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Felix has been mostly silent since they fled the Monastery. Neither Ingrid nor Sylvain tried to engage; they’d been cut on enough sharp edges for the rest of time, probably. Too busy worrying if they’d make it to Charon territory before the Oghma’s cruel snow drifts swallowed them up.
Sometimes Ingrid looks at his wild eyes, the curve of his nose, and all she sees is Glenn; young, foolhardy, burning out like any beautiful star born to a Faerghus night sky is obligated to do. She will never tell him this, of course. Some truths were killers, and loathe as she was to admit it, she didn’t actually want to kill Felix. Frankly, Ingrid never wanted to kill anybody – her desire to protect simply guaranteed that it would all shake out that way.
She doesn’t even really think Felix could be felled by any one of them: her, Sylvain - even Dimitri, once upon a time. More than likely he’d just be slit from belly to sternum, pinned open for the vultures to pick at while he breathed his last. Dead from shock and blood loss and not from the tip of the sword, pigheaded as he is.
Maybe that was too gruesome. The last two weeks of traveling had afforded her more time than she usually allotted to contemplate their deaths.
A wall of heat slides in next to her, and she is too slow and sluggish, muscles stiffened by frigid wind, to realize it’s Sylvain until he opens his mouth.
“Should probably eat something,” he says, grabbing her hands. A roll is placed in her gloved palms, alongside some dried meat. “You seen Felix? He needs to eat something too, before he starts biting people.”
Sylvain loves them both fiercely. The only part of him that isn’t covered in twenty layers of cracked veneer, and even then, it’s hard to spot, like walking straight into fog. She knows this. It’s a truth she’s kept nestled beside her heart since she removed her engagement ring for the last time, some four or five years ago.
Sylvain is also a worrier. It’s this fact that makes her tongue turn to lead in her mouth when she thinks to tell him that she spotted Felix slipping into the sparse tree line some time ago.
“I’ll come back.” He tells her. Felix is an expressive man, despite his efforts otherwise. But his face is completely blank this time, gaze fixed on the snow that had scattered atop Ingrid’s boots.
Sure, she thinks. It wasn't the first time she had been told that, and she would be foolish to believe it would be the last.
But she had let him go anyway, stomping back to camp knowing she shouldn’t have. Ingrid bites into the roll, hard as a rock – a Faerghus delicacy, really – and regards Sylvain warily. “He’ll come back around,” she grunts. The bread continues to crumble in her hands.
Sylvain stares at her, like she has a third eye, or something similar. Or maybe because he’s read between the lines, because Sylvain may be a fool, but he is far from stupid.
“Ingrid,” he starts. She refuses to entertain any notion that Felix could stay away, that the ground could open up and swallow him whole, just like his brother. Felix might have been born of the land, but he’ll not return to it. He’s too stubborn.
“He’ll come back, Sylvain.” Sylvain sighs. The wind bites into the only part of Ingrid’s face not encased by the thick wool of her scarf. She leans into Sylvain slowly. There’s a line between all of them that can’t be crossed, even now. Especially now. So much had broken already.
Ingrid wishes Felix would come back. They could fit him in between their bodies, try and stave off the cold. Entertain the pathetic notion that any of them could ever be warm again.
“My Lord, my Lady,” a guard appears behind them, holding two rolls of fur. “Have you seen Lord Fraldarius?”
Ingrid and Sylvain exchange a look. The better liar of the two, Sylvain offers a confident: “He went to relieve himself,” and nods towards the tree line.
The guard shuffles. “It has been quite a while,” she says. “Should we go search? I would not disturb him, but – “
Sylvain stands suddenly, jostling Ingrid and knocking half of the roll on the ground. She considers eating it regardless, but she’d rather keep her teeth. “I will see to it; don’t worry yourself.”
“But my Lord, at least allow another guard to accompany you, with such low visibility we cannot – “
Both of them stop suddenly and pivot towards the sparse woods, where a figure has emerged: Felix, hunched, sword in hand. “Help me with this,” he says as he turns to pull at rope. When Ingrid peers around Sylvain, she can make out the shape of a fat buck lying dead just behind Felix.
Two additional guards hurry over, kicking up snow as they go, and gingerly grab the ropes from his hands.
Sylvain whistles. “Damn, Fe. Thought you didn’t like hunting deer?”
Ingrid remembers this; a short trek away from the Monastery for combat drills just a few weeks after Byleth had taken up a position as their new Professor. Early spring, newborn sun catching on the golden tips of Dimitri’s hair, Felix just behind him, never in lockstep, but shadowing. They’re defenseless. I pick up my sword because I want to fight. Animals like that can’t fight. They just kick and cry.
Kick and cry – Felix used to do that when they were children, when Glenn would insist on hunting trips into southern Gautier territory. Dimitri had hated it too, hiding away under Sylvain’s cloak alongside Felix when the deer barked and thrashed about, bleeding its last into the snow.
