Work Text:
Hours until Sylvain quits: 6
This is how this year ends.
It does not end, as Sylvain would have believed some time ago, with his untimely yet well-deserved death — though it surely is something akin to that, on an overly-dramatic, metaphorical level. It does not end with the total collapse of the basis of their worldwide economy model, nor does it end with the umpteenth apocalypse the lunatic on the second floor of his building predicted a couple months ago. Sylvain counts his blessings: at least it does not end with another girl slapping him in the face like last year did, or with his therapist telling him he’s a hopeless cause and should just completely remove himself from the rest of society and go build his own self-sustaining farm in the Alps, like he’s feared-slash-sometimes-dreamt she would.
No, this year ends in a different, way sadder fashion. He wishes it was his usual, dramatic self talking, wishes it wouldn’t feel somehow as devastating as it does. He wishes he hadn’t just realized, now that he’s sitting at his desk on December 25th, alone in the office, that perhaps the emotions he’d kept locked in weren’t just some kind of passing fancy he’d get over as he usually does, out of sight one day, out of mind the next.
This is how this year ends: with a box of chocolates, and a take care farewell card, and having never kissed Felix Hugo Fraldarius.
***
Days until Sylvain quits: 25
“So.”
Sylvain glances up from his computer screen to wild red curls and sparkling blue eyes and a smile that sings trouble. “Yes, Annette?”
Sylvain can tell from the way her hands are folded over her hips that she’s trying her hardest not to dance in excitement. Her smile grows as wide as her voice gets quiet. “Felix is your secret Santa this year.”
“Oh my god, Annette?! I’m not supposed to know—”
“Keep quiet!” she yells, and half the open space turns to them with daggers in their eyes. “Sorry, sorry! Anyway, who did you get?”
Sylvain glances at the crumpled slip of paper he’s thrown over the blanket of post-it notes that covers his desk. “I’m not supposed to say,” he starts, and Annette gives him that look, the one that shines the hue of disappointment and utterly impartial judgement. “Fine. I got Hubert.”
Annette’s face twists as though she’s eaten a badly-seasoned meal. “Sylvain,” she starts, and she curls the L around her tongue like a whip, “don’t tell me you’re fine with that?”
Sylvain projects as much outrage as he can through the rose-gold glint of his work glasses. Is the kind, apparently not-so-innocent Annette offering that he cheats?! Should he remind her this isn’t very Christmas-spirit of her? Plus, Sylvain actually likes Hubert. He likes him the same way one likes a coworker who once threatened to burn his “rich-boy, yet still synthetic and therefore flammable” clothes the last time he tried for a joke at his expense, the same way one likes a coworker whose favorite pastime is following each of Sylvain’s remarks with an Are you certain about that? even when he actually agrees: from a respectable distance.
“I like Hubert,” he persists, forgetting about the Christmas spirit part.
“Oh my god, he’s developed Stockholm syndrome— you know you don’t have to lie just because you work for Edelgard, right?”
“Ferdinand likes Hubert.”
“One: Ferdinand likes everyone. Two: all the more reason why I must intervene,” and Sylvain can hear the period at the end of her sentence like he hears the way his paper crinkles under her short, manicured fingers.
He watches her walk off like one walks off to war, chin raised high in victory and the prospect of crushing enemies and bathing in their blood. She’s already flitting about desks like a devious fairy, giving polite smiles and good conversations to their poor, unknowing coworkers. It’s easy to forget she knows everything going on in the office; Sylvain found himself spilling some juicy gossip to her half a dozen times without prompting, merely because she looks unthreatening and inviting and like she’ll actually keep quiet.
It’s easy to forget she knows about his crush on the pretty, aloof, prettily aloof IT guy at the back of the office.
Said IT guy’s gaze drifts towards Sylvain’s desk all day long; Sylvain’s certain he would have guessed Felix was his secret santa only because of that, hadn’t Annette been there. Their eyes meet a couple of times, and Sylvain’s too busy melting away like honey in the bergamot tea of his irises to do what he usually does — to throw him a wink or two just to watch him turn away in embarrassment, to type a joke in a private message on their messaging app and hear Felix hide his laughter behind his hand to disguise it as a cough, to dream about asking Ashe to switch places for the rest of the month so that Sylvain can spend the rest of his working days in Felix and his infamous temper’s immediate vicinity.
He hears Dorothea snap a couple of pictures from her phone. No doubt these will go onto his own personal wall of shame, the #felix-free Slack channel the whole marketing team created to document every moment Sylvain spends suffering from his crush. “Ferdie says you look, I quote, dumb, but not as dumb as Felix.”
“Tell him I hope he got Edelgard.” Sylvain slides his headphones onto his ears and does not talk to anyone for the rest of the day. He removes them at 5:34pm precisely, and sees Annette seated comfortably on the edge of his desk, having pushed to the side some of his perfectly-organized pen pots. There’s a neatly-folded slip of paper near his hand; when he flips it open, the name Felix is written in Dimitri’s flawless handwriting.
