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Even a miserable bastard like Felix has to admit there’s something special about winters at Garreg Mach. Note that he said “special.” Not “magical.” Felix doesn’t use words like “magical.” He’ll use “special,” when the occasion calls for it. Never “magical.” Flowery language makes him ill.
But sure, Garreg Mach winters are… special. He likes how windows frost over and fog up with his warm breath. He likes how the ancient stone peeks through the blankets of snow. He likes the flickering lanterns in dim corridors and the smell of winter roast in the dining hall. He likes that he finally gets to wear his favorite cloak and make deep imprints in the snow with his fur-lined boots.
He likes these things. He doesn’t love these things.
Felix isn’t going to say he loves something unless he means it.
But, sure, for all intents and purposes, Felix “likes” winter.
Which is why it’s all the more frustrating when Sylvain shows up to class in his summer uniform.
“What the hell are you wearing?”
Sylvain looks at Felix then looks down at his own chest. “Who? Me?”
“Yes, you.” Felix grips the edge of his desk, only just now realizing he had stood up.
“Uh…my uniform?” Sylvain answers it like a question, as if it only just now occurred to him that he was wearing clothes.
“That’s your summer uniform,” Felix says. “It’s winter.”
Sylvain looks out at the six-inches-and-counting of snow outside the classroom and shrugs.
“It’s not that cold.”
Annette and Mercedes hurry in, pink faces bundled in their warmest furs.
“It’s freezing. You’re going to get sick.” This is said with absolutely no concern in Felix's voice, but it’s still not enough to quell Sylvain’s sly grin—a grin that betrays he knows exactly why he’s wearing a uniform thin enough to show off his cinched waist.
“Aww Fe, are you worried about me?”
“You know I’m not.” Felix grinds the words through his teeth. “Who are you trying to impress anyway?”
Felix does not know why he cares about whom Sylvain is trying to impress, only that no answer to any question has ever been more important to him.
Sylvain narrows his eyes, a familiar sign that Felix is grazing a nerve. “I thought you didn’t want to hear about my dates anymore.”
“I don’t—”
“Then drop it—”
Dimitri walks in, his ridiculous, overgrown bangs poking out from the bottom of a very warm-looking hat. “What’s going on—”
“Stay out of it!” Felix and Sylvain shout at the same time.
What happens next is nothing more than a reflex—a reflex honed by years of growing up with an older brother who loved to tease, and therefore taught Felix all of the requisite tricks for adolescent survival. And it doesn’t matter that Glenn is dead, or that Felix hasn’t played this game in years, the next word still comes out of his mouth as automatically as a parry to an incoming blow:
“Jinx!”
A warm flash of blue light fires in Felix’s periphery. The Professor walks in just in time to catch it.
“Felix,” they say with their usual eerie neutrality, “what did I say about activating Crests in the classroom?”
“I didn’t…I wasn’t—” Felix’s palm slaps his desk. “We weren’t even sparring!”
“He’s telling the truth, Professor,” Dimitri says, very much not taking Sylvain and Felix’s advice to stay out of it.
The Professor frowns and turns to Sylvain.
“Sylvain? Were you provoking him?”
Sylvain slams a nearby desk and angrily opens his mouth—
But no sound comes out.
Sylvain’s expression shifts from anger, to confusion, then to panic as he opens and closes his mouth over and over again like a fish. A silent, pissed-off fish.
“Professor?” Annette asks, the worry rising in her voice. “What’s going on?”
The Professor ignores her. They walk calmly to Sylvain and lift their hand to his throat.
“Speak,” they command.
A warm light emanates from the Professor’s fingers. Sylvain opens and closes his mouth. Silence.
“Hm.” The Professor removes their hand and wipes the Sylvain off on their cloak. They turn around. “Felix. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Felix can’t usually tell what the Professor is thinking, but he can tell right now that they don’t believe him. “He’s probably just faking it.”
Sylvain’s mouth moves rapidly enough that Felix doesn’t have to hear the words to get the gist of the reply.
The Professor’s face remains expressionless. “Felix—”
“I swear, I didn’t do anything!” Felix’s hands fly up in exasperation. “All I did was tell him he was stupid for wearing his summer uniform in the middle of a blizzard, then the Boar walked in, and Sylvain and I told him to stay out of it, and I said ‘jinx’ and—”
The Professor’s eye twitches in a rare show of emotion.
