Archive of Our Own

When Felix Fraldarius finishes his last semester at Garreg Mach and makes his long-awaited final pilgrimage back to Faerghus and the post-grad job hunt, Ingrid at his side with directions and junk food, he doesn’t expect to return to a house populated by not only his shitty dad, but also one of the only dads he knows that is shittier than his. Gustave Dominic, known daughter abandoner, has somehow, during the course of his last six months at the demanding university Felix’s dad had made him attend since Glenn had never had a chance to finish, taken up semi-permanent residence in one of the Fraldarius guest rooms.

“It’s a five year placement,” he explains to a fuming Felix, who has been given no warning by his father, currently smiling complacently and not as if he has upended their entire home life and doubled the asshole father-to-Felix ratio. “Temporary, really, before I’m back teaching at the main campus in Fhirdiad again.”

“Okay,” Felix says, mechanically, before picking up the bag he’d dropped on the floor in planned salutation before being greeted by the sight of Gustave and his father domestically chatting over coffee at the dining room table and turning right back the way he came. He wishes Ingrid had been with him, maybe to see his face, maybe to share his outrage, but he’s dropped her off on the far side of town. And that’s when he texts Sylvain.

There’s a couple reasons why he chooses Sylvain, instead of Ingrid or Dimitri. There’s obvious reasons not to choose Annette, busy at her own super exclusive fancy fine arts school and subsequent MFA in Fhirdiad for the next few years, a fact that surely has everything to do with Gustave’s sudden interest in northern relative bumfuck nowhere, Faerghus. First, Sylvain is a good listener, better than Dimitri because he’s less earnest about it and interrupts sometimes, makes it feel less like Felix is a burden he’s carrying with saintly patience. Ingrid is a great friend and a terrible listener, he doesn’t even think about her.

Second, Sylvain knows a thing or two about having a terrible father. Sure, Rodrigue has spent a lot of his time as a parent wishing Felix was someone who was long dead, treating Dimitri like the son he’d had and lost instead of treating Felix like the son he — well, still has. And sure, Gustave was a piece of shit, constantly running from his wife and daughter and responsibilities, around enough to keep them from completely abandoning hope and him but no more than that, martyring himself at the stake of the sin he so deliberately ties himself to. But Gautier, Sr., was telenovela levels of bad dad, like some kind of villain transported into real life. Pitting his younger son against his older son had almost killed Sylvain and driven Miklan away eventually to goddess knows where. The Sylvain that’s left after all that hates anyone else’s terrible parents with almost as much intensity as he chases what little approval his own father has to give.

Third, and maybe anyone could tell this already by how much, how deeply, Felix knows Sylvain, is that Felix has figured something out during this last semester, through fruitless hookups and dug up old heartbreaks and long, lose-your-mind study sessions and the fact that when he’d passed his thesis he’d called Sylvain immediately and Sylvain had faked a phone call from a repairman for the cable TV his coworkers didn’t know he didn’t have to duck out of the office and celebrate over the phone.

He’s in love with him. With Sylvain. Not that it matters — Sylvain has one of those soulmate things.

Felix has never had one, he thinks as he locks the front door behind him, nothing more exciting to come home to than, apparently, stupid Gustave in his stupid father’s stupid living room. In the ridiculous world they live in, you don’t know you have one until some mysterious force decides you’re ready for one, whatever the fuck that means. From what Sylvain told them when it happened to him, it goes something like this: you get a letter, an old fashioned letter, in the mail with no return address. It’s an invitation with a date, time, coordinates, and some kind of QR code — which means that whatever mystical power is running the show at least has scanners. You bring that invitation to the coordinates at the right date and time and, according to Sylvain at least, there’s a red door into a small building. Inside, again according to Sylvain which means it could be all made up, you’re greeted by a girl with long green hair. Sylvain says she’s short, which could mean almost anything because he’s really ridiculously tall and doesn’t have any idea of what normal people think is short.

He’s so tall, Felix thinks as he steps off the doorstep, shrugging his backpack back on to a shoulder that really could have used the break from carrying it. So fucking tall. When Sylvain hugs you, he’s really holding you, Felix thinks as he starts the walk toward the usual. Not so usual now that Felix is away in central Fodlan seventy-five percent of the time and as much on top of that as he can help, but the recognition still stands.

Anyway. Soulmate. Felix remembers the breakdown Sylvain gave him, Ingrid and Dimitri in the Galatea basement, where Felix had been irritatedly crushing Dimitri at Mario Kart while he was busy paying attention to Sylvain’s story. Idiot. Anyone with a brain could do two things at once, not that that was Dimitri to a T or anything really — he needed all that room for his gigantic heart and superhuman strength. If he had been smart too it probably would be illegal. Sylvain had only been sixteen, but he’d always been a flirt, since childhood, in ways that make adult Felix uncomfortable thinking about now, thinking about what that behavior could have been covering up or mimicking or driving lead-footed away from, and so when he was the first of them to get an invitation it wasn’t surprising. Even if Sylvain wasn’t the oldest, Ingrid had been a confused and intense softball player with a ridiculously strong crush on Glenn, Dimitri had been far too sheltered at that point to dream of anything like romance or soulmates, and Felix had been… well, Felix. More interested in proving he was the best at a fucking video game than in listening to his best friend’s story.

The girl with green hair had been small, Sylvain says. Ingrid scoffs because she’s even shorter than Felix and she knows how Sylvain is, towering over them in tall-person land, but Sylvain shakes his head. She was, he insists. He says he looked at her and knew immediately that whatever he was about to see was important. Felix stubs his toe on an outcropping of sidewalk, getting a little too lost in the memory of just how serious Sylvain’s voice had been just telling the story.

She said, he says, that she was going to show him a picture of his soulmate. A graven image. Sylvain says, I said okay. And of course he did, because he will do anything for the people he cares about, no matter what the cost, and this was the person he would, in theory, in scientific and chemical likelihood, care about the most. The girl led him through another red door — the room they had been in, a kind of barren entryway where she was just standing as if she’d nothing to do but wait for him, was all white, and the door stood out in a way that was almost unsettling.

The next room was dim, Sylvain says. His voice now is so soft Felix can barely hear it in his memory, so soft he almost asks Ingrid to turn down the TV where Dimitri’s cart is crawling along as he half-presses his usual half-press of the A button, where Felix is almost at the end of the last lap, where Sylvain is almost at the point in his story where he sees his soulmate for the first time. It was dim, he tells them, and there was just a painting on the wall. Him and his soulmate. Felix finishes the race at that point, and he turns to look at Dimitri, irritated and ready to glare, but his eyes have to pass Sylvain to reach that destination and therefore they never get there.

Crossing the street in the present Felix is kind of but simultaneously not at all surprised that it took him this long to figure it out. Sure, his heart probably looked in that moment like one of those St. Cethleann’s Day decorations with a fucking cartoon arrow shot through it, and sure the knitted brows and downturned mouth melted off his face immediately like butter in a microwave, but he’s Felix Fraldarius and he was back then too and in some way he always will be. But the fact of the matter was that seeing Sylvain look the way he did remembering the painting was like the head injury you get that comes so close to killing you but you don’t know it until, say, nine years later your embolism bursts and you drop fucking dead.

Sylvain is looking at Felix, by coincidence, and their eyes meet. He’s been generously including him in the scope of his audience even though Ingrid and Dimitri are the ones actively listening, and just like the bolt in Felix’s heart his gaze pierces him, buries a land mine that’s finally gone off in the present. His eyes are brown and warm, like soft clay, like molten bronze, and the dimple in his right cheek is carved there by the curve of his lips, smiling like he’s looking up at Felix from a photograph of them that reminds him of a time together he loves to remember. But it’s not, it’s a picture of Sylvain and his soulmate that he’s thinking of. The Felix of now kicks a rock that’s found its way out of the repetitive little gated ring of stones surrounding the trunk of every tree on the street he’s walking down, the sting of the memory landing hot and bitter inside him. It doesn’t matter that he’s in love with Sylvain, that he probably has been somewhere deep down since that day nine years ago, that he’s finally awake to it now just in time for the knife to twist.

