Work Text:
When the apocalypse descended upon them in the form of a plague that swept like wildfire through Enbarr within only a few days after the war’s end, Felix had thought, this is no divine retribution.
Dimitri’s triumphant return from Edelgard’s throne room provided only a brief moment of relief before the first animated corpse rose from the ground. It was a masked mage with one arm, torso wide open, three arrows still stuck to her back. She shouldn’t have been alive, yet there she was, walking on charred legs towards the celebrating army. Ashe was the first to spot the damn thing - human it wasn’t, not anymore - but his shout of alarm came too late as the corpse’s blackened teeth sank into the shoulder of an unprepared soldier in Dedue’s battalion. They quickly got rid of the abomination, but that single bite proved fatal as the soldier’s veins became flooded with poison within hours. Before long, he, too, was dead.
Not two minutes later, his body sprung to life and bit his unguarded healer right in the neck.
It was chaos, after that. The Kingdom and Alliance armies tried to evacuate as many citizens and soldiers as possible from the accursed Empire capital, but the disease had already begun to spread.
In the span of three weeks, the former Adrestian Empire turned into a dead zone. Within four moons, Fodlan became a wasteland.
It takes Felix five moons to reach the border between Fraldarius and Gautier on foot after being separated from the rest of the Kingdom’s force during the confusion in Enbarr. In the north, where the air is cold and the rivers freeze over half the year, the plague is less active. The stink of death isn’t as prevalent. Felix no longer needs to apply what precious little cinnamon oil he nicked from a deceased Alliance knight to his nose to mask the overwhelming stench.
His water can is filled with snow. It only takes a small Fire spell Annette had taught him a while back to melt it into liquid.
(Felix does not trust any body of water anymore. He learned it the hard way when, one moon after the end of the world, Ingrid’s army made the mistake of drinking from a river too close to the last source of contamination near Gronder. It had not rained for days by that point, and they had been desperate. Felix laid her to rest in a shallow grave under a nameless cypress tree away from the fields that still burned with her soldiers’ remains.
She would have wanted to be buried next to Glenn.)
He opens his backpack, grabs a ration bar and brings it to his mouth. It tastes like nothing. He has not been able to taste anything since the day he found Dimitri’s and Dedue’s decapitated bodies among the similarly dead in a safety camp in Arianrhod several weeks ago, without any idea who had killed them.
Safety camp his ass. Felix takes a swig from his water can and wishes it were liquor instead.
He couldn’t find Ashe anywhere in Gaspard, nor Annette or Mercedes in the territories that followed, despite the rising death count as he passed through them. So he continued his trek up, up, up, trying to look for a familiar face, any at all who could possibly be alive, sword swinging at the first sign of the sick. He tried not to think about the possibility of them being dead somewhere, or worse - wandering the streets without souls, only an insatiable hunger, waiting for a hunter to send what was left of them to the eternal flames.
Felix didn’t have the time to pick apart all the clothes and belongings on the decomposing bodies, to work out their identities. All corpses looked the same the more they rotted.
Fraldarius had been quite uneventful in comparison - the estate empty of servants, his uncle and the rest of their relatives having fled to Alliance territory according to the hastily penned letter in Rodrigue’s study. Last he heard, Claude has established somewhat of a haven in Derdriu. Felix isn’t certain how long that will last. Perhaps he should try to go there next if Faerghus proves to be a lost cause.
Are you seeing this, father? The swordsman wonders as he closes the cap on his can and puts it back into its holder, taking a moment to assess his surroundings. Aren’t you glad you died before this entire debacle?
(Whatever. Rodrigue is already dead. He can’t care anymore.)
He hefts his bow and quiver over a shoulder - not his usual weapon of choice, but they come in handy when he doesn’t want to get too close to a target - and crosses the vacant checkpoint into Gautier. The land is just as barren as he remembers it: barely any wildlife, with very few signs of civilization. Snow eclipses his vision as his boots tread steadily on.
The first house he comes across no longer has any supplies. The hearth has long gone cold, although the ashes in it looked oddly fresh. A window looks quite obviously broken into, which explains the lack of anything that could have been of use to a traveler. Someone must have taken everything and left.
It could have been a thief. It could have been anyone.
Felix walks on.
Nightfall is the most dangerous time of the day.
