![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonislandAskbox fic on Tumblr was great.
Anyway Fire Emblem: Three Houses is currently eating my life, somehow (Scott is how, every time "somehow" ends a sentence about a fandom it's Scott) and there are TOO MANY GOOD SHIPS AND CHARACTER DYNAMICS TO JUST WRITE PROPER FIC FOR EVERYTHING leave me comment prompts and you might get words. Leave as many comment prompts as you want; it will increase your odds that at least one will hit.
("kate last time you did a prompt post--" I know I know but I made a sincere effort and that's what counts in life.)
Anyway Fire Emblem: Three Houses is currently eating my life, somehow (Scott is how, every time "somehow" ends a sentence about a fandom it's Scott) and there are TOO MANY GOOD SHIPS AND CHARACTER DYNAMICS TO JUST WRITE PROPER FIC FOR EVERYTHING leave me comment prompts and you might get words. Leave as many comment prompts as you want; it will increase your odds that at least one will hit.
("kate last time you did a prompt post--" I know I know but I made a sincere effort and that's what counts in life.)
- "hours turned to years (three gardens)" | yuri leclerc/bernadetta von varley | worksafe | before, during, after Garreg Mach [and yes I completely screwed up the timeline] | now on the AO3 (with the timeline corrected)
- "dear forgiveness," | dimitri blaiddyd & edelgard von hresvelg | worksafe | tag to "something other than the desperation" | now on the AO3
- "been inclined to believe they never would" | dimitri blaiddyd/byleth eisner ust, blue lions ensemble | worksafe | dimitri has A Situation. actually he has two situations and one of them is tragic. | now on the AO3
- "but you lack the conviction to look at me straight and say yes" [1 of X] | felix fraldarius/sylvain gautier | NSFWish | sometimes you propose a friends-with-benefits arrangement purely to save your friend from himself, yeah, that's it
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 12:06 am (UTC)hours turned to years (three gardens)
Date: 2020-06-15 04:22 am (UTC)contains, y’know, yuri backstory, count varley existing, kissing someone while thinking about how you’re supposed to be killing them]
“You’ve got—“ Yuri says, laughing. One of Bernadetta’s careful braids has come unpinned and tumbles past her shoulders, a twig caught in it next to her cheek. It’s…it’s good, to see her running, to hear her laughter answer his. It doesn’t feel quite the same as the usual satisfaction of fooling a mark. He likes it.
He doesn’t like that he likes it, but here she is in front of him, pale cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, and he does like it. There isn’t any point in pretending otherwise. It would be a dangerous mistake to; he needs to understand himself better than that.
She fumbles with her braid and only tangles the twig in deeper. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t—I don’t know how—”
“Here,” Yuri says, before he can think better of it. “Let me.”
Bernadetta turns her face up to his trustingly. He steadies her with a hand at her jaw, and if he’d had a blade between his fingers— But all he can think about, rather than the missed opportunity to get the mission done and go home, is the smooth warmth of her skin. Her pulse races under his fingertips. She looks at him with dark eyes and parted lips, and he almost breaks the twig like he’d never picked a lock in his life.
They’re surrounded by greenery. Sunset paints everything with honey-gold and lengthening shadow. If there is anyplace hidden, separate, safe at Count Varley’s home, this feels like it. Yuri has to swallow before he can speak. “Better be careful,” he says, hand still in her hair. “You’re looking at me like you want me to kiss you. Some people might get the wrong idea.”
She’s still Count Varley’s daughter, after all. She’s a meek little thing, a sweet colorless shadow. He’s the gardener’s assistant, a kid with rough hands and dirt ground in around his nails so deep that he can’t scrub it off—and that’s just the dirt she can see.
Bernadetta’s breath hitches and her pulse goes even wilder, but she doesn’t move.
Step back, Yuri thinks. He’s not even sure which of them he means it to. He came here to kill Bernadetta von Varley, not to—
“M-maybe,” Bernadetta says, voice tiny and as ragged as her heartbeat, “it’s the right idea?” And then she does step back, horrified and much too late, hands coming up to cover her face. “Oh no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—I know you don’t actually want to kiss me, I’ve ruined everything, so stupid, Bernie—”
Her voice cracks in despair. Yuri grabs her by the arm before she can run. “Hey,” he says to the top of her head. “I do.”
