Chapter Text
Everyone has a favorite story.
Maybe it takes place in a small town, population of no more than a couple hundred people. The barely beating town center is home only to a gas station, convenience store, and liquor shop. Mostly, there are fields and farms and chicken. Some cows. The blue-green grass sways in the wind, and the air is cool and clean. Wide-eyed visitors from the city come to fall in love with the untouched beauty of nature, to let themselves be humbled by the austerity of virgin earth. Tilting their faces up toward a sky thrown wide open, they feed their appetite for wonder from overflowing saucers of stardust.
And that’s all fine and good.
But this is a story about the city. How people can fall just as softly, barely a whisper of hearts, under the burning gaze of city lights. Two people could be standing in their own bubble at a busy street corner as determined commuters rush on by. Engulfed by the sea of people, they open their eyes wide against the sting of saltwater in order to see each other properly.
A half-smile forms on their lips, and then the shutter clicks.
Felix is home alone when he opens the letter.
Dear Mr. Felix Fraldarius, it says. Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to receive the Saint Seiros Foundation Scholarship. In addition to covering full tuition, this distinguished award will include a stipend for room and board for four years at Garreg Mach University...
His eyes drift off the page toward the sound of wind howling through the trees. Another snowstorm. The snowscape of Areadbhar is so white and brittle that it might as well be made of bones.
He looks back down at the acceptance letter, breathing out long and slow. If he were Annette, he would whoop for joy and maybe dance like the snowflakes. But he is Felix, and even the thought of that is mortifying.
So, after reading the letter over once again, he puts down the sheet of paper and thinks about a faraway place.
It’s an eight-hour drive by car from Areadbhar to GMU, but it takes twelve by train and bus. Technically, Felix has a driver’s license and his dad had offered him a used car to take to college. But realistically, Felix’s driver’s license is just a scrap of laminated paper he takes around as an ID. He has not touched a steering wheel since he sideswiped his dad’s boss’s BMW at the parking lot of the BX.
As exhausting as the trip is, Felix finds it hard to relax. He brought his favorite sword maintenance manual to review on the ride, but his mind keeps wondering about the stranger he’s meant to room with for an entire year. He hopes he’s a neat person, at least; that he won’t touch Felix’s swords without permission; that he won’t bring home questionable company. Felix has never lived with anyone outside his immediate family, and he just needs to know, already, what to expect.
But, sad trombone, his roommate isn’t even there to relieve the suspense of the wait when Felix arrives.
(And this, after being harassed four times—once for every transfer of busses—about carrying "weapons" onto public transportation. Apparently, there are rules about this in the city.)
The apartment is dark. Empty.
Throwing down the bags and suitcases he lugged up three flights of stairs, Felix slams the door shut behind himself. He feels around for the light switch until his palm smashes right into it. An overhead lamp blinks on, filling the entryway with yellow light. As he wanders through the apartment, familiarizing himself with his new surroundings, he pulls open every door he passes. His new home has two bedrooms divided by a cramped full bath, a combined living-dining area, and a kitchen separated from the living room by a breakfast counter. (There is a closet lined with heavy drapes with sheets of blank-looking paper hanging from a string strung across the room. There are metal trays of liquid on the counter. Felix closes the door quickly and prays against cult involvement.)
The apartment is fine. It’s many times smaller than his dad’s place, so the vacancy feels marginally less suffocating. Someone’s going to be home soon. In the meantime, he’ll just find something to drink and get himself cleaned up.
He heads toward the fridge, wondering if it’ll be stocked. He pauses with one hand on the door to stare at the note—jotted down on a bright pink index card and tacked to the freezer door with a lewd magnet—addressed to him.
Or, to ‘gorgeous’, rather.
Ugh.
Hey gorgeous ;)
Welcome! I'm at work right now, but I'll be back by 10. You can visit me at the Beast Burger down the street if you're ever eager to meet before then. Otherwise, feel free to make yourself at home. ♥
~ Sylvain
Felix blinks back up at the digital clock on the stove, but he doesn’t really register the time. His mind is hung up on the flirty tone of the message. He wonders if this Sylvain is somehow under the mistaken impression that he is getting a female roommate. He might just talk like that to everyone. Or maybe, he’s perfectly clear on Felix Hugo Fraldarius being a man, and men are exactly the type he prefers to flirt with.
Felix’s chest tightens a little at the thought. He bites his lip, staring for too long at the careless scribble of a heart on the card.
