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Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.
- Linda Pastan, ‘The Five Stages of Grief’
from The Five Stages of Grief: Poems
Felix found it at the bottom of a drawer in the Duke’s heavy desk.
He had been rifling through the account books and ledgers, half-heartedly looking for last year’s household budget. It would be different, of course, and useless. Last year, the budget had to account for war. This year, it would be stretched even further to account for the abrupt lack of it. But anything signed in the late Duke’s hand was precious now. Felix’s only guide.
There, pushed behind an inkwell: a tightly rolled piece of parchment – no, thin wax paper wrapped around some dried and ground plant matter, the length of his thumb. Crumpled and worse for wear, obviously confiscated years ago. From whom? From Felix and his friends, or some other wayward young smokers while Felix was at school?
Felix put the smoking joint on the table and brought his hands to his face.
When he had finally ridden to Fraldarius to take his place as Duke, he had not expected this, of all things, to be unbearable. The work, yes, and the half-starving people sick of war. The rationing and the cold and the new king’s letters signed, Your friend . Felix’s swords abandoned without purpose.
Not this: going through his father’s things and finding not secrets, but signposts of a life. Candy in the pockets of a woolen coat. A razor by the washbasin. A smoking joint confiscated and abandoned in a drawer.
Felix pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes until the darkness began to splotch. The sharp knock made him jerk, vision swimming. He slipped the joint in his pocket, a left-over reflex. The door opened to admit a young man with thick curls tied back from his face, exposing his beleaguered expression.
“Dinner to be served soon,” the boy told him. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, eager to be done with the errand. The staff were too busy running the machinery of the Keep to bother with unnecessary niceties to their young lord.
“Cook said he’d rustled up something nice on account of Lord Gautier visiting,” he added. “It’s his first time back in a while.”
Sylvain had arrived in the late morning with a packet of letters from Fhirdiad, dusty from the road but grinning and pulling Felix into a tight hug. Just passing through, Sylvain had told him. Even lords must play the messenger boy every once in a while.
The grooms unsaddling Sylvain’s horse had laughed and shaken their heads. But Felix braced his feet as Sylvain’s body sagged against him, like Sylvain hasn’t had anything solid to lean against in months.
“The king can spare messengers,” Felix said low in his ear. And, when no answer seemed forthcoming: “You need a bath.”
Now, freshly bathed and well fed, Sylvain toasted Felix over the dinner table. He was joking with Cook as he passed around dessert, praising the dried plums stuffed with roast nuts and groaning about feeling equally stuffed. “You’re fattening me up,” he flirted outrageously.
Cook didn’t grant him so much a blush, but more fruit appeared on Sylvain’s plate. Sylvain ate it obediently.
Usually Felix took his meals in the office, or sometimes at the training yard. He regretted it now. He should have used this room more often. It was well-lit and warm, decorated in the austere Faerghus style, and it did not give Sylvain the appearance of a guest. He looked like he belonged here, raised within these walls as much as Felix. He wore a thick blue sweater, and he had cut his hair at some point in the last several months. It curled over his forehead almost boyishly, at odds with the new lines around his eyes and mouth.
Felix heard himself saying, “You’ll never guess what I found.”
Sylvain’s smile remained the same.
Fraldarius Keep nestled within the frame of four tall towers, fortified and looming as though ready for war. Guard posts crawled over the thick stone walls like lichen on a tree, but the inside was windowless and dry. Places to store grain and pickled vegetables and furs – weapons against Faerghus’ winter, the true enemy.
The Towers were named when they were built, probably. The late Duke had certainly known them. But those names soon fell out of use in favor of something simpler.
The Northern Tower faced the rough plains that led to Gautier’s border and, further, the smudge of mountains on the horizon. The Western Tower looked out over the road to Fhirdiad and the heavy gate that guarded it; the Eastern Tower watched the sea.
To the South lay the fields and then the forest, older than the stone and the roads and the coastline. The least useful lookout, often shrouded in cold fog as the approach of spring burned away the lingering frost. Least used by the guards, especially in times of peace. Most used by the children who needed a place to hide their mischief.
Sylvain laughed when Felix withdrew the joint from his pocket. “This looks…”
“About a million years old?” Felix said dryly. “Yeah. Found it in the old man’s desk.”
“No fucking way. Ah, the nostalgia,” Sylvain crooned, delighted. “Was it his, do you think?”
Felix made a face. No way. Sylvain made a face back at him, still laughing. The uncomplicated joy of getting away with something.