“You what?”
“I said ‘jinx’ and—”
“And that’s when your Crest activated?”
“I guess?”
The Professor walks over to their desk and shuffles through their stack of books until they find one that reads “Curses of the Tongue.” Felix has to admit it’s not the most optimistic of titles. He also has to admit that up until now, he wasn’t entirely sure that the Professor actually knew how to read. The Professor leans over the desk and flips through the pages, humming at odd intervals until they seem to find what they’re looking for.
“Felix.” The Professor looks up from the book. “You cursed Sylvain.”
“I what?”
“You said ‘jinx’ and your crest activated. You cursed Sylvain.” The Professor closes the book to punctuate their declaration, as if nothing more needs to be said on the matter.
“But I didn’t mean to curse him—”
“Doesn’t matter.” The Professor shrugs. “He’s cursed.”
Sylvain points a finger at Felix and mouths, “ You asshole!”
“Sorry, what’s that?” Felix asks, because Sylvain is right, and he is an asshole. “I can’t hear you.”
Sylvain flips him off. Felix has a feeling he’ll be seeing that middle finger a lot.
“How do we break the curse, Professor?” Mercedes asks, because she’s a better person than Felix. “Is there a cure?”
The Professor sighs and opens the book again, perhaps annoyed at their responsibility to make sure Sylvain can once more grace the world with all manner of inappropriate comments. They flip to a section near the end and run their finger down the page.
“Belladonna. Also known as nightshade.”
Dedue looks up from the book he’s reading, as if he’s only just now become concerned with the fact that Sylvain may never talk again. “Nightshade is poisonous.”
“Yes.”
“So he’ll die if he eats it.”
“Maybe.” The Professor shuts the book again. “We won’t know until we try.”
Mercedes hums and taps her chin with a thoughtfulness Felix had not bothered to give to the situation. “I’m sure there’s a way to counteract the poisonous effects with other ingredients.”
“But what about true love’s kiss?” Annette bounces on her heels with enough force to break through the floorboards. “What if that can break the spell? Ooh!” Annette jumps. “Felix! You should try kissing him!”
Sylvain maybe stands up a little straighter.
“What—I can’t— no!” Felix’s neck suddenly feels far too warm for his winter scarf. He hides his face a little bit in it all the same. “You’ve been reading too many fairy tales—”
“I’m sorry for being literate—”
“—And I’m not Sylvain’s true love.” Felix tugs at his scarf, tightening it around his neck. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Annette and Mercedes share a look that Felix does not like at all.
Sylvain grabs a piece of parchment off the Professor’s desk and starts scribbling madly. He folds it up and hands it to Dimitri.
“What does it say?” Felix demands.
Dimitri unfolds it, then clears his throat.
“Felix would rather let me die than kiss me.” Dimitri frowns at the paper. “Followed by what I believe is a, erm,” Dimitri coughs. “Frowny face.”
“I’m not going to let you die!” Felix snatches the paper and crumples it in his hand. “I’m just not going to kiss you either.”
Just then, Ingrid rushes in, face flushed from trudging through the deep snow.
“I’m so sorry I’m late, Professor,” she pants. “I hope I didn’t miss much.”
Everyone stares at Ingrid in the doorway, no one sure what to say. Sylvain tosses his quill on the ground and sits in his seat with a noiseless huff.
* * *
On the first day that Sylvain can’t speak, Felix avoids him like hell. It’s not his fault Sylvain had to go and get himself cursed, and he’s not about to let the cloying heat in his gut tell him otherwise. Sylvain avoids him too, and they’re both the better for it. Felix has nothing to say to Sylvain, and Sylvain can’t say anything to Felix at all.
On the second day that Sylvain can’t speak, Felix can’t believe he didn’t do this sooner. It’s been 24 blissful hours, and he hasn’t had to hear one crude joke, one shameful pickup line, or one abominable idea. Felix and Ingrid can actually have their first normal fucking conversation in years without Sylvain interjecting with some exaggerated story about his latest night out. That day in class, the Blue Lions get through an entire lecture without Sylvain piping up with some idiotic plan that would get them all killed. For the first time ever, being around Sylvain is…peaceful. In fact, Felix has never liked Sylvain more.
