Archive of Our Own

“To another successful job!”

Sylvain’s laughter spills like champagne over the edge of his crystal glass as he tilts his head back, trades itself for the bubbles sliding down his throat in warm celebration. The ring of clinking cups fills the tiny dining room better than the jazz vinyl the hotelier spins from the wooden bar counter, well-loved and scratchy with age, playing songs Sylvain thinks he remembers from his childhood and other unhappier times. The black sky of the southern countryside dyes the page-colored walls in nighttime; when he blinks, Sylvain can almost see a similar room, a few dozen kilometers away, the French Alps looming outside the window like the hulking snow giants that used to haunt his eight-year-old dreams.

He keeps his eyes open, pours himself a second glass. For an instant, it tastes like a forced mouthful of ice.

Next to him, Claude takes a tentative sip, as though he’s trying to test the alcohol for poison before committing to downing the drink, and Sylvain wonders if he’s noticed, wonders if he’s guessed what Sylvain’s thinking about. He finds a kind of simple comfort in that, in the uneasy familiarity of being seen, being known. But Claude’s eyes, greed-green, fizz from Hilda to Yuri and back to analysing whatever he discerns in the worn, wooden beams on the walls as Yuri starts speaking.

“And another toast to Ashe, yeah?”

“To Ashe!” Hilda exclaims between two mouthfuls of champagne. “I honestly didn’t have much faith in you, but you did so well! It was an awesome first campaign!”

“The first and the last,” Ashe says through a barely-annoyed sigh. The tungsten glow of the ceiling light bounces off his silver hair, fades the freckles on his nose into milk skin, brings out the grey at the soft edges of his tea-green irises. “With all due respect, Claude, I don’t think this kind of life is made for me.”

“Aww, no need to be so polite, especially with us. We’re con artists, not hypocrites.”

“Who is the hypocrite?”

The songful voice of the hotelier’s daughter dances into the room to the rhythm of her steps, a tray of coffee cups and petits-fours carefully balanced on her arm as she steps forward. She seems completely oblivious to the abrupt tension in Claude’s shoulders, to the sudden sharpness in Yuri’s gaze; even Sylvain, who has been translating their conversations on the fly ever since they arrived this morning, is a bit taken aback that the girl actually understands and speaks English. Her heavy curls bounce along when she sets the plates on the gold-stitch tablecloth; they, too, shine pale green in the light, and Sylvain makes a note to stop drinking before his brain plays too many tricks on him.

“Probably Sylvie,” Hapi says, the picture of composure, her hand shooting out to grab a foie gras toast and stuff it in her mouth.

Sylvain’s laugh tangles through his vocal chords, choking on a pretense of self-defence. “Hey, that’s kinda mean!”

“Yeah? That’s also kinda true. Man, this is all kinds of tasty, Flayn. Great job.”

There’s a pretty, embarrassed flush dusting the girl’s cheekbones, one that makes her both look older and younger than her obvious teenage years. “Thank you, Miss Hapi. My father and I were worried that store-bought delicacies would not be enough for people of your caliber. I am glad it isn’t the case.”

If Ashe looked nervous before, he now looks downright uncomfortable; the others visibly relax, though, Claude’s smile cutting itself back into charming nonchalance while Yuri’s hand squeezes Ashe’s thigh underneath the table, a reassurance as much as an admonition. We’re not partners, or friends, or family, he can almost hear Claude’s voice repeat, Team Confidence’s motto: we’re lone wolves. One mistake, and you’re gone.

Sylvain laughs. You’d think that a band of altruistic, wannabe-Robin-Hood scammers would extend the same charity and indulgence towards each other, too.

Hilda’s long, glittery nails deftly remove the tiny pieces of capers unfortunate enough to grace her salmon carpaccio toast. “No worries! I swear to you, we’re all perfectly normal people under the razzle and dazzle.”

Sylvain snorts into his champagne glass. She could be telling the exact truth, for all he knows — the only thing Team Confidence knows about each other is whatever tale they recite to their targets on any given day. He’s seen Claude play the part of an Olympic archer, of a star car racer, of a middle-eastern prince. He’s introduced Yuri as a promising scientist, or a noble’s adopted son, or an undercover FBI agent. He’s mostly met Hilda as the daughter of a famous Italian sommelier and vigneron, and Hapi… he learned about Hapi a couple of months back, and you don’t ask these types of questions to a child trafficking victim. Taking down the mafia ring that destroyed her life remains one of Sylvain’s proudest moments and Team Confidence’s most gratifying success.

“Well, except Freckles.” Hapi nods in Ashe’s general direction. “He’s actually normal.”

So normal it’s the exact reason why he’s here in the first place, Sylvain thinks. No one ever seems to doubt the innocent-looking ones. Their last target certainly didn’t, and all the dirty money that lined his pockets now lines the team’s and all of his victims’ bank accounts.

“Sylvain, are you alright?” Claude leans into him, elbow touching his own on the dinner table, a thread away from discomfort. “You seem… lost in thought. Less chatty, that’s for sure.”

“Ah, sorry.” Sylvain’s breath catches in his lungs, one inhale at a time. “It’s just… it’s been a long time since I was in France, that’s all. Lots of memories, you know?”

“You’re the only French person in your group, if I remember correctly?” The hotelier — Seteth, Sylvain’s memory supplies — asks in their mother tongue as he steps into the room, a second bottle of champagne in hand. His gaze sweeps the room like a feather duster, unforgiving of any filth that crosses its path and conveniently landing on Sylvain’s face.

“Born and raised,” Sylvain answers as he sits up straighter in his chair. “I’m originally from Paris, though my family used to own a châlet not too far from here. Busy season coming up soon?”

Seteth’s face twists in displeasure, anxiety carving deep into the lines of his face. “It has been… quite a struggle recently. Our boarding house is badly-situated, if you’ve noticed — too far from the coast, and equally far from the mountains. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a regular influx of tourists.” Something both incredibly sad and infinitely more tender lights up his eyes as he looks at the paintings hung around the dining room, the colors and shapes blending to nothing in the dark of his pupils. “I... won’t be able to pay for Flayn’s art school, next year.”

His daughter seems to age a thousand years as she slips her arm around her father’s elbow, her features the epitome of kindness. Another sip of champagne leaves bitter dregs along Sylvain’s tongue as he averts his eyes. “It’s a shame, but I do not want to be a burden. I would rather help Father as much as I can.”

“You’re extremely talented,” Sylvain tells her after summarizing their conversation to the rest of the group, the gentlest mercy he can offer. “I know it doesn’t mean much, but I hope you know that.”

“I’d believe him, if I were you.” Claude winks. “He’s an art appraiser. Travels the entire world to find masterpieces and talented artists to add to museum collections.”

Sylvain’s laughter is an exhale, this time, his smile not reaching his eyes. His own backstory never changes, the sole remnant of the lessons his father taught him, so long ago: a simple, well-crafted lie rooted in truth is always the easiest lie to defend. “I could recommend you, if you want. I have quite a few contacts in the country.”

“Thank you very much, but I must decline,” Flayn says, and there’s a fire in her eyes, an ever-living spark of passion that Sylvain has seen only once before, heat bordering on anger bursting like a broken promise. “I want to do this on my own.”

“Sorry if I’m being impolite, sir,” Ashe interjects in shaky French, barely shivering under the intensity of Seteth’s gaze, “but you have such a beautiful ring! Where is it from?”

Seteth’s hand flexes around the champagne bottle, and this is when Sylvain notices.

It hadn’t quite caught his eye, this morning, when Seteth had made him sign the deposit check; perhaps it was the early winter light, or the way his fingers curled, or the afterglow of another perfect campaign. But now, the smoky-blue stone sparkles like a river under the artificial glow of the ceiling light, imprisoned under the fangs of a faded gold ring, the diamond cut into facets of rushing waters turning to ice.

Sylvain stares, breathless, drowning under the weight of bitter memories.

“This was my wife’s wedding ring. It isn’t worth much, if this is what you were wondering, but I still cherish it with my whole heart.”

Ashe’s eyes flicker to Flayn, then to the ring, then to Sylvain, and he beams like he’s found the answer to the universe’s biggest secret.

“We never should have come here,” Sylvain whispers to Claude.

Claude smiles, all sparkly white teeth, magnetic and cryptic and provocative. “Whatever do you mean?”

*

“We never should have come here,” Ashe whispers, horrified.

Sylvain laughs a joyless exhale as he reaches for his cigarette packet again. “Whatever do you mean?”

Popular music blares in distorted echoes from the inside of the yacht, mingling with the disembodied voices of the guests into a mindless cacophony. The glare of the boat’s fluorescent lights hits the inky shallows of the Monaco port in ripples, diffusing along the calm waves of the Mediterranean sea. The weather is surprisingly mellow for this time of the year; Sylvain has always been a child of the cold, as though the Gautier frigidity had made him insusceptible to actual, material chill, but even Ashe has left his suit jacket somewhere inside the boat and has pushed the sleeves of his dress shirt up to his elbows. Sylvain uses the pretense of another cigarette as cover, lights up the tip with his lighter and lets the smoke cloak their words and intentions alike.

“This is one of the best ways to find intel on future targets, you know.” He throws a lazy arm over Ashe’s shoulders. “If anything, you can at least celebrate your good deed of the day!”

Ashe sighs. “I don’t know if tricking a random guy into buying a worthless ring is much of a good deed.”

“Hey, be kinder to yourself,” Sylvain whispers through ribbons of smoke, the best piece of advice he knows — one he’s never applied to himself. “First off, I can promise you that anyone willing to buy jewelry in Monaco doesn’t actually need the money.” Building a makeshift jewelry shop out of nothing had been quite quick, even by Claude’s standards, Balthus’ inhumanely big arms and the promise of escorting him to the nearest casino doing much more to speed up the process than Sylvain could have hoped. He certainly hadn’t expected the ring to be sold the very day they opened shop, though. Sylvain swallows down his suspicion with another sip of smoke. “Also, thirty thousand euros is more than enough to pay for Flayn’s school, and I’m certain Seteth will be thankful, despite his shining personality. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” Ashe says, looking to the seamless stretch between sea and sky, “but I can’t help having a bad feeling about this.”

If only you knew, Sylvain thinks. He had preferred omitting the fact that he’d recognized the ring’s new owner as a former Gautier House appraiser; had preferred omitting the fact he’d recognized the ring at all, all swirls of frozen sapphire and faded gold claws and scarred fingers holding it up in Sylvain’s sepia-tint memories. He hopes Ashe never gets to discover the true price of what he sold.

“Well,” Sylvain exhales through one last stream of smoke, crushing the cigarette against the railing of the yacht, “let’s cure that bad feeling with one last glass of champagne, yeah?”

There’s a different kind of white noise when they step back into the yacht’s main room, the calm lapping of waves substituted for less pleasant, rustling snippets of wine-high gossip. Most of the guests are dressed to the nines, witless wealth fluming off their shoulders in ribbons of chains and pearls, in skimpy silks and linen suits, completely season-inappropriate. Most of them lack Sylvain’s basic decency and manners, smoking near the opened glass doors and windows, coating the room in a shimmering shroud of ashes tapped off with the tip of a perfectly-manicured finger. Sylvain has been to hundreds of these parties; this had been why Claude had hired him too, the first time they’d met – his easy, born-socialite demeanor, his disgusted expertise on the deep, dark depths of silver-spoon-fed, upper-class spirits.

It had been the exact reason why Sylvain had chosen this city for Ashe’s make-Flayn-rich scheme: as he scans the people dancing around the room to the rhythm of minimale tunes, he realizes, once again, that he knows these people – not on a personal level, never on a personal level; but on a plane bordering on the metaphysical, that rooted, thorny awareness that they’re cut from the same faux-couture, hyper-manufactured cloth. Most of them, Sylvain guesses, are the unfortunate children of too-rich parents not knowing what riches truly mean, drinking overpriced champagne like it’s tap water, their drugged-up, bought-out minds unable to discern the shiny from the gold and the fake from the real.

Sylvain watches them, and knows that he, too, could have become them – could have been lucky enough to be spared the disillusionment that comes with realizing all of this, could have found solace in meaningless numbers on a bank account as a substitute for familial love and a grasp on reality. The thought of it makes him want to puke.

He almost doesn’t hear his ringtone, in the maelstrom of artificial revelry that shakes the room to the beat of the tide – but the unmistakable chime of a text message still reaches his ears through his lethargy, taking the glass Ashe gives him in one hand and his smartphone in the other to see Claude’s name in shiny, white letters.

We have a problem, the text reads. The bad feeling Sylvain’s nursed all evening settles through his bones like a chill. Look at this.