Felix wants to make clear for the official record that he is not a bath person. But he'd found the salts in his bag when he was unpacking—something frightfully fragrant that he’d vetoed when Annette tried to sneak it into his duffel the first time—and felt a little homesick at the memory of Annette helping him pick out what to bring to college.
Take a piece of home with you, he can hear her chirping into his ear.
It's true, at least, that out of everything from their hick little town, a piece of Annette is the thing he'd want to bring with him the most. Still, it was with great reluctance and suspicion that he'd sprinkled the alarmingly green crystals into his bathwater, and now it is with great regret that he sits immersed to his neck in fucking tea-tree broth, facing the consequences of stupid, useless sentimentality.
The bathroom door swings open.
An outcry against invasion of privacy dies on Felix's tongue as a man with his hair up in flames comes into view. The man, whom Felix can only assume is his roommate Sylvain, leans against the doorframe with the practiced insouciance of someone posing for a photoshoot, long legs crossed at the ankles. A smile stretches loose and easy across his wide mouth. His lips are so, so red.
Logically, Felix knows that not every ginger has pale-colored irises like Annette, but it still catches him off-guard to be staring into eyes the color of burnt butterscotch. He finds his throat very dry. Perhaps, it is because his new roommate is a tall glass of—
"Hey, sweetheart."
Felix blanches. Is this better or worse than gorgeous, or is it all the same?
"My name is Felix," he corrects.
Amusement dances across Sylvain's face. "Can't call a cutie by the wrong name if you stick to terms of endearment, you know?" he says. And winks.
Oh. The butterflies in Felix's stomach drop dead. My new roommate is a tall glass of trash juice.
"But you're free to call me anything you want," Sylvain adds in a low purr.
"Can I call you Trash Juice," Felix grits.
There's a split-second when Sylvain’s features fall slack with surprise before his (obscenely gorgeous) mouth pops open in laughter. The sound leaves his throat in staccato ha ha has, rising toward a decibel that’s downright obnoxious for this time of night. It makes Felix wince.
"So, Felix." Sylvain crosses his arms. (Fucking Sothis on a cupcake, who dared to give this bastard forearms like that?) "Missed you at Beast Burger tonight. I was hoping you'd drop by." He says this with the subtlest hint of a whine in his voice, but Felix doesn’t manage to drag his eyes away from those arms to check if he’s also pouting with his stupid, cherry-red lips. "It was such a slow night, and I was bored out of my mind. Watching Ingrid—oh, she's this girl I grew up with—lose her cool over pretty girls is only funny the first twenty times before it’s just clumsy customer service."
So Ingrid isn’t one of his sweethearts, then.
Because pretty girls make her lose her cool. And that’s okay. Is that how it works in the city? No to martial arts equipment on public transportation, but yes to casual queers at burger joints?
"You told me to make myself at home," Felix says. "So I was doing that."
Sylvain hums, "I see, I see…" and he trails off. Felix hopes that this means he’s ready to end this belabored attempt at small talk. The water is getting cold. Felix lifts his gaze from studying his pruned fingertips in the water just as Sylvain pauses with his hand on the doorknob.
"Well, anyway." He shoots Felix another smile. "You probably haven't had a chance to eat yet, huh. I'll go heat up some leftovers from work."
A beat of silence passes. Then, the door clicks shut again.
It isn't until Felix is sitting at the breakfast counter—long hair dripping water onto his night shirt; Sylvain seated across from him, chattering meanderingly about his coworker Ingrid's epic strife for wife; Sylvain's infuriatingly large hands knocking the food out of Felix's grasp by accident as he gesticulates animatedly—that Felix peers up from the lukewarm hamburger and wilted fries spread before him and realizes: Sylvain smiles much better when he thinks Felix isn't looking.
The butterscotch melts, taking place of the madness in his eyes.
The cult closet, apparently, is a converted darkroom. Upon closer inspection of the apartment, Felix can see parts and pieces of Sylvain's photography equipment tucked all over the place. It’s a surprisingly wholesome and sensitive hobby for someone who sneaks back into the apartment at 4AM three nights in a row.
Well, it seemed like a respectable hobby until Felix asks him what he takes pictures of.
Sylvain taps his chin, tilting his head to one side. (The stupid bastard, he must think he’s so cute.) "Girls, mostly?" he answers. Following Felix's line of vision toward the spare lenses he pulled out to clean, he adds, "You can touch, if you want."
Felix huffs like he hasn't spent the past five minutes itching to spin the round lens like a hamster wheel. "Is that your entire personality? Women?"