“Easy.”
His smirk cuts into his face. “How many people did you ask?”
“A couple”, she lies, obvious; Sylvain stares right into her eyes, until her cheeks flush in scarlet sage fields. “Okay. Like, eight people.”
“Who did Ferdinand get?”
Annette grins with the pride of a job well done. “Edelgard.”
***
Days until Sylvain quits: 18
Now, if only Sylvain knew what to actually get Felix.
“Just give him a kiss,” Hapi insists one day at lunch, her uncaring mouth full of raspberries. Sylvain kicks her under the table for her trouble, except Hapi kicks harder, and he’s left with the shape of her heel on his jeans that he can already feel bruising on his calf.
“You can ask Ignatz for help,” Mercedes says through the vapor fluming out of her tea mug when Sylvain’s on his third coffee break of the day, and Sylvain’s about to ask why he’d ask their graphic designer, of all people, until— “I’m sure he’d be glad to help you design a date voucher.” Sylvain doesn’t know what’s worse: the fact that she’s so obviously making fun of him, or the fact that no one understands this except him and he receives a very serious, helpful email from Ignatz at 5:47pm asking him about the aforementioned date voucher, followed by a list of his prices, I’m looking forward to your reply, Best, Ignatz.
Scratch that. He knows what’s the absolute worst, and it’s receiving a carefully handwritten, alphabetized list from Edelgard-fucking-Hresvelg herself, listing all of Felix’s interests as told by Dimitri, who also happens to be their CEO as well as Felix’s long-time childhood friend, and who Sylvain deduces is now painfully aware of Sylvain’s hopeless crush on someone he probably knew as a baby picking at his nose. Sylvain notices the list includes sharp swords, ten different kinds of meat, “the animes”, being overly competitive at board games, and cats. He doesn’t know what to think about that.
He imagines Dimitri has known for longer than Sylvain thought; after all, he always tries to make them work on projects together somehow, although Sylvain already has plenty of occasions to write content that Felix will have to put on the website. And it’s not only Dimitri: Sylvain doesn’t understand why the whole office seems so invested into his stupid infatuation. It’s been this way for close to a year — ever since Felix arrived to the company, in fact, even though they only became closer a couple of months afterwards, an easy friendship kept up by three to four cigarettes a day and the dozen newsletters per month they have to format together and Sylvain’s numerous, email-styled cries for help because he can’t manage for the life of him to understand how the back-office works.
Along the months, as Sylvain’s crush grew into one of these numerous feelings he hated not having control over, Sylvain had discovered that Felix lived in his neighborhood, and they’d started commuting together: an accidental once-or-twice-a-week soon became every morning and evening, thrown-out greetings as they ran to catch the next metro giving way to friendly waves and cigarette-smoked waits for each other at the top of the stairs. That had been when Dedue had started putting them together on the calendar for the weeks they’d have to take care of general office maintenance — mostly so he himself didn’t have to do it alongside Felix, realistically, but Sylvain always wondered whether Dedue was also trying to help, in his own way.
Bullshit. Sylvain doesn’t need help. Sylvain needs to be put out of his misery. Sylvain needs to suck it up, and Sylvain needs to tell Felix about all the things he never had the guts to tell him before so Felix can properly reject him without taking the risk of hurting the company atmosphere, now that Sylvain’s leaving anyway, and Sylvain needs to laugh at that because he’ll never see him again and he’ll never talk to him ever again anyway, and Sylvain needs to delete his contact from his phone and move on to the next one, like he’s always done before.
(As though you’ll be able to move on from this, a voice inside his head tells him; as though you’ll be able to forget the first and last time you’ve ever felt this way. Sylvain shushes the voice, locks his feelings down in the bottom of his chest, smothers them under handfuls of cold, cold snow the way Miklan used to do.)
So yes, that’s Sylvain’s game plan. He says as much to Ingrid when he leaves a little earlier than usual to browse around overcrowded, over-expensive shops for the perfect gift, which he’s decided should somehow involve both swords and cats.
Ingrid laughs to his face, or that’s the impression he gets from where he hears her laugh into his ear from his phone speaker, so it doesn’t have quite the same impact. It’s still devastating, though, in the way only Ingrid’s mocking laughters can be, because he never thought he’d have to ask Ingrid for crush advice, of all things.
“You know what— I don’t need your opinion. Just help me pick something, Ingrid.”
“You can always give him a kiss,” she answers through her fit. He hangs up.
***
Days until Sylvain quits: 14
They leave the office at 7pm, snowflakes dotting the night sky and dyed streetlight-gold.