The rest of the text is a jumble of numbers and letters forming an overlong, underlined link to a French news website, and when Sylvain’s thumb taps it, his father’s face fills up the screen in all its photoshopped, detestable glory.

Gautier Jewels CEO finds yet another lost jewelry piece, the headline reads, and Sylvain’s blood runs colder than the sea below his feet.

Ashe must see the shock and horror settling on Sylvain’s face, because he looks at the screen from behind Sylvain’s arm, pushes himself on the tip of his toes to read over his shoulder; Apollinaire Gautier, CEO of the French jeweller and watchmaker Gautier, the article reads, has revealed in a recent press conference that he has found the priceless Cethleann Diamond ring. The ring, which boasts an impressive 23.88 carat diamond, was acquired in a jewelry store in Monaco for a mere €30.000 – while Gautier priced the piece at approximately 10 million dollars.

“Sylvain,” Ashe whispers, deafeningly loud over the music and the laughters and the discussions, “what in the world is that?”

Sylvain doesn’t answer, chooses to click on a video of the press conference instead. These amateurs truly didn’t know what they were selling, his father sneers in that contemptuous, conceited tone he used to demean Miklan and praise Sylvain with. The video cuts to the ring, cushioned in a plush, red velvet box while Apollinaire Gautier starts on yet another pompous tirade, and this is when Sylvain truly comprehends the gravity of the situation.

It’s merely a replica. A pretty damn good one, to be sure, one that would probably fool almost anyone who didn’t appraise jewels for a living, and even then, one that would fool…

Well, anyone but Sylvain, really. He’d recognize Felix’s handiwork anywhere.

Ashe’s hand flies to Sylvain’s arm, anchors itself there like he’s going to fall apart. “What do they mean, ten million dollars?”

Sylvain needs fresh air, desperately. “It’s the value of the ring. The Cethleann Diamond, the one you sold.”

“And this man named Gautier–”

“My father,” Sylvain spits more than he says, a rush of bitterness coating his tongue in venom. “My worst nightmare, and probably one of the worst people to have ever graced this Earth.”

Ashe’s eyes fly open, leaf-green in the bright yellow lights of the room. Sylvain’s glad that no one hears or cares about their conversation, because he looks like Sylvain’s just told him he killed his entire family. “Did you– did you betray me?”

“No!” Sylvain shouts over the noise, a few heads turning in their direction and quickly going back to whatever worthless spectacle they were watching previously. “I don’t work for my dad. I was disowned–well, I disowned myself, actually. Ten years ago, before I met Claude. I… I was in the way.”

“In the way of what?” Ashe asks with a frown, before shaking his head like he’s waking himself up. “Nevermind, it doesn’t matter. What about Seteth’s ring?”

“It’s a fake. The one in the video, at least.” Sylvain takes a step closer as he glances around the room, leans closer into Ashe’s space, until he can count each freckle dotting his youthful, innocent face, currently contorted into shock and anger. “My father used to run auctions. Well, he probably still does, if that article is to be believed.” The ring will be sold in a highly-restricted auction in two weeks, in Paris, the closing sentence read. “Except he only sells fakes during these auctions. Facsimiles, that he gets the Gautier jewelers and apprentices to make for him so he can get even richer.” He leaves out the part where he once got Sylvain’s college boyfriend, childhood friend, only love to make them for him behind Sylvain’s back. A bitter laughter tumbles out of his lips against his will. “That’s probably what he’s going to do with this one – sell the imitation for millions of dollars, and keep the real one for himself to do it all over again if he ever wants to.”

“So you knew?” Ashe murmurs, and it’s somehow worse than his previous outburst, that quiet rage shining emerald in his irises, that expression Sylvain knows so well. “You knew how much the ring was truly worth, and you still let me sell it–”

“I didn’t know the guy who bought it was still working for Gautier!” Sylvain hyperactive hands settle on his forehead, push and drag over the skin of his cheeks, the cut of his nose. “And– and this ring– listen, the less involved I am with it, the better I am. I– I can’t stand looking at it anymore. Fuck, I hope Seteth doesn’t see this–”

Sylvain doesn’t know how Ashe manages to keep calm; he simply crosses his arms in front of him, exhales a deep, deep sigh. “Listen, Sylvain,” he says, with a finality that resembles Claude’s, a Yuri-like, barely-hidden threat, “I don’t know what kind of trauma you have with this ring, or your father, and I’m sure there’s a good reason you didn’t step in when I sold that diamond even though I know nothing about jewelry… But you have to fix this.”

“I can’t,” Sylvain starts, voice high-pitched with desperation, “I can’t–I’ll just give the ten million to Seteth, I have enough left from that last job–”

“It’s not a matter of money,” Ashe cuts, resolute and rightful, a guy next-door in shining armor, “it’s a matter of principle. I thought that was why you guys did all these heists? To take down the worst of the worst? To get the revenge their victims can’t afford?”

Sylvain’s sneer splits his face apart. “Ashe, this is real life. Not a Christmas movie.”

“Maybe so,” Ashe admits, but the smile on his face is more confident than anything he’s displayed ever since Sylvain met him, “but it doesn’t mean we can’t try. This is your father, Sylvain. You still know him better than any of us. You must have a plan to take him down somehow? If you don’t do it for Seteth”, he finishes, shaky fingers digging into Sylvain’s arm, “then do it for yourself.”

How self-centered of you, he can hear Miklan say in the back of his head, the ghostly remnant of a buried memory, but this is what does it – Sylvain can feel the spite-soaked cogs inside his brain turn, can see the drawers of his mind fly open on thousands of grievances and map thirty years of acrimony into the skeleton of a scheme.

“I may have a plan,” Sylvain sighs, and Ashe smiles when he answers then let’s go and drags him to the exit.

*

The sky rolls in snowless white over the barren fields when Sylvain looks out the window, cloudy edges dipping into darker hues as the taxi wheels bump over the airport highway, a monotone metronome. It’s a peaceful, nostalgic view, a complete antonym to the mountainside of his tenderest age, the Alpan ridges locking him in like rimy prison bars. His thumb swipes lazy lefts and rights through the pictures on his phone screen, zooms onto the ornate detailings of the Azure Moon tiara: the gold curls framing the huge, flawless blue diamond in the middle, the smaller stones embedded into the tiara frame, the large, clumsy fingers holding the crown jewel up for Sylvain to capture in still light. It’s valued at 55 million dollars, Dimitri had told him then, the day before his flight for Paris, a tinge of shame in his voice, eyes as blue as the diamond looking down to some invisible speck of dust between his feet.

Houses and buildings dot the unravelling horizon, and Sylvain’s mind drifts to the summers he’s spent in one of these small, suburban houses, to Ingrid’s blonde braids and bruised knees, to Dimitri’s princely demeanor and clumsy French. Somewhere beyond these frozen, barren fields, there’s a youthful simplicity, a conscious effort to forget they’re the heir to the Gautier corporate empire and the future prince of Denmark and the daughter of a ruined entrepreneur.

Somewhere beyond these frozen, barren fields, there’s a garden next to the Gautier countryside house, and a treehouse swing made for two. Sylvain doesn’t think about it.

The taxi driver is blessedly silent, having let the chatter of the radio anchor fill the auditory space of his car once Sylvain gave him his destination. He’s somehow glad he arrived alone, on a different flight than Claude and the others; coming home is always something he’s felt he had to experience on his own, as though returning as lonely as he left would be its own kind of mundane exorcism, would remind him of what he’s lost then and what he’s found ever since. The song that filters through the speakers is an old favorite of Sylvain’s, and he lets his mind imbibe the piano notes, fast and precise like a scalpel cut over the smooth melody, the soft, subtle beat of the drums. I never thought about love when I thought about home, he whisper-sings over the singer’s voice, and the irony of it registers in his body like a knee-jerk reaction, shakes him out of his languor to type a number on his phone’s keyboard.

The answer comes three-and-a-half ringtones later, and his ear makes out Dedue’s voice through the tenor whistle of the wind. “Hello, Sylvain.”

“Dedue, my man!” Sylvain says with as much enthusiasm as he can muster. “How are you? I haven’t heard from you since the wedding! Give a kiss to Mercie for me, by the way.”

Dedue lets out a snort, muffled by the kilometers between them. “I will make sure of that. We have been alright, though quite busy, as you can imagine.”

Sylvain brings a hand to his heart, and remembers only halfway through that Dedue can’t see him. “No way. Did Dedue Molinaro just make a sex joke? That’s it. I can die happy.”

“It was not a sex joke.” Dedue sighs. “We’ve been travelling for our honeymoon. We are actually on a ship to Mauritius. Did— Did we forget to tell you?”

Sylvain’s heart falls into the depths of his stomach. “Wait. So you’re not in Paris right now?”

For five seconds, the line goes completely silent except for the rush of waves and wind trickling through the speaker. Then— “Sylvain, we haven’t been in Paris for a month and a half. I am sorry, I really thought we told you.”

“Does he need somewhere to stay?” Mercedes’ voice rings over Dedue’s shoulder, half-drowned in noise. “Sylvain, did you already spend all your... wage? Wait— do you need a place to hide? I can tell the landlord to let you in for a few weeks!”

Contrary to her husband, Mercedes is privy to Sylvain’s hustle, an unfortunate side-effect of participating herself in a couple of heists. Sylvain swallows. “No, I— I don’t need somewhere to crash! Or to hide, or anything. I just… I’m coming back from Copenhagen, and I needed to ask you to craft me some custom jewelry, Dedue.”

Dedue hums as Mercedes oohs in acknowledgement. “In that case, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you myself. Although—”

Mercedes cuts her husband with a call of his name, and Sylvain spends the next minute listening to the sound of their debating, words lost to the static wind and the rush of taxi wheels on the freeway. There’s a tone of disapproval he only knows too well in Mercedes’ voice, the one she used when they were in college and she chided him about staying up too late or doing his papers at the last minute, the one he knows means trouble. It would be good for them, he thinks he hears her say, and Sylvain doesn’t have the time to ask what she’s talking about when Dedue starts talking again. “Sylvain? Are you still here?”

“Never left,” he says, like it’s not a lie. “What was up with that?”

Dedue inhales a deep breath, exhales a deeper one. “I still think you should go to my atelier. There’s… Well, I think you’ll find what you need there.”

Sylvain frowns. “What do you mean?”

“We need to go,” Dedue answers, more hurried than usual, “the boat is going to go into port soon, and we need to fetch our bags. I’ll explain later. Call me back tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about it. I get it. Have a fun time with Mercedes!”

“Thank you, Sylvain.” Sylvain hears Dedue’s smile through his sentence. “I… I really hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Sylvain doesn’t solve the cryptic riddle in Dedue’s words until his taxi comes to a stop, thirty minutes later, a couple of buildings down the street of his atelier. He opens the door and slides out of the seat as the driver hands him back his credit card, his hand closing around the handle of his suitcase, his foot hitting the humid, uneven cobblestone that lines the side of the road.

The door slams close, and he takes a deep, polluted breath, inhales the scent of home.

The street is cloaked in deep, crepuscular blue, strings of streetlights drawing fake constellations against the velvet of the clouds, twinkling building windows coalescing into blurry sequins in the distance. Sylvain steps into salt and sludge, sole remnants of early-morning snow, watches the fabric of the sky unfurl in ribbons of impending rain until his gaze finds the glowing sign of Dedue’s boutique, reaches the handcrafted earrings and necklaces showcased under golden light behind the window, makes out the shape of a person behind the counter in the blurred transparence of fogged-up windows. He’d guessed that Dedue had probably hired an employee through the subtext of their call, though whether they’re good enough to make a decent replica of the priceless crown tiara of Denmark remains to be seen — Sylvain’s father may be a petty, incompetent excuse for a jeweler, but even he isn’t dumb enough not to recognize shabby work.

Sylvain pushes the atelier door open, and a decade of repressed feelings tighten around his windpipe.

He’s chopped his hair shorter, Sylvain notices, has pulled it into a short ponytail at the back of his head, but Sylvain would recognize Felix in a crowd of thousands — a strong, elegant frame bent over a working desk; a fringe of hair falling across his forehead like ink drops; dark coffee eyes widening to amber under long, dark lashes as he raises his head and spots him; the riptide of longing that still rushes into Sylvain’s lungs at the sight of him and drowns him under the weight of years.

For a second, Felix looks like he’s going through the same experience, a bond of exhilaration and pain shared through space and time, like he’s just seen the ghost of a wished-for, lost future — Sylvain discerns his name, spoken out of lips he’s dreamt of kissing just once more every instant he’s spent away from them, and the helpless, tiniest spark of hope in Felix’s eyes.

He runs away.

