Work Text:
Red liquid pooled and boiled on Ailell’s obsidian ground. Annette was too far away to hear the sizzle, but she heard another sound. It was high and wordless; she only knew she was screaming when she stopped, the sound strangled in her throat as a hand on her shoulder directed her attention away from—
Byleth’s severe expression cut through her like the blade buried in Felix’s guts.
“Rowe’s men will not take him today,” they declared, their voice echoing as if it bellowed from the black depths of a deep well. The bright green of their eyes was luminescent with magic until the color was all Annette could see, her vision going dark around the edges and shrinking. Like a moth to a flame, she wanted to touch, to burn, and the world fell away from her—
—Between one blink and the next, the visions of battle were gone. Battle? They were meeting up with Duke Fraldarius’s forces to bolster their numbers. Rodrigue would be pleased to meet with them; there would be no battle. Annette wondered if the march to Ailell was more taxing than she assumed.
“Annette?”
She startled, turning on her heel. Behind her, Felix held pace with the surrounding infantry. His eyebrows rose to his hairline at her surprise, but he kept any words he had about it to himself. Looking at him, Annette became bothered by the thought that she had forgotten something. It tapped on the inside of her skull, light but insistent.
“Felix, hey,” she greeted distractedly. “Did you need something?”
“No. Yes,” Felix answered. “I don’t know, something’s just… Be careful today.”
“I know you don’t like your dad,” Annette chided, “but he won’t do anything bad. Everything’s going to be fine.”
His jaw tightened. “Right.”
Felix in a rotten mood was hardly surprising, so it was easy to brush off the apprehension puppeteering his posture taut. Even if she felt somewhat bad about it, Annette reminded herself that he was tough enough to handle a mild scolding.
It was less easy to brush off Felix’s roaring battle cry in the middle of the ambush, an attacking force all bearing the traitorous colors of House Rowe. The Duke was nowhere in sight, but that was hardly surprising; black smoke and wavering heat haze made it almost impossible to see across the volatile and craggy environment of Ailell. Annette may not have been able to see Felix, but she could hear him through the din of battle as clearly as one of Garreg Mach’s gonging bells.
“Annette,” he yelled through the clashing of steel on steel. “Where are—come here! Stay close to me!”
Easier said than done. “Felix!” she called, turning in the direction she’d heard him. The crunch of loose rock under a pair of boots approached her. “Felix?”
One of Rowe’s soldiers lunged forward from the smoke, javelin in hand. Annette shrieked, thrust her hands out, and blew the enemy back with a gale of heated wind until they disappeared into the dark cloud again. Heart thumping like a rabbit’s in her chest, she kept her eyes peeled and ears perked for anyone else approaching.
Then, she saw them; distant lights flickered across the battleground. Rodrigue was finally here, blasting away foes with potent white magic and rallying their allies to him with flashy, blatant displays and signals.
“Felix!” Annette yelled through her aching, dry throat. “It’s dangerous here! We need to get to your father!”
“No! Wait—!”
Whatever Felix’s problems with his father were, they would have to fall to the wayside during battle. In matters of life and death, a little family squabble was irrelevant. That was how Annette and her father treated every skirmish; as soon as the weapons lowered, they were strangers again.
“Now, Felix!” she barked, tearing her way across the fields of fire for those white beacons of light. Sulfuric gas hissed from the cracks in the ground, scalding her skin pink, but they did not stop her.
Thunk!
Yet, Annette couldn’t take another step. Slowly, she glanced down at her chest, sluggishly taking in the steel bar buried there. Something in her throbbed, and something else was torn or shattered—or maybe multiple things inside her had just been destroyed by the point of a javelin.
“No!” someone howled, voice cracking with panic. “I told you—No!”
Vision darkening, Annette knew she was dying. It was happening faster than she thought. The taste of magic popped on her tongue.
“Again,” another voice intoned, and she couldn’t find her feet—
—Annette blinked, putting one foot in front of the other on the march to meet Duke Fraldarius at Ailell. Had she forgotten something?
“Annette,” Felix said from behind her. He was scowling, agitated by anything and everything. Who spit in his waterskin? “Something’s… Be careful today. Watch your front.”
