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The first time Sylvain loses his key, he finds Felix at the training grounds just as he’s putting away the swords and the rest of the equipment, the familiar bright grin on his face tinged with something akin to embarrassment if Felix believed Sylvain still remembered how to feel embarrassed about anything. The truth is that he does, but he’s gotten better at ignoring things like shame in the past few years. It’s not something Felix needs to know about now (or ever, really, if Sylvain has anything to say about it), so he makes up something on the fly--he misplaced his key somewhere between the dining hall and that little garden by the gazebo, the place where he usually meets up with his date; he clocks the second Felix’s expression goes from wary to weary and he knows he’s got it before he even finishes his story.
“Fine, just come with me already.” Felix is already halfway across the grounds, and Sylvain catches up in a few strides, arms resting behind his head in the perfect picture of nonchalance. He doesn’t even try to hide his pleased grin as they make their way towards Felix’s room.
“Aw, come on, Felix. I didn’t even get to the best part!”
“You assume I wanted to hear any part of it to begin with.” Felix’s tone is flat, voice softened by the late hour. “Save it for someone else. Or you can sleep out in the hallway instead.”
It’s an empty threat and they both know it, but Sylvain doesn’t call him out on it--he never does, playing along with the tried and true method that is spinning the story anyway, and suddenly, they’re in front of Felix’s room before he knows it. Sylvain has always been good at that, distracting him and everyone else from the heart of the matter. Felix could force it out of him, but he doesn’t this time. They’re not children anymore, and Felix doesn’t possess the same deft hand as Mercedes or even Sylvain himself when it comes to dealing with these things, not anymore. All of the tears and emotion and tenderness dried up when Glenn died; Sylvain was the only one who didn’t complain about it.
So perhaps this is what he needs: to lie on Felix’s bed and talk and talk as the candle burns low, taking his time circling around before getting to the point. Sylvain’s voice is a familiar tenor in the background, a soothing backdrop to the slick sound of the whetstone over his blade. Felix has never been known for his patience, but he understands the importance of its application. A hunter must wait to lure his prey.
“We head out the day after tomorrow.”
Felix’s movements pause halfway down his sword as he looks up. Sylvain is still on his back beside him, head pillowed on his arms as he watches the shadows play on Felix’s ceiling.
“Back to Gautier.”
Something tenses in Felix’s gut, a chill crawling up his spine.
“What for?”
“Got a letter from Father,” Sylvain says, finally turning his eyes away from the ceiling to meet Felix’s. The hint of shadow beneath Sylvain’s eyes still lingers, despite how he’d been sleeping marginally better in the past week or so since Conand Tower. Felix had that same tenseness in his gut when Byleth had debriefed them, and he couldn’t get the bitter taste out of his mouth the entire time they made their way over, anticipation and apprehension roiling inside him. He knew it was worse for Sylvain--they all did, him and Ingrid and Dimitri. He hated that there was nothing he could say or do except to follow close behind Sylvain, for once keeping all of his attention on him rather than Dimitri. And even in the end, when it was over and all that was left was Sylvain picking up the lance from Miklan’s cold and lifeless body, Felix couldn’t say a word.
What was there left to say? Before the trek back to Garreg Mach, Felix found Sylvain digging a ditch by lamplight outside the tower, his brother’s body spread out on a wheelbarrow next to it. Felix wordlessly joined him and they dug and dug until blisters formed all over their palms and fingers, and they kept going. Sylvain’s face was pale, the shadows throwing his cheekbones in sharp relief; his expression both open and unreadable, and Felix put all his frustration and anger and helplessness into digging that hole, the blade of their shovels striking the dirt in a steady rhythm that continued well into the night. They rolled Miklan’s body into the hole just before first light, shovelling the dirt back on top until all that was left was a mound of upturned soil as Miklan’s legacy.
Miklan didn’t deserve it; he deserved to burn with the rest of his bandit crew until nothing remained. He didn’t deserve this kindness, and he didn’t deserve this effort. Felix still remembered Sylvain’s face during the tail end of his visits to Fraldarius, all the injuries he’d laugh off and pretend were nothing but accidents. Sylvain endured all of that, and he continued to endure it now. He’d stabbed his shovel into the ground and sat down as his shoulders shook, but he didn’t cry; he couldn’t. Felix sat shoulder to shoulder with him as they watched the sunrise. When they got back, Felix took them to Mercedes to heal the blisters and scratches on their hands, and Sylvain pretended like nothing was wrong as he usually did. It took him two days to get over it and Felix found him drunk next to the pond late one night, after he’d snuck back in from a night out in town. Felix had dragged him back to his room and finally, after all that, he cried. And still, Felix couldn’t do anything else but sit next to him as Sylvain tucked his face into his shoulder and fell apart, piece by piece.
