Archive of Our Own

The first humanoid figure Sylvain sees upon opening his eyes is Flayn, steadfast practice of social distancing (Sylvain-distancing?) by at least twenty feet, she’s looking directly at him. Fifteen was the last number Seteth had enforced, so he doesn’t know when nor why he had decided to bump up the distance. And, for fuck’s sake, he’s in bedrest, what would he even do? Play shot put with the candles on his nightstand?

Flayn waves briskly with her hand, “You’re awake, good evening.”

Evening, the word echoes hollowly amidst his brain fog.

“Hi,” a smile creeps up as painstakingly as it can, then he regrets it immediately while he discovers which of his muscles is experiencing agony and which is a pull or a stretch away from snapping. Nevermind smiling, he can save it for another girl, preferably one whose older brother isn’t probably stationed in the rafters ready to Bolganone his ass at the slightest miscalculated word. Sylvain’s head thumps back against the pillow accompanied with a groan.

“Please try not to move, the healing spell will be more effective that way.” she chirps, and he honestly can’t listen to half of what she’s telling him, in part due to the distance but mostly because the act of making a move after being still for Goddess knows how long is not doing him any favors, sensations-wise. His ears ring shrill and the vision behind his eyelids becomes psychedelic. Okay, fine, he won’t move.

About an hour later, once Flayn has vacated the room, he opens his eyes again and his head bobs to the side. Earlier he had a feeling he wasn’t alone recovering from injuries — Ashe is on the bed adjacent to his, and across the room, Felix. Ashe is awake and reading, Sylvain almost wants to start him with a ‘Hey nerd’, but when he sees Felix is definitely conked out and recovering from something worse, most of the witty dialogue he prepared goes down the drain.

Ashe starts him instead, “I was catching an extra bit of sleep when you woke up earlier,” he smiles. At least he doesn’t seem to be in pain while doing so. “Are you as restless as I am? We could go for a walk.”

“Mmmh — yeah. Hey, Ashe. Good evening. Why are we here again?”

“Oh, uh,” he seems to scramble for a moment, slipping his book over to the nightstand and failing to hide some kind of emotion, which Sylvain reads as embarrassment. “You mean you don’t remember?”

He makes a face, and then he makes a worse face upon feeling the pain of making a face. “I remember.” He answers carefully, “Barely. Bits and pieces. Not the part I need to understand how I wound up here.”

“Oh… me neither.” He says, deflating. “Sorry. Maybe Felix can tell you later, when he wakes up.”

When he wakes up. So he’s not in any danger.

“Ah, you really are awake,” a pause, “Mostly.” That’s Seteth speaking from the doorway, a stern and unreadable look in Felix’s direction and another, slightly loaded with judgement when cast in Sylvain’s way. Of course. He seems to decide that Ashe is a better suited conversation partner as he turns to look at him only, though not without mumbling under his breath loathe as I may to ask you two for a favor — “I know that you are only just recovering. Though, could I ask for help? I am overwhelmed with tasks since the rest of the students have left.”

Ashe’s head swivels from the door to Sylvain, doing a once-over. Sylvain raises his hand and gestures dismissively, mouthing ‘I’m good, mind your own’ as good naturedly as he can in spite of his expression that likely communicates the opposite of ‘good’. To his credit, Ashe doesn’t push it, probably sympathizing with their shared desire to go out and do things to combat the leg cramps.

Seteth explains that they’ve been left to their own devices for the past two days with only the company of gatekeepers and a handful of knights to corral the casual visitors and pilgrims. The professor and the remaining students, including those that had fully recovered from injuries suffered in their last battle, were sent on a wild goose chase. At the bridge of Myrddin, they were to stop the advance of stray Imperial forces that had tried to slither in Alliance territory, courtesy of Gloucester nobles that still felt eh about allowing the rebellion to keep that swathe of land. Especially when they allowed Kingdom forces to walk for free which led to the battle at Gronder field.

“What is it that you need help with, anyway?” Sylvain cuts to the chase. He’s not thrilled to hear his companions are out there while they lounge about recovering from some ‘injury’. Goddess, seriously, what happened to him? It feels like he has been on the receiving end of the flat of a really, really big hammer.

“Ah, well… Usually we check the storehouse’s supplies upon immediate return to Garreg Mach. We didn’t get around to doing so before they marched, and truly I despise to say, higher priority duties have a hold on me for the moment and I fear what could happen if we thin out our stocks before the battalions return.”

“Aw shit,” Once again Sylvain finds only the strength to throw his head back against the pillow’s fluff, barely containing another curse. “You want us to do your grocery shopping list, old man?”

“Yes, more or less.” His wrist flicks nervously while he chases a loose strand of hair back behind his ear, his tone escalates to something more clipped. “Of course, I take it that it should not be a gargantuan task for two accomplished soldiers such as yourselves, as it consists merely of looking at stocks and assessing any resources lacking within.”

Ashe, too, seems to let his nerves spike at the demand. “Um, usually you ask Ferdinand to take care of this, yes?”

“Ferdinand was injured as well, and recovered mere hours before departing. Felix replaces him when he is unavailable, diligent workers as they are. However, as you can see —”

Sylvain loudly clicks his tongue before cutting. “Then why don’t we wait ‘til he wakes up? It’s not like our stocks are empty.”

“Yes! They’re —” The older man claps his palms against his thighs insistently, then recedes upon considering his answer. “… No, they're not empty, but they could be much fuller. The head chef at the mess hall requested that we provide for the shelves, to give you an example.”

“Fifty cheese wheels could keep the five of us for a few days. Four, ‘cause Felix is out of commission. Wait, how many people did you say were holed up here?”

“No , Sylvain!” Seteth’s voice has a tendency to crack when he loses patience, which he is losing now, and it is worth the hilarity. “Moreover, we need more than food, let alone cheese, of all things to — do you not understand how this establishment runs?”

Ashe, goddess bless him, pops his head in the line of sight between Sylvain and Seteth a second before the latter’s veins begin to pop. “Okay!” high-pitched, “It’s really not a big deal. We can take care of it. Sylvain,” he looks at him, really looks at him. “We’re taking care of it.”

And despite Ashe’s attempt at a truce, Seteth remains wound up like a loom. It really is like he would rather be asking any random stranger in the next village to hold his purse full of coins and not run away with it rather than ask any kind of help from Sylvain. He could actually have entrusted the job to Ashe alone, but Sylvain can imagine that Seteth doesn’t like when Sylvain is on the loose without some task to occupy him while Flayn is also out there unsupervised (and also likely one among three women in total currently present at the monastery, but he had already given up explaining to the neurotic brother that he never had any plans to woo his little sister).

“Thank you,” Seteth’s face is now scrunched up and Sylvain likes to imagine he’s holding back expletives that would put Felix’s colorful language to shame. He bows once and his expression returns to his stony default, though the edge of the conversation remains in the twitch of his brow. “Again, I apologize for springing this onto you, I trust that it should not pose you too much difficulty, a-and this could very well be a learning experience, for both of you. I am quite certain.”

“Of course,” Ashe answers quickly. He seems to hesitate with an inquiry, but the sound of sheets rustling snatches the attention of everyone in the room to the figure of Felix stirring.

For a moment, Sylvain thinks he’ll be able to dodge this mission if they can pass it to the official delegate, but after a grunt and a choked exhale, Felix is motionless again.

The smoke clears around the potent flapping of Ingrid’s pegasus and he realizes she was shouting something at him. ‘Look out’ or ‘look ahead’, something like that, but the smoke’s what was ahead. Shit, why couldn’t he have learned some wind spells? Linhardt could not be making himself any more useful right now, if only the professor had sent him with his group rather than Ferdinand’s. Overhead, Ingrid shrieks his name. “Sylvain!”

Fuck, he’ll just have to stampede ahead. From memory, Ashe had gone up the north-east cliff to secure high ground while Felix cleaved a path for him. Flayn followed them at a distance to make sure neither died from bonking their heads. Seteth panicked when she left his side but ultimately was overwhelmed by archers and retreated to give himself some distance.

Now from what he can see above the smoke: the north-east cliff is empty save for two imperial archers. Sylvain grits his teeth. He sees Ingrid disappear into the smoke where he’s heading.

After so many successive battles, he’s learned to pick apart certain voices. It’s not uncommon that he mixes them up with strangers, but Felix is his childhood friend and he’s never once failed to recognize his voice. It’s especially not unusual when his voice is accompanied with the clashing of metal and the less pleasing, guttural and wet sounds of blood being spilled. Among the smoke, he can hear him struggle against enemy units, three of them at best, more than that at worst. If he needs backup, he will charge.

A little more concerning: he can’t hear any voice that matches Ashe’s.

“Felix!” His tone is grave, focused, “Felix, is Ashe with you?!”

Only after he screams, he’s reminded that he steered his horse head-first into the low-hanging cloud of smoke that had expanded across an acre, the result of an ambush. He has to clamp a hand over his mouth to not pass out immediately. It wasn’t typical of imperial soldiers to use fire as a deterrent, on the contrary, he’d seen the knights of Seiros set on fire the buildings near Garreg Mach to drive away an offensive and remain unblinking. This, though, seemed like a copycat attempt with the sole purpose of brewing chaos. Perhaps the work of a third party profiting off the disarray, having heard that two large battalions would be squaring it off in these thickets.

