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Felix was eight years old the first time he ever imagined himself with someone.
On a cold, early winter morning, he rose with the crack of dawn. He dressed himself in his finest warm clothes by watery grey light, hauled on boots and gloves before descending down to the yard below to wait in the softly falling snow. He pulled himself up onto the great, flat rock outside the gates and swung his legs back and forth while he watched the ribbon of road that stretched down the hillside away from Castle Fraldarius.
Glenn joined him as the sun broke the horizon, making it so that he had to squint to see if anyone was coming. “You’re going to catch a cold,” he said, settling back against the rock, crossing his arms over his chest. Glenn was only two and a half years older, but he thought that meant he was always right.
“I’m not,” Felix said, holding up his hands, fingers spread. “I wore my fur gloves, see?”
“Suit yourself,” Glenn replied with a shrug, facing the road. “Father will be down in a minute.”
Felix tried not to show disappointment on his face. In truth, he had hoped to be the only one present when the Blaiddyd contingent arrived. He’d wanted to have it all to himself, if only for a moment.
When their carriage rolled to a stop in the soft, fluffy snow, horses swinging their manes majestically and stomping proudly, knights in fine armour descending to attend to their king, Father was there. Felix knew his manners well enough to hang back and watch, chewing at his bottom lip while the King stepped down from the carriage, while Father embraced him tightly, clapping him on the back. They exchanged warm words, old friends falling from both their lips. He folded his gloved hands into his lap and remained very properly still when Lady Patricia floated down and she pressed kisses to each of Father’s cheeks.
But the next pair of small, booted feet hitting the ground in a puff of sparkling dust broke his resolve.
“Dimitri!” he cried excitedly, sliding down from his perch atop the rock. “I got up to wait for you!”
“Felix,” Father admonished, and while he knew all the rules, the proper conduct and the specific order of introductions and all the pomp and circumstances that set them above the commonfolk... he still couldn’t resist dashing forward anyway when Dimitri turned those big, shining sapphire eyes onto him.
He grasped him as tight as their fathers had, pulling him close. “You’re here! You’re finally here! I’ve barely slept all week, you know.”
Dimitri’s hands on his back were awkward and halting. “Felix,” he said.
“Felix,” Father echoed, sounding more exasperated than anything else. “I’m sorry, Lambert. He’s a clever one, but he doesn’t handle himself very well in etiquette lessons.”
The King’s laugh was warm and kind. “Nonsense, Rodrigue. Etiquette, really? We’re all old friends, here. I won’t have our families stand on unnecessary ceremony. Please. Let your boy hug mine in peace.”
“Felix,” Dimitri said again, and, seemingly given permission by his father’s approval, pulled him closer.
Felix closed his eyes, pressing his face down into the fur ruff of his cape. “You’re going to play with me?” he asked. “And spend time with me? I have a new sled. It goes very fast. You can use it, if you want. I’ll take the old one.”
This is what he imagined happening next:
Dimitri pulled away, smiling at him brightly, his best and biggest smile. He cupped Felix’s chin in his hands, gazing down at him with those big blue eyes. “Of course,” he said. “I came here for you, Felix. I only want to spend time with you. You must know, I care about you just as much as you do, me. Maybe even moreso.”
Instead, Dimitri nodded and patted his back. “I’m sure I’ll have the time,” he said. “Thank you for waiting for me, Felix. It’s very nice to see you. I need to make my courtesies to your father, now.”
Being the subject of Dimitri’s attention at all, even for a few short moments, made Felix feel as if he was walking on air. He bobbed a nod, pulling away. Glenn sometimes called him clingy, and he didn’t want Dimitri to think that about him. He wanted Dimitri to think that he was brave, and fun, and his best friend in all the world. He wanted Dimitri to think of him as much as he thought of Dimitri.
He wanted them to be together forever.
It was that moment that stuck out in his mind for years to come. The way he’d watched Dimitri pull away, walk to his father, and bow at the waist. The way he’d kept on imagining, dreaming of something more, something better, something where they were the only ones there and the only ones who mattered.
It was the first time. Far from the last.
*
They were eleven years old and it was late autumn when Felix decided it was high time they explored the run down old tower house in the castle gardens.
