Chapter Text
In the year that Felix has served as Dimitri’s representative in Adrestia, he’s discovered three things. First, Adrestians will arrive thirty minutes late to every meeting but finish them with twenty minutes to spare and three extra items checked off the agenda. Second, Faerghans get drunk to stay warm, but Adrestians, in a land where the snow is as rare as the women are beautiful (or so Lorenz says), get drunk to party. They take their parties almost more seriously than they took the war, often beginning their parties in the early afternoon and dancing into midmorning of the next day. Third, and perhaps the most notable observation on his list, the only thing that Adrestians love more than partying is bread. Not simply content to have a different bread for every single occasion, they add things to and wrap things in it with an almost alarming degree of relish. Felix’s not a complete bread novice; the dining hall at Garreg Mach served bread that incorporated sausage, potatoes, and corn, but the sheer variety of stuffed and studded breads here is, in his private opinion, almost deviant.
In comparison, Faerghus bread culture is what the Adrestians might politely call failing and geriatric. Growing up, Felix ate two kinds of bread: crumbled hardtack that was served half-soaked in fish stew, and dense rye bread that tended to scrape the roof of your mouth as you ate, giving the impression that it was trying to masticate you back in a last dying attempt at revenge. A very austere, Faerghus type of bread, all things considered. He suspects if he tried to serve Ferdinand rugbrod he might mistake it for a thinly-sliced brick.
Felix is in the middle of a croissant, poring through a sheaf of documents related to grain taxes — a fourth thing: the Adrestians take their grain taxes more seriously than any other tax, perhaps because of their cultural obsession with bread — when Dimitri knocks on the door for the seventh time in as many days.
He sighs and sets the croissant down, crossing his legs and leaning against his plush settee, preparing for another thirty minutes of wasted time. This has happened every single day since Dimitri arrived in Enbarr, but the repetition of it only seems to make the stress of the interaction worse. His chest tightens with anxiety, so he loosens the neckline of his shirt and fans it up and down with one hand.
“Felix. Felix, please, will you open the door?”
“No,” Felix says, even as the guilt sitting heavily on his chest doubles in weight. He ignores it in favor of tracking the trail of discarded clothing across the floor. A sloppily unlaced pair of stays nearest to the door, followed by a silky robe pooled in the middle of the room, then a lacy, sheer slip. On his bed, an incriminating glimpse of the ends of some silky stockings, torn by his own shaking hands when he tried to remove them last night.
Felix will sooner die than allow Dimitri in to see this scene.
“I need to know you’re alright,” Dimitri pleads. “It’s been a week, Felix.”
A week since Dimitri’s arrival in Enbarr. Almost an entire year since they successfully stormed Edelgard’s castle and Felix had stayed behind to supervise the rebuilding of the Adrestian territories while Dimitri returned triumphant to Faerghus. Three hundred and twenty days since Felix has last seen his king in the flesh. Felix has endured all of this, this damned stretch of time, only to be thwarted by his own lack of foresight and the undeniable hints of woman in his room.
“To be honest, I miss your face.” Dimitri says mournfully. “I was disappointed when I arrived in the city and you were not there to welcome me.”
The vice grip on Felix’s lungs tightens. What does one say to that? If it weren’t for the stupid curse Felix would have been the one to receive Dimitri, instead of sending Dorothea and Ferdinand as his proxies.
“Sorry.”
“I know. I’m not upset — I understand now that you were indisposed. But Felix, won’t you let me in? I could take care of you.” Dimitri’s voice is full of hope.
“How many times will I need to repeat myself?” Felix says, as if the heaviness of his chest hasn’t been stifling him for days. The gauzy hem of a hastily-discarded underskirt flutters in the breeze from his open window and nearly takes flight across his bed. “I’m fine. I don’t need your help.”
He can hear Dimitri’s reproachful pout through the door.
Felix sighs, his ribcage heaving with unnatural effort. “What if it’s contagious? Then what, boar?”
It’s not. Both Linhardt and Lysithea were very certain of that. But Dimitri has already wasted his first seven days in Enbarr stationed uselessly outside of Felix’s rooms, and frankly, Felix is tired of feeling like a caged animal.
“Felix,” Dimitri repeats, “I would rather suffer through whatever ailment you have together with you, then stand by while you suffer needlessly.”
Felix leans back on the door and the weight on his chest shifts minutely.
“Boar,” Felix grits, “It’s not that bad. Just trust me, okay? It’s not worth your time. You can wait and see me after I get better. I’m tired of arguing with you.”
