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"Felix," Ingrid says, grabbing him by the elbow before he can duck after the Imperial solider stumbling like a drunk down the castle corridor. "We can't find Sylvain."
"What?" It doesn't register in the moment. He's still thinking of the slick bite of his sword into the soldier's ribs—she won't get far. He can still catch her.
"He was supposed to report back after clearing the undercroft, but his battalion came back without him," Ingrid says, intent, yanking hard at his arm until he finally breaks from starting down the hall to stare back at her. "No one knows where he is."
Felix's eyes stay hooked on her glare, breath huffing from his mouth in unnoticed pants, and then he says, "Fuck!" and shoves his bloody sword into its sheath. "Where did they see him last?"
Ingrid fills him in as they take off for the nearest staircase. It’s hidden beyond a forest of yawning, cobwebbed guest rooms and store closets and corridors, one of the many abandoned wings of Fhirdiad Castle. Felix remembers parts of it, warm and alright, from his childhood. A lot of things died with Lambert.
“Why did no one notice?" Felix snaps as they squeeze past an ironwood door and into the stairwell, already growing fragrant with Imperial bodies. Cornelia is hours dead but they’ve been mopping up Edelgard’s men, a vindictive bunch of bastards who don’t know when they’re beat, every minute since. “He’s six feet tall and ginger!”
“Don’t get snippy with me, Felix Hugo,” Ingrid snaps back as they clatter down the steps, a pair of over-armored idiots in an echoing tower. “I was clearing the curtain wall! His lieutenant said the ambush chased them half the length of the castle, so excuse me if I can't pinpoint for you precisely where it all went to shit!"
Felix swears again, which she takes for some kind of answer, and speeds up. If he falls, and doesn't kill himself, at least he'll make it to the bottom faster.
They find the others malingering outside the first of the great, city-feeding storerooms, Annette and Ashe wringing their hands and Mercedes speaking quietly with Dedue and Dimitri and the Professor sweeping in from the opposite hall. "We're going to split up," Dimitri says, in the decisive tones of his father, of both their fathers. "Gilbert has the army on alert outside. If you find him, make noise."
It's at the half-hour mark that the panic really starts to set in.
Not for anyone else. Just for Felix. Like ants on him, under his skin and up the flesh of his throat, stealing sound and breath and sense. His chest heaves as he bashes through door after door, revealing washtubs and root cellars and decade-old herb dried to wisps. He and Ashe tear the laundries apart, tub by tub, and then he's in the armories, Annette at his side instead, the others flickering by like leaves, the too-colorful shells of bugs. So many people, and not Sylvain.
Not the one fucking person he actually wants to see right now.
The realization of how desperately he wants to see Sylvain in this moment, right now, as he's bruising he's shoulder against yet another unmovable door, how much he needs to find him breathing, needs to find him here, needs to find him unburied, hammers at the walls of Felix's awareness like it means to break them. He's been ignoring for months now, with wild success, the incoming sucker punch that is the magnitude of Sylvain’s importance to him. If he never had time for it at the Academy, he certainly didn't have time for it at war. Edelgard and her armies were bearing down. He would deal with it later. Tomorrow. Soon.
It's now. He nearly breaks his teeth on Dimitri's breastplate when they run into each other in a barely-lit cellar. "Felix," Dimitri starts, sounding concerned.
"Have you found him?" Felix snaps over him, wholly unwilling to hear the rest of Dimitri's sentence. It's getting cold in the undercroft, what little light and warmth that leached into the stone during the afternoon draining away fast.
"No," Dimitri replies, his one big eye gazing at Felix with too much of whatever human emotion he's recently rediscovered. "But we can't—this is the room where he and his men were ambushed. If he's not here—"
"He's not," Felix snarls, throwing out an arm to encompass the bare stone walls of the room they're standing in, a few flickering lamps, two open doors, a stack of ransacked boxes, an old covered well in the corner. "So where the fuck is he? We've searched every inch of this damn crypt and he isn't here, he's not anywhere, did they take him? Are they fucking jogging through the countryside with him? With his body?"
