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There is a rhythm to the day after battle: mostly that of a wheel turning, necessity and dull forward movement. The adrenaline has worn off, the scant celebrations have run dry and the stench and exhaustion settle in.
It's also when chores get done. Sylvain's on inventory, taking deeply unglamorous stock of their dwindling supplies. It's a shame sometimes, being known by your friends: most people wouldn't think of him when they think of numbers and minutiae.
He emerges blinking from the dim interior of the last of the supply carts with his back twinging and his fingers stained from list-making. It's not worse than what they'd been stained by the day before, however, so he stands and stretches in the noonday sun, rinses his hands with his waterskin, then wends his way through camp to the cookpot.
Every seat around the fire is already taken, but Ingrid shoves over for him, and Bernadetta passes him a tin plate of perfectly edible hot mush. Their fingers brush as she hands it over, and either there's something horrible standing just behind him or she's trying, silently with wide and stricken eyes, to tell him something.
He can't make heads or tails of it just now, so he shrugs minutely and tucks in.
The chatter stills as Felix drops down among them. Bernadetta gives a pained, barely audible groan. Sylvain's attention sharpens.
"So," Ingrid says dryly, a stretched-out moment later.
"It doesn't bear discussion," Felix says.
"But Felix," Annette says, "we have so little else going for us. You'd deprive us of a love story?"
"There is no story," Felix says, scraping up a spoonful of mush and avoiding all eye contact.
"He embroidered your initials over his heart," Ashe says, almost giddily. "That's the stuff stories are made of, actually."
Sylvain's spoon slips out of his mouth; he manages to catch it before it hits his plate but it's a near thing. Beside him, Bernadetta has gone pale and pinched. She offers him a single, suffering blink.
"Have you talked to him about it?" Ingrid asks. "It could cause problems later, if you don't take it in hand now."
"It won't," Felix says shortly.
Sylvain holds his breath. His gaze jumps from person to person. No one's looking at him: not Bernadetta, who has her face in her hands, and not Felix, whose furrowed brow and mullishly set jaw give nothing away, save that he's Felix Fraldarius and someone is trying to speak with him.
"Ansel is in your battalion," Ingrid says, irritation creeping in. "If he's harboring feelings for you—"
Felix stands. "It's no one's business," he says warningly, and marches off with his plate and spoon in hand, either to rinse them in the stream or fling them at the next person who broaches the topic of his love life.
Felix's love life. Sylvain meets Bernadetta's eye once more. Her mouth is grim and tight. If he looks any better it's only because he's a chronic liar.
"Sylvain, don't you know anything about it?" Annette asks. "You're his best friend."
Sylvain makes himself chew and swallows a bite of mush. "Ansel? We braid each other's hair sometimes, but I doubt he'll ask me to be his maid of honor."
Annette rolls her eyes. "You're no help."
He grins; it feels about as lively as the soggy grain on his plate. "Sorry," he says, and shrugs.
+
"Sorry," Bernadetta says, in an interesting hybrid of wailing and whispering. "I'm so sorry."
It's Sylvain's turn to put his face in his hands. "It's not your fault."
"It is," she says. "You're just being nice."
"No one's ever accused me of that before," Sylvain says. "If you need to blame something, blame the wine."
"I really shouldn't ever drink," she says and sinks down beside him on his bedroll with a hiccuping little cry.
He pats her shoulder. "Somebody already took the fall," he says. "No harm done."
"Isn't that worse?" she says. "Ansel's just — Just profiting off of your feelings—"
Her voice is rising again, and he has to shush her before the camp gets hold of the twist to their new favorite story, begun weeks before: the product of wild night of sock darning, a dramatic reading of Bernadetta's newest work, and enough wine to make the former two activities possible. After building up a healthy flush, Bernadetta—possibly in retaliation for Sylvain's commentary on the more salacious parts of her manuscript—steered the conversation toward what she called his real feelings about Felix.
He waxed poetic about nobility and duty and starcrossed childhood friends, saccharine and overblown. By the end, lulled by his own theatrical vision, he was horrified to realize he'd said at least one or two true things. Only slightly worse was that Bernadetta had moved from her socks on to one of his shirts and was stitching.
In the morning he squinted at the neat lines that made up the initials FHF and felt queasy; that and something else, still slightly nauseating, but which made his pulse stumble and right itself with one hard thump.
He kept the shirt. He didn't ask Bernadetta to unpick the threads, deep blue stitching over the heart. Saints. He makes himself sick.
