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On the day Glenn left for Duscur, Felix didn’t speak for hours. It was an unprecedented streak of silence. He didn’t cry; he stood pale and rigid with the indignation of being left behind, his hands curled in two tight fists. Sylvain’s visit was scheduled in advance as a kind of balm, exactly because Rodrigue expected some level of meltdown from his youngest son.
Sylvain hadn’t known what he was in for. Not really. He watched as all his goofy, affected cheer slid right down the wall of Felix’s outrage. Sylvain’s unease grew legs then, and crawled around in his stomach.
Training was the only thing Felix wouldn’t refuse. Sylvain’s ribs, already tender before he’d arrived, ached sharply by midday, and they carried on long after that. In the end they only stopped because Sylvain spotted blood lining the creases of Felix’s fingers from blisters that rose and broke.
That first night Felix lay stiffly atop his covers. Sylvain knelt at the foot of the bed, one candle lit on the far side of the room. They were supposed to be asleep. Sylvain picked at the pilled fabric of Felix’s favorite coverlet.
Two years older, with something to teach, Sylvain said, It’s not forever, you know.
He doesn’t remember anymore, what Felix said then. The lie Sylvain had told blotted out all the rest.
But he’d tried. Sylvain had been desperate with trying.
It was that pit of a memory that kept Sylvain from making the same mistake, when Dimitri as they knew him disappeared twice over. He didn’t talk Felix down, then. Didn’t try and put borders on the feeling. Maybe that meant it stretched out in all directions; he couldn’t know.
Probably he was a coward. What Sylvain feared as a child is the same as what he feared as a grown man: that whatever consolation he could offer, Felix wouldn’t believe him anyway. He’d deserve it. If not for the lie he told as a child, then for all the lies since then.
The night after Glenn’s armor went in the ground, they made a promise. They sat on opposite sides of the window seat in Felix’s room. A shaft of moonlight fell between them and split the room into two dim halves.
Felix hadn’t been eating. Hadn’t been sleeping. All Sylvain’s charm counted for nothing. That morning, when Sylvain finally got down on his knees and begged, made himself as pathetic as he knew how, Felix grabbed a bread roll and chewed in large savage bites. He stared Sylvain right in the eye and his rage was searing cold.
Sylvain was scared to look at him and scared to look away. Every night for a week he’d sat awake with Felix for as long as his body let him. Some nights Felix would seek out and attempt to destroy every one of his possessions. Another night, just past midnight, Felix went to the guards and demanded he be let outside. Sylvain thought he’d have to wrestle him down before Rodrigue could show up with his disastrous notions of condolences.
But for whole blank swathes of hours, they just sat, the silence pressing in on them like shrouds. It was these times that Sylvain’s mind pulled frequently toward the thought of the coffins, for Glenn and the Royal Couple, all that stale air and darkness, down under the earth.
Sylvain eyed Felix for some sign of how tonight would manifest. What of Felix departed with his fistful of soil tossed over the empty casket, and what would arrive to take its place.
It was late. The grounds beyond the window seemed to stretch long and strange, full of anxious possibility. Sylvain shivered and didn’t move. The quiet of the room felt brandished at him like a knife.
Sylvain opened his mouth. He had to clear his throat before he spoke.
“I won’t go anywhere.”
Felix’s dark eyes, seeming deep in his skull, turned slowly on Sylvain.
“What makes you think you can do what Glenn couldn’t?”
The truth only made Sylvain more desperate. He’d never been enough of anything before. Glenn was the best of them, and now he was dead.
Sylvain looked at Felix, his legs drawn up, his arms crossed. He was struck by the feeling a door was about to close, and that he might be left outside it.
“I’ll go with you then,” he said, and tried to make it sound simple. “I’m not saying we won’t die eventually. But I won’t make you do it alone.”
Felix considered him for a long time. His eyes were no less angry, but shades more wretched. The reality of things felt very near to them in the room. The dire matters of children set upon by natural law, howling at the unfairness of how it would dictate their lives.
“Which one?” Felix asked. “Being alive or dying. Which one don’t I have to do alone?”
“Neither,” Sylvain said, heart sent pounding by a feeling he didn’t quite know. Another he was startled to recognize, sincerity, pressed on his throat. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“You either, then,” Felix said after a pause. It almost sounded like a threat. Something strangled his voice, but didn’t soften it, when he said: “If you really mean it, then promise. Nowhere without me.”
Felix’s childish petulance had morphed into something harder. It began shifting even before all this death; after, it set quick and firm and frightening. It was a wall to put his back against. The last thing that meant something. A place to defend.
Sylvain stuck out his hand. Felix looked at it and slipped off his seat to pull at the knife he wore on his belt. He unsheathed it, appeared to consider it only briefly, then drew it across his palm in one silver stroke. The blood welled up as a dark pool in the moonlight; Felix closed his fist around it and looked up at Sylvain, flint and scorched-earth and steel.
Sylvain took the knife. His father and brother had traveled for the funeral: tomorrow, the three of them would depart for Gautier.
He thought of what his father would say upon seeing the wound. What his brother would say.
Graveside, he’d watched Felix’s shoulders draw tighter and tighter as Rodrigue eulogized Glenn, pinning his memory in place alongside a line of Fraldariuses who’d either kill to die a death like that, or who already had.
This was not the world of fathers and brothers. It was bigger, and smaller. It fit in Sylvain’s hand. It was the moment of his death, decided. When he pressed his bloody palm to Felix’s, there was a second where he couldn’t tell their heartbeats apart.