“It’s snowing,” Felix says next to him as though it’s not obvious enough, but there’s something in his voice like preserved memories, a hint of childlike wonder. Sylvain doesn’t tease him over it, not when it’s one of the only times he’s seen Felix with this kind of expression; he quietly basks in it instead, like one basks into winter sunlight on cold, dry February days.
“Do you like snow?”
“I guess I don’t mind it,” Felix answers, ever the contrarian, and Sylvain laughs until Felix buries his nose in the huge, woolen scarf hanging around his head. The flush of the cold reaches the tip of his ears. “Annette, Dorothea, you two have one minute to pack up or we’re leaving without you!”
Annette lets out an indignant yelp that echoes inside the office, and screams something that sounds like you wouldn’t dare lock us in! from around a mouthful of leftover cake from Bernadetta’s birthday office party. The keys to the office jingle in Dorothea’s hand as she walks out, her gaze as teasing as her words when she sees Felix all bundled up into his winter coat and muffler, you’re so cute when you’re cold!, until they have to rush to close up the office when Felix starts power-walking away in embarrassment.
Annette makes them go the long way around to the metro as an excuse to talk to them more, her gloved hand slipped around Felix’s arm with the camaraderie and comfort only a feeling of complete impunity can bring on. Sylvain helps Dorothea brainstorm out loud her gift ideas for Dedue, ranging from star-shaped cake molds and handwritten recipe cards to vinyl-record coasters to a simple, huge jar of farmhouse honey, until they reach the metro stairs and the girls wave them goodbye on the rest of their own walk home. Sylvain doesn’t bother talking so much with Felix; it’s easier to handle, somehow, effortless, the quiet contentment when they’re alone together that settles into the air like exhaled vapor. The rush of the train coming into the station as they laugh about the thirty minutes Felix had spent trying to get the printer to work from Sylvain’s computer. The blaring alarm and closing doors as Sylvain complains about the last-minute job he’s had to do for Lorenz. The rhythmic, beating roll of wheels onto railways that echoes Sylvain’s heart as Felix laughs his lighter, softer laughter.
There’s a drop of melted snow trickling down from his bangs onto his nose, and Felix makes a face. “Ugh. I take back what I said earlier— I hate snow.” Sylvain laughs in turn, louder than the disembodied voice announcing the station names, and Felix’s expression turns from annoyed to curious. “Do you like snow?”
The question takes him aback, just a little. He hides it under one of his usual teasing smiles. “Why do you ask?”
Felix’s cheeks grow a darker shade of peach. “I just realized— I never did ask you if you liked snow.”
Sylvain doesn’t. Too many bad memories from when he spent winter over winter in the Gautier chalet in the Alps, one night entertaining his father’s rich, opportunistic guests, another walking back there through the blizzard when his brother once again decided to leave him to die in the snowstorm outside. He remembers Felix’s face at the sight of the flakes, that speechless sigh that spoke of wonderful childhoods and loving families and warm Christmases, and decides this will remain a conversation for later, if ever.
“It’s pretty. And I really like skiing.”
Felix huffs. “I prefer snowboarding.”
“Why, because it looks cooler?”
Sylvain’s laughter fills the metro wagon again as Felix sputters, and Felix’s eyes flit outside as though to check how much longer he’ll have to handle Sylvain’s casual teasing—
“Fuck! We need to go—”
The metro doors close at the exact moment Sylvain realizes they’re missing their stop.
Sylvain spends the whole minute between the two stations listening to Felix complain in quick succession about the number of stairs they’ll have to climb to reach the top of the Montmartre hill, the below-freezing temperatures they’ll have to valiantly brave to make it to their neighborhood, and the fact that they won’t be home before another thirty minutes. He can see the other people in the wagon fume like metaphorical chimneys, and as the voice calls Anvers, decides to drag Felix out by the sleeve before someone decides to murder them in cold blood.
We’ll take the scenic route, Sylvain tells him. The word is appropriate, he thinks: it looks like an old movie scene, the streetlights dyeing the cobblestone and pavement in sepia, each footstep making a satisfying crunch in the freshly-fallen snow as they make their way through the smaller streets, Felix’s hair like a night sky under the white starglow of the Christmas fairy lights that hang in braids above them. They let the bright lights around the Sacré-Coeur guide them home through the crowds of people going shopping for presents on the main boulevard, before they reach the calm and comfort of the market squares, the metronome of distant conversation and children’s laughter dotting their own like a canon until they enter the lonely cable car carrying them on top of the hill.
It’s when they’re suddenly, blessedly alone, that Sylvain truly notices how comfortable silence is with Felix Fraldarius. It settles over him warm as a fireplace, when they sit down in the funicular; perhaps it’s only Felix’s warmth bleeding through his clothes and into Sylvain’s space, sitting thigh to thigh and watching the car climb up, the outside lights flickering in slow-motion like tiny suns. The view of the city at night is breathtaking, enough for Sylvain to snap a couple of pictures with his phone, distant window lights like beacons in a sea of smoky dark blues and blacks on the screen.
