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The war is over. Adrestia lost. The Empire furled their flags, withdrew their surviving soldiers, and buried their dead ones.
Felix Fraldarius is next among them. He is one of the last to be buried, because he was one of the last slain.
He was one of the Empire’s greatest forces, their metaphorical ivory Queen who moved about the board with ease, fighting for their King, Her Majesty herself, who acted carefully and precisely. Not saying that Felix was imprecise- no, he was meticulous with his blade work to an almost astonishing degree. This was, after all, what made him so valuable to the Empire. He was practically undefeatable.
Until he wasn’t.
The Cathedral in which Felix is being honored is one of the grandest in all of Fodlan, a sparkling white slab of marble, tucked away in one of the only valleys in Faerghus that consistently gets sun, which shines through the lofty, intricate stained-glass windows and casts glowing color on the floor.
Why was an Empire general being honored and buried in the Kingdom? Well, His Majesty, the King, who stood near the west wall of the cathedral, a great distance from the casket, was the one who’d insisted Felix be brought back to Fraldarius (though the cathedral was closer to Galatea) instead of being buried at some insignificant place in Enbarr, where he’d actually died. After all, Dimitri had said, nearly all of those who fought alongside Felix were dead- there’d be nobody to honor him in Adrestia. Here, in his homeland, he could be among old friends, who had miraculously all survived the war, who hadn’t seen him in five years but had posthumously forgiven him for his betrayal.
That was what they said. From what Felix could tell, watching them linger silently below a glass portrait of Saint Cethleann, they didn’t mean it. Felix had never seen them so silent before, as a unit. Usually, when they were together, there was a joke to be made, or a fight to be had. Now, there was nothing to be said, at least nothing that wasn’t already being said by the priest guiding the funeral service.
Felix doesn’t know why he’s there, how he got there, or if anyone knows he’s among them. His last memory is of Sylvain’s face, growing whiter and more horrified as Felix’s vision turned to black and the cheering of Kingdom soldiers grew deafeningly loud. Then he was here, in a white, sun-drenched cathedral, watching nobody mourn him.
All he knows is that he’s dead. Besides the obvious, the sight of his body laying still and white in the open casket, he can feel that he’s dead; he has no heartbeat, his feet make no sound on the marble floor, and even from his own vision he’s almost translucent. He is still wearing the clothes he’d died in, his battle regalia, still bloodied and torn and muddied.
It’s jarring to be at your own funeral, he realizes, but not as frightening as he would’ve expected. He’s not sure he can be frightened now, with no veins for adrenaline to rush through, with no life to fear for. All he could be now was an observer. Surely there was something for him to do, here, in the world of the living, but that answer would have to come later.
The funeral was small, the cathedral mostly empty, as only those who knew Felix well before he joined the Empire would care enough to come bid him a final farewell. And so many of those people were dead, too, like his father, who he’d watched die, taken down by one of his own men.
His father was almost assuredly somewhere else, with Glenn, and Felix wondered if maybe they were waiting for him, not to welcome him, but to banish him from their corner of the afterlife, ashamed of everything he’d made of himself. He knew what they would say, that Felix’s betrayal of Faerghus was an insult to Glenn’s memory and everything that the Fraldarius name was supposed to mean.
But he wouldn’t be arriving there any time soon.
The funeral, being mostly empty, ends quickly, and nearly all those in attendance leave as sunset starts to creep in and dye the entire room a honeyed gold. Before long, it’s just the king and his two knights, who finally come to stand at the altar. And Felix.
“This still doesn’t feel real,” Ingrid says, after a long silence. She looks the same as she always did, sober and sturdy, but there’s something off about her, something disturbing yet familiar, and it takes Felix a moment to recognize what he was seeing. The look on her face, the way she stands, her constant glancing from the body to the floor to the ceiling; she looks exactly the way she did when she was 12, standing at Glenn’s casket.
“Was I foolish to think that bringing him home was the right decision?” Dimitri asks, his voice dark.
“No,” Ingrid responds quickly, flinching at the urgency in her own voice.
