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An impending migraine edges around the corner, and all Felix can do to stave it off is drink water and eat protein and veggies. Who can blame him? The lighting at anime cons is always terrible.
Felix rips off a piece of beef jerky and— with it still in his mouth— takes a bite out of his green pepper like an apple, spilling seeds on his lap. He brushes them off, hoping they don’t land in his merch.
It’s slowed down now it’s lunchtime, and it’ll probably stay slow for another hour or so while cosplayers have post-lunch meetups. He’s considering looking around for Annette’s table when someone browsing the table across from him laughs, again. Felix didn’t get a chance to see the table across from him before it was mobbed by a crowd that has yet to thin, but they’ve been irritating him all day. He can’t peek through the cosplayers and excited preteens and eventually writes it off. He’ll find out later.
It isn’t until the end of the night when convention staff pushes attendees out of the artist alley and Felix’s table is covered that he has a chance to look. A small crowd lingers around the booth even with staff physically ushering customers away. Now Felix’s walked into the aisle, he notices this person’s low display: they haven’t built up vertically. He cranes his neck to look closer, expecting to see a fine art portfolio similar to his own, complete with high quality scans of oil paintings and in-depth studies.
The seller notices him and waves. Felix hurriedly looks away and scurries to his own covered table.
“Hey!” the seller says anyway, “I’m Sylvain, do you do these things a lot?”
Felix doesn’t turn to respond. “Yes.”
“That’s awesome, dude.” A chair squeaks across concrete floors. Footsteps. Felix doesn’t look up as Sylvain approaches him and leans against his table. Inconsiderate, what if he had merch under there? “This is my first time at one of these.”
“Okay,” Felix says.
“So, yeah, I don’t really know anybody,” Sylvain chuckles, and Felix realizes he’s tall. “Just thought I’d say hi.”
Felix hates small talk, but Annette has been encouraging him to try harder, so he does. “So what kind of art do you make?”
“Oh! Here —”
Sylvain steps back toward his table. Felix looks up at him while his back is turned. He’s wide, with bright red hair tousled like he just rolled out of bed, and when Sylvain turns towards Felix he sees freckles spattered across his face, a relaxed smile, and a small pinback button on his t-shirt saying he/they. Felix straightens his back.
“I make these little button things,” he explains.
Felix looks. Then he glances back at Sylvain’s table to confirm his suspicions. He slouches again. A red shiba plastered over a blue background, an actual, honest-to-goodness ffuuuuuu face, Pikachu with his mouth open.
Sylvain sells, eugh, meme merch.
“Seriously?” Felix glares at a circular button with a tuxedo cat and some dumb phrase like it slighted him personally, “That’s it?”
“Hm? Yeah,” Sylvain says, “That’s it.”
“That’s hardly even art,” Felix spits.
He storms off and Sylvain doesn’t stop him. He ignores them the next day, though he can’t help but note the crowd never leaves and Sylvain counts out a hefty pile of cash at the end of each day like a moron. Who counts like that? Who even takes that much cash?
Felix finds and blocks them on Twitter before the convention’s over.
Felix decides he hates his life when, at the next convention, he’s placed across from Sylvain again.
He decides he’s cursed when again, at the next next convention, he’s placed across from Sylvain again.
He seriously considers quitting conventions altogether when at the next next next convention he — well, you get it by now.
Because Felix was put on this earth to suffer, Sylvain befriends all Felix’s friends: Annette, Bernadetta, even Ignatz. Felix keeps his distance. Sylvain brings lunch for everybody, including Felix, and Felix doesn’t eat it.
Days before Felix’s next convention, with his plans settled and nothing in the way, his phone rings. He stares at Annette’s name on the caller ID and frowns before accepting the call.
“Felix!” Annette exclaims through the phone. Felix flinches away. “Hey, Felix!”
“What?” Felix snaps.
“So, I have good news and bad news,” she explains.
Felix’s stomach jolts. “What?!”
A sigh. “I’m sick. I can’t make it to the con this weekend.”
Then she sneezes.
Felix grimaces, both at her sneeze and at their hotel room’s cost. He’s willing to stay in the con hotel if he can split the price, but it’s not cheap and it’s too late to rebook to a nearby hotel; he’d have to drive in and pay for parking.
“But the good news is, I know the person who got off the waitlist for my table!”
Felix barely registers this. He’s busy working out how much more merch he’ll need to sell to make this work. He says, “Okay.”
“And he can take my spot in the room!”
A pause.
“Do I know him?”
“Yeah, so that’s the bad news.”
“...not that you’re sick.”
“Well, yeah, that too,” Annette’s voice crackles over the line, “But, uh, it’s Sylvain.”
A pause.
“No,” Felix says. Then, for clarity, “No.”
“And, well—” he knows she’s twirling her hair on the other side of the phone, “—He also took my table, so…”
“No!”
“So he’ll be next to you all weekend,” she finishes.
Felix takes a moment to consider the paths ahead of him. He decides to try a new angle. One so unthinkable, so reasonable and straightforward, Annette can’t possibly deny him. He’ll ask nicely.
“Annette—” he starts…
“It’ll be good, stinky!”
And she hangs up.
Felix stares at his blank screen, willing it to provide a solution to this hellscape he’s found himself in. He obsessively checks his phone for days, skimming notifications from his group chat as they come in and disregarding them when they don’t remove Sylvain from his hotel room, and continues to stare at the stupid blank screen even as he throws his suitcase to the floor, and Sylvain unpacks his own things on the other side of the queen bed they’re supposed to be sharing.
“I promise I don’t hog the blankets,” Sylvain says with a wink. Felix rolls his eyes and doesn’t respond.