Unfortunately he didn’t bring a helmet to shield himself from the smoke, the one item he judged ‘too cumbersome’ because ‘the ladies wouldn’t be able to see the face of their savior if he wore it’.

“Sylvain?!” There’s the response he was expecting, though weak from battling with lungfuls of smoke. “Turn around, stupid! Leave!” There’s the other response he was expecting, but not wanting. It makes Sylvain groan and roll his eyes to the heavens. No, you’re stupid.

Strong gusts of wind disperse the smoke only barely enough to perceive a gaggle of figures clashing a couple yards ahead, Ingrid shows up overhead again. “Sylvain!” she must be getting hoarse by now.

He pulls lightly on the reins of his horse to slow down its canter. “Felix is in there!”

“Bandits!” she confirms his earlier assumption, “Ashe is unconscious!”

Okay, — breathing in what feels like a supremely lethal amount of smoke, he poises his lance ahead, — Imperial bastards or opportunistic thieves, you’re not taking any of them today.

So, maybe he feels a little bad for thinking he could just dump the responsibility off on Felix’s shoulders. Even if he woke up then and there, he would still be too disoriented to do even the most menial task. He knows, because he’s seen how pale his complexion had turned (and that’s saying something when you’re as pale as a Fraldarius); it was likely that the battle out there had dried him of half his blood at least. 

It wasn’t the first time he saw Felix bedridden and in terrible shape, but you begin to wonder with each battle if that will be the one that does it. Resilience decays, which is how the most experienced soldiers lose their foothold sometimes. And Felix may be young still, with an iron grip on his sword and a frighteningly unwavering focus that defying death had already been crossed out of his bucket list several times, but warriors like him seldom choose the time and place of their final stand.

And with the way things were going, with the way Fódlan doubled down on all forms of violence, each time one of them tip-toed too close to the threshold, it made the words that were stuck in his throat inch closer to the surface, where they could hurt.

“Sylvain, are you with me?”

“Huh?” Sylvain looks bewildered like a mussed cat, and his surprise jostles Ashe too in a curious mirror effect.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” His words are sheepish. “You looked lost in thought.”

“Yeah well, that’s no wonder. This sucks.”

Unhelpfully, Sylvain thumps the corner of a wooden crate with the toe of his boot and something inside the crate tumbles and crashes. Ashe looks despondent and writes something down on the list he had started.

“Look… um, Ashe.” Sylvain starts with a knot of guilt, “Don’t snitch on me, please. Seteth already has a hundred reasons for wanting to strangle me, and ninety-nine of them are every word I ever spoke to Flayn.”

“It’s fine. You don’t look so good.” He remarks, remarkably observant. Sylvain doesn’t say anything to that, and Ashe seems to purposefully allow the silence to settle in like the dust atop the crates before picking up again, softer. “... Do you. Um, do you want to...” A vague gesture in Sylvain’s direction.

“... Do I want to what?”

“To talk. Do you want to talk about the stuff?”

Sylvain snorts. “What stuff?”

Ashe winces. “What you’re thinking about.”

He turns around and puts his weight against the crate’s cover with his elbows, giving himself an air of nonchalance. He knows what Ashe’s talking about, but he thinks dodging the subject is less likely to induce a headache. “I’m thinking about the girls I saw the other day in town. You want to talk about girls?”

What he doesn’t know is why Ashe sounds so defeated today, the chuckle he gives in response is almost pitiful. “I guess you don’t want to talk. That’s fine, so can we deal with this list? Afterward, you’ll be able to think about stuff and girls all you want.”

“Aw, come on, Ashe. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’d love to talk.” Sylvain pushes himself off the box and strides to where Ashe is holding his head in his hands while he proofreads the short list impatiently. Sylvain is aware that if he attempts to clap the shorter man’s back he might freak out, or jump up and stick to the ceiling of the warehouse from how skittish he looks. So, as his hand hovers briefly, he drops it and rests it on his own hip instead. “Tell you what, why don’t we talk about something you’d like to talk about? Guess it’s not girls.”

“Hm? Uh, okay.” He answers without so much as detaching his eyes from his task. It takes a moment of thinking before he turns halfway to meet his eyes. “Yes, I think it’d be interesting to talk about what we could put on this list, you know, like Seteth asked.”

His head is thrown back and his hands fly up to clutch at the top of his head. “Aaaaaaaaugh!!”

“Sylvain! Stop acting like it’s divine punishment, you do the same when the professor asks you to water the plants!” Sylvain had never seen Ashe stomp his foot in anger, but he looked on the brink of doing it then and there. Instead, he turns back to the list, biting the end of the pencil nervously. “Please, help me with this… I’m not even sure I’m doing this right.”

“Well I don’t know either.” He doesn’t even look at the list. 

“Didn’t you do this with Felix once? Like last month?”

“Not really, he just did whatever and I sat here and talked about my last date that went wrong, and he just kept telling me to shut up. But I couldn’t just stop without telling the kicker, you know? It was a good story. He told me so, ‘that was a good story, Sylvain, tell me another of your good stories please’.”

Ashe has a glance that only those who know him well would be able to tell it’s between exhausted and furious. “I don’t think that’s something he would say.”

“And yet the words came right out of his mouth.”

“Do you know how to pick up on sarcasm?”

Sylvain’s eyes go wide. “You’re being sarcastic right now?”

If the pointed end of the pencil Ashe was holding hadn’t been dulled by his writing, it would probably be stabbing through the paper and leaving indentations in the wood below when he turns back to his task. “You’re someone who cares about your peers, aren’t you?”

“... Are you still being sarcastic? ‘Cause I don’t know if I have to feel offended you’d think otherwise of me.”

The scratching is loud, and Ashe’s frame is still tense, but he sighs softly. “It was a rhetoric question… Of course you care.” He glances to Sylvain, not quite meeting his eyes. “You have knowledge of what people want or what they need, don’t you? Because you like seeing people smile when you do them favors.”

That makes Sylvain flick his gaze away and narrow his eyes, his mind attempting to parse the confusion of the subject changing so rapidly. “Well, maybe you’re giving me too much credit,” he starts, slowly, “I don’t always know what they want, but it’s not hard to tell when someone is in need. Of whatever. Where is this conversation going?”

When Sylvain looks dubiously back to Ashe, he’s no longer hunched over his list and frowning. He has a smile, the one Sylvain knows him well for. Genuine and unforgiving.

“You remember when Caspar thought he didn’t need to bring a spare axe to the battlefield because he was convinced he could sweep the battlefield alone with just the one he had since last year? Axes are not your best weapon, but you had one strapped to your horse’s saddle, and when the handle of Caspar’s axe snapped, you were there.”

Oh, the flattery. Ashe’s words have the strength of always being convincing with how sincere his tone feels to the ears of anyone who needs it. And it’s not like he spares his words, he’s known for stating things exactly as they are in no roundabout manner. It makes Sylvain bashfully stretch his arms behind his head and smirk like he had earned a prize he didn’t know he was competing for. “Oh, that was just…” his hand bats away with playful modesty, “Anyone could have done the same. It’s just easier for me to carry more stuff since I’m cavalry.”

Much as he should have seen it coming, some good doesn’t come without something to counterbalance it.

The tuft of silver hair is suddenly shadowed behind a paper that is being shoved up to Sylvain’s face, he staggers back and swings his arms back in front of him not to lose his balance and without his notice, a pencil is slipped in his grasp.

“This is exactly why this won’t be a problem for you.” Ashe’s small but contriving voice says, “You know what people need, how much of it and how much it’ll last. Maybe you’ll do better than Felix, even.” The paper is no longer up to his face, it’s now stamped against his chestplate. “Don’t you want people to thank you for relieving them of one responsibility?”

If Claude needed a successor for Master Schemer, Ashe was somewhere on his heels.

The tip of the paper held between Ashe’s fingers tears as it’s ripped off his hands with veneer, yet Ashe doesn’t even flinch at his purposefully erratic gesture. He keeps on smiling. Oh, devil.

“Seteth said he needed it before this evening so he can send someone to do the errands tomorrow morning. I’m sure we can complete it in no time!”

Luckily, unlike some people, Sylvain isn’t the kind to let his anger get the better of his mood. He slams the paper on the nearest waist-level crate and lets the gears in his brain turn.

Felix’s sword unsheathes from the ribcage of a breathless bandit and it’s a sight that he’s not sure yet what to make of, despite seeing it countlessly. “I told you to turn back, are you deaf?”

“I’m helping,” he seethes, “Where is Ashe?!”

As soon as the question leaves his mouth, there’s the blade of an enemy on his throat and he manages to swipe it away just in time with the shaft of his spear. The bandit staggers backwards; Sylvain briefly loses control of his horse which makes it hard to aim for a killing blow on the attacker, but a bolt of lightning cracks past him and stuns the bandit. Sylvain’s head whips to where Felix was standing, just in time to watch him recover from his casting stance and —

Just where did these bandits all come from?