On the third day that Sylvain can’t speak, Felix starts to notice things about Sylvain that he’s never noticed before. They’re little things. Inconsequential things. Things that don’t matter. Like the small moles on his neck that would resemble some sort of flower if you connected them right. Or the way he gets a little furrow between his brows whenever he’s trying to concentrate on something in class. Or the way he closes his eyes and wiggles his head a little bit every time he takes the first bite of something warm.
All little things. Things that no one could possibly care about. Least of all Felix.
On the fourth day that Sylvain can’t speak, Felix actually sort of starts to miss him.
For the next week, the Professor has the Blue Lions search the monastery from the Goddess Tower to the greenhouse for any trace of belladonna. They find rusted swords, expired potions, and an old book called “The Divine Magick of Infinite Pleasure” that Seteth quickly confiscates, much to Sylvain’s infinite dis pleasure. But even after searching through the sad labyrinth of bottles and rubbish in Professor Manuela’s office, they find nothing even close to the trademark purple berries of nightshade.
“We’re going to have to travel outside of Garreg Mach,” the Professor says, crossing off another monastery location on the chalkboard. “It only grows on the mountains north of the monastery, and we won’t be able to travel there for another two moons at least.”
Ashe suggests they look in the greenhouse for the fifth time. Annette mutters something stupid about “true love’s kiss” again. Sylvain leans back in his chair and mouths a curse at the ceiling.
“Language,” Felix whispers.
Sylvain’s body jolts with a silent bark of laughter, and he glances down at Felix with a smile. Felix feels a smirk tugging on his own lips as he looks down at his desk, trying not to think about how nice it might have been to hear that laugh.
* * *
As the weeks go on, and the search for belladonna bears no fruit, Felix learns how to read Sylvain. Two hands behind his neck means he’s about to do something he knows he isn’t supposed to. One hand behind his neck means he already did it. A shoulder shrug with a raised eyebrow means “don’t ask me.” A shoulder shrug with a smirk means “don’t ask me because you probably don’t want to know.”
And for anything that can’t be said with expressions and gestures, Sylvain uses words. Little notes like “Can I copy your homework?,” “Do you think it’s true that Caspar has a sixth toe?,” and one time, annoyingly, “Can you throw this piece of parchment away for me?”
But Felix doesn’t throw it away. He mutters something about Sylvain being an asshole and stuffs it in his pocket, then throws it in his sock drawer with all of the other notes Sylvain’s passed to him. They’re too private to toss in a waste bin where anyone can find them, even though most of them say silly, inconsequential things like baseless speculations on the state of their classmates’ feet. Things that no one could possibly care about. Least of all Felix.
It doesn’t take long for his sock drawer to become so full of Sylvain’s words, there’s no more room for his socks.
* * *
Remember everything Felix said about winters at Garreg Mach, and how special— not magical!— they were?
Well, he takes it all back.
Felix shivers in the corner of the ballroom, his glass of weak ale hardly enough to keep him warm. There are too many people here, Felix thinks. There are too many people and the music is too loud and everyone is laughing too much.
Felix’s glare has been burning into the same spot all night, where Sylvain is already dancing with, gross, another girl. How many is that—11? Felix asks himself, as if he hasn’t been keeping track all night. It took a curse for the stupid bastard to realize everyone would like him more if he just shut up.
Felix doesn’t really know why he’s mad. It’s not like he’s jealous of Sylvain. Felix doesn’t want to dance with anyone—he already said “absolutely not” to the two people who dared to ask. He looks down into his ale and glares at his ugly, amorphous reflection in the amber liquid. He’s not like Sylvain. He’s not stupid enough to think anyone would want to dance for any reason other than his Crest.
Felix looks up in time to see Sylvain smile at the girl he’s dancing with, the dreamy smile with the half-lidded eyes and the flushed cheeks—the one that always precedes Sylvain putting his hand on the small of someone’s back and pulling them in a little bit closer.
The small of Felix’s back itches. Sylvain’s hand slides down the girl’s waist, and the distance between them decreases by at least two inches. Felix clanks his glass down on the nearest available surface before his hand can shatter it.
Felix storms outside, all too ready to go to bed and put this worthless night behind him. The snow is falling in thick flurries. He tugs on the neck of his itchy formal uniform, ripping his collar open and exposing his skin to the frigid, winter night. He tears out his black ribbon, the one that probably used to belong to Glenn, and runs his shivering fingers through loose, wet hair.