“I don’t,” he says, and, “it was injured already.”
Sometimes the Felix she knew shines through, blinding, if only for a moment. It hurts to look for too long – but blink and you’ll miss it. Most days she doesn’t even remember what he looked like, young and unburdened by self-imposed suffering. She struggles to piece together toothy grins and ears flushed from the cold, straight black hair looped around strings of Gautier red.
It’s only when she opens her eyes does she realize all the pieces have slotted together to reveal not Felix, but Glenn.
“C’mon, we got some food to tide you over until they’re done skinning that thing.”
Sylvain leads him back to camp, but only because Felix, suddenly uncharacteristically quiet, allows it. There’s an emotion entombed in Felix’s wilting gaze, though Ingrid cannot place it.
-
After the Tragedy, winter had come in full force; the worst northern Faerghus had seen in years. They buried what they could of the royal family on the heels of a fearsome blizzard. Ingrid remembers the chaplain, old and frail and at least a few inches shorter than he was when Ingrid was a girl, struggling against remnants of the wind to close the door of the tomb. A week later, a small retinue led them eastward, to Fraldarius, to bury Glenn, or what remained of him.
Rodrigue had carried his eldest son’s broadsword into the Fraldarius sepulcher. Felix had cried himself hoarse. Dimitri remained sullen and silent beside him. Sylvain refused to meet the eyes of anyone who spoke to him. Ingrid can no longer recall any of the turmoil that had swirled within her that day, anything beyond a bottomless pit of sorrow.
Months would pass before she saw Dimitri again – long legs, strong jaw, booming voice. Hunched and empty and dead. A year would pass before Felix graced the grounds of the Galatea estate, just as different, just as changed, something grotesque having taken root in his heart.
She never saw either of them weep ever again.
After a few moments of gentle coaxing, Felix wraps himself in furs and the end of Ingrid’s long scarf and lowers himself to the ground between Ingrid and Sylvain’s legs. He’s freezing – Ingrid can feel his sickly shuddering against her calf. Sylvain must feel it too, but words do not follow, simply a clumsily coordinated shuffle to envelop Felix further.
The fire cracks and jumps in front of them, and Ingrid kicks a wood chip toward it with the toe of her boot. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
The shaking picks up. Felix’s teeth begin to chatter. “No.”
She wants to ask him what he found instead, what was making his bones rattle out from underneath his skin. But Felix had always been like that – charging through life shaking like a dog kicked while it was down. Like someone slammed the door shut ahead of him and abandoned him to freeze in the cold.
It was a rare moment in time when Ingrid looked to Sylvain for guidance – more often than not, it was her beating the concept of respectful interaction into him. But she looks to him anyway, desperate for anyone to quantify the depths of Felix’s despair.
Sylvain’s face reveals nothing. The lukewarm smile he gives when he spots her staring reveals even less.
The whole thing angers her, as did most things these days. The way a grimace pulls at Sylvain’s mouth, despite his desperate attempts to conceal it with something else. The way Felix practically cries out from the walls of his impenetrable fortress for some kind of divine intervention, only to bar the gates with his bare hands. The way Dimitri had appeared when ushered off by Kingdom soldiers at the border, teeth bared like a rabid animal.
When had they become such strangers to each other?
“What were you looking for?” She asks finally. It cuts through the agonizing silence like the sharp of her lance. Ingrid hears her jaw click over the rush of the wind.
Felix pulls away from her leg. The jerkiness of his motions rips the scarf right off her neck. She knows this Felix very well – primed to blow, prepared to take out anyone within arm’s reach in exchange for just a shred of dignity. She wishes she knew him less.
Sylvain stiffens beside her, shoulders pinned back like he’s mounting his horse. The smile-not-smile drops to his feet.
Felix’s back is to her when he snipes, “It doesn’t matter.”
Ingrid’s hands curl into fists. She digs them into her thighs until she’s sure they’ll bruise. And then she opens her mouth.
“Alright. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
This, at the very least, gets him to face her. “What?”
“You’re angry because of the circumstances? Because of things we can’t change right now? Because you – “
“Because no one listened!” He spits. “I was right! I was right the entire fucking time and not a single person listened.”
“Congratulations, Felix, you were right! You won! I suppose I didn’t want to face the fact that my friend could have been a –” monster, is the word. It sticks on the end of her tongue like a parasite.
He glares at her. Some of that fury she’d become so used to has faded from his eyes now, replaced by something endlessly hollow. “You – you think I wanted this? I didn’t – I never wanted to be fucking right.”