She lowers her hands just a little and peeks at him over her fingers. It’s cute. Yuri…Yuri is in so much trouble that for a minute he feels like he’s drowning in it. “Really?” she asks, voice muffled.
“Really,” he says. “But I shouldn’t.”
She lets her hands fall. “Why not?”
Because I’m here to kill you, and if I fail then I’ll have made a powerful man angry and he’ll probably hire someone else, who won’t make you smile first. Because if you knew where I’d been you’d want to scrub your face completely off after. “Because you’re a count’s daughter.”
Bernadetta tries to square her shoulders. Even the effort makes something warm and fluttering unfold in Yuri’s chest. “That’s all right,” she says. She’s trying to make it imperious, but her voice trembles. “I don’t mind.”
She’s breathlessly scared and she’s asking anyway, and Goddess forgive him Yuri can’t bring himself to tell her no. He tips her chin up again and thinks, You’re so brave. He kisses her, gently, and thinks, I’m sorry as her eyes drift closed.
He makes himself stop kissing her and still holds her for a moment—for long enough that she won’t feel rejected—and thinks, I have to do it tonight.
The first time Yuri sees Bernadetta at Garreg Mach, his own stupid heart almost stops.
He knows better. He’s always known better. He’d prepared himself this time, not tracing the Bernadetta von Varley written on the roster with anything other than his eyes and not allowing his eyes to linger. “A few acquaintances,” he’d said dismissively, when Balthus asked, and changed the subject to the Gonerils.
He’d thought he might run into Bernadetta in a classroom, or the dining hall, or something like that. Get the first shock over with. He’d only come to the greenhouse at breakfast time, when everyone else awake was most likely eating, to see what kind of more exotic plants they were growing up here in the monastery itself. Old habits—unlike most old victims—died hard.
Instead she’s here, humming softly as she rummages through a drawer. Plants riot behind her, lush and exuberant, and isn’t that a familiar sight. The air is hazy with humidity and dawn pours thick and golden through the windows, not so much outlining her in light as flooding her with it. She’s cut her hair, but there’s a fucking leaf in it again anyway.
Yuri doesn’t think he’s moved, or made a sound, but she looks up anyway. There’s a few beats of silence as her eyes get wider and wider. Blood rushes to her face then drains away again, and then she screams. The drawer slides out of the worktable with a huge clash of wood and metal, and Bernadetta takes off while tools are still clattering onto the floor. She’s a blur, and then she’s gone.
Yuri picks up every single damn one of the clippers and wires and whatever else was in that drawer and puts every single damn one of them away. Guess that answers the question of whether she still remembers him.
Guess it also answers the question of whether she regrets it.
The peace talks have been going on for days.
“I’ve written Claude a letter,” Lorenz says, as the former lords of the former Imperial Duchy of Faerghus start bickering with each other in what Yuri can only conclude is supposed to be an attempt to impress either Dimitri or Edelgard, and which mostly seems to be irritating both of the monarchs, infuriating most of their closest advisors, and displeasing Hubert. “I have to admit he has a gift for setting people at their ease.”
Hilda doesn’t look up from braiding tiny gemstones into her hair. “I wrote Claude a letter two weeks ago.”
“How did you—”
Yuri slips out a side door. The hallway is mercifully quiet. It must have been rough on Claude’s allies to lose him so abruptly—even Yuri himself hadn’t quite expected it—but with Hilda distracted they’re about to have to call a recess anyway so everyone can calm down. It’s close to midday anyway. Lunch should help.
Yuri isn’t consciously thinking about where he’s going, but he finds himself wandering toward a balcony overlooking a courtyard.
A few people aren’t at the peace talks at all—the Varley seat has been empty every day, though he knows he’s caught the flash of Bernadetta’s hair in the background a few times. If she’s here, accessible in case there’s something House Varley needs to weigh in on but out of range of the arguing, she wouldn’t be hiding in a strange room in an unfamiliar building.
Yuri is not actually surprised at himself when he looks down past the balcony railing and sees her tucked into the corner of a hedge with a book. He considers it, briefly, and decides why not: he swings over the rail, twists in midair, and lands on his feet with only a light crunch of gravel. A little out of practice, but not bad.
“Is…is someone there?” Bernadetta asks.
“Just me,” he says. Flipping over the hedge would be a bad idea—showing off, with not enough reward for the risk. He’s not dressed for it, either. He goes the long way around instead, working his way through a gap just barely wide enough for him. “Nice den you have here.”
