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Felix hasn’t been in the training grounds all day. Sylvain knows this because he himself has.
Usually they overlap at breakfast, Felix after a full set of drills and Sylvain only a half an hour out of bed.
If Felix has had a good morning, he doesn’t mind Sylvain being a little sweet from his dreams still, sitting side-by-side so their arms and legs touch. Sylvain will slide extra bacon onto his plate and fetch him coffee and not even feel dumb about how earnest that looks.
Sylvain has no idea what kind of morning Felix has had. The afternoon is beginning to look like a question mark, too. There’s no war council today so maybe he’s off doing errands, but no one else has seen Felix either.
By the time dinner rolls around, the low, dense churn of anxiety has built to something difficult to ignore.
Sylvain loops through the dining hall; when he doesn’t find Felix or anyone who knows where he is, he makes for the dorms.
At Felix’s room, he knocks and goes for the doorknob without waiting for an answer. A privilege of one who has known Felix his whole life, and regularly had Felix inside of him in the very room he sought to enter. Intimacy or immunity—they’re one in the same, when it comes to Felix.
The door’s locked. It wasn’t earlier; Sylvain had found it open but empty.
“Fe?”
He rattled the doorknob to make himself annoying and unignorable. Not because he needed to see Felix fine and in the flesh, immediately.
“Go away.”
Sylvain’s relief was powerful and instant. Beneath that, though, he recognized something off in Felix’s timbre.
“It’s me.” Sylvain knew Felix knew this.
“I know this,” he called. When he spoke next his voice was much closer. “I don’t feel well. Let me rest.”
“You have to know that was the wrong thing to say if you wanted me to leave.”
A pause. “Fine,” he snapped. “That was stupid. Don’t make me convince you while I’m unwell.”
Sylvain pressed his forehead to the door.
“Felix, I just want to make sure you’re alright. We take care of each other, don’t we? Isn’t that our thing?”
A garbled sound from inside the room. It untangled into a curse.
It didn’t hinder the efficacy, Felix knowing he was being cajoled. If anything, it was an acceptable form of honesty between them. Sylvain laid it on thick and it melted pure; 100 percent best fucking believe it’s butter.
The door opened a crack, just big enough to fit Felix’s face. Sylvain leaned into it, immediately, and stopped an inch from a kiss. True to expectation, Felix startled, stepping back, and then Sylvain had all the leeway he needed to press into the room.
“Fucking hell,” Felix said, but closed the door behind him. “You don’t listen—I’m gonna get you sick.”
Sylvain peered intently at him, wormed back into his personal space. The only color on Felix’s cheeks hadn’t been there until Sylvain stepped close. His eyes were bright and alert. There was only one strange thing about him, really.
“Babe,” he said sweetly. “What’s with the gloves?”
Felix crossed his arms, probably on reflex. It only highlighted the peculiarity: his hands covered while the rest of him was dressed down.
“Cold,” Felix said gruffly. “Go get me soup or something. Be useful.”
“Liar boys don’t get boyfriend soup,” Sylvain answered. “You’re not sick, and I’m about a minute away from getting truly concerned about what you’re hiding under there.”
“It isn’t any of your business,” Felix hissed, turning his back on Sylvain, and saints what a stupid move that was.
All this reticence with no actual follow-through on kicking Sylvain out. It was telling. A turned back was a weak gesture, only exacerbated Sylvain’s mounting curiosity. His concern was real, too, if small—Felix could be a bastard about keeping injuries hidden, obstinate about not wanting to waste magic or supplies.
Thing was, he was usually quite a lot better at concealing them. Sylvain would put gold on it: this clumsy subterfuge was something else.
With his gloved hands, Felix shuffled papers Sylvain was sure were already in order. Sylvain pressed against his back, kissed his cheek, then caught him by the wrist.
“Sylvain.” Felix’s voice was a warning.
“I haven’t seen you all day.” He gave a fake little whine; deceit was a dinner for two. “I was worried, you know—“
Felix turned in his grip, and tried to yank his arm free. He seemed a little worried, genuinely, and Sylvain’s slyness gave way. He let go, only to try and lace their hands together, to stop and hold Felix, so they could come to calm together.
Weird thing, though. Sylvain was way too intent on Felix’s features to miss it. He grabbed Felix’s hand, and Felix’s brow caved in a familiar way; his mouth fell open, head tipped back just so.
Sylvain grabbed Felix’s hand, and Felix moaned.
Sylvain knew the noise better than maybe anyone on earth. It was the sound Felix made when his dick hit the back of Sylvain’s throat. He’d heard it a hundred times, with his fist in Felix’s hair, slamming hard and fast into him because Felix insisted, over and again—it’d take more than you’ve got, to break me.