He feels Felix watching him, and suddenly finds the need to fill up the empty space with his voice, like he so often does. “I love the city at night. Walking around like this. It’s… beautiful.”
“It is,” Felix agrees, and when Sylvain turns around he’s looking right at him, studies him through dark-coffee eyes. “Do you often come up here? To walk around, I mean.”
Sylvain hums. “Not as often as I’d like, but I do, sometimes.”
“Huh. I never saw you.” There’s a startle like a flutter over Felix’s face, and he flees Sylvain’s gaze, looks down at the city below. “I usually come up here to jog. But I don’t look at the horizon, or anything.”
“Maybe you did see me, then,” Sylvain says through a smile. “You just haven’t paid attention.”
“Yeah, probably,” Felix admits, and looks back to Sylvain, his expression something Sylvain can’t quite decipher. “... Maybe I should look more.” He looks like he’s about to say something else, but there’s a shiver running through him and he shakes, brings his hands in front of his face to blow on them. “Fuck, my hands are cold?”
“Really?” Sylvain’s feet lead him to Felix, one, two, three steps — and it’s complete instinct, the feeling that makes him reach out and take Felix’s hands in his. “Wha— Damn, they really are cold!” Sylvain lets the cold from Felix’s hands fade against his skin, and feels the sharp inhale Felix breathes through the grip of Felix’s fingers on his.
They’re close, so close, and Felix looks right at him, and Sylvain looks down at the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the thin line of his nose, the graceful dip of his lips—
He lets go of Felix’s hands like they’ve burned him, looking everywhere but at him. “Let’s get a coffee to warm you up.”
“How the fuck are your hands so warm?” Felix asks as they go back to the bright, tungsten light of the busy streets, getting in line at a takeaway crepe shop to grab some overpriced coffee.
“I honestly don’t know, though I can be hired as your personal heater if needed.” He throws Felix a wink, and delights at the snort Felix lets out even as he rolls his eyes before he reaches the cashier. The coffee he gets is ridiculously small, a tiny cup with half an espresso, and doesn’t seem to warm his hands even a little bit. Felix insists it warms him from the inside, though, and curses the sugary abomination (“it’s called a caramel macchiato, Felix, get your facts straight”) Sylvain orders the whole way back. They stroll down the tinier streets through the scent of wet earth and upturned, dead leaves, the air dry like stricken matches and slow-burning embers and smoke. The wind smells of pot-au-feu and the comfort of soup as they reach their own street, their feet crushing the blanket of leaves and snow over the pavement as they’re about to go their separate ways. Sylvain’s cup is long empty, and he wishes the street stretched longer, only to walk alongside Felix some more, hear him complain about the weather, take his hands in his.
“I’m going to grab a pizza before I get home.”
Sylvain feels his gaze dance with amusement as he looks to Felix. “Seems like a good plan.”
Felix stops dead in his tracks, his eyes looking to the ground. The tip of his toe plays with a loose leaf as he clears his throat. “Do you want to eat pizza?”
“Like, in theory?”
“No, you idiot. In practice. Now. With me. At my place.”
Felix looks everywhere but at him, and Sylvain realizes he knows this pattern of behavior: it’s the one he falls into when he’s at one of his father’s dinners, making small talk as his eyes look everywhere else for a chance to escape whatever deathly boring conversation he just fell into. It borders on painful, the way his heart drops to his stomach. Felix isn’t trying to offer him a proper dinner date; he’s trying to be polite to his coworker, backtracking after realizing it was a social faux-pas not to propose.
Sylvain’s no longer hungry. “Ah— Sorry, I already have something at home. But maybe next time?” he adds when he sees Felix looking at him again, that unreadable expression back over his face like a shadow, like a mask.
“Yeah,” he ends up saying. “Maybe next time.”
Sylvain replays the words in his head as he walks back the rest of the way, alone, dissects them until he doesn’t know if there truly was disappointment in Felix’s voice, or if it was just a figment of his own projection.
***
Days until Sylvain quits: 10
See, Sylvain doesn’t mind people, usually. He’s a people person, a social animal, the kind of guy who feels better when there is a non-zero amount of other humans around him at all times. He’s a Gemini, for fuck’s sake. He gets random panic attacks when he’s alone in the dark in his flat because Ingrid is at her girlfriend’s, like every normal person ever.
Here, though, this is too much.
There are way too many people to the square meter for comfort. Groups of teenagers are walking around the mall with boba in hard for the sole sake of walking around the mall with boba in hand, couples are fighting over whether to get their great-great-aunt another potted plant or a pair of ugly socks and call it a day, families with screaming children are crowding the toy store knowing damn well they’re bringing in 85% of the yearly revenue and acting accordingly (so, like assholes).