“But…”
He can hear Byleth’s muffled voice through the wood. “You should listen to him,” Byleth says. “He carried the entire army through Derdriu. If you could trust him to do that, you can trust him in this.”
“Professor,” Dimitri says in a plaintive voice that is completely unbecoming of the King, “that and this are different.”
“Yes,” Byleth says mildly, “because Felix is clearly not in any mortal danger, and neither are you. Are you, Felix?”
“No,” Felix says.
“Then it’s solved. You’ll see him in two weeks. It’ll be fine,” Byleth says.
“I’ll be fine,” Felix echoes. “Listen to the professor and leave me alone. I have work to do, and I can’t possibly review all these documents when you insist on shuffling outside my door and making a racket.”
Though Felix does have a growing tower of documents in his room, he has no intention of actually working on anything today. He glares at the stack of papers on his desk, held down in place by a heavily jeweled hairpin, and makes no move towards them.
“Alright,” Dimitri says reluctantly. There’s a long pause and then two sets of footsteps recede from the vicinity.
Felix groans and tips his head back against the door, allowing himself a long moment to curse his life. Then he rises and picks up the clothing piece by piece with the air of a man headed to the gallows.
Roughly thirty minutes after Felix turned Dimitri away, a beautiful blond woman pushes the curtains of Duke of Fraldarius’s bedroom window open and carefully opens the shutters. She casts a quick glance at the garden below, then hoists herself onto the windowsill and leaps into the foliage of the tree directly below it. There’s some deep, muffled swearing, then silence.
Dorothea waits for him at the back doors of the Mittelfrank Opera House, as she has for the past two weeks. A glossy tendril of blond hair bounces in his peripheral vision, so he flips the corkscrew curl over his shoulder irritably.
“Gorgeous as usual,” she says saucily as she opens the door for him. “How was the trip?”
Humiliating. Skulking around Enbarr in a garish blond wig and Dorothea’s dress was not on his list of peacetime activities, but he should have known that war was the easy part all along.
“I love what you’ve done with your hair. Very fetching. And, ooh, your—” Dorothea waves an elegantly manicured hand in the general direction of his chest, her voice turning sly,“—your womanly charm is just overflowing. How do you get them so perky? Even the King of Faerghus would fall in love with such a beautiful maiden, I think. I hear he’s in town.”
“Don’t debase your King like that,” Felix says. “And stop ogling me. I outrank you.”
“Don’t forget that I’m doing you a favor,” Dorothea sings tauntingly, still looking down his bodice. “I’ll ogle you as much as I like.”
He ignores her shrieking laughter as he flounces angrily past.
Two weeks into his self-imposed confinement, Felix had disclosed the nature of his ailment in Dorothea in a fit of desperate embarrassment. This was only after he’d destroyed half of the furnishings in his quarters in his intermittent bouts of cabin fever and realized that he had wasted more of the royal stipend in those two weeks than he’d spent in six months. It’d taken three shattered water basins, seven splintered armrests, and twelve terrified maids for him to swallow his pride and ask someone for help.
Dorothea is as accomplished as she is aggravating, which meant that Felix, in his usual self-destructive competence, had boorishly ignored the pitfalls of his plan and sought her help first. Of course, he should have known that Dorothea’s help would be conditional, but by then it was too late. Technically, at this point, the scales weighing their respective favors have crashed onto Felix’s side, but he’s in too deep now.
Cendrillon marks Dorothea’s first stint directing rather than starring in an opera as well as the first opera to run after the Opera House was rebuilt. The opening night coincides with the official start of Dimitri’s anniversary parade across the whole continent, where an entire contingent of nobles and dignitaries will wend their way through United Fodlan in a show of post-war prosperity.
The soprano is a beautiful young woman in her early twenties with the face of a fairy and the voice of a dolphin. She’s perfect for the role, tall and willowy with an appropriate aura of downtrodden waifishness, except for the fact that she’ll be five months pregnant by the time the season is over. The costumers are confident in their ability to hide the pregnancy, but both the soprano and Dorothea herself agree that she should avoid performing the more rigorous final dance sequence, where Cendrillon and her Prince celebrate their newfound love in a triumphant, acrobatic performance.
The entire company had been set aflutter with stress until Dorothea had taken one look at Felix’s newly sprouted rack and proclaimed him perfect for the role. All he has to do is put on the dress, follow the steps of the dance, and mouth the lyrics convincingly while the soprano sings from the wings.
