Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts this time with a box of chocolates delivered neatly to his desk. If not for the missive attached to it by a springy, velvet ribbon, Felix would have thought it a personal threat.

There is nothing to denote it being chocolate – had he known, it would have found itself in the wastebasket, or more realistically, in the hands of one of the servants. He is known so well for his dislike of sweets, he doesn’t think the cooks even keep sugar in the pantry. What he hasn’t told them, simply through it being a tedious and pointless conversation, is that raw sugar is odorless and inoffensive. It’s usually the smell.

The smell is how it starts.

What does have a smell is the nondescript green box, once he unties the ribbon and sets the missive aside, once he lifts the lid in nothing but absent curiosity. What meets him is a beautiful assortment of foreign chocolates arranged on a red-trimmed sheet of wax paper; dark and light and white, freckled and specked, drizzled with caramel and sprinkled with crushed nuts. A note has been sewn into the velvet underside of the lid: For the distinguished Duke Fraldarius.

It’s beautiful to look at, and the cloying smell of chocolate spikes down his lungs like poison. Fills his chest and swells into that heavy, gut-loading feeling. His mouth waters for reasons entirely opposite from appetite, and he calmly shuts the lid alongside his eyes.

“Remove this from my sight,” he mumbles through a mouth full of sickly-sweet cotton. There is a shuffling about him, the faithful attendant in his office who is experienced enough to obey without asking, and Felix does not open his eyes nor breathe until he hears the click of the study door.

There is a plate on his desk, meant to be lunch. He glances at it now: half-eaten, pushed briefly aside to receive this package. Fried eggs sprinkled with pepper and a skewer of rabbit meat. It’s one of his favorites, he thinks. The syrupy, leaden feeling weighing down his stomach makes him unsure.

Felix turns away from it and reads the missive instead.

When Felix is young, he tolerates the taste of sugar.

He is too young to hold a sword, but his brother gives him candies when he returns home from training – small, round caramels, the same color as their eyes, and he sucks on them politely because he loves Glenn. He loves Glenn more than the caramels, but the caramels are alright.

They’re too sweet for his liking.

It’s fine, because eating them makes Glenn smile, and he doesn’t do that often. Felix thinks that if sweet is a flavor, it’s not very good, but if sweet is a feeling, then it’s best on Glenn. 

He never tells Glenn that he doesn’t really like them; not even when he’s old enough to know which hand holds a sword better. Not when he’s old enough to train for the first time. Not when he grows bold enough to start turning dessert down at dinner, saying that sweets give him a stomachache. 

Glenn isn’t stupid - he must figure it out at some point. But nothing changes. There is always a candy in his hand once they’re done training together; it always comes from a satchel at his hip. This is the ritual of strained Fraldarius affection. Felix eats them like it’s his duty, and the salt from his sweat makes them taste a little better.

He is too young to know loneliness yet, but a boy named Sylvain enters his life, with hair like a lick of fire across gray snowscapes and warm, brown freckles that pattern his nose. They get along okay. Glenn starts giving him two caramels like it’s a secret. One for him and one for Sylvain. Then three, for Ingrid. Then four, for His Highness.

Four kids, and no caramels. Felix would give them all away. So it more or less worked.

He is too young for battle, until he isn’t. The first time Glenn draws true steel on him, a sting of metal across his lip and iron flooding his mouth, Felix learns the taste of blood. 

He doesn’t know what expression he makes, but Glenn stops giving him candies that day. He doesn't realize it until much later, when Glenn can no longer do anything. 

Felix cannot escape the encumbrance of his new title. More immediately, he also cannot escape dinner.

The village whose inn they accost tonight, settled on the fringe of Fraldarius territory near the southern coastline, is fine enough. Though perhaps describing it as a ‘village’ was a generosity afforded to it by those who kindly brought its existence to the new Duke’s attention. 

Generosity, unfortunately, is not a talent of his. 

The missive had been written with all of the correct platitudes, but putting eyes upon the location himself confirms the reports that his scouts provided. Its roots are those of an encampment; cobbled together by merchants and travelers who were stranded in Faerghus once the war broke out. Mostly hailing from Almyra, they had drifted towards each other from all corners of the kingdom until they eventually amassed in his territory. The tightened wartime borders, for one excuse or another, made them unable to return home. So they’d planted like weeds, raised tents and dug themselves in, did business and sold mostly swords and other tools of war for five years. Places like this pop up everywhere, but few persist long enough to erect buildings and begin families; fewer still gain such a foothold as to petition the Duke for recognition as a vassal.

Even with the war over and border tensions lifted, they’re happy to stay here. He’d prefer to break it all down and send them back to Claude like the bunch of cowards they are. But Duke Fraldarius doesn’t act out Felix’s preferences. Or whatever.

Felix, frankly, thinks the entire thing stupid. Were it him, he would have simply made the trip back then and cut down anyone who was stupid enough to try and stop him. These people were on the entirely wrong border to fear the war reaching their doorstep. But perhaps they were too frightened of scurrying through the Leicester Alliance. And perhaps also too frightened to travel through Galatea territory. 

“Felix,” Ingrid says across the table from him, flint in her eyes; “Aren’t you hungry?”

That second one, at least, Felix can understand.

They are distinguished guests, and thus are served the settlement’s best cuisine without any of their actual input. A roll of golden sweetbread rises at him threateningly from his dinner plate. Framed by a salad of greens, it begs his attention. How frustrating that he finds it plainly repulsive. Felix is too old now and has survived too many battles to be a damned picky eater. His body requires energy, and though he does not say it, Felix is exhausted. 

They’ve been riding all day. That also isn’t a talent of his.

