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That day they stood in the ruins of what had once been Fhirdiad and watched the pyre burn.
Within the flickering flames lay the burning corpse of his once-friend, Dimitri, the Tempest King. Felix could only stare at the brightening skies, the smoky overhang that settled upon the rooftops of his old home and stayed behind the soldier’s façade he had crafted for himself.
His professor, the woman he called a precious person, stood silent by his side. Byleth’s eyes were blank now that they had returned to their original violet color after Rhea’s defeat by her and Edelgard’s hands. Her dark hair lay limp on her shoulders, and the ashes from the decimated city dusted her armor. Tears she had not bothered to notice rolled down her soot-covered cheeks. Her hand reached for the blaze as if grasping onto Dimitri’s hand.
No, he would never forget her eyes when she said that she would kill Dimitri herself.
Perhaps in this cruel fate they had chosen this was the only choice she thought she had. Freedom from her past in exchange for a future without war.
But Edelgard had staid her hand. Felix nearly offered to finish him off instead.
“I’ll do it, my teacher,” Edelgard had said.
The bone axe, Aymr, came down in a crescent arc that took the life of the king.
“She loved him,” Byleth whispered after. “She loved him when they were children but was forced to forget. That’s what these people did to her. They tormented her. That’s why she started this war…to make sure that what she went through doesn’t happen again.”
Felix should have felt relief when the last enemy fell, when Rhea’s dragon form crashed onto Castle Blaiddyd’s steps. It was poetic somehow that her defeat bloodied the doorstep of Dimitri’s home as if he called from the grave to perform this final act of revenge. For it was the very people Dimitri put his faith in that destroyed him.
Felix at least relished in Rhea’s death. Her betrayal of Dimitri and Fhirdiad was palpable to him even now, even after he himself had betrayed them. It was her fault that all those people were murdered, her fault that he and Sylvain aimed their blades at people who had been their friends. The fire she had called upon still raged around them, destroying the city she sought shelter in for five years at the behest of the king.
Underfoot, Felix stepped on the shards of a broken mirror. He saw what he had become. That in the five years Byleth had disappeared and the war continued he had become like the Tempest King himself, a wild boar in search of satiated bloodlust. Himself, shattered, and a reflection he could not name.
Even Claude and his own father died by his sword, and the man he knew he became—the one with eyes the same as the boar’s—never faltered as their blood splattered his face.
Felix could not help but think about how different things would have been if only Dimitri had been allowed to know the truth…that he and the Kingdom were just pawns on someone else’s elaborate chessboard. He himself had not known until it was too late.
He did not regret choosing the side of Edelgard’s war, and yet—
“It’s over,” Byleth’s voice interrupted, cutting through the ambient rumble of collapsing wreckage.
He nodded. “It is,” he agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”
It was with little fanfare that he and the rest of the Black Eagle Strike Force departed to Fódlan’s new capital of Enbarr. There was much to do, but the losses along the way made them weary.
On the way back, Edelgard granted Felix leave to Fraldarius territory until he took up his post as an official. After all, Fraldarius was his now.
What had come as a surprise was that the Professor came with him. They stared down the empty halls of his family’s estate, the mountains far in Gautier just visible in the distance behind rolling mist. He picked through the hollows, past his brother’s chambers and his father’s overturned rooms.
He found his mother’s emerald ring hidden inside his bedside table and held it between his thumb and forefinger.
“She is lost, Felix,” the memory of Dimitri said in his ear from a time long past. “The Professor just lost her father, and no one is there to comfort her.”
Felix remembered what he said after that. “What does that have to do with you?” How he regretted that afterward.
Dimitri had smiled ruefully. “In a word…nothing,” he replied. “Just as I now understand her, I find her rather mesmerizing, if not devastating.” He turned to him. “I know you wish to learn from her and that you will be joining her class and the Black Eagles next week. Take care of her.”
It was easy now to ask for her hand. Once, it would have been an ordeal. He would have struggled, tripped over his words like an idiot, and made a fool of himself.
Felix had never been one for romantic gestures. He did not believe in a bouquet of hand-picked roses. He was not one for grandeur. Rather, he said what was on his mind without fuss. He knew what he wanted. In the end that was all that mattered.
He and Byleth returned together to Garreg Mach on the training grounds of what had been the Academy, and the emerald ring shone in the moonlight.
“Marry me,” he said in earnest because he did not lie nor back down.
And though she accepted, he could not help but think that Dimitri would have loved her differently…that her longing love for him across the courtyard would have been what they both needed.
But she had not chosen Dimitri and Dimitri had chosen death.
Felix would cherish her still. Despite what he knew…that he was not her first love. He would cherish what he had left.
“Take care of her.”