“So? Who was it? Someone you know?” Ingrid is asking, mouth half full of the Doritos Sylvain had brought from the gas station, his first thought after seeing his own future hanging on the wall in a strange and solitary art museum is buying snacks for his friends. And they’re always the right ones, and there’s always extra for Ingrid because she loves food and because her dad’s face is just a little hollowed out lately, and Felix’s are never sweet because he hates sweet things, or he did, at least, until he saw the depth of sweetness in Sylvain’s eyes thinking about that painting, looking at Felix for another moment like a nail to the wall before turning to Ingrid.

“I don’t wanna say,” is what he does say. Then, because he’s perfect or because the Felix of the present leans back in time and taps himself on the shoulder and says yep, that’s going in my “I’m in love with him” compilation, the flipbook of memory he runs through on the last set of the lonely college nights when Ingrid is working and Ashe is with his boyfriend and Bernadetta is workshopping her thesis with someone more receptive to fiction than Felix has ever been, he continues, “I don’t want to influence anything. If there is such a thing as a soulmate I would rather they like me for a real reason, not just because of some QR code.” He pauses. “Oh yeah, that’s what happened next. She let me look at the picture for a minute — it was awesome. Then she tapped me on the shoulder, and she scanned my QR code with her phone. And then I left. She didn’t send me away or anything. I just… felt like it was time to go. So I did. And I got a parking ticket,” he adds, suddenly, digging into his pocket and grinning as he pulls out and waves around a pink slip of paper.

“How strange,” Dimitri says.

“You’re not going to tell anyone?” Ingrid says.

“Destiny doesn’t validate?” Felix says, because he’s thirteen and this is the funniest thing he can think of to say, and he knows validation and tickets both connect to parking in a mysterious way that he doesn’t understand. But Sylvain and Dimitri laugh, and Ingrid rolls her eyes, and Dimitri apologizes to Felix for driving so slowly and offers another race, and the afternoon wears on and their lives wear on and now Felix is on his way to a the usual with a man who will never love him back. Funny how things work out.

Even Dimitri and Ingrid are doing better in that department than Felix, and he’s always thought he was hopeless but they were more hopeless because they care, but the joke is on him because now he cares, he cares so much he’s thought a hundred times that he’ll break with the force of it. Ingrid is happy with Leonie, the girl she met at the gym — because of course she did. Neither of them have ever gotten an invitation, but most people don’t and they’re happy together and Ingrid barely believes in soulmates anymore. Once she relocates to Derdriu for the PT job she’s managed to snag there they’ll move in together and Felix will have one more happy couple to visit and third wheel with. Hooray. Dimitri too is stabilized into happy domesticity with Marianne, who transferred to Fhirdiad U and into Dimitri’s heart at basically the same time. They had both gotten their invitations already, coordinates and timestamps exactly matching, for the day after they met. Listening to Dimitri retell the story of them looking at their painting together, fondness in his gentle eyes, warms Felix all the way up to the dome of his skull but he’ll never let that get out. It’s a little easier to tamp it down when watching Rodrigue beaming at them over Skype when they chat is just one more painful arrow in the target of Felix’s forecast, no job yet, no partner, no concrete plans except, apparently, move the fuck out as quickly as possible — which, in fairness, has always been unconsciously on the table if not on such an accelerated timeline.

Sylvain, at least, is still unattached, probably still bedding his way through Fodlan the way he always has, but it’s no consolation since it’s just his careless way of killing time until that pesky soulmate shows up or wakes up, whichever. Not that it’s easy to imagine that someone who already knows Sylvain could possibly not be awake to the fact that they’re meant to be with him, if they are. Anyone who knows Sylvain loves him a little, it would be anyone’s dream come true, Felix thinks, annoying habits and self-harmful promiscuity and the constant feeling that you’ll never be as good as he is and that he doesn’t care in the slightest and all.

Now miserable and irritated, he rounds the corner onto Cornelia Street and the sunset-tinting light of day gleams against the glass door of The Pot, the uncreatively named coffee shop they had chosen as the usual due to their more inventive hours. Felix’s hair is blowing too much in the breeze from passing cars so he sweeps it up into a lazy ponytail, something it is barely long enough to achieve, trying to slow his steps to be a little less embarrassingly early. The difference between fifteen and twenty minutes never felt so significant. But Sylvain’s face, not the one from the old memory but the one from their post-thesis FaceTime, excited and happy and proud of Felix like he’s been looking for someone to be his whole life, fills his mind and his feet go their own speed. In fact he’s so distracted he’s almost run over by someone riding their bike on the wrong side of the street, and it’s unfortunately as he’s half in the door of The Pot with his middle finger still angrily and unjustifiably in the air that Sylvain looks up from the coffee bar and sees him.

Felix doesn’t see Sylvain for a second, because he’s really engrossed in flipping off that biker, so when his head turns toward the interior of the coffee shop the look in Sylvain’s eyes stops him where he stands for a second, door swinging shut behind him and chiming the bell again. Sylvain looks — well, he looks good, which is unfortunately the first thing Felix notices about him, something he’s always noticing in the background of his thoughts, playing on repeat like a skipping record Sylvain looks good Sylvain looks good Sylvain looks good. But aside from that he looks a couple of other ways too. He looks surprised, or stunned, like someone who’s been hit on the head, but that shade of feeling fades quickly from his eyes and if Felix wasn’t overconfident in his own observational ability he would maybe wonder if he’d seen it at all. But he doesn’t, even in the face of the second and overpowering light in Sylvain’s eyes, which is fondness and softness and sweetness, but for Felix it hits mostly as pain because it’s just a little too reminiscent of what he’ll never have, the look Sylvain has only for his soulmate. But he’s weak and in love so he grins back, just a little, and the evening barista is rolling their eyes at the two of them as Sylvain doesn’t wait for Felix to take the stool next to him before getting his arms around him.

He’s warm, always, maybe he’s had his coffee already to heat him from the inside or maybe it’s that natural Sylvain combustion that comes from some place Dimitri and Ingrid and Felix don’t have access to. When they collectively pass out in whoever’s bed is hosting the sleepover, inevitable after a certain number of Hellraiser movies or Smash matches, Sylvain always ends up in the middle, surrounded by the huddling and chilly others. Here in the coffee shop it feels like he’s all around Felix, wrapping him up completely, like a hand he never wants to let go of, but because they’re in public and because he wants more than pretty much anything else to see Sylvain’s face again Felix does let go.

“Hey,” Sylvain says, and he smiles like a beam of light and drops back onto his stool, pushing a steaming cardboard cup toward the empty seat next to him.

“Hey yourself,” Felix replies, taking the seat and the cup with equal enthusiasm. It smells like the usual and he takes a premature sip, scorching his tongue. Seeing Sylvain again now that he’s fucking in love with him has really messed him up.

“How’s life as Gustave’s new roommate?” Sylvain asks, and his voice is teasing for a moment before he schools it to seriousness. “Your dad didn’t say anything to you? Just let him move in?”

Felix nods, buying his burnt tongue a precious moment before replying. “It’s worse. He’s here on a placement. For five years.” There’s a pause while that sinks in between both of them. Sylvain’s mouth drops open a little in surprise and Felix hates that, while they’re talking about Gustave, a subject that makes his mind recoil like a spring, his eyes still follow Sylvain’s lips, and, unfortunately, regrettably, part of his consciousness splits off the topic to imagine kissing him. Gustave — they’re talking about Gustave. “How much do you want to bet dad’s just going to let him kick it the whole time?”

