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The stronghold is just big enough that most days a corner is just that- a corner. No Miklan haunting its folds of stone, no grim face with its twisting scars and heavy jaw.
Yep, a corner can maintain its chaste innocence in a stronghold like this.
And yet, the place remains just small enough that sometimes a corner isn’t just a corner. Instead, it was the support of Miklan’s thick back as he scowled at every milkmaid that scuttered on by. It was the shell that protected him from his own paranoia. If an assassin were to confront him, it’d have to be with a dagger to the face, just how Miklan liked it.
If Sylvain had the mind to do so, he’d tell his older brother he was far too ferocious looking for a frontal attack. Or rather, too pitiful.
He was like a square-jawed dog that’d been leashed to the tree, harmless in its leather but the teeth of its reputation still struck wariness in the footsteps that fled past it.
Dimitri had come to me first, he had spared me his thoughts and I had agreed that there was reason in keeping Miklan around. In giving him power. Dimitri had come to me first, and I had agreed.
Their one and mighty king, the grandness of all grands, had done Sylvain a service in addressing the matter with him first.
Miklan was a part of that very change both Sylvain and his liege sought for their kingdom- rehabilitation of reputation, power in the hands of the poor (though Miklan had once been a brat of luxury), and a new, intermingling system of common and noble folk. A place where crests were but pretty pictures in history books.
Sylvain knew it, knew as he bent his neck over tome after tome, searching for a way to harness fire and give it to those who had but cold, barren fingertips. He knew how important it was to water down the system of crests and nobility.
But Dimitri had also done him a great disservice.
By warning him beforehand, by coaxing him into compliance, he had taken away Sylvain’s right to be upset. He had taken away his voice in opposition, of complaining to Felix or Ingrid about the childhood that now haunted the corners of their stronghold.
“It’s not a big deal,” he conversely assures Ingrid.
They sit there outside the stables, having not yet bathed after just returning. Sometimes the effort of it was just too much to bear, and soldiers would instead slink about and lay themselves down where it best suited them.
Their faces were muddy, their skin raw and angry from deflecting enemy spells while thrusting their spears forward, fighting through frozen incantations and heated words.
Mercedes and Annette had made sure their bones were sturdy and in their rightful places, had ran hands over inflammations and cooled them into bruises.
“Rather, Felix seems like the upset one here,” Sylvain tries to joke. He watches a few of the venders fit yokes onto their bulls. “He’s the one you should be worrying about.”
Ingrid and Felix, they weren’t sappy, weren’t married to their emotions like some of the others. They professed little but the truth of most things. But they had lived a childhood together, the four of them. Had run the grounds of the High Palace playing pretend with their stocky wooden swords. They had plucked dragonflies from the sky and held them there in their hands, had helped the housing staff find the nests of mice, hoping to save the varmints before the cats were set loose.
They had gone to all the same grand events, fitting between the legs of adults as they ran through halls and gardens and smoking rooms, knocking into affairs and secret dalliances while chasing fireflies over hedges.
Ingrid, though righteous even at a young age, had enjoyed their knightly escapades, their pretending and fronting. Dimitri would be called away, because he was far more important, the starlet of every night. And then Glenn, too, because they were always in matching step as if their tunics had been sewn together.
And then it would be just the three of them, crouched beneath the roses and cupping fireflies between their hands.
“Felix was cute back then,” Sylvain mutters. It hadn’t been prompted, but Ingrid would know what he meant, because she usually did.
Felix would follow him around, fingers always grasping the corner of his shirt or cloak, from the age of thumb-sucking up until the time Glenn had teased him for it. Sylvain’s disjointed shadow, brighter than any light.
“That’s why he was so upset, Sylvain,” Ingrid says. “We had three groups between the four of us. Or. . . five. The five of us. There was me, you, Felix and Dmitri, and Glenn. Then there was Glenn and Dimitri, off growing up while we still played in the bushes. Then the three of us, the youngest of our families who were always sat next to each other at dinner. And then. . . there was you two, your own little duo, the minor territory of Itha the only thing separating your little kingdoms.”
