Chapter Text
“No, it was an easy hit, the way his hair falls in his eyes. I don't think he even saw me coming.”
Annette gave a snort of laughter – a literal snort – and clasped her hands over her mouth in hopes that Felix wouldn’t hear. They were both uncommonly cheerful that night, relative to their general demeanors, which for Felix meant almost smiling and saying more than 3 words at a time and for Annette meant embracing the entire, beautiful world as if it were her friend, a present that she had only begun to unwrap.
He had taken down three of their most prominent classmates during the Battle of Eagle and Lion. She had had three glasses of champagne at the celebratory dinner. Spirits were high for the both of them.
“I like Ferdinand’s hair,” Annette said through muffled fingers. “It has a nice swoop to it.” She dropped a hand to approximate the swoop, carelessly crashing against Felix’s arm in the process. He flinched, although she was not strong. Annette peered up at him, hazily. “You could get swoopy bangs if you wanted, Felix. That’d be cute.”
“Like that’s going to convince me,” muttered Felix, awkwardly moving his fingers to tuck his hair behind his ears. The front pieces wouldn’t stay; they never did. He looked away from Annette, never one for eye contact. “Where are you taking us, anyways? You seemed to have a plan when we left.”
Annette frowned, briefly, stumped by the question in a way that the most advanced reason formulas never bothered her. “Well, you said you just wanted to get away from all the people,” she said slowly, reconstructing the last hour with a more delayed reaction time than she was used to. “At first I thought the view from the bridge would be nice, but then I realized – it’s awfully dark out, isn’t it?” She looked around, trying to remember how they’d gotten to this corner of the monastery. She’d walked without thinking, caught up in the way Felix grabbed her waist when she stumbled and almost smiled when she laughed. Tonight was so good. “We’re by the sanctuary, right?” she said, suddenly remembering. “We could go pray, if you wanted.”
Felix raised an eyebrow. “Are you confusing me with Mercedes? She’s your friend who prays. I’m your friend who fights.”
Annette laughed again, and she didn’t care that it was too loud, not when the Professor had told her she was proud of her that afternoon, after she’d landed a particularly lucky shot against Hubert. Not when Hubert gave her a look of something that was almost like fear when she’d passed him at the banquet, despite the fact she had just managed to fit an entire cupcake into her mouth.
“You are my friend who fights,” she said, pirouetting around Felix, and the way he turned to follow her motion almost made it seem like a dance. “Fighting, fearsome, funny Felix Fraldarius.” It wasn’t quite a song, but his eyes still sharpened when he looked down at her, and she stopped her string of alliterations to look up at him.
“Funny and fearsome?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her, latching onto the only hobby he liked more than fighting. “I’m not sure I can be both, that’s a lot of – is everything okay?” He followed Annette’s gaze over his shoulder, the protective instincts of a soldier never far away, but she’d long stopped listening to both her music and his teasing. She looked past his shoulder, up at the sky.
“Is it . . . is it snowing tonight?” she asked, her voice laced with awe and homesickness.
Felix looked up, suddenly aware of his surroundings. “Huh, I guess it is,” he said. “Kind of early for it, this far south.”
“It reminds me of home,” Annette said, softly. She shivered, slightly, the white flakes strangely reminding her that she was cold, dampening the warmth from champagne and victory as they coated the surfaces around her with a reminder of the home she’d left behind and the winter fast approaching.
Felix misunderstood the shiver, or perhaps he understood the shiver perfectly. “You should have brought a cloak if you were going to chase after me tonight, you know,” he said, unfastening his own cloak and swinging it around her shoulders before she could offer a rebuttal – that she’d only meant to say goodbye, that it was a short walk to their dorms if they were walking at all, that winter shouldn’t have come this early and she shouldn’t have wanted to spend the evening with a villain and a tease and a fighter, anyway.
Felix ducked down to fiddle with the clasp on the cloak, squinting in the darkness, unaware of how close he was leaning into her. In the moonlight, Annette could make out fluffy white snowflakes settling against his dark hair. She reached up without thinking, brushing snowflakes off his bangs, which had, as predicted, fallen back in his face. Felix looked up at her, surprised, his fingers frozen against his cloak and her collarbone.
“Snow,” she whispered, and laughed again, still in love with the world tonight. She leaned forward and kissed Felix’s forehead, pushing his bangs aside, giggling at how his fingers tightened at the collar of his cloak; holding it against her.
“Swoop,” she added. And the snow felt like home and Felix did, too.