Not like Ingrid and Sylvain, who sit with him at the table and move like they’ve spent more time atop their steeds than on their two feet. For five years, they almost certainly did. Felix hates them a little for it. He picks up a fork and pulls some of the leafy greens away from the bread. Some kind of raspberry sauce oozes across the plate, and his stomach turns.

He can think of several reasons not to eat this. Sylvain and Ingrid will tolerate exactly zero of them.

“Why did you two come again?” he asks, stalling.

“You do realize this concerns me as well?” Ingrid asks, at the exact same time as Sylvain says, “I was bored out of my mind.”

Felix unfortunately knows both to be true. The encampment lies just north of the Galatean border, and Sylvain is simply a nosy idiot who somehow manages to not stay as busy as someone with his title should. These answers make sense. The question didn’t buy him nearly as much time as he’d hoped.

He’s more the fool for writing to them about the situation at all. His current excuse is that his better judgment had been slightly clouded from nausea at the time, and it had only seemed prudent to inform the masters of his neighboring territories. How should he have known they’d both impose themselves upon the official inspections?

“Felix, bud, your bread’s getting soggy over there.”

He blinks again and sees that this is indeed the case. The raspberry sauce has seeped into the bread and been sucked up, leaving the bottom of the bun pink and sludgy. Felix almost swears he can hear his own stomach churning, and prays that Sylvain next to him can’t.

“Mind your own business,” he snaps out automatically. He shoves a forkful of salad into his mouth, chews it maybe three times, and swallows. The sweet sauce coats his throat and sticks all the way down. He feels nauseous.

“Touchy,” Sylvain says, as though he doesn’t know damn well that it’s Felix’s default state. Worse, Sylvain is watching him carefully now, when he should be baboonishly fluttering his eyelashes at some new conquest. Felix is half-sure that he came along just for the thrill of notching his bedpost in a virgin settlement, anyway.

Well - no. It's several years past Sylvain behaving like that anymore. Felix is just in a bad mood. He growls and pushes the plate away, his bread-sludge untouched. 

“Felix?” Ingrid asks, tilting her head. Her voice softens, which is far worse than anything else she could have done with it.

“I had a big breakfast. It’s fine.” It’s also a lie, and Felix feels extensively stupid once it leaves his lips. Both Ingrid and Sylvain look at him as such. His stomach sinks like it holds bricks when he stands up. “Hearings start early tomorrow, so I’m going to bed. You’d both be wise to do the same.”

Like a trueborn noble, Felix leaves his mess for someone else to clean up. As he mounts the stairs and tries to climb them through the heaviness in his body, he pretends like the clink of his dishes being cleaned up is louder than the murmurs of his name on Sylvain’s and Ingrid’s lips.

Glenn died young. Felix was even younger. He’s in his twenties now, which is older than Glenn ever got to be, but still no one looks him in the eye and asks him what he remembers; no one looks him in the eye and asks anything about Glenn at all. Only the Boar ever brought the name to his lips, but his gaze preferred lingering on the ghost holding Felix's shape instead. 

Dusty memories hewn from revolting and pathetic cloth. He and the Boar have this in common. It’s just as well that no one asks.

Here is what Felix does remember: tears. His mother’s, and Ingrid’s, and his own. Revolting and pathetic. He remembers crossing steel and chasing the next taste of metal. There isn’t much else that comes to mind.

Shortly after Glenn died, there was a casket full of flowers. Felix remembers this part better. They lay in his long, combed hair like lilies in a pond of black, but they weren’t lilies. They were small and round and beautiful. They were colors Felix had only seen in dashes across the snowy plains; in arrangements atop the dining table. They smelled sweet and floral, and they framed his pale face like gentle hands.

The scent lingered after the casket was shut. Stop, he remembers thinking, throat closed on the saccharine rot of it. I'm not ready to say goodbye.

Later that evening, they are served a single slice of caramel cake and sweet chamomile tea at dinner. No one’s favorite, anymore. Felix excuses himself and finds somewhere else to be sick.

Dukedom perhaps does not suit Felix. 

There’s no great amount of angst he affords the thought, because that would be a waste of time. The mantle suited his father, and now it suits nobody, but he is the only one left to carry it. So while dukedom does not suit Felix, luckily his hand is expert over a blade. He trims here and there, cuts fat and folds in flesh. It does not suit him, but he can suit it. 

The scholars of Garreg Mach always twittered on about a great many things, but among their favorites was a fiercely platitudinous phrase: The pen is mightier than the sword. It always grated at Felix fiercely, and perhaps for this reason found somewhere to root in his skull. Were it lacking, it would be easy enough to dismiss - but in his privileged life, he knows it to be painfully empirical. A single stroke of ink can decimate more lives than have ever bled at his feet. Ten thousand swords have drawn blood, his own among them, because the single pen commanded it.

Felix finds this power distasteful. The sword is simpler and honest. When his body creaks and breaks, when the metal in his flesh sluices into mud, at least it feels real. The burning meat and taste of copper suits him best.

Altogether, though, this line of thought is dramatic. Felix does not think he’s signed a single execution order nor declaration of war. Bandits, he prefers dealing with himself. Most of the paperwork he handles is similar to what lies on the desk before him now: clerical and deathly tiresome.

Felix can’t say that he’s ever signed a new town into existence before, but the process is more or less what he expected. There is a petition with residential signatures to look at; there are law proposals to cross-check and approve; there are hearings to be held in what will be the central government building if all of this goes through. Sitting stark at the end of an overly-long official document is a single line, waiting for his name to breathe life into the floorboards at his feet. Duke Felix Hugo Fraldarius.

He should be honored to preside over the first birth of a settlement since the war. He feels very little. Only the weight of Dimitri's prompt and eager approval to his clipped, informative letter. Only the temptation to sign it now and relieve himself of all the tedium. 