Felix hears the sound of clumsy, familiar feet trudging in the snow behind him and whips around.
“If you don’t learn how to quiet your footsteps you’re going to get yourself killed.”
Sylvain pauses, his lips pressed together to suppress a silent laugh. His cheeks are pink and shiny from the winter mead. His violent red hair soaks up the falling snow.
“What do you want?” Felix asks, the words so bitter he has to spit them out. “Don’t you have some noblewoman to dance with?”
The mirth in Sylvain’s eyes fades; the warmth doesn’t die with it. His eyes soften as they search Felix’s face. They burn with shame, then desire, as they glide down the line of Felix’s neck before landing on the bit of exposed skin from his torn collar. Sylvain’s lips relax, then part. He looks back up at Felix, nearly aflame.
Felix has never seen this look before.
Sylvain has never, ever looked at Felix like this.
“What?”
The question is softer this time, neutralized by curiosity. Sylvain takes a hesitant step toward him. He bites his lip, the words he can’t say on the tip of his tongue. Whatever they are, Felix would do just about anything to hear them.
“What is it?”
Sylvain takes a small breath, and his shoulders relax. He looks down and reaches into the pocket of his formal pants, then holds out a folded piece of parchment to Felix.
Felix stares at the parchment and all of the words it promises to hold. He slowly reaches out his hand to take it. Their fingertips brush. The contact lasts only for a fraction of a second. It’s the warmest Felix has felt all night.
Felix doesn’t know why it feels like he’s being choked. Sylvain’s notes have never said anything important before—Felix should know, his sock drawer is full of them. But there was a possibility in the way Sylvain looked at him, the possibility that this note could actually say…something. The mere possibility of that little something, whatever it may be, grows from a tiny pulse to a full, thumping heartbeat in his throat. Felix holds his breath as he unfolds the note, already wrinkled from the snowfall—
On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad do you think that girl wanted my crest baby?
Felix stares at the words, then looks up at Sylvain. Sylvain puts one hand behind his neck. The uneasy gesture doesn’t match his smile.
“You should go back inside.” Felix rolls his eyes, and the pattern feels so familiar it’s lost all of its taste. “Those crest babies aren’t going to make themselves.”
Sylvain jerks with silent laughter again, and the inviting mirth in his face returns. Felix refolds the parchment and holds it out to him, trying to tamper a laugh of his own. Sylvain breaks into a wider smile that only falters slightly when he takes the note from Felix’s hand. Their fingertips don’t brush this time. Sylvain looks back at the ballroom and hesitates. He turns back to Felix, eyes expectant. When Felix doesn’t react, he holds out his hand.
Come on.
“Sylvain, I—”
Felix stays planted, his feet heavier than the rest of him. His fingers clench into a fist and grasp for the ghost of Sylvain’s words in his palm. Without them, Felix can only read the smudged words in Sylvain’s expression. Whatever’s written there fades through the veil of falling snow.
Felix tries to swallow all of the dying words on his tongue and nearly chokes on the rot. Felix doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean, but there are so many things he means to say, and he doesn’t know how to say any of them. They crawl up his throat en masse, crumpling into a useless ball of parchment that tumbles out of his mouth with no permission.
“I’m going to bed.”
It’s four chicken-scratch words, raspy and hurried. Felix doesn’t stay long enough to see if Sylvain snags himself on the jagged edges. He pivots in the snow and trudges to the dormitories without looking back.
* * *
Felix wakes with a start, unsure when he fell asleep. He’s still in his formal clothes. There’s a faint blue coming through his window.
The weight of last night smothers him. Felix tries to mumble something into his pillow, but drool drips out instead of words. Disgusting. Felix is disgusting.
He flips over and glares at the ceiling, worn from centuries of many a teenager doing the same. The realization makes Felix feel like the least important person in the world. His fingers tap his sternum, cold and empty, searching for any warmth lingering from the way Sylvain looked at him last night. He still doesn’t know what it meant. It turns out that despite weeks of silence, Felix still isn’t fluent in Sylvain’s body language.
His half-lidded morning vision finds his sock drawer, overflowing with parchment scraps.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad do you think that girl wanted my crest baby?