He weaves through the sea of customers in the biggest store of the mall trying to find random gift ideas, strolls from the books section to the photography aisle and phases through the computer section, because how cliché would it be to offer their IT guy a mousepad or some stupid stuff like this? He lets himself drift to the less-crowded areas, around the tabletop games shelf and into the records area of the store, rows of vinyl LPs standing in their twenty-first century loneliness, and he’s about to turn back when—
His feet take him to Felix’s side, looking devastatingly handsome in a black trenchcoat and his hair loose around his shoulders, twirling a record in his hands, deep in thought — and Sylvain José Gautier wouldn’t be Sylvain José Gautier if he didn’t take advantage of this coincidence, would he?
He leans in over Felix’s shoulder, slow and quiet. “I don’t know who Phoebe Bridgers is, but I’m sure she has nothing on Taylor Swift.”
He finishes the sentence even though Felix startles at Phoebe and almost punches him at she has, before Felix apologizes in passing through his rant of curses. It’s absolutely worth pretending he doesn’t know who Phoebe Bridgers is. Sylvain sees moms cover their kids’ ears from the corner of his eye, so it’s another win in his book. “Fuck, Sylvain, what the fuck?”
“I’m sorry, I swear—”
“I thought you were.” His hands do a kind of wave that’s less a wave and more a windmill. “A creep, or something.”
“I can get you a coffee, to apologize?”
“Fuck off,” Felix says through the ghost of a smile, and Sylvain knows he doesn’t mean it.
Sylvain looks at the LP in Felix’s hands again, at the way Felix’s hands tighten around it, as though to protect something precious.
“Your secret santa gift?” he asks, and doesn’t really mean it.
“My brother’s,” Felix answers.
Sylvain hums in understanding. They’ve talked about their families, before; it had been one of the subjects on which they’d started bonding, at one of the office’s afterwork parties — the complicated family dynamics brought about absent fathers and dead mothers, the bitterness with which they both talked about their brothers and things they should have been and things they shouldn’t have, the pretenses of perfection they both upheld as a blade, as a shield. “I didn’t know your brother was into that type of music.”
“Me neither,” Felix says, bitter as oversteeped tea, “but I imagine there’s a first for everything. I can always give it to you if he doesn’t want it.”
Sylvain doesn’t own a turntable. Sylvain owns a pair of airpods and a premium Spotify account. “Fuck yeah,” he answers, and hates how excited he is at the prospect of buying a vinyl record player with his final work compensation.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Looking for a gift.”
Felix raises an eyebrow. “What kind of gift?”
“What’s your favorite band?”
Felix’s eyebrow raises higher, but he still answers, which means that he must have taken Sylvain’s inelegant way of asking him what kind of gift he’d like as a sudden change in topic, which in turn means Felix has no idea Sylvain is his secret santa. Probably.
Sylvain grabs a random novel to pretend he’s buying something for Ingrid, and follows Felix to the cashier lines as he talks about the farewell party he’s never going to have the chance to throw; he reminisces how drunk they both were at Yuri’s farewell party this summer, how they’d been kicked out of the bar with Dorothea and Hilda and a couple other coworkers at 2am because the bartenders were closing up, how Felix smelt of bitter oranges because of all the spritz Hilda had forced him to drink. There’s so much laughter in Felix’s voice now, as they chat, showing on his face in sunrays at the corners of his mouth that Sylvain wants to kiss off.
“What are you doing, after?”
Sylvain hums. “You mean, after I quit?” Felix nods, and Sylvain takes a deep breath. “I… want to write a book.”
Felix’s eyes widen a fraction, turn smoky quartz to amber. “What kind of book?”
“Something about the complicated relationships between people. Family, lovers, friends… I don’t really have a plot yet.”
Felix looks down at the book in Sylvain’s hands. “I never liked reading much. But… I’d read yours, if you needed the support.”
There’s a sudden warmth flooding Sylvain’s chest when he answers. “Yeah. I’d like that. Well— I’ll invite you at the release party, at the very least.”
Felix snorts as he greets the cashier. “I think we’ll definitely hang out before that. After you leave.”
Sylvain’s book drops onto the cashier belt.
Felix would like to see him again.
Outside of a professional context.
Sylvain’s pretty sure he blacks out, because when he comes to, he’s standing outside the store with a book in his hand and Felix waiting for him in the doorway to the nearest café.
Felix’s smirk cuts Sylvain’s heart in two. “What, don’t tell me you forgot you owe me coffee?”
Sylvain’s heart beats along his footsteps as he follows Felix inside.
***
Days until Sylvain quits: 4
Sylvain is four drinks into the middle of their annual ugly Christmas sweater contest, and, as Hilda would say, he’s living his best life.