Something within Ingrid snaps. Everything tumbles out at once, every poisonous thought she’d been carrying in a knot in her gut, waiting patiently for it to dissipate. “You think you’re the only person that’s ever hurt? The only one who’s seen the plain truth of it?” Her nails bite into her palms. “I’ve been watching all of you – you especially, Felix – drive a wedge between everything that’s left. Nothing is the same, and you just – you dig your claws into it. It’s almost as if --” you don’t care, but that too is caught in her throat. She doesn’t believe that. She can’t believe that. She needs something, anything, to remain recognizable.
Somewhere in the past five years the whole world had upended and dropped her headfirst; she’d scarcely been able to catch her footing in the ensuing fallout. Some days she thinks she hadn’t stuck the landing at all, and all these years she’d just been crawling on her hands and knees through rubble and dried up blood.
Her teeth squeak with the herculean effort of blocking all that loathsome sentiment from spilling out onto the ground before her. “What were we supposed to do, Felix?”
He averts his gaze. Felix is lost – has lost, this years long spar he’s dedicated himself to. A never-ending battle against his own humanity, determined to stomp on it till it’s mangled and unusable. But he’s never been cold or unfeeling, no matter how hard he tries to be. It was always destined to fail.
“I – I don’t know, help him, or—” He gestures wildly. The fire sputters again, crackling, burning despite the frigid wind threatening to smother it. “I don’t know, Ingrid! How could I know? I just wanted him back!”
The wind whistles, piercing, cutting through the pounding of her heart in her ears. Sylvain is silent beside her. That was the look, the one she couldn’t place – lingering grief, eating away at him silently.
For a long time – her whole life, really – there was no Felix without Dimitri. If the Crown prince was present at any birthday, any wedding, any joust, the youngest Fraldarius would be there too, hand in frozen hand. She thinks of what he told her a few years back; the first big argument they had since the night Glenn’s effects were lowered into the earth.
Dimitri died in Duscur, he had shouted, sharp and biting. Once a rare tone, now the usual. Ingrid had misunderstood then. He hadn’t been berating her, though he was angry. Livid, even. No, Felix had been, in his own way, pleading for mercy. For someone to heed his words. For someone stronger to drag Dimitri from that cold and bloody brink. And loathe as she was to admit it – he was right.
Not a single soul had believed him.
“Felix,” she whispers.
He squares his shoulders, pointing his chin toward the night sky, and Ingrid immediately recognizes this for what it is: withdrawal. A strategic retreat. All those fractured walls hold fast in the face of a loss so absolute it cuts a hole straight through you.
“Never mind.” He says. “What’s done is done. There’s no use living in the past.”
Sylvain is next, snapping out of his stupor. “C’mon Felix, we can—”
“I’m going to sleep.” He declares. When he turns, the reflection from the flames catches in the brilliant vermilion of his eyes and reveals a wash of unshed tears. He trudges through the snow, shouldering past the guards who have politely pretended to not have noticed the entire exchange, and disappears beyond canvas walls.
-
That night, she goes wandering, shuffling by Felix’s tent, stopping at the flap. Pauses with her hand in the air, fingers outstretched to scratch at it. Even if he was awake – and having known Felix for eighteen years now, she could say without absolutely certainty that he wasn’t sleeping – he wouldn’t answer. He’d likely curl in on himself and put his hands over his ears like a child, even though the children in them had died a long time ago.
She drops her hand.
A guard ambles past, nodding politely. Ingrid gives a weak smile and turns around.
Sylvain’s tent is just a few paces away and is lit up from within. Ingrid can spot the rough outline of him against the tent wall, sitting ramrod straight, unmoving. She doesn’t even bother to wait after scratching on the flap, instead pressing in. It’s warmer than outside, but only in temperature.
Sylvain doesn’t look at her. He’s spent the whole evening avoiding it, like if someone saw him a little broken, he’d be completely useless for the rest of his life. “Hey,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Didn’t try,” she lies. She did, a few times, even. The image of Sylvain, Dimitri, and Felix thrown haphazardly in a mass grave was imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. “What about you?”
He turns a bit, gaze still fixed at the floor. An imperial soldier had struck him across the face in their escape. The bruise on his chin had turned a proper purple now. It cuts across the sunburnt olive of his skin, swallowing up a cluster of freckles.
“Nah, I think – I think it’d be difficult.”
She spares a thought for Dimitri; likely halfway to Fhirdiad, scared and empty and shattered. She spares a thought for his father, with a heart three times bigger than his mind, who would swing Felix and Dimitri by their ankles as they laughed themselves hoarse. She wonders if that is the Lambert Dimitri remembers, or if all he ever saw was his corpse.
She thinks of Felix, who will bend time and time again, but not break. Who will build his impenetrable fortress around the empty grave of a prince once loved and refuse to let the body rot.
The lantern burns low. She throws her legs over Sylvain’s and breathes deep. “Yes,” she whispers. “Quite difficult.”