanneman praised this scholar in class just the other day. Linhardt will have to find a way to broach the subject delicately when they next have tea.
He decides a walk will help him formulate his rebuttal. Just past the fishing pond, he sees a shock of blue hair heading toward the main gate. Linhardt sighs. Caspar is undoubtedly seeking a fight, and he hasn't even brought a light, let alone a weapon. The fool will need to be patched up, and he's awful at white magic. Linhardt quickens his steps to catch up with his friend.
#
Lysithea hates that she needs to sleep. It's not fair at all. Cursed with an early death, and on top of that, she has to pay interest on her mortality by wasting chunks of her life in bed? No, thank you.
Staying up past midnight is an act of rebellion for Lysithea, a raspberry blown at an uncaring goddess. She's gotten quite good at it. She drinks strong tea, jogs in place, recites the librettos from operas she saw as a child. Sometimes she takes walks around the monastery, where her fear of ghosts keeps her blood pumping and her mind alert.
Back in her room, Lysithea wonders if it's worth her while to stay awake when all she's doing is trying not to fall asleep. She quashes the thought. Life is its own justification, she thinks, then topples onto the bed and begins to snore.
#
Dorothea dreams of the opera stage. She and Manuela are in the midst of a stormy duet of the kind they performed a hundred times at Mittelfrank: two rivals for a wayward lover's heart, perhaps, or a queen against her rebellious daughter. It always brought the house down when they reached their intersecting crescendos.
This time, though, the audience consists entirely of clones of Ferdinand, demanding that Dorothea marry one of them. A horrifying chimera of Alois's head on Flayn's body keeps interrupting the song to demand changes to make the script funnier. Dorothea forgets her lines at the climax, and instead shouts Meteor!, bringing down a fireball that kills most of the Ferdinands on impact.
At breakfast the next morning, Dorothea will recount this strange dream for Petra, who will tell her -- a bit too quickly -- that not all dreams have to mean something. In the end, only the nameless song will remain in Dorothea's memory.
#
Sylvain tries to will some feeling back into his dead arm. The girl lying atop it fell asleep an hour ago, and judging by her gentle breathing, Sylvain isn't getting his arm back anytime soon. Or his bed. He could shake her awake, but he hasn't the heart.
Besides, he's forgotten the name of this particular girl. He should have pulled the plug on the whole evening once he realized he didn't know and it was too late to ask. But she had big eyes, and a quick smile, and a way of dancing close enough to Sylvain that he forgot about names altogether -- including, for a few glorious hours, the name Gautier and its attached crest.
He resigns himself to a day of pins and needles. If this girl wants to see him again, maybe she'll send a letter. Or he'll just admit he doesn't know her name, and push her away like all the others. That might be easiest.
#
Marianne always meets the wandering beast in her dreams.
It is a creature she can't compare to anything earthly, even other monsters -- a lumbering shadow born far outside the Goddess's sight. It whispers to her with the force of rolling thunder. Marianne. My heiress. Find me and claim thy birthright.
She wakes, her mouth filled with the iron taste of blood yet undrunk.
Normally, she would soothe the horror by rushing to the cathedral and begging the Goddess to end her suffering in whatever way she saw fit. But Marianne can no longer make herself do this. Every time she asks for an end, the horrified faces of her friends fill her mind: Hilda, Ignatz, Professor Byleth. She has too much life to give up now. So she carries on into another day.
#
Raphael is too big for the bed, so he uses it as a snacking table, and sleeps in a giant pile of blankets and pillows on the floor. That makes it pretty annoying to walk around in his room, but sleep is a part of training, and that's worth the inconvenience.
As he drifts off, Raphael remembers the first time he ever did this. It was the day after he and Maya had moved in with their grandfather, after their parents died. Raphael had tossed and turned, missing his own bed. Then his sister had knocked on the door, her eyes red and puffy, confessing that she couldn't stop thinking about their old house filling up with moths and bugs.
They had dragged all the sheets and blankets off both of their beds and piled them on the floor of Raphael's room. Maya had fallen asleep on his chest, a little weight, frighteningly light. It was probably about then that Raphael decided he'd live his life at his sister's service. It comforts him to sleep this way now, so far away from his family. It reminds him of his promise.