Her shoulders droop. “Do they need me?”
“Nah.” Yuri drops onto the grass at her side. He thinks about leaning back on his hands, but there’s nonchalant and then there’s reckless. “I got tired of the shouting and left.”
“…Shouting?”
“This is a good idea of yours,” Yuri says. Those short trousers are also a good idea of hers, but he isn’t going to say anything about her legs when it took years to get her to stop running away whenever she saw him. “Peaceful.” Sunlight, greenery. He’s got to stop running into her in gardens.
“I have good ideas sometimes!” Bernadetta says defensively. She closes her book with a snap.
He hides his smile. “Like what?”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. He turns around, afraid he’s pushed her past mad enough to spark and into genuinely hurt, and sees her frowning at the hedge, hand held out in front of her.
“Bernadetta?”
She breaks a stem off—the littlest twig, it still cracks as loud as a lance shattering—and jams it awkwardly into her hair. “Well,” she says, blushing, and stops. “I don’t—I don’t know! I, um, left a boring meeting!”
Yuri is smooth, and sophisticated, and almost never surprised when he’s dealing with almost anyone else at all. He still feels like he’s taken a hard blow to the head. “You’ve got…” He watches his hand gesture at the twig in her hair.
She blushes darker, not meeting his eyes at all. He thinks she’s staring at his shoulder, thinks he feels it like passing too near a fire when she flicks a look up to his jaw and then back down.
“You can just ask,” he says, still a little dazed.
Bernadetta mumbles something that might be, “I really can’t.”
The twig is already sliding out of her hair. The new style is sleek, incredibly flattering. It’s not designed to hold any part of a garden in it. “Do you want me to kiss you again?”
“You’re not going to try to kill me again if you do, are you?” she asks, sounding surprisingly calm about it. Her gaze catches his and holds. She might almost be…teasing?
“Really…really wasn’t planning on it,” Yuri says. “I should have just grabbed you and run, back then.” He hadn’t been thinking at all. Her skin had been the color of pearls in the moonlight, one bare arm flung over the sheet. Count Varley had thought he was defending his daughter’s virtue, not her life, until Yuri fumbled his knife trying to get it back into its sheath. Of course, that slip had been what turned the count’s intention from murder to just the worst beating of Yuri’s life, so it’d been a lucky one for him. And another reason to regret that he’d frozen.
Bernadetta says, “Oh.”
Would she even have liked Abyss?
“Well,” she says, “if...you’re not going to have to kill me like it’s some kind of curse, then, um. Maybe?”
“Yes or no, Bernadetta,” Yuri says, mostly because it matters and only a little bit to give her a hard time.
She gulps air. “Fine! Yes!”
It’s been years too long, but her skin is still sun-warm under his hand, and her mouth is still soft, and it’s been a long damn war. This time when she pulls him closer he doesn’t have to pull away.
There are grass stains on his knees and the backs of his shoulders when he makes it back to the peace talks after lunch. Sylvain is definitely laughing at him. Yuri makes a rude gesture toward the Faerghus bank of seats and settles back in his chair with a smile.
Behind him, the door opens, and Bernadetta steps in.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 12:07 am (UTC)been inclined to believe they never would
Date: 2020-06-15 09:29 pm (UTC)me:
me:
me: let’s go with Byleth existing and not realizing how much they’re making Dimitri wanna die
contains a guest appearance by dimitri’s asshole brain, plus a hot-for-teacher dynamic of the “teacher would suggest moving class to basement if someone suggested it is too ‘hot’ in the classroom” sort, not that I think anyone in this comments section is going to be disturbed by that but, y’know]
Encouraging Byleth Eisner—Professor Byleth, Dimitri reminds himself again—to come teach the Blue Lions had been a catastrophic mistake. He can see that now. At the time he’d only been thinking of what an asset they would be to Faerghus; of their incredible skill, their power, their grace…
Well, it hadn’t been the first time he’d been dazzled by someone’s prowess on the battlefield. He had thought, foolishly, that it would pass, or at least that it would be endurable.
Byleth hooks their leg—their long, muscular, very much not-covered leg—around Dimitri’s and knocks his feet out from under him. He goes sprawling on his back at their feet, barely even feeling the impact against the sawdust-softened earth of the training ground as he lands.