Again? He thinks, watching the resigned expression on Sylvain’s face. Was it not enough? Was burying his own brother not enough? Felix thinks about Glenn, thinks about the funeral and how much he’d hated it; he thinks about Sylvain having to unearth all of that up again, reopening a barely closed wound to expose the putrid flesh beneath once more.
“You’re not going alone,” is what he says instead of everything else. Sylvain has the audacity to laugh, something that starts off sheepish before it blooms into something fuller, lighter. It makes Felix bite his tongue against the reflex to snap at him.
“Sorry, sorry,” it’s died down to softer chuckles now, and Sylvain turns his smile on him, wider than it’s been since they got back from that tower. The nights had gotten steadily colder lately but in that moment, Felix didn’t notice the chill.
“It’s just--I haven’t told anyone else yet, and I was gonna ask if you’d come with me but I didn’t know how to go about it. Like, ‘hey, so remember how we buried my brother last week? Well, now I get to go back and clean up that whole mess.’” Felix watches him rub his hand over his face, feels the dredges of that same anger he’d felt a week ago and holds it in his mouth, turns it over and over on his tongue until it becomes smooth. He puts down his sword and turns to face Sylvain completely.
“I’m going.”
He’s seen enough of Sylvain’s smile throughout the years now that he’s learned how to spot the differences. This smile means Sylvain is frustrated; this smile means Sylvain wants to get out of training again; this smile means he actually doesn’t want to smile at all. He hasn’t seen the one Sylvain is giving him now in a long time, like the ones he’d given him when Felix would cry after getting left behind by Glenn, when he’d reach his little arms up for Sylvain to pick him up and hold him. He can’t decide if it hurts more than seeing Sylvain cry.
“Stay the night,” he says instead, turning away to reach for his drawer to pull out an extra blanket. “We’ll find your key in the morning.”
When Felix blows out the candle, he feels Sylvain shift on the bed next to him.
“Hey, Fe?”
“What?”
“Thanks. For going with me.”
He hears the smile in Sylvain’s voice and his face feels unnaturally warm. He blows out a sigh, ruffling the bangs on his forehead and is suddenly glad for the cover of darkness.
“Go to sleep, Sylvain.”
*
In the morning, they didn’t find Sylvain’s key. It was in his pocket all along. Sylvain had the sense to look a little apologetic and although Felix’s first instinct was to snap at him, he remembered the smile on Sylvain’s face the night before, the relief in his voice. Whatever annoyance he’d felt was cooled by it, and in the end they went to the dining hall for breakfast and everything went back to normal for some time.
At least, until Garreg Mach fell and it all went to shit.
*
They’d dug out the wine from the storerooms after laying Rodrigue’s body in the cathedral. Faerghan tradition called for the body to be left out for three days before the burial, candles and oil lamps left burning the entirety of those three days and nights while visitors left little trinkets of sentiment, or more recently, moments of prayer to help ease the dead along their journey. The circumstances are a little different in war where there was not much in the way of many things, but they’d gathered to give Rodrigue a toast, all except for Dimitri. Rodrigue’s body was to be left there before they transferred it to the coffin to be taken back to Fraldarius with Felix, should they survive the war. No one said the last part aloud, but Sylvain knew they were all thinking it.
The wine was tasteless going down, thin as water, and he’d given his shoulder for Ingrid to weep on just like he’d done at Glenn’s funeral. It’d made him feel better back then, being able to do something other than just standing there watching Felix and his tear-free face, waiting for Glenn to be lowered into the ground. Now, it was hard to feel anything at all. Despite it being years ago, it didn’t feel that long in the grand scheme of things--they keep losing things and people since the war started, every day a new body gets added to the toll, some they knew better than others.
And in the end, Felix turned and left the second they were finished, just like he did at Glenn’s funeral.
Garreg Mach has grown colder and draftier in recent months. Sylvain still can’t stand to be in his armor even with the drop in temperature; nothing would ever be colder than the border at Gautier, where it was nothing but white on white and he couldn’t see farther than five feet in front of him if the weather got especially awful. Winter warfare was always in his blood, not whatever temperate shit they have down here in the south.