Cendrillon, a three-hour, flimsily written “classic” about an impoverished girl who ultimately catches the eye of a prince, is less opera than abomination. The music is beautiful, but the plot is shoddier than the nearly shattered training sword Anna tried to sell him back in the academy. It’s a barely-veiled vehicle for gratuitous wish fulfillment, which Felix knows because it’s sung exclusively in incomprehensible ancient Adrestian, which has been dead for five hundred years, and because the Prince is styled to look almost exactly like Dimitri, except the tenor is astonishingly ugly and wears his eyepatch on the wrong eye. In his private opinion, the eyepatch actually improves the looks of the man, who is unnaturally aged for a man of forty and whose face bears an uncanny resemblance to an unrisen loaf of raisin bread.
Also, Dimitri can’t sing for shit but Sir M, despite his dual afflictions of unfortunate looks and odious personality, has a voice like the summer ocean, according to Enbarr Daily. Whatever that means. Apparently, before the war Sir M had been voted most desirable bachelor five years in a row, purely on the dubious ability to melt the clothing off women with his voice alone.
Speaking of the man...
“Ah, Lady Rosa,” Sir M says, holding his hand out to Felix from the stage. “Wonderful to see you today. You are beautiful as usual. This particular shade of red is particularly fetching on you.”
He stares not into Felix’s eyes but instead across his body. It’s embarrassing how well Dorothea’s clothes fit him. Part of it is that she has broad shoulders and her flounced, sleeveless dresses tend to be extremely forgiving. Part of it is probably that he hasn’t grown an inch since he was sixteen. But most of it, Felix suspects, is the improbably bountiful breasts that nearly spill out of his dress.
“Sir M.” Felix ignores the way Sir M’s eyes rove over the generous valley of his cleavage and also the growing urge to run him through with the hidden dagger strapped to his leg.
“Shall we begin?” Sir M bows.
Felix takes the offered hand and resigns himself to two hours of Sir M.
“They’re getting smaller,” Linhardt says critically, eyeing Felix’s rack like a butcher surveying a sow.
Lysithea scoffs and pokes at his chest with a metal wand. His breast jiggles obscenely in his chemise. “They’re still huge, though.”
Linhardt hums and prods Felix’s other breast with a wand of his own. The situation is so absurd that Felix feels no humiliation, only a resigned sort of detachment, as if the breasts yo-yoing gently between their wands like a mammary Newton's cradle are attached to someone else’s body and not his own. He turns the page of Ferdinand’s latest bandit report and skims over the table of damages.
“He had about… oh, 800 cubic centimeters to begin with, right?”
Lysithea consults a neat sheaf of notes. “That was our initial estimate, though we also noted that it was an imperfect measurement.”
“Right, of course. And what do you think he’s at now? I’d guess he’s between 450 to 500 cc's, though I’m by no means a breast expert. What I wouldn’t give to have Sylvain here.”
Felix bats the wands away with his hands and covers his breasts protectively. “Absolutely not,” he growls. He’s pretty sure Sylvain’s seen everything Felix has to see — in the winters of their childhood, Glenn used to force them all to skinny dip whenever he won a bet, which was often — but having Sylvain know about these sudden tits is too much for him to contemplate.
Linhardt just yawns. “Of course. Lysithea? What do you think?”
“I think he’s closer to 450 now. Which is really interesting; his breast mass has decreased by almost half over the past month.”
Felix uncrosses his arms and returns to Ferdinand’s report. “So? What does that mean?”
Lysithea stuffs another cookie in her mouth. “Depending on if the rate of your breast shrinkage follows some kind of curve, say, a logarithmic or exponential one, we could take a few more data points and give you a rough estimate of when you could expect them to disappear entirely. It’s really too bad we didn’t think to ask you to make some records beforehand.”
“Oh,” Linhardt says coolly, “I thought about it. But it seemed like too much work.”
Too much — Felix nearly yells in frustration.
“Sorry,” Linhardt says, his face empty of any remorse. “But I can tell you based on the readings from this device that the curse will dissipate by the end of the next month, at the very latest. The spell is clearly fading.”
“I could have told you that myself,” Felix says, then collects his manners under Lysithea’s glare. “But thanks. I appreciate it.”
“You’re very welcome,” Linhardt says, then proceeds to fall asleep and drool all over his notes.