"Felix—" Dimitri says again, voice tight, and Felix would snap at him again except suddenly he's bending over the slick, freezing floor, glove against the stone, trying desperately to breathe.
A future without Sylvain opens its maw before him.
It's—
He shuts his eyes as hard as he can.
"Felix."
"Don't touch me," Felix says, voice cracking, unable to stop it, but Dimitri doesn't take his hand from Felix's shoulder.
"We'll find him, Felix. He isn't...."
"What, boar?" Felix bites out when Dimitri doesn't go on, but then Dimitri's hand tightens like a screw press, near to pain.
"Shush," he says, the first time he's said such a thing to Felix in years. "Did you..."
This time, Felix hears it, too.
A soft, muffled sound. Like water against distant stone.
"The well!" Felix shouts, shoving himself up, Dimitri already moving, long legs eating up the room in three great strides. Felix skids into the well beside him, boots skittering over the damp stone, all these puddles too large for a well that's not meant to have been used in decades. The black iron cover over the well mouth is covered in rust but not rusted shut. The splashing sounds inside have grown louder, frantic. Terrified, says Felix's mind.
"I've got this!" Dimitri grunts, digging his fingers into the minute space between iron and stone, leaning back to heave. "Get the others!"
Felix doesn't have time for that. He turns, aims out the far door, and blasts a thunder spell into the corridor wall. It ricochets off like a sparking cannonball, as loud as a ballista, light from the hundred little fires it starts in its wake turning the hallway a flashing, frenetic orange.
"Need to discuss your methods," Dimitri says, foot propped against the well wall, body straining, "later!" and drags the whole iron cover clanging to the floor.
"Sylvain!" Felix shouts, throwing himself over the black mouth of the well, making Dimitri jerk and grab for Felix's cape. "Sylvain!"
A dark hole into the earth, the slap of freezing water against rock, and then a ragged, echoing cough, like a bonfire spewing light from the mountaintop.
Sylvain shouts, "Help!"
"God in heaven," Dimitri says, panting, as Felix lunges for the snaking, moss-slimy length of chain that's piled between the well and the wall. One end is attached to a ring in the stone, the other to an iron bucket the size of Felix's head. It's heavy as granite, and Felix skids again over the floor trying to lift it.
"We're going to break his skull if we throw that down there," Dimitri says as Sylvain continues to shout from the invisible depths of the well. It's impossible to see down to him, the cellar too dark, the well too deep, but every moment Felix spends not attempting to do so feels like the slow removal of his back teeth.
"Have you got a better idea?" Felix says.
Dimitri takes the chain from his hands, puts his booted foot to the bucket, and jerks the chain back. It snaps from the bucket handle like sugar candy. He offers the chain back to Felix.
Felix takes it with a muted snarl.
"Sylvain, we're dropping the chain down!" he shouts down the well, voice echoing weirdly against the choppy water and Sylvain's thrashing body, pitching loud to be heard over the growing noise in the corridor, over Sylvain's own shouts. "Get under the water!"
"Help me!" Sylvain screams. His voice sounds scraped raw, like he's been howling for hours.
"Can you hear me? Get down!"
"Please!"
Felix wavers, chain smacking wet against his hip. Sylvain sounds like—it feels like Felix's leg has been hacked off at the knee, is what Sylvain sounds like. "If I hit him with this," Felix says, maybe to Dimitri, possibly to the wall. His grip on the chain is tight, feeling racing out of his fingers.
Dimitri is beside him, the fur of his cape brushing Felix's neck and ear. "He's down too deep," he says, low. "We—"
Sylvain shouts again. Dimitri takes the chain from Felix's hands and throws it, clattering like a rockfall, down the well.
