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Sylvain hears sniffling down the hall. It’s a familiar sound, one he’s been witness to at least a dozen times. He blinks, trying to see further than the lighting allows. “Felix?”
There’s a hitch of breath, then the little trembling sigh that comes from someone trying to keep their sobs quiet. Sylvain continues down the hall, knowing the direction of the sound, but not the exact location. “Fe, why are you up?”
“No reason,” says a voice suspiciously close to his right.
Sylvain yelps, jumping nearly far enough to reach the opposite side of the wide hall. He looks back and sees two shoes propped up on a deep windowsill. The shoes give way to knobby knees, arms wrapped around them and pulling them close to a chest, a body, a boy—
“Felix,” he says for the third time, “you’re crying.”
It’s not a bright night— the moon is in a new phase, so what light could come from it through the window is lost to darkness, and Felix is only silhouetted so much by the faint flickering of the hall’s torchlight. As Sylvain comes closer, he makes out a trembling chin, dark, mussed hair, and watery eyes. (Eyes unlike Rodrigue’s, unlike Glenn’s— amber eyes, not blue like Sylvain only recently realised the Fraldarius family shares.)
“Am not,” Felix says, petulant and wavering.
“Are too.” Sylvain hoists himself up on the other side of the large sill, the tips of his toes touching Felix’s when he mirrors his pose. He looks out the window, then back at Felix. “Aren’t you leaving early tomorrow?”
Duke Fraldarius and his heir came to Gautier territory for business Sylvain’s father didn’t bother disclosing to him. It has been a short visit, but one he’s grateful for— if only because he missed Felix, missed hugging someone as tight as he wishes he could be hugged. In the aftermath of Miklan’s last deed, it has been a welcome break in routine.
Felix wipes his nose along the sleeve of his shirt, not meeting Sylvain’s gaze. “Yeah.”
“You should go back to bed then.”
“Can’t.”
Me, either . But this isn’t about Sylvain, or the nightmares his brother has left him with that cause him to wake up in cold sweats and wander the halls until his eyelids get heavy. “You’re going to regret it when you’re summoned in the morning.” He lets a smile quirk his lips, nudging one of Felix’s feet. “I don’t think anyone wants to hear your whini—”
“ Sylvain .”
He shuts up.
“Why are you up?”
He shrugs. “I’m older. I’m allowed to.”
“Are not.”
“Am too.”
Felix lets him have that, curling his arms tighter around himself. Fierce protectiveness rises in Sylvain’s chest, hot like fire. After a long moment of silence, one in which Sylvain thinks even he may hold his breath, Felix says, “I miss Glenn.”
Ah. “He can visit, right?”
“Not often enough. He’s... too busy with Dimitri.”
Which makes sense. A sworn knight can’t exactly allocate much time to his brother, no matter how much they miss each other. Sylvain remembers a board game with Glenn, one that feels like it happened a lifetime ago, where they played in silence for a few rounds before Glenn said, out of the blue: He’s not ready for me to go. But he’ll have to be.
And Sylvain bit his tongue before some vile part of him could hiss, I was never ready.
It’s a mutual understanding between them. Sylvain will look after Felix now that Glenn is sworn to protect His Highness. Sylvain isn’t sworn to protect anything , yet— but he has taken it upon himself for his friends. Even if he doesn’t see them nearly as much as he wishes anymore.
“That’s his duty,” he says, and he scoots forward on the sill, crossing his legs to close the distance between them. “That’s how it is, Fe.”
That’s the wrong thing to say, because Felix’s face scrunches up all over again. Sylvain reaches out to lay a hand on his arm in comfort, but it does little to stop a fresh tear track from forming.
“He’ll die for Dimitri. That’s his duty, isn’t it?”
Sylvain doesn’t answer, opting instead to rub along Felix’s arm.
“And my duty is to become Duke. Yours is to become Margrave.”
The words set off something sour in his stomach, something that crawls up his throat and curls heavy on his tongue. “Duty isn’t everything, Felix.”
Felix looks up and meets his gaze for the first time tonight. Determination flashes in his eyes, startling Sylvain into pulling his hand back.
Felix snatches out and grabs it, his skin cool from wandering the halls at night. He stares at their hands. “Then you can’t leave me,” he says, tired and nonsensical as his eyes squeeze shut. “You— you have to promise not to leave me. Not where I can’t go, too.”
The sour feeling fades into a soft bitterness. “There are some places you can’t follow me.”
Felix shakes his head, and Sylvain feels like there’s something off about the picture, but he can’t tell what. “I don’t care. Even if you die, you— you have to wait for me. We’ll do it together.”
That quirks Sylvain’s lips. “Or not at all?”
“ Promise me , Sylvain.”
Felix grips Sylvain like a lifeline, words trembling. What else can he say? “Okay. Okay, I promise.”