The words themselves were not surprising. In fact, Felix is pretty sure he’s heard Sylvain say the exact same thing multiple times before. They were in his handwriting, with the skinny vowels and the long loops on the “y” and the “g.” Felix knows they came from Sylvain’s pocket, that he took them from Sylvain’s fingertips. And yet Felix can't fathom that the Sylvain who looked at him like… that wrote them. Sylvain bit his lip like he was choking down a secret, and it’s unfathomable to think that some quip about a crest baby were the words he was so desperate to keep from spilling out.
Felix narrows his eyes, and the sock drawer comes into focus. A treasure chest of inconsequential words. They don’t mean anything to anyone, least of all Felix. After last night, he questions how many of them mean anything to Sylvain.
Felix casts off his blanket and sits up. Sylvain has something he wants to say? Fine. Felix can make him say it. He’s tired of bearing the burden of saying what he means. Felix throws on the first warm winter clothes his hands can find and bundles Glenn’s cloak around his shoulders.
It only grows on the mountains just north of the monastery.
Felix knows those mountains. Sort of. Well enough. It wouldn’t take long to get there, but the trails are craggy and steep. Probably icy this time of year, too. Felix pulls on his heaviest snow boots, the ones with the fur lining. If the belladonna was easy to reach, Sylvain would be talking by now. In fact, there is probably a very good reason as to why no one has gone to fetch it, despite knowing its location for moons. The wealth of the Church of Seiros was not enough to waste on one of its own noble students; the might of House Gautier was not worth the silver tongue of its heir.
Felix fastens his dagger to his belt. He’s going to get this nightshade if it fucking kills him.
He tiptoes into the dim hallway and carefully shuts the door behind him. It’s too early for anyone to be awake yet, especially after a night of drinking and goddess knows what else. It’s drafty in the corridor, and the chill crisps with every creak down the stairs, until Felix stands paralyzed at the threshold to the courtyard. Felix shivers and looks up at his dormitory window. He could go back to bed. He could climb up these rotting stairs and go back to bed right now, and no one would ever have to know about this fit of early morning madness, and Sylvain could just shut up forever.
But Felix isn’t thinking about bed. Or at least not his bed. The window reflecting the blue light of dawn just two doors down calls to him instead.
Come on.
Long legs sprawled out over the covers. An open mouth breathing into a pillow. A freckled arm dangling off the side of the bed. Red hair sticking up at all the wrong angles.
Felix stops shivering and takes his first step into the snow.
His boots are soaked by the time he reaches the stables, and Felix figures he has about four hours before it starts to seep through to his socks. He saddles up the horse that hates him the least (Sylvain used to call her Gwynnie, Felix just calls her “the horse that hates him the least”) and does the only thing he can do.
He goes north.
The horse that hates him the least does well in the icy conditions, which is a relief since Felix’s fingers are too frozen around the reins to properly steer. Her steady hoofbeats, muffled by snow, provide tepid comfort. Maybe even company.
Come on.
He leans in low, and there are warm arms around him. A chin rests on his shoulder. The arms squeeze tight around Felix’s chest, and lips whisper something too quiet to hear against his neck. Felix turns to the breath. There's nothing to shake off his shoulder but snowflakes.
It takes less than an hour to arrive at the foothills, and the sun barely yellows the sky as Felix ties up the horse that hates him the least. She snorts.
“You can’t go with me,” Felix says, trying to reason with a horse. “The trail’s too steep.”
The horse nuzzles her nose under his hand.
“Stop that. I wasn’t petting you.”
Felix turns and looks up at the mountain.
This is stupid.
Felix trudges to the nearest trailhead, barely-marked. It looks like no one’s walked it in years.
This is so stupid.
Felix is already twenty feet up the trail.
This is so fucking stupid.
It’s an ugly hike. A miserable hike. There’s absolutely no scenery to speak of and Felix’s boots keep sinking into the snow. The air is so thin it burns. The wind hurts his face. He wiggles his toes with every step, wincing at the pain a little more each time until he can’t move them at all. He looks around. Even in all this blasted white, there’s no sign of purple.
Felix is no stranger to winter, or hiking in it. Flinging yourself into something that will probably kill you is a Faerghus rite of passage. No, Felix has certainly had worse hikes, like the one time Dimitri got them lost and spent the whole time wailing the long way down the mountain because he felt so bad. Or the time Ingrid ate all of their bread, so they had to use Glenn’s sword to cut a hole in the ice and spear fish. Or the time when Felix scrambled alone in a midnight blizzard, terrified of what he might find because Miklan had come back to the palace without—
Come on.
