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Sylvain hears the news from his father first and Mercedes second, but Mercedes had found out first. He almost wishes he could claim she betrayed him by not hurrying to him fast enough to toll those damning bells, but that’s just the cowardice talking. Cowardice his father does not possess: a world torn asunder by war evidently was not enough to deter Margrave Gautier from the long journey south to the Imperial-occupied Garreg Mach Monastery, to face his estranged and traitorous son head-on, and inform him said son was now engaged.
“To be married?” Sylvain asks, as if there’s any other sort, and judging by the way the creases around his father’s lips deepen as his mouth flattens into a disappointed line, his father thinks Sylvain sounds just as idiotic now as he did when he’d declared his support for the Empire and run away from home.
“You may have given up your claim as heir to Gautier,” his father says haltingly, and is it hope borne of a lonely childhood making Sylvain hear emotion thick in the man’s voice? “But you are still my son. And I am willing to… I wish to forgive my son. I want my son to come home.”
It takes the entire weight of his upbringing to keep Sylvain from sagging against the portcullis. “Our army could have butchered you,” he says, ignoring the way his father flinches at the word ‘our.’ “You risked losing your life, all of House Gautier to…” forgive me, “tell me I’m engaged?”
“No,” his father replies, and no emotion save desperate determination colors his tone now, “I risked losing my life to ask the heir of House Gautier to accept this engagement. Sylvain,” he continues before Sylvain can begin to process, “House Gautier lives on as long as you do. Contrary to your belief and my better judgment, you remain the heir. No matter what should happen in this war, House Gautier must live on. Please. Please, my son.”
Three words, three stabs to the gut. All the conflicting emotions surging through Sylvain’s soul make him want to be sick. Or laugh. Or cry. Or ask, “Who’s the unlucky mother-to-be, then?”
And he does laugh, hard and pained, when his father tells him, “The daughter of a merchant in Fhirdiad, someone you know, I did my best for you. Her name is Mercedes von Martritz.”
Mercedes von Martritz. Of course it had to be her. Of course! Who else would have made his father risk life and limb and treason to face his turncoat son on the Empire’s doorstep?
The girl who’d turned him down before he could even begin to feign falling in love. The girl who still prays to a Goddess their new, shared Emperor is determined to destroy. The girl who smiles when she mocks him, smiles when she comforts him, smiles when she refuses to talk about her past. The girl whose life has been ruined by the nobility’s lust for Crests, just as his has been. The girl who is doubtlessly too good and too pure for him, for any Gautier, to touch whether with his hands or with his title.
Hell, the girl with the literal Death Knight for a brother.
“I’ll think about it,” Sylvain chokes out, because he never could say ‘no’ to his familial duty even though his father always knows when he lies.
“It was my adoptive father who first approached him, actually,” Mercedes informs him later that day. They sit on the same stone bench in the gardens a respectable distance apart. Her hands rest in her lap, clasped pretty and proper. Sylvain’s imitated her posture unconsciously, but now he realizes he looks more like a scoundrel of a preteen hiding an erection than a penitent child. He makes a great show of yawning and stretching, managing to keep his limbs constrained inside his personal bubble.
“Oh? That was gutsy of him.”
“Hm. Some might say ‘desperate,’” Mercedes titters, the smile almost reaching her eyes. “I’m sure he’d appreciate his future son-in-law thinking so highly of him, however. I certainly don’t have such faith.”
Her entire reply makes Sylvain want to throw up. “Mercedes…”
She shakes her head, and Sylvain withdraws his half-extended hand back where it belongs. “No, forgive me. That was unkind of me.”
Well, there’s not much to say to that. Is that what awaits him in this strange Imperial future? A wife with a talent for twisting white lies into blunter, sweeter cruelties that cut to the quick worse than any insult because they’re true?
No, that’s unkind of him, too. What awaits him in this strange Imperial future is a wife who trusts him enough to confide these painful truths in him. One whom he’s too cowardly to trust in return.
“Nah, I’d rather say it was brave,” Sylvain winks. “I think pretty highly of you too, you know.”
Mercedes’s answering smile trembles, and he feels sicker. That’s what awaits her now: a husband who’s cruel even when he tries to be sweet and honest.
Husband. Why couldn’t she have been a nameless, faceless girl to fuck and abandon like he’d always expected to marry?
Because the Goddess has a sense of humor while She fights the Empire with all the power left in Her bones, maybe.
“Oh, you,” Mercedes sighs. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, her first real movement since she’d told him about the letter from her adoptive father and had seemed mortified to learn Sylvain had found out only minutes sooner. “I’m sure we would have been very happy together if our fathers hadn’t intervened first.”
“Ouch. ‘Would have been,’ huh?” Sylvain forces a grin of his own.
“Oh! Oh, I didn’t mean we won’t—”
He waves her off. “Don’t worry about it. You’re probably right, actually.” His cheeks hurt from forcing this smile too long. “Well, about the ‘not being happy together now’ part, at least. Not like we’ll ever know about the what-ifs, right?”
Around them, even in this quiet garden heavy with the cloying smell of winter roses, clanking chainmail from soldiers on patrol and horse whinnies from the stables behind them interrupt what should have been a miserable and contemplative silence. It reminds him what cause he’s been claiming to fight for. What cause everyone here’s claimed to fight for, actually. A world without Crests, without a church and nobility dictating happiness and love and friendship.