Years later, he’ll agonise over this. He’ll wish they had more light, wish Felix hadn’t had his eyes shut while they made their oath. He’ll hope and pray that, maybe, when their hands touched, the world had changed around them and he just… missed it. That the small bit of contact brought the colour blue into Sylvain’s world and red into Felix’s.
The alternative will hurt just a little too much.
For now, he squeezes Felix’s hand one more time and hops down from the sill, reaching to help him down. “C’mon. Let’s go back to bed.”
If nothing else, Sylvain can say he and Felix keep their promise throughout the years.
A lot of things happen in what feels like the blink of an eye. Their king dies, along with Glenn and almost everyone else. Their prince emerges from the wreckage haunted. Felix performs a metamorphosis, shifting into the shape of his brother’s shadow.
Even Sylvain, in all his learned flippancy, can’t stop the shudder when he hears of just what happens to quell the situation in Duscur. Over the years, as he watches those he loves crumble and struggle to rebuild in the aftermath of the Tragedy, he comes to realise that not being able to see blue is the least of his problems.
Sylvain has a reputation before he enters the Academy. His lazy, skirt-chasing behaviour isn’t so much of a performance anymore than it is a crutch, something he can barely set aside even when he must. It helps. He doesn’t want the weight that comes with being taken seriously. It hurts, though, when he realises even his friends have fallen for it. When Felix has fallen for it.
(He starts to wonder if he’s even tricked himself.)
Now, he’s lounging on a raised partition, watching Felix train. It’s much more fun to watch his form than work on his own, or maybe it’s just because he likes the look Felix adopts when he has a sword in his hands. Those eyes flash like flint and steel, sparking something in Sylvain’s blood that he isn’t sure he ever wants to be able to name.
“You’re still sitting there,” Felix says after a particularly dizzying round of solo drills.
Sylvain leans back on his hands. “I’m learning through observation.”
“You’re learning nothing.” Felix rounds on him, eyes sharp, and Sylvain thinks he would let them flay him alive if they could. “Is this your new game? Sitting there and doing nothing, just— just taunting me with your complacency?”
“Pretty self important of you to think I’m doing this to piss you off.”
Felix huffs.
“If you were so worried about me training, you’d offer to spar.”
But Felix doesn’t, because he rarely has in their time at Garreg Mach. It wouldn’t bother Sylvain so badly if he didn’t know that Felix challenges damn near everyone in this academy. Even Dimitri, whom he tries to say he hates. Sylvain’s left on the sidelines. You have to choose, Felix. Our friendship, or your training.
And Felix said, My training.
So Sylvain’s here.
Felix narrows his eyes. “Why are you here?”
This is as good of an opportunity as any, so Sylvain infuses an airiness to his tone and asks, “Found your soulmate yet, Fe?”
Felix’s grip on his sword tightens, the sharpest intake of breath immediately following Sylvain’s words. This is about the reaction he expected: shock, a scowl, maybe a hiss or three—
“What do you care?” Felix hisses. There we go.
Sylvain shrugs. “Just curious. You used to talk about red all the time when we were little.”
He misses that part. Misses Felix being carefree and fluid with his emotions. Misses how he used to have dreams , and Sylvain would let himself have them too with Felix around. (He doesn’t miss the part where those dreams died the moment they were apart once more, stomped back down by the reality of how he could afford many things, but never whimsy.)
Felix stares at him for a long moment, never quite meeting his eyes, before he says, “No. I haven’t.”
Which is, okay, maybe a little relieving. “Makes sense,” he says, offering a lazy grin. “You’d have to actually touch someone to find out, huh?”
“Their hand,” Felix doesn’t rise to the bait.
So, maybe Sylvain’s a little confident right now. Maybe he’s okay with making a few bad decisions— well, bad decisions in comparison to all the other decisions he’s been making for the past few years. He holds up his hand, wiggling his fingers, and singsongs, “You have to start somewhere, right?”
“You’re telling me you haven’t found yours with all your…” Felix’s face twists. “ Exploits? ”
The hand falls, limp, and Sylvain feels some brittle part of him behind his smile crack. (This shouldn’t be what gets to him, he’s heard this for months now, but—) “Yeah,” he says, tone deflating. “Why else do you think I’m tossing myself at people, huh?”
That’s when Felix breaks, when that cruel twist of his mouth softens and his eyebrows rise. “Sylvain, that’s not—”
“No, I get it.” He stands, dusting his shirt for debris that isn’t there. “It’s not like they don’t toss themselves at me too.”
“I know that’s not why you do it.”
He sneers. “Oh, do you?”
“I also know I don’t like it either way.”
“Why, huh?” Sylvain’s voice has gone sharp, an edge there that he can’t fight down. “Why do you care?” Why should I?