Of course, he can’t do that. Discipline with the sword. Discipline with the pen. It’s all the same, or so he tells himself.

The inn is impressively large, but being a stopgap founded by travelers, it’s perhaps unsurprising. Felix, Sylvain, and Ingrid all get their own rooms. He is thankful for the privacy – for the space in which to lie in bed on his side, arms curled around his stomach and teeth grit until the churning settles. He thinks he might be sick, but he isn’t. A pitcher of water sits on the nightstand and he drains an entire glass in one breath. The taste of raspberry sauce goes down, and Felix doesn’t wish that he could bring it back up instead. He doesn’t wish that he could pull the dressing knife from his boot and score himself open, remove this sugar-rotted slab of meat from the source and leave it to bloom in the sun.

He drags himself to the desk instead. He reads economy reports and governing statements. He reads names on the petition and nods along, as if they’re units he knows on a battlefield. He crosses names out, writes them in, draws lines and stamps out dreams. The side of his hand brushes over the lip of the inkwell as he writes, and the bitter, caustic smell of ink fills his lungs where the poison was.

It’s not the smell he knows best, but it’s better. Felix makes a decent amount of headway through the paperwork and feels like he actually learns something about the place he’s sleeping in tonight. It’s the bare minimum. It’s no sword, so he supposes he can settle for that.

As the lamp burns low and he finishes up for the night, Duke Fraldarius checks the paperwork a third time and confirms something amiss. A wrinkle creases his brow as he thumbs open a space between the pages. Nothing is numbered, but he’s almost certain that he’s missing a document. The primer he’d gotten before coming here gave him a list of what to check and expect.

The petition. The merchant ledgers. The lawbook. The lordship organigram. The…

Yes, he's missing something. Felix sighs and spreads everything in a fan across the desk. An irritating setback. He'd not had time before now to look at the paperwork, the immediacy of meeting with the town's chief taking precedence; some older man whose eyes had lit up with a strange fondness soon as he'd set them upon Felix. He'd been distastefully excitable, with only great things to say about his budding little village and House Fraldarius. Felix would have been less uncomfortable if the man were to just prostrate himself and start licking Felix's boots.

Such fawning was unbecoming of someone who would be the minor lord of this settlement and any which might pop up along the southern coastline in the future. Unlucky for Felix. The concept of a commoner lord is exceptionally new in this new, post-war Faerghus; one Dimitri is eager to put into practice, but which also requires a greater delicate touch than Felix is comfortable administering.

He'd explicitly asked Sylvain and Ingrid to go over everything while he was having that meeting. He understands Sylvain slacking off, but Ingrid's lack of diligence both surprises and disappoints him.

A headache pulses behind his eyes, making Felix groan. He lifts a finger to massage the pain away. The older he gets, the less his body is ready to carry the weight of his idiocy. Sleep is no true replacement for eating well, but he feels so heavy that surely getting a spot of rest will help him feel better. A quick nap – ten minutes perhaps – and he can track those two down and give them a piece of his mind for making his life harder.

Please, sneers his own traitorous voice as he lowers his head onto the desk. Nobody makes your life harder than you. 

Felix has dreams that are utterly pointless, utterly unrealistic, and utterly sickening.

He and Sylvain stand on a battlefield. This is normal. He and Sylvain are facing one another. That is altogether impossible. Felix stares and sees no colors in the banners they fly. He sees only that there is one over here, and one over there.

He sees that there are flowers on the battlefield, sodden in the rain. He sees their sprays of color drowning in raven shadows. He smells sweet honeysuckle and rotting mildew on the bodies of soldiers that have been here for years. Their armor is pried open. He sees classmates in their helmets.

He sees Sylvain with his lance drawn. He sees his sword in his own hand.

“Hey, Felix,” Sylvain says, and there is no sun, and there is no smile. “Remember when we were kids and we made a promise about dying together?”

“I remember,” Felix says.

“Well, seems we’re about to kill each other.”

He thinks of the lid shutting, sealing sweet meat inside. Only here in his dreams does he remember: Glenn never came home. Only his armor. He wonders why he recalls seeing flowers in dark hair so vividly, then. He thinks of flowers in red hair instead.

“Sorry, Sylvain,” he says. “You’ll die first.”

The conversation is the same every time. The reasoning never changes, but the outcome does.

In the dreams where he kills Sylvain, breaking his promise is mercy. It’s the only kindness he knows. He kills Sylvain, and Sylvain doesn’t suffer the world otherwise.

In the ones where Sylvain kills him, he laughs and chokes on his own rot. He thinks, of course it ends this way – he is made of smoke and steel, incapable of kindness. Sylvain is made of something else. It is bittersweet and it follows him into the dark, when the flowers at his temples overgrow.

It was him, he suddenly recalls, and this memory will be gone when he wakes: it was always himself he'd imagined in the casket.

A rap sounds on his door. “Felix?”

Almost startled, Felix jerks up from where he'd slumped over his desk. His head feels heavier than ever before, and his stomach burns silently under his clothes. Saints, he's pathetic. If he can no longer even wake from sleep and be on his feet in moments, he's lost his edge. An enemy on the battlefield would have already carved his heart from his chest by now.

"Feeeeeliiiix?"

He entertains the thought of simply playing dead. As his brain slowly wakes up, however, he remembers that he has a bone to pick. Still. He's annoyed, so he's going to be difficult. He grits his teeth and blows a wispy bang from his vision with a huff.

“What do you want, Sylvain?”

“Hey!” comes the muffled response. “Ingrid’s here too!”

“Why? I told you I was going to bed.”

Ingrid’s voice comes next, equally muffled but not half as offended. “We can see your light under the door, Felix. Now open up.”

“I’d listen to her. You really want to see her take this thing off its hinges? That’ll make the hearing about property taxes tomorrow awkward.”