Unsurprisingly, the show is a smashing success. They perform to a full house, and after the final curtain, the entire hall vibrates with the audience’s loud approval. The soprano has retired for the night, citing fatigue, so Sir M leads Felix out by the hand to take their last bows. The crowd roars as Sir M clutches his hand and drops to his knees. He plants a dramatic kiss upon Felix’s hand and winks like an aging chihuahua. The crowd roars, and continues roaring long after the curtain has dropped for the last time and Felix wrenches his hand from Sir M’s grip.
The man is almost impossible to shake off until Felix retreats to the safety of the women’s dressing room after assuring him that he just needs a few moments to powder his nose. Then it’s only a matter of moments to extract himself from Cendrillon’s voluminous gown, drape it across one of the numerous high-backed chairs filling the space, and pull his day dress over his head.
Someone knocks insistently on the door. “Lady Rosa?”
Curse the man to a long life of impotence. Felix vaults out of the window and drops onto the low roof below it, then takes off in a silent dash along the roof. Six windows over, he reaches up and hoists himself onto the window ledge above his head, then the next, and not a moment too soon. Sir M shamelessly pokes his head out of the window of the womens’ room and peers down into the street. Felix flattens his skirts against the window and leans heavily against it, ignoring the appalled looks of the noble socializing just inside. He’ll just stay here for a few minutes, long enough to make sure Sir M’s lost his trail, then scale up to Dorothea’s office on the floor directly above him. He smooths his dress with his hands, watching with barely contained tension as Sir M sweeps the street below, then breathes a sigh of relief as his bald crown withdraws back into the window and disappears.
He stretches his arms up, careful to maintain his balanced footing on the precarious window ledge, and tests Dorothea’s window, patting his hand blindly along the ledge. It’s unlocked, thank the Goddess, so he cracks it open for a better grip, then pushes the glass upwards fully. It’s not a whole lot of space to work with, but there's enough of a gap that he can shimmy through it if he’s careful.
He grips his skirt in one hand, exposing a truly dishonorable amount of leg in the process and probably giving the staring, scandalized nobles a generous look up his skirt and at the very male smallclothes underneath. Their problem, he thinks with a dark amusement. Then he pulls himself up the ledge and swings one leg into the room.
“Ah! Is this the beautiful lady who danced as Cendrillon in the very last scene?”
Felix almost falls out of the window entirely. His body is suddenly too hot. He knows this voice, this gentle, stately voice, this voice that he's recently only heard muffled and distorted through the wood of his door, and he does not want the owner of this voice to see him like this, bare-legged and straddling Dorothea’s windowsill like some hussy sneaking her way into her beau’s quarters.
He doesn’t want to look up. He wants to let his grip on the ledge fall, escape into the street, and disappear into the Almyran wilds forever. He looks up anyway.
Dimitri’s face is glowing with boyish enthusiasm. Behind him, Dorothea’s face is a mask of panicked glee.
“You have my compliments. The opera was truly splendid.”
Felix scoffs. Only Dimitri would consider such nonsense splendid. Only Dimitri’s eyes would sparkle with this much excitement about a badly-written piece of overt flattery.
“Lady Rosa,” Dorothea warns, settling her face into something more neutral, though her voice still trembles in barely-contained mirth, “This is your king.”
Felix coughs, then says, in a truly embarrassing falsetto, “My apologies… Your Majesty.”
How does Dimitri not recognize him? Putting aside the ridiculous voice, Felix is still Felix. The only thing the curse did to him was sprout a pair of jugs on his chest. But then he remembers the caked-on layer of stage makeup and, in a truly insane moment that speaks to how disoriented he is, silently thanks Sir M for chasing him enough that he didn’t have time to wash his face.
Then he remembers that Sir M is the one who put him in this situation and asks the Goddess to curse Sir M to a lifetime of flaccid despondency.
“I do not mind. In truth, I quite enjoy being addressed casually. But please, Lady Rosa, I would hate for you to sit on Dorothea’s windowsill all night.”
Felix brings his leg down to touch the floor, then Dimitri turns around very politely to allow him to swing his other uncovered leg into the room and fluff his skirt back into place. Dorothea, frozen to her spot in some bout of evil glee, scans her eyes up and down his body, then her impassive face splits into a terrifying grin.
Dimitri turns around after a long moment of silence, then takes Dorothea’s chair and gestures at the sofa.
“I was just telling Dorothea how much I truly enjoyed the opera. Two separate people played Cendrillon, did they not? If my eyes are to be believed, you replaced the soprano in the last scene.”
Felix barely muffles his string of expletives. How the hell did Dimitri notice that? Every single member of the company had agreed on the fact that Felix and the soprano are indistinguishable from the audience seats.