Sylvain still says nothing. Felix has never seen Sylvain quiet for this long, even in his sleep. He is stone-faced, his jaw so strained as if trying to restrain a shout. He looks like he’s lived an entire lifetime between now and whenever it had last been just the two of them, in the center of the battle field, the Lance of Ruin plunged through Felix’s side.
He’s quiet until Dimitri and Ingrid leave, looking back at Sylvain every few feet as they head out of the cathedral.
Felix hadn’t known what to expect (he’d never thought to imagine what he’d see at his own funeral), but it was still unnerving to see Sylvain throw himself to the ground, kneeling at the casket with his hands on Felix’s stiff shoulders. Sylvain’s high, angry sobs echo against the high, curved ceilings and drip down the white walls with bitter irony pooling in the cracks in the marble.
Even if Felix had something to say or anyone to say it to, he is stunned silent, watching Sylvain weep at the side of his body, the body which had bled out at the tip of Sylvain’s own weapon.
“Goddess,” Sylvain nearly growls through his grief, “why, Felix? Why’d you make me do this?” Felix steps closer to Sylvain, to himself, maybe to comfort Sylvain, maybe to close the casket, thinking it will end this and send him to his brother, but stops when Sylvain starts to choke again on his words.
“Fuck, Felix, why didn’t you stay?”
Felix discovers that closing the casket or even finally burying him is not enough to release him from the waking world and send him wherever he should be going. It’s so much worse than he thought; he was not fated to haunt Faerghus, or Fraldarius, or even the cathedral, but specifically, he was bound to Sylvain, and wherever he went, Felix was not able to not follow. Felix hadn’t been around Sylvain for so long since they were children, and Felix would willingly follow Dimitri or Sylvain, most often both, anywhere they should go. It was not the same now.
Felix discovers that it had been just two since the Kingdom army returned to Faerghus that he was buried, as the war had come to its abrupt end quickly after his death.
The Emperor, he learned, was also dead, killed not an hour after him. He wonders if he will see her while he is, here, or if she didn’t have any scores to settle.
Sylvain, Felix has found out, to his amusement and horror, is considered something of a hero for being the one to take Felix down, since it was his death that had ultimately led to the end of the war. He had been the only thing truly standing between the Kingdom army and the Emperor, and when Sylvain struck him down, the rest was inevitable. Without Sylvain, they might have been living a very different reality; maybe the Empire would have claimed victory, maybe the war would still be going on- maybe Felix would still be warm flesh and beating heart in Enbarr.
Instead, here he is in Faerghus, returned with Sylvain to Gautier after the funeral, where it is just as cold and bitter to taste as always. Sylvain meets with his men in the days, always a different group of soldiers but always the same event, the same conversation. They drink, and discuss the war, and what is happening and what will happen now that it has ended. Once drunk, the soldiers fall over each other to lionize Sylvain for being the hero he is. Sylvain, face still of stone and brown eyes growing icy, doesn’t accept their praises. He lies to them that he is happy to have seen them, thanks them for their time and leaves. Every night. He is in his chambers, Felix at his side, by sundown, every night.
Felix realizes that this is the first time he has ever seen Sylvain (or anyone, really) be truly alone with himself, and it is the second worst kind of intimacy he has ever known. Sylvain is tortured when he’s alone. With his men, he has a few drinks; in his bedroom, he swallows the contents of his liquor shelf until the bottles are smashed into sea glass on the wood floors and he, too, is broken and staining the carpet.
Felix can do nothing but watch this pitiable performance every night until Sylvain is asleep. He still watches while Sylvain sleeps- he himself cannot sleep, or eat, or do anything but watch and imagine what Sylvain might be dreaming of. These few hours every night, in which Sylvain turns soft and sound again, like his old self, remind Felix of the nights before he left Faerghus, when he was still weighing the decision in his mind. Those nights, so many years ago now, Felix would lay beside Sylvain in bed at the academy, watching the rise and fall of his chest and wondering if he was worth staying for. Now, though, Sylvain doesn’t kiss Felix’s every inch before he sleeps, and not even his body heat or the snoring he’s been dealing with since they were children can lull Felix into rest alongside him.
