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Felix finds the bracelet under a desk in the library. It catches his eye, silver glittering in the light of a covered candle. He retrieves it, fingers sliding along the bracelet, and tries to think who it might belong to.
It looks like something Glenn might’ve given Ingrid years ago, a thin silver chain with a charm dangling from it. But Ingrid, he’s sure, would’ve loved a horse for a charm rather than what looks like a music note.
Felix pockets it right as the library door swings open, the hushed whispering of a conversation reaching where he stands.
“I can’t find it anywhere, Mercie!” Annette’s plaintive voice rings out. “I’ve looked everywhere, the dining hall, the greenhouse, the training grounds… If I lose it my uncle will be so angry, that was a gift for my acceptance to the Royal School!”
“We’ll find it, Annie,” Mercedes soothed. “When was the last time you saw it?”
“I can’t remember...I’m sure I took it off before the bath two nights ago, but then I think someone complimented it yesterday…” Her voice trails off as she and Mercedes slip between the shelves.
Felix reaches into his pocket, frowning. Is this bracelet what she’s looking for? But before he can work up the nerve to approach them - last time he faced Annette was on the training grounds, when he tried to give her advice on how to hold an ax with its heavy head only for her to rebuff him - they pass back out of the library, leaving him to his doubts.
Felix forgets about the bracelet even as he tells himself he’ll return it to Annette every time it winks at him from his desk. The little music note charm mocks him, and every time he sees it he hears her song from the greenhouse in his head.
But it slips his mind to grab it when he dresses and leaves his room for class, or for the training grounds, or for a meal.
He remembers it when he and Annette share stable duty, when she rolls her sleeves up to her elbows and he catches sight of her bare wrists, when she hums as she works, forgetting he’s there - or else not caring, though he doesn’t know if that’s any better - and when he picks straw out of her hair.
But then his throat dries when her cheeks color and she looks away and thanks him almost bashfully.
And Felix forgets anything he might want to say.
Everyone evacuates the Monastery when the Empire attacks, for regardless of their efforts the Knights of Seiros weren’t prepared to defend it.
It feels almost like running, or surrendering, but Felix isn’t so much a fool he’ll throw his life away in a battle he knows lost. It’s easier to live and fight another day, he tells himself, but it’s not enough to reassure him when he doesn’t know what will be waiting for him when he returns to Fraldarius.
He stuffs his most precious and urgent belongings into a bag deliberately slowly, trying to ignore his racing heart and the icy water trickling down his spine. Spare clothes, soap, his favorite knife, a rare book on past wars he actually likes, Glenn’s spur - all go into his bag.
He hesitates when his fingers bump the silver bracelet that still sits on his desk, in the middle of reaching for a notebook. His chest tightens for an instant, just long enough when he considers what leaving it behind means.
He doesn’t even know what taking it means, and at this point he doubts he’ll ever have the chance to return it to its rightful owner. Yet he picks it up and drops it into his bag alongside everything else.
Felix always liked fighting, loved the thrill of facing an opponent as strong or strong than himself with a sword in his hand and knowing he would be the one to survive the encounter. He loved it like Sylvain liked a good mental puzzle or Ingrid a story, engrossed and focused on a singular objective.
But Felix doesn’t like war, not like he thought he would. It wears at him quicker than he expects, the novelty of every challenge it brings fading in the wake of other concerns, wondering which of the men his father personally trained - men he grew up with, even if he didn’t necessarily like them - would be sent to his family in a casket, if they recovered a body at all.
Commoners starve, soldiers march, and winter freezes rivers while blood still flows.
Through it all Felix wonders why they bother, especially with their so-called king dead and buried, but he can’t even begin to guess what else he can do. He was born to fight, just like Glenn was born to die.
And if every so often his gaze catches on a delicate silver chain and the memory of a hauntingly cheerful tune echoes through his thoughts and lets his mind drift, he might choose to indulge it.
Felix doesn’t know why he lets Ingrid convince him to return to Garreg Mach for an asinine promise they made a dead man, anymore than he knows why he takes the bracelet with him. But, he reasons, if anyone from their old class is sentimental enough to risk traveling through enemy-occupied territory for a reunion, it’s Annette.
And a part of him tires of the bracelet mocking him, tires of the ache in his chest when the silver chain slips through his fingers and staring at the charm sitting on his gloved palm. He hears her voice in his head still though it hasn’t graced his ears in years.
