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He can’t remember how long he’s been traveling through the woods. Months, at least, he thinks. It must be more, it feels like so much more, but it was only just fall. Felix still remembers the trees turning red and Sylvain’s last letter weighs heavy where it’s tucked into the inside of his coat, right over his heart. Felix, it reads. Scratched out. My Love, it reads. Scratched out, almost to the point of illegibility.
My Dearest Friend is the final address.
The letter almost hadn’t reached him in time, the third one within two years. He never stayed long in one place these days although he knew he should have been trying to find a place to stay for the winter. Instead he’d stayed in the little village just at the southern tip of Fraldarius territory, the one he had long give up command of, for a few weeks. He’d stocked up on provisions, packed tightly into his bag, and pondered buying a horse. He’d never been much of a rider, never been much of a person for cooperation in general, neither with people nor animals, and so he didn’t. But his boots had needed mending and so he’d stayed, just one more night, just enough for the Gautier messenger to catch him in time. A plead for help. A plead for Felix to come home. A plead for just one last glimpse of hope.
There’s no home for him to return to and instead he starts his trek through the forest, only a vague idea of where to go next in his mind.
It feels like he’s been wandering through the woods for centuries. The snow never stops falling and when he looks back on his path the footsteps are already snowed over. He’s cold. He’s cold, down to his bones, down to his very soul maybe, ice slowly creeping towards his heart. Felix doesn’t quite know whether it’s still beating. Maybe it stopped when he sunk his sword into an old friend’s chest all those years ago. Maybe it stopped when they burnt the last bodies on the battlefield. Maybe it stopped when they were celebrating the victory in Enbarr and he looked down to find his hands still dripping with blood.
He can’t manage to get warm again and he can’t scrub his fingers clean, no matter how much he tries. He can’t remember when he stopped trying.
It feels like he’s been wandering the woods for centuries and he doesn’t remember when he lost his second sword. Or first sword, really, his most treasured possession, a reminder of the person he used to be. A reminder of the Kingdom he betrayed and the friends he abandoned. Maybe he’d pawned it off in the village. It certainly didn’t get rid of the ghosts.
He’d tripped and fallen a few days ago, he remembers that. Hit his head, just a little, just enough to make him dizzy. The war had cost him an eye, his last remaining shreds of hope in the dignity of his country and his depth perception. It was enough to turn the tree roots, buried under a foot of snow, into traps. Since then every day had felt like an eternity and no matter what he does, the cold doesn’t stop cutting through his clothes.
He still has Aegis, didn’t give it up together with his title. He should have but this was supposed to be a new world. A world without heroes relics and the blind sacrifice that came with them. And so he’d decided to be the last one in the Fraldarius line to bear the curse of being a shield. After all he never had managed to fulfill that promise when-
He doesn’t remember. There was someone he should have protected, someone whose side he should have stayed at years ago but everything in his head is a blur. There’s blond hair and there’s red hair and lances glowing gold through rain falling in sheets and blood. Every one of his memories gets drowned out by blood.
Shadows follow him some nights, when the snow storm is at its worst. In a way those are the best nights, there’s a pull on his heart guiding him in the right direction, even though he doesn’t know where it is he’s supposed to go. It vanishes as soon as the shadow behind him does but he feels he’s done something right. He’s been wandering for so long, but maybe he’s not always aimless.
He meets other travelers, kind ones who let him sit by their fire for a bit, just to warm up his hands and maybe eat a bite. His fingers always feel frozen and hunger gnaws at his stomach without relief but the presence of another person almost makes him forget about those. His gloves are clean of blood as long as he stays in the glow of the fire, as long as someone listens to his stories. The stories seem to come from nowhere, he can tell them but they never stay in his memory. When they ask his name, he doesn’t know how to answer. It’s been a long time since he’s had a name.
They’re curious travelers, sometimes he seems to startle them but they’re never as afraid as he expects them to be. Throughout the winter they get stranger, their clothes brighter and with fabrics he’s never seen before, shiny but unlike silk. Some of them talk in strange ways, use words he doesn’t know and talk about countries with unfamiliar names. He wants to ask what’s going on but the question always sticks to the roof of his mouth like honey. It doesn’t matter much anyways. He always leaves the fire before morning.
It hasn’t been morning in a long time.
He meets a familiar face one day. They have a small tent set up next to their fire, bright orange and shining through the darkness almost as brightly as the fire. They don’t look up at first when he walks closer, only continue prodding at the burning wood with a stick, face entirely blank. The hood of their jacket is drawn up, like his own, and he can’t quite make out more than a few strands of hair. Dark turquoise that turns far too bright in the light of the fire.
