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Felix says, “This thing won’t leave me alone.”
Sylvain hums and drops to a crouch. He’s not trying to catch Felix out. He only wants to see whether the whispers he heard that morning were true, or inventions from people trying to stay awake on their pre-dawn march.
Sure enough, a scraggly grey cat peels itself away from Felix’s shin only just enough to sniff inquiringly at Sylvain’s fingers.
“Did it glue itself to you before or after you gave it jerky?” Sylvain asks.
Felix narrows a glare at him. “Before,” he says. “Feeding it was Annette’s idea.”
“Why didn’t Annette act out Annette’s idea?”
“It swiped at her.” Felix sounds almost petulant.
As if that would’ve deterred Annette. Sylvain keeps the smile off his face. He seems to’ve passed some test, in any case: the cat sits back and regards him cooly. Sylvain strokes a tentative finger down its head while it evaluates how tolerable that is. After a moment it shoves its face at Sylvain’s hand with not inconsiderable force.
“Well,” Sylvain says. It’s not an ideal time to pick up a pet, no matter how cute. Even odds someone gets the idea to eat the thing, with the ongoing shortage of fresh meat. He rubs his fingertips together: soot. “You have any idea what color this thing is, under all that ash?”
“No.” Felix watches while the thing decides it’s had enough of Sylvain, and hisses to get its point across. “It probably followed the march from the wreckage we passed in town.”
“And it sniffed you out, of all people.”
Felix looks at Sylvain, flat and unamused. “I’m not keeping it.”
The cat winds bonelessly around Felix’s ankles. “Do you have a choice?”
“You think I couldn’t best an animal?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Sylvain says.
He stands, looking down the lines of tents populating the long-dead field of what was once a farmer’s plot. Felix and the cat watch him, two sets of eyes in shades of amber and gold.
“It’s already eaten,” Sylvain says. “May as well treat it to some real hospitality and give it a bath, too. Poor thing.”
“Why bother bathing it just to set it loose again,” Felix says. He’s ignoring the thing, even as it stands on hind legs to reach more of him to rub against.
“Doing good things for others makes us feel good,” Sylvain says, as sincere as a child.
“Oh, fuck off,” Felix says, but he sighs and stands. “If you want to be scratched so badly, help yourself.”
They wrestle the cat into a tub, in the end, filled from the horse trough. Sylvain does the lion’s share of the work but Felix, unable as ever to watch a job done badly—or perhaps spurred by the sight of Sylvain, waterlogged and bleeding—steps in to scrub the cat while Sylvain holds it.
Sylvain watches, wary and betrayed, as the cat tolerates Felix’s brisk and efficient treatment, albeit with a low, constant growl. Once freed, it hops out of the tub and shakes like a dog, flinging water in Sylvain’s face. Felix huffs a laugh. Sylvain hasn’t heard anything like laughter from Felix in weeks, even as he’s made a personal crusade of it.
Probably his material is bad. Probably they’re both just spent. The lines around Felix’s mouth and beneath his eyes run deeper by the day. And when Felix crawls into Sylvain’s tent by nights, for a quick toss to help them both to sleep, he doesn’t abide Sylvain asking anything like: are you alright? Or: can I do anything, anything at all for you? Laughter is maybe the most possible of a set of impossible tasks.
Felix tosses Sylvain a rag, so that he might towel the cat dry or exsanguinate trying. There’s an ease to Felix’s posture as he settles in to find out which it’ll be, so at least Sylvain can go to his death with lightness in his heart.
“Would you look at that,” Sylvain says, bleeding only a little more than he had been to start, and with a mostly dry cat to show for it. “A Fraldarius Wirehair. Go figure, she was only looking for her father.”
Felix cuts him a deeply unamused look. Sylvain lifts the cat’s paws in his own. “Papa?” Sylvain says in a small, quavering voice.
“Absolutely fucking not,” Felix says, but Sylvain would swear to the twitch of a smile as Felix turns away.
+
“Juniper,” Annette says.
“June for short,” Ashe says.
“It doesn’t need a name,” Felix says, tossing June a morsel from his plate. “You don’t know if it’s sticking around.” Then, at her pawing: “That’s all you’re getting. Stop asking.”
Sylvain chews his rations and says nothing. The situation is precarious as it is. Juniper’s spent the whole morning in camp, the newest and smallest of their number. Felix seems to thinks it’s a bad idea, but so far no one’s really asked for his opinion. In spite of this, he’s June’s clear favorite.
It’s really only Sylvain that she seems to dislike, for either the bath fiasco or for enigmatic cat reasons unknown to him. In addition to being genetically engineered to make people love her, she also makes fast friends. Byleth, by way of hello, lifted her to eye level and looked at her a long time, unblinking, while June stared back; then, apparently satisfied, set her down and scratched behind her ears. They told Felix he’d “chosen well”, to which Felix muttered something indistinct.
