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“What the hell were you thinking out there?” Felix snarls, though the light touch of his hands against Sylvain betrays his anger. Blood runs freely down across his fingers from the large wound that was sliced open just below Sylvain’s knee, and when Felix refused to let a medic treat him and dragged him away himself, he knew he was in for it.
Sylvain tries to look anywhere but his eyes, suddenly finding the shifting of light through the leaves above them very interesting. “What do you mean what was I thinking? It’s war, injuries happen!”
Felix scoffs. “You jumped in front of a lance for me–a lance I was prepared to handle, you dunce.”
The words make Sylvain frown. He lowers his head to watch Felix and wishes they weren’t arguing so he could just reach out and smooth the deep furrow from between his brow. The man is kneeling in front of the stump Sylvain is sat on, having taken basic supplies from Mercedes and is treating his injury with the knowledge of a boy who definitely had his fair share of accidents as a child.
“We always have each other’s backs,” Sylvain tries to explain again. “I was just looking out for you, you don’t have to get so upset about it.”
“There’s a difference between looking out for me and having my back like usual!” Felix is quick to bark. It’s obvious his mind was stewing with all kinds of insults and complaints he had just been waiting until they got away to hurl at him. Sylvain pales as he watches Felix pouring an antidote over a clean rag from his rucksack, fully prepared to feel the harsh sting of the medicine in its full wrath. But when the wet cloth touches his leg, it’s surprisingly gentle despite the sting.
“Well… it is different now,” Sylvain says.
Felix looks up at him with a quirked brow, and Sylvain cheekily crosses his good leg over the one in Felix’s hold with a flirty smile.
“Now that we’re actually dating and all.”
It isn’t that he’s expecting Felix to blush like any of his maidens might, but wouldn’t it be nice? If he acted flustered, or got embarrassed, or even just turned his face and called him “i-idiot…” like one of those cheesy romance novels? Sylvain knows how to deal with all of those tropes, knows all the right words and moves to have them swooning and falling into his arms.
But the expression on Felix’s face is less like a maiden and more of complete and utter disgust. Suddenly, the cloth is pressed harder into the wound, and Sylvain yelps at the medicine’s sting.
“Felix! Felix stop! I get it, I should’ve been more careful–uncle, uncle!”
“Say it won’t be different, then!”
“What?!”
Felix lifts his head to meet Sylvain’s eye, glaring at him hard as the hand holding his ankle in place tightens. Maybe Sylvain’s imagining things, about to pass out from the pain, but are Felix’s ears… turning red? “Say things between us… aren’t going to be different,” he says again, albeit quieter. The medicine rag lifts from his leg and is set down with the other medical supplies he brought.
He’s just about to turn away and pretend he hadn’t said anything when, all at once, the patient he had been taking care of suddenly falls forward. Felix doesn’t have time to react before Sylvain is grappling him into a chokehold that resembles how they might wrestle as children. But instead of adding insult to injury with a noogie, he leans down and presses his lips to Felix’s cheek in a loud, wet kiss.
“No can do!”
Felix rolls his eyes and pushes him off, admonishing him about his injury. But the rest of the time he spends wrapping Sylvain’s leg in bandages, he doesn’t bother trying to hide his smile.