There's a dull noise, a grunt, more splashing. The chain stays slack in Dimitri's hands. Felix leans as far as he can over the lip of the well, toes flat, knees shaking, desperate to see.
One long, empty moment, then another, and then the chain jerks in Dimitri's grip.
"Pull him up!" Felix shouts as Dimitri does so, huffing like an ox as he drags the chain back hand over hand. Felix stares into the dark, eyes straining, and then the shadows shift. A flash of red appears.
The well isn’t large. Felix nearly cracks his head against Sylvain’s when he reaches down to get two fists in Sylvain’s sopping shirt and haul him out of the well mouth. Dimitri, chain abandoned, hooks a gauntlet in Sylvain’s other armpit and topples all three of them to the floor. Felix grunts, shoulder smacking the stone. Sylvain makes a noise like a wounded animal.
“Sylvain,” Felix wheezes, nearly soundless, then says it again. Sylvain doesn’t respond, belly-down on the floor, hair slick and straight as helmet over his head and eyes as he gasps for breath. As Felix watches his shivers multiply into full-body quakes, nearly convulsions. The water soaking into Felix’s clothes from his is cold as ice.
Felix doesn’t know where his armor could have gone, until he realizes Sylvain must have pulled it off and let it sink. Entirely underwater those first few minutes, fumbling with the buckles, trying not to go down with it.
“Sylvain,” Felix tries once more, but Sylvain still ignores him, heaving himself not up but forward, away from the well, out from between Felix and Dimitri. But his entire body trembles, and he doesn’t make it a foot before collapsing onto his own hands, evoking another ragged, cough of pain.
He rolls to his side, eyes screwed shut, mouth slack and panting, facing Felix. Felix sees his hands.
One or two of his nails are still whole. Many are simply gone.
Free of the water, the fingers bleed like peeled fruit.
Felix feels instantly, dizzyingly sick. Dimitri is half-up, cursing as he tries to unfasten his cape and Felix inches forward, afraid to touch Sylvain, afraid not to. Surely the horror was supposed to end when they got Sylvain out of the well. Surely there was no future in which Sylvain came out alive and Felix’s hands kept trembling. He wants so desperately for Sylvain to open his eyes, to open his ridiculous mouth, to say the thing that improves the world, as he always does. But this time he doesn’t, barely even seems to notice when Dimitri’s wolfskin of a cape lands atop him and the noise in the hall echoes like a cavalry.
His lips are moving. Felix frowns, leaning in.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvain says, weak, failing, like the ghost of speech, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Sorry for what?” Felix asks, nearly demands. He reaches out to push Sylvain’s lank hair back from his face.
Dimitri looks up. “Felix,” he says, fast, “I don’t think that’s—”
Sylvain’s eyes snap open and he jerks back from Felix’s touch like a worm on the hook. Like the fish on the line. Like he fears a strike.
Felix lurches back too, heart in his throat, eyes huge. Sylvain stares at him in absolute, unrecognizable terror.
And then Mercedes drops to her knee beside him, hands already glowing white. The Professor shouts an order. The world converges and dry hands pull Felix away.
He wakes warm, in the dark, with a weight stroking his hair. It moves slowly, rhythmically, like it’s been doing so for a long time, catching little strands of his hair with every gentle pass.
Felix opens his eyes. Sylvain pulls his bandaged hand back, taking Felix’s bangs with him.
“Hey,” he says, warm, voice as rough and crumbling as sandstone.
Felix sits up slowly, neck and back and shoulders aching from having slept so long beside Sylvain’s bed. It’s more Felix’s bed than Sylvain’s, really. The whole suite of rooms was—his and Glenn’s and their father’s, back when they used to visit the capital together every month. He still remembers the heavy pill of the velvet drapes, muffling his laughter as he and Ingrid had hid from Dimitri as children.