“Are you okay?” Byleth asks, looking down at Dimitri with what he thinks might be concern. They’re backlit by the sun, radiant with it. Dimitri has to close his eyes for a moment. “You seem…shaken. I didn’t expect you to land that hard.”
“It has been a day full of the unexpected,” Dimitri says, sitting up carefully.
In the background, where his classmates have been watching him embarrass himself the entire time, Sylvain says, “I’ll say,” and then “Ow! Ingrid—”
Dimitri scrambles to his feet. “Shall we try again, Professor? This time I’ll endeavor to keep my balance a little longer so you can demonstrate properly.” He gives them his most winning smile, the one he uses to reassure Rodrigue, and after a moment’s hesitation Byleth nods.
It gets…easier. It does. That does not make it less of a mistake.
Dimitri gets a paper on how to best use mounted archers back with Very insightful. written on it in the dark blue ink Byleth favors and he can’t quite manage to restrain himself from sweeping his thumb over the words. The praise is as reserved as Byleth themself is, but that just means Dimitri can almost hear their voice as he reads. Warmth unfurls between his ribs.
“Pathetic,” Felix whispers, voice tight with familiar rage.
It is. Of course, Dimitri knows it is. Professor Byleth is his instructor, and a respected employee of the church chosen by Archbishop Rhea personally besides. They are brilliant, talented, kind, full of incredible promise. Dimitri is none of those.
“Following our professor around like you’re pretending to be something as loyal as a dog, when—”
“Felix,” Ingrid snaps.
At the front of the classroom, Byleth says, “Quiet, please, both of you.”
Ingrid chokes on an indignant sputter.
Dimitri drops his eyes to his paper again. Very insightful., Byleth had written. He pretends the period means there’s no room for doubt, that they will not change their opinion of him for the worse.
Three days later, after an hours-long exercise with counters on a map, Byleth puts a hand on his shoulder as they lean in to see the final configuration and says, “Well done,” and Dimitri forgets how to talk. He manages only a faint croaking noise as fire blooms under his skin.
“Oh, Professor!” Mercedes says, from directly across the map table. “Can you show me that approach over on the east side of the field again, please?”
Byleth takes their hand away from Dimitri and circles around to Mercedes’s side. Dimitri swallows and says, “I’m glad we reached a satisfactory answer, Professor.”
Mercedes twinkles at him.
Dimitri considers asking Claude or Edelgard if he might be allowed to change his name and transfer into one of their Houses. It would be better for everyone, and not just a relief for him. But no, he cannot run from his obligations, and those are more important.
“Your Highness,” Ingrid says when she finds Dimitri stretching his legs near the fishpond.
He looks at her.
“Never mind,” she says, and goes on her way.
It isn’t—he had grown cramped, researching in the library. It had been necessary to move to keep his muscles limber. Byleth isn’t even fishing, right now; they’re with Professors Manuela and Hanneman, discussing lesson plans or something of that nature. Dimitri isn’t following them.
He did meet them at the fishpond once. Their face was relaxed instead of blank, their eyes luminous. They’d seemed…happy.
Dimitri wouldn’t intrude on that. He truly wouldn’t. He just likes to think of them happy, while he buries himself in old records and ugly secrets.
“Ingrid!” he calls after her.
Ingrid stops and turns.
“I don’t… Please don’t…”
“It’s all right,” she says gently. “Enjoy your walk.”
It is not all right. It’s an indulgence Dimitri hadn’t considered until he was caught at it, and now that he has been—
Enough.
Five years later, Byleth’s ghost finds Dimitri. They will demand he kill that woman, and maybe for them he’ll at last be able to find her and obey.
He hates that he’s dragged them into this after all.
Their hand, outstretched, is clean. No blood, no bone, no burns, no broken nails. The cloak falls back from their arm, which is just as whole and firm.
Dimitri stares.
They make no demand of him. They just stand there, luminous, reaching out to him with a hand that does not grasp or claw.
They are…alive?
Dimitri finds his feet, and his voice, and gets up to follow them, because what else has he ever been able to do?
Re: been inclined to believe they never would
Date: 2020-06-15 09:34 pm (UTC)Re: been inclined to believe they never would
Date: 2020-06-15 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:24 am (UTC)dear forgiveness,
Date: 2020-06-15 10:29 am (UTC)“Ssh,” someone says. To see them she’d have to move, and even the thought of moving makes tears prickle in the corner of her eyes. One overflows and traces an itching path down the side of her face.