“You didn’t sing — the soprano’s voice was very distinctive, and it was the same throughout the whole opera. However, I am convinced that it was not the same person who danced onstage.”
Dorothea’s tone takes on a quality that Felix can’t read but hates nonetheless. “Your Majesty has a keen eye. This is indeed the lady who danced in the last scene. What gave it away?”
“The grace of your movements was unparalleled,” Dimitri says, addressing Felix directly, his words getting faster and louder with ardor. Sothis strike me down. “There was a divine essence to your dancing, almost as if you were a fairy from the heavens.”
Felix’s face is ablaze.
“I was struck by the sheer beauty of your movements. You are no mere dancer — on stage, you were Cendrillon. I fell in love with you from the moment you appeared.”
“You’re right,” Dorothea cuts in, before Felix succumbs to the desire to pitch himself out of the window. “Lady Rosa is our perfect Cendrillon. Beautiful, a wonderful dancer, and exceptionally smart, too.”
“I know it is uncouth to ask but—”
Dimitri stumbles on his words, his boyish charm somehow intensifying with the blunder, and Dorothea swoops in, quick as a hawk.
“Well, Your Majesty! Struck by the arrow of love, and for such a rare type of lady, too. Lady Rosa, as His Majesty’s dutiful subject, don’t you feel compelled to hear him out?”
Felix’s eyes flicker between Dorothea and Dimitri, the double D’s in the room, in a moment of horrified realization. Then, with the sinking feeling of a loose boot caught in a swamp, he nods slowly.
“Splendid!” Dimitri’s smile is almost blinding. “You have my utmost gratitude.”
“Our Lady Rosa is quite shy, however. And quite the night owl. Aren’t you, Lady Rosa?”
“No matter! I desire only to have you for a night.”
The quiet in the office is punctuated by the sounds of Felix choking and a single cackling laugh, courtesy of Dorothea.
“Lady Rosa, is everything alright?” Despite saying… that, Dimitri has the gall to look innocently concerned.
“Yes. Fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
Felix shoots Dorothea a panicked glance, which she ignores in favor of passing Felix a cleanly-pressed handkerchief.
“I’m sure a single night can be arranged,” Dorothea says diplomatically instead of what she should say, which is that Lady Rosa plans to die in a tragic, unforeseen accident in thirty minutes.
“Wonderful,” Dimitri says, turning to address Felix. “I would love to escort you to the masquerade ball in a week.”
“Ah—” Dorothea says.
“Yes?”
“Only the masquerade? Wouldn’t you… like to spend time with her afterwards?”
“Well, of course, but only if you’re willing, Lady Rosa.” Dimitri smiles dazzlingly again.
Dorothea snorts. “Ha! Willing. Right. Of course! Who wouldn’t be?”
“You flatter me.”
You flatter me. The audacity, after Dimitri and Dorothea have effectively tag-teamed him into the most humiliating situation of his life. Felix is going to die.
The next week is a cascade of major and minor irritants, none of which are important but all of which seem to be out for Felix’s blood: some backwater nobles are planning a coup, which Dimitri handily shuts down simply by riding to Lord Mercurius’s front gates and punching a hole through the wood with his bare hands; the mages forecast a drought in Enbarr’s most fertile region, causing grain prices to skyrocket and nationwide panic; the plumbing in his room breaks and he’s reduced to multiple window trips simply to use the bathroom.
The final irritant arrives on the day of the ball, shoddily disguised as a blessing: Linhardt and Lysithea pay a discreet visit to his quarters, poke and prod at him with their magical tools, and declare him curse-free. He’s free to meet Dimitri as Felix, finally, in his rightful position as the King’s shield and right hand.
But... not as Lady Rosa.
“Remember, the effects of this potion will only last until midnight,” Dorothea says, as the carriage rattles and jolts over the bumps in the road. “Not that you’ll need it for that long. All you have to do is go in, share a dance, and break his heart.”
Felix nods and takes the tiny bottle. The shimmering, viscous liquid inside flows easily down his throat. He clears it experimentally, and the cough that results is high and girlish.
“Perfect,” Dorothea says. “Sing for me, my angel of opera.”
“No,” Against his will, his voice is smooth and sweet, with all the softness of the heart of a cream puff. Nothing like his normal, surly voice. He slips his stupid half-mask over his face, leaving only his mouth bare.
“I can’t believe you decided to whore me out to the king,” he complains for the seventh time that night, but this time the complaint sounds as sweet as candy.
“Don’t be so crass, Lady Rosa,” Dorothea says, chiding.