Something primal takes over him when he sees the ruddy blade of an axe drive into the junction between Felix’s right shoulder and back, toppling him over onto his stomach and wheezing. His sword, the one that he’s always gripped with such tenacity, flies off his gloved hand and skids weakly near an unmoving figure on the ground. Ashe.

Sylvain’s horse whinnies and nearly drops him off his saddle, but at this rate it’s all he can think of, getting off his frazzled horse that was likely suffering from the smoke as much as they all were. Once again, wind clears his vision partially when Ingrid’s pegasus flies over the trees. He can’t hear what she’s screaming, it’s too much, the sight of Felix trying to regain his senses weakly while the bandit approaches him, enraged.

He doesn’t know if the horse dropped him off or if he threw himself off, his spear is no longer in his hand after he drives it into another bandit’s stomach and pins him to a tree. He doesn’t have time to check if Ashe has a pulse, he runs by him and picks up the abandoned sword, charging. The bandit on Felix’s heels bends down to grab his bloody shoulder and flips him over onto his back, sets down a knee on his sternum and punches his left temple; it draws out blood and a grunt so pained, so close to the limit.

The enemy only has time to raise his axe before Sylvain tackles him, bringing them both to the ground, punching him in the nose, again, and again, and again, leaving cuts and dents with the plate of his armored fist. Then his other hand raises, holding Felix’s sword down to point at the bandit’s chest and he plunges it as far as his strength and stamina can still allow him.

Half of the steps he took to kill him were perhaps not necessary. But he didn’t think about that, his only thoughts were you punch him once, I punch you ten more. Killing was just a necessity. If they weren’t on a battlefield he would have kept him alive, and maybe punched him some more.

He drags Felix’s sword out of the corpse and turns to his injured companions; he forgot about Ingrid. He realizes, earlier, she couldn’t land her pegasus because the trees were too close together to maneuver around. When he looks up, she’s still hovering as close to the ground as she can. Had she watched the way he lashed out? And what does it matter?

“Help me get one of them on my pegasus.” Her voice was dry, perhaps from all the screaming, perhaps holding back a reaction. Sylvain doesn’t waste time jogging to Ashe’s unconscious body and lifts him up, nearly over his shoulders so that when Ingrid dangles herself off her mount, she can stretch out an arm and pick him up. She uses all the strength within each of her muscles to right herself and position Ashe securely between herself and the pegasus’ neck.

Sylvain doesn’t watch her go, he’s already flipping Felix onto his stomach to cover up the laceration with a strip of cloth from one of the dead bandits. He feels more than hears him grunting, choking. When he hurriedly flips him again and lifts him with one hand behind his back and another under his knees, Felix coughs again and it’s bloody and painful and it covers his chestplate with splatters that he knows he’ll have to clean off some day. He doesn’t think about this being it, the day that the promise would break. It’s not today, because he’s suffered far worse, both of them have. 

And the strength of their promise is far superior than Felix’s white-knuckled grip on his sword, because this one never wavers.

When he realizes he’d been gripping the pencil enough to hurt when he flexes his fingers open, he drops his focus on the memories and pushes himself off the box.

Weird, Ashe would have interrupted him again by now. He had been so insistent on getting the grocery list done in a timely manner that he was sure he would lose it if he got distracted again. 

Sylvain perks up to look around the warehouse that had not budged since he started drifting, except for a corner with a number of boxes that had moved and some had their covers lifted open. Ashe was sticking himself bodily into one of them. If Sylvain had been in a different mood, he’d have helped him stick all the way inside and closed the lid and had a good laugh— but all he can think of right now is Felix’s words that he had spoken to him after recovering from a much less serious injury — I’m tired of these close calls.

He hadn’t made a similar promise with Ashe, or Ingrid, or all of those he felt as strongly for, but it’s almost like it was unspoken. Catching the memory of Ashe’s limp body dangling off Ingrid’s arm nearly ten feet above ground, while Felix was patiently bleeding to near-death some distance away, he thinks the same. If he hadn’t shown up, maybe Felix wouldn’t have nearly lost an arm — but then, instead he might have been overwhelmed, unable to ward off any enemy that would have attempted to make sure Ashe wouldn’t be able to open his eyes today. When I’m not the one on the receiving end of these close calls, yeah, I can understand why you’d say that.

Ashe emerges from the box with a bag of flour and seems surprised to see Sylvain has moved positions. “Er… did you figure anything out for the list?”

Sylvain opts for some honesty. “Nope. I got a little distracted.”

Ashe’s mouth draws into a thin line and looks back to the flour. “Yeah… I figured.”

With a resigned sigh, Sylvain takes the list and walks lazily to Ashe’s side. He idly pokes the lid of the box with the edge of the paper. “Maybe we should talk about stuff.”

Bright green eyes stare through his soul, Sylvain winces as if he had just been stabbed with the piercing look. But Ashe’s gaze flits briefly to the list, back to Sylvain, then back to the list realizing — “Hey, you actually added stuff on it?”

“Huh?”

The paper leaves his hands and stealthily finds its place under Ashe’s scrutiny. His eyes visibly go down the list while Sylvain stands stunned into silence, waiting for the verdict.

The verdict is rancid.

“You just wrote —” he flails his free hand over the paper, “You wrote ‘fifty cheese wheels’ and ‘more female soldiers in my battalion’, a — and… I can’t read this word…”

“Oh.” He gapes, then leans to hover over the paper and read upside-down. “It says ‘weed’.”

“Sylvain.” He states, strong. “What would you even do with… It’s not funny.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking too, but at least I know what I need?”

Ashe gives him a waning look and returns the paper to him. Yes, okay, he knows that was stupid.

They’d been in this storehouse for what feels like ages, yet the slivers of light peeking through missing shingles and cracked blinds pools around the same spots, which indicates that time did not exactly fly. And with how quiet things fell between himself and Ashe, it was easily going to rear him back to more painful distractions.

“... Ah, Sylvain.” The gentle voice speaks up again. “Sorry I cut you off earlier. You said you wanted to talk?”

Hmm.

“... Yeah. Uh. Maybe later, okay?” He waves his hand dismissively and the paper flaps along. “Tell you what, I’m gonna go make a survey to see what other people need. I’ll be back.”

Ashe stops to register Sylvain’s words while the other is already on his way out. “Uh, okay— what? Who are you gonna — Wait, Sylvain?!”

The infirmary had been empty, save for Flayn who walked by (and stopped thirty feet away) and informed him that, if he was looking for Felix, he had been helped up to his quarters by Seteth after he complained the room was too cold. Which provided him with two good news: one, Felix was finally awake, and two, his head was still whole enough to bark at the people nursing him back to health.

Sylvain steps up to Felix’s old room during the Academy days, near the end of the hallway. He knocks to a specific rate, loud enough that it could be heard without startling the person on the other side.

“What do you want.” The voice behind the door speaks like a brick being lobbed directly to his forehead, though not with as much strength as it does usually. Sylvain is used to those four words being equal to ‘yes you can come in, I have some time, sit down and talk to me’ in Felix codeword, which grants him the permission to open the door and peek his head in.

There’s nothing but an exchange of stares for a couple of seconds, Sylvain searching in Felix’s form for any indication that he’s well on a good stage of his recovery and unknowingly spends more time analyzing the way his dark, unkempt hair holds together in a low tie over the nape of his neck, save for his bangs only barely swept out of the way of his right eye and some strands that refused to accommodate to any logic.

“Sylvain.” His fuming tone snaps him back, and seeing as Sylvain’s not answering his initial question, he moves on to what he wanted to say next. “You know I told you I wasn’t gonna play along your stupid door-knocking game. Cut that out.”

“But you recognized it was me knocking, so you have to admit it’s not that pointless.”

“Because you’re the only idiot I know who would knock at my door like that and call it a ‘super secret door-knocking between best friends’. And there’s no point if you change it mid-way.”

Sylvain walks into the quarters fully and pushes the door not-quite-closed with his foot. He paces up to where Felix is sitting cross-legged on the bed and resting his back against the wall. There’s a book on his lap that Sylvain doesn’t think he’ll get an answer for what it is if it means it’s something he’s too embarrassed to admit to reading. Instead he keeps his gaze fixed on the shoulder that had nearly been hacked off some days ago.

“Yeah, well, I need your help with something.”

Felix curses, as expected, and rolls his eyes.

“I know, I know! Not the best way to approach you after you just woke up from— from that.” The bed dips where Sylvain takes a seat sideways along the edge, bringing up the paper that he had been hanging on to behind his back. Immediately Felix eyes the paper with a searing gaze. “I need you to tell me h —”

“It’s the storehouse checklist.” He states, then looks back up at Sylvain with the same sharpness that he probably wishes would tear both the paper and Sylvain apart. “No.”

“No?”

“I’m not doing the job for you.”

“That’s not what I’m asking!” He stamps his hands against his greaves like an agitated kid, brows furrowing. “However did you figure that’s what this list was?”

“Because I overheard the conversation at the infirmary.”

Sylvain sighs and thumps his forehead with the flat of his palm. Except— that somehow doesn’t sound right.