While at first, Felix thinks this haunting is a punishment for just him, the Goddess damning to watch the slow rot of Sylvain’s sanity and patience as retribution for making the one man who ever showed him unconditional love kill him, he learns after weeks that this is not true. If Sylvain was tortured before, then he is agonised, crucified, maimed now, and the longer Felix stays, he grows more mangled. He doesn’t know how Sylvain could possibly be aware of him; he makes no sound, gives off no heat, and even when Felix dares to touch him, both hands on his shoulders or one over his heart, just to remember what a heartbeat feels like, Sylvain doesn’t flinch.
But he must be gaining some kind of understanding of the situation, some recognition that he is not alone when he is alone. In his drunken sleep, he cries out for Felix, more and more each night, and each day he grows less lucid and more distressed.
He is with Ingrid, now; the two of them have met for dinner and discussion of what will be done with the Fraldarius estate- and the entire territory. The three of them have not been alone together in five years, and Felix waits for one of them to tease him, for Ingrid to break up a squabble between him and Sylvain, for Sylvain’s eyes to light up with life, of which they are now completely devoid.
But they are mostly quiet, even as Ingrid prods at Sylvain for a response.
“I don’t like this either, Sylvain,” she urges, gently, looking over a long, handwritten list of every possible issue that could arise in the dealing of Fraldarius’ acquisition by some other part of Faerghus. “But it’s not like we could bring Felix back to life and ask him what to do.” Even if they could, Felix thinks, he has no idea what should be done with his old home- let the manor grow thick with snow. Use Aegis as a dinner plate for Ingrid’s pegasi. It’s all as meaningless in death as in life.
“This feels so wrong, Ingrid,” Sylvain mumbles, his voice the same near-growl it had been weeks ago at Felix’s wake. “I killed Felix and now I might acquire his land? What kind of justice is that?”
“Fraldarius and Gautier are close, both in land and history; it’s just the way this works. Besides, you were Felix’s best friend, before. If he were here, don’t you think he’d want you to have it before anyone else?”
Sylvain takes a long, trembling breath and puts his head in his hands. “But, Ingrid-” he rasps. “I, it’s- I feel like Felix is still here, or like he’s taunting me from the grave. I keep feeling like I see him out of the corner of my eye, or like he’s always looking over my shoulder, or something.”
Ingrid and Felix are both silent- one of them may suspect Sylvain has gone crazy, the other has watched it happen in real time.
“He’s angry at me,” Sylvain says, the most sure of himself he’s sounded since Felix has been with him. “He’s haunting me. He’s trying to get revenge.”
“You sound like Dimitri used to,” Ingrid offers, cautiously, reaching across the table to take Sylvain’s hands in hers. “Do you really think the Felix we knew, who went spent all-”
Sylvain stands at once, knocking to the floor both he and Ingrid’s drinks. “There is no Felix we knew, Ingrid,” he snarls, not looking at her. “He left. He’s dead. Knowing him twenty years doesn’t mean the last five didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean I didn’t kill him. The days of the four of us running around might as well be another person’s life.”
Ingrid is quiet as Sylvain leaves.
It is that night that for the first time Sylvain does not drink himself to sleep. Holed up in his chamber under Felix’s invisible watchful eyes, he instead grows intoxicated with rage and sorrow, tearing at his skin until it grows raw, throwing lamentations and old bottles at the wall.
“Felix,” Sylvain wails, to the room he thinks is empty, but knows, at the same time, isn’t. “Why did you make me do it?”
Felix, after so long, is no longer sure what he’s supposed to feel when Sylvain makes these demands of him. There is truth in what he’s saying, after all; if Sylvain had not killed Felix, Felix would have killed Sylvain- such is war, such is the sweet irony of swearing to love someone ‘til your breathing stops. Felix kept his promise, and now Sylvain learns the taste of blood that’s been licked off a double-edged blade.