“Why come here?” Sylvain raised an eyebrow at the small space, bumping their shoulders together. “You’ve got the run of the place. Could smoke anywhere you wanted.”
Arms brushing, bodies bent toward one another, there was no way that Sylvain could fail to notice Felix go still. He extracted the matches from his pocket and struck one, careful that his hands didn’t shake. The flame wavered in the wind.
“Habit,” he said when his lungs were full of smoke, and used the excuse to turn and blow it away from Sylvain.
When he turned back, Sylvain was looking at the horizon.
They passed the joint back and forth in silence until Felix felt himself begin to relax. It had languished in Rodrigue’s desk long enough to lose most of its potency and to acquire a stale taste, but the crinkly wax paper was comforting, and the rhythm of Sylvain smoking next to him felt – good. Right. Like a dozen versions of this night all blurring together, the two of them when they were young, and the three of them when Ingrid visited, and even the four of them crammed in too tight and whispering at one another to be quiet.
Felix exhaled noisily. “I keep expecting to see the old man looking for us,” he admitted.
It was easier to say that than he thought it would be. Sylvain’s shoulder was solid against his, and he smelled like clean soap and the wine from dinner. The drug made everything feel soft enough that Felix could pretend it was the one at fault.
"After he – fell, I kept asking them to show me the body. But they wouldn't show me the body. They had taken it away somewhere, and no one would say where. They wouldn't show me the body," Felix repeated, senseless, and fell silent. It was impossible to describe in any other way. Impossible to explain that it felt as though he has been begging to see his father's body ever since. Not knowing who he was begging any longer, incapable of stopping.
It had not been so bad at first, on the battlefield and at the monastery. Rodrigue rarely visited those places, did not exist in the fabric of Felix's life within the walls of Garegg Mach, and so his father's death did not feel like an absence. It was a thing that he could pretend had not happened, or happened to someone else - some other version of Felix, in some other time.
At Fraldarius Keep, there was no space for such delusion. His father – the lack of his father – around every corner. Here was a place that did not exist without his father and yet somehow must exist without his father – an impossibility. A cruelty.
Felix was asking to see the body, and there was no body. Only its ghost.
“He would have been proud of you.”
Felix scoffed. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. He was proud of you already.”
Felix couldn’t find the words to deny it. He swallowed around nothing, tried to take another drag just for something to do. It tasted like shit. He handed it off to Sylvain.
“I don’t want him to be proud,” he said. It wasn’t true. “I just want him to be here.”
Felix didn’t know what was happening on his face, and he didn't want to see Sylvain’s reaction to it. He stared straight ahead and breathed in the acrid smell of winter fog and stale smoking joint, which may very well have been his father’s. Probably wasn’t. But what did Felix know of him, after all. What would he ever know, now.
They didn’t speak for several long minutes. Felix was pathetically grateful for it.
"He never liked it when I visited," Sylvain said eventually, though he was smiling a little. "Always smuggling contraband, always dragging you up here to smoke."
Felix tried to pull himself together. "Don't be stupid. He liked you."
Still teasing: "I was a bad influence."
"You were my friend." Felix felt the betraying flush in his face. He met Sylvain's surprised gaze, mulish. "What? You were. The old man thought it was good that I had someone."
Sylvain's hesitation was a near-physical thing. Felix waited for him to decide if he would say what he was thinking, and kept his gaze locked on Sylvain's eyes so it wouldn't be tempted to drop to where Sylvain was chewing on his lip in an unexpected display of nerves.
"You did have someone," Sylvain said, quietly. "You had Glenn."
A chasm in the ringing silence, a thousand arguments and recriminations.
They never spoke about Glenn, though the quality of their not-speaking was different from the way that Felix and Dimitri never spoke about Glenn, or the way that Felix and his father used to never speak about Glenn. Here, Felix's brother was Felix's wound, and Sylvain kept silent because he didn't know how to say, I lost a brother, too; I understand , and mean it.
Felix inhaled deeply through his nose. On the exhale, he admitted, "Glenn was busy."
Even that much felt like a betrayal of something. Sylvain looked like he knew it, too.
“There are worse things to be.”
Another reason they don’t talk about brothers.
“Not everything has to be about that.” Felix managed to keep his voice steady, just barely. “My brother wasn’t perfect just because he never put my face in a wall.”
“Sure. Your big brother didn’t pay attention to you, so your old man was happy that you had someone to play with.” Sylvain didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound like anything at all, which was worse. “No,” he interrupted before Felix could open his mouth. “That’s what you meant, isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry you were stuck with me.”
