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Sylvain doesn’t know how to be friends with women.
Well, Ingrid. But she doesn’t count.
As a friend? As a woman? It doesn’t matter, not really. She’s bold and brash and yells at him constantly and he’d sooner die for her than watch her get married off to some wealthy lord who doesn’t deserve the pegasus blessings on her boots.
He’d sooner die for her than watch her fly her way into danger because he knows she feels the same way. But if one of the two of them is walking out of the war alive it’s her.
Dimitri is half dead already and if he dies the war is over. But he’ll live. If only out of rage and spite.
Felix won’t die. He’s not stupid enough to let that happen.
Sylvain is, and he knows he is, and so he protects Ingrid. But not because she’s his friend. She’s something else that is so much more.
Annette isn’t his friend either. She’s funny and wicked smart and takes herself way too seriously. He’s just tall enough to peer over her notes, and he respects her enough to tell her when her spell calculations are just a little off. She rushes through things, and she always rounds up even when she shouldn’t.
Optimism is her downfall. At least in math.
He appreciates that in her. She’d always rather hear it than make a mistake later.
He doesn’t have that. None of it. Not the work ethic or the kindness. But he likes knowing there are people out there with it.
Annette’s not his friend. She’s more of a sister.
And his heart burns ice cold in his chest when he realizes that.
Everything he knows about being a good brother he learned from Glenn Fraldarius so he teases Annette and gives her corrections and when he praises her he always means it, and it always feels earned.
They’re not siblings. They don’t even look alike past the red head description- Sylvain is tall and built to take hits. His hair is bright as if to paint a target on his back, one he gladly bears. He’s the product of parents who care too little but pay too much attention.
Annette is the opposite, from what he’s gleaned. And he likes that in her. Talking to her is an adventure and a half and he always comes out feeling just a little better. And it’s as soothing as a lullaby and as shocking as a fall. That’s Annette.
She’s not his friend, and they’re not related, but it's nice to pretend, sometimes. What life could have been had everything been different.
Dorothea isn’t his friend either. Nor does she want to be. He’s scared of the way that she sees right through him and is too proud to keep that to herself.
She’s like looking in a mirror, sometimes. Because the more he learns about her the less he feels he knows her and that is frightening. He spends time with her, he flirts with her for the delightful rejection she throws gladly in his face. Informed rejection, somehow, feels better. She acknowledges fully what he could do for her, but she doesn’t want to deal with him.
The honesty is refreshing and he wants to keep her around. But she’s not his friend. She’s too smart to be.
But Mercedes von Martritz knows exactly who he is and she seeks him out anyway. It's confusing. He’s at his ugliest with her around- It’s so easy to be angry with her warmth. Angry at his family.
Angry at hers.
Mercedes has every right to be as screwed up and jealous and bitter as he is, but instead she figures out what sweets everyone likes and asks him to pray with her because it’s quiet and no one will come looking for him at the cathedral at night.
Mercedes patches his wounds after every battle and tells him that his life is valuable and he should protect it better.
She’s just said it for the hundredth time and his stupid brain has to have the final word.
The line, kiss it and make it better, dies in his mouth as he remembers who he’s talking to. He never knows what to say around her.
He doesn’t insult her by flirting. Or at least, he tries not to. Flirting is always on some level a joke to him. A game. It’s fun to watch the light in a girl’s eyes brighten as she starts to believe that she’s special. She’ll be the exception to his rule, his reputation. He likes to show just enough of himself to lull those girls into thinking he’s not as bad as everyone lets on.
Sometimes, with the girls who think they see through him, he acts a little bumbling. He trips over his words or seems overwhelmed, a little less smooth. It works. It’s all artifice.
Except with Mercedes it’s not. It never is.
He doesn’t like to let people in but Mercedes weaseles her way in with her smiles and her lack of judgement and the little absent minded way she sticks her tongue out between her lips when she's sewing up a wound that she deems too delicate to be fixed with magic.
“This is a mess,” she comments as she pulls the needle through the cut. He doesn’t even flinch, well used to the dull burning.
It’s easier to laugh through this, and most of the other healers are either far too eager to get their hands on him or far too disgusted to even try. He’s waited all afternoon for this specific brand of pain.
He laughs at her concentration face because it’s so sweet. “If I were dying you would be nicer to me, so it’s probably fine.”
