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He still dreams of Vale nearly every night. Fifteen years spent tumbling across its slopes, his little sister and childhood friends in tow, scrambling up trees and wading in the river, having mock Psynergy battles by imitating the adults and wishing that he would grow up more quickly- Felix misses it. Of course he misses it. His fractured family is much stiller here without Jenna to take him along on one of her adventures, colder without his grandmother's hustle and bustle as she tended to her toasty oven, quieter without his grandfather there to grunt agreeably mid-conversation, half asleep in his favorite chair.
He has his parents with him, at least, but he's never felt more like a child than when he stirs in the night to the sound of his mother weeping, barely audible, as his father tries to console her with hushed reassurances. The stars visible through the uncovered window have never looked more foreign to him, even though nothing about them has changed.
They're outsiders here in Prox. From their physical attributes to their temperaments, Felix's family couldn't differ more from the townspeople if they tried. He quickly comes to realize that his plays at make-believe conflict with his friends were a luxury granted to him through peace and through security. In Prox, fighting means killing, and killing means getting to live another day. The first time he takes up a sword in his still-shaky hands, the warrior training him disarms him and pins him to the snow faster than he can open his mouth, though the knee pressed firmly against his diaphragm makes it difficult to speak, anyways. He's weak. Of course he's weak- if he weren't, maybe they wouldn't have been in this mess in the first place.
Maybe it's something in the air, maybe it's guilt, or shame, or something else, but Felix picks up the blade again, day after frigid day, swinging it back and forth as his breath clouds the air in front of him, beads of sweat trickling down from his face and into the snow, where they freeze over again. This, of all things, is what finally endears him to the Proxians- some of them, anyways. Karst comes over to laugh at his pitiful footwork whenever she isn't glued to her sister's side or doing training of her own. Saturos' lips only curl in half-amusement and half-disgust whenever his patrols take him towards the direction of Felix's training grounds. On occasion, the older villagers will come to watch him practice with their arms folded behind their backs as if he were a particularly interesting animal at a petting zoo, and hand him water and dry biscuits like they were feeding one.
It becomes something of a routine; he wakes up with his parents at the crack of dawn and helps them with the chores they all need to do to survive, then he downs a bowl or two of gruel with them and Kyle at their rickety table, and after that he's off to train again, subsisting on melted snow, his mother's little wrapped parcel of crusty bread, and the goodwill of the villagers until it's time for supper. He's a fixture in the Proxian fields- That Weak Venus Adept Who Swings His Sword Poorly and Occasionally Trips Over His Own Two Feet. He comes to know the names of those who come up to greet him in the midst of training. They chat with him, commiserate about the weather not for the cold, which they, unlike him, are immune to, but for the way it rattles their windows at night, and even send him off with a few hand-woven blankets when they hear that his mother sometimes can't fall asleep. He doesn't correct them with the actual reason and simply thanks them.
It's odd- it is odd, isn't it? Saturos and Menardi had barged into his idyllic hometown, sent a massive boulder crashing over himself and his loved ones, threatened him more than once on their troubled journey back to Prox, and made it perfectly clear that they would only be kept alive while they were still useful, and yet here Felix is, nodding along and moving in turn as one of the warriors on break gives him tips, walking around the village with his arms full of planks and nails to help the elderly batten down the hatches for the winter, letting the children pelt him with snowballs the way Jenna used to in her delight at seeing the ground covered in white.
He's grown used to this, and he doesn't know how to make sense of it, so he doesn't. Felix has always been better at doing, not thinking, and for now, that's all he needs to do- all he can do.
By now, he's seen the rift at the end of the world, and he finally understands a little bit more just why the Proxians value grit and action more than anything else, more than empathy, more than patience; the simple act of living is in itself an act of defiance towards the land that threatens to swallow them whole, and they would fight for their lives kicking and screaming rather than let it smother them. Felix thinks he might know just a little bit about that.
Three years pass, and Felix grows taller, the efforts of his training at last giving some amount of definition to his once scrawny body, but when he looks at the wrinkles starting to overtake his parents' weary faces, he can't help but feel that it still isn't enough.