“That’s brutal,” Sylvain offers. Surprisingly, it means a lot to hear it. “Poor Annette.”

“I know,” Felix agrees. “I need to find a job ASAP so I can get the fuck out of there.”

Sylvain considers him, thoughtfully. “I mean, if you’re okay with it you could stay at my place in the meantime,” he says, and his voice is studied, careful. Felix can’t divine why, could be because his brain is mid-short circuit.

“What?”

“I mean you’d probably have to sleep on the futon in the living room,” Sylvain continues, “so I could see why you might not want to.”

Felix does want to. Even if the other option wasn’t the dark-sided Fodlan equivalent of The Odd Couple, of course he wants to. Even if he hadn’t just been thinking about how great it would probably be to kiss Sylvain, of course he wants to. Sylvain is likely a good roommate and his apartment has natural light and his worst habit by far is the people he brings home, but — and maybe this is the part of Felix’s head that feels confident enough to dare imagine kissing Sylvain — maybe Felix could change that. Maybe Sylvain would be a little more restrained if Felix might be awake in the living room, applying to another round of jobs on the futon.

All these thoughts happen in a second, not long enough for Sylvain to be suspicious or concerned. Right? “It’s definitely not that I don’t want to,” he says, then he amends it because he thinks he sounds desperate. “I mean as if my dad wasn’t awful Gustave is the fucking worst. Together it’s going to be non-stop bad dad immersion and I’m not about it. But,” he continues, testing the waters with a toe, “you hate having a roommate.”

“Yeah,” Sylvain agrees, like it’s obvious, “a roommate. You’re not just some random person I have to learn to live with.”

It’s just a statement of fact but Felix feels his heart lift, pathetically. Another one for the flipbook, maybe right next to the time Sylvain had bitten off more than he could chew, literally, with an edible and spent most of the night with his head in Felix’s lap and his eyes wide and staring while Felix stroked his hair, half trying to keep himself calm and half trying to keep Sylvain calm while they rode it out. “Uh,” is what he says. “Huh.”

“You don’t, like, have to,” Sylvain says. He, intelligently, blows at the steam rising from his cup before taking a sip, and Felix is in love with him.

“I know,” he says. “I will though.” Sylvain’s eyes flick up to him from above the rim, and he looks happy. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, that’s too weird.” He pauses again, swirling the coffee in his hands. The barista is actively on their phone because who the hell is buying coffee at what could potentially be called night by someone who goes to bed early enough? “Wanna just do the damn thing? You can move in tonight if you want.”

Felix is sure his eyebrows would shoot all the way off his head if that were possible. “Really? You’re not, like, busy?”

“I’m kind of a loser these days, Felix, in case you haven’t picked up on that,” he says with a wink. “I don’t even work tomorrow. Not that you need help carrying stuff.” Sylvain adds this, not with a wink, which puts Felix oddly off his guard. Sylvain is looking at him, at his shoulders, his arms where they drape over the counter in lazy aggravation. But then he’s looking at Felix’s face again and Felix hates eye contact and hates how completely opened and raw he feels looking at Sylvain specifically so he looks away and misses any other facial cues Sylvain might send.

“Okay,” he says, mutters really, looking away with all his might and trying not to picture him and Sylvain in any kind of easy domesticity. It’s a business arrangement, it’s a friend helping another friend out in the face of the Sauron and Saruman of bad fathers. But it’s something, another stone on the path of their friendship, a link in the chain holding them together.

Felix can’t help laughing as he piles himself and Sylvain into his still-packed car, the little moving trailer for his college apartment furniture getting one last ride in before its inevitable return. He doesn’t even bother stopping inside to say anything, one big change without warning deserves another after all, but he does flip off his house from the driveway a little childishly. Sylvain doesn’t seem to mind, laughing himself and pulling out his phone to take a picture.

“Just wanna remember this moment,” he says when Felix glares at him, and somehow that makes it okay as he drives them away.

“You still live at the same place?” he asks. Sylvain is still on his phone, hopefully not posting anything to Instagram. “No way all my stuff is gonna fit.”

Sylvain nods and scoffs at the same time, not looking up. “It’ll be fine. What do you have in there, a bed and a dresser?”

Okay, maybe his apartment had been a little barren. Felix’s mouth tightens a little. “And a couple chairs,” he says, and it sounds like a retort.

“You’re such a nomad,” Sylvain says, and he’s still looking at his phone but when Felix glances over the screen is off. “When are you gonna settle down?”

He parks outside Sylvain’s half of the duplex, looking out the passenger window behind him at the door he’s knocked at a hundred times, passed out against once when a drunk Dimitri was insisting he was sober enough to drive home and Felix and Ingrid had had to barricade his exit route in their own slightly less incapacitated state. Sylvain has always been irresponsibly generous with buying alcohol for the younger three, even now that they’re all over twenty-one. “Guess I just need the right person,” he says, cowardly and in love and absolutely not imagining himself in Sylvain’s kitchen making dinner they way they each like it with grey hair and wrinkles. Definitely not. “And a fucking job.”

He does get a fucking job, and his stuff does fit, just like Sylvain said it would, and they do settle into an easy domesticity. Even after Felix starts working, one portrait shoot leading to another wedding leading to another set of senior pictures leading to steady enough income to not be broke all the time, Sylvain doesn’t show any indication that he wants his living room back. Felix keeps sleeping in it, moving his own futon in there after a while because it’s easier to pack away when one of them has guests over.

“Should I start paying rent at least?” Felix asks, and it’s not really meant to be a question. It’s meant to be a statement, but Sylvain likes to interact with everything he says so he might as well start off with something that invites a response.

“You don’t have to,” Sylvain says, sipping the coffee Felix has made, the coffee Felix always makes because he’s a snob and Sylvain’s not picky but the first time he accidentally grabs Felix’s thermos instead of his own on the way out the door Felix puts his foot down in favor of never having to suffer Sylvain’s murky shit again. “But I know if I just say no you’ll just start, like, hiding cash under my mattress or something, so sure. Venmo me, like, a hundred bucks.”

“That’s… a start,” Felix says, pulling out his phone. “What would be, say, half?”

“Stick around and find out,” Sylvain says. He accepts the money but Felix doesn’t know what he does with it.

It’s a hot but potentially lucrative summer night in the Blue Sea Moon when Sylvain interrupts Felix while he’s editing to drop everything and take a new headshot for his LinkedIn. The sun is still out, and regardless the people in the other half of the duplex have some nice outdoor lighting going on against the top of their fence, which is more or less what Sylvain wheedles when Felix protests that he’s actually going to make money if he stays in and edits his paying client’s photos. Sure he’s ahead of the schedule they agreed on but that could mean one more star on Yelp or whatever weird consultant recommendation sites he ends up on.

“Are you even looking for a new job?” Felix asks, fiddling with his aperture until it catches the leaves of the branch dangling over their heads to a satisfactory degree. Sure he’s not getting paid anymore but if this turns out well it could easily be a portfolio piece. Even if he wasn’t constantly being reminded of how in love with the idiot he is Felix would have to admit Sylvain is handsome, easy to look at, easy to make good-looking. He snaps some test shots and the wind is appropriate, not too strong, the lighting is good in the golden hour and the neighbors’ fairy lights. He trains the camera on Sylvain and stops.

Sylvain is leaning against the fence between his yard and the neighbors’, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn to work minus the tie he’d taken off to look approachable as he’d indicated to Felix, a button or two on his shirt undone, sleeves of his blazer pushed up lazily — not that it matters to anyone but Felix, his arms won’t make the shot, but to Felix it matters enough to be embarrassing. “Should I look candid or posed, Ansel Adams?”

“Name one more famous photographer,” Felix grunts as he lines up a shot in preparation. He looks just a little too in place right now anyway, so there’s no actual picture in his mind just yet. “If you say Leibovitz I’ll kill you.”