He’d suggested it with bravado and certainty, but now he hung back, looking furtively over his shoulder while Dimitri pulled at old, dead scrub and branches that blocked the doorway.
He’d had originally protested and rejected Felix’s bold proposal. “We’ve never explored it because we’re not allowed to go there,” he’d said, seeming confused as to why Felix had even suggested it with that in mind.
Felix had shaken his head impatiently. “No, that’s why we need to do it,” he’d said firmly. “Breaking the rules is scary, right? And so if you do it, that means you’re being brave. Come on, Dimitri, please? You want to be more like Glenn, don’t you?”
And that had convinced the prince whole-heartedly, which Felix had welcomed as a victory... until now, when they stood outside the tumbling old edifice. He wondered where Dimitri’s prudence had gone, and why he seemed so entirely unconcerned with the possibility of getting caught… or something worse.
He gripped his sleeve. “Maybe we should go back,” he suggested. “Or -- or at least come back with more people! Y-you know, strength in numbers? We could get Sylvain, and Ingrid…”
Or Glenn, because this was really all his fault, after all. But Glenn had been different, lately. He was squired, now, and he’d be putting in for the knights in a year. He was as sharp-tongued as ever, but seemed to think twice before doing or saying things, these days. This was the exact sort of thing he would have done, before… and the exact sort of thing he might fold his arms and shake his head at, now.
Dimitri pulled at an old plank that had once been part of a door. It snapped off, sending him reeling a step back. Felix scuttled out of his way, whining in the back of his throat. “Be careful!”
“Ingrid is busy with your brother,” Dimitri said firmly, putting his hands on the hip to study the problem before advancing once again, bull-headed and stubborn. “And Sylvain is off kissing scullery girls. You know he can’t be turned away from that.”
Felix wrinkled his nose. Sylvain didn’t seem to do much else, lately, and no matter how many times he went on explaining why it was the best thing ever, the appeal seemed alien to him.
Dimitri pulled at the rest of the door plank. It resisted him, but only for a second. He’d always been strong enough to do almost anything if he put his back into it. With a crack, the rest of it came off, leaving a gap big enough for them to slip through. “Come on,” Dimitri said, and turned sideways to squeeze through before Felix could make one last attempt to talk him out of it.
With a sigh and one last worried glance about, Felix followed him in.
Old, abandoned furniture looked brown and decrepit. The floorboards squealed beneath their feet, and in spots it had broken, allowing tenacious greenery to emerge from the soil beneath. Vines covered the grey walls, sneaking in through chinks in the old stones and up from the ground beneath. White autumn sunlight streamed in through those gaps, filtering through centuries of dust and cobwebs. Felix coughed, raising his elbow to block his mouth. “Ugh!” he gasped. “It smells awful in here!”
“I think it’s just mold and dust,” Dimitri replied, his eyes forward. “Old things always smell weird. Come on, I want to see deeper inside...”
Felix followed on his heels. It wasn’t what he’d expected. He had, he guessed, imagined something out of a ghost story, all dark and spooky and unsettling. Instead, it just seemed… sad. Lonely, almost. Like a moment locked away in time, forgotten and left behind.
“They say my great-great-great aunt lived here,” he said, his voice hushed. It seemed wrong to disturb the quietude. “She was really weird, and she didn’t want to get married, or even go down as far Fraldarius Town at the bottom of the hill. She was my ancestor’s favourite sister, though, so he decided to take care of her. He built her a tower to live in, here in the Castle.”
“That’s really nice of him,” Dimitri said, pulling open another door. The handle broke off in his hand, and he winced, but the door swung outward, revealing a set of tumbled stone steps.
Felix saw the uncertainty on his face. “We probably shouldn’t climb them,” he said. “It might be dangerous.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Dimitri’s chest puffed up, and he nodded firmly to himself. “Good!” he said. “You can only be brave in the face of danger, after all. That’s what my father always says. Come on. Did you say you wanted to be like Glenn?”
There was no answer he could give other than to slowly pick his way up after him, trying to choose places where the stairs remained intact, and the stone didn’t crumble under his hands.
“What happened to her?” Dimitri asked, when they were far enough up that they’d curled out of sight from the door they’d entered from. “Your aunt?”