She keeps working, but her eyes glance up towards him and she gives a gentle nod, the gauzy veil of her hat bouncing just a bit with the motion. “You’ll be fine. I’m just worried you’re trying to set a new record for most stitches.”
He’s taken an axe wound to the arm and it wasn’t his smartest move ever but he’s fairly certain he’s had worse. But he’s been sitting in the tent for a long time and she’s just gotten to him. He was last to be treated. He always makes sure he is. It’s supposed to be punishment for running headlong into danger.
He gives her a wink, “Make it pretty for me. Maybe a flower. You said you never have time to embroider these days.”
He towers over her, seated on a supply crate while she works over him. He’s had to take his shirt off so she could check him out and while he knows he’s attractive- all golden body hair and muscles and a dusting of speckled freckles that leave exciting questions about how his back has seen the sun so much. But she doesn’t ask. Mercedes doesn’t even blush at the sight of a half naked man and a very good looking one at that and he likes how brazen she is under all of that purity.
Mercedes hums, and doesn’t even grace him with a look, “That wouldn’t leave a particularly attractive scar.”
He leans in, mouth ghosting over the top of her head so close he could kiss her golden hair if he’d just had the free use of his arm to remove her hat and really, really look at her, “Worried I’ll have trouble attracting a woman?”
She squeezes his arm, nails pressing spikes of sensation into the flesh and that hurts more than the cut.
“Would it make you more careful on the battlefield if I told you it would?”
Her voice is thick with concern and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the pang in his chest that makes him want to promise her he’ll be more careful.
Nor the slippery pull on his gut that tells himself that would be a lie and so he won’t say it at all. There’s an ebb and flow of thoughts and each one is more concerned with how he’ll hurt her.
And he will, he knows he will.
Sylvain is not friends with women because he hurts them. Each action is carefully carved like the thrust of a spear to keep his enemies far away, to show them that there are consequences to this game. Nobility and crests are more painful than they are good and he is beautiful but he is poison.
He doesn't want to be poison to Mercedes. Which must make them friends.
Sylvain is selfish and he knows he’d die for Ingrid. He thew himself in front of an axe for Dimitri today, not that he noticed. He knows that despite any promises he’s made Felix values life enough to go on living without him.
And he likes the thought of what all of them could do if they kept living. Ingrid could become a knight so noble and powerful that they wrote stories and songs about her for generations. Felix would go on, become a Duke or a great military leader not because he wanted to be but because no one else could do it like he could. And he could grumble about it but he’d secretly love the power to keep people safe.
Dimitri would see his mission through, and would maybe, just maybe, become a shadow of the boy who gave girls daggers and was so earnest that he believed every word he said or said nothing at all. He can see a future where Dimitri will be more okay than he was now. Maybe.
The idea that Mercedes would go on without him is a raw sort of pain. It scratches at him like brambles in the wood. Like the cold water of a well seeping into his clothes. It chills him inside out.
Mercedes can’t possibly go on without him cracking jokes at her and flirting badly while not meaning it. There could be no future without her chiding him when he got hurt, and holding him when the world hurt so damn much and no one but her understood.
He understands her too, in a way no one else can, and she can’t go on in the world without someone who feels that pain of always being used by her side.
But he’s rude and an idiot and it's too painful to think about why the steel and softness of her gaze force him to push her away. “Nah I won’t die. We’ve gotta make crest babies first, right?”
The flirt turns to ash on his tongue and Mercedes rolls her eyes at him as she keeps her steady hands on his arm, now almost in one piece. It will be a huge scar. One of thousands. He’ll live.
She frowns and her tongue finds its way back in her mouth and he’s so disappointed he almost wants to say something.
He’s not sure what something would be, and he’s not used to words failing him by accident.
There’s a cruel part of him that wants to scream at her quiet complacency. He wants her to complain. To be cruel to him for making those jokes. There’s an end of the war for her, and then she’ll be married off to the highest bidder when she deserves so much more than that.
She deserves love by someone who can appreciate her and care for her and protect her. By someone who looks at Mercedes and sees just her. No crest, no family. Not even the warm magic that thrums through her with every breath and feels like walking inside on a warm day.
Someone who knows she’s a little absent minded but smart in her own way and that the kindness is as much of a defense as his cruelty. Someone who won’t take advantage of her relentless kindness because they’ll understand it.
But she won’t find that, won’t fight for it, and he’ll have to stick by her side and make sure she gets it anyway.
Because she’s his friend.