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Something was up with Felix, Sylvain observed.
Something was usually up with Felix, of course--Dimitri, the professor turned down his invitation to duel, Dimitri, Sylvain had intentionally pissed him off, something to do with somebody's satchel or sword or technique that Sylvain still did not quite understand the issue with, and sometimes even Dimitri--but whatever it was, Sylvain could usually tease it out of him. So far, that hadn't worked on this, and while Sylvain didn't generally care to talk about his own feelings for any reason, he sensed this was one of those things that would bubble up out of Felix eventually.
He gave it time, and when Felix finally approached him in the hall between their rooms, Sylvain let his offhand comment die on his lips. "Morning Felix," he offered, and when that didn't engender a response; "everything alright?"
"We need to talk," Felix said with just enough gravity that Sylvain heard something serious in his voice and searched his eyes for his heart. Felix immediately swept them away.
"Okay," Sylvain said probingly, casually checking for observers when Felix didn't elaborate. "Dimitri's gone out. How's my room for a roundtable?" He wouldn't have offered if his partner from the other night were still there, but at least as long as Dimitri's room was vacant, the sole benefit to being crammed at the ass end of the hall meant Sylvain's room offered a certain level of privacy.
"Hmph," Felix said in the tone that meant 'yes', and he followed when Sylvain backtracked to his room. While Sylvain took a seat at his cluttered desk, Felix ignored the customary invitation to sit at the table and took up his customary position against the adjacent wall, crossing his arms.
Oh, you're really stressed about this one, Sylvain observed to himself.
Out loud, he only asked, "So what'd I do this time?" as he tucked his hands behind his head and tilted his chair back on two legs.
As intended, it drew Felix's eyes back his way with a slightly deeper frown that suggested Felix was trying not to tell him to stop doing that. "It's not always about you," Felix snapped too sharply for that to be entirely true.
Sylvain only canted his head curiously. (He caught Felix muttering something that might have contained the word 'fox.')
"I...need," Felix got out from between clenched teeth, and Sylvain raised his eyebrows; "Advice."
Sylvain's broad smile made Felix visibly regret everything. "Well why didn't you say so? I'm totally at your disposal. What's this about?" The obvious conclusion hit him in the middle of his own question: "A girl?"
"No," Felix said quickly, and glared at the floor.
Sylvain shifted his jaw and let the silence become awkward. "Ssssoo...a girl?"
"I told you, no, I--this was a mistake." Fascinatingly, Felix's blush still reached his ears, as Sylvain noticed with a little rush of nostalgia and affection.
"Wait wait wait, no no--okay, seriously, what's this about?" Sylvain asked, letting the chair down and scrambling up out of it to catch Felix by the arm before he could leave. "Are you fighting with Ingrid, or...?"
Felix blew out a short sigh, but didn't resist Sylvain's grip. "It's nothing like that." He was silent for just long enough that Sylvain thought he wasn't going to say anything else, and finally barked one short word: "Men."
Sylvain blinked. "I don't. Uh."
Flushing even darker, Felix refused to look anywhere near his direction. "I want to how to--appeal to them. That's all."
Sylvain was mystified. Why didn't you ask Dorothea? he was tempted to ask, though come to think of it he wasn't sure if Felix actually knew her well enough for that to occur to him. Regardless, if he'd struggled this hard just getting these words out to Sylvain, there was almost no chance of him saying them to anyone else.
Felix was watching him process this out of the corner of one eye, and Sylvain became aware that he was still touching Felix's arm. Just letting go might be taken as a rejection, so Sylvain gave it a bracing squeeze before he did. "Oh. Well, yeah, that's a different story, but why do you..." What do you even need to change? was somehow Sylvain's first thought, and he bit the inside of his cheek.
"It's not important why. Just tell me."
Sylvain hesitated. "It might help if I knew which guy you--"
"There isn't one," Felix snapped, which meant there obviously was. "I'm asking in general."
Instantly Sylvain was torn between his amusement at Felix's actual attempt at subterfuge and his ravenous, envious curiosity. Is it Dimitri? he wondered, and briefly felt terribly small inside. "Well, I dunno," he admitted finally, scratching one ear and shifting his weight. "I'm not sure any of my lines work on men, I've never tried it." (Except that one time, but that had been an accident, and it definitely hadn't worked.) "Maybe you could just be...direct? You're good at that. Try asking if he wants to sleep with you."
Felix's expression shifted to a starker one that usually indicated he was actively experiencing pain. "Would that work on you?"
And Sylvain nearly lost his balance. "On me?"
"You're a man," Felix said defensively, quick enough to parry all the startled thoughts popping to life in Sylvain's head. "So tell me what appeals to you. Why are you making this so complicated?"