She rests her head back against the stall just as it begins to rain, the dirt softening into mud as people begin hollering, feet running to try and escape the heated, misty downpour.
Sylvain and Ingrid sit there under the overhang of the stables with horses snorting and whipping their tails about behind them, their boots catching the rain though they minded it none.
“I was all the way down on the Leicester border,” Ingrid says, “and even I knew- even I saw vestiges of what he’d do to you. Heard stories about him pushing you into wells and knocking your head into walls.”
It hadn’t been that bad. There were plenty who’d had it worse. And Miklan had been punished for it. Luxury and title had been taken from him- his family name had been taken from him, the deepest form of rejection a son could incur.
“He’d beat you, Sylvain, beat you for having the crest he didn’t. Beat you because even at a young age you were adored, revered, loved by those who would never love him. And Felix, he was there for the most of it, probably saw the result of Miklan’s resentment when it was still fresh and bloody. So, yeah, maybe he’s mad, but it’s only because you’re just the same now as you were back then. You roll over and say nothing’s wrong, everything’s alright, it’s not that bad. You don’t get mad, so he has to, just like Glenn. He’ll get mad at you and for you.”
Sylvain blows out air and then groans at the end of it, rolling his head back as she did though his hit the wood a bit harder. A horse’s head huffs from above him, snorting out hot air as it chews.
“Miklan is the past, just like our childhood,” Sylvain reminds her. “All he can do now is try and serve the future Dimitri seeks, and as his vassals we have to abide by the terms of his vision. His lineage. Miklan will never have his name or family back, so all he can do is make a new one for himself.”
He didn’t like his brother, but he had always understood the underbelly of his resentment, and in a way, it had stirred within Sylvain his own flavor of disdain. Disdain towards the girls who sought him out only because of his crest, for those who slipped into his bed for titles and prestige and bragging rights.
“Dimitri’s doing the right thing,” Sylvain says with a grunt as he finally heaves himself up. “And now I have to, as well.”
He has to find Felix and convince him that giving one of their commanders the cold shoulder isn’t the right way to go about leading an army. He’s a Duke now, the Duke Fraldarius, right-hand man to king and country. And all those under him should be treated with the same respect as those beside him. That was the world Sylvain and Dimitri sought, and it started here, with them.
He stalks through the rain and finds Felix eating alone at one of the long tables in the mess hall. Sylvain dips into the wooden space, sopping wet and hair plastered to his cheeks and brow. He pulls a hand through his tresses before ultimately shaking his body as free of rain as he possibly can.
“Like a dog,” Felix mutters.
“Woof,” Sylvain jokes, laughing a bit and hoping it might de-thaw his comrade’s mood. He saunters close until he’s standing at his table. More people run by, and soon the grounds will be cleared of life until the skies clear and the ground hardens.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Felix warns then. So he knew.
Of course he knew.
Today’s battle had been a near disaster, the routing of imperial forces staggered because Felix and Miklan had miscommunicated, fighting amongst themselves while reinforcements banked the valley on all sides. It wasn’t like Felix to lose his temper on the field.
He had his outbursts, sure, his anger and his pride, but on the battlefield he was focused, undisturbed by the violence, by the screams and the pleading. The assault of enemy sorcerers no longer fazed him like they did the recruits, who sometimes remained stunned in the infirmary for days, jerking and trembling and shrieking as if they were still on the field.
“Something went wrong today,” Sylvain idly remarks, casually slipping into the seat opposite of Felix. The cooks were stirring their pots, their backs to them and just far enough that the distance and the cover of rain smothered most conversation.
“Miklan on our field is wrong. He only knows how to lead a small unit, and to lead them in a way that benefits his protection exclusively. Why the boar had him indoctrinate into our army is beyond me. And don’t give me your redemption bullshit, Sylvain. I’m not interested.”
Sylvain looks beyond Felix and into the rain. Dealing with those who knew you as well as your own mother wasn’t always the easiest of tasks.
