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Gronder was a mistake.
Everyone had known it, from Professor Byleth and her disapproving frowns own down to the foot soldiers Felix had heard grumbling about it on the march. If Felix's father and Gustave, or Gilbert, or whatever he called himself these days, had had an single ounce of spine with which to gainsay Dimitri, Felix would not have found himself in this situation: on a stolen horse, separated from Annette's battalion and the main body of the Kingdom army, holding a half-conscious Annette tucked against him.
It had been a mad dash into the foothills and then woods around Gronder Field. Annette rode behind him at first, her fist clinging to the back of his coat for balance as she singlehandedly fought off what had looked like two dozen Imperial mages. Then he'd felt her half-slip from the saddle, and he'd had to rein in the horse and catch her before she fell to the ground. There had still been mages on their tail: fewer now than there had been when he'd scooped Annette up and taken her off into the hills to draw the mages off, but enough to
Felix had dismounted, and then he'd done what he needed to do.
Now he was back in the saddle and hopelessly lost. He could find his way back to the field if he wanted to. Only: he did not know that he wanted to.
Before he could get any further down that line of thought, which would end in Let Faerghus burn for all I care, Annette stirred.
"Felix?" she asked sleepily, rubbing her face into the hard leather of his shoulder harness and blinking hard. "We just killed a lot of people."
"I think you got more than I did," Felix said.
Annette made a quiet hmmm sound. The sensation of it vibrated up and through Felix's chest. "How lost are we?" she asked, straightening in the saddle to look around them.
"Not lost enough," said Felix.
Felix was rewarded with the sound of her laughter, dry and hoarse as it was. He wanted more. But now was not the time for the thoughts that had kept him up the nights before the Kingdom's troops reached Gronder: that he'd been assigned to Annette's battalion, that she hated him and didn't want him there, that he wouldn't be good enough to protect her, and that she'd die and he'd never get a chance to make up for being a horrible shit to everyone she liked at Garreg Mach.
He was covered in blood, but beneath and beyond it he could smell the sweet oil she must have used in her hair the night before. At the beginning of the battle it had been scraped hard away from her face in a tight twist at the back of her head, and the twist was starting to fall out, one tendril of vibrant red falling over the deep blue of her uniform.
"So many people...." Annette rested the back of her head against his chest and exhaled a soft sigh. "But why are you complaining? This is what you like, isn't it?"
Felix was at least still self-possessed enough to notice the brittle quality in her voice and the shaking in her hands when she gripped the pommel of the saddle. He'd never tried arguing with her in the past, and he wasn't about to start now.
"Whatever I do or don't like," he said, "that wasn't it."
Annette was silent. Apparently that had been all the snippiness she had in her, or she just thought he wasn't worth the effort. What he'd done to make her annoyed--apart from the several years of running his mouth off about how he only cared about improving his skill with the blade--what he'd done today, he couldn't imagine.
"Let's let the poor horse rest," she said, patting its mane.
For the first time Felix noticed that he'd stolen a beautiful young grey. Its pale flanks were spattered with mud, and its sides were heaving with effort. He immediately felt guilty. Felix halted it and dismounted.
The stirrups were too low for Annette's feet, and after several moments letting her struggle and refuse to ask him for help, Felix, sighed, grabbed her around the waist, lifted her down. He did his best not to let her press up against his body. Unfortunately, his best wasn't very good. Annette yelped and clutched his shoulders, her knees clamping onto his hips.
"Sorry," he said, and put her on the ground, taking her hands to steady her. Felix was not imagining how long it took for for her to let go and step back to survey the forest. When she turned away, he flexed his hand, trying to memorize how she'd felt against him.
The horse huffed and pawed at the ground, bringing him back to stark reality. One, the horse shone like a beacon in the noontime sun, and he needed to do all kinds of things to it if he wanted to be able to ride it back to Gronder Field still in good condition. Two, Annette had a gash in her side that had soaked her uniform with blood, and she looked down at it with the confused gaze of someone for whom the high of battle was wearing off. Three, he was dog tired, and now he had to deal with all of these things.
"I don't remember getting this," Annette said, her brow wrinkling with annoyance. She probed at the wound with hands faintly glowing with magic and then she winced. "Nothing is punctured."