*

The heavy winter rain hasn’t stopped pouring since that evening, Sylvain notices as he nurses the last lukewarm drops of liquor in his glass; he wonders if Felix actually is a God of Thunder, reflecting onto the skies above his certainly stormy mood from when Sylvain left him running after him into that paved street, two days ago. As he downs the last of his drink, he wonders if he’s going to be stood up the way he stood Felix up all these years ago, if Mercedes and Dedue even sent word to Felix about Sylvain’s apology, about the talk he wanted to have with him – the talk they should have had a long time ago, that Sylvain was too heartbroken and bitter and so, so very afraid to have. That guilt-fueled, wistful thought crosses his mind again – that they may have been able to fix things, at the time; that Sylvain misunderstood Felix’s intentions when they started dating, that he wasn’t actually using him to get a job at Gautier; that terrifying realization that Felix might have truly, entirely loved him too.

That last idea had been so ludicrous at the time, the weight of betrayal so heavy, that Sylvain had instead decided to cut all ties with his father and his lover and his cushy Parisian life for the reassuring loneliness of an uncertain future.

Now, Sylvain is tired of waiting for a conclusion that will never come.

He’s about to pay his bill and leave when the same rain drowns the ring of the bell as the dive bar door opens, and his vision narrows down to Felix.

Ten years have done nothing to soften the gut punch that strikes Sylvain when he sees him; if anything, it’s stronger now, digs its nails into his stomach and pulls it right out. Felix has grown older and sharper, boyish charm faded into a patchwork of polished handsomeness, like he’s melded together all the pretty parts of himself to compensate for the average ones and trimmed the edges clean. His clothes look frayed even under the low light, torn black jeans and old leather jacket, boots coated in a thin layer of melted snowdrops. He looks around like a murderer looking for his next victim, and Sylvain doesn’t even have time to shrink in his seat when their gazes meet in the middle and his heartbeat stutters to a stop. Under the neon lights, his eyes are twin volcanoes in aquarelle, diffused to dark brown at the rim with the watery glare of nighttime — and maybe it’s why that forgotten feeling of yearning fills up Sylvain’s chest: that air of deluged determination seeping through Felix’s pores, like he needs Sylvain to believe in his existence once more.

Maybe it’s because Sylvain feels bad for leaving him in the pouring rain, too.

Felix takes a step forward, and another, and another, and there are so many sentences that threaten to pass Sylvain’s lips, crashing like a rushing car from one side of his head to the other — you’ve changed so much, but also not at all; did I ever tell you how much I admired you?; sorry I was too busy running from continent to continent all these years; sometimes, it felt like I was trying to write my life story far from you just so I could one day come back and tell you all about it; did you know I’m probably still in love with you?

And Felix stands in front of the counter, and Sylvain pushes the stool out with his foot, and Felix sits down, and the only thing that makes it past Sylvain’s strangled throat is—

“Want something to drink?”

Felix looks at him as though he’s opened a closet door and a dead, rotting body fell out. “I’m not planning on staying here any longer than I have to.”

Sylvain grimaces in reflex. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Fine,” Felix spits after a beat, tapping impatient fingers on the zinc counter. “You’re lucky I owe Mercedes some favors.”

Sylvain makes a mental note of sending Dedue and Mercie as many baskets of fruits and flower bouquets and piles of money as they want for the rest of their lives. He decides he’ll start with a text, if he makes it out of this bar alive.

Up close, Sylvain deciphers tiredness and something similar to sorrow has carved the shape of his jaw, has honed the cut of his cheekbones, a single line that goes all the way from Sylvain’s heart to blissful college months spent solely in his bed, to high-school sports teams and middle-school spats, to shared childhood summers in the Paris suburbs. He hates how much he wants to touch him, to run his fingers along that outline until it splits them open, to feel it sink into his neck like a noose.

“Two old-fashioneds,” Sylvain calls to the bartender. He also hates how he remembers Felix’s favorites even now.

Felix seems to try his hardest not to look at him, not to even brush their elbows or thighs; dark circles deep as suitcases frame his gaze in violet, his eyes locked on the row of liquors behind the bartenders. Sylvain is somewhat glad he doesn’t have to stare at him head on, that he doesn’t have to face the material incarnation of his worst mistakes and decisions and can study them sideways instead, taking in each detail of his misery at his own pace. Felix’s nails sculpt pale half-moons into the intact parts of his scarred hands, fingers cross-stitched over the knuckles. There’s no jewelry in sight there, no ring. Sylvain hates that he even cares.

“So, how have you b—”

“What do you want.”

All business then, Sylvain thinks. It’s probably for the better; less occasions to focus on the bitterness and grief he’d felt the last day they’d seen each other, less time to contemplate his own part in losing Felix. The ice ball clinks against the glass as the bartender slides him their drinks, and when Sylvain pushes one towards him Felix crosses his arms on the counter, like he’s bracing himself for a new onslaught of unwarranted kindness.

I need you, he almost answers, though he already knows how that would go. An acrid chuckle leaves Sylvain’s lips. “I need your smithing skills.”

“I’m not crafting a wedding ring for you to propose to whatever random girl you’re fucking this week.”

“Very funny, Fe.” The nickname rolls off his tongue with the ease of a curse. Sylvain smothers it with a mouthful of bourbon. “Actually, I need a crown.”

Felix’s head turns so fast Sylvain thinks he might have bruised a muscle. It’s the first time he’s looking straight at him; from this close, Sylvain can decipher the glint of amber in his dark eyes, iced whiskey made warmer by his astonishment at Sylvain’s sentence. It’s the same expression he wore the first time Sylvain told him he loved him. Sylvain takes another swig.

“Wait— you need me to make you a crown.”

“A tiara, to be specific,” Sylvain says as he spins his cocktail around the glass, a tiny whirlwind of liquid copper he watches with the hope he can drown whatever he’s feeling there.

He sees the hum echoing from Felix’s throat in ripples across his drink, watches the orange peel fall onto his lip as he sips. “I can do that. What kind of tiara?”

Sylvain sighs, soft as stroke-reversing suede. “A replica.”

Any hint of warmth, any semblance of truce that had settled in between them rushes out like a gust of winter wind. “No.”

“Even if I told you it’s to get revenge on my father?”

Felix frowns, knuckles turning white around his glass. “I fail to see how that’s my problem.”

“You can’t be serious.” A rising feeling of anger boils Sylvain’s blood crimson, makes him turn fully towards Felix. “He ruined your life too, Felix. He— For God’s sake, he ruined us.”

The scoff that leaves Felix’s throat is more scathing than any insult he’s ever said. “Oh, so that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? From what I remember, your dad wasn’t the one who broke up with me. Your dad wasn’t the one who stood me up in the middle of a restaurant because he couldn’t handle commitment and disappeared off the face of the earth.” Felix breathes an enraged, waterlogged exhale, and the weight of it breaks Sylvain’s heart all over again. “What did you think we’d do here? That I’d let you absolve yourself of your guilt and cure your self-hatred? That we’d stand there and shake hands? That we’d kiss?” He spits the words out like he’s been thinking about them for ten years, like he’s been waiting to throw them in Sylvain’s face, like — Sylvain fantasizes — he’s been waiting to do exactly that. Felix pushes himself up from the stool, feet almost catching on the footrest. “Forget it. Coming here was a mistake.”

Sylvain knows better than to take Felix’s wrist, knows better than holding him in place. So he uses the next best strategy he has, the only one that ever works. There hasn’t ever been a time he hasn’t been saved by his words, after all. “Do you remember the ring you were crafting that day? The Cethleann Diamond replica.”

The name is enough to make Felix stop and sit back down, if only momentarily. “What about it?”

“Well, he’s selling it off tonight. Auctioned at almost ten million dollars.” Sylvain sighs. The rest of his drink rushes down his throat in ichorous rage. “The original— it belonged to a widower. A man who’d bought it for a couple thousands at a pawnshop for his wife. ...He’s still stealing from people, Felix. He’s still stealing from you, and making victims off of your works.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried solving that?!” The discussions around them come to a sudden stop, an uncomfortable silence settling over the bar until Sylvain waves in apology. A subtle cushion of chatter covers the walls again when Felix settles from his outburst. “I bought them all off. All of the fakes. At the same price he’s sold them. I spent all of the old man’s inheritance on that, and much, much more.” Felix sloshes the rest of his drink around his glass, downs it in one go, as though the discussion will come to a close once he has nothing to make him stay. “Your father did nothing to me. All of this – all of the debts, all of the pain… I did to myself.”

“You can’t possibly believe that’s true,” Sylvain says, leaning into the space between them, and when their shoulders brush Felix startles like he’s been burned. Sylvain leans back in his seat. “Fine, then—what about all the people he fucked over? What about the guy with the Cethleann ring?” What about me? he thinks, but doesn’t say.

Felix watches him with the same caution and apprehension one feels when meeting someone for the first time, licks his lips as though tasting his next sentence before it leaves his mouth. “You’ve changed.”

“Well, I’m not twenty anymore, for a start.”

“... Fine,” he eventually whispers, and Sylvain exhales in unexplained relief. “So what’s your plan? You must have one, right?”

So Sylvain tells him. He orders them another round of drinks, and tells him about the past ten years. He tells him about his self-inflicted disowning, and about running away to London. He tells him about meeting Claude, and Hilda, and Yuri. He tells him about his first job, about Hapi’s child-trafficking ring, about all the petty, multi-billionaire thieves they’ve made a career out of ruining. He tells him about his fabricated backstory as an art appraiser, about all the contacts he’s made and all the people he’s helped. He tells him about Ashe, and about Seteth, and about his plan.

He doesn’t tell him how Felix has not left his thoughts even once since the day he left him alone in that Parisian restaurant, how he wonders if he’d be proud of what he’s doing, how he talks to his own shadow like Felix is going to answer.

There’s an earnestness in Felix’s expression as he listens to him, all wide amber eyes and bitten ruby lips, fading into skepticism when he runs his hand over his face and lets his chin rest inside his palm. “So let me get this straight—you and your fellow crew of scammers want to Robin-Hood this, use Dimitri’s fake crown to trap your father and call the police on him?”

Sylvain laughs as he finishes the rest of his second old-fashioned. “That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

Felix raises a dubious eyebrow. “Dare I ask how Dimitri even agreed to this?”

Sylvain crosses his fingers behind his hands. “I didn’t exactly tell him everything.”

Felix snorts inside his drink. It’s the most wonderful sound Sylvain has heard all night. “Yeah, I bet.”

“Let’s just say I had a favor to cash in.”

“And what do you do with the money you steal?”

“I can’t speak for the others, but I only use a small part of my share. I try to give the rest to the people who’ve been tricked by our targets.”

“That’s what I thought,” Felix sneers.

Sylvain’s frown cuts into his forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you steal from them, and you use that money to feel better about yourself. How exactly is that different from what your so-called targets do?”

“It’s never about the money,” Sylvain says, elbow slamming on the zinc counter as he stares into Felix’s eyes. “It’s about the people we’re taking it from. You know, using capitalism to its own ends, and all that.”

Felix’s gaze wavers, travels from Sylvain’s face to his hands, to his empty whiskey glass, the ice ball melted down to its core, and when he sighs a hesitant scoff, Sylvain thinks he’s won.

“You’re delusional.” Felix doesn’t look at him as he stands up, leaves a twenty-euro bill on the counter for the drinks. “You’re asking me to craft a fake antique in order to sell it off for millions, and for what? Get revenge on your shitty old man for something you did? You’re no better than your father, Sylvain. Good night.”

Sylvain’s throat dries up as Felix hurries out of the bar and the glimmer of hope inside his chest dies out.

He gets another drink, and another, and another, lets his feet drag him out of the bar and into the city’s baring cold, doesn’t notice and doesn’t care that his coat flies wide open on his directionless walk. His conversation with Felix replays through his mind like an old VHS tape, each word out of Felix’s mouth dotted with static, each eye contact eviscerated and dissected until Sylvain sees nothing but bare disappointment, nothing but cold indifference. A childish feeling of fury climbs along the walls of his throat like weeds, the same feeling that had made a home in his vocal chords the day he confronted Felix about his apprenticeship with Sylvain’s father — about the fake jewelry his father forced Felix to craft, about what little Felix had to say about the matter. Using him? Don’t make me laugh, Sylvain thinks, his drunken mind turning the clock needles back to ten years ago, he was the one using me in the first place, dating me for a guaranteed place in the Gautier ateliers, but the static of Felix’s voice rewinds and replays the same sentence, again and again, stood me up in the middle of a restaurant because he couldn’t handle commitment, and Sylvain knows there’s a hint of truth there, one he’s unearthed and accepted and regretted ever since.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been wandering, cannot distinguish where exactly he is, doesn’t really care to find out. The wild whip of the wind sobers him up better than anything else could, the relentless cold peeling the skin off his fingers as he holds his clothes close, as he reaches in his pocket for his phone.