“Wow, what on earth is wrong with her work?” When Felix doesn’t answer, Sylvain sighs and rolls his eyes. Felix takes a shot that will never be LinkedIn appropriate, but it makes him laugh when he looks at the preview on the camera. “Can I say Man Ray or are we still in the realm of the plebeian, oh arbiter of artistry?”

“Shut up. You look unprofessional with your mouth open.” It’s harsh but fair according to the unfeeling eye of the lens. Felix would love to be compared to Man Ray. He takes a couple more shots, Sylvain in motion, watching the movement of the foliage above him. “You never answered me. Are you looking for a new job?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk!” Sylvain says, teasing, and he winks and pokes his tongue out for a moment that could bring Felix to his knees, easily. He takes another photo, not brave enough to look at the preview, and steps a little to the side to try another angle. “But no, I’m not looking… yet. I just keep having these visions of me snapping and leaving the office behind one of these days so I figured I’d better be prepared. Plus I get to ask the best photographer in Fodlan to take my picture, right?”

“Okay, back to shutting up if you’re just going to mock me,” Felix grumbles.

“I’m not!” Sylvain protests, but he is silent for another few moments, fiddling with his lapel, stuffing his hands nervously in his pockets, humming and bopping his head a little to whatever tune he’s picking out, looking for all the world like a profoundly suspicious lookout on a heist.

“You should look posed,” Felix says, as an answer to his earlier question but also as a path forward to getting anything even remotely usable out of this. He does have editing to get back to, after all, and the remnants of the night’s golden hour won’t be around forever. “A LinkedIn should always look planned out. Nothing accidental.”

“Oh, good call,” Sylvain says, and then he does a very Sylvain thing, which is to immediately arrange his body in the perfect way, a way that makes him look open, approachable, confident, and he smiles and his teeth are straight but not too straight, white but not too white, eyes crinkled to let you know he’s down to earth but not so much that you think he might be a troublemaker, and Felix’s finger hits the shutter button faster than light.

He looks at the preview. It’s perfect. He could call it here. “Could you tilt your head just a little more this way?” Another snap. Another perfect shot. Another happy future boss or headhunter copying the link to Sylvain’s profile and sending it off to a coworker who’s half a friend with a check this guy out. “Put your hands in your pockets, it might make your shoulders fall more naturally.” One more completely perfect image. Looking at the preview Felix reflects that he’s braver than he thought, for having the audacity to be in love with someone who can look like that on command. “Okay.”

“Let me see!” Sylvain practically jogs over like a puppy, work shoes careless of the grass, and throws an arm over Felix’s shoulders to tug him toward him so he can see the screen. Felix flicks through the images, trying hard to control his heartbeat at their proximity. Sylvain is just like this, always has been, there’s nothing special about it except that now Felix feels that closeness in every cell of his body. It’s not Sylvain’s fault that he’s different now. “Ooh, you’re good, Robert Mapplethorpe. You should do this for a living.”

“Ha ha,” Felix says, lingering on the one with Sylvain’s eyes rolled back and his mouth open mid-word to hopefully instill some humility. Sylvain just chuckles. He asks for the middle of the three perfect shots, tells Felix he’ll tag him for credit — not that Felix uses LinkedIn much, his clients find him other ways. Later, when he’s clearing out his camera, he can’t bring himself to delete any of the outtakes. Not yet.

“Should I start looking for a bigger place?” Sylvain hums suddenly. It’s Saturday morning which means they’re hunched on Felix’s futon over the Switch playing their ritualistic Mario Kart. Felix is always Lakitu because he’s fastest, Sylvain is always the Piranha Plant because he thinks it’s funny. Felix used to gripe about it, insist that he take it seriously, but then he remembered how Sylvain always used to choose Daisy because she was cute and he doesn’t feel as strongly about it. It’s an improvement, all things considered, and he does win sometimes when he’s not hungover from his Friday nights, which is more and more frequent nowadays.

“Why?” Felix asks, focused as always too much on the game. In fairness the screen is tough to see because Sylvain stubbornly refuses to dock the damn thing, and he does pay enough attention to catch the words, the studied casual weightlessness there, because he’s still in love with Sylvain even after three months of radio silence from his father and warm brown eyes and gross breath in the morning and clean sheets on the futon that Felix didn’t wash and a weekly lecture on how to do the dishes. It’s pathetic but it’s unerring. Like Sylvain playing the Piranha Plant, every Saturday morning, like church, like a gravitational constant. He is Lakitu and he is breathing and he is in love with Sylvain.

“Well, I just think this is working out pretty well, huh? It might be nice for you not to have to sleep in the living room anymore.” He does that Sylvain thing then where he leans his body in the direction he’s turning his cart, and once again Felix has to hold on to his heartbeat as his shoulder, swathed in an enormous hoodie he’s borrowed from Raphael after goddess knew what workout and never gave back, is pressed to Sylvain’s warm side. At least he has a shirt on too this time, but it’s just thin cotton and somehow Felix feels like he could pass through it, reach the goal that doesn’t seem anywhere nearby most days.

Sylvain is asking him to stay. More than that he’s asking Felix to go with him. It should fill him with endorphins but instead a strange reluctance sweeps over him. He elbows Sylvain back into his own space to buy processing time. Sylvain wants him to stay. This is good. He’s asking him if he wants to move into a bigger place. A two bedroom. Maybe more. And maybe there’s the problem, because if they have two bedrooms, equal privacy, Felix can’t crawl into Sylvain’s bed drunk after the occasional post-gym crawl with Dedue and Ashe and bitchy about light pollution in the living room, though sober Felix refuses to buy curtains and could easily have found the eye mask Sylvain teases him mercilessly — well, not merciless exactly, nothing Sylvain does is without mercy — for and gone to sleep on the futon. If Felix has his own bedroom he can’t, won’t, wake up anymore on top of the blanket with warmth at his back and Sylvain’s chuckle from where he’s at on his phone. Hey sleeping beauty.

He shakes himself. That’s happened like twice but apparently it’s enough. “I… this is working out, yes. But I don’t mind it here.”

Sylvain scoffs, turns to look at him because Felix sees the movement out of the corner of his eye, won’t return the contact because he’s so close to winning and Sylvain never takes anything seriously enough. “You don’t mind not even having your own space? You don’t mind that we put away your bedroom whenever people come over? That’s not the lone wolf I know and love.”

And oof does that word pierce him, badly enough that he lets his crushing press on the A button up, dazed by the sheer force of it, and Sylvain flies past him in the stupid carousel cart with his stupid Piranha Plant and wins. He doesn’t notice. “It’s,” he starts, but it’s tough to talk around his heart thumping directly inside his throat like a hairball he’s about to hack up. “It’s not that I mind.”

“Okay, Felix,” Sylvain says. Felix wins the next race, and the race after that.

“Do you think I have a soulmate?” This time in the aftermath of Dedue having a better and more chase-able tolerance than Ashe and Felix combined, Sylvain is a little far gone himself. They’re facing each other, curled up like crescent moons in the mirror under Sylvain’s bedsheet despite the unusual heat of the early fall. It’s editing night with Bernadetta, which means Dorothea and Ingrid were there too, which means wine and the reward of a corny movie, which Dorothea and Sylvain alternate picking. “It was my turn to choose tonight,” Sylvain had murmured like it’s a secret, and Felix had laughed. “It was terrible.”

Felix doesn’t have to be told. The badness of the movie is almost always directly correlated to the drunkenness of the roommate and this is at least middling level. Enough that Felix only feels a tiny curl of fear in his stomach as he speaks, looking determinedly away from Sylvain’s eyes at his frustrating and close chest.

Sylvain doesn’t even stop to think, to be surprised at the question. “Totally.” It’s surer even than his verdict on the movie.