But Sylvain had his ways.
Sylvain liked reminding Felix of when they were younger, liked to remind him of how they used to be, how Felix used to be. He’d remind him of how Felix would follow him around, how he’d favored Sylvain’s bed in the guest room over Glenn’s.
How they had promised to live and die together.
Sylvain liked to remind Felix of when they were younger, but not the nasty bits. There was no point in remembering the nasty bits. But it appeared, in that moment, that it was necessary to remind Felix that Miklan was his monster- not Ingrid’s or Dmitri’s or Glenn’s, and certainly not Felix’s.
“Miklan did a lot of awful stuff,” Sylvain agrees. “Makes for funny stories, sure, like oh, yeah, one time my brother slipped a noose over my neck and tried to throw me out the window haha. And that’s all they are now. Funny, fucked stories. That’s it. So, while Dimitri is off gallivanting for more troops, you have to find a way to work with him. As our leading commander, I need you to deal with him so that I don’t have to.”
Strange that he should be saying this to Felix, when it was Sylvain that had suffered Miklan the most. Strange that he should be put in the position where he had to convince anyone to deal with the man.
“You’re confident but you don’t look in the mirror much,” Felix mutters. He tears into a bread roll and dunks it into his stew.
Sylvain furrows his brow, puzzled. “Excuse me?”
How was that a proper reply to anything he’d just said?
Felix just chews, not glaring, not smiling, just chewing with a deadpan sort of look to him. And then he speaks up once more.
“Suppose it’s because everyone’s always complimenting you that you don’t bother looking at yourself much. They do all the admiring, all the looking, and you don’t need to confirm anything for yourself because not one person has ever accused you of being ugly. And when we were kids? Well, you certainly didn’t care then,” Felix says. His brow pinches just a bit, then. “You didn’t have to see yourself, Sylvain. But me, I’d see it every day when I spent the summer with your lot. I had to see it each and every day, knowing who had done it but not understanding why. Not when my brother had been so damned amazing. When Ingrid’s brothers treated her with such care. I couldn’t understand why yours was such shit.”
Sylvain doesn’t know what to say. he doesn’t know how it is that he can serve his highness in bettering their formations and the relations between his brother and his (closest?) friend. Not when Felix is like this, more stubborn than the Silver Maiden herself.
And then Felix’s voice drops a bit and he’s busying himself with sopping up the remains of his stew with more bread. “And I’d know, back then, that he’d done it when I wasn’t nearby, that he’d cornered you whenever I wasn’t around. No matter how hard I tried to always be with you, I couldn’t. I wasn’t like my brother, who had fended off bandits when they’d hailed Ingrid’s caravan, who had protected her from wild dogs and boars.”
Sylvain feels a bit sick, like a mop bucket has just been dumped over his head and was now washing away all his warmth.
“That’s why you followed me around,” Sylvain whispers, not because he’s trying to be quiet but because he can’t seem to raise his voice any higher, “because you didn’t want him to hit me?”
That’s not how he wants to remember his childhood, not with Felix. Not those halcyon days they had spent play-fighting in the fields and swimming in the hidden brooks of the forests, the nights they had curled up together to the sounds of his mother’s gramophone.
“Your brother had told me you were attached to me,” Sylvain says, words clipped with sardonic and staggered laughter, “said you had never taken to anyone like you had taken to me. I thought you liked being around me, looked up to me, but, what, it was just because you didn’t Miklan to hit me?”
He’d rather have suffered far worse than to find out now that the little Felix he had been so fond of had only followed him around because he’d pitied him. That he had pronounced himself, at the youngest age of thought, Sylvain’s personal charm to ward off Miklan.
Felix’s gaze shoots upward, flicking between indignance and exasperation and something else.
“That’s not what I said, dumbass. How is it that me trying to protect you gets twisted into me not liking you? You are the most self-loathing, self-pitying brat I’ve ever met,” he seethes.