With effort, Edelgard says, “No.”
Whoever it is gasps. “You’re awake!” She doesn’t recognize the voice. “I’ll get his Majesty—”
Stop, Edelgard thinks. Where am I? Who are you? Where is Hubert? She doesn’t get any of those out before the door opens and closes again.
The edge of the sunlight quivers—she must have moved her leg under the sheets. Amazing, that she can do that.
Out in the hallway she hears the clicking of fashionable boots on stone, and the deeper, duller sound of marching boots. Dimitri and someone else, then.
The door opens.
She hadn’t realized how much it had hurt her to see Dimitri’s reaction to the husk until she sees the warm relief in his face now. “Edelgard,” he says, bowing. Even that doesn’t take that brightness from the room.
Mercedes, at his side, says, “You’re looking much better than we’d hoped!”
“Hubert,” Edelgard says. Her lips are dry, but she doesn’t want to spare the energy to wet them. It’s the quickest of her questions, and it will tell her something about the rest.
“He’s doing just fine,” Mercedes says. If she’s lying she’s terrifying; Edelgard believes her instinctively. Then again, when this started, Jeritza had said that his sister was good clean through. Maybe it’s all true. Either way, Mercedes’s sweet smile doesn’t change. “You’re both still recovering, but once one of you is able to move around of course you’ll be able to see him.” She touches Edelgard’s foot through the sheets and a rush of magic rises, loosening Edelgard’s aching muscles and dulling the flares of pain. “You damaged yourself pretty badly, though.”
“What…”
“You’re tired,” Mercedes says, and her eyes are so, so sad. “You almost burned yourself up to fuel that thing you turned into, and you didn’t have much before that.”
Dimitri takes a seat at Edelgard’s side, in the chair she couldn’t see before. With the echoes of Mercedes’s magic still whispering under her skin she’s able to roll her head to face him. “It is good to see you again,” he says quietly, “in happier circumstances than last time.”
Mercedes withdraws, leaving the two of them alone.
Edelgard considers her lack of fear, turning it and looking at it from every angle. There are things she is afraid of, she decides. Pain. The possibility that they’re lying to her about Hubert. The dreams that she knows she’ll have when she sleeps. But she isn’t afraid of Dimitri, for all that they were enemies when she was last awake. “Good to see you too.”
“There are treaties and things to negotiate when you’re feeling better,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I think the paperwork breeds when I’m not looking.”
“Treaties?” Edelgard asks, frowning and then wishing she hadn’t.
“Peace treaties.” Dimitri sounds surprised. “We’re not at war any more, after all.”
Edelgard keeps her face still with long practice. “You conquered Adrestia.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with Adrestia,” he says with an awkward little laugh, as if they’re so much younger than they really are. “All I ever wanted was to do well by Faerghus. And our new Archbishop Byleth has been talking to Hapi about church reforms, but you may want to bring that up in the negotiations yoursel—”
“Wait,” Edelgard chokes out, reeling. “Wait. Please.” She’s crying again, the room full of refracted light, and every stuttering breath yanks pain through her shoulders. “I don’t—I lost.”
One of Dimitri’s hands covers hers where it rests atop the sheet. The warmth of it is dizzying, gives her strength enough to turn her arm so her palm lies against his. “You were playing the wrong game,” he says. “That’s all.” His own voice is rough—when she blinks her vision clear she can see his eye is shining wet too. “Edelgard…I wish you’d asked for help sooner. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“You called me El again,” she says. Moving had been a mistake. She’s weighed down by exhaustion again, rolling from her hand, her mouth, her eyes. She pushes through. “When we were enemies.”
“El,” Dimitri says. His voice almost breaks on it. She can’t keep her eyes open any more. “Thank you.”
She gives him a twitch of her fingers, the closest thing to a squeeze she can manage, and falls into sleep again.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 09:09 pm (UTC)this was beautiful. el...!!!!
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:31 am (UTC)but you lack the conviction to look at me straight and say yes [NSFWish; a scene not a ficlet]
Date: 2020-06-20 12:12 am (UTC)contains…fuck, idk, my brain isn’t working. sylvain’s general horrible coping mechanisms, attempted assassination during sex, some violence and blood, offscreen OC death, references to torture (no torture actually occurs), talking about sex that doesn’t happen in this scene, general dubiously-worksafeness without actually being the fun kind of NSFW. i might be missing something in that list.]
