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“You have explicit permission to do this.”
Sylvain looks up from where he’s currently leading a pair of penguins out of their enclosure. His eyebrows are raised, mouth agape in a projection of innocence that Felix could spot as fake from a mile away. “You think I would suggest it if I didn’t?”
Felix crosses his arms, rustling his aquarium garb. “Absolutely.”
“Oh come on, you know me better than that!”
Felix does not budge, which earns him a snort as Sylvain shakes his head and spreads his hands— he’s always one to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Felix knows this better than anyone.
“Alright, maybe I didn’t give the exact details to Marianne. But, as the head penguin keeper of our beautiful aquarium, I feel I’m perfectly suited to treat these guys to a nice date.”
Felix realizes then that Sylvain is very bored. “A date,” he says, enunciating carefully as if that has any hope of reminding Sylvain how absurd he sounds.
“A date!” Sylvain grins, bright and beaming.
Yeah, maybe that’s why Felix agreed to take the renovation day shifts with him. (Or the fact that they’ve been dating for six months, but, you know.) “They’re nesting for the season, right? But they can’t have an egg yet.” This last part is whispered conspiratorially, a hand cupped around Sylvain’s mouth to better keep it between the two of them and not the exactly zero other people in their empty aquarium.
“The penguins don’t speak English,” Felix says, only a little amused. “You don’t need to whisper.”
“Can I have a little fun, Fe?”
Felix rolls his eyes. “I just don’t see why they need a date.”
“Do we have anything better to do?” And there it is, that whine in Sylvain’s voice that signals when he’s going to dig his heels in and refuse to relent. “We’ve fed everyone else, and we’re stuck here patrolling to make sure nothing goes wrong. Wouldn’t you like to cultivate some romance in the meantime?”
Correction: Sylvain is painfully bored. “They’re penguins.”
“They’re husbands!”
“You have a boyfriend right here.” Felix does not mention that he is the boyfriend in question. “Why are you obsessing over their relationship?” He kind of hates that he’s calling it a relationship.
“If I took him on a date, I’d be neglecting my duties, wouldn’t I?” There’s a smug point in Sylvain’s tone at that— a subtextual hah, there. Probably because he’s parroting what Felix has said multiple times before, when Sylvain has crooked a knuckle under his chin to lift him into a kiss during the few times they have simultaneous breaks between taking care of their marine wards.
Felix narrows his eyes at Sylvain, who’s infuriatingly steadfast with that stupid dancing gaze of his. He sighs and rolls his eyes one last time. “Fine. Fine. What are we doing?”
Sylvain grins and winks, and Felix finds himself unable to complain when he says, “Just follow me.”
‘Follow me’ means following the penguins, actually. Loog and Kyphon have been the two darlings of the penguin enclosure ever since the news outlets picked up the story of a bonded pair of male penguins settling down to nest. They’re celebrities in their own right, and they garnered plenty of new visitors for the aquarium before it had to close down for mild renovations.
So, maybe it is alright to let them have a nice little moment. Even if it feels ridiculous to wander among the sea-toned galleries of sea creatures and watch over a pair of flightless birds. But their little feet go pap pap pap on the tile, so Felix thinks it’s probably worth it. He doesn’t admit it enough, but he knows Sylvain’s right— there’s not much to do during glorified patrol duty. They might as well make their own fun.
Their aquarium isn’t anything special, but that’s because aquariums are usually gorgeous as a standard. The thick glass barring visitors from the tank contents allows blue-tinted light to dance over the floor in shifting arabesques, complemented by the soft orange lights providing a bit more visibility along the darker, tank-less parts of the area. All of it, predictably, casts Sylvain in some unfairly flattering silhouettes, but he seems unaware of it.
Which is good, because Felix doesn’t feel like being caught staring right now.
They’re in the main oceanic area of their aquarium, which means they’re in the home to Felix’s favorite and least favorite sea creatures. He’s on the lookout for his favorite right now, scanning the cylindrical tank in the center of the spacious room with a keen eye as the penguins continue to pap pap pap and Sylvain continues to tap tap tap after them.
“C’mon, Clay,” he murmurs, studying the rocky croppings and serenely settled sand. “Where are you hiding?”
“To think you’d get better at spotting him,” Sylvain teases, because of course he would hear Felix. He saunters over, settling his hands on his hips as he peers into the glass as well.
“I’m not an expert on these things, I just… like him.” Probably because Felix was the one who got to name him when he came in. And also because—
“Because octopi have eight arms and can therefore hold eight swords.”
“Exactly.” Felix sees no problem with this.
Sylvain does one of those quiet, breathy laughs that makes Felix’s heart start pumping warm honey. He reaches and points, stopping his finger before it taps the glass because hey, they’re professionals. “There, in the nook of the rock. That’s his tentacle, see?”
Felix follows the line he points through and, sure enough, there’s a tentacle that curls slowly over the outcropping. Claymore the Octopus reveals himself then, his natural color bleeding through his disguise as he crawls down to the bottom of his tank.
Felix wrinkles his nose. “How are you so good at that?”
Sylvain shrugs and nudges Felix with a broad and stupid shoulder. “Dunno. Maybe I’ve got an eye for detail.”
Sylvain was the one who completely revamped their now-shared apartment when they both finally got their shit together and got, you know, together. (It wasn’t the proudest moment of Felix’s life, but picking a place out with Sylvain, somewhere different from either of their shitty-in-their-own-way apartments, and seeing him walk into the new place, spin around, and immediately say Alright, I’m fixing this place up before you cover it in swords had lifted Felix’s heart up into his throat in a way only Sylvain has only really managed to trigger.)