Sylvain’s never been sure if he believes in their success, and right now, he believes in it even less. The fact one of the most powerful nobles in the Kingdom—no, the Dukedom—could march right up to the aggressor’s base of operations without a single blade to his throat and announce his son was now committed to the same ancient values that same son had insisted he was rejecting… Well, that’s fact enough to prove it’s only a matter of time before Edelgard’s whole scheme comes apart fraying at the seams, isn’t it?
“The war won’t last forever,” Mercedes suddenly pipes up, as if she can hear his thoughts. Sylvain jolts upright, unaware he’d even been slouching. “Someday there will be peace. Someday soon, I hope, but… It will end, one way or another.”
Sylvain nods. “That’s what they keep saying, anyway.”
“And weddings take time to plan.”
Her tone is… not what he expects. Steelier. Something more confident than acceptance reinforcing the syllables. Sylvain sits up straighter and meets her gaze, which he’d been afraid to try before now. And yes, her eyes glow stormy blue, ready to wreak havoc upon the shores of fate when she says, “Perhaps we won’t be able to finish our wedding plans before the Empire wins this war.”
Sylvain stares at her, and Mercedes stares back. The resolve etched into the curves of her features somehow bleeds into his heart, his thoughts, his spine and muscles as he nods in slow, relieved comprehension.
They really could have been happy together, in a world that valued hearts pounding with love instead of Crest-tainted blood.
Sylvain goes back to his old dorm room soon after and writes a letter to his father, telling him he’s thought about it and has decided to say yes.
I agree to marry Mercedes von Martritz, he writes, and it feels less like signing a death warrant and more like signing a pardon.
Felix, for once, is speechless. And for once, Sylvain wishes he wouldn’t be, wishes he would poke through Sylvain’s flimsy lies and hear the real meaning behind them. The lie that he’s really not—
“What? Not even a ‘congratulations on finally settling down?’”
“You’re getting married,” Felix finally says, voice flat like his sword lying in the dirt. “To Mercedes.”
“That’s what they tell me.” Sylvain tries not to heave a sigh. “You’re not even happy for me? Uh, us? Not even a little bit?”
“No.”
No one’s really capable of hurting him anymore. No one except Felix, apparently, and he hadn’t even been clever with his words. Sylvain drops his smile fast. “Hey, it could’ve been a lot worse, you know.”
“For you, maybe.” Felix flits his gaze to the abandoned training sword in the sawdust and Sylvain skitters back a few feet on instinct. “Why did she say yes?”
“Didn’t have much choice, from how I understood it.” Sylvain watches Felix, who watches the sword, but none of them move: not Sylvain, not Felix, and— thank the Goddess— not the sword. “You could ask Annette. She’ll probably get all the details straight from—”
Straight from the broodmare’s mouth.
Sylvain does sigh now, sinking to the ground for good measure. No one’s in the knights’ hall but him and his cruel best friend, but he’ll be ready to pop up to his feet again the second anyone else tries to enter. This is a private moment: one for shame and lies and misery. “It’s horrible,” he says.
“It is.”
It is indeed. What’s also horrible is how he can’t even tell Felix how he and Mercedes are just… faking acquiescence. They have to seem even more reluctant than they would if they weren’t planning on dragging this out to the bitter end. Felix can’t keep his mouth shut under duress, and if he lets it slip to Annette… Well, then it’d only be a matter of time before the entire army knows about the fake-real engagement and someone passes the gossip on north to Gautier.
“Let’s skip the whole tirade where you tell me she deserves better, because I know already, okay?” Sylvain says into his hands muffling his mouth. “But since there’s not much anyone can do about it, I just figured you should be the first to know.”
“Me?” Felix squeaks, and Sylvain peeks through his fingers to appreciate how huge and— terrified the guy’s eyes have grown. “Why— why should I care?”
Oh, Sylvain’s going to enjoy this. Felix is just playing dumb at this point.
He takes his time getting to his feet, rolling his shoulders, getting the cricks out of his neck. Each of his bootsteps towards Felix send his baby best friend skittering backwards, almost tripping over the sword he’d never picked back up.
“You know why,” Sylvain beams, jabbing his finger into Felix’s chest. “Same reason Annette gets to hear from Mercedes first.”
“Sylvain, I swear if you make me do this—” Another jab, and Felix stumbles further.
That’s what you get for not being sympathetic, buddy, Sylvain manages not to say. What he says instead is much worse: “Because you’re going to be my best man, and Annette’s gonna be Mercedes’s maid of honor. Hope you’re ready for some shopping trips.”
Misery loves company, after all.
Shopping trips will be the fun part, which is why Sylvain and Mercedes agree to go on as many as possible. Plus, the more excursions they have, the fewer meetings they have to set up with House Gautier staff and advisors or even Mercedes’s adoptive father himself. It’s on Sylvain to invent some explanation for why the shopping comes first and the meetings come second. “Balancing the heir’s responsibilities and the indulgences of noble life is a careful dance, Mercedes,” Sylvain winks at her from over a library writing desk, “and I did win the White Heron Cup, remember?”
“However could I forget?” Mercedes replies. “It was all you’d talk about for days.”
“I think I still have the sexy outfit they made us wear,” he muses, shaking out the letter to dry the ink. “Think my father’d let me get married in it?”