Felix had been sleeping the whole time, he never heard him waking up —

“Wait, for real?”

“Yes.”

He takes stock of Felix for a moment.

“... No.”

“Yes, Sylvain. I’m not a psychic.”

“You’re joking.” His jaw nearly drops off its hinges. “You mean, you were pretending to sleep the whole time we had that conversation?”

“Yes.”

No way.

“Feeelix.” He says in a cautionary tone, which ends up sounding too distressed to be threatening.

“What, are you going to be angry at me?” There it is, Felix’s signature sound: Tch. “I don’t care. Suit yourself.”

He was a little angry.

“I’m — not… well, no. No!” He thumps his fists against his lap again, the metallic shrill of his gauntlets hitting his greaves causing Felix to wince. “I’m not mad, but why? ”

"I knew we had to do an inventory check soon, and Seteth would try and get the jump on me as soon as I woke up because he's that stressed all the time about things that are out of his control. So I asked Flayn not to let him know that I was awake."

“So you let the responsibility fall onto us.”

“Yes, Sylvain. I wasn’t feeling up to it. My shoulder feels like it’s going to dislocate, my head feels like if I think too hard it’s going to split in half and one of the halves is gonna abandon me.” His hand reaches up to touch at a large bruise healing on his left temple that he immediately hisses at the touch. “Ugh, it still hurts.”

Sylvain watches Felix’s arm fall limp over the book and give him a glare that he could hardly hold, because of that bruise on his temple. It occurs to him that, maybe in the same way that Sylvain had been slowly recalling the events, maybe Felix was in a similar predicament. Maybe he remembered, or maybe he was drawing a blank. It’s not unlikely that the hit had scrambled his memories. He doesn’t even know if he wants Felix to remember any of it, if that was the case.

He turns back to observe the joke of a list on his lap, just to tear away his gaze from Felix. He knows how much he hates looking weak, and the fact that he had even gone through the gymnastics of letting himself get some reprieve was amazing on its own. It must mean that he’s really going through it. If Sylvain so much as fusses over Felix’s wounds, he’ll get nothing but hissing and scratching like the more feral cats around Garreg Mach. He’ll let him take his time.

“Can you at least give me some pointers?” He asks tentatively while picking at the wrinkles of the bedsheet, the silence growing too awkward for his own comfort.

“Why don’t you use that big brain of yours?” The bed creaks when Felix moves to lie down proper, “I’m sure you can find a way to compare the task to asking a girl out, or writing a poem for her.”

Sylvain smiles knowingly and turns to look at him, but the movement is stiff and almost nervous. Almost at the same time, Felix looks over his shoulder with a raised brow.

“By the way, you left Ashe to take care of it alone?”

“Oh, shit.”

Ashe quietly curses the West-facing view of the noble quarters’ windows while he tries to find a good spot to sit on Sylvain’s bed and is only met with the shine of the late-afternoon-early-evening sun rays soaking the room. He tries holding his hand up to shield his left eye from the glare but it proves futile, his hand tires out too quickly.

“Wanna sit on the desk instead?” Sylvain offers and Ashe moves without assenting. He gives a conflicted look at the mess of semi-rolled-up papers littering the desk and gently tries to nudge them aside with his forearm without throwing them down. He manages to clear a small space to slip the storehouse checklist, taking a book to hold down flat the edge of the paper that was starting to roll up on its own. “Sorry for the mess, I usually keep my desk clean.” Sylvain comments after he’s already settled on the bed, the sun bothers him much less, though he has to squint.

“It’s fine. I just…” Ashe murmurs. “I hope we did it correctly. I don’t know if some of these things are even… You know?”

“Whatever, man. Seteth will read over it and he’ll decide on his own. We’re not experts.”

“Hmm. Yeah.” For a couple of seconds, the only sound that fills the silence is Ashe’s finger sliding down the page and stopping at various points. One, in particular, “Are you sure we should keep the ‘weeds’, though? Like, what are these for?”

“I don’t know, medicine? Gardening? Don’t ask me, Manuela once told me it was a good thing to have, but I forgot what for exactly. Or what to do with it. I don’t think it was to eat it.”

“Okay, sure… At least I don’t think they’re expensive.” Ashe lifts his hand to let the paper roll back, he grabs it between his palms and rolls it up even tighter. “So I think we’re good.”

“Yep, we’re good.”

The chair scrapes over stone with a jarring screech, Ashe swipes his arm to hold himself on the chair’s backrest, and with the motion sends some paper scrolls tumbling down the desk. “Oh — crap.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Sylvain waves him off.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” He bends down to scoop the papers and carefully places them back on the tabletop, freezing after a moment. “... Ah.”

“What’s wrong?”

“... I — the checklist, I mixed it up with your papers.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s… Um.” He goes silent, giving Sylvain the incentive to lift one of his eyebrows.

“What’s up?”

“The list is… it’s exactly like your papers. Um —” He gestures to the pile. “I need to look what’s in these scrolls. To find it.”

Sylvain gives a short laugh. Ashe’s politeness was irrefutably endearing, on top of the situation sounding a little too much like the start of a romantic comedy skit; but knowing what he wrote on those paper scrolls, he doesn’t have much to worry about. Mostly. “You can peek on what’s written in them, I don’t mind.”

“Erm… I won’t pry, I promise. See, I remember the list even had the corner ripped off when you took it from me.” He adds in, a bundle of nerves as he picks through the papers and fishes for one with a tear. “Maybe this…”

Sylvain is not paying it any mind, already feeling the exhaustion of a troublesome day wash off of him with the warmth of the sun bathing him gently, his eyes closed and his arms crossed behind his back with his usual air of nonchalance.

He knows Ashe can have moments of silence, so there’s no reason for him to worry over the quiet stretch carried along by the sound of paper crinkling.

“Woah…” softly, Ashe sighs in a manner that sounds reverent. “Did you write this?”

Sylvain cracks open an eye. “Well, yeah. Who else would write on my papers with my pencil?”

“It’s, well, it’s just…” He stammers, turning the page over to face Sylvain even if he can’t read from that distance. “I knew you liked to wax cheesy prose to girls, but I didn’t think you were this good, and so… so romantic.”

“Aw, really? I mean…” He draws a hand over his chest. “I’m both flattered and offended. I guess after so much practice, I learned a thing or two. Especially after reading Bern— eeh, Bernard…’s fables.” He closes his eyes again, to better hide the lie.

“Bernard?” Ashe stills, it was a mistake to slip in front of the book connoisseur, but he seems to drop the subject in favor of admiring the page again. “No wonder.” He says, a hint flustered when he reads it over again.

A gentle warmth blooms within his chest at the praise, stronger than the sun painting his face in soft oranges. Being praised for something that his reputation gave the opposite impression, it truly felt like a part of him wanted to take a step into a new direction. Romantic. That was a word he found he liked, when people said that about him.

“If you don’t mind me asking…” Ashe interrupts gently, “Who’s the guy you wrote this for?”

Guy?

The adrenaline rush that pumps into his whole being is nearly transformative. Sylvain becomes like an assassin leaping off the bed at neck-breaking speeds with both hands forward and ready to reclaim his deepest, most tragic, most romantic secret— but Ashe is no one he’s ever fought in a real fight, thus he doesn’t expect his reaction time to be so short and snappy when he lunges out of the way screaming and holding the paper far out of Sylvain’s grasp.

“Sylvain!! What is wrong with you?!”

“No, no, no, no, no, Ashe— Aaaaaashe. Hold it right there—” He scrambles wildly to recover from the way he crashed directly into his desk and probably broke one of the chair’s legs in doing so. He freezes and points wildly to Ashe who’s standing like a deer staring down an arrowhead aimed between the eyes and twitches his arm to the doorknob. “Don’t you dare MOVE a muscle. Ashe!”

“I didn’t do anything— I don’t understand! Why are you reacting like that?! We’re both adults, you don’t have to be embarrassed!”

“Give me the paper! Give it to me.” He stomps his foot, at this point it’s difficult to hide his intentions when he loses control so violently, and his blood is pumping, and his hands are shaking, and his face is boiling. He’ll start sweating any minute. “Please. Don’t make this awkward. … Any… more awkward.”

Ashe’s grip on the doorknob was deathly, until Sylvain pleaded. The hand doesn’t move, but his stance becomes more relaxed. More… apprehensive and curious. His head tilts to the side and his look is nearly sympathetic.

“If… if it’s because…” He takes a steadying breath. “I’m not… you have no reason to be scared. I won’t tell anybody!” The other hand, which still holds the prose, curls into a loose fist so as not to crumple the paper and thumps over his chest. “Cross my heart.”

Now he’s sweating. What a way to conclude his day.

There’s no immediate solution to slow down his heart rate, which is nearing the point of prison-breaking through his ribs. His arms drop to his sides, he paces around for a second, stepping on papers. Ashe is still looking at him and he knows without seeing it that he’s now morphed his expression into something fully empathetic. 