Usually he did his own laundry, but in his defense, he'd been exhausted. He'd come in off the battlefield bloody, soot-streaked, so jittery with residual adrenaline that he was upsetting his horse. He stripped down, toweled off, left his clothes in a heap. He hadn't thought anything of it when they were collected the next morning, this morning, for washing.
Ansel was on the washers' short list of suspects. Roughly the same build as Sylvain, and—who knew?—possessed of similar romantic inclinations, or else just looking to score points with his battalion leader, albeit with a deeply misguided strategy. He owned up when accused. Apparently, Bernadetta says, he blushed when they handed the shirt over to him. Blushed! Sylvain's never been more repulsed by someone's bullshit, save for his own.
"What do you think Felix is going to do about it?" Bernadetta asks in a proper whisper.
"Felix? Might boot him from the army, if we weren't so short on troops. Probably he'll make him run laps."
"So you don't think..."
"Not usually, no."
"But about Felix, and Ansel...?"
Sylvain jolts like the goddess herself brought a hammer down on his skull. "No," he says, too quickly. "I mean. It's Felix, right?"
"Right," Bernadetta says, but her gaze cuts away.
"I can't imagine Felix having feelings for a guy like that. Ansel's too— chipper." Vapid, Sylvain thinks. Naive. And blonde, obnoxiously so.
Bernadetta picks at a loose thread on his blanket. "Some things are easier to do without feelings," she says slowly.
Sylvain blinks. The hammered feeling strikes again. "Yeah," he says after a beat. "I guess I would know. Fuck."
"Fuck," Bernadetta agrees.
+
It's not lost on Sylvain, the irony of feeling gut-punched over the idea of Felix having casual sex.
He spends the rest of the afternoon dogged by it, and it makes way for worse thoughts. Maybe Felix genuinely likes sunshiney idiots with broad shoulders. Maybe there are things Sylvain doesn't know about Ansel that Felix does: maybe he fucking loves swords. Maybe he took a blow for Felix, once, and saved his life. Maybe he's a good person—and Sylvain's fucked, if that's the case, because he can't even wish his lifelong best friend well in his hypothetical relationship.
By the evening, Sylvain's deep cleaned his armor, his tack and saddle, and tidied and rearranged his tent twice over. He wishes he had more inventory to take, would kill to scrub his brain clean on columns tallying hardtack and jerky.
He hasn't lost all perspective: there's every chance Felix is the person Sylvain believes him to be—namely tactless and sexless—and he'll appear at dinner having already ground Ansel's heart under his heel. It heartens him, enough that he makes the walk to the cookpot with an almost normal amount of dread.
Naturally, Felix isn't there.
Nor does he appear at any point in the meal. Ansel is absent, also: the camp's opinion about this coincidence takes the form of an explicit limerick that can be heard passing from group to group.
Ashe thumps Sylvain on the back as he splutters into his plate. "The meter isn't even right," he says, frowning.
"I imagine it's hard to find a good rhyme for 'Fraldarius'," Mercedes says consideringly. "Though one would hope for a better effort than 'hairless'."
"How many soldiers can we afford to lose?" Sylvain asks Ingrid. "Rough estimate."
Ingrid's lips are a tight, flat line. "Surely Felix knows the sorts of rumors he's fostering. Someone," she says, with a significant look at Sylvain, "ought to ask him what he's thinking."
He chews and swallows Hot Mush, Evening Edition. "I'm starting to think you guys only love me for my ability to take a blow."
Bernadetta, as if sincerely making the case, adds, "You're also very good at inventory."
"Thanks," he says. Then, at Ingrid's insistent stare: "Look, Felix can handle his own—" he stumbles, looking for a word that doesn't physically pain him to say, "—affairs. He doesn't need me—" cool, so that hurts worse, "—or anyone else to meddle in them. If he wants to date some idi—" Bernadetta's eyes have gone wide and horrified watching him, but his mouth keeps running, "—some nice young man, being that he himself is a nice young man—" ??? "—then that's fine. He doesn't need our blessing. We're not his parents." Both of whom are deceased, one more recently than the other.
Fucking hell. Everyone fireside is looking at him. Ingrid's mouth is hanging open. Ashe's face is strained like he's trying to work out a kind lie about something awful he's been made to eat. Sylvain almost continues, on the basis that surely, surely he can only go up from there, but Bernadetta clears her throat instead.
"Um," she says, shakily. She's still not used to speaking in front of a group; Sylvain feels an insane surge of gratitude amid his humiliation. "I think we should just wait and see. Before anyone does anything."
"I think that's a very good idea," Mercedes says after a beat.