“Fine,” he says, and nudges Sylvain back with his less broad, pointier shoulder. “How are the lovebirds?”
Sylvain snickers at the pun that Felix didn’t actually intend to make, and wraps an arm around his shoulder to guide him over to where the penguins are staring into the large, open enclosure that would probably trigger someone’s fear of open water if they got too close. This is the glass wall that takes up one whole side of this part of the gallery, the shapes of its inhabitants shifting in muddled shadows in a sea of blue.
Felix grimaces. “There’s nothing here, guys,” he says to the penguins that definitely still can’t speak English. “Move on to the seahorses or something.”
Sylvain keeps his arm around Felix’s shoulder.
One of the moving shapes pauses, and Felix sighs.
Quick as a flash, there’s a distinctly canine-not-canine snout and dark, bulbous eyes staring at him as the writhing mass of flippers and fur twists to keep its spot in the water. Its whiskers twitch.
Sylvain waves. “Hey, Rufus!” he coos to the sea lion that, much like the penguins, can not speak English. (And they’re behind a thick sheet of glass, so.)
Rufus waves back with his dumb flipper.
Felix scowls. Rufus is the one that always gives him trouble and splashes him when it’s his turn to feed the tricky bastard. Sure, it gets the spectating kids to laugh, but it also ends in Felix having to bite back his own swears and let his hair down to dry it faster.
Maybe that’s why Rufus is Sylvain’s favorite— he loves it when Felix’s hair is down, even when, objectively, he looks like a drowned rat.
“Let me go,” Felix says, trying to shrug out of Sylvain’s orbit. “I’ll look after the penguins while you and Rufus have your precious moment.”
“Yeah.” Sylvain lets him go, tone going sarcastic. “We have so much to catch up on over the past hour we haven’t seen each other.”
Rufus, however, looks delighted by the development of Sylvain turning his full attention on him, doing rolls in the water with the kind of bouncing delight only sea lions can. Sylvain spreads his arms, probably pairing the action with a big grin, and Rufus does his best to mimic his pose.
Felix, who has wandered back to check on the penguins (who are now, understandably, entranced by the seahorse column), watches as a warm, airy fondness flips around in his chest. He takes his phone out to take a quick candid, the goofy (and so infuriatingly endearing) image captured forever. With his phone out, he can see what notifications he has been ignoring: particularly, how’s work? from Annette.
Felix attaches the picture of Sylvain and the sea lion, sending it with a simple caption: fine i guess.
The response, though late, gets an immediate reply from Annie, their redheaded coworker with a love for otters. It’s a simple thing, three heart emojis followed by an unnecessarily long awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
“What’cha looking at?”
Felix moves to shove the phone in his pocket and misses, instead just sending it careening to the hard tile. It clatters, triggering the penguins’ startled honks and his own wince. Thank God Annette made him get that heavy-duty case. A sturdy case, however, does nothing to hide his utter lack of composure. “Nothing,” he says. You know, like a liar. “Just, replying to Annette.”
Sylvain tilts his head with one of those wry smirks, eyes flashing to the fallen phone. “You gonna get that, babe?”
Felix’s face grows hot, and he stoops to pick it up and check for damage— none. Thanks, phone case.
Sylvain’s face lights up, then, and he rushes forward on legs that cross the vast gallery space between them in far too few steps for Felix to accept. “Hold on— babe,” he says, like he just had a fucking light bulb flash over his head. “Keep it out, I’ve got an idea.”
Felix is understandably wary. “What kind of idea?” Sylvain’s ideas haven’t been awful today, but that could always change in a moment’s notice.
Sylvain pivots on his foot, framing Loog and Kyphon with his fingers like he’s suddenly some hot-shot indie film director. “Social media gold. Something to brighten everyone else’s days along with our handsome boys here.”
Felix is about to put up a fight, he really is, but Sylvain looks back at him one more time with a grin that goes ear to ear, brilliant despite the lack of true sunlight in their gallery, and Felix realizes there’s no place he’d rather be than right here. Possibly filming a pair of penguins perusing a part of their home they rarely see with a way-too-charming redhead. “We’ll have to clear it with Hilda, you know,” he says, dropping the name of their bubblegum-tinted social media director.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but what else would we post while we’re under renovation? This is perfect, Fe. Trust me.”
Felix does. He always will.
Later that night, after they’ve gone home and the night shift has been taken over, Sylvain takes the footage Felix dutifully recorded of the penguins wandering around and cuts it into something more palatable to the masses. While they sit on opposite ends of their couch, legs tangled together, he drops it into their work chat with little preamble— @Hilda, here’s something for twitter.
Immediately followed by omg perfect, they’re on a date!!!
“See?” Sylvain says, grinning over his laptop at Felix.
Felix rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”
Is this what you meant by letting them stretch their legs? Marianne asks shortly after.
“See?” Felix asks, smug.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sylvain mumbles as he types back a more dutiful explanation to their supervisor.
It doesn’t matter much, in the end: the penguins are a hit, and their chaperones’ next date night starts with Felix’s favorite restaurant as a reward for humoring yet another one of Sylvain’s ideas.
As if Sylvain’s ecstatic grin alone wouldn’t make the possible absurdity of penguin dates worth it. But Felix hasn’t gotten comfortable enough to say as much, yet. One day— which is the best part of this relationship; there will be a one day. And Sylvain will be there with him every step of the way, be it their own or the steady pap pap pap of the penguins they watch.