They’ve pushed the lunch table against a wall in the main room and spread a reddish piece of fabric that they pretend is a red carpet; Annette grips the mic they hooked to the TV like it’s her life-support system, yelling over the Christmas playlist Hilda plays in the background as she calls the name of the different contestants. They’re all putting up a good fight: Dorothea looks regal as she strolls down the catwalk with a sweater featuring a reindeer with a red nose that lights up at completely random times through the almost-dead batteries in it, singing an impressive rendition of All I Want For Christmas Is You all the while, and Sylvain would almost think she’d win if he wasn’t wearing the obviously worst sweater of the lot — a very tasteful, black-and-white sweater where three reindeers are mounting each other, with the caption “Santa’s favorite ho”.
“Next, my favorite,” Annette screams, “worn by the handsome, wonderful, almost-dead-to-us Sylvain José Gautier!”
The not-praise makes him strut down the room with the confidence of his mediocre father, Annette commenting his every move like he’s in the middle of a beauty contest and vying for the crown. He lets the sweater ride up his stomach as he runs a hand through his hair, exaggerated and dramatic, and the crowd of his coworkers wolf-whistles until he reaches the other side — Felix is standing against the farther wall looking anywhere from incredibly miserable to extremely entertained, and Sylvain, in an excessive access of self-confidence and self-hatred, throws him a wink and blows him a kiss before turning around with a flourish. It’s unfortunate, he thinks, that he cannot see Felix’s reaction, but it must be good, because Annette suddenly trades her witty commentary for hysterical laughter that only stops when Hilda takes over and calls for Dedue to come down.
Dedue wins. Sylvain would think it’s a travesty if Dedue didn’t have a sweater with a gingerbread man saying “Let’s get baked” that Dimitri almost positively bought him in complete seriousness.
They clear what remains of the snacks on the table; the food is almost all gone, by now, the oysters and foie gras toasts and pieces of flavorful quiches nowhere to be seen, the wine bottles on the table on their way to emptiness. He helps Bernadetta and Mercedes bring out the cakes the latter baked, in all their deadly-sweet, eclectic-taste, elaborated-frosting glory, and sees Felix pretend-retch from the corner of his eye until he’s called to help cut the cakes, and starts wielding the only good knife they have in the office kitchen with the precision of a surgeon. Their fingers brush when Felix hands him his plate. Sylvain feels like a fucking schoolgirl.
“Merry Christmas, everyone,” Dimitri says into the mic as Annette devours a third piece of cake, his hair shining golden and bright under the Christmas tree lights. “I’m incredibly happy to get to work with a team as wonderful as all of you every day, and although we’ll soon say goodbye to one of ours, I’m thankful with all the memories I get to make every day with you. To another great year for us!”
The office echoes him, clinking glasses together and sipping on champagne until Dimitri clears his throat again. “Now, for what everyone has been waiting for: let’s open the Secret Santa gifts!”
Everyone gets their present from under the Christmas tree as Dimitri calls them; eight people in, Sylvain’s hands are starting to hurt from each time they’ve had to clap along Dimitri’s own enthusiastic applause when someone opens their gift, though the hurt completely fades when Edelgard asks who got her such a thoughtful gift as a pair of silk gloves and Ferdinand has to power through a forced, twitchy, diplomatic smile. Annette quietly high-fives Sylvain out of sight.
“Now— Felix!”
Sylvain’s back straightens against his will — talk about acting casual, Annette whispers, and he elbows her in the arm — as Felix reaches for his present and unceremoniously tears out the paper Sylvain spent thirty minutes perfectly taping over it. The vinyl record is on the wrong side, tracklist first, but Felix’s eyes whip to Sylvain so fast Sylvain fears he’s hurt himself.
“It’s you, isn’t it.”
A slow, fond smile crawls onto Sylvain’s face — he’s glad Felix remembers that time in the store, too, as insignificant as it must have seemed to him. Sylvain’s hands cross behind his head, relieved that Felix hasn’t looked into the vinyl sleeve itself yet. He wants Felix to read the card alone, possibly while he listens to the recond and the live rendition of Slow Show for best effect. He wants it to matter, just a tiny bit, even though they won’t see each other ever again after tonight.
Felix thanks Sylvain with a quick, one-armed hug that smells like pine trees and lavender, and still everything slows to a stop — Dimitri’s voice, the other people stepping forward to pick up their gifts, the cheers and claps — when Felix whispers a small, sincere thank you along the skin of his neck.
Sylvain doesn’t have time to respond; Dimitri calls him up, and Sylvain steps, decided, to pick up Felix’s gift to him.
It’s a small, thick package, wrapped in kraft paper and a red cotton thread that Sylvain unwinds and curls around his fingers. His fingers are careful as he removes the tape from the corners of the wrapping paper so it doesn’t tear, reverent as they slide out the present from the packet —
In his hand, there’s an old-fashioned notebook. It looks handcrafted, and Sylvain caresses the edges of the cotton pages as he opens the leather cover. Felix’s handwriting is carved into the first page, midnight ink over ivory:
For your first novel.