The moment the words leave his mouth, he wants to cringe, because it’s not like there’s going to be a wedding at all. Mercedes just pats his shoulder and he remains still and un-cringed. “Hm, maybe for your next wedding. We have to spend a very long time choosing the fabric for ours, right? We must be certain it flatters our figures!”
Sylvain laughs. He’s pleased by how genuine it sounds. “Yeah, as long as it’s flattering.”
“And time-consuming.”
“And time-consuming, yeah.”
So: the first order of business is clothing. Lots of clothing. A dress for Mercedes and her retinue of lady friends with a whole variety of body types and fashion sensibilities, including the ever-so-particular Annette. A suit for Sylvain and Felix— “You can’t show up in armor; we have to match!” “So? Wear armor, then. Maybe someone will try to stab you. Enough of your ex-lovers will attend, won’t they?” –and all of their retinue. House Gautier prefers its weddings to be terribly segregated by gender. It likes to remind its heirs of the reason for their love and their matrimony, after all.
“Why don’t we just all go at once?” Annette asks as he and Mercedes draw up schedules to the different tailor shops for small groups of friends to make their visits at a time. “You know, me and Mercie and the others spend a day somewhere, and then you and everyone else—”
“Sylvain and I have to choose a tailor first at all, Annie!” Mercedes sweetly cuts in to rescue him from coming up with an excuse on the fly. “It’s going to be hard finding a good seamstress when trade routes are so unreliable right now, remember?”
“True…” But Annette doesn’t sound entirely convinced, and Mercedes seems to know it. She places her hands on Annette’s shoulder and subtly begins guiding her out of Sylvain’s room.
“And don’t forget we have to select fabric swatches!” she adds, and this seems to mean something to Annette that it doesn’t to Sylvain. She coos a little ohhh of understanding, asks them to tell her whenever they’ve decided, and skitters away down the hall. Mercedes closes the door as quickly as secrecy can allow.
“Fabric swatches?” Sylvain repeats as she settles back into the chair beside his.
“Haven’t you ever needed to select clothes before? I thought that was something all nobles did.”
Sylvain shrugs. “Well, sure. But I just get my measurements taken and go from there, you know? Whatever looks good, feels good…”
“Right! Well, sometimes you might fall in love with the way a pattern looks,” Mercedes holds out her arm and tilts it this way and that so the light catches on the pale yellow satin and sets it aglow, “but when you touch it, it makes you shudder.” She waits. Sylvain gets the hint and sets his hand on top of her sleeve and strokes lightly. It does make him shudder, but not just because of the heat of her skin underneath or her pulse he can feel flickering under his thumb. It’s just… not very nice to touch. It almost catches on his fingerprints like oil.
Mercedes grins at whatever face he makes. “See? That’s not material I want close to my skin or easy for me to touch by accident. And it’s stiff, so it doesn’t bend easily where I need it. When I made this dress, I had to be very particular about the fabric and cuts of cloth I purchased, and it was long after I decided on the design of the dress.”
Sylvain’s first thought is how impressed he is that she’s made her own clothing. His second thought is how knowledgeable she is about these small details or personal touches and how if he complimented her on it, she would absolutely downplay her skill. His third thought is how perfectly smooth her skin probably feels under that fabric.
His fourth thought he speaks aloud: “Oh, boy. And we haven’t even decided on any designs, have we?”
Mercedes’s laughter tinkles through the cold air of his bedroom. “My, my! You’re right! We’ll have to add it to our to-do list as well!”
In the end, Ignatz is the one who designs the clothing. “I’m just used to sketching,” he explains. “I usually paint landscapes, of course, but… a hobby is a hobby, right?”
Sylvain is pretty sure that’s not how artistic technique works and Ignatz is just extremely skilled and able to adapt his talents far too easily than a wannabe knight can explain, but the guy gets cagey the second he tries to communicate this fact. Saints, is everyone around here so self-effacing?
Not like he’s one to talk. He keeps his mouth shut and lets Annette and Mercedes squeal over the sketches.
It’s harder to watch than he expects. Mercedes deserves genuine joy, real excitement to design her wedding dress. Instead, she gets to watch her dreams and tastes come to life on parchment knowing full well it’s something she’ll never get to see.
When— and if— she does choose to get married someday, is this the dress she’ll want to wear? Will she cast these memories aside along with the deception and recycle the design, the fabric, the fabric swatches and whatever, to enjoy her day with someone who really does love and respect her and will swear to do so the rest of their days together?
The thought irritates him. That’s what Mercedes deserves, sure. But Sylvain’s pretty incapable of imagining anyone who deserves receiving that same love and respect and promise from her.
Again, though: it’s not like he’s one to talk.
“You’ve been really quiet,” Annette chirps, and Sylvain twitches in his seat from where he’s been reclining. “You wanna take a look?”
Not really. “Sure,” Sylvain says. He joins them at Ignatz’s side. Ignatz visibly tenses as he approaches.
“It’s just a sketch so far,” Ignatz hurries to assure him. “I— I know you’re really, uh— I know I’m not that good yet, and you’ve always had really good taste in art, and mine’s—”
“Yeah,” Sylvain says hoarsely. “Yeah, you’re right, this is really good.”
It is. The outfits carefully penned on the pages swirl in elegant poses side by side, holding hands above their shoulders like they’re about to dance.
“I drew them that way so you can see the detail on the sleeves,” Ignatz explains when Sylvain traces them with his index finger. “If you don’t like anything, I’m happy to change it.”