Sylvain’s jaw was white with tension, but he kept his tone lightly mocking. Felix sneered. “I fucking hate it when you pick a fight and pretend that you’re not picking a fight,” he snapped. “I used to beg my father to visit Gautier and you know it. I cried when you didn’t come to my birthday.”
He didn’t recall the memory until he said it. It was idiotic that he had to say it at all. He had never had to tell Sylvain about the space he claimed in Felix’s life, in his thoughts. He had counted on Sylvain knowing it, the way that Sylvain always seemed to know the most inconvenient truths about Felix without being told.
“Why did you come here?” Felix asked.
Sylvain shrugged, not looking at him. “I wanted to see you. I figured, why not?”
You could almost believe the nonchalance. His shoulders loose, his head tilted back, his generous mouth relaxed in a smile. Felix cut his gaze to where Sylvain flicked ash off the joint, clean and precise like a dagger toss. His tell, always, in his hands.
“It's a four-day ride from Fhirdiad.” Five if the weather was bad; and winter had not retreated yet.
“An easy ride, though.”
Dust in Sylvain’s hair, his body sagging against Felix’s.
“No,” Felix said. “I don’t think it was.”
Finally, Sylvain turned his head. The sun had dipped behind the tower, and in the falling darkness his hair was more rust than copper. The hand with the joint had stilled. They regarded one another in the near-dark.
Looking at Sylvain made Felix ravenous, hungrier with each moment as though he were whetting his own appetite for the sight of him. A pit in his stomach that yawned wider the longer that he let himself stare at the face he knew so well in every permutation, every age, every emotion. Filthy with blood and bright with mischief and pale with grief. Sometimes he thought he could look at Sylvain so much that he would eat right through him, end up on the other side of him. Carve a hole in Sylvain to match the one in Felix’s chest.
Sometimes he thought Sylvain might let him.
“Ah, fuck!” Sylvain jolted and dropped the joint with a hiss. It sailed over the parapet and disappeared below as he brought his singed fingertips to his mouth, grimacing. “Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention. I just missed – your eyes on me.”
“It’s fine,” Felix said mechanically. His head was buzzing. He thought he might cry. Or something. “We should head back.”
“That wasn’t a line,” Sylvain said.
Felix said, “Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“Felix.” Smiling, this time. Reaching for Felix’s face, his hair; thumb brushing his jaw, a paralyzing tenderness. “Felix,” Sylvain said, “I don’t want to kiss you after we were just talking about your dead father.”
Felix turned his face into Sylvain’s palm, just a little. He thought he might have said, okay, again, but he could barely hear himself over the rush of blood in his ears, amplified by the press of Sylvain’s skin.
He took Sylvain’s other hand and drew it towards himself until Sylvain was half-hunched over him. Felix held him by the wrist, careful of the injured fingers. Sylvain’s expression was shifting too quickly to pin down, but Felix understood that he had meant what he said.
Very slowly, Felix brought Sylvain’s hand to his mouth and kissed the tip of one finger, then another. Handling the lance had given him calluses around the knuckles, but the skin where he held the joint was soft and smooth, warmed and reddened by the burn.
Felix dared a quick glance up through his eyelashes. Sylvain’s mouth was half-open as though in shock, a sliver of teeth visible in the near-dark. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he looked like he wanted to pry Felix’s jaw apart and see how far his fingers could go.
Felix had to put his mouth back on Sylvain’s skin so that he wouldn’t say anything fucking crazy.
The noise that Sylvain made at the touch of Felix’s tongue made Felix’s face burn. Night was setting in, the fog was moving in colder and thicker, but Felix was so warm. Sylvain was lighting him on fire with his fingers, putting his burn to the inside of Felix’s cheek, the roof of his mouth, behind his teeth. Sylvain made another sound, this time unmistakably a whimper.
If there was anyone who would catch them, Felix might have shushed him. But who would look for them here?
Felix’s father was dead.
Felix let Sylvain’s hand fall from his mouth. He pressed his forehead against it, an old knight paying fealty, or an old man searching for a place to rest his head. Sylvain’s other hand was still in his hair. It felt good to be surrounded, if only in pretense.
They sat like that for what felt like a long time.
“I’m sorry that I missed your birthday,” Sylvain murmured. “I didn’t want to miss another.”
The month of Pegasus Moon. The first that Felix would spend as Duke Fraldarius. The first with his father in the ground.
Sylvain’s hands cradling his face as he wept.
Around them, the end of winter.