Sylvain knows that. Deep down he does. He knows that he’s twisting words but he can’t help it. He feels disjointed. A great shift in memory has happened here at this table, and it would take endless nights to adjust to it.
Felix is glaring at him now, fork in hand and looking rather dangerous.
“If you and Dimitri want to use Miklan, fine,” he bites out. “But surely there’s some other grand way you can stick it to crestology. A way that doesn’t include me having to trust that useless lump of flesh for scouting intel and routing advice. Because I want to kill him most days, Sylvain, I want to kill him and sometimes it’s just because I don’t like the way he looks.”
Felix shoves a small potato into his mouth just then, glowering still as he did so.
Sylvain weighs his head onto his hand, staring at Felix. He taps his pinky against his lips in thought, before he abandons it altogether. He no longer wants to talk about Miklan or why Felix had held onto him so tightly during the nighttime hours.
Sylvain then decides to tap into academy Sylvain (as brief as he had existed), the one that chased skirts and smiled all the time.
“Ah, yes, well I have thought of other ways of de-cresting my life,” he says with a lopsided grin, “I mean, avoiding procreation is a surefire way to stick it to the man. Have the Gautier crest end with me. Even with all the intermarrying that goes on, the possibility of it emerging elsewhere is pretty slim.”
Felix snorts, glancing up at Sylvain, chewing still.
“You’re far too insatiable to handle such discipline,” Felix remarks once he’s swallowed.
The rain hits harder, like lead it pummels the ground, sometimes bullied sideways by the wind so that it rippled like a sheet of linen.
Sylvain feels like bullying Felix a bit, just like that wind. Finally the conversation iwan’t all sour and biting. He turns his chin a bit more into his palm, eyeing his friend.
“Well, sure, but realistically all I gotta do is find me a nice bloke and that fixes it, we’ll roll around a bit, maybe jerk each other off, and all will be well. Y’know, back at the academy I took a few trips down into the Abyss, talked to that Yuri guy for a bit. He told me some wild things-”
“Sylvain!”
Sylvain grins.
Felix is flushed from his ears to his neck, looking every bit as scandalized and unbelieving as he suspected he would be.
“I’m serious,” Sylvain goes on, “just cause I’m smiling doesn’t mean I’m not serious, Felix. I’ve thought about it, y’know? Even before Yuri told me all his dirty secrets. Even when we were little, I wondered about it. It happened in the gardens and the courtyards when the parties ran late into the night, you remember, don’t you? The way men would grope at each other, falling between hedges and disappearing from their mothers, their wives, their fathers. We stumbled across those two knights. . . “
Felix hasn’t stopped him yet. Sylvain was so sure that he’d protest again, but he’s just sitting there, staring beyond Sylvain. And then he realizes that Felix must be remembering that night, as well.
They had been early on in their teens at that point. Felix had wanted to escape the din of the party and so they’d slipped out into the darkness of the gardens where the yellow-lit windows only reached so far. There were a few others who’d had the same idea, either liquored up and heaving into the bushes, or otherwise fondling and pushing into each other.
“Are you thinking about it right now?” Sylvain murmurs. He doesn’t want to be too loud, doesn’t want to startle Felix back into his shell. He doesn’t even move his head from his hand though his wrist begins to ache.
He does lean forward a bit, though, eyes still intently on Felix.
“It looked fun, didn’t it? A nephew of Duke Charon’s and the son of Duchess Conand, looking so incredibly desperate for each other. They couldn’t stop kissing so it took them forever to find their buttons and their zippers.”
In all honesty they hadn’t seen much beyond that, given that Felix had grabbed Sylvain’s arm and tugged him away from the sight, but Sylvain had watched behind him until no more of the fumbling two could be seen.
“Enough of these jokes,” Felix mutters, standing up suddenly and startling Sylvain into standing as well.
“I’m not joking,” Sylvain says. He feels a bit indignant that Felix doesn’t believe him. And so what, if he does find himself a nice man is Felix going to rebuke him for it?