Felix sighs heavily, half-turning to throw his arm over the back of his chair. “Don't be so dramatic. Just come in.”

“You mean you didn’t lock it?” Sylvain’s muffled voice, full of abject surprise, turns clearer as the knob turns and he pokes his head in. “Oh. Hey, Felix!”

Felix’s lip curls. “I asked what you wanted.”

Sylvain, ever incapable of rising to his bait, grins like he’d just been welcomed in with a kiss. He nudges his way further into the room with Ingrid close behind, and Felix takes note of their dress: they’ve washed and changed into comfortable clothes, looking fully ready for bed themselves. Ingrid wears her hair in a pleat that reminds him of their academy days, and surely that’s what brings the twinge of discomfort back to his stomach.

“I was just here to force our way in if necessary,” Ingrid says evenly. She finds a comfortable-looking dresser nearby and leans against it, arms crossed. Felix tries to ignore how fond that makes him.

“Well, I wanted to bring you this.”

It speaks to Felix’s exhaustion that he hadn’t even noticed something small and oblong in Sylvain’s hand, wrapped in wax paper. Almost instantly, the world feels like it blurs at the edges. Felix swallows and tries not to look pale.

“I don’t want it. Go to bed.”

This is perhaps the wrong answer, but it’s almost certainly the one Sylvain was expecting. His smile angles the way it does when he isn’t happy but also isn’t surprised. He ignores Felix and saunters closer, unwrapping the paper with one hand.

“C’mon, I think you’ll like this.” A pause. The blur is profound on the floor, and he finds his head dipping to observe it. “Felix? You with me?” 

He blinks, surprised. No. He wasn’t. Felix grits his teeth and finds Sylvain’s gaze again. He doesn’t think he likes the expression on the fool’s face, so he looks to whatever Sylvain is trying to force on him instead. 

A simple baked potato, split open and steaming and smothered with melted cheese. The smell of it hits him all at once.

“What the hell, Sylvain?” He murmurs, setting his pen down and staring. “Where did you even get that?”

Sylvain shrugs. It’s candidly infuriating, knowing how pleased he is to have disarmed Felix in more ways than one.

“The innkeeper’s niece is a lovely lady, as you know – or maybe not, since you didn’t actually talk to anyone at dinner.” Sylvain raises an eyebrow. “She was so taken with me, she just insisted on making me a midnight snack. Who was I to turn down such a kind gesture?”

Ingrid watches the back of Sylvain’s head like she wants to punch it several times. Felix is glad she’s here.

“That’s Gautier cheese," he snorts. He’d know the color of it anywhere. It’s not difficult to source this far south, but there are higher taxes on it than other types of cheese. Most businesses don’t bother.

“Oh, is it? I guess it is. She must be such a fan that she keeps it in the kitchen.”

“No she doesn’t, you fool. Why are you carrying around Gautier cheese?”

“Felix,” Sylvain says, and the smile has dropped from his face. “Come on. I've barely seen you eat anything today.”

Damn him. Of course he'd noticed. Felix's carefully-laid plans to keep his friends out of his business began with their replies stating their intentions to come along - dodging Ingrid was a simple matter, as she'd be traveling north to meet them at their destination, but Sylvain had clearly expected to meet Felix at his residence and then travel further south together. Yes, perhaps it was extremely strange of Felix to set out the evening before his arrival to avoid him, and yes, perhaps such a loudly broadcasted message was unintentionally a little hurtful to Sylvain. That certainly didn't stop the lout from somehow catching up to where Felix was pulling up camp this morning, less than a day's ride out from the village. It isn't the first time he's underestimated Sylvain's clinginess, who had pouted and put on a show for him, but otherwise showed no sign that he thought something amiss.

Sometimes Felix is the damned fool.

Sylvain moves closer to the desk, placing the unwrapped potato near Felix’s ink-stained hand. His touch lands on Felix’s other hand, which grips the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles are pale. Stupid. Why is he even doing that?

“I told you I had a big breakfast this morning,” Felix growls. The lie again, like spoiled treacle on his tongue. He swallows several times in succession. Sylvain frowns and hooks his fingers gently around Felix’s grip. Loosens him from the chair, and suddenly Felix remembers why he’d anchored to it. The tumble of his stomach in his own body feels like a slumping corpse. Felix shudders, sways the other way before Sylvain reaches out and steadies him. Quick, and quietly, and grimly. Like he’d known. 

“I thought so,” Sylvain says gently. "You've been so pale all day, I could barely see you over the snow."

“Is it happening again?” Ingrid asks. Felix is suddenly dizzy and can’t respond, but doesn’t think the question was directed at him anyway.

“Yeah,” Sylvain answers. He kneels at Felix’s side. How patronizing. “C’mon, talk to me. How long this time?”

“Don’t treat me like a child,” Felix grits out. He remembers being a child. He remembers sitting in the dining hall with the Professor and proclaiming that to be strong, he must eat. No matter how the food disgusted him. No matter how it sticks to his insides, turns thick in his skin, fills his flesh until he’s bloated and rotting. What happened to his resolve from back then? Did he vomit it somewhere into the mud and slush, brought up with his own blood? Did the back of Rodrigue’s head strip it from his bones when he realized that even while dying, his father wouldn’t look his way?

“Hey. Easy. You gonna be sick?”

“No, idiot. Shut up.” His breath feels quick and thin, walled by the putridity in his chest. “Just a few days. It’s fine.”

“Okay,” Sylvain says. He sounds sad but transparently relieved, and Felix supposes he has a right to be; there have been far longer bouts. He stands again. Brushes a bit of sweat from Felix’s temple with callused fingers. “And what did it?”

It’s hard to think over the feeling of his stomach liquefying. The spoil will climb up his throat and decay his tongue. Syrup will spill from his mouth and he’ll forget the taste of iron. He swallows.