What in the world was that kind of warning for? Some sort of insinuation against Rodrigue? Huffing, she chastised, “I know you don’t—”
Wingbeats tore through Annette’s thoughts. Facing forward, she saw Byleth approaching from atop Seteth’s wyvern, and she hadn’t known the professor knew how to ride one. The troops scattered to make way for the winged beast as it descended, touching down with a plume of upturned dirt.
“Huh. Flying is easier than I thought,” they commented. “Anyway, I’ve made some last-minute arrangements.” Brilliant green eyes bounced between Annette and Felix. Although their voice was just as inflectionless as usual, their complexion was ghostly. “In case of an ambush.”
With a creeping sense of dread, Annette whispered, “Ambush?”
If Annette was concerned by Byleth’s precautions, she was even more concerned by how surprised she wasn’t. An ambush seemed inevitable. Did anyone else on the march have this feeling tickling their spines, or was it just her?
“Felix,” the professor addressed him coolly. “Do not jump in front of any swords for anyone.”
Annette could sense Felix stiffen over her shoulder.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked archly. “The old man’s too much of a coward to stab me, and he wants to help his Boar Prince. He won’t betray us.”
“I know that.”
There should have been a demand for an explanation. There should have been a denial that Felix would get stabbed.
“Fine,” Felix conceded. “I won’t jump in front of any swords in the odd possibility that we get ambushed.”
No one would have expected his easy agreement. He must have been more nervous about meeting his father than Annette thought.
“Annette will stay close,” Byleth directed. “Work together.”
“With Felix?” she asked, stunned. Lone Wolf Felix never fought with someone close. It stifled him. Everyone knew better than to cut their most skilled swordsman’s efficiency in half.
“If something happens, I can’t be there in time to save you both,” the professor said ominously. “You both need to survive until I can get to you.”
Annette glanced over her shoulder. Felix’s eyes met hers. If he was nervous, it didn’t show in his face. She knew he was, regardless.
Turning back to Byleth, Annette acquiesced, “Sure, no problem, but aren’t we just meeting with Duke Fraldarius?”
The professor nodded, short and sharp. “Just in case.”
They cracked the wyvern’s reigns, ending the discussion by taking off to where Annette had to assume Byleth had stranded Seteth. In the wyvern’s absence, the infantry fell back into place around them, but Felix had taken the place of the mage Annette had walked beside before.
“That was… weird,” Annette stated. She hoped the thread of anxiety wrapped around her words didn’t reach his ears.
“This march is weird,” commented Felix. “It feels like… When Glenn died, I watched riders make their way to the keep from one of the windows. They were so small when they were far away.”
“Felix?”
“Watching the horses ride up, I was certain something bad was coming, like when the air changes before a storm. They came on behalf of the king’s council in Fhirdiad, delivering my brother’s burned-up armor and a letter written by some no-name scribe full of condolences.” Felix paused, clearing his throat. “That was how House Fraldarius heard about the Tragedy of Duscur.”
When Annette was young, the town criers had belted the news across the city square. Everyone in Faerghus felt the loss of their king and queen like an open wound, but few mourned a solitary knight. It was Felix’s private tragedy, and her heart ached for him.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Annette said. She hadn’t spared the thought to tell him that before. Was late better than never?
“Thank you,” Felix replied. It was the least irritated he’d sounded throughout the entire march.
They arrived at Ailell, Valley of Torment. Black, volcanic rock. Stinking, hissing vents. Scorching air, tainted by smoke. Fire.
A turncoat knight for House Rowe, Gwendal, met them there with a not-insignificant amount of soldiers. His ambush surprised them very little.
Felix was stalwart at her back, swinging his swords at enemy soldiers foolish enough to get close to his whirlwind of blades. To be fair to them, they must have assumed they’d be able to use the smoke to hide in, but Annette tore through their assumptions and the clouds with her wind spells.
In the distance, she became aware of magic flashing brightly like comet trails. “Felix!” she called. “There!”
He groaned when he saw his father’s magic. Still, Felix sounded almost relieved when he griped, “It’s about time he showed up. Let’s move.”
“Together?”
“‘Stay close’, remember? I won’t leave you behind.”