This was the part that had always made him afraid of the tower. His father had told him the story very solemnly, as a part of their history. Glenn had told it with a grin and his face contorted by firelight, trying to get a rise out of him so that he could laugh and pull him close and comfort him when he got scared. “She died,” he said. “Here, in the tower. After Duke Byron died, his son didn’t really take the time to come see her. I guess they thought she was creepy, or weird, or they just didn’t bother to make the time. One day, someone noticed the lights weren’t on at night. When someone came to check on her, they just found her here. She was sitting in her favourite chair, and she’d been gone for at least a week already. Nobody had even noticed.”
This was where his father’s version turned into a lesson about the importance of caring for all of those you are sworn to, even those you might prefer to forget, and Glenn’s version went on to describe how, on some nights, you could hear great Aunt Georgiana weeping on the wind, and see the lights in the old tower come up, flickering in the dark. Those had always felt like the most important parts of the story, to Felix. The responsibility it conjured, and the terror.
But now, as they climbed the last steps and emerged into the second floor room littered with old, rotten chairs and a broken down piano, where the mythical figure had surely spent most of her time, he just felt faintly melancholy.
“That’s very sad,” Dimitri said.
“Yeah,” Felix agreed.
“What happened to her?” Dimitri asked.
Felix shrugged. “Nobody knows, exactly. It was probably the cold. She didn’t really have enough firewood, and she couldn’t chop it herself. She might have been sick, too. Or even hungry. They really weren’t coming by very often to bring her supplies. Or maybe she was just… really old. Her brother had died of old age, after all. She couldn’t have been that much younger than him.”
“I guess not,” Dimitri said, and he cast his gaze around the room. There was a solemnity to his expression that made him look very dignified and serious. “I wonder, though,” he said, and there was something wistful and distant in his voice. “Do you think you could die just from being unseen by someone you loved?”
“I don’t know,” Felix replied softly.
“Felix,” Dimitri said, and stepped in closer. He turned the full weight of his attention onto him, grasping him by the shoulders, and those kind, soulful eyes stared right into his soul.
Felix’s heart leapt into a gallop. His palms began to sweat. Thoughts and feelings and wishes he’d never felt before collided in his middle, making his head spin with confusing, impossible, incoherent wants. He thought of everything Sylvain had told him, all those lurid details, and suddenly he understood, with crystal clarity, the appeal of every single one.
Dimitri’s hands slid from his shoulders to his neck and then up into his hair. His expression turned thoughtful, and then tender. “Felix,” he repeated, moving closer, and then, tilting his head up by his grip on his scalp, he kissed him, with lips that were smooth and soft and cool and sweet, and Felix was melted down to a puddle and then washed away…
“I want you to promise me something,” he said, and Felix blinked.
His imaginary version of events evaporated in a puff of smoke, frost under harsh sunlight, and left him staggered and confused and gasping. He shook his head, trying to make sense of what he’d just wished for, dreamed of. “I… anything,” he gasped. “I’d do anything for you, Dimitri.”
Dimitri nodded gravely. “Promise me that will never happen to me.”
Despite his blown out, compromised state of mind, Felix couldn’t help but laugh at the idea. “Dimitri,” he said, breathlessly. “You’re going to be a King. You don’t think anyone will notice if you don’t have enough firewood?”
“You can be alone even when there are people around,” Dimitri said.
Felix blinked at him, not understanding.
Dimitri glanced away. “My mother…” he said. “Sometimes, I think… I think she seems as if she is…” And then he shook his head, turning his gaze back onto Felix. “Just promise me. That you’ll always look at me and see me. Won’t you?”
In that quiet, sad old tower, imagining their lips pressed together and more, things he didn’t even have the understanding for yet, he would have promised Dimitri anything. “Of course,” he agreed. “Didn’t I just say? I’d do anything. I promise, Dimitri. You don’t have to worry.”
He wanted more. Wanted this little moment in the old, broken down tower to continue, where he could explore what was happening inside of him for as long as he wanted. But Dimitri released him, though he did not want to be released, and stepped away.
