Chapter Text
Felix scanned book titles on the highest shelves, searching for the ones Annette asked him to retrieve. His vision blurred as a yawn split his jaw, and he realized he’d never stayed awake so late to study.
To train? Certainly, though by this time of night someone - whether a particularly vigilant Fraldarius man-at-arms or an especially observant friend - would stop him and press him to rest. “You’ll injure yourself if you don’t rest your muscles,” they would say, and Felix, beginning to feel an ache in his limbs, would concede.
Annette, he since realized, was a harsher taskmaster, if more patient (with him), and with an exam in a mere few days she pushed herself to study later and later into the night. Despite the exhaustion threatening to drag his eyelids down he was loathe to leave her alone in the library at night.
Felix tucked the books under an arm and climbed down the ladder. He followed the singular light source that made shadows dance across his path, his eyes warily scanning the dark rows of bookshelves lest something jump out from behind one.
He’d been on edge since they left Remire.
Some of the tension eased from his shoulders when he spotted Annette in the same place he left her. She sat hunched over a notebook, the scratching of her quill and her mumbling the only sounds in the library until he dropped his load on the table beside her.
Annette jumped with a gasp, her shadow shivering as she jerked her head up to glare at him. “Really, Felix?” she grumbled. “Can’t you announce yourself like a normal person?”
He rolled his eyes as he resumed his seat beside her. “You don’t usually hear me when I do,” he retorted. He nudged the stack of books towards her. “Shouldn’t you light another lamp? You’ll hurt your eyes reading in this lighting.”
Annette glanced at the lamp on the desk between them. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m used to working in lower lighting.”
“Right, well, I’m not,” he complained. He stretched his legs out under the table and crossed his arms, trying to get comfortable in the hard-backed chair. The library’s furniture wasn’t constructed for comfort and he never could understand how that one Black Eagle always fell asleep on it.
Well, maybe he began to understand now, he decided as he stifled a yawn behind his hand.
“You can leave if you want,” Annette said, and for some reason her comment made heat rush to his face. He was so sure she glued her attention to her notes… “You seem to understand the theorems we went over earlier well enough.”
Felix grunted and waved a dismissive hand. “I want to go over them again,” he lied, reluctant to tell her why he really lingered. He tugged his own notes towards him, squinting as he scanned them without really reading the symbols and scribbles…though his eyes always wandered back towards Annette before he could stop them.
Her nose wrinkled slightly while she worked, and she chewed on her thumbnail. She cursed under her breath when she smudged ink as she wrote and hummed a vaguely familiar tune while reading. Her foot nudged his under the table, making his heart skip a beat, but when he glanced down he found she only swung her legs back and forth.
An accident. Of course it was, he told himself, unsure why his chest would tighten in disappointment.
He raised an eyebrow, unnoticed by her, when she rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Maybe you should leave,” he commented.
Annette spun her head around, her eyes wide as if she forgot he sat beside her…and with ink smeared on her cheek. “Why?” she wondered. “I’m not finished yet.”
He coughed to disguise the smile tugging at his lips. “I’m sure you know more than you need for the exam,” he told her. “And you”—he pointed to his cheek—”have ink on your face.”
She flushed under the ink as she scrubbed at her cheek with the back of her hand, skin reddening even more. “Oh, that’s so embarrassing…” she mumbled.
Felix smiled, unable to resist it anymore, but turned his face away. “There’s no one else here.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Annette groused. “You’ll surely tell everyone what a mess I am, getting ink on my face while studying, and then by breakfast even Dimitri will know.”
His blood froze at the boar’s name, irritation flickering in his chest. Eager to change the subject - however much a part of him still wanted to prod Annette a little more - he nodded at the books he’d fetched her and asked, “Are you even going to use those, or was I wasting my time grabbing them for you?”
“Oh, no, thank you,” she said, brightening far quicker than he thought possible. She sifted through them, scanning each one’s table of contents before setting them aside. “None of these are exactly what I was looking for…” she admitted, pinching her lip between her teeth.
Felix sighed and rubbed his nose. “Really.”
“Huh,” Annette said the next instant, as if she hadn’t heard him. “This sounds interesting!” She slid a thin volume with a worn cover from between the other books and squinted at the cover. “Black Magic Theory of Dreams,” she read. “So there’s a way to interpret dreams using Reason rather than Faith?” she mused.
Felix didn’t know how to answer her - learning to interpret dreams wasn’t high on his priority list - so stayed silent while she flipped through the book. He found how her brow furrowed in concentration more entertaining than her occasional comments about what she read, listening more intently to her humming than to her words.
At least until an excited gasp escaped her and she shoved the book under his nose, pointing at a chapter title. “Look at this, Felix!”
He blinked as he tugged the book from her hands to frown at the words on the page. “‘Dreaming as Communication’?” He glanced up from the book at her, his eyebrow raised and confused about why, exactly, she smiled so wide. “What are you showing me?”
“It’s a whole chapter about…sharing dreams, I think.” Annette took the book back, lips shaping the words as she read. “It describes the theory and the application. It’s an old technique, but apparently anyone with the slightest affinity for Reason can manage it with enough concentration and with a strong enough relationship to the person they want to share a dream with.”
Felix didn’t want to tell her that was the most absurd and far-fetched thing he’d ever heard, but he did say, “That sounds…unrealistic.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, to his surprise, “but it’s still an interesting idea. I want to try it!”