“Sure, Sylvain. Listen, I’m not going to have a heart-to-heart with Miklan, but I’ll keep all this in mind when dealing with him tomorrow. If it’s got you of all people concerned then I’m sure there are plenty others who feel the same way, though they lack your forwardness to approach me about it.”
Who cares about Miklan anymore, Sylvain wants Felix to acknowledge what he’s just said. That he isn’t joking.
He grabs Felix’s arm and turns him around so that he has to look at him. Felix has to tilt his chin slightly so that their eyes can meet, fashioning himself a righteous glare.
“I’m serious. Girls are great, love them, but I don’t- can’t trust them, not yet, not here. I’ll never know what it is they’re seeing when they look at me, if it’s just the Gautier title or little crest babies they’re after. But a guy? He can’t have kids, can serve my lineage none by being with me. As it is now we can’t get married, and so we won’t be recognized by high society. My crest and name will serve him no purpose. My house, maybe, money, probably. But not my crest. It would have to all be born of love, then, Felix.”
Sylvain isn’t sure why he feels so desperate for acknowledgment right now, why he wants Felix to just acquiesce. He thinks the kitchen ladies might be looking at them right now, at the way the Gautier knight has his hand on Duke Fraldarius’s arm, keeping him close so that his body warmth could be felt despite their layers.
He just wants-
“It was your birthday,” Felix says suddenly. “That party you were talking about, it was your birthday, though it had mostly been for the adults with all their twisted talk of marrying their kids off. It was boring. So we had taken those little wooden dragons someone had given you as a present, and were going to try and charm them to fly out by the fountain. And then we had stumbled upon the nephew of Duke Charon and the son of Duchess Conand making out between the hedges.”
Sylvain is a savant when it comes to discerning Felix’s moods, a true scholar of the Fraldarius ilk. But right now, in that moment, Felix was impossible to read.
“I remember that night well enough, Sylvain,” Felix continues on with a sigh. “I remember that while I was trying to find you in that big, gaudy hall, mothers and fathers thought to put their daughters up as potential brides. I remember how they whispered amongst themselves, whispering because they knew, deep down, that it was all in poor taste. You were thirteen, Sylvain, just a year above twelve. And that whole time, while I was pushing through these stupid adults, never once did I hear about any sons. Babies that had just been born were put before sons.”
Sylvain brings his other hand to Felix’s other arm, slipping them down to the smaller’s elbows and keeping them there. He still can’t get a read on him, but he wants to touch him, keep him close, calm him down because something seemed to be bubbling up under the surface.
“Back then-,” Felix starts, looking to the side so that he can properly consult his thoughts, “it was easier for me. Easier to talk. Less depended on what I said and how I said it. But now we have armies under us and before us and behind us. We have tasks of the highest order. So now I’m bound and I can’t say a damned thing because, as you’ve so gallantly pointed out, even the smallest disruption between commanders can cost us a battle. And because I’ve backed myself into a corner. With you.”
Felix pulls himself away from Sylvain then, taking a step back so that the heat of the gray rain overtook him.
“You’re frustrated,” Sylvain realizes, hands still held out a bit from where Felix had just been prior. “You’re upset.”
Felix’s jaw clenches and unclenches. His fingers shift in that way one’s does before they reach for their sword. Felix wouldn’t go for it, was just a nervous habit of his.
“You’re frustrated,” Sylvain notes, daring to take a step forward while Felix takes another step back. They stand there in the road, hardly seeing each other through the shroud, the downpour like a curtain between them.
Sylvain won’t allow the rain to hush their conversation, and he places himself before Felix once more, his hair dripping onto Felix’s cheeks as he leans over him, partially protecting him from the onslaught.
“You’re frustrated because I’m being honest, and you aren’t,” Sylvain says. “I’m okay with rolling around with men just as much as I am with women.” He wets his lips, knowing it’s a mighty leap he’s taking that very moment, “and you’re frustrated because you’re the same, but you feel like you can’t say as much. That you’re past the point of saying it.”
Felix’s hands are clenched, but he refuses to look away, ever the unwavering leader. Ever the contradiction.