Dimitri had offered his own rooms, when Mercedes sat back and pronounced Sylvain as healed as he was going to get without rest. Felix had said no. If nothing else, in his own rooms he still knew the best way to stoke the fire.
Sylvain, curled on his side in Felix’s old bed, smiles. Not the biggest smile he’s ever flashed Felix, but the sight of it still frees a few of the stones from around Felix’s heart. When Sylvain drops his hand to the sheets, the rough bandages around his fingers close enough to brush Felix’s pinky, Felix doesn’t shift away.
“Hi,” he says to Sylvain. “Are you—how are you feeling?”
“I’ve been worse,” Sylvain says, and then, when Felix glares, “—but also better. How long was I out?”
“Half a day,” Felix replies. The windows beyond the tied velvet curtains are dark as the sea, still an hour or two before dawn. Felix’s clothes are likely dry by now, spread out beside the fireplace. Maybe even Sylvain’s, too, lain beside them.
“Have you been here this whole time?”
Felix flushes, all the way up to his hairline. He’s not so stupid as to think Sylvain can’t see it. “Obviously,” he growls. Looking away. He can hear the way Sylvain smiles, though, the way his eyes surely crinkle at the corners. “Mercedes said I had to make sure you didn’t vomit up any more water and then drown in it. Idiot.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault that a bunch of Imperial soldiers threw me down a well in the basement?”
“Yes. Obviously. How could you be so stupid?”
Sylvain laughs, a moth-eaten shadow of what the sound should be, and maybe that’s what keeps Felix from getting up and leaving, or threatening him, or threatening him with Ingrid. He feels where the impulse should be, but then he thinks about the floor of the cellar again, the freezing puddle under Sylvain and his hunted breathing, and finds himself still sitting beside the bed, letting Sylvain laugh at his expense.
“It was an ambush, buddy,” Sylvain says, “I don’t know what you want from me.” He shifts, folding one arm under his head, beneath the pillow. Felix has to look away from the bruises on his elbow. They’re as dark as the drapes, and Felix knows the other elbow matches. So do both of Sylvain’s knees. It hadn’t been a large well, and Sylvain had waited for them for a long time. “We chased them to what we thought was a dead end, turns out they were waiting behind a door we didn’t know about, and they routed us. Not my finest moment, but it happens, right?”
Felix glowers. “Ambushes happen. How did you end up down a well?”
Sylvain’s smile, creasing his face in gentle lines, wavers. It makes a fist close around Felix’s ribs. He wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t looked for it. “I don’t know,” Sylvain says. His tone is still light, joking, his smile reaffixed, “maybe it just seemed like the easiest way to knock me out. I was giving as good as I got, you know.”
“Kill you.”
Sylvain pauses. “What?”
“The easiest way to kill you,” Felix says into the still air, warmed carefully, softened by years of dust. “They threw you into a natural well with your plate armor on and closed it after you. They were killing you.”
Sylvain is, for a moment, staring fixedly at Felix without seeing a square inch of him. Felix is familiar with the expression—he used to think it unique to the boar, before he went to war. If Sylvain’s ever worn it before, he’s never, ever shown it to Felix.
“I, yeah,” Sylvain says with a shuddering inhale, “sure, they were trying to off me, but it’s not so—”
He’s going to dissemble again. Felix bites down hard on the instinct to yell and says, low, “Sylvain, what are you not telling me?”
He lets Sylvain lurch for the low-hanging fruit. “I mean, Felix, if you want me to start making a list, we’re going to be here—”
“I mean, when Dimitri and I pulled you out of the well, you looked like reheated shit,” Felix says over him, because there’s indulging Sylvain, and then there’s letting him finish every one of his goddamn sentences.
“I was trapped in a well! Was I supposed to come out smelling of roses?” He’s still smiling at Felix, still perpetuating the joke, but without much humor left.
“I saw you take an axe to the side last year and you still tried to flirt with the damned healer!” Felix hisses. “This was different.”