“I wouldn’t have to be, if you hadn’t made promises in my place.”
“Look, His Majesty’s going to bother me for the rest of my life if you disappear now. Let’s just let him down gently. Tell him you’re with child. He’ll back off.”
The idea of Felix, telling Dimitri to his face that he’s pregnant, gives him heart palpitations.
“No.” Anyway, knowing Dimitri, he would just offer to raise the child as his own.
“Oh,” Dorothea says, swooning suddenly. “My stab wound’s acting up again. Oh… I might really faint this time, Felix.”
“Shut up,” says Felix. “It was a Thoron spell, not a stab wound, and we both know full well that if I hadn’t cast it you would have taken out all of the Blue Lion Dancers.”
“Oh,” Dorothea coughs softly, then sways and pitches forward toward the floor. Felix watches without a shred of pity as she lurches off the plush cushion and crumples dramatically across the tiny carriage floor. “My ribs…”
“We were on different sides of the war then! You nearly gutted me right after that!”
Dorothea’s gaze is sly beneath her curtain of hair. “And I’m glad you didn’t die, otherwise I wouldn’t have a stunning damsel to whore out to the king.”
“I’m not going. It’s your problem now,” Felix says. “I’ll open this door right now and get off in the middle of the street.”
“Don’t you dare,” Dorothea glares. “If you do that, I’ll make it your problem.”
“I don’t care. What could you do, anyway?”
“I’ll tell him you know who it is,” Dorothea says triumphantly, as if that could come close to swaying him.
“He knows better than to bother me with that.”
“Oh, Duchess Fraldarius, you drive a hard, cruel bargain.”
“What do you mean,” Felix says, immediately suspicious.
“Oh, you know, I’m pretty sure Ferdie mentioned that the von Aegir estate has a Sword of Zoltan sitting around gathering dust in the armory,” Dorothea says airily. “Did you know he and I are on pretty good terms nowadays? I’m sure I could have it if I asked. He’s more of a lance guy anyway.”
“Fuck you,” Felix says venomously as the carriage rolls up to the palace.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Dorothea responds mirthfully.
Extracting himself from the carriage is a tedious and degrading process. Dorothea, in her swashbuckling pirate’s breeches, has no problems exiting, but Felix and his stuffed bodice, his multiple layers of skirts, get jammed in the door. The two stagehands who have agreed to serve as their coachmen for the day look on in barely concealed amusement as Dorothea carefully coaxes the trailing hem of Felix’s gown with all the care of a midwife with a fresh baby before tugging Felix himself out of the carriage like an errant child.
Dorothea twines her arm with his and pulls him up the steps of the castle. The grand ballroom is awash with chatter. Walking in this contraption of a dress is worse than he imagined — like heavy armor, it weighs him down. Unlike heavy armor, it actively conspires with the ground to impede him by snagging and pulling on each carpeted step of the grand stairs. It feels like marching through the swamps during the war, when the sludge of the earth rose up to cling obstinately to each step he made.
“Felicia,” Dorothea whispers disapprovingly under her breath. “Look a little happier.”
“I’m wearing a mask,” he retorts.
“I can tell from your posture.”
“Hard to stand up straight when you’ve got this sacking on you,” Felix responds, as if they didn’t all march with double that weight of armor plus supplies during the war.
“Sacking!” Dorothea exclaims, feigning affront. “You are wearing one cage crinoline, fifty yards of horsehair braid, a hundred yards of tulle, and twenty of fine silk. Not to mention a dragon’s hoard of pearls! This cost me a royal bride’s ransom, Felix, so look a little happier about it. Most women can’t even dream of getting within ten miles of it, much less wear it.”
“Whatever.” Felix straightens up anyway.
The guards at the door allow them to enter on sight, which is a problem that Felix will address when he’s not squeezed into a gown that resembles a cake more than it does a dress. It’s something to look forward to though, a solvable equation with a simple solution. Thinking about it calms his nerves.
Felix has seen this ballroom from this particular angle many times — sometimes even with Dorothea on his arm, instead of the other way around — but tonight the view, which he normally feels ambivalent-to-annoyed about, digs tendrils of anxiety into his chest. There are so many ways this could go wrong. He’d become a laughingstock if anyone were to discover his true identity, not to mention the whole issue with Dimitri.
The herald standing at the edge of the balcony clears his throat. “Lady Dorothea and guest!”