“Why?” he asks, and his voice is small and his heart has always been small, walled up and closed off and pulling away into the distance until it’s a pinprick at intersecting perspective lines. Felix has never cared about having a soulmate because he can barely stand what he does feel. Imagining the strength of emotion he’s spent his whole life beating down, not just love but everything, makes him feel like he’s spinning out of control across a sheet of ice that’s cracking beneath him. Sylvain’s complete faith in someone mystically out there for him presents a pickaxe against the fissures.

“Dude,” Sylvain says, and as usual that little tiny heart in the emotional chastity cage Felix has it cooped up in grows and heats up, because when Sylvain calls him dude it’s the easy comfort that could only be between them, their story, their promise in an alley after a particularly shitty fight with Miklan to never leave the other one alone, “I just know.”

Felix’s hands are clenched into fists, and he’s weak and he’s in love and he feels a million miles away from Sylvan so he bends his elbows to press his knuckles against his stomach, warm and just soft enough. Sylvain doesn’t pull away, a possibility that hadn’t even occurred to Felix until the absence of reaction strikes him. Instead he rests his own hands on top of Felix’s, like weights to tug him back to the ground.

“Why do you ask, Fe?” Sylvain asks with cabernet soaking his voice, a nickname he only brings out when he wants to land a double whammy of soft voice and sentimental epithet, and as usual both hit square in the chest.

Why does he ask. Felix thinks about it for a second. Maybe it’s just seeing Ashe and Dedue together, happy and confident in knowing that whatever might happen between them or besides them they never have to let go of their bond. It didn’t bother Felix before he suddenly had someone he wishes he could care about like that, and in his half-drunk haze the articulation of that thought is almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. “Why are you so sure?” he asks instead, self-preservation kicking in at the last second.

“Just am,” Sylvain replies, easy smile and warm eyes and thumbs absently stroking at the heels of Felix’s palms where they poke out from under his knuckles. “Come on, Felix, what’s bothering you?”

The impulse to pull back is strong inside him now, fight or flight in conflict with freeze, in knowing that there’s someone out there Sylvain knows he could fully trust with something like the sentence that’s foaming behind his teeth behind his teeth like a cresting wave, but that Felix has no one like that, no paranormal implicit bond that can never be broken, delivered in a letter and a QR code and a painting of you and the all-powerful someone you love, soulmate.

“I…” he says, and bites his tongue, but the strength of the desire to unburden himself is powerful, like a battering ram against a pre-war deadbolt. “I want to feel something without being afraid.”

It’s out and Felix can feel the moment it hits Sylvain like a blow because he sucks in air like a gasp, and his hands where they’re loose around Felix’s fingers tighten. Felix isn’t looking at him still so he misses the movement that brings Sylvain’s forehead pressing against his, warm and as smooth as a 25-step skincare routine can make it. Okay, maybe not all of 25 steps but it feels that way to someone who still washes his face with the Cetaphil he’s used since high school and calls it a day. “Felix,” he says, and his voice though still thick with the red is serious. “You know you don’t need some painting from goddess knows where to make you safe. You’re surrounded by people you can trust — Ingrid, Dorothea, Dimitri, Bern, the list goes on.”

“What about you?” Felix asks, because his open wound is already completely exposed and under fluorescence so why not dig in a dirty finger. “Can I trust you?”

Sylvain is quiet for a moment. This is weird so Felix does shoot him a glance, which is a mistake because the look in Sylvain’s eyes pins Felix’s gaze to his as surely as if he’s clamped a cuff around his neck to hold him in place. He looks a hundred ways at once, like he’s measuring Felix up, like he’s going to consume him, like he’s going to kiss him, like he’s going to kill him. “I guess that’s up to you,” he says, “but I wish you would.”

Felix wakes up the way he usually does, in the early hours of the morning, seeds of a headache planted in his skull, but this time he’s still pressed to Sylvain, warm body and heavy arm thrown over his waist, and this time instead of rubbing his eyes and making his way back to the futon he sighs and lets sleep take him over again.

It’s the next day that someone knocks at the door Felix has started to think of as theirs. It’s early enough that Sylvain is still out at the farmers market he insists on going to regardless of weather or inclination, so Felix rolls out of the bed Sylvain had left him in and shuffles to the door. Probably Ingrid, she’s just shy of treating their place as her own when she’s in town and the only reason she isn’t there yet is because she doesn’t have her own key. Luckily or unluckily he’s still wearing the clothes he’d changed into after the gym last night so he doesn’t have to worry about whether it is actually Ingrid or someone who would be more surprised to see him less dressed.

It isn’t Ingrid. The person on the front step has dark hair, the greenish end of black, and blank eyes, and not much else notable except that Felix feels something strong and inexplicable sweep over him when he looks at them. Incomprehensible trust? Anger? A familiarity so deep and unbelievable that it floods him throughout like ice water, like fire? The corners of their mouth turn up a little, like someone carving a smile onto a clay puppet.

“You should update your address.” Their voice is measured, bland almost, but the sound of it shoots through Felix like a knife, like a… like a sword? He almost reels back from it, hand still on the door clenching down hard. “You missed your appointment.”

“Appointment? Does GMC make house calls now?” he asks, snaps really, because he’s confused and he hates being confused.

They shake their head. “That’s not what I mean.” Their voice is unsettling in its expressionlessness. “You’re in luck that we found you. We rescheduled.”

And they hold out an envelope. A fucking envelope with nothing written in the top left corner, Felix’s name and Sylvain’s address printed in impersonal type front and center. Felix takes it and it may as well be a hundred pounds, lead paper in a lead sleeve, for how weighed down he feels.

“Is this real?” he asks, and feels a little ashamed but not enough at how his voice cracks over the words.

“You’re holding it,” they reply. “Good bye, Felix Fraldarius.”

He half expects them to vanish in front of his eyes, but they turn and walk away quite normally, feet making sounds against the pavement that should be reassuringly physical but instead make Felix feel queasy somehow, and he watches them until they’re out of sight after turning a corner, hand shaking under the mass of the envelope in his hand.

He closes the front door eventually, even remembering to lock it behind him, and struggles back to Sylvain’s bed without thinking too seriously about why that might be the case. The paper in his hand, his name printed there like a death sentence, trembles a little — maybe because he hasn’t eaten anything yet, maybe because his head is spinning and sparking with the sapling of a hangover that thankfully doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. Over and over he turns the letter, imagining the QR code that he knows is on the inside because of course it is, of course this cursed shit would drop down on Felix just when he finally feels like maybe, maybe something in his life might be going right. Like he has some kind of hope that even with Sylvain’s soulmate in the mix somewhere out there, waiting for his unfairly warm and inviting brown eyes to lock with theirs across a crowded room or a busy street for the first time, maybe whatever could be left between them might survive.

He finally slides his finger under the flap at the exact moment that the front door opens again. “Hey Felix?” Sylvain calls, and it sounds like a question which probably means something is wrong but the paper resting against his knee is still heavy enough to hold him in place, unable to respond, unable to do anything but stare at the slip within. A date. A time. Coordinates. A black and white map to his fate.

“Hey Felix, I wanted to — oh, hey.” Sylvain cuts himself off as he passes the bedroom door and sees Felix still sitting, mysterious and intrusive, in his bed. He manages to raise his head at that, tries for blankness in his expression, but the way Sylvain’s brows knit tells him he fails. “What’s up?”

“You sound like you have something to say,” Felix says, and he thinks his voice gets across level-headedness better than his face. Sylvain dumps a bag of something on the counter and crosses into his room, sitting on the edge of the bed, and something about how the distance between them is perfectly calculated to be enough to leave him breathing room but not enough to put Sylvain out of reach hits Felix like a punch to the gut. They’ve always been like this, soulmates or not, always just right for each other, always at exactly the right spot to grow and move forward, always just a phone call or an arm’s length away. It hurts.