“Yes, because, again, I was stuck in a fucking—”
“I know you were stuck in a well!” Felix shouts at him, finally breaking through whatever ceiling they’d both been trying to preserve over this, pushing to his feet as the sound thuds against the tapestries on the walls and Sylvain’s shocked face. He doesn’t know how this became a fight, and he doesn’t want it, but fuck him if he’s able to stop it. “I was there. I saw. And when we pulled you out it was like—”
He looks down at his hands, flexing before him like things half-conscious. “It was like Dimitri. When he talks to his damned ghosts. Like you weren’t even there”
There’s no immediate response. When he looks back up, Sylvain is staring at the sheets, breathing through his mouth. The tips of his fingers, the only skin unbandaged above his wrist, press hard into the cotton. It must hurt. Even aside from his fingernails left in the well water, Mercedes healed a half dozen fractures in his fingers and hands before they carried him upstairs.
Sylvain inhales, looks up, and Felix knows it’s going to be a lie. The next thing that comes out of Sylvain’s mouth is going to be undeniable bullshit. Felix doesn’t give him the chance, gritting his teeth and saying, “You were apologizing.”
It stops Sylvain. Like a strike. Felix tears himself away from the thought. “To who?” Sylvain asks, in that voice he tore to raw shreds.
Felix looks at the window. “I don’t know. You didn’t exactly tell me before you—” He gestures stiffly.
“Before I what?”
“Before you—I tried to,” Felix swallows, “touch you, and you… flinched away. Like you thought I was going to hurt you.”
It’s too warm in this room, the fire still too high and every piece of antique fabric draped from the walls holding the heat like a fucking brazier. Felix pushes his sleeves up to his elbows. Sylvain props himself up on one arm in Felix’s bed with a low grunt.
“I’m sorry,” he says, which is so ridiculous a thing for him to say that it thumps the last of Felix’s anger right out of him. It’s the middle of the night and Sylvain looks like shit and Felix can’t stop shouting at him. Great. Good work. Ingrid and Annette are going to flense him.
“Don’t,” Felix says. He steps around his toppled chair, picking it up and resettling it on the heavy carpet. He sits down again, elbows on his knees, rubbing at the tight joints of his sword hand. “You don’t have to do that. Don’t apologize.”
“Really?” Sylvain raises an eyebrow at him. It’s his left eyebrow, the one with the little nick of a scar through it. He’s been raising that same damn eyebrow at Felix for fifteen years now.
Felix lets go of his own hand, propping his head on his fist. He looks at Sylvain. “Sure,” he says. “You did fall down a well.”
Sylvain grins at him. Felix smiles back, just a twist to his lips. He bears the pressure of Sylvain’s dark eyes on his. “Who were you saying sorry to?” he asks.
Sylvain exhales, slumping against his own shoulder. His hair, wavier than ever for having dried against Felix’s old pillow, flops into his eyes. “You know, up until right now I guess I really thought you knew,” he says.
Felix frowns. “What?”
“Miklan threw me down the well behind the house when I was like nine,” Sylvain says. “It was midwinter, he did it after dinner, it took a while for the servants to find me. So, probably him. I don’t remember being pulled out last time, but hey, maybe I was apologizing to him then, too.”
He says it so casually. Like this is just some foible of older brothers across Fódlan. “Sylvain...” Felix says, strained.
“He did worse over the years,” Sylvain says. He winces lightly when he shrugs. “But the well was pretty bad. I think I may have lost it a little down there, waiting for you guys to find me.”
Wondering if they would ever come at all. Felix tries to swallow, feeling his own tongue like a sharpened stone in his mouth, his throat small and dry and not up to this task.
“He was trying to kill you,” Felix says.
“Yup.”
“You didn’t deserve that.”
Sylvain looks at him, bemused. “That’s been my thinking, too. Glad we can agree.”