But Felix’s face wasn’t exactly as it had been then. Those times he was lost to it, the heat they generated between them. Here and now, his face was red, his eyes were round: he looked fucking mortified.
He didn’t seem to even register that Sylvain still had his hand, held loose in his own.
“Felix…”
“Don’t fucking talk,” Felix said, stock-still. “Don’t.”
Sylvain didn’t. He squeezed Felix’s hand again, harder than the incidental pressure of before.
Felix’s knees nearly buckled. If Dimitri were in his old room and his right mind, he’d probably have come running at the noise Felix made: a keening, nearly injured sound. Shit, they were lucky for the windfall of spiced meat skewers at dinner, or Ingrid would’ve crashed through the door already, from clear down the hall.
She would’ve seen what Sylvain did: Felix, bottom lip caught in his teeth, his thighs clenched, looking murderous and beautiful. Her feelings about it would have been a lot more straightforward than Sylvain’s, too.
“What the fuck.” Sylvain was strangely breathless.
He rubbed experimentally at the glove’s seam between Felix’s pointer finger and thumb.
Felix’s hand flew up to cover his mouth. It didn’t do much to muffle his high, desperate whine. He glared at Sylvain, his face half-hidden.
Then, through the gaps between his fingers, he said, distinct and irritated, like Sylvain had made a mistake he needed to put right—
“Well don’t fucking stop.”
Sylvain was good at following orders. This was one he didn’t even need to think about. He held Felix’s right hand carefully in both of his own and rubbed slowly, deep-digging movements meant to permeate the muscle. Great for repetitive stress injuries. It’s more novel application was reducing Felix to a barely-upright mess.
Sylvain drove Felix backward until his thighs hit the bed and he sat. Never letting go of his hand, Sylvain knelt, and watched closely just what effect he was having, delighted at what, if it wasn’t literal magic, certainly felt like it.
It was fucking potent: Felix biting back sounds and writhing, bucking his hips in stuttering little movements, all because Sylvain was kneading his palm. He was blushed red from cheeks down below the neck of his shirt, mouth working like he had too much spit.
“Tell me about your day, sweetheart,” Sylvain said, voice low and less than steady.
Felix cut him another glare. He was a little teary-eyed already. Sylvain drank it in, a bit awed, aching in his pants. This was the fastest and most thorough he’d unraveled Felix since they first tumbled each other, back in the early days of the war.
“Ah—,” Felix opened his mouth only for it to betray him. “F-fuck you.” Sylvain pressed harder, worked the ball of his hand. “Fine! Annette asked me— She needed some book. She, nh, wanted to reverse engineer some—fuck—some fucking dark magic, I don’t know. Sent me to Hubert’s old room.”
A picture was forming. “She was too scared to go herself,” Sylvain supplied.
Felix looked down at him, hazy, his lips a wet, bitten red. He was drooling a bit, but Sylvain wasn’t gonna mention.
“I spilled something on my hand,” Felix admitted quietly. “Was an accident.”
“I bet,” Sylvain said, and laid his cheek into the cradle of Felix’s palm, rolled his face against it, just to see.
Felix’s legs kicked out. So that was too much, maybe.
“Then what?” Sylvain asked.
Felix swallowed audibly, but continued. “Couldn’t find the book she wanted. Went—went back to train.”
Sylvain grinned, he couldn’t even help it. “Did you now?”
Felix threw his head back. Sylvain had started to work over each finger with loving attention.
“Came twice. In my pants, like some fucking—shit, Syl—teenager. Just from swinging my sw—Sylvain, you can’t do that.”
Sylvain smiled with Felix’s glove between his teeth. He tugged it off and stuffed his mouth full on three of Felix’s fingers.
“You don’t know what was in that mixture,” Felix said, and didn’t manage any of his usual heat.
It seemed hard for him to keep his words straight. Sucking hard, Sylvain couldn’t imagine why.
He licked his way up to Felix’s fingertips. “My mouth is already an erogenous zone, where you’re concerned,” he said, and jerked Felix’s spit-slick fingers like a cock. “What’s the harm?”
Felix dragged his free, unsexed hand down his face. He had no argument. Not one he could voice anyway.
“I wanna see it,” Sylvain whispered, craning upward for a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss. “You’ll come in your pants a third time, won’t you baby? For me?”
Felix whined. “Fourth,” he panted out.
Sylvain whined, too. A sizable wet spot was spread over the crotch of Felix’s trousers. Dunno how he missed it, with Felix’s dick straining the fabric, an arrow pointed right at the mess he’d made of himself.
In that moment, in an act that had no precedent and would never, ever repeat, Sylvain gave thanks for Hubert.