“It can wait,” Sylvain says, and then his eyes hit the paper on Felix’s knee and something odd happens. His face shuts down in a way Felix is familiar with but not a way that he’s often been the victim of, the plastic smile, the shuttered eyes, the something is wrong but I won’t let you be privy to it. It’s not exactly something Felix likes seeing under any circumstances but under these it’s especially surprising. “What’s that?”

“You know what it is,” he says, waspishly, because something about Sylvain’s expression reminds him of Miklan and there’s nothing Felix hates more than thinking of Miklan these days. “Why ask such a stupid question? What were you going to say?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Sylvain replies, and his voice is strange but Felix is reeling too much to question it. “What’s the date and time?”

Felix pauses at that, turning over finally what the person who had delivered the envelope had said. Update your address. Reschedule. Had there been a previous delivery, maybe to his college apartment? Maybe to the house where his father still lived, where Gustave was staying, where he was clearly and fully forgotten? As if he needs one more reason to keep that number blocked. He looks at the paper. “What day is it today?”

“Sunday,” Sylvain says, unhelpfully, but then he adds, “Horsebow 29th.” And that’s more useful, because that’s exactly the date on the card.

“Whoever runs this shit doesn’t waste time,” Felix replies then, standing, feeling for all the world like he’s tugging at a cord wrapped around him somewhere deep inside as he does. “It’s in an hour and a half.”

“Want me to go with you?” Sylvain asks, and his voice is oddly strangled but he pulls out his phone. “I can look up the coordinates, I can drive you there.”

“I doubt it’s far,” Felix says. “And you had to go alone, so I should too.”

“I didn’t want to go alone,” Sylvain says, and when Felix looks at him he’s biting his lip, pink across the cheeks under his freckles like it was a mistake to have said anything at all, and Felix is in love with him. Maybe he shouldn’t do this. It won’t change anything, won’t fix anything, he’ll still be stupidly in love with Sylvain and Sylvain will still be patiently waiting for his soulmate to show up and put the earth on its right axis. “You’re right about the coordinates, though. It’s like a ten minute walk away.”

“Hmmph,” Felix says, because that’s all he can manage, and he grabs his phone off the charger where he miraculously managed to place it last night and storms into the bathroom, turning on the shower before he dials Ingrid with fingers he hates to admit are trembling.

“Felix?” she answers on the second ring. “Everything okay?”

“I got my thing,” he says, vague to a fault and he knows it. “The soulmate paper thing.”

A gasp on the other end, and the muffled voice of Leonie in the background — Everything okay? Tell Felix I say hi! “Everything’s okay,” Ingrid says, placating but distracted, and then into the mic she continues, “Holy shit, Felix. Don’t be mad but… I just figured you wouldn’t get one. Like me.”

“Me too,” he replies, and it’s true. Who the hell else could it be, who the hell else would he want it to be. “I think I might not go. The person who brought it said —”

“Someone brought it to you?” Ingrid interrupts.

“Yes. They said they had to… reschedule or something. Because I didn’t ‘update my address.’” It sounds ridiculous as he explains it, but really the whole process is ridiculous so who is he to say.

Ingrid is quiet for a second. “Strange,” she says eventually. “Felix, I think you should go. Imagine how you’ll feel if you don’t, how unfair to the other person it would be.”

How he would feel is something he’s imagined a hundred times in the few months it’s become relevant, relief and despair and abandonment to fate without purpose, at least in this realm of his life. How the other person might feel is not something he’s considered, because even though Felix would be the first to throw his life away for his friends (or maybe the second) he’s fundamentally selfish, set in his ways. Ingrid always knows how to put him right.

“You may have a point,” he concedes, instead of the gratitude he hopes permeates his voice where his words can’t convey it.

“You’re welcome,” she replies, and the conversation is over.

Felix takes long enough in the shower, turning everything over in his mind, that Sylvain knocks on the door, pokes his head in in that annoyingly intuitive way of his of disrespecting personal space but not enough to irritate. “Wanna eat something before you go? I made omelettes with the peppers I got at the market. They’re spicy, like you like. Might help you steel yourself.”

“All right,” Felix agrees, and like always Sylvain is thinking about the other, putting himself last, because whatever ugly veil had fallen over him before is dissipated. “I’m shutting off the water now, so leave.”

“And miss the show?” he sighs, theatrical, but the door is already closing behind him and Felix is left in the cold with nothing but his towel to keep him company.

The omelette is good, spicy and earthy the way fresh vegetables allow for, and Felix finds himself swallowing the last bite even as his stomach rolls over and over like it’s beneath a wave. Sylvain brought iced coffees back from the market as well, thoughtful as ever, but Felix decides to skip that. He’s jittery enough, headache mostly cleared thanks to the shower and food. They’ve been eating completely in silence, weird weightiness hanging in the air, muffling even the sounds of their chewing. Felix sets his fork down and seethes for a moment before practically leaping out of his seat, suddenly tired of waiting, mind made up. Felix thinks about Sylvain, knowing one side of his own story for all those years, imagines if his soulmate somewhere has been selfish the way Felix had planned to be, to not look, not keep the appointment. Sylvain, alone, waiting patiently now the way he has for a while — though he certainly was neither waiting nor patient in his younger years. Things are different now.

“Let me come with you,” Sylvain says at the same time that Felix says, “Come with me,” and by the time they’ve spoken they’re already both standing, and Sylvain cracks a grin and with it cracks Felix’s heart right in two.

It’s warm enough for only a light jacket, even for Felix; midday in the Horsebow Moon in Faerghus isn’t completely unaffected by climate change unfortunately but it does make for a pleasant atmosphere for a walk to fate. Sylvain hums, tunelessly, maybe mimicking something Annette had sung sometime while cleaning or working. Her music has a way of burying itself in your mind and staying. Felix can barely hear it though with the loudness of his pulse in his ears. How long had Sylvain said the walk would be — ten minutes? It feels like an interminably long stretch of time. Felix half expects to drop from a heart attack between now and then.

“Are you nervous?” Sylvain asks, and Felix can tell he knows that he is because his voice is serious, no hint of a tease to prickle at him, and secure in that understanding between them, Felix shakes his head no anyway. “Okay,” Sylvain says, and it sounds like I thought so.

“Were you?” Felix asks, puking up the words, anything to put the spotlight somewhere else though Sylvain is already doing his best to stand between him and the hot bulb.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Totally. It’s a big thing, Felix, or at least I thought it was.”

“You’re right,” he offers as an olive branch against his own brusque anxiety. “It… must have been hard to learn so young.” Sylvain doesn’t respond, and now seems as good a time as ever to tug the scalpel deeper, down into organ and muscle and interstitial tissues, so he asks a question that hasn’t been asked since the day it happened, the day the story they’d all heard as kids became real. “Did you recognize them?”

He’s not looking at Sylvain, he’s looking at his phone and the quickly approaching pin of coordinates. They’re ahead of schedule. Sylvain is quiet, which doesn’t surprise Felix because he’s never answered anything about his painting before so why would he start now, which is why he almost trips over his own feet when Sylvain does answer him. “Yes.”

“What?” It’s stunning, like a tornado just blew through the street in front of them, ripping up an entire world and forcing a reorientation. “Even back then you… you already knew who…”

“Yeah, Felix. I did. Someone I knew even back then.” Sylvain’s voice is strange, measured and off somehow, like he’s explaining something very basic but Felix doesn’t know what the hell he might be talking about so he doesn’t know how to respond.

In his usual way, he decides to go for pushing his luck. “Do they know?”