Then there was the brief window in which it seemed the matter of June might be taken out of their hands entirely. Shortly after her bath, she went missing. Felix claimed not to notice or care, but tagged along on Annette’s search party at the behest of her wide, wet eyes.
They’d walked all of camp, and when hope seemed lost, Annette gathered her courage and poked her head into his Highness’ tent.
His Highness sat very stiffly at the edge of his cot, both hands gripping the frame, tense in every line of his body. Juniper comprised a small, perfect circle in his lap. The way Annette tells it, it’s a wonder they couldn’t hear her purring clear across camp.
“Remove the animal,” His Highness said stiffly. “Please.”
The please was an improvement on Dimitri’s behavior of late. Juniper was proving to be a fantastic influence.
“She’d always be underfoot,” Felix rebuts that evening. “If fighting breaks out, she’d be a liability.” They’re gathered around the fire, June sitting sleek and alert as part of the circle, gaze flicking to each of them in turn.
“She’s darling,” Mercedes says, “but I do wonder whether life on the march isn’t too hard for such a small animal.”
“There might be people around here who’d miss her,” Ashe says. “She seems very comfortable around humans.”
Sylvain catches the look Felix flicks his way. There’s no one looking for June, not in the towns they passed today. Felix ducks his head and spoons his stew from his bowl to his mouth.
Suddenly June goes rigid. Her focus pointing like an arrow. She crouches low to the ground and creeps away from the firelight to stare out into the dark beyond the perimeter of camp. Annette, who has already stated her belief that cats can see ghosts, shut up, Felix, of course they can, yelps quietly.
Felix rolls his eyes and stalks forward; midway between the cat and the shadows laid down by the edge of the forest, he draws his sword. Sylvain is at his side in an instant, Ashe on his heels.
They bring down a stag that night. Some 30 yards away from camp, moving almost imperceptibly through the undergrowth until a shaft of moonlight through the trees picked out his antlers.
Felix roasts a strip of flesh over the fire and feeds it to June.
“She has better hunting instincts than you,” he says to Sylvain, before Sylvain has said anything at all; he was content to watch June snuffle at his fingers, seeking after more scraps.
+
Sylvain’s a pragmatist, more or less. Sure his heart bleeds for lost little animals, and for the larger implications here—their conflict with the Empire tears through lives large and small, the consequences trickling down to darken places he’d never have considered.
So when he decides to advocate for the cat, it’s not about charity, it’s about Felix. It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? To give Felix one reason to take a breath for one second of the day? Sylvain knows that wanting something for Felix that Felix hasn’t asked for himself is a good way to get his heart broken, and he wants it anyway.
He stakes out his moment and considers his tack. Morale, maybe. Sylvain feels pretty strongly about the concept, personally; or at least he does late that night, in his tent with Felix on his knees above him, only kind-of succeeding at staying quiet while he spills down Sylvain’s throat.
He watches through his lashes as Felix’s muscles lock up then shudder loose, his head tipped back on his neck. He’s blushing all down his chest, his lips parted and bruised-looking. He’s gorgeous, vital and solid, and for a minute Sylvain doesn’t care about their march through uncertain territory or what waits for them at the end of this war.
Sylvain swishes a gulp of wine around his mouth from a skin near the bed while Felix tucks himself away. There’s evidence of exertion in his face, proof that Sylvain has learned to look for: the slow blink and nigh unheard-of languor; Felix, looking something close to satisfied.
Typically it’s the precursor to Felix absconding to his own tent. Sylvain waits for him to stand and tie his hair back and bid him goodnight. No strings, at least not ones they speak of.
Felix is still loose-limbed on the bedroll beside him. Sylvain says, “She’d sort of keep herself fed, wouldn’t she? Maybe the rest of us, too. You saw her with the deer.”
“She’s not a pet,” Felix says shortly. “She’ll stay or she’ll go.“
“You think she has somewhere else to be?”
Felix blinks crisply, not rising to the bait. “If she’s smart, she’ll head the opposite direction of here.”
“She could board a boat to Morfis,” Sylvain says idly. “Live life on the docks. Steal fish for her supper.”
Felix rolls onto his stomach to look up at Sylvain, at least a little amused. His mirth is never without edges, but at this moment, his expression is still lazy and as open as Sylvain ever sees it these days. It’s enough to make a man ashamed of his own artifice. Sylvain’s throat tightens around a glut of feeling.
“You like cats,” Sylvain says quietly, with a wry, pleading note.
Something in Felix shutters. His brow creases, the corners of his mouth turn down. Sylvain knows the look of Felix with his heels dug in. There’s just no way for Sylvain to make him believe in the novel concept of his life being just a little bit better. It was selfish of Sylvain to even ask. The circle Felix’s made around himself, the radius he needs to be able to protect, is full already.
Felix opens his mouth to answer. Then he stills, looking past Sylvain to the mouth of the tent, eyes narrowed as if he’s heard or seen something. Sylvain sits up silently, reaching for his lance.