Felix sets up camp in the fifth empty house he finds on the way to Gautier estate. He has put a sword through six zombified bastards in total and set fire to half that number of buildings. He keeps count of each day’s deceased only to forget them the next. It’s just something to keep his mind temporarily preoccupied.
Besides, murder isn’t murder if what you kill is already dead.
Or so he tells himself, anyway. Felix is good at that, good at deceiving his own mind, just like how he used to be good at throwing his all into training, good at making himself so strong he could pretend that strength was the solution to every single problem in his life.
(It isn’t. Which brings him to this point: alone, with his friends either already dead or well on their way there. But we do not talk about that.)
The house actually has some logs left that he can use to light the hearth in the master bedroom. As long as he is quiet, none of the walking corpses should wander in here and cause problems. They rely on sound to navigate - something he noticed very fast during his travels. He has already set up a few magical traps near every possible entrance that should alert him to intruders, whether alive or not.
He is about to lie down on the dusty old bed when he sees a photo, faced down on the nightstand. He picks it up.
It’s a family of four. Parents and two children. Boys, the both of them. The older looks like he could have been Glenn’s age.
The furniture was all over the place when Felix walked in earlier. Some bore scratch marks. A kitchen knife, stuck on the wall over the counter. Old blood on the carpet, on the bathroom floor.
He puts the picture back onto the nightstand. Face down. He goes to the living room and settles on the broken couch. He doesn’t breathe for a while.
One zombie tries to break in some time before dawn. He kills it with a swing of his sword before setting out again. He does not look at its face.
His first ray of hope comes, ironically and morbidly, in the form of the trail of corroding corpses from the south gate of Castle Gautier leading up to the front door.
Felix inspects each and every one of them. None has the distinctive shade of sunset hair he has been looking for since Enbarr. It would be easy enough to spot, he supposes - flaming red amidst a sea of black and blonde - but Felix doesn’t take chances, not anymore. Ashes and dust could dull even the most radiant colors.
The castle itself seems empty when he steps in. He starts towards the direction of a familiar room, but then hesitates. Hope is a dangerous thing to possess, and he cannot give in to it completely, not yet.
Felix spends the next hour combing through every space he can, sidestepping the occasional decaying pile of bodies that have somehow been moved neatly to the corners. The stone garden looks like someone has dug large holes into its soil in a careless but efficient enough fashion for makeshift graves. He passes by two smaller ones near a dying oak tree, with actual headstones but no names carved.
He does not bother to check the Margrave and his wife’s room when he gets to the Gautier family’s wing. He knows all he would find are ghosts.
(Sylvain, messy and chaotic in every other aspect of his life, has always preferred order and cleanliness in his surroundings. He is also disgustingly sentimental, but who is Felix to say anything about that.)
The first thing Felix notices when he finally manages to pick the lock and come inside: Sylvain’s room is vacant. The second thing he notices: vacant does not necessarily mean uninhabited. The tightness in his chest grows stronger with every sign of life: the dip in the mattress, the slightly ajar drawer that contains half-used whetstones, a forgotten food container near the hearth. A basin with two day old water, still drinkable, glimmering with what looks like purifying magic. When he inspects the pillows, a lone strand of red hair looks up at him from a crease. Felix picks it up and marvels at the way it shines in the bleak afternoon sun, his knees growing weak with exhaustion and relief.
Sylvain is here.
Or, he was. Felix does not know where he has gone - possibly to look for resources, or to scan for potential threats. But this entire room - no, this entire castle has felt like a one-man stronghold since the first moment Felix stepped in here. Gautiers are born to hold the fort, to fend off invasions, to protect what lies behind them. Sylvain would not have strayed very far from this place. He will come back.
Felix desperately wants to believe that.
He crawls into Sylvain’s bed, reaches for the blanket that’s still bunched up at one end and wraps it around him like a cocoon. Inhales the faint scent of sandalwood and sweat as he buries his nose into the same pillow he found that single strand of hair on earlier.
The door is no longer locked, but Felix doesn’t need it to be.
He closes his eyes and waits. It doesn’t feel much different from all the sleepovers they used to have as children, when Felix would snuggle into Sylvain’s comforter and wait for the older boy to finish with his studies and come to bed. When he finally did, the sheets would have already been warmed by Felix’s body heat, and Felix would complain about Sylvain’s cold feet until he fell asleep to the soothing motion of Sylvain’s hand steadily petting his hair.