“We should go back,” he said. He sounded sad, reluctant, and Felix wanted to argue with him, because he didn’t want to go back, not anymore. But he didn’t have the presence of mind to do so, not now. So he nodded, and they did.
*
On the night they bring Glenn’s body home to rest, his coffin draped in the flags of Faerghus, Blaiddyd, and Fraldarius, Dimitri finds Felix in his room. They’re both broken, gutted, torn open and wasted, but they cling to each other. There’s no shame and no judgement. There’s no holding back. No one needs to be strong, to be smart, to be better, to be right. There’s just the two of them.
Dimitri kisses him. Felix kisses back. It’s fumbling and confused, all comfort and no passion, but Felix feels like someone is there, someone understands, and he remembers that he’s alive. They both are.
Dimitri has lost more than he has. He sits with him, holds him while he cries. He’s there for him. They kiss again. Cry some more. Kiss again, and again. Neither of them are alone in this. They’re there for one another. Like they always have been. Like they always will be.
*
On the night they bring Glenn’s body home to rest, his coffin draped in the flags of Faerghus, Blaiddyd, and Fraldarius, Dimitri stands quiet and distant in the column. His eyes are downcast, his mouth is slack, and he stares at the ground, blank-faced and lifeless, while Duke Rufus says all the proper words. He’s a thousand miles away, maybe more, and Felix wants to push past all of the knights and aides and soldiers to pull him into his arms, hold him close, make sense of the madness of what had happened together, but he’s not eight years old anymore, and certain proprieties must be observed.
Dimitri leaves without having said a word, without having met any of their eyes. The knights and aides and soldiers, the Duke and the future King, they leave Glenn’s dead bones in the yard, near the big flat stone, and then they’re gone, off to make more stops on their tour of Faerghus’s mourning nobles.
The only reason Felix doesn’t just start screaming is because the lump in his throat is too big for anything at all to get out.
*
They were seventeen and it was nearly midnight or later at Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy when Dimitri found him in the training yard.
Felix would have stopped, if he’d known he was there. He liked to imagine he didn’t much care about anyone’s opinion of him, but he’d be lying to himself if he tried to pretend he didn’t want to be seen as a swordsman of unparalleled finesse and form, and not a hacking brute relying on pure, animal strength.
Like some sort of boar.
But with all potential sparring partners long since abed and left to nothing but his wooden practice sword, a training dummy on squealing hinges, and his own thoughts, he’d let himself go. What had started as an attempt to get the thing swinging about so that he might practice dodging and weaving between an enemy’s strikes had become cathartic, mindless hacking. He breathed heavy, sweat flying off him in droplets as he battered the shrieking dummy with blow after blow, strong, overhand strikes with his full power behind them. His hair was soaked, his lungs burning with effort, and the mannequin screamed and squealed and howled in protest, swinging about with such speed it was a blur that he could simply hit until he could move no longer, dropping his sword and bending at the waist, hands on his knees, sucking in breaths…
And that was when he saw the boar prince.
He straightened, his back stiffening. His heart hammered so hard in his chest he thought it might burst, putting a merciful end to whatever was about to happen. Because Dimitri did not just happen to be there, and he did not make any show of pretending he hadn’t been watching intently. The hair on the back of his hands and forearms and neck all rose, and Felix eyed him warily, waiting for him to do… whatever it was that he would do.
Nothing happened.
He broke first, damn him. “What?” he snarled.
Dimitri looked surprised for a moment. He took a half-step back, raising his hands in surrender. “It’s nearly curfew,” he said.
So. Not midnight just yet, then. Felix dropped a hip, folding his arms. Sweat dripped steadily down his back. “Is that why you’re bothering me?” he asked. “Are you volunteering with campus patrol, now, or just taking initiative as a good House leader to keep your flock in line?”
“Neither of those,” Dimitri said. His tone was always so even, his voice so reasonable. Felix remembered that mouth pulled back in a rictus of rage, those eyes wide with bloodlust, that face spotted with blood. He wouldn’t be fooled.
“Then what?”
Dimitri indicated the blunt wooden sword Felix had dropped into the sand with his chin. “Do you want to go a round?” he asked, perfectly solicitous.
Felix actually laughed, lips peeling back from his teeth in something that did not feel like a smile. “No,” he said.