Felix clicks his tongue, a sharp and instructive sound. In the next second, worming in past the tied-shut flaps, June appears.
“Pervert,” Felix tells her disapprovingly. Sylvain huffs a laugh, the beginnings of adrenaline crumbling to giddy relief.
June trots over to sniff at Felix and shove her face against his knee. After a few head-butts to say hello, she steps carefully past him to where Sylvain is sitting undressed on the bed roll.
She takes one look at him then hops decisively onto his lap and starts to knead, claws out, into the bare skin of his thigh.
He yelps but holds fast against the instinct to remove her. The stakes are high: this is the most extensive and willing contact she’s made with him all day. Felix is already set to leave her behind at the next town. One false move could damn the whole thing.
“C’mon girl,” he says instead, like a joke, but his voice is strained. “I’m tenderized already.”
He looks to Felix and tries to smile but he thinks it’s probably a grimace. Felix meets his eye and breaks. He turns away to laugh, a sudden bark of noise. Singular, but even still. For a second Sylvain doesn’t even feel the claws anymore.
Magnanimous, Felix lifts June off Sylvain’s lap—“Felix, careful, she’s still hooked in!”—and sets her down between them. She has the nerve to look offended at Sylvain, as if he did anything but try to accommodate her. After a second of staring like she’s memorizing him and this grievance for later, she slinks into a neat circle in Felix’s lap, no kneading required.
“She hates me,” Sylvain says, staring after her. “She has a grudge.”
“Your ego is bruised. You’re used to animals liking you.”
Sylvain flashes him a hurt look. “I’m used to being liked by everyone. I’m likable.”
Felix stares flatly at him, but there’s the suggestion of a smile still tucked up in the corner of his mouth that works on Sylvain like a narcotic.
Sylvain examines the little gouges left on his thigh. “I cant believe you don’t think she takes after you.”
A glare from Felix, albeit distinctly non-lethal. “A good first line of defense would be some pants.”
“I like to stay ready for you,” Sylvain says, batting his eyelashes.
“Gross.”
“Of all the things that’ve happened here in the last hour—“
“Sylvain,” Felix says warningly.
Sylvain holds his hands up in a bid for peace, then puts his pants on and shuts up. An easy silence settles in while Felix scratches June behind the ears. It occurs to Sylvain that he hasn’t seen Felix pet her before. June flips over in his lap, belly up. The rumble of her purring seems to Sylvain like one radiant coal, throwing out more warmth than should be possible for such a small and solitary thing.
Felix looks up and catches Sylvain’s eye as if by accident. His face is guarded like he’s waiting to be caught out. He scratches under June’s chin, and when she lifts her head, he parts the fur around the underside of her neck, up-nodding to Sylvain who leans over obligingly.
There’s a scar there, from throat to ear. The edges are just a little too neat, too much like what Sylvain’s seen on human skin. Botched slaughter, if he had to guess. Maybe someone needed the food more than the companionship.
“I saw it when we gave her a bath,” Felix says, smoothing the fur back down. “Whoever did that was either too soft-hearted to commit, or she made it too hard for them to do it properly.”
“Hard to believe she’d want to be around people at all,” Sylvain says after a beat.
“It’s not that much of a surprise,” Felix says, “if she’s never survived without them.”
Sylvain twinges. More the bleeding heart than he thought, maybe, or else there’s another reason he doesn’t want to look at that head-on. Slowly, he reaches out to June, who lifts her chin receptively, her eyes squinting closed in contentment.
“Attaching herself to the top swordsman in the country’s a smart gambit,” Sylvain says. “Maybe cats have their own information network.”
“Hm,” Felix says. “Maybe she takes after you.”
This shocks a single, incredulous laugh out of Sylvain. It’s the most Felix has done to acknowledge the thing between them, the blank space they both skirt around.
Felix looks at him, then. The post-sex shine has worn off. He seems tired in a way sleep can’t touch. Sylvain wants to take his face in his hands.
“I won’t keep her,” Felix says, with a rare bout of eye contact. “But if she wants to stay, she can.”
His words are slow, measured. We all get a choice, Sylvain thinks he’s saying. Everyone picks where they are, and to a different extent, who they’re there with. It strikes Sylvain with a resounding clatter, that Felix might value these choices more than anyone he’s ever known.
Sylvain swallows. He feels out the words. Is Felix looking for that choice from him? He must know already. Sylvain thinks anyone could take one look at him and know.
Delicately, he says, “Given how she acts around you, I imagine she’ll want to stick around.”
Felix blinks. Spots of color show up high on his cheeks. “Yeah, well,” he says. “She’s a stray. I wasn’t going to get my hopes up.”
“You could put a collar on—her,” Sylvain says innocently.
“Don’t make me regret this,” Felix says flatly, but his expression loosens when Sylvain grins. It’s a choice—though it hardly feels like one—when Sylvain inches forward. Felix leans carefully over June and meets him halfway.