He doesn’t understand why he can’t purge her from his head, why her song follows him into battle and why the memory of her smile directed at him warms him too, but maybe, if he sees her again, he can finally rid himself of the bracelet and of its strange curse.
(Deep down he’s not so naive to think a simple silver bracelet cursed. Deep down he isn’t sure he minds such a curse if it exists.)
But then he sees Annette again for the first time in almost five years, her hair a whirlwind of flame as she summons gales and blows bandits away with a flick of her arms. For a heartbeat it feels as if her Wind spell tears the air right out of his lungs, though Felix thinks there might be worse ways to suffocate.
Beautiful, dangerous, capable - he can hardly believe she’s the same girl who shouted at him for overhearing her sing, or who blushed when he picked straw from her hair, or—
She stumbles over the body of a bandit she slayed, a gasp slipping past her lips. The illusion shatters, because that’s exactly the Annette he remembers - but the awe lingers.
He jumps into action when another bandit approaches her from behind. “Annette!” he shouts in warning.
Her eyes find him, widening, watching him sprint towards her with his sword raised before she takes the hint and spins around with a spell igniting the air.
An almost unfamiliar energy quickens his stride, and he strikes the bandit at the same time Annette’s Wind plummets into him. Together they finish him quickly, and he turns to her with his mouth open only to forget what he wants to say.
She blinks at him, eyes wide as she takes him in, and he has the keen sense that he startled her, somehow.
But there’s no time for conversation in the midst of a battle, and more shocks than just the shock of seeing each other again await.
Felix remembers the bracelet after the fact, after finding a walking corpse where his old friend should be, but by then the familiar tightness in his chest stops him from approaching Annette again.
They’re at war, he remembers, and it’s made even clearer while the professor - miraculously alive or awakened or something - and Sir Gustave make their plans around the boar’s delusions. Any one of them can die for this, and Felix wants—
He keeps the bracelet and swears to himself it won’t be another keepsake for a dead loved one.
The way the bracelet haunts him feels like a deja vu, something entirely familiar - an echo of their school days, when they were all just foolish and ambitious children, really - but suitably different. He carries it with him, convincing himself he’s only waiting for the right moment to return it to Annette:
When he finds her dancing atop a ladder in the library, when they share a meal and she smiles and pokes at the corner of her lips so distractingly heat fills his face until he realizes she’s telling him he has fish sauce on his mouth, when she convinces him to show her how to hold a lance as if Ingrid or Sylvain wouldn’t be better suited to it.
When she leans into him and cries into his shoulder in a tucked away corner of a courtyard after he came across her when she was obviously trying to hide, when he can give her something he knows will cheer her up.
But Felix doesn’t, and he squirrels her bracelet away like it’s another one of her songs, tucked safely into his pocket.
Annette finds him in his room, just like everyone else that knocked on his door, but unlike the rest she doesn’t ask to come in. She only announces she’s brought him food, and that she would like to see him, or if he might feel up to it maybe he might like to go on a walk with her?
Felix agrees, if only because sitting on his bedroom floor and wishing the only worthwhile keepsake he has of the old man’s isn’t a bone-white shield he can only make use of in battle is...pathetic.
And he hates the little hesitant break in Annette’s voice as much as he hates that he’s the reason it’s there.
Her eyes widen when he emerges from his room, but she recovers from her surprise quickly. Her arms hooks into his, and he doesn’t protest when she all but drags him down the hall and stairs and into the courtyard, where the sun shines for the first time since they returned from Gronder Field.
They walk in silence, and Annette half-leans into him. He lets her steer them past the greenhouse, past the fishing pond, all the way around Monastery grounds. But eventually the silence becomes unbearable, when all he has are his own thoughts crowding his head, so he says, “Talk.”
“I—what?” Annette says, startled from how she blinks owlishly at him.
“Talk to me,” he tells her, because he doesn’t want to admit he just wants to hear her voice. When she just stares, surprised, his face warms, though he swallows his nerves and adds, “Please.”
“O-oh,” she says then before a smile that looks so easy and natural rises to her face. “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Anything,” he says. “Nothing. I don’t care.”
“A-all right,” she agrees. “I-I can tell you about Ashe helping me find my old doll…” And the next smile she flashes him before she launches into his story fills him with warmth.
The relief when they return to Garreg Mach from Enbarr fades fast. When Felix thinks about what lay behind them and what yet lies ahead, he understands one thing his father always tried to tell him:
War and fighting are easy, but what comes after is hard.