“I swear,” Sylvain says, not loosening his grip on—hell, what was her name, Giselle?—“she really was trying to kill me.”
There’s a knife that definitely isn’t his lying in the middle of the floor, and a trickle of blood running down his leg from where Giselle hadn’t been quick enough to cut the artery in his thigh before he pinned her. Those might be points in his favor.
Of course, the points against him are: one, he’s naked; two, Giselle is mostly naked and her breasts are just as nice outside her dress as he’d thought they would be; three, he’s not actually completely sure where she’d been keeping the knife before she almost managed to kill him with it, which was embarrassingly unobservant of him; and four, well, four, it isn’t Ingrid whose room is near his and heard the scuffle and—
Sylvain is pretty sure he’d locked the door, actually.
Felix crosses his arms. “What did you do,” he says, unimpressed. When he’d first burst in his eyes had flicked down Sylvain’s body, catching briefly on the blood before making their way back up. Now, his glare doesn’t waver.
“Wait a minute,” says Sylvain, still not letting Giselle get any space to move. She’s not much bigger than Annette; he’d feel bad about it if either her knife or her movements had been less sharp. “Did you break the lock on my door?”
“What did you do,” Felix repeats, which is, in classic Felix contradiction, an answer itself. He was worried, like a real person who doesn’t actually hate Sylvain. It might be charming in different circumstances.
Giselle whimpers. Sylvain glances down to check the angle of her shoulders and is reassured—he hasn’t popped anything out of alignment. “Nothing! I met her tonight in the village, I bought her a drink, I invited her somewhere a little more comfortable, and then next thing I know she has a knife on me.”
“Right,” Felix says, and leaves.
Sylvain has a moment to be stunned but not enough time to work his way around to outraged before Felix comes back, carrying what looks like a pair of ornamental sashes.
“Turn her around?”
“We should probably wake someone else up,” Sylvain says, even as he turns Giselle so Felix can reach her hands. Oh, she is furious—but not even at him, which is the most unsettling part of this. He’s used to women glaring at him like they’d like to carve his callousness clean off, along with a good few inches of his skin. Giselle genuinely does not look like she cares.
Felix finishes with the first sash. “We will. The crossguard design on that knife is Imperial.”
“Oh,” Sylvain says.
Giselle tries to spit in his face, but this is not Sylvain’s first day at the fair, and he dodges. She kicks when Felix tries to get her ankles and it gets very uncomfortable for a while. Sylvain grabs the top sheet off his bed and tucks it around her torso to make himself feel a little less villainous. She had tried to kill him, after all.
“Put some clothes on yourself,” Felix says once Giselle’s ankles are tied too. “I’ll get the others.”
He leaves as if this kind of thing happens every week, which, Sylvain would like to note, it does not. He’s never picked up an assassin before, or at least not one who intended to kill him personally. He’s presumably never picked up an assassin before at all.
“So what was the plan?” he asks her. “Use me to get into the monastery, then kill as many of us as you could before someone caught you?”
Giselle doesn’t answer.
“That’s a low-down trick for your Emperor.”
“Please,” Giselle says, sounding disgusted. “Her Majesty would never have commanded such a thing.”
It’s true, it doesn’t really seem Edelgard’s style. She favored the direct back at school, and she certainly favored the direct when she started the war.
The problem with interrogating Giselle, Sylvain thinks glumly, is going to be that torture doesn’t actually work. Dimitri might order it, the way he is right now, but people will say anything to get the pain to stop if it gets bad enough. If they knew who she was they could try something with some kind of leverage, but the fact that Sylvain is thinking about it as “something with some kind of leverage” sums up the problem there. They are woefully unqualified to be doing this.
He might have made some errors in judgment along the way. He puts some trousers on, so as not to add to those errors by having to see Dimitri’s indifference to Byleth seeing someone else’s dick. Or, and this is a terrifying thought, giving Mercedes the opportunity to comment. Trousers are a marvelous invention.
Soon enough there’s an entire gathering in his room, and the conclusion is that Giselle is to be locked up under guard until they’re able to get some useful information out of her. Since this gets her out of Sylvain’s room, he thinks that’s an excellent plan.