Sylvain opts for slumping down on his bed, head in his hands rubbing off the sensation of pinpricks on his skin as best as he can. He thinks Ashe is choosing to stay quiet out of respect for the time it takes him to regain his spirits, which, honestly, he doesn’t think he’ll get there before next week. But Ashe’s not leaving the room either, knowing that after the frankly embarrassing outburst he just witnessed begging him not to move, it was the kinder thing to do.

“Hrmm. Yeah . Guy.” He grunts raggedly against his palms.

Ashe answers quickly, “Yeah! It’s — yeah, I... “ He’s having a similarly complicated time choosing his words. “G — good! I hope he is… nice. To you.”

Oh, to begin answering that question. Sylvain snorts pathetically and dodges the implicit question.

“I was practicing, writing poems to some girls around the monastery,” he gestures to the rest of the pile. “So that one was supposed to be the final… I just — well, I didn’t expect your first pick to be exactly the one I didn’t want you to see.”

“Sorry. I overstepped.” He panics. “I shouldn’t have said… but then you wouldn’t know I found about… and maybe —”

“Look. Don’t worry. I’m not concerned over you finding out.” Sylvain peeks through his fingers, voice muffled. “That was just. Panic. Over nothing serious. That’s all. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

“H — hey, don’t be. I think that’s, um, it’s normal. To be concerned. With how gossip can go —” He breathes. “Go around. Circulate.”

“Yeah. Take a deep breath, Ashe.”

Ashe’s head bonks against the door when he throws it back and he lets out an impossibly pained groan. “That’s not right, Sylvain, you shouldn’t be the one calming me down. I’m so sorry! I swear, I swear no one will know from these lips.”

“That’s good,” Finally he lets go of the tight hold on his face, moving his hands up to his hair, tangling his fingers in the wavy strands. “That’s good. Yeah. Thanks.” Nodding to him and smiling, “Can I have it back? The prose.”

“Yes!” Like a bolt shooting through his being, Ashe snaps to the desk and plops down the rolled-up paper, then snaps like a spring back to the door. “Not a word to anybody! You have my parole!” Valiantly, he bows and slips through the crack of the door, as if too scared to open it wider in fear that any secret will actually leave the room.

Sylvain shakes his head and throws back against the mattress, considering an early night’s rest.

The door to Felix’s quarters creaks open, a sliver of light through the crack is shadowed by a figure. Ashe halts his erratic stride and takes a wide-eyed gander at Felix, who looks like he was one self-restraining nerve away from committing crimes.

“What was all that about?” He sneers.

Right, Felix was only two rooms down from Sylvain’s. It wasn’t a surprise he would have heard some kind of commotion down the hallway.

“S — sorry, Felix. Don’t concern yourself with it, he was just telling me one of his stories.” He smiles, disarming. “Are you feeling better?”

Felix pauses, releases the hold on the doorknob and sweeps his fingers over his fringe that had fallen to obscure his right eye’s vision.

— Your hair that I think of ruffling and messing up, watching you fumble to put it back together incoherently, impractically; I wish you would let it down sometimes, so I could see it weave into the darkness of a clear night. So I could card my fingers through it like the stars. — 

Ashe’s hand clamps over his mouth.

“Yeah, sort of.” Felix finishes accommodating his unruly hair. “Is there something on my head?”

There were still two bandits on the loose, just about a hundred feet behind him. He couldn’t turn back with Felix losing precious seconds of vitality. The north-east cliff still had those two infuriating archers and, by a stroke of misfortune, an arrow already sheared its way firmly into the back of his calf, causing him to slow down to a limp. The smoke had dispersed enough to clear a couple of yards of visibility ahead, but not enough for him to breathe clean air.

He had no idea how far they were from the nearest backline, things moved too quickly and unpredictably on the battlefield when one was facing the Adrestian empire. One thing kept him pushing forward: Felix, breathing uncomfortably and occasionally coughing blood onto the both of them. He was delirious, the blow to the head had done a number on his senses. If he had a concussion, the last thing he needed was for Felix to lose consciousness.

Sylvain spoke a steady stream of words, anything to keep Felix tethered on something. The man in his arms answered occasionally with more sounds than words, likely if it was up to him he would not even make the effort, but Sylvain was forcing it out of him.

“What kind of- food- what kind of food do you want to eat- tonight?”

“Fff… fish.”

“Seasonings?”

“Mmhng —”

“Saffron?”

“Hnno.”

“Cayenne pepper?” He hauls him up closer, “P- parsley? Uh, lemon?”

“Pars… mmmph…”

“What will you have with- what drink? Water?”

“Syl… vain.”

“Wha —”

Thunk, the archer’s aim was getting better by the minute. If Sylvain wasn’t running away from them, the arrow would have found Felix. Though he knew another thing: he was going to need a new armor set. 

The impact causes him to cry out and stumble forward, but he catches himself with one foot in front and the other kneeling on the dry earth for stability. His whole torso hunches over Felix who barely reacted by reaching his uninjured arm out to clutch at the nape of Sylvain’s neck.

“Stop… it. Don’t fucking—“

Sylvain’s face presses tightly against Felix’s chest, he chokes out a pained sob.

“Don’t. Die- not here. Sss- stupid…” He inhales and hisses through another pained bout, head bobbing to the side. “What… did I say.”

More painful than the arrow that lodged high up his back is listening to the way Felix’s words fade out of his mouth, and he can’t respond to them.

“I don’t want… to die. Here. To some... nameless bandits…

But-

I- I won’t-

go down with you-”

“You’re not going down —” Sylvain wheezes into the fabric of his clothes. “You’re delirious — you’ll be fine, Felix. Stay awake.”

“You… stay.”

“I’m staying, I’m staying —”

“A little…”

With the way Sylvain had been neutralized, the arrows had stopped raining. He lifts his head in a moment that feels too light and too frightening, time froze with a brutally crushing offering: to be able to look at the color of Felix’s eyes, to see his terse gaze free of all tension for this fleeting moment until his eyes closed with a flutter. He was saving his energy to breathe in a couple more plumes of smoky air, to smell the blood on his lips and the one staining Sylvain’s armor. He moves his mouth slowly.

“... Thank you…”

The night is still.

This isn’t it, Felix. He looks on at the stillness of his features. Convinced, so convinced, his conviction defies all forces of nature. This isn’t where we part.

And when he thinks he hears a mixed bag of enemies, allies, miscellaneous sounds returning to him like clouds shielding away the peaceful darkness, reality tears him from the inside with a bolt of electricity penetrating his weary armor, his entire body convulses. He thinks he hears someone calling his name among the thunderous bolts of a cornered imperial sorcerer before his vision turns psychedelic, then white.

They said a good night’s sleep refreshes the mind, but all it did was draw out a yell and the sensation of phantom pains in every muscle cell. This probably began explaining itself when he realized that it wasn’t morning; not yet, so it couldn’t really be considered a night’s sleep. A crescent moon adorned the sky, discernible through some gaps of heavy clouds that alerted of potential future rainfall.

He doesn’t think his brain will grant him the reprieve of sliding right back to a quaint slumber, for that he’ll need to lower the record-breaking levels of anxiety crashing past the threshold that felt tolerable. He lumbers out of his quarters with the bare minimum amount of layers of clothes he currently needs to face the chill of a spring night.

Night patrols do double-takes at his appearance. It’s not like he hadn’t left his room in the middle of the night before, but never did he look so trashed. Fair. If they want to gossip about his weird behavior, it wouldn’t be the first time. He doesn’t care. He needs to walk and feel his muscles flex and relax.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t expect to see Felix in the training grounds, because it’s just so obvious. He practically sleeps there. What he doesn’t understand though is why he’s sitting on the steps, hunched over an old armor set and scrubbing at it with an old rag.

He looks up to Sylvain and almost seems offended to have company— almost because normally he would be offended, but Felix had long since stopped trying to put too much space between him and his childhood friend. Now more than ever, it nearly looked like he was happy to see him.

“You won’t impress many girls with your ‘fit.” Felix comments on the assortment of clothes that mostly served the purpose of covering his skin from the cold.

“Yeah, clearly I’m out to chase tail.”

Felix snorts , and looks down to the chestplate propped between his legs. “Came to the wrong place, then.”

Sylvain smiles at the opportunity, but doesn’t seize it.

“You?”

Felix juggles the old rag in his uninjured arm and dunks it into a bucket containing a liquid mix of water and soap. When he flings the rag out of the bucket, bubbles float out and up, popping when they touch Sylvain’s leg.

“I’m cleaning your shitty armor.”

That is indeed his armor set on a pile beside Felix, the chestpiece standing between his bent legs is dripping with the soapy water and dried blood coming off in chunks. The blood from their last battle. Sylvain wants to stop him.

“I — Felix. Thank you.” His voice is unusually wobbly, “I mean I was going to get a new set anyway, it doesn’t protect against arrows anymore.”

Sharp eyes look up at him, assessing, but he doesn’t stop scrubbing. “You’re right, the back is unsalvageable. I’m not cleaning that one.” His eyes shift to the pile by his side. “But this wouldn’t happen if you did proper equipment maintenance. Your armor is like your weapons, you have to clean off the blood and grime or it will wear down and rust faster.”