“I won’t say.”

“Felix.”

“Leave it.” Chocolates. Well-meaning sweets from hopeful constituents. How fucking pathetic. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“Fine. Ingrid, can you – oh, you’re the best. Read my mind.”

Felix blinks again, and Ingrid is at their side with a glass of water. She takes Felix’s clammy hand and helps him grip. He’s allowed the dignity of lifting it to his own mouth and taking a tepid gulp. The liquid flutters in the glass, and Felix is absurdly ashamed.

“You need to eat, Felix,” she says. “This isn’t acceptable.”

He could laugh. Objectively, she is correct, and that’s what he can’t stand. 

Sylvain's gentleness is made of sugar – like icing layered over whatever the hell is beneath it. He wants to help and coddle and comfort in his sickeningly sweet way, because he knows he's always two steps from spoiling things instead. The crisp, clean futility with which he hangs up his facade, even briefly, makes Felix want to scream. Ingrid is different. She sticks her bare hands into the muck and scrapes it out with her fingernails. She affords him the same tang of metal that keeps him from decaying into bilge.

He doesn’t know what he needs more. Maybe neither. Maybe both.

“I’ll eat it,” he says, forming the words while his stomach turns. Sylvain sits on his bed and leans in, watching. Ingrid stands like a statue of something honored and dead.

“We have to figure this out,” she insists. The blurring has reached the center of his vision; that’s surely why her jaw trembles. “This can’t keep happening.”

Felix laughs bitterly. It’s maybe the best taste on his tongue in days.

“Don’t bother yourselves so much,” he grumbles. Sylvain reaches over to press a fork into his hand. Warm fingers push against his, almost threading. “It’s an inconvenience. Nothing more.”

“Felix.” Sylvain’s laugh is equally bitter, and Felix doesn’t know why he imagines how that would taste in his mouth, too. Sylvain leans forward, their foreheads pressing together, and he smells like sun and snow. “You are not an inconvenience. That, I promise.”

Here is what a promise means to Felix: almost nothing.

He thinks it might be Sylvain who soured him on the whole concept. Before the war, he would watch as the heir to Gautier whored his way about the Monastery and crawled into damn near any bed he could reach. His arm slung around women’s waists, and he bent his head and murmured into their ear with low, honeyed tones that Felix could hear from across the room. They blushed strawberry-soft. They wore perfumes that choked the air.

Felix tried not to listen, most of the time, but he knew a lot of what was muttered were promises. Promises of fidelity, promises of love. Promises to hike skirts up to thighs and bring them accolades. He liked women with flowers in their hair. He liked women who smelled sweet.

But he would come back to Felix, without fail. The arm would fall around his shoulder, not his waist, and Sylvain would lean into him with a smile as bright as the sun, and blinding everything beneath it just as well. Felix could tell when it was simply their friendship, and he could tell when it was something else – when his senses were overpowered by the sugary odor of apples or butterscotch or whatever other horrific scents these women doused themselves with. Because he is disciplined, Felix somehow manages not to retch.

“She broke up with you,” he observes simply, every time.

Sylvain shrugs. 

“I wasn’t that serious about her,” he says simply, every time. His smile doesn’t change, like his heart doesn’t break, because promises mean nothing to him. The rot leaving his mouth are just dead flowers and mulch in which to grow his next garden.

“You’re incorrigible as always. And you stink,” Felix says. He shoves Sylvain away with his elbow, and as Sylvain concedes, the angle of his lips turns a bit until the smile is more like a grimace. It’s a stupid look. “Am I supposed to pity you? What else do you expect, making promises you never intend to keep?”

“Aw, c’mon, Felix. You know I save my very best promises just for you. And I take them very, very seriously.”

Felix sneers. It’s their academy days, beautiful and framed in laurels, and there is not yet a serious bone in Sylvain’s body. He considers that it’s because Sylvain labors for him not to see them. Idiotic. He’s seen Sylvain’s promises in beds of flowers, smelled their cloy and decay on his own clothes. He’s seen Sylvain’s bones rent open on the battlefield, pulverized by an axe that would have severed Felix’s own head had he not intervened.

He remembers making their promise as children. Sticky caramel coated Sylvain’s mouth, and his smile was by lamplight. It wasn't Glenn, but it meant something to Felix at the time.

Here’s what it means to him now: almost nothing.

Here’s what Sylvain means to him now: almost everything.

Somehow, he eats nearly the entire thing.

If he thought he felt heavy before, now he’s almost sure there’s a stone low in his gut. Felix swallows uncomfortably, and with a decisiveness that both Ingrid and Sylvain know, he pushes the hollowed-out skin away. It’s a rather small one of its kind, and there is absolutely no reason to feel any sort of pride for managing to eat a damned potato.

The way Sylvain beams at him is no signpost to measure by. Ingrid, at least, has the wherewithal to only look somewhat placated.

“I’m done,” he mumbles. He feels full, but he breathes a little easier. The heavy carbs seem to smother everything else. Felix almost reaches for the memory of what the sauce from dinner tasted like, but has no energy to entertain self-sabotage at the moment.

“That’s fine. That’s great, Felix.” Sylvain squeezes his arm gently. “You did great.”

Ingrid sniffs and says nothing. She reaches forward for the potato skin and wraps it in a napkin. Felix can tell from the set of her mouth that she doesn’t agree with Sylvain’s exact word choice, but she seems done chiding him for the moment. He wouldn’t mind it, but perhaps Ingrid knows his limits better than he does.

Felix is almost incapable of thanks, so he grunts instead. The spices on the potato and the savory tang of the cheese coat his insides. Heavy, but the nausea is gone. The cloying sweetness is swallowed back. He feels tired. 

