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Sylvain has never really imagined the end of the world. Mostly he thought he wouldn’t be around to see it. There had been a time, even, when he would’ve joked about that—hey, apocalypse party at my place!
He would’ve gone out on a high. Stolen some alcohol, maybe. Found a pretty girl, maybe. Maybe he’d go get his father’s stuff just to watch it burn. The world’s ending, hasta la vista, baby!
Reality is so often disappointing. ‘Global temperatures will soon fall to levels unsustainable for life,’ the news headlines read, and instead of making his guest list, Sylvain just waited for the punchline. It wasn’t until he was packing his bags that he realized he was the joke.
At the end of everything, this is how the unflappable Sylvain finds himself: no goals, no plans, no company. Sylvain keeps nothing but an unknowable impulse to keep putting one freezing foot in front of the other, like a rat trapped in a hamster wheel.
Amidst the constant cold and the unexpected isolation, it actually takes weeks for the obvious to occur to him—how he should employ the benefits of the Gautier family legacy, the lasting impacts of his father’s careful social climbing.
As a kid, the Blaiddyd family lake house was just a fun summer hangout. He’d known that the house itself was a cog in a system of secret royal safehouses, but its carefully reinforced walls and underground bunker were never as interesting to him as a fishing competition with Ingrid or a chance to toss Dimitri in the lake. In truth, even knowing the house’s location was a privilege, and it was one his family had spent years schmoozing before Sylvain’s birth to grant him.
Fitting, then, that Sylvain almost forgot about it—and when he remembers, it’s not out of any misplaced gratitude toward his father.
It’s because he really wants to see his ex.
This being Sylvain’s grandiose end-of-the-world revelation is about as unsurprising as it is vaguely pathetic. There has to be some sort of karmic justice to Sylvain’s last act being haunted by a past lover—he can almost hear Ingrid laughing at him. But it’s not like it’s just anyone. It’s Felix. That has to count for something.
It takes some time for him to get everything in motion. There’s a lot of wading through snow—first a thin dusting, then ankle deep, then levels he’d rather not think about. He catches rides when he can and commiserates with the masses when they cross paths—where are you headed? Still got any family? Me? Well, someone like that.
Eventually he manages to lay his pieces out, and Sylvain finds himself standing at the foot of the Blaiddyd family lake house, copy-and-pasted from his memories but for the blanket of white. He sends a silent wave of gratitude to Dimitri, wherever he is, and hopes he can feel it.
The house is cold without electricity, but the underground bunker has enough insulation to heat it without too much trouble, and there’s enough space for Sylvain to drag in his sled and all the supplies that he collected along the way. He retreats upstairs to collect whatever blankets and bedding he can find, feeling like a post-apocalyptic mother bird making her last-ditch nest.
Once he’s satisfied, he bundles up, grabs some supplies to start a fire, and settles outside to keep watch.
He hopes Felix got his letter.
The Fraldarius family house used to have an impressive back garden. When Felix’s mother was still alive, she’d grown rows upon rows of bright flowers in it. He and Glenn would sneak back there and play a game: throw pebbles at the other’s head, first to flinch loses. They’d be scolded if they ever got caught, and to avoid it they’d shriek and run and duck into the bushes—tucked among the flowers in the warm dirt, sweaty and adrenaline-filled.
There’s nothing left of the garden now. Felix can’t even see where it would begin or end. Truthfully, if he didn't know the house so well, he might have had difficulty identifying any of it at all—the piled-up snowdrifts make what’s left look shapeless, splintered sections of its wooden frame poking outward like a ribcage.
If this had been one of the many dilapidated houses he’d passed on his way, he wouldn’t have spared it a second glance. This area didn’t have enough natural defenses from the winds and didn’t get enough sunlight to alleviate the ice’s burden during the day. Only a fool would stay here.
Unfortunately, his old man is a fool. He would never have abandoned this house, not when Felix’s mother’s trinkets still lined the shelves, not when Glenn’s ghost still roamed the halls. Rodrigue had always been sentimental to a fault—a trait Felix had tried his damned hardest not to inherit.
Felix never called him, but he knows. When the temperatures dropped and the winds blew in, Rodrigue would have just barricaded the windows. When the voices on the news suggested ‘migration toward the equator, move to warmer ground’, Rodrigue would have just turned up the heat. When the media changed its tone, and everyone started to say ‘actually, stay where you are, actually, it doesn’t matter’—Rodrigue would have been smug, self-satisfied with his loyalty to his house and his ghosts.
Then when the power grid went down, and the voices on the news went silent, and Felix couldn’t call him even if he wanted to, Rodrigue would have—well.
Felix watches the bones of the house creak and prays for once in his life to be wrong.
A preliminary check for corpses turns up nothing. The inside looks like a movie set, snow piled in through cracked windows and color drained out. Felix wades through upturned furniture and tries not to hover in any place for too long, but it’s obvious even from a quick glance that most of the house has sat undisturbed. It isn’t until he approaches the dining room that he spots the slightest dissonance in the snow, the echo of footprints. He quickly steels himself and follows them, but the prize waiting at the end still sends his heart plummeting into his stomach.