A ghost appears in his palm, a transparent ball of light, soft and warm as a human hand. Felix’s fingers tense around something thinner than the air. His thumb dangles from side to side, brushing against an invisible knuckle.
Loneliness is a difficult word for Felix to describe. He’s spent plenty of time alone, especially in the last four years. Up until coming to the Officers Academy, most of his nights were spent with the door to his room locked to keep out a very particular piece of the outside world. Felix doesn’t remember most of those nights. You stare at the ceiling enough and it all starts to blend together.
But Felix remembers this. He remembers the phantom sensation of touches too sweet to be real, like hands on his chest and arms wrapping around his waist to pull him in a little tighter. He remembers fingers brushing back his hair and a freckled nose touching his own. He remembers the selfish nights, where the kisses were smooth and solid like marble, and the long nights, where he thought so much about what he wanted to say that the words were almost said out loud.
So loneliness is a difficult word for Felix to describe, because even on his loneliest nights, there’s always been something there, even if only the outline of that something. Felix’s fingers fully close into a fist. Perhaps clinging to an outline is what’s made him loneliest of all.
Felix’s boot doesn’t find traction, and his stomach coils around the empty sensation of falling. His fists don’t unclench in time to catch his fall. He lands face down in the deep snow.
Everything’s too cold to hurt. Felix tries to groan and inhales shards of ice instead. He wrenches his face from the snow and the wind freezes to his face. With monumental effort, Felix rolls onto his back and looks up at a graying sky. Felix is too tired to get up. His clothes are soaked. His legs are tired. His feet are numb. Maybe this is how it’s going to end.
Here lies Felix Fraldarius. He hiked up a mountain for no reason and died.
How pathetic.
Something cold and wet hits Felix’s eye. He squints it shut and feels something else hit his chin.
Snowfall.
It comes down in thick, heavy flakes that threaten to bury Felix alive. He’s motionless, powerless to the pull of the sparkling vortex above him. The snow flies toward him in a canopy of falling stars, until the flakes come toward him so fast it’s him who’s flying, hurtling toward the silver ghosts that shroud the sun and promise nothing but danger and beauty.
Weightlessness gives way to laughter, until Felix is laughing loud enough for no one to hear him. It’s absurd, really. It’s absurd that even though the cold makes his cheeks hurt like he’s been smiling at someone’s asinine joke for too long, even though his thighs burn from stomping in and out of crunchy snow that’s fallen just for him to ruin, and even though it’s so unpredictable from moment to moment it makes him laugh and scream and cry and laugh again—
Felix likes, and maybe even loves, winter.
The snowfall thins, and Felix throws his head back with a happy sigh. This is probably the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, he thinks, still smiling to himself. No wonder no one else had bothered to look. There was never any nightshade up here to begin with.
Felix lolls his head to the side and stops. There’s something in his field of vision that isn’t white. He winks one eye shut to focus his vision.
It’s a plant. A plant with small, purple berries.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
* * *
“Take it.”
Sylvain stares at the plant in Felix’s hand. He makes no move to follow the order.
“Take it.”
Felix looms over Sylvain in his bed and holds out the nightshade with added emphasis. Sylvain sits motionless and eyes the plant with something weaker than fear but stronger than suspicion. He looks up at Felix, unable to make any excuses for himself.
“Sylvain,” Felix says, his patience already scorched, “take this to Mercedes so she can mix it into something that won’t kill you.”
Instead of taking the plant, Sylvain grabs one of the many slips of parchment he keeps handy by his bed and scribbles a note on his nightstand. He holds it up to Felix like an accusation.
Where did you find that?
“It doesn’t matter,” Felix says too quickly.
Sylvain looks down at his own lap. Felix has confirmed the worst.
“Look, can you just take it?” Felix holds the plant out again. “Please?”
The plea tastes too sweet on Felix’s tongue, and he nearly puckers from the sensation. He tries to force Sylvain into eye contact. Sylvain willfully does not acquiesce.
“Fine.” Felix snatches the flowers away. “Be a child. I’ll take these to Mercedes myself and we’ll force-feed you.”
Felix turns to enlist Mercedes’s help despite the late hour. Sylvain springs out of his bed and grabs Felix’s arm, stopping him before he reaches the door. Felix spins around.
“What.”