Hey, he types on the keyboard, send me the address for my dad’s auction, and a minute later Claude’s name shines on the screen, a muffled chime seeping through his fingers.

His father is setting up the very last auction as he slips into the lavish hall, rows of rich heiresses and wealthy rentiers gasping and gossiping as he lists off the properties of the Cethleann Diamond ring, sipping from overpriced champagne glasses and eating defrosted petits-fours. His father looks at them like he used to look at his wife: with contempt and condescension, small, dark eyes narrowed into a smile as counterfeit as the jewels he sells, gazing down towards his audience like a tyrant king gazes down to his subjects, like a mad scientist observes his lab rats. His lean, elegant figure walks the length of the stage as he reads aloud the number of carats, the quality of the gold; even that knowledge is stolen, Sylvain knows, taken from more talented people doing the work for him while he strolls from spotlight to spotlight, the grey-stricken, red hair Sylvain shares with him catching on fluorescent fire, igniting Sylvain’s hatred all over again.

“Auction starts at 9.69 million dollars,” he says. Sylvain takes a seat.

He bides his time, lets other, poorer attendees raise their hands and the stakes, from ten to twenty to thirty million, lets his father count one and two before he raises five fingers.

A collective exclamation makes the room convulse and turn to stare.

“Thirty-five,” Apollinaire Gautier starts, voice shaking like a dead leaf.

“Fifty,” Sylvain corrects, and the look of horrified recognition on his father’s face leaves a bittersweet taste in Sylvain’s mouth. You’re no better than your father, Felix’s voice intones in his mind, a ping pong ball that ricochets onto the walls of his skull until the cartilage cracks. The commissioner’s gavel falls. It doesn’t feel like a victory.

Sylvain makes his way to the podium as the people rise from their plush chairs, going back to their rich, frivolous lives as he gets his checkbook out of his bag. Up close, he sees his father has aged like an overripe fruit, all the rot inside seeping out of his wrinkles in sweatdrops as he stares his only remaining son down, the features Sylvain’s face borrows from his gleefully unrecognizable under the ruffles of skin. Sylvain is all joy and laughter as he greets the commissioner, white teeth biting theatrically onto his lower lip as he writes down the amount and tears the check from the spine; he makes a show of folding it in half and sliding it into his father’s suit pocket, swiping the ring box from the table and pushing it open with a finger.

“It’s so beautiful,” Sylvain laughs, dregs of bitter bourbon turning to bile in his throat. “Even for a fake.”

Apollinaire Gautier regards him with a calculating look, a predator deciding whether he’s letting his prey go. Good thing Sylvain’s his own kind of hunter. “And what will you do?”

“Give it to Felix, of course.” Sylvain’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes as he turns around and walks away. “I’ll see you in hell, father.”

*

The bright mid-morning light hacks into Sylvain’s skull like a cleaver when he stumbles into their rented living room, swimming through the rhythmless drumming of yet another hangover.

“We’re moving,” Claude tells him as a greeting, his too-chirpy tone ringing like an unsheathed knife over the sounds of rolling suitcases and the whirring of the vacuum cleaner over the coffee-table carpet. He’s sitting on the leather couch with Hapi, the both of them sipping from carton coffee cups in front of a half-eaten bag of pastries; Hapi’s face pales in distaste when she bats away Sylvain’s hand as he reaches for a croissant, daggery eyes tearing him limb to limb as she takes in every detail of his probably pathetic appearance.

“Ew, no. Go take a shower, put on a shirt, and brush your teeth. I’ll save one for you.”

Sylvain ignores her. “Moving where?”

“We’re leaving in an hour,” Hilda chirps from the open kitchen counter as she sips on her own coffee, perfectly content to let Ashe clean everything behind her. “Don’t wanna keep the taxi waiting. I’m not getting on public transport with all our suitcases.”

“Don’t worry,” Claude tells him with a wink and that damn enigmatic smile, “we’re not going that far. You should pack up your bags, though.”

And Sylvain, ever talented at reading between the lines, guesses this is how this failed venture ends: with him having lost fifty million dollars for a fake diamond ring, with him having ruined the only relationship that has ever mattered to him all over again, with him getting one last shower and packing his bags before hopping on yet another plane for god-knows-where. One mistake and you’re gone, he remembers Claude telling him the first time they’d met. He wonders if it’s his time now, if Team Confidence will fly to other, brighter destinations while he’ll be left to his own devices after nearly ten years of collaboration. The familiar fire of self-hatred enkindles inside his chest – he didn’t even bother spending the last couple of days with his partners, the only people he’s been close to ever since he left Paris; was too busy drinking through the days and the disappointment and the despair to even take them sightseeing. Pathetic, someone whispers inside his mind. For an instant, it almost sounds like Miklan. For an instant, it almost sounds like Felix.

He emerges from his bedroom forty-seven minutes later, shaven and showered and blue-blazered, travel bags heavy in both his hands. The fading side-effects of his hangover blessedly save him from any small talk as he helps Claude with the rest of their belongings; it would be too cruel, he thinks, if their leader were to chat with him like nothing has changed and everything is alright and he’s not about to kick Sylvain out and say goodbye forever. Hapi’s seated on the edge of the pavement, waiting for them with a croissant in her mouth and another in her hand that she offers to Sylvain, and as Sylvain sits down next to her and thanks her he realizes he’s probably going to miss her most, her sharp tongue and sharper gaze and silent, caring nonchalance.

“Chin up,” she tells him. “I’d try to look like I’m fucking amazing if I were you.”

He doesn’t have time to ask her what she means when the blaring klaxon of the taxi echoes in the empty street, and Sylvain only hands the driver his bag before settling at the back of the car and letting his temple fall against the cold glass of the window.

He doesn’t know how much time passes until the regular lull of wheels in motion slows down and he opens his eyes. When he does, the car is parking on the side of a very familiar, paved street, the glow of Dedue’s shop sign reflecting off the frozen rain puddles in waves of golden light.

“Wait– Claude, what–”

Claude ignores him, instead making conversation in Arabic with the taxi driver when they stop, the car door handle clicking underneath his fingers when he and Hapi get out to help him pull out their suitcases from the trunk. Hilda and Ashe leave, too, and Sylvain’s left scrambling out of the taxi as he counts the Euro bills in his wallet to hand to their driver. He’s certain he’s overtipping him. He doesn’t find it in himself to care.

“Claude,” he calls as he catches up to him, gets one of his bags from where it’s lying precariously on top of Hilda’s bright pink suitcase, “why are we here?”

Claude’s smile is bright with the rush of pride one gets when outwitting a worthy chess opponent. “We’re invading Dedue and Mercie’s apartment, of course. Don’t worry,” he adds with a worried look when he sees the dread Sylvain’s expression morphs into, walking down the street until they’re in front of the building door, “I have a key double, and their permission. Dedue gave it to me for when I need somewhere to sleep here. Both the key, and the permission.”

“That doesn’t explain why we’re here,though.”

“It’s simpler, isn’t it?” A clear, familiar voice spells out, just the right side of annoyed, and Sylvain’s head snaps so hard he almost breaks his neck.

Felix stands in front of the shop’s door in all his sullen beauty, arms crossed in front of him, looking everywhere but at Sylvain. “If I have to work on this stupid tiara anyway.”

A surge of anxious relief and breathless euphoria jolts Sylvain’s brain awake as he stares at Claude’s shit-eating grin and Felix’s subdued, sardonic expression.

“Told you you’d better look fucking amazing, Sylvie,” Hapi says as she tugs his bag out of his hand and Claude’s keys out of his pocket. Behind Felix, Ashe calls for him to show them the atelier, and when Felix stalks away with a spat-out what the hell, don’t touch the hammers, Sylvain feels like he’s breathing again for the first time in five entire minutes.

“But why?” is the only thing Sylvain can croak out.

Claude laughs, smooth as honey-in-milk, and it’s like he’s never been threatening at all, the curve of his smile a butter knife. “It doesn’t suit you to be this miserable.”

“How did you even–”

“Oh, I take no credit for that,” Claude answers with a shrug. “Ashe did most of the heavy lifting. Basically went directly to Felix’s atelier to convince him to give you another chance. I just… gave him a little push in the right direction,” he finishes, throwing Sylvain another one of his insufferable winks. “Plus, he’s very, very deep in debt.”

“This isn’t happening,” Sylvain sighs through the weight of his embarrassment.

“I mean, there’s no need to thank any of us, really. It’s a professional collaboration. Nothing more than that, if you don’t make an effort.”

Sylvain returns Claude’s pointed stare with a dubious raise of eyebrows, and doesn’t say anything else as he enters the atelier.

Only now can Sylvain allow himself to take in the atmosphere of the shop: it feels like Dedue, most of all, the sheer amount of handcrafted jewelry mixing on the shelves with traditional linens and printed fabrics and an equally sheer amount of plants, dark leaves growing wild along the walls and the columns, a pot of dried flowers elegantly standing on the wooden cashier counter. The actual atelier at the back looks more rough-hewn, hammers and knives hanging onto the exposed bricks of the back wall with simple black nails, the lit-up forge and ovens burning hotter than any radiator, the steel-stained workdesk messy with Felix’s work.

Felix, who’s standing just a few feet in front of him, scolding Ashe for touching everything his fingers can lay upon. Felix, whose ponytail shakes from side to side as he shakes his head in disapprobation. Felix, whose gaze travels from Ashe to Sylvain, whose breath visibly catches and shakes his silhouette, whose lips open on an aborted sentence before closing back up again.

“Thank you,” Sylvain finds himself saying, with the sincerity he reserves to Felix, and Felix only. “For doing this.”

“I’m not doing it for you,” Felix shoots back as he averts his eyes. “It’s… It’s for the old man. And it’s for Glenn.”

Sylvain doesn’t have many memories of him, and the ones he has aren’t the happiest — he mostly remembers Glenn as an extension of Miklan, two unlikely friends brought together more by physical proximity and collective, teenage loneliness than by actual understanding. Felix, however, had walked into life like a soldier walks to war: safely hidden behind Glenn as he opened the march, first in line for all their battles — against their parents, against outsiders, against the world. Glenn had been authority made flesh-and-marble, placed on the spotlit pedestal of youth, casting its protective shadow over his unwilling little brother. That one family member you never rebel against, the one that can both scold you when he catches you smoking and ask you for a cigarette at the same time. Felix’s very own, cloud-textured suit of armor.

Sylvain remembers when Glenn and Miklan died. Their funeral had been the first time he had wanted to kiss Felix, on that two-seated swing between their backyards, if only to quieten the tears rolling down his face, if only to silence the decades of loving memories slipping from Felix’s mouth in stories and apologies and regrets. When I was born, he’d ended up saying, Miklan didn’t speak to our parents for three entire weeks, except to scream at them, and it must have sounded like a funny joke, because Felix had stopped crying, and Felix had laughed, and Felix had never cried again.

“I get it,” Sylvain admits. “But I hope you’re doing it for yourself, too.”

He gathers Ashe and Hilda’s bags, and gets out through the back door, and if Felix answers, he doesn’t hear it.

*

Just as Sylvain figures they’d buried the hatchet, when Team Confidence invaded Dedue and Mercedes’ apartment, he figures Felix and he will go back to brisk cordiality, exchanging mundane greetings and mundaner looks in the mornings when Sylvain leaves and in the evenings when he comes back, basking in the heartrending relief of almost-indifference for the remainder of their reluctant cohabitation.

Instead, Claude corners him as he’s about to leave the building the first day, flashes him that smile that hides a thousand provocations. “Not you.”

“What do you mean, not me?”

Sylvain’s lack of patience must be relatively palpable, because Claude lifts his hands in front of him in mock-self defense. “Come on, Syl,” he says, like Sylvain doesn’t know he only calls him Syl when he wants to be especially placating – or especially persuasive, “you’re the only one who actually knows his stuff about jewelry. You need to stay and help Felix.”

Sylvain frowns. “Felix doesn’t need me to tell him how to do his job.”

“This needs to be a perfect replica, Sylvain.” Claude’s gaze has gone from calculated fondness to calculating obstinance. “You said so yourself – even your dad won’t be fooled by anything less. And you’re the only one of us who’s actually seen the tiara firsthand, who’s held it in his own hands. I don’t actually care much about what happened between the two of you,” he says, pointedly looking at his nails as though to make a show of hiding that he’s lying, “but I do care about doing this job the right way, and about your dad getting what’s coming for him.”