“Because—” It stumps Felix, and Sylvain tries to get himself to revel in the victory. He fails. “Because you need to take things more seriously . We’re not kids anymore.” A pause, and Felix says, quiet and fierce, “You need to take yourself seriously.”
Sylvain laughs, choppy and harsh. He turns to leave. “Where’s the fun in that?” He gives a half-hearted wave. “Good luck training, Felix. I’ll let you focus on the important things.”
And three days later, when they both manage to apologise to each other, Sylvain doesn’t ask to shake on it.
Sylvain likes to think that this is one of the first times he’s had to retreat with his tail between his legs. That being said, the feeling sucks. Fleeing from Garreg Mach, overrun with Imperial forces and Crest-mad monsters… it’s disheartening, to say the least. Riding back to their homes in Faerghus feels like walking away from a forest fire. In time, it will come to find them all over again.
For now, they move.
It’s just him and Felix now, the others having split from their paths already to go to their own territories. He still remembers Dimitri, scowling and dark, spitting curses at Edelgard as he struck through scores of enemies like they were nothing but wheat in a field.
Felix’s knuckles are white where they grip his own reins, which is how Sylvain knows he hasn’t forgotten that particular image, either. They’ve been riding in silence for what feels like ages, resting when needed. Soon, Sylvain will ride on his own out into Gautier, leaving Felix for who knows how long.
He has to say something. To clear the air, and hopefully his mind of the heretofore woefully incessant fondness he only acknowledged a couple months ago.
“You’ll answer my letters, right?”
Felix thaws from a long-frozen state, sliding amber eyes to him, and Sylvain aches.
“You’ll keep in touch,” he amends. “Right?”
Felix stares at him for a moment that’s too long, too charged. Then he slips off his horse, form smooth as quicksilver, and says, “We should rest.”
As if they need to. Despite logic, Sylvain drops off his horse, as well. “Felix,” he repeats, desperation leaking into his tone. “I asked you a question.”
“And I didn’t answer it.”
“But you have to.”
“Why should I? What do you want me to say, Sylvain? That everything will be okay, that we’ll send letters back and forth like back when we were children?” Felix’s lip curls, and Sylvain feels something ugly rear its head. “We’re at war, now.”
He doesn’t mean this. He can’t. Sylvain likes to think he knows Felix better than he knows himself, but Felix looks at him like he expects an answer, and he realises he can’t find one for a long, slow-passing moment. He swallows. It burns like whisky. “I have to know you’re okay. You— and everyone else. It’s going to get rough from here on out.”
“It’s been rough.”
“Fe—”
“Sylvain.”
He clenches his jaw. “You’re not the only one going through this. You don’t have to— to withdraw like you do. We’re all here— I’ll be writing to everyone I can get to, and that includes you.”
Felix, however, is already withdrawing, turning back around to rummage for something in his saddlebags, as if he can just ignore the situation entirely because of course he won’t run away just yet. Even Felix can’t hide the fact that he doesn’t want their paths to part, either.
Sylvain growls, frustration boiling over, and he reaches out to grab Felix and make him face this and talk —
And the sky comes alive.
His chest spasms in a stumbling breath, something like a laugh. His grip tightens
Felix turns back to glare at him, unable to pull himself free. “What are you—” His breath leaves him, too, and Sylvain’s sort of glad for it. He’s not sure what look he has on his face, but he can see Felix’s eyes go wide, his jaw dropping as his gaze flies up to— to Sylvain’s hair, of all things.
Well. He supposes it can be called ‘scarlet’.
“You,” Felix echoes, quieter.
And this time, the sound leaving Sylvain is a laugh, something high-pitched and breathy as he pulls, and Felix stumbles closer. So— so his hair is blue, but Felix’s hair isn’t the reason Sylvain feels the overwhelming weight of the world, right now. No, it’s the sky he shuts out when he closes his eyes, stepping to wrap an arm around Felix in a hug he knows he should clear beforehand, but doesn’t.
“You can’t, now,” he says, nearly babbling. “And leave me behind? Not a chance.”
Felix says, quiet and full of wonder, “Your hair’s red.”
Sylvain snorts against his neck, tucked there to block out the assault of sudden colour above him. “And yours is blue.”
Years later, Sylvain will delight over this. He’ll come to learn that blue looks best twisted around his fingers whenever he does Felix’s hair. He’ll know that, while it was in his reach for years, that he just missed it the first time, a world without blue is a much better alternative to a world without Felix. And he’ll say as much with his hands clasped over Felix’s and eyes bright with promise.
For now, he keeps his eyes closed and presses his forehead to Felix’s. Felix curls a hand into his hair, and Sylvain listens with a devotion rarely shown as Felix says, quietly, “Okay. Okay, I promise.”