“Why not?” Dimitri asked. “You were willing earlier. We had a fine bout of it.”
More reasons than he could explain even to himself, much less speak outloud. Because it was different when they were here alone, with no faculty overseeing them. Because the press of the night made everything strangely intimate. Because it was so quiet on the Academy grounds so late at night that the sound of them both panting in effort, breaths mingled and air hot, would bring to mind all manner of bedeviling idiocy.
Because Glenn had died, and it had turned Dimitri into a monster.
If he’d ever been anything else.
“Because it’s late, and I wanted to go to the sauna before bed. As you can see,” he said, spreading his arms so that Dimitri could see how the silk uniform shirt clung to his arms. “I’ve worked up just a bit of a sweat.”
The corners of Dimitri’s eyes crinkled. “You aren’t like to get less sweaty, in the sauna,” he said, and the self-satisfied gleam in his eyes was simply too ridiculous, like he thought he had just scaled to the pinnacle of humour and planted his flag on its peak.
It was agonizing to even look at him, smiling like that. Like he was a perfectly normal human being, and they were friends.
It was too much, and he stalked forward, wanting nothing more than for him to be out of sight, forgotten, gone. It was too hard to be around him, close enough to touch. It put a tightness in his chest that pulled and burned, one he wanted nothing to do with. “I’m going up to my room,” he said.
“Not the sauna?”
“I changed my mind. There’s a breeze, I’ll dry.” He brushed past him. “Don’t follow me.”
Dimitri laughed again, and Felix gritted his teeth against the soft, familiar feelings that wanted to settle into his chest. “My room is right next to yours, Felix. Am I not meant to go to bed, as well?”
Felix wanted to whirl on him, teeth bared, fingers clutched into claws. Why can’t you just leave me alone? But he didn’t have it in him, and so he merely flinched against the words, wishing he could just block them out, block it all out, make him go away and leave him in peace.
“Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”
The sound of Dimitri’s fine boots hitting the cobbled walk down the long line of first floor dormitories was deafening. The silence was moreso. Felix bit down when each footfall sounded, so close behind him, and then held his breath between them. It was as if he could feel Dimitri’s breath on the back of his neck, hot and fetid, like he was a wild animal, indeed.
He’d have lengthened his stride, if not for the weakness it would show.
A few rooms on the second floor still had open doorways, other students up studying or even talking just inside. It would normally irritate him -- he’d be trying to sleep in a moment -- but tonight, having the awful quietude broken was a blessing.
He actually began to think he would get into his room, close the door and shut out everything he so desperately wanted to hide from behind him. He had his hand on the latch when Dimitri’s soft voice at his ear made every single nerve in his body light up simultaneously.
“Felix.” Breathy. Hot. Pleading.
Felix turned, meeting his eyes, and the electric current that passed between them took his breath away. His knees wobbled. The door held him up.
“What?” he asked.
Dimitri’s hands on each side of him, flush with the door. Those sapphire eyes burning. Breath hot on his face, not an animal’s breath, but a man’s, smelling of cloves and wintergreen. Strong fingers on his face, taking hold of his chin, forcing him to look up at him. “Felix,” he repeated, lower, rougher, sending snakes coiling up into Felix’s belly. A promise.
He kissed him like he was taking possession of him, like he was claiming him and taking him over. Felix gasped when his tongue plundered his mouth, breath sighing out of him and into Dimitri’s lungs. He clutched at his shirt, his coat, his lapels, pulling him closer, dragging him down.
Dimitri’s hands were in his hair, pulling it apart and down, and Felix’s were fumbling and grasping for the latch until he found it and sent them stumbling into his bedroom where no prying eyes might see them pull desperately at one another’s clothes, tugging shirt tails from waists, kicking off boots, breathing air from one another’s lungs as they --
“Won’t you talk to me?”
They’re still in the hallway. Dimitri looks down at him. Damn him and damn him again, but the expression he wears is soft. Melancholy. Longing.
“I talk to you when I need to.” Felix said. He reached for the latch. He needed to get away. Their proximity was making him dizzy.