“I know,” Sylvain answers in a sigh. “One mistake, and you’re out.”

“One mistake,” Claude repeats, “and you’re out. Don’t let this job be your last if you don’t want it to be.”

So Sylvain helps Felix. Sylvain spends the entire morning helping Felix, if sitting in silence on the other side of his atelier and welcoming the store’s customers while Felix works behind the counter counts as helping. Felix doesn’t talk to him, only asks him to fetch stones or tools for him, doesn’t thank him when Sylvain hands them out or puts them down on the workshop desk Felix’s back has been bent over since nine in the morning – and it’s somehow worse than the disappointment and resentment and sadness he’d seen in Felix’s eyes, when they’d met in that dim-lit dive bar: that forced apathy and faked disinterest.

“Are you sure you don’t want to put on music or something?” Sylvain ends up asking around noon, more a provocation than an actual request, anything to make Felix acknowledge his existence, “you know, for atmosphere.” Sylvain punctuates his syllables with an exaggerated wiggle of eyebrows, counts down the seconds until Felix finally rises from his chair and bashes his head in with his hammer in exasperation. Yet Felix unfortunately doesn’t kill him, only settles on a groan that echoes distorted in the atelier, and Sylvain decides he’s had enough of all this and steps out of the shop.

The flickering flame of the lighter, that had been safely tucked away inside his pocket, burns blisters on the tip of his thumb as he holds it close to the cigarette between his lips, and the cloud of smoke he inhales smoulders inside his throat and down his lungs in liberating constriction. The breath he releases shakes into the breeze, laced with slow-burn poison, heavy with temporary solace.

“I thought you’d stopped smoking.”

Felix’s voice drifts from behind him and through the smoke before the man himself does, stepping into Sylvain’s space at his side, and a surprised startle ripples along Sylvain’s nerves like blood on pavement.

“God, don’t scare me like that.” He tries to tune his tone teasing, but the air between them shivers with a trembling exhale. Perhaps it’s why Felix does not bother apologizing, his eyes trained on Sylvain’s shape, the color of the glowing ember at the tip of the drug he brings to his lips again. The weight of guilt makes Sylvain avert his gaze towards the snow-powdered emptiness of the bricked street.

He barely hears Felix’s annoyed clicking of tongue and the rustling of clothes before cool fingers forcibly tear his hand away from his face and bring it to Felix’s own.

Felix’s lips feel so much softer than he remembers, Sylvain thinks when he curls them around the cigarette end and against Sylvain’s knuckles. His eyes don’t leave Sylvain’s face as he takes a long, slow drag, glinting dark gold in time with the burning ash, his nails an inch short of biting into the back of Sylvain’s hand to keep him in place. Not that he has to — Sylvain is far too captivated to even dare move, Felix’s warmth so far yet so impossibly close to his own in the chilly, cloudy daylight, and when Felix lets go of the cigarette in his mouth and the smoke in his lungs Sylvain wants to breathe it all into his waterlogged chest.

“I didn’t know you still smoked.” The sentence slips out unbidden, the cold shaping it in evanescent ribbons.

Felix’s hand does not release his own. “I don’t.”

“You used to. Back then.”

“How kind of you to remember.” Felix’s voice is strained into hieroglyphs, something akin to bitterness seeping from the syllables as he stares at Sylvain.

Felix is forced to loose his hold on his fingers when Sylvain raises them to his own mouth again, tasting death there in an indirect kiss; he still stands and stares, unmoving, unyielding, undecipherable, lighting Sylvain’s insides on fire.

“I remember more than you think I do,” Sylvain says as he turns away. The silence is as stifling in the burning winter air as in the smothering warmth of the shop. He no longer feels like smoking. “Listen, you don’t have to believe me, but I–”

“I’m sorry.”

Sylvain chokes on the smoke of his cigarette.

“What?” He wheezes once he’s gotten his cough under control and Felix looks sufficiently spooked.

Felix’s tongue clicks against his teeth, his arms coming to cross in front of his chest, and Sylvain sees the shiver that flickers into his posture. “I said, I’m sorry. For saying all that stuff, in the bar. I… I shouldn’t have.”

“Wait, no,” Sylvain says, his hands waving like a windmill in front of him. He wonders how pathetic he must look. “I’m… I’m the one who should say that.” An accidental sigh falls out of his lips as he finishes his cigarette, crouches down to crush the ashes against the edge of the pavement. “I wanted to apologize too, that night. Felix, I’m… I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry for…” For everything, he wants to say, the word on the blunt edge of his tongue, and just as he braces himself to speak it into existence–

“I know,” Felix cuts him. When Sylvain looks up, Felix isn’t looking at him; from his slanted vantage point, down on that greyscale piece of pavement, he looks like he’s looking to the beyond, to the cloud-covered horizon of a frozen past. “I know,” he repeats, like he tries to persuade himself, and Sylvain wonders if he’s the same – if he, also, speaks it into existence as a proof of conviction, a last-minute acceptance.

Another shiver racks his body, and Sylvain bursts out laughing.

“You’re still so sensitive to the cold,” Sylvain says through his fit, and Felix kicks his shin hard enough to make him stumble.

“Come on, let’s get back inside,” he says as he’s already halfway through the threshold. “I hope your taste in music improved in ten years.”

Sylvain rises, steps into the inviting atmosphere of the shop. “Oh, we’re so listening to Taylor Swift all day.”

*

The next few weeks are cadenced to the pulse of a pendulum, habits settling back into Sylvain’s muscles until it feels like he’s never stopped seeing Felix at all, content to let Hapi and Hilda and Ashe bear the brunt of his usual workload. Claude deploys Hapi as a spy inside the Gautier headquarters, spreading rumors about the prodigal son turned famous art dealer Sylvain Gautier from the bird’s eye view of her secretary job, whispering of hyper-secret, underground auctions reserved to the dark, higher powers ruling the world from the shadows. Ashe makes for the perfect PR representative, sends word about the Azure Moon to all of the big publications, spins the tale of Prince Dimitri of Denmark giving away the crown jewel to his precious college friend Sylvain in order to donate the auction money to the least fortunate. Claude and Hilda arrange the fundings, the seatings, the invitations, the decorations. Yuri calls them one night to announce he’s recruited fifty of their former partners in crime to fill out the place and play the part of important mafia godfathers and yakuza families.

Sylvain’s relegated as Felix’s personal assistant, from their borrowed flat just above the workshop; would find it boring if it was anyone else but him. Felix is usually already working when he climbs down the stairs at nine and enters through the back door, brings breakfast and coffee and advice about the intricacies of the jewel Felix spends sixteen hours a day crafting. Felix’s dark circles get deeper and darker, burrow under the amber of his irises in willful ignorance of Sylvain’s care; Felix’s work is relentless, only settling when Sylvain forces him to eat by bringing him a plate full of food at ten in the evening, counting on Felix’s upper-class upbringing to coerce him into not wasting his meal and taking better care of himself.

On weekends, Claude has him scour Parisian museums and reception halls for a venue, and Sylvain brings Felix along, asks him for his impressions, his advice. They visit one after the other: the Louvre (too mainstream), Orsay (too conspicuous), the Musée de la Vie Romantique (too quaint), the Maison de la Photographie (too labyrinthine). Felix brings him to the Grand Palais, but the reception room under the dome has been turned into an ice rink for the rest of the season; they still spend the entire evening there, Felix teaching Sylvain to skate under the gaudy disco lights shining in tiny planets over the ice, and for an instant it feels like they’re eighteen and twenty again, the road of their life together wide and bright and straight in front of them. Sylvain remembers how scared he had been, back then, the fear of disappointing his overbearing father carved into his bones – now replaced by the ever-growing dread of losing Felix again, of stepping away and out of his life once and for all, once all is said and done and there’s no father to ruin anymore, no Gautier to swear revenge upon.

Every night, Sylvain drags Felix up to his own flat, at the top of the seven-storey building, forcibly tears him away from his work and pushes him up the stairs in a lustless urge to put him to bed. Every night, he recounts him the story of one of his schemes, starting with the first – that time he incarnated a genius scientist cooking fake drugs to extort millions of dollars out of a rich movie director; each new plot making Felix experience an entire dictionary of quiet emotions until he falls asleep, his body curling on himself under the covers of his convertible couch.

Each and every day is a reminiscence: of lazy days wandering wherever their feet would take them, strolling through museum hallways and imagining Felix in every beautiful statue, every intricate painting he studied; of pining evenings spent writing papers on a twin-sized bed, elbow to elbow until exhaustion took them and they woke up face to face; of heavy nights where the only paper Sylvain wrote on was Felix’s skin.

If Felix shares the same sentiment, he makes no mention of it. In Sylvain’s delusion, it’s better off this way.

At exactly 10pm, Sylvain climbs down the stairs for his now-usual, fake cigarette break; Mercedes forbade them to smoke in the apartment, and it’s as good an excuse as any to check for any light streaming from the backdoor of the shop, for any remaining, hushed sounds of metal on metal. Tonight, like every night, he finds the shop still occupied – as careful as Felix tries to be, Sylvain’s habit of listening through closed doors for signs of warning and sounds of disturbance has been nurtured ever since his tenderest of childhoods, learnt and practiced each time he needed to pass Miklan’s door in the dark, second-floor hallway of his icy-cold house.

He lets his knuckles rasp against the door in a soft knock, chuckles at the swear he hears Felix whisper.

“You know resting up is important for focus, right?” He says, rhetorical, when Felix opens the door.

Felix pointedly looks at the tupperware box in Sylvain’s other hand, and his stomach makes a quiet, gurgling sound Sylvain does his best to ignore. “Do you want this crown or not?” Felix groans, but there’s a hint of relief in the curve of his shoulders as he stretches his arms. Sylvain also does his best to ignore the way his shirt rides up his hips, the sliver of skin pulled taut over the line of his abs.

“See, one of the perks of this job is that we’re not particularly pressed for time,” he answers as he steps into the atelier, starts turning the lights off. “Plus, what happens if you hurt yourself because you haven’t been resting properly and can’t work anymore?”

Felix doesn’t answer, which must mean Sylvain’s won this battle. The keys jingle between his fingers as he pushes Sylvain outside and closes the door behind them.

Sylvain doesn’t know how he can climb the stairs two by two even after twelve straight hours of work, but he does, his lithe, athletic figure disappearing around the corner of the spiral staircase while Sylvain’s left breathless after three stories, having to stop at each landing until he reaches the last, seventh floor. Felix is carelessly picking at his nails in the threshold of his flat when Sylvain finally puts one foot on the final step, looks at him with barely-concealed amusement in the chiaroscuro of the ceiling light.

“After you,” he says with a self-assured raise of eyebrows, so different from the first time he’d allowed Sylvain in – he’d been awkward then, pushing the mess of his clothes away with the tip of his foot as they’d made their way in the main and only room, only letting Sylvain stay because of the takeout fried chicken he’d gotten for them at nine in the evening.

Sylvain collapses on the couch as soon as he enters the flat, leaves the tupperware box on the small coffee table in front of him, observes the beautiful, silver edges of Felix’s face in the refrigerator light as he gets two cans of coke for them to drink, and when he pushes the fridge door closed the room is swallowed in complete darkness. The alternating red and green lights outside the window spell Morse sentences in neons over Felix’s figure; when Sylvain’s gaze follows them to the source, snowflakes shimmer in slow-motion under the blaring city lights, suspended in midair against the black sky like a broken TV screen – and for a single, icebound moment, Sylvain’s entire world reduces to him, and Felix, and that infinite, snow-dotted obsidian sky. He thinks he hears Felix sit besides him, silent, sublime, and Sylvain wants to live the rest of his life in that single instant of content emptiness, that state of unknown beginnings or endings, of perpetual, postponed possibilities.

Felix shifts next to him, and it’s like the night shifts with him, pulling Sylvain’s gaze in the orbit of his presence. Felix is observing him, green light turning to orange on his scribbled-on expression.

Sylvain smiles. “Like what you see?”

Felix’s snappy comeback is immediate. “You’re insufferable.”

“And you’re staring,” Sylvain teases. “Something you want to tell me, then?”

Felix exhales in a tiny simulacrum of laughter. “Can I ask you a question?”

Sylvain looks at the neon highlights sinking into the night of his hair, at the way the subtle glow of the red light softens his edges. “Shoot.”

“Are you happy?”