"I wouldn’t say that it's a personality trait so much as an inclination," Sylvain says. "Also, I get paid pretty good money for it."
Felix's mind springs to connect the dots between this piece of information and the walks of shame. "Wait, you get—"
"I freelance for a teen magazine," Sylvain says, putting up a hand. "Just FYI, the thing you're thinking of, I do for free."
"Did I ask?!" Felix feels his cheeks flush. The feeling stirring in his chest is irritation, surely. "And do you plan to still be doing that after the quarter starts?"
"Do what?" Sylvain blinks innocently, one corner of his lips curled like the leaflet of a touch-me-not.
"The—" Felix waves his hands. He doesn’t know why he's even making a fuss of this, especially with a guy whom he barely knows and whose life he's in no position to judge or control, except that this is his home, too, and—"I'm a light sleeper!" (He is not.) "It wakes me up whenever you come banging back in at the asscrack of dawn. You do not step light."
Sylvain’s eyebrows drift up to his hairline. "Oh, I'm sorry." The way the apology tumbles out of him, as if he's been caught off-guard by the honesty of his own feelings, makes Felix deflate a little. He scrunches in on himself, arms folded in a tight knot over his chest in the pose that Annette calls the 'angry gnome'. This is unfair and stupid because Annette is a whole 20 cm more of a gnome than he is. "Nobody's ever mentioned that was problem before."
"Well, it's a problem for me," Felix insists.
"Okay, Felix," Sylvain says. Felix stiffens against the jolt of electricity that startles his heart at the soft roll of his name off Sylvain's tongue. "I'll take care of it."
"Well. Good."
Sylvain chuckles, leaning back with his hands tucked behind his head. He peers up at Felix through the thick, doll-like lashes that frame his eyes. "Look at us, settling our roommate disputes like adults," he says, as if he hadn't simply folded to Felix's demands. "I'm getting hungry. You wanna have dinner early tonight?"
They finish dinner just as the sun sets. After they clean up the dishes together (when had they started doing that?), Sylvain says he's going to head out for a bit.
The look that Felix shoots him must be sharper than he intends. This, he can only blame on the long, narrow eyes he inherited from his father. His brother had the same eyes, too, and people were constantly cowering under his gaze, too.
But Sylvain isn't so much cowering as he is chortling quietly to himself as he heads for the front door. Keys in hand, he wiggles his fingers in a toodles-like motion. "Don't worry, Sleeping Beauty. I remember our promise."
It turns out that Sylvain is a person who keeps his promises.
Felix hadn't been prepared to meet Ingrid: Sylvain's childhood friend and lesbian extraordinaire.
She herself is a blond of average height and build, but she tows in another blond who is possibly even taller and broader than Sylvain. Out of pure pettiness, Felix decides he does not like the gorilla dressed in a blue polo shirt. He misses his itty-bitty friend Annette and her itty-bitty boyfriend Ashe.
When the pair let themselves in with what must be a spare key (that Felix hadn’t known existed), Sylvain is in the shower and Felix is seated on the floor in front of the couch previewing his orgo textbook for the next day. He's partially hidden by the breakfast bar, so they don’t see him right away. He doesn't make himself known either, quietly observing the way they move around the kitchen with an air of being well-acquainted with the place. Makes sense, given the spare key (that, again, Felix was not informed of existing).
When Blond Gorilla rounds into the living room and his bright blue eyes land on Felix, he lets out a quiet ahh! of surprise. Almost immediately, his features rearrange into a smile so…stately, Felix is reminded of the princes from Annette's shoujo manga.
"Oh, I’m so very sorry. Did I startle you?" Blond Gorilla asks, despite the fact that it was clearly Felix who gave him a scare by watching them like a cat from through a slit in his favorite box. "You must be Sylvain's new roommate."
Felix stares down at the hand extended toward him. The girl joins Blond Gorilla's side.
"Felix, right?" She smiles. "The chemistry major."
They watch him for a response. Felix flushes from both the attention and the knowledge that he's obviously been talked about amongst people he's never met before. He squints at them menacingly to hide his discomfort. "Shouldn't you introduce yourselves first?"
Blond Gorilla lets out another ahh, sheepish this time, retracting the hand he'd offered. "You're absolutely right. My apologies for our rudeness, Felix," he says. "We're Sylvain's friends from childhood. This here is Ingrid Galatea." He motions to the girl. Felix had assumed as much. "And I'm—"
"Your Highness!"