Felix wakes to the touch of someone’s fingers in his hair.
He snaps his eyes open, dagger in hand and ready to strike. The offending fingers retreat immediately, their owner letting out a surprised yelp as they stumble off the bed.
It’s a very familiar voice. A voice Felix has spent most of his life learning to turn to for comfort, to listen for above the fray during battle, to coax out of a certain man’s throat when their bodies melt into each other’s.
Felix is already getting up before his mind registers the movement. The dagger falls to the floor as his hands find purchase in Sylvain’s coat, Sylvain’s neck, Sylvain’s face. His eyes threaten to water as he takes in the warm brown of Sylvain’s, the initial surprise inside them mellowing into fondness as the knight raises his own hands up to keep Felix’s in place. Sylvain feels warm. Warm and alive.
“You’re here,” Felix murmurs, frantic and delirious, his shipwreck heart threatening to set sail again at the sight. “You’re here. You’re—”
Something must have broken in his expression, because the next moment, Sylvain’s smile turns pained as he gently strokes the insides of Felix’s wrists.
“I’m sorry, Fe,” the childhood nickname slips out of Sylvain’s mouth so smoothly, as though it has not been years since they stopped being boys and started becoming murderers in everything but name instead. “Kept you waiting, didn’t I?”
“ No shit,” Felix snaps. It would have sounded angrier if his voice wasn’t wavering. “I’ve been - I’ve been looking for you all this time—”
“I know,” Sylvain says. His hands leave Felix’s to cradle his face, the scars and calluses on each palm softly dragging across his skin. “That’s why I stayed here. I believed you would come.”
“Ingrid - Dimitri—”
“Dead, I know. I killed Dimitri myself. He specifically asked me to, before he turned into one of them.”
And it would have felt like a betrayal, except there is nothing left to betray anymore. They are warriors without an army, servants without a master, men without a country. Felix has buried one of their childhood friends and Sylvain has buried the other, unable to watch as they lost themselves to the goddess damned disease that ruins everything. Survival has ceased being a requirement for being alive and become the end goal.
What do they have to live for, anymore?
For a long while, they breathe in each other’s presence. Felix allows himself to flood the chambers of his weary heart with grief for the first time since his father. Sylvain holds him in silence, his arms the only thing keeping Felix together as they both fall apart to the dying light of day.
“I have to go.”
Felix looks up from his seemingly permanent spot on Sylvain’s chest.
“What,” Felix blurts out intelligently before trying again. “What do you mean, ‘I have to go’?”
Sylvain smiles down at him. But it’s the kind of smile that’s all marble and mirror, cool and smooth and almost inhuman. The kind of smile he used to direct at the women he once dated. The kind of smile he glued onto his face for weeks after Miklan.
The kind of smile he only shows when he is lying, the truth bouncing right off of its surface.
“It’s going to get dark pretty soon,” Sylvain loosens his hold on him, and all Felix can think about is don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t — “I have to patrol the territory again, get some supplies, check for more survivors before then.”
“I’m going with you,” answers Felix immediately, determined to keep Sylvain firmly in sight. The man is not telling him something, but he doesn’t know what, and it terrifies him the same way he used to be scared of the growing darkness in Sylvain during their academy days. “Two are better than one. I can—”
“You can’t , Felix. It’s too dangerous out there. I know my way better than you do around this turf.”
Sylvain is definitely grasping at straws now. Felix knows Gautier almost as well as his own territory, having spent what felt like half of his days traveling back and forth between the two lands, and he is just as good at protecting himself if not more.
“Stay right here and keep the castle safe for me, eh, Felix?” The end of the question is punctuated with a wink. Felix just wants to punch it off of his face. “I’ll be back.”
“You’re lying,” he spits, and for a split second, Sylvain’s mask cracks. The winning grin disappears, replaced with a solemn frown. “I know you are. What are you hiding from me?”
During the course of the conversation, they have somehow moved a little apart from each other. Now that Felix is looking, truly looking, he doesn’t know why he didn’t notice before: even in the chill of winter, beads of sweat are collecting on Sylvain’s forehead. He looks washed out, ashen even - far from the tanned hue he has acquired during the five years of war. When he was basically supporting Felix earlier, he didn’t distribute his weight equally—
— and it suddenly clicks in his head, why Sylvain hasn’t kissed him once since he walked in. Why he is looking at Felix like this would be the last time he ever will.
