Work Text:
It’s of no importance whether Felix believes in the Goddess. He has more important things to do than worry about whether any particular ghost, spirit, or invisible omnipotent lady in the sky is real or not.
But if, by chance, the Goddess really does exist, Felix wonders what the hell she’s doing. She doesn’t take the most simple of requests. Felix would know.
Since everyone reconvened at Garreg Mach, Sylvain has been slacking off even more than he used to. And even though Felix had fervently hoped—one might even say prayed —that the prospect of real war would make Sylvain take staying alive more seriously, it seems he would have no such luck.
Because for all that Sylvain had talked about changing his ways, everything is the same as five years ago. If anything, Sylvain seems to accumulate scars even faster now, whether through carelessness or reckless chivalry. The philandering hasn’t stopped either; Sylvain continues avoiding all of Ingrid’s and Felix’s attempts to spar with him, instead preferring to pester Annette to “study” with him (despite having no classes), to eat all his meals with Mercedes…
In fact, he seems to have taken a special interest in Mercedes. He follows her back to her room sometimes, darting around as if intentionally trying to shake someone from tailing him. It is of no consequence that Felix is, in fact, tailing him a bit.
He would stop if Sylvain just went to his training like he was supposed to. But the bastard just keeps sneaking off to Mercedes’s room. (For healing? Or for sympathy? Is that why he has so many fresh cuts on his arms?)
It annoys the hell out of Felix. Every time he follows Sylvain to Mercedes’ closed door, he almost feels tempted to eavesdrop, except that he’s trying to stop caring about Sylvain’s habits and has no plausible excuse to be standing outside Mercedes’ ground floor dormitory room.
And Sylvain, the incorrigible hedonist that he is, also sneaks away by himself at every opportunity. Lingering in secluded corners, hastily departing as soon as Felix sees him, as if he’s been caught just before a clandestine rendezvous.
He even seems to be spending time in...the cathedral, for some reason?
First Felix spots him headed across the bridge late in the night after leaving Mercedes’ room. Then he sees him returning there again as soon as he wakes up in the morning.
And when Felix thinks about what unholy things Sylvain is doing there, and who he might be meeting, his patience finally snaps. He awakes at sunrise to the sound of Sylvain’s footsteps past his room, right on schedule. He waits a moment to give him a generous head start, and then stalks him across Garreg Mach to catch him in the act.
Felix pushes open the heavy double doors with curses he shouldn’t say in the Goddess’s presence on his tongue. He bites them back and instead calls out, “Sylvain!”
And sure enough, there he is: standing in the center of the cathedral with his back turned, bathed in the strong morning sunbeams raining down through the cathedral’s dome. The dark, polished floor under Sylvain’s feet appears to glow, reflecting the light like still water, interrupted only by bits of rubble like river stones. Were it not for the long shadow he cast, it would look like Sylvain was floating on light.
Sylvain whips around at the sound of his name, his perfectly upright pose dropping into a tense battle-ready stance before he sees Felix and relaxes.
“Whew, Felix!” he says with an easy grin. “You scared me for a second there.”
“What are you even doing here, Sylvain?!” Felix marches up to seize him by the front of the shirt. “It’s the crack of dawn! And I know for a fact that you were out late again last night!”
“Aww, Felix, are you worried about me?”
Felix bristles at the teasing. “Of course I am, idiot! You’re going to get yourself killed in battle if you keep showing up to fight on two hours of sleep and zero hours of training!”
The smile on Sylvain’s face falters. “I’m not trying to get myself killed,” he says, gently prying Felix’s fingers from his shirt. “I promise.”
“Then what are you doing, Sylvain?”
Sylvain turns his eyes away to the pews around them. “You’ll laugh.”
“Try me.”
Sylvain hesitates. “I’m...working on my faith.”
And Felix laughs, of course. The sound echoes in the hollow ceiling of the cathedral. “What, you? Faith? At least come up with a better excuse than that.”
“I’m not lying! You’re the one who told me to stop throwing myself in harm’s way! How else am I supposed to make myself useful?”
“Maybe if you came to training you could stay out of harm’s way in the first place? Stop counting on the Goddess to save you, and—” stop letting yourself get hurt to get attention, he almost blurts.
“I swear! I swear, I really have been working on healing, so—”
“Yeah? Then prove it.”
Sylvain steps closer. He reaches a hand down toward Felix’s belt. And for an insane second, Felix thinks Sylvain is about to pull him in and kiss him.