The question takes him aback less than the earnest tone in Felix’s voice, than the unreadable emotion in his eyes as they bore into his. It’s a loaded one, Sylvain knows, a test more than an actual interrogation, an ask with no right answer. Still, he sinks further into the plush pillows of the couch, his shoulder just shy of brushing Felix’s. “On a practical level, I guess I am. This is a very lucrative endeavor.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Felix says as he fully turns to him, his arm settling on the back of the couch, a strong, safe shackle to prevent Sylvain’s elusions. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since… Ever since you came back.” His voice dips into sorrowful contraltos, his other hand reaching up to toy with some invisible chain tucked under his shirt. “This thing that you do, and everything it implies. Does it truly fulfill you?”

A hum leaves Sylvain’s throat as his gaze finds the wall, the moving lights of passing cars reflecting there in faded, misshapen moon puddles. “Let’s just say it hasn’t always been a pleasant experience. It’s been… quite lonely,” he admits, not looking at Felix. “But the good thing about being alone is that it gives you tons of time for introspection and examining where exactly you fucked up.”

Felix snorts. “Tell me about it.”

The idea that Felix may have felt as lonely as he has, all these years, has never crossed Sylvain’s mind before; now, though, as he looks back to his best what-if, his prettiest missed chance, Sylvain remembers how similar they are, at their core – one a robotic architect of retribution, a dealer of self-aggrandizing kindness and clichés of compassion; the other a post-mortem, physical encyclopedia of grief and misguided fury; both dinner party-crashing, low self-esteem assholes with the worst good intentions.

“But this whole con artistry thing, as you call it,” Sylvain continues, “it made me realize that I’m just as bad and just as good as anyone else. Everyone in this world has their malfunctions, everyone has something that holds them back. And taking down the lowest of the low really puts into perspective how shitty you are as a person.”

Felix laughs, sudden as a flash of thunder, booming and bright and blinding, and Sylvain wants to swallow the sound at the source, wants to feel it in tides against his heart. “That doesn’t answer my question, though.”

Sylvain feels the answer curl along his tongue like smoke, releases it into the air in slow fumes. “I was never really happy. I thought I was fulfilled, though, until…” Until I came back and saw you again, his mind fills in, until I saw you in that atelier and in that dive bar, until I remembered how happy I was with you. “Until I remembered,” he finishes in a sigh.

He can feel Felix study him, all black coffee stares peppered in intermittent milky lights, fingers still absentmindedly dancing around that chain Sylvain’s only seen glimpses of. “Why are you doing it, then? If it doesn’t make you happy?”

His answer is immediate, like his heart jumped into his throat and onto his tongue before his mind caught up. “It’s not about my own happiness.” He takes a deep inspiration, a leap of faith. “When I started, I felt like for the first time, I was doing something right. That these people were getting what they deserved, and that I was making the world a little bit of a better place, one heist at a time. That even though I wasn’t happy… I was doing something bigger than that. I was destroying the very system that destroyed me. All these people,” he continues, not letting Felix comment, “I want them to pay for what they’ve done. I want them to hurt as much as they’ve made other people hurt, and I want to give some level of justice to their victims.”

“I’d forgotten”, Felix says through a bitter chuckle, “how foolishly selfless you can be.”

“Isn’t that why you’re doing it, too?” Sylvain counters, crossing his arms in front of his chest until his t-shirt crinkles under the weight. “Doing it for Glenn, doing it for Rodrigue.”

“I lied.”

Sylvain chokes on his own breath. “Wh– what do you mean you lied?”

“I’m not doing it for them, okay?” He snaps, and there’s a pretty, pretty peach dousing his cheeks, melting into the orange and red of the street lights as he averts his eyes. “I… I went there, that day. At the auction. I was planning on buying the Cethleann Diamond, get yet another loan at the bank, but…”

Sylvain’s eyes widen, his next sentence a muted exhale more than an actual, voiced thought. “But I bought it.”

“You did.” There’s a tinge of fond amusement in Felix’s statement, a hint of childlike, fairytale awe. “I wanted to call you out for it. To yell at you, to punch you – but then you told him you’d give the ring to me, and I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

Sylvain, too, laughs; an uproarious, unhinged fit that Felix follows with mock-embarrassment. “Fuck, now that I think back about it,” he coughs out through quakes of fading laughter, “it was so, so stupid. Even buying the ring in the first place when I knew it was a fake.”

“It was a bit stupid,” Felix says after a soft hum, “but also… a bit bold. Made me think about what you’d said. That maybe it wasn’t all just for show, that you actually needed my help. That maybe…” His tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth as he shakes a thought out of his head, doesn’t finish his sentence. “Do you… Do you think it would truly fulfill you? To take your father down?”

Sylvain lets his head fall against the back of the couch, stares at the ceiling awash in wavering neons. “I don’t think fulfill is quite the right word. I think it would bring me peace, though. Ease my guilt. Give me a reason to…” he swallows, lets out a small sigh. “To have ruined the only thing that could make me actually happy.”

A sharp intake of breath echoes through the room, and when Sylvain straightens up on the couch, looks back at Felix, he’s no longer looking back at him; Felix’s gaze has trailed to Sylvain’s hands twisting and untwisting themselves into knots, and Sylvain watches Felix reach under his own collar, watches his fingers slip that thin, golden chain he’s seen in flickering flashes around Felix’s nape when bends over his worktable, out and onto the crux of his chest. Two matching, gold rings hang there, two simple bands entwining like lovers, as though indissociable from each other. Sylvain’s brain reads their meaning in subtitles, and his heart drops to his stomach.

“What’s the story behind those?” He asks before he lets his mind fully process what he’s seeing.

A spark of emotion lights up Felix’s eyes as he exhales a dubious snicker, or perhaps it’s just a trick of the light, brown turned burnished copper. “There was this guy I dated in college,” he starts, and the bittersweet expression on his face tears Sylvain’s lungs right out of his chest, “that I thought was the person I’d spend my life with.”

“What was he like?” Sylvain chokes out, a small, pathetic heartbreak.

Felix’s eyebrows fly up his forehead, and it would be almost comical if Sylvain wasn’t currently seeing his hopes being dashed at an excruciating funeral pace. The ghost of a small smirk floats over Felix’s face as he starts speaking again. “A fool, truly. The biggest in all of France. But,” he speaks through a resigned sigh, fluttering through his eyelashes as he looks down to Sylvain’s hands again, “he was kind, kinder than most people gave him credit for. Generous, too, without wanting anything in return. He had a gift for talking to people, and cutting right to their core. He probably understood me better than anyone else. Could see right through my bluntness and my fits of anger.” Sylvain feels like he’s going to die right there and then, if Felix continues praising a stranger that he obviously still has feelings for, that he crafted matching rings for. He’s about to tell Felix exactly that when Felix cuts him again. “Suffice to say, I didn’t take it well when he dumped me because he thought I was using him to get a job at his father’s company.”

Realization crashes through Sylvain’s brain like a rushing train. “Wait. You’re– You’re talking about–”

“You, you dolt,” Felix says as he stabs his finger in the middle of Sylvain’s chest, eyebrows twisted in exasperation. “I’m talking about you. God, you truly are the biggest fool in all of France.”

The wave of relief that wrecks against the shore of Sylvain’s ribs turns into short-breathed hysteria, smashes his heart to smithereens against his bones, the shards pushing through his lungs and cutting off the airways, as though the only way he’d ever be able to respire again would be to steal Felix’s breath away right from his lips. “Yeah,” he says through feeble, wheezed-out laughter, through the emotional roller-coaster Felix has just made him ride, “I truly am.” The neon city lights flare over the rings in muddled, everchanging crescents, and the thunder of questions storming inside Sylvain’s mind synthesize into a single, unfinished one: “Can I…?”

But Felix seems to understand nonetheless, the blush of the red light making itself home onto the parchment of his cheekbones as he gives a minute nod of permission, and Sylvain reaches out, curls a knuckle into one of the rings to lift them from their place over Felix’s heart.

It’s a work in progress, or what a work in progress would look like if left forgotten for a few years; the warmth of Felix’s skin has seeped into the gold through the imperfections dotting the insides of the bands, the unpolished, raw scars where Felix has melded the metal together. The rings clink against each other as Sylvain turns them over his fingers, observes each and every crooked curve Felix hasn’t smoothed out, their slight deformities and all their blemishes more beautiful than any jewel the Gautier jewelers have ever crafted.

Felix is so close that Sylvain could pull onto the rings and he’d fall right into him, noses brushing and breaths mingling. “I was making them at the time,” Felix whispers, a telepathic answer to Sylvain’s untold question, “just before you left. I was– I was planning on giving one to you. Later.”

“Fe,” Sylvain lets out, a little desperate and a little breathless and a little in love, and Felix breathes a joyless laugh. “So, all this time…?”

“All this time,” Felix says, his voice unravelling at the seams until there’s nothing left but bare, raw sorrow.

“Sylvain,” and oh how Sylvain wants, wants to chase the warmth and tang of his own name seeping out of Felix’s throat in the receding space between them, desperation turned command, “don’t you dare not kiss me right now,” and Felix’s sentence fades to nothing on Sylvain’s mouth.

It’s somehow fitting, that the first time he touches Felix, truly touches Felix in ten years is through a kiss. Their lips brush in torturous electricity, like they’re destined to meet over and over again through the sheer force of gravity, ten years of yearning released in small exhales each time they break away and Sylvain pulls them back into each other with a soft tug on that golden chain. There’s a jolt sparking over his nerves as his fingers let go to graze Felix’s jaw, to ghost his thumb down Felix’s cheek to his mouth, Felix’s teeth and tongue tapered against the tip of it, and when Felix’s eyes open on burning, melted amber, Sylvain finally, finally yields to him, his lips meeting Felix’s again in a concession of overwhelming defeat, his eyes sliding shut when Felix’s hands bury into his curls and he gets to finally taste him again. It’s a sin they’re not closer, Sylvain thinks when Felix curls his tongue against his, the slightest presence of space between them an unbearable sensation, the physical manifestation of his starvation reverberating over his bones like broken nails dragging on a chalkboard. He tangles his hand in the mess of Felix’s hair as he pulls him closer, undoes the tie holding it up until he can part the locks between his fingers like still water, and Felix falls into him like a sigh, pushes him against the back of the couch until he can push himself into his lap and push his mouth back onto his.

Sylvain’s fingers trail down the perfect bend of Felix’s back as he kisses him again, wander down each ridge of his spine, imprint each sharp edge into the skin of his hands in memory-foam scars. Felix’s knuckles twist and tug on the strands of Sylvain’s hair with each sinking stroke. Sylvain’s thoughts crawl to a stop.

A moan slips from Sylvain into Felix’s mouth, unbidden, unrestrained, and when Felix pulls away Sylvain follows the taste of him. “Fuck, Felix. Where have you even learned all that?”

Felix snorts, graceless, weightless, and wonderful. “I’ve learned a lot of things since you left me.”

The implication is clear, and Sylvain doesn’t have to squint to read the footnote; the slow, forgotten burn of jealousy climbs along his insides, brings his blood to a rolling boil. He pulls Felix into him again, gets his mouth open and slips inside, nips on his lower lip – and it’s Felix who moans then, a quiet sigh of absolute contentment and mocking victory that he swallows right back in an abrupt inhale when Sylvain kisses down the line of his jaw, sucks his own, copper chain of bruises around his neck, tattooes there temporary evidences that Felix is his.

“I never should have left you,” Sylvain whispers in a soft, gentle graze on the lobe of his ear.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I’m never leaving you again.”

“Yeah?” Felix exhales as his nose brushes the cut of Sylvain’s cheek, looking at Sylvain through half-lidded charcoal – like he knows it’s a lie-to-be, like he’s asking Sylvain to at least make good on that promise instead of all the other, broken ones. “Then prove it. Make me yours.”

Felix doesn’t have to ask twice. Sylvain smooths his thumbs over the crimson light flushing each of his cheekbones, draws Felix’s face closer, follows the enthralling feeling of Felix’s nose along his own in the ghost of an almost kiss. Felix’s chest rises against his as he breathes in and digs his fingers into Sylvain’s shoulders, the contrast in sensation sharp and searing, and Sylvain opens Felix’s lips again with his own, snowfall-slow.

“Touch me.”

Felix’s words are euphonious with impatience as he says them over Sylvain’s mouth, a hand guiding Sylvain’s fingers under the seam of his shirt, and Sylvain takes his time, makes it last, files his nails against the soft skin between his loins until he feels the goosebumps travelling up Felix’s arms around his neck. Sylvain’s teeth find Felix’s throat as his hands stitch patterns between each of Felix’s ribs, close around Felix’s pulse point until he leaves another mark there, until he feels Felix’s heartbeat stutter and hasten as he brushes his thumbs over the sensitive skin of his chest, pushing the fabric up and up and up till Felix’s frustration takes over and he tears himself away from Sylvain and his shirt from his body.