“I didn’t mean—” Felix cuts himself off, pressing the butt of his palm into one eye. It’s hard to… think suddenly, to wrest coherency from the dozen guilty realizations that have arrived to pulverize him. Certain looks, certain shadows, a hundred odd memories from his childhood dredged up and wiped clean and woven into pattern.
Sylvain was always so reluctant to go home when they were kids.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he asks, pathetic. Whining. What a stupid question.
“You were six, Felix.” Sylvain smirks at him, but it sounds tired, too.
“After,” Felix says, biting back on further insult. He wishes in great frustration that he didn’t need to. He wishes he maybe weren’t such a jackass.
Sylvain, gently, flops back against the sheets. There’s still a soft grunt and a wince, which makes Felix’s guts clench. “What would that have done?” Sylvain says, so reasonable about it. “And besides, like I said…” he shrugs, one shoulder nudging against the pillows. “I kinda thought you knew.”
Felix should have known. He did know. He knew that Sylvain hated his brother and he hated to go home and that something was happening that shouldn’t. He knew Miklan hurt him. What did it matter that he never considered that Miklan might want his brother dead?
He knew it, and he did nothing about it, and after Glenn died Felix never spared a single thought for it ever again.
“Dimitri knows,” Felix says at length, with the fire slowly sinking into itself across the room and his hair sliding loose across his shoulders. Don’t, Dimitri had said in the cellar, one eye wide.
“Yeah, I think so,” Sylvain says. “Ingrid, too.”
“Did you tell them? Or did they…”
“They figured it out, I suppose,” Sylvain replies. What he doesn’t say, doesn’t even imply, though it booms like a church bell in Felix’s mind: unlike you. “I did mention it to the professor directly once or twice back at school, but those were,” his mouth twists in a grim smirk, one swaddled hand waved flippantly between them, “not my finest moments.”
“I’m sorry,” Felix says.
Sylvain looks up from his purple fingertips, gaze settling on Felix like a bird on the branch. “For what?” he asks. “Are we just taking turns now?”
Felix meets his eye, unable to open his mouth, unable to stop clenching his own hands.
The fire snaps its last log and Sylvain’s face softens like a pat of butter. “Hey, Felix, it’s okay,” he says, one mitten hand covering both of Felix’s, making Felix take it and hold it and run his thumbs over the rough bandage like he’s memorizing its fiber. “Miklan was a monster and a stain upon our shared bloodline, but he’s gone. It’s okay. I’m fine. Downstairs, in the basement—you found me.”
Felix snorts, a little snotty, feeling it in his throat and behind his eyes. It’s such a blatant change of subject, but one he’s grateful for beyond speech. He looks at Sylvain’s hand in his. “Dimitri did all of the work.”
Sylvain smiles. “Can’t speak to that, really, my memories are all pretty fuzzy and horrifying but,” he can’t really grip Felix’s hands, but he can press harder against them, shaping them around his own, “I do seem to remember your voice,” he says. “Calling my name.”
Felix, cheeks wet, eyes streaming, looks up.
“C’mere, dummy,” Sylvain says, whole and smiling and leaning forward on Felix’s old bed.
Maybe he meant for them to hug, is the thing. Or to pet Felix’s hair again, with one of his big, mangled hands. What Felix does, though, is this: bends at the waist, like a bow to his partner, and kisses Sylvain’s mouth.
The fire sputters. The dust settles in to rest. Felix pulls back, just a sliver, Sylvain’s hot breath, his soft, half-open mouth, still there for the tasting. He opens his eyes and Sylvain stares back, his own eyes huge, the color of fresh-minted copper in the dying fire and seemingly reading whole textbooks from Felix’s expression. He reaches up, back stretching, eyes affixed, and only closes them at the very last moment, as he kisses Felix back.
“C’mere,” he says again, low and lovely, after a period of time for which Felix has no measure. “C’mere.”
He leans back and Felix follows him, careful of Sylvain’s healing body, taking him in his arms.