But what Sylvain really does is unsheathe an inch of Felix’s sword and run his palm down it.
“Sylvain!” Felix leaps away, but it’s too late; Sylvain’s palm is pooling with blood.
“Just watch!” Sylvain raises his other hand to work magic over it while his blood starts to drip to the floor.
Felix watches, fascinated. He can’t heal either, of course, but he finds himself overtaken by some strange desire to see Sylvain’s skin knit back together. He imagines everything healing to be as unmarred as the hand he remembers from his childhood.
He wants so badly to see Sylvain’s wound melt seamlessly away, for the blood to disappear and reveal the fist he’s watched gripping a lance in training, the fingers he always catches and squeezes once for good luck before battle, the shape he knows as well as the back of his own hand—
But it doesn’t do any of that. It just bleeds.
Felix crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow. “Wow. You never cease to disappoint.”
“Just—just give me a second!”
Felix watches with detached amusement as Sylvain repeatedly gestures at his own hand, the fervor of his motions increasing with each failed attempt. He flicks his wrist, as if trying to wring the magic out of his fingertips. His lips move, too, mouthing words Felix can’t identify. Perhaps heal, or please, or Fe.
Nothing happens.
“Good one, Sylvain.” Felix bats away Sylvain’s healing hand and takes the injured one in his own, removing his cape to ball Sylvain’s fist in it. “Next time, maybe make your false claims a bit more achievable.”
“But… this doesn’t make sense! I’ve never had any trouble with reason!”
“That’s your problem, then. Healing isn’t reason. It’s faith.”
“I know! I just don’t understand why I can do one kind of magic and not the other!”
“Maybe the Goddess disapproves of your philandering,” Felix says with affectionate meanness. Then he grabs Sylvain’s bundled-up hand and gives it their customary squeeze, tight enough to make him wince.
“Ack! Ugh, Felix…”
“Don’t forget,” Felix says, dragging Sylvain back out into the early morning sunlight, “you did this to yourself.”
Sylvain weakly grumbles and protests and whines all the way to Manuela’s office.
Once Sylvain has been attended to, Felix sets off to see the other person who can put a stop to this.
“Mercedes.”
She stands in the door to her room, mouth open in a soft “O”, probably wondering why he’s come to see her when the sun is barely in the sky.
Without any further preamble, Felix says, “I think you should stop seeing Sylvain so late at night.”
“What? Felix?” Mercedes blinks and tilts her head in confusion. Then she rubs her eyes and blinks at Felix again. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what Sylvain told you, or what rumors you heard, but—”
“He said you’re helping him with healing, but he obviously can’t heal a papercut. So whatever it is you’re doing, you need to stop. It’s either enabling him, or distracting him from more useful pursuits.”
“Ah, is that what he’s saying?” She sighs. “Come inside for a moment, won’t you?”
Felix reluctantly steps through the doorway while Mercedes starts preparing a pot of tea.
“I’m not really sure why he keeps coming back, to be honest,” she muses over the kettle as she fills it. “I keep telling him, healing is less about faith and more about life, but he keeps going to the cathedral anyway…” She casts a quick Fire spell under the tea kettle, then sets out two teacups. “Perhaps because I told him the Goddess helps me, he thinks she can help him, too. He doesn’t seem to understand that you have to have it before you can give it away.”
“Have it? ” Felix repeats, confused. “Have what? Life? Sylvain has life. His heart’s still beating, isn’t it?”
Mercedes sighs, her eyes still on the flames. “Sylvain isn’t like you. He’s not one of those people who can survive just for the sake of survival. He needs something to live for, and I think he’s not sure what that something is. For me, it is the Goddess, but Sylvain says he has trouble loving a deity who allows things like war and poverty and crests to exist. For Annette, it’s the pursuit of knowledge, but that’s not what Sylvain wants either…”
Felix scoffs stubbornly. “Come on, it shouldn’t be that hard to find a reason to live.”
“Really?” Mercedes glances up. “What’s yours?”
Felix hesitates. What is it that keeps him alive? Anger? Stubbornness? The thrill of battle, the pursuit of strength?
The water is boiling by the time he responds. “Fear of death,” he says simply.
At the time, he thinks it’s a lie.
Felix had never feared death, nor thought he ever would fear it. Much as with the Goddess, he was reluctant to believe in anything— either heaven or hell—without seeing any evidence for it himself. So with no expectations of any afterlife, Felix supposed he would take death with grim acceptance, with the knowledge that this had long been his destiny as the shield of Faerghus.