“Have fun,” he said, unable to disguise a snort. “You and Mercedes can have tea parties in your dreams and in waking then.”
Annette rolled her eyes before admitting in a lower voice, “Well…I was thinking maybe you and I could try it first.”
Felix nearly fell from his seat. His arm flung out to catch himself on the desk as his breath hissed out of him. “W-what?” he stuttered, his face flushing at his unsteady tone. “Why?”
“Why not?” she said, shrugging. “This is sort of our mutual discovery.”
“You found it,” he noted.
“You brought me the book!”
“I thought it was one of the ones you asked for!” he argued. He didn’t know why his heart raced, or why he had to fight her so vehemently on this. Then again, he spent so much of his time refining his skill with sword and bow and studying for these inane exams that wouldn’t serve him in battle that he didn’t have any energy to spare for an experiment.
“It’s not,” Annette mused as she glanced at the cover again. “It must’ve been caught between two, but now that it’s here…” She pouted at him, lower lip jutting out. “Come on, Felix.”
He reached past her - goosebumps rising along his arm when it brushed hers - and nudged her notebook towards her. “I thought you had too much studying to do,” he said. “What happened to being the ‘best warlock ever’?”
Annette flushed all over again, her nose turning up as she cleared her throat. “We don’t have to start working on this till after the exam.”
“Right, because I won’t be doing this with you,” he insisted. “I can barely cast a simple Fire spell. What makes you think I can do this?”
Annette turned the book and tapped at the curling script. “I told you, didn’t I?” she said. “Anyone with the slightest affinity for Reason should be able to learn.”
Felix scanned the words under her fingertip. “And we need to have a ‘strong enough relationship’, whatever that means,” he observed. He covered his face, his whole body filling with an embarrassed heat.
“Yes, I suppose that could be a problem,” Annette said, “but I think it’s still worth a try! And if we do succeed, it could be useful, right?”
“Sharing dreams?” Felix scoffed. “What makes you think so?”
“Well…think about it in terms of strategy and tactics!” she explained brightly. “It would be instant communication between us if we were in two different places.”
“Rather inefficient, I think,” he said. “We’d both have to be asleep for it to be useful, and I’m not prone to napping.” But he frowned, her reasoning resonating with him like none of her other arguments had. He rested his chin on his palm…though there was still something about someone - especially Annette - knowing what he dreamed that made his skin prickle with discomfort.
She didn’t need to see his nightmares of Glenn’s empty casket or learn how he, a man nearly grown, still sometimes woke from them with his eyes damp.
“Neither am I…” Annette said, poking her chin with her quill and apparently oblivious to the ink she blotted on her face again. “I still think we could find a use for it, that’s all.”
“Why me?” he tried again, though he could already feel his resolve crumbling, the urge to give in and do as she wanted almost overwhelming. What was wrong with him? It usually took even more needling for Sylvain to convince him of something. “Why not Mercedes or Ashe or Lysithea?”
“Because…you’re here right now,” she said.
“Ah, so it’s circumstantial,” he noted, rolling his eyes, though his dismissal of her logic did nothing to loosen the tightness in his chest.
“No, no, of course not!” she denied with a wave of her hands. “It’s just that, well, we see each other in the evenings a lot so I can tutor you in Reason, so we can go through the steps before we go to our own rooms to sleep.”
He frowned. “And you won’t ask anyone else because…?”
“Well, you said you can barely cast a Fire spell?” When he nodded - though how much effort even that simple magic took galled him - she added in a low, sheepish voice, “Ashe can’t even do that.”
“Then anyone else you’re closer to,” Felix said.
“Mercie has a strict bedtime,” Annette informed him so it wouldn’t really work, “and I do not want to give Lysithea any kind of edge against me, especially since she’s in a different class.”
“And so you’re still asking…me?” He sighed and grumbled, “I just don’t understand.”
“Because I…like working with you sometimes?” she blurted, as if it was a question, and without looking at him. “I don’t know, Felix, maybe if we can’t make it work, I’ll ask someone else, but right now I kind of want it to be something I try with you, that’s all.” She spoke in such a rush her face turned a shade of red he barely thought possible, but before he could ask her if they needed to detour to the infirmary before they walked back to the dormitory, she said, “So…? What do you…think?”
“And you want to work closely with a villain like me?” he wondered.
Annette bent her quill so far it snapped in half. “That’s not—yes, well, it’s not like I haven’t been doing that already!” she retorted. “But you seem so intent on avoiding it, so maybe we should just—just stop these nighttime study sessions too!” She capped her inkwell and snapped her notebook shut, shoving her belongings into her bag as he watched her, stiff with shock.
“Wait, wait, that’s not what I—Annette!” His fingers closed around her wrist before he could comprehend he’d reached out, but when she paused and stared down at his hand with wide eyes he dropped it. “I just, um…you just surprised me.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, the weight of hour at last threatening to drag him down. “We can…try it,” he said, because even he could admit to himself that he…rather liked spending time with her. He grabbed the bizarre dream book and held it out to her.
Annette’s gaze drifted from his hand to the book. For once lost for words, she accepted the book and tucked it under her arm, but a slow smile shaped her lips.
“All right then!” she said with renewed cheer. “Let’s give it the first try after the exam.”
(Felix wondered why Annette smiling at him gave him the same rush of accomplishment as defeating a challenging foe in battle.)