[exTREMEly part 1 of X but this absolutely wants to be a whole-ass fic and i absolutely need to finish a couple of other things first so accept a token first scene instead. half from the lyrics you actually gave me, half from the next verse: you’ve a knack / for applause from the back of the stalls but you lack / the conviction to look at me straight and say yes
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.
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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.