But when death comes for him, he’s afraid.
It’s in battle, as he’d known it would be. He’s already taken a battery of blows when the fateful arrow strikes him in the chest, below the collarbone, and the pain is bone-deep, blindingly hot, only slightly dulled as adrenaline kicks in. But pain isn’t in the forefront of Felix’s mind the way that safety is. Because when he looks down at the arrow sticking out of his body and sees blood staining his clothes, all he can think is, Oh, that's where the heart is .
In a move motivated by screaming nerves, confused panic, and sheer terror, Felix pulls the arrow out of him. And realizes immediately what a grave mistake he has made.
Just as he’s about to drop to his knees in the middle of the battlefield, in the perfect position to be shot again, his knees go out from under him—not because of his own lack of balance, but because someone has just scooped him up into their arms.
“Syl...Sylvain?” Felix hears his own words slur as the world moves around him in an ever-darkening blur. Pain wracks every piece of his body as he’s jostled, rhythmically—he’s on a horse, Sylvain’s horse—
“Stay with me, Felix, please, Goddess!”
Felix groans and raises his head in an effort to see something other than dizzying flashes of trees and the heartlessly blue sky. It feels like it’s pulling him in, like he’s slipping out of his body already.
In the din of battle, Sylvain’s face is all he can see to anchor him—the determined set of his chin, and his furrowed brows, and—Goddess, had Sylvain always looked like this?
—and then Felix is being laid down on a swell of moss in a thicket of trees shielding them from the chaos all around, his back still supported by one of Sylvain’s arms while Sylvain’s other hand presses flat against the wound on his chest.
Felix groans and nearly blacks out with the pain of it. He feels his blood pumping out of him against Sylvain’s palm and hears Sylvain muttering, “Heal, heal, heal, goddammit—”
Against all odds, Felix laughs. He’s so drunk with endorphins that in that last moment before he loses consciousness, before his death, he wants to laugh at the doomed irony of Sylvain cursing the gods while trying to do faith.
But perhaps it’s not the worst way to go. Perhaps he can die happy as long as he has Sylvain’s hand over his heart.
He keeps his eyes open and on Sylvain for as long as he can.
But his consciousness doesn’t fade. If anything, Sylvain’s face above him comes into sharper focus the longer he looks up into it. The sensation of Sylvain’s hand on his chest fades from excruciating agony to a soft, aching burn.
And then Felix is left with an aching heart and Sylvain’s face above him.
“Huh?” He coughs and tastes the tang of blood in his mouth, but he can breathe. There’s pain under the skin telling him he’s still wounded internally, but the surface of the wound is sealed. His heart is beating. He won’t bleed out.
And then he blinks, in genuine surprise, when something—tears or sweat, he can’t tell—drips from Sylvain’s face onto his. Sylvain has closed his eyes and is curled down toward him in relief, so close that their foreheads almost touch. “I’ve got you, Felix. I’ve got you.”
Felix lays there, unable to come up with the right question: How am I alive?
“You…you healed me. But…how? Last time, I thought...”
“Because this time it’s you, and I just wanted you to live.” Sylvain pulls him the rest of the way into his arms, hugging him tight against his chest. “I don’t believe in the Goddess, or any gods at all, but I…I know you shouldn’t die yet. You have to make it through this war in one piece.”
“Then—” Felix raises his arms to embrace Sylvain back, despite the burning in his chest. “—you should also be able to heal yourself now. Because—” His throat burns, inexplicably. “I think your life is worth saving, too.”
They don’t have time to talk about it. Felix doesn’t have the chance or clarity or proper words to say what it means for them. For him. They’re in the middle of a battle, and he’s still in desperate need of a stronger faith spell, a Fortify or Recover to fix the internal damage.
But as Sylvain carries Felix to the backlines of the army and then gallops away again, rejoining the fray with newfound fire in his eyes, Felix knows something has changed. Because against all logic, his chest still tugs towards the frontlines.
He’s not in any immediate danger. He’s not hungry for revenge. He doesn’t feel any need to prove his strength or serve his country, but he wants to be there, fighting alongside Sylvain.
“I wonder what that means,” murmurs Mercedes while she heals him. “That Sylvain was able to heal you.” Even after the spell, Felix’s chest burns.
And Felix knows, in his heart, it’s not the battle that he lives for anymore.