Dimitri shook his head. “Do…” He swallowed, adam’s apple bobbing. Too close. “Do you remember, that day at the old tower house?” he asked softly. “No, I know that you do. You promised me something. Do you remember what it was?”
A hysterical laugh tried to escape Felix’s throat, and he scoffed. “What is this, now? You’ll hold me to vows made a lifetime ago? To what end, boar? To try and recall what it was like, back when you were still a man?” It wasn’t enough. He wanted it to hurt, to twist the knife, so he spat: “Still my friend?”
Ah, and that -- that worked.
Dimitri took a faltering step back, and with the space between them lengthened by even that much, Felix was free, and he could breathe once again.
“I do, though,” he said. “I remember. I said I would look at you and see what no one else saw, didn’t I? That I’d see what was really there? I’d say I’ve more than kept it. I see what you really are, even when everyone else still thinks you’re a man.”
It had not been the spirit of the promise, and Felix knew it. He had sworn, in his heart, to never forget about him. To always care for him. To make sure that the boy, the man, did not become lost in the titles and trappings of his position. He did them both violence by desecrating that unspoiled memory and everything he had felt that day, things he’d experienced for the first time and still remembered with quickened breath and that desperate, yawning sort of nostalgia that could leave one hollowed out from scalp to toes.
But he wanted to hurt him, and he’d succeeded with aplomb. Those big, expressive blue eyes looked like those of a beaten dog. It was hard to take joy in that, but he’d do his level best. He deserved something, now didn’t he?
“You need to understand,” Dimitri said, softly, patiently, despite everything Felix had done to him already. Still standing up, like an opponent who would not yield. “Felix. What you saw in me… at the rebellion…”
“I understand perfectly,” he sneered, hurling the words away from him as much to be free of them as to deliver the killing blow. “Go back to your den, boar, and be out of my sight.”
*
Felix was twenty-two years old when he found out Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, who he had spent years mourning and hating and cursing and missing, was still alive.
He woke up with the dawn, splashing cold water from the basin on his face before gathering his hair up into a tail before a small hand mirror he’d propped up against the old desk. Most of the others had moved to more convenient rooms up in the main monastery building, but austerity had always suited him well, and so he was perfectly content to take up residence back in his old dorm room. He only used it to sleep, in any case.
Cold wind tugged at his clothes and his hair as he makes his way across the long, grand bridge that connects the monastery to the cathedral. Winter in Garreg Mach was nothing compared to what he was used to in Fraldarius, but he was still glad for the furs he still wore as big, fat snowflakes whipped his at exposed skin.
He took up his vigil near one of the pillars, leaning against it and folding his arms as he waited. He knew it wouldn’t be long.
It wasn’t.
He shuffled like a beast in truth, now, that great stinking fur cape he wore giving him a silhouette more bear than boar as he made his way between the pews, lit up by the rising sun behind him. Felix watched flatly, cutting down all stirrings of emotion that tried to creep their way up out of the seething pit of snakes in his stomach.
He had done this for a week, now.
He was not sure why.
Dimtri took up that same position he always did, standing at the front of the Cathedral as if he was about to begin praying for the goddess. For what, Felix could only imagine. Blood. Death. Revenge. Or perhaps just peace, just sanity. Occasionally, he twitched his head from side to side, as if he heard someone speaking to him.
Goddess knew. He probably did.
He stayed there for hours, just watching him. It was pathetic. Beyond pathetic. There he was, the last remaining Blaiddyd, uncrowned King of Faerghus, the sole survivor of the Tragedy of Duscar. A noxious bog of unwashed hair, sodden fur, tattered cloth, rusty armour, and hatred. How far could one man possibly sink?
Felix had warned them all, hadn’t he? Seen it when no one else had.
It didn’t give him any amount of satisfaction.
He nearly startled out of his skin when Dimitri turned about and pinned him there with his one shining eye. How had he lost the other, exactly? It seemed he ought to know. Wondering kept him from showing any emotion as the other man studied him as if trying to deduce whether or not he was really there. And why not?
“Felix,” he said eventually, hesitantly. He did not seem entirely sure.
“I can’t fool you.” He meant for it to come out mocking, dismissive. But with no one around to see, there wasn’t really any point, was there?