Ashe fills in the silence with a story about helping Dedue prepare the morning mash and accidentally doubling or halving the water, Sylvain isn't sure, he can't bring himself to focus. The conversation veers blessedly away from Felix and the best way not to speak to him. Sylvain stares down into his mush to avoid Ingrid's gaze, which lingers on him and seems to ask, fairly: what the fuck is your problem?
He gives the question its due consideration, flanked as it is by thoughts of Felix, which he prods like a bruise. Where is Felix, and is he there alone? Is Felix seriously considering this? If he did consider this, would it be his first time? First time kissing, first time fucking or getting fucked? And hey, what the fuck is Sylvain's problem, and, less pressing, but also worth asking, is he ever going to get his shirt back?
Quietly, he says to Bernadetta, "I need to be put down like a lame horse."
Her gaze follows the sparks coughed up by the fire to the sky beyond. "Yeah," she says. "I know the feeling."
+
Anyone who would like to can tell Sylvain, a grown man with free will, that his autonomy was a mistake and he'll probably agree. Regardless, he uses that freedom of thought and locomotion to walk the path of the unwise to Felix's tent after dinner. It's been a whole day with this hanging over him. He has to know.
He waits for the camp to settle down a bit then ambles along like he's headed nowhere in particular. His pulse isn't half as nonchalant. In fact, he feels terribly fucking chalant as he draws close enough to see Felix's tent, lit from within like a beacon. Then he spies two perfectly silhouetted figures cast on the wall of the tent, heads bent close together.
They're sharing a bedroll, Sylvain thinks distantly. Their tents aren't large. There's no other way to sit so close. What's more is Sylvain can't hear what would be, for him, the dulcet strains of Felix tearing Ansel apart for so much as breathing in his direction with romantic intent.
Is he jumping to conclusions? Maybe. And could he just announce himself, barge in and say: hello, this man is a liar and freak, whereas I am both of these things and a coward, and thus the better romantic prospect? Of course, if he craved a more novel, fun and flirty mode of suicide. Thankfully he's a man of unpretentious tastes. He walks himself past Felix's tent, and can't hear a word of whatever's being said inside, no matter how hard he listens.
+
He takes a winding route around the edges of camp, dipping into the woods beyond to sit by the stream tossing rocks and mourn not having his wineskin to hand.
Eventually, with his ass numb from the cold bank and his troubles stacked precariously high—one misery always invites another, and he's never had to look far for the cause of his own suffering—he makes his way back. He doesn't yet feel like laying awake in his tent feeling heartsore and stupid, so he slips into the paddock to stand and watch the horses sway and breathe and nicker softly to themselves.
His own horse, Lula Bell, reproaches him when she realizes he's come empty handed. She takes his conciliatory petting with a sort of tolerant grace.
A real winner of an idea, he thinks, coming here: now he can number exactly how many horses they lost the day before. His selfishness is astounding, that he can nurse his petty sense of rejection amid a war.
So Felix is the crutch Sylvain has used to hobble forward through the long and useless years. So what, he thinks, trying the phrase on for size. So what if Felix takes Sylvain's ill-advised romantic gesture for some other idiot's ill-advised romantic gesture. Maybe it's a good thing, to have hope stolen out from under him. It isn't as if he was doing anything with it, save for drunken, overwrought soliloquies.
He attacks it from every angle—the unsuitability; how little he deserves it; how there's no reason Felix should want him, anyhow—and in spite of every iron-clad piece of logic, there's still the quiet, almost petulant thought, the voice of a child who doesn't understand why the world is the way it is: but I want him.
Sylvain heaves a breath, casts a furtive look around the paddock, then presses his face to the neck of his horse, lucky to have lived so long with an idiot for a rider.
+
At length he hikes back to his own tent. Camp is quiet now, the whole of it seeming to breathe in the dark like one huge beast in repose. He considers what it would be like if he just kept walking, straight on to the nearest pub in the nearest town. He could get spectacularly drunk on their finest swill and find someone to ignore the sunrise with. He tempts himself with the thought, like holding a morsel out to a cat, but can't make it stick. Maybe he's getting old. All he wants to do now is sleep.
The odds of that plummet as he approaches his tent. It's bright inside, when he sure as hell hadn't left it that way. He's wary and hopeful and raw with exhaustion all at once.
Worst case: indiscrete assassin. Best case: Felix in nothing but his thigh-highs, with a bottle of rich brown liquor and holding a dripping rack of lamb. Likely case: Ingrid, waiting up to get to the bottom of his public weirdness earlier in the evening.