Sylvain smiles at him but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge his words. Ignatz shrinks in his chair, pink in the cheeks. “You like lace, huh?” he asks Mercedes, who grins right back.
“I’ve always found it tasteful,” she says, “even as it shows a bit of skin.”
Sylvain’s heart leaps to his throat. He doesn’t even care what his own imaginary suit looks like next to her sketch. The details on the sleeves, the cut of the cloak, the buttons, nothing. It’s not like it matters anyway, but for a moment he can pretend, and in that moment, nothing else matters but the smile on Mercedes’s face while she admires the wedding outfits that never will dance in this pose. Not together, not ever, and not with him.
“I don’t want to taste-test,” Felix says glumly. “Annette and Mercedes can figure this out on their own.”
They absolutely can. Guilt sinks heavy into Sylvain’s stomach like the cloying icing he knows they’re about to try. Mercedes had warned him beforehand of how many sweets she’d had two different bakeries prepare.
“You’ll make yourself sick if you eat each one. Just taste them in little bites, like this,” she’d shown him. She’d lifted a bit of her berry-filled bun into her mouth across from him at the dining hall. Pearly white teeth sank into the soft dough of the pastry and tugged at it just a little, just a hint. Her tongue had darted out to catch a dollop of red jam that hadn’t quite managed to disappear into her mouth, and she’d giggled at whatever expression he’d failed to mask.
Little bites. Right.
“Hey, second opinions are crucial,” Sylvain argues now.
“Whatever.”
He works the soreness out of his back and neck while they walk through the spring market air. Felix had to be dragged kicking and screaming to come out with him— meaning ‘Felix had insisted on dragging and kicking Sylvain in a vigorous training session beforehand as apology for bringing him along to this wedding errand’— yet he still is screaming and whining, because that’s just who Felix is sometimes. Sylvain wishes he could own up to the lie, confide in someone other than a girl he wishes whose love he could have… earned, maybe.
Life’s not like that, though. Even life’s sweets are bittersweet. Literally, it seems: the first bakery’s chocolate delicacies are salty and bitter enough to make Felix’s eyes light up, which means Sylvain flatly rejects each one before they’re halfway into his mouth. The puff pastries and jams and syrupy ones are okay: more palatable to a normal person’s tastes and sensibilities. They still have the other bakery to try, though.
Once they waddle over, Felix wastes no time spitting out pastry number one into his hand, right in front of the poor pâtissier. Sylvain consoles the merchant with a dazzling smile and pops the whole sugary confection in his mouth. He immediately regrets it. It’s delicious, actually, and sweet enough he can see why it had so offended Felix. But his stomach is already full from all the other things he’s sampled thus far. Mercedes was right.
Well, excuse him if he can’t be so dainty like her. Her teeth on the crust. Her lips on the icing. Her tongue licking a slow, teasing stripe—
“Yeah, we’d be glad to have you bake for our wedding!”
The baker glows with pride, Felix mumbles unpleasant judgments on Sylvain’s character and tastes under his breath, and Sylvain hates himself for lying to a commoner trying to make a living.
Later that night, he drops by the pastry shop again. It’s long since closed, the owners asleep early to wake before dawn to knead dough. Sylvain finds a good place near the open-air ovens to hide a sack of gold: the same amount of the pastries and then some. He leaves a note, too: “Paid in advance. -Margrave Gautier.”
It’s a risk, but a small one. Sylvain doubts the baker will think to question a Gautier seal on the wax, and no commoner would dare insult House Gautier by objecting to such a large sum of gold no matter where their own loyalties might lie. He sneaks back to the monastery, to the dorms, one foot on the second-floor stairs—
“Where were you so late? Is everything okay?”
Mercedes materializes from the spring mists and darkness like his conscience had summoned her into being. Sylvain jumps as though he’s been caught red-handed with lipstick on his neck.
“Huh? Me?” He grins for half a moment, then drops it like it burns. “Just, you know… out on the town. You know me.”
“Hm.” Mercedes peers closer, trying to read something on his face, and Sylvain bristles without meaning to.
She seems suspicious, which isn’t surprising. In the end, she really is just like every other girl, and every other girl wanted to know who he was out fucking when he wasn’t fucking them. And Mercedes is definitely someone he’ll never get to fuck, Sylvain thinks with no small amount of bitterness and a whole lot of cruelty.
But before he can say something caustic that’s sure to make her hate him and ruin the whole ruse only months into the attempt, Mercedes smiles. Shy, soft, and it shames him. “You’re a good man, Sylvain. Whoever does get to have you will be so lucky. Don’t forget that.”
What?
“I saw you leave with such a full coinpurse and seeing you now…” She nods at his distinctly-coinpurse-free belt and then gestures to his unruffled attire. “I was worried you’d been robbed. But…”
Sylvain winks like the idiot he is. “I’m pretty impressive, huh? Ladies love a tough guy.”
Mercedes’s eyes gleam each time she smiles, don’t they? “Hm, I’m not so sure about that, but… A man in a kitchen is always attractive, isn’t he? Or a bakery, even. I do like pastries.”
She turns on her heel and leaves him in shocked silence. When the click of her door shutting snaps him back to attention, Sylvain glances down at his clothes to see cake flour smeared along the tops of his boots.
They can’t put it off forever.
The wedding? Oh, sure. But meeting with the advisors their respective fathers sent? Less so.