Sylvain turns to Felix, who immediately flees his gaze, looks around at the rest of their coworkers. He mustn’t quite like what he sees on their faces — Sylvain doesn’t see, Sylvain doesn’t care to see, too busy looking at Felix and how beautiful he is in the Christmas tree lights — because he glances at Sylvain again, peach flush on his cheeks bringing out the gold in his irises.
“Merry Christmas,” he says, and Sylvain gives him that same, one-armed hug in turn, whispers thank you in the space between them when he pulls away.
Sylvain ends up leaving the party after Dimitri’s fifth song at karaoke — one of the neighbors stormed into the office courtyard screaming at them to make less noise — a cigarette between his lips and Felix by his side.
“You sure you don’t wanna walk back home?”
“Sylvain,” Felix says, and he’s drunk enough for his voice to be louder than usual, ringing out into the empty street, “it’s almost midnight. We’re drunk, but not to the point where we’ll puke in the cab. It’s fine.”
They don’t puke, indeed. They do annoy the cab driver by laughing too loud when Felix imitates Dimitri singing Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life, tone-deafness included. Sylvain overtips him when he drops them off at Felix’s address.
“Wait— did you forget your coat in the car?”
Sylvain looks down at his sweater, at the obnoxious reindeer threesome. Through his drunken haze, they seem to mock him. “No, I— I think I forgot it at the office?”
Felix’s eyes go wide as saucers. “How the hell did you not notice?”
“I’m used to being cold,” Sylvain eludes. “I’m okay, don’t worry.”
“Unbelievable,” Felix spits as he unrolls his scarf from around his neck, before wrapping it around Sylvain shoulders.
It’s way too narrow to cover Sylvain’s chest, or arms; he feels Felix’s fingers against his neck when he wraps it around his throat instead, pictures him caressing his nape in other, less chaste circumstances. Felix’s hands arrange the scarf around Sylvain’s neck, linger around the ends.
“Thank you,” Sylvain says. “Both for the scarf and the gift. It’s kinda strange — thinking it’s the last time we’ll see each other.”
Felix huffs. “If you think I won’t ask for my scarf back, you’re delusional.” There’s a hint of a smile on his face when Sylvain snorts in laughter. “But… Yeah. It wasn’t bad, having you around.” His thumbs are playing with the edges of his scarf, brushing against Sylvain’s chest. “I’ll miss you. Maybe.”
“I’ll miss you too,” Sylvain laughs, tries to pretend it’s less true than it is, until he notices Felix’s hands still haven’t left his scarf, until he watches Felix’s eyes boring into his, until he sees how close they’re standing together, on the edge of the pavement, and Sylvain realizes he hasn’t known need before this very moment, hasn’t known the overwhelming, desperate desire of leaning down and closing the distance between them, hasn’t known the lack of Felix’s lips against his and the urge to remedy this.
A sudden gust of wind blows past, and violent shivers throw Sylvain out of his trance.
Felix startles away, drops his hands from his scarf. “You should get home,” he says in a rush, like the words have been punched out of him with the fist of reluctance. “You’ll catch a cold. I’ll— I’ll see you around.”
Felix steps one, two, three steps back, his back against the building door, and Sylvain knows he’s lost his only chance.
“Yeah. See you around, I guess.”
He leaves before he has to hear Felix open and close his door.
***
Hours until Sylvain quits: 15
He brings Ingrid and her family enough tea to last a year.
“Merry Christmas,” he says.
“You work for a tea company,” she answers. She lets him in anyway.
This Christmas is spent like all the ones since his father disowned him: at the Galatea household, laughing at Ingrid’s dad’s jokes, charming his way into helping Ingrid’s mom in the kitchen, trading stories of wild parties with her little brother Thibault and talking about poetry and books with her older brother Basile and telling everyone embarrassing stories about his life as Ingrid’s roommate while Ingrid herself looks on in defeat and betrayal and bitter, glacial vengeance.
Like all the other Christmases, Sylvain and Ingrid end up on the living room couch watching old Christmas movies while Sylvain complains about his love life. This time, though, he thinks Ingrid gets how serious (or serious-er) it is, because she doesn’t laugh as she tends to do; she listens, and she keeps quiet, and she understands, lays a hand on his back and rubs soothing circles there as he talks about Felix, until she falls asleep with her legs across Sylvain’s lap.
Felix sends him a picture, at 1:47am, of Sylvain’s gift turning onto his record player, and Sylvain, through his five-glasses-of-champagne-and-six-glasses-of-wine haze, opens his Spotify account.
He sends Felix a playlist at 2:03pm. It has every single song that makes Sylvain think of him in it. It’s called and the road not taken looks real good now, because Sylvain had to force some Taylor Swift in there. It’s, overall, truly pathetic.
At 2:58am, he opens Felix’s notebook, and starts writing.