Sylvain chuckles at that, and Felix feels brave enough for the first time in the entirety of their walk to look at him, and damn it if it isn’t the biggest thing on his mind already but he is in love, hazel eyes and dusty freckles and red hair and worn out GMU sweater and self-loathing that runs deep enough that Felix isn’t surprised in the slightest when Sylvain replies, “Nah. At least I’ve never said anything. I’ve been sort of hoping they’d figure it out on their own, you know? That they might, like, love me naturally.” Another chuckle, unfortunately sincere. “Not likely, I get it.”

Sylvain stops walking, and Felix follows his lead. The red door is there, across the street, standing out like a sore thumb in the white walls encompassing it. Cars drift by. It’s hard to believe that most of them are probably just in the middle of an average day when Felix’s heart will not stop pounding in his ears for any number of reasons.

“Hey Felix,” Sylvain says after a moment, the perfect stretch of silence and street noise. His fingers tug at the sleeve of Felix’s jacket, oddly shy. “Look at me.”

He does and he is doomed. Sylvain is tall and his eyes are warm and fond and he’s all the things Felix would have wanted from some stupid soulmate if he’d ever cared to think about it before now, and somewhere Sylvain’s soulmate is out there, knowing him, making him wait. Sylvain opens his mouth to speak again and Felix has to force his eyes not to flick down to meet the movement. He speaks instead, before he loses his nerve, before whomever is out there wakes up to the reality of destiny.

“I’m not good at this,” he says, and Sylvain obediently cuts himself off. Felix twists his hand a little to catch his fingers around Sylvain’s wrist where he had pulled at him a moment ago, where he still lingers. His skin is warm, like sun though a window on a cold day. “I… whatever happens in there, you are…” He’s not looking at Sylvain anymore, because with every moment he does he loses his resolve to see this stupid painting through, wants more to say fuck it and run, together or alone, cowardly against the machinations of fate, but he can feel Sylvain looking at him. He can always feel Sylvain looking at him. “You are worthy of love. Good love. Not the kind you’ve had so far. You should tell your soulmate while I’m in there, they’re probably an idiot.”

Sylvain laughs, hard, head tipping back and stretching his throat around the sound, and even if Felix doesn’t really understand why, the sound fills him with even more warmth and he finds his own lips quirking too, like they’re sharing an inside joke. When Sylvain looks back to Felix, back down to earth, his expression is soft enough to soften Felix more by extension. “All right, Fe,” he agrees, and Felix wants to take a knife and tear the stupid painting up, even if his heart will collapse Dorian Gray-style in retribution. Instead he gives Sylvain’s wrist a squeeze where he’s still holding it and stomps resolutely through the red door.

Inside it’s still like Sylvain says, white walls and the red door like a wound in the middle of it all. The person who brought his envelope earlier that same day isn’t there, maybe making more house calls or maybe creating all this mystifying artwork in the studio of fate. Instead, there’s a girl with green hair. Sylvain is right, always has been, she is short and she is smiling at him.

“You were a tough one,” she says, and holds her hand out. He places his sheet of paper against her palm.

“Don’t you scan the code after I see the thing?” Felix asks, recalling Sylvain’s story.

She rolls her eyes, pulling out her phone. “We used to, but it’s easier to remember to do it in this order.” The code scanned, she places the card on a surface he cannot see behind the desk she’s at and turns again to face him, beckoning, and he follows her through the red door of destiny.

Even if there had been anything else in the room, Felix’s eyes go nowhere else. The pounding of his heart speeds up then slows. The girl could have evaporated on the spot for all he notices outside of the scene in front of him.

It’s familiar, familiar beyond anything he could have imagined, on his mind of late especially like it has been planned — and maybe it has. He’s not Lakitu, because back then Lakitu wasn’t in the game. When Felix was thirteen, before Glenn had died, Felix was always Luigi, even when Glenn wasn’t playing, because Glenn was always Mario and they were brothers and Felix and Glenn were brothers. He knows in the present that in the past, in the painting, he’s racing against Dimitri but he doesn’t appear at all. It’s the moment Felix has just won, he remembers it clear as day, turning to lecture Dimitri but instead seeing…

Oh. Sylvain. He’s in the painting too, their eyes meeting, and in the present Felix is close to tears for the second time in twenty-four hours at the impact of the tidal wave of feeling, like slotting one last piece of a puzzle into place to finally understand what the full picture is. He doesn’t know how long he looks at it, how long he spends thinking through it, coming to terms with Sylvain being his now by destiny and by choice, wondering what the hell he’s going to do when he leaves this room and has to face the world outside where it’s entirely new and yet almost completely unchanged. His phone buzzes in his pocket and robotically, unseeingly, he takes it out, turning the screen toward his face for whenever he can tear his eyes away from the painting.

When he does leave the room, the girl is in the entryway, standing behind the desk she was at earlier. She doesn’t look up as he approaches, or when he speaks. “Why did you have to reschedule me?”

“Are you asking why we did at all?” Her voice is high, even considering how small she is. Felix doesn’t answer, so she continues, still without looking up. “It’s like you told him earlier. You’re worthy of love. How did you put it?”

“Good love.” It tumbles out of him, propelled by the rush of air driven by whatever the hell had to happen for her to know somehow what he had said moments before. Preternatural. Fate. A tiny girl with green hair and a mysterious and blank assistant who can find you whether or not your address is up to date. Felix looks at his phone. There are two messages, sent within a minute or two of each other, both from Sylvain.

Just remember you said it, not me.

Wow I really hope you’re seeing what I think you’re seeing in there otherwise I’m going to look like an asshole. *Felix voice* More than usual.

It goes off again and whether or not it actually is it feels like the only thing that kicks Felix’s heart back into gear, reeling as everything settles back into place at once. He loves Sylvain. Sylvain is his soulmate. He is Sylvain’s soulmate. He is a fucking idiot, just like he said. He puts his phone away without looking at whatever just came through and touches the knob of the red door, pausing for a second to get his breath. Over his shoulder, unseen in his single-minded focus, the green-haired girl waves without looking up as he opens the portal into the rest of his life.

When he steps forward, away from the strange and specific museum, it takes Felix a moment of searching, wildly, like he’s a lost wallet or a returning long-distance friend, to catch sight of Sylvain. He’s leaning against one of the posts designating a parking spot in front of a nearby business whose purpose Felix cannot divine, hands in his pockets, looking away for a moment at the intersection nearest him, hair catching the sunlight and just… has it always shone that way or is Felix just now alive to it, justified in his indulgence at noticing it?

While he’s staring, Sylvain turns and meets his gaze, his eyes unreadable at this distance, face schooled strangely against expression, and Felix beckons him over, trying to hold in the grin that’s threatening to overpower him and escape onto the plain of his own face.

“Hey,” Sylvain says, when they’re at comfortable speaking distance. “How did it go in there?”

“I,” Felix replies by way of an answer, “am an idiot. And apparently I have been for nine years.”

The smile that breaks over Sylvain’s face is like a wave, like a star, like a sunray that warms instead of blinding, and Felix can’t help but mirror it back to him. There’s more to talk about but he can allow himself one smile in the grand scheme of things. “I was getting worried,” he says. Something in Sylvain’s voice indicates he’s waiting.

“Why didn’t you ever… say anything?” Felix asks, might as well get all this out of the way before they begin in earnest.

“It’s like I said earlier,” Sylvain says, hand to the back of his neck, eyes crinkling at the corners without mirth, “I was… I guess I was hoping you might… I don’t know. I was being stupid I guess. I didn’t want you to have it hanging over you, you know?”

“So you kept it hanging over yourself?” A sword of Damocles, with Felix’s unpredictable nature the fragile string holding it in place. Sylvain nods, sheepish. “Well, I have some good news for you then.”

“Oh?” Sylvain asks, and it’s half an inhale, half surprise.