There’s a hush as every masked face below turns towards them. Dorothea tugs him toward the staircase and they descend together. Every step pulls Felix deeper into panic but the moment they reach the bottom of the stairs, the faces whip away from them as if on cue and the babble of the ballroom resumes. Felix relaxes into a sense of peace that he knows is based on a flawed premise, but even a false sense of security is better than no security at all.
“Well, that went well,” Dorothea said. “All eyes were on you. He definitely knows you’re here.”
Felix snags a tall flute of champagne off a passing tray and lifts it to his lips hastily. The more alcohol he can get through his system before he meets Dimitri, the better.
“My lady.”
Felix chokes and the rim of his glass comes away smeared in deep red.
“Oh, Your—” Dorothea starts, voice delighted, but the delight disappears as soon as she sees the man, replaced with a sort of dour disappointment. “Sir M.”
Sir M hasn’t even bothered to dress in a costume. Instead, he’s stolen the Prince’s suit from Cendrillon’s costume department and has once again affixed the eyepatch to the wrong eye.
“Dorothea,” Sir M says. “Lady Rosa.”
He extends a hand out towards Felix. Before Felix can feign a sudden bout of poisoning, someone else places a large, steady hand on his waist. Sir M frowns, sheen of oil on his face lending him an appropriately malevolent complexion.
“Lady Rosa,” Dimitri says, and Felix resheathes the dagger hidden in his bodice.
“Your Ma—”
“Please, not now, Dorothea. I am very much enjoying going incognito. Call me Sir Pig instead.”
Felix turns. Among a sea of barely-disguised nobles, there’s only one man on the whole continent foolish enough to come to a masquerade ball fully dressed as a caped pig, complete with graphic, dangling udders. And there’s only one man on the whole continent whose friends are either too insubordinate or too loyal to stop him from making such a catastrophic decision.
“Hello, Sir… Pig,” says Felix.
“Ah,” Dimitri says, “I chose the name myself, but it is still so refreshing to be addressed so!”
Felix can’t stop his mouth. “You prefer to be called a pig?”
“It is… nostalgic, in a sense.”
The guilt strikes Felix like a poisoned arrow, red-hot and radiating from his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“I don’t know.” Too much. Everything.
Dimitri laughs. “Do not worry about it. As I said, it is nostalgic. Truthfully, I am a little fond of the name. It was given to me in unhappy circumstances, but I still hold that friend dear to my heart.”
This is awful and Felix will have his revenge on Dorothea, old Thoron wounds be damned.
“Sir Pig,” Dorothea says. “Such a pleasure to see you tonight.”
“Sir Pig,” says Sir M, with barely-concealed irritation.
Dimitri turns to address Sir M for the first time, beaming brightly. “You must be Sir M! What a wonderful costume. It suits you well. Very kingly.”
There’s an almost aggressive tint to Dimitri’s pleasantries tonight, and Sir M shrinks like a street mutt away from the intensity of his good-boy glow. His glance darts from Dimitri to Felix and back, then he sputters some vague niceties and slinks away.
“Shall we, my beautiful fairy?” Dimitri asks. Felix hates his stupid mask.
Dimitri releases his hold on Felix’s waist and offers his arm in replacement. Felix takes it begrudgingly only after Dorothea nudges him violently.
“Well, don’t let me get in the way of you two lovebirds!” She says, giving Felix a hard, meaningful stare, then flounces off into the crowd without a backwards glance.
“Please, do not feel pressured by her words,” Dimitri says. “Dorothea is an old classmate, and as such tends to treat me with a certain sort of familiarity despite my status. Though it is true that I am the King, tonight I am merely a simple pig.”
Felix rolls his eyes. “I’m sure there’s more to you than that.”
Dimitri shrugs, then steps closer. “I’m sure you’ll find out if you stick around,” he says in a move too smooth and practiced to be natural. Specifically, it’s the wording he uses: overly casual, at odds with his princely upbringing.
Dimitri is hitting on him, with all the bizarre finesse of a man who shared a wall with Sylvain during his academy years.
“My beautiful lady, would you give me the pleasure of a dance?”
There’s nothing to do but soldier on. Felix takes his hand and allows himself to be led toward the ballroom floor and into the churning mass of dancers.
“You are a beautiful dancer,” Dimitri says, as if a pavane were anything other than two fools tiptoeing in lines at each other. “Have you been dancing long?”
“Long enough.”
They make it through a particularly dull pavane, a gavotte, and a sarabande, and Felix feels himself relax slowly. The tightness in his chest eases, and some of the tension he feels melts away as they move in sync. Felix feels the presence of dozens of eyes fixed on them, though he’s not sure if they’re Dimitri’s guards or just curious onlookers ogling the pig and the fairy.
