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Hope is a fickle thing.
Felix lies in his bed and waits for it to pass. A lantern flickers dejectedly in the corner, thawing his thoughts into something far more bearable than Ingrid and Sylvain. There is no hope there. He knows that. He knows.
Knowing and feeling are very different things.
Blankets lie crumpled around him. Dusk whispers over the sleet-clouded window. Dandelions rot on the sill.
Burying his face in a pillow, he tries to crush the sweet decay from his mind. Succeeds only in fracturing a memory of warm voices, careless laughter, spring sun. Of kissing the light in Sylvain’s smile, squeezing Ingrid’s hand across the grass. He wants to leave this stagnant, sweat-soaked bed and go outside, pick new flowers, pretend they'll be waiting for him. Felix's heart is taut around the enormity of such a feeling. Such a lingering feeling.
If he opens that door, there will be strangers and weeds and humidity that never burns off, so he lingers in the dry heat of his tiny room.
He chose to leave. He has no right to feel like this—it was the right thing to do. He had to. He had to.
But goddess, how he wants to hold them again.
Ingrid screamed, anger splitting into something raw and wet as her emerald ribbon lashed in the wind. The color burrowed deep into his heart as she dove at him, pegasus feathers spinning free against the sunrise. "Angel," she had called him that morning as she grazed his cheek with a kiss. The word was torn from his memory as he rolled out of the way of her lance; a whisper swallowed by the crash of battle as he scrambled to his feet.
Sylvain's eyes glinted in the dim light, disbelief carved plainly in his outstretched hand. His blade hung heavy at his side, an old and desperate oath. "Fe," he pleaded. As if this was something he could have slipped out of with a roll of the eyes, with the point of a training sword, with three perfect, bloodless seconds against the ground. Of course it isn't, of course he's serious, so Felix growled, "Keep a promise for once in your life," and ran from death like the fucking coward he is.
The boar watched with a wild eye.
He's been in Adrestia for a month and hated every second. The emperor—his emperor—relegated him to planning. Temporarily. Supposedly. Because, if the low grate of voices in her chambers were any indication, they didn't trust him to actually hurt any of the Lions. Goddess. Lions. Can he even call them that? They're not eagles and lions and deer. They're not animals.
They're not kids anymore.
///
"Do you regret it?"
Byleth asks in a voice so steady, so clear, he wonders if she ever left. Maybe everyone else had left, gone out to the forest. Maybe now she's calling them back to her classroom, leading them beneath the alien warmth of her blade, and that's why she doesn't waver.
Her hair is lighter now, like Rhea's. He doesn't mention that.
Instead, he says, "No." And then, "I couldn't serve a beast anymore."
"Then you are loyal to Edelgard?"
He doesn't respond.
Undeterred, Byleth says quietly, "It will not hurt him."
Crimson glints sharply in his mind. His jaw tenses. "What?"
"I don't pretend to understand you, Felix. But I know monsters. You cared for the man he was—"
The man Glenn loved enough to die for. The man with a hunger too dark to see. That no one could really see, no one could really love, except for Felix, except for Felix—
"I never—"
"I wasn't done," she says coolly. Waits one moment. Two. Her gaze doesn't falter. "He does not feel betrayed. Do you need him to?"
Of course I do, is the low, aching thought. He won’t. He won’t, and I want him to with everything I am. I want him to bleed and I want him to be safe and I want to be seven in the courtyard where we don’t know what it is to kill. I want to recognize him again.
“No,” he says simply. It’s more of a rasp than a response. She doesn’t believe him (he can see it in the tilt of her head as she bids him goodbye, the faint sliver of grief in those empty eyes), but it doesn’t matter. Not really.
The next morning there is a battle. Byleth stands beside him.
He tells himself he does not regret.
///
It is easy to help Edelgard.
She is pragmatic and persuasive and her ruthlessness skirts the edge of brutality to step into something sharper. More precise. He can tell himself it is not familiar if the blood does not show on her dress.
Her vassal tugs on the hem of his glove. He's a dog of a man, blinder than Dedue ever was. Remnants of vicious nausea, cracking bone, crackle around his hands—magic light as night.
"It is done, Your Highness."
"Not yet," she says softly. "Not yet."
Felix lets his gaze tail hers rather than those of the empty bodies that surround them. Maybe he is a dog too. Maybe he should tire of rusting these church bells. He does not.
It is good to bring about change.
It is better to feel good about something, anything, to feed the base desire for purpose. He is a hypocrite, then, for mocking Sylvain. He should have been kinder. If he returned, would he forgive him? Would Ingrid still love him, after everything, with that devotion she clings to so desperately? He does not think so.
He is usually right.
///
It feels like all he does these days is fight. There is no solace between the battles anymore, no humanity after the bloodshed except his own—and even that seems to waver. He sleeps and does not rest.