Sylvain’s touch is brushing back his bangs again. Felix is also tired of pushing it away, so he doesn’t.

“You gotta tell us when this happens to you. Alright?”

Felix looks down. It sounds like Sylvain wants a promise and he dares not shape one now. The silence lasts just enough to be an answer. Then there's movement on the bed, and it takes Felix a moment longer to realize that he’s being gently hauled up by the arm.

“Look, we talked to the kitchen already. Breakfast tomorrow is just gonna be plain toast with butter and goat’s milk.”

“That’s fine,” Felix says automatically. "You didn't need to do that.”

“Of course I did. You don’t make this easy, Felix.”

Felix’s mouth turns upward at the corner. No, he supposes he doesn’t. But that's why Sylvain always returns to him, isn't it? 'Easy' is dreadfully droll to the head of Gautier. Boredom is tantamount to death. Sylvain's true love is self-destruction, but he doesn't find it half as tasteful on someone else. Felix humors Sylvain’s attempt to help him stand, and then he looks at them both sternly.

“What did you two do with the proposal document for the town’s name?”

Sylvain is so shocked that he lets Felix go, his mouth forming a small ‘o’ shape. Ingrid, however, meets his gaze steadily. No surprise at all. 

“You shouldn't worry about it. There will be a new one."

Now, this makes more sense. Felix grits his teeth. The only thing worse than incompetence is conspiracy. "What are you hiding from me?"

There are a few moments of silence where they measure one another. "Ingrid?" Sylvain asks, somewhere between a warning and a plea. She purses her lips and stands straighter. She ignores Sylvain, because that is a skill she's honed well.

“You won’t like this. But if you must know, fine.”

She produces a crumpled ball of paper and tosses it onto the desk.

Lysithea had come the closest. She almost had him.

Their professor had a strange, stoic charisma that drew far too many students to the Blue Lions for Felix's liking. Through some odd turn of fate, however, Lysithea was not among them. They hadn't many occasions to interact for most of year. He respected her skill with magic. He also always saw her with sweet buns and sorbets in the dining hall and knew her preferences at once, which made him stay far away. Then there was one very strange time when Byleth sat them both down together at the table and presented them with pheasant roast and berry sauce. Felix scraped his sauce off and Lysithea was quick to reach over and spoon it onto her plate without even asking, and for some ridiculous reason, they kept talking after that.

Lysithea liked desserts. It wasn't a secret to anybody. He never understood why she tried to keep buying his silence with cake when he'd made it clear that sweets repulsed him, but he didn't hate her for it. 

That was well over five years ago. Garreg Mach was still a symbol of hope and not yet one of strife. He knows now that she was ill, and for her, sweets were one of life's few pleasures to indulge in before her untimely end. The smell of baked goods that hung about her used to disgust him, but now that Felix is just slightly wiser and far too late, he sees no reason for hypocrisy. Lysithea glutted herself on sugar to feel some control precluding her fate, just as surely as Felix glutted himself on anger.

Neither of them escaped their fates, though Felix doesn't think either of them ever truly expected to. Maybe. If he had let himself grow closer to Lysithea, he'd know her well enough to be sure.

It changes nothing. She didn't escape, but she defied the low-burning candle of her life by throwing it into the bloody pools of war herself. Now that, Felix understood. War wasn't their real struggle, but it was something real to cut. If death met them sooner, then dead was dead and fate no longer mattered.

There was a moment he'd stood over her small and crumpled body. He'd barely glanced at it before the immense chaos of Gronder Field demanded his attention or his life once more. There were no duels with corpses. Now, he tries to tell himself it was Edelgard's forces that killed her, but the truth has been lost to the goddess. It could have been Dimitri. It could have been anybody. It could have been one of Rodrigue's final acts in fealty to his beloved king.

It could have been Felix.

Claude talks about her later, once the Boar and the Deer have begun frolicking through the bloody fields together. He looks so utterly sad in the same way that Sylvain always does: carried in his eyes and nowhere else. The set of his jaw is firm, but unlike Sylvain, at least he has the decency not to pull a smile over his grief.

"She burned too brightly and faded too fast," he says, and all three of them act as if they're completely certain that it was the Empire who snuffed her out.

Felix thinks about their final interaction, sometimes. Another worthless memory in the bloat of his mind where something else would serve better. Lysithea had forced yet another cake on him, and he'd promised to try it if she'd leave him alone. Young and foolish, he'd even wondered, for a brief few moments: perhaps there was a world where he could stomach sweets, and perhaps Lysithea could lead him there. He’d set it on an end table in the corner of his room. Then he'd marched with his class to the Holy Tomb that same day and forgotten all about frivolities like optimism and cake.

Even when they returned to Garreg Mach five years later, it had taken a while before they all regained access to their rooms. Felix was one of the last. There, he'd found it still in that corner: unbelievably disgusting, long fossilized, yet somehow preserved from vermin and the elements by a dome-shaped cover. Nothing, however, could preserve it from time. It was so rotten that slime had bubbled under the glass, bled down the plate, and dried on the surface of the table. Sylvain, who had invited himself along to 'help Felix settle back in', couldn't stop staring at the decomposed lump in horror. Felix still wonders what went through his mind in that moment.

Neither of them had said anything about it. Felix opened a window to vent the smell. Sylvain walked out with the table and brought in a new one within the hour. They shared Sylvain's room one more night. He never found out what had been done with the cake, or with Lysithea's body.

The Settlement of Gleann. 

Gleann, meaning valley in some other language. This much he knows about the word because that’s all that was ever relevant about it. Felix stares at the wrinkled sheet of paper and barks out a laugh. Certainly a valley in their lives, isn't he? After all this time. Carved out and patched over with grass and still, still Felix cannot see over the hills on opposite sides, even when he thinks he’s scaled them fifty times over.