He leaves his greaves at the foot of the bed and strips down to his undershirt before reaching for the other bottle of wine he filched from the storeroom. There’s a layer of dust over the glass but wine is wine, and the first sip goes down better than the one they’d used to toast with earlier. He thinks Felix might like this one more just as the urge to go looking for him crawls back to the forefront of his mind, but he and Felix are different in the way they take and carry grief: Sylvain always wants to be found, whereas Felix needs to be waited out, coming back on his own terms and on his own time.
So Sylvain waits. He’s always played the long game, and this time is no different.
He’s gotten a third of the way through the bottle when his door nudges open and Felix’s face pops in. He looks windswept, locks of hair falling around his face; a lingering flush high on his cheeks likely from spending all that time at the training grounds. There’s a thin and brittle layer of calm about him as he leans against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest a little tighter than it would after training, as if he’s physically holding himself together. Sylvain’s smile softens as he looks back at Felix’s face, the bottle dangling from his fingers between his knees.
“You stayed out pretty late.”
“Lost my key,” Felix says simply, with a short shrug of his shoulders. Something flickers in his eyes before he glances down, scuffing the tip of his boot against the carpet. There’s a question beneath the statement; Sylvain doesn’t wait for him to ask and simply waves him in with a lazy roll of his wrist, scooting over on the bed to make room for him.
“Well, you better come in then, before you catch a cold.”
Felix settles on the edge of the bed, keeping a healthy distance between them until Sylvain scoffs, reaching out to tug him closer. Aside from the perfunctory grumble, Felix doesn’t fight him, letting himself be pulled in until their knees bump, thighs pressed against each other. Sylvain watches him slowly unclench and unfurl as Felix glances towards the bottle in his hand.
“Have you been drinking this whole time?”
“Mmhm. You want some?” Felix doesn’t respond, but Sylvain offers him the bottle anyway with a grin and a little shake, just enough for the wine to slosh around against the glass. “Come on. It’s better than what they used to toast with earlier.”
Maybe it’s a culmination of everything; not just that day, that week, or that month, but all of it-- the past five years of fighting and searching and more fighting, of losing so much and the prospect of losing even more. But Felix takes the bottle without further protest, staring down the rim of it before taking a swig. His shoulders slump afterwards as if the strings keeping him straight were suddenly cut, and they pass the bottle back and forth, leaning further and further into each other over time until Sylvain feels the sudden weight of Felix’s head on his shoulder. It’s nothing new--they’ve always been close as children, and while Felix had withdrawn into his walls during his academy days, he’d seen Sylvain in his worst moments and found a way to piece him back together anyway. When did they become like this, he thinks to himself. Why did they become like this? He hated the Faerghan tradition of dealing with emotions by not dealing with them at all, the conditioned compulsion to push all of that ugly weakness down and down until the body could no longer hold it within; until it all came gushing out like blood from an open wound, flowing too quickly to stem, too deep to mend. He thinks of Felix returning to Fraldarius and its sprawling grounds after the war, the empty halls and rooms filled with dust and memories in equal measure; both Rodrigue and Glenn, Felix’s past and his future, laid to rest next to his mother in the garden by the pond. The wine turns bitter on Sylvain’s tongue with the next swallow and he’s lost track of what he was talking about, but Felix stays anyway. He stays even if he doesn’t say much as usual, his cheeks slowly turning redder with each pass of the bottle, pliant and warm as he all but curls into Sylvain’s side.
“Come back with me to Fraldarius,” he says, when they’re down to the last few sips of wine. Sylvain looks down at the crown of Felix’s head, watches the way his hair glows almost blue in the candlelight. There’s a funny feeling in Sylvain’s chest, equal parts lighter and heavier, as he nudges Felix’s shoulder with his own.
“Sure, but only if you don’t get sick of me after the first day.”
“I’ve been sick of you for years and you’re only worrying about it now?”
“Oh, Felix,” Sylvain sighs, voice softening as he presses a hand to his own chest, eyes wide and full of emotion. “That was the sweetest thing you’ve said to me.”
Felix has sat up now, raising the bottle to his lips in a futile attempt to hide the twitch of his smile. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Too late for that.”