“You… wish to get married in… in Dominic territory?”
Sylvain leans back in his chair, balancing on two of its legs. “Whatever my beloved fiancée wishes. And what does she say?”
“Oh, but of course! I want nothing more than my very best friend to be able to attend.” Mercedes has pitched her voice much higher than her already breathy and flutelike range. The curl of a giggle hugs each syllable and Sylvain marvels at her ability to summon such an annoying habit on cue. If it grates on his ears when he knows she’s faking it, the advisors must be going insane. She titters at everything they say, at everything Sylvain says, and at most things she herself says.
“I understand that, miss,” Margrave Gautier’s advisor says cautiously. “But—”
“That’s ‘Lady Martritz’ to you,” Sylvain reminds him with a dramatic wag of his finger. “She’s my fiancée, remember.”
“Yes. Of course. Lady Martritz. Castle Dominic’s loyalty constantly wavers. We cannot be assured of your safety, especially if the war goes on as it does.”
Sylvain whistles meaningfully, and his father’s advisor jumps. Sylvain waggles his brows in the direction of the red banner fluttering above their table in the cardinal room. The Adrestian Empire banner. “Walls have ears, friend,” he reminds the advisor with a wink. The man flushes as deep a crimson as the very banner he’s forgotten about.
“Friend or foe cannot always assure safety in war, regardless of side,” the advisor Mercedes’s adoptive father selected says more tactfully and even more stubbornly. “Castle Dominic is no place for this wedding.”
“Well! Perhaps we’d best spend a few days to think it over,” Mercedes suggest airily. Sylvain is about to agree when her adoptive father’s advisor slams his hand down on the map.
“Absolutely not. We’ve preparations of our own to make. Decide now, the both of you. There are plenty of options outside the city, if you insist upon your ‘very best friend’s’ territory.”
Sylvain gapes. They’ve only been trapped the advisors here three hours. Maybe he and Mercedes’s sense of time has been skewed these last few months in their procrastination efforts. Or maybe the advisors have caught on. Either way, even he stammers apologies and bends over the map, Mercedes at his side.
It’s easy to compare this map of chapels and cathedrals to the one he and the rest of the ‘Black Eagle Strike Force’ stare at daily. He knows troop movements and encampments and can visualize them with his eyes closed at this point. And far, far to the westernmost part of Dominic territory…
“Here.” Sylvain stabs his finger onto the marker for a tiny Chapel of Saint Cichol by the coast. “How does this sound, my heart?”
Mercedes squints at it. He can almost see the information processing through her mind, steeping like the delicate tea she likes into her memory, parsing the reasons why he might have chosen that specific chapel. “Oh, I see,” she mumbles in her normal speaking voice before pitching it louder and higher again. “Oh! Of course! What a wonderful idea, my love!”
The strike force hasn’t planned any skirmishes anywhere near that strategically bare beach. The closest encampment is far, far away, and even then it’s on the opposite side of the nearest village.
The advisors, for their part, seem ready to weep.
“It’s safe. No activity there for months, if ever,” Sylvain assures them. Mercedes edges closer and he wraps his arm around her side. “It’s the safest possible place to put a ring on the love of my life, right?”
“Thank you, sweetie.”
“Of course, beautiful.”
“I love you, handsome.”
His face hurts trying to restrain his laughter at the expression she’s making.
“I love you, sexy.”
“You fill my every… desire, you fiery piece of a man,” Mercedes purrs, and Sylvain chokes on his own saliva on his next inhale.
Both stodgy men stare at the map, their disgustingly lovey-dovey antics, each other, and sigh. “The Chapel of Saint Cichol it is,” his father’s advisor says grimly while the other advisor hastily rolls up the map like the happy couple is about to fall onto the table and fuck their way through the entirety of Fódlan.
They’re not losing the war, exactly. They’re just not winning it, and that’s sort of worse.
More often than not, the Black Eagle Strike Force—or whoever it consists of that day—returns to the monastery sweaty and battered and exhausted without much to show for it. No casualties, but no victories. Emperor Edelgard laments the Professor’s disappearance with every other breath, it seems. What was supposed to be the Millennial Festival rapidly draws near and the war remains at a stalemate. Everyone knows the Emperor would love some sort of momentous… something to happen on that day. Anything. Absolutely anything to remind the people of their inevitable triumph, a brighter ‘today’ instead of a brighter ‘tomorrow.’
But nothing changes save the slow crawl of cold dread dripping down Sylvain’s heart that maybe, just maybe he and Mercedes won’t be able to escape this. That their fake-real-engagement won’t wind up fake after all. That they’ll wind up married forever as they tear their home country apart. And what frightens him more is how frequently he’s able to convince himself none of those things would be so bad.
The day before Mercedes’s birthday, Ingrid scolds him for not having any plans with his fiancée, and Sylvain agrees it’s suspicious. He plans something private for the two of them to hide from squinty eyes and give them a moment of respite from the lie: dinner he prepared himself— well, if ‘asking the monastery cook to arrange a specific to-go menu’ counted as such; a bouquet of lavender and lilies to complement her skin and perfume; high-quality tea leaves from the shop he’d once seen her gaze at longingly… He’d even commissioned Hilda for a necklace at no small cost, because the last thing he needed was Hilda giving him grief for treating Mercedes’s special day like any other girl’s.
He should have known all would not go according to plan the moment Mercedes opened the door.