“I would have hated that,” he says bluntly.

Ingrid’s smile is sad. “We know. That’s why we rejected it on your behalf and threw it away.”

“I’d like to point out that you didn’t actually throw it away,” Sylvain says. Felix thinks he actually sounds a bit annoyed. “Why were you just carrying that paper around all night?”

“In case he noticed it was missing before they got a new proposal to us,” she says as though it were obvious, gesturing to Felix because that is exactly what happened. Sylvain sighs. 

“You know, I think maybe we weren’t on the same page. I didn’t want Felix to know about a bunch of strangers naming their village after his brother. At all."

Ingrid looks at him with disapproval. “They aren't all strangers, Sylvain. The populace might mostly be Almyrans, but the lord worked at Duke –” she pauses, eyes flicking to Felix and then away. “– the previous Duke’s estate years ago, when we were just children. Glenn was dear to him - he meant well.”

“I don’t remember him,” Felix snarls. He sits on his bed, staring at the floorboards. His hands feel clammy in his lap. “He - they have no right.”

Sylvain opens his mouth, but Ingrid cuts across. “They want to honor him, Felix.”

The pathetic brick that is his dinner is weighing him down, or else Felix would surely have sprung to his feet at that. He closes his eyes and he sees a casket of flowers. He sees a laurel looping around the back of his father’s head. He sees Sylvain alone with the garden of rot that is Felix at his feet. 

There’s no honor in the way he died, Felix wants to shout, but cuts his tongue on silence instead. Ingrid, like Rodrigue, has always run the tendency of trying to find some beautiful, noble poetry in Glenn's death. Felix hated it in his youth. He hates even more how age has given him understanding - how he looks at Dimitri upon his throne, less Boar and more King every day, and finds himself seeing how someone like that might be worth dying for. Still; unlike Ingrid or his father or even Dimitri, Felix would never dare to speak for Glenn. He can barely speak for himself.

He rubs his face tiredly. The butter from his dinner smells rich and salty.

“Felix.”

Twin weights drop onto the bed at his sides. Their scents, too, fill his senses – so uniquely theirs, he can’t begin to draw the correct comparisons. Sunshine and snow. Skies and silver. A hearth, and fire, and steel, and home. These are what come closest.

“We're still allowed to grieve for him,” Ingrid says softly. And that is Ingrid: steel folded in layers over kindness. She pushes at him like no one else. She gets her knife under his ribs and pulls. She finds his grief for Glenn, she bleeds it from him like gangrene, and then she opens her wounds too. Maybe in her own way, behind her own walls, Glenn’s death has been transforming into something else for her, too.

He makes a sound in his throat that he doesn’t even recognize. Ingrid’s hands find his, and Sylvain’s mouth finds the crown of his head.

“I know. Okay? I know.” Felix swallows thinly. “But it can’t be that. I’m – look, I'm not going to punish them or anything. It can be whatever else they want. But it has to be something else.”

Sylvain exhales into his hair. “I think that’s fair. Don’t you, Ingrid?”

“Yes. I do.”

Perhaps Felix is the one who never escaped the casket, he suddenly thinks or finally remembers. Maybe his flesh is what feeds the flowers. He closes his eyes and bows his head, and his friends pull up the roots of his rot.

Shortly after Dimitri's official coronation, there is a banquet which requires the attendance of every noble in the land. Felix is on his very best behavior.

It is his version of 'best behavior'; it is also his good fortune to be surrounded by friends who know this and thus deem it acceptable enough. He holds his tongue with a blunt edge and does not call his sovereign Boar even once. The sword at his hip, ornamental and foreign to him, remains sheathed despite his temptation to test its balance. Annette, ever seeking the tender bruises in his heart where the flesh is sweeter, finds him in the ballroom. She asks for his hand on the dance floor. He spins with her beneath a chandelier of gold and black and blue. Her eyes are like dazzling jades, and her hair catches the light like every other kind of jewel.

It tastes bittersweet when they finish. He bows with a smile and she curtsies with a giggle. Gilbert drifts close by, inclining his head towards Felix before taking his daughter's hand and leading her away. The walls press in and the smell of libations makes his chest tight. There has been a small flock of noblewomen following at his heels tonight - his father knew their fathers, and that's as well as he knows them. That's the new Duke, he hears them murmur behind their laced fans. Their wolfish gazes are the most obvious. Felix is left in a crowd of suffocation, within a gilded cage.

His very best behavior requires breaks. Throughout the night, Felix takes them on the balcony. 

He meets Sylvain there exactly once. If Felix feels suffocated by the title finally clasping around his throat, then soon-to-be Margrave Gautier carries his birthright with weary familiarity. He leans against the stone railing, hair slicked back with pomade, ascot lopsided. He meets Felix's eyes with a smile that feels more real than not.

"Guess those Crest babies aren't too far off now," he says, without much humor. Felix wonders why it sounds so off, until he realizes that it's without much anger, either.

He scoffs. "Speak for yourself. I have bigger things to worry about than extending my bloodline."

Sylvain is strangely quiet at that. He shifts his weight back to his elbows, chin tipping to gaze at the darkened sky. Felix stares at the curve of his throat for some few moments before looking away.

"Let me guess. Some part of you wishes we were still at war?"

Felix closes his eyes; exhales slowly. Mercedes had given him a glass of wine, and because it was Mercedes he drank it, and now its sweetness lingers on his tongue. For a change, he focuses on it to distract himself. He can't deny the accusation. Were battle the only thing he had to worry about, he'd be slightly happier. But it was never about his happiness.

"Inheriting a title is no excuse for losing my edge."