“You’re here, again,” he said, and to Felix’s surprise, began walking toward him. His gait was a bit more solid, a bit less staggering, as if he was experiencing some moment of clarity. “You’ve been here quite a bit, haven’t you? Are you watching me?”
Felix looked away, shrugging. That one eye could lance right through his soul. His gaze had never been so sharp, so hard, when he had both. “I seem to recall that I was here first.”
“I suppose so.”
Close enough to feel the air displaced by his movements, now, and Felix looked up at him defiantly. Why avert his eyes? He wasn’t intimidated by him, by his bloodlust or his madness or any of it. He’d seen this coming long before anyone else had.
“You haven’t gotten any taller,” Dimitri said.
Felix scoffed. “You haven’t gotten any shorter,” he snapped back. “We were supposed to have?” This close, he couldn’t the way his eyes roved over his face. Something about his rough jaw, the faint shadow of a beard, arrested his attention. In this state, Dimitri couldn’t bother to wash his own hair… and yet he still shaved every morning.
Impossible to understand the mind of a broken man.
Dimitri shook his head. “No. It’s just… you always have been shorter, haven’t you? Even when we were boys.”
Evoking the image of them like that had a particular sort of magic. It always did. Felix hated it, hated the way the ghost of his younger self infected his perception of the present. It wasn’t right, wasn’t decent, for this hulking, half-wild animal to pretend to be the same as the boy he used to count down the days to see again.
But they were the same. Weren’t they?
It tainted those memories, what good was left in them. And worse, far worse, it made him ache for the desperate soul he saw before him, in ways that made him wish he could evacuate his own emotions so that he could be free of what they did to him. The first person he’d ever imagined dedicating himself to, touching, kissing, loving, wanting, the person he’d most longed to have at his side for the worst moments of both of their lives...
Well.
If he had any decency, he’d conjure up one of his little fantasies, right now. Imagine Dimitri better, imagine him healed. Maybe he’d put one of his ridiculous romantic spins on the whole disgusting fucking scenario, and heal him with a kiss.
But try as he might, he couldn’t imagine anything but this. The hollow eyes. The sunken cheeks. The chapped lips and limp hair and the unbearable catastrophe that was the harsh, unyielding reality they had found themselves in.
He laughed, harsh and sharp and loud.
“You know,” he said, and why not? Why the hell not. “I loved you, once.”
Something flickered behind Dimitri’s one eye. He swallowed, hard. His throat bobbed. “I… loved you, too.”
“No,” Felix said, shaking his head far too fast and hard. “No, not like that. None of that like a brother shit. I loved you. I loved you, and you were never better than this. You lived, and Glenn died, and this is what we all got in exchange.”
He wanted to hurt him. He really did. To see pain in his eyes, to know he’d struck true.
He didn’t want what he got: a grave nod, followed by a deep sigh and a slow retreat as Dimitri made his way back to the altar. “I know,” he breathed under his breath. ‘It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
Felix left the cathedral like a horde of ghosts chased him. Goddess and Saints all knew, they most likely did.
*
Felix is twenty-seven years old when he rolls over into a patch of sun-baked warmth and blinks slowly against the early morning light forcing its way past his eyelids. The bed is soft and spacious and luxurious, and the remaining cloak of sleep clings pleasantly to him, coaxing him back down into its comforting embrace.
He turns to look at the space beside him.
Dimitri smiles lazily. He doesn’t need to say a word, just props himself up on one elbow to gaze down at him. Their lips meet. Dimitri’s hands are combing through his hair, his body warm and solid against him, his mouth hot and insistent. Felix lets him climb atop him, lets him kiss down his neck, and sighs as he cups his cheeks in both hands, thumbs ghosting over his lips.
“I love you,” he gasps, and --
Dimitri’s eyelids flutter open. Felix catches his breath. Laying there in a pool of sunlight, hair all fanned around him, and that unbearably tender smile curling slowly onto his lips… not even his scars could make him less beautiful.
“Felix,” he breathes, and then seems to notice something in his expression. His brow furrows. “What is it?”
Felix reaches out. Brushes hair from his forehead. A lifetime flashes before his eyes, and he shakes his head faintly. “Nothing,” he breathes. “Just up at dawn, waiting for you.”