He stands briefly just outside the tent, weighing his odds, then ducks under the flaps.
Well fuck. Felix: fully clothed and frowning. Sylvain's heart does a little flip anyhow. Turns out he doesn't actually need much to be happy.
"Aw," Sylvain says. "You lost, little guy?"
Felix's eyebrows twitch as if he doesn't find this funny. "Are you? Took you long enough."
A feeling knocks hard on Sylvain's breastbone. Felix tosses something at him in one quick movement. Sylvain catches it reflexively, just before it hits him in the face.
FHF. Right over the heart. The shirt smells better than the last time Sylvain saw it.
"You giving me your boyfriend's clothes?" Sylvain says weakly.
"Oh, fuck off," Felix hisses. "Like I wouldn't recognize your shirt, or Bernadetta's sewing."
Sylvain collapses down beside him on the bedroll, still clutching the shirt. "Embroidery."
"What?"
"It's called embroidery," Sylvain croaks, looking up at the ceiling. Every blink feels like sandpaper, suddenly. He's so tired and so far afield that he's not sure he's really having this conversation right now. It just doesn't seem likely, not this or any of the events that led up to it.
"Okay?" Felix says, incredulous. "It's dumb. Not Bernadetta's work," he amends, "but letting some twerp get his hands on it."
"It really wasn't my intention."
Felix studies his face. "I believe you," he says, and for some reason that about cracks Sylvain open.
"I'm sorry," Sylvain says. "It was—" Not a joke; he can't diminish it that way, not even now, in the face of their probably dissolving friendship. "It wasn't meant for anyone else to see."
"Just you," Felix says, in an odd voice.
"Yeah."
"And Bernadetta."
"Well, I don't exactly have the craftsmanship—" Sylvain shakes his head, cuts himself off at the pass. "I'll get rid of it. We can pretend it didn't happen? Odds are I'll get kicked by a horse one of these days and forget it for real. And math, too, probably."
"You're an idiot."
"I'm not arguing."
"No—" Felix says, which is funny, because his tone does sound exactly like he's dealing with an idiot. "It's a perfectly good shirt," he says, a bit strained.
Sylvain meets his eye. Slowly, cautiously. "You mean before I went and ruined it?"
"No. It's— Fine, as it is." He huffs a little.
"Felix," Sylvain says, lingering on each sound that makes up his name, laying it out between them. "To be clear, I have—feelings, for you."
There's a pause, for the space of a half-heartbeat, with the air fragile and still.
Then: "Do you think I'm fucking stupid?" Felix bursts out. "You don't think the shirt gave it away?"
Sylvain laughs; he laughs louder and longer than he means to. It's like the sudden crash of floodwaters. Felix looks on, pink-faced, and maybe, maybe, just a little pleased.
"Should I have written a ballad, instead?" Sylvain asks him, still grinning. His face hurts. "Hired a bard to perform?"
"That seems like the amount of discretion you're capable of," Felix mutters.
"Saints," Sylvain says. "Say, you haven't heard the rhyme going around, have you?"
The flash of murder in Felix's eyes attests he has. His mouth is grimly set. "Ingrid says we can't afford to lose any soldiers."
Sylvain laughs again. "I asked the same thing!"
Felix looks on him anew. He seems, impossibly, touched by this. "Ansel is a moron," he says gruffly, after a moment. "Harmless, but a moron."
"Did you break his heart? Poor thing."
"As if you care," Felix says.
Sylvain shrugs, happily. "I've walked around all day feeling like there was a spear in my gut," he says. "Ansel doesn't know the half of it."
Felix takes an audible breath. Sylvain's grin fades to something quieter, watching him. He catches and holds Sylvain's gaze and the air turns thick. Felix leans forward on his knees, tucks a bit of Sylvain's hair behind his ear, and kisses him, full and firm on the mouth.
It's like Sylvain breaks open, then. All the bad and the good rushing out and in, the pressure equalizing for what feels like the first time in his life. He takes Felix's face in his hands and kisses him back: deeply, intently, with more care than he's ever put into anything before.
They go on like that, swapping air, hands tangled up in each other, until Sylvain is so dizzy he has to pull back or do something humiliating, like come or pass out. Felix, gratifyingly, looks at least a little bit dazed, a frown playing over his red, wet mouth.
"Felix," Sylvain says once more, swiping a thumb over the corner of Felix's lips. "Just checking, but is it possible you have feelings for me, as well?
Felix gives him a flat, fond look. He fishes the shirt out from where it's pressed between them, badly wrinkled now. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger a moment, then tosses it over his shoulder before leaning in again.