Felix is even more masculine than he was ten years ago, Sylvain notices now that he’s more exposed, the toned muscles of his arms tensing and curving as he impatiently pushes Sylvain’s shirt off, his frame squarish and solid in the contrejour of night lights, his legs strong when they straddle Sylvain’s lap again before Felix falls back into him. His laughter is rough as gravel when he sinks his teeth into Sylvain’s neck as he undoes the buttons of Sylvain’s jeans, the sound snuffed from his throat like candlelight when Sylvain grazes fingertips along the smooth curve of his ass, sinks his knuckles into the fabric as he pushes Felix against him, and another groan ripples out of Felix’s lips when his fingers reach down, down, down to close around Sylvain’s cock.

“I’ve thought about this,” Felix says as he pulls out Sylvain’s dick from his underwear, open mouth finding Sylvain’s in an intermittent kiss, “every night since you came back,” and fuck, Sylvain’s pretty sure he’s never been this hard in his entire thirty years of existence. Felix’s hand is rough and dry and so, so warm as it strokes down Sylvain’s length, lazy and practiced when his fingers brush back up, nothing like the hurried, eager way his tongue slips inside Sylvain’s mouth to shush every sigh that tumbles past his lips. “Thought about this,” and his hand tightens around the tip, “splitting me open,” his thumb rubbing circles over the glans until Sylvain’s leaking, “filling me up,” and it’s by sheer force of patience for what’s to come that Sylvain doesn’t come right there and then.

“Fuck, Fe,” Sylvain whines as he tugs Felix’s pants and underwear down over his hips, past his thighs and above his knees, until Felix can rise from Sylvain’s lap and kick them off in a smooth motion, “even when I was here?”

Felix kneels back over Sylvain’s body. “Especially when you were here.”

For once, Sylvain’s at a complete loss for words; he lets his hands do the talking instead while Felix jerks him off, kisses down the expanse of his chest until he slides down along the couch and Felix has to let go of his cock. “You’re so gorgeous,” Sylvain whispers, tracing the shape of the clause with his lips along Felix’s legs, nipping at the inside of Felix’s thighs, relishing in the gentle dig of Felix’s toes as they curl into Sylvain’s knees, and Felix’s voice pitches lower, each kiss turning each sentence into words and each word into wisps, Sylvain, Sylvain, please–

Sylvain’s mouth closes around the tip of Felix’s cock, and Felix’s knees buckle underneath him as Sylvain swallows down the length.

Sylvain’s fingers push into the firm, slim curve of Felix’s ass as he sucks his dick, tongue tracing each centimeter of skin until Felix is a mess of incoherent moans above him, hair falling in pretty curtains around his face as he buries it in the couch pillows. Sylvain, too, moans around his shaft, lets the taste of him overwhelm the rest of his senses as he urges Felix forward with a soft press of knuckles, and Felix yields, sinks into the back of Sylvain’s throat until Sylvain’s nose brushes the soft hair of his stomach. That’s it, he whispers as he looks up into Felix’s eyes when Felix withdraws entirely, his hand reaching to jerk Felix’s tip over the flat of his tongue, that’s it, angel, let yourself go, and Felix sinks into his mouth once more, slower, letting Sylvain taste every inch of his cock until he’s fully sheathed again – Sylvain feels Felix’s fingers tangle back into his hair, feels him pull on his scalp as he props himself up until Sylvain moans against the head of his dick, and Sylvain sees Felix bite his lip over the vibrato before he pushes Sylvain’s head back and thrusts into his throat.

Sylvain’s eyes flutter close as he lets Felix fuck his mouth, precum leaking all over his tongue until it mixes with his spit, Felix’s staccato breaths falling in perfect rhythm with the distant sounds of rushing cars. Sylvain’s fingers wipe the mess on his chin and curl around his own length, his hand fisting his cock at the same abrupt pace, his thumb digging into the head and sparking aftershocks of lust through the rest of his body until he has to let go and squeeze the base tight; his spit-slick knuckles caress the side of Felix’s thigh and trace a path to the space between Felix’s legs, and when they brush up Felix almost sobs above him and tears himself away.

For a single instant, Sylvain’s afraid he’s just done something very, very wrong, but Felix bears down upon him like a wolf on his prey, kisses him as though Sylvain’s his only source of oxygen, as though he wants to replace all the air in Sylvain’s lungs with his own. “Wait here,” he says, fingers squeezing Sylvain’s until he’s walked too far to hold them properly, and Sylvain’s left stiff and kissed and lost on the couch, the only sound around him the rustle of cardboard as Felix rummages around drawers in his bathroom.

Sylvain kisses Felix as soon as he comes back, as soon as he’s within reach, dragging Felix into him before he can even curl his arms around Sylvain’s shoulders and let go of the items in his hands. They fall down uselessly by their side as Felix’s hands reach for Sylvain’s face, and Sylvain sees a bottle of lube and a box of condoms, grabs the first until he’s squeezed a healthy amount over his fingertips.

“Can I…?”

“Yes,” Felix hisses, exasperation blending with thirst, “I swear, Gautier, if you don’t–”

Sylvain’s finger grazes Felix’s hole, feels it wet and supple and so, so inviting, and Felix’s sentence dissolves into a sigh over Sylvain’s mouth as Sylvain’s knuckle sinks in. Their pace is slower, this time, languid and languishing, Sylvain relearning each of Felix’s weaknesses, what makes him shiver, what makes him writhe, each gesture a question to which Felix’s body answers. Sylvain thrusts his finger deeper and drinks his sighs from the source, curls a knuckle upward and drags it down, and Felix’s back arches, leaves his branded throat his for the taking. Sylvain’s mouth dyes each sliver of still-pristine skin in scarlet stains as he slips another finger inside Felix, feels the rim of Felix’s hole stretch around the base when he sinks down on Sylvain’s hand, free fingers stroking Felix’s cock to the rhythm Felix sets, and when Sylvain scissors inside Felix the couch shakes with the strength of Felix’s shudders. Yes, Felix whispers, just like that, and Sylvain’s fingertips caress deeper inside, flicker across Felix’s prostate until his cock drools over Sylvain’s hand and Felix’s rough groans turn into dulcet whines, until the only thing that slips out of his lips is a string of Sylvain, Sylvain, Sylvain. Sylvain pulls his fingers out and shushes Felix’s sob with a kiss, hot and open-mouthed, as Felix reaches for a condom and unrolls it onto Sylvain’s shaft, his hand slicking it up with the rest of the lube until he grasps it and his hole clenches around the tip–

Sylvain grips Felix’s hips and sheathes himself inside Felix so fast they both gasp.

“Fuck, I forgot you’re so big,” Felix says, each syllable punched out of him as Sylvain pulls out and thrusts back in.

“Yeah?” Sylvain says into Felix’s carotid, neon lights dripping down the line of his neck in sweat specks. “Don’t worry, my heart,” he whispers through kisses melting against his nape in syrup sentences, “I won’t let you forget ever again,” and Felix clamps around his cock like he’s never going to let go, like he’ll get Sylvain’s body to keep all the oaths his heart makes.

Sylvain rocks faster into him, his hands mapping each beauty mark on Felix’s chest in constellations until they reach his stomach and his fingers wrap around Felix’s cock, strokes matching the tide of his hips as he buries himself balls deep inside Felix, and any semblance of coherence fades out of Felix’s sentences, his voice fluttering in a flurry of yes, right there, yes. Felix’s nails carve half-moons into Sylvain’s shoulders as he bounces on his cock, rides him so hard that his dick bobs against Sylvain’s stomach when Sylvain lets it go to brush his thumb along Felix’s lips, makes Felix taste himself on his fingers until Sylvain’s cock shudders and he gets his hand back on Felix’s length, strokes his tip to leaking over Sylvain’s abs.

Sylvain angles his hips higher, sinks a bit deeper, and Felix’s back curves like a bow as he swears. Sylvain thrusts in the exact same spot, once, twice, thrice; please, Sylvain, Felix sobs as he reaches for Sylvain’s hand, winds his fingers in the spaces between Sylvain’s, squeezes until his knuckles turn white, please, want to come, he murmurs in an almost kiss, want to come on your cock, fill me up, make me yours, am I yours, and Sylvain jerks his cock faster, kisses him until his breath is exhausted – yes, my love, Sylvain answers as he slams his cock into Felix, it’s you, only you, it’s always been you, and Sylvain only feels Felix’s moans echoing along his nerves and Felix’s release spilling over his hand before he comes deep inside him.

Sylvain barely has time to slip out of him and remove the condom before Felix collapses besides him and brings him down into a kiss, exhaustion claiming them right there and then, curling into each other as they drift off to sleep.

*

They spend the following month in snowed-in timelessness, stuck in the storm’s eye of consummated longing.

Sylvain’s surprised how little it changes. He thought he’d want to spend every waking hour at Felix’s side, the way he used to when they started dating back then; now that he’s grown older, colder, and a little bit wiser, he finds himself perfectly content in the fleeting routine they’ve set up, bringing him breakfast and lunch before going back to welcome customers behind the counter, the metrical ring of Felix’s hammer on metal the only evidence of the passage of time. He goes out more, starts helping Claude and Hilda in earnest with the logistics of their fake auction – Claude, who has rented the fucking Grand Palais, who just shrugged when Sylvain asked about it and answered a lighthearted there’s a glass roof, you know, if we need a quick escape.

It’s strange, for him to feel so tranquil at being away from Felix for a couple of hours where the mere idea of him used to suffocate him, as though the actualization of his long-held feelings, the concrete confirmation that Felix wants this too – wants him too – does much more to quell his anxiety than physical proximity, makes him certain that this Felix isn’t just another daydream fragment he’s imagined in the place of a meaningless conquest, of a resentful shadow.

Felix’s schedule, somehow, gets healthier, now that they don’t need the excuse of nightfall and overwork to seek each other’s company, now that they’ve traded the passive enjoyment of each other’s not-so-accidental presence to an active pursuit of shared intimacy. Sylvain leaves the comfort of Mercedes’s couch for the annoying bedsprings of Felix’s, letting Felix drag him up the stairs as soon as the shop closes to further put them to the test, spending hours upon evening hours caressing Felix’s hair as it fans over Sylvain’s chest, falling asleep to the night shifts of red lights and Felix’s breathing, the domesticity of their newfound rituals their own belated, out-of-place honeymoon.

Maybe that’s why he takes longer to complete the tiara than they expected; maybe, Sylvain hopes, it’s a transparent tactic to keep Sylvain here longer, a calculated effort to keep the crown as irrealizable as Sylvain’s promise to stay, even when every other part of their scheme is ready to operate.

So when Sylvain climbs down the stairs one evening and hears Claude’s overjoyed exclamation that the replica’s done, Sylvain, he can only swallow down his disappointment along with Felix’s sigh as Sylvain kisses him, can only fold his hand around Felix’s rings and whisper I’m so proud of you instead of I wish you didn’t.

And just like that, the whirlwind of the heist catches up with them: Sylvain spends the next week practicing the part of the auction host under Hilda’s reluctant tutelage while Felix gives the Azure Moon replica its last finishing touches. Claude asks him for the number of Ingrid’s law firm – just in case, he says, and Sylvain’s anxiety ties knots in his stomach – and they spend the last day going from couture shop to couture shop, trying on too-expensive suits and custom-fitted dresses. We’re going to their wedding, Hapi says when the sales clerks ask, thumb pointing in Sylvain and Felix’s overall direction. Nobody denies it, not even Felix, and even though Sylvain knows he’s just playing along, the concept rends his heart to ribbons.

On the fated day, Sylvain arrives on the premises before anyone else, takes in Hilda’s design work: the giant ice rink where Felix and he had skated a month and a half ago has been melted down and removed, replaced by hundreds of square meters of white-marble tiles. The sides of the huge glass roof have been covered in elegant, burgundy curtains, velvet fluming down until it reaches the floor behind the rows of cloth-covered tables, where thirty of Yuri’s acquaintances set glass towers of champagne and trays upon trays of petits-fours. The sun has long set, behind the glass of the roof, the web of faded copper beams that hold it up knitted over the deep night sky, entirely bejeweled in fairy lights and neon spotlights shining over the stage where Sylvain will stand, on the other side of rows and rows and rows of reception chairs.

He makes his way across the room, wondering why Claude even rented such a big place for such a small event; the bigger the venue, the fancier the impression, he remembers Claude telling him once, and the fancier the impression, the easier the job. Sylvain finally reaches the platform and his podium, the printed list of all the pieces of art and jewelry Claude’s contacts have selflessly lent them that they’ll pretend-auction tonight, leafs through the pages as he tests his microphone, the speakers, the huge projection screens.