“Oh! Sylvain! I wasn’t expecting you at this hour!” she says, partially obscured by the half-open door and his own enormous bouquet.
“What? Why not?” Unfamiliar nerves flutter in his stomach. “I mean, sorry, did you have plans?”
A pause. Sylvain lowers the bouquet, sees the lacy strap of her nightgown, and promptly shoves his face into his flowery gift.
“I’ll… let you get back to bed.”
“No, it’s…” At least she sounds embarrassed, too. “I was just relaxing, that’s all. Let me put on a robe and you can come in.”
The door clicks shut. Sylvain contemplates depositing the gifts on her doorstep and fleeing upstairs, praying she answers the door for the cook, but before he can decide whether it’s worth the shame or not, she reopens the door, mercifully covered in a modest, comfy robe.
“You’re not much of a wild partier, are you?” Sylvain teases. “Here, these are for you.”
Mercedes accepts the flowers with a tiny coo of delight. She buries her nose into the petals and inhales. “They’re so fresh, thank you! And… Well, actually, I told Annie I’d be spending my birthday with you.”
Sylvain, fussing with the present in his pocket, freezes. “Was I… supposed to know that?”
She sighs from where she’s pouring water into the bouquet’s new vase. “No,” she admits. “Truth be told, I was too embarrassed to ask you! But I knew Annie would want to talk about the… the engagement and all sorts of details, and… Oh, Sylvain, I’m just so tired of lying all the time!”
He lowers himself into his usual chair by her hearth without being offered. “Yeah, that’s… honestly one of the reasons I came, too.”
Mercedes joins him. “Oh? You didn’t actually want to celebrate my birthday, I see.”
“No! No, I did, it was just… an added bonus?” Sylvain winces even as the words leave his mouth. “I just wanted to say I know how you feel.”
Mercedes’s smile is beautiful even when it’s sad. Sylvain wonders what it would feel like if she ever were to smile at him for real, without mockery or tears. “Yes,” she says softly, “you always do, don’t you?”
Sylvain has nothing to say to that.
“I have a gift for you,” he blurts out instead. He thrusts the carefully wrapped necklace at her, the corners of the fragile paper tearing a little during its speedy egress from his pocket. Mercedes blinks at it, startled, before she remembers to take it from his trembling fingers.
“Thank you,” she says. “Shall I open it now?”
He hadn’t considered she wouldn’t open it in front of him until now, and the alternative suddenly seems quite appealing. But he’s come this far.
“Yeah, please! I hope you like it.”
Mercedes unfolds the wrapping like it’s more precious than the jewels inside. Sylvain’s tidier than most people in general and prides himself on his presentation in more ways than one, but the meticulousness with which Mercedes smooths each crease out of the paper puts him to shame. When the necklace finally glitters in the candlelight, reflecting off the excited blue of her eyes, Mercedes’s joyful exclamation soothes Sylvain’s agony and anticipation.
“It’s beautiful! Oh, my!”
Sylvain leans back in his chair, unaware how tense he’d been all hunched over in his seat. “Glad you like it. Uh, you do, right?”
Stupid anxiety, slipping from his lips like that. But Mercedes just beams at him, a true smile, and holds it up against her slender neck. The smooth expanse of her skin and dip above her sternum peeking out of the collar of her tantalizingly innocent robe has never looked so delicious.
“I love it.” Mercedes emphasizes the words with a quick shake of the chain in her fingers. “Can you… ah, do you mind if…”
Sylvain drags his gaze from where he’d been ogling her neck to find Mercedes— blushing. Pink as her robe. Pink as a rose. Pink as berry jam in a slice of cake, not the white cream center piped through a buttery pastry flaking crumbs on her lips—
Sylvain gets to his feet and swooshes behind her in one fluid moment. “Yeah, let me.” His voice is rough where her skin is soft. The grooves of his callused thumbs catch on her neck, his hands brush the shivery bumps rising from the nape of her neck, and the delicate gold chain clips neatly around her neck with a click as loud as the tolling of the nineteenth bell.
“Thank you.”
His lungs shake with each breath. Sylvain can only nod and take his seat once more, blushing as red as his hair, red as the rubies imprisoned in gold around her neck.
Too many heartbeats of silence pass. Neither her smile nor her blush have faded from her face. “I’m glad you like it,” Sylvain finally says again. “You look good in red, you know?”
Mercedes laughs at that, loud and warm. “So do you. What a pair we make.”
And although Mercedes’s mouth immediately slams shut with an audible click of her jaw and he’s sure she’s as mortified by those words and their effect as he is, they’re saved by the cook’s knock heralding the arrival of their dinner. And they don’t speak of pairs or love or lies the rest of the evening.
“You are hiding something.”
Jeritza’s voice slithering from the shadows between the dorms and the sauna has Sylvain jumping out of his skin. He tosses his head back, letting the curls floof enticingly across his forehead to distract from his embarrassing flinch of surprise.
“You, me and the rest of the army,” Sylvain agrees. Jeritza’s expression remains stoic and cast in shadow, but his next words are anything but placid:
“If you break her heart, I will cut yours from your chest.”
And then he’s gone, melting into the darkness where he belongs. The air hardly stirs as the last flutter of Jeritza’s cloak disappears behind the dorms. Sylvain struggles to contain a manic cackle.
Out of everyone who will be offended or relieved when they inevitably learn about this sham of an engagement, Sylvain would never have guessed Jeritza would be the most of both.