Sylvain looks at him, eyes desperate. Then he looks at the nightshade in Felix’s hand. Then back to Felix. Then back to the nightshade. Despite the amount of decisions it took to get here, it somehow only dawns on Felix now that he is mere minutes, perhaps even seconds, from hearing Sylvain’s voice again. Felix doesn’t know what he’ll say first, but he can almost hear the voice in his head now, a little husky from disuse, low in Felix’s ear, maybe whispered against his neck—
Sylvain wrenches the nightshade from Felix’s hand and ignites it in his palm.
Felix stares at the incinerated flower in Sylvain’s hand, now nothing but ashes. A cruel souvenir from the hell Felix just emerged from.
“Sylvain, what the fuck?”
Sylvain wipes the soot off his hands and sits at his desk. He stares at a spot on the floor by a waste bin full of crumpled pieces of parchment.
“I almost died getting that for you!”
Without any other acknowledgment, Sylvain reaches for the quill on his desk and pulls out one of the many of thousands of scraps he keeps handy and starts scribbling.
The audacity is so baffling, Felix almost has to laugh. He lets out a harsh scoff instead. “Oh great, another fucking note!”
Sylvain’s jaw twitches, but he otherwise ignores Felix’s outburst. He finishes the note with a forceful period, then stands and gives it to Felix with downcast eyes. Felix does nothing to temper the cruelty in his voice as he unfolds the parchment.
“I can’t wait to see whatever idiotic half-truth you’ve written me this—”
I think you like me better this way.
Felix stares at the words in hand. His grip softens. A spade takes to his chest and hollows it out.
Sylvain returns to his bed without waiting for Felix’s response, pulling his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. His wide eyes stare at nothing in particular. They flicker to Felix, and that’s all it takes for the hollow spot in Felix’s chest to fill with something again.
“Sylvain, I—”
Felix stops himself. He can feel the words crumpling in his throat again, and he doesn’t trust his mouth to keep them from tumbling out. He sits at the foot of Sylvain’s bed and studies every line and loop of his words, trying to decode a message that couldn’t be more plainly stated.
Felix folds the parchment with a gentle crease and looks up.
“I love you, Sylvain.”
Sylvain snaps up to Felix, and Felix can tell by now when his face has nothing to hide.
“I love you,” Felix repeats. “I know you can’t say it back, and maybe that’s for the best because I always expected to hear silence after I said it anyway. But I love you. I think maybe I always have.”
Sylvain lunges forward, and suddenly there’s something warmer and more real than any ghost on Felix’s lips. Felix’s hand finds the familiar motion of lonely nights and as he pushes his fingers into Sylvain’s hair. Sylvain’s hand grips Felix’s waist tight, as if to remind him that this isn’t just an outline.
The hand softens, and their lips separate by just a whisper.
“Felix—”
Sylvain’s eyes go wide. Felix jerks back. They stare at each other with held breath, each too afraid of being the first to acknowledge the unfathomable noise they just heard come out of Sylvain’s mouth.
Finally, Felix sighs. “Don’t tell me that true love’s kiss bullshit was actually true.”
“Felix,” Sylvain tests the name on his tongue. “Felix, Felix, Felix, Felix, Felix.” His voice is rough and sweet like a spoonful of honey, and he seems to savor every taste.
“I climbed a fucking mountain.” Felix crosses his arms and huffs. “I’m actually mad about this.”
“I love you, Felix.”
Felix studies Sylvain to see if it’s true, and despite what his eyes are telling him, there’s a stubborn part of Felix that still refuses to believe it.
“You do?”
“I love you,” Sylvain repeats. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—saints, I’m never going to get tired of saying it.”
Felix is the one who kisses him this time. His hands are needier than before, and they draw Sylvain in until their bodies touch as much as they can while still wearing clothes. There’s a muffled moan of equal parts surprise and desire against Felix’s mouth, and Sylvain must decide they’re still not close enough because he paws at the buttons of Felix’s shirt until his fingers slip under the fabric like quiet steps in the snow. Felix pulls back, a little too delighted by the whine his withdrawal elicits.
“If anyone asks, you can talk because you ate that damn nightshade.”
“Whatever you say.” Sylvain smirks, and Felix will be damned if he doesn’t know that Sylvain is about to say something stupid. “Looks like you were the deadly nightshade all alo—”
Felix pulls in Sylvain’s face and stops him with another kiss. He could go without talking for five more minutes.