Work Text:
"Why are we even here?” Felix asks.
He stares at the pair of skates Dimitri is handing him. They're his own, well worn. He'd scoffed when Dimitri had stashed them into the boot of his car.
"They aren't actually going to make us skate onto the ice, you know," he said.
Dimitri had just shut the boot and turned back to him, smiling. "I know, I know. But maybe we'll find some time."
*
They meet Alois outside the arena. There isn’t anyone around this late on a non-game day, and the place is unfamiliar in its silence.
“I’ll just leave you boys to it, then?” Alois says over the top of a thick white scarf, cheeks red from the cold. It's been a long time since anyone's called Felix a boy.
“Thank you for letting us in this late, Alois. We must catch up properly sometime — dinner, or drinks,” Dimitri replies, shaking his hand while also clasping him on the shoulder.
Alois laughs loudly from his belly, and rubs the side of his finger against his moustache. It’s streaked with grey now, Felix realises.
“It’s my pleasure, captain. And you too, Felix," he adds in his booming voice. "We're all just happy you're both here for the ceremony tomorrow."
Alois has got some sort of wistful expression on his face now. Felix doesn’t want to get into whatever emotions Alois has conjured up in his head about them, so he just smiles tightly as Alois departs.
*
Dimitri is chuckling to himself as he struggles with the door handle and the huge keyring Alois had given them. So much for being stronger than everyone, Felix thinks, keeping his freezing hands shoved firmly under his crossed arms.
“Dimitri. Can you open it or not?”
Dimitri half turns around, face flushed from the wine they had earlier with the others, and now from a mix of excitement and the cold.
“Give me just a little longer, Felix. I’ve almost got it—”
Dimitri puts his shoulder into it one more time, and the service door at the back of the arena finally swings open. The grin on his face is even wider than before, and Felix finds himself doing his best not to smile back.
“Stop that,” he says, willing sternness into his tone. “Don’t look so pleased to be breaking in. What if someone sees us?”
“We’re not breaking in, Alois gave us the keys himself,” Dimitri says, shoving the jangling mass of metal back into his pocket. “Though I don’t think I’ve ever been here so late at night…”
Dimitri sticks out a hand behind him as he peers down the dark corridor. Felix looks at it for a moment, before taking it in his own.
“I still don’t know why we’re here,” he says, grumbling as he follows.
“It's been a while, hasn't it?” Dimitri says. “They've already prepared everything for tomorrow, but Alois did say we could have a go on the ice tonight if we wanted."
Felix scoffs. Dimitri sounds slightly guilty about being given special privileges, which is absurd considering how much Dimitri has done for the club.
Their cups are far behind them, Felix knows. As a team they stormed to incredible heights — they won when no one else thought they'd win. The Lions were a team clinging on to long-faded glory when Felix had been drafted. But they were his childhood love and the only jersey he'd ever wanted to wear on his back, so that's where he stayed.
He used to not be able to look at the trophy cabinet in the atrium, deliberately making detours and taking pains to avoid it. But of course the arena was designed to force people past a wall-to-wall montage of the team's triumphs on their way deeper into the arena, including a larger than life print of Rodrigue and Lambert grinning toothlessly as they hoisted the cup.
Felix still prefers not to look too closely at it. He used to barely notice anything before he walked out for games, anyway. But now his eyes catch on the details — a hand curled around a waist, wild joy in wet eyes above flushed cheeks, the stark white of the A stitched onto the navy uniform across his father's chest.
It's a good photograph, he concedes.
*
Sylvain had gotten the whole gang back together in Fhirdiad earlier that night, ahead of Felix and Dimitri’s number retirement ceremony the next day.
“See you there, Felix. No excuses,” he’d said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself over their video call weeks before. Pointless, actually. It’s not like Felix could make himself scarce when Dimitri is sitting right next to him, saying goodbye to Sylvain too.
“Make sure he turns up, Dimitri!” Sylvain added, shooting them an exaggerated wink before hanging up.
It’d been nice to see everyone again, Felix admits. It’d been long enough that he started to have moments of nostalgia every time he walked past the framed team picture Dimitri put up in their house.
It wasn’t even of any particularly glorious moment — just one time they’d all gone fishing up at Sylvain’s lake house in Gautier at his insistence. It was summer, and they were all smiling with the sun in their eyes on Sylvain’s ridiculous yacht. Dimitri had liked the photo enough to get it framed, clearly. And Felix, well. It’s a good memory.
This time, he and Dimitri had made the short trip down from Fraldarius, while Ingrid and Sylvain flew in from Galatea and Gautier. As far as he knew Mercedes had opted to drive north from Enbarr, picking up Annette and Ashe along the way, while Dedue rode his alarmingly large motorcycle over from Duscur.
They had all piled right back into their favourite restaurant ten minutes away from their practice rink — the one they'd been to so many times before that no one even blinked an eye whenever they used to stop by after a particularly grueling training session under Jeralt's watchful eye.