Hubert storms out of the cardinal’s room, the air around him crackling with fury and poorly restrained magic. Mercedes and Sylvain, perched on the plush yet uncomfortable armchairs in the next room over, stare at his retreating figure over the swathes of fabric rolls trailing over their laps.
“Whatever is the matter?” Mercedes calls after him. Sylvain shakes his head.
“Don’t bother. He gets testy about everything these days.”
Mercedes bows her head over the roll of— ‘taffeta,’ look at him, he’s learning!— she’d been comparing against Ignatz’s dress sketches and sighs. The sweet scent of berry tea ruffles the corners of Sylvain’s own sketch.
“Sylvain.”
Her voice hardly makes sound. Sylvain leans forward to hear better, and that berry-sweet breath caresses his cheek. “Yeah, gorgeous?”
Oops. But Mercedes doesn’t smile or even tease him. No, she gnaws her lip instead, a nervous habit she’s picked up only recently that, also recently, has tortured Sylvain ever since he first noticed it.
“What will you do if… we don’t win the war?”
Time freezes. And Sylvain’s blood runs cold.
It stops coursing through its veins, the second hands of the grandfather clock halt mid-tick, but Sylvain’s mind keeps rushing. Flashes of memories he won’t ever have, impossible futures he doesn’t want to want, bombard his brain and lungs and heart.
Running home, any home, Felix’s or Annette’s or anyone’s as long as it had a cupboard to hide in, just like when he’d been small.
Snapping the Lance of Ruin in half and tossing it into some lonely lake while his ancestors screeched and the Goddess laughed.
Daring to hope his father would still forgive him, shower him with his praise and love the same way he’d taught Sylvain how easy it was to make people believe they were worthy of it.
Waking up every morning in his own bed, the one he’d grown up sleeping in since childhood, free from fucking and from sweat-stained sheets changed every afternoon, the one he’d abandoned for a cause he wasn’t sure he believed in the same as he used to.
Waking up every morning to a wife whose face he wanted to see and smile he wanted to love.
Waking up to Mercedes as his wife.
“I have no fucking idea.”
Mercedes’s eyes widen even as her gaze softens. Before her pretty pink lips can even part to speak, Hubert’s hissing voice echoes through the halls again.
“The Emperor pays you to prevent such insurrection, mercenary. Your contract with us—”
“My contract is to kill people, not babysit,” Shamir’s flat voice replies, although the woman herself is nowhere to be seen. “The princess should be grateful I bothered to report on this at all. My spies have better things to do.”
“Yes, better tasks indeed, such as reining in reckless militia acting of their own accord in the Emperor’s name. And you would do well to remember it.”
“Right. Edelgard.”
“You must address her as—”
Sylvain’s about ready to ignore the bickering and return to planning a meaningless future until Shamir scoffs, harsh and guttural. “They’re your disobedient soldiers. Shouldn’t you discipline idiot Dominic troops using the Emperor’s name to sate their own bloodlust, not the messenger who went to the trouble of telling the stick up your ass about your pathetic excuses for soldiers?”
Mercedes shoots Sylvain a troubled glance. Sylvain only returns a shrug. Annette’s still here in the monastery; whatever the militia problem is, she won’t be involved.
“Your princess should know it takes more than an army to lead a country’s people,” Shamir continues when Hubert does not interject. “She can inspire every conscript holding a pitchfork all she wants with her pretty words, but once her speeches are done and she’s headed home to Enbarr away from the stink of fish, someone’s got to stay behind to keep order. What else did you expect, giving a coastal village weapons and a reason to hate the Saints without providing a general?”
“I didn’t know you were such an ardent follower of Cichol,” Hubert cuts in, smooth as grease. “Sentimental over the charred remains of a chapel dedicated to a monster, are we?”
“Do you want intel in the future or not?”
“As long as I never hear such arrogance cross your tongue again, lest I cut it out.”
“Try me. It’s not even like you’ll punish your own troops.”
“Dominic fishing villages and their willfully blind priests are inconsequential. The ones our Emperor chooses to trust, however—"
Whatever argument ensues next doesn’t reach Sylvain’s ears. All he can hear is the silent sobs shaking from Mercedes’s lungs and muffled by her hand. His mother’s Gautier engagement ring sparkles on her finger, winking at him like it’s personally responsible for the ravaging and looting of the chapel where they were supposed to have their nonexistent wedding.
Tomorrow is the Millennial Festival.
The monastery has waited a thousand years for this celebration and Emperor Edelgard’s inner circle has been waiting five. And they’ll wait longer still, Sylvain knows, because the Professor will not be there tomorrow, nor the day after, but the war will be, whether for five more years or another thousand.
Tomorrow is the Millennial Festival and Sylvain is supposed to marry Mercedes soon.
“Goddess preserve those poor priests’ souls,” Sylvain’s mother writes breezily, “but one blessing we may take from such a tragedy is having our son close to home again. It’s fitting that you start your new family back here in Gautier where you belong.”
The family bishop hasn’t retired yet and is apparently “ecstatic” to bring two Houses together— one broken by death and desperate marriages, one of an unbroken lineage proud of its false familial love. “A good match,” the bishop says, and Sylvain laughs reading the letter. He couldn’t agree more.
