Chapter Text
It never stings any less. Ingrid keeps hoping it will. She thinks, this will be the last time. She says, no more Sylvain.
It is never the last time.
Sylvain always smiles something handsomely sheepish at her, he always playfully teases, he sometimes promises he’ll stop.
And he does.
But never for long.
Sylvain is not a cruel man, Ingrid is sure, but he can certainly be cruel. Underneath it all, she knows - she’s seen, the heart that beats golden.
It’s buried underneath all the bitterness that he holds close and spits only when he’s on the brink of some dark spiral, buried further underneath the humor and charm and showmanship he displays.
But Ingrid knows it’s there. She knows better than most. Sometimes, when she’s being particularly naive, she hopes that she’s the only one that knows.
It is why she sticks around. It is why she can do no more than huff with her hands on her hips and glare when she catches him again, behind the stables this time, his arm on some poor pretty girl’s waist as he whispers something sweet in her ears.
Ingrid stamps down the raging jealousy that bubbles in her throat. She focuses instead on her palms and how they sting as she presses her jagged bitten down nails as deep as they can possibly go.
Somedays, it is easier than this but today, this is the only way she can hold herself together. It is the only way she doesn’t rage at them both. Doesn’t rage at an innocent girl who had simply fallen for Sylvain’s charm just as Ingrid has.
"Sylvain," Ingrid calls instead, voice clipped, but not more than normal. “Seriously? We have stable duty.”
He grins at her. Ingrid’s fists tighten even more as her heart does, then he smiles the same smile at the girl in his arms and Ingrid has to look away.
It never hurts any less.
Ingrid stares sometimes. She can’t help herself. It’s always when he’s got someone flocking to him. She does her best not to glare. Most of the time she succeeds.
Felix catches her most often but that’s usually because he is often glaring in the same direction.
“That’s not going to end well,” he says, turning his head back to his breakfast in front of him.
Sylvain is chatting up Dorothea at a table nearby. He’s got an easy smile on his face. Ingrid can’t see the expression Dorothea has but the fact that she’s still there means that she’s humoring him, which is how it always starts with girls like Dorothea.
Sylvain is charming. He is good at reading people. He often knows the right things to say.
“Dorothea can handle herself,” Ingrid decides anyway. She stabs her fork into her eggs a little more roughly than intended.
Felix, of course, notices but he doesn’t say anything. He raises an eyebrow instead.
Ingrid sighs. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she explains even though no question was asked. “Dorothea is my friend. I’d rather he stop altogether but I really wish he would stop flirting with my friends.”
Felix shrugs. She can’t tell if he believes her or if he is simply letting it go. Perhaps, he simply doesn’t care.
“You could tell him that,” Felix says.
“You and I both know it wouldn’t change anything,” Ingrid says bitterly.
Felix doesn’t reply. It’s because they both know it’s true.
Mercedes is the first one to confront her about it, although it is less of a confrontation and more of a conversation. In truth, she is the first one to point-blank ask. Everyone else either hasn’t noticed, is too polite, or hasn’t cared enough to.
“Oh Ingrid,” Mercedes says. And it’s the tone in which she says it that reminds Ingrid why she hasn’t said anything to anyone before. It is the way Mercedes looks at her, sad and yet with some assumed sage-like understanding of the situation.
It makes Ingrid’s blood boil.
It’s more complicated than that, Ingrid wants to explain. It’s not just a simple case of chasing the unobtainable, of waiting and hoping. Ingrid is not so naive to think that this is as easy or juvenile as some unfortunate schoolyard crush. It is a lot more. It is a history that she cannot share because it is a history that belongs only to her and Sylvain.
It is too much to explain. Words oversimplify the matter.
“It’s okay,” Ingrid says instead with a sigh. “I’m used to it.”
Mercedes says nothing more.
This is how it happens. Slowly, over time and after Glenn. It is unintentional but Ingrid figures that if feelings were intentional, everyone would be happy and in love and there would be no complicated notions about marriage and social class.
She wishes it was easy. She wishes it was intentional. She wishes she chose Sylvain. She wishes every day that he would choose her.
She doesn’t like that version of her. Ingrid hates the part of her that says, maybe, that says, wait, that says, pine and pine endlessly in the hopes that he’ll see her. She hates her heart.
Because she knows that this is a love that will never come to be.
Sylvain’s heart is caged behind the thick stone walls of some frozen well hidden in the tundraitic hellscape of heartless Gautier. He will never let it free. He will certainly never free it for her.
It would have happened already otherwise.
Because Sylvain is kind to her, even when he is kind to few else. He wouldn’t hurt her if he knew. He hurts a great many people, hurts them on purpose. Ingrid knows this, she hates him for this too.
But he is kind to his friends. He cares for them deeply. He trails after them and hopes for them and loves them in the single certain steady way he allows himself to.
She knows this because all those years ago, Sylvain Jose Gautier knocked on her door after traveling three days on horseback through the splintered dangerous shortcut paths they were told never to take all the way down south to Galatea just to speak to her through the other side of a locked wooden door.
She told him to go away and he said, when have I ever listened to you? She said it again and he said, I dare you to make me. When she finally let him in, it was because he wouldn’t stop singing stupid songs offkey about Dimitri’s bad hair, and then he slept on her cold wooden floor for three days until she finally got sick of him and left the room.
That’s love too. That needs to be enough.
So Ingrid doesn’t say anything to him about her feelings. Sometimes, it is hard to hold but somehow, as sharp as Sylvain is, as well as he knows her, he never catches on.
She likes to think of it as a sign. It reads, he hasn’t even considered it; it has never crossed his mind that she could love him. That he could have her.