Felix knows war, knows fighting, because it’s the only thing he ever really learned how to do, yet with the boar - Dimitri - dropping new titles at his feet he knows he still has more left to learn.
It’s curious to realize he almost...wants to; it’s a new sort of challenge, and not one he’s used to, but with it come other changes, and as he once more sifts through his bedroom at the Monastery with the understanding that this, at last, is final, he stares at the bracelet he’s held onto for far longer than he needed to.
He finds Annette in the kitchens, because she can never let anything rest. Flour dusts her hair and clothes and bare arms, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows as she kneads and rolls and beats a lump of dough into submission.
Felix approaches her on soundless feet, waiting until he stands close enough to her he spots a speck of flour streaked across her cheek. He resists the smile trying to tug at his cheeks before he wonders, “What are you making?”
Annette jumps, her arms flailing as she spins around. Between one heartbeat and the next a glyph lights between them, only for her gaze to fall on him and the spell to fade. “Felix!” she exclaims. “Don’t sneak up on me!”
“Sorry,” he says, though he can’t say he’s truly sorry at all.
Annette sighs as she returns her attention to her dough. “I was just trying to make a peach pie,” she tells him. “Ashe and Dedue found some peaches at a market in Enbarr, and I had an old recipe my mother gave me, and—” She cuts herself off when Felix, unable to hold himself back anymore, takes her chin and scrapes the flour from her cheek with his thumb.
His heart thumps against his ribs as he does, feeling her skin soft beneath his thumb, feeling the moment tense and freeze when her eyes bluer than Fhirdiad’s harbor in summertime meet his.
His mouth dries, and he watches when Annette pinches her lip between her teeth and—
She surges up on her toes, fingers grasping his arms to keep her balance, and presses her lips against his. His breath catches while his face feels like he stuck his head in the oven rather than her pie, but before he can do anything else her grip loosens and she pulls away.
Annette flashes him a sheepish smile but doesn’t meet his eyes. “Um...I’m just going to…finish my pie, if you don’t...mind.” Her hands slip from his arms, leaving streaks of white dust behind on his sleeves, but before she can get far his fingers close around her wrist.
“A-Annette,” he tries, licking his lips - she left her taste behind, of roses from her favorite tea and peaches for the pie - before she turns back towards him. While she watches him expectantly, her cheeks dark, he fumbles inside his pocket with his other hand.
Annette’s eyes widen when Felix pulls out her bracelet. “Is that—”
“I’m...sorry,” he says as he holds it out to her. “I found it in the library years ago; I should’ve returned it before but I just kept forgetting.”
“And you still have it?” Annette demands, her voice high and incredulous. When he nods, though he tears his eyes away, no longer able to meet hers, she laughs. “Felix, I...it’s funny, but I didn’t really miss it. I even forgot about it too, until just now.”
“Didn’t your uncle give it to you?” he says, unable to keep the confusion from his tone.
“Wait, how did you know that?” she asks.
“Um…” He rubs the back of his neck before lying, “I don’t remember.”
“Well, um, never mind, but...it’s just a bracelet,” Annette explains. “It was a nice gift, but it wasn’t really sentimental like, well, like my old doll, or anything.”
“Do you...do you not want it back?” Felix asks, hardly daring to believe this conversation is really going this way.
“Of course I do!” she exclaims. A giggle bursts from her, something sharp and sudden. “Well, thank you for returning it even if it took you five years, Felix.”
A smile prods at his lips, and his own cheeks warm anew. “I-it’s nothing,” he says.
“I’m surprised you held onto it for that long,” she muses, and when he dares to look at her she smiles. “I’m sure it would look very nice on you, but I would think a sword charm would suit you better than a music note.”
Felix snorts. “I like music well enough,” he says, and before his boldness fails him he mumbles, “Especially if it’s yours.”
Annette’s smile widens, and her floury fingers wrap around his. “You don’t know how...happy that makes me,” she admits in a low voice.
Somewhere in the midst of Annette embracing him so tightly she imprints him with streaks of flour and him clasping the bracelet back onto her wrist and her sneaking another kiss from which he’s not so eager to let her slip away from and convincing him to help her shape the dough (in exchange for her singing while they work) and smearing flour across her forehead until she retaliates with throwing a small handful at him that bursts into white dust against his chest until Mercedes and Dedue arrive carrying ingredients for dinner and scolding them for wasting ingredients…
Somewhere in the midst of it all does Felix build up the courage and remember to tell Annette he loves her.