“That —” He doesn’t realize before the word escapes him, but now he has Felix’s attention again as he points to the blood. “That was your blood.”

There’s only a hitch in the sound of scrubbing, a missed beat, but he continues.

“So?”

“So —” He kneels in front of Felix and that causes the latter to stop moving altogether. “You remember what happened?”

His gaze is cast downwards. “Bits and pieces.”

Felix knows that something is being laid bare, because otherwise he would be trying to power through the conversation. To end it snappily with ‘anyways’ or ‘what’s your point?’ or ‘you’re acting strange’. Instead he gets a silence that speaks at length of something that Sylvain wishes wouldn’t stay unspoken — but Felix was never one for words, only tells, and he resumes with the cleanup.

Sylvain stays the night for a little.

He wakes up to Seteth banging at his door.

“Goddess, if I could knock him out cold just once.” Sylvain mumbles against his pillow. He swings the door open and Seteth’s mute cries are no longer muffled by the thick of the wood.

“Sylvain. The list.”

“Oh, sh… crap.”

“I have to- oh Saints. Urgently. I have to hand over the list before the shops close.”

“Tight schedule,” Sylvain comments rasply when he ambles over to his desk, searching for a list. Knocking some scrolls to the ground. “Can’t they stay open a little longer? Isn’t it like seven in the morning?”

He finds the paper with a torn bit, like he remembered it.

“I asked you to bring it to me yesterday!” Seteth quips back tightly, taking the scroll and rolling it up tighter in his hold..

The memory of his stand-off with Ashe makes him breathe deeply. They had both forgotten because of it.

“Well, you could have showed up to reclaim it when it was already getting past the deadline.”

“Grrah!” The hilarious noises of distress this man could make were worth the petty squabbles. Immediately, he pulls himself back together. “No matter, I appreciate nonetheless that you completed the task. Everyone will be grateful that their stocks are replenished.”

Sylvain shoos him out of the room to hurry before the stores close at five past seven or whatever, kicks a scroll on the ground on his way back to bed and notices the paper has a torn bit. He hears his heart beating into his ear when he can peek through the slit of the scroll a word scribbled as part of a list, ‘weeds’.

For the second time in under twenty-four hours, his senses go into overdrive.

Worse than when he had walked out in the middle of the night, this time he is running out with nothing but a pair of pants, an open shirt and a crumpled paper in his white-knuckled grip. Sylvain’s thoughts cannot not be described in any way that matters when there’s a trillion of them flashing in the back of his skull while he attempts to focus on navigating the monastery grounds. More importantly, how the fuck did Seteth manage to vanish so quickly from the dorm area.

He spots the semi-long cut of green hair standing in the dining hall and nearly screams bloody murder when Sylvain barrels into him with his full body. Sylvain was already screaming from the moment he spotted him. “WRONG PAPER! WRONG PAPER! WRONG PAPER! I gave you the wrong paper, please return the one I gave you and please Goddess tell me you didn’t read it.”

“A- are you out of your mind?!” Seteth shrieks, “Curses, you have to be more careful, I- I- I already gave it to your friend!”

“WHAT?!”

“Yes, Felix. He-”

Sylvain shoots both arms out to grab Seteth’s shoulders. “Are you nuts?!”

“STOP!” He wrenches himself out of the grasp with impressive force. “Calm yourself, fool! He volunteered to do the errands! I don’t understand why you’re so- so outraged.”

“Shit, shit, shit, shit —“

An early morning storm brews overhead and fat drops of rain pour on him minutely, but he doesn’t truly register any of it until he’s screeched to a halt at the main drawbridge of the fortification. He clasps his hands around the metal bars of the gate and peeks through the gaps to see a figure just a couple yards beyond, on horseback but unmoving. Sylvain can chance a guess for who it is, if he is lucky — 

“Felix!”

It seems to draw the figure’s attention. A man just ten feet away from Sylvain clears his throat and inquires, mystified, if he needs to go through the gate, to which Sylvain replies with a furious nod.

The guard pulls on a wooden crank and the metallic bars lift too slowly for his comfort, and to make his desperation even more clear and embarrassing to the public, he drops onto his stomach to the slightly-muddy ground and slinks his way under the gap that wouldn’t have allowed his entire width to pass had he been wearing his suit of armor.

The rush was unnecessary, probably, given that Felix doesn’t look the slightest pressed to be on his way. He’s steered his horse halfway to face him and Sylvain can recognize a scroll, the cursed scroll, cursed to find its way to forbidden hands and eyes , gripped loosely in Felix’s left hand.

“Wrong- wrong paper.” Sylvain, out of breath, extends the checklist. He’s not too trashed to notice the way Felix’s lips curve into a smirk; now would be a good time to invent something that could capture moments as captivating as this one and turn it into some kind of picture that he could look at whenever he felt sad. Only if he hadn’t been staring, he wouldn’t have noticed Felix’s shoulders shake lightly. Oh no, he was laughing at him . “ Felix. ”

“What?” His tone was unusually light for once, and in turn he extended the paper that was in his grasp, the one he shouldn’t be holding right now, the one he hopefully didn’t read; though the chances were slim. Why didn’t Seteth notice before passing it over? Did he suddenly trust him that much? And why was Felix laughing?

“Did you read it?”

Felix seems to take a moment to register what he was asking about. He shakes his head, “No.”

“Then why are you smiling? What’s so funny?”

His smile drops at the mention, as if remembering that he had a certain personality to uphold. “Just, you look like shit.” He gestures with his head, then with his free hand he vaguely motions to his chest. “You’re slathered in dirt. You’re barefoot. Why are you so terribly underdressed?”

With that said, he’s grounded to the present and feels the gust of cold slithering through his open shirt and giving him a full-body shiver. His bare feet probably have a splinter somewhere that he’d notice if he makes a move. The rain picks up and hits aggressively on his shoulders. Sylvain sticks out the checklist again, with more insistence.

“I woke up thirty seconds ago and I ran here as fast as I could. Just take this.”

“You’re so stupid.”

“Yes.”

They trade papers. Both are now soaked and one minute longer under the rain away from dissolving. If he wasn’t so attached to Ashe’s compliments, he would have considered letting the forces of nature erase all traces of it.

“Should I be concerned?”

Sylvain snaps back to their exchange, “To feel concern is so unlike you, though.”

There’s the eyeroll. “On a normal day,” he explains, “You would find this situation funny, not the  cause for a panic attack.”

“I’m not panicking.”

“He says, panicked.”

“I’m not panicking, Felix!” He knocks Felix’s knee. “Don’t sass me.”

“You won’t tell me what’s on your paper?”

With the way Sylvain is immediately at a loss for words, he concedes the defeat. He stores said paper between his hip and the hem of his pants from lack of a better place to put it in. Felix raises an eyebrow, apparently in the mood to wait.

“No, I’d rather not.” The answer is honest. His nerves must be too visibly frayed because Felix doesn’t even seem perturbed by the rejection. Well, at least not the way he expected. He’s not saying anything back, no ‘whatever’s, no ‘thought so’s. It makes Sylvain leap to the nearest metaphorical ledge, one he might regret. “Maybe later.”

Luckily, he doesn’t have to pinpoint when ‘later’ is.

When the last stand at Enbarr had ended, one of the first things (if not the first ) to come to mind was finding Felix, and maybe ask him if he wanted to get married. No, that was too soon, he didn’t even ask him out. If he allowed himself the smallest bit of indulgence, he would believe that Felix had a similar idea when they made eye contact through the crowd of victors, pushing past, dropping his sword mid-way (he still can’t believe that) and lunging into Sylvain’s arms. 

Though Felix became as still as a rock and holding onto dear life around his waist, Sylvain was debating where to put his hands (around his waist? on his sides? on his back? could he touch his hair?), he settles for one on his back and another tangling with the ponytail that had surprisingly not come loose yet but the simplest touch made it fall apart and drape over his fingers messily. He does not dare give in to the urge of kissing the top of his head in spite of his mouth being pressed right into his locks, the moment is too euphoric and feels too brittle in his hands to risk it with the impulses of a hopeless romantic.

He feels Felix pushing himself off his chest with a grumble and Sylvain drops the hand on his hair to rest on his shoulder instead. The fierce light of the afternoon sun on his face makes it hard to determine if Felix is flushed right now, but he thinks he sees a shade of color on his face which — yeah, probably exertion, probably emotions, “You were crushing me against your chestplate.” Or, probably that.

“Sorry.” Sylvain can’t bring himself to apologize sincerely when the word is followed by a barrage of chuckles. “Also you’re mashing my insides into paste with your death grip.”

Felix would probably have kneecapped him and walked away any other day, but they just ended a war and he really must be wanting to hold someone close for any reason and his choice was made on Sylvain. His head falls back limply to the chestplate and his grip around Sylvain’s waist is, both thankfully and regrettably, loosened a notch.

“If ending a war is what it takes for you to hug me, then I think I’m gonna go look if any other continents want to get frisky and—”

“Eat your words, Sylvain. It’s not funny.” Yet when he says it lightly like that, Sylvain can wager that he’s not too mad about it, for once.