“I was thinking about not even coming here today,” Felix says. He can’t look at Sylvain while admitting all this, he knows he can’t, so he grabs Sylvain’s sleeve and tugs, starting them on the walk back to their place and their coffee and their entire lives stretching out in one pair of intertwining paths. Sylvain follows, eager. “It just seemed so pointless, you know? I already was… in love with somebody. What the hell was seeing some painting going to do to change that?” Felix pauses, lets it sink in, gathers his courage, and slows to keep pace with Sylvain where he’s pinned into place by realization of what Felix is saying. “Turns out nothing had to change at all. It was you, in both. Maybe always.”

“Felix,” Sylvain says, and his voice is warm but tight, stretched like a drum. A few minutes go by, nothing spoken, just the sound of their feet moving slowly through the leaves and the cars going by. Felix’s heartbeat is calm now, though, quiet, nothing to panic over for this moment in time. “Sorry,” Sylvain says then, and Felix looks up at him in surprise. They’re taking their time, like they’re moving through a thick and physical fog, like they’re floating down a river in the sun. “I kinda don’t know what to say.”

Felix waits, just drinking in his face and his voice and his body next to him on the sidewalk. Sylvain always knows what to say given enough rope to hang himself with.

“I never thought… I hoped you might, you know, be interested.” And Felix hopes the flush painting across his cheeks says what he’s thinking — that’s the right thing to say, always.

“You never said,” Felix replies, aloud. “I mean, until like six months ago I don’t know what I would have done in response.”

“I tried,” Sylvain counters, smiling. His hands are in his pockets and Felix begins the long and arduous process of working up the courage to reach for one, to hold it now that he has the permissions of the universe. “I can’t believe you didn’t pick up on anything, you know? Like I didn’t want to use the word, but I tried everything else. I just figured this whole time I was too shitty for you to even consider like that.”

“Stop.”

“Sorry.” Sylvain rubs the back of his neck again, right hand, the one closer to Felix, and the dark sympathy in him at the frank self-deprecation gives him the strength to catch Sylvain’s fingers on the downswing, to entwine the tips of just the pinky and ring fingers. In case Sylvain wants to pull back, he tells himself. In case Felix has to pull back. In case he’s completely overwhelmed by the feeling of holistic routine as their skin touches, the whorls and loops settling together in atomic press. He doesn’t and he isn’t, and Sylvain flexes his hand to catch the tips more securely, and they walk on. “Gotta remember to be cool around you.”

“Hmmph,” Felix mumbles to cover the you’ve always been cool that he’s shocked to find almost tumbling out of his mouth. Something about the strange and mystical certainty, the heft of the soulmate label, the external confirmation of mutuality, makes Felix a little more secure in even allowing himself to think along that path, regardless of whether he’s ready to voice it yet.

“So,” Sylvain says after a moment, “what was your painting? Like what was in it?”

“You? I thought… I figured…”

“I know that part.” He laughs, squeezes Felix’s fingers with a desperate kind of affection, like he’s surprised he hasn’t pushed him away, like he has a lot to catch up on. “I meant like… what was happening in it? I wonder if we had the same one or what.”

“Oh,” Felix says, blushing a little. “Right. Mine was… well what was yours?”

“I asked first,” Sylvain replies, immune to deflection when he wants to be.

“Fine. You probably don’t even remember this, but… it was the time we were all at Ingrid’s house, the day you saw your painting. I was mad at Dimitri because he wasn’t paying attention to the race we were in, he was listening to you, but when I went to look at him I… saw you instead. That was it.” The flush on his face is hot now, he’s sure he’s red all over. “If you don’t tell me what yours was I’ll kill you.”

“I’d better get used to that, huh?” Sylvain says, and he’s smiling but it’s fond, so fond, and Felix feels another wave of feeling hit him that he’s happy to be carried in. “I remember that, Felix. Don’t be mad, but it was kind of… weird seeing you that day. It took a while to get used to knowing you were my soulmate but not really knowing what would happen or when. I don’t even know if I was smart enough to understand whether I had feelings for you or not. Luckily it’s pretty obvious now.” The wink he gives Felix is warm. “The other weird thing about it was that my painting was from the future. Like the past from now but back then it was in the future. If that makes sense. But it was adult you — looking like a complete snack, I should add — and adult me, and at that point I wasn’t even sure if I’d make it to be an adult so that was another surprising thing.” The same suffocating sympathy rises in Felix again and he twists his hand in Sylvain’s so they’re palm to palm. “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, remember earlier this year when you were back from school and Gustave moved in and we met up at The Pot to talk about it? And you were flipping off that guy on the bike on your way in and your hair was in that cute little ponytail? That was it.”

“You like the ponytail?” Felix asks, because he’s already blushing hard so why not crank it up one more notch. What he doesn’t expect is for Sylvain to come to a full stop in the middle of the sidewalk on the quiet residential street they’re traversing on their way home. He stops too, turning to look with furrowed brow at Sylvain.

“Felix,” he says, taking a step to close the distance between them, and he is slammed once again with the fact that Sylvain is tall, and he is broad, and he is warm and smiling down at Felix and he loves him he loves him he loves him. All that comes out of Felix in the form of a heavy exhale. “I love the ponytail. When I see you with it, like now, I can’t help thinking…” His voice is a slow fire in Felix’s veins, a vise clamping his heart down so it roars through him to be let out. “I think about how I might get my fingers in it…” And he raises an arm, slowly, slowly enough for Felix to bat it away as is his wont, but he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on Sylvain’s with all the willpower in him as Felix feels his hand wind through his hair where it hangs at the back of his head, fingers deft. “And I might pull on it a little to tilt your head up my way…” Felix is ready for this, the low breathiness in Sylvain’s tone a warning or a promise, but the light tug still sends sparks from his scalp to his chest to his toes, and his head does follow the command of Sylvain’s fingers, tilting his chin almost defiantly up even as his mouth parts a little with the movement. Sylvain grins, fingers curling in Felix’s hair. “And then… well, anything could happen then, right Fe?”

“Just kiss me already, idiot,” Felix says then, crossing his arms unthinkingly, too late to realize what would happen next, and Sylvain’s grin slides away as his own lips part, as his eyes blow wide for an unfiltered moment before lidding again, before he’s leaning down and all Felix can see before he closes his own eyes are freckles and the earring in Sylvain’s left ear and lashes sweeping over sunny skin and then his mouth is on Felix’s and any thought besides untangling his arms to wind them around Sylvain’s neck is out of his mind.

If the revelations of the day have made Felix more adjusted to overwhelming waves of feeling, he wouldn’t know it by the intensity of the almost crushing flame of serotonin that spreads through him when they kiss. Felix has had plenty of practice, plenty of experience in this area both good and bad but nothing, no one, has even come close to the way Sylvain makes him feel, hand in his hair and arm wrapping around his waist, tugging him closer, tipping his head back further with another gentle pull at his ponytail. It’s a better angle for Sylvain’s tongue to press, heavy and welcome, into Felix’s mouth, and Felix, unfortunately, can’t catch the moan that escapes him in time to tamp it down. They part at that, both breathing a little heavy, neither letting go of the other.

“That’s promising,” Sylvain murmurs, low and close to Felix’s face still, like he can’t bear to be away. “It does remind me that we’re practically in someone’s front yard. Probably some sweet old lady who hasn’t had this much excitement in a while.”

“Then let’s go home,” Felix says, tugging at the collar of Sylvain’s jacket, squirming to get moving, but Sylvain has him in place.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Sylvain asks, and then he’s smiling, huge, big enough that Felix is sure whatever he’s about to say has been on his mind for a while, and it’s surely corny. “You know we’ve got the rest of our lives for this stuff. Soulmate.”

“Ugh,” he says, tugging again, and maybe it’s because he catches the little answering quirk of spit-slick lips on Felix’s face, but this time Sylvain does follow him, toward home and toward the rest of their lives.