“You must be tired,” Dimitri says after two songs, as if he hadn’t watched Felix dance for two hours straight onstage. “Shall we take a rest outside?”
Now is a better time than any to turn Dimitri down gently and then disappear into the night. He allows Dimitri to lead him out to a balcony. Outside, the cool Adrestian fall chill has begun to set in. The air smells bright and sharp, sending a fresh burst of energy through Felix. Though the layered dress itself is warm enough, Felix finds himself rubbing at his arms.
“Are you cold?” Dimitri asks.
“I’m fine,” Felix says, though the hairs on his arms are clearly standing on end. Shit. Women normally don’t have hairy forearms, do they? Dorothea had painstakingly tweezed the hairs off his chest in anticipation of this but they’d forgotten his arms. Maybe Felix might just be considered a hairier woman? He’s brought back from his distraction when he feels a warm weight settle on his shoulders.
He glares at Dimitri. “I don’t need this.”
“But I would be happy to see you warm, especially out in this chill. Having just rode down from Faerghus myself, I find this weather quite temperate.”
“Fine,” Felix says, and burrows gratefully into the velvet. Far below, Felix sees a group of clearly drunken revelers and — is that Bernadetta? He didn’t realize Bernadetta left her estate at all, and the figure down there is dressed as some kind of amorphous blob, but he would recognize that expertly-executed flailing maneuver anywhere.
“You remind me of someone,” Dimitri says.
“Is this a line?”
“No, not at all,” Dimitri says earnestly, and the worst part is that Felix believes him. “I was drawn to you from the moment you appeared on the stage. Your movements recalled the grace of a close friend of mine.”
All of a sudden, Felix aflame with a feverish mortification and the white-hot fear of discovery. He shrugs Dimitri’s coat back off and thrusts it back.
“Sir Pig. Thank you for spending time with me, but I should—” Felix begins, only to be cut off by the telltale swelling of music in the ballroom.
“Ah,” Dimitri says. “A waltz! I love waltzes.”
Felix knows this. They danced together often as children, though at the time Felix had been a scant inch taller than Dimitri and cried whenever he wasn’t allowed to lead. Dimitri’s eyes are bright with fond nostalgia, and this, more than anything, is what drives him to take Dimitri's hand himself and draw him back toward the dance floor. Behind him, Dimitri’s breath hitches.
They move with the intimacy of two lovers on the dance floor, and almost immediately a crowd of onlookers begins to gather to watch. Dimitri is an exceptional leader when it comes to dancing and Felix’s steps are light with what he begrudgingly recognizes as joy, in this familiar dance, in this familiar man, in this improbable echo of a long-forsaken past. Despite what feels like twenty pounds of armor weighing him down, Felix feels almost weightless. Half of the waltz whirls by in an instinctive flurry of sound.
Then Dimitri decides to get ambitious: he adds extra jaunty little steps, chances a few light dips here and there, and allows his hands to linger for a few moments too long on Felix’s waist or his back. The onlookers ooh and ah, and Felix checks the security of his mask for a moment.
“Everything all right?” Dimitri asks in a tone of genuine concern, even as he dips Felix low.
“I’m fine.”
Dimitri spins him for the fourth time. Felix’s chest simultaneously tightens with dizziness and loosens with the euphoria of their dance.
“I am glad to hear that. I’ve been greatly enjoying this time spent with you. You are a phenomenal dancer.”
“I have to be,” Felix says. Dimitri lifts him by the waist and spins him into the air, and for a moment Felix feels like he’s floating.
Suddenly, everything falls apart. Dimitri dips him particularly vigorously and something dislodges in Felix’s chest. He heaves a sigh of relief at the sudden lightness. Then, as the moment flows by, slow as honey, he registers something round and beige falling past his face and a chorus of gasps from their audience. He straightens immediately and tears himself away from Dimitri, backing away in panic.
There’s a slightly dented brioche bun on the floor.
Felix stares at it in mute horror, then clasps his hands protectively in front of his neckline. The audience begins to murmur.
He makes a split second decision right there and grabs his skirt, hiking the layers of silk and tulle up roughly and probably wrinkling them beyond repair. Dorothea will throw a fit but there’s nothing to be done about that. He turns and dashes for the door.
“Wait, please, don’t go! You dropped— you dropped your...” Dimitri trails off.
My left tit, Felix thinks hysterically, and flees.