Except Sylvain was the one leading this dance. Sylvain was the first to share his fancies, to whimsically fantasize about bedding a man, something Felix appears to have been dwelling on for years in total darkness.
Sylvain cups Felix’s cheeks with his hands, lowering his head so that he could whisper and still be heard.
“All those dukes and duchesses, those margraves and countesses and marquis,” Sylvain murmurs, “didn’t even think about their sons when I turned thirteen. And neither did I, not until I was seventeen and kissing some girl and thinking how, in that moment, I’d rather like it if her chest was flatter, if her hair was darker, her eyes sharper, her tongue just a bit meaner. And I had to buy her all sorts of things for weeks after, because it wasn’t her name I had said.”
Felix jolts in place, eyes wide.
“That was my first time, Felix. My first time sleeping with a girl and it wasn’t even really her I was sleeping with,” Sylvain says. He says it so quietly, so endearingly. “Please tell me it’s the same, that it’s not Dmitri or some distant cousin you’ve been thinking about.”
Felix wrinkles his nose, shaken from his trance at the mere mention of their dear king of Faerghus.
And then he’s pulling Sylvain somewhere dry, pulling him by the elbow instead of the hand but it’s better than a grunt and a command to follow.
They find recluse away from the kitchen staff and the animals and the guard rotations. They find a shed for seeds and settle there, except they don’t sit down just yet, standing still with little space between them. Felix’s gaze drops to Sylvain’s chest.
“Fifteen,” he mutters, “I was fifteen when Miklan had a steady following of bandits under him. He’d come through the territory, had tried to grab himself some Gautier stallions while we were in the stables.”
Sylvain remembers this, though it remains one of his more unpleasant memories.
“And you probably would’ve let him, which pissed me off,” Felix says. “So I went up to him and told him off. Suppose in that moment he realized he could say whatever he liked, no repercussions from his father or mine because his worth didn’t belong to them anymore. Said some nasty stuff, about me looking like a girl- all that shit. And you, you got angry, Sylvain.”
Felix lifts his gaze and Sylvain shudders.
“I’d seen you angry before, sure. But it was the first time I’d seen you stand up against him, to lunge and try and overtake him. You were like an animal, Sylvain. Maybe because the stuff he was saying reminded you of what your father had told us about those Sreng raiders from the north, about how they pillaged, how they took what they wanted and left little to be recovered.”
Sylvain doesn’t want to remember such an awful thing. Was this a memory Felix treasured?
“That was the first time you had stood up to him, and some sick, twisted part of me was happy that I had been the reason for it. And I had started to see,” he stops, fighting with how and what to say, “things in a different way. You. You in a different way. That’s why-”
Sylvain tugs him in close, holding him to his chest, his chin to the crown of his head.
And Felix, after a considerable moment, raises his hands and grasps Sylvain close as well.
“Right now isn’t the time,” Sylvain acknowledges, “but when this is all over, we’ll properly love one another. We’ll allow ourselves the time do as much. No war, no Miklan, no pretty ideals. Just us in the Fraldarius household.”
Felix’s voice is muffled but Sylvain understands him all the same.
“Why Fraldarius?”
Sylvain cradles the back of Felix’s head with his hand.
“Because it’ll teach my father not to put all his betting money on one horse. Miklan was awful, but maybe he wouldn’t have been if they had been better.”
Felix hums into his chest before turning his head to the side and resting his cheek there.
He wants to give Felix chaste kisses, wants to feel his breath on his skin, but he knows if they were to start something now it’d make everything else all the more dangerous.
So he’ll wait, he’ll wait for bluer skies and happier days. He’ll wait for a love that isn’t desperate and fearful, but innocent and meandering. Childish. A childish, whole-hearted love that deserved time and space.
Just like what they could’ve had if their academy days hadn’t been stolen from them. If they had been allowed their classes and dances, their nighttime walks to the greenhouse and the pond.
“We’ll get this done, Felix, and then we’ll get the ending we deserve.”