He just then notices Ashe had been rooted in place, staring from a couple of yards away and jumping and careening into Ingrid when he notices Sylvain staring back. Now Ingrid is staring too. Sylvain gestures widely for them to come into the hug even if he very well knows he would kill to bask in this intimacy with Felix for a couple more seconds. He sees Ashe reaching to hold Ingrid’s forearm and shake his head, then— with only a shrill scream for a warning, Caspar brutally and lovingly crashes into the hug, shortly after followed by Annette, and several others seem to think that this is their cue for a pile. Now Felix is mad.

Officially, the war had ended, but separate conflicts and cleanup tasks still awaited their efforts. For instance, two more large-scale battles were fought in the name of peace or some greater good. What it did was that, even as they managed to mercy-kill Lady Rhea, the last known threat, a new kind of fear lingered and no one truly celebrated as much as they had when the empire had reached the end of its reign. This was not truly the end of the struggle, they all knew, the skirmishes would be ceaseless for years to come. This fear, though, it was akin to anticipation , in case of something bigger lurking beneath it all, something that would have the people start over and think, tiredly, ‘one more time’.

Even weeks after the confrontation at Garreg Mach, not everyone had packed up and left the premises. Only some were ushered by duty, nobles such as Ferdinand who wished to rebuild something from the rubble of his dishonored estate, or Petra, in a rush to settle affairs between Brigid and the hotpot of legions in Fodlan. Some more humanitarian like Dorothea felt compelled to do something, to help people brace for a possible bleak future.

Then there were others like Felix who, in losing everything, gained the estate of Fraldarius. It had been days since he ran out of things to do in the monastery like he said he would do before leaving. There was no Officer’s Academy to attend, no war council, no scheduled training sessions. No rubble to clear from the communal areas, no rafters to dust, no more casualties to account for, no, no, nothing anymore. Even if there were always smaller tasks to help the archbishop in the smooth running of the church’s affairs, none of them required the aid of a strongman like him. In short, he was stalling.

And, to be fair, so was Sylvain. The margrave had asked — no, demanded that he return to Gautier promptly. Yet to this day, Sylvain sees more fit to sit legs propped up on a table at a restaurant in the village surrounding the monastery, flanked by other remnants of the war effort. Mercedes is passing around drinks and giggling at some antics between Caspar and Bernadetta. Linhardt still somehow manages to work on his research in spite of all the noise at their table. 

The professor — ah, archbishop now, had somehow managed to not only slip past Seteth’s vicious walls of responsibility, but also drag him along. Ingrid, like Sylvain, seems to be testing how thin she can stretch the patience of count Galatea by ignoring his letters for as long as she can. The two of them made bets to see who of the margrave or count would show up first, in the flesh, at the gates of Garreg Mach with ten bodyguards hired to wrestle their heirs back home.

He can count more of the people present at their little outing, but it’s hard to divert his attention too long from Felix, who’s talking to Ashe, who’s been giving Sylvain stressed looks for the whole night. And while Felix talks to him, it’s like the tension shoots up and wrings him like a wet rag. Sylvain guesses that, at some point, Ashe figured the prose he wrote months back about some guy with night-sky hair had to be about no one but the person he was talking to, and that made him terrified of slipping up and failing to keep his knightly oath. Or something worse that Sylvain can’t fathom right now, because looking at the back of Felix’s head is somehow too tantalizing to divide his attention.

After a couple of minutes, when his attention gets snapped by Caspar spilling the second shot of whisky on his coat, Sylvain gives a hearty declaration of ‘going outside to check the weather’, which generally people take it to be his way of saying ‘I’m gonna see if I can get hooked up with some pedestrian tonight’ and he leaves with minimal fanfare and a promise to return in ten minutes, that he was just joking.

The weather outside is cool and clear, the new moon and the speckles of stars look back at him serenely. His hand stretches upwards to reach for the sky, the way he wishes he could run his fingers through his hair once more without the context of a close call, without the context of post-war euphoria. Reaching for the stars somehow feels like it would be a less arduous thing to accomplish.

It feels almost natural for Felix to walk out the restaurant and join him to sit on the edge of the broken fortress wall, overlooking the plains where countless battles had clawed hungrily for human sacrifices.

“Hey,” Felix says, conversationally. “You’re not going back to Gautier?”

“I should, like, eventually.” Spoken without hiding the lack of enthusiasm.

“You’re stalling.”

Sylvian glances sideways at him, “You’re stalling too.”

He can hear the scoff that says ‘touché’ . “I don’t want to go back.”

Oh, okay. Sylvain snaps bodily to face him. “So you made up your mind?”

“I’m going to be a sellsword.” He replies without much hesitation, as if this had been a choice he made way before the war had ended, and he was just waiting for the right time to spring on to it. “Faerghus is no more without a king. Fraldarius has just… me.” The last word sounds almost disgusted.

‘Baby, I wish I was Fraldarius, so I could have you.’ Oh no, no, don’t say that.

“Under different circumstances, I’d probably have tried to follow my old man’s footsteps. Make sense of this whole mess. But, without...”

“... Without the glue to hold the kingdom together.” Without a king. “It’s not the kind of life you’d see yourself living, isn’t it?”

Felix, looking down to the plains beyond, simply nods. The sight clutches at his heart painfully. 

“Sooo,” He starts with a tone too casual to fit their conversation, which gets Felix’s attention and a quirk of his brow. “I heard there’s this reeeally handsome-looking heir of a rich nobleman who’s, uh, kind of bored lately —” Oh, oh, Felix is smiling, it’s working, “— and who likes to spend time with his best friend , and, oh, I don’t know— maybe if you ask him to come along in your little adventure as a fledgling mercenary, he could be a really good travelling companion, and you guys could go —“

“Don’t say skirt chasing.”

“Wasn’t gonna!” He raises both hands up defensively, “It’ll just be you and me, and nothing will get in the way of our fun. Except maybe my old man, if he ever finds me.”

Felix snorts and turns back to the horizon. The subject is pushed aside, understandably. Decisions can’t be taken so impulsively on his part; not only he didn’t mull over it as much as Felix did, but he doesn’t either know if he has the strength and conviction to abandon Gautier altogether. The fantasy of running away with Felix, however, is one he’d be lying if he said he didn’t consider before.

“Ashe’s been acting really weird.” Felix says after a while, like it was the natural continuation to their conversation that had nothing to do with Ashe. Sylvain blinks and plays along with the subject change.

“No shit. You’d think he’d be more excited about the proposal he got to help rebuild House Gaspard.”

The sound of paper crinkling catches his attention to Felix’s lap, where he’s trying to lay flat a worn and crumpled piece of paper, which… seems familiar, by the torn bit on one of its corners.

“He was talking to me earlier like someone was going to murder him if he spoke too much.”

Sylvain doesn’t know how to breathe anymore.

“Then he gave me this paper.”

He cannot even spare a glance, the words escape his mouth mindlessly.

“Oh, look at … that. He wrote you some nice prose.”

“He said he found it in the dorm’s hallway.”

“Uhm, then... Someone wrote you some nice prose!”

“Well he didn’t say who it was for nor who wrote it, there’s no name. He told me I should find who it’s for because he’s ‘too busy’.”

“Maybe you can ask the guy who wrote it?”

“How do you know a guy wrote it?” Oh Sothis smite him right there and make it hurt. Felix abandons the question altogether and trucks on, “Sylvain,” he sighs. “It’s your handwriting.”

He didn’t ever in a thousand years think he’d actually, for once in his life, want his obsessive father to appear in a cloud of smoke and snatch him back to Gautier, toss him in the fiery pits of the valley of torment to learn a thing or two about survival, because he doesn’t think he will emotionally to survive this.

“Yes.” Yes? Is that the best answer he can come up with?

Of course the silence was going to be stifling after that. Of course Felix was going to look just as awkward trying to figure out what to say.

“Sylvain…” He begins, slowly, “I already read it.” And, feeling the need to clarify, he adds: “When you mixed it up with the storehouse checklist. Months ago. During the war.”

The Goddess must be playing some kind of one-sided game of dodgeball with him. The kind where he has rocks tied to his ankles and she’s standing just five feet from him and flinging loads of karma directly to his face (and maybe under his midsection too because that would be the peak of comedy) while screaming ‘dodge this, headass’ and he has no choice but to accept it. He must be looking downright miserable, because even Felix can’t say anything witty.

“Uuh,” Universally known fact: Felix doesn’t often let his concern show, and it was showing, and Gods it was unnerving. “Guess I should have told you sooner.”

“... Yeah. Yeah you should have.” Deep breath. “Why didn’t you? … Why did you lie?”

It has the merit of making Felix look caught in a dead-end. “You said you were going to show me later. You never did.”

“Felix, it’s my… it’s personal. I don’t owe it to you just because I said I would.”

“Yeah. I know, I know.” Looking even more undignified as the seconds pass, perhaps even angry, but Sylvain can tell the anger is directed to himself. One thing Sylvain has always appreciated about Felix is that he knows when he’s in the wrong, and he doesn’t misdirect his rage… well, not as much anymore. “Ugh, I didn’t mean to sound like I was trying to pressure it out of you.”