Some of his compatriots try to connect with him. Lysithea brings him a cupcake and eats it herself, Caspar claps his back and smiles at his glare, Lindhardt sits beside him and fails to understand.
He wants to like them—he does! He does, desperately, with all he is, because maybe this life he has chosen will feel full if he has people to care about.
Then he wonders if that's what Glenn was thinking when he died and he shuts them all down.
///
The forest dyes the sun green. It winks beneath the shivering branches. It watches when the monster pounces.
His matted furs crack in the wind. His teeth are bared, senseless, animal. Felix ducks, skull slamming against armor instead of the lance. The star staring back at him is unbearably blue as he drives his sword into the beast's stomach.
It is a practiced motion. He's faked it tens of times (dozens, hundreds, thousands) and it has driven this creature against a wall before. He should have seen it coming.
He growls wetly and grabs Felix by the wrist, yanking the blade from his organs. Blood slides starkly from between the dark plates.
"Felix," he hisses, and squeezes, and breaks.
He strangles a scream to the floor of his throat. Numbness infects his hand as bone snaps in the monster's grasp. The hilt bends.
"What could you possibly have to say to me?"
Felix is no match for his raw strength without a weapon. It's ironic in the worst sort of way, but he bites the boar's hand (like an animal, like an animal, like fangs dig into hooves and this desperate struggle is the only thing that matters). He rips his arm away and brandishes the sword in his offhand. It doesn’t matter. He's trained with both.
Light shreds the beast's eye. It (doesn't matter. He's trained with both. It doesn't matter) curves into something terrible as he laughs, rabid, humorless. "He hates you. That's what I have to say to you. I can hear him, even now. He did not die for this."
Felix understands, then, that this is a creature of perfect awareness. How could one exist for such an all-consuming purpose and not possess such acuity? This being, this grotesque, slavering aberration, has built himself for pain. Maybe that is why he lusts for blood so flagrantly. Shallow deaths, shallow pain. Searing Felix with this constant reminder that the entity before him was his friend (he was! he was! he was!) and now it is not. He is conscious, but he sees through a single warped lense.
Felix understands immediately after that not everything is about him and that Dimitri is just insane. To suggest he might be so invested in a Fraldarius is almost funny.
Dimitri. As if this thing has any right to that name.
Felix lunges for the boar's throat. He is unconscious before he hits the ground.
///
He receives the news of his father’s death in a cell.
Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius. Fallen in service of the king.
He is now. A king, that is.
It's poetic. Unbearably so. Maybe Felix should have killed him before he had the chance to die for Dimitri. Maybe Felix will rot in this dungeon and everyone will say, oh, how heroic that he didn't escape. How admirable that his corpse aided as royal fucking fertilizer.
Ingrid stands outside the cage. Felix cries when he sees her. He doesn't remember the last time he cried.
"You're pathetic," she says.
He feels that maybe he is the one going mad as he looks up at her blurry form. The tears are weak (for his few fortunes have never quite allowed catharsis), but as they fall, he says, in a matter of senselessness, "Yes."
There is a beat. A moment. "I hate seeing you like this. I hate that I ever had to see you again, but Sylvain wouldn't come. So."
She could've sent a courier. Sent another Lion.
"They're going to kill you," she says. "You know that."
"Of course."
"Don't you care?"
His teeth snap together. His head jerks up, salt spinning from his face.
She just glares at him. It's a rueful sort of thing. Her eyebrows are drawn, like when she's trying to figure out a faith paper.
"You care too," he hisses, quieter.
Her jaw tightens. "Do I?"
///
Seven minutes after she leaves, there is Sylvain.
A liar as always.
He kneels before Felix, a candle choking down a breath too bright for its dying wick. Red hair ruffles beneath shaking hands, light dances in eyes that must surely burn beneath the heat of his tears. Why is everybody always fucking crying?
“I’m sorry,” he croaks.
Felix wraps a hand around his where it clings to a bar. The metal kisses cold against his fingers. His other hand still hasn’t healed. Both are numb now.
“Shut up,” Felix says, and squeezes with what strength he can muster. “Shut up.”
A guard’s boots click around the corner.
Sylvain shoots up and smiles a watery, chapped, reassuring little smile. It dies as soon as it’s given. As soon as he turns to go. Felix holds the corpse of it in his hand, pretends it is cold like the iron.
///
Dimitri is getting better.
That’s what he hears. That’s what the sentries say in relieved little half-laughs where the dungeon meets the stairs, that’s what comes to languish in this echoing hall. There are no other prisoners here. Perhaps he is blessed in a way Dimitri never was, in that regard.
It was his father’s death that dragged the king back from his den. He wishes he could be there to see it.
A warm shard of crimson sits heavy in his palm. It pulses with magic. A dark thing. A dark, dark thing. A tiny door, slipped between spies and in with the water, all to take him back. He left because he could not serve a nightmare any longer.
A twin-headed eagle stares blindly from the stone.