He doesn’t show Mercedes those letters, however. The Goddess has enjoyed more of Mercedes’s prayers than the Saints, even if She doesn’t hear them. Still, news of the razing of the Chapel of Cichol far away from the violence in Dominic territory has hit her hard.
“It’s not our last hope, babe,” Sylvain whispers into her hair when, with uncharacteristic shyness, she asks for a hug. “You’re not stuck with me just yet.”
But that only makes her cry harder. And Sylvain, always cruel when he’s kind, loves the sound. With Mercedes clutching his chest and heaving ugly, gasping sobs against his tearstained shirt, for those minutes he can pretend she trusts him enough to love him. To grieve for their future, one where their affection isn’t built on lies and necessities and fear.
Tomorrow is the Millennial Festival, and Sylvain wants to hold Mercedes for a thousand more years. He wants the war to never end, if only so they won’t part ways once their false duty is fulfilled. He wants to fall in love with her properly, because for the first time in his life, he thinks maybe he’s found someone who could love him back. Someone willing to lie for him, to protect him, to protect back, to commiserate with him, to enjoy his company on special occasions, to think he’s special and demand nothing from him but the secrets they share and the trust they’re too afraid to offer anyone else.
The Professor returns, and everything goes back to normal.
Normal in that Margrave Gautier abandons his son yet again in the name of war. Normal in that so many victories taste sweeter than berry tea. Normal in that the Black Eagles become a unified force again, led by someone who can both motivate and command in the same breath. Normal in that fire returns to the Emperor’s fierce expression and fans the flames of her loyal subjects’ devotion.
Normal in that Sylvain and Mercedes aren’t engaged. The annulment isn’t exactly signed and dated, but with Faerghus renewing its fight against progressively more aggressive Imperial assaults, it makes sense the Margrave and Mercedes’s adoptive father have had other problems to handle besides rebellious children now seeking to spill their blood.
Normal in that Sylvain is utterly predictable in his pick-up lines.
“I’ve got a lot of regrets these days,” he tells Mercedes as they drag their bloodstained feet through the monastery portcullis. “But you know what I really regret?”
“You’re about to reveal that secret, it seems.”
He’d planned to joke about pastries. Or maybe Felix and Annette’s hurt when Mercedes and Sylvain had finally sat them down and told them the truth. Something less specific than, “I wish I could have seen you in that dress.”
Mercedes stops in her tracks. A few months ago, Sylvain would probably have kept walking without her, but now they’ve spent months on months needing constant interaction and closeness that the second she leaves his side he freezes. Even the summer breeze whistling through the gaps in his chainmail feels cold and lonely.
So is Mercedes’s expression. “I wish you could have too,” she whispers, and the tears spill over.
And Sylvain doesn’t know who had given in and cried first.
He does know he’s the first to open his arms. Mercedes flies into them, heedless of the grime and steel of his cuirass. She fits well anyway, like they could have been good together after all, and—
“I really wanted to love you, you know? I really wanted to learn how.”
His voice cracks halfway through the sentence.
“Me too,” Mercedes sniffs, hardly audible.
Sylvain’s heart pounds through the cuirass. Maybe the Sylvain from five years ago, five months ago would be glad for the protection. But now all this Sylvain wants is for her to hear it, to hear his fear and nerves and desires and longing for something unknown and terrifying he almost but didn’t quite have.
“I would have married you anywhere,” he continues. The cuirass presses on his lungs; that must be the reason he feels like he has to wring each word from his vocal chords. “In any stupid chapel. Or in your favorite one, in… in a field of lavender, the… the top of a fucking battlement back in Castle Gautier in the middle of a siege, in… I would have tried to be good to you, whatever you wanted, whatever could have—”
“Me too,” Mercedes says once more, then again on a wail, “Me too, I would have, I would have loved you if I’d just been given the choice.”
The words stab through his stomach. A rapier couldn’t have cut through his armor so easily. Sylvain squeezes her tight enough it has to hurt, but Mercedes only clings to him tighter.
“Do you…” She mumbles the rest of the sentence, and it gets lost in the wet streaks of dirt on his cuirass. Sylvain takes a deep, painful breath and pushes her away with enough gentleness his hands shake.
“Sorry, didn’t catch all that.”
Mercedes’s eye makeup runs down her tear-reddened cheeks. Possessed by an instinct he never knew he truly had, Sylvain smooths the black smudges away with his thumb, then continues stroking her cheekbones and cupping her jaw long after her face is clean and bright again.
“Do you think we could love each other someday? For real, I mean.”
Simple, dismissive assurances and lies almost fall out of Sylvain’s mouth, and he almost lets them. Familiar is safe, even if it’s cruel. Cruelty is safe, even if he means to be kind. But Mercedes deserves a better answer, not just for what they’ve been through together, but for what she’s been through all on her own.
“We can… we can find out,” he croaks. “Not... maybe after. Maybe after all this.”
One day, Sylvain hopes, her sad smiles will crush him. One day he’ll only crave the sight of her happiness, not just any hint of affection. But her sad smile now is enough. “Well,” she says through a watery laugh, “I suppose we’ve a wonderful reason to make it through ‘all this,’ don’t we? I’ve never been fond of the tragic ghost stories, you know. There’s never any room for a happily-ever-after.”
Sylvain wants to kiss her and doesn’t. “I’m tired of ghost stories. I’d rather try out a happily-ever-after with you this time. On our own, just the two of us.”
“Yes,” Mercedes says. “Just the two of us.”