They don’t ask his name when he sits down but they do look up to give him a smile, so faint he almost misses it entirely. For the first time he feels the warmth of the fire on the bare skin of his face.
“Felix Fraldarius,” they finally say.
Who’s that, he wants to ask, before he realizes. It’s his name. Felix doesn’t understand how he could have forgotten.
“You’re…” He tries to piece together the words, tries to understand how a stranger could be so familiar. It hits him he sees the hunting dagger hanging off their belt. “Oh. It’s been a long time.”
“It has, hasn’t it,” their voice is easygoing but it makes his heart clench in his chest or maybe that’s just the ice finally closing in around it. They turn back to the fire, keeping the flame alive, before reaching into their backpack and offering him a strip of dried meat.
He expects it to feel like eating air but for once, it satiates the aching pain in his stomach. They sit together in silence for a while, for just a few minutes, he thinks, a grasp on time he hasn’t felt since-
Since he fell, he realizes. It’s all been dragging on like this since he had hit his head and-
“I’m dead,“ he says. There’s no emotion to it, it’s a statement of fact but the other person still smiles at him sadly. Byleth, he remembers suddenly. The one who changed everything. “Why am I still here?”
Byleth hums in thought and stares up at the sky. The snow has died down just enough that the stars are visible. “There’s someone still waiting for you.”
Felix frowns. There’s no one waiting for him. There’s no one left, nothing except for the regrets that haunt him and the blood that soaks his clothes and stains his soul. “I betrayed them all. I betrayed him, he’s not waiting, just haunting me. “ He spits out the words with a venom he hadn’t felt in years and he wasn’t sure who it was directed at, the memory or himself.
Byleth shakes their head. “Not Dimitri. He’s not here.”
He furrows his brow and takes another bite of the offered food. It makes sense, if he’s a ghost himself why should he be haunted.
“Then who- Oh.” The realization hits him harder than Annette’s hammer when she had shattered his shoulder. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to think about the arrow that had hit her throat at the same moment. “I broke our promise.”
He doesn’t need their confirmation to know. If anyone would wait, it would be him.
“I can’t go back,” he breathes out and his throat hurts, “I- I don’t know how. It’s been so long.”
“And he’s been waiting all that time,” Byleth explains gently. “I think you should go home. You still have his letter, don’t you?”
He does. He knows the moment they say it that he does, he can feel the thick envelope against his skin now that it’s not cold as the snow under his feet anymore.
“He asked you to come home,” Byleth continues without waiting for a confirmation, “So just follow the letter and go home. I think you both deserve to rest.”
They don’t talk more after that and when Byleth retreats into their tent to sleep, Felix stays curled up next to the fire, keeping watch and reveling in the warmth. He stays sitting there until the first rays of sunlight begin to creep through the trees. When the two part ways he can feel warm morning air on his skin.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” Byleth says at last, “but you’re not condemned.”
He follows the pull of the letter for days but he hits a road on the second morning. It sky has been clear since he met his old teacher and it’s a relief to travel along a real path. Finally he think he’s really heading somewhere instead of just scrambling through the overgrown forest with the desperation of a starving animal. The road is strange, neither a dirt path nor cobblestone but smooth and almost black.
It takes him still over a week to find a familiar castle, deep in the woods but not far from the road he’s been walking on. It looks the way he last saw it, or even better maybe. The path leading up to the open gate, over a small bridge, is well kept and bright sunlight shines onto the castle.
He spots the figure standing at one of the windows before he’s seen in return. It’s the old library, he remembers, the window that Sylvain would wait at when they were children, full of anticipation when Felix was supposed to visit.
Sylvain spots him barely a second later, jumping up from his slump against the windowsill, then disappearing into the castle. Felix makes his way up the rest of the path until he enters the bailey and at the same moment, he hears Sylvain skid along the gravel as he almost falls trying to run towards him. Sylvain looks washed out, almost fading around the edges and it hits Felix that they really are ghosts. They aren’t supposed to haunt this place anymore. His next thought is that he didn’t know Sylvain could grow a beard.
Sylvain looks like he’s seen, well, a ghost, eyes wide with disbelief. He comes to a stop and simply stares for a moment but before Felix can take the last few steps towards him, Sylvain closes the distance. His hands come up to hover just besides his face and then he gingerly runs his thumb over the scarred side of Felix’s face.
“You came home,” he whispers into the morning air, almost too quiet to hear.
Felix leans into the touch and, for the first time in years, in centuries he now realizes, he feels a smile on his lips.
“I’m sorry it took me so long, my love. But I came home.”