That night, after setup, Felix decides he doesn’t just hate Sylvain, he detests him. He detests how warm the bed is. He detests the way they flirt with girls just outside the door, filling the room with infuriating giggles. He detests Sylvain’s organization system, their gazillion button designs immaculately placed for easy grabbing, making Felix’s whole throw-it-on-the-floor system look like a kindergartner put it together.
“Hey.” Sylvain leans back in his chair, balancing a pen between his lips and his nose. Felix glares. “Can I fix your setup?”
“My setup is perfect,” Felix spits.
Sylvain frowns. The pen falls to his sculpted chest. “It’s so messy,” he explains, “It bothers me.”
“Tsk.” Felix crosses his arms and stares blankly into the deserted aisle. “Whatever. Just don’t talk to me.”
Sylvain doesn’t say anything else as he gets to work, though Felix finds he’s pretty unignorable. Their cologne isn’t the worst, he’ll admit, something musky and fruity all at once, and the warmth radiating from their body in the overly air conditioned convention hall is pleasant. Sylvain gives him space before the next sale he makes, and when Felix reaches to pull out a print, Sylvain points out its location.
“It’s alphabetical,” they explain, gesturing toward the neat stack of prints in plastic poly bags, each labeled with Felix’s messy scrawl.
Felix nods and finds the print with ease, quickly placing it in its own sleeve and handing it off to the customer. The next transaction passes with exactly as much ease, and by the end of the day, he finds he’s made more money than he has any other day. Did it have to do with how quickly he found merchandise, or did it have more to do with him not saying fuck out of frustration every few seconds with customers in front of his table?
Sylvain doesn’t say anything. Felix begrudgingly admits to himself that Sylvain may only be a little stupid.
Felix unblocks Sylvain.
It’s good timing, too, since their next convention is expensive. It’s high competition and the hotel, despite only having two beds, is only affordable if Felix is sharing with Annette, Bernadetta, Edelgard, Hubert, Ignatz, and him. Felix is shoved in a bed with Sylvain. He’s shoved on the shuttle with Sylvain. He’s shoved behind a table back-to-back with Sylvain bumping into him every two seconds.
Sylvain’s elbow jams into Felix’s armpit.
“Fuck off,” Felix snaps.
“Hah!” Sylvain playfully jabs him again. “You’re too cute to talk like that.”
Felix’s face heats. He twists in his seat and gives the back of Sylvain’s neck an aggressive pinch. Sylvain yelps.
“Sorry, sorry!” he brushes Felix’s hand away. “I was joking!”
For reasons unknown to Felix, his gut drops. “Of course you were,” he snarls.
The alley is, as always, overstimulating. Sylvain manages to keep Felix grounded with mysteriously cold water, and even manages to get him to the hotel room at the end of the day while everyone else leaves to get take-out. They’re stopped outside their door by a cosplayer in a long blonde wig with a big bow on top, wearing a white bikini with enormous foam pauldrons.
“You look terribly exhausted,” she says with big, innocent doe eyes, “Have you two had a long day? Is there anything I can do to help?”
Irritation spikes through Felix, but before he can snap Sylvain laughs.
“Nice,” they say, “Solid characterization. Love it. Have a good weekend, alright?”
Her soft eyes turn sharp and she snorts out a laugh. Sylvain laughs harder. “You caught me. Rest up,” she says.
Felix stares blankly while she walks away and Sylvain swipes the key card twice, finally getting the door open and guiding him inside. Felix suppresses a groan; they left all the lights on, he’ll have to deal with that before he can relax.
“What’s up?” Sylvain asks.
Felix curses himself: his groan came though, anyway. “That cosplayer was annoying,” he lies.
“Nah, that was just her character,” Sylvain says, gently setting Felix down on the bed. “Besides, I have something more important to attend to.
Felix doesn’t know what to say to that. He watches in silence while Sylvain darkens the room and adjusts the air conditioner. He doesn’t look away in time to miss Sylvain pulling his sweatshirt off over his head and draping it over Felix’s shoulders like a warm, sweaty blanket. Felix wraps it around himself and pretends like he’s not breathing in the scent.
With the lights off and the air conditioner on low to drown out the noise from next door, Sylvain sits down next to Felix on the bed and says, “Hey, uh, sorry. Again.”
“Uh huh,” Felix grunts.
“I can, uh, say stupid things sometimes,” Sylvain says, “when I’m nervous.”
“You’re dumb.”
Sylvain laughs, stiff and awkward. The words take their time coming out, as if he’s forcing them against his better judgment. “I, uh, I didn’t want to say anything back there, but uh, you know.”
Felix does not know. He waits, staring dead-eyed at Sylvain’s cheeks as they grow pinker and pinker.
Sylvain finally gives up. He shifts back and forth on the plush mattress and clears his throat. “Well, uh, guess who has two thumbs and a crush on you!”
To Felix’s utter disbelief Sylvain points at himself with both thumbs and a big, doofy grin. Felix stares. And stares. Sylvain, to his credit, doesn’t move
“Don’t fuck around with me.” Felix rubs his tight forehead with his palm. “I’ll kill you.”
“I’m not fucking around,” Sylvain says.
Felix angles his head so he can see Sylvain— really see him. They’re staring at their hands and fiddling around with their thumbs, their body filled with frenetic energy seeking a release. Felix swallows.
He doesn’t think Sylvain’s lying, and he’s not sure how to approach it.
He thinks he likes them back.
Well, Felix has never been a man of many words. He presses on his forehead one last time to alleviate the tension and, in one quick, graceful movement, pushes Sylvain onto his back and crawls over him with one hand pressing into the mattress next to their head. Sylvain looks up at him in shock, speechless. Felix tries to suppress a smirk and fails.
“What a coincidence—”
Then, because everything’s really just swell, the door to their hotel room opens.
“Eeeeeeew!” Annette’s voice cuts between them.