No.
Before Sylvain can turn around and run, Felix pounces. They tumble to the floor, Sylvain’s back hitting the ground as Felix searches for the cracks in his armor, the unprotected places.
“Felix— Fe, please—”
“Shut up,” he grunts, pinning the older man in place with his knees, copper eyes searching, searching. Sylvain may be taller, but Felix is the stronger one. “Just—shut the fuck up—”
Sylvain struggles under him like a cornered animal. Felix ignores his cries, hoping against hope that he is wrong, that he is reading too much into Sylvain’s behaviors as usual, that Sylvain is not lying to his face like he hasn’t done in years.
And then he finds it. A teeth mark on the outer side of the knight’s left thigh, the wound small yet already darkening, the veins surrounding it painfully visible, stark black against pale skin. Poison will slowly spread through the system until it stops the heart, denying the brain its much needed oxygen. Death would happen soon after that, and then—nothing. Only hunger remains, an empty sort of existence, neither alive nor dead, forever stuck in between.
Felix stares at the injury, slack-jawed. His heart, a ship freed from land too soon and sailing across the waters too fast, plunges downward into the deep sea along with the budding hope in his chest.
In his peripheral, Sylvain sits up and barks out a laugh. The bitterness in it sends chills up Felix’s spine and leaves a bad taste in his mouth despite his newfound ageusia.
“Guess I can never hide anything from you,” Sylvain shakes his head, wry and resigned, and Felix wants to throttle him for daring to entertain the idea of giving up, but also to save him from the inevitable. Knowing he won’t be able to hurts so damn bad that he is sure he will never recover. Neither of them will, after this. “So, Felix. Are you going to do the honor of sending me to the eternal flames yourself, or should I go to spare you the trouble? It’s all up to you now.”
Suddenly, fury rises up to Felix’s throat like bile, the unfairness of it all hitting him all at once. He turns to Sylvain, eyes burning with more than just tears, his trembling hands clutching at the man’s collar. Death grip.
“Were you going to leave me here, waiting for someone who would never come back?” His voice shakes. Felix has always been the one to avoid eye contact, but now Sylvain is the one averting his gaze. “Answer me! Goddess, Sylvain, we promised !”
“Fe—”
“ Don’t,” he growls, his vision blurring around the edges. Sylvain’s profile is little more than a messy blob of red and white, now. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare say it’s for my sake, because it fucking isn’t and you damn well know it!”
“Then what am I supposed to do ?” Sylvain’s tone turns cold with anger and something else Felix cannot put a name to. “Stay here and wait for my death knowing I’m just going to put you in danger after? What, Fe? At least if I leave now, you will—”
“Stop running away for once in your damn life!”
“I’m trying to protect you—”
“—You’re just afraid of having my blood on your hands,” Felix cannot take this. He literally cannot take this anymore. Sylvain can’t have everything he wants and leave Felix with nothing but a memory. “So you push your blood on my hands instead, right? Coward!”
“Felix—”
“I don’t want your protection, Syl,” he croaks brokenly. “I just want you.”
Only now does Sylvain look his way. The knight’s mouth opens and closes, as if he is about to say something but hesitates.
Felix doesn’t care. He yanks Sylvain forward and crashes their lips together.
He might have just sealed his fate. There is no telling if the poison has made its way far enough into Sylvain’s body for the kiss to be damning, but Felix has long gone past the point of no return ever since he spotted that cursed bite mark on Sylvain’s thigh.
If they die, they shall die together.
Sylvain freezes under him for all of five seconds before he, too, starts moving against Felix, tongue prodding at his lower lip for permission that’s immediately granted. His hands come up to thread in Felix’s hair, snapping the old, worn hair tie he has had since before the world decided to end.
If Felix could still taste anything at all, he imagines Sylvain would taste like impending doom, like red spider lilies and winter incense, like dust and decay, like eternal darkness. The inside of his mouth already feels lukewarm in comparison to Felix’s, his fingers gradually losing its earlier heat yet still spreading little bursts of fire along the swordsman’s skin all the same.
Felix opens his eyes some time later to one side of Sylvain’s jaw slowly being decorated with a spidery web, black and blue against greying skin. Under the moonlight streaming through the windows, it almost looks like the shade of Felix’s hair.
Sylvain kisses him again, and Felix picks up the dagger.