I'm not the one who can't be straightforward, Sylvain was tempted to grouse, and that reasoning didn't even hold up. Felix was also a man, so by that logic he should just apply whatever appealed to himself--only Sylvain made the mistake of letting himself imagine it. Felix nose to nose with him, eyes narrowed in spite of the flush to his cheeks, breath rushing over Sylvain's lips with a question that was more of a command: Sleep with me.
"Yeah, that'd work on me. I think. Probably."
Felix pinched the bridge of his nose. "Besides that."
"Fine, let me think..." Scrubbing a hand through his hair, Sylvain frowned. It really seemed to him that appealing to other men should be pretty simple. Obviously there were guys who'd be offended about some imagined slight to their pride or something, especially in Faerghus, but even those would probably roll their eyes and get on with it if they were actually interested. (This was more or less the way Sylvain would have expected Felix to react if Sylvain had been the one to bring this up instead.) But were there things that recommended a person to Sylvain over anyone else...?
Felix had almost certainly asked the wrong person, Sylvain figured.
But he'd asked. "Spontaneity," Sylvain said finally. "It's exciting to meet someone who's a little hard to predict."
"Like a surprise attack," Felix said approvingly.
"Yes.--No. Not like--well, actually, maybe it's better for both of you if he likes those," Sylvain realized.
Felix looked worryingly likely to press the issue, but Sylvain caught a thoughtful look in his eye as he shifted his weight and set a hand on his hip instead. "What else?"
During the brief silence, Sylvain had already hit on an easy one: "Assertiveness."
"I don't know how to do that," Felix said flatly.
Sylvain couldn't help shooting him an arch look. "Felix, you're the most assertive person I know."
"I am not," Felix asserted. "What else?"
Holding in a sigh, Sylvain tapped his chin with a thoughtful knuckle. This one had also already occurred to him, largely courtesy of the flush that still had not entirely left Felix's ears, but he knew he had to precede it with some qualifiers. "So this one probably depends on the guy in question, but, y'know, maybe try...being kinda shy and bashful. Just a little," he added quickly when Felix's expression twisted with consternation.
"You literally just told me to be direct." Felix's glare told Sylvain he was weighing the possibility Sylvain was just screwing with him.
"I know, I know, it's contradictory--listen I don't make the rules, I just know that's what appeals." To me, anyway, but Sylvain decided it wouldn't be useful to Felix to draw attention to that. "Just try directness sometimes and shyness other times. You know. Like how you don't just use the same angle of attack over and over again in a fight, because it gets predictable." Damn. Now he was doing it.
Felix made a considering noise.
Judging it safe to probe a little deeper, Sylvain crossed his arms. "Now before you say 'what else', I could really use some idea who you--hey!"
"That's all I wanted to know," Felix said, eeling out of Sylvain's reach with damnable speed and pausing with his hand on the door handle. "Thanks," he said, just softly enough to almost resemble the way he might have said it when they were kids, and then-- "for actually being helpful this time."
"Seriously? I swear, none of you give me enough credit..." Sylvain's grousing failed to entirely cover up what the tone in Felix's voice had done to him, and he blew out a sigh. "Anytime. See you in class?"
"Hn."
The door shut unobtrusively behind Felix, and Sylvain instantly regretted not insisting. He should have chased Felix out, slung an arm across his shoulders and pestered him all the way to class and then lunch and then back. Showed whoever had caught Felix's eye that there was already someone in their way, someone important who couldn't just be pried off him with some easy words like I'm well aware that you two have always been close, but notwithstanding, Felix and I...
Sylvain scrubbed his hands down his face to bring the daydream to an end. Like Felix said, this had nothing to do with him. He shouldn't want this anyway; Felix might be a prick sometimes but he didn't deserve for someone like Sylvain to play around with all those intense feelings he always had in his heart. If he'd spotted someone he wanted to pursue, Sylvain's role as a friend was to support his choice and stay out of it.
I should see if Elodie still wants to go on that date, he thought to himself with a little rush of vindictive satisfaction as he headed out.
-
Something was still up with Felix, Sylvain observed.
In the few days since they'd talked, Sylvain had expected to see a change, or for Felix to start spending a suspicious amount of time in the company of someone else from their class (or perhaps not even their class). And while he had noticed Felix occasionally training with one of the Black Eagles (his name was Alessandro or Fortinbras or something like that), it wasn't like that was new or had ramped up recently.
Still. Felix was pretending his shoulders had come down from around his ears when Sylvain could plainly see they had not.
This was perhaps the reason why Sylvain indulged him when Felix pushed one of their sparring sessions a little longer than usual, until their fellow students at the training grounds went from sparse to absent. This wasn't exactly new either; Sylvain tended to bow out sooner than Felix would have preferred as a general rule, and he was definitely not quite working hard enough for his stamina to improve too much (but if he started doing that then for all he knew Felix wouldn't harangue him to train anymore and Sylvain just couldn't have that). At this point, he'd been useless for the last few rounds and the fact that Felix seemed to be trying for a new personal best each time was starting to wear on Sylvain's pride.