Next to him, Sylvain hums. An arm comes around his middle and pulls him into Sylvain's side. The scent of cologne fills Felix's senses - something smoky and earthen. It brings to mind the familiar. It makes him crave the fire, the steel; the iron and salt. The things he knows.

"Have you eaten yet?" Sylvain asks, still staring upward. He stares at the sky, and Felix stares at him.

"No. Too many desserts on the table. I lost my appetite.”

Sylvain laughs. The sound is warm, a little sad, and his breath is mist in the frigid air. "Never change, Felix."

"I don't have a choice," he says. "And neither do you."

"Then don't change tonight." There's a little bit of pleading in Sylvain's smile. "Stay with me just a little longer. Don’t go cutting ahead, Felix. Can you promise me that?”

If he'd ever broken his promise outside of his dreams, Felix thinks, he'd have done it quietly. He would burn out the candle of his life and send Sylvain a parcel of steel. Because Sylvain means everything to him, and steel means everything Felix is.

Well. It's not too late, either. 

But isn't that strange - Felix has been sure for so long that promises meant almost nothing to him. All the dreams of them breaking; all the likelihood that he'd fall in battle and leave Fraldarius a cold and empty name. All the nightmares that Sylvain would beat him to that cruelty. He'd spent five long years fighting for a future he couldn't even imagine. Promises were a fool’s gambit. And now that Sylvain's survived to the other side, he can hardly think of anything he wants more than another one. Anything that will keep him in reach. Anything to go on.

"Fine." Felix crosses his arms and leans his head onto Sylvain's shoulder. They watch the sky for several minutes until he adds, "Our wise and noble king is the one who begged me to act 'proper' tonight."

"I figured. It's been a little off-putting, to be honest."

"Don’t test my patience."

“But it's one of my talents! Seriously, though - you should try to eat something, Felix.”

Sylvain's clumsy pretense drops along with his smile. Felix knows this scrutiny well: searching the gaunt of his cheeks, the fit of his clothes. How he bears his own weight and carries himself. Felix finds no current fault in his physical condition, but he’s never quite been able to get into Sylvain’s head in these moments. All the better. He doubts he’d appreciate what he finds there.

A garden. A garden of sugar, like rot. He wants to swallow it from Sylvain's mouth.

“Spare me your hovering. I just needed some fresh air first.” Felix pulls away and smooths his unform out. He feels his breath coming a little quicker, clearing the cologne from his lungs. With the unpleasant taste of wine also gone, he figures he may as well eat now. Sylvain’s prodding is like to grow incessant otherwise. "At least you smell somewhat decent these days."

Sylvain's eyebrows shoot up as though he doesn't quite know how to take that. Felix doesn't find it worth explaining. He leaves Sylvain there on the balcony, pretending he's still watching the stars, knowing he's always watching Felix.

(The next morning, Dimitri receives several written letters from nobles all demanding apologies for the way Felix spoke to their daughters. When Sylvain hears about it, he laughs all the ride to the Fraldarius estate.)

“It was the chocolates,” Felix says abruptly several days later.

Sylvain, who has just returned from drawing town borders and still has one ankle hooked into a stirrup, stops to look at Felix as if he’d grown a second head. When further explanation is not forthcoming, he says: “Uh, what?”

“Here, the –” Felix rushes to say, then pauses. He lifts a hand to gesture, vaguely, around them; to the streets and the buildings, to the people feasting well into the night as they celebrate their induction as first vassal town to the new Duke. The air is thick with scents of cheese, of spice, of wine and spirits. The innkeeper’s niece had run the menu by him three times. “Eiesenvald.”

The name is fresh on his tongue and exceptionally strange still. Sylvain’s own suggestion. Better that way; the lord seemed dead-set on sentimentality, and again, Sylvain covers for his weakness. If Byleth ever asks about the similarities, Felix will swear up and down that it’s pure coincidence – eisen means iron, after all, and the settlement put down roots by selling weapons. It’s easy enough to deny. Not even to touch on the significance of iron to him, of course. Felix isn’t sure yet if he’s wrapped his head around playing midwife to the birth of an entire village.

He doesn’t hate it. Maybe one day, there will be a version of himself ready to forgive their first suggestion.

Sylvain watches him carefully. He pulls his foot from the stirrup and sets it on the ground. Felix considers that he could have at least let Sylvain rejoin the celebrations before ambushing him like this, but Sylvain looks unbothered. Steady eyes hold him in focus. “Gonna need a bit more than that, Felix.”

Felix sighs. He’s already tired; Ingrid didn't let him step away until he'd cleaned an entire plate. He moves closer and lifts a hand, turning it up. A sphere wrapped with waxpaper rests in his palm. Properly contained, now.

“These,” he clarifies, sounding put-upon. “Almyran chocolates. There’s a family of chocolatiers here who sent me their finest batch along with the town's petition.”

Sylvain’s eyebrows raise.

“I see,” he says thinly. He searches Felix’s face. “I’m guessing you didn’t care for them?”

”It was… a thoughtful gesture.”

”Uh-huh. And… ?”

“The smell of them made me sick to my stomach.”

There is some raw frustration for his own weakness that he hadn’t meant to inject, but it makes Sylvain’s eyes soften. He finally steps closer, hand lifting to fold over Felix’s atop the candy.

“And yet they gave you more. You didn’t tell them.” An observation, not a question. He’s so close, Felix can smell his cologne.

He huffs.

“No. Why would I? I have you.”

At this, Sylvain pauses. Felix watches him. He watches a crown of rot fall away; he sees flowers sink into a silent and dark grave. He sees Sylvain laugh, and bring Felix’s hand to his mouth, and brush his lips atop Felix’s fingers. The chocolate rolls from their joined hands and falls to the ground.

“You do,” he promises.

Sylvain pulls him in, and Felix finds his hunger in the taste of sugar and steel.