He thinks about his father, wrinkled and pathetic and terrifying. He thinks about Felix, and steps down from the stage, takes his place at the entrance, and welcomes the flow of guests.

There are a lot of people he recognizes, people from previous jobs and heists hired to play the part of rich, influential people, ready to spend false money on false sales; he’s surprised to see members of the press, too, journalists and cameramen wanting to film the auction of the Azure Moon from up close, and just as Sylvain’s anxiety and adrenaline start to bubble through his good evenings, Felix steps into the hall.

His hair is tied up low, tumbles over his shoulder in a cascade of ink over his pressed midnight suit, looking breathtakingly handsome as he takes confident, resolute steps forward. Dark leather gloves hug his hands as he offers his coat to a cheerful Hilda, and Sylvain wants to feel the texture of them around his throat, along his tongue. Felix slips one off with a nip of his lips – Sylvain feels like he’s going to die of thirst right there and then – the scars embroidered onto his skin shining silver in the light, and when he removes the other there’s a golden ring around his finger, the same one that hangs around his neck along with Sylvain’s, and Sylvain’s breath catches on fire inside his lungs.

He takes Felix’s hand in his when Felix walks past, raises Felix’s knuckles to his lips, leaves a kiss on the cold gold of the band. “Good evening,” he greets, “Sir Fraldarius-Gautier,” and Felix’s face turns bright as a firefight pump.

“Fuck off,” he says, but there’s no bite to it; if anything, Sylvain deciphers a tinge of barely-concealed bashfulness, only made more evident when he tears his hand away but doesn’t actually leave Sylvain’s side. “Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Sylvain sighs, and Felix’s gaze softens.

“I’ll see you after,” he whispers as he starts walking again, a promise as much as a threat, and for an instant Sylvain’s mind tells him it’s all going to be okay.

Then, Apollinaire Gautier walks in. The rage Sylvain has kindled and entertained for ten years fuses with the remnants of childhood terror he still keeps locked inside his stomach, turns to poisonous, cloying sweetness as he opens his mouth. “Welcome, Mr. Gautier. Please, make yourself at home.”

“I must say,” he says, each word tinted in deference as his patronizing gaze scans Sylvain from head to toe, “I’m quite impressed with what you have accomplished ever since your little fit. There may have been hope for you, if you’d stopped seeing that Fraldarius kid.”

“I hope you spend a most elegant and enjoyable night,” Sylvain says without looking at him, and Hilda ushers him in with a pushy hand to his back and a cheerful let me show you to your seat, throwing a knowing wink Sylvain’s way before disappearing behind the entrance curtain.

Claude’s the last one Sylvain meets, as the lights come down and everyone gets seated, hands him the microphone with a confident smile. “Here goes nothing.”

“Claude,” Sylvain says as he grabs his wrist, and it’s the first time Sylvain’s seen anything close to surprise dyeing his expression. “Thank you. Whatever happens. You’ve been… a great help.”

Claude only laughs, bright like summer sunshine. “Wow, you sound like you’re going to die, Sylvain.”

“I mean, maybe?”

“No you won’t,” Claude just says like it’s a certainty, just another part of his carefully-laid plan, his hand reaching up to squeeze Sylvain’s shoulder. “Team Confidence is here to back you up, and everyone here is onto the plan somehow. Well, not the press, but all the rest. Plus,” and his hand leaves Sylvain’s shoulder, settles on his hip, “I will not let my friends die. Never.”

Sylvain grins. “I thought we weren’t friends? You know, this whole we’re not partners, or friends, or family schtick of yours.”

Claude only smirks. “Aw, come on,” he says, like it’s just another one of his schemes, like he’s finally tricked Sylvain’s like-minded brain, “you really believed that crap?”

Sylvain doesn’t have time to answer before Claude pushes him through the curtains, and he steps forward onto the stage of his play.

*

“So that’s it, huh?”

Felix holds out his beer bottle by the neck, chokes it with his fingers as he waits for Sylvain to clink pine green glass against pine green glass, breathing in the city’s early-morning cold. One of his legs hangs over the side of the gutter, like he’s sat in a place where not even the fear of death can reach, here, on the roof of his seven-storey building – not after what they’ve done, not after the police burst into the storage room as Apollinaire Gautier basked in the possession of his fake crown, not after Sylvain slipped away with a case containing 110 million euros in cash and on the back of Felix’s motorcycle, the rush of cold wind carding fingers through his hair as they drove and drove and drove.

Sylvain hits the side of his bottle against the label on Felix’s. “Yep, that’s pretty much it. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

Felix snorts. “I bet.”

The drink tastes sour in Sylvain’s mouth as he takes a sip, watching Felix’s throat shift when he swallows. They remain like this, for a while, all words silenced by the distant rush of cars and the copy-pasted, disembodied blare of police cars and ambulances, eyes drowned in the brilliancy of another winter dawn.

“I still can’t believe your father didn’t bribe himself out of this,” Felix admits around another mouthful of beer.

Sylvain shrugs. “Oh, he tried, from what Ingrid told me. Turns out that when Ashe tipped off the cops and they raided his house, besides all the fakes, some of the jewels in his precious collection were stolen relics from the Emirates.” He takes another gulp, lets the taste coat his tongue. “Let’s just say that the French government really, really wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident, so he’s just going to rot away in jail.”

“Hm. Good.” Felix hums into his bottle, the whistle dissolving into the winter breeze, fingers brushing Sylvain as they lay down on moon-kissed tiles to watch the stars above fade, blinking out of sight one after the other, chased away by daylight.

“So,” Felix murmurs eventually, sitting back up to look down at the transiently-frozen world below, “what are you going to do now?”

There’s a tone of pretend-detachment in his voice, too practiced, too perfect to fool Sylvain. He lets out a stilted exhale of a laugh. “We’ll probably have to leave soon,” he admits, the words a tangible incarnation of his breaking heart. “Even though my father got arrested, the police don’t take too kindly to con artists. We have… probably a couple of hours to pack our bags.”

“Where will you go?”

“I never really know.” Sylvain’s breath curls in glimmering fog as it slips out of his mouth, vanishes in the noxious atmosphere, in the magnificent landscape. “That’s part of the fun, though,” he adds as he throws a wink in Felix’s direction. “We never know where the wind’s gonna take us. The purest definition of freedom.”

Felix doesn’t look at him. “I see.”

“And you…” Sylvain starts, the sentence twisting into knots along his tongue, “you’ll probably have enough money to pay off your debts. Start anew.” Forget about me forever. “Oh, that reminds me–” Sylvain sits up and fumbles into the pocket of his suit pants, as good a deflection as any, his finger hooking into– “Here.”

Felix’s eyes fly wide open when they land on the Cethleann Diamond replica in Sylvain’s hand, his gaze blinking up to Sylvain’s face and to his hand and back to his face again, Felix’s lips falling open on a disbelieving stutter.

Felix reaches to hold the ring between his fingers, his knuckles brushing against Sylvain’s as Sylvain squeezes his hand one last time. “It’s…” He studies the smoky-blue stone, the curl of gold fangs, the glint of rising sunlight over the band. “It’s the fake.”

“I know,” Sylvain answers, laughs at Felix’s dubious expression. “You remember what I told you, about the real one belonging to a French widower?”

Felix raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to send it back to him?”

“Get this.” Sylvain leans into Felix’s space, and it’s like they’re kids again, conspiring on the best prank to play Dimitri and Ingrid, on that backyard swing. “The original… It never belonged to him in the first place.”

Felix frowns. “What?!”

“Yeah. I didn’t know either. Ashe drank too much champagne to celebrate and told me everything.” He sighs, and it sounds as bitter and betrayed as it sounds elated. “Claude was the one who instigated the thing in the first place. Paid Seteth to pretend it was his. Asked Ashe to come up with the scheme. Apparently, he was banking on the fact that I still wanted to raise hell on my dad, that I’d have a plan ready to bring him down. And the rest…” Sylvain glances back to that Parisian horizon, to the gleaming, golden ring of the Sun. “The rest is history, I guess.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Felix snaps back, incomprehension dusting his features like sunrays. “How could he– Why would he even trick you like that?”

“Because he wanted me to have closure.” Sylvain licks his lips, looks up at the limitless expanse of purple-pink skies. “I think the fact that you were here was just the icing on the cake, for him.”

Felix’s mouth opens on a wordless objection, and Sylvain cuts him before he can speak. “Anyway, the ring is yours, if you want to have it. The real one. I can… I can keep the fake.”

“Why would you want the replica?”

The answer is so, so simple that Sylvain doesn’t even need to ponder it, doesn’t need to say anything but the exact, unfortunate truth. “Because it’s yours,” he says, an evidence, a declaration. His eyes find Felix’s, and they burn melted gold in the forge-fire of dawn. “It’s one of your works. In my book, that instantly makes it more valuable than any priceless jewel Claude can give me.”

For a long, stretching instant, there is no sound besides the winter wind, besides Felix’s breathing, besides the hum of clothes-on-tiles as Felix’s knees scrape on the roof when he closes the distance between them – and it breaks Sylvain’s heart all over again, how easy it seems to melt into his kiss, how natural it feels to curl a hand around his nape, how thrilling it is to taste the perfect, puzzle-piece fit of Felix’s lips against his own. How tragic it is to realize he’ll never, ever feel this complete again.

They break apart on a call of their names through the open roof window, on the urgency in Ashe’s voice, telltale of time trickling like sand until they’re caught and locked up and away.

“I have to go,” Sylvain whispers against Felix’s lips, but Felix holds him in place, fingers pushing into his cheek as he lets his forehead fall against Sylvain’s, as he lets their noses breathe each other’s air.

“Sylvain,” Felix asks, his name bubbling out of his waterlogged chest, “tell me – do you love me?”

And Sylvain can feel himself smile the sincerest of smiles. “Fe, I’ve never, ever stopped loving you. I’ll probably love you to the end of my days.” His hand grazes Felix’s jaw, brings him into another, softer kiss, a silent farewell. “It kills me, to leave you like this, to let you go again – but I just… I just can’t risk it. I can’t risk my… my friends’ safety.”

Felix takes a deep breath, and when he pushes himself away, when he swings his legs into the open window of his apartment, he’s wearing the tiniest, brightest smile Sylvain’s ever seen on him. “Ashe,” he calls, “tell Claude we’ll be ten minutes late. I need to pack my things.”

*

Sylvain stretches sleepiness out of his muscles as he steps into the stunning summer sun.

“I thought you were supposed to work today,” Felix says with a raised eyebrow, lips hidden by the rim of his steaming coffee cup. The weather’s warm enough that he, too, is still only wearing a bathrobe, sitting at the table of their balcony overlooking the Copenhagen lakes.

Sylvain bends down, and Felix cranes his neck up, strands of dark hair brushing against his shoulders when he tilts his head back for a coffee-stained kiss. Sylvain keeps his eyes open, watches the way Felix’s long, obsidian lashes flutter closed; it’s so much better, to be able to witness Felix’s features soften, to watch the slight hint of pink sift over his cheeks in powdered sugar, to grasp the material reality of Felix’s existence as Sylvain’s lifelong love and not just a figment of his forgotten fantasies.

“I took the day off,” Sylvain takes a seat as Felix pours him a cup of coffee from the moka pot, pushes a plate of toast and butter towards him. The engagement rings in the pocket of his robe – Felix’s old ones, repolished by Dedue’s hands – dig into his thigh as he crosses his legs. “I doubt Dimitri will miss one person in his array of diplomats on a Sunday.”

Prince Dimitri had called him a couple of months after the heist, as Felix and he were travelling through Norwegian fjords for Felix’s birthday, the only social interaction they’d had in two weeks of cabin-in-the-woods, nonstop mindblowing sex – and maybe that’s why Sylvain had accepted the job, wintry afterglow and Felix’s love doing more to ease him into settling down than anything ever could. A year and a half later, he can’t say he regrets it, though a small part of him misses the thrill of Team Confidence’s heists, the adrenaline rush of a successful scheme, the excitement of unpredictable, new adventures.

No, he thinks as he curls a foot against Felix’s calf, as he recites the words of tonight’s proposal in his head when Felix’s phone rings – as long as Felix is by his side, he’d never regret it.

Felix’s tone as he answers shifts from mechanical apathy to piqued curiosity, and Sylvain’s eyebrows thread into a frown when Felix slides his phone on the table, taps the speaker icon on the screen.

“Yo, Syl” Claude’s voice trickles from the other side of the line in laughter-full confidence. “Was wondering if you two were bored?”

Sylvain’s gaze finds Felix’s, decodes the glint of interest in his irises, the eager curve of his smile.

“Well, are we?” Felix asks, his voice shivering with anticipation, and Sylvain smirks.