His gloved hand found hers, and the leather was thick and soft. Annette took more comfort from that small action than anything else since this atrocious war’s start.
Fighting their way to Rodrigue was a slow, bloody process. Enemy combatants tried to stop them—separate them—but none could rise to their challenge. A giddy, victorious feeling rose in Annette’s chest. They were going to win, and they would absorb the Fraldarius soldiers into their forces, and they were going to win more, and they would win the war. There was a song she could make about more and war. She’d need to tweak the context and pentameter.
“Watch it!” Felix suddenly shouted, ripping through her unfocused daydreams, and the comforting grip on her hand tightened painfully.
Annette gasped as the ground under her fell away into a river fire, so hot the little hairs in her nose burned, and her eyes dried quickly between blinks. Felix pulled her back quickly, and more disturbed earth fell into the forever-burning rivers of Ailell. The gap continued to widen, rock going molten in a mimicry of disastrous landslides, forcing them further away from the continued sounds of battle on the other side. Rodrigue’s magic went from large arches to star-like pinpricks.
“What do we do?” Annette asked.
“Can you jump it?” suggested Felix, but his grim tone told her he knew the idea was fruitless.
Fwump. Fwump.
Wingbeats.
Through the smog, a wyvern dived toward them, carrying the silhouettes of two riders atop its saddle. Before Annette could draw her winds to her hands to defend herself and Felix from them, their shapes filled out like thin, watery paint as the light of the flames caught them.
“Seteth! Professor!” she cried, elated.
“Grab on!” Byleth called, reaching out.
For a moment, Annette was too stunned to move. Then, Felix muttered hurriedly, “Move!” and shoved her forward. Her hand clasped the professor’s, and they used the wyvern’s momentum to haul her the rest of the way onto the mount’s back. The creature grumbled discontentedly, a rumble Annette felt throughout her entire body, but it obediently circled back around so its inconsiderate riders could collect Felix and increase its burden further.
With an unsafe amount of passengers, Seteth steered the wyvern over the gaping river to the comparative safety of the other side. “We have to land soon before we fall out of the sky,” he said, guiding them into a gentle descent.
“Don’t kill us after all of this,” Felix grouched.
“Your gratitude is noted,” Seteth snarked. “Although, perhaps you should direct it to your professor. We are lucky they suggested I stay nearby, or we may have left you to Gwendal’s reinforcements by mistake.”
Byleth let out a shuddering breath. “I’m just glad something finally worked,” they murmured.
The wyvern’s feet touched the ground, matching the hiss of a nearby smoking vent with its own. Carefully, Annette and Felix slipped off its back. For a moment, she’d forgotten what the heat felt like beneath her boots.
“Thank you both for coming for us,” Annette said sincerely.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re grown now,” the professor insisted. “You are my students. I won’t surrender responsibility for you so easily.”
Seteth’s little smiles transformed his entire face from strict instructor to kind older brother. “Well said,” he mused. To Annette and Felix, he said, “I am glad you two are safe.”
“My father doesn’t even worry this much,” Felix muttered without bite.
“Hush, Felix,” Annette scolded. Her words were as toothless as his.
“We’re almost to Duke Fraldarius’s position,” Seteth said, motioning with the jerk of his chin towards an eruption of bright, white light. “You two will be fine making the rest of the trip on foot?”
“Of course,” Felix answered, hands on his swords’ pommels. “Annette, stay close?”
Steeling herself, Annette nodded firmly and said, “I’ll stay close. Rowe’s men won’t lay a finger on us!”
By Annette’s command, the winds swirled around them, blowing away smoke. Felix stepped into her space, knocking his gloved fingers against her own.
To Byleth, Felix ordered, “Go, keep my worthless father alive. We’ll catch up.”
“We’ll meet again soon,” Byleth insisted. In their stony face, Annette thought they looked immensely proud.
Together, they watched the wyvern lift off the ground with heavy wingbeats, flying Seteth and Byleth higher until they disappeared into the haze.
Felix sighed, shrugging something invisible and weighty off his shoulders. “Again?”
Annette grinned at him. “Again. Let’s wrap this up, Felix.”
“Confident. I like it.”
The singing of his swords sliding from their scabbards guided them onward.