“We’ll talk tomorrow about your…diversions,” Professor Byleth says, giving him a stern look.
Sylvain groans, but it’s a fair point. “Tomorrow, though? You’ll all let me sleep first?”
Professor Byleth nods.
Sylvain shoos everyone out the door, except for Felix, who refuses to go. “What,” Sylvain asks, too tired for charm. It had been a bad week—an ice storm, bad news from Gautier, an ugly drawn-out scuffle against some bandits where they’d lost one of the knights.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Felix snaps. “You could have gotten us all killed.”
“Who does that?” Sylvain asks, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Who just—for Goddess’s sake, I’m used to women who are using me, but women who are using me to kill me?”
Felix picks up the knife and turns it in his hands. “Can you just not stop yourself?” he asks, barbed and vicious. “Do your limbs start dropping off if you don’t get enough sex?”
It’s soothing. It’s familiar, from back when the worst problem he had was the margraviate and not the war. Giselle had thanked him for the work they’d done defending the village, which hadn’t stopped him remembering the sound of blood bubbling in a dying man’s throat or made him think she actually cared, but— Sylvain tries for a smirk as he says, “Wouldn’t want to risk it.” He’s not sure it lands.
“I can’t believe you,” Felix says, sounding like he absolutely can believe Sylvain and only regrets that he isn’t more surprised. That’s familiar too. “Fine.”
The week only needed this. Felix looks not just furious but like he’s about to break, something brittle and despairing in the set of his shoulders. Sylvain hadn’t ever really thought about the possibility that he might drive his friends away as thoroughly as he drives the women he fucks, but of course. Of course this is where it was all leading to.
He should apologize, maybe, but that’s never done him any good before. I’m sorry, I promise I won’t do it again—except what the hell, they all know that’s a lie, Felix even better than every woman who’s never bought his attempts to pacify them.
“Fine,” Felix says again, visibly steeling himself. “If you can’t keep your trousers fastened even to save your own stupid life, you’d be better off with me than some stranger.”
Sylvain experiences a sudden urge to sit down, except he’s already sitting. He has the full-body sensation of his knees just having given out. “What?” he asks, because he’s fairly sure he’s both awake and sober, and that means that there is no way that Felix Fraldarius just propositioned him. Not ever but especially not now.
Except Felix is blushing as well as glaring now. “You heard me the first time. Just—close your eyes and pretend I’m a girl if you have to, I don’t care. A mouth’s a mouth, right?” The flush on his cheeks is so dark his eyes look golden. It’s moderately life-ruining.
If Sylvain had the heart that Dimitri used to have, or Ingrid’s honor, he’d say no. Dedue’s loyalty, Ashe’s earnestness, Mercedes’s goodness, Annette’s joy. He is, in fact, the only one of them who’s enough of a miserable fuck to say yes, except apparently for Felix, who is the one who offered in the first place.
“I like guys too,” Sylvain says, because there are a lot of things he intends to lie about but this isn’t going to be one of them. “That’s not the problem. Uh, just asking, have you…done this before?”
“Shut up,” Felix says, which is not an answer. Goddess. Sylvain is starting to consider the possibility that there was some kind of hallucinogenic poison on that knife. “Yes, all right, I know you have”—he sneers—“standards.”
Sylvain has never had a standard in his life and for the first time he kind of regrets that, a little. “Fine,” he says. “If you’re sure.” Felix sounds sure, but he also sounds angry, and Sylvain doesn’t have standards but he does have lines he won’t cross.
“It’s better than burying you,” Felix says, looking away as if that’s the most embarrassing thing he’s said all night. A minute ago he’d been telling Sylvain to shut up and let him suck his cock, which—that happened. That still happened.
Sothis fucking wept, that really happened.
“Okay,” Sylvain says. His voice is fainter than he’d really like it to be. He can hear it tremble, just a little. “I’m going to…sleep now.”
“Oh.” Felix looks surprised, like he really expected Sylvain—still bloody from Giselle’s knife, still reeling from this entire thing—to just, what? Push him up against the wall? Throw him down onto the bed? Twist one hand into his hair and knock the tie loose so it fell messily around his face and Sylvain could see if it was still as soft as it looked?
The assassination plot might work after all, Sylvain thinks half-hysterically. He might just die of this instead.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:36 am (UTC)