But Felix didn’t even answer his question. Why didn’t he say anything if he knew all this time? He turns back to look at the paper spread out in wrinkles over his lap with a frown— Sylvain can boast the ability to read his expressions no matter how subtle and practiced they were, but there’s one mental block he can’t vault over which makes this particular frown so unreadable.

Is that it? Sylvain’s unhelpful brain supplies, Is that all he has to say? Was all of this agonizing build-up for nothing?

“When I read this, I felt like… you were being sincere. For once.” Felix’s voice cuts through. “You showed up crawling face-down in the mud, screaming and panicking. I never saw you act like that over your usual conquests of the week.” 

Sylvain gasps, attempting to regain some footing. “Hey, I liked some of those girls! They weren’t just conquests.”

“It still stands. You didn’t write this for a girl.” The pad of his index swipes over a section of the writing, likely highlighting the sentence that refers to the recipient as undoubtedly not a woman. “You were… ugh. You were all embarrassed! You looked like your head was gonna explode if I told you that I read it. It was seriously weird of you. So I lied. And besides…” His voice was already quiet, but now it was even moreso, laced with a sentiment that Sylvain thinks is genuine worry. “We were in the middle of a war, Sylvain, it was better for you if you focused on the war effort rather than your love life or — whatever, and I didn’t want you to have a raging panic attack again.”

Fair enough, he wants to say, but the sting of being lied to still lingers.

“I guess.” Sylvain grovels, “It makes sense.” Pulling himself out of the small hole he felt like he and Felix had made a collaborative effort in digging, he takes a tentative closer look at the paper.  “Uh. What gives, though? What makes you think this is more sincere than the others?”

Felix shrugs, “I haven’t seen you date around in a while.” And as he speaks, Sylvain notices that he hasn’t made eye contact in several minutes now, especially when he says, slower: “You’re still thinking about that guy, aren’t you? You never gave him this paper.”

Sylvain raises a brow, “... Nope. … I didn’t.”

“Well… I won’t ask who it is, but don’t you want to give it to him now?” He’s being sincere. He’s being— he really doesn’t think this whole time, every little piece of evidence littered in the text was about anyone else but… 

Felix extends the paper for him to take, still not looking. Oh, okay. Okay.

“Sure?”

Sylvain grabs the paper, smoothes out some of the creases and sighs stupidly.

Felix is right, he wasn’t ready at the time. He’s still unsure of how ready he is, to this day. The years will pass and he still won’t be ready. He just thinks it’s because he’ll never be ready. None of the people he has seen, dated, dumped, none ever gave him the full means to prepare. But whether he’s ever ready or not, there’s just one thing that will always be certain — it has been certain for years, and it’s all the push he needs to go forward.

Felix’s tone sounds dry. “What.”

“For you.”

Sylvain had casually slipped the hand holding the paper back in Felix’s field of view, which was hard-focused on his lap. He catches the way his eyes dart around the lines of the page, looking for some explanation, looking for some meaning. Sylvain wants to tell him that’s not where he should be looking for answers.

“Stop joking around.” His voice chokes up around the words, he brings up his hands to clamp over his face.

“C’mon, don’t be an idiot. Felix,”

The insistence in the way Sylvain pronounces his name makes him drag his hands off carefully to look back at him. And Sylvain knows how much vulnerability is the last thing he would be willing to unveil even to the people he loved the most; so as it’s being offered to Sylvain, all fears and all reason dissipate, his heart seizes and speaks without restraint.

“I am in love with you.”

He is certain of it. He has never been as certain as now, when he can see through the parting clouds of Felix’s hardened façade, the corner of his lips lifting like the smile that he sees in his most romantic dreams.

Epilogue

"It's two in the morning."

It’s eleven past two or something like that. Sylvain hadn’t been fully asleep when one of the guards at the end of the hallway connecting to his room had stomped to his door and knocked like his life depended on it. Nevertheless, groginess carried his step from his desk to the door and with how soulless he looked, he only opened it a crack.

"Margrave..." the soldier looks through the sliver, skittish. "The guards spotted an intruder."

"Mhh... what?" He yawns, "And did you identify them?"

He takes a deep breath and steeples his fingers, "No, they moved too quick. One of the soldiers was knocked unconscious. They say they saw him climbing the wall up to your room."

That seems to slap Sylvain awake. He closes his eyes briefly, reopens them wide and closes them again to pinch the bridge of his nose. The exact same thing happened two months ago. And three months before that, periodically, ever since he returned from Garreg Mach several years ago.

He turns away from the door in time to hear an unnatural sound of metal against stone coming from the open doors of his balcony, "Oh, sweetheart. Love.” His words are soft, yet exasperated. He turns back to the guard still patiently waiting behind his door “Tell everyone to go back to their posts. And you should… uh. Go take a break. Come back to this hallway in the morning. Okay?"

“Are you — is this really fine?”

“Yes, you’re doing a great job. Go, now.”

He clicks the door shut and presses his ear against it to ensure the guard had truly followed his order. When he thinks he can hear the sound of boots going down stairs, he pushes himself off and jogs towards the balcony just in time for Felix to hoist himself onto the railing.

"There you are..."

Felix doesn’t wait to finish his climb. He only barely secured his footing on the edge of the balcony, but he’s still on the other side of the railing. One hand is gripping onto it so he doesn’t fall, and the other shoots out to grab a fistful of Sylvain’s shirt and pull him into a furious kiss, the kind he gives him after months of being apart as he usually does. It’s almost like a ritual, except every time Felix is increasingly more urging and Sylvain’s heart nearly jumps out of his throat. As much as he wants this, and he trusts the swordsman’s acrobatic skills, he automatically throws his arms over the railing and around Felix’s waist to make double sure he doesn’t die some silly death like ‘got too distracted kissing his lover’.

Sylvain attempts to drag him fully into the balcony so he can attribute the way his heart races to the quality of the embrace and not his rogue boyfriend dangling precariously some thirty feet above ground. Despite his protests because of course Felix has to protest about even the least of inconveniences, he hauls over to stand in the safety of the balcony, where they resume the encounter a little less frantically.

“Sorry, didn’t shave.” Sylvain pulls back a half second to comment.

“Don’t shave.” He growls in response, and any extra commentary Sylvain had in mind is drowned out by the hunger that drove Felix’s kisses.

He never counted the minutes spent like this; someone could tell him it’s been an hour and he’d believe it without question. It doesn’t matter to him.

"You need better guards if they can't protect you from intruders." Felix pulls away this time, seemingly satisfied for the time being and in the mood to make a jab at the quality of his elite trainees.

"You're the intruder. Why would I need protection from you?" When all that does is make Felix glare, as if challenged, Sylvain corrects: "What I mean is, if you came here to kill me, I'd be fine with that."

He snorts. "The years don't make you any less stupid, do they?"

“You’re not the smartest either for always coming to visit me by climbing up the walls of my domain and knocking out my guards like a thug. You’re lucky my father is no longer the regent here.”

“It’s two in the morning. I’m not gonna walk through the front door and wake the entire place to ask for an audience with you, at this hour.”

Sylvain rolls his eyes. “That’s what night shift guards are for, Felix. One of these days the soldiers are gonna mistake you for a real assassin and shoot you down with crossbows.”

“Impossible. Their aim sucks.”

“Pshh. Come inside, criminal.”

In Sylvain’s quarters, Felix beelines for the desk where he can drop all of his gear, weapons, unnecessary layers of clothes and stops midway of taking off his sweater to inspect something on the tabletop.

Sylvain waits ten seconds in silence, already making himself comfortable in bed. Felix lifts a paper from the stack of letters littering the desk. “Why didn’t you send me this one?”

“I wasn’t finished writing it. Do you mind?”

“Well, hurry up.” He snaps, “I want more of your letters.”

He scoffs, but he can tell that beneath the seemingly urging demands, Felix means that he is very passionate about them. He smiles good-naturedly and crosses his arms behind his head. “I didn’t expect you to be back so soon. Usually you come around every three months. Did you miss me that badly?”

“Be quiet.” He shucks his sweater the rest of the way off and joins Sylvain in bed, throwing himself violently across the width where his head lands on Sylvain’s stomach and makes him wince and choke out a laugh. Felix rolls over just enough to lay sideways and close his eyes, his hand searches for Sylvain’s on the sheets, which the latter helpfully extends, fingers twining lazily.

After a while tangling his other hand around Felix’s undone hair, he speaks up softly. “Maybe I would write faster if you just married me. My muse would be by my side a lot more often.”

“Sylvain,” he quips in the haze of sleepiness. “The wedding is in the next Wyvern Moon.”

“True.”

He waits a little more in silence before speaking again.

“So, you’ll be ready to settle in with me? For certain?”

The sigh that escapes him is soft, almost like he intended it as a chuckle but the exhaustion took priority over it. “I don’t need to be ready. We’ve… we’ve always been together, in a way. This is just a dumb formality.”

Only Felix would call marriage a dumb formality. 

And in a way, Felix is right; they don’t need dates nor marriage to define or solidify their relationship. They just need each other and a promise well kept.