"Phew! Alright, I'm calling it," he said finally, catching his breath and ducking his head into his arm so he could wipe his forehead with his sleeve.
"Again," Felix said, snapping back into his offensive stance.
Sylvain hesitated. Admittedly he'd held out this long in hopes of hearing a grudging concession to his unusually invested work ethic, so it peeved him slightly that this was going unacknowledged. But on the other hand he also didn't want to sour things by irritating Felix with a true denial, at least before he could sour them by suggesting a double date. "C'mon, Felix, don't you think that's enough? It's not like you won't be able to beat me again tomorrow, too."
"That's because you don't train consistently enough," Felix insisted.
Sylvain frowned, annoyed to be confronted with something as inconvenient as the truth. "Okay, granted. We can still work on consistently tomorrow. We're done."
Something had changed in the air. Sylvain felt it even before Felix straightened up out of his stance and took the four strides that entered Sylvain's space. He caught a fistful of Sylvain's shirt and pulled them nose to nose against Sylvain's grunt of surprise. "We're done," Felix said almost against his lips; "when I say we're done."
"Oh," Sylvain said faintly.
Before his garbled memory of language could arrange words into sentences, Felix had shoved him back and was recreating an opposing distance. "Again."
Interesting. So something about this was important to Felix on a level Sylvain hadn't clocked. It was odd; he hadn't had the impression when they started that there was anything particularly unusual in the air, so it was like Felix had just decided arbitrarily in the middle (or maybe even the moment Sylvain wanted to stop) to keep pushing.
Then again, it was Felix, and even as well as Sylvain knew him there was still so much he'd never be able to suss out.
"Fine, you win. We can go one more time," Sylvain relented, readying his sword.
Felix's response to this was a scoff and then a lunge; the same move he'd opened with a few other times, and which Sylvain was prepared to dodge. The feint afterward was also predictable, and Sylvain was quick enough to deflect the empty fade after that; Felix was still all speed but less aggression than the prior rounds, and Sylvain wondered if he was tiring.
Sylvain wondered this right up until Felix interrupted a sequence of blows to drop (narrowly avoiding Sylvain's counter) and execute a leg sweep that put Sylvain right on his ass.
When the world stopped spinning, Sylvain could feel Felix's legs on either side of his hips and the cool flat side of the wooden training sword against his throat.
"Yield," Felix commanded from above him, panting.
Sylvain stared, taking in the flush on Felix's cheeks and the tendrils of black hair that had escaped his ponytail to stick to his face and neck instead. It was as though he briefly forgot where he was, and had to blink to remind himself. "I yield," he said finally, relinquishing his hold on his own sword and letting his hands lie open on the gritty floor of the training grounds.
Felix hesitated for longer than Sylvain expected him to, and there was something in his eyes almost--an appeal, as if he were looking to Sylvain for rescue from a conversation he didn't want to have or a journey he didn't want to go on alone. Then it was gone, and despite the resolutely steady hands that pulled the sword away from Sylvain's throat and tossed it aside, Sylvain could feel something--else. A quiver, passing through Felix's whole body; unmistakeable from this close.
Sylvain's hands landed on Felix's hips before he could try to stand up. "You don't know what to do with me next," Sylvain said wonderingly, feeling his lips split into a broad, punchably smug smile.
Instantly Felix's flush was even more obvious. "D-don't be ridiculous." Assertive, spontaneous--and he was doing bashful now, but Sylvain didn't actually think this was an intentional display.
The pure victorious glee that surged through Sylvain was as good as any concoction. Felix struggled but could not match him for strength in such close quarters or at this angle when Sylvain wanted him on his back, and Sylvain trapped him there, pinning one hand above his head and the other to the ground next to Felix's ear. (Felix let out a low growl that reminded him of an enraged cat.)
"It's me, isn't it?" Sylvain said then, feeling Felix's entire body go very still. "You've been trying to get my attention. Admit it."
Felix's mouth worked soundlessly and Sylvain felt an exploratory sort of tension in his pinned hands before they went still. "You," Felix finally got out, meeting Sylvain's eyes with sudden, deliberate defiance; "can't make me."
The thrill that hit Sylvain was like standing up too fast, briefly turning his vision to shadows as his body rushed all that blood somewhere else, and Felix's breathing stuttered underneath him. He sought out Felix's lips then and found them yielding, inviting, as if all this time Felix had only been waiting for Sylvain to get bold enough to try him--and the disappointed noise when Sylvain pulled back was fit to break a heart.
"Oh, Felix," he chuckled into Felix's ear; "I think you know I can."