It isn’t his father. It’s a folded-up letter, envelope carefully taped to the dining table, reading ‘Felix’ in a dreadfully familiar loopy scrawl. He opens it slowly, the paper too delicate in his gloved hands.
Felix,
I didn’t see your old man. No signs of an animal dragging any corpses out either, for what it’s worth—though I’m sure you checked thoroughly, little cub-scout that you are. He either left or he’s been gone a long time. I figured you’d want to know that.
I’ve actually been thinking about your dad a lot lately. Wow, weird sentence. Wish I could erase that one. But I have—do you remember when he and Glenn crashed that ski trip with us? We weren’t even dating then, but someone put all kinds of weird ideas about me in his head. He kept giving me the evil eye and you didn’t believe me. Then Glenn challenged us to a two-on-two snowball fight and he dumped two fistfuls of snow right down the back of my shirt. I thought I’d never be so cold ever again. Ha, ha.
Sorry, I—there’s something furiously scribbled out here—I didn’t mean to write all this. I’ll get to the point.
Remember when we were little kids spending summers at the Blaiddyd lakehouse, and we promised we would die together? I think we were insane. What a weird thing for a kid to even think about, right? But it made sense to me back then. Somehow, it still makes sense to me now.
I’ve been thinking about the lakehouse lately, too. How it had that underground bomb-shelter bunker because Dimitri’s entire family was so weird, or how there might still be some fish underneath the ice at the lake. The whole world has seemed pretty inhospitable lately. The lakehouse feels like—something else.
If not a chance to survive, at least a fitting place for us to keep that promise.
I know you might not want to see me. I wouldn’t blame you. And I’m not asking you for anything, really. I guess I just wanted you to know: you’ve been on my mind. And if there’s any chance that I’ve been on yours—you know where to find me.
Love,Yours, Sincerely,Sylvain
Felix stares. He reads the words, then he reads them again.
He hasn’t been on amicable terms with his father in years. Somehow, Sylvain still knew he’d come here. The knowledge sits acidic in his throat.
Under ordinary circumstances, he’d text Sylvain and complain. A letter? What are you, eighty? Or, upon remembering the content, and the way it was so confidently left on Rodrigue’s dining room table—are you having fun making assumptions?
But it isn’t ‘ordinary circumstances’. It’s the end of the fucking world. Felix grips the edges of the paper so tight it threatens to tear, unclassifiable emotions swirling in his stomach. It takes him a long time to realize the most prominent is relief. He’s relieved that Sylvain is still alive.
Felix knows the lakehouse, of course. His father was about as obsessed with that house as he was with this one. If they’d been allowed to invite the wedding reception there, his old man probably would’ve gotten married right along its shores.
And he knows that goddamn promise. How could he not?
Felix takes another glance around the room and feels a laugh crawl out of his chest, puffing in the chilled air. Somehow, his father managed to leave the house behind, but Felix came crawling right back to it. Felix is the most sentimental fool of all.
He looks back down at the letter in his hands.
Well, fool or not… Felix has always liked to keep his promises.
It’s nearly evening when Sylvain sees it.
The sun settles low behind the ice, making the chill all the worse. He’d been about to abandon his watch and head back inside, yet some unknown force kept him out for just a moment longer.
The shape on the horizon is dark and lumpy, nowhere near close enough to be identified, but Sylvain doesn’t hesitate. He would know that shape anywhere.
Felix looks about how Sylvain would expect him to look. Haggard, lumpy, a confident and vaguely pissed-off cadence to his steps that Sylvain has only ever seen Felix pull off. Beneath his ski goggles, he has eyebags so deep an airline could charge extra for them.
Sylvain wonders if he looks much better in comparison. He’s sure the multiple layers of Gautier-family-heirloom coats and the permanent dusting of snow and outdoor grime don’t do him any favors. Still, the prideful part of him wants to think that even like this, he can manage something close to charming. As Felix approaches, he employs his best smile—a perfect movie star grin, all teeth.
Felix stops walking. Sylvain saunters a little closer. He’s going for casual, like it’s a lunch date and not the apocalypse. He doesn’t quite know if he gets there; some part of himself always gets stuck in his throat when it comes to Felix. The snow crunches underneath his feet.
“So,” he says. The wind whips around them. “You found me.”
They’re close enough now that Sylvain can see the flash in Felix’s eyes in response. Even after all this, Felix still faces basic human interaction as if it’s a challenge that he aims to win. It’s a relief, honestly, that the freezing of humanity wasn’t enough to dull him.
“Don’t I always?”
This time, Sylvain’s grin is a little more crooked, a little less polished. The laugh is a surprise, too. “‘Course you do. Haven’t failed me yet.”
He’d thought it would be more difficult than this—reconnecting, after everything, after all this time. But Felix peers at him, ice-worn and ragged and so achingly familiar, and Sylvain knows that it was always going to be this easy. After all, it’s Felix.
And they have a promise to keep.
The sky still falls down around them in thick sheets, the scream of the wind still worse than a woman scorned. But when Felix sidles over next to him, leaving behind only a set of footprints and a trail of breath puffs—honestly, Sylvain doesn’t even feel that cold.