And on the back of that wooden sign, carved crooked in tiny subscript in the corner that no one sees are the words, he doesn’t want you.
Sylvain is nursing a bruised lip from some girl’s brother trying to defend her honor, or at least, that’s the story he’s telling. Ingrid is too angry to search for the whole story. In the beginning, she used to learn as much as she could. She used to find all the sides to the conflict. She used to try to mediate.
Now, Ingrid whacks at a training dummy and takes Sylvain at his bruised face’s value. Which is to say, that he actually hardly ever lies to her. He somehow seems to wear these encounters like a badge of dishonor. He is not apologetic in the least. He usually says, I deserved it, with some strange twisted grin. He usually admits that he was wrong. Then he goes and does it again anyway.
There is no salvaging a man who seeks this kind of punishment. She can only feel angry that he does it or else wallow in the fact that the man she loves is so broken that self-destruction is the only outlet he is willing to consider.
I’m right here, she has stopped saying. Talk to me.
Ingrid has tried many things with Sylvain. She has tried to be the friend he was to her. She has knocked on his door and refused to move. She has tried to berate and yell at him, hoping that if he wants punishment, she would be enough. She has tried to love him and she has tried to hate him.
Nothing seems to work.
It is hard not to wonder if the problem is with her. If the reason it worked so well for Sylvain when he came to her and dragged her out of the room was because it is much easier to hold your ground when you didn’t love the same way she does.
When you don’t hurt the same way she does.
The training dummy is in tatters when she is done. It will need to be replaced. As will the broken training lance.
“Maybe you need some distance,” Mercedes tells her later. “How are you supposed to move on when he’s always right in front of you?”
Mercedes has a point. Sylvain is everywhere and when he isn’t, she feels him anyway. Every hallway has a memory of some apologetic smile he’s thrown her, every classroom the ghost of some joke she barely remembers that he tells her.
Space is a good idea.
Space is only an idea. A week after Ingrid decides to make some distance, Miklan dies at their hands. She cannot abandon Sylvain when he needs her, not when the Lance of Ruin sits by his bedframe tormenting him.
Her heart seems so silly in comparison. It feels like it means nothing in Miklan’s wake. She refuses to watch Sylvain drown in it.
His door is not locked but he doesn’t come to open it when she knocks. She barges through all by herself.
He is in a bad state. Sylvain smells of alcohol and blood and women’s perfume. He talks to her all night, raging drunkenly about how stupid he feels for grieving and how much he hates the things his brother has done, how he hates that he still cares. Ingrid holds him to her chest, cries with him, and whispers soft reassurances that she’s sure he won’t remember in the morning.
He says many graciously sweet things to her that night. She tries to forget them all.
You’re always there for me Ing.
I don’t know what I’d do without you.
The Goddess may be cruel but you aren’t.
Thank you.
I don’t deserve you.
Have I ever told you that you’re beautiful?
Then he brushes her hair back. Then, his thumb wipes away her tears. Then, he kisses her - soft and light and quick.
It tastes like alcohol and blood and the smell of women’s perfume.
Then Sylvain forgets.
Ingrid tries to forget this too.
Ingrid keeps close to him in the aftermath that follows. Sylvain’s behavior is largely the same. He is dark for a few weeks but she manages to pull him back, pull him away from hurting someone underserving because he is never given a chance to with how closely she sticks by him.
He doesn’t seem to mind. He does not make cruel or even playful jokes about her hovering. This is how she knows he appreciates it.
Sylvain does not kiss her again.
He only says, thank you for being there, even when he remembers very little of it. He tells her so. He tells her that waking up in her arms made him feel the first sense of comfort afterward, made him realize that comfort could still exist because it exists in her.
It is a very sweet line. It is said so easily. It is said with a smile that makes her believe that he believes it but Ingrid is not always kind to herself. It sounds too saccharine. It sounds too close to something else.
She was there for him during his time of need. As he was for her. It is nothing more than that.
No one accounts for war. Despite all this time spent training for battle, gearing to be soldiers, there was always the understanding that it would not be needed.
It turns out, they were wrong.
Too many things happen in too little time. Ingrid has no more youthful innocence to dwell on happy academy days by Sylvain’s side. She tosses the locked box of her complicated relationship with Sylvain onto a shelf somewhere to collect dust and focuses instead on her lance.
It is easier to do when they are all scattered. It is easier to read carefully benign letters from him than to see his face.
Her father presses her harder than ever to marry, too worried about their rapidly dwindling resources. It is harder to dodge now that Ingrid is at home again. Before, she could burn letters or forget to pen replies.
Now, more than ever, there is a sense of urgency.
Ingrid is saved only because there are few suitors in war. Most of them are conscripted or playing careful games of false neutrality in an attempt to save their hides. That is enough to convince Ingrid that they are not worthy of her attention.
Her father is a good and loyal man who loves her. She is grateful for this. She is lucky for this but she also knows that this cannot last forever.
But perhaps it will last long enough. She can hope for that now. Some days, it is the only thing she can hope for.
Ingrid only sees Sylvain a few times a year in their time after the Academy. They are all very brief encounters. Twice, she aids him in battle at his request. Most of the time, he comes to the Estate to talk politics with her father and stays in the guest room down the hall. They spend what little time they have catching up over tea.
It is easy companionship when he comes. Her heart doesn’t ache when she sees him. It is only careful happy warmth she feels when she meets his tired beautiful eyes.
She thinks, at the end of each of his visits, that she has done it. That space and time and age has finally done it. That she loves him but no longer in a way that pains her. That the world is upside down but at least her heart is not.
Ingrid thinks, this is finally enough.
She is wrong.