Had it been the reason she'd passed out on the horse, or had it happened before, when they'd still been in the thick of the slaughter? Felix reached for her--she didn't slap his hand away. He peeled the thick fabric back, and then the underlayers she wore beneath it, to expose the wound. She was right: it was deep but clean, and the blood was already drying.
Annette made a high, pained sound. "You went to Mercie's seminar last month, right? Can you heal it? I can't do it myself."
Felix very much could not heal it. At best, he could stop up the bleeding, and poorly. He'd gone to Mercedes's seminar so he could stare at the back of Annette's head and maybe pick up a few tricks to make casting the two spells he did care about easier under high-stress conditions. A small and childish part of him considered lying about it, but Annette was a gremory (though she'd sensibly picked a uniform that would make her a less high-priority target on the battlefield) and would immediately notice bad work, especially when it was done on her own skin.
He told her as much, and she nodded, worrying at her lower lip and holding her hand to her side.
"Take care of the horse, then," she said. "She saved our lives, we should name her--"
"Pumpkin," said Felix.
Annette smiled, winced, and coughed.
Rather than demand to bandage her himself, Felix was responsible, and took Pumpkin's reins and led her in circles around the clearing to cool down. From the corner of his eye he watched Annette work. She was neat and unselfconscious about her body. She stripped to the waist, peeling her robes down, setting aside the close-fitting gambeson she wore beneath and pulling up the undershirt beneath that to tuck into her brassiere. With an effort that made her pale visibly, the crusted blood around the edge of the wound flaked and fell into the dirt at her feet. Then she bandaged herself up. She'd done this before, clearly. When, and where had all the healers been, and why hadn't someone been around to drag her to one of them--he was going to have to get himself posted to her battalion for the rest of the war, for her own good. He hated to do it, but he'd speak to his father about it once they got back.
She looked up at him and caught him staring. Her face white as a sheet, and she looked like she was going to faint. "I'm all right!" she said. "Really! Stop worrying so much. A little scratch like this can't hold me back."
"I'm not worrying," he said. "I'm concerned."
"That's the same thing."
"It's not."
"How is it not the same thing!"
Felix couldn't think of anything to say, so he led Pumpkin to a patch of new grass and considered how they were going to get her some water. There was someone's canteen tied to her saddle, but there wasn't much left in it; they'd had to cross a stream on the battlefield, but how far they'd gone from it, he did not know.
Annette was annoyed with him, which brought spots of high pink to her cheeks and was much better than seeing her exhausted. When he looked back at her, however, she looked tired again, and leaned up against the tree as she struggled back into her clothes.
"We should go back," she said. "There were so many losses on all sides, and we...."
"We didn't run, we were chased," he said. "Those mages in black robes on the Empire's side broke our formation. You're a good commander. You did everything you could be expected to, and more."
She finished clasping her uniform and stared unseeing up at the canopy.
And we don't have to go back, he thought. Fodlan was big, and he was good with a sword, and she was amazing with magic. There would always be work for people like them. If their bodies weren't found in the piles of the recognizable dead, they'd be assumed to be two of the blackened and charred bodies--but Annette would never agree to that. She'd tell him: they had to stand by Dimitri. She couldn't live with herself if she walked away. She'd remind him that his father had lost one son already and to lose another one would break him.
Or maybe not. Maybe she hated this war as much as he did. After a certain point, he was just using his imaginary Annette as a spare conscience when his own wasn't working correctly. He had no idea what was going on in the real Annette's head, except that she was feeling guilty, in tremendous pain, and was drained of most of her magic. She needed to get to the best healers available for that wound before it festered.
"When you're ready, let's find some water for Pumpkin," Felix said.
Annette didn't move. For one horrible second, she did not blink, and Felix thought she wasn't breathing, until the slow rise of her chest told him otherwise.
"Come here," Annette said, sounding as imperious as someone could when they were half asleep. "These roots are awful. I'm going to sit on you."
"Yes, sir," Felix replied. He sat next to her, and she crawled into his lap, tucking her head under his chin and arranging herself.
"Why Pumpkin?" she asked, her voice muzzy. "Why not... 'Blizzard.' 'Fimbulvetr.' She's a warhorse."
"Because I'm hungry," said Felix.
Annette's arms went around his waist. His hands were in fists at his side.
"It's a cute name," she murmured, and drifted off to sleep atop him.