When Saturos announces one day, marching in through their front door like he owns the place (not that Felix and his family do, either, despite how familiar it's become to him), that he'll graciously permit one of the Venus Adepts present to accompany them on another visit- he sneers visibly upon uttering the word- to Vale, Felix doesn't say anything at all. Behind him, his parents and Kyle are exchanging glances, their expressions somewhere between tumult and longing. Saturos regards them, his face forever cold with contempt, before turning his eyes towards Felix, who is staring down at his rapidly cooling mug of water.
"You'll do, Felix," he says decisively. "If all of your training hasn't been for naught, then prove it."
Felix's hands twitch around his mug, and he forces himself to meet Saturos' gaze. His mother's hands immediately grip his shoulder in concern, and he squeezes them quickly without breaking eye contact.
"I'll do it," he says quietly, without another moment's pause. He hears his mother slump against his father, the wooden floorboards creaking. Saturos only nods curtly and swiftly turns to leave.
"We'll depart in three days. Be ready by then."
As the door slams shut, his mother wraps her arms wordlessly around Felix, and then his father around them both. Kyle pauses, then gives Felix a small reassuring smile before retreating outside to give them space.
His parents spend the next few days alternating between fussing over him like they used to when he was small and gazing at him with pursed lips and teary eyes as if they were sending him off to die. When he recalls the perilous journey to Prox, as well as the calamity that Saturos and Menardi had unleashed upon them the first time around, and now perhaps upon the entire world, he can only grimace.
The night before his departure, he doesn't sleep. His parents, exhausted from a day of watching their son forlornly, their expressions only growing darker as the sky itself grew dimmer, have finally fallen asleep in the bed nearby. Felix inhales slowly then peels the blankets away from himself as silently as possible, then quickly dresses himself in his training garb and heads to the fields, deliberately leaving the carefully packed satchel of his belongings by his bed so that his parents would not think that he had already gone were they to awaken before he returned.
This time of night, he's all alone in the field, with no one coming up to him for idle chit chat, and the biting wind cuts at his exposed skin, and even though he's used to it by now, he still shivers until he's swung his training sword a few hundred times. The monotony of the action, the memorized repetition works to quell the uneasy buzzing in his head, if only by a little bit.
He's going back to Vale. Swish.
He might get to see the rest of his family again. Swish.
They'll hate him for this. Another swish, but this one is louder and clumsier, and it sends him tumbling to his knees, panting at the sight of his torn expression reflected back to him on the edge of his blade by the first rays of sunlight.
He doesn't have a choice, not really. The rift has already gotten a few inches closer since he first came to Prox. He can't bear to watch these familiar streets crumble, the doors and windows he reinforced with his own hands collapse, the people whose names he now knows vanish into the void.
The sound of footsteps makes him slowly raise his head, and through his disheveled bangs he spots the figures of Saturos and Menardi in the distance, as unimpressed with his lack of prowess as ever.
"Pick yourself up," Menardi says, coolly. "It's time."
Felix only manages to nod as he staggers to his feet. Something flies towards him and lands squarely at his feet, and he picks it up without thinking.
"Courtesy of Alex," Saturos answers by means of a shrug, walking briskly away with Menardi and leaving Felix holding a rather ugly green mask in his hands.
He scrutinizes the mask for several seconds, then at the flat edge of his sword, where his jagged face is still reflected. Slowly, he shoves it in his pocket and dusts himself off, the morning light now causing the ground to shimmer and scattering the last vestiges of his likeness into air.
There's a warmer, heartier breakfast than usual waiting for him when he returns to the house, and his parents clutch his hands one last time as the entire village comes to see them off- they're mostly there for Saturos and Menardi, their finest warriors, of course, but some of them pat him on the shoulder and wish him well, and as far as he can tell, they mean it.
He swallows, looking into his parents' faces. "I'll come back," he says, and the last word that he can't bring himself to utter lodges in his throat like a fishbone. He casts one last look at Prox, at the snow-capped buildings and the flags waving to and fro from the wind, and he closes his eyes and recalls the verdant cliffs and thatched roofs and bustling laughter of his childhood.
When he opens them again, he's still here. The weight of the mask in his pocket finally registers to him again, and he gingerly affixes it to his face. He briefly wonders why Alex thought he would need it, even though he's probably right.
He hasn't chosen. He can't choose. He misses Vale from the bottom of his heart, but when their ship departs, he thinks he might miss Prox just as much.