***
Hours until Sylvain quits: 6
This is how this year ends: with a box of chocolates, and a take care farewell card, and having never kissed Felix Hugo Fraldarius.
The card is cute, all things considered; Sylvain’s thumb runs along the details of the linen paper, over the printed Merry cat-mas and happy new year! and the little drawing of a black cat with a Santa hat, flips the card open and feels the places where his coworkers buried the pen too deep into the paper. Felix’s note is the worst offender, stark black ink chiseled into white: I almost want to give you a hug, he writes. Almost. P.S.: drink some real coffee. There’s no signature. Sylvain would be creeped out at how easily he recognized his handwriting if he wasn’t already busy sighing like a fairytale maiden losing her star-crossed lover. You’re the worst romcom protagonist I have ever met and I love you so much, reads Dorothea’s message, and he’s glad he’s alone, for once — at least she isn’t here to notice that the box of chocolates lies on his desk already half-eaten and laugh at his misery.
Another sigh like a gust of winter wind, tumbling out of his mouth so loud he thinks the door slammed open, one last glance at the word hug as his glasses slip further down his nose, and he rises for another cup of badly-brewed coffee—
Five steps away, Felix stands in a flurry of reddened cheeks and sharp irises.
His hair in undone at the seams, stygian strands flying away from his ponytail, and Sylvain wonders if he’s run here; he flees Sylvain’s gaze and the smile that threatens to slash Sylvain’s face in half as he tosses his coat over a random chair.
Sylvain, because he’s both incredibly smart and unbearably stupid, says “But you’re not working, today…?” instead of a greeting. The sentence trails, uncertain, out of his mouth and into the space between them.
Felix takes one, two steps towards him. “I— I forgot something.”
“Oh.” Sylvain probably visibly deflates, because Felix takes another, more worried step.
“I listened to it,” Felix says in a rush.
“The album?”
“The playlist.”
Oh no. Sylvain tries to convince himself he’s going to act cool if he props himself against his desk. His hands tremble ever so slightly when he puts them on the edge, the very picture of forced casualness. “Oh yeah? What did you think about…”
The words fade when Felix slides close enough to brush, vanish onto Felix’s lips when he kisses him.
It’s instinct, truly, the way Sylvain’s hands reach for Felix’s nape and the crux of his waist, pulling him closer and closer until Felix’s fingers dig into his arm. Felix kisses him slow as a dance, light until it isn’t, tentative brushes of lips turning more urgent, more intense as Felix’s knuckles come up to tangle into Sylvain’s hair, the line of his body sinking into Sylvain like one sinks into sea. Sylvain, too, takes his time, learns the subtle pain of every graze of teeth, studies the way Felix’s voice goes high and low as his fingers travel the roadmap of his ribs, decodes the exact taste of Felix’s tongue with his, and when Felix laughs against Sylvain’s mouth he swallows the sound for safe, selfish keeping.
There are things he wants to say — things he’ll tell him, later: you taste like every great coffee I’ve never had. I want to play the sighs you leave against my lips and make them scratch like a record. I wrote about you at 3am and I’m scared I could write about you for the rest of my days.
Now, he tells him: “Did you pick the farewell card?”
“If you tell anyone, I’m never kissing you again,” Felix threatens, leaning into yet another kiss.
Sylvain spends his last day at work decidedly not working.
***
Days since Sylvain quit: 6
This is how this year begins.
It does not begin, as Sylvain would have believed some time ago, with his untimely yet well-deserved death. It does not begin with the total collapse of the basis of their worldwide economy model, nor does it begin with the umpteenth apocalypse the lunatic on the second floor of his building predicted a couple months ago. It does not begin with another girl slapping him in the face like last year did, or with his therapist telling him he’s a hopeless cause and should just completely remove himself from the rest of society and go build his own self-sustaining farm in the Alps, like he’s feared-slash-sometimes-dreamt she would.
The wind blows through his hair as he stands on his balcony, glass of champagne in his hand and Felix’s waist under his arm.
“You know,” Felix says, the flush of alcohol rising high on his cheeks, “I’m kinda glad Annette changed my Secret Santa name.”
“She what?!”
“I asked her to.” Before Sylvain has the time to voice how betrayed he feels, Felix adds through a pout: “And I still was the one who had to make a move after that.”
Sylvain’s voice goes an octave higher as their coworkers call the countdown. “How was I supposed to know you were into me?”
Felix has the indecency to look incredibly offended. “You could have just looked?!”
“Felix, I looked at you all the time. Thea had a whole group chat with pictures of me staring at you.”
“This conversation is too embarrassing.”
“You were the one who started it.”
“Sylvain,” Felix begs as he stares straight through him, “please kiss me.”
The clock strikes twelve.
This is how this year begins: with the taste of champagne on his tongue, and Felix’s laughter on his lips, and kissing Felix Hugo Fraldarius.