A flood of relief crashes through Felix when Sylvain bursts out from his room. The comfort is short-lived, though, because while Sylvain has managed to throw on a shirt, there's nothing but a pair of tiny red boxer shorts covering his lower half. As he strides toward them, dripping water all over the hardwood floor, the thickly-corded muscles in his thighs power each long stride.
Felix rips his eyes away before he's caught ogling like a creep.
"—And Ingrid, too, hey what's up," Sylvain adds when Ingrid motions to herself pointedly. "I thought we were meeting at the theater."
"Change of plans," she says, dismissive of the pout forming on Sylvain’s lips. (When did Felix’s eyes find their way back to Sylvain again?) "We’re here to meet your new roommate, since you seemed so intent on hiding him away for yourself."
"Ingrid!" Sylvain hisses.
"Yes?" Ingrid crosses her arms, nose upturned in challenge.
Sylvain makes a garbled noise, then forces a weak smile at Felix. "Fine, see? Here is my new roommate. Felix. In the flesh. Happy?"
Instead of replying, Ingrid shifts her eyes between Felix and Sylvain. Sylvain catches her gaze at one point, and Felix looks on as a silent conversation takes place. One that would appear to involve a lot of groveling on Sylvain's part.
Caught in the middle of this exchange, Dimitri offers Felix a helpless smile. "Please, call me Dimitri," he says. "I wouldn't want you to think that you should conform to addressing me as they do. In fact, I would prefer if you don't."
"Oh, don’t you worry, Your Highness." Sylvain pops out of his telepathic sidebar with Ingrid to throw a chummy arm around Dimitri's shoulders. "Felix has quite the way with nicknames. What was it that you called me the first night?" He rubs his chin in a pathetic play at recollection. He is a terrible actor. "Oh, that's right—Trash Juice."
Ingrid snorts so hard, she must suck her sinuses into her brain. "Not even the solid stuff that you can just throw out easily, huh. But like, that brown slop you gotta mop out of the bottom of the can." She nods. "Accurate."
"Hey, he didn’t say any of that!" Sylvain protests.
"You're right, I did." Ingrid sighs, turning to Felix. "Seriously, good luck with this one."
"I think we'll be fine," Felix says simply.
He doesn’t have any childhood friends of his own; the closest he's got is Annette, whom he started talking to in high school. Their sense of distance—or lack thereof—toward one another is strange to him. They toss around shade like they're trying out for the Olympic volleyball team but stand huddled together like vagabonds around a pot-bellied fire.
Exasperated parents lecturing their teenage son might also be an apt metaphor. Sylvain is still dripping water onto the floor.
Something blooms in Felix’s chest, sprouting long vines that choke the breath from his lungs. But before he has the chance to evaluate the feeling, Dimitri is asking if he'd like to join them for the movie.
Felix looks down into his lap at the electron-pushing diagrams. He slams the textbook shut.
He can see a movie.
Felix enjoys peace and solitude, so he eats his lunch in the science quad at two every day. It's right next to where he has orgo lab at 3PM, and there's less competition for a table at this time. For the most part, he’s able to get through his sandwich (six slices of bacon and one leaf of lettuce between white bread) without getting badgered by constant queries of May I borrow this chair?
It's the last Friday of the first week of school, and the sun beams down over the campus like the statue of Saint Seiros at the main gate. (Lady gives him the creeps.) Tossing his brown paper bag down onto his usual table, Felix repositions his chair halfway under the sun and halfway in the shade of a big magnolia tree, before settling in. In the quiet of the courtyard, the crinkle of the paper bag is obnoxiously loud when he reaches in for his sandwich.
A tray slides in next to his bag.
"My friend Felix, mind if I join you?" Sylvain flops down into the seat opposite him without waiting for answer.
"Aren't your classes on the opposite side of campus?" Felix asks, watching Sylvain stab his fork through the plastic of his disposable cutlery set.
"Am I not welcome on your turf?" Sylvain adds to the litany of unanswered questions.
He twirls his fork over a knuckle—once, twice—before spearing a slab of meat drowning in purple sauce. He cuts the meat into little cubes before popping them into his mouth. Sylvain is a clean eater and doesn't let a drop of the sauce stain the table or his cheeks. Some of it clings to his lips, though, glossy and sinfully tantalizing—even to Felix, who hates anything sweet or sweet-adjacent.
Especially to Felix, who stares and stares and stares until he's dizzy in the midday sun.
Sylvain pauses with his fork halfway to his mouth, butterscotch eyes stuck on Felix.
"You want a bite?" asks Sylvain in yet another question.
This one, Felix answers.
He wants.