It startles a chuckle out of Felix, stilted and abrupt, but unmistakably bright. That weighted and light feeling returns to Sylvain’s chest as Felix lowers the bottle and resigns himself to a round of giggles, like they’re kids again and plotting their next big act of mischief. It wasn’t even that funny, but it’s good to hear Felix laugh again; Sylvain can’t remember the last time he did in recent years, and it hurts as much as it relieves him, the ache worsening when his laughter slowly dies out. There’s a crack in the layer of calm in Felix’s frame and Sylvain sees the fractures spidering out all along his body, thin and delicate. Sylvain doesn’t know how to stop it; he’s never been good at fixing broken things when all he’s known is how to break. But he watches as Felix lifts the bottle, passes his mouth entirely to dump the remainder of the bottle over his head instead. Wine drips from his hair down his face, flowing down in little rivulets to soak into the collar of his turtleneck as his shoulders shake for an entirely different reason.
“Hey.” Sylvain reaches out before he thinks about it, carefully turning Felix around. “Come here.”
Felix’s eyes are red, but he can’t see his tears beneath the wine still clinging to his skin. Sylvain tastes the salt of it when he brushes away a trail of it over his cheekbone, licking it off his thumb. Felix is silent while he carefully cleans him, wiping the alcohol and tears with his sleeve, eventually abandoning it to press his lips gently along Felix’s cheek instead, sipping it from his skin. He clings to Sylvain by the end of it, fingers curled tightly in Sylvain’s shirt as he shakes and shakes, silent while they both wait it out. For once, Sylvain doesn’t say anything--what is there left to say? He keeps his arms around Felix’s chest and hugs him tightly as if he’s holding him together, runs his palm up and down Felix’s spine in broad and measured strokes. Eventually, Felix matches his breathing to it--inhale with every upward stroke, exhale on the next pass down; steady and inevitable like the sunrise over Miklan’s makeshift grave all those years ago. They had buried his brother’s body outside of the Tower and at the end of the day, it was still his brother, cold and beaten. At the end of those three days, Rodrigue’s body would still be Rodrigue, and still be Felix’s father.
The candle has burned down to nothing more than a stub by the time Felix’s fingers loosen from Sylvain’s shirt. He leans back to cup Felix’s face in his palms; like this, he almost looks like he did when they were young, puffy eyed and red-cheeked. And Sylvain does what he’d always done back then, presses his lips to the furrow between his brows, smoothing it down with his thumb.
“Let’s make another promise,” he says softly, pushing Felix’s damp bangs back from his forehead. “Neither of us dies. We’ll survive this war, and I’ll say yes when you ask me again. Promise?”
He holds up his fist, pinkie finger out. Felix stares at it for a moment before curling his own finger around Sylvain’s, turning his hand to press their thumbs together to seal it. His expression lightens, little by little.
“Promise.”
*
Felix finds Sylvain on an empty balcony after the war, sitting with his back to the column with another bottle of wine. He can still hear laughter from the soldiers down below, Dorothea’s lilting voice riding on the night breeze enough to be heard but too soft to make out the lyrics. Maybe it’s better that way; Sylvain looks up with a smile when Felix joins him, takes his lame excuse of not having a key to the rooms in stride, and they end up passing the bottle back and forth again, leaning into each other. Tomorrow, they’re all to go their separate ways to settle their affairs, some to stay behind and others to return to Dimitri’s side. There was a clarity in war that Felix appreciated and found himself missing the moment the battle was over; a bittersweet sentiment that clouded the brightness of victory. There is nothing left to fight now, the battlefield will soon shift to meetings and audiences instead, and it leaves a restless emptiness in Felix that he can’t ignore. He’s unmoored, drifting just far enough away from port, and he knows Sylvain feels it too. The prospect of peace and freedom was once incomprehensible, they were born and bred to fight; a weapon is given trajectory, not autonomy.
But in the midst of it all, there was a promise. Two of them. And as much as Sylvain was in the business of lying and hiding when they were younger, he has yet to break a promise to him.
“Come back with me to Fraldarius,” he says, halfway through the bottle. Sylvain’s face is close enough that he can feel his breath on his face and smell the sweetness of the wine. “Whatever you need to do, we’ll do it together.”
He’s never seen anything bloom at night until now, watching the smile spread on Sylvain’s face in the moonlight. In the end, they always chose each other. Perhaps that was inevitable, too. Just as the way Sylvain leans the rest of the way into him, slipping gentle fingers into his hair to press his words into his mouth, sealing the promise.
“Deal.”