Chapter Text
“Okay! I think everything is ready!” Annette chirps, her tiny hands clapping together while she bounces on her toes. She’s always so eager and, by now, Felix is accustomed enough to her energy. Today, however, he finds himself rubbing away at tension in his forehead when he lifts his head from the tax reports he’s been reading to see Annette so excited.
Felix hasn’t been sleeping well—the library lounge is decidedly less comfortable than the bed he shares with Sylvain, but one of them has to be the one to walk out. So far, it’s been Felix every night this week, a matter of pithy pride and little more. His hip complains, deep beneath the surface, and his lower back protests his each and every movement with even more fervor. Nonetheless, Felix stands and circles around his desk.
Annette’s books of sorcery litter the floor of his study. To Felix, there is little organization, but he knows Annette well enough to understand that not a thing looks out of place to her.
“The spell uses largely faith magic,” she explains. There’s something cryptic about the way she phrases it, but Felix picks and chooses his battles these days to keep sane. He decides not to worry about it. He trusts her. “The incantation’s base has its roots in—”
“It’s fine,” Felix says. He doesn’t mean to ruin her fun, but it’s not likely that he’ll understand the specifics of her art anyway. Quickly, he apologizes. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I trust you.” He waves off his own rudeness and the background of her spell in a single motion, then holds his arms out beside him until they’re parallel with the plush rug beneath his boots. “Ready when you are.”
Annette’s spell coats him from head to toe, the sensation not unlike warm water spreading across his scalp and pouring down across his shoulders, along the planes and contours of his body until it puddles around his feet.
The soft, white light coating Annette like a saint fades. “You’ll sleep much better tonight,” she says as she slides her index finger in an “x” across her bosom. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“That confident, huh?”
“If this doesn’t work, the school of sorcery in Fhirdiad will have to take back my diploma.” She sets to work snapping her books shut and stacking them in two piles.
Felix assures her that one the estate’s servants will return the books to her guest quarters as the last remnants of magic sink into Felix’s bones. They tingle throughout his limbs and crawl in deeper, invasive, and suddenly he feels nothing at all save for an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. The yawn comes before he can stop it, and Annette is already grinning from ear to ear.
“See? It’s working.”
Felix lifts one eyebrow, skeptical when he falls back into his desk chair and struggles to focus on Annette’s diminutive form framed against the massive window overlooking the Fraldarius estate. The sun is just beginning its descent toward the horizon, but he’ll need to light some candles soon. There’s no way that he can neglect his duties to sleep, and Sylvain will want to eat supper together…
“Yeah, yeah,” Annette says. “I never said it would be easy for the first night or two. But just think how well you’ll rest when you’re so exhausted!” Then, more gently, “It will even out, Felix. You’ll be all right. I’d never steer you wrong, and I wouldn’t travel this far north just to slap you with a sleeping cantrip.”
If only magic like hers could repair a relationship, Felix thinks. With candles lit, he pushes through the mental fog and works late into the night.
He skips supper with Sylvain.
Felix’s eyes open to a bright morning, something that absolutely does not exist in the dark corner of the Fraldarius library where the heavy curtains have remained drawn ever since Felix began using the space as a second bedroom.
Something is wrong.
Just as Annette promised, his body is light and his mind clear when he sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the mattress—mattress?
Oh, yes. Something is very wrong.
Felix rushes to the window as his brain struggles to piece together what’s happened to him, and he recognizes quickly that this room is familiar. It’s not dissimilar from his dormitory room at the Officer’s Academy…
Sure enough, the view from his bedroom window is far, far from Fraldarius territory. Felix’s face pales as he overlooks a place he didn’t think he would set eyes on again for some time—Garreg Mach monastery. There’s more that’s the matter, though. Felix could never forget the damage that had been done to this place during the war. Since then, of course, elaborate repairs have been made beneath the new archbishop’s direction.
He doesn’t have to look down at the sprawling stone roofs and spires for long to know that the monastery is, without a doubt, how he had known it as a student. He lets blunt nails dig into the skin of his forearm and draw upwards, just enough dull pain to wake him had he been dreaming.
Felix wouldn’t be so lucky.
He glances down at his clothes to find that they haven’t changed and one glance into a smudged looking glass tells him that he has at least maintained his age. He is thankful, at least, that he was too exhausted the night before to care about changing out of his raiment (or even discarding his sword) before retiring to the library and flopping down onto his lounge for sleep. To wander Garreg Mach in anything less would certainly be an embarrassment all its own.
Luckily, the height of his window tells him that he is roomed somewhere on the third floor, far from the majority of the monastery’s bustling activity.
Sitting still and waiting for the rest of this dream or nightmare to come to him is pointless, and so Felix peers out into the hallway. He is less familiar with this part of the monastery than the second floor, where his own room had been, and the lower levels full of classrooms and dining halls and stables and all the other places that had become his home for that year so long ago.
Reluctantly, he descends the stairs on high alert, the palm of his hand curling around the pommel of the sword at his hip.
Wondering whether or not this is a part of Annette’s spell (and even moreso wondering whether she intended this to happen at all), Felix doesn’t let his guard slip even when no immediate threat presents itself. He receives only a couple of hurried nods from servants; otherwise, it’s like he isn't there at all. If not for their brief acknowledgment, Felix would assume that he is invisible in this world, like a ghost wandering the monastery’s stone corridors in search of relief.
It’s not until a familiar face smiles at him and offers a gentle hand that the tension falls from Felix’s body. His shoulders relax, and he feels his jaw unclench.
“Lord Fraldarius.” The archbishop greets him, though they are not the archbishop at all. No, Byleth’s hair is darker, their eyes a largely empty expanse that has yet to lighten with the Creator’s blessing. “It’s lovely to see you here.”
Felix’s throat bobs. It’s the only answer he can muster for some seconds.
“Archbi— Professor?”
“Yes.” Byleth nods knowingly and exchanges a silent glance with Felix. “Professor, for now. Lady Rhea is the archbishop at this point in time, the Imperial Year 1180.”
Down the stairwell and to the ground floor, Felix follows Byleth in a daze. Everything is exactly the same as he remembers it, down to the areas of the bushes that have been trimmed in an effort to hide the crushed leaves and holes that emerge from the occasional student brawl or, more commonly than one might think, from young lovers' rapid attempts to hide when nearly caught kissing in the garden paths.
Over a tall hedge and through a wrought iron gate, Felix hears the bustling of friendly banter and the clack of wooden swords from around the corner. “Your house often seems the rowdiest,” Byleth laments. Together, they turn the corner so that the professor can acknowledge the chaos.
And that, for better or for worse, is when Felix spots Sylvain.