This time, when the restaurant owner came by their table to greet them amid the racket Sylvain was making with Ashe and Annette, he took Dimitri's hands in both of his own and thanked them for coming with more sincerity than Felix expected.
It had been a few years since that cup-winning team had been slowly dissolved — whether in free agency, trades or the aging curve.
Felix had always known their time together was limited. But there had been a hollow feeling in his chest when he heard the news that Sylvain had finally been let go, leaving himself as the last remaining member of those storied Lions teams that afternoon.
Cyril had tried to check in on him, but he didn't have the time to coddle their rookie centre. Instead he found himself standing in a corridor, staring wordlessly at a photograph of his younger self yelling deliriously as Dimitri finally, finally raised the cup.
"Those years were really something," came Byleth's voice from behind him. Their inscrutable general manager, emerging without warning as usual, who had taken five years to painstakingly assemble the team and then won three cups in a row. "I won't say I'm sorry to have broken the team up—"
Felix scoffed. "Don't. You're supposed to replace us. All of us, eventually," he said pointedly. "That's your job."
Byleth smiled almost imperceptibly beneath the fall of their green hair. Felix wouldn't have been able to tell when he first met them, but this time the warmth on their face was clear as day.
*
He and Dimitri played more than three hundred games together. Or barely over three hundred, if Felix was being honest with himself. It could have been twice more, had everything their fathers planned for them fallen into place. But it could also have been no games at all, if the worst had come to pass. Three hundred and eight is a nice, whole number, Felix had long since decided.
“I still don’t understand why you insisted on coming here.”
Dimitri, who’d been walking at a steady pace in front of him, turns around and smiles.
“An indulgence, I suppose. Nostalgia. Do you remember when Annette broke the ceiling?”
This particular hallway. Felix does remember. They’d been warming up with their usual pre-game soccer before puck drop when Annette — still a rookie back then, all nerves and humming under her breath when she thought no could hear — had kicked the ball upwards with so much force that it shot through the false ceiling and sent a lamp crashing to the floor. It’d been utterly hysterical, Felix doing his best not to double over while Annette wailed her apologies and Sylvain laughed so hard he started to cry.
Felix snorts. “Gilbert still thinks Sylvain is the one who did it.”
“To be fair, he has broken a number of other things.”
Felix narrows his eyes, thinking back. Sylvain doesn't tend to get into many accidents he didn't deliberately orchestrate himself.
“Like what?”
“Other teams’ penalty kills, for one. Fans’ hearts?” Dimitri's tone is innocuous, but there’s a twinkle in his eyes as he chuckles at his own joke. Felix rolls his eyes, at odds with the smile growing on his own face.
Dimitri’s right, though. Sylvain had always been one of the team's most popular players. The second of the two first line centres they'd been blessed with in the draft — and he'd stepped up during the lost seasons when Dimitri was incapable of doing so.
It's a time Felix doesn't much like to think about. It's all in the past, and they're here now.
They pause in front of the double doors leading to the rink, where Felix can smell the ice on the other side. Dimitri looks at him expectantly, one hand resting on the door handle.
"Ready?" Dimitri asks.
As if he needs to be asked. "I'm always ready."
*
There's nothing like skating on a fresh sheet of ice, Felix thinks. The sound of the metal blades slicing through the frozen surface — the satisfying spray it makes when he comes to a hard stop. He can move faster, more effortlessly on the ice than he ever could on land.
It's freeing. He always misses it.
He turns back to the home bench where Dimitri had been taking his time to lace up his own skates. He'd offered to help, but Dimitri just waved him off and told him to just go on the ice first. But now Dimitri was nowhere in sight.
"Dimitri? Where are you?"
A reply echoes back from down the tunnel to the locker room. "I'm here, Felix. Give me a moment — there — "
There's a loud buzzing sound, and suddenly the dim lights on the arena walls are overshadowed by the spotlight that turns on from somewhere in the rafters, trained on centre ice.
"This is overly dramatic, isn't it?" Felix grumbles, shielding his eyes from the glare. It's too bright, he can barely see anything outside of the narrow illumination as he waits for his eyes to adjust.
He hears the sound of someone running heavily across the padded floor — Dimitri, obviously — that give way to the smooth strokes of skate blades cutting through the ice. Then there's a pair of hands landing warmly on his shoulders, and the impact launches both of them into a gentle spin across the ice.
Felix can feel Dimitri laughing against him, the low rumble of his chest muted by the thick winter coats they're both still wearing. The weight of Dimitri's chin resting against his shoulder, his arms that have moved from Felix's shoulders to wrap him in a full embrace.
Then Dimitri lets him go, and lifts his head. There's a light in his eyes now, that Felix recognises.
He open his mouth to say something, but Dimitri hushes him softly and presses his lips against Felix's own before he can.
"Just like old times, isn't it?" Dimitri says, pulling away for a moment, fondness written all over his face.
Not really. But Felix will take it.